The Traitor: Hunter Circles Series Book Two

by Jessica Gunn

  I wanted to remind him that I hadn’t done anything. Giyano had done this to me. But I didn’t. “I’m good.”

  He nodded. “Then let’s go.”

  Ben led the way down to the first floor of Fire Circle Headquarters, where a line to get into the grand hall had formed. Once inside and seated next to the rest of our team down in the third row, I found a sight I hadn’t expected to see: a wave of pale yellow robes. Ether Head Circle.

  I gulped, looking anywhere but at them. The absolute last thing I needed right now was these douchebags on my case. Had Ben and Nate told Jaffrin about Giyano and me? Did the Ether Head Circle know too?

  Oh, god. Was this my execution or something, the old-time Fire Circle way?

  I gulped and reached for the edge of the marble bench I was sitting on, anything that’d help me get a grip on reality. Now that I was out of that quarantine chamber, I felt the rush of my magik, a flush just underneath my skin. I had my powers. If this was the end of me—as a Hunter or as a person—I’d be able to teleportante out of here. Off the entire continent.

  I gulped again.

  Jaffrin took the stage and motioned for the room to quiet. The grand hall was meant to fit the entirety of the Fire Circle, though it rarely did, so seeing it half full tonight took my breath away. And not necessarily for any good reasons.

  “Thank you all for coming on such short notice,” Jaffrin said as he greeted the room. “As you’ll see, we have some guests visiting us this day.” He pointed to the Ether Head Circle representatives and my stomach rolled over itself. “I have called together the top teams in the Fire Circle at their request that we handle a situation that has been developing within the city’s limits for a few days now. We received word that Landshaft is running an operation near the center of the city.”

  Fucking fantastic. You’d think they’d know by now, especially after today, how dangerously unbalanced Cianza Boston was at this moment.

  “As such,” Jaffrin continued, “and as a result of today’s White Flame visit, I am ordering a raid of the facility they’re rumored to be using. That raid will happen tonight. Avery, your team will lead the incursion. Ben and Cassie, your teams are to act as flanks with the rest of the Hunters currently present. I want this operation shut down before the cianza is put in more danger than it’s already experienced today.”

  “And also,” said a man, one of the Ether Head Circle representatives, “we need to send Lady Azar a message. This will act as our message.”

  I tightened my grip on the bench below me. It’d send her a message all right. A giant “fuck you!” but also, “hey, we’re panicking, so please don’t take this the wrong way.” All anyone had to do was get out of the area. Return Boston to the normal humans who already thought they owned it. It wasn’t hard.

  Except it would be. Because even with a very real threat of them tipping and exploding the cianza, Darkness would take the opportunity to move in and sweep the city. And that was unacceptable.

  Jaffrin lifted his gaze to our team and settled it on me and Shawn. “I want you two to still go, even if we’re a bit too close to Cianza Boston.”

  I elbowed Ben, hoping he’d ask the question for me despite our argument and probable non-future.

  Ben nodded, then stood. “Isn’t that risky after today?”

  “Riskier than a Landshaft operation collecting too many demonic magik users? They’re maintaining a steady feed for Autumn Fire, and if they were to hold their transformations here next August…” Jaffrin shook his head, a small smile on his face. “This mission will put a stop to that. So yes, I’m sure.”

  “It might be okay,” Shawn said, mostly to Ben, but he’d said it loud enough that Jaffrin gave him an odd look.

  “Something to say, Mr. Jacques?” Jaffrin asked Shawn.

  He nodded. “Yeah, actually. Krystin’s mother bound my powers again. I’m relatively safe for both Krystin and the cianza.”

  The man from the Ether Head Circle leaned over to Jaffrin and whispered something. Jaffrin nodded, then stood tall. “You are to unbind your powers, learn them, and try to unlock the Alzanian power you both have. Either for this battle or Darkness’s inevitable retaliation—we’re going to need it.”

  Jaffrin returned his attention to the rest of the room. “Individual notes will be handed out over the next few hours. We’ll leave tonight with hopes of wrapping this up within a few minutes. Everyone needs to bring their A-game on this one.”

