Chapter Twenty-Five

For most of the first flight I dozed, but when we disembarked at the greater airline, I goggled over the crowds. I haven’t flown many times, and I had never seen such a huge concourse. The complex was like a double-decker mall tied into an airport tied into a subway. Shuttles ran along an underground track to take you from station to station. Landing, departing, layover; the crush of people was outrageous. Where could they all be going?

Li assured me that it was nearly always like this, but how would he know? I guessed the summer’s end was to blame. If people weren’t fitting in a last chance vacation, they were returning from one, and that was on top of whatever constituted business as usual.

It was such a distraction that I almost wasn’t angry when I found out where we were going. He couldn’t keep it from me when I was the one paying for the tickets.

No pockets? Really!

“Vermont!” I shouted over the ocean of voices. “You’re taking me home?”

It’s not that I didn’t want to go back; I just didn’t like having him not mention our destination beforehand. A part of me couldn’t have been happier, except it’s not as if I could actually have things back the way they were. Nothing was going to change what I had seen or what had happened to my dad. I was angry because I didn’t want to be reminded of him.

When Li responded he didn’t have to shout. His voice carried perfectly despite its softness. Stupid magic.

“I am sorry I did not explain this earlier,” he said, “but please, wait until we are on the plane. We should not talk in a crowd.”

Wait for the plane! I fumed. Who did he think would listen to us? Or think we were talking about something real? Wizards Council indeed.

But there was no moving him when he’d made a decision. I could keep my peace, or at least my silence, as long as I needed. The rest of our trek around the airport was uneventful. We ate dinner, and I marveled at vending machines that sold IPods and resisted the impulse to crack young ladies over the head with anything at hand.

They were like freaking moths.

Some of them stopped in their tracks, some of them followed us, and some of them only watched him go by and looked like they had forgotten where they were. The ages ranged from eight to way too old to be mooning over Li. I don’t care how much of a mythical creature he is. It’s not like they could actually see what he was, just sense it, I guess.

The only thing to assuage my smoldering temper was the men. Boyfriends and husbands at first were confused, and then they were hurt, and then they were furious. I actually thought a few were going to try to jump him at one point, but it’s not like he was doing anything to attract all this attention. He just was.

They grabbed their women by the arms and yanked as hard as necessary, but it was the unattached women who were the worst. Not all of them followed him of course. Plenty of girls and women in the airport didn’t notice him. They didn’t even spare him a glance, but there were so many people in total that the numbers affected by him began to add up.

Incognito, my ass!

By the time we were ready to board our flight, we were being trailed by a female wake like he was an ocean liner plowing through the water. I might have really hurt someone if it wasn’t plain that the grimmer I became the more amused he was. So I kept it to a simmer.

I don’t know why they made me so angry, apart from being a huge embarrassment to collective womankind. Hardly any of them tried to talk to him, and only a handful came close enough to touch him. When they did it was barely a brush of the fingertips, and they went away looking like they had just been blessed by a rock star and the pope. I mostly felt sorry for them. A little attention, a little appreciation might have been fine, but enough is enough. I was angry…because he was mine . Then I was even madder for thinking that, because it made me just as stupid as the flock behind us. He wasn’t mine. He wasn’t anyone’s. He couldn’t be.

Then I was just sad.

I caught a flash of blue glaze in the thinning crowd, then nothing. Timothy? I was so surprised I forgot all about our entourage, but he wasn’t there. It had been my imagination. Timothy was dead, not tracking us through the airport. Not that we would be hard to follow. My heart had jumped into high gear, higher gear anyway, and it was a long while coming down.

We were boarding. Li’s wake was waking up to the fact that they had wandered across the concourse and couldn’t remember why, so I was relatively calm by the time he and I found our assigned seats.

Night was firmly in place, with the plane’s interior twilight dim. We were lucky enough to have places tucked in the rear, myself at the window, creating an illusion of privacy. Once I had sent an overtly friendly stewardess a glare sharp enough to make her stammer, it was like having a room to ourselves - a tiny, tiny, vibrating room.

The earth shrank away; the city, a distant galaxy below. Li was silent, eyes lidded, the picture of beauty in repose. If I didn’t know he never slept I would have thought he was napping, but rest for him meant taking another shape. I wasn’t angry now that we were putatively alone, but I still had questions he wasn’t about to avoid.

“Li,” I began. “Please explain what’s going on.”

His eyes remained shut, but a grin teased the corners of his mouth.

“You mean about the girls?”

I narrowed my glower, but he didn’t appear to notice.

“No,” I said. “I mean about where we are going and what happens when we get there. You have to have a plan by now. Let’s hear it.”

He nodded like I had just agreed with him about something. Stupid boys.

“We’re going to visit the hospital where your father was. I’ll need you to give directions.”

“ What! ” A few heads turned, and I and went on in a stage whisper. “Why are we going there?” Of all my memories, that was the last place I wanted to visit. I had to stifle a pang of guilt, of acid regret, at the thought that followed. I didn’t even know where he was buried.

“Did you ever consider,” he said slowly, placing pieces on a game board, “that your father’s sickness was not natural?”

“I…” I had told him everything while we were in Numia, about my dad and the coma, about the picture of my mom and why it was important to me, but he hadn’t voiced any such concern then. “I don’t know,” I said finally.

“The doctors didn’t understand it, did they?”

