Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  “It’s not monsters that you need to worry about. Fear is coiled up inside you so tight that it’s become part of you.”

  The features of the man became clearer, and I recognized him. Knoll Forester, an old man with a head like a prune out in the sun too long. “What would you know, you old windbag?” I wasn’t supposed to disrespect the elders, but that was what Dagger had called him.

  “Dagger pushes you too hard,” Knoll said. “He pushes all of you too much.”

  “What’s it to you?” Knoll was a Forester, not a Blackthorn. He had no right to interfere.

  “You were better at knife throwing before, right?”

  “I hit a knot five times in a row once,” I said.

  “Your hand knows how to throw a knife, your muscles know, your being knows. Your mind is getting in the way. Your fear. The harder you try, the more you fail. The more you fail, the harder it becomes. You need to break your fear, destroy the cycle of failure.”

  “How?”

  “Do not allow your mind to get in the way of the process. Close your eyes, allow your mind to go blank, and trust your hand.”

  I threw the knife once more and this time—

  I woke. I opened my eyes and looked around, blinking as I slowly made sense of the world. I wasn’t outside the Forester caravan practicing my knives; I lay on the floor of Camp Danielle. I wasn’t eleven; I was twenty years old. Strangely, adjusting to the realization that I was not a child took longer than calibrating to my surroundings.

  I sat up, remembering what I had just experienced. It had been more memory than dream. The sky hadn’t been indigo, of course, and the old oak hadn’t moved, but most of the conversation had happened. I’d been struggling with my knife throwing and woken before dawn, while everyone else still rested, to get extra practice in. Knoll, a Forester elder, had come to speak to me.

  I stood and glanced out the window. From the position of the sun it was early afternoon. Both the bedroom doors were closed. My tuxedo from the other night was draped over an armchair. I quickly dressed in my old clothes and threw on my yellow hunting coat.

  Harps, who’d been sniffing at a scrap of food on the kitchen counter, spotted me and scrambled excitedly my way.

  Quiet. I put my finger to my lips. We’ll get out of here for a while. Harps climbed up onto my shoulder, and we quickly exited the apartment. Let’s find somewhere green to relax for a bit.

  Harps tugged on my hair. Sounds great.

  What happened last night, boy? When a vampire attacked, I was expecting my man Harps to come to the rescue, only to later find out that you were asleep the whole time.

  I didn’t mean to fall asleep, Slate. It was just so boring in the van when Gabriel left. And I was so tired.

  I’m only messing, Harps. I shouldn’t have teased him about falling asleep; he was still sensitive about his role as familiar. I reached up and rubbed the fur on the back of his neck. We both know a vampire is no match for me. I took the stairs down instead of the elevator. Better climb inside my coat to avoid too many stares.

  Harps scrambled down my chest and swung himself inside my jacket, squirming about for a few moments before he settled himself into an inner pocket.

  Outside on the street, the touch of sun on my skin felt nice, and I tried to ignore the grinding rumble of overlapping engine noise. Moving through the crowd, I had to sidestep fast several times to avoid being jostled. I didn’t want Harps to be squashed. I was heading toward Fairmount Park, but well before I reached that I came across a smaller park and I went into that instead. I let Harps wander off and I sat on a bench.

  Did it mean something, such a vivid dream coming to me at this moment? It had to, didn’t it? Was it my subconscious telling me something? Or could it be something more powerful, something similar to whatever force had channeled the truth of the tarot cards within me? Assuming that it was truth, not madness, that drove what I had seen in the tarot cards.

  We had traveled with the Foresters for several weeks. Dagger hadn’t much liked most of them, and I couldn’t remember exactly why we’d stayed. I used to enjoy the evenings, the singing and dancing around the fire. Knoll Forester would often tell stories, helsing myths and legends, about heroes and villains, princesses and dragongods. Perhaps they weren’t all legends, though if so, it would be impossible to tell which parts were true.

