Interlude Maya
Interlude
Maya
“We shouldn’t have gone to that party,” Maya said to Jason as they hurried out.
“Can’t believe you bailed right at the good part.”
Maya clenched her jaw. “The violent part? I don’t want to see that.”
Jason shot her a grin as they pushed through the back doors of the Amberdash building and into the night beyond. “I don’t care what you think.”
“He’s going to kill us now.”
“It was worth it to see someone beat the shit out of him.”
Maya frowned, pushing her glasses up her nose.
Sansara was the sacred tree of peace. She had communed with it daily for years now.
She was Jason’s top acolyte and would have been a full Druid in another life.
The tree told her to follow Jason. It told her to work her magic for the betterment of society.
But she didn’t understand how this meeting with all these horrible people did that. This felt antithetical to helping all the poor, lost people of the Goblin Market.
“There was no reason for the violence.”
Jason looked at her as if he wanted to issue violence against her.
But eventually he sighed and shrugged. “You don’t understand,” he said as they stepped into the getaway car.
“The world out here isn’t like it is back in Sansara.
There is much evil here. We’re going to return to our haven to avoid more of this. ”
Maya believed him. She always had.
Because Graves had been the one to send her to him.
She had been a young, impressionable teenager during the war, and she’d almost starved on the streets, fallen in with the wrong gang who only wanted pretty young women for one thing.
Her mother had been a Druid but had died in childbirth, and she had grown up with her dad on the streets of Manhattan.
She wanted to go looking for her mother’s people, but her dad had always told her she was safer without them. That magic just brought trouble, even as her own magic came in fresh and brightly blooming. A calling for peace and serenity that she couldn’t find in the world.
There was word on the streets that the warlock could solve all your problems if you could get in to see him, but no one could get in. She got the meeting. Maya had always been good at getting answers to the things that she wanted. She had a little knack for finding them.
So when she sat across from Graves in his library and had him listen to her problems, she knew that he’d help her.
But when she’d told him she was a Druid and not a warlock, he’d been unimpressed.
He’d said that he couldn’t train her and that she could go to Brooklyn for that, but it wasn’t what her father had wanted for her.
He told her about a rogue Druid in the city, but he wasn’t sure that he lived anymore—to seek out Cillian Ryan.
She could tell he didn’t want to tell her. That it wasn’t a suggestion he would have normally entertained.
But she went looking for the answers. And there he was broken and bleeding and needing help. A sapling of a tree in his pocket.
It wasn’t Jason or Cillian Ryan or the Druids that she needed. It was the tree. And so she had followed Jason into the market and to Sansara and built the entire organization from the ground up with him, for him. All because the answers to her life were in that tree. Not out here.
“Someone is following us,” Jason said from her side.
Maya turned around, but she didn’t see anyone. “Looks fine to me.”
“Step on it,” Jason said frantically. “The last thing I want is Kierse and her boyfriends following after me.”
“Us,” Maya corrected.
Jason rolled his eyes and held tighter to his cane.
As they got closer to the entrance to the Goblin Market in the West Village, Maya began to notice what had made Jason jumpy.
“I think you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right.” His hand went to her thigh, a grip that was just past friendly. “I’m always fucking right.”
“Who do you think it is?”
“Kierse,” he spat like a curse.
“Well, I could talk to her.”
Jason shook his head. “No. It wouldn’t work. She can’t be told anything. It’s her greatest flaw.”
“But I could talk to her, Jason.”
“Won’t work. Do you hear me?”
“Well, let me out. She isn’t going to hurt me.”
“Whatever.”
The car pulled over before the entrance to the market, and Jason was already striding inside like he owned the place, which for New York wasn’t far off. Sansara was growing. Just as she had always wanted it to.
A second car screeched to a halt outside of the large entrance, and a tall white man with soft features stepped out of the front of the car. He had a coin in his hand.
Not Kierse.
She had never seen him before. He was a handsome man with dark-brown hair slicked off of his face and ever-watchful eyes.
He wore a black suit and a little hat. Maybe just a driver?
But he held himself as if he were more than that.
Like he had a persona he could shed in a moment’s notice. So a spy? She wasn’t sure.
She was still in her pretty dress, and if Kierse couldn’t listen to her, then he could.
“Hello,” she said, pushing at her glasses and smiling in his direction.
He looked her up and down, calculating how dangerous she was. “You must be Maya.”
She put a hand to her chest, pushing her magic toward him as she asked, “You’ve heard of me?”
“I have.” An easy smile hit his features. Was that natural or staged?
“Do you think that I’m pretty?”
“Yes,” he forced out. A muscle ticked in his jaw.
A little resistance made her excited. So few could resist her.
“What’s your name, handsome?”
“George.”
“Hello, there, George. Have you heard the good word of Sansara? We preach peace for all.”
“I’ve heard it,” he said flatly, more resistance to her.
“Were you coming to the market to hear the good word?”
He hesitated before saying, “No, I was following you.”
“Me?” she asked with a bright smile. Okay, she was in. More questions to wrap him up. “Or someone else?”
That cute smile returned. “You and someone else.”
Oh, clever. He’d walked around that one. Not many people could.
“Would you tell me why you were following me?”
“No,” he said as his hands went into his pockets.
“Hmm,” she said, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Usually, she was deeper by now. He must have been trained in some way. “Why don’t you come in with me to Sansara? We can have a long talk.”
“I have other plans.”
Her eyebrows rose. She needed to push harder. She used her hand this time as she said, “You don’t anymore. Do you understand?”
He straightened as if her magic had finally woven into him. He resisted, but it was futile. He wasn’t strong enough.
It wasn’t persuasion exactly. That was what Jason had thought.
But it didn’t work on him. Not like that.
Or at least he was much better at hiding it.
It was simply answers. She could always get to the bottom of what she wanted, and once a person answered her questions, they wanted to do whatever she asked them to.
“Won’t you come inside with me, George?” she asked, putting her hand on his sleeve. “I have a lot more questions.”