Magic on the Hunt (24 page)

Chapter Twenty

T
erric fell into step behind Mikhail-Shame, already breathing harder, even though he’d taken only a few steps.

This was ridiculous. Crazy. They were marching to their death. And for some reason, I was marching right behind them, up the wet trail, toward a wetter waterfall, on a cold, wet spring evening, with an undead egomaniac, a broken Closer, an escaped criminal, my undead father, and my injured lover.

Really, I’d turn around and walk home if it meant I could get a hot bath and a good book.

We hit a switchback in the trail, and two people stepped out of the shadows. They did not know how lucky they were not to get a fireball in the face.

“Allie,” a familiar voice said. “What are you doing out on this fine night?”

I peered at the man. Sid Westerly, the Hound. He wore a bulky jacket and had his hands in his pockets, his hood not doing a lot of good to keep his glasses dry. Jamar Legare was next to him, flannel shirt and turtleneck under a trench coat, a slouch hat and sneakers. Very Malcolm X meets the Pacific Northwest.

“Did you see what happened to Jack?” I asked.

Jamar glanced at Zay, Shame, Terric, and Roman. We were all wearing weapons. Another thing I’d explain to them later.

“They know about Dane,” I said. “They’re here to help me deal with this.” Okay, so that wasn’t all the truth. We were looking for Sedra, but last I knew Dane had helped her get away from Jingo Jingo. It was possible he was with her.

“Dane shot Jack,” Jamar said. “Leg. Bea’s taking him to the hospital. The police haven’t arrived yet.” He paused long enough to let me know he thought that was a little strange.

Hells. The Authority had probably found out about it and canceled the call. Was Bartholomew sending people out this way?

“You know where Dane went?” I asked.

“Up that trail,” Sid said. “He hasn’t come back.”

I was glad they hadn’t followed. Dane would be easy to track out here in the brush. For all that there was still a lot of magic around here and the well, which most people did not know about, open spaces, forested places, simply did not have much magic worked on them. So the magic that was used was easy to spot.

I inhaled and caught a whiff of Dane’s old-vitamin stink.

Mikhail-Shame started walking; Terric, dragging his feet, followed behind him.

“We got it.” I wiped rain off my face. My hand hurt, and my face felt stinging hot, even though it was covered in wet. Fever? Probably.

They both gave me a doubtful look. “If you follow me, I’ll take it as a breech of our contract for finding Dane. Deal was to find and not engage.”

I waited until they both nodded.

“Davy’s on his way,” I said. “Tell him not to follow. I’ll see you all back at the den tonight, okay? And call me if you hear anything about Jack.” I started off, bringing up the rear.

I didn’t look back, but after a few steps, I heard Sid and Jamar head down the trail, talking quietly. I was so glad they didn’t follow. I had seen enough bleeding, broken bodies today and didn’t want to see theirs added to the number.

The trail curved along another switchback.

“Here,” Mikhail-Shame said. His voice was a little thin, a little shaky. The walk, or the strain of the possession, or both, were wearing on him.

He had stopped in front of the hill that rose up and up above us. Didn’t look any different than any other part of the trail. Sword fern, moss, and needles covered the ground; fir and vine maple stretched up to the sky.

“Guardian?” he said.

Both Zay and Roman stepped forward.

Roman stepped back and motioned Zay toward the hill. “They’ve probably changed the locks since I last used it.”

Zay cast a spell. The hillside melted away. There was a very real, very solid door in front of us. Zay cast a second spell, something in the unlocking family, and then pressed his hand against the door for a moment before pushing it inward.

Mikhail-Shame whispered something, a hurried, hissing litany. The breeze and gathering mist in the forest lifted and wrapped around us like a damp cloak of shadows. It was a spell. Some sort of Camouflage. I inhaled, exhaled, smelled forest and stone and the strangely dry scent from beyond the open door but did not smell magic.

Mikhail-Shame strode in first, and we fell into step. I expected a hallway or a room, but instead, a set of wooden stairs led down and down. Light—plain electric with a low enough wattage, they were probably siphoning off of the gift shop and restaurant without making a blip in the meter—poured out along the stairs and in pockets of the walls. It was bright enough to show each stair and to give a general idea of the space.

