The high-heeled shoes walked toward me, then stepped to face the other direction. The bed creaked above me. “Becca, sit. We should talk.”
“Now?” Becca said.
Now? I thought, wincing. I had come for a high-octane rescue, not to listen in on a private mother-daughter chat.
“Becca, sit.”
The bed creaked again.
“You’ll be eighteen in a few weeks,” Ann said. “Have you thought about marriage yet?”
“You and Father trying to sell me off for a few camels?”
“You know how Hadrian feels about you.”
The bed creaked once more as Becca jumped up. “Wait, you’re serious. You are trying to marry me off? You realize we are living in the twenty-first century, right?”
“I’m not trying to marry you off. But Hadrian is planning on proposing. I was going to let it be a surprise, but it now looks like it won’t happen tonight, and it’s hard enough to get you to attend any social occasion.”
“And you know this because… I know, Hadrian is such a romantic he asked Father first. Nice. What was the final figure? Five hundred camels? One hundred? Less? Tell me I’m worth more than fifty camels.”
“Becca, be serious.”
“You know I like Hadrian. He’s a nice guy. But I don’t have any further feelings for him.”
“Perhaps that’s enough, Becca. Many a great marriage has been built on less.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” Becca’s bare feet walked across the room, and she opened the door. “Come back when you have stocks fitted for me.”
Ann stood. “You must remember, there aren’t plenty of fish in the sea. Not for us. We are Cressingtons. You can’t just marry some guy off the street, or God forbid, off the internet. It has to be someone from another mage family or someone suitable to be adopted in.”
“Out.”
“You could do worse.”
“Out.” Becca pushed on the door, but her mother held it open.
“Your father thinks he would be a good choice to run the family.”
“Out.” Becca finally shut the door, then came over and tapped on the bed. “You can come out now.”
I rolled back out from under the bed and stood, with a few light coughs to expel dust.
“Did you enjoy being trapped and forced to eavesdrop on my possible marriage arrangements?” Becca asked.
“I was left in Death Valley in summer with nothing but my clothes and had to survive two weeks on my own. Got sunburn on my sunburn, passed out from heat exhaustion, and came real close to dying of thirst. And still, I just experienced the most excruciating moment of my life.”
“Ha. Don’t believe you. I work hard to ensure my mother-daughter banter is top notch.”
I laughed, too loud, then covered my mouth.
“See, I’m adorable.” Becca sat down at her desk, twisting two strange-looking metal pieces against each other until they snapped into place. “Now if I can just get this working, I’ll be adorable and deadly. You know, like Princess Zelda, or honey badgers, or black widow spiders.”
I shuddered at the thought of anyone considering a black widow spider adorable.
“Your family is crazy about weddings and marriage, isn’t it?”
Becca rolled her eyes. “Tell me about it.”
“Did Lionel say Hadrian was a cousin, or did I get that wrong?”
“Mage families are large and sprawling. I’m sure he’s some kind of cousin, but it’s pretty distant. My mother and his are best friends, so we spent a lot of time together growing up.”
I had heard more than I wanted to about Becca’s possible marriage. “The electronics and equipment on your desk, it’s all to do with building a—what did your mom call it?—a maser. What’s that?”
“It’s a blending of laser technology and magic.”
“I guessed that part. Your family isn’t terribly inventive with names.” Magic controllers were magtrollers, magic safes were magsafes, magic lasers were masers.
“You know how bullets can’t really harm your kind, or vampires, or even trolls?”
I shrugged. “We are hard to kill with ordinary bullets. It can be done, though.”
“Well, a single strike from a maser will kill you.”
“It will? How many helsing warriors have you killed?”
“None, of course. I wouldn’t do that.”
“How many vampires or trolls have you killed?”
“This is all theoretical,” Becca said. “I haven’t got it working one hundred percent yet. But it should even be able to kill demons from the underworld.”
I looked at the electronics spread across the desk with renewed interest. Could Becca’s technology be used to stop Grimstar? “Is it close to being built? We may be fighting against demons soon. If you join us, you may get a chance to test your maser.”
“Ha. You don’t care about my maser. You are just saying that so I’ll agree to help you program the magtroller. Obvious ploy is obvious?”
That wasn’t exactly true. Still, I had delayed long enough; I had to get going. “I’m sure you can see through all my ploys. You are much smarter than I.” I picked a notepad and pen off her desk. I wrote down the address of Camp Danielle and handed it to her. “Come meet us here tomorrow. We can talk.”
“You mean, assuming you aren’t killed or captured tonight.”
I nodded. “Assuming that.”
“Haven’t we been through this?” Becca ripped the page of the pad, then balled up the paper and dropped it on the floor. “Why on earth would I help you?”
“Because I think that’s what you want. You got drenched in a rainstorm because you didn’t want to be left out of everything that was happening. One doesn’t get to be both deadly and adorable by hiding in their room when all the action goes down.” I padded across to the door, opened it, looked both ways down the corridor, then stepped outside. “Be careful with your experiments. Don’t blow up the world or anything.”
