Day Killer

by Clara Coulson

  Head spinning, stomach churning, I have to squint past the double vision to find my truck. Luckily, we’re only three spots away, so I stagger over to the driver’s side door before he can pick me up again. He’s in the passenger seat with the door closed before I even climb in. Annoyed by this vampire speed bullshit, I situate myself, buckle up—because I don’t want to get thrown from the truck if we crash, and die horribly as all my skin is peeled from my bones by rough asphalt—slam the door shut, and start the truck.

  Twenty seconds later, we’re cruising down a complex maze of backroads and two-lane highways that no one unfamiliar with this city should be able to follow. Of course, that’ll just stall the death squad in my apartment. No amount of subterfuge will solve the main problem.

  “How’d they find us so fast?” I weave through the dense morning traffic at ten miles over the speed limit, hoping I don’t get pulled over. “Surely they didn’t break through your anti-tracking charms that easily.”

  Foley brings his Rolex close to his face. In the corner of my eye, magic sense active, I see a soft green glow as he scrutinizes the spells embedded in the watch. After a minute of deliberation, he murmurs, “All the charms are intact, but a few of them are weak, which means they were attacked by someone else’s magic. Lizzie must’ve realized she couldn’t find me with conventional tracking magic and tried something else.”

  “Like what?” I roll through a red, keeping my focus split between the road ahead and the road behind, searching for any signs of the death squad. “I only have general knowledge of magic. I don’t know enough to decode this situation.”

  Foley considers the possibilities, worrying his lip with that same fang again. A tic. “The only thing that comes to mind is a blood trace. But that requires you to be within a mile of your target. Which means Lizzie is already here in your city, and she must’ve been for several hours. Because there’s no way she got lucky enough to cast the trace within a mile radius on the first try. She probably spent the morning being driven around, casting it over and over again. She’s persistent like that.”

  “How’d she even know you were here? Lucian said he sent you to me because your sister had no clue I existed, thus making my apartment a reliable safe house.”

  “My fault, probably,” he admits, sullen. “During the ambush at the parliament building, I think I said, ‘I’ll find you, wherever you go, and pay you back for this seven fold, you bitch.’ Or, you know, something equally stupid to say in the heat of the moment after being disemboweled. Regardless of how I worded it though, she must’ve taken the message to heart and thrown in the blood trace along with all the other tracking spells. Just in case I really did ‘follow her’ to Aurora for a poorly thought-out vengeance quest.”

  “So,” I say, “if this spell can find us within a mile radius, that means it’ll only be a matter of time before the goons catch wind of our location again.” I tap my fingers on the steering wheel. “Can you block a blood trace?”

  He stares intently at the dashboard for a moment, then shakes his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know any counter-spells for a blood trace. I don’t even know how you cast the trace in the first place. That’s highly advanced magic, years above my level. I’ve been studying magic since I was thirteen, but there are so many disciplines—each with decades’ worth of material to learn—that you can’t become even remotely competent in all of them in less than forty of fifty years of study. Even human practitioners are constantly learning new spells and charms and potions throughout their extended lives. Magic is a practice that’s always building on itself, just like modern science or medicine, and…” He stops himself with a deep breath. “I apologize. I ramble when I’m nervous.”

  “No need to apologize. You’re not the only one,” I say. Foley reminds me ever so much of Cooper in this moment, those watery, frantic eyes, that trembling lower lip, the scholarly ranting, to the point where I have to glance out my window so he won’t see me wince, desperately wishing my boyfriend was here and not thousands of miles away, totally unable to help me when I need it most. When Cooper finds out about this fiasco, he’s going to have a fit. Assuming, of course, I live through this fiasco.

  I take a hard right and gun it straight down a major four-lane highway, hoping to put enough distance between us and Lizzie Banks that she won’t be able to effectively use the trace spell without first correctly guessing which direction we’re going. I press myself into the seat cushion and sift through all our options.

