Chapter 22 Sam
Sam
Tamsin drags me out of her father’s underground club like Orpheus pulling Eurydice forcibly from the land of the dead. Of course in most versions of that story, Eurydice never put up quite the fight that I do.
“Let go of me!” I shout as she drags me out the door past the half-snoozing bouncer. “Who the hell do you think you are!”
“Your opponent for the biggest duel of your career.” Tamsin continues to drag me down the street then around a corner.
We’re approaching the nicer part of town, at least. “I refuse to let you get yourself thrown in jail for manslaughter by killing my father in front of a hundred witnesses, at least not before I get the chance to take your head off myself in front of thousands.”
I could probably tug myself free from even Tamsin Blackwood’s steely grip without too much trouble. I don’t. Instead, I scowl and fuss and fume, biding my time, as I allow her to continue steering us down yet another street.
I don’t have to wait long. Tamsin drags me into the empty parking lot of some anonymous diner.
As I suspected, like me, she wants the convenience—and relative safety—of privacy.
Knowing Tamsin, she wants that privacy for some annoyingly civilized reason, like a real heart-to-heart conversation, or the chance to yell at me without witnesses who will write about it on Reddit an hour from now, or an opportunity to grab me by the face and kiss me one last time before we return to the very important business of hating each other.
I don’t want privacy for any of those reasons.
And the minute she steers us into that parking lot, I snap my wrist free, jerking it toward her thumb, where the grip is weakest. I waste no time once my hands are my own again.
The curse I’ve been preparing trickles readily down to my fingertips, a heady swirl of arcane energy hungry for the retribution Tamsin Blackwood denied me when she pulled me off her father’s bloody body.
My curse arcs toward Tamsin, but she’s no longer there.
I blink once before my knees pinch together of their own accord and I’m flung unceremoniously to the concrete by an invisible cord of magic.
I let go of my curse and break my fall in time to avoid banging my head on the wheel of someone’s bright red Toyota, but I’m going to have scrapes along my elbows and thighs to clean up later.
Tamsin steps over me, looking unimpressed, and dismisses her counter-spell with a careless flick of her fingers.
“Save it for the New York Magicians’ Arena, Sam.
” She cocks her head, looking down her nose at where I sit crumpled up against the Toyota with the wind knocked out of me.
What a silly sight I must make. “Like I said, it serves neither of us to delay this duel with jail time.”
I can’t help it. I start laughing. I don’t mean to. It just bursts out of me, giddy and near hysterical. Tamsin watches me for a moment, looking incredulous. Then her mouth twitches.
“Oh, come on,” I gasp between giggles. “Quit fighting it. Just laugh. It’s funny. This whole mess is goddamn funny.”
“It’s not that funny.” Of course as soon as Tamsin says it, a giggle escapes her.
“Go on, give in.”
“No!”
Tamsin’s laughing in earnest now, though, which only makes me laugh harder. We howl together in that parking lot, clutching our bellies, until we’re both in tears.
“Come on,” Tamsin finally manages to say once we can both breathe again. She offers a hand. “Let’s talk.”
I look warily at the hand, but she’s not telegraphing any signs of casting magic, so I take it and allow her to pull me to my feet. “All right.” I fold my arms. “Talk.”
Tamsin doesn’t beat around the bush. Carefully wiping the lingering tears from her eyes, she says without preamble, “I hope you realize by now that killing my father tonight wouldn’t have brought you peace or satisfaction. And I can’t imagine it would have made your brother happy.”
I’m immediately on defense. “I don’t know what would have made my brother happy.
He’s dead, and when he was alive, the thing that made him happiest in the world was magic.
” I sneer at Tamsin. “I’ll spare you my incredibly depressing speech about the irony of magic also being the thing that killed him. ”
“It was also the thing that made you happiest, once upon a time,” says Tamsin softly. “That’s what you told me that day at the bookstore. That magic was something you and Jamie shared. Something you both loved.”
“Love never avenged anyone.”
“Oh, for—” Tamsin makes a frustrated sound.
“Don’t you get it yet, Sam? You already won.
You blame my father for your brother’s death?
Well, consider Jamie avenged about a hundred times over.
Dad is trapped in a hell of his own making, and it’s a hell that smells like blood and piss and eternal mediocrity.
