“What did you just do?” he asked.
“A cone of silence.”
“A what?”
“You know, from Get Smart?”
He looked at me blankly.
“It’s magical soundproofing,” I clarified. That rune came in handy growing up in a house with a nosy older brother. “So …” I prompted when he stayed quiet.
“So what?”
“So tell me about the mission.”
“About that. How did you know that’s why I’m here?”
Luckily, I’d had time to think about that. “I assumed the CIA sent you. I mean, besides a new mission, there’s no other reason you’d come to my apartment, right?”
I was pretty pleased with this logic, but Ryerson’s expression had me second-guessing that assumption. But why? What other reason did he have to come see me?
For a moment, I thought he might tell me. Then the moment passed and he reached for his chopsticks.
“And you’re in, just like that?”
I supposed he’d earned the right to be doubtful. After all, I had spent most of our last mission together complaining about, well, everything.
See, I’m not actually a spy. Shocking, I know. I’m a barista at the Java Hut inside CIA headquarters. Last week, the CIA recruited me for a mission because they needed a witch on short notice and everyone thought Ryerson’s last partner, the witch who had love-cursed him, was dead. Turns out she wasn’t dead, just crazy with a capital K.
So why use me? For a witch, I don’t have a lot of power, and the closest I’d been to danger before this week was the daily commute down the GW Parkway.
But I did know Alec, and the CIA thought using me would draw him out of hiding. As it turned out, they were right about that. They were just wrong about being able to capture him.
“If you don’t want to do this,” Ryerson said, “I understand.”
“Want is a strong word, but I’m still in.”
“You don’t even know what the mission is.”
Not technically true. Alec had told me. He’d made friends during his time at the CIA, and apparently one of them liked him enough to leak classified information.
Basically, the CIA wanted Ryerson and me to recover an old, powerful Grimoire, which was essentially a journal that belonged to a single witch or a coven, filled with their notes and favorite spells. Alec believed the Grimoire contained the curse that had turned him into a werewolf, and that it was too dangerous to be out in the world. He also believed—or maybe just hoped—it held the werewolf counter-curse. He wanted me to help the CIA recover the Grimoire, perform the counter-curse, and then help him destroy the book.
Alec was my friend, sort of, and I’d had a crush on him since I was ten years old. I wanted to help him, but I wouldn’t betray Ryerson to do it. Especially after everything Ryerson had been through with his last partner.
But maybe I could read the Grimoire before we gave it to the CIA. I could find the counter-curse, cure Alec, and help Ryerson deliver the Grimoire to the CIA.
Ryerson was waiting for an answer, so I said, “Maybe I’m just an adrenaline junkie.”
The flat look he gave me said he knew me better than that. “This mission will be dangerous.”
“I know that. I was with you on the last one, remember?”
“I’m serious, Ainsley. Are you sure you want to do this again?”
I frowned at him. “Aren’t you supposed to be talking me into this?”
“I just don’t want you getting in over your head. I want you to really think about this.”
My frown deepened. “Why don’t you want me on this mission?”
“It’s not that.”
It was exactly that. I could see it in his eyes. Ryerson was a skilled spy, but he’s never been good at lying to me. “Yes, it is.”
He shoved a frustrated hand through his dark hair. “I just don’t think this is the life for you.”
I set down my fork and glared at him. “Too bad. Like it or not, you’re stuck with me.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said quietly.
Something in his tone stopped me from storming out of the room. I pulled in a deep, calming breath and said, “Okay, what did you mean then?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked away.
“I see,” I said through gritted teeth. “That really clears things up.”
Ryerson stood. “Look, I have to get to the office, but I’ll pick you up tomorrow for the briefing. It’s at two o’clock.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll meet you there.”
He nodded tightly and turned to go, then thought better of it and reached into his pocket. He pulled something out and set it on the floor. A tiny clay golem, no bigger than his hand, scampered across the hardwood, up my jeans, and into my lap. Black button eyes blinked at me and despite how irritated I was at Ryerson, I grinned.
