“Enough,” Blackstone said.
But Vivian felt Dex tense beside her. “No,” he said. “Not enough. I told you that ploy worked.”
“You only know it because you’re careless with your magic in public,” Blackstone said.
“At least I don’t use mine to improve people’s meals or to change the décor. Yes, I’ve heard all the strange stories about Quixotic. Who hasn’t, over the years?”
“Boys,” Nora said. “No need to fight.”
But Dex wasn’t going to stop, even if Vivian asked him to. And she wasn’t sure she wanted him to.
“Why shouldn’t we fight?” Dex asked Nora. “It’s clear your husband doesn’t like or trust me.”
Blackstone made a sputtering sound, but Dex wasn’t through. He glared at Blackstone. “You must be happy I have the Fates. That way if something happens to them—and you’re not sure that would be a bad thing—then you won’t get blamed for it.”
Blackstone straightened, as if making himself taller also made him seem more powerful. “I’ve been trying to help them.”
“By talking, dithering, and running your restaurant,” Dex said. “Only Vivian and I have taken the risks here.”
“That’s not fair,” Ariel said.
“Fair doesn’t matter,” Dex said. “Truth does. You people aren’t sure how you feel about the Fates, so you haven’t been working hard to save them. Well, I bought us a month. And I’m going to do what I can, with or without you.”
Vivian had the odd feeling that he was including her in that challenge. She touched his arm. I’m going to help.
I know, babe.
The easy communication between them, the telepathic communication, startled her. Especially since she knew she wasn’t getting all his thoughts, just most of his emotions and the occasional idea that he sent her way.
“We’re going to help you,” Blackstone said.
Dex turned toward him as if he’d forgotten Blackstone was there. “By doing what? Feeding every reporter in the Northwest? That’s helpful.”
“There’s no need to be snide,” Blackstone said.
“Nor is there a need to be overbearing. If you want to help, fine. Figure out who’s after the Fates, and let me know. Otherwise, I’m going to take care of this, with Vivian’s help.”
Vivian nodded so that the others knew she agreed.
“Look,” Blackstone said, “we didn’t mean to—”
“Let him be, Aethelstan,” Nora said. “He’s right. We haven’t done much. He and Vivian have done it all.”
Blackstone looked down at his wife, then his shoulders slumped as he seemed to realize she was right.
“If you’re going to take Vivian far away from here,” Vari said from his perch beside Dex, “and, I might add, I think that’s a good idea, you probably should know she was targeted.”
Vivian’s hand went involuntarily to her neck. The singed hairs were brittle, and a few of them broke as she touched them.
“Targeted?” Dex asked her softly.
“That’s what—” She wasn’t sure what to call Vari, since he had so many names. “—he said. He did something, and my neck felt better afterward.”
“I shorted out the spell,” Vari said. “Someone used her signature from the glass jar, traced her, and used her to keep an eye on the Fates.”
That wasn’t exactly what he said before. Vivian felt her stomach twist. “I was bugged?”
“Essentially, kiddo. But you’re all right now.”
“You’re sure?” Dex sounded breathless, and Vivian could feel his concern for her. “You’re sure she’s not hurt?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Vari gave him a patient smile. “And no, I couldn’t figure out who left the trace. That’s one powerful mage we’re up against.”
Dex’s gaze met Vari’s. Vivian could feel Dex measuring the other man. “And that’s why you think we should continue to work together.”
“Didn’t say that.” Vari leaned against the filing cabinets.
“You didn’t have to,” Dex said.
Vari shrugged. “We’re stronger together.”
“If we all have the same goals.” Dex gave Blackstone a look.
Blackstone raised his hands, palms extended to Dex as if he were giving up. “I don’t understand why I’m the villain here.”
“I think Dex is as used to running the show as you are.” Ariel had scooted herself on top of one of the desks. She was sitting cross-legged.
Her remark struck something. Vivian felt Dex’s irritation rise before he buried it.
“I’m used to working alone,” Dex said. “I think it’s better if I go back to that. If you find something, great. If you don’t, that’s all right too. But I’m going to make sure those women are all right.”
“Always the hero,” Blackstone muttered, and Nora slapped his arm with the back of her hand. He caught her fingers in his. “Well, I’m just calling what I see. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s hard to shed.”
“Remember Robin Hood?” Vari asked.
“Who could forget?” Blackstone said. “And you had the same trouble with Arthur, right?”
Dex was getting angry. Or maybe Vivian was. She suddenly couldn’t separate their emotions at all.
“I may be younger than you are,” Dex said, “but I’m old enough to handle this. And I don’t appreciate being made fun of.”
“We’re not making fun of you,” Vari said. “It’s more like a warning. You can’t always ride to the rescue, Kemosabe. Sometimes the forces of evil are more powerful than the forces of good.”
Dex stared at all of them, then reached out to Vivian. She took the hand he offered, and that spark rose between them again.
“If I had a team I trusted,” Dex said to the others, “then I would work with them. But it’s becoming very clear that this group doesn’t work well together. Do what you want to. If you want to help the Fates, you’ll have to come through me, because I’m not telling any of you where they are.”