I shook my head. If they had had any solid theories they certainly hadn’t shared them with me. At the time, I had been too upset to really think about it. I don’t have any medical knowledge. It had seemed reasonable enough to me that he had sort of gone away. He had been getting sicker for a long while, more lethargic, and the doctors hadn’t had any ideas about that either. His sleep cycle had been lengthening dramatically, so when the day came that he didn’t wake up, it was almost expected. There was never a way to account for it with disease. I blamed my mom for leaving and myself for tying him down. It was like he had just given up and gone away.

Li was watching my face.

“It’s all right.” He touched my cheek. “It’s all right.”

I suppose I’m not very good about hiding my feelings. I make do most of the time by not thinking about the bad stuff, the scariness of not even knowing myself anymore. My dad is a topic I usually keep quarantined, but amazingly enough, it was sort of all right, just by him saying so.

“You are a Cariad,” he said gently. “The word means beloved, by itself. It also names you as descending from one of the greatest lines. Over the course of this year or the next, that blood will begin to awaken. Your inheritance will begin to show. Coming of Age is a significant period among Cariads, and yours has already started.”

Coming of Age. I had definitely heard that phrase before, but it hadn’t seemed to deserve capital letters, then.

“Isn’t it a neat coincidence, that as this most important period of your life comes around, so much happens all at once? First your father becomes ill, and then Milton appears out of nowhere to provide you with a new home”

I still had the water bottle Esme had given me; it was my only carry-on luggage. I was using it as a stress ball.

“Milton did this,” I said. “He did this to my dad.” A sudden wave of anger washed over me, dragging me under, more than I had ever known in my life. I felt hate like a furnace in my heart and I could have screamed. I could have killed, but the emotion wasn’t all mine.

I snapped back with a shock. The Shadow was roiling in its cage. It was hot as the sun at my back. It had almost taken me over again.

I chilled, shivering. Li was watching me with infinite concern, infinite sympathy. Had he seen the change nearly overtaking me, or was it all in my mind? Those violet windows were unreadable, at least on that score.

I felt my hand being squeezed like it was happening to another person.

“Coincidences happen all the time,” he said. “Only the very naïve and the very foolish see conspiracy in every coincidence, but this was no chance series of events. It was a ploy to put you under Milton’s wing when you would be most vulnerable to his influence.”

Milton the sorcerer, the schemer. From what little I had glimpsed of his ultimate goals, he had intended to rule the world. He had lived so long, nearly two hundred years, and my dad had lived all that with him. They were brothers.

“How could he do that to him? Why would he hurt my dad?” I hesitated over the heaviest question, struggling under its weight. “Did Milton kill him?”

Li frowned, considering. “He put him to sleep, I am sure of that.” His frown deepened. “He probably could have murdered his brother even after extending his life for so many years, but I do not believe he would have. Not unless he thought it was absolutely necessary to his plans; unless he saw it as unavoidable.”

It sounded like a contradiction. There had to be more to make everything fit.

“Then, why?”

“You don’t understand yet how important you are to the magical world. You are not thinking about how big Malice is and Milton was, and what you are now a part of.”

His eyes flashed, was there anger there?

“They have always been watching you,” he said. “The Wizards Council wouldn’t allow one of the last keys to go unguarded. Not if they could help it. Malice would have attempted to keep you secret, and Acton separating himself from your uncle would have helped that. Yet nothing Malice does can be hidden for long. She is too powerful and too feared for it to be so. All your life the Wizards Council has had eyes over you, none that you would recognize, some you would not even be able to see. They knew the danger of allowing Malice to return for you when you had Come of Age, as she wished. They also knew that the danger of allowing Milton to influence you directly would not be much less.”

He was angry, I was sure of it. A barely controlled heat frothed just beneath the surface, though that was as smooth as ever by appearances. The only crack was his voice.

“For the story to have played out as it has, Milton must have corrupted those eyes so that he could take you out from under them. Once he had you at the ranch he no longer had to fear the Council. They had tested themselves there in the past and failed.”

The way he said ‘test’ made it sound extremely uncomfortable - blood and fire and fearsome machines flowing over the clay.

“He could not blind them forever,” Li continued. “Ultimately they had to discover the treachery. They knew he had you and they knew what he did to get you.”

He was angry at them, I realized. The heat in his voice was for the ones who had failed to protect me. Li was furious that I had been put in danger, and it felt kind of nice, thinking about it. Then with the next sentence he regained his usual equanimity, and mine was shattered.

“They would have gone to your father and tried to help. They may have taken him away.”

Sorcerers always lie.

“He’s alive?” I murmured. “They healed him?”

Li was caught, vacillating. He didn’t want to dash my hope but he had to be clear.

“I cannot be certain yet. I think he is. Even though he never embraced the study of magic, he had it in his veins. The Wizards Council values anyone with the talent, the Spark, and his being your father only interests them further. When Milton’s attention went elsewhere they could have healed him. If he was with the Council it would be natural for Milton to pretend he had died in order to solidify his hold on you. We just can’t be sure. There are too many possibilities.”

That seemed like a roundabout way of not telling me something.

“Like what?” I asked.

Li looked pained. This news would not be good. “It is possible,” he allowed, “that the weaves were woven too deep. When whoever the Council sent tried to pull Acton out of his enchantment, the spell shredded his spirit. It could have separated him from his body, or it could have killed him outright.”

I felt a prick at every word, but he wasn’t done.

“Or,” he said, “someone else thought to use him to their advantage, perhaps as a way to influence you if you were ever free of Milton. They could have spirited him away before the Council roused itself to action.”

“Who else is there?”

He hesitated. “I’m not sure,” Li said, but I felt a lie in it, something I had never sensed from him before. Omission, yes, but not lies. My Shadow, in its corner, pulsed with satisfaction; it seemed to take this as a point proven.

I only hurt.

‎