The walls and ceiling were carved wood, joists and wooden columns supporting the weight of the hill above and around us. It should feel cramped and claustrophobic. But the lights were angled to soak as much warmth into the polished wood as possible and reflect it back, so that it felt like we were descending a beautifully carved and spacious stairway.

The farther down we walked, I noticed glints of light catching on bits of glass worked into the walls and shadows clinging to dark veins of lead and iron. Glyphs, spells, and protections worked into the walls grew like leaves, branches, limbs, spreading through the walls themselves and seeming to shift and sway as if a wind followed us and stirred them.

Six sets of stairs later, I, for one, was breathing hard, and we were at a double door.

Squared-off glyphs ran a line like an ancient language strung across the top of the doors.

Mikhail-Shame cast a spell, pulling the magic from even deeper beneath the ground.

I drew my sword and cleared my mind. I could tell by the heartbeats still at my wrist that everyone else was doing the same.

“Let this end now,” Mikhail-Shame said in quiet reverence, almost a prayer. He placed his hand on the door and pulled it open.

The scent of summer, of magic and flowers and cool night breezes, poured out from beyond the door.

And so did the stink of old vitamins and new blood. Dane was in here.

We walked in, shoulder to shoulder.

The room was easily as large as the ballroom beneath Maeve’s inn. But the floor was inset with dozens of different woods, all polished to a glow, flowing from the lightest white-honey, through amber, then red, and into a deep mahogany black.

I knew this room had been built long before civilization took root here. Knew this ancient place had been kept secret for thousands of years.

And I knew that the Life magic well pulsed just beneath that layer of wood.

“We have been waiting for you, Mikhail,” a woman said.

No, not a woman. Sedra. Or perhaps Isabelle.

She stood in the exact center of the room, wearing a long white gown and a ceremonial robe, covered collar to hem with blood. Behind her, on five wooden tables, were the bodies of five men with torso-sized metal disks laying upon their chests. Dane’s goons. Stabbed, bled. Used, discarded, dead.

What had they died for? What kind of magic took the lives of five men to cast?

Standing next to Sedra, gun in his bloody hand, was Dane.

Sedra was not trapped, not bound in any way. Other than the blood on her gown, I didn’t see a mark on her. She stood with her shoulders back and chin high, her hair loose around her shoulders, the white of the gown making her skin as pale as alabaster. Her blue eyes burned bright.

“Isabelle,” Mikhail-Shame said. “Your game is over now.”

“No, Lord of Death,” she said, “it is you who will be overcome this night.”

Was it really Isabelle? She sounded like Sedra, looked like Sedra. Acted like Sedra. Well, maybe a little more high-handed, but not much.

Look.
Dad cast an odd little Sight spell that felt like he’d strapped a pair of goggles over my eyes and adjusted the lens. I suddenly saw Sedra for what she was.

She still looked like Sedra, but in the same space, stretching out from beneath her skin, was another woman. Dark haired, with wide-set eyes and stronger, heavier features, she moved her head slightly. Like a blur of light behind that movement, I saw another face—masculine, hard cut. Leander.

Isabelle
, my father said,
and Leander. One body, two souls.

Holy shit. How? How could they possess one body? How could they both be possessing Sedra?

Lives were sacrificed
, Dad said, and I knew he meant the dead men on the tables.

“Our game has just begun.” Isabelle-Sedra smiled. “Now is our day. Now all magic will belong to us. And the world will fall at our feet.”

She raised her hand. Her sleeve fell away from her wrist. A disk pulsed a pus-colored yellow there, bloody, burned and raw at the edges, as if it had just been implanted in her flesh.

“You,” Isabelle-Sedra said, both a man’s and a woman’s voice somehow coming out of her mouth, “will not stop us!”

Mikhail-Shame lifted his hand and pulled on so much magic from the well, the floor burned with white light.

He threw a twisting gout of raw magic at Isabelle-Sedra.

Terric heaved a wall of magic up out of the floor in front of Mikhail-Shame just as Dane fired his gun.

The explosion of bullets was too loud in the room, but Mikhail-Shame did not fall.

