Kaye Brand and Jack Bastian had stopped the hostilities between Shadow and Order. Had something happened? Was this war?
Mason locked eyes with the angel across the street in the small park. He was old and dirty—looked homeless—and yet absolute in his perfection. The way he stared at—or through—him was uncanny.
Mason drew himself up. His gun was a joke, so his best defense—for Cari and himself—was his soul. An angel wouldn’t hurt a human. They were bound to
protect
souls, and if Jack Bastian told the truth—though Mason wouldn’t put it past him to lie—then this angel wouldn’t go through him to get to a mage.
“Your life will be a noble sacrifice. Cari Dolan needs to die.” His voice carried effortlessly across the street between them as the angel started forward to finish what he’d started.
Shit.
Mason glanced at Cari. Her nose was bleeding. She was half-collapsed against the Vauclain Wards.
He needed a different kind of weapon. Less predictable.
Mason lunged for a man-hole cover on the sidewalk. As soon as he touched it, Shadow pushed through the metal, overcoming and replacing the bonds of the atoms with Mason’s will. The bolts holding the cover in place spun at his command, and Mason lifted and flung it in a desperate wind and release.
The thick, metal disk cut through the air, propelled by magic. It hit the side of a speeding car—a red M5—which fishtailed. And hit the back of a Prius, accelerating the vehicle to strike the angel at his hip. He went down. Score.
Mason, chest heaving, backed again to Cari, who’d smeared the blood from her nose across her cheek. Her eyes were still glazed.
And the motherfucker angel was getting up again. The zigzag wreck of the cars slowed him slightly, as did the drivers now opening their car doors.
Mason looked around for more ammo—he hated clean and tidy streets. Saw the spear stuck like a sliver of sun in a bush. Grabbed for it.
He’d held all sorts of things with sharp ends, but never a spear. He made to clutch it with both hands, but the weapon was already morphing in his grip to a slender sword, lighter, easier to wield. Yes, much better for hacking up angels.
The angel in question smiled as he gained the sidewalk. “You must be an emissary of Order for the weapon to change into the required blade of the moment.”
Mason raised the sword. “Believe me. I’m not.” He didn’t like any of the angels he’d met.
“The weapon reveals it to be a foregone conclusion,” the angel said. “You will be angelic. Perhaps momentarily.”
The angel’s arm licked out, but Mason’s stray instincts had him already dropping to evade. He swiped simultaneously.
The angel dodged, but not before being slashed along his side. Scarlet bled into his rent shirt. Mason rolled back up, but the angel’s reflexes were superhuman. He got there first, jabbing Mason in the back so that he went down again, vulnerable, on all fours.
Then the angel lunged toward Cari.
But not before someone else got in the way.
“On the ground!” a man shouted, gun drawn and pointed at the angel.
Mason grabbed a breath and spun to his feet. He hadn’t even noticed the other man’s approach. Seemed like a plainclothes cop.
Another cop, backup, appeared and braced himself opposite. “Let me see your hands!”
A third joined them, gun ready. But this one looked over at Mason, his eyes blazing with terrible white light, so Mason knew him for an angel, too.
Brand and Bastian’s peace must have failed.
“The peace holds,” the angel police officer said. “He must be rogue. I do not know him.”
The other cops looked confused. Well, so was Mason.
“I’m no rogue,” the old angel replied. “I am What Must Be.”
“He’s mad,” the angel police officer said. “Run, Mason Stray. Get the Dolan warded. Run while you can.”
Chapter Eight
Specifics were foggy, but Cari was almost positive she’d been collected again in the strong arms of Mason Stray.
Up to the bedroom, please
, she thought.
Let’s try this again.
His steps jarred this time, but his pulse seemed just as fast. The blue sky—weirdly out of place—bumped overhead. Her muzzy head was on his shoulder—he smelled good, and she liked being close enough to know it.
“Can you stand, Cari?”
Maybe. But she didn’t want to. In his arms was a good place to be. He was solid and made her forget all the scary stuff that she had to deal with as the Dolan . . . A flicker of a vision recalled the bolt of lightning that had just skimmed by her shoulder. Her ears were still ringing from it. Hallucination. Had to be.
But they
had
been at Vauclain House.
“Cari Dolan, I need you to stand so I can break into this car.”
Ugh. Okay. She lifted her head. Dizzy. She swallowed to wet her dry throat. Maybe she’d caught the mage plague again. Was she going to die this time?
Mason was already putting her on her feet. When she listed immediately to the side, she grabbed the trunk of a car for support. Held herself upright. Glanced around and took a full breath.
He sure loved piece of shit cars. This one was even older than his other, and an eyesore to boot. It was painted orange and had garish hippie stickers all over the back. The yellow smiley face blaring at her was particularly annoying.
“What’s wrong with my car?” She touched her nose, which felt slightly crusty. Came back with a congealing dab of blood.
Oh . . . Vauclain House . . . Maeve . . . all that Shadow.
Too much and the flesh will weep.
