Stray Magic

by Kelly Meding

  I swallowed, mouth suddenly full of cotton. “Yes, we are in agreement.”

  She extended an elegant, gray-skinned hand. Her fingernails were long, carefully shaped, and the same thick, dark brown as her hooves. I forced myself to shake her hand and not shudder at the cold, tree-bark rough texture of her skin. Hey, I had to feel just as foreign to her touch. I even managed to not wipe my hand on my jeans when she released me. A flare of magic sparked between us, a miniature firework of green and brown and silver lights, sealing the pact we’d made.

  The Green Lady stepped back until several feet distanced us. She held her right hand out, palm down. Mint-colored light glowed from her palm, and an outline etched itself on the rough wood floorboards of the attic. It wasn’t quite a pentagon—only two sides were completely straight lines. The other straight line had a jagged chunk missing. The top lines were mountain-rough, the point flattened. Her light seared the image into the wood with the familiar scent of scorching. A single dot burned itself near the peak.

  Her light ceased. I crouched down to study the image. It was familiar, I just couldn’t place it. A flash of white light removed the scents of flowers and grass, and then she was gone.

  “Perfect,” I muttered.

  Dad peered over my shoulder. He pointed to the right side of the pentagon, where the jagged chunk was missing. “This is familiar to me. If it is a map, this is likely a body of water.”

  “Delaware,” I said. It had to be Delaware. “That’s the Rehoboth and Indian River Bays. We need a map so we can figure out what town she’s showing us.”

  We simplified the plan by using a large sheet of paper to trace the map, then took it downstairs to scan on K.I.M. I set her security settings as high as I could on the search, which ought to alert us if anyone accessed the information—let me know how on top of things Weller really was. Mom and Tennyson had joined us in the conference room by the time K.I.M. spit out her findings: Route 16 outside of Milton, Delaware.

  “Bovine farms?” Tennyson asked.

  “Several,” I replied. “Which works with the images you saw this morning of farms and the odor of cow manure. As evil lairs go, it’s certainly an inconspicuous location. No one goes looking for necromancing chambers on a cow farm.”

  “Indeed.”

  “With such a close location,” Mom said, “I’d have no trouble echoing the magic back to its source.”

  “No way,” I said, in the same moment Dad said, “What?”

  Mom tilted her chin, adopting the Determined Mother look she used to get when I refused to eat my string beans at dinnertime. “I helped you source the first one, Shiloh—”

  “And it almost got you killed.”

  “I know how the magic feels now. I can track it faster than you or your friends, and you know it.”

  “What almost got her killed?” Dad asked, indignation in his tone. Oops. Had I forgotten to tell that part of the story?

  “It was a magical snare, it could have happened to anyone.” Mom waved her hand in the air as if to erase the question.

  “But it didn’t happen to anyone,” I said. “It happened to you. I can’t put you in that kind of danger again, Mom.” I couldn’t risk it, not if she was the one I’d lose my memory of—dying and then being erased. I’d lose everything about her if that happened. “As a United States Para-Marshal, I am ordering you—”

  “Sweetheart, you can’t order me to stay behind.” Radiating calm, she touched the bandage on my arm, then met my gaze. “This necromancer attacked me and he attacked my family. I may be a civilian, but I am still your mother. You can’t keep me out of this.”

  “I won’t be there to protect you, Elspeth,” Dad said.

  Mom smiled patiently. “As I recall, our separation forfeited your right to try to protect me from anything, Gaius, including my own stubbornness. Djinn law may prevent you from coming with us and actively engaging, but I’m bound by no such limitation. She’s my daughter.”

  Dad flinched. “She is my daughter as well, and I have done what is within the limits of my powers to do.”

  “As always.”

  “Enough!” I stomped my foot, once again reduced to childish gestures by my squabbling parents. “Dad, thank you for your help with the sidhe. Without her, we’d have no location. Mom, I will tie you to a chair and gag you, if it keeps you from coming with me and getting yourself killed or kidnapped. I’ve got one hostage situation ongoing in Myrtle’s Acres, the necro already has Vincent to use against me, and I don’t need to negotiate for you, too. Do you understand?”

