Couture and Curses

by Danielle Garrett

  But if not her, then who?

  Harmony sucked in a deep, ragged breath, as if she’d just surfaced from swimming under water, and I realized her eyes weren’t wide because she was surprised—they were wide because she hadn’t been breathing.

  “Tell me what I want to know!” the shadow roared. “Or next time I won’t let go!”

  “Dragon’s Crossing!” I blurted out in a panic. “The books are at Dragon’s Crossing! There’s a book store there. That’s where Ramona sold them.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was true or not. For all I knew, Ramona had tossed them in a dumpster or sold them somewhere else entirely, but it bought us some time.

  And time was all we needed.

  A flash of red exploded from the hallway behind the shadow man and Meryl appeared, wand extended, face drawn. Words from an ancient language spilled from her lips and the red light ensnared the shadow man like a lasso.

  “Go! Get downstairs!” she shouted at Harmony and me.

  Not waiting, I grabbed Harmony’s arm and started forward, only to rear back when the lasso snapped with a loud crack and the shadow man surged free, seeming to have doubled in size.

  Stars!

  Meryl swore and tried another spell. That one was to batter away like an irritating fly. The shadow man’s attention shifted to Meryl and she backed from the room, slinging spell after spell.

  “I have an idea!” Harmony jerked my hand up. “Repeat after me.”

  A protest died on my lips as Harmony started speaking and I had to focus to hear what she was saying over the booms and pops coming from the battle in the hallway.

  “In angelum lucis!” Harmony shouted, a blast of light shooting from her palm.

  I repeated the words, not expecting anything to happen. Like most of our magic lessons, Harmony found my magic unable to stand up to the complicated spells and charms she tried to teach me. This time was different. Something shifted inside me and the power I’d sensed before came rupturing out like a broken dam. “In angelus lucis!” I shouted again.

  My palms warmed and I repeated the spell. Light poured from my hands, shining across the room in radiant, almost golden beams. Harmony and I advanced on the shadow man and when the light hit him, the darkness disappeared and shrank the figure down.

  Meryl hit it with another binding spell and this time, it held. Harmony and I shouted the incantation once more and with the power of four beams of blinding light, the shadow man dissolved.

  My breath came fast and shallow as I sagged back against the wall, my arms falling like limp noodles to my sides. “What. Was. That?”

  “Angel’s light,” Harmony replied, her own breathing ragged.

  “But how did I … I mean, I actually did it!”

  Harmony laughed. “Now will you believe me when I say you’re not a lost cause?”

  “I’ll try,” I replied, still in a daze.

  I rolled my head against the wall and looked at Meryl. She had a phone pressed to her ear and a worried look on her face. I hadn’t even heard the phone ring.

  Our eyes met and she turned away. “On my way, boss.”

  Boss?

  “Caleb’s here?” I said, pushing against the wall to get back on my feet. My legs felt like I’d run a marathon—or at least what I imagined that must feel like, having never been bored enough to attempt one myself.

  Meryl looked at me and then Harmony. “I think it’s best you stay here.”

  I frowned. “Why? What’s happening?”

  “We have the man behind the shadow,” Meryl said.

  My mouth fell open. “You do? Who is it?”

  She hesitated, clearly uncertain whether or not she should be sharing any information with us. After a moment, she leaned in and lowered her voice. “I don’t know, but Caleb says we aren’t leaving this house until he finds out.”

  Whether Caleb wanted us there or not, Harmony and I followed Meryl as she went down two levels into the home’s basement. A man was secured to one of the bistro-style chairs that had been in front of a wet bar along one wall of the basement, his wrists and ankles tied with shimmering bonds. He had stringy, shoulder-length hair and a good week’s worth of scruff on his face and neck. A too-big black trench coat partially concealed an all-black tee shirt and jeans ensemble. The only color anywhere was the half dollar-sized sapphire pendent against his chest. The Heart of Poseidon was encircled with white gold and attached to a chain that hung around the man’s neck. The sapphire would be stunning enough on its own, but it was giving off a sparkling glow that made it all the more mesmerizing.

