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

by Margo Bond Collins

  “You won’t,” Becca said. “What do you want me to do?”

  Dawn gave her the name of the first shard that she wanted, and Becca found a sheet of paper that she could lay across her lap to dump the bag out onto. She started picking through them and handing them to Dawn, one by one, and Dawn started placing them in the water, in the same sunburst pattern that Becca had seen the first time. Finally, maybe thirty minutes later, they were done, and Dawn looked back up at the crystal under the blanket.

  “Will you put it in the water?” she asked. “I don’t want to touch it until it’s supposed to empty. Don’t touch it with your hands.”

  Becca nodded, picking it up with the blanket and then very awkwardly trying to put it in the water without letting the blanket disturb the crystals the way Dawn had lay them out.

  It would have been a lot easier if she’d used the sequence that Mama Bella had used - put the crystal in the tray first and then lay out the shards - but she could understand the fear that Dawn might bump it while she was working and accidentally set it off.

  She was only going to get one shot at this.

  Finally, Becca threw the blanket back up on the bed and sat down cross-legged across from Dawn.

  “You aren’t going to mess it up,” Becca said again. “Have you ever done this before?”

  She shouldn’t have asked. Dawn gave her a panicked look.

  “Why didn’t I think of that? I watched Bella clear this out how many times, and I never asked to try it once. I could have been practicing…”

  Becca shook her head.

  “You’re a natural,” she said. “Bella trusts you, and she wouldn’t trust you with something important like this unless she was sure that you could do it. Okay? Just relax. You’re going to be fine.”

  Dawn frowned and put her hand out over the crystal, jerking it back once and rubbing it against her other hand, then putting it out again.

  “Okay,” Dawn breathed. “Okay.”

  She slowly lowered her palm onto the green crystal, and Becca watched the shards.

  Nothing happened.

  Becca tried not to look up, but finally she did.

  “I don’t know,” Dawn said. “Maybe I messed it up.”

  “Try it again,” Becca said. “Just breathe.”

  There was a pause.

  “Oh,” Dawn said. “Oh, I get it.”

  The shards slammed into the walls of the pan, so many plinks almost simultaneously, and the moment of victory died.

  “Oh,” Becca said. “We can’t really measure that. We needed a bigger tray.”

  “I don’t think it matters,” Dawn said glumly. “It’s the same signature as last time, and I’m pretty sure the strength of it was at least as much as before. Maybe more.”

  Becca nodded.

  “Should we show her?”

  “I’ll tell her,” Jackson said softly. “Thank you, Dawn.”

  Becca hadn’t heard him come in, but he pressed his lips when he caught her look, the best he could offer, and he left again.

  “That door needs to make more noise,” Becca said. Dawn laughed.

  “They do that on purpose,” she said. “Do it to me all the time. You just never assume you’re alone.”

  Becca shook her head.

  “Do you want me to help you clean up?”

  “Um,” Dawn answered. “Yeah. Okay.”

  She started fishing crystals out of the water and Becca dried them on the towel before dropping them back into the bag.

  “What does it mean?” Becca asked as they worked.

  “It means that the things she had protecting her failed,” Dawn said. “And whoever is after her is still trying, and is still strong.”

  “We need Peter,” Becca said. “I wish I knew why he won’t see us.”

  Dawn shook her head.

  “Jackson says they’re unpredictable on purpose.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably true,” Becca said. “It would fit what I’ve seen, anyway.”

  Dawn shook her head.

  “I mean, it’s better, knowing than just waiting, but… You know, I’d thought maybe…”

  Becca shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “Maybe they got bored. Maybe they died. Maybe they went away. But the magic that killed her dog was real. We saw it, and nothing is going to convince me that it was just something bad happening because bad things happen.”

  Dawn nodded.

  “I know. I just forget, sometimes, and start to hope. Do you think…” She paused, twisting her mouth to the side.

  “What?” Becca asked. Dawn shook her head and Becca frowned. “What were you going to say?”

  “Do you think it’s Grant? Even maybe?” Dawn asked.

  “No,” Becca said firmly. “I don’t. I’d believe it was Billy or Robbie or Quinn or Colin before I’d believe it was Grant. He hasn’t got the ability to hold a grudge like that.”

  She thought of how he felt about his father, about how he felt about his father abandoning his family for the tribe, how maybe that did qualify as a grudge, then she shook her head again.

  “No. I don’t believe it.”

  “Then what?” Dawn asked. “Why?”

  Becca shook her head.

  “No one knows, so I’m not even going to guess, but I don’t believe that Grant is involved. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “But the timing,” Dawn said. “I mean, the timing really is… suspicious, don’t you think?”

  “Do you know something I don’t?” Becca asked.

  “No,” Dawn said. Becca wondered if she’d say, if she did.

  “Then let’s not guess at it,” Becca said. “I don’t think it’s him, and talking about it just makes me feel suspicious of everyone.”

  “I feel suspicious of everyone all the time,” Dawn said.

  “I think that’s sad,” Becca told her, then looked around the trailer. “Though I get it.”

