Ash arrived in Philly hours early for his scheduled meeting with Caren Navarrete. All Fraternitas Mercurii activities had been canceled for the day thanks to the tragedy; Arcadia’s Alchemists’ Guild facilities were shuttered, too. On a day like this Ash might normally have immersed himself in his private research in his home lab—the top-secret stuff he couldn’t risk working on in the Guild labs with the likes of Bram Baptiste hovering around. But he hadn’t wanted to stay in the house any longer than he had to after pissing off Dad.
It was a wet, clammy day—the kind that never happened in Arcadia, where the sun always shone by day, the stars by night. Ash liked days like this, he realized. Arcadia’s perpetual brightness was false.
He wandered Center City in the rain for a while. Stopped into a cafe for tea, connected to the Wi-Fi to review mundane media coverage of the so-called Midnight Riots. Skimmed through the case file, zoning out on the gruesome photos, asking himself for the umpteenth time if he shouldn’t be feeling more disturbance at the deaths of his colleagues, and more fear for his own life, given that he was hanging around Philadelphia alone not twenty-four hours after the attacks. Ash had heard the story countless times, since before his brain had learned to make sense of words—how he’d come into the world pried from the smoking womb of a mangled corpse. Death had given birth to him. Death felt, in many ways, more like a parent to him than the man who’d raised him. It was difficult, he supposed, to drum up fear of a thing he’d known so intimately for so long.
He packed up his laptop after a while. Set out for one last stroll before he would have to head to Port Richmond for his meeting with Navarrete.
Walking down Market Street, glanced through the glass-door entrance of The Shops at Liberty Place.
Slowed his steps. Doubled back. Peered in.
In the center of the huge Westin lobby, beneath its opulent chandelier, sat a grand piano.
Indecision gripped him for a moment. There were people around. With the exception of the music professor, Ash had never played in front of an audience.
He checked his heirloom pocket watch.
Should really get going, too…
Peered in again at the piano.
Just a brush of the keys…
He slipped in through the door, shuffled across the marble floor of the lobby, reflexively noting every human who had a clear sightline, feeling as if all eyes were on him.
Arrived at the piano.
Unshouldered his bag and sat.
Inhaled.
Exhaled.
Felt a sudden preternatural calm.
With the piano now in front of him, its keys within easy reach of his fingers, he felt as if he and the instrument were entirely alone.
Ash took a deep breath, felt his mana channels stir to life with thrumming currents. Pushed up his sleeves a bit, closed his eyes, let his inner eye bloom open; his hands drift up to alight gingerly on the keys, a tactile sensation that felt intimately familiar. The instrument like an extension, an appendage of himself.
A gestating silence—
Then, the third movement of Moonlight Sonata came tearing out of him: a coded, calculated madness, rocking, rollicking, tempestuous, broken chords unfurling in tide after frenzied tide.
Almost instantly, he felt all sense of his boundaries dissolve—all demarcation of anatomy, identity, a (non-)essence loosed from the cadaver, from all anchorage in time and place, into a vastness with which it was consummate—one—void of distinction, a landscape spanning perception and beyond—a field, limitless and changeless, traversed by storms.
The performance didn’t come to an end so much as he was born—as the last resounding chord died out, its ghost lingering in the silence.
The sense of his surroundings closed in on him: first, the weight of his own body; then, the weight of others’ eyes.
He felt the stranger before he saw them.
Ash opened his eyes—took in the sight of a kid not much older than himself standing beside the piano, a flair-covered bag slung crosswise over their body. They looked like someone you’d see in a photo tagged #fashion on Tumblr, like a walking Crayola eight-pack: short wavy powder-blue hair, pink lips, a faded purple denim jacket over a yellow t-shirt with a huge blood-red grimacing mouth across the chest. Acid wash jeans flecked with different colors of paint, shredded horizontally across the thighs. White high-tops with rainbow laces.
Somehow, this ensemble worked.
Ash, by contrast, had on his favorite pair of red Chucks Dad hated. Aside from that, his outfit—he was suddenly painfully aware—was boring: his perpetual gray peacoat, dark jeans, black sweater.
