The Collected Christopher Connery (39 page)

Nia lay out Connery’s body piece by piece. Head, arms,
and legs all in perfect alignment around the empty space in the middle.

“Don’t take all day,” Connery said from his place by
Xavier’s truck. “Time’s a-wasting, princess.”

Nia jerked around. “Don’t call me that!”

Connery only smiled at her and she had no choice but to
return to her work, her heart battering angrily against her aching ribs. She
wanted to kill him. She had never wanted to kill anyone in her life, but she
wanted to kill him. But if she killed him now, she would also be killing
Xavier.

She could also be killing Gail.

She might already be dead.

But what if she wasn’t?

Though each movement sent a sickening pulse of pain
through her battered body, she picked up her chalk and began to prepare the
spells that would put Connery back together and restore him to life.

“So you were listening to us the whole time?” she asked
in a dull voice as she drew.

“In a manner of speaking,” Connery answered. “For a bit,
I was just dead, but the more of me you found, the better I got at absorbing
information. It was all piecemeal of course, a conversation here, a dream
there.”

Nia shuddered at the thought of Connery’s magic
slithering around in her mind while she slept.

“It wasn’t until you brought everything here that things started
to arrange themselves up here.” He tapped the side of Xavier’s head with a
fingertip. “Then you woke me up.”

“You’re not really him, you know,” she said as she
dragged her chalk slowly across the cement. “You’re just a collection of
memories, less than a ghost.”

“I know,” Connery replied with an almost dreamy smile.
“That’s why I have to get home quickly. I don’t want things to start getting
flaky.”

“What do you mean?” Nia asked, startled by his strange
tone of voice.

“Like you said, I’m a memory. Even with the support
Xavier gives me, I’m not a fully functioning consciousness.” When he caught her
watching him wide-eyed, he smiled. “See, my theory was identical to yours. I
thought I would eventually consume Mister Rivers’ consciousness and become more
or less who I was before, but I see now that won’t happen. I miscalculated the
strain of controlling a living consciousness.” He sighed and held up his hands.
“No experiment is perfect, I guess.”

“Then what will happen to you?” asked Nia, curious in
spite of herself.

“Oh, if I’m returned to my body, these memories will be
assimilated back into my former consciousness, but if I’m left here I’ll start
to deteriorate, becoming more and more unstable. I don’t know when it would
end, but I doubt I would much care about the old me when it was done.”

Nia felt hope sting her and tried to brush it away.
There’s
a catch or a lie here somewhere. He wouldn’t be telling you if there weren’t.
But
maybe… maybe he was losing control already. Maybe he was already slipping. “And
if I just waited for that to happen?”

“Then I suppose you’d find out exactly what that
deterioration would entail.”

“And that would be?”

“Oh, uncontrolled violent psychopathic behavior.” That
dreamy smiled hardened into a fiercely present grin.

“Xavier would never –” Nia began.

“He won’t be here anymore. If this mind decays, which do
you think will go first, the memories preserved and protected by magic or the
one already terrified half to insanity? Oh, and I forgot to mention, while he
was sleeping the magic woven into my body got him to inject a good several
liters of vernix into his veins. That also gives one of us an advantage. Do you
know which?” When Nia didn’t answer, he added, “Do you need a hint?”

“No.” Nia turned away. That tiny spark of hope turned to
an icy stone in her chest.

“Anyway, that’s another reason for you to hurry up,
because right now I’m fully capable of deciding that you and yours are more
valuable to me alive than dead.”

Nia glanced over and felt her stomach clench with fear.
Connery had the wrench in his hand.

“That won’t always be the case.” He tapped the wrench
lightly against his shoulder. “So you had better get to work.”

Her hands were unsteady as she took up the chalk again,
but when she set it back on the concrete, the shaking ceased. She never
trembled when she drew, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid.

What would Mother do?

Die. Don’t you remember?

Swallowing hard against the tears that would make her
voice quiver, she said, “You won’t get far. The Academy will send someone
else.”

“Oh yes, the Academy that failed to catch me for close to
ten years. I’ll definitely keep an eye out for them.” He watched her, wearing a
shrewd expression that she liked even less than the arrogant grin. “I wouldn’t
rely on the Academy, Illuminator Graves. They’ll let you down every time, but
then I’m sure you know that. After all, they ruined you.”

Let it pass. He’s just toying with you because he
takes pleasure in seeing you upset. Don’t let him.
But then she said, “What
do you mean?” and hated herself for it.

Connery twirled the wrench thoughtfully in Xavier’s
strong hand. “You could have been powerful, really powerful, but you’re just
another chalk scraper. And all it took was a lie, one little lie to keep you in
line and stop you from really thinking.”

Nia turned away, cursing herself for letting him play
with her. “If you’re not going to make sense, then just shut up and let me
work.”

But for all his earlier talk of haste, he apparently
found needling Nia too amusing to stop. “I honestly expected you to have
figured it out by now, given how clever you are, but I guess you’d rather not
know.”

Nia slammed her palm on the floor, snapping her chalk in
two. “Rather not know
what?”

