Artifacts, Dragons, and Other Lethal Magic

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

  “The vampire contributed to your personal warding. I figured it was fair to do the same.”

  I blinked rapidly.

  “You appear frozen in fear, Jade.”

  “Ahh … I …”

  I couldn’t articulate anything, probably because I still wasn’t thinking terribly clearly. So I lifted the lid of the platinum box instead. Two gold rings crusted with tiny gems were nestled within a velvet lining of dark gold. One ring was smaller than the other. Tiny incomprehensible runes were carved on the inner edges of both bands.

  “Wedding bands,” I murmured.

  “Betrothal,” Warner said, repeating himself for what I was pretty sure was the third time. “Have I made a mistake? Are they not … right somehow?”

  The age-darkened gold and the well-worn runes on the rings simmered with dragon magic. I’d never felt such a strong residual from a simple ring before. Though knowing that one of the bands had been worn by the guardian of Northern Europe for who knows how many hundreds of years, it was easy to guess that an Adept of her power was bound to leave more than a trace.

  A smear of buttercream marred the edge of the platinum box. Most likely from the rectangle of Jealously — a wafer-thin, delicate pastry layered with buttercream and fluffy sponge cake — that it had been hidden behind. I wiped it off, then sucked on my fingertip.

  “They’re perfect …” I whispered.

  “But?”

  “But I … are you …”

  “Am I perfect?” Warner laughed. “I’d like to think I am.”

  “That’s a huge lie.”

  “Jade. I’m … I’ve obviously upset you. Perhaps I should have given them to you for Christmas. But I was worried about the … significance of the time of year. I wouldn’t have sprung them on you now, but I know you feel that your necklace has diminished since …”

  I didn’t prompt him to finish his thought, choosing instead to brush my fingers across the rings and allow the silence to stretch between us.

  “Since Shailaja,” I said finally.

  Warner nodded reluctantly, obviously wishing he hadn’t steered the conversation toward the rabid koala.

  Well, I wished he hadn’t either.

  “I know you think she stands between us,” Warner said. “She doesn’t.”

  I curled my fingers over the rings, gathering them into the palm of my hand and feeling the residual magic intensify when the bands touched each other.

  One of these rings had been worn by a guardian dragon for centuries. It was a staggeringly significant gift, even if it wasn’t accompanied by the marriage proposal I’d been expecting the moment I laid eyes on the box.

  The rings were a gift I wasn’t ready to accept. Not with Shailaja hovering in the background of our lives.

  But I wasn’t ready to refuse, either.

  “Thank you.” I raised my eyes to bravely meet Warner’s blue-green gaze. “I’ll add them to my necklace tonight.”

  He smiled, settling back in his chair. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to the sweets?” He gestured toward the platter of pastries between us.

  He was going to let the subject drop.

  For a moment, I thought about picking it up again, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. Was I going to push for the marriage proposal I had thought was happening? Even knowing it was a proposal I couldn’t figure out how to accept?

  “The Diplomat cake is Notte’s signature dessert,” I said. “You can get it with or without rum. Most people order it as the base for their wedding cakes … or for baby showers …”

  Why did it suddenly feel as if the table between us was just an illusion covering a yawning chasm?

  I gestured toward the pastries prettily piled on the glass cake stand before me. “They’re sized for individual servings. Most are filled with buttercream and pastry like the Diplomat, but with different flavor combinations …”

  Warner reached across the table, snagging the hand I was holding over the pastries like I was some sort of dessert tour guide. He ran his thumb across my palm, sending sweet shivers up my wrist and forearm. “I’ve upset you,” he said.

  “No. Shailaja upsets me.”

  “You got another summons.”

  “I did. And I already know how you feel about it, so we don’t have to talk about that, either.”

  Warner laughed quietly, but his amusement was tinged with bitterness. Instead of dropping my hand, he squeezed it.

