“Wayne went to get them.” Jo wanted her remark to sound curt, but it merely sounded tired, the words hardly her own. Jo dragged her feet over, sitting heavily in one of the empty chairs.
“Lollygagging no dou—oh, Wayne, so good to see you!” She clapped her hands together. Sure enough, Wayne had arrived, the rest of the Society in tow. “What took you all so long?”
As expected, no one answered. Takako stopped in her tracks, staring down the ridiculously dressed creature. Pan’s smile expanded, curling into something slightly more sinister, her cat-like eyes staring Takako down from beneath her mint green fringe. Takako shook her head and walked away. While she gave off the air of confidence, of not being intimidated, her movements looked a lot more like a tactical retreat than the advance following a victory.
“Shove off, Pan,” Wayne muttered, barely loud enough for Jo to hear as he passed. If Pan heard, she made no motion. The other two men filed in without so much as a glance in her direction.
“Do you not like me anymore, Wayne-eee?” Pan whined.
Just seeing Pan had set Jo to seething, so actually hearing and interacting with the woman reared something ugly in her. It was a cold fire of pure malice that burned deep in Jo’s chest, the flames licking to be let out, to wrap a stranglehold around Pan’s throat. It felt like the longer she was in her presence, the stronger the hot current of liquid loathing flowed between them. For the first time in her life, Jo knew the true essence of hatred.
As if sensing Jo’s dark thoughts, Pan’s eyes rolled over to her. The same expression Takako had received—a sort of wicked smile—was now directed at her. Jo had seen this smile before, she’d seen it like a bad omen of something to come in the morning the day before Fuji had erupted. A tremble worked up her spine, but Jo squelched it right between the shoulder blades. Her rage, simple but all-encompassing, would be a dam to any fear or intimidation. She wouldn’t let Pan have the satisfaction, not now.
It was in that staring contest, pitting her will against Pan’s, that Jo found herself wondering for the first time if she could use her magic to tear apart something living.
“Thank you all for coming.”
“As though we had a choice,” Wayne mumbled, low enough that Jo was fairly sure she was the only one to hear.
Across the table, Samson shook his head, rocking slightly, handing digging into his hair hard enough that the braids on one side began to come lose. His eyes were wild, hardly looking at anything at all as he kept repeating the words, “Too soon . . . Too soon . . .” He was barely breathing, shaking so violently that Eslar’s steady arm around his shoulders seemed to be the only thing keeping him upright at all.
The other side of Samson was vacant.An empty seat. Self-loathing welled up within Jo. How had Samson, out of all of them, ended up next to what would have been Nico’s chair?
“Will he be replaced?” Jo whispered—and perhaps she shouldn’t have; perhaps the exhaustion had loosened her lips and left her tactless. The whole room fell into a hush the moment they were said. Even Samson stilled, following her gaze with the rest of them to the place where Nico used to be—and still should have been.
There was a long pause, a deep sigh, and then Snow finally diverged from acting as his namesake.
“No.” Snow’s answer was gentle, as if he let himself hear their grief for the first time. It was factual, but not cold. The sound settled like its own warmth right next to her heart. It was the fracture she’d been looking for—the glimpse into a humanity that she knew was there. “As you all know, when the Age of Magic ended, so too did magic disappear from reality. A few lineages of power were strong enough to survive the jumps, the rebuilding of the world, and exist—dormant—in the blood of their ancestries. When a descendant of these ancients makes a wish, they are drafted into the Society.”
“And Jo was the last one we were looking for,” Pan finished brightly. Jo fantasized about smothering her cheerful face with a nail-filled pillow. Especially when she added under her breath, “Took you long enough.”
Jo was taken back to the Ranger Compound.Seven lineages, Snow had said then. Be it through some secret knowledge or a sensory power, he’d known seven people would join the Society from the start. And just when all chairs had been filled . . . Jo looked back to Nico’s empty seat.
No more companions. No more help. No new faces for eternity.
And no more martyrs, she vowed.
“Fine,” Jo mumbled. “It’s for the best . . . not like there would ever be any replacing Nico, anyway.”
The silence that overcame them sounded like agreement to Jo’s ears. Everyone sat with their heads bowed, hands in their laps, in a stiff competition to be the smallest of the group. Even Snow stared at the table beneath him, as if he’d somehow forgotten why they were there, or how to pull up the wish.
“You guys are soboring.” Pan drew out the ‘o’ in the last word for what felt like a complete three minutes. “Come on everyone, we have a job to do!” When still no one moved, Pan leaned heavily back into her seat with a groan, kicking her legs beneath the table like a child seconds away from throwing a proper tantrum. Jo thought the woman-child might have been mumbling something, the annoyance in her tone bordering on a whine. But then she was sitting back up, looking around the table in sickeningly genuine confusion. “Why the long faces? Didn’t you used to get excited by this? What changed?”
A beat passed. Then two. No one seemed fully equipped to handle such a question, it would seem. Especially not one filled with such legitimate lack of what should have been easy understanding.
“What changed?” Jo’s head eventually rose, a scathing remark on her lips. But before she could continue, Takako was on her feet.
“What changed?” Takako echoed, more animated than Jo had ever seen her. “How about the fact that we know you’re sitting there like a smiling demon just waiting for your chance to strike us off one by one?”
“Strike you off?” Pan blinked. “Why would I want that?”
“You tell us.” Jo joined the conversation. She’d insist it was to support Takako, but there was no use lying to herself. She was at the point of taking any opportunity to fight with Pan.
“Well, I don’t.” Pan folded her hands behind her braided, mint-green tresses. “Why do you think I would? I’m here too, you know. If the Society ends, what do you think happens to me? Do you think I’m any different from you?” Pan’s fingers began to fuss with her braids, pausing long enough to look at Jo. Were they friends, it would be like some kind of inside joke. But they were the furthest possible thing from friends and Pan’s intention escaped Jo entirely. “The wishes stop, and the Society stops. It needs to be dismantled properly or fed constantly with the magic of destroyed worlds. And the only thing more boring than staring at you lot for eternity is to stop existing entirely.”
The logic was a sharp kick to the gut. It pulled Jo’s insides in different directions, layered atop each other in illegible and unbearable contrast. Everything Jo had come to believe about Pan hinged on the fact that she was the laughing monster, lurking under their beds and waiting to devour them the second their eyes closed. But if Pan was a prisoner too, then that just made her . . . a righteous bitch, yes, but one with no more or less power than the rest of them.
Takako must have worked through a similar logic, because Jo watched her deflate back into her chair. The woman tucked her chin to her chest, and made eye contact with no one. Everything diffused, begging to be let go and forgotten about.
