Unleash (Spellhounds Book 1)

by Lauren Harris

  He sighed, and I glanced up. Weariness hung on his face. His eyes were serious and uncertain. “You, I want. The rest of it... is sort of on lock down. I’m not dealing with it right now; it’s too big.”

  “Yeah.” Without command, my hand drifted to his chest, where his heart pulsed against his sternum. The warm depression between muscles fit my hand. I wasn’t used to wanting to touch people, or giving in to that want.

  He pressed his hand over mine, cupped the back of my head in his other, and bent. I rose to meet him, and though the kiss was soft and over far too soon, some of the anxiety in my body settled.

  I spent an eternity in the shower. The water ran black and red around my feet. It took several applications of shampoo to get the smell of charred car from my hair. Shreds of lambs wool stuck in the scrapes on my thighs, which, thanks to Isaac, were shedding the scabs in favor of new, pink skin. I had to sit on the side of the tub and rub with a wash-cloth, wincing and hissing, to get them all, but once my skin was clear, I felt better.

  Jaesung forgot to pack me anything to sleep in. I dug out a pair of his pajama bottoms and pulled them on with a sweatshirt. I brushed my teeth, wincing as the bristles delved into the gap where my missing molar had been. It had been too cold for my face to swell, but I still had bruises. The pallid girl in the mirror was little more than a wraith of my former self, and I couldn’t look at her long.

  I slipped into Jaesung’s room like a cautious cat. His blinds were drawn against midday sun, casting the room into artificial dusk. I couldn’t tell if Jaesung was asleep, lying there with one arm over his eyes. He didn’t fit well in his bed. The mattress was too short for him, and the comforter struggled to stay on his feet.

  I crept over and lifted the covers. He stirred, then moved toward the wall so I could slide in. My legs ached, and my ribs felt worse. A deep twinge in my shoulder said there were far too many parts of me still recovering from the Hellhound fight to have suffered a second round of injury and healing.

  As I scootched into bed, his arms came around me. I settled into him. My head rested heavy against his shoulder, and his chin pressed into my forehead.

  It was not romantic. Not really. There was something desperate and afraid in the way he clung to me, heart thudding against my cheek. I reached for his hair, drawing my nails across his scalp like I would for any of the dogs that needed calming. His breath stayed shaky for a long time. When it relaxed, the tension in his body slowly followed suit.

  I thought he'd fallen asleep. Then, into the motes of dusty sunlight creeping up the wall, he spoke.

  “You know how you said the world needs more good cops?”

  I nodded. His hand found my damp hair, fingers grazing the back of an ear. “I think the world needs more good Sorcerers.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I woke around five in the afternoon. Cool dusk light had replaced gold, and my wet hair had halfway dried, leaving a humid spot on the pillow when I lifted my head. We'd moved apart in sleep, seeking more comfortable resting positions, and Jaesung didn't stir as I extricated myself from the tiny bed.

  I dug through my duffel, pausing as my fingers fell on something sharp-edged and hard. I tugged it out. It was the picture of my parents. I sucked in my lip and withdrew the sketchbook from Krista, the sweater from Sanadzi and Eugene, and my little piece of sea glass.

  My throat throbbed. How had he known exactly what to grab? It made me wonder what he might take if he knew he might never come back. Family mementos, necessities? I wanted to call it sentimental, and maybe it was, but I would have hated to lose those things—my touchstones to friends and family I'd lost or might lose.

  The scent of frying meat wafted up the stairs, setting my mouth to watering. I pulled on jeans and the sweater and slipped downstairs.

  Isaac might have been an asshole, but he was an asshole with an unexpected talent for food. Stepping into the kitchen, I was greeted by the sight of skinny, freckled arms slinging a spatula. Bacon draining on a paper towel-covered plate.

  He glanced back at me and jerked his bruised chin in greeting. I quirked an eyebrow at the sweet smell of whatever he was frying now.

  "French toast?" He sent me a thumbs up. I leaned against the island and filched a piece of bacon. "But you're wearing a Marilyn Manson tee shirt."

  "What, so I can't like good food?"

  "There's powdered sugar on your jeans."

