Episode 17: Spell
Date: 1604
Location: France
The cage rattled over every rut and stone in the road, and the iron bars shuddered against their bolts with each jolt of the carriage wheels. Inside, the three women swayed with the motion, their wrists raw from the manacles that had been fastened too tight hours ago. A heavy tarp had been thrown over the cage, sealing them in darkness. The only light came from the faint orange glow of distant torches bleeding through the canvas weave.
Briana Withridge pressed her shoulder against the cage door and worked her fingers around the chain that held it shut. The links were thick, cold, and slick with evening dew. She pulled at the padlock, twisted the chain where it looped through the bars, and tried to find a weak joint or a bolt that had come loose from the rattling. Nothing gave.
She let go and slumped back against the bars, breathing hard.
Across from her, Madeline Evans sat with her knees drawn to her chest. Her dress was torn at the sleeve where one of the guards had grabbed her. Briana's attempt failed. Madeline swallowed.
"We must escape before we reach the pyres." Her voice was thin. She turned to the third woman in the cage. "Isobel?"
Countess Marguerite Isobel Theroux sat against the far wall of the cage with her back straight and her hands resting in her lap as though she were seated at a dining table rather than in an iron box being dragged to her execution. She wore a red hooded cape, the hood pulled forward so that it cast her face in shadow.
"They've taken the book, and with it, our powers. What would you have me do?"
"Anything." Briana's voice cracked. "We're running out of time."
"Time is the one thing we do have. If we fall this night, I promise you, we will rise again to finish our quest."
The carriage lurched and stopped.
Briana and Madeline both gasped. The wheels had gone silent. Outside, a sound was building, low at first and then swelling into something ugly. Voices. Dozens of them. Shouting.
The tarp was ripped away from the cage door.
Torchlight flooded in, harsh and orange, and with it came the roar of the mob. They pressed forward, men and women dressed in rough wool and linen, their eyes wild with righteous fury. Pitchforks jutted above the crowd. Someone hurled a stone that clanged off the bars inches from Madeline's head, and she flinched back with a cry.
A man in a black hooded robe unlocked the chain and wrenched the cage door open. He reached in and seized Briana by the arm, hauling her out and shoving her toward another guard who caught her roughly and began dragging her through the crowd. Madeline was next, pulled, stumbling from the cage.
"Please, we've done nothing! Have mercy!"
The mob answered with jeers.
The hooded man turned back to the cage. Isobel had not moved. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out, setting her feet on the ground and pushing her forward. She walked without resistance, her steps unhurried even as the crowd surged around her.
Another guard reached up and yanked the red hood from her head.
Isobel whipped around, and torchlight found her face. Dark hair fell past her shoulders. Her features were fine, striking. She fixed the mob with a look of such cold contempt that several of the nearest villagers took a step back.
The guard shoved her forward again, toward the clearing where three tall stakes rose from piles of stacked wood. Madeline and Briana were already being lashed to two of them, rope wound tight around their chests and arms. Both women wept openly, their faces streaked with tears and dirt.
A well-dressed man stepped out from the front of the crowd. His coat was dark and finely tailored, his collar starched white. He stopped in front of Isobel and looked her in the eye.
She stared back at him. "Magistrate Wilkins. Come to enjoy your handiwork?"
Wilkins struck her across the face with the back of his hand. The blow was hard enough to snap her head to the side, and she stumbled back against the hooded guard, who caught her and held her upright. A line of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth.
"Tell me of the three stones of power, Countess." Wilkins leaned closer. "You may yet escape the pyre's flames."
Isobel straightened. She ran her tongue along her lower lip, tasting the blood, and smiled.
"In my book. There's a page marked."
Wilkins turned and gestured. Another man came forward carrying a leather-bound book. Wilkins took it and opened it to a page marked with a long feather. On the page was a symbol. He held the open book up to Isobel's face.
"What means this?"
"It means that the stones of power shall be mine." The smile on her face became darkly gleeful. "And once I possess them, you shall tremble at my feet and never again persecute my kind."
Wilkins stared at her. For a moment, the magistrate's composure faltered. Fear, plain in his face.
Isobel spat. Blood from her split lip struck the open page and landed directly on the symbol, spreading into the ink, seeping into the parchment.
"Animum remitto."
The blood sank into the page as though the paper were drinking it. The symbol on the book pulsed once, dark and wet.
And on Isobel's lower back, where her dress had been torn, and her skin lay bare, the same symbol materialized. It rose into her flesh like a brand pressed from the inside, the lines darkening until the mark was complete.
Wilkins took a step back.
"Demon." His voice had gone hoarse. He thrust the book at the man beside him and pointed toward the pyres. "Join your confederates."
Isobel laughed. It was a cruel sound, bright and sharp. The hooded guard seized her arms and dragged her up the pile of stacked wood toward the third stake. Below, Madeline and Briana were already bound, their faces white with terror.
"Please," Briana whispered.
"Have mercy," Madeline begged.
They grew more frantic as Isobel was walked up the woodpile and lashed to the third stake, the ropes pulled tight across her chest. Several people in the mob shouted with excitement, pressing closer.
"No, no, please!" Madeline thrashed against her bonds. "Have mercy!"
Wilkins stepped forward and raised his hand. The crowd fell to a murmur.
"Madeline Evans. Briana Withridge." He paused. "Countess Marguerite Isobel Theroux."
Isobel laughed again from her stake, mockingly and bright.
"You have been found guilty of committing the darkest art. Witchcraft." Wilkins clasped his hands behind his back. "For this affront against God, I hereby condemn you to burn in the fires of Hell, of which you so eagerly seek communion."
Isobel smirked down at him from atop the pyre. Wilkins nodded at the hooded guard. The guard stepped forward with a lit torch. He moved methodically, touching the flame to the base of each pyre in turn. The dry wood caught fast. Smoke curled upward, and then the first tongues of fire licked along the kindling and began to climb.
