Consort of Pain

by Eva Chase

  “She answered!” Rose bounded down the stairs to the lower floor of the apartment with an excited light in her dark green eyes. “Margo Elands. She’s all right. She said she can meet me at Wolfe’s Pond Park in a couple hours.”

  I glanced over at my consort with a grin from where I was standing watch by the front window. “Meet you? Pretty sure we’re all along for the ride, angel.”

  “I did mention I’d have company. Probably we shouldn’t be too obvious about it.” She breezed over to give me a quick kiss with an energy that was infectious. I tugged her to me a little harder, stealing a few more seconds with that heavenly mouth. When she drew back, I didn’t think it was just excitement flushing her cheeks.

  “There’s some pizza left from last night,” Gabriel said from the back of the apartment, nodding to the fridge. The greasy cheese smell of the stuff we’d ordered in still lingered in the air. “If you’re not too picky about breakfast.”

  Rose wrinkled her nose as she rolled her shoulders. “Why don’t we go out and grab something on the way to the park? I don’t like how long we’ve been hanging out in the same place.”

  “I haven’t seen any creeps out there,” I said, jabbing my thumb toward the window.

  Kyler looked up from where he’d been sitting at the table with that damn phone of his and a couple other pieces of equipment I didn’t understand that he’d picked up yesterday. “Have you gotten a sense of the Assembly people’s magic again, Rose?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing more than before. But they’ve obviously got techniques we’re not sure of. At least while we’re on the move they can’t surround us. Has everyone gotten enough sleep after all that driving the last couple days?”

  “I’m good,” Jin said, arriving at the bottom of the stairs. He smiled languidly, but his eyes looked alert enough. His damp hair was rumpled as if he’d just rubbed a towel over it. “Nothing like a shower after a long time on the road.”

  “Is Seth up?” Rose asked.

  “He’s washing up right now.” The artist ambled over to Rose and wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, tucking his chin over her shoulder with a contented sigh.

  Yeah. Contented. That was definitely the word for the glow that seemed to fill the room with all of us here in her presence. I let the warmth of it sit in my chest for a few beats, just absorbing the sensation.

  It was hard to remember when I’d last felt content in the past several years before Rose had returned. Even with those assholes still on our backs, I wouldn’t have given this up for anything.

  But damn if there wasn’t an ache in my chest too, remembering that short time when we’d really thought everything was okay. When we’d had a place that could have been a real home for all of us to share, at least some of the time.

  Fucking bastards. They’d taken that from us. They’d taken it from Rose. All because of their stupid prejudices about guys who hadn’t happened to be born into one of their exclusive families?

  If they thought they were taking anything more from us, they had another thing coming. My gaze dropped to the backpack I’d stuffed my own recent purchases into. If those “enforcers” messed with us again, they were sure as hell going to regret it.

  When Seth had joined us, we headed down to the street. I kept scanning the area as we walked, one hand on the strap of the pack I’d slung over my shoulder. Summer was coming up fast, and even in the middle of the morning you could feel it in the sunny warmth rising between the buildings. The smells of fresh baking drew us into a café a few blocks over.

  We came out full of scones and croissants, still an hour before the scheduled meeting time. Rather than hail a cab just yet, we ambled on down a few of the quieter side streets.

  We’d just crossed the road when an unsettling prickle ran down my back. I glanced around at the same time Rose slowed.

  “Where did everybody go?” I said in a low voice. There’d been other pedestrians scattered along both sides of the street a minute ago. Cars cruising past. Now all of the street in my view was empty. Quiet. In a totally unnatural way.

  We all stopped, gathering close together. Rose made a quick gesture with her hand. The air vibrated with a hint of the spell she must have cast closing around us. The wooden pendant under my shirt quivered against my chest.

  A man stepped out of a side-street, tall and boxy-shouldered, with a hawkish nose and a few streaks of silver in his copper hair. He wore a suit, as if he were going to some fancy business meeting. But I could tell with one look at him that he was part of the Assembly. The bastards practically stunk of snide condescension when they looked at any of us.

