Turning Tides (27 page)

Though I asked the room, I looked at Josiah. I felt an unexpected stab of guilt. Even with extenuating circumstances, I was leaving him to face a murder trial for a death I forced him to commit.

He looked at me, and at that moment I saw Sera in his eyes. For the first time, they held softness, perhaps even understanding. “You know I’ll be fine, Ms. Brook. I always am. You did a wonderful job today. You should be proud.”

I didn’t cry. I just thought about it for a moment or two.

“We’ve got this, dear,” said my mother. “You need to be home now. If the council is determined to see you in person to deliver the sentence, they can always travel to you.” She stared at Michael and Deborah, daring them to contradict her.

It felt strange to accuse and run, but my job was complete. There was nothing else for me to do.

I stood, knowing this could be the last time I ever saw my grandmother’s house. Already, it felt foreign, a place I might wish to visit but would never call home. It was bittersweet to leave, but the emphasis remained on the sweet.

“How can you just go?” Lana asked. Her eyes darted around the room, and I was reminded of a china doll, beautiful to look at but so easy to destroy. One good hit, and it would smash into thousands of pieces. David clutched her hand, but for once she didn’t seem to notice his presence. “Everything’s just wrong. It’s all wrong. You say my aunt is a crazed killer and blew up the cottage and my brother is something that isn’t even supposed to exist but you want to take away his magic and it’s just all wrong. Stop it. The world doesn’t make sense. Stop it.” She pleaded with me, begging to be returned to a time when everything wasn’t awful.

I wished I could. I longed for that myself, for a world that made sense. I held out one tentative hand, not even sure if I was trying to touch her or hug her or just shake her hand.

It didn’t matter. Lana wasn’t even looking at me. As her tears broke forth, she called to the water just outside, pulling it to her for comfort. Thin waves ran through the room, heading straight for her. One of the waves passed over my outstretched hand—a hand I’d used to spread the chemical mixture on the towel.

There wasn’t much, just a few grains on each finger. My hand didn’t explode.

It just caught fire, flames dancing along the skin.

I didn’t think. I let the fire magic loose, grabbed hold of the flames and pulled them through my skin, absorbing them into my body. In a matter of seconds, the fire was extinguished.

I don’t know what I expected to see when I looked around the room. Concern or surprise, perhaps. Instead, no one met my eyes. They were too busy staring at my hand.

My perfectly smooth, unburnt hand.

Chapter 26

Once, while walking through a
park in Tahoe, I passed a group of children playing a game. They called it freeze tag, and I watched for several minutes, fascinated by the way they would cease motion the moment someone yelled “Freeze!” and then burst into action once the game resumed.

That was how the room reacted. No one moved for what felt like a small eternity, during which I had time to appreciate that, after days of fearing Lana’s words would unmask me, she’d managed to do the unthinkable with a single stream of poorly directed magic. I turned my head, catching my mother’s eyes, Josiah’s, my grandmother’s, hoping one of them would offer a lead I could follow, but there was nothing. They were as frozen as the others, unable to think of a way to explain the impossible.

And then, just as quickly, the room burst into action.

Deborah grabbed a large cushion, holding it before her as a shield.

My aunts started shrieking, one question after another falling from their lips, filling the room with uncertainty and fear.

Mac, sensing something had gone terribly wrong, barged through the front door and joined me in the library, Simon and Miriam right behind him. The elementals were so fixed on me, no one cared that the hated shifters were in their midst.

Lana stared, baffled, and David looked at me as if I’d grown a second head—one I’d borrowed from Medusa, perhaps.

Lydia hissed, an inhuman sound. “You. All this time, you.”

“It’s not what you think,” I sputtered, sure that if I could just delay long enough, I’d find a believable explanation.

“No?”

I felt it then, water controlled by Lydia brushing my other hand. Flames ignited where the chemicals still clung to my fingertips. “No one put it out,” she ordered, voice thick with rage. The passive elemental prepared to accept her fate was nowhere in sight. Perhaps it had never been anything but an act to buy herself time.

I felt Sera grab hold of the flames and pull them toward her. She wasn’t in the habit of taking orders from anyone, let alone recently unmasked murderers.

I looked at her, grateful, but my expression froze somewhere around horror, instead.

If I could feel her magic, it was because my own had risen to the surface.

I knew it was there, angry and gleeful in equal measure. It had waited years for this, maybe decades. Even before I knew it was a part of me, this was what it wanted. Freedom.

The secret was out. My fire side was done hiding.

“She doesn’t burn.” Lydia raised her voice, ensuring no one missed her words. I supposed, if there was one way to take the focus off her murderous deeds, it was to point out the other person in the room in need of a death sentence.

My fire crackled, full of energy and desire.

“Aidan.” It was a single word, spoken in a low voice, but my magic responded. It knew that voice intimately. It had climbed inside his skin.

