Death’s Door

Nobody Dies Today

Secrets and force are the power that Oliver Greer’s magic holds. He and his family can reveal the truth behind every shadow, or fling blazing light against the enemies that have come for them. But their newest discovery might turn their unlikely allies and the whole world against them: the power to heal.

Coming soon on Amazon and Apple, Nook, Kobo, and many more

Sample

My father chanted the words differently, as though he’d never worked a talisman before.

“Zathqua zath zath kva…”

The sound was a faint brushing in the air, nothing that could push out against the many far-scattered voices and footsteps and vehicles we could hear from the back end of Saint Luke’s Hospital this morning. But I heard more in Elliot Greer’s voice than just the whisper that kept the magic to ourselves.

He said the words tentatively, as if every new syllable might damage their work, or crack the ring that was covered tight within his fist. Hesitation peeked out along his face.

My own breath caught, and my guarded glances around the roads and corners eased. Worrying about bypassers could wait, and so could the work and the choices we’d have to make once we entered the building… relief eased through me for that much. And this delay would actually be worth it, if the idea worked.

My pulse tightened in the moment.

Dad’s other hand was clamped around two more familiar shapes. Several inches of iron rod stretched from one side of his grip, reaching toward the hand that held the ring. From his fist’s other side, a short length of animal horn spiraled gently out, the other of our own talisman types. The two worked best by channeling power into one from the other.

We’d never had a third kind to chain them through before.

My hand tightened around my own horn. Their magic resonated in my mind… I felt the energy drawn, drawn from the layers of the ether lying over the material world and pulled into Dad’s horn talisman and on through the iron. It vibrated—with enough focused power it could blast through a wall, while my father fought to ease it gently on into the ring, to tamp down the dim green light flickering along them. His face shook too, still too worn and vulnerable after all he’d endured.

No, not just him.

Pain twinged at the back of my skull, like the start of a headache and then holding, gripping tighter.

Far around us, the varied rhythms of footsteps and voices around the hospital complex missed a beat, the same beat… that first slowing as people felt that ache and then began to notice the same on the faces around them… again. We should never have tested it here, just one wall away from doctors who might be fighting to save lives—

Dad let the magic go still, and the pain snuffed away. The world smoothed out again.

His shoulders sagged. His face looked wrung out with regret as well as squeezed with fresh guilt.

He held up the ring’s hand, and we stared at the last lingering cracks in his skin. If our ether energy had succeeded in powering the ring, he’d be using its healing magic to smooth those marks away.

“It’s no good, Oliver.”

His voice was casual—as if I couldn’t hear the disappointment in it anyway.

He went on “The horn draws energy from the ether and channels it to the iron. And this ring does seem to draw on some of a user’s vitality, similar to what the iron does alone. But I can’t pass the horn’s power on to charge the ring instead. And, trying it pulls the ether’s world too close for comfort.”

I nodded, all I needed to admit that I’d shared in the headache myself. I could only guess how much even that flash of broadcast pain horrified him, after all the “waves” of it we’d already been responsible for.

I glanced around the building’s side, along the sidewalks and streets and the sense of their people trying to settle into normal rhythms again. Had any of them noticed the wisps of light from our talismans, blocked by our bodies? Could Miriam be circling somewhere on those streets?

The test had failed, and we were losing time. We didn’t know Miriam wasn’t closing in on the unconscious Seth’s bedside right now… and there were the deeper risks we were putting off too.

Dad sighed. “Well, we got the ring working before—”

“Who had it working before?” I held my hand out for it, smiling like this was simple competitiveness and not concern about his still-recovering strength.

The healing ring was a plain, heavy band of some odd iridescent metal of grayish-blue, that was somehow a talisman for a whole separate magic from the ether energies we lived with. My fingers wrapped it close, giving it the moment sheltered from light that it would need.

Unless our test had disrupted its power all over again. Unless we broke it, when we still haven’t identified what metal it is and how to make others. Right when Seth needed more healing, and we had this chance to do so much more… if we hadn’t ruined it all looking for a shortcut…

“Zathqua zath zath kva.”

Power tingled out through me. Throbbing living energy, streaming from me into the metal, leaving touches of tired coldness behind in my flesh. This was the cost we’d tried to bypass with the ether, but it was nothing like the fierce cold the ring might leave if its magic got snarled up. It felt right again.

I smiled my relief, and looked around us again.

