by DAVID B. COE
Witcombe eyed Patty, who gave a single curt nod.
“Join us for a moment, won’t you?” Witcombe said, the smile on her face doing nothing to mask her fear. “I’d like you to meet some people.”
Heather joined us on the patio, pulling the glass door closed behind her.
I didn’t know what Witcombe and Patty had in mind for her, but I cast a warding anyway, not on me, but on Heather. The gazes of both weremancers snapped my way as soon as I released the magic.
“What was that?” Witcombe asked.
I stared back at her, defiant.
“Nothing that matters,” Patty said.
“Have you met Missus Hesslan-Fine?” Witcombe asked, even as Patty walked to the edge of the patio and gazed out at the mountain.
Heather shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“She’s the agent who found this house for me. And she helped me sell my old one. She’s lived in this area for . . . How long has it been, Patricia?”
Patty didn’t answer.
“Well, a long time.”
Witcombe glanced my way, swallowed. “And this is . . . this is Mister Fearsson. He’s a private detective.”
Heather turned in my direction. At the same time, Patty spun and lunged, covering the distance between herself and the young woman in a single, shockingly sudden motion. Sunlight gleamed off something in her hand. I opened my mouth to shout a warning, but couldn’t get the words out.
I’d warded Heather against attack spells. It never occurred to me to ward her against a knife blade.
Patty’s aim was uncanny. She slashed with the knife along the side of Heather’s neck, sending a spray of blood across the flagstone patio and a torrent of it down over the young woman’s shoulder and chest.
Heather staggered, dropped to the ground. More blood pooled around her and ran in rivulets along the grouted seams between the stones.
Witcombe stumbled back a step, gaping in horror at what Patty had done “Oh, dear God! Heather! My God, my God!”
I dropped to my knees beside the girl, blood soaking my jeans, and put my hands over the wound. “The cut, my magic, her healed flesh! The cut, my magic, her healed flesh!”
I hadn’t cast many healing spells, and I was too freaked out to try to recite the spell silently. As it was, the magic I summoned felt weak, inadequate to the task.
“Don’t bother,” Patty said, her voice so calm it made me want to snap her neck. “She was dead before she hit the ground.”
“Her blood’s still flowing. She’s not dead.”
“But you’re not weremyste enough to save her, are you?”
I repeated the spell. But Patty was right: Heather was dying, and I wasn’t strong enough to do anything about it.
Witcombe continued to babble and blubber, saying “My God, my God” again and again.
“Would you shut up already?” Patty snapped.
Witcombe whirled on her, the rebuke seeming to kick her out of her panic. “Are you fucking crazy? Killing her like that, here in my home? What in God’s name were you thinking?”
“We need the blood,” Patty said. “And I didn’t kill her; Fearsson did. That’s what we’ll tell the police.”
Something clattered on the stone beside me. The bloodied knife.
Three elements. My hand, Patty’s foot, and a good hard tug. I’d used the spell before, and it worked every time. Her foot shot out from under her, and she landed hard on her back.
I scrambled up. And was hammered back to my knees by what felt like the kick of a mule to my temple. Magic stirred over my skin a second time, and I was hit again. This time, I sprawled onto my back, too dazed to do more than lie there.
“Quickly now,” Patty said to Witcombe. “You know the spell.” She got to her feet and kicked me in the jaw with her open-toe shoe. It hurt more than I would have imagined.
I tried to get up, but another spell stopped me. This one seemed to thicken the air. Magic surrounded me, clung like heavy mist to my skin, my hair, my clothes. And then it fell upon my mind with the fury and finality of an avalanche. It buried my will, my ability to act. I tried another attack spell: fire this time. Nothing happened. I tried to sit up, to roll onto my knees
I raised my eyes to Patty; I couldn’t so much as lift my head. She leered down at me, and for good measure she kicked me again, digging her foot into my side this time. I felt the impact, gasped for breath. But I couldn’t raise my hands to clutch the spot she’d hit. I wasn’t even sure I grunted.
