Kat gasped.
Liam heard it over the sound of his rapidly beating heart and dragged himself into a sitting position, peering through the broken window. Kat was back on the street, but she was stumbling sideways as if unbalanced. Her clothes were torn and dirtied from the spell that sent her careening into the steps. Her wounds, as Liam had predicted, were mostly healed already, nothing but minor cuts and bruises now. It wasn’t the physical damage that concerned Liam, but rather the large-gauge tranquilizer darts sticking out of Kat’s neck and shoulder. There were four of them.
The sniper had fired them while Marta drew Kat’s attention.
Liam didn’t know what chemical was in the darts—or if the stuff was magically bolstered—but whatever it was, it affected Kat heavily. She dropped to one knee as she yanked two of the darts out of her skin and stared at them, barely comprehending what had just happened. She’d been brought down like a goddamn zoo animal who’d escaped from its enclosure.
Kat’s eyes flashed an unearthly green, even as they unfocused, the drug taking effect, and she bared her teeth at Marta. “You bitch!”
Marta stood on the sidewalk, wearing a nasty sneer. “Got you, little kitty. Time to take a nap now.” Her eyes flicked Liam’s direction. “And as for you…”
Kat looked over her shoulder in terror, mouth dropping open to warn him, but Liam was already moving before the magic coalesced around Marta’s wand. He scrambled backward then dove for the supply room through an open door behind the checkout counter. He kicked the door shut just as a whirlwind of fire blasted through the hole in the window and consumed the interior of the store. Flames curled up underneath the gap in the door like demonic fingers, and Liam kept crawling in the darkness, hitting all manner of metal racks and piles of clothes and waterlogged boxes filled with bugs, until he finally spotted the outline of the door that let out onto the gravel lot.
Liam pushed himself to his feet and lunged for the door, slamming into the push bar. It opened, and he tumbled outside into the cool air, landing flat on his back on the rough gravel. He took two deep breaths and then tried to rise again, only for a sharp ache to zing up his arm. His pain reduction charm had run out of juice. And if that little ring had run dry, then…Liam checked his knife. Sure enough, the extension charm and the electrical charm were dead.
He was out of magic.
Tires squealed on asphalt, and fear jolted down Liam’s spine. He staggered to the alleyway entrance and peered through to the other side just as the white van tore down the street. He dashed forward, jumping over the two dead guards that Marta had punted away like refuse, and skidded to a stop at the end of the alley. Kat and Marta were no longer on the street, and as Liam scanned the rooftops, he saw no black-clad sniper either. He looked to the right as the white van crossed the nearest intersection, running a red, and raced away into the belly of Salem’s Gate. Something on the roadway glittered in its wake: the silver bracelet that contained his anti-scrying charm.
Liam dropped to his knees, a low whine in his throat.
He’d failed. Advent 9 had recovered Kat.
11
Liam
Liam woke up on a metal table in a room with a plain white ceiling, and immediately came to the conclusion that he was in the morgue and had been mistaken for a corpse by some rookie cop who couldn’t take a pulse. A conclusion that was dispelled a few seconds later, when Yun leaned over him with a frown on her face and said, “You’re a fucking idiot, Crown.”
He didn’t remember what stupid thing he’d done today, but since he felt like he’d been run over by a steamroller, he figured Yun was right. On “smart” days, Liam was simply drunk. It was the dumb days where his ass hurt the most.
“What happened?” he slurred out, looking down at his bare torso. He was covered in cuts and bruises, and he was pretty sure his arm, now in a splint, was broken. “Did I jump off a building?”
Yun shook her head. “I was hoping you could tell me. I got an emergency text from you and picked you up from a disaster zone. There was fire, lots of fire, and a few hundred feet away, there was even more fire, plus a crash scene surrounded by police.” She paused. “And I didn’t see Kat anywhere.”
Kat.
It all came rushing back.
Liam smacked himself in the face. “Oh, shit. We got ambushed by Marta.”
