Spellbound (24 page)

Faye decided to walk to the boardinghouse. It wasn’t far. Ada had changed a lot, but not for the better. It was a ghost town, only some of the ghosts hadn’t realized it yet. Most folks had given up and moved on, but the stubborn or desperate were still here, scraping out a living in a place that had been ruined by magic. There weren’t very many businesses left either. The seed store had burned down, but it wasn’t like anybody would miss it in a place where nothing could grow. The wind had eaten the paint off of the buildings, giving everything a worn-out and faded look. Only a few people were out and about, and there were only a handful of beat-up cars on the dusty street.

Some children were playing baseball in the road. They were all barefoot, the ball was a rock, and the bat was a stick. The pitcher was probably the oldest, maybe twelve, and judging from his broken front teeth he’d stopped a few flying rocks with his mouth. He quit smiling when he saw her. The game stopped and the players watched her as she walked by. She was an outsider, and therefore interesting and suspicious.

A woman was coming down her porch, wiping her hands on an apron. She shouted into the road. “Hey, you kids best get on home. Gonna be a real howler tonight.” The kids scattered like she was somebody they were used to taking orders from. Then she saw Faye and smiled. “Well, howdy, missy.”

“Ma’am,” Faye dipped her straw hat in greeting. Faye realized that this woman was familiar. She was the schoolteacher, not that Faye had been allowed to go to school, but she had been jealous of the kids that had. The schoolteacher lady had always struck Faye as kind when she’d seen her around town. Faye was thankful for Whisper’s big dark glasses, because surely the teacher wouldn’t recognize her. “Evening.”

“Good evening to you, stranger.” The teacher cocked her head to the side. Like everybody that still lived in Ada, she looked dried out and sunburned. The wind was blowing her ponytail around. “We don’t get many new folks in Ada.”

“Our car broke down,” Faye said, keeping her head down.

“Breaking down is the way of things around these parts.” The teacher was curious, like Faye reasoned all good teachers probably were. “You look familiar. Have you been around before?”

Faye quickly shook her head no and started walking.

“Now hold on.” Ingrained manners forced Faye to stop. “You got a place to stay, honey? Because I think it’s gonna be a hard one. You don’t want to get caught outside on a storm night. It’s liable to peel your skin off.”

“We’re at the boardinghouse, ma’am.”

“Oh, that’s nice.” The teacher was trying to get a better look at her face. “That’s a nice place. You staying long?”

“Passin’ through.” Faye realized that the lady was trying to remember where she’d seen her before. In fact, she was trying to get a look at her eyes . . . Faye reminded herself that she needed to think like a proper fugitive. It was time to get out of here. “I best be going. Evening, ma’am.”

“‘Bye then.” The teacher nervously put her hands together. Faye had made it nearly to the corner when the woman shouted after her. “You know not everybody here blames the wizards!”

Faye froze.
She knew.
“What was that?”

“I’m just saying . . . The wastes. The drought. Some of us know they were trying to help when they broke Mother Nature. The wizards were just doing what they were told. Not all magic people are bad.”

“I hear most of them are regular folks,” Faye answered.

“It wouldn’t be right to be angry at somebody that didn’t do nothing wrong to begin with. Not right at all.” Suddenly embarrassed at saying so much, the lady turned and walked quickly up her porch. “Have a safe journey, child.”

Faye waved goodbye.

A block later, she found the address that the mechanic had given her. There was a sign in front of the old two-story home, but the wind had eaten all the words off. A nice old lady with blue hair answered the door. The way she squinted so hard told Faye that she was mostly blind, and by the way she shouted all her words and kept saying “Eh?” she was hard of hearing too, but she eventually ushered Faye inside. The other knights were eating supper in the plain dining room downstairs. There was a pot of stew in the middle of the table. The smell made Faye’s stomach rumble embarrassingly loud.

“Look who decided to grace us with her presence,” Ian said. “What’ve you been up to?”

“Burning something,” Whisper suggested.
Of course
, Whisper was a Torch. Her strange fire magic had probably told her what Faye had doing. Whisper wrinkled her nose. “You smell like smoke.”
Or maybe not.

