Chapter 4
Taland Tivoux
A few hours earlier
Whatever place this was, wherever they’d taken me to, Rosabel was not here, and that was pretty much all I needed to know.
I pushed the doors open at the same time and with all my strength, as if I hoped the sound of them slamming against the walls was going to do something —anything —to alleviate the anger and pain weighing my chest down. Not physical pain because I’d been healed, it seemed, but the pain of not knowing where she was. What had happened to her. Why she wasn’t with me, when it had been her who took me out.
I remembered it just fine, even though I’d had a foot in the grave—I remembered. She’d carried me, dragged me all the way out of that shit show by herself when she could barely stand on her own.
My stubborn little criminal.
And now she wasn’t here. I’d woken up in a small dark room all alone, without her.
At the end of the narrow corridor outside that room were the others, and they all stopped speaking when I barged in. The doors did slam against the walls on either side, and it was definitely satisfying to hear the cracks as the handles dented them in, but the satisfaction didn’t last.
Aurelia and Kaid were sitting on a couch farthest to the left of the room, while Seth sat alone on the floor near a table with weapons on top of it, resting his elbows on his raised knees as he played with his feather. And on the other side, near a dark grey desk stood Zachary, Radock and Violet—one of the elder members of Selem, a Bluefire that could kill you twenty different ways with nothing but two pocketknives in her hands.
Or she used to when she wasn’t sixty years old, I guessed.
No Rosabel.
I stepped into the room as they watched me, some flinching, some concerned—Seth just looked bored as he rolled his eyes at my naked torso. I hadn’t taken the time to change or shower—I couldn’t have cared less.
“Bro—” Radock started at the same time as I said, “Where is she?”
They all knew who I was talking about. They could all see that she wasn’t here, but her bracelet was. It was right there in the middle of the grey desk’s shiny top. The bracelet, but not her.
“I imagine you’re feeling well, Taland,” said Aurelia as she stood up from the couch and fixed her leather jacket.
“‘Course he does, the bastard. After all those spells, the dead would feel great, too. Meanwhile, I can’t get any of you to do more on me ,” Seth said. His voice was low, but the entire room heard it because of the silence.
The entire room ignored him, too.
Radock turned toward me with his hands in his pockets. “Glad to see you’re okay, Taland.”
I moved closer to him, to that desk. “Where is she?” I asked again, and he had to see that I was holding myself back from screaming my fucking guts out. I hoped he answered me before I did something stupid. My magic was at the ready, and that bracelet was right there. I didn’t even need a feather—or the pain that came with it. I’d already used that bracelet with Rosabel so I knew how easily I could best all of them here if it came to it.
“She’s home.”
I turned to Violet Asher while she crossed her arms in front of her chest. Since I was a kid, she’d always looked strange to me with her wavy hair that fell down to her hips and wrapped around her shoulders like a silver blanket—and she still looked almost exactly the same somehow.
“She went home. Madeline Rogan took her,” she added.
Every drop of blood in my veins turned to stone. Madeline Rogan. “The IDD?—”
“ Not the IDD—she’s in the mansion in Baltimore. She’s with her grandmother.”
I took another step closer, and I felt the cool tiles underneath my bare feet as if they were trying to call to my mind, to my attention, to remind me that I was in a room full of killers who could take my head if they wanted.
Here’s the thing, though: I could take theirs easier. I would take theirs because whatever kept them alive and clinging to this world was much weaker than my purpose.
“Why isn’t she here with me, Radock?” I asked my brother because he had been there at the Devil’s lair. I’d seen him before my body gave up on me. He’d been there.
Radock took a moment to look me over. “Because I was concerned with getting my brothers out of the ruins, Taland. Because I didn’t need Madeline Rogan on me while I was tending to you.”
“What you’re saying is, you’re a coward.”
The words slipped out of me—in normal circumstances I’d have kept that thought to myself. However, there was nothing normal about any of this and hadn’t been for a while now, so I’d lost the will to bother.
Radock clenched his jaws so hard the whole room could hear it.
