by SM Reine
This woman was well over six feet tall in heels—taller even than me—and her wispy hair was pale blond.
When I finally reached her face, my testicles attempted to claw their way into my body in horror.
I’d been checking out Lucrezia de Angelis. The possibly evil vice president who controlled the fate of my job and my memories.
She didn’t look happy to be there, but she was so Botoxed that she probably couldn’t have smiled even if she wanted to. “You’re late for the test, Agent Hawke.”
Lucrezia worked for OPA’s headquarters in Italy, and you could tell by the way she talked. Her accent was so thick that I expected her to go off about spicy meatballs at any second.
I stood, adjusted my suit, smoothed a hand over my hair. “I got sidetracked by the case. We’ve got an active murder investigation going.”
“I’m aware.” She turned on her heel and left. The expensive white suit was as flattering for her ass as it was for her nonexistent hips.
Guess I was supposed to follow.
“You can do it,” Suzy said. She punched me on the shoulder. One more bruise on top of all the others.
I grimaced and rubbed my arm. “Thanks, Suze.”
Before I left, I took a last, long look at my partner’s face. She had big eyes and charcoal hair. I’d been staring at that face every Monday through Friday for the last two years.
Seemed impossible that I could forget her. Seemed impossible to forget any of this.
Lucrezia’s clicking heels were retreating down the hall. I followed her.
The test was administered in one of our warded workrooms, which took up an entire floor in the Magical Violations Department.
I’d spent a lot of hours tearing my hair out in that room. Deconstructing and reconstructing circles by covens that had broken the rules so we could figure out how. Trying to duplicate spells from crime scenes. Testing dangerous enchanted objects.
Man, I missed that part of the job.
The workroom had a great view of the OPA campus. The walls were nothing but window so that we could see the exact position of the sun. Grassy lawns and square government buildings stretched around us. I could see guys heading to work, a couple of secretaries eating breakfast in the shade by the fountain, some black-uniformed kopides jogging in formation.
Lucrezia stood in front of a cardboard box at the center of the room. “This is your test, Agent Hawke.”
“What, no Scantron?” I asked.
“It’s a practical test using standardized supplies.” She twisted her watch on her wrist to check the time. “I’ll assume it’s safe to skip the dull formalities of the basics. We’ll skip to the end. Agent Hawke, I want you prepare the circle for the binding ritual between kopis and aspis. You have two hours.”
That spell wasn’t in the appendix of the aspis manual. The Union handles the binding of kopides and aspides all the time, so they have a room where the circle is permanently erected. It’s a lengthy ritual, too. Redoing it every time they assign a partnership would have meant letting witches take days off of work to prepare—days we often didn’t have.
And I was pretty sure it couldn’t be done in two hours.
“You’re kidding, right?” I asked.
She waved impatiently at her entourage, who’d followed us into the room. One guy lifted the lid off of the box. The other handed me a barebones diagram of the circle without any instructions.
“I’m too busy to waste time on this,” Lucrezia said. “It’s eight o’clock. I’ll be back to inspect your finished circle at ten.”
She definitely wasn’t kidding.
Lucrezia left and her lackeys stayed. Guess they had to make sure I wasn’t going to cheat by pulling a miracle out of my ass or something.
I picked through the supplies in the box. There was all the standard stuff you’d expect: chalk and salt and even yarn, which some witches—my brother included—preferred to use for the perimeter of a circle.
There were also some less-standard supplies, like a wand and a crystal bowl. Then all the candles. Tons of candles. And the statuettes? I had no idea what those were for.
The terribly photocopied diagram had little dots around the edge of the circle. Maybe those were meant to represent statuettes.
I did know what to do with the ritual dagger. The super sharp steel blade was split into two down the middle. Its handle was engraved with a pentagram, some runes, a few thorny flowers. The knife was an athame, more form than function, meant to bleed the kopis and aspis so their blood could mingle.
Then I twisted the top off of a bottle of oil that I found at the bottom of the box and sniffed it. This was more familiar territory—identifying herbs. I smelled some dragon’s blood, St. John’s wort, arrowroot. Maybe some sage, too.
It was like being handed a disassembled machine and being expected to build it. And find a way to give it electricity without having a power cord.
All within two hours.
I’d once missed a week of high school because I’d driven Domingo’s getaway car after a 7-Eleven heist and gotten caught by the cops.
I hadn’t driven the getaway car on purpose. I hadn’t even known Domingo was planning another robbery until the alarms were going off and he shoved a bag of money into the glove box and started yelling at me to drive fast. I’d just obeyed him like I always did because he was my brother and he’d kick my ass if I didn’t.
When they caught us, the justice system was gentle with me. Everyone knew Domingo was the source of the trouble. By age seventeen, his record was longer than a Robert Jordan book, and I was just his confused, scared kid brother.
Still, I ended up missing a week of school, and my teachers didn’t feel very forgiving once I told them why.
Anatomy finals had been the Tuesday I came back from juvie. Open notes. Should have been easy…if I’d had any notes.
