by Faith Hunter
I stopped in the doorway to the stairwell and stared at them. They had to have heard me come down, yet neither turned. Something was up. “Morning,” I said.
“You missed Ciana. I walked her to school with Cissy,” Jacey said without looking my way.
“Oh. Sorry,” I said, trying to interpret her strange tone. Her body was tense, stiff. Something about the two made me wary. “I’ll catch her later.”
“We’ll continue to clean up in here. You can work in back today,” Rupert said, his back still turned.
I folded my arms, sensing a scheme to keep me out of sight. “Why?”
“Did you reset that thing you did last night, to protect the shop? During the battle?” she asked. “That shield that glowed?”
The ward. Oops. No, I was too busy having really good makeup sex with my ex-husband. But I didn’t say it. And I remembered that I still had to find out how Ciana got through the ward without an explosion, and where the energies went when Jacey and Polly walked out. “No. Why?”
“After you risked your life fighting for the town, and healed the survivors, someone paid us a visit,” Rupert said, his shoulders hunched, voice bitter. “They left a little warning.”
I walked across the shop and peered between them. Swathes of red paint marked the unbroken glass. Grabbing Rupert’s new blue cloak from the coatrack, I went into the cold. During the night someone had painted slogans on the walls. DIE MAGE WHORE. DIE MANLOVERS. DIE UNBELIEVERS. It wasn’t very original, but it got the point across. Rupert’s cloak dragging in the slick slush, I turned in a slow circle and surveyed the street.
The road had been plowed, something the town fathers did only rarely, as snow-el-mobiles and horses could navigate over most anything, and cleaning out the accumulated snow several times a week wasn’t practical. The asphalt was scorched in places: large circular spots, where humans had battled behind barricades; smaller areas where flamethrowers had melted the snow and singed the road; where the seraph had stood or walked. Smoke blew down Upper Street in gusts, reeking of charred spawn. Windows up and down the street were boarded over. Only ours had been decorated with slogans.
I bunched the cloak in front of me and walked down the middle of the street, passing numerous townspeople: some I recognized from business, some from school years ago, some from kirk, some from my trial. Fewer from the fighting. None met my eyes. Not one.
He may not have actually said so, but Rupert was right. It wasn’t fair. There was an old saying among mages. Give humans your best and they’ll kick you in the teeth.
Fury and hurt welled up, a noxious brew in the back of my throat. I pulled the cloak tighter, feeling cold.
“Miz St. Croix?”
I turned to find Do’rise, Shamus Waldroup’s wife, behind me. The old woman wore the shapeless black dress of the orthodox, but with a white apron over it. The apron was embroidered with bright red strawberries, a pie with slits in the top through which steam escaped, and a blue-bird on a stem, an odd combination, but pretty. Her gray hair was in a bun and she was stooped, a widow’s hump rounding her back. She held out a long loaf of bread wrapped in paper. I caught the smell of yeast, hot and fresh over the scent of rancid smoke.
“You and your partners probably haven’t had time to eat this morning,” she said loudly. “It’s just out of the oven.” Softer, she said, “Shamus chased the kids away. The ones who did that.” She indicated the graffiti with a jerk of her head. “He’ll be speaking to their parents today. My husband would consider it a personal favor if you would accept their apologies when they make them. And attend the funeral.” At my blank look she said, “There’ll be a mass funeral for our dead tomorrow. You should be there.”
Funeral. Right. The town had lost citizens, elders, men, women, children. I blinked against a momentary image of a teenage girl being eaten in the street. I couldn’t seem to stop the words but I felt selfish and arrogant when I said, “Apologies don’t fix the hurt.”
“No,” she said gently. “But they are a step on the road to forgiveness.”
After a moment I heaved a breath in agreement, and Do’rise extended the loaf. Reluctantly, I accepted it. “Thank you for the healing,” she said, again speaking so her voice would carry. “Some fools haven’t realized that you saved the town when you called the seraph. And the ones who died in judgment did so because of their own sins and choices.”
