Defying Fate (18 page)

“I can’t. I’m just messing with you.”

James laughed. She laughed. The sun caught on her curls, highlighting them a coppery shade of red that made her cheeks seem to glow.

But then Elise cut off abruptly. She was staring at something in the trees.

James turned. A stag watched from the ridge above them. The points of its wicked horns and what must have been extremely long legs were half-concealed by shrubbery.

Once he made out the shape of one deer, he could pick out the others, too, though they were somewhat better concealed in the trees.

One buck. Two does. And two fawns.

James and Elise were only separated from the herd by fifteen feet of craggy cliff. If the buck decided that they were a threat, they would hardly have time before it charged. Yet Elise only stared at the buck, and it stared back.

The wind through the trees sounded like the rush of tires on smooth freeway. The sun was warm, snow and all, and James thought that he had finally seen where Elise belonged: among the earth and the forest, a primal force of nature.

James’s eyes opened, and he realized that the sound of the wind had really been Brianna’s car.

They were approaching South Reno, but it wasn’t the South Reno that he remembered. All of the familiar landmarks he expected to see—the shopping mall, the sweeping parks, and the geothermal station—had been torn down. Guard stations and towering iron fences stood in their places.

Brianna slowed to a stop behind a short line of cars waiting to enter. The Union only allowed one vehicle through at a time, after what seemed to be a lengthy inspection of the entire car.

James twisted to look at his son in the back seat. Nathaniel was asleep again. His shirt was still covered in Hannah’s blood.

“Get off the freeway. We need to find a way around the guard station,” James said, grabbing a blanket to toss it over Nathaniel’s sleeping form.

“Nah, it’s fine,” Brianna said. “I’ve got this.”

“What are you talking about?”

She waved a hand. “I told you, it’s fine.”

A witch was walking up the line of cars to speak to each driver. James triggered the glamor spell. Prickles washed over his skin, as if his entire body had fallen asleep at once. In the side mirror, the reflection of his gray-stubbled jaw had turned clean-shaven. He looked young, brown-haired, and Mexican—identical to Anthony, whose appearance he had “borrowed” for the spell.

Brianna stared at him. “Holy crap, that’s…”

“Not right now,” he said in his own voice.

Activating his magic immediately killed all of the electricity in the checkpoint. The red signal dimmed, darkened. James watched the guards inside the booths take out their earpieces and look at them in confusion.

The guard rapped on their window with her gun. Brianna rolled it down. “Hi,” she said. “We’re on our way to UNR for the study.”

What study?
James tried not to stare at Brianna.

The guard bent over to look in the car. “He’s not old enough,” she said, jerking her chin at Nathaniel.

Brianna put her hand on James’s knee. His skin crawled. “We couldn’t leave our little guy behind.”

James glanced back at Nathaniel. His glasses had fallen off. With the blanket to his chin and uneven bangs, he did look like a little boy—though probably not little enough for Brianna and Anthony to have produced him.

“Get out,” the witch said. “I’m going to search your car.”

“I don’t want to disturb him,” Brianna said.

Her lie was already falling apart—the guard didn’t look remotely convinced. But when James reached for a spell to attack, Brianna’s hand tightened on his leg, digging her fingernails into his thigh.

Brianna held up her wallet. It bulged with money. “Can you just inspect this?”

After a beat, the witch took it from her. When Brianna took it back a moment later, the wallet looked much thinner.

The guard stepped back and waved them through.

“See?” Brianna said when they had cleared the checkpoint. “I told you that it was fine.”

XV

James didn’t allow his glamor
to dissolve after they passed the checkpoint. He clutched it to his skin like armor.

“A study at UNR?” he asked Brianna, glancing over his shoulder at the retreating guard post.

“It’s been all over the blogosphere,” she said. “The Union’s experimenting on people in Reno now.”

“What kind of experiments?”

Brianna shrugged. “Who cares? It saved us.” She picked up speed as they hurtled down the highway, weaving between the empty lanes. “Where to now?”

James wasn’t sure what to tell her. Should he have her take them downtown, straight to the mirror city? Was he ready to pass through the gates? “Cross over to I-80 and get off on Keystone,” he decided after a moment.