Yun grimaced. “The Advent 9 magician?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d she find you? You had your anti-scrying stuff on.”
“I don’t know. Maybe one of the goons saw us around town. Maybe…I don’t know.” He pressed his palms against his temples and blew hot air through his teeth. “Damn it. They took her again.”
She laid her hand on his shoulder. “Then we’ll just have to free her again.”
“Easier said than done,” he spit out. “They have more resources than us.”
Anger flooded Liam’s system, revitalizing him with a rush of adrenaline, and he sat up on the metal table, realizing he was indeed in a morgue but was not lying among the bodies of the recently deceased. The autopsy room was clean, scrubbed down from whenever it was last used, and there was a tray with an assortment of sterile medical equipment on it next to the table. “Um, where are we?”
“At a friend’s place,” Yun answered flatly. “I couldn’t take you to the hospital. People would’ve asked too many questions.”
On cue, a middle-aged woman with a streak of gray hair curling around her face entered the room, a roll of fresh gauze in her hands. When she spotted Liam, awake and alert, she pushed her glasses up her nose and gave him a pinched look. “You shouldn’t be moving yet, Detective Crown.”
“Have we met?” Liam had met several medical examiners in his time as a cop, but he didn’t recall this woman’s face.
“Not exactly. I’ve seen you in my dreams.”
Liam glanced at Yun, who was smiling. “Um, come again?” he said.
“I’m a psychic,” she clarified. “Precognitive. I get glimpses of the future in the form of dreams.” She walked over to the tray of tools and selected a needle, along with some stitching thread. “I’ve been seeing you a lot lately. Nothing concrete. Just flashes. You driving in your SUV. You walking around in a bookstore. You glaring angrily at somebody out of view. Things like that. Anyway, I asked around and found out we had a mutual acquaintance.”
Yun raised her hand. “She asked me about you yesterday.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“Only the true stuff.”
“Oh, wonderful.”
The ME cleared her throat. “Anyway, I’m Nancy Ambrose, assistant medical examiner. And I’ll be performing your medical care today, since you’re apparently in too big a pickle right now to get care from a doctor who works on the living.” She pressed against Liam’s chest, coaxing him to lie back. “I fixed up your worst injuries the best I could, but you will need to visit a hospital—or a healer, if you know one—to take care of that arm more thoroughly. You have a major fracture in the ulna.”
“I understand,” he said, “but it’ll have to wait until—”
Ambrose raised her hand. “Yes, I know. Until after you rescue the princess from the dastardly villains. That’s why I’m patching you up in a hurry.”
“Princess?” Liam chuckled at that image. “More like the king.” A sudden thought scuttled through his mind. “You’ve been seeing me in your psychic visions lately, you said? What about Kat? You see anything about her?”
Ambrose paused as she was threading her needle, a far-off look in her eyes. “Actually, I can’t See her at all. In the visions I’ve been having of you, there’s always this blank space in your vicinity, which I assume is where this Kat King should be relative to your position. It seems there’s something about her magic that blocks my abilities, perhaps autonomic—some faeries appear this way to psychics—or perhaps instinctual.”
“Instinctual?” Yun asked.
“Well, you said this woman, who is clearly magica
l in nature, is on the run from some kind of group? Perhaps she’s masking herself from some forms of magic reflexively. Sometimes, your power responds to your whims even if you don’t consciously notice.” Ambrose raised an eyebrow as she looked down at Liam. “Surely you know this, Detective, possessing magic yourself.”
Liam nodded, more to himself than to her. Kat’s magic was quite strong and versatile; it made sense that her desire to hide from A9 would manifest in a way like that. He just wished it had manifested in other ways as well, such as a natural anti-scrying spell that Marta could not penetrate. Then she wouldn’t have been on the run for weeks. She could have hidden more easily. Could’ve stayed hidden, instead of being forced to flee like a scared animal from an encroaching forest fire, again and again.
