Chalice and Blade Read online

  Chalice and Blade

  Oona Goodlight book four

  Alexes Razevich

  Copyright © 2018 Alexes Razxevich

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

  products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance

  to actual events, locals, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely

  coincidently and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photography, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system existing now or in the future without permission in writing from the author or the author’s estate.

  Requests for permission should be sent to [email protected].

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Untitled

  Also By Alexes Razevich

  Acknowledments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  I yanked my hands out the dishwater, grabbed a towel, and hastily wiped my hands sort of dry.

  Bang! Bang!

  “Oona!” called a voice I recognized.

  “Damn it, Oona,” a deeper voice called. “Open the door!”

  I flung the front door open with a spell as I raced down the hallway. My parents rushed in so quickly I barely caught sight of the sunlight outside, the low wall that separated the cement Strand from the beach, the sand and ocean beyond—and something else. Something floating, maybe six feet above the porch. My dad blew past me saying, “Shut the door and lock it tight. Wards up.”

  I shoved the heavy wood door closed, heedless of breaking any of the four, narrow milk-glass panes in the hundred-year-old door, but wasn’t fast enough. Three long plumes of light gray smoke sped into the house a millisecond behind my parents. My dad wheeled around to face the smoky entities, mumbling under his breath.

  The skin all along my body prickled at the magic pinging off the apple-green walls and dark-stained oak floors in the foyer. Mine, the smoke plumes—and my parents’ magic.

  My healer mother’s.

  My completely non-magical dad’s.

  The smoke-comets—that was the best way I could think to describe what they looked like with “heads” the size of basketballs and four-foot plumes trailing behind—writhed and twined around each other, braiding together. All the while, my dad kept up mumbling words I recognized now—a standard but heavy-duty protection spell. A cocoon of magic like a thin gold web spun around Mom, and another around me. Cocoons meant to repel any dark magic cast our way.

  When the smoke-comet’s last strand was twined into place, a tall, stunning human stood in my foyer.

  The person—if it was a person and not a glamour—could have been any age between twenty-five and fifty-five and either female or male, it was impossible to tell from the smooth, pale features. The being wore a sky-blue caftan that covered its body from neck and shoulders to wrists and feet and did nothing to help me guess gender. It stood facing my parents and me, a worried look on its ageless face. Dad stepped in front of Mom and me, further shielding us from whatever had invaded my house.

  Dad’s fear of the creature and his determination that no harm would come to us made my jaw clench. Being an empathic psychic meant I often felt others emotions. Only human emotions though. I didn’t feel anything from the entity standing in front of us.

  “Peace,” it said, turning pale, long-fingered hands palms up. “I mean you no harm. I’ve come to beg your help in righting an injustice.”

  Once, this sort of weirdness would have completely freaked me out. Since teaming up with wizard and private investigator Diego Adair last year, I’d seen stuff a lot weirder than smoke that turned into something that could pass for human. Except this was starting to seem like a bad science fiction movie with the “we come in peace” motif. That never ends well.

  “What are you?” Dad said. At six-foot-three, he was taller than the entity by four or five inches. He drew himself up to emphasize his advantage.

  The entity smiled thinly. “You know me, wizard. I am Modis, guardian over the Keepers of the two artifacts.”

  Wizard? My dad? I was always told he wasn’t magical at all. That Mom had married a remarkable ordin—what magicals called the non-magical—but an ordin nonetheless.

  And what the hell were the two artifacts?

  I sent out my psychic senses, but Modis, like all non-humans, was impossible for me to read. I switched to dipping into Dad’s thoughts.

  He knew Modis all right, and what the artifacts were. Images flitted through his mind: a crystal chalice and a bejeweled knife. Something was in his mind too about a magical star, but I couldn’t tell if it was tied to the cup and the knife or not.

  “Ah,” my dad said, and all the tension crammed into the long narrow space of my hallway seemed to just float away. “This is a new form for you. What has gone wrong and how can we help?”

  Modis bobbed its head. “My apologies. On my own plane, I have one look. On each of the others, a different form each time.” Its forehead crinkled slightly. “Have you a mirror perhaps?”

  Dad shifted his gaze to me.

  “Oh,” I said after a moment I’d spent basically flummoxed by the slew of new information flung my way. “Yes.” I gestured toward the downstairs bathroom. “There’s a mirror in there.”

  Modis nodded and took itself off to see what it looked like. I grabbed my dad by one arm and my mom by one and pulled them into the parlor.

  Yes, I called it a parlor, not a living room. It was a parlor when my great-great-grandfather built the house in the early 1900s, and parlor it would remain to me, though I’d painted it delft-blue, picked the furniture, placed the family photos, and hung the paintings—some of which I’d painted myself—where I wanted them.

  “What is all this?” I said to my parents. “What’s going on?”

