Magic to the Bone (16 page)

“You ever played that game where you disarm
a bomb while the other person has the manual?”

“I suck at that game,” Harper said.

“You’re one of the best pro gamers I’ve ever seen,” Cal said. “You got this. Tell me about the bomb.”

“The bricks look like C-4, but they are orange. Oh, there’s a weird crystal taped to the side, too. Looks like smoky quartz or something?”

“Do the bricks have numbers on them?”

“No, writing. Not English.”

“Cyrillic,” Ezee said, coming back into the room. He had a flak jacket and the gunman’s belt with him. “Leatherman,” he added, holding up the belt. “So we got tools.”

“Cyrillic,” Harper repeated to Cal.

“How many red wires?” Cal asked.

Harper moved closer to the bomb. She bent and examined the wires. They were all white.

“No red wires,” she said, hoping that wasn’t bad.

“No red wires,” Cal
repeated. Then there was silence over the radio for what felt like eternity.

Sweat trickled down the back of Harper’s neck, itching in the cement dust and hair stuck there. She was no bomb expert and this was no game.
Deep breath
, she told herself.
Don’t panic
.

“There are two spots the wires go into the C-4?” Cal said, the radio crackling.

“Yes.”

“Hand the radio to Ezee,” Cal said. “You are
going to need both hands.”

Harper looked at Ezee. He put down his loot and took the radio, giving her a quick thumbs-up.

“You kill us, at least we don’t die alone,” he said with a forced grin.

Harper bared her teeth at him.

Ezee clicked the radio on. “Go ahead; she’s ready,” he said.

“Okay. Harper. Put both hands on the wires where they join the metal pins.”

Harper did so and nodded to Ezee.

“Done,” Ezee said.

“Now, on the count of three, I want you to pull. Smooth and fast, got it?”

“Got it.”

Harper felt the wires under her fingertips, felt the cool metal pins and their slightly rough edges. Time seemed to slow. Just her breath easing out and the sound of Cal counting down from three over the radio.

Three. Two. One.

She pulled. The long metal bits slid out of the C-4, leaving
Harper crouched in front of the bomb with two probe-like things attached to wires in her hands. She looked at Ezee and raised her eyebrows. The circuit board was still blinking green.

“She did it,” Ezee said. “Circuit board is still blinking.”

“Good,” Cal said. “She said there’s a sink? Take it to the sink.”

“Okay,” Harper said. She kept hold of the pins as Ezee helped cut the tape off the
sides of the board. They walked it together to the sink and put it carefully down. Harper set the pins down carefully, too.

“It’s in the sink,” she said, taking the radio back from Ezee.

“Turn on the water?” Cal said.

Ezee and Harper shared a look. They had no idea if the water worked.

“Here goes nothing,” Ezee muttered. He twisted the tap.

Water choked and spat and then flowed out in a brownish
rush. It smelled heavily of metal and rust, but it splashed down onto the electronics. The lights blinked on and then something popped and sizzled. Water plus electronics when powered was bad. Harper could put that together.

“It’s wet. Lights aren’t on anymore.” She left the water running.

“Congrats, you just disarmed your first bomb.” Cal’s voice was full of laughter.

“Wait, what? That was
it?” Harper glared at the radio. “What about the explosives?”

“This isn’t the movies,” Cal said. “C-4 is very stable. Without the blasting caps and electric trigger, you could light it on fire and cook dinner with it and it wouldn’t blow up.”

“What about the crystal?” Ezee asked.

Harper repeated that question.

“Probably magic,” Cal said, sounding more serious. “Secondary trigger? Amplifier?
That isn’t my area.”

“Let’s remove it,” Ezee said. “We can wrap it in the flak jacket and put it at the end of the hall.”

“Better than leaving it,” Harper agreed. She relayed the plan to Cal and Levi.

At the far end of the hall was a set of doors that were long sealed, the tunnel beyond bricked up and closed off. It was weird to think that only feet above her head was a room full of shifters
awaiting their fate. In the end, she and Ezee dragged the body down there, too, piling it on top of the flak-jacket-wrapped crystal.

Nothing exploded.

“Can you guys come help dig us out? What’s going on up there?” Harper asked Cal as she slumped to the floor, leaning against the cool wall in relief.

“We’re on an upper floor, pinned down. They have retreated a bit though. We’re going to try
getting out and finding some more guns. Levi is a crack shot,” Cal added.

“Of course he’s a crack shot,” Ezee muttered. “Raised on a rez in Idaho. Geez.”

Harper grinned at him and shook her head.

“We’ll be here,” she told Cal.

Ezee and Harper stared at each other for a moment and then both sighed.

“So, you wanna go keep digging? Or sit here and stare at a bomb while we talk about my sex life
some more?” Harper asked.

“Digging sounds great.”

Gunfire crackled through the rising gloom, coming from up the hill. My friends must have gotten to the mercenaries. Time was definitely short.

Samir stopped laughing and looked toward the noise. He gave a small shake of his head.

“So you chose to come here, to stop me,” he said. “Stupid girl.”

Calm slid over me. This was it. It was time.

“See,” I said, gathering my magic into an invisible
shield. I took a deliberate step into the circle, smudging the black line as I went. “You are older than I am, more powerful, way more tricky, but there’s something you just super suck at.”

“What is that?” Samir tipped his head to the side, watching my slow advance with narrowed eyes.

“Making friends,” I said. We were less than twenty feet apart now. It would have to be close enough. I threw
up my shield, making it purple and sparkly and visible as hell.

Bullets zinged by me. Three bounced off Samir’s own protections, but the fourth found an angle he hadn’t shielded quickly enough. It cut a deep furrow into his arm, blood spraying in a mist in its path.