  “Who are you?” Caleb demanded.

  Meryl stopped us at the bottom of the stairs, gesturing for us to hang back. I leaned against the wall for support, my legs still wobbly. When she was sure we were staying out of the way, she raised her wand and took light steps toward the captured man.

  “Is that the best you can do?” the man taunted, his eyes dancing as he looked up at Caleb, unblinking.

  Caleb leaned in, close enough that the man could likely feel his hot breath on his face. “I’m giving you one more chance to answer, and then I’ll show you my other options,” he growled, the words forced out between clenched teeth.

  The man swore at Caleb.

  Caleb took a half step backward and peeled off the dark gloves he wore. One by one, his fingers changed, each sprouting fur and long, razor sharp claws.

  I expected the man to be horrified—not many shifters had such control over their change, and Caleb’s silent control was intimidating at best. If I was at the mercy of those three-inch claws, I’d have spilled every secret I’d ever kept, including the one about my bizarre—and slightly PG-13—dreams involving Inspector Gadget.

  Okay … on second thought … maybe not that one.

  But all the others, without question.

  “Your sick little game is over now,” Caleb said, stalking closer to the man, his lips curled into a snarl. His movements were always graceful but there was an extra fluidity to his slow prowl, even though only his hands reflected his beast side. “You’ll tell me what I want to know, or I’ll finish what I’ve started here. And let’s just say my beast isn’t much of a talker.”

  His eyes flashed gold.

  “You’re an SPA agent,” the man scoffed. “I know your codes and procedures. You can’t harm a suspect without answering to the council and losing your badge. You’re all claws and no teeth. No more intimidating than a little baby kitty cat.”

  I expected a flash of anger, but instead, Caleb laughed, his own tone bordering on manic. “You’ve done your homework. I’ll give you that. But there’s one loophole you’ve overlooked, friend.” He gestured at Meryl and the three other agents. “None of them hold positions on the council. I can do whatever I want and they aren’t going to say a thing. If you just … disappear … no one will be any wiser. In fact, that would save me a lot of paperwork.” He lowered a claw to the man’s neck and I sucked in a sharp breath.

  Harmony looked at me, her eyes wide.

  My heart slammed against my ribs. I didn’t think Caleb meant it. He was an agency superstar. He hadn’t gotten to the top of his field by pushing boundaries, let alone breaking them. The SPA had a very low tolerance for rule-benders. When magic is involved, the stakes go too high, too quickly, and those who couldn’t follow the Council’s laws were thrown out of the agency.

  But the gold fire in Caleb’s eyes told another story. Was there something I didn’t know? A side I hadn’t seen?

  The man swore again, and in a move so fast I struggled to see it, Caleb dropped his claws, cut the chain around the man’s neck, and caught the Heart of Poseidon in one hand. That got the man’s attention. The prisoner went wild, thrashing and cursing. Meryl gave a lazy flick of her wand and the high-backed chair rooted to the floor, as if nailed down.

  “Aha. So this is what all the fuss is about,” Caleb said, inspecting the stone. “I wonder why. Sure, it’s beautiful and likely worth a pretty penny, but what ma
kes it worth killing for?”

  Murder blazed in the man’s eyes. “Leave it alone, or I swear, I won’t stop until you join that ingrate, Ramona.”

  “What did she do?” Caleb asked, taking a step back.

  His eyes still transfixed on the sapphire, the tale unfolded. “She stole the Heart. My Heart.”

  “You were in a relationship?”

  The man soured. “No. She was nothing to me. I answered her ad in the paper. She was looking for a roommate and I needed a place to stay.”

  “Her neighbor said you fought often. What about?”

  “She complained endlessly about my work. What I do—what I create—it takes up a lot of space and she always said it was too much.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “I left. I moved out and I wasn’t planning on looking back. When I went back to get my things, she’d changed the wards. I broke them but she came home and we argued again. She called the SPA and I left before they could arrive. The next day, I hired movers to go and collect my belongings from her, but when they dropped off the items, several things were missing.” His eyes flashed. “The Heart, among them.”

