Reflections

I have to tell her

This should be the time to disappear, now that we’re finally free of our enemies. And Emma has already seen too much of my sister’s and my illusion magic, and the world should never know we’re hiding in their midst.

Besides, we still have mysteries left about about why our family has always lived in secret, and where our magic came from. Old sins, and a long-ago threat that was once deadlier than any power we’ve ever seen, so it’s time for me and my sister to put those to rest.

And yet… I’ve never met anyone like Emma. I never thought that while I went through every face and trick I know to find our answers, I’d still be thinking of showing everything we are to a stranger. There’s no chance she could choose me and this hidden life over the life she has, even if my sister and I weren’t still on the run.

But I have to tell her. If anyone could make this choice… maybe all we need is a chance.

Unless the deadliest past comes after all of us.

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Sample

This deep in the night, there would be only the worst of muggers on the streets. But right now we were safe in our borrowed car, as every minute I drove us farther away from the subway station, from what I’d done. A small layer of my magic disguised the car’s license and gave its rear a whole different outline to throw off any police attention.

But that island of safety squeezed in around us.

My sister rested in the seat beside me—finally. Just the edge of my vision could feel Valerie’s sharp gaze taking in the thin traffic we moved among, the growing distance we covered. Her raised head and her shifting posture in the seat were constant tests and promises to me, that no head injury or bandaged-up blood loss would be slowing her down. Even though my mind could still see her toppling from that platform.

It was the other person who didn’t fit, at all. Emma Lynn sat crammed into the token space behind the car’s pair of seats. Again and again she’d chosen to secretly help me search for my sister, but it was hard to believe she’d kept up with us when we’d slipped out right under the authorities’ noses. Nobody outside our family had ever known so much about us, or our illusion magic.

Or it’s never ended well. I had left Valerie’s kidnapper, Ingram Knowles, dead after she’d broken free of him… my second kill, and I let it come to that. Never gave myself a choice.

Valerie watched Emma with small glances in the mirror. She had to be wondering, how long before we slipped away from her and finished disappearing.

That would be simpler if Emma were less fierce, less resourceful, less conflicted by everything she’d risked to help us. Too many kinds of beautiful.

Emma’s phone began chiming, and she squirmed to work it out of her pocket. She was the only one of us who even had a usable phone now—except how the locked-down cell I’d taken from Knowles had powers beyond the machine itself.

She answered the call with “I told you, I’m fine. It’s all okay now.” And she got her tone right, close enough to actual, reassuring confidence while keeping a hurried pace. “I’ll fill you in when I can talk,” and she hung up.

That had to have been her mother. Lydia Lynn and police captain Donald Harrison were the surviving members of the conspiracy that had been watching for our hidden family and our magic for so long. And even after one of Knowles’s men had shot and wounded Harrison too, his cops were still searching for me.

Valerie was the first to say it: “The police could start tracking you by that phone.” She kept the words calm, with no trace of her injuries and certainly no reminder that the real unknown among us was Emma herself.

“I know,” Emma answered. “Harrison’s people were never comfortable with him involving my mother and me. Since he could never really explain what you were.”

Nobody should believe, since nobody had glimpsed enough of our magic to accept that it was their own senses that were wrong… More than ever, that was our best hope for going back to our lives in hiding.

Emma added “So where are we going?” She managed to make it simply a question—and make the word “we” simply more true in the moment than saying “you.”

I said “Just getting some distance, before the cops can tighten the net.”

Before they would have found out I’d shot Ingram Knowles. The memory brought a queasy coldness inside me, worse because that fact shouldn’t be just another thing to put aside for survival’s sake. And there was still the warning Knowles had given before he died, the mass murderer who might reappear someday…

I looked along the street, the balance of bright headlights moving around us in the spotted blackness. “It’s been dozens of streets,” I said. “The next step would be someone bringing this car back to where its owner can find it.” Bringing it back to that surprised, innocent face, some random driver who’d let a “cop” commandeering his ride, while illusions hid the handcuff and the broken chain that are still dangling from my wrist now.

Valerie added “Emma, that shouldn’t be you.”

“Ah… I see.”

I could hear the shift in Emma’s voice the moment she caught up, that we couldn’t simply trust her out of our sight just now.

“Alright,” she went on. “How about this: we leave the car where it’s safe, and I leave my phone with it.”

Valerie looked back and let her see her eyebrows rise at the offer. It would reduce our worries for now… For an instant I imagined she could have been offering to truly abandon it and her mother and everything, for us, and what I could say if she actually did—

I locked my gaze on the road.

Up ahead a long public parking lot stretched beside the street, half-full with the blocky shadows of cars.

“Like there?” I said.

My sister twitched a smile, and I turned toward the lot. I heard Emma draw in a breath, about to speak at what must have looked like a lone decision. She hushed that as we pulled up.

I parked the car right across the line between two spaces to be sure it was reported—not easy to hog space with a vehicle that could barely squeeze a third person inside it. We clambered out into the shadow of a huge SUV, and Emma did tuck her phone in the glove compartment.

