by K. F. Breene
“Better you than me,” Callie said, opening her satchel as she walked forward. “Let’s get this show on the road. If I’m going to have people staring at me, I’d rather it be people and not animals hiding in the bushes.”
“Sorry, bro.” Emery stepped around Reagan and put out his hand. “Penny’s magic is throwing me for a loop.”
“No sweat.” Roger’s grip turned his knuckles white, and Emery’s muscles started dancing too.
There was no way I was going to say what I was thinking and sound like my mother…
“Where do you want to start?” Roger asked, looking us over.
“The ward,” Callie said. “Lead us to the trouble spots.”
“I’ll take the house.” My mother stalked forward like she owned the place. “I want to get a feel for—”
Roger gracefully stepped in her way, and a shock of power burst from his frame. Emery tensed and turned away, shaking his head. Apparently he could handle the dance of Alpha…until he was blasted in the face with it. He clearly wanted to retaliate.
Unfortunately, as a longtime matriarch and all around badass, so did my mother. “Penny, get my shotgun.”
“Oh my God, Mother! This is his house. You can’t just go wandering through. Clearly.”
“They called us in to help,” Callie said, strapping on her bulldog face and joining my mother’s side. “Now we’re here, and they keep us out?”
“They didn’t call you. They called us.” I didn’t know whether to step in their path, or just run and let the shifters handle it. “You tagged along.”
“Penny—” my mother started.
“I know, I know.” I was unable to help sulking a little. “Don’t sass.”
“I’m not in the habit of letting non-pack affiliates in the house unattended,” Roger said. “You are”—his eyes didn’t flick around her person, but beat into her head like a dual-colored hammer—“the Seer, is that right? Penny Bristol’s mother?”
She met his gaze without so much as sweating. I doubted many others could boast the same accomplishment. “That’s right. And right now, I’ve been of very little use. I need more input. I need to be exposed to more magical influences. Which means I need access to your house. To your organization, or lack thereof.”
He didn’t flinch or even frown with the dig. Very self-assured, this shifter. “Of course.” He glanced right, and a wolf went trotting away. “If you’ll just wait here a moment, I’ll have someone escort you around.”
My mother shifted and her chin rose slightly. “If you’re worried about me telling the vampires how you run things, there’s no need. As far as they’re concerned, I’m in the same boat you are.”
He stared at her for a silent beat. She took the stare and gave it right back.
Finally he nodded. “Noted.”
A few people came out of the house, two of them a couple of years younger than me and a guy about Roger’s age, early thirties and with a resting dick-face that had me scooting backward into Emery. He was taller and leaner than Roger, but with the same grace and ease of movement. His hard brown eyes swept over everyone quickly before darting back to Emery, then Reagan, and then sticking on me. Wariness crossed his features, and I got the distinct impression that I made him uncomfortable. He’d clearly heard what I had done to Rex. As he got closer, I noticed a thin white scar running down the side of his face like a river, from his sharp cheekbone to his neck.
“Alder is the beta of the North American pack,” Roger said, not shifting to the side as the scarred man came up behind him. “My second-in-command. He’ll take you around the house, Miss…?”
My mother swayed in a disturbingly girlish manner. “Bristol. You can call me Karen.”
Roger nodded sharply. “Karen.” Finally, he stepped to the side with a tiny tilt of his head, a shallow representation of a vampire’s bow. “Please don’t give Alder a hard time, Karen.”
She giggled—giggled!—before allowing Alder to lead her away without so much as a pistol.
Roger squared off again, blasting out another force of power, and I wondered if this was the shifter equivalent of elders shooting power at newbie vampires to make them cower. The younger guys behind him certainly seemed to feel it. One of them, a striking guy with dark brown hair, a square jaw, and a fetching cleft in his chin, turned a little brittle. The other, a shorter guy with a messy mop of light brown hair and a small hole in the shoulder seam of his T-shirt, took a step back and hunched.