Madeline whimpered. Briana sobbed, pulling uselessly at the ropes that held her. The heat was already building, the air above the pyres beginning to shimmer.
Isobel watched the flames rise toward her feet. She was still smiling.
"You think this ends with a lick of flame?" Her voice rose above the crackle of burning wood, above the shouts of the mob. "I sleep but a while. And when the time is appointed, my heir will awaken me, and I will have vengeance!"
She threw her head back and cackled at the night sky, the sound wild and terrible. The fire climbed higher, engulfing the base of all three stakes. Madeline and Briana screamed. Their cries tore through the night, raw and desperate and animal.
Isobel kept laughing. The flames reached her legs, her waist, her chest, and still she laughed, her voice rising with the fire, triumphant and mad and unbroken, even as the smoke swallowed her whole.
— Meteor Freak —
Date: Saturday, November 19, 2011.
Location: Smallville, Kansas
Lana lay on her stomach across Tyson's bed, the old spell book open in front of her, chin propped on one hand. The pages were thick and yellowed, the ink faded in places to near invisibility. She turned them carefully, one at a time, scanning text she couldn't begin to decipher.
"Do we actually need to worry about that thing?" Tyson asked from across the room. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed. "Dean seemed to think Countess Isobel was significant enough to stick around town over. And magic is real, you know. We've established that."
"Yeah, but I can't read any of this anyway." Lana turned another page. Dense script filled both sides, surrounded by hand-drawn illustrations of plants and geometric figures. "I'm just hoping I'll come across something that helps explain what happened in Paris. When I touched Isobel's tomb."
"Magical tomb, magic book, magic tattoo." Tyson ticked them off on his fingers. "The answer is magic."
Lana rolled her eyes and went back to the book, turning pages slowly. The handwriting changed styles in places, as if different sections had been written years apart. Some pages had small illustrations in the margins. Others were nothing but dense blocks of text.
She stopped on a page and squinted at it. "Hmm. So, uh, how's your Latin?"
"This is America. I only speak American." He paused and shook his head dramatically. "Uh, English. Sorry. Been in Kansas too long, it must be getting to me..." he began mumble-singing, "America, Fuck Yeah."
Lana shook her head and looked back down. She turned another page.
The next spread stopped her. The left page held more of the same cramped handwriting, but the right side was different. A large symbol dominated the page, and across its surface, dark reddish-brown stains. Old blood, soaked into the parchment, marked the symbol like a seal.
The lights in the apartment flickered. Once, twice.
Tyson glanced up at the fixture overhead. "All that electrical work in the theater, I probably should've done some up here in the apartment."
"Oh, my God," Lana said.
"What?"
"This is the symbol from Isobel's tomb." She stared at the page. The same design she'd traced her fingers over in that Paris crypt. The same pattern that had burned itself into her skin. "It's the same one."
"Spooky," Tyson said in an exaggerated voice. "Why am I not surprised?"
Lana reached out. Her fingertips hovered over the bloodstained symbol for a moment, then pressed flat against the page.
The symbol lit up.
Pink light bled through the old parchment, bright and warm, pulsing outward from beneath her hand. At the same time, heat flared across Lana's lower back where the tattoo sat hidden under her shirt. The same color. The same glow, visible through the fabric.
A surge of energy hit her like a current. Her head rolled back. Her eyes opened. They were pink. Bright, luminous, wrong. The color filled them completely for one long second. Then it faded.
A smile formed on Lana's lips. Slow. Serene. The kind of calm that had nothing soft in it.
Tyson looked at Lana, and for the first time, he didn't have his usual joking tone. "You okay?"
Lana stood up from the bed. Slow, deliberate, the spell book held loosely in one hand at her side. She turned to Tyson, but the look was wrong. As if he were a stranger. As if she were cataloging him.
She didn't answer. Instead, she looked down at herself. Her free hand came up and touched her stomach lightly, fingers pressing against the fabric of her shirt. Testing. Feeling.
"Never been better," she said.
Her voice was Lana's voice. But the cadence was different. She looked at Tyson again with that same quiet smile.
Tyson didn't move. But everything in him shifted. It wasn't the voice. It wasn't the smile. Those were wrong, sure, but wrong in a way he might have talked himself out of noticing. People got weird sometimes. Touched something old and spooky and needed a second to shake it off.
No. It wasn't that.
It was her aura.
He'd been seeing auras since the day he arrived in Smallville. Every Meteor Freak he'd tangled with, every creature that wasn't quite human. Lana's had always been green. Faint, steady, the telltale signature of meteor rock exposure. He'd taken that ability from her, pulled it out of her without really understanding what it did, because green auras meant Meteor Freaks and Lana being one was a problem he needed to get ahead of. He'd given her something back, though. Tina Greer's shapeshifting.
But shapeshifting wouldn't change an aura's color.
And after touching that book, Lana's aura was pink.
Not faintly. Not ambiguously. A deep, saturated pink that clung to her like smoke, rolling off her shoulders and pooling at her feet. The same color that had just lit up the spell book. The same color that had flooded her eyes.
"Your aura just changed colors," Tyson said.
He kept his voice conversational. His arms stayed crossed over his chest, but his weight shifted to the balls of his feet. Casual posture, combat-ready foundation. He looked relaxed. But it was actually anything but.
He ran through what he knew. Green meant meteor freak. Gold meant Kryptonian. He'd seen that on Clark, blazing and unmistakable. Black meant demon. He'd learned that one the hard way. Pink was new.
New was dangerous.
He uncrossed his arms and let them hang at his sides. Open. Ready.
Lana tilted her head. The gesture was birdlike. Curious. Not a movement Lana had ever made.
