Page of Tricks, page 18
“It’s mine.”
Quentin turned sharply at the sound of Father’s voice. Father, who wasn’t there. Father, who had appeared.
Mama faded away as the dream twisted.
“It’s my fault,” Father said, his deep voice brooking no argument. “I did this to you, Quentin. I did this to you, but you always forget, don’t you? And when your mother tells you that it was all an accident, you believe her. But I did this.”
Father loomed over him and placed a hand to Quentin’s chest, pinning him down in his bed. “You think you’re accident-prone. You think you fall off horses, trip down stairs, get run over, and whatever other rubbish excuses you’ve given over the years, but haven’t you ever stopped to wonder why all of your scars are in straight fucking lines, Icky? Not once?”
Quentin struggled to breathe. The pressure against his chest made his wounds crack and bleed. He felt the wetness seeping across his skin, trapped by bandages. “Please,” he breathed. “Stop.”
“I beat you, Icky.” Father’s colorless eyes came closer. Blood spattered his chest, dripped from a line across his cheek, ran between them in an endless stream that terrified and aroused. “I took a crop to you as part of a ritual, and that ritual lasted thirteen years. I beat you until your skin broke and you bled. I beat you until you blacked out, shut down to protect yourself. I beat you until you were broken; I hit you so hard that your blood was on me, Icky. And then, when I was done beating you, I raped you.”
Quentin screamed. He reached for Father, tried to push him away, but his fingers slipped in blood and he couldn’t find a hold.
“I raped you,” Father snarled in indignation. “All to give you the power to use magic, just like I can. Just as my father did to me. Are you listening to me, Icky?”
Quentin’s screams couldn’t drown out Father’s words.
“Thirteen years!” His father bellowed at him. “Jesus Christ, Icky, aren’t you the least bit angry?”
Quentin’s eyes snapped open and he beat at thin air as he screamed until his lungs had nothing left to give.
There was nobody there.
His arms fell to the table in front of him and gripped the edges tightly. It was real. It had to be real. Who dreamed of sitting on trains?
I’m on a train.
His breathing was ragged, and every single intake was a struggle. The wind that streamed through the car tugged at his hair, his jacket, and flung sheets of newspaper and uncollected sandwich packets from one end to the other and then back again.
A train! Get ahold of yourself!
The image of his father looming, pinning him down, crushing him with his superior weight, lingered. He felt hands on him that weren’t there, smelled blood that was fresh and altogether absent.
It was a nightmare.
Just a nightmare.
He sniffled as he wiped wetness from his cheeks, and fought to bring the winds under control. He’d already destroyed a hotel room. If this went on much longer, he’d be responsible for ruining a train carriage too.
Windsor had to be in here somewhere, too. This had gone beyond the potential for collateral damage and into the realm of harming a living creature.
Quentin screwed his eyes shut and counted down from ten, but he kept hearing his father’s words.
Or were they Freddy’s?
They echoed around his head, snatches of broken sentences half-remembered, and he screamed again to drown them out but it didn’t work. Nothing worked.
The train shuddered. He fell forward in his seat and put his arms out in time to catch himself on the table, then looked around, bewildered.
There was a station outside his windows.
Run.
Get away.
Be safe.
He pushed himself from his seat and scrambled through the carriage. He hit the button for the sliding doors with such force he thought he heard something snap, but the doors opened for him, and he sprinted from the train, shoving his way through anyone who didn’t move aside for him.
He ran. He vaulted the ticket barrier, and he ran. With no idea of where he was, no care for who saw him, he bolted through the train station in search of open air, and once he found it he kept going.
He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t control the storm. All he could do was try and take it away from anywhere it could do harm.
He had no idea where he was going. He’d sped past some sort of multistory car park and some shops and houses, then the moment he caught sight of green, he’d sprinted toward it, barely avoiding cars and bikes when he launched across a main road.
Quentin ran into the park and straight through it, until he could find enough open space to keep away from anything breakable, then he sank to the ground and dug his fingers into cold, mushy grass. Damp seeped through the knees of his trousers, and the wind howled around him without mercy.
But nobody else was here. Not in the center of this park on a miserable November day. Oh, there were cars in the car park, but their owners were most likely in whatever buildings bordered the green. This wasn’t picnic weather, no matter how stubborn the British could be about these things.
It was the best that he could do under the circumstances.
Hands fell on Quentin’s shoulders and pushed him to the cold, wet floor. The stench of his own blood was in his nostrils and on his tongue, metallic and salty, pervading his thoughts until all was red.
He was a child.
He was a teenager.
He was an adult.
He was nothing.
Hands slipped through the blood on his back and squeezed his backside. They pressed and probed and invaded where they shouldn’t.
He couldn’t scream any more. It didn’t stop him trying. Reality had become nothing more than chaos. He felt his sanity bleeding away, and nothing he could do would stop it. The earth around him rippled, sending clods of mud into the air.
Candlelight flickered in the darkness and then blew out. His body shuddered with pleasure as the wind tore around the dark chamber.
