Chapter 8 #2
She was quiet for a moment. “Those sound way more dangerous than active curses.”
“Either type can be dangerous, just in different ways.”
She pushed up until she was facing him. “And which type of Key are you?”
He searched her expression—for what, he wasn’t sure. “I’m both.”
She blinked. “You’re a Dual Key?” When he nodded, she let out a quiet “Wow” then resettled against him. “No wonder you’re in such high demand.”
“There’s no shortage of work—that’s for sure.”
“I’m guessing Miles’s situation was more the cleanup type than the disable type.”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, the rune’s initial intention was poorly constructed, so when the intended magic tried to ‘set things back to normal,’ it matched the base materials in their furniture and belongings to core materials like the wood framing of the condo or the metal pipes in the walls.
I got their stuff back to its normal state, but they’ve got a good three or four hours of cleaning to do, and then quite a few holes to patch and paint, if they want to salvage their security deposit. ”
“Even with you undoing the hex?”
He made a noncommittal noise as he continued to play with her hair.
She tilted her head back, a little smirk playing around her mouth. “Wait, is this your way of teaching Miles a lesson?”
“Maybe.” When she shook her head and went back to her previous position, he added, “Hey, I didn’t charge him my normal rate.” Or any rate, actually, since there was no way the kid would be able to afford it. “And hopefully, next time, they won’t use a knockoff hex.”
Cass’s laugh was soft. When she didn’t say anything else, he enjoyed the moment of quiet intimacy—him playing with her hair, her idling tracing circles on his stomach. He thought about what was on deck for tomorrow and knew there were a couple of questions he needed to ask.
Grayson looked down at her bent head. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something.”
Her fingers stilled, and she tensed a little but didn’t look up. “What?”
Something told him to tread lightly. “When you mentioned your family’s business, you said something about being naturally inclined to do the work.”
He stopped, not sure how to ask what he needed to know because it might lead to him revealing more than he was currently comfortable sharing.
She let go of his shirt and flattened her hand against his chest as she tilted her head back to study his face.
Whatever she saw eased the stiffness from her body.
“Is that your polite way of asking what I am?” she asked with a hint of teasing.
He cleared his throat and did his best not to squirm. “Yes.”
“The Ambrose name is my father’s, but the Alcmenes are my mother’s family. They also happen to be one of the Arcane twenty-seven.”
Now it was his turn to tense. After the carnage of the witch trials and the eventual creation of the Mystic Accords, twenty-seven Arcane Families had fled Europe.
Some landed in America, where they forged agreements with the existing people of the First Nations, which led to the creation of the First Nation lands and the Mystic States.
That had lasted until the late 1800s. Tensions exploded into a brutal civil war, and when the dust settled, three ruling powers emerged—the First Nations, the five-seat Arcane Council, and the US government.
The First Nations and the Arcane Council held much more sway than the government, which represented the nonmagic-user faction known as Traditionalists.
The majority of the five-member Arcane Council could trace their lineage back to one of the twenty-seven families, the true movers and shakers of the modern Arcane world.
“Unlike the other big-name Families,” she continued as if reading his mind, “my maternal line prefers to stay out of the limelight, which is why no member ever sat on the council.”
“That’s unusual.”
“It is,” she agreed. “But it’s also necessary.”
“How so?”
“Well…” Cass said reluctantly. She looked away and finished in a rush. “The Alcmene line is one of Seers.”
Grayson’s body locked with shock. “You’re a Memory mage?”
At his sharp tone she started to pull away, but he tightened his arm, keeping her close. Stilling, she said cautiously, “You know that’s a misnomer, right?”
“What?” he asked, too agitated to focus.
“Memory mage? The only ones who really work with memories are Muses, and because the classification of Seer was originally Memori, everyone got smacked with the label of Memory mage.” She sounded disgruntled.
Grayson was still trying to wrap his head around her revelation. “Okay, then, what kind of Memori are you?”
“I’m an Oracle.” She winced. “Well, a broken one.”
He wanted to dig into that, but he was drowning in a sea of relief, grateful that he might not be forced to walk away from her. An Oracle, I could handle… If Cass had said she was a Muse, he wasn’t sure how he’d have handled it. His experience with Muses had nearly destroyed his family.
Cass watched him. “Are you okay, Grayson?”
He shook his head. “I’m good.” Before she could press, he asked, “You said your maternal line is of Seers?”
Cass gave a slow nod.
“So your mother is…”
“A Sage, like Sofia and my yaya.”
The tension riding him took another step back.
Cass didn’t miss it. “Grayson, what’s going on?”
“I’ve got issues with Muses,” he said, determined to be as honest as possible.
“What kind of issues?”
“Big ones. It’s something we can get into later,” he said. Cass didn’t need the added weight of his baggage at the moment.
Fortunately, she went along with his suggestion. “I’m going to hold you to that.”
He gave her a reassuring squeeze before circling back to her earlier comment. “What do you mean by broken?”
It was her turn to deflect. “How about I share that story when we’ve been together a little longer than a week, or when you share yours?”
Which implied she was hoping this would last longer than the weekend—something he could get behind. Grayson covered the hand on his chest and curled his fingers around hers. He was relieved when she returned the gesture.
“Deal.” He brought her hand to his lips and pressed a light kiss to the back of it. “What about your dad? What’s his contribution?”
