I knew this wasn’t a fairy tale. Still, I bent, kissed him on the corner of his mouth, ignoring that, yes, he was motionless, unresponsive, not even a flicker of his awareness stirring at my touch. There wasn’t any magic in the kiss, but there was something just as strong: a promise that we were in this together.
I straightened and the crystal in my pocket clunked against the side of the bed. I dug it out.
It was warmer, pinker, the shadows dusty blue. It was filling with magic, though I didn’t know how it could collect it when even the best magic user couldn’t tap into the cisterns and networks right now. Maybe the crystal had a default mode that allowed it to collect whatever scraps of magic it could find to fill the emptiness.
Maybe it could help Zay. I thought about leaving it here. The crystal might act as a beacon for him.
My dad, who had been wisely silent this entire time, brushed the backs of my eyes gently.
The crystal is passive, he said. It holds magic and gives it up when tapped correctly. It will not call a soul, save a soul, or hold a soul. It carries magic, deep, natural, but it works no magic on its own.
I didn’t want to listen to him. I was heavy into hating him for what he had done to me. But his thoughts were weary, as if he had lost the hope of making me believe him, but tried anyway.
Will it hurt him if I leave it here?
No, but there are those within the Authority who may take it for themselves.
He was right about that. One of the reasons I kept Stone under wraps was because when the Authority found out I had him, they brought him here and were going to keep him for study. And even though the crystal was smaller, it was no less amazing than the gargoyle.
Dad was telling the truth. And it seemed to be a truth that would help rather than hinder me.
Weird.
That still didn’t make it okay for him to run me around like a puppet.
I put the crystal back in my pocket.
“Allie?” Shame pushed on the door. “Ready?”
“Has it been five minutes?”
“More like fifteen.” He stepped in and leaned against the wall. From the way he moved, I knew he had stashed more weapons on his body. A lot more.
“Do you know where Zayvion’s sword is?” I asked.
“Probably. Why?”
“I want to take it with me.”
“This is a peaceful gathering. We’re setting up storm rods, or something—Terric wasn’t very clear about that. But it’s not going to be a fight.”
“I’d feel better with a sword on me. As soon as we deal with the storm, and get Zayvion back through a gate, I won’t have to make a special stop to gear up before hunting Greyson.”
“Thought you might have that in mind.” With a little contorting, Shame pulled Zayvion’s blade out from the sheath he had strapped to his back.
Peaceful gathering, my ass.
“His knife?” I asked. I took the blade—not the machete Zay usually used on Hungers and for other magical threats, but a beautifully balanced sword, his katana. I’d used it a couple times in practice. It fit my hand and reach better than a machete, but it was harder to convince a police officer why it was in the trunk of a car. So for quick dirty hunts, a magic-worked machete was best.
I don’t know where Shame pulled the knife out of, but I was glad he had it on him. Zayvion’s blood blade was long, slender, deadly, centered with a beveled crystal and glyphs that were carved into the metal and glass, ash black against the shiny dagger. It was familiar, the first weapon Zay had given me, trusting that with it I would be able to protect myself.
Call me sentimental, but that knife was more romantic than a car full of pink roses.
I tucked it in my belt. Shame handed me the sheath for Zay’s sword, which I strapped on my back, before shrugging back into my jacket.
“Anything else?” Shame asked.
“Hold on.”
I stepped over to Zay, rested my forehead against his. “Come home to me,” I whispered. “I love you.”
Magic beneath my feet bucked and I braced against the bed frame to keep from falling. Something, low thunder with the strangest high wail behind it, like a horde of the dead come calling, skittered at the edge of my hearing.
I looked at Shame. “You felt that?”
“The storm,” he said. “It’s about to break. We need to haul.”
I brushed my fingers one last time over Zay’s lips. Then I jogged across the room out to the hall. Shame was already at the stairs and heading down. He was also on his phone.
“How much longer?” Pause. “Fuck. Yes, we’ll make it.”
“How much longer?” I asked.
“Maybe ten minutes. Maybe not.” We took the stairs as fast as we could without falling, then used the side door to exit the building.
“Car’s here,” he said. “I moved it.”
Smart thinking.
We ran.
Got to the car, got in, got going.
Stone was sitting up in the backseat, his big face pressed to the window, his eyes searching the sky. He crooned, a lonely sound, and his wings trembled.
“Stay in the car, boy. It’s gonna get messy out there.”
He crooned again, but didn’t try to get out. The big lug was moving better. Maybe because there was magic coming our way, roiling across the sky. Maybe the storm was helping him. Wild magic was, after all, still magic.
Halfway across the bridge, magic rolled again, like a hot wind pushing through the car, through my skin, my bones.
I hissed, and Shame grunted. “Lord. This is gonna be such an ass-kicking,” he said. “Ours.”
He drove at a terrifying speed, one boot on the gas, both hands on the wheel, eyes narrowed in concentration. I stopped watching the traffic around us as soon as the number of impending collisions got into the vicinity of two digits.
The void stone between my breasts went warm, then pulsed cold. My skin itched.
