by Faith Hunter
Before heading back upstairs, I walked into the stockroom and placed my palm on one of the metal boxes that contained the amethyst, the lavender stone I had thought was dead, yet which had generated the cobra. The first time I ever touched one of the metal boxes, I had been met with a frisson of heat, a whisper of power, and the touch of mage-perception. I had known that there was stone inside, stone imbued with power. That first time, sweat broke out on my arms and tingled down my spine. Not now. Straining, I lifted the metal box to the floor.
I touched the second box, which also contained stone. And behind it was another box, similar to the first two. I studied the boxes in the dim hallway light. They were an ugly green, painted with pale white pigments, words hidden under the crisscrossed security strips. A number six was clearly visible on one, the number two in a different place on another. They were Pre-Ap, US military ammunition boxes.
I sent a mind-skim into the box under my fingertips. The first time I had done this, the stone inside had swirled around me in an eddy, testing, toying. Something had touched my mind, recoiled a bare instant before it wrapped around me, seized me, and pulled me in. Something with unheard-of might. Such power. It beat into me, demanding.
Now there was nothing, not a whisper of power. I opened the box, its hinges twanging softly, and unexpected gloom settled across my shoulders at the sight of the once wondrous amethyst. Now it was pale, almost clear, like good-quality quartz, spotted with slightly darker inclusions in half curves and spots like eyelids and pupils. After the cobra, I had hoped it might be restored.
I lifted a fist-sized specimen and sent a tendril of thought into it. There was nothing there, no tremor of energy. I replaced the amethyst and closed the lid, feeling the chill of the unheated room through the soles of my feet. Fighting dejection, I turned off the light, went back upstairs, and found my bed. I was asleep almost instantly.
The lynx sat on my back porch railing, purring, body erect, stubby tail curled around its back feet. I placed my hand on the ice-rimmed window and leaned closer to the huge black cat. It was between sixty and eighty pounds, its waterproof outer coat of hair harsh and glossy over an inner coat that fluffed for warmth. Moonlight brightened white facial hair and its pale-haired belly, and white tufts sprouted from erect ears. It was prim and proper, until it opened its mouth and growled at me. Two-inch fangs caught the moonlight. My breath fogged the glass—and I woke, the echo of the growl reverberating in the apartment around me.
I came awake fast. The loft was cold, silent, and very dark.
I had left the fireplaces on medium to combat the winter chill, and their flames should have cast wavering light on the walls. They didn’t. The fans should have stirred the air with warming currents. They didn’t. The air should have smelled of fish and potatoes and beer and candles. It didn’t. I caught a whiff of fresh roses and moldering leaves. Beneath it was the dank stench of standing water, mold, and mildew.
I opened my mage-sight and scanned the room; the furnishings, walls, ceiling and floor were lit with soft blue, green, and pinkish tints. There was no hint of Darkness, but the scent continued to grow, as if it—they—sat on the foot of my bed. There were two of them.
I slid my hand across the sheets to my amulets but encountered only cotton. They weren’t there. I remembered taking them off at the computer nook. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Head full of kisses and beer, I hadn’t put them under the pillow before sleep. I didn’t remember where they were, and broke into a sweat of fear. My hand met a solid object. The kris—no, not the kris, I remembered as I forced myself more fully awake. It was gone, broken off in the belly of a Minor Darkness. What I touched was the hilt of a throwing blade.
I slid my hand around it. The knife was beautifully balanced, but wasn’t shaped right for close fighting. It needed a longer blade with a honed edge, not just a sharp point. The hilt was bone, tapered and smooth, to slide from a hand without a hitch, which was great for a throw; not great for cutting. No help against a being of spirit. But it was what I had.
I slid from the sheets, a soundless action, and placed my feet on the icy floor. As I stood, the flames came on with a quick puff of natural gas. A click and hum overhead indicated the fans were back on. The other scents faded as if they had never been. I looked around, the blade catching the light.
Had the smells been real or a dream? Had the heat gone off? Had there been an interruption in both electricity and the supply of gas, leaving only enough to keep the pilot lights lit? Then when power and gas were restored they both came on at once? Was such a thing possible? Were the two forms of power linked somehow? Or was I going nuts? I looked at the black-pig clock in the kitchen. It was three a.m. I was wide-awake.
