Witch on a Roll

by Evelyn Snow

  “Too late.” I pointed the tire iron at him. “With storm and fire, cold iron by my will conspire.” A silver beam arced through the night air, hitting the dead wizard in the center of his chest.

  He was still waving his hands and struggling to speak when he was absorbed into the tire iron.

  When we were alone, Holden pointed. “Is he … in there now?”

  “All nice and cozy.” I handed him the tire iron. “If you don’t mind, you can stow this and finish taking off the chains while I get busy.”

  “But you haven’t recorded the scene yet.”

  “I’ll be fast. I want to get out of here. Something is giving me the creeps.” Until the words popped out of my mouth, I hadn’t acknowledged the feeling, but it was true. Someone or something was watching us.

  “Spending twenty minutes talking to a dead guy would do it for me.”

  “He said someone else was here earlier. Maybe that’s what I’m picking up on.” Dylan Maddox was the most logical candidate. He hadn’t made my skin crawl, though. “Let’s do this. I’ll be fast.”

  “Go for it. Let me know when you’re ready.” Holden trotted back to the car.

  Ten minutes later, I’d scanned the entire area with the hand mirror. It took some doing, but I bent the images as they entered the mirror and then bounced them into the library book. Since I would store it inside the car, I didn’t have to worry about the book’s basic containment spell failing. Theoretically. This whole operation was magical DIY all the way.

  Lights flashed in the mirror occasionally, which was to be expected, I supposed. I wasn’t sure what the flashes might mean and doubted I ever would. In the aftermath, Cassandra would no doubt be happy to explain in excruciating detail where I’d made mistakes. Always something to look forward to.

  As I closed the cover of the library book, the pages flipped, revealing the inside front cover. A loopy, but elegant hand had inscribed a few lines there. Because it was too dark to read, I called a tiny globe of fire and set it adrift above and read:

  Life without a body,

  Sound without ears,

  Words without a mouth,

  The air alone gives me birth.

  Echo: The name of a dead witch and the answer to a riddle.

  I closed the book. Gilt lettering on the volume’s spine glittered as my fire globe flared and fizzled: Ethereal Astronomy: The Secret History of the Pale. I turned it over in my hands.

  The book was bound in leather dyed a light blue that had aged over the decades into a soft gray. I’d grabbed it at random from the shelves at the Battenborne University library. Zero thought is how much attention I’d given to choosing a book to stand in for a Twilight Grimoire at my test. It was nothing more than a prop. That there should be a connection, even a distant one, between this book and the witch who’d died at 1712 Mulberry Street seemed impossible.

  Three days ago, when I’d taken the book from the library shelves, Echo had still been alive.

  Then I remembered something Devi liked to say: The universe doesn’t speak to us often, but when it does, it likes to rhyme. At the time, I’d assumed I knew what she meant; now, I wasn’t sure I understood anything.

  “Are you done?” Holden demanded.

  No, I wanted to say. I’m not done. Things just took a turn into high strangeness, and I’m ready for my melt down.

  Instead, I said, “Sorry. Let’s do it.”

  While Holden loosened the final chains, I walked the line of the house’s foundation, sweeping the mirror in an arc through clouds of purple and red. I waded through it, feeling the magic swirl and flow against my legs. The itchy feeling on my skin returned. Then I was breathing faster, feeling heat rise along my spine as the tide of magic rose around me.

  Just when I thought I couldn’t handle the sensations a minute longer, Holden lifted the trunk, ran to the front, and threw open the hood and shouted, “Let her rip!”

  I aimed the mirror at the car. The dark magic roiled under the glass, and the mirror shook in my hand. I gripped it tighter, willing the magic to flow … and finally, it gushed toward the car … slow at first and then faster, like a fire hose in reverse.

  When it stopped, Holden frantically slammed the car door, closed the trunk, and linked the chains once more. I scooped up my pack and bolted for the car. We dove inside through open windows and scrambled to roll up the glass on either side.

  Safe and still at last, we stared at each other.