“This just caught us by surprise,” Nora said. “We’re not that bad a group—”
“You’re probably not,” Dex said. “But stuff like this always catches people by surprise, and their initial actions are usually the truest ones. I don’t blame any of you for having mixed emotions about the Fates. Hell, I do, and they never punished me. They only threatened to. So I do understand. But because you are uncertain how you feel about them, I’m uncertain about you. I’ve made my decision. So has Viv, who has no experience with the Fates at all, and who has gotten roped into this whole thing against her will. Right now, she’s the only other person I trust.”
Blackstone studied both of them. Vivian could feel his emotions suddenly, as if they had grown stronger. He was embarrassed and slightly angry, as if Dex had struck a chord.
“You have a point,” Blackstone said.
“We’ll do what we can,” Vari said, his tone soft. He seemed contrite and understanding. Vivian was really beginning to like him.
“If you come up with anything,” Dex said, “leave a message at my store. Ariel knows where it is.”
“I do?” Ariel asked.
“The basset hound puppy, remember?” Dex asked. “How’s he working out for your friend?”
“I’m the friend,” Vari said. “He’s my familiar. And he’s great.”
Dex nodded, and Vivian suppressed a smile. He had known the answer before he asked the question. He was just using the information to establish his own credentials with the group. He could be as subtle as Blackstone was when he wanted to be.
“Then you know how to find me,” Dex said. “And as fun as this has been, it’s time for me to leave. You want to come?”
He turned toward Vivian as he asked this last.
She nodded. She wanted to stay with Dex and figure out how to help the Fates. Even if the Fates were all right, Vivian would have wanted to go with Dex.
She was having trouble imagining herself without him in her li
fe.
“I’m ready,” she said, and took his hand.
He glared at the group as he swung his arm. Together, he and Vivian disappeared.
SIXTEEN
ERIS SAT IN THE CENTER of Quixotic, nursing a vodka martini. What an interesting hour she’d had. Dexter Grant popping into the middle of the room like a mage newly introduced to his powers, and his startlingly prepossessed statement about Buckingham Palace, proving that he’d made this mistake before. The man could get careless when his mind was on other things.
And Eris had a guess what other things had preoccupied him. Those Fates, of course, and that pretty little psychic who seemed to think she had more power than she did.
Vivian Kinneally was prettier in person than she had seemed from Eris’s magical glimpses of her. Theoretically, the girl shouldn’t have been attractive at all. Her hair was too curly, her features too delicate. But that dark skin and those intelligent eyes made up for a lot. With the right makeup, the right clothes, and the right pair of contact lenses, Vivian Kinneally would be a stunner.
Grant had taste.
Eris grabbed the plastic sword that held her olive and swirled it in her glass, pretending to listen to Sturgis, Kronski, and Suzanne discuss the day’s news stories. In the back, she could sense the group gathered in Blackstone’s office.
Blackstone himself was furious at Grant for taking control of the Fates. Blackstone’s little friend, Sancho, who apparently wasn’t so little any more, was amused by the turn of events. And Blackstone’s wife was trying to placate her husband, her feeble not-yet-developed power glimmering off her like reflected sunlight. The other woman, Sancho’s wife, wasn’t worth Eris’s time or attention.
No, what interested Eris were Grant and Kinneally, who had just popped out of the back office on their way to a new adventure. Off to search for Eris, who, unbeknownst to all of them, was sitting front and center in their little restaurant.
She had given Kinneally a chance to recognize her. Their gazes had met, and she had felt Kinneally’s mind probe hers. Of course, Eris wasn’t going to open her thoughts to just anyone, particularly not a little not-yet-magical talent whom everyone treated as more important than she was.
That little trick Eris pulled, in fact, proved that Kinneally wasn’t the talent Eugenia had thought she was. Not that Eugenia had been right about many things.
Eris smiled at the memory, although her smile must have been inappropriate for the conversation. Sturgis glared at her as if she had burped at the table. She let her smile fade, nodded once as if she were paying attention to his prattle, and listened instead to the discussion in the back.
Not that it was much more interesting than the one in the front. The little group of rescuers had no idea she was here. No mage could sense her powers when she used her blocking magic—a series of spells she had devised while undergoing her torture from the Fates. As the blocking spells became more and more successful, she gained some respite from the pain those three harpies had inflicted on her, until, in the end, she felt no pain at all.
They thought their little creative methods of justice worked. All those harpies had really managed to do—at least in Eris’s case—was make her even more determined to have her revenge.
And she would have her revenge. She was sick of the Powers That Be, and the Fairy Circle—who thought that they knew even more than the Powers—had taken self-righteousness to a new art. That didn’t even include all the other, tinier groups of magical rulers who thought they had a corner on right, might, and power.
All of them would learn they knew nothing about governing, about control, about the way the world worked. They would learn who was really in charge when Eris’s plan hit its final stages.
Getting rid of the Fates and replacing them with those marvelously imbecilic children was simply one of the middle steps along the road to success.
“…do you, Erika?
