Unbinding (22 page)

Ackleford snorted. “Not with the rush the mayor was in. Got his panties in a twist, scared to death a tourist might get hurt.”

One of the others spoke—the one in a good suit. He was a tall, hefty man, with sandy hair quietly going gray and no-nonsense glasses. “Wouldn’t have made much difference if we’d tried to take names, and it would’ve been a huge job. Too easy for someone to slip away without my people spotting him or her. My name’s Franklin Boyd.” He gave Kai and Arjenie each a nod. “Assistant chief of police. I believe you’re the experts we’ve been waiting for?”

Reminded, Ackleford introduced Arjenie, calling her “an FBI researcher with a strong background in Wiccan spells.” When he got to Kai he frowned. “What the hell do I call you?”

Her mouth twisted wryly. “I’m the closest thing you’ve got to an expert on sidhe magic and religion—specifically, one pissed-off chaos god. I’m also a mindhealer,” she added to the assistant chief. “My Gift lets me see the colors and patterns of thoughts, which is why I need to look over the transformed building carefully. Intent is a component in spells, and it often leaves traces—remnants—I’m able to see. We don’t know if that will be true with chaos-fueled transformations like this one, but it bears checking out. I understand there haven’t been any injuries this time? Not so much as a scratch?”

Franklin Boyd shook his head. “We’ve had the paramedics check everyone who was in the building at the time of the incident. No broken skin on anyone.”

“And no one’s missing.”

“Not that we can determine.”

Was this a snatch that hadn’t worked? Kai frowned. “I’d like to send Doug over to sniff out the transformed building. He—”

A load of bricks smashed into her. Training took over; she went limp as the bricks followed her down, flattening her, and she heard someone shouting, “Sniper!” even as the loud
crack
! of a high-powered rifle sounded. Someone cried out. A second shot came almost on top of the first and Arjenie joined her on the pavement, her eyes wide and startled, flattened beneath a blond-haired lupus. Doug. Doug had tackled Arjenie.

More shots, crazy loud, each one jerking her heart rate higher, coming from close by—cops or feds or maybe those of their guards not currently pretending to be body armor. She couldn’t see, didn’t know what the hell was happening.

“We need to get to cover!” the bricks on top of her shouted in José’s voice. “Doug, carry Arjenie. Everyone else form up—”

“No!” Kai tugged her left arm free. “Thirty seconds. Give me thirty seconds.” She’d practiced this one, practiced it over and over and over—surely she could make it work now. “
Arenthyla-en-ná-abreesh
—” She rushed through the syllables, the images that went with each rolling through her mind automatically as she pressed her thumb to the palm of her hand and drew hard. Power rose within her, shooting down her arm—“
makabaj
:
ta’vo!” S
he flung out her arm, fingers and thumb spread wide. Felt power rush out with the snap of a spell well-wrought.

Someone cursed.

“Now we can take cover without being shot at,” Kai said. “The spell won’t last long, though. I had to cast it too wide.”

“What did you do?” José asked urgently.

“Gun control, sidhe-style.”

J
OSÉ
chivvied Kai and Arjenie under cover quickly—the wide, shaded patio between the two buildings occupied by Café Coyote, across the street from the hobbit house.

“That was you who shouted sniper, right?” Kai asked him as they stopped beside a table where two people had been eating tacos before being evacuated. “What did you see?”

“Gun barrel. Pure luck I saw it in time.” He was grim.

“That’s not luck. That’s good training and practice. If you hadn’t been looking everywhere—not just at ground level—you wouldn’t have seen it. Thank you. But I thought I explained earlier about my vest.”

“You said it’s probably bulletproof. Probably isn’t enough.”

“It’s more bulletproof than you are.”

“And I heal better than you do. You’re bleeding.”

“I am?” Only then did she notice the stinging. She raised a hand to her cheek. “It’s nothing. I scraped it on the pavement. Is everyone okay? Arjenie, you weren’t hit, right? But you got knocked down. Did—”

“I’m fine.” Arjenie cut her off in an abrupt way that wasn’t like her. She looked shaken, but she’d scooped up her backpack from where it fell when Doug tackled her and held it in one hand now. “He was aiming at you.”

Kai’s eyebrows shot up. “You saw him?”

“No, but the policeman who was shot—you were between him and the sniper. If José hadn’t knocked you out of the way—”

“A policemen was shot?” Her heart jumped back into alarm-mode.

Doug spoke. “I don’t think it’s too bad. Look, here they come with him now.”

Two of the men in suits had made a chair with their arms to carry one of the uniformed cops. They were accompanied by Boyd, Ackleford—who was talking on the phone, unfazed by being in the middle of a fire fight—and the female FBI agent. Blood covered one side of the wounded man’s face and turned the shoulder of his crisp blue uniform dark and shiny. A head wound? Yes—his black hair was soaked with it. But he was conscious, even able to hold on to the shoulders of the men carrying him. They lowered him carefully into a chair. “EMTs will be here in a snap,” Boyd told the man. “We’ll have you taken care of real quick, Ruiz. You’re going to be fine.”