Over the bridge now, and rolling up to the St. Johns neighborhood. Before we reached the tracks that separated St. Johns from the rest of the city, magic rumbled and rolled again, and I saw the faulty-lightbulb flicker of lightning somewhere high, high above us.
“Do you know where?” I asked.
“The bridge.”
“What is it about that bridge?” I scrubbed at my arms, but the itching only got worse. “Too many weird things happen there.”
Shame didn’t answer. We were over the railroad track and into St. Johns. Even in the darkness, St. Johns looked like it always looked. Magic never prettied it up to make it into something marketers would approve of. St. Johns wore her face bare, and even if she wasn’t perfect, she was more beautiful because of her flaws.
Broken-down, homey, unapologetic, St. Johns wore many faces. All of them the truth.
Crossing the railroad track made my teeth hurt. Not like there was no magic in St. Johns, but like there was far too much magic here.
Stone clacked a low growl and rubbed the top of his head against the back of Shame’s seat. Stone felt it too. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
Shame took the speedometer down out of death-defying, and worked off the main drag toward the towering green arc of the St. Johns Bridge.
“In the park?” I asked.
“I think so.” He got us there in too little time. Parked in the open lot and got out.
I turned to Stone. “You stay here, boy. Sleep, okay?”
Stone’s ears flattened, then perked back up. He tipped his head and looked out the window, making the bag-of-marbles sound and then the coo again. He jiggled the door handle.
“No. Don’t go out. Don’t leave the car.” I pointed at him and he let go of the handle. “Sleep,” I commanded.
He clacked, then clunked his snout against the window, ears up in triangles.
I hoped he would stay put. I didn’t want anyone in the Authority to see him. I locked the doors and stepped out.
The air had so much magic in it, it felt like it
was made out of lead. It weighed on my shoulders, legs, and feet, crushing. Shame had lit up and sucked his cigarette down to half ash. His face was tipped toward the sky, his neck exposed, hood fallen away, to let his dark hair fall free from his eyes. Eyes closed, the arc of his body was taut with ecstasy as he drank the magic down.
He held the cigarette smoke captive in his open mouth, then exhaled, his mouth still open, eyes still closed in rapture.
The air broke under the impact of thunder. Shame moaned away the rest of the smoke, and took in a breath like it was his first, like he could suck down the sky and still not be full.
He opened his eyes. “Fuck yes,” he said up into the rain. “That’s what I needed. More. Much more of that.”
I finally got a full breath myself. “This is not good.”
“It’s magic. It’s never good.” Shame grinned at me. “But it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.”
“Not if it’s wild magic.”
I’d been through a few wild-magic storms before, fast-moving tangles of lightning and thunder and magic. Beckstrom Storm Rods did their job and channeled the strikes of lightning and magic down into the glyphed channels that stored magic throughout the city.
This was different.
This storm had death on its wings.
“Come on,” I said.
I jogged across the parking lot toward the center of Cathedral Park, Shame at my side. Above us, thunder broke, the high demonic wail an earsplitting echo. Magic crackled through the sky, tracing out in flashes of glyphs.
Lights on the bridge flickered. A rolling blackout washed over the city downriver.
The void stone at my neck burned.
I ran, but my feet moved mud-slow. My breath came too quickly, too loudly. The void stone flashed cold again as lightning the color of dead roses webbed the sky with wild, elongated glyphs and spells.
Even my feet itched.
What had Maeve said? We were wearing the stones because when magic came back, the stones might help us not burn to death? Nice. And since I held magic inside me, I was in for a world of pain. Maybe Shame had the stone pressed against his neck for another reason. Like to keep him from drinking down too much energy once it hit.
What if magic wouldn’t fill me again? What if it was a onetime thing, back when Cody had pulled it through my bones? Maybe now that it was gone, it was going to stay gone, leaving nothing behind but some ribbon tattoos.
I hoped not. I had a lot of things I wanted to do with magic right now, one of them being taking out Greyson. I wanted the magic back. I wanted that power back.
The pathway parallel to the river hooked uphill. Even though it was dark, the trees weren’t leafed out enough to hide the flicker of the warehouse and factory lights on the river. I wondered if there were people there. People who were about to get hurt.
“And I repeat: fuck yes,” Shame said beside me. “That’s beauty.” He pointed.
I looked over to where the bridge angled across on huge arched pillars. Magic lingered there. A lot of it. Not from the storm, thundering like a mountain being hammered down. This magic was contained, controlled, almost mechanical in its perfection. I knew the Authority had to be behind that magic. Shame had one thing right: it was beautiful.
And I knew that magic came from the disks. Hundreds of them.
The Authority had broken into Violet’s labs and stolen these disks from her. They had hurt her, maybe killed her baby, and hurt Kevin, one of their own. I didn’t know anything that would justify those actions. Not even this. But I was willing to tame the storm first and take names for ass kicking later.
Shame strode toward the wall of magic that had been cast in such a masterful Illusion that it mimicked the park perfectly. I started off after him, and pushed through the spongy resistance as I crossed that magical barrier. Someone who wasn’t determined would not be able to get through the Illusion—it had a weight and a Diversion woven in it that would repel people and animals.
This, apparently, was a private party.