But it wasn’t just the magic that answered. He’d called to the woman, and his voice found her, hidden somewhere beneath the panic and the pure blind fear and the fire’s slow-building rage.

“This isn’t good, Mac.” I met his eyes, that dark melting brown I knew so well, no matter where my magic tried to take me. “We need to go.”

“You cannot leave.” Deborah blinked at us, and the haze over her eyes lifted, revealing a sharp intelligence only a fool would miss. “What you did, we all saw. You are a dual. You have fire.”

Grams recovered first. “Don’t be ridiculous. You know they’re practically impossible. It requires two full elementals, both fertile. The odds are staggeringly slim. I’m still struggling to believe this Trent Pond is one. You think to unmask two in an hour when we haven’t seen one in a century? I’m sure there’s another explanation.” Grams turned expectant eyes to my mother. Grams had only had a day to work up a cover story. My mother had been concocting lies for me since the day I was born.

Of course, she hadn’t expected me to demonstrate my ill-fated abilities before the council. That was a little more difficult to cover up.

My mother stood, and though her spine was stiff and her face set, her hands shook. “I think I would know if my own daughter was a dual magic. If you recall, the reason they were banned was their rampant insanity. Aidan is perfectly sane. If you can cast your mind back a full five minutes, she was the one who solved these horrible murders while the rest of us twiddled our thumbs. That is hardly the sign of an unordered mind.”

I kept my face still, thinking the sanest, most rational thoughts I could manage. Quadratic equations. Flow charts. Actuarial tables. The whole time, the fire churned through my core, gathering strength.

Deborah gave no sign she heard my mother. She consulted the notes she’d been given on my case. “Aidan is sixty-five. I seem to recall you took a long vacation six decades ago or so. To Hawaii. I believe I still have a postcard somewhere.” The room hung on her every word. The damn woman had picked one hell of a time to appear lucid again. “Josiah Blais lives in Hawaii, does he not?”

Loaded looks flew between my mother and my father, between my sister and myself, trying to decide how much we could deny.

Considering the alternative, I was happy to deny it all. “This is ludicrous. The only reason I learned dual magics exist is because I met Trent.” It was the absolute truth, and I would stick to the truth as much as I could. “I didn’t burn because I’m surrounded by water and I used it to heal my hand when it caught fire.” That part might have been a bit less true.

“Hmmm. And why, exactly, were you visiting Trent in the first place?”

Because I’d heard he was a half-water in a mental hospital and I was worried I might be going insane, too. Because Lana told me about him when I visited her, hoping for answers before I knew the truth could kill me. Because it was the only way I could figure out what I was.

I couldn’t say any of it, and Deborah saw my hesitation. “Light her on fire,” she instructed the room. No one moved. “Very well. I will do it. Someone bring me gasoline.”

Josiah stepped between us. “This isn’t a witch hunt, Rivers, where we throw the accused into water and watch them drown to prove their innocence. If you light her on fire, she will burn.”

Deborah scoffed. “As she said, she is surrounded by her element. It will take her mere moments to heal herself. Though Ms. Brook, I do suggest you wait at least a few seconds before doing so. A bit of singed flesh will prove your innocence much faster than this incessant prattling.”

There was no way out. It was over, and part of me was relieved. The secret had only grown heavier the last several months as I became more and more of a danger to people I loved. I already felt like I’d been living under a death sentence since learning what I was. Making it official felt like the logical next step.

But there was Mac and Sera. Simon and Miriam. Vivian and the agents, watching the drama unfold with matching expressions of alarm. I wasn’t ready to leave them, or my mother and Grams. Even Josiah might, on occasion, demonstrate a redeeming quality. My exposure as a dual magic would affect him and my mother as well. A century of incarceration for any parent who harbored a dual magic child.

The way Deborah looked at him now, she had little doubt who my father was.

There was only one thing for it. I had to run. I had to run before my status was confirmed, before my parents were condemned and all our fates sealed.

I had no second plan. This wasn’t something I could talk my way out of. I needed to start running and never stop.

I sought Mac’s eyes and found them, as ever, on me, full of a comfort no one else could offer.

He reached out his hand, my anchor in the storm. And somehow, in the middle of the worst moment of my life, I knew. I loved this man, with everything I was. It might be my magic that had staked a claim on his body, but he’d possessed me far longer than that. He would go with me, I knew. He would give up his life to run with me, as long as I needed him, and though it was weak and selfish, I’d never been so glad of anything in my life.

“Let’s go.” I took his hand, prepared to leave. Prepared to find whatever life awaited the condemned and the crazy.

I overlooked one small detail. I might have been willing to disappear forever, or at least until we came up with a workable plan. My protective parents had a different plan.

“No.”

They weren’t the only ones who spoke. Deborah and Lydia, Lana and David, they all wanted me to stay for their own reasons.

