Page 42 of The Mage on the Hill
“John?” Yes, damn his eyes. Director John Whittaker sat primly beside his bed. “Where?”
The director shook his head. “For Toby’s safety, I won’t tell you that.”
“Hospice,” Darius snarled. “You’re… killing him. Hechanneled.”
“We’re doing all we can to make certain he’s comfortable and supported. His parents are with him. When he wakes up, we’ll test him once more, just in case. But the wild magic is still too evident. I’m sorry. Beyond that, I can’t discuss him with you. We do have other things to talk about. The guild owes you several apologies.”
Despite the urge to throttle John until he revealed where Toby was, the last statement completely threw him. “What?”
“We leftyouunsupported fifteen years ago. Yes, you’d engaged in dangerous activities that caused one of your students to die a horrific death—”
Darius couldn’t help a wince.
“But we left you, wounded and damaged in body and mind, to fend for yourself. That was not well done. Not at all. We overreacted. Your exile from the guild was premature. While your right to teach needed to be revoked, that’s not in question, we abandoned you. For that I’m truly sorry.”
“Didn’t… need you.”
“I’m pleased to see you’ve done as well as you have. The house is in relatively good shape. Your koi pond looks lovely.”
He was at my koi pond?The feeling of violation wasn’t entirely rational, but it surged up in a nauseating wave. “Get out. Out of my… damn… house.”
John smiled indulgently and patted Darius’s knee. “We should at least have speech therapy set up for you. Weekly visits from the guild. Perhaps some projects you could work on outside of teaching. For now, though, I’ll leave you to rest. There’s water and aspirin on your bedside table. And several precooked meals stored in your freezer until you get your strength back.”
I have my strength, you insufferably smug weasel!His planned lunge at the director came up short when his headache blinded him, though. All he could do was listen to expensive dress shoes clomping down his stairs and down his first-floor hallway. The door shut. A car started up outside and drove away.They took Toby. They took my Toby.What the hell am I supposed to do?
In terrible pain, exhausted, and heartbroken, he shattered. Great sobs racked his body, his single eye stinging with bitter tears while the phantom of his ruined eye echoed the sensation. He’d failed. Again. Someone else under his care was going to die. Worse, this time it was someone he’d come to love.
He’d never managed to tell Toby that, and now he would die without knowing that he had been loved. The guild would never let Darius see him. Not even to say goodbye.
“Fuck, fuck,fuck!”
The window was open. A soft breeze cooled his overheated face. The thought occurred to him that he should throw himself out the window. Wasn’t high enough, though. No guarantee he would die. Still, he dragged himself over and leaned on the sill. The weeping cherry swayed, trailing leaf fingers in the koi pond, where flashes of gold and white confirmed the fish were still active and healthy. The bench where he’d sat with Toby sat empty beside the water. It would always be empty now.
He took the aspirin and drank the water, just to get himself to stop sobbing for a moment. Then he wandered downstairs, registering in a vague, clouded way that he wore only his boxers. No one was in the house. Who cared? Past the parlor sofa where Toby had napped when he was tired. Past the dining room table where he’d built his strange and imaginative Arcana webs. Into the kitchen where he had chattered at Darius and helped him cook and clean up. The kitchen where Darius had begun to speak again in sentences of more than two words. The kitchen where—
The drawer he’d pulled open contained a half-eaten package of Oreos. Toby’s Oreos that he would never finish now. They’d starve him in hospice. Let him die while they kept him drugged. Bright, chattering, beautiful Toby. The damned Oreos were the tinder that caught his little sparks of anger.
“No,” Darius said to the Oreos. “No. This can’t be. I won’t… let it.”
What exactly he was going to do, he didn’t know yet. First he needed to find Toby.No, wait, first I need to get dressed. He showered and made an effort to dress respectably. The blue button-down that Zubayr had always said matched his eyes was a little big on his bony frame but presentable. Black slacks. A pair of loafers he found at the back of his closet. Hair tied back neatly.
Not bad. Oh. Eye patch.
There. Now he looked less like a homeless disaster survivor and more like a professor with a pirate affectation. His keys were on their hook by the garage. His truck wasinthe garage. Someone had obviously driven it home for him. The guild might have been bastards, but they weren’t thieves. Four hospices he knew from long ago. Every guild member knew them just in case one might be called upon to visit a relative or friend there. The guild hospices weren’t just for euthanasia, but also for elderly mages at the end-of-life stage and those who were terminally ill with diseases magic couldn’t contain. He hoped the count remained at four. If there were newer ones, he had no idea how he would find them, though the need couldn’t have grown that much in fifteen years. New ones were unlikely due to cost of land acquisition and so on. New ones outside the county were even more unlikely since Montchanin Guild wouldn’t cross over into another guild’s territory.
Reaching out for Toby through his channels would be possible through any connected metal or stone, but only within a narrow radius. His range was about two acres—beyond that, what he could distinguish became muddy and indistinct, finally petering out to nothing. He would need to be standing on a hospice’s grounds to know if Toby was there.
He wasn’t sure after his visit from John what his guild status was now, but it sounded as if he had been reinstated with certain caveats and restrictions. He should be able to enter a hospice without raising alarms? Maybe. Worrying about maybe got him nowhere, though. He couldn’t just sit in the garage andnottry to find Toby.
His first stop was Avalon, a pretty sandstone building reminiscent of a French château that backed up to state park land on an unnamed lane off Adams Dam Road. The fanciful name made sense to Darius in an odd way. Why not name a place where mages went to die after the Isle of Apples, where Arthur went to his final rest? He was an avatar of the Summer King after all, an aspect of a resurrection deity. It struck Darius as a more hopeful name rather than one that only pointed toward a quiet death.
Empty attaché tucked under his arm, Darius straightened from his habitual hunch and strode inside. Confidence. Friendly assurance. Once those things had been second nature, and he told himself sternly that he could recapture them.
Right up to the front desk where a sympathetic-faced young man looked up and chirped, “Good afternoon. Can I help you?”
For a single panicked moment, Darius forgot how to form words. The young man cocked his head and Darius blurted out, “Toby Jones. Counseling appointment.”
There. That didn’t sound too deranged.
