Alchemy Shift

by Jenny Schwartz

  “Where are the guardians?” Delphi asked.

  Jet was the were liaison to the Collegium, so where was his magical back-up?

  Arlee turned and scanned the environment. “They could be veiled?” So she couldn’t sense them either.

  “They’re scrambling a takedown team,” Jet said, his tone noncommittal.

  Perez’s expression said, not good enough.

  It wasn’t. The guardians ought to be there.

  “We can handle the magic,” Arlee said. She just put it out there.

  Jet’s shoulders jerked. But he controlled his protective instincts, even if his scowl was ferocious as he studied Delphi. “You sure? That the sword you were talking about?” He barely glanced at Excalibur. It was Delphi he worried about, his mate.

  She raised the sword point a fraction. It dragged toward the warehouse. “It seems to counter death magic spells directed at me and it definitely finds evil magic. It guided us here.”

  “All right. We’ll scope out the building. There’s no electricity supply to it and neither Perez nor I can hear a generator, so technological surveillance oughtn’t to be an issue. Still, we go carefully. Delphi with me. Arlee with Perez.”

  Perez caught Arlee’s hand and they loped away, moving surprisingly well together. Then again, Arlee was a runner. She could keep up with the jaguar-were where Delphi would have stumbled and panted. Perez and Arlee vanished around the corner, taking a wide path, evidently following a plan Jet and Perez had in place to reconnoiter the warehouse.

  “Stay alert. Stay hidden. Don’t engage. There’s no shame and a lot of wisdom in running,” he said

  “But if we can get the girl out…?” Before the guardians arrived and who knew what would go down.

  “We’re playing it by ear.” Jet led Delphi through the shadows closer to the warehouse. “I hope your friend can climb? Perez is going to go up the old fire escape.”

  “Arlee will manage.” Delphi readjusted her grip on the sword as she saw the warehouse again. Her mage sight overlaid it with a sickly green glow, that of the death magic ward and repulsion spell.

  “Come on.” Jet headed for the double doors at the front of the warehouse.

  Delphi tried to pull him back, but her efforts didn’t halt him at all. “Jet!”

  “Ian’s car is parked around the back. People tend to be alert to entrances through the door they use. So we’ll use the front door.”

  “How will you get it open? If I use an Open Sesame spell, Graham will—”

  She stopped as Jet exhibited an all-kinds-of-illegal lock opener, the kind police used.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “According to the spells you said are on the warehouse, no one on the street will notice a little break and entry. And if Ian or Graham notice, we run.” He tapped his ear. “Perez is on the roof. He can’t hear or scent anyone on the second floor.”

  Belatedly, Delphi noted the earpiece Jet wore.

  He passed on Perez’s report. “Arlee said she senses three people. Below ground.”

  “Basement?” Delphi suggested.

  “Let’s go see.” Jet unlocked the padlock on the front door. The double doors opened with a gratingly unwilling sound. He paused and listened, before shaking his head. “Anything?” He checked with her.

  “Excalibur is pulling downwards.” Toward death magic and the sword felt insistent. But for herself, Delphi couldn’t sense any hostile magic. Perhaps Excalibur was neutralizing it. She passed the sword to Jet and snatched it back, her heart rate accelerating thunderously.

  Jet blocked her from the door, looking alert for the threat she’d reacted to.

  “Panic spell,” she said softly. As a were, it hadn’t affected him. “I’m okay. I don’t think there’s anyone there. Graham, or someone, simply left this spell as a precaution.”

  Jet assessed her, then nodded. “Panic spell,” he murmured for Perez’s benefit. “Is Arlee—? Okay.” And to Delphi. “Graham didn’t ward the rooftop entrance. Let’s hope he’s careless about other things, too.” He walked into the dark warehouse.

  Taking a cautious breath, fingers brushing the back of Jet’s jacket for the contact, Delphi stepped inside. With his bear-were senses, there was probably enough light for him to see by as it filtered in through the badly boarded up windows. But for her, she tripped over her own feet. She tried to see by mage sight, but there was no magic in the room—other than Excalibur, which began to glow faintly, as if aware of the need for stealth. By its discreet illumination she saw the ghostly outlines of counters and shelves. The front of the warehouse had been a store at some point. It was empty now. Empty of life and spells.