That time as a kid when she’d huffed Shadow—her nose had bled until her father had stopped yelling and had gone down on his knees to apply pressure himself.
Pitch.
She was going to have to be more careful. There was a reason her father had refused the fae.
Mason put his fingers through the space above the car’s driver-side window to force it down. The owner must have left it cracked so the car wouldn’t get too hot. “Your car? Not enough time to retrieve it, princess. We need to get you home now.”
She liked it when he called her princess, even though he didn’t mean it as a compliment. The gruff roll of his voice felt good. She wanted to crawl up in that sound and sleep for a hundred years.
“And this is easy to steal.” He had the door open, threw the sword inside, and leaned over to unlock the passenger side.
Her mind cleared enough to remember the source of the ongoing
twang
in her head. Why had an angel attacked her? She was too dizzy to recall the provocation. Or what had happened right before . . .
Maeve?
Silence.
Mason moved to support her once again.
“I’m fine.” She waved him away, but he followed her around the car anyway. He shut her inside. The vehicle smelled like dusty, dank carpet; the owner should have left the windows down all the way. Mason ran around the front. He put a hand to the hood. The engine turned, then rumbled to life.
Mason and his cars. He liked machines he could boss around. He mastered things to use them; they did not master him. It was a compelling idea—mastery. Her father would’ve approved, both intellectually and in practice. Her father might’ve actually liked Mason.
“What happened at Vauclain House?” he demanded. He was out of breath. Checking the mirrors as if someone were following.
This was easy to answer, and a little satisfying considering Mason’s connections. Cari decided she’d be angry just as soon as she had the energy to be. “I believe an angel threw a spear at me.” Not a hallucination, but her memory did get foggy after that. Nevertheless, she was going to report what had happened to Kaye Brand at the first opportunity. Her angel lover wasn’t keeping up his part of the truce between Order and Shadow.
“Yeah, I think I got that much.” The car turned onto Mass Ave. “I meant, what happened inside Vauclain House? You went batshit crazy on me.”
Oh. “I used too much Shadow again.” She’d simply had to ask, and the fae had given her great big jewels. A fortune that easily—not that jewels would matter in the time to come. Who cared about diamonds when they needed bread? But maybe Maeve could give that, too. Cari had been trying to push Maeve away, but maybe that was the wrong thing to do. It wasn’t working anyway.
Wait. Had Mason just
brawled
with someone out in front of Vauclain House?
“That’s not all.” He was angry. “You were totally out of it. You
came on
to me.”
Yes. He’d brawled with someone—that angel . . . the street prophet?—to protect her.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. A lie, because she was starting to remember.
His scowl deepened, as if he were mad at the road in front of him. He shot her a look. “Cari, I
know
you. I’ve studied you. Your umbra has always been steady and true. But you are different now. Tell me why.”
Why? “My father died.”
“And?”
And she missed him. She missed him so bad. Felt like he’d abandoned her.
“Cari, answer me.”
Fine. She sat up a little straighter. Chose her words. Tried to avoid the emotional landmines. “All this extra Shadow”—she would not name Maeve—“is part of my inheritance. I just have to figure out how to manage it.” How to manage the fae, in particular. It was the mastery question again.
“Is that why you wanted me to look into the faelore about Dolan House?”
“Yes. I want to understand the nature of this power.”
“Shadow’s pitch, Cari—you went
way
overboard with those rocks. Since when are
you
manipulated into doing something out of anger? You always had a cool head.”
“Not always.” Take their history, for example. She’d been furious and crushed when she’d found out that Liv was pregnant with Mason’s child, though it had been weeks after they’d broken up. But after he’d done that lean-in thing, so close she could feel his body heat, the way he’d contemplated her mouth, and then had never followed through . . .
“Was it worth it?” he demanded. “What did you see at Vauclain House?”
He meant the source of the plague. “Nothing.” Failure again.
“You said Francis killed his father.”
“Yes, absolutely. He left his father with Erom, who was dying. His father caught the plague and died as well, which made Francis head of his household.”
“And his glass ceiling. The fae trapped in it? You did something . . . ?” Mason was looking at her as if she should know what he was talking about.
The bug . . . Francis had seemed like a blood-fat tick . . . a lash of Shadow to break the glass.
Had
she
done that?
Cold frosted up her spine.
No. She had not. Maeve again
.
“That wasn’t me.”
“It came from you.”
She didn’t answer. How could she? She remembered her father’s journal entry; the situation was similar:
Was this justice? I don’t like being used.
She agreed with him.
Mason exited on to I-90. “You got no sense of the person behind the mage plague?”
She laid her head back, disappointed herself. “No. Just raw Shadow, the same as with my father’s death.”
“Raw Shadow how?”
She tried to think about how or what it felt like, and came back to Mason in her mind. Mason, always him, mage, stray, or human. He’d fought for her today. “Raw Shadow like yours.”
Xavier held open the palms of his hands, red with blood, stained with soul. These human lives—police officers, peacekeepers—were on the Dolan’s head, not his. That the Mad Queen would hide behind souls revealed her to be the blight on the world that he’d always known. He remembered what she was capable of. This was just the beginning. The world would run red.
