“What aggravates me,” Leandras growled, “is this incessant refusal to move forward, Yafi-ít.”
Whisps of purple and silver flickered around his features, but they weren’t nearly as vivid or solid-looking as the colors rising around the mage.
“Move forward. Yes, while we’ve willingly entered Ahárra in the heart of a netheryield.” Railen scoffed. “That’s an excellent assessment of my refusal coming from the fae who’s spent the last several millennia rearranging the very fibers however he sees fit.”
“Enough,” Leandras growled, sitting perfectly still now and glaring at the table.
Jessica grimaced as the red light in Railen’s forehead grew brighter and strobed faster.
Jesus, the guy was about to explode if this didn’t stop.
“Seriously,” she cut in. “I don’t think this is—”
“And where do you suppose I find the mechanisms to propel the rest of us out of this stasis, hmm?” Railen continued, completely ignoring her because he’d probably forgotten she was sitting right there with them. “Because I should very much like to know how the Laen’roth finds it so easy to push aside everything he once—”
“I know what I have done!” Leandras bellowed, and a blaze of silver light exploded around him like a blinding halo. The red and purple lights in the overhead lanterns flickered, and a timely gust of wind buffeted the walls of the tent with a heavy flutter. “I have seen the intricacies of what we face, Yafi-ít, so do not question me about mechanisms.”
Oh, shit...
Jessica had never seen him lose it like this. Or maybe it was just a lot more apparent now because Ahárra gave everything a life of its own. Even emotions, apparently.
Railen hadn’t moved an inch during the outburst, but now he stared at Leandras like the fae man had just sprouted a second head on his shoulders. He said nothing as he studied the fading silver aura shrinking back down around Leandras’ form before the Laen’aroth sighed and hung his head. Neither of them looked at Jessica.
It made her wonder if she was even supposed to be here to see this. Honestly, this whole thing felt like a private squabble between some seriously messed-up couple—however weird that sounded—and it filled her with a sudden urge to haul ass out of this tent right then and there.
“And it...” Leandras’ jaw worked again as his breathing slowed and his voice took on a surprisingly gentle tone. “It has never been easy, Railen.”
“No.” The mage dipped his head but didn’t once look way from his guest. “No, I imagine the responsibility comes with a heavy toll. It’s better that you should be the one to bear it.”
The fae grimaced and closed his eyes.
“Accept my apologies, brother.” Railen extended a hand, palm turned completely upward. “I’ve pushed you too hard.”
“No, I haven’t been pushed enough, it seems.” Leandras snorted, then accepted the other man’s truce, and they firmly clasped each other’s forearms. A flare of opalescent light glowed beneath the contact. “It’s better that you should be the one to do it.”
They both let out wry chuckles, staring at each other without letting go of their weird not-quite-handshake.
Jessica bit her bottom lip and waited for whatever the hell this moment was to be over and done with.
When the seconds ticked by and neither of them proved they hadn’t suddenly been turned into statues, she couldn’t take it anymore. “So...”
“Yes.” Grinning once more, Railen released his hold on Leandras’ arm and fully squared himself toward the table again. “Well. I’m convinced that was a productive first round, don’t you think?”
Leandras rolled his shoulders back and sat taller on the cushion. “No lack of satisfaction on my end.”
“Wonderful. Shall we go again?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Jessica leaned away from the ridiculously weird display and wondered if she’d just hallucinated the whole thing. “Great to see you guys have kissed and made up.”
The fae looked up at her and smirked.
“But we haven’t gotten to the part where you finish explaining why I’m—”
“Yes, yes. That’s next.” Railen retrieved his cordial glass from the table and held it aloft one more time. “First, we drink.”
“Oh, come on.” Jessica scowled as Leandras picked up his glass too. “You know, it would’ve been really helpful if one of you had told me this was a sipping potion and not to knock down the whole thing in one go.”
“That would entirely defeat the point, Jessica.” Leandras lifted his glass in her direction. “Drink.”
