by Domino Finn
The seal was a game changer. Connor's malfeasance in physical form. This was a contingency Tyson must've been aware of. A sacrifice to provide the only proof he had.
"You fool," berated the shah, his meaty head shaking and dripping with sweat. "You forgot to remove your mark. You used your Earthly artifacts but carelessly left behind your signature. And then you bring him here, spin the truth until his mark is made bare, plain to see, offending us with its presence."
"It's just an old—" protested Connor.
"He was no rogue!" boomed the shah. "He was abandoned. Your property, your crimes. He was put to death while bearing your mark. Do you not see what this means?"
"It's not the first time an aspect rebelled against his master."
"You created him. You let him loose in the world. First in your playground, then in ours. Even more vile, you came before us and lied through your teeth." The shah turned to his aide. "It is a good thing we held council privately, else our good name would have been besmirched."
Connor scrambled. "I never would do anything that—"
"Connor Hatch," chided the shah. "Do you believe you are a shah unto yourself? A king of kings, above the law because of a tithe?"
The shah waited. When Connor realized he was supposed to answer, all he said was, "You were waiting for this the whole time."
The shah narrowed his eyes. "You are stripped of your jinn protections," he proclaimed. "Stripped of all service and status for one hundred years."
The ifrit's face paled.
"You are hereby exiled from the Aether. Wander the world as you see fit, but wander here no more."
"But my home."
The shah was ruthless. "Your possessions in the Aether have been assumed by the empire. Live in your Caribbean paradise, or even in the wallows of the Nether you are so fascinated with. We wash our hands of you."
Connor traded glances with the aide, the shah, the officiates. Even me. His mind was reeling from whiplash. He desperately wanted to save himself, but nothing came.
"Connor Hatch," decreed the shah. "Welcome to exile."
The king of kings clapped the scepter between his thick hands and Connor disappeared.
The executioner loitered a moment with an eye on me. The aide waited as well, but dismissed him at the shah's behest. The executioner rested the polearm over his shoulder on his way out. The aide motioned to the officiates as well. They finally released me and exited the room as a group.
My arms were raw, like someone had taken sandpaper to them. I rubbed them gently. The aide receded into a corner, leaving me shivering under the cold glare of the shah. Just me left now. And the spinning golden seal.
The shah sighed deeply and wiped his brow. The trial had taken its toll on him.
"And you," he declared, "are no longer ignorant of the ways of the Aether. We would advise you never to return."
I opened my mouth to say something as the jeweled scepter cut through the air. All sound went out a fraction of a second before the world went white.
Chapter 30
I'd just seen Tyson vaporized. Connor banished. So when it was my turn to go, you'd better believe I was crapping my spiritual Aether pants.
I returned to form. Not my Aether body but real, actual form. Replete with imperfections. The scratch in my throat. The poke of the knife in my belt. That abominable bright-orange Phish shirt. I ran my fingers through the shag rug and remembered where I was. The dank library offshoot of the museum archives. Back in the real world. My world.
My eyes adjusted to the faint light in the room. Relief washed over me. No cops here anymore. The fireplace was dark. The Taíno coffins and artifacts, gone. A strip of yellow police tape snaked over the floor, trampled by movers no doubt. This was a crime scene but the evidence was priceless. No doubt the museum staff would be tasked with restoring the Taíno relics. Still, Connor and his men had murdered a curator and a security guard to get this location. They caused public havoc. This room held potential evidence leading to those perpetrators and would be searched again.
Between an elemental, a jinn, and a dead man, the police were sure to be stumped.
Besides the missing relics, the study appeared to have been straightened up. My eye caught a dark blue globe sitting on a mahogany end table between two leather chairs. Had that been there before? I studied the crystal sculpture and took a few calming breaths to center myself. That whole experience in the Aether now felt like a dream. But the world had certainly turned. I guessed the sum of the experience resulted in a day's passing.
And the death of Tyson Roderick.
