Magic to the Bone (14 page)

I gripped the tags, swallowing bile at the feel of Samir’s magic. Consolation prize was that this would hopefully be the last day of my life I’d ever have to deal with it.

If it wasn’t just the last day of my life, period.

With that happy thought, I closed my eyes. I gathered my magic and thought of Tess, of her magic, clear and cold and precise. The
air around us grew thick, the world holding its breath as I messed, only a little, with time itself. Then I hummed a soft note as I opened my eyes and yanked on the dog tags.

The chain and tags slid clear of Vollan’s neck, the chain moving straight through his flesh as though it weren’t there at all. For a moment Tess was there in my mind, a ghost of a smile on her ruby-red lips. She nodded to
me, pleased, before she faded away into the silver circle that Wolf had constructed inside my head to hold my ghosts at bay.

I threw the tags into the snow beyond us as I stood up. They sank away into the white wet, the feel of Samir’s power fading as the snow engulfed them.

“I am free,” Vollan said with awe in his voice. “I can’t hear him anymore.” He looked at Cal, and a wild grin broke out
on his face.

Alek looked at me and I nodded. He released Vollan and backed up, his hand casually resting on the gun at his waist.

“Good to have you back, Boss,” Cal said, offering Vollan a hand up.

“How did you know?” Vollan asked.

“Talk later,” Alek said. “We upheld bargain. Your turn.”

“Bargain?” Vollan looked at Alek and then to Cal.

“We free you, you help us stop Samir,” I said. “What’s
his plan? Where is he now?”

“That the deal you made, son?” Vollan said to Cal as he bent and retrieved his gun.

Alek growled, but the big bear just made a sour face at him. “I ain’t gonna shoot you,” he said. “Just not leaving my weapon on the ground.”

“Yeah,” Cal said. “That’s the deal I made. We shouldn’t be here, Boss. This isn’t our thing.”

“All right.” Vollan ran a hand through his hair,
making it stand up in the growing chill. “Sorcerer is up that way, in that field tucked down at the bottom of campus. Not that far if you go through the woods. The humans are up doing something around that church. I think they are going to blow the place up. Lot of shifters been taken up there in cages. We ain’t been a part of that.”

“Blow the place up?” Harper said, moving toward us. Behind
her I saw Ezee and Levi exchange a worried look.

“I smelled some things, like Semtex, maybe. I never did much with demolitions, but you don’t really forget the smells,” Vollan answered her.

That made sense in a sick way. Samir liked explosions. He had blown up things before. Like my adoptive family. At a school, no less. Maybe time really was a flat circle like that character in
True Detective
had said.

“Could you bring down the building with that? Enough to kill shifters? He needs a sacrifice,” Harper said.

“He could if he augments it with magic, I suppose,” I said. Not a happy thought. He’d used a regular-old-dynamite-type bomb before, but also had exploding stones placed at intervals to magnify the blast. The school had burned for days. My nails dug into my palms hard enough to
hurt. Freyda, her pack, Vivian—all of them were locked up in that chapel.
Not again. Not fucking again
.

“Worse than that,” Ezee said, exchanging another worried look with Levi. “There’s an old boiler room and some steam tunnels that run right under the Commons. I ran a Spycraft game set here once, before Jade’s time. We used blueprints and figured out you could drop half the school in on itself
if you put enough explosives in those tunnels. Put them right under the chapel? Boom. No more chapel.”

I’d been in those tunnels with Ezee before. An evil warlock had been using them for his lair. It was true; nothing good happened to gamers in steam tunnels.

“We stop Samir, the bomb won’t go off, right?” Harper said.

“Humans are in charge of the bomb,” Vollan said. “I don’t know what their
orders are, but given where they put their trailers? I’d say they are expecting the center to go. Samir seems the type to build in contingencies, too.”

“He is,” I said. I rubbed the bridge of my nose. We were fucked.

“I know a way into those tunnels,” Ezee said. “What if we got to the bomb—could we disarm it?”

