But it had never felt like this.
Jessica’s palm burned against Damian’s glowing silver back, and she felt a part of her wanting to break away from her own body and join him in the dimensions where only Umbál could exist without being torn apart.
Shit. If her magic wasn’t strong enough at half-capacity to keep her rooted to this plane, they were all screwed before they even got past the first part of their plan.
“Jess?” Anthony’s voice sounded like it came to her through a long metal tunnel, echoing over and over.
“I…got it.” She grimaced and forced all her concentration into lifting her other hand. Casting necromantic hexes wasn’t for the faint of heart. Breaking through them even less so.
She couldn’t back out of this now.
“If you’re gonna do it, fucking do it,” Damian growled.
If she’d misjudged how much of this oscillating power she could handle, this was the end. For all of them.
Her arm lifted impossibly slowly as she prepared to toss the handkerchief covered in Leandras’ blood into the flickering wall of wards Damian still held at bay.
“Shit. Something’s wrong.” Rebecca’s heels clicked toward Jessica from behind. “Damian, you have to pull out—”
“Are you kidding?” Cedrick shouted. “She’ll explode.”
“It’s taking too long…”
Their voices faded away into a high-pitched ringing blasting through Jessica’s head. The heat spread quickly through her entire body. Before her vision gave out beneath it, she saw thin tendrils of shimmering silver smoke rising from both Damian’s glowing form and her own outstretched arm reaching down his back.
Then she tossed the handkerchief. Or at least she thought she did. Because then she couldn’t feel anything at all.
Chapter Three
“Damian, pull back!” Anthony shouted.
The searing heat blazing up Jessica’s arm and through her chest was unbearable. But she still felt the vibrations in Damian’s back when he let out a low growl.
Before anyone could interrupt their combined magic, the flickering ward lines burst with a loud pop and a blaze of light.
“Whoa, shit!” Cedrick’s stumbling footsteps drew away from Jessica, but she barely registered the fact that her friends were stepping back.
The heat released her, and she staggered sideways with a gasp.
“Jesus.” Anthony was at her side, catching her before her legs could give way. Which they probably would have at this point. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m… Yeah. I’m good.” Blinking furiously, she finally got the dazzling circles of light to clear from her vision and nodded.
He gave her arm a quick, reassuring squeeze but didn’t say anything else.
“Dude, what the hell was that?” Cedrick hissed.
“The job,” Damian grunted, his corporeal form now completely returned, no longer flickering through planes. He turned slowly and scowled at Jessica. “Took you long enough.”
“Sorry.” She brushed her hair away from her face and couldn’t quite look him in the eye. “Been a while.”
“Yeah, no shit.” Cedrick huffed out a laugh and gestured toward the wards again. “All gone?”
Damian fixed his dark eyes on the changeling, expressionless as ever. “I wouldn’t be standing here if they weren’t.”
“Okay, we get it, big guy. Good work.” Cedrick’s hand came down on Jessica’s shoulder, and he gave her a little shake. “You too, Jess. Wasn’t sure if you’d pull through there, but you got it done.”
“Looks like it.” She steadied herself with a hand on the wall and stared at the now empty air where the ward lines had existed and just been demolished into nothing.
She hadn’t been sure she’d pull through, either. Because she’d never attempted a shrouded break-in with only half her magic, let alone a hex reversal. Jessica was the only one of them who’d been able to pull off combining magical power like that with someone else. Perks of being a vestrohím and all. Except for she wasn’t one hundred percent herself, was she?
This had almost been an even worse idea than it already was.
“Are we just gonna stand around and waste the rest of our night, or what?” Rebecca nodded toward the door.
“Right.” Anthony slipped around Jessica and headed for Leandras’ apartment. “Time to move.”
As the guys stepped quietly forward, Rebecca stopped beside Jessica and leaned toward the witch. “You okay?”
The elf woman didn’t look Jessica in the eye—she didn’t look at her at all—but there was a clear note of concern in her voice.
Hey, she wasn’t completely heartless, after all.
Jessica nodded. “I’m good.”
“Can you stay good?”
“Yeah.”
With the barest hint of a nod, Rebecca headed toward the door and left Jessica standing in the hall, supporting herself with a hand against the wall and forcing her breathing to calm.
Yeah, they all knew something was wrong. In five years of this kind of work, only a physical attack—like the knife wound from that job out in Miami or the time a target’s security guard had opened fire on them—had knocked Jessica out this much. And then she’d been right back on her feet.
No way to hide the fact that some things about Jessica Northwood had changed in the last year and a half. No time to talk about it now, either. They had a job to do.
Honestly, it was a small miracle in and of itself that all the noise they’d made in the hall hadn’t drawn the attention of whatever magicals Leandras had promised would be inside his apartment, waiting for him. Maybe the fae had had the place soundproofed. Maybe they were just lucky.
Anthony turned his head to press his ear up against the door, then looked back at Jessica and whispered, “You wanna take this one?”
She shrugged. “Go ahead.”
Rebecca raised an eyebrow. “He was being polite. You’re taking this one.”