Emery blew out a breath, now looking down at his feet with his hands in his pockets, his whole body tense. “This is going to take some getting used to.”
“You can always blast him with power to get even,” Reagan said with a grin and a manic light in her eyes. I knew that look.
“Don’t do that.” I patted Emery. “Whatever you do, don’t do that.”
“I wasn’t expecting so many mages,” Roger said conversationally, and his accusation rang loud and clear.
“Honestly, they followed us,” I said, pointing at the Bankses. I wasn’t going down with this ship.
Callie leaned toward me and, in a low tone, said, “Snitches get stitches, Penny.”
“We thought we might lend a little experience,” Dizzy said with a smile, opening his satchel. “Maybe even a little…levelheadedness. Things can be turbulent for a couple in the months after a dual-mage pairing. And as you’ve heard, Emery and Penny just paired last night. I’m sure you’d rather be safe than sorry.”
Reagan started forward, flashing the two younger shifters a fiery gaze. “Who are your…associates?”
She’d wanted to say “underlings” to rile them up. I’d heard her do it before. That she’d refrained now meant she was on her best behavior.
Roger stared at her for a moment, probably sharing my thought wave. Unlike my mother, Reagan didn’t just stare right back. She winked, grinned, and then flared her mighty magic. Only hers was a wave of beautiful complexity that I wanted to bask in before unraveling one subtle piece at a time.
Emery blinked at Reagan before shifting his haunted gaze toward me. “How do you stand this?”
“That”—I pointed at Reagan—“is new. The strength of that”—I made a circle with my finger around the shifters—“is newish, and I haven’t been coping all that well, actually. As you might’ve noticed from the meeting in Derry.”
Roger waited until our exchange was finished (he didn’t seem like a man who missed much) before half turning toward the two guys who stood behind him. “This is Devon, a sub-alpha residing in Northern California. He has great leadership abilities and is assigned to escorting—”
“Monitoring,” Reagan interjected. In response to Roger’s hard stare, she shrugged with a smile. “We’re all friends here—why mince words?”
Roger’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t react. “He’ll be escorting you around today, taking over should I be called elsewhere.”
“What’s a sub-alpha?” I asked Emery quietly.
“Roger overseas all the packs in this very large territory,” Reagan said. “The overall pack is divided into smaller packs, each with a different overall status level depending on the kickassitude of the pack members. Each of those packs has an Alpha. If there are subgroups under that, each of those packs has an Alpha—”
“Reagan, honey, unless you have a pie chart handy, let’s get moving,” Callie said. “You’re not doing anyone any favors.”
“A pie chart?” Dizzy muttered as Roger started walking, his jaw clenched again.
“Reagan likes flirting with death,” Emery said in an undertone as we followed Roger.
“This is honestly the first time you noticed? She bonded an elder vampire, for criminy’s sake.”
As a group, we headed directly for the tree line at the side of the driveway. I wondered where the mages that worked for Roger were. I’d thought we were supposed to chat with one of them while checking out their setup.
As if hearing my unspoken question, Devon, the shifter
with the fetching cleft in his chin, glanced at the house. Roger hadn’t had the patience to introduce the other shifter, which showed just how quickly Reagan could make a shifter reach a boiling point. When it came to rage, she could manipulate people just as easily as vampires. “Alpha,” he said, “what about Patrick?”
“Go tell him to catch up. I’ll speak to him about tardiness later.” Roger stepped off the gravel driveway and onto a small path cutting through the trees. We could only go single file, so Emery put his hands on my shoulders and directed me in front of him.
Judging by the distance we walked, zigzagging through the trees, the ward didn’t cover the property in a dome. Instead, it clearly followed some other path. Just as we’d sensed on our way in, it was cobbled together in pieces and patches.
The path opened up gradually until we reached a small clearing. Roger stopped about ten feet from the ward and looked up, as though studying it. I hesitated beside him, wondering why he was pretending. Everyone knew only natural mages could see magic, and even then, they could only see wards when they were infused with a bunch of power and often spells.
