by Susan Conley
Mona looked at them. “Old spells that aren’t quite working. The Maven will want to set her own, so I’m inclined to just leave them.”
“But you could fix them.”
“But I’m not going to.” She crossed over to the only other door and found a bathroom with a shower and lots of white marble.
“I need to freshen up.” She opened up her bag and pulled a couple of things out.
“Wait, what?”
“I have dinner with my brother every week. And no, you can’t go. I’m not up to dealing with two men thinking they need to protect the women in the room from each other. I’ll never get anything accomplished.”
Cart grunted and looked at his watch.
“Oh, no.” She strode to the bathroom door. Stopping, she turned to find Cart immediately behind her. “I am not canoodling with you here. I’d be embarrassed to leave a residual of magic energy in a place the Maven was going to use.”
“But—”
“Excuse me, are you working on a case or not?” She crossed her arms and canted her hip. “I’ve got to say, I can’t decide whether or not I’m flattered by the fact that you are distracted by sex every time we are alone.”
“Me either, but part of me is convinced I need to make memories now, since every time we separate I’m worried I’ll never see you again. Doesn’t help that with the full moon tonight, my beast is close to the surface and he doesn’t want to let you go.”
“We haven’t separated in days! Until last night, I’ve been in the same building as you since we met.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Mona took his hands in hers. “You’re wrong, it does.” Mona held tight when he tried to pull away. Realizing part of his anxiety was due to his being low on energy she fed him some of the magic she’d unconsciously been cleaning since she’d entered the room. “Worrying that a thing might happen, when you have as much magic as you do, can cause it to happen. So you need to stop.”
Mona sighed, released him, and grabbed her coat. Staying here with Cart was too much of a temptation for both of them. “I need to get going. Is there a car I can borrow?”
Mona saw him mentally bracing himself to let her go. It was both sweet and annoying. She could only hope he’d get over his need to monitor everything she did before it drove her nuts.
He dug some keys out of his pocket. “There’s a tan all-wheel drive car in spot fifteen, use that.”
He held them up and out of her way. “I’ll be out running with the pack. You have to promise to leave a message when you get back so I know you’re safe.”
Mona kissed his cheek and agreed, plucking the keys out when he lowered his arm to hug her. He flipped her into his lap and convinced her he was not settling for anything close to a peck.
“I do have to go. If you want, I’ll call you when I get there and when I leave.”
“No, that’s okay. I’m pretty sure you’re right. In the grand scheme of things, our being together is useful, but not monumental.” He did sound as if he was still trying to convince himself, but she let it slide.
And she knew she was going to try to call him anyway.
“Okay, I’ll be back around eleven. Have fun on your run.”
“Let’s go, before I haul you back and pin you down.”
Mona headed down the hall, Cart right behind her.
“Just as well you’re here, or I’d get lost,” she said as he took her elbow and steered her in the correct direction.
“Yo, Cart, some dude here to see you.” The voice echoed down the hall.
“Who is it?” he called abruptly.
“Some dude from the Buffalo Pack.”
Something wasn’t right. “Didn’t Averill say all the able-bodied men were missing?”
She had never seen someone move so fast. Cart took off down the hall before she’d processed that he’d moved at all. She raced after him knowing it was likely this Were had a spell on him too.
Cart and two other protectors wrestled with the man in the main rotunda. They moved around so much it was hard for her to get a read on him. No time for finesse, she just had to hope her changing things didn’t trigger the same summoning the Weres she’d encountered had.
Her stomach roiled at the thought.
There, the rune for endurance was riding on the top of the spell and thankfully it didn’t have the darker residue that made it difficult to move. She flipped it and he went down under Cart’s next chop. Now speed rose to the top. She flipped that too as she yelled, “Stop!”
Amazingly, they all stepped back. The Were was pitifully flopping on the floor but she was not about to change back the runes.
“I’ve reversed the strength and speed aspects of the spells,” she told Cart.
He walked over and hunkered down by the man.
“Wait, don’t ask him anything—he’s got some nasty things tied to speech. Let’s see. . .” She looked over the spell. She’d been incredibly lucky with the two she’d chosen to turn as they were linked to so much else.
Having learned her lesson she looked deeper.
“Get him out of here! He’s got some kind of beacon on him!”
Cart picked the man up and slung him over his shoulder. The two other protectors who’d been fighting stepped further back.
“I don’t think so!” Mona was not going to let Cart face whatever was being called.
Acting on instinct alone, she gathered the residual magic from the fight and spell. Somehow she fed that magic into Cart. He ran down a corridor, and out to the back lot of the building. As soon as he passed the old barrier, Mona grabbed the back of his t-shirt. Blackness swirled around them.
“What the hell are you doing?” Cart yanked his shirt out of her grip.
“Helping you!”
They were in the living room of an empty house, the stunned Were Cart had carried now slumped unconscious at his feet.
“It’s not helping when I have to take care of you too.”
“You don’t have to take care of me, I’ll take care of myself.”
Still snarling, he grabbed her hand. This home had a ton of residual magic, an elf adept at spells had lived here and left. Not that she was able to do more than recognize the potential before they were jumping again.
