Pale Demon (8 page)

“Hey, Legolas!” I shouted, my boots grinding the gravel as I shifted. “You want him, you go through me.”

Ignoring me, he continued on. That was just insulting, and gathering up a wad of fish-tasting ever-after, I threw it at him.

The guy with the long hair raised his hand, a protection bubble flashing into existence to deflect the ever-after. Standard move. I hadn’t really expected my first shot to land, and I started backing up more, my feet finding grass as I moved under the huge trees. But the men stopped, and that was all I wanted for the moment.

Side by side, the three men looked at me, traffic passing behind them in an uncaring blur. The guy with the long hair seemed to be the leader, and he frowned at Trent, disappearing through the bushes, before turning back to me. “Whatever he’s paying you, the Withons will double it if you turn your back for ten minutes,” he said loudly, and my face burned.

Why was I not surprised? Elves were elves. “He’s not paying me anything,” I said, just now realizing it. I was either really smart or really stupid.

The short guy on the end snorted his disbelief. “You’re kidding.”

Embarrassed, I backed up until the roots of a thick tree stopped me. “And even if he was, I don’t work like that,” I said. “Obviously you do. Pathetic. I should have known you were amateurs when you tried to take us out on the expressway. You keep that up, and the union is going to come down hard on you. There are traditions for this kind of thing, procedures. Or haven’t you been playing the game long enough to know?”

I was stalling, and the guy with the long hair knew it, taking a moment to tie his hair back and frown at the arch behind me. I glanced back, a knot of worry easing when I realized Trent was gone.

“Who wants the pleasure?” he asked, and the one in the middle, the one who reminded me of Quen, smiled.

“I’ll do it,” he said, and I tensed, shocked when a heavy lassitude filled me. My legs buckled, and that fast, I was on my knees, the tingle of wild magic coursing through me, robbing me of strength. There was music in my head, like green, growing things, and my hands hit the ground, bits of twigs biting into my palms, making them tingle. I gasped, my lungs reluctant to expand.

I fought it, finding strength from the ley line. I pulled it into me, feeling it burn. Teeth clenched, I looked up through the strands of my hair. The man in the middle widened his eyes as if in surprise. And then he started to sing.

My breath escaped me in a rush as his words washed over me, and my head bowed. My elbows trembled, and everything I had won back left me. “Stop…,” I whispered. I couldn’t think, the thick, muzzy blanket swallowing me up as he sang, the lazy words unclear as they became my entire world. My pulse shifted, becoming slower, meeting his song beat for beat. It was too slow, and I fought for control, failing.

I felt myself start to fall, and a warm arm caught me, gently cradling me. I could smell cinnamon and wine, bitter and spoiled. I couldn’t fight the music beating its way into my existence, making me live to a rhythm too slow, and my eyes shut as someone propped me up against the tree. I was losing my hold on the ley line, and in terror, I reached for it, trying to make a protection bubble in my mind to wall the music off. But it was already in my head, and I couldn’t separate it from me. It was too beautiful. I couldn’t help but listen.

“That was easy,” I heard the long-haired elf say derisively, but I couldn’t move. Couldn’t fight the lassitude that had become my world, hated and familiar from my childhood.

“You have her then?” the voice asked, and finally the singing stopped. The fatigue lingered as the song echoed in my brain, circling over and over, going more slowly each time. It was killing me.

“Go,” a breathy voice said, and my head landed on a shoulder. “I’ll be done by the time you finish Kalamack.”

Oh God. Trent.
But the spark quickly died. My breathing had slowed to a shallow hint. I was faltering. I recognized it. I’d lived this before when I was younger. The grass sighed as two of them left, and it was only me and the elf singing me to death. So beautiful I couldn’t let it go, couldn’t forget it, mesmerized.

The air grew cold on my face, and I realized I was crying. I didn’t want to die like this. Damn elf magic. Wild magic. Divine, slippery…alive, uncontrollable.

