“We’re good,” she said. “Charlotte should be almost done.”
They kept low and snuck around the outside of the hedges. Aspen scanned the ground for any other signs that there was something she’d missed. With a house this luxurious, the security was surprisingly light. Maybe they had a less subtle form of security: guard gremlins; nasty green suckers with sharp teeth you could keep in line with the promise of fresh meat. Maybe even a hellhound. Aspen shuddered as they reached the back porch. She hoped not a hellhound. She’d run into one on a job. One had been bad enough.
Charlotte had jimmied the back door open without Aspen’s help. Aspen held her hand up to keep Snitch back, then stepped forward.
“Proximity charms?”
“Negative,” Charlotte answered.
“Contractual guardians?”
“Unknown.”
Aspen sighed. She loved the little machine, but it did have its limitations.
“Guess we’ll find out.” She crouched and Charlotte leapt into her hand, folding back into an iPod. She slipped it into one of the many pockets in her jacket and motioned for Snitch.
“There, you’re in. Can’t guarantee there won’t be any lovely surprises your mystery man left inside, but I’ve done my part for Hugo.”
Snitch hesitated before nodding. Then he slipped around her and slunk through the door. Aspen carefully folded up her gloves, stowed them away, and followed. She usually hung back on jobs like these, but this person—whoever they were with their ridiculous house and lack of any prior info—intrigued her.
The inside was just as immaculate as she’d imagined. Full, glass-paned windows ringed a central rotunda of white marble, an enormous skylight at the very top. An immense crystal chandelier hung directly above her. Not one, not two, but three freaking spiral staircases led from where she stood to the second-floor landing. Aspen counted half a dozen rooms just on the ground floor.
She’d been in a lot of places to steal a lot of stuff, but this was by far the most elegant. Extravagance had been almost tossed around carelessly; gold gilded bannisters, crystal adornments on the doors, elegant paintings of Chinese dragons snaking across the walls and encircling the ground floor, marble friezes depicting mythical battles. The classiness made Aspen want to puke. Most of the other magical boroughs weren’t exactly poor, but they were nothing compared to this.
As she finished taking it all in, another twinge of nervousness festered in her gut. This was lifestyles of the rich and famous material right here. Who, exactly, was Hugo stealing from?
While Snitch was busy rifling around in another room, Aspen took the stairs two at a time. Most of the rooms on the second floor were empty or filled with useless junk; books and dusty scrolls and artifacts that looked like they’d hold no real value if she tried to sell them on the black market. But Aspen could understand being a collector of stuff. Brune did it. Tinkering with all the mundane and magical knickknacks he brought back was how she’d learned to build most of her gear.
A loud crash came from the first floor. Aspen ran back to the balcony. Snitch was kicking pieces of a shattered vase into a corner. He glanced sheepishly up at her.
“My bad.”
“Idiot. Better find what Hugo wants fast. I leave in five.”
“What? But…But can’t you check if there are any more safeguards I need to watch out for?”
“I haven’t foun—”
Aspen jerked her head up. Above her was just the chandelier and the continuation of the rotunda, another balcony bannister ringing it. She thought she’d seen a shimmer of magic, a flicker of movement. She took another look at her surroundings. Everything else seemed normal. Except…hadn’t the Chinese dragon paintings been on the ground floor?
No, she was going crazy. They were quite intricate, though, with their yellow peering eyes and snarling mouths. Quite life-like.
“I haven’t found any other charms,” she said to Snitch. “Five minutes. Then I’m out.”
She left a groaning Snitch behind and returned to the previous corridor, throwing one last look over her shoulder. She hadn’t seen anything just then, but instinct told her not to dismiss it. This was no ordinary job, or victim’s house.
Aspen rounded the next corner and paused. Here was a broad, white-tiled hallway. The air shimmered in front of a single door.
Aspen triple-checked there was nothing immediately obvious that would kill her, then pulled out her gloves and slipped them on.
