Magic in the Blood (26 page)

No, no, no.
What was I doing wrong?

I smelled the fetid rot of flesh again, opened my eyes. The Veiled shuffled slowly toward me. I did not stop pouring magic into Pike.

Pike’s eyelid flickered open. His eye roamed the flat, dark sky and then rolled down and focused on me.

“Al,” he rasped. “Trag used”—he inhaled, a short rattling breath that made his body stiffen—“my blood. To kidnap girls. Trag used Ant to cast like me. . . .” He inhaled again, his one eye wide, as if there were more words trapped behind his broken lungs, as if there were more words trapped in his broken body.

“Doctor,” he wheezed. “Has blood. Yours. Girls.”

My blood? What doctor? What girls? The kidnapped girls?

“Don’t let Trager free—” The painful inhale again.

“Easy, Pike,” I said. “It’s okay. I won’t let Trager free. I’ll take care of everything. You just hold on. Hold on, okay?”

A spasm wracked his body. His hand jerked out, gripped the blade that was still in my right hand. His blood mixed with mine, caught in the finely wrought runnels of the blade and slid down the liquid glyphs, turning the glowing symbols into a dull fire before dripping onto his chest.

“Not Ant’s fault. I . . . failed . . . him. Look after”—the painful inhale again—“the kid. The Hounds. They’re family. Mine. Yours.”

“Hey, now. Don’t get all soft on me. You and I can look after the Hounds together, okay? I promise.” I poured magic into him—more, faster.

“Worth it,” he exhaled.

Pike’s one eye stared at me. I did not look away from him. Did not look away from him as the Veiled rushed me and shoved greedy fingers into my skin, burning, hurting, eating the magic out of my flesh. Did not look away from him as the last spark of life drained from his eye. Did not look away from him as he became unnaturally still, vacant, empty. Dead.

Only then did I let go of the magic pouring into him. Only then did I look away from my friend.

As soon as I let go of the spell, the Veiled faded. I stung from head to foot. Felt like my skin had been scraped raw by frozen sandpaper. My thigh throbbed; my chest throbbed. Every breath caught and burned, and, damn it, tears poured down my face.

But I was raging inside, seething. And way past caring about my own pain.

I was angry as hell. Trager was going to pay. Fuck the law. I was going to kill him with my own hands. I pushed up onto my feet, turned a slow circle. I couldn’t smell Trager, but I could feel him like a dirty echo in my bones. He was here. Near. I followed my gut and my rage and walked toward the corner building. The wind picked up again, pulling ice off the skin of the river and slapping me in the face with it.

I felt alive. Focused. If this was the last thing I ever did, it would be worth it.

I strode along the building until I found a door that was partially open. The smell of blood came from that room—Trager’s blood. I tightened my hold on the dagger and calmed my mind. I didn’t hear anyone moving behind the door.

I pushed it the rest of the way open. Two rooms were divided by a wide arch in the center: an office. A large solid desk held down the back wall. Both rooms nicely furnished. Modern. Tasteful.

Except for the dead man with a slit throat on the floor. Lon Trager’s goon. There was a trail of dead people, actually, and if I had to guess how they got that way, I’d bet on Pike. I walked past them all, noting their fatal wounds with satisfied detachment. Slit throat, bullet hole in the head, bullets in the chest, a knife still lodged in the carotid artery. The man with half a head missing, his buddy sporting a matching wound—probably from the big-ass gun in the river of blood on the floor. Six of Trager’s men. The same six that had been on the bus with me.

Fuck
, I thought.
What a mess.
Even though I was not accustomed to being this close to dead people, the numb rage that filled me let me note that I was going to have nightmares about this but also let me not care. All that was important right now was that Trager was not among the corpses. How could Pike have missed him?

Maybe another room, another office. I turned to leave. Heard someone struggling to stand behind me. I turned back around. Lon Trager stood behind the desk. Blood covered one side of his face, turned his crisp white business shirt red.

Looked like he and Pike had both gotten their hits in.

Trager white-knuckled the edge of the desk to stay standing. He held a gun in his other hand, leveled at my chest.

“Bye-bye, Beckstrom.”

I threw myself to one side, yelled at the fresh tear of pain in my thigh. The bullet grazed my left shoulder, and my vision went black for a moment.

Trager fell back in the chair behind the desk, breathing hard. He wasn’t moving. The gun clattered to the floor.

I pulled myself together and strode across the room, boots slapping in the blood of dead men. I walked around the desk and stopped in front of Trager. He watched me but did nothing more than breathe hard and hold still.

“You killed Pike,” I said.

Trager, the bastard, smiled. “Won’t be my last.”

With a strength I didn’t think he had, he lunged at me, a wicked knife in his hand.

Oh, hells, no.
He wasn’t the only person with a knife in the room.

I gripped the dagger in both hands and thrust all my weight behind it.