The pain remained, but his cock was hard, and pressed into the blood-slick floor again and again as the pressure built inside him. He wasn’t there, wasn’t present, wasn’t in his own body, he just had to survive this and it would all be over.
But if it felt so good, could it be so bad?
Candelabras crashed to the ground in the black of the void. Glass shattered. The wind howled in triumph.
A wave of heat rippled through his body as he came, adding to the moisture trapped under his body.
His father grunted as he spent, and his weight crushed Quentin down.
“Never again,” his father whispered weakly into his ear. “This is the end, Quentin. I promise.”
Quentin said nothing.
Because he wasn’t there.
He was here now. He didn’t know where here was and it didn’t matter. All he knew was that his mind had broken, and there was no way to put it back together again.
The anger inside him was in control now.
31
Laurence
Laurence double-checked his sigils before he cast the ward, and now the room bore a gentle greenish glow that he knew neither Mikey nor Freddy could see. There were only two windows, so preventing scrying through them both was a quick job, and then he sat back on the bed and offered up the pen as though handing over his weapon.
Mikey took it from him and stepped back.
Freddy eyed the walls, then regarded Laurence. “You can actually see magic,” he murmured, sounding just a little impressed.
“It’s complicated.” Laurence kicked his shoes off and pulled his legs up onto the bed, then crossed them and rested his elbows on his knees. “Ongoing spells like wards are hard for most sorcerers to see, but Rufus thinks my heritage is what lets me perceive them.”
He ran a palm across his beard. “Quentin can see them too, but I don’t know if that’s because of what…” He trailed off.
Freddy nodded as he returned to his seat. “You don’t know whether that’s something Father bestowed upon him,” he said.
“Yeah.” Laurence’s throat tightened and he cracked his knuckles. “You can’t just tell Quentin what happened, man. Do you think I’d keep shit like that from him if I didn’t have to?”
Freddy’s lip curled, and his eyes glinted like steel. “You think you can protect him from this?”
“I think there’s no way for him to ever find out without it killing him, Freddy!” Laurence jabbed a finger at his own temple. “You must have seen it! I spent all Samhain trying to find a way to do it, and I couldn’t! Either he shuts down, he forgets it again, he spends the rest of his life in hospital, or he loses control and people find out that people like him — like us — exist.”
“But you only tried to find futures in which you broke the news to him,” Freddy snapped. “You didn’t explore any other possibilities.”
“You think it’ll be different coming from you?” Laurence gripped his own hair and tugged, exhaling slowly to calm himself. “No. Fuck, it’s done now. With any luck, he’s just forgotten what you said. It’s not what we were gonna talk about.”
Freddy bit his thumbnail briefly, then crossed his legs. “You had a proposal,” he prompted.
“Your plan,” Laurence said. “What was it?”
Freddy pursed his lips and glanced at Mikey, then shook his head. “Simple. I created a marker the moment we boarded the plane. The plan was to break you and give you to Father, and anger Icky enough to seek revenge on Father directly, then restore you to that marker.
“You were the ace up my sleeve, Laurence. Father would believe you to be utterly ruined, but when Icky needed you most, you would be there for him.”
Laurence blinked at him. “What the fuck? You…” He licked his lips slowly. “You think my mind’s got a fucking save point in it that you were just gonna revert me to, without even asking if I was okay with this shit?”
“If I asked your permission, you would have had a fragment of hope to cling to, which would prolong your suffering. If I made you forget agreeing to it, then I might as well have never have asked at all.” Freddy shrugged. “Do not think that I made my choices arbitrarily.”
“Maybe not arbitrarily, but Goddess, Freddy, that’s cold. You’re a fucking sociopath!”
“I won’t deny it.”
Laurence hissed through his teeth and grabbed his own knees to keep himself from doing anything stupid.
“Do you think it’s possible to be anything but,” Freddy said softly, “when the minds of every person you ever meet are an open book to you? Do you think it’s possible to retain any sort of blind optimism when it comes to humanity when you know what everyone around you thinks?”
He shrugged a little. “Most people are motivated by comfort, Laurence. They want to live an easy life. A simple life. One without risk or fear or doubt.
“People will turn a blind eye to injustice so long as it means they don’t have to bother getting involved. Change the channel. Move on. Pretend everything is fine.” Freddy idly brushed his hair back from his forehead. “Everything is not fine.”
Laurence stared at him, but he just couldn’t find the words to say. Everything he thought he knew about Freddy was a lie. The man who had been so caring, so thoughtful, so willing to give up his time and look after Quentin all those months ago was a callous, calculating, manipulative psycho.
It didn’t fit together exactly right.
He tore his gaze from Freddy and looked at Mikey, who had sat back down against the door. Mikey, with his neatened-up hair and his nice new clothes. Hell, even his teeth seemed better than Laurence remembered.
Freddy was doing all this to save them both, and that meant Freddy cared. He cared about Mikey, if no one else, so he wasn’t as cold as he was making himself out to be.
Laurence gently bit his lip and shook his head. “You care,” he murmured. “You want justice for what your dad did, don’t you? Both to Quentin and to your mom. You want him to pay.”
Freddy’s features remained blank. He said nothing.
