The Sorceress Screams

by Anya Breton

“Good grief, Marino.” My pitch jumped back into its defensive lift. “He made me drink two margaritas. I can’t hold my liquor. And I am trying to get something back from him.”

  “Two margaritas didn’t make you dress like a can-can dancer!”

  “Whoa,” I heard myself saying before I could stop it. “Where did that come from?”

  “Nowhere.”

  But the accusation offended me. It wasn’t smart of me, but I felt the need to defend myself. Again.

  I hopped to my feet so I could pace the floor in angry agitation. “That skirt is two inches longer than the one I wore on our fake date. The top is basically a tank top, because, you know it’s June in Ari-freakin-zona. And one more thing, Marino, at least I kept my panties on during his date.”

  I smashed my finger down on the disconnect button before he could retort. I was done playing mole if he was going to get nasty with me.

  If Desmond wanted information from Maximo, he could damn well get it himself.

  ****

  Nell pretended nothing had happened when she returned. A portion of that might have been because of the black look on my face. I retreated to the Wipuk storefront to avoid her because I’d already gotten in two fights before our first hour had finished. I didn’t want to make it three.

  I’d done a foolish thing by hanging up on Desmond. He knew I could access four schools of magic. And he knew my ability in each was nothing to sneeze at. He had the power to sway the coalition against me.

  And if I didn’t stay in Maximo’s favor, I could be run out of the colony. Remaining in Wipuk was critical for the success of my mother’s plan. I had to stay in the good graces of one of them. But which was the lesser of the evils?

  It was disturbing to realize Desmond fit that bill.

  Though it was conceivable he’d taken a life at some point in his years, I thought it slim. And I highly doubted he would have killed a lover. But the more important fact was that Desmond was a witch. He was one of the high priests I had to win over to further my mother’s agenda. I couldn’t afford to have him gunning for me.

  Hades’s hair. I was going to have to make nice. Again.

  ****

  Desmond shockingly answered my call rather than sending it to voice mail. It was half past nine. I’d just walked through the apartment door. It might be late to call a veritable stranger, but I hadn’t wanted to speak to him while Nell could overhear. His chilly greeting wasn’t promising, but that I heard it at all gave me hope.

  “I’m sorry I hung up on you,” I said rather than greet him. He did have a preference for getting right to the point.

  As the silence stretched onward, I struggled with the urge to give an excuse for why I’d done it. I dug my teeth into my lower lip to remain quiet. Excuses seemed to cheapen an apology.

  “You called me to apologize?” he asked in what sounded like his cautious tone.

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  My jaw set angrily. “Yes, really. That’s so shocking?”

  “Apologies are a terribly difficult trick for your gender.”

  I just about shot through the roof before I realized where he’d gotten that.

  “Oh, I see,” I said at a drawling pace, giving my blood pressure time to ease. “You’re using my words against me.”

  He inhaled a soft breath that might have been a laugh.

  “Cute.” I grumbled even though it wasn’t cute at all.

  “So what do you want, Ms. Walsh?”

  “I have to want something to apologize?”

  “You don’t like me. I can’t imagine you would call me at half past nine simply to chat. You want something.”

  There was nothing like the truth. “I need the stay in the good graces of one of you, or I risk getting kicked out of the colony.”

  Silence. My blood pressure hiked into a loftier position. I was about to make an excuse and hang up when he finally spoke.

  “So you chose me? Or are you keeping your options open by jerking us both around?”

  The bitter build in his voice caught me off guard. This wasn’t going at all how I planned. But wait … had he said…?

  “How am I jerking you around, Marino?”

  He let out one of his irritated puffs of breath. “Apology accepted, Ms. Walsh. Good night.”

  And then he hung up on me.

  Chapter Six

  The baying of dogs at three o’clock in the morning meant only one thing—my mother had come for a visit. I staggered out of bed and stomped into the living room. Reclined almost upside down, atop the beanbag chair the size of a small elephant, was the petite goddess Hecate in gauzy ceremonial robes. Her burgundy hair hung over the chair and pooled on the floor like a veil. She made shadow puppets using the light cast through the mini blinds.

