I nodded. “They’re scared you won’t come back?”
“More like they’re eager to go out and kick ass with me.” Pride gleamed in her eyes for a moment, then she shook her head. “But not at age five.” Jack grabbed the door handle. “Let’s do this!”
She led the way outside, her enthusiasm infectious, calming any doubts I had left. This could totally work. I even had a time limit. An hour and a half to get some training and help Kir out a little while rebuffing his advances. Then I could check in with Theiya and see what the cops had dragged in about the love potions, maybe weasel some files away from her for Josie to peruse.
This had to work.
Chapter 8
As we walked out of the shop, Jack shifted back to her favorite male form. “All the better to stay incognito.”
I knew what she meant. A scarred, red-haired Japanese woman was far more likely to be remembered. While she shrugged off the looks people gave her for her scars, I could read her strong desire to be treated normal, which she never would be in her true human form. Or in her fox form, which was also crisscrossed with scars.
Kiran was leaning against the side of the building, sketching in a small notebook with a pen. A few stray black curls fell into his eyes as he was absorbed in his work. The whole scene was so utterly familiar that I chuckled fondly. “I always said art was your first love.”
“A cruel mistress.” He glanced up at me with a rueful look, then eyed Jack with disfavor. “So now we have a kitsune chaperone.”
“One who can stun you with her skoffin death eyes? Yeah.” She flashed him a sharp-toothed grin.
I shrugged. “Jack’s just here as backup in case you try to entrap me in a diabolical scheme or provoke me so I lose control of my powers. Unlike you, I know how to lean on and trust others to help me.”
“Oh, you do? Where’s your new husband? Still can’t show up?”
“Otherwise occupied with important business.” It had to be important. I trusted Cid. And the mark on my left arm that signified our union hadn’t started flaring up, so his situation wasn’t deadly. Otherwise I would have teleported to his side, no matter what.
Kiran smirked. “More important than being with his new wife lest her ex-boyfriend seek to lure her away?”
I crossed my arms. “Is that what you’re trying to do, then?”
“I didn’t say that.” He shut the notebook and tucked the pen into the binding. “But it is curious that he’s not here, especially after I heard he made quite a fuss in the Fae court about you two being close partners. Yet he pursues his own cases, and you yours.”
I gritted my teeth. “You can thank the machinations of your mother for that situation.”
“Touché. Although I’m no longer under her thumb, as such. Which puts me in a better situation than your, ahem, mate.”
“Oh? And how did you manage that?”
Kiran only stretched his arms out lazily, managing to tweak a strand of my hair as he did so. “I know something he doesn’t. How did you say it? I know how to lean on and trust someone else to help me.” He fixed me with a suddenly-intense stare. “Someone who is far more than she realizes.”
I inhaled shallowly, resisting the sudden urge to step closer to him. “Ah, so basically you’re somehow sponging off your ex’s mojo. That’s classy.”
“If by ‘sponging’ you mean selflessly offering to help train you while working on a romantic investigation case with you, what can I say? I know how to prioritize what is most important—even if it means breaking the rules for your sake.”
His words stung in a place I’d tried hard to guard. Cool it, Allis. I’d known about Cendric’s rule-following nature from the get-go. It was just part of the package. Somehow, the truth of the matter didn’t stop me from wanting to shoot Kiran then and there.
Burn it all to the ground.
Yeah, that sounded good.
Jack cleared her throat. “Kiran, if you’re just here to slam Allis’s mate to make yourself look better, you can go stroke your ego somewhere else.”
The foxshifter’s sharp words soured Kiran’s expression and jolted me out of my destructive mindset. I gave a short laugh. “Yeah, what about this advanced training? Or were you making more infamous false promises?”
“I can’t reveal the mysterious secrets of the Jinn with an outsider here.” He glowered at Jack.
“Screw that,” I said. “You’ve already taught me some things. You were the one who showed me how to put up mental shields and how to teleport small objects. Gideon was around for all that.”
