AN: Thank you to those who took the time to leave a note or a review! I appreciate them and I am glad so many people enjoy this story.
Tessa's thoughts were still on Jem as she followed Natasha through the streets. Natasha was all bright energy and orange hair. She was excited about the project though she was extremely cagey with details. She didn't want to give anything away as though it were a surprise gift.
"Just wait until you meet Dmitri, he's incredible," Natasha had said as she took Tessa's arm and hurried her along. It had led to teasing about what incredible meant that left Natasha blushing in a way that was more bashful than Tessa ever imagined her to be.
They'd met at the train station just as the sun started to sink and now they passed through deepening shadows as the sun lit the sky above them in oranges and pinks. The glimpses of the canals reflecting sunset were heart-stopping and crossing one foot bridge, Tessa did stop to stare out at it.
Venice was a fantasy city.
Natasha led her away from that fantasy ideal and into the parts of the city that were all crumbling grandeur. They stopped at a boarded up church. Natasha struck an infomercial pose and Tessa raised both eyebrows at her. It was a huge structure made of white stone and rising to a dome that had once been painted white but was now peeling. A pair of angels stood over the doors their faces had been worn down and their robes were dirt streaked.
"This is it?" Tessa asked.
"This is headquarters," Nat said. She'd been talking the entire time. She had told Tessa about the warlock team that was working on the project, about her newest boyfriend, about her apartment in Moscow - a city she'd vowed once to never return to. She told her everything but what the project actually was, claiming it needed to be seen to be explained.
"Is it structurally sound?" Tessa asked tilting her head back to take in the massive facade. It was impressive and Tessa tried to imagine how it had looked in its heyday when it had been brand new and Venice had been the seat of culture and trade for half the Mediterranean.
"Don't be a ninny, of course it is structurally sound," Natasha said. Nat had learned English decades before and she'd spent months working on idioms and figures of speech that she couldn't shake now. She still spoke with slang that had started going out of fashion in the 1930s.
They didn't enter through the grand front doors. They were sealed shut. Instead, Natasha led the way into a deeply shadowed alley where Tessa had to keep her eyes down to step around puddles and rubbish that had gathered in the narrow space. A slogan was sprayed across the wall in red paint but it was so slang-laden that Tessa couldn't decipher it even though she spoke passable Italian. The side door of the church swung open to spill yellow electric light into the narrow space.
Inside smelled of damp and the white paint on the walls was stained yellow in some places with water damage. The light came from uncovered bulbs set in intervals along the ceiling and they cast harsh light. Tessa followed Natasha down the hall to a set of double doors that she assumed led to the nave. This space was all offices, some still had their labels in place on the doors. They passed a bulletin board with a poster up with bible study times from the 1950s listed in faded careful handwriting.
Pushing into the nave Tessa was momentarily struck by the size of the place. It was far larger than she had thought. The dome rose high above them and a marble floor stretched out in all directions. No longer polished and shining as it must have been once but it was still impressive beneath a layer of grime. Jesus still hung from the cross over the altar though someone had given him a hat and a scarf. All the stained glass windows were covered from the outside to prevent them from being broken. It had even worked in a few places. All other evidence that this space had been a church and been stripped away and piled in the corners.
"Stormy!" a voice called.
Tessa was smiling before she'd turned all the way around. The warlock who wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted was smaller than she was but still strong enough to get her off her feet. He had that corn-fed blustery look about him that screamed "farm boy" though he held an advanced degree in obscure poetry and would probably have difficulty differentiating horses from cows without a diagram. His eyes were round as tennis balls and almost as large. They were also sky blue from lid to lid. He grinned with teeth that had obviously had expensive meetings with orthodontics in their youth.
"Frankie," she said when he dropped her back on the ground. His name was Charles Hamilton. Like Stormy, Frankie was a nickname. He was named for some singer who had been known as Old Blue Eyes. Tessa had missed most of the pop-culture from that era and always mixed up which one.
"How are you darling, still in that smelly old Labyrinth?" Frank asked in a British accent that was best described as posh.
