Consort of Pain

by Eva Chase

  I fired two more shots, my back against the bus, and then Naomi dodged into my line of fire. Gabriel leapt in to tackle a woman near the edge of the fray. Fuck. I couldn’t keep shooting when I was as likely to hit one of us as one of them.

  I shoved the pistol into the back of my jeans and hurled myself into the fight. A guy with one of those glowing batons charged at me. I could tell in an instant that he wasn’t used to any kind of hand-to-hand fighting. I ducked under the thrust of his baton and elbowed him in the gut.

  He staggered backward. I didn’t give him a second to recover. Ramming into him with my shoulder, I knocked him right to the ground. My hand lashed out and yanked the baton from his grasp, sending it rattling under the bus.

  The guy tried to shove himself up and me off him, but I was faster. I whipped the pistol out and pointed it at his forehead. He froze.

  Yeah. This dude didn’t have any magic outside of that glorified wand to protect himself with. Nothing that would block a bullet from entering his brain. Maybe he was rethinking this whole career path he was on right now.

  Shouts and sizzles of magic carried around me, but I didn’t risk looking away from my captive for a second.

  “Who sent you here?” I said, jamming the muzzle of the gun against his forehead. “Tell me every name you know that’s in on this mission.”

  The guy stared back at me with his mouth clamped tight.

  “Come on,” I said. “Just one or two, and maybe you’ll walk away from here.”

  When he didn’t answer, I waggled the gun. “Or you could tell me about this Cliff you all think is so important.”

  His eyes twitched with a flicker of panic. Huh. I leaned in, and he spat out at me, “I don’t know anything about what happens at The Cliff. But even if I did, I’d let you kill me before I told you. You think there aren’t worse things that could happen to me? The people I work for have been very clear.”

  Maybe he’d weigh his options a little differently if I started with his kneecaps. I hesitated, wondering if that was the direction I wanted to go in—if I wanted to be the kind of guy who would shoot someone lying helpless to try to get an answer from them, if I even could be that kind of guy—and a wave of magic resounded across the freeway with the force of a sonic boom.

  It jostled me off the guy, and it sent the guy’s body slamming even more solidly into the pavement. His head lolled, his muscles going limp. Not dead, I realized at the rise of his chest. Just unconscious.

  “I think we knocked them all out,” Rose said, spinning around. Her black hair was wild around her face. Beside her, Naomi wiped a smear of ash and blood from her cheek with the back of her hand. “Let’s go—let’s go! We don’t know how many more might be coming.”

  Seth had taken a nasty blow to the temple that had left a cut seeping blood where he’d been hit in the minivan crash, and Gabriel’s forearm was scorched with a magical burn. As Rose and her cousin cast their best healing spells to mend the damage and Jin set the bus roaring on down the freeway, I found myself sitting next to Greg. The first witching guy I didn’t have any reason to hate. Which didn’t mean I had any idea what to say to him.

  “So, this is what you’ve been dealing with since you broke out of the Assembly prison, is it?” he said after a moment.

  “Yeah. They don’t know when to let up.”

  “They’re obviously very scared of what you could tell people.” He rubbed his mouth, his eyes fixed on Naomi. “It could change a lot.”

  “That’s what Rose says,” I said. “I’ve got to admit, I don’t know a whole lot about the political side of things. I’m here for her.”

  One side of his mouth quirked up. “I know that feeling. Naomi wasn’t going to let Rose head back into the fray alone.” His gaze slid to me. “We got a couple of good ones, didn’t we?”

  “If by good you mean keeping our lives way too exciting,” I said, but I didn’t really want to joke about it. “Yeah,” I added. “It looks like we did.”

  From Greg’s expression as he turned back to watch his consort, he didn’t much care how much danger she dragged him into. Well, I knew that feeling too.

  I’d take a fighter over a pushover any day.

  “Do you really think Aunt Irene tipped off the Assembly?” Rose said to Naomi as she straightened up. She left her hand resting fondly on Seth’s short-cropped hair, just above the skin she’d sealed.

