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

  Shereen practically crushed Ryan in her quest for a closer look. She closed in on the blade but didn’t make any move to touch it. Her reverence made it obvious, I thought, that she knew what it was, or at least, what it was capable of.

  “But Nicodemo is dead.” Basil’s eyes were wide and glued to the blade.

  “Elda sent me his things. Dante is also dead.”

  Another hush went through the room. Even Ryan looked shocked.

  I explained what the note had said, and the room was so quiet when I finished you could have heard an ant marching across the floor. Basil and Shereen seemed incapable of drawing their eyes from the knife, but neither moved to touch it.

  “So, what is it?” Ms. Shepherd asked, her voice filled with impatience.

  It was clear from Mehmet’s expression that he didn’t know what it was either.

  “It’s ghost steel,” Basil said.

  Tomio glanced at me. “That’s the other Chinese character: ghost.”

  I looked at Basil. “What’s ghost steel?”

  Ryan finally got up and came over to look. “Can I see it?”

  “Don’t touch it,” Georjie emphasized again, patronizing Ryan on purpose, like he was five. I almost threw an arm around her for that. She handed the blade to him so he could take it by the handle.

  He took the knife, and immediately touched the blade with a finger. He snatched it back, cursing but also looking elated.

  Georjie sent me a half-lidded look of bored disbelief. “Seriously?”

  “He’s not the brightest,” I told her.

  But Ryan laughed, too amazed to care about my insult. He handed the blade back to Georjie. “That’s incredible.”

  “It is,” Basil agreed. “Remarkable. I have a sample, somewhere.”

  “You have some of this? Here? In the academy?” Ryan looked like he was torn between throttling and hugging the headmaster.

  “Just a small chunk,” Basil admitted.

  I produced the box.

  “Yes, there it is. Thank you, Saxony. Quite so. I found it at an estate sale in 1990. In fact, I’m ashamed to say I never paid for it. I’m not entirely sure it was for sale, but I wrapped it in a kerchief and pocketed it, intending to take it to the proprietor to make an offer. But an emergency came up, one that your father, Ryan, had something to do with, and I forgot all about it until much later.”

  “Was that the estate sale where my dad set fire to the drapes? I’ve heard that story a million times,” Ryan said.

  “The very same. How remarkable to see something actually forged of the stuff. For a time, I tried to learn whatever I could about the substance. I sent samples to geologists, who could handle it without being hurt by it, and they claimed it was simple quartz and suggested I was obtuse for wasting their time. Can you imagine? Quartz!” Basil looked appropriately scandalized.

  “Clearly, it’s not quartz,” Shereen said.

  “No. It’s called ghost steel, but in fact it’s not steel at all. It shares precisely zero properties with steel, well, other than being hard. It doesn’t respond to any level of heat, but it is on the brittle side. It can be broken by a strong enough mage, if only touching it could be endured.” Basil’s amazed gaze drifted back to the box. “How diabolical to have made a weapon from it.”

  “It’s genius,” Ryan observed. “Don’t you see the serendipity? It makes what happened to my brother worthwhile.”

  We stared at Ryan in open bewilderment. Even the background conversation from the monitors seemed to have subdued itself in confusion.

  Basil finally broke the silence. “Good heavens, man. What a thing to say.”

  Ryan rolled his eyes heavenward, then looked at me. “And you call me the dense one?”

  “Humor us,” Georjie ventured, gently.

  “If Dante hadn’t taken my brother’s fire, Dante wouldn’t have died. If he hadn’t died, Enzo wouldn’t have sent Nico’s stuff to Elda. Elda’s a decent chick, obviously she thinks highly enough of Saxony to send it here. Putting that,” he jabbed a finger at the box in Georjie’s hands, “into our possession.” He stopped there, waiting for us to get to the conclusion he’d obviously reached.

  “Are you saying, this is the weapon we need to stop Nero?” I asked, slowly.

  “Well, duh.” Ryan returned to the couch and plopped into it, like he’d solved all our problems, and the rest of the world’s besides.

