by Carmen Caine
I took a hasty step back as Lucian whirled to de-spell Heath.
A moment later, the pretentious Lord Rowle reasserted himself to bark orders once again. “Stay alert. They won’t see us until we’re inside. I’ll lay a snare the first chance I get, but this time, I’m not to be fully relied upon. Do you understand?” He peered at us from under stern, dark brows.
“Loud and clear,” Heath rumbled with a half growl, shifting into full wolf mode, a great gray brute of a beast about the size of a pony.
They didn’t wait for me. Lucian flashed up the stairs with vampiric speed as Heath bounded up behind. I hurried after them, but the moment I drew abreast of Tabitha, I found my path blocked once again.
Lucian’s arm had been like steel. Tabitha’s felt like running straight into a brick wall. And she had scales. Thick green scales. They covered her arm, down to the very, very long claws where her fingers had been.
So, this must be the true firedrake.
“What’s this?” her voice shrilled as she inspected me with only the whites of her eyes.
I licked my lips nervously. “What’s up?” Drakes were intimidating. As. Hell. I half expected a forked tongue to flicker out of her mouth.
“On your hand.” Tabitha dropped her pupil-free gaze to my fingers. “That ring. It’s Lady Elizabeth’s ring. It must be worn only by Lucian’s bride.”
I blinked, startled. I’d honestly forgotten I’d even had the thing on, but I was hardly going to talk about it right now. “Don’t lose sleep over it,” I said, gingerly lifting her green-scaled arm enough to limbo under it to the other side. “Ask Lucian. He’ll explain.”
“Be assured that he will,” she vowed so softly, I hardly heard it.
She followed me as I closed the distance to where Lucian and Heath waited impatiently in the elevator. We hustled inside, but as the doors shut, two men emerged from the darkness nearby and walked right past us, obviously oblivious to our presence.
“Just Culpepper and Tony left,” one of them said.
“Good,” the other answered. “We’ll regroup at Location Eight by midnight.”
The doors sealed shut, cutting their conversation short.
“Just two left? How fortunate for us.” Lucian chuckled. It wasn’t a nice laugh, more like a dastardly villainous one. “Fate smiles at last.”
I didn’t have time to probe further. It was a zippy elevator. The doors sprang open onto a third floor decorated just like the lobby. Red-velvet wallpaper. Walnut trim and paneling. One light bulb for the entire corridor. Clearly, they didn’t pay much of a monthly electric bill here.
“Ready?” Lucian asked. “The imp said the last door on the right.”
I really don’t know why he even asked. Without even waiting for a response, he was out of the elevator and striding down the hall with purpose.
Heath and Tabitha were close behind.
I hurried after them, but mention of ‘the imp’ reminded me that I hadn’t seen my trouble-causing puff of smoke since I’d stepped foot in the theater. Most likely, he’d slipped away. But even so, I executed a quick pat down of my collar area and pockets. To my surprise, I found him at the bottom of my back left pocket. Catching him by the toes, I reeled him into my palm as I joined the others.
“Looks like a normal door,” Heath was saying.
“Cass?” Lucian arched a brow my direction.
Casting him a sour look, I inhaled deeply. “All clear.”
As Lucian nodded and turned away, I focused my attention on Ricky. He was holding unusually still, but I could feel him breathing, and the big black ears that had popped out between my fingers were flicking this way and that.
Bringing him up to my face, I scolded, “Hey, get to work.”
His little body shuddered, and his head popped up between my fingers. One eye opened to glare at me. “I say, what’s this?” he grouched back. “Waking a chap up from a much deserved nap?”
I snorted. Sleeping? Really? How could he even think of sleeping in such circumstances, but any exchange we might have had was cut short by Lucian’s announcement of, “Be ready on three.”
It was a fast three. Less than a second later, the door blew apart with a loud bang and a puff of acrid smoke—only to reveal another door behind it, a steel one complete with a hi-tech palm scanner.
“Careful there, guvnor,” Ricky piped up from somewhere at the top of my head. “It’s ultra-sensitive. One muck up and the thing blows the entire floor.”
