Soul Kissed (21 page)

“They’ll go after you first,” Custo argued.

Mason shook his head no. “The wraiths will be contained by their traps. And when Xavier arrives, I’ll conceal my soul before releasing them.”

“What if he can conceal his, just like you?”

Mason slid his gaze over to Cari.

Cari dipped her head into a deep, satisfied nod. “I can part Xavier’s Shadow. I’ve done it to Mason. The angel will have nowhere to hide.”

Mason hadn’t even had to explain it to her. She’d come to all his conclusions, seen all the steps he’d take. A couple words and she could follow his thoughts step by step to their conclusion, no matter how ugly.

Custo stood and walked to the window. “It’s a risk.”

“Ours to take,” Mason answered. “Do you think Adam would loan me the use of a bunch of his monsters?”

“I want to watch the monsters feed on that SOB,” Cari gloated. “Gobble him down just like his plague took my father.”

“They’d be trapped on the island anyway,” Mason pointed out to Custo. “Easy to recapture. Not a great problem to the human population nearby.”

Custo swallowed the terribleness of the idea. “How fast do you think you can get this together?”

Was it decided so quickly then? No conference with the Order?

Mason’s attention narrowed. Custo wasn’t telling them something. “Depends on Adam.”

“Travel time,” Cari added. “Besides the obvious, why the rush?”

“Kaye Brand fell to the plague this morning,” Custo said. “She’s cycled through fire and resurrection twice already. Jack doesn’t know how long she can hold out. He’s past his breaking point himself, especially because Xavier must have been picking details from
his
mind to target the Houses he attacked. Bastian was the Council’s weakness.”

Mason’s heart knocked hard as the implications snapped into focus. The peace between Order and Shadow would break if the Houses knew. Would Cari tell them?

Further, Fletcher’s fosterage agreement had been made with Kaye Brand. She couldn’t die. There was no Brand heir as yet to succeed her and fulfill her part of the contract.

Mason thought of the way his Making magic worked—things remained animated or held their function until he lost his interest and released the Shadow from his control. He imagined death would accomplish the same thing—everything Xavier had made would become inert.

Mason looked to Custo for confirmation. “Kill the angel, end the cycle?” End Xavier’s control of the plagued Shadow?

Custo nodded. “That’s the hope, if there’s any left to be had.”

 

 

Xavier strode down an alley behind a pizza joint, the smell of tomato sauce heavy with garlic overriding the funk of the garbage bins. The smell intoxicated him, reminding him that his neglected body needed sustenance. But he didn’t have time to stop. He could feel the net closing around him.

He had to get free of the city. Get out of this warren of closely packed shops and restaurants teeming with people. He had to find the Dolan. It was Imperative.

The brick buildings to each side pointed upward to the sky, a symbol of where his mind should be. His purpose. The laughter of people inside burst into the alley as a boy popped out of a kitchen to throw away a bag of trash.

The boy spotted him and went rigid with alarm.

Hold!
commanded a figure at the end of the alley. A female angel.

Xavier took the bag of trash from the boy’s grasp and with a hand to the kid’s chest, pushed him back inside the restaurant. Xavier threw the trash into the bin. “I have work to do,” he told the angel ahead. It was a young one, earnest and resolute in her stance.

Such sadness had the fae queen wrought, and she was not yet even born to this world. More death, more grief. Darkness everywhere.

Xavier approached, palms open. “Peace, sister.”

“Come home,” the angel said.

Xavier filtered through her memory so that something would be remembered . . . after. Diana was her name. Her human life had been a good one, and she’d dedicated her angelic one to giving back. But she had to die. Would she have chosen to give
this
much, had she known? His quest was more important.

“Xav!” Laurence shouted from behind him. Too far to help her.

Xavier broke Diana’s neck, fast, clean, so that he could get by. One more soul destroyed by Mab.