  “Ryan,” Basil began, “I don’t entirely disagree, but I think it’s dangerous to assume that this little creation, as dastardly as it is, will be sufficient to stop a mage who has now absorbed six out of the seven original idle fires. What we’re dealing with is a supernatural beyond our comprehension. Getting close enough to pierce him with it would be a challenge on its own. Whether its magic would even affect such a powerful mage, who—let’s face it—might as well be labeled a demi-god now, is completely unknown.”

  Ryan stretched both arms out then laced his fingers over his head, letting them rest on his skull as he tilted his head back. He eyed the headmaster with disdain, which made me want to smack him. “You have a better idea?”

  Shereen took a gleeful stab at a few: “A bomb? Semi-automatic weapons? Anything we might fire from a distance?”

  Ryan frowned. “You’re not getting it. That thing is the reason Gage had to lose his fire. That thing is what will stop Nero. We’re supernaturals, that means supernatural serendipity conspires to help us when we need it. Gage’s sacrifice has to have meaning, and this gives it meaning. If you can’t see that, well, I don’t know how to help you.”

  I thought about the fight with the storm-demon in Saltford, and the fact that Akiko had been a demon-hunter and willing to sacrifice herself for us. I thought about the crystal of Atlantis that Targa had described, and how Petra had unearthed the ancient ruins in a single night so it could be located, and the curse broken. I thought about the fae queen called Elphame who was now in possession of an apparently harmless rosebud that held trapped within it the spirit of a malevolent witch who could be buried no other way, and only a Wise as powerful as Georjie could have contained her there.

  The expressions on Basil, Mehmet, Shereen and Tomio mirrored doubt, but as I looked into my fae friend’s eyes, I wondered if Ryan might prove to be right. I understood the need for tragedy to make sense, really, I did. Did that mean that tragedy always made sense? I didn’t know.

  The fuzzed and distant sound of an electronically filtered voice drew our attention to Ms. Shepherd, who put her fingers to her earpiece.

  “They’ve found it,” she said, moving to where she could peer over Mehmet’s shoulder.

  Her words had the effect of an air raid siren on everyone except for Georjie. We bolted into a cluster behind Basil’s desk, cramming together to get a view of the screen. Georjie wandered a little further into the room, watching us with a bemused expression, holding the box at her side.

  Mehmet clicked on the link which had popped into his messaging feed. It opened a neon yellow outline of a map of Eurasia against a black background. A small green dot blinked, sending green ripples outward from its center. Mehmet’s fingers skimmed over the keys and the trackpad, zooming in. “This is it,” he breathed. “The point the radiologists and linguists have narrowed to. Here we go.”

  The map was too blank to hazard a guess about the dot’s precise location. I could find Turkey on a world map, but if you asked me to point to Ankara or Istanbul, I’d be at a loss.

  A satellite image, starting out blurry and pixilated, sharpened into a topographical overhead view.

  “There.” He jabbed a finger at the green dot, then made a line toward another dot with a name beneath it in small letters. “Closest airport is Nevşehir.”

  Ms. Shepherd snatched up her phone and dialed. Holding the mobile to her ear, she moved away from Basil’s desk and put her back to us. A moment later she turned and glanced up, seeing us watching her expectantly. She snapped her fingers and barked. “What are you doing? We leave fo
r the London Airport in fifteen minutes. Now! Move, move, move!”

  10

  It is wherever they are

  We were somewhere over the Mediterranean. Ms. Shepherd had told us to get sleep while we could, because the moment we got off the plane, we’d be hustled into choppers and headed as-the-crow-flies for the epicenter. By the time we’d lifted off the tarmac at London City Airport, it was nearly ten that evening, which had made Ms. Shepherd crusty as she muttered about incompetent fools.

  There’d been no news from any of the contacts at the world’s airports, small or large. No sightings of Nero. I wondered if by this point he had some ability to travel without a plane. For all we knew, the man might be immortal by now. A scary thought that kept me from sleeping.

