INDEX:
Link here to a general overview of the novel
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Chapter Three
Sebastian
We creep down the hallway until it opens up to another entryway containing the double doors of the studio, finding them shut to the rest of the house. The sound of breaking glass had come from behind them. Daav gestures to me to be ready, to keep myself a limited target standing along the wall at the side of the door, the silent messages we’ve perfected years before from living day to day with a madman who switched from loving mentor to psychopath in the space of a breath.
Gun ready, he reaches to the handle and turns it with a slow, smooth motion of wrist, swinging it forward in a controlled movement .
He shifts to the side for coverage after it opens, and peers into the room.
I do the same, to take in three men, one standing guard with his black, high tech tactical weapon out and ready. The other two move around the room, attaching small, sleek boxes to the support beams along the walls. Shit!
With only seconds to absorb the full picture, my gut clenches hard around the new threat.
Then, the guard jerks his head toward the doors and notices us. He barks warnings in the guttural Staltzian language that has always sounded to me like stabbing, staccato verbal wounds.
Bullet fire rips from his weapon as his eyes shoot hate, lips twisting with venom.
Daav is firing from his cover behind the door, yelling back in that same awful language of his homeland. I almost recognize the curse words he’d taught me years before, although the deafening snap of the projectiles mutes them. His face is an ugly mask of hate as he takes aim, the pain I know lurks inside him making an appearance in his rage. I’m surprised at its intensity, but maybe I shouldn’t be. It’s gorgeous, familiar and heartbreaking.
I lean around the door and start shooting. Verse, twist them, they’ve broken into our damn home. Tried to kill Daav! Their fucking people grind ours down at every turn. My shots go wide, good aim never the top of my skill set.
Daav’s are sharp, controlled, although both of us keep having to duck back behind the cover of the doorway.
And then the two other men are retreating, scaling a wall to a high window, its glass shattered. Their entry point.
The third man, their guard, keeps screaming as they exit. His gun coughs out ammo, aimed mostly at Daav. The walls are riddled with holes, chunks flying with the assault.
After the first two men are up and out, the third retreats, with more bullets flying to cover him from where one of his team is shooting back into the room from some perch on the outside.
But when the last guard turns himself to scale the interior wall for the window, Daav hits true.
The man cries out, plummeting back to the ground, weapon falling away at the crunch of contact. His teammates yell for him, but quickly disappear from the window, cutting their losses. Then Daav, all fucking grace, a dance of its own, is running into the room, gun out and aimed down at the intruder who lies unmoving but with his eyes open, blinking up.
More guttural demands from Daav.
The man, red bubbling at his lips, only grins, repeats some terse, weakened response as he stares down Daav’s gun.
Daav pulls the trigger, firing a dozen shots into him point blank.
The body jerks under the impact, jumping again and again.
Until the gun clicks empty. Daav keeps pulling the trigger.
“Daav!”
He looks back at me, the pupils of his sea green eyes blown wide, his breaths fast, although each sharp.
“Are you okay?” he finally asks, his words sounding brittle, his focus reemerging from the trance of his rage.
“We have to get out of here. They planted detonators.” I point toward the nearest box on a support beam. There are maybe a dozen throughout the room. I hang onto my weapon, Daav the same. Even now we don’t trust that the gunmen are gone.
Daav narrows his eyes at a detonator, and I watch them flare gold. Magic.
“No, Daav,” I yell, wanting to wake him the fuck up. “We don’t know the countdown.”
He’s opening the Verse, the fool, planning to use tangles to shut down the electrical connections in the boxes.
“No fucking time!” I scream again.
And then I’m over to him, shoving him toward the doors.
He snarls at me, and pushes back. “This is our home!”
“Worth the price of our body parts littering the ground in tribute to it? How are you going to save Orreance with your magic if you’re dead? Your father wins whether his assassins kill you, or you throw away your life yourself,” I say.
Listen to me, please. Please.
The mention of his father narrows his eyes, all green blue mix of the sea again. No more gold.
He grunts, swears more in Staltz’s ugly language, and nods.
Thank the Verse.
“Let’s go,” he says and drags me as we run toward the front doors of the mansion. Wrenching them open and barreling outside.
We make it only a dozen yards.
A deafening roar, searing heat, and wave of energy explodes behind us. My hand tears from Daav’s. I’m thrown forward through the air. Flying.
Shit!
My body lands hard, rolling across the dirt of the urban lawn, sensation like ground glass scraping over nerve endings, breath forced out of my lungs. Pain. My tangles laugh, their desert dry cackle.
Smoke and haze burn my eyes. Gasping. No air. I cough out the constriction against my chest and croak a call. Only a whisper escapes. I try again.
“Daav? Daav!” Keep coughing.
Where is he? The smoke clears, and I finally spot him near a half charred tree, a large bough from the remains lying over his legs.