 

 

Cari walked up the pier. The roof of a house ahead cut angles out of the tops of trees. There was a hollow knocking, wood on wood, blustered by an incoming storm. Mist whipped off the water of the bay. The leaves shushed the wind, but it gusted on to rattle something metal, like chains. A beaten path fixed with uneven stones dug into the ground led the way around to the house. High grasses bristled near the water.

She cast her eye as far as she could see along the shore—water did have magical properties. Mason’s “wards.” The man had done the best he could with what was available.

Mason caught up behind her, supplies in hand. “Adam called. Wraiths are a half hour out.”

There’d been a furor at Segue when Mason had requested the use of a bunch of wraiths to combat the angel. At first there’d been outright refusal. Adam wouldn’t stand for any soul to be devoured by one of those monsters. But Kaye was barely hanging on to life. And the angel Xavier was practicing genocide against magekind. Adam had finally conceded, saying his soul was damned anyway, and even Shadowman had agreed, saying that Xavier had forfeited his soul long ago. Custo had been silent. Five portable wraith cells were being flown in from the satellite New York site.

The most recent sighting of the angel placed him in Boston, where he had killed another of his own. That was two angels dead because of him, and a couple of police officers outside Vauclain House.

But now that Cari was here, at Mason’s home, she partly regretted the impending destruction. Her nod to Mason became another look around, a little wistful. “This is a lovely spot.”

The little island wasn’t grandiose, like the manses of the mage Houses. But a place this idyllic didn’t come cheap—millions, Cari thought. He had to have some means.

“My first couple of jobs—bloody work—paid for it.” He shrugged. “I also scared the shit out of the owner when a better offer came in.”

Cari could imagine. “Good for you.”

“I had a toddler keeping me up nights. I was in a bad mood. All my patience—and back then I didn’t have very much—went to the kid.”

The trees stepped out of the way as she turned a bend in the path. An overgrown lawn ran up to the back porch, which held some kind of awkward metal and netting apparatus. Trapped underneath was a soccer ball. The house itself was a white cottage. Very sweet. Well cared for. The hedges under the windows were a little wild, but Mason had been away.

Mason had to wrestle the soccer goal out of the way to get the back door open. He tried to hold it open, but the bags in his arms made his effort clumsy, so she held the door for him. It gave her the chance to look around without being observed.

Kitchen to the left. Out of date and cluttered with counter appliances. Silly flowery curtains with ruffles on the window above the sink. To the right what had to be the dining table, but it was scarred from use and held some kind of project. Screws. Bolts. Tools. Mason had been making something. Curious, she wandered over while Mason made banging noises off somewhere. A large piece of paper was folded open, a drawing—plans—sketched in detail, but just lopsided enough that she knew it’d been created by the son, and not the father. A little bit of their arrested life together. She was greedy to absorb all the details she could.

Movement turned her head. Mason, in the living room. “They’ll land on the front lawns, and we’ll pull the cages into the trees to conceal them.”

She walked forward into the living room. The threshold of the pass-through was marked up. Upon closer examination she realized the pencil marks had dates that grew progressively more recent as they inched up the doorway. The last was a couple months ago. Her heart ached as she realized she could guess how tall Fletcher was.

A beat up leather sofa set faced a smoke-scarred stone fireplace.

Cari let her gaze travel, taking in the minutiae of their life. His home made her feel strange, sad and angry, as if in another world at another time, she’d been the one to defy family and run away with Mason Stray. This was where she’d have ended up.

She couldn’t understand how Liv—stupid, proud Liv—had abandoned this home. Cari looked at the curtains again—those flowery ruffles. Maybe Liv had tried.

“Not your style.” She pointed to the window and hoped she wasn’t being obvious.

Mason leaned a shotgun, smoking with Shadow, by the front door. “Maria. She gets fussy sometimes when I’m away. Said the place needed a woman’s touch.”

“Maria.” Another woman, caring for him and his son. Adding touches. How nice.

Mine,
Cari’s heart rasped.

