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  The woman raised her hands placatingly, resting long fingers against my shoulders. I resisted, straining against her touch, but the exertion of movement raked like talons across my skin. I screamed again.

  “We’re only trying to help, Mr. Graves. You’re wounded. We’ll give you something for the pain, but for now, you have to rest.”

  She was right. Maybe it was the drugs, or maybe it was the shock of it, my mind misremembering events and shoving them way to the back of my memory, but how could I have forgotten so soon? The last time I was conscious there were six full inches of metal sticking out of my chest.

  How the hell had I survived that? I winced as I tilted my head lower to glance at myself, feeling the pinch in my chest as I did. And I tried not to gasp. Couldn’t tell you if I was more bothered by the pain or by the sight of fresh crimson bleeding into the bandages wrapped across my torso.

  “Thanks,” I groaned. “I think.”

  The woman smiled, and somehow the room went brighter. “When you’re ready, I’ll call in a cleric to deal with your injury.”

  What was this, a role-playing game? Clerics? “Don’t you mean a doctor? Or a nurse. A medic? And you can call me Dust.”

  “No,” she said, half-chuckling. “I meant a cleric. I know you’ve seen a lot of strangeness already, Dustin, but you may as well be prepared for things to get stranger still. There is much you don’t know about the world.” She paused, then gestured to me, then to herself. “Our world, now.”

  “I don’t understand. Uh – ”

  “Thea,” she said. “You can call me Thea. And of course, yes. It’ll take some time for you to understand yet, which is why we need to ease you into things.” She folded her hands and laughed, an easy, melodic sound, the kind of laugh someone might use to break the bad news to a patient. “We can’t just take you from zero to twenty, as they say.” Somehow the words hit me with all the gravity of a doctor announcing that they’d found that my body was half tumor, and I had minutes to live.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  The smile vanished from Thea’s lips as quickly as it had come. “There’s no easy way to say this. For all intents and purposes, Dustin, tonight, you died.”

  Cold dread washed across my body, the hairs on my forearms standing on end. Is – is that really what happened? Thea was all in white, as was the room, and there was the halo of her hair. Was I –

  “Am I in heaven?”

  Thea’s eyes went wide, and she laughed again. “No, not at all.” Her mouth quirked, and she chuckled. “Heavens, no, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

  “Look,” I said, exasperation starting to work its way through my blood. “You’re speaking in riddles and I can barely understand what’s going on, or what’s even happened. Just tell me what the situation is, please.” And the sooner I find out, I thought, the sooner I can get out of here.

  Thea seemed to detect that exact train of thought, and she shook her head, the smallest, subtlest of gestures. “That won’t do, Dustin. Legally speaking, you are dead. The authorities raided that gang of thugs who picked you up and – ”

  “Slow down. Thugs? Didn’t seem like thugs to me. That wasn’t a mugging.”

  She nodded. “And you’d be right for thinking so. It was a cult. Crazed men and women who thought that their actions would help them somehow, that spilling an innocent’s blood would change the world.”

  I looked down at my chest. “Change the world how?”

  She shook her head. “That, I do not know, only that they felt it necessary. After the raid I can only assume that the authorities found your body and extracted you from the scene of the crime. You were in a morgue when my people found you.”

  “Wait,” I said, my throat suddenly feeling like it was closing up. “Wait. You’re telling me there was a mistake, that people – like, actual professionals – thought I was dead and locked me in a freezer? And what do you mean ‘your people?’ I don’t. I’m confused.”

  Thea took a deep breath, like this was the sort of thing that took the most explaining, that this was the part of the sales pitch where most people got up and walked away. “The knife – the dagger that they used on you was some sort of enchanted artifact. It didn’t kill you. It injured you grievously enough, to be sure, but it was used specifically to bewitch your body, to make the casual observer – even one who is medically trained – believe that you were dead.”

  I shook my head, almost forgetting about the pain tugging at my chest. “How is that even possible?”