  “I don’t know,” Naomi said. “My mom wasn’t very clear—I didn’t really have time to ask her with everything happening so fast. And now I’m kind of scared to text her anything, even talking vaguely the way I was before.” She let out a sharp breath. “All I know is that she caught Aunt Irene in the house with her—my mom’s—phone. Irene saw that last text from me about reaching the border. And when Mom confronted her, Aunt Irene said something that made her worried.”

  “Why would she do that?” Ky said, frowning.

  Naomi’s head drooped. “I don’t know. Maybe in some weird way she thinks she’s protecting the family. The rest of it, other than us, I mean. I’m sure she found some way to justify it to herself. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not as if I’m heading back home.”

  “You thought we could trust her,” Rose said.

  “I never thought she’d go this far. But I guess we’ve never been in a situation like this for me to know. I’m sorry.”

  “No!” Rose touched her cousin’s arm. “I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying—I know it feels awful. Thinking you knew someone better than that. After what happened with my dad… Anyway, maybe your mom misunderstood.”

  Even after everything she'd been through, my angel was willing to give these people the benefit of the doubt. My hands clenched at my sides. If I had my way, after everything they'd already put her through, we'd burn all of them down—the entire Assembly, every part of this awful witching society of hers except maybe the two of them with us...

  Rose turned toward me then, with a slightly pained smile that nonetheless sent a piercing sensation through me. Suddenly I was remembering her yesterday, open and vulnerable, asking us to trust her. My throat tightened.

  I wanted to burn everything down, but this was her fight more than mine. And she still wanted to salvage some of this witching world. She still saw hope in it.

  Maybe I could offer something more than fire, if that was what she needed.

  "I tried to question the guy I tackled," I said. "He got pretty edgy when I asked about The Cliff. But I'm pretty sure he doesn't know any details. The way he was talking, there's really nothing this faction of your Assembly cares about more than keeping their secrets. He was ready to let me kill him for things he didn't even know."

  Rose nodded. "If their conspiracy to steal witches' power ever got out, every member of that faction would lose everything. And we don't even know why they're doing it, what they might stand to lose there."

  "Well, I'm thinking that’s a whole lot of leverage right there," I said. "We don't know if we can get this proof, at least not right now. Not soon enough to save our lives. But there might be a way we can make them back off without it."

  Gabriel cocked his head. "What do you mean?"

  "You ever hear the term 'mutually assured destruction'? Both sides could destroy the other, but they agree not to, to save themselves.” I motioned toward the fallen bodies now far behind us on the freeway. “If we can make them believe we have enough to bring them down, we can bargain based on that. If they care that much about saving their skins, we might never need to reveal the bluff."

  "I want to take them down, though," Rose said.

  "But if we can't find enough right away to convince the rest of your society that your story is true, a deal like that could at least buy us some time," Seth said. "It's a backup plan."

  "Yeah." I grinned. "So maybe it's not such a bad thing they know we're here. All we have to do is make it to that 'Cliff,' and they'll wet their pants trying to contain what we might know."

  Chapter Twenty-Fiv
e

  Rose

  We parked on the main street of the little town that was home to the newspaper with the article on the Frankford family’s property, and within fifteen minutes Gabriel had managed to chat the exact location of that property out of someone. He tipped his head to the elderly lady he’d struck up a conversation with outside a cheese shop and ambled back to me.

  “It’s about five miles north up the coast,” he said. “‘Not much to look at,’ according to her.”

  “If there’s something important up that way, I’m sure there’s some kind of protection on the property,” I said. “Presumably at least partly magical.”

  “Which is why it’s a good thing we’ve got two witches on our side now, huh?” he said with his usual smile, but then his gaze flicked away from me to scan our surroundings warily.

