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

  Basil looked from me to Ryan in a species of dazed bemusement. Tomio shot Ryan a sideways glance that wasn’t particularly friendly.

  “So what?” Ryan asked, but took a step away from Tomio. “You have yours, Tomio has his, why is it so shocking that I have mine?”

  I took a step toward him, half expecting him to bolt. Though I understood Ryan to have lied, I knew he’d done it out of shame, not because he was against us, so I didn’t believe he would run. “There’s a good reason why Tomio and I haven’t lost our fire, but you? You have no good reason, unless you’ve been a very”—I took another step—“bad”—I stopped in front of him, looking him in the face—“mage.”

  His eyes flickered with fear, but he closed the distance between us, bumping his chest against me. The tip of his nose nearly touched mine. “How’s that, omniscient one?”

  “Plenary endowment.”

  He faltered. Confusion swept over his features. He stepped back, glancing from me to Tomio and back again.

  Only I knew Tomio’s secret, but there were only the three of us standing here in the hallway. I didn’t think it mattered anymore given the circumstances. It was the clincher I needed to get Ryan to spill.

  “W-what?” He stuttered, his indignance now gone.

  “I never knew the idle color of the little girl who passed her fire to me,” said Tomio, in a tone too gentle for my liking. “I suspected it was violet, but when I shook hands with Fred and Greg, I knew it couldn’t be violet. So, I called Junko’s father and he told me her idle had been red. I should have lost my fire along with the batch that was snuffed while Nero was in Yangjiang, but I didn’t. I didn’t know why, not until the green fire went out just now. Saxony and I both received our fire by plenary endowment. We weren’t born mages, we were born human. We’re like… adopted into the family. Somehow, that must have severed the connection our fires had with the original.”

  I poked Ryan in the shoulder. “But, you…”

  Ryan’s wide gaze whipped to me.

  I felt Basil sidle up to join our group, listening.

  “You were born a mage. You should have lost your fire just now, but you didn’t.” I put my finger in his face. “You have exactly one second to start talking.”

  After waking Ms. Shepherd to update her—she agreed to send a driver to take Basil to the agency for an assessment—I filled the carafe in Basil’s office and poured glasses of water for everyone as we settled into seats.

  Ryan had agreed to explain what had really happened in Iran without embroidery or omissions, though it was apparent the prospect of this had him as nervous as someone going in for major dental surgery.

  “I went to Ramsar with specific instructions,” he began, sitting in one of the big wingbacks in front of Basil’s desk, water in one hand and one foot tucked up beneath him. “Janet’s work had highlighted a region west of the city, an area with a lot of archaeological ruins. One of Nero’s contacts, a man at a university nearby, had found an orb and was willing to sell it. The transaction was illegal, but that’s never stopped Nero from doing anything, obviously.”

  “The orb was in the university’s possession?” Georjie hadn’t left the couch beside Janet, who was eating a sandwich that Tomio had made after Georjie explained that Janet’s current weakness was mostly low blood sugar. I suspected Georjie’s healing presence also made the woman feel better, in addition to the food. Some of Janet’s color was returning.

  Ryan took a sip of water, then slid the glass onto the small table beside his chair. “It was, but this contact was almost as high as you could get at the uni, and was able to smuggle it out without being discovered. I don’t know how, and I didn’t ask, it’s not relevant to the story anyway. I was to deliver the orb to Nero. In exchange, he would teach me more alchemy. At the time, I thought his enhanced abilities were all rooted in alchemy. I didn’t yet know that it was idles he was after.” Ryan’s gaze went down to the floor. He scratched absently along his thigh as he talked.

  “Along with the orb, this contact also provided an envelope, a certificate with basic information about the orb. It wasn’t sealed, so I looked at it. It was like a receipt. It included the results of some tests that had been run on it. Those, I didn’t understand, but I did understand that the GPS coordinates were where the orb had been found. I was curious about the location, and wondered if there might be other artifacts relevant to magi history. Since I had a little time before my flight back to Italy, and the location was not far from Ramsar, I rented a vehicle and took a little road trip.”

