Chains and Memory (32 page)

“Or bring along a few baselines in iron necklaces for comparison,” the man next to me muttered under his breath.

At least there was no evidence to suggest any sidhe had been involved in the attack; that was one piece of good news. The ringleaders had been evicted from the other march for overstepping their bounds, and our forces on watch there had conducted a quick divination to check the odds of them causing trouble elsewhere. Unfortunately, since every man jack of them was sporting at least three pounds of iron jewelry, the results weren't very reliable. The best guess had been that they wouldn't do anything serious, and since they couldn't be locked up just for being assholes, they'd been left to roam the area on their own. They'd found a bar, found some friends, and the rest had snowballed from there.

The debriefing lasted until nearly noon. Grayson found me after I left the auditorium and said, “You might as well get lunch now. We'll pick up again this afternoon.”

“I'll let Julian know,” I said. With the meeting over, I was free to scan for him—but I didn't spot him anywhere in the Guardians and trainees streaming out into the halls. “Huh. Did you see him in there?”

Grayson shook her head. “He may have been called away to speak with Nantakarn or someone else about his encounter with Falcon.”

If so, gods alone knew when he'd be out. I went out to a food truck rather than stand in the enormous line forming outside the Corps cafeteria, and ate my lunch in the basement room where we'd been training with Grayson. Julian didn't join us all afternoon, which I found ominous. After Grayson released me, I went upstairs to get signal and called Julian's port. It went straight to voicemail.

I stood in the lobby, tapping my port against my other palm, trying to decide what to do. If he'd been called away, he might not even be in the Aegis Building anymore. I wished he'd sent me a message before vanishing into thin air; it would have gone a long way toward reassuring me that he hadn't been kidnapped by the Unseelie or something.

Well, I had at least one way to check on his whereabouts. I went to the lobby and asked the security guards whether Julian had left yet.

One of the women there consulted the logs and shook her head. “I'm sorry, ma'am. Julian Fiain has not registered here today.”

It took me aback. “What? You mean he never came in this morning?”

“That's right, ma'am.”

Where the hell had he gone?

My fears, which had been nebulous and silly-seeming before, suddenly got a lot more solid. I walked away without thanking her and pulled up a new number on my port. “Grayson? Sorry to bug you; I know you're on your way home—but I'm worried Julian's gone missing.”

A brief pause. Then Grayson said, “Are you still at headquarters? Wait there.”

She must not have gotten on the Metro yet, because she came back into the lobby only a few minutes later. I gave her a rundown on the situation, including the last time I'd seen Julian, the night before. “I went to bed before he did,” I said—leaving out the comments I'd made at the time about Grayson's determination to find out just how many quick-fire shields I could build before I died of exhaustion.

Grayson, thank all the gods, neither dismissed my concerns as foolish nor fed them into a blaze. “It does seem out of character for him to wander off like this. But I think it's unlikely that anyone attacked him. We have no reason to think Julian went anywhere after leaving your apartment except toward here. No point along that path is very secluded; if there had been trouble, someone would have noticed. And it is
exceedingly
unlikely that anyone managed to take him without a struggle.”

“Unless they gutted him first,” I said in a low voice.

She put one hand on my shoulder, which startled me out of my funk. “Kim,” she said. “Go home. I'll pass the information along; if something has happened to Julian, we'll find out. But more likely he simply went somewhere and didn't tell you.”

Robert had told me once that Julian vanished occasionally at Welton, without a word. It wasn't as out of character as Grayson thought. But I'd never imagined Julian would do this to
me
—not anymore.

Maybe I hadn't read him as well as I'd thought. The shield, the
geas
, Shard's apparent betrayal . . . it might be weighing on him even more than I'd realized.

But if so, I wished he'd at least
told
me.

“I'll check around,” I said. “Maybe he went to Toby's.” It didn't seem likely. But right then, I would take a shred of hope over none at all.

