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

  Georjie and I took a little hut with a thatched roof, which had been christened Periwinkle Cottage, and painted the color of its namesake save for the trim, which was forest-green. Ryan and Tomio would bunk in a large, remodeled horse trailer a few meters away. Some clever carpenter had installed windows, flower boxes, a kitchenette and a set of bunkbeds. They weren’t glamorous, but I suspected Georjie preferred unglamorous, and the rest of us were too tired to care.

  These humble shelters shared a firepit and a yard, which was partially enclosed by a forest of saplings. The sea was close enough to be a whisper on the breeze, but there were plenty of seagulls willing to let the world know that the shoreline was near.

  Georjie and Ryan went to buy firewood, and to see what could be scrounged up in the way of dinner in the nearby village. Tomio and I searched out the sawed-off logs someone had helpfully rolled into the bushes, collecting them so we could sit and eat.

  I tumbled one of the logs upright and settled it near the pit, noticing something as I did: a trail of white trilliums leading along the path to the parking lot. They were perfect and dainty, with tender white petals. They were lined up like the seven dwarves on their way to work, only there were a lot more than seven. Utterly charmed, I pointed them out to Tomio.

  “Yeah.” He came to stand on the trail beside me, eyes crinkling at the little flowers. “Georjie did that as we were walking. She was at the back, so I guess you didn’t notice. What a sweet talent that lady has.”

  I stared at him in open astonishment. “Georjie put these here? Why?”

  Tomio shrugged and picked his way through some brambles toward another wayward stump. “Why not? Because she can, I guess. I wouldn’t mind being able to make flowers pop up wherever I went, leaving a trail of happiness for other people to find. Ouch! Maybe she can do something about these thorns. This place needs a gardener.”

  Bemused and a little amazed that Georjie had had both the presence of mind and the desire to foster new and fetching life just for the fun of it, I went to help Tomio wrestle with the less friendly aspects of nature and forgot about the trilliums.

  After we’d made the firepit suitable to eat around, we wandered through the campground admiring the other quaint buildings. A few families had pitched tents and one had parked a modern trailer, but the place was mostly empty. At the rear of the small forest, an open area of sloping hills and random, crumbling cairns opened to the sea. The wind picked up as we emerged from the trees. I could taste the salt in the air.

  “These fields seem familiar,” I said.

  “All the fields along the coastline look alike. Arcturus could be just down the road,” Tomio replied, “even though it’s still hours away.”

  “True.”

  After a moment, Tomio wrapped his arms around me from behind as we took in the fields of green against a backdrop of evening sky. He murmured contemplatively into my neck: “What are we going to do?”

  I had thought of little else all day, yet at the same time trying to guard my thoughts in case Nero went digging. We couldn’t stay awake indefinitely. It was not only difficult to develop an idea while trying to protect that idea from my own overt consciousness where it might be plucked like a peach, it was impossible. I let out a long sigh, saying what I couldn’t say in Ryan’s presence.

  “Would it be so bad?” Meaning, to lose our fire.

  Tomio rested his chin on my shoulder. “No. It would be an adjustment, but I think I’d be one of the magi who could cope quite well.”

  “Me too.”

  This was expected. After all, we knew what it was like to be a natural. But a born mage like Ryan, and especially a power hungry one, he would not likely cope much better than his father. I wondered how Gage was doing. He’d be settled in at home by now, together with his dad, figuring out what was next. If Ryan lost his fire, at least he could go home to them. He wouldn’t be alone.

  “All life that sprang from it will be mine.” I rubbed Tomio’s forearm absently as I repeated Nero’s words. “Is he just talking about fire? Or is he talking about every mage who was born, like, they’d become his slaves, or something?”

  “I don’t want to find out, which is why we can’t just give up.” Tomio buried his nose in my hair. “Right?”

  “Right. So, we can’t give up, but we can’t formulate a plan.”

  A call from the forest edge behind us made us turn. Georjie was there, waving and miming lifting a fork to her lips.

