Hunted By The Others (19 page)

Chaz let out a low whistle when I strode back into the living room in the armor, belt, and holster. The guns weren’t going to be out of easy reach until the holder of the focus was dead, no matter how many times I forgot and jabbed myself in the ribs by folding my arms. The sweet scent of cloves and cinnamon also clung to me, as I’d applied some more of the Amber Kiss perfume, just in case. I put the trench coat on, slung the duffel over my shoulder, and headed for the door.

“Let’s go, guys.”

Chaz and Arnold stood and started to follow me, but I paused at the door and looked back over my shoulder. “Janine, I’m sorry, but I’d recommend you go lay low somewhere else for a couple of days.”

She looked up when I spoke, her eyes red from her tears. What surprised me was the anger there, glinting in the icy blue depths so like Sara’s. I’d never seen her anything but a neurotic, nervous wreck before, so the sudden intense animosity was unexpected.

“You find her. You get her out of this mess. If you don’t, I’ll—I’ll do something. Something bad. You won’t like it.”

“Janine.” I hesitated in the face of her anger. “You know I don’t want anything bad to happen to her. She’s my best friend. I swear, I’ll do everything in my power to save her, to get her back.”

She continued to glare at me from her seat. The two men were awkwardly shuffling their feet and trying to back away as inconspicuously as possible. “Do it. I swear to God, Shiarra, if she gets hurt because of this mess you dragged her into, I
will
do everything I can to make your life miserable.” I might have taken offense if the angry look hadn’t suddenly crumbled into helpless despair. She lowered her head into her hands, hiding her tears.

“Janine, I promise, I’ll do everything I can to get her back.”

She didn’t turn in my direction when I spoke, not that I could blame her. All she did was nod in response.

I felt bad, but with everything else going on, I didn’t have any time to sit and hold her hand. There was too much work to do. I had come up with the semblance of a plan while getting dressed and scrubbing the worst of the sweat off my face. My hair needed a wash, but I didn’t have time, finger combing it instead and using water to slick the curls back out of my face as much as possible.

As the three of us stepped out into the noonday sun, I waited until there were no pedestrians nearby and then said, “Arnold, you were talking about familiars last night. Mage familiars.”

“Yeah. What about them?”

“Does every mage have one?”

“No.”

Crap. That was disappointing. But he wasn’t finished.

“Newer magi fresh out of the Academy generally don’t. Neither do some of the less well off or not very powerful ones. Generally any practicing mage has one, though, particularly if you’re part of a coven and expected to be casting on a regular basis. Why?”

I grinned. Maybe something was finally going right after all. “Does that mean Veronica had a familiar?”

After a moment, recognition dawned and he started grinning right back at me. Chaz was looking at us like we were crazy. Maybe we were. “Yes. Yes, she did. A cat.”

Somehow I wasn’t surprised. “Excellent. Do you think there’s any way we can get into her apartment to find it? Without alerting the cops?”

He looked thoughtfully at me, then frowned as his gaze slid to Chaz. “No.” An awkward, hesitant expression crossed his face, which reminded me of what he was like when I first met him. All he would need to complete the look were the coke-bottle lenses. “I guess we can go back to my place and I can summon it. I’d need equipment anyway to be able to speak with it and see what it knows.”

Chaz’s brows rose. “Summon it? You can do that?”

“Yeah. Familiars are planar beings. Technically, it’s considered rude to call someone else’s familiar uninvited, but since Veronica is dead, I don’t have to worry about the consequences quite so much.”

“And you can talk to it, right? Find out what it knows, the way you do with…uhh…” I asked, fumbling for the name of the mouse he’d shown me. “Bob?”

“Sort of. Enough that I can maybe figure out who was there when she died. If we’re lucky, maybe the holder of the focus was there and the familiar saw it.”

Chaz’s brows finally unfurrowed as understanding dawned. “You think somehow the person who had the focus was using Others to kill a mage?”

Guess he didn’t read the Sunday paper.

“Yeah. It’s kind of a long story,” Arnold said. “Let’s get going, I’ll explain in the car.”

We hurried to Arnold’s car, parked in a guest spot at Janine’s building. I let Chaz sit shotgun since the tiny sports car would have forced him to tuck his knees under his chin just to fit in the back.

