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

by Margo Bond Collins

  “He lives alone. In an apartment. The girl Jackson talked about used to live there, but she left him. And Lange is still with Argo, he just lives in New York, now.”

  “He hasn’t got anyone?” Dawn asked.

  “A psychic,” Becca said. “Named Abby.”

  “Thought you didn’t believe in psychics,” Dawn said.

  “I don’t believe in divination. It’s different. Abby just sees things.”

  “Yeah, that’s different,” Dawn said teasingly.

  “No, like… I think she closes her eyes and sees things. She can see the future, but it’s like… to listen to her messages on the phone.”

  “I’ve got a supernatural gift, and all I got was this lousy voicemail?” Dawn asked with a quiet laugh.

  “She was really neat, actually,” Becca said. “I think you’d like her.”

  Dawn smiled.

  “Then he has at least one good friend,” she said. Becca nodded.

  “Yeah. I think he does.”

  “So how was Lange?” Dawn asked. “Just like you remember him?”

  “I don’t know why you think it matters,” Becca said.

  “Because every time I say his name, your head ticks just a little to the side and your eyes wander,” Dawn said.

  “They do not,” Becca said, looking hard at Dawn to make sure it wasn’t true. Dawn nodded.

  “It is. You think he’s dreamy.”

  “I do not,” Becca said.

  “What is it then?” Dawn asked. Again there was the flash of thrill, of heat against heat, Lange against her in the shadows behind the trailers, mouth on hers, fingers pulling at her sides. She realized her eyes had wandered and Dawn grinned, then bit her lip. “So?”

  “I’m not interested,” Becca said.

  “Is he?” Dawn asked.

  “He’s too old,” Becca complained. “Why does everyone not see that?”

  Dawn looked up and to the side, and then the other side.

  “Because even in his world, you’re going to be legal in like six weeks.”

  Becca swallowed.

  “Okay, he said he’d never sleep with a Gypsy because Bella would kill him.”

  Dawn’s head jerked.

  “Any Gypsy, or you Gypsy?”

  “I don’t know,” Becca complained, regretting saying it, though she’d been desperate to tell Dawn about it from the moment it had come out of Lange’s mouth. Dawn grinned.

  “He likes you.”

  She tried to argue, then closed her mouth, and Dawn’s eyes lit up.

  “What?” Dawn demanded. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “He told them about me. Both Abby and Carter knew who I was.”

  Dawns eyes got even bigger.

  “He so likes you.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Becca said. “I’m not going to see him again, and I’m not interested, and he’s old, and I don’t even know that he does like me.”

  “You will see him again,” a smooth voice said as Bella emerged from between two of the trailers. “Though I do see the wisdom in the rest of what you said.”

  Becca hoped her mouth wasn’t hanging open. Checked. It was.

  “Forgive me. I didn’t intend to overhear,” Bella said, sitting. “But you are going to have to go back, and soon. We’ll stay out our time here, as planned, but then we have to keep moving. I’m not going to let this change how we work. I have a call from Washington and we’re going to go. After that, we’ll try to drive to New York so you don’t have to fly again, but if something comes up, I may have to send you on your own.”

  “While everyone else is hunting?” Becca asked. She wanted to complain that it wasn’t fair, but it sounded childish and she managed not to.

  “Yes,” Bella said. “This tribe has suffered enough losses and enough fear. I’m not going to let this go on. Once Carter identifies the mage, we will hunt him down and we will kill him.” She looked at Dawn. “Not without proof, no, but we will kill the man who has stalked this tribe. This is the greatest responsibility I have as queen, and I do not take it lightly.”

  “So why do I have to go back?” Becca asked. “Can’t I just call?”

  “Carter won’t answer your calls,” Bella said. “Believe me on this. And Lange won’t be able to spur him to action, even if he should be inclined to. You will go, in person, and you will continue to go until he gets the information we need. I’m sorry.”

