by Jessica Gunn
“I ask you a question, you give me the answer. Then you usually do some sort of magik that knocks me out or makes me feel generally like an evil demon bitch for a short while.” At least so far, his magik had only had short-term effects on me. I wasn’t sure that’d be the case forever.
Giyano’s gaze traveled to mine and looked me over, his eyes narrowing. I shivered. I didn’t like him like this—when he looked so human. I preferred Giyano in the dark, silhouetted by torchlight that masked everything except the demon inside of him. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”
“Well, yeah. I don’t know why you’re doing it, though. Care to enlighten me?”
He shifted, looking away again. “What do you want, Krystin?”
“I want to know why Kinder’s back in town. What she’s after.”
Giyano flinched at the sound of her name. “Kinder?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, my turn to look at him and judge him for all he was worth. “We’re worried she might be after Cianza Boston, or worse.”
His hard, burgundy gaze held mine, but his breaths were uneven, fast. “Maybe she is. As long as it’s not Cianza Alzan she’s planning to tilt the magikal balance of, why do you care?”
“Because I live in Boston?”
Giyano took a deep breath. “You misunderstand. Baiting Kinder won’t be hard; it’s taking her down that will be. Either way, as long as you do so before she tilts Cianza Boston, everything will be fine.”
“Yeah, and do you have any tips on how we might take down someone with the Power?” It wasn’t like she’d allow us to get close enough to requirem her magik away from her. And even if I prepared a power-binding crystal or had my mother make one, we’d never get within range to use that either.
Giyano squinted, as if seeing something I didn’t, then shook his head. “No. Unfortunately not. Not someone who’s had it for as long as Kinder.”
“Meaning what exactly?” Had he run into someone else with the Power? His tone, nostalgia-laden, made it sound like that was true. If so, they must have not been recorded into the Fire Circle’s history books. Something’s not right.
“What that means is you have two separate problems,” Giyano said. “Two which will work together to defeat you and your entire team if you’re not careful.”
“So help me take down Kinder. I mean, she betrayed your boss’s father. You’ve gotta want to take her down for that at the very least.”
Giyano’s jaw worked, his lips twitching.
“Ooh. Touchy subject for you?”
His eyes narrowed again. “I’m not going to help you with Kinder. Doesn’t the fact that those words came out of your mouth bother you?”
It should. It really fucking should. But I couldn’t find it within me to care in that moment. “You know, don’t you? How to cut off her powers?”
Giyano looked to me, a fire burning behind his burgundy eyes. “You’re more in danger from your own Circle than you are from Kinder. There are those within the Hunter Circles who would love to see the powers of Alzan within yourself, and Shawn, turned into weapons for evil.”
I choked on my previous retort, both at Giyano’s implication and the fact he knew about Shawn. Of course he knows. Giyano appeared to know everything. “Excuse me? For evil? Reality check: the Hunter Circles are good.”
He laughed and looked at me like I was stupid. No—not stupid. Naïve. “We both know that’s not entirely true.”
“They’re representatives of the Powers. They’re the definition of good.”
“No, that’s just the label they were given when Aloysius’s split from the Entity rubbed the Powers the wrong way,” Giyano said. “With his split, magik became tainted and the Powers deemed that tainted-ness wrong. Hence, evil. Whatever that means.”
“Who’s after our magik then?” I asked. “If you’re so keen on telling me in the first place.”
“In time.”
“In time?” I stood from the bench and peered down at him. It felt good to have the advantage, to be able to look down on him the way good should over evil. But the damn sunlight and the stupid aviators and the ass-hat smirk on his face kept making him look so damn human. Hatred rolled down my spine. “I don’t have time. You just told me that!”
Giyano stood, too, and went to place his hands on my shoulders. I backed out of the grapple, smacking his hands away.
“Don’t touch me, asshole. I won’t fall for that again.”
He gestured to the bench. “Then sit.”
