Even though Jo had never stepped foot here before, she could see the truth of her situation in the rows of offices, in the pompous-looking walls and doors of glass, in the high ceilings and the hardwood floors. She could see it in the placards on the walls next to bigger offices spouting titles like “Senior Investigator.”
A Ranger compound.
The panic from before that she had managed to redirect into calm action returned full force. The layout of the hallway she was standing in was too open—too much glass. She didn’t have blueprints and couldn’t identify an immediate escape route. She needed to think, needed to breathe. But she couldn't do either in her present spot and if she waited any longer, one of the many suits sitting behind their computers would notice her.
Which left her no choice. With the stakes substantially higher, Jo turned around to key her way back into the Society. She’d stay just long enough to figure out a proper plan once she really knew what secret task team she’d unwittingly been drafted into. Things worked out much better with the feds when they believed you were playing along nicely.
Except the door she found herself facing was no longer giant and steel, but wooden and labeled “Supply Closet”. Jo blinked, feeling her chest tighten as she reached for the handle. It didn’t budge as she tried to turn it.
An office door creaked open nearby.
“Shit!” she hissed under her breath and tugged on the handle again. No luck. Jo frantically searched for an empty hallway, a vacant office—somewhere she could hide for a second to get her head on straight.
Blindly, she started off in the opposite direction of the office. As soon as the door swung open, she ducked into a side hall, keeping an ear out for anyone else wandering around. Thankfully the path she’d chosen was empty and, as she scanned the doors to her left and right, she found none of the large panes of glass from previous hallway. A lucky break, for sure, but that still left her wandering aimlessly in enemy territory. So, mental map set in place, Jo began sneaking around as quietly as possible—a skill she’d honed to perfection.
But skills honed to perfection often left the mind free to wander, and as Jo inched her way around the compound, those wandering thoughts began to consume her.
Was she going crazy? She’d seen the steel door when it closed behind her, watched it lock and heard it pressurize. How had it suddenly transformed itself into a supply closet? Was the Society even real? Had that all been a dream and really she’d been stuck in this Ranger compound the whole time?
What if she’d never left Texas?
What if they’d captured her that day, dragged her away from Yuusuke’s bleeding corpse and threw her in a government prison cell to rot? Was she even in the Lone Star Republic anymore? Or had she been handed over to the Yakuza—the Japanese mob—who’d hired her, to be dealt with by them as some sort of under-the-table political maneuver?
But then what about the Society?
Was this all an elaborate hoax meant to mess with her head, get her to confess to her collaboration with the mob and spill her carefully combed information on the Black Bank? Was any of what had happened with Wayne and Nico even real? Or was that just a hallucination brought on by torture she didn’t even remember being inflicted?
What if they’d drugged her?
What if, what if, what if!
At the sound of more footsteps, Jo stumbled to a halt, heart in her throat and mind buzzing with paranoid over-stimulation. They were approaching from her left, but she’d been coming from the right, which gave her very little option. She chose an adjoining hall and peeked around the corner, hurrying past once she deemed it safe. The footsteps persisted, but they didn’t seem rushed, like they hadn’t realized her presence yet. Another stroke of luck; luck that might not last long the deeper she went into the compound.
She had to find a computer, a phone or tablet left out on a desk, something she could use to hack into the Ranger main server from within their firewalls and look at the building’s layout. She’d worry about her own sanity and possibly repressed trauma once she was out of their clutches and safely back home. Or as safe as she could be, considering the self-imposed WITSEC she’d probably have to endure for a while.
Her luck sneaking around had to run out sooner or later, but she wasn’t ready when it did.
At almost the same time as she turned the corner, a man in a suit decided to come out of his office. Jo swallowed a sound of panic and turned back the way she’d come. Only that hallway was now inhabited by multiple men and women leaving what looked to be a conference room.
She’d rather take her chance with the lone man than the swarm.
At least that was the plan, till they all looked her way.
Jo bolted down the other hallway at once, sprinting past the man in the suit. She’d been spotted. Shouts would turn into alarm bells that would become dogs barking and the click of disengaged gun safeties. But all Jo heard was the ringing in her ears. All she knew was that the lone man hadn’t grabbed her; she hadn’t been captured yet. She was alive for now, but if she didn’t find a way out, that would surely change.
Jo bolted for the first open door she saw, thanking any gods that might possibly exist when she saw a computer inside. It was a bigger office, no glass on the walls—again, thanks to all possible gods—with pictures of some man’s family on the desk. It looked to be the office of someone higher up, but not too high. Still, better to hurry and avoid—
She made it a few strides towards the desk before a man and a woman in full Ranger attire walked right in behind her.
Jo’s vision seemed to dim in fear even as it heightened in desperation, looking at every corner of the room for somewhere, anywhere decent to hide. But even she wasn’t desperate enough to think they hadn’t already seen her.
“Don’t shoot!” she said out of reflex instead, holding up her hands and willing them not to shake. She thought of Yuusuke, full of holes and bleeding out on a dusty server room floor. She wasn’t ready to die then, and she still wasn’t now. “Please, don’t shoot!”
