by K. F. Breene
I rattled off the address as Darius got in. He smoothed his tight black shirt over firm pecs. This had to be his “dressed down, I might have to fight” look. Some people wore sweats; this too-handsome vampire wore cotton with a designer label and stylish jeans.
“How do you expect to move in those jeans?” I asked.
“How do you expect to move in leather?” he replied, not looking at me.
“With aplomb.” I smiled. He didn’t notice.
After a moment of sitting in traffic, he asked, “Why did you seek out the dog?”
“You mean Red?”
Darius turned his flat stare on me, something I was now realizing indicated confusion. “Mr. Nevin.”
“Is that Red’s last name?”
His brow lowered. “Roger.”
“Oh.” I laughed. “Hurts to say his first name, huh? Afraid that will imply you’re friends?” His expression darkened. “What is up with you two?”
After a moment of staring at me silently, jaw clenched, he lowered his voice and leaned toward me. “Since he became alpha, an unusually large amount of my children have been killed. It is a widespread problem. That is why I now have a safe house. American police are unaware that I am not human; they only know that I own the property. Anyone caught breaking and entering will be apprehended. The human world’s judicial system comes in handy, especially when the perpetrators mostly live in that world.”
“Why don’t you kill them when you see them? It seems like you just wait for them to kill you.”
“Your magical law enforcement does not mind our presence so long as we play nice. That is easy to do most times. It is only when we are caught…” He paused as the song changed on the radio, not wanting his voice to be heard in the silence. “Feeding,” he continued, “that there is the problem.”
“With houses, how could they catch you?”
“I am surprised at the lack of common knowledge about us, given how long we have been around. I hope it continues this way.” He gave me a warning look.
I rolled my eyes. Knowing about their habits was nothing compared to knowing about unicorns. I was already under the informational thumb.
“Large-scale changes are becoming more common, given our dwindling numbers,” he continued. That was when they created new vampires, I knew. “There is more power in numbers, as you can guess—and less chance of an ambush that would cripple us. Mr. Nevin is very organized, however, unlike his predecessor, and he has been more effective than we would like.”
He paused for a moment, looking out into the night. “Then there are the newborns. It takes a lot to quench their thirst, and it is hard to control them for the first few decades. They make a great many mistakes and are often caught in the act. Mr. Nevin has trained and nurtured extremely capable employees. We need to make some changes. Give them something else to do.”
The way his voice changed, and his eyes darkened, gave me warning shivers. I was right not to choose the side of the shifters. I had every reason to believe the vampires had something in the works, and whatever it was, I didn’t want to be anywhere near it.
I hoped I wouldn’t be anywhere near it, anyway. After what Red had said, I was a smidgen concerned.
“Okay, then. Well, I wasn’t there to see Roger. I was there to see Red, the guy who was cowering in the booth. He’s great for information. And before you ask, I told him what I did just to help him out. He’s a good guy but very low status, so he’s dumped on a lot. Besides, they seemed like they already knew the guy was dead.”
The cab driver’s eyes widened and flicked up to the rearview mirror. Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel.
“Which movie was that?” Darius asked smoothly.
My mind went blank. “‘Thriller’?”
“I believe that is a song… Or did you mean the music video, perhaps?”
“Yes?”
“Here,” the cab driver said as the car stopped on the familiar street. Darius drew out a wad of money, peeled off a bill and handed it over. The lady grabbed it, barely looking, before turning back in disdain. “Do you got anything smaller?”
“What’d you give her?” Peering around the seat, I spied a hundred-dollar bill.
With his thumb, he flicked off bill after bill. Hundreds kept flashing by. Rolling my eyes, I dug out a twenty I’d found lying around Darius’s house. They would never have noticed it missing. Clearly. “Here. Keep the change.” I handed over the money and captured the hundred. Without flinching, I stuffed it into my pocket. “Let’s go.”
Out on the sidewalk, I paused in front of the familiar house before feeling my body go rigid. I stooped, peering through the partially opened door from a distance, and then started walking. No magic surrounded the outside this time, but the residual feel vibrated off the house like a swarm of bees.
I kicked the door open. It tore off the heat-warped hinges and half crumbled onto the floor. The house I had been inside five days ago was no longer a house. It was a shell. Someone had magically burned out the inside until there was nothing left.
Chapter Fifteen
“How is the roof still intact?” Darius asked as he filed in behind me. “And the walls?”
I reached around and tapped my back. He took hold of my belt, which was close enough. I stepped forward, heard the moan of the badly charred floor, and felt it give a little. It didn’t break. I took another step, pausing when he was forced to follow me. It held under his weight, too.
“This was a well-contained magical fire,” I said, running my hand along the wall. Black flaked away.
“Hellfire?” he asked through a tight throat. “The dog said that the mage you killed could do hellfire.”
I scowled back at him, a knee-jerk reaction, since he hadn’t shown up in the bar—at least not publically—until after Red had told me that.
My focus snapped back in front of me. “Not hellfire, no. That rumor is false. He didn’t have the power. How long were you there for that conversation?”
He didn’t respond. Then I remembered his stalking human friend, who must have followed me into the bar and kept the text messages rolling. How annoying.
