My voice trailed off, and Ingeborg smiled at the sight of my blushing cheeks.
“No magic is more powerful than love.”
“Is that why it happens?” I lifted my eyes up to hers. “He swears other women’s touch never had the same effect. Why me?”
“Well, maybe there is some demon blood in you too?” She looked at me coyly.
“Me?” I thought about my parents, either of them was the furthest thing from what I imagined a demon would be. “Very unlikely!” I shook my head, laughing.
“In this case, don’t we all have a special effect on our loved ones? Even ordinary humans? Just a touch or even a mere presence of a soulmate can calm, soothe and comfort anyone. Because Marcus’ magic is so strong, I think that your ability to comfort your soulmate had to grow to match it.”
It was not the specific explanation I was hoping for, but it was an explanation I could accept. At the end of the day, it didn’t really matter why my touch helped Marcus, I was glad that it did.
Deep in my heart, I always sensed that he was special to me; the word soulmate put the name on it. It also brought a feeling of relief: my ability to calm Marcus’s fire wouldn’t go away one day. For as long as I loved him, I would be able to bring him comfort, and I knew that I would love him until the end of time.
“He is waiting for you,” Ingeborg said suddenly. “You should probably go.”
“He is?” I looked around, expecting to see Marcus here, in the coffee shop.
“No,” Ingeborg laughed. “At home! I sense he is waiting for you at home. I should be going home too.”
“It was very, very nice to meet you, Inge.” I got up, pressing the opened box of chocolates to my chest, and shook her hand again.
“I hope so much that you can make it to the family reunion in June. I would love to meet Marcus in person! I will email the address to you. Oh, and take care of the baby!” she added out of the blue.
“Baby?” For a second, I thought she was referring to Marcus again that she downgraded him from “the boy” to “the baby” for some reason.
“Yes, your baby,” Ingeborg said. “I can’t predict the future, but it’s most likely a boy, considering who his father is. Boys are more common among our kind. Over the last two centuries, there were only two girls in our extended family, myself and Cecilia, my great-great granddaughter.”
She gave me a small wave and disappeared into thin air, leaving me there with my mouth wide open in shock from her revelation.
31. Marcus.
It was the weekend of his week off. Angela had a meeting with Ingeborg this morning, and Marcus sat on the couch in her apartment, playing with her cat.
Well, the cat was actually trying to sleep, curled up in his lap as Marcus flicked his ear with his finger. Lannister flipped his tail in annoyance but wouldn’t get off his lap and didn’t stop purring.
Animals had always been drawn to Marcus. It was hard to stay indifferent to their affection for him too, and with time Marcus grew attached to all of the animals in his show.
He firmly believed that the lion in Africa — the one that left scars on his ankle many years ago — would have ended up loving him too if he only had a few more minutes to get to know him better. Of course, Marcus had no desire to sacrifice his leg in order to give the lion those few moments to get better acquainted.
This morning, Marcus was bored and anxious for Angela to come home. She should be here any minute now.
He still wasn’t sure how he felt about her being able to uncover a promising link to his family through Ingeborg. The possibility that there were more people like him in the world — that he was not the only one — both intrigued and unsettled him.
Carefully and painstakingly, he managed to craft a status quo of his existence in the world. He considered being able to lead a more-or-less ordinary life as his biggest achievement. Now, he was allowing Angela to take the risk of upsetting this balance.
The potential exposure of what he was to a large group of people — even if these people were as different as him or maybe because they were all different from the norm — felt like a big step back in his strive to be “normal.” He trusted Angela explicitly, but he couldn’t help feeling nervous and apprehensive.
Thankfully, she finally quit her work at the store, and he enjoyed having her in Vegas most of the weekends. He loved returning to his cold, impersonal hotel suite after the show knowing that Angela waited for him there. Her mere presence made any place feel like home.
To his endless frustration, she was still delaying her move to Vegas. He had asked her to move in with him, and she’d agreed. However, there was always something that kept her in Toronto: she wanted to make sure her parents’ house was sold and they settled into their new condo apartment in the city; she needed to help plan her brother’s engagement party, she had to find a job in Vegas before quitting her day job in Toronto… There was always something that required her attention, attention he longed to have focused solely on him, at least for the next little while.
True, it was much easier for them to have a long-distance relationship than it was for other couples. Even separated by thousands of miles, they saw each other daily, sometimes multiple times a day, but it was no longer enough for him.
He needed her to share his bed, his house, his life — all day, every day. He wanted her smell on his sheets, her toothbrush in his bathroom and all of her multicoloured shoes in his closet.
He wanted her goddamned cat curled up on his couch!
Marcus removed the cat off his lap and got up, determined to go out and meet Angela on her way home. She had a bad habit of cutting through the alley that worried him. It didn’t matter that it was broad daylight outside.
Shielding his face from the biting wind, Marcus made it to the turnoff into the alley, contemplating whether he should turn his leather jacket into a winter parka or a heavy-duty survival suit.