“Don’t bother sparing his feelings, Penny,” Reagan said, tromping through the grass around the line of people in front of her with her sword out and her fanny pack open. “Get to the actual ward.”
A blast of Roger’s magic locked up Emery’s body, his muscles flaring and his fingers curling into fists. The man clearly didn’t deal with challenges well, whether directed at him or not.
Ignoring the tension, I neared the ward and studied the hodgepodge spell, which was weird and ill-fitting.
Protect. Access. Barrier. Unseen.
“The intent is conflicting.” I crinkled my nose, closing my eyes to make sure I had it right. “This isn’t solely a ward, but it isn’t totally a spell, either. It feels like both, mashed together. Which I’ve done, so I guess it isn’t crazy, but it doesn’t work in this case.”
Emery looked between me and the spell. “I can’t feel the intent.”
“Oh.” I turned my frown upside down. “I guess sharing magic wasn’t my add-on. This must be.”
“No, I think we were right, but… We don’t have time to figure this out right now.”
Emery turned to face the ward, tracing his finger through the air, pointing out a strange seam that didn’t seem to mesh with the overall construction. The freshly woven spell glittered on one side; on the other, I could only feel the spell’s intent, not see its magic.
“They patched up the ward with a spell, it looks like,” he murmured, clearly not wanting the shifters behind us to hear the assessment. I wasn’t sure why. “That spell is practiced. I bet that ward isn’t as much.”
“Meaning…” Reagan had her sword up, with one hand beside it, trying to disguise her attempts to feel out the spell. “The ward is a newer creation they put up for the first time, but they’ve been using the spell all over the place?”
“That, or the ward was the collaborative effort of people not experienced in working together, and the spell is from one person with experience in this exact spell. There is no finesse to it, but its simple economy and uniform weaving speak of years of experience.”
“The intent of this spell is to hide,” I said, picking my nail as I analyzed it. “Maybe even to fool. Why would they patch up a weak spot in a ward with something like this?”
“Here.” Callie and Dizzy stepped up together, herbs in Callie’s hands and powder in Dizzy’s. I watched in rapture as Callie crinkled the herbs just so before releasing them—or, more accurately, throwing them—in perfect timing with Dizzy’s pinches and blows of powder. As they sprinkled the spell/ward with their efforts, it lit up like a Christmas tree, allowing us to see the finer intricacies.
“Oh!” I said as Emery said, “Huh.”
“You don’t need to teach this old dog new tricks.” Callie surveyed her handiwork.
The spell spread farther along the sides and up, giving us a much larger picture of what was going on.
Suddenly, the patterns and patches all made perfect sense.
Shivers of fear coated my body. Emery grabbed my arm and stepped back before looking around warily. Without it needing to be said, I knew he was thinking about the warnings delivered through his premonitions. His anxiety when we’d first shown up. His constant wariness within the shifters’ boundaries.
We need to get them out of here.
24
With the way the original spell had been hacked into, then covered up, and the feel of the intent… There was no second-guessing. The situation was plain as day.
I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.
“Roger, you’ve got a traitor.”
Devon reappeared on the path, walking behind a scrawny man with large black-rimmed glasses. Scrawny Man must’ve been a mage, because he was certainly no shifter—I didn’t need my magic to tell me that.
Roger stepped closer to me, cutting off my line of sight. “What did you say?”
Reagan looked at the newcomer and put her hand on my shoulder, squeezing hard, silently telling me to zip the lip. There was no way to tell if the traitor was just one of the mages, or many, and where this newcomer fit in.
Her face had closed down, all humor sapped away. “What else do you need looked at, Roger?” she asked in a perfectly calm, steady voice. She’d picked up a trick or two from Darius.
“I did my part,” Callie said, moving away from the ward/spell stiffly. “Roger, can one of these boys take me to Karen?”
Roger paused again, his gaze now beating into Callie. His focus wasn’t there, though, I could tell. He was analyzing the sudden change in all of us.
