Twenty-Sided Sorceress 3 - Pack of Lies

by Annie Bellett

  She turned abruptly and walked to the parking lot, climbing into one of the last three vehicles left. She snapped her fingers at Henry, and he looked at Alek with an apology in his puffy, reddened eyes, and left with Eva.

  When the crunch of their tires on the gravel had faded, Alek looked at me. “Track?” he said.

  Sheriff Lee watched with interest as I shook the fur out of the bag and into my palm. I pictured the wolf it must belong to, pushing my magic into the spell. Silver thread spiraled out from the fur, then hung in the air, pointing one way, then another, like a compass in the Bermuda Triangle.

  I pushed more power into the spell, wondering if the owner of this fur was out of range. I had no idea what my range even was. I had never tracked someone more than maybe twenty miles. The spell fizzled, the connection too weak to form a link. Which was weird, since I’d formed stronger links off things people had only been in contact with. This was a piece of someone or something. It should have created a nice strong link. Unless…

  “It’s not working,” I said. “I think this fur is very old. So old it has lost any real connection to its original body.”

  “Hmm,” Lee said. Her lips pressed together and she looked skeptical. I didn’t blame her. To her eyes it probably looked like I’d stared really hard at a bit of fur in my hand.

  “Dead end,” Alek said.

  I slid the fur back into the bag. “Maybe science and the crime lab can tell you more,” I said, handing it back to Lee.

  Her laugh sounded tinny and bitter. “What do you think we are? CSI Idaho? Besides, this crime will never see a report.”

  Alek took his keys from his pocket and handed them to me. “Go back to your friends. I will help Lee, go talk to the other alphas, and then meet you later.”

  They were going to cover up another murder. I sighed. Somehow the sheriff being involved made it slightly less awful. Slightly. I knew that they couldn’t bring this body to the country medical examiner, just as I had known before Alek made his case the other night that in the end, the Lansings’ bodies couldn’t be found by normals either. There was a whole world of magic and danger that humans couldn’t see. I had a hard enough time wrapping my mind around this stuff. Universe knows what the rest of the world would do if faced with so many things that didn’t follow what we all thought of as “the rules.”

  “Be careful.” I squeezed Alek’s arm. “I’ll try not to crash your truck.”

  I realized that Alek’s truck was almost out of gas, so I detoured past the B&B turnoff and headed into town. I grabbed a change of clothes from my house and checked on the store, taping up a note saying we were closed for the weekend. I hoped my few regulars would forgive me. The wards on both apartment and shop were intact and undisturbed. Then I filled Alek’s tank, amazed at how much fuel fit in it as opposed to my little econo vehicle, and headed back.

  I hadn’t realized how worried I’d still been until I heard her laughing and teasing Max as I entered the Henhouse. Harper was awake and sitting up.

  I took a moment to check my wards, though they’d done a fat lot of good against the ninja assassin. Still, it made me feel slightly better, though that could have been the feel of my magic rushing through me. All the sleep I’d gotten had done a decent job of fighting back the exhaustion, my nap with Alek refreshing me more than I realized.

  If the assassin returned here tonight, I would be ready. I had an idea or three about how to deal with him. No more hesitation.

  Harper and Max were playing the Electronic Talking Battleship with an original board, a relic from the late eighties. The electronics still worked, little pings and crash noises coming through the speaker.

  “Hey,” Harper said as I came in and settled into the chair I’d slept in the night before. “Where’s your handsome half?”

  “Out,” I said. I didn’t know what to tell her.

  “Still riding the secrets train, I see,” she said, making a face.

  “Glad you are feeling better,” I said.

  “She’s fine. She’s just lapping up the attention.” Max entered a number and a letter. A crashing noise rang out from the Battleship board.

  “Fuck, you sank my battleship.” Harper stuck her tongue out.

  Max laughed and then straightened as his phone buzzed loudly in his pocket. He pulled it out, flicked the screen, and then handed it to me. There was a text from Alek, telling me he was going to meet with Justice Eva to interview alphas and work on the case.

  “There’s a second Justice in town?” Max asked.

