by Jill Archer
“I told Ari this conversation would be a waste of time.” Sasha sighed dramatically. “I told him if you didn’t have waning magic, we didn’t need to talk. And if you did—we still didn’t need to talk. Because anyone with waning magic who seriously considers not declaring, especially a weird mutant gender bending freak who has waning magic, isn’t worth working with.”
The itchy feeling I was experiencing turned fiery. Everything Sasha said may have been true, except for the part about me being weak. I had to leave now, before I set him on fire. But he beat me to it.
“I feel like I’m talking to a corpse,” he said. And then he got up and walked away.
I sat there on the bench for a while. The sun set and the night grew dark. Fewer and fewer students walked through the square. My cheeks got cold and my toes grew numb. The fact was, like it or not, declaring was starting to sound like a viable option. Oh sure, I hated thinking about making any choice that someone like Sasha might have suggested. But my life was different now than it had been even one month ago. My days of growing up in secluded Etincelle or hanging out in relative anonymity at Gaillard were over. Bryde’s Day was next week and Peter still hadn’t contacted me. The likelihood that he’d find the Reversal Spell in the next seven days was about as likely as Lucifer guest lecturing for Meginnis.
My magic control had been tested more in the past four weeks than it had been in the past four years combined. If this was my new normal, I was in big trouble. Eventually, I would give myself away, or worse, hurt someone. Maybe it was time I started learning how to control my magic instead of hiding it. I hated possessing waning magic because it was destructive and deadly. But I didn’t have to be, right? Some people—the Mrs. Asters and Sashas in the world—would view me with disgust. But others might not. Ari hadn’t.
The temperature dropped. My breath puffed in and out in small white clouds. The square’s lamp lights came on. Finally, I got tired of just sitting there. I got up and walked back to Megiddo. Back in my dorm room, I took a good look around. Our room was more cramped than cozy, little more than a ten by ten space crammed with two twin beds, two desks, and two wardrobes. Ivy had plastered her side of the room with pictures she’d taken during her frequent travels: panoramic vistas of Halja’s western mountains, sepia-toned shots of her posing with various crew members who worked on her family’s ferries, whimsical pictures of her fishing from docks, rowing in dragon boats, and sunbathing on dahabeahs. There were even a few of her and Fitz at the Seknecai estate.
On my side of the room? Peeling paint and crumbling plaster. Maybe it was time to put some pictures up there, even if they weren’t the pictures I’d always dreamed of.
Maybe it was time to declare. The jangly sound of our room’s electro-harmonic machine wrenched me out of my meditation. I walked over to the wall and picked up the receiver. It was Peter. And this time the connection was clear as lark song. He was at the Joshua School and he wanted to see me.
“Noon, can you come over now?”
I didn’t even spare Ivy’s pictures or my blank walls a second glance as I hung up and rushed over to meet him.
Unlike at the Aster estate, Maegesters and those with waning magic were always welcome at the Joshua School. In modern times, Maegesters and Angels worked together all the time. Mostly, Angels were hired as consultants. Angels were experts on Apocalyptic knowledge, the history of Armageddon, and its aftermath. They were also fluent in all three of the primary demon languages. Angels were the ultimate linguists. Any case involving a matter of interpretation, whether it was historical or linguistic, was likely to have an Angel involved. Their spell casting abilities were an added boon.
The inside of the Joshua School was more modern than I expected from people who made their living off of ancient knowledge. In fact, the lobby was very contemporary, all slick lines with whitewashed walls and curvy bleached wood trim, funky colored, oddly shaped furniture, and lots of tables made of bubbled glass and oiled iron. I walked up to a long counter that ran along part of the side wall. The setup reminded me of a hotel. Behind the counter, along the wall, were little niches for the Angel students, full of mail and packages.
A man stood behind the desk. He had one of those boyish faces that never seem to age. He watched me approach, expressionless and silent.
“I’m here to see Peter Aster,” I said.
“Is he expecting you?”
