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

  Nero languished in his storytelling, knowing full-well the spell he had me under. This was nothing like the seduction of his demands when he’d come to me in my sleep the first time, wanting to know what had happened to the crate. His quest for information had not been easy to resist, but I had found will and strength and resisted.

  This? I couldn’t.

  “I was eventually adopted at the age of six, by the wealthy man who funded the orphanage, no less, after I impressed him with my hunger for knowledge. I excelled in my lessons, you see. Unlike the other children, who were normal, uninteresting, unremarkable children. There was nothing wrong with them, but there was something wrong with me. I wished for more discipline, longer lessons, and to be punished when I could not recall facts accurately, which rarely happened. I excelled at everything from mathematics, to language.”

  “Why did you need to kidnap Janet then, if you were so smart?”

  “I said one question, imp,” Nero said, but not without an expression that looked something like delight at what he probably perceived as my impudence, though I’d meant the question honestly.

  “He took me home, hired tutors, taught me philosophy and science, and indulged every desire I had for learning. I read books penned for adults at the age of nine. I wrote scientific papers that were published in journals at the age of fourteen. I was good at everything. The best in the city, perhaps in all of Italy. I was invited to learn from eminent minds in a wide range of fields. Some of these men, and they were almost always men, were wealthy, but I noticed that they did not flex their wealth in ways that changed things. At least, not the way I would have changed them. Those I wanted to interview the most had no interest in indulging a young man, even a highly intelligent one. They were too busy politicizing for that.”

  I was growing dizzy in my attempt to follow this story well enough to ferret out its point, and hoped he’d get there soon.

  “After falling into brief and fiery love with your headmaster’s sister—she never accidentally revealed what she was to me, in case you’re wondering, the woman was a vault. Had she not chosen to trust me with the reality of their, your, existence, my life would have taken a much different turn. But she did. And this, I understood much later—many of the most important things that happen to us in life cannot be understood until much later—was why I met her in the first place. It was not to marry her. It was to learn of the magi. This was a world I had heard nothing of, not in all of my years of study on an extensive range of subjects. As you might well imagine, my thirst for knowledge took a short and violent leap into a thirst for power.”

  At his mention of Babs, Bellamy sprang to mind. No amount of articulate storytelling would ever change the reality of what the man sitting before me, occupying real estate within my own slumbering consciousness, was: a murderer.

  Giving no hint that he’d sensed my accusation, he went on with his philosophizing.

  “Power is not unlike money, those with the most have opportunities to influence the world in ways other don’t, and not having it, or not taking it when you can, is foolish and weak. Not only are you dishonoring the talents and abilities you were born with, you are crippling your future self, denying the being you are destined to become of resources you’ll come to wish you had preserved. So, I found a way to take what I wanted. I had been adopted by a philosopher and into a highly educated family. They taught me that out of misfortune comes fortune, along with opportunity. My adopted father’s great-grandfather worked for a powerful company that traded in furs, that’s where their fortune began; in Canada, your country, I believe, based on the limited amount of words I’ve heard you speak.”

  He waited for agreement, and after I felt my head nod, he continued.

  “When reproached and criticized by future generations about how this fortune had been acquired, my father answered that the harvesting of furs would have happened whether his ancestor had been involved in it or not, and that some of that fortune had gone into building the very orphanage I had begun my life in. The funding for those orphanages had come out of the fur-trade, but perhaps another wealthy fur-trader would not have opted to contribute in such a way.”

  “What are you saying? That you will do good with the power you’ve taken? That more good might come from you hoarding our idles than the magi you stole from might ever have done?”

  Nero shrugged, allowing me to utter not another additional question but three. “I’ll have the right to decide, and that’s what I want. I take the power for myself because I can, no one can stop me. It will leave others destitute, yes, but they will continue to live out their existence, coping with what fate has dealt them. It wasn’t them who did all the hard work to find the idles. It wasn’t them who sacrificed all suggestion of a normal life to inherit this power. They could have, but they didn’t. It’s those who can reach the moon first who can claim the right to mine it, simply because no one can prevent them. Should a magus choose to end their own life, that has nothing to do with me, and I would argue that they didn’t deserve to wield what they were born with in the first place.” He leaned forward, blazing eyes flickering through a mesmerizing rainbow of colors. “And you? Will you end your life when your fire goes out?”

  “Of course not. I came into this world without it, I can go on without it.” I managed to speak blithely, but I knew it would not be so simple. While I would never remove myself from the world because it would hurt my family too much, how could I possibly predict the ways in which returning to the world of naturals would affect me?

  His expression softened with a sick species of generosity. “I could have taken them by now.”

  Meaning the orbs, of course.

  “Why haven’t you, then?”

  “I was curious about your company. They are not magi. Who are they?”

  Ah. So that’s why he was here, so distastefully invading my mind. Unfortunately, I couldn’t produce even a hint of resistance against answering him. He was in control, and I was overwhelmed.

  “Friends I’ve known since I was practically in diapers.”

  Nero chuckled and rubbed his forehead in a gesture of self-reproach. “Silly me. I should have been more specific. What are they?”

