Chapter 12 Sam
Sam
The sky’s grown dark. Night embraces us as Tamsin drags me down the block. She finds a bench near one of the boutiques on the next corner and plops me right down on the edge, as if I weigh nothing at all.
The world tilts around me. All I see is the camera footage all those Internet denizens shared of my brother’s disastrous, final night in an arcane arena. The blood, the broken limbs, the way he barely even looked like himself anymore. Jamie’s ghost might as well be screaming in my ear.
The daughter of my brother’s murderer kneels beside me, her hand on the small of my back. “Hey. You okay?”
What an absurd question.
“You’re going to be okay,” says Tamsin Blackwood. Her fingers rub my back, warm to the touch. “You’re going to be just fine.”
And strangely, horribly, in that moment, I believe her, just a little.
I hate that I believe her. I hate how soothing her touch feels on my body.
But I don’t hate either of those things enough to pull away from Tamsin.
We stay like that as minutes crawl by: me shaking like a leaf in the wind while Tamsin Blackwood rubs my back.
“Thanks,” I finally croak.
Tamsin frowns, leaning a little closer. “What was that?”
I lift my head. “I said thanks.” I wince at how rough my own voice sounds. “I— You didn’t have to do that for me.”
“Of course I did.” Tamsin sounds a little aghast. “You think I’d just leave you in there with that book?”
“It’s just a book, Tamsin.” I laugh harshly. “It can’t hurt me.”
“But it did, didn’t it? Or that one photo did, anyway.
” Tamsin gnaws at her lower lip, sucking on it through her teeth.
I’m briefly mesmerized. “We don’t need to talk about it, if you don’t want to.
” She hesitates. “But if you want to, I don’t mind.
” She peers at me with eyes full of caution.
It would be kind of cute, under different circumstances.
“You said something about…about your brother?”
I close my eyes. This is dangerous territory.
I never planned to breathe a word about Jamie to Tamsin Blackwood.
What would be the point? Tamsin was never the Blackwood I intended to punish.
As long as her father got his just desserts, what his daughter did or didn’t know about my brother wouldn’t matter.
And then I saw the photograph in that book, and all my neatly laid plans came crashing down around me in a roar of awful, blood-soaked memory.
“Jamie,” I say at last. “His name was Jamie.”
“And your brother, Jamie, he—”
“He got mixed up in the illegal dueling business, and that same business got him killed.” I get the words out quickly, spitting them out like bile.
“I’m sorry.”
I rub at my eyes with the heels of my palms, breathing out slowly. Come on, Chan. Get a hold of yourself. With a grunt, I force myself back to my feet. To my relief, the world around me remains in focus this time. “Walk with me.”
“Where?”
“I don’t care. But let’s walk. I can’t stand looking like I’m sulking. At least let me disguise it a little.” I glance down the block. Eenie, meenie, miney, mo. I pick a random storefront. “How about this? Let’s window shop, as girls like us do, and I’ll tell you all about my tragic dead brother.”
Tamsin looks hilariously horrified at my word choice. She really is adorable, for a Blackwood. “You don’t have to—”
“But I want to.” I hesitate. Maybe I’m playing the painful truths angle too hard. “Unless this is all too much. We can head back to the hotel, and—”
“No!” Tamsin grabs my hand again, so hard that it actually startles me this time. “I told you I wanted to listen, if you wanted to talk. I still do.”
I feel the side of my mouth quirk upward despite my best efforts. “Okay, okay, twist my arm. Window shopping it is, then.”
Tamsin follows obediently in my wake. As luck would have it, I’ve picked a good shop to peruse for eye candy.
The interior décor is gorgeous: dramatically dark wooden finishes on everything from the walls to the furniture that lend an era of mystique to the whole place.
Silks and velvets in rich jewel tones ranging from ruby red to amethyst purple are draped across display counters and hung up as curtains in the windows, while crystal chandeliers overhead cast everything indoors into simulated twilight on an autumn evening.
It’s like something out of the fabled old world of magicians, the wild, dangerous place that existed before magic was confined within the walls of magicians’ arenas for the safe and largely sanitized entertainment of the world at large.
It’s one of those all-purpose magical boutiques that seems to stock a little bit of everything—and this one, with its spot on one of the most prominent streets in magical New York, is definitely higher end.
