Somewhere, Tristan caught the sound of a deafening explosion, followed by the unmistakable whoop of Nico de Varona’s laughter.
He was enjoying this, Tristan thought with disgust. When they’d last left Nico behind, gunshot wound and all, his steps had been so careless and at ease he looked like he was dancing, slipping between gunshots; as if gravity itself worked differently for him, which it probably did. Tristan hadn’t known anyone with the broad specialty of ‘physicist’ before, finding that most physical medeians had the narrowest fields of skill. With immense power typically came the ability to influence only certain things: Levitation. Incandescence. Force. Speed. Tristan hadn’t known it was possible for someone to be capable of all of that, and, by the looks of it, possibly even more. Physical magics were draining enough that Nico should have been exhausted by now, but he wasn’t.
He was laughing. He was enjoying this, and meanwhile, Tristan was going to be sick.
In Tristan’s mind, he had accepted the easier job; he was only going to ‘secure the perimeter,’ or whatever this sort of activity could be called. If anyone was going to shoot at anything, he reasoned privately, it was going to be all those guns aimed at Nico, whom Tristan hadn’t particularly liked to begin with. He knew the type—loud, showy, full of meritless bravado, like most of his father’s gang of witches. They all had violent streaks they barely concealed with a slavish devotion to rugby, and Tristan had assumed Nico was one of those. Young, brash, and prone to fights he couldn’t win.
Apparently Tristan was wrong. Nico could not only win, he could also do it with a gunshot wound to the shoulder of his dominant hand.
Even more alarmingly, he wasn’t the only one who could.
It was with immense reluctance that Tristan had initially agreed to split off with Libby, who had been little more than an irritation that Tristan suspected of being too insecure to last a day. Only chivalry (or something akin to it) had kept him from wandering off instead with Callum and Parisa, who had taken a left turn based on something the latter could read in the house’s mind. Tristan had thought, Well, someone’s going to have to keep an eye on the poor little annoying girl, or how else would she survive having no one to answer her thousand questions?
But then, of course, he’d been blindsided by a pack of what appeared to be spies with guns, and he was now having to rely on said annoying girl much more heavily than he cared to admit.
“Get down,” Libby snapped as another gun fired, this time from somewhere behind them. It was, at least, a refreshing change of pace from her usual apprehensive mumbling. If there was one thing to be relieved about given all this, it was that Libby Rhodes was far more capable than she looked.
Tristan was beginning to regret not befriending any of the three physical specialties. Nico would have been ideal, given that he seemed to be a powerhouse of energy. The magic radiating from him was more refined than any Tristan had ever seen, and he’d seen quite a lot in his capacity as an investment analyst. He’d met with medeians claiming to power entire plants with the equivalent of nuclear energy who didn’t have the raw talent Nico had, and who certainly didn’t have his control. It occurred to Tristan, unhappily, that Libby and Nico may have come off as the least threatening for being the youngest and least experienced, but he suddenly doubted they were as juvenile as they seemed. He wished now that he hadn’t drawn a line between him and the others, because he doubted it would be easy to un-draw.
It was all an unpleasant reminder that Tristan’s father, a witch capable of moderate levels of physical magic, had always considered Tristan a failure. From the start, Tristan had been slow to show any signs of magic, barely able to qualify for medeian status when he reached his teenage years. An unsurprising outcome, considering they had spent so many years before that concerned he wasn’t even a witch.
Was that why he’d chosen to do this? Atlas Blakely had told Tristan he was rare and special and therefore he’d thought yes, fine, time to drop everything I spent years tirelessly cultivating in order to prove to my estranged father that I, too, can do something wildly unsafe?
“Do you know any combat spells?” Libby panted, giving Tristan a look that suggested he was the most useless person she’d ever met. At the moment, he suspected he might have been.
“I’m… not good with physicalities,” he managed to say, ducking another shot. These men seemed to be different from the group Nico had taken on in the drawing room, but they were definitely also outfitted with automatic weapons. Tristan didn’t know prodigious amounts about the intersect of magic and tech in warfare, seeing as James Wessex had chosen to handle any matters of weapons technology himself, but he suspected these were mortals using magically enhanced scopes.
“Yes, fine,” Libby replied, clearly impatient, “but are you—”
She broke off before something he suspected to be the word useful.
Which, as Adrian Caine had always made an effort to point out, Tristan had never been.
“Just come on,” she said in frustration, pulling him after her. “Stay behind me.”
This, Tristan thought, was a mildly infuriating turn of events. For one thing, he didn’t have a lot of experience being shot at. This was supposed to be an academic fellowship, for fuck’s sake; he hadn’t expected his time in the Alexandrian archives to involve ducking behind the closest piece of gaudy furniture he could find.