  “Wait, what? Who?” Harper set the gameboard aside with a wince.

  “Some woman, a wolf, named Eva Phillips. She’s kind of a bitch. Oh, and she told Sheriff Lee and some of the Wylde pack what I am. So I give it a day or two at most before every supernatural in town knows. Kickass, eh?” I pulled my knees up, tucking my feet under me, staring at the text message on the phone.

  Phone. Oh, right. “Max, can I check my messages on this thing?” I asked.

  “Sure, if you know how to work it, and you know your box number and password.”

  “I don’t know. I’m so ancient I might have forgotten.” I smiled at him. “I touch this screen thing here, right?”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, putting up his hands in surrender. “I could have worded that better. You are as bad as Lea.”

  “That’s not my name,” Harper said. “Don’t make me kick your ass.”

  “Like you could catch me right now, gimpy.”

  “Guys,” I said. “I’m trying to check a message here?”

  They continued making silly faces at each other as they cleared the Battleship board and began a new game.

  I had one message, sent this morning at seven fifty am.

  “Jade Crow? This is Liam Wulfson. Alek gave me your number. He said if we found the car to call you, since he wasn’t expecting to be in town. He said you could help and would want to see it. I’m out at the…” He paused. After a breath he called out, “Justice!” and I heard a woman’s voice answer, followed by a shuffling noise and a crack that sounded like a gunshot. Then the message ended.

  Fuck.

  I played it again. And again. Each time hearing the same thing. Him telling me they found the car. Him calling out “Justice” and then the sound of a gun. Adrenaline hit me as I realized that Alek was going to meet with Eva. I dropped the phone as I jumped up and had to scrabble for it under the bed.

  I called Alek back but his phone went straight to voicemail. I checked the text message and it was timed stamped over twenty minutes before I’d seen it.

  “Jade?” Max and Harper looked at me, alarm in their faces.

  “Why didn’t you see this before?” I yelled at Max, shoving the phone in his face. “Why is it here twenty minutes after it was sent?” Why did I stop for gas? For clothes? How much time had I wasted? Would she hurt Alek?

  “Jade!” Rosie came into the room, flour from the bread she had been kneading floating off her hands and arms. “Stop yelling.”

  I stopped and looked at her, shaking. The twins and Junebug appeared in the doorway behind her, all my friends watching me for an explanation.

  “The Justice,” I said. “The woman. I think she killed Liam.”

  “Liam? Like Wulf’s son Liam?” Rosie said, her hands twisting in her apron.

  “Yes. I have to find him. Alek is going to meet her.” I threw the phone at Max and pulled Alek’s keys from my pocket. I could trace these—they were his; he kept them on him all the time.

  Except I needed them to drive. No, wait. Someone else could drive me. I looked desperately at Levi over Rosie’s shoulder.

  “Can you drive? I have to track Alek. We have to save him.”

  “Go,” Junebug said. She and Ezee stepped aside as I rushed out the door, Levi at my heels.

  Levi’s Honda Civic didn’t look like a speedy car, but he had clearly made some aftermarket modifications to it. We gunned down the drive and out onto the road. I poured magic into the
keys, visualizing Alek, his smell, the feel of him. The link was strong, an undeniable pull and a thick silvery thread stretching out into the dark.

  I wasn’t that surprised when it took us back to the quarry.

  “She has a gun,” I told Levi as he cut the lights and stopped the car just off the highway. We were going to walk in on foot, just in case.

  He nodded and shifted to his animal form. Wolverines look somewhat like bears, but cuter. Until they open their mouths or reveal their claws. Then they are kind of fucking scary. Wolverines the size of a Doberman? Scarier. Levi slipped silently into the shadows, leaving me alone on the track.

  I ran. Eva would be able to hear me coming no matter what I did, so I gave up stealth in favor of shields and speed.

  Mental note: definitely taking up running if I lived through the night. My lungs and legs burned. My pool exertions were clearly not enough to counter my sedentary, geeky lifestyle.

