The Immortal Queen Tsubame: Ascension (13 page)

He started to sarcastically reply that until recently his life revolved around an almost nineteen-year-old sorceress, but before the answer left his lips he decided to say, “I used to teach fighting.”

“What kind of fighting?”

There wasn’t really a name for what Devdan taught those few years right after he was released from Claude’s seal. He had simply needed something to do and since he had been good at fighting back in the eighteen hundreds, he used his magic to help speed up the process of learning more technical fighting techniques and opened up a dojo. He hadn’t even planned on going to look for Claude’s heir, even though more often than not his mind was plagued with thoughts of getting revenge on the man by killing whoever it was. Not until one summer day in Atlanta when he’d seen Bastet with MaLeila and the girl’s best friend Nina trailing beside her did the effects of the sealing and their forced bond spur him into stalking the two for the better part of a month before he actually took a shot at killing her and then his life dominoed from there.

“A little of everything. Whatever works to win the fight,” Devdan said.

Ezra smiled and said, “Then we should spar. How about after dinner?”

“I would but,” Devdan trailed off to look across the table at Adina and continued, “your sister is taking me to see the hyenas tonight.”

“Is she?” Ezra asked looking at the girl who pointedly avoided her brother’s gaze.

“Is that a problem?” Devdan asked.

“Not at all,” Ezra said still looking at Adina. “In fact, I will go with you. Would you like to join us Councilwoman Anya?”

Devdan was vaguely aware that Anya politely declined the invitation, more concerned with Adina’s expression. He got the impression that she hadn’t intended for Ezra to join them on the trip.

It didn’t seem to affect Adina’s excitement though. She eagerly led them to where the hyena man made a show of feeding the hyenas at night for a small fee, a fee that was waived as soon as he saw Adina and Ezra. They stood amongst a group of some odd thirty or forty tourists and watched the man feed the hyenas, even going as far as to put a stick in his mouth and letting the beasts eat from it.

“The hyenas are a very important part of the histories of the Ethiopian Magic Family,” Ezra said.

“Just yours?” Devdan asked.

“There is only one magic family in Ethiopia and every sorcerer or sorceress born in Ethiopia is part of that family,” Ezra clarified. “Back when the Europeans traders began kidnapping our children, we befriended the hyenas. Not only were they our companions, but they became the protection of the magical children just out of the direct reach of our patriarch at the time to protect. Sure some of the sorcerers who came after magical children carried guns and indeed some of them still managed to steal away some of our children, but not nearly as many as were taken from the other families. It’s hard to pull the trigger of a gun after a hyena bites your hand off.”

“If they’re that important, it seems like you would have some around your home,” Devdan said. Despite their rarity and the fact that it was technically illegal to have possession of one, Devdan knew for certain that the Thorne’s kept bald eagles. Then again, they were the one who pushed for the laws protecting their beloved birds from non-magical sport.

“We like to make sure they keep their baser animal instincts despite the fact that they are more comfortable with human presence than other wild beasts. They come to us when we call them, though they are glad to see us when we come see the shows,” Ezra said with a smile on his face as he looked past Devdan.

Devdan followed the man’s gaze and found Adina knelt down in front of one of the spotted beasts. It nuzzled her face while she curled her fingers through its fur. Upon seeing Devdan’s gaze on her, she smiled and said, “Come meet Asma.”

Devdan took a few steps forward, but still kept his distance. Adina may be comfortable with the animal nuzzling her, its large powerful jaws so close to her face, but Devdan already wasn’t very comfortable around dogs, tamed and domesticated as they could be. He certainly wasn’t comfortable around something that resembled a dog—no matter the fact that science said they weren’t—with many times a stronger bite.

“Come rub her fur,” Adina said.

Devdan slowly kneeled down next to the animal, still keeping his distance and ready to spring back if the animal became aggressive. Slowly he curled his fingers into Asma’s dusty coarse fur.

“She likes you,” Adina said.

Devdan decided not to ask how Adina could tell and instead said, “Sorry.”

“About what?” Adina said, now returning the animal’s nuzzling with her own.

“I’m sure you hadn’t planned for your brother to be here when you invited me to see the hyenas,” he said bluntly.