  “Shiloh—”

  “Do. You. Under. Stand?”

  She held my stare for several seconds, and I watched a reel of emotions play across her face. She looked away first, slipping back into a mask of resignation. “I hate that you do this job,” she said.

  “I know. But right now no one else can do it. Please stay here with Jaxon.”

  “All right.”

  Okay, good, progress.

  K.I.M. beeped and without waiting for a command, switched her main display to a streaming news feed. The sound was off, giving no voice to the close-up of a male reporter. Fire trucks and distant licks of flame were visible over his shoulder. The ticker at the bottom of the screen made my stomach heave: Helicopter Crash Near 404.

  I couldn’t seem to kick-start my brain. All I could do was stare at the screen and the distant flames.

  “Shiloh, you don’t know—” Mom started.

  “Yes, she does,” Dad said.

  “K.I.M. wouldn’t have come on without a command,” I said. Was that really my voice? So hollow and deep? Everything around me felt cold, far away. Blood roared in my ears. “It’s my fault. I wanted K.I.M. to call Novak. It gave away their location.”

  Mom touched my elbow. “They probably got out—”

  “They would have called.” A haze of rage edged my vision. I’d assumed Weller wouldn’t attack us directly so soon, without assuming he’d use a method other than controlled vampires. I should have shut down our connection to K.I.M. entirely when I first suspected Weller and never used her for anything related to this hunt.

  All.

  My.

  Fault.

  I dropped to my knees and crawled beneath the table housing the majority of K.I.M.’s hardware. Julius had shown all of us how to disconnect her systems from the line networking her to Weller’s half of the Knowledge Interface Matrix. It was a safety measure in case of exterior hacking—chances: next-to-zero—or internal malfunction—not quite what was happening, but close enough.

  This was basically a combination of the two, and it made me sick.

  The orange cable stared at me from a small cluster of wires varying in size from pipe cleaner thin to hot dog thick. This one was the size of my thumb, with a splitter connecting it to another of similar length. I yanked the cord out of the splitter. The tip sparked once.

  Above me, K.I.M. blared a warning that she was off-line. Yeah, no kidding, you bundle of chips and parts.

  I crawled back out to three concerned faces. I brushed off my knees as I stood, working hard to keep my expression blank. If they expected me to have a breakdown over the helicopter crash, they had a long wait. I didn’t have any more tears. I definitely didn’t have the time to sit around and wait for them find me.

  “If Novak and Kathleen are alive they’ll find a way to contact us,” I said. “We can’t—”

  Dad disappeared.

  I blinked at the empty spot on the carpet where he’d stood just a moment ago. Surely he wasn’t . . . .

  “We need to get to Delaware,” I said to Tennyson. “The two of us against who knows how many wasn’t how I wanted to play this, but I don’t see a choice.” It wasn’t as if I had a SWAT team in my back pocket, or a squad of federal marshals on standby. The trouble with being only one of a two-team, specialty branch of a government agency was lack of backup. I could request a marshal unit, but any local they could spare was already at Myrtle’s Acres. We coul
dn’t afford the time it would take to get someone from outside. Besides, I had no idea how far Weller’s reach had spread—was anyone else in the Marshals’ Office supporting his agenda?

  Were we to play the part of the fool in this little production?

  Tennyson held up his cell phone. “We have my people.”

  I blinked. “Even if I could call off the marshals watching the trailer park’s perimeter, which is highly unlikely given the circumstances, you put them there for a reason—to keep them safe.”

  “Your Para-Marshal Weller knows where they are. They are no longer safe in Myrtle’s Acres, and they can certainly be of assistance to us. A dozen marshals and as many sheriff’s deputies are nothing. They do not keep my people in check within the town. I do. We will rain down upon that bovine farm like Hell’s own fire.”

  If that statement had come from anyone else, I’d have demanded a sobriety test. “Once you pull your people, Weller will know. He’ll have to heighten security. He may even abandon the location.”

