by Jade Alters
“ENOUGH!” the voice erupts from the cabin. The guards freeze, which is enough to freeze the three of us right alongside them. Out from the wide-planked door steps Graham Bartos, head of one of the Core Line. Helena’s father. “That’s enough, all of you. There’s no reason for you to hurt these misguided children,” he directs to his guards, then to us, “and there’s no reason for you to be trying to tear Helena away from us.”
“No?” I dare to object. Each word settles on top of a dense air-pocket of hesitation in my chest. It takes everything I have to actually fling them out of me. “Not the other three powerful families that are probably a few hours behind us on paying you a visit here?”
“Emery…” Helena mumbles. For a second, it even looks like she might take a step back toward her father. I’m more than a little shocked when Darius of all people, steps between them. He breaks the commanding line of sight between Graham and his daughter.
“Come on, Helena. You know this is wrong,” I plead. Then I turn back to her father. “You know you can’t protect her from all three of them if they came knocking. Not here. It’s their home turf as much as it is yours.”
“The Bartos family is loyal to the will of the Council, always,” Graham objects, though he’s suddenly less than half as stalwart as he was a moment ago. I haven’t chipped away his armor - only wiped the polish away from where cracks had already formed. But I know from experience with a certain other powerful family how dangerous a game this is. There’s nothing worse than telling a proud person their way of thinking is flawed. Nothing, besides telling them they know it’s flawed. “The other Core Lines are no different. If the Council decided for Helena to stay here, they must accept it.”
“And what about Helena? Must she just accept it?” I growl. Even the mighty Graham Bartos can’t look me in the eye when I say it, as much in the words that aren’t there as the ones that are. Her choice doesn’t matter. Her fate isn’t for him or even her to decide. Go on, I dare him with my eyes, agree with me. But he won’t. Unlike others I know, it appears Graham Bartos is Helena’s father first, everything else second. “You weren’t there, at the Heritage Ball,” I take advantage of his silence. “You didn’t see how they treated her. The way they acted…had nothing to do with the will of the Council.” I see I’ve misstepped in the immediate twist of lines across Graham’s face.
“Obstinate children who have no concept of the bigger picture their parents fight to balance,” he denies. “Cassandra Dymmer…Gary Gorshen…Emery Dalshak.” At the sound of my name, a calloused hand rises from the long sleeve of Graham’s mauve dress robe. The clink of armor plates, both decorative and functional, distinguishes him from any other Warlock. “You will receive no further warning. Leave, or I will remove you.”
“Father, please-”
“No, Helena!” Graham cuts her off, “If this is what I have to do to keep you safe…” His fingers open at me, as one final warning. Darius inches closer to Helena. His hand inches near to hers. If he can just get a hold on her, maybe we can still get her out of here. That means keeping Graham’s attention somewhere else. I can’t believe it, but I lift my own hands, in threat of trickery, to the head of the Bartos line.
“Then this is what I have to do,” I tell him. Both of our eyes narrow in their sockets, watching the other for the slightest betrayal of initiative.
Graham cracks first with a fiery missile. It scorches through the air straight for me. A finger snap opens a portal just in front of its path. My other hand holds open the corresponding portal, next to Graham. His fire vanishes into the first and flings out at him from his flank. The Bartos power is made clear in how quickly a vortex conjures itself beside him. It sucks in the flame and scatters it as harmless embers. He didn’t even need his hands to do it. At least it distracted him enough for Darius to grab Helena. He zips past the gathering guards. His face, however, slams nose-first into a wall of earth that jumps up in his path at the stomp of Graham’s foot. The guards move in on them while Graham throws his arms out at me.
A windstorm tears needles from every tree around me. They wrap around me in a tornado, sharpened somehow by his magic. Each one engraves a red slice across part of my arm. By the time I wrap myself in a glassy cloak of protection, it’s almost too late. My whole body stings from the crisscrossed drips of blood streaming down to the dirt. Graham’s storm is relentless, which forces me to keep my arms crossed to keep my trick-shield up.