“Dark magic, Jay. You should try it sometime. It really is exhilarating.”
If I could have turned her into a torch, or peeled back the skin from her face, I would have done it. But I could no more cast than I could speak or get up and walk away.
I tore my eyes from her face—they seemed to be the one part of my body still under my control—and looked around. Heather lay beside me, her eyes open and fixed on the sky, a bit of blood oozing from the wound. Most of the blood, though, had vanished with the spell Patty and Witcombe cast. I would have bet that even the blood on my jeans was gone, though the spell kept me from confirming the hunch.
The conjuring had put me in mind of a landslide. I imagined a giant shovel digging me out, removing this terrible weight, freeing me. The weight of the spell, the imagined shovel, and me. Nothing.
“You can’t save yourself with a spell. You’re ours now.”
“What are we going to do with him?” Witcombe asked.
Patty loomed over me, regarding me the way she might a newly listed property. “Just what we planned to do all along. We’re going to use him to kill his runemyste.”
CHAPTER 17
I thought they would have to carry me—or have the guards do it. What they did instead was infinitely worse.
“Get up,” Patty said, her voice echoing in my head.
I stared at her, wanting to tell her she was nuts, that obviously I was incapable of sitting up, much less getting to my feet.
But even as these thoughts flashed through my mind, I rolled onto my hands and knees and pushed myself up. My vision swam, and I felt like I was going to pass out, but I didn’t sway.
“Get it now?” Patty said. “Pick up the knife.” Again, the command reverberated in my head, the power lashing at me.
God knew I didn’t want to do it. Her control spell had wiped the blade free of blood, but her fingerprints were still on the hilt, and that was the only way I’d be able to prove that she, and not I, had killed Heather.
“By the hilt,” she said.
I bent and picked it up.
“Grip it the way you would if you were about to stab someone.”
I fought her with every ounce of strength I possessed. The effort should have been enough to make my muscles tremble, my pulse race. But I had the feeling that no one watching me would have noticed at all. I wrapped my fingers around the handle, which was made of some dark, polished wood.
Etienne de Cahors had used similar magic against me when I fought him, but somehow this was worse. Patty and Witcombe were weremystes, like me. They shouldn’t have been strong enough to control me with such ease.
“Now,” Patty said, voice echoing, “hold that blade to my throat.”
I did as she said, laying the honed edge along her neck just below her jaw line. She showed no fear at all. Her smile, the look in her eyes: She was as sure of her power over me as she was of her own name.
“You’d like to kill me, wouldn’t you?” she said, her voice low, so that only I could hear. “It wouldn’t take much; a flick of your wrist, and I’d probably be dead before anyone could stop the bleeding. But you can’t do it, because you belong to me, completely, utterly, without hope of reprieve. You can fight me all you like. You can try to cast spells, you can resist until your heart bursts within your chest. It won’t matter. Our spell will hold you until you’re dead.”
Or until you are. I wanted to scream the words at her. Nothing.
“Put the knife in your pocke
t.”
I slipped it into the inside pocket of my bomber, despising myself.
“What about her?” Witcombe asked, gawping down at Heather’s body, her cheeks ashen.
Patty eyed me in a way that made my stomach clench. “Jay will carry her out to his car and put her in the back. We’ll decide what to do with her later.” She faced Witcombe. “But first you need to clear out your guards. Too much to explain if they see us with the girl’s body.”
Witcombe eyed me. “But won’t—?”
“Jay’s not going anywhere without my permission. We don’t need the guards right now. We need privacy.”
Witcombe nodded and hurried into the house.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Patty said, gazing after her. She waved a hand toward the view. “To the rest of world, she’s a corporate giant, one of the most powerful women in the country. But as you can see, she’s a bit pathetic. She’s handy to have around—all that money, you know. But otherwise she isn’t good for much. And before long, I’ll have access to enough income that we won’t even need her for that. For now, though, in our circles—yours and mine—she answers to me. Just like you do. Stay here. Don’t move.”
