Ink and earth, smoke and gunpowder.
I was sitting at dinner with the man who had tried to blow off my head only hours earlier.
I smiled at him, all teeth. “Have you seen the barn?” I asked him. I wanted to take his head off right here, but he had magic. I couldn’t predict what he would do. His actions earlier had indicated a total disregard for collateral damage and we were sitting around a table full of people I cared about.
Not exactly an advantage.
“Yes,” he said, his mask back in place. “Max showed me earlier. It is very nice. This is a very nice place.”
I gathered my power, letting it spread through me, ready to blast him or shield my friends. “We should go outside,” I said to him in Japanese.
“I am fine where I am,” he responded in the same as he leaned back, scooting his chair out a small ways. He draped one hand casually over the back of Junebug’s chair next to him. “How did you recognize me?”
“You were too invisible,” I said. I wanted to zort him right out of his chair, blast him away and end the threat, but I didn’t know what magic he had, what it might do. There were too many people.
“Jade,” Levi said.
I didn’t dare look at him and risk the man in front of him making a move. “This man is the killer,” I said instead, switching to Nez Perce.
I had engaged in long discussions on the dying out of the Sahaptian language with Ezee, so I knew he at least would understand. And Junebug had been an academic, studying Northwestern Native cultures before she fell in love with a wolverine-shifter mechanic and took up pottery.
Levi, Ezee, and Junebug all tensed. Beside me, Max stood up.
“Anyone want more ice in their water?” he said, too brightly.
Mr. Kami’s right hand slipped beneath the table. I took the risk and threw pure force straight at him, driving into him with my will, wanting to crush him like a bug. As he flew backward and flipped out of his chair, magic flared to life, burning sigils appearing in the air around him and turning aside the brunt of my blast.
On the periphery of my vision I saw my friends all leave their chairs, moving with the graceful speed only shifters can achieve. Ezee and Levi shifted, a huge coyote and wolverine materializing. They sprang at the assassin, snarling.
“No,” I called out as I struggled to my feet, shoving my chair away.
Glittering kunai filled the air as the assassin leapt onto the table. I threw shields up around my friends. Fire started to swirl around the killer’s body, sigils spinning faster and faster. Heat blasted over me and I pushed more power into my shields. The table began to burn.
I had to get him out of the house or he would just burn it down around us. I slammed more force into him as my friends attacked. The assassin jumped away, moving out of the dining room and into the front entry.
I grabbed the pitcher of water off the table as I followed and threw it in his direction, turning the water into a thin spear of ice. Magic raged through me, my blood singing with it, but I felt the edge of fatigue as well. Keeping his fire contained, my friends shielded, and throwing magic at him was taking a quick toll on me.
I gritted my teeth as the front door flew open and he dashed through it, the ice spear melting away before it hit him. He threw more kunai at me, the small dark blades glancing off my shields.
Bits of paper tied to the loop at the ends fluttered as the knives bounced and fell. I threw magic tendrils at them, mage-handing them back out the door as quickly as I could. Explosions rocked the house and I stumbled, smoke and heat filling my nose. A furry body raced past me.
I made it through the smoking ruins of the front entry, rage rising inside me. The assassin was running for his car. He spun as I sprang down the steps, and he fired a pistol at me. The shots hit my shields like punches from giant fists, the force shoving me backward, off my feet.
A fox, her body a streak of red in my smoke-blurred vision, leapt straight through his wreath of flames and latched onto his arm.
Harper.
I rolled to my feet and ran at the assassin. He threw Harper aside as though she were a puppy, not a hundred-pound fox. His lips moved and he thrust his arms out. His shirt curled and burned, the pieces lifting and turning into their own slips of dark paper, sigils flaming to life on the ruins of his clothing. I poured everything I had into my shields as a wave of flame rushed at me.
Belatedly, I remembered the house behind me, the people who might be there. Harper somewhere to the side of me, a crumpled form in the dry summer grass.