Connery held up one finger –
wait –
and smiled
another infuriating smile. Then he set down the wrench and got on one knee.
When he pulled a piece of chalk from inside the cuff of Xavier’s shirt, Nia
thought of how often she had used that trick herself.

Glancing up to make sure she was watching, Connery began to
draw.

Nia’s body tensed before she remembered that he couldn’t
create any new magic. All the magic he could do now were on pieces of paper in
his pockets. Curious in spite of herself, she stood to better see what he was
drawing.

“I borrowed this from your memories, I hope you don’t
mind,” Connery said in the same way he might talking about taking a pencil
without asking.

Nia looked at the circle, but it wasn’t even complete.
The circle was smudged and skewed, the edges rough and uneven. Why was he showing
her this?

Then she remembered.

It was a protection circle. The same kind her mother had
used during her catastrophic experiment. Her mother believed it would be strong
enough to absorb any magic that got away from her, but she had been wrong. The
force of the unbound magic had shattered the protection spell and everyone had
– they had –

Then Nia realized her mistake. This wasn’t just the same
kind
of protection spell her mother had used. It
was
the spell her mother had
used. Connery had drawn it exactly as Nia had seen it when she had been dragged
away from her mother’s brutalized body and carried from the room. The angle was
strange because she had been practically falling out of the man’s arms in her
struggle to get back to her mother and the edges were uneven because most of
the circle had already been destroyed by the flood of blood.

This is just another game,
Nia thought.
He’s
just trying to hurt me.
But against her will, her eyes were drawn back to
the circle, drawn to the tiny symbol at the far left, the one she had
remembered so clearly even in her terrified grief-mad state. She had thought
the symbol resembled a pretty little tree.

A tree?

Nia hadn’t recognized it then. How could she have? She
wouldn’t even draw her first functional spell for another three years, but now
– now she knew. Protection spells, especially big ones, were made up of
straight lines and blocky shapes, almost ugly in their simplicity. This symbol
was entirely out of place.

“Of course, it’s not completely accurate to your memories,”
Connery said, “because –”

“Because the chalk was lighter,” Nia finished for him.
Yes, she had noticed that as well. The chalk in which the little tree symbol
had been drawn had been a slightly brighter white than the rest of the spell.
That was probably why it had drawn her eye in the first place.

Connery sat back a little, one arm cocked casually on his
knee. “Looks like somebody made a mistake.”

This was no mistake. This wasn’t a forgotten line or an
unclosed ring. This symbol had been deliberately drawn into the spell where it
didn’t belong. And she knew that symbol. Of course she did. She had drawn it
herself a hundred – a thousand – times. It was an accelerator. When used
properly, it was a safe way to increase the power of spells without any further
input from the caster.

But to attach an accelerator to a protective spell was
madness. Protective spells were deliberately static, the immovable object meant
to meet the unstoppable force. There were ways to make them stronger, but they
all involved thickening lines and reinforcing boundaries. An accelerator would
put the static spell in motion, destroying it.

However, just because the protective spell was nullified
didn’t mean the accelerator was. Its parameters broken, it would latch on to
the nearest magic and magnify it a hundred fold. In this case, it would have
found her mother’s unbound magic.

Dizzied and overwhelmed, Nia could only sink onto the
cold floor.

Connery got to his feet, brushing the chalk from his
hands. “Do you see now?”

No, Nia couldn’t see anything but her mother’s blood. Her
mother who had been – who had been…

Everything – Connery, the storm, the pain in her ribs–
vanished until all that remained was the razor sharp truth.

Her mother hadn’t made a mistake. Her mother had been
murdered.

“See,” said Connery from above her. “I told you they
couldn’t be relied on.”

Nia lunged at him, grabbing for the wrench with a shriek
of rage and pain.

Gail had just managed to get herself and Arthur – who was
awake now, but still weak as a half-drowned rat – up to the top of the muddy
riverbank when she heard the scream.

“Nia.” Arthur tried to stand, but slid down into the mud
again. “That was Nia.”

“Shit.” Gail’s throat was still throbbing and she had a
feeling that the chain had done some serious damage that she would feel keenly
when the adrenalin wore off, but at least she was conscious and aware.
Conscious and aware of how absolutely fucked they were.

“We have to help her.” Arthur tried again to get up, but his
legs wobbled beneath him and when Gail tried to catch him they both hit the mud
with a filthy splash. “You have to go,” he told her when he had caught his
breath. “I’ll be fine here. I just need to rest.”

Gail was already standing. “Are you sure, doc?”

“I’m sure,” Arthur snapped, arms wrapped tightly around
his chest. “Go!”

Putting the light in his hand so he wouldn’t be left
huddling in the dark, Gail pulled up the hood of her poncho and ran. The ground
had turned to treacherous slop beneath her feet, but she didn’t slow her pace.
If Nia’s scream had reached them over the river’s roar, she couldn’t be far.

But
god, please say we didn’t just hear her
die.

She skidded to a stop in front of the garage, the wet gravel
scraping under her wet boots. Through the door, she could Nia, slumped over on
the concrete. Connery was gripping her arm in his hands, trying to twist
something out of her hand.

Gail charged inside. “Nia!”

