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

by Margo Bond Collins

  “But my dad…” he started, but she interrupted.

  “But you just said that people aren’t always what they seem. Couldn’t she be faking being a great little sister? Nothing is scripted for you. You can be whoever you want.”

  Grant opened and closed his mouth.

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “It could be her, too.”

  Dawn gasped and Becca threw her arms up again.

  “This is such a dumb game,” she said. “Suspicion isn’t helping anyone. Not a soul. It’s just making us doubt each other.”

  “It isn’t helping anyone… yet,” Grant said, and she growled. She thought she heard Dawn laugh, but her phone rang before she could glare at Dawn again. She stiffened when she saw the name.

  “Abby,” she said.

  “Ow,” the psychic answered. “This is harder than I remembered.”

  “Then be quick,” Becca said.

  “Go south,” Abby said. “I’ll call you when it’s time for you to turn.”

  Becca nodded and hung up, standing.

  “It’s time,” she said, going to find Jackson.

  There was a brief argument between him and Bella over whether Bella should go, and Becca never got it straight in her head which side either of them were on, but finally Jackson pointed at Becca’s trailer.

  “Get supplied for a fight,” he said. “Just in case, all right?”

  She nodded and went for her stash, loading up her skirts with everything she thought might be useful and stepping back down the short ladder to the ground to follow after Jackson to his truck. Someone caught her arm, and she gasped, ready to fight as she turned. Grant held up his other hand defensively.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just… I wanted to talk to you before you left, without everyone listening.”

  “Okay,” she said, looking after Jackson.

  “Um,” he said.

  “I’m listening,” she said, only half her attention on him. She was going through her list of tools to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. It was true that she would hear him when he spoke, at least.

  “Um,” he said again, fidgeting in some ambiguous way in the dark. She looked, about to be exasperated at him when he grabbed her face between his hands and kissed her.

  It was awkward and uncomfortable, and she tried not to pull away, though the surprise of it was enough to make her want to. She just didn’t want to reject him like that.

  “Not like this,” she said. “Not like this, Grant.”

  He put his forehead against hers.

  “Do you love him?” he asked.

  “Who?” Becca retorted, pulling back sharply.

  “The one in New York,” he said. “You always come back… different.”

  “I wish everyone would stop implying things,” Becca said. “I don’t love anyone. I want to do my job. All right? I know…” she softened her tone, “I know you have feelings for me. But I’m just not thinking about that stuff at all right now. I know what’s important to me, and a guy isn’t…” She was going to regret this when she took a second to think about it, she knew, but she said it anyway. “A guy isn’t one of them.”

  He sighed.

  “Okay,” he said. She hated to hear him so glum, but Jackson was waiting, behind her, and Abby was watching for her to get moving so that she could give them directions.

  “I have to go,” she said. “Look, we’ll talk later. Okay? Actually talk.”

  He nodded and found her fingers with his, then turned his face away and left. She watched after him for just a moment, but that was as long as she could stand it.

  She ran after Jackson.

  “Here,” she said, pointing at the strange building. The architecture didn’t match anything around it, and there was no parking around it, nor any sign of life.

  “Don’t let him fool you,” Abby said. “It’s a facade. Mostly magic.”

  “Magic can do that?” Becca asked.

  “Watch every face that goes by,” Jackson said. “Really look at them. He could try to slip by us with a disguise.”

  “Which would help if you’d ever seen him,” Abby said on the phone, hearing Jackson.

  Becca grinned.

  “But we can see through it,” she said. “If we have to.”

  She held her focus stone.

  The street was deserted. The sun had been down for maybe an hour, and the building with its odd solid-stone facade did not stir as they approached.

  “There’s a door on the side that you’ll want to go through,” Abby said. “I can give you the ritual to open it.”

  Becca relayed this to Jackson.

  “What kind of magic is it?” Jackson said.

  “The ritual is engaged with the magic; it isn’t magic itself,” Abby told Becca before Becca could ask. Becca again told Jackson, who didn’t look thrilled, but he went along with it.

  They went to the far side of the building and down a half-flight of steps where Becca did as Abby indicated and the door opened. Step by step, Abby guided them through the building, down into the basement, through doors that Becca wouldn’t have noticed in a day of searching and with methods that she couldn’t have possibly guessed.

  “All right,” Abby said. “He’s two rooms ahead of you now, but I can’t see anything any more. He found the hole in his magic and he patched it, so you need to move quickly.”

  She gave Becca the directions for the next two doors.

  “I’m going to go,” she said. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Becca said, hanging up.

  “You trust her enough to believe this isn’t a trap?” Jackson asked as they started for the next door and Becca put her hand to the top center of the frame, feeling for warmth.

  “Not you, too,” she said. “These are our allies, regardless of how difficult they are. Why would it be a trap?”

  There was silence behind her and Becca sighed without turning.

  “Because asking a question like that is just begging for it to be a trap,” she muttered. There was one soft chuckle off to her right and she closed her eyes and sighed, opening them and turning her head to look.

