by Jessica Gunn
“No way I’m sleeping,” I told her. “I might walk home. To blow off some steam.”
“That’s a long walk when it’s this cold out,” Nate said.
Ben nodded. “Good. I need it, too.”
“Yeah,” Shawn said curtly.
I gestured to the front doors of Fire Circle Headquarters. “Let’s go. There’re only a few hours until morning.”
We took the shortest route between Fire Circle Headquarters and our team’s house, although it was still a good five-plus miles. I was sure that, after the first hour, we’d likely hop a subway. But the fast pace we kept didn’t promise that as an outcome.
Though I was glad I wasn’t the only one too riled up to hope of sleeping any time soon, I hated what’d happened tonight. How close we’d gotten to death—again—as a team after years of me operating perfectly fine on my own. Having to worry about them stressed me out more than me working solo missions for Jaffrin that were meant to be completed by teams. And to know that Shawn had almost gone in head-first anyway… What had he been thinking?
“Do you smell that?” Rachel asked, pulling me from my thoughts.
“What?”
Nate stopped, sniffing the air. “Yeah. I do.”
Shawn looked up. “Fire?”
Sirens wailed, piercing the early morning in sharp tones.
“Should we investigate?” I asked Ben.
He shrugged. “It’d give us something to do.” I guessed he was feeling the restlessness too. “Let’s go.”
We took off in the direction of the sirens, following them to an area of the city that got a bit closer to the cianza at Boston’s center than I would have liked. Chills crept up my skin, goosebumps following. I looked to Shawn. This was the first time we’d brought him close to Cianza Boston, although I didn’t know if he’d been this close on his own before.
“Do you feel it?” I asked as we jogged to the scene.
He looked down at me. “Feel what?”
“The cianza. It affects me quicker than normal magik-users because of the prophecy. You should feel the same.”
He shrugged. “I guess so. Feels like a blanket of power settling over you?”
“More like strangling me, but yeah, sure.” The closer I traveled to the cianza, the worse the feeling got. The feeling of tipping the power balance between good and evil.
“Shit.” Ben froze in place. “The human police are already there. But look.”
I stopped behind him and peered over his shoulder. At Arnie’s bar, engulfed in flames. “Damn.”
The building looked like it was mostly standing okay, but the windows and doors had been blown out. The walls were charred and half the roof was caving in. The fire department must have already decided no one had been inside—it was after 2 a.m. at a bar after all—because they were still fighting the flames outside.
“Any way we can sneak in and look for survivors?” Ben asked.
“I can sneak in,” I said. “I’ve been there enough times to teleportante inside and back out again.”
Rachel stepped beside me. “I’ll come to help combat the blaze. We need to see if there are survivors.”
Ben nodded. “Or any clues as to who started the fire. Go. But be quick.”
I was surprised Ben had agreed to this without putting himself on the detail, too. In the past, he’d have demanded to go with us. Rachel’s gaze met mine, her eyes wide in surprise. Guess she couldn’t believe it either.
She held out her hand and I grabbed it, using teleportante to bring us into Arnie’s now-burning down bar. Flames burned along the banisters and walls, over the tables, chairs, and the bar top, behind which… Oh, god.
Rachel’s hand, still clasped in mine, squeezed tight. She didn’t handle gore well. And after the last few days, it’d gotten worse.
Arnie had been impaled against the wall behind the bar by two chair legs. Blood poured out of the wounds in the middle of his chest and out of the corners of his mouth. His eyes were open and alert despite the pain wrinkling his face. His mouth was open, gasping for air.
We’d by no means been friends, but my heart plummeted for him.
The heat from the fire scorched my skin, scents of burning wood and something less savory wafting up inside my nose. Sweat slipped down the side of my face and my neck. I made my way over to the bar and used my telekinesis to push off smoke and flames reaching out for me. Still, my ether-based magik couldn’t block out the heat from the fires burning around me.