Good times there, actually.
“Very well,” Kiran grumbled. “We’ll need to figure out your kind of magic first.”
“Jinn magic.”
“Beyond that,” he scoffed with a half-smile. “Walk with me.”
We fell into step beside him as he walked down the sloping sidewalk and deeper into the Hollows, the main neighborhood for Fae and Unspoken in Pittsburgh. At first glance, it looked like the middle-class section of the city, with well-kept wood and brick homes from the early 1900s scattered among more modern glass and steel structures from the sixties and later. But with a second glance, any human with a drop of Fae or Unspoken blood would see how vines were growing out from certain buildings instead of clinging to and coiling around them. They would see a number of different ear types—furry, pointed, flat, no ears at all—as well as skin tones that went beyond the human norm and heights ranging from one foot to eight feet. And maybe they’d be able to tell that some of the buzzing around them wasn’t straggling houseflies trying to survive in October.
Things got even more interesting when you entered the magisphere dimension that overlaid this place.
I let out a sigh of relief. I could fit in anywhere I needed to, but there was something nice about a place where people wouldn’t look at you twice for being weird. And since my curse-mark was gone, I didn’t immediately scream “magical pariah” to passersby. Although, by the way some of them gave me a wide berth and the hairy eyeball, people still remembered me. Feared me, even. No matter what I did, that would always be the case.
Jack nudged me. “You okay?”
“Just the usual welcome.”
She gave me a wry look of understanding that helped calm my nerves. Cendric would get it too. A vegetarian vampire, trying to do the right thing. I had to do what I could as well.
I focused on Kiran. “Okay, so what is this great beyond of Jinn magic?”
He shrugged. “Jinn is more of a generic term, kind of like Fae. The humans like to give us all kinds names, and we go along with it because it makes mortals feel more secure and allows us to trick them.”
I nodded. “So trickery is a thing.”
“Always.” He grinned. “Besides, I’m sure you’ve realized by now just how annoying all their molecules and noise and vibrancy can be when you only want to focus.”
I opened my mouth to agree, then thought better of it. The last thing I wanted to do was to let Jack in on the chaotic pettiness buried in my mind. The way Kiran’s dark eyes glinted, he knew I agreed.
With a quick wave, I urged him on.
“Types of Jinn are divided into families,” he said. “Wish granters are the most powerful, with—”
“The usual magic of teleportation, transmutation, and creation from the magisphere.” I tapped my fingers against my side. “I know this.”
He shot me a peevish look. “It goes much further than that. Much of our wish magic is related to the family line. The tribe. My tribe specializes in small, intricate magic.” He stopped at a vacant park clustered with trees and swaths of grass. Jack immediately shifted into fox form and curled up on a bench to watch.
Kiran held out his hand and focused on his palm. For a moment, it flared with orange magic that reflected in his eyes. Then a cell phone appeared. A real one that looked like the latest model with all the gizmos and gadgets.
Shock filled me. The device was a far cry from the creamsicles I’d conjured earlier.
He held it out to me. “Take a look. Pull it to pieces. Or let me do it for you.”
A second later, the cell phone had broken into its intricate pieces: microchips, sparkling magical bits, casing, and glass, all hovering in the air above Kiran’s outstretched palm. Bits of orange magic arced between them, suspending everything in place as they spun, each on their own axis. It was incredible.
There was no way I could do that.
“Thanks for the light show, but electronics aren’t my thing.”
“You won’t know if you don’t try,” he insisted. “Just focus on it.”
The very idea gave me a headache. I rubbed my forehead. I’d just gotten rid of the last one too. Although it hadn’t been me. “Wait, you can heal people too?”
He leaned in and with a sidelong glance at Jack, gently rubbed his thumb on my forehead. The headache vanished again. “Manipulating the functions of the body requires the same amount of technical skill.” Kiran eyed me speculatively. “I heard about you dropping a roomful of vampires. Even though you aren’t of my tribe, you’re capable of fine technique as well.”
