Page 11 of The Grip of Death (Arcane Hearts #8)

11

No fewer than three healers arrived at the Halls of Making within minutes of Master Lobelia’s summons, each of them ending their inspection with the same conclusion. “Xander Wright will be fine.”

Plenty of bed rest, they insisted, and plenty of fluids, too, and he would be none the worse for wear. We moved Xander to Mystery Row as quickly as we could carry him. A deeper spiritual scan from one of the healers revealed that no actual damage had been done to his soul. Somehow he’d been spared a fate worse than Incandescence.

If I could ever bring myself to pray to the entities, I would have fallen on my knees in gratitude to Hecate. My prismatic talent had saved Xander, sure, but I knew in my heart of hearts that he wouldn’t have survived without her support. Divine intervention in the most literal sense, really.

Niko had encased the arcane engine in a sheath of enchanted glass, effectively sealing it, leaving it in quarantine while we figured out our next steps. There was talk of dismantling it and reclaiming the materials. Vikhyat, despite looking readiest of all to smash the thing open with his fist, had floated the very practical necessity of leaving it intact — for now. It was evidence, if nothing else, something to be stopped from happening again, something to be studied.

Lore had dropped everything — abandoned every household chore — the moment he realized what was happening. Literally. Every appendage, every tentacle that had been engaged in dusting, sweeping, or doing the dishes immediately switched gears to fluffing pillows and starting up a mean chicken noodle soup on the burner. Lore had rededicated his systems to making Xander as comfortable as possible before I even had time to climb up the stairs to our bedroom.

Whitby took a little longer to digest the events of the afternoon as we recounted them. Completely understandable. His soft response of “This all seems awfully familiar” resonated with everything Hecate had told me. Whitby went quiet after that. Again understandable. He was there at the blast and would need the time to process.

It was strange, knowing that the only few who now knew about the historical echo of the arcane engine were a goddess, an artificer’s intelligence, and me, possibly the most useless one in the bunch.

Even when we’d gotten Xander situated I still felt as though I’d lost control of my limbs. Part of me was afraid to touch him, as if the very act of placing my hand on his arm might be yet another way for me to unknowingly bring him harm.

Our friends crammed together in my bedroom, bringing it to capacity — Preston, Sedgewick, Niko, and Beatrice had all insisted on coming home with me, at least to help Xander to bed and make sure everything was all right. The masters had each gone their separate ways. Drama notwithstanding, they still had their own guilds to run.

Preston and I stood by the doorway, watching as the others sat by Xander’s side of the bed. Beatrice stroked locks of his hair away from his eyes, plucking at the curls like she was making silent music. The girl could be awfully affectionate when it mattered. More affectionate than me at the moment, at least, and I was supposed to marry the guy.

I felt fine enough with them there to support us, but how would I feel later at night with all four of them gone? I would never intentionally try to hurt Xander, but it frightened me to even think of being alone with him. I’d fucked up so much already. What if I fucked up even more?

A huge, heavy hand settled on my shoulder, squeezing tight. Preston forced a smile, though it still made his mouth look more like a flattened line.

“This wasn’t your fault, little buddy. The schematics — we followed every last detail precisely.”

I sighed, unable to reply that it was precisely why everything had gone so very wrong. We’d essentially made a copy of the very machine that had blown up the Halls of Making. Frankly, it was a miracle that we hadn’t yet received a reprimand from Guildhall, or a terrifying visit from one of Eleanor Grouse’s inspecters.

Come to think of it, no one from SEER had made an appearance, either, which was odd considering how closely the Black Market’s enforcers liked to keep a tab on arcane activities within the dimension. Maybe letting Beatrice and the masters test the machine first had led any potential spectators to believe that we were producing extravagant magical displays on purpose.

Maybe no one had been close enough to hear Xander screaming.

Gods above and below, what a horrible thing to put him through. Never again. Yet it led to another awfully misshapen piece of the puzzle. Several pieces, in fact. Lobelia, then Kaoru, then Beatrice — none of them had experienced any measure of discomfort from using the arcane engine, much less excruciating pain.

What made Xander so different from the others? He was a candidate for Incandescence once, but did that truly mean that he was so much more powerful a mage in comparison, even in spite of his youth? Maybe it had more to do with how his Grayhaven training had carved deeper and deeper wells of arcane essence within his body, smoothing out the channels and making him the perfect conduit for turning raw magic into purified elements.

There it was again. I had to stop the most vindictive parts of me from blaming Hecate for all this. Well and good — in her role as Madame Catherine Grayhaven, she was partially responsible for bringing Xander Wright to the height of his magical potential. That was the whole point of the academy, to forge the crude metal of young men so that they finished their education transformed into blades of the finest points, of the sharpest edges.

