Chapter 6 Ember
EMBER
I couldn’t examine the brochure until I was back in the car with Lara. I’d flipped through it, of course, just to make sure there were photos. But I hadn’t been able to look. There was no way in Hel I’d admit I needed Lara’s support, but I did.
By the time I got back into the car, it was dumping rain and Lara had reclined her seat. Blessed heat seeped out of the Dodger’s vents. Lara barely spared a glance for me when I slammed my door shut. I waited, stretching my fingers towards the vents to warm my frozen fingers, but she didn’t sit up.
“Don’t you want to look?” I asked, fidgeting impatiently with the Saints medallions around my neck. Tanith and Amarante clinked together. I liked to imagine they were kissing in moments like these.
Lara was silent for a long moment. She never gave the silent treatment, so this was something else. I craned my neck to look back at her. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her jaw tight.
“If I hadn’t fallen asleep on watch—”
We’d been through this a thousand times.
“You’d just ascended,” I said with a sigh. “And you dozed off. They got the jump on all of us, Lara. It wouldn’t have mattered if you’d heard them. They were just better than us.”
“But if I’d heard them sooner—I’d have had hold of my sword.”
It was tempting to sigh again. We’d been over this countless times. “And you’d have done what? They might as well have been ghosts, Lara. They had the swords so fast none of us had time to do anything.”
It was true. We’d made camp, and the four of us had fallen asleep easily, with Lara on watch.
Back in those days, the life was traipsing around the wastelands on a horse.
Humans had a lot of weird nostalgia about the medieval period, but I didn’t miss it.
I wouldn’t miss whatever the historians would call this wretched era either.
Back then, sleeping outside was cleaner and safer than the desperate little wasteland inns. The five of us had woken in time to realize something was wrong, and then the swords were just gone. It wasn’t that we didn’t see the thieves. Technically, we did see them.
We all saw the same thing—a blur of movement, and then nothing.
They didn’t even have to attack us. They moved faster than they should have been able to, obviously fueled by a miracle, though the Thaumas in the area admitted to nothing.
With our swords gone, the Consulate felt it necessary to give us the worst assignments.
It had been almost eleven hundred years of this shit.
But none of us had ever blamed Lara for falling asleep.
We blamed ourselves for letting the youngest of us, ascended only a few months, keep watch overnight.
We were all hundreds of years older than Lara and we’d forgotten what it was like to be habitually ruled by mortal urges like unelected sleepiness.
The loss of our swords and honor had been devastating, making us the weakest of the Maere and the least respected.
We still had our immortality, but the things most Maere could do, we couldn’t.
The swords acted as a conduit for power we couldn’t access otherwise.
We’d had to get scrappy since we lost them.
Lara never answered me about what she would have done.
Whenever the subject came up, it always went the same.
She beat herself up, wouldn’t let anyone talk her out of her stance, and then she went silent and depressed for weeks.
We didn’t have time for nonsense like that—not if these actually were our swords and we had a chance to get them back.
“Just look and tell me if it’s them,” she said, sounding depressed already.
I suppressed the urge to snap back at her that she was the fucking expert about swords, having been a blacksmith, a swordsmith, and a rare weapons dealer.
Instead, I flipped through the brochure’s expensive, heavy pages until I found them.
Five swords with identically crafted blades, each with a different hilt.
The photos were not clear enough for me to positively identify them, but they looked real enough that my breath caught.
Lara’s seat went up in a flash and her chin rested on my shoulder. “Fuck.”
I tapped the brochure. “There’s an online viewer. They have videos. We need to go look.”
“Okay,” Lara agreed. “Where’s the new place?”
“I lied a little last night.”
“About having a new place?”
I bit my lip. “No. About you liking it.”
Lara glared at me. “Where is it?”
“It’s at the Carlyle.”
“Ember,” Lara snarled before the word had even left my throat.
I knew she would react this way. She’d hated everything the Consulate stood for since the swords were stolen. It’s why we’d lived elsewhere before she was taken. “Why the fuck would you live there? The Consulate’s given us short shrift for hundreds of years. Why are you so fucking loyal?”
Who was she to talk about loyalty? I was loyal to my sistren, my cohort. Who the Hel had she been loyal to all these years? “Where else was I supposed to go, Lara? You all left. The Consulate is all I’ve got, and the apartment is free and safe.”