"Not these days," she said. "What are you doing in Italy? I thought civilized people didn't cross the channel."
"Expanding my horizons, I have this ancient friend who tells me that the world is too big to spend your life in one city," he said.
"Ancient?" she said smiling. Frank was young by warlock standards - less than 50 - and had had the most atypical of warlock upbringings. No attempted drownings, no attempted exorcisms, lots of toys, braces, a university education. His parents had been solidly upper class and had always ignored the weird things that happened around him and pretended that the eyes were just a quirk. He still visited his mother at Christmas and Easter.
"Ah, the Stormbreaker, over a hundred years old but not ancient," he said.
"I'm not ancient," she said. She had spent time with warlocks well over 500. She knew a few who had seen a millennium turn though none of them were particularly well adjusted any more. That Frank still thought a century was old was quaint and she resisted the urge to pat his cheek and say something condescending.
Frank had an arm around her shoulder and was drawing her farther into the church. The pews had all been stacked against the walls, except for one that someone had dragged free and was sleeping on with a sweater draped over their horned head. The space was full of folding tables. Papers and books were stacked in haphazard piles. Computer screens blinked. At the back, near the doors that she had seen from the outside were large spell circles carved into the floor. They shimmered but the magic wasn't doing much more than hovering over the lines in the stone like low lying fog.
"Does the consecrated ground affect the spells?" she asked trying to reopen the question of what the hell was going on.
"Deconsecrated church, doesn't matter," Natasha said.
"So are you going to tell me what it does?" she asked.
The answer was interrupted by a man with massive bat wings stomping in from another door on the other side of the building. Both Natasha and Frankie turned to look. He was plain looking except for the wings and the scowl. His wings stretched and snapped back in a motion that reminded Tessa of someone clenching their fists or perhaps a cat's swishing tail.
"Where's the Arrival?" Natasha asked.
"Chauncey and Elsa are out looking for him," the warlock growled and turned on Tessa with a cold look, "Are you Natasha's oh so useful friend? The Stormbreaker."
The contempt he put onto the name might have been offensive if Tessa didn't agree that it was absurd. She pulled up a smile and tilted her head to the side as though considering him carefully. It was a look she'd stolen from Will more than a century before. He used to use it in Clave meetings because it was not actually mocking but it was so very close.
"Tessa is fine. Nobody but this lot," she waved her hand at Natasha and Frankie, "has called me Stormbreaker in 30 years. It was a brand name back when the market at La Miroir was going through a theme park stage. Marcelline thought dramatic names would drum up business."
"Is it true?" the warlock said without introducing himself.
"That Marcelline thought nicknames would bring in business? Yes, she did think that," Tessa said and the scowl deepened. She sighed and answered the question he had meant to ask, "I can track a spell back to the caster," she said. "It is imperfect but yes, I am a breaker, that's true."
Among warlocks there are only a very few things considered to be impossible and to be a true spell breaker was one of them. Tessa watched the skepticism cross his face. Her smile widened but it also got colder. Next would come the demand for proof.
She had had this conversation many times since she'd discovered by accident in 1917 that the magic that allowed her to find the spark of ownership in an object and change into another person could also be used on spells.
She'd held a music box in her hand and reached for the change and found something different. She hadn't found a spark of ownership. She had found a glowing filament that traced back to the owner of a spell that had been cast on the box long ago. The spell hadn't been anything dangerous. It simple changed the song that the box played depending on who was holding it. She had seen much more dangerous magics since.
It had taken years to learn how to use it but she had found eventually that if she followed that filament far enough back she could snap it. Once it had been snapped, the spell broke. It was impossible magic for anyone else. She didn't advertise it much these days. Like the details of her ability to Change, she kept it a near secret.
"Prove it," the warlock said.
"Travis, she can do it," Natasha said. "Would I lie to you?"
"I want to see," he crossed the room and picked up a metal sphere from a cluttered table. Some of the instruments were things that Tessa recognized but many of them were arcane and indecipherable. There were devices that could track magical fields. These looked like dowsing rods with extra prongs. A compass with a heavy brass case that she knew could be use to measure the strength of a spell sat beside a tall thing with the glass balls hanging on long strings that was completely new to her.