  I grunted over a yawn powerful enough to pop my ears. “I hope you’re here for an early report.”

  “No.” My mother drew the word out while she made the shadows of a bird dive-bomb a dog. “I need a favor.”

  My eyelids slid shut while I pulled in a long breath for fortitude. Her favors were never anything simple like babysitting four packs of Boy Scouts with ADHD after a raid into a Girl Scout cookie factory. Her favors involved tracking down witches gone rogue and stopping them before they did something terribly destructive, all with minimal assistance.

  “I’ll get my bracelet.”

  Catey—my mother’s preferred name these days—appeared within my bedroom before I did. Unlike moments earlier, a fine mist coated her delicate frame. She’d moved into the Spirit Realm. Only I could see or hear her—well, only me and any of the dead lingering nearby. The baying of the neighborhood’s dogs fortunately faded.

  As I hopped into my jean shorts, I debated asking her about Trip. My lifelong nemesis had taunted me every Wednesday night without fail for six years. But I hadn’t seen him in two weeks. Though he’d been sentenced to two weeks in Tartarus, time moved differently in the Underworld. He could have served his time in the blink of a mortal eye. If he’d wanted to, that is.

  What had I said the last time I’d seen him? I’d been furious he’d tried to trick me into eating an apple from Hades. And then that he’d used his newfound power to touch objects on the Mortal Realm to do something as pointless as tangle up my power cords at the shop. My fury had made me proclaim it would be a travesty if he were promoted from a back-up judge for North American souls in the Underworld to the full-time judge. And I’d meant it.

  Was that why he’d been avoiding me? Or was it because he believed his punishment was my fault? Why did I care?

  I slipped my hammered silver cuff over my arm—the magical gift that enabled me to stay alert without sleep. My mother held her palm out toward me. I hesitated. The moment our skin would touch, she’d transport me into the Void—the realm of nothing that filled in the crevices around everything. It would be uncomfortable.

  No, uncomfortable was an understatement. Voidwalking was my least favorite fact of divine life. But it was the quickest way to get around the world. And it was the only way to get to the Underworld without dying.

  I pushed out three quick breaths, and then set my hand atop hers.

  ****

  I’d visited few cities in the world that shone as brightly as Las Vegas did at three in the morning. I gazed at the sparkling jewel of a city in all its electronic glory from my vantage point high in the night sky. Why was I here?

  The soft sound of contentment to my right reminded me. I glanced over and found my mother clad in a pair of her denim overalls. Beneath them was a lime T-shirt with a winking apple printed in the center. She’d twisted her hair into a baseball cap, making her look like a pretty, teenage boy.

  She wasn’t particularly concerned about the sleazy dead guy gawking at us from within the Spirit Realm where she’d dropped us. Though I tried to ignore it, the scent of decay and cheap cologne was too much. I discreetly covered my nose with my fingers.

  “You have two hours,” she sai
d, snaring my attention again. “And if Clotho’s time at the slots gets interrupted, you’re going to have bigger problems than your battered conscience.”

  The fate spinner was here. Crap.

  I nodded because my mother’s bosom buddy status with Fate meant I had leeway no other Diakonos—the half-blood children of the gods—could claim. If I wanted to keep my leg up, I needed to make sure nothing interrupted their girls’ night out.

  She waved and then disappeared. I was plunged into the air-conditioned Mortal Realm. The decay and cologne scent faded beneath the smell of tourism. I took in the view from the lofty height atop what I assumed was the Stratosphere’s tower.

  Just once it would be nice to enjoy Las Vegas like anyone else instead of always being favor-bound. Styx, it would be nice to enjoy anything like anyone else. But alas, this was my life. This was who I was.

  Woe-is-me-moment behind me, I sent out a pulse of magic awareness. Pings returned from all sides.