Golem had been confiscated by the CIA after our last mission, and I’d been worried they would try to keep him, or maybe even return him to the North Korean dictator I’d sort of stolen him from. I had a feeling Ryerson had something to do with the fact he was back in my care, and despite my best efforts, I felt myself softening toward him.
Golem spotted the leftover Chinese food and bee-lined for it, and Ryerson walked to the door. He paused at the threshold, running his fingers over the lock.
“What?” I snapped. Still angry then. Good.
“This lock. It’s been picked.”
He turned to look at me. His face was carefully blank, but his eyes were hard. “The man I saw from the street, the one standing in your bedroom, that was Alec, wasn’t it?”
Oh, bloody broomsticks.
2
By the time my old Jetta sputtered into the parking lot of CIA headquarters the following afternoon, I had worked myself into a fit of righteous indignation. How dare Ryerson imply he didn’t want to be partnered with me again? I mean, sure, I wasn’t exactly trained. And I couldn’t possibly be the strongest or most capable witch the CIA had on retainer. And okay, maybe I’d agreed to this mission to help Alec and not the CIA, which may or may not be treasonous—I was a little fuzzy on the legalities there—but that wasn’t the point.
Or was it?
Did Ryerson have a point?
I wanted to help him, and Alec, but would Ryerson be better off with a more capable witch watching his back?
Probably.
The thought put me in an even pissier mood. I parked the car and slammed the door, wincing when the noise woke the headache behind my eyes. Stupid magic hangover. I’d spent the morning throwing up, so at least the worst was over. Probably. Hopefully.
I plodded through the parking lot, only slowing when I realized I had no idea where to go once I got inside. I’d only done this once before, and Ryerson had been there to guide me through the labyrinth of hallways beyond the security checkpoint. A pang of regret tried to settle in my gut and I batted it away. I pushed through the front doors and glanced hopefully around for a CIA help desk but instead found Ryerson waiting for me by the metal detectors, chatting with the security guards.
He spotted me immediately and nodded. I was relieved to see him, although I’d never tell him that. Not after the way he’d stormed out of my apartment last night. He’d been furious with me for not telling him that Alec had been there, and it only got worse when I wouldn’t tell him why he was there. But what could I say? That Alec had smuggled himself back into the country to ask me to help the CIA find their missing Grimoire, only to help him destroy it?
Okay, yeah, I suppose I could have just told him that. But I was still determined to prove that Alec wasn’t a traitor to his country, and telling the CIA that he had tried to recruit me to interfere with their latest mission probably wouldn’t help. Besides, I did want to help Alec find the counter-curse, and I didn’t trust that Ryerson would let me on this mission, much less anywhere near the Grimoire, if he knew what Alec had asked me to do.
Anyway, now Ryerso
n was suspicious of me, and the worst part? He was right to be.
The decision to help Alec hadn’t been an easy one. I’d spent the night tossing and turning, but by morning I’d made a decision: I would help the CIA find this Grimoire, get the counter-curse for Alec, and then let Ryerson turn the book over to the CIA.
Alec was convinced the Grimoire was nothing but trouble and needed to be destroyed. But more than that, he warned of a shadow organization deep within the CIA who wanted nothing more than to get their hands on the book.
I could have told him that.
After all, Ryerson’s crazy ex was a member of that organization. Just something she’d mentioned the last time she’d tried to kill me. Right now she was probably locked in some black-site bunker being interrogated, and soon the CIA would know exactly who all was involved. Probably. Maybe.
As for the book being nothing but trouble, well, if it held the counter-curse to the werewolf spell, it couldn’t be all bad, right?
But more than that, finding the counter-curse wouldn’t interfere with the mission. Destroying the book would. And I wouldn’t betray Ryerson, not even for Alec.