“I can’t. It’s empty.”
“Hmm.” Railen glanced at his drink and chuckled through pursed lips. “Perhaps her previous astuteness was a fluke.”
“That is always a possibility,” Leandras added.
Okay, now all this talking in code and sharing Xaharí inside jokes was seriously pissing her off.
“I thought we were done playing games,” she snapped. “But it looks like that’s the only thing you two care about, so I’ll just—”
“It isn’t empty.”
“What?”
Leandras glanced pointedly at her cordial glass.
Slowly, Jessica leaned forward over the table, her suspicion keeping her gaze firmly fixed on the fae and the mage watching her with matching smug looks. Then she dropped her gaze to the cordial glass and froze.
It wasn’t empty. Not at all.
The delicate frosted glass was filled yet again to the brim with the same translucent amber liquid. As if she’d never knocked back the first pour at all.
“What is this?”
“This is Ahárra, Jessica,” Railen replied gently.
Gazing at her reflection in the drink, she could have sworn the rippling face of Jessica Northwood staring back at her had actually just winked. Immediately, she leaned back again to sit perfectly straight on the cushion and glared at the mage. “That literally means nothing to me.”
“It means we’re not finished,” Leandras added. “We drink until we are.”
“Jesus...” Swallowing thickly, she folded her arms and instantly felt like an idiot for doing so. “Exactly how many rounds does this special cocktail of yours have in it, huh?”
Railen patted his cheek before double-checking the magical refill in his own glass. “The amount differs each time, depending on the circumstances.”
“Yeah, I’m not getting wasted with you two just because you wanna figure out how many shots it takes to get to the bottom of the invisible barrel.”
“Ahárra exists in layers.” Railen studied at the tent’s ceiling, as if he’d find a better way to explain this floating around up there with the lanterns. “A cyclical clearing-away. We drink until everything that needs to be said has been said.”
“And then what? We all pass out and wake up dead? That doesn’t sound like a smart move for any of us right now.”
“It takes some getting used to, I’ll admit.”
Jessica rolled her eyes.
She’d committed to diving down the rabbit hole, sure. But that was before either of these impossible morons had bothered to tell her the rabbit hole apparently didn’t have an end.
“But Ahárra provides what we need. Time. Communion—”
“Can you not...call it that.” She grimaced. “It just brings up all kinds of weird images.”
“As you wish.” Now Railen cast her cordial glass a pointed look. “We will be here until the end, Jessica. The only way out now is to continue, all three of us, until we’ve pulled away those layers one by one to reach the heart of the matter at hand.”
“Which is?”
“Exactly what we’ll discover.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“There’s no need to worry about divulging certain details you’d rather keep private,” Leandras added, giving her one of those looks that was obviously supposed to mean something but that she couldn’t quite unscrambl
e. That only made it worse. “Ahárra reveals necessity by necessity. Nothing more.”
“Yes, it’s a frustratingly honest system.” Railen huffed out a laugh.
“But without this next step,” the fae continued, “the rest of what we came here to do cannot be accomplished. So drink.”
“You...” Jessica wrinkled her nose and stared at the cup.
Shit just kept getting weirder and weirder on this side of the Gateway, didn’t it? The last thing she wanted was to spend the rest of eternity stuck in this creepy mirror world where magicals glowed with their own feelings and the damn table kept singing to her.
The hell with it. In for a shot, in for the whole magical fucking trip, right?
She snatched up the glass and couldn’t bring herself to look at the amber liquid again. “And how do we know when we’ve ‘reached the heart of the matter’?”
It was impossible to hide her sarcasm, but that was literally the least important thing now.
Railen lifted his glass again to start the next round of toasting and grinned like an adrenaline junkie about to jump out of a plane. Without or without a parachute. “When our glasses remain empty.”
“Wait, what?”
“To Ahárra.”
