by Faith Hunter
“—Medic!” Jodi demanded, and I realized she was still speaking into her official police radio, words fast and clipped. “We need an ambulance at the Elms on St. Charles and Eighth. Single burn victim. Paranormal injury, accidental or criminal, unknown. I want marked cars at Seventh, Eighth, and Harmony streets to keep the public back.”
Someone said, “Ten-four, Detective.” There was a click and to me Jodi said, “Did you see what happened?”
“Something went wrong with the circle, and then Evan jumped inside it, which is either the height of stupidity or something heroic,” I said, trying to figure out why Evan had thrown himself into the ward. He had to have seen something dangerous inside, but I couldn’t spot anything.
Evan was still rolling, and with Beast-vision, I could see gold energies cocooning his body as he drew on his personal protection magics, but the flames weren’t going out. Green flames. Green magic, attacking Evan. “The fire has weird green tints,” I said. “It isn’t an ordinary fire. It’s magic.” And it was attacking Evan.
“It’s a targeted spell,” Jodi added grimly, drawing the same conclusion.
I pulled my skinwalker energies out, a gray and silver cloud of my magic, the Gray Between, laced through with darker silver-gray motes of dancing power. I wasn’t planning on bubbling time, but already my guts twisted, a taste of blood in the back of my throat.
The ward fell. Molly dropped the powers she had been holding and raced toward her husband, her hands doing something, too fast to see. Eli sprinted in from the side carrying his medical gobag, a blanket, and a fire extinguisher. He tossed the bag and extinguisher to me and shook out the blanket on the run. He threw it on Big Evan and rolled the much larger man in it, applying his own body weight and slapping with his hands to smother the weird green flames. The purely mundane remedy was working. I let go of my own power, swallowed back the vile taste of blood, pulled the pin on the bright red extinguisher, raced forward, and aimed carbon dioxide at the burning grass, the white cloud suffocating the last of the fire. It took longer than it should have to kill the flames on the grass, and the stench of ozone mixed with iron and copious amounts of salt hung heavy on the air by the time the last flame died.
Molly and Eli were kneeling beside Evan. Lachish stood at his head and Bliss/Ailis at his feet, already working to dampen his pain and speed healing, which was Ailis’s special gift. I could see the brilliant energies, blues and purples, blending into a dark but vibrant working.
Big Evan sighed as the working descended and his pain began to ease. Tears and mucus glistened on his face. “I’m okay, Mol. Let me see.”
“No! Don’t look.”
He caught both of her hands in his one unburned, catcher-mitt-sized hand, and the blanket slid down. “You know I’m going to look,” he said with a pained version of his old smile. He did. The shreds of his clothes were charred; his left arm and both legs looked like raw meat; the red body hair and outer skin were gone, as if blisters had formed and burst, exposing cooked muscle and blackened, ropy veins. “Well, dang. I won’t look so pretty at the beach next summer, but at least I still have my limbs.” He let Molly go and touched his face, sounding mournful. “It burned off part of my beard.”
“Evan!” Molly was crying, but not tears of fear or worry. Molly was mad. Which was dangerous on all sorts of levels. Molly had death magics to control and hide, and being angry tended to bring them to the surface.
“I’m fine, sweetheart,” Evan said. “Breathe.”
“You breathe!”
Evan laughed, the sound pained and a little wild. “I am. That’s the important thing to remember. I’m still breathing.”
“Nothing a little vamp blood won’t heal,” Eli said. Four of the witches whipped their heads to him, clearly scandalized. “Not that your spells aren’t great and all, ladies, but I know this vampire? And he’ll be happy to heal. He even swore an oath to do anything necessary to help.” Eli gave me an evil grin. “Perfect time to test out that primo promise.”
“Right,” I said, relief scudding through me. “Get Alex to send Edmund here.” I stopped, thinking about what I had just said. I was treating Edmund like a blood-slave, which made me no better than a vamp. I rubbed my head and drew on the hard-taught manners I so seldom used. I rephrased, “Please ask Alex to please request the presence of Edmund here.”
Eli gave a half-smothered, derisive breath at my polite words.
“Molly, remember what Edmund promised. Evan will be fine. He’ll see it happens. But what we need right now is for you, all of you, to tell us what happened.”
“I’m breathing,” Evan said, his voice tight with pain, “so I can talk.” In the distance multiple sirens sounded as police and ambulances closed in from every direction.
“Okay,” Molly said, though it was a lie. She wasn’t okay at all. But the word meant that she was reining in her anger.
I knelt beside Evan as Molly lent her Earth magics to helping Evan with pain relief, tears drying on her face. “Evan,” I said, “you were outside the circle, and Jodi and I smelled a spell go bad. And then you jumped into the circle. And then we saw that you were on fire. Did you go on fire before you jumped into the circle or after? How do you remember it?”