  “Perhaps. However, going in alone guarantees failure. We are strong, you and I, but we cannot defeat these men by ourselves. Of this I am certain.” He started to dial, then paused. His eyebrows slanted a fraction. “Peculiar.”

  “Good grief, what?”

  “A thought.” He met my gaze, his copper eyes blazing with confusion. “Yesterday your incubus friend used Drayden to relay a message when he could not contact you directly.”

  Yesterday, two days ago, the day we found the storage unit. Time was bleeding together. “I remember,” I said.

  “This evening you were unreachable for several hours.”

  Ding, ding, ding! “And he didn’t try to call via Drayden. Bless it.”

  “Shiloh, what’s going on?” Mom asked, comfortably oblivious.

  I conjured up a mental image of Novak—strong, muscular enough to give a bodybuilder wet dreams, and handsome as a cover model. He had a deep-timbre laugh you felt in your bones, a temper the size of a big rig, and a loyalty streak as long as the San Andreas Fault. Julius brought him into the Para-Marshals to protect him from Hell and keep him off the demonic radar. Novak had spent the last eight years hiding and surviving. He wasn’t dumb enough to risk it all to help Weller.

  Was he?

  Everything he knew about this case . . . every time he’d fought against keeping Tennyson around. Was any of it more than just Novak being Novak?

  “I don’t know,” I finally replied. “We could just be paranoid and seeing conspirators everywhere.”

  Tennyson grunted. “It’s hardly a conspiracy if—”

  “If everyone’s really out to get you. Yeah, I know the line.”

  He gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze, his hand lingering. And of course, Dad chose that moment to poof back into the room.

  Chapter 18

  Tennyson removed his hand from my shoulder slowly, deliberately—not taunting, but refusing to acknowledge he’d done anything wrong by offering a physical gesture of comfort. Not that Dad cared. He bristled at the sight of it, and I wasn’t sure what bothered him more: that I was close with a vampire, or that I was close with a man.

  Dads!

  I was very proud of myself for not rolling my eyes.

  With Dad came the faint odor of smoke and gasoline, and his skin looked a tad sooty. Surely he hadn’t—“Where did you go?” I asked.

  “To the crash site.”

  My heart hammered against my ribs. “Really?”

  “Yes, Shiloh.”

  “And?”

  “The helicopter is burning hot and fast, and on-site investigators are unable to determine how many bodies may or may not be inside.”

  “Okay . . . but were you able to tell?”

  He didn’t restrain himself from rolling his eyes. “Yes, I was able to get closer to the heat of blaze than those humans. Close enough to see only one body in the pilot seat.”

  I admit it: I whooped for joy. Literally and loudly. Tennyson took a step backward. Dad smiled. My elation was short-lived, though, as explanations began rolling through my head. Had someone removed Novak and Kathleen from the helicopter, and then orchestrated the crash and burn to throw us off track? To make me believe the rest of my team was lost? Had it happened recently? Hours ago? If the latter was true, there went my earlier assumptions of Novak’s possible involvement. If not—

  “This means your teammates are likely now hostages,” Tennyson said.

  Hooray for Captain Obvious. “I know,” I said, “but at least it means they’re alive somewhere. And alive somewhere is a hell of a lot better than dead there.” I threw my arms around Dad’s neck and hugged him tight, not caring that he smelled worse this close. “Thank you.”

  His hand came up to pat the center of my back. “You’re welcome. Unfortunately, it’s all the magic I can expend here before someone notices.”

  “I know.” I drew back and kissed his cheek. “Luck?”

  “Luck is for leprechauns.”

  “And half djinn up against impossible odds.”

  “You are a half djinn, Shiloh, a heritage you never asked for and yet have embraced, despite the obstacles of belonging to two worlds. And if you can overcome those obstacles, then nothing else against you is impossible.” On the scale of strange compliments from my father, it certainly rated high on the meter. He stepped back and gave Tennyson a scathing look. “If you get her killed, I will drain every drop of your blood and spread your ashes over the Chesapeake Bay.”

  Tennyson inclined his head as though acknowledging a friendly wager.

  Dad gave Mom a curt nod. “Elspeth.”

