Ensnared (Sorcery and Science Book 5) (8 page)

He felt like never letting go of her. Not after what had happened the last time they’d parted ways. His mind scraping hard against every assassin instinct he had, Jason brushed his nose past her neck, his nostrils flaring with the scents of vanilla and strawberries. Isis’s scent. He brushed his lips against her ear.

“I want to talk to you later,” he said.

Her pulse thumped, the skin of her neck popping against his. “We are talking now.”

“We will go up there, and you can tell me and Cameron and Lana what you know about Terra.” He paused. “But I want to talk to
you
later. Alone.”

He stepped back to gauge her reaction and was disappointed to sense a hint of despair before she threw up her wall again.

“All right,” she said slowly. “I’m ready.”

Jason didn’t fail to note that she hadn’t actually responded to his words. Curious eyes tracked them as they stepped up onto the terrace. Isis kept her eyes forward, trying to ignore them. Jason made his eyes smolder black and turned them on their audience. The gapers all quickly found themselves with something better to do.

When they reached Lana’s table, his sister looked at their clasped hands. The corner of her lip twitched with amusement, but she said nothing. Cameron was sitting on her right side and Everett on her left. Jason slid onto the end of the bench and, still holding Isis’s hand, helped her squeeze in between him and Cameron.
Lana poured them each a cup, filling their filters with different leaves.

“What’s with the hand-holding?” Everett asked Jason, grinning. “And helping the lady into her seat. It’s so…gentlemanly of you.”

Isis blushed, and Jason swallowed the urge to hit Everett upside the head.

“Silver’s Balancing Serums have proved insufficient. Isis’s mind is calmed by contact with me.”

Everett’s tea squirted out of his nose. “You’re calming?” He coughed. “
You
?”

“Apparently so,” Jason said, giving him a dark look.

The Rev took the hint and said no more.

“Isis,” Lana said, pushing a tea cup across the table. “Silver has instructed you to drink only fruit tea and to do so with steaming water and a touch of vanilla three times a day. No mint and definitely no alcohol. Keep to that regimen for the next month, and he believes your mind will settle.”

“What is this?”
Jason asked, eyeing the mint leaves of his tea.

“You,” Lana said, tossing him a ginger cracker. “Are to drink Winter’s Mint tea and foods with a hint of zest, like ginger and cinnamon, in the hopes that they will infuse a bit of passion into your cold heart.”

“Is that Silver’s prescription or yours?” he said drily.

Her eyes met his without fear. “It was a joint effort.
You’ve been too cold for too long, and it’s not healthy. There’s something to be said for loosening up once in a while.
”

Jason eyed the cracker with suspicion. He was going to be alone with Isis later. This didn’t seem to be a particularly good time to be experimenting with ‘loosening up’. There was a reason Phantoms kept a careful check on their emotions. Their tempers were far too volatile to risk inciting.

“Sit back, drink your tea, and eat your cracker.” Lana tossed him a second cracker. “In fact, have two.”

Really not a good idea. Jason took a bite out of the cracker anyway. Lana nodded in approval. Jason decided that sticking his tongue out at his sister was not in line with the deadly assassin image he was trying to maintain, so he settled for a seething glare. Lana was unfazed.

Isis released Jason’s hand to lift her teacup, but subtly shifted her weight to be closer to him. Trying not to think about how her thigh was pressed against his, he decided this was a good time to get them back on track.

“Isis, if you are ready, could you tell us why you’ve come here?” he prompted her.

She tried to look calm, but Jason could make out the wince she contained half a second too late.

“The Selpes told me you stole the Book of Memory from Orion,” she said.

“I did.”

“Until they confronted me with this, I didn’t even know they had it.”

“Did they say how they got it in the first place?”

She shook her head. “No. But apparently they have experts on Elition lore working for them.”

“What kind of experts?”

“I’m uncertain. Perhaps scholars who have studied our texts and history. Perhaps just a few humans who have dyed their hair blue and sit around all day smoking dandelions.”

Cameron snorted in appreciation of her description. They all knew the sort. Some humans thought if they just made themselves look Elition and consumed enough of the right plants, they would become Elition. Fortunately, magic didn’t work that way, else Elitia would have been plagued by a plethora of fools.

