Source Fire: A Young Adult Fantasy (Arcturus Academy Book 5) Read online

  I took the package from Tomio and looked at the postage. “It’s from Venice, express post, but there’s no return address.”

  Georjie gave a quiet gasp and moved from the chair, where she’d been sitting, to beside me on the sofa. “Could it be from Dante?”

  I frowned, hefting the weight of the box. It wasn’t light.

  Tomio perched on the coffee table across from me, knees almost touching mine. “This ain’t Christmas, quit guessing and open it.”

  Tearing the tape off the box, the packing slip fell out of its plastic envelope and into my lap.

  Georjie snatched it up. “Hmm. It’s insured, but there’s no value listed.”

  Inside the box was bubble wrap and layers of crumpled up craft paper. Underneath that lay a small white envelope. I recognized the handwriting which spelled out my first and last name. I smiled. “It’s from Elda.”

  “Isaia’s mom?” Georjie’s brows lifted.

  We hadn’t talked about the Baseggios in a while, and I had only ever referred to my previous employer as Mrs., until after we’d become friends. Georjie knew her as Signora Baseggio.

  I nodded. “Color me intrigued.”

  Opening the letter, I scanned the note. “Even more intriguing.”

  I showed it to Tomio and Georjayna.

  Georjie read aloud: “Call me when you get this, ideally before you see what’s inside. I need to explain.”

  Tomio handed me my cell.

  I dialed Elda’s number, and got her almost at once.

  “Hello, Saxony.” Elda sounded like she had just woken up, even though it was early evening. “The package has been arrived, I see.”

  “Yes.” I was too distracted to correct her English. “I haven’t looked inside yet. Can I put you on speaker phone? Tomio is here, you met him when you visited the academy, and one of my good friends from Canada is also here, Georjayna Sutherland.”

  “As you like,” Elda replied. “I’m sure this will be of extra… ultra interest to Tomio, given that he is one of yours.”

  Interesting that she was referring to our kind. This wasn’t just a late birthday present, then, or a random gift.

  Pressing the speaker button, I set the phone on the arm of the sofa. “Go ahead.”

  “First, I have some bad news.” She sounded melodramatically sad as she said this. “This is why I didn’t want to say you in a letter. I’d prefer to say in person, but you’re there. I’m here. And here we are.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at the phone as Georjie covered a smile. It wasn’t just me, Elda’s English had deteriorated since I’d last seen her. Like, a lot.

  “Dante is dead.”

  Wow. Okay. That came out perfectly. There was a beat of silence that covered us like a layer of new-fallen snow. Georjie lost her smile, and Tomio’s head recoiled. I searched for words and came up blank. Mercifully, Elda continued.

  “Last week a courier delivered a package from Enzo. The note told that the contents had belonged to Nicodemo and were found in his room after his death. He explained, Enzo did, not Nicodemo, obviously, that his son arrived home in horrible pain.” Elda hiccupped before continuing. “Suffering from the curse that also plagued Nicodemo. There was nothing any of the best doctors of Italia could do for Dante. He didn’t recover. He is gone, and Enzo wants nothing to do with any magi. He believes his line has been cursed, because his son interfered where he should not. He apologized for not giving Nico’s things to Isaia sooner, and told me that he kept nothing. In his words, ‘with this final transaction, Isaia and the Baseggio famiglia will be pulito’d from memory.’ It will be for him as though Nico and his kind never were.”

  This speech hammered me with blow after blow. Emotions as mixed as a mutt rose unbidden: sadness for the father who’d lost his only son, vindication that a crime had gone punished, shock that Dante had not survived the process that I and Tomio had both survived, and anticipation for what could possibly be inside the box.

  After that, my armpits felt positively swampy.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Dante,” I said, when no one else spoke. “I didn’t like him, obviously, and I’m not fond of Enzo either, but death isn’t something to celebrate.”

  I was lying, though. If the news had been that Nero had died instead of Dante, I would have popped some bubbly, even if only to watch the snuffed magi enjoy it.