Unsettled, I crawled back into the warm bed. Unable to sleep, I stared at the ceiling, waiting on something. Anything. Time passed. The loft warmed. What seemed like hours later, I heard an almost silent click, a distant sound, muffled and muted. A quick glance told me it was now four, and I slid from the bed again. I gathered the practice swords Audric had given me, thin and pliable bamboo staves. Careful to keep from stirring the air currents, I crept to the door and crouched beneath the bar that separated the kitchen from the entry.
Stealthy as the lynx that invaded my dreams, Audric opened my door and entered my apartment. Until now, I hadn’t figured out how he got in, but my eyes were adapted to the dark and my position was perfect. I saw him pocket a key as he stepped over the threshold.
Without warning, I attacked. I got in three deadly strikes, stabs in each kidney and one cut across his spine at shoulder level before the half-breed managed to master his surprise, turn, and raise his weapons. “Dead,” I said softly, feeling triumphant. I should have known better than to gloat.
Audric countered and slapped me four times with his staves, any one of which would have killed me. Even prepared, I didn’t get a single block in. After that it was downhill all the way. I lost count of the ways I died. Audric killed me with the walking horse, the dolphin, and three versions of the crab, an ugly move that I should have been able to block with my eyes closed, half asleep. He killed me with the scissors, the lion rampant, the lion sitting, and the lion resting. He killed me with a half-dozen moves whose formal names I didn’t know and had never seen. I had bruises on top of bruises.
When my Thursday-morning lesson in humility was over and Audric let me rest, I fell across the couch, gasping and groaning. My teacher turned on a lamp and studied me. He wasn’t even breathing hard, standing over me in his white dobok, arms crossed, staves beneath one arm. The light gleamed across his freshly shaven skull. “I smelled the evil when I entered,” he said. “But not as strong as before.”
“Let me guess,” I gasped. “It distracted you and that was why I killed you three times before you responded.” When he inclined his head, I whispered, “Bloody seraphs.” And then, boneless across the couch, desperately needing to rest, I told him about the lynx whose cry waked me some mornings, the dreams of Raziel, and the incubus who had tried, but been unable to gain a foothold this morning. Audric listened as if he had been solely my champard, and not the bound servant of the seraph, the winged-warrior Raziel himself.
Chapter 10
I laid my amulets aside, wearing only a healing conjure to lessen my practice session aches, and ate breakfast—oatmeal, because two teeth were loose from the fighting. A knock sounded on my door and, distracted by the sting of yogurt on a busted lip, I answered it in my bathrobe, the ruby velvet soft against the abrasions on my shoulders. Any knock while the shop was closed had to mean Rupert or Audric. Both had seen me in much less.
As I unlatched the door, the smell hit me and my entire body clenched. Kylen.
Caramel, brown sugar, and vanilla with a gingerlike hint of heat. My body reacted instantly. I threw the door wide, mage-sight flashing on before it banged open. Thaddeus Bartholomew was a huge form composed of reddish-gold with hints of green light. I reached for him, heat rising in me like lava from the earth’s crust, like
a megatsunami. My lips found his mouth. He tasted like a bakery. He smelled wonderful.
Distantly, I heard a voice say, “Get her amulets. Quick.”
I could hear panting. Need thrummed through me. His hands pushed aside my robe. I tore at his clothes, found his throat with my teeth, and bit down. Hard. His arms came around me, lifting my bare bottom with heated palms. His seraph ring flared, scorching my buttock. My legs wrapped around him, pulling him closer.
Something slipped over my head. The world tilted. Agony and blistering cold twisted through me. I gasped and drew back, hissing with pain. My spine arched back and wrenched forward in an electric spasm. Mage-sight snapped off, leaving a whiteout of frozen emptiness. Heat paled and cooled so fast it crackled through me like breaking ice. Like a glacier calving and falling. I dropped to the hallway floor, fingernails carving into the old wood.
“Blood of Michael, what was that?” someone asked.