  Jet walked straight through the counters toward the door that led to the backroom.

  Delphi wasn’t great at estimating size and distance, but she thought the front room was perhaps a third of the long, narrow building, even if apprehension made traversing it seem endless. Excalibur didn’t resist her progress, but continued pointing down to the basement.

  Gun in hand, Jet indicated that Delphi wait by the shelves till he’d cleared the backroom.

  She hated seeing him vanish into the darkness. She counted. One, two, three,… She’d give him till ten seconds before entering after him. Ten seconds had never felt so long. She’d have been right on his heels, except Excalibur’s glow made her a visible target, and she wasn’t letting go of the sword again. Not after her brush with the panic spell on the front door. …eight, nine,…

  Jet reappeared, waving her in. He moved competently, trained for this type of action, and he was silent.

  Delphi felt clumsy, as if her feet were twice their usual size. Her knees resisted bending, muscles and tendons stiff with tension. Her every footfall sounded loud in her ears.

  The backroom was lighter than the front one thanks to two completely unboarded windows. It was also entirely empty except for a staircase against the far wall. Two figures crept down the wooden stairs, merging with the shadows. Delphi’s panicked heartbeat nearly choked her till she recognized Arlee and Perez. She reined in her surging magic.

  Jet put a hand at her lower back and urged her to the staircase.

  Perez pointed down, then held up three fingers.

  Chances were the three people in the basement were Ian Lewis, the girl and Graham Monroe. What would the two villains do to the girl while the Collegium guardians scrambled a team? And even when the guardians arrived…

  Delphi concentrated but she couldn’t sense the three people below ground. Earth had a tendency to muffle magic and she lacked Arlee’s entropic magic’s affinity for life forces. She concentrated hard, trying to force her magic, and the only result was that her ears rang with a buzzing, jagged whine.

  Jet and Perez held guns, and Arlee’s hands shimmered in mage sight with high-potency spells. They were ready for action. Everyone looked at Jet. This was his call. It was meant to be a recon mission…

  “Please. Please, just let me go.” The girl’s voice, sobbing and despairing, carried up the stairs. There was no response from the men with her.

  However, upstairs, everything changed. There was no question any of the four present could walk out and leave the girl there, not with her plea echoing on the dusty, dank air.

  Jet tapped his chest, before pointing at Perez, then Arlee, and finally, Delphi. The order of attack. The order of their strength in a fight against a death magic rogue mage.

  He was wrong and right. If Graham and Ian had guns, Jet and Perez needed to go first. Plus, a direct magic attack wouldn’t affect them, since they were weres. But Delphi had Excalibur, and she’d seen herself in prophecy as an angel with a flaming sword.

  Justice. Deliverance. She had a role here, she just didn’t want it to be avenging Jet’s hurt or death. She readied her magic, running it into spells she’d studied for use against death magic. Those she could depend on. What Excalibur might be capable of was yet to be discovered, and hence, couldn’t be relied on.

  Although what was known was i
ts glow. Delphi couldn’t follow the others immediately or the light from the sword would give those below a warning of intruders.

  Jet vanished down the wooden stairs and fear for him clamped like a vise around Delphi’s lungs. She had to count her breaths to keep them silent or she would have panted like a dog. Perez was right on Jet’s heels, vanishing, and then, Arlee, equally as focused.

  With a start, Delphi recognized that her friend was as much a warrior as the two men. She should be a guardian. It was the guardians’ loss for mistrusting the unknown quality of Arlee’s entropic magic, whereas the alchemists embraced its mystery. Arlee had gone where she was welcome and valued.

  “Hands up! Where I can see them,” Jet shouted.

  Delphi ran down the stairs, trying not to fall as she tried to see everything. Excalibur’s glow steadily increased. The basement stretched the length of the building, but was lost to shadows. Only the center of the subterranean world was lit by portable lamps.

