“I’m a friend to mage royalty,” Mason said. At least as long as that “friendship” lasted.
Khan’s lip curled. “You do not take Mab seriously enough.”
“Who’s not serious?” The voice came from behind. Custo prowled out, uninvited, to join them. He leaned on the stone banister near the table. The angel looked like one dangerous motherfucker, especially when he had that wolf grin stretching across his face.
Cari didn’t seem to object to his presence however—Mason recalled they’d formed a club last night while everyone else was fighting. She leaned toward Death. “And Makers are mages?”
Mason closed his eyes. He knew what she was asking. The human thing again. She wanted to know if Khan knew, and what he thought about it. But this wasn’t supposed to be about him. Makers make. Done.
Khan sat back, crossed a leg, enjoying himself at Mason’s expense. “Makers are Shadow and Light. Such is the requirement to create anything that lasts, that can hold. Michael is still playing with that puppet.”
“By the way, the other kids are getting jealous,” Custo put in.
“I’ll make more. I used to make a whole collection for Fletcher.” Just thinking of his son made him worry. There’d been no contact since yesterday’s text about the Lure. If not for a phone appointment with Webb in an hour, Mason would be going out of his mind.
Fletcher’s fine. A human made a delivery to Webb House early this morning. He was soaked by two rotten kids with water guns.
And you know this how? Mason pinned Custo with a glare.
He shrugged. The angel watching over Webb House picked it out of the delivery man’s head.
The Order is watching Webb House? Mason didn’t know how he felt about that. If Webb discovered it, there could be trouble, in spite of his connection to Brand and Bastian. Jack Bastian was tolerated, which wasn’t the same thing as accepted, and a far cry from embraced.
Jack Bastian said it was part of your agreement.
Mason’s heart beat harder, sweat breaking out on his neck. Took him a sec to realize that Cari and Khan were watching him in silence. “What?”
Then understanding dawned on Cari’s face. “Angels are telepathic. They can speak right to a soul.”
Damn it. She knew he was human, but he didn’t want to be obvious about it.
“Why is this about me, anyway?” So he made things, so what? “Weren’t we supposed to be talking about Maeve, or Mad Mab, or whatever the crazy fae queen is called?”
Khan lost his good humor, too. “What’s to talk about? Dolan is the mage offspring of the mad queen. The Dolan line has always known to kill any females born to them, to stop Mab from entering the world again. Cari’s father was either ignorant, or was too weak to do it.”
Cari shook her head. “Not weak. He loved me.”
“And Caspar was not ignorant either,” Mason told him. “His library alone contains more knowledge than all the other Houses combined.”
“Bah,” Khan said. “He knew better. By the time you were born, he had to know that Maeve was mad.”
“He controlled her. And I can control her, too,” Cari said. “I’m getting better and better at it.”
Mason kept his mouth shut. She already knew what he thought about her ability to manage that limitless Shadow. No one could control it.
Khan tilted his head as if he were talking to a child. “How long has Maeve been with you?”
Cari exhaled audibly. “About two weeks.”
“Bear Mad Mab for a year, and you will welcome her into your mind, into your body.”
“Cari’s father lived with Maeve for decades.”
“He was a man. Dolan is a female line. Maeve would have been but a whisper to him.” Khan looked at Cari. “Is she a whisper to you?”
Her eyes got that full look, as if her mind was filling with awful conclusions. She shook her head. No.
Mason bore down on Khan’s point. “If Maeve is so evil . . .”
Khan shook his head. “Not evil. If she were evil, then good in equal force could be marshaled against her. The fae don’t recognize good or evil; they live on whim. They are elemental, essential, like death and dreams. You can’t fight an elemental. You can only keep it in its place. The sun must stay in the sky. The seas must not ravage the land. Dreams must stay within Twilight, lest they become nightmares on Earth.”
“That would be Order,” Custo said under his breath.
Khan glowered at the Shadow-darkened angel. “Wolf, you asked me to kill you once. I’ll oblige you now.”
Cari’s gaze went distant, internal. “The angel that threw the spear at me. He knows about Maeve?”
Custo answered. “Yes. He’s on a personal quest, though. Not Order sanctioned. He is being tracked by a team, led by the best.” He looked over at Mason. “You met him, I think. Laurence?”
Mason bobbed a nod to say, yes, they’d met. The mention made him restless and uncomfortable. Laurence had looked inside him. He’d seen all the horrible things that Mason had never wanted brought to light again.
Khan gazed off into the trees, his alien eyes squinting. Wild animals. “Tell Adam that the children should not play on the grounds today.” He looked at Cari. “Maybe for a few days.”
“Will do,” Custo said.
Cari put a hand to Mason’s knee. “I should go.”
She meant she didn’t want to be the reason anyone here got hurt. If her thoughts kept going down that road, she was going to make a terrible decision about herself.
She’s a keeper, Custo said.
Didn’t work that way among magekind, so Mason didn’t answer him. He took Cari’s hand, and she stood when he did. “We’ll head out right away.”
Her lips pressed together, as if she were going to suggest something. Mason knew what was on her mind—her “I should go” had given her away.
Mason shook his head before she could put her thought into words. For reasons he wouldn’t bother to enumerate to the very smart Cari Dolan, he said simply, “Together.”
Xavier strode into the crowd that moved in constantly morphing packs through Harvard Square. He attached himself to the back of a family. Camouflage. The Order was pursuing him. He wiped the mind of a father mid-conversation with his adult children, and supplanted his face in their memories. The true father wandered dumbly on with the wave of people. A baseball cap and an animated discussion about the children’s university coursework were his disguise as angels filtered through the throng in search.
“—so then Dr. Schmidt, the program chair, said I could look at witchcraft in The Scarlet Letter in terms of the modern mage movement. I mean, the concept of ‘the woods’ alone will be an entire section of the paper.”
Xavier had to resist the impulse to look around and gauge how close the angels were. He felt their eyes on the back of his neck. He hid under the voice and mind chatter all around him. Music up ahead sent punctuated ripples of sound all around. As he hadn’t been in ages, he was self-conscious of his rank smell. Would one of these young angels think to use his nose?
“Dad, are you listening?” The young woman grabbed his arm, and Xavier was forced to look down at her. “So I submitted a proposal to the department’s top scholar’s program, and in light of current events, they awarded the grant to me.”
Adversity had never deterred him before. But now that he’d been identified, and at least part of his mission revealed, success was not assured. His heart ached with disappointment he could not afford. All this time. All this waiting. The excruciating silence of the days. The loneliness.