  Can’t tell DSI anything without risking Lucian’s life, along with control of House Tepes. Can’t ask Erica for help because she’s being held captive by the ICM in Europe. Can’t ask Lucian for help because he’s not here yet. So, yeah. We’re on our own. We have to come up with a solution ourselves.

  “Hey,” I say, teasing out a vague idea. “Can you learn to do new spells if you have instructional materials?”

  Foley perks up. He was digging around in my glove compartment, where he located some old McDonald’s napkins. He uses them to wipe the blood off his mostly healed arms as he says, “Well, sure. I use books to learn new things all the time. In fact, most of magic education is like regular education. You study texts and memorize new information, then perform practical work afterward, the way you would in a chemistry course. Why do you ask?”

  “It just so happens I have recently gained access to a number of magical texts. You have any idea what a book that teaches a blood trace might be named?”

  He wrings his hands as he thinks, and rattles off a few possibilities, some of which aren’t in English. “I know we have those titles in the family library. So that means there’s a high chance Lizzie studied them at some point.”

  “All right.” I take a left turn at the next light, abruptly altering our heading. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to drop you off at a neutral location, somewhere heavily populated where the goons won’t want to make a scene—if they do, they could give themselves away to DSI before Lizzie’s crew can attempt the takeover, so I figure they’ll try to be quiet with your assassination. Which will cost them time, because they’ll move slowly.”

  I accidentally cut off a car at the next light, and the driver honks at me. I respond by flipping them off, because I’m not in the mood for rush-hour traffic. “Meanwhile, I’ll go to the place where the books are and see if I can find those titles you mentioned. I’ll bring back whatever seems promising, and then we can hit the road again. As long as we keep moving, they’ll have a hard time pinning us down. I figure I can drive around in perpetuity while you peruse the books. Or at least until we run out of gas.”

  Foley scrunches his eyebrows in confusion. “Why won’t you take me to the place where the books are? Is it only for ‘trusted associates’ or something?”

  “What? No.” I can see how he would think that though. I’m DSI. We’re not exactly known for our trust of or goodwill toward supernatural creatures. “I don’t want to risk leading your sister’s goons there. The place belongs to a friend of mine. It’s her business. I don’t want it to get trashed.”

  “Oh, I see.” He scratches a scabbed cut on his chin. “Are you bringing your friend into this? Is she a practitioner?”

  “My friend’s unfortunately not in the city at the moment. Thanks to Omotoke Iyanda.”

  Foley starts. “Wait. Would that friend be Erica Milburn?”

  “How’d you know?” I frown.

  The details of Erica’s involvement with DSI over the past year were meant to be kept under wraps by Iyanda and owl man so the truth can’t tarnish her reputation and leave her an outcast in the practitioner community after her indefinite term of punishment as a High Court lackey is finished. As far as the general practitioner community knows—is supposed to know—she was “rewarded” with a special job for her service to the Court for exposing Delos as a rogue. Basically, everybody’s supposed to think she’s a golden child, while really she’s paying the price for being a rule breaker.

  Fo
ley notices my discomfort. “Oh, Lucian told me about her. Don’t worry. There haven’t been any leaks from the ICM about Milburn, as far as I know. They’re pretty tight-lipped about things like that, people violating procedure and what not. They don’t cause a stir unless they have to. Makes them seem more organized than they actually are. They hate looking sloppy. Unfortunately for them, Lucian is a very skilled intelligence operative.”

  “Bastard knows everything, doesn’t he?” I grumble.

  Foley sighs. “Clearly not, after what happened to, you know, every single one of my friends and family members.”

  My heart jumps into my throat, and suddenly I feel like a massive asshole. Here I am, complaining to Foley about my problems, when he’s traveled across the damn ocean through a magic portal after narrowly escaping death at the hands of his own psycho sister, and in the process, watched most of his relatives and friends get brutally butchered by the Black Knights. Jesus, Kinsey, you should know better than to act like this, after all the shit you’ve been through.

  Foley probably feels the way I felt after Mac’s death.