To Hecate, the entire purpose of the academy had been to test the limits of magic as wielded by humans, unadorned, unencumbered. No fancy wands or crystal balls or wizard staffs to focus and amplify their power, only the body itself. It was why she insisted on healthy diets for her students, strict regimens of physical and mental exercise.

Hecate might have known about the blast and the arcane engine’s existence in its first iteration, but she would have balked at the idea of using machinery to augment magic. It just wasn’t her style, and the Greek goddess of magic, to my knowledge, was all about style. And madness. And cryptic answers.

And no answer was more cryptic than what Giuseppe had told me himself about the arcane engine. He was too guileless to make anything up, simply didn’t seem the sort to trade in cunning and deceit. I didn’t pry any further after the blast, leaving Giuseppe to fumble with his hands and shuffle back home, but something about his involvement with the engine still bothered me.

He had to have known. Preston and I together had made passable progress on the arcane engine on our own, but Giuseppe’s arrival had truly accelerated the machine’s development. It wasn’t just the addition of a third set of hands, either. Exponential, it felt like, how the days had whizzed by.

The side of me that trusted people and believed them to be inherently good tried to convince me that time had flown by because we were having fun reliving the old days of artifice. Now my gut insisted that the project came to completion so quickly because Giuseppe, whether or not he realized it, had helped build it before.

Xander groaned. I snapped out of my thoughts, taking a clumsy step forward, but Beatrice held up her hand, then shook her head.

“He’s dreaming, I think. At least it doesn’t seem like he’s in any pain. The healers said it would take a while for him to actually wake up.”

“Hours?” Sedgewick offered hopefully. “He might even be up by tonight with any luck.”

Niko patted his stomach. “I’m sure he’ll be starving by then. Thirsty, for sure. But you’ll want to have something easy for him to eat when he comes to.”

“When,” Niko said. Despite my disappointment at still seeing Xander’s eyes closed, I allowed myself a tiny smile. When Xander woke up, and not if . We’d sort this all out then.

“Lore said he was getting started on some chicken noodle soup. I’ll check in on him and see how things are going.”

Selfish, maybe, for me to leave them in the bedroom with Xander, but I was grateful for the space to breathe. To think. I plodded down the stairs to the sound of boiling water and clanging pots. Lore had engaged all his appendages for the task, somehow acquiring a whole roasted chicken in the short time I’d spent upstairs.

It looked a lot like one of those rotisserie chickens that Zephyr liked so much. Lore’s tentacles reached for the chicken on the counter all at once, his pincers shredding the meat at top speed. I grimaced, finally understanding what the labels on food containers meant when they referred to mechanically separated chicken.

But it was the sweet scent of smoke that greeted me before I even hit the bottom of the stairs. Not the smell of Lore’s cooking, either, nor one of the scented candles Sedgewick was testing for the wedding favors. It was something like fragrant woodsmoke, almost close to incense.

A column of smoke erupted from the floor, dissipating instantly to reveal Reza Arshad, handsome high-ranking SEER officer and loving boyfriend of our good buddy Niko. He shrugged his shoulders as if to make sure his leather jacket hung properly on his muscular frame, then nodded at me in greeting.

“Pryde,” he said, voice guttural and low, the way someone speaks in the hallway of a hospital, outside a ward for critical patients.

“Reza Arshad, as I live and breathe. I don’t remember inviting you to smokestack your way into our living room. Vampire rules, man.”

His brow furrowed, eyes already darkening. It was one of those unexpected things that he had in common with Niko — they were just so much fun to tease.

“Very funny, Pryde. Though I’m glad to see you doing your best to keep in high spirits considering the — well, you know. The incident. At the Halls of Making.”

He’d muttered that last part almost under his breath, as if the two of us weren’t speaking in the privacy of my own home. And then it dawned on me. How come I didn’t guess to begin with? Reza was the reason we didn’t run into any trouble with SEER, or Guildhall, or even any nosy Black Market neighbors.

“You beautiful bastard. You killed the story before it even made its way to the papers. I didn’t know you were so influential, Arshad. But in all seriousness: I want you to know that I really, really appreciate it.”

Because this wasn’t only about the future of the Halls of Making. The sting of leaving a stain on the Pryde name would hurt me, but it would pass. What I couldn’t stomach if word spread of impending disaster was how the negative press would impact the others: Preston and Giuseppe’s ability to find work, the reputations of the masters who so publicly helped us, and worst of all, Xander.

What if he was labeled a danger to the Black Market, or to the arcane underground at large? What then?

Reza cleared his throat and tugged on his jacket, adjusting it again as if it somehow needed more adjusting. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about. And besides, you know Niko would kill me in my sleep if I didn’t do anything to help you guys.”

