Rise of the Magi

by Jocelyn Adams

  “Gallagher. My name is Gallagher, and we’re … good friends.” He smiled and reached for me, but at my backwards step, retracted his hand. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time, Lila, but you keep running deeper. There is no need to fear me.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, shaking off a niggle of memory, recognition of his voice speaking to me from far away. Had I heard him calling for me while I stared into the white wilderness? “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  That smile again, a small laugh. “There were times when you probably wished that were true. Many, in fact.”

  A flash of him tapping his temple, giving a grin that stirred even more memories hit me before I shut it down. Heart pounding, I turned and ran.

  “Lila, please! We’ve been waiting for you to come home. Out there, in the distance, there’s happiness if you’d just reach for it.”

  I came to a halt, wondering what he meant by that. Staring at him over my shoulder, I said, “Who’s waiting?” The moment I asked it, I wished I could take it back. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

  “Do you know why you’re wearing that dress today?” His voice, smooth and mellow, wrapped around me like a father’s tender embrace. “You’ve risen farther today than you have in months. You’re trying to come back to us, and I want to help you.” Such a strange old man.

  “It’s just a dress. It’s pretty. Why wouldn’t I want to wear it?”

  “Someone gave it to you. Let yourself remember slowly. He had it made especially for you, and when he gave it to you, you both shared a tender moment. You’re trying to recall it, I can see it trying to break through your barriers. Let it. Tell me his name.”

  “Stop it.” I turned on my heel and strode away, trying to flee the flashes of a man’s face that lit up my mind. Yellow swirls in laughing, powder-blue eyes. A bedroom chuckle full of promise and pleasure.

  “You think you failed him. Is that it?” Gallagher asked, trailing after me at a distance. “You think he’s angry with you?”

  “Well, why wouldn’t he be?” I stopped and pointed a shaking finger at him. More images slapped at me: a red sky, those blue eyes that held so much sorrow in a face of white feathers, a world covered in green and blood. Screams filled my ears, none of them mine, one of them his as he plummeted from the sky. “Stop it! Stop it!” Shaking my head, I continued on my path to nowhere. “No, no. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to remember what I did to him.”

  “You did nothing but saved us. Not all of us, but those who perished gave their lives willingly.”

  Coming to a halt again, I glared at Gallagher over my shoulder, my skin darkening with my growing anger. “I burned him, and he fell. I couldn’t hold it. Something went wrong when I let go. She told me to let go, and she’d take me home. Look around you, old man!” I gestured wildly with my arms to the white field. “Does this look like Iress to you? Where are the rest of the spirits? Does this look like home to you?”

  He smiled at me, a bold curve of his black lips, showing lots of the white teeth behind them. “You remember Iress? You remember home?”

  More mental pictures: a woman with pink ringlets, a little girl sitting on my foot, her orange pigtails bobbing in the breeze, a man with a shaved head who made me feel like punching something, or hugging him, I wasn’t sure which. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out and leave me alone.”

  “You feel like you’re missing something, do you not?” Gallagher came to stand beside me, staring far before craning his head right toward me. “You know you’ve lost something, yet you don’t know what.”

  Gaze lowered to my bare toes, I wrapped my arms around my middle. “How do you know that?” I glanced at him but couldn’t hold his clouded gaze. “Do you know what I’ve lost?”

  “I do,” he said, nodding. “Quite well. In fact, he’s been most impatiently awaiting your return.”

  “He? I don’t understand. The one who gave me the dress?”

  “No. Someone else.”

  A desperate desire to know had me fisting my hand in his suit collar and tugging him closer. “Tell me.”

  He continued to smile as if I wasn’t shoving my face into his. “Tell me who gave you that dress, and I’ll help you get home.”

  I shoved him away from me and made a good attempt at tearing my hair out as I paced, terrified of those sad eyes with swirls of yellow that haunted me right down to their hypnotic depths. “It doesn’t matter. He’s dead, so I don’t want to remember.”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “Lies. Don’t fucking lie to me, Gallagher! You know I hate it when people fucking lie!”