He could have stayed at Wessex Corp and never been shot at in his entire life. He could have simply told Atlas Blakely to shove it and gone on holiday with his fiancée; he could be having vigorous, herculean sex right now, waking up to discuss the future of the company with his billionaire father-in-law over an expertly blended Bloody Mary. Did it matter that Eden was a tiresome adulteress or that James was a capitalist tyrant if it meant never having to break a sweat aside from a drunken family game of badminton?
At the moment, it was unclear.
Libby, at least, was starting to take some initiative with her defense, having discarded any further hesitation in favor of survival. Whoever had broken in, they were covered head to toe in black and moving acrobatically around the room, like a small pack of ninjas. That felt like a childish thing to say, but there it was: there were three or four ninja-things coming after them, and Tristan couldn’t think of the first thing to do. There was so much magic in the room it was difficult to see anything but hazy, translucent leaks.
Libby turned and aimed at something; an expulsion of power that was directed at nothing.
“You missed,” he said, a muttered I-told-you-so moment that he would have decorously avoided if not for how potentially life-threatening all this was, and she glared at him.
“I didn’t miss!”
“You absolutely did,” he said through his teeth, pointing. “You missed by about five feet.”
“But he’s down, he’s—”
Hell on earth, was she blind? He should have stayed with Nico. “What are you talking about? You might have broken a lamp, fine, but it’s only Edwardian—”
“I didn’t—” Libby broke off, blinking. “You’re saying there’s nothing there?”
“Of course there’s nothing there,” he growled in frustration, “it’s—”
Bloody Christ; was he stupid?
“It’s an illusion,” Tristan realized aloud, scowling at his own failure to see the obvious, and then, without any further wasted time, he took hold of Libby’s shoulders and aimed her, pointing.
“Right there, see it? Straight ahead.”
She fired again, this time setting off a round of bullets by stopping their progression mid-air and instigating mass combustion. The gunman was blown backwards, the air littered with shrapnel, and the force of the explosion set off a momentary fog of smoke. Libby was frightfully incendiary, which Tristan suspected was something to conserve as much as it was a timely relief. It was probably going to cost her the same amount of energy as whatever Nico had been doing downstairs, so best not to fire incautiously while they didn’t know how many others they would still face.
“What does the room look like to you?” he asked in her ear, trying to concentrate as the smoke cleared. All he could make out were flares, torrents of magic.
“I don’t know… dozens of them, at least,” she said, grimacing. He could see she was battling frustration; for someone with her obvious control problems, the presence of illusions must have been particularly nightmarish. “The room’s crawling with them.”
“There’s only three left,” Tristan told her, “but don’t waste energy. Let me see if I can find the medeian who’s casting the illusions.”
Libby gritted her teeth. “Hurry up!”
Fair enough. He lifted his head to glance around, trying to determine who, if anyone, was doing the casting. He couldn’t see any indication of magic being produced, though he did spot a bullet—a real one; Libby must have not been able to tell it from the illusioned ones—just in time to throw up a fairly primitive shield, which dissolved on impact as Libby jumped, alarmed.
“The medeian’s not here,” Tristan said, which was possibly the most troubling conclusion he could have reached. “Let’s get rid of these three and move.”
“Aim me,” she said without hesitation. “I can take out three.”
Tristan didn’t doubt it.
He took hold of her left arm, guiding her just as one of the gunmen fired another round of bullets. As with before, Libby’s explosion ricocheted backwards into the assailant, though Tristan didn’t wait to see if he’d achieved his intended results. The others were moving, and quickly, so he pulled her into his chest, aiming first for the one coming towards them and then, with a little added difficulty, at the one who was slipping from the room.
“They’re headed that way,” he said, pulling Libby up and racing after the escaping gunman. “Must be where the medeian is. Can you—”
A thin bubble of atmospheric change warped around them, sealing itself with a little slurp of vacuumed pressure.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem,” she panted, as Tristan caught traces of magic and followed its trail to land them in one of the sitting rooms.
The illusionist was easy to find, even before they had fully entered from the corridor; the cloaking enchantment was obviously expensive, covering most of the room and reaching into the nearby access points. Tristan held Libby back, watching the medeian first to see if he was working with someone else.
It looked like he was, though it wasn’t clear if whoever the illusionist was working with was a remote partner or someone else in the house; he was typing rapidly into a laptop that didn’t seem to be magical at all. Probably programming security cameras to be able to see, if Tristan had to guess, which meant they had seconds to spare. If not for having to control the illusions at the same time, the illusionist would have known they were there already.