Boyd looked around in that assess-the-room way most cops had. It reminded her of Nathan. His gaze latched onto Kai. He strode toward her. “What the hell did you do?”

“Made everyone’s guns stop working. It’ll wear off soon.”

“When?” he demanded.

“Another five or ten minutes?” She paused, considering. She had put a lot of power into the spell. Too much, considering she didn’t have Dell to draw on. She’d panicked. Kai grimaced, acknowledging that. “Maybe more like fifteen or twenty.”

“I need to know when my people’s weapons will be operational again, damn it!”

Kai matched him scowl for scowl. “I gave you my best guess. I haven’t field-tested the spell under these conditions.”

Ackleford walked up, shaking his head. “Funniest damn thing I ever saw.” One corner of his mouth crooked up. “Like we were all kids playing cops and robbers.” He held out a hand, shaping it like he was holding a gun. “Bang. Bang.” He shook his head again. Now both sides of his mouth crooked up—his version of a belly laugh. “Like a bunch of kids. Funniest damn thing I ever saw.”

Boyd stared at him. “Are you nuts? One of my men is wounded, and that—”

“You need to get a goddamn sense of humor, Boyd. Your man’s okay. Bullet barely grazed him. Didn’t even knock him out.”

“She kept us from nailing that perp!”

Ackleford snorted. “Which of your men is good enough to nail a perp from nearly two hundred yards away with a handgun? That’s assuming he could even see the bastard. I sure as hell didn’t.” He cocked his imaginary gun, sited. “Bang.” Grinned—at least that twitch of his lips might be taken for a grin—and holstered the nonexistent weapon. “We’d have more people hurt or dead if she hadn’t put the woo-woo on that bastard’s rifle. He could’ve picked off another three or four of us, easy, before hightailing it.”

Boyd gave a grudging nod. “Maybe so. Maybe so. How far does this damn spell extend?” He directed that question at Kai. “My people are going after him. It would be good to have some idea of when and where their weapons will work. Or the sniper’s.”

“I’m not sure. I understand why you need to know, but—well, I meant to cover a quarter-mile radius, but I think I overshot.”

Another uniformed officer came up to him, this one with a gold bar on his collar. Lieutenant? Captain? He and Boyd started talking, Ackleford answered his phone’s urgent chirping, and a pair of EMTs came in from the other end of the mall-like patio with a gurney.

“You know,” Kai said, “I’d like to sit down.” Her body had used up its adrenaline and was suddenly in the shaky stage. Really shaky. Dammit.

“Over here,” José said, gesturing to the building on their left. “We’ll be out of the way.”

Feeling foolish—it was such a beginner’s mistake to overspend power!—Kai followed him inside the café proper. She plunked herself down at the nearest table and looked around. The place was deserted. “I wish there was someone I could order coffee from.”

“I can get you some,” a young-looking guard said cheerfully. He had gorgeous dark eyes and tawny skin . . . Kennedy, that was his name. Kennedy Garcia. “If it’s okay with José, that is. My sister used to work here. The owners are good folks. They won’t mind.”

“You can’t just go grab whatever you want.”

“We’ll leave money to cover it,” José assured her. “Arjenie?”

She shook her head. “I’m wired already.”

José studied Kai’s face. “You do look wiped. You should probably eat something. Kennedy—”

“No,” she said quickly, before he appropriated a three-course meal for her. “I used too much power too fast, but food won’t help me recover the way it would you.”

Arjenie sat next to Kai. “Who knew Ackleford had a sense of humor? A weird one, sure, but I had no idea he found anything funny.”

“Surprised me, too. People do have unexpected nooks and crannies.” Kai felt disconnected. One moment she was getting shot at. The next she was sitting in a deserted restaurant while someone fetched her coffee. “You’re acting like the danger’s over,” she said to José. “Is it?”

“Of course not, but the sniper’s probably gone. His rifle isn’t working.” A quick grin. “He won’t know what happened or why, so it’s bound to make him want to be elsewhere. They might even catch him. It will take some luck, but either the cops Boyd sent after him or the copter Ackleford diverted might—”

“Ackleford diverted a helicopter?”

“The one those TV types had hovering over the scene. I heard him arranging it while we were headed for cover. The man does know how to multitask.” His eyes stayed busy checking out their surroundings. José might think the sniper was gone, but he wasn’t assuming anything. “I should report in while I have the chance. Isen will want to know what happened. Justin, you’ve got the patrol for now.” He made one of those hand signs the guards used. A dark-haired man nodded, and José stepped back and took out his phone.

“That is one amazing spell,” Arjenie said. “You look drained, though.”

Kai made a face. “It’s a power hog even when done right, but I pumped more into it than I should have. Beginner’s mistake.”

“Is that spell why you didn’t take a gun when you went questing with Nathan? Because people in Faerie can make guns not work?”

“That’s right. The spell’s widely known, though not everyone who knows it can cast it. Like most spells that are primarily oral, it takes a ton of practice, and not everyone wants to invest the time. Not everyone has the power needed, either, but enough people can cast it to make guns unpopular.”

Doug looked surprised. “They’ve got guns in Faerie? I thought they were all about swords and knives.”