He wailed to the sky, begging for grace. But the sky was silent, as it had been for so long.
He knew what that meant: he must persevere.
Maeve shivered with joy. Her daughter was perfection, a monarch emerging from a chrysalis. The girl took her own time, but Maeve would grant her that. Another gift. Time was so difficult to manage anyway;
then
and
now
such prickly flowers. Cari’s flesh needed to be still stronger to bear the power, as a ruler does her mantle.
The immortal do not wither, do not die.
The world would be theirs.
“That’s right, an angel,” Mason told Webb over the phone as he paced a small lane between some two-story brick cottages on the Dolan property.
There was no reason to hide the call—after all, his son now lived with Webb—but Mason still found himself looking left-right to see if anyone might overhear. The Dolan clan had stayed out of Cari’s general domain, but everywhere else, family was stashed pending the resolution of the plague investigation. He hadn’t seen many children though, or maybe their parents kept them away from the dangerous stray.
Cari was inside the main house sleeping. He’d gotten them past the entrenched humans outside the compound, though they’d again shouted at the windows and pounded on the hood until Cari lifted the wards for the car. Since this car didn’t have tinted windows, Mason made certain that all of the photos and film taken would come out Shadow black. There were enough images of them circulating already.
Her stepsisters and mother had looked at him with acute loathing to see the smear of blood on Cari’s face and the waxy gray of her pallor. No sparkle from the sisters
this
time, unless the daggers in their eyes caught the light. If Cari hadn’t been lucid enough to say “not his fault” he’d be under lock and key. But he wouldn’t put it past them to have him watched.
Behind the main house, he paced back the other direction, facing rolling lawn.
“And this angel came after the Dolan?” Webb asked. “Her specifically?”
With one hell of a weapon, now Mason’s.
He drew breath to answer, but Webb beat him. “Of course he would. Why bother with a stray?”
That wasn’t exactly it, but Mason wasn’t about to say that the angel wouldn’t hurt a
human.
Who knew if the angel would go after a stray? That was the reason Mason had called Webb in the first place: so that Webb would not be complacent about Fletcher’s safety, not around the Order. The kid might not be born to a House, but he was a full mage.
“The truce is ended,” Webb concluded.
Mason bowed his head, kicking a stone across the pavement. “Not necessarily. Brand says that the angel was rogue and that the Order is hunting him as we speak.”
“Rogue. An unlikely excuse.” Webb dismissed it out of hand. “Has the Dolan made any progress toward finding the House that caused the plague?”
“Nothing certain.” Mason didn’t mention Cari’s “inheritance.” Webb already had enough information to potentially screw her with the DolanCo Umbra project. “But I’ll contact you immediately when we have something.”
She’d said that the Shadow was raw.
Mason shook his head. No, she’d said the Shadow was raw . . . like
his Shadow.
Because he didn’t have an umbra?
Maybe the source of the plague didn’t have an umbra either. Maybe the source had a soul. What if they were really hunting someone like himself? And if that were the case, how would he go about it?
Set a trap. Lie in wait. Make the perpetrator come to him.
“I’d like to talk to Fletcher.” The one he really wanted to warn, though he had no words for what to say to a kid. Don’t trust anyone? He couldn’t teach him that.
He just wanted to hear Fletcher’s voice; he’d know everything he needed to by the “Hi, Dad.”
“The boys are out back playing soccer.”
“Out back” at Mason’s properties would’ve only required a yell.
Disappointment knifed him. “Tell him I called.” Earlier Fletcher had seemed okay. Except for that moment when he’d said that their lair needed a secret way out.
You always need a way out.
“I’ll do that.” Webb summarily cut the line.
There was nothing worse than uncertainty.
And Webb, a father himself, would know this, too.
Mastery. Cari needed it
now
. Word was that the angel was rogue and that he would be apprehended by the Order soon. Not good enough. Without Mason, she would’ve been vulnerable, made so by the fae within her.
She sat on the end of her bed, post shower, wrapped in a robe and grappling with life. She’d recovered much more quickly than she’d expected. One deep sleep, a good meal, and she could take on Francis Vauclain again. That is, if he still lived. Take on that angel, too.
Fact of life: everything was different. Her father had told her that becoming head of the household would set her apart. She’d anticipated friction over authority with some of her family members. Relationships might grow thin, but they would be made new eventually.
And there was the endless work of her House, the responsibility of turning over the Dolan legacy to the next generation.
But “set apart” had a whole new meaning now.
Her skin felt golden, as if the precious metal had mixed with her blood, turning Shadow into a rare alloy. It was armor and beauty, a kind of forever feeling. She was becoming something, but what that was, she had no idea. “Stronger” barely scratched the surface of what she felt.
She had to figure out what was to be done next.
She’d tried to
deny
Maeve, with mixed, ultimately unacceptable results. Exhaustion and weakness, leading to a lack of control. That state wasn’t going to work, unless Mason was there every night to put her to bed. She suppressed a smile at the thought.