“WERE YOU his student?” Toby took a bite of the veggie burger Arden had made for him, piled high with spinach greens, tomato, and onion. Mmmmm. I could eat twelve of these. With a jolt, he realized he’d recovered his appetite living with Darius, then jolted again when Arden laughed. He’d forgotten he’d asked a question.
“Me? No, but thank you for thinking I’m that young.” The smile transformed Arden’s face, making him immediately more accessible, less forbidding. “I worked as a teacher at the Montchanin Guild when Dar started taking unplaceable students, so we were sometimes colleagues even if he was still at the university.”
“Were you, um….” There wasn’t any polite way to ask it.
Arden jerked forward to take a bite of lunch, like a water bird striking, though his eyes still crinkled in amusement. “No, not that either. Friends, yes. Co-conspirators. Dar was young, fit, and very much not wanting a relationship. Sex, yes, indiscriminate of gender. Anything lasting, no.”
“And you wanted something more?”
Arden tipped his head to one side, then the other. “Back then I did. Oh, I had a terrible crush on him. When we became friends, it faded.”
“Because you didn’t want to lose him as a friend?”
“Ha. That too. Mostly because his ego was bigger than a container ship.”
Memories of that one photo of Darius still online surfaced, of the transcript he’d let Toby read. Yes, the self-assurance, the confidence could’ve been cocky, maybe even arrogant. It sure wasn’t Darius now.
“Co-conspirators?”
The sound Arden made was somewhere between a snort and a sneeze. “We were both young. Going to change the world, our hearts full of revolution and our heads full of big ideas. The old guildmasters wouldn’t know what hit them, and we’d make the world better for all of mage kind, not just the acceptable ones.”
“What happened?”
“Well, we failed.” Arden took another peck-bite. “Obviously.”
“No, I mean…. Sorry. I guess Darius’s not-talking’s been rubbing off.” Toby dissected an onion ring, wondering if his actual question would be too intrusive. Curiosity won out over manners. “You both wanted to change things. He wanted to change how unplaceables were treated. I read the lecture. But he wasn’t exiled until, um, the Pittsburgh thing. Did you…?”
Arden’s smile turned into something uncomfortable. Bitter, maybe. “Oh, no. My transgression was much worse. I dared to research.”
“Okay, that makes no sense. I mean, it’s not like we’re living during the Inquisition. What were you researching? Did you build a time machine or something?” Toby stopped dissecting his onion ring. “Sorry. I get like this. It’s your business. Tell me to shut up if I ask, you know, a question too far.”
“You’re… I see why he likes you.” Arden’s expression lost the mean again as he chuckled.
“He does?”
“Not naïve, exactly. But you definitely have some sheltered spots.” Arden flipped a hand toward him. “That’s not always a bad thing. You’re openly curious and don’t bring a lot of baggage to the table.”
Toby puzzled over that last statement, but there didn’t seem to be intentional innuendo in it. “So what did you do?”
“Persistent too. No, it’s all right. It’s something you could ask any guildmaster.” Arden pulled over one of Toby’s web drawings, the one where he’d used numbers corresponding to each letter of the alphabet to indicate the web’s symbols. “What’s here?”
Elbows on the table, Toby leaned over to see where Arden pointed, directly at the center of the web where the connections of the Minor Arcana all crossed. He shrugged. “Nothing. It’s just the middle.”
“You don’t seem quite certain. Neither was I. It always struck me as odd that at every other line drawn between two points on the web, there’s a connection. The lines between are the whole basis of the web—what connects to what. Why would there be nothing at the center, the very heart, where everything comes together?”
The bit of crazed academic in Arden’s voice pulled Toby in. “What was it? What was at the center? Did it do something horrible?”
“I have no idea.”
Toby sat, blinking. Didn’t see that coming. “So there wasn’t anything?”
“Again, no idea. They told me the research was forbidden. I responded that research within safe parameters could never be forbidden and continued on. They tossed me out and barred me from the community.” Arden’s hand fluttered in a way that suggested both being tossed out and flying away.
“And from the guild hall,” Toby ventured. “Where your research was.”
“Not just a pretty face.” Arden shrugged. “The research, the facilities to conduct said research safely. Relatively. The support of other mages of different channels. All of it.”
“I’m sorry.”
The smile returned, not a happy one, but not the angry, scary one either. “All long past. Or it was… I thought it all was. You have no idea what happened in Pittsburgh.”
It wasn’t a question. Toby answered anyway. “No. Just the tiny bits I’ve heard. Unplaceable student Darius was teaching. Something went wrong. He got hurt. She died. And he blames himself.”