My friend Tiana had let me copy hers, but I’d had to sneak into the teachers’ lounge to rush them through the shitty Xerox machine, and I’d ended up missing half the pages.
Bullshitting my way through that final had been one of the hardest things I’d ever done, especially the practical part. I’d mutilated the pig fetus because I hadn’t known what half of the organs were. Plus, Tiana’s handwriting would have been too sloppy to read even if it hadn’t been an awful photocopy, so I wrote a lot of dumb answers like “urine is made in the thymus.”
I’d failed that test something like fifteen years ago now, but I still had stress dreams about it: being wrist-deep in pig blood, with the clock ticking toward the end of the school day, and Tiana’s incomplete notes smeared with formaldehyde fingerprints.
I’m always naked in the dream, too, because that’s literally the only way that test could have gone worse.
Now I was staring into that box of supplies for the aspis test and I was having pretty powerful flashbacks.
Two hours was definitely not enough time to cast the binding ritual.
I wasted twenty minutes just trying to decrypt that goddamn diagram. There was a pen in the box, so I used it to fill in the blanks wherever the bad printing had left holes in the image. It required too much guesswork. I didn’t know which part was the pig’s right kidney and which was the liver, metaphorically speaking.
Once I gave up on that, I tried to start drawing the circle on the floor of the workroom.
Lucrezia’s lackeys weren’t talking but I heard the occasional snort. They were probably witches too. They knew where I was fucking up.
“Any help here?” I asked the woman by the door, a square-jawed brunette who looked to be silently laughing at me.
“Why? I’m having so much fun,” she said.
“What if I put this candle here?” I asked. “Am I getting warmer? Colder?”
She smirked. “Cold.”
“How cold? Slightly cool? Frostier than Lucrezia’s scrotum?” I moved the candle between two points, looking to her for any sign of where it should be placed. The diagram was missing th
at whole part of the circle.
No help from the peanut gallery—the witches just schooled their expressions and stopped talking to me at all. They weren’t going to help me cheat.
And following the diagram definitely wasn’t working.
I paced between the walls, arms tightly folded, pig dissection nightmares swirling through my skull.
At least I’d just had to repeat that anatomy class over the summer to earn credit. I hadn’t forgotten my entire high school career.
I can’t do this. There’s only an hour and a half left. I’m so fucked.
The realization that I was going to fail settled over me with calm certainty. There was nothing I could do to make the situation worse now. Fritz wasn’t going to have an aspis, he wouldn’t be able to hunt down the fallen angel, and I was going to go back to being a private dick without any clue that I’d taken a hiatus to work for the government.
I stopped pacing. I turned back to the box.
If Lucrezia de Angelis was going to fire me, I might as well try to fuck up the spell really thoroughly first—and do it my way.
I’d always sucked at instructions. Precise magic just didn’t work for me. I didn’t use recipes for my potions or poultices—I used a heaping dose of old-fashioned instinct.
So I crumpled the diagram into a ball and chucked it across the room.
“Salt,” I said. “Oil. Fine.” I could work with salt and oil.
Fuck the yarn. Yarn was for sissies. I threw that at one of the windows.
Starting over on the circle might not have been the most time-efficient maneuvers, but it felt good. I drew a pentagram and the circle enclosing it in chalk. Then I put the box of supplies in the middle and started picking through it again.
I picked up the statuettes and rolled them over in my hands to feel their energy. One felt hot, like it had been in the sun all day—it got to go in the south, the cardinal direction that was associated with fire. One of them made my fingers go numb with cold. Figured I’d stick that one toward the east.
There was a whole spectrum of sensation in those statuettes, smells and textures and temperatures. Wood and stone, electricity and wind. I put them in what seemed like the right order around the circle.
Chances were good I was wrong, but it felt right.
Dribbling the oil inside the circle didn’t feel right. Once I started rubbing it around the outside of the salt, though, I sneezed—hard.
The air got thick. The salt sparked with magic.
I put the double-bladed dagger in the center of the circle and the energy only grew more intense.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said.
I had to smooth out the diagram page to see the symbols again. I couldn’t totally bullshit that part. But I only glanced at it to see what kind of marks they’d placed in which quarters, and then I went back to the absolute basics: the magical alphabet of runes that Suzy told me to use when I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.
And I really didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.
After about a thousand tiny runes in chalk, I could barely breathe through the lump in my throat, my head was swimming, and my nose was streaming down my upper lip. I didn’t stop. I threw my jacket in the corner, blew my nose on the shitty diagram, and kept drawing.
Then the salt started to burn deep grooves into the wood of the floor. The candles lit even though I hadn’t touched them. The oil started to smoke.
And someone said, “What in the world is this?”
Lucrezia de Angelis’s voice was low and dangerous.
The clock on the wall said that it was ten on the dot. I looked down at the floor to see a mess of chalk, salt, and candle wax that looked nothing like the drawing that I had been given.
“That’s a damn good question,” I said.
I picked up the knife I’d put in the middle of the circle. It was scalding hot. I bounced it between my hands, blowing on my burning fingers.
