My sword clattered to the ground. 

I turned to face Jay and his captor, and I couldn’t help but notice the way his expression hardened into something more resolved before I’d finished facing him. It seemed automatic, like a reflex that prevented him from showing his fear in front of me.

I met Jay’s eyes. Whatever it was he expected to see in mine, it wasn’t there. Confusion turned to realization on his face. I nodded imperceptibly.

“Make it quick,” I said, eyes still on Jay’s.

“So eager to die?” the barrier mage called out from behind me. “Perhaps if you give up information on your group, we will not torture the boy.”

I moved a half step to the left, turning to look back over my shoulder at the man who had spoken.

“What promise can you give me, that I could trust?”

“Enough,” Jay said, voice steady. The man who held him gave him an amused look. “If you make it painless for her, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

Behind the barrier, the two closest bloodmages exchanged a glance. The one with the barrier nodded once, then jerked his head towards me.

I turned my back on the group of them, facing Jay full on once again. I’d only get one shot at this, and timing was everything. From what I could tell, it wasn’t x-ray

vision I’d gotten, or anything like that. I could just see everything within a certain range of me, from any angle. It wasn’t like a camera drone, like my point of view was flying around. It was just all the information, all at once.

It meant that when he raised his still-bleeding palm to the barrier, I could follow the bloodmage’s aim to know for certain that he was going for a headshot. It meant that instead of having to react to the opening of the barrier, I could react to the first sign of magical activity from inside him, so I was beginning to dodge a clean half-second faster than before. And, most importantly, it meant that I could tell without having to line things up that the attack that would have lanced through my skull had another target in its path.

 The barrier opened and the spear snapped to its full length in the blink of an eye. It passed through my hair again as I spun on my heel, the thick black curtain and my body concealing the position of the targets beyond me. The bloodmage holding Jay didn’t have a chance to react as the spear took him in the eye. He slumped to the ground as his machete slipped from lifeless fingers, Jay shoving him off to one side with a surprised cry.

I didn’t have to wait to see if the attack landed. As soon as I’d moved out of the path of the spear, I was moving. I swept up the sword that I’d dropped as I took a few long strides back towards the men behind the barrier.

“Jay!” I called out, gratified that it only took a moment for Jay to snap out of his surprise. “The machete!”

He picked it up and hefted it, uncertainty flickering across his face.

“Throw it!”

I had to fight down the surge of elation I felt as I began to realize the true scope of my magic. Every part of the plan, every individual component of the maneuver I had planned was in my sight at all times. The enemy’s shield flared with black light as I pulled my sword back towards my hip, couching it like I was readying a lunge.

When I was about three feet away from them, I dropped it.

My toe found the handle of my sword, and I kicked it forward without slowing my stride. It slid forward until its point came into contact with the raised edge of an unevenly placed brick. Barely a quarter of an inch of exposed stone, almost invisible as white on white, plain to see.

Wedged as it was between stone and the tip of my boot, a lift of my foot saw the sword begin to flip upward. I leapt off my other foot, and the moment when I left the ground coincided with the machete leaving Jay’s hand. It was a good throw, cleanly spinning end-over-end. He’d put it at least four feet over my head, which I could work with.

I crouched, and my momentum carried the sword forward and upward, me atop it like it was a stilt. The bloodmages’ eyes widened in surprise as the sword reached a fully upright position. Once again, even without looking I could track the line from my knee, down to my foot, and then down the length of the blade to where the point was digging a small furrow in the stone.

Once I could trace a straight line between my knee and the ground, I jumped again.

I could have done without the flip, and I definitely didn’t need the half turn, but at that moment I was feeling more than a little unstoppable. Besides, I’d practiced acrobatics enough that it felt like a waste to not squeeze it in when I could, and the more ostentatious my movements, the more likely the enemies would be looking at me. I needed their attention.

I heard Jay’s sharp, panicked inhalation as I spun directly into the path of the flying machete, but there wasn’t a moment where I was in danger. From the machete, at least. Just like with the bloodmage throwing knives the night I was pacted, snatching the handle of the weapon was as easy as catching a ball in a glove.

Catching a razor sharp ball behind my back, while upside and spinning through the air.

The spear-launcher had withdrawn his blood by this point, and his hand was beginning to track the path of my leap in preparation for another attack. Which wouldn’t be good. I wouldn’t be able to dodge as I was, so my only recourse was to prevent the next attack from launching.

