Chapter 41
CHAPTER 41
Roger set Vincent on Thomas’s cot in the small room and moved to stand in the doorway. He leaned his back against the frame and crossed his arms over his chest. His inner sea continued to churn. There was something agitating it, but so far as he could tell, his anger wasn’t the source.
Thomas had disappeared with Lacey and Amber, though since valuable belongings remained, Roger assumed they would be back at some point. Likely, Thomas wanted privacy as he discussed with his daughter and cousin what had happened to Zack.
Josefina had seen that the building wasn’t crashing down and declared she was taking the other vampires back to their residences with an attitude so cold Roger knew something was wrong with her.
That left Noah, Bastian, and Dmitri.
And Bastian’s gray tabby cat, who strode underneath Roger’s legs and entered the room as if they owned the place. They sat at the end of the cot and watched Vincent with feline intensity.
A familiar scent drifted on the air. Roger took a deeper sniff, but it fell apart underneath the overpowering aromas of dust, wood, sweat, and cat.
Dmitri stepped into the hall. At a soft, gentle volume, he said, “Bastian would like a word.”
Roger could hear the end of the conversation happening in the second classroom, though it was muffled to near silence. In the relative silence of the building, Roger shouldn’t have had a problem eavesdropping. They must have used a spell, but his hearing was sharp enough to pierce it.
“I have to take this back to Pendragon,” Noah said fiercely. “It’s one thing allying ourselves with a vampire who wants to fuck up the status quo. It’s an entirely different thing to throw our lot in with a vampire warlock who could be using us to stage a coup.”
“I don’t think he’s like that,” Bastian replied. “You saw how he didn’t have control over his magic. He’s new at this.”
Noah sighed, his frustration clear. “Look, I think backing Roger is the right move, but I can’t speak for the whole community. Pendragon has to weigh in.”
“ You could still work with him, even if Pendragon won’t ally the Burrow.”
“And that is a whole other conversation I have to have. With my husband,” Noah replied. “Which, knowing him, he’ll say yes, but I still have to talk to him. Plus, I’m fucking tired. Do you have this?”
“How long will the sleep spell last?” Bastian asked.
“I infused it to run a natural course. Kid looked exhausted, so at least a few hours. You shouldn’t have any problem lifting it if you have to. If you do, call me,” Noah said.
“Will do. Be careful.”
Noah snorted. “You’re the one sticking around with two ticking time bombs and a bunch of killers.”
A door opened and shut, and then there were only three heartbeats in the building. Roger pushed off from the doorway and took a step toward the lit classroom, but the steady heartbeats pulled him to a pause. Something was off. Quickly, he isolated each. Bastian’s was the steady of thrum of someone who’d been in conversation and was now moving toward rest. Vincent had settled into a deep sleep, and his heartbeat reflected that.
The cat was weird. Roger moved back to the doorway and frowned at the creature. Their heart moved at a pace similar to Bastian’s. For such a small beast, that was wrong . It should have been at least twice what Bastian’s heart was doing.
Not wanting to leave Vincent alone with a potential shapeshifter—or some other mysterious creature—Roger zipped into the room and grabbed the cat. Predictably, the cat was not a fan of that course of action, but Roger was faster. He managed to grab the cat by the scruff and hold it out in front of him so they couldn’t scratch him.
The cat meowed pitifully, then began to snarl as Roger carried them into the lit classroom.
Dmitri silently stepped out of his way and moved to lean against the wall beside the door inside the classroom.
Bastian lifted an eyebrow. “Is there a reason you’re carrying Lee like he’s a snot-filled handkerchief?”
“This is not a cat,” Roger replied. “Can you keep him from going back to Vincent?”
“He’s curious about the boy. Nothing foul involved,” Bastian said.
“Vincent is under my protection. I will decide what motives are foul, and since I don’t know what this beast has in mind, I would prefer he remain away from the boy. And I notice that you didn’t deny he’s not actually a cat.”