“Just past midnight,” she noted.

Then I locked it up and relaxed the thought holding the illusion over it, and we started down the street, quiet steps against the still rain-damp sidewalk. The street lay low and open around the lot, but the buildings ahead began to rise into commercial properties again. That was space we could slip into to get some rest.

Touches of my illusions kept us disguised, and even hid the satchel I carried that had been Knowles’s. Still, we stood out on the bare sidewalk just for there being three of us—and none of us could risk walking apart now.

Valerie held her pace with us, and I tried to listen for any forced sound in her stride. Around us lay the hushed, scattered sounds of empty sidewalks and individual cars passing. We even reached a dingy sort of hotel, but Valerie took a careful look at the shabby sign and led us on past it. Any siren in this night, any pattern at all, might be our best warning of trouble.

The loudest sound was the heavy churning of a bus, passing by and pulling up half a block ahead. Tension tightened—I could feel Valerie eyeing it, thinking of the chance to step onto it and then slip off it at the last instant and let it carry Emma away. To my relief, we never dashed after it.

Instead we walked on, watching the buildings, listening to the streets. The crackle of neon shifted behind us, almost falling into a rhythm.

A shadow moved in the alley beside us. Footsteps charged out.

For an instant we could have run, but Valerie hesitated. A tall, lean man in a hoodie burst from the alley waving a gun.

“In here! Now!” His rough voice meant to sound menacing, but it only came across as desperate.

Valerie didn’t move, trusting it to me—

The small, soft step behind me was Emma, edging toward concealment where she could draw her own gun—

“You picked the wrong night,” and I gave the mugger my harshest, pitying smile.

The sound made him flinch back, and I knew I’d read him right.

Slowly I pulled my coat back, and my will drew up my moonstones’ power and shaped a small, precise illusion under it: a police badge, but one thickly spattered with dark blood. Even seeing Harrison shot, and what I almost did to Detective Behm, were memories to draw on.

The mugger’s eyes flashed wider in the cover of his hood.

I could have let him see the very real handcuff on me too, but that would tell him too much. Instead I added “The other cops will be out looking for this one any minute. I just make one mistake and now nobody’s safe—”

I left my story at that. He took one more look at me, at the hardness my illusionary face radiated, and he ran.

For a moment I wondered, if the horror story I’d picked might scare him clear off the streets, maybe even save a life or more. There was always that chance.

Emma was looking at me, her mouth half-open for some reaction she might be still working out herself. Was that respect, or more? Or apprehension if she was guessing there had been a death tonight?

Valerie turned back along the street in careful motions, not quite trusting her injured head. On any other night my big sister could have panicked him with one well-placed image.

“Are you okay?” Emma’s voice was shallow with relief.

“Let’s keep moving,” and Valerie pushed on, still slow.

Emma darted forward, swerved around me, and planted herself in front of her. She stared into Valerie’s face—the illusionary face of an older woman that I’d given her, but Emma’s eyes flicked around to measure her alertness and her balance instead.

A car rolled by us, just a typical dark car that didn’t slow at all—

“I think I remember a clinic a few blocks from here,” Emma said. “Or you should be in a hospital. You can’t ignore this.”

Valerie let out a sigh. “And this is your revenge for pointing a gun at you, days ago? Here, see for yourself.”

She turned back, and strode into the alley the mugger had retreated in. I fell in behind her and motioned Emma along.

“What this is,” Emma said as she followed, “is me still fighting for someone who would have been left to Ingram Knowles’s mercy. Even if you forget you’ve been starved, injured, and you never let the EMTs finish with you.”

The alley opened up, crossed by a narrow driveway that ran behind the shops. Beside one dark door a LOADING sign gleamed under a faint light hanging from the building’s corner.

I kept my gaze away from that light and myself at the fringe of it, to watch the dim, near-silent paths around us. Emma steered Valerie under it and studied her face again.

“I’ve been looking after my mother ever since I could read med bottles—”

She broke off. Lydia’s injuries had come from Valerie’s late birth mother, even if Emma had tried to put that behind her.

I let the illusion drop from Valerie, and Emma gasped to find herself beside a woman suddenly inches taller than her. Then she reached up and tilted that face toward the light.

“Your eyes look fine. Now, the sixth sick sheik’s—”

“The sixth sick sheik’s sesquipedalian sixth sheep’s sick. Seriously?” Valerie whispered back. Our voices and faces were what we grew up learning to control, with and without illusions.

The alley went silent. I heard a car and then a van trundle by out on the street, as Emma began tapping at Valerie’s fingers and palms.

“No numbness? You do seem alright, but you should still get looked at. A fall headfirst off a subway platform, after days of him starving you?”

“I wouldn’t lie to myself, not about this.” Valerie said. “And we’ve all been watching me for any sign of dizziness, or stumbling, or anything.” She turned and nodded to take in the both of us—Valerie’s and my knowledge of sudden roadside injuries should be well beyond what an investor’s daughter knew. “You know if I go in for help, they’ll be looking for me.”