  “Stop right there,” Rose said, her voice firm but with a tremble she couldn’t quite quash. I brushed my hand against hers as if to reassure her we were all there with her. My gaze darted along the street.

  Several more figures had emerged at either end—mostly women in the athletic-wear I was starting to associate with the Assembly’s enforcers, but also a couple other men in similar clothes holding thick batons I guessed held some kind of attack spells.

  The hawkish man who’d been approaching us stilled. He clasped his knobby-knuckled hands in front of him.

  “I request a parlay,” he said.

  “A ‘parlay’ while your attack dogs creep up on us?” I said.

  “Just let us go,” Rose said. “I don’t want to fight you, but you know that I can.”

  “I don’t want to fight either,” the man said. “I was simply hoping for the chance to talk with you. To help you understand our position.”

  Kyler snorted, expressing the disbelief I think we were all feeling.

  “I already understand your position,” Rose said, an edge coming into her voice. “You want us all trapped or maybe even dead. The Assembly, or at least your faction of it, has made that very clear.”

  The prick didn’t even try to argue. “Perhaps we could come to alternate terms that are more suitable to both of us.”

  “Oh? Like what?”

  “The enforcers are moving in,” Gabriel murmured. The circle of figures around us had slunk a few steps closer. My spine stiffened. I eased my hand into my backpack, and my fingers closed around a hard metal surface.

  “More discussion on that note is possible, but first we need to confirm the exact nature of the magic you cast on your father and ex-fiancé,” the man said.

  Before he could go on, Rose dismissed him with a flick of her fingers. “No. There’s nothing to discuss there, since you don’t even consider what they were doing to me to be a crime. This is just a distraction to try to take us in without causing too much chaos. But I promise you, if I have to defend myself and my consorts, it won’t be subtle. Do you really want half of Manhattan finding out that witching society exists?”

  Of course. That was why they’d cleared the street. There didn’t seem to be anything her Assembly hated more than the idea of regular people finding out about their secret magic. The hawkish guy’s jaw had tightened. I smiled to myself even though my shoulders stayed tensed. Rose had his number, all right.

  “I’d rather it didn’t come to that,” he said.

  “So would I,” Rose said. “We don’t want to hurt anyone at all, even you. We’d just like to be left alone to live our lives. We aren’t any threat to you if you leave us alone. Is there any chance at all of negotiating that?”

  The man paused, and I could see in his expression that the answer was, No way in hell. Rose must have seen that too, not that she’d probably had much hope in the first place. Her left foot slid slightly behind her in the witch version of a fighting stance.

  The man’s fingers twitched with a gesture so quick I almost didn’t catch it, and the figures around us whirled into motion.

  The air sizzled with waves of magic. My pendant quivered harder against my skin. Rose flung out her arms and swiveled on her feet, throwing out her own magic to shield us, to knock our attackers down.

  My hand jerked from my pack. My pulse thudde
d in my ears.

  One, two, three of the enforcers toppled over at Rose’s strike. But two more were rushing closer, the magic their hands were forming so potent it visibly glowed. Rose spun toward one, and my hand snapped up. I didn’t let myself think, just pulled the trigger.

  The pistol recoiled in my hand with a hitch I’d almost forgotten in the months since I’d last gone to the range for target practice. I’d never had to fire a gun in an actual fight. The shot thundered in the air, and the bullet slammed into the witch’s shoulder. Blood bloomed stark red across her yellow T-shirt.

  The woman cried out. The hawkish man who’d lead the group had whipped around at the sound. When he saw her wound, his face darkened. My gut clenched as he jabbed his hand toward us.

  “Damon,” Seth said through his teeth, but another hail of spells was already descending on us, even faster and sharper than before. Gabriel stumbled to the side, his hand jerking to his temple, and I swung around. Make them regret this. Make them back off. Make them scared of people hearing and coming to see the magic they were throwing around. I didn’t care, as long as I got some of it done.

