“Wizard Aaron—” Avery began.

  Nate let out a gruff, “You—”

  Ebony made a quick decision and stood suddenly. “Stop. He didn’t do it.” Her words seemed to come from nowhere, but she knew they were true. Somehow, she knew Aaron hadn’t done it.

  Ebony looked right at Aaron. She looked at those once handsome but now tired eyes. She dared him to prove her wrong.

  “Ebony, sit down—” Nate tried.

  “We will establish the truth by—” her mother began.

  “What are you going to do? Steal his memories too?” Ebony gestured at Aaron with a stiff arm. “Torture him? Bribe him? I’m telling you, I know he didn’t do it.”

  Aaron managed the smallest of smiles, the corners of his lips barely lifting up.

  “You can sit down, Ebony, and you can have your memory back, if you want it.” Aaron brought a hand up and rested his jaw heavily on it.

  “So you admit to having stolen her memories, then—” Nate began.

  “Stolen, no. And I borrowed only one memory. Though, even though I doubt you are in a frame of mind to accept this, it was only for her own good.” Aaron glanced at Nate without animosity. He seemed too tired to show genuine dislike.

  “Own good?” Avery Bell’s skin was shot with red, shifting lines of light. The way her power manifested in her body was always a fair indication of her mood. Red was never a good sign. “Explain.”

  “Where would you like me to begin?” Aaron kept his head rested on his hand. It looked as though he would conk out right on the table. “With the Knights of the Round Table?”

  Nate stiffened. He didn’t say anything, but Ebony could tell he hadn’t been expecting those exact words to pop out of Aaron’s mouth. Apart from Harry and her mother, no one else in Vale was supposed to know of Nate’s true identity. Either Aaron was taking a lucky guess, or—

  “You are a knight, are you not, Detective Nate?” Aaron put a hand up automatically, perhaps using the last vestige of his energy. “And before you jump up and run me through, you need to know that I only know that because the Round Table chose to share that knowledge with me.”

  Nate’s eyes were fixed on Aaron, eyelids narrowed and pupils unmoving.

  “You see, I went to your brethren recently with information which I knew they were well-placed to receive. It has been common knowledge – to those who seek knowledge uncommonly, at least – that the Knights of the Round Table have been sworn protectors of the Portals for millennia. So naturally, when I had discovered certain worrying information relating to the Portal of Vale, I took this to the Round Table.”

  No one was saying anything, especially not Nate. The silence was palpable as everyone waited for Aaron to finish his tale.

  “Something is attempting to come through the Portal,” Aaron jabbed a finger into the table, “this Portal. There is a drain in all other Portals around the globe, indicating that energy is being redistributed to this location. An increase in the magical fields around Vale is only increasing this reaction. Unless stopped, I am sure unfortunate circumstances will result.”

  Without moving her head, Ebony shifted her gaze to her mother. While Nate had shared the Round Table’s knowledge of what was going on with the Portal with Ebony and Harry, neither of them had ever told Avery. And though the impression was that the Coven witches of Vale had some idea something wasn’t right with the Portal – that had never been made explicit.

  It was about to be made explicit.

  Avery took a sharp breath. “The Vale Portal is not your concern,” she said.

  Aaron gave a half-hearted laugh. “You don’t mean that. I think you mean that the Vale Portal is the concern of all those whom it can affect. And the longer this situation is allowed to continue, the greater the threat grows. If something – anything – is allowed to come through that Portal, then far more than Vale will be at risk.”

  Avery shifted her head but didn’t respond.

  “How do you know all this?” Nate asked. His anger wasn’t gone so much as on hold. Ebony knew that if the topic turned back to who’d stolen her memories, Nate’s rage would return with it. For now he seemed to be in that special, half-detached knight mode where the only thing that mattered was what was right.

  “In my specific line of work, I tend to come across a lot of… information,” Aaron said carefully, leaning back in his chair and slumping against the high-backed recliner.