  Becca frowned.

  “It isn’t that it’s even that bad,” she said. “It’s just so strange.”

  Bella nodded.

  “It’s a sign that you are healthy, because they are not. Trust that. You can stay with my grandmother if you choose to.”

  “Yeah,” Becca said. That probably would have helped. “How long does it take to get from there to Carter’s apartment?”

  Bella shook her head.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never understood their systems of transportation.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Becca said.

  Bella nodded.

  “It’s getting late,” Bella said. “You have things to do at first light, don’t you Dawn?”

  “Yes,” Dawn said, standing. “I should get to bed.”

  Bella nodded and watched her go.

  “I have some errands for you to run tomorrow, but most of the day will be yours. I assume you can amuse yourself well enough?”

  “I sit in a truck all day with Billy,” Becca said with a smile. “I’ll be fine.”

  Bella nodded and stood.

  “Good night, then.”

  “Good night,” Becca said, watching the woman walk away. She wondered when it had gotten dark. She hadn’t noticed. Someone had kindled a fire. She shook her head.

  She needed to get her head in the game. There were important things going on, and she was going to miss them if she kept letting her mind wander like that.

  She rubbed her arms against the cold air and went to find her bed.

  They needed her to be ready.

  The next few weeks went evenly, slowly. Bella would give Becca a list in the morning, if there were things for her to do, and then she had the rest of the day to herself. She studied her crystals and took inventory of everything in the trailer that wasn’t Billy’s. She talked to Dawn, when Dawn could find time for her. She spent time with Dozer when she thought she could get away with it without Bella’s children noticing. She spent hours in front of the fire, by herself, or listening to stories. Jackson invited her to tell one, once. Maybe about New York, but she didn’t feel like she’d ever had the gift for story the way the others did, and she declined.

  The rest of the Makkai arrived within a couple hours of each other on the last morning and they said goodbye to Mama Bella and the girls, leaving only shortly after the last Makkai got back to drive across the mountains and up the coast to Washington.

  “Anything you girls want to tell me?” Billy asked as they were taking the little road away from Mama Bella’s farm.

  “Nothing we can,” Dawn said. Becca was bursting with everything that she understood, everything that she didn’t, but she shook her head. No. Nothing she could tell him. He nodded.

  “Someday. That’s the nature of secrets. Someday you can tell them.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  He had her recite her water crystals twice on the way up to Washington, once alphabetically and once by density. Dawn only had to help her once.

  Grant had waved when he’d seen her, but there hadn’t been time to talk. He’d been helping Robbie and Quinn get the trailer packed up and attached to the truck in the minutes before departure.

  They stopped at a park, and Becca helped Colin make sandwiches and hand them out before inhaling her own lunch and getting back in the truck. Bella drove a punishing pace all the way north. Becca heard her say once that they’d been waiting on the Makkai for weeks, already. She wasn’t going to keep them waiting any longer.

  Outside of a little coastal town, they stopped
again, taking a broth and cheese before they went to meet with the man who had called them.

  “He says it’s an evil eye,” Bella said. Jackson cleared his throat, and Bella cast him a meaningful look. His innocent look in response communicated a mountain of concern, if you knew what you were looking at. Becca didn’t like the idea of Bella going into the middle of an evil eye cast, either, but she wasn’t about to give voice to it. Evil eyes were usually targeted, but they sort of brought a malaise and bad luck with them that was based on proximity, depending on how strong a cast it was.

  “We’ll be the judges of that,” Jackson said and Bella nodded.

  “Could be coincidences,” she said. “That’s where we’ll start. Dawn, Quinn, and Grant will go to look at it in person, as quietly as possible. We don’t want to flush the witch who cast it, because they’ll just recast it after we leave.”

  She looked at Dawn, and Dawn nodded. Bella went on.