  Maybe not impossible, actually. Gabriel probably knew. Now that I thought about it, I remembered their caravan had been particularly devout. Each morning, a little shrine was set up in the middle of the camp with a painted metal sculpture as the centerpiece. The sculpture was small but intricate, depicting three intertwined dragons curled around a mountain. At the top of the mountain were four giant pillars, representing the pillars of creation.

  Other than that one time, Knoll himself hadn’t talked to me much. I wasn’t sure if the advice had helped or not, but my knife throwing had improved. Not immediately, but over the following days and weeks. Thinking back, I realized that Knoll had been referring to a fear of Dagger. It could have been partly true; I was eleven, and Dagger had always been a scary individual.

  That was then. I had plenty of problems, but I didn’t think fear was chief among them. What else had Knoll said in the dream? Don’t let the mind get in the way, or a similar phrase. A warning against overthinking? Once again, it didn’t seem high on my list of problems. Perhaps it just had been a dream.

  When the sun dipped below the level of the skyscrapers, sunshine turned to shadow and the air lost several degrees of heat. It was time to return to Camp Danielle, figure out what we should do next.

  Harps, boy, I thought, looking around the park. Where had he gotten to?

  In truth, not finding Harps for a while and having to delay my return didn’t seem so bad. When Dagger had sent me to Philadelphia, his instructions had been terse and to the point. Nothing in what he’d said had implied that I wasn’t ready. However, the expressive scar at his right eye had screamed out his doubt, proclaiming that he knew I wasn’t ready. And as usual, Dagger had been proven correct. A dragongod had come down from heaven to guide me and still I was plagued by uncertainty.

  What would Gabriel’s reaction be if I did summon Dagger to help? After he had specifically told me not, I imagined he’d be rather unhappy about it. But unhappy in a scowling, finger-wagging, you-shouldn’t-have-done-that way, or unhappy in the-wrath-of-the-gods-knows-no-bounds kind of way?

  I still had no inkling of who the traitor might be, and one thing had occurred to me that I tried to forget, but once the kernel had taken root in my mind, I couldn’t dismiss it entirely. What if I was the traitor to the team? It seemed farfetched, that I would both be The Chariot and The Devil in the same reading. And I was a helsing warrior, born to be the world’s salvation, not its doom. And I had no intention of betraying anyone. But what if it was unintentional? The later reading had said that I would have the fate of the world in my hands. What if I made the wrong decision, damned the world, thus betraying the mage team and all our efforts?

  There you are. Seeing Harps coming, I lowered one knee to the grass and bent my back to allow him to quickly scramble up my shoulder.

  I found an acorn, he told me excitedly. And a squishy beetle. They were delicious.

  Delicious, eh? I started toward the exit of the park, remembering that that was Grimstar’s catchphrase. I want to hear more about that beetle, but first you better…

  Harps didn’t wait for me to complete the thought, swinging off my shoulder and squeezing under the lapel of my hunting coat, settling into his favorite pocket. From how quickly he disappeared from view, he had to seriously dislike the open stares he got when on the streets.

  While we walked back, Harps filled in more details about his adventures in the park. They didn’t get more exciting than eating a beetle. I could only hope my upcoming adventures proved to be as uneventful.

  By the time I reached the main door to the apartment building, twilight had begun to descend. The streetl
ights glowed orange. I took the elevator to the seventh floor, and entered Camp Danielle. The only person in the living room was Lionel, who sat in the armchair by the window. Dimness surrounded him. He stared out the window.

  I switched on the lights, and he jerked himself to attention. “Where were you?” he asked.

  “I just took Harps to the park. He was feeling cooped up.” At those words, Harps hopped out of my pocket and wandered into the kitchen.

  “Possibly he’s not the only one feeling cooped up,” Lionel suggested.

  “It felt good to get away from everything for a short time.” Though I hadn’t exactly gotten that far away, for my thoughts had kept me centered on what we faced.

  “Alessa will be here soon.”

  “Is something happening?”

  Lionel nodded. “She says she has an idea. And that it involves you and that you won’t like it.”

