Emery stepped through the tear in the worlds, the gateway invisible to anyone without magic. He blinked at the sudden shift in visuals. Deep blue sky stretched overhead. Lush greenery surrounded him, moving in the light wind, alive and wild.

He sucked in a deep breath and stilled for a moment with his eyes closed. Natural energy buzzed through his body and sizzled along his bones. The slight weariness of crossing from the magical Realm to the Brink, the human world, evaporated. Replaced by the wholeness, and goodness, of the natural magic surrounding him.

Home. He’d missed it.

Solas stepped out a moment later, a scarf covering her fire-red hair. Her intelligent green eyes surveyed their surroundings before going skyward. Her arm brushed his and he stepped away.

“This the place?” she asked, her gaze now sweeping the trees.

He patted his pockets before bringing out a Brink phone, a piece of human technology that didn’t work in the Realm. He pushed the button to turn it on, frowning when it wouldn’t fire up. He’d have to plug it in. Right after he found a place to stay.

He slipped the phone back into his pocket and took out a map instead. “I think so,” he said, starting forward.

She followed him without a word, content to let him take the lead. When this was through, he’d likely never see her again. She was here to repay a favor, nothing more—they weren’t friends. He didn’t have any of those anymore. Or anyone constant in his life at all. He was a drifter now, or near enough. It was better that way. Safer. There was less to lose.

An hour’s walk and they reached a ramshackle office at the end of the sleepy, unimpressive town of Middlebrook. He’d spent a year searching for his former mentor, following vague clues and surmounting near-constant name changes. There was no denying Isaias had a gift for hiding. A gift that he had, in part, taught Emery. But in this, like in all things magical, the pupil had surpassed the teacher. His mentor couldn’t hide from him any longer.

“You can stay out here,” Emery said, his heart heavy at the thought of the coming confrontation. It was long past due, but that didn’t make the prospect any more pleasant.

“What, and miss the show?” Solas chuckled and stepped to the side, waiting for him to open the door for her like the royalty she someday hoped to be.

“I should go in first,” he said by way of apology. He tried the handle and heard a distinct click. A magical warning most people thought was the handle or lock.

It seemed this old dog hadn’t learned any new tricks.

“You’re tensing,” she said. “Will he attack you, then?”

“With certainty. You’ll want to stay clear.”

Solas slid her hands into her trouser pockets, unmoving and completely unaffected.

A grin threatened his lips. Clearly a worn-out mage being hunted by a Natural wasn’t enough to shake her. It was her fire and fearlessness that had intrigued him when they’d first happened on each other in the woods of the Realm a while back. When she got her chance to stand in the coliseum for the Placement Games, a series of bloody and brutal battles magical folk participated in to win a few choice seats within the Realm hierarchy, Emery had no doubt she’d snag one of the top spots. She wasn’t favored by the sponsors, and her family did not have a lot of gold, but her people were from a warrior class almost as majestic and ruthless as the fae. From what he’d seen of her practice sessions, her spark and her passion pushed her above anyone else he’d met from the Realm. She was a wild card. An ace in the hole.

“Suit yourself,” he mumbled, digging through his pockets for the right elements. He was sure he had a few within easy reach.

“Most mages carry a satchel.” She watched him with a steady, assessing gaze.

He stuffed a piece of flint into the door’s keyhole before glancing at his feet. After lifting a boot, he scraped off some dirt. He sprinkled it onto the door handle. “Most mages also need to travel with a recipe book and all their ingredients.”

“And you are not most mages.”

“You knew that.” Naturals could draw the materials they needed from their environment—they were not limited to the supplies they could carry on their person.

“I meant, both in and out of bed, you are not most mages.”

His face heated. She was trying to bait him with innuendo, but he wouldn’t bite. No, he needed to focus on the elements before him. The metal of the door, reacting with the flint. The earth holding them together. The wood pushing against them.

He willed the elements into a tight weave that would form his intended spell.

