by Carmen Caine
They’d already called them in? Not good.
We fell silent as a pale-faced teen lugging a gray tub arrived and began bussing the tables around us. Only Heath really ate, humoring his voracious appetite with fish, chips, a chicken sandwich, and a huge veggie and hummus plate. He even finished Tabitha’s peppered salad. I stirred my chowder and forced two more spoons down while Lucian stared into the distance, lost in thought and oblivious of the plate before him.
All and all, it was the most awkwardly uncomfortable of meals. The only good thing was Ricky, out cold. As we wrapped things up, I jiggled the bag a couple of times, hoping to wake him up, but he only hiccupped and sloshed around. Great. Since I was headed for my first perimancer encounter, I could’ve used his clarification on the spaghetti and harp strings mention—if it even could be clarified.
And what about mana signatures?
Thanks to Strix, I knew everyone had their own unique, one-of-a-kind signature—except me. Yep. I had the awesome luck of sharing the exact same one as my father, the Mindbreaker, a legendary war criminal of some kind who’d died over a thousand years ago. And while nobody had gotten around to explaining just how he’d fathered me, it didn’t matter. By now, he was nothing more than dust in the ground and certainly nothing I could use to deflect the suspicion rolling my way.
Tabitha’s phone buzzed, jolting my thoughts.
“It’s time to go,” she said, holding her cell phone in a perfectly manicured, hennaed hand. “He found something.”
Rising from the table, I looked her straight in the eye. If I hadn’t succumbed to temptation a few weeks ago and punched her buttons, I wouldn’t be working for my enemy now. Well, it was too late this time, but I made a mental note to govern my temper a bit more in the future.
“Right then, boss,” I said, almost choking on that last word. “What do you want me to do?”
She had the gall to deliberately ignore me. “The car’s waiting,” she said to Lucian. “I’ll pay and then join you.”
He merely nodded and brushing past me, headed for the SUV pulling up to the curb. I stalked after him, wondering just what kind of mess I was walking into, but even more, wondering why I wasn’t bolting in the opposite direction.
Unmasked
Tabitha unclipped her seatbelt and twisting on the black leather seats, faced me as the SUV rolled to a stop in the cemetery parking lot. “We’ll start with you,” she announced.
Not comforting words.
“Sounds good,” I bluffed, forcing a bright smile and rubbing my palms together. “What am I looking for?”
“The truth,” she responded, exiting the SUV.
Well, I wasn’t looking for the truth—that was for sure.
Slightly unnerved, I peeked into my pocket, hoping to find Ricky awake and ready to help. Right. The snoring black pool at the bottom of the sandwich bag wouldn’t be waking any time soon. I sighed. Perhaps that was a blessing in disguise.
Taking a deep, fortifying breath, I hopped out of the SUV and joined Lucian and Heath standing at the edge of the parking lot. Tabitha hadn’t waited. Instead, she’d minced on ahead in her spike heels, straight through the wide entrance gate nearly buried in vines and then up the gravel path running through the very center of the graveyard.
The cemetery was an old one, nestled between two public parks and dotted with crumbling tombstones hidden under ancient, bare-branched trees. A tall, black iron fence surrounded the entire place, giving it that classic Halloween feel. It was creepy. Disturbing. But what else would you expect from such a place?
I shuddered as we passed the lichen-encrusted stone monument where I’d witnessed the Fallen One delivering its mysterious gift to an even more mysterious figure. I hadn’t thought about it much. I was strangely reluctant to. Instinct informed me such a thing was a mistake, as if pondering on it would summon the Fallen Ones to my side. Something whispered in the back of my mind thinking even just that much. My imagination? Pushing all thoughts aside, I focused on the sound of the gravel crunching under our feet and my current predicament.
Looks like I’d lost the chance to run. I’d been a fool to stand around, second-guessing myself. It was almost as if I didn’t want to leave. And for me, that was unusual. I shoved that thought aside, too. I couldn’t afford to go all sentimental—now or ever. It tended to interfere with things such as revenge. And right now, I even had to temporarily shelve revenge, at least until I’d extricated myself out of my current mess.
