The Last Sun Page 3

  I don’t remember what party I was sneaking back from; I just remember being fifteen and carefree and drunk and stoned, and trying to avoid Brand and the household security force. I think I got as far as the solarium—at least, I can dimly remember something rushing up at me in the solarium—before I was hit with a stun spell.

  I woke up in the carriage house, in the custody of nine men wearing animal masks. My hands and feet were bound. Brand was there, but he was not conscious. He would not return to his senses for hours yet to come.

  They kept me there while the rest of the estate ran with blood. Eventually Brand woke up. He surprised them. We escaped. No one else did.

  Over fifteen people died that night, the entire live-in staff. Their bodies were burned beyond the point of recognition. Most were identified only by the simple elimination of who didn’t show up for work the next day.

  Media exposure was inevitable. I was very young, handsome, and disgustingly over-privileged. It was a lurid and sensational crime, and I was photogenic in my disrepair. Consider also that Atlantean society does not protect its victims: it exposes them, it uses them as moral lessons on fitness and survival.

  Two decades later—two decades, significant even among a people who aged slowly—the story just. Won’t. Fucking. Die. It gets me a lot of sidelong looks on the subway. Truth be told, I suppose I do my best to earn them.

  I woke to the sounds of fighting, which tricked me into thinking that I was still asleep, because I’m always fighting in my sleep. Rubbing my eyes didn’t make the noise go away, though.

  I arched my throbbing back and stretched, the tips of my fingers and toes brushing the edge of the custom king mattress. I crawled to the foot of it—the only way off, since there was less than an inch of clearance on either side—and swung my legs onto the floor.

  After yawning a cantrip, a honeyed ball of light appeared above me, chasing back the narrow room’s shadows. I padded to the air-conditioner and used pliers to turn the broken dial to the off position.

  “Rune?” Queenie said from the stairwell. She hesitated half a landing below my eyesight.

  “Someone’s yelling and I haven’t had coffee,” I said.

  “That’s why I came up? It’s Brand. And, um, your seventeen-year-old?”

  “He’s not my—” I glared at the ceiling. “I’ll be right down.”

  I dry-swallowed two Percocet to ease the soreness in my shoulder, and did a one-legged hop into dirty jeans and a clean t-shirt. The pants were tight. Noticeably tight, especially across the backside, and wasn’t that just great. It had been a frigid winter, a cold spring, and a cool early summer. I’d spent too many months hiding in sweaters.

  I tugged at the waistband and freed up an extra half inch while jogging down the tight spiral stairway. The second floor was split into a guest bedroom and full bath. The disturbance was coming from the bathroom. The first thing I saw when I entered was Brand holding Matthias Saint Valentine’s head in the toilet. Matthias was wearing just a towel.

  I pointed at Brand.

  He gave me a look. That was it. I waved an impatient arm at the toilet. Brand sighed and loosened his grip a little, and Matthias’s head lifted out of the bowl, spitting water. His white-blond bangs dripped over his face and hid his expression.

  “Allow me to explain,” Brand said. “Apparently, our Queenie tried to unpack Little Lord Scion’s suitcase while he was in the shower. Not her job, of course, but she’s just that kind of person, isn’t she?”

  “Brand, really, I’m not ups—”

  Brand raised his voice over Queenie’s. “In the midst of her friendly efforts, Little Lord Douchebag comes trotting out of the bathroom, takes one look, and asks our Queenie whether she’d be able to do it right, or whether he’d need to do it himself. Upon her recounting this criticism to me shortly thereafter, I hastened upstairs to inform him that, yes, he would need to do it himself. I took offense to his dismissive response. Further discussion ensued. Eventually it appeared that the most diplomatic solution was to stick his fucking head in toilet water.”

  “Let him go,” I said.

  Brand’s hand, hovering just above the smooth, pale skin of Matthias’s neck, flipped up.

  Matthias glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Brand had complied. He gripped the towel tight at his waist and stumbled to his feet.

  Whatever he saw on my face must have reassured him. I could almost read his reaction like ticker tape. Rune is a scion like me. He’ll understand.