The sirens of emergency vehicles saw through the night as I crawl to him.
He lies among debris, body too still. “Wake up, Prince. Wake up!” I kneel next to him and shake his shoulders. Not hard in case of spinal or head injury, but I really want him conscious. Please, be alive. I then move down to try to shift the trunk sized branch, but it’s solid and heavy.
He opens his eyes.
“Sebastian?”
Bloody gashes decorate his face. I leave aside my effort and move back up to his shoulders.
“Can’t move my legs,” he says.
“Cause you have a damned tree on you.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah, oh shit.”
I focus to reach my Verse, feel the change to my eyes, but before I get far, his eyes spark gold and the glow is enough to light up the dark remnants of our yard.
There’s a shifting sound in the wood. I try the bough again and this time I can lift it off him. Despite his injuries he’s tapped into his Verse. Damn virtuoso. I get why the Conclave sets their hopes on him.
“Fucking show off. You shouldn’t be working tangles when you’re hurt.”
He ignores me.
“My side,” he gasps, and his hand is pressing his torso above his right hip. “Head hurts.”
Blood seeps between his fingers. Something has torn skin as he’d been thrown. And probably a concussion. But he’s moving his legs. The branch hadn’t done damage to his legs, just kept him pinned.
Verse twist this shit. “Okay, the medics are on their way.”
“No medics,” he says, grimacing and swearing. “Trapped in a clinic bed makes for an easy target. It’s not deep, just messy.”
“How would you know? Lie still, let me look.”
I pull his hand away from his side, exposing a long bloody gash, thankfully not organ deep.
“If you tell them who you are, they won’t detain you,” I say.
But it’s never that simple, admitting to the mundane world our mage status. It comes with…complications. I know it, but Daav is hurt.
“No, I don’t want the Conclave involved.”
Like we ever have much choice.
“Yet,” I remind him.
“Yet. Not tonight.”
A gathering crowd of onlookers from the neighborhood finally pierces my attention away from him. If we want to avoid attention, it’s time to leave.
“Okay, Prince. My place then, so I can clean you up. You need healing.”
“Well,” he says, and has to halt his sentence with a coughing fit that finally passes. “Since you insisted I let my place explode and burn to the ground, it’s only polite to invite me to yours.”
Humor from my stoic Prince? Good. He’ll be okay. He has to be okay.
“I wouldn’t want to be called impolite. Can you get up? My car’s down the block, but if police and emergency get here first, we’ll have no choice but to stay.”
I make him wait one more moment as I’m lucky enough to find our guns in the debris around us. Nothing about our safety is guaranteed.
Then, Daav is able to wrap an arm around my shoulder, letting me help him up between a fuckton of wincing groans, then half carry, half walk him down the road to my rusting vehicle.
“This thing’s seen better days,” he wheezes as I lower him into the front seat. “I am afraid I’ll stick to the seat. Or the floorboards will drop out.”
I roll my eyes. “Why thank you, Sebastian, for saving my butt from being blown up,” I say to him. “I really appreciate it. You’re a brave man.”
He snorts. But as soon as I get the car moving, racing away from the disaster scene, he nods off again, half in, half out of consciousness during the drive. I bite my lip and avoid reaching over to put my hand on his thigh. Then, reconsider. What the hell. I move my palm to the warmth of his quad. Dancer’s legs, toned and strong. So much power. And fuck, but the want only deepens for that light of his.
He stirs, but sleeps on.
He has to be okay. I’ll make him okay. He has to be.
We arrive, after flooring the engine to race each potential red light. Impatient much? I sure as hell am. It comes from fear for him, and a need to get him someplace to sit and absorb the missing years, every moment that has passed in the last eight. But I know I have to slow it down, and not just the car.
Between Daav’s half coherent comments, I manhandle him up the stairs to my second floor apartment, fumble the key into the lock and manage to carry him into the place. Daav is all compact muscle, weighing more than you’d expect looking at him. Damn dancer.
We move to the bed, and I drop him onto the mattress of the bed unit. It’s a small place, thank Verse, so not far to carry him.
A murmured Angel from Daav before he falls fully into unconsciousness. He stays that way while I wrangle off his tattered clothing and wash off the abrasions and the longer gash. Exposing his beautiful body, the defined muscle, mouth watering pecs, cut abs, and the calluses on his feet. I’ve missed even those badges of war. Because that’s what this fool’s been doing, fighting a war. Without me.
The anger tries to flood back up over me, but then it passes. He knows why I left him. Yet he hasn’t followed.
It hurts, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll take his cuts, take ribbons of them, deep or shallow. As many as it takes.
For now, the priority is healing him.
I shuck off my jacket and boots, gather my ever shrinking medical supplies, along with my focus object, and sit down on the mattress next to him. The fit is tight. I haven’t designed the nest of the wooden bed with two bodies in mind.