Shielded as they were by the blood barrier, they didn’t need to worry about the flare that still burnt white hot at Jay’s feet. The light cast the fight in long, strange shadows, but the brilliant glare didn’t penetrate past their protection.

That is, until I angled the silver metal of my new machete correctly, a process made much easier by my magic. All eyes were on me as the metal caught the light, flashing white at a moment when my opponents needed desperately to keep track of my position.

I caught the barrier mage with a backhand slash as I fell, cutting so deep into his neck that I felt the dull grind of metal on bone. It stood to reason that if my Rainbow Nation blade was enchanted to defeat normal levels of magical fortification, the same would hold true for the White City’s weaponry, but I was still somewhat relieved. It wouldn’t be great to land in the middle of three enemies with a chunk of metal in hand that couldn’t cut any of them.

I was a little too close to the spear-launcher to swing the machete, but in quarters this close, his magic was more of a liability than my weapon. Martial arts was all about controlling your opponent, their means of attack and their avenues to advance or retreat. Now that he had no barrier to hide behind, he was reduced to the equivalent of an opponent who could only strike with his palms.

 One hand came up, and instincts kicked in. I stepped in, past the raising arm, past the shoulder. The last bloodmage, the one at the back who had yet to contribute, simply stepped backward, hands still hidden in his sleeves. It wouldn’t matter until he decided to start trying to contribute, and I’d know as soon as he so much as shifted a foot. For now, I focused on the enemy whose danger I knew.

He couldn’t turn to face me, not with me controlling his shoulder, so he reached across his body with his other arm, palm angled to shoot the spear behind his back. He hesitated as the two of us struggled there, which I’d been counting on. He barely had an angle to see me, the way we were positioned, and I imagined there was something about his recent team-kill that made him leery of firing off another blind attack with an ally in the line of fire.

I had a different concern. If his magic involved using open wounds to create those dangerous lances, then drawing blood on him would be dangerous. I’d either have to hit from a strange angle or land a strike that killed him instantly, and I wasn’t sure I could manage that while keeping track of both his palms.

Different tactic, then. I reversed the machete, setting the edge against the small of my back, close to my right hip. I grit my teeth as the blade slid through my skin. I wanted the cut shallow, but it ended up a little deeper than I intended. Sort of hard to gauge, with a weapon that sharp.

With a snarl, the bloodmage whirled on me, swiping out with both bloody hands. I leapt back a few feet as he did. Tricky as my sight let me be, it wouldn’t matter if I let him grab me. No amount of acrobatics would get me out of that grip.

I brought the machete around horizontally, swiping at the air. There was no way I could have landed a blow at that range, but hitting him wasn’t what I was after. Not yet.

A cackle started in the bloodmage’s throat, but cut off just as quickly as the blood on my blade splattered across his eyes. He twisted his head to try to wipe the blood out of his eyes with his shoulder, both hands held up defensively.

I almost laughed back. It was pretty even odds that he could land a spear on me with his eyesight, but now? Me versus a blinded foe was about as one-sided as things could get.

He fired spears from both hands, but it was a hopeless, desperate effort. Only one of them would have hit me, had I stood still, but I wasn’t going to waste any time gloating.

The blind attacks came out at chest level, so I went low. The tough armor of my knee-plates skidded easily over white bricks, and I slashed him savagely as I passed, just below the ribs. Blood and viscera spilled out through the gash, but I didn’t stop moving. I could see the magic building in him, more of a burst than the more controlled flow that accompanied his palm-attacks.

It exploded out the side of him all at once, a blood lance three times as thick at the base as his previous attacks. It was woefully mis-targeted, coming off at an angle nearly perpendicular to the orientation of the alley. It punched through the stone wall, still thicker around than my torso, and disappeared deep into the building.

Before the last ditch attack had retracted from the wall, I reversed the machete again and jammed it through the man’s heart. I made to pull the weapon free, but a flash of black light in the man’s chest saw me abandon the attempt in short order. Still, as swift as my reaction was, barely a moment after I saw the magic begin to react, it wasn’t quite enough. Blood burst from everywhere on the man’s body, like the needles of a porcupine. A much larger quantity emerged from the place where I’d stabbed him, the force of it launching the machete out of his chest.  

The needles were only active for the blink of an eye, but as I stumbled away from the dying man I was bleeding from a dozen points on my right arm. The perforations were small, but most of them had pierced me cleanly. My hand trembled as I opened and closed it a few times, my teeth clenched against the pain.