  I went over and put a hand on Matthias’s shoulder. When I had enough leverage, I shoved him into the shower stall. He tripped over the low lip and fell. I turned on the cold water, and he scrabbled noiselessly at the side of the fiberglass stall in shock.

  Then, to my vague unease, the fight went out of him. He pulled his towel into his lap to cover his genitals and turned his face from us. The cold made his body shake like hard sobs.

  Queenie said, “Must be tough? Losing everything? I wonder if he even knows who survived last night, or which of his family is still alive. Do you think . . . Well, do you think maybe he just finds it easier to act high and mighty—maybe it’s, I don’t know, his armor? How was it with you, Rune, the day after you lost everything?”

  Brand and I exchanged guilty looks. Brand shut the shower off. Matthias stopped shaking but stayed where he was, knees and face drawn into a ball.

  Brand leaned over Matthias’s prone body and said, “Sorry about that. Rune’s got anger issues.”

  I shot Brand a dirty look. But for the first time, a really unpleasant thought occurred to me. At best, I’d been a part of the raid that had dismantled Matthias’s home life. At worst, his father had been a lab chemist.

  I cleared my throat and said, “Matthias. This is a bizarre situation and . . . It’s just bizarre. Your grandmother tricked me, and we need to talk about that. But until then, we’ll treat you like a houseguest, and you’ll act like one. Okay?”

  He hesitated so long that I didn’t expect an answer. When it came, it was soft and hoarse. “Yes.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Great.”

  I turned and punched Brand in the thigh, hard enough to give him a charley horse. He motherfuckered me through gritted teeth while grabbing the spot.

  “Anger issues,” I told him.

  I spent the rest of the morning in my sanctum on the third floor, studying Elena’s emerald ring.

  There were many types of magical disciplines, all of them as unique as the willpower it took to quicken them. But the most common type of power available to Atlantean scions came from our sigils.

  Sigils allowed us to store spells for later use. They were generally shaped in the form of jewelry or piercings, the finite product of a lost art, which made them all the more precious. In giving me a sigil, Elena had dropped close to a hundred thousand dollars in my lap. Selling it wasn’t an option, though. The one time I’d suggested selling one of my six meager sigils to pay our cable bill, Brand had put a knife through the television set, ironically ending the discussion. Each sigil, in his eyes, was a chance for me not to get killed in a firefight.

  Now I had seven sigils. I fooled around with Elena’s sigil, trying unsuccessfully to figure out what kind of spell she’d already stored inside it.

  Just when I was ready to drain the spell from the ring, Brand came into the sanctum. He was in a t-shirt and running shorts, sneakers and no socks. For all that, he still had about five weapons on his person, right down to a silver garrote threaded through his shoelaces.

  He kicked off the running shoes and sat down on the floor in front of me.

  “I did some research on Little Lord Asshat,” he said. It lacked any real heat, though. I’d overheard him earlier giving money to Queenie to buy Matthias “a razor, a toothbrush, and a fucking clue.”

  Brand said, “He’s definitely Elena’s grandson. His father was one of her sons. Him and his mother are alive—or at least they were before the raid—but it looks like his uncle h
ad custody of him. No siblings. Did you know he’s nearly a full-blooded fae?”

  “A changeling?” I asked, surprised. Full-blooded fae had the ability to alter their appearance—not as dramatically as were-folk, but it came in handy.

  “Don’t know. Fucking ask him. Anyway, he hasn’t gotten in trouble, nothing in the gossip rags, he hasn’t run up any debts. He’s just a birth certificate and a guardianship filing. That’s it.”

  I asked the question that had been bothering me most of all. “Why him? Why did Elena save him?”

  Brand shrugged and asked the question that most bothered him. “Do we have to let him stay here?”

  “I don’t know. If I screw with my oath, I screw with my magic. Lord Tower wants to see me this afternoon—maybe I can find a way to ask him without actually asking him.”

  “The Tower called?” he said, a little suspiciously.