  “Yes, yes! That sounds more like my Lila. Tell me his name, and I’ll prove to you he’s alive. I’ll show you where you’ve been these last months.”

  “Months?” Hand to my throat, I swallowed a sob before it could be born. “How could it have been months?”

  “Who gave you that dress?”

  A touch of lips. His masculine aroma that could weaken my knees. “No.”

  “He’s waiting for you.”

  “Stop it! He’s dead!”

  “Who gave you the dress, Lila? Tell me.”

  My walls came crashing in, flooding me with sight and sound from days long past. “He hates me! I killed our son!” Sobs wracked my body, sending me to my knees in the grass. “I didn’t even get to hold him, see him, and he’s just … gone. She told me Garret and Liam would never leave me, but they’re both gone! I’ve lost Liam’s son, and he’ll never forgive me.”

  Gallagher knelt and took me into his arms while I wailed into the nothing. My Garret. He was no longer inside of me, leaving a bleeding hole in my center. His little feet no longer pushed against my ribs. His emotions didn’t lay over mine like the warmest blanket in the world. My anchor to reality had vanished, taking my sanity with it.

  “He lives, Lila. Garret is alive.” Gallagher took my face in his palms and lifted my face until our gazes met, passing his thumbs through my endless stream of tears. “Liam is alive, and they’re waiting for you to return to them. Their greatest hero, their greatest love, is all they need to find happiness again, if you’d only open your eyes and see them.” Gallagher chuckled. “Quite frankly, I got so tired of his grouchiness and the fact that he barely leaves your side enough to bathe and shave his scruff off, I decided to come in here after you at risk to life and limb.”

  I studied Gallagher’s opaque eyes and found no deception in them as the floodgates continued to dump memories, unloading every painful detail on me. I’d done what the Goddess wanted, returned her children to their natural states, forgiven them, and left them to a peaceful existence, but something had gone wrong. Garret and I had become one for the briefest of time until I’d come apart at the cellular level and had become the sun Alseides had wanted. I’d touched her sisters, consumed their fear and their joy as I let them fade into what nature and the Great Mother wanted them to be.

  For a moment, I just sat there, shaking. “I couldn’t hold it. When I came apart … how did anyone survive?”

  “I borrowed Liam’s eyes that day as we all fought to give you time. Will you see the truth through them? Will you believe, then?”

  I considered for a moment. “Are you and I dead? Is this where the spirits live? In this white place.”

  “You’re changing the subject. And no, we’re not dead, though if I don’t succeed in bringing you back with me, I might wish that I was.”

  What if it was true? What if they were alive? I hugged myself harder and didn’t stop Gallagher when he wrapped his arm around my shoulders.

  “Show me,” I said.

  31

  A sense of vertigo rolled over me as the white field transformed into the valley during the day that seemed so
long ago. We were running toward me. No, Liam was, and I watched myself through his eyes as I burst into a ball of energy. Only the edges of my body showed within.

  “I can’t feel him,” I said to Gallagher, huddling closer to his warmth. “I want to feel his anger.”

  Gallagher sighed and nodded in my peripheral vision. “Very well, but his anger is not for you, no matter how much you might try to convince yourself it is.”

  Black rage and a stranglehold of fear took my knees out from under me.

  “Lila!” The vision of Liam bellowed before being slammed to the ground. He twisted his body and came to his feet with the skill and speed of an acrobat, grabbing a Magi by her wooden whip and cracking his knuckles across her gray face. When his gaze sought me out again, I’d risen far above the canopy. My arms stretched wide as my body turned slowly—a star about to be born.

  The world trembled as I gathered power, and Liam fought his way through some of the lesser Magi. His laser stare remained set on Alseides—on the far side of the valley in her human form—as she faced me with a smile of deep satisfaction. Sluagh darkened the sky, rocketing downward in attack.

  Liam joined with Gallagher, Andrew and Cas, and ripped their way through savages dressed in filthy loin cloths. A group of witches formed a circle, the prickle of their growing magic barbs in Liam’s feet, but still he carried on, to save me. To save us.

