Birth of Chaos (Age of Magic: Wish Quartet Book 3) Page 2

  But as if he hadn’t just heard their panic, their sorrow, as if he hadn’t just witnessed their vehement reluctance, Snow straightened his back, looking over them like the mighty demigod he claimed to be.

  “As members of the Society of Wishes, you will do as you are told.”

  For a beat, she let that sink in, the atmosphere wrapping cold around Jo’s limbs. Wayne seemed to be impervious to the invisible binds.

  “Like Nico did as he was told?” he fired venomously.

  Another beat, another agonizing silence, and then Snow turned away. “You have your orders,” he said, as detached as Jo had ever heard him. “Gather the team.”

  Jo slumped slightly, face dropping to stare at the scattered shards of the mug Wayne had smacked from her hands. Sure, it was easy for her to shout objections, act as if she had any say in the matter. But the demands of the actual members of the Society had little more weight than the hot air they were made of. When their choices were to grant wishes or stop existing, what else were they supposed to do?

  Chapter 2

  Too Soon

  Her mental state was in tatters.

  Her body felt heavy, splintered. Her joints popped with every step, worn to agony by the tension of mourning that she’d carried in her limbs for days. For a being outside of reality, immune to human necessities, Jo knew in that moment that she had never known such exhaustion.

  She regretted having not gone to Snow in the limited time they’d had for grief. Maybe, if she had, she would understand something? Perhaps there was some insight she lost because she’d spent all her valuable time—all six days of it—mourning the death of her friend. At the very least, she might have been able to see the man who had been working his way into her heart underneath the cold and distant facade he was currently sporting.

  But his mental state now was an enigma to her. Was this all an act? Or had he really and truly broken, shattering differently but just as irrevocably as the rest of them?

  Thinking of going to him merely renewed old frustrations. Snow was a pawn as much as she was, as much as all of them were. He couldn’t undo the magic that bound them, even if he wanted to—she had enough faith in the goodness of the man to know that. She also knew he was speaking the truth when it came to not being able to choose the wishes. He was helpless to do anything more than try to keep them alive, and watch.

  At once, Jo forced herself to recount every look of devastation on his face, every sorrowful attempt to keep her at arm’s length out of what she could only assume was guilt for his circumstances. She committed to memory every time he’d caved to her touch and let slip apologies in breathy whispers into her ear. This wasn’t his fault; he was a victim too, no matter how hard he tried to convince them all otherwise.

  Yes, Jo’s jaw popped as she clenched her teeth. Snow was trapped in this game. And if he wasn’t the ringleader, that meant someone else was—and she would do whatever it took to uncover the truth.

  The doors of the briefing room opened to the cold gray of the inexplicable light source that hovered over the center table. It cast long shadows behind the chairs—eight in total. One would remain heartbreakingly empty. And one . . . one was already occupied.

  Pan sat, leaning back in her chair almost to the point of tipping. Her feet were propped on the table, crossed at the ankles, and her hands were folded over her stomach. The hem of wide-legged pants draped from her knees, little red bows up the back dangling ribbon to the floor. The woman-child tilted her head to the side, looking at Jo as she entered, chiffon and lace floating about from her ruffled turquoise top as she moved.

  “About time you got here!” With the flourish of a giggle, Pan uncrossed her legs and tipped her chair forward. “Where’s the rest of them?” Jo couldn’t help but flinch; the woman’s cheery tone was like nails on the chalkboard of the Society’s collectively despondent attitude.

  “Wayne went to get them.” Jo wanted her remark to sound curt, but it merely sounded tired, the words hardly her own. Jo dragged her feet over, sitting heavily in one of the empty chairs.

  “Lollygagging no dou—oh, Wayne, so good to see you!” She clapped her hands together. Sure enough, Wayne had arrived, the rest of the Society in tow. “What took you all so long?”

