The Silver Mask (Magisterium #4)(39)

“Call?” a voice called. Tamara stepped out of the shadows. For a moment, it didn’t seem possible that she was real. But then he saw how tired she looked and figured he wouldn’t have imagined that.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I’ve been sitting in the dark trying to figure out what to do.” She was wearing the clothes she’d arrived in. He looked down at his pajamas and then over at her, puzzled.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You said that if he wasn’t right, you’d let him go,” Tamara said. “You promised.”

“It’s too soon.” It was true that Aaron was acting weird, like maybe some of him was still stuck in death. “He’s going to get better. You’ll see. I know he was a little weird tonight, but he’s just back. And he sounds like himself sometimes.”

Tamara shook her head. “He doesn’t, Call. The Aaron who was our best friend never sounded like that.”

Call shook his head. “Tamara, he was murdered. He’s not going to come back from that cheerful and optimistic!”

She flushed. “I’m not expecting him to be perfect.”

“Really? Because it sounds like you are,” said Call. “Like you think either he has to be exactly the same as he was or he’s — broken. You didn’t say he couldn’t be different, or traumatized. I wouldn’t have agreed to that.”

She hesitated. “Call, the way he talked about other people — Aaron was never indifferent.”

“Just give him a few days,” Call said. “He’ll get better.”

Tamara reached out and touched Call’s face with the palm of her hand. Her fingers felt soft against his cheek. He shivered.

“Okay,” she said, but she looked incredibly sad. “A few more days. We better get back to sleep.”

Call nodded. He got his glass of water and went back up the stairs.

Back when he’d been at the Magisterium, Call had known right from wrong — even if he hadn’t always done the right thing. In prison, everything seemed to have slid away from him.

Maybe it was just that Aaron had always been his moral center. He didn’t want to believe that there was anything wrong with Aaron that couldn’t be fixed. He wanted Aaron to be okay, not just because he was Call’s best friend but because if Aaron wasn’t okay, then Call wasn’t okay either.

If Aaron wasn’t okay, then Call was exactly what everyone had been afraid of all along.

Back in Constantine’s bedroom, Call flopped down, willing himself to sleep. This time he did.



He woke up what felt like a few moments later, to an explosion. Leaping out of bed, he went to a window. Trucks were revving up outside, the sound almost drowned out by shouting.

His first thought was that the Assembly had come to arrest them. And in that brief moment, fear warred with relief.

Master Joseph came into view as he stepped off the porch, wearing the silver mask of the Enemy of Death. Without what looked like any effort at all, he flew up into the air. Below him, crowding around the porch steps, Call could see a cluster of figures: Anastasia in a white dressing gown, Alex glowering.

“Find them! Find them both!” Master Joseph shouted. It was then that Call realized what he was looking at. Who had set off the explosions.

Tamara and Jasper had done it. They had run.

Tamara and Jasper had run and they had left him behind.





CALL THREW HIMSELF against the window, scrabbling at it, before he remembered that it was made of some kind of air magic.

Barely thinking, he conjured flame into his hand. Havoc started to bark. Call could barely pay attention. He felt like his head was full of bees, buzzing so loudly that he couldn’t think. The magical flame wore away at the window, but it was working too slowly. Call didn’t have time for this.

He drew on chaos. It came to his hand quickly, an oily curling ribbon of nothingness. He could feel how hungry it was and how it seemed to tug at something deep inside of him.

You don’t have enough soul left for this, a part of him thought through the buzzing, but it didn’t matter. He sent the chaos toward the window.

It began to eat away the air magic and the glass and the frame outside it. Call didn’t care. By the time he stepped out of the window and onto the roof, it was through a huge hole in the side of the house.

In the distance, he saw fire.

He walked to the edge of the tiles and stepped off, concentrating on drawing air magic to him. He wobbled and, for a moment, was afraid he was going to crash down on the grass.

But the magic held. He hovered in the air. Havoc was on the roof behind him, barking wildly. Call turned back to look at him and saw that two of the other windows in the house were smashed out — appearing like they had been burned, the wood around their edges sparking with low flames.

Call’s leg had given him a reason to practice this kind of magic, but since the Magisterium was in a cave system and at home there were neighbors, he’d never really flown. It was one thing to hover a little, but this, up in the air, high off the ground, like he’d dreamed, was new. He knew he ought to be more nervous, but all his concentration was on the scene unfolding before him.

He looked out toward the fire. Not a natural fire, he realized. Elemental fire. As he stared, he saw something undulate over one of the hills on the horizon.