  “He was too late,” I said, not realizing it had been out loud until Gallagher said, “No, not too late, but he was helpless to change our fate. Only you could do that, and when Liam finally accepted that it was true, it nearly broke his soul.”

  In the vision before me, my voice, terrible and booming like the first warning crack of a deadly storm, flattened everyone to the ground. Liam, drowning in my power, lifted his head in time to see Parthalan reach my Light form, but speed away.

  “What is she doing?” Liam shouted at Gallagher who’d gone down beside him.

  “A contingency she’s trying to cancel. Oh, Goddess, she would have the humans destroy her and the child to end this, and it may be too late to stop!”

  Red with rage, Liam rushed Alseides again while shouting, “Over my goddamned dead body, she is. Parthalan!”

  Willa and Quinn tumbled into the fray. My dearest friend held a club while her mate preferred his fists. I winced and gasped as they moved like programmed beasts designed to fight. A scream pooled in my throat as the last remaining Magi in dryad form, tall and terrifying, came from behind and flayed them both with one strike of her whips.

  I jerked at the pain that seared me, at the knowledge that they were gone.

  When Liam diverted to them, the Magi turned on him. He faced her, riding a wave of fury. “Come on, you bitch! Give me all you’ve got!”

  She complied much faster than he’d anticipated. Before he could duck out of the way, Nix piled him to the ground, taking the blow in his place. “Forgive me. I understand now,” Nix said, before the light faded from his eyes. Somehow, Laerni had known he would redeem himself in the end.

  Overwhelmed with emotion, I reached out to Gallagher, sobbing for Willa, for Nix’s lost life and Liam’s pain as more fae from the Black City joined them. Humans rushed out of the trees in droves. The ground boiled with fists and blood and war. Healthy men and women, some of whom hated me with passion, fought, giving their lives just to give me a few more minutes to figure it out. My heart split at the seams.

  A sound drew all eyes to the sky, the sonic boom of a jet launching its death blow. Parthalan streaked into the sky followed by dozens of his people, just as I’d seen him do. Liam and Gallagher watched as the world held its breath.

  The sky turned red. Lightning left my fingertips, streaking toward the ground. The blast knocked Liam on his back, his heart breaking at the sight of me, his wife, his son, believing he’d lose us to the Magi, knowing that would be the final glimpse of me he’d get. Tears spilled from his eyes, and he wailed my name. Feathers erupted on his body, and a few flaps of his wings carried him to my fireball. “Stop, Lila,” he tried to cry, but it came out only as owl shrieks. A flare seared his face, blasted him back, and he plummeted to the ground. He awoke moments later beside Gallagher with a crushing headache.

  He’s alive!

  Gallagher’s hand on his arm brought his attention back to the ground. Screaming. Alseides and her remaining sister, who was still sentient and standing, along with all of their offspring, shrieked in a piteous crescendo. Their legs had grown roots into the ground, their skin hardening to bark. Hair twisted up to form branches, each sprouting a different shape of leaf.

  “She’s stealing their power,” Gallagher whispered, as if afraid it wasn’t a good thing. “Lila is returning them to their true forms. No, not Lila, Garret. I can feel him guiding her without words, like … well, I have no description for the bond between them. Perhaps all is not lost.”

  My form in the sky grew nuclear in glow, and all on the ground were forced to throw hands over their eyes. I rose higher and higher, my fireball ever expanding until a flare burned over the land in a scorching wave. Not flame but pure power.

  The Magi stared, sightless, into the sky, their eyes nothing more than glossed-over wood.

  “There is no consciousness left,” Gallagher said. “No madness. No fury. Only peace.”

  I broke out of his grasp in my white nowhere, unable to draw in enough air. Too much divided my emotions. “I can’t see any more. I lose my son next.”