Arnold efficiently wove through traffic heading downtown. Finally he turned onto a side street in the Village and pulled into a gated garage below a small, new-but-made-to-look-old, red brick apartment building. The majority of the cars parked down there were trendy sports models like his. No minivans or broken-down junkers here. He pulled into a numbered parking space and Chaz, ever the gentleman, helped me clamber out of the back and shouldered my duffel.

Arnold led us to his apartment, which was open and spacious, with large windows offering a great view of the street and a park down the block. The floors were a clean, shiny hardwood, and rather than the expected geekdom or magic paraphernalia, he had some nice electronics and plush, comfortable-looking furniture. There was a stereo, a large flatscreen TV, and a bank of four computers lined up against one wall, along with more movies than you could watch in a year shelved in floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

I left my duffel next to the door and shrugged out of my jacket, tossing it over the back of a couch as Arnold led the way down a short hall. I managed to catch a peek into his bedroom, a bunch of bookshelves lining the walls and a laptop sitting open on the rumpled blue and white sheets. Arnold shut the door before I could get a good look at all the figurines and gaming books on the shelves, but I still saw enough to be amused.

We moved on to the next room, and as Arnold flicked on the light switch, it only took one look for me to know without a doubt that this was where the magic was done.

My first thought was that his landlord probably wasn’t going to like it that he’d etched—no, on closer inspection,
burned
—a very large pentagram into the center of the room, right into the nice hardwood floor. It wasn’t the usual star and circle that I’d seen a thousand times in movies and on book covers and magazines. There were dozens of other symbols inside the circle, mostly outside of the star, none of them familiar to me.

There were white candles set at each of the five points of the star, just inside the line that made up the circle. I noticed a number of bookshelves here, too, though none with gaming manuals. Nothing but arcane texts, spellbooks, books on herbs, and surprisingly, a couple of shelves devoted to books on physics, languages, and history. Tucked away in a corner was an altar holding dried flowers, crystals and stones, a small silver knife, a mirror, and a chalice.

It smelled mostly like dusty books and dried flowers, but there was an undertone of ozone or something that made the air positively crackle with energy. I noted distantly that Chaz’s nostrils were flared and the hair on his arms had risen. Guess he didn’t like the feeling any more than I did.

Arnold waved us back to the door, heading over to a chest of drawers beneath heavily draped windows. “You guys can stay if you want, but it might be better if you waited outside. I need quiet and concentration for this.”

“No,” I said, “I’d like to see what you do. I’ll stay.”

“Me, too,” Chaz said, folding his arms and leaning against the wall. I sat on the floor facing the windows, carefully adjusting the holster and belt so I wouldn’t jab myself in the process.

Arnold pulled some things out of the dresser and set them on top. I watched with interest as he flicked through some files, selecting a small packet out of one, then pulling out and neatly arranging on a silver tray a piece of quartz, a plain wooden disk, two silver bowls, a few pieces of twine braided into a circle, a bottle of spring water, and a lump of what looked like sculptor’s clay.

One by one, he moved the items into the circle. He put one of the bowls in the center of the star. The quartz, twine, clay, remaining bowl, and disk were each put inside one of the triangles that made up the points of the star. Next he poured some of the water into the bowl that was in a point. Lastly, with two deft fingers he plucked something too small for me to make out from the packet and dropped it into the bowl in the center, resealing the packet and returning it to its file in the drawer.

After that, he walked over to the shelves, perused the titles briefly, then took down a thin, unlabeled volume. Skimming through the pages, he moved around the outside of the circle, plucking up the small dagger and moving back to the center. Without looking up from the book, he absently pricked his finger with the dagger, letting a couple of drops of blood drip into the bowl before moving to stand before one of the points.

Chaz and I exchanged mystified looks. It was odd seeing Arnold, the nerd in jeans and a rumpled button-down, performing this arcane ritual and muttering over the pages of an ancient book.

Eventually he found what he was searching for and looked up, holding the book open with one hand, the dagger in front of him with the other. “
Luminare. Jungere!
” he said, and Chaz and I jerked back slightly as the candles all simultaneously lit themselves and a haze shimmered in the air, enclosing the circle in a huge sphere.