Black fog clouded his vision. An image took over of the handle exploding off the door and punching a hole through his chest.

He took a step to the right. Problem averted.

Spell finished, he pushed out a small bit of power to finish it off. Immediately, his premonition came true. The handle burst from the door, flying over the small walkway and out into the cracked and crumbling pavement beyond. On the other side of the door, the handle hit the ground with a dull thud.

“Open sesame,” Solas said with a smile.

He shoved the door open and stepped through quickly, the wood slamming against the interior wall. A blonde woman stood at a tall desk, dead center in the cramped lobby space, with wide eyes and a gaping mouth. She shrieked and threw up her hands.

Magical components called out to him throughout the room, almost as if they were begging to be used. He’d tried explaining this to a non-natural before, and the best explanation was that he could see the potential elements waving to him from their sources. Almost like they had little translucent tags. He grabbed out five—velvet from a chair, paper from a magazine, plastic from the fake plant, dye from the woman’s hair, and the dirt still lingering on his shoes. He willed them together and pushed with his power.

The woman’s eyes rolled into the back of her head and she fell behind the counter.

Directly ahead, on the other side of the shabby check-in desk, waited a closed door draped in shadow. Behind that, a dingy hallway led to a bathroom and another office, unoccupied since Isaias, operating under the name Jonas Smith, had taken over the lease.

“That is surprising.” Solas wandered in behind Emery and filed off to the side, utterly fearless and unruffled. “I thought you said you didn’t kill without reason. Has your sordid life in the Realm changed you?”

Emery kept his voice down. He’d revealed his presence to Isaias, but he didn’t want his former mentor to know anything else. “She’s not dead. She’s knocked out. She’ll come to in about an hour.” He dug out more flint from his pocket and picked up objects as he worked his way to the visible door, the wood lined and faded.

He summoned up the protective magic that every mage was born with. It required no ingredients outside of the mage’s own body. No power or energy other than what was stored. It was the magic of survival, ingrained.

Most mages didn’t know how to manipulate the power. It was a blunt tool called up as a last resort, used on instinct. But most mages hadn’t spent years running for their lives and hiding in places no sane person would willingly go. A man developed a certain affinity for staying alive when he was forced to struggle for existence every moment of his life.

He dropped the ingredients he’d collected, leaving them in a pile at his feet. Working the elements he needed, he half built the weave before anchoring it to the doorway. The black fog came and went in a flash.

The walls blew out.

Emery smiled to himself. Isaias had been expecting him. He’d built spells into the walls in anticipation.

Did he not remember Emery’s natural gift? How had he hoped to hide that particular surprise?

Shaking his head, Emery thought about creating a spell to soak into the wood of the wall, countering Isaias’s spell and causing it to disintegrate. But what a waste of time…

He pulled on the magical threads he needed for the protection spell, entwining them with his survival magic for an extra kick, and wove his work along the surface of the wall. The dirty white paint dissolved into blood red. The color stretched to the corner before wrapping around. He’d covered the whole door.

“He was notorious for wasting his resources,” Emery muttered, anchoring the spell. “Just around the door would’ve been fine.”

“Maybe he feared you’d bring an army,” Solas whispered, thankfully quick at picking up the situation.

“I did.” Emery glanced at her. “Oh, you meant more people?”

A pleased smile curled her lips before red crept into her pale cheeks. She looked away in delighted embarrassment.

For all her hardness, the planes and angles of her personality, she wasn’t immune to flattery.

“We’ll need to get cover just in case he has more power than I expect. The reception desk should be enough.” He gestured for Solas to take cover.

“I was content to watch you work, as I find it fascinating, but I am not going to hide behind a dirty desk in a filthy establishment. I may not be from much, but I do have some standards.” She flicked her hand. The door handle clicked, but not in the warning way of before. It was the click of the lock.

Emery frowned as anticipation built.