“To Ahárra,” Leandras echoed, his silver eyes wide with amusement as they both waited for the Guardian to join them for the next round of Spill Your Magical Guts.
This was going to be a long night, even without the assurance that time stood still in the Laenmúr forest and nothing outside this tent could crash their little huddle. Jessica and Leandras both had enough layers on their own to bake a cake. If this potion-spell-ritual thing wasn’t going to stop until it had peeled them all back to reveal the real reason they were here, the three magicals in this tent would be sitting around the table way longer than one night.
More like an eternity.
Hell, it was basically free therapy with a few hallucinations, right?
“Fuck.” Jessica lifted her cup, and they drank.
Chapter 5
“Oh, come on. Pop-Tarts? Really?” Jessica would have slammed her cordial glass down on the low table if she hadn’t been so convinced it would shatter beneath her hand. She smacked her lips and stuck out her tongue, trying to get rid of the brand-new taste in the amber liquid’s surprisingly wide range of flavors. Honestly, it was more like Pop-Tarts with a chaser of lighter fluid, but still. “How does anyone in this world even know what Pop-Tarts taste like?”
“Hmm.” Leandras studied his empty glass and shrugged. “The way Tabitha went on about that nauseating substance she called a meal, I’d at least expected it to be more palatable than this.”
Railen chuckled. “Once again, I’m completely at a loss in keeping up with you two. But if that’s what you’re tasting now, I might dare to say we’ve finally reached the crux of our issues here tonight.”
“Oh, really? You think Pop-Tarts are the crux of the issue?” She scowled.
“They certainly appear that way to you,” Leandras added as he set down his glass.
“So, then.” The mage vigorously rubbed his hands togheter and looked back and forth between his timeless-in-Ahárra companions. “What is it the Guardian and the Laen’aroth have yet to resolve?”
Jesus, if that was next on the menu, they’d never get out of this place.
Five shots. Five different rounds of knocking back Ahárra potion that magically refilled itself and somehow tasted different every single time. At least, she thought it was five since they’d started.
Jessica remembered the fading synesthesia after round two and the minty tingle that had not only filled her mouth but had seemed to spread into every nerve of her body. After that, the memory of what she’d tasted with all five of her senses was a little fuzzy. The conversations they’d already had, however, were as clear in her mind as if she’d been sitting around this table without the aid of hallucinogenic tonics.
The Guardian’s role since the first and only sealing of the Gateway—since no one had been stupid enough to attempt opening it until Jessica Northwood took the job—had always been to protect that dungeon door in Winthrop & Dirledge Security Banking, or whatever the bank had previously been in its long list of multi-use establishments over the centuries. She’d already know that part, of course, but the part no one had bothered to tell her until she’d gotten caught up in this mess of a meeting with a fae and the leader of the Laenmúr was pretty freaking heavy.
“And what exactly are Leandras and I supposed to resolve, huh?” She shook her head and blinked away the shimmering specks swimming in her vision.
“Perhaps you’d appreciate another summary,” Leandras suggested. “Again.”
“No, I’m pretty sure I got a handle on it, thanks.”
And she did. For the most part.
The bank and all its magic were intrinsically tied to the massive spell that sealed the Gateway and made it nearly impossible for anyone to pass between worlds. It didn’t exactly keep magic from crossing over, but that was where the very first Guardian had come into play. The guy who’d led the Order of Laenmúr before Railen, apparently. He’d willingly taken on the job once the Xaharí had figured out their world wouldn’t survive nearly as long as they’d hoped. Neither would Earth. And the Gateway’s vessel—what had now become the bank—couldn’t protect itself on its own. It needed a Guardian to fuel the millennia-old spell keeping everything in its place until the Order of Laenmúr, with the help of one very special Laen’aroth, put all the necessary pieces in play to open the Gateway one more time and end the Dalu’Rázj.
No surprise there, either. Other than the fact that while the Order of Laenmúr had fought on this side of the portal to keep the entire world from imploding on itself, they’d fallen into a trap none of them had expected.