I should have seen it coming. Every time I convinced myself to not underestimate magic, every time I added another layer of caution to my mindset, I was proven to still be too lax. Their magic was in their blood, so it was easy to imagine it only being active when exposed to the air. But the blood was always there. That meant every bloodmage was always on the verge of unleashing a brutal suicide attack like this one, burning up the last bit of life in their veins to call on their magic in a way they could only possibly manage once.

Jay rushed to meet me, already pulling a roll of bandages out of his bag. My first instinct was to warn him to stay back, but in the few seconds since I’d been injured the sleeve of my body armor was soaked through with blood.

Unfortunately, our last opponent had other plans.

As soon as Jay pulled out his knife to begin cutting my sleeve back, the bloodmage made his move. His hands came out of his over-large sleeves, along with a truly unbelievable quantity of red mist. It flowed out like he had fog machines hidden inside his robe, spreading out to fill the alleyway before I’d even finished processing what was happening.

It settled around our feet, reaching no higher than our ankles. The magic energy in it spoke to its potency, but when it didn’t immediately start to burn us, I realized something else was afoot. The magic in the mist, it didn’t seem interested in interacting with us at all. It was reaching out to the stone, bonding with it, but it slid off of our clothes and shoes like we were oiled. 

“We need to get off the ground,” I told Jay quietly. “Get up to the next level.”

It was maybe twelve feet from the ground to the next level of the building, where the haphazard stacking had left a foot-wide lip that ran the perimeter of the structure. From there, it was another ten feet to the top of the alleyway, then a short run back to where the others were waiting. Hopefully.

“Is he going to let us?”

As if in answer, the bloodmage standing at the edge of the field of mist knelt to the stones. His hands raised, as if in reverence, then plunged into the bloody fog.

I saw the change begin from the place his hands first touched the mist. The stone beneath, probably too obscured for Jay to see, was melting away. It wasn’t a slow melt, either. Less like chocolate on a hot day and more like cotton candy in water. 

I swore, crossing to where I’d left my sword in the ground, and swept it up. In the same motion, I crouched and leapt, taking one final step up the wall before slamming the blade into the stone as hard as I could. Almost three quarters of the blade was buried in the stone, and I hung off it with my left hand. I turned back with my injured hand, holding it out to Jay.

“Jump!”

Jay’s hand slapped into mine just as the stone fell away from where we’d been standing. I stifled a scream as his weight pulled on my arm, the pain sending stars bursting through my vision.

Beneath us, a chasm yawned open. It was as though someone had excavated the stone, shearing the walls away almost twenty feet straight down. The bloodmage watched us with a twisted grin, eyes glinting in the darkness beneath his hood. One hand came up and pressed into the wall where we’d anchored ourselves. Red mist began to spread out once more, only this time it was clinging vertically instead of spreading out shallowly on the floor.

This wasn’t going to work. In a few seconds that magic would activate again, and the wall Jay and I were hanging onto would disappear, sending us both to the depths of that pit. We’d probably survive the fall, maybe with some injuries, but it would be a death sentence either way. We’d be stuck at the bottom until more bloodmages arrived, and there wouldn’t be a victory to be seized.

Groaning with the effort, I started to swing Jay back and forth.

“What’re you doing, Em?” Jay asked, a hint of panic in his voice.

“Gotta…” I began, grunting with exertion and pain. “Gotta get you out of here. Get to...the next level. Get back to the others.”

With one final scream, I hauled on Jay as hard as I was able. I could tell he tried to keep a hold of my hand, but his grip failed on the blood-slick skin. He was sent flying in an ungainly arc, limbs flailing until he rose high enough to get two hands and a leg up on the lip of the next level.

As soon as he’d managed to get himself up on the edge of the building, he turned back around, hand reaching out for mine. I offered him a sad smile. No way was I making it. The toss had put him six feet to my right, three feet above. Even if my dominant hand wasn’t injured, I didn’t have enough time.

The bloodmage carefully, almost gingerly, placed both his hands in the mist on the wall.

“Go,” I said, my voice almost a whisper. Jay gave me one last look, fear and grief in his eyes, then he ran, following the lip around the edge of the building until he disappeared from my sight.