  “Did you know anything about the effluent at that time?” I shifted as Tomio lay his arm across the sofa back behind me. He draped his hand over my shoulder.

  “No, Nero hadn’t put that together yet either, he thought that he was radioactive.”

  At this, Janet perked up. “He’s not?”

  Ryan shook his head. “The effluent registers as radioactivity, but that’s not really what it is. My guess is that after he absorbed another idle or two, he could feel the effluent in his bones, and that’s why he was able to zero in on the remaining idles so quickly.” He waved a hand. “But back to my road trip. I had the orb with me, and carried it in my pocket because I was too paranoid to have it more than a few feet away from me. At the time, I didn’t realize it, but now I believe that the orb led me to… it.”

  “A shell.” I stared at Ryan, but he still wouldn’t look up.

  “Yes. I discovered it not even knowing what I was looking for or what I would find. I thought it was just curiosity, but it wasn’t—some magic tethered the orb to the shell. It was hidden in a cave along a ravine that floods every spring but is dry the rest of the year.”

  “You say it, but was the shell a man or a woman?” Tomio asked.

  “Honestly? I couldn’t tell. It was already partly destroyed. Crushed over time, I guess. It had no face and part of its shoulder had been destroyed. The legs, too, were nothing more than rubble. If it hadn’t been mostly caved in, I never would have spotted the idle—” Ryan’s voice went froggy, then choked off altogether.

  We waited, tension mounting in the office as it became apparent what was coming.

  Ryan’s eyes were red and tear-glossed, his lower lids rimmed with moisture. “If I had known what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have touched it.”

  Tomio took in a quick breath.

  I glanced at Basil, who was seated in his chair, still as a carving himself, his mouth half hidden behind his hand. He was listening, but it was also apparent that he was half elsewhere too. In shock, naturally. He didn’t visibly respond or prompt Ryan with questions, just sat there. I dragged my attention back to Ryan in time to see him wipe away a tear. I knew this was what he had done. It was the only thing that made sense.

  Ryan’s bleary eyes found mine. The turmoil I saw there made my heart cramp. “When did you suspect me?”

  I blinked, not expecting him to ask me this, but all attention was on me now.

  “When I saw your skills on display inside Vesuvius, I knew something had changed you. At the time, I thought it was just Nero’s coaching. Alchemy. I didn’t know what Nero knew, and I knew nothing about alchemy either, so I suspected it was that. But then, when you taught me some, and I felt what it was like to have access to chemical fire, it became clear that simple alchemy wasn’t enough to explain your increased abilities. It was like… you were a chip straight off Nero, a lesser being, sure, but cut from the same cloth. You move faster, like you can bend time. Even with alchemy, I can’t execute the way you can. And then, when you had me travel with the orb…”

  Ryan wiped a hand across his nose. “I thought that was it.”

  “You couldn’t have traveled with the orb in Ramsar, not all by yourself, not the way you claimed to.”

  “Why not?” Janet asked, rubbing a fist into an eye. She looked better, but still like she needed to sleep for a couple of weeks.

  “Because someone has to be there to facilitate. The orb takes a hold
of your imagination completely. It takes you on a kind of astral journey. You have no sense of your own body while you’re traveling. There’s no way you have enough presence of mind to take a pencil and put it to paper to capture the language. You have no awareness of making the scribbles at all.” I looked at Ryan. “You were alone in Ramsar. You couldn’t have done it yourself. Writing everything down is what ends the vision.”

  Ryan nodded. “You are right. The first time I traveled with an orb was here at the academy. I had only learned the principle of it from Nero, but there was no way he ever would have allowed me to receive the information the orb gives. He wanted that all to himself, because locating the shells was his main goal. Yes, he was willing to teach me alchemy, but he never intended for me to absorb an idle, and he hadn’t explained to me that that was what he was after. When I touched the idle, I didn’t know I was going to absorb it, and I certainly had no idea that it was going to snuff all the idles that ever came from it.”

