Unveiling Magic Page 18

  The world was made of bewilderment and fog and noise.

  And then they were downstairs.

  There had been two more people in the building, but the stun-bomb had hit them and for some reason they hadn’t been wholly defended from it - heck, Valerie and Sasha weren’t fully defended, and that was with Valerie’s own cast protecting them - and Valerie and Sasha had been able to slip past them.

  Or something.

  It was a bit foggy exactly what had happened.

  “Are you okay?” Valerie asked as she and Sasha leaned against the side of the building. The streetlights were beginning to come on and it was cold out. Sasha pulled a sweater out of her bag and handed the other bag to Valerie. There was a jacket in there, and Valerie paused long enough to put it on before she straightened and started walking again.

  “There’s a car around her somewhere,” she said. “They didn’t walk here.”

  “How do you know?” Sasha asked. “How do you know any of this?”

  “It’s guesses,” Valerie said. Based on movies, if she was being honest. “If you’ve got better ones, I’m glad to hear them.”

  Sasha shuddered, looking back at the building.

  They needed to make it to the corner before they figured out what had happened, inside.

  “Should we run?” Sasha asked.

  Valerie shook her head.

  “I don’t think so. I think they could follow that.”

  She could follow that, she realized, stunned.

  “No, we need to walk, and we need to find a safe place to hide.”

  “And then your parents will come back and they’ll…” Sasha started, then shook her head, wiping at her eyes. “What’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Valerie said. “I don’t know, but… My mom said they could find us anywhere. We have to keep moving, or else they’re going to catch us, and we lose our chance to decide…”

  “Did your mom teach you all of this?” Sasha asked, and Valerie frowned.

  Her mother hadn’t taught her any magic, but they’d been talking about self defense and tactics and… They’d watched all of her mom’s favorite movies over and over again, and her mom had talked about what was realistic and what wasn’t…

  “She did,” Valerie said. “I didn’t see it before now.”

  Sasha nodded, looking back once more.

  “That makes me feel better.”

  “Come on,” Valerie said, putting an arm around Sasha’s shoulders. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but this is the best we can do.”

  They stopped the car alongside a busy road, looking at chain link fence and a vast abandoned lot.

  “What is this?” Hanson asked.

  “I don’t know,” Martha answered. “It’s warded. Heavily. I can’t get past here, even on foot. There’s something hidden out there on that lot.”

  “And they were here?” he asked. She nodded.

  “They were here for a long time,” she said. “Maybe they were digging, I don’t know. They got past the wards, though. Susan’s magic disappears in there.”

  Hanson couldn’t imagine what his mom was tracking based off of, and he didn’t like being in the car with her, though he had to admit that he was torn between wanting Valerie to get away and hoping that he would get to see her again soon.

  He’d missed her badly while she’d been at school, and he was just getting used to being around her again when this had happened.

  “Could you get in if you wanted to?” he asked, and Martha shook her head.

  “No. I… maybe. But I’m out of practice, and Susie is the covert operative. I’m just tracking her.”

  Hanson looked out at the lot, squinting to try to see what Valerie might have been up to, then Martha put the car into drive again and pulled away from the curb.

  “It’s not ours,” she said after a moment, looking over her shoulder. “I’m not certain, but it doesn’t feel right. I think it’s Superior-held.”

  “She took Valerie into an enemy property?” Hanson asked, and Martha shrugged.

  “I don’t have any idea what the two of them are doing,” Martha said. “You shouldn’t assume that Susan Blake is going to take care of that girl the way you expect her to, based on who you always thought she was. She’s at war now, and she’s brutal.”

  Hanson sighed.

  “Seems like everyone changes,” he muttered, and Martha looked over at him.

  “Do you want me to teach you magic?” she asked and he turned sharply to look at her.

  “Yes.”

  “We need to find a place to stay for the night. They came back out, but we’re getting further behind. I need to report back what I’ve found and see if we can’t come up with a way to get ahead of them.”

  “How would you do that?” Hanson asked. “Why would you be following them if you knew where they were going to be?”

  “Look who’s so smart,” Martha said. “This is our opportunity to matter. Where would she take Valerie to reward her? To calm her down after something went wrong? What kind of thing is going to get Valerie back into a mindset where her mother can use her to work again?”

  “Is Sasha still with them?” Hanson asked.

  “How would I know?” Martha asked. “I’ve never met her. I’m following a magic trail, not using a crystal ball.”

  “Fine,” Hanson said. “I’m just worried about her. No one seems to care what happens to her.”

  “Certainly not me,” Martha said, then glanced over at him to catch his disgusted look. “Look out that window.”

  He turned his face away.

  “Tell me what you see,” his mother instructed, and he sighed.

  “Sidewalk, buildings, cars… dude having an argument with a lamp post…”

  “People, son,” Martha said. “The world is full of people. People who matter to the people around them. Sasha Mills is just one of them. One among billions. I get that you care about her personally, but the minute you let that happen, you lose your ability to fight the war to save the rest of them. It’s going to be the thing that hamstrings Susan Blake.”

  “Thought it was the leash you were going to use to control her,” Hanson said.

  “It cuts both ways,” Martha said.