“This isn’t a spy movie,” Levi said.

“Yes, I could,” Cal said. “It’s what I did
for the army.”

“You waited until now to say that? Seriously?” Harper glared at him.

“Dramatic reveal,” he said with a half-smile.

I couldn’t decide if I wanted to shake his hand or punch him. He was almost likeable, for a stone-cold killer.

“I kind of hate you,” Harper muttered.

Cal just shrugged.

I looked up at the sky. It wasn’t dark yet, but we could count the daylight left in terms of
minutes, not hours.

“Can you get your men away from Samir? Or at least get me through the line?” I asked Vollan.

“Maybe,” he said. “I can get you through to the sorcerer. We’ve got orders not to shoot you until he gives the signal anyway. That’s why I came out of the trees when I saw Cal wasn’t alone. I remembered you. The little part of my head that was still mine hoped you could help.”

“Glad
you were right,” I said. “Can you stop them from shooting?” Last thing I wanted to worry about was dodging bullets and shielding myself from gunfire while trying to fight Samir also. It warmed my heart that my ex was scared enough to give orders to shoot me if he needed it, though. He wasn’t as confident as he appeared. That or he was just a deck-stacking asshole. Probably a little from column
A and a little from column B.

“If you give me enough time to get around to their positions,” he said.

“I can stall Samir,” I said, hoping I wasn’t full of shit. I could certainly distract him, at least.

“What about the bomb?” Harper asked.

“You guys are going to have to handle that,” I said, turning to her. “Think you can get Cal into those tunnels? Show him where the room is?”

“Zomg, you
are letting us help?” Harper leaned forward and squinted at me. “Pod person, I’m sure of it.”

“Maybe I learned that friendship is magic,” I said. “Don’t push it. Don’t do anything stupid and do not get yourself killed. I’ll raise you from the dead and kill you again if you do. Promise.”

“I go with Jade,” Alek said in a tone that shut up any argument I had.

“I face Samir alone,” I said. “Nonnegotiable,
Alek.”

“Ah, there’s our girl,” Harper said.

We hashed out a quick plan that was likely suicide. But we were gamers. Rushing into certain death hoping we could win was pretty much par for the course for us. I was putting my friends’ lives in the hands of a mercenary who had helped kidnap Max and Rosie. Who had also helped free Harper. I was putting my and Alek’s safety in the hands of a bear
who had, in another timeline, killed two of my friends.

Desperation breeds strange bedfellows. With quick hugs all around, I followed Alek and Vollan into the woods. It was endgame. The boss fight loomed, and no matter how unready I felt, there was no turning back. Not this time. Not ever again.

In fox form, Harper ran along behind Cal, Levi, and Ezee. Cal and Levi stayed in human form, carrying the guns. Ezee was in his coyote shape, running slightly ahead, scouting for them.
As they got to the edge of the first set of dorms, they had to slow down.

Three big RVs were parked in the lower lot, barely visible as they ran through the trees toward the center. A dozen men were clustered around the Campus Security building, but they were definitely human. None of them even glanced their way, though a shifter probably could have heard or smelled them coming. The wind was
not in Harper and her friends’ favor.

Ezee skirted the brick dorm building. The Student Commons lay in the center of everything, like the circle at the heart of a wheel. Ezee had explained there were two ways to get the old boiler room below it. One was through the Commons itself, but that had been sealed off when the renovations were done to convert the chapel into what it was today. The other
entrance was in the Math and Science building to the right of the Commons, dead ahead of them now.

Campus was dead quiet once they snuck past the men around the security office. When she glanced that way, she saw the Commons’ main doors were locked with a web of silver wire. Harper shivered as she ran, and it had nothing to do with the snow. Samir’s magic was sealing the door, she was sure of
it. Not a good sign.

Three men sporting automatic weapons and wearing body armor emerged from the Sciences building. She’d been so focused on what was beside and behind that Harper didn’t see them until they were shouting and raising their guns.