  Thea looked around the room, then down at her thumbs. With a sigh and a slow blink, she turned her eyes on me and said the single word that was to change my life forever.

  “Magic.”

  Chapter 4

  I blinked at Thea, unsure of whether to shout her down or laugh, of how to react to the wet sincerity in her eyes, the earnestness of her response. She wasn’t joking. Magic. Then the man who bound me with the leather straps with a word, and the way the fires from every candle leapt as they chanted, the dagger itself. Magic? Really?

  No. No. None of it made sense. My mind whirled with the possibilities, weighed down with the gravity of more impossibilities, and I responded the only way I knew how.

  “Bullshit.”

  Thea didn’t flinch at the word, wearing the face of a professional who seemed to have gone through this same script countless times. “It is what it is, Mr. Graves.” I didn’t miss the sudden reversion to formality. “Our people – the Lorica, that is – are devoted to helping people like you. Victims of magic-related crime.”

  “The Lorica.”

  “Yes. It means armor, and it describes what we do: protect both the normal world and the arcane underground. The Lorica is the body, and we are its limbs and its organs, the component parts, each specializing in a different field of magic. And it was our specialists who found you.”

  “Specialists.”

  She nodded. “Our Eyes.” I noticed the way she emphasized the word, noted the capitals. “Surveillance. They picked out the traces of magical energy from the botched attempt to, ah, sacrifice you, and found your body stored at the Valero morgue.”

  “Okay. Sure. Then I suppose your people waved their wands when they found me, and they magicked my corpse all the way here, where you brought me back to life.”

  She flinched that time. “Not as such. Once we confirmed your location, we sent in Hands to retrieve you. Assisted by Wings, of course, to help extract you safely, and to ensure the Hands themselves had a smooth excursion.”

  Eyes. Hands. Wings. And the body, the Lorica. What the hell was she even talking about? I threw the covers off my body, gritting my teeth at the blasting pain of merely moving my arm, but resisting because that was all part of the flourish, of demonstrating that I was done with this shit.

  “So,” I said. “Thank you for your help. I appreciate all the magicking you did to get me out of there, and” – I gestured at my chest – “whatever it is you did to hold my insides together.”

  She scratched the side of her nose. “We don’t do quite as well with mundane medical work, you see.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But thanks all the same. I’ll just be seeing my way out of here if you don’t mind.”

  Thea stood bolt upright and positioned herself by my bed, placing her body squarely in my path. “Please. Mr. Graves. Hear me out. Hear the Lorica out. I know it’s a lot to take in.”

  I crooked an eyebrow and cringed through the pain as I forced myself into a seated position. God, even my ass hurt. “You’ll pardon me for being skeptical, Thea, but this is all just – ”

  “Our healers have been working round the clock to keep you stable, but their work isn’t done. Let me assure you, Mr. Graves. If you leave the premises in your current condition, you will die.”

  That took the steam out of me. I sat stock-still, but defiant, measuring my next move. “Then what you’re saying is that I actually am alive.”

  “Yes. Through whatever so
rcery that dagger was corrupted with, you only appeared to be dead.”

  “So I’m free to leave once you patch me up. I can go back to my old life.” Could I? She mentioned the morgue, the authorities. And then there was my father. Could I tell them all that it was just a mistake?

  But the door creaked open. Rather, a door, since I hadn’t noticed it before, so seamlessly white that even its knob was nearly invisible against the immaculate uniform ivory of the entire room. Another woman stepped through, this one younger, smaller, and certainly meeker than Thea. She had on the kind of glasses worn by the kind of girl who thought she wasn’t pretty enough for contacts.

  “Thea,” she said, her voice barely a squeak. “I’m here.”

  Thea’s mouth quirked into half a smile, and she cocked her head in the girl’s direction, favoring me with a conspiratorial grin. “Yes, Berta. I can tell.” Then she turned her body fully on me again. “Mr. Graves, this is Berta. She’s the cleric I mentioned, a Hand who specializes in healing. Will you at least let her look at your wound before you go?”