Travis handed her the ball and she looked away from the collection to hold it up in the light and get a good look. Plain, silver, a seam running around the middle and it was heavier than it should have been for its size. She passed it hand to hand a few times and considered how much to show off. Travis was looking at her with his eyebrow up and that little sneer tilting the corner of his lip. Superiority and arrogance in every line of his face.
He was just asking for the show.
She smiled in spite of her mood.
When she'd been working at the market she'd been told to make magic a show because it would keep people coming back. That La Miroir had a larger mundane clientele than they let on was a big part of that. Tessa's years in the Clave often left her with a deep unease about using magic among mundanes but the years in La Miroir had been part of one of her more rebellious stages and the risk had almost been a a relief after years of doing as the Clave said.
She held the ball between her hands and reached into it with magic. Once this had felt like groping in the dark but now it was as easy as opening a cupboard. She found the spark of ownership first but she bypassed that without looking at it too closely and reached farther. In the space where the magic opened up there was a buzz. Bespelled objects sometimes vibrated hard enough that even unskilled warlocks or even humans with the Sight could feel it.
Tessa followed the buzz until she found the thin gold line. She smiled again. Sometimes she could tell what the magic did but in this case she couldn't. The line wound and twisted through the ball, a complicated spell involving whatever substances swished about inside. It looped but she traced along it like untangling a knot or completing a children's maze. When she found the point beyond the object itself where it stretched tight she snapped it.
It had only taken a few seconds. The magic finished, she dropped the expression off her face and drew herself to her full height. Very slowly her head tilted to one side and she widened her eyes.
Stormbreaker was a stupid nickname but she'd brought it upon herself with this trick. She used a glamour and her century's worth of remembered changes and altered only her eyes. Jet black, flashing to white like a lightning strike and then roiling through gray as she used a simple levitation spell to push her hair back and up as changed it from brown to gray then white as though the colour were being pushed out of it from her forehead back as it swirled around her head. It was useless but it looked impressive.
She dropped all the glamour and held the ball out.
There was a stunned moment. Travis stared with an uneasy look in his eyes as though afraid something terrible would happen if he took the ball from her. She smiled as sweetly as she could, "It's done."
Natasha snorted and Frank started to laugh and a moment later he was leaning against Tessa's shoulder and laughing hard enough that his shoulders shook. Travis took the ball and looked at the three of them with dawning anger that he was being messed with.
"You should have seen your face," Natasha said to Travis before turning to Tessa, "Do it again, only do the hair in pink this time!"
"No, I am not a performing monkey," Tessa said but she couldn't not smile. Natasha thought the changing was a cute trick, just another glamour. Tessa had tried to tell her that it was so much more than that but Natasha wasn't particularly fond of what she did not understand so she simply pretended it didn't exist.
Travis was glaring but he no longer seemed particularly threatening. The storm cloud eyes was a parlour trick and that it had worked on him made him seem even younger than Tessa had expected considering the way he behaved as though her were the supreme leader of the group. It could be hard to guess a warlock's age but she guessed he was no older than Natasha. He was certainly shy of his first century.
He looked down at the ball in his hand and shook it. A moment later he shook it harder. Whatever it was meant to do, it didn't do it.
"Now will you tell me what all this is for?" Tessa asked waving a hand at the room.
"There's a portal," Natasha said her face lit up, she'd been waiting to explain it. She grabbed Tessa's arm and hauled her forward to stand nearer the glowing circles at the back of the room. The one on the left shimmered in blue while the other winked from yellow to lime green and back again. Natasha wasn't looking at them, she was looking at a pair of maps spread across the tables.
They were massive and Tessa's sense of familiarity as she looked them over didn't settle into recognition until she tracked the river past Black Friar's bridge. It was a map of London. The other was a map of Venice.
"The portal is picking people up here," Nat tapped London, "and dropping them here," she tapped Venice.
"That's how I got here," Tessa said looking between the maps for the trick that would explain why this warranted a team of seven warlocks and enough magical paraphernalia to open a store. After the show and the fit laughter, all the warlocks were watching Tessa as Nat grinned at her.