“I didn’t do that alone.”
“Oh?” He raised an eyebrow. “Who with?”
“Cendric, actually. He guided my actions to make sure I controlled my magic, instead of allowing my impulses to control me.”
“Hmph. A crutch.” Kiran frowned. With a blink of his eyes, all the parts of his cell phone snapped back into place again. “Well, you can at least try doing this solo.”
I shook my head. “With whose cell phone? I’m not wrecking mine.”
“Or mine,” Jack chimed in.
Kiran whispered a few curses in Hindi. “Fine.” Another cell phone appeared in his hand, a cheapo flip phone. “Use this. Take it in your hand.”
“Where’d you get this from? Did you make it?”
“No, that’s beneath me. It’s from a local store.”
“You stole it?”
“I've told you before, mortal ownership is fluid.”
I put my hands on my hips. “You fluidly took it without asking, then?”
He snapped his fingers. “There. The owner has the exact amount in cash waiting for him on his desk. Now hold the phone in your hand and lower your shields. Concentrate on pulling it apart with your mind and your magic.”
I reluctantly took the phone. “What if I make it explode?”
“It happens. Just do it.” He shrugged. “Or don’t. See if I care. You’re the one who wants training, after all.”
I sighed. “Fine.”
Focus on the phone. Focus, Allis.
I drilled my eyes into the phone and let my shields drop, just a little. Immediately my surroundings started pinging me with the same old hyperawareness, every molecule screaming for attention, every fear and desire demanding notice.
Too much. Far too much.
I have to make it disappear. Make it all disappear.
My fingers twitched, flames tickling the edges of my palms, eager to exert some kind of violence against the sensory and magical overload, a return for the violence I already felt.
Silence them!
I shook my head. No.
I shunted up the shields again. “I can’t.”
Kiran’s voice was flat. Great, he was in his oh-so-winsome teacher voice. “Yes, you can. You’re not even trying.”
“How do you know?” Anger and realization flared within me. “You read my fears.”
He stared down at me. “You dropped your shields. I could have read your fears from across the city. Now try again.”
“I can’t shut them out!”
“Just let yourself be consumed by your objective and your anchor.” He raised his eyebrows. “Unless your vampire mate isn’t actually that useful to you after all, except to tell you what you can and can’t do.”
“Shut up.”
Clenching my jaw, I focused on the phone again, reaching for the bond between Cid and I, a rope of ever-shifting shadow and chaotic sapphire magic. I tugged at the bond, coaxing magic from it. A stream flowed down the line into me and filled me with a sense of security. I stared at the phone and lowered my shields once more, this time, using what magic I got from my mate to build a wall to keep away the outside. I pushed deeper and deeper into the mechanics of the phone, forcing the atoms apart.
With a brilliant flash, the cell phone fell to bits, dancing in the air above my palm. I gasped.
“Good,” Kiran said shortly. “Now put it back together.”
“Not so great at that part,” I retorted.
“Stop with the excuses.”
I groaned and focused on the pieces again. Back together. Go back together.
Nothing.
Go somewhere, dang it!
With that, tiny, flame-lined openings appeared around the cell phone parts, swallowing up each piece like a tiny mouth. Um. Maybe not like that.
Too late. Within half a minute, the cell phone was gone. I glanced up sheepishly at Kiran. “Hope you weren’t lying about paying for that phone. I don’t think it’s coming back.”
His mouth gaped open.
“Damn, Allis,” he said finally. “How did you—do you even—do you know where those went?”
“Ummm …” Images flashed through my mind. Visuals, some of them decidedly weird and involving chemical lightning flashing over puddles with faces in them, others with dragons soaring through the depths of space. “I don’t think I have words for that.” I crossed my arms. “So, do you know what tribe I am?”
“It shouldn’t be possible.” Orange flames danced around his fingers as he reached out to me. “I can’t believe I never realized it.”
“What do you mean?”
“It means—” His eyes narrowed, and he withdrew his hands. “I have to go.”
