by Jenn Stark
“Bad weather as in…”
He pulled a small tablet out of his tattered jacket, turned it toward me on the table as he swiped it on. A map of the world materialized on the screen, with clusters of gold gathered over Ecuador, Norway, and deep in the Indian Ocean. “What are these?” I asked.
“Meteor showers. So far, only that, and nothing seems to be dropping other than rocks, but they keep dropping. We’re keeping an eye on those areas in case…”
“In case that’s where the veil is tearing.” I thought of green fire and leaping embers of rose and blue, my throat going a little tight. “The Council know about this?”
He nodded. “Rangi too, though he’s hip deep in his new recruits to the House of Wands. Kreios apparently is off the coast of Africa, said he’d look into it himself.”
“Really,” I said dryly.
“Mercault and Gamon are still off communications,” he said, referencing the other two heads of the Houses of Magic, Pents and Cups, respectively. “Rangi’s stepped up his training, though, and every time we talk to him, he urges us to do so as well.”
“Agreed.” I jerked a thumb at my medieval-looking backpack. “What’s in there may help us as well. Or may not. Kreios sent me to retrieve some artifacts on the QT, but he’s not interested in relieving me of them anytime soon. I’m sensing some sort of trap, but now that I’ve found the things, I can’t leave them lying around.”
Nigel frowned. “If Kreios is behind it, it could definitely be a trap, even if it’s a beneficial one. What’re the artifacts?”
“Stone wands, probably the best way to describe them. Very old. One inscribed with spells of life, the other with spells of death and darkness, but no handy instruction booklet to explain how they’re used. I figured…maybe Chichiro could help. Maybe keep them safe too.” The sensei’s home had seemed like the safest of havens when I’d visited her last, and the sensei herself the soul of restraint. Surely she was a better candidate for holding on to the ancient cylinders than I was.
“Chichiro definitely could do both.” Nigel watched me as he took a long drink of his tea. “Ma-Singh has been in contact with her. She’s ready whenever you are.” He hesitated. “That’s part of the reason I’m here, actually.”
That surprised me. “What do you mean?”
“Madame Chichiro has been made aware of your…hesitation in returning to train with her. She asked to provide you with a message. Its first point is that your visit to her will not be, and I quote, a Karate Kid montage.”
“Dammit, Ma-Singh,” I muttered. “It’s like working with a six-year-old little brother sometimes.”
Nigel grinned. “He tells me that the training she can provide you is much more concentrated and much more necessary than simple rote discipline, though rote discipline would reinforce that training more completely.”
“Rote discipline is always best, but it requires time. Time you do not have.”
I blinked up, startled to see the young woman from the front of the noodle shop at our table, her bowl in hand. Only beneath the gleaming black hair, Sensei Chichiro’s timeless eyes flashed, her lined face somehow still maintaining a youthful cast.
What the hell? I fumed. How was it I’d missed someone that Connected when I’d entered the noodle shop? Either I was more tired than I realized or my bounty from the Arcanum Library was messing with my circuits.
Chichiro sat down, and I glanced to Nigel’s table. Sure enough, the stuffed kitty had joined the monkey and the hippo.
“I have been waiting for you, Madame Wilde,” Chichiro said, picking up her spoon and dipping it into the soup, to take a small, dainty sip. I switched my attention pointedly to Nigel. He should take notes. “You have been avoiding me, but you cannot avoid your path any longer. We have very little time as it is. We will focus on what’s most important.”
Despite all my intentions to cowboy up, my stomach flipped queasily at Chichiro’s words. I’d had the barest amount of instruction from her already, but it had opened up vistas of awareness I hadn’t thought possible, and abilities I could still barely control. “Manifestation,” I said flatly.
“In part.” She nodded. “Also, control of your manifestation once it has been brought into this plane. You can summon objects, yes, but objects will not always help you. Sometimes you must summon an army of ready soldiers, or complex devices, or even your own internal flame in a moment’s breath. Sometimes all three.”