"You want to tell me what just happened?" he asked. "Because you touched that book, your eyes went full glow stick, and now you're standing there looking at me like you've never seen me before."
She was still holding the spell book. Her grip on it had changed. Not the loose, careless hold from a moment ago. She cradled it now. Close to her body. Possessive.
The pink aura pulsed once, bright, then settled back to its steady burn.
She smiled at him again.
— Meteor Freak —
Isobel moved through Lana's memories like fingers through water.
It came fast. Lana Lang. Her descendant. Obviously. The bloodline had thinned over the centuries, but it was there, unmistakably. The new world. America. A place called Kansas, which Lana's memories painted as flat, quiet, and dull. Hundreds of years. Hundreds. Isobel let that settle. The weight of it should have been staggering, but she'd been dead, and the dead didn't experience time. One moment she was burning. The next she was here, standing in a body that fit like a borrowed dress, looking at a young man who was watching her like he was deciding whether they were going to fight.
Tyson. The memories came in a rush. He was powerful. Not magic, not the way Isobel understood it, but something. Many somethings. Abilities collected like coins in a purse. Meteor rocks, Lana's mind supplied, and Isobel turned the concept over without understanding it fully. Stones from the sky that changed people. Crude. Unpredictable. But the results were undeniable. This boy had gathered power, and he wore it well.
A worthy partner.
Or a dangerous obstacle.
The distinction would depend entirely on the next few minutes.
His question hung between them. The aura. He could see auras. That was inconvenient.
Isobel pulled from Lana's mannerisms. The way the girl tucked her hair behind her ear. The slight duck of her chin when she was embarrassed about something.
"I think the book taught me something," she said. She held it up and gave it a little shake. Kept her voice light. Lana's voice, Lana's cadence. "When I touched the symbol, it was like something clicked. I think my aura changed because I actually learned a spell from it."
The wariness didn't leave him, but something else joined it. "You can do magic? That's awesome." He took a step closer. "I thought you couldn't read any of it."
"I couldn't. I can't. But the symbol did something on its own. Like it was waiting."
"What can you do?"
Isobel crossed to the kitchen counter. She tore a strip from the paper towel roll, slow and deliberate, and held it flat on her open palm. She reached for the old words.
"Infuego."
The paper towel caught. A clean, bright flame that burned from the center outward, consuming the paper in a steady curl. Real fire. Real magic. The warmth of it kissed her borrowed fingers, and Isobel let herself feel it, just for a moment. How long had it been since she'd cast anything at all?
Tyson clapped and broke into a grin. "I got the same power." He pulled a paper towel from the roll, held it out on his palm, and said, "Infuego."
The paper towel ignited.
Isobel watched carefully. The fire that bloomed was real enough. The heat was real. But beneath it, nothing. No pull from the ley lines, a false invocation, no cost. Whatever Tyson had just done, it wore the skin of magic the same way Isobel wore the skin of Lana Lang. Convincing from the outside. Hollow underneath.
Meteor rocks. The girl's memories supplied the explanation again, and Isobel accepted it the way she might accept a foreign coin. Strange currency, but it had value.
"See?" Tyson said, shaking the ash from his hand. "Twins."
Isobel laughed. Lana's laugh. She'd practiced it three times in her head before letting it out. "Twins," she agreed.
Tyson closed the distance between them in two steps. His hands found her waist, and he lifted her onto the counter like she weighed nothing, and then his mouth was on hers.
Isobel didn't flinch. Didn't hesitate. Lana's body knew this man, knew the shape of his mouth and the pressure of his hands and the way he tilted his head slightly to the left. Lana's muscle memory carried the first second, and then Isobel took over.
She kissed him back.
Not because the body wanted it, though it did. Not because the girl's emotions were bleeding through, though they were, warm and insistent and embarrassingly uncomplicated. Isobel kissed him back because she was thinking.
Lana loved this man. That much was obvious. The memories were saturated with him. Not the desperate, consuming love of someone who'd lost themselves, but something sturdier. He'd shown up. Again and again, in memory after memory, he'd shown up. When the world had gotten strange and frightening in ways that a seventeen-year-old shouldn't have had to face. Tyson had been there, steady as stone, and Lana had built something real on that foundation.
Isobel could see why.
His hands were on her waist. Strong hands. She'd known men like this before, centuries ago. Knights and lords who carried their power quietly, who didn't need to announce what they were. They were rare then. They seemed rarer now.
He was loyal. Lana's memories confirmed it without reservation. Reliable. Respectful. He'd touched the girl a hundred times and never once pushed past what she offered. He listened when she spoke. He remembered small things. He'd built her a theater and saved her family's business without being asked.
He'd make a good father.
The thought arrived without sentiment. Isobel had been a witch for decades and dead for centuries, and she'd learned to think in longer plots than most people lived. The bloodline mattered. It was the thread that connected her to the living world, the anchor that could pull her back if the worst happened again. Countess Margaret Isobel Thoreaux had burned once. She would not burn twice. But if she did, if some new enemy found her, if this borrowed life was cut short, she needed insurance.
A child. Her blood, carried forward. Another descendant, closer to the source than Lana had been, stronger in the old ways. A door she could open from the other side of death.
And this man, this Tyson, with his strange, collected powers, his genuine smile, and his hands that held without grabbing, was the best option she had. Perhaps the only option worth considering.
So she let the kiss continue. She brought her hands up to the sides of his face and held him there, and she kissed him the way Lana would have kissed him, with warmth and want and the softness of a girl who felt safe.
It wasn't difficult. He made it easy.
A voice floated up from the stairwell below. Bright, rapid, already mid-sentence.
"...and I found the streamers on sale, so I grabbed like eight rolls, which is probably too many, but you can never have too many streamers, that's what I always—"
Chloe Sullivan. Lana's memories supplied the name, along with a cascade of associated information. Best friend. Reporter. Relentlessly curious. Coming to help arrange the Talon for tonight's party. Celebrating a football win, of all things. Isobel nearly smiled at the smallness of it.