“I’m still not a professional. You want to take chances with this?” Emma looked over at me, searching for support.

“They’ll know me,” my sister said. “The police will have alerts out, or they’ll match me to Valerie Landis.” Embarrassment twinged in her voice, that she’d lived under her real first name for years.

Emma pulled back a step, folding her arms. “I suppose you do this every day.”

“No,” I said. “Usually there’s something dangerous—”

That drew a strangled, awkward laugh from Emma, and before she could snap back I finished—

“that we’re able to walk right around.”

“I… I guess.”

Emma’s laugh smoothed to something more honest, still too far short of the moments the two of us had begun to share before.

Then she turned back to Valerie. “But, the police saw the room you were kept in. They know you’re the victim here. And they know Knowles had kept explosives there, so they’re probably putting that together with the blast in the subway tunnel too.”

I nodded. But I didn’t add that Knowles had done that to unearth more of his magic—or that when I’d thought Valerie was dead, I’d killed him out of plain vengeance. My gaze swung away from them to watch the alleys again.

Emma said “But there has to be a way to help you—”

“If I step into a hospital,” Valerie said, “I’ll never get out free.”

That soft sound had to be her brushing back against the wall. Letting Emma see her as afraid.

As I looked back, Emma took a step toward her. “But if you could be sure…”

“If she says you need help,” I added, to play off what my sister had begun, “there have to be ways.”

“Really?” Valerie whispered. “You think I’d ever let someone cage me again?”

This time her voice made Emma waver, look over at me.

I began “All that time you spent ‘caged’ is what you should be worried about…” Then I let the stubborn sound trickle away, and added “But, really you just need to be watched, so any late symptoms have time to show. I can do that—I’m sure not letting you out of my sight now.”

Emma’s shoulders, her breathing, softened in acceptance.

The two of us had just conned her together, with me pretending for one moment that I’d have let Valerie risk being caught again. Now I had to smile reassuringly at Emma, ignoring the sourness of how much she didn’t understand.

Emma let out a breath. “I see. And they did cage you too, Nick.”

Don’t look, don’t look over at Valerie to see her reaction to Emma knowing my name too—

The alley was more silent than ever, as Emma’s voice softened. “No, not they. We had been trying to trap you for years—that was what Knowles used to get close to us and Harrison. And when we finally meet you, you turn out to be the one who’d stop Shaun’s killings, and then you turn the city upside down to find your sister.” Then she shut her eyes. “You also shot and wounded a cop, trying to escape.”

“You what?” Valerie said, and her shock had to be real enough.

Emma’s eyes squeezed tighter. “I… I need to stay with you two, to watch for complications…” Hesitation gathered in her.

“You think that would work?” I said. Not a warning, that we couldn’t let her that close now. Someone showing this kind of concern for us was still something too new to me… and I didn’t want her to leave.

“But,” and her eyes slowly opened, “I know my mother’s worried that I’m still missing.”

“Her?” Valerie said. “Yes, that’s probably the only thing that can scare her.”

Emma drew herself up. “I told her I’m alright. Now I need to tell her to her face, before she reports me as kidnapped—or sends out those videos of what you do.”

If she was expecting a gasp from us this time, we didn’t provide one.

She added “It’s not as if I could forget how you tried to delete those once. But I’ll try to show her there’s no point in exposing you anymore. So, you know where you’ll be staying?”

“We’re still deciding,” Valerie said.

“All right—”

And I heard it, the moment in mid-word when Emma realized we needed our secrecy, that we would never have told anyone where we’d go.

“But,” I added, “we’ll contact you tomorrow—no, it’d be today, now. And you know we will.” That was one promise I’d be keeping.

It drew a smile from her, at least. “I’m sure you’ll find a way. And… it’s over, right?”

And are we free to be leaving town—

“I mean,” she went on, “I know it’s not over for your recovery. But I guess Knowles really is… not a threat now.”

I said “He’s gone. But…”

Her eyes tightened, at what I’d just implied.

But even then, Knowles had left his magic behind, and left me his pleas that I’d need him against the killers that might be coming someday…

Then Emma said “Alright. Then, can I take care of the car now?”

Now that we could put four blocks and ten faces behind us before Emma reached her phone, now that Valerie could see there was no worst case to separating? I pulled out the keys and sent them in a toss to her, and she snatched them neatly out of the air.

“Remember, she’s counting on you to watch her,” Emma told me, and she moved away for the street. I let the illusion on her drop, and had one glimpse of her own short bright-blonde hair before she became just brisk footsteps making their way beyond the corner.

Valerie watched me as I stood there. I could feel that gaze too.

I drew on my moonstones, to form a precise whisper right to her ear—a method we hadn’t even needed while Emma could overhear us, but now it felt like the most fitting way to speak. “Yes, I’ll check in with her tomorrow. We’ll see.”

Then the two of us turned and made our way into the alley’s dark.

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