After the events of the day, Drenar instinctively called for a break, and said that this discussion needed to be wrapped up after everyone got some much-delayed sleep. Because even he was fatigued now, and this series of crazy bullshit was becoming too much for him to keep track of. He was busily looking through all of the notes he’d been jotting down, trying to figure out why and how of too many things.
This job did, indeed, suck in all the worst ways. Joey’s clawed fingers on his shoulder broke his focus, and she handed him a cup of coffee in the room he was calling his own in the downstairs bedroom that was doubling as his lair. Wait. I don’t live in a lair, I’m not that much of a dragon.
“This has been a crap day, hasn’t it?” she says after a few seconds after smiling faintly.
“Yeah. something like that.” He took a sip of the still-hot liquid and nearly burned his mouth; Joey tended to drink hers piping hot, and even as a half-dragon, this was a bit too much for him. “How did we get in this mess, Joey?”
“It was always there, Drenar. No one did anything about it. Not for hundreds of years.” She sat down on the small futon, looking wearier and scuffed up from the day’s events. “Angela is the toughest person I know besides you and Julia, and even she cracked a little on this one. I’m glad Julia is hanging out with her, tonight. And her mother, I personally want to strangle her for doing this to her.”
“Get in line,” he grunted, before giving up and tossing his notepad aside. “I just can’t believe this. Were the dragons that collectively stupid? Or desperate? They just marched right up to a teleporter that was pretty suspect, and if the head of the conclave, whose been alive since before even then was there to preside over the events? She’s a criminal architect of the highest order. And I can’t help but feel that it’s tied to the events of keeping Gaia suppressed, or removing her from the equation entirely.
Joey sits down next to him, hands folded tightly, and deep in thought. “You know something? The way things have gone lately, I wonder if we were all brought together for reasons beyond our understanding. Your mother knew something about Angela. Or suspected it. King has been behind all of these plays. Even me. He knew about my run at academia at the London Arcanist Academy. And Sam’s comments about the teleportal…I have a theory we need to try out.”
“You still want to try out that primal crystal deposit,” he concluded, before he shook his head. “This could be dangerous on so many levels, Joey. Above and beyond what we’ve faced collectively.”
“But someone has to do it. Even Kiera needs evidence to pin on a foe. And I hope it’s not the head of the conclave, either. I think this one is a reach from Volkir, who is carrying a grudge. She does look like what Angela was describing.”
“Here, show me.” Joey pulls out her phone, and makes a quick connection to the Arcanet browser before looking up an image of her. Drenar looks down at the face. “Angela looked at this, too, right?”
“She said she wasn’t sure. Too far away to really discern much else, in a fractured memory from a dead dragonness from seven hundred years ago,” Joey replies quietly, before clicking the phone off. “Did she look familiar to you?”
He shakes his head. “Facial features look a bit like my mom, but, no. she doesn’t look familiar to me. How long did you say she has been running the Conclave?”
“Since its modern inception, almost. She hasn’t been the Chancellor the whole time, but she has been the de-facto head of it in some capacity, shifting between that position, or one of the senators on the upper and lower panels of the house of the senate. The real power players of the Conclave,” Joey explains, and pops open her phone again to show off more photos.
Drenar lets out a tsk sound. “Kiera mentioned a few names that my mother swore were involved, but proof died with the merc team they turned into worm food. She said if the Valkyries had definitive proof, they’d have burned all those bastards to dust, neutrality be damned.”
“That’s some bold words, even for Julia’s mom,” Joey admits, before setting her phone on the table, and leaning on his chest. “I’m just an alchemist who stumbled into a world spanning crisis. Why isn’t you mom leading the charge on this, and leaving it to us?”
“I wish I knew, Joey. If it’s the head of the Conclave, or someone else in a very high seat of power, I now understand fully why she didn’t want to bring that kind of burden back home with her.” He glances at the wristwatch holding his magitech armor, and pulls it off slowly, and rubs at the faint scar across his wrist. Joey picks up on it, and glances at him.