  Holden spoke first. “That was … amazing.”

  “Wanna do it again?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Maybe.”

  A sharp knock sounded on the driver’s side window.

  Chapter 21

  My body registered the stranger first.

  I stared, eyes wide, my brain dead as a rock. One beat later, I took a steep straight dive into a shields-up-battle-stations-oh-holy-moly scream.

  Two beats more and all the pieces slammed together as my brain caught up with my terrified body, and then I was gripping my backpack to my chest like a shield. What I wanted to do was curl into a fetal position. It wasn’t an option.

  Holden started to roll down his window.

  “DON’T!” My shout kicked him out of a trance.

  He lifted his hand from the crank and stared at it as if he couldn’t imagine how his hand had become attached to his wrist. Then he turned his head to me while pointing out the window and whispered, “Is that what I think it is?”

  Apparently, a single scream was all I had in me because I couldn’t find my voice. All I could do was nod.

  The figure standing next to the car only looked human; I knew that now. Before, I hadn’t understood. Not when I’d glimpsed him behind the wheel of the car waiting for Professor Ashmore. Not when he’d been standing next to Tony outside Rolling Thunder, watching me with cool, amused eyes. I’d been distracted and preoccupied, wrapped up in problems that had seemed huge at the time. Now, I couldn’t even recall what I’d been thinking.

  The stranger had my full attention.

  He wore a dark suit similar to the one he’d had on last night. That shiny hair still fell in an immaculate waterfall that seemed too perfect to be real. Or maybe it was an illusion. I’d heard his kind were good at illusions.

  “Evie,” Holden whispered, “that’s a freaking vampire.”

  “So, that’s good news, right? It’s not the demon.”

  A strangled sound came from Holden’s throat.

  “Perfect.” The vampire’s deep voice echoed through the glass. “Now we’ve established I’m not a figment of your overactive imaginations, please get out of the vehicle.”

  There had been many times in my life when I’d been plagued by doubt and indecision—too many to count. This was not one of those times.

  “Thanks, but no thanks.” We had a polite vampire. I figured, why not return the favor?

  “Things will go infinitely easier for you if you do as I request,” he warned. “Make no mistake, though, my patience is a courtesy offered with a time limit.”

  “What do you want?” Holden’s hand drifted toward the car door again. I shifted on the seat, ready to tackle him if he went for the window crank again.

  “You have something that doesn’t belong to you. Return it, and we can get on with the night.”

  All innocent confusion, Holden asked, “What would that something be?” His fingers twitched. I locked onto them with both hands and held tight.

  The vampire looked annoyed. “Do not try my patience.”

  “Why don’t you come get us?” I taunted.

  “Oh, I will if I must. You won’t like it, and I don’t want to wrinkle my suit, so how about we find another way? Who wants to play?”

  Holden’s gaze met mine as the unspoken question loomed between us: Would the chains protect against a vampire as well as they did against a demon?

  “They must be working,” I whispered. “If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We can wa
it him out.”

  “It’s a long time until sunrise,” Holden noted. “What if the chains fail?”

  “When did your dad install them?”

  “About twenty years ago.”

  I forced my lips into an encouraging smile. “See? That’s good. It means they’re strong.”

  Holden craned his neck to watch the vampire. “It’s not the same thing. Sarrath shows up to rattle them once in a blue moon. Fang over there is serious. If I had to bet on it, I’d put my money on a vampire over a demon.”

  “Fang?”

  The vampire backed away from the window and spread his arms wide in a gesture of harmlessness. “Hand it over,” he said, “and you won’t be harmed. You have my word.”

  “The word of a vampire?” Holden scoffed in a show of bravery. “Get real.”

  “The word of Zen.” He lifted his left palm and dragged a fingernail. A blood red letter Z bloomed against his skin. He strode to the car and pressed his bloody palm against the driver’s door window, printing the image against the glass.

  Holden groaned. “Oh, that’s bad.”