  Dad adjusted his black-rimmed glasses, pushing them up on his nose with his index finger, then settled himself on the sofa. “I’m not exactly sure. Modis will no doubt tell us.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but what’s this about—“

  Modis came into the parlor and I cut off the rest of the sentence, which would have been “Modis calling you wizard?”

  The entity reappeared with a more feminine face than earlier, straight, light brown hair cut just above shoulder-length, dark brown eyes. Modis caught my look of surprise at the change.

  “I made subtle adjustments,” it said. “I have observed that humans are more comfortable if a being looks like them shape-wise and looks clearly either male or female. Females are considered less threatening. I don’t wish to frighten you, so I chose a highly female form.”

  “Modis in its natural state,” Dad said, “is non-corporal.”

  A year ago, a statement that a non-corporal being was in my house would have floored me. Now, I simply said, “Would anyone like tea?”
>
  Mom said, “I’ll give you a hand.”

  In the kitchen, I filled the electric kettle with water and turned it on. I dropped my voice low. Modis may be non-corporal in its natural state but it had ears now.

  “What’s going on?” I said. “Why is this Modis here?”

  Mother pushed a hand through her short, brown hair. “I don’t know. I picked up your dad at the airport. He suggested we come by and see you; he’s been gone three months and he missed you. We were parking the car up on Hermosa Avenue when we saw the smoky things following us. We didn’t want to lead them to you, so we stood by the car. But the smokies started shrieking and dive-bombing us. The only thing we could think to do was run to your house, get inside, and lock them out. I assumed Diego had warded your house and we’d be safe.”

  That surprised me—that she’d assumed that Diego, who I called Dee, had warded my house. That, in fact, she expected him to ward it. The last time Mom and I had talked about my relationship with Dee, she’d rattled off a long list of reasons why I shouldn’t be involved with him.

  “Obviously we weren’t quick enough and that didn’t work,” Mom said. “And here we are.”

  I stood a moment, taking that in. “Okay,” I said, not bothering to mention I’d set the wards—the magical security and protective system—currently on my house. I hoped my mother was still blissfully unaware of how much magic I’d learned and was using on top of my native empathic and psychic abilities.

  “But why did Modis call Dad wizard? What’s that about?”

  Mom tensed, her shoulders rising, then sighed. “I know we’ve always told you your dad was ordin. We thought it would be easier for you to have a normal life if you thought your mom was a little magic, but only as a healer, and your dad wasn’t magic at all. But the truth is both of us are—”

  “Full-on wizards.”

  She nodded.

  There are few betrayals as powerful as parent to child, even if I had gone along with it. Somewhere deep inside me, I think I’d always known but had blocked the knowledge, playing along with the fantasy of normal life they’d woven.

  The electric kettle switched off, the water at a boil. Lost in thought, I needed a moment for the click of the kettle to register.

  I busied myself putting loose-leaf tea into the tea ball and pouring hot water over it into a white porcelain teapot.

  It wasn’t that my whole childhood had been a lie. Not quite that bad. But it had been shaped by omission. I was magic-born and could have been magic-trained from childhood instead of coming to it in my late twenties and playing catch-up. There was a damn good chance that if I’d been acknowledged and trained all along I’d have picked up on Gil’s treachery much earlier, maybe stopped him sooner, saved some lives—spared Dee and his family from the suffering they were going through now.

  “Do you have any cookies or biscuits?” Mom was much shorter than me and had to crane her neck to look me in the eyes.

  I shook myself out of my dark thoughts, back into the here and now. “In the pantry. There’s a bag of frosted animal cookies.”

  She raised her eyebrows at my choice of snacks.

  I shrugged, but barely. The kind of shrug that meant that right now I didn’t give a damn what she thought.

  She’d lied to me my whole life. I couldn’t quite take it in and make sense of it.

  I watched her pour the cookies into a porcelain bowl I’d bought at a local craft fair. I’d bought the cookies for my friend, Maurice, but hadn’t delivered them yet. I didn’t think this was the moment to tell my mom I was friendly with a magical talking rat with a fondness for sweets. There was enough weirdness going on already, thank you very much.

  Which was me hiding magic from them just as they’d hidden it from me.

  Hmmm.

  When the tea had steeped to the perfect depth of flavor, I put the teapot, four cups, a plate of cut lemons, sugar and honey pots, spoons, and the bowl of animal crackers on a bamboo serving tray and carried it all back to the parlor.

  Modis eyed the serving tray and nodded. “You treat your guests with courtesy and respect. My kind appreciates that.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Would it be rude to ask exactly what your kind are?”

  “Not at all,” Modis said and settled in a chair that faced the sofa where my parents sat. “We are the guardians of the Keepers of the sacred artifacts, as I said before.”

