by Rachel Aaron
The similarities to the bleak prison cell where Vann Jeger interrogated her were enough to make Marci instantly nervous, but there was no drain in the floor this time, and the “door” was nothing but a flimsy, corrugated metal sheet that slid up on a track. Once she got over her initial shock, the little room actually reminded Marci more of a storage unit than anything else.
“That’s because it is a storage unit,” Amelia answered proudly when she asked. “Best security you can get for the price! Plus, no one bothers you.”
“You sleep in a self-storage unit?” Marci said, horrified. The closet-sized room was barely big enough for the two of them to stand in.
“Of course not,” Amelia scoffed. “I just needed somewhere safe to hide this.”
She reached out as she spoke, rapping her knuckles against the unit’s rear wall. A split second later, the painted cement bricks vanished to reveal the most beautiful beach Marci had ever seen.
Turquoise water lapped in small, gentle waves in a crescent bay under a pink and blue sky just on the cusp of sunset. The white sand beach was speckled with black, volcanic boulders and bordered by an explosion of tropical vegetation so dense, it looked like a wall of green. Directly in front of them, in the dry sand above the surf, someone had set up a wooden table shielded from the sun by a large beach umbrella with heaps of beautiful, ripe, tropical fruits and a metal bucket loaded with ice and what appeared to be bottles of high-proof rum.
The whole setup was so absurdly picture-perfect, Marci would have sworn it was an illusion, but even the best illusions covered only two to three senses at the most. Here, though, not only could she see the beautiful landscape stretching out in front of her, she could smell the warm sea air coming in like a caress. The setting sunlight that streamed through the gap was hot and balmy on her skin, and when Amelia kicked off her shoes and stepped through, her bare feet slid into the sand with a silken kush.
After that, Marci had no choice but to accept that there really was a hole in the wall in front of her that led to paradise. But when she reached down to plunge her own fingers into the warm, white sand, pain shot through her neck like a knife, making her jump back with a strangled gasp.
“Interesting,” Amelia said, glancing back at Marci’s pained sound before resuming her stroll to the fruit-laden table. “Looks like your curse is pretty literal. You really can’t set so much as a finger outside the DFZ.”
“So it would seem,” Marci said, rubbing her throbbing neck. “So is that another plane?”
“Wrong again,” the dragon replied, grabbing the heaping bowl of fruit off the table. “Keeping a portal to the outer planes open for more than a few minutes is beyond even my abilities. This is a little island of no consequence in what you now call the Philippines. I’ve been using it as my base of operations in this world for centuries. The tropical climate agrees with my plumage.” She walked back to the portal and stuck the bowl through, placing the fragrant fruit just below Marci’s nose. “Mango?”
Marci took the offered yellow fruit without looking. She’d never been to the Philippines personally, but the island’s beauty certainly matched any tropical postcard. Also, being on the other side of the planet would explain why the sun looked to be on the verge of setting behind Amelia despite the fact that it was early morning in Detroit. But what she still didn’t get was, “How?”
Amelia arched an eyebrow. “How what?”
“How can you do this?” Marci said, flailing her arms at the gently cresting waves. “Dimensional magic is one of the most competitive fields in modern sorcery. All the top universities are working on it, but the biggest portal I’ve ever heard of was MIT’s last year, and that was barely the size of a dime. You’ve got a whole wall! And you opened it inside the same dimension. I didn’t even know that was possible.”
“Hey, they don’t call me the Planeswalker for nothing,” Amelia said smugly, grabbing a mango for herself before dropping the bowl back onto the table. “Don’t worry about it too much. Proper portal creation takes longer than a single human lifetime to master. You see those seams?” She pointed at the edge where the beach met the storage unit like a razor slice. “It takes centuries to get to that level of precision. But I had a lot of time to practice, and portals to my own private island are much more convenient than actually trying to live in Algonquin’s playpen. But enough about me.” She plopped down into the folding beach chair beside the table, leaning back to face Marci with a wide grin. “Let’s talk about your spirit.”