Even with spring around the corner, the weather in Toronto wasn’t warming up at all. Overtime, he got to know the city well and even grew to love it. However, this wet cold — that seemed to be the predominant state of the weather this time of the year — was something he could never get used to. It seeped through his clothes — no matter how many layers of clothing he had on — and chilled him through to the bone.
He glimpsed Angela’s silhouette at the other end of the valley and quickly forgot all about the cold. She was his ray of light and warmth.
A smile spread across his face at the familiar sight of her jumping over potholes and puddles. She was the only person he knew, who could successfully navigate wet, slippery pavement covered with slush and ice while wearing four-inch heels.
A dark figure separated from the corner of the alley and Marcus froze. An arm grabbed Angela from behind — one large hand closing over her face to cut off her screams — and pulled her back around the corner and into the street. There was a piercing screech of tires, and his heart dropped into an icy abyss.
His feet moved before his mind had a chance to recover from the shock of what he had just seen. He didn’t even have a chance to think about teleporting as his feet took him off running with the fastest speed that was humanly possible.
Only he was not an ordinary human!
The thought finally registered with him — and he took off into the air between the two factory buildings of the alley, landing in a crouch precisely in the very spot where Angela stood just a few moments ago. A small cardboard box with several pieces of chocolate spilled over the pavement was all that remained.
His fist hit the ground in frustration! An uncontrolled bolt of energy blasted out of it and cracked the pavement all the way to the walls of the buildings on each side of the alley.
The car was gone and so was Angela. The vehicle must have turned off into any one of the dozen side streets or alleys of this relatively older part of the city.
Frantic, Marcus shot up into the air, rising higher and higher over the trees and the rooftops. He didn�
�t care that it was in the middle of the day and that anyone could see him; he hovered over the city and searched the streets in vain. There was just no way of knowing which one of the numerous vehicles below carried his Angela.
Hot rage collided with the icy cold fear inside of him and exploded out of his chest in one impossibly painful, inhuman scream.
He sped up in his ascent higher into the sky, getting away from the populated city below him as far as possible, not because he was concerned about being exposed, but because he was no longer sure he could contain the power surging inside of him. He didn’t want to unleash it on the unsuspecting innocent people below.
The air was getting colder and harder to breathe the higher he ascended. It rushed by his face in biting icy-cold streams that actually felt good against his scorching hot skin, but the sensation was nothing like the calming, soothing touch of Angela’s hand.
Angela! His heart burst into a black cloud of pure pain. She was taken right in front of him, and he’d done nothing. He, the man who could do everything!
He stopped moving. His insides twisted, making him curl into himself, and he screamed again, as loud as his burning lungs would allow. He wished the pain of failure, loss and helplessness could be released into the air just as easily as his screams.
It remained. The pain stayed like a dagger stabbing his insides in unending torture, but his mind began to clear.
He looked again at the city below. From this distance, he could see the whole area of the City of Toronto in its entirety hugging the horseshoe curve of the shore of lake Ontario.
Angela was there somewhere. She needed him. There was nothing he could do for her up here.
He took a couple of deep breaths. The freezing air filled his lungs, cooling him off from the inside out.
He needed his mind calm and clear. He needed to focus. A list was already forming in his head. Call Simon. Track her cellphone. Security camera images from the nearby businesses to identify the car.
He was going to figure out how to find his woman. And then he was going to annihilate those responsible for taking her from him.
32. Evil.
They took off my blindfold and I came face to face with my captor.
“Well, so very nice to see you here, Miss McAllister.” A condescending smile stretched his lips, and his sterile minty breath fanned across my face. Watery blue eyes fixed on mine. “We’ll see if your boyfriend is going to join us too. I did send him an invitation.”
I blinked in the semi-darkness of the large building. Was it a warehouse? There was barely any light coming through some narrow dirty windows high under the ceiling, but my eyes had a hard time adjusting to any light after the blindfold.
I was sitting in a chair; my legs tied to its front legs with a coarse rope. My arms were stretched backwards, around the back of the chair with my hands tied together with something thin and hard that was digging painfully into the skin of my wrists. Plastic ties?
The warehouse wasn’t heated, and I shook violently from the cold. Somebody had taken my boots and my coat, leaving me only in my dress and nylon stockings.
I caught a glimpse of two more men lurking in the shadows behind the one who spoke to me.
Bewildered, I realized I should be afraid, but I didn’t feel any actual fear yet. I was cold, uncomfortable and rather confused but not afraid.
“Who, on Earth, are you?” I said slowly, articulating every word, and shook my head in disbelief. The true question was how on Earth did I get myself in this situation? It couldn’t be real. It wasn’t like me to get in trouble. It all must be some horrible mistake.
“Well,” he replied curtly and straightened. I immediately inhaled in relief when his face moved away from mine. “You see, you would have recognized me immediately if your goddamn boyfriend didn’t show up and steal what was mine. Now, no one even knows my name!”
The tone of his accusations sounded immediately familiar.
“You’re the one who sent those emails!”