I threw back my head, tossing my hair, which had come undone. I smelled kylen. I wanted. But some minute, newly rational part of my brain catalogued the symptoms and knew what had happened. I pulled that stable fragment of myself around me even as I tugged the torn lapels of my robe over my naked flesh. I was panting, and I could smell my heat, a raw, wild smell of roses and almonds and a hint of blood. From my place on the floor, I looked up.
Rupert and Audric were restraining Thadd, who was growling like an untamed animal, his face twisted in need and fury. He battled the two big men as Rupert found Thadd’s police sigil with one hand and opened it. The sigils carried by the state police had built-in conjures, including an antimage conjure. Rupert pressed it against the cop’s bare chest. Thadd screamed.
That cool, composed part of me registered that he was emitting kylen pheromones at an unprecedented rate. His genetic makeup had been hidden from him his whole life, arrested at conception by a powerful seraph conjure held in a turquoise ring, its band shaped like angel wings. My buttock stung where the ring had been pressed against my bare skin as it battled against mage-heat. The ring and his heritage had been a forbidden secret kept by his mother.
Until I made him take off the ring. The transformation that should have taken place in the womb had been held at bay by unknown incantations and unimaginable power. When the ring came off, it had begun in the body of an adult. His bones, organs, and cells had begun trying to transform him into a kylen from the genes up, in a single instant. With the ring back in place, the process was interrupted, but he was still kylen, still part seraph. Still smelled of caramel and ginger and hot, fierce, furious sex. I wanted him.
As the police sigil pressed into his bare chest, his scent faded. Intelligence returned to his eyes and they met mine. In their depths, I saw his anguish. The transformation and the constant low-level mage-heat were making him crazy. Only the partial protection of the ring and the sigil were keeping him sane. That and the fact that I wore my amulets almost constantly, which gave us both protection from my effect on him.
I gathered my robe closer. One-handed, I levered myself up from the floor. Reaching my feet, I caught the wall unsteadily and looked at our rescuers. Rupert and Audric were flushed and sweating. Blood streaked their faces and hands. I smelled it: human, half-breed, mage, and kylen. I’d torn at Thadd’s throat with my teeth, wanting the taste of his blood, and reopened the tear in my lip. I’d ripped at Rupert and Audric as they tried to separate us. The image of two rutting wolves hit me and I laughed. A shaky sound, but lucid. My friends were staring at me, guarded and cautious.
“I’m okay,” I said, almost like myself.
“That would sound more convincing if your mouth weren’t bloody,” Rupert said wryly.
I licked my lips, tasting kylen and mage. Heat threatened to rise again, but the amulets sent a burst of something into me, like a shot of a powerful drug. I hadn’t drawn on them, even instinctively, but I recognized the pulse of power from the pink tourmaline ring. Clearly part of its purpose was to help control mage-heat.
Leaving the door wide, I walked into my loft, touching the amulet in the doorknob to damp my neomage attributes. Behind me, I could hear the three males entering as I grabbed clothes from the armoire storing casual wear and pulled a screen around the bath area to shield it from the rest of the apartment. With icy water and a coarse rag, I scrubbed the smell of kylen from me, abrading my flesh to help with the last vestiges of heat. I stuffed the robe into a bag of salt for cleaning later. When I could find a new laundress and someone to stitch up the ragged tear.
Naked, I looked at myself. Beneath the amulet necklace, my body was mottled with fresh bruises from this morning’s training, and on top of the bruises were the imprints of Thadd’s hands. I inspected the visa, feeling the power of the four-inch stone doughnut and thinking. A mage in the human world would sometimes encounter a seraph or kylen. They would need something to keep heat at bay. The visa had a lot of powers I needed to know about. It would all be funny if I thought the amulets could control mage-heat for any length of time. They couldn’t. I could feel it starting to rise and clamped down on it hard. I dressed in layers for warmth and separation from the kylen. From the look of my robe and his shirt, it might not be enough.
When I emerged, they were drinking coffee made from the bag Lucas had left last night. Water for my tea simmered on the gas stove. Warily, Rupert and Audric watched me. “I’m okay,” I said, risking a look at Thadd even as an embarrassed flush rose in my cheeks. Tooth marks ringed his throat. Great. “How about you?”