Her voice was still casual and friendly, but the abrupt subject change was enough to remind Marci that this wasn’t actually a beach trip. “Why are you so interested?” she asked, clutching her bag where Ghost was still snoozing, blissfully unaware.
“He’s a unique specimen,” Amelia replied, reaching into the ice-filled bucket beside her to grab a frosted bottle of rum. “So are you, for that matter. New sights are a rarity at my age, so when I find one, I don’t waste time.” She popped the cork with her teeth and took a long swig of the cold, amber liquor. “Assuage my curiosity,” she ordered when she finished. “Tell me how you ended up bound to him.”
Marci frowned. She hadn’t needed Julius to warn her that telling dragons anything before you knew their end goal was a bad idea. That said, Amelia had answered all of her questions so far. It seemed wrong not to return the favor. Besides, the entire reason she’d agreed to go with Amelia had been to get a chance to pick an ancient dragon’s brain. Maybe if she told the truth, Amelia would be able to shed some light on what had happened in the alleyway?
“I kind of got him by accident,” Marci confessed. “My very first job in the DFZ was a haunting job. Most so-called hauntings are actually caused by spirits, so I came prepared for a banishing, but when I reached my client, Ghost was sitting on her chest draining her magic. I’d never seen a spirit do anything like that before, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of time to investigate since my client was nearly dead by the time I got there. So, since banishing Ghost would have meant I’d never get to answer my questions, I decided to bind him instead. That was a little over a month ago. We’ve been together ever since.”
“Hold up,” Amelia said, leaning forward in her beach chair. “You found an unknown spirit sucking the life out of another human, and you decided to bind him to your own soul for the rest of your life just so you’d get a chance to poke at him later?”
Marci’s cheeks began to burn. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said quickly. “I’m no expert at spirits—my training is in Thaumaturgical spellwork theory—but even I could tell that Ghost was too small to be a threat. The only reason he was able to overpower my client in the first place was because she was already old and sick. I was perfectly safe, and I couldn’t send him away without at least trying to figure out what he was.”
That came out more defensive than she’d intended, but Amelia was grinning ear to ear. “You mistake me,” she said. “I wasn’t being critical. I appreciate your audacity. Were you successful, then? Do you know what he is?”
Marci had no choice but to shake her head. “My first hypothesis was that he was a death spirit. I’d never heard of a non-human one, but the house where I found him was overrun with cats, and there was more than enough death for a manifestation.”
“A death spirit of cats,” the dragon said, pausing for a long, thoughtful draw off her rum bottle. “That’s a new one. And do you still think that’s the case?”
“No,” Marci said. “At the time, I was hoping I’d discovered a new classification, but Ghost has never acted like a death spirit, so now I’m not sure what he is. I was actually about to start experimenting when this Vann Jeger nonsense blew up.” She smiled at the dragon, crossing her fingers in secret where she held her bag. “Do you know what he is?”
She’d just meant to fish for clues, but to her amazement, Amelia actually seemed to be giving her question serious consideration. “There’s a lot of answers to that,” she said at last. “You claimed you
weren’t an expert on spirits. What does that mean?”
“Well,” Marci said. “I mean, obviously I know the basics. Every licensed mage in the U.S. has to learn how to bind and banish and so forth for their own protection. But the study of spirits is part of the Shamanic branch of magic, and I’m a Thaumaturge. We deal with the more rigorous, scientific aspects of magical theory.”
“I’ve been gone for fifty years, so I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Amelia said with a shrug. “But I’m guessing all of that was a fancy way of saying spirits aren’t your area?”
Marci sighed. “More or less.”
“Don’t worry,” Amelia said. “If spirit studies are like the rest of modern magical theory, they’re all wrong anyway. It’s actually easier if you don’t know anything, because that means I can start with the basics. Here.”