“I didn’t know you had control of metal,” he said, still for the moment.

“Any Elemental worth their practice grounds has a secret. Some small talent they keep close to the chest. This particular ability can be useful.” She paused, her eyes steady on his. “I trust I can count on you to keep this to yourself?”

“Given how tenaciously you’d try to kill me if I passed it on, I’d say so, yes.” Emery slowly reached for the handle.

“And given that I know your location…and your enemy.”

“That too,” he muttered. “It looks like his spells aren’t dependent on the lock.” He paused before reaching out to touch the metal. “The spells are dependent on that door opening without the correct element to render them dormant. If I just push it open, my protection spell won’t help us. The walls will still blast.” Something occurred to him, and he spun, looking for the woman he’d put to sleep.

“What element do you need?”

“Not an element in the sense of the ones you wield. I mean…the properties of natural items. The building blocks that make up nature. Sometimes it’s part of an object near me, like the cotton in my shirt or rubber on my shoe, and sometimes it’s the object as a whole, like dirt, flint, or wood. I draw the energy out of the material and weave it into a spell.”

“That is not usual for mages—or anyone. Correct?”

“No, it’s not, unless you are a mage with the highest level of magic. Even if you’re a natural, you still have to learn to harness the ability. You have to practice and train. That was something my brother and I did together. And we’d still be doing together if this…” He gritted his teeth to keep from exploding in rage.

Thankfully, Solas let it go.

Pushing the emotion away, he bent to the woman lying in reception. Elements called to him from each item making up her wardrobe—all except for one. An item from her pocket. A plain gem keychain pulsing with power.

He snatched the keys and headed back to the closed door, his heart heavy. Once there, he paused, staring at the handle in trepidation.

“You do not seem like a man who fears battle.” Solas’s low, feminine hum drifted to him through the heavy silence.

His heart surged in his ears, nearly drowning her out. “It’s not the attack that I’m afraid of. It’s my past.”

He swung the door open before ripping his hand back behind his protective spell. Not a moment later, a stream of spells flew at him—mottled red, brilliant blue, and one orange-yellow. They hit his dual pane of protection and flashed brightly before fizzling into nothing.

Unable to stall any longer, he stepped across the threshold, seeing the undulating strands of magic surrounding him, ready to be used.

Emery’s stomach flipped and lead filled his shoes.

There he was, with deeper lines in his face and more gray in his hair.

Isaias.

The man Emery had met as a boy. The man who had recognized potential in his brother, then him. The man who had trained them through the grief of losing their parents, past the rebellion of their teenage years. The man who had shown Emery how to become a dual-mage with his brother, two naturals of the highest caliber entering into one of the most powerful pairings in the world.

The man who had betrayed them. Then disappeared.

One question had been burning in Emery’s mind these last few years, begging for an answer.

“Why did you do it?”

Isaias’s shoulders straightened for a moment, but then sadness crossed his features and he hunched back down on himself. He didn’t bother getting up from the rickety old chair behind his busted and decrepit desk.

“Why did you do it?” Emery repeated, stepping farther into the room. “Conrad trusted you. I trusted you.”

“It wasn’t my fault.” Isaias put up his hands. “You have to believe me.”

“You sold Conrad out, and then told them how to get past our wards. Then you just left.”

“I had to! It was safer for you that way.”

Emery gave a humorless laugh. “Safer for me? I’m the Mages’ Guild’s number one most wanted. You chased me out of my home. You chased me out of safety.”

The old mage shook his balding head. His jowls jiggled with the movement. “You have to believe me, Emery. It wasn’t my fault.”

Blackness crept through Emery’s mind at the sight of his mentor’s guilt-ridden face. “Tell me why,” Emery said, his demand sounding more like a plea. “Tell me why.”

