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

by Margo Bond Collins

  He raised his eyebrows and nodded.

  “Okay, sure, maybe the internet is a bad idea, but someplace where everything is written down so we don’t just lose important stuff?”

  “Because maybe the important stuff is so important that we’re supposed to lose it,” Robbie said, coming to sit next to him. Grant frowned.

  “That makes no sense at all.”

  Robbie shook his head.

  “She give you this much trouble?” he called to Billy, who laughed and came to sit with them.

  “Probably more,” he said. “What’s going on now?”

  “They want a grimoire,” Robbie said.

  “Is that a fact?” Billy asked. “And why would that be?”

  “Because memorizing is hard,” Robbie moaned and shook his head. “Dawn gives them written-out lists to study from, and they still can’t do it.”

  “All I know is what all the crystals are,” Grant said. “We haven’t even started talking about what they do and how to identify them.”

  “You’ll get there,” Robbie said. “That’s the point of all of this. You work for it.”

  Billy shook his head.

  “You’re missing it, Robbie.”

  “Am not,” Robbie answered, as though he knew what Billy was talking about.

  Becca looked at Billy and raised her eyebrows, and he gave her a nod.

  “We’ve written them down, now and again, across time and places. Especially when someone does something pretty new and interesting. Healing crystals, in particular, they wrote down a lot of places because they thought it was important and they wanted all of the Makkai to know about it.”

  Becca nodded. She knew what her healing crystals were, but she hadn’t ever used them, because doing it wrong was sometimes dangerous and often destructive to the crystals. Dawn took a particular pride in being the only one in the tribe who used them on a regular basis.

  “The problem with writing things down is that people find them,” Billy said. “The more you write down, the more dangerous it is for someone to find it, and the more careful you have to be with what you wrote. When you’re done studying, you ever notice that Dawn disappears with her lists?”

  Becca frowned. They did go missing right after she’d finished a set. She’d been blaming it on being too busy to be aware of where they’d gone, once she was done with them. Billy nodded, scratching his jaw.

  “Yup. She burns them. Thorough, that one, even if what she’s given you isn’t that dangerous, on its own.”

  “Surely the risk of losing important crystal magic makes it worth having a written copy somewhere,” Grant said.

  “Crystal magic follows patterns, the same way the crystals do, themselves,” Robbie said. “It happened once - and only once - that we wrote down a long list of magics and a human came across them. He was a smart fellow, figured out some of the patterns, some patterns even the Makkai hadn’t noticed, and he started making his own magics. Mastered a lot of them that griping young Makkai like you take decades to learn, because he was hungry. Now,” Robbie nodded, acknowledging Billy before Billy had a chance to interrupt him, “he was hungry because he wanted power, and that kind of hunger is always dangerous. You lot have been trained since you were pups that crystal magic is dangerous and that you only use it where you know what you’re doing and for good reason. I mean, look at Becca, blowing up half a city back in Washington. It’s easy to do it on purpose, if you know how to do it on accident. The only thing that saved the world from our magic was that he blew himself up before he got really good at using it as a weapon. We vowed then that we weren’t going to write it all down again anywhere.”

  “But we forget,” Grant said. “Surely we forget the really high-level magic.”

  “And maybe that’s the way it should be,” Billy said. “If it’s so high-level, maybe it’s best that only the ones who can find it in the first place be using it.”

  Grant shook his head, but Becca liked the logic of it. Only the people who were gifted enough to develop that kind of thing could really be custodians to it the way it deserved.

  “You remember that, when you go to New York,” Robbie said. “Those people are tied in with demons. You really don’t know what they might do with our magic, if they could.”

  “She’s fine,” Billy said. “I’ve never seen her talk magic with anyone outside the Makkai, and even then she’s not that interested.” He grinned. “Becca’s a throwing-knives-and-doing-what-Dawn-says kind of Makkai.”

  Becca tipped her head to the side.

  “Gee,” she said and he grinned.