  Alek was ahead, his keys yanking me toward him with the power of a rare-earth magnet. I dropped the tracking spell and stuffed his keys in my pocket, stopping only long enough to pull Samir’s knife from its sheath at my ankle. If this thing could hurt an Undying, I figured it could really fuck up a shifter.

  I threw light out ahead of me, not trusting just the moonlight, though the rising moon was nearly full. Soft purple light spread across the quarry like bioluminescent graffiti. Just beyond where we’d parked the night before, I saw Alek.

  He was on the ground, not moving, looking like an apparition in the ghostly mix of silver moonlight and violet spell light. A furry body streaked toward him and I almost blasted it off the stones. Then I recognized Levi’s shape as he shifted from wolverine to man and bent over Alek’s body.

  I skidded to a stop and fell to my knees on the rocks, my hands reaching for Alek, feeling for a pulse. He was warm to my touch, his chest still rising and falling. I looked up, looked around.

  “No one around that I can smell or hear,” Levi said. “There is something on him though, something wrong with his smell. And I smell blood.” He touched Alek’s collar where a smear of greenish fluid had stained his grey undershirt.

  I saw a stain along Alek’s side and lifted his arm. Blood soaked his side and the back of his shirt. Cursing, we turned him carefully and found the bullet wound. Bitch had shot him in the back.

  “Alek,” I said, shaking him. “Alek, you have to wake up.” I knew what the smear was before I found the puncture mark in the side of his neck, near where it joined the shoulder.

  “We have to get him to Vivian,” I said. “He’s been poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?” Levi shook his head. “But—”

  “Don’t fucking argue. This is how Dorrie died. We don’t have time.”

  “Dorrie is dead?”

  “Levi! Please.” I tried to lift Alek, but couldn’t even get his torso off the ground.

  “I’ve got him,” Levi said. He lifted Alek as though the man weighed only a hundred pounds, but Alek’s body was long and awkward. I grabbed his feet and we managed to carry him to the boulders. Levi sprinted down the road and brought his car as close as he could get it, while I hovered over Alek, nervously watching the shadows of the quarry for movement. Getting him stuffed into the small vehicle was another exercise in frustration. Everything was taking too long.

  Vivian lived above her practice, and my shouts and banging on her back door brought her downstairs quickly.

  The three of us managed to get Alek inside, but his body wasn’t going to fit on an exam table, so Vivian had us take him into her office. There was a narrow couch there along one wall, but it was far too short and cramped for him to fit, so we laid him on the floor. She listened to his heart, checked the puncture wound, and pressed a bandage to the bullet wound in his back. Then she checked his reflexes, and poked and prodded him while I tried not to chew off all my fingernails or blow the place up with the rage and magic boiling inside me.

  “We can try adrenaline straight to his heart,” she said finally, looking up at me. “If we can rouse him, enough that he can shift, he might stand a chance.”

  “Do it,” I said. I remembered her description of the poison. How it was eating away at his organs, his heart. I grasped my talisman and prayed to the Universe not to take him. I had just gotten him back. He couldn’t die like this. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

  She left and came back with a long-needled syringe that looked like something out of Pulp Fiction, partially filled with greenish liquid. Deftly she knelt over Alek and sliced his shirt open. With a murmured prayer of her own, she jammed the needle into his heart, depressing the plunger.

  We all held our breaths. The silence was complete, only the sound of Alek’s ragged breathing, like the ticking of an old, erratic clock, breaking our vigil.

  Nothing. His eyelids didn’t even flutter.

  “More,” I said.

  Vivian shook her head. “That’s all I had. That stuff is highly regulated.”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t accept this. Get out.” I needed them out, needed time and space to think, to figure this out. I had power. Lots and lots of fucking power. What was poison against a motherfucking sorceress?

  “Jade,” Levi said, touching my shaking shoulders with gentle hands.

  “Out,” I said. Whatever he saw in my face convinced him it was in his best interest to go.

  They left me alone with Alek. I placed my hands on his chest, trying to send my magic into him, visualizing the poison as a foreign agent, as a thing that could be burned out and destroyed.