  “Yes, well I’m not sorry,” said Elda, as flat and blunt as you’d expect an offended mother to be. “We endured molto years of aggravation from Enzo. If the death of Enzo’s son brings an end to that, then I shall celebrate it with a glass of wine. In fact, I already have. Two. No!” There was a pause. “Three.” She trilled the ‘r’ in ‘three’ as beautifully as any Italian could. “And, I don’t need anyone to celebrate with. I’m perfectly ability, all for myself.”

  Clearly, and her solo celebrations also explained her English.

  I tried not to let the symmetry of her proclamation with my own thoughts about Nero’s potential death bother me. Georjie and Tomio’s faces were carefully blank. I felt like they were watching me for my reaction before they’d commit to their own.

  Elda took an audible sip of her wine, then cleared her voice. “I went through Nico’s things and took what I thought Isaia would want. I’ll give them to him when he’s older. I don’t want to upset him, you understand. Anything to do with the magi, I have passed on to you. I want as little to do with it as Enzo does, and I figure it’s correctly yours now anyway. Do with it as you like.”

  “Thank you,” I said, involuntarily. “How is Isaia?”

  Elda let out a breath, like she was relieved to have done her duty and happy to be moving on to her favorite topic. “Bene. He’s wonderful. He’s growing too fast, and playing soccer. He always wanted to play.”

  “Yes. I know.” In her libations, it seemed Elda had forgotten that I looked after Isaia for a full summer.

  “He’s still nowhere able to keep up with Cristiano, but in a few years, he’ll be very good. He’s also fallen in love with… what, it’s called… parkour?”

  “Street acrobatics?”

  “Si. He has strong of a monkey now. I try not to hover like a scared mama, but some habits die hard.” She smacked her lips. “I always liked that saying.”

  I grinned, imagining my dark-eyed little friend bouncing around the Venetian Calle and bridges. “Cool.”

  “He still asks about you. All the time. In fact, since we saw you at the academy, he’s only asked about you more often. But, he’s not worried about you anymore, so that’s good.”

  Tomio lifted an eyebrow at this and I thought I knew what he was thinking. I was in more danger now than I’d ever been. The Baseggios didn’t need to know that.

  “That’s lovely.” It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I’d come visit when I could, but it seemed a better idea not to get Isaia’s, or my, hopes up.

  “I have to go pick Cristiano up from English,” Elda said. “It’s nice to hear you, Saxony. Now when you visit Venice, you know Enzo won’t bother you. I don’t think he’ll be in the market for a magus again. Penso di non.”

  “Thanks. Nice to hear your voice too, Elda. Give the boys and Pietro my love.”

  We said goodbye, and I hung up the call.

  “Well, that was enlightening,” said Tomio, then cocked an eyebrow. “Wait, did she say she was going to pick up her boy? With all that alcohol in her system?”

  “She’ll stagger there on foot,” I said, “there are no cars in Venice.” Elda would likely embarrass herself in the process, showing up half-cut and breathing wine fumes at the other moms.

  “Hopefully she doesn’t fall into a canal.” Georjie moved to the floor. “Can you please open it now?”

  I took a breath before lifting out the first bubble-wrapped item. Unraveling the protective layer revealed a small leather-bound journal. It smelled of decades passed somewhere damp. It was plain brown, a little damaged at the edges, and wrapped closed with a leather thong. Opening
it revealed brittle, yellowed pages, and hand-written entries in a language I didn’t recognize. Further in, there were entries by a different hand. Those I recognized, because they were in Italian.

  “Those must be Nicodemo’s notes,” Tomio guessed, his head and Georjie’s bowed over the journal as I paged through it. “But whose are the first ones?”

  “Whoever passed the diary to Nico, I guess. Maybe an ancestor.” I flipped a page open near the front. “What language is that?”

  Tomio grabbed his phone. “Let me search it. Those are Latin letters, but with a hell of a lot of accents. Hang on.” Tomio’s fingers flew over the keyboard as his eyes flashed back and forth from the diary to the phone. His brows cocked again. “It’s Turkish.”

  That brought back a memory. “Dante told me Nico’s grandmother had been Turkish. Interesting. Maybe the diary was hers.”