  “Maybe he wants to give me a big fat check.”

  “Why does he need to see you to pay us? Do you think he’s got another job for us?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If we’ve got to feed and water this kid, then I hope so.”

  THE TOWER

  Among modern cities, New Atlantis is a precocious freak.

  The expenditure to create it—in terms of money and magic—was incalculable. Hundreds of abandoned human buildings from all over the world were bought and teleported to Nantucket: sanitariums, madhouses, churches, palaces, hotels, skyscrapers. Taking possession of these ruins wasn’t as difficult as it sounded. Humans never appreciate what they’ve allowed to fall into disrepair.

  New Atlantis now occupies half the acreage of Nantucket, just a little over the size of Manhattan. The former topography of the island—scrubby trees, sand dunes, wide-open spaces—lasted as long as it took us to strip it clean and slap on a coat of asphalt. Don’t even get me started on the west end of the island. The Westlands were the poisoned magical backwash of the translocation magic; a deadly mess of monsters, pocket dimensions, and heavily warded Arcana compounds. I had as much interest in taking a Sunday drive into that countryside as I did in getting a colonic with jet fuel.

  The human world never figured out the phenomenal expense it took to create New Atlantis, or the unlikelihood that it would ever be possible again. To them, it looked as if we pulled our Gotham out of a cereal box. They saw their abandoned buildings turn into craters overnight, and assumed that that was the sort of thing we would always be capable of doing.

  Not a bad rep to have.

  I spent much of the morning in my sanctum, filling my sigils with a balanced blend of defensive and aggressive spells. Brand did his own preparation in the basement, only with knives and Kevlar. Our experience with the Tower had taught us well. A job offer and the actual beginning of the job were very often simultaneous events with Lord Tower.

  That said, Brand wouldn’t come with me to meet Lord Tower; he’d just join up if I needed him. I kept him and the Tower in separate rooms as much as possible. They didn’t get along, which, when you’re talking about two personalities like that, was like mixing an oil spill and a tidal wave.

  A few minutes before I was about to head downstairs, Brand poked his head up the spiral stairway. “The fuck?” he said.

  “What the fuck what?” I said.

  “Queenie is outside, fussing over Matthias.”

  “He’s coming with me. I thought I’d bring him along, get a feel for him.”

  Brand came up the stairs. “You’re taking him for a walk? To get a feel for him? You know he’s not a dog you picked up at the fucking pound, right?”

  “Aw. Look who’s worried at being replaced. It’s okay, you’re still my best friend.”

  Instead of swearing some more, Brand rolled his eyes. He was a master at eye-rolling. He used facial muscles and forehead wrinkles for the whole effect.

  I picked up the sigils I’d laid around me, refastening them around my ankle, fingers, and neck. The ivory cameo had a pain-in-the-ass clasp, so Brand came around and helped me with it.

  He said, “Look six ways before crossing the fucking street.”

  “I will.”

  “Don’t forget down. You always forget to look down.”

  “I will,” I said. He was always uneasy when I left the house without him. If I ever got hurt when he wasn’t around, I wouldn’t even be allowed to the bathroom without an escort for the next six months.

  I went downstairs, put on my boots, then met Matthias on the front stoop. Queenie had all but packed him a bagged lunch. She hemmed and hawed her way back inside, while Brand pretended not to look at us from the upstairs window.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  He stared at the ground. “If you insist.”

  “Only in a friendly sort of way,” I said. When that didn’t get a rise out of him, I shrugged and set off.

  Half House was on a cul-de-sac in a quieter part of the city; but, in a sold-out housing market, that only meant the quiet parts were two streets away from the loud parts. I made a beeline toward loud, where there was a coffee shop on every corner.

  I ordered a triple-shot and bought Matthias a black iced coffee, which he indicated he’d prefer after a series of one-word answers to my questions. Then he made me wait while he dumped three inches of raw sugar into his coffee, packet by packet by packet. When he was done, I led us outside and away from the shop.