  A monster stood at the edge of the floodlit circle. A human monster. Death magic crawled over a tall, cadaverous man wearing unremarkable gray sweats and holding a heavy, leather-bound book in twisted hands. He took a step back, out of the light.

  “Down on the floor.” Jet and Perez spread out, angling to cover the two men, the other of whom held a tattoo gun.

  That was Ian Lewis, recognizable from his prison photo. He’d been bent over a young girl who was naked from the waist up and tied stomach-down to a massage table. He was tattooing what was likely a spell onto her back. Blood ran down the side of her ribs.

  “Please, God. Thank you, God.” The girl was crying and straining against the ropes that bound her. “Get me out of here.”

  “Down on the floor,” Jet repeated.

  Ian put the tattoo gun down and raised his arms.

  Excalibur’s light flared. It illuminated Graham’s ruined face. Scars, three deep gouges, ran down his left cheek. Part of his lower lip was missing, as were his eyebrows, burned off to judge by the reddened skin where they’d been. The tip of his nose was gone, cut off and scarred over. It was all evidence not of death magic, but curse magic, where the spell-caster disfigured himself to power the spell. Graham had started by sacrificing himself, then discovered that killing others was more effective.

  Even his voice rasped, as if his throat had been scoured by fire or acid. “Serpents and—”

  Jet fired, hitting the grimoire.

  Graham flinched and dropped the book. Excalibur’s glow dimmed fractionally, suggesting that the gunshot had distracted the rogue mage from the spell he’d been building. For a heartbeat Delphi thought they’d won. Then Graham lunged for the girl.

  Jet and Perez fired. Their bullets struck a barrier that suddenly shimmered in mage sight, a ward. The bullets dropped to the cement floor of the basement, their energy lost.

  “Unravel!” Arlee screamed the word, or perhaps, it was her magic that screamed. Reality hazed.

  The barrier fell.

  Jet and Perez fired again.

  But Graham dived across the floor, reaching out to wipe his hand in the girl’s blood even as he grabbed Ian Lewis. The two men vanished.

  The thunder of Jet and Perez’s guns, the ricochet of their bullets, and the deafening echo of both, ceased.

  “Illusion or truly gone?” Jet shouted the question for Delphi and Arlee.

  “Truly gone.” Delphi ran forward, sweeping the sword over the space where the two men had been. “Translocation takes a powerful…oh, dear heaven.”

  The girl was convulsing on the massage table, the ropes tearing her flesh as her body wrenched itself apart in a death struggle.

  “Graham took the girl’s life force for his translocation spell,” Delphi explained rapidly to Jet and Perez.

  “And he can’t have it,” Arlee snarled. In mage sight and true sight, Arlee had her hands inside the girl. “I’ve got her life force. Delphi two feet above the crown of her head, swing Excalibur. That’s the cord Graham is using to drain her life force for his translocation.”

  Delphi couldn’t see the cord. But she didn’t have to. She trusted her friend. She lifted Excalibur. The sword blazed. It swung down and fire torched up to the ceiling, and went dark. The sword had cancelled the death magic in the basement.

  A second later, the girl gasped, choked and cried.

  “It’s all right. We have you. It’s all right.” Arlee patted and comforted the girl.

  Perez had a knife out and was sawing through the ropes. The knots were too tight, pulled by her struggles, to be undone.

  “There you are. There you go.” Arlee lifted the girl to a seated position.

  Jet shrugged off his jacket and handed it over. The girl’s back was bleeding, but the self-respect of being able to cover herself, that mattered.

  The girl hugged the jacket to her chest and leaned into Arlee.

  Perez was studying the set up. The basement was a makeshift tattoo parlor.

  Jet had been right. There was no noisy generator to provide electricity. Instead, the tattoo gun was connected to a battery. That had been the noise Delphi’s straining ears had heard from the first floor: the jerky, irritating painfulness of a tattoo gun in use.

  Ian Lewis must have tattooed the death magic spells Graham traded in onto their courier-sacrifices in this room. But why had they risked stealing a girl now when the New York police were looking for them as the killers of the boy?

