“A blessing, huh?” He didn’t see it, but she’d certainly proven herself with the ice spell, so he’d give it a shot.
Seating himself cross-legged on the plastic, so he wouldn’t ruin the rug or upholstery, he palmed the butcher knife he’d lifted from the main kitchen. It was solid in his hand, and far sharper than the steak knife he’d used to offer himself to the makol almost exactly two years earlier. Turning his right hand palm up, he set the knife along the gnarled scar that followed his lifeline. Then he closed his fingers around the blade in a fist and yanked the knife free of it. Cool steel burned, then sang to pain as blood welled up, then dripped down. Taking a moment to review the questions he meant to ask if—
or rather when—he made it back in, he focused on the painting and began to chant the nonsensical words formed by the musician’s glyphs, trying different tones and variations, mixing up the order of the symbols, all while seeking the power that had to be inside him somewhere.
Nothing happened.
In fact, nothing happened for long, long into the night. Grimly, he kept going, letting blood from different ceremonial spots on his body and working every spell fragment he’d absorbed during his months at Skywatch, knowing that he had failed at many things in his life, but he couldn’t afford to fail now. Jade’s mother might have been right about love being a key to winning the war; gods knew the magi drew their powers from one another. But he knew damned well that in this case, it wasn’t about love. It was about the magic. All he had to do was find it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
June 16 Two years, six months, and five days to the zero date Jade slept later than she’d intended, but woke more or less refreshed. Trying not to resent that she’d woken alone, in her own suite, when she would’ve rather been elsewhere, she pulled on jeans and a tight, dark T-shirt, and laced on the boots she’d taken to wearing in place of sandals. Anticipation thrummed low in her gut: She had been banished to the training hall to experiment with her magic.
And that felt damned good.
When she headed over to the main mansion to scrounge some breakfast—her appetite had skyrocketed—she found the place nearly empty. Which felt seriously weird. “Hello?” she called, and heard the word echo back to her.
Granted, the compound wasn’t actually deserted, but with half the magi out on assignment, it sure felt that way.
After a failed attempt to ’port Lucius himself out to Ecuador—something about Lucius, whether the hellmark, the library connection, or something else, had fouled the magic—Strike had ’ported several of the warriors to Ecuador to search for the hellmouth, in case the Banol Kax had somehow returned it to the earth plane in advance of the solstice. Patience and Brandt had gone to Egypt, to the site where Akhenaton’s capital city had stood. The city itself had been thoroughly defaced by Akhenaton’s successors, who had returned the empire to worshiping their familiar pantheon and done their best to wipe Akhenaton from the historical record. Lucius had put the Nightkeepers in contact with a curator he knew from the 2012 doomsday message boards, in the hopes that Patience and Brandt would get lucky and find an artifact or reference giving a clue as to how Akhenaton thought he might usurp the sun itself . . . and from there, how the magi could stop him.
Jade had been left behind, but not in a business-as-usual way. She had an assignment of her own, and it wasn’t in the archive. Which seriously rocked.
Over a breakfast of cold cereal, she wrote down the iceball spell for Strike and the others to try, in the hopes that it wouldn’t be specific just to her. Then, refusing to let herself hesitate at the place where the path split off and ran down to the cottages, she headed to the training hall—which was fire-, water-, and freezeproof—to practice her new magic.
She felt a quick, hard jolt of relief when she called up the spell in her mind and got a buzz of power in response. Grinning in solitary triumph, she held out her hands, shaped an invisible, intangible ball, and whispered the iceball spell. Magic detonated, blue-white light flared, and a shock wave exploded away from her, sending a lettuce-size iceball whizzing across the open hall to slam into the far wall.
When the light died down, exhilaration roared through her. “I did it!”
The wall was ice crazed and coated with thick frost. It had held, but just barely.
After giving herself a moment to do a booty-shaking solo dance that wasn’t the slightest bit dignified or decorous, she pulled herself back to the task at hand, namely figuring out whether she could manage the spell. It didn’t take her long to figure out how much energy to put behind the spell in order to create a manageable blast of cold magic that froze whatever it touched and went where she wanted it to. Remembering a scene from X-Men, she tried to make an ice-sculpture rose, but wound up with a blob instead, so she decided that wasn’t how the magic rolled. But that was okay, because at least it was rolling. Which meant it was time to try morphing another spell.
Jumpy with anticipation, she headed to the temporary archive—aka an unfurnished spare room where the winikin had set up laundry racks and hung the worst of the waterlogged books out to dry under fans. There, she hunted up the Idiot’s Guide , which was boxed up among the other books, the ones that had survived relatively unscathed, with just a little frost damage. Flipping to the last chapter, she paged past the fireball spell to the next standard in the warrior’s arsenaclass="underline" shield magic. Okay, she thought, let’s do this! She focused on the page and opened herself to the magic.
Nothing happened.
The glyphs were there; the translation was there . . . but the shimmer of power wasn’t. She stared at the page for a full minute before she was finally forced to admit that whatever magic she’d been jacked into the day before had deserted her. Again.
“Oh, come on!” she snapped, disgusted. “This isn’t”— fair, she didn’t say, because it was probably past time to man up and accept it. Life wasn’t fair, which sucked, but wasn’t something she could change. The magic worked on its own schedule and by its own rules. And more often than not, apparently, it didn’t work for her. Resisting the urge to bang her forearm against the table, to see if the same brute- force approach that worked for her TV remote might apply to her talent mark, she flipped back a couple of pages and tried another spell. Still no dice.
Frustration welled up inside her along with the aching drag of imminent failure. No, she told herself. You’re not giving up. Not this time. She was better than that, stronger than that.
“Okay,” she said, dropping down cross-legged on the floor. “You’re smart; you can think it through.
Yesterday you looked at the spell the first time and there wasn’t any magic. Then, later, there it was.
What changed?” When she put it that way, the answer was obvious: The difference had been her. The first time she’d been relatively calm. Then Shandi had shown up and dropped an emotional shitstorm on her, and in the aftermath, she’d had her magic. “So . . . what?” she asked the empty room. “I’ve got to be pissed off to access my talent?”
Predictably, the damp books didn’t have an answer for her. But she had a feeling she already knew at least part of the answer; she just didn’t want to go there. Honesty, though, and a certain degree of self-awareness, compelled her to admit that it probably wasn’t about being angry, per se. . . . It was about being open to the emotion. Any emotion. Problem was, emotional openness wasn’t her forte, not by a long shot. Just the opposite, in fact—she had built a career on teaching others how to distance themselves from drama and guard against upheaval. She had Shandi to thank for that. The winikin had closed herself off to affection and emotion in the wake of the massacre, and had taught her charge the value of control for control’s sake, making it Jade’s automatic fallback when it might not have been her natural inclination.