If George was in town, then George was going to go by the tire warehouse.
Fuck.
Zicon shot up out of his seat. “Babe. I have to go. I have to go right now.”
Imane frowned. “But you just got here.”
“I know.” He bent over and kissed her, enjoying her mint lip gloss for a moment. “I’ll make it up to you. I promise.” Zicon bolted out the door, heading for his car.
Unlike most Brooklynites, Zicon tried very hard to avoid public transportation. Imane had once said he just didn’t like being around other people. False. He had an issue with things he couldn’t control, and being in a huge hunk of metal traveling at fast speeds was as unpredictable as he could imagine. Sometimes he couldn’t avoid it, and found himself on the subway, but when and if he could, he drove. Unconventional and expensive but he didn’t care. His vehicle of choice was a fully restored 1964 Gran Torino, set up with an old-school glass pack muffler. His car was head-turning without the rumbling exhaust, but the little call to attention didn’t hurt.
When he pulled around the warehouse and parked, he cursed. George’s bicycle was outside, chained to a pipe.
The back door that led to his office was unlocked, and he ground to a halt when he found George already inside, staring down at a card table.
“Mr. Elder,” Zicon said, out of breath. “Imane just let me know you were in town. If you’d let me know I would have—”
“What’s rule number one, Zicon?” George Elder asked in a silvery tone.
Zicon slumped. “Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another,” he recited.
George turned around slowly. In his hands was a bloody basin. Zicon narrowed his eyes. It looked like a…
“This looks pretty violent to me,” George said, poking at the bullet. “Especially since it’s covered in blood.”
Zicon wanted to sink into the floor, anything so he could get away from George’s accusing scrutiny. “It’s not what you think.” It sounded weak even to his ears.
“Does Imane know about this?”
Zicon shook his head.
“Good. Keep it that way. Since I don’t see any dead bodies around here, we can guess no one died tonight.”
Zicon gulped. “Honestly, I hope so, too.”
George’s stare deepened. “Zicon, do you know why I have so much faith in you?”
Zicon’s brow rose. He wanted the answer to that himself. Zicon had a pretty fucked up past, he knew that, and there was no denying it. He used to wander into Imane’s bakery, someplace loud, filled with people, so that he could distract himself. Sometimes his past liked to stare at him and parade its ugliness in his face, but if there was noise, distraction, he couldn’t hear what it was saying. After a while, Imane was his distraction—sliding him a free cup of coffee and a scone, sitting across from him, listening without reservation or judgment. She told him how he wasn’t his past, how he was so much more. Soon, instead of feeling sorry for himself, he felt empowered, and he wanted that same empowerment for people like himself.
Because of that, Imane introduced him to George, and without much convincing, George handed Zicon the keys to a rarely used warehouse. He never explained why, and just as Imane had become a presence in his life, now George was, too.
“I have faith in you because you put your faith in others. A rope that is woven of three strands is hard to break. You,” George emphasized, “are hard to break. It’s in your spirit. You are important.”
George dropped the basin and turned for the exit. “Clean this mess up, son. I’d hate for the ones who look up to you to see this.” George clapped him on his shoulder as he walked by. “Don’t let it happen again. Overwhelm the world with your good, Zicon. There is magic in that.”
Zicon dropped into the chair as the door closed behind George. He glared at the basin, and the trashcan full of bloody gauze and used gloves. The unmistakable blue container that once held a suture kit. Even with all of that, he didn’t have room in his brain to worry about Shen being injured or…dead. George’s words resonated in his head.
Overwhelm the world with your good.
The fact that George saw the good in him was…too much. He didn’t deserve it.
He never would.
Not if Jin was dead.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Key’s real name was Kithlish of Caeli. Kithlish was a fun guy. When he laughed, he laughed loudly and obnoxiously. He joked around with his peers, and he’d broken the rules—and occasionally the law—a time or two before. Kithlish was who he’d been at MATE—Magnus Academy of The Elite—before his promotion, before responsibility, before Tahir and Rooke…before Jin.