She broke the kiss and pressed her forehead against Tyson's. "That's Chloe," she said, slightly breathless in the way Lana would have been. "She's coming up to decorate. But I need to run out and do a few things."
"Oh." Tyson stepped back, giving her room to slide off the counter. "Sure thing."
"It's her birthday, and I want to surprise her with something. Can you keep her busy here? Help with the decorating for the party?"
"No problem. I'll do my best."
"Perfect." Isobel squeezed his arm using Lana's gesture, pulled straight from memory. "Thanks."
Tyson moved toward the door. "Don't use up too much of that fire," she said. "Save some for me later tonight."
His grin spread slowly and wide. "Absolutely."
Isobel returned to her spellbook as he left. She waited until Tyson's footsteps faded down the stairwell before she opened the spellbook again.
Lana had handled this book like a curiosity, a historical artifact to be studied. Isobel handled it like what it was. Hers.
She found the page she wanted. The ink had faded over the centuries, but the symbols held their shape, stubborn as the magic that had written them. A summoning. Not a simple one. The kind that reached across the veil and pulled, that dragged the dead back into flesh the way Isobel herself had been dragged. She ran her finger down the list of ingredients, translating the old script without effort.
Ash of white oak. Common enough.
Blood of the caster, freely given. Simple.
Earth from a place of power. She'd need to find a ley line convergence, but Lana's memories suggested this town sat on something.
Rendered fat of a black candle. Trivial.
Hair of two virgins…
Isobel stopped.
She read it again. Plucked a strand of hair from her own head and held it up, examining it between thumb and forefinger. Dark and fine. Lana's hair.
"That's out," she said. "Obviously."
She tucked the strand into the book as a placeholder and kept reading. The rest of the list was manageable. Herbs she could find in any garden or health food store, such things existed even in this flat little town. A few mineral components that sounded like they'd be available at a farm supply. The virgin hair and the wine were the only real complications, and complications were what planning was for.
A knock at the door.
Isobel closed the spellbook and set it on the counter behind her. "Come in."
Chloe Sullivan pushed through the door carrying two bulging plastic bags. She looked at Isobel with theatrical suspicion, scanning the apartment.
"Tyson is trying to run interference downstairs," Chloe said. "I figured I'd catch you in a compromised position."
"A few hours too late for that," Isobel replied.
Chloe's cheeks went pink. "Way to rub it in for us single girls." She dropped the bags on the kitchen table and started pulling out rolls of crepe paper. "You coming down to help decorate? I've got a vision for the Talon tonight, and I need someone with actual taste to tell me when I've gone too far."
"Actually, I need to stop by the Kent farm. And then Lex's."
Chloe paused mid-unroll. "What's more important than tonight's party?"
"It's a surprise."
Chloe's confusion lasted half a second before it softened into a smile. "Okay. If you say so." She gathered up a handful of streamers and turned toward the door.
"Wait."
Chloe stopped. Isobel crossed the room to her, closing the distance with Lana's easy warmth, and reached up to brush a strand of blonde hair from Chloe's face. Her fingers caught a single hair at the root and pulled.
"Ow!" Chloe flinched. "What was that?"
"Gray hair."
"What?" Chloe's hand flew to her head. "Let me see that."
"Don't worry. I got it." Isobel closed her fist around the strand and guided Chloe toward the door with her other hand on the girl's shoulder. "Go help Tyson. I'll be back before the party starts."
"I'm seventeen," Chloe muttered as she headed down the stairs. "Seventeen-year-olds don't get gray hair."
Isobel waited until she heard the stairwell door close. She opened her fist and looked at the single blonde hair, fine and bright against her palm. She tucked it into the spellbook beside her own dark strand.
One down.
She grabbed Lana's coat from the hook by the door, shrugged into it, and headed for the Kent farm. Lana's young friend, Emily, would provide the second. A child, but a virgin is a virgin, and from Lana's memories, they were harder to find in this time.
The walk to the Kent farm took half an hour.
Emily was in the barn with Martha, helping sort through a box of old photographs for some school project. Isobel knocked on the open door and gave the girl Lana's warmest smile, the one that crinkled at the corners and made her look like she meant every word she said.
"I'm making a scrapbook," Isobel told her. "For Chloe's birthday. I want to put a lock of hair from each of our closest friends inside. Like a keepsake."
Emily thought that was the sweetest thing she'd ever heard. She sat still on the hay bale while Isobel plucked a single dark hair from the crown of her head. The girl barely winced.
"Can I sign the scrapbook too?" Emily asked.
"Of course you can."
Martha offered coffee. Isobel declined, cited party preparations, and was back in Lana's car within the hour. She tucked the second hair into the spellbook.
Two down. The wine was next.
The machine was extraordinary.
Isobel had pulled the knowledge of operating it from Lana's memories. Foot here. Hands here. Mirror, signal, the painted lines. Simple enough. But knowing how to drive and understanding what driving was were different things entirely, and as Lana's small red car carried her along the flat Kansas road at a speed that would have terrified any horse she'd ever ridden, Isobel permitted herself a moment of genuine wonder.
The land was impossibly open, flat. No forests. No hills. Just an unbroken sweep of brown and gold stretching to every horizon, bisected by roads so straight they seemed drawn with a ruler. In France, the roads had curved. They'd followed rivers and ridgelines and the borders of estates, and every mile had been contested ground, fought over by lords and bandits and the Church with equal enthusiasm.
France had texture. This place was a table. No wonder Lana found it dull.