Pain rattled through me again. Trager had aimed low, stabbing my thigh.

I, however, hadn’t. The dagger sank into his belly, catching against a scrape of rib on the way in. Trager went limp, heavy, his body dead weight against me, until all that held him up was my grip on the dagger in his gut.

“Yes,” I said, “it will.”

He gurgled and stank. I stepped back, pulling the dagger out as hard as I could. Then I watched him fall to the floor and move no more.

I was covered in blood. My blood, Trager’s blood, Pike’s blood.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was still screaming and screaming. This was a nightmare, and I wanted out. There was a dead man on my shoes. A man I had killed.

Killed.

But in the front of my mind, I was too furious to care.

I pulled my feet out from beneath Trager’s dead weight and then knelt and shoved him over so I could see his face. The dagger wound added to the blood already on his shirt. I was no expert, but it looked like Pike’s bullets, which had left three clean holes through his shirt directly over his heart, had done just as much damage—maybe more—as my knife in his gut.

I swore. Killing Trager, feeling him die in my hands, hadn’t changed my anger. And it hadn’t done a damn thing to bring Pike back. I stood and stared down at Trager, trying to make sense of it all. Pike had come to kill Trager, who had been waiting for him. Pike said Anthony had Pike’s blood—probably sold it to Trager in exchange for blood magic and drugs.

But Pike had said something else. The girls and a doctor. A doctor had my blood. I didn’t know which doctor. But I knew how to Hound. And I sure as hell knew what my own blood smelled like. All I had to do was track it—track the magic in it—and I’d have the last piece in this puzzle.

“Jesus Christ,” a voice said behind me.

I swung around, dagger at the ready.

Davy Silvers, the hangover kid, stood in the doorway.

His eyes and nose were red, his cheeks splotchy. He’d been crying. He smelled faintly of alcohol and puke. He’d obviously been following me.

“You’re up early,” I said.

“Not early enough. Lon Trager?”

“Dead.”

He glanced down at the bloody knife in my bloody hand and then looked me up from shoe to face.

“Did you kill him?”

I wiped the blade across the least gory leg of my jeans, staring Davy straight in the eye as I did so. “He was dead when I got here,” I lied.

I had to give the kid credit. He didn’t look away. He shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, as if every inch of him wanted to turn and run from what he saw in my gaze. Still, he stood his ground.

“Good.” His voice caught. “Wish I was here to see it.”

Boy had a vengeful streak. That would probably serve him well in this business.

“Pike?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

He just shook his head. “I called 911.”

I nodded. “When the police arrive, tell them I was here. Tell them I didn’t see everything, but I’ll give them my statement. If Detective Stotts shows up, tell him I’m Hounding a lead on the case I worked for him, but tell only Stotts that, got it?”

“Yeah.”

“And if you follow me, Davy Silvers, I will kick your ass. Even if I have to come back from the dead to do it. Understand?”

He swallowed and nodded, and then moved out of my way.

Smart boy.

I strode out of that damn room, out into air that smelled too much like blood. I pulled a small amount of magic into my sense of sight and smell. And strode off toward the trail of magic in my blood that hung like a ghostly fire in the air.

No one stopped me as I made my way north and west, heading toward the heart of town. Maybe it was because it was icy and there weren’t many people out. Or maybe I didn’t see anyone because I was covered in blood and carrying a knife. Or it could be because the trail of magic in my blood led me down little-used alleys and footpaths hidden from traffic.

Whatever it was, I stopped at an old warehouse without anyone getting in my way. The old brick building’s windows were boarded and broken. Red, black, and white graffiti twice as tall as me turned the crumbling brick and sagging doors into one flat canvas.

There. I knew my blood was there, inside that building. I didn’t pull on magic, didn’t want to draw the Veiled forward again, didn’t want to alert whoever was in there with my blood that I was near.

A wave of dizziness washed over me. No, not now. I didn’t have time to fall apart. I put one hand on the brick wall next to the only door on ground level and breathed until the world stopped rocking beneath my feet. When the dizzy spell passed, I tasted wintergreen on the back of my throat and I smelled leather.

My dad.

The last thing I needed right now was for him to show up and screw with me. I looked around the filthy alley, the dim light of morning glinting against the dark, ragged-toothed windows above me.

No ghost. No father. Good.

I lifted the latch on the door with my left hand, expecting it to be locked, rusted, welded shut. The latch released. I nudged the door inward on silent hinges. The warehouse might look abandoned, but someone had been using it enough to bother with oiling the door. The door swung open just enough that I could see into the shadows and wide-open space beyond.

Light filtered through grimy windows high on the wall to my left, illuminating the decaying brick and plaster wall in the back. Arcs of graffiti stained the wall, and in one slant of light someone had painted a face twisted in a scream, teeth crooked and white around a gaping black mouth.