Brianna did as he ordered, shooting him looks out of the corner of her eye, as if she couldn’t quite believe what her eyes were telling her. “You’re kind of sexy like that.”

Elise certainly seemed to think so. “I’ll choose to take that as a compliment.”

On the west end of Reno, the devastation wasn’t too bad. There were a lot of abandoned, ash-covered cars parked on the sides of the road, and a few blocks were cordoned off to block sinkholes that Yatai had created, but everything was otherwise normal. With the sun shining, it was hard to believe how much of a disaster had befallen Reno.

Despite the beautiful day and the wind smelling of blooming sage and sun-warmed earth, the streets were empty. Boarded-up windows concealed empty houses. Any cars that hadn’t been destroyed were missing, and the sidewalks were empty.

It was a dead city—as much a ghost town as any James might pass on the drive to southern Nevada.

Motion and Dance was just as dusty as the other buildings on the street, but everything else looked normal. The grass was even green—a condition that would end within the next two or three weeks, as soon as summer’s blistering heat struck.

Brianna pulled into the parking lot. She turned in her seat to face him.

“I want to know how to do…
that
,” Brianna said, waving at James’s face. “I want to know
everything
you know. Landon might be dead, but I can still lead the coven if you teach me. Let me be your apprentice.”

James massaged his fingers over his temple. He could feel a headache forming. “You will not be my apprentice. I don’t
have
apprentices.”

“Pamela had apprentices.”

“Thanks for the ride,” he said, getting out of the car. “I hope your trip back is safe.”

“Trip back? But I’ve driven hundreds of miles to help you!” Brianna said.

“And I’m grateful,” he said. “But this is where we separate.”

He opened the back door and gently shook Nathaniel’s knee. He jolted awake, staring wildly around the car as if they were under attack. James could see the instant that he remembered what had happened over the last few days—his face hardened into a mask, and he shoved his glasses onto his nose.

“We’re here?” Nathaniel asked, squinting at James’s magicked features. It wasn’t a look of confusion; he looked to be analyzing the magic, trying to understand the spell that had changed his father’s face.

“We’re here,” James confirmed.

Nathaniel pushed the blanket off and got out. Brianna rolled down the window and hung her arm over the side.

“I’m going back to Colorado to see what I can figure out,” she said. “Give me a call when you’re done with…whatever you’re doing. I could use your help salvaging the coven now that Landon’s gone.”

“I’ll consider it,” James said, which was his way of saying, “Not a chance in Hell.”

“You’ll want to be somewhere safe before it gets dark,” Brianna said. “There are demons underground. A lot of demons. I can feel them. And as soon as the sun goes down, I bet they’re all going to come crawling out looking for something to eat. You know?”

“Yes. Right. Thanks for the warning.”

Nathaniel stood on the sidewalk until Brianna’s car disappeared down the street. It looked like he wished he could go with her—maybe he was having second thoughts about their ridiculous rescue mission.

James had bigger things to worry about than second thoughts. He drank in the sight of the studio, his heart aching.

One of the front windows had been broken. The carpet in front of the reception desk was sprinkled with glass. He reached through the broken window to unlock the door, then stepped inside.

The memories that Metaraon had dragged to the surface seemed so recent, rather than years old. It was like prodding a fresh wound.

James could almost hear Betty laughing in the dance hall.

Nathaniel followed him through the dance hall, where the blue exercise mats still covered the floor. The boy tapped a key on the piano. It was desperately out of tune, and the note rang sour.

A glimmer of metal under the piano caught James’s eye—a pair of rings that had been tossed aside in a moment of passion.

James fished the rings out from under the piano and pocketed them.

“Who’s that?” Nathaniel asked, staring hard at James.

He touched his face. He could still feel his own nose and chin, but it was Anthony’s face in the mirrored walls.

“This is a man named Anthony Morales,” James said. “He’s a…friend.” He let the glamor fall away. His skin turned white again, gray stubble reappeared on his cheeks, and exhausted blue eyes stared back at him from the mirror.

