by Kelly Meding
“But they are also, by their very nature, pacifists,” Marcus said. “They suggest and whisper in your ear, and they provide certain means, as they’ve done for centuries, without direct interference. They will not raise their hands to strike directly, nor will they order someone to do it for them.”
“So they have both the ability and the desire to see this city in ruins, but they won’t just do it because … they’re too nice?”
“Something like that. Sprites could no more raise their hands in violence to me than you could shift into a jaguar.”
Milo’s face screwed up into an epic frown, and he turned his head to glare out his window. Marcus reached over and gave the younger man’s shoulder a tentative squeeze. Milo impressed me by not shrugging off his touch.
“So option one was a bust,” I said. It was four o’clock. Three hours and counting. “Now what?”
“While you were inside,” Kismet said, “Reilly came through with some information on Matthew Goodson.”
“Alias?”
“Yep. Reilly stumbled across the name in his earliest research into the city’s vampires. He has a surveillance photo of Goodson meeting with an unidentified vampire female, and he’s traced him to an herbal tea shop in Mercy’s Lot owned by a man named—”
“Brutus Longfellow,” Wyatt said. His fists were clenched in his lap, his eyes narrowed.
I knew that name. “Why do I know that name?”
“He’s a mage I’ve done business with before.” A low, deep growl filled the SUV. “Bastard.”
Then I got it. “The invisibility spell.”
Wyatt had traded with Brutus for the enchanted orange crystal that briefly rendered me invisible to the eye, so that I could attend Alex’s funeral service. I never met Brutus, but I knew that Wyatt had done business with him in the past for various things. I guess Brutus didn’t discriminate with his customers.
“Old World Teas,” Wyatt said. “It’s in Mercy’s Lot, corner of Adler Road and Cottage Place.”
The drive took less than ten minutes. Cottage Place was a block north of Wharton Street, and Adler Road intersected it two blocks east of the Black River in a busy little slice of the Lot popular with college students and wannabe hippies. About six blocks farther east, my old neighborhood crept up like a dirty little secret. Lined with loft apartments and dozens of shops and unusual restaurants that sold everything from used records to chipotle ice cream, the trendy area was bustling with business this Saturday afternoon.
Old World Teas was situated in a narrow building between a beeswax candle shop and a tattoo parlor, with a simple, painted-wood sign the size of a mailbox. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d probably wander past it. A parking spot didn’t look likely, so Kismet drove half a block down and stopped.
I climbed out with Wyatt, Phin, and Marcus. The SUV pulled away.
A trio of girls sitting in an outdoor café giggled and pointed at us, and it took me a moment to realize they were admiring my male companions. All three were incredibly handsome in their own ways—something I probably didn’t stop to appreciate often enough.
Wyatt led the way back down the sidewalk. We followed single file, with Marcus in the rear. We didn’t have time to plan this carefully, and none of us knew what to expect from Brutus. So Wyatt barged inside the shop door, which rang with the jingle of a happy bell.
The shop was long and narrow, with polished wood shelves lining both walls and filled with dozens of jars of teas. Two small tables with mismatched chairs filled the front window, and a three-foot counter sported an antique register, an antique balance, and an electric kettle. Teacups hung on hooks behind the counter. The entire place had an air of magic, rippling just below the surface like water trapped in the desert. Just waiting for someone to tap into its potential.
A teenager was browsing a row of teas halfway down the shop. He saw us and left, either assuming we were cops or intimidated by the glares he was likely receiving. The bell dinged as the door shut.
“Be right there,” a voice bellowed from the far rear. I noted the beaded curtain, and what was probably a storeroom beyond it.
Marcus locked the front door and turned over the Out to Lunch sign.
Wyatt didn’t wait. He stormed down the length of the shop. A shadow moved behind the beads and a meaty hand reached through to brush them aside. Wyatt grabbed the hand and yanked Brutus into the shop, hard enough to send the larger man crashing into a shelf of teapots. Several broke; Brutus yelped.
“There’s cash in the register,” Brutus said.