“Go,” Tristan said to Libby, “while he’s not looking.”
She hesitated, which was the one thing he’d hoped she wouldn’t do.
“Do I shoot to kill, or—?”
In that exact moment, the medeian’s eyes snapped up from the laptop screen, meeting Tristan’s.
“NOW,” Tristan said, more desperately than he had hoped to sound, and Libby, thank bloody fuck, threw up a hand in time to stop whatever was coming towards them. The medeian’s eyes widened, obviously startled at the prospect of being overpowered, while Libby advanced towards him, shoving the force of the medeian’s own expulsion backwards.
The medeian wasn’t going down without a fight; he tried again, and this time Libby’s response was like a bolt of lightning, snapping the medeian’s control with a lash of something around his wrists. Tristan heard a cry of pain, and then a mutter of something under his breath; some basic obscenity, Tristan suspected, though his Mandarin was rusty.
“Who sent you?” Libby demanded, but the medeian had scrambled to his feet. Tristan, concerned the medeian might conjure more illusions as a defense, leapt forward, taking hold of Libby’s arm again and raising it.
“Which one?” Libby gasped. “He split.”
“That one, there, by the window—”
“He’s multiplying!”
“Just hold steady, I have him—”
This time, as Tristan locked Libby’s palm on the trajectory of the medeian’s escape, he caught a glimpse of something; evidence of magic that hadn’t been clear from afar. It was a little glittering chain, delicate like jewelry, that abruptly snapped.
In that precise moment the medeian turned his head, eyes widening in anguish. It had been a linking charm, but it was gone now.
“He had a partner but he doesn’t anymore,” Tristan translated in Libby’s ear.
She tensed. “Does that mean—”
“It means kill him before he gets away!”
He felt the impact leave her body from where his fingers had curled around her wrists. He could feel the entire force of it pumping through her veins and marveled, silently, at being so close to what felt like live ammunition. She was a human bomb; she could split the room, the air itself, into tiny, indistinguishable (except to Tristan) atoms. If Adrian Caine had ever met Libby Rhodes, he wouldn’t have hesitated to buy her somehow; he’d have offered her the biggest cut, given her the highest privilege of his little witchy cult. He was like that, Tristan’s father; male, female, race, class, it didn’t matter. Optics were nothing. Usefulness was paramount. Destruction was Adrian Caine’s god.
Tristan turned his head away from the explosion, though the heat of the blast was enough to sting his cheek. Libby faltered, struggling for a moment from the effort, and he locked an arm around her waist, half-dragging, half-carrying her from the room.
He kept moving until he saw Parisa, who emerged from one of the lower floors onto the landing of the stairwell, white-faced. Callum was at her side.
“There you are,” said Parisa dully, sounding like she’d seen a ghost.
“What happened?” Tristan asked them, setting Libby back on her feet. She looked a little woozy, but nodded to him for release, disentangling herself from his grip.
“I’m fine,” she said, though she remained braced for another attack, shoulders still tense.
“Just ran into another medeian downstairs,” Callum said. “Some spy organization from Beijing. A combat specialist.”
Tristan blinked with recognition. “Did the medeian have a partner?”
“Yes, an ill-”
“An illusionist,” Tristan confirmed, exchanging a knowing glance with Libby. “We got him. How did you know they were spies?”
“Aside from the obvious? She told me,” said Callum. “It was just her and the partner who were magical, everyone else was mortal.”
A distraction, probably, while only one of the medeians broke in.
Libby was testing her joints, still glancing around in paranoia. “She told you there was no one else? She could have easily been lying.”
“She wasn’t,” Callum said.
“How do you know?” Libby pressed, suspicious. “She could’ve just—”
“Because I asked nicely,” Callum said.
Parisa would have known—or could have, assuming the medeian hadn’t been using any mental defensive shields—but she, Tristan noticed, hadn’t said a word on the subject.
“You okay?” Tristan asked her, and she shuddered to cognizance, glancing up at him with a look of temporary displacement.
“Yeah. Fine.” She cleared her throat. “As far as I can tell, the house is empty now.”
“Was it just one group?”
Parisa shook her head. “Whoever Nico and Reina took out, they were a group, then the partners we took out, and someone else who was working alone.”
“Not alone,” came a voice, as the four of them looked up, instantly assuming various positions of defense. “Not to worry,” chuckled Atlas, who had Dalton trailing at his heels. “It’s only me.”
“Is it actually?” Libby whispered to Tristan, who was mildly impressed. Paranoia clearly suited her, or perfectionism, or whatever this was. She no longer trusted her own two eyes, and long-term, that was probably for the best.