  Georjie nudged my knee. “What else is there?”

  Setting the diary aside, I lifted the last item from the box. It was heavy. It was just under a foot long and a slender, rectangular shape. Removing the bubble wrap revealed a cardboard box with two characters on the lid. I showed them to Tomio.

  “Is this Japanese?”

  He squinted at it, then his expression brightened. “Nope. It’s a form of old Chinese. I can’t read the first character, but I can tell you that the second one means ‘steel’ because it’s very close to the Japanese character for steel. My guess?” He pointed at the box, his eyes bright with intrigue. “That’s a blade.”

  Tomio was right.

  Beneath the lid, a shiny black handle protruded from a paper sleeve, into which the blade had been slid. Sliding off the sleeve elicited a gasp from all three of us.

  “What the hell is it made from? Porcelain? It’s doesn’t look anything like steel. Weird that’s what it says on the box.” Georjie shifted for a better look.

  The blade was a bright, pure white. There was a single character embossed into the blade, just below the haft.

  “That’s the name of the metalsmith.” Tomio pointed at the character.

  “But it’s not metal.” I held the blade up in the poor side-lighting of the lounge.

  It wasn’t porcelain, there were flecks of something reflective in it. I didn’t recognize it from my metal studies. Past experience told me that the best way to identify a metal was to handle it. Touching the blade lightly with my fingertips, I jerked my hand back in shock and hissed as pain seared the sensitive skin of my forefinger.

  “What the hell? It’s freezing!”

  Tomio frowned. “Can I see?”

  “Be careful.” I handed the blade over to him.

  Tomio pressed his thumb to the blade lightly, and pulled back as fast as I had. We exchanged a shocked look. What kind of blade could harm someone with a single touch?

  “It feels like it’s coated with nitroglycerine, or something,” Tomio said.

  “May I?” Georjie held out her hand. “I have to see this for myself.”

  Hesitating a moment, Tomio handed the blade over. “It hurts like hell.” He looked at his thumb. “I’ve got a blister.”

  My fingertip still throbbed and I looked at it, dismayed. “Me too.”

  Georjie gingerly touched a fingertip to the blade, but didn’t pull back her hand. She frowned, then pressed the blade against her palm. Her brown eyes found mine, then Tomio’s. “Nothing. I don’t feel anything.”

  “Bloody hell,” Tomio breathed, alarm rising in his face. “It’s made to hurt magi. Do you think it will melt?”

  Georjie looked confused at how Tomio got from his initial observation to his question, so I explained. “We’re trained to melt blades on contact, so they can’t hurt us.”

  “Oh.” She looked duly impressed.

  “I’m not sure I want to try, though.” I ran a hand across my brow, feeling the damp that had gathered there. There was something niggling at my memory, something that reminded me of this blade. Something I had seen in the academy.

  “What are you thinking?” Georjie slid the blade back into its paper sleeve and set it in its box. She put the lid on, like she didn’t want Tomio or me to inspect it any further.

  “I’ve seen that substance somewhere before, only not in knife form.” I sat back against the sofa, wracking my brains.

  Georjie got to her feet and stretched her back. “In the library, maybe? Or Basil’s office? You said it’s full of cool stuff.”

  Tomio grabbed my knees. “The professor’s lounge!”

  We exchanged an enlightened look and got up at the same time, bumping chests.

  “Bring that,” I called to Georjie as we bolted for the door.

  The professor’s lounge was unlocked and needed airing. No one had used it since the Fire Games, and a layer of dust had been allowed to collect on the light fixtures and desks. We made a beeline for the glass case under the window where a collection of raw minerals and rocks lay under cover.

  “There.” Tomio jabbed his finger against the glass. A few inches down, a white chunk of jagged rock sat benignly on a bit of tweed, laid within a wooden box. “Is it the same, or is it the same?”

  We bent our heads over the unlabeled item.

  “It’s the same,” Georjie pronounced.

  “It’s too hard to tell in this light,” I said.

  Even the overhead lamps only threw a muted amber glow. It was atmospheric but terrible for identifying a lump of mystery rock by its finer details.

