Host (12 page)

“If the Most High appears, or a messiah, or if evil is really defeated and paradise on earth results, then I'll lay down all resistance. If he really is God almighty, I'll bow down and worship him like the rest of humanity.

“Now, I got a question for you. Why do you think the big bad uglies are always ugly? What if they looked and smelled just like seraphs? The biggest BBUs used to be seraphs, right? Did the seraphs put an incantation on their enemies to make 'em look that way?”

I said nothing, just let the syllables flow over me. It wasn't anything the EIH hadn't been saying for years. It wasn't anything I hadn't thought before.

“What if they were beautiful like the seraphs? Which side would we go for? The side that killed six bil' of us right up front? Or the side that likes us for dinner? If one side decided to save us—really save our asses—would we care which side it was?”

Heresy. Profane sacrilege.

Truth? Finally, I looked away.

D
rinking cinnamon and vanilla tea, I reread the notes I had made not so long ago on the history of the one I now thought was the Dragon of the Trine, Azazel. I made additional notes on what I needed to ask Lolo, the priestess of the New Orleans Enclave. I had a lot of questions.

My parents had died when Rose and I were children and the priestess had taken us under her wing. She hadn't raised us, exactly, but she had overseen all aspects of our education. We had spent a lot of time in her house, being tutored by special teachers, listening to envoys from other Enclaves and to humans who came to barter or purchase services, and we hadn't spent as much time with other mage children as we might have had our parents lived. Yet nothing I had learned as a child had prepared me for the horror of my gift when it came upon me.

For mage children, the ability to see and manipulate leftover creation energies comes upon them at the onset of puberty. Like all mage girls, I started my menses and my gift descended, but for me it had an unintended, unexpected consequence. My mind opened to every mage in Enclave, all twelve hundred supernats. Every thought, hurt, fear, hope, petty jealousy, hatred, desire, love, and need descended on me at once. I nearly went mad. I was drugged and shipped to Mineral City. Rose remained in Enclave until she was eighteen, when she was licensed and went to work in the Atlanta consulate. Whatever we had been expected to become had been lost when I nearly lost my mind.
A Rose by any Other Name will still draw Blood
. Enigmatic to the point of uselessness. No one knew what the prophecy meant.

My special education hadn't prepared me for the past winter either. I hadn't kept up my lessons in the ten years I had been banished. I wasn't ready to fight Darkness any more now than when I first went under the Trine. Not that I had much of a choice.

I finished my tea and shoved the kitchen table against the cabinets, exposing the tile floor. The tiles were stoneware from clay collected in Mexico, from a site near a battlefield where seraphs, humans, and Darkness had once fought an earth-rending war. The glaze was composed of mineral pigments Lolo had charged to my protection before shipping them to me on a summer train. Taking up a bag of unused salt, I poured a heavy ring in a six-foot-diameter circle, leaving a foot of space open for me to enter.

Around the outside of the ring, I positioned candles scented with bayberry and juniper, to cleanse the air and my spirit. I filled my sterling silver scrying bowl at the sink and set it in the exact center of the salt ring, springwater sloshing gently. Stone amulets I tumbled at its side, a pile all drained and needing to be charged. A shard from the amethyst downstairs went with them, one too small to have a fully formed eye, but still a part of the wheels of the cherub. My ceremonial knife, in plain view in the cutting block, I set to the side of the stones. Lastly, I pulled the
Book of Workings
from the shelf beside my bed, placing the book on the floor by the bowl in case I needed it. Into the bowl went three polished marble spheres, empty stones that could accept and store whatever energies I needed. The water lapped to its top.

I sat within the circle, at the open space in the salt ring, crossed my legs yogi-fashion, and closed my eyes. Spine erect, I blew out tension-filled breaths and drew in calming ones, again and again. There were several kinds of circles and several ways to opens channels to the power left over from the creation of the universe. Because I was tired and my amulets were so drained, I was using the safest method to open one.

I'd been removed from Enclave long before I would have learned how to scry—a basic skill, but one a young neomage could learn only after her gift came upon her. I'd never practiced a skill I thought I'd never need. After all, scrying was a way to contact another neomage, and I couldn't do that. I was in hiding, so why bother? I had scried successfully only a time or two.