Key could not be that person. He wanted to be, but he couldn’t. Leadership weighed heavy on his shoulders. The rules he wanted to break…they couldn’t be broken.
There were six of them still—as in, they were still there—at the safe house. Proper protocol—which was a joke at this point—stated that at the end of a Causatum, a message would be delivered containing a Nuntii passage key So far there had been nothing; no word from Caeli and definitely no passage key. That left them here, with three people who were demanding an explanation.
Key rolled his eyes.
Watcher’s watch. Human’s pray.
Yeah. That was going to go over well.
The one he referred to as the Dog—Jon—sat across from him in a big, high-backed, upholstered chair, glaring. Why he thought that still worked, Key didn’t know. He opened his mouth to tell him such, when a voice to his right—curious, worried—interrupted him.
“Your name is Key, right?” Jin asked softly.
Key blinked slowly before answering. His name sounded crisp in the quiet of the house.
“Well, actually Kithlish of Caeli, but nobody has called me that for centuries. “This,” he said, pointing at Tahir who was in the process of tugging off her heavy boots, “is Tahir of Caeli, and that is Rooke, also of Caeli. They are my Captains. I am a General of the—”
“Wait. General? As in these two grunts are your subordinates?” Jon scoffed. “Someone made you a leader?”
Key ran his tongue over his teeth. “Jealous? As I see it, the aptitude to be a leader doesn’t seem to be something you have the propensity for…if the Chul case has anything to say about that.”
Aiden chuckled weakly. “God, that case is going to haunt you forever, man.”
Jon eyed Aiden. “Shut up, dickweed! That was a—nevermind!” He turned to Key, sputtering. “How do you know about that?”
“How do you know about any of us?” Jin asked.
Key took a moment to think before reaching deep into a pocket in his leather pants and withdrawing a bronze coin and holding it up for everyone to see. On one side was an engraved pattern of two circles, a pentagram, and three heptagons “This is the Sigillum Dei Aemaeth, or the Seal of God.” He flipped the coin. “This is Enochian—the ancient language of angels.”
“Together they form the Watcher Star, an amulet that signifies Mutare status,” Rooke finished. “Mutare is a word of Latin descent meaning change, originating in the—”
Jon held his hand up. “Nobody cares. Keep going.”
Key raised a thin eyebrow at him. “Mutare are a race of half man, half angel. A rare species that possesses the Nephilim gene, passed down through the eons. We,” he said, pointing to Tahir, Rook, and himself, “are mutare.”
Jon crowed. “So you’re a bunch of freaks? Nice.”
Key raked him with freezing contempt. “Do you want to shut up, already? I’m giving you the answers you want, if you haven’t noticed.”
“I’d have to believe them first,” Jon rejoined.
“What does that have to do with us?” Jin said, sliding in between their argument, fingers massaging the bridge of her nose. “Some of that has to do with us.”
Key scrunched his face. “Eh, more or less. As descendants of what the Book of Enoch called Grigori or the Watchers, we have certain dutie
s to perform, certain tasks to complete, and certain people to protect.” He turned to Jin. “Our duty this time was to look after someone. Our task was this time was to stop a murder, and the person we needed to protect…was you.”
Jin blinked, slow and confused. “What?”
“You heard correctly,” Rooke said as he reached into his backpack and pulled out a small iridescent pyramid. He set it on the table, point down, and it hovered there. A holographic image of a woman in white—the same one that had appeared out of the Writing Wall—shimmered into view, a string of numbers floating above it. “Causatum mission number 4512715 was you. Jin Amaris.”
Jin didn’t say anything. Her face was still a mask of disbelief, and Key cursed the practicality of this realm. You could show them the wonders of the world, each and every last secret, and they wouldn’t believe it. Sighing, he reached into his own bag and pulled out a medium-sized clear case. Floating inside the case was a teal druzy agate framed in gold. It had ragged edges, and pulsed every few seconds like it had its own heartbeat.
