Chapter Two Jordan
Two
Jordan
Unmarked tourists crowd Ya?uper Rea like fleas.
What was once a university at the heart of the Order’s operations now masquerades as a museum. My insides swim with nerves; raiding here feels like sacrilege. Still, I put another step forward and gesture for my team to gather. The Dragunhead intends to name me second-in-command, but if I fail at something this big, in a place this important, I’ll never see a raid again, let alone lead one. Everything I’ve been working toward, all I’ve sacrificed, all I’ve lost, will be for nothing.
I twist a ruby ring on my finger, recalling the notes on the target. He’s described as young, tall, and slender, with dark brown hair, wearing jeans, a windbreaker, and a red baseball cap. He was first spotted exchanging goods with a Trader in New Jersey using toushana, which put him on the brotherhood’s radar. From there we trailed him to London: he was carrying liquid kor in quantities large enough to level a block of small buildings.
We followed him here to Wales. He landed early this morning, but didn’t show his face outside his hotel until midday, when he took a train to Ya?uper—coincidentally, the busiest time of day for the museum. I’m not entirely sure what he’s planning, but I have my suspicions. If I’m right, the blood of hundreds could be on my hands.
“It’s a shame what they’ve let come to this place,” Charlie says beside me. He is the most seasoned in today’s flock of Draguns. His short black beard has peppered significantly since I saw him a month ago. His usual stocky stature has slendered, his meaty arms hardly noticeable in his sleeved top. Before I finished at House of Perl, Charlie guided me on upholding Beaulah’s rules. Since I’ve left, we’ve only butted heads. But this time, I don’t disagree with him.
“A damned shame.”
Loitering bystanders bottleneck nearby, drunk with the sight of Ya?uper’s ornately carved architecture, endless arched windows, and flying buttresses. Charlie’s thumb runs back and forth across his commissioning coin, its silver minted with a cracked column. My jaw clenches. It should be a talon . He notices my glare and smirks, amused.
“Is he working alone?” Charlie asks, slipping the coin into his pocket.
“Appears so. But we need to follow him, let his plans start to unfold, to know.” The team surrounds me and I count heads. Five here, plus one at the entrance scoping out the scene. Far too many for a raid in broad daylight, but the Dragunhead wouldn’t be argued with. I had grabbed a few familiar faces: my former mentor and Yaniselle, my first of many things, both from Hartsboro, the seat of House of Perl. Both Draguns with extraordinary skill. Despite our pasts, they’re unarguably the best. I selected a few others with impressive raiding records who had finished from various Houses.
The shortest tagalong, who isn’t taller than my elbow, has dark scruffy hair, pale ruddy cheeks, and big hazel eyes. The Dragunhead insisted he join.
“How old are you?” I ask when I spot the boy, his collar pinned by a cracked column, magically changing the shape of his nose in the reflection of a puddle.
“Too young,” says one of the others as he runs his nails back and forth over the tally marks tattooed prominently on his bald head—marks of his achievements. Boastful like a typical ’Roser. “It isn’t the way it’s done.”
Charlie pulls out his coin and flips it before blowing Tally Mark a kiss.
“He’s a kid,” I say.
“He’s a spawn of Perl perversion. Another training to wear the talon as a costume.”
The boy’s eyes widen.
“You sound jealous.” Charlie smirks.
“Enough,” I say.
“You Perls think you’re above the way of things.”
I flinch at the surname I was born with. A stain on everything I stand for. My father lost our family name when I was younger. The only thing he’s ever done that I’ve wanted to thank him for.
“That boy’s a Wexton,” Charlie says.
I step closer to Tally Mark, and the pounding organ in his chest batters his ribs.
“Another word of division on my raid and—”
Tally Mark crosses his meaty arms. I can feel the hatred and judgment rolling off him: for the House that bred me, for the privilege that I have as a Headmistress’s nephew to rise in position so swiftly. A crater vibrates in my chest. Words move through me like bile that needs to come out. I hate my House, but I can’t say that. I can’t shout how deep my aunt’s obsession with power has become, how there are no rules she won’t bend and few she won’t break. She and my father were cut from the same cloth.