Her piece said, the wife of the most powerful elder and most powerful town father turned and walked back into her shop and out of the icy morning. Only then did I notice that she hadn’t been wearing a coat. Flaunting the bright colors on her apron.
Smoke blew across my path, and I turned upwind, seeking its source. Keeping my mage-attributes hidden, I opened mage-sight, the extra cells in my retinas that humans lacked, allowing me to see creation energies. The town was a bright place, constructed mostly of brick, stone, and mortar, but the smoke that drifted through was tainted with Darkness. I followed the wind, and knew they still burned spawn near the Toe River that bisected the city.
Below my feet something caught my eye. Buried in the street, a part of the rocks, tar, and the frozen slush that was freezing into black ice, there was a dim shimmer forming a perfect circle. The contour incorporated Thorn’s Gems, the bakery, and large parts of Upper Street. Seraph stones. It was a seraph’s sigil, embedded in the earth.
The cloak tight against me, I rotated in a tight circle, trying to see what it said, or what it did. It was too weak for me to be certain, but it looked familiar, flames jutting toward the center. And then I knew. Cheriour had twice stood in the same place in the street, the first time after he judged me, when I was revealed as a mage before the town, and last night when he fought. I had never heard of a seraph leaving a copy of his sigil anywhere, but the Angel of Punishment had left his twice, once in the shop, on the display cabinet, and now in the street. I didn’t know what it meant, but I guessed it was a sign of a verdict, a legal ruling. It might not mean the town was doomed, but it gave me the willies.
I shook my head and spotted Romona Benson, the reporter for SNN, standing in front of the shop. In the last weeks, she had come by Thorn’s Gems several times, but Rupert had always managed to divert her before she could bother me. Now, unless I was willing to pull the cloak over my head and run like a scalded dog, I was going to have to speak to her.
Romona stood in the cold, arms crossed, one foot angled out. She looked haggard, hair mussed, no makeup, her clothes wrinkled as if she had slept in them, or hadn’t slept at all. Strangely telling, her cameraman was nowhere to be seen. Her back to the street, she was studying the slogans painted on the remaining shop-window glass. I stopped beside her, our reflections wavering in the glass.
“Imaginative little cusses, weren’t they?” she said. I said nothing, and after an uncomfortable pause, she went on. “I had a several times great-grandfather who was killed at Auschwitz. That was a place the Nazis killed Jews in one of the World Wars.” Having studied world history in school, I was familiar with the war and the atrocities and genocide that took place. “It started like this,” she said. “With hate.”
Romona turned and studied me. “Some of the elders think you saved the town,” she said conversationally. “The rest think you brought down judgment on it. Which was it?”
I still didn’t reply, and she added, “There are also rumors that you melted the ice cap on the Trine, then vaporized the snowmelt to prevent a flood.” I shook my head, not denying it, but not responding either. “If so, that makes you a hero. You saved the town and didn’t charge the town fathers a hefty mage-price.” When I pressed my lips tight, she turned back to the window and sighed, trying to smooth the blond chaos of her hair.
“I’d like to tell your story,” she said more softly, finger-combing a snarl. “Add it to the footage I have of you fighting and healing. You and your champards were pretty amazing. I’ll sweep this year’s awards without it, but an interview would complete the story of what happened here. I admi
t it’s a self-centered motive, but that and curiosity are all I got.”
“Where’s your cameraman?” I asked, almost idly.
She opened her mouth, hesitated, and I could see her riffling through possible answers. She dropped her hands from her hair and settled on a reply, but when she spoke, the word was strained, as if pulled out of her by force. “Dead.”
I held her gaze in the reflective surface, waiting.
“He went with one of those things,” she said, her tone for the first time revealing emotion. “Had loud, crazy sex with it in the hallway, on the floor outside my door at the hotel, while I filmed the fighting from the balcony. When he got quiet, I turned off the camera and peeked into the hall.” She looked a little sick and I guessed what she had seen. Succubi were reputed to eat their conquests. “I ran down the stairs into the night and started filming again. But I still can’t get the picture of him out of my head.” She made a fist, knuckles white in the morning light. “And I still—” Her voice broke. “I still don’t know why.”