“I didn’t jump inside. I’d have broken the circle.”
“You did jump,” Lachish said. “The circle didn’t break and it should have.”
“No, no,” Jodi said, her eyes holding a faraway stare. “There was the circle you had already raised, and then the ward you were starting to raise. And there was a third working. Something outside that was activated before Evan jumped into the circle, before he caught on fire. And it wasn’t your workings. I smelled something odd.” Jodi pulled out a psy-meter and started scanning the grounds.
“Iron and salt,” I said. “And here all along I thought that salt and iron were the antithesis to magic.”
“Nothing is ever an absolute,” Jodi said. “So that means the circle itself may have been a target instead of a bystander. Is that even possible?”
“It’s possible,” Lachish said, drawing out the word, sounding uncertain.
“Explain,” I said.
“There are two ways it might work. One: a group of witches were nearby with a working in process. Then our working triggered it, attracting it to us. The timing and similarity of energies being raised would have to be impeccable, which, to my mind, rules out an accidental merging. Two, which is much more likely: there was a booby trap working on the grounds, and when we raised the circle, and triggered the hedge of thorns ward, our actions activated the concealed working. The explosion was close enough to Evan to propel him into the circle.”
“That’s it,” Evan rasped. “The magic was under my feet. It exploded upward and threw me inside.”
I remembered the spell that had knocked Evan flat to his back earlier in the morning. That might have made him more likely to be hit again, but I didn’t want to say that aloud. “Okay. Assuming door number two,” I said, “and assuming Evan was an accidental target instead of the intended target, what would be needed for a booby trap?”
“A focus is the easiest method,” Lachish said.
“That’s it,” Big Evan repeated, now sounding dreamy, as Molly’s and Ailis’s magics pulled his pain away. I wondered if the young, untrained, and inexperienced witch could tell Evan was a witch, but she didn’t act odd, so I guessed not.
Emergency vehicles closed in on the Elms, the sirens doing that house-to-house fast echo of a neighborhood in the muggy South. “Yeah,” Evan said. “I saw a green leaf iron . . . focal.” And he was suddenly asleep, knocked out by the healing spell.
I knelt and checked his palms. Nothing there except blisters on the burned one. Eli said, “Jane, my cell just went out.”
“Lachish,” I said, pulling my own cell, “we need to keep everyone away from here, away from Evan, away from th
e circle. You know that my house has been attacked twice, by two witches using iron focal items. So was I, personally. Evan got some of the backlash.” I took a surreptitious look at my left palm, which was unmarked, no green eye there. Thankfully. I scrubbed my palm on my pants before opening my phone. “Alex sent you the photos. Did you recognize anyone through the pixelated-out mess?”
“No,” she said. “Their body shapes might have been any of dozens of witches in the state. But there was nothing visible of their faces.” Which I knew.
“My phone’s out too,” I said to them, poking at the dead screen. “Proximity to the broken circle?”
Lachish said, “It could be. Or it could be a multilayered spell with interrupted communications as part of it.” She looked at Jodi, who immediately started barking orders at the officers, to cordon off the whole block. Too many things were going on, going wrong, and I tried to think, while Jodi, standing on the patio tiles, waved the approaching ambulance into a parking spot. I could hear the voices as they explained to the cops and the paramedics what the witches were doing and what the holdup was. The cops checked their cells, to discover that they were out. Even their radios were nonfunctional, though the car engines themselves were seemingly fine. While the human cops cordoned off the area, I walked around the healing working and murmured to Molly, “Where are your kids?”
“Being watched over by a teenager playing World of Killer-Death-Something, and a werewolf.” She sounded wry, as if her life had taken off on an inexplicable tangent and nothing made sense anymore.
“Can you find any other icons that might be on the grounds?” I asked, not adding, Like Evan did.
“Yes, I think so.” To Lachish, she said, “I think he’ll sleep now. The ambulance is here. We should clear a path from the street to Evan first, and get him to the hospital, where the vampire can help heal him.”
“I wouldn’t let a fanghead touch my—” Lachish stopped. “Never mind. Things change. Maybe the suckheads have changed too.” More reluctantly she added, “And if it was my husband there, hurt, I’d strip naked and slow-dance with a vamp for the chance to get him help. You’re right. We need Evan in a safer place so we can tackle the whole yard.”
“Good enough,” Molly said, tension leaking away, making her shoulders droop. “And by the way, you and Jane need to go over the list of witches who were at the cemetery when Jane was struck by lightning, and add a few last names. She has a right to personal protection. She has a right to see which witches might be responsible for the attack on her.”
“None of my coven would be involved,” Lachish said, her chin up and shoulders hunched in what looked like a pugilistic stance.