Chichiro had the uncanny ability to scare the crap out of me without raising her voice. “You want me to call people to my side who might die because of me,” I said flatly.
“They might,” she agreed. “But you are this conflict’s mightiest warrior, whether you wish to be so or not. And warriors must engage in the fight, or all is lost.”
She turned smoothly to Nigel, who was eyeing her with fascination. The British former special forces agent hadn’t met Chichiro the first time I’d gone up to her mountain home, only Ma-Singh had. But from the look on Nigel’s face, the Mongol general had filled his ears with every last detail of her impressive résumé.
“You must be trained as well,” Chichiro said to him.
Nigel held up his hands. “I’m happy to do whatever you need, but I’m afraid I’m about as Connected as a doorknob.”
Chichiro’s eyes twinkled. “But even a doorknob opens a door, Agent Friedman. And what lies beyond that doorway may surprise you.”
Chapter Eleven
Madame Chichiro’s home in the mountains appeared unchanged from the last time I’d been here, months before. The tiny cottage sat tucked into the cypress trees, seeming to brace itself against the stiff breeze that blew in cold, gusting bursts around the tidy property.
After catching a few hours’ sleep in rooms Ma-Singh had rented a year earlier under a maze of false names, we’d left Chichiro’s car in Tokyo and taken a hired vehicle we’d located through the House of Swords’ network. Despite whoever had been knocking at the Revenants’ door, Nigel reported there’d been no official uptick in activity across the intergovernmental networks currently on the lookout for me in the city. His best guess was that I’d been targeted by a Connected rich enough to hire private police to do random searches for me in any place I’d previously popped up. While that wasn’t the best news ever, it appeared that when it came to official channels, I was a person of interest, but not enormous interest, at least not for the moment. I was strangely okay with that.
Nigel exited the car and helped Chichiro out, ignoring me completely as I slung my body out of the vehicle, hauling my pack with me. Instead, his attention was fully on the cottage and grounds. I glanced to the house too—all gabled roofline with delicate decorative spires, clean angles, and soft colors, neatly tucked against the mountainside. “You’ve lived here a great many years,” he said, appearing impervious to the wind as he peered into the forest, clearly noting several trails that wound up through the trees. “How many warriors have you trained?”
“I’ve trained many people who wished to be warriors, though not all of them were,” Chichiro replied. Her glance at him was amused. “You believe you are a warrior?”
“I seek to act as one. Whether I am or not is not for me to say.”
Oh, brother. Nigel had been fangirling over Chichiro for the past twelve hours, courtesy, no doubt, of Ma-Singh’s breathless tales about the sensei. Tales I hadn’t had the advantage of before my first meeting with the woman. Even now, clammy streams of cold sweat plastered my shirt to my back beneath my heavy pack, and I peered at the house with trepidation. My first visit here hadn’t been all that bad, arguably. Some pain, some disorientation, and a tiny little distraction of errant fireballs exploding the house entirely; otherwise, I’d fared pretty well. But Chichiro had warned me that a return visit, while a requirement for my progress, would involve a fair amount of pain.
I wanted to be the person who decided what “fair” actually constituted. Sadly, I didn’t think I was going to get a vote.
“
How long were you here?”
It took me a second to realize that Nigel was talking once more to me, and I glanced away from the house toward him. He’d completely removed any vestige of the old-Japanese-guy disguise he’d been rocking in the city, and was now looking preternaturally British—blond hair, blue eyes, chiseled features, muscles in all the right places. He was also fairly bouncing on his toes, the operative let out for the field trip.
“Long enough to blow everything up and put it back together again. That took, what, a few hours?” I asked, glancing at the sensei.
“A few,” Chichiro said gravely. “You will stay longer this time.”
“I don’t have a lot of time—”
“Not true,” Nigel broke in. “I’ve got it all arranged with Ma-Singh. Knowing where you are makes it a lot easier to stage false clues for Interpol everywhere you aren’t. We’ve got false Saras in Paris, Rio, New York, even as close as Shanghai. Each following a similar path of moving in and out of black market areas, though these women aren’t meeting with anyone, and their faces don’t hold up to close inspection. Still, they fit the general description and clothing, and by tracking them, we can see how much interest you’re generating with local law enforcement. Those operatives are embedded, so we have all the time in the world.”
