“You should be in bed,” he said more roughly than he meant to.
She stared at him for a long moment, then walked to him and hugged him.
Something in his heart cracked at her unconditional caring. He hugged her tight, bending to put his face against her hair and inhale the warm, rose-and-woman scent of her. “I kept imagining Emma in the world I saw, tonight.” His guilt came out in jerky words. “Tony and Grace.”
“Did you find anything?”
“A name. Ian Lewis.” At her question, the change of topic, he tried to straighten and pull away.
She gripped his hair with one hand, keeping him with her. “Then you did something for Emma. You are doing something for Tony and Grace.” Her dark brown eyes showed concern and her voice rang with conviction. “Do they, do you, have any other family?”
“None who are interested,” he said. “My dad died when I was five. He was a cop, shot on duty in Boston.” Delphi shuddered and he remembered that her brother served on the NYPD along with her mom. He sat down with her on the sofa, keeping her close. “My memories of him are shadowy. Mom raised me, mostly alone. Her parents retired to Arizona. They’re dead, now. She died.” He had to clear his throat. “Six years ago. She was working in a charity hospital in Mali. There was a car accident. It was the rainy season and the roads were bad. The car rolled.”
“I’m sorry.”
He sighed. “This wasn’t how I hoped tonight would go.”
She nestled into him. “You don’t have to race me to bed for me to know you want me. This afternoon’s kiss told me that. We can wait.”
“I don’t want to.” He slid his hand under her pajama top to caress her breasts, finding them soft and full. “And yet…I want to do this right.”
Her face was level with his throat. She kissed it, leaned back, and smiled at him.
He kissed her. The sweet taste of her drove out some of the night’s demons.
“Snuggle with me on the sofa,” she invited.
They had beds aplenty upstairs, but he agreed with her thinking. On the sofa in the living room, there was no pressure. They’d take things slow, see how things developed…if they could recapture the afternoon’s mood. He grabbed the blanket and flung it over her as she stretched out against him.
“Who were you working with, tonight?” she asked casually.
“I was alone.”
She pushed up on one elbow. “But you said the Collegium assigned guardians to work with you.”
“Martin and Seleste have other priorities.” He kissed her frowning mouth. “It’s okay.”
“Hmm.”
A couple more kisses, the welcome sensation of Jet surrounding her, and then, he was asleep. Delphi lay cuddled into him, feeling tenderness for the big man who was exhausted from all he attempted to do. The Collegium guardians should not have left him alone to track his cousin’s killer.
I’ll only investigate a tiny bit, she promised him silently. Not enough to make you think you have to protect me, too.
She fell asleep making her plans and woke to Jet’s low whisper.
“I hear the kids.”
“You do?” She couldn’t hear a thing. Then again, she was a tad distracted, waking to such a sexy man.
“Bear-were hearing,” he reminded her.
“Ah.” She kissed him.
He responded enthusiastically, before abruptly lifting her up and off him, steadying her as she stood.
Now she, too, could hear Tony and Grace. The thump of their feet meant they were descending the stairs. She smiled at Jet as he folded the blanket and she headed for the kitchen. Nothing to see here, kids.
“Good morning, Tony. Good morning, Grace,” Jet said.
They chorused “Good morning” before entering the kitchen and greeting Delphi as she measured coffee into the coffeemaker. A few minutes later she escaped the breakfast chaos, carrying her precious mug of coffee upstairs to drink while she showered and dressed. She returned to eat a slice of toast—setting a good example for Tony—before dashing out the door.
Well, not quite dashing.
Jet walked with her, and since the kids remained out of sight in the kitchen, he stole a scorching kiss. “I like your dress.”
So did she. It was red and fitted, and she felt like a Hollywood goddess when she wore it. She opened the front door. “I wore it for you.”
“I appreciate it.” A quicker kiss before he reluctantly let her go.
She was smiling as she waved to her cousins arriving to work on Jet’s house. In response, she got wolf-whistles. Evidently, they’d seen the last kiss. At least they hadn’t seen the first steamy one.
Spells that required human sacrifice were death magic, which was on the list of evils that the Collegium fought. A report of death magic required Collegium guardians to investigate. However, the two guardians assigned to Jet’s cousin’s death didn’t seem particularly interested. That made Delphi mad. A bear-were mightn’t be able to be directly affected by magic, but a mage could change the world around a were in ways that tormented and killed him. The guardians should have provided Jet, the new were liaison to the Collegium, with back-up last night.
Since they hadn’t, she would.
She wouldn’t be reckless. She’d chosen to be an alchemist and not a guardian because she lacked the edge you needed to engage with the bad guys. It was an edge she saw in her mom and brother. They didn’t live for the adrenaline rush of police pursuit, but they were people who stepped up to handle trouble. Delphi stayed home and cared for the vulnerable. Both sorts of people were needed. Each had different skill sets. She just had to be smart and play to her strengths.
The first step was to get up to speed on death magic, which wasn’t her area of expertise.