  I closed my eyes, attempting to calm myself. “I’m all riled up,” I muttered.

  “And we’re nowhere near a bed.”

  I laughed, answering Warner’s leer with one of my own. I leaned forward suggestively.

  He did the same, matching my body language.

  Holding his gaze, I reached into the collection of pastries and extracted my favorite. “The Florentine,” I said. “Three individual Florentines sandwiched together with chocolate buttercream.”

  Freeing my right hand from Warner’s grip, I broke the pastry in two, but the crisp, caramel-coated shaved almonds and candied fruit didn’t snap cleanly. Rich buttercream squished out and over the broken edges. I licked the chocolate goodness from my fingers.

  Warner grabbed my left hand along with the other half of the Florentine, pulling it across the table and completely ready to give it the same treatment with his tongue. Then, realizing we were in public, he growled and took a bite of the pastry instead.

  With the cocoa creaminess of the buttercream in my mouth and Warner holding my hand, I felt more grounded.

  We consumed the rest of the pastry, enjoying the treat in comfortable silence.

  “We’re going to need a box of those,” Warner said.

  “Oh, yeah. At least one box.”

  ∞

  We strolled out of Notte’s Bon Ton, laughing and laden with bakery boxes filled with more pastries, along with a seven-inch Diplomat cake for Gran. The betrothal rings were tucked safely in my moss-green Peg and Awl satchel, though I swore I could still taste their magic despite the containment spell that sealed the bag. Granted, that spell was mostly to stop things from falling out of the satchel and not necessarily to dampen magic.

  Warner went abruptly still.

  My father Yazi — the warrior of the guardian nine — was sauntering toward us from the corner of Trutch and West Broadway.

  My laughter died on my lips. I simply stared at my demigod father as he closed the space between us.

  Other shoppers brushed past us. West Broadway was a busy street even on a Thursday afternoon, but the pedestrians skirted my father as they passed. The overly intense gaze of his light-brown eyes didn’t break from me. Except for that eye color, he was my exact twin … well, a brawny, better-tanned, masculine twin.

  I hadn’t seen my father since he’d saved the rabid koala from a killing blow from my knife, at the site in Peru that I’d come to think of as the temple of the centipede. He’d stopped me from becoming a murderer that day. Yet I’d responded by shoving his Christmas present, unopened, underneath my bed. I was holding onto my grudge, hard and tight. It was unlike me.

  My father smiled as he stopped beside us. I fought the instinct to smile back. He wore a hand-knit scarf of blue and green looped around his neck, a sky-blue T-shirt, and a pair of well-worn jeans. The scarf looked suspiciously like my Gran’s knitting.

  “A jacket might have been a good idea,” I said.

  Yazi cast his gaze over my somewhat-cold-weather-appropriate attire, then shrugged. So much for being careful to not stand out.

  “Sentinel,” he said, addressing Warner without looking at him.

  “Warrior.”

  “You are dismissed.”

  Wait, what? No freaking way.

  Warner immediately stepped to the side, but then he seemed to fight off the impulse to leave with a jerk of his shoulders.

  Yazi glowered at him.

  “We’re on a date.” I ground the words out between clenched teeth. “How dare you —”

  “
I dare,” my father said. “We have things to discuss.”

  It was certainly obvious — even to me — where my penchant for childish retorts had been inherited from.

  “I’m not remotely interested —”

  “I have some errands to run.” Warner interrupted the rant I’d been gearing up on. “I’ll meet you back at the bakery.”

  “Your courtesy is noted, Jiaotuson,” Yazi said.

  In response to the formality of his last name, Warner bowed — though stiffly and shallowly — in my father’s direction. Then he tugged the boxes of pastries out of my hands. He squeezed my wrist lightly while doing so, and the comforting taste of his black-forest-cake magic tickled my taste buds.

  I just nodded, worried about making things worse if I opened my mouth.

