Grey leaned against the rough brick wall of the building and pulled his illusions closer to his body. The thing that mattered right now, more than the jagged press of brick into his side, more than the rot rising from the uncollected trash bags on the corner, more than the thousand potential distractions and annoyances sharing the sidewalk with him, was that no one notice how badly he was hurt, especially not here in the mundane world. Someone actually seeing his wounds would mean things like doctors and hospitals and explanations that wouldn’t be believed anyway. Better to stay hidden, even if being hidden made things like walking more difficult.
The duel had gone poorly. No. The duel had been a fucking mess. It was the heir to House Morgan. Violet, her name was. Or Daisy. Something like that. All the girls in that House were named after flowers. He hadn’t thought anyone there knew anything about his relationship with Rose, but someone must have suspected because what should have been a fairly easy challenge had turned bloody. Marigold or Peony or whatever had wrapped him in a Briar Rose illusion—a forest of thorns he’d had to fight his way out of. He’d been able to do it, but they’d sunk in and cut deeply before he’d finally broken free.
Plus, the last girl hadn’t had as much magic in her bones as he had thought, and so he’d gone into the challenge weak. Hadn’t had enough power to heal himself after casting his spell, so he had forgone healing and done his best to hide the weakness, the wounds, as much as he could so no one would know how bad it was.
He took another step and gritted his teeth against the pain. He pressed his hands harder against the wounds in his abdomen, winced as blood flowed over them, as he felt the soft edges of opened skin. He thought maybe the bleeding was slowing but didn’t want to look back to see if there was a trail of blood visible behind him—sometimes looking too closely at an illusion could be enough to break it.
Two blocks away from Laurent’s building. He could get there. He pushed off the wall, felt his legs threaten to go out from under him. Forced them straight and steady. Steadyish.
He would need to replenish his stores of magic. He would need to do that soon. He’d wait to tell Laurent about where he was getting it—he couldn’t afford to share this time.
Grey stumbled through the sidewalk crowds like a drunk, arms wrapped tight around his abdomen, as if that might keep the blood in. He kept his gaze down, locked on his feet, one in front of the other. He was shaking when he walked into Laurent’s lobby, but he hadn’t fallen.
“I’m afraid you can’t be here,” the doorman said, moving toward Grey as if to herd him back onto the sidewalk.
Perfect. Some idiot new guy. The day just kept getting better. “I’m Grey Prospero. I’m on Laurent Beauchamps’ approved list.”
“I’m quite sure you’re not.” The doorman puffed himself up, indignant.
“Send me up.” Grey spent energy he didn’t have charming the doorman into calling the elevator for him, rather than wasting time fighting with the man. He sagged against the elevator’s walls and let himself fall, hard, against Laurent’s door.
Laurent heard the thud. Looked through the peephole, then yanked the door open. “Shit. Shit. Grey, wake up.”
Grey’s eyes rolled open as Laurent pulled him in the door. “Challenge. Hurt. Don’t tell.”
“Yeah, I can see that you’re hurt. The blood everywhere was my first clue. What do you mean, don’t tell? How did no one notice this?”
“Illusion.” He coughed and blood spattered his mouth.
“You cast an illusion to—you know what, later.” Laurent pulled back the other man’s shirt. Swallowed hard. It looked like Grey had been flogged with a whip made of razor blades. “Okay. That’s . . . that’s not so bad. I can help. But I think you should let me call someone. This is maybe a little beyond the healing magic we were taught in school.”
Grey shook his head, regretting the movement even as he made it. “No calls. They’ll know I’m hurt.”
“Yes. And they’ll fix you. Better than I can.” He spoke slowly and clearly, as much to calm himself as in the fading hope of making Grey see his point. He knew the basics, of course, but the mess of blood and skin was a far cry from the precise cuts and supervised spells he’d been taught.
“No. They’ll tell.”
“Tell who? Don’t be an idiot.” Laurent’s hands were sticky as he tried to clear away the blood, to see the extent of the damage.
“The next House that challenges me.”
“Sydney, then. At least let me call her.”
Grey reached up, wincing, his hand leaving a bloody print on Laurent’s arm. “She’ll know. She’ll remember. If you challenge me.”
“I won’t.”
“Said it wasn’t as bad as it looked.” His voice fading, the words half-whispered.