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
She nodded gravely, but didn’t say anything.
“The agent taken out by Miss Kamali was sent by your former employer, Mr. Caine,” Atlas said, glancing at Tristan. “We always expect to see someone from Wessex Corp, mind you, so that was unsurprising.”
Tristan frowned. “You… expect to see them?”
At precisely that moment, Nico bounded euphorically up the stairs, Reina following like the slip of a shadow behind him.
“Hey,” Nico said, gorily disfigured. His thin white t-shirt was caked in blood from his shoulder and his nose was broken, though he appeared not to have noticed. He thrummed with adrenaline, acknowledging Atlas with an overeager nod. “What’s going on?”
“Well, Mr. de Varona, I was just informing the others about the operatives you faced this evening,” Atlas replied, opting not to comment discourteously on Nico’s appearance. “You and Miss Mori took out a military task force.”
“MI6?” Nico guessed.
“Yes, and CIA,” confirmed Atlas. “Led by a medeian who specialized in—”
“Waves, yeah,” Nico supplied, still buzzing as he glanced at Libby. “How’d you come out, Rhodes?”
Beside Tristan, Libby stiffened.
“Don’t look so thrilled, Varona, it’s monstrous,” she hissed, though Atlas answered for her.
“With Mr. Caine’s help, Miss Rhodes dispatched one of the world’s most wanted illusionists,” said Atlas, giving Tristan an additional nod of deference. “Her partner, a hand-to-hand combat specialist, was dispatched by Mr. Nova. They are both favored operatives of the Guǐhún, an intelligence operation from Beijing. Conveniently, they were both wanted globally for war crimes,” he informed Libby kindly, “which we will be pleased to inform the authorities they will not have to concern themselves with anymore.”
“Did we miss anyone?” asked Libby, who clearly couldn’t be deterred from her apprehension, but before Atlas could open his mouth, Reina had spoken.
“Yes. Two got away.”
The other five heads swiveled to hers, and she shrugged.
“They couldn’t get what they came for,” she said placidly. “Wards were too complex.”
“Yes,” Atlas confirmed. “Miss Mori is correct. There were, in fact, two medeians from the Forum who attempted unsuccessfully to penetrate the defensive wards of the library’s archives.”
“The Forum?” asked Callum.
“An academic society not unlike this one,” Atlas confirmed. “It is their belief that knowledge should not be carefully stored, but freely distributed. I confess they greatly misunderstand our work, and frequently target our archives.”
“Why do you know all this?” asked Tristan, who was growing rather frustrated by the Caretaker’s upsettingly careless tone. “It sounds as if we were all sitting ducks for something you already knew was going to happen.”
“Because it was a test,” Callum cut in.
Atlas gave him an impatient smile. “Not a test,” he said. “Not strictly speaking.”
“Try speaking less strictly, then,” Parisa advised tightly. “After all, we did nearly get killed.”
“You did not nearly get killed,” Atlas corrected her. “Your lives were in danger, yes, but you were selected for the Society because you already possessed the tools necessary to survive. The chance that any of you might have died was—”
“Possible.” Libby’s lips were thin. “Statistically, that is,” she added, inclining her head towards Atlas in something Tristan disgustingly guessed to be deference, “it was possible.”
“Many things are possible,” Atlas agreed. “But then, I never claimed your safety was a guarantee. In fact, I was quite clear that you would be required to have some knowledge of combat and security.”
Nobody spoke; they were waiting, Tristan expected, to be less annoyed about the fact that while they had never specifically signed anything saying they preferred not to be shot at in the middle of the night, some principles of preference remained.
“It is the Society’s practice to ‘leak’ the date of the new members’ arrival,” Atlas continued in their silence. “Some attempts at entry are expected, but it was never for us to know who or what those attacks would be.”
“The majority of the attempts were deflected by preexisting enchantments,” Dalton added, surprising them with his presence. “The installation allows us to see the ways our enemies may have evolved.”
“Installation,” Nico echoed. “What is that, like a game?”
He seemed delighted about having been invited to participate.
“Merely common practice,” said Atlas. “We like to see how well our potential initiates work together.”
“So, in short, a test,” said Callum, sounding none too pleased about it.
“A tradition,” Atlas corrected, with another steady smile. “And you all did quite well, truth be told, though I hope having seen each other in action allows you to put together a more thorough defense system. Collaboration is very important for the sort of work we do here.” He turned to Dalton, arching a brow. “Don’t you agree, Mr. Ellery?”
“As I said, every class of initiates consists of a unique composite of specialties,” Dalton supplied neutrally, addressing them as a group. “You were selected for a team as much as you were chosen as individual members. It is the Society’s hope that, moving forward, you will act accordingly.”