“Not all the time in the world,” I retorted. “I’m not checking into rehab, here. This needs to be a focused visit.”
“Very focused,” Chichiro said. “Several days, perhaps, a week. A time for deep rest and healing.” She gestured to the house. “We go inside to begin.”
“I don’t need healing,” I grumbled, but I headed off after her. In truth, for once, I didn’t need healing. The racketing around the world I’d done over the last few days hadn’t damaged me as much as usual, courtesy, no doubt, of Death’s inked path. Jimmy’s handiwork had proven more valuable than I’d imagined.
Speaking of.
“Nigel, you are following Kreios as he goes to check on those meteor showers, I assume?” I asked as we crossed the threshold. “He hasn’t checked in?”
“Not that we’ve heard,” Nigel said. “We’ve got him monitored on satellite feed now. We won’t lose him.”
He spoke with the conviction of a man who didn’t play with demigods all that often, but once again, Nigel wasn’t paying attention to me so much as taking in Chichiro’s neatly decorated cottage as the sensei showed me to her safe, seeming to know without asking that I wanted my pack secured at all times. The furniture throughout Chichiro’s home was minimalist, the slate floor warmed up by thickly loomed rugs. The walls of the sensei’s sitting area were painted a soft green with even softer white trim. I could feel the touch of enervation tugging at me, even as Chichiro locked the safe, then returned me to the sitting area and bustled around, making tea.
“You should trust the Devil at your own peril, but if you can pay his price, he’s a worthwhile ally,” she said softly to me. “Worthwhile and, in his way, predictable. He will not be swayed by anything but his own mercurial whims.”
“Right.” I accepted the teacup from Chichiro, botching the ritual in the process but suddenly too tired to care. Nigel was more alert, nodding and bowing and placing his hands just so, as if he’d watched a YouTube video on the way over, anticipating this moment. I found myself wondering why he was here. Chichiro had asked for him specifically, he said, and I believed him, but why?
“You cannot spar against me,” she replied, though I hadn’t asked the question aloud. “Nor can you spar against an unknown assailant, because you will pull your punches for fear of hurting them. You will not hurt the Ace, however. You have already saved his life.”
“What?” Nigel spluttered his tea, and I scowled at Chichiro. Nigel knew I’d had a hand in his healing after a run-in with a set of psychic twins, but he’d been passed out for most of the important bits. He’d never realized how damaged he’d really been, and I didn’t like to dwell on stuff like that.
Nigel, apparently, did. “What do you mean, she saved my life?” He set down his teacup, but Chichiro merely perched on another chair near an ornamental gong, watching us both.
“We must begin as we mean to continue,” she said, folding her hands in her lap. “Agent Friedman, are you comfortable?”
“Yes, and please, call me Nigel,” he said, frowning, but he swung his head toward me. “I was that burned back in France?”
“Good,” Chichiro said, ignoring him. “For this first exercise, Nigel, you will best serve through your healing and regeneration.” She lifted a small cylindrical tube and touched it against the gong.
Nigel slumped forward in his chair, completely knocked out.
“Wow.” I blinked, my own enervation disappearing with a jolt. “You roofied him.”
“I assure you, he is in no danger.” She turned her gaze to me more fully, then gave me the same sweet smile I remembered from the first time we were there. “You, however, are.”
She knocked the gong a second time, and I slid to the floor.
When I came to, I was no longer seated in Chichiro’s living room. I was outside, shivering in my too-light hoodie against the stiff mountain winds. The sensei and I were on a rocky precipice far above Chichiro’s cheerful cottage, and I looked gloomily down at it in the distance.
“If this is all happening in my mind, why am I still cold?”