  “I won’t like it? What kind of idea?”

  “She didn’t say. Something to do with Casino Demonica. That’s the place Grimstar runs.”

  “Is she still mad at me?”

  “She didn’t say. I guess so.”

  “And you?”

  He sighed. “No, I don’t think so. I wish it was different. But it’s hard to be mad about how you act toward Alessa, given I would have felt exactly the same not long ago.”

  “What changed for you?”

  “I like to think I learned and grew. Of course, many would say the evil vampire seduced and corrupted me, turned me against my own family, against my very nature. Most things look so very different depending on where one sits.”

  “Are you having doubts about her?”

  “What?” His head swiveled toward me. “No, never. Just being contemplative, twisting things in my mind to try to understand what’s going on, and what we should be doing.”

  “Are you having doubts about Gabriel, then? About him being able to keep the swirl key safe?”

  “I don’t know. How did Gabriel describe having the swirl key in Cressington Tower?” He looked into space as he remembered. “Put something on the top of Everest, on the bottom of the Marinas Trench, even on the moon, and someone will figure out how to get there. A powerful artifact in a known location will just draw those who want to use it until someone eventually gets it. Only by keeping it hidden and secret will it remain safe.” He glanced across at me. “It still makes sense. Did he tell you something similar to persuade you?”

  “Similar, yeah, kind of. Where’s Danielle?”

  “Danielle said something about an old bookstore and a spell she’d once seen and dashed away earlier.”

  Was Danielle figuring out how to nullify Grimstar’s power as I had asked her? “So where are we?” I asked. “In terms of retrieving the swirl key before Grimstar does?”

  “Not very good. We still don’t have a magtroller, and the codes could be updated at any time, making the ones we have worthless. Even if the codes aren’t changed, after the two recent breaches in Cress House and the Dulane Building, security at Cressington Tower will be amped up to eleven.”

  A knock rattled the door.

  Lionel started. “Who could that be? Gabriel, Danielle, or Alessa wouldn’t knock.” He pulled his pendant out from under his shirt.

  “If it was someone who meant us harm, they wouldn’t knock.” Becca was a likely candidate, and if so, I was about to find out if Lionel was against getting her involved. I moved quickly to the door and opened it. It was Becca, but she—

  I stepped back. “Wow. What’s that?” She had thick metal bracers on her forearms. An attachment from the front of each bracer connected to a metal circle that she held in her hands.

  “Bang, bang, you’re dead,” she said, aiming the circle like the barrel of a short cannon.

  Lionel pushed past me and grabbed his sister by the shoulder, pulling her inside. “What are you playing at? What are you even doing here?”

  “Desperate times and all that,” she said. “Things must be really bad when your seventeen-year-old sister is your last great hope.”

  I closed the door, looking at the weapon. “That’s not the…”

  Becca nodded. “It’s a maser gun.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Of course it doesn’t work. How do you even—” Lionel turned to stare at me. “That’s what you were doing at the house last night when you turned off your earpiece. You were recruiting Becca. That’s why she came.”

  “I’m not here because of him,” Becca said. “I came to save the world, darling. I don’t get out of bed for anything less.”

  Lionel crowded closer to me. “You had no right. If anyone was to talk to Becca about getting her help, it should have been me.”

  “You wouldn’t have succeeded, brother darling,” Becca said. “But Slate is quite the sweet talker.”

  “Sweet talker? What actually happened when Slate’s earpiece was off?”

  “It’s okay, he hid under my bed when Mom came in. No one knows a thing.”

  “What?” Lionel’s eyebrows came together. “Hadrian thought there was something happening between you two. He wasn’t right, was he?”

  Becca pulled at a lever on her right-hand bracer so it came off. “I’m just teasing. Slate was in my bedroom, but his eyes were still white and unseeing from staring at Jacinta Hamilton all night.” The metal ring dangled from the bracer on Becca’s left arm, dragging along the ground as she walked further into the apartment.

