THE KOI needed feeding. Darius hunched farther into his cardigan against the evening chill. He shuffled out to the shed in his slippers. Why bother with shoes? They just hurt his feet, and he wasn’t certain he could bend down to tie them.
He could have filled the birdfeeders while he was out there. It was spring, though. The birds could fend for themselves a day or two, just until he had the energy. The koi swam in an excited knot to see his shadow above their pond, and they eagerly accepted his offerings. Beautiful, but the sight of them made his heart so heavy it might plummet and drive a hole through the Earth’s mantle. Toby had loved the koi. He’d failed Toby so badly. Failed to protect him, to keep him out of the hands of those who would harm him, good intentions notwithstanding.
Darius had failed to find him, and now Toby lay dying in some sterile, lifeless room somewhere. He sat on the bench with a soft thud, unable to stand for a second longer. Maybe if he just stayed there by the fishpond, he could quietly fade away. No mess. No dramatics.
The tears had begun again at some point. They hurt by now, since there’d been too many. Everything hurt. He should never have had the gall to think he could be anyone’s hero. He should never have—
A huge bee buzzed somewhere. Odd since it was dark. Wait. The insect was in the house? No. Phone. Huh. Darius shuffled the few steps inside and stared at the caller ID showing Zubayr’s name. Had he given anyone his number?
“He… llo?”
“Dar? Are you all right? You sound terrible. Where are you?”
That certainly was Zubayr. Darius picked up his twitching through the phone. “Home.”
“Where’s Toby?”
The lead pipe Darius suddenly found blocking his throat prevented him from answering long enough that Zubayr repeated the question twice. Finally, he got out in a rasping whisper, “Don’t know. They…. Zu, they took… him.”
“Okay. Deep breaths. We’re about an hour out and on our way to you.”
Darius aimed an angry swipe at his tears, certain he wasn’t following this conversation well at all. “We?”
“Yes. I went to Elias as soon as the guildmasters and their minions left. We got in his car and went to retrieve Arden.” Zubayr hesitated as someone spoke in the background. “I know.” His voice was muffled as he spoke to the other person, then clear again as he came back to the phone. “We weren’t there for you when we should’ve been. We let the guild scare us off. Shut up, Arden. Give me a second. But we’re coming now. Just sit tight, Dar. You’re not alone anymore.”
“Okay.” The raw whisper was all he could manage before he ended the call.
The night wasn’t any blacker. The gaping hole in his heart hadn’t changed in shape or size. But he found the energy to shuffle through the house, unlock the front door, and turn on some lights. He hadn’t realized until then that the house had been completely dark. Positioned in one of the fussy armchairs in the front parlor, Darius stared out at the driveway, heart hammering, trying not to count the minutes. Not precisely fear, this strange nameless dread, but not being alone had become desperately important all of a sudden.
Watching with such anxious urgency was absurd in the end. When they arrived, the roar of Elias’s truck would’ve been audible from the back of the house with the stereo on full volume. He could’ve taken a nap and still had plenty of warning. Not that he would’ve been able to rest.
He levered his stiff joints up from the chair, shuffled into the front hall, and flung the door open.
Arden was the first to reach him at a run, nearly knocking him over with the force of his hug. “Gods! You’re all right. We were so worried. Zubayr said… well, he couldn’t tell us much. Are you all right?”
Darius managed a grunt and reached for Zubayr next to receive a less painful hug. “Okay?”
“I’m fine.” Zubayr pushed him back and searched his face. “Not like they roughed me up and tossed my house. Let’s get everyone out of the night air and we can exchange stories.”
Elias trotted up on his blade legs with a bag over his shoulder and claimed a hug as well. “Dammit, old man. Can’t let you out of my sight, can I?”
“Guess… not,” Darius whispered and allowed himself to cling a moment. He closed the door behind them and, after some awkward shuffling around people, recalled that none of them had been in his house before. He twitched a hand for them to follow and slouched to the kitchen.
Zubayr began poking through the cabinets the moment he set foot on the kitchen tiles. “When did you eat last? Probably this morning. No wonder you look so tired. Don’t you have any food in this house?”