There’s one section for sartorial needs: robes designed for both active dueling in an arena and for the rigors of daily training, plus the accompanying bodysuits to protect the magician’s skin.
There’s a miniature book display featuring most of the same titles we saw in the window of its neighboring bookshop, minus the discount markers.
There’s even an apothecary’s section full of potions and tonics to use as supplements—all guaranteed to be competition legal under the latest dueling ruleset regulations.
I know some magicians who budget in the hundreds for a veritable medicine cabinet full of those potions, to aid recovery, to enhance strength gain, to improve the conversion efficiency of a body’s physical energy into usable magic.
It’s the kind of thing my brother would have gone nuts for when he was alive.
“Magic was the only thing Jamie and I really had in common,” I say aloud.
I’ve practically forgotten that Tamsin is still standing there, she’s so quiet.
I might as well be talking to myself. Still, it feels weirdly good, to talk about Jamie.
I don’t remember the last time I talked about my brother, even to empty air.
“But it meant everything to us. Having a brother like Jamie can be…Well, he was wonderful, but he could be a lot.”
“Like a diva?” asks Tamsin.
“Nah, that would have made things easier.” I chuckle.
“He had every right to be an arrogant dick. Handsome, smart, charismatic, and of course, good at magic. When I was younger, I wanted to hate him, but he was just so nice. You can’t hate someone that nice, even if they are your brother and better than you at everything, on top of it all. ”
“You were jealous of him.”
“Not quite.” I do actually have to stop and think about that idea.
“I mean, I don’t think I wanted to be Jamie.
I wouldn’t know what to do with all the attention and adoration he got.
I think I’d find it overwhelming. But he did make me feel…
wistful, I guess. Having to constantly stand beside him.
Constantly being treated as a pair. There was Jamie, who was that talented, that good-looking, that extroverted, and just so effortlessly easy with people.
And then there was me.” I offer Tamsin a wry look and hold out my palms, partly covered by the cuffs of my careworn hoodie. “Who was just me.”
Tamsin chuckles. “Fair.”
“Jamie sometimes felt like the sun itself. So full of warmth and life. So bright and comforting. So easy to love. But hard to look at directly, sometimes. And when you got him in a shitty mood, god, it was like standing in direct sunlight on the most sweltering summer of the year. Exhausting. Miserable. Genuinely painful, sometimes.”
“He sounds like Lysander Rook,” observes Tamsin.
Her words hit me right in the gut. I stiffen without meaning to. “Not really.”
Before Tamsin can apologize again, I recover—enough to smile at her, hoping that I look at least a little reassuring.
“I get why you’d think so,” I allow. “Both pretty boys who know they’re pretty boys—and both peacocks as a result, if in different ways.
Both more talented in magic than seemed totally fair to the rest of us.
Both capable of totally taking over a room full of people without even trying. ”
“But?” ventures Tamsin, sounding cautious.
“But Jamie was…well, happy, in his default setting.” I speak slowly, trying to choose the right words. The right words are always so important. “Don’t get me wrong: He got mad and sad and pissy just like anyone else. But I know, at baseline, my brother was happy with his life. Content. Stable.”
“And Rook’s not?”
I almost laugh, and I can’t quite tamp down the hint of cruelty in my voice when I snap, “You just shared a press event with him. Does my champion strike you as an especially happy person?”
To her credit, Tamsin only looks cowed for a moment before she retorts, “You say Jamie was happier than Rook. But Sam, in my experience, happy people don’t get involved with underground dueling.”
There’s that gut punch again. The truth behind Tamsin’s words only makes them hurt more.
“You’re right,” I admit because what’s the point in denying it?
“They don’t. That’s what you’re asking, right?
How a guy like my brother—the golden boy I’ve described—could possibly debase himself in an underground dueling club? ”
Tamsin flinches. “That’s not what I—”
“No, no, a lot of his friends wondered the same thing.” I’m pretty sure I’m dissociating.
As I speak, the past envelops me, more wholly than it has in years.
“The truth is, the night he died in that club, he wasn’t there for himself.
He was there for one of them. His friends.
” I chuckle bitterly. “His many, many idiot friends.”
“What happened?”
“Do you remember the worst of the clubs?” I ask Tamsin. “The ones that let underage kids duel?”