~

He wasn't at Toby's. Neeya, when I pinged her, messaged back to say she hadn't seen him. He wasn't at any of our usual haunts — not that we had many these days, apart from the Aegis Building and Toby's house. And the apartment, when I got there, was as empty as I'd left it.

I barely paused to drop my bag and flick on the lights before grabbing my tarot cards. My Piacenza was still in a shielded locker at FAR, but I had a backup Candleflame deck I'd bought when I came to D.C.; that would serve well enough.

I wanted to know what had happened.

First I had to meditate, clearing my thoughts as best I could of the fears and distractions plaguing me. To have any hope of a good answer, I needed to be as centered as possible. Then I spread a cloth over the carpet and began to deal the cards.

This was not the time for a big, elaborate spread. I did a five-card reading, with the Knight of Swords to signify Julian; the traditional coloration of the card didn't match him at all, but the personality it indicated did. Around it I laid the seven of swords, the Hermit, the Page of Swords, and the Ace of Swords, to give me the past, the future, his reasoning, and what he might achieve.

Deception, enlightenment, curiosity, action. The Hermit drew me particularly. I lifted it by its edges, as if it were some kind of specimen I was studying, and tried to sort through what my gift was telling me. Questions, answers—whatever Julian had done, he was trying to get an answer.

But what was the question?

The last thing he and I had discussed, other than what to have for dinner, had been Shard. Maybe he'd gone to find her—to ask why she'd lied, what could possibly be so vital that she would destroy her gifts to keep it hidden from our own people.

“Oh, Julian,” I whispered, laying down the card. Could he get to the Otherworld? I summoned my port into my hand and tapped out a quick message to Grayson, asking her to check whether he'd registered with the people monitoring passage back and forth. My bet was that he hadn't. Which meant he'd have to make his own gate—could he do that? If he drained his power reservoir, maybe. But that would leave him stranded in the Otherworld, with no backup and no protection against whatever the sidhe chose to do to him.

Even though the Seelie were our allies, I doubt they would take kindly to Julian poking around in search of their crippled seer.

Message sent, I gripped my port my fingers ached. It felt like last fall all over again, with Julian missing and me wishing like fire that I could go after him. I didn't have the first bloody clue how to get to the Otherworld, though; the Unseelie had always taken me. And even if he was still in our world, I couldn't find him without a hell of a lot more ritual prep than I could stage in my living room. I'd never thought I would wish so much for Welton's sorcery labs.

If the powers that be got worried enough, they'd find him for me. Hell, there was an entire section in SIF devoted to searching for missing people. Julian might have warded himself against scrying—it depended on how secretive he was being—but they had specialists for that kind of thing.

My port beeped the arrival of Grayson's reply.
Will do. Get some rest, Kim.

There didn't seem much chance of that. But Julian had a near-miraculous ability to sleep on command, courtesy of his training, and I'd been trying to cultivate something similar. I put my cards back in their box, brushed my teeth, and went to bed, where I stared at the ceiling for a long time before sleep came.

~

As with the Falcon dream, I knew immediately that my synapses were not firing at random. This dream was real.

And Julian was there.

“Gods and sidhe!” I swore, flinging my arms around him. It didn't give me the reassurance I wanted; “real” or not, this was still a dream, and I had very little sensation of touch. But my mind recognized him, which in its own way was as good as a hug. If I'd been awake, relief would have made my knees go weak. “I'm so glad you're okay.”

“Kim,” Julian said. It registered as much in my thoughts as in my ears—not that I actually had ears here. His voice rippled through my spirit, carrying with it a breathtaking sense of joy and wonder.

In a blink, I flashed a little distance away from him. My gaze searched his face. “What is it? What happened?”

His smile was faint, as if he didn't quite believe yet in his own delight. “I did it, Kim. Or rather—
they
did it. They freed me.”

The space around us had been vague in that dream-like way, but now it flashed to a forest. Not a specific place: just an imitation, cobbled together from the memories I tried to ignore. The Otherworld, with its spreading trees and deep shadows below. “You got the Seelie to remove the
geas
? How?”