A car hummed past us on the pavement. People moved and milled on patches of sidewalk, what few were in view of us back here. Moving on from the brief spattering wave of pain.

And the paths here told us nothing about whether Miriam was searching for a route to slip inside the building. I brushed a thought along where the misty ether lay unseen over the material world, and flicked just the briefest after-image of some of the impressions on it into visible sight, glimpses of who had passed here in the last hours—

But of course this was my grandmother we were watching for, the woman who’d taught my mother about the ether from the beginning. How many ways would Miriam know to hide her footprints, her presence?

The impressions on the ether here felt so natural, undisturbed. Besides Dad’s experiment, the sharpest presence had been left from a child-sized shape in a baseball cap dashing by.

I motioned to the pale-painted back wall of the hospital. “If Miriam’s looking to reach Seth unnoticed, she could start by stepping through the ether from here, just a few feet to reappear in the back corridors.” Or, we could. And anyone who did that would spill even more pain around the people here.

“If, yes.”

Then Dad was bringing up his phone.

“Didn’t work, Theo,” he reported. “We’ll have to try waking Seth up with the same healing again. It still comes down to getting in to see him, quietly.”

He listened, for whatever my uncle was replying.

“I know,” he added. “But we owe him.”

Something else made Dad’s eyebrows twitch, and then he hung up.

And he chuckled to me, “Yes, Theo had something to say about keeping watch with Ramona beside him.”

“Just ‘say’?”

My uncle had insisted on keeping with our “new” ally, and I could picture him staying on guard more against her than Miriam. But then, Ramona had first discovered us by posing as a novice to magic for Theo to teach, so to him, her help now was only her pulling the same trick in plain sight.

The hospital wall loomed up beside us, all white paint and blocks of glass. For the plans we had… Miriam considered any new combination of magic unsafe, unstable. What would she do while we risked this whole institution discovering it existed?

“Dad?” My voice came out small.

“We have to try, Oliver,” he said. “To heal Seth, to heal ev—”

He stopped short of the word everyone.

I nodded.

We turned together, and stepped away from the tree back onto the sidewalk. Leaving that hint of shelter left our look of secrecy behind us too, and we could be just two men walking along beside the pale hospital wall.

A car hummed by us in the street, one more component of all the people each going their own way. I looked ahead at the corners and the side streets that wended their way between the hospital’s buildings, all places that Miriam might be watching from…

Or she might not. Something had to have changed between us, since the moments she’d been willing to throw fire at us. I had to hope so.

Even without the weapon of her fire magic, she could read the ether better than any of us, or twist it against our senses, and now she could vanish through it too.

And all I saw was the rear side of the Saint Luke’s hospital complex, and the few people walking and driving along back here. Nothing yet like the full crowd that would be around the building’s front—that thought pushed at my steps, made me want to shove ahead faster, but that would leave us off guard.

My father’s pace beside me was steady enough, no trace of strain now after all we’d been through to get him back. But here he was, and Theo was safe inside the building too, and we could try to leave the waves we’d inflicted on this city in the past. Now we had a chance to finish healing Seth, and more.

My fingers clenched around the ring, around its magic. If I had to fill it with power and some of my own strength again and again and again, that was a small price to pay. If.

Up ahead, a young man in a T-shirt ambled along the sidewalk, looking around like he was lost. At his pace he was too far to overhear us… but…

I slowed my steps. “Do you think we can wake Seth up this time?” The whisper sounded hollow now that it had slipped from my mouth.

My father’s eyes still narrowed. “We don’t have enough information to guess there. The first thing is, it sounds like we’ll be able to get in—”

He paused there, as the man ahead drew closer. That pace led past us and slowly on, slowly. Even then, Dad let the hush stretch out unsettlingly long after the footsteps had begun fading behind us.

Then he said “You mostly healed Seth’s burns last night, before the doctors even saw him. With luck, we’ll bring him back—it’s just him regaining consciousness now.”

And the doctors would see that too, that much and no more. “Then we search around. It’s triage, right? Sizing people up as the three types that matter: the lives we can’t save… except, we don’t know if there are any this magic can’t.” My too-quick response faltered as the idea rattled through me. I added “And the lives that need saving, and the ones that don’t. Or we could be healing those too.”

Across the street, a man moved along the sidewalk with a tired step. His face looked thin, even at this distance. He didn’t turn, but were his eyes still glancing back as I watched?