“Yes, quite,” Atlas concluded, returning his attention to the group of them. “There will of course be some relevant details to see to as far as any structural or magical damage, but seeing as the house has now been emptied and the wards have resumed their usual work, I would invite you to get some rest and revisit the house’s security in the morning. Good night,” he offered crisply, nodding to them as a group, and then turned on his heel, followed by Dalton.
Parisa, Tristan noted, watched Dalton go with intense and possibly excessive interest, frowning slightly in his wake. Tristan waited for the others to move—first Reina, who headed to bed without a word, and then Callum, who rolled his eyes, followed by Nico and Libby, who immediately started arguing in hushed tones—before he approached Parisa, sidling up to her as she turned away in troubled thought.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Her gaze flicked up to Callum, who was a few strides ahead of them.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing.”
“Doesn’t it?”
Only in that Callum looked perfectly unchanged.
“What happened?” Tristan asked again.
“Nothing,” Parisa repeated. “It was just…” She trailed off, and then cleared her throat. “It was nothing.”
“Ah yes, nothing,” Tristan said drily. “Right.”
They reached their rooms, lingering at the start of the corridor as the others filed off to bed. Nico barked something disapproving at Libby—something about “Fowler will fucking live for fuck’s sake”—and then only Tristan and Parisa remained in the hall.
He paused beside her door, hesitating as she opened it.
“I was thinking,” he said, clearing his throat. “If you wanted to—”
“I don’t at the moment,” she said. “Last night was fun, but I don’t really think we should make it a regular thing, do you?”
He bristled. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Sure it was,” said Parisa. “You’ve just had a near-death experience and now you want to stick your prick in something until you feel better.” Tristan, who was much too English for this conversation, rather resented her choice of words, though she cut him off before he could express his demurral aloud. “It’s evolutionary,” she assured him. “When you come close to death, the body’s natural impulse is procreation.”
“I wasn’t that close to death,” Tristan muttered.
“No? Well, lucky you.” Parisa’s expression hardened, her eyes darting to Callum’s bedroom door.
Not that Tristan had doubted it before, but ‘nothing’ had most definitely been ‘something.’
“I thought you liked him,” Tristan commented, and Parisa bristled.
“Who says I don’t?”
“I’m just saying—”
“I don’t know him.”
Tristan contemplated the value of asking a third time.
“Something clearly happened,” he allowed instead. “You don’t have to tell me what it was, I just—”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” She gave him a defensive glance. “How was little miss sunshine?”
“Libby? Fine. Good,” Tristan corrected himself, as it didn’t seem fair not to give her credit. She may not have been able to get out easily without him, but he wouldn’t have gotten out at all without her. “She’s good.”
“Needy little thing, isn’t she?”
“Is she?”
Parisa scoffed. “You should see the inside of her head.”
Tristan was already quite certain that was a place he had no interest in being. “I doubt we’ll be friends,” he said uncomfortably, “but at least she’s useful.”
There it was again. Useful.
The one thing he was not.
“Self-deprecation is such a waste,” said Parisa, sounding bored by the prospect of his interior thoughts. “Either you believe you’re worthy or you don’t, end of story. And if you don’t,” she added, opening the door to her room, “I certainly don’t want to chance ruining the high opinion of you I may have mistakenly gotten from last night.”
Tristan rolled his eyes. “So I’m too good, then? Is that the problem?”
“The problem is I don’t want you getting attached,” Parisa said. “You can’t just replace one high-maintenance woman with another, and more importantly, I don’t have time for your daddy problems.”
“By all means, let me down gently,” drawled Tristan.
“Oh, I’m not letting you down at all. I’m sure we’ll have our fun, but certainly not two nights in a row,” Parisa said, shrugging. “That’s sending entirely the wrong message.”
“Which is?”
“That I wouldn’t eliminate you if given the chance,” she said, and slipped inside her bedroom, shutting the door.
Great, Tristan thought. It was such a confounding reality that Parisa was beautiful even when she was being mean; especially then, in fact. She was also much more beautiful than Eden, which said a lot about beauty, and about cruelty, too.
He had such a talent for finding women who put themselves first. It was like he was some sort of sniffer-dog for emotional fatality, always able to dig it up from the one person in the room who would have no trouble making him feel small. He wished he were less attracted to it, that brazen sense of self, but unfortunately ambition left such a sweet taste in his mouth, and so had Parisa. Maybe she was right; maybe it was daddy problems.
Maybe after a lifetime of being useless, Tristan simply wanted to be used.
