Stray Magic

by Kelly Meding

  I didn’t notice the stack of neatly folded clothes on the back of the toilet until Jaxon knelt to finish drying my feet. Someone had dug them out for me. As much as I wanted to salvage a little dignity, I let Jaxon help me dress. Underwear and bra, jeans and a t-shirt, and a pair of fuzzy socks.

  He untied the plastic bag and rewrapped my bandages, giving me a brief look at the spider bite. The twin punctures were wider than I remembered, open sores still oozing clear, greenish liquid. Magic venom took a long time to go away, apparently, vampire blood or not. My fingers seemed less swollen, though, a little more flexible.

  Jaxon really won points by brushing my damp hair and then securing it in a ponytail. It wasn’t a braid, but it was up and out of my face.

  “I draw the line at doing your makeup,” he said.

  I laughed. “Me, too, actually. I don’t need you poking me in the eye with a mascara wand.” Not that I wore mascara. Maybe it was me, but even the expensive waterproof stuff ran and gave me raccoon eyes.

  His smile disappeared behind a pensive frown. A tiny glimmer of fear flashed in his hazel eyes. “You really did scare the hell out of me.”

  “I scared the hell out of myself.” I couldn’t believe I’d admitted that out loud.

  “You mean so much to me, Shi. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”

  I failed to control the burst of warm fuzzies that buzzed around my heart. “I’m fine.”

  “You almost weren’t.”

  “I know.”

  Something shifted between us, invisible but no less powerful. An acknowledgement of old feelings. An admission of how close to dying I really had come today. Jaxon still meant a great deal to me, too, but I’d never say it out loud. Not even when the words were perched on the tip of my traitorous tongue, ready to leap off and be spoken.

  To cover, I asked, “So you get anything useful from the Homme Alpha of California?”

  He opened the bathroom door, allowing some of the moist air to escape and be replaced by a whoosh of coolness. It evaporated the residual moisture on my skin. “Same basic info we got from the Dame,” he replied as I followed him into the hallway. “All of the mated pairs were infertile. The only oddity was one of the pairs had reproduced, but their three children all died young for no apparent reason. And I don’t mean SIDS young, I mean two-and four-year-olds who died in their sleep.”

  “That’s strange, right?”

  “More than strange, and the Pack code forbids autopsies, so no one could figure out what killed them.”

  “Did we get names?”

  “Yeah, K.I.M.’s got all of the relevant info. We’ve got her digging up anything she can find on those three kids who died. Where they were born, who the parents knew, the doctor who signed the death certificates.”

  “Did the Homme Alpha think foul play was involved?”

  “For the kids? He said no, only that the deaths were tragic and puzzling, as were the disappearances of all of his wolves.”

  “In other words, butt out of Pack business.”

  “Yeah.”

  We’d wandered slowly down the hall and reached the top of the stairs. I grimaced. Jaxon looped an arm around my waist without asking, and we descended the stairs together, one at a time. Instead of tiring me, each foot forward woke up my inner reserves of strength. My hand ached less. Maybe I was coming out of this.

  We reached bottom and he let go. I didn’t want him to, but he did. The enticing fragrance of cooking meat greeted me. Lunchtime. I walked into the living room on my own steam and was greeted by four sets of eyeballs, all swiveling in my direction. Novak and Kathleen lounged on the sofa, both munching away on hamburgers and potato chips. Dad was just beyond them, poring over papers spread out on the conference table. Tennyson stood stiffly somewhere in between, back against the wall, arms crossed over his chest like a sentry.

  Someone banged a pot in the kitchen, and I finally placed Mom.

  I met Novak’s gaze first. He held it a moment, then nodded. “Jaxon bring you up to speed?” he asked.

  “I gave her the overview,” Jaxon replied.

  “K.I.M. have anything on the werewolf pair whose children all died?” I asked.

  “Working on it,” Novak said. “Hungry? Your mom makes killer burgers.”

  “She gets soup!” Mom shouted from the kitchen.

  Jaxon snickered. I went the childish route and rolled my eyes.