  Warner turned away, and I quickly lost sight of him on the busy sidewalk. His disappearance was due to his chameleonlike magic more than anything else. Physically, he towered over everyone, even my father.

  “The boy dares too much for you,” Yazi said.

  It was an observation, not a critique, but I still bristled at it. “His name is Warner. Calling him Jiaotuson is just a cheap way to remind him —”

  “Of his lineage? His duty? His bow was at least five inches shy of acceptable, yet I let him walk away without reprimand —”

  I pivoted on my heel, turning my back on my father and following Warner’s path back to the bakery.

  Yazi effortlessly fell into step beside me.

  Catching a break between the slow-moving cars circling the block for parking, I jaywalked across West Broadway. Then I cut north along Balaclava until I hit the sidewalks of West Sixth Avenue, where the traffic was almost nonexistent. The street was lined with refurbished Craftsman-style and Cape Cod-inspired family homes, as was the norm for the area. Most of the houses in Kitsilano had been renovated and redesigned into duplexes and triplexes in an attempt to combat the ever-rising price of real estate in Vancouver. The bid for density wasn’t really working, though. Gran’s house on the water in Point Grey was considered a mansion these days and was worth an ungodly amount of money.

  Turning east, I wrapped my cashmere hoodie tightly around me, stuffed my chilled hands in the pockets, and tucked my chin into my scarf against the cold.

  The warrior didn’t leave my side, and neither did his muted but still potent spicy dark-chocolate magic. No matter how much dim sum I ate, I still couldn’t place the spice that imbued my father’s power. My own magic must be similarly flavored, since all the shapeshifters I knew insisted that I smelled of Chinese food.

  “It’s not raining,” Yazi mused. “Doesn’t it always rain in Vancouver?”

  I stopped in my tracks, rounding on him. “I will not discuss the weather with you!”

  “I understand that you are mad —”

  “I’m freaking livid. I see Warner maybe once a week, because all the other times, you have him off doing hell knows what —”

  “There are territories to walk,” Yazi said mildly. “If you —”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. I will not unlock your sweet little girl’s magic for her.”

  Yazi frowned as if he had no idea what I was talking about.

  “And yeah, I get why you don’t want Warner and me together.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because you think I’m not … enough.”

  “Enough? Enough what?”

  I clamped my mouth shut. The conversation was veering off in unexpected directions. I was actually managing to confuse myself in the process of venting.

  I began walking toward the bakery again. Sections of the sidewalks were becoming slick as the afternoon cooled, and I wasn’t wearing great shoes for long-distance urban walking.

  We’d crossed Trafalgar, then Larch, before my father spoke again.

  “I would have thought …” he said, then corrected himself. “It was my understanding that the sentinel intended to propose … with my blessing.”

  “He hasn’t.”

  “Because you wouldn’t accept him?”

  “Listen, just because you slept with my mother once and accidentally made me, that doesn’t make you my father.”

  “It most certainly does.”

  “Biologically, maybe.”

  “In every way.”

  “You can’t be my dad if I won’t let you.”

  “Watch me.”

  Jesus, it was like arguing with myself. Except with an Australian accent. “No. You don’t get to choose the rabid koala —”

  “This rabid koala is Shailaja?”

  “Yes, and you don’t get to choose her over me …”

  “When did I choose her over you?”

  I stopped to face off with him. “You don’t get to say you’re my father, then play the ‘I’m so busy I’ve forgotten carrying a crazy teenager out of a mountain and leaving my flesh and blood behind’ card.”

  Yazi’s frown deepened. “I asked you to come.”

  “You demanded —”

  “Yes, when the portal was closing and I feared for your safety.”

  “You cradled her in your arms to protect her from me. You called her ‘child.’ ”

  Yazi tilted his head, genuinely perplexed. “I am not so old that the command of modern English eludes me. It was you I was speaking to. I called you ‘child’ and informed you that the treasure keeper couldn’t hold the portal open for long. I picked up the rabid koala, as you appropriately call her, because it was the quickest means to remove her from the situation. Had you followed me through the portal, I would have had no concerns about you continuing to fight with her. If that was what you deemed necessary.”