  You think? It wouldn’t be the same as all the other missions. And more than just innocent normal humans might have been involved.

  “We will meet in this room in three hours,” Jaffrin said. “You are all dismissed.”

  So, too, was my appetite for any more answers. Depending on how prep work went and any conversations with my teammates I was about to have, this whole operation might be over really soon.

  Shawn took off the crystal around his neck and dropped it to the training room’s floor, then shattered it with his foot. His magik returned to him in a glow of orange that encapsulated his form.

  I sighed. “I’m starting to run out of those.”

  “We can go shopping for more.” He sat across from me on the training mats in the basement of Fire Circle Headquarters. “There’s a shop downtown that sells them for pretty cheap, like souvenirs instead of the tools they really are.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, downtown. I’m thinking I’ll have to take a rain check for that excursion, Shawn. But thanks.”

  “Why?”

  “Seriously? I can’t even leave the house without someone crying about cianzas.” Okay, that was unfair, and I knew it. But everywhere I looked, it was like something would set the damn thing off. Like even a bird shitting in the center of it.

  Shawn leaned back and kicked his legs out, stretching them. “I have a hypothesis about us and cianzas, too, by the way.”

  “You have one for everything, it seems.”

  He shrugged. “I’m thinking that whenever we unlock this Alzanian power—”

  “If we do,” I amended.

  “Right, if we unlock it, I think it’ll nullify our effects on the cianza in Alzan, possibly in Boston, too.”

  I squinted, as if that’d help me see the connection I was so obviously missing. “What’d be the point of that?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” Shawn held out his hands. “In any case, are you ready to try this again?”

  I grabbed on to his fingertips and tried not to think too much about what this power would do to us, or what Giyano had tried doing to me.

  But instead of feeling even a glimpse of that warm, white light that seemed to emanate from somewhere deep within me, the light I associated with Alzan, nothing happened. Like whatever progress we’d made before, small as it was with Shawn healing me with our shared power, it meant nothing now.

  Like Giyano’s magik had undone it all.

  “Shit,” I said.

  Had that been his goal all along? Not to help me avoid becoming a weapon for the Fire Circle, but to eliminate the threat Shawn and I posed to Darkness? The whole point of Alzan’s Son and Daughter was to stop Darkness’s advance on the city for some unspecified reason. It obviously had to do with much more than simply “saving” the city because Darkness was “bad.” Which meant Giyano was probably right about Lady Azar wanting the power of Cianza Alzan, the biggest of all known cianzas. And with Riley, she might have succeeded.

  “What’s wrong?” Shawn asked.

  I ripped my fingers from his grasp. “This is pointless. Whatever power we have is blocked—by Giyano’s magik, by yours, by God Himself, if he exists—”

  “Krystin.”

  “What?” Frustration itched its way up my spine. “You knew it couldn’t be as easy as waiting for Lady Azar to make a move against Alzan and then going there, hands waving, and magically poof her and her army out of existence.”

  “Well, yeah, that’d be pointless,” he said.

  “Would it be, though?” I sho
ok my head and stood. “Maybe there’s more to the prophecy than the version Jaffrin has. He might not know everything about it.”

  Shawn stood too and rubbed the back of his neck. “You think there’s a chance we might not actually have the power already?”

  I shrugged. “It is the only explanation I can think of. Maybe we weren’t born with it, or at least not with immediate access to it, and only after who-knows-what will we be able to access it. Or maybe the Powers got it wrong. Or maybe it’s a hoax. Either way, we’re not unlocking anything before tonight’s raid. Jaffrin will have to deal with that.”

  Shawn closed his eyes and turned away, like he couldn’t deal with me. Which was fine because a lot of the time, I couldn’t deal with me either.

  “Maybe it’s best we bind my powers again,” Shawn said quietly. “In case it helps with us being so close to the cianza.”