Uncontrollable,
I thought, fastening on that idea.
Malleable.
I couldn’t control wild magic, couldn’t fight it. But maybe I could…change it.

My heart gave a thump, and refused to beat again as the man’s voice faltered, leaving a single note in my mind to spiral down to a long, soft hum. Om, perhaps. The sound of peace, the sound of death.

Not yet,
I thought, and then I added to it, giving my mind an ugly note to follow the one of pure beauty, and my heart gave a beat at the harshness of it, discordant and wrong. The arms holding me jumped in surprise, jarring me, and I added a new note to follow my first.

I could hear him singing again, the words unclear and so exquisite it broke my heart. My jaw clenched, and I drowned the purity of his song with my own ugly music, harsh and savage—survival. It was never beautiful except for its pure honesty.

Again my heart beat, and I took a sip of air, breaking away from the elven spell, tingling with wild magic as control came flooding back, his hold on me broken. My eyes flashed open. I was sitting on the ground, my back to a tree, his arm around me like a lover, sleeping in the sun as he sang to me.

Son of a bitch.

I sat up out of his reach, turning to see the shock in his green eyes as his voice faltered. There was a hint of resemblance to Trent in them, and I felt a moment of doubt.
Could he do this, too?
“That was a mistake,” I rasped, and then I plowed my fist right into his gut.

The man grunted, bending over and bringing his knees to his chest. I swung my legs around to kneel, reaching for his hair. It was soft, like silk, and I clenched my fingers in it, anger giving me strength. I slammed the back of his head against the tree, and as he groaned, I staggered to my feet, giving him a mean kick in the ribs, hard enough to at least crack one or two, if not break them. I was pissed.

“You son of a bitch!” I yelled, seeing the mothers nearby gathering their kids and moving them away. “Try to kill me with your magic? Have a taste of mine!” I shouted, shredding the last of the music in my mind, trying to get rid of it completely.

He looked up at me, the pain from his ribs making him squint. I put my hand on his face, and flooded him with ever-after, burning the last of the wild magic from me with my own. He screamed and tried to pull away, but I followed him down, having to kneel when he fell over.

“You are slime, you hear me?” I shouted, wiping my eyes as I pulled away, my hand throbbing and me not caring. “Slime! And you know what? The Withons are slime, too, and Trent’s going to make it to the West Coast if it kills me. And it won’t!” Heart pounding, I gave him another kick, thinking I should do a lot more. All those people dead on the expressway. Glancing at the empty park, I went and picked up my bag, searching until I found my lipstick. Throwing the cap away, I scrawled “I killed them” on his forehead.

Panting, I lurched to my feet and dropped the ruined lipstick on his chest. He whimpered, his synapses singed. He wouldn’t be doing magic any time soon. Turning to the park, I pushed myself into a staggering, ugly run.

I did not like St. Louis.

R
ache!” Jenks shrilled, scaring the crap out of me as he darted down from the tall trees.

“God, Jenks!” I yelped, heart racing as I paused, a hand on the tree beside me. “You scared me. Where’s Trent?”

Dripping red dust, he hovered before me, taking in my haggard appearance and accepting it, knowing better than to ask what had happened. I was here, the assassin wasn’t. It was enough for Jenks, and right now, it was enough for me. “In a hole in the ground,” he said, and tension hit me. “Some kind of gardener’s bunker. It was his idea. I told him to find Ivy, but he wouldn’t listen. They’re going to find him, Rache! It’s not my fault! He wouldn’t listen!”

I panted, turning to look back the way I’d come. “Show me,” I said, and he darted away, dusting heavily so I could follow at my own limping pace. “If that man gets himself killed, I’m going to pound him!” I muttered, starting up the gentle incline.

The back of my mind registered how cool and restful it was here, the grass thick and well maintained. The trees were huge, rising high overhead like a distant ceiling. Seagulls called, swarming a crying kid with a box of animal crackers. Breathless, I caught sight of two men vanishing behind a row of tall shrubs.

