Aidan’s accent had the delicious effect of warping Myra’s name just so. Moira.
It had her wishing he would speak it again. Perhaps he might, provided her answers proved sufficient.
Because Aidan had incensed her curiosity. Because, for the first time since leaving home, Myra remembered what hope felt like. Mage, he had called her. If that—fantastical as it seemed—were possible, then perhaps she could learn to control that thing inside her which would not let her be.
Also there was the already-concluded unlikelihood of her shoddy footwear taking her away to safety.
“How do I know I can trust you?” Myra’s past had taught her caution, and the words came automatically.
Aidan’s smile grew lopsided, and Myra’s heart flipped in her chest.
Oh, he most definitely knew the effect he had upon her. But for all his apparent rakishness, his undeniably strange demeanor, Myra could feel a trustworthiness that she simply knew to be right. For it came from the same place as her visions. It was a force all its own, a thing not to be denied. This man, too, had a power in him that set him apart. Myra wondered what it was, wondered if it were the same as her own.
“I’m from the orphanage up the valley.” Myra indicated her flimsy shift and careworn slippers. “And when I was woken by the fire, I—” She hesitated, not entirely certain as to the “how” of her arrival in the midst of the flames. “I suppose I just leaped here from there. By . . . magic,” she tested the word, half-fearing correction.
Aidan nodded, his gaze narrowing. He wanted to contradict her. She could feel it.
Don’t worry, I find my story equally impossible. Myra quirked a smile.
“Was this the first . . . inexplicable happening . . . with which you’ve been involved, Moira?”
There it was. The trap. Myra thought quickly, arriving at a near-truth. “Yes and no. I mean, sure there have been things. It’s how I ended up at the orphanage. But nothing of this magnitude. Normally, I just . . . feel what everyone around me feels.”
She hadn’t meant to have her words fall to ill-concealed melancholy. Emotions made her vulnerable.
“I must ask you”—Aidan’s wand trained itself back on Myra, regret coloring his words—“have you heard of a Professor Silas Addair?”
Myra began to shake her head no, stopping short as she realized that, yes, she had heard the name. Recently.
“Doctor.” She whispered the word and felt Aidan’s anxious shift. She flinched and continued, “Not professor. Not as Stephen saw him, anyhow.”
Now there was little chance of her hiding the truth from Aidan, not as transparent as she felt. And why should she? Because Aidan’s wand is pointed at your heart, that’s why, Myra. Truthful though he may be, you don’t know he’s not the enemy.
The enemy. Had such a word ever entered Myra’s mind before this evening? Was the thought, and the emotions attached, even hers?
The feeling of being in Stephen’s mind pressed at Myra anew. A memory and nothing more; it could not hurt her, could not effect change. And yet . . . The sensation was novel and rather like walking around inside someone’s head as though it were a room.
Myra cocked her head to the side, listening, probing, so engrossed that even Aidan’s guarded lowering of his wand did not take her out of the moment. She narrated for his benefit, “Doctor Addair. Silas. He was not in the warehouse. Two—there were two—of his . . . wizards? And they poisoned m— They poisoned Stephen. Just before the explosion. But no Addair.”
She shook her head in an attempt to clear her mind of the pain and the heat, terrified at the prospect of reliving Stephen’s violent end. Returned to the present, Myra now saw that Aidan’s gaze had removed itself from her and that his wand was now held in a shaking line back toward the infernal glow of the dying munitions warehouse, a divining wand of pure rage. She, once again, found herself lost in the labyrinth of emotion pouring off the man, leaving her little time to register relief over his clearly having not heard her slip-up with regards to her firsthand experience of the mage’s torture.
“You have no direct memory of the Professor. No connection that you can recall before the orphanage, before—”
“I don’t know him!” Myra hadn’t intended her protest to sound as sharply as it did. But there it was. Aidan would now know that he had hit upon a nerve. She could have listed every doctor she had ever been subject to—alphabetically, chronologically, by specialty . . .
Aidan interrupted further thought, “Then we must away to M.I.”
“Em eye?”
“Stands for Magical Intelligence. Stephen’s team of wizard spies. Offices are in London, England. Whereas mine are—were—” Aidan’s voice wavered, threatening to crack under the pressure of emotion. His eyes . . . he still hadn’t looked back to Myra. It was as if he was stuck, as though he had left something of himself behind in the fire and was seeking desperately to reconnect with it so that they could leave.