  “Binding your powers doesn’t make you not have them. And if you yo-yo too much, you might risk losing them altogether.” My own mother had only bound my magik because she’d been scared of the damage an angry, telepathic, and telekinetic nine-year-old could wreak.

  Shawn shook his head. “No, but it’ll make me less likely to use them instinctively, which will directly affect the cianza.”

  “Good point.” Hard as it was to admit. I sighed heavily. “A very good point, especially after last night.”

  Shawn turned to me, his eyes narrowed. “What are you thinking?”

  A lot of shitty, shitty, stupid things. “Maybe we take it one step further.”

  He tilted his head. “What do you mean?”

  It was a risk. A big one. But so was putting us so close to the cianza after what’d happened yesterday. I understood Jaffrin’s thinking, and the fact that we would probably draw so much attention… depending on the size of that operation, it might be helpful to have some extra good magik to balance out the scales.

  But if Kinder or Giyano, Lady Azar or any number of Old Ones showed up… all the good magik in the world wouldn’t matter.

  Why was this cianza so damn special?

  I looked up at Shawn with an awful, sickly dread forming a pit in my stomach. Each word out of my mouth felt as though it’d been dredged up from that hole. “I think we should take a trip to that store of yours, buy more crystals, and bind my powers, too.”

  Chapter 19

  Ben

  I’d never seen an operation like this. Five of the best teams in the Fire Circle. Twenty-five Hunters, plus three Cassano freelance witches and a possible Ether Head Circle babysitter escort. They weren’t with us now, as the other Hunters and I made our way from Headquarters to the center of the city. But hopefully, they’d show up sooner rather than later.

  The night was cold and the wind that picked up, carrying the start of a snow shower on its wisps, chilled me to the bone. I wasn’t totally superstitious or anything, yet that put me on edge. We picked up the pace and were soon outside an older brick building that, according to the sign out front, claimed to be the home of a newspaper company.

  Not anymore. Now it was home to a faction of the Trade, of Landshaft, brave enough to make a base for itself inside of the city. Right near the cianza.

  I watched Krystin as Avery called the positioning shots. She wasn’t shaking or paling like she and Shawn had been the other night. For now, it seemed like they were safe from the effects of the cianza. Luckily enough, this building was a little farther away from Cianza Boston than the demon bar had been.

  Avery made hand signals, ordering everyone to take their places. We took up position behind his team, acting as immediate support for anything we found inside. Avery waited a good sixty count for the other teams to get in place, then he lifted his gun and looked to me, nodding once.

  My hand lit up with lightning and I sent a strike of it to the wooden door. The wood splintered into a hundred pieces, which Nate’s ether-shield kept from hitting all of us. Then Avery took point and ran into the building’s dark first floor.

  The dimly-lit room we ran into smelled of cleaning solution and something vaguely rotten, a combination so weird that it caused me to hesitate enough that I didn’t see the first wave of demons coming.

  Landshaft’s minions shouted as we breached the first floor of their compound and about a dozen jumped out of the shadows. I readied myself, sucking in a breath, then leapt into the fray. My lightning and Nate’s ether sailed around the room, incapacitating demon after demon. Krystin drew her favored three-piece sword and, with Shawn at her side, took on a group of three demons.

  An errant swing connected with the side of my head. Stars danced along the edges of my vision, but I remained upright, dazed but otherwise fine. I turned on the demon and caught the fist he’d sent flying at my face, gripping on to him and sending a shock of lightning into his body. He jerked, seizing, and dropped to the floor. Unconscious but still alive.

  Grunts filled the air alongside shouts and the scraping of blade on blade. Krystin fought expertly with her sword, working with Shawn to dispose of the demons without using magik. Which was weird—magik was second nature to her, last I checked.

  I spun, looking for Rachel, whom I’d lost in the initial chaos. She sparred with a woman toting two swords, slashing away at Rachel’s ice attacks before any of them landed. I ran over and shot lightning at the water Rachel was gathering in front of her chest as she moved, dodging the demon woman’s attacks.

  Rachel nodded and swung the water into the lightning’s path, then pushed the water right at the woman. It clung around her like a cocoon and shocked her. She convulsed and fell to the floor.