"But you came from today," Natasha said. "The portal isn't so … particular. It brings people from all over history."
"It's a time travel portal?" Tessa asked. "Why would you do that? How would you do that? Warlocks have tried to play with time for centuries, it never ends the way people want it to."
"We're not doing it," Frankie said, just a little offended.
"Where are the people?" Tessa asked. Nat's face fell as though that wasn't the response she wanted to hear.
"They're from all over the last 500 years or so," Frankie said.
"No, where are they? Where are the people?" Tessa asked looking around the room full of warlocks. The audience had drawn in a little closer. None of them looked like they had come from some point 500 years earlier. They wore modern clothing and they were young. All of them were young. Tessa wasn't sure she'd even seen this many young warlocks in one place. She certainly wasn't used to being the oldest immortal in a room.
"Upstairs," Travis said with a shrug. He still held the ball and watched Tessa warily as though she were something dangerous.
"Can I meet them?" Tessa asked. "Are they mundanes or Downworlders? What are you going to do with them?"
"Always with the questions," Natasha said shaking her head.
"Always with the non-answers," Tessa was exasperated enough that it was coming through in her voice. She had to catch herself before she exclaimed, by the Angel instead it came out as, "My goodness, Nat. This isn't a small thing. You have people here. What did you tell them?"
"That we're trying to help them," Natasha said. Tessa wasn't sure what expression was on her face but it certainly wasn't friendly. Natasha was defensive when she added, "Which is true. We are trying to help them. That's why you're here. You're going to do your tracking thing and find the source of the spell and we'll be able to turn the spell around. It'll be fine."
"Introduce me," Tessa said.
"No," Travis said.
Tessa was about to start an argument when a commotion at the side door pulled everyone's attention. A black shadow came through the door as it opened and everyone took an instinctive step back from it as it flashed red eyes.
Everyone but Travis. Travis cooed at it.
"Who's a good girl?" he asked as it slunk towards him looking nothing like a good girl and everything like a hell demon. It swirled around his legs and nearly obscured him completely for a moment in a mass of black and red menace that he seemed not to see.
Tessa tried for something more articulate but only succeeded in saying, "The fuck?"
"Elsa where is Chauncey?" Travis asked the mass of shadow.
"Are you telling me that Elsa and Chauncey are Hellhounds?" Tessa asked her voice more incredulous than anything else. "You sent Hellhounds after someone who just stepped through a time travel portal? Worse than that, you sent Hellhounds out into a mundane city at dusk? How many people has Elsa eaten do you think?"
"Tessa, let it go," Natasha's voice was low and urgent and Tessa let herself be dragged away to the side door because she needed a moment to collect herself.
Neither of them spoke as they walked down the hallway. The yellowed tile was smeared with red where someone had bled on it and then it had been tracked around. Tessa could see drag marks as well as footprints and her stomach turned a little. She looked around trying to figure out which door they had taken the prisoner through. There were two with bloody hand prints and she filed that information away but suppressed the urge to react before she had a plan.
"I shouldn't have invited you, I'm sorry I got you involved in this, you probably shouldn't come back. Travis will tell Dmitri that you're a problem and you don't want to be here when he comes looking for you," Natasha said.
"No, Nat, you shouldn't have gotten involved in this," Tessa said. "This isn't going to end well for anyone at all, least of all, you."
"Don't come back, Tess, I'm sorry, I am," Natasha said just before she pushed Tessa out the door. Before she could get her bearings and argue the door slammed shut and she was left her in the dark graffitied alleyway behind the church alone.
AN:
Yes, that's the same Marcelline and the same La Miroir that showed up in passing in Infernal War.
One of my great pet-peeves with the TID books is that they never really get a chance to delve into Tessa's abilities but hint that she is more powerful than we learn of in the story. One of the things I really enjoyed in putting this story together was the chance to explore that. Tessa as I write her in this story is a seriously powerful warlock - with a bit of a reputation to precede her - and that's a lot of fun to write.