Chosen (9781742844657) (3 page)

‘Lisandro destroyed Peter,' she accused, struggling to stand. Her foot caught the hem of her robe and she stumbled. Renatus grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her to her feet, but he continued watching Lisandro. ‘It wouldn't bother ‘im to ‘urt any of us.'

‘
You
nearly destroyed him,' Lisandro replied carelessly. ‘His friendship for you was weakening his resolve. If he'd given in I would have killed him.'

‘Lisandro…What went wrong with you?' Lord Gawain asked. He was really struggling to understand why this was happening.

‘Honestly? You, Gawain.
You
are what went wrong with me. Watch out, kid,' he added to Renatus, before turning back to Lord Gawain. ‘You, my friend, my mentor, my leader, are responsible for anything I do henceforth, because
you
failed me in the exact moments I needed you not to. Think back: you remember the moments, the times I needed something and you ignored me.'

‘Your needs were selfish,' Lord Gawain rebuked, thinking of one such time quite easily but having difficulty recalling any more.

‘Maybe so, but I've noticed that the world is ready for a change, and realised that
I
could be it. It's a very empowering feeling.'

‘What will you do now?'

‘Destroy you. Bit by bit.'

At the opposite side of the dismantled circle, the energy levels spiked as someone relinquished their self-control and anger burst forth.

‘You deceitful monster!' Emmanuelle screamed, her usually smooth blonde hair ruffled. ‘How dare you? How dare you ruin this council, after all it ‘as gained you? How dare you destroy Peter?' She continued ranting in furious French and started forward as though to attack her friend's manipulator, but Renatus caught her and held her back. Glen hurried to Renatus to help restrain her.

‘I think that's my cue to leave,' Lisandro said cheerfully. He tapped Peter's motionless form with his wand and the young Scot disappeared, displaced.

Lord Gawain froze mid-step –
the Elm Stone
! Why hadn't he bothered to look into the future to see this coming? He'd been so focussed on the events unfolding in the
now
and now the ring, the White Elm's greatest source of emergency power was
gone
!

‘No! Bring ‘im back!' Emmanuelle cried, fighting against those who restrained her. Renatus held her tightly, his face expressionless, while Glen transferred soothing energy to her. It wasn't working.

‘Someone needs to shut that little girl up,' Lisandro commented, waving his wand in her direction; she dropped as though dead, but Renatus was quick to catch her before she hit the ground. An automatic check of her aura confirmed that she was alive and unharmed, just stunned. Lisandro smirked at Renatus. ‘Pretty girl, that one. Not as pretty as your sister was, though.'

In an instant Renatus had released Emmanuelle and shouted an ancient-sounding word. A bolt of too-fast misty blue energy ripped through the air, aimed at Lisandro's green-sashed chest. Lisandro saw it coming. He dropped his wand.

The result of his unexpected spell was instant. With a deafening, unexplainable noise, the entire garden was shrouded in poisonous black smoke. The candle flames that had lit the space were immediately snuffed. The White Elm began coughing painfully as soon as they inhaled the smoke. It was toxic, constricting the throat and lungs in a way that normal smoke did not. Lord Gawain dropped to the ground, his lungs already desperate for air. He had no idea how to reverse this dark magic. That was Lisandro's job as Dark Keeper, but no doubt Lisandro had displaced himself by now.

Because, impossibly, the council's secret weapon had backfired and Lisandro had betrayed them.

‘What is this?' Susannah asked, her voice forced.

‘I don't know!' Lady Miranda said, coughing and sounding lost.

‘It's exhaust,' Renatus said. His voice was calm and easy, his sudden anger of moments earlier lost. Lord Gawain looked around for him but the smoke stung his eyes. However, the smoke was thinning. Within a few seconds it was gone. Renatus was the only one standing, his wand out.

‘Exhaust?' Lord Gawain asked, slowly standing and looking around. Sure enough, Lisandro, Peter and Jackson were gone. The other White Elm were getting to their feet.

