Earth Awakened, page 16
They found him by the gas fireplace in the dining room, lounging comfortably in a puffy leather chair, wearing a set of expensive clothes that looked like they’d been taken off a display mannequin in one of Mersetzdeitz’s higher-end men’s clothing boutiques for the rich and famous. Coal-colored dress pants with a matching vest were paired with the white dress shirt that covered his arms.
He always seemed to hide his arms. Handy, if you’re fighting Mages.
He had a mostly empty glass of brandy in his hand. And, by the half-empty bottle on the table, she guessed he’d finished off the last one and started a new one.
Beyond, the scene overlooked the tumultuous cloud and cityscape that stretched to each horizon. The fire was lit, dancing across fake coals, its transparent backing making the flames seem to flicker over part of the city as if it were burning. The light caught a sheen layer of ointment Gobardon had applied to the cut above his eyebrow.
His clothing hid whatever other possible injuries he could have obtained from their fight, which was a shame because she would have loved to see him just as bruised as she was.
She rubbed a thumb over her aching knuckles.
Punching the man had been incredibly satisfying.
“Here to castigate me?” he asked lightly, giving the liquid in his glass a little swirl. “Or would you like a second round?”
By the low growl that sounded in her mind, McKay could guess what the cat wanted.
Fortunately, Kitty was doing the talking.
“Abso-fucking-lutely I am—what the fuck was that yesterday? Are you fucking insane?”
Gobardon took a sip of his drink. “Last I checked, I wasn’t the one hearing voices.”
“Yeah? Well, at least my voices aren’t fucking stupid. What were you thinking? Were you even thinking, or did the fucking alcohol get to your fucking brain? Fuck, Gobby—it’s barely nine in the morning. Only someone with a guilty conscience starts drinking this early.”
“I’ll admit that I hadn’t considered that Finnevar and Kjaran may have already tried to extract the crystal, or that their attempts to do so would be as extensive as they had been. But, as for my actions yesterday, I stand by them.”
Only now did he deign to turn his gaze from the outside scenery and look at them. His dark eyes flickered first to Kitty, then fixed on McKay.
Once again, she felt that jolt go through her.
God, she’d never get used to how dark they were.
He swirled his drink again, giving her a look over, and she felt a touch of his magic go through the floor to her feet.
Assessing. Examining. Feeling.
Kitty spluttered. “You… stand by them? What the fuck, Gobby? I thought I could trust you.”
He snorted. “I stand by what I did. McKay has a piece of Lürian technology embedded inside her. I simply wanted to give it an option to get out. Clearly, the spirit is not working out in her current situation.”
“And you thought you could provide a better situation for her?” McKay asked.
“No,” he said, his voice a rumble. “I know I can provide a better situation for her.”
“Fucking hell, Gobby. I trusted you to do the right thing.”
He fixed her with a look, his lips twisting for a moment before he spoke, then he pointed at her with the hand that held the glass. “We rarely do the right thing when we’re together.”
“But at least we do the right thing for each other.”
A small silence passed through the room. Kitty’s tone had been quiet, calm, more serious than it had been even a few seconds ago. The two of them watched each other. Something flickered in his eyes, then was gone, like seeing the belly of the fish glinting in the sun underneath the surface of water—a bare, quickly hidden patter of emotion.
So he did care. About something, anyway.
“Look,” McKay said. “I didn’t ask for this. I was three days fresh from the front of the war when this got dumped on me. As far as I know, the cat only chose me because I happened to be the closest person to it and Meese was already occupied by the Phoenix. And yeah, I get that it’s a crapload of power, and a huge honor and all that, but I can barely go a day without having some sort of incident. Usually, I can rein them in, but sometimes, they take more than I can give, and yesterday, I couldn’t control it at all. I have no idea what sets it off, and I’m putting people in danger by even being in the city.”
She crossed her arms. Gobardon was looking at her now, and she met his eyes, willing herself to not flinch at their darkness—she’d already had enough darkness for this week.
“I only agreed to this because I know that you’re strong enough to stop me, you don’t sugarcoat things, and you know a heck of a lot more than you let on,” she continued, taking a breath. “An entire team of engineers spent the better part of a month attempting to get the cat back out of me, with my permission, and failed. I’ve accepted that the cat is not going away. Can you accept that, too, or do you want to go for a second round?”
Another small silence met her words, only this time both he and Kitty were looking at her instead of each other. Gobardon’s face was stony, unreadable, but his grip had tightened on the glass.
She stared him down.
Finally, he shifted. “You’re Earth.”
A frown pressed down her eyebrows. “What?”
“You’re Earth. That’s why the cat chose you. You were dormant, but she awakened your powers before transferring herself into you. I remember you having them during the raid on Kjaran.”
Her frown deepened. Yes, that had been true. She’d bent a railing and carved small pieces from a concrete wall in the time between her first contact with the cat, when it had touched her and knocked her out, and when it had finally transferred into her after Les Amerand’s death.
“Hey, I remember that, too,” Kitty said.
“No, you don’t,” Gobardon said. “You were definitely unconscious at that time.”
