The spirit flicked his ears in the cat equivalent of a shrug, and Marci gaped at him. “Really?” she asked out loud.
“Are you talking to the spirit?” Sir Myron demanded, grabbing the table as he leaned in closer. “What does he say?”
Marci waved for him to be quiet and kept her focus on Ghost, who unfortunately seemed to be struggling to stay awake. “Come on, buddy,” she coaxed. “If there was ever a time to drop the cryptic-cat act and just give me a straight answer, it’s now.”
I’m not being cryptic,the spirit whispered grumpily in her mind.I’m as new to this as you. But I know you’re not what they say. At least not yet.
“How?”
The cat yawned and closed his eyes again.Because if you were, I wouldn’t be this tired.
“Oh, comeon,” she said, reaching out to pinch the icy fur on his back. “Don’t go back to sleep.”
But it was too late. Ghost had already turned nearly completely transparent, his presence in her mind receding as it only did when he was deeply asleep.
“He faded,” Myron said accusingly. “The magic here is simply too weak to support a spirit of his size.”
Marci dropped her eyes. Much as she hated to admit it, Sir Myron was right. She’d dismissed Ghost’s current downturn as the natural consequence of blowing so much magic to scare Gregory, but if she was honest with herself, he’d been running on low power ever since they’d left the DFZ, and no wonder. She’d noticed herself how empty and lifeless Heartstriker Mountain felt when compared to the pea-soup magic you found in Algonquin’s city. If that was how it felt to her, how much worse must it be for Ghost, who was entirely made of magic? If it wasn’t for Amelia’s flame, he might have vanished entirely.
Even without all the stuff Sir Myron had told her, that was a sobering thought. She’d only had Ghost for a little over a month, but what a month it had been. He was her cat and her foxhole buddy, as close and dear to her as Julius himself. Maybe even more so, because while Julius belonged to his world, Ghost washers.He depended on her,and as she looked down at the faint shadow of his outline on the table, all Marci could think was that she was doing a piss-poor job of it.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
Sir Myron arched an eyebrow. “Okay what?”
“I’m ready to become a Merlin,” she said solemnly, folding her hands on the table. “I know you just said you don’t know exactly how that works, but you clearly know more than I do, so I’m ready to try. What do I do?”
For some reason, this announcement drew a sour look from the older mage. General Jackson, on the other hand, was grinning like she’d just landed the shot of the century. “I was hoping you’d say that,” she said, folding her gloved hands on the table. “With your permission, Miss Novalli, I’d like to take you into protective custody.”
“Huh?” Marci said, blinking in surprise. “Why? Protective from what?”
“Everything,” the general said flatly. “I’m not a mage like you or Myron, but I amhighlyinvested in humanity’s long-term magical security. I’ve just had a Merlin dropped into my lap fifty years ahead of schedule. That’s not the kind of good fortune I’m willing to gamble.”
Marci still didn’t get it. “But…Sir Myron just said you guys don’t even know what a Merlin actually does.”
The general shrugged. “We know they’re powerful. That’s enough for me.”
That seemed like nebulous reasoning to Marci, but before she could say as much, General Jackson leaned over the table, her dark eyes sharp as knives in her oddly ageless face. “I don’t think you understand our situation,” she said quietly. “For the past sixty years, the reawakening of spirits and reemergence of dragons has left humanity scrambling to keep up. Even with modern magical advances in weapons and security, we’ve always been the weakest force in this new power structure. That’s how spirits like Algonquin and dragons like Bethesda have been able to take and hold so much ground. Because for the last six decades, humanity has been at a crippling disadvantage. Quite frankly, the only reason we haven’t been wiped out or enslaved already is because of our gross numbers advantage. But even that edge won’t last forever. Spirits and dragons have time on their side. We, on the other hand, are mortal, and while we have our own form of magic, we’ve lost all cultural knowledge for how to use it. Myron’s one of the best mages in the world, and even he knows only a fraction of what an apprentice would have been taught before the drought.”
“Less than a fraction,” Sir Myron growled, his ringed fingers curling into fists. “A sliver. Apittance.”
His voice shook with an anger Marci knewverywell. She’d raged herself at how unfair it was that dragons and spirits had gone right back to business as usual while humanity had been forced to relearn everything from scratch. But even so. “It’s not like we’re helpless,” she said. “The EU shot down that dragon who went crazy over Turkey twenty years ago. And you!” She turned to Myron. “You got your knighthood because you banished the spirit of the Thames River and stopped it from flooding London. I wrote an entire paper about it.”
“Then you should know that I and my entire team nearly died in the process,” Sir Myron said bitterly. “We’ve made huge advancements in magic considering we didn’t even believe in the stuff sixty years ago, but we are still far,farbehind where we need to be.”
“Population and military strength have kept us from open conflict,” the general picked up. “But none of that helped us save Detroit when Algonquin claimed it, and we won’t be able to save the next city a spirit decides to take, either. Just look at China. Dragons took over the ruling Communist Party barely a week after the return of magic, and they’ve been running the country like their own private kingdom ever since. Same goes for Algonquin and the DFZ. We can’t even make her honor basic human rights because we can’tdoanything to her, and she knows it.”
Marci blew out a breath. “And you really think one Merlin could change that?”
“I do,” General Jackson said firmly. “Myron’s histories might not agree on the details, but all of them describe Merlins as mages with access to a caliber of magic miles above what we have now, enough to put them on equal footing with dragons and spirits. Even if we assume those stories are grossly exaggerated, there’s still a good chance that you and your spirit could be the push we need to tip the balance of global power back into humanity’s favor. If you really are the Merlin, and you’re even half of what the stories say, you could be what finally turns the tide back in our favor. That’s a chance I’m willing to risk a great deal for, Miss Novalli.”
Marci swallowed. That was a lot to take in, though at least now she understood why Amelia had pushed so hard to win her over back at the beach. Having the world’s first Merlin as your pet human would have been quite the ace up her sleeve. But then, maybe that was why she’d given Marci her fire yesterday. Maybe it wasn’t actually a ploy by Amelia to keep herself safe from some unknown threat. Maybe it was an oblique way to make sure Marci had the magic she needed to fuel Ghost.
That last bit felt a little far-fetched and, frankly, way too selfless for Amelia. She might not care about her clan, but when it came to magic, the Planeswalker was as ambitious as any dragon. However much she liked humans, Marci couldn’t imagine her risking her fire to keep the first Mortal Spirit ticking over unless that Mortal Spirit and its Merlin were firmly under her control. But while Marci was busy thinking all these puzzles through, General Jackson interpreted her thoughtful silence in an entirely different way.
“I know this is an enormous responsibility,” she said gently, giving Marci a look that would have been reassuring on a less stern face. “I’m asking a very big thing of you, and I don’t fault you for being nervous, but you owe it to your country and your species to see it through.”
“I’m not nervous,” Marci said, snapping herself out of the endless cycle of dragon plots. “I volunteered, remember? You’re the one who brought up protective custody.” She frowned. “What would that entail, anyway?”