I stepped over too many demon bodies on my way to the bar, Rachel trailing behind me, using her power douse flames as best she could. But they kept springing back to life despite the water from her attacks and the firefighters’ hoses outside the building.
This was no normal fire.
Someone’s magik had done this. Might still be doing this.
When I reached the bar counter, I placed a hand on the wood to vault over it, but the wood was scorching. I yelped as my skin burned.
“Here,” Rachel said, floating a small wave of water over to me. She encased my hand in the water and cooled it to stop the burning. “That will help. But we shouldn’t stay here for too much longer. I can’t do anything against the fires and I’m sure the fire department will be inside soon.”
I nodded. Rachel was right. But the way her powers cooled my burning hand, the feel of relief, had me frozen in place. Rachel was a godsend and a total natural at her powers.
“Thanks,” I said and used my telekinesis to lift myself over the bar, feet dangling, behind it to where Arnie was impaled. “You’ve looked better, Arnie.”
He coughed, blood sputtering from his mouth over the chair legs piercing his chest. I wanted to pull them out, to help comfort him, but instinct told me that’d just kill him quicker. There wasn’t anything I could do for him unless a healer showed up within the next few minutes. And I wasn’t totally sure a Fire Circle healer would even want to help out a demon, regardless of the information he might have.
“Funny,” Arnie croaked. “Get… out…”
I tsked, looking him over for any sign of what’d happened, or if there was a way to save him. “You let me worry about the human police and fire department.”
“No…” He coughed again, splattering more blood from the corners of his mouth.
I lay a hand on his shoulder. “Easy. This isn’t as bad as it looks, but talking will make it worse.”
His eyes shut weakly, like he wanted to roll them instead. Like all the times we’d joked when I’d come here, pretending to be a demon, to deal dharska. “Demon.”
My eyebrows rose. “A demon did this?”
He nodded his head almost imperceptibly, moaning painful, pitiful sounds.
I shot a look at Rachel over my shoulder. “Check for that cuneiform mark.”
“You think it’s the same person?”
“He said a demon did it,” I yelled over the roar of the fire around us. Rachel looked around as I put my focus back on Arnie. “Which demon?”
His eyes rolled back into his head, his breaths slowing. Arnie didn’t have much time left. And from the roar of the flames and creaking of the wood structure around me, neither did Rachel and I.
“Kin…der…” he croaked. “Betrayer.”
My heart stopped, all breath whooshing out of my body. A cool wave of shock washed over me, petrifying. No. “Kinder.” No way. No fucking way. I shook Arnie’s shoulder to wake him up again. To confirm the maddening reality of his words. “Kinder did this? Are you sure?”
But Arnie didn’t wake, and his chest didn’t rise. He was gone.
I spun back to the bar, where Rachel stood looking up at the burning ceiling.
“It’s the same,” she said, pointing. “Cuneiform here, too.”
A calling card. Kinder’s fucking seal.
Oh, this was not good at all.
“We need to leave,” I said, vaulting over the bar counter again with aid from my telekinesis. “Now. This entire area isn’t safe.”
I grabbed on to her arm before Rachel could protest and teleported us back out to the alley where the others stood. Heat radiated off of us in waves in the suddenly-cold night air. Steam puffed from our breaths.
“So?” Ben asked as soon as we landed.
Rachel’s face paled and I felt all the blood rush from mine. “It’s not just Landshaft we have to worry about anymore.”
“What?” Shawn asked.
I gulped, closing my eyes. “We have a bit of a problem. And by we, I mean the entire Fire Circle.” Not to mention Cianza Boston too.
“What do you mean?” Ben asked.
“Kinder’s here,” Rachel said. “Kinder is at fault for all of this.”
This couldn’t be happening. Except it was. And we were so not ready.
Kinder was an Old One. Another Old One. First Lady Azar and Giyano. Then Shadow Crest. And now Landshaft. But Kinder was more than that. She was the Betrayer of Darkness. Mother of Aloysius’s children.
Lady Azar’s mother. And she’d had it out for the Fire Circle as a whole since the beginning of recorded history.