She went back into the house, and emerged a short while later with a drink. It smelled like Scotch. She sat in the chair I’d used a short while before and sipped her drink, ignoring me.
And still I fought, straining at the invisible bonds that held me, desperate to lift a hand, to grab hold of that knife again, to kill Patty and escape to my car. I felt a tickle of sweat on my temple and couldn’t even wipe it away.
We’re going to use him to kill his runemyste.
I had no idea how they planned to make me do this. The day before, I would have sworn that Patty was delusional, because I knew with the conviction of the ignorant that runemystes couldn’t be killed.
Thanks to Namid, I now knew better. And thanks to Patty, I understood in the vaguest sense how it might be possible. What had Namid said when I asked how his fellow runemyste died?
We do not know. We know only that one of her weremystes was killed as well. They died together, perhaps battling a necromancer and his or her servants.
What if they hadn’t been fighting side by side, but instead had battled each other? What if the weremyste had been controlled, just as I was now, and had been used as a weapon against the runemyste?
I wouldn’t know how to kill Namid. Surely I didn’t have the power to defeat him in magical combat. But he trusted me, as I trusted him. I could get close to him, enable someone who wielded as weapons my body and my runecrafting to strike a killing blow.
Is that what Patty and Witcombe had done to the runemyste in Virginia?
“You’re awfully quiet,” Patty said, without turning. Then she laughed. She swiveled in her chair to face me and narrowed her eyes. “Why do you have a runemyste? I’ve felt your magic now, and it doesn’t strike me as being terribly powerful. And yet, from what I’ve been told, a runemyste has taken interest in you. He’s training you. So he must see some potential that I’m missing. And you did kill Cahors, though I’d wager that was more dumb luck than anything else.”
The door swung open once more and Witcombe bustled out onto the patio. “They’re gone for now. The ones around the house, that is. There are still men at the guardhouse, but I assume that’s all right.”
Patty regarded me for a moment longer. “Yes, that should be fine. Jay and I will take his car. You’ll follow us.”
“Where are we going?”
“His house, I think.”
“And . . . and Heather?”
“I told you, we’ll work that out later. But I think that Jay’s status as city hero is about to end. A messy murder-suicide with a pretty young thing like Heather should do the trick.” She drained her Scotch and levered herself out of the chair. “Pick her up,” she said, her voice taking on that echoing quality once more.
I lifted Heather’s body into my arms and then slung her over my shoulder.
“Very good. We’re heading out to your car now. You’re going to follow Regina through the house, doing exactly as she says.” She stepped forward and reached a hand into my jeans pocket, her eyes finding mine once more, a mocking leer on her lips. She pulled out my car keys and held them up for me to see. “Go,” she said to Witcombe.
The word didn’t echo as her commands did in my head, but they had the same effect. Witcombe made her way through the house, and I followed. She glanced back at me every few seconds, acting like she was afraid to have me so close to her—or perhaps afraid of the corpse I carried. My eyes scanned the furniture as we walked. Even knowing that I was helpless, I searched for something I could use as a weapon or a distraction. Not that I could take advantage of either. I followed, as dutiful as a trained puppy.
Once we were outside, Patty had me halt and wait as she opened the back hatch of the Z-ster.
“Put her in here.”
I laid Heather’s body down in the back, taking care not to let the little bit of blood on her neck touch the upholstery. The significance of this wasn’t lost on me. Patty hadn’t told me how I should position the body, and so I could put her in there any way I wanted. As loopholes went it wasn’t much. But maybe I wasn’t completely helpless after all.
“Get in the car.” The command echoed as had the others. “And drive us back to your home, obeying all traffic rules, taking the most direct route possible, and doing nothing to draw undue attention to your car or to us.”