  As expected, no one answered. Takako stopped in her tracks, staring down the ridiculously dressed creature. Pan’s smile expanded, curling into something slightly more sinister, her cat-like eyes staring Takako down from beneath her mint green fringe. Takako shook her head and walked away. While she gave off the air of confidence, of not being intimidated, her movements looked a lot more like a tactical retreat than the advance following a victory.

  “Shove off, Pan,” Wayne muttered, barely loud enough for Jo to hear as he passed. If Pan heard, she made no motion. The other two men filed in without so much as a glance in her direction.

  “Do you not like me anymore, Wayne-eee?” Pan whined.

  Just seeing Pan had set Jo to seething, so actually hearing and interacting with the woman reared something ugly in her. It was a cold fire of pure malice that burned deep in Jo’s chest, the flames licking to be let out, to wrap a stranglehold around Pan’s throat. It felt like the longer she was in her presence, the stronger the hot current of liquid loathing flowed between them. For the first time in her life, Jo knew the true essence of hatred.

  As if sensing Jo’s dark thoughts, Pan’s eyes rolled over to her. The same expression Takako had received—a sort of wicked smile—was now directed at her. Jo had seen this smile before, she’d seen it like a bad omen of something to come in the morning the day before Fuji had erupted. A tremble worked up her spine, but Jo squelched it right between the shoulder blades. Her rage, simple but all-encompassing, would be a dam to any fear or intimidation. She wouldn’t let Pan have the satisfaction, not now.

  It was in that staring contest, pitting her will against Pan’s, that Jo found herself wondering for the first time if she could use her magic to tear apart something living.

  “Thank you all for coming.”

  “As though we had a choice,” Wayne mumbled, low enough that Jo was fairly sure she was the only one to hear.

  Across the table, Samson shook his head, rocking slightly, handing digging into his hair hard enough that the braids on one side began to come lose. His eyes were wild, hardly looking at anything at all as he kept repeating the words, “Too soon . . . Too soon . . .” He was barely breathing, shaking so violently that Eslar’s steady arm around his shoulders seemed to be the only thing keeping him upright at all.

  The other side of Samson was vacant. An empty seat. Self-loathing welled up within Jo. How had Samson, out of all of them, ended up next to what would have been Nico’s chair?

  “Will he be replaced?” Jo whispered—and perhaps she shouldn’t have; perhaps the exhaustion had loosened her lips and left her tactless. The whole room fell into a hush the moment they were said. Even Samson stilled, following her gaze with the rest of them to the place where Nico used to be—and still should have been.

  There was a long pause, a deep sigh, and then Snow finally diverged from acting as his namesake.

  “No.” Snow’s answer was gentle, as if he let himself hear their grief for the first time. It was factual, but not cold. The sound settled like its own warmth right next to her heart. It was the fracture she’d been looking for—the glimpse into a humanity that she knew was there. “As you all know, when the Age of Magic ended, so too did magic disappear from reality. A few lineages of power were strong enough to survive the jumps, the rebuilding of the world, and exist—dormant—in the blood of their ancestries. When a descendant of these ancients makes a wish, they are drafted into the Society.”

  “And Jo was the last one we were looking for,” Pan finished brightly. Jo fantasized about smothering her cheerful face with a nail-filled pillow. Especially when she added under her breath, “Took you long enough.”

  Jo was taken back to the Ranger Compound. Seven lineages, Snow had sai
d then. Be it through some secret knowledge or a sensory power, he’d known seven people would join the Society from the start. And just when all chairs had been filled . . . Jo looked back to Nico’s empty seat.

  No more companions. No more help. No new faces for eternity.

  And no more martyrs, she vowed.

  “Fine,” Jo mumbled. “It’s for the best . . . not like there would ever be any replacing Nico, anyway.”

  The silence that overcame them sounded like agreement to Jo’s ears. Everyone sat with their heads bowed, hands in their laps, in a stiff competition to be the smallest of the group. Even Snow stared at the table beneath him, as if he’d somehow forgotten why they were there, or how to pull up the wish.