Then Aurelia was coming toward us. “That’s no way to talk to your brother, boy.”
And I had plenty to say to her, too, but Radock didn’t let me. Maybe because he knew and he didn’t want me to make a bigger mess out of this little meeting they had going on here?
He was right.
“There was no time to hide her properly when they came. I wasn’t about to risk everything for her the way you continuously do.”
A bitter smile stretched my lips as I moved back a couple feet and rested my hip on the edge of his desk. Then I slowly reached for the bracelet he’d left there— her bracelet.
“You didn’t have time to hide her, but you had time to take this off her wrist?” He was a fucking liar is what he was—and he knew I knew.
“Yes. It was fairly easy, too. She was unconscious,” my brother said, and I hadn’t wanted to slam my fists on his face so much since he was torturing Rosabel in the basement back home.
“We couldn’t have kept her hidden, Taland,” said Aurelia, stepping in front of me. “Look at me.”
I did. I was taller than her, so she had to look up at me, those wide blue eyes as intense as always. Like they held secrets. Like they knew my secrets.
“There was nothing we could have done. The Council would have come after us with their everything the moment they found out what happened. She’s safer with Madeline Rogan.”
I leaned closer just a bit. “Move out of my way, Aurelia.”
She was shocked and she was pissed and probably feeling plenty of other things, but before she could voice any of it, I was in front of Radock.
“She told you. I know she told you the truth. She saved me. She saved us from the Devil, too. Yet you decided she wasn’t worth the effort when you know she can use this .” I raised the bracelet between us.
“She also told me that you can, too,” my asshole of a brother said.
“And it didn’t occur to you that I would use it against you if you don’t help me get to her and bring her here safely right now?” I didn’t even care where here was, but wherever I was, that’s where she had to be.
Otherwise, I was going to fuck something up.
“If you’re thinking about starting a fight, you can’t win against all of us, Taland. Not in the state you’re in,” said Kaid, shaking his head with a sigh. “Drop the attitude. We did the best we could. We got you out—and Seth, too.”
“If only his own life and mine were as valuable to him…” Seth said from where he sat on the floor—and he was absolutely right.
“But you left her there,” I reminded them. “And now…what? What happens when the Council gets to her? What do you think they’ll do?” I went closer to Radock. “Do you think Madeline Rogan is going to save her, brother? Spare her? Do you?”
Radock held my eyes but said nothing, and I knew he was tense. He hated to be spoken to this way, but I currently had zero fucks left to give. They were all back in Silver Spring where he left them behind—together with Rosabel.
The guilt ate at me, gnawed at my insides like a living beast. I had been too weak to make sure she was okay. Too weak to stay conscious.
“Of course, you don’t,” I said after a second of loaded silence. “You know they won’t. They’ll kill her—and you don’t care. Maybe you even prefer it.”
“I don’t. She saved you, despite everything. But if her own grandmother will allow the Council to kill her, who am I to try to intervene?” Radock said, having composed himself as fast as always.
“ My brother,” I said, and it was hard to keep the bite out of my voice—so hard.
“Is that so? And was I your brother when you betrayed me and yours for her? When you called Madeline Rogan herself to come for her granddaughter?”
Words died on my tongue. I had no idea he’d found out—not that it mattered. I would have told him myself when the time was right.
The problem was that the time never seemed to be right. For those short hours when Rosabel and I were together in that safe house, everything had made such perfect sense, had aligned as it should. But then I had a fucking debt to pay, and so here we were again in this old dance.
“I need a car.” Because I was realizing it was useless to stand here and talk to him. His opinion wouldn’t change no matter what I said.
“You’re not going anywhere,” said Radock, and I would have laughed any other day.
“What you need to do is sit down and call to your mind and forget about Rosabel for a second—she can take care of herself, okay? I met her. She will be just fine.” Aurelia again, and she pushed both me and Radock to the sides—we’d come much closer to one another than I’d realized. “What we all need to do is figure out how to find David Hill before everything goes to shit because if he wins, Taland—you know what happens?” Again, she looked up at me with that conviction. “Then we all die. Not just Rosabel, but all of us.” She gave her words a moment to sink in.