I crossed my arms and gave him my smuggest grin. “Admit it. You love us. That’s why you did it. Well, me, most of all.”

He slipped his hands into his jeans pockets, narrowing his eyes. “Killing you in your sleep isn’t off the table either, you know.”

“There it is. There’s the Reza I know and love.”

I furrowed my brow. And the Reza I knew and loved could help us with one or two things, indeed. Beyond the coverup, that is. He wouldn’t mind. Probably. Hopefully. It was all for Xander.

Before he could make his way up the stairs, I grabbed Reza’s wrist and made a beeline out of the living room. Lore didn’t seem to notice our presence and certainly wouldn’t notice our absence, his appendages all spinning in a whirlwind of chicken disassembly and food preparation.

I turned to the great hunk of crystal that Whitby lived in instead.

“Whitby, if anyone asks, would you let the others know that I stepped out for a minute? Reza and I just need to look into something real quick.”

The crystal mainframe pulsed a gentle white. “Of course, Jackson. My pleasure.”

“And have them text me or something if there’s any updates on Xander’s condition. I — I’m going to see if Reza and I can help in a different sort of way.”

Whitby’s mainframe pulsed twice in acknowledgement, but he said nothing more. As we passed through the foyer, just before I reached for the front door, Reza placed his hand on my shoulder to stop me.

“This doesn’t seem like you, Pryde. Your fiancé lies in bed unconscious. Wouldn’t you want to be around for when he wakes up?”

“Look,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose, perfectly aware of how strange this all looked. “Color me unstable, but there’s nothing I can do to help that hasn’t already been done by the healers. I love Xander more than anything else in the world — anything. But I have to have answers, too. I need to be sure this can never happen to hurt anyone or anything I love, ever again. Fool me once, shame on me.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “And fool you twice? Jackson, what are you saying, exactly? There’s something you aren’t telling me.”

And so I told him everything I’d learned from Hecate, all my suspicions, from initially thinking the goddess herself was involved to outright naming Giuseppe as the most important piece of this bizarre puzzle.

“Gods above and below,” Reza said, his hand against his forehead. “For real, this time. You owe me a big one, Jackson. It took a goddess to stop your machine from blowing.”

I shook my head. “That’s why I’m all fucked up about this, man. It took a goddess to stop Xander from dying.”

He pursed his lips, taking a moment for himself. I hadn’t meant to throw that in his face, but this had to be done. I wanted to think Xander would have liked it this way, too. Upstairs, in our room? There was little I could do to change things. But out there? There could be answers.

“So that’s where we’re going?” Reza asked, frowning. “To question Giuseppe. And you taking me along has nothing to do with the fact that my presence as a SEER officer would intimidate him.”

I frowned at the accusation. “We’re only going there to talk to him, Reza.”

“And this has nothing to do with retribution,” Reza continued. “Answer me honestly.”

“No.” I threw my hands up, my fingernails digging through my hair. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t fucking know. It’s not like I’m planning to punch Giuseppe in the face. I just have this awful feeling that he’s a part of this somehow. He could have warned us, maybe. He could have said something.”

“Jackson,” Reza said, both hands on my shoulders now, holding me tightly in place. “Consider this. Why in the world would an old artificer come out of retirement and go through the trouble of tuning up a machine just to murder your fiancé, someone he previously didn’t know or care about?”

I raised my hands between his arms and carefully brushed them aside, freeing myself. “Then you can see why I have so many questions in the first place.”

He clenched his teeth, but relented and sighed. “It’s hopeless. You’re hopeless. Let’s just get this over and done with before Xander comes to and wonders why his beloved lump of a husband is incognito.”

“Future husband,” I said, tutting as I wagged a finger in his face. “There’s still a wedding to attend.”

And guests, and decor to worry about, and parents. I gave the Wright house a quick glance as we turned down Mystery Row. I knew that they were out of town. A weekend in Italy or something like that, something about Wilhelmina wanting to visit a very specific Milanese tailor to make sure that Edric would look perfectly sharp in all the wedding pictures.

Guilt stirred somewhere in my stomach. I hadn’t told them what had happened to Xander yet. My mind was still too foggy, and there was also the question of the time difference between Milan and the Black Market. Why didn’t I have either of my in-laws’ phone numbers? Did either of the Wrights have phones, for that matter?

Later. There would be time for that later. I didn’t like the idea of Edric glaring at me sharply the next time we met over the faux pas of waking him up on a Milanese midnight, and we also needed to get to Giuseppe’s place and sort this out as soon as possible.

But what if Reza was wrong? What if Giuseppe did know all along? What if he already made a run for it?

I ignored Reza’s complaining. I made a run for it.