A question glinted in his eyes.
She looked down at his mouth and went tingly when she saw the slight, wondering smile that appeared there. She smiled back. It was an answer. Yes. Permission. What she’d really wanted for her big birthday.
But the kiss never happened.
“Cari!” Liv had shouted.
And the moment between her and Mason had exploded.
Never happened.
A moment. That’s all it had been. And then, soon after, all magekind had found out just how dangerous a stray could be.
A two-and-a-half-hour drive, and Mason arrived at the deserted campground that was his rendezvous location between the Taconic Mountains of Webb House and the suburban Boston estate of Dolan. Drought had made kindling out of the underbrush, and so the park had been closed rather than risk a forest fire. That’s what all the notices said on the narrow drive to the park’s interior, though the thickets of birch and maple trees looked lush enough to him. A cluster of cabins ringed a central lodge.
He’d just signed away his son.
Fletcher was eight, almost nine. And he would not reach his majority in magekind until he was seventeen. The time until then was almost exactly double Fletcher’s life. The early years had gone by so fast, but Mason knew that from now until then each moment would creep by, snickering at his agony.
Fletcher was safe; that’s all that mattered. Mason held on to that fact with everything he had left.
Three angels, in all their eerie perfection, exited the main lodge as his car slowed to a stop. Jack Bastian was not among them, and Mason was glad for that reprieve. He didn’t want to hear one more platitude about how the Order was looking out for Fletcher, too. Light was just as opportunistic as Shadow.
Mason got out of his car and slammed the door shut.
A white-haired angel came forward. Though his body had the ease of youth, the man had the weight of ages in his eyes. If Mason had any feeling left, he might have been frightened. Not today.
“I’m Laurence.” The angel didn’t try to shake his hand, which Mason knew would’ve broken him. He was not in the mood to shake hands. “These are my companions Jorge and Frederick.”
Mason barely glanced at them. He grimaced what he could of an acknowledgment.
“This way.” Laurence gestured toward the lodge door.
Mason followed them inside. The place smelled of fresh wood; logs and beams made it rustic. Benches and cafeteria-style tables were stacked over by one wall. A gurney waited in the middle of the room. One table had been opened to hold a metal suitcase with tools couched in some kind of foam.
The plague scars. To make him look like a mage.
With his shroud of Shadow in place, Cari would not know him for what he was.
“If you will disrobe,” Laurence said. Polite words uttered by power.
Mason got the feeling that the angel could look right into him. That he could see the scraping filth that had been his early childhood. The tough living as a boy, like a stray dog begging for scraps. The hours he’d spent squatting in the dark, attempting to master his Shadow craft, trying to make something of himself as he labored with clumsy fingers at this or that invention. Then the teenager, showing off for pretty mage girls. The wild hope that was Livia. So reckless, loving danger. Then being shut out of her House, a dog again. And finally Fletcher, who’d made the world and this life finally make sense.
But Laurence didn’t speak of any of that, though Mason knew for sure that the angel had seen it all in one glance. “Your clothes, please.”
Mason nodded. He stripped until he was naked—in front of them he was naked regardless—and then climbed up on the table to lie on his back.
One of the angels brought up a tool. “An anesthetic.”
But Laurence stayed his hand. “He’s numb already.”
And it was true. Mason felt the burns as if from a distance, an abstract kind of pain. One on his chest, and another at the lymph node near his groin. Sizzle, snap.
The wounds had to be able to be hidden by clothes, or Webb would have noticed their absence.
His thigh burned. Then some scattered pocks like blisters. And another tool to accelerate the healing process. Each welt itched and crackled as his flesh reknit. And he didn’t really care.
The worst of them were covered with cotton bandages and tape—drug store stuff. And then he dressed to leave again. He didn’t like being here; didn’t like the knowing gaze of one angel in particular.
But as Mason made to leave, Laurence touched him on the arm. “You wondered once how you might perceive your soul.”
Laurence had seen too much.
Mason shuddered. He didn’t want to know. Didn’t need proof to distance him even more from his son. Not anymore. Please not today.
But Laurence didn’t pity him this time. “Mason Stray.”
Every atom of Mason’s body reverberated, as if struck with a tuning fork. The welts finally ached, pain blooming everywhere, especially his heart. He staggered.
“You are your soul.”
Mid-scrawl on a notepad, an inset window popped up on Cari’s laptop screen over her flooded e-mail inbox. The window showed streaming video of an old blue car, what an optimist might call vintage, awaiting entry to the Dolan grounds. A dialogue box below the video read, Mason Stray, here on business for Ms. Dolan.
Here we go.
She looked at the time. 2:35 p.m. He was running late.
Lifting wards now, she typed to notify the guardhouse.
A deep thought and Cari reached for the ward stones buried deep within the foundation of the house. The resonant response in her umbra grounded her. Stones meant strength, an echo that rippled through the diffuse magic in the room.
In the window on her computer screen, Mason’s car crossed the wardline and drove out of sight, toward the main house.
She had to remind herself that he was like her—he’d already contracted and survived the mage plague, and was not a carrier. Mason was safe for her House and her family. But his arrival still made her uneasy—she did not like people going in and out. Cari moved to meet him herself; she didn’t want the ceremony of staff leading him to her. It felt awkward with a stray, with Mason, as if he were beneath her. She would meet Mason head on.
She found her stepmother in the hall looking out one of the slender windows that flanked the sides of the massive front door. Scarlet managed to be elegant, even in mourning—black slacks, black silk. Pearls. Her silver hair styled away from her face, highlighting her high cheekbones. The look of censure was gone from her eyes though. Progress.
Blue streaked past the window, which had to be Mason, winding around the driveway to park.
“I don’t like him. What he did to poor Livia Walker.” Scarlet put a hand to her mouth and shook her head, as if the scandal were happening right now.
Or maybe not progress. Mason was just juicier gossip.
Cari felt a tired smile coming on. At least her stepmother was distracted from both her grief and the upset of losing Erom Vauclain. The story of Livia Walker made a very effective cautionary tale about what happened when a mage girl forgot her House.
Once upon a time, it could’ve been Cari. Easily. Burned a little, remembering. The Mysterious Mason Stray, so tempting, so dangerous.
But Cari refused to think about what had almost happened at Walden Pond. It was ancient history, anyway.
Shortly thereafter word had gotten out that Liv was pregnant, probably from fooling around with him before they’d broken up. As Mason was stray, he couldn’t marry Liv, a House-born mage woman. So he’d convinced her to run away with him, to have the baby—a baby that because of Mason would be accepted nowhere, just like him. And as the child constituted Liv’s firstborn, no other mage would marry her and risk the bastard child making succession or inheritance claims.