  My throat felt bee stung in an increased effort not to respond. It was the first physical discomfort I’d felt since this whole thing had begun. There wasn’t much I wanted less than to tell Nero what my friends were capable of, to expose them, and arm him. But I could not have held back my words any more than I could force myself to wake from this illusion. “One is a siren.”

  “The dark-haired one,” Nero murmured. “I should have guessed. I’ve never seen one with my own eyes, but I’ve read about them. Dangerous voice, she has. A problem I can easily remedy. And the other?”

  My subconscious writhed against his interrogation, begging for me to wake before I divulged further secrets. Already I had endangered Targa to a point of eye-rolling panic. Losing the advantage that his ignorance would have given us was a blow so heavy I wondered if it showed through on my dream-face. But my dream-voice came through unencumbered by the worries that would plague me when I woke. I felt as though I was sitting in the front row of a drama, watching my own performance on center stage with helpless dread.

  “A Wise,” I said, hating myself.

  Nero’s brow crinkled beneath his widow’s peak as his eyes flashed green, then indigo, then orange. “I don’t know this term. What is a Wise?”

  “Half-fae, half-human,” I mumbled.

  He brightened. “How delightful. Well she does not present a problem either, then.”

  I damned my inability to read his true emotions behind all that colorful light. Was he intentionally misleading me in order to shake my confidence? Did I have any actual confidence left anyway? “So, you want us to hand over the orbs without putting up a fight. That’s what you’re driving at?”

  Nero flexed his fingers and fisted both hands at the same time, then lay them purposefully on his thighs. “The
world belongs to those who are powerful enough to take it. Why risk the life ahead of you only to fail to prove me wrong?”

  This struck a chord that I had forgotten ran through me, a chord strung by religious parents. I didn’t pay much attention to their discussions of intangible, or spiritual, things while I was young. It was a rare young person who did pay attention to such things, but there was an old scripture that had managed to stamp itself into my memory. It came back to me now. “There are those who say the meek shall inherit, not the powerful.”

  He laughed dismissively. “I have never once seen that happen. Have you?”

  I certainly hadn’t, and was compelled to shake my head in answer.

  “No,” he agreed, silently getting to his feet. “And it’s not about to start happening now.”

  And then he was gone, like the flame of a candle puffed out.

  17

  Fire-Fight

  Something blunt nudged against my shoulder, drawing me into wakefulness. Droplets of liquid sprayed across my face and spattered my clothing, bringing me the rest of the way awake with an electrified start. Gasping, I first looked to where Nero had been sitting across from me, where Ryan had been.

  Nero was not there.

  Neither was Ryan, or his backpack.

  Scrambling to my feet, disoriented and wondering if this was another elaborate hallucination, I spun, looking for someone, anyone. Georjie and Targa’s blankets lay across the grass, discarded.

  I became aware that something—aside from missing friends—was very wrong, something more difficult to define. For one thing, the sound of the sea had changed. Instead of a distant hush of repetitive sighs as waves licked the base of the cliff, it sounded more like a trickling brook. There was something wrong with the horizon, too. It wasn’t there.

  My heart ratcheted up a notch. Why had no one woken me sooner? Where was everyone, and now that the sleep had been torn from my eyes, why was the light so weird? I wanted to yell for my friends but instinct told me not to. Something was afoot. Was this the beginnings of a plan that was not a plan? Who was in charge?

  A gentle touch on my shoulder made me spin, gasping.

  “It’s just me,” Tomio whispered, his features misted with a palette of soft blues and grays. He cradled the boxes containing the orbs against his chest, his fingers splayed and hooked across them like a stretched-out spider. He gave one of them to me, urging me to take it by pressing it against my stomach.

  The moment I took its weight in my hand, I understood there was no orb inside. My gaze dropped to his box, wondering if both orbs would fit within one, but the way Tomio shifted the other made it apparent there was nothing inside his, either.

  More water droplets landed on the top of my head, making me look up. I held out a hand, palm up, wondering if it was raining. A few more droplets fell, and I licked one off my wrist and tasted salt. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust because there were no sharp details to focus on, no moon, no treetops. A wave of vertigo overtook me as I fought for depth perception. Then my heart gave a little leap as I discovered why the lighting was so weird.

  The moon was there, but it was a pale blur, a smudge of white against dark, wet paint. It glimmered down through a thickness of running water, which explained the trickling sounds. We were surrounded by it. Water. A wall of indiscernible thickness. The wall was curved, and moving, slowly and gently, but still moving. It shot high then curved gracefully overhead, like a dome. It met the earth and its currents swept along the grass before sweeping overhead again.

  It was a huge bubble, with only me and Tomio inside it.

  We were enclosed entirely within a cocoon of Targa’s making, though there was no sign of the water elemental herself. My mind staggered at the powers she possessed. Though I’d seen them in action before, I had not observed her magic since the storm in Saltford. This display renewed my respect.

  “This is Targa,” I whispered to Tomio, though I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to whisper. Maybe from respect.

  “So I gathered. I’m appropriately astounded,” he replied, not whispering,

  “How long have you been awake? Do you know what’s happening?”

