Champagne, Misfits, and Other Shady Magic

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

  I paused, stepping over to the curb so as not to block the sidewalk as I glanced around.

  No zombies appeared to be ambling along West Fourth. Which was a good thing. But I had just been torn from my bakery by magic I actually didn’t want tied to me, so I was kind of spoiling for a fight. Or at least a good rant and rave.

  Okay, so I was still carrying an excess of tension from Gran and Scarlett’s confrontation, as well as the mounting evidence that I was tied to the magical grid. And in a way that Gran might actually have intended, if she had modified the runes as Scarlett accused her of doing. Of course, I might have done that myself, with —

  The magic tugged me back the way I’d come.

  “Damn it,” I muttered, turning back.

  Kandy, freshly showered and outfitted in skinny jeans, a rather low-key, plain green T-shirt, and the still-completely-out-of-character purple backpack, appeared out of the crowd streaming up and down the sidewalk. She paused, peering into the windows of the nail salon we both frequented monthly.

  The green-haired werewolf frowned, then looked at me, holding up her phone.

  I joined her outside the glass door. “The grid is lighting up?”

  “Yep. Itchy feet?”

  I nodded. Then I surveyed the interior of the salon.

  It was empty.

  At noon.

  On a Saturday.

  “This can’t be good,” I muttered, trying the door and finding it unlocked.

  Kandy grunted in agreement as she followed me in. Then she locked the door behind us. Unfortunately, there weren’t any blinds to pull down over the wide front windows.

  We stood crammed together in the tiny entranceway, before a small white-painted desk that held the cash register.

  Comfy couches in white faux-leather ran along the wall to our left, adjacent to two matching seats before the front windows. Magazine-strewn side tables sat between them. A couple of still-foamy foot baths, along with manicure tools, had been abandoned at each station. Someone had knocked over a bottle of bright-red nail polish, which had spattered across the white tile floor. Thankfully, the polish had too much orange in it to be mistaken for blood — which I unfortunately knew from experience.

  “Got anything, dowser?” Kandy whispered behind me.

  I started to shake my head. But then the taste of tart-but-sweet jam — raspberry and blackberry — tickled my senses. It was muted. Perhaps the low intensity was due in part to how tightly I’d been holding my own magic of late. But it might also have been indicating less-than-formidable Adepts.

  Or someone who could mask their presence.

  Now that would be interesting.

  “Two Adepts ahead,” I murmured, stifling a smile of grim anticipation. “No underlying base.”

  Kandy nodded, understanding that I meant I didn’t know what type of Adept we were dealing with. She slipped ahead of me, forgetting — perhaps willfully — that I was supposed to take point. We stepped past the reception counter, then through the salon with the high stools at the drying stations to our right. The muted TV was overhead. An old episode of Charmed was playing. Appropriate. Except no one in the building was a witch, at least not as far as I could taste.

  The open storefront narrowed into a corridor leading to the bathroom, and what I had always assumed was the employee break room.

  Two more steps, and I picked up the sound of sobbing. The door to the washroom on the left was closed. Kandy opened it, then glanced inside, shaking her head.

  The taste of tart jam increased. We continued on, heading to the back of the salon. The presumably-the-break-room door was closed. And locked when I tried to turn the handle.

  I pressed my ear against the hollow-core wood, hearing whispers beyond. “People in here,” I said to Kandy. “But the source of the magic is farther back. Maybe in the alley?”

  I knocked lightly. The chatter within increased. Then a tiny woman in her midforties opened the door, blinking behind thick-rimmed pink glasses a few times before she recognized me.

  “Jade!” Jenny, the salon owner, cried. “You don’t have an appointment.”

  “Um, no,” I said, surreptitiously glancing into the room. “Everything okay?”

  “Sure, sure,” she said, opening the door far enough to reveal seven people crammed into the small space behind her. Four of the shop’s estheticians, all in their white uniforms, were attempting to manicure three customers around a tiny table.