The Dragunhead is the only one who actually cares about protecting magic. But some things are too destructive to admit out loud . The face of the girl I have to kill comes to mind like a summoned ghost. Many things.
I allow some distance between Tally Mark and me.
“Regardless of your disaffinity for my name, you will do what I say, as I say it. And I’ve said enough .” I don’t need his approval. I need to finish this raid, apprehend the target, and ensure no Unmarkeds are harmed. That puts me a step closer toward having the reputation and influence I’ll need to flush the corruption out of this Order.
The boy stares at me with fear in his eyes. I lower myself to his level.
“You were saying?”
“You asked my age, sir. I’m nine.”
Beaulah’s sending them younger and younger.
“Mother says I have a better shot of being invited to join the brotherhood if I’ve got raid practice under my belt.” It’s true. I’d done so many raids by the time I was seventeen, an invitation from the brotherhood had seemed like a given. Perl débutants who become Draguns outnumber other Houses ten to one. My aunt is as subtle as she is strategic.
“Target spotted, but he’s a ways off from the doors,” Yani says over the speakerphone in my hand. “Stand by.”
“Aye.”
The team’s conversations move on but the boy is frozen, his gaze stuck on Tally Mark.
“Ignore him.” I squeeze the boy’s shoulder. “Remind me of your name?”
“Stryker, sir. But my friends call me Stryk.”
“I’m not a sir.”
“You’re raid leader. Mother says we’re supposed to obey on raids without question. So nobody gets hurt.”
“Look at the young’un.” Charlie slugs him in the arm playfully. “Knows all the rules.”
“Well, your first order of business is to stop calling me sir ,” I say.
Stryk nods, then bites his lip. I look to the rest and dole out assignments before turning to Tally Mark, who’s still fuming.
“What personas can you pull off today?” I ask.
“A restaurateur or a bum musician.”
“Use the musician, loiter near the door.”
“Do we have execution orders?” he asks, slipping on a hat to cover his tally-tattooed head.
“Today, your ears are your greatest weapon, Tally Mark.” I clap him on the back.
His jaw clenches at the nickname.
“Focus on what matters: the raid. Keep magic use discreet. This whole place will end up a bloody mess if we’re exposed. No one needs that kind of death on their conscience.”
Tally Mark motions for the others who also finished at House of Ambrose, and together they mutter in prayer. “The Sovereign, point out the darkness. The Sage, bless our hands with skill. The Wielder, blow the winds of fate our way.”
“You better hope those fake gods hear you, boys.” Charlie jostles Tally Mark by the neck before tossing his bag to Stryk to carry.
“Target is approaching the doors,” Yani says from the speakerphone. “Coming up the south side of the building. Repeat, Red Ball Cap is in play.”
I grab Charlie by the sleeve before turning to Stryk. “Your second order is to stick with this guy. And no magic, just watch.”
Stryk’s posture deflates.
“Mother says—”
“Stop worrying about everything Mother says.” Craters dent the boy’s cheeks. Charlie’s mouth hardens but he remains silent like a good Dragun . I tug my coat tighter around myself and push more insistently through the crowd of paying trespassers. My team disappears into the throng as well. The line at the entrance to Ya?uper is slow, but I spot the target stepping through its doors and follow at a distance. When we’re inside, I present the shifted tickets, and in minutes we’re past the entrance ropes.
“Garden courtyard tours this way,” someone yells, and I signal to Charlie. He and the boy head that way.
“History tour starting this way,” says another. Red Ball Cap moves toward the history guide and I do the same, careful to stick to the perimeter of people.
“Now, if you’ll stand in the center there and look straight up, you’ll notice a dome of colored glass.” Gasps erupt from the crowd as our tour guide pulls at his high-waisted khakis. “Most assume these are just random pictures. But these are stories , legends of magic that thirteenth-century artisans worked tirelessly to capture.”