Faye was embarrassed. “I had some things to do. See, I grew up near here . . .” She crossed her arms nervously. Being recognized by a local made her feel stupid. “And, well . . .”

“It don’t matter.” George got up and pulled out a chair for her. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years now and I’ve yet to meet a knight that didn’t have some things they didn’t feel like sharing.”

“Thank you.” Faye sat down. The old lady brought her a bowl and spoon, shouted a few questions about if the stew was good or not, said “Eh?”
and cupped her hand over her ear when Ian tried to answer that everything was fine, and then shuffled back into the kitchen. “She seems nice.”

“Anytime a proprietor is willing to serve me without making a scene,” George said, “I’ll take it.”

“She’s blind as a bat and deaf as a stone. She probably thinks you’re white as snow. When everybody’s equally blurry, you don’t discriminate,” Ian said. “On the bright side, that means we can talk business.”

“The car is almost done. We can leave tonight if we want,” Faye reported as she scooped herself some stew. “The winds get worse at night, and if it’s bad you can’t hardly see until you drive into a ditch.”

“I say we leave in the morning then,” George said. “Did he say what was wrong with it?”

“Some doohickey melted,” Faye said between shoveling stew into her mouth. It was mostly potatoes and carrots, flavorless, like they’d been buried for quite a few seasons and then boiled until they were chewable. “What about Lance and them?”

Ian seemed cranky as usual. “Last we heard, they’re hunkering down for a bit, so they won’t miss us for another day. They made a real mess with the Iron Guard. Maybe if we’re lucky we’ll be asked to do something useful instead.”

Faye was tired of his negative attitude. “You’re not going to be happy until I Travel your tongue someplace without the rest of your head, are you? What is
your
problem?”

George tried to intercede. “Now, you two—”

“My problem?” Ian raised his voice slightly. “I think this is a wild goose chase. We don’t know that this creature of yours is even real. Knights have stooped to consulting with Iron Guards! No good can come of that. Meanwhile, our organization is being slandered and our members arrested—”

“And what do you propose we should be doing about that?” George asked with the utmost calm.

“Find out who framed us!”

“Others are working on that. We’re—”

Ian cut him off. “We’re scared of what the answer is going to be if we poke too deep. Japan, Russia, and a dozen other nations have used every excuse in the book to enslave their Actives. You think America is different?”

George’s expression barely changed, but a little bit of anger crept in. “My father was born a slave. You really want to get all preachy at me?”

“Are you nostalgic for the institution then?” Ian furiously pushed his chair away from the table and stood. “Because mark my words, Actives will be
property
if we don’t fight back now. We have to assert our place before we’re trampled into history.”

“So, you’re one of those,” George grumbled. “Thinking that Actives are better than Normals, not equals. I should have known.”

“I’m no Active supremacist. Don’t you dare put words in my mouth, Bolander!”

“
That’s
why you spoke up for Harkeness and Rawls,” Faye said quietly.

“I’m sorry for what they did to General Pershing and your friends,” Ian said quickly. “But those two men struck the greatest blow against tyranny that any of our people have ever accomplished. Through killing the Chairman, how many millions of lives did they spare?”

Faye’s voice was deadly. “That’s easy to say when it wasn’t your grandpa getting shot down like a dog.”

“I didn’t mean . . .” Ian’s face turned red. “Fine. You know what? I’m one of the best Summoners the Society has ever seen. I should be using my Power to hunt our
real
enemies, not the imaginary ones.” He stormed out in a huff.

“Can I kill him now?” Faye asked. “Pretty please?”

The look on George’s face indicated that he couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. Just in case, he said, “No.”

Whisper had not spoken during the argument. She waited for a door to slam upstairs. “Ian and I have worked together for a long time. Please do not judge him too harshly. He has had to face some difficult things recently.”

Faye had just burned down the horrible shack that she’d been raised in. She had a pretty high standard for what she considered
difficult
. “Whisper, I—”

“Ian’s wife was taken by the Imperium.”

“Oh . . . I didn’t know that.”

“I was very fond of her. Everyone was.” Whisper stirred her stew absently. “Despite Ian’s family’s disapproval, they wed young. She was one of us, Grimnoir. In fact, that is how the two of them met. His family is rather wealthy, aristocrats even, and they saw her as unworthy, their love, scandalous. He was gladly disowned to be with her.”