  “We?” I said and set the serving tray on the teak coffee table between the sofa and the chair.

  Modis gave a small nod. “We are three, though now we are one. Something like your 3-in-1 oil, I suppose. Or your father/son/holy ghost. We are three and at the same time one.”

  I glanced at my parents. The looks on their faces said they knew all this already. See—if they’d raised me right, I’d have known, too. Saved some question-asking time.

  “Guardian of the Keepers?” I said. “Not guardian of the artifacts themselves?”

  “The artifacts are divided one to the humans, one to the fairies, one to keep harmony between the two. Two have been stolen, their Keepers destroyed.

  Destroyed?

  “We,” Modis indicated itself, “believe the murders and thefts are meant to start a war between the fairies and humans. The stolen artifacts must be found and returned.”

  A nervous twinge flew up my breastbone. “Why come to us?”

  “Only those with fae blood,” it nodded toward my mother and then to me, “may enter the darkling land with the smallest hope of leaving again alive.”

  My gaze shot to Mom, but her face was impassive. She was a doctor, long trained to show nothing on her face.

  Family lore was that my great-grandfather had been a selkie. If mother and I had fae blood, as Modis believed, then the stories were true. Which meant I wasn’t fully human, just as Elgrin, the fairy warrior, had said. Mother and I were some sort of hybrids. The thought made me a little queasy. But it was intriguing, too. I’d think more about it when I had a moment.

  “You think the artifacts are with the fairies?” I asked.

  “Not with the fairies. One is in the darkling lands. We sense it there. Our senses are never wrong.”

  “Where is the other?”

  “On the human plane,” Modis said. “We need you to fetch back the artifact in the darkling land. Another will fetch back the one on the human plane.”

  “And if we can’t?”

  “War. Unless the chalice and the blade are where they belong, it is inevitable.” Modis took a sip of tea. “The fairies already believe their champion was murdered by humans. The human magicals will be led to believe the fairies killed their Keeper. Wars will surely come unless the two artifacts are recovered and brought to the Keeper of the third and balance is restored.”

  Modis was very calm talking about an inevitable war if the artifacts weren’t recovered. Maybe, as a smoky, it was outside the danger.

  “Who is the Keeper of the third?” I asked.

  “He does not wish to be known at this time,” Modis said. “I will return both to him as they are recovered.”

  If the Keepers of the two stolen items had been killed for them, I didn’t blame the third Keeper for wanting to keep his identity secret.

  I glanced between my parents, who still wore impassive faces but their vibes were strong: Mom contemplating taking on the task and Dad hoping she’d decline—and neither of them considering whether I would choose to go or not, despite Modis clearly indicating that I, too, had fae blood.

  “I’m… willing to go,” I said. Because this wasn’t all that different from the work Dee and I did for Danyon and Peet, the private investigative firm he worked for and I consulted to.

  Mom snapped her head and locked eyes with me. “You will not go.”

  I was way past the age when my mother could tell me what I couldn’t and couldn’t do. How old would I need to be before she saw me as an independent adult instead of only as her child? If twenty-eight wasn’t enough, would thirty be
the magic number? Forty?

  “My only concern,” I said to Modis, “is am I fae enough? I’m pretty far down the genetic ladder from the supposed one full-fae in the family

  “You are fae enough,” it said.

  I felt my mother’s rising worry and anger. Her determination that I not take on a dangerous quest. I felt the same emotions from my dad, plus his worry about my mom, if she went on this hunt.

  If my parents knew the situations I’d been in with Diego, would they worry less or more now?

  My father abruptly stood. “We’ve heard your story and your plea, Modis. We’ll discuss it and let you know if we can help you. If we can’t, we’ll try to point you in the direction of someone who can.”

  Modis drew a deep breath, pulled itself to its feet, and turned its gaze to me. “If you would be so kind as to see me to the door.”

  I nodded and walked with it the short way from the parlor down the hall to the front door.

  Modis reached into a pocket of its caftan and drew out a peach-pit sized green glass sphere. “Did you ever craze marbles when you were a child?”

  I nodded. There’d been a period when I was in the fourth or fifth grade where crazing marbles had consumed me. I was weirdly fascinated by the process and repeatedly heated marbles in the oven and poured them into ice water to watch the glass crack and craze.

  “Do the same to this,” it said. “Heat and cold unleash its magic and will call me.”

  I put the sphere in my pocket. It made a funny little bulge and I patted it half unconsciously.

  Modis’s human facade began to fade, unraveling from one woman-looking being into three smokies. I opened the front door to let them out. Modis sped away in a zig-zag pattern, much the way a balloon goes if the air is suddenly released. It was midafternoon and the Strand in front of my house was crowded with beach-goers, dog walkers, people on bikes or roller blades or skateboards. Not one seemed to notice the smoke-comets streaking away from my front door.