  He shrugged, attempting to dust the white handprint from his thigh. "Given the amount of magic I use on a daily basis, I had to learn to fucking cook or spend all my money on fast food." He poked a slice of bread swimming in a pan of some yellow, eggy mixture by the stove. "Also, fun fact: magic doesn't cancel out cholesterol."

  "Noted."

  We were silent for several minutes during which he fried more toast and I peered out the kitchen window into the back yard. It was snowing again, gentle flakes fluttering down to collect on the windowsills and birdhouses next door. It was awkward, being alone with Isaac, and from the tension in his back, he felt the same way.

  "So, what are you going to teach me? Is this going to be boot camp, or a wax-on, wax-off sort of thing?"

  Isaac snorted, sliding French toast onto a plate and shoving it onto the island. "Neither. It's a sit-down-and-memorize-shit thing. Maybe a little of practical application, but there ain't much of a back yard in this place."

  We ate, and I accepted an iron pill. Just as I was contemplating hunting through the cabinets for something caffeinated, Jaesung appeared. He'd showered and changed into track pants and a loose gray shirt. He and Isaac met eyes, but didn't speak, even when Jaesung helped himself to the leftover French toast and the two slices of bacon we'd set aside.

  "Mom doesn't buy bacon," he said at last.

  "I had a delivery," Isaac said, gesturing me to the couch. "Got your sketch pad, Martin?"

  I retrieved it and joined Isaac leaning over the coffee table. To my surprise, he leaned back and looked at Jaesung, his face blank.

  "You Chinese?"

  The question startled me but Jaesung didn't look surprised by it. Annoyed, but not surprised. "Korean," he grumbled. "What are you, a leprechaun?"

  "But you use the Chinese characters, right?"

  Jaesung looked at me, his expression somewhere between confused and annoyed. "We have our own phonetic writing, but we use them, yeah.”

  "Cool, so the order of strokes in the characters is important, right?"

  "Ostensibly. Not everyone cares."

  "Where do you think that comes from?"

  Deadpan, Jaesung answered. "A pathological need for control achieved through a culture obsessed with organization.”

  Isaac blinked.

  “He’s a sociology student,” I said.

  "Magic,” Isaac said. “The Chinese were some of the first to figure it out."

  Jaesung lifted a hand. "Is anyone surprised?"

  Isaac motioned for me to open the sketchbook. He hunched over the pad and drew a trio of vertical lines. "Each stroke shows the magic where to go, what form to take, and what direction to leave. Take this one." He glanced back at Jaesung, pointing the marker at the character.

  "Cheon," Jaesung said. "River."

  "It goes at the middle of a mandala that's built like a circuit—keeps magic flowing through it." He drew a circle next, with a line through the center. "This one means sun."

  Jaesung grimaced. “Like a thousand years ago. It’s changed.”

  Isaac waved a hand at him. "Shut up, Park. Anyway, this one is in a bunch of the mandalas we use to cast light or heat."

  "Maybe people without magic simplified things," Jaesung said aloud. "After all, we muggles don't need that many strokes. God. Taiwan must be full of Sorcerers."

  Isaac cast a glare back over his shoulder. "Can I continue my lesson?"

  "Depends. You owe, like, twenty bucks to the racist jar."

  Isaac rolled his eyes. "I don't have time to pamper your injured feelings. In case you missed it, there's a
sanguimancer from a murderous family of Scottish druids after your girlfriend."

  "Can you both stop?" I said. "Isaac, stop being a dick if you can. Jae, I know he's a dick, but it's hard enough to let myself listen to him without you antagonizing him into new heights of assholery."

  Both of them scowled, and Jaesung looked liked he wanted to argue. Instead, he lifted his eyebrows at Isaac and set about loading the dishwasher, loudly.

  Isaac rubbed one tattooed forearm and jerked a thumb back at Jaesung, dropping his voice to a murmur. “Is it cause he rescues dogs?”

  “Huh?”

  “You actually like Tinkerbell over there.”

  It wasn’t a question. I sat straighter, gripping the marker tight, uncomfortable with the thought that Isaac wanted to know anything about my private life.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “I do. Unlike some people, he’s not trying to kill or enslave me.”

