And he was utterly invisible to her danger sense. That was new, too, and just as upsetting.
“What’s going on?” she repeated when he didn’t answer. “What happened to you? Why did you—”
“Stay there!” he said sharply, and Marley realized she’d moved closer to him, still towing Penny. “Stay away. Stop following me. I didn’t come here to talk to you.”
“What, you only tracked me down to steal back the charm you gave me?” demanded Marley.
“Yes,” he said coldly. “And I should have started with your Sight instead. You can get Zachariah to replace it. Go away now, or I’ll take that too.”
“Corbin,” Marley whispered, shocked nearly speechless. The man she remembered helping her, teaching her, and holding her had never spoken to her like this. When she’d been at her most neurotic and confused, he’d been gentle. When she’d been frightened, he’d helped her see her own strength. And when she’d been indecisive, he’d been patient.
But she never had decided. He’d left on a mission from Senyaza rather than demand things of her she wasn’t ready to give.
Something changed in his posture, and his mouth curved in a smile both alien and familiar. “Shoo,” he said. “Go play with the children.”
Maybe she deserved the coldness, but there was more going on. Marley shook her hand out of Penny’s and moved closer. “Something’s wrong, Corbin. I can’t see you with my magic, but I can tell that you’re not well.”
He tilted his head, watching her approach. He was taut as a bowstring, practically quivering as she got closer. His eyes dilated. “Can you?”
“Let me help you,” Marley coaxed, reaching for him. Her protection magic could do so much to help somebody, but only if they allowed it to work. “What happened to you?”
He flinched as if she’d struck him, and his hand wrapped hard around hers, his fingers long and strong and warm. “You can’t help me now, Marley. I made sure of that. I just wanted to see you one last time.”
She held his hand to her cheek, barely hearing his words as she remembered being even closer to him. He’d left for good reasons but oh God, she’d missed him. She swayed closer, inhaling his sandalwood scent.
His eyes, so dark a blue as to be charcoal, widened and he gasped, pulling away from her and backing up as if she’d burned him.
“I said stay away!” He kept moving. “Don’t come near me again. You, Penny? Explain to your friend that I’m not interested in this conversation. I’m not interested in her.”
Then he backed into another tree, twisted the Geometry around him, and vanished into the Backworld.
Marley’s hand dropped to her side and curled into a fist as Penny joined her and said apprehensively, “Are we done chasing him?” She slid her hand around Marley’s arm.
Marley leaned on her, her legs suddenly unsteady. “For now.”
Chapter Three
Branwyn
Branwyn tapped her foot as she stared at the video chat with her youngest sister on her tablet screen, waiting for Meredith to get her act together. She’d decided to complete the paperwork for Meredith’s new music school at her own studio instead of at her family’s house, because her family’s house was endlessly noisy and distracting.
It had been a good idea. But she’d failed to get all the bits together in advance. And filling out paperwork for a school was a lot more complicated than Branwyn had realized. Or at least this school. She hoped fervently it was the only school she’d be doing paperwork for in the next decade.
The chat session had already gone on longer than she’d hoped. Meredith fumbled through a file folder, babbling a mix of cheerful apologies and enthusiasm. Their mother, Holly, hovered in the background behind Meri. “You can just bring it by and I’ll get it done, sweetheart.”
“You’ve got enough to do, Mom. I said I’d send Meri to this place, so I’m going to do the paperwork,” said Branwyn, digging deep into the patience reserves. She was so, so glad Tristan, one of her middle brothers, could do his own paperwork for the drama seminar she was sending him to.
“It’s just so generous of you,” said her mother anxiously. “Are you sure you don’t want to save the money for a rainy day instead?”
Branwyn laughed, looking around her studio at the detritus of a dozen very profitable commissions. “I have a waiting list, Mom. I’ll be busy for years.”
“Yes, but it’s for all these… magic people,” said her mother fretfully. “How reliable can that be?”
“Found it!” said Meredith, pulling a sheet of paper from the folder.