I asked “How many do you think we’ll try to heal?”

Dad said “I… can’t answer that yet.” He looked at me, and his face softened. “The ideas keep going through my head, about how to get us close enough to touch those patients. How to explain visitors making rounds like that, or explain…”

He let the rest fade away unsaid: every faster recovery with us nearby would be harder to ignore than the last. And yet, the thought that now we could help them made the distance around the building feel like they’d all be just heartbeats away.

And once we start chasing down those heartbeats, how do we stop before everyone knows?

A group of three stood ahead of us now. An old man walked on a cane with a younger man close beside him. The woman with them hung back, more distant than her likely husband or brother.

“He’s the one that resents bringing him, not her,” Dad mused.

“You think so?”

I looked at the trio again. Days ago we would have considered speaking to them as they passed by, just a few words to sound out how troubled they were, and if they needed a shoulder to lean on or more. Not a use for our ether magic, most likely, but the Greer awareness of people didn’t end with magic.

But how could I face them now?

My eyes twisted from being drawn toward their gaze. Now, instead of holding out support or sniffing out answers for their needs, I had in my hand the magic that just might wipe away whatever tied that man to his cane… and I was thinking of walking on by just to keep it secret…

Keep the secret or lose control of our whole lives.

Step by step, we walked past them. I looked around us again.

Something moved—my head twisted up, my hand shot up—

Birds. A flock of shapes broke away from the top of the hospital and swept off in a cloud. I could almost hear the beat of crow wings, but my blood was still racing, ready for something.

Miriam wouldn’t be up there anyway. Flying was our move, and Ramona’s, while Miriam didn’t understand the iron talismans that called streams of ether into solid force. And even Ramona wouldn’t be flying in broad daylight, not now. I was the one being jumpy.

I gritted my teeth, walked faster. Thinking of Miriam… I gave my hand a small flick in the air, and reached my will out through the onyx Ramona had given me—the fourth talisman I was carrying now. The stone’s power felt slippery as ever, and all that my fingers raised were tiny shadings of black, nothing like coalescing into a barrier ward. I was a long way from defending myself from Miriam again.

If we met her again. If there was anything standing between us and the hard choices ahead. I glared around the street.

My father said “We’ll get our chance to make things right with Seth. And then we can—”

His words tried to gather speed, but then they choked off.

“Dad… what are you thinking now?” Openly asking that wasn’t the usual Greer way, but sometimes it was the only one.

His eyes closed, closed a stillness over his face, the way it could when he was contemplating something I couldn’t guess at.

Then he said “All our lives, back to your grandmother—Freida Greer, that is—”

A twitch passed over his face, of course it did, to have Miriam intrude on that memory now—

“Always we’ve told ourselves,” he said, “that we have the secrets of the ether so we can find small answers and lighten people’s lives. Or, not always small answers, yes. And now we have the power to cure broken lives, just after my waves mean I owe this city more than ever… but you’re asking what’s really on my mind?”

I waited. Let him come to his answer.

“Our next road trip,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking how I would have had us drive up, maybe all the way from Alford to New York if it worked out that way. And, this time I thought ‘we’ should mean you holding things down here while I got some time alone with my brother.”

An embarrassed grin nudged onto his face.

“That’s all I was thinking back then. How Theo and I needed some time to reconnect. He felt like he was keeping secrets from us.”

The grin tilted into a grimace. Because that was when Theo had been working with Ramona, until…

I said “It would have been fun for you two. Unless it wasn’t.”

“Exactly.”

I glanced around, down the cross-street ahead. Down that way stood the space for managing some of their ambulances—where chasing Seth had led me last night, with Miriam right behind us. A handful of people around that pavement, and as I stared, one head and then a second looked around at me.

Then my father spoke again.

“Oliver… all it would take is two minutes being seen with someone who’s healing too fast, and then those doctors would never let us out of the building, ever.” He sighed. “Or we’d end up jumping away through the ether, and the wave of pain we’d set off would show every one of them why we don’t deserve to escape—”

A strange sound filled his voice and cut him off, caught, but then he cleared his throat and turned to look at me.

“But still, we’re talking about our lives too, Oliver. This is everything we’ve built—and the world takes all that away if they see someone with actual magic.”

I nodded. My own voice wasn’t working, didn’t want to work.