  “You women and your impossible standards.”

  His grin was a slash of mockery. “Are you going to teach me mandalas or not?”

  He flipped to a new page in my sketchbook. Freehand, he drew a nearly perfect circle.

  “Mandalas are constructed to direct the flow of power toward the middle. The outer ring denotes the edges of the circuit, and the cardinal points,” he drew four smaller circles at north, south, east, and west, “anchor the power within that circle. The shape of the effect is always determined by the glyphs within this outer circle. I’m sure you’ve seen spells fly in bolts or in discs or shards.”

  I nodded. Isaac continued, “The pattern is created by the way power flows inward from here to light up the next ring.”

  “Okay, so if that were the case, shouldn’t most mandalas look the same on the outer rings?”

  Isaac nodded. “You’d think so. Unfortunately, people got their own ways of creating effects. It’s like how everybody figured out that sharp things on sticks made good weapons, but nobody made them the same fucking way. And bitches got to tinkering. Anyway, the effects of the spells responded better to some techniques than others. It’s pretty much impossible to figure out without some serious theory.”

  “And that’s why it’s so hard to figure out spells just by looking at them. Because there are thousands of ways they could match up with the inner glyphs.”

  “And thousands of ways they could blow you to bite-size for a maggot.”

  A dish clanked loudly in the washer, followed by a quiet curse. Isaac quirked an eyebrow, shook his head, and drew another circle inside the first.

  “The middle rings, however many there are, are like the spell’s DNA. They decide the medium the power will take, whether that’s an element or a different kind of energy, and how it will affect the target. For something like fire, you wouldn’t have to specify that. Fire burns. No shit. But say you want to transform a girl into a big-ass dog?” He flicked my shoulder. “That’s gonna need some intricate coding.”

  I leaned away from him, bristling at the touch. He lifted his hands in a placating gesture.

  “So the middle is where you specify direction?” I asked, ready for this part of the lesson to be over.

  Isaac looked surprised. “You know this shit already?”

  “No, but it makes sense to give yourself a way to aim.”

  “Clever girl,” Isaac said. I gave him a sour smile. “You can think of the middle like crosshairs on a scope. You line up your target. It you want the spell to shoot out as an attack, you draw it in the air, make this mark-” he sketched a shape “-and overload the circuit. The power will take the exit you give it. If it’s an embedded spell like a ward or a shapeshifting spell, you push power into the circuit until it’s at capacity, then close it off with a central glyph. Remember river?”

  I sat back against the couch, absorbing the information. The construction of mandalas had always been a foreign language, one where I knew a few words but not enough to speak or understand. Now, as I recalled the forms of the spells I’d memorized, I could analyze their parts.

  “It’s all about the order of flow,” Isaac continued, sketching a simple, three-ring mandala. “Like a human heart—you’ve got your chambers and valves and veins and arteries, and if just one thing messes up, the whole system stops working right. Spells are like that.”

  “Speaking of ways to die,” I said. “Is this really the way we should go about this?” I waved a hand at the sketchbook. “Shouldn’t I be practicing spells or something?”

  “On what, the neighbors?” Isaac’s brows knitted, knee jittering as he spoke. “Nah, there’s not enough space around here, especially with some of the spells I’m giving you. And I don’t want you wasting your magic by firing at trees.”

  “So I’m going to spend the next however many days…?”

  “Memorizing the mandalas I give you, eating lots of meat, and generally making your peace with the idea of maybe not dying.”

  I didn’t want it to, but that made me laugh. Partly because it was so true. I hadn’t really considered life after Gwydian, and the thought of it even now felt forbidden. My smile faded.

  The possibility of making it through was slim, and the idea that even Isaac was trying to give me hope just convinced me it was unlikely.

  “Yo, Park,” Isaac said. He’d stopped calling Jaesung Tinkerbell to his face, probably due to the bruise still dark on his freckled cheek.

  Jaesung looked up from filling the kettle.

  “You got any old silver jewelry?”

  “Old… what? Not that I know of.”

  “Come on, your mom’s got to have something.”