“Well, you knew more than I did.” Arden ran both hands back through hair so thick it was a wonder his fingers didn’t get stuck. “How did you find him?”
“Google fu.”
“Keep your secrets, then, young Jedi.”
“Mixed universes there.”
Arden squinted at him. “Don’t be that guy. Go rest. He said you should. Guest room has plenty of space.”
Toby wandered down the indicated hallway, also lined with cabinets and shelves, to the door that opened into a cozy, not entirely cluttered bedroom where the most prominent feature was a queen bed with a massive oak headboard carved with woodland scenes. Darius’s shoes sat by the door, perfectly aligned and perpendicular to the wall. His jeans and sweater lay on the perfectly placed chair at the midpoint of the wall opposite the bed, both articles of clothing folded neatly enough for a window display.
The only messy part of the room was the Darius lump under the covers, curled on his side. His unbound hair looked like it was trying to flee in every direction from his snoring, and he’d kicked enough of the covers sideways that one foot stuck out.
Toby’s heart turned in his chest and flopped over to settle as a spreading ache. That foot, naked and pale, toenails badly clipped, looked so vulnerable, and Darius wasn’t supposed to look….
Except sometimes he did. When he hunched in on himself as if the world might be caving in, when his single eye lost focus and remembered pain etched spiderwebs on his face, when he flinched at certain words—those windows into despair were always there. Then they weren’t and Darius as an immoveable stubborn object returned, powerful enough to contain a magical explosion without a containment room, strong enough to carry an unconscious person up a flight and a half of stairs.
With a shuddering sigh, Toby flipped the blankets back over the exposed foot and glanced around the room. One bed, though it was a big one. Not that Toby minded. He’d shared with cousins, roommates, and the occasional friend too drunk to go home. He just hoped Darius didn’t mind or wouldn’t freak out.
He toed off his shoes and eased onto the bed atop the covers. The room was warm and Darius’s heat had already soaked into the bed. A little nap sounded good. Toby wasn’t going to say it to Arden, but he was starting to feel shaky.
“I wish I could help,” Toby whispered as he lay down slowly so he wouldn’t shake the mattress too much. “I wish I could, you know, take the pain away. I know it doesn’t work like that…. I’ll shut up now.”
Darius grunted and curled into a tighter ball. He didn’t seem to have woken, but at least the snoring had stopped. Nothing of him stuck out of the blanket now beyond his hair, not that Toby wanted to watch him sleep. Much. That would’ve been creepy.
The warmth wrapped around Toby and dragged him under fast. Tired—yeah, maybe he wasn’t up to traveling yet—but secure and safe with Darius sleeping next to him didn’t hurt one bit.
WARMTH AS he woke. A soft heater wrapped up in his right arm, snugged against his chest. Darius nuzzled closer, unwilling to commit to waking yet. Where had he been last night? A bar? A concert? A lecture? And who had he brought—
No. He didn’t live in the house near campus anymore, the old two-story in the neighborhood nearest Old College. Aunt Eva had left her huge, rambling house on the hill to him. He’d moved there when he couldn’t face the world anymore. But he didn’t go to bars anymore, or concerts, or anywhere else… and this wasn’t Aunt Eva’s house.
He didn’t….
Gasping for air, he shot up in bed in a room he didn’t recognize beside a tousled head of dark hair with a white stripe on a person he couldn’t immediately place. A collection of metal boxes rattled on a nearby bureau, responding to his distress. He had to stop, but he couldn’t find a solid anchor.
“Hey.” The person beside him turned, the face suddenly rooting Darius to earth and magic and his own protesting lungs. Toby. “What’s wrong? Nightmare. Hey, you’re okay.”
Something that tried to be a reassuring sound stuck in his chest.
“Dammit. You were having a really good sleep.” Toby rubbed his shoulder, somehow comforting even though Darius wanted to twitch away. “Stupid nightmares. Hey. Look at me. Take a breath.”
Darius put a hand over the one on his shoulder to hold it still and stared at the comforter in…. Arden’s guest room. There. He had place and person. The angle of sunlight through the room’s single window suggested late afternoon. Time. “Startled. Sorry.”
The hand in his had an odd texture, human skin but with an overlay. Darius gripped that hand tighter and fumbled for Toby’s free hand. “Leaking.”
“Am I? That’s good, right? I’m supposed to be leaking so I don’t go all explody?”
It was good and probably meant they’d bought Toby some time. “Webs?”
“Did them. Three of them like a good student, but that was hours ago. Does the magic leak for hours? Not that I mind being a dripping faucet if it helps.”
