Lord of Unkindness: Chapter Eighteen

 Notes: Oooh, things are getting intense! Who knew communication could be so hard? (we knew, we all knew)

Title: Lord of Unkindness, Chapter Eighteen

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Chapter Eighteen

 

“No!” Ciro sits up and pulls away in one motion, and Angelo’s not fast enough to keep his head from hitting the pillow before he too sits up.

“Ciro.” He holds out a placating hand, but Ciro isn’t having it.

“That’s a terrible idea. Are you insane? That’s bullshit!” He wants to get up and pace, but he’s naked now and can’t quite stomach getting back into his old, filthy clothes. He settles for sitting at the far edge of the bed and pulling the blankets right around his waist, so no roving hands can distract him. “The last thing I need to do is attract attention by pulling my magic toward myself! How do you think they found me the last time?”

Angelo looks unimpressed with his objections. “Given that your family is ridiculously wealthy and runs a telecom company, I think there are literally dozens of ways they could have found you. Bribing people for access to CC camera systems, hiring hackers to look for any sort of digital footprint you might have left—hell, even hiring an old-fashioned private investigator to find you. Or a firm of private investigators. It’s not like you tried to hide yourself in the wilderness, baby. You chose a city. A shithole of a city, but a city.”

Ciro shakes his head. “They do their tracking with familiars. You know that, you know they don’t like to hire contractors unless they have no choice. No one in the family is a good enough hacker to trace me—I was the best of them all. And private investigators are a useless expense when magical investigators will do just as good. They work on regular humans and on witches.”

Angelo sits up and crosses his legs, settling in for the argument. “All right, let’s consider that. Your family lives on the other side of the country. This is a big damn place. Even with all their familiars, given the fact that you had no reason to pick Vernon in particular, that’s a lot of ground to cover and familiars are delicate. Nephele didn’t have hers run all the way from Massachusetts to California, that’s for sure.”

“Not her,” Ciro agrees. “Her father. Uncle Magnus is the one who found me.”

“Cockroaches are even more of a stretch than rats.”

“They’re hard to kill and they fit in luggage,” Ciro replies doggedly, batting at his bird when it flies irritatedly at his head. “Stick a hundred into a hundred different bags at the airport, send them to a hundred different locations, and let them start sniffing for trace. I’ve seen him do it before.”

“Even if you’re right,” Angelo says, “the best defense isn’t to send your magic away! It’s to coalesce it around you into a strong defense!”

“I’ve got over a hundred ravens! That’s a huge fucking flock of coalescence!” How does Angelo not see that all this does is make it even easier for Ciro to fuck up? How does he not see how dangerous it would be for him? “This isn’t going to work,” Ciro says, looking around the room for wherever Angelo has stashed his own clothes. They’re not the same height, but he’ll figure something out.

“Whoa, whoa. Hang on.” Angelo reaches out a hand but doesn’t touch him. “Please don’t be hasty. I think…” He frowns thoughtfully. “I think we’re talking around a misconception. Ciro, do you think you don’t have any power outside of your familiars?”

Great, now they’re talking witchcraft 101. “My familiars are my power,” Ciro says impatiently. “That’s how it works with witches like me. Our familiars are the physical and spiritual representations of our power, existing outside of us but connected to us. We control and commune with them, and can restore them with time and effort if one is used up, but they’re primarily a static creation.”

Angelo nods slowly. “And what are other witches’ familiars for?”

“The same fucking thing,” Ciro snaps.

“But they’re not the same thing, because other witches don’t require their familiars to be present in order to do their magic,” Angelo says. “They help, for sure. It’s easier to do magic when there’s a familiar to channel it or augment it, but they’re a construct. A tool to utilize magic, not the person’s magic in and of itself.”

Ciro shakes his head. “That’s a whole separate class of witch. We’re different from them.”

“No, you’re not.”

Ciro clenches his hands. “Yes we are, it’s the first thing we’re taught as children! Our magic lives in our familiars! We have nothing without them!”

“Ciro.” There’s a tenderness in Angelo’s face that makes Ciro’s hackles rise. “That’s not true.”

He can’t stand it any longer. He gets up and grabs for his filthy, waterlogged jeans. Pulling them on feels like pulling on a layer of cold slime, but he persists until they’re up all the way.

“Ciro, stop!”