Lucian didn’t even hesitate. Without turning, he reached behind his back and grabbed my arm. “Cassidy, come here.”
“Crud, no!” I balked, digging my heels in. “I’m done with this bait and bomb-sniffing gig.”
He turned to face me then, a dark gleam of amusement dancing in his pale eyes. “Really, Cass, what kind of man do you think I am?” He gripped my arm tighter, and I saw then that he’d merely begun to wave his other hand over my sleeve. “Just lifting the print, sweet thing. A shortcut.”
I frowned, watching as a shimmer of sparkles rose from my jacket to bathe his palm in glowing light.
“There,” he said, satisfied. “We’re lucky he touched you. Saved us some time, though your imp could’ve mentioned this little factoid before we’d gotten this far.” He cast a dark look of disapproval at the top of my head.
Ricky grumbled something in reply as he slid down my neck and took up residence behind my collar once again. I didn’t hear it all, but I caught a few choice words, amongst them: “hoity-toity” and “toffee-nosed prig”.
If Lucian heard, he gave no indication. Turning back to the palm scanner, he extended his glowing hand.
I winced, half inclined to run as the scanner mulled over his identity. But then, the door clicked as a soft feminine voice murmured from a ceiling speaker, “Access granted.”
“Right then,” Lucian murmured, obviously pleased with himself. “It’s show time.”
An Unexpected Find
And what a show it was. Lucian clearly had a penchant for flare. Kicking the door back on its hinges, he stormed through, disappearing into the complex, his deep baritone thundering harsh syllables that just plain sounded dangerous all by themselves. There was a flash of bright light—of the blinding, retina-burning kind. The floor beneath my feet rolled. Glass shattered. A cloud of blue smoke mushroomed through the doorway as Lucian’s tone shifted into a deep, wicked laugh, bouncing off of the walls in a crescendo of dark delight. It was absolutely terrifying. A laugh designed to strike fear in the hearts of any who heard it. As the last echo of that intimidating display faded, the warlock himself stepped out of the curling billows of smoke to dust his hands with a distinct smile of satisfaction.
“That will do,” he said, obviously pleased with his handiwork. “They’ll remain stunned for quite some time.”
“I’ll find Culpepper,” Heath volunteered, bounding off into the lifting haze.
“Aren’t the cops going to come running?” I asked, pointing to the floor. Surely, the people in the theater below were stampeding for the exits. The police had to already be on their way. Not to mention news cameras.
Lucian’s pale eyes sparked with scornful amusement. “No one hears, sees, or even smells what I don’t want them to,” he bragged.
Yeah. Right. Until his wards dipped again. Stepping up to him, I rapped my knuckles against his chest, murmuring dryly, “Yep, that pompous ego’s alive and well.”
A cool smile of disdain curled his lip, but I lost interest in further banter. I’d caught a glimpse of the destruction. It was the first time I’d witnessed the damage a single warlock could do. It looked like a bomb had detonated in the very center of the place with every interior window pulverized into sand, every door imploded, and every piece of furniture flattened into a pancake. Buzzing, sparking wires looped down from the ceiling, and the stench of burning electrical wires permeated the air.
“Lucian, quick, man!” Heath called from the recesses of a darkened corridor.
We took off a
t a dead run.
The werewolf crouched before a door, the ridge of his fur raised on alert and his ears pinned back. “There,” he growled, twitching his nose at the only unharmed door in the entire hallway. “Culpepper’s in there.”
Odd that it hadn’t been damaged. And odd that I couldn’t smell anything. “Really?” I murmured a bit skeptically.
That made them pause. Enough for Lucian to motion me to the forefront, anyway.
Whatever.
“You try,” he suggested with a sardonic lift of a brow.
I took another deep breath. “Nope,” I confirmed. “Can’t smell a thing.”
His eyes narrowed into shrewd calculating slits. “Finally,” he muttered, reaching over my shoulder to slam the door back with the heel of his hand.
The door flew back on its hinges, revealing the office I’d seen in Ricky’s photos. Muted colors. Modern IKEA desk furniture. A printer, one of those huge office floor models. Several computers. Efficient and functional, no frills. But I scarcely noticed the surroundings.