“I fucking lied, you idiot.” Arguing wouldn’t help, wouldn’t stop the blood washing over his hands in time with Grey’s increasingly erratic pulse. He wasn’t sure they had time to wait for someone to get there. Laurent breathed in and out, regulating the flow of air in his lungs, slowing his own heartbeat from galloped panic into something that approximated stability. He wished very specifically and succinctly not to fuck this up, hoping his affinity for luck would cancel out his lack of practice with major healing magic. Then he spoke the words that would slow blood leaking, would draw severed veins back together, would drive out infection. He bent his fingers into shapes that would have hurt if he’d been thinking of anything other than keeping his hands steady, and bit by bit, he healed his best friend.
Sweat stung his eyes and Laurent was shaking like a man gripped by fever when he had finished, but Grey’s skin was knit, the bleeding had stopped, and his eyes were clear.
“Did you,” Laurent asked, his voice a rasp, “at least win your challenge?”
“After all that,” Grey said as he sat up from the floor, “I better have.”
• • •
Later. After Laurent cleaned the blood from the floor of his hallway, after he washed the red handprint that ended in a smear from his door, while trying very hard not to think that it was Grey’s blood he was washing away, Grey’s blood on the clothing he was changing out of, that the blood had gotten there because of magic, and he was so angry at the very idea of magic at that moment that he didn’t even want to use basic spells to clean up, and so here he was, scrubbing like a mundane.
After his apartment almost looked normal again, and not like someone had performed surgery in his front hall. After the blood was gone from everywhere except his memory. After he washed his hands one more time.
After things were clean, he could start thinking about what had happened. Maybe then he could look at it straight on.
He had known the Unseen World could be harsh, knew the Turning carried risks, potentially fatal ones. But these people seemed to treat death like it was a fencing match. There were weapons, sure, but everyone would salute and go home after the ritual was completed. He’d watched it happen, when Sydney had been stabbed at her last challenge and then walked out of the room as if it were a paper cut. He’d let himself get swept up in that—let himself see the idea of death as a possibility, but one they would all shake off at the end.
It wasn’t. It wasn’t that at all.
He washed his hands again.
After the takeout Laurent had ordered arrived—because this was a thing he could do; he could order warm styrofoam containers of hamburgers cooked rare and covered in mushrooms and caramelized onions, thin French fries with some sort of truffle sauce, and he had to do something. After he had poured them both glasses of whiskey, Laurent said, “You could have died.”
“It wasn’t a mortal challenge. It just got a little out of hand.” Grey shrugged and kept eating. “Man, I’m starving.”
“A little out of hand.” Laurent put his burger down, half-eaten. “Speaking of hands, I’m pretty sure I had mine on your small intestine. That seems like more than a little.”
Grey drank. “These things happen. I’m fine. It’s no big deal.”
Laurent stared. “What do you mean, it’s no big deal? This was a nonmortal challenge. I thought there were rules. Precautions. Fucking safety measures, I don’t know.”
“Look, maybe you didn’t understand what you were getting into. Maybe you still don’t—it’s not like you’re the one taking any risks out there. But the Turning isn’t about precautions and safety measures. It’s about power, and about making sure you’re strong enough to claim it.”
Laurent set his glass down on the marble countertop. A big magic duel. Competition for power. He loved those things. Thrived on them—they had bought this apartment, his parents’ house. Every material comfort he wanted. He had thought he would love the Turning as well. “Just because Sydney’s in danger and not me doesn’t mean I think this is a joke, Grey. I know what the Turning is. I’m just trying to decide if I still think it’s worth it.”
“If it’s worth it? Worth it? Establishing a House means the difference between having actual power in this world and being nothing. Nothing else is worth as much. If you weren’t so fucking lucky, you’d get that.”
“That is what you’re best at, right? Luck?” Grey shrugged. “Some of us have to work.”
“Right. Well, I’m glad we’ve cleared that up,” Laurent said.
Grey pushed his plate away. “Look, I’m sorry. Pain’s making me say things I shouldn’t. But this might be my only chance to get back into the Unseen World, to really be a part of it again. And that matters to me.
“I hate the way these people look at me now, like I’m nothing now that I’m not standing behind Miranda’s skirts. Like they’re wondering if maybe I don’t belong here. I was born in this world—I was the heir to a House! No one belongs here more than I do, and I’m sick of being looked at like an object of pity. This is how I change that.”
Grey had never told him why Miranda had disinherited him—he said he had agreed to be bound to secrecy. At the time it had happened, Laurent had understood Grey’s decision not to fight his disinheritance. He would have had to prove that Miranda was incompetent to lead Prospero in order to overturn it, a thing that seemed impossible. But he wondered now whether it would have cleaned some of the poison from his wound if Grey had fought back then. “Sure. I get it. Just remember I’m on your side in this.”
“As much as you can be, anyway.”