We’d almost reached the Rowle family crypt and its hidden entrance to the Night Terrors’ domain, when to my dismayed surprise, Tabitha took a sudden turn and made a beeline through a collection of ancient headstones to the corner of the cemetery where I’d freed Dorian.
Great. It was showtime. Spaghetti and harp strings. Spaghetti and harp strings? What could it mean? I blew my auburn locks out of my eyes. Had I gone soft and insane? Was I really staying? Putting my trust in a snoring sandwich bag of smoky ooze? Was fate providing any other choice?
As we emerged from the tombstones and out onto a small expanse of dead grass, a vibrant blast of mana assaulted my nostrils.
Crud. There was real power here. Strong.
The mana’s owner proved to be a delicate old man with wispy white hair and wild black eyebrows. Stepping out from behind a cluster of bushes, he scurried over to the very spot where I’d broken Dorian’s curse and crouched down, running his hands along the cold ground.
So, this was a perimancer. And someone Ricky thought I could take on with spaghetti and harp strings? I scowled. My head was beginning to hurt again.
“What did you find?” Tabitha asked, stopping before the feeble old man to execute a deep bow.
Well, there was no way but forward. I was done with the second-guessing—it hadn’t helped, anyway. Adopting a bold stride, I joined Tabitha and subjected my new nemesis to a closer inspection.
The old man looked harmless enough, appearing frail and slight and reminding me of the typical cartoon rendition of a mad scientist. Rising to his feet, he extended a handful of rocks towards me and whispered enthusiastically, “Vibrating. Excitable creatures.”
I cocked a brow at the various bits of gravel resting in his palms. “Looks like crushed rock to me,” I couldn’t resist observing.
The perimancer gasped and thrust the rocks under my nose. “It’s you!” he charged.
Act natural, Cassidy. Natural. Summoning my acting skills, I asked, “Me what?”
I didn’t need to look at Tabitha to see the prim I-told-you-so expression on her face.
“You were here,” the perimancer explained. “You know something.”
If I’ve learned one thing about bluffing in my life, it’s that loud equals confidence in most people’s minds, and the more volume, aka confidence, you project, the higher the probability they’ll believe what you’ve said. Especially if you mix your lie with the truth, giving it the ring of authenticity. If you can pull that off, you’re basically home free.
“I sure hope I know something,” I said with conviction accompanied by an exaggerated eye roll. “And yes, I absolutely was here. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” Betrayed by gravel. Little punks. I’d have to get even. Somehow.
Tabitha took immediate advantage of the offer. “Did you have a hand in setting Dorian free?” she asked bluntly.
Wow. Talk about cutting to the chase.
“Nope,” I lied. I’d actually had two, but I wasn’t about to confess to anything. Adding a touch of frost to my gaze and ratcheting the volume up a tad, I counterattacked, “What would I gain from that? He wasn’t so nice to me in Venice, if you recall. Didn’t Lucian have to come and rescue me?”
Bingo. Wiped the smug expression right off her face—or at least some of it. Unfortunately, it only lasted a second. “I don’t profess to know how your mind works,” she admitted.
“And what do the stones say?” Lucian’s smooth, slight-accented tones sounded from close behind.
Crud. I’d forgotten about him. I didn’t hazard a glance his way. I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw in his piercing, blue gaze.
“Let’s ask, shall we?” the perimancer’s wrinkled face split into a wide grin. Bringing the rocks close to his lips, he whispered, “Come, my pets, come. Clear your minds. Be calm.”
I couldn’t help it. I arched a brow in disbelief. Calm? Rocks?
The perimancer nodded his pointed chin at a wide, shallow bowl of water nestled on the ground a few feet away. Stones of all sizes and shapes were stacked around it. “Here,” he said. “In my scrying bowl, we shall see the truth.”
“Great,” I responded, moving to join him as I jammed my hand into my pocket, pinching Ricky’s bag. Hard. Of course, there was no response.
“Come, come.” The perimancer waved me forward impatiently. “Hold them.”