“Whoever their experts are, they figured out the significance of the Recovery Scrolls. And the Selpes want them,” said Isis.

“Were the Recovery Scrolls to fall into the hands of the Selpes or the Avans, they could use them to track down every last Elition,” Lana commented.

“Right,” Isis replied. “I imagine they’d hunt down the most powerful Elitions. They would try to form their own version of Vib’s menagerie.”

The encounter with Vib’s odd Elitions had left Jason unsettled. Absolutely obedient and trained to attack as a swarm of perfectly coordinated killers, there was nothing natural about them.

“No, not nearly so harmless. The Selpes would create their own Elition killing squad, perfectly brainwashed to obey their every whim,” commented Jason.

“I thought Elitions were resistant to brainwashing and, um…” Everett tried not to look at Isis. “Torture.”

She looked down at her hands in her lap. Jason stroked a finger across her palm and felt a pleasant spark, like a bolt of energy had rippled through his body. She must have felt it as well because her back straightened. He took a second to consider what the strange phenomenon was. He’d never felt its likes before.

“Resistant, yes, but not immune. We’re quite susceptible to drugs
—
or even basic foods, as Lana has shown here. They could be used to weaken our mental resistance. Theoretically,” Jason added as Isis gripped to his hand like a drowning woman.

He didn’t know if she’d spilled any information while the Selpes had strung her up on stimulants and tortured her, and there was no point in bringing it up now. Her mind was shattered enough as it was.

Isis took a deep breath and continued. “Now the Selpes no longer hold the Book of Vision, something they are quite sour about.”

Her hand drifted up to her neck. She left it there for a few silent seconds before dropping it.

“They’ve employed the services of the Crescent Order to retrieve the pieces of the Recovery Scrolls.”

“Assassins?” Everett asked, looking significantly at Jason.

“They are foremost assassins, but they can also be hired for other perilous tasks. The more dangerous and challenging the job, the more likely the Crescent Order is to take it,” said Isis.

“Sounds like a bunch of masochists to me,” Everett commented.

“It’s about the money. The more peril involved, the more they can charge,” Jason explained. “The Crescent Order has made their fortune taking on tasks no sane person would.”

“Even you?” Everett posed.

“Jason is not scared of anything,” Cameron boasted, just as Jason said, “I am hardly the epitome of sanity, Everett Black.”

“Yeah, I’ve gotten that idea by now,” he muttered.

“We can assume the Crescent Order will come for the Book of Memory eventually,” Isis told them.

“That means they will come here to Eclipse,” said Cameron. “Will they be able to find us?”

“About half of their numbers are human. The other half are rogue Elitions, meaning they can see the portals. Eclipse is protected by masked portals, ones that only those who have been led inside can see.” Jason looked at Isis. “Led in while conscious. You were unconscious when we brought you in last month. Yet you still made it back here. How did you find us?”

“I…I don’t know,” she stuttered. “I could just feel where you were, Jason.”

A second spark popped along their joined hands. Jason dropped her hand, but the sensation remained. There was something bizarre going on between them. Phantoms could sometimes sense other Elitions, but it didn’t go in reverse. Isis was no Phantom, and she’d found him. It was almost as though they had joined somehow. The idea was laughable. True, in some of the old tales, a few Elitions were shown to have a special connection, though it was always some ritual that had joined them. A serum, an act… Jason tried to discard the idea. He hadn’t so much as kissed Isis, let alone done more than that. They were just silly tales anyway.

“Perhaps the magic that masks Eclipse is not as sound as we’d thought,” suggested Lana.

“Does anyone outside of the town’s residents know how to get to Eclipse?” Isis asked.

“Only you,” Jason replied. Or was she now part of Eclipse?

“Actually, that’s not true, Jason. Remember Spice’s band?” Lana said.

