Druid Vices and a Vodka: The Guild Codex: Spellbound / Six

by Marie, Annette

  “Six against one,” Mario growled. “I like our odds.”

  “Do you?”

  The air rippled—and five huge varg wolves appeared around him, their hackles raised and red eyes glowing as they bared their teeth at the mythics. Fear singed the air, palpable and intense.

  As the Odin’s Eye mythics hesitated, Zak pulled on a handful of leather cords hanging around his neck. Four colorful crystals lifted out of his jacket. With the murmur of his voice, the first one lit—then the second—then the third.

  “If you won’t move,” he said, dangerously quiet, “which of you should I go through?”

  The swordsman behind Zak flicked his short blade.

  Zak pivoted as a fireball shot from the sword’s tip. The yellow magic coiling over his arm flared outward into a shield and the flames burst harmlessly against it.

  “You’ll have to do a lot better than that,” he said. The indigo magic snaking over the ground brightened and the earth rumbled again, the vibrations deepening.

  A varg snarled, its teeth snapping at thin air. Zak turned again—and with his distraction, four combat mythics and Mario’s demon launched forward.

  My vision went black.

  I gasped in fright, throwing my arms out. As fearful cries rang out around us, my elbows thumped against Aaron and Ezra, still behind me. The vargs were snarling, people were shouting, then—

  “Everyone stop!”

  I sucked in a sharp breath, barely recognizing that voice. None of Darius’s usual humor touched the command in his tone.

  The darkness slowly lifted, as though someone were sliding a dimmer switch for my vision. The revived streetlamps cast an orange glow over the Odin’s Eye team, who’d closed half the distance to Zak, their weapons mere feet from the vargs.

  Zak was still in the middle of the street—and Darius stood beside him, one hand gripping the back of Zak’s neck, his hood pushed off. With his other hand, the GM held a shining silver dagger against Zak’s throat, the blade resting just under his chin.

  I blindly grabbed Aaron’s and Ezra’s arms, my fingers digging in as I tried to remember how to breathe. Maybe it was my imagination, but as everyone stood frozen in the sudden return of light—or vision, or whatever the hell the luminamage had done to blind us—I could’ve sworn I saw Darius’s lips moving with fast, quiet words.

  Zak’s eyes, bright with Lallakai’s power and burning with fury, flicked from the guild master to Shane.

  “Now,” Darius said, cool as a cucumber as he held a dagger to the druid’s throat, “before damage is dealt and lives are lost, let’s have a little discussion.”

  “Are you obstructing justice, Darius?” Shane asked, equally calm but nowhere near as cool. The total sum of his badassery couldn’t fill Darius’s left shoe. “That mythic is under arrest.”

  “Of course, Shane, of course. But unless I am very mistaken, you do not intend to arrest this mythic. Nor do you intend to kill him.”

  My eyebrows scrunched in confusion.

  Shane wiped rain off his bald head with a gloved hand. “What makes you think that?”

  “The Ghost is, by your standards, a rather small and local barracuda in a worldwide sea of sharks. Wouldn’t you agree his list of crimes is trivial compared to your usual quarry?”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere, Darius.”

  “My point is, Shane, that you didn’t come to Vancouver for this mythic’s bounty. So rather than risk the lives of this fine Odin’s Eye team on an attempted capture, why don’t you tell us what you really want from the Ghost?”

  The famous bounty hunter adjusted his water-speckled glasses as he considered Darius’s suggestion. “I want Varvara Nikolaev—and the Ghost will tell me everything he knows about her power.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Wait,” I muttered. “Shane isn’t here for Zak?”

  “He said he was investigating the Ghost,” Aaron growled.

  “But looking back,” Ezra said quietly, “he hasn’t been very focused on that. He spent more time investigating the guild attacks.”

  Which had been Varvara’s doing.

  In the center of the street, Shane and Darius were engaged in a staring match. Zak didn’t move, seemingly unwilling to speak while Darius had a knife to his throat.

  “In that case, Shane,” the guild master said, “make your offer.”