“He’s a pattern mage from a family that made serious money in the tech industry. That cash was helpful when he and Mother decided to expand the family business.” She made air quotes around the last word.
The man bought his way into an elite family. Interesting. “Gotcha. I wasn’t aware strategical planning was such a profitable business, but considering your family’s magical bent, I guess that makes sense.”
She gave an amused huff. “It does and it doesn’t.”
“Not following.”
Her lips tightened as her shoulder rose and fell in a jerky shrug. “When it comes to accurate predictions, Pythia is the best of the best—hence their ability to charge top dollar. It’s also why their main clientele come from the Arcane Families and their businesses.”
He heard her thinly veiled distaste. “And that’s a bad thing?”
Cass’s gaze roamed over his face, and the shadows that drifted through her eyes hinted at deep hurts and a deeper anger. “It is when the right price ensures that the predictions are in your favor.”
Why that surprised him, he didn’t know. The Families were nothing if not ruthlessly capitalistic, but to shift actual events to meet their ends… “They can do that?”
She nodded.
A shiver of disgust crawled over him. “That sounds remarkably…”
“Illegal? Unethical?” she offered.
Evil would be his choice, but instead, he said, “Either. Both.”
Her soft “Yeah” was followed by a harsh exhalation. “I shared that opinion with my parents.”
“I’m sure that went over like a lead balloon.”
“Let’s just say body armor became de rigueur for family dinners. It got worse when they realized I had no intention of ever working for Pythia. Then Yaya got involved and sided with me. The arguments got so bad she eventually chose to step down rather than continue to play a part in the business.”
He had a feeling there were a lot of details she was leaving out, but her story did, in part, explain the rift with her family. “Can’t say I blame either one of you.” He squeezed her hand. “Does Sofia know what’s happening at Pythia?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like it’s an easy thing to prove. The company’s never been sanctioned, never faced any legal repercussions or things like that. It’s more whispered comments than anything else, and whispers are easily squashed when you’ve got heavy hitters that can back you up.”
“The Families.”
She nodded. “They don’t want to risk losing their crystal ball, so…”
“Your parents continue to call the shots.”
“Exactly. No one at Pythia will stop them. Last I checked, eleven Sages of various strength were employed there, and each one had some sort of tie to my parents. They’re not going to screw their paychecks by speaking out.”
“So the natural-inclination thing means Oracles aren’t a common occurrence?” he asked.
“There’s maybe one per generation.”
“That explains why your parents wanted you on board.”
“Yes. There is an Oracle on staff. A first cousin to my mother. He’s about twenty years older than me.
When he joined Pythia under my grandmother, he negotiated an iron-clad contract that allows him to pick and choose which clients he works with and when.
Under that contract, my parents have to be very selective of when and how to use him because Oracles don’t have a long career life. ”
That doesn’t sound good. There was that pesky protective streak again. “Okay, you need to elaborate.”
She gave him a long, considering look before she answered. “Unlike with most mage-wielded abilities, Oracles don’t become better at mastering their abilities the more they use them—they can actually get worse.”
He frowned. “How does that work?”
She plucked at his T-shirt. “When an Oracle is asked to forecast, they don’t just ‘see’ one path but all the possible paths.
Most of the time, an Oracle will stick to the clearest and most obvious path for their forecast, but sometimes an Oracle will go too deep into a seeing, losing track of the reason they’re forecasting in the first place.
That’s when, if they’re not careful, it’s easy to take a wrong turn and get lost. Think of it like a tree of never-ending what-ifs.
The trunk is the clearest path forward, but each choice a person makes forms a branch, and each branch leads to another choice, creating another branch, and so on. ”
Picturing it, his brain ached. He couldn’t imagine having to live that reality.
Cass kept talking. “For an Oracle to get back to the trunk of reality, they have to be rooted in reality, but the more times they climb the tree and the farther out they go, the weaker the root becomes. In the cousin’s case, he’s got another five, maybe ten, years left so long as he doesn’t cascade out. ”
The grimness of that last description set Grayson on edge. “Cascade out?”
“Being an Oracle requires a mental strength that can be difficult to maintain, which is why we train almost from the moment we can think and all through our lives,” she said somberly.
“It’s our way of trying to strengthen that root holding us in the present.
But if it splinters, so do we. It’s what we call a cascade, and the chances of recovering from it are slim. ”
“This cascade thing—can you stop it once it starts?”
“You can if the Oracle has a strong enough anchor to pull them back.”
A chill raced down his spine and settled icy links around his chest. “And your parents wanted you to risk that possibility on a regular basis?”
“They did,” she confirmed. “I did not, and neither did my grandmother.”
“What the hell, Cass?” He didn’t bother hiding his revulsion at her parents’ attitude. “That’s some serious bullshit.”
She stayed quiet, and he realized this wasn’t the worst of it. “You said you were broken.” Something flared in her eyes, striking a chord in him. Before he could put a name to it, she pushed away from him. “And as I said before, that’s a story for later.”
Recognizing her self-recrimination and sorrow, he tightened his hold, keeping her at his side.
He softened his tone. “Okay, we can circle back to how that came about, but for right now, I need to know—was it them that broke you?” If so, he’d make damn sure to severely limit how much air they got to share with her.
“Not them.” Her voice was rough. Then she swallowed hard and touched her tongue to her lips in a nervous tell. “That was all me.”