Mona found herself dumped like a hot potato when they arrived. Her bottom smarted.
“What the hell is your problem? I’m trying to help here!”
“You’re distracting me!” he whispered back. “Now shut up before you get us both killed.”
Mona stalked to the opposite corner of the small, decrepit shed he’d brought them to. To the far left, through the door-less entry she could see a house under the full moon. Further than across the street, for sure, but close enough that they’d be able to see movement. Cart must have known whoever lived in the house and thought it was a safe place to leave the spelled man.
She studied the building closely as she rubbed her arms in an attempt to get warm, unsure what Cart was waiting for. “This isn’t the Were’s fault, they don’t have control. We need to track down the shithead who is creating these spells. We, as in I need to be there too.”
Cart didn’t look convinced. He turned back to watch the house, not responding to her statement.
“What are we watching for?” she asked, barely able to keep her teeth from chattering. She began bouncing in place to try to warm up.
“Well, we’ve got a bit of a predicament. I can’t do what I was going to since, as you pointed out, they’re not entirely responsible for their actions. On the other hand I can’t leave them here to wreck havoc on any Folk that may be around.”
“No mortals?”
“Not for some distance. Tania liked her privacy.”
“Oh, if it’s just the non-human Folk, I can take care of that.”
“How?”
“I am a Warder, or at least one in training,” she said between bounces. “I do know how to send alarms to the Folk, particularly creatures who we can’t wa
rn with words.”
Mona stopped bouncing, closed her eyes, and remembered the tone, then did a flick that sent it out to reverberate along any magic lines in the area.
“Crap. I felt that.” Cart shook his head and rubbed at his left ear.
“You shouldn’t have, that tone is for creatures!”
“It’s a full moon tonight, Mona, and I am not just strong and able to change, I’m a first generation Were. Right now I’m probably closer to creature than person.”
“Shit, let’s hope other shifters didn’t,” Mona said. “I don’t think there are many strong Weres in the pack.”
“I don’t know if I have enough energy,” he grumbled. “If I hadn’t pulled you along with me, I might have enough for just me.”
“Even with the extra I sent into you?”
“The . . . what?” He stopped talking for a minute. “How did you do that?”
“Later, just get us out of here. I’m getting a really bad feeling.”
Too late—a mix of wolves, big cats, and other predators headed to the house. Right as they got there, the spell they had unwittingly carried caused the building to shake, then burst into a huge ball of fire.
Mona saw the spell, saw the simple runes, and reached out to turn them, thankful this spell, for once, didn’t have any of the sticky residue.
Only to have her hand batted down. The bastard!
“Don’t ever do that! If I have a rune in my hand you could wreck the entire spell and cause chaos.” She turned her back on Cart. “I’m going closer. I want to try to send the whole thing, including the fireball, back to the maker.”
“Don’t go closer!”
She shot a ‘fine! But don’t interrupt me’ over her shoulder and raised her hand again.
The large swirling she’d come to expect with the magic wielder formed in the sky above the house. Weres were dying in that fire, she was sure of it. She needed to move the fire away from the shifters if she was going to save any.
If she turned the homing rune that way and flipped the igniter rune that way . . . the ball of fire shot right at the swirl.
And so did all of the remaining Weres.
Mona stood numb, not wanting the bespelled shifters to get caught in the flames, not seeing what was pulling them along with the spell.
“No!” she screamed as the first of the shifters passed through the fireball on its way back to the face. The decimated remains hit the face and there was a huge flash of light. Everything—the swirl, the shifters, the face—everything disappeared.
She blinked in the pitch black, spots dancing before her eyes. Cart had jumped her out before she saw any more.
She tumbled face first onto the bed. He’d jumped them to the rooms above D’Alessandro’s again. Shivers wracked her body, despite the solid warmth at her back. The frantic beat of her heart matched paced with the pounding in the chest pressed behind her.
She’d killed Weres she’d been trying to save.
“If you had gone in closer—” Cart started.
“But I didn’t,” Mona interrupted. And then, because she simply could not help herself, she started to babble. “We got out of there, didn’t we? But those poor Weres! What if I—”
“Stop!” Cart’s angry yell made her blink. He scrambled off the bed and stood, arms akimbo, tension in every line of his body. His face looking down at her was furious.
She sat up and stared at him.
“Excuse me?” she finally said. “You did not just tell me to stop talking.”
“I did because you were going to babble incessantly about what happened to those Weres, which wasn’t your fault. Oh, you may have killed one or two who might have been spared from the fireball, but only by random bad luck. The bad guy here is whoever sent them and the fireball in the first place.”
Mona blinked at him. Killed one or two? As if that wasn’t a big deal.
Perhaps to him it wasn’t.
But she couldn’t ever see looking at lives that way. Her job was to stop magic from hurting others. Instead, she’d killed two the people she’d been trying to protect.
She stood up and absentmindedly brushed her pants off. “I need to go.”
“I think you’d better.”
Mona looked at Cart. Anger still poured off him.
“I know why I think I have to go. Why do you think I need to go?”