  “I don’t need to bargain. He’ll answer my questions or suffer the ‘dead’ part of his DOA bounty. Unless you intend to help him escape, at which point we’ll arrest you instead.” Shane smiled coldly. “That would be a satisfying consolation prize, I’ll admit.”

  “Helping him wasn’t my plan, but you don’t seem to realize how unlikely it is that you, I, or your team can stop him.”

  “You have a knife to his throat.”

  In response, Zak lifted his left hand—revealing an empty glass vial from his belt. As a silent, fearful rustle passed through the watching Crow and Hammer guildeds, he let the vial slip from his fingers. It shattered on the pavement.

  My gaze followed its trajectory, and I spotted the black stain on Darius’s knee where Zak had splashed the potion.

  “Soon your arm will be too numb to hold that knife,” the druid said. “You can slit my throat, but you’ll die either way.”

  Darius sighed. “Unappealing, to say the least. Luckily, I’m a more flexible man than our dear friend Shane.”

  “Do not release him, Darius,” Shane hissed. He clenched and unclenched his jaw. “Zakariya Andrii, assist me in capturing Varvara and you can walk free.”

  Gasps rang through the Crow and Hammer mythics.

  “Why should I believe that?” the druid demanded.

  “Your bounty is one-point-two million,” Shane replied tersely, “encompassing eight years of criminal activity. Varvara Nikolaev’s spans fifty-three years and is set at thirty-four million, with contributions from major guilds across Russia and Eastern Europe.”

  Whoa. The Ghost was a trivial rogue indeed.

  “You,” Shane added, “are a means to an end. Deliver on that end and you can go back to kidnapping children and selling cheap artifacts until a local guild finally catches up with you.” A sharp smile. “Which won’t take long now that your class, name, and face have been unveiled.”

  Zak studied the bounty hunter with his inhuman eyes, then Lallakai’s huge shadow wings folded down his arms and faded away. The ten-foot-diameter indigo circle under his feet dissolved in sparkles that drifted skyward.

  “Agreed,” he said.

  Darius lowered his knife, then slipped it out of sight under the back of his shirt. “Excellent. Shane, would you join us inside? We can pool our knowledge immediately.”

  Not waiting for a reply, Darius clapped his hand onto Zak’s shoulder, splattering raindrops, and steered the druid toward the guild. His saber and yellow shield spell shimmered away as he walked with the GM, sparing not even a glance for the Odin’s Eye mythics. His vargs faded into shadow, disappearing as swiftly as they’d joined the fight.

  The Crow and Hammer mythics parted for their GM and the notorious rogue. I arched my eyebrows at Zak as he passed, then stepped after him. Aaron and Ezra followed.

  “Were you planning to provide me with an antidote, Zak?” the guild master asked as we crossed the empty pub.

  “No.”

  Darius stopped abruptly, pulling the druid to a halt.

  “You don’t need one,” Zak added. “That vial was a burn-treatment potion with a full-body numbing effect. Though if I’d been carrying a lethal poison, I would’ve used it.”

  A short pause, then Darius threw his head back in a laugh. “Well played, alchemist. The sensation was distinctly alarming.”

  I rolled my eyes, half impressed by Zak’s quick thinking but mostly annoyed by his penchant for pretending harmless potions were lethal. Sneaky cheat.

  We gathered around a long worktable on the second level. Darius claimed the chair at the head of the table and Zak sat
on the corner beside him. I took the next spot, and Aaron and Ezra followed suit. Kai, Makiko, Girard, Tabitha, and Felix—the third officer carrying a laptop—filled out the table’s other side.

  Tabitha glared arctic laser-beams at Zak, while Girard, sitting across from the druid, seemed cautiously curious.

  “So,” he said, “you’re the one who stole our bartender for two weeks, eh?”

  I propped my chin on my palm. “It was a lovely vacation. I enjoyed some hard manual labor, a battle with darkfae, and a dragon airshow. Oh, and he tricked me into thinking I’d die if I talked about him.”

  Girard pressed his lips together at his new understanding of why I hadn’t revealed where I’d been or how I’d escaped.

  “Don’t forget the shower,” Zak told me.

  “Huh?”