Keeping an entire world alive was hard work. Building a safe haven around themselves—a sanctuary for Xaharí who opposed the destructive blight in their home and rebelled against the darkness consuming it—had been the Laenmúr’s last chance after every stronghold had either been obliterated right off the map or overrun by Xahar’ásh’s version of the assholes back home. Like the Requiem and Jensen Ardis and The Hakali Hand Corporation.
Assholes who wanted to see the Dalu’Rázj finally relieved of his inability to cross over to Earth on his own and suck the life right out of that world just as he had with this one.
Millennia of waiting for the figurative stars to align was apparently long enough to have solidified the Laenmúr’s oasis among the barren wastelands. What they’d erected as a safe haven had been squeezed so tightly under the pressure that it became their own prison. It had crystallized around them, impenetrable at this point to everyone but the Laen’aroth and the Guardian required to accompany him.
No one could escape. Contact with the outside was cut off. And the only reason they’d survived even this long in an endless loop of perceived safety was because Ocaiye, whoever that was, had been keeping the third and final artifact the Laen’aroth required to put an end to this whole thing.
Right here under their noses, somewhere in this forest, Ocaiye waited for the fae man’s return to put everything into play from here on out.
It had taken Leandras way longer than anyone expected to track down the right pieces of the puzzle on Earth. The sigil, of course, was the first—that damn coin he’d deposited in the witching vault sometime before Jessica ever came into the picture. And then, obviously, he’d had to find the right Guardian, which of course no one actually knew how to identify.
Until Jessica, apparently.
And that was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it?
“I get that I’m here to help you guys break out of your own time-loop,” Jessica said. “Which we’ll obviously get to once those stupid cups quit making us drink ourselves into oblivion.”
“Sometimes, the abyss is exactly what we need.” Railen’s chuckle came out strained and uncertain. “Honestly, I suspected the reveal of that in
convenient oversight on our part would have ended our comm—our conversation here. I’m surprised there’s more to be discussed.”
Yeah. Surprised that they’d been drinking and spilling all their secrets for who knew how long and still hadn’t managed to “satisfy Ahárra.”
“Okay, so here’s what I wanna know now.” Jessica studied the contemplative gazes aimed back at her from her two Ahárra drinking buddies. “Why me? Leandras had all the pieces arranged just the way he wanted them on Earth, and that obviously happened way before I came into the picture. Why did this whole thing crack wide open the second I stepped in as the Guardian?”
“I imagine it has more to do with timing than anything else.” Railen didn’t sound all that convinced of it himself, and his half-hearted shrug didn’t exactly help. “If your predecessor had remained among the living perhaps a little longer, it might have been her sitting here instead of you.”
“No!” Leandras cleared his throat and tried to smooth over yet another odd outburst. “No, Tabitha spent decades denying my request to withdraw the sigil from the vault and would never have agreed to do so.”
“And this Tabitha...” Railen frowned. “She knew of your plans?”
The fae man stiffened, his gaze practically glued to the tabletop, and his jaw muscles clenched furiously beneath his darkening frown.
Not exactly the kind of reaction that stoked a whole lot of confidence.
Jessica widened her eyes, waiting for him to say something.
Whatever was going on in Leandra’s head, it obviously wasn’t good. His hesitation now seemed a hell of a lot like an even worse sign. Especially after how surprised he’d been during their first private sit-down in that Ryngivát bar to hear that Tabitha had encouraged Jessica’s trust in him, right before he’d ripped the Heart of Ithríl out of Mitra’s chest with his bare hand.
All at the mention of Leandras’ plans.
“Yes,” he whispered. “She knew.”
“And she still refused to help you initiate the reckoning?” Railen lightly ran his fingers back and forth across his lips. “Why would a Guardian—”
“How am I to guess the rationale behind a dead Guardian’s idiocy?” Leandras snapped.
The Spellcast Gate (Accessory to Magic Book 5) Page 5