Arnold started in on a rapid, fluid litany of unintelligible words. Every now and then he threw in a word that sounded almost, but not quite, familiar. Maybe it was Latin or Greek, or some heretofore-unknown tongue. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“Speak to us. Do you know what happened to your mistress?” he finally said, in such a normal tone of voice that I almost missed it. I glanced in the circle, surprised to see that a small black cat was now sitting on its haunches in the center, next to the bowl. The clay and water from the points of the star were now gone.

The cat pricked its ears forward, bright yellow eyes drifting over to look at Chaz, tail twitching slightly as it did so. My jaw dropped open as it turned back to Arnold and spoke in a soft, hissing voice. “A vampire and a werewolf worked together to kill Veronica Wright. I take it I was summoned for information rather than a new binding?”

“That’s right,” he said, snapping the book shut and regarding the cat with a touch of wariness. I wondered why. Despite the fact that it was talking, in all other ways it looked like a normal cat to me. “You will not be bound as a familiar; I only ask for your assistance to find the ones responsible for Veronica Wright’s death, and in return will call any hold you have on this plane by The Circle void. You will never be summoned by one of us again.”

“Spare me the platitudes,” the creature hissed, flexing its claws. “You cannot enforce that trade. I have another offer.”

A slight twitch like a nervous tic started under one of Arnold’s eyes, and I watched in fascination as he spoke, his voice carefully controlled in a way I’d never heard out of him before. “What do you want in return?”

It looked directly at me. “I want information. A piece of data or insight from each person in this room. No more.”

A chill washed over me for no reason I could readily put my finger on. What was so bad about that? Arnold didn’t seem to like the idea. “Three pieces of information from me. I am your summoner, not them.”

“You called me in the presence of witnesses, mage.” It yawned as though bored, rising to walk slowly around the inside perimeter of the circle, never quite touching the edges of the haze. “Take it or leave it.”

“I can’t speak for them.” He shot a look at me out of the corner of his eye. I knew he didn’t want us to talk to it, but at this point I didn’t see much of a choice.

“Will you tell us everything you know about Veronica’s death, who killed her and who was involved if we agree?” I asked it. Arnold looked like he wanted to throttle me.

The cat made an eerie sound that was half-laugh, half-purr. “Of course.”

“I agree, then,” I said, looking to Chaz.

After a brief hesitation, he shrugged and nodded. “Me, too.”

Arnold swore softly under his breath before agreeing as well. “Information only. What do you want to know?”

It looked all too pleased. “No time limit was imposed. I reserve my question for the girl and the wolf for another time.”

“No!” Arnold cried, desperate. “That was not part of the agreement. I’m not resummoning you later just so you can ask them questions.”

“I didn’t ask to be resummoned, mage. I will collect from them when I am ready.” It lifted a paw to delicately lick at it, carefully splaying razor-sharp claws before making a big production out of cleaning its face. “My question for you is a simple one. What do you think to gain by taking control of the focus when you know full well that any who wield it are destined to have its power turned against them?”

My gaze shot from the cat to Arnold, who was very carefully avoiding my gaze. The cat was asking the very question I’d been pondering since he’d mentioned that he was helping me for his own reasons. Not that I hadn’t figured out by then that he wanted the focus for himself, but it was still a bit disturbing to hear it from a talking cat instead of straight from him.

“I want to restore balance to the—”

“No!”
it hissed. “Information, I said. Not, as you might say, ‘PR’ bullshit.”

He took a deep breath, his fingers tightening around the dagger and book at his sides. His green eyes narrowed to thin slivers, anger filtering through his voice. “Like I was saying, I want to restore balance to the Other community. If I can accomplish that, my standing in the coven will rise, and open the way for me to lead when Alexandra steps down.”

The cat tilted its head to one side, thoughtful. “Your logic has two flaws. First, magi currently outnumber vampires and Weres. Particularly in this city, the ratio is almost four magi to one vampire or Were-creature. It does not make sense that you would want to bring more power to those not of your species. Second, Alexandra is unlikely to step down. You would need to fight her, and if you won, fend off many other aspiring, grasping magi for the reins of your coven. And therein lies the fault in your plan. You are not stupid, though I suppose avarice could make a fool of anyone. No. What is it
really
? Remember our deal, or I shall call it null and exact immediate payment on the penalties.”