I eyed the gravel. Hold them? Hold the little rabble-rousers hell-bent on exposing me? “Gladly,” I offered, wondering how to coerce these particular witnesses into changing their tune. How does one choke and threaten a rock? “And do what with them?”
But he wasn’t listening to me. After releasing the gravel into my hands, gently as if they’d break, he knelt beside the water and began waving his fingers, muttering all the while.
Mana. I smelled it then. Heavy. Overpowering. Incredibly strong. So strong, I couldn’t move or even react.
Spelled.
Horror rippled at the realization. I couldn’t do anything but let a paralyzing blanket of mana descend over me, whispering, calling my name and trying its hardest to force my eyes to close.
I battled, struggled to keep my lashes open as the water in the bowl shifted from clear to black. A picture flashed across its smooth, dark surface: an image of myself, squatting on the ground and reaching. I recognized the scene immediately. And I knew the most incriminating snippet of evidence came next, the part where I took Dorian’s puppet out of the case.
That startling realization burned through the haze infiltrating my brain and jolted me into action, cutting through the mana swirling around me like a knife.
Regaining control of my body, I scrambled back, dropping the stones as the vision in the bowl shattered and the water cleared.
Everyone gasped, shocked.
“Exceedingly odd,” the perimancer said, knitting his black brows into a straight line. “The connection shouldn’t have broken. Perhaps it was faulty. Come, let’s try again.”
“Yeah,” I agreed in a voice dripping with sarcasm, one foot poised to hightail it out of there.
“Come, come, pets,” he crooned, running his hands over the rocks scattered in the gravel around me. “We’ll try again.”
No thanks. I’ll pass. Deciding to finally make a run for it, I turned, only to collide directly into Lucian’s hard-muscled chest. My mistake was in looking at his face. I expected him to be hunkering over me, tall, dark, and angry, but instead he looked nauseated, almost ill.
“Are you ok?” The question tumbled from my lips of its own accord.
I don’t know if he even answered. The wizened sprite chattering to the stones behind me hadn’t waited in casting his spell again. The mana was much stronger this time, reaching from behind to trap me in its nets.
Crud. How the heck was I going to get out of it this time? It was too strong.
Summoning every particle of willpower that I possessed, I forced my muscles to move. It felt like swimming in cement.
“Just relax, Cassidy,” Heath’s warm voice advised. “Nothing to fight here. You never know what you might accidentally know that could help us find the perp.”
Yeah, that was Heath. Trusting to the bone. Unable to even imagine I might be guilty. I felt a small, genuine twinge of remorse—in letting him down.
But the next moment, I wasn’t thinking about anything but pain.
It arrived in a flash, setting my every nerve-ending on fire. Hex it, crud, and cripes, but the throbbing ranked right up there with the bone shattering I’d suffered when Emilio had tossed me off that building.
Panic coursed through me. There was no escape.
“It’s dangerous to resist a perimancer,” Tabitha warned, her voice sounding like it came from miles away. “It can end in death.”
End? It felt like death right now. A hoarse gasp bubbled from my lips as agony shot up my legs and rolled over me like a tidal wave, tying my stomach into knots.
Crud. All the effort I’d been expending had only moved me about a foot.
Suddenly, the cool, soothing Tiger Balm healing sensation I’d experienced once or twice before rose to chase my pain away, leaving me weak-kneed and ecstatic with relief.
I took a deep, wobbly breath.
Had Lucian come to my rescue?
As if on cue, he stepped into my field of vision, his piercing blue eyes holding what could only be surprise.
Surprise?
“I’m ready to fish for the pertinent memories now,” the perimancer announced, waving his hands over the rocks sitting inside the shallow scrying bowl.
Memory-fishing didn't sound fun to me at all. I flexed my muscles, preparing to run, but the effort unleashed a new bout of pain. Yeah, the Tiger Balm responded quicker this time, but I was still frozen, powerless, caught in the same spell.
I could only watch, helpless, as the perimancer’s knobby, arthritic fingers pointed my way.
Something new took over then.
Instinct?
A strange feeling sparked deep inside me and my vision altered.
