Stray Magic

by Kelly Meding

  He frowned at the display screen, then answered it. “Drayden?” I couldn’t hear the other vampire’s voice, but the sudden spackle of red across the dash clued me in that this wasn’t good news. I sneaked glances at Tennyson’s profile as I drove. The frozen chipotle scent of his emotions returned, chilling me bone-deep.

  “You’re certain it’s them?” His voice was horrifyingly flat, cold. The red flecks coalesced into twin headlights as the emotion blared like beacons of fury and anxiety. Weller was apparently keeping his promise to secure Tennyson’s cooperation.

  “Do not engage them, Drayden. Remain inside of the park’s perimeter. Do not give the humans an excuse to end us all.” He listened. “Soon, my friend. Very soon.” He said something in a language I didn’t know—Latin, maybe?—and in a soft tone that surprised me. It was a calming tone usually reserved for frightened children or worried lovers.

  I stayed quiet after he hung up, even though I ached to know what was happening. Tennyson needed a moment. That much was frighteningly clear in the way he clenched and unclenched his fingers. The line of his jaw was so tight I thought he might snap a few teeth.

  “My twelve,” he finally said. “They are . . . I never imagined . . .” He couldn’t even say what was happening, but in a flash of clarity and horror, I understood.

  “Sweet Iblis. He used the revenant spell on your vampires.”

  “Yes.” Never had a single word carried the weight of so much disgust.

  And if Drayden called—

  “They’re in the trailer park, aren’t they?”

  Tennyson breathed sharply through his nose, nostrils flaring, and I desperately wanted out of the car. “They have wounded or killed all of the law enforcement personnel surrounding the town, have taken the gaggle of reporters hostage, and are now taunting my people, goading them to emerge from the safety of their hiding places. And the human residents are becoming more vocal.

  “It’s falling apart, Shiloh.”

  I reached out, overcoming my fear of him, and squeezed his arm. “This is Weller’s move. He’ll threaten to have the revenants murder the reporters and the wounded, then he’ll threaten to turn them loose on the park residents.”

  “The scent of so much fresh blood will be maddening to my people.”

  “Couldn’t Drayden take some of your people out to dispatch the revenants?” It was such a simple question, but I knew it couldn’t have a simple answer.

  “It’s far too risky. My people obey my commands as best they can, but they must also be true to their base nature. It is going on four days that they have been cooped up so close to humans without fresh blood to sustain their needs. They will be on edge, hungry, frustrated. Even believing the revenants are no longer their kin, I fear they will not stop with only killing those twelve. Once they taste blood, I fear they will slaughter the residents.”

  Frozen fingertips skated down my spine. Definitely not a simple answer. If Tennyson’s people acted first, the humans could die. If Weller’s revenant-vamps acted first, Tennyson’s people would be forced to act . . . and the residents could die. And I didn’t have any forces hiding up my sleeve capable of dispatching the revenant-vamps.

  As for our grand plan of killing the necromancer? It would stop him from ordering the revenant-vamps around—which came with a plus and minus.

  Plus: no slaughter of reporters or residents.

  Minus: no one controlling a dozen vampire zombies left to roam the countryside.

  Allowing Tennyson to house his line in Myrtle’s Acres was ranking at the top of my Stupidest Decisions Ever list.

  I glanced at the clock radio. Weller’s call was due any moment.

  “Shiloh.” Tennyson’s voice was calmer now, almost contemplative. I wanted to give him my full attention, but even though the highway remained mostly deserted, I also didn’t want to crash us. “Vampires have long been enemies with both humans and djinn. No matter how this night ends, thank you for all that you have done for me. It will not be forgotten.”

  My heart swelled at the unexpected thanks. “I wish I could have done more.”

  “You have done enough. You have fought for me, and you nearly died in service to myself and my kin.”