His closed lids accent the dark of his lashes brushing the skin above his cheekbones to hide the sea of his eyes. Unconsciousness brings him the pause from the single minded grind of his life. My Prince needs sleep, a hell of a lot more rest than I know he ever gets. It had been true when we were younger and likely more true now. I haven’t been around to protect him from Victor’s shit, or more importantly from himself.
Stop procrastinating, man. He’ll heal better with the help of tangles.
You’d think after a lifetime of the Verse I’d stop hesitating to enter.
I grab the stainless steel triangle of the focus and close my palm around it. The sharp points of its tips dig into my skin, pricking. Beginning to turn it within my grip, fingers scraping over the metallic sandpaper of its sides, I let my vision go soft, drinking in the room. Daav lying still in front of me, the colors of the antique patchwork quilt underneath him, mint and beige, black and burnt orange, lovely contrasts against his olive skin. The wavy black hair, he mostly keeps short, although it seems he’s started wearing it just long enough to have it curl the back of his neck.
I turn the triangle over and over, breathing with its contact, sinking into the sensation of the points, the sideways scrape as my fingers travel around the object. Keeping it spinning in my palm. Around, around. Only the sensation, only this moment.
A state of hypnotic distress.
My vision sparks with a glowing golden sheen, the same color others would see in my eyes if they catch me sinking into the Verse.
And then…it unfolds. Cackles with my arrival.
The Conclave says this isn’t a separate place. Just an unveiling of the magic that lives among us all, surrounding us, swimming between molecules as a witness to the physics of our reality, the chemical kiss of reactions, the dance of atomic charge. And that a lucky blessed few are able to manipulate. I’m not convinced. It’s never added up and what little scientific community we have remains suspiciously silent about the physics of it. Instead it’s all about God's miraculous gift, says the Conclave. Bullshit.
The Verse sounds beautiful, charming, like a fantastical ocean populated with otherworldly creatures just out of reach. And to others it is. To Daav. Each mage experiences it differently.
To me it’s a dark place.
A place of fascinating leering, jeering serrated-toothed ugliness. Where the tangles, those nuggets of floating magic, are tossed within a landscape of desolate pain. I see the shadows of this despairing desert superimposed over the real world, and know its form thoroughly. I hate it. I adore it, as it fills a twisted corner of my deepest self, a drumbeat pounding out the darkness of my soul. And hate that fact as well.
Beneath this dark vision is the true one of Daav, lying exposed on my bed, his body battered and needing care.
Needing my care. Fuck the twisted Verse.
I squeeze the triangle, let the surface pricks deepen to true pain. And begin to cajole the tangles.
The tangles themselves are like tumbleweeds to me, blowing around the matter of our universe. And if a mage catches them, corrals them to their will, they can be convinced to lend their energy to expand potency or increase speed of chemical reactions. Breaking bonds between atoms, or combining others. The tangles’ energy bounce the molecules around with a vigor not found naturally. And reactions explode to life, although not like they did before magic went into almost dormancy with the Diminishment and Tristan Crane dreamed about its savior.
It’s become a cult here, to find this mystical dream mage, magic messiah, and wake magic the fuck up again. The Conclave is all about this dream, and I’ve been tied to the Conclave since age three, the youngest child to ever have eyes glowing gold. Lucky me, shackled to Victor as its servant. Although sometimes it felt like the Conclave was Victor’s servant.
Do I believe the cult of this prophecy? Maybe. Maybe not. I know we need to be doing other things to help our people.
Except when I look at Daav, my dark haired sexy Prince. Then, I almost believe. It’s that damn light of his contrasting his dark looks, the light so carefully hidden away behind a locked door. I have always known something large and important waits behind it. Gorgeous. It’s everything. Once upon a time, he’d agreed to unbar that door to me. I miss it, miss him. Because I’d walked away and he’d slammed it behind me.
But here I am knocking again. Or maybe I’ll need a battering ram.
The sea is hidden behind his closed eyes now, but when they open, flash their swirling color, it leads me to memory. A memory of laughing among blue-green jeweled and dark tossed ocean waves, strong hands holding me so I won’t drown, then running across the sand and climbing rocks. Picking up stones to toss them into the water, delight as they skip the surface and I howl with victory. A feeling of home, of perfection, of ease and beauty and belonging. A memory buried far back from my childhood. Before the Conclave, before Victor, before Daav himself.
But the memory needs to wait.
I examine Daav on the bed again. The Verse shows me more than tangles and bleak landscape. Underneath the cloud of it, my vision is able to narrow down to the molecules and particles of the physical world. I turn this sight to Daav’s body, then beneath it as my focus shrinks to the small blood vessels to stop the hemorrhage from the gash, to balance chemical reactions and nerves in the brain, and support his immune system. Although his body is doing its work, my magic needs to speed up and encourage the reactions that support this process. To heal the actual damage fast, and the leftovers on his back from the damn club.