  “Here.” Georjie reached up and scraped back the drapes along the narrow, attic-style dormer window above the case.

  Natural light swept into the room, reflecting off the little particles embedded in the pale substance. My heart thudded hard with recognition, but there was only one way to be sure. I found the latch keeping the lid closed and lifted the cover back.

  As I reached a finger out to touch the lump, Tomio’s hand snaked out and stopped me. “Let me do it.”

  Before I could protest, he tapped a finger against the top of the rock, then brought it to his mouth. “Yep. Same. Ow.”

  I let out a harsh breath. “What the hell is this stuff? And why hasn’t Basil told us about it? Why does he have a chunk of it sitting here in the library?”

  “Given that Nicodemo had a whole blade made of the stuff, I wish we could ask him instead.” Tomio frowned at his second blister, and somehow also managed to look impressed at the damage a simple touch could inflict.

  “Seems like this might be something worth disturbing Basil for,” Georjie said. “But it’s up to you guys. I’m just the peanut gallery.”

  “You’re hardly that,” Tomio said. “You’re the one who showed us what Nero was really up to.”

  “I agree. Let’s bust up the party. Come on.” I took the box containing the murdery rock, and led them from the lounge.

  We’d been given a directive not to leave the academy until we’d had our next location target. Basil wanted us all in one place and ready to go when the time was right. He’d also asked not to be disturbed as he, Ms. Shepherd and Mehmet closed themselves in his office with multiple computer monitors, connected to scientists from multiple locations across the world. In some ways, Tomio, Ryan and I were treated like equals, and in other ways we were treated like students who would just get in the way. After listening through the keyhole, I surmised Basil was right to kick us out. There was a lot of incredibly dull, academic conversation going on in there.

  I rapped on his door with a knuckle.

  “Come,” answered Ms. Shepherd.

  I opened the door to see Basil and Mehmet bent over a computer monitor. They had glasses perched on the end of their noses, which made them look distantly related. To my surprise, Ryan and Shereen were seated on the couch, and from the looks of it, quite cozy. I assumed that Ryan was ingratiating himself to an agent, the clever weasel. I wanted to ask him what he was doing in here when the rest of us students had been banished, but didn’t want to sound petty. I was fine with sounding petty when we were alone, b
ut not in front of adults.

  “Can you zoom in?” Basil glanced up briefly, not upset to see us. In fact, he looked almost jovial. They must be hot on Nero’s heels.

  Timing was everything.

  “Hi, kids,” the headmaster said.

  Yep, he was excited. He never called us kids unless he was feeling upbeat.

  “We’re getting close. We know it’s going to be Turkey, just haven’t nailed the coordinates quite yet.”

  That comment knocked my peevishness about Ryan right out of my head.

  “We figured it would be Turkey,” said Tomio, a bit peevishly himself.

  Ryan scoffed. “You did not.”

  “We did, actually,” I lied, ignoring Georjie’s look and keeping the box containing the lump of white rock behind my back so I could refresh Basil’s memory with it, if need be.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that the next location would be in Turkey, but that’s because I’d been distracted by the freezy white blade. Given a bit more time, I would have come to that conclusion. I was sure of it.

  “How did you figure that?” Shereen appeared much less annoyed and skeptical than Ryan, which made me like her a little more.

  I wondered if I needed to warn her against dating my semi-deranged frenemy, but dismissed the thought as her ferocity on the tundra came surging back to me. A woman like Shereen could eat Ryan alive. She didn’t need any help from me.

  “Saxony got some interesting items in the mail, from Nicodemo,” Tomio said.

  I appreciated his abbreviated version events so we could get to the point faster. “It contained that.”

  I pointed at the box in Georjie’s hands. She stepped forward and lifted the lid.

  At the mention of Nicodemo’s name, Basil stood erect. At the revelation of the blade, he came around his desk, fixing his glasses more firmly into place. He made a move to take the box, but Georjie held it back.

  “Let me show you,” she said. “You’ll understand why in a second.”

  She set the lid on the table by the carafe of water and lifted out the knife. As she slid the paper sleeve off the blade, Basil and Shereen gasped.