I shift my feet in irritation and keep an eye on Red Ball Cap. He hangs back on the perimeter of the crowd, looking around more than he looks up. The tour guide calls our attention to a particular story: a window of flames surrounding a village.
“That one there is one of my favorite tales, about dragons roaming the earth, burning villages, determined to eradicate the human race and claim the planet for themselves.”
“Utterly ridiculous,” I huff, and heads swivel in my direction. I force my lips to smile.
“The legend goes that villagers could hear screams and smell burning flesh for miles,” the tour guide goes on. “Until Elopheus, a humble farmer of no special gift or talent, managed to slay one of these beasts. Then he dressed himself in the dragon’s skin and found he could suddenly breathe fire, too. He flew from village to village, protecting the people and chasing away the dragons forever.”
Cameras raise and I groan. Elopheus is probably rolling over in his grave hearing this warped version of history. Red Ball Cap and I meet eyes, and I bite down my annoyance, hoping my scorn hasn’t given me away. I grab my phone and take a picture of the windows, trying my best to appear impressed.
Outside, the sky flickers an odd orange, then purple, before flashing bright white.
My brother comes to mind unbidden for some reason. He is a traitor in more ways than one. First, he tries to shatter the Sphere, then he runs off with… her . Red Ball Cap breaks from the edge of the crowd, clears a roped-off area, and disappears down a stairway. I shove thoughts of Yagrin away and follow him.
The basement is silent and dim, but light streams in from the ground-level windows overhead. “Into the basement,” I whisper into my phone, but the signal flickers. The beat of Red Ball Cap’s footsteps quickens as it grows fainter. I follow him deeper into the bowels of the museum, when I turn down a familiar dead-end corridor packed with storage crates and Restricted Area signage . The last time I was here was the evening before my Cotillion. Yani and the rest of my Perl peers threw me a surprise celebration in this palace of magical history. The Dragunhead had to sign off on the approval, and security was strict. The others spent the night drowning themselves in dancing, drinking, and hanging from the ripped ceilings. But I spent it down here, in a secret library, home to a legendary collection of magical texts, at the end of this corridor.
I speed up. The inner workings of the Sphere, original writings from Dysiis—the founding father of toushana—dangerous information that should have never been left behind with only a doorless stone room to conceal it.
When the target reaches the end of the corridor, he presses his hands against the walls. I hide around a corner, stealing a glimpse at him. Shadows bleed from his palms and the brick blackens, disintegrating beneath his touch. He destroys enough of the wall to step through.
Once he’s inside, I hurry to the opening he’s just created and look inside. Thousands of texts cover every inch of wall. A single candle with a tiny wick burns on a table. He isn’t working alone. Someone else was here. He grabs the light and rushes to the shelves. His fingers trail several spines before pulling a book off a shelf. But he quickly closes it and moves to another. He parts the next one, flipping furiously. When he tears a page out, my heart seizes in my chest. I step over the crumbled opening and join him inside.
“I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to stick to the rooms along the tour.”
His pulse picks up. He wears a bit of jewelry. He has no visible tattoo marks.
“Those guides are always so boring, don’t you think?” His hand holding the torn page moves to his pocket. I close the distance between us.
“The rules are the rules. Stealing pages from ancient texts is also probably a no-go.”
“I’ve never been much for the rules.” His palm opens and shadows seep through his skin, spooling in his fist. Not rippling through the air as toushana does for me and my brethren. His seems to appear in his palm out of nowhere . I blink, hard, but tighten my fists, glaring at his magic to discern for certain if the magic is indeed coming from inside him. He hesitates, clumsily pulling at the toushana, and my certainty abandons me. As he fumbles with it, I command the chill of death to my hands and dark magic rushes to me in an instant. He reaches for me, but I’m faster. My hand hooks around the base of his skull. Before he has a chance to react, my wrist pushes against his windpipe. The black dancing on his fingertips dissolves, leaving a nasty bruise behind.