  Vegas was a magical city despite its heavy reliance on electricity. I’d have to change my usual procedure of homing in on a magical signature. There were simply too many here for that to work. For this favor, I’d find the largest concentration of power signatures within my two-mile radius and also monitor for spikes.

  The magical signatures congregated thickest a mile away at what was likely the central portion of the strip. A sole response came from the ground below. Only one witch was in the Stratosphere resort. That figured because this wasn’t the trendy area.

  Time to find my way down from the tower. After a long elevator ride, I glided down the quiet corridor toward the hotel’s main casino floor, narrowly avoiding the security. Pumping music on the ground floor from the central bar proved Vegas was hopping even early on a Monday morning. The heavy bass nearly covered the hum of the slot machines’ digital bells and whistles.

  I strode through the game floor and on into the heated night without pausing at any of the glimmering devices. Few tourists waited for cabs. That suited me fine. I slid into the back seat of an SUV, telling the guy in the driver’s seat that I wanted to go to the Flamingo—the only resort I could recall at the strip’s center.

  The cabbie eased us out of the drive, zipping along the quieter northern strip streets. We plunged into the traffic on the main boulevard. I held onto my seat as the driver zig-zagged into narrow spaces. Soon he demanded a ridiculous amount of money for fare given we’d traveled less than two miles.

  My steady pulse of magic awareness hadn’t turned up anything new as the cab had moved down the strip, but it had reinforced my findings. The magic concentration did come from the center, but rather than from the Flamingo, it came from across the street at Caesars Palace.

  One of countless covens in the country had probably converged on Vegas for a weekend of fun. Perhaps a witch would fail at poker and attempt to take it out on the casino in retaliation. I’d seen worse reasons for witches going berserk.

  I tracked the group down to Caesars’s posh spa across from the equally posh restaurant in a quiet hall on the second floor. The spa didn’t appear to be open—because the door was locked when I pushed on it—but there were definitely witches inside. There had to be an employee entrance somewhere. I simply had to find it.

  A woman in a pale yellow polo and black pants disappeared into a small door hidden in the golden wainscoted wall. My employee entrance? I gave her a few moments to move away from the door. Then I followed her lead.

  An RFID reader blended within the trim to my right. Electronics were beyond my ability. I called on the aether, tugging a bit of Air magic into me, and then willed it to give me a visual representation of the hardware holding the door shut. The standard pin tumbler lock would be easy to pick … if I’d had pick tools. Instead, I used small bursts of Air to align the pins with the shear line. It was only a matter of turning the plug with my fingernail after that.

  After a quick check to make sure no one had noted my breaking and entering, I slipped inside the employee area. There I paused for a breath, contemplating my next move.

  Cerulean hair was far too notable for a job so close to home. I’d need a disguise as otherwise every witch in Wipuk would know who had been in Vegas this morning.

  Altering the pigment took a good deal of concentration. Not because it was difficult to change hair and pigment colors, but rather because it was second nature now to do so. Since I had no control over my dyed tips, my only choice for a drastic change would be to make it all black. Once I’d noted the shift out of my peripheral vision, I moved on to the task of darkening my skin. Only when I’d coated myself in a deep mocha color, did I start down the hall toward the spa.

  Several feet to my right stood an employee entrance into the establishment, exactly as I’d thought. It, too, was locked—a mere stumbling block. I sent Air magic in to pick the lock as I had on the outer door.

  The back entrance put me into a storage room filled with lotion bottles, stones, towels, and a hoard of other spa accouterments. I grabbed a polo shirt and pants off the shelf. Minutes later I quietly moved into the spa’s interior dressed in my spa employee clothes.

  An accented male voice called out at a powerful volume. “Who is there?”

  He had to be speaking to someone else. I’d barely left the storage room and hadn’t made any noise.

  “You there! Whoever emerged from the back, show yourself!”