“How come?” Faye asked.

“She was a quadroon.”

Faye didn’t know what that meant, but George nodded in understanding. “She had a black grandparent, Faye. That can cause some . . .
legal
issues most places.”

“Among other things. It did not matter. She was truly the light of Ian’s life. Her name was Beatrice and they were everything to each other. Such love . . . it was like a story.”

The French had a way of making things sound extra romantic. For the briefest second, Faye thought that sounded a bit like how she secretly hoped Francis felt about her, but then she decided she was just being silly. “What happened?”

“Several years ago . . . was it four, five now? How time flies when you’re battling evil . . . She was pregnant with their first child, residing at home while Ian was away. We do not know how the Iron Guard found her, but they did, and they took her. Oh, how we chased them, but they eluded us. The trail was cold, but Ian would never give up. He went all the way to China, following even the vaguest hints from the spirits he could Summon, but he was too late . . . Beatrice had been given to Unit 731.”

Just saying the name of the Imperium’s experimentation unit made Faye’s stomach turn.

“The bastards,” George hissed. “I’ve seen their work.”

“They did horrible, awful things to her. Ian could not save her, so instead he used his Summoned to end her life, to spare her any more indignities at the hands of the Chairman’s Cogs.”

“That’s awful,” Faye said quietly. That would sour anyone. “I didn’t know.”

“Of course not. He never talks about it, but I know it changed him. He used to have the soul of an artist, even his Summoned were beautiful, graceful, heavenly things, yet now they are misshapen, cumbersome beasts. The form of a Summoned is a window into the soul of the man that commands them. He would certainly be upset to know I had told you of this”—Whisper leaned in conspiratorially— “but there is another thing you must know. I believe you have also met some of Beatrice’s family.”

“Really?” Faye hadn’t met that many Grimnoir, and those that she knew well had confided to her about their losses. “Who?”

“It would have been brief. Just long enough to wring the secrets from you. I’m speaking of Isaiah Rawls . . .” Whisper seemed to enjoy the look of surprise that appeared on Faye’s face. “Oh, close your mouth before you catch a bug. Do you think that those villainous conspirators came to trouble you on a whim? No? I believe Isaiah’s granddaughter’s death was what pushed him to such drastic measures to destroy the Imperium. Yet, by betraying the Society, he dishonored the name of all those who had followed him as well. As General Pershing was your leader here, Isaiah was ours.”

“He was a traitor,” Faye insisted.

“To some, and to others, a hero.”

“And to you?” Faye liked Whisper, so dreaded the answer.

“There is no doubt to me that Isaiah was a traitor, but sometimes a trust must be betrayed to serve the greater good. Such distinctions can be difficult. However, it was no accident that Ian volunteered to join the American knights. Maybe he is seeking to atone for deeds done on his behalf . . . I do not know.”

George was leaning back in his chair, appearing deep in thought. “And why did you volunteer?”

“Me?” Whisper’s smile was mischievous. “I go where the excitement is.”

Chapter 10

I don’t believe I ever saw an Oklahoman who wouldn’t fight at the drop of a hat—and frequently drop the hat himself.

—Robert E. “Heavy” Howard,

Letter to H.P. Lovecraft,
1932

Ada, Oklahoma

THE WIND WAS JUST AS BRUTAL
as she remembered. The old house shook and rattled with every gust. The window panes flexed so much that the glass creaked like it was threatening to pop. The windows had been caulked shut to keep the dust out, and there were towels stuffed in the bottoms of the doors. The view out the window was a brown mass of blowing dust, interspaced with occasional soft blurs from a handful of lights, but around nine o’clock at night the power had gone out. After that, the dust provided its own sort of shadowed light, almost like it was infused with visible energy. Before he’d gone to bed, George had pointed out that there was static electricity in the dust, and had said that there was
lots
of it.

Power outages were a common enough occurrence, so the old lady that ran the boardinghouse had appeared and left them several candles and some matches so they could find their way to their room when they decided to retire for the evening. Whisper waited for her to leave, then simply lit the candles by thinking about it.