  “Think it over. There’s no hurry.” Zen smiled. “I have all night.”

  Tapping Holden on the shoulder, I asked, “What was that? What does the Z mean? Why did he mark the car?”

  When he turned back Holden’s skin had gone even paler in the moonlight. “It means trouble. He’s making a blood claim.”

  I swallowed. Blood claims were valid legal instruments in the magical world. Rhiannon’s Wheel listened to arguments in such cases. The only way to break one was with a valid and competing blood claim.

  “Zen’s his name,” Holden continued in a shaky voice, “or what he goes by. No one knows his real name.”

  “Vampire Rumplestiltskin,” I muttered.

  “Seriously? You’re bringing up fairy tales now? What’s wrong with you?”

  “All I meant was it might help if we knew his name. Real names have power.” I still had the hawthorn wand in my backpack. Hawthorn was good for protection spells against vampires, but to use it we’d have to roll down a window or get out of the car. I didn’t want to find out who was faster—me with my handy dandy wand or the vampire.

  Holden’s attention kept drifting back to the vampire as if controlled by an invisible string. I tugged on his arm. “What else do you know about him?” If I kept him talking, maybe he wouldn’t become entranced again, which was my biggest worry. At least the dark magic inside the car seemed to have settled into the upholstery and the body of the vehicle and lay inert.

  “Who?” Holden looked dazed.

  I thought about slapping him. Instead, I squeezed his hand and kept on holding it. “The vampire! That would be the guy attempting to control your body.”

  “Oh, yeah. Zen’s bad news. He’s a freelance fixer who works for expensive people all over the West Coast.”

  “Like a mercenary?”

  “Mercenary, assassin, whatever. He does things people with money want done, no questions asked. Tonight, it looks like he’s playing errand boy, retrieving lost magic.”

  “The magic isn’t lost. We have it.”

  “Maybe Echo and the dead wizard stole the magic from Zen,” Holden suggested. “If the magic belongs to him or he works for the owner, that would explain the blood claim.”

  “Only if Echo and Dead Guy were his slaves.” I shivered, imagining how horrible it would be for a vampire to enslave a witch. “Blood claims work if there’s a one-to-one match between two sets of blood.”

  “Vampire blood matches what?” Holden asked.

  “Blood used in the dark magic and/or the blood of the others involved.”

  Holden covered his face with his hands. “We are so screwed.”

  “Not necessarily. Blood claims based on enslavement aren’t legal.”

  “You try telling him that,” he said, lowering his hands. “I’m not, and when did you go to law school?”

  “When Kerri was studying for her magical law finals last spring, I read flashcards for her.”

  “Wow. Flashcards? Remind me to never ask you for legal advice.”

  “Do you have any ideas, genius?”

  “Yeah,” Holden said in a brighter tone. “We leave. If we drive away, what’s a vampire to do?”

  “Follow us.”

  “So?”

  “He knows where I live!” I hissed.

  “Some random vampire knows where you live?” Holden wasn’t convinced.

  “He was standing outside Rolling Thunder last night with Tony.”

  “Tony?” Holden asked. “My Tony?”

  “What? Are you two dating?”

  “Shut up. Big guy, dark hair, ginger beard?”

  “That’s him. I was walking home from the bus stop, and Zen asked me about the fire. At the time, I thought nothing of it—two guys hanging out in the neighborhood, making conversation.”

  “You mean to tell me you completely overlooked the fact he was a vampire?”

  “I was distracted.”

  Holden pointed where the house used to stand. “And he asked about this fire?”

  I nodded. “It was maybe twenty minutes before Ballard contacted me.”

  We both fell silent.

  Our breath was fogging up the glass on the inside. Holden scrubbed his hand over the window to reveal Zen had moved out of the center of the street and was now standing by the curb in front of the car. While running him over might be fun, it wouldn’t kill him. Or if it did would that be killing him again?

  The situation might have been different if I’d let Holden bring his grandfather’s rifle and silver bullets. So far, I was still simply doing my job. Holden could assert he was helping me. Killing a vampire though would put us on the wrong side of the law in both the Greater World and the Nightingale Lands.