  “We’re staying at an orchard outside of town. They think they know about gypsies and they have a romantic idea of us being free spirits with eccentric cultural tendencies. We aren’t going to disappoint them, nor are we going to inform them any further. Understood?”

  Becca smiled. Americans had a strange relationship with the idea of gypsies. Playing to it meant lots of singing, lots of dance, lots of music, and big campfires. Parking the trucks away from the trailers and leaving the generator off while outsiders were around. Becca had, somewhere, a set of coin jewelry that her mother had made for her, half a joke, but it was beautiful and made lovely noise when she danced. She’d gotten it out a few times for stuff like this. If it came to it, Bella might wear a shawl.

  “All right. This is the address,” Bella said as Jackson handed out torn slips of paper to each of the drivers. “Careful and don’t trust anyone until we know who we’re looking for.”

  Mutters of agreement, and then they loaded up again and they were moving.

  Quinn took Robbie’s truck, once they detached it from the trailer, and she left with Dawn and Grant. Becca helped with setting up, decorating this time, and then sat with a blanket across her shoulders and a bowl of broth, just waiting. The call didn’t take long to come.

  “What?” Bella asked. The tribe went quiet. “No. Stay there. I’m coming.”

  Jackson cleared his throat louder this time, but it didn’t appear that Bella heard it. She was already headed for the truck. Jackson shot a look at Becca and raised an eyebrow. It took her a fraction of a second to realize that it was an invitation. She was the only other one in the tribe who would know to be watching out for Bella while they were there, so as little help as she might be, she could be another set of eyes. She sprung up and waved at Billy, chasing Jackson across a field after Bella to the trucks.

  “What did she say?” Jackson asked as he started the truck.

  Bella shook her head.

  “They didn’t try to hide the evil eye,” she said. “Warner doesn’t even know who it’s directed at.”

  Jackson frowned. So did Becca. Evil eyes were actually something she knew pretty well because her mother’s art integrated the counter symbols in it.

  A powerful evil eye was the kind of thing you had to destroy in order to break the power it had, but most witches didn’t know enough about them to make a really powerful one, which meant that Nora’s wards could completely protect people who came into unwitting contact with one, or who were the victim of an inept one. Thinking of that, Becca reached into a pocket and came up with a necklace that her mother had given her. She put it forward between the seats.

  “Would you wear it?” she asked. “It would honor my mother.”

  Bella had been about to argue, but instead looked back at Becca and sighed.

  “Don’t try to coddle me child.”

  Becca held her eye and Bella took the necklace, putting it on over her head and pulling her hair though.

  Jackson wove his way through the open country, alongside fields full of trees and fields full of stubble, turning onto a gravel drive and continuing a short distance before he parked next to Robbie’s truck and they got out. Dawn and Quinn were visible around the side of a large red barn. Dawn waved, not looking particularly disturbed, but not happy to see them, either.

  They rounded the side of the barn and Jackson looked up.

  “Yup,” he said. “That’s an evil eye.”

  Becca looked up at the side of the barn.

  Evil eyes were supposed to be covert, something that someone would leave nearby or be in contact with for a long time. You just looked at who used the thing that had been marked, or who spent time around it, and you figured out who the target was. Simple.

  Becca was looking up at the biggest evil eye she’d ever seen. Easily ten or fifteen feet tall and just as wide, it was the curse-side of an evil eye. Well-formed and actually quite artistic, the cast was powerful enough that Becca could feel the tremor of it in her chest.

  Mystic wisdom said that an evil eye was simply a physical look of lust or jealousy, some kind of desire for something someone else had. True enough, it was a simple enough magic that individuals with an innate gift could build up around them, and Becca’s mom had met a few of them that she could cure with the right jewelry or bedside trinkets. They poisoned everyone they were around with curses that no one would have ever noticed if they hadn’t been looking for them.