The floor shone with a layer of water. The stink of pigeon, rat, blood, and rot filled my nose. I paused but heard nothing but the traffic in the distance and my own uneven breathing.

I opened the door a little wider, put a little too much weight on my left thigh, and went dizzy with pain again. Damn.

In the light from the last window, I could see someone slumped in a chair, so near the screaming face that for a moment I wondered if the chair and person were part of the art on the wall. But then the person twitched, the head swinging back and forth at a strange angle.

I toed the door open a little farther, and my eyes, more adjusted to the light now, could make out the person: a man. No, a boy, head hanging forward, body and arms tied to the plain wooden chair with wide leather straps. I could smell his sweat, his pain, and his blood.

Anthony. The Hound kid Pike said had cast those spells to kidnap the girls with Pike’s blood.

Sure, I promised Pike I’d look after the Hounds—all of them—and I meant it. But I felt a small dark satisfaction seeing Anthony tied up. It was all I could do not to storm across the room and shake him until he told me why he had betrayed Pike. Why he had let him die.

But chances were if there was someone tied up in a chair, the person who did the tying was nearby. And since I hadn’t been grabbed or shot at yet, I figured that person was not currently in the room. Now was my chance to get Anthony out of there.

First, rescue the kid. I could kick his ass after I carted him down to the police.

I walked into the room, let the door swing silently shut behind me. The electric tingle of heavy Wards clicking into place as the door shut made me shiver. And without the extra light from the door, I suddenly felt like there were too many shadows in the room. Unnatural shadows.

I calmed my mind, set a Disbursement—I was going to be in the hospital if I kept this up—and silently wove the glyph for Reveal.

The entire warehouse changed. Dark burnt-ash glyphs on the walls flared to life. The walls dripped with pastel light carved in a mosaic of Life and Death glyphs just like the ones I had seen on the wall outside Get Mugged.

The light from the glyphs was bright enough that I could make out the rest of the room. To my right, a row of six cots neatly lined up along one wall. There were people on those cots, young women. The girls Pike was talking about. Maybe even the kidnapped girls Stotts was looking for.

Black lines of magic coiled around their still forms from head to toe like dark silken cocoons. More lines of magic extended from their chests, snaking and pulsing through the air to attach to two surgical tables in the center of the room. One of those tables was empty, and the other had a prone figure across it.

Next to four of the cots stood a ghostly copy of each girl. Not quite as pale as the Veiled, the transparent girls swayed in time to the pulsing lines of magic extending from their physical bodies, as if rocked by a gentle current. Just like the Veiled, they saw me and opened their mouths in hunger.

All of them stepped toward me, arms extended. And then the lines of magic holding them to their bodies thickened, tightened, and thrummed with a bass-drum thump, jerking them back a half step, though their hands still wove in the air as if they could almost reach me.

Six cots, six girls, but only four ghosts. Did that mean the other girls were more dead or more alive?

Holy shit. I looked back at Anthony. No spirit stood next to him. Strangely, though I’d been holding Reveal for several seconds, there were also no Veiled, no pastel fog. I could only assume it had to be because of the pastel wards painted on the walls.

I hope they held.

I walked over to Anthony first. I tried to be quiet, which was near impossible in my boots over the uneven wooden plank floor and with my left leg hurting with every step. Anthony did not move.

I gently lifted his head. If I didn’t know Anthony’s scent, I might not recognize him. The kid was a mess. Blood poured out his ears. He was bruised and swollen like he’d gone through a meat grinder. And I knew it wasn’t from physical violence. Thick ropes of magic wrapped around his neck and sent tendrils of ebony chains down to sink into his belly and chest, where they then reached upward to press over his face like an iron mask and stab deeply into his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.

An Offload glyph. Someone was using him to bear a hell of a price for using magic. Dark magic.

I traced the fingers of my left hand over the magic chains, and Anthony twitched with every link my fingertip brushed. I didn’t know how to break a spell this powerful without killing him. Only a doctor who was skilled in Siphon spells and knew how to slowly drain the magic off of him could break something this strong.

Shit.

Who would do this to a kid? I could probably answer that if I kept tracing, Hounding the spell around him, but every time I touched the spell, Anthony jerked in pain. I didn’t know how long he’d been tied up like this. Didn’t know how much more pain he could endure.

Just because I couldn’t break the spell on him didn’t mean I couldn’t untie him from the chair. I’d carry him out of the warehouse, find a phone, and call the police.

“Allie.” The whisper was close, a cold exhale against my cheek.

Holy shit.
That
was my dad. I spun toward the sound, holding the Reveal spell intact. Pain bloomed up from my thigh as my wound reopened and poured more blood. I gritted my teeth against making any sound and peered into the crosshatch of light pouring through the dust and dark webwork of magic that filled the air.