  “That’s a very pretty way of not saying anything. What kind of information, and how?” Nate was in full knight-mode now. His features were pressed into keen, aggressive interest. He was leaning forward, compensating for Aaron’s apparent desire to get as far away from Nate as possible.

  Aaron regarded Nate coldly. Perhaps he wasn’t sure how much he should reveal to the group, or perhaps he didn’t want to say something that was going to be met with a punch in the face. “I work for the Enforcement Squad,” he admitted blankly.

  It was a fact they already knew. But the way he’d said it made Ebony suspicious it hid a greater truth. “What do you mean you work for the Enforcement Squad?”

  Aaron reacted as if Ebony had seen through some clever ploy. A wan smile spread his lips. “Let’s put it this way, then – I lead the Enforcement Squad.”

  Now that was a revelation. The Enforcement Squad was the strong arm of the Council. When there was a problem between wizards or between the other magical races, the Enforcement Squad was the first point on the wizards’ staff of action.

  For Aaron to be the head of the Squad meant Aaron was a hell of a lot more powerful than Ebony had assumed, imagined even. Because the head of the Enforcement Squad….

  Ebony’s mother cleared her throat. She even sat up straighter. “You are part of the Council, then? You are one of the Eight?”

  Aaron didn’t reply.

  “He’s part of the Council?” Nate snapped his head around to stare at Avery.

  “The head of the Enforcement Squad always sits on the Council,” Avery replied coolly. She kept her gaze fixed on Aaron, but it was different now. Perhaps Avery was reassessing the odds. If it came to blows between a Coven witch and a Council wizard, all bets were off. All you could predict was there’d be destruction-a-plenty and several smoking craters by the end of it all.

  Aaron, a Council wizard? But he was so young! He also didn’t even have a beard, and she’d always assumed that to be on the Council of the ruling body of all wizards you would have to have a beard that you carried around with you in a wheelbarrow or at least had tucked into a substantial pack on your back.

  Tattoos and beards made the wizard, and Aaron had neither. He also didn’t come across as arrogant enough to be the equivalent of a wizard president. There was only one wizard Council, and it served all the wizards of Earth. For Aaron to be on that Council made him the equivalent of a world leader.

  No wonder the bouncers had been so resistant to allowing them to just bust in here and take Aaron away for questioning. This was like kicking down the door to parliament, pointing at the guy in the big chair, and saying, “That guy owes me money.”

  She frowned as she suddenly realized something. “Hey, you’re Wizard Arana.”

  Aaron bowed. “True.”

  “So all this time while you were telling me you couldn’t give me those books until the Wizard Arana okayed it, you were just wasting time.” Ebony crossed her arms. Stealing her memories was one thing, no matter how noble his intentions had been. But bookstore business was something else. He’d kept goods from her.

  Aaron nodded. “Ah, your books. To be fair, I had been somewhat honest. These are rare and important grimoires, after all. I couldn’t have them going to just anyone. I didn’t realize which wizard still possesses your bookstore.”

  “Harry? I don’t get it – why is he an issue? Yes, he is cantankerous, and yes, he can be a bit over the top with all that dragon nonsense. But he’s not a threat to anyone.”

  Nate and Avery shot Ebony a look that said “You’ve gotten off topic here,” but Ebony ignored it.

  Aaron laughed. “Perhaps that bookstore will surprise you one day, Ebony.”

  “Let’s get back to the matter at hand, shall we?” Nate pressed his index finger into the table. “And let’s not forget that the only reason you kept those books was so that you could lure Ebony here.”

  “Lure?” Aaron arched an eyebrow. “A strange word for a date, Detective. But perhaps they do things differently at the Round Table. Me, I simply offered Ebony dinner—”

  “And then proceeded to steal her memories.” Nate tapped his finger on the table. He did it with such stiff vigor it seemed like he was trying to squash an ant. “Yes, we do things differently at the Round Table. We tend not to assault women—”

  Ebony shared a quick look with her mother. It said “Boys,” and it said it with a quick shake of the head. “Okay, enough. It doesn’t matter. We have to move on. Why did you take my memory, Aaron? And if you didn’t take the second one, then who did?”