‘It's an old, old piece of dark magic,' Renatus said smoothly. ‘It's the negative energy left over after dark magical spells, turned physical. It's called exhaust. Most of the time this energy dissipates but Lisandro obviously knows how to manipulate it into exhaust.'

‘How do you know this?' Lady Miranda demanded, standing and pointing her wand at him threateningly. Renatus handed over his wand obligingly but didn't answer. ‘Is it from your spell?'

‘Partly. Mostly your own energy you imparted to him-'

‘He's done nothing wrong, Miranda,' Lord Gawain said immediately. He knew Renatus's family's reputation, like everyone present, but now wasn't the time to pretend it mattered. ‘We need to focus on Lisandro.'

Lisandro's gone
.

The Elm Stone's gone
.

Both weapons, and two other talented councillors, gone – lost in a matter of minutes. In this moment, there was no obvious course of action.

Heavy rain slashed at the windows, so hard they could have broken and no one would have been surprised. A flash of lightning briefly relieved the stormy darkness, but was followed by an eerie flickering of the living room lights and television. The thunder clap was immediate, and the image on the television blinked out. A cold and shaking hand grabbed mine – my equally terrified sister trying to comfort me, trying to remind me that inside, we were safe, surely. The wind howled, and whole branches were ripped from the massive tree in the yard. The two men I loved most in the world ducked as the wind intensified and flung a neighbour's post box over their heads. There was a huge, sickening crack from outside, totally unlike the thunder and many times worse, and the tree began to fall…

A harsh rumble like thunder jolted me awake, and I sat up suddenly.

‘This is your stop, isn't it?' my bus driver asked kindly, smiling at me in her rear-view mirror. I nodded, blushing as I got to my feet and hurried to the front door.

‘Thanks,' I mumbled, grateful that my bus driver, at least, knew what I was doing. I apparently didn't. Falling asleep on the bus? That was something new, and stupid. The next stop wasn't until the Catholic neighbourhood, and, well, I wouldn't exactly be welcomed there. As far as they were concerned, I was a Protestant through and through, and this
is
Northern Ireland, after all. You're one or the other, even if you're neither, which is my category. I suppose someone in my family, way back, might have been a real one, but I didn't think so.

You don't get many Protestant or Catholic witches.

‘No worries,' the driver said, waving once as she closed the doors behind me.

The bus rumbled again, its ancient engine sputtering loudly as it continued on its journey. That's what had woken me. No big deal. Nothing to be paranoid about. I looked up at the sky. I needed to get a grip. The clouds were grey and low, but harmless. The weather lady on the news had predicted rain this afternoon, but no storms. I could relax.

Naturally, I'd forgotten my umbrella, despite the weather lady's warning, so if I was to avoid being rained on I should probably hurry and get home. I zipped up my jacket and hurried along the quiet street.

I'd lived in this neighbourhood for three years, but it still didn't feel like home. I didn't know any of my neighbours, not even the people in the houses right next to mine, whereas in my childhood home I'd known the whole street and heaps of kids living nearby. Other witch kids, mostly, because our old neighbourhood had been home to several witch families. Maybe that was the problem with this neighbourhood. No magic. Sorcerers just didn't tend to live in secluded, dull North Irish suburbia, or at least not within like twenty kilometres of our place. You'd hardly think
anyone
lived around here, I reflected as I crossed the silent road. People just stayed inside their houses unless they were getting into their car to go somewhere more interesting.

I turned a corner and kicked a stone. It clattered across the road and rolled into a puddle from yesterday's rain. I felt that disappointment you get when your game ends prematurely. Oh, well. There would be other rocks, no doubt.