“What’s happening, please, I can’t feel my—” His body straightens like a board in my grip as the Dragun choke takes him.
“Do you have any idea how not smart it is to call on toushana when you don’t know how to control it?” I tighten my grip; his eyes widen. “Right now, toushana is moving into you at such a high rate, it feels like freezing water is replacing your blood. Like you’re slowly being turned to ice. Soon you’ll pass out from a lack of oxygen to your brain. Then your heart will give out. Unless you tell me very quickly who ordered you here.” I loosen my grip to free up his tongue.
“Like I said,” he chokes out. “I’m not much for rules.”
“I—” Suddenly my heart twinges, stuttering in my chest. For a moment I can’t breathe. Confusion clenches my brow as anger burns deep in my belly, swelling and strong. The feeling, its place and intensity, nudges me with unfamiliarity.
It’s not mine.
It’s hers.
Quell.
Heat roils through me, my own frustration rising as the image of her freckled skin, head of long curls, brown eyes, somehow both fiery and tender, form in my memory. I wait for some visual of her location, but it doesn’t come. The trace I have on her has not shown me her location since she bound to toushana. Binding to dark magic destroyed that part of the tracer magic.
A rocky ache turns deep in my chest. My grip tightens on my captive.
Her name sits on my tongue. Her face lingers in my mind. The way her nose would crinkle when she was uncomfortable. The way she’d hide her laughs when we first met, as if she hadn’t given herself permission to feel things like that freely. That changed drastically. As if part of her came alive at Chateau Soleil right in front of me. I remember the last time I saw her, when I truly saw her, when the glimpses of her desperate determination finally made sense. She is a raging storm when she wants something: forceful, unyielding, uncontainable. She would not be possessed by anyone or anything. That Quell is whose anger I feel now, and a tangle of emotions wrestles in my chest.
My feelings for her can’t be real. She played a game with me, using me to get better at magic, concealing her secret the entire time. The look in her eyes when I pleaded with her to not bind with toushana and seal her fate deepens the throbbing ache. I confessed that I loved her—and she turned her back on me. A feeling of revulsion rises so viscerally in my throat that I try to gather it in my mouth to spit it out.
She was right under my nose! What she did at House of Marionne’s Cotillion, and what she’s done with her toushana, makes a mockery of this Order.
When I find her, she’s dead.
Not by my orders. By my hand.
I force myself back to the present, waiting for Quell’s anger to pass, separating it from my own frustration. When it dissolves, my insides uncinch.
Then my chest pangs again.
This time with frigid fear. My arm trembles and nervousness thrashes in my stomach. I close my eyes and suddenly Yagrin’s harried face appears: the trace I put on my brother, working like a trace is supposed to. Behind him is a stretch of rocky grassland and an ocean.
She’s angry.
He’s scared.
The urge to go to them gnaws at me. My hand slacks and Red Ball Cap wriggles from my grip. His fist slams into my nose and the world spins.
“Slick, are we,” someone behind me shouts as I blink the world back into focus. Yani whips past me in a blur of smooth black hair and deep brown skin.
Red Ball Cap darts to the doorway, but Yani is faster, grabbing him in the choke.
“I’ll hold him,” I say, finally coming to. “Grab Charlie. He’ll help you take him in.”
“You grab Charlie,” she says, refusing to release her hold. Her dark eyes glitter with ambition, shinier than the cracked-column coin at her throat. Yani’s lethal and sharp. But she’s also stubbornly fiery. Always on the edge of flirting with her demise. “I don’t need a babysitter to bring a Darkbearer descendant in.” The jewel in her nose twitches with her smirk.
I blink. Darkbearers …
There are toushana-users. But long ago there were toushana worshippers who terrorized, pillaged, and slaughtered their way across kingdoms for hundreds of years, just for the hell of it. That’s who Elopheus actually spent his life fighting.