“That’s why I won’t talk to you,” I said. “Because I don’t have any answers. I don’t know what’s going on in this city. I don’t know what’s going on up the Trine. I don’t know any more than you about why I’m here.”
She searched my face again in the glass. “May I quote you on that much?”
“Sure. Why not.”
“Thanks.” She started to walk away, but stopped and pressed a business card between the folds of cloak bunched at my waist and the loaf of bread. “If you ever decide to talk, remember me, okay?” I stared at her. “You can call the number on the card and my service will get back to me. Your story is important.” This time, she didn’t look back.
I was left standing alone in the cold, gazing into the glass at words that called me a whore, that condemned Rupert and me both. In the reflection, I saw a man walk down the street and enter the bakery. Lucas, dressed for the weather in a bulky vest and layers. My heart went from cold to warm in an instant and a smile pulled at my mouth. Through the layers of glass I watched him as he leaned over the counter and pointed inside, and I wondered if he was buying lunch for us. Maybe a picnic on the floor in front of the fire. On a down coverlet. With wine and grapes and more fresh bread. My skin warmed at the thought and I knew that there were some things that were still good in my life.
The girl on the other side of the counter laughed at something he said. She had dimples and a sunny smile. And bouncy breasts straining at her dress. Lucas shook his head, pointed at something else in the case, and leaned across the counter, weight on one elbow. She cocked her head, pushing back her hair. The girl bent into the display and then held her hand over the counter to Lucas, offering him a taste. I turned to watch, faint disquiet stirring.
He took her hand in his, directing it to his mouth. He bit into the sample, holding her hand, smiling into her face. And then he kissed her fingers. I watched as she blushed, her perfect, unscarred, unblemished skin glowing with simple human health, blushing with frank sexual attraction. She giggled. Pushed back her hair, fingers lingering in the tresses.
Around me, the smoke of burning spawn blew in, adding a putrid fog to the murky day. It reeked of rot. Silent, I turned and entered the shop.
I changed clothes and went to the workroom, turning on the gas logs. Though the expenditure of energy was unforgivable, the stock was frozen and my equipment was stiff. My breath blew clouds and the cold was searing on my exposed fingers. I was afraid the saw and drill would heat the crystalline matrix unevenly and cause any stone I worked to shatter.
I poured a bowl of cool water over the dark green aventurine I had previously excised and set it aside. The due date for the necklace of stone leaves was close. I could warm the pieces slowly, starting with cool water and adding warmer water to it several times, and it would be fine until the room warmed above freezing.
Until then, I was at loose ends and feeling edgy. I didn’t want to put stock away or rearrange the bins that needed attention. I didn’t want to sweep or clean. My movements were erratic, and my mouth was a tight line of hurt and anger. I ought to stop and look at what I was really feeling before I hurt myself or broke something.
But I refused to think about the night before. Refused to think about his mouth on that girl’s fingers. And more importantly, I would not cry over him. Never. Never again.
I took a shuddering breath and forced the hurt into a deep, dark place inside me. It was getting full, that region of my heart where I shoved all the stuff I didn’t want to look at. I breathed deeply, trying to find a peaceful place within myself. I wasn’t sure one existed anymore. My hands quivered with inaction, my heart with a painful rhythm, and my eyes burned like brands. But as I forced long, steady breaths, my muscles relaxed, my breathing evened out, and the threatening tears dried into a hot, scalding mass in my chest.
Firmly, I buried my ex-husband and my love for him. I truly had cried my last tear over Lucas. I would not grieve for him, or for my dead marriage, again. I would not look at that part of my life. Instead, I pulled the three wild-mage stones from the time of the first neomages off my amulet necklace and inspected them.