  “Anything from Piotr?” I asked Novak.

  “Guess I’m not his type,” the incubus drawled. “Vamp’s got a good vocabulary of insults, though. Didn’t say much else.”

  “He has not been questioned further,” Tennyson said. “I thought you’d like the next opportunity.”

  How sweet. “Where is he?”

  “In the holding cell you installed in your basement, secured to the bars with several silver chains. He is quite uncomfortable.”

  “Good.”

  Mom strode into the living room with a bamboo tray in her hands, delicately balancing a soup bowl, a glass of orange juice, and a glass of ice water. “Sit down and eat something, Shiloh,” she said. “Get your strength back before you go torture the vampire.”

  She said it the way a normal person’s mother might mention carbing up before a big track meet. And she was wearing her Mom Face, so I dutifully sat in the room’s only unoccupied chair. She put the tray down on my lap, gave me a critical look, then retreated to the kitchen. I sniffed the steaming bowl. Nothing like reheated condensed chicken and stars soup.

  “So I’m guessing Tennyson filled you guys in,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Novak replied. He put his empty plate on the coffee table and picked up a sheet of printed paper. “Did some research on those alchemical symbols.” He passed the paper to me via Kathleen.

  I read it while I gulped down some of the orange juice, its cold, pulpy goodness settling nicely in my empty stomach. Aries stood for decomposition through calcination. Taurus for modification through coagulation, and Sagittarius for modification through ceration (a word I didn’t know). Scorpio was separation through filtration, and Aquarius union through multiplication. For the most part, their relation to necromancy made sense.

  “What does ceration mean?” I asked.

  Novak plucked another sheet of paper off the table. “Adding a liquid to something while heating it, usually resulting in giving the finished product a waxy appearance,” he read off the notes.

  “It’s part of the modification process of the spell,” Tennyson said. “Add it to coagulation, and you have a recipe for preserving dead tissue.”

  “What about those herbs we found in the pentagram room?” I asked. “Anything on those?”

  “Sage, witch hazel, henbane, angelica, tulsi, sweet violets, and the dried powder of several organic compounds.”

  “Such as?”

  “The samples will have to be tested, if we cannot encourage Piotr to tell us.”

  I nodded, then asked Novak, “Any new vamp activity reported?”

  “Atlanta PD has gotten several reports of suspicious lights at an old plantation outside of the city,” he said. “Looks like one of the Masters has brought his line together and is trying to keep a low profile.”

  “A New Orleans plantation would have fit the stereotype better.”

  Kathleen snorted laughter.

  I used my fingers to fish a few ice cubes out of the water glass, then dumped them into the still-steaming soup. I stirred them in while staring at Kathleen’s half-eaten, medium-rare burger. The idea of tiny pasta stars in reconstituted grease-broth was not as appealing as that pink, juicy meat. My stomach gurgled.

  “I don’t suppose we have any way of using the rest of that spider for anything, do we?” I asked. Sipped a spoonful of hot soup.

  “Very little,” Dad said. He gave Tennyson a glare and a wide berth as he joined us in the living room. “My tracking skills are a tad rusty, but I managed enough to know it wasn’t conjured by the vampire you’ve got trussed up
downstairs. And I received serious magical feedback when I tried to trace it to its source. Whoever is pulling these strings, Shi, he’s a powerful puppeteer.”

  I swallowed more soup before retorting, “Yeah, thanks, I kind of got that.”

  “The question more important than who is why,” Kathleen said. “Why blackmail a vampire into teaching necrotic magic to an apprentice? Why kidnap forty-six vampires and twenty-eight werewolves of specific lines or reproductive abilities? Why now? Why here?”

  So many questions and so few answers. Time to get some, bless it. I forced down a few more spoonfuls of soup, but even with the tiny bits of chicken, it wasn’t what my stomach wanted. I drank the rest of the juice, then put the tray on a nearby end table.

  “Let’s go see if Piotr can shed some light on those questions,” I said, standing.

  And then I’m getting a blessed burger.