Straight ahead, with his back to us and still staring at a computer monitor sat Culpepper. He wasn’t moving. He sat there on his rolling office chair, one hand half-raised, the other holding a pencil, looking very much like one of those figures in a Madame Tussauds wax museum.
“Still nothing?” Lucian drilled from behind.
Right. He considered me the team bomb-sniffer. We needed to have a little tête-à-tête about that. I glanced around. It didn’t seem particularly dangerous. Straightening my shoulders, I stepped inside—and found myself nearly flattened by that spicy, unique spider-scent.
“Spiders,” I gasped, battling the impulse to run. “A lot of them.”
Heath growled.
Lucian whistled between his teeth. “Guarding or spying?” he asked, joining me with a strange maniacal gleam in his pale eyes.
I shrugged. “Does it matter? They’re against us either way.”
“Catch one,” he ordered. “And don’t kill it this time. I need to track the spell.”
Yeah, that mad glint made sense now. “I see why you go through spellfinders so fast,” I observed in a withering tone.
He chuckled. “Catch that spider,” was all he said and then turned away, motioning Heath over to where Culpepper sat.
I wasn’t too keen on catching one of the many-legged suckers, but with the apparent thousands lurking in the room, I figured it wouldn’t be too hard. There was so much mana, it was hard to function. As I followed a particularly pungent trail towards the wall, Heath rolled Culpepper aside and shifting back to his human form, began an inspection of the computer with Lucian hovering over his shoulder.
“Can’t be,” Lucian grunted. “Just the one shipment? There’s got to be more.”
Their voices faded into background buzz as the strong spider scent got even stronger to hijack my full attention. That concentration of mana was beyond unusual. I’d never experienced anything like it, even in the Nether Reaches’ mana pools. It made my stomach roil. A sudden pain shot across the back of my head. My eyes began to burn.
“Wake up, Ricky,” I hissed, stumbling to a stop. “Something’s up.”
The imp’s soft body slid up to curl around my neck like a smoke stole. But he didn’t offer any words of wisdom. Instead, he giggled, and then straddling my neck like he was settling into a saddle, he seized my ears and proceeded to use them like reins, yanking my head to the left. “Tally-ho, Silver!” he chirped gleefully.
I scowled. “Go back to sleep.” What had I been thinking? Help? From him?
An acute wave of nausea rolled over me again. I grimaced and closed my eyes, attempting to control it, but it only grew stronger. It had to be a spell. Lucian had warned me I was unusually susceptible to such things. Almost as if in confirmation, an image flitted across my mind. Gray eyes filled with evil amusement. A hand, the fingers reaching out for me. And then, the echo of a gloating laugh.
Dizziness gripped me, but a new sensation rose to counteract it. A soft cool healing. The Tiger Balm tingling that I’d experienced during my recovery from journeying into the Nether Reaches.
The gray eyes still watching me narrowed in alarm, and then vanished, along with the seeking fingers and the laugh.
A moment later, the nausea disappeared as well.
My eyes flew open. Surprised, I whirled towards Lucian, but he was still hunkered over Heath’s shoulder, eyes glued to the monitor.
They caught the movement and looked over, asking in unison. “What is it?”
I lifted a calculating brow.
“Get to work,” Lucian ordered, complete with a scowl.
Right. He certainly wasn’t the source of that Tiger Balm sensation.
“Straight ahead, Silver, there’s a good sport!” Ricky yapped, yanking my ear further to the left and spurring me on with a kick of his smoke heel. “Smashing fun, mate.”
Yeah, the imp certainly wasn’t, either. Even though the manual I’d read in Venice had postulated elite imps could heal, those powerful creatures were rare. Legendary rumors, really. Obviously, the turmeric-addicted puff of smoke pretending I was his horse didn’t fall into that category.
Shrugging it off as some latent jagger skill to be analyzed after the immediate crisis, I focused on the job at hand and inhaled again.
The foul odor of spider overshadowed everything else in the room, and now that the nausea had vanished, the major source of the stench obviously originated from behind the printer. Quite coincidentally, I was pointed the right direction.