  “How did they get out?” Perez asked.

  “Translocation spell,” Delphi sagged as adrenal fatigue kicked in.

  “Delphi interrupted it, though.” Arlee looked at Jet. “Wherever Graham was headed, he didn’t get there.”

  “Which means what?” Jet asked intensely. “Is he stuck in some in-between realm?”

  “I wish.” Delphi mightn’t be the best in a fight, but she knew her magic theory—and translocating people was mostly theory. Since it required human sacrifice, it wasn’t something Collegium alchemists experimented with. Delphi glanced at the girl. It wasn’t Jet her sword had saved tonight, but the girl. But perhaps, in saving the girl, some of Jet’s guilt at not being there for his cousin would lift. “The translocation wasn’t completed, so it would have coughed Graham and Ian out somewhere short of their intended destination. That could be anywhere, probably at ground level. So, building, street, river.”

  Perez’s head tilted. He looked up, listening. “Company.”

  Eight seconds later, a team of Collegium guardians ran down the stairs. Chad, Arlee’s ex-date, was among them.

  Chapter 9

  “Arlee, what are you doing here?” Chad, one of their guardian “rescuers”, demanded.

  Martin had other concerns. The older guardian glared at Jet. “You should have waited for us. Where are Graham and Ian?”

  “Did you let them get away?” Chad strode angrily around the basement, poking into its secrets and discovering there were none. The guardians were outfitted like soldiers with the torches attached to their helmets sending beams of light haphazardly into the basement’s shadows. It was surreal.

  Despite the bleeding tattoo on her back, the girl shrugged Jet’s jacket on and huddled into it in a sure sign that the guardians scared her.

  That made Delphi mad, and she sensed the same in Jet, Arlee and Perez.

  Jet strode to stand next to Delphi, putting himself between the guardians and the girl. He met the guardians’ criticism head on, but in silence.

  Perez aligned himself with Arlee, standing at her shoulder, his gun holstered and his jacket pushed back to show the police badge on his belt.

  “You let them get away!” Chad swore. “Playing games. This is the crap that happens when untrained and mundane people meddle.”

  “Like you could have stopped a translocation,” Arlee said witheringly.

  All activity in the basement halted. The guardians swung around to stare at her.

  “Where is the body?” Martin demanded, a valid question given that translocating peop
le required human sacrifice.

  “Delphi cut Graham’s drain on his prisoner’s life.” Arlee gently squeezed the girl’s shoulder, trying to soften her words.

  “How?” Chad barked.

  “Careful.” Jet’s warning was a rumbling growl.

  Chad waved aside the warning. “How could you stop a translocation?”

  Arlee stared at her ex-date and shook her head. “Damn, but I was mistaken in you.”

  “Him?” Perez seemed to catch her meaning. “Mi cielito, no wonder you are single. Such bad taste.” His flashing grin was a promise to Arlee and a provocation to Chad.

  The guardian took a step forward. Martin pushed him back.

  Delphi had endured enough. “I cut Graham’s translocation spell with the sword. Excalibur hates death magic.”

  “Excalibur?” The question came from seven guardians, and then, it all went to hell. “Excalibur, as in the sword Shawn brought from Texas? What were you thinking, taking it out of the Collegium!”

  “Enough.” Jet’s low shout silenced the angry voices.

  Delphi spoke into the silence. “My possession of Excalibur is a matter for me and Tyrone.” The chief alchemist and her boss. “I’m responsible for the sword and it has not been harmed.”

  “That’s not really the point.” Martin frowned at Jet. “This was a joint operation between the Collegium guardians—not alchemists—and the weres to see if we could work together.”

  Chad’s face suddenly went blank.

  A couple of the other guardians also looked odd. One of those, a woman in her thirties, Portia, intervened, or tried to. “Martin, we’ve worked with weres before. We have shared goals. We get along. This isn’t some test.”

  Martin slashed his hand through the air, dismissing her words, as he scowled at Jet. “You couldn’t wait for us. You went in with these two untrained women.”