  Caleb considered the jewel in his hand.

  “I went back and that cow told me she’d sold things to recoup her expenses and lost rent as I’d moved out before the lease ended.”

  “What did you do?” Caleb asked, his tone still measured.

  “I struck her!” the man burst out, testing his bonds again. “I told her she had two days to get everything back to me or I’d kill her.”

  Harmony reached for my arm, looping hers through it. She wasn’t blinking as she watched the man.

  “She came back a few days later, crying and pleading for more time. She gave me some of the items but told me she needed time to get the others back.”

  “And when she couldn’t …” Caleb said, letting the statement trail off.

  The man flashed a cold, cruel smile. There wasn’t a drop of remorse in his confession.

  “After she was dead, I found a notebook she was keeping. It had the name and address of the dress shop and next to that, circled, she’d written sapphire. I didn’t want to hurt that dressmaker, but she didn’t give me any choice. She wouldn’t give me the Heart and I needed it.”

  “Why? What’s so important about it?” Caleb asked again, clasping the stone.

  For a moment, I thought he was going to resist answering, but then with a quirked grin he said, “It’s my essence.”

  I looked to Harmony with a silent question. She lifted her brows and shrugged one shoulder.

  The man scoffed at the blank expressions peering back at him. “Ugh! Of course you don’t understand. You’re all government stooges who can’t see past the pile of paperwork on your desks! My essence is my soul. I’ve found a way to bond my soul to an item, ensuring I live on into the next life. The shadow is another piece.”

  “Correction, was,” Meryl said, clearing her throat.

  The man snarled, but I could have hugged her.

  “I can make another,” he growled, flashing his teeth at Meryl.

  “Boss, can we take him in now? I’m getting tired of listening to him talk,” she asked in a bored voice.

  Harmony snorted.

  “Not yet,” Caleb replied, new flames appearing in his eyes. “Why were you terrorizing Anastasia?”

  The man’s eyes tracked across the room to me at the mention of my name and I tugged a little tighter on my robe’s sash, feeling vulnerable and exposed somehow.

  “She wouldn’t leave it alone. If she’d just kept quiet, I wouldn’t have had to act.”

  Meryl looked over her shoulder at me and then back at the sorcerer. “How did you know what I was doing?” she demanded, putting herself between me and the man to draw his attention from me.

  “We share a bond, now,” he replied, straining to see past Meryl. “You and me, Anastasia. You’ve been shadow kissed.”

  “What does that mean?” Caleb snapped.

  “When the curse struck, she was hit with the impact, which rendered her partially under my control. I can’t put her into a sleep the way I did with the dress witch, but—”

  “Wait!” I stalked forward, coming shoulder-to-shoulder with Meryl. “You’re keeping Aurelia is a trance?”

  He smiled. “Neat, isn’t it? It’s a spell of my own making. No one can break it.”

  “So, you were planning to keep her in a coma forever?” Meryl asked.

  “Oh, no no. Stars forbid.” The man chuckled as if amused by some private joke. “Once I had the Heart and my books, I was going to leave, disappear, and once I was gone, my hold on her would loosen and she would awaken.”

  My gaze cut to Caleb. “Well, that’s good news for Aurelia, because I’m planning on finding a deep, dark hole just for you.”

  The man closed his eyes. I thought he was struggling to accept his fate, to come to grips with his reign of terror coming to an end, but instead, he was conjuring a new spell. A new shadow figure appeared, slightly different than the last, but the same dark, faceless form.

  Harmony jumped to attention and we both shouted the Angel’s Light incantation.

  Before the blast of light hit the shadow, it lunged and grabbed at Caleb’s hand, knocking the Heart out of his grip. Meryl shot off another spell, trying to contain the shadow, and the other three agents joined the fray. The Angel’s Light was working, until Meryl was lifted from her feet, clawing at her own neck.

  “She’s choking!” I screamed, dropping my part of the Angel’s Light spell.