The bullets hit the barrier Terric held and rattled to the ground, useless.

I was so going to make Terric show me how to cast that bulletproof wall when we got out of this. If we got out of this.

Dane traced a spell with his left hand and threw it, not at Terric, but at the walls of the room around us.

Glyphs caught pastel light, melted, shifted, re-formed, and stepped away from the walls, becoming the watercolor people. No, not just watercolor people. The Veiled. At least twelve solid Veiled formed over the top of disks placed around the room, the disks settling into their throats.

What the hell? We’d fought only seven solid Veiled before. We destroyed two. I think Leander killed three or four of them in prison. But there were twelve now—and I did not recognize any of them.

Zay chanted; so did Roman—a similar cadence, but very different spells. They both twisted at the waist and struck the Veiled with streams of magic that followed their hands like a crackling whip.

The Veiled sucked the magic down. Zay nicked his hand on his sword, and Roman sliced his hand with a knife he pulled out of his belt. Blood magic spun glyphs down the line of magic they cast, wrapping and changing the line of magic pouring into the disks at each of the Veiled’s necks into a solid rope. The two Closers stood, back to back, hauling on the magic, hand over hand, pulling the Veiled closer and closer.

I chanted my mantra, clearing my mind, pushing away my fear, fatigue, pain. I could deal with the horror of this later. Magic can’t be cast in high emotional states. And I needed magic to do exactly as I told it to do.

And I was going to tell it to kick the Veiled’s asses.

The mark of magic in my left hand burned warm. Pike had said that mark was a beacon to the dead. Good. Because I wanted their attention.

I opened my hand and held it out in front of me.

A half dozen Veiled moaned, each face turning our way, mouths open, as if craving the beacon of light that poured from my skin.

I began the glyph for Impact.

No
, Dad said,
Cleanse.

What?

Cleanse. Use dark magic through Cleanse and it will break their connection to the disks.

I don’t know Cleanse.

The Veiled were fast—inhumanly fast. They rushed.

Dad stretched forward in me and took over just my left hand and arm. I let him and got busy casting a Shield with my right.

The final stroke of Cleanse bit hard into my palm. Black fire poured out, striking the three Veiled nearest me.

They screamed. They burned. They fell to the floor in a rush of color and light until they were nothing but ash. The disks clattered and shattered to the floor.

“No!” Isabelle-Leander yelled.

And then there were hands around my throat, hands that pushed me down to the floor and squeezed.

The man on top of me was not a Veiled. He was Leander. Heavy, real, stinking of Blood magic and Death magic and the disks.

But he had just been possessing Sedra. What, could he come and go as he pleased?

He had a disk in his hand and pressed it hard over my throat, leaning straight-armed down on me.

“Child once dead and now alive, I will break you. I will break the magic in your bones and drink down its sweet pulp.”

I couldn’t breathe.

I felt, or heard, Zayvion yell. Heard Terric yell.

And Isabelle-Sedra laugh.

“Do you see what we can do?” Leander asked. “Do you
understand
? Isabelle and I are not like you. We pay no price to use magic.”

He uttered a hard word, twisting dark and light magic through the technology of the disk. If I’d had the air, I would have screamed. A spell dug into my chest, as hot as a razor, and hooked on to something deep inside me.

Leander lifted up, his hand clutching the disk that was somehow hooked into the spell that was hooked into me. Hooked into my soul.

No!
Dad yelled.

Dad grabbed for me. I could feel his ghostly hands as he tried to hold me, keep me in my mind in my body. I grabbed for him too, my mental fingers slipping from his grip.

Leander only smiled. “Magic will do anything we wish. Anything we ask of it. No price. No pain. You are so little, so weak. And now, you are nothing.”

He yanked on the disk, then brought it up to his mouth and pressed his lips against it.

“Break her,” he said, not to me. To magic.

And magic listened.

I screamed. Pain stole away the world, stole away my mind, as Leander pulled me, up and up out of my flesh, out of my bones, until I broke from everything I was—body, mind, life—and stood in front of him, nothing but a naked soul attached to the disk by a thin silver line.

“Less than nothing.” He smiled and traced a glyph with his left hand.