Something Magic This Way Comes (30 page)

Missy had not actually believed Gram about the shadow people until she hit Dallas proper. After that, there had been no doubt. Shadow people moved everywhere, and each one tasted a bit different. What was worse, some of them would follow Missy and chase her until she got far enough away to hide under her shroud. If Tommy had not found her that morning, a shadow person would have finally gotten her, because she had not been able to weave a shroud for days.

The sound of a footstep in a rain filled gutter caused her breath to catch in her throat. Another step followed the first . . . then another.

“Oh, to hell with this,” she heard a frustrated woman’s voice say and the darkness disappeared before a flare of blue light.

Missy bit down on her tongue to keep her teeth from chattering as the light moved forward to hover over Tommy’s body. His pale skin glowed like the summer sky beneath the brilliant globe. A woman stepped past the dumpster into Missy’s field of view.

She wore a dark raincoat and held a clear vinyl umbrella over her head. Missy could see a pair of soldier’s boots peeking out from under the coat.

“Ah, damn it,” the woman muttered as she squatted down on her heels by the corpse. “Poor kid. You didn’t deserve this. Don’s gonna be
so
pissed.” She reached out and drew her fingers over the body’s face, closing the eyes. Light flickered from her fingertips, and when her hand came away, the eyelids stayed shut.

Missy watched the woman glance around the alley.

She held her breath, asking in another silent prayer that this strange person would forget to look over her shoulder and back into Missy’s corner. The woman stood and extinguished her ghostly light, shook her head, and began walking through the passage toward the far street. Just as Missy started to relax, she heard a sound like rain bouncing off a hollow can coming from her left side.

She slowly turned her head toward the sound and found a large, silver cat staring back at her. Not just silver in color, like a kind of gray. Oh, no. This was a cat made of
silver metal
. If its tail had not been twitching and its ears swiveling back and forth, Missy would have thought that the woman had dropped a statue as she passed.

“Nice kitty?” she whispered. Both ears swiveled forward and the tail went still and rigid.
Oops.

The growl that came from the metal cat echoed and boomed as though a real animal had been caught in a snare drum. The clincher was the snarl, though.

“Mryaaaow!” The woman’s footsteps faltered and Missy tried to jumped up to run . . .

. . . Except that her legs had fallen asleep while she had been hiding. At her first step, she tripped over her own feet, falling flat into a puddle. The cat hissed and jumped back as water splashed everywhere. She tried to get up again, but hot needles burned all the way down to her feet. Gritting her teeth, she lurched forward anyway. Another fall seemed imminent, but something rigid and unyielding caught the back of her tattered jacket, jerking her to a stop just short of the pavement.

Missy screamed and twisted. She threw her arms back and tried to claw at the hand that held her but the old jacket was so big that she could not reach.

Feeling her arms slip inside the oversized sleeves, a sudden inspiration hit and she began frantically trying to worm her way out of the jacket.

That was when the hand let go.

The cat yowled and scurried under a cardboard box as a second splash filled the alley. Blue light flared to life between the confining walls.

“Hellfire, kid, I’m not going to hurt you,” the woman’s voice said, sounding more annoyed than angry.

Missy had no intention of waiting around to find out, though. She was already doing her best to frog-lunge down the alley back toward the street.

“Oh, for the love of Mike,” she heard the woman mutter as Missy finally managed to get back on her feet and start jogging forward awkwardly. The end of the passage loomed ahead of her, and hope had just started to rise when she hit the net . . .

. . . Which came as a shock since the net had been invisible until she hit it.

As Missy gazed at the now-fading multicolored strands, the unfairness of the situation threatened to loom up and swallow her. Then she realized that the net she had bounced off of had been made from threads just like the ones that came from her, just many times stronger and a lot more of them.

She turned wide-eyed to face the calm footsteps that were approaching her from behind. The woman seemed to be in no hurry, and the floating globe of fairy light kept pace with her as she approached.

Down the alley, a silver nose poked out from under the shadow of a box.

The woman stopped in front of Missy, the bright light casting stark shadows across her face. Short, dark hair tumbled out from under a light, unadorned ball cap. The woman’s face was serious, but not angry, although her features were more than scary enough beneath the fairy light. For a moment, Missy quailed beneath the woman’s measuring gaze, but then the odd sorceress ran her tongue over her left eyetooth and sucked noisily at it.