  “Showering together,” he clarified. “Sleeping together. Waking up in bed together. It was so romantic.”

  My jaw hit the tabletop. Aaron’s face was stamped with disbelieving horror and Ezra’s had gone completely blank. Kai’s suspicious gaze darted between me and the druid.

  “After all,” Zak added, a sneer slipping into his voice, “we dated, remember?”

  I snapped my teeth together so hard my skull rattled. “I was covering for you, asshole.”

  “I told you that was an idiotic lie.”

  “You didn’t suggest any alternatives, did you? You—”

  Shane Davila swept into the room with two Odin’s Eye mythics in tow—Izzah, plus a thickly muscled older man I assumed was their team leader. Shane sat opposite Darius, and Izzah and the Odin’s Eye man sat flanking him.

  Izzah glanced once at Kai, sitting beside Makiko, and looked away, her full lips squeezed into a pale line.

  “Let’s begin. Zakariya, you—”

  “He prefers Zak,” I barked aggressively, shifting my temper to an equally worthy target.

  Shane glanced at me, then refocused on the druid. “You engaged in a direct altercation with Varvara last July. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you fought her?”

  “Yes.”

  Shane adjusted his glasses. “And you lost.”

  Temper flashed in Zak’s face. “She had a hostage, which limited my options, but I held my own.”

  “Tell me everything about your fight with her.”

  “That’s what you want from me?” He shook his head. “I’ll keep it simple for you: she’s lethal.”

  “I’m aware of her combat prowess,” Shane said impatiently. “Shortly before she fled Russia last year, an elite bounty team cornered her in Moscow. She escaped—and killed most of the team. I can find her. What I need from you are details about her abilities so I can ensure she doesn’t escape or slaughter another team.”

  “You’re awfully confident that you can find her.”

  “I already have.”

  Zak’s eyes narrowed to calculating slits. “Then tell me where she is and I’ll take her down.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You can have the bounty. I want her head.”

  “I’ve told you what I require from you: her skills, strategies, and weaknesses.”

  The druid’s upper lip curled as his gaze slashed across the people gathered around the table. “Haven’t you seen enough black magic to know that a master practitioner could crush everyone in this room?”

  “But you could defeat her?” Aaron snapped.

  “Yes.”

  Aaron rolled his eyes in disgust.

  “I’m not saying it would be easy. She thinks of everything, plans for everything. She has defenses in place for every kind of attack.”

  “How would you defeat her?” Shane asked Zak intently.

  “In an ideal world, I’d crush her throat with my bare hands.” His mouth twisted. “The only way to take her down is in close combat, but that puts you in range of her poisons. She’s a highly adaptable strategist, and with fifty years of experience in the dark arts … you can’t plan for that.”

  “I’m quite certain I can. Tell me everything you saw in your confrontation with her.”

  Anger roughening his voice, Zak described the spells and alchemy Varvara had used against him, getting technical so quickly that my head spun from all the unfamiliar words. Felix typed rapidly on his laptop, his brow scrunched in concentration, while Girard and the Odin’s Eye team leader nodded along. I couldn’t tell if Shane was following or not.

  “She carries far more magic than what I saw, so I doubt any of that will help you,” Zak concluded. “That’s assuming you can reach her when she has forty rogues to hide behind.”

  Tabitha leaned forward, her face paler than usual. “How do you know she has forty rogues?”

  “I can count.”

  “Actually,” Shane butted in with a pretentious air, “casualties from the Pandora Knights and Odin’s Eye attacks have reduced her rogues to around thirty, though we don’t yet know how many golems she has to supplement their numbers.”

  Zak grunted at the bounty hunter’s correction. “Golems take a full moon cycle to charge, meaning she’s been preparing for this for months.”

  “What’s she preparing for?” Felix asked. “What’s her end game?”

  “Control of Vancouver’s black market,” Shane answered before Zak could. “Assuming she follows the same pattern as in St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Bucharest, she’ll gain control of the artifact trade first, then expand into smuggling and human trafficking—mythic and not.”