Snarling, Wyatt crowded in and grabbed the front of Brutus’s shirt, making sure Brutus got a good look at his old client. Brutus went pasty white. His lips parted and his eyes widened. I pulled my gun and took a position opposite the pair, giving me a good line of sight on both men—just in case one of them did something stupid. Phin and Marcus flanked me.
“Mother and Earth, Truman, what happened to you?” Brutus asked.
“Seen anything with eyes like this lately?” Wyatt said.
Brutus swallowed hard.
“I smell them,” Marcus said.
“Go,” I said.
He and Phin disappeared behind the beaded curtain. Brutus started to protest. Wyatt shoved him hard against the shelves.
“You sold a sunscreen to the vampires three years ago on behalf of a human named Walter Thackery,” Wyatt said.
Brutus shifted from surprised to annoyed in a single breath. The magic around us felt denser, as though it was crowding in. Our resident mage was not a happy guy anymore. “Yes, I did,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’m a businessman, Truman. I’ve done jobs for a lot of people in the thirty years since I opened this shop, yourself included. I stay in business and I stay alive because I keep my blessed nose out of things and don’t rat on my clients.”
I snorted. “Which means he paid you a lot of money.”
Brutus tried to look at me, which earned him a firm shake from Wyatt. “Money buys monthlong vacations in warm, tropical climates.”
“Money also signs death warrants for entire races of living beings,” Wyatt snapped. Even from his profile, I saw the solid silver color of his eyes. His canines had grown just enough to hang below his upper lip—far enough for Brutus to notice the change.
“What in the name of Mother Earth happened to you?”
Wyatt bared his teeth. “Werewolves.”
“Werewolves don’t exist.”
“Try telling that to the one who bit me. Are they here?”
“Are who here?”
Another hard shake sent a ceramic teapot shattering to the floor. “The Lupa. Teenagers. They work for Thackery.”
Brutus started to shake his head, then stopped. Thought about something. “Wait, those kids were werewolves?”
“They were here? You saw them?” I asked.
“A few hours ago. They paid me a grand to babysit a pair of caged birds until six-thirty.”
My heart leapt into my throat and my hand jerked.
“Go,” Wyatt said. “I’ll watch him.”
I didn’t like leaving Wyatt alone with Brutus, but the idea that Ava and Aurora were so close, almost safe, propelled me forward. I’d just crashed through the wooden beads when Phin shouted my name. I peered through the gloom of the back room, past stacked boxes and a tiny desk that served as an office. A single open door was tucked away behind a row of storage containers, and it led to a rickety staircase.
Up I went, into the odors of bacon grease and patchouli. Halfway there I sneezed. The stairs led into an apartment—kitchen and living room, two other doors. One door was open and obviously a bathroom. The other door would have been my destination, even if I hadn’t heard the unmistakable sounds of a kestrel keening.
“Phin?” I said, charging at the door.
He and Marcus were inside a cramped bedroom. Two metal cages stood atop an old wooden dresser, and inside of them, the two most beautiful things I’d ever seen
—Ava and Aurora in their true forms. One was an adult, the second a miniature version of her mother. Phin stood in front of the cages, hands out and palms up, both crisscrossed with weeping red welts.
“The cages are silver,” Marcus said. “They can’t shift and we can’t break them.”
“We need a key,” Phin added.
“Something tells me the Lupa have the key,” I said. “Maybe Wyatt can summon off the locks?”
“Where—?”
“Downstairs with Brutus.”
Marcus left without being asked. I moved closer to the cages holding my friends, so relieved to see them that I wanted to weep. Ava was crying constantly, her kestrel scream indignant and frightened, even with her mother close by.
“We’ll get you out,” I said to them.
Aurora screeched at me.
I lifted one of the cages—heavy, but not impossible to move. Phin grabbed a pillow off the bed and shook it out of its case. He ripped the case into strips and began wrapping them around his hands. I caught on and helped until we’d created a pair of makeshift mittens.
As I pulled the last knot, Phin’s head jerked toward the bedroom door. “Something’s happening downstairs,” he said.
