Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  About thirty feet down the hall, she spied a large catlike figure with a slumped form on its back, along with a humanoid figure, heading toward the building’s main entrance. The figures were crawling low to the floor to avoid the worst of the smoke.

  A strong quake rocked the building, and somewhere nearby, a wall collapsed, flinging debris into the air. Gabby had told Kat that Hunt and the A9 magician were duking it out in the back yard, and apparently, they weren’t pulling their punches.

  Deep fissures in the drywall, sagging floors, and crumbling ceilings indicated that the building’s key supports were growing unstable. If the fight didn’t come to a swift end, the mansion was going to suffer a catastrophic structural failure and come tumbling down. On top of anyone unlucky enough to be inside.

  The door at the bottom of the service stairwell flew open, and a vicious snarl carried up to Kat. “Where’d you go, pretty girl? We weren’t finished with our rematch.”

  Jolted into action, Kat took off down the hall.

  She quickly caught up to Gabby and Sally Radigan, blowing past them to open the double doors so they didn’t have to fumble for them through the smoke. Sally Radigan stumbled out first, wheezing, a white handkerchief stained gray held to her face. Gabby’s jaguar followed, gracefully padding down the wide front steps.

  Kat slammed the doors shut behind them, not only to ward off the billowing smoke, but also to slow down Glasya-Labolas for an extra second.

  Dismissing the air spell around her face, Kat jumped the steps and grabbed hold of Sally Radigan, hustling her across the yard toward the front gate, which stood open, half a dozen flashing cop cars littering the street before it. Gabby loped on ahead of them, ferrying the weak Daphne to safety.

  Gabby was ten feet from the gate when a line of cops in riot gear lurched out from behind one of the parked police cruisers, guns and shields raised. One of them shouted for Gabby to halt and revert to human form immediately, or they’d fire at will.

  Gabby skidded to a stop, growling.

  Mrs. Radigan threw up her arms and shouted, “No, no! Don’t shoot!”

  The cops hesitated, and one of them said, “Isn’t that the senator’s wife?”

  Mrs. Radigan opened her mouth to provide some acceptable explanation for why she was in the company of a jaguar, a wolf, and a mystery woman in a catering outfit, but she didn’t get a word out. The doors Kat had shut a moment ago violently burst open, tearing free from their hinges, and flew across the yard.

  Kat pushed Sally Radigan out of the way and attempted to dive aside herself, but one of the doors caught her in the shoulder. She tumbled across the yard, crashed face first into a tree, and rebounded onto the winter-hardened earth.

  She rolled back and forth as pain lanced across her face, her nose broken.

  Behind her, one of the cops yelled, “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s a demon!” Mrs. Radigan replied. “It’s trying to kill us.”

  Serves you right, Kat thought darkly as she clambered back to her feet, for hiring an A9 magician.

  Linda Cunningham’s body was smeared with soot, highlighting the blackness of her possessed eyes. Her clothing was torn and rumpled like she’d taken a stroll through a warzone. And the smoke pouring out of the doorway made it seem like she’d just clawed her way out of the Inferno.

  The demon under her skin twisted her lips into an unnatural grin, and Kat shivered when those oily eyes tracked her down again.

  The cops, having forgotten all about Mrs. Radigan and the two shifters—who’d now slipped past them and were fleeing down the street—trained their weapons on the demon.

  Kat’s breath caught in her throat. “No, don’t use guns! You’ll kill the host.”

  “Aw, how sweet you are, pretty girl, trying to save a pitiful human you’ve never even met,” said Glasya-Labolas, warping Linda Cunningham’s voice into something straight out of a nightmare. “Super sweet, and hilariously stupid.”

  The demon cast its gaze at the cops. “As if I’d let a second host go to waste. These things aren’t cheap, you know?”

  Kat’s head snapped toward the cops. “Run away! It’s going to—”

  The demon lashed out with a psychic attack, striking all the cops at once. Two of them managed to pull their triggers before they went down screaming, but the bullets went wide, one of them barely grazing Linda Cunningham’s hip.