Laurent thought back to his conversation with Sydney, when he had very carefully laid out the circumstances under which Grey could be challenged, and said nothing else.
• • •
A diner this time, early enough that pieces of the sky were still sunrise pink. Even so, Sydney had gotten there before Madison and was halfway through a plate of French toast drowned in syrup when the other woman slid into the banquette across from her.
“So, how’s your shoulder—wait, seriously, that’s what you’re eating? Are you secretly twelve?”
“I like syrup,” Sydney said. “And from the first part of your question, I gather you heard about the Blackwood challenge. It’s fine—all healed. Have you heard anything about what will happen to Colin?”
“Happen?” Madison asked, and flagged down a passing server for coffee.
“For altering the duel. Trying to make it fatal. Whatever he did.”
Understanding crossed Madison’s face. “Sydney, nothing will happen.”
Sydney set her fork down. “He was trying to kill me. In a nonmortal challenge. Which breaks the rules that were sent out at the beginning of this. Rules set by the Unseen World. And nothing will happen.”
“Right. Okay. I forget that you haven’t been through one of these before, and Laurent is new, too, and so no one has told you how things work.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?” Sydney said.
“Nope. You’re not. First of all, it was during a sanctioned challenge. There is a lot of leeway over what’s considered proper behavior in the course of one, and people don’t like to interfere. Fortune’s Wheel, blah blah blah. And the thing is, you were the better magician, and so you’re fine. His loss is considered punishment enough—he’s out of the Turning now.”
Sydney poured more coffee. “And second?”
“Special Projects doesn’t have a criminal division.”
Sydney’s face went blank.
Madison sighed. “What I mean is, even under normal circumstances, the Unseen World doesn’t have a criminal justice system. What they have is a bunch of people with extraordinary power who take matters into their own hands. When the Unseen World decides that someone has crossed a line, there’s either social and economic sanctions—disinheritance being a popular one—or there’s the equivalent of vigilante justice. And this is a Turning, which means it’s not normal circumstances; it’s an entire event presaged on the ideas of upheaval and change. The fact that Colin is out of the Turning is enough. And if it’s decided that it isn’t, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he has an accident in the next week or two. But there won’t be any formal consequences. Now or later.”
Sydney stabbed at her French toast. “These people.”
Madison held up her hands. “No argument. But happy as I’d be to spend the morning talking about how they all suck, I’ve got to run soon if I don’t want to be late to the office, so maybe I should answer the question you asked me here to talk about.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“No problem. So, you asked if House Prospero was doing anything out of the ordinary. Which, turns out, it is. Miranda has our office running two different financial scenarios—one where she shifts her investment portfolio very heavily into only Unseen World concerns, and the other where almost every investment is mundane.
“Now, that could be just caution or curiosity on her part, and I’m going to check Prospero’s files to see what the House has done in past Turnings, but it’s definitely odd.”
“You’re going to need to explain why this is out of the ordinary. Aren’t there usually financial rearrangements during a Turning?” Sydney asked, pouring more syrup over her plate.
Madison shuddered. “You’re doing that just to make my teeth hurt. I can tell. And yes—participation in the Turning tends to be an expensive endeavor, even if you’re not paying the big bucks for a champion. Plus, business alliances tend to change when magical ones do, so the fact that she’s running scenarios makes sense.
“But the thing that’s odd is the potential removal of her assets from Unseen World holdings altogether. That’s something I’d expect to see if it looked like the House were in danger of being unmade. Which—did you hear? House Greenfield was.”
Sydney set her fork down. “What did they do that was bad enough?”
“Apparently, they tried to re-create your audition spell as part of a challenge. Turns out it’s harder to drive a flying bus than people think, and seven mundanes wound up in the hospital, all talking about how the crash felt just like the bus falling out of the air.”
“So that’s enough to unmake a House, but Colin can . . . You know what, never mind,” Sydney said. “Anyway, Prospero?”
Madison nodded. “Prospero is currently ranked second. There’s no imminent danger of it being unmade as a result of performance, and Miranda’s way too careful to allow Ian to pull the kind of shit that could cause exposure to the mundane world, not to mention he’s too good. So shifting assets to fully mundane concerns makes no sense. I’m looking into it.”
“I think maybe I can help with that. What if it’s not just House Prospero that’s in danger,” Sydney said. “What if it’s the entire Unseen World?”
“What?” Madison asked, her voice knife-sharp.
“If something’s wrong with magic. Which, there maybe is. Actually, almost certainly there is—I’m just not sure precisely what or how bad yet. But it’s obviously bad enough that people are noticing. How much have you heard about the failures of magic?”