“It’ll be fine, Mom. I’m ready, Meri,” Branwyn lifted her pen.
“I just don’t want you to get in trouble like Jaime did,” explained Holly.
“Mom, go away,” said Meredith impatiently. “She’s going to send me to Gleason Academy of Music. Dad already signed the form. Why are you trying to talk her out of it?”
Holly shook her head and moved out of the line of sight of the camera.
“Quick, while she’s temporarily defeated,” said Branwyn, and Meredith read off the information Branwyn needed. She noted it down neatly and then slid the final form into the envelope. “There we go, brat. I’ll send it off today and you’ll get a letter in a couple weeks. And now I have to go, because I’m already late for lunch.” She ended the call mid-gush without a twinge of guilt. Meredith’s enthusiasm could devour hours.
“That kid does go on,” said a familiar voice fondly behind her. Branwyn grabbed her backpack and turned to see Rhianna, the oldest of her younger sisters, leaning on the open door of the studio.
“Hey, Rhianna,” Branwyn said, rising and looking over the younger woman curiously. She’d cut her red hair recently—exactly the same hair that Branwyn would have if she didn’t keep hers dyed green—and had smoothed the curls so that it framed her face in a sleek bob. “Mom didn’t mention you were in town.”
“I haven’t told her yet.” Rhianna moved into the studio and looked around. “You’ve changed the place.” It was true. What had once been Branwyn’s art studio was almost a storage space now, with boxes of supplies stacked as high as Branwyn could reach. In one corner a partially open door had been painted on the wall, and the darkness beyond had a depth to it that hinted at its true nature: a passage to the Backworld where Branwyn did much of her real work. Rhianna only gave the door a glance before her gaze fell on the large inscribed metal hammer laying on the table beside Branwyn’s tablet. There was a black gem embedded in the head. “Nice war hammer.”
Despite the fact that Branwyn was standing, Rhianna seated herself in the nice chair, the one Branwyn normally offered to potential clients. She spun the chair, lifting her feet out of her shoes to make it go faster.
“Ah, you’re not even pretending this is a casual trip. What’s going on?” Branwyn let her backpack slide down to the ground again, but she didn’t sit. Rhianna worked for the federal government, in the kind of job she couldn’t admit to having. Since the previous October, when the faeries had emerged back into the human world, she’d only been home for the briefest of weekend trips.
“What makes you think something’s going on?” asked Rhianna absently, watching her feet as she flexed them in and out.
Branwyn stopped the spinning chair. “Your hair looks nice. Different, but nice. How do you chew on it when you’re studying, though?”
Rhianna gave her a small smile. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”
Branwyn waited for a moment but Rhianna didn’t say anything else. “You didn’t come for a commission, did you? I mean, I’ve been a little surprised that I haven’t heard anything from your crowd but it’s all good. I’ve got a three page waiting list of private customers.”
“In a way, that’s why I’m here,” said Rhianna and sighed.
It was the sigh that did it. It was too much. “You’re softening me up,” said Branwyn flatly. “Either spit it out or come back later, because I’m late for lunch.”
Rhia
nna gave her a subdued smile and Branwyn felt a twinge of alarm. Either Rhianna had become even better as an actress, or something really was bothering her. Rhianna wouldn’t hesitate to use her own trauma to manipulate somebody else, but she was usually delighted to admit it when Branwyn caught her.
“All right. Do you remember the key you gave me last October?”
“The key to this very studio that I impulsively gave you and then regretted later because I’d locked myself out? Yes, I remember.” Branwyn had used her artificing magic on the key before giving it to Rhianna, waking up the inert metal into something with a Geometric node and the beginnings of an intrinsic nature of its own. “Did it become something useful?”
Rhianna took a deep breath. “Yes. It did. It was incorporated into a device that allows a supernatural entity to fully manifest in our world.” Her eyes widened innocently. “They can’t normally, you know. There’s a field in place that inhibits them. But the device erases the field for the wielder.”