She took another quick drink off her rum bottle and set it back in the ice bucket. With her hands free, she turned her chair around and started digging a hole in the wet sand behind her.
“Think of magic in this plane like this water,” she said, moving her hands to show Marci the seawater that was seeping up through the bottom of the sandy hole she’d dug. “It wells up constantly from the Earth at a more or less even rate. Like water, magic’s not picky. It’ll fill anything that’ll hold it.” She expanded the simple hole into a cross shape as she said this, and sure enough, the water followed, filling the canals with foamy salt water.
“On the beach, of course, we’re uphill, so the water only goes part way. But if this beach were perfectly flat, the water would fill each of these depressions to overflowing before moving to the next one. Magic is the same.”
She turned her chair back around to face Marci again, grabbing her rum for another swig before continuing. “It’s like water welling up in a flat field. If there are any depressions—ditches, holes, low areas, etc.—it will fill those first before flowing on. Once filled, these puddles of magic take on the characteristics of the land that contains them. This is why magic feels different in different places. It’s literally taking on a different shape depending on what it’s filling. But, if the vessel in question is large and deep enough, eventually the enormous amount of magic filling it will reach critical mass. When this happens, the magic itself can develop sentience and become what we know as a spirit.”
She paused there, shooting Marci an Are you following all this? look, but Marci could only stare back in awe. She’d never heard anything like this. Everyone knew that magic rose from the ground, but no one yet understood why that was, or why certain locations had different magic than others. There were dozens of competing theories as to why some places—like the Great Lakes—had spirits while others did not, but nothing had ever been proven. This, though, this made sense.
“Spirits are sentient magic,” she said, her voice shaking. “I always thought a domain was just the specific place a spirit had control over, like Algonquin and her lakes, but it’s the other way around! The domain is what contains the magic that becomes the spirit, because spirits are magic!”
Amelia smiled. “Like that, huh?”
“Like it?” Marci plunged her hands into her bag, pulling out her notebook so fast, she tugged them right through Ghost. “I have to write this down!”
The more she thought about Amelia’s explanation, the more things clicked together. Her whole life, all of her teachers had talked about spirits like they were just a different, more powerful type of magical animal, but that had never really made sense. A tank badger had magic, sure, but it was nothing like a spirit. It couldn’t vanish and reappear like Ghost could, and no magical animal had ever talked to her in her head. But if she accepted the idea that spirits weren’t physical at all, but sentient magic that thought and acted for itself, that explained so much! That was why she’d been able to bind Ghost in the first place, because he was just more magic, the same stuff she touched and moved around all the time.
And the drought! She’d always thought the name for the thousand-year span when there’d been no magic was just poetic, but what if it was literal? What if the magic really had dried up like a river in a drought? That would explain why the spirits had all been forced into sleep, and why they’d all come roaring back the moment the meteor got the magical flow going again. Unlike magical animals—including human mages—who’d merely been altered by the sudden influx of magic, spirits had been practically reborn on the spot, because they were magic. Unified, self-aware, sentient magic.
Grinning like a maniac, Marci paused scribbling her notes and jumped back to the top of the page, writing the words SENTIENT MAGIC THEORY across the head of her notebook in bold stokes. Forget earning her doctorate, this was the sort of magical breakthrough that got your name in the history books! All she needed now was proof—some kind of experiment that would show definitively that spirits weren’t a separate class of magical animal or gods or whatever the current popular theories claimed, but thinking, moving blobs of self-aware magic—and she’d be famous forever as the mage who finally cracked spirit theory. They’d awarded the Nobel Prize in Magic for less. And here she’d thought her academic career was over!
That thought snapped her back to the present, and Marci looked up to see Amelia watching her with a bored expression and a nearly empty bottle of booze. That wouldn’t do at all. She’d finally found an immortal willing to talk to her about magic, and the results had already gone beyond her wildest expectations. She couldn’t let Amelia get bored with her now. Who knew what other secrets she had to offer?