  “Work to be done,” he said. “Always work to be done. Don’t lounge around here all day.”

  Robbie agreed silently and stood. Grant looked at her.

  “Still think…” he said. She laughed.

  “I know. Old rules and new rules. They always come at each other.”

  He laughed.

  “Your mom?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t really get to meet her.”

  Becca nodded.

  “I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like her.”

  “Then you’ve got that in common, too,” he said, standing and offering her a hand. Billy was right. Breakfast was done. There were more things to accomplish today, and, when she looked, she found that Bella and Jackson were already gone. She wasn’t going to get to go out to play with the two of them, so it was working for Becca. The glamorous life of a Makkai gypsy.

  They hopped across the country again, making a little money here and there, always bumping against the fear that they wouldn’t be able to put gas in the trucks, and Becca thought from time to time of the box of crystals Argo had given Bella. There weren’t many people in the world who knew the value of such things, but the ones who did, and who weren’t Makkai - they were the type that everyone wanted to keep these kinds of crystals away from.

  Bella wouldn’t sell them.

  It didn’t matter how hard-up they were for money, Bella would keep them and she would keep them safe. Becca had started to think that she would eventually give them away to someone who would take equally good care of them, then she thought of the chest buried out away from Mama Bella’s house and revised her expectation - Bella would never, ever give them away in her lifetime. She just wouldn’t do it. No one would care for them as well as she would.

  The new members of the tribe learned quickly as they faced ghosts, shifters, curses, and the like, and more and more often, Becca and Grant would end up at the end of the night, sitting against a trailer and talking.

  She liked him.

  Not like he liked her, but she did like him. She enjoyed his company and he made her smile and he made her think. He was a good friend, and she was appreciating having one of those every single day. Not that Dawn didn’t fit the description - she was just eternally busy, now, trying to think of better ways to keep Bella safe.

  Becca was guessing, from how the girl acted, that Dawn had started setting up her own wards out of fear that Bella would discard her own again.

  Because nothing was happening.

  They’d gone to New Orleans twice more, and it was becoming comically obvious in a deeply painful way that Peter knew exactly where they were and was intentionally being somewhere else the entire time they were there.

  Jackson grew increasingly irate while they were there, and Becca had called Lange twice more, trying to get some clue on how to find the man, but Lange was either lying to her or didn’t have any better idea than the Makkai did. The city was full of magic, Becca could sense it on the air, but the serious users avoided them after the time they’d used one of them to get a lead on Peter.

  And so they kept on, because Bella saw no better action for the tribe to take.

  As Becca’s third summer with the tribe approached, she got a call one day from a number she didn’t know.

  Billy looked back at her.

  “You have signal?”

  “Some,” she
said.

  “You need me to pull over?”

  Ursa wouldn’t like it. Ursa preferred to keep up with the convoy, and resented any diversion from the plan. Becca and Ursa didn’t get along very well, and Bella moving the woman in with them to make room for Reece in another trailer had made things much, much worse.

  “Yeah,” Becca said, answering.

  “Ack,” the woman on the other end of the phone said. “Geez, that hurts. Didn’t see that one coming.” There was a pause. “Ha ha.”

  Becca frowned.

  “Who is this?”

  “Oh. Sorry. This is Abby.”

  Abby.

  Abby.

  “The psychic?” Becca asked.

  “You got my joke,” Abby said. “I don’t get to make them often. So I don’t get a lot of practice… Sorry.”

  Becca shook her head again.

  “What do you want?”

  That came out ruder than she’d intended, but she was off-guard.

  “Oh,” Abby said. “Right. I need you to do some work for me.”

  “You what?” Becca asked.

  “Yes,” Abby said. “It’s kind of complicated and psychic-y, but I’ll pay you.”

  Becca covered the phone with her hand.

  “Call Jackson.”

  “Something wrong?” Billy asked as Dawn dialed.

  “Work,” Becca said.