I ground my teeth. After the ethereal experience in the sky, the sensation was pleasantly grating. But as my worldly senses sharpened, I detected coarse breathing behind me.
I spun, hoping to see the volcanic elemental intact. No such luck. Of all people, Connor Hatch was on his hands and knees, experiencing taste and touch as if for the first time, just like me. I froze. He blinked and focused on me, confused.
Connor Hatch. Three feet away from me.
I lunged. His features hardened immediately, a good soldier heeding the call to battle. The jinn braced to meet my raised fist. I pooled shadow into the blow and hammered his right cheek.
Nobody was more surprised than me that the punch actually connected.
Connor's head snapped to the side. A tooth jangled to the wood floor past the rug. The jinn bounced after it and slid to a hard stop against an unforgiving bookcase.
We stopped and stared at each other. Connor spat blood and wiped his jaw.
"You're exiled from the Aether," I said slowly. "You can't blink anymore."
The jinn's eyes widened in shock. I could tell he was trying to blink. Once, twice. That confident patience he'd taken for granted had grown from the ability not to lose a tooth like that. I wondered if this had been Tyson's plan all along.
I rose. Connor twitched as he demanded his body to teleport. Failing that, he rolled to the side.
I dove into the shadow and appeared beside him. Connor lifted his hand but I snapped it down. Then I leveled him with a body blow. I gave him a left and a right and a left again, punching opportunistically more than for damage.
His hand flushed with red. I ducked as a lance of fire tore through the ceiling. I rolled to my feet, alert. Connor's eyes narrowed.
His defenses were gone, but his weapons were intact.
The sound of something rocking on wood startled me. I took my eyes off Connor for a split-second and scanned the room. Nothing.
I felt the incoming heat and threw up my shield. Turquoise energy strobed against brilliant flame. My shield held, but I backed away to keep the glancing flames off me. My retreat brought me up against the stone fireplace.
"Perhaps I can't blink," hissed Connor, pressing his magic to me. "But I can still burn."
"Burn this," I growled.
I reached into the darkness of the raised chimney, pulled out my shotgun, and leveled the sawed-off barrel at him. My finger squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped into the firing pin.
A light mechanical click was my only reward.
Of course. Firearms work best when loaded. I'd emptied the weapon shattering the hotel window. The rest of my ammo and spell tokens had burned up in the inferno.
"Can't a necromancer catch a break?" I complained.
I flung the shotgun through the air like a boomerang. It rocketed right through Connor's flames and hit home, popping against his skull. The fire faltered and dissipated.
Connor went down to a knee, clutching his head. A sliver of blood trickled over his fingers. The sawed off fell back into shadow. Before I could advance, another sound interrupted us.
A click, like glass cracking. My eyes finally located the source: the dark blue globe of blown glass on the end table. A single splintered crevice ran along the prime meridian from one pole to the other.
Suddenly I knew for sure this globe hadn't been here before.
Connor grunted in pain. His expres
sion was harried. Scared, and rightly so. But he wasn't terrified. He wasn't a quivering wreck. And, if he was anything, he was cocky.
"You fool," he spat. "I can bleed, but I'm not human."
His fists tightened and burst into flame. Like his ifrits in the Aether, the fire ran up his arms. It flared brightly, consuming his shoulders, sending sparks into the old books behind him. The crystal globe seemed to shiver against the newfound light.
"No," I shouted. "The fire—"
The glass spiderwebbed. A deep light emanated from within.
Over the course of the last day and a half, I'd seen a lot of strange things. A magic world. A magic elevator. A magic VW Bus. Now I had even witnessed a magic bomb.
Without wasting a second, I dove into the open fireplace. I shifted into the darkness and snaked up the chimney. I wasn't Mary Poppins. I couldn't slide up on a gentle wind and drift to safety, but I could stuff myself a few feet above the opening in the stone pillar.