It was different this time, nothing as pronounced as when I’d lost complete control and had flared into specter form. And while it was a shade reminiscent of that experience, it was much more muted, feeling more like the moment you actually see those 3-D Magic Eye pictures after staring at the page of overlaid dots for a while.
Everything around me shifted, appearing brighter and standing out in sharper relief. Yes, I still saw everyone clustered around me, but I saw something more this time. Mana. Their mana swirled around them, auras of pulsing, shining threads of light.
Lucian was unbelievably, absolutely beautiful. And he was hard to ignore, standing there like the proverbial white knight in shining armor, even though he claimed to be a warlock of the darkest kind. Silvery-white, glistening threads of mana clothed him almost entirely, nearly obliterating the occasional ebony strand thrown into the mix. And to my surprise, I spied several of those sparkly-white tendrils extending my way, fusing with the gray spirals twisting around me. My specter soul?
The perimancer said something and again, my nerves responded in sharp, lancing pain.
I gasped, my chin falling to my chest.
It was then that I saw the source of the Tiger Balm sensation rising to heal me.
It was red. Gorgeous. A vibrant thread of molten lava. Powerful. Protective. Unwavering in its ability to bring me much needed relief.
And it came from … my pocket.
Selective Memory
Ricky? Ricky was protecting me?
I was dumbfounded.
Could that mean—really mean—that Ricky, my wayward, turmeric-addicted puff of smoke was one of the fabled, elite imps? Of a kind nobody believed existed? Rumors of imps being able to heal had always been just that: rumors.
“It only hurts if you resist,” the perimancer was saying, sounding as if he was speaking underwater. “Let the memories imprint so the truth shall be revealed.”
Right. Ricky could wait. I had a problem to deal with first. Schooling my startled thoughts, I directed my attention back to the mana swirling around me. Viewing the world from this perspective was odd, as if I were looking through thermal night-vision goggles. And while, unbelievably thanks to Ricky, the sensation of razors shredding my nerves and the injection of liquid fire into my veins had subsided, I still felt an uncomfortable pinch here and there.
Peering closer, I saw the source of the discomfort. The perimancer’s mana had invaded my body, piercing my eyes, mouth, nose, and hands
with long strings of pale yellow mana. I shuddered, not really keen on this new specter sight ability of mine. Were some things better left unknown? The sight of the foreign strands burrowing through my flesh like worms made me want to vomit. One of them wriggled and began to withdraw, coiling back to the wizened, old sprite crouched in front of his bowl.
As it exited my nostril, it took something with it. A thin, spiral strand of gray. Was that mine? Had it imprinted? Had that foreign invader tunneled through my memories, swabbing what it wanted, and now it just thought it could leave to spill all the juicy details?
Not on my watch.
Yeah, I was still spelled, but I wasn’t completely helpless. I focused on the strand snaking through the air and, using my feeding technique, caught the tail end as it brushed across my palm.
It was enough.
I consumed it in a flash. More strands detached from me like plump, filled leeches and began their fluttering journey back to the perimancer. I cut a swath through them as they passed. Some dwindled into nothingness as bits and pieces of others fell across my skin, feeling cold and almost wet. I absorbed the bulk of them, but a few escaped, though not unharmed. At least I’d thrown a monkey wrench in his imprinting process. I watched the few escapees limp back, hoping it was enough and finding the entire psychedelic experience strange, surreal. The stuff of drug trips depicted in movies.
“There, there,” the perimancer whispered, eyebrows fluttering with excitement. “Now we see the truth.”
The truth.
As the paralyzing blanket of mana lifted from me, my specter vision faded with it, leaving me with a rip-roaring headache.
Scowling, I watched the scrying bowl’s surface darken once more.
The vision didn’t last long—that is, if you could call the jumbled series of incoherent images that displayed anything like a vision. Even I had difficulty in following those random snippets of my life.
A close-up of Lucian’s lips. Me, smelling mana. Emilio choking me. Me again, sniffing mana. Ricky taking selfies. Lucian, lying on his deathbed before we’d broken his curse. Another flash of hunting mana with my nose. An interesting visual of Gloria wanting to kill me.