“It’s called the Hush,” said Branwyn slowly, staring hard at Rhianna, trying to see through all her projected body language. “It was incorporated…. And who did the incorporation, Rhianna?”
Rhianna shrugged. “A lot of us contributed something, but it was overseen by our Senior Adviser.”
“Your Senior Adviser,” Branwyn said. “I want to know more about your Senior Adviser. Is he the one who put those empty charms on you?”
“My protections? Oh yes.” Rhianna gave her a sunny smile. “He’s a supernatural entity too, but he’s not like the faeries. He wants to protect people.”
Branwyn remembered Penny saying something similar a year ago. It was back when Penny had been entangled with an angel who wanted to destroy two little girls as a way of ‘protecting people’. She sank back into her desk chair, feeling sick.
“What’s wrong?” asked Rhianna, moving closer, her smile fading.
“You’re not in love with this guy or anything, are you?”
Rhianna drew back in surprise. “You’re kidding, right? Oh my God, Branwyn. He’s like my boss’s boss’s boss. And a lot more freaky than the faeries, to be totally honest. We’re glad to have his help but he’s an adviser, not some kind of celestial playboy.”
Branwyn stared at her searchingly, and then relaxed in relief. Rhianna lied sometimes but she wouldn’t lie about that, not to Branwyn. After a minute, she pulled herself together. “Senior Adviser sounds more governmental than you usually admit to. What’s up with that?”
Rhianna looked self-conscious. “It seemed like the right corporate term for him would have been ‘angel investor.’ Nobody was really comfortable with that.”
Branwyn laughed despite herself and stretched her legs out. “All right. Your Adviser is a supernatural entity who took what I gave you and made a device that would let him fully manifest on Earth.”
“Yep! It’s even better than what you and Jaime did for the faeries.”
Shooting a dirty look at her sister, Branwyn said, “I used the faeries to save Penny; I didn’t give them anything in the end.” Which was a little bit of a lie, but in the context it was true enough. “And they used Jaime to get around their door; he didn’t do anything for them on purpose.”
Sweetly, Rhianna said, “And now here they are, running all over the world causing trouble. Don’t you watch the news?”
“I do, but I hardly need to. I have an up close, personal understanding of how dangerous they—and other supernaturals—can be, Rhianna! Penny almost died because of one who wasn’t a faerie, and I—” Branwyn stopped herself. She tried not to think too much about her own brushes with a fate worse than death at the hands of monsters. “But never mind that. You’re not worried about your supernatural guy at all?”
“Nope. I wasn’t before, because we’ve got nothing else to help us against the faeries and I’ve seen the unpublicized reports on what they’ve been up to the last year. And I’m definitely not worried about him now. I’ve got something much better to be worried about now.”
Branwyn wondered what the secret reports said. She’d heard bad things about some of the stuff happening in the rest of the world. In the USA, the most popular face of the faeries was the Nightwell movie production studio that had formed in Hollywood. They were friendly and sociable with the media, and very happy to put on demonstrations of magic. According to interviews they were positively thrilled with the idea of entertaining the masses with special effects-laden films. Their announced list of projects was… ambitious.
But pretty faeries in Hollywood aside, there’d been some awful clashes between some of the faeries and humans. A lot of the faeries who’d emerged from their Backworld prison weren’t particularly trying to integrate themselves. Many, many humans refused to welcome those who wanted to try. And the faeries had enormous power when they chose to exercise it: over the weather and nature, over the minds of the unprotected, and over illusions.
On the other hand, humans had numbers and, while less well known, their own magic. It was a problem to be solved and Branwyn was secretly glad that her sister was part of an organization with the resources, information and willingness to try. But…
“What are you worried about now?”
Her sister reached for a strand of hair that was too short to chew on. “I’m worried about how the device has been stolen.”
Slowly, Branwyn leaned her chin onto her palm, letting the silence drag out as she thought of who she didn’t want to have stolen the device. Then she took a deep breath. “All right. The million dollar question: why are you here telling me? Do you expect me to make you another one? Because—”
Rhianna laced her fingers together. “Well… you’ve been doing a lot of work with Senyaza. We’ve got the records. You’re tight with them right now. Do you know about their history with my organization?”