“We all know it. Word of that getting out would change everything, every part of the world, and for any other spellkeepers hiding out there like Ramona or Seth were. That’s not an option… but we know that our tricks and cover stories can only cover up so much healing. What happens when we have to choose between someone in need and keeping our own lives?”

For a moment, cars and voices and all the other layers of sound around us seemed to pull back, to pause for breath.

“I…”

My voice faded away. I had no answer, and I hated that it was still a question. We always said we owed the world, but the choices looked different now that we had this much to give.

I looked back at him, and tried to weigh how I felt.

My mother’s face floated in my memory, the long-ago image that was all I had left of her. And now the fear of losing Dad was still scraped raw in me.

“How am I supposed to answer something like that?”

“Exactly,” he groaned. “And there’s so much we’ve lost and so much we have to lose, but—what?”

His head snapped around to stare ahead, at the corner of the building where a whirl of black spun away and back out of sight. A glimpse of a woman.

Miriam? I charged forward over the sidewalk, Dad racing beside me. I dodged around two pedestrians, closed on the corner gasping for breath and knowing it was the wrong move.

My shoes scrabbled on the concrete. I twisted around the corner.

A woman in black looked around at me—a dark business suit, but still almost young, and her eyes stared in wide confusion as we strangers ran up at her.

“Sorry, our mistake,” and I managed to meet her gaze like it was nothing. All this had us too jumpy—I’d made the same mistake searching for Ramona once.

“Were you looking for… did my son come this way?” Her features slipped from the calm façade they’d tried to pull into. “I was sure he wouldn’t, but…”

Dad said “He’s gotten lost?” Sympathy warmed in his voice.

“You’ve seen him? Blue cap, zigzags on his shirt?”

“I’m afraid we haven’t.”

Not physically, he meant. But back around the corner, there had been that ether-echo of a boy running by. Dad had seen it too.

He added “You thought he came this way?”

“I knew I was wrong. I’ll try back here again, but thank you—”

“You go with her,” Dad told me. “I’ll take this side.” And he was whirling away and off, leaving her staring after him.

I kept my gaze on her, keeping the same steady smile, not looking back after him. Miriam could be watching for us—but we don’t know that, and he’s safe out in public. Dad was heading back up the boy’s trail, and he needed me here so we weren’t both conspicuously ignoring the mother’s best guess.

“I shouldn’t be this grateful.” Her voice went stiffer now, and her shoulders moved, settling the suit coat that she might have been called out of a board meeting in.

“It’ll be alright.” I smiled and started forward, on around the building with her. “But… well, how often do we get a chance to lend a hand for someone like this?”

Every day, was how often, until we started dodging ether waves and hostile spellkeepers.

I set a brisk pace up the sidewalk, and she fell into it at once, with just her clumsy-clicking shoes holding her back behind me. We moved past a man, a pair of women, traffic trickling along the path. Her glances searched the ways ahead with nervous motions. I knew her type, busy and self-controlled and now fighting to cope with a problem she never saw coming.

A car rolled past us, glass flashing in the sun.

“I’m sure he’s fine.” She almost hid the crack in her voice.

“I expect you’re right.” Since I couldn’t say my father was already homing in on the child’s tracks in the ether.

Still, how fast could he catch up and get back to us, when none of us knew where Miriam had gone? But splitting up had been Dad’s own idea, and he was the one who spent most of yesterday watching her, weighing her threat. He even broke me free of her senses-shaking grip somehow, when she wouldn’t even let him keep his talismans. And I never did ask him how.

The mother’s voice murmured “I never should have… if I’m wrong…” This time fear creeped into her tone.

“He’ll be fine.” My smile drew out a small grin from her.

I looked around the street, the paths around the hospital complex, the increasing number of people on the sidewalk. My feet moved faster, sweeping us around a couple arguing. A cluster of bushes stood across the street, and I slid a tendril of my will down through the last few hours of the ether around them. Nothing had disturbed them, no touch of anyone hiding there.

The crowd grew thicker. We pushed on faster.

The main Saint Luke’s entrance drew closer. More and more people streamed onto the sidewalk, in and out of the bright doorway, along the crosswalk that fed into it. The gleaming sign hung above it, cold promises.

We closed in, peering between the shifting currents of people for what might be hidden among them. The mother zigzagged as she walked, to stare down one angle through them, then another.