“Yes.” The lobby was so quiet and deathly still, it felt like a tomb. The ageless man walked over to the lobby’s small harmonic and cranked the handle.
“Mr. Aster? There’s a woman down here to see you…” A moment later, the man nodded, replaced the receiver, and looked at me. “Go on up,” he said. “Thirteenth floor, room seven.”
I nodded my thanks and walked over to the lift. It was self-operating and opened immediately, which was a relief. At the top, Peter was waiting for me.
His smile disappeared as soon as I stepped out.
“What happened to the cloaking spell?” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders and leading me down the hallway. “It’s practically gone. Did you have a brush with a demon over at St. Luck’s?”
I didn’t bother answering him. There’d be plenty of time to catch up later.
“Did you find the spell?” I asked breathlessly.
“Not yet,” Peter said cavalierly, not realizing the effect his words would have on me. The giddiness I’d experienced when he first called evaporated.
Peter pushed open the door to his room and led me in. Small, gleaming silver ensconced white glow lights hung around the room, reflecting off white walls and waxed wooden floors. Its brightness was jolting. Peter turned toward me, his face a mixture of concern and expectation.
“So how are things at St. Luck’s?”
Horrible. Frightening. Awful. And yet, if I were being 100 percent truthful, I’d also have to add interesting, intriguing, and challenging.
I walked over to him and put my head on his shoulder. I’d missed him. He was my oldest friend and I needed one right now. I wanted something comforting, something familiar. But there was nothing comfortable or familiar about resting my head against Peter’s chest. He stood stiffly beneath me for a moment and then slowly put his arms around me. After a moment of awkwardly embracing, I pulled away.
Peter’s room was nothing like I expected. It was in fact a suite of rooms, but clearly built for just one occupant. Apparently, Joshua School students didn’t have to bunk up like the Hyrkes at St. Luck’s. It was also flawlessly clean. The living area was defined by a spotless white love seat and a black leather chair. On the floor between them was a thick cream-colored area rug and, on top of that, another glass and iron coffee table. The only thing on the table was a piece of mail. “Masquerading as a Hyrke has been a lot harder than I thought it would be,” I said. “I thought I could do it. Now, I’m not so sure. Honestly, Peter, if you haven’t found the Reversal Spell yet, I think I’m going to declare.”
“What? How can you say that? You don’t want to be a Maegester.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve always hated the thought of having to use waning magic.” Peter nodded. When he wasn’t frowning, which was a lot of the time, Peter was handsome, almost beautiful.
“But it might be good to learn how to control it,” I said slowly, gauging his reaction.
“Learning how to control waning magic means becoming a Maegester,” he said, motioning me over to sit on the couch. I sat, teetering on its edge. He took the chair and faced me.
“You won’t be allowed to learn how to use your magic and then say, ‘no, thanks’ to the job. You’ll be required to serve the Council.”
I grimaced and Peter’s face softened.
“Do you really want to be someone whose job is to advise, judge, and possibly execute demons?”
We stared at each other for a long time. Peter could be very convincing. I sighed.
“No,” I said finally. “But it’s not just about me, is it?”
“
What do you mean?”
“I mean if I don’t learn to control my magic, someone could get hurt. I do know that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as someone who’s afraid to lose her temper for fear of burning something… or someone.”
I thought of Sasha and how much I’d wanted to hurt him. He might have said horrible things, but no one deserved to be burned. I’d never burned another person before, but then I’d never felt as cornered as I had lately. And if I didn’t declare my magic by Bryde’s Day, the cornered, panicky feeling I’d been holding at bay would turn into a full-fledged fight for my life.
“No one will get hurt,” Peter said impatiently. “I’ll cast another cloaking spell—”
“Peter!” His eyes widened and he leaned back from me. I lowered my voice. “I don’t want another cloaking spell.”
He moved to the edge of the chair. Our knees touched. He took my hands in his.
“What are you saying?” he asked. “That you’re going to declare?”