I shook my head, looking around. No one was here anymore, not inside the park. Fantastic. “No. Tell me how to take down Kinder and then we’ll go our separate ways.”
“She doesn’t concern me,” he said coolly.
“Then what the hell does? You try to taint my magik, you come when I supposedly call, you dispense half-truths of information and expect me to put it together—why? Why do you care so much about what happens to me or what choices I make or who my enemies are, especially if you won’t tell me?”
A beat passed before he answered, his eyes now the color of the last remaining embers of a campfire. I shivered again as his aura danced across the space between us, enveloping me in his dark magik. “I don’t tell you because there’s nothing you can do about it right now. Though I still believe you should know to watch out for yourself.”
“Why?” I asked again. “You killed my father. I have to believe you would have killed me, too, if my mother hadn’t stepped in.”
Giyano smiled slowly. “I’d never kill you, Krystin. You’re too important.”
Important. For someone who killed so freely, it was hard to believe anyone was important to him. Except for that witch in Salem. The one he’d fought Lady Azar for.
“Is this about your lover? The one Lady Azar killed in 1692?”
Giyano swallowed hard and, though I didn’t expect him in a million years to, he answered, “Yes.”
My breath hitched and all words escaped me. “Um, well…”
“Ashbel was a confident man, but he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I’m afraid,” Giyano said, staring straight ahead into the late morning goings-on of the city. People walked by outside the park with backpacks and grocery bags, dogs on leashes. So normal. So unaware. “He was also an Ember witch who had the Power, though he didn’t know either of those two things. He was like Ben: the inheritor of power he didn’t understand.”
“So Lady Azar killed him for it? That doesn’t make sense, not when she had you kidnap Riley for the same reason.” She’d wanted the Power to channel enough magik to break through the barriers protecting Alzan.
“Ashbel was nearly twenty-five, the age the Power settles in its host and disappears,” Giyano said, shaking his head. He looked down at his hands, to where the Shadow Crest tattoo curled around his wiry wrist. “Even if she’d had him within her grasp, he would have lost the Power within weeks. Not that he knew he had it.”
“Then how did he end up on that pyre?” It was a bit of an insensitive question, but given Giyano had murdered my father, I elected not to care. Still, when he flinched at the word ‘pyre,’ I felt sort of bad about saying it. But only a little.
“He was accused of witchcraft by his neighbors. Or so Ashbel said. I saved him from the burning, used my magik to back the fires off of him until enough people had walked away.”
Chills crept up my spine as the memory—his memory—of that night flashed across my mind like I was having that vision all over again. “I know. I saw it.”
He nodded. “Apologies for that. I hear visions are uncomfortable.”
“They are. It’s not your fault.”
“It was, in a way.”
I looked up at him. “How?” He nodded to the mark on my hand. “Oh.”
Giyano resettled his focus on a point in the distance. “Ashbel was the target of someone he didn’t know existed. I tried to explain it to him when he finally awoke after the pyre, but he wasn’t having any of it. So I dropped the subject and we liv
ed in happiness until Lady Azar caught word of not only my presence in Colonial America, but also that I’d taken to someone. Given my deserter status, she’d decided to blackmail me into returning to her service.”
“At which point I’m assuming she killed Ashbel, then you tried to stake her with a fire sword.” The memory had been so clear, him dragging Ashbel’s body into Shadow Crest’s lair.
I felt for Giyano then, watching his face contort with the painful memories. He was like me, both of us just trying to live our lives when all this shit happened. But then I caught sight of the mark he’d left on my hand, and bile and anger rose up in my throat over what he’d done to my father. To Nate’s parents. To Riley, a baby back then.
I stepped back from him. “That sucks.”
“Indeed. As for why it matters here…” He looked away. “The Power is dangerous and so is Kinder. My worry is the joining of both Kinder’s agenda and Lady Azar’s, that they’re interested in destroying both the Boston and Alzan cianzas. You and I alike, whatever else might separate us, cannot let either cianza fall.”