“Yeah,” Mikey said quietly. “Of course he does. I don’t think you know how much he loves Quentin, or Nicholas. They’re all he has.” He glanced toward Freddy with a slight frown.
Freddy finally took on an expression. It was pensive, with a touch of sadness to it. “Had,” he corrected softly. “But to keep you, I had to sacrifice what little relationship I still had with Icky.” He shook his head. “This is my fault. I shouldn’t have…”
Laurence snorted at him. “What? Shouldn’t have fallen in love? You can’t think like that.”
“I can. I simply shouldn’t have to.” Freddy shifted in his seat. “Regardless, that was my plan. It should have worked, but clearly something has gone awry.
“I was not aware that you had this ability to leave your body almost entirely, and drift into a comatose state which would heal you of the damage I could do. I don’t know where your mind went, but I couldn’t reach it, and yet you appeared to be in a state of REM sleep. Now it seems you buggered off into another world somehow, and now that you’re back, you’re in one piece. I would have to break you all over again, and it was difficult enough the first time.”
Laurence bit the tip of his tongue. “Difficult?” he hissed.
Freddy eyed him. His blond eyebrows raised slightly. “To tear you apart when you have been the single most beneficial person to enter Icky’s life? Yes. Difficult.”
He frowned at Freddy, then allowed his head to droop forward. He tried to think through how he could possibly use any combination of his gifts to kill the duke quickly, get this all done and dusted, but the more permutations he tried to work through, the more he became convinced that Freddy might be right. Perhaps if he and Quentin worked together they could do it, but Laurence’s gifts alone wouldn’t suffice. The duke could fend off plants, set wards to alert him of anyone entering his property, and would happily kill Laurence as soon as look at him.
Bad. Very bad!
Laurence hesitated. The bond he shared with Windsor had flared to life, and flooded him with concern. “Give me a second,” he said.
He closed his eyes to reach for Windsor. What’s wrong?
Quentin. Windsor’s response was a jumble of feelings and images, a mishmash of thunderstorms and screams that made no sense.
Laurence gripped his knees and tried to sort through it, but it was gibberish. What’s wrong?
See! Windsor urged him to use his eyes.
Laurence reached out for his familiar, and as before Windsor reached for him in return, guiding him, until Laurence’s world was filled with color.
And destruction.
Windsor was clinging for dear life to the top of a lamppost, buffeted by a strong wind. The bird had hunkered down against the weather, and his gaze was fixed on something maybe a quarter of a mile away, across a vast stretch of open field.
It was unmistakably Quentin, and that was without being able to see the man himself. The field had become a cyclone of detritus. Mud, litter, water from the river that bordered the park, flashes of flame that flickered in and out of existence, all span in a tornado that obscured something dark at its core.
Like the wail of a banshee, Laurence heard an unearthly sound, faint beneath the rage of the wind. It came and went as snatches of it escaped the barrier, ghostly and filled with pain.
Goddess, it was horrible.
Laurence’s gut lurched. He wanted to fly down there, to find Quentin and take him to safety, but he wasn’t there.
Windsor was.
He took a sharp breath. Where are you?
Here! Windsor seemed pleased as punch.
Show me!
Windsor threw himself backward off his perch and flapped as hard as he could to escape the wind. He sailed over buildings for a couple of minutes, then down toward railway lines. We came here.
Laurence didn’t have time to worry about how the hell Windsor had gotten to England. The bird landed on the roof of a taxi and eyed the train station’s building.
There was a huge sign on it. In bold capital letters, black on white, it read WELCOME TO PETERBOROUGH STATION.
You’re a good bird, Laurence assured him. Go keep an eye on Quentin. I’m coming.
He withdrew and opened his eyes. “You get all that?”
Freddy nodded grimly. “Peterborough,” he said. “Christ, that’s miles away.”
“Yeah, well, if we don’t stop Quentin, there might not be any damn Peterborough left,” Laurence snapped. He leaped off the bed and grabbed his shoes, pulling them on quickly. “You’ve gotta take care of witnesses. Can you do that from here?”
Freddy grimaced. “For the sake of expediency, I shall have to. Go.” He hesitated, then added, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
Laurence shook his head. “Later.”
Mikey bounced to his feet and grabbed the door. “I’ll drive,” he said.
Laurence didn’t answer him. They ran downstairs through the little house and out to the waiting car without another word.
He had no idea what he was going to do, but they didn’t have time to stop and think.
They piled into the car, and Mikey floored the gas.
32
Quentin
“This is good, Quentin. But you must learn to control it.”
Quentin said nothing. Did nothing. He felt ashamed, disgusted; he wanted to be sick.
Nothing here was right. Nothing was good.
So why had he felt such pleasure?
He remembered touching himself once, some years ago. The boys at school were so eager to talk about how great theirs were, and he dithered around with the idea for weeks before he summoned the courage, but once he did it, he wet the bed for weeks after. It felt bad and good; it was a violation and a pleasure. It was wrong, and he knew then that sex was wrong, too.
And it was.
It was vile.
There was blood and pain, screams and shame, and he would never do it again. Not if he had the choice.