“They are. A few hundred years ago, though, guns started showing up. Probably a gnomish invention—at least, the elves blame the gnomes for it. The elves were seriously unhappy. Guns offend their aesthetic sensibilities, plus they were destabilizing the power balance, and elves are almost as big on stability as they are on beauty. The Queens came up with a special ward that can be set over a large area, like a city. It targets gunpowder, turns it inflammable. The ward was only partly effective, though. Some of the—oh, thank you, Kennedy.” She accepted the mug of coffee gratefully and sipped. Good and strong, just what she needed. Maybe it would do something about the headache knocking on her door.

“So what went wrong with the ward?” Arjenie asked.

“The ward works great, but not every place could be warded, plus not all the lords accepted the Queens’ terms for the spell to set the ward. Maybe the Queens would have ended up adding guns to their thou-shalt-not list. Opinions vary about that, and the Queens aren’t saying. In the end, it didn’t matter. There was this one lord—an adept, a real top-drawer, A-list kind of guy—and he really, really hated guns. He developed the spell I just used. And he
gave
it away.”

Arjenie looked suitably shocked. Doug looked puzzled. “That’s unusual?”

“Elves give away lots of things casually—food, clothes, art, even gems. Not spells. Their economy is partly knowledge-based. They hoard knowledge in general, but magical knowledge especially, because it’s dangerous. Giving it away would be like—oh, like giving away guns to anyone who wanted them. This adept broke that taboo, and it worked. His spell spread throughout the realms. Now no one can depend on guns to work, so no one uses them. Almost no one,” she added conscientiously. “There’s still a few around, so it pays to know the spell.”

José must have been listening even as he spoke with Isen, because when he put his phone away he asked, “How does this spell work? It doesn’t change the gunpowder. You said our guns would start working again, and they wouldn’t if the gunpowder had been rendered inflammable.”

“It tells guns not to fire. And no, I don’t know what that means, except that it’s the sort of thing adepts can do. That’s the remarkable thing about this spell. It isn’t adept-level, but it ought to be.”

Arjenie’s forehead pleated. “We ran into an elf lord once,” she said. “Me and Benedict and Cullen and Lily and Rule. He wanted to make Rule and Benedict slaves. He didn’t use that spell when Lily started shooting him. The bullets couldn’t hit him, but her gun worked.”

Kai shrugged. “Either he wanted to show off—you know, see the tough guy, bullets just bounce off me—or he was conserving his power for some reason. Even when you cast it properly, this one’s a power hog.”

“That makes sense. He’d just finished opening and modifying a gate, so he must’ve been lower on power than he liked. He was here on Earth, you see, so he couldn’t draw on the land-tie.”

Which was interesting, but beside the point, as was her own explanation of the sidhe history with guns. She needed to focus, dammit. Which was hard with her head pounding. Kai rubbed the back of her neck with one hand.

“Headache?” Arjenie said sympathetically. “That’s a common reaction to depletion. You sure eating won’t help?”

“Nothing helps but time. Ibuprofen wouldn’t hurt, though, if anyone has some.”

“Sure, in my purse.” Arjenie grimaced. “Which I left in the car because I had the backpack to carry. Sorry.” Her gaze shifted. “I wonder what’s got him worked up?”

Kai followed her gaze. Franklin Boyd was headed their way. His lips were tight and he was scowling, but his colors didn’t look angry so much as frustrated.

“He got away,” the assistant chief said abruptly when he reached them. “He did leave us a couple cartridges. Highly unprofessional of him. Either he was panicked or he isn’t a pro.”

“Why are you saying ‘he’?” Kai asked.

“Playing the odds. A female sniper is possible, but highly unlikely.”

“Well, if he or she is gone, we need to get busy. I need to give the building a thorough survey while Doug does it his way. And maybe . . .” Kai looked at José. “Can one of your men Change and check out the spot the sniper was? See if he can pick up the sniper’s scent?”

José considered that briefly. “I’d like to keep as many men with you and Arjenie as possible, but Doug’s got to Change, anyway. He can check out the sniper’s perch as well as the transformed building.”

“Okay. If you could have one of your men go with him, Assistant Chief—”

“Hold on. I haven’t agreed to let any of you go anywhere.”

Kai huffed out a breath. “Do I need to get Ackleford? Because this is the sort of thing he brought us here to do. If nothing else, Doug can tell us for sure if the shooter’s a human.”

That startled him. “What else could it be?”

“A team of brownies. An elf. A gnome. Various kinds of halflings. A lupus from another clan. None of those is likely, but it’s good to be sure.”

Boyd called someone over—the man with a gold bar on his collar, who started toward them. José motioned to Doug, who stepped slightly apart. And Changed.

Kai loved watching lupi Change. She’d seen it several times now, and she couldn’t have said why she loved watching it, no more than she could say what she saw, which literally made no sense—as in, it didn’t register properly on her senses. Not sight or hearing, smell or touch. And yet it moved her. Everything about Doug slid sideways into an elsewhere she couldn’t perceive, yet somehow knew. Even his thoughts were both here and not-here as they froze for an instant in a pattern of great pain—then broke free.