My shields took the heat and I threw my will into directing it upward, toward the sky, toward nothing that it could burn and hurt and kill. My eyes squeezed shut against the heat. I held my breath, ignoring the stench of burning hair as I spread my shields as thin as I could, trying to funnel the flame wave away from everything. Away from the people I kept failing to protect.
Pain radiated through my forearms and I felt my own clothing catching fire. It wasn’t going to be enough. I needed more power, another answer. No time. I hung on, gripping my twenty-sided talisman with hands gone numb from pain, pouring all my strength into blocking the flames as the unfamiliar magic roared over me, resisting, almost alive, hungry for death.
And then, as it had before with the explosion in the parking lot, it suddenly ceased. Blood roared in my ears instead of fire.
I raised my head, catching sight of the retreating taillights of the assassin’s car. Again. He turned a corner, speeding off. I had no energy to go after him. I wanted to breathe. To curl up in a bath of ice and forget what fire tasted like. My body vibrated with spent power. With terror. With pain. My arms were raw, skin bubbling into blisters even as I stared at it, trying to gather my mind back into itself.
Rosie ran past me, toward a charred shape in the smoldering grass to the side of the driveway. Then she started screaming.
Harper was alive, barely. Her scorched chest rose and fell in uneven breaths. Clumps of charred hair fell off her as Levi and I carefully got her moved onto a blanket and brought into the house.
“Why isn’t she shifting?” I asked, ignoring the pain in my hands and arms as the blanket rubbed on raw, burnt patches of skin.
“She’s not conscious,” Levi said. “She’s breathing though. Her body will start to heal.”
“Can you do anything?” Max asked me. “Heal her?”
I shook my head. Healing was complicated. I didn’t know anatomy or what her healthy skin was supposed to be like exactly. I was scared to try using my magic that way. I’d attempted to heal Wolf once and had failed miserably, my magic sliding uselessly off her bloody chest.
Wolf appeared as though thinking of her had called her. I wanted to curse at her, ask her where she had been, but she couldn’t have stopped this. The assassin was human—using some kind of magic, sure, but not a magical being himself, not enough that she would have been able to help.
Still, part of me thought she could have at least warned me. She should have smelled the magic on him. Instead she’d been absent. I felt betrayed, but shoved it away. Irrational anger wouldn’t save Harper.
“Max,” Rosie said. “Go help Ezekiel put out the fires.”
He glared at her but left, throwing a last worried look over his shoulder at Harper.
We put her on a bed in the first-floor guest room. Her fox body was small for a shifter, her normally red and glossy fur charred away in ugly weals, burned to brown and black and patches of raw red flesh.
Guilt swamped me as I stood there, helpless.
“I shouldn’t have come tonight,” I said.
“You don’t know what he would have done if you hadn’t,” Rosie said. “Don’t start blaming yourself, dearie. If we start that game then Harper shouldn’t have run out the door like an idiot. That man was bad news. He is the one to blame. He set my baby on fire.”
“But only because I was here,” I said, turning to her. My vision blurred as tears leaked out my eyes, tears of rage, tears of guilt. “A
nd I didn’t stop him. How can you look at her and not hate me?”
“You saved me from the slowest, most terrible death I could ever envision. You risked your life, your freedom to protect my family. As far as I am concerned, that makes you family.” Rosie’s mouth set into a line and her hazel eyes were uncomfortably kind, full of a deep understanding that wrapped around me like a physical presence.
“Family,” she continued. “Family don’t give up on family just because things get dangerous. Azalea risked her life for you, same as you’d risk your life for her. Don’t belittle that choice by pretending you could make it for her. You don’t have that right.”
She squared her shoulders as I shut my mouth on any protest I would make. I stared down at my burnt arms, my flaking and crisped shirt. Something was hard and uncomfortably hot in my pocket. A fried plastic smell leached from my jeans.
I pulled out my cell phone, wincing. It was dead, totally slagged by heat.
“Jade,” Rosie said.
I looked up. Levi had slipped out of the room. It was only Rosie and I now, with Harper’s heavily breathing body on the bed between us. At least she was still breathing.