My eyes narrowed. “You know there’s like a hundred others spread around the world, right? They’re not just here.”
Giyano nodded. “I’m aware. But Kinder is here, at this one, and so are you. So is your power.”
“It’s not mine. Not alone. Shawn’s involved, too.”
“He has no magik right now,” Giyano said, looking back at me. “And yours is unstable at best, a puppet to be used by others.”
I crossed my arms in front of me. “There you go again, warning me about things to come but not about who to run from.”
“It’s not about running, Krystin.”
His serious, dark eyes met mine and froze me in place. So fast, I didn’t see it coming, he reached out and touched his bare hands to mine and held on tight.
Immediately, he pumped his dark, demonic magik into mine, flooding my senses with his cinnamon aura. Only this time, instead of pain or a sense of overbearing evil, I felt… bliss.
My cheeks flushed and though I squeezed my eyes shut against the daylight, my senses exploded. Sounds became louder, clearer. Smells—grass and dirt and snow. Breads from the bakery down the street. The crunch of debris under trucks in the road. The scrape of garbage bins being placed out for the morning.
Giyano chuckled. “There. We’re finally making progress.”
How was this making progress? Oh, my god. Was my body used to his magik now? His magik was elemental. My body physically could not be used to this.
“Shit,” I moaned as his power coursed through my veins and into my heart, warming my chest and making me giggle with the tingles that spread from my fingers to the tips of my toes. An electricity that burned as well as satisfied.
“Before I was turned into a demon,” Giyano said, his words reaching me past a haze of euphoria, “my father and I were archaeologists of sorts. We uncovered a secret in southern England, one that would change the face of the world you and I both know. But we didn’t act on it before he was killed and Lady Azar captured me. She’d turned me into a demon like herself. She doesn’t know what I do, and that’s why I run, Krystin. That’s why I choose to help you. Because you and your Alzanian destiny have the power to change the world. In the wrong hands, your power can be channeled for an evil so great, not even Aloysius can stop it.”
He let go and shoved me away from him. The sudden loss of contact brought with it a blanket of darkness, of despair and desperation to return to Giyano’s hold. I needed his magik, craved that euphoria his magik had given me. A heady sense of power and happiness and passion and strength.
But all that remained was darkness. That was the only thing that ever seemed to remain when all was said and done.
“Are you helping me because you feel bad about losing Ashbel to Lady Azar?” The veins in my wrists were black, tendrils of the inky shadows twisted up my arm.
He shook his head. “I’m helping you before you lose control or hand that control over to the wrong person and get us all killed. Before every plane of existence is wiped from reality.”
Giyano rushed me, holding a hand out, and shouted, “Teleportante.” With a thrust of his palm, I was thrown into the teleportation and landed on the floor of my bedroom in the team’s house with a thud.
The last thought I had before losing consciousness was how he’d been able to send me to my bedroom… if he’d never been there before.
I SPENT the rest of the morning on the floor, wallowing in self-pity and despair, waiting for Giyano’s magik to wear off. What the hell had that all been about? A traitor in the Fire Circle, someone willing to turn my power evil? Wasn’t that what he was doing?
The better question was: Why did I let him keep doing it?
Because he’s the only one who has answers. And answers were, after all, the only reason I’d stayed in the Fire Circle instead of running away from it all these years. Answers as to why my father had been murdered and by whom—resolved when I’d met Giyano in person. And now…
I closed my eyes again. Too many questions. Too many awful answers.
A knock sounded on my door.
“Who is it?” I asked, my voice verging on a wail. I didn’t want to talk to anyone or have anyone even see me like this.
“Shawn,” he said. “Are we still training?”
What was the damn point? He didn’t have magik. There was no Alzanian power to find. Maybe Jaffrin and his Fire Circle buddies had gotten it wrong.
“Krystin?” Shawn called through the door.
I rolled onto my stomach and pushed myself off of the floor. I caught sight of myself in my full-length mirror. The veins in my wrists remained darkened and my eyes were red and puffy. Like I’d been crying.