  “I borrowed your memory, I didn’t steal it.” Aaron put a hand up to silence Nate. “And you ask me why? I think you already know the answer.”

  Ebony thought. Then she frowned. “It’s all about the Forms, isn’t it?” Avery had given Ebony an explanation of the Forms on the way to the Arlington. As Avery had been explaining it, Ebony had found it familiar, even though she couldn’t remember any of the factual content. The feeling of the Forms was familiar to her. “Both of my missing memories are about the Forms,” she continued. “Everyone seems to want to know about the Forms,” she said slowly.

  “Everyone?” Aaron’s snapped. “Who else?”

  Ebony blinked involuntarily at his sudden interruption. Her comment – which had seemed so innocent at the time – now seemed to hide a very obvious key. “I… don’t know why I said that.” She really didn’t. But she also knew that it had been the truth. She knew that everyone – or at least more than the people in this room – wanted to know about the Forms. She knew it because she felt it. She took a breath and continued, “I don’t know why you want to know about them… but I don’t think you stole that memory to do me any harm.”

  Aaron watched her carefully, sitting straighter in his chair. The importance of her admission was enough to strike through his fatigue.

  “I think you took that first memory because you knew it was… unpleasant or traumatic, or something. I think you didn’t want that coloring my perceptions the next time I met the Forms – if I ever met them again, of course.”

  Aaron nodded emphatically.

  “This is ridiculous,” Nate interrupted. “How do we know that he hasn’t implanted that memory, just as he took the others?”

  “Implanting memories is close to impossible – not true memories, anyhow,” Avery clarified with a short wave of her hand. “You can suggest a memory; you can even make a person believe it. But to a member of the magical races – like my daughter – you will not be able to make that memory line up with feelings. It will always feel wrong.”

  Nate rolled his eyes. Even though he was surrounded by people who practiced and believed in magic and magical explanations, it didn’t matter. “I don’t see how that works.”

  “And I do not care if you do not see. Wizard Arana couldn’t have implanted a memory, not without a great deal of power – and that power would have left an obvious mark. A mark I do not see.” Avery didn’t even bother turning to Nate.

  Ebony knew exactly the kind of mark her mother was referring to: dribbling, glazed eyes, and monosyllabic speech. A creature of one of the magical races knows that memories are a complex affair. They don’t go by the popular human belief that all memories are stored in the brain. They know experiences can be recorded anywhere in the body. If the hand is cut, it will be the skin that remembers the scar. If the leg is broken, it will be the bone that remembers the fracture. It was the alignment between these body-memories and the more factual memories that were stored in the brain, that summed to make a creature aware of its past. But these memories had to match up. It was the interplay between the body and mind that gave recall its validity. If the mind remembered having wings, but the body remembered only arms, then questions were asked in consciousness. This knowledge was exquisitely keen in members of magical races. With the explicit knowledge that memories were shared between the mind and body, a witch or wizard would always check between both systems to ascertain the truth behind recall.

  Forcing a memory onto a witch or wizard, then, was hard. You had to force it onto the body as much as you did the mind. And that always met with resistance. The power involved would usually leave the unfortunate victim in an impaired state afterward.

  So even if Nate wasn’t willing to accept it, Aaron wouldn’t have been able to force a memory onto Ebony, only take one away.

  She looked up at Aaron, the Wizard Arana, and waited for him to confirm her suspicions. Had he really done this for her?

  “I did take that memory, though, to be fair, you had offered it to me. I simply expedited the process of your recall… and attempted to block you from experiencing it for a time.” Aaron flicked his gaze over to Nate, apparently waiting for the knight to bluster back with some kind of insult.

  Nate just sat there. Perhaps he was realizing that things weren’t as clear-cut as he’d hoped. Perhaps he was also realizing that Aaron wasn’t the guilty party. Which of course meant that the man – or creature – who’d stolen Ebony’s second memory was still out there.