I pulled my hands free and sank back into the couch. “You can’t cloak me forever.”
“I would, if I had to. But I think I can find the Reversal Spell before Bryde’s Day.”
“It’s next week, Peter,” I said, groaning, covering my face with my hands. “When we first came up with the plan to search for the Reversal Spell, we had nine years. Now we have seven days. Don’t you think it’s time we called the search off?”
“Absolutely not. I found something. Another reference.” I took my hands off of my face. He came to sit beside me. This time he was flush with excitement.
“Remember I was telling you that the ancient book of Revelation referenced the Reversal Spell? That the spell had been written down in the immediate aftermath of the Apocalypse at His command?” I nodded. “Well, I did some digging. Most people believe that Armageddon was the last battle of the Apocalypse. But I don’t think so.”
It was my turn to frown. How could that be? Peter was arrogant, and he spent more time studying the archives than anyone I knew, but even he couldn’t rewrite history.
“I was in the Divinity Archives and I found a working draft of a manuscript titled Last Stand. It was never published. The draft was pretty rough, but from what I can tell it was an account of the end of days. The true end. According to Last Stand, a small portion of the Savior’s army survived Armageddon and holed up on the far shore of some river. They huddled there, dejected and weary, waiting for the Savior to rally them for the final battle. But he never came. Instead the Host did. But instead of killing them, they offered a truce. The terms of the truce were recorded by scribes on both sides. The Savior’s scribe was the same person who wrote the draft of Last Stand… Jonathan Aster.”
Our eyes met.
“Do you know where the Savior’s army made their last stand?” Peter asked. I shook my head.
“In Etincelle. Think about it, Noon. It makes sense. The far shore of some river has to be a reference to the Lethe. Everyone knows Armageddon was fought here, on the ground that became New Babylon. And it would explain why Etincelle was settled by both Angels and Host.”
What he said made sense, but still…
“You’re losing me, Peter. What does this have to do with us—here and now?”
“If the Reversal Spell was recorded after the end of the Apocalypse, then it may have been recorded as part of the truce terms between the Host and the Angels. And if Jonathan Aster was the scribe who recorded the truce… where would you search for it?”
The Aster estate. It was almost too much to hope that the spell that could make everything okay was right next door to where I grew up. Could Luck be that cruel? That kind?
“Your house,” I said.
Peter nodded. “Or, more precisely, the Aster Archives in the crypts beneath it. I’m headed back to Etincelle tomorrow morning.” He pointed to a duffel bag beside the door that I hadn’t noticed before. “Want to come?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know…”
“If you help, we’ll find the spell twice as fast.”
“Maybe…”
Finding the Reversal Spell was what I wanted, right? I didn’t want to be a Maegester. Heck, I didn’t even want to be a Barrister, although I’d miss Ivy and Fitz. The three of us worked well together. Each of us had our strengths and weaknesses. Fitz loved all the idiosyncratic rules of Council Procedure, but was hopeless at Evil Deeds. Ivy seemed to intuitively understand all the confusing promise doctrines like oath estoppel and unjust empowerment. Whereas I’d become surprisingly adept at Sin and Sanction. Fitz and Ivy depended on my near perfect recall to quiz them on the hundreds of sins the residents of Halja could be found guilty of. I suppressed my guilt over the upcoming Sin and Sanction midterm. It wasn’t as if Ivy and Fitz were helpless without me.
Peter smiled. It was the first real smile I had seen from him in a long time. It transformed him from a dour, hand wringing intellectual into a beautiful, bright, and highly capable young Angel. I smiled back.
“Have you eaten yet?” he said. “I’m hungry.”
I shook my head.
“Want to go somewhere on your side of campus? How about Marduk’s? It’s been ages since I’ve been there.”
I ate there every night. But it wasn’t every night that Peter was in such a good mood.