His chest rose and fell as he took several deep breaths before answering.
“I’ve seen what happens when someone thinks their job is to protect everyone else but themselves and their family. They end up dying. I don’t care if I’ll be in physical agony because I’ve withdrawn from the person who I’m pretty sure is my mate, but I can’t watch as you destroy yourself helping other people. Nothing is worth that.”
Mona nodded, unable to form an argument with her grief over killing the Weres wrapping itself around her heart.
He took a step toward her and before his foot hit the ground he disappeared.
Unsure what to do, Mona wandered out into the hall and to the kitchen. Dinner was gearing up downstairs, the smells from the restaurant were almost overwhelming.
Dinner. She was supposed to join Cart and Tania.
One of the lights shifted and moved toward her.
An imp.
“I’m Mona Lisa Kubrek, state your message.”
“Mona,” Nic’s voice carried in the empty room. “I need to cancel dinner. Something’s come up with Tania—Titania, the Maven. I’ll explain later. You should get in touch with Smythe, some odd things are going on.”
Past time to track him down. The imp blinked out and another took its place. She directed the imp to state its message.
A quivery, out-of-breath voice said “Mona, four hundred eleven sixty, make note.”
There was a heartbeat of silence after the imp sparked out. Smythe! He’d sounded odd, out of breath and almost incoherent. Where was he? Did he need help? Mona paused in the act of calling an imp to check. Cart was right, damn him, someone was messing with imps and she couldn’t rely on them. Mona grasped on the one clue Smythe had given her. ‘Make note.’ He had to be referring to his extensive journals and records. Mona needed to tell Cart so they could track down the clue and try to find him.
She headed to the door then stopped. Cart had left.
Surely the protectors would help. Unless Cart had told them to keep her safe, in which case she’d be stuck at the station instead of doing something. Better, then not to say anything, yet, about the message and track down the clue.
Mona headed out, grabbing an oversized sweatshirt off the coat rack by the backdoor. It was going to be a cold five block walk to the new headquarters, but even with Cart walking out, she wasn’t foolish enough to head over to the complex without some backup. Despite his assumptions, she didn’t jump into situations without a thought to her safety. She just didn’t plan to tell them the reason she wanted to go.
Chapter Twelve
During the walk over she’d gotten more and more antsy about Smythe’s message. What did the numbers mean? There were too many possibilities, none of which seemed to fit.
The desk was manned with two Weres when she entered this time, neither of whom she knew. She wondered if any of this crew had had a chance to go on a moon run, if any of them needed to. Surely Cart would have taken care of it.
Indeed, as she waited, a half a dozen Weres headed out, chattering and excited and talking about the tricks they’d learned to hide their tracks in the snow and how hard it was to not mark the territory with everything so unclaimed. Tifft Nature Preserve was mentioned too, a good place for a group their size, provided they had control, which it sounded like they did.
“Hello,” she said to one of the attendants. “I need to find someone from Protector Dupree’s unit. Can you help me?”
The man gave her a look and dismissed her. “We’re closed, except for emergencies. Is it an emergency?”
“Well, no. . .”
“Very well
then, it can wait until the morning. The protectors are here to help, but it’s unreasonable for you to expect them to jump just because you can’t wait until the morning. Really, the Buffalo Pack has got to learn some priorities.” This last was spoken more to himself than to Mona.
He glared at her. She smiled sweetly back.
“Protector. . .” She glanced at his badge, pinned to the hem of his t-shirt. “Matheus. I am glad that Cart, Tiff, Menlo, Hyram, and the rest of the crew have such an avid defender. However, perhaps first you should find out from whom you are defending them from.”
Mona didn’t realize how anxious she was to get going now until she made the pithy speech. Turning to the desk, she saw that Herrick was there, an annoyed look on his face.
“Matheus was doing his job, Trainee,” he said before she could say anything.
What? She didn’t see any foul magic about him so she was very taken aback at the attitude. No, without Cart there, he was acting like a typical Were and dismissing her ‘hysterics’.
“Protector Leader Herrick, I cannot but think that if he’d asked who I was and found out that I am the Warder’s trainee, he might have handled the situation differently.” She emphasized “Warder” since his calling her “Trainee” had been more than a slight. “While I understand the need to vet requests to see the investigative crew, since I am working with them, my request for help to locate them is reasonable.”
“Not at this time of night it isn’t.”
He just lost any chance of her being civil.
“I must insist that it is.” Somehow she knew bringing Cart’s name into the mix would only make his attitude more recalcitrant. Besides, she didn’t want him involved in this.
“With Leader Dupree gone, I am the senior Were here and I say it isn’t.” He crossed his arms over his chest and stared smugly at her.
“Oh?” She did her best to hide the fact she was plucking at every recently laid magic thread she could find by using her hands to emphasize her points. Disrupting the energy was a silent call to those Protectors sensitive to magic. “You think that gives you the right to rule the place? To make decisions that will affect Dupree’s unit? Last I heard, the investigative team and the policing team were separate entities. Have you, in your megalomania, decided they need to be joined?”