Back at Headquarters, I pounded on Jaffrin’s door. We explained what had happened at Arnie’s at lightning speed, with Jaffrin still on speaker-phone with the Ether Head Circle.
Jaffrin stood, mouth agape. “Kinder?”
“Is back,” I said. “And clearly that Power of hers never settled because that’s exactly what she’s doing—she’s collecting magik from around Boston and the Guild, and that’s a big fucking deal, considering the cianza at Boston’s center.”
“We can’t protect it,” Ben said. His face had turned to stone. He knew about Kinder. About her having the Power. She was, aside from Riley, the only person still living that we knew had that magik. “The cianza is as good as an open target for the taking.”
“But she has to know that if she goes near it, it’ll blow,” Nate said. “That’s not exactly hidden knowledge, and she’s an Old One. She knows better.”
“Not sure she’ll care,” I said. “The Fire Circle betrayed her. She was a Hunter like us until the Fire Circle found out about the Power, hunted her down, and tried to have her killed. That’s why she turned on them.”
Jaffrin rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. “We couldn’t confirm until tonight that her Power hadn’t settled. It’s supposed to around age twenty-five, picking either ether or elemental-based magik and settling with the last ability she had inside of her.”
“Well, clearly Aloysius made her immortal before that happened,” I said. “He must be regretting that decision right now.” The two of them were the only truly immortal demons the Hunter Circles knew of. And they’d been dancing around each other for thousands of years.
“You’re assuming he even knows she’s still alive,” Shawn said. “Don’t the histories say she screwed him over too?”
Rachel nodded. “She’s supposed to have been in hiding ever since.”
What had changed in this world in the last month that had caused everything to escalate? It couldn’t have been Riley because he was two years old. And it couldn’t have been Shawn and me and the Alzan prophecy because we were twenty-four.
So, what the hell had changed?
“Something’s happening inside of Darkness,” Jaffrin said. “A power shift, perhaps. Maybe one of Aloysius’s sons is making a bid for the throne.”
“Or Lady Azar,” Ben proposed. “She’s trying to get to Alzan. Who knows how long that’s been the case. And she almost did it when she had Riley.” Ben looked to me. “If we’d waited a single day longer to get him…”
“Still doesn’t explain why Kinder’s going around murdering people in mass and stealing their magik,” I said. “It’s not like she can use eighteen powers at once. Even her ability is limited.” Supposedly, anyway. And according to the balance all power had a limit.
Supposedly.
“Is there a chance that she might be after Riley?” Ben asked, his words barely louder than a whisper. As if even the possibility of that being true scared him to the bone.
No one spoke, not even Jaffrin. Which might have been worse than him speaking at all.
“Great.” Ben stepped away to pace between Jaffrin’s desk and the door to his office. “What do we do now, then?”
Jaffrin pulled in a deep breath. The line he had open to the Ether Head Circle clicked off. He looked down at the phone, then back to us. “I assume that means they’ll be calling the shots on this one.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said.
The Ether Circle did nothing but rule from afar, completely out of touch with what the rest of us were dealing with. And yet they were respected enough that no one spoke against them. There had to be a reason for that, but I’d never seen one beyond Jaffrin’s utter deference. And, you know, the fact that the entire Blackwood line had always obeyed them, even when they laughed in the face of Fire Circle Leaders.
“Just go home. For real this time,” Jaffrin said, defeat thick in his voice as he plunked into the chair behind his desk. “Stay out of trouble for a day.” For once, he appeared more exhausted than we were. I didn’t blame him. The last forty-eight hours had been an utter mess.
“We’ll try,” I said. “It seems to always find us, though.” The truth was, in placing all of us on a team together, despite his best magik-weapon-making intentions, Jaffrin had instead formed a huge target on our heads, and on the heads of the entire Fire Circle. All of us posed some threat to Darkness or were otherwise connected.