His reputation is wrecked forever. Soon, his money will probably be gone, too.
His ability to duel is a joke now—you proved that tonight, if nothing else.
” Tamsin closes her eyes. “And the cherry on top if it all: You did, in fact, succeed in breaking his family. The one thing you wanted more than anything else.”
I falter. “Tamsin—”
“I meant what I said to him tonight,” she interrupts, her voice hard. “He and I will never speak again. His daughter—the one thing he had left after he aged out of the dueling circuit—is gone forever.”
“Then why don’t I feel any different?” I whisper.
I shake my head. “Avenging Jamie was supposed to give me closure. It was supposed to change everything. But all I’ve felt for weeks is just…
empty. Even tonight, beating Mateus Blackwood’s face in over and over, every time he smiled back at me through all that blood, I just thought, ‘It’s never going to be enough.
I’m never going to feel better ever again. ’ ”
“Then quit throwing your life away on a guy you hate!” exclaims Tamsin. “Don’t live for my dad, Sam. Believe me, it’s extremely not worth it. Ask me how I know.”
I chuckle bitterly. “Then what, pray tell, do you suggest that I live for?”
“Hell if I know. But I think living for yourself would be a decent place to start.” Tamsin gives me the first real smile I’ve seen all evening.
I’m not prepared for how much it hurts. She hasn’t smiled at me like that since we kissed in New York.
“The way I understand it, once upon a time, your magic wasn’t wholly consumed by hatred for my family.
Once upon a time, magic—for you—just meant loving yours. Loving Jamie.”
Tamsin blinks rapidly, a faraway look in her suddenly too-bright eyes as she turns away.
“I know you can’t bring your brother back.
But maybe you can still have the next-best thing.
Maybe you can learn to love magic again, the same way you both did when Jamie was alive.
And maybe that, more than anything else, keeps some part of him alive. ”
She swallows hard and shrugs slightly too casually.
“Or maybe I’m full of sentimental crap.” She clears her throat.
“Either way, I’ll meet you in the New York Magicians’ Arena a few weeks from now—assuming you haven’t gotten yourself arrested or killed before then.
Ball’s in your court now. I won’t be going out of my way to save your ass again, Samantha Chan. ”
Tamsin Blackwood, my one-time object of vengeance, target of all my hate and all my lust, walks away from me without so much as a goodbye.
She walks aways just like she walked away from her father earlier tonight.
Her step doesn’t falter, and she doesn’t look over her shoulder. She walks with assurance.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be capable of that kind of assurance.
I close my eyes for a long moment as I lean on that stranger’s Toyota, breathing in and out as carefully as I can. I wait for my heart rate to slow. Then, with one last deep breath, I dig my phone out. There’s a conversation I’m long overdue for.
Finding Rook is a lot harder than finding Blackwood.
For one thing, Blackwood wanted to be found—by the right people, at least. He needed to attract the right kind of broken, desperate people down to his little underworld. It was his only means of staying afloat.
Rook doesn’t need or want to attract anyone to wherever he is. Maybe he’s struggling to stay afloat, too, or maybe he’s just fine. Knowing Rook, he wouldn’t care either way. He could be up to his elbows in debt and living out of a hovel, and his pride would still never let him change his ways.
In the end, I do the old-fashioned thing: I take one last stab at reaching out to him directly. He didn’t want to hear my apologies or explanations, or even my anger, after what went down in New York. But maybe, just maybe, he’ll want to hear this:
Hey, Princess. You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to. And maybe you’ve already heard about it. But in case you haven’t, I thought you should know: I’m going to duel Tamsin Blackwood at the New York Magicians’ Arena a month from now.
I don’t know what to do.
I send it as text and then as email, too, for good measure. For several days, I get no response. And then, one day, I get a phone call from a number I don’t recognize. I assume it’s spam at first, but on the off chance that it’s important, I pick up anyway. “Hello?”
“For the smartest person I know, you’re pretty stupid, you know that?”
I close my eyes. “You know, you’re the second person this month to call me the smartest person you know. Think there’s something to that, princess?”
Rook huffs a laugh on the other end of the line. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You changed your number.”
“Nah, I just have an extra phone now. I’m turning over a new leaf.”
My eyes pop open. “And you need a whole new phone for that?”