The wall dissolved in front of me, a wave of silent destruction that swept from the bloodmage’s hands to the far end of the building. My sword lost its purchase in the wall, and I fell, one hand questing upwards in desperation.

And someone grabbed it.

I narrowed my eyes as I hung there. The figure above me was distorted, in a way that was difficult to envision. Like the artifacting that accompanied video glitches, or something like three-dimensional white noise.

All at once, the distortion disappeared, settling in the shape of a girl.

Adela.

She hung off the end of a rope, feet planted on the wall in a rappelling position. She held me easily, one hand on the rope and the other on my wrist and, when she lifted me, it seemed to take no effort at all. Up to her chest level and then over her head, like I was a doll.

“Fantasma,” the man from below called out. “Qué estás haciendo?”

Adela glanced down at him, but her dark eyes returned to me shortly.

“Pull us up,” she said, turning her head slightly to speak at someone over the edge of the rooftop. The sounds of straining and groaning came back in response as whoever held the other end of the rope began hauling on it. Adela walked up the side of the building as the rope raised, me still dangling from her hand like a toy.

When we reached the edge of the rooftop, more hands came over and seized me by the arm and underneath the shoulders, hauling me up and onto solid ground once more. Julia and Augustus. Xander and Tyler were on the rope, dropping it with matching sighs of relief once Adela made it over the edge. On the other side of the roof, Marika was helping Jay up.

“You came back for me?” I asked, panting. I looked up at Adela from where I’d collapsed to my knees, and she looked back at me, eyes inscrutable.

“Give me your sword.”

“I...what?”

“The blood priest down there. He’s dangerous. We can’t leave him to come after us. Your sword.”

I hadn’t even thought about it, the fact that I’d managed to keep the sword in my grip as I fell. It was a point of shame, that I even hesitated to hand over the weapon. She’d just saved my life, but every time I looked at her tan face, those dark eyes...I saw the others. The teeth filed to a point, the bloody knives.

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to get the images burned into them to dissipate. When I opened them again, I offered Adela the sword, handle first.

She took it, then turned and stepped off the rooftop, disappearing into static and distortion once again. She was fully gone before she hit the ground. 

“Are you okay?” Julia asked, her eyes on my wounded arm.

“She got hit, right at the end,” Jay said. He pulled another roll of bandages out of his bag as he approached.

Julia glanced at him, then went back to looking at me.

“I still think it was stupid,” she said. 

“So we’ve heard,” Marika said, coiling the rope. “Let’s get back. I don’t like sitting on this rooftop.”

I pulled myself to my feet, warding away Jay’s attempts at administering aid. “Mari’s right. Did we make it to our destination? Do you know where to go?”

Julia nodded. “We took care of the guard they left posted, and were about to go inside when the blood priest got a surge of conscience. Said we had to come back for you two.”

We made our way across a bridge to the next rooftop over, just a pair of planks, really. A narrow set of switchback stairs led us down to the ground, and a short dash through cramped alleys saw us at another building, indistinguishable from the rest save for the corpse that lay on the ground in front of the door. The robe it wore still smouldered.

Our group stopped just outside the building’s entrance.

“Adela told us to let her go in first,” Marika explained. “Said it would be best if her contact saw her before us.”

It was a good enough reason to get my arm taken care of. Jay split my sleeve back with his knife, cutting the fabric away all the way up to my shoulder. I didn’t want to look, but I heard Jay’s sharp intake of breath, and saw Julia flinch as she examined the wounds.

Marika produced a bottle of water and set to cleaning the blood from around the punctures. I winced with each prod, each wipe of the gauze.

“When I was eight years old, the White City attacked Avalon,” Julia said suddenly.

“Jules,” Augustus said sharply.

“Shut it, Aug. It wasn’t bad, as far as attacks go. Avalon is by far the most defended city in the Rainbow Nations, it’s where the Rainbow Citadel is. We’ve never recorded casualties so low.”

The last sentence was spat bitterly, Julia’s pretty face distorted with grief and something darker. Over her shoulder, I could see the pain mirrored on Augustus’s face.

“My father died in the defense. It was years before I could let my anger go. I hated them, hated everything they stood for, everything they’d done to us. It was all I could think about.”

Jay applied fresh gauze to my cleaned wounds, then set about binding them tightly. I flinched with every roll of the bandaging, but my eyes were on Julia. I’d never heard her speak so candidly.

“I met someone who taught me another way. It’s thanks to him that I can live a life with purpose. Actual purpose.”