With his bones turned to jelly from some species of relief, Darius collapsed in his chair at the table and took in the activity, numb and lost. Arden came to sit beside him and hold his hand, a gesture Darius would’ve found annoying before. Now he needed the anchor badly.
Through some miracle of instinct and persistence, Zubayr managed to unearth a rice cooker and rice, beans, and a frozen steak that he had bullied into an actual meal in twenty minutes. No one made any comments about the late hour for dinner as they came to the table to join him.
Zubayr kissed the top of his head before he sat down. “All right, I’ll start. I left you two to do what you needed to and headed up the trail. They jumped me in the parking lot, and some Air mage I’d never met took the O2 away. When I woke up, Arla Messer, you remember her?”
The guild director of the Allegheny guild—of course Darius remembered. He offered a curt nod.
“I was back home and she was there to tell me not to worry. You and Toby had been contained and safely carted away. For your own good, naturally. But she wouldn’t tell me anything else. So I worried.”
“As you do,” Elias murmured.
“So I went to Elias, and he shared my concerns that things were probably worse than advertised. And we took Elias’s truck to Arden’s place—”
“Of course we were worried,” Arden broke in with a huff. “They were like rabid bloodhounds when they came to my house looking for you. I thought they were going to get out the rubber hoses and thumbscrews.”
“But they didn’t. Your turn, Dar.” Zubayr rolled his eyes and slid his phone across the table. “Type it out if you have to. What happened after I left?”
Darius left the phone on the table since his fingers trembled so badly, and then he began to type and type. He told them about the ambush at the top of the hill, nearly identical to the one Zubayr had sketched out. He wrote about waking up at home and about what John Whittaker had said. Fingers gaining momentum, he typed furiously about his determined search, what he had done to eliminate sites, and his final bitter despair when he’d failed to find Toby.
He’s dying somewhere. I can’t find him and he’s dying. I don’t know what to do.
His friends passed those last sentences around with varied expressions of sympathy and anger.
“Are you sure he can’t be hidden away in one of the places you checked?” Arden tapped the table sharply with one finger. “We should check again.”
Darius raised an eyebrow at him and took the phone back. Toby’s magical signature is unique, and I’ve had closer and more prolonged contact than anyone alive. If he’d been hidden, I would have felt him.
Zubayr scrubbed both hands over his face. “It’s late. We know we have some time since he’s in hospice somewhere. It’s a slow process, starving someone to death. That’s how they justify it as not murder for wild mages. Hush, Dar. I’m sorry.”
Stopping the sob that wanted out made Darius’s lungs burn, but he nodded and waved for Zubayr to go on.
“We’re all tired. Dar’s exhausted. I say we start with the guild in the morning. We have witnesses at this table who saw the first glimmers of Toby’s channeling. If they don’t take Dar’s word for it, maybe they’ll listen to a delegation. If they’ve tested him and he managed to prove his channels on his own, wonderful. But from what you’ve said, Dar, it sounds like he was still unstable and probably needs guidance to his Arcana while he’s learning. And we still need to find him. Montchanin’s territory is a single county in a single small state. Between us, we should be able to figure something out.”
Darius nodded miserably. A lot of wild mages struggled the first few times, though the younger ones tended to do better. Toby was the oldest student he’d ever had.
“Bed, then.” Elias took dishes to the sink. “You have somewhere for us, Valstad, or are we sleeping in a puppy pile in your bed?”
Any other day, Darius would have laughed. Now, he could only think about who wouldn’t be in his bed that night. He hoped Toby wasn’t awake and frightened. “There’s… room.”
He bypassed Toby’s room when they trooped down the upstairs hallway. A spare few days Toby had slept there and he couldn’t bear to see anyone else occupy that bed. He pointed Arden to the corner guestroom at the front of the house. It still held all of Aunt Eva’s bird ceramics, so it struck him as appropriate. Zubayr and Elias he put in the room that had been reserved for visiting nieces and nephews with its two sets of bunk beds. Neither of them was tall enough to need more than a twin, and they wouldn’t want to murder each other as they might Arden, who would, Darius was certain, fuss interminably before going to bed.
Wait for me, Toby. Darius sent the desperate thought out into the night as he kicked off his slippers and climbed into bed. Give me time to find you. I have help now. Just give me time.