“They will be,” he promised, covertly wiping the water from his neck. “There’s enough magic here to raise you three times over.” It was more power than Myron had ever worked with before, perhaps the most magic any human hadevergathered in a single circle. If any of his former colleagues had been present, it would have been a circle for the history books.Hishistory, specifically. The core spellwork might have been Raven’s, but Myron was the one who’d arranged it into a masterpiece of magical engineering. The repurposed circle in front of them was some of the finest work he’d ever done, and the knowledge that no one but Algonquin’s troops was ever likely to see it was physically painful. Though not as painful as what he had to do next.
He stood with a bracing breath, turning to glare at the lake, who was still wearing his face. “I’ve done my part. The control circle is complete and filled to the brim, precisely as promised. Now it’s your turn, Algonquin. Tell me what Mortal Spirit we are raising to make me Merlin.”
This was the question that had been plaguing him from the moment he switched sides. Algonquin had always spoken of gathering magic to raise her own Mortal Spirit, but she’d never actually saidwhichspirit she was working to fill. Myron had caught a glimpse of its shape in the dragon blood when he’d been on his belly under the Leviathan during the disaster with Novalli, but not enough to determine its nature or domain or even how big it would ultimately be. He’d asked Algonquin for specifics countless times after joining her, but she’d always put his questions off, promising to tell him when, and only when, the time came.
Given how he’d come to his position, Myron had assumed she was just being cautious. He had no illusions about her opinion of his trustworthiness, and he did not take offense. Keeping mission-critical information hidden from a questionable ally was only logical. Now that he’d seen the location she’d chosen for the summoning, though, Myron was beginning to worry that Algonquin’s reasons for keeping her spirit secret had nothing to do with security.
“Why are we doing thishere?” he demanded, looking nervously around at the unnatural darkness of the Pit. “I told you when I joined, I’m not summoning any more death spirits.” It had been his only stipulation. He’d seen where Novalli’s deal withthatdevil had led, and he wanted no part of it. Not even to fulfill his dream of being Merlin. Fortunately, Algonquin was shaking her head.
“I’m well aware of the qualities of this place,” she said, looking at the blackness as though she expected something to come charging out of it. “But as much as I’d prefer to do this somewhere that didn’t reek of mortal fear and death, it must be here, becausehereis where it began.”
She waved her water at the surrounding land, which Myron only now noticed wasn’t flat like the rest of the city. It was sloping, the grid roads and destroyed yards of the crushed houses around them all tilting down at the same angle to form the bowl of a shallow, city-block-sized crater, which they were currently standing at the bottom of.
“This is where it started,” Algonquin said, staring at the sloping land. “Six decades ago, this was the exact spot where the wave of my anger first crashed down. The echo of that rage mixed with the terror of those it killed to form the magic you feel now. The combination was so virulent and tenacious, I was forced to seal it off to prevent it from seeping back into my water. But sad as the loss of any land is, it’s notallbad. The magic of the Pit may be vile, but it’s thicker than anywhere else in the city, because this is where she was born.”
A chill went through Myron’s body. “She who?”
“My city,” Algonquin said, tilting her head to stare up at the black underbelly of the Skyways above them. “Did you never wonder why I would conquer the very city that had abused me most? Why I chose to rebuild Detroit instead of washing it clean off the map?”
“Of course I wondered,” Myron said, fighting to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Everyone’swondered. They’ve even got a name for it in the Spirit Affairs Office: ‘the Paradox of the DFZ.’ It’s quite famous.”
That was criminal understatement. The question of why Algonquin, who famously cared more for fish than people, would pour herself into rebuilding a human city from a flooded wasteland into one of the biggest, densest, richest cities in the world was the most hotly contested mystery of the post-magical era.
The leading theory was that she needed the DFZ to get a foot in the door for spirits on the international stage, but other than a handful of sweeping statements like the announcement she’d made after killing the Three Sisters, Algonquin had never bothered with politics. All she seemed to care about was growing the DFZ itself, reinvesting all the earnings from her multiple patents, technology companies, financial institutions, security contracts, and entertainment studios back into the city itself. The result was the fastest-growing metropolis in human history, and still, no one understood…
“Why?” he asked, looking her straight in his own reflected eyes. “Why the DFZ? Did you just want your own piece on the political board, or—”
Algonquin scoffed. “What you call politics is nothing but apes dancing in front of fires, marveling at the shadows they cast. But foolish and shortsighted as all human power structures are, your magic is real. The damage you do, the harm you cause, the monsters you create from your fear:theseare humanity’s powers, and they are what I built this city to stop.”
