Defying Fate (11 page)

“Would you like to know why Ariane looks so familiar to you?” James asked. “Her last name is Kavanagh. Ariane Kavanagh.”

“Elise has a sister? Well, fancy that. I never knew.”

“You’re sweet,” Ariane said, patting his cheek. “I’m her mother.”

The light in Malcolm’s eyes vanished. He leaned back far enough to free him from her reach. “Oh, er—wow. You must have been…young.”

“Very,” she said.

James tried not to feel satisfied at Malcolm inching his chair away, but he couldn’t seem to help it. Apparently pregnant women were fair game, but mothers of exes were not. Even Malcolm had his boundaries.

James started on the spell
at the kitchen table, keeping Ariane and Malcolm company until they finished dinner. Neither of them were keen on talking anymore. It should have been easy to focus in the silence.

But instead of drawing, he tapped the pen against the table and eyed the pale band of skin where he had used to wear a warding ring. He had thrown it aside at Motion and Dance, so it was probably still there—maybe in the dust under the piano. Elise’s ring would be nearby, too. It seemed fitting for the rings to have been lost together.

It hadn’t been all that long since James could close his eyes and find himself immediately transported to Elise’s mind. He missed watching her jog around Reno, drink tequila with breakfast, and even get in fights with her ex-boyfriend.

Or, to be more precise, he missed being so close to her. Even when they were miles apart. But their bond didn’t work between dimensions.

When he looked up again, Ariane was gone. Malcolm had finished eating. He was picking food out from between his teeth with a knife.

“I’m not going to take you to the Haven’s door,” Malcolm said, flicking a string of plaque off of the blade. “I need to get away from the Union.
Far
away.”

“I expected that would be the case,” James said, setting down his pen. “But I still need your help. Elise is in an ethereal plane right now, and I want you to get her.”

“She’s in
Heaven
? I’m not going to Heaven. Not a chance.”

“No, certainly not. I only want you to book a flight to Yakutsk, in Russia, and then drive to Oymyakon. When she returns to Earth, that’s where she’ll appear.”

“Russia,” Malcolm said with a disbelieving laugh.

“You want to get away from the Union, don’t you?” James asked.

He blew a breath out. “I suppose that’s ‘away,’ yeah. But why aren’t
you
going to get her? You haven’t abandoned her, have you?”

“No,” James said. It came out sharper than he intended. Sharp enough to make the other man lean back in his chair, tipping it onto its rear legs.

“Right,” Malcolm said slowly. “So…why aren’t you the one hopping a plane to Yakutsk?”

“I can’t,” he said.

Malcolm gave him a calculating look. “She was in love with you the whole time, you know. Back when we were dating. I mean, she certainly wasn’t thinking about me when we fucked.”

A headache throbbed in James’s temples, like every vessel in his skull was threatening to rupture. He pinched the bridge of his nose. It did nothing to relieve the tension.

“I know,” he said. “I felt much the same.”

Malcolm’s bushy eyebrows lifted. “Wait—you did?”

“Always.” James’s voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat before trying to speak again. “Just…go to Oymyakon. There’s a field where the farmers walk their cattle in the summers. She’ll come back there. It might take a few weeks. There’s a house you can stay in, if you—”

“Logistics are no problem, Jimmy. You know I’d pick go pick her up even if you hadn’t saved my arse—can’t leave a pretty girl lost in Russia. But I still think it should be you.”

“You’ll do it, though?” James pressed.

“I’ll do it.”

That tension in his skull alleviated. Just a little. “Thank you,” James said.

“You two are so fucked up.” He stood, taking his snifter of gin with him, and leaned into the living room. “Oi! Ladies! Nice to meet you! I’m out of here.”

If there was a response, James didn’t hear it.

Malcolm turned back, and the two men shook hands. The kopis had a firm grip and an unusually serious look in his eye.

“What do I tell her when she shows up?” Malcolm asked. “Should I have her meet you somewhere?”

James’s head throbbed again. “Just tell her…tell her I’m sorry.”

“Ah,” Malcolm said. “Gotcha.”

He gave a short nod, then headed out the back door into the black night.

