The Children and the Blood (23 page)

She tossed the weapon into the open compartment in the floor and looked back toward Carter and Samson. “Is he…”

“I’m fine,” Samson said, his voice tight. He hissed with pain as Carter pulled his coat back, exposing a dislocated shoulder. Grimacing, Samson clenched his teeth, and then let out a muffled yell as the older man shoved the joint back into place.

Watching them a moment more, the girl exhaled and then turned away, emotions flickering swiftly over her face. Rage won. Closing her eyes, she paused, and then kicked the compartment lid closed.

“Sons of–” she muttered.

“Highway in thirty seconds,” Bus called, veering around another corner in response to chatter on the police scanner. “Where to?”

“Abbey,” Carter said.

“What the–” Samson protested, struggling to sit up and then falling back with a gasp. “Carter, you can’t just bring her–”

“Enough, Sam,” Spider said without turning around, her quiet voice nevertheless cutting him off. “She saved your life.”

The girl looked at Ashley briefly, and then started shrugging off her jacket to check the condition of her own bruises. Carter tied a bandage on Samson’s leg and then eased the younger man down onto the bench. Shifting around awkwardly in the tight quarters, Carter climbed to the front, glancing down at Tala as he passed.

“Good girl,” he murmured to the dog, who wagged her tail tiredly.

Ashley stared at them. They were so calm. Yet they’d just… and that woman…

“What…” She swallowed hard and tried again. “What…”

The others weren’t listening.

“They killed her,” she said. “They just…”

Words failed. Directionless, her eyes searched the van for answers and came to rest on Tala. The dog was still breathing, though Mischa licked the other animal’s leg and whined.

Images flashed in front of her. Shenandoah. The men. The window. The others had just started across the street at the sight of the window and then…

“You knew,” she said, looking up at them. “You knew… those men… you…”

“Of course we knew,” Spider said, glancing over at her. “We’ve been fighting the wizards for years.”

“T-the what?” Ashley stammered.

“Wizards,” the girl repeated.

Twisting around, Spider winced at the beginnings of a livid bruise beneath her tattoo.

Ashley nodded slowly. Right. That’s what she’d thought the girl had said.

“Um…” she tried. “There’s, um… there’s no such thing as…”

She trailed off, her brow furrowing distractedly. No such thing as what? People who hurt others with impossible nothings? People who burst into flame?

Spider looked at her curiously. “Your parents really didn’t tell you anything, did they?”

For some reason, the words made her want to laugh, though she couldn’t think why. And meanwhile, the floor kept swimming in and out of focus.

“Are you going to be sick?” Spider asked cautiously.

Bus glanced back in alarm, but Ashley just shook her head, regretting the motion instantly. “No,” she managed. “I’m… I’m fine…”

Watching her a moment more, the other girl shifted her shoulders with a pained grimace and then reached down to check the dogs. “So what’d you think was going on?”

The laugh emerged this time, choked and hysterical to her own ears. The impression must have been mutual, because Spider glanced up again, her brow drawing down at the sound.

“I…” Ashley started, swallowing back the fluttering panic. She shook her head, unable to continue.

Spider’s gaze went to Carter, who looked between them briefly and then jerked his chin at the other girl. Shrugging her eyebrows, Spider took a deep breath and turned back to Ashley.

“So nobody’s told you about Merlin or Taliesin or…?” she trailed off, watching Ashley’s face. “Cripples?” she tried again.

Ashley stared.

“Right. And let me guess. You lived on that farm your whole life and just… what? Never left?”

The mildly knowing tone in her voice was annoying, but the irritation was thwarted by how closely the words hit to home. Yet it wasn’t entirely true. Sure, for the past few years, they’d stayed with Jonathan and Rose, but not out of a nefarious design on anyone’s part. There just wasn’t much of anywhere else to go, and vacations weren’t possible on a working farm…

And then there were about eight years unaccounted for, before her mother died.

Uncomfortable with the turn her thoughts had taken, she shrugged noncommittally, and the girl shook her head.