Damn it, I don’t want to do this again.

My shoulder bag held tight to me, I ran after them, seeing Jenks’s faint trail leading down a damp sidewalk. Ahead of me, the two men stood at a bunkerlike door built right into a wall of earth. In the distance, one of the arch’s huge legs rose up. Oblivious to me, the men slipped inside—and the door swung shut.

I slid to a panting halt before the brown-painted steel door, listening as I struggled to catch my breath and tried the handle. Locked—and not with a spell, which I could break, but probably with a mundane dead bolt from the inside. At least Jenks was in there.

“Damn it!” I hissed, dropping back and digging my phone out of my pocket. “Answer me, Ivy,” I said as I hit the button and wrenched on the door at the same time.

“Right behind you,” came her voice, and I spun.

“Where…,” I started, then shoved the thought out of my head. “The door,” I babbled, dropping the phone into my bag. “Two of them. In there with Trent.”

Ivy motioned for me to back up, and she gave the knob a side kick, yelling for strength. I heard metal snap, and I wasn’t surprised when the knob came away in her grip as she gave it a tug and the door opened. God, I had good friends.

Shoulder to shoulder, we looked down a long, dimly lit room that narrowed into a black hallway. The electric lights were pale, and the sun streamed in for only a few feet. It was silent, and a cool breath of underground air, blowing out from the depths, moved my hair.

“Which way?” Ivy said, and I crept inside, feeling the chill take me. The faint glow of pixy dust showed when she pulled the door shut, and I pointed.

“There.”

It smelled like oil and damp—of sweaty men, old machinery, and dusty paperwork that hadn’t seen the light of the sun for twenty years. This was not on the regular tour, and I wondered where we were as we followed the corridor down and around, shunning doors and open archways when Jenks’s dust pointed elsewhere.

“Where’s the third one?” she whispered.

“Back at the car, out cold. Don’t let them start to sing, okay?” I said breathlessly, and she nodded, taking that at face value.

We have to be almost under one of the feet,
I thought, wondering how Quen kept Trent safe every day. I suppose watching Trent in an office was easier than trying to shake three guys in a Cadillac, but I was going to get the man a leash if we found him alive.

A soft crack of metal shocked through me, and then Jenks’s yelp.

“Shit,” Ivy swore, darting past me and running down a corridor.

Gasping, I bolted after her. Trent was shouting—it sounded like Latin—and, my boots skidding on the oil-slicked cement, I grabbed a rusty ceiling support and swung myself around a dusty machine and into a puddle of dirty light.

Squinting, I watched Jenks bust another bulb to make it darker yet. Two shadows were scurrying into the dark, Ivy’s sleek form chasing them. The ceiling was low, and the space was crowded with abandoned machines. Trent had his back to me as he knelt next to his suitcase under a light, a protection bubble around him. Relief hit me, and I paused, torn between seeing if he was okay and following Ivy, busy thunking people into walls by the sound of it.

The circle was larger than I thought Trent could make, almost one of my size, and I was glad I’d given him the magnetic chalk. He had a ribbon draped over his shoulder, and a cloth hat on his head that I didn’t recognize. I sniffed, wondering if that was an extinguished candle I smelled or just sulfur. He was kneeling and looked haggard as our eyes met, seeming almost scholarly with that hat and ribbon, but he seemed okay.

“Rachel! Some help here!” Ivy yelled, and I gave him a look telling him to stay put and ran. The glow of Jenks’s dust lit a dark corner, and I winced at a loud clang. Crap, if that had been Ivy’s head…

I barreled into another puddle of light, scrambling to catch the arm of the man she had flung. It was the short guy, and using his own momentum, I threw him into a rusty ceiling support. He hit with a thud, grasping weakly at it as he slid to the dirt-caked floor. With a dull crack, the beam he’d hit broke from the ceiling, falling right on him. A splattering of ceiling dust slipped over him, patterning him with rust. I wedged a toe under him and flipped him over to see his pained expression. “Surprise,” I said, and his eyes widened.

