by A. E. Lowan
It was Grief.
Cian shivered and backed away from the named weapon. Etienne had taught him to never covet another’s weapon, but Grief was one he wanted no part of, anyway. He needed something more mundane. Etienne had taught him to look for what he was most familiar with, and he looked, for a moment overwhelmed by the size of the collection and his need to hurry. Finally, he found a rapier resting on a display rack with others of a similar style. He drew it from its scabbard and nearly dropped it when an unpleasant sensation sizzled up his arm. It wasn’t sidhe steel, but mortal steel.
Cian frowned in distaste. He did not often touch steel directly; Etienne did not let him. It was not unlike the time he touched the inside of that light socket, only less intense, but it still left him uncomfortable with a vague sense of nausea.
A bright ball of light struck one of the weapon displays, knocking the whole thing to the ground with a deafening metallic crash. Senán had been reduced to inarticulate screaming.
Cian looked around at the other sheathed swords, but could not tell which ones might be sidhe steel and he did not have the time to check them all. He sheathed the rapier and gripped it by the scabbard. It would have to do.
Cian quickly made his way to Midir’s front door and let himself out of the apartment. Out there were only the small entry chamber and the elevator door. He pushed the only button beside the door and waited. He remembered from being with Etienne that they had had to wait for these things. Even so, he looked frequently over his shoulder. Was it quieter in there, or were the walls just very thick? The soft chime of the elevator was loud in the silence and Cian stifled a small cry of alarm.
Alone inside, he was faced with a bank of buttons that crawled up the reflective surface. So many! Before on the way up he had been so afraid he had not noticed them. Which one should he push? He wanted down, down to the ground… His eyes traveled down the rows looking for a button with a large “G” symbol. That was the first letter in the English word for ground. He had seen those on elevators before. But there was no “G” button. The door slid shut and Cian’s heart jumped. What was wrong? He looked at the lower buttons again. Etienne always pushed a lower button on an elevator to go down, but they had never been in one with so many buttons.
And then he saw a button with an “L” symbol. He had seen Etienne push buttons with that one, too, to get to the ground. He pressed the button and it lit up. The elevator began to move down. Down and away from Midir. Cian sagged against one wall with relief.
Cian glanced up and caught his reflection. He looked exhausted and pale. One side of his face was swollen and blood was drying between his lips. That would catch attention and he did not want anyone to notice him leaving. He dug into his pocket, pulled out a paper napkin and cleaned the blood, then cast a glamour over the injury. It was a small spell that even he could manage. He then cast a similar glamour of concealment over the rapier and settled in to watch the lights progress across the buttons.
Still the elevator carried him down.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Seriously, who gets business deliveries from an herbal store first thing on a Sunday?”
“I don’t know. This guy does. Just let me up.”
The security guard rolled his eyes. “Fine, whatever. Give me his name and I’ll call him.”
Yeah, okay… so it wasn’t Jessie’s best plan ever. “Uh, sure. Gimme a sec.” Why hadn’t she thought about that? She made lots of business deliveries for Curiosity’s so the sneak-in-as-a-delivery-person idea had made perfect sense when she’d come up with it.
The only thing was she usually made those deliveries to the preternatural leaders and they were all people who knew her.
She turned her back on the big round desk and dug the receipt book out of her delivery bag while her mind spun at a frantic pace. She only knew the names of two people who worked here and one was the guy who had kidnapped Cian. She really didn’t want the guard to call him. Even if he let her up to his nefarious lair where he was holding her friend prisoner, she could just imagine how that conversation would go. “Here, have some herbal lotion. I’m just going to grab this boy and run, now. Kthxbai.”
Yeah, that would fly like a lead turkey.
The other one was Jeremy Moore, the walking, talking MacGuffin himself. Man, that would have to be a major mind fuck, knowing a knight was, like, on a quest to rescue you. Jessie wondered how much he could know about himself, to stay with a guy like Midir. Maybe nothing? Maybe everything and he was just really screwed up? Either way, she didn’t know him and couldn’t trust him and she certainly couldn’t have the guard call him.