She ran through the plan as the fields blurred past. The wine would come from the Luthor boy. Lana's memories marked him as clever, perceptive, and accustomed to being manipulated, which meant he'd be looking for the wrong kind of deception. The political kind, the financial kind, even the seductive kind. He would not be looking for a seventeenth-century witch wearing his friend's face. Men who expected knives rarely noticed poison.
On the drive to the Luthor estate, Isobel passed a building with a lit sign.
SMALLVILLE MEDICAL CENTER
Through the glass doors, she glimpsed people in white coats moving about. A hospital. Lana's memories supplied the word along with a flood of associated context. Surgery, anesthesia, imaging, antibiotics, and Isobel's hands tightened on the wheel. In her time, the healers had been barbers and priests, and they'd killed as often as they'd cured. The Church had burned women for using herbs that worked better than prayer. And now, three centuries later, these people had built temples of medicine and called it progress, as if the knowledge had simply appeared, as if no one had died for it.
Lana's thoughts pushed forward again, unbidden.
The boy. Tyson.
Not the kiss this time, not the warmth of his hands or the easy way he smiled. Something else. Something Isobel had skimmed past in her first survey of the girl's memories and now returned to with sharper attention.
He could heal.
Not the crude healing of poultices and prayer, not the stitching and bone-setting that passed for medicine in Isobel's century, not even the miracles of this new age with its hospitals. Tyson's healing was something else entirely. Lana had seen it.
Isobel had known healers. Real ones, not the charlatans the Church paraded through plague towns. Hedge witches who could slow a fever, draw infection, and coax a broken bone to set clean. The best of them, working at the peak of their craft with the right herbs and the right alignment of stars, could save a life that should have been lost. It took hours. It cost them days of exhaustion afterward.
Tyson did it like it was nothing.
Her thoughts circled him. The strength, the healing, the collection of abilities. A man worth keeping close. Worth binding to her.
She caught herself.
That was Lana. Lana's want, Lana's warmth, bleeding through the seams of this borrowed body. Isobel pushed it down. Sentiment was a luxury, and she had a wine cellar to visit.
She parked in the circular drive and walked to the front entrance of the Luthor mansion. The door was unlocked. Lana's memories said it usually was, that the openness of the house was its own kind of statement.
She heard the piano before she saw him.
The sound carried through the mansion, a classical piece, something dense and layered. Isobel followed it through the foyer and down the main hall to the study.
Lex Luthor sat at a grand piano positioned near the tall windows. His right hand moved across the register, each note landing clean, while his left hand built the harmonic foundation beneath. Sheet music rested on the stand before him, but he barely glanced at it. His attention was somewhere inside the music itself, somewhere private.
Isobel paused in the doorway. Lana's memories supplied context. Wealthy. Intelligent. Complicated. The kind of man who played piano alone in a mansion and called it relaxation. The kind of man who kept vintage wine in a cellar that most restaurants would envy.
She stepped into the room, and he stopped playing. His hands lifted from the keys, and the last notes hung in the stone-walled study before fading.
"You play beautifully," she said.
"Thanks, but I'm afraid I'm a little rusty."
"Well, I hate to interrupt. But I wanted to ask you for a favor."
Something shifted in his expression. "Have I ever been able to refuse Lana Lang?"
He rose from the piano bench and walked toward the center of the room, hands in his pockets.
"What do you need?"
"A good bottle of wine. For Chloe's birthday."
Lex tilted his head. "Well, the last time I checked, she wasn't turning twenty-one yet."
"I know, but I thought it'd be nice to raise a glass with her and Kyla to celebrate." His mouth pulled at the corner, reluctant but not refusing. She leaned in slightly. "I promise I won't tell anyone where I got it from." She lowered her voice to whisper conspiratorially and with a slight seductiveness. "It'll be our little secret."
Lana's eyes on his, dark and steady. Lex held for a beat, then two.
"Well," he said. "I think I might have a light Riesling that won't do too much damage."
Isobel smiled. Lana's grateful smile. Lex turned and started toward the far door that led to the lower levels of the mansion.
"Actually," Isobel said.
He paused.
"I was looking more for a vintage Merlot from the south of France. Something from a vineyard in the Languedoc, or possibly the Deldonia. That should do in a pinch."
Lex's voice came back from the next room, already receding down the corridor. "Well, your tastes have certainly matured from a summer in Paris. Just give me a second."
Isobel stood alone in the study.
She took in the room. The piano. The bookshelves were lined with first editions that Lex probably hadn't read more than once. The tall windows with their heavy drapes. Everything expensive, everything placed just so, and all of it arranged to look unconsidered.
Then she saw it.
A glass case on a stone pedestal near the far wall, lit from beneath by a single recessed light. Inside, resting on a bed of dark velvet, sat a stone.
She crossed the room.
Her reflection slid across the glass as she approached, and beneath it, the stone seemed to pulse. Not visibly. Not in any way a camera would catch. But Isobel felt it the way she'd once felt ley lines beneath her bare feet in the forests of Castelnaudary. A low, steady hum of power, patient and vast, like a river heard through stone walls.
She knew what it was.
The Stone of Power.
One of three. She'd spent the last of her living life searching for them, had burned contacts and allies and years chasing rumors across Europe, and here it sat in a glass box in Kansas, displayed like a paperweight.
Isobel pressed her fingers against the case. The hum sharpened.
Footsteps in the corridor. Lex returned carrying a dark bottle, holding it by the neck with a collector's careful grip.
"1902 from the Sallier vineyards in Languedoc," he said. "It should make quite the birthday present."
Isobel didn't turn from the case. "Where did you get this?"
Lex set the bottle on the side table and walked toward her. "The Kawatche caves. One of my researchers, Dr. Walden, was studying the cave wall when he found it. Or it found him, depending on how you look at it. I had it retrieved after Walden was discovered unconscious, in a coma. He still hasn't woken up." A pause. "Why do you ask?"
"Because I know what it is."