“Okay,” I said, slipping my arm through his as we walked to the door.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said, turning back to the coffee table and grabbing the piece of mail I’d noticed earlier. He handed it to me. “This is for you. It’s a letter from Night. I brought it for you from Etincelle.”
“He’s okay, right?”
He nodded. “That’s what your mother said when she gave me that to give to you.”
Well, at least that eased one of my concerns. I grabbed Peter’s arm again before his good mood could change and marched him to the door.
“So,” I asked, “what time is the ferry leaving tomorrow?”
Marduk’s was crowded. Peter and I waited for a table. One finally opened up, a deuce near the front door, and, regardless of the constant draft creeping in, I finally began to relax. How could I not? We weren’t leaving tonight—the last ferry had left hours ago—so I shrugged off my remaining unease about our planned early morning departure. I reminded myself I hadn’t wanted to come to St. Luck’s in the first place. When I began to think about how much work I’d put into school already, I concentrated on the menu. As I skipped over a baby spinach salad in favor of grilled vegetables, I remembered the evergreen in my locker. Which led me to think of Sasha again and the things he’d said to me. And that reignited my earlier anger.
I feel like I’m talking to a corpse.
If the Reversal Spell worked and I retained only half the amount of magic I currently had, no one would ever associate me with death again. My healing powers would rival my mother’s, before her mysterious decline. My touch would be a balm to the sick and soothing comfort to expectant mothers. At the very least, I’d be able to eat a bite of fresh salad without it rotting on the way to my mouth. I vowed to look up Cousin Sasha after I had blessed my one hundredth crop of wheat so that I could dare him to look me in the eyes and call me a—
Three things happened almost instantly. I set my napkin on fire. Peter knocked over his water glass, putting out the flames, and Ari walked through the door. If I had doubted before whether there was any vestige of Peter’s cloaking spell left, I knew then that every shred of it was gone. The feeling I experienced when Ari walked into Marduk’s was as different from the prickly, skittering feeling I was used to experiencing around him as demons were different from Angels. It was as if a small sun had entered the room. Heat, or something like it, radiated from Ari. The intensity of it left me feeling blistered and burned. I instinctively reacted, putting up the magical equivalent of a hand to repel the force assaulting me. But I had no idea what I was doing or how much counterforce I used. I only know that Ari turned toward me then, first with a look of shock and t
hen one of absolute focus, as he made his way through the crowd toward our table.
Peter shoved the half-burned sopping wet mess that had been my napkin into his pocket. He scowled at me, his earlier winsome expression completely gone.
Ari arrived. He wore a long dark wool cloak over a charcoal gray, thick weave sweater. Small snowflakes glistened in his hair, melting in the heat of Marduk’s. In the warm underground glow surrounding us, Ari’s dark eyes appeared almost entirely black, devoid of pupils and eerily intense. I concentrated on controlling my emotions. I felt like two people. The first was a wannabe Mederi who was desperately infatuated with a seriously hot, super powerful Maegester in the making. Having Ari stand this close to me when for weeks we had done nothing but ignore each other was difficult. I couldn’t help remembering how it had felt the day of Shivel’s orientation lecture when he had put his hand over my demon mark. What would it feel like now, without the barrier of Peter’s cloaking spell?
What would it feel like without the barrier of clothes beneath his palm?
I turned away, blushing. When I turned back Ari stared at me, a set expression on his face.
The second person I felt like was a real-life she-devil. I wanted to crisp Ari on the spot for his little tree trick, but doing so in such a public place was hardly a good idea.
“Did Sasha find you?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“And?” Ari said, completely ignoring Peter.
“And,” I said, my voice betraying my anger, “I told him to go to Luck with my blessing.”
Ari inhaled sharply and leaned over the table toward me.
“I was hoping he’d talk some sense into you. I’d have thought you’d have come around by now.”
“Excuse me,” Peter said, placing his hand on Ari’s chest and physically pushing him back from the table and away from me. “Who the hell are you?”
Ari looked at Peter, almost as if he were seeing him for the first time.