The Father’s Dream

The yard was frozen hard, and he was already on his back in it.

He didn’t remember falling. He remembered the heat coming at him across the stone, and then the sky, white and low, and the taste of blood where his teeth had caught his cheek. His hands were small. That was the first wrong thing. He lifted one and looked at it, and it was a boy’s hand, raw across the knuckles, with a burn healing shiny at the edges on the heel of the palm that he had never had.

“Up.”

The voice came from above him. He knew it the way he knew his own pulse, and he had not heard it in eight years.

“Up, Samael.”

He got up.

The man standing over him was tall and gray at the temples, coat off despite the cold, sleeves rolled to the elbow. He had Weston’s jaw. He had Weston’s way of standing with his weight back on one heel, as if the ground owed him something and he was waiting to collect. Fire sat on his open palm, small and white and patient.

Grandfather. The word came from somewhere outside the boy. The boy only thought, Father, and was afraid.

“Again,” Ezekiel Weston said.

The fire came. He got his own up in time, barely, a thin orange wall that buckled where the white hit it, and the heat drove him back three steps across the frost. His heels slid. He didn’t fall.

“Better. You opened late.”

“I opened when it came.”

“You opened when you saw it come.” Ezekiel closed his hand, and the white flame went out. “They do not let you see it come. A rider in a body is fast, and it is not polite, and it will not stand in a yard and wait for you to get your feet under you. Again.”

They went again. And again. The light moved across the yard and the frost went to mud under his boots and then froze again as the afternoon died, and every time he went down, his father said up, and every time he got up. His arms shook. The burn on his palm split open and bled into the cuff of his sleeve. He didn’t look at it. Looking at it meant his father would see him look.

At some point, he understood that Ezekiel was not angry. That was worse. There was no temper in any of it. His father hit him with fire the way a man splits wood, steadily, because the wood needed splitting and winter was coming.

“Why?” The boy got the word out between breaths, on his knees in the mud. He was twelve, maybe. Thirteen. Weston could feel the age of the body like a coat that didn’t fit. “Why every day?”

Ezekiel looked past him, toward the house.

Weston turned his head and followed the look, and there was a woman on the back steps.

She stood with a cup in both hands and a shawl over her shoulders, watching them. Small. Hair cut in heavy bangs that came down almost to her brows. She wasn’t smiling, and she wasn’t upset. She was simply there, watching the way someone looks down a road they’ve already decided to walk. Beside her on the step lay a deck of cards, squared neatly, with one turned face up on top.

Something in Weston went completely still.

He had never seen her like this. He had been seven when she died, and his memories of her were a chair, a hand on his forehead, a voice in the dark counting him through the fever. He had never seen her standing up.

The boy he was wearing saw her every day and didn’t think anything of it at all.

“Because of her,” Ezekiel said. He said it quietly, and for the first time all afternoon it sounded like it cost him something. “They have wanted your mother since before you were born. They will want her after I am gone. When I can’t stand between them and her anymore, you will. That is why every day.”

The boy looked at his mother. His mother looked back, steady, and lifted her cup an inch, the way you’d salute someone across a room.

“She drew the Tower this morning,” Ezekiel said. “So. Tonight, they come.”

He held out his hand, and white fire bloomed in it again.

“Up, Samael.”

Weston got up.

Noelle approached them as Weston continued the drills. His hands were shaking and his knees felt like they were about to give out.

“You’re pushing him too hard again, beloved.”

“He’ll be fine in the morning. He always is.”

“Because I heal his wounds every night.”

“That’s why he’ll be fine.” Ezekiel looked at her. “He’s our son. He has our blood. He can handle this.”

Noelle didn’t argue with that. She set her cup down on the rim of the old stone fountain at the edge of the yard, dry and full of frost, and she came the rest of the way across the mud in house shoes, not looking down once, and took the boy’s bleeding hand in both of hers.

“Let me see.”

The boy tried to pull back. Weston felt the reflex go through the arm, a twitch of pride, the shame of being handled in front of his father. She held on anyway. Her grip was much stronger than it looked.

“Mother. It’s nothing.”

“It’s split to the meat, Samael. That’s not nothing.” She turned the palm up toward the last of the light and studied it. “Your father opened late too, at your age. He won’t tell you that,”

Ezekiel said nothing. He let the fire on his palm go out and folded his arms.

Then the warmth came.