“Hello, lovely.”
Sure enough, the door had a severe locking charm on it. She could break it, but it’d probably drain the remaining magic her gloves had stored.
“You’d better be worth it,” Aspen muttered. She turned the circle on her gloves to the right countercharm and placed them against the door.
Searing pain raced up her arms. Aspen yelped and leapt back. The ends of her gloves were singed. She yanked them off and furiously rubbed her raw, tender fingertips. “Why you—”
The doors clicked open.
Something rustled in the hallway behind her.
Aspen whirled, pulling her Dakri knife, the rarest and most prized possession she owned. She’d nearly gotten herself killed stealing it from a Fae’s shop. Forged in the heart of a dying volcano, the blade was cursed, making anyone it cut bleed continuously until Aspen pressed a button on the hilt. It needed a constant supply of blood to keep the blade from rusting.
There was a chance that blood was coming soon.
Aspen flicked her eyes left and right, trying to pick out any anomalies around her. The knife would hopefully be enough against anything here. She wouldn’t use her guns except if absolutely necessary. Magic bullets weren’t cheap.
Keeping her eyes on the corridor, Aspen backed through the now-open doors. She swore she heard movement on the ceiling, but there was nothing there except lights and more of those eerie dragon paintings. She hurried inside the new room and paused.
“Whoa.”
More immaculate than the others, it was also filled with floor to ceiling bookshelves stuffed with metal devices and leather-bound books. This was the one room that actually looked somewhat used. Three broad tables were set in a fan before large-paned windows facing the garden. Delicate instruments had been set on the center table beside writing tools: Spell sealing dust, pens, bottles of ink, open notebooks with blotches and scribbles messily scrawled on the inside.
Aspen slowed as she trailed her hand along the left table. She thought she’d heard the rustle of a page across the room; maybe the slither of scales on paper. But that wasn’t the only thing that’d made her stop.
In the middle of the center table was a device she’d never seen before. And that was saying something. With the amount of magical materials moving in and out of Brune’s shop, she’d seen a whole lot.
This device was made completely of silver. It was pill-shaped, and almost entirely smooth, the body no bigger than a football. A faint blue glow emanated from the surface. When Aspen leaned closer, she could see the shimmer of magic; hear it humming, almost like a computer fan on overdrive.
There was a symbol etched on the top: claws reaching up from either side to encompass a single blood red dot in the very center. Something else she’d never seen before. Maybe this trip wouldn’t be so fruitless after all—
Her hand accidentally brushed the metal. Aspen felt her fingers pulled onto the surface, then violently shoved away. A force like a punch to the gut hurled her into the nearest bookshelf, slamming her head against the spines.
“Hex it all!” Aspen wheezed, pushing herself up to a crouch. Her muscles shook as the excess magic ran up and down her skin. Moments later, it dissipated. It always did. She’d been hit with more magical attacks, safeguards, and counterspells than she cared (or dared) to admit. None of them ever lasted too long. She never knew why but she was willing to take whatever small mercy had been thrown her way. She couldn’t use magic, but at least she could take a hit better than others in her line of work.
Aspen slowly froze as she stood, dread filling her. She’d knocked some items off the bookshelf when she’d hit. One of them, a scroll, had unfurled, revealing a deep, golden seal. A symbol she did recognize.
A Mage’s seal. Hugo had asked her to help steal from a freaking Mage’s house.
Aspen jerked as the sound of sharp claws scuttled on the ceiling. From way back in the rotunda, Aspen heard Snitch cry out in shock. Her stomach dropped.
Then she was sprinting out the door, yelling, “Snitch! Snitch, we’re getting out of—”
Something hit her from behind, sending her tumbling into the hallway. Aspen rolled as she fell, avoiding the cleaving claws that pierced the ground where she would have landed. She sprang to a crouch to find herself face to face with the Chinese dragon paintings—one on either side of the hallway walls, both peering at her with glowing yellow eyes.