“What are you trying to say?” I asked, closing my eyes.

Julia shrugged. “There’s an order to things. To the universe. The Seven Roads flow through everything, and there isn’t anything in existence that doesn’t bear at least one of their colors. They mark us all. What we love, what we fear. What we want.”

“I want justice.”

“That’s not the color you’re wearing, Emily. There is no Cabal of Justice.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but found I didn’t have anything to say. What could I say? It felt pretty obvious, when pointed out. Was Cheri just an excuse to me? Was I just here to kill as many bloodmages as I could?

Would that even out what was taken from me?

I met Jay’s eyes, and there was something new in them. Something that wasn’t concern, something that I’d just gotten used to seeing in Jay’s brown eyes.

It felt like fear.

“You’re not really alive if you don’t have a purpose,” Julia said. “But the same thing goes if your purpose is just death.”

“You’re right, Julia,” I said, the words feeling strange in my mouth. “Sorry. I-”

Movement on the roof, three buildings over. Another patrol, it looked like. Five men in black robes, prowling over bridges and leaping over gaps. From the way their

attention was being split in all directions, I don’t think they knew where we were, but they’d see us soon if they continued on their course.

I motioned everyone to get low.

“Patrol incoming!” I hissed, indicating the direction. “Five on the rooftops.”

“They won’t take this fight,” Xander said. “Not like the others. They’re not on guard duty, they’re searching. They’ll send some to engage, but the rest will raise the alarm.”

I scanned the faces of the group. Jay had finished bandaging me, and he was looking to me for direction. Uncertain, but he didn’t look scared anymore. Marika was watching the street, never one to sit around and talk. Ty was crouched next to the door, his eyes up, but unfortunately looking in the wrong direction. Julia and Augustus were conferring in hushed whispers, and Xander was as hard to read as ever.

We were out of time.

“Inside,” I said, moving to the door. “Get the body, move it in with us.”

“Adela said-” Xander began.

“To wait and die?” I finished. When he remained silent, I continued. “No. We get inside, now, and hope it doesn’t mess things up too badly. It’s too early for the sirens to sound.”

Julia and Xander exchanged glances, and Julia nodded.

“Xander, Aug, get the body. Emily, on me.”

Julia and I flanked both sides of the doorway. I grabbed the doorknob, twisting slowly until the knob was fully turned. I gave Julia the slightest of nods, which she returned.

I threw the door open and rushed inside, Julia right on my heels. As quick as we were entering, Julia almost ran bodily into me as I stumbled to a halt, just inside the door.

The room was...homey. The stone of the floor was covered with quilts and carpets, multi-colored patterns that looked home-made. A table of dark polished wood was lined with woven wicker seats, and the air was thick with the smell of meat and spices. I heard a soft, melodic sound that took me an oddly long time to recognize as singing. No words, just a pretty, lilting set of la’s and mm’s to a tune.

The entryway was small, most of the first floor being this single room, but a few feet of wall separated us from the singer. Julia tapped me on the shoulder, then jerked her head towards the corner. She put her hands over her ears, then nodded to me until I did the same. I stuck my head back out the door, making sure everyone saw me with my hands over my ears. Xander and Augustus followed suit immediately, with the rest of the Tryhard Club shortly afterward.

I met Julia’s eyes and nodded at her once. Without further prompting, she rushed around the corner, night-blue sword drawn. Even through my hands, I heard a scream, cut off quickly.

I moved inside as well, making room for Augustus and Xander to drag the bloodmage corpse from outside. Around the corner, a cozy little kitchen stove was nestled in between two cabinets, and a woman knelt in front of them with wide, terrified eyes.

Julia tapped her ears as I approached, and I let my hands down.

“Stay kneeling, no screaming, no magic,” Julia said. “Usual containment compulsions.”

“Who are you people?” the woman said in thickly accented English. “Arco iris? Rainbow?”

“Relajate, Reina,” Adela said, stepping past me into the room. She handed me the sword she’d borrowed as she did, giving Julia a hard look. “Release her, Karalis.”

Julia frowned, but her eyes glowed amber for a moment, followed by the woman scrambling to her feet. Despite what I’d pictured, the woman didn’t show any signs of recognizing Adela. She backed away as soon as she’d risen, and struggled briefly as Adela attempted to grasp her by the wrists.

“Mírame,” she said, leaning in to look up at the woman, only slightly taller than Adela was. “Look!”

