Money, power, genealogy, or any combination of the three were the price of admission to campus. Not everyone was accepted, and those who weren’t quickly realized how fortunate they were. There were no dropouts at campus. The graduation rate was one hundred percent. It was the twenty-five percent mortality rate of incoming candidates that had the rank and file of the community releasing a collective breath when they didn’t get accepted.
“Were you a candidate, Nicholas?” I couldn’t hide my smirk. “Because we know you weren’t on campus because of your casting skills.”
“I’m sorry.” He shook his head with an apologetic look on his face, but I caught something else in his eyes. Mischief. “My story gave the wrong impression. The moral wasn’t that I’m bad at spells, but rather how one mistake and a piece of withheld genetics is how I ended up assigned to you.”
“Don’t forget your dead roommate.” Magic skated across my skin, radiating throughout the room. I looked to Lars for confirmation he felt it too. “What is that?”
But it was too late. Nicholas broke the magical bonds and was in motion, a pile of ropes on the floor at the foot of the chair. He smiled, wedging himself into the corner where the two far walls of my office met, looking at us with an awful lot of confidence for someone who’d literally backed himself into a corner.
It seemed we’d grossly underestimated our opponent.
“Well, Houdini, you’re out of the chair. Let’s see if you can get out of the building as easily.” Lars lunged forward in a burst of speed, muscle, and magic most wouldn’t think a man of his size and stature would be capable of.
His attempt to get him in a bear hug and grapple him down to the floor set Nicholas in motion again, flushing him out like a rabbit hiding under a bush from a hound dog. With Lars as a distraction, I pulled the used packet of needles from my back pocket and pricked my finger again. Blood welled up on the tip of my index finger while I waited for my opportunity to present itself.
Nicholas sailed by but not before I was able to mark him. Three quick swipes and the sigil was complete. Our hostage dropped like a sack of potatoes at my feet, fully conscious with all of his faculties intact, including his ability to speak, but immobile.
“Grim didn’t teach you that, either.” Lars had a look of newfound respect, peppered with a healthy dose of fear on his face.
“Nope.” Another of my foster parents’ favorites. Short and sweet. Three hatch marks that looked like chicken scratch to most was enough to drop a toddler in a split second.
How else would you get them to sit still?
“Marks, you are definitely bringing out the worst in me.” I knelt over him, holding his gaze in the hopes he saw the same thing Lars apparently had.
A woman completely out of fucks.
“What am I going to do with you?” I poked him in the chest, testing the hold of my sigil.
Nicholas smiled again. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to make a deal?”
Chapter Nine
“A DEAL? THIS ISN’T a game show, Nicholas.” I toed him in the ribs with the tip of my shoe to be sure he hadn’t unraveled the mark I’d placed on him.
It was unlikely, given the individual who’d created it was an unsavory black magic market dealer known as Charles who’d died shortly before Grim found me in the alley. Did I mention he was also my foster father?
My foster father was rotten inside and out. The only thing he was good at, aside from breaking every Magistrate law ever written, was making his mark. A mark worked differently than a ward, forcing the maker’s will upon the bearer. Charles perfected it, and then he taught his wife, Jodi.
She perfected it by practicing on me.
“What did you have in mind?” I squatted down so I could get a better look at him. So I could look him in the eye while he tried to wheel and deal me. “Better make it good, Marks, because the alternative is enough Forgive and Forget potion to make you a permanent amnesiac. Lars?”
Lars pulled a chain out from beneath his shirt, a small key dangling on the end, and walked behind the desk. After freeing the chain from around his neck, he unlocked the bottom drawer and took out a glass jar. He set bottle after bottle of the memory potion in a neat little row the length of my desk.
“Let me go back and report in,” Nicholas said. “I’ll tell them I missed you, again, but I’m close to getting the proof they need to bring you up on charges. It’ll buy you some time.”
Nicholas’s plan lacked a lot of details. To say I was less than impressed would have been an understatement.