“Sorry,” Marci said, scanning her page one last time to be sure she had all the key points down before closing her notebook. “Got carried away.” She paused, suddenly worried. “You don’t mind if I tell other people about this, do you?”
“Knock yourself out,” Amelia said, downing the last inch of rum and tossing the empty bottle into the sand at her feet before digging into the ice bucket for a fresh one. “Believe it or not, this stuff used to be common knowledge. If I’d known human magic was this far behind on the fundamentals, I’d have come back decades ago just to save myself the pain of watching you all make the same mistakes all over again.”
“That’s not our fault,” Marci said hotly. “There was no one teach us! All the old books and resources on magic were either destroyed by time or burned by the ignorant as heretical. By the time magic actually came back, most people believed it had never existed in the first place. That’s not even starting at zero. The first mages had to work their way up from negative knowledge, and the whole time, the spirits and dragons were just watching and not telling us anything!”
“Why should they?” Amelia said, popping the cork on her new bottle. “Human mages used to be at the top of the food chain, killing dragons and banishing spirits. The only thing that kept you in check was the fact that most of you died of preventable causes before you could become really dangerous. With the modern explosion in the human population, though, there are more mages alive right now than have ever existed in all the previous history of mankind combined. Your astounding ignorance is the only thing that keeps you from ruling the world on all levels. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were hidden dragons embedded in academic magic circles purely for the purpose of feeding you false information to keep it that way.”
Considering how long a few incredibly stupid theories had stuck around in otherwise respectable circles of magical thought, Marci didn’t actually find that idea too far-fetched. “So why are you telling me now?”
“Because I don’t have to stick around for the aftermath,” Amelia said with a wink. “I can leave this plane anytime I want. Also, I’d love to see certain individuals taken down a peg or two. Watching a new generation of dragon slayers rise up to take down the old guard would be very satisfying.” She paused for an evil grin before taking another slug off her bottle. “Shall we continue? I still haven’t actually answered your question, and I’d like to get this over with before the sun goes down and the mo
squitoes come out.”
“Of course,” Marci said, flipping her notebook open again. “Please go on.”
“You asked me when we started if I knew what kind of spirit your kitten there was,” Amelia said, settling back into her chair. “The short answer to that is yes, but the long answer is a bit more complicated, and has to do with you.”
Marci blinked. “Me?”
Amelia nodded. “As you might have guessed from what I said earlier, spirit classification is a tricky business. Traditionally, spirits are organized into four types according to their vessels. The most common type of spirit are those whose power gathers in physical landmasses, like, say, the Great Lakes. We call these spirits Spirits of the Land, and they tend to be the heavy hitters of the spirit world since they’re the magical embodiment of freaking giant mountains and whatever. Really, though, anywhere magic pools for long enough can become a spirit. Animals, for example. If enough animals get together in a population, their collective magic pools to form an Animal Spirit.”
“I’ve seen plenty of those,” Marci said, thinking of the tank badger spirit she’d banished yesterday evening. “They don’t seem to be as powerful, though.”
“They’re not,” Amelia said, nodding. “But that’s a volume issue. Even if a critter is super magical, it takes a lot of them all living together to create a magical depression as big as the Great Lakes. Most animal populations simply never reach that size, and so Animal Spirits tend to be weaker, smaller, and stupider than their geological counterparts.”
Marci nodded, writing all this down as fast as her pen would go.
“Animals and land are the obvious ones, though,” the dragon went on. “Stuff gets really crazy when you get into death spirits. Strictly speaking, death spirits aren’t even really a formal category. It’s more of a catch-all term for the phenomenon that occurs when so many individuals die all at once, the combined release of their magic creates a temporary glut big enough to become a spirit. This is why death spirits come in so many different forms, and why they almost never stick around for very long. Because they’re formed by a temporary magical surge instead of filling a vessel, there’s nothing permanent holding them together. Once the natural ebb and flow of magic disperses the glut that created them, death spirits fade right back into oblivion, never to be seen again.”