  “I understand you’re always looking for paying work?” Abby asked.

  “Yeah,” Becca said. “But why are you coming to us? Is there something going on in New York?”

  “No,” Abby said. “Like I said, it’s kind of psychic-y, but I’d like to discuss it with you in person, if I could.”

  “In person,” Becca said.

  “Yeah,” Abby said. “I thought the phone would work, but you’re giving me a huge headache.”

  “I don’t know,” Becca said. Dawn had started giving a short summary to Jackson and was looking back over her shoulder at Becca.

  “Twenty-five thousand,” Abby said. “In cash. And I’ll pay for your plane ticket here and back.”

  Becca repeated the numbers and details back to Dawn, who gave them to Jackson and waited.

  “You think she’s real?” Dawn asked. Becca considered for a minute, then nodded. She thought so. Dawn gave Jackson this and waited again.

  “Yes,” Dawn said, then mouthed ‘sorry’. Becca shrugged. It was a year’s worth of money. She just hoped it wasn’t worth it. That kind of work was the type that ended up getting people killed.

  “I’ll come,” she said. “In a few days.”

  “Now,” Abby said. “Next plane. The ticket will be waiting for you at the desk, all you have to do is give them your name.”

  Becca swallowed.

  “All right.”

  The airport was big and busy and crowded, and Becca was uncomfortable again. At least this time she was wearing the clothes Lange had bought her, which, while they didn’t blend in in an airport in Nebraska, they didn’t make her feel like a gypsy.

  She got her ticket and went to sit to wait for the plane, feeling a bit queasy. Takeoff was no better than she remembered, nor was the rest of the flight, and she deplaned with a sense of being a leaf in a whirlwind as everyone scurried off to do their important next thing and she stood still, trying to get her bearings.

  She finally made it to the front of the airport, where a woman hopped up and down and waved. It was perhaps an even better reception than finding Lange there; Becca wasn’t sure what she had expected, much less hoped for.

  “You came,” Abby said.

  “It’s a lot of money,” Becca answered.

  “You never take planes,” Abby said. Becca shook her head.

  “Nope.”

  “You don’t like them?”

  “Not even a little bit,” Becca told her, and Abby hugged her.

  “Well, thank you for coming. It means the world to me, and it means even more to Sam.”

  “Sam?” Becca asked, taking a moment to place another name that hadn’t come up in a long time. “The girl? The one who lived with Carter?”

  Abby nodded.

  “If Carter knew I were here…” she shook her head with a grin. “Come on. We should go somewhere private. I know too many people around here.”

  Becca glanced around.

  “Here?”

  Abby nodded.

  “For the rest of the world who aren’t Makkai, planes are the fastest way to get between two places. A lot of the important people in Carter’s circles use them a lot.”

  “Oh,” Becca said, and Abby wrapped an enthusiastic arm around her waist and dragged her out to the parking lot and into a car with blacked-out windows. Becca put on her seatbelt, then paused when Abby didn’t do the same. Abby shook her head.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of extra time,” she said. “Carter is…” She shook her head again, her hair rustling around her head like foliage. Becca liked her hair. “Anyway. If he comes looking for me and I’m not there, he’s going to start digging, and I’m keeping this secret for now. For as long as I have to.” She tipped her head toward Becca. “I’m trusting you not to tell Lange or any of the rest of them, either. It’s a big deal.”

  “Tell them what?” Becca asked.

  “I know where Sam is,” Abby said with an unrestrained smile. “She isn’t dead, she isn’t missing, and she’s only barely running away, right now. I think she might come back again, at some point, even if it’s just to say hello. I’ve missed her…”

  “Why is that a secret?” Becca asked. Abby frowned.

  “Because if they knew where she was, they’d try to go get her, try to make her be Carter’s leash again. He’s angry all the time again and they’re afraid of him.”

  Becca wasn’t sure she followed, but she nodded.

  “We keep secrets,” she said. “That’s not a problem.”

  Abby nodded.