  Math wasn’t my strong suit, but I was fairly certain two customers were missing — the two who’d been getting the side-by-side pedicures. The two who tasted of tart jam — including whoever was almost-silently weeping farther down the hall.

  I met the owner’s gaze, raising an eyebrow and allowing silence to stretch between us. It was a pointed questioning technique I was trying out. You know, when I didn’t have any cupcakes with which to extract information.

  Her lips tightened, but she held my gaze without obvious guile. So apparently, the silent treatment only worked when I was on the receiving end. Jenny didn’t have a drop of magic in her. So I couldn’t actually ask her outright what the hell was going on if she wasn’t going to offer it up.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m just going to wander into the back. I think I have … I’m meeting friends here.”

  The owner nodded. “Fine, fine.”

  Then she shut the door in my face.

  I looked at Kandy with disbelief.

  She dropped her jaw in silent laughter.

  Shaking my head, I slipped to the very back of the salon, pausing at the exit to the alley. But then I turned back, feeling the raspberry-and-blackberry magic emanating from what I assumed was a storage room.

  I stepped up to the door, calling my jade knife into my right hand. Kandy set herself just behind and to the side of me, reaching around and placing her hand on the storeroom doorknob. Magic glinted off the rune-carved gold cuff at her wrist.

  The slow smile I’d been suppressing before spread across my face. My magic stirred, responding to my completely inappropriate anticipation. I should have been baking, not looking for the chance to knife a dangerous Adept in a storeroom.

  I also should have been focused on containing the situation. Not daydreaming about it suddenly escalating into an all-out brawl in the streets.

  Kandy nodded.

  I shifted my weight forward over the balls of my feet.

  The werewolf flung the door open, snapping off the knob in the process. I gathered she assumed it would have been locked.

  A wild blast of tart-raspberry magic hit me full in the face, rippling harmlessly around me and bringing with it an inexplicable urge for Pop-Tarts. Kandy slipped behind me for protection, though the weakness of the magic made that completely unnecessary.

  Not bothering to absorb whatever spell the Adept in the small storeroom was trying to use against me, I blinked, adjusting my eyes to the low light.

  Then I blinked again, certain that I was seeing double. Or, rather, some sort of weird reflection.

  A willowy blond, slightly taller than me, stood with her back to the far wall. Boxes of supplies occupied the shelves to the right. Cleaning gear, an industrial sink, and a short counter took up the left wall.

  An exact reflection of the svelte blond was curled in the fetal position at her feet.

  Problem was, they weren’t dressed the same — one wearing shades of cream and the other in dark gray. And the blond who was upright was currently standing against me with only a blue flip-flop for a weapon.

  Twins. In their late teens.

  Kandy peered around my shoulder.

  “The broom would have made a better weapon,” I said, nodding toward where it was hanging next to a mop on my left.

  “Too far away,” the standing blond said.

  “You should have armed yourself the second you stepped in here,” Kandy snarled. “Then barricaded the door.”

  The blond curled her lip, almost as if she were a werewolf herself. But by the
taste of her magic, I was certain she wasn’t.

  “Sis … sis …”

  The blond on the floor cried out suddenly, clutching her head. Her eyes flooded with blue-white magic as she shuddered.

  Then tendrils of her magic reached out for me, flooding my mouth with the taste of blackberry jam. The power slipped past the barrier of my necklace and tried to enter my mind.

  I brushed it away effortlessly.

  Kandy grunted, shifting to the side as she raised her hands in a boxing pose, placing the cuffs between her and the questing power flooding off the blond on the floor.

  A telepath. But not strong enough to invade my mind, or Kandy’s. At least not after whatever had left her curled up on the floor.

  Reacting to what must have appeared to be an aggressive move from the green-haired werewolf, the standing blond flung herself protectively across her sister.

  It was a completely stupid move for two reasons. First, as soon as the first twin touched her sister, the power of the telepathic onslaught tripled. And second, one look at Kandy or me should have let the first twin know that we weren’t something as benign as a sprinkle of rain. If we had wished her harm, using her body as cover wouldn’t even have been a stopgap measure.