Fuck, she was right.
How I hated that she was right.
“So now that you got your head out of your ass, help us figure out how to track Hill, and once we stop him, the Council will have no reason to want to get rid of anyone, will they?”
“You’ll have your girl back and everybody lives happily ever after,” Kaid said.
“Nobody’s going to be happy anytime soon, I assure you,” Violet muttered.
“Just help us,” Aurelia insisted. “Help us find the Devil, at least—they are surely together. You spoke to him. You worked with him when he helped you escape the Tomb—you must know something about him.”
“David Hill,” Radock said. “He’s the most important thing now. We need to find him.”
Violet came closer. “And the best part?” She smiled as if to show me that two of her upper teeth were missing. “The best part is that we’ll still need to contact the Council if we do.”
“We don’t, ” Zach insisted, but his eyes were closed and he had sweat on his forehead—his clean forehead. Just now I was realizing that everyone in this room was clean and dressed in fresh clothes, healed and rested, probably fed. Meanwhile my stomach was growling with hunger, and as much as I hated to feel the weakness of my muscles, I still did. Healing spells were miracles, indeed, but they still needed the body’s own energy.
“We don’t need anybody’s help,” Kaid agreed, but Radock didn’t.
“We do,” he said. “Unfortunately, Violet is right—we do need the help of the Council. Alone, we cannot defeat Hill.”
“Or maybe we can.” Zachary came closer, too, and even Seth was finally interested enough to get up and come closer. They were all around me now. “Maybe we can with the help of that thing.” He pointed at the bracelet in my hand. “You can use it. The Drainage in the Roe turned you Mud—that’s what Rosabel told Radock. You can use it.”
Suddenly, all the pieces clicked in place in my noisy brain. I might have been tired and hungry and still not fully recovered from the torture that Yuri and the Devil’s people put me through for those few days, but I still had the upper hand here.
I could still win. I was going to.
“That is true—I could,” I said, raising the bracelet again, inspecting the details, the mud-like surface, the thickness of it, how cold it was to the touch.
Then how it fit my wrist, just slightly tighter than I’d have preferred.
I released a bit of my magic just for show, just to allow small flames in all colors to dance on the tips of my fingers so they could see. So that each and every person in this room could see that I was not fucking around.
They did.
The way they watched those tiny flames could have been funny.
“Here’s the thing, though. Not only will I use this to help you against Hill, but I can do something far better—recite the Script of Perria the Devil sent me to steal. I can recite it to you as many times as you’d like.”
The greedy look in their eyes intensified.
“Remember what you taught me, brother?” I asked Radock. “When dealing with important documents, we never know when we’ll see them again, so it’s important to memorize anything we can, as fast as we can memorize it.” This he’d told me before I went to the Iridian School of Chromatic Magics—at the request of David fucking Hill.
“You memorized it,” Radock said, both afraid and impressed, though he’d never admit it. It wasn’t his habit to allow anybody to see how he really felt about anything.
“I did. And I’m assuming they already told you everything that happened in the Regah chamber so I’m not going to repeat any of it to you—but if you want to find David Hill, you will have to go where he is going.” To Perria, the place where they buried the Delaetus Army seven centuries ago.
The fucker wanted to actually bring those soldiers back and conquer the world, which was mind-blowing on its own.
But there would be time to think about that.
“So, why didn’t you give it to the Devil then? You said you didn’t know what it was,” Seth asked, and all the others seemed suddenly curious, too. “I mean, you could have spared yourself all the torture.”
“Does it matter?” I said because I didn’t have the patience to explain to them that I had, in fact, tried to give the Devil the contents of that script engraved on the marble plaque. I’d turned myself in to do just that, but turns out, the Devil wasn’t interested in the contents at all, only the plaque.
I’d been confused then, but now it made sense—he couldn’t sell David Hill something he already had in the IDD Vault.