  I side-eye him, dissecting his expression and other body language layer by layer. Somehow, he’s holding himself together in a way I never could have in the immediate aftermath of Mac’s death. But I can tell when I look really, really hard, at the barest shaking of his hands, the slightly hunched posture, the eyes that keep drawing down into pools of sorrow whenever he loses focus on his face…I can tell his composure is a fragile thing, a mirror cracked and ready to shatter. God, what a dick I am for not being sensitive to his plight. Just because he’s a vampire doesn’t mean he’s impenetrable.

  He’s your age, I remind myself. A young man. Practically a kid. He’s not some cold, ancient marble statue like his elders. He can bend. He can break. He’s vulnerable.

  Speaking over the lump in my throat, I say, “How does a college library sound? For a place to wait?” I gesture to the big sign for Waverly College about a quarter mile farther up the road. It’s been years since I was a student there, but I remember the layout of the campus. If we do end up being pursued by the mooks again, I’ll have the home-field advantage.

  Foley observes the grassy sprawl of the nearby campus, cutting across an otherwise overdeveloped area of the city, and nods. “Looks good to me. How long will it take you to get to your ‘place’ and grab the books?”

  “It’s about a fifteen-minute drive from here, so thirty round trip, plus maybe five minutes for me to sift through all the books. Are you comfortable waiting that long?” I don’t want to push him harder than he’s already pushed himself over the past twelve hours. “If not, I’m sure I can find somewhere closer for you to wait.”

  He shakes his head. “No, the library is fine. I look the right age to fit in there, which will make me hard to spot even if they know I’m in the building. Is there maybe a gift shop or bookstore nearby?”

  “Actually, yeah.” I point at a bookstore a block down, on the opposite side of the street, across from the western edge of campus. “Why? You want a souvenir?”

  He smiles. “I was thinking more along the lines of a disguise. It’ll be almost impossible to pick me out if I’m dressed in a ‘Waverly’ hoodie in a busy library full of students wearing the exact same thing.”

  “Huh. Good point.”

  Chapter Five

  Scouring the shelves of Erica’s back room, I find two of the books Foley mentioned, tuck them under my arm, and hurry out the side door into the alley. Every minute I leave Foley waiting in that library is a minute Lizzie’s goons get to spend catching up to him. So I relock the door as fast as I can without dropping the key, and skedaddle back to the spot where I parked my car a block away.

  As my strides lengthen and my side complains about all the running I’ve been doing this morning—I haven’t had my average amount of daily exercise for the past few months, so my stamina has suffered—I idly wonder how I keep getting drawn into nasty, bloody feuds like this. It’s not just because I work for DSI. There’s got to be more to it than that. I’ve got to have some problem magnet jammed inside my body. Either that, or I was cursed unaware by somebody I’ve encountered over the past year. Yeah, I’m sure that explains it.

  It also explains why I run into Delarosa’s team on the forty-foot trip to my truck. Because no one can be that freaking unlucky without a reason.

  I skid to a stop, suppressing a yelp, and attempt to duck into a nearby thrift store. But Zhane Carpenter, who’s slipping quarters into the parking meter for the team’s SUV—which is parked two spots from my truck—happens to glance my way, having caught my abrupt, awkward shift of motion in her peripheral vision. Like the rest of us, she’s been trained for combat, which includes reacting to every possible threat in your immediate vicinity. She looks at me for a second, confused, and then the recognition kicks in.

  “Cal?” A smile sprouts on her face. “I didn’t know you were back in town. When did you…?” Her gaze drops to my clothing, in particular the obvious dried blood spatter on my jeans from the scuffle in my apartment. Her jaw drops, and she gasps. “Oh, god. Are you all right? What happened?”

  Shit.

  My lips flap soundlessly as I fail to come up with an excuse that’ll make her leave me alone and forgo alerting her captain, who I can see is standing inside a convenience store to my right, along with the rest of his subordinates. They must’ve been assigned to a foot patrol in this neighborhood for the morning and are now stocking up on donuts and coffee before they get to work. I mentally flip through my list of standard patrol routes and shifts but fail to find this one on it; it must either be a new addition to the roster, created during my leave, or an exception resulting from a recent event. Seriously. Why does this stuff always happen to me?

