The Silver Mask (Magisterium #4)(23)

Anastasia gave him a searching look. “Master Joseph needs you. He will use the Alkahest to take your power only if he is forced into a corner. Don’t force him into a corner, Call. He needs us — and we need him.”

“You don’t mind him threatening me?” Call said. “You don’t think we should be worried?”

“If I thought there was a safer place to go, I would go there,” said Anastasia. “But your soul, your restless soul, Con, was never meant to have peace. It was meant to have power.” She moved closer to him. “You are powerful. You can’t just give up that power. The world won’t let you. It won’t allow you to simply hide and be safe. It may come to this — ruling the world or being crushed under its boot heel.”

That seemed grim and dramatic, but Call just nodded, trying to look thoughtful instead of freaked out. Anastasia touched his cheek once, longingly, and then rose. “Good-bye, my dear.”

As weird as she acted around him, and as much as he didn’t want her talking about how much he was like Constantine all the time, he was a little sorry to see her go. Anastasia wanted him to be Constantine, her lost son, and that wasn’t possible, but at least he felt like she was kind of on his side.

Master Joseph wasn’t, no matter how he pretended to be.

Call ate the rest of his egg salad sandwich alone, watching the Chaos-ridden push the mower right into the river.

After that, he looked around the house for Tamara and Jasper, hoping he could persuade Master Joseph that they could all learn together. When he didn’t find them, he went back to the stoat room. Alex was there, with two new, partially defrosted stoats.

Call felt a little queasy.

“Here,” Alex said, slamming a black notebook stuffed with extra sheets of loose-leaf paper onto the table. “This was Constantine’s final notebook. And if you want to see the others, you don’t have far to look. They’re in your room, on your bookshelves, just like Master Joseph and Anastasia insisted.”

“Thanks,” Call said grudgingly, picking up the book.

“Now it’s your turn,” Alex said, pointing to the small creatures on the table.

Call looked at the stoats. He wasn’t sure he could do it. But he did want Aaron back. And if there was any chance …

He reached out with chaos magic, toward one of the creatures. He could sense the cold that still gripped it, could feel the silvery remains of where its soul had been. Something was still there.

He tried to catch hold of it, tried to warm it and grow it to life. But there was too little left. In desperation, he tried to inflate what was there. We need more power, Alex had said.

Call inhaled, gathering up the chaos inside himself, reaching into the darkness and the violence and the swirling movement that only a Makar could see. He grabbed at the chaos as if with both hands, shoving it desperately into the inflated soul of the stoat as if he were trying to light a fire in the middle of an ice field.

He felt the spark catch, and grow —

Alex yelled. Call ducked down as a loud bang echoed through the room. When he stood up again, black spots danced in front of his eyes. He felt weak and exhausted, drained of energy and magic.

Alex looked at him furiously. He was splattered with bits of an unspeakable something that Call didn’t want to dwell on.

“You exploded the stoat,” Alex said.

“I did?” Call was amazed, but the unfortunate evidence was everywhere. He’d missed the worst of it by ducking under the table, but Alex and his designer jeans hadn’t been so lucky.

Alex took off his gloves and threw them down on the table. “I am so done with today.”

He stalked out, and after a minute, Call followed. Nobody wanted to be alone in a room with two dead stoats, one of them in pieces.

He hoped Jeffrey wouldn’t get stuck cleaning up.



“How did it go?” Master Joseph asked that night at dinner.

They were all gathered in the dining room again, though Anastasia’s chair was empty. The table groaned with food: potato salad, coleslaw, barbecue ribs gleaming with spicy sauce, beans simmered in molasses, emerald collard greens. Jasper had already eaten an entire rack of ribs.

“Call exploded a stoat,” Alex reported. He looked freshly scrubbed, as if he’d showered and then showered again.

“One cannot expect to get everything right in the beginning,” said Master Joseph, gnawing a rib. “But I expect you to make steady progress.”

“I’m sure someone else could do just as well as Call at this,” said Alex. He was staring piercingly at Master Joseph, as if to communicate his hope that Master Joseph would immediately suck out Call’s powers with the Alkahest and move on from there.

“I’m sure they couldn’t,” said Master Joseph, though his jaw tightened. Call watched him in fascination.

Did Master Joseph ever want to use the Alkahest and have Chaos magic for himself? First, he’d been in Constantine’s shadow, and now he was in Call’s. Did it ever bother him? It was hard to tell; his voice was calm when he said, “We’ve never had two Makars before working on this project. Even Constantine was alone.”

I’m definitely alone, Call thought. Alex was worse than no help at all. But Alex just grinned at him across the table in a not-pleasant way.

“We’ll get right on it tomorrow,” Alex said.