His eyes narrowed as he smiled. “The nanny. She just celebrated her sixtieth. Fletcher and I made her a pasta gizmo.” He shrugged. “Granted it was so she’d make us more ravioli, but she seemed to like it.”

Nanny. Maria was practical, not personal. Well, not personal in the way that Cari had feared.

“Does she know about Shadow?” If Maria took care of Fletcher, she must.

“She said she raised seven of her own and that she could handle anything.” He chuckled low, as if remembering something. “Fletcher put her to the test. I was so exhausted by then, there were a couple nights I wept for sleep. Maria took pity on me.”

Cari walked through the room, her heels knocking on the wood floors. She came to stand by Mason to look out the front door. The wide and deep lawn needed to be cut, but the state of overgrowth made the spot storybook-magical, though big gray clouds rolled overhead. “I’ve been in a lot of Houses,” she said. “Great Houses. And this one is among the best.”

It was an effortless, feel-good place, exactly how everything about Mason seemed to go easy on her—always had. She could imagine curling up on his sofa, wrapped in a blanket, or wrapped in him, and feeling more herself than she ever had in her life.

He put an arm around her waist, and she let her head fall to his shoulder.

And in what—a day?—this perfect place would be decimated by Shadow and Order.

A dark swell of anger made her heart beat harder.

If she survived this, and she intended to, she already knew what she was going to do first thing. She smiled, thinking to herself of the bomb it might set off among the Houses. She was going to enjoy every moment.

She was going to claim Mason Stray for Dolan House.

She was sure counter claims would be set. Brand was expected—she’d valued Mason from the beginning. Webb was a lock for Mason as well—he’d already gone so far as to take on Fletcher. She’d have to fight the fosterage agreement. Were there other Houses interested? She should plan on it, and disappoint them all. Her first big coup. She’d have to offer him something big to lure him away from other offers—something more than the status of a vassal, which was what the other Houses would give him—and she had just the thing in mind.

Scarlet was going to pitch a fit, but Stacia and Zel would be okay. If they could just see her and Mason together, really together, then they’d approve.

Mason’s shoulder rose under her cheek as he drew a big breath. “Webb is trying to take the Umbra project from you, and I’ve been helping him.”

She stopped breathing. His shoulder didn’t fall, so he was holding his breath, too.

Umbra.

So that’s what it was.

She heaved her own sigh, but stayed put in the crook of his arm. She’d expected some terrible thing—he’d warned her not to trust him. His breath came out slower, waiting for her reaction.

Umbra, her father’s legacy, a commodity that would be highly prized now, and even more so as the world fell to magic.

She swallowed the bitter taste in her mouth, and ignored Maeve.

Mason was allied with a different faction within magekind. It was expected that either he or she would attempt to seize an advantage. Plus, Webb had his son. Mason had warned her not to trust him, yet had just proved that she could. By revealing Webb’s intentions, he’d just trusted
her
with his son’s life.

So she laid it out for him, truth for truth. “My House needs Umbra.”

All her father’s hard work. All the resources they’d dedicated to its development. She had so many people to take care of. Every day the world was more perilous. If predictions were correct—and recent events revealed they were dead on—then industries, including DolanCo, would collapse. Currencies would lose their value. Dolan would be able to trade for goods, services, safety, and more with Umbra. Which was probably the same reason Webb wanted it.

“Your membrane is promising,” Mason said. “Using a synthetic living tissue was brilliant, but I don’t see how it can ever work the way you want it to.”

He’d obviously been at her research as well.

“Our refinements have had very encouraging results.”

“Shadow is just playing with you.”

Ridiculous. “Shadow doesn’t
think
.” Results were results.

“Sure it does.” He turned his head to look down at her. “Shadow is fully aware of what you want it to do, and it is ambivalent about your success. You have to be able to tell it what to do, what to become.”

His mastery. She met his gaze. She loved his face. Those troubled eyes. Which made her glow with satisfaction. “Mason Maker,” she named him to persuade him to voice the idea turning in his head. She could guess. She’d been thinking about it herself since that terrible conversation with Khan.