It started where her thumbs pressed into the heel of his hand, and it didn’t stay there. It moved up through the wrist and into the arm, slow and thick, and wherever it went the shaking stopped. The burn pulled itself closed. The ache in his knees let go. His lungs opened all the way for the first time since noon.

Weston knew that warmth.

He had felt it under Eva’s hands. It was the same, exactly. The heat had the same weight, and it reached for the hurt the same way, as if it already knew the way in.

The boy felt only relief, and a little guilt about the relief.

Weston felt something split open in him that he couldn’t close.

“There,” Noelle said, and she let go. A thin new seam of skin crossed the palm where the burn had been, shiny and tender. She pressed the back of her wrist to her own forehead for a moment, under the bangs, and then dropped it before her husband could see. The boy saw. Weston saw through him.

That cost her, Weston thought. The boy only thought, She’s tired again.

“Tonight,” Ezekiel said.

“I know.” She picked her cup back up. “I drew it, love. I know.”

“Then you’ll stay in.”

“I have a shift at nine. The Gallagher boy is still in the infirmary with half his ribs, and Morgan’s team goes out to the river line at ten. They’ll want someone who can close a wound in the field.” She drank. “I’ll be on the river line.”

“Noelle.”

“The cards tell me when. They don’t tell me to hide.” She looked at him over the rim of the cup, steady and unbothered. “If I stayed home every time I drew the Tower, I’d never have left this house.”

Ezekiel’s jaw worked once.

“Then I’m coming.”

“Of course you’re coming.” She softened, finally, and touched his arm on her way past. “You always come.”

She stopped beside the boy and lifted his chin with two fingers. She looked at him for a long time. Weston had the feeling she was looking for something past the boy’s face, further in. For one cold second he thought she might find it, find him, crouched there behind his father’s eyes decades too late.

“You’ll be stronger than both of us,” she said quietly. “I’ve seen it. Don’t let him tell you you’re not enough yet. You’re just not finished.”

Then she went back up the steps, and the door shut behind her, and the cards stayed on the step where she’d left them, the Tower still face up.

Ezekiel watched the door for a while after it closed.

“Up,” he said finally, though the boy was already standing. “One more. Then eat. Then you sleep in your boots.”

“Why my boots?”

His father looked at him, and Weston saw the fear under all that steadiness. Weston had seen that same fear in his own reflection, any time Eva walked out of the wards.

“Because when they come for her,” Ezekiel said, “you will not have time to put them on.”

They came at the river line a little after eleven.

The boy had his boots on. He’d been standing at the edge of the field tent for an hour with his hands in his coat, watching his mother work. Morgan’s team had pulled a man out of the reeds with his thigh opened to the bone, and Noelle had knelt in the mud beside him and put her hands on the wound, and the man had stopped screaming. The boy had seen her do it a hundred times. Weston had never seen it once, and he couldn’t look away.

Then the lanterns along the bank went out, one after another, from the far end toward them.

Ezekiel was already moving. “Samael. To her.”

The boy ran.

The manifestation stood up out of the river.

It had been lying in the shallows, or it had been the shallows. Weston couldn’t tell. It rose in a long slope of black water that shed weeds and silt as it climbed, until it stood taller than the willows, and the thing inside the water had too many joints and no face at all. Weston had read about ancient ones that had slipped out of unlicensed circles decades back and gone to ground. He had never stood under one. The boy had, four times already. He was still afraid of it, and he ran anyway.

And around it, coming up the bank on foot, were the riders.

Twenty of them. Thirty. People. A woman in a nurse’s smock. Two boys no older than Samael. An old man barefoot on the frozen mud. They moved wrong, all of them a half second off from their own bodies, and every face was turned the same way. Toward the tent. Toward Noelle.

The boy reached her and threw his fire.

It went out of him in a sheet, the best he’d ever cast, and the front line of riders walked straight into it. Clothes caught. Hair caught. They didn’t stop. They didn’t scream. A man with his sleeve burning reached through the flame for Noelle, and the boy hit him again, and again, and he kept coming.

It’s not enough. Weston felt the boy know it. I’m not enough.

“Behind me,” Noelle said.

She stood up from the wounded man and wiped her hands on her coat, and she put one palm flat on the ground.

The earth answered her.

It came up out of the bank in a ridge, waist high and then head high, a wall of packed mud and root and river stone that tore itself loose from the field and curved around the tent in a ring. The riders hit it and clawed at it. It held. Where they dug in, it closed over their hands and squeezed until they let go. She didn’t strain. She knelt there with her palm on the dirt and her bangs fallen in her eyes, breathing slow, and the wall grew another foot.