Unfortunately, it confirmed that my being here was not a mistake after all.
He looked middle age, maybe in his fifties, maybe younger if the bags and the dark circles under his eyes could be attributed to his lifestyle choices rather than to his age. His receding hair was pulled back into a short ponytail, and he wore fairly ordinary jeans and boots. However, the rest of his clothing was more flamboyant: the dark-purple satin shirt and the black blazer with thin stripes of sparkling silver thread betrayed the taste of the showman in him.
“I wanted him to know that he wasn’t going to get away with it!” he shrieked. “That payback was coming. I wanted him to be scared.”
I scoffed. “You don’t know Marcus if you think a bunch of crazy emails would scare him.”
“I know him very well, missy. More than you could ever guess,” he hissed triumphantly, obviously proud of the work he had done.
How much did he know? Did he figure out Marcus’s secret too?
“I spent months of my life tracking that asshole! I know his show schedule by heart. I know where he lives. I watched his house for days!”
Marcus’s house? This lunatic was watching Marcus’s house? The cars! It dawned on me. Marcus mentioned suspicious vehicles near his property on more than one occasion. Those weren’t paparazzi…
“He is not an easy one to catch,” continued theavenger, “I swear he must have an underground tunnel dug under his house! But then, one day, I had an epiphany!” He stepped back and opened his arms wide to the sides in a dramatic gesture. “I knew about his one-off show in Canada, of course. I watched some videos of it a while back, saw all the bullshit headlines about how he ‘found the girl he was looking for.’ How romantic,” he spat. “I was sure it was all a marketing gimmick. I had run out of leads a few days back and decided to check this girl out — you — my dear. Bingo! Less than twenty-four hours after we started following you, there you were, both of you, hand in hand, going out for your morning coffee. Added bonus — I finally got a shot of Marcus without his mask, and now I have his last name too!”
That couldn’t be good! If he decided to expose Marcus’s true identity to the world, it would make things difficult for Marcus.
“What do you want? Why are you doing all of this?” I tried to get the words out as clearly as I could. It wasn’t easy, with my teeth chattering from the cold that seeped all the way through to my bones.
He stepped close to me again, curling his hands painfully into my shoulders and hissed into my face. “I want his secrets. All of them! Just like he stole all of mine a long time ago.”
“He did? When?” I pushed back into the chair as much as I could but still couldn’t get away from his sickeningly minty breath.
“Damn right he did!” he screamed in my face, making me flinch. “I was the best! I would have been on top of the world if it wasn’t for this asshole! He just came in and thought he could take it all from me! He stole every single trick I ever did! He stole them all!”
“Listen… um… Avenger?” I still didn’t know his name and racked my brain trying to figure it out. Granted, I didn’t know much about the world of magicians until Marcus came along, but if this guy was as big as he was telling me, I would have heard of him or would have even seen his pictures during my short-lived career as a celebrity stalker.
“The name is Harold!” he screamed. “Harold the Great! And I was the greatest!”
“Okay. Harold. Listen,” I started in a pacifying tone of voice. The man was definitely unwell, and I needed to keep my voice calm. Maybe I could reason with him then? I still didn’t believe that situation was hopeless and refused to feel scared, keeping panic at bay the best I could. Even if Harold didn’t tell me that he expected Marcus soon, I knew he would come for me no matter what. There was no reason to be scared, I told myself. “Marcus is moving into a very different direction now. He is not going to be using any of the mainstream magic tricks like that anymore. He is planning something else. You can have your s
ecrets back —”
“Ha! I don’t want my secrets back now! He used them — they are useless to me. I want all of his, every single one that made him famous and took away my chance. It’s a good thing I found a much more profitable business to run nowadays. I made more money in the past four years than your loser boyfriend could ever dream of!”
“Four years? You stopped working as a magician four years ago?”
“Seven. It took me about three years after that to get established in my new business. But I am very successful now!” He stood above me, his arms folded across his chest.
“You said you stopped performing because Marcus stole your secrets and became famous using them. Seven years ago he was performing at birthday parties and shopping malls,” I pointed out as calmly as I could muster. I didn’t give up hope to reason with him. As long as I could talk, I would hope. “Nobody even knew of him then. His fame is just a couple of years old. Besides, all magic tricks he had performed until recently are public knowledge. Anything new he does, he created himself. He didn’t steal anything from you —”
“Shut up!” he yelled, his face a dangerous shade of red. He pushed back, and his fist connected with my face without warning.
Bells rung inside of my head, and I blinked, disoriented from pain.
“What do you know about our world? You think that fucking a magician makes you one of us? I was going to come back after I quit. I was planning a huge comeback! It was supposed to be the greatest comeback ever! If only your pretty boy didn’t show up from nowhere and steal my spotlight! Bastard!”
What he was saying made no sense, no sense at all.
“You’re jealous, because Marcus got what you never did! How is Marcus to blame for things that didn’t happen for you?” I screamed back at him, infuriated by pain and indignity from his blow.
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