  “So you don’t care about me?” Hanson asked, not turning around.

  “Look out that window and tell me that I should take care of you over all of them,” Martha said.

  Hanson rested his head against the glass.

  He loved his mother.

  He’d had a good childhood, he thought.

  Happy.

  He’d always been happy.

  Even when they’d been yelling at each other, he’d always known that his mother was his staunchest - and most emphatic - ally.

  This.

  This was foreign in much the same way coming home to an empty apartment had been.

  He didn’t know what to think.

  “When we get to the hotel for the night, we can start walking through the basics. I need to think about where I would start, teaching you, but everyone else does it, so it can’t be so hard, can it?”

  “So it would seem,” Hanson said. “Mom?”

  “Yes, Hanson.”

  “Did you ever think about just not coming back?” he asked. “Pretending like it was someone else’s problem, keep going with the lives we had? We were happy.”

  “No,” she said. “Possible that Susan Blake could walk away and forget about all of this, but it’s been a part of my life the whole time. If we lose this war, I guarantee your dad will end up dead. He isn’t going to walk away until we win it once and for all.”

  Hanson hadn’t thought of that.

  “Where is Dad?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” Martha answered. “They don’t tell me that kind of stuff. Secrets are easier to keep when fewer people know them.”

  Hanson leaned his head against the glass, closing his eyes.

  His life was a wreck, and it
wasn’t ever going to get better.

  Yes.

  He’d known about magic his entire life, but his mom hadn’t told him anything about any of this world… And that she was some different person, now… Driven. She’d always been a force of nature, but this - this - this was what motivated her. He’d found it. And it was like she’d forgotten him.

  “Where would they go, son?” Martha asked. “That’s the one thing I need from you. Something special for Valerie to help her get her mind back together after something hard happened? We need to jump ahead. And you’re the one who knows how that’s going to go.”

  “Why not you?” Hanson asked. “You were Mrs. Blake’s friend.”

  “I was, but she isn’t going to be predictable on her on behalf,” Martha said. “She knows how to not follow patterns. She’ll break her rules for Valerie, though.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Hanson said.

  “I want you to take a good long look out that window,” Martha said. “You think about letting every single one of those people die because you want to keep me from finding your friend. I don’t want to hurt her, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to her mom. I just need to get her back on the right side of this fight. If you have the key to that and you keep it from me, you are complicit in the deaths of every single person we pass. You live with that.”

  “Mom,” he said, but she shrugged and turned her attention forward again.

  “You live with that,” she said again.

  “Mr. Trent, Mr. MacMillan, you have someone to see you,” Mr. Benson said through the door after he knocked. Shack sat up and looked over at Ethan.

  “You think they know something?” he asked.

  “Everyone knows more than we do at this point,” Ethan said, hopping down off of his bed and waiting for Shack.

  There was a ladder.

  Shack just declined to use it.

  Ethan felt bad for the girls downstairs. They’d said something about it at lunch the other day, and Shack had been unrepentant.

  So.

  Ethan opened the door and went out into the hallway, where Mr. Benson was waiting for them.

  “I swear, I’ve never done so much message delivery work,” Mr. Benson said as they set off. “It’s like they’ve forgotten what it means, that I’m the head of academics.”

  Ethan had several things he might have said to that, before he’d started at the school, but today he was a more mature, seventeen year old version of himself, and he kept his mouth shut.

  They followed Mr. Benson down the hallway to the office, where he let them into the large conference room, where both Ethan’s dad and Shack’s mom sat.

  Ethan looked over at Shack and stretched his eyes. Shack just shrugged, settling down into a chair the same way he would have anywhere else.

  “Ethan,” Mr. Trent said. “Shack.”

  “Mr. Trent,” Shack answered. “Mom.”

  “Dad,” Ethan said, still standing.

  “Your reports have been unsatisfactory,” Mrs. MacMillan said.

  “Don’t know what you expect us to do, ma,” Shack said. “They’ve got us in lockdown while they try to fix up security.”

  Still.

  Ethan couldn’t imagine what was taking that long.

  Merck Trent looked at Ethan with his eyebrows up.

  “I understand that you are still eating meals with the full population of the school,” he said, and Ethan nodded.

  “Minus the interesting ones,” he said.

  “Milton Maury says that you boys are planning on starting a coup,” Merck said.

  Well.

  He’d held off like a whole week before turning that one in.

  Ethan was proud of him.

  “It’s not a coup,” Ethan said. “We just don’t trust you to have our best interests at heart.”

  “Never did,” Shack said.

  “Oswald,” Mrs. MacMillan said sharply. Ethan tried not to smile.

  Failed.

  “Smug child,” Merck said. “It isn’t about your best interests because we are a part of the Council. We must balance everyone’s best interests.”

  “No,” Ethan said, short. This attitude, the one that had permanently eradicated any idea from his father’s mind that Ethan might be the right one to succeed him at Council, it was like taking a step back in time and finding something he’d really liked about himself. “No,” he said again. “You don’t care about everyone’s best interests. You care about maintaining power.”

  “Which is in everyone’s best interests,” Merck said, his tone dark.