The blast was as fast as I was. A shockwave turned the world blue. The opaque light followed me and dissolved the shadow. It ran up the chimney and jerked me back to physical form. My alligator boots scraped for purchase against the rough interior as the whole tower shook with the boom. Scraps of debris flew into me. Pieces of glass. Splinters of obliterated wood. I covered my ears, tucked my head, and braced my boots into the wall as the library literally exploded.
My ears rang. I blinked away the light but I knew I wasn't thinking straight. The shockwave had knocked me senseless. The stone chimney rocked. Dust and mortar rained down from above. Too late I realized the whole damn thing was coming down.
The chimney stack broke away. Thousands of pounds of stone crashed through the roof and walls of the library. Dust blotted out all ambient light. Above me somewhere, the chimney collapsed in on itself, but the thick base I was in held together. Upended but intact. After a frantic bout of crashes, the demolition settled into stillness.
I choked away dust and fled to the shadows again. There were no crevices large enough to escape through, but at least I didn't need to worry about breathing.
"Relax, Cisco," I assuaged myself between coughs. "The upside to being buried alive is that you're still alive."
I didn't want to vocalize the downside.
Chapter 31
I was stuck debating my options for only a minute before I heard sounds around me. Walls being overturned. Wood beams being dragged away. Holy hell, this was a prompt rescue effort.
Light flooded into my tomb and I squinted. It wasn't a fire or flashlight, it was the sun. I cautiously poked my head out of the newly exposed fireplace and saw why. I wasn't inside anymore. Or rather, the entire library was now outside. The ruins of the quaint chamber were nothing more than blackened rubble. No semblance of the room in the vicinity of the bomb remained.
"Cisco!" cried Darcy. "You're alive!"
The teenage telekinetic. That explained the expedient excavation. She hurried to help me climb from the rubble. I accepted her hand and shook my head, still reeling from the blast.
"What the hell happened?" she asked.
We shambled to the grass. Half the building had been leveled, and the other half would never be deemed safe for public use again. Worse, a crowd was beginning to form in the neighboring property. Workers. First responders wouldn't be far behind. We rushed to the curb just in time to see Winthrop's orange-and-white van veering through a tight U-turn and speeding away.
"Berna!" yelled Darcy, half crestfallen and half pissed.
I glanced back over the smoking rubble. Everything was scorched and melted. Much of it was disintegrated. So much for the crime scene. I spat out a dusty loogie and began marching down the sidewalk. So much for Connor Hatch, too. And to hell with these people.
"Cisco," called Darcy, still a little pissed. "What the hell happened?"
I stomped away, no stranger to what she was feeling.
"Hey!" she yelled. Her sneakers rapped the sidewalk until she circled in front of me and leaned her hands against my chest. "What the hell did you do in there?"
My eyes flared. "What did I do? What the hell did you guys do?"
She scowled. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Sure you don't. You're just a kid."
She lifted her chin. "I'm old enough to know things."
"Yeah? You know why your friend Berna took off just now?"
Darcy pouted. "I wasn't supposed to help you."
"Yeah, right." I stepped around the teenager and proceeded down the sidewalk. One thing I'd learned about kids was that their eagerness to argue exceeded mine.
Darcy didn't try to stop me again. She was together enough to know we had to clear out of the area. She fell in pace beside me as we turned down the block. Already sirens were blaring to life. That would be the fire department, soon followed by the police.
A block further, I sprinted across Sunset Boulevard and flagged down a Metrobus. I hopped on and reached into my jeans for cash. When Darcy climbed in behind me, I frowned, peeled an extra bill away, and fed them into the machine. Just like my teenage years, I walked to the very back of the bus where I could lean against the wall and feel the warmth of the engine against my shoulders.
"Look," she said, "I came after you. Against orders. The least you could do is talk to me."