  The cops dropped their weapons and clutched their heads, eyes screwed shut, tears streaming, and half of them gnashed their teeth so hard that they bit their tongues. Blood frothed up around their lips as they wailed and sobbed, the torment in their minds flooding out all their physical senses.

  Kat swore. The damage has been done. I can’t help them now. I have to—

  The demon launched itself toward her at a blinding speed, and she couldn’t wrest enough energy from her healing factor to dodge in time. The demon slammed into her chest, knocking the breath from her lungs, and tackled her to the ground. Hands wrapped around her throat and squeezed, cutting off her air, and panic drowned out all of Kat’s thoughts.

  Thrashing, Kat tried to roll them over, but it was as if the demon had somehow increased Linda Cunningham’s density. The demon didn’t budge even when Kat pumped into her muscles every available ounce of energy. All she succeeded in doing was breaking both of Mrs. Cunningham’s humerus bones. At which point she stopped tugging for fear she’d rip the woman’s arms clean off.

  Low on air, Kat clawed at the hands locked around her neck. But the demon didn’t let up.

  Glasya-Labolas leaned close to Kat’s face. “All the work they did in that lab, and you were the best they could come up with?”

  Kat froze, eyes bulging. It knows who I am?

  The demon’s grin grew wider. “Oh yeah, pretty girl, I recognized you during our first tussle. Advent 9’s been coming to me for jobs going on three years. They bring me in every now and again, whenever they have need of my special skills. Or whenever they need to study a demon to further their experiments.”

  “You…were…there?” Kat choked out.

  “Uh-huh,” Glasya-Labolas said. “I was in Georgia for a stint. I saw you there, but I doubt you saw me. You were too concerned with screaming your lungs out at the time.”

  Dark spots danced in Kat’s eyes. “Did…you…tell?”

  “Tell who what?”

  At Kat’s seething glare, it chuckled.

  “No, I didn’t tell Teddy I saw you here. That shitty excuse for a magician gets on my nerves, so I didn’t want to reward him with a prize like you. Plus, your escape from the lab has got the bigwigs at A9 running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Which I find immensely amusing. Humans are such silly creatures. I like watching them squirm.”

  Those pitch-black eyes bored deep into Kat’s own. “But you’re not human anymore, are you, pretty girl? You’re a whole lot more than that. I suppose it’s only natural that you’d gravitate toward him. He was their biggest mistake, you know? They lost more men trying to get him in one night than they lost in six weeks of chasing you.”

  Kat dug her nails into Linda Cunningham’s wrists and practically shredded the tendons, weakening the demon’s hold. “What are…you…talking about?”

  The demon kept on smiling. “Ask the right question, and you’ll get the right answer.”

  Kat growled. “Stop playing games with me, you—”

  A deep, rumbling roar ripped through the air, and a five-hundred-pound grizzly bear charged through the front gate. Glasya-Labolas reared back, letting go of Kat’s throat, and tried to scramble to its feet, but the bear was coming in like a speeding train.

  The bear struck out with one of its huge paws, catching the demon in the abdomen and throwing it through the air. Linda Cunningham’s body sailed thirty feet across the yard and landed with a sharp crack on the asphalt driveway, one of her arms folding underneath her and breakin
g yet again.

  Kat winced. So much for minimizing damage to the host body. I hope she’s not critically injured…

  Kat used the nearby tree to haul her self to her feet, heaving in air, her throat on fire. “You’re Casey, right?” she said to the bear. It was hard to imagine a young man Casey’s size could turn into such a huge animal, but the bear nodded his head in confirmation.

  “We need…” She paused to hawk up a glob of blood. “We need to go get Hunt so he can exorcise the demon. He’s still fighting the rogue magician in the back yard.”

  The bear made a sound that Kat took to mean the other shifters who’d been with Casey were heading that way to help Liam and Hunt wrap up their battle.

  Kat looked at Glasya-Labolas again. The demon was already rising, blood running down the side of Linda Cunningham’s face from where the skin of her temple had been sheared off by the rough asphalt.