“Come on.”
I grabbed Aurora’s cage. Phin took Ava’s and followed me into the living room.
The floor in front of the stairs exploded upward, and a big black shape was flung toward the ceiling. It bounced off and landed in a heap next to the kitchen’s miniature fridge—Marcus in jaguar form.
Shit.
Chapter Twenty-five
4:30 P.M.
Marcus lifted his head and blinked at me, dazed, before putting his head back down. Anything that had sent a two-hundred-pound cat through the floor wasn’t something Wyatt needed to be fighting alone.
I put the cage down, leapt over the hole in the floor, and landed on the first step with enough grace to twist my left ankle. I stumbled down the steps two at a time anyway, pulling my gun again, all to the sounds of Wyatt’s deep-chest growling. Something else crashed and thumped in the shop below. Then it went quiet.
The beads were down. Wyatt was crumpled on the floor in the doorway, conscious but stunned. I hopped over him, into the shop, stupidly blind as to what awaited me.
Brutus stood in the middle of his shop, clutching a leather cord. Dangling from it was a blue crystal, about four inches long, tapered at one end like a nail. Power crackled around the room, caressing my skin and urging me to tap into my Gift. I didn’t know much about mages, but I’d seen crystal magic at work, mostly as some sort of blocking spell. Blocking a person from sight, for instance, or blocking their ability to tap into the Break. It was organic magic, requiring proximity to the crystal for it to work.
Brutus glared at me, his eyes swirling with a faint hint of light and power. “I won’t be bullied by you people. I took a blessed job, nothing more!”
Rationally, I understood that. He was a businessman. He sold exotic tea, and he enchanted crystals if you could pay him enough money. He’d helped us out a few times in the not so distant past.
Emotionally, I didn’t give a shit. He’d hurt Wyatt. He’d held people I cared about in tiny cages made of a material that injured them if they touched it. He’d taken money from my greatest enemy.
“Please, try to take me down, little girl,” Brutus said.
As much as I loved the idea of breaking his nose with my fist, I knew I’d get bounced into a concussion by that crystal in his hand. I couldn’t get through. But I bet a bullet could.
“If you insist,” I said. I raised my right hand, steadied it quickly across my left wrist, aimed my gun at his fist, and fired.
He screamed loud and long as his hand exploded, and the crystal fell. It shattered against the concrete floor, releasing a blast of power not unlike a faint electric shock. He fell to his knees, clutching his wounded hand against his chest. I walked over and kicked him in the face. He toppled over, unconscious.
“Little girl, my ass,” I said.
“Evy?”
I turned at the sound of Phin’s voice. He stood just behind Wyatt, one cage in each hand. I holstered my gun and squatted in front of Wyatt. His eyes remained wholly silver and his canines long, but he didn’t snap or snarl. He let me help him sit up.
“How’s Marcus?” he asked.
“Stunned,” Phin said. “You?”
“Same. That crystal had a pretty good punch.”
“Can you walk?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Awesome.”
I found Marcus’s discarded clothes and took them upstairs. He’d pulled himself into a sitting position, but hadn’t changed back yet. His copper eyes watched me, a little too wide, and he didn’t move when I knelt down and touched his head. The fur at the base of his skull was damp with blood. My fingertips brushed a knot there and he hissed.
“Sorry,” I said. “Brutus is down. We have the girls; we need to go.”
He lurched to his feet, then promptly flopped back down. Whined.
“I know, pal, you’ve got a good-sized goose egg on your head. Can you shift back into a man, at least?”
He whined again. Downstairs, the doorbell dinged.
“Come on, Marcus.” I felt strange talking to a giant black cat. But manhandling a human down the stairs would be easier, so I needed him to shift.
Feet pounded the steps. Unsure who was coming, I said, “Watch the hole.”
“The what—? Oh.” Milo leapt gracefully over the hole in the floor and crouched on the opposite side of Marcus. “Is he okay?”
“Concussion. Brutus tossed him through the floor.”