“England!” Myra whispered her surprise, fearful of disturbing Aidan but unable to contain herself. New dismay shook her. Leave America? Impossible. What with the expense and the time involved and her in naught but—
Magic, Myra. You’re with a wizard, remember? Still, she had to ask. “How?”
This brought Aidan back to the present. His piercing gaze returned to Myra’s face, setting her heart flip-flopping anew. Follow him halfway across the world? Perhaps. The hard grief in his face cracked, and he gifted her with a half-smile, undoing her completely. “TurnKey system. Fast. Private. Mages only, you know.”
Myra knew better than to respond. Mage? Addair? TurnKey? She wasn’t going to repeat everything in one word bursts like a child. She could afford to wait for an explanation. It was not as though life was verdant with other options for her at present. And besides, him being a wizard meant, too, that he would likely be able to withstand the force of Myra’s own terrifying ability.
In silence they picked their way through the low brush and shallow sandy rise and fall of the cold ground, distancing themselves from the disaster they had left behind them. It was in gingerly avoiding stubbed toes and jabbed heels that it took Myra several long minutes to realize their trajectory. Aidan was taking her straight back to the orphanage! Mind reader, indeed.
Myra slowed, testing the wizard’s motives. Fear prickled her shoulders and arms, and she tensed, ready to run. Aidan slowed as well, endeavoring to stay alongside Myra. His sideways glance came tinged with empathy. “Almost there, love.”
Myra’s companion further curbed his pace, now shrugging his shoulders violently. In three short jerks, he had his jacket down around his elbows and in one smooth motion, he swept it off and up around Myra’s quivering shoulders.
“Shoulda thought of that sooner,” Aidan apologized, eyes back on the horizon. “I don’t have a spell for the feet though, and train’s probably going to be by pretty soon. Can you manage?”
“The train? I thought it was the Key Turning we were going to take?”
“TurnKey. Yes,” Aidan confirmed with a curt nod of the head, now speeding the pace a touch. “But there are not a lot of Apex points around these parts. Closest one, I’m afraid, was that warehouse. And until we can get M.I. to sort out your apparent kinesis abilities, we must take the train like other mortals. Least until we reach the nearest Apex.”
“Kinesis?” There it was. She was parroting again.
“The gift of mages who can jump from place to place instantaneously. Such a wizard is known as a Kinetic.”
“Oh, I’m no kinetic.” Emboldened, Myra tried to dispel Aidan of his assumption. “Perhaps I simply fell through the TurnKey system by accident?”
Aidan chuckled, shaking his head.
“No, really. We are heading directly towards the orphanage.” Myra realized, with a shock, that Aidan was looking straight at, straight through, her dissembling. She had let her guard down. Had he been waiting for her to confirm their destination? No, he was trustworthy. Something inside of her refused to believe otherwise.
This time, Aidan’s responding laugh came freer, more indulgent. “No, no, Moira. If I say you’ve magic, then you have it. With my gift it is exceptionally rare for me to be wrong about such things. Particularly with what yours seems to do to it.”
“Your gift?”
“I am—was—my agency’s truth-teller.”
There it was again, the past tense wording and sharp snap of Aidan’s agony running up against Myra’s own pain. This alongside the comforting hum of absolute truth. Suddenly, Myra found herself quite envious of Aidan’s particular gift. It would make life so much easier to know the truth of things.
He continued, “By no means would we ever allow an orphanage to be placed over an Apex. Too dangerous. Can’t have just any old ords getting in and mucking about.”
“Ord?”
“Non-magic folk. Non-mages. Short for ordinary.”
How rude. Myra took a moment to be indignant on behalf of her fellow man. But then she was a mage, wasn’t she? “But you just said it’s only for mage use. So how would any . . . ord . . . get in?”
“There are always exceptions.” Aidan raised his hand for silence, stopping short his next footfall.
Exceptions. Despair began its creep upon Myra’s heart, but a sudden jolt removed her from its path. She heard it before she saw it, a strange whirring sound she couldn’t quite place. She turned.
“Down!” Aidan leapt between her and the streak of light that flew at them out of the darkness. A second, a third followed, blinding in their brilliance. Like shooting stars thrown sideways and from far too close, all reds and blues and greens. The wooden stick in Aidan’s hand now proved its worth. It zipped sparks, countering the strange attack and offering fire of its own.
“Run, Myra!” He pointed.