“Are there failures beyond what happened with Ian’s duel with—who was it—Hawkins?”
“Yes. Verenice said normal spells are starting to go haywire, too. There was a mess at the Mages’ Club the other day. So something is for sure going on. And if Miranda thinks the entire Unseen World is in danger of falling apart—”
“—then switching her investment portfolio to mundane concerns makes perfect sense. Shit, goddamn, Sydney.”
“Exactly,” Sydney said.
“Okay, now I really have to go.”
“Thanks, Madison.”
“Not a problem.” She swiped a strip of bacon through the lake of syrup on Sydney’s plate, and left.
• • •
A quiet chime interrupted Miranda at her desk. She glanced up at her mirror.
Miles Merlin is at the door. The words scrolled in perfect cursive, a precise replica of her own handwriting.
“Miles . . .” she started. Miranda sat back, steepling her fingers, then got up. He’d have an agenda, and he wouldn’t mean it to be helpful, but it was always possible she could glean something useful from whatever rumors he’d come to spread. “I’ll see him in myself.”
She smiled as she opened the door. “Miles! What a surprise!”
“Miranda.” He looked around the entry, taking in the sweeping staircase, the beeswax-polished wood and soft-white candles on tables and in sconces. Mirrors reflected white flowers and Morris-print wallpaper. “I always forget how traditional this House is.”
“I’ve never been as enamored of technology as you are, Miles. But I’m sure you didn’t come here to discuss interior decorating.” She led him down a hall lined with marble sculptures of Greek goddesses in recessed niches and into a sitting room.
“No, I came because I wasn’t sure if you would have heard about Grey’s most recent challenge.” He sat across from her.
Miranda sat on the edge of a chair, back straight, knees together, feet discretely tucked, as poised as a duchess. “Can I offer you something? Coffee, tea, water? The House would be happy to put something together for you.”
“Oh, did you have that automated?” He looked around, interested enough to be distracted from what he had come there to say.
“No, that’s always been done through the House’s magic. I see no reason to change it, not with the spell working as well as it does.” And that was a dig, if a polite one. The stronger Houses, the ones with a close bond to their Heads, could do such magic. House Merlin, notoriously, could not. She suspected it was part of why Miles spent so much time at his club, why he’d installed enough technology to make his House look like the set of a sci-fi movie, that the expensive shine was a distraction that kept people from wondering about the real reason that the oldest House didn’t run on magic.
“Nothing for me. This isn’t a social call. Did you hear about Grey?” Awkward now, and impatient because of it.
“I was just about to get more tea. Are you certain you don’t want any?” Miranda asked, cuttingly polite.
“Really, no.”
“A pot of tea please, Lady Grey.” She didn’t want it, not really, but she did want to keep Miles off-balance.
Of course.
The drink followed on the mirror’s chime and agreement, the scent of lavender and bergamot steaming into the air.
“Thank you for being patient,” Miranda said. “As you may have gathered, since you’ve been through something similar recently, the disinheritance left things strained between us. Grey and I don’t talk; nor are we part of each other’s lives. As you might infer from that, I haven’t paid particular attention to his progress through the Turning.”
“It was a duel with House Morgan.” Merlin’s eyes watched her face like the hawk he shared a name with. “Something went, well, not exactly wrong. Let’s say overenthusiastic. It was a Briar Rose spell. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such thorns. It was almost as if they wanted to hurt him.”
Miranda kept her face carefully blank. Just because she was magically prevented from speaking about the circumstances of Grey’s disinheritance didn’t mean they were gone from her mind.
She knew, too, that Rose Morgan had been murdered a year after, in circumstances that were close enough to those that had triggered that disinheritance to chill her heart.
She had not asked. She would never ask.
“I know you’re very busy, Miles, so while I certainly appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule to tell me this in person, I’m not sure why you felt that I needed to know—he did survive, or I would have heard that before now.” That same note of polite curiosity and nothing more.
“Yes, yes, he survived—that challenge was even decided in his favor. But he was, though he tried to hide it, quite hurt. And the casting magician was the older sister of the girl from that House who was killed. Grey dated her around that time, I believe—or am I remembering incorrectly?” He adjusted his cuffs.
And now the reason for the visit was clear. Merlin, with his fingers full of threads, was shaking his spider’s web and hoping to catch her in it. “Again, Miles, Grey is not a part of my life; nor am I a part of his. That’s been the case for years now. I don’t pay attention to whom he has had relationships with. I’m not sure what else you expect me to say.”