  Dinner turned out to be a precooked lasagna that Georjie reheated in the kitchenette. There were also butter rolls, apples, ginger ale, and a lot of cold water. We sat around the fire eating dinner as the last of the evening’s light retreated. We began to burn away the occasional mosquito, but after the Arctic mozzies, I barely noticed. Everyone seemed either too lost in thought or too full to complain.

  “Is anyone going to try going to sleep?” Ryan cradled the box containing the ghost-steel blade across his lap. He looked over at Georjie. “Obviously there’s nothing stopping you from getting rest. Nero can’t glamour supernaturals who aren’t mages, or he would have done it by now.”

  “If you guys aren’t going to sleep, then I’m not going to either. But, I was wondering if you had any sense of how far away he is. Can you feel that?”

  We shook our heads.

  Georjie glanced toward the trail briefly, watching perhaps for Nero to come blazing through the trees at us. “I figured not. So, when he shows up… we…?”

  Ryan said, “We—by which I mean the mages—fight him with anything and everything we have. And given that you have healing powers and we don’t, it’s best that you keep your distance. You’ll be like our lives in a video game.”

  Georjie sent him a half-hooded, unimpressed look for that line. “Charming.”

  Silence descended again and we stared into the fire while alternately watching the bushes for signs of Nero. Ryan cradled the backpack containing the orbs between his feet.

  “Waiting’s the worst.” Tomio kicked a burning log back into the fire when it threatened to roll out. “I hate it.”

  “Maybe we should invite him to come,” I said, because I’d been thinking something similar. “We should go to sleep, and when Nero comes poking into our minds, we should just show him exactly where we are.”

  Georjie sent me a startled look. “And burn down the campground once the fire starts flying? This place is their livelihood. I can patch up bodies and even whole forests, but I can’t do anything to fix burned property.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I suddenly felt quite daft and selfish. From the looks on their faces, Ryan and Tomio hadn’t thought of it either.

  Tomio raked a hand through his hair. “We should never have checked in here. We should have bought tents and camped in a random field. Far from civilization.”

  “Let’s take our bedding into the field between here and the shoreline, then,” I suggested. “We’ll hang out under the stars.”

  Several minutes later found us marching through the narrow path to the open fields, carrying pillows and blankets. Only Georjie really needed the blankets for warmth, but they gave us something soft to lie on.

  The grass was thick and long here, making a surprisingly pleasant bed. I was laying down a blanket for Tomio and me to snuggle on when I noticed Georjie picking her way, barefoot, through the grass. Little white trilliums popped up in the undergrowth as she passed. There was a whole line of them again, leading over the rolling hills all the way back into the trees.

  “What are you doing?” My question caused Ryan and Tomio to take notice of Georjie’s fetching little habit.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, innocently.

  The moment I’d addressed her, the trilliums stopped popping up, like I’d broken her concentration.

  I pointed at the flowers and gave her an expression that said, Those. Hello!

  “They’re pretty, don’t you think?” Georjie placed a blanket on the grass and proce
eded to arrange her long limbs across the surface, putting her hands behind her head for a cushion and crossing one ankle over the other. She looked quite pleased with herself.

  I opened my mouth to demand a better explanation—not that I had a problem with trilliums, but my suspicions were running high—when Tomio said, in a voice more awe-filled than I’d ever heard before, “Who is that? Am I hallucinating again?”

  A petite and slender woman had emerged from the forest like a sylph. She wore a plain tank top and shorts, revealing skin so pale it gleamed in the starlight. The wind picked up her dark hair and flicked it around her. She was barefoot, but carrying a pair of sneakers, and looked like she’d walked straight out of a dream.

  “Targa,” I rasped, thinking that if she was a hallucination, then Nero had met her before because he’d captured her features and her way of moving perfectly.

  Georjie leapt up at the uttered name with a single word that snapped the scenario together like the final piece in a jigsaw. “Finally!”

  She was off and jogging toward the approaching siren.

  I was too dumbfounded to move, and watched my friends embrace as they stood beside the row of trilliums Georjie had left so that Targa could find us. But… Targa had come all the way from Poland. When? How?

