And now that they’d found each other, they both had something precious to lose.
TWENTY-TWO
ERIS WAITED UNTIL the sun had set. Her magic was stronger in the dark. But this street wasn’t entirely dark. Street lamps cast large pools of light on the road and the surrounding yards.
Eris pointed her right hand at the first streetlight and pinched her thumb and forefinger together. The light went out. She continued the process until all the other lights were out as well.
The change was silent. No big explosions, no cascade of sparks. The neighbors—the handful who lived on the block—probably hadn’t even noticed.
Eris smiled and walked farther up Dexter Grant’s driveway. While she had been waiting for the twilight to end, she had been sending out thin feelers, searching for magic. She made sure the feelers didn’t touch the magic; if they did, they might alert Grant.
The feelers found a deep sense of magic all around the house. Grant had used standard protect spells and had updated them just that afternoon, probably when he arrived home with Kinneally. Two bits of magic still floated in the air above the house—one a large relocation spell, bringing two people into the area (it took little work on her part to realize those people were Grant and Kinneally) and the second a small relocation spell, which brought three boxes into one of the bedrooms.
The boxes carried the faint odor of Eugenia Kinneally.
Eris had finally found where Eugenia’s spell recipes had gone. They had gone to her niece Vivian, who in return gave them to her new sweetheart, Dexter Grant.
The recipes were a bonus. Eris could hold the Fates without them. But the recipes would show her the protection spells that surrounded the Fates, the way Eugenia Kinneally had shown them how to protect themselves even though they had given up their magic.
Eugenia’s spells had to have been very powerful, given the success the Fates had had so far. Eris was certain the spells had been designed to protect magical Fates. The fact that the spells protected nonmagical Fates showed just how powerful Eugenia Kinneally had been.
The night had become pitch black. The moon wouldn’t rise for another two hours, and then it would be a pitiful sliver—certainly not enough for some inept souls to pull magic from. Eris never pulled her powers from anywhere else. She stole magic from rivals—although she hadn’t been able to get Eugenia Kinneally’s, dammit—and she absorbed glimmers from the marginally magical, but she never used an object outside of herself as a source for her power.
It simply wasn’t practical. Other people, other things, couldn’t be relied upon. One had to learn to rely upon one’s self.
Eris extended a hand and cast a shimmering red light forward. The light was almost invisible to the untrained eye. She loved this spell; it detected hidden magic.
She sent the light toward that fence in the backyard, where she was certain Grant had built a second house, this one shielded and magical. The light floated around his ugly ranch, caught on the weak shielding, and shimmered there for a moment.
Then it disappeared.
Eris followed it, careful to avoid the edges of the shield. The light had not gathered in the backyard, as she had expected. Instead, it was seeping into the earth.
She had never seen anything like that before, and she wasn’t certain what it meant. The light didn’t sit on top of the ground and shimmer; the ground had apparently absorbed it.
A spell she didn’t recognize? A protection she wasn’t certain of? She hadn’t encountered one of those in more than four generations. She had to give Grant credit for resourcefulness. For such a young man, he had a wide repertoire.
She tried to call the light back to her, but it wouldn’t come. It felt stuck, and now she recognized the spell. If she tugged on her own magic, urging it to return to her body, it would instead pull her into the trap, holding her there until someone—probably the mage who laid the trap—set her free.
Clever, clever Grant. Her respect for him grew even more. Too bad she had to rely on her careless son Strife when a talent like Grant was in the world. Too bad she couldn’t bring him over to her side.
She put her hands on her hips and studied the aluminum windows of the horrible little ranch house. She couldn’t sense any life in there at all—not even the animals Grant was famous for rescuing.
He had them hidden somewhere. Just like he had the Fates hidden. And he had them hidden very well.
But no one thought of everything—at least, no one as young as Grant. He would have made a mistake, left an access point somewhere, or allowed a weakness in one of his shieldings.
She just had to find it.
***
A klaxon sounded overhead.
Vivian jumped, her heart pounding. The calico cat scampered off her lap, leaving deep claw marks in Vivian’s thighs. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw other animals scurrying for cover.
The klaxon continued, and over it, a digitized female voice repeated, Security breach, south lawn. Security breach, south lawn. Security breach, south lawn.
Vivian wasn’t sure if she had transported to the bridge of the starship Enterprise—that klaxon was damned familiar—or if the elevator had taken her to the White House. She wondered what the President would think if he heard “Security breach, south lawn,” and then decided he probably wouldn’t have felt a lot different than she did now.
Adrenalin rushed through her system, and her heart was pounding. She looked over at Dex, hoping he would tell her what to do. She was in his world now, and it was about as alien as a world could get.
“Audio system off!” he shouted, and the noise ended mid-klax and halfway through the eighth round of “Securi—”
Vivian’s ears rang. The noise had given her an instant headache. “Well, let me guess,” she said. “You got that klaxon from Star Trek.”
