Frost silvered over Central Park, and Laurent’s and Grey’s breath puffed into the air as they ran. “Is it just me, or is it getting cold earlier this year?” Laurent asked.
“We’ll have to start meeting at the gym soon.” Grey sounded excited. Laurent was . . . not. Running on a grey piece of plastic that went nowhere while facing an infinite number of wall-screen televisions that all showed the same cable news channel was his idea of a level of hell in a modern take on the Inferno.
They passed another quarter mile in silence. Then Grey said, “So how was your meeting with Merlin?”
“Fine. Sort of anticlimactic. Like, I was expecting the Mages’ Club to feel, more, I don’t know, magical. Instead, it was just boring and out of touch. The whole thing felt like a college interview.”
“So no big offer of alliance or anything like that?”
“Not even close. I’m glad—I’d rather make my own choices. Like you always say, if tradition holds us back, we need to think outside of it.” They came to a stop, and Laurent bent down to fix a loose shoelace.
“We should talk about that sometime,” Grey said. “There’s all sorts of things that could be done, ways to strengthen magic, to make the Unseen World more powerful, that people aren’t even thinking of yet.”
“We’re the future, right?” Laurent said. “That’s the point of the Turning. Clean out what isn’t working, bring in what could. Speaking of, when’s your next duel?”
“Two days from now,” Grey said.
“Why don’t you stop by after? We should discuss our own strategy. We don’t need Merlin in order to make an alliance.”
“Exactly,” Grey said. “I’ll text you later, set it up.”
Laurent waved goodbye, and Grey headed for the subway. After the debacle with Miranda, he hadn’t told anyone how he supplemented his power. Maybe it was time. It wasn’t like Laurent had any great attachment to Unseen World traditions, and he might be able to see the potential in what Grey was doing. He’d decide after the next challenge.
? ? ?
Outside the Mages’ Club, Miles waved off his car and driver and walked home in the wind-tossed night. The air smelled like the promise of snow, and the damp soaked into his joints.
They ached.
It had been that sensation years ago—waking up with pain in his joints, the reminder of his own mortality sitting on him like a smog—that had made him realize what was happening. The small spells that he’d come to think of as background noise, the ones he used constantly, that should have kept him from feeling the minor aches and pains of age, were failing. And there was only one reason for such basic spells to fail: He was losing his magic.
Unacceptable, of course. No one could hold a House if they didn’t have magic.
Once he had realized what was happening, he had taken steps, made changes. So much magic came out of Shadows, and the Angel of the Waters was the perfect conduit. It hadn’t taken that much to set some aside. To collect the magic and store it against need. His need.
But lately he could feel the signs again in his body, in his magic. He knew them. The slowness, the aches, the tremors, all returning. It seemed that what he had thought of as a permanent solution was merely a stopgap.
There had been a failure of magic today. Not in a duel. And so it was impossible to comfort himself with the idea that magic had halted in its path because of the words of a spell spoken out of order, or a magician’s failure of nerve in a moment of pressure. It had been a dishwashing spell, at the Mages’ Club. The kind of spell that had been cast thousands of times, a spell that barely even required thinking about. Instead of clean glassware, there was a shattered heap of useless fragments, still stained.
Magic was breaking.
The wind picked up, tossing plastic bags and fallen leaves with abandon. The temperature dropped, and rain—hard, angry rain, just on this side of ice—spat from the sky.
Here, where no one could see, where no one would know, Miles gestured, his hand hidden in his coat pocket. He spoke a word under his breath, the will mattering more than the sound.
The rain parted, and fell around him.
He exhaled. He had enough magic. Today, he still had enough.
But.
His joints ached.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Grey leaned against the rough brick wall of the building and pulled his illusions closer to his body. The thing that mattered right now, more than the jagged press of brick into his side, more than the rot rising from the uncollected trash bags on the corner, more than the thousand potential distractions and annoyances sharing the sidewalk with him, was that no one notice how badly he was hurt, especially not here in the mundane world. Someone actually seeing his wounds would mean things like doctors and hospitals and explanations that wouldn’t be believed anyway. Better to stay hidden, even if being hidden made things like walking more difficult.
The duel had gone poorly. No. The duel had been a fucking mess. It was the heir to House Morgan. Violet, her name was. Or Daisy. Something like that. All the girls in that House were named after flowers. He hadn’t thought anyone there knew anything about his relationship with Rose, but someone must have suspected because what should have been a fairly easy challenge had turned bloody. Marigold or Peony or whatever had wrapped him in a Briar Rose illusion—a forest of thorns he’d had to fight his way out of. He’d been able to do it, but they’d sunk in and cut deeply before he’d finally broken free.
Plus, the last girl hadn’t had as much magic in her bones as he had thought, and so he’d gone into the challenge weak. Hadn’t had enough power to heal himself after casting his spell, so he had forgone healing and done his best to hide the weakness, the wounds, as much as he could so no one would know how bad it was.
He took another step and gritted his teeth against the pain. He pressed his hands harder against the wounds in his abdomen, winced as blood flowed over them, as he felt the soft edges of opened skin. He thought maybe the bleeding was slowing but didn’t want to look back to see if there was a trail of blood visible behind him—sometimes looking too closely at an illusion could be enough to break it.
Two blocks away from Laurent’s building. He could get there. He pushed off the wall, felt his legs threaten to go out from under him. Forced them straight and steady. Steadyish.
He would need to replenish his stores of magic. He would need to do that soon. He’d wait to tell Laurent about where he was getting it—he couldn’t afford to share this time.
Grey stumbled through the sidewalk crowds like a drunk, arms wrapped tight around his abdomen, as if that might keep the blood in. He kept his gaze down, locked on his feet, one in front of the other. He was shaking when he walked into Laurent’s lobby, but he hadn’t fallen.
“I’m afraid you can’t be here,” the doorman said, moving toward Grey as if to herd him back onto the sidewalk.
Perfect. Some idiot new guy. The day just kept getting better. “I’m Grey Prospero. I’m on Laurent Beauchamps’ approved list.”