Yep. Right back to the old days of Jessica being the power source, the lockpicking expert, and the first one in and out of a battle, if it came to that. Only she wasn’t so sure she could handle a battle with only half her magic. Especially not without the bank’s magic to help her at the last second.
At least she’d known she couldn’t do this alone, and now she didn’t have to.
She slipped past her friends and pointed at the lock of Leandras’ front door. With all the wards and necromantic hexes, there was little point in the fae applying more than a simple lock on the doorknob and a deadbolt. Jessica pointed at each of them in turn, casting her favorite spell for opening simple locks. The yellow light flared at her fingertip and twice from within the door.
Cedrick grabbed the handle, turned, and slowly pushed open the door before standing back again.
A loud electric hum filled Leandras’ apartment. It came from farther inside, right where the fae had said his gúlmai would be. This was why no one had heard them; the sound drowned out nearly everything else.
Jessica slipped inside and gave the all-clear signal for the others to follow. The penthouse lights were off, giving them a perfect view of the glittering downtown lights through the massive wall of windows on the left stretching all the way down the wall of the apartment. An open staircase cut the huge main room in half, rising up to the small loft above the kitchen and blocking Jessica and her friends from view.
Whether or not the place was teeming with magicals just waiting for the chance to jump Leandras in his own home, the location of the gúlmai was clear enough. She couldn’t see it through the underside of the staircase, but something gave off a flickering glow of dark purple light interspersed with the occasional bright flash.
It looked radioactive.
It probably was, if handled the wrong way.
As the last one inside, Anthony slowly pulled the front door closed behind him, one hand on the doorknob and the other on the door itself. A muted light flashed beneath his hand, silencing the click of
the shutting door. Then he pointed at Cedrick and Rebecca and nodded to the left. A quick glance at Jessica and Damian told them to follow Anthony to the right. If there really was anyone standing in the living room on the other side of the stairs, the team would come at them from both sides.
Element of surprise. Just like they’d planned. And Leandras’ rough sketch of the inside of his penthouse apartment had told them everything they needed to know about how not to get caught. At least, not the wrong way.
Each group moved slowly around the edge of the apartment. Rebecca and Cedrick slipped behind the huge wingback armchairs set three feet from the long wall of windows, hiding themselves from the glow of the artifact in the center of the living room. Jessica followed Anthony and Damian into the kitchen, where they ducked behind the counter and peeked their heads out to get a good look at what was waiting for them.
So far, the apartment looked untouched. Everything in its place.
Except for the two rings of magicals standing around the purple-glowing artifact in the center of the room.
Jessica quickly counted almost two dozen of them. Some of the intruders wore the same long black robes of Requiem members, and the sight brought back the memory of fighting off so many of them in the bank lobby just a few weeks ago. Those who didn’t wear the robes were dressed like regular magicals trying to blend into regular human society. But all of them were apparently working together now, standing perfectly still in their two concentric circles around Leandras’ gúlmai.
He’d put the damn thing on a pedestal.
It was an otherwise perfect plan on their part, honestly. Leave the fae’s apartment undisturbed, exactly as he’d left it the last time he’d stepped out for whatever business a magical like Leandras had beyond his own front door. And when he came back to retrieve the source of his magic, as these weirdly ritualistic strangers were so sure he would, they’d have the jump on him.
It also made it way too easy for Jessica and her friends to get the jump on them.
All the magicals in the center of the living room looked inward toward the glowing purple artifact on the pedestal, which honestly looked more like a glass lantern than anything else. The buzzing, thrumming light of Leandras’ magic illuminated the intruders’ faces in sharp lines of purple glow and deep shadows. Eyes blazed with a fierce intensity, reflecting that dark light.
It looked like hunger in those couple dozen pairs of eyes. And victory. And something else Jessica couldn’t quite put her finger on.
One hooded Requiem member lifted his arms toward the pedestal and muttered something, his thick lips barely moving. The incantation was impossible to hear over the hum of the gúlmai’s protective wards. Or maybe that was all just from Leandras’ magic itself.
A small, incredibly brief flicker of silver light flashed on the opposite side of the room from behind one of the armchairs. The signal that Rebecca and Cedrick were ready to move.
Anthony gently nudged Jessica’s shoulder as they crouched and nodded.
Get ready.
Damian slowly rose to his full height, and habit made Jessica start counting down the second he moved.
Three.
Two.
One.
Anthony leapt out from behind the kitchen counter with a hiss and threw both hands forward toward the circle. A blinding flash of pure-white light burst from his palms and filled the entire apartment. Jessica’s old crew was ready for the signal and moved immediately.
The two circles of Requiem assholes and whoever was helping them didn’t see it coming.
“What the—”
“He’s here!”
“Dampen the goddamn light!”
“Where is he?”
The instant they were blinded by Anthony’s attack, Damian moved. He spun and twirled through the living room like a cyclone, silver streaks of light darting from his body as he raced toward the quickly scattering circles of magicals.
