Faith Hunter - Host

Standing at the door, I inspected the room. Other than the two sets of weapons and a small case of liquids, there was nothing to indicate why Cheran was here or what he was here to do. Or rather, who he was here to kill. Because a mage who traveled with poisons was on assignment. Cheran was an assassin mage. The gift was rare—and deadly.

Unnerved, I made sure my guise was in place, then slipped out of the room and down the steps, confident that no one would remember me. I was in front of Thorn’s Gems, stopped by a long line of children and parents leaving, chattering about the night in the mage’s den, before I heard Cheran’s thoughts. He was approaching from the east, talking to two humans, whom he despised, thinking them stupid and traitorous. They were Elder Culpepper and his son, Derek. While I couldn’t hear their words, I was able to follow Cheran’s mind. Father and son were planning something against the town and against me, hoping to enlist Cheran’s help. Before I learned what it was, Murphy’s Law stepped in and the men were interrupted.

Inside my shop, I lifted the Apache Tear and almost put it back over my head. Instead, I carried the talisman to the workroom and dug into a box of snowflake obsidian. I found a nugget of roughly the same dimensions and a tiny shard of black jasper.

Quickly, I did a down-and-dirty incantation, filling the jasper with a simple conjure for heating bathwater. I then wrapped and strung them together, the jasper hidden in a wire knot, so the Tear looked like the amulet prepared by the Enclave council. Unless he did a deep inspection, the new, fake one, with the jasper so close they touched, would look like the original to a metal mage’s sight, the conjure in the jasper providing the radiance of power. I hung the phony on my necklace; the real Tear went into the drawer at my worktable.

As I strung the fake Tear on, I noticed that one of my amulets was glowing, a small citrine nugget shaped like a pear with a nub of a stem and a small leaf, an amulet I hadn’t made but had purchased at a swap meet. It was one of three wild mage-stones I owned, created in the time of the first neomages. I still didn’t know what they did, but I had noticed that the citrine sometimes glowed when the wheels of the cherub Amethyst were around. On a hunch, I went to the metal boxes that stored the stone recovered from the wheel’s crash site midway up the Trine.

The boxes were in the stockroom, lined against the wall in a short stack. I had been lazy about getting things in the stockroom put away—my job in the business—and it had been easier to simply push them aside than to find a logical place for them. Where did one store shards from the wheels of a cherub?

I hefted one of the boxes to the floor and opened its keyed lock, peeled back the metal straps that held it closed, and raised the lid. “Son of a seraph,” I whispered, swearing.

Inside were two double-fist-sized hunks of stone, vaguely flame-shaped. The last time I looked at them, they had been pale, nearly clear, and so empty of power that they could have passed for midquality quartz. Now the crystals were purple and lavender, rich shades of color swirling in vague curves. As I watched, one mutated, revealing a grape-toned iris and a pupil of deeper purple. The eye looked at me, pupil contracting, focusing, and the stone seemed to vibrate, a long, slow pulsation, half purr, half heartbeat.

Without thinking, I reached in and touched the stone. A faint electric charge tingled against my fingertip. Mage-sight came on with a snapping sensation and I jumped back as a lavender serpent undulated up from the stone, swaying in front of me. Its hood swelled open, cobralike, and a tongue so deeply purple it looked black tasted the air, menacing. Its body was composed of eyes, all watching me. Its mouth opened, tissues within bloodless and deadly, white fangs snapping down. I started to turn away.

The snake struck, demon fast, fangs buried in my throat, stopping my breath. I tensed and clawed my throat. But there was nothing tangible. Something—venom? poison? — pulsed into me, hot and burning. No, not demon fast. Seraph fast.

My heart beat, a single throb. Instantly, I was here, not here, eyes closed. Vertigo gripped me and I swayed on my feet, light-headed in both worlds as a whirlwind of voices filled my mind, singing a harmonious scale.

I opened my eyes to a place of dappled purple light. The world was shades of purples, but nothing in it made sense. The floor beneath my feet was a purple deeper, darker than wine grapes, to my sides were spiraling hues of lilac and violet, and overhead, a shade of delicate orchid. Even the air was a lavender mist, and if sound had a color, it too would have been purple. The note of the song changed, a dirge dying away, and I heard beneath it a crooning hum. I caught my balance and searched for a recognizable pattern in the purple world. My mind was free, floating, tethered to my body, which was still in the shop.

I had been in the otherness, a place not of Earth, before, and I knew how it worked, sort of. This was much like that place-no-place. A here-not-here. Time and reality were different. I could be wounded in one plane of reality and not in the other, time could be slower in one reality than the other, I could move faster than I could on Earth. But if I died in one reality, I was probably dead in both.

This place was different from the otherness I had visited before—a different otherness or a different location in the otherness, I didn’t know which. More stuff I didn’t know.

I breathed in and the soft air, slightly arid and tart, moved into my lungs, When I exhaled, the air was clear, moving through the lavender atmosphere like a pale stream before being absorbed.

My heart beat. It was a slow sound, like the slow-motion fall of a wave on the beach. I looked down and focused on myself. Though I had glanced at myself in the otherness, I had never found the time to study my spirit vision, as each time before, I had been in battle, dying. And I was…different. Very different.

I was still short and too slim, but here I wore scarlet armor and black chain mail, and boots that latched on with flat, black buckles. A full-sleeve, black chain-mail shirt lay against a scarlet silk knit tee. Warm on my skin, the mail was a heavy, pervasive weight that came to midthigh. An over-the-shoulder coif covered my shoulders, forehead, neck, and head, leaving only my face bare. Over it, buckled to my torso, I wore a scarlet cuirass shaped to my form, my amulet necklace strapped to the cuirass with links of black steel, arranged as if it was a decorative piece. Articulated gauntlets, leg armor, and a segmented girdle were scarlet metal as well, but my arms and shoulders were armor-free, sheathed in the black chain mail over heavy silk underclothes. The boots on my feet were soft bloodred leather, not steel. I carried a shield and two swords.

I was half armored for battle. No helmet, no mace, no spiked flail, no battle hammer or ax. Which was a weird thought as I had never practiced with the heavier weapons. In my belt was an eagle-headed Damascus blade dagger I had never seen before, my longsword in its walking-stick sheath, and the Flame-blessed tanto, weapons of Middle Eastern, English, and Japanese origins, at all odds with the medieval-style armor.

In my belt was a long, iridescent green flight feather. Barak’s gift. My necklace of amulets glowed softly. The seraph stone on my necklace, a gift from Zadkiel when he healed me, was glowing bright. I lifted it and it tingled through the gauntlets, an electric charge. I dropped the stone.

Something moved in the lavender air and brushed my cheek, softer than the breeze, feather light. I caught it and held a pale lavender feather. I managed not to curse aloud in surprise. I knew where I was. Saints’ balls. I was in Amethyst’s wheels. The knowledge jolted me, and I caught my balance on the smooth floor, a floor made of the same substance as the crystals in the metal box back in the stockroom. Where I still was.