  A large lump formed in my throat. There was only one explanation for the male’s enhanced senses. He had to be a member of one of the Underground factions. A shapeshifter, Were, or vampire would have supernatural hearing and a keen sense of smell. I wasn’t in a hurry to meet any of those. But he was with the witches I was after, and he knew I was here. My options were limited.

  I walked forward, turning down the marble corridor that entered into the steamy Roman baths. I lifted my chin above the stack of fluffy towels and bath salts I’d grabbed as an excuse for being in the pretentious place after hours. A group of women and one male lounged within the heated water. Or rather two women and one male lounged in a cozy little trio while the others could have been tan statues in terry robes on the pool’s edges.

  My steady inhales brought in an amalgamation of scents just barely discernible over the water. If my nose could be believed, there was an Air witch, a Fire witch, a Water witch, a Dark witch, a Healer, and even a Death witch in the room. The only acknowledged school missing was Earth.

  The abundance of water available made it easy to send out empathic links to the creatures within the space. Emotions battered my consciousness. Several witches broadcasted fear and anger, some more than others. Hot, forceful jabs came from the witches with the darkest expressions. The one who took the cake was the redheaded witch with her deeply knit forehead. Her malicious glare was focused squarely on the male figure stretched out along the pool’s back end.

  Pinching envy emanated from one of the lounging women. The press of satisfaction came from the other woman while they took turns drawing hands over his toffee-colored skin. The last creature, the man, was in a state of relaxation mixed with intermittent pokes of irritation—irritation reserved for me. Angular eyebrows drew down atop nearly black eyes as he silently demanded I explain myself.

  I lied through my teeth. “My boss asked me to make sure you had fresh towels and to offer you these.”

  “You don’t mean the silly salts do you? We told your boss we didn’t have any interest in your over-priced shit.” He ran a hand over the top of his buzz cut, brown-black hair. His full lips curved. “Unless ‘these’ refers to your adorable little breasts.”

  Envy came at me in stereo. I struggled not to wince from the force of it.

  One of the women clinging to him slid her hand over his compactly muscled chest and down into the water where it disappeared. He didn’t so much as blink while she caressed him beneath the surface.

  “No,” I whispered, giving the illusion I was mouse-like. “I’m sorry. I was only doing what my boss asked. I
’ll leave.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Becky,” I replied with my go-to alter ego.

  “Becky, join us in the pool.” His tone brooked no argument. This was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted, when he wanted, without question.

  Was someone here going to cause a large enough scene to merit my mother dropping me in Vegas? There could be an Air witch out in the desert readying to level the place with a tornado for all I knew. But the fear and anger the witches put off made me want to try to help them first.

  “Pookie.” One of the women purred into the male’s ear. “Don’t you have enough?”

  “Never.” He swam out of her arms, gliding through the water toward me like something out of a SyFy original movie.

  I took a step back, earning a predatory glint in his dark eyes. Vampire. He had to be. Calling on Death magic, I sent a tiny pulse out for any dead within the vicinity. There were three.

  The male emerged from the heated water, one menacing step at a time. His nudity should have made him less of a threat. But the dense build combined with a vampire’s natural magnetism made him the biggest threat in the room.

  He snatched the towels out of my hands, tossing them to the ground with careless regard. Then he clutched my fingers in his cool grip. I hesitated as he drew me closer, calling on Water to increase the empathic link between us. And then I pushed all of the power I could get at into him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  His lips spread into a wide smile. “I’m about to take off your shirt, little Becky.”

  That wasn’t going to happen. “But what are you doing here with them?”

  “We’re having a little meeting,” he said with an irreverent shrug. The vampire ran an icy finger over my arm. “Take off your clothes, and you can join us.”

  “She’s just a stinking human,” one of the female vampires snarled. “You already lost one of them because you were distracted.”

  He held my gaze. “Susan, please take care of Frederica.”

  Susan—the satisfied member of the vampire’s trio—punched the second female across the cheek. “Frederica” sailed out of the water clear across the room. The resulting crunch into the far wall was either the surface caving or a bone breaking. I didn’t hide my revulsion for the brutality.