“Look, it’s not much, but we’re both dead if we don’t work together,” he continued. “Consider it part one of a two-part plan, with part two still under development.”
“This is ridiculous. Send you back?” Lars fingered one of the potion bottles on the desk. “The Magistrate is probably minutes away from blowing down the door. You think they weren’t watching you? You think they don’t know you’re here?” He turned to me. “Del, a word? Out in the hall?”
“Don’t move.” I gave Nicholas a little pat on the chest. “I’ll be right back.”
Lars led the way out of the office and into the hall, marking the door with a sigil for silence once he closed it behind us.
“I know what you’re going to say, Lars, but listen—”
“Because it is crazy.” Lars cupped a hand over my mouth. “We didn’t use the Forgive and Forget with Ms. Brown, and look where it landed us.” He spared a glance over his shoulder at the door and back to me. “Grim must have known the Magistrate was gunning for you because he left explicit instructions should a situation like this arise after he was gone. Made me swear to follow them.” Lars removed his hand.
“Is it my turn to speak now? What are you talking about? Instructions?” My shoulders sagged under the weight of more guilt being piled on.
“It’s all taken care of. New name, new place, enough money to get you started after I buy you out of your half of the shop. Grim thought of everything.” Lars delivered the specifics about Grim’s contingency plan with a certainty that brooked no argument.
Not that that had ever stopped me before.
“New name? New place? Buy me out of the shop?” I realized I was parroting everything Lars had said and in danger of having a cracker shoved into my mouth, but the shock of my future being ripped away from me was too much.
That Lars would even consider it was a sucker punch to the gut.
“We give him the elixir and get you out of here. It’s what Grim wanted.”
I’d be a liar if I said a part of me didn’t want to tuck tail and run, to get the hell out of Providence and never look back. But something Karen had said came back to me. She wanted to be invisible, to live outside of the Magistrate’s reach. In order to do that, she gave up everything that made her who she was. I did that to her, with a ward. With Grim gone, who would do that for me? As far as I knew, I was the only one left.
And then something else occurred to me.
“All my life, people have been trying to get rid of me. My parents, the Magistrate. Grim. Now you. Why do you suppose that is, Lars?” Having asked the question aloud, I wondered why I never pushed for answers before.
“Grim never wanted you anywhere but by his side. What he wanted, what I want, is for you to stay alive, and that’s not going to happen if you stay in Providence, Del.” Lars reached for my hand, his large fingers engulfing mine.
“It won’t happen anywhere, Lars.” After a gentle squeeze, I slipped my hand from his and went back inside the office to talk to Nicholas Marks before he figured out how my mark worked and unraveled it.
As it turned out, not a moment too soon.
Nicholas had managed to roll himself over to a prone position. A meaningful conversation would be more uncomfortable this way, with his neck craned up to look at me. But the fact that he’d moved at all was impressive. Had I stayed out in the hall with Lars any longer, he might have made it to his feet.
“Ah, you’re back.” Nicho
las looked up at me, his head cocked at an odd angle now that he was on his chest rather than his back. “I thought you forgot about me.”
“I highly doubt that. You make quite an impression.” Rather than squat down to his level, I hopped up and took a seat on my desk.
I couldn’t help but smile when Nicholas rolled those big brown eyes, knowing full well what I’d done.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” Rather than keep his neck craned, he rested the right side of his head on the floor and looked up.
“Why, you miss him? Don’t worry, he’ll be back in a minute. He just needs to cool down.” My legs dangled in front of the desk, emphasizing my short stature and the reason why people often made the mistake of assuming I needed someone to fight my battles for me. “Lars isn’t my boyfriend or my bodyguard. Lars is more like my big brother—a little overbearing when strange men come snooping around for the Magistrate, you know?” I gave him a pointed glare.
“So, not your boyfriend. Cool,” he said. “I was just wondering how long I had to convince you to work with me before the big guy came back in.”