Confusion and fear slowly changed to recognition. Eyes that had held only suspicion filled with tears, and the woman threw her arms around Adela as she dissolved into sobbing.

Adela returned the embrace, looking more at peace than I’d ever seen her. She turned her head to look at the rest of us as the Tryhard Club filed in and shut the door behind them.

“This is Reina Delgado,” she said. “My mother.”

*************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

“I wish I’d paid more attention in Spanish,” Marika said.

I shot her a glare, and Adela verbally hushed her. Three men with hoods combed Adela’s home top to bottom, looking inside each container, even going so far as to tear up rugs and knock on the walls to listen for panels. Just outside the door, Adela’s mother spoke to two more bloodmages in rapid Spanish.

“Oh, relax,” Marika said, waving one hand dismissively. She stood directly in front of one of the searching men, doing her best to get in his way only to have him inadvertently reach around her, or shift his focus to other tasks when he found his way barred to the cupboard.

I glanced at Adela, who was watching the proceedings with an amused expression.

“Is this how your magic always works?” I asked.

“More or less. It helps if you’re less obtrusive, but it goes pretty far to smooth over mistakes. They see us and hear us, they just forget immediately. So that guy’s brain knows that he can’t reach through Marika to get to the cupboard, but it doesn’t get as far as processing why. He just continues doing what he’s trying to do without running into what he knows is impossible.”

“He probably could reach through me, couldn’t he?”

Marika was pulling a series of funny faces at the bloodmage as he finished his inexplicably difficult inspection of the cupboard’s contents.

Adela shrugged. “It’s possible. But if he knew you were there, he wouldn’t try. He’d grab you, or call out to the others, or something along those lines. Either way, they won’t try to touch you, or run into you, or anything like that.”

 “It’s no wonder you performed as well as you did, for so long,” Julia remarked. There was an edge to her tone, but she sounded begrudgingly impressed. “It’s a convenient magic.”

Adela looked at her sidelong, but nodded. “Most shadow abilities are Alteration-type magic, which are pretty easily countered by sensors. After a bit of experimentation, I’ve discovered that mine is more like a Compulsion, which gives it other weaknesses, but covers a lot of the standard weaknesses of things like invisibility.”

The rest of our group stood or crouched along one wall. It had no features on it save for a picture of Adela and Reina, so we weren’t worried about getting in the way of the search.

Beams of black energy flowed through the air, connecting Adela to the rest of our group. It was kind of astonishing, that even though the connection used Adela as the source, it didn’t appear to diminish the magic inside her at all. It wasn’t sharing her magic, it was just replicating it.

“Your mother is pretty impressive herself,” I murmured.

“Her power was a big part of our assault strategies, for a long time. Very few blood priests are as widely known.”

“It’s kind of surprising seeing her...you know.”

“Cooking? You figured she’d be in here licking a knife blade and filing her teeth?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She sighed. “No, it’s fine. You’re not far off anyway. She was one of the most fiercely loyal soldiers the White City had, for a time. Until…”

“Until?”

Adela gave me a look.

“Ah.”

“Something in her changed on the day I was born. She left the active invasion force, only contributing her magic to an operation when my father requested. All the rest of her time she spent raising me.”

The ghost of a smile danced on my lips. My mother had been nearly the opposite. Dad told me that he’d had to struggle to get her to take any time off after my birth. She had a drive to be out there protecting people, and I didn’t feel like I’d ever managed to stand in the way of that.

Until the first and last time.

“How long have you been gone?” Julia asked from where she crouched next to me, eyes still on the searching bloodmages.

“Three months.”

A shadow passed over Julia’s neutral expression.

“You used your power on her.”

Adela sighed. “I always do, before I leave on an operation.”

"Why?” Julia asked, with more emotion in her voice than I’d ever heard before.

“You never know what’s going to happen, out there,” Adela said, head leaning back against the stone wall, dark eyes distant. “She never wanted this life for me, and she always said that one of her only regrets in life is that she let Father gift me magic. It was the life I wanted, but it would never be the life she wanted for me.”

She fell silent as she walked over to the dinner table, her hand running along the polished wood. In the background, the bloodmages seemed to finish their cursory search, filing out after trading a few more words with Reina. It didn’t sound friendly, but Adela’s mother held her composure, motherly demeanor never fading through the whole exchange.