“He’s right,” Aurelia finally said. “Taland didn’t steal the script so that means Hill has it. Hill can use it, if he hasn’t already.” Her eyes squeezed shut. “Goddess, he could be in Perria right now, reviving the dead!”
Everyone in the room shivered visibly.
“You will tell us what the Script of Perria contained, right?”
“I will,” I said. “We leave for Madeline Rogan’s mansion right now, we find Rosabel, and then you can have the Script of Perria—and you can keep the bracelet, too.”
“The bracelet is useless to us—we’re not Mud,” Violet said.
“You can’t be serious,” Zach and Radock said at the same time.
If only they had a clue what it was like inside my chest. If only they had a clue of the lengths I’d go to for my girl.
But since they didn’t… “Two options.” I raised two fingers in front of me. “I can take this bracelet and my memory of the script with me right now and leave on my own. Or you can come with me, and once Rosabel is with us, I will write the whole thing down for you myself.”
I gave my words a moment to sink into their brains.
“So, what’s it going to be, friends?”
In my mind, I was already preparing for them to stay behind. I was already picturing the details of my solo trip to that mansion from wherever the fuck they’d brought me. I’d need clothes and food and water—lots of water. I’d need feathers, too, though I planned to use the bracelet until I got to her. But once I found her, I’d still need to be able to do magic until we got to safety.
“Well, I mean, to be fair, there’s a good chance that the Council is already on her. It’s been almost twelve hours since she ruined the Regah chamber and we made it out.”
Twelve hours.
“She’d be unconscious, I would think, but yes. The Council could very well be onto her already,” said Aurelia.
“And how do you propose we fight off the Council, assuming we don’t even need them for Hill? How do you assume we win and take your precious Rosabel out?” Violet again, and her voice had turned even more bitter.
“We don’t fight them,” I said, struggling to keep my calm now. Twelve hours. That was a long time.
Could it really be that they’d already gotten to her?
“They’ll want Hill as much as we do. Where is he now?”
“Disappeared,” said Radock. “Nobody knows—not the IDD and not the Council.”
I nodded. “Then I’ll give them the script as well.”
“You said you’d give that to us ,” Zachary insisted.
“What difference does it make? We’re all going to him, aren’t we? Didn’t you just say that we’ll need the Council to defeat him?” It made perfect sense to me already because I was in a rush to figure out how to get to Rosabel and how to get them all to join me.
It took the rest of them a minute, but they all came to the same conclusion.
“So, we go back to Baltimore, and then…” Kaid started.
“Then we go to the Council, if they haven’t killed her already,” Radock said, his eyes never leaving mine.
A cold chill rushed down my spine at the idea. Rosabel, killed?
Never.
“Then we tell the Council we know how to find Hill if they agree to fight with us,” said Aurelia.
“I can see that happening. They have a lot of people. A lot of soldiers and agents. People trained to fight. Yes, yes…” Violet’s voice trailed off as she stared at her feet.
“And then—” Zach started, but I’d run all out of patience already.
“Then we all go and find Hill and stop him,” I finished for him. “Now, I’m going to turn around and I’m going to leave. Come with me or don’t—it’s entirely up to you.”
A moment, that’s all they had. A single moment of thick, heavy silence that I could feel in the air going down my throat.
Then I turned, just as I said, and walked for the doors with the bracelet around my wrist.
The rest of them, all of them except Violet, came after me.
To say that I wasn’t relieved would be a lie. The Council was still the Council, the most powerful mages in the world even without their soldiers and guards and agents. Against them I’d have died on my own. They would try to kill me without hesitation, right away, and even if they didn’t, there was a good chance that they wouldn’t take me seriously if I went alone. Having Radock and Kaid and the Mergenbachs there would change that.
As much as I wanted to just fly over to that mansion and get Rosabel and disappear, I couldn’t, so I had to play by these rules for now.
Lucky for me I had something they all wanted, and right now I was going to use that as best as I could. Hill and the Devil and the Delaetus Army could wait—for now. Everything could wait.
I’m coming for you, sweetness.