He took a slow breath. “I’m okay. I guess. That was…”
“Mage-heat.”
“Yeah. Explains why I’ve been feeling—” He stopped again and flushed.
“Right,” I said. “So why are you here?” I didn’t mean it to sound so abrupt, but didn’t apologize or take it back, either.
“Two things. You made SNN’s breaking news last night, and it’s still on this morning.” When I grimaced, he said, “And you’re under surveillance by the AAS.”
“Why?” Audric asked, responding to the surveillance part.
“Because she’s the only sanctioned mage living among humans who doesn’t have a specific job to do.”
My mind gave a drawn-out, unconscious, Ohhh, of course, at his words. When no one responded, he continued. “All other mages are diplomats, working to stimulate and facilitate trade between our respective governments. Thorn—” He paused and started over. “You—”
“Are loose and running around, having fun. A bad precedent for the immoral to be allowed among the holy humans,” I finished sarcastically. As I spoke, I found the remote and clicked the television on. I didn’t even have to wait. On the bottom left of the screen was footage of me holding a sword to the elder’s throat. I winced and turned it back off.
“And your Lolo keeps calling me.” He fished out his satellite phone and looked at it. “I’ve tried blocking her. I’ve had headquarters try to block her. She keeps getting through. She’s driving me nuts.”
“What does the priestess of the New Orleans Enclave desire of you?” Audric asked in that disconcertingly formal way half-breeds sometimes employed in the presence of kylen, seraphs, and mages.
Thadd shrugged, that odd, seraph-like gesture he used, a lifting of shoulder blades, and shifted his gaze to the wall behind me. “She implies that she wants us to mate.”
“She would not. Such matings are forbidden,” Audric said before I could reply.
“Like hiding my birth was forbidden?” Thadd asked, looking at me. “Somehow, your Lolo knows what I am, and she wants something. I don’t think it’s a plan she just came up with. I think it’s been in the works for a long time. Like since before I was born.”
The same thought had occurred to me, and to avoid the penetrating looks of the males, I went to the kettle, which had started to sizzle, and busied myself with the ritual of tea. I chose almond cookie tea, a comfort flavor, and measured a heaping tablespoon into the kettle to swirl in the hot water. I found a mug I
liked, one Audric had dead-mined from his town. On it were the words BEST FRIENDS ARE CHEAPER THAN SHRINKS. I liked the concept. As I worked, I thought about Lolo.
Rumor claimed the priestess was old, maybe over a hundred years. If that was true, it would make Lolo one of the Mage War survivors, alive when seraph and mage were free to mate, when kylen had been born in high numbers. Some mages wanted a return to the freedom of mating when they wanted, and with whom. Some mages wanted Enclaves abolished. Some hoped there was a way to coerce the Most High into giving us souls so we might join the elect and go to heaven when we die. Rumor said Lolo was among those, but rumor was often false.
Except: I had lived among humans freely. Free mages were thought to be a rumor too, but they weren’t. Lolo had placed me in Mineral City, hidden me here, ten years ago. Was the old woman involved in some plan that required me to be in this town? Required the birth of Thadd, part seraph, part mage, to one of Mole Man’s descendants? Required him to be here, at the base of the Trine, where the original sacrifice took place? And Audric, too? I had wondered all this before, but I couldn’t see it—yet I had long ago learned to disbelieve in coincidences. I sat at the table and added crystallized honey to the tea, sipping slowly to keep from burning my split lip. I remembered Thadd’s teeth against it. My flush deepened.
“Durbarge is taking a special interest in you, Thorn,” Thadd said. “Be careful.”
“Did he see you enter the shop?” Audric asked.
“Probably. But if we get back downstairs and I buy something, and if I report back to him on our conversation, I should be safe.” When Audric lifted his brows in inquiry, Thadd said, “We talked about the weather; about the ice cap on the Trine melting. About the device that rose from the mountain peak. Thorn shrugged and said she thought it was all weird. I couldn’t get anything from any of you, even in friendly conversation.”