As I passed the puddle, something compelled me to look down. My stone lay prone in the murky water amongst other stones. Was it a trick of the light, or was something glinting? I tilted my head, and saw again the glint of something shiny. A coin? The first drops of rain struck the surface of the water, marring my view, so I leaned down and scooped it out. At first, I felt nothing in my hand, and reached again, but noticed that my fingers had indeed closed around something.

My prize was more of a river pebble, I saw now, smooth, round and flat. Bizarrely, weightless, like it was hollow. Unassuming, and unshiny, until I turned it in my hand and saw a silvery engraving on its other side. The design was of a roughly symmetrical tree, like a Celtic tree of life. I knew I'd seen it before, probably many times, but for a long moment couldn't place where.

It came to me suddenly.

‘White Elm,' I murmured, recognising the tree as the symbol of the magical world's governing council. Thirteen of the world's most gifted sorcerers worked together to regulate the use of magic, maintain secrecy of our kind from the non-magical community and monitor the goings-on of sorcerers everywhere. They were like our politicians, our judges, our police and our social workers all rolled into one entity. I'd never met any of them, but three years ago, immediately after the tragedy that had killed my parents and older brother, I'd received a letter from them, offering condolences and providing my sister with best contact details for emergencies now that she would be a teenager raising a minor on her own. Days later, we'd received another letter, congratulating my sister on coming of age on her twentieth birthday – the first day of adulthood in magical culture.

We'd kept the second letter, but tossed out the first one in a clean-up five months ago when we'd realised that the directions we had for an emergency were to contact one Lisandro, a man who no longer even worked for the White Elm. Worse, he'd deserted it in a controversial political bust-up and not been seen or heard from in almost half a year. It had all been very exciting at the time, with the White Elm publishing weekly public safely messages, acting like their former councillor was an escaped convict on the loose, but nothing had come of it, and things had been quiet on that front for quite some time now.

I turned the pebble over in my hand again, wondering what it was doing lying around two streets from my house. Maybe a sorcerer had been this way, and dropped it? Random. Maybe a councillor from the White Elm had left it here for me, a message? Doubtful.

Giving up on my dumb theories, I slipped the pebble into my pocket and turned to continue on my way home. I stopped immediately.

A man was standing there. He certainly hadn't been there seconds ago, and he wasn't puffed like someone who might have just bolted out from one of the houses behind me. Where had he come from?

‘Hello, Aristea,' he said. For a long second, I just stared. Where had he come from, and how did he know my name?

‘Hi,' I responded, warily. His appearance didn't tell me much – mid-fifties, Arabic in descent, skin the colour of dark coffee, deep soulful eyes, curling dark hair, short beard, powerful build, tall, dressed in a suit – so I tuned into my other senses, my witch senses. They were like long, invisible fingers I could brush over things nearby to feel for energies. I could sense straightaway that he was a sorcerer, and one of the strongest sorcerers I'd ever encountered. His energy field was fuller and stronger than that of anyone else I'd previously met. What he was doing here, I couldn't guess, so I probed deeper, looking for feelings and intentions. I felt curiosity, mild interest, but nothing frightening or threatening about his emotional state.

How someone feels isn't always a perfect indicator of how they intend to act, so when he moved towards me I jumped back and opened one hand instinctively. Unseen, an energetic shield, a ward, blossomed from my hand, blocking him. The man paused, sensing what many others wouldn't. He wouldn't be able to walk through it. He shifted his weight to a standing position again and extended his hand, probably what he'd been doing in the first place, I reflected now.

‘My name is Qasim,' he told me. ‘I belong with the White Elm council.'

My ward lost its fizz and dissolved as relief washed over me. No weirdo. No escaped convict. This was one of the good guys.

‘Aristea Byrne,' I said, stepping forward to accept his hand. His handshake was warm and firm. ‘You gave me a fright.'

‘My apologies, but I couldn't arrive here before being sure you would pass the test,' he said, sounding far from sorry. He had a businesslike tone that I wasn't sure I liked, but I overlooked this for the moment in light of what he was saying.