Adina blinked, a light blush on her cheeks. When she recovered she asked, “Are all Americans this forward and indiscreet?”

“Anyone not from the United States will probably tell you they are. But the truth is if we were all this forward and indiscreet in the settings that mattered, we’d have a lot less problems,” Devdan replied and then added, “I wasn’t trying to offend you. You just looked like you hadn’t wanted me to mention it at dinner.”

Adina stopped nuzzling Asma and looked at Devdan with her head leaning on the hyena’s head. Then she said, “I didn’t. I… Many people pass through our home on business, but no one has quite caught my attention like you have. I was curious to find out why.”

If he weren’t already a cautious person, if she were just some forward girl that he met in a bar or club to have sex with, he might have humored her and flirted back. But Adina wasn’t some forward girl in a bar. She was the shy blushing daughter of the head of the Ethiopian magic family and this wasn’t a trap he was going to let himself fall into. Still, it was a precarious situation. He couldn’t outright reject her. That could be as bad as getting involved with her, but he couldn’t make it seem like he was reciprocating her curiosity even though he kept feeling the compulsion to do so.

He decided to be vaguely truthful.

“No one’s ever quite caught my attention like you have either,” he said, keeping his eyes locked in hers.

She blushed this time and turned her attention back to Asma while Devdan continued to stroke the hyena’s fur.

13

With all the boldness that made MaLeila infamous in the magical world, that single minded determination that helped her storm into meetings, council rooms, and even people’s houses like she owned the building—with all of that, she approached Dominik the day after Tsubame essentially told her she wanted her to seduce Dominik and told Dominik exactly what Tsubame had requested of her. Most people would have called it a gamble. MaLeila called it following her intuition, an intuition which rarely if ever lied to her when it was this strong.

Dominik at first stared at her for a few moments in which MaLeila didn’t falter, only waited expectantly for him to say something. Eventually he laughed, followed by saying, “So this is why you’re both infamous and famous?”

She followed up by saying that while Tsubame was her mentor, she didn’t necessarily agree with the woman’s methods all the time and that she preferred to be up front with people than play coy games, as valuable as the method may have been. Dominik appreciated that, adding that her blunt honestly was a refreshing change in a world ruled by political correctness. Then he added that while he’d very much like to remove his grandmother out the picture, especially since her obsession with immortality and conquering death kept their family from achieving the prestige and power she could attain while she lived, the problem was that they still needed the undead army. And though Dominik knew in theory how to summon it as it had been part of his magical training as a child, he lacked the magical talent to rip, manipulate, and then repair the otherworldly seams that kept space together and created what non-magical physics called distance.

In other words, Dominik couldn’t open portals, and to summon the undead army the way Marie had showed him he needed to be able to open one up. Having been unaware that it was a talent not all sorcerers had, MaLeila offered to teach him. He laughed at her at first, unable to believe that a sorceress with no formal magical training, not even in her twenties yet, could accomplish such a feat.

The laugh disappeared when she open a portal at his feet and threatened to throw him in it.

Still, while he agreed that they certainly needed a way to ensure that his grandmother didn’t go back on her word and end up aiding the Magic Council, because he despised them as much as MaLeila did and as much as Irvin had pretended he didn’t, his pride wouldn’t allow her to teach him. She didn’t push the matter. One of the many things that she learned from Tsubame was that it was better not to pry and push people. Usually, they’d come around, especially if there was no other option. Instead, MaLeila pondered over the fact that there was more animosity towards the Magic Council and the few powerful families they were always in tug-of-war with than anyone ever let on, even amongst the European families they considered their allies or under their control.

“Of course there is.” Dominik said to her when she told him as much days later when she encountered him again. “Especially amongst our generation. The Magical Council, powerful families who monopolize the wealth and power, queens and kings who rule with an iron fist while making the people they rule think they’re free—that’s all the older generations know. But people like you, me, even you’re the Long heir, we understand that we’re just as much slaves to the power struggle of the magical world as the non-magical people who don’t know it exists are.”

It was MaLeila asking him how long a generation was in the magical world (100 years according to Dominik) considering he was almost thirty years her senior that prompted him to make an agreement with her. He would let her teach him how to manipulate distance and space and in return he would teach her how to speak German and how to politically maneuver in the current climate of the Magical World. MaLeila agreed to the German and added that she’d ask about politics when she needed it.