  Ding! It came to me like a bolt of lightning, sudden and jolting and a little bit awful. Something that had seemed vaguely familiar and my subconscious mind needed to place on its own. Something to do with the spiders. “Fuck me,” I said.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  I was vibrating between excitement at connecting the dots and feeling like a complete moron for not doing it sooner. “When your missing kin were tortured and killed, do you remember the impression you got from one of them? Of her captor?”

  “Luisa, yes.”

  “Large man, golden skin, black hair, right?”

  “Yes, and a scar.”

  My hands tightened on the steering wheel hard enough to make my knuckles ache. “I can’t swear to the scar, because I never saw him up close, but I think I know him. Knew him. It could be a man named Lars Patterson. He’s a spinner. Was. He was a Para-Marshal on Weller’s team, and he supposedly died two years ago.”

  “A spinner?”

  “A warlock who specializes in manifesting from our subconscious. He manifested fear in the creepy-crawling way, and if he’s been dabbling out of the picture for the last two years, it’s possible he’s refined his magic.”

  “Refined the manifestation into poisonous, controllable spiders.”

  “Yeah.” Recalling the deliberate army of spiders in Caine’s house, I shuddered. “Bless it all, I should have figured it out faster.”

  “You figured it out now.”

  “Fat lot of good it does us at this point.”

  “Knowledge is power.”

  The nugget of wisdom tugged the corners of my mouth up. “You sound like a PSA.”

  “Is that an insult or a compliment?” He sounded genuinely confused.

  “Dunno.” I glanced at the clock again. Thirty-four minutes had passed. What was Weller waiting for? My stomach churned. He said he’d kill Novak in half an—

  “I feel I must apologize to you,” Tennyson said.

  I blinked and gave him a sideways glance. The first car I’d seen in ten minutes passed us in the southbound lane. “For what?”

  “My decisions to hide my people in Myrtle’s Acres and to involve your team have caused only suffering and loss. For that I am sorry.”

  “You were doing what you thought best for your people, Tennyson. No father would do any less for his children.”

  “My desire to protect them has only placed them in graver danger.” He didn’t seem to notice his unintentional pun. “I fear many more lives will be lost before the morning sun rises.”

  In just over three hours. If Weller meant to have the revenant-vamps move against the trailer park, it would happen soon. Intent on getting this the hell over with, I grabbed my Raspberry from the cup holder. It chimed in my hand.

  “Lose your watch?” I asked by way of salutation.

  “A problem arose that demanded my attention.” Something in Weller’s voice told me his wordplay was completely intentional.

  “Yeah, well, jerk off on your own time.”

  Weller chuckled. “My, my, the stress of the situation has certainly given your vocabulary an edge.”

  “You don’t know me, so don’t pretend to know my fucking vocabulary. We got your message, by the way. What’s the move?”

  “The vampire is with you?”

  Tennyson leaned across the seat, close enough to speak clearly and be heard without shouting. “He is,” he said.

  “Then I don’t suppose I need bother explaining the precarious nature of events unfolding in Myrtle’s Acres. How it ends is up to you both.”

  “We’re listening.”

  I concentrated on driving, easing onto an eastbound back road that would take us closer to our destination. It was darker here, without the interspersed random gas stations and smal
l towns. The moon was waning, too low on the horizon to provide much light.

  “I will offer you this, Woodrow Tennyson,” Weller said, as if making a grand gesture Tennyson was sure to accept. “Your people need not die, nor do they need to undergo revenancy. As you have no doubt deduced, it’s a quite painful procedure, and too many individual minds at once are difficult for my necromancer to control.”

  “So far you have offered me nothing,” Tennyson said.

  “A war is coming, and I am in need of soldiers.”

  “There is no war. This war only exists in your own paranoid mind, fueled by your desire to accumulate power and strength. Since coming out in public sixty years ago, we have strived to live peacefully among humans. It is you who seek to undo the balance of things.”

  “You’re deluding yourself, Vampire, if you think the balance has only recently been upset. I didn’t create this storm, but I am trying to weather it.”

  “Oh, for Iblis’s sake,” I said, sick of the bantering and blame-throwing. “What’s your offer, Weller?”