“Go get a clean shirt, clean those burns off. She isn’t going to die.”
“I’m already healing,” I muttered, the guilt not quite gone. I did as she asked, however, slipping up the stairs to Harper’s room. Peeling off the remains of my clothes sucked more than I want to say, but the burns on my arms were turning pink now, the blisters fading down into the skin almost as quickly as they’d appeared.
As my head cleared, rage replaced the guilt. I didn’t know where Mr. Kami had gone, but I was going to find him. I was going to end him.
I washed my face off, biting down a scream as the water hit freshly healing skin. My hair wasn’t as damaged as I’d feared, but it would take a true shower and a lot of conditioner to return it to some semblance of pretty. I left it as it was and went back downstairs.
Harper wasn’t a fox anymore. Her human skin was clean of burns, but she lay on the bed whimpering under her breath as Rosie covered her with a clean quilt. Her green eyes were open and clear. Relief dumped the rest of the adrenaline from my veins and weighed me down.
“Hey, furball,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “You okay?”
“I will be,” she said. She winced, as though it hurt to talk, and her voice was rough.
“I thought you told me that shifting healed you?” I said with narrowed eyes.
Her lips formed a faint smile. “It does, eventually. I still feel pain through the link though, am still weak. I didn’t want you worrying about us anymore than you already do though. So I kinda fudged the truth a bit, sorry.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t protect you,” I said.
“I ain’t dead yet,” Harper said. “’Sides, I totally got a chunk of that guy. Won’t be throwing ninja stars with that arm anytime soon.”
She was right about that, unless he knew spells that healed, which I supposed wasn’t unlikely. I’d seen similar things, though not in real life outside of shops where they weren’t truly imbued with magic. Ofuda, like you’d find at a Shinto shrine. Or Omamori, protective Japanese talismans. Nothing I’d seen outside of animated movies looked like what the assassin had managed. Spells inscribed on paper. Fire and ink. I suspected the sheets of paper stuck to his body were for physical enhancements. It sucked he was trying to kill me, because his kind of magical practice was fascinating. Maybe I’d ask him questions before I kicked his ass.
Chuckling at that, I imagined myself like a monologueing villain, giving the enemy the chance to recover and surprise me. Maybe I wouldn’t be holding another conversation with Mr. Kami. I wondered for a moment why I cast myself as the villain in my head, but shoved the rising tide of dark thoughts away for later examination.
“You promise you’ll be okay? And never do that again?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, her eyes slipping shut. “I learned my lesson. Fire bad. Tree pretty.” She closed her eyes and her breathing slowed, deepened.
If she was cognizant enough to make a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference, I figured she just might live after all. I watched Harper sleep for a few minutes until I heard voices. Reluctantly, I rose and left the room. Levi, Ezee, Max, and Junebug all trooped back into the dining room, spent fire extinguishers in hand.
“Fire is out; don’t think we’re at risk of a wildfire,” Levi said.
I nodded, looking around the charred dining room. The table was a mess of burn scars and smashed dishes. The chairs were overturned. Next to one was a familiar bag. Mr. Kami’s camera bag.
I picked it up, reaching for my magic. The bag seemed normal at first, then that normalcy fell away and the alien touch of foreign magic brushed against my power as I tried to link this object to its own.
It wasn’t the smoke and ink power of the assassin that touched me, but another power, one I had once been very familiar with.
Cool sweetness flowed through the bag, a seductive song against my senses, like watching the ocean waves roll in and out. Deep, vast, a power that knew no limits and would take you into its embrace with hardly a ripple.
Samir.
I dropped the bag, my heart punching against my ribs. Without thinking I ripped into the magic there, the physical bag itself as well, smashing in, rending it piece by piece and turning the pieces to ash.
“Jade, Jade!” Ezee’s voice finally penetrated my fear, my hatred.
I looked up at him, amazed to find myself on my knees, a smoking pile of ashes at my feet.