“He’s not, but he won’t be changing into anything else for a while.” Bastian gently took Lee from Roger and cradled the cat in his arms, scratching his belly. He strode across the room to the turned-over chairs, righted two of them, and sat in one. “Think you can keep a level head about you?”
“Despite what you saw, I’m not known to give in to impulses of violence,” Roger replied. Slowly, he took the chair that Bastian had set up for him. “What happened earlier … Vincent and I have some shared pains. I?—”
“Hey, I don’t need you to divulge your traumas.” Bastian deposited his cat onto his shoulder, and the creature remained there, casting his silver-eyed gaze on Roger. “I take it your magic is something new to you.”
“I would say I don’t have magic,” Roger said. “At least, before tonight, I didn’t think I had anything in common with arcane practitioners. Vampires my age are known to gain new abilities, but this doesn’t have the touch of them, except for the shadows.”
“There are some arcanists that can manipulate shadows, but I have seen it more with vamps.”
“I am over three hundred years old,” Roger said, allowing his shock into his voice. The night had been full of long plunges up and down high waves. “I should have shown some sort of power like this before, correct?”
Bastian took a very long moment before he said, “I wager Thomas hasn’t told you much about me, so let me tell you a little more about what I do. The Greater Circle of the Unyielding concerns itself with bigger matters than the day-to-day politics of mages, which is a fancy way of saying I spend my time going from one magical disaster to another. I’m familiar with power manifestation.
“Vincent gave us a clear picture of some of the trauma he’s been dealing with. And you told me just now that you can relate.” Bastian looked up from the floor to meet Roger’s gaze. “In my experience, abuse is more likely to suppress the onset of arcane manifestation. Abusers and manipulators excel at making their targets feel not only physically powerless but spiritually weak. Forgive me for having overheard, but you told Thomas you had been surviving for centuries.”
“He’s saying that because you molded yourself into a vapid fuckboy, you couldn’t be anything more than a vapid fuckboy,” Dmitri said. He thumped his head back against the wall and stared up at the ceiling. “I am such an ass.”
“You?” Roger asked.
“I haven’t helped,” Dmitri replied, his voice growing more distant.
“You two seem like you’ve got a lot of history, but I need you to dissect that later,” Bastian said. His cat slipped off his shoulder, landed on the floor quietly, and sat a small distance away, like he was another member of the conversation. “Right now, yeah, it seems like you’ve had some sort of arcane breakthrough. You were casting wildly, but you moved with intent. You weren’t trying to blow up Noah. That spell was a raw undoing, the same sort of spell I used to disperse it. When you turned on us, it was out of protection. I think you’ll do fine in a standard lesson structure, starting tonight if you want.”
Bastian pointed toward the back room where Vincent slept. “He’s a different story. His manifestation nearly brought the building down. Your power is raw, but you have a better handle on your emotions. He doesn’t have that. He could be a danger to himself and to others.”
Roger narrowed his eyes. “What do you propose to do about that?”
“For the time being, nothing without consent,” Bastian replied.
“For the time being?”
“I’ll repeat, he’s showing signs that he is dangerous. His magic is incredibly volatile. I’m not blaming him. It’s clearly unintentional at the moment.” Bastian produced two metal bracelets. “My first suggestion is that he wears these until he learns how to separate his emotional state from his power. They’ll dampen his magic so that if he manifests like he just did, it’ll come out like a breeze instead of a tornado.”
“May I see one of those?” Roger asked.
Bastian tossed him one bracelet.
The metal was lighter than Roger expected, and it wasn’t silver like he’d initially suspected. Instead, it was aluminum. A series of runes covered the outside and the inside. As far as Roger could tell, Bastian wasn’t lying, but Roger didn’t know the man. He pulled his phone from his pocket, snapped a few pictures of the bracelet, and sent Ezra a message with the images. Ezra had said that he’d researched arcane manifestations. Both Ezra and Bastian could lie to him, but Ezra wouldn’t have the motive.