She turned to face him. Lex went still. Watchful.
"Lana, how could you possibly know—"
Isobel raised her hand toward him, index and smallest fingers extended. "Finis."
Lex stopped. Mid-step, mid-breath, mid-thought. His body locked in place as though the air around him had turned solid; holding him in place. His eyes moved. That was all.
Isobel walked to him and took the wine bottle from the side table. She held it up, read the label, and tucked it under her arm.
"You seek the stones," she said. She circled behind him, her footsteps quiet on the hardwood. "We can't have that."
She stopped at his shoulder. Close enough that he could smell Lana's perfume, close enough that the betrayal would cut.
"There are three stones." The last pretense of Lana's softness was gone from her voice. "This is one. Where are the other two?"
Lex's jaw worked against nothing. The muscles in his throat strained, tendons standing out beneath the skin, but his mouth stayed shut. His eyes tracked her as she moved around the case, fury plain in his face, bright and impotent.
"I asked you a question." She placed her palm flat against the glass. "The stones. Where are the other two?"
Nothing. Lex's hands trembled at his sides, fingers curling into fists that couldn't quite close. Fighting it. She'd expected that. Men like him always fought. They mistook stubbornness for strength and held on until the holding broke them.
Isobel raised her hand again. "Veritas."
The word hit him like a slap. His head snapped back, then forward, and when it settled, something in him had loosened. Not broken. Pried open, like a lock forced with the wrong key. His mouth moved before he could stop it.
"My sister has one." The words came out tight, squeezed through clenched teeth. "In Metropolis. She acquired it in Egypt."
"And the third?"
Lex's lips pressed together. A vein pulsed at his temple. Three seconds passed, four, and then the spell pulled the answer out of him like thread from a spool.
"Wayne Enterprises." His body shook, sweat beading along his scalp. "Beyond that, I don't have details. Bruce Wayne keeps his acquisitions close."
Isobel opened the glass case, tearing through the lock with a gesture, as if it wasn't there. She lifted the Stone of Power from its velvet bed and closed her hand around it.
The hum became a chord. Deep and resonant, vibrating through the bones of her hand, up through her wrist and arm and into her chest where it settled against her heartbeat like a second pulse. Isobel held it for three seconds, letting the power register, letting it know her. Then she slipped it into the pocket of Lana's coat.
"Lana." Lex forced out, voice ragged from the spell but sharp with concern.
"I think you're right, Alexander. You do need more practice." She leaned close to his ear. "Infinitas."
She left the study without looking back.
Behind her, Lex's body unlocked. He walked to the piano with stiff, mechanical steps and sat on the bench. His hands found the keys. The same piece. The same dense, layered composition he'd been playing when she arrived. The notes filled the empty room, precise and beautiful and utterly involuntary.
His eyes darted left, then right. He tried to stop. His fingers kept playing.
— Meteor Freak —
Chloe Sullivan was impossible to escape once she had you cornered with a clipboard and a vision for party decorations. He'd finally managed to extract himself from the Talon by volunteering to check on something at the Kent farm, a vague enough excuse that she'd let him go with only mild suspicion and a pointed reminder that the streamers needed to be hung at exactly eye level.
He hoped Lana wouldn't swing by the Talon before tonight to avoid Chloe in full event-planning mode.
The new irrigation system hummed quietly along the eastern field. The tractor, the one Tyson had arranged to replace the old John Deere that broke down every other week, sat parked near the barn with a fresh coat of red paint that Martha had insisted on. Said it wouldn't feel like a Kent tractor without it.
Clark was somewhere out in the north field with Emily, who had taken to following him around like a duckling imprinted on a particularly tall, flannel-wearing mother hen. Her laughter carried across the property, bright and clear, punctuated by Clark's deeper voice explaining something about fence posts. The kid had never had a little sister. He was a natural at it.
Tyson found Jonathan and Martha on the porch. Jonathan sat in a wooden chair, a glass of lemonade sweating on the railing beside him. Martha occupied the bench swing, her hands resting on her lap. They both looked up when he climbed the steps.
"Chloe finally let you go?" Martha asked.
"Barely." Tyson dropped into the empty chair across from Jonathan. "She's got the Talon looking like a homecoming float exploded in there. Clark's going to love it."
Jonathan chuckled. He picked up his lemonade, took a sip, and set it back down. Then he leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees.
"Tyson, I want to say something, and I want you to hear it." Jonathan looked right at him. "Thank you. For everything you've done for this family."
Tyson opened his mouth, but Jonathan held up a hand.
"Let me finish." He gestured out toward the fields. "The farm is doing better than it has in years. The equipment, the supplies, the irrigation. Martha and I, we sat down last month and looked at the books, and for the first time in I don't know how long, we're not just getting by. We're actually ahead. And with the baby coming, a new addition to our family... I can't tell you what that peace of mind means. I can't thank you enough."
Martha reached over and put her hand on Jonathan's arm.
Tyson shook his head. "You earned it, Jonathan. Both of you. You earned it by raising Clark the way you did. That's why I've done what I could for your family."
Martha frowned. "What do you mean by that?"
He looked at her, then at Jonathan. These were good people. The best he'd met in this world or any other. They deserved honesty, or at least as much of it as he could give.
"Clark's a senior," Tyson said. "In a few months, he graduates. Then what?"
"Well," Martha said, sitting up a little straighter, "the recruiter from Princeton is coming tonight, actually. For Clark's interview. He's been preparing all week, though he won't admit it."
"Princeton." Tyson nodded. "That's good. That's really good. He should go."
Jonathan studied him. "Is that why you bought all that equipment? The new tractor, the combine, the irrigation, the solar panels?"
"Part of it. When Clark leaves for college, this farm still needs to run. You've got a baby on the way. I wanted to make sure you had what you needed to handle the workload without him."