Nia looked up. Her cheeks were streaked with tears and
the soul-deep misery on her face shook Gail to her bones. But when Nia caught
sight of her, a little light came back into her eyes. “Gail?”

“How the hell did you –”

Gail didn’t give Connery time to finish. She didn’t dare
draw her gun, not while Connery was still inside Xavier’s body, so instead she
just decided to beat the shit out of him.

He raised the wrench he’d taken from Nia, but when she
drove her elbow into his stomach and slammed her knee into his groin, he
grunted and dropped it. Gail might have dove for it, but she knew the wrench
wasn’t the real danger.

Grabbing him around the waist with both arms, she shoved
her hands into his pocket. Her hands closed on piles of paper. He realized what
she was doing a second too late and before he could wrench away, she had two
huge fistfuls of paper in her hands. She didn’t dare tear up the spells, not
knowing what that would do, so she just shoved one handful into her own pocket
and threw the other aside, scattering paper across the garage.

Without sparing her another look, Connery threw himself
down on the floor, snatching up the papers, just she hoped he would.

Spinning on her heel, Gail rain to Nia who was still
sitting stunned on the floor. “Come on, princess,” she said, yanking Nia to her
feet and wrapping a supportive arm around her waist. “We have to get out here.”

Nia didn’t say anything in response, but she looped an
arm around Gail’s neck and together they hobbled out into the storm as fast as
Nia’s bruised ribs would allow. As they stumbled over the slick ground on their
way back to the river, she whispered, “Where are we going?” But Gail just shook
her head. If they were lucky, Connery would check the house first before coming
after them. That would give them time to prepare.

But Gail hadn’t taken Nia’s injuries into account. They
made it about three hundred yards before she had to stop and rest. She hunched
over gasping, both hands clutching her chest.

“Are you all right?” Gail whispered against her cheek,
hoping with all the hope she had left that Connery had gone the other way. “Did
he hurt you?”

“No,” Nia managed, but the sobbing hitch in her voice
gave lie to the word. “He didn’t, but oh, Gail, he – he –” She suddenly lifted
her hand to Gail’s face and found her soaking hair under her poncho. “You’re
all wet.”

“Yeah, it rained,” Gail answered stupidly.

“Are you okay?”

And despite every single shitty thing that had happened
that day, Gail couldn’t help laughing. Catching Nia’s face between her hands,
she pressed a quick closed-mouthed kiss to her lips. “Yeah, I’m okay. Are you
ready to go?”

Nia nodded and they continued limping to the riverside.
Nia’s shoes weren’t made for mud and Gail had to hold her tight to stop her
from slipping. When Arthur caught sight of them, he held up the light and they
managed to stumble to his side. As soon as they reached him, Nia collapsed into
her brother’s arms, choking on barely suppressed sobs.

Shooting a quick glance over her shoulder for any sign of
pursuit, Gail hid the light in her coat pocket.

“Ni, are all right?” Arthur was saying. “I swear if he
hurt you, I’ll –”

“No, Arthur, it wasn’t – he showed me something.”

“Whatever it was, it was a lie.”

“But that’s the worst part. It wasn’t. I should have
realized before, but I never thought – how could they? How could they?” There
was anger in Nia’s voice now. No, more than anger, rage.

“How could they what, Ni?”

Gail stared nervously over the lip of the riverbank. She
didn’t like this spot. Not only were they still getting rained on, but with the
river to their backs, they were as good as cornered. Nia and Arthur were both
hurt and if she were honest, she wasn’t feeling too great herself. What they
needed was a place to hide until they could regroup, but where could they go
where Connery wouldn’t find them?

“They lied to me. They lied to everyone about
everything.”

“Who –”

“The Academy! They said it was Mother’s fault. They said
that no one could control unbound magic. They said she should have known
better. They said it was her fault they all died, but it
wasn’t.”
As if
she knew she wasn’t expressing herself clearly, she broke off and took a
breath. “They framed her, Arthur.”

“What?”

The explanation that fell out of Nia was tearful and
confused, but everything she said made a terrible kind of sense.
Would the
Academy really do that? Would they kill one of their own just to maintain the
status quo? And if they would do that, what else would they do?

“They murdered her and then they framed her, so she
wouldn’t succeed in proving her theory. They couldn’t risk her being right. You
have to believe me, Arthur. I know Connery lies, but not about this. It’s the
truth. I know it is.”

Gail felt like she was waiting on the edge of a coin, one
side left the world as it had always been and the other would alter her
perspective on her city and her home forever. And what Arthur said next would
determine on which side things landed.

“I believe you.”

And there it was. The world had changed slightly but
irrevocably from the one Gail had known.

Then Nia pulled in a sharp breath. “Oh, Arthur, your
binding –”

“Yeah,” Arthur answered. “It broke. I was trying to help
Gail. I had to do something, Nia, if it hadn’t broken, I think –”

“I would have been as dead as Connery,” Gail finished for
him.

She knew that Nia was full of questions, but she wouldn’t
get a chance to ask them just yet. Over the edge of the riverbank, Gail could
see a light coming at them quickly out of the darkness She reached for her gun.

Connery was on his way.