Weston had never known her birth element was earth. Fire was the house’s. He had assumed she was fire, too. Eva would have known. He thought of the way Eva stood in the garden with her bare feet in the grass sometimes and looked like she was listening to something, and the thought wouldn’t leave him.

“Keep them off the top,” Noelle said. “That’s all, Samael. Just the top.”

He kept them off the top. Anything that climbed, he burned back down. It was a job he could do. His hands had stopped shaking.

Outside the ring, his father fought the manifestation alone.

The boy could see him through a gap where the wall hadn’t closed yet. Ezekiel stood on the open bank with the black water towering over him, and he wasn’t backing up. His fire came off him white. The thing swung down at him, and Ezekiel’s flame didn’t arc through the air to meet it. It moved. It went sideways, then down, then folded into a seam in the water’s body that hadn’t been there a second before, as if something had taken the fire in hand and put it exactly where it needed to go.

There was no wind. There was no air mage on the bank. Weston had always thought fire needed someone to path it. He had needed Eva.

His father’s rider needed no one.

The boy knew it was there. Weston could feel him knowing it, a cold settled fact. Whatever lived in Ezekiel Weston could take hold of anything inside a space it chose, the water, the stones, the fire, and set each where it wanted. The fire went where the rider placed it. Ezekiel only had to make it.

The manifestation came apart in pieces. It went down into the river in slabs of dead water that steamed where they landed, and the riders dropped where they stood, all at once, like a hand had let go of every string.

Noelle took her palm off the ground. The wall slumped back into the field.

Ezekiel came through the gap with his shirt smoking, and he looked first at her and then at his son.

“Five,” the boy said. His voice cracked on it. “That’s five.”

“That’s five,” his father agreed.

“I’m still not strong enough,” Weston said. “I can’t protect mother alone. This training isn’t helping. I want my own rider, father.”

Noelle looked at Ezekiel. He frowned.

“You’re still not ready. Until you can beat them on your own. You’re not ready for the rider your mother brings out of the circle.” Ezekiel put his hand on his shoulder. “Soon. Keep working.”

The words had come out of Weston’s mouth. He hadn’t chosen them. He’d felt them rise up through the boy’s chest and by the time he understood what they were, they were already in the air between the three of them. I want my own rider. Weston had never asked for his. At twelve it had simply been put in him. He hadn’t known anyone in the family had ever wanted one.

The hand on his shoulder was heavy and hot through the coat. The boy wanted to shrug it off. He didn’t.

“The rider your mother brings out,” he repeated. “What does that mean?”

Ezekiel didn’t answer. He looked at Noelle.

She was kneeling in the mud again beside the man with the opened thigh, who had slept through the entire fight with her hand still on his leg. She checked the wound, and pressed it once more, and the last of the torn edges drew together. Then she sat back on her heels and pushed the bangs off her face with her wrist. The boy looked away before he saw what was under them. He always did. Weston tried to look, and couldn’t, because the boy had never once let himself.

“It means you’ll be offered when you’re ready,” she said, “and I’ll be the one who opens the door. That’s how it’s done in this house. It’s how it was done for your father.”

“Who opened his?”

“His mother.” She held out her hand, and Ezekiel took it and pulled her to her feet. She didn’t let go of him right away. Her thumb found a scorched place on his forearm, through the burned-out sleeve, and stayed there. Weston watched the skin close under it. “And it nearly killed him, and he won anyway. He was older than you are now, and he’d already put down two of those.” She tipped her head toward the river. “You’ve watched five. You haven’t put down one.”

“Because I’m not allowed.”

“Because you’re not able,” Ezekiel said it without heat. “Yet.”

The boy’s jaw locked. Weston knew that, too. He knew the exact ache of it at the hinge, the way you held it shut so nothing came out that you couldn’t take back. He’d done it at his father’s table for sixteen years.

Morgan’s people came up the bank with stretchers and lanterns relit. Somebody was crying near the reeds. Two of the riders who’d dropped were sitting up now, empty-eyed, the things inside them gone. The old barefoot man was not sitting up. Neither was one of the boys who had been no older than Samael. A Hunter knelt beside that one and covered his face with a coat.