“Oh, was I? Are you sure? I feel like I was definitely kicking ass at that point.”
“No, you were definitely limp and unconscious. I had to carry you out of the room.”
As they bickered, her mind flicked back to the raid on Finnevar. She… sort of remembered that part. It had been a long night with a lot of fighting and running—and a lot of that before she’d been mentally clotheslined by a crystal spirit. When they’d found Gobardon in the lab, she’d still been staggering around, recovering from that. The first few incidents of Earth Elemental use had been accidents. She’d been blissfully oblivious to the addition of her new minor Earth Elemental powers and completely unaware of how to use them. She’d bent the railing by leaning on it, leaving an indent of her fingers in its wrenched metal. Later on, with the concrete, she’d been doing the magical equivalent of chiseling away at it with a spoon, attempting to get her and Meese away to safety through a wall.
It hadn’t worked. But it had, possibly, summoned the cat back to them.
That had worked.
She shook her head. “No, it must have been the power that she gave me. I didn’t have it before.”
“Yes,” Gobardon said, giving her a slow look. “You did. I called it ‘dormant’ for a reason.”
She frowned. “You sure?”
He sighed, his gaze dropping to the alcohol in his hand, seeming to note its rapidly decreasing quantity. “Yes, I’m sure. The spirits don’t give power like that, they can only activate what’s already there.”
She frowned. “What about Meese? Meese didn’t have Fire before the Firebird.”
“Meese is a special case,” he said. “Her power is in being a vessel rather than in possessing an Element. Any Fire she wields comes from the bird. Take away the bird, and her power disappears—as happened following the shield incident after the bird died and before it re-birthed. Before she had Abrochdan, she could borrow magic from others via a transfer sigil. But you had Earth before you had the cat. Ergo, you had dormant Earth Elements that the cat activated.”
Huh. She’d never thought about that.
“You certainly know a lot about Meese.”
“She’s a new development in magic, and I’m invested in her continued success and survival,” he said. “Of course I know a lot about her.”
On the other side of the table, Kitty cupped a hand to her mouth and stage whispered to her. “He’s a nerd.”
She elongated the last word out, just in case McKay hadn’t gotten the point.
“A nerd who has an obsession with a teenager,” she said. “Yeah, that’s not weird at all.”
Gobardon gave them both a flat look.
“She is literally changing the face of magic as Lürians know it. Why would I not be interested in that? She’s already attracted a lot of attention. At least I have her best intentions in mind.”
“Yeah, that’s like a line straight from Lolita.” McKay shook her head. “Whatever, man.”
Gobardon set his glass down with a hard clunk, and a shiver of Earth magic slid through the floor.
“My father had an unhealthy interest in Mieshka, to the point where he abducted her and attempted to do experiments and extract the crystal from her—”
“Much like you just tried to do to me—”
“In order to protect her from him and others like him,” Gobardon continued, ignoring her interruption. “Yes, I did research her. I needed to know what I was dealing with so that I did not get blown up in the process. The fact that I also happen to have the vast amount of knowledge in crystal engineering and magical physics required to understand her specific brand of magic, and that I happened to have also spoken with Aiden on the subject of her magic, is a practical coincidence.”
“Ooh.” Kitty sucked in a breath. “Looks like we found a nerve.”
“I don’t like the insinuation that I have an unhealthy obsession over a sixteen-year-old,” Gobardon said. “Not when that insinuation is untoward in nature.”
“She’s seventeen now,” Kitty informed him. “Her birthday was six months ago.”
“Maybe he’s not all that obsessed, then.” McKay puffed out a breath and closed her eyes for a moment. “Okay, let’s move on—tell me what you plan to do in Seola. What are you after? An Earth spirit? How do you know it’s even real? Do you know anything more than the articles I saw yesterday?”
He took her in for a few long seconds. His hand had encompassed the rim of his glass, fingers clutching around it delicately, and he swirled it again while his dark eyes watched her, flicking over her face to get a read.
Then, he set the glass back down on the table and made to get up. “Follow me to the computer. I’ll show you.”
Chapter 19
They all piled around the computer, Gobardon taking a seat at the table and opening the laptop while she and Kitty stood at his shoulders.
It felt odd to be so close to him after what he’d done yesterday. Hell, it would’ve felt odd, anyway—he was a powerful Earth Mage, after all, and here they were, gathered like a bunch of college students around his computer, looking at videos—but it was just so much more, now.
She was hyperaware of him, and hyperaware of herself in proximity to him. And she was watching him instead of the computer, her spine completely rigid.
God, he must know it, too. How could he not? She was literally staring daggers at his neck, and she hadn’t come quite as close as Kitty had.
And inside, the cat was on edge, too.
The spirit felt like the drawn string of the bow, ready to fire.
But Kitty was at ease. And, if Gobardon noticed anything, he didn’t comment. And he seemed… Well, not perfectly at ease with her at his back, but not quite to the point where he had Earth sigils glowing on his skin, ready for defense.
Then again, maybe he was hiding them under his sleeves like she’d seen Aiden and some other Mages do. Or he had decided the cat would detect any magical shenanigans on his part and had gone dark, so to speak.