  The basement wasn’t finished when we took over the house. A rickety set of wood steps had led down into a dirt pit that reeked of soil and mildew. With a little time and elbow grease, we put down a concrete floor, as well as protective wards in all four corners, and replaced the wood stairs with a sturdy aluminum set. The cement block walls were treated and reinforced with the wards. Basements were uncommon this close to sea level, because of flooding dangers, so we lucked into this one. It gave us somewhere to erect a cage of alternating silver and iron bars—guaranteed to trap and hold almost anything—human or otherwise.

  Piotr was secured to the cage’s interior bars by a length of silver chain. His fangs were bared and he was sweating pink. The gagging-sweet odor of seared flesh tickled my nose the closer I drew to the cage. Anywhere the silver touched bare skin it burned.

  Silver chains. Silver bars. All of our specialized silver bullets and knives. The garlic spray only our team used. K.I.M. A high-tech, coded and thumbprinted security system. Had the Marshals’ Office really wrestled this sort of money from the Federal budget? I’d never questioned our house or our gear before; not until I found out Julius had rented a storage unit for a necromancer. Possibly unknowingly, but if he’d known? Had he been paid to keep silent? Had that money gone into this house? Our equipment.

  I truly hoped not.

  Tennyson flanked me closely on my right side, Kathleen on my left. Dad had followed us down, but stayed back near the stairs. Between Piotr and Tennyson, and Kathleen’s vampire half, Dad had to be on revulsion overload.

  I pressed my thumb to the cage’s locking mechanism. It popped open. Piotr finally lifted his head and looked at me. His hooded eyes swam with red sparks and a brief flare of surprise. I stepped inside, taking care to avoid his gaze directly. He was bound physically, but he still had power.

  “I heard you didn’t die,” Piotr said, the disappointment in his voice a living thing. He’d failed big-time, and he knew it.

  “I’m tricky like that,” I replied. “I heard you didn’t feel like talking.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “I think you’ve got plenty to say, and there’s no blood oath keeping you from spilling your guts to me. So I’m guessing there’s something else.”

  Silence.

  “When you broke the oath, you said your debt was fulfilled and your people safe,” I said. “What did you mean?”

  “Exactly as I said.”

  “When Julius rented that storage unit last year, did he know its intended use?”

  Piotr wheezed laughter. “Your incubus attempted to retrieve answers to those questions an hour ago, djinn. What makes you think I’ll tell you?”

  “An hour ago, you weren’t certain I was alive. Your puppeteer is going to be pretty pissed that his plan to kill me didn’t work. Your people may not be as safe as you believe they are.”

  Snaps of green light played in his eyes, combining with the red to create a queer holiday glow. “I cannot stop what is being done to them,” he said so quietly I strained to hear. “As I could not stop it before.”

  “How many have been killed?” Tennyson asked.

  Piotr swung his gaze past me. “My six strongest are dead. I felt them all die.”

  “If you can’t protect them, then what’s stopping you from cooperating?” I asked.

  “I negate their sacrifice by assisting you.”

  “You could save the rest of them.”

  “Unlikely.”

  “But not impossible,” Tennyson said. He appeared on my left side. If he was ill at ease so close to all that silver, he made no indication in his rigid stance and clenched jaw. “Yours are not the only vampires being threatened, Piotr. Other Masters have lost children and their abductor must be stopped.”

  “It is too late,” Piotr said. “The new necromancer will rise, and then it will matter little what you and I try, my brother.”

  “What matters most is that we do try. I will not be manipulated into inaction, not while I have the strength to protect my people. Help us and we may yet save yours.”

  “No.”

  “You’re a coward,” I said.

  The green in Piotr’s eyes drowned beneath a gale of red. “And you are a half-breed, neither human nor djinn. You are of two worlds, and have tasted the blood of a third. I smell his power in you.”

  “Nothing a good laxative won’t cure,” I quipped. “Look, you stay here and work on your grill marks until we solve this thing on our own—which we will, by the way—or you can agree to help us, we’ll let you go, and we’ll try to save your people.”

  “No.”

  “Great Iblis.” I gave Tennyson a frustrated glare. “Are all Masters this stubborn?”

