As we drove, I texted Krissy photographs of the faces of both corpses to see if she recognized either of them. And yes, I warned her and asked if it was okay before sending photos of dead people. Not the kind of thing you want to spring on an unsuspecting person.
Sadly, she didn’t know either of them. I’d been hoping to find some connection between Jade’s victims, only there didn’t seem to be one beyond the tattoos. That meant she wasn’t targeting a specific group but randomly doling out curses to anyone unlucky enough to go to Floral Ink.
Conor pulled up to yet another red light and groaned as the car rolled to a stop. So far, we’d hit every single red light, even ones that were usually timed to stay green together.
“Guess the curse is working on your car,” I said.
“It’s not a problem,” he said, though I could tell he was a little irked. “You should be grateful it’s not doing worse.”
As if on cue, pain flared across the tattoo and a bolt of heat ran down my arm. I winced. Conor looked worried but I waved it off, insisting it was nothing.
Because of the slowdowns, it took us over an hour to get to Joel’s apartment in Lynnwood. His building was a modern block of shiny windows and a mix of bright blue and white siding. The windows were the floor-to-ceiling fishbowl style that I found unsettling. I didn’t want to live my life on display like that, but given the rents buildings like this got away with charging, I was clearly in the minority.
I reluctantly left my sword behind. At the call box, dialed his apartment number and listened to it ring. No answer. Conor called a random apartment. When the person answered, he claimed to be UPS. The neighbor buzzed us in and hung up.
We took the elevator up and I banged on Joel’s door. Again, no answer.
I pulled out my lock picks and ignored Conor’s disapproving looks. Despite the high security on the outside of the building, the locks on the apartments themselves were pretty standard (read: cheap) and didn’t take long to pick.
I opened the door and immediately wished I hadn’t.
The apartment doors were heavy and industrial, with no real gap between the door’s bottom and the carpet. This was to help insulate the hall from noise inside the units, I guessed, but it also helped to contain odors. The odor of death smacked into me so hard I stumbled backward into Conor.
Conor swore softly under his breath as he crinkled his nose and covered his mouth.
After a moment of adjusting to the foul smell, I stepped over the threshold and into the unit. Conor followed, crossing the apartment and opening the window on the other side.
Joel’s body had fallen on the kitchen floor next to a pool of coagulated blood. He had an arrow sticking out of his stomach. The shot itself had probably not been fatal but if the tip had been poisoned, it would have killed him easily enough. The arrow looked exactly like the one that had struck Leah in front of my office.
I shook my head, staring down at the pale-faced young man, his blue hair bright against the white kitchen floor.
“Guess he won’t be telling us anything,” I said.
Conor nodded grimly. “Do you think Jade had him killed to keep him quiet?”
I shook my head. “I think it’s an Unseelie arrow.” It looked like the one the red cap had been carrying, and the one that had struck the woman outside my office. “Which means he was killed by the Unseelie fae who are trying to hunt Jade down and kill her, too.”
I swallowed bile as a wave of nausea washed over me. Jade was leaving a trail of death and destruction in her wake, unintentional or not.
My tattoo pulsed with pain again. My arm felt wet, suddenly, and I couldn’t work out why.
“Just how many people are after this girl?” Conor asked.
“That’s the problem. Everyone is after her and no one can find her.” I shrugged off my jacket. Lines of blood ran down my arm. I pulled off the bandage. The tattoo itself had turned an angrier shade of red and little bits of yellow pus were bubbling out of it.
Conor sucked in a breath and stepped over the dead man to grab a paper towel. I pressed it against the wound and went into the bathroom, where I did my best to clean the wound with hot water and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, which burned as it fizzled white in the broken skin. Joel did not have bandages on hand so I made a note to stop at CVS and used Band-Aids to tape some paper towel over the tattoo.
“Is it infected?” Conor asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It feels… hot and tingly, like it’s buzzing with magic.” I wiped out the inside of my coat and put it back on. “I think we need to find her fast. Because if she doesn’t remove the curse, I’m pretty sure it’s about to get a lot worse.”
* * *
Back in Conor’s SUV, he let the engine idle while we tried to plan our next move. “I can appeal to the Council to send a warrant for questioning to the Seelie queen,” Conor suggested. “If she grants it, we can arrest her and question her. If nothing else, she needs to be contained.”
“It’s a bad idea. If the Seelie Queen doesn’t grant it and we get the chance to detain Jade, you’ll have a hell of a time justifying doing so after being told no,” I pointed out.
“I’m not allowed to detain this woman without that permission if she’s a faerie unless she does something worse.”
I winced. What Conor meant was, until she killed someone in the supernatural community. There were people dead because of her, but they were mundane humans, so the Council would write them off as collateral damage.
“You may not be, but I am,” I said. “I don’t care if this woman ends up arrested or what, as long as we stop her.”
Conor smiled. It was a faint smile that barely danced across his lips but it made my heart swell. “You’re not a fan of following the rules, are you, Warren?”
“I love rules. I just think some of them are a little too restrictive.” Like the fact that my using demon magic could get me arrested, even if it was in self-defense. “Besides, if we get a chance to grab Jade, there’s no way we can let her go, no matter whose jurisdiction she falls under. Not until she releases the curses on myself, Krissy, and anyone else she might have gotten her ink into.”
