Rise of the Magi Read online

  He extended his hand to me. I hesitated only a moment before grabbing onto it. “Her visions change,” he said. “You know that.”

  I met his troubled gaze, wishing I found more confidence in his thoughts to support the idea. “For them to change, we have to do something to alter the path we’re currently on. Isn’t that how she said it works?”

  He nodded but didn’t look happy about agreeing with me. “Then, the million dollar question is how do we change our path when we can’t find these lousy tree people?”

  “Dryads. That’s what Gallagher’s calling them, anyway. The true children of the Goddess are the basis for the dryad legends, not that I know lily-white-squat about that—I just smile and nod and pretend to listen to him.”

  “Bitches-from-hell works, too.”

  I couldn’t help but snort at that, though it didn’t last long before dying away in the face of the demon in the room. “I wonder what the Goddess thinks about her kiddies planning to destroy everyone on earth.”

  “If they were mine, and I had the power she does, they’d be lightning fodder.” He cast a wary glance upward as if waiting for said lightning to find him.

  “Yeah. Ditto on that. I’m thinking it’s more complicated than a simple discipline problem, though.” I frowned. We have a stop to make.

  “You told Gallagher the three of us needed to talk?” At my glower, he added, “I didn’t go digging, Lila, give me a little credit. You were thinking about it just now.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t realize the thought had sailed through my head. “Yeah, sorry. He lost contact with Raze’s team.”

  Liam shoved fingers through his hair, making it stand up in a way that reminded me of how he looked after we’d been for a naked tumble on the bed. Or in the woods. Or at the waterfall we’d found along the river in the north. It had grown long enough for me to tangle my fingers in.

  Shaking off my pornographic thoughts, disgusted how I could even think such things during an imminent war, I grabbed his wrist and started down the street. We had only a few weeks to find a way out of our sinkhole. How could so many trees grow to cover the earth before the first leaf fell? Had the Magi needed the selkie pelts to make their forest spread like a disease?

  My energy sparked, cracking the air as I considered anything happening to Brígh. If I could have plucked a perfect sister out of my twisted little fantasies to take the place of the two I’d lost to Parthalan, she would have been just like Brígh. It couldn’t be a coincidence that her own future disappeared when her other vision of a tree-plagued earth began. Somehow, the two had to be related; I only had to figure out how. I also had to consider that whatever would happen to her would come before the Magi’s big move instead of being a part of it, or she’d have been able to see at least a little way into her future.

  “Will there ever be a time when we aren’t walking around with an axe over our heads?” Liam asked after he’d exhausted his grunting and cursing.

  I wished I knew. Every time I thought it was time to celebrate victory—like killing Alastair and Parthalan—that we’d done the seemingly impossible, another disaster fell on our shit pile. If I didn’t learn how to climb faster, and drag my people, half of them kicking and screaming, with me, it would bury me alive.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you here,” I mumbled, half hoping Liam hadn’t heard me. According to Laerni, I thought lots of great stuff that never made it out of my mouth. After a few months of intense psychotherapy, she suggested words would mean more if spoken of my own free will instead of having them pulled from my head.

  Chuckling, he stopped, grabbed me and pushed me out to arm’s length. “I’m sorry, what was that?”

  Feeling all squirmy and needing a boulder to hide under, I tried to wriggle free from his grasp without success. He slid his fingertip beneath my chin while hooking his free arm around my back, holding my lower half firmly against his solid frame.

  A few seconds passed before I met his gaze. “You heard me.”

  His smile did crazy things within my body, sending wave after wave of hot flashes to my deep places. Muscles down low quickened. Flutters started a rave in my belly.

  “I thought I did, but I couldn’t have heard you right.” He kissed my nose, his lips never breaking contact until they made it to my forehead where he planted another and another until he’d thoroughly liquefied my bones. “Tell me again. Please.”