Anyway, I’d half-expected Ryerson to report me for harboring a fugitive—even though this particular fugitive had totally broken into my apartment—and was pleasantly surprised when no one had come in the night to whisk me away to some CIA detention center.
For that reason alone, I was downright civil as I let Ryerson lead me through security and onto the elevator. I felt him glance at me once, but neither of us said anything as we got off on the seventh floor and stopped in front of a door with a retinal scanner, one that I knew doubled as a spell detector.
Ryerson submitted to the scanner, and then the door clicked open and we walked into the Magical Protection Division of the CIA. Despite its name, the MPD looked decidedly ordinary. A central activity hub crowded with desks and people and an air of purpose, ringed by an open hallway a few steps above it, lined with conference rooms and offices. Ryerson led us to a conference room I’d spent more time in during the last two days than I had in my own apartment.
Andersen, the CIA’s resident mage, was already seated at the conference table, idly rolling a ball made entirely of light over his knuckles and between his hands, like a magical stress ball. He looked up and grinned as we walked in. I gave him a finger wave and slipped by Ryerson to snag my favorite chair—the one that didn’t squeak and had the best view of the cherry blossom trees outside the window—and then wondered if having a favorite spot here meant I should reevaluate my life choices.
Director Abrams, Ryerson’s boss and head of the MPD, had already claimed his own favorite spot at the head of the conference table. Today he wore an impeccably pressed suit, a shade darker than his iron-gray hair. He didn’t glance up as we took our seats around the table and greeted us by killing the lights and flipping on a screen mounted on the wall behind him. He pressed a button on a tiny remote control, and an image of a tattered old book appeared on the screen. The cover was thick and tanned, the coloring too light to be leather, but I didn’t know any other material that would crack like that. There was no title or author name, only a symbol etched into the front cover. A seven-pointed star.
The symbol looked familiar, like I’d seen it somewhere before, but I couldn’t quite place it.
“This,” Director Abrams said, “is the First Flame Grimoire. Andersen?”
Andersen stood. “Or as the German Federal Intelligence Service calls it, the Buch der Einhorner. Book of unicorns. Get it? Because some of the enchantments are mythical, one-of-a-kind spells.”
Ryerson shook his head while Director Abrams tightened his lips and made a “get on with it” motion.
“Fine, but German special intelligence is rarely whimsical. I like to give them credit where I can.”
“Andersen,” Director Abrams warned.
“Right.” Andersen moved to the head of the table, molding the ball of light with quick finger work until it had stretched to a thin stick, which he pointed at the screen. Spell-it-yourself laser pointer. Nice.
“The Grimoire belonged to the Coven of the First Flame, a coven of powerful witches and mages who came together from all over the world in the late 1940s.”
“How did they find each other?” I asked. Covens were usually formed by witches—and not mages, who tended to be loners—in the same community. Covens of witches who lived in different cities, much less oceans apart from each other, were rare even today. Seventy years ago, when travel was limited, they were almost unheard of.
“It’s unusual, but those were unusual times. These particular witches and mages were brought together by the Allies during the Second World War. They were the most powerful witches and mages their countries had to offer.”
“Like a magical Manhattan Project,” I murmured.
“Exactly.”
“What did they do for the war?”
“It’s classified. Problem was, powerful doesn’t necessarily mean good. There was this one time they—”
Director Abrams cleared his throat.
“Er, not important. Anyway, after the war, they kept in touch. Even got together occasionally. Usually right here in DC, in fact. Apparently, one of the witches lived here.”
Interesting. My family had been in DC for generations, so I knew most of the magical families in the area. I wondered which one had a Coven of the First Flame member in their ancestry. A few old, powerful families sprang to mind. I made a mental note to ask Aunt Belinda.
“Anyway,” Andersen was saying, “over the next ten to fifteen years, they compiled all of their most powerful and dangerous spells into a Grimoire. Word of the Grimoire spread, so the coven cast a protection spell over it, which allows any witch or mage who opens it to access only one of its spells—the spell that witch or mage most desires. The hope was that it would prevent other covens from attempting to steal it.”