Conor’s jaw clenched slightly. He sat silent for a moment. “I have to be careful here, Warren. I could get into deep trouble if I make the wrong move.”
Frustration boiled in my stomach. “The wrong move is anything less than stopping this maniac before she gets more people killed.”
“I know that,” he said quietly. “But I’m a Watcher. I cannot act recklessly against the Accords—”
I opened the car door and jumped out. I slammed it shut and opened the back to get my sword.
“Where are you going?” Conor demanded.
“I need to fix my situation. If you’re not going to help, you’re just going to get in my way.” I slammed the back door, sheathing my sword and pulling my coat tight around me.
He rolled down the passenger side window. “At least let me drive you home.”
“I’m not going home,” I said, and I walked away.
Not the smartest move on my part, given that we were in a residential area that didn’t have a lot of public transit, but I was better off on my own. With Conor around, I couldn’t use my demon magic if it became necessary. Plus, I wouldn’t have to worry about breaking any Council rules if I managed to capture Jade. After all, I wasn’t working for them. I didn’t have to follow the rules.
Conor was too wrapped up in bureaucracy to focus on the problem at hand. If we found her and he refused to do anything out of fear he might violate the Accords, we might not get a second chance, and I couldn’t risk that, for myself or for Krissy.
I’d just have to do what I always did: solve this by myself.
Chapter 11
Trying to locate any fae who wasn’t dead to the world before noon was a waste of effort. Unsure where else to go, I took the bus up to the Pox Box, a small bookstore in downtown Marysville, north of Everett. It was off the main
drag, and ironically across the street from a Christian bookstore and a church.
The Pox Box had a colorful sign with floral accents and advertised “books and tools for harmony and magick.” It was run by a kitchen witch named Marie who preferred to spend most of her time with mundanes who pursued simple magic, burning colored candles and sprinkling herbs and putting good will into the world. Humans could do very rudimentary magic, most of it akin to cooking or crafting.
One of the Pox Box’s bestselling items was a “good mood spell kit” that had the user arrange herbs and fragrant flowers into a potpourri pot and light it. It wasn’t technically magic but it sold because it worked for people who needed it.
Marie manned the counter, sitting on a stool behind it. She was a woman in her late thirties and had blond hair that had been pulled into a neat bun. She wore minimal makeup and a black cardigan over a t-shirt and jeans. An orange and white cat slept next to the register. The cat looked up at my approach, its ears pointing backward as its green eyes bore into me. He got to his feet and hissed.
“Castle, shush,” she told him, in her thick Scottish accent. The cat meowed and jumped up on top of the nearest bookshelf, staring down at me with its tail flicking. “He senses magic,” Marie explained, though she’d told me that before and the cat usually didn’t act like I was a threat. He must have sensed my curse.
She pulled out a case and withdrew a set of reading glasses, which she put on, using them to study me. She tsked. “Got the bends, have you, Dani Warren?”
“The bends?” I asked, confused.
She gestured to the air around me with her hands. “Some kind of magical wonkiness is all over you.”
“It’s a curse,” I told her. For a kitchen witch, Marie was more perceptive than most, her intuition stronger than even regular witches I knew.
She shook her head and tsked some more. “That won’t do. How on earth did you manage that?”
“It’s kind of a long story. That’s actually why I’m here.” I gave Marie a very condensed version of events, leaving out the fae stuff and anything else that didn’t seem relevant. When I finished, Marie’s expression had turned to stone.
“Atramancy and ink curses? What is the world coming to?” she breathed. “Hold on, dear, I might have some books for you in the back.”
She pulled a key out of the register, told Castle to be good—he flicked his tail and didn’t take his cat eyes off me—and
unlocked the back room. “Be back in a jiffy.”
While I waited, I walked around her shop. The walls were lined with white bookshelves organized into sections like Tarot, Ghosts, and New Age. Most of the books were sleek and shiny oversized paperbacks with colorful covers, meant for the use of mortals who didn’t know the first thing about the supernatural world. Wiccans and Pagans did real magic, but it was much more primal and intuitive than witch magic. They didn’t know about the Magic Council and the Council treated them as mundanes.
In the center of the shop were display cases full of colorful candles, stones, and gems, as well as a selection of ribbons and dried herbs and flowers. A real witch like myself could stock up her spell kit at a place like this, which was how I’d originally found it. I’d needed some dried nightshade and faerie blossom for a spell. But the majority of her customers were normal folks and that was how Marie liked it.
A white table sat in the corner, near the window, where people could sit and peruse books. When Marie returned, she set a stack of older tomes on the table. These were leather-bound, hand-written books, not the kind she’d ever show to a human.
“These are the best references I’ve got for atramancy,” she said. “It was never a popular magic. Quite a bit of work and energy, you know. Would you like tea?”
“Tea would be lovely.” I took off my coat and hung it over the back of the chair before sitting down to go through the books.