Jason hadn’t forgotten about Spice. He and four other disgruntled Elitions had abandoned Eclipse a few years after the people of Pegasus had fled there. The life of seclusion had not agreed with them. Just as Jason had not agreed with their putting Eclipse at risk by leaving with knowledge of its existence. He’d eventually hunted down and killed every last one of them. Lana had a point, though. The hunt had taken him years, and who knew if they’d spilled Eclipse’s location to anyone else in that time.

Jason only said, “That could be a problem.”

There was no reason to burden them with the details of his gruesome deeds. They didn’t understand the necessity of them the way he did.

“Perhaps the Crescent Order will save the hardest for last,” Isis said. “If it’s easier, they may track down the other pieces first. The Book of Vision, the Book of Prophecy, the
Stones of Resonance.”

“We have the Book of Vision too,” Jason told her.

“Oh,” she replied. “Well, that’s good.”

“But the stones are with the Avans.”

“They’re after the Recovery Scrolls as well?” she asked him.

“Perhaps. Likely.”

She paled. “We’ll figure some way to get them from the Avans.”

“We?” Jason repeated calmly. And—he hoped—casually.

“You helped me rescue Hayden and Ian Selpe from Nemesis. I will help you now.”

She stared at him, never blinking. Jason was hit with the sudden desire that the others weren’t sitting right there beside them.

“Ok,” he said finally.

Isis nodded, then broke eye contact. “The Selpes know what you’re up to, Jason. They know you are looking for Terra Cross. They think they can get to her first.”

“They have gone too far. They have hurt Elitia too much. One way or another, this will not end well for them,” he declared.

CHAPTER EIGHT

~
The Magical Tapestry ~

526AX August 20, Eclipse

CAMERON WAS BORED. Bored and anxious. He wanted to set off to find Terra, but none of them had any idea where to go. The Book of Prophecy, the next piece of the puzzle, was supposed to be tucked away inside one of Elitia’s temples. The question was which one. And whether it was even still where it was supposed to be.

While Jason stood staring
at a tapestry on the wall of the Eclipse library, arms crossed stiffly, Cameron and Everett sat on the dusty stone floor playing Wilderness, an Elition strategy game. Cameron looked through the mud-caked window and was just able to make out the distorted streaks of falling rain. It snapped and crackled against the glass pane, marking the passing seconds.

Jason had been staring at that tapestry all morning, and he’d gotten absolutely nowhere. Not that anyone was brave enough to point that out to him.

After morning tea, Lana had walked back to Silver’s office with Isis. It was only now, as lunchtime approached, that Isis joined them in the library. She stood in the doorway for a few minutes, watching Jason
trace his fingers across the tapestry’s canvas surface. Small black picture symbols followed his movements, dancing about in loopy whirls, as though a tornado had blown them about. Every few minutes, Jason zoomed in or out of the canvas, and the symbols grew or shrank as others vanished or appeared. The tapestry looked like a very large Delineation Scroll, the famed magical map of the Elitions.

Isis stepped up behind him and set a hand on his shoulder. “Jason.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” he said under his breath.

“What doesn’t make sense?” Isis asked him.

He turned around and met her eyes, as though he’d just noticed she was standing there. “I’m trying to decipher the location of the temple that holds the Book of Prophecy. This tapestry knows where it is. If only I can figure out how to make it tell me.”

Isis moved in for a closer look at the tapestry. “Those are where you found the Books of Memory and Vision?” she guessed, pointing to symbols of a book and an eye.

“How do you figure that? The map is not even geographical,” Everett grumbled.

He looked hungry. Or maybe Cameron was projecting. He was absolutely
starving
, and instead of going to lunch, they were still cooped up in that dusty old library.

“Well, the book is history. Like the past, you know? So that’s where you found the Book of Memory. You see with an eye, so this eye is where you found the Book of Vision.” She hovered a finger over the symbol of a sphere. “This sphere looks like a crystal ball, which is associated, however erroneously, with prophecy. Hence, it’s where the Book of Prophecy can be found. Wasn’t that all obvious?” she finished, looking from Jason to Cameron to Everett.

Cameron was impressed. Jason appeared to share the feeling, but it was hard to tell with him. His face tended not to be particularly expressive. And Everett… Well, Everett couldn’t seem to get past the moving symbols on the tapestry.