“Father, stop!” Helena cries, with her back to the earthen wall that blocks her and Darius’ escape. Graham’s hands shake in an attempt to focus his storm, to tear through my illusory defenses. Helena tries to step away from the wall but the guards block her path to her father.
“Keep her over there! Deal with the Vampire and bring her back inside!” Graham orders. Veins throb from his head while he fights with me. With a steady increase in tension, I’ve begun to push out with my shield. His needles and my glassy forcefield entangle in an effort to overcome one another.
In the corner of my eye, I see something I hardly believe. Darius knocks the guards back, even when their firebolts scald his skin. Even when their gusts fling him away. He returns instead of fleeing.
“Take a hint!” he cries out, batting the guards away from Helena every time they reach for her. All the while, Graham bears down on me. I feel his needles and wind blades scratching through the outer shell of my shield. I’ll be ribbons in seconds if Darius doesn’t get her out of here. But the guards keep flinging him away. They keep burning him. Until finally, Helena bars him with a hand across his chest.
“I said STOP!” Helena screams. She sweeps an arm out in front of her. A small tornado screeches up from the dirt, counteractive to Graham’s. His needles freeze in the air, then fall in a dense circle around me.
“Helena don’t- we still don’t understand this power!” Graham pleads with his daughter.
“If you’re going to continue to hurt my friends…I don’t need to! I just need to use it!” Helena barks back. She kneels to thrust her palms into the ground. A localized tremor shoots from them, through the earth behind her. It climbs through her father’s stone wall, fracturing it into massive boulders. But none of them hit the ground. They fall into the cradle of Helena’s conjured stormwind. “Emery!” she calls to me.
I let my shield fall and make a break for her through the duststorm of shattered earth. The bigger pieces swirl around us, missing Darius and me by the magic of Helena’s concentration. They bash the remaining guards off their feet.
“Helena…please don’t make me-”
What Graham was willing to do, to his own daughter, we’ll never know. A boulder crashes into his gut and pins him to the ground long before he can finish his sentence. With the thickening of her storm, I can hardly see Helena’s silhouette anymore. I think I’m almost there, when a hand seizes my wrist. The other arm of the cold body that has me connects me to Helena in a three-body chain. We zip through the treeline in a heartbeat. When the world refocuses from the sickening blur, Darius, Helena and I stand on the pebbly banks of the river.
“Let’s get the hell across,” Darius says. He takes a single step into the river, only to find his shoe suddenly stuck. “What..the…hell… Don’t get in the water!” He shouts a second too late, because it isn’t the water. It’s the plants at the bottom of it - and the Fey controlling them. Helena and I find ourselves similarly bound with ivy around our legs. It crawls up toward our knees until a jade-skinned, pointy-eared woman emerges from the forest across the banks. It’s a long way to squint, but I can just barely make her out.
“Is that…Fey Rorelia?” Helena gasps. I bend over to tear her ivy from my legs, until a gust too sharp to really be wind shoots past my face. A vampire. I look up to see Darius still bound, but with the imposing pale body of a second man like him at his side. One with two rubies for eyes.
“Va-Va-Va-VampKing Lucidous?” I hear Darius stutter for the first time, like a starstruck fan. And it is. The VampKing puts
a cold hand on Darius’ shoulder. At the sight of him, the first thing that pops into my mind is the Kyrie. It’s real. I bend to yank Fey Rorelia’s ivy from my legs, along with Helena. All that stops me is a voice I recognize. One of the only sounds that can restore me to factory settings like the press of a button.
“Nicely done, Fey Rorelia. But you can release our daughter. This is a misunderstanding I’m sure she can clear up for us,” says the old Magister, Horace. Head of the Dalshak family of Magicians. Father. The ivy shrinks back down my legs into the ground instantly. Father blinks into existence before me, like he’s been there the whole time. He probably has been, behind the veil of a master’s trick. Then my mind catches up. Our daughter, he said.