Josiah looked at each person in the room, turning his merciless black eyes on them one at a time. They all tried to hold his gaze, but only Deborah had the years and power to back it up.

At last, when he was certain everyone waited to hear his next words, he stepped next to me and curled his hand around my arm, the one that wasn’t gripping Mac’s hand. The touch was light, but there was no missing the strength behind it.

I’d known Josiah was my father for months now. He’d spent most of that time trying, and failing, to convince me he loved me as a daughter. In all that time, he’d never touched me.

Sera stared at his fingers, wrapped around my elbow, and her eyes turned even blacker than her father’s. That was my only warning for what was about to happen.

“Aidan Brook is my daughter,” he announced to the room.

I expected cacophony, screams and noise and an onslaught of question. Instead, everyone was too stunned to speak.

He continued, unconcerned with the room’s reaction. He spoke with confidence an award-winning actor wouldn’t be able to reproduce. He spoke as one who has walked upon the earth for thousands of years and wielded power most can only dream of. He spoke as a man used to getting his way, and one who expected to get his way this time, as well.

“She is my daughter, and she is a dual magic, and I will not allow her fate to be decided by an archaic law passed in the middle ages. As Fiona pointed out, she is not insane.”

The fire unspooling through my body as Josiah sealed my fate was less certain. It was busy thinking this room would look better with flames kissing the wallpaper and carpets, with the door blocked by a thick wall of fire that would prevent anyone from following me. My enemies, all who knew what I was, they could die in that room.

I felt it detach, as it had before. I felt it stretch and grin, ready to deal death more eagerly than it ever had before. I was a spectator to its thirst for destruction.

I stared across the room, and the smile forming on my lips stilled. My mother would not survive that. My aunts and grandmother would not.

And so I pulled it back with a vicious tug. I couldn’t even tell which part of me fought anymore, whether it was the water struggling to reassert itself or my fire hesitating in the face of my loved ones. It didn’t matter. I took it back, controlled it, and beat insanity for one more day.

Josiah continued to speak, and the room still hung on his every word. No one had seen my lapse. No one except Mac, whose grip on my hand tightened enough that I might have a bruise the next day. It was a silent reminder that, whatever happened in this room, he wasn’t letting me go.

“We created this law when there were hundreds of dual magics and we possessed few resources to track them. That is hardly the case in our modern world. Trent Pond’s parents practically bought the institution, and it has done an excellent job of preventing him from harming others. We can learn about this condition, rather than eliminate it from fear.”

Lydia’s expression vacillated between suspicion and an uneasy hope. “That’s why you were researching the dual magics. You weren’t trying to kill them. You were looking for a cure.”

“I was looking for a solution. You cannot cure someone of their magic. And yet, if the humans can treat schizophrenia and other mental diseases, shouldn’t we be able to do the same to our own? I recognize that we do not like change, but neither do we like being surpassed by humans. We have not needed to face the problems of a dual magic in centuries. Now, we have no choice, and I am telling you we must do so with civility, rather than barbarism.”

My family were still stunned, and I couldn’t begin to fathom how many bottles of wine the aunts would demolish that night.

Lana and Lydia listened to every word. I guessed their thoughts were with a dual magic far to the south, living in a small windowless room in Eureka.

Deborah looked at no one but Josiah. “Change for its own sake is meaningless, and your argument fails to address the reasons we initially chose barbarism, as you put it. I remember the havoc wreaked by the duals. One thousand years ago, I watched a village burn because a child was denied a toy. I watched an entire island drown under the weight of one man’s unrequited love.”

“I too remember such events, Deborah. That does not negate the need for—”

Deborah continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “I also remember you killed one of our own, Josiah Blais. Whatever the circumstances, Rachel’s blood is on your hands. You are not a man whose opinion I will consider. The girl will have a trial, and if she is found guilty, she will die. That is our law, and it will not be broken. Not this day.”

Josiah nodded, as if coming to a decision. “You are outnumbered by those who wish otherwise.”

“Is that a threat? There will already be a severe backlash against this island. Two of our number have died on its shores. If Michael and I fail to return, the Brook clan will be known as the family that slaughtered an entire council to protect their girl. Vengeance will be swift, and it will be absolute. Threaten me if it pleases you, but if you act on it, this island will be destroyed. You know what must happen. Lydia has accepted her fate and will die tomorrow. Aidan’s trial will be postponed until a quorum can be assembled. Anything else would be disastrous to the residents of this island.”

By the time Deborah finished, my aunts were standing, and for the first time since I arrived, there wasn’t a single hint of intoxication in their eyes. My mother and Grams held hands, and I suspected it had less to do with comfort than with merging their magic together. Lana looked back and forth, appearing unsure of pretty much everything. The rest of us, we watched Josiah, waiting to see his reaction.