“Did it work?” I asked.
“Not so much. The Grimoire disappeared for fifty years. No one’s really sure what happened to it, until it resurfaced four years ago in Norway, of all places. Since then, the Grimoire has been passed around the criminal underworld. Usually sold to the highest bidder after the previous owner wrings their one spell out of it.”
“Why sell it?” Ryerson said. “What’s to stop whoever has the Grimoire from simply hiring other witches and mages to open the book and give them whatever spell the book shows them?”
“Honestly? We’re not really sure. But it appears the Grimoire is smarter than your average semi-sentient magical book, and somehow it knows when someone is trying to get around the one-spell-per-witch rule, and it offers up defective spells instead.”
“Defective how?” I asked.
“Word is a mage in Sri Lanka attempted it, and the Grimoire gave his associate a second spell that purported to be a plague spell but was actually a transmogrification spell and turned both of them into chickens.” Andersen shrugged. “Since then, the magical underworld has been wary about bending the rules.”
“Thank you, Andersen.” Director Abrams tapped the remote, and the screen shifted to a photo of a beautiful brunette woman with large brown eyes, dark hair that cascaded down her back in perfect waves, and a curvy figure. She was smiling, the fingers of her left hand resting on the forearm of a man wearing a suit. The image had been edited to remove all of the man except his forearm.
“After recent events, it has become the MPD’s top priority to recover the Grimoire.”
“Recent events” had to be the last mission I’d been recruited for: to stop a dark mage from using the Grimoire to complete an invisibility spell, which would have allowed him to cloak missiles from U.S. defense systems. We stopped him, barely, but we’d lost the Grimoire in the process.
Director Abrams nodded at the screen. “We believe the Grimoire is currently in the possession of this witch in Sao Paulo. Her name is Isadora Carvalho. Your mission is to retrieve the book and deliver it to the CIA. You lea
ve tomorrow.”
Ryerson frowned at the photo. “Is that—”
“Yes,” Director Abrams said.
He nodded, seemingly satisfied.
That made one of us.
“If this book is so important and we know where it is, why wait until tomorrow?” I asked. I wasn’t super keen to jump into danger so soon after the last mission had nearly gotten me killed, but waiting seemed counter-productive. Besides, the sooner we found the book, the sooner I could find the counter-curse for Alec. Then Ryerson could turn the book over to the CIA, and I could make it back in time for the mid-week premiere of Bachelor in Paradise. Everybody’s a winner.
“Because I said so,” Director Abrams said.
Well, that answered that.
“The details are being finalized, and you’ll find them in your briefing packets tomorrow.” He tapped the remote, and the screen went black. “Questions?”
Ryerson shifted in his seat. “Sir, this is off topic, but has there been any progress in the investigation into the organization that Sloane Daniels admitted to being a part of?”
Sloane Daniels was Ryerson’s crazy ex—ex-girlfriend and ex-partner—who had told me about the secret shadow organization within the CIA that she was a member of, when she thought she was going to die. I saved her, fat lot of good that had done. The last I’d heard, she hadn’t cracked under interrogation yet. Which I guess wasn’t too surprising, seeing as the CIA was also the one who had trained her not to.
“Sloane Daniels’s interrogation is ongoing, but Internal Affairs has launched a comprehensive investigation. For obvious reasons, the details of their investigation are classified.”
Those “obvious reasons” were that until the investigation was concluded, everyone was a suspect.
Abrams stood, signaling the briefing was over. Ryerson and Andersen stood too and headed for the door.
“Director Abrams, can I have a word?” I said.
Ryerson paused at the door, a crease forming between his brows.
Director Abrams nodded. Ryerson hesitated and then stepped into the hall and closed the door, leaving me alone with the director.
You Only Spell Twic Page 2