  Staring once again at the white field, Gallagher rubbed his heart as if his hurt as much as mine. “There is one last thing you need to see. Liam remained in the valley for weeks after you came apart and blazed in the sky. For months, the world had two suns, one of which never left the sky above the Magi’s prison. You, Lila. Thousands came, from all corners of the world, from every race in existence, to kneel here and bask in your warmth. Some prayed. Some gave thanks. None will forget. I could not sense your mind, as if it had shattered along with your body, but my heart told me you would return. Eventually, I coaxed Liam back to Iress to wait, where he grieved in near silence.”

  The Court garden appeared around us as if we’d actually transported there instead of watching his memory. Liam, or a hollowed out shadow of himself, spoke quietly to Andrew and Neve in the center. Cas and Brígh held one another, swaying. I wanted to laugh at the sight of them all alive and well, but it wouldn’t come.

  “Why are you showing me this?” I asked. Can it really be true?

  “Patience, Lila.”

  “I’m not good at patience. I’ve never been, and will never be good at patience.” I opened my mouth to demand he tell me when the spirits parted in the sky, leaving a dark hole in their center. Andrew shoved Liam and Neve halfway up the aisle before they all turned.

  A golden flash preceded a globe of Light, one I recognized as being me without any knowledge of why. As I descended toward the platform at the heart of the city, another, smaller sphere broke away from me.

  After wrenching his arm free of Andrew’s hold, Liam raced forward, his eyes streaming tears. Holding his hands up, he waited as the little one descended into them. When the brightness faded, a small, naked child lay in Liam’s arms. He brought Garret to his chest with tender care, sobbing his name, watching as my form made contact with the ground behind our twin thrones.

  “Lila!” Neve shrieked, turning to Andrew. “Get Gallagher.”

  Instead of running to me, she held her arms out for our son, taking him as Liam raced to me, choking on my name.

  “And that’s where you lie still,” Gallagher said, taking the vision from me while I strained to see. “The entire city feeds you energy so you won’t fade from us, shares in your grief, their hopes and happiness. Brígh reads to you every day, saying the culture will do your brain some good once you wake the hell up. Arianne brings her toys to show and share with you
, while she and Garret play near your resting place. Cas and Andrew scarcely leave your side, a duo we all have to battle with just to approach you. Their protectiveness and loyalty have gone into hyper drive. Liam bathes you, telling you stories of his own childhood while he brushes your hair out and adorns it with flowers, knowing you’d hate it and hoping you’ll wake up to throttle him.”

  I laughed, the sound rusty since I hadn’t done it in so long, but it didn’t last. “Nix lost his life, his whole life, because of them. Under all of his shortcomings, he was a proud man. He knew in the end what he did, didn’t he? And that’s the worst of all. He’ll spend eternity knowing he almost helped Alseides destroy everything.”

  “That is between him and the Goddess, and I’m certain she will help him find happiness in the next life.”

  “What about Parthalan? He died because I didn’t have enough faith.”

  “You saved me.”

  His voice from beside me rattled through my bones. I turned to find him looking his once dapper self with dark curls and wearing his favorite charcoal gray, thousand dollar suit. “How am I seeing you? You died. I saw you take off like a rocket and do something, so whatever James and Richard sent to kill me went away.”

  “He is speaking to you through me from the realm of the spirits, the image is your own making,” Gallagher said.

  The smirk carving Parthalan’s lips would have made girls swoon for miles, his ice blue eyes sparkling with it. “For my loyalty and sacrifice, the Goddess saw fit to restore my soul.”

  “Death is not the end, Lila.” That from Willa, who appeared beside him in a flowing white gown, grinning, her hand intertwined with Quinn’s, who winked at me. “It’s only a new beginnin’.”

  I threw my arms around her. My heart shattered all over again as I fully accepted what her presence meant. “Oh, Willa! Goddess, I’m sorry.”

  She hugged me back, and twirled before falling into Quinn’s arms in a dancer’s dip. “The only one yeh need be sorry for is yeh when yeh finally wake up and catch hell from yehr boys for makin’ ‘em wait so very long. Yeh’ll always know where to find us. This isn’t goodbye.”