  “Abby is very good,” Peter said. “But she wasn’t watching close enough when I put in this door.”

  “A dude who puts a labyrinth in his basement is clearly more important in his own head than he could possibly be in real life,” Becca said. “Which would make you Peter, yes?”

  She didn’t know why she had the instinct to lash out at him; maybe it was that he’d been avoiding them for so long, or maybe it was that he really had trapped her, and for no reason she could see. Maybe she just didn’t like the look on his face. Regardless, she wasn’t going to go with the plaintive this time.

  He shifted in his cloak and stepped away from the wall, pulling his hood all the way back from his face.

  “You are in no danger here,” he said.

  “But you separated me from my companion and did a big shadowy reveal anyway,” she said. “Just like the element of the dramatic?”

  “I like to talk to people,” Peter said, folding his hands together in front of his chest. “And I find that people don’t speak as openly in front of others, even if those others are their friends.”

  “We’ve been looking for you for more than a year,” Becca said. “If you wanted to talk, you could have come out of hiding any time you liked.”

  He shrugged, holding up his nails to look at them in the dim light.

  “I didn’t want to talk to you. What’s going on with you people is much more interesting than anything I’ve seen in quite a while. But if you’re going to force yourselves into one of my holdings like this and I must converse with you, I’d at least rather it be an interesting conversation.”

  “And what makes a conversation interesting?” she asked.

  He had a soft face, like a young boy, with hair that was combed across his forehead and ears that bespoke years of glasses. But there was something about his
eyes, something about the way that he looked at her that reminded her of Carter’s warning not to be alone with him.

  He was hungry.

  And, again, if Carter was telling the truth, it wasn’t for her as a woman.

  The story that Jackson had told on the way here. It had been for her. She looked back the way she’d come, but she couldn’t see the door she’d come through. He shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “You’ve come all this way. You fought so hard to stand here in front of me and ask your piddling questions. You aren’t going to flee now that you’ve done it. Not if you have that marvelous Makkai spirit I keep hearing so much about.”

  “I’m here to find out…” Becca started, but he raised a finger and whispered a silencing noise, and she found her voice betrayed her and she fell quiet. He smiled.

  “No, pet,” he said. “No, you don’t get to go first. I have so many things I want to know, and you actually have some of them there in your head.”

  “I’m not your pet,” Becca growled, relieved that it had been a momentary spasm and not something that stole her voice entirely.

  “You are,” he said, his tone a faux bored. “I can keep you here as long as I like, and no Makkai is going to break in, and none of us are going to interfere, Abby be damned.”

  “She likes me,” Becca said.

  “She would,” Peter said with the sound of disgust. “No. I keep many people whose information I want, and no one says a thing about it. Most of them because they don’t know, but the rest because it’s none of their business. Your friend,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. Becca thought of the throwing knife in her skirts, the way he exposed his throat like that, “your friend is on his way out, now. He doesn’t think he is, but he is. He won’t make it in again.”

  “Abby will help him,” Becca said. “And he’ll bring the rest of the tribe back.”

  Peter looked back at her again.

  “Oh, come now. This isn’t interesting at all. There’s no threat you can make against me that is going to hit home, so everything you say… It’s just the thrashings of a tiny bug. I could make you into so much more, but that’s all you are right now. And I only talk to bugs when they have something interesting to say.”

  “Who is trying to kill Bella?” Becca asked.

  “No,” he said. “Show me gypsy magic, and then I will tell you.”

  “Is that all you want?” Becca asked sweetly. “A demonstration, and then you’ll tell me who is hunting our queens?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “No, I’m going to stand right by you. I’m going to put my hands on yours and feel the magic in you. And you’re going to impress me. If you don’t impress me, I won’t tell you and I won’t let you out.”

  “That sounds like a treadmill if I’ve ever heard one,” Becca said, going to lean against the wall. “Look, I don’t know what you know about us. We’ve never worked with you before, and maybe it’s for good reason. But we don’t give up our magic. If you want me to read cards for you, I will, but that’s it.”

  “You can do whatever you like,” Peter said. “But the information I have… it’s valuable. And not just to you. It’s very valuable to me, because what I’ve been watching is so interesting. I’d still like to see how it plays out when you can’t stop it.”

  “You’d let a gypsy queen die just to watch?” Becca asked.

  “You don’t know us very well, do you?” Peter answered. “Believe it or not, I’m one of the kinder among us. I don’t like demons.”

  “I don’t either,” Becca said.

  “Carter does,” Peter said. “The man who sent you to me? His best friends are all demons.”

  “I wasn’t under the impression he had friends,” Becca said, and Peter grinned.

  “That’s true. Maybe you do know a bit about us. Let me see your hands.”

  “I’d rather you wouldn’t,” Becca said, backing away as he approached with frightening speed and tried to take her hand between his. By instinct and training, she had a knife out and headed for this throat as he got in close, and with speed faster than her mind could process, she felt a cold blade against her own throat. She hadn’t realized he was carrying a sword, but there it was in his hand, drawn and against her skin. It made her throwing dagger seem puny.

