White Winter (The Black Year Series Book 2) (8 page)

The corner of Alice’s mouth twitched upward. “She worked with our analysts to track a rogue vampire, built a case, and pitched it to me. I sent her to Los Angeles; she should be back in a week.”

Wow
. Jonas said.
I didn’t even know we could do that.

“I read Damien’s report. How do you think you did?”

He felt his face redden. “About that. I didn’t know I was being tested.”

She smiled.

He clenched his fists in his lap. “And did you know the town would be like that?”

“No,” she said, looking away. “I thought I was sending you to meet an old friend, and see that the Agency does some good in the world. You can thank Marcus for what happened; the peacekeeper program may never recover, and Arthur’s beside himself.”

“He kind of should be, right? I mean he killed-”

“Your team killed over a hundred people in November. Give it a few years; you’ll catch up.”

His breath caught in his throat.

She sighed. “You did well against the Order, but I’ve known Arthur longer than I’ve known you, and you need to see the bigger picture. I sent teams to check other towns in the program. This wasn’t isolated.”

Jonas . “How many?”

“All of them, so far. Either the puppeteers were corrupted, or replaced, or given artifacts like Arthur’s chair. Tens of thousands are dead. We couldn’t isolate all the survivors; we’ll have to run interference in the media. I lost two human teams in Asia, so we won’t know the full extent of the damage until after sunset. I’ve asked the Chinese government to-”

She kept talking, but Jonas wasn’t listening. He felt sick.
This is it. This is
how it starts, and I caused this somehow, but how does this fit into the-

He looked up and realized his mother was staring at him.

She peeled his barrier open like gift-wrapping, rifled through a few months of his memory as if she was browsing a magazine. She saw him and Eve. She saw the prophecy. She took a particular interest in Fangston’s secretary.

She left his mind. He gasped. It felt like she’d taken a scalpel to his eye.

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Sometimes-”

“I can’t believe-”

“-I really hate Victor for-”

“-you just…”

“-leaving me to deal with you at this age.”

He trembled. His eyes watered.

“You’re grounded,” she said.

CHAPTER 9

How can she-

“Grounded. Restricted to the facility.”

But-

“You can go to the Macreadys’. You should have done it sooner.” She tapped her headset and started talking to someone called Chief.

Jonas shuddered.
This is Fangston all over again. She just-

“Don’t be melodramatic, Jonas. You-”

“Stay out of my head!” he shouted, clamping his barrier down. It hurt, and she could tear through it again, but he was going across the desk if she did.

“Hold on one second, Chief.” Alice tapped her headset, then said, “Jonas?”

“What?”

“There comes a time in a boy’s life when he stands up to his mother or father. It’s the last argument, the one that makes you a man.”

“Yeah, well, this-”

“This is
not
that time, and I am
not
that woman.
Sit down.
”

Jonas blinked, and the red haze in front of his eyes lifted. He hadn’t even realized he’d stood and taken a step toward the desk. Alice was still seated, but she was tensed to spring. He sat back down.

“A priest - an active apostle with a guardian - has issued a prophecy against you,” she said.

“I thought you didn’t believe in that stuff.”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. If the wrong person finds out about this, they’ll want you dead.”

“And you don’t?”

Her jaw clenched.

Jonas blushed. “Sorry,” he said. “Having you tear through my mind like that really hurt. It still does,” he said, pressing his palm against his right eyebrow.

“Don’t hide things from me. I can’t afford secrets, Jonas. Not after what Marcus did.”

Silence. She tapped her headset and started talking again. His eyes burned.
I guess I should stop expecting her to apologize for things.

A minute later, she said, “Damien’s waiting for you outside,” and waved him toward the door before turning back to her screens.

He stood, wincing at the sharp pain in his forehead, and walked out.

“And Chief,” she said into the headset, “find out everything you can about a witch called Linda Aiza. She may be the key to all this.”

He closed the door behind him.

♘

Damien was outside, arms crossed, leaning against the wall. His face was impassive, as usual. He waved Jonas over, Madoc’s phylactery dangling like a charm bracelet from his wrist. “Ready to train, Jonas?”

“Actually, I’m a little-”

“What? You have somewhere else to be?” Wrinkles around his eyes.

Jonas stared at him, fists clenched, but the pain in his head stopped the red haze from clouding his mind again.
I’m better than this,
he thought, then realized,
I’m acting like Bert.
“No, sir. I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

♘

Damien didn’t say anything as they rode the elevator up, and Jonas was glad of it. They went straight to training room five.

He’d always wondered what TR-5 was for. Unlike the others, its floor, walls, and ceiling were gray rune-warded metal, haphazardly marred by dents and scorch marks. Instead of large viewing windows, it had horizontal Plexiglas slits one-foot-wide and two-inches-tall. Damien closed the metal shutters when they walked in. He also locked the door. A tub full of ice stood in the center of the room.

Jonas sat on the hard edge of the ice bath, his feet not quite reaching the floor, his hands balled into fists as he waited for something to happen. He wondered if he would feel something or if it would be visual, like the time he’d destroyed a protective ward in the Order hideout, beneath the Agency. The ice cubes clicked against each other behind him. He felt like he was sitting on the lip of a gigantic soda. It should have been funny, but vampires in water sunk like rocks because of their denser bones.

Damien spoke into his wrist. “Madoc?”

