by SA Magnusson
I let out a shaky breath, looking around the room. Derek and David crouched in the corner, not moving. Gran and Gramps were thrown to opposite sides of the room, but both of them seemed to be alive. Barden had collapsed near the door. He blinked slowly, getting to his feet and staring at the space where the gorgon had been.
The only one who had not been tossed around as if it were nothing was Aron. He stood behind me, power and a presence that provided me with strength. Had it not been for him and his recommendation, the gorgon wouldn’t have been defeated.
“We did it,” I said.
Aron smiled at me. “You did it.”
I looked from Barden to Gran and Gramps. “Now we just have to make sure that the fighting between the Dark Council and the mage council is done.”
Barden slowly got to his feet, still watching the space where the gorgon had been. “My people will stop.”
“Gran?”
She sat with her elbows propped on her knees, her head in her hands. “We will stop, too. The fighting needs to end.”
Barden and Gran watched each other for a long moment before they both nodded.
It took me a moment to realize that Gran had agreed on behalf of the council. That meant that she was on the council. Everything made sense. Her distractibility. The way they were able to summon resources to look for Derek. Even the way they were able to get word to Aron to come for me.
Gran was on the mage council.
Gramps spoke up, shaking me from my thoughts. “There’s still the matter of how these things got into this world in the first place.”
I pulled out my phone, tapping through the security to open up the app for our hospital’s electronic medical record. “I think that I can help with that.”
18
Aron pulled up to a house in a neighborhood near the midtown market. It was run-down, the paint peeling and fading, and a broken window had long since been boarded up. Even that had cracked and now had a hole in it. A rusted car in front of the house didn’t look as if it had been driven in years.
“Are you sure this is the address?” Aron asked.
“This is what it says. The kind of people we typically see at Hennepin General don’t have much money.” As a county hospital, we served everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. All hospitals claimed that to some extent, but the populations that the primary care clinics affiliated with Hennepin General served were mostly lower income.
Magic bloomed, and I glanced over at Aron. “Was that you?”
He nodded. “I figured we should be ready. Are you?”
I took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure what we would see, but after stopping the gorgon, we needed to finish this. Getting to Tony and finding answers was the last thing on our list. We had to ensure he didn’t do this again and had to prevent any others from suffering the same fate.
I held onto the sword as we approached the door, crossing through an overgrown lawn that had turned brown. “I wish I would have worn boots,” I muttered. When Aron arched a brow at me, I shrugged. “Tetanus.”
“Is that something to fear?”
“I’m vaccinated against it, but I still don’t like the idea of stepping on some nasty rusted-out—”
Movement inside the house cut me off.
I nodded to Aron and he approached the door, pushing his hand on it and exploding out with the spell. The door slammed open in front of him.
I hurried up behind him before hesitating and backing out of the house, racing around the side. It would be just our luck to break in and go after Tony only to discover that he had left through some back entrance.
I found him as he was trying to sneak out a door.
“Tony?”
He skidded to a stop and his eyes caught on my sword before looking up at my face. “Hey. I know you. You’re that doctor.”
“Yeah. I’m that doctor. Where do you think you were going?”
“I’m feeling better, Doc. I didn’t need a house call.”
I lifted the sword, pointing it at him. With as tired as I was after the attack, I wasn’t sure how much magic I would be able to pull through it, but it looked threatening, if nothing else. “I think you did.”
Aron caught up to him from the other side of the house and grabbed him by the back of his shirt, throwing him backward. I glanced around to see if anyone was watching. In a neighborhood like this, there probably were a few people keeping an eye on others, and someone showing up with the sword and someone else throwing Tony around would be sure to draw attention. That couldn’t be helped now. Maybe the idea of a woman carrying the sword openly would make them think they were hallucinating.
I stepped inside the house and wrinkled my nose at the smell. It was like old gym socks mixed with rotten food. “Don’t you ever clean up?”
Tony lay on the floor with Aron looming over him. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to talk to you about your friend Rory,” I said.
Tony frowned. “Rory? What’s he got to do with this?”
“The two of you were messing around with power that you shouldn’t have.”
He glanced from me to Aron, the way he tensed at seeing Aron telling me he was much more concerned with him even though I was the one with the sword. “It was Rory’s idea,” he said quickly. “He thought we could learn a few tricks and develop faster. He thought in doing so, we could get the attention of the Dark Council.”
“Oh, you got the attention of the Dark Council all right. You started a war between them and the mage council.”
His eyes widened. “I did what?”
I nodded to Aron. “And he’s an archer. I don’t suppose you know what that is?”
The way he started scooting back told me that he did.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. We had a book we were given, and we were using it—”
“A book? Where is it?”
Tony glanced from Aron to me. “If you give me a second, I’ll grab it.”
“We can follow him,” Aron said.