I scoffed. "Cut the bullshit, sweetheart. You guys planned this. You were taxiing me around the city to keep track of me. The Society tipped Tyson off to my location. You knew he'd take me to the Aether on a suicide mission. Kill himself and probably me to get Connor exiled. To strip him of his ability to blink."
"Tyson's dead?" she asked genuinely. "We weren't keeping tabs on you, we were helping you. Keeping an eye on things without interfering, as agreed."
"We never agreed to sacrifice Tyson."
She took a measured breath. "Look, it's true that Winthrop was in contact with him, but Tyson's revenge was his own affair."
"Winthrop used him."
"It's what he wanted."
"Winthrop used me," I said.
"Didn't it give you the same opportunity?"
I smiled dryly. "I don't recall asking to be blown up."
"We didn't have anything to do with that."
"Of course you did. The whole plan was to strike Connor through me. My life? Tyson's? Neither mattered as long as you got Connor. That little bomb back there was activated by Connor's presence. The Society's insurance plan in case I didn't finish the job."
"I swear, it wasn't us."
"Pssh. If not you then Berna. Why do you think she didn't wanna stick around and chat?"
The young mage's face darkened. "No way. This had to be Margo. If she knew we were going after Connor—"
"This was Winthrop and you know it. He set me up to take down Connor. At any cost."
"I don't know that."
"Think about it. This was always a suicide mission. The Society doesn't risk going to South America. You think they want any piece of the Aether? So they sent me. Either I died there or I died here. Either way, I'm expendable."
"You're dedicated," she corrected.
"Same thing."
I shook my head and stared out the window. I'd probably had that kind of idealism once. The passing cars and pedestrians went about their everyday business, ignorant of the destruction we'd left behind. Ignorant of the rampant monsters in the world. The police sirens faded into the passing miles.
"What was that spellcraft?" I asked. "It was like solid blue fire."
Darcy shrugged. "That doesn't sound familiar."
"Fire's not going to kill Connor," I said.
"You said he couldn't blink anymore."
"He's been stripped of his protections but he's still a jinn. An ifrit. He's literally made of fire. Trust me, if I could survive that blast, he could. He was gone before you dug me out."
Darcy worked her lips between frustration and despair. "This couldn't have been Winthrop. He would have told me."
"Did he
tell you to stay away from the building? Did Berna ever have a chance to slip in with the bomb?"
The teenager worked the answer over in quiet concentration. That was for the best. I didn't need to hear the thought process to know how it played out. She would come to the same conclusion I had, eventually.
"It doesn't make sense," insisted Darcy. "Why kill you if he wants you to find the city of gold?"
I shrugged. "He doesn't want me to find it. That's the easy part. He just wants to stop Connor from finding it first."
She crossed her arms and turned away, focusing outside her window. After a minute of silence, she shook her head firmly. "No way. It had to be Margo."
I didn't bother correcting her. It could've been Margo. It could've been anyone. But I couldn't afford to concede theoretical possibilities right now. A very likely and straightforward sequence of events led to this road. The only conclusion was a very likely and straightforward punch to Winthrop's mug next time we crossed paths.
Darcy? Hell, we'd butted heads before. And I'd never admit it but she was strong enough that I didn't look forward to tangling with her. But on this count? I figured she was innocent. A good-natured pawn in a dark army. It was possible I could trust her, but I couldn't trust the Society. They were strange and mysterious and had decades of political motivations to satisfy. It's like I had said to the Mother of High Valley: bureaucracies get so complicated they only make sense from the inside. Darcy was too young to comprehend the depths greed and ego drive men to.
"If Winthrop's innocent," I offered in a rare concession, "then he'll talk to me."
"Impossible."
"Well, does he want my help or not?"
She sighed. "He does, but not at the cost of our lives. Listen, if Margo did this, she may already be on to us. Winthrop can't risk exposure... I can't either. I'm sorry, but you're on your own."
She pressed the bell to signal the driver to stop. He pulled to the curb at the next bus bench and flipped the doors open. Darcy stood and waited.