“This is a keystone. The manifestation of someone’s soul.” Key inhaled deeply, struggling with a better way of saying it. “This one,” he sighed, “is your stone, Jin.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Okay?”
Key frowned. “All right, so to explain that, I have to explain how all of this works.”
“Finally,” Jon said, throwing his hands up in the air.
Key ignored him. He placed the case on the coffee table, just within Jin’s reach. Tentatively, she picked it up and gazed at it before putting it back down.
“People have a misconception about how fate works. They have been taught that it is out of their control, that it’s some sort of rigid, preordained future and they are just along for the ride. What you call fate, we call purpose—a flowery way of saying that we are all born with something to accomplish. Free will and fate do not contradict each other. There is no system of absolute control. You are not robots.”
Key snapped off a loose thread from the hem of his shirt and held it up. “If you look at a string, one strand of it, and called it someone’s life, what could you expect? Bland. Boring. Stagnant.” He tugged the bottom cuff of his leather pants up to reveal a black-handled throwing knife with a gold blade. Using that, he cut the string into three individual strands and held them up. “But human life isn’t just a single strand, it’s complex and multifaceted. And—” Key paused to put the three pieces of thread in the palm of his hand and furiously rub them together until the three strands wound together into one. “—the pieces still work together to create a life.”
“A lot of things in life can be explained with math,” Rooke said, taking over. “In terms of free will, in life you are allowed to make any choice you want. With each choice, a list of probabilities arise, and by using that, it’s pretty easily to formulate what path your strings will take. Think of the trip you take home every day. You have a destination—you want to get there, but how? There are possibilities, an infinite number of possibilities, but if we take you, your nature, your wishes, your desires into context, there ends up being a finite number. Five. So you have five different possibilities, five different ways home. Two are rare, since no one goes backward to go forward when their house is two blocks away. Three are definite—a straight shot to your home, to your purpose. Life works the same way.”
Jin and Aiden nodded, albeit slowly, but Jon jumped up from his seat.
“What? What the fuck does that have to do with anything? How the hell does that even make sense?”
“You’re too cute to be this stupid,” Key said as he rolled his eyes.
Jon’s face flushed red and he opened his mouth, and then Tahir stepped in between them.
“So,” she interjected smoothly as she swapped positions with Key, choosing to sit on the arm of the chair while Key slid the center of the couch—and away from Jon, “what he is speaking of directly relates to you. We access the strings and root out the anomalies on your path. We don’t change little things, we don’t redirect lives, we don’t fix the future, and we most certainly don’t set a guideline on how to live your life.”
“What counts as an anomaly?” Aiden asked.
“You take a right, and your strings take a left. You go down, they go up,” Key eyed Jin. “You’re supposed to stay alive, and you don’t.”
Key walked over to Jin and couched down in front of her. Reaching into his back pocket, he removed two folded pieces of rice paper. “There’s more.” He unfolded the rice paper and laid it in front of her. Five oddly crooked lines spread across the paper—two were faded and nearly illegible, and while the other three stood out boldly, one of those was stronger than the others.
“These are timelines. There’s a lot of technical…stuff, but look at this one. This one is a failure.” Key ran his finger down it until he came to a star. “This is seven thirty-eight p.m. on the fourth of October. You called Aiden as you left the Upper East Side.” He continued down the length until he came to another star. “This is when Shen showed up. This,” he trailed off. He glanced at Tahir, wondering if this was the right thing. They were never around to explain afterward—this was a first. Tahir nodded back.
Key inhaled deeply. “This is eleven forty-two p.m. This is when you died. The first time.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Jin believed in a lot of things. Incredulity wasn’t a particular trait of hers. But she didn’t believe this. She couldn’t believe this.
“A keystone…represents the soul of someone who has died but was not meant to die. This is your last keystone of three. Your death was a mistake, a grievous one, and we’ve been fighting to fix it ever since.” Key sighed. “Tonight isn’t the first time I’ve seen you, Jin. I’ve seen you before today. I’ve seen you die.”