I am prepared by years of Victor’s relentless instruction, the hours we spent in the lab. Him pounding into us our understanding of living cells and intracellular structures, nanoparticles and atoms. All of this knowledge thanks to our second hand mooching of the research and investment of other nations who focused on science instead of the cult of magic. But Victor offered it to us so that our skill at picturing particles and structures, understanding how they are meant to function, became second nature, like breathing. Biology, chemistry, some atomic level physics, every day. We ate and slept it in between our practice with the Verse and tangles, just another one of Victor’s fetishes.
The necessity of science is the dirty secret the Conclave refuses to acknowledge, depending on the Mentors to pass on the necessities to their wards even as it forbids talk of it within Cohorts and Conclave sponsored events and interactions.
Sometimes the science instruction, practice with the Verse, and Victor’s torture blended to become all one thing. One endless marathon blurring past us, swallowing up our lives. We spent our youth drowning in it, with only each other to make sure we were never pulled down to a final watery grave, lifelines for one another.
Seeing the work I need to encourage in Daav, I expand sight again to face the floating tangles hovering near his body.
Reaching out to the tumbleweeds, the Verse version of my hands come to a hairsbreadth near one's surface. Ugly, misshapen energy-filled thing, my fingers lower to make contact, to caress. And I suck in as its burning pain sears my flesh like acid, as the tangle pushes back in resistance. I keep my hands in place. Move down you lovely thing. It pushes harder into my palms and the pain shoots through me, rolls over me so that my vision dims.
Refocus. Okay. Convince, cajole, suffer as I whisper to it. Respect, I send as it tries to bite back harder, to snarl its refusal. Like with my sculptures, I don’t mold or impose shape, impose my will, as much as convince the material to show itself. Convince it that it wants to do the work I want.
Sweat beads down my neck, my back. Damn it, tumbleweed. Please. How beautiful you are, how much you want to help my friend. Move lower. Just a little more.
Need to go faster. Tired, so tired. Just want to lie down. More. Move a bit more, darling. There you go, beautiful.
It rams back, fighting, unconvinced. Hold it close, Seb. A little longer.
But it is hungry now, wanting to push back into my hands to explode its energy against me.
Shit. That’s the risk of doing this work. Lose focus and the tangles backfire, spear through the mage instead, a nasty feeling even for someone like me. And dangerous. If I don’t want to end up unconscious on my bed next to Daav, broken, I need to keep it together.
You deserve to use that lovely energy, darling. Please lovely. Here you go, over here.
It snarls again, and it hurts. Verse, it hurts. So, I let go of all resistance, accept all the pain, remind myself that it is gorgeous and all I need, that its twining with my soul is inevitable. My purpose.
But this effort is for Daav. The pain isn’t all I need. Daav’s wavy coal black hair, the way he moves through space as if he floats, with only his stoic face, serious heart keeping him weighed to the ground. The fucking grace of him, it makes me want to wrap him up and tuck him inside me. To entice out his smiles. It’d been that way forever. I want him to be happy, safe, well. Verse twist it, I love Daav and that’s the entire truth of me. The truth that fills up my twisted heart beyond the pain. The damned tangle needs to cooperate.
Yet with the pull of the man unconscious on my bed distracting my focus and filling my heart, finally, the tumbleweed hesitates. My caress has it slowly pushing in the other direction, toward Daav. And then, all clicks into place and the tangle sinks eagerly to the reactions inside his body. I whisper my requests, compliment and caress more through the acid feel of it. Move it toward the compounds and reactions, picturing the shapes of the atoms, the molecules. Click again, contact.
There you go, you beautiful motherfucker.
Now I have to hold. Hold and hold on.
It does its work, one tangle thankfully enough to take care of what I need.
The sweat drenches me. Sleep. Want it. Crave it.
A bit longer.
Toxins drain away, blood clots, tissues mend, nerves and chemicals rebalance. Healing. Faster than Daav’s body will do on its own, even more so than with doctors’ help. No need for stitches or medicine to fight infection since this is a small injury. The body holds its own solutions, and the magic brings them awake, powers them.
Then, done. Or done as much as possible.
The dark Verse cackles around me as I reel inside it, weak from the tangle work and blinking with blurry relief.
Pull back, Seb. Pull out. Is that Daav’s voice?
Yeah, that.
I squeeze my hand around the pointed triangle, let the physical world’s pain puncture and remind me. Of me.
And come gasping back to the room, the shadow of the Verse gone.
Daav in front of me.
I’m glad he’s still asleep. He’d avoid the itchy ache after-healing sensation when a person is forced to mend unnaturally fast.
My body’s wrung of everything, with no more juice.
Idiot, Seb. Nuée was right.
Then let myself fall against Daav. Sleep.