“It was evil,” I said, aware I looked totally crazed.
“It’s dead now,” he said.
It was. And with it any chance I had of linking it to the assassin. I took tiny consolation in the fact that it was unlikely I could have anyway, not with Samir’s power all over it.
“What was it?” Max asked, poking at the ashes with his sneaker.
“A container,” I guessed. “For my heart.”
“Gross,” he said.
A search of the room that Rosie had rented to the assassin revealed nothing, not a stitch of clothing or a metaphysical trace. I had already half expected that.
Weary to the bone, I made my way back to the room where Harper still slept, and collapsed into a chair. Her steady breathing reassured me, but I still wanted to stay, to keep watch. I didn’t trust that the assassin wouldn’t come back.
Rosie sat on the other side of Harper for a while, knitting. I heard the others moving around out in the front rooms, cleaning up. I almost went to help them, but my body had decided that sitting was all I was going to be good for at the moment. Exhaustion crawled over me, and I found myself drifting off. At some point, Rosie put a blanket over me, and Harper’s soft breathing carried me into uneasy sleep.
Alek woke me with a kiss. The sun streamed through the window and I had a hell of a crick in my neck. The clock on the nightstand said it was after ten in the morning. I opened my eyes, half convinced I was dreaming.
He looked far too tired for this to be a dream, however. His ice-blue eyes were bloodshot and shadows had taken up residence below them. I looked from him over to where Harper still slept.
“Max told me what happened,” Alek said.
“Rosie promises she’ll be okay,” I said.
“She will. Come have breakfast.”
I sat in the kitchen and picked at my pancakes for a few minutes under Alek and Rosie’s watchful gazes, then pushed the plate away. I was too keyed up to eat much. I wanted to lay some hurt on someone, preferably a damned ninja assassin someone, but I’d settle for whoever killed the Lansings.
“You get anywhere?” I asked Alek, though I was guessing he hadn’t from his exhausted and frustrated expression.
“No,” he said, then switched to Russian as he glanced at Rosie. “I could find no trace of them. Their car is missing. But no unusual scents at their house, no sign of struggle. Nothing on the road between here and Bear
Lake, or at their cabin.”
Rosie slipped out of the room with a murmur about looking in on Harper. I felt bad about talking in a language she didn’t speak in front of her, but Alek clearly wanted to keep the murders as quiet as possible.
“Bear Lake? You drive all night?” I asked. It was obvious he had. I sighed.
“Most of it,” he said. “I have Liam and a few of his pack he trusts, and who I vetted, out looking for the car. If they were taken anywhere near Wylde, the wolves should be able to pick up a trail.” He didn’t look as hopeful as his words sounded. He just looked tired.
“You need sleep,” I said. “Where is your trailer?”
“On the side, in the RV parking.” He drained the last of his cup of tea and started to rise.
“Rosie won’t begrudge you a room, you know.”
Alek shook his head. “Too much to do.”
“Too many ways to fuck up if you don’t sleep,” I said. “What about that other Justice? Shouldn’t she be helping?”
His expression soured, and he sighed. “Vivian told her about the murders, said Eva came and asked about Dorrie. She came to the Lansings’ house before I did—I smelled her presence there. She does not wish to work directly with me, I do not think. We do not get along.”
“What about the Council? They not giving you useful guidance? You’d think they’d want you two to work together since this Peace is so important.”
“Yes,” he said, his jaw clenching. “Perhaps.” He shook his head at my questioning look.
“Will a shower with me cheer you up?” I asked. It was a shameless move, but he needed rest, needed to relax. We both did.
We borrowed one of the empty guest rooms on the second floor. The shower cheered up both of us and we lost ourselves in skin and comfort and heat for a little while. He pulled on his underwear, then crawled into the bed when I pointed. I tugged on my borrowed teeshirt and jeans, then pulled a quilt over him, and lay down on top of it.
Alek’s arms came around me and he tucked my head under his chin.
Twenty-Sided Sorceress 3 - Pack of Lies Page 6