  “You guys are so boring.” Pan drew out the ‘o’ in the last word for what felt like a complete three minutes. “Come on everyone, we have a job to do!” When still no one moved, Pan leaned heavily back into her seat with a groan, kicking her legs beneath the table like a child seconds away from throwing a proper tantrum. Jo thought the woman-child might have been mumbling something, the annoyance in her tone bordering on a whine. But then she was sitting back up, looking around the table in sickeningly genuine confusion. “Why the long faces? Didn’t you used to get excited by this? What changed?”

  A beat passed. Then two. No one seemed fully equipped to handle such a question, it would seem. Especially not one filled with such legitimate lack of what should have been easy understanding.

  “What changed?” Jo’s head eventually rose, a scathing remark on her lips. But before she could continue, Takako was on her feet.

  “What changed?” Takako echoed, more animated than Jo had ever seen her. “How about the fact that we know you’re sitting there like a smiling demon just waiting for your chance to strike us off one by one?”

  “Strike you off?” Pan blinked. “Why would I want that?”

  “You tell us.” Jo joined the conversation. She’d insist it was to support Takako, but there was no use lying to herself. She was at the point of taking any opportunity to fight with Pan.

  “Well, I don’t.” Pan folded her hands behind her braided, mint-green tresses. “Why do you think I would? I’m here too, you know. If the Society ends, what do you think happens to me? Do you think I’m any different from you?” Pan’s fingers began to fuss with her braids, pausing long enough to look at Jo. Were they friends, it would be like some kind of inside joke. But they were the furthest possible thing from friends and Pan’s intention escaped Jo entirely. “The wishes stop, and the Society stops. It needs to be dismantled properly or fed constantly with the magic of destroyed worlds. And the only thing more boring than staring at you lot for eternity is to stop existing entirely.”

  The logic was a sharp kick to the gut. It pulled Jo’s insides in different directions, layered atop each other in illegible and unbearable contrast. Everything Jo had come to believe about Pan hinged on the fact that she was the laughing monster, lurking under their beds and waiting to devour them the second their eyes closed. But if Pan was a prisoner too, then that just made her . . . a righteous bitch, yes, but one with no more or less power than the rest of them.

  Takako must have worked through a similar logic, because Jo watched her deflate back into her chair. The woman tucked her chin to her chest, and made eye contact with no one. Everything diffused, begging to be let go and forgotten about.

  No, Jo tried to force her mind to begin to work again, to shake off the grief and start moving forward anew. Dismantled properly . . . Do you think I’m different than any of you? She’d phrased the latter as a question, not a statement. And the former . . . the former was an idea all its own. Pan was hiding something: she so clearly knew more about the Society than she was letting on. But opportunities to talk one-on-one with Pan in any productive way seemed about one in a million. Still, Jo filed away the knowledge.

  And of course, Pan had no idea when to stop. “Really, my power is boring too. Just—” Pan snapped her fingers “ —poof! One of you is dead! Snow has magic and problem solved!” She sank back into her chair with a huff. “That’s no fun to watch.”

  Maybe Pan was one of them, maybe not, the jury was still out. But even if she was, Jo would most certainly still hate her. She’d sort through everything else when her emotions weren’t making every attempt to get the better of her. She leveled her eyes with the ice-cream haired woman. “Don’t speak about us like we’re cattle.”

  “Then act smarter than cattle, and work on this next wish, so none of you have to die.” Pan smiled. You, not us, Jo noted; Pan didn’t see herself at any risk. “Or you can just break everything and see how that turns out. It’s not like I really care that much.”

  “All right, enough.” Snow finally joined in, far too late. “That’s enough,” he said, quieter. The man shook his head and straightened. He’d been hunched over, chin nearly against his chest.

  Though his gaze seemed to hold far less intimidation and power than usual, he looked each one of them in the eyes. At Eslar who now sat under the arm Samson had slung around his shoulders. At Wayne, who seemed ready to blow his top in anger, or collapse into tears. At Takako, who out of all of them, still met their leader with a searching, almost trusting expression, as though she were still waiting for orders.

  And then, finally, at Jo.