“Lars is right—they’ll know you’re lying. They’ll know you were here.” As much as I didn’t want to run away from my life and everything I loved, if the Magistrate knew we had Nicholas, I wouldn’t have a choice but to implement Grim’s contingency plan.
“No, no, they won’t.” Nicholas took a deep breath and closed his eyes. His eyelids twitched and his lips moved as he muttered something I couldn’t understand but instinctively knew involved magic.
Rolling off the desk, I used the massive piece of old oak furniture as cover and crouched behind it before pulling on my own magic. My repertoire of offense spells was limited, but I could hold my own in a fight.
“Relax.” Nicholas sat on my floor, legs crisscrossed like he was preparing for meditation. “I’m not going to do battle with you, Adeline. That would be counterproductive to both of our goals, but I do find it difficult to hold a conversation lying facedown on your dingy carpet.”
“Okay.” I rose slowly from behind the desk, picking up the scattered receipts and paperwork from my roll across the desktop. “How did you do that?”
“Unravel the mark?” He rolled his shoulders back a couple of times before stretching his arms above his head. “It’s kind of my thing, how I became a candidate and a campus man. A spell is just layers of elements, like a cake. I work the recipe backwards.”
“A cake?” Nicholas was an unusual—and unusually talented—character. But was he trustworthy? “But you didn’t completely unravel mine. Why?”
“I thought it might be a sign of good faith.” He rolled his eyes, relenting. “Fine, I admit it. There’s something I can’t place, part of the puzzle I haven’t figured out yet.”
“Ah, my secret ingredient.” I sent a silent thanks to Charles, the black market magic dealer. Something I thought I’d never do, but I might not have stood a chance against Nicholas if it weren’t for that miserable old bastard.
“Adeline, get out of here.” Lars stormed back into the room, gun raised and pointed at Nicholas’s head. He clearly hadn’t taken a time-out in the hall.
“Lars.” I came out from behind the desk, hands raised in a placating gesture. “What are you doing? We can’t shoot him.”
“You can’t.” Lars pulled the revolver’s hammer back. “Me? I can splatter his brains on the back wall as easy as scrambling an egg for breakfast.”
“I guess we aren’t teaming up?” Nicholas shrugged, but I sensed his apprehension.
And his gathering magic.
“How are you going to keep all this from the Magistrate?” My hands up, palms facing Lars—even though I knew he wouldn’t risk a shot with me in the line of fire—I turned to look at Nicholas. “Convince me and we have a deal.”
“Del, you can’t be serious.” Anger swelled Lars’s chest and deepened his voice to a low timbre that signaled he was about to go off like a powder keg.
“I could say the same to you. You’re not a killer, Lars.” I lowered my hands and rested them on my hips.
“We were both something else before Grim found us.”
Lars never shared his past with me but whatever he’d been didn’t matter. I only knew this version of him, the one Grim must have seen buried deep down inside and deemed worth saving. And he was worth saving. Something he obviously needed to be reminded of if he was willing to throw his life away over Nicholas. Without a second thought to the gun in his hand, I moved in for a hug. My fingertips barely touched as I wrapped my arms around the broad expanse of his chest and back.
“We’re in enough trouble without killing a candidate.” With my head resting on his chest, I could smell his cologne. It was the same cologne Grim always wore, a weird combination of spices that smelled a little like pipe tobacco, though neither of them smoked, and a reminder that I was safe as long as I was with them. “Let’s hear him out first, okay?”
I saw it in his eyes. He wanted to argue, to tell me to run while he did a terrible thing in order to keep me safe.
“Fine.” Lars managed to lace all manner of threats into that one word but moved the hammer of the gun back into place and lowered the revolver. “Let’s hear this miraculous plan that’s going to save all our asses.”