“You’re wrong,” he snaps without looking at Angelo. “You just don’t get it. This is a fundamental aspect of my magic—you think I don’t understand my own magic?”

Angelo, not to be outdone, gets out of bed. Unlike Ciro, he doesn’t give a shit whether he’s clothed or not. He’s bathed in the golden light of his own magic, and his nudity is less of a vulnerability than it is simply a fact. Ciro feels envy rise up as he glances at him, but refuses to meet Angelo’s eyes as he comes closer. “I know this was the way you were taught,” Angelo says, frank but calm. “But your family aren’t the only multi-familiar witches I’ve worked with over the years, and several of the others have used their magic very, very differently, with great success.”

“Not my family, though,” Ciro points out—harsher than he needs to be, harsher than he wants to be, but this is a matter of life and death now. Both their lives, potentially, but he cares about Angelo’s far more than he does about his own. “Not my family, so you can’t say that whatever ability you’re talking about crosses over. None of us work magic outside what’s kept in our familiars, and—”

“Your mother did.”

Ciro goes blank. He…he can’t think of anything to say to that. He doesn’t know anything to say to that, because he doesn’t know enough about his mother to refute it. He wants to refute it—this is an argument he can win, that he needs to win for both their sakes, but…

But he remembers little things. Little magics his mother used to do with her hands, like healing a cut on his face or mending a bruise on his knee. He remembers how she could coax a flower to give off a stronger scent, or widen its bloom. Warming him up with a touch when he was cold, or the one time they went sledding and she was able to pull him, on his sled, up the steep, steep hill over and over, never faltering, never falling, never getting tired.

Her familiars had been fish. Koi. His father had hated them, but she never listened to his insults or hatred. His mother had been a goddess in the water, and she’d done the sort of specialized work with her fish familiars that had helped cement their family’s value and expertise in the magical community.

Cheng Mei could do magic without her familiars at hand. Not dramatic magic, not that Ciro had ever seen, but…

“It’s not the same.”

“It can be,” Angelo says. “Your mother’s skills at hands-on magic suffered during her marriage to your father, but they never went away entirely. This is something that you can learn.”

Ciro shakes his head. “I don’t think I can.”

“I think you have to.”

“I—”

Now it’s Angelo’s turn to raise his voice. “What are you going to do without your magic? Hunker down in a wilderness somewhere and hope against hope that you’re never spotted by the wrong magic user? What about when your father gets desperate enough to share your family’s business with other people and hires specialized bounty hunters to hunt you down? What about when he decides to do business with a blood clan?”

Ciro balks. “He hates blood magic.”

“He hates having you out of pocket even worse,” Angelo insists. “He’ll get there eventually, especially if what you told me is right and your uncle isn’t able to resume his work for the family. He’s going to need your strength to prop up your family’s status in the magical world, and he won’t care who he has to hurt to get it.”

Ciro stares at Angelo in dismay. “Then it’s even more important that I get away from you, soon,” he says grimly.

“No. You’re safe here,” Angelo says. “My parents’ magic is strong enough to turn eyes, magical or otherwise, away.”

“Then I’m stuck here forever.”

“Ciro—”

“And so are you,” he goes on, knowing that he’s hit on a thread here that he’s got to pull. “This place won’t let me stay without you, will it? It’s meant to be your sanctuary, not mine. I can only be here with you, and you can’t stay here forever.”

“I can stay as long as I need to,” Angelo says.

Ciro shakes his head. “You can’t. You can’t, you’ve got a business and employees and other people to help. You—your whole life revolves around helping people, and familiars, and—you can’t give that up for my sake.”

“I won’t be giving anything up,” Angelo insists. “I’m here because I—Ciro. You—you know.”

You know I love you. And he does know, he feels that, but he also knows he doesn’t deserve for Angelo to turn his life inside out. Not for as long as it might take him to learn an entirely new magical discipline, which could take months…years. “I won’t do that to you,” Ciro insists quietly. “I can’t. I’ll—I’ve got to leave.”

“No.”

“I’ve got to. I won’t trap you here, I won’t…” He turns blindly, looking for his shirt, for anything he can shove on his feet to make the first few miles easier.

“Ciro!” Angelo grabs his hands and pulls him back to face him.

“I won’t.” Ciro pulls his hands free but doesn’t look away. He needs Angelo to see this next part, see the truth in his face. “I would rather die than trap you.”