They didn’t.
Instead, they didn’t seem to notice her at all, talking amongst themselves like she wasn’t even in the room. Like there wasn’t some sweaty-palmed girl pleading for her life literally two feet in front of them.
The man whom the office seemed to belong to walked right up to her, looking just past her shoulder, and grabbed something off his desk. If he’d been any closer, he would have skimmed her hip in the process.
Panting loud and harsh, Jo watched the two agents have a civil and almost flirtatious conversation in front of her before exchanging the file and walking away, closing the office door behind them.
It wasn’t until she heard the click of lock on the door that Jo even thought to put her hands down.
What. . .? What just happened?
“Do you see now?” An already terrifyingly familiar voice spoke without warning from the edge of her periphery. Jo jumped, nearly knocking the computer off the desk as she whipped around to face him.
The man who every instinct told her was Snow leaned against the office’s side wall, arms crossed over his chest and silver hair hanging casually over one eye. Jo wanted to ask what he was doing there. She wanted to ask a lot of things really, like how they hadn’t seen her, how she’d ended up in the compound at all, whether or not she was actually dead this time. But no words would come out, like the neuron-pathways from brain to mouth had fractured; too much data or not enough, she couldn’t be sure.
Either way, Error 404.
“Jo,” Snow said her name, soft and low but with impossible depth. Despite the fact that she was looking right at him, despite the fact that he’d obviously meant it to be nonthreatening, she still started. “Do you understand?”
No. No she didn’t. How could she? So much had happened, too much, too quickly. There was no way for someone to take it all in and stay sane. She wanted to understand, she wanted more than anything to figure out just one tiny bit of what was going on, but a part of he
r already felt broken. All she wanted to do was go home. . . Was that so much to ask?
Why couldn’t she just go home?
Something on Jo’s face must have compelled Snow to walk towards her, and even though Jo felt wound up tight, about ready to snap, somehow his presence didn’t make her feel cornered. It didn’t soothe her either, but not being outright panicked was something. Without a word, he reached towards her face and, with pale, elegant hands that seemed almost too still, carefully tucked a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear. Then, with the pad of his thumb, he gently wiped away a tear from beneath her eye.
Oh. She’d started crying after all. Damn it.
This close to Snow, it was impossible to ignore just how excruciatingly beautiful he was. He didn’t smile, and his eyes remained guarded even as he scanned her face. But somehow, that cold, quiet distance only added to his allure. Like a statue in a museum—untouchable, and all the more breathtaking for it.
He said her name again, and this time she didn’t jump. Instead, she soaked it in, reveled in the way it rumbled past her ears and echoed deep in her chest. When Snow finally dropped his hand from her face, turning away, it took everything she had not to feel disappointed. With a gesture over his shoulder that almost seemed bored, he motioned for her to follow.
Chapter 5
Dangerously Easy
FOR THE FIRST time in possibly her whole life, Jo’s mind was silent.
The usual incessant buzzing, always reminding her of something she needed to be doing, something she must be freaking out over, was quiet. She wasn’t sure how to handle the stillness, so she didn’t do anything at all. Her mind must have overloaded and completely fizzled out, faced with the combination of sensory overload and utter panic.
She followed behind the strange, beautiful man while he led her out of the room, his demeanor casual, as if they were walking through the park, or down a street, and not into the hive of what had been her arch-nemesis since Jo was fourteen and took her first job.
“I know you have a lot of questions,” he started.
“Understatement.” She wanted the word to have more snark, but she just sounded tired, even to her own ears.
“Where would you like me to begin?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just begin.” She paused when another agent rounded the corner ahead of them. Just like the two in the office, the woman walked down the hall without so much as a glance at them as she passed.
“They can’t see us.” Snow seemingly answered the question she’d been posing to the woman’s back.
“Why?”
“Because you no longer exist.”
The words were like swallowing a shot of tequila and chasing it with a can of RAGE ENERGY—burning delivered with a tang of sweetness that would become one massive hangover the next morning.
“Nico said I couldn’t go home. . . Wayne said they were my family. . .” Jo tried to piece together the earlier conversations in a way that would make sense. But none of the pieces fit yet. She needed some rough edges shaved off before they’d snap into place. “What is the Society of Wishes?”
“You invoked the Society yourself, you know.” Snow had the audacity to chuckle at her. Jo’s chest had the audacity to tighten at the smooth, rich sound.
“Please,” she said tiredly. “I. . . I remember the ritual.” Admitting the fact was hard, because it meant that her memories of Yuusuke had been real. “I remember what my grandmother told me. But. . . she said it’s magic lore practically from the dawn of time. No one believes that stuff anymore. It’s stupid.”
“You believed.”
“Not really. I was frantic,” she mumbled, willfully ignoring the truth. Either she finally owned up to the fact that the part of her that believed in magic had never gone away (much to her father’s dismay up until the day he walked out), or she was in some kind of trauma-induced craze. There wasn’t a way to win.
“Dawn of time. . .” he repeated softly, mostly to himself. But before Jo could question, Snow continued. “Then I’ll start at the beginning.” There was a long pause and Snow’s expression left Jo wondering if he even knew where “the beginning” was. “The Society of Wishes exists outside of time, outside of any reality, and functions with the singular goal of granting wishes.”