Darkbearers have been gone for centuries, but magical bloodlines rarely just die out. There are rumors some still congregate in secret. Beaulah always said rumors are born from a seed of truth. She’s wrong about a lot, but maybe she’s right about this.
I wrestle with Ball Cap’s collar. On the back of the target’s neck is a circle of angry red flesh in the shape of a sun with a shaded center. A mark I’ve only ever seen on the pages of a history book.
“You will burn for your traitorous life,” I spit.
“You know nothing about me or my life,” he says.
I snatch the page he’d managed to shove in his pocket. It’s a diagram of the Sphere with hand-drawn annotations, torn from the book The Unbreakable Pact . “I know that if you had any regard for your life, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Have you heard what’s happened to the Sphere? You must know what’s coming, and yet you’re here, more concerned about me.”
I watch him closely. His pupils are relaxed; the thud of his heart has eased some. Is this a game, a warning, a threat? I turn to Yani. “ Wait for Charlie.”
She purses her lips but doesn’t mutter another word. I send another message, this one asking Charlie to meet us in the library and bring a Retentor. To my great relief, it sends. Thankfully, he, Tally Mark, and Stryker are here in minutes. Charlie takes over restraining the target so that I can pull Yani aside.
“How’d you know what he was?”
“How bad do you want to know?” Her teeth pull at her lip.
I ignore her. “When you get back to Headquarters, write your report. Any other intel you have needs to be included.”
“Wait, don’t burn him!” Stryk rushes over and tugs at my arm. “Mother says—”
“What did I tell you about listening to Mother?”
A question glints in the boy’s amber eyes, but he skips off.
“You shouldn’t poison that boy’s mind like that,” Charlie says. “Whatever your grievances with Beaulah, that is his House mother.”
“We’re not under the Houses anymore, Charlie. I’m not your boy to shape and prune. Get the captive back to Headquarters. Book him. If he burns, we do it quickly. I have no doubt he’s working with someone much smarter.”
Charlie’s lips thin as he and the captive head out the door.
“Yani, get Stryk back to Hartsboro.”
She takes the boy by the hand and staggers her feet, preparing to cloak. “You know, I almost thought you’d lost the nerve. That that girl broke you…permanently.”
“Concern yourself less with your thoughts of me and more with my orders.” I turn to the boy. “Stryk, you did great today.”
“Can I use magic next time?”
“Probably not.”
“But why ?” His eyes well with tears. “I’m really good, I promise. I can shift my whole face! Been practicing since I was eight.”
“And I could at six.”
His mouth falls open. His unruly hair covers his brow in bangs, and he wiggles one of his front teeth every few moments as if it’s some nervous habit. He just wants to do a good job. Make his House proud. Beaulah has indoctrinated him well.
“In an ideal world, you could use magic anywhere and anytime you want. But the world doesn’t work that way, Stryk. It can. But it doesn’t. Not yet. We’ve got to fix our reputation first.” I move his bangs aside to see him better. “That’s why you’re going to be such a good Dragun. You’ll help restore magic’s good name, keeping it away from the people who want to use it to do bad things. You think you could help me with that?”
“I know I can.”
“Then the future is bright.”
The boy blushes, and Yani pulls him to her.
When the library is empty, I feel for my brother again. These raids the Dragunhead insists I focus on are only so helpful when the future of magic hangs in the balance because of my brother, Yagrin.
And her.
But now this? Darkbearer descendants, organized and on the move. The Sphere’s condition is emboldening people. I tighten my core, close my eyes, and feel for him. But there is no fear churning in my gut, no sense of anything from her or him. The whiff of his location is gone. How close have they gotten to finding the Sphere these last few months? My hope has been that, if they were close, I’d feel it through my brother’s trace. I summon the cold, preparing to cloak. To Headquarters. I need to speak with the Dragunhead .
I must find Yagrin and Quell now .
Or soon there won’t be any magic to protect.