Eris blinked at Sturgis, who was still glaring at her. He knew she hadn’t been listening. No sense in pretending she had been.
“I’m sorry,” she said, pulling the olive out of her glass and tapping the plastic sword against the rim. “I seemed to have lost the thread of the conversation.”
Sturgis picked up the tray of spinach-stuffed mushroom caps, and scooped the last onto his glass appetizer tray. “Kronski, here, believes we should put some of our science reporters on this, to see if they can figure out what happened to that building this morning. I think this story’s run its course, and it’s time to leave Oregon for someplace that has real news. Don’t you, Erika?”
She set her olive on the bread plate to her right—his bread plate, not hers, but if he challenged her on it, she could lie and say she always got confused by bread plate placement. He was irritating her. It was clear he had repeated his answer verbatim after he had given her Kronski’s argument.
Kronski had just finished his fourth raw oyster. Who he thought he would bed in the afternoon, of all things, with that scruffy blond hair and poorly shaven face, she had no idea. But his entire meal seemed geared toward aphrodisiacs—oysters, oysters, and more oysters. Too bad she hadn’t paid attention to his order for the main course. She had a hunch it had oysters in it as well.
“Science reporters?” she said to Kronski. “You actually believe there’s a story here?”
Kronski pushed away his appetizer plate, then grabbed his linen napkin and wiped his hands. “Buildings don’t flash in and out, at least not in real life. I wasn’t so much thinking about making this story into an evergreen as I was thinking of it as a CYA story.”
“Why do we need our asses covered?” Eris asked.
“Because someone could—and I’m sure someone will—accuse us of using CGI to make a slow news day into a real story.”
“Nonsense,” Sturgis boomed, and half the restaurant looked at him, surreptitiously, of course. He was the famous one at the table—or, at least, he was the modern famous one. At times in her very long life, Eris had been much more famous than he ever was.
With a slight movement of her left hand, she ordered him to lower his voice.
“Why would anyone think we had to make up a story?” Sturgis asked. “We’re not tabloid television. I have the awards to prove it.”
I not we. That ego. Eris would have to crush it, and soon.
“The print people love to trip us up,” said Suzanne. “They think we wouldn’t know real news if it dropped in our laps.”
Leave it to Suzanne to state the obvious. But her point was an interesting one. Eris’s first inclination had been to send the entire team back to New York and say she’d be meeting with stockholders. But if the team stayed, no one would think twice about her presence.
“You’re scheming,” Sturgis said.
Yes, idiot, but not about you or your paltry news career. Eris smiled at him and finished her martini. Then she set the glass down. She took a warm slice of bread from the basket in front of her.
“Let her think,” Kronski said.
As if they ever interfered. Eris poured some olive oil in the provided dish, then dipped her bread in it and chewed, surprised at the richness and freshness of the oil. Blackstone was living up to his mortal reputation. He had found olive oil that actually tasted like the kinds she had as a girl in what was now Greece.
Kronski, of course, had asked the wrong question—not that, as a limited mortal, he would know the right question to ask. No one cared, in the long-term scheme of things, if KAHS was a tabloid news network or a real news network. Hell, the definition of what was real news changed every few decades anyway.
No. The important issue was how she could use their stay in Portland and surrounding environs to further her goal of disseminating the right kind of information to create even more chaos around her.
When she was participating, each story had to further that goal. Of course, KAHS covered a lot of stories that meant nothing in Eris’s scheme of things. But here in the heart of happy mage country, where Blackstone h
ad his friends and his restaurant, where Dexter Grant, that good-hearted do-gooder, had settled and where the late Eugenia Kinneally practiced her particularly offensive brand of niceness…well, this would be the best place to dismantle some magical systems that had gotten way out of line.
The fact that the Fates had chosen to hide here, cowards that they were, was simply gravy.
“Erika?” Sturgis asked.
She could tell from his tone of voice that he expected her to agree with him.
“I think we should stay here,” she said, setting down the crust of her oil-saturated bread. “We haven’t done any live reporting from the Northwest in a while, preferring to rely on our affiliates—and, as we all know, their reporting is beyond wretched. Who cares about trees, anyway—old growth or otherwise? There have to be other stories in this part of the country, right?”
Sturgis was staring at her as if she had grown a new head. Kronski had a grin on his face that he was trying—and failing—to suppress.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Sturgis said. “There’s no news here. This is the ass-end of nowhere.”
His voice carried, like usual, and the patrons of the restaurant looked at him. Half of them seemed offended. Locals, probably. The C-team news crews who had been covering the weird building all morning gave him a sympathetic smile.
“Maybe there’s the perception of no news,” Eris said, “because no one pays attention to this part of the country. We might break a few stories. Have you thought of that?”
“I’ve been hoping to check out some of the fringe political movements here,” Suzanne said, her voice breathy and timid, as usual.
Fringe political movements. Eris sighed. As if that story hadn’t been done to death.
Kronski saw her expression. “I’m sure there are other stories too.”
“Like a scientific investigation of the Great Disappearing Building.” Sturgis crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, tilting it on two legs. He nearly collided with the waiter, who was bringing their lunch.
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