  “I heard Georjayna and Targa talking at some point. I figured they were trading watches and went back to sleep. When I woke up again, I saw this”—he pointed at the bubble—“and found these”—he gestured to the boxes—“beside me. Empty. Then I woke you.”

  I thought, but didn’t say aloud in case there were unfriendly ears nearby, that the boxes were to be used as decoys, although if that were part of the plan, it would have to have been communicated to Tomio, and it was apparent that nothing had been communicated to Tomio. Still, decoys they could be.

  A glimmer of something appeared through the wall of water, streaks and smudges of a vaguely human shape. It grew in size as it approached, distinctly male in form. It stopped on the other side of the water. The figure raised an arm, and slowly fingertips appeared through the wall, followed by the rest of the hand, though the hand was not entirely corporeal. It flickered with colorless flame. It reached into the space beyond, discovering the thickness of the wall of water was no more than a man’s arm, and neither did the water pose any threat to him, or extinguish his blackfire.

  Tomio nudged me away, indicating we needed to separate our decoys. He went to one side of the bubble and I went to the other, unable to tear my eyes away from the figure. The distance between us grew as Nero slowly passed through the water, perhaps hoping to make no noise, or thinking it was a trap. By the time Tomio and I reached opposite sides of the bubble—near enough to run a finger against it—we were a soccer field apart.

  Nero emerged fully as a figure made entirely of blackfire. The water allowed him through and closed up after his passage, leaving no evidence of a breach. He stood just inside, head turning to take in first me, then Tomio. His face was impossible to read because it wasn’t really there, only a mere suggestion of features flickered within the colorless fire. Eyes, nose, and mouth were just shadows inside shadows.

  My stomach and throat clenched as this specter observed us, neither fully man, nor fully fire. He radiated something that could not be classified as heat. Perhaps if I’d been closer. But there was something, entirely different from temperature, that marked his blackfire, something that made my eyes smart and my skin tingle. It had to be the supernatural effluent we’d been chasing as a team these last weeks, leaking from Nero like radioactive waste. But the sensation he gave off was not entirely unpleasant, it was irritating to my skin and eyes and acrid in my nose, like ammonia, but I felt my fire fatten in its presence. I felt a flush of energy as my mage’s body responded to Nero’s presence.

  He neither spoke nor made sound as he stepped forward, flicking his gaze between me and Tomio. He saw the boxes. We made no attempt to conceal them, though perhaps we should have, to make it appear more likely that they held the treasure Nero was after.

  One instant he was there, observing us, and the next he was a streak of transparent flames, heading straight for Tomio.

  I’d been tense and ready for Nero to charge at me, maybe because we’d so recently exchanged views, but I hadn’t been ready for him to attack Tomio. I flinched and cried out on reflex.

  But Tomio was ready. He was born ready.

  The moment Nero arrived where Tomio had been, Tomio was no longer there. He moved at near the speed of electricity, jumping and darting, ducking and dodging. Never attacking, only evading. He used his fire without wasting energy to conceal it. Flashes of light filled my vision with starbursts. They couldn’t be watched, they could only be seen in snapshots captured in brief flashes. A flash of Tomio rolling over the ground, then in the air in an athletic vault, then into an impossibly low crouch, head lifted and eyes wide, taking in his pursuer, then rolling beneath. Nero by contrast was a negative silhouette against the world, blocking out whatever was behind him as he reached for and pursued Tomio.

  I crouched there in a half-squat, gaz
e darting and eyes watering as they strained to keep on the magi. I coiled, ready to spring when Nero headed my way. I rejected the idea of leaving the bubble, because it meant leaving Tomio. Why Targa had made it wasn’t entirely clear, perhaps it was to protect us, perhaps it was just a spectacular distraction that gave them a chance to get the orbs away. Perhaps Targa didn’t know herself, it was just something she was able to do. It also never occurred to me that the bubble would not stay there all night, like a watery womb separating us from the rest of the world.

  When the whole thing came crashing down in a torrent of rain, it shocked me. It drummed against my head, taking my breath and sight away as I bent my neck and presented my back to the waterfall with a series of gasps and shudders. The barrage lasted only seconds, stopping abruptly. The moonlight made everything suddenly stark, the audio of the world came to my ears, and the sound of the sea swept close. The air moved again, fresh and cool.

  Water dripped from my hair, my clothes, my eyelashes, I blinked and wiped at my eyes with my free hand, desperate to lay my sight on Tomio and Nero again. Across the lake of water and wet grass, they were not difficult to spot.

  Tomio was always ready for combat, you couldn’t sneak up on him or jump him, but nothing had prepared him for the Niagara that had struck when the water came down. Nero, the opportunist, had not wasted the surprise. Tomio lay at Nero’s feet, frighteningly still, his face half buried in wet grass. Nero stood over him, a figure outlined in blackfire, holding the box open in his hands.

  My heart leapt into my throat and my hearing narrowed to exclude everything but the sound of my own breathing. I tore my eyes from Tomio’s prone form in time to see Nero’s head twist toward me. A suggestion of a grimace in the black cave of his face was all the expression he gave before he was a blur again, coming straight for me.