  What worried me most—could Zen be right? What if his claim on the dark magic was valid?

  We needed help and soon because there was no way I was taking a vampire’s word for it. If things went sideways, Dylan Maddox would be there to accuse the MBI of screwing up again. Only this time, he might put together a case where it looked like I was colluding with vampires and traffickers in my spare time.

  “If he knew about the explosion twenty-four hours ago,” Holden said, pulling my attention back, “and he wants the magic, why didn’t he make his move last night? Why wait until now?”

  I had no answers. Zen might. No big surprise, even if we got answers out of the vampire, I wouldn’t trust them.

  Holden chewed on his lower lip for a minute. “Scavs don’t work alone. That’s why they use shifters as their sniffers.” He shook his head. “It’s too much of a coincidence he was by your house last night, Evie.”

  He was right. That didn’t mean I liked where this line of thinking was leading. “If Zen already knew where to find the dark magic last night, he didn’t need a sniffer.”

  “I’m not talking about Tony,” Holden said flatly. “Zen needed a witch.”

  “Then why didn’t he get one? For the right price, he could have easily found a witch online.” I sighed. “We could spend the rest of the night speculating. It all comes back to one thing—I can’t go home.”

  “Easy then,” Holden said, “we go to my place.”

  “That would put your dad at risk.”

  “Don’t worry about my dad. He can handle himself.”

  “Against a vampire?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “As charming as it is to listen to your paranoid speculations,” the vampire drawled, “you’re wasting your time and mine. There’s only one way this night ends, and that is when you hand over the vehicle and everything in it.”

  Holden whipped his head around. “Excuse me, what was that about the car? I thought you only wanted the contents.”

  “Are you kidding?” I was aghast. “That’s what you’re worried about—the car?” Holden ignored me.

  “If we can save the vehicle,” Zen said smoothly, a
pproaching us once more like a salesman from the dark side, “someone will return it to you after they have completed the magical extraction process.”

  “If it can be saved?” Holden’s eyes never left the vampire’s face. He appeared to have shed every hint of fear or anxiety. I didn’t know how he did that, but I wanted to learn.

  A blue folder materialized in Zen’s right hand. “Be assured that we will take every measure to preserve your property. You’ll find it listed under item 13.23 in the agreement. In the event they cannot save the vehicle, you will be compensated appropriately for the loss. The agreement is fair—more than I would offer if they left matters in my hands—but then, I’m the errand boy.” He let out a sound from deep in his throat that could have been a snarl, only it was darker and burrowed under my skin.

  I shivered. Was that the last thing his victims ever heard? Memo to me: Never piss off a vampire.

  “Mind if I read the contract first?” Holden asked.

  “No!” I shouted.

  Holden swatted at me to shut up.

  “Don’t do this,” I insisted.

  The vampire strode to the side of the car and spoke in a silky voice. “Roll down the window, and I’ll hand it to you.”

  Shaking his head, Holden said, “How about you hold the folder open so I can read through the glass?”

  Zen scowled, but he did as Holden asked.

  I skimmed as much of the document as I could see. My stomach was churning by the time I read the name of the attorney: Morrigan Shade of the Montemar branch of Shade & Shade, Magical Attorneys-at-Law.

  “Looks legit,” Holden said a few minutes later. “The car is mine, but you gathered the contents. I think we both have to sign. Fifty-fifty split on the fee.”

  “It’s a magical document,” I sputtered, shocked he might consider signing.

  “Obviously.”

  “What experience do you have with magical contracts?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “You keep saying that. Stop it.”

  “The reason I keep saying it is because it’s true. They’ve listed too low a valuation on replacing the car. On the bright side, they’d have to deal with Sarrath going forward, which would be super satisfying to watch from a safe distance. As for the contraband magic, they’re only offering a finder’s fee. It’s nothing close to what we could get for it on the dark market—”