  Ethan pursed his lips, resting his arm across the back of the next chair over.

  “Nope,” he said. “That’s just you. If we elected the dude who ran the Council, maybe the Council self-perpetuating would be in everyone’s best interests…”

  “If we voted, who would get the vote? Fact Alexander would take over the Council by manipulating an election, and then the only resistance to his genocide would go away. Is that what you want?” Merck asked.

  “Maybe if the magic community really thought that the human race deserved to die for being inferior to us, sure. I’d be okay with it,” Ethan said.

  “Ignorant, short-sighted boy,” Mrs. MacMillan said.

  She was a cool lady, outside of the Council. She was a better basketball player than Shack, and there wasn’t a single card game Ethan had ever tried where she didn’t win every hand.

  Sitting next to Merck, though, she was a ruthless ice queen, and Ethan had a hard time meeting her eye, even as he mocked his own father.

  “We aren’t here for you to tell us how much you dislike our politics,” Merck said. “We are here because Martha Cox just reported back what Susan and Valerie Blake have been up to…”

  “They’re together?” Ethan interrupted. “It wasn’t the Superiors who took her?”

  He’d been afraid it was her dad, and that she’d gone along without a fight - he would have heard a fight, right? - because she’d wrongly trusted him.

  He’d been deep-in-his-stomach afraid of that.

  “That’s what Martha says,” Merck said slowly.

  “You can’t trust her,” Mrs. MacMillan said. “She’s too invested in currying favor. She’s going to lie to us to try to convince us she’s on the right path.”

  “If she’s found Susan, am I concerned where the girl is?” Merck answered. Ethan gritted his teeth.

  “Valerie matters because her mother loves her,” Shack said. “In case you’ve lost sight of that.”

  “Yes,” Merck said. “I remember, thank you. She called in tonight to tell us what they’ve been doing…”

  “Do you know if Sasha is with them?” Shack asked. Mr. Merck straightened, pursing his lips, then went on as though Shack hadn’t spoken.

  “… and it is your responsibility as representatives of the council here at this school to consult on what it means.”

  Ethan sat forward.

  They didn’t know what Susan was up to.

  That was a very good sign.

  Not because he had some specific outcome that he was rooting for, but because he loved to see his father frustrated.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “First,” Merck said. “I need to know what interests Valerie has that her mother would be unable to avoid attending to.”

  Ethan raised an eyebrow.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. She goes to the bathroom like the rest of us.”

  Mrs. MacMillan gave him a cold look, and Ethan looked over at Shack, just to not have to see it.

  “Mrs. Cox can’t keep up,” Shack said. “They’re looking for a short-circuit to catch up with Mrs. Blake, and trying to use Valerie to do it.”

  Ethan narrowed his eyes and nodded.

  “You’re right. Mrs. Blake is too good for their spy, so they’re trying to pile on more spies to tip the odds.”

  Shack gave him a phantom of a sideways smile.

  Ethan
looked directly at his father again.

  “You gave me a mission,” Ethan said after a moment. “Told me to get close to her.”

  “Didn’t know that,” Shack breathed, and Ethan dipped his chin, a nod.

  “That’s right. He held me back from my freshman year at magic school so that I could spy on an asset’s daughter.”

  “And yet I find that even that was too complex for you. You’ve lost her, haven’t you son?”

  “Oh, no,” Ethan said, lifting his chin and rolling his tongue in his cheek for a moment. “No. I could find her if I wanted to. I haven’t lost her. You lost me.”

  Ethan stood, and Shack began to rise as well.

  “Oswald,” Mrs. MacMillan said, the strongest form of a command Ethan had ever heard.

  “Yeah, ma,” Shack said.

  “Where are they?”

  Shack shook his head.

  “Val’s cool,” he said. “Knocks back demons, defuses bombs, likes this guy, I mean, seriously. But I don’t know her like he does. I’m just hoping she comes back, because the rest of the year’s gonna feel awfully flat if she doesn’t. But that’s between her and him and not you. Ma’am.”

  “You think that we have no power here,” Merck said, sounding tired. “That you serve at your own leisure. You are mistaken.”

  “Are you going to pull me out of magic school, Dad?” Ethan asked. “Have your own son be a flunky who can’t cast? Make me a target for the Superiors, because I can’t defend myself for the rest of my life? There’s a war on. Thought you needed every soldier you could get your hands on.”

  “Oh, no,” Merck said. “I wouldn’t take you out of school. But I could force you to drop out after next year and join the front lines.”

  “That’s assassination,” Shack said. “You wouldn’t do that to your own kid.”

  “Oswald,” Mrs. Macmillan said. “You watch your friend, and you watch him break. And then know that Merck is nowhere near as ruthless as I am.”

  Shack set his mouth and looked at Ethan, raising an eyebrow.

  “You want me dead, Dad?” Ethan asked. He sighed. He liked magic. He also liked being alive.

  “No, but I want you to think about it,” Merck said. “Really think about it. That fear of being out where someone else is willing to kill you, no one to defend you, no one to save you. Your job to kill or be killed. Somewhere out in the dark, knowing that that other guy is better than you, that he’s going to get you and it’s only a matter of time…”