Myra shook her head, too terrified to move. For once in her life, she was firmly locked within herself and her own emotions. The fear in her outshouted any feelings from others nearby. No, wait. There was Aidan’s calm composure. His resolve, too. And then a sharp spike of angst.
Aidan went down on one knee, hissing. He held his wand arm tight against his side and complained through gritted teeth, “Stands to reason that if I could escape, so could they.”
“Who?”
“Them.”
Myra followed Aidan’s gaze. She spotted two figures, their dark clothing rendering them nigh invisible against the nighttime landscape. Cloaked and hooded.
Memories chloroformed her mind. Memories of calloused and cruel fingers prodding her arm, inserting a needle in just the right place . . . Not Myra’s memories, of course, but Stephen’s.
Thus transfixed, Myra only distantly noted Aidan’s free hand reaching into his vest and pulling out a pistol. Aiming, he pulled the trigger. An eerie red spark darted through the air and buried itself in one of the cloaked men. The other whipped one parting arc of fire at them before seeming to disappear into nothingness.
“Now, we go. Run.” Aidan grabbed at Myra’s hand.
“What was that?”
Aidan ignored her wide-eyed surprise, and together they took off at a sprint. Myra could feel the ugly tang of foreign anger touch her soul. It followed them, slowly falling behind and eventually fading into the soft breeze of the open fields.
Yet still, they ran.
“Hold tight,” Aidan cautioned.
Together they hurried down the hill towards the approaching train.
“How are we—?”
Myra’s question was answered before the words were fully out of her mouth. Leaping? Flying? Together she and Aidan gained sufficient speed and air to catch the steaming, swaying train as it rushed by. Through the open doors of a stock car—blessedly empty—and onto the floor, she and Aidan landed together in an untidy heap for the second time in the space of an evening.
Not exactly the way Myra had train-hopped in her exodus from home to orphanage. Then she had caught trains on their slow hastening from the station. This, this was madness. Or magic.
“Phew.”
Myra glanced up to see Aidan wrinkle his nose in disgust. Apparently he had gotten the worse end of their ungraceful entrance.
A not entirely empty stock car, then. Sitting upright, Myra picked several sodden pieces of straw out of her hair. She concluded once more that the events of that evening were most definitely not a dream. Dreams didn’t smell like a barnyard stall. A low chuckle rent the air, cutting the odor of cattle in twain with its brightness. For all that he had landed in stale cow dung, Aidan was taking the trip in good spirits.
“Moira, you gem. Look at what you’ve done to me.” The mage lay on his back, fully spent, his chest rising in cadence with the laughter. “If I hadn’t thought you one of ours before, I certainly do now.”
He rolled over onto his side, growing stern. “Not hurt are you?”
Myra quickly shook her head. No, she was not hurt. Just . . . stunned. So far in her short acquaintance with Aidan, she had come to conclude that he used magic in the most unpleasant of ways. She remembered the way he’d hissed in pain and held his hand to his side and returned his question to him. “Are you?”
“Yes. But ’tis easily mended. Perils of the profession.” Aidan grinned, showering Myra with a rush of relief. A part of her wondered if he was doing it deliberately, that he’d come to suspect that the collision of their emotional states went both ways for her. Still, Myra watched as Aidan flexed his hand gingerly but couldn’t feel any evasion in his claim. And he was right. From what she had seen thus far, magic did appear to be a dangerous business. The sort of thing nice young ladies should stay far, far away from.
Her last conclusion, a gentle scolding in the back of Myra’s mind, came at her in motherly tones, and she blanched. Myra, of all people, was not a nice young lady, now was she? She set aside her guilt and blurted, “England or Ireland?”
“Sorry?” This confounded him. Aidan sat up, attentive.
“Are you from England, like Stephen and his M.I. people? Or Ireland?” She had a right to know, and it certainly seemed a logical question. His accent was as Irish as Myra had ever heard, after all.
“Neither. New York. But my parents were from Donegal.”
“Oh.”
“Stephen was—” Here a sharp intake of breath, another reminder that Aidan was newly speaking of his friend in past tense. Myra lowered her gaze, feeling the man’s grief anew. “Stephen had come to my team having given chase to a rumor.”
Glad that she was not looking at Aidan, Myra found she had to press shut her eyes, lest they leak their threatening tears. What had she cost this man with her wayward, uncontrolled magic? His friends. Kady who’d tried to rescue Stephen, whom Myra had seen through her vision.