  Tomio sat beside me in an aisle seat with a sleep mask on, but I didn’t think he was having much success sleeping either. The seats were soft and as comfortable as plane seats could be, but the grim reality—the grim unknown—of what we were headed into had a disturbing effect on slumber.

  Ms. Shepherd had procured the smallest plane available that could make the journey without requiring a fuel-up in Istanbul, which meant it was much too big for our small party. When we landed, it would be in Nevşehir.

  Georjie had not been invited. She’d volunteered to come, but neither Ms. Shepherd nor Basil would take responsibility for her, and in my heart I was relieved. Georjayna though, had decided that rather than jumping on the first train back to Blackmouth, she’d wait a few days for us to return to Dover, in case it was all over quickly. She wanted to be there to receive us. She had books, a beautiful garden, and claimed to be perfectly happy to house-sit the academy.

  I slouched in my seat with my knees propped up. My reading light was on, illuminating the pages of Nico’s journal where it lay open against my lap. I’d been skimming the pages of the Italian entries for the last ten minutes, wishing for a functioning Wi-Fi connection so I could translate it. I’d half expected Ms. Shepherd to snatch it away and send it to a lab, but either she wasn’t interested in anything additional since we had our target, or she’d forgotten about it.

  I spotted words here and there that I recognized. No coherent picture had formed, though. Most of the entries weren’t even full sentences but bullet points, some ticked with checkmarks. I could translate a few of those. They were things like deliveries of packages at locations in Venice or nearby Mestre, or offers that had been made, and subsequently accepted or denied. It never gave much detail about to whom these offers were made or what they were for. It seemed that Nico had been using the journal as a catch-all for day-to-day information about his activities.

  I flipped through the pages faster, wondering why Elda had sent it to me. Surely it would have been better left in Isaia’s hands. Then again, Nicodemo had worked for a crime boss, maybe Elda didn’t want Isaia knowing too much about his father’s doings.

  Then there was the Turkish section. A flip through that was basically useless. I had zero understanding of the language. As the pages flew past, my eye caught on a drawing that made me pause and sit up. It was a small, poorly done sketch in black ink, smack in the middle of a written entry. It looked like a cluster of eggs that someone had draped shoelaces over.

  My heart skittered and picked up speed as I found an entry above the drawing, written in Italian. It was a simple phrase, one I had enough of the language to understand, though it didn’t entirely make sense. I reached over and pressed on Tomio’s knee.

  He made a soft grunt and shifted up his sleep mask enough to peer at me from beneath it. “Trying to sleep, here.”

  “Look at this,” I whispered, holding the drawing under the reading light.

  He peered at it from underneath his mask, his head tilted back. As the importance of it registered, he slid the mask to the top of his head, making his hair stand up around it in spikes. Then he took the journal from me and stared at it. “What is that? Are those what I think they are?”

  “Look at the caption.” I pointed at the Italian entry, which had clearly been added by Nicodemo at some point later.

  “I see it. È ovunque si trovino,” he read aloud. His gaze flicked to mine. “What does that mean?”

  “It means: It is, wherever they are.”

  I watched as this took time to sink in, my heart knocking blood audibly past my eardrums. Tomio’s gaze drifted back to the drawing.

  “What is it?” I asked, my voice fluttery even through my whisper. I was afraid to venture an opinion first, because my opinion seemed too far-fetched. If Tomio’s thoughts hadn’t immediately jumped to the story that Basil had told us while we were in Naples about the original fire, then I didn’t want to prompt it. He might have some other idea of what “it” was talking about, but there was no mistaking what those egg-like objects were, and he knew it as well as I.

  Tomio sucked in a breath and looked at the top of Basil’s head where the headmaster was asleep a few rows up. “Should we wake him?”

  “I think he’d kill us if we didn’t.”

  Nodding, Tomio scrambled out of the seat and I tumbled after him. We scampered up the aisle to Basil. I flicked on the reading light over his seat as Tomio slipped through the seats ahead of Basil to come around to his other side. We woke him, pincer-style.

  His eyes came open immediately. Seemed he was having trouble sleeping, too. “What is it?”