  “The vampire surrenders himself to my necromancer and undergoes the revenancy,” Weller said. “With him under our control, there is no need to torture his children to death.”

  “Instead, I condemn them to never-ending slavery,” Tennyson said.

  “The alternative is that I set my revenants loose on the trailer park, and the bloodlust turns your children into the monsters they are. Anyone who isn’t killed will be hunted by law enforcement and executed as an example to other vampires who can’t control themselves. The line of Master Tennyson will be forever stained in the eyes of his kind. No survivors will be given refuge.”

  Weller had the connections to follow through with the threat. He had Tennyson bent over a barrel and was just waiting for him to say “go ahead and fuck me.” Getting Tennyson’s coerced cooperation probably made Weller feel like less of a monster.

  Made him an even bigger one in my book.

  “In exchange for my cooperation, I would ask for one guarantee,” Tennyson said.

  I gave him a sharp glare, which he promptly ignored. His eyes showed swirling flecks of red, green, and blue all at once, unable to keep up with his conflicting emotional state. He stared at the dash, his face stony.

  “Ask, then,” Weller said.

  “Immunity from harm for Shiloh Harrison, her mother, Jaxon Dearborn, and the incubus Novak.”

  My hand jerked the wheel and I struggled to keep control. My throat tightened. I wanted to punch Tennyson in the head. Or kiss him. Maybe both at the same time. His noble streak was going to get him killed in the very permanent way.

  “As long as they stay out of my way, I won’t seek them out,” Weller replied.

  Tennyson growled low and deep. “Not good enough. Immunity. They are left alone.”

  Silence stretched out into a full minute. I strained to hear hints of whispers, any signs of Weller conferring on his end of the line. Finally, he said, “All right, immunity. I will release the incubus once you have submitted to the procedure.”

  Procedure. Weller made it sound like a hernia operation. I loosened my grip on the steering wheel, wincing at the ache in my knuckles. I wanted to say no and couldn’t bring myself to do it. It saved me. It saved my surviving friends. And we still had one last trick up our sleeves to prevent Weller from winning. A trick I’d have to find a way to live with, just as I’d found a way to live with what Kress had made me do.

  “Agreed,” Tennyson said. “Where?”

  “Where are you now?”

  He didn’t know we had a head start, so I lied, “Just over the state line, heading into Delaware.” We were, in fact, thirty miles farther north. Surprise was the only advantage we had left.

  Weller made an indeterminate noise. “Switch over to Route 1, keep going north. Call back at this number when you’re north of Lewes.”

  He hung up.

  Route 1, also known as Coastal Highway, ran the entire length of the state. We were coming at the small town of Milton from the west, so we didn’t need to get on that particular stretch of road. I knew enough about the area to fake it if Weller asked for landmarks. He’d expect our call in another half hour or so, which gave us more than enough time to find him first.

  The invisible tether binding me to Tennyson by the Rules of Wishing flared suddenly, glowing brighter in my periphery, a phantom warmth all around me. Oh, no.

  “What are you—?”

  Shiloh Harrison, my second wish is this.

  I winced at the volume of his telepathic voice and braced myself to once again be forced into something I didn’t want to do.

  In the event the necromancer we seek successfully completes the revenancy spell on me and takes control of my mind, I wish that—

  Don’t say you want to die, because you’re technically already dead and after the revenancy, you’ll really be dead, so the wish won’t—

  —my body be engulfed in flames such that cannot be doused until I am utterly destroyed, so that I cannot be used for another’s whim.

  The idea of purposely causing Tennyson to spontaneously combust sickened me. I swallowed against rising bile, battling the tether and my blessed djinn instinct to immediately grant the wish. I’d hoped any wish binding me to kill him would be of greater power than his first wish, thereby preventing me from granting it. Either the magic wasn’t stronger, or the Rules did not apply to us as they did to others. We’d already circumvented the little fact that vampires can’t bind djinn to the Rules. Did they apply at all? What if other vampires found out about this little loophole?