  Zak thudded a gloved finger against the tabletop, drawing everyone’s attention. His stare locked on the bounty hunter. “Tomorrow night, Varvara will animate a new batch of golems and send them and her rogues to level another guild. Are you planning to do something about that?”

  Shane prodded his glasses up his nose. “Similar to Red Rum, Varvara favors sea travel on her yacht. She only comes to land when necessary. Otherwise, she’s at sea and impossible to find. However, she needs a location to store her golems and hide thirty to forty rogues—and I’ve identified that location.”

  Almost everyone at the table leaned forward slightly.

  “Over the last three nights, she’s arrived at this secret location at seven p.m. and departed at seven-thirty. I assume the purpose of these visits was to animate the golems for the next attack.”

  “I thought golems only last ten minutes,” I muttered to Zak.

  He shrugged one shoulder. “If the golems are immobile, they could last a few hours.”

  “They transport the golems in a semi-trailer,” Makiko added in a crisp tone. “We saw it on our security cameras. Once Varvara animates the golems, the rogues would need to load them and head to their attack location immediately.”

  “Then we strike before that,” the Odin’s Eye leader declared. “If Shane gives us the location, we can have teams in place well before seven tomorrow, and stop her next assault before it starts.”

  Shane shook his head. “It isn’t that simple. If even a single enemy is detected, Varvara will flee. She needs to dock and come ashore before any combat teams move in.”

  “She can’t be allowed to animate the golems,” Darius countered. “Thirty rogues plus golems is more than we can safely handle, even with our combined forces. We can’t count on help from the other guilds.”

  “Then what are we supposed to do?” Aaron slumped back in his chair. “If we attack the rogues first, we miss Varvara. But if we wait for Varvara, we’ll have to fight her, all her rogues, and an unknown number of golems.”

  Silence fell over the table, and my heart sank.

  “Battling the rogues will be loud and messy.” Zak’s vibrant eyes swept over the gathered mythics. “You can’t engage them before Varvara is ashore, but the golems are a different matter. Until they’re animated, they’re vulnerable. Disabling them would be quick and quiet, and it could be done shortly before Varvara arrives.”

  “If we can remove her golems from the equation,” Girard said, his eager smile sho
wing through his beard, “then our combat teams can focus on the rogues and Varvara.”

  “The bitch is mine,” Zak growled.

  “We will capture Varvara,” Shane cut in, “so she can be tried and convicted for her crimes before all the guilds and families she’s harmed. She’ll be executed without a doubt, but there are more and better mythics than you who deserve to see justice served.”

  Zak’s jaw tightened.

  “How are golems disabled?” Shane asked him.

  “By damaging the animation array inside them.”

  “And how does one find and destroy the animation array?”

  Zak arched a mocking eyebrow. “You can find them by studying dark Arcana and learning to decipher some of the most complex arrays in sorcery. Destroying them is straightforward, though, as long as you have a tool that can damage steel without making any noise.”

  Deep wrinkles settled into Shane’s forehead. “In that case, you will be responsible for disabling the golems, since you have the required knowledge. That will be the extent of your role.”

  That arctic, burning hatred simmered in Zak’s eyes as he stared Shane down.

  Unflinching, the bounty hunter said, “Cooperate, and I’ll forget I ever heard your name. Refuse, and you become my next tag. And this time, when you’re arrested, I’ll ensure you stay behind bars. There will be no miraculous rescues.”

  I shrank guiltily.

  “Fine,” Zak snarled. “I’ll handle the golems.”

  Shane glanced at Darius. “Such a crucial part of our strategy shouldn’t fall on one person—especially him.”

  The guild master nodded. “Aaron, Kai, Ezra? Zak needs a chaperone. Would any of you care to volunteer?”

  As the three mages exchanged looks, Zak’s green eyes turned to me. I blinked at him, confused by his attention.

  He leaned forward to look around me. “Ezra?”

  The aeromage paused thoughtfully, then shrugged. “I’m game.”

  It took me a moment to clue in. Zak was requesting Ezra’s help because he was a demon mage, and his inhuman strength would come in handy against huge, heavy golems, even unanimated ones.

  Shane turned his attention back to Darius, who nodded.