Cal dropped one of them with a headshot worthy of any zombie killer. The shot rang out like a clarion call in the silence. Harper dove into the deeper
snow off the path. Ezee charged ahead as Levi dropped the rifles he’d been holding and drew a pistol. A bullet whizzed by Harper’s ear.

More shouting. More gunfire. All three of the men ahead of them were down. Harper charged past them and into the building, shifting to human as soon as her feet hit the tiled floor.

Cal took up the rear and yanked the door shut behind them.

“We’ve got seconds.
Let’s go,” he said. He wasn’t even breathing hard, the bastard.

Harper reminded herself that he was on their side and shoved away her annoyance and anger. She followed Ezee, who had also shifted to human, down the hall and then down a narrow set of stairs.

Harper stayed on his heels as they crashed through a fire door and into an even narrower hallway. Ezee stopped abruptly and threw her to
the side as a bullet clipped his arm, spraying her face with warm blood. The gunshot sound was booming and disorienting in the narrow space. More shots from behind them rang out and Harper twisted, shifting back to fox to lower her profile.

The fire door banged shut, cutting her off from Levi as he and Cal turned to fire up the stairs. Ezee went down beside her, shifting as he fell. No shots
came at them. Down the hallway, Harper saw the silhouetted figure of a man. He was messing with something in his hands. His gun? She didn’t care.

Harper threw aside her fear and charged down the hall at the gunman. His gun had jammed. He threw it at her and tried to pull something from his belt but she was too fast. Harper remembered body armor so she went for his throat, letting her animal instincts
guide her. Her teeth sank home, blood filling her mouth, flesh squelching and crunching in her jaws. It was disgusting but she ripped and tore, thinking only of survival.

Ezee barreled past them, leaping over them both as Harper took her prey down to the ground. He grabbed her by her scruff and dragged her forward with him, still running. Harper didn’t fight, but got her legs underneath her and
scrambled beside him. Ezee was shouting. Shouting a word over and over.

Blood rushed in her ears, and they still rang from the gunfire but Harper made out what he was saying.

Grenade.

The gunman hadn’t thrown his jammed gun at her. He’d thrown a grenade.

The explosion rocked the world, or so it felt like. Chunks of concrete rained down and the ceiling groaned. A wave of force threw Harper
and Ezee down, knocking the air from Harper’s lungs. There was a secondary crash and then all she heard was ringing, like an alarm someone had forgotten to shut off.

She reached into the mist and found her human form, shifting away from the injured, unhappy fox.

“Harper, you okay?” Ezee whispered. Or shouted. She couldn’t tell. His face was caked with cement dust.

“Biblethump,” she said.

“Thank God,” he said. He helped her to her feet.

Feet. She still had them. Small mercies. Her human body had been safe from the blast, so she bet that she looked ridiculously clean compared to Ezee. Harper turned to look behind them and saw only a pile of rubble. Complete cave-in. The blast had shoved the body of the gunman down the hallway with them. He lay in a dusty, crumpled heap. She could
still taste his blood.

Harper swallowed the bile that rose at that thought.
Nope. Big fat cup of nope
. She wasn’t going to barf. They had to figure shit out.

Her ears were healing, the ringing retreating. She looked at Ezee.

“How do we get out of here?” she asked.

“That’s the bad news,” he said, brushing ineffectually at his coat. “That was the only way in or out.”

“Where’s the boiler room?”

“That way,” Ezee said.

Harper started walking. Her heart was still beating. She could mostly breathe. She felt strangely numb, and wondered if that was shock. They found the boiler room right where Ezee thought it was, about thirty feet farther down. There were no other gunmen in their way. They seemed to be completely alone down here.

“Least there are no more bad guys,” Ezee said from behind
her. “We can’t get out, but nobody can come down here either. Hope Levi is okay,” he added, almost too softly for her to hear.

Pushing through the metal door into the boiler room, Harper groaned.