“If I died out there, it would destroy her. The loss, and the guilt of knowing that she didn’t stop me.”

“Could she have stopped you?” I asked.

Adela grinned at me, the expression failing to reach her eyes. “Of course not. But you should know better than most that what you’re capable of doesn’t really factor into survivor’s guilt. It’s just what you wished could have happened, a memory that tortures you for as long as you carry it.” 

My first instinct was to argue it, but at that moment, I couldn’t say for certain that my mother wouldn’t have made the same choice for me, if she could. If she’d known how her death was going to torment me, would she rather be forgotten?

Adela’s mother closed the door with a sigh of relief. She’d set up her bizarre magic-sharing scant moments before the patrol swept into the building, and I could see the tension go out of her as the bloodmages left. I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath, and crossed the room to meet her in the small entryway. She watched me approach with curious eyes, but didn’t seem at all discomfited by my presence.

“Thank you for helping us,” I said, bowing my head slightly. “I’m sorry if we frightened you.”

“You did frighten me,” she admitted. “Rainbow wizards are unusual guests.”

She glanced at Adela, and I saw a storm of emotions in her eyes. Sadness, pain, anger and fear, but a deep and satisfied love shone through all of it.

“But you brought my daughter back to me, and that is enough to make you welcome.” 

“We’re not visiting, mamá,” Adela said, approaching the two of us with a somewhat annoyed look on her face. “They’re not guests, and none of us are welcome.”

“Ah? Should I not be helping you?”

Adela made an inarticulate sound of frustration, which prompted a good-natured laugh from her mother. Marika was watching the exchange with a smile on her face, Julia with narrowed, almost suspicious eyes.

Reina reached up and gently gripped her daughter’s chin, tilting it to look her in the eyes.

“I’ve never seen you do anything you didn’t think was right, mi cielo. Looking at you now, I can see something has changed. Something important.”

Adela pushed her mother’s hand away, dropping her gaze. After a moment, she nodded.

“Have you finally found something to believe in?”

“Yes, mamá,” Adela answered, briefly meeting my eyes. “And a lie I can no longer follow.”

Reina smiled again, drawing Adela into a brief embrace. When they separated, Reina grabbed her daughter by the shoulders and spun her around before giving her a light tap on the back, towards the door.

“Then go, mija. And don’t you dare use your power on me again.”

Adela stumbled a few steps, then stopped, back turned on the rest of us.

“Thank you, mamá,” she said. Her voice had a slight tremble to it, and she sniffed once and wiped her hand across her face once before turning to the rest of us. “We need to go. We’re running out of time, and the link won’t last forever.”

With that, she opened the door and disappeared around the corner. The rest of us exchanged glances, then filed out after her.

Bringing up the rear, I was stopped by a light tap on my shoulder.

“My daughter respects you,” Reina said softly.

“How do you know?” I asked, when it didn’t seem like she was going to continue.

“I’ve never seen her look to someone else so often. She cares what you think, she values your reactions and she looks to you for guidance. She might not even realize it.”

I was silent for a moment, staring after the rest of the group.

“She’s done horrible things,” I said eventually.

Reina laughed again, though she stopped when she got a glimpse of my expression.

“Ah, child. I know she has. But she is my daughter. I know her better than anyone, and I know how much she yearns for something more. If she were a monster, condemning her would be easy. But she isn’t. She’s my precious daughter, and I would forgive her anything.”

I felt like something was stuck in my throat, my vision distorting slightly with tears.

“Was your own mother so different?”

My breath shook in my chest, my hands curling into fists.

“I think not,” Reina said sadly.

 She wasn’t very similar to my mother, I could tell by the short interaction we’d had, and what I’d witnessed of her and Adela. My own mother was a little more distant, a little more awkward with affection. She was quick with a lesson to impart, slow with an admission of pride, but she wasn’t cold. I had fond memories of warm, affectionate moments between the two of us, and I’d never once thought she was anything but an amazing woman. Had she ever even blamed me?

“I know I don’t have any right to make requests of you,” Reina continued, “but please...keep her safe. Look after your friends, and look after my little girl. She can be reckless.”

I cleared my throat, blinking away the moisture in my eyes.

“I will,” I said, holding her gaze. “You have my word.”

I turned to go.

“One more thing, niña.”

I paused on the threshold.

“Keep yourself safe.”

As the tears threatened to return, I nodded once, and strode off after my friends.