As I breathed, the silence of the loft settled about me. My breath smoothed. My heart beat a slow, methodical fifty beats a minute, beats I timed against the ticking of the black-pig clock, the sound becoming one with the stillness I sought. All glamour fell from me. Behind my closed lids, my own flesh was a gentle radiance, the brighter glow of my scars a terrible tracery down my legs and arms. I opened my eyes, seeing now with mage-sight.

The loft pulsed with power, the bower of neomage safety I had created in the humans' world. Stones were everywhere, at bath and bed and gas fireplaces, every window and doorway, the floor. From them, every aspect of my home glowed with pale energy, subtle harmonious shades of lavender, green, rose, red, and vibrant yellow. Mage-sight saw the power of mass and energy in everything, luxons, the building blocks of the universe.

My skin burned brighter than the apartment, a pale pearl sheen, a soft roseate coral, the glow traced with the hotter glow of scars. I closed the circle with two handfuls of salt. As it closed, power seized me. Power from the beginning of time, heard as much as felt. It hummed through me, a drone, an echo of the first Word ever spoken. The first Word of Creation. The reverberation was captured in the core of the earth for me to draw upon, a constant, unvarying power of stone and mineral, the destructive potency of liquid rock and heat. I trembled as vibrations rolled through my bones and pulsed into my flesh. I could
see
the thrum of strength, the force, the raw, raging might of the earth, a molten mantle seeking outlet. Finding me, rising within me. I was a crucible for incandescent energy, mine to use.
Power.

Because I was tired, perhaps because I was lonely, the need for power, the lust for it, rose in me, higher than ever before, calling to me, promising me everything I wanted. Promising me safety, happiness, a way to fight all Darkness and destroy the humans who wanted to hurt me, who wanted to hurt Ciana. For the first time in a long time, I had trouble fighting off the fulfillment it offered.
I could take what I wanted.
The might of the earth burned below me, writhed inside me, welding me to it. I
was
the strength of the earth, the might of the core, the power of the creation of the Most High. Temptation. To be as God is…

I forced my hand up. With a single motion, I slid the necklace of amulets over my head. The need receded, fled. Died. Acid churning in my belly and rising in the back of my throat, I returned to myself, gasping,

The loft was unchanged, the world unchanged, but now the power pulsing through the room was sharp and focused to my mage-eye. I swallowed reflexively, not knowing why it had been so hard this time to harness and control the stone-energy of creation. Something was wrong, I could feel it, but I didn't know what it was. The circle I had drawn looked fine, the loft looked okay. I was normal. But something didn't feel right. Exhaustion? The effect of low-level, prolonged mage-heat? I shook it off, concentrating on my breathing to settle myself.

Before I tried to scry, I drew on the creation energies I had harnessed, and dropped a shard of amethyst from the stockroom into the silver bowl. As it fell through the water, I sent out a mental call to the wheels of the cherub Amethyst. I had done this before, and the wheels made working with energies so much faster and easier. It was a shortcut, and I knew I probably shouldn't do it, and it was probably dangerous to contact and use a cherub's power base without her permission, but I was just so tired.

The wheels answered with a drone of joy and a gush of power so personal and tender that it felt like the love and affection of a mother's hands. A small smile curved my mouth and I sighed as the wheels poured power out on me, into me, filling my flesh with energy so gentle it was almost like a sedative. For a long moment, the wheels and I communed, and though they were far away, I could sense the wheels' eyes gazing at me tenderly.

As if knowing what I needed, the ship offered control of the power conversion properties of its living engine. Steadier now, I used the wheels to manipulate the energy of the molten heart of the earth, directing them and filling all the amulets on my necklace. Without the wheels, it would take hours to fill my amulets, but now, bonded as they were to cherubs' wheels, it took only minutes.

The speed was a blessing, but the payback would be a pure horror if Holy Amethyst noticed what I was doing. I had tried this after a previous battle when I needed healing from battle injuries, when I needed to fill my amulets and I was too tired and injured to do it. But I had been careless, and Amethyst had noticed. The backlash when she closed the power circuit had knocked me unconscious.

The ship crooned, its voice mellow and tender, vibrating along my nervous system, through my bones and marrow. “Little mage,” it sang. “My little mage.” Mentally, I caressed the wheels as I would a cat, if mages could keep pets without them eventually going feral and killing anything that moved.