If I get the chance, he promised himself, I will teach her every scrap of magic I know.
And he would start with the anti-scrying charm she’d requested.
He tried to relax as Ambrose numbed the laceration on his head that he’d acquired during the crash, trying not to think of all the crap that was piling up in front of him. But the mountain was so tall it was hard to ignore. The cops would check the registration on his totaled Cherokee and come knocking at his door. There would be interviews. He’d have to give satisfactory answers without revealing the truth of the whole A9 conspiracy, because if he blew that lid too soon, the city would erupt like a goddamn volcano. He’d have to play this very carefully.
But first, he had to get Kat back.
He could only hope A9 hadn’t gotten her out of the city yet. There’d been a lot of those white vans around, and they would, at some point, have to regroup before they headed back to their base. Liam was hedging heavily on the idea they would take some time to reorganize their forces so they could ride in a tightly controlled and well-defended convoy as they smuggled Kat away. That they would play this game strategically. It would make them stronger, sure, but it would also give Liam the leeway he needed to come up with a plan of attack.
The needle tugged at his skin, a disconcerting pressure, and to take his mind off it, he said to Yun, “You know, I’m kind of bitter that I used up my favor with Vanderhall, only for Advent 9 to rip the rug out from under my feet and make the whole ploy irrelevant.”
“It’s not irrelevant,” Yun countered. “When we get Kat back, we can still use it, make them think she decided that staying in one place for more than a day is too dangerous, that she decided to go on the run again and resume their game of cat and mouse.”
“You sound optimistic. You really think we’ll get her back?”
She snorted. “Of course we will. Either that, or you’ll die trying. You’re too valiant to accept any scenario that isn’t a total win or an honorable death, when it comes to saving people.”
Liam pursed his lips. “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not.”
Yun replied, “Me either.”
For the next half hour, Ambrose continued to patch up Liam’s injuries, until he was wrapped in enough gauze to replace a mummy in a sarcophagus and doped up on just the right amount of pain meds—he was lucid, but the pain wasn’t overbearing. As Ambrose packed her equipment, Liam sat up again, having spent the quiet time deliberating about the best way to track down Kat. He knew that Marta would have defenses against any scrying spells, much stronger than anything Liam could hope to penetrate. And he didn’t have enough tight-lipped allies to pull off a move that involved blocking all the roads out of town. If he wanted to find Kat, he would have to utilize someone’s eyes and ears. Someone whose eyes and ears were much keener and cleverer than Liam’s own.
Liam slid off the metal table, a pit in his stomach. He said to Yun, trying to be lighthearted, “You know, this would’ve gone a lot faster had you helped.”
She turned away from where she’d been fiddling with the door to a freezer unit that might very well have had a body lying on its interior rack. “Sorry, Crown, but I’m no good for medicine, the magical kind or the regular kind”—she held up her hands, sparks dancing between her fingers—“unless you need a defibrillator.”
He smiled. “Not today.”
“Not yet, you mean.” She tugged on her loose bun, concerned. “What’s with the downtrodden expression? You look like you’re about to walk to the gallows.”
“I can only think of one way to pinpoint Kat’s location in the amount of time we have to find her before the A9 henchmen get her too far from the city limits for us to reasonably give chase.” Liam’s throat felt like sandpaper as he spoke, as if his impending suggestion was sacrilege to speak aloud. “We have to use the person with the best spy network around.”
Yun blinked a few times, unsure of what he meant.
It was Ambrose who figured it out first. “You sign a contract like that, Detective,” she said as she tossed a used syringe into a sharps container, “you’ll be lucky to come out the other side with your head on your shoulders.”
Liam cringed. “I know. But what choice do I have? I have no more leverage on Vanderhall—I used that up earlier—and even if I did, the vampires aren’t as expedient as the—”
“The fae?” Yun blurted out. “You can’t be serious, Liam. That woman will eat you alive.”