  “We’ve better get going,” I said. I waved to Naomi, who’d gone with a few of the guys to grab some food at the local café. “If that enforcer Damon questioned mentions we were asking about The Cliff, they’ll be coming out here after us with guns blazing. Metaphorically.”

  “I’d rather deal with guns than some of the magic they’ve got at their disposal,” Gabriel said.

  We all piled back into the bus where Jin was adding a few more glyphs by the windows and Kyler was tapping away on his laptop. “I still haven’t found any way to get deeper into the network from a remote link,” Ky said.

  “Maybe we won’t even need that,” Damon said, dropping onto the bench beside him. “Maybe we’ll find everything we need to shut those assholes down at this cliff.” He didn’t sound all that optimistic.

  Gabriel took the driver’s seat and revved the engine. I sat down next to Naomi.

  “Anyone guarding the place, any enforcers that come after us, we use the same spell we did on the freeway,” I said. “Knock ‘em out. All we need is to get in there, see what we can find, and get right back out.”

  My cousin nodded. “It worked back there.” She raised one eyebrow at me. “I can understand why they’re worried about you being on the loose, Rose. I’ve never seen any witch who can wield magic with as much force as you do. I don’t know if it’s the mixing of the Levesque and Hallowell genes or having five consorts supporting you or what, but they picked the wrong witch to mess with when they took you on.”

  I laughed haltingly. “I think that’s why they took me on. Why they wanted control over my magic.” At least, that was what Celestine had said. I leaned my head back against the hard surface of the window behind me. “I don’t know why Dad wanted to marry a Levesque in the first place if he was going to be so scared of how powerful their kids might be.”

  “Maybe they really were in love for a little while,” Naomi said. “Like in one of those romance books. If those are even remotely accurate, people do some pretty stupid things when they’re caught up in that initial rush of emotion. And then sometimes they do even stupider things if they wake up and realize their actions had more consequences than they considered.”

  “This should be the place up here,” Gabriel said with a motion toward the windshield. “That driveway will take us—no, better not to go down there.”

  My head jerked around at his last words, the abrupt change in tone. At the same moment, magic tingled over my skin.

  “There are wards,” I said. “To divert anyone who considers coming to visit. Slow down before you reach the driveway.”

  I focused my attention inward, to the bonds that thrummed between me and each of my consorts. With a few twitches of my hands, I directed some of my strength through those connections into them, bolstering the defenses I’d already built around them. Adding an extra tread to dispel the compulsion of that ward more directly.

  Gabriel shook his head. “That felt… really odd,” he said. “We do want to go down there, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just keep taking it slow. I doubt those wards are the only layer of protection.”

  Naomi and I moved to stand next to him, peering through the windshield as we turned west toward the Frankford property. A stretch of trees hid the actual coastline, but the air the fan was pulling in from outside carried a hint of salt and wet rock. I gripped the railing by the steps. A faint quiver touched my skin.

  “Stop!” I shouted. Gabriel hit the brakes. The second I had solid footing, I was whipping up the spell I’d used before, the one that seemed to smack the consciousness right out of our enemies’ heads. Naomi whirled her hands beside me, propelling her magic to me to add to the heft of my casting.

  A spell from outside hit the windshield, sending a crack down the middle of it. The whole thing probably would have shattered if not for Jin’s painted reinforcements. A few more blasts of magic rattled the metal shell around the engine.

  Before the unseen guards could throw anything at us strong enough to break down the whole bus, I hurled my spell forward. I felt rather than saw several minds go dark. A breath stuttered out of me.

  “It’s done,” I said. “We can keep going. Let’s hurry now. I’ll keep watching in case there are more guards.”

  How many enforcers did this faction of the Assembly have at their disposal? I couldn’t imagine they’d ever had to deal with a situation quite like this before. It might be the same ones coming after us over and over. Weren’t they getting worn down?

  Maybe they were. If they’d known exactly what they were dealing with when they’d first imprisoned us, if they’d shored up their defenses enough then, we might not ever have escaped. And from that moment, in some ways I’d had the upper hand. That was the only reason we’d made it this far.