  For a moment it felt like his body responded; his breathing changed, grew steadier beneath my palms. I sank into him with my consciousness and my heartbeat changed, turning erratic and painful. My lungs burned and a headache to end all headaches speared me between the eyes. I was dying.

  I lashed out with magic, recoiling from the acid eating away at me. Recoiling back into my own body. Bile rose in my throat and I vomited blood, barely turning my head to the side in time to avoid splashing Alek’s chest. The headache continued but my heart steadied and the feeling of my insides burning away faded.

  That was not the way to heal someone with magic, apparently.

  “Alek,” I said. “Tell me how to do this.”

  No answer.

  So much power, and here I was, helpless again. I got up, took a folded throw blanket from the narrow couch, and spread it over him. I found tissues and cleaned up my vomit as best I could before lying down next to Alek, pressing myself against him. His heart was still beating. He was still fighting.

  I touched the puncture wound on his neck, imagined Eva luring Alek out to the quarry. What would she have told him? How did he not see her lies? I guessed that she would be very good at not quite lying. Did she have others helping her? No way to tell. Alek would have been vulnerable anyway. He didn’t like her, perhaps didn’t even trust her, but she was a Justice. They had both been sent by the Council. He would trust in that. Let her get close enough to shoot him in the back. To drive the poison needle into his flesh.

  Tears choked my throat, burned my eyes. That bitch was going to die. I wanted to go find her, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave him. The least I could do was stay, keep trying with my magic to heal him. I pressed more power into him, not sinking into him with my mind but just letting magic flow into him. But I might as well have been channeling at a rock. A rock would have absorbed the magic better, probably.

  Sorcerers can’t eat shifter hearts. They have a level of immunity to most kinds of magic and their power can’t transfer. The same thing that protected shifters from sorcery was preventing me now from helping him. The best I could do was kill him more quickly. I smashed that thought to pieces as I rubbed the tears from my eyes.

  The door creaked open and Levi poked his head in, one hand on the door as though ready to flee and close it behind him if I snapped at him again.

  “Jade,” he said softly. “Can we help?”

  “No,” I said.
“No one can.” Then I froze, a memory rising in me. Alek and Carlos roaring and crows falling from the sky, changing back to their human forms.

  “Wait,” I said. “If he shifts, could he heal? Ask Vivian.”

  “Yes,” she said, looking in at me from under Levi’s arm. “I think he is strong enough. But he can’t shift if he doesn’t wake up. I think there is too much damage.”

  “But what if someone made him shift?” I asked.

  “No one can force a shift on another,” Levi said.

  “I’ve seen it. I watched Alek make crow shifters come back to human.”

  Levi looked down at Vivian and they both shook their heads. “Perhaps that is a power the Council grants. I’ve never heard of such a thing, but Justices are special.”

  “So we’d need a Justice?” I asked, defeat stabbing the hope in my heart to death. “I thought it might be an alpha thing.”

  “No,” Vivian said.

  The only Justice I had access to wouldn’t do it, I was sure of that. For a moment I indulged in a very violent fantasy of hunting her down and forcing her to make Alek shift, but I knew from the tiny bit of logic left in me that she would never cave. Eva had too much at stake if she was willing to kill another Justice.

  “The Council, what about them?” I was grasping at very tiny straws but any glimmer of a chance…

  “They do not directly interfere. We may as well ask Jesus Christ to intercede,” Levi said, a bitter note in his voice. I wondered at it but shoved the questions aside.

  “Jade,” Vivian said. She licked her lips and glanced up at Levi again. “The Justice is strong. He’s suffering. He will take a long time to die. That isn’t right.”

  “No,” I whispered. “It isn’t. Just…give me a few minutes. Let me say goodbye.”

  My real words were unspoken. Give me time to think. Give me time to figure out how to cheat my own personal hell, my own Kobayashi Maru.

  She nodded, and they left me alone with him again.

  My magic was no good, not the way I wanted to use it. Bernard Barnes had been able to affect shifters with his magic. I didn’t want to think about the evil warlock who had nearly killed my friends, who had used dark rituals to bind shifters into their animal forms and turned them into living magic batteries for his use.