  Shiloh?

  “Granted,” I choked out.

  Magic flared hot and fast. A thread of orange flame danced across the tether, me to him, and he winced.

  All things considered, it was a well-thought-out wish. I destroyed his body with fire, which left nothing for the necromancer to control. The time and effort would be for nothing. My friends and I would be safe from reprisals (unless Weller went back on his words, which was an entirely possible scenario). There was just one thing—

  “What about your line?” I asked. “If I’m the one who causes your death, what happens to the line?”

  Tennyson cleared his throat. Some of the tension he’d been wrapped in had loosened its hold, giving his harsh features a softer edge. So nice that he felt better about this, the jerk. “Technically speaking, as my murderer, you would take control of the line. However, as you are not a vampire, I would ask that you verbally relay my wishes that control pass to Drayden.”

  “And if something goes wrong in Myrtle’s Acres and he’s killed?”

  “Seek out a woman named Jade Tsang.”

  “All right.” I negotiated a wide curve in the road, tapped the brakes, then revved back up to speed. “So what’s our actual plan? Other than letting you waltz in and turn yourself over to Weller, I mean.”

  “We did bring an arsenal. I assumed an assault—”

  Something large and vaguely human-shaped darted into the road. My headlights flashed on copper skin and opalescent eyes, and I yanked the wheel. We swerved the roadblock, only to hit a log on the opposite lane. I didn’t have time to wonder why a log was in the middle of the road. The Expedition bounced and tilted. Adrenaline surged through me as I fought for control of the wheel, but something else hit us from behind.

  We careened off the road, wobbled, then flipped, landing upside down in a ditch. My head slammed against the steering wheel. I dimly heard glass cracking, Tennyson shouting my name, and then nothing at all.

  Chapter 20

  Cow manure.

  The first thing I smelled as I struggled to wake up and collect my bearings. It was immediately obvious I was no longer suspended via seat belt from the upside-down Expedition. I was on a cot in a room the size of a broom closet, with a single barred window casting a faint glow of light on the bare wood walls and floor. Testing limbs and extremities, I found nothing broken. Just lots of aches and pains, plus a headache cr
ushing my skull into mush.

  I was alive, though, so bonus points for not killing myself in the crash. But why was I here—wherever in heaven here was—instead of a hospital? And why was I surrounded by the faint odor of cow manure?

  It wasn’t an accident.

  The understanding catapulted me into a sitting position. A maneuver my head immediately protested by beginning a bass line behind my eyes. My vision blurred and my stomach rebelled. I leaned over the edge of the cot and retched, managing to eject only a small amount of liquid from my relatively empty stomach. I didn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. Was it even still the same night?

  I didn’t have to search to know my phone and weapons were gone, but I did anyway. Even the slim blades in my boots were missing. A cut on my forehead was bandaged and in the near-dark, I found a few scratches and scrapes that were also recently cleaned. Not quite scabbed over, so it had to be the same night. Maybe an hour or two since the accident.

  Accident. Yeah, right.

  Fear crashed over me like a wave of cold water. They had Tennyson. The necromancer could be turning him right now, and at any moment the tether could flare and demand I send the killing fire.

  My legs wobbled on my way to the window. The bars were solid, the frame sealed shut. My room was on the second floor, facing a yard right out of a tractor advertisement. Tall oak trees bordered one side and a red barn the opposite. A clothesline bisected the left edge of the property. A pickup truck was parked near it, its bed loaded with what looked like scrap metal. Random bits of farm equipment littered the rest of the yard, and beyond the barn, I saw the cow pasture.

  Was the pentagram inside of the barn? In the house? Somewhere else entirely I couldn’t see from here? Where the hell was Novak?

  I didn’t need the window to get out of here. I jiggled the doorknob. Locked. Not a shocker. Fortunately that didn’t matter, either—as long as no one thought to reinforce my room with metal bars. Like teleporting, moving through solid objects was a talent that hurt more than it helped, unless faced with a situation leaving no other choice. Kind of like right now.