At my trial, one of the mage-stones had glowed—yet I had never filled it with power. It should have been as dead as weather-beaten rock, holding potential, but nothing more. I held it up to the light; a sapphire with lots of dark inclusions, a poor-quality stone carved in the shape of a fat owl. It didn’t look any different from my other amulets, but it had to be. I thought the owl might have worked on, and with, my mind to allow improved psychic reactions. During the trial, when I tried blending the mind-skim and the sight into one, I hadn’t been as nauseated as before. In hindsight, I was pretty sure the amulet had started glowing about then, and had somehow facilitated blending the two gifts. Maybe it had something to do with the otherness as well, that odd sensation that flooded me with the blending.
Centering myself, I opened both sight and a skim. The world whirled drunkenly around me, and I gripped the edge of the workbench to steady myself. The sapphire nugget was glowing, a sunlike glare I blinked away. Mentally, I reached out and touched the otherness. It felt bubblelike, solid and ephemeral, like a cell wall of energy enclosing, yet not binding, me. Testing, I hooked a thought in it and tugged.
Suddenly I was on the other side of… something, standing beside a river glowing like lava. In a quick glance I saw humps and lumps, like boulders in the lava flow, and sparkles and flares, like tiny explosions. I turned to step back, but there was no doorway, no opening, just the wide, endless plane. I heaved a fear-filled breath and felt myself shift, hard. I landed back in the workroom, my fingers cutting into the bench top, holding me in place.
“Tears of Taharial,” I muttered coarsely. That had sucked Habbiel’s pearly toes. I wouldn’t be trying that again anytime soon.
When I caught my breath, I inspected the second wild mage-stone. It was a citrine nugget; the sparkling, translucent, soft yellow gem was shaped like a pear with a nub of a stem and a small leaf carved at the top. The final wild-mage stone was a green zoisite carved like a cherry. A tiny ruby inclusion looked like a gemstone worm in the matrix of the zoisite.
I placed the wild amulets on the workbench, adding the two extinguished Minor Flames. They were unlike anything I had seen before. Their color had changed overnight from smoky quartz to the color and opacity of peach moonstone. Today they were malleable, like putty, and warm, slightly warmer than my body temperature. In mage-sight, they had a dim glow, like a candle through a distant window in a night of dense fog. Experimentally, I touched a Flame to each of the wild-amulets. Nothing happened, not even in mage-sight.
From the frozen stockroom I carried one of the metal ammo boxes of amethyst. It still looked dead, unchanged from the time on the Trine when I had pulled its energies to me and drained it totally. Except for the cobra, some small part of me reminded. Unlike normal stone, it wouldn’t take a recharge, meaning it didn’t accept the restoration of crea
tion energies like ordinary stone. I had tried to fill it once before, and the energies I could bring from the heart of the earth bounced right off. It really was dead stone. Yet, there was that danged cobra and the purple mist I had breathed.
I added water to the warming aventurine and returned to the workbench. It was harder than normal to calm my heartbeat and breathing, a current of anger still spiking through me at the thought of Lucas. But I didn’t want to go messing with unknown energies while ticked off, so I made a space and hopped onto the workbench. I sat, my legs curled, and opened a portable charmed circle. I probably should have gone out back, away from people, but I wasn’t going to try anything tricky. I just wanted a quick look-see into the stones.
I never found a peaceful, slow heart rate, but I did relax. When I had calmed myself, and my own temperature had cooled from grief and anger to merely unhappy, I began inspecting all the stones in mage-sight. I placed the sapphire in close proximity to one of the Flames, and nothing happened. I tried the amethyst with the sapphire. I tried several combinations of Flame with the visa, with my prime ring, and with the sapphire. Nothing.
But when I tried the extinguished Flame with the amethyst, both sparked. It was just a flash of light, like a jolt of recognition, but it was there. Nothing happened when I added the sapphire or the zoisite. But when I brought the pear-shaped citrine nugget close to the amethyst and the Flame, there was instant heat, and the Flame began to glow. I separated the stones and sat there on the workbench, staring at them.