Lucrezia prowled around the edge of the circle. I couldn’t help noticing the way her bony hips snapped from side to side when she walked. I liked my women with curves, which she definitely didn’t have, but there was something about her predatory stride that pushed my buttons.
Probably better not to notice how hot my future ex-boss was, but whatever. I might have been about to lose my memory anyway.
“Ridiculous,” she muttered, inspecting my work closely. “This is simply absurd.”
I didn’t bother keeping my mouth shut. Might as well speak my mind while I still had one. “You know what’s absurd? Expecting me to perform a twelve-hour ritual in less than a quarter of the time with shitty instructions. That’s what’s absurd. This circle’s just a byproduct of absurdity.” The knife wasn’t cooling off. I jammed it in my belt. “I don’t know what it does, but if it happens to make the OPA campus explode, don’t look to me for apologies.”
“It’s a binding circle.” Lucrezia held her hands out as though she could feel the invisible edges of my magic. “Definitely some kind of binding circle.”
“Not like any binding circle I’ve seen before,” said the brunette by the door.
Lucrezia shot a look at her. “Obviously.” She turned back to me. “Tell me how the ritual would proceed from here, Agent Hawke.”
I scoured my memory for that chapter from the handbook. “There’s some kind of verse. The witch uses the ritual knife to cut open his arm, and the arm of the kopis, and they share blood. Then they’re bound. Done.”
Considering how disapproving she looked, I was pretty sure that was the right answer.
“Fine,” she snapped.
“So this circle would work?” I asked. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
The vice president prowled and frowned and prowled some more. Finally, she looked like she was too disgusted to keep facing the chalky mess burned into the wood floors, and she flung her hands in the air. “None of this matters! I’m sure Fritz prepared you for this test. This result doesn’t mean anything.”
“If he had tried to help me cheat, he wouldn’t have prepared me for the whole binding circle thing,” I pointed out. “You kind of sprung that on me. Or, hey, if I’d been prepped, maybe I would have fucking done it right instead of doing…whatever the fuck this is. Did you think about that?”
Her eyes flashed. “What’s your point?”
“I don’t have a point. Why do you want me to fail? No wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess. I look like the stylist you fired for screwing up your two-hundred-dollar haircut.”
She lifted her chin to look at me down the bridge of her nose. It was an impressively disapproving expression. I wondered if she’d practiced it in front of a mirror. “I couldn’t care less if you fail, Agent Hawke.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Enjoy your smug sense of satisfaction,” Lucrezia said. “It will not last.” She stomped toward the exit.
“Should I clean this up? Am I fired?” I asked.
“You can bind here tomorrow. We’ll have to have a crew wipe it out when you’re done,” she said. “It’s set in too deeply to easily remove.”
“Does that mean I passed?”
I just barely heard her say as she left, “Yes. You passed.”
Miracles do happen.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
PASSING THE ASPIS TEST was just about the least satisfying victory I’d ever experienced.
Lucrezia had shaken me off like something stuck to her shoe, her lackeys had kicked me out of the room before I could figure out what the hell I’d done to the spell, and Fritz hadn’t been in his office when I went to deliver the news. I hadn’t gotten a single congratulations. More like an overwhelming sense of, “Yeah, I guess we won’t kill you this week.”
I’d won. I had my memories, my life, and my job.
I wasn’t sure how good I actually felt about that.
“Hey! Hawke!”
Suzy was sitting under a copse of trees outside the Magical Violations Department. She
had a grocery bag beside her on the bench and a hot dog cradled in her hands.
Only one guy made hot dogs with that many sinfully delicious toppings. “I see that Crazy Ricky’s put his cart on the corner again,” I said.
“Yeah, doesn’t matter how many times we wipe that guy’s memory of the OPA campus’s location, he keeps finding us again. Stubborn stupidity must be his mutant power.” Suzy squinted at me. “Why do you look like crap and smell like smoke?”
I flopped onto the bench next to her. “I just cast a binding ritual.”
She glanced at her watch. “It’s not even eleven. You were gone for less than three hours.”
“I cast it in two.” I wasn’t trying to brag. Okay, maybe I was bragging a little.
Suzy did look satisfyingly impressed by the news. But not surprised. “Here, taste my hot dog. The jalapeños will burn the roof of your mouth off.”
“Yeah, that’s not a great sales pitch right there.”
She shrugged and took a giant bite with gusto. Her eyes watered, and she spit crumbs as she said, “Congratulations, Hawke. I knew you had it in you.”
“No you didn’t. Nobody knew.” I laughed hollowly. “I didn’t know.”
Suzy took another bite. Her mouth was too full to speak, so she just rolled her eyes.
“Look, it’s obviously not that you suck at magic, Cèsar,” she said once her mouth was clear again. “It’s that you think you suck at it. Your family is full of witches, right? And you think you’re not as good as them. They’ve probably told you that a few times, too. When your family talks like that, you get it in your head, you let it grow under your skin.”
I lifted my eyebrows at her. “Speaking from experience?”
“Add in your low ranking in the OPA database, the expectations of the test, even Fritz saying you’re not good enough to be his aspis…”