  I snuck glances at him as we headed toward a nearby plaza. He was a good-looking kid. More pretty than handsome, but at his age you could still grow out of that. He had the strange fae coloring that managed to be pale yet luminous, and hair so blond that it was almost white.

  At that hour, the streets were hopping with lunchtime activity. We passed the mundane and the miraculous. Rolling vendor carts steamed with cashews, a pair of lounging werelions stretched their bellies toward the sun; there were people in business suits and hair shirts, iPod armbands and cilices, high heels and webbed toes. A hunchback in silk swept by, three asphalt golems in her wake. Their pebbled arms were looped with pink shopping bags.

  Matthias watched all this, and I watched him watching.

  He touched his ear twice when the light turned from white to amber on a crosswalk; went blank when a werelion teased a crooked finger over his passing thigh; bit hard on the corner of his lip when the hunchbacked matron called him ‘grandchild’ after we stepped aside to let her pass.

  I tugged my sunglasses out of my breast pocket with one hand. A brass translocation plaque in front of us stated that the nearby statues were from the ruined Kopice Palace in Poland’s Brzeg County. I said, “Is that an elk?”

  Matthias didn’t so much as glance.

  “They never go into enough details on these plaques,” I said. “I always have to look them up online. It’s a hobby of mine.” I waved at the antlered animals. “I’m thinking elk.”

  Matthias offered the ground a tight smile and raised his drink to his mouth. My polarized sunglasses gave the lid of his cup a petroleum sheen, so that it looked like he was sipping rainbows.

  I sighed, and we started walking again. “Is the guest room okay?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Good. Queenie did a run on our closets, by the way. To find you more clothes. You’ll probably get better stuff from Brand, if you don’t ask too many questions about the stains. You’re better off just thinking they’re blood.”

  “I’ll make do with what I have.”

  I let the ensuing pause stretch, then stuck out my ankle and tripped him. While he recovered from a windmilling stumble, I said, “You’re making it real hard to talk, Lord Saint Valentine.”

  A brief surge of heat mottled his cheeks. To my delight, he didn’t check himself before he said, “What is it we need to talk about, Lord Sun?”

  “Matthias, this isn’t an eighties sitcom. I can’t casually accept an orphan into my house for comic relief.”

  “I just need a place to stay until I get on my feet. That’s all. Just a room for a couple we
eks. Then I’ll leave and you can keep my grandmother’s sigil.”

  “It’s not about the sigil. There’s—”

  “So I can have it?”

  “It’s not completely about the sigil,” I said. “There’s also this whole issue about my promise to watch you until your—”

  “Age of majority? No. Her words were vague in order to get you to make a promise. There’s no way she expected that much from it.”

  “It’s not what she expected that counts. It’s what I expect, and what the laws of magic expect. You burn an oath, it comes back at you threefold.”

  “Her words were vague,” he insisted. “Give me safe harbor until the worst of this is past, and the price will be met. I’ll acknowledge it. That makes a difference, right?”

  “There are still bigger issues. I know you can’t see them, but they’re there.”

  “Bigger issues like how I feel about the raid that killed my court? The raid you participated in? Those issues? Or issues like people wanting me dead, people who’d like nothing more than to take a parting shot at my grandmother? Or issues about what people will say when they see you in the company of a seventeen-year-old male minor? Issues like how we’re going to live in a small house on top of each other? Or about how much you’re responsible for me? Whether you need to get me educated, buy me clean underwear, make sure I drink enough dairy?”

  He wasn’t stupid, that’s for sure.

  “No one will recognize me,” Matthias insisted. “I didn’t . . . I wasn’t in the public eye. I was not . . . popular. I served other purposes.” When I didn’t say anything to that, he finally raised his head and met my eyes. It was the first time we’d really looked at each other, and it seemed to startle him. The word please slipped out of his mouth as a mumble.

  A crow-black limousine slid to a nearby curb. “Our ride,” I said.

  I let the conversation die, because it felt like I was kicking a dead horse, and Brand was better at kicking things. Plus, part of me remembered Queenie saying, How was it with you? The day after you lost everything?