  Actually, the how part was easily solved. Targa had access to private aircraft, her company’s aircraft. She could go wherever she wished, whenever she wished it. She had vast financial resources available to her, and since she was the boss, she didn’t have to answer to anyone or explain herself. Within reason, of course. She did have a board to answer to.

  Georjie hadn’t been on the phone to Lachlan earlier, she’d been talking to Targa, explaining what was going on, and asking her to come.

  Crushing the joy at seeing my siren friend here so unexpectedly, was a cold and heavy dread. It increased in weight with every moment that she closed the distance between us. I knew why these fields had seemed familiar now that Targa was in them, barefoot and wearing shorts. The cliff she’d leapt from in the dream that had me waking up choking not that long ago, was a mere couple of hundred meters from here.

  I couldn’t move to meet her. My legs and arms felt too heavy, my heart a stone. My stomach seemed to have decided it didn’t much care for the lasagna after all.

  Targa walked straight up to me, her face inscrutable as her eyes devoured me. “Hello. Georjie mentioned you were in a spot of trouble?”

  I lifted leaden limbs and she stepped into my hug.

  The realization that I was not hugging one person, but three, rushed through me like a hot wind. I whispered, “Why did you come?”

  She pulled back, her bright blue eyes appearing dark in the starlight. “Don’t freak out. I’m pregnant, not ill or injured, and a siren pregnancy is not nearly so fragile as—”

  “Excuse me?” Georjayna shrieked and came between us, her shock so intense that I heard distant trees creak. “You’re pregnant?”

  “Yes. When you called earlier today, I planned to tell you, but then you explained the trouble they’re in”—Targa knocked a head toward the boys and me—“and I knew that if I told you, you would forbid me to come, and you’d also feel guilty for asking in the first place. And we can’t have that.”

  Georjie made a choking sound that could have been anger, could have been indignation, could have even been excitement, and was probably all three.

  “Oh boy. Just what we needed, a pregnant chick.” Ryan’s words were quiet, but they were loud enough that none of us missed them.

  Georjie and I whirled on him.

  “Pregnant chick?” I raged. “Let me tell you a thing or two about this pregnant chick—”

  My words were lost amidst Georjie’s rant, which I only caught the tail end of. “—ask your father how his confrontation with a siren turned out.”

  Ryan stumbled back, his hands up in defense. “Sorry, geez. My bad.”

  Meanwhile, Targa and Tomio exchanged a handshake and some pleasantries; I thought I heard him politely thank her for coming, the way you would a neighbor who brought you a casserole. Targa responded in kind, having had more practice at pleasantries than her mother, who was famous for her abrupt manner.

  After Ryan had been appropriately humbled, we stood around for an awkward moment, until Targa spoke as she settled onto a blanket.

  “So, why are we hanging out in a field that smells like sheep? And who’s going to fill me in about this Nolan fellow?”

  We sat in the grass, bringing Targa fully up to speed. The moon hauled itself across the sky, the sea whispered, and the gulls grew quiet.

  We resisted the urge to sleep until Ryan pointed out that if he were Nero, he’d wait until we were well and truly exhausted before springing on us at an unexpected and vulnerable moment.

  There was no sign of the mage, no one saw anything strange or heard any voices.

  Sometime after two when our jaws simultaneously creaked with yawns, and our eyes were leaking tears, Ryan lay in the grass on his side. “You take first watch, Nakano. Wake me in an hour.”

  And with that, it was decided. We would execute the age-old tradition of trading the night watch.

  Targa and Georjie curled up under a blanket, and I heard Georjie whisper, “How did you convince Antoni to let you come?”

  “I called him from the runway,” she whispered back.

  I lay with my head on Tomio’s lap and he must have felt me suppress a laugh at Targa’s response. Poor Antoni. What a thing to do to the father of her children.

  Tomio bent over me. “What is it?”

  I rubbed his hand. “Nothing.”