X

The scrying spell required more
space than James’s parents’ house had indoors, even in his old study, so he took his supplies outside. The air was moist with the promise of spring rain. A chill breeze bit at his nose and chin.

James picked a spot on the lawn where the house would shelter him from the wind and began to prepare the circle.

The moon was high in the sky by the time he finished digging the first quadrant into the soil. More than once he caught himself drawing a line incorrectly, or putting the right rune in the wrong place.

He sat back on his heels, trying to make sense of the lines, but it wouldn’t come together. The fatigue was too strong.

Nathaniel appeared, standing outside the circle. He only needed to glance at it to say, “That’s wrong.” He pointed at the north corner.

He was right. James started over on that quadrant. “Would you like to help me?”

Nathaniel scuffed his shoe in the mud. “That’s why Mom sent me down. To help you.”

“Very well. Help yourself.”

Nathaniel grabbed a spade from the nearby tool shed and went to work. James didn’t have to tell him which parts of the circle were missing. He joined in with as much confidence as if the circle belonged to him, and James was only helping.

As Nathaniel worked, James searched his face for a hint of familiarity. A sign that this was his son, and not a young man that simply resembled him. Nathaniel met his gaze with defiant anger.

That anger—James understood that kind of anger well.

Maybe they were related after all.

“There,” Nathaniel said, wiping his hands off on his jeans. He left muddy handprints on his thighs.

“Let’s take a look at the entrance to the Haven,” James said, drawing the final lines.

He bent to grab one of the notebook pages off of the ground, but Nathaniel grabbed it first. He held it out of reach. “I’m not going,” Nathaniel said. “You know that, right? I can’t go somewhere that I’ll be a cripple.”

James held out his hand. “Give that to me.”

“No. Listen. I’m good at this stuff—I
know
I’m good at this, everyone in the coven says so. And I’ve been working on my interdimensional stuff. I think I’m about to come up with something amazing. Something better than anything that you’ve ever…”

Nathaniel didn’t have to finish the sentence for James to know what he had been about to say.

He stepped forward and took the paper out of Nathaniel’s hand. “Do you think this is a competition between us?”

The boy’s eyes glowed with barely-restrained anger. “I know it is.”

“There’s no need for us to be at odds.” James flicked the paper at the circle. It ignited. “In any case, you have about thirty years to catch up with me.”

The map snapped out flat in the circle, as if pulled between two dogs playing tug-of-war. A hazy blue ghost of the topography appeared above it. The trees were barely more than wisps of smoke, as if the hills themselves were on fire.

It was a new use of akashic magic, this model, and James expected that Nathaniel would have never seen it before. But the boy looked as unimpressed as ever.

“The highway,” Nathaniel said, pointing between two hills.

James traced the road into the hills and found a service road branching off the highway.

He gestured to enlarge the topographical image until he could see a tiny line that looked like a fence. It surrounded a cave set into a hill. An outbuilding was parked in front of it, as well as three tiny SUVs, each no larger than a toenail.

“Is this real?” Nathaniel asked, tilting his head as he studied the map.

“Yes. It’s somewhat like scrying. What you see here is a representation of reality.”

James made note of the outpost’s location on the map. The three SUVs probably carried two men each. Six guards, nine at the most. More than Malcolm’s estimate.

He watched his son’s face through the hazy blue forest. It distorted his features and almost made his eyes glow with blue light.

“There’s a cost to power, Nathaniel. I designed this spell—and thousands of others—but it was not free,” James said. “The foundation of knowledge upon which I craft my magic came at a high price.”

“Don’t lecture me.”

They both stood. Nathaniel was almost up to James’s chest now. It wouldn’t be long before he outgrew his father.

“People you love will die if you stay here,” James said.

Nathaniel lifted his chin in defiance. “I’m not afraid. I’ll protect myself. I’ll protect everyone.”

“There are worse things that can happen to you than dying.”

“That doesn’t mean I should run and hide in some other dimension. I’m not a coward like you are!” Nathaniel snapped.

James felt like a deflated balloon.
Coward
. That word stung.

Waving his hand, he dismissed the spell.