The best book was from 1825, written by a witch who described how she’d brewed ink for atramancy with the blood of a hellhound. The Council would lose its shit if they found out anyone was summoning hellhounds and using the blood for magical purposes these days. Demon magic had only been banned for fifteen years and it was easy to forget how commonplace it had once been. Summoning demons or demonic creatures had just been part of being a witch.
I suspected Jade wasn’t using that method—faeries didn’t truck with demons—but it was good to know that was a possibility.
While I was flipping through the book, Marie appeared with a mug of steaming tea on a saucer, two lumps of sugar and a wedge of lemon on the side. I’d put my coat over the back of the chair and my cap sleeve on my t-shirt revealed the bandage on my shoulder.
Marie sucked in a breath. “Your arm is pulsing a wicked magic.”
I winced. It had been pulsing a wicked itch for hours and I was doing my best to avoid scratching it. I didn’t realize it was doing anything else.
“May I see?” she asked.
I was reluctant to take off the bandage but Marie might know something I didn’t. I pulled off the bandage. Cold air tingled against the surface of the tattoo. It was still puffy and reddish around the dark ink.
“My goodness, girlie,” Marie said, tilting backward on her heels. “That’s one heck of a bad luck curse.”
I blinked at her. “It is?” I’d always suspected Marie was more than she claimed but I knew better than to ask people’s magical secrets. Still, the way she spoke so confidently about something no one else seemed to understand sort of confirmed that theory.
“Oh, yes. It’s a nasty bugger. They work slow. Might be painful and annoying to start. And then small little things start going wrong. Then the effect snowballs until…” She clamped her mouth shut but I knew where she was going.
“Until the person dies.”
She shrugged. “Not always. It might run out of energy before it gets that far. But it sure isn’t going to lead to anything good.”
“Do you know how to undo it?” I asked hopefully. If she could see from a glance what it was, maybe she had more tricks up her sleeve.
“I’m afraid not. And what’s more, even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to.”
I blinked, confused. “Why not?”
“Because I’m not the one who cursed you. Only the caster can remove the curse.”
My shoulders sank. That made a horrible kind of sense. I’d already half-suspected it but magic is just energy, concentrated and pushed into a specific effort. Almost all spells had a reverse spell of some kind, even if many weren’t practical. Apparently my curse did, too. The catch was the only one who could cast it was Jade.
“I do hope you manage to get it undone. The energy it’s sending out gives me the willies,” she said.
I stared at the angry black flame that looked so cool before it was etched onto my body. “That’s what I’m working on.”
Marie brought me a fresh bandage and I went back to work.
Hours later, I’d had two cups of tea and learned a lot more about how atramancy worked: it was, as Belinda described, a dual magical effort: first one had to brew the ink with magic and then they had to cast a spell into the ink as they—or whomever—wrote with it. But really, the books didn’t tell me anything Marie couldn’t: the ink itself was magical and could only be removed by the person who penned it, along with any magic held within.
“Want me to try to find more books on curses and ink magic?” she asked, as I stacked the books I’d gone through on her counter.
“I think I’ve learned all I can. Unless you have something about the fae using ink magic.”
Marie opened her mouth and then closed it again. “I thought it was atramancy. No fae can do that.”
I didn’t know about that. I had been sure of that myself for a while but clearly a faerie had. And really, no witch could wield demon magic as far as most people knew. Maybe the rules of magic weren’t as rigid as we all thought.
“Maybe there’s a faerie magic equivalent, though,” I said. Mar
ie’s books hadn’t listed any but they were books written by witches who rarely if ever interacted with the fae. The truth was, most of us witches were downright ignorant when it came to the limits of fae magic. “Or maybe she figured out how to use witch magic somehow.”
“Maybe,” Marie said, dubious. “But from what I can tell from that nasty curse, seems to me your attacker is at least part witch.”
I stared at Marie, alarm bells sounding in my head. I wanted to argue, to say that was stupid and impossible. The girl was a changeling. Mace had said so and Mace couldn’t lie. That meant Jade was fae. But it also meant she was only half fae.
Could she be half witch?
My brain fought against the idea. After all, faeries and witches didn’t get along. Most would avoid each other at all costs. But it was possible. It would explain why her magic was so unexpectedly powerful. If she could combine the power of fae magic with the tricks of witch spell casting... I shuddered at the thought.
I thanked Marie again and ducked out of the shop, speeding down the sidewalk. I wanted to run the theory past Conor but I was reluctant to get him involved again.
I missed having him with me, which was silly. I worked alone all the time. It was my thing. I liked working alone.
And yet working with Conor had been surprisingly comfortable. At least until he started in on how the Council had all the answers and he had to follow the Accords. But that was his job and I didn’t want to get him in trouble.
I grumbled to myself and decided not to call him. I could do this alone. It was probably better that way.
The sky overhead was a slate gray, the pavement wet from the morning’s rain. The September air was frigid, not yet the freezing temperatures of winter, but much colder than it’d been in a while.
I ducked down an alley to take a shortcut back to the main street. The shadows thickened around me. My heart pounded. Wrong alley, I thought, as two creatures peeled out of the shadows on either side.
Demon Rogue: Brimstone Magic - Book 3 Page 8