  I stared at him. Then I shook my head. “She’s crazy,” I muttered.

  “Yes,” Yazi agreed.

  “But you’re still here to demand I return to the nexus, unlock her magic, and hunt down the last instrument of assassination.”

  “Request, yes. And as for the instrument, only if you wish to do so.”

  “I don’t wish to do so … any of it.”

  Yazi glowered at me.

  I glowered back at him.

  He looked away.

  Silence stretched between us, and even with the heat of my anger, I began to get cold.

  “The sun sets early in this part of the world,” he said.

  And we were back to the weather. “Only at this time of year.”

  I started walking toward the bakery again. We were only a few blocks away, and I yearned to be back within its sweet, comforting aroma.

  “I’ve never been anyone’s father,” Yazi said. “I alternate between wanting to let you achieve your destiny and wanting to shield you from it. Then I say nothing at all.”

  “I’m not going to unlock her magic.”

  “The healer believes that her magic being corrupted is what is making her … rabid.”

  “Qiuniu is a soft touch.”

  “Is that why you haven’t accepted Warner Jiaotuson? You have feelings for the healer?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Good, because —”

  “But I’ll marry who I want to marry.”

  “Yes. Fine. But —”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Yes, no.”

  Yazi thought about my refusal while we turned north on Balsam toward West Fourth Avenue. “I could demand it. I could command it.”

  “Let’s see how that works out for you.”

  “The disturbed fledgling creates an imbalance —”

  “No.”

  “You are being childish and wasting everyone’s time.”

  “Double freaking no, then.”

  Yazi rolled his shoulders, opened and closed his mouth … and then stilled as if listening to something.

  Right. Something more important was happening in the world. Something more important was always happening.

  “Nice chat, daddy,” I said, erecting a barrier of sarca
sm before he could tell me he had to go.

  “Jade …”

  “Just go.”

  “All I’m asking is for you to do your best when requested.”

  “But my best will never be enough, will it? Shailaja ran circles around us last time we fought her off to keep her from seizing an instrument of assassination. And she wasn’t anywhere near her full power.”

  “You have to trust your elders.”

  “Yeah? The same elders who didn’t even know Shailaja or Warner still existed in some suspended form?”

  “Information gets lost over hundreds of years. We adapt.”

  “It’s one thing to adapt. To endure. Sure, I can do that as well. It’s a completely different thing to barrel blindly into situations I have no hope of controlling.”

  Yazi reached out, gently tugging me to a stop a few feet from the dry cleaner’s on the corner. Ahead of us, traffic moved slowly up and down West Fourth.

  I reluctantly turned to face my father.

  He brushed his fingers down my upper arm. Even through my cashmere hoodie, I could feel his dampened magic. I didn’t want it to be comforting, but it was. The caress was also a gesture ripped off from my mother, Scarlett.

  “Control is beyond any of us, Jade. You walked the earth for twenty-three years before I knew you existed.”

  “Yeah.” I dropped my gaze to somewhere around his chest. The scarf he was wearing was frayed along one edge, as if he’d caught it on something, then pulled away without realizing the delicate cashmere had snagged.

  He dropped his arm, sighing regretfully. “I must go.”

  I nodded.

  “She cannot harm us, Jade,” Yazi said. “She doesn’t have the means to do so. And neither the treasure keeper nor I will allow any harm to befall you.”

  “The instruments.”

  “Which only you can wield.”

  “She’ll figure out a way around that.”

  Yazi’s gaze became distant again. He was listening to a voice I couldn’t hear. A guardian was calling him, which was something they never did lightly. And I was the brat holding up the quashing of a demon rising or some other earth-shattering event that needed his attention.

  “Go,” I said again, but I was nicer about it this time.