  “He has something yet to lose,” Tennyson said.

  “Like what? A home in Maui?” I reached behind me and Kathleen pressed the handle of a silver blade into my palm. I moved to stand an arm’s length from Piotr, whose gaze was fixed on the gleaming metal. It was the size of a paring knife, its custom blade infused with pure silver, and I held it level with his eyes. “Tell me what I need to know, or we’ll see if your eyeballs regenerate as quickly as other tissue.”

  Most men quail at the idea of having their eyes cleaved from their skulls. Piotr threw back his head—which made a loud, painful crack against the bars—and laughed. Deep, piteous laughter that was equally horrifying and terrifying. “Open my shirt, half-breed,” he snorted. “There is little torture you can devise that will come within half a mile of what I’ve already suffered. Your threats mean nothing.”

  Curiosity drew my blade hand down. I cut through the fabric easily with its sharp tip, exposing Piotr’s sunken chest and belly. It looked like the moon’s surface, pale and pockmarked, as though chunks of flesh had been carved away and the skin healed over before the tissue could reassert itself. My stomach sloshed, rebelling against its liquid contents.

  A low growl filled the basement, and it took me a few seconds to assign its source to Tennyson. “Who did this?” Danger lurked in his voice and his face, anger sharpening every angled feature.

  “The same man who is murdering my people,” Piotr said. “The same man who had me teach his chosen one how to control necrotic magic.”

  “The same man who is kidnapping vampires and werewolves across the country.”

  “Yes.”

  I blinked, shocked Piotr had offered up even that small tidbit. Then I realized Piotr had made the mistake of looking Tennyson directly in the eyes. The two were battling in a silent gazelock, and as the stronger, Tennyson was winning. He was forcing Piotr to answer.

  “Why?” Tennyson asked.

  “I do not know.”

  “Who is this apprentice you taught?”

  More pink sweat popped out on Piotr’s forehead. He lurched against the chains holding him. He ground out, “No one.”

  “Did Julius Almeida know that rental unit was to be used for necrotic magic?”

  “He was paid handsomely to rent it for us.”

  I flinched at that, but we’d finally gotten something useful out of him. Tennyson latched on t
o it and asked, “Paid by whom?”

  “No one.”

  “He was paid to rent the storage unit under his own name, and not told why, so that if it was discovered, it would lead his team to doubt his loyalty to them and tear them apart,” Tennyson said, summarizing perfectly my own thoughts.

  “Yes.”

  “This was Julius Almeida’s only role in recent events, and his death and revenancy were merely additional tools to break apart his team.”

  “He was practice for the apprentice.”

  “So you said. Was my previous statement correct?”

  “No.”

  A ripple of tension swept the room. Behind me, Kathleen shifted as though to strike. I stared at Piotr, while Tennyson merely seemed puzzled. Magic filled the room, so powerful my lungs hitched and threatened to make me cough. Piotr had gathered energy to fight back against Tennyson’s gazelock, and the feedback was stunning. The air snap-crackled, keen and crisp with electricity.

  Julius had been chosen as practice, because he had rented the storage unit, and its discovery would send us running in circles. It would make us suspect him as complicit in the necrotic magic. His death would hurt us. Something else, though, was missing from the list.

  I twisted my head to look behind me. Dad still hung back by the stairs, his face twisted in disgust, practically green from the force of the vampire magic. He caught me staring, saw the question in my eyes. He tapped his forefinger against his temple.

  Think? I was thinking, and blessed hard, too. He repeated the gesture, working too hard against being sick to offer more. Not think. Mind. Sight.

  Crap.

  “Tennyson,” I said. “Ask him about the link created between necromancer and revenant. What sort of control does he have over the revenants he creates?”

  “Answer the lady,” Tennyson said tersely. A fine sheen of pink perspiration had formed on his face, giving his usually ghostly skin an almost normal glow of color. “Can you control the revenant?”

  Piotr roared, a beastly sound that set my teeth on edge. He said something in Russian, then switched to English. “Yes, when it’s awake.”