  Frowning, Kat said, “I don’t want to hurt Linda Cunningham any more than we already have. So let’s go for a bait-and-switch instead of another brawl. We’ll lead the demon around to the back yard and free up Hunt so he can have a rematch with his favorite demonic earl. Then we can both take a bite out of an asshole magician.”

  The bear gave an approximation of a smile and a huff of excited agreement.

  Kat spun back toward the house, sparing a concerned glance for the cops, all of whom had been rendered unconscious by the demon’s psychic attack. Resolve flaring in her chest, accompanied by the familiar rage of her magic, she said, “Let’s end this.”

  20

  Liam

  The rogue magician threw a fireball at Hunt’s head, and Hunt threw it back. The fireball sailed past the swiftly dodging magician and crashed into a tree, setting it ablaze in a brilliant yellow flash. Landing on his knees, the magician slammed his palms against the ground. Energy funneled through the rings on his thumbs transferred into the earth and blasted toward Hunt.

  Just before the energy reached Hunt, the earth split, and an enormous chunk tilted up. The wall of hard-packed dirt surged forward, trying to crush Hunt to a pulp.

  Hunt didn’t even flinch. He swept his arm down, and magic funneled through a quarter, of all things, shot out in a curved arc and sliced cleanly through the earthen wall. The wall split before Hunt, and the two halves flew off at different trajectories, smashing through what remained of the courtyard’s windows.

  The magician, having used the earth wall to obscure his approach, came in low at magic-augmented speed and swiped at Hunt with his ornate dagger.

  Hunt caught his wrist, the dagger missing his neck by an inch, and jerked hard, snapping both the man’s forearm bones clean in half. The man screeched, then reeled back and kicked Hunt in the chest, forcing him to release the broken arm.

  Staggering, Hunt let out a gasp, his ribs cracked. But he didn’t allow the injuries to hold him back for more than a second.

  As the rogue magician transferred the dagger to his other hand, Hunt pulled some loose change from his pocket and pinched coins of differing denominations between his fingers, charging them up with energy.

  The magician lunged at Hunt again, his focus totally absorbed by his opponent. And that was what gave Liam the opportunity to pop up from behind the bush where he’d been hiding and shoot off a tiny pinch of force. The force struck the magician in the ankle.

  The man stumbled toward Hunt, his dagger swipe aborted, and Hunt didn’t miss the opportunity to throw a penny at the man’s face. The penny struck the man right between the eyes, and energy discharged into his head.

  Liam didn’t know what spell Hunt had infused into the penny, but whatever it was put the magician in agony. The man screamed like a banshee and fell to his knees, clawing at the penny that was stuck to his forehead. His dagger forgotten, it landed in the grass, and Liam quickly swept it away with a magic puff of wind.

  Cautiously, Hunt approach the rogue magician, the other coins still in hand.

  “Drop your obfuscation spell and surrender,” Hunt demanded. “Or the pain won’t stop.”

  From behind the black mist, the man audibly snapped his mouth shut to cut off his shrieking. He pulled his hands away from his face, both of them slick with bright-red blood, and defiantly reached for another dagger on his belt.

  Unimpressed, Hunt raised his hand, threatening to let the rest of the coins fly. But he needn’t have bothered.

  Two wolves bounded over the property’s back fence at lightning speed, teeth bared, eyes alight with rage. They rammed into the rogue magician, knocking the second dagger far out of reach. One of the wolves bit into his bicep, and the other sank their teeth into his thigh, the flesh tearing so badly that Liam heard the awful sound over the roar of the fire that had now consumed a third of the mansion.

  The magician went down, and when he saw a coyote and a mountain lion approaching as well, he didn’t try to get back up. He was running low on energy, there were too many adversaries, and he’d already used up his only full-proof escape method, the magic bomb, to blow up Radigan’s study.

  He was beaten, and he knew it. So he went limp on the ground and let the black mist dissipate, revealing the face of the older man that Liam had seen earlier.

  Hunt scowled. “Theodore Pearson. Why am I not surprised?”