  As annoyed as I was that Ryan made me handle an orb before him, like a human guinea pig, I believed his story. I suspected that if Ryan had known that absorbing an idle would make him super powerful, he would have gone out of his way to find one and take it into himself. But if he had known that absorbing it meant quenching all other idles of the same hue, he wouldn’t have touched it. He wasn’t that monstrous, but still, he had absorbed an idle. It was the only thing that explained why he hadn’t lost his fire when Nero absorbed the green idle. Which led me to the next obvious question.

  “What color was it, Ryan?” I asked, knowing this would be the most difficult part for him to admit. I didn’t know for sure which color it had been, but given the timeline of snuffings and when Ryan was in Iran, there were only two possibilities.

  Misery made an old man of Ryan’s expression. His mouth drew down and his eyes filled with grief. But he looked me in the eye and didn’t flinch.

  “Pink.”

  Basil covered his eyes with a hand, making the first motion since he’d sat down in his chair. He pinched his eyelids and the bridge of his nose, the gesture expressed so much sadness and sympathy that I felt impaled by it.

  “Oh, Ryan.” Tomio lay his forehead against my shoulder.

  Georjie looked around, confused. “What does that mean?”

  Ryan couldn’t answer. He put his face in his palms and leaned forward, his posture that of someone allowing themselves to feel the full weight of a tragedy.

  I looked at my fae friend, wishing she could heal Ryan’s pain, not to mention the pain that the rest of his family was in. “Ryan’s father, Chad, had a pink idle.”

  Georjie’s mouth opened a little. “Oh.” Her soft, brown eyes went to Ryan in sympathy, but he was bent over and unable to look at anyone. “I am so sorry.”

  Would Ryan come clean to his family about what he’d done? If he hadn’t gotten involved with a criminal of supernatural proportions, he would never have found that idle, never quenched his father’s fire, or sent him into a crippling depression. Gage wouldn’t have been put in a coma. Chad would have lost his fire anyway, as would all the rest of magedom who had not received their fire by plenary endowment, but at least Ryan wouldn’t be at fault.

  Ryan sat up suddenly, half laughing, half crying, eyes blazing in my direction. “How ironic. What a mockery you’ve made of our kind.”

  Tomio stiffened. “She had nothing to do with any of it!”

  Ryan’s wet gaze flicked to Tomio. “I know that, I’m not accusing her of anything.”

  “Sure sounds like it,” I muttered.

  “No, I’m not. I’m merely pointing out the great poetic justice. You, and apparently Tomio, too—nice job keeping that a secret, by the way—born human and given fire by accident or by providence, are now members of a very small, elite class of supernaturals. Fire mages—once the most populous species—are now rarer than sirens, maybe even rarer than Wise.” He gestured at Georjie and then laughed again, but there was no joy or humor in it. Only bitterness.

  Basil might have intervened to stop Ryan’s acerbic tirade, but he didn’t say anything. He probably agreed, since Ryan wasn’t wrong, and it was ironic. The only magi left were those who’d stolen idles—and there were only two of those: Ryan being one—or those who’d begun their lives as naturals.

  Briefly, I thought of Dante, wondering why he’d died. If he hadn’t, he would have been counted among our number.

  Ryan sniffed, calmer now. “I suppose, ironic though it is, you won’t last long either.”

  “What do you mean?” Georjie asked, a wrinkle forming in her brow.

  “He means that Nero isn’t finished yet,” I explained. “There is one last fire he wants to possess.”

  “An eighth fire?” She cocked a brow. “But there’s only seven colors in a rainbow, what color is the eighth?”

  An image of Nero’s form, transparent and yet black, flickering like smoke as he passed through the walls of the school.

  “It’s white.”

  “The white god,” Janet murmured, “from the original legend.”

  “He’ll be back for my idle. I’m a walking dead man,” said Ryan.

  “You don’t have to die,” Tomio said.

  Ignoring him, Ryan turned to Basil. “He’ll be back for those two orbs as well.”

  Basil watched him with detached interest.