And now, because we were all Fire Circle Hunters, we were targets for Kinder and her revenge. Because they’d hunted her when they’d discovered she’d had the Power. Back then, anyone with the Power had been killed because the ability to wield both ether and elemental magiks in one body simultaneously was considered wrong, despicable, and dangerous.
That was why the ability was so rare these days. Because no one with the Power back then had survived to pass it along to their offspring.
Except Kinder. And now Riley.
Chapter 9
Ben
The rest of the team fell into their beds almost upon arriving home. I didn’t blame them. It felt like years had passed since Krystin had joined the team instead of a few dozen days.
But I couldn’t sleep, no matter how badly exhaustion tugged at my eyes and muscles. I paced around my room for a good hour, phone in hand, before I’d gathered enough strength to begin dialing Sandra’s new phone number. Her Canadian one. I wasn’t sure what had me so afraid. Or rather, I knew what did, but not what I was more afraid of: her answering the phone or her not picking up at all. And what the latter would mean.
Finally, I summoned some courage and forced my fingers to dial Sandra’s number. The call connected and rang, my pulse thudding behind my ears in a painful rhythm.
I’d uprooted her entire life, both by getting her pregnant in college and again days ago by forcing her to move to Canada with minimal explanation of what was going on. I’d told her I’d solved the problem, that I’d taken care of the bad guys, but I needed to make sure they were gone for good before I knew it was safe for Riley to come back to the United States. Back to Boston.
Sandra hadn’t been happy, but she’d obliged.
And now… now the phone rang. Twice. Three times. By the fifth ring, I was certain she wouldn’t pick up.
The call ended and her voicemail started. “I can’t get to the phone right now. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.”
“Fuck!” I shouted and threw my phone. It smacked against the wall I shared with Krystin and bounced onto the floor.
Shit. Would Sandra hear that in the message?
I walked over to my phone and picked it up, finding it surprisingly intact. Thank all the phone-case gods. I rolled my shoulders and stared up at the ceiling, though aiming my words much higher. To whomever might be up there listening. “Are you having fun screwing with me yet? Because I’m not!”
A knock sounded on my door
, quiet and soft.
“It’s open,” I called.
Krystin poked her head in. “Everything okay in here? I heard a slam against the wall.”
I righted myself and nodded. “Yeah. As okay as it’ll ever be.”
Sandra hadn’t picked up, but she might have answered my call if I’d had the balls to dial her number sooner. Maybe she was busy, or driving, or chasing Riley around in the snow. Or maybe she decided she never wanted to talk to me again, least of all in the early morning hours when we hadn’t spoken for over two years before last week.
And although I’d only heard it for a few hours before handing him over to Sandra, I hadn’t realized how much, in that very moment, I wanted to hear Riley’s voice too. How much I wanted to talk to him, with him, even though he didn’t have many words yet. I needed to hear his funny laugh, to see him smile.
My heart wrenched itself and my chest squeezed tight. I missed Riley so much. I’d gone over two years without him. One day wasn’t enough.
I breathed in a ragged breath and plunked down onto my bed. “I can’t do this.”
Krystin shut the door behind her as she entered my room. “We’ll figure out what to do about Kinder. It’s just another bump. I mean—it’s a huge hurdle, but—”
“Not Kinder,” I said. “Riley. I can’t… I need to see him again.”
Krystin paused. “Oh.”
I didn’t expect her to say much to that. Or to understand. She didn’t have kids. And until two weeks ago, I’d almost forgotten what it was like. Lady Azar had Riley kidnapped weeks after he’d been born. I’d barely known him at all.
“I called Sandra. That’s what the phone being thrown against the wall was about. Sorry if I woke you.”
Krystin’s gaze traveled to the wall where phone-sized dent had been made. “Jeeze. Use that football arm outside the house, please. The poor wall.”
I swallowed hard, jaw working. I knew she was trying to lighten the mood, but I wasn’t sure anything could at this point. “All I wanted was to hear her say they were okay. I need that information to come straight from her, not through Jaffrin.”