Chapter 15
They say there’s calm after a storm, but there was no calm at Hell Gate. The wind whipped savagely around the gray stone spires. It drove itself against the walls and howled as it hit immovable stone. The iron gates groaned as they resisted the wind, teeth bared against its howling.
While the tsunami had been swallowed whole by Finn’s abyss, the wind had been left to rage.
It sped giant gray clouds through the city, a facsimile of the wave that was meant to strike.
The clouds cloaked the sun and left the city in their savage shadow.
The lightning was gone, but the violent anticipation remained.
I shivered as the clouds swamped Hell Gate in gray. I clutched my mug of chamomile tea and let the heat scald my palms. Grit and dirt from grimy sidewalks sandblasted the kitchen window, and even Rou’s kitchen fire couldn’t keep out the summer cold front’s chill.
Justice and I made it back right before the wind began its violent sweep. I didn’t know if it was attacking Hell Gate alone or if it was flying through the entire city.
Who can say with the wind? It has its own reasons for blowing where it blows and going where it goes.
On the roof, the grotesques were stone again. They snarled and bared their teeth, frozen on Hell Gate’s ledge.
In the kitchen, Justice, Griff, Jagger, and I sat at the long, scarred wooden table. Rou was at the stove, stirring a pot of something that smelled of cinnamon and anise. She hummed a disjointed song that sounded like the murmur of swift river water sliding over mossy rocks.
Jagger ignored her. He’d ignored her even when she set a plate of blueberry scones, a pot of tea, a cold roast, and a pint of beer in front of him. She’d recovered from the shock of the tsunami and was making up for her wavy disorientation by fixing an afternoon meal.
Justice pressed the towel she’d given him to the cut on his head.
It was stained red from his blood and leaking melting ice onto his shirt collar.
If it hadn’t been Rou who’d given him the towel, I know Justice would’ve left the cut to bleed and swell.
It wasn’t that he wanted to appear tough; it was that he never remembered he was hurt until blood was running into his eyes.
I understood. It was hard to feel the pain of a cut when your insides were constantly on fire.
It would probably take something as strong as an arm falling off to catch your attention.
I took a sip of my chamomile tea, concentrating on the floral taste.
“You stabbed the Smith,” Jagger said in a deep, satisfied rumble. “And Jacob Ward fought him.”
We’d been through it all. Jagger had picked through the events like a man sifting through sand, looking for that one speck of gold.
A trail of sweat ran down my forehead, and it immediately turned cold.
Griff glanced at me then back down at the table.
“Yes. And the Smith boatmen.”
“Hmm.” Jagger narrowed his gaze and stroked the obsidian knife hanging from his neck. “Justice. How do you kill a conjurer?”
Justice dropped the soggy towel to the wooden table.
He bit his bottom lip and narrowed his eyes, thinking.
“It depends on the conjurer. Surprise works best. You have to be fast. Don’t give them time to conjure.
Bullets are no good. Neither is fire. You have .
. . about a half-second. Sometimes less.
Depends on how strong they are. The trouble is, you kill one, there’s always another. ”
“Exactly. They’re a hydra. Cut off the head and another grows. It isn’t the conjurer—it’s the power that passes between them.” Jagger slid his finger against his knife, and a line of blood swelled. He tsked and stared down at his gray finger and the small pool of blood.
I held back a gasp. The tip of my right pointer finger burned. When I looked down, a drop of blood was smeared on my mug.
I glanced at Justice. He had his right hand held in a tight fist, revealing nothing.
Jagger caught my stunned reaction and sent me a gloating smile. What had he always said? If I hurt, you hurt. If I die, you die. No wonder I felt the instinctual need to protect him.
“Roumelade,” he said, and when she turned from the stove, he held out his hand.
“Perfect. That’ll do nicely.” She bustled over and scraped the blood from his finger with her wooden spoon, then she went back to the stove and stirred it into her pot.
“I’ve been considering this peculiar problem for centuries,” Jagger said, turning back to us. “I would’ve liked to possess the crown. It would’ve made this easier.”
I tilted my head. “If I hadn’t died, I would’ve retrieved it for you.”
Griff stiffened and gave me a quick warning glance. Of the three of us, he was always the most scared of pushing Jagger.
Jagger’s wooden chair squeaked as he leaned forward and slowly folded his hands together. “Don’t test me, Mari. I have more ways of hurting you than you could ever imagine.”
