I got us to Gran’s before the magic I’d cast wore down. If he wanted to find us, Pierce Carter could do it now. Still, it felt better to be home. Carter would stand out like a mob of torch-wielding villagers in the neighborhood. People would talk if he came around asking questions. I carried Jessie in and put her on the bed I’d slept in for most of my life. Gran hadn’t asked any questions when I arrived, just held doors open and gave Jessie grave looks. Gran knew something about healing, so I wasn’t surprised when she sat down by Jessie’s unconscious form. What I hadn’t expected was to be thrown out of the room. I’d hovered there, my arms crossed, feeling protective, helpless, and more than a little belligerent. I wanted to take those feelings out on someone, but there wasn’t a convenient target. After a few minutes of my angry brooding, Gran heaved a great sigh and turned a stern eye on me.

“Lad, you’re angry. It’s making this a hundred times harder than it ought to be. Go find something to do for the next hour.”

I opened my mouth to protest and watched as Gran’s expression went from stern to arctic. I’d misinterpreted her order as a suggestion. I bit back on my comment and nodded.

“Yes, Gran,” I mumbled as I left the room.

I spent that hour returning the car to the rental location the agent back in Denver had told me about in her magic-induced haze of forgetfulness. I flagged down a cab and brooded in silence as she drove me home. To her credit, the cab driver took one look at my face and decided that chatting me up was a bad idea. I knew that the cabbies did that sometimes to earn extra tips. I wanted silence. I wanted to be left alone. She intuited that got herself a big, fat tip for it. She even did me the courtesy of not racing away after she dropped me off back at Gran’s place. I went inside and fought the urge to charge in and see what was happening with Jessie. I sat down on the small sofa in Gran’s living room and did everything I could to just not think at all. It didn’t work, but at least it gave me a focal point for all my pent-up energy. Every time a brave thought emerged from my self-imposed inner silence, I lashed it back into my subconscious with a brutality that shocked even me. I only sat there for fifteen or twenty minutes before Gran finally emerged from the little spare bedroom. She looked tired and moved as though she’d pulled a muscle in her back. She sat in her large recliner and let out a deep breath. I knew she probably needed a few minutes to gather her thoughts, but I couldn’t wait.

“How is she?”

“The girl’s alive. Think she’ll stay that way,” said Gran.

I let out a deep breath. I noticed, in the way one notices strange graffiti, that my hands were shaking. How odd, I thought.

“She needs her sister,” I said. “She needs Annie.”

“Yes, lad, she does.”

There was an odd disconnect between the trembling in my body and the calm of my voice.

“I didn’t have a number to reach her. I didn’t know how to reach out to Annie with magic. Strange, isn’t it, that I’d know so much about how to fight with magic, but nothing about communicating with it?”

Gran watched me like she expected me to do something unexpected. “Strange?”

“Yes, Gran,” I said, the trembling reached my voice then. “It’s strange, all the things I don’t know about or how to do. My friend might have died sitting in that car, and I couldn’t reach the person she needed. I didn’t know how. You know how, though, don’t you? Don’t you!”

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The last words came out of my mouth in a scream that barely registered as language. I was on my feet, but I didn’t remember standing. Every light bulb in the house flared. The TV switched itself off and on, off and on, over and over again. I heard the blender in the kitchen whir to life. I looked down and saw my hands clenched into fists by my side. Blood was seeping between the fingers. I hadn’t even felt it when my fingernails cut into the flesh of my palms. The coffee table was on its side. Had I kicked it, or did it just get knocked over when I stood? I couldn’t be sure. I was just too angry. All those hours of feeling helpless and thinking about what I might have been able to do if I’d just known how yearned to pour out of me in a wave of destruction. I wanted to break things. I wanted to rave. I wanted to hurt someone, just to repay the world in some way for how I felt. Gran’s expression never changed. She didn’t flinch at my screams, or lean back in the wake of my anger, she just waited a moment.

“Yes,” she said. “I know how.”

“Then why don’t I?”

The words came out as something between a bellow and a choked sob. I felt the hot tears on my cheeks. They might have been tears of pain, or tears of frustration, or tears of betrayal. They might have been all of those things or none. I didn’t know then. It never became clear afterward, either. I stood there trembling, my fists clenched, and crying. Gran leaned forward a little, her hands resting on her legs, and she met my gaze. There was pain in her expression. There was also a little guilt. On the whole, though, she looked resigned, as though she’d been waiting for this day to come forever.

“Because I told Bill not to teach you, lad.”

I stared at her. She wasn’t making sense. The words, unbidden, tumbled from me. “For God’s sake, why?”

“To save your soul,” said Gran.

She said it with the kind of bedrock certainty most often seen in messiahs and biblical prophets. My jaw dropped open. She meant it. She believed it. Somehow, she had gotten the idea that teaching me other things about magic would cost me my soul. I couldn’t fathom it. I knew there were dangers that magic users faced. There were temptations to draw the unwary off the path and into a night forest of dark possibilities that might cost a man his soul. Yet, I’d never been tempted. I led a life of violence and had a certain capacity for it, some might even say talent, but that didn’t make me evil. Did it?

“My soul,” I said. “You hid knowledge from me to save my soul.”

‘Yes.”

Anger and confusion warred inside me. “Save it from what?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Anger spiked. “Can’t or won’t?”

She considered the question for a long moment. “Both.”

I’d never felt so betrayed in my entire life. Jessie had been righter than she knew. People had made my choices for me, only I hadn’t even realized they were doing it. I had known there were other things I could theoretically do with magic, but I’d trusted Gran and Bill. I assumed they had prepared me; taught me the things I’d need to survive. Instead, they’d only taught me what they dared to teach me because they hadn’t trusted me. They had decided when I’d been nothing but a child that I was too stupid or too weak to make the right choices. My anger drained away and left me hollow inside.

“It’s all a lie,” I said.

“No!”

I continued on as if I hadn’t heard her. “All of this, it’s all been a lie. You didn’t trust me to be the kind of man who does the right thing, so you lied. You told Bill to lie. Then you sent me out to fight monsters. I’m not your son. I’m not even your knight.”

She flinched at my words and lifted a pleading hand. “Jericho, that isn’t the way of it.”

“I’m your tool. I’m your goddamn attack dog.”

“Jericho, please listen to me. There’s more happening here than you know.”

Something bitter and cold overwhelmed me. “Of course, there is, but I couldn’t know about it. After all, you don’t tell a gun why it’s shooting. You just aim it.”

Gran started to say something, but I lifted a hand. My heart was breaking, but there was only one thing I wanted from the woman sitting in front of me.

“Contact, Annie,” I ordered. “Do it today. You owe me that.”

Gran looked like she wanted to say more, but she lowered her eyes and nodded.

I wasn’t looking at her, so much as through her at something hideous I didn’t want to think about too hard. “I’ll be back when Annie gets here.”

“How will you know she’s here?” Gran asked, and she sounded old.

“I’ll know.”

With that, I stepped past the woman who had raised me, lied to me, and convinced others to lie to me. I walked out the front door into the cool night air, uncertain whether to weep or burn the whole damn city down.