“So,” she said as if they had just met at a party, “you must be Missy, right?”

Missy gave a hesitant nod, dumbstruck. The woman twisted her lips to the right thoughtfully as her eyes moved up and down.

“Well, you aren’t much to look at,” she said at last as the silver cat slinked up to her ankles, “but damned if Tommy wasn’t right. You throw off more thread than any twelve kids I’ve ever seen.”

“Thread?” Missy asked as she swayed on her feet.

A pounding pain had started up behind her eyes. The woman reached out and wrapped one of Missy’s strings around her index finger.

“These,” she stated flatly as she pulled the pale yellow strand down and held it out to Missy’s nose. A fragrance of lavender played along with a hum like a flying wasp’s wings. “Threads of power? Foundation of magic? Boon of Magecraft? Any of this ringing a bell?” Missy shook her head.

“Oh, come on!” the woman snapped at her as she tossed off the yellow string. “Word I had was that Tommy had seen you weave a stealth glamor and a fire glyph. You don’t learn that sort of stuff on the street. Who taught you to do that?”

“My . . . my Gram showed it to me,” Missy answered defensively, stung by the woman’s vehemence, “just before mama got mad and moved us just outside of Dallas.”

“And who’s your . . .” The woman paused, closed her eyes, and sucked on her teeth again. “Nope. Don’t want to know. My contract was to bring you back to Houston, and to Houston you’re gonna go. I’m not getting paid enough to play good Samaritan.”

“But I want to go home to Gram in Denton!” wailed Missy, the tears boiling up again as her head throbbed. “I want my room back and my stuffies and . . .”

The woman reached out and clamped a hard hand on Missy’s wrist and yanked her toward the streetlights at the end of the alley. “I don’t give a hoot what you want, kid. You’re not paying me.”

Missy twisted and kicked out with her left foot at the woman’s shin, connecting through her target’s raincoat with a wet thud. The woman yelped and jumped back, her grip coming loose in the process.

Missy tore free and ran toward the street.

“Why you little . . .” she heard the woman snarl behind her, but Missy only ran faster. The exit was only a few yards away. She was going to run into the Chinese restaurant and start screaming her head off.

A tall, sparkling shadow appeared from around the corner and stepped into the alley.

Missy screamed and tried to stop but her feet slipped, turning her run into a splashing slide toward the shadow. The flickering darkness loomed above her, as though gauging how much of a meal she might make. A smell of mildew appeared in her mind, dark and tainted, accompanied by the aural impression of fingernails on a chalkboard. Missy flopped on her belly and scrabbled for a grip on the wet asphalt. Houston suddenly sounded like a fine place to visit.

“Dibs!” shouted the woman as she hobbled forward, pausing once to shake the leg that Missy had kicked. “I got here first.” The shadow twisted, morphing to focus its attention on the sorceress.

“Gerard,”
it breathed, the disgust plain despite the wheezy softness of the voice.

“The one and only,” the sorceress answered back with a jut of her chin. Missy managed to half fall, half lunge to flop in front of the woman. The cat appeared in front of Missy’s face and growled.

“You better sit still, kid,” Gerard warned. “O.G.’s wet and unhappy. He might give you a nip if you don’t mind.” The rain slacked off as Missy ignored the woman’s advice and struggled to scoot behind the sorceress’ leg. Once there, she leaned around Gerard’s left to peer back at the flickering specter.

“This is none of your concern, Eleuran,”
the shadow interjected in its creepy voice.
“Leave her to me and
I will let you live.”

Gerard hunched her shoulders and wiggled her fingers at the shadow. “Woo! Leave off the ‘dark rider’ hocus and dire threats, Prentice. She’s scared enough as is, and you sure as hell don’t freak me out one bit.”

She cocked her head quizzically at the shadow. “It is Prentice, isn’t it? Not Practice or Prickwise or Pornhick or something more suitable like that?”

The shadow melted away before the fairy light globe, leaving a thin young man in a baggy business suit with long, sopping wet hair that might have been blond when it was dry.