Chapter 16
Out in the corridor, I hesitated for a moment, unsure which direction to go. Danielle, I decided. Rescuing her was the first priority. I had to go back to the function and figure out how to get her out.
Upon reaching a corner, I heard footsteps approaching. I pushed close to the edge, then leaned out to see who was approaching. To my surprise, it was Danielle herself. I stepped forward. “What are you doing back here?”
“I have to find my spellbook.”
“Your spellbook? What does that matter? We’re here to rescue you.” I took Danielle’s arm and led her quickly forward, heading for the window that I’d refused to open for Alessa. I could escape with Danielle through there.
“All my spells are in that book. A lifetime of work.”
“Did you not make a copy? Upload it to the cloud?”
“You’re just clueless about magic,” Danielle whispered. “Spells have to be painstakingly written down and can only be cast by the mage who wrote them. The calligraphy of the letters has to be perfect or the spell won’t work, or it won’t work the way it’s supposed to.”
“How does the calligraphy matter if the spells are spoken?”
“They are incanted, not spoken, and the way they are written affects both the intonation and how the spell is shaped in the mind. The words themselves are just a small part of the creation of the magic.”
“Incanted? Is that why no sound comes out?”
“Of course sound comes out. Oh, you must be like vampires.”
“Helsings are nothing like vampires,” I said coldly. We turned the corner, and I could see the window we were heading for at the end of the corridor. I saw no glimmer of red aura, which I hoped meant that Alessa had been forced to move on.
“It’s impossible for vampires to learn magic, or at least not the white magic we mages use,” Danielle said. “Even if a vampire was once a mage, he or she will lose that ability once turned. They can’t speak or even hear spells. Helsings must be the sam
e.”
Even if it were true, I didn’t appreciate having myself compared to a vampire. “The spells in that book didn’t do you much good against the zombie. Maybe you should start on a new lifetime of spells.”
Danielle came to a sudden stop. “You don’t have to keep throwing that in my face.”
“What?” I was taken back by the sudden venom in her voice. “I haven’t been.”
“Every time you look at me, I know you are thinking about how I failed. And how I’m going to fail next time. I panic easily, okay? Happy?”
“No, of course I’m not happy. Why would I be happy?”
“You are probably right. I’m better off not being able to do any magic. What good are the best spells in the world if they fail me when needed the most?”
“I never said that.”
Danielle’s face was reddening as she got angrier. “Don’t you think I know that I will let everyone down? I wanted Lionel to take over the seeing eye when we were going into the Dulane Building. I should have been able to help Alessa get out of the mindtrap. But like always, my mind froze just when I needed it to be clear.” The anger left her as fast as it had arrived, leaving her deflated. “My spells rarely work when they matter most. Because of me, Alessa was almost captured. Because of me, Lionel almost died.”
“No one blames you for that.”
“They should,” Danielle said. “If I’d been thinking straight, I could have helped Alessa out of the mindtrap. Then we’d all have had the chance to escape.”
“Let’s just concentrate on escaping this time.” We arrived at the window, and I pushed my face against the pane of the glass, peering into the darkness, trying to get a sense of whether anyone was close by. Seeing no sign of movement, I pushed the window open and quickly climbed out, then crouched down and checked for any sign that we’d been spotted. I could hear people moving but nothing close by.
“Mage team on,” I said. “We have Danielle, and I am outside the house. We are going to attempt to flee the grounds.”
I was surprised to receive no reply. I could imagine why Lionel or Alessa might be unable or unwilling to answer, but Gabriel was supposed to be coordinating the mission.
I glanced up at where Danielle was trying to maneuver herself out of the window. She still wore her high-heeled shoes, and struggled to lift her left leg high enough to get her foot on the window edge. I had already figured out she wasn’t the most athletic or graceful person, and watching her try to climb out of the window in high heels and an evening dress reinforced that opinion.
Crossing the grounds with her by my side would take an eternity. “Danielle, may I carry you?” I asked the question tentatively, remembering her anger from when I’d picked her up before.
“Is that necessary?”
“If we both want to get out of here in one piece, yes.”
She gave a reluctant nod. “Just don’t squeeze the life out of me.”
I carefully lifted her out of the window, making sure I had a firm but gentle grip on her, then began to jog away from the house. I didn’t break into full speed, aiming for a steady run that didn’t make noise and didn’t jolt Danielle too much.
I didn’t get far when a light lit up the area all around me. I stumbled to a stop, looking for the source of the spotlight before quickly realizing that it came out of nowhere. Damned mages and their stupid magic.
“You!” a voice from the left called out. “Stand where you are. Don’t move.”
I directed my steps away from the voice, and a burst of machine gun fire turned my run into a full sprint. I adjusted Danielle in my grip so that my body was between her and the bullets, though I hoped it was just a warning shot.
The circle of light adjusted to follow me. I headed for the trees, thinking to lose the light there, or if not the light, then at least the mages.
“Can you do anything about the light?” I asked Danielle, raising my voice so she could hear me over the sound of air rushing past us.
“Like what?” she shouted back.
“I’m not the mage.”