  Harmony continued blasting the shadow but Meryl’s face turned purple.

  “Let me go if you want her to live!” the sorcerer shouted as another shadow appeared at the other end of the room. Then another. And a fourth.

  We were surrounded.

  I saw the fear on the agent’s faces and the hair went up on the back of my neck as the sorcerer let out a peal of wild laughter. Without thinking, I dove to my knees and snatched the Heart of Poseidon from the floor. The manic laughter stopped, morphing into a string of curses, and all four shadow men turned their attention to me.

  Meryl crumpled to the floor, sucking in huge gulps of air.

  “Give it to me, Ana!” Caleb called, reaching for the necklace.

  I clenched the jewel in my hand and muttered a spell. I’d read it in one of Harmony’s spell books.

  She grinned when the words left my mouth.

  The jewel compacted in my hand, crunching down like a piece of soft rock, until tiny flecks of sapphire sifted through my fingers, falling to a pile before my knees.

  A howl echoed through the room, so piercing we all covered our ears and ducked against the barrage. I forced my eyes open against the gale of shrieking wind and saw the shadow men melt into ash and blow away, then, with horror, realized pieces of the sorcerer were flaking off in the same manner and dissolving into thin air.

  The wind stopped as suddenly as it started, leaving the chair empty, the magic bonds in a pool on the floor.

  He was gone.

  It was all gone.

  Chapter 18

  “What in the Otherworld did you just do?”

  It was a good question. One that I, unfortunately, didn’t have the answer to.

  “It’s a compacting spell,” Harmony answered, coming to squat beside me. “You okay?”

  I nodded, still staring around the room, waiting for shadows to appear or an echo of the maniacal laughter to burst in through one of the narrow windows that peeked out above the ground to provide the basement a small amount of sunshine during the daytime. As it was, the only lights were the recessed lighting over our heads, and it wasn’t revealing anything but an empty room and a pile of sapphire dust.

  “We use it to crush cans and trash,” Harmony continued, twisting to look up at Caleb. A surprised bubble of laughter escaped her lips. “Although, what made you think to use it on the jewel is beyond me. Apparently, somewhere along the way you decided you had s
uperhuman strength?”

  I shook my head and ran my fingers through the dust. “I wasn’t really thinking anything, to be honest. I just didn’t want him to get the stone back. There had to be a reason he’s so protective over it, and I don’t think it’s so he could live longer to help more little old ladies across the street or rescue kittens from high tree branches.”

  “No,” Harmony said, her voice nearly a whisper. “I don’t think so.”

  “But what does it mean?” Caleb asked aloud to no one in particular. He paced to the stairs and looked up. “Is he … gone? Where?”

  Meryl stooped to inspect what was left of the Heart of Poseidon. “If he bound himself to the stone, it stands to reason that with it destroyed, so is he.”

  “We’ll gather the remains and take them to headquarters,” Clark said helpfully. He produced an evidence bag from the inside pocket of his coat and we all gave him a strange look. He shrugged. “What? Can’t a guy be prepared?”

  “When we get back to the haven, remind me to call my cousin, Loretta,” Meryl said, pushing to her feet. “I think she’d like you.”

  Harmony’s brow furrowed and Meryl turned back to us, whispering, “She has a small vacuum in order to vacuum her other vacuum.”

  My eyebrows lifted and Harmony muffled a snort against her balled fist. “Oookie dokie.”

  “There’s one way to know whether or not he’s really gone,” I said. Harmony offered me a hand up and I took it.

  “What’s that?” Caleb asked. “And please don’t say mind magic,” he added, shooting a look at Harmony.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “We need to go to the hospital. Remember what he said about Aurelia? If he’s gone, dead or whatever, the hold he has on her will have broken and she’ll come out of the trance.”

  Caleb snapped his fingers and barked out a series of orders. He tried to tell Harmony and me to stay put but we both squashed that pretty quickly, pointing out that the safe house was no longer safe and that we’d all be better off staying together in a group. He muttered something about not being a pack of werewolves, but didn’t argue further.