Jonathan sat back. His jaw tightened, just slightly, in that way it did when his pride pushed against his practicality. "We would have found a way. We always have."
"I know you would have." Tyson kept his voice even, respectful. He knew this man. Knew that Jonathan Kent would sooner work himself into the ground than accept charity. "I've got no doubt about that. But I wanted to ease the road. That's all."
Martha looked at her husband, then back at Tyson. She understood what he wasn't saying yet. Her face showed it.
"There's more to this."
Tyson leaned forward. "Clark is destined for great things. You both know that. You've known it since the day you found him in that field."
The porch went quiet. A breeze moved through the wind chime hanging near the door, sending a few soft notes into the silence.
"You've done an incredible job," he continued. "Protecting him. Teaching him right from wrong. Giving him a foundation that most people never get. But Clark can't hide on a farm in Kansas forever."
"He's still just a boy," she said quietly.
"He's eighteen. And he's the most powerful person on this planet.
Jonathan's hand tightened around his glass. It was a long moment before he spoke. "When he was twelve, a combine caught fire on the Hansen property, three miles down the road. Clark heard the sirens from his bedroom window and was out of the house before Martha or I knew he was awake. By the time the fire department got there, he'd pulled the driver out, carried him two hundred yards, and ran back to smother the flames with a horse blanket." Jonathan paused. "The driver was unconscious. Didn't see a thing. But the Hansens' oldest daughter was watching from the house, and she told her friends at school that Clark Kent ran into a burning machine and came out without a mark on him. It took Martha two weeks of baking and visiting and gentle conversation to walk that story back." He looked at Tyson. "We're not hiding him. We're protecting him. And we're protecting every person who might look too closely from those who would decide he's something to be studied, or controlled, or afraid of."
"I know," Tyson said. "And you've done it better than anyone could have asked. But the world is going to need him, Jonathan. Not someday. Soon. You raised him to be kind, to be decent, to care about people. But the day is coming when being kind and decent on a farm in Smallville won't be enough. The world out there has problems that only someone like Clark can face."
Clark came walking up with Emily on his heels, both of them flushed from the sun and smelling like cut grass. Emily had a streak of dirt across her cheek and was mid-sentence about something involving a fence post and a groundhog.
"What do you know? You sound like you've seen what's coming," Jonathan said.
The words landed in the middle of whatever Emily had been saying, and the porch went still. Clark stopped just past the doorway, looking from his father at the railing, then to his mother, then to Tyson in the chair.
"What's going on?" Clark asked.
Tyson leaned back, rolled his shoulders, and cracked his neck.
"I was just telling your folks that I used to run track at my old high school. Two hundred meters, four hundred." He stretched one leg out in front of him. "Now that I'm stronger and faster, football's gotten kind of boring. You know that feeling? Like playing a video game with all the cheat codes turned on. No challenge. No point in competing when you already know you're going to win." He looked up at Clark. "And I realized that's basically what your whole life must feel like."
Clark shifted his weight. His hand came up to rub the back of his neck. "I wouldn't say it like that."
"Yeah, but that's how it is. You can outrun anything on this planet. You can lift a truck over your head without breaking a sweat. You've never had to push yourself against someone who could actually keep up." He paused.
"So race me."
Clark blinked. "What?"
"Race me. You and me. No holding back. Full speed, as fast as you can go."
Something shifted in Clark's face. Tyson offered him something he'd never been offered before. A fair fight.
"Okay," Clark said. "Where to?"
"Grandville and back?"
Jonathan turned from the railing. "That's a six-hour round trip by car."
Tyson looked at Clark. Clark looked back at him, and the smile broke through, wide and genuine and a little bit reckless.
"You're on."
They walked out past the porch, past the barn, down to where the dirt-and-gravel road stretched straight and flat toward the horizon. Emily positioned herself between them, bouncing on the balls of her feet with the self-importance of a kid who'd been given an official job.
Clark pulled off his flannel overshirt and tossed it onto a fence post, leaving him in a white t-shirt. He shook out his arms. Tyson rolled his shoulders and settled into a runner's stance, one foot back, weight forward.
Martha and Jonathan stood on the porch. Martha had her hand on her husband's arm.
"On your marks," Emily called out. "Get set."
Clark and Tyson both dropped low.
"Go!"
To the Kents, they simply vanished. One moment they were there, two figures crouched on the gravel road, the next, the road was empty, and a wall of displaced air hit the porch hard enough to rattle the wind chime and send Jonathan's lemonade glass skidding across the railing. A plume of dust and gravel erupted in a line trailing them, stretching toward the horizon, and then even that was gone.
Emily whooped and punched the air.
The world became a tunnel.
Clark hit full speed in the first three strides and the landscape smeared into a continuous blur of green and gold on either side. Fence posts became a single unbroken line. The road beneath his feet was a grey ribbon feeding into him at impossible speed. The air parted around him. Heat built against his skin from the friction. Behind him, a slight sonic crack, trailing like a whip.
This was the part of himself he never got to use. Not really. Not all the way. He always held back. Always measured. Always careful, because the world was fragile and he was not.
He pushed harder. The blur tightened. Fields gave way to the outskirts of a town that flashed past in a single heartbeat, there and gone, a gas station and a church steeple and a water tower all compressed into one smudge of color.
And Tyson was right there beside him.
Clark almost stumbled. Not physically, but mentally, a hitch in his focus that cost him half a stride. He'd expected to leave Tyson behind in the first second. He'd expected to be alone out here the way he always was when he ran, the solitary fastest thing in the world, untouchable and untouched.
Instead, Tyson matched him. Stride for stride. The other boy ran with a different form, more compact, his center of gravity lower, his arms pumping in tight controlled arcs. The speed was the same, but the mechanics were different. Clark ran like someone who'd never needed technique because raw power had always been enough. Tyson ran like a sprinter, every motion optimized, every ounce of speed earned through form.
