Ronan felt that he had caught happiness without meaning to.
He could do anything.
“Ronan, bro, what are you doing up there?” Declan called. “Dinner’s done!”
Ronan was on the roof of one of the small equipment sheds. It was as high as he could get on short notice without wings. He didn’t lower his arms. Fireflies and baubles and his dream flower were glowing and swirling all around him, and they kept sweeping by his vision as he gazed up at the pink-streaked sky.
After a moment, the roof groaned, and Declan groaned, and then his older brother pulled himself up beside Ronan. He stood looking not at the sky but at the things floating around his younger brother.
He sighed. “You sure have done a lot with the place.” He reached out to catch one of the fireflies. “Jesus Mary, Ronan, there’s not even any bug here.”
Ronan lowered his arms and looked at the light Declan had snagged. He shrugged.
Declan released the light back into the air. It floated right in front of him, illuminating the sharp Lynch features, the knot of worry between his eyebrows, the press of disappointment to his mouth.
“It wants to go with you,” Ronan said.
“I can’t take a glowing ball with me.”
“Here,” Ronan said. “Wait.”
He shifted his weight to remove something from his pocket and proffered it to Declan in the palm of his hand. It looked like a crude heavy-duty metal washer, about an inch and a half across, a steampunk paperweight from a strange machine.
“You’re right, that’s much less likely to stick out,” Declan said wryly.
Ronan delivered a sharp tap to the object, and a small cloud of fiery orbs sprayed up with a sparkling hiss.
“Jesus, Ronan!” Declan jerked his chin away.
“Please. Did you think I’d blow your face off?”
He demonstrated it again, that quick tap, that burst of brilliant orbs. He tipped it into Declan’s hand, and before Declan could say anything, jabbed it to activate it once more.
Orbs gasped up into the air. For a moment, he saw how his brother was caught inside them, watching them soar furiously around his face, each gold sun firing gold and white, and when he saw the spacious longing in Declan’s face, he realized how much Declan had missed by growing up neither dreamer nor dreamt. This had never been his home. The Lynches had never tried to make it Declan’s home.
“Declan?” Ronan asked.
Declan’s face cleared. “This is the most useful thing you’ve ever dreamt. You should name it.”
“I have. ORBMASTER. All caps.”
“Technically you’re the orbmaster, though, right? And that’s just an orb.”
“Anyone who holds it becomes an ORBMASTER. You’re an ORBMASTER right now. There, keep it, put it in your pocket. D.C. ORBMASTER.”
Declan reached out and scuffed Ronan’s shaved head. “You’re such a little asshole.”
The last time they’d stood on this roof together, their parents had both been alive, and the cattle in these fields had been slowly grazing, and the world had been a smaller place. That time was gone, but for once, it was all right.
The brothers both looked back over the place that had made them, and then they climbed down from the roof together.
Depending on where you began the story, it was about Neeve Mullen.
Neeve had the sort of career that most psychics longed to have. Part of this was because she had a very easily monetized variety of clairvoyance: She was good with specific numbers, specific letters, pulling telephone numbers out of people’s wallets, birthdays out of people’s heads, accurately pinpointing the times of future events. And part of this was because she was single-mindedly ambitious. Nothing was ever enough. Her career was a glass that never seemed to get full. She started with a phone line, and then published some books, landed herself a television gig that came on very early in the morning. She had respect within the community.
But.
Outside of the community, she was always going to be just a psychic. These days, this century, even the very best psychic had the nose-wrinkled stigma of a witch and none of the awe.
Neeve could put her hands on the future and the past and other worlds, and nobody cared. And so she’d done the spells and dreamt the dreams and asked her spirit guides for a path. Tell me how to become powerful in a way people can’t ignore.
Henrietta, whispered one of her guides. Her television screen stuck on weather maps of Virginia. She dreamt of the ley line. Her half sister called. “Come to Henrietta and help me!” Mirrors showed her a future with all eyes on her. The universe was pointing the way.
And here she was in a blackened forest with Piper Greenmantle and a demon.
Neeve should have guessed that her fixation with power would bring her to an opportunity to bargain with a demon, but she hadn’t. She wasn’t 100 per cent on ethics, but she was no idiot: She knew there was no happy ending to such a bargain. So this was a dead end. Probably literally.
Morale was low.
Piper, on the other hand, remained enthusiastic. She had replaced her tattered rags with a perfect sky-blue dress with pumps to match; she was a shock of colour in an increasingly colourless landscape. She told Neeve, “No one wants to buy a luxury item from a hobo.”
“What are you selling?” Neeve asked.
“The demon,” Piper replied.
Neeve wasn’t sure if it was a failure of imagination or psychic perception on her part, but she hadn’t anticipated this either. A rush of bad feeling accompanied Piper’s answer. Neeve attempted to articulate it. “It seems to me that the demon is tied in with this geographical location and exists for a specific purpose, i.e., in this case unmaking all energy artefacts associated with this place, and so it seems unlikely to me that you would be able to move it without considerable har—”