“We’ll find him, we’ll find him,” I said. “I think if your son went in the building someone would already spot him, so we should stay out…”

I swung around through the thinnest part of the crowd, with her behind me. A few long steps and hard searching stares brought us past the entrance to continue along the building’s other side. Foot traffic here stayed thicker, but we had to be more than halfway around the building from where we’d seen the boy before. Dad could be coming back into view any time.

Or Miriam could. Or she was off targeting Dad, or inside going after Seth, right where my uncle was too.

“Please…”

The woman’s voice made me slow.

“Please, let me thank you for your help. I should never have taken my eyes off him. But he won’t have run far, right?” The worry still tightened her voice, but her face looked more confident now.

“Right. And maybe—”

Ether crashed into my mind.

It came pouring, flooding in past all my will and vibrating through my skull, wrong—I staggered, looked around—Miriam had to be nearby.

The woman’s face looked at me, surprised, untouched by the flood… right, this is no “wave” of breaking through the ether, it crashes only through us and our talismans because Miriam holds it onto just this level. She made it as a weapon against us. I clung to that truth, with my head buzzing like a skull full of flies.

My eyes didn’t want to focus. I looked around, saw shape after shape of people walking along blind to the storm, or starting to glance at me. I staggered forward, stared harder. I couldn’t see Miriam, could barely see through the haze, but I couldn’t just drop my talisman this time…

Far off, a voice broke through the crowd for a moment: “someone, help—”

A high, helpless tone. Confused. A child.

The mother’s head snapped up toward it.

A young voice… raised up just now, like he was with someone the magic had been called up to strike…

I heaved myself forward into a clumsy run, swaying around blurry shapes that had to be people, leaning outward like I could shove through the chaos clogging my head. Dad was up there somewhere, and Miriam.

Feet stumbled. I fought to see past those so-untouched figures and pick out anything that might be more important. The mother half-glanced back at me, then she raced on ahead after that shout. My balance slipped again and I could only try to ride it out, faster, faster.

The boy’s mother pulled farther ahead. My talisman’s power writhed in my pocket—and yet I was still hanging onto it.

Had I ever thought this crowd was thinning? It looked like it streamed on forever. Sounds murmured and twisted in their own mad currents. But I had heard the boy through them once…

There.

One shape in black and gray stood stark in front of the white wall. She looked so still in the distance, but so menacingly close to where my father sagged back against the wall, and there would be pain on his face—

A smaller shape stood beside Dad, with a flash of blue on his head that must make him the missing boy.

I charged forward, grazed off a passer-by and spun on, too slow.

Miriam had Dad trapped, and I couldn’t reach them. Not even like the time Theo had thrown a blast of ether all the way down a hall at Ramona—even if I could, that would have us back to trying to kill each other.

The boy’s mother pushed farther into the crowd. What was wrong with the others, the kid had yelled for help once and everyone ignored it? One couple strolled right past them, heads leaning together and never glancing over.

Miriam lifted her hand. The same motion as the grasp she’d burned Dad with once.

I could try to shoot her—I refuse—

I shoved my will out, flailing to reach through the buzzing, choking energy in my head, whatever it took. Instead of a blast, I clawed at the ether around me, straining to tug it inside out for a doorway.

My ether-clogged senses fought, failed, left me stranded in the solid world—I crashed down, hands and a knee splayed over hard concrete. Pain flared and joined with the whirl in my head, all out of control.

The woman was pulling away, closer to breaking in on Miriam…

Something brushed at my senses. A lighter touch, not like the ether crashing through me, through all of me—all except the other level that this found to reach me.

So with one part of my head clear again, I grabbed my will toward that, around the flood, and I stomped my feet down wide and forced myself upright.

The street was in focus now. Far up ahead, Miriam leaned in close to Dad, close enough to be cursing at him instead of burning him. The boy in the blue cap stared up at them in what must be confusion.

His mother was closing in.

No, you can’t! But the ether was still blocked to me—I slapped a hand down over another pocket, over the onyx.

One sweep of my will swung out, scooping at that talisman’s slippery power and demanding it move, fly out and settle into one small hard form… and it moved and gathered just around the woman’s foot… for one long instant before the ward broke apart, as it tripped her and spilled her and her unsteady shoes down on the sidewalk. It worked!

That bought her a moment of safety. If I could get to them first.

 

Coming soon on Amazon and Apple, Nook, Kobo, and many more