“Right, no pressure.” Nicholas had the good sense to at least look nervous. Whether he actually felt that way was questionable. “The Councilman assigned to monitor me is my uncle. He’s not a big fan of mine. My death is of little consequence to him—in fact, he would probably welcome it as retribution for some unknown slight by my mother when they were growing up. Trust me, he’s not watching me. Or you for that matter. There’s still time to figure a way out of this.”
“Your uncle is a Councilman? Your family is connected?” Lars had murder in his eyes. “Del...”
“Lars, we are not killing a candidate.” I searched Nicholas’s eyes, his soul, poking and prodding with all my senses—magical and Mundane—for any sign that he was lying to us. “If he’s telling the truth, the Magistrate doesn’t have anything but suspicions to go on. If we kill him, we give them the confirmation they need.”
“Those are some pretty big ‘ifs,’ Del.” Lars’s shoulders relaxed as some of the tension and anger left his body. “You really trust this guy?”
Did I? I wasn’t sure. He seemed to know an awful lot about me and Lars, despite being a relative stranger to the two of us. Trust was something you earned. Over time. I wasn’t in the habit of just doling it out. But if there was one thing I was certain of it was that we were out of options.
“What choice do we have?”
Chapter Ten
“FOR THE RECORD...” Lars pulled a new pack of needles out of the autoclave and set them on my tray. “This is a bad idea.”
“Worse than the idea to put him in the trunk and take him home?” I wiped down my chair, taking a last pass with sanitizing wipes to ensure my station was clean. “Because one could argue that gem of an idea set all this in motion.”
“One could argue, but one would not win said argument.”
Setting up my station was such a constant in my daily life that I could do it with my eyes closed. Lars lost a twenty on that bet years ago. It was second nature and easy to forget about the troubles of the previous day when I had an appointment to focus my thoughts around.
Only my next appointment was exactly what my current problems centered around.
Nicholas’s grand idea was to tell his uncle he’d scheduled an appointment for a traditional tattoo in order to gain my confidence and with the hopes he’d be able to schedule a follow-up appointment for something a little more unconventional. The Footman who collected our weekly tithes had already seen him in the shop and would verify as much if asked, giving additional stability to his story.
The plan was to buy us some time. Time for what exactly was still under debate. Entering Grim’s version of a Magistrate Protection Program had Lars’s vote. Nicholas leaned in th
e opposite direction—buying time to come up with a way off the Magistrate’s radar and back to a normal life.
For both of us.
Or some semblance of normal, anyway, because I was far from it on a good day.
Warding would be off-limits though. Still, I’d be alive, and that was better than the alternative. When everything blew over and the Magistrate had another witch under the microscope, I could go back to doing what I did best—fixing mucked-up magic with my wards.
“For a city named Providence, she’s not offering much of it these days.” I set up the bottle of black ink for lining along with my favorite set of inks for grey wash on the tray. My hands itched with the desire to grab one from my private stores and add it to the others, but I resisted the urge and stuck with the Mundane options instead.
“Unless of course this whole situation is divine providence.” Nicholas stood inside the doorway with a casual demeanor like he was any other customer, on any other day. He had an annoying habit of showing up unannounced and undetected.
The hip college professor look—crisp, white button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, combined with dark jeans and Converse All-Stars—worked for him. Was it a clever ruse to distract people from the reality of his status as a candidate and the money and family ties that came with it? Or was this the real Nicholas? Either way, it suited him.
“Tattoo artist by day, warder by night? Does that sound like a divine prophecy to you?” I pointed to the chair in my workstation. “Take a seat.”
“It sounds a little like a story about a chosen one, yeah.” Nicholas strolled over, a mischievous glint in his eyes as he unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off, revealing a worn and faded Nine Inch Nails T-shirt underneath.
“There’s no story about a chosen one. Don’t be an ass, or in your case, yourself.” Lars crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the half wall that separated his station from mine. “Hovered” may have been a more accurate description. “Well, let’s see what the candidate designed. A family crest, something to represent the campus? Or maybe a big red T, like a scarlet letter but for traitor instead of adultery?”
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