“Original Trek.” Dex was standing. “I tend to prefer prototypes.”
Even though he was speaking lightly, he wasn’t smiling, and his mind didn’t seem to be on his words.
“What’s going on?” Vivian asked.
“Probably nothing.” But he wasn’t acting like there was nothing. He was acting like there was something. And, she realized, he had cut himself off from her. She couldn’t reach his thoughts or his emotions.
“Dex, you can’t lie to me.”
“I’m not,” Dex said. “When the system’s on, it’s very delicate.”
“This was a magic warning?”
This time he did grin. “No magic at all. You can buy all this stuff and program it yourself from half a dozen websites.”
“So what was breached?”
“The backyard. Might have been anything. A deer. A neighbor. I’ll just go to the cameras and see.”
“Okay.” Vivian stood.
“I’m going to go alone, Viv. I work better alone.”
“I thought you were just going out front,” she said.
“I am, but there’s an entrance into this place from the south lawn. If someone found it, they could conceivably be heading into the main area now.”
His explanation sounded true, but he was still cut off from her.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked.
“Keep researching, so that we know what we’re up against.”
“What if it’s Eris out there?”
“I’m not leaving the building, Viv.” Dex sounded impatient. “Now let me go.”
She realized then that she’d been forcing him to stay by quizzing him. She nodded once, reluctant to let him leave, but not willing to cross him either. This was his place. He understood it better than she did, and he knew how to respond to it.
She would have to trust him.
“What if you don’t come back, Dex?” she whispered.
He was already halfway through the kitchen. “I’ll come back, Viv,” he said. “I always do.”
TWENTY-THREE
HE LIED TO HER.
Dex was astounded at his own behavior. He had just lied to
Vivian.
He’d had to hurry out of the dining room before he couldn’t hide his thoughts or his emotions from her any longer. Both were threatening to spiral out of control.
At the moment the klaxon had gone off, his own magical system sent a shiver through him. A very delicate spell—some kind of light, done to suss out his own magic—had been absorbed by his backyard trap. He’d set up that trap so that he would be alerted whenever something magical touched it.
And this time, the magic was subtle and ever-so-light.
Then the alarms had gone off, warning of an intrusion. Even though the breach had been in the backyard, Dex had a hunch that whomever had done that was long gone. Either that or it was a way to use his own system to snare him.
He wouldn’t be trapped. And to prevent that, he had to keep Vivian protected.
As long as she stayed down here, she would be all right.
He hurried toward the main room. Sadie joined him halfway there, looking concerned. He wondered where she had been when the alarms went off. He hadn’t seen her in the dining room.
All of the lights were on in the main area, making the black walls seem even shinier. The computer screens were up. Words scrawled along the center one: Security breach, south lawn, Quadrant A. The other screens showed the lawn—all of it, including the north, east, and west portions. Floodlights had turned on, making it seem like daylight outside.
Other screens showed the interior of the house. The lighting hadn’t changed there. It remained the way he and Vivian had left it—a few lights on in some of the rooms, off in others.
The rumpled bed caught his attention, the pillows propped against the wall, the sheets tangled. That bed—that room—probably still carried the faint scent of their love-making. It had been the best experience of his very long life.
He hoped it wouldn’t be one of the last.
The reading he had done worried him. Eris was, by far, the strongest mage he had ever encountered. If Vivian’s Aunt Eugenia was right—and he had no reason to doubt her—then Eris had been stealing magic for years. She would be even more powerful than the woman whose impetuous actions had started the Trojan War.
If this were a normal situation, he would have gone to the Fates and begged for their help. He would have told them he would be able to prove that Eris was abusing some of their magical laws, and he would have demanded—and probably got—justice.
That was how he had caught his first few mages, the ones who were so much stronger than he had been. At first, the Fates had thought Dex was doing a good thing. Then, in a blink of an eye to them, two decades to him, he’d been outed, in a comic book of all things, and the Fates’ attitude changed.
Their biggest problem was their hatred of mortals. Or it had been their biggest problem, until they decided to venture into the real world with no power at all.
He reached the computer screens, Sadie beside him. He was still angry at the Fates. Even though they had enabled him to find Vivian, whom, he knew, was the woman he’d been waiting for.
He had always wanted to be loved as freely as he loved. And, because he could touch Vivian’s mind—or, more accurately, she could touch his—he knew that she loved him as much as he loved her.
Ironic, because until now, he had not believed in love at first sight.
Perhaps his feelings for her had grown so quickly because they only had twenty-four hours in which to live a lifetime.
He tamped down that thought. Negative thoughts destroyed confidence in time of crisis. He’d learned that one the hard way.
This was the reason he hadn’t wanted Vivian beside him. He would worry about her, and wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the mission at hand.
He couldn’t see Eris, but he’d felt her in that delicate magic. Not that she’d left a signature. Somehow she’d managed to filter out her signature from all her spells.