  Pearson glared at him, but the effect was diminished when he grimaced as one of the wolves adjusted their bite. “I could say the same about you, Huntington. Always the fucking do-gooder, even in your ‘retirement.’”

  “This is my hometown,” Hunt retorted. “If you didn’t want me to interfere in your salacious murder plot, you shouldn’t have stepped foot within the city limits.”

  “What can I say?” Pearson panted out. “The money was good, the opportunity better.”

  Hunt narrowed his eyes. “Opportunity to do what exactly?”

  Pearson choked out a dry laugh. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “You think I can’t get it out of you?”

  “I think you won’t have the chance.”

  Hunt stiffened, and he said to Liam, “Raise a veil. Now.”

  In the blink of an eye, Hunt disappeared beneath his own veil. Liam tried to emulate him, though sadly, he was too slow on the draw. Just before he muttered the final few words to turn himself invisible, a heavily armed SWAT team surged over the top of the fence, pointing rifles at everyone in sight. Liam ducked back down behind the bush, but it wasn’t tall enough.

  As one of the SWAT guys was dropping to the ground, he spotted Liam. “You there!” the man shouted brusquely. “Put your hands behind your head and come out.”

  Oh great. This is just what I need, Liam thought. A felony arrest on my record.

  Following the SWAT guy’s instructions, Liam rose and stepped out from behind the bush. Two other SWAT men hurried over, guns trained on his chest so they could bring him down the instant he displayed a hint of hostility.

  One of them roughly grabbed Liam’s wrists and bound him with magic-suppressing handcuffs. The other divested Liam of his knife, rings, earrings, and even his belt, following the training guidelines for stripping magicians of potential mediums.

  While Liam’s arrest was taking place, most of the SWAT team swarmed the shifters. The wolves, mountain lion, and coyote reverted to their very nude human forms and surrendered with nary a growl, per Gabby’s firm instructions on how to handle the operation going south.

  Three of the SWAT officers crouched beside the magician. After thoroughly examining his wounds to make sure he wasn’t going to croak in the next five minutes, they clamped a pair of magic-suppressing cuffs onto his wrists as well and hauled him to his feet.

  “Which one is the magician who tried to killed the senator?” a female SWAT officer asked, glancing between the rogue magician and Liam.

  A man with a New York accent answered, “Must be the older guy. He matches the description that Mrs. Radigan provided.”<
br />
  “So who’s the other guy?” the woman said.

  All the attention turned to Liam then. For a brief moment, he had hope that none of these people would recognize him and he’d endure this situation without the added humiliation of his own former coworkers chewing him out all the way to the precinct lockup.

  Then the very man who’d first noticed Liam pulled up his goggles and squinted at Liam’s battered face. “Liam Crown, is that you?”

  Liam groaned inwardly and hung his head. “Long time no see, Owen. How’s it going?”

  21

  Kat

  Kat and Casey were halfway around the house when they ran into an invisible man. All of a sudden, two hands they couldn’t see grabbed hold of them, jerking them to a stop.

  Casey whipped his head around, huge bear teeth snapping for the hand that had grasped the scruff on his neck. But then Hunt’s admonishing voice cut through the veil: “You bite me, bear boy, and I’ll give you an ass-whooping you’ll never forget.”

  Casey shrank back and made an apologetic sound.

  “Hunt,” Kat said, “where’s Liam?”

  “Unfortunately, he’s been arrested. A SWAT team assailed the back yard.” Hunt’s magic energy enveloped Kat and Casey, and Hunt appeared as the boundary of the veil expanded to cover them.

  “Arrested?” Kat hissed.

  Hunt released her arm and gave her a nonchalant wave. “I wouldn’t worry too much about him, since he’s a former cop himself, and a well-respected one at that. I seriously doubt they’ll treat him poorly. Per protocol, they’ll book him in a precinct lockup, but it’s up to the district attorney’s office to actually pursue charges against him. And we just happen to know someone who has a great deal of pull with the Salem’s Gate DA.”

  Kat chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Senator Radigan.”