  I looked at Berta, then at Thea, then down at the mess of blood and bandages on my chest. Everything was painful, and my head was such a tangled mass of questions and all the wrong answers – magic and Hands and Loricas – that I just gave in.

  “Fine,” I said, maybe a little too firmly because Berta jerked at the sound of my voice. “Fine,” I repeated, giving her the tiniest smile.

  I sat up gingerly as she began the unenvious task of unwrapping my bandages. Even with her hair in her face I could tell that her cheeks were reddening. I noticed that Thea was staring at my chest, too, and only then realized how naked I was. I cleared my throat and looked to the far end of the room, which was as white as everything else in it, like gazing into an alabaster void. I hoped my ears weren’t turning red.

  “There’s more you should know,” Thea said, breaking the silence.

  “There couldn’t possibly be.”

  Thea folded her hands together, like she was preparing to announce something of gravity. Whatever it was, I knew I wasn’t prepared for it myself. Looking back, I truly wasn’t.

  “Imagine, if you will, that everything I’ve told you so far about magic is true.”

  “I’ll try,” I droned.

  “Now imagine that there are different ways for magical ability to manifest in the human body. For some of us it involves grueling study. Some others, like Berta here, are naturally talented.”

  I didn’t think it was possible for Berta to blush any redder, but she proved me wrong.

  “And sometimes,” Thea continued, “sometimes, latent arcane ability is awakened in times of great pain, of great distress.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re not serious, are you?”

  Thea pressed her lips into a tight line. “Everything I’ve told you has been deathly serious, Dustin Graves.”

  That was it. I was done.

  “I don’t possibly see how you people think you can get away with trying to convince me that there’s something secret I’ve never known about this world, that you’ve been magicking behind the scenes. So those people who tried to kill me weren’t just mentally ill, they were cultists who wanted me dead for some unknowable reason?” I threw my hands out. “And you, you’re some kind of white wizard, like Gandalf in a pantsuit? And this place is some kind of wizard dungeon for magical people to gather and work in some kind of magic hocus-pocus corporation?”

  “Realistically speaking, there could be more of those cultists out there.” Thea sighed. “And it’s not about wands or beards or robes, Mr. Graves. It could be if you want, of course. Magic is what you make of it. We’re just here to make sure it’s all aboveboard.”

  “Excuse me,” Berta said meekly, pulling away the last of my bandages.

  “Sorry,” I said, maybe secretly appreciative of the little disruption in my tirade, because frankly I’d run out of things to say. I lifted my finger, my mouth hung open and prepared to spit out more accusations as they came to me, when Thea interrupted.

  “You might want to look at your wound there, Dustin.”

  That stopped me in my tracks. It was ugly, the hole in my chest loosely sutured and still weeping blood, and only just barely patched with gauze. Didn’t these people know anything? What had I gotten myself into? Sure, I was grateful that they’d somehow rescued me from those cultists – all that other stuff about the morgue was clearly just Thea’s nonsense – but I was going to have to go to a hospital as soon as possible, get everything looked at. Though I didn’t miss what Thea said. What if there really were more of those cultists out there?

  I kept my face level as Berta raised a hand, palm flat, fingers outstretched, just inches from my wound. The breath caught in my throat as the last of the blood oozed out of the wound, as the edges of my skin began to stitch back together over the break in my body. I stared in horror, in awe, my gaze flitting from Berta, to Thea, and back. This miracle, of my skin healing itself completely in front of their eyes, it was nothing to them. Just another day at the office. Just another patient.

  Berta wiped a fresh piece of gauze against my chest, sopping up traces of blood. I winced in preparation for the pain, but there wasn’t any, only unbroken skin, and the shiny, ragged tissue of a telltale scar. The breath finally returned to me, and wide-eyed, I looked between them, and said all that I could say.

  “How?”

  Thea folded her arms and shrugged one delicate shoulder.