  Again, the broom would have been the smarter move. Though also just as useless.

  So, to recap.

  Twins.

  One a telepath, who was almost insensible on the floor. The other an amplifier, who had absolutely no instincts on how to protect herself or her sister effectively.

  It was an easy guess that she had at least tried to get the telepath out of the salon through the back door. Though why the employees and other clients had locked themselves in the break room was still a mystery.

  “Dowser,” Kandy grunted pissily. “The magic?”

  The amplifier’s head snapped up at the mention of my magical classification.

  I slashed my knife before me in a figure eight, cutting through the tart-jam magic with ease. “Stop touching her,” I said pointedly.

  The amplifier stared at me dumbly.

  “Step away from your sister,” I said, as patiently as I could, slipping my knife into its sheath. “You’re making whatever is going on with her worse.”

  The amplifier glared at me stubbornly. “I am not.”

  I looked at Kandy, shaking my head in disbelief.

  “Fledglings,” the werewolf sneered. Then she darted forward, grabbing the amplifier by the back of the neck and pulling her away from her sister — all before the amplifier had even reacted to her moving in the first place.

  The amplifier squeaked, then opened her mouth to launch into what was sure to be an indignant protest. Kandy grabbed a bag of cotton balls off the shelf and stuffed them in her mouth, pinning the amplifier’s arms together behind her back.

  Suddenly assessing the situation with more clarity — because being abruptly and efficiently handled by Kandy could have that effect — the amplifier stilled, looking at me with wide eyes.

  I nodded curtly, stepping forward to hunker down by the telepath. She looked up at me with her blue-white gaze. Trusting. But then, even without actually accessing my mind, it seemed likely that she could pick up on my intentions.

  I looked her over, seeking foreign magic that might have indicated she’d been spelled somehow. I found nothing. Flummoxed as to what could have been affecting the telepath so adversely, I glanced back at her twin. “Are you just coming into your magic?”

  Kandy loosened her hold on the amplifier, who plucked the bag of cotton balls out of her mouth to offer me a surly, “No.”

  I returned my gaze to the telepath. The twins appeared to be about eighteen years old, which would have been late for magic to manifest. But not impossibly so.

  “Dowser,” the telepath murmured, rolling over onto her back.

  “That’s me,” I said, smiling. “I’m going to try to settle your magic for you, okay?”

  She nodded.

  I glanced back at the amplifier. “I’m not going to hurt either of you.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Kandy said. Not entirely joking.

  The amplifier folded her arms across her chest, taking a step away from Kandy so she had a clearer view of her twin. “We know who you are.”

  I nodded, calling my knife into my hand and ignoring the way the amplifier flinched at its sudden reappearance. I flipped it so I was holding the blade. Then I carefully placed it on the telepath’s chest, the hilt across her breastbone, the blade between her breasts, and the tip ending just above belly-button height.

  I stroked my fingers across the honed jade stone, drawing a hint of the telepath’s magic toward the blade. Then I coaxed the knife to settle her power as it naturally did for mine.

  The blond at my feet sighed, reaching up and lightly placing her fingers along the hilt of the knife. “Oh, I see,” she murmured. Her magic shifted around her, and I squelched the instinct to absorb it into the knife. It wasn’t mine to collect.

  Pressing the weapon protectively to her chest, the telepath sat up, supported by one hand on the linoleum floor. Her impossibly straight, jealous-worthy hair tumbled down around her face and shoulders. Her magic settled. She blinked her now sky-blue eyes at me. “The blade is wondrous.”

  “The dowser is the wonder, fledgling,” Kandy said.

  The telepath nodded agreeably. Then, with some reluctance, she loosened her hold on my knife, allowing it to fall forward from her chest. She paused, waiting to see if her magic raged back. It didn’t.

  Then she reverently offered it back to me, the blade placed across both her palms. “Thank you.”

  I took the knife from her, carefully holding her gaze for a moment and waiting to see if her magic surfaced in her eyes again.