“Aw, troll piss,” she muttered as the pair of them lunged.
A Bad Deal
Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. That’s what this whole thing had been from the start. That was what she’d been for not trusting her instincts and ditching this job the first time her gut had told her to.
The dragon painting to her right peeled off the wall and rocketed toward her. Aspen rolled aside and swiped with her knife. The blade carved a neat slice through the canvas of the dragon’s side as it skimmed past before it reattached itself onto the wall, becoming two-dimensional once more.
Aspen flipped back and forced her breathing to slow. Analyze. Understand. Counter. She’d faced magic hundreds of times before. It always had a weakness. Some shortfall she could exploit. Magic might have been power, but even power had limitations.
She just needed time to figure out what it was.
The dragons slithered up the walls on either side of the hallway. Their glowing eyes refocused on her. They curled their long, scaled bodies back to attack.
Aspen drew her hand from her pocket and threw the last of her shadow powder. A plume of darkness exploded in the middle of the hallway and she used the cover to make her escape, tearing back toward the rotunda. She hit the spiral staircase and practically flew down it. Her feet slapped on the bottom floor just as Snitch came barreling out from another room. His eyes widened on her.
“Behind you!”
Aspen instinctively ducked. One of the dragons soared overhead and stuck onto a marble pillar on one side of the door where it circled around, waiting for her.
Limitation: Clearly the Mage had used an animation spell on the décor. Stealthy, but they had to be grounded to something or they’d cease to work. In this case, that something was a fixture of the house.
The other dragon had slithered down from the second floor. Another two dragons had appeared along the wall from one of the other ground floor rooms. Snitch’s eyes grew even wider.
“I’m so out of here!”
“Snitch!” Aspen said as she backed up, not willing to risk taking her eyes off the dragons. “Snitch, don’t you dare leave m—”
Snitch took off, his long elvish legs eating up the space to the door in a second before he was out and gone.
All the dragons turned on Aspen.
“Snitch, I swear if I don’t die I’ll make sure you do!” Aspen bellowed. She readied her knife. Four opponents and she was in the center of the rotunda, completely exposed.
Screwed.
The first dragon attacked. Aspen leapt over it and brought her knife down but it had already slipped past. Searing pain lit up her left arm as another dragon’s claws raked across it. She swiped at that one but the next had already attacked. Another blossom of pain on her leg. Her back. Her stomach.
Aspen managed to retreat toward the center again. The dragons had paused in their assault and Aspen took the reprieve to reassess. Her blood loss wasn’t bad. The situation was worse. Clearly these things weren’t trained to hold back on intruders. There’d be no keeping her here until the authorities arrived.
Which meant she was a dead girl.
Options, she needed options. Buy herself a little time to make a break for the open door.
Then she saw the chandelier.
It hung directly over her head; hundreds of pounds of extravagant, gloriously shatter-able crystal with a nice big hole right over where she stood.
Aspen drew her gun, cocked the hammer, and aimed up.
“Man I hope this works.”
She fired. The shot was surprisingly perfect, the bullet severing the chain holding the chandelier. Time stopped as it hung suspended in midair.
Then the whole thing came crashing down on her. Metal screamed as it slammed into the marble floor. Crystal shattered, spraying shards of fractured reflections every which way. She’d judged her placement correctly, putting herself in the dead center, surrounded by the metal arms and what intact crystals remained.
The dragons growled.
“Try to get me now,” Aspen muttered.
She waved her arms and a thousand reflections mimicked her. More crystal shattered as one of the dragons lunged and missed. Then another. Aspen kept waving, hoping these things weren’t smart enough to figure out which one was the real her.
A crystal shattered just on her left. Too close. She needed to beat a hasty retreat.
The dragons growled as she broke free from the chandelier and sprinted straight for the door. She could feel them at her back, feel them closing in, feel their claws and teeth reaching to tear into her.
Just…a little…further…
The dragons lunged.