And Roger had to trust someone, or he might lose his mind.
Within a minute, Ezra sent back a message confirming what Bastian had said. The bracelets were a common tool among “troubled” cases of manifestations.
Roger ran his thumb along the runes and then tossed the bracelet back to Bastian. “You won’t force them on him?”
“These things are designed to work with the willing,” Bastian said. “If I were to shove them on him, he could wreck the enchantment the first time he has a fit. For the record, I want these to work for him. I want to find him a mentor that’ll give him the time he needs.”
The cat let out a loud, meaningful “Mrrreow.”
Bastian startled and then frowned at his cat. “Seriously?”
The cat flicked his tail and swiveled his head to face Bastian. His next meow was forceful and insistent.
“All right, but he’s got to agree,” Bastian said.
“The not-a-cat has an opinion?” Roger asked.
“Lee’s full of them.” Bastian wiped one hand across his lips and sighed. “He thinks I should take the kid under my wing. Which I hope”—he raised his voice a little and aimed his words at the cat—“he realizes that means we might have to settle down here in Chicago for a while.”
Lee strode up to Bastian and rubbed up against his leg. He wrapped himself around Bastian’s ankle and then lay down across his foot.
“You’re a pain in the ass,” Bastian said to Lee. He cleared his throat. “When Vincent wakes up, I’d like to talk to him. I’m guessing there aren’t parents in the picture.”
“No. I’m the closest thing he has to a guardian, though he is eighteen,” Roger replied.
A distant look filled Bastian eyes. One of his tattoos must have blocked vampiric abilities because Roger couldn’t read his fears or desires. However, he’d seen enough mortals to know when someone was thinking through everything they’d learned. Eventually, Bastian nodded once to himself, then dragged both hands down his face as he sighed.
Clapping his hands together, he said, “All right. Give me five minutes to set up, and I’ll be ready to guide you through some novice focus practices.”
“Just like that, you’d teach me?” Roger asked incredulously.
“Whenever Tommy calls, I know shit’s not only hit the fan, a sewer’s spewing in a china shop. And there are monkeys who have covered the wares in shit and are trying to outthrow the sewer’s sewage. Vampire though you may be, I noticed that boy didn’t have a fresh bite mark on him. Neither does Tommy or Amber. Even if you are going out and slaughtering the innocent behind Tommy’s back, you’re not stupid enough to kill me.” Bastian gave a wolfish grin. “And if I’m teaching you, then I’ll get to know what your magic feels like. So if you do turn out to be a maniacal undead warlock, I’ll have an upper hand on knowing it’s you and knowing what you’re capable of.”
Allowing Bastian to help him meant sharing a newly discovered part of himself. Roger had barely wrapped his mind around the notion that he had arcane power, and now he was supposed to trust this stranger? So what if Thomas had called him in—Thomas’s allegiance to Roger was clearly thin. And I likely ruined it . If Thomas relied on Bastian in disastrous situations, then either he believed he needed stronger people on his own side, or he thought Roger’s mission needed bigger players.
You asked him to find talented people. You asked for warriors . Roger put a hand to his forehead to shield his eyes. The world was too much. Zack a vampire. Takashi with a sireling. His own power. Vincent’s manifestation. Seamus throwing fucking parties after Roger had crippled him financially.
Quietly, Dmitri moved over to his side. He put his hand on Roger’s shoulder and murmured in his ear, “You can do this.”
I thought he was preparing me for the draining ritual , Dmitri had said during their first conversation in Nathaniel’s apartment. What Roger had been seeing must have been magic, and the rainbow sigil on Dmitri was proof of what Anton had done.
But without learning magic, Roger wouldn’t know what it was or how to help him.
Centuries of helplessness, and I could be as powerful as Anton . Roger put his hand over Dmitri’s and squeezed him tight as a brittle smile crossed his lips. Standing motionless had aided no one. If he could move forward, he had to.
“Five minutes,” Roger agreed. “Then I guess I’m learning magic.”