  “I don’t care if you all get along.” She didn’t know why he seemed to be speaking only to her. “But this changes nothing. You must still grant wishes. Our focus should be on that, and that alone.” He pressed his fingers into the table and it rippled to light with magic. Images began to float, taking shape from the ether, but Jo focused solely on Snow.

  Live as a slave to wishes, or die for them—that was his message. Jo’s hand balled into a fist. She refused to believe their eternity was perpetually linked to such an unforgivable ultimatum; there had to be a third way out. And she wasn’t going to let them see the end of this wish before she found it. She didn’t care if—How did Pan put it? She had to dismantle everything to get to it.

  Chapter 3

  The Bone Carver

  The next couple of minutes seemed to drift by at half speed.

  Jo watched in a sort of numb daze as Snow continued to bring to life an array of images. His motions were disjointed, robotic. Jo tilted her head, trying to make sense of them, though he seemed to be having as hard of a time as she was. It was as if he were moving on autopilot or, perhaps more aptly, like a puppet with invisible strings.

  He finally stilled and, for a long moment, he didn’t speak. Then, as if steeling himself, he took a breath and sifted through the images until one illuminated and expanded, taking up the majority of the space in front of their faces.

  The image was of a human bone, that much was obvious by its size and shape—likely a femur, Jo thought—and Snow’s demeanor. But the unnerving quality of the stark photograph wasn’t so much in its subject matter. It wasn’t in the way the bone was bleached and cleaned so completely that it no longer looked like it belonged to a body it all.

  No, what made this unique was the jagged lines carved deep—so deep that delicate pinkish marrow was visible in their grooves. Upon closer inspection, it became obvious that they were numbers which, at first glance, appeared random.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” Wayne mumbled. “Some kind of code?”

  You could call it that. Jo kept her thoughts to herself for now. It was a sort of code, she supposed, one of the oldest: binary.

  “A string of murders have been plaguing United North America,” Snow began.

  Jo studied not the bone and its odd markings, but around it for the first time. The bone glistened with moisture, no doubt deposited from the snow that had been pushed aside and piled around the rocky cement where the bone lay. Snow—real snow, not the man standing at the head of the table—inches thick and perfectly white. She’d seen pictures of the harsh winters in the UNA, heard the gloating from Texans about never having to worry about anything so bris
k, but she’d never experienced it herself.

  “Just a nickel minute here, big cheese,” Wayne interrupted. “You’re telling us that this . . . this is . . .” He’d started off strong, but the words faded into nothingness. A truth they had all figured out, but did not want to recognize.

  “This is the work of what’s being identified as a serial killer. They’re calling him the Bone Carver.” Snow’s voice was as icy as his namesake. “This is his calling card.”

  Jo felt herself leaning forward in her seat, despite the way her hand settled with her fingertips pressing indents into her lips in a shaky line. By all logic, it was grotesque and horrific, yet her brain seemed to short-circuit when it came to thinking of anything logically. It was beyond terrible. It was as if it were too wretched for her to comprehend. Here was a bone—a human bone—cleaned, bleached, and neatly prepared by some murderer. It was grotesque and horrific and Jo didn’t quite know how to process it. The effect was so disjointing that it was as if someone else was looking at it, not her.

  When Jo could tear her eyes away, she could tell by just one look at everyone’s faces that she wasn’t alone. Even Snow seemed at a momentary loss. Whatever he had to say next would be even worse; it was better to rip it off all at once, get it done with, like a bandage.

  “The Bone Carver has an appreciation for binary.” She finally shared her observation with the room, an addition that seemed to spur Snow back to life.

  “Yes.” He cleared his throat with a soft cough. “The methodology has been consistent enough that law enforcement and government agencies have deemed it the work of a bona fide serial killer rather than a string of unconnected or copycat events.” As he talked, Snow sifted through image upon image, dragging up medical reports and news broadcasts of the crime scenes, the arrest that failed to meet criteria for conviction, the victims. Jo’s stomach dropped, the atmosphere settling into something too grim for their already wounded attitudes to handle.