Illusion of Power
The red emergency lighting cast everything in shades of desperation. Veronica released Raven’s fingers. A single bead of perspiration ran the length of her jaw. Exhaustion radiated from both of them. They’d been drawing on reserves they didn’t have, pushing against magical barriers that shouldn’t exist.
The crimson glow made every shadow deeper, every face more angular. It turned the familiar reading room into something alien, where normal rules didn’t apply. The air felt thick and stale, charged with the residue of failed magic. Or maybe it was just the fact that fresh air was no longer being pumped into the reception area.
“We’re not strong enough alone,” Veronica whispered again, but this time her voice carried a different quality—no give in it at all.
Raven’s shoulders heaved in defeat before he gave her the tiniest nod.
She pivoted toward Jakin with the slow deliberation of someone making a choice that couldn’t be unmade. He sat apart from the rest of us, a slim volume still balanced on his knees, but his attention wasn’t on the pages anymore. His dark eyes tracked every movement in the room with predatory awareness. He counted weaknesses and exits the way he always did, the same way Raven and every other High Priest did. Except that Jakin was always out for himself, the rest of us be damned.
Around us, the chaos kept stacking—more radios, more boots in the corridor. Officers muttered into crackling or dead radios. Through an intercom, I could hear footsteps in the corridor beyond. More personnel arrived, drawn by reports of the power failure and lockdown. One after another, they entered through the opened emergency exit without badging in, which no doubt set Dru’s teeth on edge. We were being surrounded, one uniform at a time.
“Jakin,” Veronica grated out above the noise. “We need you. I need you.”
The words hung in the battery-lit air like an admission of guilt she couldn’t take back. Raven’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t contradict her. If anything, he shifted closer to Veronica’s position, creating a united front. The gesture told me plainly how desperate they’d become. Raven didn’t ask for help lightly, especially not from Jakin, and probably Veronica was the only person in the room who might get a positive response from him.
I felt the shift in the room’s energy as every conversation paused. Even Charlie looked up from his hunched position against a filing cabinet. Shame bled from him and left a bitter taste at the back of my throat.
But why? What has he done?
The officers nearest us inclined forward slightly, sensing something significant was happening without understanding what.
Suddenly aware of her audience, Veronica cleared her throat and extended a hand to Jakin. “Let’s all meditate, shall we? That should help us all stay calm until this is over.”
Immediately, a few officers rolled their eyes or shrugged, and the attention on Veronica and her friends on the floor faded.
Jakin closed his book with deliberate care, the sound sharp in the sudden quiet. When he rose, it was with the fluid grace that had always marked him as dangerous. But something about the movement felt performative now, as if he were playing a role he’d rehearsed too many times.
Of course. I watched him skim the room with artificial indifference. Of course, he’d wait until the last moment to get dramatic.
But something about his energy signature felt off. I’d always been able to read Jakin’s emotions, even when I didn’t want to. Arrogance was his default setting, along with a restless hunger for power that made my skin crawl now that I recognized it for what it was. The combination had been consistent since I’d first met him a year and a half ago—unpleasant but reliable.
Now, though, there was something else running under it. Something that felt suspiciously like fear wrapped in layers of careful control. Not the clean fear of physical danger. Something murkier. Older. Silt at the bottom of it.
That can’t be right.
Jakin Crutchfield didn’t do fear. He did predatory confidence and barely leashed violence. He did smugness and cold calculation. But not fear. Never fear. He was the one other people feared, and that’s the way he liked it.
Another figure in uniform stepped through the open emergency door. The newcomer talked into a radio that still wasn’t transmitting. They were arriving faster now. One more every couple of minutes. We were running out of time and out of space to hide.
Obviously, these people don’t get enough excitement if taking over a rare books library is the highlight of their year.
The three Daeganeans knelt in a tight triangle between the vault door and me, their knees almost touching. Veronica and Raven immediately joined hands again, their fingers interlacing easily. Instead of a gasp, I breathed in what I saw. The connection between them was visible to my empathic senses. A steady flow of shared energy and intent, a mix of purples and blues with a touch of magenta.
Jakin hesitated for just a moment before completing the circle.
The nearest German Shepherd shifted uneasily, ears flicking toward the vault as if something was happening behind the sealed door. The handler tightened his grip. He murmured something under his breath, but the dog didn’t settle.
“On three,” Veronica said. Everything after that was a Daeganean chant under her breath, her head nodding on one and two.
I watched the shimmer begin to form around them, that same heat-wave distortion I’d seen before. But this time, something was different. Veronica’s face contracted with concentration. Sweat beaded at her temples as the whole room seemed hotter. Raven’s breathing had gone deep and controlled, the way it did when he was pushing his abilities to their limits.
Jakin looked almost relaxed.
The shimmer expanded outward, stronger than their previous attempts. It reached the vault door and began to spread across the metal surface like a liquid force field, coating it in protective energy. For a moment, I thought they’d succeeded. The barrier looked solid, substantial—a real defense against whatever the officers planned to do once they regained control of the situation.
Then it wavered.
The magical barrier held for perhaps ten seconds before it began to fracture. Hairline cracks appeared in the shimmer. They spread outward from a point that seemed to originate where Jakin sat on the floor. The shimmer shattered. The dog let out a sharp bark and lunged an inch forward, then froze, muscles rigid. The handler cursed softly and pulled it back. On the other side of the circulation desk, the other dog whined, and its handler gave several barely obeyed commands. The protective field collapsed entirely, dissolving like mist in red sunlight.
Veronica’s hands fell away from the circle, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Raven stared at the vault door as if he could will the protection back into existence through sheer determination. But his expression was shifting from focus to confusion, then to something darker.