Darius ran his thumbs over the backs of Toby’s hands, head cocked to one side as he tried to glean some hint from the slow trickle from Toby’s fingertips. Like a fleeting scent half remembered, he couldn’t grasp enough to identify the channels or even if Toby was manifesting channels yet. He shook his head, biting back frustration. “No.”
“No, what? No, it’s not usually hours? No, it’s not helping?”
For a moment, Darius could only stare until he realized he’d failed to put two pieces of a conversation together. “Your channels. Can’t tell.”
“Oh.” Toby’s forehead creased in confusion, and Darius had to fight the urge to smooth the lines away with his thumb. “Wouldn’t I figure it out first? Where it’s supposed to be going?”
“Not always.” Darius patted one of the hands he still held and released both. “Been doing this longer.”
That swift Toby smile blossomed suddenly, erasing both creases and the shadows from his eyes. “Early days, right? I mean, if it was easy, I wouldn’t have been kicked out of every guild in the country. And at least we got to sleep together and hold hands.”
Part of him wanted to return that smile, though he didn’t want to send the wrong signals. His social skills might have atrophied nearly to the point of being snuffed out, but even he knew better than that. He managed a soft snort and slid around Toby to get out of the bed. No slippers, no cardigan—the habits that had developed in his cocoon of solitude had no place here. He’d known after that first day with Toby that they might need to travel. It had seemed so distant, and even on the road, it hadn’t felt real.
Now, after seeing Arden again, who wanted things from him, wanted him to be Professor Dar Valstad again? Now he just wanted to go home.
“Darius? You okay?”
He pulled in a long breath and shook out his sweater. Promises. They tangled around a man’s feet and pulled him into the dark. But there was Toby, regarding him with earnest concern, and he knew he would let them. One more time. “M’fine. Sleep?”
“I had a decent nap, even though you snore.”
There it was again—clear illustration why Toby wasn’t Kara and why he hoped the outcome might be different. She had been a disturbingly immense dam of power, just like Toby, but Kara hadn’t been able to fight her way free of despair. Toby carried his sense of humor like a second set of clothes, always right there when he needed it, and his desire to live burned fierce and bright. They were not the same.
Darius scooped up his shoes as he left the room and pointed Toby, hard on his heels, to the back door. “Outside.”
Toby’s eyes widened. “I’m not… am I? It doesn’t… my hands….”
“No.” Darius shook his head, irritated with himself. “Go feel things.”
“Ummm….”
He waved a hand to indicate the surrounding area. “Magical confluence.”
“Magical… so it’s more concentrated here and I might get a jumpstart or something if I touch the right things?”
“Don’t just touch. Feel. Reach.” Darius cleared his throat. More words. “See what reaches back.”
“This is one of those you’ll know it when it happens kinds of things, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Toby rolled his eyes but seemed happy enough to skitter out the back door into the sunshine. Warmth spread through Darius to see Toby move like someone his age should rather than someone who was afraid any sudden movement would break bones. He turned toward the kitchen, arrested by the shelves of owls in the hallway. Owls, of all things—ceramic, pewter, plastic, yarn, and glass. Arden had always been a magpie, collecting bits of this and that, but this current collection of over-regimented obsessions? It struck him as worrisome.
Creaking from the second floor placed Arden upstairs somewhere, so Darius went through the kitchen as quietly as he could until he found pen and scratch paper. Since his ability to put spoken words together worked about as well as a clogged water pump, he would write. He took a seat at the kitchen table and began, slowly at first, to write a factual account of that trip to Pittsburgh. The magical confluence there, both intense and far-reaching, came largely from the meeting of three rivers—Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela. Darius hadn’t considered it a last resort, but he had thought it the best chance for Kara within easy reach.
He kept his own reactions out of the tale—the confidence he now recognized as arrogance, the rising uncertainty, the abject terror of those final moments. Only what happened, though twice he had to retrace his steps since the order of events wouldn’t stay in a neat line in his brain.
“Dar? What in the world?” Arden had come downstairs when Darius reached his third sheet of scribbling.
He handed off the first and kept on while Arden lowered himself into a chair and began to read. The end of the story came hard, and Darius’s hands shook already from unaccustomed writing, but he shoved his heart and his more visceral memories in a lead-lined box and went on, fact following fact.
“You don’t—”
Darius thrust the second page at Arden without even stopping for a glare. Three pages. Three and a half. He shoved them all across the table and walked to the counter to stare out the window over the sink, unwilling to watch Arden’s reactions. Maybe he was afraid to. Arden had always read swiftly, taking in information at a blinding rate that often left onlookers incredulous, disbelieving. Darius knew better. He turned back to the table when he heard the last page set down.
“You self-centered bastard.”