  Lost in eyes like crystal oceans with golden treasures glistening on the white sands far below the surface, he could have asked me anything, and I’d have told him without hesitation. “I said … I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here with me. I need you. Now more than ever. You keep me from drowning in all of this.”

  He stayed silent for a while. “Wow.” Another brush of his lips, that time at the corner of my mouth, followed with a wicked, shuddering breath. Instead of saying the words, he opened himself to me and let me feel what my admission had done to him. A rush of joy heated me from the inside out. I’d almost reduced him to tears, and he was letting me see it, feel it. That meant as much to me as my saying it had meant to him.

  Once I found the will to tear myself out of his arms, we finished our journey to the Court garden. Gallagher still lay on the same dais, staring into the wilderness of his own thoughts or maybe at the spirits. By the grim set of his lips, and the even deeper grooves in his brow, I took it he’d already gone spelunking into my head and knew about Brígh’s vision.

  “What do we do?” He sat up as we neared him, groaning as if in pain.

  “No, Gallagher, you don’t ask me that.” I shook my head and jabbed a finger at him. “You’re the aide; I’m the newbie in this joint. I’m coming here to ask you what to do, and you’re supposed to know.”

  The lost look in his opaque eyes shredded the remaining thread of hope I’d clung to. Guilt skewered me. “I wish … I do not know what to do,” Gallagher said. “This level of threat is unprecedented and beyond my comprehension.”

  Yeah, good thing, too. If it wasn’t unprecedented, none of us would be alive to worry about it.

  Liam rubbed his thumb over my knuckles, his mind such a hurricane that I shut him out. “I think the other races need to be warned,” he said. “The remaining Seelie and Unseelie, too.”

  I made an unhappy sound between a snarl and a cough. “And how do you suppose we’re going to do that? The last time we went to the Black City, we were treated like rapists at a preschool. They’re not going to listen.” When I realized how pissy I sounded, I softened my tone. “But I think you’re right about the rest. Good idea. It’s the smart place to start.” At least I’d noticed my gaff that time. Baby steps, and all that.

  He flashed a knowing smile, suggesting he knew just how difficult it was for me to give praise where it was due. I hated that it didn’t come naturally to me, like it did to my mother, but at least I’d gotten better. Liam brushed a kiss across my forehead, his breath warming my skin.

  I shrugged, embarrassed. “What?”

  “Your big girl panties are showing again. I love you.”

  Squirming under the invasion of warm fuzzies, I stepped away and shook off the grin that tried to ease my lips up from their downward curve. “I love you, too. Now stop with the sappy shit.” Before you make me cry, you dick.

  Smile fading, he turned back to Gallagher. “So, what about Raze’s team. Any word yet?”

  “Alas, no, and I fear for them.” Gallagher rocked up to his feet and straightened his rumpled suit, twirling one of the white starflowers in his fingers. The way he focused on it, with an absent sort of fascination, made me think he was trying to hypnotize himself. If only it were that easy to escape reality. “Shall I send another out to them? Perhaps Meredith has simply fallen ill and cannot respond to me?”

  “I think we all know that’s not the case.” My sigh didn
’t expel much of my dread, the bulk of it settling in the pit of my stomach like a thousand pound stone. “Send a team of two. If they find nothing within a day’s search, pull them back. In the meantime, you need to set up a meeting at the coalition headquarters with the Mounties, the Feds, the selkies, elves and whoever else you can think of. If we’re all about to be tree lunch then everyone should at least be given a chance to dress for the occasion.”

  Both of them nodded.

  Thoughts of Brígh’s sacrifice stirred up darker thoughts. “I’m worried about Brígh and what she did today. She’s normally not very brave, but … you should have seen her face, the way she just seemed to … I don’t know … break inside when she decided to tell me what the Overseers had forbidden her to tell. Will they really strip Brígh of her gift?”

  Silence accompanied a quick bob of Gallagher’s head. A shiver rocked him as he turned away from me.