The smile faded. “Not the Seelie, Kim. She was telling the truth.”

A cold wind snapped through, external manifestation of the sudden chill in my bones. “Julian . . .”

“The Unseelie,” he said. “Her name is Ravel. Kim, everything she told us is true. About the
geas
, about the Seelie—
everything.
”

The dream stuttered and caught, like a badly-streaming video. His meaning was there, but my mind wouldn't let it in. Julian, unshielded . . . but it was the Unseelie, not the Seelie, who had done it.

He had put himself in the hands of our enemies.

“No,” I whispered, shaking my head. “It isn't possible. You would never go to them.”

“Because of the
geas
?” he asked. “I didn't trust them, Kim. I still don't trust them. But I didn't have to. If the only option you have is a bad one, then you take it. I asked myself whether I was willing to risk the Unseelie taking me prisoner again, even killing me, if there was the
slightest
chance they might free me instead. And the answer was, yes.”

His grey eyes were alight with some inner flame, glowing in the dark forest of this dream. They weren't gold. If they'd turned him—they couldn't, could they? It had only worked on me because they caught me in the moment of transition, when my blood and flesh and bone were rewriting themselves from human toward sidhe. But if they had, surely he couldn't disguise it here. He wasn't one of them.

It didn't matter if he was. Back then, he'd freed me; now I would free him in return.

“Kim, listen to me,” Julian said, his voice low and urgent. “You won't believe this—you can't. But I have to tell you anyway.
It's lying to you.
The
geas
is. No, the Unseelie aren't our friends. They're incapable of compassion, of empathy; friendship is impossible for them. But the same thing is true of the Seelie. It isn't our allies versus our enemies, the kindly ones against the cruel. There's no difference between them, not in any way that matters to us. I absolutely believe the Seelie attacked you, made you look unstable so you'd be gutted. Without it, you were a wild card: as strong as any of us, but free. So they betrayed you. They aren't our friends, and if we let the world go on believing they are, that is going to put us in more danger than I can imagine.”

A drumbeat pulsed through the air, low and accelerating. It was my heartbeat, spiking with horror. “For gods' sakes, Julian . . . think it through! You put yourself in the hands of the Unseelie, and then you come here and tell me you know the truth? They're manipulating you! They've put their
own
compulsion on you—can't you see?”

“I would know,” he said, with all the certainty of a born wilder, trained from birth to know and control his own mind. “They couldn't do that without me noticing.”

Just like they couldn't sneak up on us during the most heavily-guarded public event in the last decade. Just like they couldn't cross the planar injunction without alerting our watchers. There was nothing I would put past their skills.

But it was a mental effect, an influence on his thoughts. I knew how to deal with those.

In the dream, it manifested as me taking his head between my hands. Julian didn't flinch back. He opened his mind to me, inviting me to search every corner. I didn't bother trying; they could easily hide something like that from me. Instead I flooded his spirit with my own feelings: my fear for him, my love, my hatred of the Unseelie and my determination to root out every last vestige of their touch.

He shuddered beneath my touch, overwhelmed by the onslaught he didn't even attempt to defend against. When I released him, he caught my wrists and kissed each of my hands in turn. A ghostly pressure, indistinctly felt. “Nothing's changed, Kim. Because it's true. We cannot—we
must
not—trust the Seelie.”

I wasn't even thinking about the Seelie anymore. With his mind so open to mine, I'd picked up a trace of thought, even though I wasn't looking for it. “There's something more,” I whispered, staring at him. “I almost saw—what aren't you telling me?”

He wasn't holding my wrists anymore. Between us, the ground began to fall away.

Julian said, “I made a promise. To you, and to Neeya. In my heart, I promised all of the Fiain. Now, finally, I can fulfill it.”

To get rid of the deep shield. To get rid of the
geas
on which it rested. But that prospect should have made Julian fierce. What I'd felt in him was something else: a quiet acceptance, tinged with sorrow.