They hit the county line, and the road curved. Clark took it wide, eating up the shoulder, his feet barely touching the ground. Tyson cut inside, leaning into the turn, and for one impossible moment, he pulled ahead by a full body length.
Clark felt something ignite in his chest. Not anger. Not fear. Something simpler than both.
Competition.
He dug in, past the gear he shifted into when someone was in danger, down into something deeper and harder that he'd never had a reason to find before. The world narrowed further. Sound dropped away entirely. The air in front of him wasn't parting anymore; he was punching through it, leaving a vacuum trail that collapsed behind him with a continuous rolling thunder.
Tyson stayed with him. Close. So close, Clark could see him in his peripheral vision, a dark shape keeping pace, refusing to fall back.
Grandville appeared on the horizon, and then they were in it and through it in the same instant, a flash of buildings and streets and a startled flock of pigeons that exploded off a rooftop in their wake. Clark caught the briefest snapshot of a woman on a sidewalk whose hair blew straight back from her face, her mouth open in surprise at a wind that came from nowhere.
They hit the turnaround point, some unspoken agreement at the Grandville water tower, and both of them carved a turn so tight that the displaced air stripped leaves from a row of elms lining Main Street.
The run back was different. Clark was ahead now, but only by a stride. He could feel Tyson pushing, could feel the pressure of someone actually trying to catch him, and the sensation was so foreign and so exhilarating that he almost laughed. The fields blurred past. A river appeared and vanished. A highway overpass flashed overhead like a camera shutter.
Tyson surged. Clark felt him closing the gap, felt the displacement of air shift as the other boy pulled even with his shoulder. For three full seconds, they ran side by side at a speed that would have been invisible to any human eye, two figures tearing across the Kansas landscape like bullets fired from the same gun.
Clark found one more gear. He didn't know where it came from. Somewhere past everything he'd ever done, past every rescue and every sprint and every desperate moment. His feet hit the ground so fast that each impact was indistinguishable from the last, a continuous controlled explosion of force against the Earth.
The Kent farm materialized ahead. The red barn. The white house. Three figures on the porch and one small one standing in the road with her arms raised.
Clark crossed the invisible finish line one stride ahead of Tyson.
They stopped. The air behind them caught up all at once, a shockwave of wind and dust and sound that rolled across the farm like a thunderclap. The fence along the road rattled. A loose shingle on the barn roof flipped up and resettled. Emily's hair blew straight back from her face, and she shrieked with delight.
Clark stood in the road with his hands on his knees, breathing hard. Actually breathing hard. He couldn't remember the last time that had happened. His heart was hammering, not from exhaustion but from the sheer unprecedented thrill of having been pushed.
Tyson stood beside him, chest heaving, a grin splitting his face. He clapped Clark on the shoulder.
"See?" he said between breaths. "Told you."
Clark straightened up. He was smiling too, wide and unguarded, the real one that he almost never let out.
"That was..." Clark shook his head. "How are you that fast?"
"Good race. You're faster."
Jonathan and Martha came down from the porch; she held up her wrist. "Thirty-five seconds," she said. Her voice was calm, but her hand trembled just slightly. "Grandville is a hundred and eighty miles round trip."
Jonathan looked at the road. The dust was still settling in a long, straight line that stretched to the horizon and faded into nothing. He looked at Clark, then at Tyson, then back at the road.
"You made it to Grandville and back?" he asked, needing it to be said out loud for it to become real.
Clark nodded. He was still catching his breath, still riding the high of it, that impossible grin refusing to leave his face. "Yeah. We did."
"Thirty-five seconds," Martha repeated, quieter this time, mostly to herself.
Tyson straightened up and turned to where Emily was bouncing toward them from the road, practically vibrating with excitement. "Emily, why don't you go get Clark some lemonade? He worked really hard today."
Emily spun on her heel and sprinted for the house, bare feet slapping against the porch steps as she disappeared inside. The screen door banged shut behind her.
Tyson waited two beats. The grin faded. He kept his voice low.
"Look, we don't know what's out there. Yesterday, I saved Chloe from a demon. A true-to-life, biblical demon. Not a Meteor Freak. Not some kid who got too close to a rock. A demon."
Martha's hand found Jonathan's arm. Jonathan didn't move.
"We know there are more Kryptonians out there," Tyson continued. "Kara. But what if there are others? What if they're not friendly? What if the next thing that shows up in Smallville isn't some Wall of Weird curiosity but something that is actually out to hurt people, and the only person fast enough and strong enough to stop it is standing right here?"
Jonathan's jaw worked. "You beat Eric. When he had Clark's powers, you beat him."
Tyson shook his head. "I didn't beat Eric. I cheated and won. There's a difference. Eric beat me. Tossed me around like a ragdoll. I just happened to have Clark's one weakness in my pocket. Literally. A chunk of meteor rock." He dropped his hand. "Take that away, and Eric would have killed me. Clark could beat me. Today proved that once again. Even with all the powers I have, he's faster, he's stronger, and once he learns to really push himself, the gap's only going to get wider."
Clark had gone quiet. The grin was gone. "This was about more than a race," he said.
Tyson held the look for a moment. Then he cracked a smile and shrugged, rolling his shoulders loose.
"Nah. I just needed to stretch my legs after being cooped up with the Chloe decorating committee. Do you have any idea what that woman does with crepe paper?"
Clark let out a short laugh. He'd heard what Tyson said. All of it.
The screen door banged open, and Emily came carefully down the steps carrying a glass of lemonade in both hands, her tongue poking out the corner of her mouth in concentration. She crossed the yard and presented the glass to Clark with a flourish.
"Here you go."
"Thanks, Em." Clark took the glass and drank half of it in one pull.
— Meteor Freak —