“That makes no sense,” Myron argued. “If humanity’s evils are what you hate, then creating the Detroit Free Zone was the absolute worst thing you could have done. You made a place where vice runs rampant. Where drugs and guns are sold in vending machines, and murder is punished with a fine. The only reason this city isn’t the most crime ridden in the world is because you also made nothing illegal. The only laws you’ve ever passed are anti-water pollution, fishing ordinances, and the ban on dragons. If you think we’re all just ignorant dancing apes, why would you create a city that does nothing to restrain us?”
“Because you cannot be restrained,” she said angrily, her watery voice sharp as cracked ice. “I’ve lived with your kind since you began. I’ve seen human nature in all its guises, and I can say without doubt that you are selfish, brutish creatures. You consume everything, including each other, in your relentless drive to rise to the top of your own sweaty heap.”
“But we’re notalllike that,” Myron argued.
“Aren’t you?” she said coldly. “My city says otherwise.”
“Because you made no laws!”
“If you were really good, you wouldn’t need laws,” she shot back. “That’s my point. I’ve seen how you behave over generations. It would be easier to stop the sun from rising than to make humanity act in a responsible fashion, so I didn’t try. Instead, I built you a place where you could be as awful, selfish, and self-destructive as you liked. No rules or restrictions, just desires and the freedom to pursue them. I gave you a blank slate, a DetroitFreeZone. You were the ones who turned it into this.”
She lifted her hands up to the Skyways overhead. “The DFZ wasyourmaking, not mine. I built the elevated ramps because I needed conduits to channel magic into the proper forms for my Reclamation Land projects, but you were the ones who turned them into a division where the rich live literally on top of the poor. You’re absolutely right when you say the DFZ is a terrible city, but I’m not to blame. I merely gave you the shovel and let you dig, and now that the hole is wide and deep, all I have to do is step back and let it bury you.”
His reflection shot him a cruel smile as she finished, but Myron barely noticed. He’d thrown his lot in with Algonquin because that was the price of becoming the first Merlin, but whatever Emily thought, he wasn’t a traitor. Sometimes you had to do the wrong thing to get the right end, up to and including working with a walking, talking natural disaster. It wasn’t until this moment, though, that Myron realized the true depth of the contempt the Lady of the Lakes held for their kind, and the more she insulted him, the clearer her purpose in bringing him here became.
“That’s it,” he whispered at last, voice shaking. “The DFZ is ours, not yours. Humanity made it.” He looked down at the silted ground in horrified wonder. “The cityisthe spirit.”
Algonquin chuckled. “Youarea clever human.”
It wasn’t a compliment, but Myron had no time to waste being insulted. Now that she’d put the pieces together for him, he felt like a fool for not realizing the truth sooner. The DFZ was Algonquin’s Mortal Spirit. Not just the physical city, but theideaof it, the addictive promise of a city of absolute freedom that had been hammered down through countless movies, shows, novels, and video games over the past sixty years. The concept of the DFZ as a place where anything could happen and anyone could go to start a new life was so common, it was its own family of clichés, andthat was the entire point. Algonquin hadn’t built a city. She’d created a hook for people to hang their dreams on, a place to pin their hopes and ambitions and greed. The DFZ wasn’t just a dot on the map. It was a concept, a collection of discrete ideas and hopes, fears and feelings. A Mortal Spirit, and he was standing right on top of it.
“Now you understand,” Algonquin said, reaching out to pat Myron’s graying hair with a watery tendril. “You were right, Myron. I had no need for a human city. What I needed was a vessel. A concept for you to cling to and fill with your own ideas, because that’s how human magic works. You take something innocent, like a city, and you give it power by projecting your fears and desires on top of it. On a person-by-person level, it doesn’t add up to much. But sell a dream to the world—combine the ambition of thousands, millions,billionsof humans—and you end up with monsters no one can control, including yourselves.” She tilted the reflection of his head. “Now do you understand why we were willing to die to stop the rising magic from bringing them to life?”
Myron had understood from the moment he’d first seen Marci Novalli’s death spirit. All Algonquin’s explanation had done, besides satisfy his curiosity, was add even more weight to his resolve and a new, broader target for his end game. “I understand you perfectly, madame,” he said, stepping away from her touch. “These spirits are terrifying, and it is in all of our best interests to stop them.” He moved to the edge of the circle. “Ready to begin when you are.”
“Oh,” Algonquin said, clearly surprised by his sudden and unequivocal agreement. “Well, glad to know there are humans who can grasp the larger picture.”
“I have always had a clear vision of what must be done,” Myron replied, flashing her his famous smile, the one he normally saved for photo shoots. But while his outside was perfectly collected, his mind was boiling with a terrified anger that could no longer be contained.