“Oh, Emery!” Mother cries out, as she blinks into life beside Father. My blood stills in my veins. The same blood that runs in theirs. Blood I’ve defiled and betrayed in every way they could imagine. And yet, for the first time in my life, Mother sounds concerned. “When I lost communications with you for so long…I… I’m sorry.” She tries to compose herself, but the black lines of mascara down her cheeks tell all. What a sour taste - she does care, in the moment it’s least convenient. “We feared something had happened to you. But now I see you’ve retrieved the traitor. You must have needed to stay quiet for this, yes?”
“I…” But all the cogs of strategy grind in the wrong direction in my brain. It’s too much to put together all at once. I have to save Helena. I have to hand over Darius…right? I have to, I keep telling myself. But the same songs of betrayal don’t have the same ring in my head anymore.
“Of course she did,” Father answers for me. “It was a covert operation. She needed him to trust her to capture him alive.”
“VampKing,” Darius mutters, “You don’t know the whole story. I’m not a traitor. At the incident last term, with Cece, they-”
“That’s enough,” Lucidous silences him with the tone of a living tundra. It’s enough to freeze the words even in all of Darius’ hot air.
“Allow us to take care of him, Lucidous,” Mother offers with sickening sincerity. “It’s the least we can do, for allowing his escape in the first place.”
“No…I trained Darius myself,” Lucidous refuses. There’s the slightest note of sorrow in the deep hue of his executioner’s gaze when it rests on the Vampire in question. “I’ll do it myself.”
“Do what? You’re fucking with them, right?” Darius mutters to Lucidous, too quiet for anyone but me to hear, over the river. Lucidious answers by tightening a grim grip on Darius’ shoulder. “You…” he tries, but he can’t get another word out. Not with the weight of isolation, condemnation, so heavy on his chest.
“Wh-wh-why are you even here?” I ask Mother, to buy myself time. Maybe, if I just have a few more seconds to think, it will be clear to me. What I should do. One. Mother looks at me with eyes less calculating, more caring than I’ve ever seen.
“We were sent by the Council, to retrieve Helena,” Mother tells me. Two. Lucidous pushes down on Darius’ shoulder. He aims his head for the current of the river. Struggle as he might, Fey Rorelia’s vines trap him there. Three.
“They rethought their decision to send her here. They thought it too insecure to house someone so powerful. And it seems they were right,” Father jumps in. Four. Helena starts to struggle with her own vines as Father starts towards her. I might have believed him, almost, if he didn’t add, “She’s too dangerous. To herself, and others.” That’s not the Council’s voice. It’s my family’s. And, for once, there’s something ringing louder in my head than that. The grunts of my best friend, frightened for her life. The string of profanity from the man who helped me rescue her, who’s inches from being drowned for it. Five, six, seven. It’ll never be clear. It’ll never make sense. So I do the thing I’ve been afraid of all along. No calculating. No orders. I decide.
“Too dangerous…to you?” I say to Father.
“To all of us, Emery,” he answers, still ironclad. Where once it inspired respect in me, now it only makes me sick. “That’s why the Council-”
“You mean the Kyrie,” I dare. At the sound of it, my parents turn on me with a new look in their eyes. One I’ve rarely seen, even less than love. Surprise.
“The traitor. He’s filled your head with nonsense,” Mother tries to stop me from going on. “It seems you’ve discovered how easy it is to get lost in playing double-agent, daughter.”
“I’ve discovered more than that.” I pull my arm away from her when she reaches for me. “Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare…use love to try and control me.”
“What in the world are you talking about?” Mother feigns ignorance. It does little good with the fury I see stirring in her eyes. Now that’s the Mother I remember.
“Your daughter seems less obedient than you described,” Lucidous says over his shoulder. Darius’ nose has just poked into the water beneath his rigid hand.
“What’s gotten into you, daughter?” Father asks.
“Thoughts besides yours!” I shout back. My teeth scrape together at the absurdity! Here, with a man being drowned. With my oldest friend’s life in the balance. Still they obsess over keeping face! I’ll tear them off, right down to the chattering skulls. “Perspective! That’s what’s gotten into me. Something you never let me have.” Father tries to yell over me, but he can’t. I scream louder, “Tell me where you’re taking Helena! Where is safer than here?”