“You’ve never talked about that one. You had it before, and I’ve seen you rubbing at it a lot.” She furrows her brow, and runs a finger over the scar tissue gently. “I think I know what it is, given recent events.”
“Care to take a guess?” he asked softly. The fact that so few people knew about this one, was something he could take comfort in. and those who did figure it out…knew him well enough to understand why.
“Your world fell apart not that long ago,” she answers, barely over a whisper. She doesn’t have to say it, for him to realize, she knows. “That’s why you kept Remari, all these years. It was your reminder…wasn’t it?”
“Julia…walking in on me, in a moment when I was hovering on a knife’s edge, on a decision in my life. Pun, not intended,” he answers with a soft sigh. “At the last second… I decided I wanted to keep living. And when Julia screamed, not realizing I was about to pack it in and dry my tears, I forgot my spatial awareness for a split second. That earned me a hospital trip.”
“I had a feeling that’s why you always closed off that memory. It’s hard to not think about something that hurts.” She held him close for a minute, and he realized, he’d been needing that all day.
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“Me keeping Remari, afterward, was my reminder, yeah. To do better by my mother, in my own way,” he answers quietly. “Two years in therapy helped. But it’s like filling a void, and there’s nothing left to fill it with. That's who my mom was. This wonderful, brave woman who I looked up to, who was plugging in holes in people's hearts. She was doing that, long before I was born.”
“And you’re worried our world is going to fall apart again, with all this going on.”
“Not if I have a say in the matter,” he vows solemnly. “That's what Alex died believing in. That’s what Kelly’s father died believing in. that the Luminaires are the answer to this crisis. Me, not dying because of a stupid mistake I made, six years ago? This means the world has a fighting chance, now. Because we’re here, fighting for a better world, against the monsters who want to turn it into an ash pile, whoever they are.”
“I had a bad experience, too,” Joey said, and leaned against his chest, fingers running gently across his torso and arm. “I almost drowned someone.”
“You did?” He doesn’t move, even at this shocking admission. “What happened?”
“My psionics went into overdrive. It was different than the link I’ve got between you, Angela, and Julia. This was…not friendly.” she sighed and rested against his shoulder, after finding a comfortable spot, purple eyes looking weary from all the hurt.
“You don’t have to talk about this one, if you’re not ready for–”
“If we’re going to be fighting the monsters I think we’re up against, then yes, you need to know, Drenar. And the others, too. But, I think I’d run this one by you first. Not even Kyle knows this one,” she said, barely over a whisper. “Psionics has two levels of potency, both of which I discovered by accident. Even my mother, the record keeper of our community, has never spoken much about the psionics some kitsune possess.”
He glances at her, with that weary expression, and strokes her hair gently. “I’m guessing one of them, or even both of them, haven't’ seen a lot of practice, then.”
Ever since he’d nearly drowned at Asquaila, that line of hers had been stuck in his head. But, she never brought it up afterward. Possibly, to not have to relive that trauma? He put his hand firmly on hers, fingers lacing gently between her clawed fingers. She nods softly, and winces. “Curtis was the first person I put an end to…but I almost killed someone. I had just gotten a letter from London Academy of the Arcane, saying that my academics were exceptional and singularly noteworthy. They wanted to bring me in on scholarship, a full ride.”
Her tail sways back slowly, and he nods with barely a motion. “That must have been a great, to get that kind of news.”
“It would have, except for what happened afterward. I had a friend, another kitsune in the community. His name is Blake. I had the letter in my hands, and we were at the small lake, not that far from where I grew up. It was a little distance from my parent’s house. So, we were walking, I was telling him the news. He…didn’t take it well. He told me, he wanted me to stay. I told him, I didn’t want to rot there in Bixby for my whole life, and go nowhere.” She clenches her jaw tightly, and closes her eyes, looking anguished. “He called me a traitorous rat. Which, as you might have picked up–”
“It’s a slur,” he interrupts, knowing what that sounded like, on the rare occasion someone had dared to say something horrific to Julia at school, a long time ago. “It’s a dehumanizing word. But…did he mean it?”