Tony got to his feet and stumbled down the hallway to a room. Aron and I trailed after him, and when I stepped into the room, my breath caught. The room was empty. The wooden floor had a maroon circle painted on it, and it wasn’t too hard for me to believe they had used their own blood.
“Christ, Tony what were you thinking?”
“We were thinking that we wanted power.”
“And instead you called something worse.”
“We didn’t call anything.”
I pointed to the summoning circle. “I imagine that whatever spell you were doing used that?”
Tony nodded.
“Well, you called something across the Veil. Rory wasn’t quite as lucky, but I think he’ll pull through.” I didn’t know what sort of long-term effects Rory might have after suffering from the gorgon feeding on him for as long as it had. Maybe nothing, but I suspected it had drawn off his magic.
There was something about that I still didn’t understand, but I wasn’t about to go and ask Gran and Gramps why the gorgon had been drawn to the dark mages only. It had fed on them, though it hadn’t seemed to care much about mages like Gran and Gramps, or even Aron.
And it hadn’t really attempted to try to feed on me.
If I had needed any sort of confirmation I wasn’t a dark mage, that was it.
“What book is this?” Aron asked.
“It’s just a book. It shows how to try different higher-level spells. Most of them are designed to help us pull power we couldn’t pull otherwise.” He grabbed a book out of the corner. It was old and bound in thick leather, and as I took it from him and began to flip through the pages, I noticed the paper it was written on was equally old.
Aron stared at the book, his eyes narrowed. He didn’t say it, but he recognized it. What was it that he recognized?
Maybe he wouldn’t tell me, but that wouldn’t stop me from asking him after this was all done.
“Who gave it to you?
” Aron asked. He sounded angry. Most of the time, I found Aron to be fairly even-keeled, but Tony and Rory using this book upset him.
“Like I said, Rory got it.”
“Did Rory get it? Or did someone give it to him?”
Tony shrugged. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”
As I watched the way Aron stared at the book, I knew that it did. “What can you tell us about this man?”
“Not much. He found us when he heard we were looking for something like this. Even showed us which spell to use for what we wanted.”
“Of course he did.” They’d fallen for whatever this man had planned. Had done exactly as he had wanted.
“Hey. Not all of us are naturally gifted mages.”
“I’m not a naturally gifted mage,” I said.
“No? And what are you? Seems that you had to use some sort of magic to save me, not that I’m complaining.”
I shook my head, not knowing how to answer that. “Have you tried to use it again?”
Tony began to glower at me. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Why would I be kidding?”
“After what happened?”
“What happened?”
“You were there. You rescued me. I probably would have died if not for what you did.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” I said.
“I haven’t been able to use any magic since you saved me,” he said.
“None?”
He shook his head. “It’s like… It’s like it’s gone. Everything that I was able to do is no longer there.”
At least that answered my question about whether the gorgon had fed on him. Maybe it had more to do with the fact that Tony wasn’t a powerful mage to begin with. Rory must’ve had some potential.
What about his mom? The poor kid probably didn’t even know she died.
“I took care of your mother,” I said softly.
Tony tensed. “You did what?”
“She came into the ER when I was working. She was complaining of a headache. She was seeing things. It didn’t take long for me to realize she had been attacked much like you were. I tried to help her, but…”
Tony took a step toward me, but Aron positioned himself in between us.
“But what?”
“I’m so sorry, Tony, but your mother didn’t make it.”
“Ma? She’s gone?”
“This creature you and Rory released attached itself to her. It fed on her the same way it was feeding on you. I was able to get to you in time, but I wasn’t able to help her. I tried, but I couldn’t.” I hated this part of medicine. Talking to the families, telling them that I had failed, always felt heartbreaking. And there would always be failures. I wasn’t God, and I wasn’t able to save everybody, regardless of how much I might want to. Even if I had mastery of my magic, I still wouldn’t be able to save everyone.
Tony turned away from me. He rubbed his hand through his hair. “Haven’t seen her in a few days, ever since the summons. She knew a little more magic… thought to stop us…”
Christ. She had tried to keep them from doing this. Could that be why the gorgon had gone after her too? “I’m sorry,” I said again.
We stood there for a moment, and Tony began to sob. I approached slowly and patted him on the shoulder. “Is there anyone who can stay with you?”
He shot me a look. “Are you offering?”
“I just wanted to make sure that you would be okay.”
He took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes with his fist. “I’m fine. And if that’s all you to wanted, then maybe you can go?”
I shrugged, my attention on Aron. “I guess we can go.”
As we headed toward the door, Tony called after us, “What happened to Rory?”
“He’s alive. I don’t know what else to tell you. You have to ask his father.”
“You managed to save him, too?”
“Like I said, he’s alive.”