“Nothing that comes from the Consulate is ever free.” Lara shook her head, her jaw clenched tight as she revved the Dodger to life. The truth stung. “I’ll come in for a few, but I’m not staying.”
“There’s actually room for everyone. It’s a penthouse—”
“Stuff it, Verona.” Lara pulled into traffic without another word.
Forty-five minutes later we were in the wood-paneled office in my apartment, our apartment, pulling up the National Gallery’s auction website on my giant monitor. The Carlyle was an all-purpose building owned by the Consulate, with offices in one sector, and residences in another.
Plenty of the city’s most dangerous parapsychs lived and worked here.
I got why Lara hated it, but I had no idea what she expected from me.
Where did she think I’d be living? Some shoebox downtown, probably.
Crying into my Happy-Os every morning with only the rats to talk to… No thank you very much.
Lara spun around in the chair I’d picked out for her. “So you just decorated this place all on your own? With our money?”
I glared at her. “It’s not ‘our’ money, it’s the Orphium Maere’s money. It is not my fault that the four of you refused to do the job.”
This wasn’t the time to have a fight about why she hadn’t let me help her, but I’d have it if she was going to get shitty with me about spending money on this place.
It wasn’t as though I’d bought crap. I’d done my best to make things ready for my cohort to return.
And maybe that had been foolish, but I wasn’t the one who abandoned her family.
Now it was Lara’s turn to glare. “Just log into the website. Let’s get this over with.”
I turned back to my computer and did as she asked.
It took the video of the first sword forever to load, and in my head, I justified spending the money.
We were all rich as royalty after centuries on this cursed plane of existence, but the designated Maere in any city got a stipend from the Consulate to help run their outfit.
Typically, that stipend was easily spent between five ancient warriors who liked new toys for running their territories.
Without my sistren, I’d struggled to spend the money.
I’d even asked the Consulate to send less, but they wouldn’t, purely as a reminder of how meaningless I was to them, I assumed.
So I spent it on my people, anyway. Furnishing this space, kitting it out with all the best stuff.
Waiting, like some pathetic little girl for her best friends to please come home.
How many times had I sent that exact message?
In texts, emails, postcards, and at least one telegram.
But no one came. And for a while, I was mad about it.
Now I just wanted to stop fighting and be a family again.
I needed them to come home, now more than ever.
There was a good chance that these swords coming up for auction was an epic trap.
That whoever stole them in the first place was playing a long game with us. We wouldn’t know til we looked, though.
The video finally played. It was Rhiannon’s sword. Lara leaned towards the screen as the camera panned down the blade and tapped the screen as a tiny nick glinted in the light. “She got that at the Vale of Lovane.”
“I remember.” I pulled up the next sword.
A choking noise came out of Lara as the hilt came into focus, still wrapped with the scarf of the mortal girl Lara had loved—and lost—when she ascended.
The Maere were the only parapsychs that were not born.
Not exactly, anyway. We grew up mundane, and when we reached twenty-eight, our aging slowed, just as all parapsychs did.
The difference was that we gained preternatural strength, agility, and other talents…
and knowledge. Everything about us sharpened as we regained all that had been lost—we called this ascending.
I closed the window and loaded the third sword in the lot, holding my breath as the camera panned down its pristine blade.
Deep inside me, I felt the comfortable grip of the hilt, the way it felt to run my thumb over the scales of the snakes.
My stomach turned, and I was dizzy. There was no doubt in my mind that it was my sword.
I opened the fourth and fifth videos simultaneously, desperately needing this to be over. But something was wrong. Lara stared blankly at the wall, still lost in her grief. I hit her leg with my hand. “This is wrong. They look like Max and Sera’s swords, but…”
Slowly, she dragged her eyes away from the wall to my monitor. First she frowned as the videos played, then she shook her head. “They’re good replicas, but those aren’t their swords.”
“What does this mean?” I breathed, resting my elbows on the desk. I didn’t expect an answer.
“Who’s the seller?” Lara asked, picking up the brochure. That had been the first thing and only thing I’d read, before I even left the National Gallery offices.
“It doesn’t say.”
“You need to call Rhiannon.” Lara leaned back in her chair. She crossed her arms over her chest. Before I could protest, she grinned, wicked and smug at the same time. “Better you than me.”