“Well, kid? Who placed the order?”
“I’m looking.” Shit! Jessie took her time flipping pages, but she knew she needed to make a choice. Fast. Her eyes slid to the elevator bank and her mind traveled up the floors of the office tower. Did she have the power and skill to fight her way through this building? Winter’s cousins, Kelley and Martina, had taught her a lot about combat magic, but would it be enough? How many other magicians were in this building – besides the really big, scary one that had Cian? Once she made this choice, there was no turning back. She would have to fight her way up to Cian, who was only God knew where, and then fight to get them both back out. She had known that coming here.
She just hadn’t known the tower was so freaking big.
The only other option was to turn back, admit that Winter was right and she was just a half-grown wizard who’d bitten off more than she could chew. Leave Cian here. God, how could she do that?
“Look, if you don’t have someone to deliver to, you’re gonna have to leave.”
Jessie looked up, her face heating in frustration, and out of the corner of her eye saw a tall man with red-gold hair step off the elevator. Her head snapped around in a double take. Cian? It was Cian! “Him,” she said, her voice high with tension. She cleared her throat and pointed at Cian, trying to regain her cool. “I mean, that guy there. He’s the one who came to the store yesterday.” Was he okay? How had he gotten down here? But, questions had to wait. First she had to get him to safety.
The guard gave her an irritated look, and turned to face Cian. “Hey! Are you expecting a delivery?”
Cian froze, eyes wide.
Jessie raised her delivery bag to her chest to display the logo and wiggled it back and forth as she grinned at him.
Cian saw her and a wide smile of relief spread across his face. Jessie’s cheeks colored more. Nobody should be that gorgeous! There were laws. “Um, yes?”
The guard shook his head. “Well, come get it.”
Cian skirted the tree in its big planter and crossed the lobby to Jessie. She tucked the receipt book in her bag. “I’ve got the rest of it in the car. Come on, I’ll help you with it.” She jerked her head towards the tall glass doors.
The security guard muttered something under his breath and then answered his phone. Jessie pushed her glasses higher and decided to blow him off.
Cian fell into step close behind her.
“Stop him!” Jessie spun around to see a tall man with long, wavy black hair striding towards them from the far side of the lobby. Also impossibly hot, so he had to be another sidhe.
“Friend of yours?” she asked Cian. The guard was still talking on his phone, but looked up at the commotion.
Cian shook his head with a worried frown and stepped away from her. She saw a shimmer and then he seemed to pull a sword, a rapier, out of thin air.
The black-haired sidhe stopped and a slow grin spread across his face. He also did the shimmering thing and a sword of a kind she did not recognize appeared in his hand. “Let’s dance, little boy. Show me what you can do.” And then he was moving too fast for Jessie to follow.
Cian made a small noise of panic, and he, too, was a blur.
“What the fuck?”
Jessie saw the guard standing up behind the desk, eyes wide in shock. But his hand lifted to his shoulder mic and he started talking. She sur
ged forward. It was her turn.
As she moved she swung the delivery bag off her shoulder, around behind her and whipped it forward, clobbering the guard in the face with the full weight of a few pounds of herbal products. There was the crunch of cracking glass and the sudden scent of lotion filled the air, mixed with his muffled cry of surprise and pain. Jessie released the bag handle on impact and stretched over the counter, grabbing the guard’s shoulder mic, and with a Word of Command surged raw power into the line. A mind-splitting squeal erupted from the guard’s earpiece and she heard cries of pain echo in the lobby behind her. She twisted, belly down on the counter, to see two more guards clawing at their ears. She forced more power into the communications line, bringing the tone to a fury’s scream, until the whole system overloaded and cut out. There, no more talking for them. Jessie kicked back off the counter and palmed her focus object. The pink, rectangular eraser covered in glyphs was warm from her pocket. It was only her first one, her learning one, but it was one that she could take to school with her without question or hassle. She got off a quick stun spell on the guard she had struck with the bag and turned to the other two now recovering from the feedback.