  “Thanks,” Rachel said, her breath ragged. “Needed that.”

  “Always.” I turned to survey the rest of the fighting, which seemed to be dying down. Krystin took one last swing at a demon and knocked him out.

  “Everyone okay?” Avery yelled even as he made his way toward a set of double doors. Various calls of “yes” and “sort of” rang back, but Avery ignored them. “Up and out.”

  This building had more than a few floors, so there was a good chance that—even with flanking and a possible Ether Head Circle escort—it’d take the better part of an hour to clear this place. There was no way that small group of demons were the only demons here, even despite the relative quiet encapsulating the building.

  I glanced up. No alarms seemed to be going off. In fact, even the flood lights hadn’t turned on. Which meant either the team at the back door hadn’t yet cut the generator power as ordered, or literally none of the Landshaft operatives knew we were here.

  A sickly feeling of dread collected in the bottom of my stomach. This isn’t right. My gut revolted. Even if their victims were on higher floors, the small amount of guards down here didn’t add up. Not for Landshaft.

  “Avery!” I called as he reached the doors to the lobby and stairwell. He reached forward and yanked on the door handles. “Hang on—”

  A massive fireball of burning metal and drywall flew out a split second after a thunderous explosion rocked the building, burning my eardrums as I flew backward, arms over my face. My back hit something solid, driving all air from my lungs, and I slid down to the floor. My lungs seized, ears ringing, and I blinked through the shock. All the noise around me seemed to be caught in a barrier made of cotton inside my ear.

  I dropped my arms, looking around me. “What the hell?” Even my own words came quietly, each one wading through a foggy darkness. “Rachel? Krystin?”

  I expected a mess of bodies, of disposed limbs and pools of blood next to smoke and fires. Instead, I found Nate and another ether-shaper kneeling, palms out, with an ether shield encompassing our entire raiding party. Their eyes squeezed together as fire and debris raged around the shield, swirling and dancing along the ether until finally, it subsided. They fell to the ground but held the shield, looking up at the ceiling.

  Gradually, sound returned, but not by much. Nate and the other ether-shaper must have been able to stop the damage but not the c
oncussive force of the explosion. At least they’d been there. If not… Rachel.

  I looked around. Where’d she land? Scattered around, everyone seemed to have taken that part of the blast. But nearly everyone was standing again as the ether shield around us lowered. “Rachel?”

  “Here,” she said. She was helping Shawn up, who was pulling his hand away from his… bloodied head.

  “Shawn?” I asked. “You okay?”

  Head wounds were tricky. You always bled a ton. But here, inside this dimly-lit building, it’d be impossible to know for sure. But he was standing at least.

  Shawn nodded. “I think so.”

  “Krystin, can’t you do that healing thing he did to you?” I asked.

  Krystin’s gaze fell between mine and Shawn’s, then lingered on him. She frowned. “I don’t know how. I’ve never done it before.”

  “Me healing her was an accident,” Shawn added quickly.

  “Avery!” Nate shouted.

  Avery lay on the ground in front of the door. He was cradling his head with burnt hands.

  Nate fell to his knees at Avery’s side, touching two fingers to his neck. “Are you—”

  Avery shoved Nate’s hand away and grunted. “I’m fine.”

  I rushed over to them with Rachel right behind me. “You don’t look fine.”

  His eyes narrowed, focusing on his burned hands. “It’s okay. The healers can help me later. We need to keep moving.”

  Rachel collected water from her water canister backpack and floated some around his hands. He moaned when she’d covered them both. “This might help for now. Stop the burning. Cool them down. Someone should teleportante you back right now.”

  He shook his head, but I could tell from the way the pain wrinkled his eyes and his drawn expression that he was strongly considering it. Finally, he pushed even Rachel away. “It’s time to move on. Let’s go.”

  “You’re lucky we got the shield up in time,” said Nate as he helped Avery. I grabbed his other shoulder and heaved him into a standing position. “You really need to rest.”