No. He recognized the spell as being as elegant as the one threaded into the rope, the one that caused the puppet to kidnap the Fates. The texture of the magic was the same.
As they figured out who their enemy was, she had found them. And he knew she wouldn’t leave until she had what she wanted.
Somehow he had to protect the Fates from her. The Fates and Vivian.
He sat in his chair and used the cameras to scan the lawn again. He couldn’t see anything. He closed his eyes and used his own magic, feeling for a strange presence.
Nothing.
Except the odd sensation that they weren’t alone.
He opened his eyes. He had lied to Vivian about two things. There was an entrance into the hideaway from above ground, but it wasn’t on the south lawn, and no one could crawl down it without being zapped by both his state-of-the-art security system (the kind designed for survivalists, paranoiacs and other wackos) or by the handful of spells he’d left there to trip up the magical.
Every way down here was protected, but that wouldn’t stop Eris. Her magic was so powerful, her mind so strong, that she’d figure out how to break in. Dex was under no illusions about his own powers. He was no match for a woman who had been practicing magic for around four thousand years.
He couldn’t even call for help. He wasn’t sure if the Quixotic gang was involved with Eris, since they’d let her in the restaurant, and his old magical friends were too far away. Besides, if he sent out a magical signal, Eris would feel it.
Instead, he would have to take a chance that had worked in the past. Eris would expect him to stay hidden, to play defense, protecting Vivian and the Fates.
She would never expect him—the weaker of the two of them by a considerable amount—to take the initiative.
The problem was, he’d only have one shot at this. But one shot was all he needed.
TWENTY-FOUR
ERIS HAD TRIED EVERYTHING. She had used tiny spells and large ones, important spells and half-forgotten spells, trying to reveal where the magic lived on Grant’s property. She found nothing.
She stood just outside the ring of protection he had put around that dilapidated ranch house, her arms crossed. By now, Grant would know she was there. She’d tripped at least two traps, although she hadn’t been caught in them, and she’d used enough magic to alert even the most inept mage.
She only had two more things to try before she could conclude that the house was just a house, with no magical hiding place anywhere nearby.
Eris had made an assumption, something she used to warn Strife about when he was a young mage-in-training. Assumptions could be false. She had assumed, because Grant’s property was so large, that he had placed his real living quarters somewhere else. She had also assumed they were large and spectacular and well protected.
But she based that assumption on the way she lived, not on the way he did. She had been around for a very long time and comfort was important to her, particularly after all those years of torture in the name of justice.
Dexter Grant was just a pup, and a male pup at that. Perhaps he had no interest in comfortable living or, like many male pups of the mortal persuasion, no idea how to take care of himself.
Eris wouldn’t live in such a tiny home—her apartment on Central Park West had five bedrooms and three floors, and it was the smallest place she owned—but that didn’t mean Grant wouldn’t.
And if that was the case, then he had only added one or two spells to his protect spell. He’d put some kind of block on the house so that Eris couldn’t sense any living creatures inside, and he had erected some kind of magical shield spell so that most magic performed inside the house would be impossible to detect outside.
She doubted this last because she did trace the relocation spells. But he was weak enough that his abilities might not allow him to block magic that originated from the outside.
If these spells didn’t work, she would have to see if he owned property elsewhere in the city, and had set this place up as a dodge.
Either way, she would have to dismantle his protect spell and go inside the house. She might be
lucky and find Grant and Kinneally inside, or she might have to do some searching through his personal papers or his computer to find out what else he owned.
Dismantling a protect spell wasn’t something to be done lightly. And with as many traps as Grant had established outside the house, he was certain to have many more inside.
Eris would have to proceed with caution.
After all, she wouldn’t put it past Grant to use the weak protect spell, the leftover relocation traces, and Eugenia’s papers to lure Eris inside the house. The house itself might be a trap.
And it was up to her to disarm it.
***
Dex had left the basement. Vivian knew the moment he had stepped out of the area. That sense she’d had of him, like the hum of a computer screen or background music played so softly that it only registered on the subconscious, had disappeared.
She felt alone again, like she had felt in Quixotic when he had taken the Fates to his so-called cave. Only this time, she didn’t feel abandoned. There was a connection between them now, an understanding of each other that was so strong, Vivian could feel it even though Dex had physically moved away from her. She knew him now, almost as well as she knew herself, and he would do everything in his power to return.
He would also do everything he could to protect her. That was the part of this whole thing that worried her. She didn’t know the details of his history, but she knew enough. Dex was the kind of man—or he had been until the Fates finally got through to him—who acted first and accepted the consequences later.
She sighed and continued sorting Aunt Eugenia’s papers. Vivian didn’t know what she was looking for, but she would know it when she found it. Maybe Aunt Eugenia had some insight into how to defeat Eris.
But if Aunt Eugenia had known that, why hadn’t she used it? Why had she allowed Eris to kill her?
Simply Irresistible Page 24