“I can’t undo a spell by blinking my eyes. Magic doesn’t work like that.”
What good was having mages on the team if they couldn’t help in situations like this? I heard several shouts coming from different directions as various mages converged on us. Just as we reached the trees, another round of machine gun fire burst out. I swerved to the left as bark splintered off nearby trees. If the last shots had been warning shots, these certainly weren’t.
As I zigged and zagged through the trees, the light fell back. I came to a large tree and jerked to a sudden stop just behind it. I waited as the spotlight zoomed past us, then silently returned the way I had come until I came upon a cluster of bushes. I eased Danielle into the center of the bushes, then I followed behind her.
We squatted opposite each other, able to just about make out each other’s silhouettes in the darkness. Hearing voices, I touched my finger to my lips. Danielle nodded.
The sound of voices increased in volume as they approached. A dry twig snapped, and Danielle jerked. I reached forward and took hold of her arm, holding her steady, as the mages passed by. I wasn’t able to make out what they saying, but I recognized one of the voices. Hadrian.
“We’ll rest here a moment,” I whispered once the voices had faded away. “We’ll wait for those searching to spread out to other sectors of the grounds.” A tremor ran down Danielle’s arm. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” she whispered back. “They really shot at us, didn’t they? Tried to kill us? I didn’t think Lionel’s family would do that.”
“They might not have known who they were shooting at. They fired at intruders who ran when challenged.” I wasn’t sure if that was worse or better.
“You shouldn’t have come for me,” she said.
“Nonsense. We were never going to leave you behind. And even your being here helping us, we were able to use your rescue as a cover for taking the… Well, I guess that part of the plan isn’t going to happen now.”
“What did you do, Slate?”
“How do you know… I… It wasn’t my fault.” Others might not see it that way. “I’m sure Alessa will get away.” She was a vampire, anyway. “Not that I care.”
“Alessa is on our side, Slate. Why can’t you see that? Being part of a team means having everyone work together.”
Some team I’d been put on. Each person as useless as the next. All we’d done was fail. I couldn’t even exclude myself from that verdict. In the fight against Grimstar, I had been as powerless as Harps. A thought popped into my head. “Danielle, do you know any way to break contact between a necromancer and the demon from which he derives his power?” Lionel had said to his father that Danielle had a magical ability like no one else. And she had managed to create a spell that located zombies.
“I doubt it.”
“What if you had your spellbook back?”
“Maybe. I’d have to…”
“Wait here,” I whispered, then crept out from the bushes. I had seen Danielle’s spellbook inside Hadrian’s jacket, and he’d just passed. If retrieving Danielle’s spellbook was important, then now was the time to do it. Plus, stalking a few mages through the woods at night was the kind of thing I’d trained for. If I couldn’t do that, then I truly was worthless, and Dagger had wasted his time with me.
For some strange reason, that thought was comforting. I stepped in the direction that the voices had gone, my feet landing softly and noiselessly. A gust of a cold breeze swept against the skin of my face, bringing the scent of algae from a distant pond. Glimmers of moonlight fell between darkened tree branches. This was my world.
I increased my pace but continued to move silently. Within a short time, I heard branches snap, followed by a curse, and a few moments later, I spotted three shadows with light emanating in front of them, their pendants glowing to provide light. I bent down and picked a heavy stick off the ground as I came up behind them. I made sur
e to soften my blow as I swung, catching the man on the left low on the back of his head. He crumpled to the ground. The man in the middle turned rapidly, the light from his pendant flaring up, bright enough to blind me. I sprang at him, hitting him with both knees in his chest. The third man had half turned and was rotating the barrel of his machine gun around to point at me.
With my knees still on the other guy’s chest, I used the branch to deflect the machine gun upward. It fired, but the bullets shot uselessly into the air, the recoil sending its owner down onto one knee. I swung the branch back across the man’s head, knocking him down.
I turned back toward the middle man, only to see a gun barrel pointing directly at me. It was Hadrian. I backed away from him. Hadrian coughed as he gingerly got to his feet. The grimace on his face and the way he held his left hand against his body showed he was injured, but he held his gun steady. “Tell me. Why did you come here, helsing?”
“To free Danielle,” I said. “Hood mage or no, she has a right to use magic.”
“What do you know of magic?”
“Enough.” I took several steps to the side, and Hadrian turned to keep his gun trained on me. We were both lit by the glow from his pendent.
“And Becca?” Hadrian asked.
He couldn’t know I had talked to her, could he? “What about her?”
“I saw the way you looked at her the other night,” Hadrian said.
“You are wrong. I’m not interested in Becca.” Not the way Hadrian thought, at least.
He coughed again, his body hunched over, his coughs sharp and short and, from the look on his face, painful. “I’m going to marry her, you know.”
“I imagine that would be up to her.”
Hadrian straightened and took a step forward. “Get on your knees!” he shouted, gesturing violently with the gun.
I hesitated, then fell to my knees. I doubted he’d kill me before I had a chance to get to him, but I didn’t want to be riddled with bullets, either. Waiting until he was distracted was a better option, especially since he wanted to talk rather than summon reinforcements.
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