“Ouch. No wonder he’s lying there like a stuffed animal. Big, bad mage beat him up.”
Marcus lifted his head, and I swear he glared at Milo. Yawned. Then he closed his eyes. Magic sparked around him in the faint way it always did when a Therian shifted near me. Black fur melted away, paws lengthened into fingers, pads into palms, and his face blurred as the cat gave way to the man. The sound was similar to sticky tape peeling away from skin.
His long black hair was loose around his shoulders, making the goose egg hard to see, but I still noticed some blood on his neck. Milo and I each took an arm and helped him stand. He wobbled a little, so Milo acted as a human crutch while I assisted Marcus in stepping into his jeans.
Me dressing a naked man—I could just imagine the possessive, overprotective reaction this would get out of Wyatt’s wolf.
By the time we got his shirt over his head and settled properly, Marcus seemed more alert. Just enough floor remained along the edge of the hole for us to slide around, backs to the wall, and over to the stairs. Milo and Marcus went down first, the former still supporting the latter, and I couldn’t help smiling at the friendly rapport that had developed between them.
Down in the shop, Brutus was being tied up none too gently by Phin. Kismet had one cell phone in her left hand and another pressed to her ear. She read telephone numbers to whoever was on the other line.
“Those are all the numbers he called or called him today,” she said. “No, he’s unconscious.”
I glanced at Phin, who mouthed “Astrid” back at me. “He” had to refer to Brutus.
“He said the Lupa paid him to watch their birds until six-thirty, that they’d be back for them then,” Kismet said. Paused. “I doubt it. They’d see the shop’s closed, or they’d smell that we’d been here and run.” She walked toward the street window, probably looking for a good surveillance spot.
Wyatt was sitting cross-legged in front of the two cages, and he waved me over. I squatted next to him, relieved to see the canines gone and the silver in his eyes reduced to a single circle of color. Pride swelled my chest—he’d done that without me.
“I can summon off the locks,” he said. “I didn’t want to try without you.”
“Okay.”
His ability to summon inanimate objects to himself had come in handy dozens of t
imes in the past. But he hadn’t attempted it in the few hours since his infection, and I appreciated his need to be cautious. The kestrels had crowded as close to the backs of their cages as they could get without touching the silver bars, probably unsure exactly what Wyatt was now.
“It’s okay, we’re getting you out,” I said to them.
Wyatt closed his eyes and turned his right hand palm up. His fingers twitched, and I felt the shift in the Break as he connected to his tap. The silver padlock on Aurora’s cage shimmered, disappeared, then reappeared on his open palm. He hissed and dropped it. I turned the latch and opened the door.
Aurora exploded out of the cage with an excited screech and a blur of feathers. She flew the length of the room twice before settling on a high shelf, far out of reach. She screamed again, as if to say to hurry the hell up.
He summoned the second lock as easily as the first, but when he opened his eyes the silver glow was back. I unlatched and opened Ava’s cage, then pulled Wyatt away. Once we’d given the cage a wide berth, Aurora coasted down and landed on the floor. Ava crept forward in the cage, blue eyes gleaming, then hopped out. She huddled beneath her mother’s chest.
Phin approached slowly, the relief and joy on his face heartbreaking. He knelt in front of them and held out his hand. Aurora tilted her head, blinked, then pecked at his fingertips. “I’m so sorry you were taken,” he said. “Forgive me?”
She screeched at him, then began to shift. Feathers smoothed into creamy skin, and long, thick spirals of brown hair sprang from her head. As if prompted by her mother’s magic, Ava shifted as well. Soon mother and daughter were in each other’s arms. At only two months old, Ava was the size of a child four times her age, with a crown of brown curls just like Aurora’s. She sobbed as only a baby can, her face pressed against Aurora’s chest, terrified and uncertain.
Aurora looked up, her doe eyes full of falling tears. “It wasn’t your fault, Phineas,” she said.
He choked, then collected his family into his arms and held them tight. I looked away, eyes stinging, but incredibly happy to have them both back.