He waited, his folded gray skin and flat gray eyes conveying precisely how little compassion and empathy he held. None. He was as compassionate as a granite boulder crushing an infant.
I nodded. He smiled. It was a smile that often made people shiver, because it was only a stretching of skin and a flattening of lips. It was a smile that inevitably led to cruelty.
“While we don’t have the crown,” he said, staring at the steam rising from Rou’s pot, “neither does anyone else.”
“The Smiths?” Griff asked, finally looking up from the gouge he’d been tracing in the wood.
Jagger shook his head. “My source tells me the crown is not the Smiths’.
Better yet, they tell me the Clarks are claiming the crown.
The Bards and the Clarks are united against the Smiths.
The Wards . . .” He let out a slow rumble.
“I hear the Smiths dropped the Ward’s body through the Clark’s solarium.
And now Jacob Ward and the Smiths are fighting with earthquakes and tsunamis.
” He rubbed his hands together and reached for the pint of beer Roumelade had left in front of him. “Mari? How do you defeat a hydra?”
I frowned. Hydras were tricky. They were mythical creatures who grew two heads for every one cut off.
In Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1817, Fidelus Bard and his wife Gloria had an argument, while sailing in the bay, concerning his liaison with their washerwoman.
In a rage at the (correct) accusation, Fidelus conjured a hydra to scare his wife and clear him of her charges (I don’t understand his reasoning.
But this is the story). That hydra was spotted by sailors and fisherman and became known as the Great American Sea Serpent.
All sorts of sea monsters spawned from that hydra: there was a rash of sightings all over the Atlantic in the 1800s.
But how did the Bards finally rid the water of the hydra?
“You have it attack itself,” I said. “You make it devour its own heads.”
“Precisely.” Jagger lifted the pint in a toast. “You make them attack themselves.”
While Jagger tilted back his beer, swallowing the whole pint in one long draw, Justice gave me a searching look.
Attack themselves?
I nodded.
Griff looked between us.
“It’s ready,” Rou said, banging the wooden spoon against the edge of her pot.
Outside, the wind ripped at the window’s casement, still groaning.
Jagger set his empty pint glass down. “Do you still think this is about the crown?”
“No,” I said.
“No. It’s time to sow seeds of doubt. It’s time to turn the conjurers against each other. I want them to tear each other apart. Until . . .”—he stared at me—“none of them remain.”
“That,” Roumelade said, setting a glass jar full of electric-blue liquid on the table, “would be a lovely thing indeed.”
Justice frowned at the glass jar.
“Justice. Make yourself look like the Smith.”
Justice looked over at Jagger and then held out his hand, twisting an illusion into place.
I blinked. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t even great.
But Justice looked close enough to Finn that it made my heart thump painfully.
I stared at him, and he gave me a half-smile—one that was all Justice and zero Finn.
“Good,” Jagger said, eyes narrowed on Justice.
“The three of you, at dark, take that—it’s blue fire—near enough to the Smiths that it’ll do.
Justice, make certain you are seen. Not well, but well enough that you can be identified as the Smith.
Mari, you won’t let yourself be seen. You’ll slip into the Bards’ home, the Clarks’ home, and the Wards’ home.
Tonight. Burn them down. Burn them with blue Smith fire.
Griff, stay out of sight. If trouble arrives, fly them out.
Tomorrow, I expect Hell Gate will have company.
We’ll be playing host to some new friends. ”
“You truly think the Clarks, the Bards, and the Wards will believe the Smiths attacked their homes unprovoked?” I asked. It didn’t seem likely.
Jagger pinned me with his stare. “They’ll believe it because they want to believe it.
” He tapped his finger against his knife.
“Just like you believe things you know to be untrue because you want to believe them. Like . . . hmm . . . Justice didn’t want to kill you.
He did, Mari. He did. Or the Smith is somehow the same man you knew in the games.
He is not. Or that you are still . . . perhaps .
. . maybe good. Happily, no. You are not good.
Yet you believe the unbelievable. So, yes, they will too.
They will believe it because they want to.
And that belief will be what flings them down to the gates of hell. Now, go. Go.”
Justice and I stood quickly, shoving our chairs back. Griff stood more slowly. I grabbed the jar of liquid blue fire.
As we strode out of the kitchen, Jagger called after us, “Oh, I almost forgot. Have fun.”
He laughed.
I did not.