“How did you do it? Not just that one. All of them.” Nathaniel waved at James’s body to indicate the marks. Even with the glamor concealing his skin, the magic contained within the spelled tattoos glimmered faintly.

“Like I told Brianna—”

“No crap. Just tell me,” Nathaniel insisted. He sounded exactly like Hannah when he talked like that.

James sighed, running a hand over the stinging welts on his arm. “It’s hard to explain. Human magic requires a source of power, preferably one that originates from plants. The strength of the spell correlates to the energy source, which is why sacrifices are sometimes—”

“I know,” Nathaniel interrupted.

Of course he did.

James stared helplessly at his son, wondering how the hell he was meant to bridge this gap between them. Nathaniel was already educated well beyond the point that any boy his age should have been. James couldn’t speak to him like Pamela spoke to her initiates.

He would have to approach it from a different angle.

“Arcane ethereal magic is self-powering,” James said. “The words themselves are the magic, augmentable with herbs and crystals, rather than using them as a source of power.”

He extended his arm toward Nathaniel. James had used all of the spells on that forearm, but the imprint of welts remained. Even with increasingly kopis-like attributes, he couldn’t heal the burn of magic quite so quickly. The red marks stung when he looked at them, as if they burned anew.

“See these marks? It’s a bastardization of written magic and arcane ethereal magic—what they used to call magecraft.”

Nathaniel rolled his eyes. “Magecraft hasn’t worked for hundreds of years.”

“Thousands,” James said.

“And only angels can perform it.”

He coughed into his fist. “That’s true. Mostly. It’s been strictly regulated by the Council of Dis, but the touchstones of the Treaty have all been killed.”

Nathaniel’s eyes widened. He sat on the piano bench.

“So there’s nothing to stop humans from using it safely.”

“‘Safe’ is not the word I would use,” James said. “But…desperate times.” He pushed his sleeve down again, then clenched his fist on the warding rings—the only reason that he had returned to Motion and Dance in the first place.
Very desperate
.

Nathaniel didn’t seem to hear him. He was rubbing his own arms, lost in thought, as if imagining what he could do with that kind of power.

James hoped that he would never find out.

They headed out immediately. James
dug the bicycles out of the shed—a small red mountain bike for Elise, and a larger blue one for James. He pushed Elise’s bike toward Nathaniel. “Take this one.”

Nathaniel wrinkled his nose. “That’s a girl’s bike.”

“You’re welcome to walk,” James said, climbing onto his bicycle and starting to pedal.

He heard his son follow a few seconds later.

Orange twilight drenched the neighborhood, fading the shadows to blue. The shadows seemed to writhe. Darkness was approaching quickly, and James could feel a familiar tingling growing as the demons underground began to stir.

They climbed north, toward downtown Reno. James set a hard pace, but Nathaniel kept up without complaining.

Once they got on the freeway, they had to weave through the lanes to avoid crumbling concrete that would throw them off of their bikes. It meant James couldn’t stare at the ruination surrounding him, even though it was impossible to ignore. Several distinctive buildings were missing from the skyline.

As the sun grew dimmer, the shadows grew darker. It wasn’t simply an absence of light. The shadows had substance. James’s kopis senses itched.

Nightmares. Reno had been flooded by nightmares.

The ruins of the mirror city were still suspended above downtown Reno, encompassing the area from the Truckee River all the way to St. Mary’s Hospital. It had been deteriorating rapidly the last time that James had seen it, but now it was propped up by Union scaffolding. The honeycomb of metal looked like it hadn’t been maintained since it was originally erected. It was beginning to rust.

There were also multiple cameras on the scaffolds. If the Union hadn’t known that James was coming before, they certainly did now.

He punched the button on Allyson’s disruptor anyway, just in case.

“What
is
that?” Nathaniel asked, staring at the inverted city.

“It used to be an ethereal city in another dimension, but a demon pulled it into ours so that she could use the gates to destroy the world,” James said. “It didn’t work.”

“I get that.”

James took his feet off the pedals and glided through the shadow of Circus Circus’s remains. What used to be one of the tallest buildings in Reno had been sucked into the earth, leaving behind nothing but shattered walls and a lot of broken glass.