The wheels increased the power flow, and when the amulets were all full, I transferred the surging energy to the empty household amulets. Utilizing the underground viaduct, I topped off the energy sink at the ring of stones around my spring out back. The wheels seemed to ripple and surge in my mind, though I knew it was probably impossible for a ship the size of a football field, one made of living amethyst stone filled with eyes, to move in the way I sensed.

“Enough,” I told it softly, feeling warm and full and slightly drunk on the might of the wheels. “Your mistress will see.”

“Yours,” it hummed, so softly in my mind. But it constricted the flow of power into a fine strand that twisted to a delicate point and pulled away.

“Thank you,” I whispered as it withdrew, as grateful for the might it offered as for the secrecy we shared. When it was gone, even to the echo of its voice, I gathered the creation energies and my will and breathed myself into a meditative state again. Content, tranquil, I began the process of scrying.

Into the bowl, I dropped a stone, a small shard of unpolished bloodstone, a mineral I had a close affinity for. It clanged softly when it hit bottom. I added another. They settled gently into the bowl between the larger spheres of white and gray marble. When the third dropped in, a soft resonance of energy gathered, as crystalline matrix touched matrix. A faint sheen shimmered on the surface, mutable and chatoyant like liquid kyanite.

I had tried this several times before, without success. But I was not giving up. “Rose?” I whispered the incantation. “Can you hear me? Rose, hear your Thorn.” The water mottled, darkened, as if light warped in lumps and bulges. The vision rippled at the bottom of the bowl, like a current in a creek, with sunlight dappling over smooth sand. I heard a roar, like howling wind in a storm. It lasted only a moment. A single heartbeat of time. The surface cleared.

Disappointment scoured my heart like steel wool. I had seen moments of visions in the last weeks, while trying to scry for my twin, and like this one, they had been out of focus, blurry, confused. But I kept trying, and had promised myself that I wouldn't give up, my hope bolstered by the memory of both Light and Dark claiming my twin was alive. Forcing away the frustration, I settled myself again and, when calm, began to scry for Lolo.

“Sea and shore, jazz and dance, I search for the priestess of Enclave,” I said, repeating the incantation several times. It was a simple mantra as conjuring went, and the lack of scripture made it less powerful, but more focused. Simple seemed best. With my pitiful level of training, I was less likely to mess up and do a truth read or some other conjure by accident. I had done that before and it wasn't fun. On the seventh repetition of the verse, the water in the silver bowl began to glisten. It thickened, forming a dark, mirrored surface. It didn't cloud or become opaque, but it was as if all the light began to vanish, as if a silver cloud rose from the bottom. I kept up the words and rhythm of the incantation, syllables soft and cadenced.

In the water, kaleidoscopic images swirled, cool greens and warm creams, mellow shades of butter and amber and the gold of sunlight on yellow roses. These were not the rich shades of ruby and emerald I associated with Lolo. The image began to sharpen into a sunlit room, walls painted shades of sage, rosemary, and moss, with cream moldings. A huge vase of flowers, roses and buttercups and freesia against darker green fronds, sat atop a round inlaid wood table. Over it a fan turned lazily, the air moving the flowers in an artificial breeze.

Beside the table, reclining on a yellow chaise lounge which was centered in a conjuring circle, was a woman. She stared at me through the water and the miles, unsmiling, her face giving away nothing except beauty and hauteur. Instantly I felt like a bumbling country bumpkin in the presence of royalty. She was elegant in gold silks and lace, her formal mage-clothes embroidered in the leaves and flowers of her gift. By her clothes I knew she was an earth mage with an affinity for living things, one of the rarest and the most difficult to control mage-gifts. With it, one could heal or kill, bring life or destroy it. She was staring at my scars, and though her expression didn't change, I sensed her revulsion.

I fought the urge to raise my hand to cover my face and throat. The visa throbbed with a rhythm of suggestions and information and I recoiled. This was a consulate situation?
Seraph stones. Who had I contacted?
“I offer apologies for disturbing you,” I said, following the visa's lead as to proper protocol for a scrying mage. “I am Thorn, of the litter of twins, licensed stone mage out of the New Orleans Clan, abiding in Mineral City in the mountains of the Carolinas. Hail to Adonai. I was searching for the priestess of Enclave.”