Or perhaps they were dead in any case. Perhaps Myra’s incursion truly had saved Aidan from much the same fate as his team. And gave her answers she hardly dare hope for: a chance at knowing what was really wrong with her.
Magic. Not mania. Could she, might she, return home armed with this knowledge? Disturbed by the thought that she had benefited thus from Aidan’s pain, Myra waited in silence for him to continue.
“You’re doing it again, Moira.”
“What?” Myra locked eyes with Aidan, surprised that he might have noted her soothing touch on his mind.
“I—” Aidan blanked his face. Careful. Clinical. His gaze searched hers. He seemed unsettled, hunting for the right words and finding nothing.
You and me both, wizard. I can’t figure me out either. In fact, Myra would be astonished if anyone could. And with that bleak thought, their halting conversation died to silence. And, in the silence, Myra discovered that the sleep she had so far eluded, found her at last in the gentle rhythmic sway of the train car.
“Now, the TurnKey system of travel is, as I said, only available to mages.”
Myra jumped. Amplified by proximity, Aidan’s voice startled her out of a shallow slumber.
“The same spell that helped us aboard, I will use to aid us in disembarking.” Aidan stood with his back to her, his eyes on the lightening sky. Apparently, he had no idea he had woken her. He turned to Myra, and she saw that the wand was back out, lying flat over the palms of his hands. “But first, we need to do something.”
The crisp pre-dawn air cut through the stale cattle odor of the train car, and Myra rose, stretching stiff muscles as she did so. She eyed the wand in Aidan’s hands, morbidly curious.
“Take it,” he urged. “I want to test you.”
Myra reached out shyly, then hesitated. “What do I—?”
“Oh!” Aidan’s smile grew brilliant. “Just take it like this”—he held it as one might hold a knitting needle, relaxed yet firm—“but don’t wave it about or anything.”
The wand held thus for demonstration purposes, Myra’s fingers brushed Aidan’s as she reached for it, earning her a new blush. Moira. The heat of her reddening cheeks was quickly lost in a rush of something rather unusual. It was as though her soul had been freed, empowered. For the first time in her short life, she felt in control over the external forces that pressed upon her subconscious. She could hold true within herself and not fall prey to the emotional needs of others. And yet nothing had changed. Not visibly. Not internally. She was simply . . . whole. And without understanding why.
Aidan gently took back his wand. “How do you feel?”
“Horrible,” Myra croaked, feeling empty, dizzy, lost yet again. She was back inside herself, trapped and broken. “I mean, that wand . . . It did something to me, didn’t it?”
Smiling crookedly, Aidan turned from her, pocketing his wand. “Luckily, leaving the train is easier than getting onto it, as we will need quite a bit of magic at the Apex. Provided I am correct in my assumption that you have no knowledge of how to even call your power, yes?”
Myra hoped her blank look was answer enough. Was wizardry going to be completely about her feeling dumb and out of place?
Aidan turned long enough to see that the non-response was meant to be a response to his query. “No matter. Provided nobody else has charged the system on us and no local municipality has been so stupid as to erect a telegraph line near the ley. And, if it doesn’t work, we’ll just pop out and walk from there.”
Again, Myra had no answer. Was any of this supposed to make sense to her? He did know she knew nothing, right? Her mind still buzzed with how the wand had felt in her hand. The world shining so right, so true, and so suddenly. But now everything felt all wrong again.
“Kidding about the walking bit. Mostly.” Aidan was now leaning from the car, precarious and nerve-wracking. In the dawning light, it rendered him even more attractive. The rake.
“You’ll have to hold tight to me, regardless. And if you get lost for any reason, any at all, I will send Laurel looking for you—she is M.I.’s Ways-walker.” He turned, his hand outstretched. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes.” I think so. No amount of instinctive sureness could stop the tremor of anxiety that pulsed through Myra as she clasped hands with the mage. Perhaps that was proof enough of her sanity.
“Good. Good girl. Now hold tight, Moira. The Apex placement is . . . quite remarkable . . . when compared to the train’s trajectory. And to save on my own tired magic, we’re going to leap straight to the TurnKey from here. Don’t let go.” He turned to the door and then back again. “Oh, and hold your breath!”
Together they dropped like a stone. Right out of the train and off the trestle to the waiting river below. Myra’s heart squeezed, and she shut her eyes in horrid anticipation.
But the magic had them, and to Myra, it felt like falling into a well of butterflies.