“Yun,” he said, “do you have a viable alternative?”
She bit down hard on her bottom lip. “No. But there must be one.”
“We can’t spend a week brainstorming. We have to recover Kat as soon as possible. The more time we waste, the more likely it is they’ll get away. And if they lock her up in one of those godforsaken labs again…”
Yun lowered her head. “I understand. It’s just, I don’t want to see you get hurt. Not like that.”
“It was bound to happen anyway.” Liam headed to a counter set against the wall and reached for the dirtied, torn piece of fabric that had once been his shirt. It would have to do until he got home and grabbed a change of clothes. “I had probably a dozen run-ins with her during my time as a cop, and she promised me every time I’d come crawling to her on my knees for help one day.” He glanced at Ambrose, who was now waiting by the door, her keys in hand, ready to lock up for the evening. “Wouldn’t surprise me if some of the more psychically prone of the fae caught glimpses of this day, what with the way she always seemed so sure. And they can’t lie, so…”
“They can manipulate,” Yun muttered.
“Yes, they can. And she will.” Liam slipped on his shirt and recovered the rest of his belongings from where Ambrose had laid them out across the counter. “We’ll just have to be better at it than her.”
Yun rubbed her arms and shivered. “No one is better than Caoimhe.”
Liam knew that statement was true, but he smirked anyway and replied, “No one will ever be unless somebody challenges her. Might as well be the first to try.”
12
Kat
Kat woke to pain. Which was familiar. She’d often been in pain back in her days of endless testing at the lab. It permeated even her dreams, taunting her with the fact that she would feel it in full the moment she opened her eyes to greet another day of captivity and torment. The first time Kat woke up in relative comfort in a hotel room, she was almost uncomfortable at the lack of strong sensation. All she’d remembered at that time was her life under the thumb of A9. She had no context, thanks to her amnesia, of a good night’s sleep.
Now she knew better. Knew what a pain-free morning felt like. And she’d be damned if she allowed Advent 9 to lock her in a cage again and take her back to the grim days where she was dragged into the waking world at five o’clock sharp to be poked and prodded and sliced wide open, soul and all.
Which was why she didn’t let on that the tranquilizers had worn off when she woke in the back of the van, feeling like she’d been beaten by a baseball bat. At first, she didn’t quite remember how she’d ended up here, but the memories came back to her between her forced even breaths. Marta had ambushed them, wrecked the Cherokee, snatched her out of the vehicle, an
d tried to bind her magic and haul her away with the help of some lackeys. Liam had come to the rescue, freeing her from the spelled ropes, but Marta and a sniper had gotten the better of them both. Kat had taken multiple hits from a tranquilizer gun, and Liam had been forced to take cover from a brutal fire spell.
That was the last thing Kat remembered, Liam scrambling to get away before he was burned to death. She hoped to god he’d managed to evade the fire unscathed, though she knew he’d already been injured after the crash. His arm had been broken when he showed up to save her. He came to help me, she thought sadly, even though he needed medical attention. And in the end, Marta and her mooks still got me back.
The good thing was that Marta had never gotten Liam’s name—as far as Kat knew—so if she hadn’t killed him back on the street, there was a good chance she wouldn’t bother to return and do it later. Liam was only one man. He was a nuisance to A9, not a threat. They had no defensible reason to expend resources bringing down a minor not-quite-a-magician just because he decided to help a pretty girl who was clearly in trouble. Although, if Kat escaped and returned to Liam’s side again…
She liked Liam, a lot, and his plan to have her stay in Salem’s Gate while her “ghost” traveled the world had been excellent, but now that she was a prisoner again, and they were god knew where, driving away from the city, she couldn’t simply round back and return to Liam’s cute little bookstore and messy house. A9 would just send more goons, wreak more havoc, and the consequences would extend beyond Kat’s personal life. Their interference in the city’s affairs could cause a supernatural war on the streets.
Lock & Key (King & Crown Book 1) Page 11