Noelle saw it. She let go of her husband’s hand and went over there, and she knelt down in the frost beside the covered boy and put her palm on his chest through the coat, and held it there a long time. Nothing happened. The boy watched her do it anyway. Weston watched her shoulders drop when she finally took her hand away.

“She’ll try every time,” Ezekiel said quietly. “Even when there’s nothing left to fix. You need to know that about her. That’s what you’re protecting.”

“I know what I’m protecting.”

“You know what she looks like. That isn’t the same thing.” His father squeezed the shoulder once and let go. “When the day comes that you can hold that wall without her, you’ll have your rider. Not before. I won’t put something in you that eats you before you’ve lived.”

He walked off toward his wife.

The boy stood alone on the riverbank with his hands balled in his coat pockets and the smell of burned hair still in the air, and he made a promise. Weston felt every word of it go down into the body and set like poured iron. He would get strong enough. He would never again stand behind his mother while she held the line for him. It didn’t matter what it cost.

The river ran past, black and quiet, and the lanterns burned on the bank. Then the dream let go of that night, and the years began to slide past underneath him.

Suddenly the scene around him faded into black. He shut his eyes. Opened them.

He was at the foot of the basement stairs. Weston recognized it immediately. His grandmother was with him. Hugging him.

Through the open door he could see the room. Not his basement, but the same one, forty years younger: the red paint on the stone still fresh, the old circles not yet worn to ghosts, the strapped chair standing against the far wall with its leather uncracked. Candles burned at the points. He was taller now. The body he was wearing had filled out across the shoulders and lost the softness at the jaw, and it held itself the way Weston’s own body had at sixteen, braced for a blow it expected to come from somewhere.

Noelle’s arms were around him. She was smaller than he was now. Her cheek rested against his collarbone, and he could feel the steady way she breathed.

“I let it go into me. Feed from me. And then it will go into you. And it will stay,” she said quietly.

“Go into you?”

“Through the male host. You’ll wait on the stairs. It’s not proper for you to be in there.”

Ezekiel walked his son up three steps and sat him on the stair with his back to the wall. Then he went down, and the heavy door shut behind him, and the bolt slid home on the other side.

A man passed him on the stairs on his way down, someone who smelled of expensive cologne and fear. The host was someone who had paid to be a part of the ceremony. He did not inherit the demon or the contract itself, but would forever be corrupted anyway.

The boy sat in the stairwell with his hands flat on his thighs and did not move. Weston could feel what it cost him to stay there. Every muscle in the body wanted to go back down and put his fist through that door. He knew what was happening on the other side of it, and he knew his mother had chosen it, and the stone between them was the only mercy anyone had been able to give him. He counted his own breaths so he wouldn’t have to think about anything else. He got to two hundred and eleven.

Weston wanted out. He wanted Eva’s hand. He wanted to wake up in his own bed with the window cracked and her hair across his pillow, and the dream would not let him go. It held him by the throat and made him wait there in his father’s skin, and know his grandmother was choosing this for her son with her eyes open. She had seen it in the cards long before she came down those steps.

Then the bolt slid back. Ezekiel came up for him without a word and led him down into the circle, and put a blindfold on him, black silk folded twice, and tied it with the same knot he used on his boots. The chalk under his knees was so new it still smelled of dust.

Then, the exchange was over, and the demon entered him.

It didn’t come the way Azra had. Azra had come into a twelve-year-old like heat into a cold room, slow, until there was no corner he hadn’t reached. This came in all at once, through the mouth and the eyes behind the silk and the soft places under the ribs, and it was full. It had fed on her. It was heavy with her, with Holy blood, with everything she had let it take, and it was not grateful. It was hungry for more. It had tasted the best thing it would ever taste, and it wanted the rest of the world to taste like that.

The boy’s back bowed. The blindfold slid. For one second he saw the candles, Ezekiel on his knees at the edge of the chalk, the stranger slumped and empty on the floor, and Noelle sitting with her arms wrapped around herself, looking at her son with her bangs pushed off her face and the brand on her forehead bare.

Then the demon reached up from inside and closed his eyes for him.

Mine, it said. Not to the boy. To the body. As if the boy were already gone.

He wasn’t. Weston felt him dig in. Somewhere down under the panic, under the pain that had started in his teeth and spread outward into every joint, there was a small hard thing that would not move. It was the promise from the riverbank. The boy found it in the dark and held on to it with both hands.

“Water,” he heard Ezekiel say, far away. “Only water. Nobody touches him.”

The demon laughed through his mouth.

The first day began.