“He could create fire, though,” I said. “That’s what burned away my eyebrows, in case you haven’t made the connection. It seems someone else has the same ability.”
I scuffed the ground with my toe. The carpet had been largely burned away and parts of the wooden floor beneath were blackened. In a small spot near the wall, a hole had burrowed.
“The floor should be worse off. Magical fire can easily be contained from rising, but it has to sit somewhere. There are very few who can suspend fire in midair. Very, very few, and none, that I know of, are human.” It was only a half lie.
“Those who can do hellfire can also suspend it?”
There wasn’t much Darius was scared of, but clearly hellfire was high on that short list.
“As far as I know, those who work with hellfire can only blast it, not control it. Think of an extremely powerful flamethrower with three settings—destruction, massive destruction, and total destruction. It gushes out, along with the conjurer’s power and energy, eats everything in its path, and then goes out. If that were the case here, we’d see melted walls from the blast radius.” I shook my head, noticing the fire pattern winged up in some places to form a V. “No, this is a normal kind of fire, created with magic instead of sticks and matches. This fire was kept on a tight leash.”
I traced the fire patterns in the air with my fingertip, noticing how the burn marks stopped at the same place near the ceiling on all the walls. I ducked and ran my fingers along the floor before knocking. “Heat weakened the properties of the wood, but it didn’t ignite. It was not an efficient fire.”
“What does that mean?” Darius asked, following me to the doorway of the room that had held the book. The floor in this room had been destroyed, and remnants of the framework and the ground below showed through. A picture was starting to form.
“An
efficient fire is one without much smoke. It is mostly flame. You see, smoke is actually fuel for the fire, in gas form. If a fire isn’t efficient, that means it’s creating a lot of fuel in the air. Here, the floor’s smoke-damaged but mostly intact, which suggests an inefficient fire. But these walls say otherwise.”
The living room was about the same, with the right side of the room worse off. Warning shivers raced across my skin. I did not like the look of this one bit.
I worked toward the kitchen at the back of the house. “When fire is burning wood, the actual wood is not aflame. Rather, it’s the air right at the surface. There is the tiniest gap. If you see a burning log, the outside might be charred, but if you stop the fire, the middle of the log will be fine. In essence, it’s the smoke that’s burning. The heat changes the wood’s properties, which creates chemical gas, which then fuels the fire. The more heat, the faster the burn. Long story short, the massive amount of heat in this house should’ve burned the floor as badly as it did the walls. But the floor is fine in some places, and not in others. Our very tricky mage could float fire. He kept it off the ground in some places, but let it burrow in others. How? Why?”
I let out a breath as I broke out in a cold sweat.
“He controlled all this magically?” Darius asked. I felt a tug on my belt as the floor bowed under my feet. It didn’t break, though.
I touched Darius’s hand attached to my belt just to assure myself I wouldn’t fall in. “This belt better be quality, Darius.”
We edged forward another few feet, and I answered his question. “Yes. He controlled it very well, or else…” I cut myself off as a light bulb snapped on in my head. Air filled my lungs in relief. “He must’ve laid down a type of magical floor. I’ve never seen one used as fire retardant, but it could work, I suppose. The floor’s probably messed up in a couple of places because the mage didn’t root the spell.” I scratched my head. “I should’ve asked Callie about mages who don’t root spells. Usually that’s a rookie mistake. The one in the Realm wasn’t rooted, either, though that one had some power behind it. Strange.”
I rubbed my temple, thinking this through. I couldn’t do these spells on my own, but my magical encyclopedia was extensive. If it hadn’t been, I’d be dead twenty times over by now. “So he creates the magic buffer first, protecting the ceiling. The layer for the floor comes next, but that spell can’t be interrupted by walking through it, so he’d have to do this room by room. The fire seems moderately controlled, which is hard for a human to do. It would take the highest level of power. Or…” I tapped my chin in thought.
“Or?” Darius asked, a captive audience.
“Or it would take the right knowledge and a boost of power. The unicorn blood is the boost. The knowledge and sustained increase in power could come from a demon. Is our tricky mage playing host to a demon? Curious minds want to know.”
I saw the hole from which I’d retrieved the sack of spells. Not burned.
I turned back toward the living room, more pieces of the puzzle fitting into place. “I bet he was in here looking for something”—the book of spells, most likely—“and whatever he wanted wasn’t there, so he freaked out.”
I stepped too far into the living room. The sound of cracking wood made me flinch, but it was too late. The floor gave way. My foot went down.
My hands came up to protect my face. Gravity ripped at my body, but my backward fall was cut off abruptly—pain cinched my stomach and air greeted the crack of my ass.
Darius held me in the air by my belt.
“Once again, this strange form of security has proven effective,” he said. He didn’t sound taxed. “And Reagan, you should know that I only buy the best quality.”
“It seems so, yes. Fancy putting me down?”
I appreciated that he set me down gently. I didn’t appreciate the smile on his face.
“Suddenly you gain a sense of humor?” I dusted myself off out of habit.
“I have always enjoyed circus performers.”
“Lovely.”