With Ricky chortling “straight on” in my ear, I stalked forward, and with one booted foot, shoved the printer aside. It rolled back a few feet, enough to reveal a small shoebox under the electrical outlet.
Curious, I flipped the lid off with my toe.
“Cripes!” I gasped, recoiling.
“What is it?” Lucian and Heath bombarded me at once.
Footsteps pounded my way, but I only had eyes for the shoebox.
It was filled to the brim with spiders, writhing in a disturbingly squirming repulsive mass. So many little eyes zeroed in on me. I shuddered, almost feeling their tiny legs creeping over my flesh. I didn’t like spiders very much, but I could tolerate them—normal ones, anyway. However, these weren’t your average arachnid. These were the many-legged minions of some gray-eyed witch.
Again, the mana came at me in waves, a thousand lancing points of pain.
“Stand back,” Lucian hissed. “There’s sorcery here. Ancient sorcery.”
I hardly heard him. The mana was so thick, threatening to overwhelm me once again. I raised an instinctive hand in self-defense—and froze. I felt them then. Tiny feather-light channels of mana slithered through the air, thinner than a single strand of spider silk. Several of them fell gently across my extended hand, so fragile that even the slightest whisper of a movement would destroy them.
At my side, Lucian’s deep voice chanted some mysterious spell. His eyes had closed, and he clutched an amulet in one hand.
The air felt heavy, so pregnant with mana that I wondered if I’d soon be able to even breathe. My thinking slowed. And in that near stupor, it was as if some long forgotten knowledge arose, guiding my hand to my forehead, my third eye. Instinct made my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth as I focused a rapt attention on the invisible mana strands nestled against my flesh, so vibrant, so alive.
A movie began to play in my mind’s eye then. Crystal clear. But in reverse. I zoomed back along the sidewalk darting through the feet of pedestrians walking backwards through Times Square, and then up the side of the wall, swinging across a few street signs to ride backwards on the back of a blue van. It was all low, hugging the ground, clearly from the spider point-of-view. I kept traveling back to Park Avenue, to a large brick building with a green door. The door knob was unique. A large, brass gargoyle with a wide open mouth. A mouth many spiders were crawling out of.
I zipped inside, following the trail of spiders marching
in lines like ants, to where a mysterious woman sat, wearing a medieval-style hooded blue cloak. She jerked, accidentally knocking the hood back from her face, revealing gray eyes, a heart-shaped flawless face, and honey-blonde hair.
A large dark-haired tarantula crouched above her ear like a flower.
The woman stared at me for a moment, and then quickly drew her hood back over her face. She turned away, but not before I saw the star-shaped scar on the back of her hand.
The image wavered.
At my side, Lucian’s voice rose.
The woman reappeared in my mind then, or just the bottom half of her face anyway. I watched her pink lips open. I saw more than heard the word: moarte.
The effect was immediate.
Spiders. They appeared from all around me, dropping from the ceiling, bubbling up from the baseboards, and leaping out from under every nook and cranny.
The mana was too much. I could drown in its sickening stench. But before I could even let out one gurgling gasp, Lucian’s baritone cracked through the air.
There was a brilliant flash of light.
I heard their collective hiss as they died, spiders in all shapes and sizes, crumbling into dust along with the heavy, overwhelming odor that had threatened to undo me.
All spiders, except one. I could still smell and touch the single strand of mana coming from the shoebox.
Curious, I glanced down.
The shoebox was filled to the brim with ash, but something under it moved.
“At last,” Lucian breathed at my side.
As I watched, a small blue figure emerged, covered in dust. It was the warlock’s ward, the blue troll he used to protect the House of Rowle. But there was something wrong with it. Its skin had taken on a waxen sheen, giving it the appearance of a typical plastic figurine more than a magical vessel belonging to a powerful warlock.
Lucian caught his breath.
I saw the legs then. The hairy tarantula legs, climbing up the back of the doll.
I didn’t hesitate. My blade flew through the air, spearing the spider straight in the gut and pinning it to the wall with a disturbingly squelching thud.
