Zayvion, however, seemed to know exactly where he was going.

He parked. “The cistern is up that path. We’ll need to hike.”

We got out of the car and I was glad I was wearing my coat. There was more shade here, the old fir and pine soaking up the day’s sunlight and warmth and leaving nothing but cool breeze and shadows beneath them.

I heard a car approaching. Bea drove up, parked, and got out. “Hey, you two.”

So much for us not seeing her until this was done.

“You’re not following us up there,” I said.

“Why not?”

Huh. Why not indeed? If all we were doing was looking to see if a concentrated storage point of magic was tainted or being messed with by the Veiled, there was no reason she couldn’t come along.

How many people are guarding this cistern? I asked Dad.

None, last I knew, Dad said. It’s a very minor storage. If it fails there are other stronger cisterns that will automatically take on the load.

If it’s so unimportant, why was it built? I asked.

There was a time when I was going to run the network of magic lines through St Johns. He paused and I could tell he was sorting through how much of that he wanted to talk about. Finally, This was support for that.

He had plans to run magic through St. Johns? This was the first I’d heard of it.

Why didn’t you? I pressed. He didn’t answer.

Why didn’t you run magic through St. Johns, Dad? I asked with a little more force.

There was something melancholy in his thoughts. I wondered what he regretted about that decision.

“Um, Allie? Hello?” Bea said.

Right, just because I was having a conversation with a dead guy didn’t mean everyone was in on it. What had we been talking about? If Bea could follow us?

“Sorry,” I said. “Yes, fine. Follow us. All the standard rules apply.”

She pulled out her cell phone. “I’ll dial 911 if we run into any trouble.”

“Not with the cell reception up here,” Zayvion said.

Bea glanced at her phone. “Right. Forgot about that. If we run into any trouble, I’ll drive into cell range and call 911 from there.”

We headed off up the hill. Zayvion took the lead since he knew where the cistern was located. I walked right behind him and Bea stayed a respectable distance behind us. I’d expected her to chatter all the way there, but she was silent, observant and damned near invisible when I glanced back to see if she was following us.

The trail led up a ridge with sword ferns and moss-covered rocks scattered between the tall brush and taller trees. Forest Park was one of the largest urban forest reserves, about five thousand acres or so, with seventy miles of trails, just west of Portland. I was glad Zayvion knew where we were going. Easy to get lost out here.

Birdsong filled the air and little things skittered in and out of the trees and layer of leaves and needles on the ground. I took a nice deep breath and realized I didn’t smell the stink of magic at all.

Finally Zay stopped. “That’s it.”

I looked at the more level area we had arrived at, then at the trees, scrub brush, and the path that ambled off into the distance.

“What’s it?”

“The cistern.” He pointed.

“It’s a tree?”

“It looks like a tree.”

It really did. The level area was still covered in grass, some wild roses, and a few daisies and ferns. In this area were also trees, just like all around us were trees. And the one Zayvion pointed at looked like an old cedar.

“I thought they buried all the cisterns,” I said, walking over to it.

“In the city, yes. Better way to keep vandals from tapping into them. But this was one of the early models. There was an idea, when your dad first came up with this stuff, that the cisterns could also be a sort of public art.”

“An artist made this? Was it Cody?”

“This was made almost thirty years ago,” Zay said.

Cody wasn’t even born then.

I sniffed, trying to catch a whiff of the rotten smell. Nothing.

“It doesn’t look magical. At all.”

“It’s not magical. It just contains magic. And it doesn’t let magic leak.” He strode right up to it and walked around the base, running his hand over the rough bark.

I followed him, noting that the grass hadn’t been worn down. “Does anyone know this is here?”

“It’s not a secret, but I don’t think very many people come up this way. Even if they did, they might look right past it.”

True. It was realistic. Moss was even growing on it and the branches above looked alive. “So how do we tap into it and see if the magic is okay?”

“There should be a manual trip. Hold on.” He circled the tree again, this time more slowly, his hands running up and down the bark, his fingers following cracks and ridges like he was reading braille.

He stopped on the other side of the tree from me, completely hidden. “This is it. You might want to take a couple steps back, Allie.”

I did so.

Lines of magic shot up through the bark of the tree, looking like water flowing upward. For a second, it was just a white-gold light, and then the light darkened, a push of gray, green, and finally black, spreading up the tree like a bruise.

I put my hand over my nose. It stank like rotten flesh.

“Can you see that?” I asked Zay.

“Yes,” Zay said. “You?”

The black flow of magic pulsed, and a Veiled stepped out of the cistern, pulling itself up out of the ground at the base of the tree like a man climbing out of a swamp.

“Veiled,” I said calmly, “coming out of the ground.”

Zayvion came around the tree to where I was standing. He held a very clear Sight in his hand that made me want to barf.

I went through the motions of drawing a glyph for Shield, but stopped halfway when pain stabbed my brain. I could not draw on magic and did not want to pass out. I pulled the gun out of my pocket instead.

“Will this work?” I asked.

“Might,” he said.

The Veiled finally pulled all of itself out of the ground. It took a step away from the cistern. The darkness drained away from it, and then it was just a pale watercolor pastel reflection of a man, which is what the Veiled usually looked like. It walked straight toward Zayvion and me, shuffling slowly, not moving like I’d seen Veiled move, not running. Yet.