  I fired off three more shots in quick succession: bang, bang, bang. My aim was shakier now. One bullet clipped a woman’s thigh, another sent up a puff of brick dust where it dinged a shop corner, and the last—the last slammed into the chest of one of the guys waving his magic baton.

  His body crumpled. My stomach flipped over with a lurch, and then our remaining attackers heaved a searing blaze of magic toward us.

  Rose whirled around faster than I’d ever seen her, the air singing with her own magic, but even that wasn’t fast enough. I rocked backward on my feet, little barbs of heat digging through my skull and rattling my thoughts, and Jin yelped at her other side. Rose’s arms whipped out. Her feet pattered against the ground as she moved through the form of her spell, and in another instant the barbs fell away. A wash of cold swept away from her and collided with the enforcers and the hawkish man, toppling them.

  Jin swore, holding his arm. I caught a glimpse of it: the sleeve of his shirt charred, the skin all down from there mottled with red blisters. An angry red mark slashed across his neck.

  “Come on, come on,” Rose was saying, choked and breathless. “I don’t know how long they’ll be out for. We’ve got to go.”

  She wove her fingers in the air over Jin’s arm with a few darting circles, and the redness faded to a still painful-looking pink. He nodded sharply as if to say that was enough for now, and we all took off around the nearest corner.

  “Put that away,” Seth gritted out beside me.

  The gun. I still had it clutched against my sweating palm. I shoved it in the pack before we came onto the next street. The witches hadn’t cleared that one. Ordinary people were standing all around, many of them staring our way. How much had they seen and heard? Did it even matter now?

  “You should get rid of it completely,” Seth muttered as we hustled past those gaping faces to another street over. “That was the stupidest move I’ve seen from you yet.”

  “I took a couple of them down,” I said.

  “You pissed them off even more,” he said. “Now they think we’re dangerous too. Maybe too dangerous to even try to keep any of us alive.”

  He was just being the same old buzzkill Seth he always was. I told myself that, but my pulse hiccupped as I glanced at Rose.

  She looked back at me, her expression tight. “I know what you meant to do. You were just trying to help protect us. It’s okay.”

  She said that, but my stomach sank anyway, because I could hear the fear in her voice—not of me, I didn’t think, but of what her Assembly might do next. As we ran on, our feet pounding the concrete, the image of the one guy falling with a bullet hole in his chest replayed in my memory.

  I’d had to do it. I’d had to. But my gut sank even lower with each repetition.

  I just had to hope I’d helped things more than hurt them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rose

  I stopped in a little courtyard between a couple of shops. We’d come several blocks, and no reaching whisper of magic had touched me yet. I didn’t know how severely I’d taken down the enforcers, but they obviously weren’t bouncing back quickly.

  My heart was still thumping away twice as fast as normal, adrenaline singing through my veins. The lingering sweetness of blueberry jam from my breakfast had turned sour in my mouth.

  The guys came to a halt around me. I immediately turned to Jin. He was holding his arm a little away from his chest—any contact must have still been painful. Sucking in my breath, I motioned him closer and studied the mottled burns that streaked down his skin from his neck to his wrist.

  “They’re not so bad now,” he said, but the rough note in his voice gave him away. They were hurting him even without any contact.

  “I can do a better job of healing them,” I said. “Now that we’re out of the line of fire.”

  I worked the magic with my hands over his body, knitting together the broken flesh and cooling the sting as well as I could. Jin’s shoulders had come down half an inch by the time I was finished, so I guessed I’d done an all right job.

  He flexed the muscles and turned his arm one way and then the other. “Good as new,” he said with a smile, even though pink marks still mottled his olive-brown skin like scars. I wasn’t sure those would ever fade completely.

  Imagining how much damage that spell might have done if he hadn’t been wearing his protective pendant made my stomach churn.