  “Gallagher?” Following, I grabbed his arm with one hand and his chin with the other, and made him face me. “Your wrinkles just grew wrinkles, and if you frown any harder your lips are going to fall clean off your face. When you look like that it freaks me out. Spill it. Is there something more I need to know about this?”

  His hand covered mine, making no attempt to remove it but pressing it harder against his face. “For the level of timeline breech she’s committed, they could strip her memory completely. She would cease to be who she is or remember any of us. Even her personality could change.” His Adam’s apple made a jerking bob, and a harsh breath escaped him. “It has happened once before. The young woman went mad and had to be imprisoned until she withered enough that her mind …”

  Opening my senses, his grief spilled over me, aged and thick like rotten wine. I gasped.

  He turned away from me again, though his hand remained clamped to mine.

  I rubbed his arm, and with my voice soft, said, “You knew her. What happened?”

  Face tilted up, he remained that way for a long while before speaking. “Without the mind, the body will die. It took years.”

  A blue streak of profanity blasted through my head, and I held it from escaping my lips in the face of Gallagher’s pain. Who had she been? His mother? Sister? Daughter? Would it be polite for me to ask if he wasn’t offering the information? I decided to leave the subject, at least for a while. “If the Overseers think, for one second, I’ll allow anyone to lobotomize Brígh over this, then I’ll punch another thought right through Tameryn’s skull.” Tameryn had been Brígh’s mentor for more than a year. Still eying Gallagher’s statue-like form, I began to pace. “Liam and I are supposed to make decisions for the fae, right? What we say goes, and I say that’s bullshit. Her telling us could save thousands—if we can figure out what it all means in time.”

  Gallagher cleared his throat hard. “The Overseers do not consider themselves under your rule, but serve the Goddess directly.” The edge to his voice could have shaved Liam’s scruff clean off.

  “They can’t think the Goddess would want this,” Liam said. “It’s her children who are behind this clusterfuck in the first place. She should want to help us.” He turned those haunted ocean eyes on me, uncertainty shining out from within. “Right?”

  I thought on that for a minute, all I’d been through over the years. She’d sent me animals to help me when I needed warmth and protection, shelter, bugs to warn of Parthalan’s nearness. She’d given me amazing abilities I didn’t entirely understand why or how they worked, but ones that had gotten me out of more than a few tight places. “She wouldn’t have given us these gifts and helped us to this point only to destroy us. It doesn’t make sense.” When Gallagher had nothing to add—and I noticed he’d had less and less insight over the last few weeks—I said, “Set up a meeting for me with these Overseers, and after that, one with every race on this planet that has intelligence and is willing to listen. Let’s meet at the coalition headquarters. Please. As soon as you can do it.”

  Gallagher shifted his feet, holding up a finger, his body rod-stiff. “The second, I will gladly do. Immediately. However, the Overseers do not allow males into their domain. I have no authority to demand anything from them even if I had the ability to enter their realm. If I try to go, their portal will not allow me passage.” He shivered again, and his unease made me shake, too.

  Roughing a palm over the back of his neck, Liam squinted at Gallagher. “Portal? Don’t they live here? In Iress?”

  “They do, indeed. Mostly, though I’d rather they lived a thousand miles away from here. They have powers I do not fully understand, unnatural ones if you ask me, which seem to have grown stronger of late. And, even when I have seen them within the city, I cannot penetrate their thoughts any better than I could jump head-first into a boulder and succeed in gaining anything more than a headache.” Gallagher tugged at his tie, lips pinched. “To be quite frank, they petrify me. Always have, since … I’m failing you, Lila, and I’m lost as to how to fix this.”

  Unable to stand the chilly defeat in his gaze, I reached out for his left shoulder. Liam stepped in to take his right. “Don’t you give up on me, old man,” I said, my voice carefully controlled so as not to betray my inner turmoil. I was getting a better poker face with so much practice. “You’re not failing me. Say that again and we’re going to have a problem, you and me. We’re all winging this, and it’s up to Liam and me to figure this out, not you. I’ll deal with the Overseers, and you set up the other meeting, okay?”