“Duck!” Jenks yelled, and I dropped, feeling the rush of metal over my head.

“Son of a bastard!” I whispered as I rolled away, finding my feet when I hit a piece of machinery the size of my car. I scrambled up, the lethal-magic detection charm on the strap of my bag clinking. The guy with the long hair was in front of me with a metal rod the size of a baseball bat.
Damn it, is Ivy down?

I couldn’t see her, and I backed up as he came forward, swinging his pole in some lame-ass elf move as if it were a sword. My hands were empty. I had Jack’s splat gun in my shoulder bag, but there were no charms in the hopper. Licking my lips, I tapped the ley line that St. Louis was built on. If he started singing, I was going to fry him, black charm or not.

Energy tasting of dead fish and electric lights slammed into me, and my eyes widened. It was as if it hit every square inch of my skin all at once, and I sucked in my breath, exhilarated.
Crap, I think we’re right under the ley line!

The guy I’d slammed into the pole was moving, and his buddy took a moment to help him up. “Ivy!” I called out, worried, and she coughed from the darkness.

“She’s okay,” Jenks said, darting in circles around my head.

The two men stood, a ribbon of blood seeping from a scalp wound the short one had. Grinning, ponytail guy pointed at me, then Ivy, and I cringed when someone pulled hard on the ley line humming somewhere above us. Their heads shot up as if surprised, and I dove for the shadows.

“Grab some air, Jenks!” I shouted, my heavy-magic detection amulet flashing red as I found Ivy, upright but holding her head. I never got a circle up as the tingle of wild magic hit me.
Too late,
I thought, doubled over in pain as a surge of energy swamped me. It was as if they had found a way to dump the entire line through me, forcing me to hold it. I screamed, trying to channel the entire ley line or spindle it—anything to get atop the massive force burning me.

Gasping, I managed to ride the wave of cresting energy, and with a triumphant cry, I shoved the spindled energy back out of me and into them, breaking my connection with the ley line entirely before they fried my synapses. It wasn’t wild magic, and this I could handle. Son of a bitch…what demon had taught them that? And how much had it cost?

I looked up from my half kneel, not remembering having fallen. Ivy was standing beside me, and I peered through my watering eyes to see the two elves picking themselves up off the floor. I would have felt pretty good if my mind wasn’t aching from the pain.

“You okay?” Ivy said, her grip on my arm hurting as she pulled me up. My skin felt as if someone had forced sand through my pores. She let go when I winced, but she didn’t look much better than I felt, her cheek swelling and dirt caked on her entire right side.

“Great. How about you?” I snatched my bag up from the grimy floor and faced the two assassins.

“I’ll live,” she said darkly. “Which is more than I can say for them.”

Yeah. I felt the same way, and I stifled a groan as I stepped forward with Ivy, ready to take them on if they wouldn’t just go away. Somehow, looking at them, I didn’t think they would. I took a breath to let them have it, hesitating when the faint sound of rumbling echoed up through our feet. A soft pattering of dust sifted down, and the two elves looked up. The one who’d hit the support looked terrified. Pointing up, he turned and ran the way we’d come in.

“Hey! Come back here!” I shouted as the other one bolted after him.

Jenks darted up, his face scared. “Out!” he shrilled, the sound of rumbling growing louder. “Run!”

“What?” was all I had time for, and then the earth moved. My balance left me, and I reached out for something, anything, to keep from falling. Chunks of concrete dropped where the elves had been. Ivy danced, somehow staying on her feet as I clung to another rusty ceiling pole.

“It’s falling!” Jenks screamed, the only thing not moving in the suddenly choking air.

Wobbling, Ivy grabbed my arm, and we staggered to the door. The ground quit moving, and we broke into a run.