  “Magic.”

  Chapter 5

  The rest of the day was a blur. Berta slipped off after performing what, to my eyes, was a miracle. It took a little effort on Thea’s part, but she was able to convince me not to go running shirtless and slightly bloodied into the streets. Not that I even knew where we were.

  “I promise you, you weren’t drugged,” she said. “At least not above what was necessary to help relieve the pain.”

  “This is a prank. Right? It’s got to be. Who are you people even? Where am I?”

  “One thing at a time, Dustin.” She gestured to the door. “Will you walk with me?” She nodded at a chair at the end of my bed, where something white was thrown over the back of the seat. It was hard to make out at first, considering the stark whiteness of the entire room to begin with. “If you’d care to make yourself decent.”

  I went red at the ears, sure that I didn’t even have any reason to do so, but I dutifully shrugged on the slip of cloth. It was a loose kind of shirt, as it turned out, made from a fairly comfortable type of linen. It suited everything that was presently happening, the weird, zen-like atmosphere of the room, Thea’s otherworldly presence and sense of serenity. I smoothed down the hems of my shirt, then looked up at Thea for approval, unsure if I should voice the question at the back of my throat.

  She smiled. “No, we aren’t a cult, Dustin, as much as you’d like to think that. The Lorica is an organization of men and women who oversee the workings of the arcane underground, the magic that goes on behind the scenes of everyday American life.”

  I cocked my head. “So, on a national scale?”

  “Yes. There are other authorities in other territories, but we mainly concern ourselves with the operation and regulation of magic in North America.”

  “So like a government?”

  “More of a corporation, I would say. Although we are affiliated with the American government, if that’s what you mean.”

  “So they know about you?”

  “To a certain extent. Only what we want them to know. We underplay our abilities, to be sure, because you know the lengths humanity will go to acquire more strength. In time you’ll see that people like us can wield power enough to rival the most terrifying weapons man has ever created.” She grimaced. “I can’t imagine the things the military would do with one of our own.”

  “And that’s why you keep things secret.”

  “Correct. From the government, and from the world at large. It makes things – less complex.”

/>   A whole tribe of people hiding in plain sight, living in a separate layer unseen by society, unseen by anyone in the city of Valero, or California, or the world. And magic? Real, actual magic? My gaze kept flitting, like my mind was trying to settle on which of a million different questions I should ask first. When I spoke, I realized that I hadn’t even decided.

  “This is a lot to take in, Thea.”

  “That’s understandable. If you want to get mystical about it, we’ve got fancy terms to throw at you as well.” She chuckled. “We hide from normal humans from behind the Veil. That’s what it’s called, this covenant we all maintain to keep our powers unseen and unknown.”

  I clutched my stomach, dizzy, but also queasy, like my body itself was having a tough time processing all this. “Yeah, that doesn’t really help.”

  “And you, you’ve awakened,” she said. “Talents that once lay dormant within you are stirring, roused by the call of responsibility, or in your case, pain. But maybe I’m just confusing you. Maybe it’s best if I just show you.”

  She gestured to the doorway again, her posture rigid, but graceful, like she had done this many times in the past. Ah, what could it hurt. I followed her lead and stepped out of the ivory room, expecting, I suppose, an even greater expanse of white.

  “Welcome to the Lorica,” Thea said.

  I was not prepared.

  What I walked out on was a massive tableau, like standing on the mezzanine of the greatest library I had ever seen. The place was at least the size of a football field. The walls, the furniture, the banisters of the great staircase that led to the lower level, everything was finished in a rich, lacquered brown, the very wood itself pulsing with regal warmth.

  Said warmth also radiated from fires that hovered in midair, burning freely and suspended from nothing. They provided the light for the interiors too, some placed strategically among chandeliers or lamps to project their illumination, but many floating freely like fireflies, or will o’the wisps. None of them smoked. I looked around, wondering how anyone could think open fires could be anything approaching a good idea considering all the paper.