  She stood and leaned against a wall, folding her arms.

  “It isn’t like us,” she said. “Believing that someone is out to get our queen, starting to believe that it might be one of us.”

  “We’re Makkai,” Dawn said slowly. “But we’re all just human, too.”

  Becca nodded.

  “I understand. I do. But last night we were drinking beer and dancing and celebrating two new people in the tribe, and now, it’s the middle of the night and everyone’s afraid and pointing fingers at each other.”

  “Is that what’s going on out there?” Dawn asked, and Becca nodded.

  “Yeah, it’s not pretty.”

  Dawn grimaced, then nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just…” She swallowed. “Don’t be so loyal to the idea of being Makkai that you refuse to think about it. You know? It could be one of us, and if you aren’t at least a little bit suspicious, you could miss something important. And…” She shrugged. “Who knows what the thing is that’s going to make it so that we can fix it? I just don’t want to be the one to miss it. You know?”

  Becca laughed.

  “No, that will be me,” she said. “You have nothing to worry about.”

  Dawn gave her a pained look and Becca smiled.

  “I know,” she said. “I know it matters, and I promise to try to do a little better, paying attention. But you have to promise to try not to let it bother you so much. Your color’s off, do you know that?”

  “It is?” Dawn asked, standing and going to a mirror. “Oh. Wow. I didn’t realize.”

  “You’re worrying too much,” Becca said. “And that was before there was even something to worry about. It was a year. Maybe they’ve been trying the whole time and this was the first time they got through…”

  “I told you this was a bad idea,” Jackson said, coming back into the trailer.

  “It was immeasurably valuable,” Bella answered, sitting down on her bed and nodding at Becca. “Hello.”

  “What is he talking about?” Dawn asked. Bella sm
iled.

  “You aren’t going to like it.”

  “I didn’t like it, and I’m a lot more tolerant of that kind of thing than she is,” Jackson said. Bella nodded.

  “But I needed to know.”

  “What is he talking about?” Dawn asked again, louder. Becca tried to ease past to get out of the trailer, but Jackson moved slightly so that he was blocking the entire aisleway and winked at her. All right, then. She was staying. Message received. He nodded, leaning against a post near the entry again.

  “I took off my wards,” Bella said. “Last night. All of them.”

  “You what?” Dawn demanded, flying to her feet. “Why would you do that?”

  “To see what happened,” Bella said. “To see if we were taking all of these precautions for no purpose. They weigh on me, Dawn. I want them to be gone.”

  “But the very night you did it…” Dawn protested, and Bella nodded.

  “Exactly. The very night I took them off, something happened. Which means we knew more than we did, yesterday.”

  She looked from Jackson to Dawn with a quiet defiance, then looked at Becca. Becca smiled.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said. “I get it.”

  Bella smiled and shook her head.

  “The crystals told us nothing new?” she asked.

  “No,” Dawn told her. “Why didn’t you tell me what you wanted to do?”

  “Because you and Jackson both would have tried to talk me out of it.”

  “So what is it you think we know that we didn’t before?” Jackson asked. “Just to say it out loud?”

  Bella nodded to Becca.

  “Let’s start with the one who was actually with Carter.”

  “The one of us who knows the least,” Becca muttered. “We know they’re still after you. They didn’t die and they didn’t give up. And we’ve got a good bet that the wards are working.”

  Bella nodded.

  “Well said. We are confident of both of those things,” she said, then looked at Dawn.

  “What else?”

  “They don’t want to kill you,” Dawn said.

  “Prove that,” Jackson said, not unkindly.

  “If they’d wanted to kill you, they’d have struck you dead while you were outside of the trailer. The trailer has a metal frame, so we were safe in here, even if the wiring in the walls wasn’t.”

  “Add that to the list,” Jackson said. “All right. In an open sky, I have to believe that they could have hit her just as easily as the trailer.”

  Bella nodded slowly.

  “And they have use of elemental magic that I haven’t seen used like that before. Just in stories,” she said.

  “It should have showed up…” Dawn said, indicating the still-sitting pan of water. Bella shook her head.

  “The signature of the magic isn’t changed. That also means that the caster is much more powerful than the spell would have required. Which is very informative. For a mage who is as broadly gifted as he is, I shouldn’t be surprised to find that he can use elemental magic, but it will help us figure out who could be doing it, once…” she looked at Becca.

  “Once get in touch with Peter,” Becca finished, and Bella gave her a nod.

  “It isn’t your fault,” Bella said. “I want you to hear that carefully. They are not Makkai, and so they do not care about Makkai interests, no matter how much the young man in New York cares about your personal interests.”

  Becca flushed and turned her face away, and Bella laughed.

  “Life is long and complicated, Becca. No one knows that better than me. There’s nothing wrong with it, though you have been warned many times by many different people about that particular young man. I don’t need to say any of those things again.”

  Becca put her palms to her cheeks and nodded.

  “So we have learned,” Bella said. “I have upset everyone, but we have learned, and I am content at that. I’m warded, again, so you can go back to bed, if you wish. We have blighted crops in Kansas that we’ll be going to see tomorrow. No promises that it’s anything other than bad farming, but it does have a payment attached to it, if we are able to help.”