  Zhane shuffles closer, frowning. “Cal, seriously, what’s going on? Your rings are cracked. Were you in a fight?”

  I lift my right hand and look at my rings. Sure enough, there’s a big-ass crack in the fire ring, a result of my double-hit on the vampires. A whole year of work, and I’m still not much better at beggar magic. I’m starting to think that’s a hopeless cause.

  Racking my mind for any words that make sense, I reply, “It’s a secret. I can’t tell you. You need to pretend you didn’t see me.” Because that doesn’t sound suspicious at all.

  I check Delarosa and the others and find them closing in on the register. Any minute, they’re going to walk out and see me, and Delarosa is not going to let me go without a fight. Not in this condition. He’ll drag me right into the fortress and sit me in a chair in Ella’s new captain office. I can’t let that happen. Foley needs me.

  “What’re you talking about?” Zhane says. “Is there something going on?”

  I lurch toward her and grab her shoulder with my free hand. She stiffens, legitimately uneasy, and I pretend I’m not upset about instilling fear in a person I like when I say, “Listen to me carefully. There’s a huge operation going down today. It’s top level. I’m involved specifically because people think I’m out of town. You cannot tell anyone you saw me here. And if you catch wind of any police reports about a disturbance at my apartment building, try your best to quash them.”

  Zhane pulls free from my grasp. “I don’t know. This sounds a little…”

  “Zhane,” I say in a dead-serious tone I almost never use, “you need to do this for me. The fate of Aurora is at stake.”

  She snaps to attention, like I just said the key words that unlock loyalty. “Okay. Yeah. I understand. I won’t say I saw you. But my team’s right there, and—”

  Before she finishes talking, I backtrack into the alley between the convenience store and the thrift store, flattening myself to the brick wall of the former just as Delarosa and the others emerge from inside, a jingle of bells tracking their movements. Breath stuck in my chest, pulse racing, I clench my eyes shut and wait for Zhane to give me away. But when Delarosa asks her why she’s standing on the sidewalk, staring off into the distan
ce, she merely replies, after a pause, that she thought she saw some suspicious activity down the street.

  “It was nothing,” she finishes. “Some teenagers goofing around.”

  Delarosa accepts this answer and orders his team to disperse into patrol formation farther up the street, in the opposite direction from the alley where I’m hiding. Oh, thank god. At least something’s going right.

  I wait a suitable amount of time before I peek around the end of the wall. The team is about three blocks down now, all of them facing away from me. I use the opportunity to dash over to my truck, climb in, and pull down the sun visor to block my face. When they’re five blocks off, I start the truck, carefully pull out of the parking space, and make a U-turn in order to take an alternate route back to the library. DSI agents have keen eyes, and they’re suspicious about everything. If anyone else catches a glimpse of me, I’m screwed, and so is Lucian, and so is Foley—and so is the whole goddamn world.

  Jeez. This is so wrong. I’m supposed to be able to rely on DSI for help. They’re my people. How is it that I’ve stumbled into the one situation where I can’t do that without severe consequences? It’s so unfair.

  Irritated, I pout all the way back to the library.

  When I get there though, I peel off the self-pity and throw it out the window. Because I’m on a deadline and I don’t have any time to waste stewing in my feelings.

  Parking my truck in a thirty-minute spot across the street from the library, I scan the area for suspicious-looking vampires wearing mean faces. But all I find are students in sweatpants, some office workers in stuffy suits, and a few guys preparing to snatch a vehicle with their tow truck for violating parking ordinances. Satisfied I’m not about to get jumped, I leave the truck and power walk toward the library, trying to seem like I’m a student in a rush to get some research done or print a paper, as opposed to a very stressed DSI agent working an off-the-books case that will likely end in my brutal death.