Cian and the stranger moved past in a blur of singing steel, taking their fight to the far side of the lobby. Cian’s voice reached her, broken and breathless, “Midir! Hurry!”
Jessie braced her feet, heart racing as the two men closed in on her. Yeah, no pressure. She caught the closest in the face with a stun spell, which Martina had liked to call the “spectator special.” It was intended for use on human bystanders. It was fast, clean, kept a target down for about an hour and caused short-term memory loss. But she only had time for the one – the other man reached for her as his buddy fell.
This one wasn’t clean, but it was fast. It was a lesson Kelley and Martina had hammered home hundreds of times. She side-stepped the man’s grab and brought her knee up into his soft belly, driving hard for his spine. He folded and she drilled her elbow into the back of his neck with all the force her young body could bring to bear.
The man dropped. Jessie bounced backwards on the balls of her feet. He did not move again.
Jessie waited, bouncing, a stun spell on the tip of her tongue. He still did not move. Dread crept cold into her blood. Why wasn’t he moving? But she knew the answer, knew what the defensive move she had just done, in theory, was supposed to be able to do. It should knock a man out. It could kill. It was just that this wasn’t a practice dummy, or the soft floor of the dojo. This was a strange man on cold marble, and he wasn’t moving.
Jessie felt sick.
Behind her Cian cried out in pain. Jessie pulled her attention away from the guard to see Cian backed into a corner, a line of blood running down to his elbow and fear on his face.
The other sidhe laughed. “Come on, boy. Your girlfriend is watching. Pick up your game.”
She forced herself to compartmentalize her emotions about the guard. She had to get Cian out of here.
But first a rhythmic chiming caught her attention. Jessie looked and saw the elevator numbers were all coming down from the upper floors. They could be bringing more guards – or worse, any one of them could carry Midir! She ran for the elevator bays, skidding to a stop on her denim-covered knees in front of the center set of buttons and slapped her right hand to the metal. She surged power into the elevator system, wasting her body’s magic on brute force efficiency because she didn’t know enough about the electrical system for finesse. She felt the drain even as she heard pops and a high-pitched whine and a series of dull chunking sounds that she prayed were the elevator breaks engaging. Two of the number lights exploded before the whole thing blanked out.
She waited a moment. No crashing. Good. But how long would the elevators be stalled? She turned, her breath coming in short pants, to see that the guard she had dropped was turning his head – thank God! – but Cian was struggling. The black-haired sidhe was playing with him, flashing and dodging from side to side, leaving small cuts in his wake.
Jessie shot off a stun spell on the waking guard and got as close to the duel – if that was even the word for the ass-kicking Cian was getting – as she dared, one hand on the edge of the tree planter. They were so close and fast as they moved she could not risk throwing even a stun spell.
Cian cried out as the sidhe whipped his blade across the back of his sword hand once, twice, and the third time he dropped the rapier. The sidhe kicked Cian hard, forcing him to the floor, and held him at the point of his silvery gold sword. “Time to end the fun, kid. I have no idea how you two got in here, but I know someone who’s going to want to meet you.”
Oh, bad, this was… Jessie looked at the pottery tree planter under her hand, and then at the profile of the standing sidhe.
This was her chance.
Clutching her focus object, she sketched glyphs in the air with more speed than she ever had in her life and watched them settle over the planter. She felt the pull of power as it was dragged from her body to encircle the planting, the tremendous weight of the thing as an abstract sensation that seemed to sink her into the cheap soles of her sneakers. And then she gathered every scrap of energy she could muster, pooled it – and used it to launch the tree, the soil, and the pot with violent force at the sidhe’s upper body.
It took him off his feet and crushed him against the wall beside him.
“Run!” Jessie ran toward Cian and grabbed his arm. Dirt and debris were everywhere and only the sidhe’s legs were visible sticking out from beneath the shattered remains of the huge pot.
Cian scrambled to his feet and ran with her.
They got exactly five steps before Jessie’s knees buckled. Oh shit! She had forgotten this could happen.