“Earthquake?” I guessed as we found Trent, dazed and numb in the middle of his fallen circle, that hat of his slipping off and my chalk loose in his grip.

“We’re on a thousand-year-old swamp,” Ivy said. “No fault lines here.”

“Run!” Jenks shouted. “It’s not over yet!”

I grabbed Trent’s suitcase, and we all ran for the brown-painted door, getting three steps before a wave of dusty dirt rolled over us, clogging our lungs and making our eyes tear. The lights went out, and the earth shook again. Choking, I felt my way forward, squinting past Trent and following Ivy as she threw stuff out of our way.

“There!” she shouted, and the dim light of the sun spilled in.

The ground gave a hiccup, and noise crashed down, making me cower. Hand on Trent’s arm, I yanked him forward as he hunched over and coughed. We spilled out of the earth in a cloud of dust, running several feet before stopping to turn and stare at the opening. Damn, maybe I shouldn’t have swung that guy into the support pole.

“They’re getting away,” I said, hands on my knees as I pointed to the dusty elves, a short distance up the walk. Seeing us, they turned and ran. Chicken.

“Let them go,” Ivy said, and I turned to her, trying to ignore Trent throwing up in the nearby bushes.

“I owe them some hurt!” I said, tugging my shoulder bag back up where it belonged. “Damn it, Trent!” I shouted, pulling him up from where he was wiping his mouth with the red ribbon he’d pulled from his shoulders. “I told you to find Ivy, not go hide in a hole in the ground! I can’t keep you alive if you don’t listen to me!”

“Leave him alone,” Ivy said, tugging my arm off Trent, her eyes on the sky and her lips parted.

I was bleeding, and I looked at my hand in horror, flexing my fingers until I realized that it wasn’t my blood staining my fingers but Trent’s. His right bicep was soaked where I had been yanking him forward. His ears, too, had blood leaking from them, and his hand was red when he wiped his mouth. It only made me angrier. Damn it, he was hurt.

“You are my
responsibility
!” I shouted, ticked. “If you
ever
do something like that again, I’ll kill you myself.
Do you hear me!
”

Trent glared at me as he wiped his mouth with that ribbon, then let it fall. “You’re not my keeper,” he said, his green eyes vivid, reminding me of the elf who had almost killed me, lulled me to my death.

“Right now I am!” I shouted, getting in his face. “Deal with it!”

“Rachel, will you shut up!” Jenks exclaimed. “We have a bigger problem.”

I suddenly realized Trent had gone white faced, and like both Jenks and Ivy, was now staring at the river. Turning, I felt my mouth drop open.

“Oh,” I said, the sound of the approaching sirens taking on new meaning. I didn’t think I needed to worry about having left the scene of an accident. The cops, both the I.S. and the FIB, had something bigger to worry about.

The arch was not there anymore. Sort of. The legs were mostly there, but the rest of it was in house-size chunks between the shattered posts.

My stomach clenched, and I looked at the bunker, realizing what had happened. “This wasn’t my fault,” I said softly, but my voice was quavering as if I didn’t believe it.

“Maybe we should get out of here,” Jenks suggested.

“Good idea,” Ivy said. “Forget the rental. They have tracking charms built into the framework, and no one is going to be looking for you now.”

Nodding, I grabbed Trent’s sleeve and tugged him into motion. “They’ve probably got a tracking charm on my mom’s by now, too.”

“I can find any bug,” Jenks said, then flew up when Trent shuffled to his wheeled suitcase and limped silently beside me. We came out from the sunken sidewalk together and joined the walking wounded, heading against the wash of help flowing into the park from the surrounding city. For once, our dusty and bloody appearance was unremarked upon. We were walking, and there were lots of people who weren’t.

No way did a single support beam falling cause this. It had been the two elves and that magic that I’d pushed back into them. This was not my fault, and as I remembered the children playing on the grass, I vowed that the Withons were going to pay.
With interest.