Anyone trading in death magic spells would have to be able to protect themselves from contamination. Death magic tainted the world. The rogue mage needn’t be a mage. He or she could be a witch, a shaman, or even a healer gone bad. The crucial point was that somehow they’d contained the taint of death magic. Otherwise, the Collegium would already be aware of them. So Delphi intended to work out how whatever they’d used to contain the taint of death magic could itself be tracked.
After half an hour’s research, she shrugged on the over-sized comfortable cardigan she kept in the office for when the air conditioning went mad and tried to freeze them all. The air conditioning was working fine, today, but she felt cold all the way to her soul. The research into death magic was proving an icky eye-opener.
Within the alchemists’ department, she specialized in researching the provenance and qualities of magical objects. On the whole, that specialization hadn’t required her to have much contact with death magic. She hadn’t realized how grateful she ought to be for that fact.
“People are vile.” Delphi tucked her hands into the sleeves of her fluffy purple cardigan, trying to retreat from what she’d read.
Practitioners of death magic were willing to sacrifice plants, animals and other people to power their spells. The harvesting of living beings’ life force provided a boost to standard death magic, but for a few, specific spells it was more than a boost. It was essential. These would be the spells Jet’s quarry traded in: spells of ill-wishing, enslavement (including love potions, which was a truly horrible thought. Imagine killing someone to bind your lover to you?) and transmutation.
Delphi slumped in her chair, leaning back to stare at the ceiling. She barely saw the stain there from when a cornucopia she’d been studying had erupted. Her office had smelled of strawberries for days.
No, she stared at the ceiling and thought about transmutation.
Transmutation was so much more than turning lead into gold. It wasn’t just inanimate objects that could be affected; although a cheap car could become an expensive one, a modest house a mansion. The horror was that when you added death magic to a simple transmutation spell you could alter living things.
A rogue mage using a death magic transmutation spell and
with the ruthlessness to sacrifice three people, could turn a person into an animal. With slightly less deaths—just one human sacrifice—the mage could permanently alter a person’s appearance.
It was the ultimate plastic surgery.
Delphi bent forward, hugging herself as she battled nausea and panic.
A death magic practitioner who traded in banned magic and people’s lives wouldn’t do so for love potions or to enslave people. They wouldn’t care about love, and enslavement could be achieved through violence, threats and addiction. But transmutation, giving people utterly new identities, that could be lucrative—if you found the right market.
“Breathe, just breathe.” Delphi forced herself to straighten from her huddled position. She rolled up the old scrolls she’d been studying, noting that her hands were steady. Good. She needed to be calm to consider the notion that intuition had just terrified her with.
She closed two grimoires and shut down her computer. Moving mechanically, she brought her desk to its usual tidiness till only the computer, her notebook and pen, and the sword—the so-called Excalibur—that she was meant to be studying remained on it. Then she stood and walked the one step to the window, leaning her hip against the low bookcase beneath it.
The familiar view of building after building stretching upward, nudging sideways, and competing for their right to crowd into Manhattan had her thinking of all the people inside them. So few people had magic. Those who did ought to help those without, or at least, not hurt them. That was the simple, fundamental purpose of the Collegium.
She tugged at her cardigan, hugging it around her.
Her intuition was never wrong.
Two floors below was the forecasters’ department. She’d never wanted to join them. She didn’t want to look for patterns in the present to decipher the future. She believed the future ought to stay an unknown land. Living in the present was difficult enough.
However, to ignore the power of her intuition was to deny part of herself.
If her instincts screamed that the trade in banned spells focused on transmutation, then she needed to suggest the possibility to Jet. Instincts were simply knowledge that hadn’t found the words to express itself.
What she needed was evidence to substantiate her intuition that the trade in death magic spells, the sacrifice of the spells’ couriers, and Jet’s cousin’s death weren’t the end of this evil, but the beginning.
If her intuition was right, a rogue mage was using death magic transmutation to provide organized crime bosses with new identities, which meant that most “wanted” posters had just gone out of date.
Chapter 5
Delphi frowned at the blank page of her notebook. With her preliminary research on death magic done (basically a swift refresher course) and her intuition pushing at her, she was ready to move onto analysis of Jet’s case and structuring an argument to back up her claim that this was far more than a lethal trade in death magic. If organized crime was mixing with magic, that was trouble for everyone.
There were a few problems. Delphi lacked access to the guardians’ database of current cases, so she couldn’t confirm that it was only Emma’s killer who’d been careless enough to leave a tiny portion of the original death magic spell tattooed on her skin. But from what Jet had said about his cousin’s death, and the guardians’ lack of urgency regarding the case, she suspected that was the truth. That remnant of skin was a significant oversight on the part of the rogue mage involved and a potentially major clue. Had the guardians working with Jet attempted to identify the exact spell Emma had been sacrificed to? Were they successful?
It was over six weeks since Emma’s death. She’d have been buried or cremated by now, the mundane autopsy complete and her body released to her last remaining family: Jet. He’d have probably arranged a cremation so that any lingering magic around her body was neutralized. But the scrap of skin containing the remnant of the tattooed spell? That would be in the Collegium’s evidence bunker.
“I can’t.” Delphi rubbed her arms. The thought of touching a dead person’s skin freaked her out. And it wasn’t as if she could check out the evidence, anyway. Milbourne, the mage in charge of the evidence bunker, would want to see her authorization since the evidence belonged to a current case.