I climbed into the car on the driver’s side, sifting through her words for something—anything—that I could do, within the constraints of her instructions, to gain the upper hand. Nothing came to me. She had been specific enough to keep me on task, and general enough to leave no loopholes. I had the sense that she had done something like this several times before.
I drove back to Chandler with Regina Witcombe trailing me in her silver Mercedes. Thanks to Patty, I was the model driver, hitting the speed limits dead on, using my directionals for every lane change and every turn. Anyone who knew me well enough to have driven with me would have realized straight away that something was wrong; I wasn’t this good a driver. But to the strangers on Phoenix’s freeways, I was just another grunt in a car, following the rules and driving in the slow lane.
As we neared my house, my cell phone rang. I couldn’t reach for it, or even glance Patty’s way to gauge what she wanted me to do.
On the second ring, she reached over and took the phone from my jacket pocket.
“Kona Shaw,” she said.
My heart leaped.
“She was your partner when you were a cop, wasn’t she?” She dropped the phone into the tray behind the stick shift. “That’s a call you won’t be taking.”
Fine with me, I wanted to say. I always took Kona’s calls. She’d try again, and if I didn’t answer a second time, she’d come looking for me.
I felt Patty’s eyes on me, and I wondered if mastering my body in this way also allowed her to read my emotions. Or maybe she was simply too smart for my own good.
“Except that you probably take her calls all the time, don’t you? I’ve heard that partners on the force get very close. It’s practically like a marriage. If she calls again, you’ll have to answer.”
Call again, Kona.
The sun had gone down by the time I navigated the streets of Chandler to my house. It hadn’t gotten completely dark yet, but it wouldn’t be long. I parked in the driveway and sat, waiting for Patty’s next set of commands. Glancing at my rearview mirror, I saw Witcombe’s car glide to a stop by the curb in front of my house.
Patty took my keys from the ignition. “You’re going to get out, shut the car door, and walk to the door of your house acting like nothing is the matter. You’ll allow me to unlock your front door. If a neighbor calls to you, you’ll wave and smile before continuing to the house. Now get out.”
I opened my door, climbed out of the Z-ster, and closed the car door. Patty joined me, an
d we walked to the house. She unlocked the door, pushed it open, and waved me inside. “Go in and stop in the middle of the first room. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
I walked into the house and did as instructed. She was too good at this, too thorough. I needed help.
And as we waited for Witcombe to join us, I got it.
My cell rang again. Patty still held the phone, and she checked the incoming number, frowning. “It’s Shaw.”
“Who’s Shaw?” Witcombe asked as she entered the house.
“Fearsson’s partner on the police force. This is the second time she’s called.”
“Ignore it.”
Patty shook her head. “She’ll keep calling.” She held up the phone for me to see as it rang a second time, but didn’t hand it to me right away.
“You’re going to talk to her, but tell her nothing about us or what I’ve done to you. You’ll keep your tone casual, and you’ll say nothing about being in trouble or needing help.” A third ring. She handed me the phone. “Now answer, on speaker.”
I opened it, unable to refuse. But on the inside I was doing cartwheels. Patty’s commands had been rushed, because she didn’t want Kona to get no answer a second time. She’d left loopholes all over the place.
“Fearsson,” I said.
“Hey, partner. Where have you been?” Kona’s voice sounded thin and tinny on the tiny speakers, but I’d never been so happy to hear her.
“Busy day,” I said. “I’ve been all over.”
“Did you get out to Paradise Valley?”
Patty and Witcombe shared a look.
“Yes, I did. Thanks again. Tell Hibbard thanks, too.”
Kona’s pause was a split second longer than it ought to have been. I wasn’t sure that Patty would notice, but I certainly did. Kona knew something was wrong. “I’ll tell him,” she said. “He’s gone for the day, but I’ll tell him. Where are you now?”
“Lie to her.” Patty mouthed the words, lending only enough breath to make them chime in my mind.
But I felt the compulsion; I was incapable of telling Kona I was at home. Once more, though, haste had made Patty careless.