“Wait, what? Now? Where?”
He scowled. “To deal with someone.”
Fear leaked through his shields. The same fear that had struck me in my shop earlier. “Who? What trouble are you in?”
“I can handle it.”
My gut leaped. Kir was going to teleport. The prickles on my skin confirmed it. “Yeah, not alone you don’t.”
I grabbed his hand and clutched it tight. My hand flickered with sapphire flames at the point of contact, forcing my magic into the same teleporting course as his. A heady rush filled me.
A moment later we appeared in a broad plaza paved with large square stones. A tall building covered with reflective glass panes hemmed the space in on three sides, the roof crenellating into thin points. PPG Place. We were in the magisphere dimension. Green leaves from numerous trees shaded us from the midday sun, their trunks glowing with swirls of brown hues glinting gold. The pavement was filled with slick, forest green marble veined with glimmering silver whose patterns shifted every second. The air was filled with a fine mist of sparkling, iridescent magic. In the mortal dimension, PPG Place was just another spectacular building with offices. For the Fae, it was the entrance to the Fae court.
Right now, a woman with coppery skin and dark hair was shouting at the front of the building, demanding justice, while tree elf guards warded her away from the entrance.
I released Kiran’s hand. “What are we doing here?”
“We’re not doing anything, Sandy.” He gave me a shove. “I’m handling this, and you should get out of here. Now.”
I snorted. “Yeah, you know that’s not happening.”
Something in his expression snapped.
“Fine. Here’s your evidence of illegal love potions.” Kiran strode across the plaza. The woman spun around, her dress whirling against her curvy frame. I recognized her as the woman I’d seen on Kir’s arm back in August. Terry-something, and a genie herself, though not as powerful as a regular Jinn. Kiran froze in the middle of the plaza, his face filled with equal parts horror and desire.
Her voice rang out across the plaza. “My darling, I knew you’d return to me!”
She closed the remaining steps between them
and kissed him full on the mouth. He returned it as if her lips were oxygen.
But all I could sense from Kiran was an overwhelming fear of being consumed.
Chapter 9
I blinked. Was I supposed to stop this? Kiran had mentioned a love potion, and the mix of his fierce desire for the Terry-woman and his desperate fear of that desire—and of her—was a huge warning sign. But what was I supposed to do about that when they were busy sucking face in front of the Fae court headquarters? By all accounts, Kiran seemed to have a solid handful of exactly what he wanted. Two hands full, as a matter of fact.
Cendric might have some ideas. Crap, I’d forgotten to text him. I moved to tap my earvine, then stopped. He’d said I could handle it. He was busy dealing with something else serious. And he trusted me. All right, then. Jack and Theiya were out. They had no expertise with potions. They hunted monsters and did police work.
I finally tapped my earvine. “Gideon? You there?”
“Al, what’s up?”
“Is there any way to disable a love potion from a distance?”
He made a thoughtful chirrup. “Only with another potion. There might be some Fae with innate abilities to do so. Maybe a blood binder, like Cid.”
“Well, that’s not an option right now. Cid’s busy.” I could just picture the vampire’s expression when I asked him to show up to disable the love potion messing with my ex-boyfriend. Why would my husband help him? The only reason I was helping Kiran was that no one should have their mind twisted like this. And I was called by destiny to stop bad things. Even if it wasn’t fair or felt far too merciful. After all, I was technically a blood binder too, even if the local court wouldn’t acknowledge that.
Finally, Kir and the woman came up for air, staring at each other with glazed expressions, their fingers still entangled in each other’s clothing.
Kiran caught his breath first, his voice low and angry. “I told you never again, Terezal.”
Aha, that was her name.
“You still kissed back, my love.” Her voice was velvet with a musical edge.
Her intentions were obvious from the way her eyes roved his figure, like he was a side of beef or a designer outfit. Considering the tailored white dress and heels she wore, it was probably the latter.
Wish You Weren't Here Page 8