“Then your family was what we would consider in hiding,” Spider said, her tone fading into seriousness. “And to keep things as normal as possible, some of them don’t always tell their kids why.”

She sighed, seeing the denial rise up in Ashley’s expression. “Okay, look. What you saw today? Those were wizards, and they come in two–” She cut off. “To
them
, they come in two categories.”

Ashley’s brow furrowed.

Spider shook her head dismissively. “More on that later. What you need to know right now is that they think there are two groups, but they’re all just wizards and none of them are your friends. Primary rule:
never
trust a wizard. Keep that in mind, and everything else falls into place.”

“Wizards are bastards,” Samson muttered. “Bloody fucking bastards.”

The girl turned, seeming unperturbed by his words. “Try to rest, Sam,” she said quietly.

Grimacing, Samson rolled slightly to one side and closed his eyes.

Her gaze lingered on him for a heartbeat more, and then Spider blinked and shifted back around. Drawing a breath, she continued. “So. We could just say there’s two or more sides, depending on your point of view. They’re in a war, they hate each other, kill any of them if they mess with you. And we could leave it at that. But,” she paused, glancing to Carter, “considering no one ever told you much, it might help you understand what probably happened with your family if you have some background on what’s actually going on.”

Ashley swallowed uncomfortably.

“To start, one side calls themselves Merlin. The other, Taliesin. Their names come from their basic allegiances, which in turn come from two guys who died about five hundred years ago. The original Merlin and Taliesin were brothers, part of a regular old wizard family, except their mom obviously had an obsession with Arthurian literature and their ancestry tended toward talents nobody else possessed. Wizards are all like that, in their way. Some are better at certain things than others, just like anybody. But Taliesin and Merlin… their gifts were rather freakish by wizard standards, probably because they had a family filled with generations of folks with a liking for magical experimentation. Or so the story goes.

“In any case, Taliesin got it in his head that the current state of staying behind the scenes and letting ordinary humans run things wasn’t really ideal. Wizards should
fix
things. Change the world. Figured if they had these abilities, they should take advantage of them. They should set policy and law, not the regular humans who – to his mind – had thus far just screwed everything up. And lots of people agreed and thought it sounded like a great idea.”

She scoffed. “Wizards don’t have many records of their history, due to everything that came later, but you’ve got to figure there’d been plenty of folks who’d tried the same thing before. I mean, it’s not rocket science. Yet, dammit,
those
losers must have been stupid or less advanced or something. Why else would they have never pulled it off?”

Spider shook her head and then dropped her sarcastic tone. “But not everybody liked that plan. And ultimately, Taliesin’s biggest opponent turned out to be his brother. Merlin believed Taliesin would end the wizards up in a position they couldn’t sustain. Like his mother, Merlin loved history, and in his opinion, governments that deprived people of any voice eventually degenerated into doing just one thing: using brute force to stay in power. Your regular humans wouldn’t remain docile beneath wizard rule forever, and in event of any uprisings, the situation would go one of two ways. Either the wizards would have to make examples of those who opposed them, and then maintain power through further violence, or they’d be eliminated.

“Whichever the outcome, Merlin foresaw his people becoming something he never wanted them to be.

“So, as the story goes, Merlin gathered up what supporters he could, and tried to stop his brother. It didn’t go well. In fact, it devolved almost immediately into a bloody civil war. And in not too long, the wizards turned into exactly the kinds of monsters Merlin had hoped to keep them from becoming.

“Nobody really knows how long they fought. Accounts are sketchy, since most records were destroyed in the war. All anybody really knows is that, in the end, it looked like Taliesin had to win. His numbers were greater. Simple as that.

“And then Merlin changed everything. Like I said, his family was freakish. Back in the good old days when the wizards weren’t trying to wipe each other off the face of the earth, Merlin and Taliesin’s family had long since developed the skill of taking someone else’s magic and using it themselves, or binding it away from the original owner, which was something nobody else could even dream of figuring out how to do. So of course, this made them both incredibly dangerous in battle… against one person. And then another. And then another, et cetera ad nauseam. But not a whole group. Not a whole battlefield.

“Until Merlin did it.