Then, the screen of his laptop woke up, and her thoughts shifted, eyes narrowing at the collection of videos and articles that had collected on his screen—and the sheer amount of Internet windows he had open. By the clicking sound coming from the laptop, the hard drive was straining itself to keep up with the demands.
He must have been studying them last night. Studying and drinking, by the small gathering of empty glasses on the table. Those hadn’t been there yesterday.
He cleared his throat. “Okay, here’s what I know so far about this potential spirit. According to what I’ve read, there are three separate mythologies claiming there exists a spirit on this mountain. She’s female, some sort of maternal figure—no comments on that, please, Kitty—whose depictions have shifted over the centuries. The oldest known archaeological evidence of her dates back a good ten thousand years.”
“How do you know she’s an earth deity, then?” McKay said. “She doesn’t sound like any of the crystal spirits I’ve heard of.”
“The crystal spirits that you’ve heard of all came from somewhere. Their forms now have adapted from their contact with humans, but most had some sort of sacred place that they represented and protected. In the case of Greneinta, she was a protector deity for a series of very wild jungles in Lür’s Southern Hemisphere, an example of one of our more primal deities. She was one of the earliest crystal spirits.”
McKay nodded. She’d known that already. The people at Finnevar and Kjaran had gone to great lengths to impress upon her the power, knowledge, and history that the cat possessed. She’d been a protector, and she’d been integrated with more technologies than now existed, from running a city’s support structures and shields to creating power grids, powering ships, being a structure for a supercomputer, and many more.
“So, you’re saying that she actually sounds precisely like a crystal spirit.”
“You’re a quick learner,” he said dryly. “Yes, she is very much like many other crystal spirits, except for the fact that she is apparently an active Terran spirit who still lives in her native mountain and still has shrines dedicated to her.”
“Does anyone even worship at the shrines anymore?” McKay said, frowning. “I remember my grandma taking me to one once. We clapped at it and laid some flowers down, but that was it.”
“According to these articles, at least some people still do—or they did before occupation.”
McKay ground her teeth together.
Occupation. Even now, with the war behind her, it still grated to hear it.
There had been no way to win that war. She knew that. And everyone that she knew and respected agreed with that assessment.
But, still, there was always that little niggling thought that ate at her—what if they’d done things differently? What if they’d had more help? What if they’d had more Mages, and shields to hold back the invasion?
What if she could have done something? Tried harder?
Even now, the thought of her countrymen under the thumb of Swarzgardian rule put a slippery feeling in her throat.
If she wanted to stay sane, she couldn’t think of it. She had enough problems without adding to them. That was one of the rules of PTSD: don’t chase the rabbit, or your mind will go straight into the hole.
The war was not her problem. Not anymore.
It was over, and there was nothing she could do about it.
But… fiddling around past Swarzgardian lines, with an Earth Mage by her side and a giant spirit full of power ready to unleash havoc from inside her, looking for an ancient Westran deity that seemed to be causing Swarzgard a bit of trouble…
That was definitely something she could get behind.
If Gobardon could be trusted not to attack her again. He still hadn’t said he wouldn’t. Nor had he apologized.
She’d noticed that.
Getting an apology from him would be like drawing oil from a dry carcass. Laborious and a complete waste of time.
Her grandmother used to say that.
A smile tugged at her lips. It was funny—just one mention of Seola, and it was like the city’s memories started leaking back into her.
She’d forgotten about it.
Gobardon clicked to reload the page. A second later, the video was starting.
Huh. Fast connection. Must be nice, being rich.
“Look,” he said. “Watch.”
It was like watching one of those hokey ‘ghosts caught on tape’ videos. The camera was shaky, and the scene poorly lit—a dim blur of forest, the path bobbing in and out of view as they attempted to zoom in on something, a whisper of bird song before the camera operator’s heavy breathing whooshed against the recorder’s microphone.
“Look—” the recorder’s companion said. An arm jabbed out, its forefinger pointing somewhere, and the trees whirled as the camera turned. “Look, look! Over there!”
A bleeped-out swear came from behind the camera. The picture stopped on a patch of trees in the distance that were shaking.
Okay, that was surreal. Unless there was some sort of very specific mountain storm she didn’t know about, she couldn’t think of a wind pattern that would do that. Every tree around them was normal—still, except for the odd sway in the wind—but this patch, about three meters across, was shaking like a family of bears had just gotten really itchy on their trunks.
Then, all the trees’ branches came down as one. The rush of their leaves was almost drowned out by the bone-chilling cracks and groans of the wood as it flexed.
Then, something much closer to the camera gave a crack.
The camera operator and his friend yelled. In the next second, they were running.
The video cut out.
Gobardon switched into another window, reloading a second video.
They continued their silence as it began to play.
This time, the camera feed was much more stable and of higher quality. By the watermark in the corner, it had been done by a professional videographer, someone who specialized in nature films.
They’d likely been out filming birds when they’d come across the manifestation of an Earth spirit.
As before, trees shook and shivered, then bowed. This time, they caught a ground-level view of it, not someone looking over from another ridge.