  I was too tired to talk anymore, and what could I say? Targa was at times more like her mother than she liked to admit. When she’d come into the full extent of her siren abilities, I’d been daunted by how much like Mira she seemed. But in time she’d softened again, although not entirely. I could only hope that Antoni knew Targa well enough not to be too upset with her for taking off without warning. That’s what you get for falling in love with a siren.

  My thoughts became muzzy, and the crickets lured me into slumber. It seemed like I’d been asleep for about six minutes when Tomio kissed me awake and told me it was my turn. I sat up, rubbed my eyes and took some invigorating breaths.

  Georjie and Targa were a lump under their blanket. Ryan lay sprawled on the grass, his head resting on the backpack containing one orb and the blade, snoring lightly. Tomio stretched out beside me, propping the sack containing the other orb under his head.

  I walked wide laps around my circle of sleeping friends, wondering if we’d been silly not to sleep in our cabins. I had thought Nero would have come for us by now, but there was no indication he was even thinking about us, let alone was anywhere near us. But my friends seemed to be sleeping peacefully enough, and it was nice out here. The air was warm and smelled like the sea. Even the insects had gone quiet, and the long grasses made a comfortable bed. So, I passed my hour walking laps and waiting for some tingle that Nero was approaching.

  No tingle came.

  Then I woke Georjie, and lay down beside Tomio, spooning him.

  Nero came to me gently.

  I found myself dreaming that my eyes had opened. He was sitting cross-legged in the grass, watching me. I had no shock or panic because I understood he was not really there. For one thing, my friends were nowhere in sight, and beyond us there was no field or sea, just a vast nothingness that was not important.

  “I haven’t yet learned your name,” Nero said, his voice completely different from the one he’d used in the fire-gym. The tone was the same, the timbre was his, but there was no threat or malice in it. It was warm, conversational, inquisitive.

  Some tiny, inner voice hissed to wake up, but I easily ignored it. This was only a dream, not a true confrontation. The curiosity to hear what he had to say was stronger that my desire to flee, Why this charade of civility? I was helpless to prevent this interaction, anyway. I recognized that by the way
my fire—for the first time since I’d inherited it—was demure in Nero’s presence. It was not merely resting the way it did when it wasn’t in use, it was cowed. This was not a good feeling, but I understood that emotion had taken a back seat. Nero wanted to talk, and he preferred for the conversation to be as cool and rational as possible. He brought the full weight of his psychic ability as my superior to that effect.

  I brought myself up to mimic Nero’s cross-legged position, as calm as afternoon tea, compelled to answer. “Saxony.”

  “I will permit you,” he said, with an expression of contrived grace, “to ask me one question before I take what I want. Consider it a consolation prize. I’m feeling sorry for you, truth be told.”

  So, he couldn’t read my thoughts, otherwise he would have seen the single word blinking in the foreground of my mind like it was a sign for a seedy, underground snooker club. If I understood one thing—his motivation—then perhaps he could be talked out of this relentless pursuit, and the ownership of all life that sprang from the source—as he had put it.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  He didn’t react in any particular way, other than to take a minute to think about my question, evidently wanting to do it justice. “I lived the first six years of my life in an orphanage, you know. In Naples.”

  I gave no reaction to this strange and seemingly irrelevant statement.

  “Don’t pity me,” he added, as though I’d replied with a sympathetic noise.

  “I don’t,” I said, flatly.

  He went on as though I hadn’t spoken. “I was fed, and even loved. I had nice friends and an education. The start of one, at any rate. Monks ran this particular orphanage, ones who had been interviewed to the point of interrogation, and watched to the point of surveilled. The head monk had been told by the proprietor in no uncertain terms that there was to be no abuse of any kind at this orphanage and school, as it was funded by a wealthy man who abhorred and condemned the ill-treatment of children.”

  “How nice for you,” I replied, with not a hint of audible sarcasm. I couldn’t have let it leak into my tone had I wanted to, and I did want to. I was as much a captive as if I had been chained down with links forged of the same stuff that made up that freezing cold blade.