“In one moment, he bound the entirety of Taliesin’s side. Not just the ones currently fighting either. All of them. Every wizard associated with Taliesin, and their families too. He locked their magic away and left them almost like any human you’d meet on the street. And in a heartbeat, the whole war came to a screeching halt. Thousands of wizards suddenly had no magic, facing an enemy that still had all of their own.

“No one knows how he did it. He never told a soul. Legend says he bound himself to the spell to keep it going, and tied his family line to it as well. And from then on, that was the way things were. The wizards allied with Merlin kept their powers, and the wizards allied to Taliesin suddenly had to figure out how to live without any magic at all.

“But Merlin didn’t think that was enough. At the time, the damage his brother did was too real, and the idea Taliesin might find a way around the spell was too frightening. So he left a mark on the Taliesin wizards – something allowing anyone on either side to tell what allegiance that wizard held.

“If one wizard sees another, they can distinguish them from normal humans with just a glance. They say it’s like a perception just beyond sight, telling them if that person is a wizard and on what side. So apparently, the mark around Taliesin made that perception feel like shadow, whereas Merlin just feels like light.

“To hear them, it all sounds ridiculously poetic.”

The girl rolled her eyes.

“Regardless, even with their magic bound, the Taliesin wizards could still see their Merlin counterparts, setting them apart from your average, blind human. And so the Taliesin lived their whole lives knowing what they’d lost, and what they were on the outside of.”

At the baffled look on Ashley’s face, Spider paused. “Okay, slowing down. It’s like this. Humans? They aren’t too fond of things that don’t fit in their world. They’ve done experiments on this kind of thing, like having a man in a gorilla suit walk past people wrapped up in doing other things. A fair amount of the time, folks won’t even notice him, because it doesn’t fit into what they expect to see. Wizards go way beyond that. They’re human, but if they don’t smother it, they basically
are
magic too. But that doesn’t work with what humans expect in the world. People blowing things apart without touching them? Walking in one door and coming out another miles away? Please. Can’t happen. Doesn’t work in ‘this’ world.

“So folks filter it out. Don’t see it. Or them. And generation after generation of doing this has led to remarkable talents in that category. Your average adult human, when faced with something a wizard has done, will show no sign of seeing it at all. On video, it’ll just be static. In an audio recording, same thing. Now
kids
, young ones, have the tendency to recognize wizards, but that’s only because they haven’t caught on to the whole ‘don’t see things that aren’t possible’ mentality. And while wizards can repress their magic, making themselves visible by bottling up the energy inside, most don’t bother. To their minds, why should they? It’s just easier that way.

“But back to what I was saying. For years, Taliesin wizards had no accessible magic and lived constantly aware there was this other group who did. Five hundred years went by, and obviously, that’s a long time. Lots of Taliesin families just drifted off, initially giving up on ever getting their magic back and then, as the generations passed, forgetting about magic entirely and thinking their weird tendency to feel an aura of light or shadow around some folks was just an odd family trait. Nothing more to it. And if sometimes others with them didn’t seem to see the person with the aura who just walked by, well…” She shrugged. “You drop it. After all, nobody wants to appear crazy.”

Spider grinned and then continued, humor fading. “But of course, not everybody gave up. Which brings us to eight years ago, and the lovely world we now live in.

“The descendants of Taliesin and Merlin had become royalty to their respective allies, by virtue of their lineage and their status as possessing the ability to bind magic, and representative councils for the people existed on either side. Between the two groups, though, there’d always been a not-so-subtle hierarchy, wherein Taliesin was eternally second class, if Merlin even acknowledged them at all.

“And then, one night, that all changed.

“News was hard to come by in the first days of their little mess of a war, but rumor has it the Taliesin king got fed up with Merlin ‘supremacy’ and took matters into his own hands. He went after the Merlin king and assassinated him in effort to break the spell. And while plenty of people had thought to free the Taliesin’s magic by doing this in the past, until that night it’d never worked. But then, none of them had been the Taliesin king. Somehow, he killed the Merlin’s ruler
and
destroyed the spell, instantly giving thousands of Taliesin their magic back.