“Shield?” I suggested.

Zayvion had already dropped Sight and was casting something that made my eyes water from the stench.

Shield.

The Veiled continued shuffling our way. Once he reached the Shield, he ran his fingertips, then palms, over it. He pressed, as if expecting the Shield to let him in. When it didn’t, he opened his mouth, revealing a set of serrated teeth I’d never seen on a Veiled before, and bit down into the Shield. Black lines, just like the black lines on Anthony’s body, just like the black lines on Davy, snaked out from that bite, twisting and squirming over the spell like leeches.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Can you can see that?”

“Yes.” Zayvion began chanting, something soft and low, then raised his left hand. Magic wrapped around his fist like a silver gauntlet of fire. He broke the Shield, and threw the silver fire at the Veiled.

The Veiled writhed and screamed. It shriveled up like a piece of plastic catching on fire.

Just as the Veiled reduced down to nothing but a burnt smudge on the grass, another Veiled pulled up out of the cistern.

“I think,” I said, pointing at the other Veiled, who was almost on her feet, “we can conclude that yes, something is wrong with magic. And something is horribly wrong with the Veiled.”

Zayvion didn’t screw around with Shield this time. He just did the chant and threw flaming silver magic at the thing. She caught fire, screamed. Zay strode over to the cistern, ignoring her as she melted, and made his way around to the back of it where he could undo whatever kind of opening he had just done.

“There’s more coming up,” I said.

He did something on the other side of the tree and all the black magic that was pulsing up through the trunk of the tree, up into the limbs, and stretching out into the tips and fan of needles, stopped pulsing.

About six Veiled stopped coming up through the ground, caught half in and half out and opening and closing their black hole mouths like fish biting air.

Zayvion calmly chanted and set each of them on fire, leaving scorched patches in the grass.

I tried to breathe air that didn’t make me want to hurl but wasn’t having much luck.

“Let’s go,” Zayvion said. “We’ve seen enough.”

I put the gun back in my pocket, only then realizing that I hadn’t even remembered to take the safety off.

“We’ve seen enough what? Magic tainting Veiled or Veiled tainting magic?”

“Magic tainting the Veiled.”

“Are you sure?”

“Enough that I want people out here, scientists, magic users, investigating it before it spreads.”

Zayvion pulled out his phone and dialed with his thumb. Interesting, it wasn’t a number he had on speed dial. “Put me through to Bartholomew,” he said.

I looked around for Bea, caught just a glimpse of her ahead of us. She might have seen most of that. Or if she wasn’t casting Sight, she might have just seen us walking around the tree trunk.

No, she’d probably seen it. If I were shadowing this job, I would have had Sight ready to go the moment Zayvion started messing with the tree.

We had hiked halfway down the trail before Zayvion spoke again. Apparently his cell reception was good.

“The magic in the cistern isn’t clean,” Zay said. No preamble, no pleasantries, just straight to the point.

Because we were hiking and Zay was a good distance ahead of me, and the wind was making that ocean wave sound in the trees, I couldn’t hear Bartholomew’s response.

“Yes. I’ve gone to a cistern and seen it with my own eyes. I want a team at every cistern in the city checking this out.” He paused. “Like hell we don’t need any further investigation.” Pause again. “The Veiled,” he said just a little louder, then took his tone down, “crossed through the cistern, and the magic changed them. They were immune to my defensive spells.” He waited as Bartholomew spoke.

Then, “No, it is a problem. If magic is poisoned, the poison may have spread from the holding tanks down the networked lines throughout the city. If there are any failures or leaks in those lines, then not only is the magic everyone pulls on going to make them sick, it’s also going to draw the attention of the Veiled, who are attacking anyone who casts a spell.”

Again the wait. We were almost back to the parking area. The wind had picked up some, cooling the sunlight.

“You are forgetting Sedra had been possessed by Isabelle for years,” he said. “She had full access to the cisterns and the wells. There’s no knowing what she might have had set up to trigger when she died. No, you’re wrong. They both have done harm with magic—first they sent the Veiled with disks to kill us and then, over the Life well, they tried to join together—with magic—in one body.

“They broke magic’s rules because they are Soul Complements.” He paused again, but I could feel the anger building in him. Anger that had been building ever since Bartholomew had fired Victor.

“Guardian of the gates means I protect people, I don’t just stand by and watch them die. No, not even under orders.” A longer pause this time—probably Bartholomew telling him exactly what he expected Zayvion to do. “My duty is to keep magic from killing people.” Zayvion stopped so quickly I almost ran into his back. “Bullshit.” Pause. “No. I absolutely refuse.”

I could tell he had made a decision. His shoulders squared and his left hand curled into a fist. “Fuck that,” he said. “You can find a new Guardian of the gates. I quit.”

He thumbed his phone off and threw it into the forest, where it smashed against a tree.

He stood there, hands clenched into fists, chin high, looking like he wanted to beat the living hell out of something. I waited for him to calm down, waited for him to pull that cool Zen mask of his over the fury.

That didn’t happen. He stormed down the last of the trail, and out into the parking lot. His anger hadn’t eased even a notch by the time we reached the car. “Get in,” he said. “We need to be out of here before they track my phone.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Bartholomew’s dogs.”