  “Gaius,” she replied.

  He poofed.

  Tennyson closed his eyes and tilted his head to the left, brow furrowing. I started to ask what was wrong, and then realized he was listening. Hard. Something out of my hearing range, because strain as I might, I couldn’t figure out what he heard. His eyes popped open, blazing red.

  “Piotr,” he said, and ran.

  The moment the basement door opened, agonized wails echoed up the stairs. I followed Tennyson down. Piotr was as we’d left him, suspended from the bars on legs paralyzed by a silver knife in his back. Contact with the silver bars had burned away the flesh on his back and arms, and scented the room with charred meat and ash. His eyes blazed red and blue, and the light glistened off elongated fangs. His skin was sallow, stretched like rice paper over his bones, more monster now than man.

  He muttered to himself, words I didn’t understand at first. His voice had adopted a much thicker accent as he lost himself in the past, of a Russia long gone. Tennyson and I approached slowly, even though the bars would stop Piotr cold if he somehow managed to lunge. Something about a mad vampire would make even the bravest person cautious. Words continued to drip from his lips, and I started to recognize names: Ivanya, Eketarina, Vasiliy, Tanya, Leonid, Pascha. Old friends? His vampires?

  “Piotr,” Tennyson said.

  He didn’t seem to hear. He kept muttering, crying, screeching—rinse, repeat.

  “Piotr!”

  Nothing.

  “Could the necromancer be doing this to him?” I asked.

  “Unlikely. The silver is slowly poisoning him. Unless he feeds soon, he will go feral and need to be put down.”

  “I thought we couldn’t kill him without causing a line inheritance problem.”

  His red headlights flashed at me, a hint of green in their centers. “He is suffering.”

  I bit back a tart so what? and managed a more polite, “I can see that, but you’re the one who lectured me on why—”

  “I know.” A flash of sympathy was there and gone again. “However, if I am correct in my guess, most of his line is gone already.”

  My stomach churned. “They’re being killed off, even though Piotr did what was asked of him.”

  “I believe so.”

  “Bastards.” I make no bones about my general hatred of vampires, but mass slaughter out of spite is beyond any sa
ne, reasonable person’s level of tolerance. Still, Piotr was complicit in the recent goings-on, and I hated the idea of giving him death as an easy out.

  I plucked a key from a hook on the wall and strode to the cage. Piotr thrashed at my nearness, but didn’t directly acknowledge me. I grasped the handle of the knife in my left hand. The silver was blazing hot, reacting to the vampire. The flesh around the wound was little more than a scorched crater the size of an apple. I swallowed hard, forcing away a pang of nausea, and pulled. The blade slid out with a squelching sound. No blood, just a bit of brackish fluid.

  Gross.

  I dropped the blade with a clatter and quickly unlocked the chains. Piotr crashed to the floor of the cage like a sack of wet laundry. He didn’t cry out, just huddled there as he’d fallen, still muttering in Russian. Bits of ash clung to the silver bars. Vampire or not, mortal enemy or not, he’d been tortured enough by us.

  “Will you kill him?” Tennyson asked.

  “No.” I kicked the silver blade to within arm’s reach of the cage. “But I won’t stop him if he wants to end his own suffering.”

  “He may do so. I have lost twelve and each death is a burden. I cannot imagine the agony of losing so many at once.”

  “Me, either.” For the fifteen minutes that I’d born the weight of Tennyson’s grief, I had suffered in a wholly unique and horrifying fashion. I never wanted to feel like that again, and it was beyond my imagination to apply it to hundreds of losses. Could anyone return from such a thing with their sanity intact?

  Piotr screeched, a piteous sound that set my teeth on edge. He flopped onto his back like a beached fish. His spine would take a long time to heal, if it ever did. The silver poisoning could have cauterized the spinal cord at both ends. Had I paralyzed him?

  Did it matter at this point?

  More Russian words tumbled out and, based solely on his inflections and attempts at eye contact, they were curse words aimed at me. He swallowed several times, his Adam’s apple working hard. “End. This.” The two English words were guttural, demanding action.