Page 13 of All Out of Flux (Stolen Hearts #3)

13

LEON

I opened my eyes to blistering, searing white. I groaned, my hand flying up to cover my face. My eyes squeezed shut as I struggled to adjust to the light.

The brightness seemed to be pouring from every direction, as if floodlights were staring me dead on. A ring of cars with their high beams set to asshole, burning my retinas even with my eyes closed.

I sat up, still covering my eyes, almost yelling out loud for someone to turn off the sun. The light wasn’t hurting my eyeballs as much anymore, but the intensity hadn’t changed at all.

“Must be in heaven,” I muttered, realizing my throat was very, very dry. “Funny. Didn’t think bruhos could go to heaven.”

“Or finders, for that matter.”

I shifted away from the sound of the voice, stopping suddenly when I remembered that I didn’t even know where I was. On the edge of a bed? Kneeling on a precipice? I forced my eyes open, gritting my teeth against the harsh light, marveling at how quickly my vision adjusted.

The Quartz Spider was sitting on the floor several feet away from me, still dressed in his oily, iridescent black, face fully exposed. We weren’t, in fact, surrounded by a ring of SUVs.

The light was pouring from all around us, from all angles, even from the tippy-top of this bizarre structure we were locked in. Trapped in, perhaps? I certainly couldn’t see a way out of — oh, God.

Were we inside a crystal?

“Where are we?” I breathed. “ When are we, for that matter?”

Brendan Shum waved his hand like he was trying to drum up a response, draw out a memory. “Oh, you know. Somewhere between here and there. Sometime between then and now.”

When I was sure he wasn’t trying to kill me, I folded my legs underneath myself, mirroring his posture. “Why are you so sure that finders don’t go to heaven?”

He shrugged. “No offense meant, but you’re not exactly in the business of performing acts of kindness. Remember, I used to be a spider myself. Spiders don’t go to heaven, either.”

“Then where do they go?” I threw my hands up in frustration. “And seriously, where the hell are we? Where’s Max?”

Something in my gut told me he hadn’t really hurt Max — not in a way that mattered. The Quartz Spider would look more pleased with himself, otherwise. Somehow I believed him when he said he wasn’t out to kill us. There was too much gloom in him. A man like him, someone who’d fallen so deep into darkness — he’d only kill out of necessity. Or provocation.

Brendan sighed. “Had to leave him behind. Being too loud, asking too many annoying questions, if I’m honest. He’ll tire himself out soon enough.”

I licked my lips, still thirsty, but even warier of asking the enemy if he had any bottled water sitting around his crystal abduction dimension. I gestured around the massive crystal around us.

“So is this like your interdimensional interrogation room? Is this where you take your victims to gloat before you gut them like a fish?”

He squeezed the bridge of his nose, eyes flickering with annoyance. “I wish you’d stop insinuating that I’m more than what I really am. I’m far too boring to make big, sweeping speeches.” He ruffled his hair and sighed. “Far too tired to skin anyone alive.”

I shrugged. “Just testing you. I guess there’s no way out until I give you what you want. So, Brendan. What the hell do you want, exactly?”

“Understanding,” he breathed. “I need someone to listen.”

Too much sadness in those words. “Why me?” I asked.

“Because you’re someone who might understand. I know the things I’ve done haven’t been righteous, but surely you’ve been in my position before. As someone who’s lost a loved one, I mean.”

He knew too much, but of course he had to know. He used to be a spider, just like Vera, just like Faizan. Building dossiers and harvesting information came as easily as breathing air.

My brow furrowed. “I’m not sure what that means. My mom died years ago. What does that have to do with anything?”

Another deep sigh, another heave of his chest. “I lost someone, too.”

My gaze fell to the ground, crossed the floor, examined the pinpoints along the walls where the facets of crystal met. Anywhere but his face.

“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled, picking at my fingers.

The dark circles underneath his eyes that seemed to grow deeper with every encounter. That coarse stubble of his that grew ever more unruly, the hair that had started going gray too soon — I could have guessed myself. I should have.

Brendan sniffed, more a biological response than a deliberate attempt to tug at my heartstrings.

“We pick these dangerous professions — you, a finder, me, a spider — we should know better than to expect happy endings, you know? But you’ve got nothing to lose now, do you, Leon Alcantara?”

I shook my head. “That’s not true, and you know that.”

I had Max, my new friends, my new home in Dos Lunas. I was a finder out of necessity, because it was the job that matched my skill set. It wasn’t because I was in some career dead end — I had to make ends meet, pay for food and a roof over my head. I believed all these things, but didn’t speak on any of them. He was smart enough to know.

“But you know the risks,” he said. “This stuff we do, it’s all too easy to end up with a pissed-off client, or to find yourself up against a rival finder, maybe even a rival spider. Couldn’t tell you which was worse. It terrified me, you know? Thinking I’d lose the only family I had left to something like that. Retribution from a competitor, punitive action from someone in our circles, or someone beyond.”

He shook his head, running his fingers through his wild mane of hair.

“I worried for nothing. I killed my little brother all by myself.”