Aspen dropped to the floor and slid the rest of the way out the door, rolling to a stop in the grass at the edge of the pool. From the corner of her eye, she saw the dragons slam against an invisible barrier at the doorframe.
No time to rest. Who knew what other extra security measures she’d already triggered?
A few seconds later, Aspen vaulted the house’s outer wall and slumped against the other side to catch her breath. The more she calmed down, the more her mind replayed what had just happened. A Mage. What had Hugo been thinking? What had she been thinking? They needed the money bad, but not that bad. Not bad enough to deal with a partner that’d ditch her at the first sign of trouble. Not bad enough to try stealing from a Mage, some of the most powerful magical figures in all of the boroughs. In all the world.
She stood. She double-checked she hadn’t dropped anything during her escape and that most of her blood was out of sight. Then she turned back to the street.
“Time to go murder someone.”
Getting back into Ember’s Landing was the easy part. Each magical borough had their own special mode of entry: the Jade Palace borough, where most djinn and low-level demons resided, was through some mystical gates. The Fae of the Courts borough was through a couple magical pathways in Central Park. The Necropolis, the borough of the undead, was accessed by some kind of cemetery entryway she didn’t know too much about and wanted to keep that way.
Aspen pulled the collar of her jacket up to hide the worst of her injuries and joined the flow of passersby heading to wherever. Nobody spared her a second glance. She reveled in the anonymity. She’d lived long enough in Ember’s Landing that most of the comments and dirty looks she got barely affected her anymore. With the hair, most newcomers to the borough couldn’t tell. Most couldn’t tell which magical being someone was until they showed their fangs or magic.
Aspen let the dull hum of traffic wash over her, before skirting around a taxi to cross the street. There was the distinct, intermittent honks of cars, like the cries of exotic birds through a jungle of steel and glass. She shoved through another crowd until she could walk freely again.
She could understand why most Supes didn’t want to venture out here. The normal world was chaotic. The normal world was unpredictable. Within the boroughs you might run into a d
ozen deadly magical beings but there were rules in place. Ancient rules. And the Mages—as corrupt and useless as they were at being head of the boroughs—usually enforced them.
Aspen finally reached the corner of Broadway and Columbus. The Lincoln Center sat directly across from her, but instead of heading there she walked a little farther along until she reached the sliver of an alley between a second-hand electronics store and a Chinese nail salon. The salon was a farce. Aspen knew the succubus inside who ran it was just there to make sure anything too unusual didn’t try to enter Ember’s Landing this way.
Aspen nodded through the window and walked into the alleyway. In seconds, she was swallowed by the narrow, high walls. The sound of traffic slowly faded away.
She cut left, into another alleyway that veered directly off, almost invisible if you weren’t looking for it. This led to another dim alley. She took another left, down a third.
Right. Right. Left. Right. The pattern was so ingrained in her she could do it even when being chased. Which she had. Multiple times. The charmed, maze-like alley entryway had ferried her to safety more times than she could count, while spitting any pursuers who didn’t know the pattern back onto the streets.
Eventually, the bare walls around her began to change. Rough brick transitioned to smooth, which then filled with windowsills and crawling vines. Gargoyle-headed water spouts craned above her. Street signs were tagged with graffitied words no normal human could have read.
Aspen emerged on one of the main streets of Ember’s Landing and immediately turned right. Night had begun to fall but she still had a bone to pick with Hugo and his sucktastic choice of places to hit. She knew exactly where Snitch would be going to meet him.
Aspen’s breathing was harsh in her throat, her heart still thudding way too fast. She’d been scared back there. She hadn’t been scared like that for a while. Whenever jobs went south she could usually keep calm and not lose her cool. That was how she’d survived this long. But this time…this time had been too close. Why had Hugo wanted to steal from a Mage of all people? What could have been important enough for him to risk her going there?
Mage's Apprentice (Mages of New York Book 1) Page 3