I don’t know what I expected to see on the other side. Something gothic, magic going off like fireworks, maybe wizards’ robes and pointed hats and wands, which I had yet to see in all my time in the Authority.
What I saw was even better.
The Authority, all the men and women who were supposed to make sure magic was used correctly, that the common citizen wasn’t destroyed by it, that the world benefited from it, stood shoulder to shoulder, creating a circle.
No longer in street clothes, they wore what I could only assume they liked to cast magic in. Maeve had on her leather pants and stiletto heels, Hayden his leather bomber jacket and lumberjack boots. The twins Carl and La wore loose-legged pants and kimono-like shirts. The rest were in a variety of leather, tight- or loose-fitting coats and jackets, none longer than knee-length, and all of them had weapons at their sides.
I expected the atmosphere to be grim. What I didn’t expect was the mood behind the magic.
The magic users did not like one another.
The magic users did not like being here, working together.
The magic users were all waiting for someone to make a wrong move.
Angry, suspicious, explosive. Just the kind of situation I liked to stay far, far away from.
There were two places open in the circle. One next to Terric, which I was surprised to see Shame stride over and fill, and one next to Sedra. I supposed that one was mine, though I wondered if it had once been my father’s, or Zayvion’s.
I crossed the grass uphill, conscious of the body language of everyone who stood still and focused. Even though the general mood was hate, they were, for the moment, each doing their job. They held their hands in front of them, and as I came nearer, I saw why.
At the feet of each of them was a disk. Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, the disks were silver and black. Since I’d gotten a pretty good look at the one in Greyson’s neck, I knew the disks had glyphs carved through them.
The disks gave off a soft pastel light. Magic I could see with my bare eyes rose in wisps, held in stasis by the magic user’s hand and will.
I took my place beside Sedra. There was no disk on the grass in front of me.
What? The new girl didn’t get to play?
“This completes our circle,” Sedra said before I could point out that I didn’t have a shiny toy like everyone else.
“This completes our power,” she continued. “We stand together facing a common threat. Magic rises in our world, claiming the sky. It is our duty to bring it once again to the heart of the earth.”
A few people looked over at her, or pointedly avoided her gaze. Wasn’t that interesting? Liddy didn’t look at her. Neither did Mike Barham, and half a dozen other people. No, instead they looked at one another.
Uh-oh.
The sky above us clotted with color. Lightning flashed again, shattered the sky with wild glyphs so bright I couldn’t blink away the burn. Even flash-blind, I thought I saw a shadow moving back by the trees on the other side of the wall of magic. Short, female.
It was Mama Rositto, the woman whose youngest boy had been used as a Proxy, and almost killed, to cover up my father’s murder several months ago. I used to Hound for her, but after her boy had been hurt, and her son James had been thrown in jail, she’d made it clear I wasn’t welcome in her life.
What would she be doing out in the park in a storm?
With the Illusion up, she wouldn’t see us, couldn’t see us. And if we did our job right, she’d go her way, take her walk or whatever it was she was doing, without ever suspecting that the most powerful magic users in Portland were about to bring the sky, and all the magic in it, crashing down in her backyard.
Lightning flashed and thunder exploded so close they joined.
A drop of rain hit my head. Then another.
Great. Why did it always rain when the world needed saving?
The disks around the circle flickered as rain pattered t
hrough the rising magic.
I looked around, uncertain as to how this was a storm rod that was going to channel the magic. Unless they intended to channel bits of the magic into the disks at their feet. Even so, there weren’t nearly enough disks to contain that storm.
The big, heavy figure of Jingo Jingo lumbered out into the center of the circle. He carried a sack over his back. Lightning struck, painting him pale as a horror-movie Santa Claus. A flash of ghostly faces, children’s faces, swarmed around his body, tied to him, clinging to him in sorrow and desperation.
Darkness returned, snuffing out the ghosts.
But I knew I’d see them in my nightmares.
Jingo swung the bag off his back and upended it.
Disks poured out, dozens and dozens, striking one another in sweet glass tones, primal music and magic, ringing in song so pure I caught my breath. Disks and magic poured into a pile, a mountain, a treasure of glittering, beautiful power.
I moaned softly. I wasn’t the only one.
There it was—the unattainable dream. Easy magic.
Safely contained, safely used. No price to pay. Ready to do what you wanted it to do. At no cost.
I wanted it to stop a storm. I wanted it to help me open a gate so I could get Zayvion back.
I looked around the circle, at faces brushed in liquid light from the disks at their feet. I saw awe, doubt, greed. I saw anger, and fear. All the good things a human could feel and all the bad, played out across the faces of those gathered.
The Authority, Zayvion had told me, was on the brink of a war.
And someone had just poured a pile of loaded weapons at their feet.
“Allison Beckstrom,” Jingo Jingo said. “Come forward now.”
“What?” Thunder struck, covering my voice. I shot a panicked look at Shame and Terric, both of whom looked away from the thrall of the disks and at me. They looked as confused as I felt.
“We need a focal point,” Sedra said softly next to me. “I had hoped there would be another way. If Zayvion hadn’t fallen, he would be the one standing here. I would not have asked this of you.”