“Andy,” he said, his voice a whip crack.
“Yes, Alpha.” The guy with the hole in the seam of his T-shirt scooted up and put out his arm.
“I’d break you, son. Just lead the way,” Callie said.
I couldn’t help my gaze dipping to the “Sweet Thang” written across the butt of her bright green sweatpants. The woman was colorful.
“Patrick, what do you think about this ward?” Roger asked.
“Well…” Patrick pushed his black-rimmed glasses up his nose and studied where the Bankses’ spell discovery spell was now starting to wear away. “It seems a little mishmashed for sure. But you had, what, three mages erect the ward? That’s to be expected. It has a good bit of power behind it. I’d have to check along the rest of the perimeter, but this looks good. We’ll know if someone comes through or tries to tear it down.”
“Who is this spell connected to?” Emery asked. “Who will get alerted if someone comes through?”
“Well…” Patrick adjusted his glasses. “It changes. Generally it is whoever’s on guard at the time. Whoever’s overseeing magical security for the house.”
“Who is…on guard right now?” Emery asked.
Patrick looked upward and sucked on his teeth. “I can’t…remember exactly. I’d have to go look. It’s not my turn yet, at any rate.”
Roger studied Patrick, and I couldn’t help but ask, “Is this how you run all of your operations, Roger?”
“It isn’t,” Reagan said, moving her fanny pack a little more toward her hip. It looked like an unconscious gesture. “Which makes me wonder why he would put up with it when the stakes are so high.”
Roger blasted out his shifter magic, but he didn’t so much as clench his jaw. “I’ve checked the schedule and had my people monitoring the effectiveness of our protections. So far, no one has been asleep on the job. The different mages have checked the work of their peers. As you’ve seen. Without understanding the magical side, there’s not much more I can do. Except call for reinforcements.”
Clearly he meant us, and I wondered if it was pride or something else that prevented him from saying it. It was also clear he not only thought someone might be getting through the ward, but was also worried about the loyalty and truthfulness of the mages he’d hired, who weren’t totally under his control.
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“Oh yeah, we’ve seen.” Reagan shook her head. “Where do you get these people, Roger? The street corner?”
Patrick squinted and pushed his glasses a little farther up his nose.
Emery took off walking, and I hurried to catch up. Reagan fell in behind me.
“Patrick, we’re going with them,” I heard a male say. It must’ve been Devon.
A phone chimed and Roger barked, “Yeah?” He didn’t seem pleased with the way the day was unfolding.
Tattle.
I stepped over a spell snaking across the small path running alongside the ward. Reagan did the same, not needing me to point it out. She glanced back, and I could just see Roger stutter-step behind her before jumping over it at the last moment.
“Get Steve on it,” Roger said as he turned around and pointed at the spot he clearly couldn’t see, but had noticed us all avoiding. Devon grabbed the confused Patrick’s shoulders and walked him around the area. Roger paused a moment, his gaze on Patrick, his eyes hard.
Patrick hadn’t known the spell was there. That, or he’d forgotten. Either was bad, and clearly Roger had picked up on it.
“Steve,” Reagan said, pushing me forward. “I wonder if that’s the Steve we know.”
The Steve we knew turned into an enormous lion, and had helped us out in New Orleans. He’d wanted to take a tumble in the sheets with Reagan before finding out she was already spoken for. He’d been mystified to discover who (and what) had spoken for her.
Emery had stopped on the path and was staring off to the right at a tiny clearing with a patch of trampled grass. The branches of the small bushes dotting the area looked like they’d taken a beating. No spell was currently stretched across the little clearing, but as I stood there, I felt a strange sort of echo. Almost like threads of magic, weak and wispy, fluttered across the space like broken spider webs.
Hide. Fresh.
Reagan had barely stopped beside me before following the path up to the trampled area. Roger didn’t fall in behind her. Instead, with rumpled brow, he stared down at where the paths intersected.