“They said they wouldn’t hurt you boys. They just wanted you out of the way, that’s all. You have to realize, Emery—the Mages’ Guild doesn’t like anyone they can’t control. Conrad was gathering supporters. And he had you, another natural waiting in the wings. He was amassing power, don’t you see? Amassing power with the intent of overturning the system. I had to warn them of what Conrad planned. What he wanted to do was madness. Don’t you understand how much money we stood to lose if Conrad took over? How much power?”

The world dropped out from under Emery’s feet. Weightless, all he could do was stare at his former mentor in confused disbelief for a moment. “How much we stood to lose?” he asked incredulously. Painful pressure ripped at his heart. “We? As in…you?” He gulped, the action difficult. A humorless smile pulled at his lips and he narrowed his eyes. “You’re kidding, right? You just told them what they wanted to know… You weren’t actually…one of them, were you?”

Isaias’s eyes tightened. His mouth worked for a moment, nothing coming out. Finally, he found his voice. “I should’ve told you. I should’ve. That was wrong of me. But it wasn’t important back then. My job coincided with what you boys needed. We were working together. Why ruin that? Then, when the guild called me in, I had no choice. I thought they’d force you to disappear. Peaceful resolution for everyone. I had no idea they’d kill your brother, Emery. You have to believe me. I thought they’d just scare you boys.”

Emery held up his hand to stop the conflicting babble of someone he’d once thought of as a father figure. His limbs slowly numbed, like his mind.

He’d expected a confrontation that would turn his stomach, but he’d thought Isaias would admit to buckling under torture. Or maybe because he’d somehow thought he was helping. Emery had never expected, not once, that Isaias had sold them out because it was his job. That Isaias had befriended them, helped them, trained them…for the guild.

He’d been the enemy from day one.

“Did Conrad know about this?” Emery asked in a wispy voice.

“No.” Isaias waved his hands. “But I had intended to tell him. When the time was right, I was going to explain the truth.”

“But how…” Memories flashed in bright lights before Emery’s eyes. “How could this have escaped him? He had high clearance in the guild.”

“He had no reason to go looking.” Isaias spread his hands. “And even if he did, his clearance wasn’t high enough.”

Emery pulled air from his lungs, still unable to get enough. Memories continued to barrel into him. The dark days and sleepless nights after his parents died. The pain and the fear. Conrad and Emery were given the choice to live with a few distant relations, but no one really wanted them.

Then, out of the blue, they went to the store to pick up some lunch and ran into a man claiming to be a friend of their parents. What a strange and wonderful coincidence. He claimed he’d stopped by the store on his way to the social worker’s house to meet them. From the word go, Isaias said all the right things, knew all the right facts, and then he threw the perfect curveball.

They were different, he said.

They were special.

They had magic.

He was a light in their darkness, serving up candied words when everything else tasted like dirt. And what do you know—like the very magic he spoke of, he was approved to take custody of Emery and his brother when they were barely teens, until they could stand on their own. To train them. To shape them.

So the guild could use them.

It had all been a lie. Plotted, planned out. They’d been raised to be instruments.

Looking at it through this lens, the events that had placed Conrad and Emery in Isaias’s custody looked a lot less like fate, and lot more like the contrived circumstances of an extremely powerful organization.

Emery let out a shaky breath. “You told them how to break into Conrad’s and my home. The wards you insisted on helping us create, even though we didn’t need you at that point.”

“You were scrappy. I knew that even if they got in, you’d get away!”

“Just like you probably thought Conrad would get away, too.”

A shadow crossed Isaias’s visage, and just like that, Emery knew.

Isaias hadn’t thought Conrad would get away at all. He’d known what the guild would do to him, and he’d served him up on a platter. Then he’d sent them after Emery, the flunky, next.

Isaias was the reason Conrad was dead. He was the reason Emery had no life. No future.

The kicker was that Emery had had a chance to go with his brother. The invite to see somewhere new—a distant land—had been extended, and it was only because Emery was working on something that he’d declined.

He could’ve helped his brother. Given him a much-needed ally.

Saved him.