“Emery, these are things that can’t be disclosed to those who-”
“You won’t tell me? Even on the slim chance you could win me back?” I cut Mother off. She glares at me blankly as she can. But I see in the wince of her forehead, it stings. I laugh at the immeasurable idiocy. “Then I’ll tell you. Point Arena. Am I right? Tell me!”
“That’s enough, Emery. Let’s get you away from all this,” Father says. He reaches to grab my arm. He never will again. I convert a ball of solar energy to force in my palm, and use it to launch him back into a tree.
“Fuck you, Horace,” I spit. Not Father. Not anymore. Not after this. I turn to Mother before she can so much as form a hand sign. “And fuck you, Deliah.” I sling a trick with both hands that kicks her back and secures her to a tree.
In the second it takes her to get there, Horace has recovered. I have just enough time to open a portal under Darius and Helena. Horace closes the one under Helena, while Darius falls through. With nothing to take root in, Fey Rorelia’s vines fall away from him. Darius reappears on the banks behind me. I feel a hand on my back. In a blink, I’m suddenly on the other side of the thicket that hides the Bartos cabin. Darius gives me a nudge towards the water.
“We have to go back for Helena!” I try to scream, but Darius muffles it with a palm over my lips.
“I can only say this once, if you want to save her,” Darius prefaces. He doesn’t let go of my mouth until I nod. “They weren’t ready for that. That’s the only reason we escaped. If we go back now, they’ll get all three of us. If you and I leave now, we can get help, and get her back. Understand?”
“I…” my instinct is to object. But what came from Darius’ mouth was so much less selfish and biting than I expected, all I can do is nod.
“Good. Now haul ass. We’ve got to beat them back to the car,” he turns me around and gives me another nudge forward. I start across the river.
Backup
Rock,
The Broken Academy, B-Wing Hallway
Emery only missed two mornings. For anyone else, I might write it off. I’d have convinced myself she either lost interest in Sealbreaker, after Silver Spark’s removal from this term’s league, or me. But not Emery. She doesn’t miss appointments without notice. She doesn’t sacrifice discipline for something so frivolous as interest. I still can’t help feeling like a bit of a freak for creeping around her corner of B-Wing hallway. According to my class schedule, at least, I have no reason to be there.
I turn down her hall to find who else but her Heritage Ball date. Here
I was, thinking I was paranoid for “wandering” past her room, completely out of my way. Hoster has both hands on her door, doing God-knows-what. His eyes are clenched shut. His lips act out some silent message to the door. I glide down the hallway behind the skinny little runt. He’s so entangled in whatever he’s doing, he doesn’t even notice. Not until I put a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey.”
“Jesus!” an electric shiver straightens Hoster’s whole body. He spins around, back against Emery’s door. His face is even paler than usual. I watch him for a second with a cocked eyebrow to try and figure out what he thinks I’m about to do to him. His eyes reflect a range of fears from me pinning him to the wall all the way to wrapping my fingers around his throat.
“Relax,” I tell him. I put my hand on his shoulder again, which has roughly the same effect as the first time. I unclamp my fingers from his shaking frame. “I think we’re here for the same reason.”
“Yo-yo-you…” Hoster pumps a fist into his own chest to dislodge whatever it is he’s afraid of. He stands up a little straighter as the surprise runs its course out of his system. “You’re here to find Emery?”
“Find?” I repeat. “So she is missing.”
“She went after Helena,” Hoster tells me, eyes trailing off towards the floor.
“Helena Bartos? Went after her where?” I ask immediately. My sense of urgency acts as two hands to flatten Hoster to the wall again. “Would you relax? I’m not going to hit you.” Hoster peels himself free of Emery’s door a second time.
“Six Rivers. The Council voted she be taken there for…some kind of training, I guess, after what happened at the Heritage Ball,” Hoster tells me.
“So why the weird bonding session with her door?” I pose. Hoster straightens up to clear his throat before explaining.
“It’s only seven hours from San Francisco, where she left from, to Six Rivers. That’s if she hit traffic. She should be back by now,” says Hoster.