She opened her eyes, and after a reluctant pause, she nodded. “He was super jealous. Blake was never as good at academics, and his parents were dirt-poor. He didn’t know how to envision something better, and…he took it out on me. He threw the papers on the ground, got right in my face, and screamed that was all I’d ever be. A traitorous rat, who ditched her community for bigger and better things. That I’d never fit in. That Kitsune were always going to be on the bottom of the pecking order, when it came to the magical Kin community. I shouted at him, shoved him away, out of my personal space.”
“Then, he hit me across the face with an open-palm slap. And after that, I saw red. I screamed at him, and rather than beat him bloody, I told him to go jump in the lake, and go cool off.” She winces when she says that, fingers clenching tightly against his. “That was when the horror show started. I felt something of a connection to him, the same way I could feel my parents probing my surface thoughts, but much stronger. And I pushed on it, thinking I could scare him. Instead, his eyes went glassy, and he moved in a stupor along the dock. I had no idea what was happening if he was pretending, but I knew something was wrong. When he got near the end of the dock and kept going, I realized something happened to him, and I screamed for him to stop.”
She let out a soft shudder, ears laid back tight against her skull. “He planked right in, and I saw bubbles coming up. I’m sprinting to the end of the dock, realizing I must have done something by accident. No one ever told me this could happen, at the time. I dove in, and grabbed him, and he’s already taken a lung full of water by that point. So, there I was, soaked, doing chest compressions to get the water out. I was at it for two terrifying minutes while I was shrieking to anyone nearby who could help me. My parents finally came out of the house by the time I got him breathing. And I will never forget that look of utter terror on his face, Drenar. Never.”
He wrapped his arms protectively around her, and she shuddered under the terrible burden of this truth being laid bare. “It was an accident, Joey. No one told you.”
“I still feel responsible–”
“Joey. Parents keeping secrets is what caused some of these wounds. Talking about them, is what helps them heal,” he whispers and holds her tightly, and can smell that slight scent of cinnamon in her hair…along with something else earthly. “We might have dangerous powers, but they can be used for good. You say you can do that, either inspire us, or control people? Use it only when it can save a life.”
“I’m not even sure I could replicate it. I’m not sure I want to. But, I see your point. I’m a deadly alchemist with knowledge and use of the deadliest substances on the planet. But I can also bring a person back from the brink of death.” Tiny claw points press into his back, and she rests her head against him. The tension in her face has lessened, somewhat. “Let’s hope we never have to go down a path where we have to do awful things to do the right thing.”
“Moral quandaries? Yeah. We’re going to get to that point, if the bitch on the lofty throne is responsible for sending that hulking killer after my mom and dad. Davos is a symptom of a bigger problem with this world.” He lets out a quiet breath and notes how incredibly late it is, on his watch by the nightstand. “Think we can get some rest, before we jump back into a firefight?”
“I hope so, Drenar. Because I get this feeling, we are going to need to go back to Asqualia as a fallback haven starting soon. Val’s going to be looking for us, and she won’t have to look very hard, given how unsubtle we are.”
They lay there together, and within moments, Joey was fast asleep against him. He reaches out, hesitantly, before stroking her ear gently. She murmurs but doesn’t wake. You brave woman. I wish I'd met you sooner. Alex, you’ve been pretty chill. Nothing to say at the moment–
Get some rest, lad. You’re going to need it. For once, he doesn’t disagree, and within a few more minutes, he feels himself drifting off to sleep, as well. He knows one thing for sure before his thoughts fade to black:
Angela will not be facing these monsters alone, in whatever happens.