  A true evil eye, though, was one that watched, physically and intentionally, over a victim day after day. The cast had to be done right, with the right mindset and the right knowledge of the shapes involved in crafting the eye, and it wasn’t something that washing or destroying it could fix. The power of the cast would stay there until you managed to break the seat of the magic, in the person who cast it.

  Which was worse than it sounded. Usually.

  “Found it the day I called,” said the old farmer, apparently the man named Warner. “It just looks out at the fields. Don’t think there’s anyone out there, really, for it to be watching.”

  “Just an attempt to curse the field?” Dawn asked.

  “If you wanted to curse the field, you’d do it in the spring, so you got a good result for the investment. Why curse a field all winter? The weather’s already doing it,” Quinn said.

  Dawn nodded. Jackson elbowed Becca.

  “You look the sort to have climbed your share of trees,” he said. She nodded, and he jerked his head at the barn.

  “See if you can’t find something to look through, back there.”

  “Sure,” she said, glancing to mark the spot of the cast in her mind andjogging away, going into the barn.

  It was dangerous, looking through an evil eye. It put you into the mindset of the person who had cast it, and the darkness there could be infectious, if you weren’t careful. Becca was wearing her fluorite, against her skin where it needed to be, though, as part of a bangled bracelet. Besides, Makkai had a native resistance to evil eyes, to begin with, so she wasn’t particularly concerned.

  She found a ladder and dragged it across the barn floor. It was an equipment barn more than a livestock barn, so getting across the floor was more about avoiding tractors than it was navigating stalls. She looked up at the wall where the evil eye was, and nodded to herself as she spotted the shaft of light coming through the dusty air. Jackson had guessed right.

  She put the ladder below it and climbed up, standing on the top step to look through the hole at the center of the evil eye.

  It was part of a strong cast, looking through the eye at the intended victim. Though it was almost always pretty obvious who it was looking at, this was the way that the cast gelled and became permanent.

  She felt the draw of it as she put her eye to the hole, hands flat against the wood of the barn, balanced on one foot. At first it was black, through the hole, even thought she knew it was daylight outside. She struggled, feeling the anger of the cast as she tried to make the image appear. She began to realize, as she waited for her night vision to adapt, that it w
asn’t a dark image she was looking at, but a dark mind she was looking through. She adjusted her tack, pushing the heated anger, jealousy and rejection away to see what was actually through the hole. She got flashes, dim and unfocused, but flashes. She should have been looking at a cut field, but that’s not what it looked like. There were buildings, a road, horses, people moving.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, then an external force pulled her back to the hole and she was looking through it again.

  Anger. She was so angry.

  They’d lived so well, and never even seen her.

  She squinted, feeling bitterness about lives going on around her while she’d been shunted to the outside, ignored, despised. Oh, how they’d hated her.

  She would show them.

  She was important, even if she wasn’t as pretty and likeable and worthwhile as they found each other.

  She would show them.

  The world through the evil eye was gray, as if formed from ash and stone, and the men and women walked along wooden walkways on either side of a dusty street. The women were in dresses, the men wore suits or suspenders. There was a moment of confusion as Becca tried to remember where she was, when she was, but it passed. They were so prim and so busy.

  She would show them.

  Becca pulled away from the foreign sensation of hatred, dark brooding anger, but it held her. It was intoxicating, to have that much rage to push out at the world, to feel the potency of lashing at them, proving her worth while they suffered.

  It wasn’t right.

  They hadn’t done anything.

  They’d just ignored her, and for good reason. She’d never done anything worth noticing. Even casting the eye was sneaky and underhanded and designed to hurt them without anyone being able to blame her.

  Becca pulled harder.

  The eye held her, showed her how bad the world was, how much it needed to be punished. How much she wanted to be a part of bringing that punishment to them.

  And then she found her hands. Which were, unfortunately, flush against the side of the barn, with nothing behind her to step on.

  She jerked, remembering herself, and tried to regain her footing, but there was nothing. She tumbled backwards, hitting something soft that went ‘oof’ as she landed on it.