Branwyn narrowed her eyes. The records. She’d given up most of her privacy a year earlier, in a dangerous deal with the faerie Queen of Stone. It had been a serious wrench. But she didn’t think Rhianna had been talking to the Queen of Stone about her work schedule. No, Rhianna had records, because she worked for an organization that had zero respect for anybody’s privacy.
And it didn’t bother Rhianna at all. How had Branwyn’s sister’s ideals ended up so far from her own? It was mind-boggling.
Her irritation spilled over. “Given that your organization doesn’t even have a name, how could I possibly know about any mutual history?”
Rhianna flashed a smile. “You don’t like Acme Integrated Solutions?” Branwyn just gave her a steely look and she added, “The President calls us the Office of the Unexpected. OX.”
Her throat tight with conflicting emotions, Branwyn asked, “Rhianna, have you met the President?”
Pursing her lips, Rhianna said, “Met? No. Been in the same room while he talked to my boss’s boss? Yes. Anyhow, OX has been monitoring the exploitation of supernatural resources—magic—for a long time. A lot longer than the faeries have been running around. We used to be just a little office in a basement. But we’ve gotten quite a bit of a budget boost lately.”
“Yes, I can imagine.”
“So… Senyaza is the biggest collection of magic users around. OX has never been exactly happy with that. But as long as magic was on the down low and they didn’t use it to influence the economy or anything, all we had to do was monitor them and the other magical weirdoes. And Senyaza was so good at managing uncontrolled magic that when trouble did start we could just sort of help out with paperwork after. It’s not like we had the resources to do anything else.”
“How long has your Senior Adviser been on the scene?” Branwyn interrupted.
“Oh, a while. Years. Though he didn’t always have a formal position. For the longest time there was just my boss and my boss’s boss as the human staff, stuck in a basement below Acme Integrated Solutions. Anyhow, a couple of weeks after our talented stepfather’s song unleashed the faeries, OX contacted Senyaza to find out if they ha
d a remedy planned. We spent a couple months talking about how to send the faeries back where they came from, but apparently there were problems on Senyaza’s end?” Rhianna gave Branwyn an inquisitive look.
“I wasn’t involved in any of this. All I know is that you were home for a weekend in February, and I made Mr. Black a belt that lets him talk to Titan One.”
Rhianna shrugged. “February was a quiet month, comparatively. Anyhow… March was the Congressional hearings, and we had to manage those so the faeries didn’t influence them—”
“Yes, it would be just awful if Congressional hearings for deciding what to do about a group of people were actually influenced by those people.”
Rhianna gave her a scowl and went on. “Meanwhile Senyaza started—” then hesitated and backtracked. “Actually, wait, really, Branwyn? Really? You really think it was wrong of us to not allow entities with both the ability to influence minds and the ability to manipulate natural forces into the Capitol? They don’t let in people with bombs either, even if they’re discussing what to do about terrorists. At least the faeries were allowed to present video statements.”
Branwyn ground her teeth. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
With a severe look, Rhianna went on. “Senyaza started planning a big company meeting, and we started making our own plans. With a lot more fingers in the pie, because yay, Congress. In May Senyaza had their meeting. They invited most of their contractors and OX was invited to observe. All very nice and polite.”
There’d been an invitation, Branwyn vaguely recalled. She’d been in the middle of something, and she hadn’t been able to imagine why anybody thought she’d want to go to a Senyaza company meeting. She’d assumed it would involve boring financial figures and maybe a few product demos.
“So, um, yeah, it started nice and polite. But the new initiative the Secretary of Homeland Security gave OX didn’t really go over well in the pre-meeting briefing and tensions kind of… flared during the meeting and there was a pretty vocal disagreement and that’s why we think Senyaza has stolen the device.” The words tumbled out of Rhianna in a flood.
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