Madoc appeared in the room. He was thin, with gray skin, and wore wire-frame glasses perched on a thin, hooked nose. Jonas gaped.

“What’s wrong with you?” Madoc asked, looking at Jonas.

“You’re real.”

“Of course I’m real. What did you think, you were hearing voices?”

“I mean, you’re in the room.”

Madoc rolled his eyes and said, “What’s left of my body is in Damien’s hand. This is just a-” He yelped, and Damien’s eyes creased in amusement as Jonas tried to touch the specter. His hand passed through him. “Stop that!”

Jonas grinned and pulled his hand back.

Madoc scowled, cleared his throat, then clasped his hands behind his back and started to pace. “The universe almost always follows rules, like gravity and the conservation of energy. When those rules are broken, we call it a miracle. When they’re bent, we call it magic.”

Madoc crossed his arms. “Miracles operate based on faith and the whims of God. There may be rules to them, but if there are, they’re either too complicated for us to understand or we can’t see the whole picture. Magic, on the other hand, will always produce the same consequence from the same action. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

It was 3 a.m. He’d managed to catch a few hours of sleep between the incident with Fangston and the drive to Temperance, but he was mentally and physically exhausted. Still, it was interesting to see Madoc speak on a subject he had mastery over, if only because the specter seemed so uncharacteristically confident.

Madoc sighed. “I doubt you do. We’re going to start with fire. You understand that if you don’t do exactly as I say, you’ll die?”

Jonas swallowed. “Yes.”

Madoc reached up like he was pulling something off a shelf, and a thick, leather-bound book appeared in his hand. He waved his free hand at it and the pages flipped, then stopped. He hung the book in midair in front of Jonas. It was a diagram, a simple circle, crossed by three lines that met in the middle, like a wheel with three spokes. There were different symbols in each of the three sections.

“Watch,” Madoc said, and traced his finger along the lines, following each spoke to the center, then back out and arcing to the next until he ended up where he started. “You need to visualize the diagram and the motion in your head. Don’t worry about the runes, just the lines.”

Damien took a step back.

Jonas pictured the diagram and the motion Madoc had showed him. He went through the whole cycle several times, faster and faster, focusing his will into the task, until he could feel the motion as a kind of bellows, or engine, squeezing… something into the center of the design.

Nothing happened. “It’s not working,” Jonas said. He saw Damien relax.

“Of course nothing happened. If it was that easy, people would be setting themselves on fire every time they doodled in class,” Madoc said. “Now look at the runes,” he said, pointing to each in turn. “The first is
anapnoi
. This one is
kafto
. The last is
kafsima
.”

“Air, heat, and fuel,” Damien said, “the three things you need to make fire.”

Madoc turned to him and said, “You speak Greek?”

“It used to be more common,” Damien answered, shrugging.

“Why are the runes in Greek?” Jonas asked.

“The runes aren’t Greek, they aren’t even words, they’re just representations of something else,” Madoc said.

Jonas opened his mouth to ask what “something else” was supposed to be, but he yawned instead.
I don’t need to understand this, I just need two packs of blood and some sleep.
“Just tell me what to do.”

“Visualize the pattern, speaking one of the words for each section, but - and this is important -
only do it once.
”

“Okay,” Jonas said, and Damien tensed again. Jonas pictured the cycle, and said, “Anapnoi, kafto, kafsima,” ending each word as he came to the center, inhaling as he circled to the next spoke. As he finished the cycle, he felt a slight warmth spread out from the center of his chest to his limbs.

“Did you feel anything?” Madoc asked.

“Warmth,” Jonas said, tapping his sternum.

“Good. I think that’s enough for today,” Madoc said, looking pleased with himself.

Damien nodded. “If you say so. We’ll—”

“Really?” Jonas said, allowing the irritation he felt to creep into his voice.

Madoc and Damien looked at him.

“I mean, seriously? You scared me with stories of nuclear explosions. This was what all the fuss was about?”

Madoc scowled and opened his mouth to speak, but Damien beat him to it. “The boy has a point, Madoc. You have to admit, it’s a little anti-climactic.”

Madoc crossed his arms and squeezed his eyes shut. “Fine. Hold out your hands, like this.” Madoc put his hands out, palms facing Jonas, his thumbs and index fingers forming a triangle.

Jonas mimicked the gesture.

“Now do the same thing you did before, but picture the symbol between your hands and keep cycling. I doubt anything will happen, but it’s worth a try.”

CHAPTER 10

Jonas focused on the space in front of him, picturing the three-spoked wheel and speaking the words as he completed each third of the motion. He felt a chill this time; it spread from his chest, traveling along his arms, until the air between his hands shimmered.

“Keep going.”

Jonas blinked as three strands of light formed, extending from his hands toward the middle, just like the diagram, except they didn’t quite meet.

“Focus, Jonas, it has to be perfect.”

Jonas shut out everything but the pattern, enunciating the words, feeling like a cool breeze was blowing across his skin. He shivered and a small flame, like the burning end of a match, flickered into existence.

“Amazing,” Madoc said.

Damien raised an eyebrow. “What’s he going to do, light candles with it?”

Madoc scowled. “I spent
weeks
studying and trying to light candles before my master would let me learn more.”

Jonas stared in wonder at the hair-thin strands of sunlight. They pulsed in turn as he spoke the words, shining gently as they spun like a slow whirlpool, so slowly it would probably take a full minute for them to make a complete circuit. He wondered what would happen if they spun faster.