So, let’s go at this a different way. Is there anything more I can learn about death magic and transmutation?
The answer was blindingly obvious. She needed access to one of the lesser banned spells, and those were contained in the E (for Evil)-rated grimoires. She didn’t have clearance to access them, but her friend Arlee did.
“No,” Arlee said. She was eating a late lunch in the otherwise empty staffroom. Her booted feet were on the coffee table and she had a book open in her lap. She wore a t-shirt and jeans, as she usually did unless the day’s work included formal meetings. Arlee liked to be prepared to kick butt.
“Don’t you trust me?” Delphi tried the guilt card.
Her friend rolled her eyes. “I’d trust you with my life, but you don’t need the nightmares. Death magic haunts a person. I have some immunity since my magic is entropic.” She could command things to unravel. Such a magic talent tended to center around the end of life, but it could be a positive force. Unravelling released the potential for new growth. Every so often, Arlee took a holiday—a mental health break—in the country. Ranchers and farmers knew that death was part of life.
Arlee put aside her book. “Why do you want to know about death magic?”
Delphi might have hoped that Arlee wouldn’t ask questions, but she hadn’t expected to get access to the E-grimoires without some explanations. Plus, she could do with Arlee’s insight. Transmutation would have similarities to the unravelling of Arlee’s entropic magic. “Come into my office and I’ll tell you.” There, they wouldn’t be overheard.
Once settled in her tiny office, Delphi told Arlee everything: the deaths, the rogue mage, Jet and the kids, and her own suspicions about a link to organized crime. The office grew darker as she talked. It wasn’t her imagination. Storm clouds were massing, swallowing the daylight.
Arlee frowned. “If the guardians suspected transmutation, they’d have asked me to confirm it, and I hadn’t heard of Emma Dillon’s murder.” In other words, she’d have been asked to analyze the death magic tainting Jet’s cousin’s scrap of skin. “I haven’t heard any rumors of physical alteration of people, either.”
“But it’s possible?” Delphi asked, wanting yet dreading confirmation of her intuition. She ignored the dimness of the office. This conversation didn’t need the harshness of artificial lighting.
“Yes.” Arlee stared at the sword lying in the shadows on the desk. It didn’t seem that she saw it, though. “I would have joined the guardians, but they wouldn’t have me. They doubted that my entropic magic would allow me to be a team player.”
“Their mistake,” Delphi said instantly. “You’re the loyalist person I know.”
“Spoken like a friend.” Arlee smiled ruefully. “The point I was making was that the guardians have blind spots. Everyone does. The rogue mage trading in these death magic spells must have identified one of those blind spots to fly under the guardians’ and forecasters’ radar for so long. There are degrees of badness to death magic.”
“It all seems horrific to me.” Delphi tugged the sleeves of her cardigan over her hands again in a self-protective gesture, symbolically withdrawing.
Arlee shook her head. “Death magic happens. The Collegium can’t stop every evil. The guardians try to draw limits. Lines in the sand.”
Rain started, hitting the window and sliding in tears down the glass.
“This rogue mage has crossed the line any decent person would draw,” Delphi said.
“Yes, he has, but the Collegium is still waking up to that reality. You said that Jet is the new were liaison. I think that threw the guardians. They focused on him.”
“I don’t follow.”
Arlee rubbed the back of her neck. “Th
e guardians focused on Jet’s personal link to his cousin. She was a were, yes? So the guardians want to prove to our new allies—the weres—that they can avenge or, better yet, protect them. So the guardians working with Jet have focused on specifics rather than looking at the wider picture.”
Delphi stared at her friend. “For a woman who professes to hate navigating office politics, you have a pretty good grasp of them.”
“Power is power. I just hate spending it on minor stuff. But this isn’t minor.”
“No, it’s not.”
There was a long silence in which thunder could be heard in the distance, then Arlee shook her shoulders and stood. With one booted foot, she pushed back the visitor’s chair till it bumped the door. In the small office, that didn’t take much. “Jet is important to you.”
“Yes…I mean, he could be. I…” Delphi hadn’t expected Arlee’s question. Although it was more a statement than a question. Still, it flustered Delphi. “Jet and I—”
“He’s important to you,” Arlee said flatly. “Which means you’re going to be involved in his investigation and things could get dangerous, and not just because for him it’s personal.”
Delphi drew a deep breath and nodded.
“So you need to be able to counter death magic,” Arlee continued. “In case it follows him home.”
Nervous and fidgety, Delphi picked up the sword that lay on her desk. “I have a strong ward around my house and I’ll make sure Jet, Tony and Grace stay with me till he catches the rogue mage.” She rested the tip of the sword on the floor, for once uncaring of the damage to the carpet, or to the sword, itself. She folded her hands over the pommel. “But you think I’ll need more than that?”
Arlee nodded seriously. “Death magic isn’t something you’re used to encountering.”
“Thank God.”
“You need to be able to recognize the subtlest touch of it and how it affects you, then you can select or craft protective and cleansing spells that suit your magic. Ones you’ll be able to use in an instant.”
Alchemy Shift Page 7