  Gallagher’s lips formed a slight smile. He cast his gaze upward as if listening.

  “Who’s up there?” I asked. “The woman who died. It’s her, right?”

  A nod and he dropped his chin to reveal a sad smile. “Marla. Do not concern yourself with the hauntings of my life, for you have enough of your own to whiten a man’s hair.”

  I intended to press him, but he hugged me so hard I grunted.

  “Your parents’ pride for their daughter gives me strength,” he said, “and all of our lost ones, who now watch our new queen come into her role like none have done before you. If the spirits hold faith still then so shall I.” After a squeeze of my hand, he trotted off, appearing less like a soldier who’d lost the war and more like a fae on a mission.

  I stared up at the molten sky, wondering what Gallagher had heard, and allowed Liam to tug me into his arms. He stayed out of my head, and remained mute while I pulled myself together, his fingers kneading at the mess of knotted muscle along my back and shoulders. I appreciated the gesture more than I could say.

  “Who do you think it was? The woman Gallagher mentioned.” I brushed Liam’s ear with my lips just to hear his quick intake of breath.

  “I’d say he loved her, whoever she was, and losing her left him with a wound that hasn’t stopped bleeding. I haven’t been around him as long as you, but I should have noticed something before now. He must hide it really well.”

  “That’s pretty much what I was thinking. What do you suppose she foresaw and told someone about that could make the Overseers do something so terrible to her? You don’t think it has anything to do with this Magi business, do you?”

  “I think he’d have told us if it did, but … just in case, I think we need to find out. There has to be someone here who was around when it happened.”

  Who in the city would know that part of his history? Somewhere along the way, the Overseers had taken someone from him, and I would find out why. I had a sudden burning need to heal my aide, but for some hurts, not even my breed of magic would work. I shook it off and focused on another task.

  “We need to go back to Brígh and Cas’.” Not only did I think Brígh was the key to getting in to see the Seers, I also wouldn’t be able to concentrate until I’d made sure the two of them were okay. Well, as okay as could be expected with the revelation that we were all about to become permanent fixtures of the forest. I couldn’t imagine how w
e’d drop that bomb to the other races. Yeah. A bunch of trees are going to invade your cities and eat everyone in sight. It sounded loony even to me.

  I straightened and pulled away from Liam, allowing myself one more deep look into his eyes, not because it wasn’t nice being in his arms, but because his nearness often distracted me, and I needed every brain cell for the coming events.

  “Do you think she’s brave enough to take you to them, especially when she must be number one on their shit list at the moment?” Chuckling and clutching my hand, Liam led me toward the gate. “Just last week, I found her screaming bloody murder over a spider the size of my thumbnail.”

  My smile didn’t last long. “She’s mad enough, I think she will.” I gave a half-hearted shrug, disliking what I had to do. “Even if she doesn’t think she can, I’ll do whatever I have to convince her to take me.” Including forcing my will on her and hoping it wouldn’t destroy our friendship. I rubbed my belly, wincing at a heel thrusting into my ribs. Little Garret was at stake. All of us were at stake. The day I’d discovered Garret in there, the mother bear in me roared to life, and at the latest disaster to befall us, she extended her claws.

  My son. It still sounded foreign on my tongue—like I knew what to do with a kid. I could barely take care of myself most of the time. The thought of him outside of my body, where I actually had to feed him, keep him safe and figure out what he wanted, scared the bajeepers out of me. Give me the Shadowborn again any day, and I’d probably have been less terrified than I was of becoming a mother.

  After the short journey through the city, Liam knocked on Brígh’s door, and Cas opened it a moment later. “Come in.” He stepped aside.

  I forced myself to look at him. His drooping posture made him seem small and broken, as if hearing Brígh’s news had shattered some fundamental structure inside him.