Back to analyzing the hole in this room, it seemed I had missed an item hidden in the floor—why else would another cubbyhole exist? Judging by the lesser destruction in this room versus the other, I’d taken the most valuable prize. That was good to know. “Our mage has a rage problem. He wanted something that wasn’t here, so he fried the place. Childish.”
“Possibly that was the demon at work.”
Who had taken the item from this room?
Another light bulb went off.
“Could be,” I answered Darius, marching toward the door. His reflexes were as fast as ever, thankfully, and I didn’t have to rip out of his grip, or pull him behind me. “Depends on the demon. With all the mage’s power, though, that demon must be constantly trying to take over.” Outside, I swung my gaze to the side. No curtains moved. “I bet the mage is playing the dangerous game of demon pack and play.”
“What is that?” Darius followed me across the dead grass and to the neighbor’s house, my original destination.
“He creates a spell to contain the demon in a circle of some kind, one that can coerce the demon into giving information or power at the mage’s behest. Those spells are extremely complex, require a lot of power, and unwavering confidence and focus to maintain control. When the mage needs to take the power on the road, like he clearly did here, he performs a forced possession, pulling the demon into his body. At the end of his errand, he uses an exorcism to put it back into the circle. There are a few very dangerous points. Getting the demon into the body without it escaping, getting the demon out of the body and back into the circle, and keeping the demon from overtaking the body while the possession is in progress. Lots of work, but our mage clearly thinks it’s worth the crazy power boost. It’s just a matter of time before one of those three issues goes wrong.”
“Or else the circle falters.”
“Or that, sure. The demon could eat away at the circle over time, and if our mage is primarily concerned about the more dangerous situations, maybe he gets complacent with the finer details and upkeep. But wow. A true demonic possession for power. I haven’t seen this in a while. It totally fits, though.”
I felt the wards protecting the property, paltry things designed by a hack.
Or maybe playing with the powerful mage had made me forget what lower-level magic looked like.
“You have magic, you know all about magic…” Darius paused beside me, watching me feel my way around the spell. “Reagan, I have never heard a mage speak like this. The Banks are at the top of the power spectrum in the area, and they have never sounded this confident and insightful. In addition to being extremely aroused, I am certain you could be the best mage I have ever met.”
“My mother thought the same thing. Had she lived longer, she would’ve taught me more. But her time was cut short.”
“I hear the sadness in your voice. I would like to revisit this conversation in a quieter time. But for now, why don’t you learn magic?”
I stood, whipped out my sword, and sliced through the spell. Immediately I felt the small tug of the sword, asking for a little bit more power to keep it completely stocked. I resisted, to see what would happen. After a moment, the feeling died away.
“I really like this sword. Thank you.” I tried to step forward, but felt his hand on my shoulder, stopping me. “You want to soak in the moment of me thanking you, huh?”
“You’ve cut a ward. Usually some sort of defensive measure happens afterward.”
“Yes, professor, that is true. So why are we standing still, waiting for it?”
His hand disappeared from my shoulder.
I stalked forward, waiting for the ball to drop. “I am learning to be a mage, after a fashion. Did you not hear me in that mage’s house? I study spells and incantations, but there’s a lot of information, not to mention tons of spells that are virtually the same other than their names. A spell that shocks people can be performed in ten different ways, did you
know that? Ten!”
“Pick one and then you can shock a person.”
“Yes. That is the logical conclusion. The problem is, I’m a perfectionist when it comes to magic. Maybe one is better than the other. Maybe the versions are different because of climate or environmental differences. I don’t want to try each one, because I’m also cautious. I’ve seen what happens when an idiot with too much power tampers with unknown spells. So then I look up each variation and try to figure out why it’s different from the others. All that takes time.”
“I assume you are the idiot with too much power?”
“I am not the idiot with too much power because I’m not tampering with spells I don’t understand. But thanks for the finger pointing, ass.”
He smiled again as we made it to the three steps that led up to a modest porch. No defensive spells had come, or even vibrated from within the house. It was then I remembered what we were dealing with: a community.
“Move!” I shoved Darius to the side and ran the other way.
Not a moment too soon.
A wash of magic rolled through the yard from behind us, churning the air with heat. It bounced against the porch and stopped. I’d seen that spell before—it was supposed to contain blue fire. This one contained a glowing blue orb instead. The caster had sent it in the right direction, but not with nearly enough power.
“This is what I’m talking about. Step in here.” I walked into the spell and closed my eyes in bliss. It was a lovely dry heat, like a sauna. “Comfy.”
Darius lightly grabbed my arm. He was reaching in instead of walking in. “It is too hot for my liking. I will not be grieved by my inability to take a bath with you.”
“You won’t be grieved because vampires in water smell like rotting flesh, or because you realize I’m not into dead things and you don’t want to embarrass yourself?”
“You have consented to let me feed from you. It is only a matter of time before you desire to feel me, skin on skin.”
“I consented to let you feed if you absolutely had to. But you’ve fed. A lot, actually, considering you just did so again last night after only a week or whatever. You have to be stuffed. We’ll have killed the mage or died trying long before you need to feed again.”