“That’s impossible.” Raven twisted to confront Jakin directly. His voice carried a note I’d never heard before. Betrayal? Surprise? “It should have held. I felt… nothing from you.”
The words landed. Something shifted in the room—the kind of change animals feel before an earthquake, when they just run.
Jakin’s face went very still. Not angry. Not defensive. Just… empty.
“That’s not possible,” Samantha said from her position near Dru. Her voice was small, uncertain. “Jakin’s one of the strongest priests in the order. Everyone knows that.” She looked directly at me as though she were pleading with me to confirm what we both had accepted as gospel.
But Veronica wasn’t looking at Jakin anymore. Her hand went to her forehead. She pressed her fingers against her temple as if fighting off a sudden headache. Her eyes unfocused, taking on that distant quality I’d seen in psychics having visions.
“When we cast together, I could feel it,” she said to Raven. “There was nothing on his end. We were drawing from an empty well — everything we were putting out came from you and me, right down to our own life forces.” Her gaze sharpened, coming back to the present. “That’s when I remembered. A memory from the future, after the apocalypse, when I learned his secrets.”
Jakin tensed but otherwise remained perfectly still, but I could see the stiffness building in his shoulders, the careful way he held his hands to keep them from shaking.
Veronica’s voice, when it came, was eerily calm. “It’s a façade! It was always Aoife. You were just borrowing her power. Or… or she was lending hers to you. It wasn’t just borrowed magic. It was rigged to feel like your own. A parasitic bond from when you were her lover, tailored to perfectly mimic the signature of your own energy. I have to hand it to Aoife. It was a flawless deception. Etched into your skin in those lightning tattoos you hide on your arms. No one could have felt the difference because, to any magical sense, it was you. We were drawing from an empty well because the well itself was an illusion.”
It landed.
Jakin’s mouth opened as if he might deny it, but nothing came. No smooth explanation, no deflection, no clever manipulation to turn the accusation back on his accuser. Not even his usual gaslighting when caught in a lie. For a man who’d built his reputation on having an answer for everything, his silence said enough.
A flicker of anger crossed his face—familiar territory, the rage he defaulted to when cornered. I felt something tighten in my chest. Not my emotions but his. Shame, real and bone-deep, that seemed to hollow him out from the inside.
His gaze found Samantha’s face. He searched for something. Maybe he hoped she wouldn’t believe it. Maybe he looked for forgiveness he knew he didn’t deserve. But whatever warmth she’d been tentatively offering him was already packed up and gone.
Probably a good thing he didn’t look at me because I had far less kindness to give than Samantha.
Jakin’s shoulders sagged, all that rehearsed posture going out of him at once. The predatory confidence simply vanished. What remained was a man who looked older, smaller.
He didn’t deny it. He just knelt there on the floor. He stared at his hands as if he expected to feel something—light, heat, proof—but found nothing.
“Jakin?” Samantha’s voice cracked on his name, but the sympathy I expected wasn’t there. Something else built in her energy. Not the heartbreak of someone who’d once loved him before I’d met him, but fury.
Her rage came through my empathic field at full volume, nothing held back. It wasn’t the devastation of lost love. It was the clean, bright anger of someone who’d discovered they’d been played. Jakin hadn’t just lied to her. He’d used magic to manipulate her affections, to keep her close, to make her believe in something that had never existed. And now it turned out that power hadn’t even been his to begin with.
Her trust didn’t break—it was ripped out. He’d done the same to me sometime after Samantha’s fling with him, and I’d retreated to a relationship with Charlie while she’d retreated to an equally bad relationship bent on hurting Jakin. We only hurt ourselves, but now we both knew the truth.
The silence stretched, opening something raw between us. I could sense the exact moment when both my realization and Samantha’s broke in the room—not cleanly—no bone-snap to it—but with the slow tear of rotten linen giving way under too much pressure.
I’d spent over a year resenting Jakin’s arrogance, but I’d still leaned on the idea that his power was real. That it counted for something. Maybe even that he had some deeper integrity I couldn’t see. But now the illusion was gone. He hadn’t just lied. He’d faked the one thing we couldn’t afford to fake. In a world where magical ability meant the difference between protection and vulnerability, between life and death, he’d built his entire identity on borrowed strength.
We weren’t a circle anymore. Just pieces of one. And Jakin probably thought they’d never realize he wasn’t pulling his weight in a three-way effort of magic.
The sound of more footsteps echoed from the corridor with at least three new arrivals. Their voices carried the crisp authority of people accustomed to being obeyed. Our window was closing fast, and we had no protection left to offer.
From somewhere beyond Gate 1, I heard the distinctive rumble of backup generators and a slight vibration in the building itself. They caught with mechanical certainty. The red emergency lighting flickered, and for a brief moment, the room plunged into absolute darkness.
Deanna’s doing, no doubt. She would see only the SCIF protocols and the Chancellor’s looming arrival, not the ward lattice that faltered with every surge. To her, this was her job as an administrator. To us, it was exposure.
In the darkness, the dogs whined—high and keening—before falling silent.
In that heartbeat of blackness, I felt something shift in the vault’s protections. Not stronger—more exposed. As if the blackout had scrambled more than the lights. The wards must be synchronized to continuous current. A power cycle desynchronizes the lattice, leaving the protections unstable until the grid re-locks.
Beside me, Raven’s voice emerged from the darkness, stunned and foggy. Late to respond to the revelation, like he was still working through it in his head. “You were faking? All this time…?”
Before Jakin could answer, whether he planned to or not, the main lights blazed on, flooding the room with cold, merciless clarity.
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