  “He was fixated on Jacinta, that’s true,” Lionel said.

  “You should be more worried about me being sold into marital slavery by Mom and Father in the interest of mage family purity than me running off with a dashing gypsy.” Becca pulled a lever on the left-hand bracer, letting the whole contraption fall to the floor.

  “I wasn’t fixated on Jacinta.” I didn’t know where everyone had gotten that idea. “I was creating a distraction. Sacrificing myself for the team.”

  “A sacrifice?” Becca rolled her eyes. “With that woman? That’s not how I heard the story!”

  “Why is she that woman now?” I asked. “Isn’t she an ally of your family?”

  “Mom went on a fifteen-minute rant about her this morning without once using her name,” Becca said.

  “Jacinta said she’d been close to marrying Lionel.”

  Lionel made a face. “There are some advantages to being totally out of favor.”

  “No one wants to have their partner chosen for them, but I wouldn’t have thought that she’d be the worst option.”

  “See,” Becca said. “He’s besotted.”

  “It’d be like sleeping with a serpent,” Lionel said. “A delectable one, but a serpent all the same.”

  “But you…” I trailed off. I had been about to mention that he didn’t have any qualms sleeping with a being of inhuman evil. But I had to stop thinking of Alessa like that. At least until this was all over. I nodded toward the maser gun on the ground. “Tell me about that.” The last time I had faced Grimstar, I had been completely powerless, and I liked the idea of having a gun that could blast the bowler-hat-wearing weirdo into the underworld.

  Becca unslung a backpack off her shoulder, retrieved a screwdriver from it, and picked up one of the bracers. “It’s a work in progress.”

  “Don’t mess with that here,” Lionel said. “You know how dangerous that technology is.”

  “Relax,” Becca said. “I know what I’m doing. Besides, I’m just adjusting the fit.” She massaged her wrist. “It’s a bit tight.”

  “Is Lionel right that it doesn’t work?” I asked.

  “Do you like the design?” She dropped the screwdriver, picked up the two bracers, and handed them up to me with the metal ring hanging between them. “The bracers have battery packs in them to supply the power. The core technology is in the ring. I just grab hold of it and press these two buttons on the side, then pow! And look.” She pressed a small button on the top of the ring and it divided in two. She then swiveled each half o
f the ring around and snapped it into place on a bracer. “The whole device can be worn just as two separate bracers when not in use.”

  “Extremely impressive,” I said. “Tell me more about the pow part.”

  She took the bracers off me again. “It needs more polish. All the bare metal and wires make it look crude and naked. I was thinking of painting it black and red. Like a black widow spider.”

  “Make it look deadly and adorable,” I suggested.

  “Exactly.” She smiled, then her head turned, seeing Harps’s head pop up out of the sink. “A darling little monkey.” She dropped the two bracers on the floor and moved toward him.

  Lionel flinched as the bracers bounced on the carpet. I wasn’t sure if I, too, should be eying the weapon as if it were a venomous serpent. Becca wasn’t worried about any explosions or other mishaps from the maser technology, and she knew it best. On the other hand, from what I’d gathered so far, her tendencies lay on the crazy side.

  “You little cutie.” She picked Harps up and rubbed his head. “What’s his name?”

  Harps squirmed out of Becca’s grasp and ran across to me, climbing up onto my shoulder. “Harps, meet Becca,” I said. “Becca, Harps.”

  Not so rough, tell her, Harps thought.

  “He says he’s not a teddy bear to be manhandled,” I told Becca.

  “You can communicate with him,” Becca said. “How cool is that! What kind of thoughts does he have?”

  “He’s usually thinking about how tasty beetles are and which trees are a good shape to hump.”

  Liar, Harps thought. That’s more how humans think. You all need to know who is humping who, then you decide how mad to get about it. Tell her the truth.

  The world will never know your genius, Harps, because I’m your only mouthpiece, I thought. It’s a tragic tale.

  Harps gave me a tug on my hair. Maybe I’ll get lucky and the vampire by the door will kill you.