  Jaesung set the kettle on its base and flicked the boil switch. “Why?”

  “Because I’m casing the joint for a low-level robbery. Nah, see these?” He held up his be-ringed fingers. “They’ve got spells etched into them. Some are personal shields, and some let me fire off certain spells faster. Martin doesn’t need the latter, but we usually tattoo the shielding spells. Figured she doesn’t want a sewing-needle tat.”

  “Not so much,” I confirmed. Jaesung dug out his high school ring which, despite being bulky and half black with oxidation, seemed to suit Isaac’s purposes. I drew mandalas over and over, my stomach growing tighter as I tried not to imagine what I would see when Gwydian showed up.

  How many members of my pack had he recaptured? Had any of them been re-enslaved like Morgan, or had he turned all the rest into Hellhounds?

  And then the questions Isaac had evoked: could I survive this? And what the hell would I want if I did? There was no way I could settle into a normal life. As much as I wanted what my friends had, there was too much instinct anchoring me to the life I had now. Even if I killed Gwydian and, by some miracle, survived, the Guild would never leave me alone.

  And now, I’d made it impossible for Jaesung to go back to living in ignorance of magic.

  I remembered my first impression of him—that day on the train, when he and Krista had been scoring passers by. He’d seemed harmless, way too clean and way too normal to ever be a part of my life. And yet here I was, sitting in the living room of the home where he’d spent his teens, preparing to meet Gwydian head-on.

  If I made it through this, I would have to make it up to him.

  Chapter Thirty

  When Jaesung’s phone rang the next morning, all of us were slumped in the living room, preparing. Isaac was filing off the raised date on Jaesung’s ring, I was memorizing mandalas, and Jaesung was fiddling around on his laptop.

  We all looked at the phone vibrating toward the edge of the coffee table. The displayed name was in Korean. Jaesung lunged for it.

  “Yeboseyo?” he said, voice falsely calm.

  I heard the shouting from three feet away. Jaesung jerked the phone from his ear and held it away, eyes going wide at the onslaught of enraged language. He tried to interrupt several times, but the woman on the other end spoke over his frantic Korean until, at last, he switched into English.

  “Jesus, Mom. No, we did not elope
!”

  I jumped, and Isaac laughed. Jaesung covered the receiver, shooting him a glare as the shrieking started off again. “Mom? Mom!”

  He gave a frustrated groan and set aside his laptop, taking the phone with him upstairs.

  Isaac cackled. “Lover boy’s in trouble.”

  “At least he’s still got a mom,” I snapped back.

  Isaac went back to filing the ring.

  It was twenty minutes before Jaesung came back down, and I could tell by the state of his hair that the conversation had not gone well. I winced in his direction, trying to express how sorry I was to have fucked things up without saying it in front of Isaac. He caught my eyes, gave a little shrug as if it was no big deal that he’d ditched a wedding and disappeared, and dropped into the chair he’d vacated earlier.

  “Are we married?” I asked.

  He tilted his head against the back of the chair. “Jury’s out.”

  “Okay,” Isaac said, holding up the ring. “Time to etch this fucker.”

  I’d wondered how he would do it. He chose a fine-tipped sharpie from the pile of writing utensils and, with a steady hand, drew a tiny mandala on the broadest part of the band. The messenger bag he’d brought contained a small bag of crystals that looked like drugs, but emitted a metallic smell in water.

  “Ferrous nitrate. Don’t touch this shit—it’s acid,” he said, and dropped the ring in.

  “The sharpie works?” I asked, leaning away.

  “Yep. It’s a resist coating. Protects the metal. Thank you studio art degree.”

  Jaesung gave him a sharp look. “I find it suspect that you call me Tinkerbell when you have a liberal arts degree.”

  Isaac shrugged. “All the dance majors I knew sucked cock no matter what they had in their tackle box.”

  “Now you owe the homophobia jar too. You’re really racking up debt, Ike.”

  I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and willed the boys to shut up. I was no longer used to broken sleep and strange hours—the past few weeks had spoiled me in that regard—and the last few hours of memorizing mandalas had transformed my brain into a fried mess. My eyes throbbed in their sockets.