The door opened, and a big, burly Deuce with mussed dark hair and the beginnings of a beard stepped onto the stoop. For someone who was close to her father’s age, he looked like he was in his twenties.
“Cyntag!” His voice was boomingly loud, which was how she’d heard him so clearly on the phone. “Long time no anything.” He gave Cyn a back-slapping guy hug, then turned to her. “Well, well, what do we have here?” He thrust out his hand. “Jay Caruso. And you are…”
“Ruby Salazaar,” she said as he enveloped her hand in his.
“Nice to meet you.” He waved them inside the warm cottage. “Come in, make yourselves at home.”
The place was cluttered, though not dirty. Papers and whiteboards covered with calculations made her long for her parents. Framed pictures of auroras adorned every wall. Off to the side sat a huge backpack.
“Coffee? Tea?” Jay said from the kitchen, pouring from a pot. “Something to warm you up?” He shivered. “Spending two days in the wilderness is a bit much even for my Alaskan blood.” No wonder he smelled of fresh air and pines.
She rubbed her upper arms. “Coffee sounds great.”
Cyn pulled her against his chest. “Got everything I need right here.”
Jay gave him a speculative look. “I see that.” He handed Ruby the mug and set out milk and sugar. Then he opened a wooden cabinet and poured out two shot glasses of whiskey. “Bet I can tempt you with this.”
Cyn waved the glass under his nose. “You remembered.”
“It was the only way I could regale you with my fascinating studies of the aurora borealis.” Jay cleared off the couch and gestured for them to sit. “You said you’re here because of Brom. So you know he called me about the Deus Vis fracturing in Miami that coincided with a vision he’d been having for years. Where is he? I haven’t heard from him since his initial call to me.”
Cyn and Ruby filled him in on what had happened, her gaze going to an aquarium on the floor that contained a prism instead of fish.
Jay finished off his whiskey, shaking his head. “Will he be all right?”
“Once we kill the one who summoned it,” Cyn said. “We need to know what you found out.”
Jay braced his elbows on his thighs as he sat forward. “When Brom had the first vision, Justin wouldn’t tell us what element he was using to fracture the Deus Vis. He said no one knew but him, and if it was doing something dangerous, he wanted to keep it that way. I don’t think he believed his father’s vision yet. I told them how to make this, something I’d been working on for years.” He tapped the aquarium with his foot. “Brom called and said they could see the fracturing. Justin’s prototype pulled the Deus Vis ribbons so hard they completely fell apart. The solar storm we were experiencing at the time wasn’t particularly strong, but it was enough to weaken the ribbons. That exacerbated the effect of the element Justin was using.”
Jay went to the cabinet, took out the bottle of whiskey, and poured more in their glasses. “Brom called me back a few days later and said that Justin had obviously destroyed his device—and was killed for it. The good news was that the fracturing stopped. Then Brom came here, broken and catatonic. I tried to talk to him several times over the years he’s lived here, but he wouldn’t even see me.” He gave a slow shake of his head. “He saved a lot of lives, but all he could focus on were the two he didn’t. I think it made him crazy.”
Ruby took a long drink of her coffee, hoping it would warm the cold that truth left in her heart. “Brom’s vision of Black Doom came back.”
“Yeah, and he came to me pretty freaked out, especially when he learned about the big upcoming solar storm. Apparently someone re-created your father’s technology. But Brom had new information. He saw you trying to destroy the cause of the fracturing—and the device exploded. Not only did it kill you, but it also totally fractured the Deus Vis. And that narrowed down the element that Justin was using to a few choices. I got my hands on them, which wasn’t easy, and ran some experiments.”
Jay got up and dug through his backpack, extracting a glass tube. He killed the lights, grabbed a black light, and mounted it on clips over the aquarium. The ribbons were visible as they undulated in the water. He lowered the tube into the water, and the ribbons began to pull toward it. “This is a weak example. There are formulations that would need to be figured out to do it properly. But you get the idea.”
“What’s in the tube? It looks empty,” Ruby said.
“Deus Vis. There’s only a trace amount in the tube. Deus Vis isn’t magnetic, per say, but it acts like one, drawing more of the essence toward it. Your father did it, Ruby. He found a way to free us, to make Deus Vis portable. He would have been a hero if it hadn’t ended up being such a bad thing.”
“How?” Cyn asked, studying the vial.
“It stems from hydrogen and helium,” Jay began, “the two most basic—and prevalent—elements in the universe.”
Ruby leaned forward for a closer look at the tube. She saw just the tiniest flicker of silver. A trick of the light or the Deus Vis? Hydrogen brought to mind water, H2O. And helium. She thought of how she used to suck air out of balloons backstage at Mon’s magic shows. Gosh, she really should’ve paid more attention during her tutoring sessions.
“Mundanes would kill for this technology,” Jay muttered. He pulled the vial from the water and set it carefully on a towel. “To date, there is no practical fusion reactor in use. Justin discovered a way to harness the energy of these basic elements. No small feat.”
“How does it work?” Cyntag asked.
“Hydrogen plasma is superheated. The isotopes collide and combine, then fuse. In labs, it takes massive electromagnets to confine the plasma. It took some time, but I figured out how your father did it. He used an orb.”
Magick and science, a dangerous combination.
Jay ran his finger down the tube. “What I can’t figure out is how the orb is maintained for any length of time. Eventually they disintegrate.”
“The device we saw in Darren’s lab was metal,” Ruby said.
Jay tapped his temple. “Ah, titanium, maybe. It’s one of the few elements that resists magick, meaning it can maintain the energy of the orb for an extended time. And thus the fusion process. The fusion draws in the Deus Vis, channels it.” He frowned. “And that fits in with Brom’s vision of doom. The process isn’t stable. Think about it. This fusion is the same reaction that fuels stars. It’s how our sun works. The fusion gives off massive amounts of energy and heat.” Jay raked a hand through his hair. “Combine it with the upcoming coronal mass ejection, and we’re talking the perfect storm, so to speak.”
“Smith—Purcell used that phrase about the ejection,” Ruby said. “What is it exactly?”
“That’s the blast of charged particles that hits the Earth a couple of days after the eruption. It bombards our magnetic field, disrupts communications, and, unbeknownst to most of the scientists studying this, distorts our Deus Vis—”
“And a device that acts like a magnet for Deus Vis is going to draw all that instability into one place.” Cyn’s dark eyes were bleak.
“That kicks off a chain of events. If the Deus Vis within the reactor isn’t dismantled, it will fuel a fusion process that won’t stop. The heat and energy released will cause massive damage.”