“We’re so different, yet so alike,” Tsubame said when MaLeila revealed what she had done, seeming generally unperturbed as she usually was when her plans didn’t go the way she intended. “That’s certainly something I would have done in my youth.”

To MaLeila’s surprise, the woman left it at that and sent MaLeila on her way. It hadn’t escaped MaLeila’s notice that Tsubame had been surprisingly hands off in the war lately, spending most of her days watching the news, reading a book, or talking with Marie. It was a decided contrast to her normal manipulative, get go personality. As new as she was to the politics that governed the Magical World, MaLeila certainly knew when someone was hiding something from her and Tsubame certainly was.

She went to Marcel about it first, and while he admitted that the woman probably was hiding something because there was always some kind of plan and a thousand contingencies going through the woman’s head for every situation, he shrugged off her concerns. As far as he cared about the matter, Tsubame would reveal her intention eventually. After her conversation with Marcel, MaLeila decided that she needed someone in her corner. While she trusted that Marcel probably didn’t know any more about Tsubame’s plans than she did and while she also trusted that if he got even an inkling that Tsubame was planning anything malicious toward her, he would warn her about it, she also knew that Marcel wouldn’t seek to find out what the woman was planning, wouldn’t try to put the puzzle pieces together to get the full picture, because if there was one thing he had proven it was that he unconditionally trusted the woman. And despite not knowing what the woman was planning, he always helped her by making the world turn a blind eye to her if he could.

She debated with herself for a couple of weeks about going to Dominik about it, carefully observing him when she was teaching him magic and he was teaching her German, gaining amusement and a sense of familiarity as she learned that talking to him was like talking to and dealing with her peers back in high school. Not to say he wasn’t intelligent and as cunning as his grandmother when he wanted to be, but it was to say that he was a little cocky, arrogant, overconfident, and practically begging for his ego to be knocked down a few a pegs, always teasing her about acting like she was so much older than she was, always so serious, never really wanting to fight but always ready to confront and go toe to toe with those who came against her.

“And people say I act older than my age,” he teased one day.

Finally she let him in on her suspicions that Tsubame had much more planned than she was letting on. Dominik sat back and looked at her from across the table, paper and books he used to teach her his native language spread around them.

Then he said, “And yet again, you surprise me. I thought I had you rightfully pegged as Tsubame’s little follower like Marcel and Nika are.”

MaLeila decided not to defend or confirm his assumption about Marcel and Nika, instead saying, “I trust that whatever Tsubame plans her intentions are at least much better than the Magic Council’s and that at the very least her manipulations while sly are somewhat honest and only her pushing people faster down a path they were already going down on their own. But I’ll never trust that she’s not hiding something. If I know anything about Tsubame, she’s always got something hidden away in the sleeve of those fucking kimono dresses she’s so fond of.”

He helped her start by making a timeline. From when MaLeila first encountered her, to now, as they hid away with the Vosses. It was a surprisingly short list for someone that had created such chaos in the world.

“I don’t get it. She’s no different than any other terrorist sect or supposed dictator that your country has snuffed out. Why are they so afraid of her?”

“It’s not her,” MaLeila said offhandedly as they looked at the world map that was projected on the wall, pawns on the many countries, most of them western, involved in the conflict.  “It’s the idea of her and what she represents that they’re afraid of. If you look at the news reports, it looks like the world has forgotten about her, if they knew about her in the first place. But they haven’t.”