Merlin held his silence for a moment. Two. Then he shook his head. “Perhaps I misestimated the power of a mother’s concern. No matter—I’ll see myself out.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. I’ll walk with you,” Miranda said, and led him out of her House.
After he had gone, she stood, her hand on the back of the door that would no longer open to her son and very carefully cleared her mind of the reason why.
There are some things that cannot bear looking at.
• • •
Harper had asked some of the other women at work where to find the bar. She knew there would be one, because this was New York and somewhere in this city there was a bar that catered to every possible clientele. She had simpered and giggled and made jokes about wanting to find a guy with a little magic in his wand until she was sure they all thought she was some sort of magician groupie, but they had told her where to go. “Houdini’s Elephant. It’s next door to a magic shop.”
She had poured herself into a push-up bra and minidress, slicked her lips with gloss, and had gotten to the bar early enough to get a seat at the corner, where she could see the other people there without being obvious.
She’d known she was in the sort of place she was looking for when she’d had to prove she could light a candle to get in. She was currently treating the resulting headache with an excellent vodka gimlet, and watching the crowd.
It was, probably, a stupid idea to put herself out there as bait. There were at least five good reasons she could think of not to, not the least of which being she could wind up dead. But she’d heard rumors—women being killed, in a way that made her think of how Rose had been killed. Details that matched the parts of the police file she wasn’t supposed to have seen, full of horrors.
And it had been unexpectedly hard, working for Wellington & Ketchum, knowing that she was so close, almost there, and yet not really any more likely to find out who had killed Rose than before. So she’d drowned out the voices that knew precisely how stupid this was because being smart about it was too frustrating.
She waited and watched and the evening dragged on, and her glass got closer to empty, and Harper felt less and less like she was going to find anyone useful in this bar. There weren’t a lot of people there, and those who were seemed . . . obvious. Magic so aggressively over-the-top that it looked fake. She wondered if it was, and leaned across to the bartender. “That guy has lit his own hair on fire three times now.”
The bartender rolled her eyes. “He’s in here all the time. The hair thing is his one party trick. It usually comes complete with a joke about how hot he is. Three’s a slow night for him. He’ll be fine.”
Drunken antics with the addition of magic really weren’t any more entertaining than normal drunken antics. Harper contemplated ordering another drink but decided against it. They were slammed at the office, and she was hoping that if she proved herself on the mundane stuff quickly, Madison would let her work on files directly related to magic. “I’m calling it a night,” Harper said.
“Be careful. There’s women who have been hassled—maybe even worse—after leaving here. Take a cab, maybe.”
“What do you mean, worse?” Harper asked.
“Worse like murdered. Finger bones removed.” She shuddered.
“Finger bones?” The dread of recognition, a lump in her center that she had to breathe around. Rose’s hands had been cut into, like someone wanted to remove her bones.
“Like they were killed for their magic. Which means this creep is stalking magicians. So like I said, be careful. Take a cab.”
Harper added an extra twenty to her tip, grateful for the warning. “Thanks. You, too.”
She stood outside, letting the cold air wash over her, letting it clear the noise and closeness of the bar from her mind, and thought about walking home. She wasn’t that far. But then she thought about how swollen her feet were in her shoes and the likeliness of being able to run in them. “You aren’t actually a superhero,” she reminded herself, and hailed a cab.
• • •
Grey left Colin Blackwood’s party early and in a bad mood. He’d had to stand there and listen as Colin—Colin, of all people, who hadn’t even made it past his second challenge, who’d been humiliated by that chick Laurent had hired—had bragged about how he was in Miles Merlin’s inner circle, how he’d been promised a place in House Merlin at the end of the Turning.
“You should talk to him, Grey. I heard your last challenge was rough.” All artificial sympathy.
“Not that rough—I won.”
“Still. Merlin can help. I’ll put in a good word for you.” Colin smiled, and Grey wanted to punch him in his perfect teeth.
He’d mumbled something half-polite and left.
“I couldn’t wait to get out of there, either.” She was curvy and dark-haired, and Grey was sure he knew her. He racked his brains, and knew it was his lucky night after all when they spit out a name.
“Hayley? Hayley Dee?”
“Wow, I didn’t think you’d remember me. I had such a crush on you in high school.” She smiled, stepped closer. He could see the flush of alcohol in her face, her unsteadiness on her feet. She had been, he remembered, a couple of years behind him in school. Barely any magic.
Perfect.
“I always remember the cute girls. Want to go grab a decent drink somewhere?” he asked.
“I’d like that,” she said.
He needed more magic, and she had just enough. He made sure they never got to the bar.