When James spoke again, his voice was softer than before. “Why are you angry at me, Nathaniel? I didn’t choose to be absent from your life.”

“I know.” Nathaniel seemed to chew over his next words, mouth twisting and brow furrowed. “I saw you kissing her.” His gaze fixed on a spot over James’s shoulder. “I saw you kissing Elise.”

James knew before he turned that he would see Hannah watching. “I told you to see if he needed help,” she said, approaching the circle with another mug of tea in her hands. “That doesn’t mean that you should bother him. Go inside and sleep.”

“But Mom—”

“Go,” she said.

“I hate both of you,” Nathaniel muttered.

He trudged through his grandmother’s bushes. The branches closed around him, but James could hear him crashing around for several more seconds before the front door opened and slammed closed again. The entire building shook.

James braced himself for Hannah’s vitriol. Even though they hadn’t been together in a long time, he felt, maybe irrationally, that he owed her some kind of explanation for his relationship with Elise—as if he could possibly put together a decade’s worth of feelings into a sentence.

“Hannah—” he began, but she cut him off.

“It’s fine. Nathaniel’s just at that age where he hates everything. And it’s not easy to find out that your heroes are human.”

James hadn’t been trying to start a conversation about Nathaniel. The change in subject threw him.

“Wait,
hero
?”

“The coven deifies you. I tried to shelter Nathaniel from it, but he studied with Landon, and…well, he heard things.” Hannah sipped her tea. The steam spiraled toward the stars. “He’s spent his entire life looking up to you. Be patient. Talk
with
him, not
at
him.”

Attempting to have another heart-to-heart with Nathaniel sounded about as pleasant as surrendering himself to Union custody again.

“If he refuses to go into the Haven…”

“I can talk him into it,” Hannah said. “Did the spell work?”

“Yes, but we need a car to get there. My parents must have left their truck at the airport.” He gestured toward the trees. “I’ll have to hike down to Thistle’s and ‘borrow’ her van.”

“I’ll get Nathaniel and Ariane ready,” she said. “Should we—”

A tree at the bottom of the hill rustled, and James cut Hannah off with a gesture.

James squinted into the darkness and saw nothing. But a sense of power rippled over him, making the skin on his shoulders rise in goosebumps.

His eyes skimmed the trees, searching for the source of that sensation. It tickled his crown as though his chakra had been jolted with electricity. The forest seemed to loom over them, darker and deeper than it had been a few minutes before.

They weren’t alone.

“What’s wrong?” Hannah asked.

“Just get the others,” James said. “We’re leaving.”

He stepped forward to search for the origin of those sensations as Hannah ducked into the house. A breeze rustled the branches around them. Clouds slid in front of the moon, then revealed it again in tantalizing peeks of pale gold.

“Who’s there?” he called.

He hadn’t expected anyone to reply, so he wasn’t surprised when only silence responded. There was no sign that the forest was anything but peaceful. A barn owl hooted.

Yet the energy at his crown was building, and with it came a sense of dread.

There must have been an angel nearby.

The door opened again. Ariane’s hair was frizzed and her skirt was twisted halfway around her hips, as though Hannah had dragged her out of bed. Nathaniel skulked behind them.

“Hurry,” James said, taking Ariane’s arm and leading her down the trail.

“Where are we going?” she asked. Her accent was thicker when she was sleepy.

“We’re visiting another coven member to borrow her van.”

“I thought you were going to get that on your own,” Hannah said. The unspoken question was obvious:
What changed
?

But James didn’t respond. He walked Ariane as quickly as he could down the hill, seeking out the trail that he had taken a thousand times as a boy. Thistle had a nephew his age named Grant, and they used to use that trail to meet up with one another at night.

Nathaniel pulled a spell out of his Book of Shadows. “Wait until we’re deeper in the forest,” James said.

“But—”

“Wait,” Hannah snapped.

Nathaniel huffed and shoved past them.

The feeling of power faded with every step they took away from James’s parents’ house. He glanced over his shoulder as they stepped carefully over the dark, rocky trail.

He wasn’t sure if it was just a trick of the light or not, but he thought he saw something flying over the roof of the house. Something too large to be a bird.