A mage with a fiery blaze of green light conjured in his hand screamed and flew across the room when the Umbál’s unstoppable force hit him head-on. The others fired off their shots at Damian, but his iron-like skin deflected every magical blow. Spells of every color ricocheted off his spinning visage and crashed into the walls, the ceiling, the floors. Somewhere overhead, lightbulbs shattered and rained flecks of glass all around them.
“Take him down!” It was the hooded troll who’d been muttering an incantation. His hood flew back from his face as he circled away from Damian, sneering and scanning the still-dark apartment. “Find the—”
A raging column of fire hit him in the back and launched him forward. The troll slammed into the ground and skidded across the well-polished floors with a squeak of flesh against wood.
Rebecca emerged slowly from the other side of the room, summoning another attack in her hands. The click of her heels was lost beneath the screams of magical cultists flung in every direction by Damian’s unpredictable whirling.
Cedrick followed closely on the elf woman’s heels, sneering and scanning the scattered mass of their targets for new attacks. A bolt of blue light raced toward them from across the living room, and Cedrick stepped briefly in front of Rebecca to raise his arm. His arm morphed instantly into a wide, flat expanse of hardened flesh. The blue attack pinged off the makeshift shield and crashed against the heavily laden bookshelf lining the far wall. As soon Cedrick lowered his arm, Rebecca unleashed another blaze of flame at the witch racing toward them.
The other woman’s black robes caught fire first, and she screamed for all of five seconds before the attack overtook her and she fell to the floor in a smoking heap.
Anthony had actually leapt up onto the counter now and flung silver-blue darts of attack magic at the disoriented cabal members, picking them off one by one as if he were throwing daggers instead.
And the whole time, Jessica was waiting for her opening.
None of her friends seemed to notice the fact that she hadn’t joined them in the attack quite yet. Or if they did, they probably still expected her to unleash the full fury of her magic at any second.
But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t risk blowing her single greatest secret in this moment by attacking too soon. If what was left of her powerful magic sputtered out on her like it had during that fight against both the Requiem members and Jensen’s little army—like it had when she’d stupidly thought she could take Mickey all on her own again—they were all dead. Right here in Leandras’ annoyingly tasteful penthouse apartment.
So she stayed behind the kitchen counter, watching the violent chaos as spells and smoke and light and magicals flew across the room and smashed into literally everything.
No doubt the fae man would fixate more on the destruction of his things than on the fact that she’d accomplished this and saved his life. If they managed to get that far.
Then she saw her opening.
Standing from behind the counter, Jessica whipped off her brown leather jacket and tucked it sloppily under her arm before racing forward into the fray. A cloaked Requiem mage launched a blazing spray of howling red darts her way. She ducked, halfway skidding across the floor that felt a little too sticky for her liking. Hopefully, it was just blood. Anything else had the potential to do serious damage.
As her friends held off the magicals—furious that their little ritual had been interrupted by the wrong intruders—Jessica darted beneath wayward spells and leapt over the bodies quickly piling up on the floor.
Hadn’t Tabitha brought up a pile of bodies the first day they’d met?
And why the hell was Jessica thinking about Tabitha now?
She skidded to a stop in front of the white marble pedestal in the center of the room. The strange lantern-shaped outer shell of Leandras’ gúlmai pulsed with purple light, and up this close, she could actually see the roiling energy of the fae’s magic rippling and flickering within its glass casing.
Not glass. He’d told her that much. Which was why she’d removed her jac
ket.
The image of her own magic—stripped out of her by a self-cast Shattering and roiling just like this inside that dented tin box of hers—flashed through her mind. Maybe she should have put her own warded protections around the thing…
Another body sailed across the room, thrown by Damian’s whirling, spinning, flashing figure. The orc woman was huge, almost twice Jessica’s size. Her limbs flailed as she hurtled toward Jessica with a scream, and just the barest tip of her boot knocked against the top of the gúlmai’s casing. A flash of purple light momentarily blinded everyone else in the room—except for Damian—followed by the intensely overwhelming scent of burning hair and flesh. The orc woman’s screams cut off immediately, and when Jessica blinked away the spots in her vision, she looked down to see a pile of smoking clothes on the floor beside the pedestal. Only one boot; the other that had touched this artifact must have been obliterated.
No shit none of these assholes would try to remove Leandras’ magic themselves.
The fighting picked up again immediately, and Jessica tossed her jacket over the top of the glowing purple case. She only had enough time to see her jacket still intact before the purple glow faded almost completely and plunged the apartment into an even deeper darkness.
Then someone barreled into her from behind and knocked her to the ground. The wind was knocked out of her too, and she grunted, barely aware of a sharp sting above her right hip. But that was hardly the biggest concern now that hard, warm fingers dug into her ankle and calf. Jessica kicked out at them, scrambling to right herself.
“You’re finished!” her attacker hissed.
Jessica flipped onto her left side, looked back, and recognized the chanting troll in the Requiem robes before the sole of her shoe met his face with a sharp, wet crunch.
The Secret Coin (Accessory to Magic Book 3) Page 3