“What is the mind but another reality of the body?” Chichiro asked. She lifted a hand, and I was shoved back from the precipice, thrown to the ground with such force that the wind was knocked out of me, my head cracking against a rock. I saw stars. I vaguely sensed another shift from Chichiro and felt the corresponding kicks to my ribs and torso—swift, brutal, bone-jarring…and invisible.
“Stop!” I pleaded, curling up into a ball against both the howling wind and the rain of blows. I knew the answer before she smugly gave it.
“Make me stop.”
A distant place in my brain immediately erupted in protest. She’d said we were going to rest, first. Rest, relax, and heal. In no way did any of that include getting stomped on by—
I’d dropped my arms unconsciously, trying to find purchase to stand, and I paid the price as a vicious uppercut cracked my head back a second time and I went sprawling to the other side, my body crunching painfully against the side of the mountain.
See, this was exactly why I didn’t want to come back here. Forget Karate Kid, I’d imagined it being like something out of Kill Bill, with less rice and more blood, and it was quickly living up to my expectations.
“Make me stop,” Chichiro said again, her voice completely devoid of anger, irritation, or impatience. I could have been a leaf she was gently blowing in the breeze, instead of a human body whose bones were getting smashed together, whose skin was snagging on rocks and jagged stumps and—
“Aigh!” The blow clipped me in the hip and sent my legs jerking out at an angle parallel to the ground, only instead of hurling me against the mountain again, this time my trajectory was back toward the house, over the side of the cliff—and I wasn’t alone either. Nigel’s body, still in a dead coma, hurtled beside me, racing toward the roof with all those—
Spikes!
I saw a close-up of the roof as if I was suddenly astral traveling again, my eyes a hundred flickering cameras at once, taking in everything with pinpoint precision. I saw Nigel falling—faster than I was, somehow, his body a deadweight hurtling toward Chichiro’s roof. I saw the decorative spikes that had looked so charming when we’d driven up, but which now revealed themselves as metal instruments of pain and death. And while I could heal on a dime, Nigel wasn’t Connected. Nigel would be hurt, Nigel’s body would register terrible trauma even if I eventually would wipe it away. There were repercussions to that, over time. There had to be. It was one thing to rip myself to shreds and put myself back together, but him—
I registered all this in a fraction of a second, then I reached out my arms, shocked to see my hands were bloody and raw, one arm c
anted awkwardly at an angle no creator ever intended. But none of that mattered. I still could form a fireball, still send it shooting down, catching up Nigel to shift him away from the cottage roof, slowing his descent, wrapping him in magic so that when he hit the ground, he’d doubtless jar awake, but—
I realized my mistake too late.
Flipping around, I attempted to correct my own fall but merely managed to drop back-first onto the spiked roof, not forward, which was no great improvement. The first spire entered my body at the top of the right shoulder, another piercing me at my left kidney. I managed to avoid a direct hit to my legs, one of them merely gashing open as my thigh slid along a particularly gruesome spire. My temple was similarly gashed, and my right hand flung wide, impaling itself on another spike.
Somewhere in the dimmest recesses of my mind, I knew this was an illusion, knew it was a lesson. Knew I was supposed to pop myself off these spikes and drag myself back to Chichiro. But none of those rational thoughts could chase away the completely irrational surges of pain, panic, and fear—fear for myself, but also the latent runoff of adrenaline for Nigel, goddamned Nigel, who’d looked at Chichiro as if she hung the moon and then was served up by her as cannon fodder in a psychic game of chicken that was too real, too immediate to ignore. And I hurt—hurt like I never had, the kind of hurt that would normally require Armaeus…Armaeus…
Out of nowhere, another chorus of pain assaulted me, a completely unexpected resurgence of grief and shock and remorse over what I’d done in the Arcanum Library, the power I’d wielded and the pain I’d endured as the burst of gold-and-black power had turned toward me to attack, to destroy…
To destroy me.
“No,” I whispered, and there, pinned to Chichiro’s roof, I couldn’t move, I could hardly breathe. I tasted blood in my mouth, but it was nothing compared to the fall of salty tears blinding my eyes. First one dropped, then another, trickling down my temple in a trail of acid against my torn and battered skin.