“Traitors,” Samir hissed. He wasn’t bleeding as much as I’d hoped, but he was definitely hurt. Score one for the good guys.

“Traitors?”
I said. I threw an exploratory bolt of lightning at him. He bounced it away with a gesture. “Forced loyalty isn’t loyalty. Not hard to betray someone coercing you. Maybe you should have tried not being an evil motherfucker.”

A golden lash of power whipped toward me. I sprang back, barely keeping my feet on the uneven ground. His magic fizzled on my shield.

“Live long enough, Jade, you’ll learn
that everyone betrays everyone eventually,” he snarled.

“I almost pity the lonely, sucking black hole inside you,” I said with a grunt as he whipped more power at me.

Samir changed his attack, throwing magic into the ground at my feet. Stones rose around me, burning with honey-sick power. I poured magic into my shield and charged at him. The stones burst, forming a thick, burning mist. I couldn’t
see him anymore. One moment there was field and snow and Samir’s angry face, the next just burning fog.

I thrust my left hand out, my right gripping my talisman, and sent a wave of force to part the fog, calling up wind to disperse it.

Samir had moved. I barely dodged the golden whip of power snaking in from my left.

For a second my concentration wavered and my shield weakened. The burning
fog coated my left hand, my skin blackening and blistering instantly.

Choking back a scream, I grabbed my shield around me again, running to my right, bringing the whirlwind to bear on the fog. It dissipated in time for me to dodge another whip.

“Running out of time,” I gasped at Samir, hoping to distract him. I was defending myself, more or less. But I wasn’t able to attack. Without offense,
I couldn’t end this fight. I’d expended too much magic in the last two days, or maybe never had enough in the first place. I needed an edge, or I was going to lose and fast.

The moon was rising. I saw a sliver of it over the trees beyond Samir.

He turned his head, and I threw the power in my shield at him in a slam attack.

Tricks. Samir was so good at them. My shield rammed through his illusion
as the real Samir jumped me from the right, materializing out of thin air. Only my dragon sense of his magic warned me.

I twisted and threw myself sideways, rolling on the hard ground. Burning golden power, reinforced with actual physical chains he’d thrown, wrapped around my legs instead of my body, as he’d intended. I slashed at it with my own magic, forming purple blades as extensions of my
hands, cutting through his power. He yanked, dragging me along the ground toward him. The chain attached to my left leg wasn’t fully cut. I felt my femur bend, then snap.

Pain shot through me and I caught the wave with my magic, forcing myself not to feel it, cocooning the injury in power. I tried to stand, but my leg wouldn’t hold me.

I was losing. All the magic in the world wasn’t going to
save me. He was too powerful.

Powerful. But predictable. I heard Ash’s voice in my head again. Samir was on his A game, working with the things in his comfort zone. Why wouldn’t he? They had never failed him.

He’d approach me, just as he was now, moving slowly toward me, gathering his power to him. He would want to gloat, to savor the moment he took my heart. I let my shoulders slump and pulled
my own magic in close. It wasn’t that tough to look like I was defeated. I almost was.

Come a little closer, bastard
. I let my right hand slip to the hilt of the Alpha and Omega but didn’t draw it. I didn’t want the motion to catch his attention. Not yet. I wasn’t the using weapons type, which Samir knew. This surprise was best saved for the last moment.

“You could have been amazing,” Samir
said. “You should have stayed with me.”

“Until you ate me,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Perhaps I would have kept you,” Samir said with a half shrug. His eyes darted to the sky. “Ready to feel your friends die?” he asked. He released power, and the line up the hill became visible again.

“Not today,” I said. I released the knife hilt and slammed my good hand into the ground. I pictured my
magic like a huge scythe and threw it toward the glowing umbilical cord of power. My magic met his and cut clean through it, burning away Samir’s gold with purple vengeance.

I slumped for real as the power faded. It had taken more than I thought to cut the cord.

Samir swore and advanced the last feet to me, caution gone.

“Stupid, meddling bitch,” he said. He grabbed me too fast for me to react.

My muscles were lead, my magic a whisper in my veins, my left leg screaming in pain. It was like my nightmare unfolding all over again. Another snowy field. Another dusk. Another moon.

Samir’s hand formed claws as he lifted me up. I tried to push him off with my bad hand and get to my knife with the good one. My ankle was too far away, my body bent unnaturally upward by Samir’s strength.

His
sweater had pushed back and the angry scar, a wound that wouldn’t quite heal, showed on his forearm.

Wolf had done that.

Wolf, whom he had been afraid of.

Wolf, whom I had found and rejoined with.

I brought my good leg up hard, going for his balls or his abs or whatever I could connect with. Samir plunged his clawed hand into my chest even as the knife hilt touched my fingertips.

Now.

Wolf
flowed out of her silver circle in my mind and manifested. She slammed into Samir from the side, hard enough that he lost his grip and his fingers slid out of me with a sucking sound that was worse than the pain.

“No,” he said, his face a death mask of hatred and horror as he stared at her.

I drew the Alpha and Omega and threw myself forward, my legs refusing to hold me. Samir and I ended up
in an embrace as he caught me instinctually. The dagger slid into his chest, up through the soft tissue beneath his ribs.

We were eye to eye, close enough to kiss, his arms around me, half kneeling in the snow.

“Did I ever tell you the story of the scorpion and the frog?” he murmured.

I had no idea what he was trying to say. It didn’t matter.

I was all out of fucks to give.

I twisted the
Alpha and Omega and shoved it up, straight into his evil heart.