I didn’t see my father. Didn’t see his ghost. But I realized that all the lines of magic in the room—coming from the girls, coming from the glyphs on the walls—were connected to whoever was lying on that surgical table.

I took a step closer to the table. The figure was familiar. Two more steps, and I recognized that profile. And I should. It was my father.

Oh, hell, oh, hell, oh, hell.
Reality did a sick little dreamlike swing, and I broke out in a sweat. Suddenly I hurt everywhere: my head, my chest, my bleeding leg, every inch of skin and bone that the dead magic users had stabbed burning fingers into and torn apart.

This was too much. Too much too fast. I pressed the palm of my left hand over my forehead, trying to steady my breathing, trying not to let the part of me that was screaming and screaming take over.

Images of Pike’s bloody body, his mutilated face, flashed behind my eyes. Trager’s bloody smile mixed with that, his cold gaze as he shot me, stabbed me, died on me, a heavy stinking heap of flesh that I stabbed until his blood gushed down my legs. Stabbed until he was dead.

What did I think I was doing? I wasn’t a cop. I wasn’t a soldier. I wasn’t a killer. I was a Hound. Good at tracking spells.
Spells
. My life wasn’t supposed to be filled with dying, bloody, horrible, hurting, tortured people.

The part of me that was screaming took up a new chant.
What if he’s not dead? What if he’s not dead? What if Dad isn’t dead?

What if my father was still alive—right there, on that table, in this hell house? What if all those lines of magic leading to his body were keeping him alive?

A ringing started in my ears and I felt the room rock a little more. Hello, shock. Wondered when you’d get here.

Get a grip
, I told myself. If that was my father, alive or dead, I needed to know. Needed to find a way to save him too. And Anthony. And the girls, if they were still alive.

All before whoever was throwing this little soiree came back to check on the guests.

I gripped Zayvion’s dagger tighter and limped over to the tables in the middle of the room. The ghost girls to my left moaned and shifted, stretching to the lengths of their magical chains, hands still clawing the air for me. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if those chains broke.

I stopped next to the table.

My dad—my dad’s body—was strapped down to the table, leather bindings across the ankles, hips, and both wrists. Why? My mind raced with images from horror movies. Things people did to torture, to destroy. But none of it matched this. It was as if someone expected his body might get up, leave, go for a walk, escape.

Which was ridiculous. Because even I could tell he was very, very dead.

Black lines of magic from the girls draped down to play like wind-stirred mist across a large square lead and glass engraved plate on my dad’s chest. From this angle, I could make out glyphs of Life surrounded by glyphs of Death carved on the plate just like the wall outside Get Mugged—just like the walls in here.

The acrid stink of chemicals—formaldehyde and something else—the rancid scent of something biological gone bad, like spoiled fat left in the heat, hit me. And the misty black spell rising like steam off of the plate stank of cloying licorice, so strong it made the back of my throat tighten. Magic. Not blood magic. Not any kind of magic I had ever smelled before. Something dark. Something bad.

“Allison.” The whisper came from the other side of the table.

I looked up.

My dead dad stood on the other side of the table, his corpse spread out between us. Ghost Dad was transparent enough that even the dull light from the window poured through him. He cast no shadow next to mine on the floor.

“The gates between the living world and that of the dead are opening.” His voice was the most alive thing about him, though his pale, pale green eyes still shone with a kind of light—anger, determination. He sounded like himself but as if he spoke from across the room even though he was close enough I could touch him.

“That’s not my problem.” I wanted it to come out strong, but only a whisper escaped my lips.

“Yes,” he said. “It is. There are things you don’t know, dark things, dark magics that dwell on the other side. If they are allowed into this world, you, the people you care for, will die.”

I thought about Pike, already dead. Then I thought about Violet, who was pregnant with my father’s child, my brother or sister. I thought about Davy, and then my mind turned to Zayvion.

Shit.

“I’m going to call the police,” I said a little louder than before. “MERC can handle this. Fix this.”

“Allison, listen to me. This is far more than the police or any of the uninitiated can handle. You must do as I say. Let me touch you. Let me use the magic you hold in your body, your blood to seal the gates. It is what you were born for, what you and I were meant to do. With your magic, I can break these spells. Close the gates that are just beginning to open. You and I together can keep those we love safe. Alive.”

Okay, I liked it better when he couldn’t talk. Maybe being so close to his dead body made him strong enough his words carried a little of the old Influence he used to use on me to make me do what he wanted.

Frankly, everything he was saying just made me want to run like hell.

“You want to use me?” I said. And yes, that came out indignant. I get prickly under extreme duress. We had a long history, my father and I. And most of it was him trying to use me for his own benefit. “For all I know you set this up. Maybe you’re the one who wants to open the gates. Maybe you’re the one who is hurting those girls and hurting Anthony.”
Maybe you’re the one responsible for Pike’s death
, I thought silently.