My fingers clenched. God, I couldn’t imagine the horror. I looked up at last, our eyes meeting for only a fraction of a second. But it was enough. We’d both lost the ones we’d loved. For all the terrible and deadly things Brendan Shum had done in Dos Lunas, I knew there was something inside him trying to make things right.

I was doing my best to be a decent person, yet doing my absolute worst at understanding my position in this bizarre, tangled web. Here I was, empathizing with the enemy. But was the Quartz Spider really the enemy?

“At first it was just to dabble. Isn’t that the fascinating thing about life in the arcane underground? There’s always something to learn. Something to discover. So I learned about chronomancy. I discovered the power of time magic. And I discovered why so many mages shunned its practice.”

My teeth bit into the inside of my cheeks, almost hard enough to draw blood. I had to say it. I couldn’t help myself.

“Those men in the parking lot — ”

Brendan’s fist struck the ground. The entire crystalline structure around us rang with faint vibrations, his anger reverberating throughout the dimension.

“I told you already,” he said, softly, slowly. “I had nothing to do with that.”

“So you mean someone out there could be copying you.” I spoke matter of factly, worried about another outburst. This was news to me. “Someone else is toying with time magic.”

He rubbed the heels of his palms against his eyeballs. “I don’t know. Why would anyone want to follow in my footsteps? And no. I didn’t instantly turn my brother into dust. It was — no. I’d rather not say.”

Brendan Shum rose from the floor unsteadily, almost struggling, like his body weighed heavy with the gravity of his sins. He paced toward me. I didn’t move, putting on a brave face. He went back down as before, squatting on his haunches so our eyes were almost level.

“You would have been the same age, you know,” he whispered. “You and my little brother.”

The sorrow in his eyes, these deep, lightless pits of despair. I couldn’t decide what I felt, or why I felt it. Sadness. Sympathy. Guilt. Why? But there it was at last, at least one small reason he’d never really meant to kill me. On some level, in some way, Brendan wanted to be caught, afraid of the secrets he’d unlocked in his studies. He wanted someone to stop him.

“And that’s why I kept on researching time magic, even knowing its dangers.” He parted his hands, gesturing at the great crystal around us. “What if there was a chance I could rewind time, just enough to bring him back?”

I licked my lips, sitting perfectly still, throat as dry as a desert. This was the sort of talk that got quickly hushed, back when I was growing up with the Alcantara clan — back when there was still an Alcantara clan to grow up with. Life and death, that was the cycle, the way of things.

Even as practitioners of the occult, the bruhas of my lineage understood their place in the cosmos perfectly well. We could harness the power of the supernatural realm, but in the end, on this Earth, in this universe? The natural world reigned supreme.

Magic afforded us the ability to bend those laws, to tug at the invisible strings of the world, nudge nature along. But even as a child, I understood. Push too hard, and the universe pushes back.

“The dead deserve their rest,” I told him, echoing my ancestors, sprinkling some of myself on top. “Even ghosts need their sleep.”

He clucked his tongue. “You’re smarter than that. This isn’t about ghosts. This is about reversing the flow of time. Correcting errors. My brother didn’t deserve to die. Neither did your mother.”

My hand curled into a fist. “You can’t use me for your guilt, Brendan. That’s not how this works.”

“You could help me,” he continued, ignoring my words. “We could work on this together. Wouldn’t you give anything to bring her back? Your mother?”

I pushed my hands against the floor — warm, solid as glass — then stood up. “I see where you’re going with this, and I think you already know my answer. So I’ll just be going, if you’d be so kind as to show me the way out.”

“Why?” rasped a voice inside my head. “Why do you spurn power when it is offered to you so freely?”

I staggered, hands reaching for my scalp, fingernails digging through hair, into skin. “You don’t belong here,” I growled. “Get out, Tiamat. You weren’t invited.”

Brendan scanned the chamber, then stared harder into my face. “One of your dragons? The ones you forged pacts with.”

“One of them,” I said through gritted teeth, my mind a fracturing jumble. Dossiers and harvests. Spiders and information. He knew about the dragons, but what could he possibly do to help me? “Two of them inside me. This third one — she’s trying to break through. Trying to take over.”

It was something about this place between places. The barrier protecting my soul from her encroaching influence was more fragile here, the membrane thinner. Like crystal. Like glass.

Then the Quartz Spider did the very last thing I expected. He helped me.

He traced his fingers in the air, drawing out a glyph in the shape of a glowing hourglass. He spread his hand out, capturing the glyph like it was a soap bubble, then slammed his open palm into my forehead.

Time passed. A blink, a moment, a heartbeat. My lashes fluttered as the wave of magic seized my body, the warmth accumulating, then crystallizing in my skull. I reached for my head, my jaw slack.

Time froze, but only in that little sliver of my skull — with Tiamat locked inside it.

“I can’t hear her anymore,” I muttered, grateful for the silence. “I don’t know what you did, but she’s gone.”

Unmoved, unsmiling, Brendan raised his hand again.

“Don’t say I never did you any favors.”

The Quartz Spider pressed the tip of one glowing finger against the center of my chest. From its gleaming floor to its lofty ceiling, the crystalline chamber exploded. Everything turned white. I screamed, but all I could hear was the sound of the world shattering.