Chapter 23 #3
Beads of sweat kept swarming down the backs of Ezra’s knees.
“I’m not—I—” His eyes locked desperately with Biz’s.
You’re all I have left. “I don’t know why knives and bullets bounce off me.
I didn’t even know that magic was real until I tripped through that mirror into the Seek and Find.
Please.” He hated begging, but he hated the thought of losing his sister even more.
Hugo didn’t appear particularly moved. His shadow-strings lay thick on the floor.
His gaze thinned. “Grandfather always said I was a waste when it came to magic. Father was too devastated to care. Nothing I did would ever compare to Nolan, so why bother? For the longest time, I didn’t.
I drank and danced and danced and drank.
But there’s only so much hedonist escapism one can take.
I’m done with hangovers and half-spun dreams. I want real power. Your power.”
Vultures. That’s what Celia had called them. It was, Ezra thought, quite an insult to the birds.
“If you want your companions to leave this place alive,” Hugo continued, “then you’ll do as I say. You’re going to help me retrieve whatever great treasure is hidden here. Then you’ll return to London with me. For study.”
The magician didn’t mean the kind of scholarship Ezra was used to. Surely. His neck hairs bristled through the stick of sweat. “Do you even know what’s behind that gate?” he grunted.
Hugo grinned. “A relic no one else in the Order has been able to reach before. Daresay I’ll be able to move a few rungs up the ladder with this offering—”
“Don’t you mean we?” Everett interrupted.
Hugo’s smile turned fangish. Like a hyena.
Except hyenas eventually stopped being hungry and Ezra knew these men would keep sinking their teeth into everything they could.
They would take and take and take. They would dynamite statues and use sarcophagi as party props and burn an entire country to ash simply for its gold.
Ezra was done living in their shadows.
What makes you so special?
The rage.
The shadows.
The shine.
The loss.
Loss after loss after loss.
The fact that, after everything that had been stolen from him, Ezra Bright was still standing here.
He was still here, and he was no longer afraid to be.
He finally let himself feel all of it. Ezra let out a scream—not a helpless sound but one that built and built as the carefully crafted barriers inside him collapsed.
Years of anger.
Decades of walls.
All the madness that never was.
Every fear of being too much and not enough.
It poured out of him, joining the raw threads of magic that met the mirrors. Ezra could see himself there: devoured in his own light. More and more and more and more. But for all the craftsmanship of those Venetian Isle glass masters, cracks began to appear.
The glass was finally starting to break.
Fear flinched through Hugo’s shadow. The beastly smile vanished from his face.
He pulled a dagger out of his belt.
“You can’t hurt me,” Ezra said.
The magician lurched across the chamber, to where Vincent stood, holding the Webley pistol at Biz’s head. The threat was made that much clearer as the dagger rose to Vincent’s bare throat, blade settling just beneath his Adam’s apple.
Ezra swallowed.
The magic around him, beating into the mirrors so many endless times, had become a firestorm. The glass wouldn’t contain it much longer. Even if Ezra wanted to stop, he wasn’t sure if he could.
But he did not want to stop.
It wasn’t just the mirrors that were cracking.
As Ezra stared across the room at his lover and his sister, he felt years’ worth of raw emotion rising to the surface.
That feeling of not quite belonging—while the Ellingtons sat for a family portrait and Ezra was instructed to “get out of the way” for the day.
How the governess had slapped his wrist for speaking Arabic.
How George had stepped between the pair, chest puffed out, and Ezra had loved his brother for it, but he could never call his brother his brother.
Just as he could never call Vincent my darling, even though the young man made him feel as bright as all the jewels in Egypt.
All the gold that his mut had shown him.
All the treasures that had been taken and taken and taken…
“I’m not going back to Britain with you,” he told Hugo.
The first mirror shattered.
The next two quickly followed suit.
As the magic rushed forward, he found himself thinking of Celia—holding out that stem of thorns in the garden, laying her shadow bare in the train car, burning him with a cigarette. It hurt, but she’d been onto something. Ezra could control his anger. Or at least hold on to it by the tail…
“You will not harm my sister. Or Vincent.” Light blazed across the obsidian tiles and wrapped around the magicians’ ankles, much like the snake at Biz’s feet.
The dagger clattered to the floor, followed by the Webley, which, thankfully, did not discharge.
“You aren’t going to harm anyone ever again. ”
Ezra’s light coiled up their knees and waists and chests. They were such small men… He could feel their souls trembling against his power as they toppled to the floor like spent chess pieces.
“That’s right!” Biz laughed, but her arms were shaking. She kicked the parasol snake on top of Everett. “No more stealing shit that doesn’t belong to you! That includes my dignity!”
Vincent knelt down and picked up the pistol.