  “Is anyone else hurt?” I asked, glancing around at the other guys. In the chaos of the fight, I wasn’t sure I’d been able to keep track of everyone’s injuries.

  I got nods all around. Gabriel cleared his throat. “I think maybe we should talk about other lines of fire.” He cocked his head at Damon. “Bringing a gun to a magic fight—maybe something it’d have been good to discuss with the rest of us ahead of time?”

  He said it in his usual calm, almost gentle way of chiding, but Damon immediately bristled. “What, so you all could have freaked out and told me to ditch it? I know I do things differently from the rest of you, but some of the things I’ve learned are actually useful when you’ve got murderous witches after you, you know. I’m probably ten times better prepared for protecting myself against anyone this vicious than any of you are.”

  His voice was brash, but I saw a twitch of his eyelid that made me think he wasn’t as certain as he was trying to sound. Seth had already laid into him about the gun. I wasn’t all that crazy about Damon going around with a weapon like that either—the crack of it firing still jittered through my nerves whenever I remembered it—but it wasn’t as if he’d necessarily hurt our attackers any more than my own magic had. So, who was I to judge, exactly?

  I took Damon’s hand. “I meant what I said before. I’m glad you had it so you could help fight back. I have no idea what the Assembly people after us are going to make of it… but there’s not much we can do about that now, right?”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. His fingers squeezed mine and then let go. There was something pained in his expression that I didn’t like.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He gave me a smile that looked a little forced. “It’ll take more than those bastards to get me down, angel.”

  I didn’t think he’d respond well to being pressed harder, especially when the other guys were already on that job.

  “Can I just say I’d like to know if you picked up any more exciting items from those associates you met up with yesterday?” Kyler said with a tight grin.

  “I got a few pistols,” Damon said. “In case anyone decided they wanted to go into these fights armed too. So we’re not leaving Rose to do all the work.”

  My stomach flipped right over. “Hey,” I said, and waited until he met my eyes again. “I’m not doing all the work anyway. I need you—all of you. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be a miserable slave to a consort who hated me. So don�
��t for one second think you haven’t done enough.”

  “What do we do now?” Seth asked into the silence that followed. “They know we’re in New York. Should we hit the road again?”

  “Where would we go?” Gabriel said. “We’d still have the same problems. We came here because Rose thought there were people who’d help.” He tipped his head to me. “Do you think we should risk meeting up with that woman from the shop?”

  I inhaled and exhaled slowly, gathering my thoughts. “It’s almost time for us to meet her at the park anyway. I don’t think the people after us will attack us again right away—they never have before. They’ll need time to decide on another plan.” One of the few times the Assembly’s bureaucracy had benefitted me. “You’re right. We have to see if we can find people who’ll help us, information we can use against them, or we’ll end up losing no matter where we go. But let’s hurry. If we’re lucky, she’ll get there early and we won’t have to stick around here too long.”

  We flagged a couple of cabs—no way were we all squeezing into one—and I sat on the edge of my seat as the driver wove through the streets and crossed over the bridge back to Staten Island. The taxi dropped us off at the edge of the park.

  A salt-laced breeze blew through the trees from the shoreline I couldn’t see. A few kids were playing on the playground while their parents watched. I checked the signs and led the guys between the scattered trees to a signpost I could see in the distance near a thicker stretch of forest. That was where Margo Elands had said we should meet her.

  When we were close, I motioned for the guys to stop. “I think you should let me wait for her alone. She sounded a little weirded out by the whole public meeting thing… I don’t want her to get overwhelmed.”

  “We’ll be right here if you need us, Sprout,” Gabriel said. Kyler gave me a playful salute.

  Leaving them behind sent a tug through my chest, even though I was only walking about twenty feet away from them. They’d be able to see me the whole time; I’d be able to look over at them. And it wasn’t as if I couldn’t defend myself or was likely to need to against the expert on historical witching oddities.