“What’s wrong?” Cian came skidding to a stop.
Jessie fell forward, tried to catch herself on her hands, but her arms went limp and she dropped.
Cian caught her before she smacked her face into the floor. Her glasses slipped down passed her nose and caught on her upper lip. “Jessie? Are you hurt? What’s wrong?” His voice was high pitched with fear.
She tried to speak, to tell him, but no sound came out. She was utterly spent, her magic tapped and she was left weak and helpless. Her fingers had no strength and she dropped her focus object. The eraser wobbled on the marble floor. Kelley and Martina had warned her against this so many times. Winter was going to kill her – if they got out of here alive.
There was a tinkling noise of broken shards of pottery shifting against one another. Cian looked over his shoulder and his eyes widened. He grabbed up her eraser, stuffed it in his pocket, and lifted her into his arms all in one, graceful, dizzying motion. She tried to object to a skinny kid like him picking her fat ass up, but she remembered him picking up that backpack; her weight would be nothing compared to that monster. Then he was running, the lobby a blur of motion, and they were at the glass doors. At least, she was pretty sure they were at the glass doors – her glasses were still in her mouth. Cian dropped her legs to work the pressure handle and they were out in the sunlight.
Which was awesome! Except that her legs still weren’t working, and she was willing to bet Cian couldn’t drive. The way she was, she couldn’t even tell him that the blue compact in the circle drive was hers. How the fu-?
“What happened?”
Brian?
“I don’t know. She just… um… I don’t know the word. Fell down?”
Brian gently pulled her glasses off and tucked them back onto her face, and then scooped her up into his muscular arms. “C’mon.”
Cian nodded, casting his attention behind them. “Yes, we need to go. Hurry, please.”
Jessie’s head rolled from side to side as Brian broke into a run, her face nestled against his warm shoulder. Her cheeks were heating up again and she was glad he couldn’t see her, but God he smelled good. She didn’t even care that her glasses dug against her nose with each bounce. As embarrassing as it was to have overextended her magic
and done this to herself, it was almost worth it.
She just wished he wasn’t too good for her.
They ran up along the passenger side of Brian’s – well, the bookstore’s – van, and Brian’s voice rumbled against her cheek, “Can you get the door for me?” Cian figured out the handle and got the door open, and Brian lifted her inside.
He disappeared from her sight for a moment and she heard the side door slide open. The van dipped and rocked as Cian climbed in. Then Brian reappeared, stepped up on the running board and pulled her seatbelt around her, an activity that brought his face pleasantly, and blushingly, close to her breasts. It also made her think of something and gave her enough energy to get a question out. “How?” she breathed.
Brian looked up, his dark eyes questioning, his face inches from hers. “How?”
Jessie widened her eyes at him.
“Oh! Me.” He gave her a little smile. “I followed you. The Theatre’s only a few blocks from the bookstore, and you said you were going to do something drastic.” His eyes twinkled and he tapped the brim of her store cap. “Besides, you’re not the only one who can pretend to be a delivery driver.”
“They’re coming! We have to go!”
Brian turned his head. “Pull that door closed, just like you opened it. Hard.” He jumped into the van and crossed over Jessie as Cian slammed the sliding door home. She could hear running footsteps in syncopated rhythm getting closer. Brian turned the key and the big engine roared to life.
Something hit the side of the van and it rocked up on two wheels for a moment.
“Go! Go now!”
Jessie couldn’t agree more.
Brian hit the gas. The van jerked and there was the sound of screaming metal, and then it jerked again and they were speeding away. “What was that?” Brian asked, his eyes never leaving their path as he whipped around the circle drive.
Jessie turned her head and saw security guards running up to join a huge man in the security uniform and what had to be the sidhe, now filthy and looking the worse for wear, shaking his hand as if in pain. She thought again about the strength it took to lift that backpack and cringed at the thought of what the van looked like, now. Brian’s mom, Norah, was going to be so pissed. How was she going to explain this to Brian?