  “I’m all right now. The knife showed me …” She bit her lip, darting her eyes to her sister as if suddenly realizing she was discussing magic with a stranger.

  I stood, stepping away from her and sheathing the knife. The amplifier darted past me, helping her sister to her feet.

  Thankfully, along with the differing color schemes, the amplifier was wearing cropped jeans as opposed to the pretty floral skirt the telepath wore, so I could tell them apart even when they were standing shoulder to shoulder.

  “Introduce yourselves,” Kandy said, seriously peeved. “Then let us know why the hell you’re in a storage room with eight mundanes only one door over.”

  The amplifier opened her mouth — but then snapped it closed after a look from her sister. They stared at each other for a moment, and a tiny taste of tart jam shifted between them.

  “Communicating telepathically,” I said for Kandy’s benefit.

  Kandy snorted. “Don’t make me teach you to obey your elders, my pretties.”

  “We know.”

  “We understand.”

  They overlapped each other, nary a pause between one speaking and the other taking over.

  “You first, sis,” the telepath said.

  “I always go first.”

  “You’re the eldest.”

  “So they said.”

  “Why would they lie?”

  “I’m not having this conversation —”

  “You!” Kandy jabbed her finger toward the amplifier.

  The telepath flinched. “She’s even more growly than Bitsy.”

  “She’s older.” The amplifier shrugged, eyeing the pissed-off werewolf at my side.

  “I swear to God,” Kandy growled. “I’m going to teach them some manners.”

  I quashed a grin, looking pointedly at the amplifier. She squared her shoulders, intoning with exaggeration. “Gabrielle Talbot. Commonly known as Gabby. Amplifier. Sister of Margaret.”

  “Talbot?” I asked. “Daughter of Angelica?”

  Gabby scowled. “Adopted daughter of the sorcerers Stephan and Angelica Talbot.”

  “Margaret Talbot,” the telepath said, picking up practically on top of her sister’s final word. “Known as Peggy. Telepath �
� truth seeker.”

  Gabby shot her a look.

  “Well, there’s no point in lying to a dowser, is there?”

  I didn’t correct Peggy’s assumption that I could wield my skills to distinguish magical abilities that finely.

  Gabby looked from me to Kandy belligerently. “We won’t be used. The Talbots won’t allow it. Never again.”

  Kandy cackled. “You think two sorcerers could stand against Jade Godfrey, dowser, alchemist, wielder of the instruments of assassination, if she wanted you?”

  “Plus, I’m not interested in using anyone,” I said mildly.

  “Not the point,” Kandy said. “It’s the principle. They come into your territory and question your authority.”

  Peggy looked stricken. “We certainly weren’t.”

  “Henry Calhoun said we’d be safe here,” Gabby said quietly.

  That gave Kandy pause. She glanced over at me.

  I nodded.

  “Henry sent you to Vancouver?” the werewolf asked.

  Gabby and Peggy nodded in perfect unison.

  Kandy grumbled under her breath, retrieving her phone from her back pocket and opening her texting app. I had a feeling there would be T-shirts for the amplifier and the telepath in the near future.

  Kandy’s self-assigned pack was rapidly expanding. First Rochelle and Beau, then Mory — though the necromancer might have nominally been under the werewolf’s protection first. Then a fledgling vampire, and now an amplifier and a telepath. If Kandy ever needed to invade a small country, she was collecting the army with which to do so. With at least a dozen more years of training, of course. And that wasn’t even including Drake, Warner, and me.

  Either that or the US Marshal, Henry Calhoun, who most assuredly belonged to Kandy by way of her bite and the transfer of magic that had come with it, was about to get an earful.

  I gestured toward the green-haired werewolf. “Kandy, enforcer of the West Coast North American Pack.”

  Gabby and Peggy exchanged another look. Then, by seemingly mutual decision, Peggy spoke. “The pack has a presence in Vancouver?”

  Kandy paused her texting to growl. “Why do you care?”

  Neither Gabby or Peggy answered.