Faith Hunter: Seraphs

My self-appointed teacher, his deep brown eyes trying to pierce the secrets I still held close, pointed to the Book of Workings on my shelf. “Study that. Learn what you did wrong. Then we’ll talk about it. You missed proper training when you left Enclave. I will see you appropriately educated in all the mage arts.”

At eight o’clock, he clicked his bamboo staves together and left, pausing once in the open door of the loft, a cold breeze blowing in from the stairwell. “You must strengthen your wards and find out why these are suddenly so ineffective.”

“Gee, Audric, what a bright idea. Wonder why I didn’t think of that?” I was feeling snarky.

He closed the door. I took two more ibuprofen and ate a breakfast of oatmeal, raisins, and almonds while soaking in a hot bath atop healing amulets on the porcelain tub’s bottom. Underneath the neomage glow, I was a mass of welts, bruises, and new scars that crisscrossed and lumped over my older scars. I wasn’t real pretty to look at, but then, if I didn’t count the incubus who came by from time to time, I hadn’t had a suitor, lover, or boyfriend in months, no one to see me naked. Audric didn’t count. His preferences lay elsewhere.

I dropped a last healing amulet into the water, and let it settle in the bottom of the old tub behind my back. It worked its conjure as I sipped my tea. The water in tea and bath was springwater, drawn from the conjured, shielded, and booby-trapped spring behind the shop. With the amulet, they would take most of the pain and a lot of the blood out of the bruises, making it easier to glamour them. The newer scars were harder to hide; they glowed hotter than the older ones, especially the ones on my left hand. I made a fist, testing the flexibility of the fingers and the ugly, ridged scars that pulled against tendons and bones. In mage-sight, the scars were a solid white glow across my hand. Even with a double dose of a glamour, there was still a muted radiance.

Not that I had to conceal what I was. Everyone in Mineral City now knew I was a mage, and that I had been in hiding among them for more than ten years. A lot of the townspeople didn’t want me here, so I was keeping a low profile. No mage-clothes, no practicing savage-chi or savage-blade in the streets, no glowing, and certainly no display of my scars to remind them of the battle I had fought, the battle that had kept them safe for the last few weeks. There was nothing like demonstrating that people were beholden to you to make them hate you.

At nine, I braided my hair, dressed in beige overleggings and a tunic with boots, hid my amulets, and glamoured my skin down to the dullness of human flesh. The mirrors assured me I looked human, if not beautiful. The scars on my face resisted even my best conjures. Before leaving the apartment, I checked the messages, the red blinking light reminding me that a call had come through near dawn, just after Audric woke me with swordplay. No message, just the sound of breathing and a faint click as the caller hung up. Not a threat; not really anything. But there had been a lot of such calls recently. I figured it was disgruntled members of the orthodox, or maybe Jane Hilton, my ex-husband’s alleged new wife. But I didn’t know, and until someone made Caller ID technology cheap enough for the average investor, I had no way to find out. Like many such devices, the technology was available, but expensive since the end of the world.

I put back my shoulders, set aside my disquiet, and went to open Thorn’s Gems, the jewelry and lapidary shop I owned with my two best friends. I would wear red brecciated jasper today to contrast with the brighter scarlet of my hair. And maybe today the townspeople would stop treating me like I had brought them a plague.

Downstairs, I lit the gas logs to warm the shop, and opened the safe. By the time Audric and Rupert joined me, the dregs of an argument lingering in the air, display cases were filled with our wares, coffee was brewing, and water for tea was simmering. Rupert was close-mouthed, lips tight with denial. I knew what it meant. He was always like this when it was time for Audric to head back to work. Arguments always ruined their last few days together.

Audric was a dead-miner with a claim on the entire town of Sugar Grove. He had been in Mineral City, in the Appalachian Mountains, to sell his latest finds, visit among the humans he loved, and resupply. Now he had to go back to work. In late February, in a mini-ice age, work meant a grueling three- or four-day journey to his claim through snow-covered mountain trails, Then months of work uncovering more of the gold, silver, junkyards, china and crystal, and other treasures that had survived the town’s destruction and abandonment.

Unless he sold the claim to a rich prospector or a big company that specialized in dead-mining, it would be months before he returned. There had been offers for the claim, which made this leave-taking even more bittersweet. I wanted to add my voice to Rupert’s and beg Audric to stay. When he left, I’d be the only supernat for a hundred miles. Maybe more. But I knew better than to ask him to give up his claim. Few dead-miners ever located an entire town. Audric was famous for his discovery. The big half-breed had pride: pride in his find, pride in his claim, pride in his mining skills, pride in his fighting abilities. If he stuck around, he’d be less independent, and Audric could never countenance that. He had to make a fortune and a name for himself.

As they argued, covering ground they had scoured clean a hundred times before, I laid out a selection of emerald pieces, the stones extracted from the nearby hills. Mineral City was known all over the US for the quartz and feldspar dug from cliffs and scraped from strip mines. The two common minerals provided financial success for the town, but its gems were spectacular, calling to the speculator and the individual prospector, and the latest claims were making us famous for gemstones. The emeralds had been sold to Thorn’s Gems by a local miner, and the deep green of the stones was spectacular. I had made a chunky necklace out of some B-grade portions, and added a faceted focal stone. The necklace was too pricey to interest the locals, but I’d listed it on the store’s Web site. I was hoping for a quick sale at the asking price. Two comparable pieces had been sent to retail stores that showcased our jewelry in Atlanta and Mobile. Stores all over the country hoped to carry our designs, and we had to decide if we wanted to expand the line to satisfy the current demand, or stay exclusive. Expanding meant we needed to hire help or take in a new partner. Like Audric, who could buy in if he really wanted to. Which made these arguments even more difficult.

I was a lapidary, meaning I worked with raw stone, turning it into unique jewelry, statues, vases, and, now that I had been revealed as a mage, into amulets and charms for the customers who wanted them. Not all did. The sale of conjured items was a sore spot with some orthodox practitioners, both locally and out of state.

I set our pricey items in the center display case. The top glass was damaged, making it hard to see some of the merchandise, but the blemished site was probably the only reason Thorn’s Gems hadn’t been broken into, vandalized, and ransacked by a mob of the local extremists. Even in a town as small as Mineral City, there were plenty of those around. The flaw was a four-inch circle, created when a seraph, an angel of punishment, had dropped by to visit me—well, to judge me—and had removed his sigil of office, placing it on the display case. The antique, Pre-Ap glass had crazed and heated almost to the melting point under the powerful amulet, leaving the top permanently etched with a symbol of the Most High—the ring and its firelike lettering of the word Adonai. I polished the defect with a cloth.