Yeah, crying over the withdrawal my body seemed to be having over losing Giyano’s magik. Like an idiot.
I wiped my face with my forearm and forced a smile onto my lips. “Yeah, one second.” I smoothed over my clothes, tugged down the sleeves of my shirt, and tried to make it look like I’d done nothing this morning but sleep. But this walk of shame was a lot longer and more obvious than any I might have done before.
Finally, I stepped over to the door and opened it wide. “Let’s go.”
Shawn stood there, hand lifted as though he were about to knock again. He wore dark jeans today and a dark T-shirt as if he didn’t feel the cold trying to work its way from the winter outside into our house. “Are you okay?”
I smiled up at him, thankful for having practiced in the mirror. “Yeah. Let’s get down to the training room.”
And we did, not talking the entire way. When we’d gotten into the basement, I flicked on the lights before taking a seat on the stack of mats in the corner.
“I don’t know what you want to try today,” I told Shawn as he stood before me. “I’m not sure what will kick your powers into gear.”
He shrugged. “Me either. You said you can feel it there?”
“I mean, yes. Your power… I felt the same inside myself when I was fighting Giyano in Shadow Crest’s lair. It’s warm and feels alive, but it’s dormant, hidden for some reason.” And if it was locked away and nothing we’d tried so far had worked, I didn’t want to tell him that probably nothing would.
Shawn sat before me, crossing his legs. “What about your telepathy?”
My brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“If you found the power that way, in my head… or does it not work like that?”
I wasn’t sure. I’d never used my magik that way before. And most of the time, I felt how powerful people were by their auras, of which Shawn had none. Only non-magik users, normal humans, didn’t have auras. “You want me to read your mind?”
“I guess so.” He grabbed a pair of wooden fighting sticks about twenty-four inches in length and flipped them around his fingers like oversized drumsticks.
At least he could fight. He was a better fighter than most of the magik-users I knew, anyway, who all reli
ed on magik giving them the power to fight Darkness’s demons.
“Are you sure? Most people balk at the idea.”
Shawn nodded. “Yes. Maybe if you try to do it while we’re sparring, it’ll make something click. Like if there’s a wall blocking the power. If that makes sense.”
I stood from the mats. It did make sense. People were easier to read when they were doing something else. Snagging the other pair of fighting sticks, I fell into a stance and waited for Shawn to make the first move. He circled around me, watching every step I took.
“I don’t think so,” I said as I reached out to fake a snap at his right wrist and instead kicked out, hitting the top of my foot into his side.
He grunted but rolled with the hit, surfacing with a barrage of attacks. I blocked them all easily, weaving in and out of range, and tried to break into his mind. But opening up my telepathy power to a single person never worked as well as I planned it to.
Instead of only his mind, I instantly heard Rachel singing song lyrics in the shower and saw Nate’s dreams of kayaking as he slept through the entire day. And then there was Ben, dreaming about throwing footballs with Riley. My heart wrenched at Ben’s dream, knocking me off-balance as Shawn’s strike hit me straight across the shoulder with a hard smack.
I cried out and backed away, breathing heavily. “Hold on. I can’t zero in on just you.”
Shawn moved to strike again, coming in up high. “There’s no waiting in a demon fight. Isn’t that what Ben always says?”
I tossed up a stick to block his and fought hard against the onslaught of thoughts piling in. I hadn’t opened myself up like this in a long time, and now I’d pay the price. The neighbor next door was compiling a grocery list. I heard someone down the street going over some fantasy conversation about getting back at their ex-boyfriend. So many thoughts and none of them Shawn’s.
I deflected his next two attacks, then came up with a wave of my own, knocking sticks until he missed a block and took one of my attacks to the back of his knee.
The second Shawn crumpled to the floor, holding his knee, a burst of white-hot energy seared into my mind. The pure power, so light and full and unlike any aura I’d ever felt before, blinded me.