  “Look at this.” I thrust the drawing beneath the light’s glare.

  Like a man not quite sure if he’s dreaming or not, Basil rubbed his eyes, sat up, and took the book with one hand. He patted his chest, looking for his glasses, and found them in his inside jacket pocket. The headmaster was the only person I knew who still dressed posh when everyone else around him had opted for t-shirts and sweat pants. He put the specs on and inspected the drawing with clearer vision. It took a few seconds before he reacted, but when he did, it was an artfully crafted curse word. He glanced at Tomio, then to me, then down to the page.

  “Where did you get this?” His finger shook a little as he pointed at the drawing. “These are the orbs!”

  “It came in the box Elda sent. We were so hung up on the knife that we didn’t talk much about the journal.” The words tumbled out of me. “You see the Italian phrase?”

  “In among all the Turkish? Yes, I see it. My Italian is rusty, please humor an old man.”

  “It means: it is, wherever they are.”

  Basil’s eyes looked the size of saucers, being behind the strong lenses of his glasses practically made them pop. His cheeks looked pale beneath his hours-old stubble. “All this time. It was right under my nose.”

  Tomio braced his shoulder against the back of the seat in front of him, getting a better view of Basil’s face. “What do you mean?”

  Basil lay the journal open on his lap and took off his glasses. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, taking a moment to gather his thoughts. “After I came into possession of the first orb in 1990, I spent the next three years searching for more. I knew from the myths that there were supposed to be seven. It wasn’t until 1994—when a progressive friend of mine convinced me to have dial-up installed—that I was able to locate another one through a website that sold unique items. Of course, I bought that one immediately, and paid a small fortune for it. The owner, a Brazilian art collector, had no clue what it was, but knew it would be valuable to someone. It didn’t come with any information, no story on where it had been found. In fact, I had to sign an agreement before using the site that was like a non-disclosure. Buyers could make any purchases they wanted, and sellers could peddle whatever they wanted, as long as they agreed to operate under a blanket of universal anonymity.”

  He put his spectacles back in place, his expression turned sheepish. “I kept looking, but after that I never found any more. I used to dream about them, vivid, disturbing dreams. There was always this feeling that if I didn’t get my hands on the orbs, all of them, that something terrible would happen.”

  “In your dreams,
you had this feeling?” I asked. “Or in waking life?”

  “Only in my dreams. As soon as I woke, the feeling would fade. I ignored it, but the dreams intensified. I was beginning to feel as though I might go crazy if I didn’t try to do something about it. I found a therapist. She suggested that since I couldn’t find the rest of the orbs, that I make them instead, that having a complete collection, which my subconscious so desired—even if the collection wasn’t authentic—might make the night terrors go away.”

  I hardly breathed. This was the story behind the secret studio. Finally!

  I sensed a presence behind me and looked up to see that Ryan had slid into a seat ahead of us.

  He peered over the seat back to look into Basil’s lap. “Can I see that?”

  Basil lifted the journal into Ryan’s hands, who stared at with glassy eyes. “Holy shite.”

  “Did you do it?” Tomio prompted Basil.

  The headmaster nodded. “I was embarrassed about it, though. I was raised never to show weakness, and by that time I had students wandering every nook and cranny of the academy. I would have been horrified if they stumbled across my artsy-fartsy activities. Which were more fartsy than artsy, let me tell you. I never did have much in the way of creative talent, though I tried my best.”

  “Don’t say that,” I urged, recalling the drawings in the greenhouse. They weren’t brilliant, but they weren’t half-bad, either.

  Basil waved a hand. “I’ve made peace with it. As it happened, there was an empty cellar beneath my office. During the renovations, its access got closed off, so I had a stair built that led down to it from my storage closet. When I had time, which wasn’t often, I would go down there. I would listen to music and try to imagine what the other orbs might look like, based on the differences between the two that I had acquired. I started by doing paintings, then moved to plaster and molds. Got quite good at that, better than I ever was at painting, in point of fact.” Basil chuckled self-consciously.