  “I did this because I knew that the Forms would contact you again.” Aaron looked confused, his lips crinkling as if he were surveying a curious mark on the table, something he wasn’t sure what to do with. “And I needed that information.” He looked up and straight at Ebony. “I needed you to meet with them, and I needed to know what would transpire. I couldn’t have you afraid to meet them – that would have changed the way they would speak to you. I needed you to meet them for the first time, again, as it were.”

  “So you used me,” Ebony got there before Nate could say the obvious.

  Aaron dipped his head to the side and suddenly wasn’t so willing to make eye contact. “I suppose I did.”

  Nate now huffed and crossed his arms. “So you aren’t quite so justified, after all, wizard.”

  “From what I remember, last year a certain event transpired between Ebony and an old family of Vale called the Grimshores. Though I cannot be 100 percent sure of my sources, from what I gather you used Ebony in quite the same way I did. The Round Table sent you here to find out who, or what, is behind the problem with the Portal. Knowing this, you allowed Ebony to go through probable danger in order to find out who was at the source. In other words, you used her.” Aaron sighed and gave a smile of sorts. “Now, I am not proud of what I have done. But it was the only opportunity to get the information I needed.”

  Nate looked red. Perhaps he hadn’t been ready for Aaron to pull the whole “do you remember last year when you almost let Ebony get rewritten just so you could catch the Portal Culprit” card. But to Nate’s credit, his determination didn’t seem all that dented. “And that information is important why?”

  “Because it relates directly to the Portal. The Forms, Detective, are from the Portal. They are one of the very first things to have ever come across from the Other Side. But unlike some of the other creatures from their realm, they pose little threat to our dimension. However, that being said, they have valuable information that we require should something else ever try to come through.”

  “The Forms are part of the balance,” Avery interrupted, her voice taking on a far-off quality. “They keep the line between reality and thought, form and concept, substance and mind.”

  It seemed these Forms – whatever they truly were – were at the center of this whole mess.

  That left one important question waiting in the dark, one Ebony needed some light shone on right now. “Why me? Why do I have to get in contact with the Forms? Why not you? Why not anyone else? I’m hardly very powerful or special; there are plenty of other creatures the Forms could communicate with.”

  “You do not have to be powerful to be special – those concepts are entirely distinct.” Aaron gave a very knowing smile. “And as for why you? The Forms were willing to contact you in the first place. Perhaps it was your willingness, when stuck down in the sewers that first time, to seek out a different conclusion than the one the rest of us followed. We fought the formed shadows in the dark, and you looked for the very real root of the situation. You opened your mind to more than what appeared to be, and you went with whatever impressions came to you.”

  Ebony sucked air through her teeth. Not that she could remember the incident Aaron was referring to, but it sounded like something she’d do. She wasn’t one to jump into a fight and just accept that the person on the other side was the enemy. Yet she still didn’t feel nearly as special as Aaron hoped.

  “You don’t have to believe me,” Aaron shrugged, “but that is the reasons I give you for the Forms contacting you. To be honest, I’d gone down into the sewers that day to try to contact them myself. But when you disturbed that root and triggered the release of that ectoplasm, I knew what had happened to you. The Forms had chosen to speak to you, but in your condition, all you could sense was fear.” Aaron tapped his hand slowly on his armrest as though he was using it as a metronome to keep the pace of his speech steady and slow. “When the Forms contacted you, I went with the opportunity presented to me. I realized that they were far more likely to contact you again once they had already tried to make contact. But I also knew that – if we were to gain any true knowledge of the situation – we would require you to meet them without fear. So I took your memory,” he swallowed, “to enable that to occur.”

  “Why not just explain it to her?” Nate demanded. “I don’t understand. If you had spoken to the Round Table, if you knew about Ebony and I, if you knew about the Portal – and if contacting the Forms was truly as important as you claim – then why didn’t you tell us? If you had told Ebony what the Forms were, she could have met them the second time prepared. That is, unless you didn’t trust us, or you have some other agenda to hide.” From the way Nate spoke, it seemed he already believed the second option was the correct conclusion. He apparently wasn’t sold on the fact Aaron was just here to help everyone.

 

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