When we were settled in the car, I leaned back, letting out a heavy sigh. “What is this book? You recognized it.”
“I don’t know why he should have it.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you that, Kate.”
“After everything we’ve been through, now you’re going to refuse me?”
Aron gripped the wheel as he pulled into traffic. “It’s something the council lost many years ago. It’s a way of speaking to the other side of the Veil.”
“It’s got to be more than just a way of speaking to it.”
“Probably, but it’s not something I know all that well. Like I said, the book was lost.”
“And now it’s been found.”
Aron glanced over at me. “Apparently.”
I stared at the cover of the book, flipping through the pages. They were incantations. Spells. All of them were incredibly complex, more so than I would have expected someone like Tony to have been able to do. Rory might’ve been a different story. With his father plugged into the Dark Council, he probably understood how to perform these incantations much better than Tony.
Why would they have gotten a hold of it?
Tony had said that it had been given to Rory. That indicated that someone wanted them to use it.
I continued flipping pages until I reached one where the corner was folded over. There were notes on the side of the page, and I suspected this was the one that Tony and Rory had used to summon the gorgon, though that wasn’t what they thought they were doing. They thought they were getting more powerful.
“Someone wanted them to release the gorgon.” I looked up at Aron. “Someone wanted there to be a battle between the Dark Council and the mage council.”
“So it would seem,” Aron said. He glanced at the page, reading it more quickly than I could. Most of the words were gibberish to me. “And they offered themselves as the sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?”
“The spell seems to require one.”
Maybe more than one. And that could be why it had targeted only dark magic users. They had been the ones to summon it.
“Who would have done this?”
Aron shook his head, speeding off from a stoplight. “I don’t know.”
I turned my attention back to the book. “Could there be another group that would benefit?”
“Not that we know about. We’ve known of the Dark Council, so if there is someone else, they have remained hidden.”
A Real Dark Council.
I sat in place, exhausted. After a while, I looked up to see that we were continuing west, now traveling along the interstate, away from the downtown. “Where are you taking me?”
“Home for now. You need to rest and then we can go for answers.”
“Solera?”
Aron glanced at me. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. You’ve done more than you needed to in order to help the council. I can go, take this book with me, and find out who might be responsible.”
“You think she might know?”
“It’s a place to start.”
“That’s not why you want to go.”
Aron didn’t look over at me but squeezed the wheel. “You need answers about yourself, Kate.”
I did, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready for them. “What happens if they aren’t the kind of answers I’m ready for?”
Aron reached over and took my hand, his massive hand engulfing mine as he squeezed. “I will be there with you.”
I met his eyes, and a spark passed between us. I’d been fighting the tug of attraction I’d felt toward him since meeting him. I don’t think that I could fight it anymore. And who better to go with me to search for answers? I could have Gran and Gramps come with me, but they had their own secrets they needed to keep. I didn’t blame them for it. They were trying to protect me. This one would be my secret, at least until I understood what it was and what it meant for me.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me until this is over. You migh
t not like the answers you get.”
“At least I’ll know.”
He nodded, turning his attention back to the road. “At least you’ll know.”
19
Aron dropped me off at my condo and I crashed, sleeping for the better part of the night, not even awakening to Lucy and her incessant crawling around my head. The only time she managed to get me to awaken was when she decided to drop her ass right in my face, forcing me to sit up with a start. My grandparents came and left, letting me know that they were working with the Dark Council, finalizing details on the treatise, but wouldn’t tell me much more than that. Somehow, the fact that I had helped defeat the gorgon and negotiate the truce didn’t factor in. But then, I wasn’t one of the mage council, so why should it?
I kept waiting for Aron to return, letting me know that we could go and visit Solera, but he never did. Eventually I gave up. On the second day after surviving the attack, my door opened without a knock and I looked up to see Aron standing in the doorway. He looked good and I pushed that thought away, studying him for a long moment.
“Do we get to go see her?” I asked.
He shook his head, stuffing his hands in the pocket of his leather jacket. “She has made herself unavailable.”
“So I won’t get to know.”
“In time, and I promise that I will continue to work on getting her to answer, but I can’t make any other promises.”
Throwing myself on my couch, I petted Lucy absently as she rubbed herself up against me. “All I want are answers.”
Aron didn’t sit, telling me that he had no intention of staying for long. I suppose that I should be thankful that he had come in person. “You’ll get them, but sometimes answers take time. And with a woman like Solera, time is a different construct.”
“What about the book?”
“The council has reclaimed the book. They’re looking into who might have provided it to Rory and Tony.”
“That’s it?”
“Kate—”
I looked up at him. “I get it. You have to go. The fighting between the Dark Council and the mage council is over.” And I wasn’t a part of the magical world. I didn’t have any right to push my way into whatever the council might do about the attack. It should be enough that it was over.