  “I know you do,” she said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have called you. Even if…” She shook her head. “You know how to do exorcisms, don’t you?”

  Becca shrugged.

  “I don’t, but there are people in my tribe who do.”

  Abby nodded.

  “Good.” She started to speak, then stopped. “Honestly, I hadn’t thought through how to explain this to you.”

  Becca scratched the back of her head.

  “Take your time.”

  “Oh,” Abby said. “Money. I can do that part.”

  She reached into the back seat and pulled out a banded stack of hundreds and a selection of loose bills.

  “You won’t offend me if you count it,” Abby did. “I stole it from Carter, so there’s no telling.”

  Becca ran her thumb down the stack of hundreds, counting to ten twenty times, and then fingered through the rest of it.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s twenty-five.”

  Abby nodded.

  “Good. I mean, I have more in case I wasn’t looking close enough when he put it away…”

  “You stole it from him,” Becca said. “Is that going to cause a problem? Is he going to stop helping us?”

  Abby frowned at her the way she might have frowned at a puppy who rolled over when she told him to sit.

  “No,” she said. “I take money all the time. He doesn’t care. It’s… Money is the easiest thing in his life. Sometimes I think he goes out and buys something expensive because it takes up less space.”

  “Than money,” Becca said. Abby twisted her mouth to the side and nodded.

  “Yeah.”

  “He won’t even notice?” Becca asked, holding up the stack of bills. Abby shook her head.

  “I’d have to get up close to a million before he’d see that it was gone,” she said. “Sorry.”

  A million. The Makkai could live, as a people, on that for years. Years and years. Becca shook her head. That wasn’t what she was here about, and it didn’t matter.

  It didn’t matter.

&n
bsp; “Okay,” she said. “What is it that you need us to do? Who are we exorcising?”

  Abby narrowed her eyes.

  “It’s kind of a little hard to explain,” she said. “Well, the what isn’t hard. There’s a tiny little community up in the desert in Southern California where they’ve been taking in people who are terminally ill and… possessing them. I’ll give you directions. The why part is what’s complicated.”

  “Why would they be possessing terminally ill people?” Becca suggested.

  “Well, that, and why Sam isn’t doing it herself.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like a good one,” Becca said. If it was too dangerous for one of Carter’s people to do it, Becca was ready to walk away and leave the money sitting in the car. Abby nodded.

  “Yeah. She isn’t who she was.” She paused, holding up her hands in front of her as if to just look at the fingertips for a second. “Hiding is hard,” she said, still looking at her hands. “Being powerful and hiding is harder. There are demons, psychics, even parts of hell that are looking for her, and she hid for a long time just by being almost completely powerless, outside of what it took to stay hidden. And now she’s getting stronger again, but only a little at a time. She pulled a demon out of the one girl, but she can’t take on the whole town. Not when they’ve held the bodies as long as they have.”

  “Demons are kind of your thing, aren’t they?” Becca asked. “Like, this is one of the things we would have brought to you. Ian, isn’t it? He’s the one out there, now.”

  Abby nodded.

  “That’s the rest of it. If she calls Ian and he comes in, he’s going to be too lazy to exorcise all of the demons. They’re terminal, anyway, and they’re powerful. Ian would just go wipe them all out.”

  “Okay,” Becca said. Abby frowned.

  “I’m going to assume that someone who did exorcisms would know this. If a person dies while they’re possessed, especially if they chose possession, which all of these people did, they don’t get a chance at redemption. They’re soul-burnt and hellbound.”

  Becca sat back in her seat.

  “And your people wouldn’t care?”

  Abby shook her head.

  “I’d love to tell you that they aren’t all bad, but… They mostly are. They aren’t in this to protect innocents and promote justice. They do it because they’re powerful and there are rules. And the rules say that possessing demons can’t be permitted to stay. They don’t say anything about the people they’re possessing.” Her eye ticked. “That’s been a sticking point before, actually.”