Not the response Darius had anticipated. “What?”
“Always so sure of yourself. Never asked for advice. Never asked for help. No, the great Darius Valstad knows better.” Arden slapped the pages onto the table and rose, stalking toward him. “Someone should’ve been there with you.”
“But there—”
“Someone besides a student of yours.”
“I—”
“Someone who could’ve helped you control the blast. Put things back afterward. Maybe saved Kara, but from what you’ve written, probably not. Or not for long. Someone at least could’ve been there afterward.” Arden had reached him and poked Darius’s chest hard with one bony finger. “For you, you idiot! You shouldn’t have been alone!”
Darius squeezed past him and returned to the table to write, Arden, still bristling, peering over his shoulder.
Zubayr was there. Water for water. And I barely saved him. What could you have done?
In his irritation he may have underlined you a few too many times, which wasn’t kind or fair.
Arden’s whisper was an ice-tipped serrated knife. “He was too young. I could’ve done something. And you could’ve told me you weren’t dead.” He paced in a ragged circle around the kitchen, arms flapping. “I mourned for you, you son of a bitch. The guild told me nothing, and I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t even acknowledge your death. I’ve spent these years constructing strange conspiracies in my head, and all this time you’ve just been sulking?”
“I… wasn’t well.” Darius’s own anger deflated in the face of such anguish. He hadn’t thought anyone would even wonder. He’d been resigned to being dead to the community.
“No shit, Dar.”
The break in Arden’s voice took his feet across the room, and Darius enclosed him in a hard embrace before either of them could think too much about it. Part of him recoiled from the raw emotion as Arden struggled with tears and clung to him. Part of him resented having to comfort someone else when his life had been nothing but pain for so long. Both of those dishonorable thoughts died well-deserved deaths in the face of Arden’s immediate need.
“I’m sorry,” Darius murmured, rocking them both. “I am.” He pulled in a shuddering breath. “Hospital. Then rehab. Wasn’t….”
Arden’s voice was steadier when he asked. “How long were you in rehab?”
“Don’t know.”
“Do you remember anything? From then?”
“Bits. Spots. It’s jumbled.”
“And then?”
Darius lifted the shoulder Arden wasn’t clinging to quite so hard in an awkward shrug. “Home.”
“Not your home, though. Your house.” Arden pulled back, holding him at arm’s length. “I kept checking.”
“Aunt Eva’s. It is mine.”
Arden stared at him. “You said you’d never live in that old pile. You were going to sell it. I would never have thought of looking there. That’s where you’ve been?”
Darius had to look away.
“Tell me you haven’t been alone all this time. That someone was checking in with you.”
A memory of nursing aides flitted in and out. It might have been an actual memory from the first month. There’d been visits from the guild every six weeks those first couple of years, too, to make certain he was behaving like a good outcast and not doing anything stupid. Eventually, all contact stopped. He couldn’t have said when, which made the back of his brain itch. Aggravating, losing time like that, potentially years’ worth. He shook his head in irritation, unable to explain all of that, especially to someone who had known him so well in his old life and had no understanding of the new.
“Fifteen years. My gods, how did you—” Arden twitched toward the front of the house, raced to the kitchen window, and opened it. He thrust his hands outside, palms outward. “Dar, you have to go. They’re coming.”
No need to ask who they were. Darius spun and flung himself toward the back door, bellowing as he built up to a limping run. “Toby! Let’s go! Now!”
Give the boy credit, he moved despite his what the fuck expression. They hadn’t unpacked anything from the car, so Darius just needed to grab his shoes and jacket, while Toby snagged his backpack. On their way back through the kitchen, Arden had the papers with Toby’s webs and Darius’s account burning in the sink.
Darius stopped for a quick one-armed hug. “I’m sorry.”
“Doesn’t help anything now. Go, go.” Arden waved an impatient hand toward the front door. “I’ll cover traces of you best I can. And I haven’t seen you.”
Toby clutched his backpack to his chest. “Will you be all right?”
Smart kid. Figured it out.
“Please. I’ve been handling guildmasters longer than you’ve been alive. Get.”
Darius hooked an arm through Toby’s and pulled, hustling them out the front door. When things had settled again, he’d check in. For now, the question pummeling at his brain was—how had the guild found them so quickly? He went to one knee and put a palm to the ground while Toby scrambled into the truck. They were maybe a half mile out and coming in fast. In a vehicle, then, so the situation hadn’t reached such a dire point that they were closing a circle on foot.
He headed up the side streets, zigzagging in a roughly southwest direction before turning them north again. Anything to throw them off. They could track his outline in the web at this range. Every mage left a signature as they moved through the world, and Toby’s, unchanneled, uncontrolled, would shine like an uncapped oil well on fire. But that was at close range….