It was hard to breathe. Hard to think.

“And now you’re hiding,” Emery said in a whisper. “Why is that, I wonder?”

“Because the guild wants him dead,” Solas said from just outside the doorway. “The guild in the Brink are corrupt. Everyone knows that. If you are no longer necessary, you are executed. Although…maybe they left him alive to monitor him in the hopes he’d lure you to him. Like he has done.”

“They wouldn’t be able to find him.” Emery shook his head, his mind racing. “I could barely find him, and I know how his mind works.”

“The guild probably didn’t predict that,” Solas said, crossing her arms. “He is a loose end. One that wronged you horribly. Tie it up. Send him to his maker.”

“The new plan is already in place,” Isaias said with a manic twinkle in his eyes. All pretense of pleading dropped away. Rage took its place. “With Conrad out of the way, the setup was easy. The rewards plentiful. Dark magic has its benefits. And I could’ve stayed and reaped those rewards if Conrad had just listened to me. If he had gotten off his high horse and seen what was possible. You should blame your brother, not me. He killed us all.” His mouth twisted in distaste and he pinched a casing and threw, still fast despite his age. Or maybe Emery was just horribly slow right then.

A stream of black blistered through the air. Emery lifted his hand to shield himself, but he needn’t have bothered.

Hot air rushed in front of his body, filling the space between him and Isaias. It spun like a tornado, sucking up the hex, and then twisted upward, toward the ceiling. Plaster and paint flew from the sides. Wood groaned.

“Shall I end this?” Solas asked with sparkling green eyes. So much electricity filled the air that Emery’s hair stood on end. “A lightning bolt would be efficient.”

“How did you gain the favor of a weather Elemental?” Isaias asked with widened eyes. He clutched another capsule.

“She is much more than just a weather Elemental,” Emery said, siphoning power from the mini-storm. He pulled elements from within the room and bent them to his will. A tight weave wrapped around his old mentor, pinning Isaias’s hands to his sides. “And I was in the right place, at the right time. Leave him, Solas. Let the guild deal with him however they will.”

“No! Not that. Emery, please. You don’t understand—” Isaias pinched the casing in his hand and jerked, trying to throw it. It hit the desk and bounced back, hitting his side instead.

A puff of green was all the warning the spell gave. It ate through Isaias’s shirt like acid and into the skin of his stomach, burrowing down.

Isaias started to scream, twisting against the magical binding Emery had just constructed. Emery’s heart ached, but not because the spell had been intended for him. In that moment, he didn’t care that his mentor had wanted to kill him gruesomely in order to save himself. This was the man who had pulled him out of the darkness. The man who’d taught Emery and Conrad to use their incredible gifts. Call him sentimental, or a plain fool, but it killed him to see his mentor leave the world like this. Didn’t matter what Isaias had done.

“End it,” Emery said to Solas as he turned away from the grisly sight. “End his suffering.”

A bolt of lightning blasted down from the ceiling. It struck Isaias’s head. The screaming cut off suddenly.

The wind died down and silence filled the room.

Heavy-hearted, Emery stripped away his spells from the door.

“You are too soft for this war you fight,” Solas said as she stepped aside.

He didn’t meet her eyes. “Once upon a time, he was a father figure, of sorts. Regardless of the lies he told, for good or bad, he made me what I am. It’s hard to get around that.”

“I see. And when you meet the Mages’ Guild?”

He led her out of the building and back to the gateway between worlds. This had been a detour. A lingering question. Isaias had nothing to do with the guild members whose names he’d collected thus far. With the war Emery had inherited from Conrad.

The war he intended on fighting with everything he had.

It was time to truly face the guild. He knew the name of the hired gun that had killed his brother, knew the office that man had worked out of at the time, three years ago. He would visit that office in Seattle to start collecting more information. From then, he had but to follow the trail.

“When I meet the guild,” Emery said, “they will rue the day they tore apart my world.”