  But if we didn’t end this conflict soon, I was going to get worn out. And no matter how powerful I was, there were a lot more of them than of me.

  We passed a tall but graying clapboard house that hardly looked like high witch society style. I wondered if the Frankfords had ever spent much time out here. If it was a place they’d rather no one asked about or tried to see, it was probably better not to put too much work into it.

  The driveway skirted the line of trees and then looped around them to a small parking lot. The span of packed earth was empty—I didn’t know where the guards had left the vehicles they’d come on. The edge of the cliff was visible now: a ragged line of slate-gray rock jutting beyond the sparse grass toward the foamy blue expanse of the ocean.

  The sky overhead was gray as the rocks, clouds dimming the afternoon sunlight. As I stepped out, cool droplets flecked my face. I wasn’t totally sure whether they were spit from above or spray the breeze had swept off the far-below waves. The crash of the surf hissed at the base of the cliff.

  “Here we are,” Greg said, looking around. “What now?”

  With my hands raised, ready to begin a magicking, I crept to the cliff. I couldn’t make out anything below except the thrashing waves against a rocky shoreline, but farther along, a notch was cut into the cliff edge.

  “I think there’s a path there,” I said, pointing. “About half a mile farther along. It must lead down the cliff.”

  We hurried over with the salty wind licking over us. It might have been a pretty view on a sunny day, but today’s clouds only made the scenery look ominous. The grass was so sparse I couldn’t tell how well-traveled the route we were taking might be. Certainly this didn’t seem like a place many people were likely to casually wander through, even without a magic spell repelling them.

  As we came up on the notch I’d seen, it became clearer that it was indeed a path carved into the cliff face. A narrow ledge slanted sharply down along the otherwise stark drop. I paused at the top of it and looked at my companions.

  “I have to go down. Whatever’s waiting down there…” If it was the threat Gabriel’s enforcer had seemed to think it was, I was better equipped to deal with it than anyone else here.

  “You can’t go alone,” Damon said. “I’m not getting left behind.”

  Gabriel had turned to Ky in hushed conversation. “Why don’t Damon and I go with
you?” he said a moment later. “Everyone else can stand guard up here, ready to shout a warning if the enforcers launch another attack.”

  I glanced at Naomi. “Are you okay with that plan?” She was the one who’d be providing most of the defense if it came to that.

  She nodded, her mouth set in a defiant line. “I won’t let them get past me.” Greg reached to squeeze her hand, and she shot him a tight smile.

  “Let’s get this over with then,” I said, and took the first step down the path. I wasn’t letting any of my consorts act as my shield.

  We picked our way along the descending ledge one by one. In no time at all, the top of the cliff and the people we’d left there disappeared from view and hearing. The warble of the wind and the roar of the surf drowned out everything else.

  I only noticed the trap because I was so intent on setting my feet securely on the rough stone. A patch of rock just ahead of me shivered with a magical haze, and I stopped in my tracks, holding out my arm to halt Gabriel and Damon. Damon pulled out his pistol, but it wasn’t as if he could shoot through a spell.

  I studied the patch of magic, absorbing the wisps of energy it gave off into the air. Then I slid my foot forward with a sweep of my arm. The strands of the spell fractured apart and spun off into the air. The heat that wafted over me with their leaving suggested we’d have been burned to a crisp if the spell had been truly activated.

  A shadow on the cliff face came into view up ahead. I eased down the last several feet to the opening of a cave, barely wide enough for me to step inside without brushing both my shoulders.

  The guys squeezed in after me. A dim stream of daylight followed us down a passage about ten feet long. Our shoes rapped against the stone as we emerged into a larger cavern. Huge stalactites and stalagmites loomed from the ceiling and floor around us. Water dripped somewhere distant.

  The space should have been dark and cool, but warmth emanated from a ruddy light at the far end of the cavern. Warmth and a pulse of energy so off-kilter it made my stomach turn.