I could swear I saw him tremble at that. What the hell was this thing? “I wanted to use the focus to fuel a spell that grants me permanent power over vampires and Weres,” he ground out between his teeth. A trickle of nervous sweat slid down his temple as he glanced at Chaz, who had pushed off the bookshelves to stand with his hands clenched at his sides, blue eyes glinting with suppressed rage. “I wanted to take its power into myself so that no one else could use it.”

“Ahhh,” the cat breathed, leaning forward on its paws. “This answer I accept. I will tell you what I know of my former master’s death.”

Despite my own intense fury with Arnold at that moment, I shifted my attention back to the cat. This was really what we needed. Maybe it knew something I could use to track down whoever had taken Sara.

“She was in the middle of preparing her usual vanity charms,” it said, a touch of disgust in its voice, “when a knock came at the apartment door. As she was mid-preparations, I could not leave the circle and so could not follow when she went to answer. Before she could set a defensive ward, I heard the voice of a man speak the spell command for silence.

“Almost immediately, a female vampire, not long turned, pushed Veronica back into my line of sight. The vampire was already drinking from her as she screamed with no sound. As she was under the male’s spell, I formed my own circle and watched as the vampire took from her.”

Arnold quietly cut in. “Do you know the identity of the vampire?”

The cat’s ears lowered and its eyes narrowed faintly. “No. It was not of a bloodline that I have experience with. Though once the vampire took its fill and backed away, I did see and recognize the werewolf that took her place when the male ordered it forward. Reluctant as it was, I imagine because she was still alive, it obeyed the order to shift and ravaged the body as I watched. The alpha of the Moonwalkers was not pleased to be ordered, but he could not withstand the command of the focus.”

Chaz swore, stepping forward. “Rohrik Donovan was being controlled by that thing?”

The cat slowly turned an infinitely contemptuous gaze upon Chaz, the kind of look only cats can truly manage. “Of course. No matter how strong the will of the victim, the focus grants the holder the power to overcome any resistance and come to full physical control of the Other over which they seek dominance.”

“Did you see the focus, or the mage?” I asked, though at this point I didn’t have much hope of it.

The cat turned to look at me, and I had to suppress another shiver. “I did not see the focus, but I felt its presence. Also, though I did not see his face, I do know this—the male was not a mage. It was a sorcerer.”

“Oh crap,” Arnold whispered, his eyes widening.

I looked back and forth between the two, confused. “What’s the difference?”

“The difference,” the cat said in a voice so flatly bored that it frightened me more than Arnold’s loss of composure, “is that magi use the energy that composes matter to bend, break, or otherwise manipulate the laws of nature. They learn how to control their abilities by study and apprenticeship with other magi. A sorcerer, also known as a ‘wild’ mage, uses a mix of his own life energies and the life energies of others as his fuel, and generally consorts with demons to learn, cast spells, or gain power. They do not rely on covens or other magi to assist them, rather on sacrifice and the tutelage of demonic forces to fuel their more powerful spells.”

“Holy shit,” I breathed, rising so unsteadily that Chaz had to reach out and take my arm so I wouldn’t fall over. “You mean whatever thing has Sara might use her as a sacrifice to fuel a spell?”

“Perhaps,” it said, cocking its head to one side as it regarded me. “Though I do believe the intention behind her kidnapping was to force your compliance in some matter. It does appear to be working.”

“Son of a bitch,” I swore, hating the tremor in my voice. “We’ve got to find her. Do you know where they are?”

“No,” it said, rising to all four paws and arching its back with a stretch and a yawn. “Frankly, I’m not sure that any of you have anything of enough value to offer me in return for the information even if I had it. Though,” and here it turned to Arnold, baring its tiny fangs in a semblance of a rictus grin, “I might be persuaded to find out for you with another slight concession…”

“Partire!”
he demanded, his voice cracking in a mix of rage and fear. The candles immediately extinguished themselves, the cat and sphere over the circle disappearing to the sound of faint, mocking laughter.