If Tsubame had been forgotten the impending war would have been over once she had been assumed dead with the rest of her people. But Tsubame had never been representing herself. Sure she had boasted a few times that she was dangerous, but when MaLeila looked at everything in hindsight, Dominik was right. Tsubame had never done anything truly dangerous. Even when she took the blame for Fathi’s murder and they had gone after her, the woman had done little more than deflect their attacks and escape. Tusbame hadn’t been trying to make the world fear her. She had been trying to make the world fear the domino effect caused by displacing hundreds and thousands of people who would push on the borders of Europe even more, make their way to Europe and inadvertently bring in more possible terrorists so that they could bomb an airport here, another busy shopping mall there, making their way further and further inland to Europe to get revenge and do to Europeans what had been allowed to happen in their ruined homelands. The Russian Clan was using that fear to justify their war, picking up allies along the way, the allies they had supposedly lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Dominik huffed when she mentioned the Soviet Union, saying, “I keep forgetting you grew up in the non-magical world. Don’t be so quick to believe that stuff. An empire like the USSR doesn’t just suddenly fall one day. The Romanovs planned that to get the Magic Council and the UN off their back and so they could regain their power and prominence behind closed doors. This refugee crisis and the rise of terrorist groups just gave them a reason to expand their borders again. And this time, many of the countries will willingly give in because of the protection Russia can give them from the invasion of supposed terrorists. The Thornes have never seen it that way since they don’t have to worry about invasion of their borders with two oceans to the east and west and friendly neighbors.”

“No,” MaLeila said. “I think they perfectly well understand the Russian’s fear. They just don’t want them to amass that kind of power. That’s why they were so willing to help Tsubame. They gain control of people by making them become indebted to them, under the guise of bringing peace and democracy. This is just one big excuse to have a war and decide who will dominate for good.”

“Looks like someone didn’t need my help figuring out the politics of this war after all,” Dominik said. “If you ask me, Tsubame not participating in the war is a wise move. By the time the dust settles, she’ll come out on top without even a morsel of debris on her.”

“It’s more than that,” MaLeila said. “It’s much more than that. Tsubame’s not a patient woman. She sped along a war that would have happened ten years from now if she had let everything take its natural course and didn’t care one bit about getting dirty in the process. Why would she all of a sudden want to slow down?”

“I think you’re putting too much thought into this,” Dominik said with a sigh.

Maybe she was. But Dominik didn’t know that Tsubame was already a queen in an alternate universe, so the question became why would she travel to another world to do what she already knew she could do? Tsubame’s plan hadn’t always been to recreate herself in MaLeila after all. And if the queen was doing it for the hell of it, why slow down? To draw out the game and get more enjoyment out of it? No. Tsubame wasn’t a sadist.

“It’s amazing though, isn’t it? Tsubame essentially told all of them that she plans to sit them down and rule in their stead, yet they still fight against each other anyways. Human nature is very peculiar. You can see yourself falling into a trap, see yourself doing the exact thing you were warned about, yet you can’t keep yourself from falling,” Dominik said leaning on the table next to MaLeila.

MaLeila didn’t miss the insinuation in Dominik’s statement and idly wondered for a few moments whether or not she should address it. Then, because she had never been one to shy away from addressing the elephant in the room, she said, “I have a feeling you’re not just talking about the Magic Council and the magic families knowingly falling into Tsubame’s trap.”

“Your feeling could be wrong.”

“My intuition is almost never wrong. And the times it was depended very much on your definition of wrong,” MaLeila pointed out.

“And do tell what your intuition’s telling you?” Dominik dared.

That despite the fact that she warned upfront about Tsubame’s intentions to have her seduce him, despite the fact that MaLeila warned him that she was supposed to use him for her own gain, despite giving him every reason not to trust her, he had decided to trust her anyway and keep falling for her. Though she hadn’t been trying to charm him on purpose and explicitly told him that it had been Tsubame’s plan from the beginning so that he wouldn’t charmed by her, it seemed her upfront attitude only further encouraged him. His glances at her as she worked on German didn’t escape her, or how the way she laughed could distract him from whatever he was doing, or how even though he managed to contain it she still got the impression of jealously from him when Marcel would sweep in and steal her away.

Finally MaLeila replied, “That despite the fact that I’ve given you all the reasons why you shouldn’t trust me, you’ve fallen for me despite it.”

Suddenly, MaLeila was very aware of Dominik’s presence as he leaned closer to her and said, “Or maybe because of it. Will that be a problem?”

If MaLeila were honest with herself, no it wasn’t. It was empowering to see this man fall for her still after she had warned him not to. If MaLeila continued to be honest with herself, she took pleasure in watching Dominik continue to knowingly fall for her and wondered just how far he would allow himself to go still knowing that even though she liked him well enough as a friend, she didn’t care for him romantically.