“You’re really good. Do you know Kitty-valse?” The stranger’s voice ranged lower than Ash’s, but had a gentle, unaffected, childlike inflection. Nothing most people would have read as male, despite the pitch.
“Yeah, actually.”
The stranger moved to sit down on the bench. Ash scooted to make room.
The stranger cracked their knuckles. Poised graceful fingers over the keys.
Ash hesitated, then positioned his own hands. Met the stranger’s eye briefly.
After a coordinated intake of air, the two of them played.
The notes lilted, skipped, flirted, conversed, melody lines streaming faultlessly back and forth between two pairs of hands.
Ash kept his eyes open this time, found coaxing the instrument came just as easily. He didn’t look at the stranger while they played, but he was vividly aware of another presence, of an aura of color, and from the corner of his eye he traced the artful motions of the unfamiliar hands skimming and darting in complement to his own.
By the time the duet was done, a small crowd had gathered. A few passers-by laid cash on top of the piano.
The stranger jiggled excitedly. “Thank you! That was really fun! I like your ink.”
Ash glanced down at his tattooed left arm, cleared his throat. “Thanks.”
The stranger put out a hand—their nails were painted in a gradient, navy blue to teal, a rough match to their hair—and stopped just short of tracing the exposed part of Ash’s forearm. “May I?”
Ash stiffened. “Sorry—I don’t like being touched.”
The stranger withdrew the hand, gave a little shrug, smiled. “Neither do I! I like touching other people sometimes, if they’ll let me. But I really don’t like them touching me.” They giggled, bobbed their head, birdlike. “Playing piano’s kind of as close as I get to having sex.”
Ash stared at them. “Yeah…me too.” He hesitated. “Um, I guess it’s…okay, though, if you want to have a closer look?”
“I’d love to!”
Ash shrugged his coat off, pushed his sleeve all the way up to his bicep, held out his arm, displaying the assortment of alchemical circles and symbols linked by labyrinths of aurichalcum channels. The stranger’s starburst-contact-lensed eyes surveyed the tattoos so closely it could have been a touch.
Ash realized he didn’t mind.
“You’re really pale,” said the stranger.
“So are you.”
“Not as pale as you!” They continued studying the web of interlinked tattoos. Pointed to one of them, careful not to make contact. Ash’s skin tingled at the proximity of their fingertip. “What’s that?”
“An alchemical array.”
“That sounds neat! Do you do magic?”
Ash blinked mutely, not sure how to answer. He’d set himself up for this, he realized. He couldn’t very well tell someone who was, as far as he knew, a mundane that he was a literal practitioner of magic. It went against the Occultation Protocols.
“Are you Wiccan?” they went on, with an amiable tilt of their head. “Or some other juicy-fruity flavor of neopagan?”
“Oh,” said Ash. “I’m…yeah, I’m Wiccan. That’s right.”
The stranger smiled. “I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in the supernatural.”
I don’t either, Ash wanted badly to say. But real magic’s not hocus pocus. It’s just stuff mundane science hasn’t figured out how to explain yet. “Ah, well…different strokes,” he said instead, feeling stupid.
“Sure. I mean, who’s to say what’s real, right?” The stranger giggled, kicked their legs, rocked around a bit on the bench. “Honestly, I’m jealous of people who believe in things.”
“Yeah…me too.”
“But you just said you believe in Wicca.”
“Oh…right.”
The stranger surveyed Ash, smiling. Something in their expression looked fixed. Something in their eyes didn’t seem to jibe with their sunny affect.
“Well, it was nice to meet you,” they said at last, clambering to their feet. “Have my card!”
“Uh…thanks?” Ash took the proffered rectangle of paper.
He watched the stranger walk away—a kind of shambling gait that would have looked awkward if they hadn’t been so elegantly built—then glanced down at their card.
Valentine, it read, alongside a rainbow heart logo and a stylized neck-up portrait of the stranger. There was an Instagram handle, and, more prominently, an address for a YouTube channel.
Underneath all this, the stranger had drawn something in red ink that made every fine hair on Ash’s body stand on end.
He snapped his head up, glanced around frantically.
But “Valentine” was gone.
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