  Becca nodded, and Jackson moved aside. She looked back.

  “I don’t know who you trust and who you don’t, but if you trust us, you should tell us what you’re doing,” she said. Bella shook her head.

  “Someday, if you follow your path as it is built for you, you will find that queens are not always at liberty to trust anyone but their own minds.”

  Becca looked her in the eye for a moment, then nodded again.

  “I could see how that would be true,” she said, and Bella gave her a warm smile.

  “Sleep well,” she said, and Becca laughed.

  It wasn’t like it would be easy, after a bolt of lightning had literally jolted her out of bed in the first place. She would try, though. Even if Ursa snored worse than Billy did.

  Becca wasn’t sure how many people actually did get back to sleep that night, but Bella was as good as her word, and after breakfast the next morning, they were on the road again, driving straight through dusk and nightfall and setting up camp in the dark in Kansas.

  In the morning, a grizzled old farmer came to see them at the camp, and talked privately with Bella and Jackson for a good period of time while everyone else sat on the ground and ate breakfast.

  “She acts like it’s nothing,” Grant said to Becca. “How can she act like nothing happened?”

  “Because she has to worry about everything else, too,” Becca said. “It’s amazing, how she’s more concerned with the tribe than with what could happen to her.”

  He shook his head.

  “We ought to be doing more,” he told her. “We just sit around and wait for her to do something about it. Why aren’t we doing more to keep her safe and find the person who is trying to kill her?”

  “I don’t think they are trying to kill her,” Becca said, remembering Dawn asking about Grant’s intentions. Sitting with him, seeing his face, she couldn’t imagine he would be going after Bella. It just didn’t seem possible. “If they were, they probably would have just done it.”

  Grant sat straighter.

  “You don’t think they missed?”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the magic involved to be sure. It’s just… the other queens, they had a lot of stuff go wrong for a long time, before they died.”

  “It’s been a year,” Grant said. “Did any of them have that big a gap in the middle?”

  “I don’t know,” Becca said. “I don’t think so, but I only heard the story once. I don’t think anyone tells it.”

  “Then who told you?” Grant asked.

  “Jackson.”

  He nodded.

  “How long has he been here?”

  “He joined about the same time Bella did. They both knew your dad, but they haven’t been here from the beginning.”

  “I knew Jackson took my dad’s place,” Grant said. Becca wondered what that looked like - how it worked. She didn’t ask, because even if Grant had known, she suspected he wouldn’t want to tell her.

  “Do you think we’ll get real blight?” she asked. “Or just weather and bugs?”

  He shook his head.

  “Have you seen it before?”

  “Once,” she said. “They didn’t ever take me with them, because it’s crystal work and they weren’t going after whoever set it. Bella said sometimes a field gets blighted by accident. I didn’t know that was possible, but…” She gave an exaggerated shrug and Grant nodded.

  “Dad says that magic is magic, and that sometimes it just happens, even if the person using it didn’t know.”

  “My mom says that magic is everywhere, and some people channel it better than others.”

  He nodded.

  “Pretty much the same thing,” he said. Becca thought that her mom’s words were more poetic, but didn’t see any profit in pointing that ou
t.

  “How are your crystals going?” she asked. He wrinkled his nose.

  “Earth crystals are hard,” he said. She nodded. “You’re done with them, aren’t you?” he asked her.

  “Yeah.”

  “What comes next?”

  She grinned.

  “Combinations.”

  He groaned and she gave him a big nod.

  “Oh, it gets worse again after that. After combinations, Dawn says it’s specializations. How many different variations of quartz do you know?”

  He dropped his face into his hands and she laughed.

  “I know,” she said. “But if it were easy, they’d let us run the place ourselves, by now.”

  “I guess,” he said to his palms, sort of muffled and exhausted. “I just don’t think I’ll ever know them all.”

  She weighed it for a moment, then went ahead and spoke.

  “Dawn says that’s the point.”

  He looked up.

  “What?”

  She nodded.

  “That you spend your entire life memorizing the next set. It means that you never stop going over them, and you forget less.”

  “This is worse than school,” he said. “At school, I at least had graduating into a tribe to look forward to.”

  She grinned, leaning back against the trailer.

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why they don’t tell you until later. If you never memorize the four families, you really are going to be weak at everything, and it’s demoralizing to know that the list of things to learn is that big.”

  “Why don’t they just put it online?” Grant asked. Becca laughed too loudly and clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “Don’t you dare ever let Dawn hear you say that,” she said.

  “What?” he asked. She shook her head.

  “Everything we do is secret. Everything about crystal magic is handed down directly from Makkai to Makkai. They barely even write it down.”

  “Then how are we supposed to keep track of the really complicated stuff, if we don’t write it down and everyone is bogged down in impossible-to-learn stuff that’s already easier than the complicated stuff?”

  She opened her mouth to give him stock answer, but nothing came out. She tipped her head to the side.

  “You know, I never asked that.”