  She brandished it anyway, keeping him back and away.

  “Full points for bravery,” he said, his voice even. “But you are outclassed in every conceivable way. Put it away.”

  “Don’t touch me,” Becca answered. He rolled his jaw to the side, then took a step back, disappearing the sword back to wherever it had come from inside of his cloak.

  “I get eager,” he said, “around information that is as closely guarded as yours. I won’t do it again.”

  She put her dagger back into her pocket and went to lean against the wall again.

  “So what happens now?” she asked. “I’m not going to tell you about our magic. And I’m not leaving until you tell me about Bella.”

  “You aren’t leaving until I say,” he said. “You should not confuse interest with softness. I am the one with the power here.”

  “No,” she said, taking a leap. “No. There are rules, and holding me against my will to try to use some kind of passive torture to make me tell you things - that violates those rules. Or else all of you would be doing it. You have no boundaries to what you’re willing to do, personally, but there are rules, and that would break them.”

  It might be true. It was as good a guess as any, and she couldn’t see any real cost in calling his bluff if he wasn’t bluffing.

  “If you’d like some time to think about it,” Peter said, moving away, “this is as good a place as any for you to stay.”

  “And I told you I’m not leaving until you tell me the answer to my question,” Becca said, moving with him. “By that, I mean I’m not leaving you. And believe me, I can be annoyingly persistent. You can call Carter and ask.”

  She glanced at her phone. No signal. That didn’t surprise her in the slightest, but she’d had to check.

  “You don’t want to challenge me to this game, child,” Peter said. “The things I could teach you, if I were willing. They would destroy every sense of capability you have today and I would build you back up into something else entirely.”

  “I’m Makkai,” she said. “We don’t reform so easily.”

  She put her hand around her focus stone and started looking at the walls in the darkness, trying to figure out where he intended to go. He was human. He couldn’t get in and out of the room without a door or an opening of some kind or another, and while illusions could stop her, physically, if they were powerful enough, she could see through them…

  She dug the tourmaline out of the bottom of another pocket and put it in her mouth.

  And saw, with the help of her focus stone, Jackson pacing back and forth in the next room. But it wasn’t a next room. It was a fake wall that was only there by magic. She looked at Peter.

  She didn’t think he had anywhere to go. He would go through the wall, maybe magically appear next to Jackson, maybe even make the same ultimatum he’d just given Becca, but he couldn’t just disappear.

  She found a few shards in with her normal crystals and tried to identify them with her fingertips.

  “What is it that you want out of life?” Peter asked.

  “To live with a Makkai tribe and kill as many things that deserve it as I can before I retire.”

  “And after that?” Peter asked. “Surely you tire of the boredom and the poverty.”

  “No,” Becca said. “Not really. We have fun.”

  That. That right there was a citrine.

  She could work with that.

  “You know, I think you underestimate us,” she said. “We’re happy. I know you don’t remember what that’s like, but we are. There’s not a lot you can do to threaten people who are happy and love their own people. I’d give up everything to keep our secrets, even if I did believe you could keep
me. You can’t, by the way. Either way, I’m not going to suddenly decide that I’m willing to betray my people because of some promise of power and riches that you make me. I don’t even care if that part’s true. We’re happy.”

  “No one is happy when they’ve been here long enough,” Peter said. “Everyone eventually tells me what I want to know.”

  “Are you back on that one?” Becca asked, digging around in her pocket for all of the copper dust she could find with her fingernail. “That’s a lie, and I’m calling you on it.”

  “Believe what you want,” Peter said. “It doesn’t change what’s about to happen.”

  He was moving for the fake wall again. She took a larger step to the side, rolling the citrine in the copper dust and then shaking it, like rolling dice. She took it out of her pocket now, moving to stay even with Peter. She had to be careful how she talked, how she moved, because if she swallowed the tourmaline she really would be stuck in here for at least a day or two.

  She felt the reaction start and she encouraged it, keeping an even pace. Peter was watching her funny.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m about to show you gypsy magic,” she said, opening her hand as the heat there got too be too much.

  “Wait…” he said, charging toward her, but she was way too close to the wall and too far away from him. She slapped the wall with her palm and felt the magic in the citrine explode into the magic illusion - a good one, she’d give him that - and make it what it really was.

  A long bead wall, it turned out.

  “What?” Jackson asked, turning to face her.

  “Jackson,” Becca said cheerfully. “Let me introduce you to Peter.”

  Jackson hadn’t been happy. That hadn’t been surprising at all. What did surprise her was how relieved Becca was to be standing behind him, and how contrite Peter seemed.

  “How did she do that?” Peter asked.

  “She’s a well-trained Makkai,” Jackson said. “What did you expect? You’re lucky she didn’t hurt you.”

  “She was willing to try,” Peter said. “Except that I’m the one who knows what’s going on with Bella.”

  “You’ve been avoiding us,” Jackson said. “Whatever you say next, you’d better make it convincing, because my best bet is that it’s you.”