Jin eyes pitched heavenward. “That’s ridiculous.”
“We’ve seen Aiden, too,” Tahir stated. “In the hospital after you died. It took three men to strap him down to the bed so they could treat him. Jon was there. He watched as they had to sedate him. He tore his stitches twice trying to get the mortuary.”
“You know what?” Jin smiled brightly. “I-it’s okay. I don’t want to know anymore. I-I just want to go home.”
Aiden turned to her. “Jin, we have to—”
“No! No, we don’t!”
Key eyed Aiden. “Tell her.”
Jin’s head snapped around in time to see a rainbow of assorted emotions washed over his face—confusion, denial, guilt.
Fear.
Aiden grabbed her hand. “He’s telling the truth.”
Jin snatched it away. “You can’t expect me to believe that! You…you’ve been weird since this morning!”
“I’ve been weird because of this, Jin. I thought my mind was playing tricks, that because I never wanted to lose you, my…mind made up these thoughts and visions or something. But no. They were all real.”
“Am I the only person here who is actually listening to this?” Jin whipped around to look at Jon. “Help me out here! You don’t honestly believe this.”
“Actually,” Jon rubbed the back of his neck, “I’m kind of on the fence right now.”
Jin stared at him. “Am I the only sane person here?”
“You’re missing the point,” Key said. “Everything is okay. We prevented your death after the second time.”
Jin stood abruptly, hovering over Key with the hostility born of pure panic. “You. Can’t. Die. A second time. You can’t die a third,” she screamed. “When you are dead, you’re dead. I am not dead.” Jin snatched the keystone—the supposed presentation of her soul—from the table, hauled it over her head and threw it against a wall. It hit with a thud before bouncing to the carpet and rolling to a stop in front of the fireplace. “Get that thing away from me,” she cried hysterically. This isn’t real, none of this is real. She was going to go to sleep, wake up and none of this—none of this—
Quick as a cobra’s strike, Key reached out
and grabbed Jin’s hand, pressing right below her wrist. Jin’s pulse slowed, and with a slight push from Key, she fell back onto the couch in a heap.
“Sorry,” Key muttered, contrite. “I had to calm you down.”
Jon eyed Key’s hands. “You keep those things away from me.”
Key snorted. “You wish I would touch you.”
“Is she okay?” Tahir said as she got up from where she was perched on the arm of the couch, looking like a concerned mother hen.
“Why don’t any of you trust me? In Caeli, I’m a premium healer,” Key said to Tahir and Rooke, who both gave him a look. “Okay, premium was a stretch but… she’s fine. It was a panic attack, she just needs a minute.”
“I don’t need a minute,” Jin croaked as she rubbed her hand over her face. “I need a drink.” She didn’t miss the way Aiden stiffened or how Jon’s brows knitted together. She rolled her eyes. “That was a joke. I don’t actually want a…”
Aiden’s gaze darkened further.
“Sorry. Bad joke,” she whispered. Sighing, she waved her hand in the air, almost numb to any more shocking news. “Okay, so…what happened to me the first time, then?”
“Shen happened to you,” Tahir explained. “From behind bars, Shen’s network gathered as much information about you as they could, from the trial up until a few weeks ago. When he had enough information, he orchestrated a jail break. Just as he did the latter two times, Shen showed up at your apartment to confront you. The first time, the two of you managed to escape the apartment, making it all the way to the subway.
Aiden stood abruptly, and Jin eyed him with surprise. “The subway?”
Tahir frowned “Uh, yeah.” Tahir took a moment to remove a small electrical device from her pocket. “During Status Ones, we have a transcript of what happens. It’s stupid if you ask me, but in order to monitor this realm, we have to have Causat ducat or permission. We have to know something is going to happen first. They,” she said in a derisive tone, “say it’s a privacy issue.”
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