“You have a smart mouth, Allison Gerard,” he said in a nasal voice that was nothing at all like the sepulchral tones of the shadow, “and you’re quite a bit off your reservation, aren’t you?”

The woman reached down and back, grabbing Missy by the shoulder of her jacket and pulling her to her feet, but the sorceress never looked away from the man.

“So I’ve been told . . . about the mouth, anyway. As for being ‘off the reservation’, well, it’s a free country, and I’m at most one thirty-second Cherokee, so the tribe cut me off.”

The man snorted. “Always the quick comeback. You might want to reconsider your attitude, smartass. Beaucomp’s influence isn’t quite as pronounced here as in Houston. Besides, he’s got no right horning in on this action.”

A brief tightening of Gerard’s eyes gave the only clue Missy could see that the man’s words meant a thing to the sorceress, but she could sense a highpitched sound coming from her erstwhile protector, like that of some great spring being wound too tight.

“I’m an independent contractor, Porkwit, and this job doesn’t belong to Beaucomp. Despite what you think you’ve heard, he’s just an occasional customer. There’s no chain on me.”

“Whatever,” the man said carefully as he pulled a sodden glove off his right hand while stretching his fingers. “Oh, by the way, it is Prentice. Robert Prentice.”

“Well,
Bob
, if you’re thinking of taking me on, you can’t be serious,” Gerard mocked. “You’re not even within sight of being in my league. I don’t care how many poor souls you’ve tagged to boost yourself.”

“Always room for one more,” Prentice said softly, and then he snapped out his bare hand, not at Gerard but at Missy. A pale blue string flowed out and away from his fingertips, streaking across the darkness and aimed directly between her eyes.

Before she could move or even scream, a wall of violet flame erupted between Gerard and the man, obscuring the faint string and hiding Prentice from her sight. The occult flames burned against the black for a handful of seconds before disappearing as suddenly as they had erupted, leaving Prentice sucking his fingertips and Gerard smiling cruelly.

“Ah, ah, ah,” she chastised him as she wagged a finger. “That was very naughty. I told you I had dibs. No free samples.”

Prentice raised his right eyebrow and lowered his hand from his mouth. Shrugging, he began putting his glove back on.

“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” he said, nonchalant.

“Oh, hell yes I can. Time for you to shove off, bucko, or you’re really going to irritate me.”

The man straightened, as if pulling himself up for a speech. “I challenge for personal decision.”

“What?” Gerard blurted out in disbelief. “Are you out of your gourd? Not only is she underage, she doesn’t even know who we are!”

“Nonetheless, I challenge.”

“You might want to know that I’m currently having a very hard time
not
incinerating you!”

The man snorted. “Now who’s bluffing? I know you’d never start a one-woman war with any of the Stephanos families, even here in Dallas. That’s the problem with being a lone wolf, even if one happens to be an archmage like you. No backup.”

Gerard’s hand clamped down painfully on Missy’s shoulder. She looked up at the sorceress and caught just a faint glimmer of sparkle around the curls of hair that had escaped the hat. The air felt greasy in a way that only existed in Missy’s mind, and she could not get the smell of burning rubber out of her nose.

“Fine,” Gerard spat out finally, “but I’m making sure the playing field is level.” Her hand snapped out and flare of silver light filled the alley. Missy had an impression of something bright streaking up into the sky and disappearing.

“Missy?” asked the sorceress, again without looking away from Prentice.

“Uh huh?”

“This man gets to try to convince you to go home with him.”

“I want to go back to Denton!”

“That’s a fine thing to want, but I don’t think it’s going to happen tonight. Anyway, by our laws, he gets to have a say. If you decide to go with him, I can’t stop you. Just remember one thing . . .”

“Yes?”

“Tommy.”

“Hey!” Prentice snapped. “No coercing the candidate!”

“Is that kind of like ‘no terrorizing the candidate’? ’Cause if that’s the case, I think you can just sit on it and spin, Pratfall.”

Missy could hear the man grinding his teeth behind his thin lips.

“Fine,” he said venomously after glaring at Gerard for several long seconds. She stepped to the side, leaving Missy facing the man as he closed his eyes, shuddered slightly, and then made an air-clearing gesture with his hands.

“Let’s just start over shall we?” he asked at last, opening his eyes and fixing his attention on Missy.