“You’re telling me you’re a fairy godmother?”
Snow did laugh then and, despite herself, it brought a sly smile to Jo’s mouth. “I suppose you could call us that.”
“Where’s your wand and ball gown?”
“I’m afraid I lost those a few hundred years ago.” For all Wayne had cautioned against Snow, he was proving to be the easiest to speak to of them all.
“Wayne mentioned something about a thousand years. . .”
“As I said, we exist outside of time and space. The Society as it’s known now has been around for well over a thousand years. Closer to two thousand, actually.” Snow continued forward, walking as though he’d been in these halls many times. “Each Society member has joined at a different time, as their magic was made known.”
“How did they join?” The Society was still a “they,” an other, something Jo was not quite ready to admit to being a part of herself.
“A wish.”
A dusty server room floor, a friend bleeding out, a last resort in the form of a desperate cry for help, any help—
“It was real, then?”
“It was.”
“Is Yuusuke. . .” She couldn’t even bring herself to say it.
“He lives.”
Jo let out the breath she’d been holding, the one that couldn’t be expelled with the word “dead.”
“Your wish saw to that,” Snow continued. “But wishing takes power, an immense amount, depending on what is asked.”
“And the power came from my life?” She was dead, then. It was the only explanation on so many levels.
“In a fashion,” Snow conceded. “When a wish is made, something of equal value must be given. Every choice you make divides reality. If you say yes to a decision, there is a world in which you said no.”
Jo remembered reading something about parallel dimensions and alternate realities in quantum mechanics when she’d fallen into a binge-watch of one of Yuusuke’s favorite pop science shows.
“To grant a wish, I must utilize the very essence of that possibility. I harvest the energy that exists in each alternate world by destroying it. Then, I take the energy released from that destruction and turn it into the magic that will be used to help see the wish in a single reality.”
“So, a life for a life, in my case?” Jo struggled to understand exactly what the “destruction of worlds” meant. “You killed a world in which I existed to stop Yuusuke from dying?”
“Somewhat. . . You are a unique case. Like the other members in the Society, you are one of the rare few who come from a long lineage of ancient, now latent, magic.” Snow ran a fingertip at the edge of his hair as he spoke, pulling it just far enough away from his eye to see. But the movement didn’t register to Jo; she was more focused on the memory of her grandmother, of her mother, and the craft of mysticism that had died when the latter left her small town in Chihuahua.
“Magic is real?” It was like twelve-year-old Jo had finally got what she wanted. But the fact didn’t make nineteen-year-old Jo nearly as excited as it should. Her whole body was laden with some invisible force that grew heavier by the moment.
“It both is, and is not.” Snow nodded. “Long ago, the world was in an Age of Magic. Wishes spliced humanity time and again, driving the world as you know it away from that era, rewriting history, destroying worlds and possibilities, and rebuilding reality in each wish. Those whose magical lineage was strong enough to remain intact throughout the splices are very few now, and the power is so far removed that it’s nearly unrecognizable without the individual being a member of the Society.”
“So, let me get this straight.” Jo stopped, putting her hands on her hips. “You’re telling me I’m
the descendant of some ancient witch, and you awoke magic passed on in me by forcibly drafting me into your Society, which floats between alternate dimensions?”
He paused as well, a look of focus overcoming his features. “Simply put, I suppose that encompasses the rough idea of it. Though we do not float, and there’s only ever one time. . . What it looks like merely changes due to wishes.”
“I didn’t ask for that.” She stood her ground, even if there was little use in pointing out the fact now. As Ranger agents and office workers floated around her, oblivious to her presence, it was obvious that what was done, was done.
“You asked for your family to be safe, for your friend to be alive. Those were the terms.”
“Don’t bring my family into this,” she chastised.
“You don’t want magic, then?” He arched his eyebrows. Jo instantly hated the way she felt under his gaze, like he could see right through her to the very curious, very excited girl squealing over the mere idea of being some kind of ancient witch.
“That’s irrelevant,” Jo insisted. Just because the idea of magic was sparking some curiosity in her—enough to give her a bit of fire to fuel her through the exhaustion that was trying to smother her—that didn’t excuse his actions. “There’s something called consent, and it’s necessary.”
“I believe your words were: ‘Take me, I’m yours.’”
She had said that. “I didn’t know what I was agreeing to!”
“Would you rather live with magic, or have died? Or would you rather your friend died?” he snapped, frustration creeping to the surface.
Her own front wore thin and Jo finally averted her gaze, her hands falling limply to her sides. She wanted to keep up her righteous anger, but she just felt exhausted. It was downright disorienting being a specter in a world she was so clearly—despite all logic—no longer a part of. “Is that supposed to excuse being forced into this agreement?”
“It doesn’t much matter if you think it does or doesn't.” There was the Snow that Wayne had warned her of—a colder, calculating, more calloused man. “There’s no revoking wishes and no leaving the Society. Furthermore, the reality in which you existed is gone forever.”