  Ryan continued, “You won’t be able to prevent him from taking them. He can feel them. He has six idles now, and five orbs. All he needs is those two, and…” Ryan put his fingertips against his lips and blew on them as he flicked outward, making the sound of a candle going out. “No more white god. No more adopted magi. Only a psychopath with unimaginable power—all the power of the original Source Fire.”

  15

  The Best Plan is No Plan

  Ms. Shepherd sent a car from London to whisk Basil and Janet off to the agency for care and safe-keeping. The headmaster had left the orbs with us before he’d gotten into the vehicle, insisting that he not be told what we planned to do with them. Which was good, because Ryan, Tomio, and I—the only soldiers left standing, with an earth elemental to back us up—hadn’t a clue.

  Georjie, Tomio and I stood around the orbs—nestled in their velvet beds and sitting on a table—brainstorming. Georjie had handled them gingerly, amazed that such small innocuous bits of art held the power to sweep one into an astral journey. Ryan hadn’t stopped pacing in the lobby’s hall, far enough removed from the rest of us to signal that he wanted time to think, but close enough that he could hear our ideas.

  One thing was clear: time was running out. Nero hadn’t made another appearance, but we doubted he was far away. Maybe he was waiting for us to go to sleep so he could dig around in our minds for the location of the orbs to make snatching them easier. That’s what I would do if I were him. He professed to hate violence—not that I believed that for a second, but he did seem to be the type who only engaged in physical combat if he had to. His goal was supremacy, not murder. What he’d done to Bellamy years ago proved that he wasn’t above murder, but the fact that he hadn’t physically hurt Janet, or broken one of our necks in the fire-gym, was a kind of twisted testament that his intention wasn’t to kill.

  Could we afford the same luxury, though?

  It didn’t look like it.

  I balked at the thought, my mouth souring with distaste. Some small part of me just wanted to let Nero have the orbs—he was already too powerful for us to beat. But what would we allow to be unleashed upon the world if we gave up? I wouldn’t utter the words out loud, not when it was clear my companions had no intention of surrender. The expressions of determination on their faces made me feel ashamed for even considering it.

  “We obviously can’t keep hiding them here at the academy.” Tomio picked up an orb and palmed its weight.

  “It’s no good,” Ryan called from the lounge doors where he did an about-face. “He can feel them, anyway. He knows roughly where they are at all times.”

&
nbsp; “How do you know that?” Georjie watched Ryan through those keen brown eyes, taking in every movement, every twitch of an eyebrow.

  “Because I can feel them, and I’ve only absorbed one idle. Imagine how good his radar is for anything remotely connected to fire mages. Why do you think he was so willing to dump Janet on us? She’s no good to him anymore. He’ll come for them, make no mistake, and there’s nothing we can do to stop him.”

  “I wouldn’t say nothing,” muttered Georjie, crossing those long elegant arms.

  “What are you saying, man?” Tomio shot Ryan a horrified look. “We give them up and be grateful to get away with our lives?”

  The look on Tomio’s face made me doubly glad I hadn’t suggested it myself.

  Ryan put a hand over his chest, where the pink idle lived. “He won’t kill unless he has to. The person the most in danger here is me.”

  “He took Gage’s fire pretty easily. Can he take your idle?” Tomio asked.

  Ryan went back to pacing. “I don’t know, but he’s got blackfire now, so probably.”

  “What is blackfire?” Georjie asked.

  “It means he can dissolve, walk through walls.” Ryan scoffed. “I wouldn’t doubt if he could fly by now, or maybe even teleport. How else did he come and go to the Arctic so quickly and without detection?”

  “And what will he be if he gets all the orbs?” I asked.

  Ryan snorted derisively but didn’t answer.

  Tomio let the orb roll off his fingers and settle on the fabric. “It won’t be good for anyone, that much is apparent. We have to do whatever we can to keep these orbs from his possession. Should we split them up? Take them opposite directions?”

  “That’ll leave them both less protected,” said Ryan.

  “Why don’t I take them to Stavarjak?” Georjie offered.

  We froze, Tomio and Ryan in confusion, and me because at first blush, this was a stroke of genius. But a moment later, my stomach curdled. Georjie would be stepping straight into Nero’s headlights.