“Toby.”
His student still clutched his backpack in both arms, eyes far too wide, complexion far too pale.
“Toby!”
“What? Don’t yell. I’m right here.”
“Guild.” Darius choked on the words as he took a left turn.
Toby let out a hiccoughing sound. “Yeah, I know.”
Darius held up a hand for patience, took a deep breath, and tried again. “In your pack. Anything from them?”
“Oh. Um.” Toby’s hands shook as he held his pack away from his body. “I don’t think—”
“Check.” Darius did his best to smooth out his growl as he added, “Please.”
Pocket by pocket, Toby searched through his sparse belongings. “Pens, no. Tissues, no. Really old pack of gum, no. Oh, there’s a mint from… gods only know. Not guild, though. Sunglasses. Some receipts. Should really clean this thing out. Tablet. Notebook. Oh….”
Darius risked a glance over, dangerous with only one eye, as Toby pulled a folder out of the largest pocket of his pack. “What is it?”
Breaths coming short, Toby pulled out the folder and set it in his lap, smoothing the edges fretfully. “It’s the brochures. For the hospice centers. They… they wouldn’t have tracking on that? Would they? Not on something so, you know….”
Toby trailed off, and Darius pulled over next to a roadside trash can. He held out his hand, waiting for Toby to finish processing this newest betrayal. They were far enough out of reach. Darius could give him the time he needed. With a loud sniff, Toby finally held the folder out, watching with glistening eyes as Darius took it and threw it in the trash.
He let Toby have his privacy all the way out of town. “You okay?”
“Yeah. No.” Toby’s voice was a dull, faded-poster version of its usual bright clarity. “How could they do that? The whole hospice thing was so personal. I mean, I kept them just in case. So I’d be able to pick if you’d said no or… I feel….”
Darius reached across the center console and groped for Toby’s hand, grateful when those slender fingers closed around his without hesitation. “Violated?”
“Sort of?” Toby’s grip tightened. “Growing up, everyone always told me the guilds were the good guys. The ones who made sure magic wasn’t misused. The people who helped when you needed it. The places where good little magelets learned how to be the best thems they can be.”
“They try,” Darius said softly, though it rankled to say it. “They do.”
“But they’re not always right.”
“No.”
Toby patted the hand he held in an absent way as he stared out the window until he looked down and flushed. “Oh. Sorry. You need that to drive.” With gentle deliberation he placed Darius’s hand back on the wheel. “I guess you scare them, huh?”
With a nod, Darius pulled back into traffic, such as it was on 849. “Change scares them.” He turned words over as he drove. “Radical change… probably harmful.”
“They kept saying that to me, over and over.” Toby sighed and reached in the glove box for his package of Oreos. “Well, not that exactly, but that they were trying to protect me, to keep everybody safe.”
“Yes.”
“I guess dead is pretty safe.” The bitter note in Toby’s voice stabbed at Darius.
“Rules, because they worked.” Darius gripped the wheel tight, determined to get out enough words for once. “Procedures, because they worked. But also walls… against new ideas.” He stopped and swallowed hard as his words started to rasp. “Kovar? Twenty years… to approve.”
Toby leaned forward far enough to look him in his eye. “That was a lot of wording. Go you. But are you serious? It took twenty years for them to start using the whole Kovar thing they’re so sure’s the only way now? Twenty freaking years?”
An asshole in a Jeep was riding his bumper, so Darius eased into the shoulder to let him pass before he answered, “Yes. Adrian Kovar had passed.”
“Huh. Poor guy. Didn’t even get to see his ideas used. Not that it was fun. At all. It was kinda awful, actually. But not for everyone, they said. When it worked, it worked. Maybe it wasn’t so bad then.” Toby twisted in his seat to look behind them. “Are they still coming?”
Good question. Darius opened his door and put his foot out on the ground. This wasn’t his familiar home patch of earth, but it still spoke to him. Quiet. The rumblings of something powerful approaching had quieted. “No.”
“Cool. Okay. I guess they’d check Arden’s house first, and dammit, I hope they don’t give him a hard time. Then I guess they’ll be checking out a trash can on whatever street that was back there.” Toby stuffed an Oreo in his mouth, obviously feeling better, and spoke around it. “Can they still follow us, you think?”
“Possibly. Slower, though. Don’t spray crumbs.”
“Sorry.”
West, Darius decided. They would head toward higher ground and less populated country. Maybe meeting Elias would help. It was possible that Toby was like him. As he drove, he tried not to think about how empty his hand felt without Toby’s.