“You’re probably right,” Molly said, her tone composed and serene, “but it’s smart to consider everything. No stone unturned, you know?” she said.
Lachish didn’t like it, but she gave me a curt nod. She gave Molly a small come this way gesture with her fingers and said over her shoulder, “We can start at the ambulance and work our way to Evan. Then once he’s in the ambulance, we can clear the yard, beginning at the area where your husband entered the circle. We need to find out what attacked him and how he was able to enter without breaking the energies. The circle should have stopped him.”
Molly’s expression didn’t change, but her scent went to panic, fast. Lachish didn’t know that Big Evan was a male witch—whose magics had never been studied—and this wasn’t the time to explain it all.
Speaking loud, I said, “It could be part of the focals’ working. First disrupt a working and its ward, and then allow people in to attack. All you have to do is figure out how to defend against both parts. Or it might be because he was in the backlash of the same kind of magics today.”
Molly blinked and said, “Exactly,” maybe a little too emphatically, but Lachish was already on the far side of the patio, bending over a place in the grass, a spot of browned grass similar to the ones at my house.
Lachish said, “There’s something here—”
“Don’t touch it!” I shouted.
The explosion threw the witch across the grass, toward the ambulance. Dirt and grass and two tree branches blew outward. Beast shoved me into action and I threw myself over Molly to protect her. Eli hit the earth. So did two of the uniformed cops. Jodi and all the other officers drew their service weapons. One raced to unlock bigger firepower and came out with a city-issued automatic rifle.
“Get off me, you big oaf,” Molly said, pushing at me. “I’m suffocating here.”
I rolled to the side and got to my feet, pulling her with me and running my hands over her and her baby bump, leaning in and breathing her scent deep. Molly wasn’t fine, but she wasn’t bleeding or leaking amniotic fluid from the concussive release of magic. Lachish, however, wasn’t moving. “Lachish is hurt,” I said. “Stay with Evan and keep his healing wards up. Don’t wander.” I spotted Bliss—Ailis—standing in the shadow of the back door, with a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. The elegant hostess, Amalie, stood beside her, face pale and drawn. “Ailis,” I said.
“The explosion shut off my cell phone,” she said. “I don’t know how to summon yet, so I was going to call in some more of the circle to help, but the phone is fried.”
“I know. I need you over there.” I pointed at Lachish, whose blood I smelled on the air. I walked slowly across the lawn toward Lachish, my eyes on the ground. But it was getting darker and even pulling on Beast-vision I couldn’t see well enough to step safely. “Watch the ground for any indication of dead grass or magics.”
She came, feet uncertain, eyes wide, watching the ground, and followed in my footsteps to Lachish. The coven leader was bleeding from the mouth, her left arm looked as if it had an extra elbow above the wrist, and her lower left leg was deformed. Both leg bones were broken, not quite compound fractures, but close. But she was breathing and her heart was beating. “Don’t touch her until the paramedics can get here. Set a healing circle,” I said, “and”—I looked around—“where are the two aka witches?” I asked, meaning Butterfly Lily and Feather Storm.
“They took off the moment the circle was down.”
“Guilty or afraid?”
“Terrified,” Ailis said. “I have the healing circle up. I can hold it for a while alone, but I’m not used to using my gifts, so . . .” She opened her lips to drag in a deeper breath, and finished, “So I can’t promise anything.”
“You didn’t run,” I said. “You could have. I’m proud of you.” Ailis sent me a smile that suggested I shouldn’t be proud just yet because she might still run, but she returned her attention to Lachish.
Carefully I walked to the side street. “Eli,” I said as I neared, speaking softly, “the magic may have been intended to interfere with communications too.”
“You think we set off a prepared working early. As in, this was probably supposed to happen after all the witches were gathered in one place. Which would mean the witches who set it weren’t on the inside of the plans.”
“I think so. Maybe. But multipurpose spells are difficult to craft, harder to power, and tricky to activate and deploy.” I lowered my voice even more. “I have no idea what the double exposure to the green energies will have on Evan, or have on the spells here, for that matter. But we need to get Lachish and Evan to Tulane.”
“Suggestions?”
“I find the icons, and you shoot them?”
“Anything with explosions—where people don’t get hurt—is fun. I’m in. I’ll tell Jodi, and she can tell the cops what we’re doing so they don’t shoot us.”
“Good idea. I always like not being shot at.”
“But the adrenaline rush is such a high.”
“It’s too dark to see, but I’m rolling my eyes.”
“Love you too, babe. I have a .22 target pistol in the SUV. I’ll be right back.”
It didn’t take Eli long to talk to
Jodi and get his pistol, and bring the cop she insisted go with him up-to-date. The officer was a recently discharged boots-on-the-ground soldier, and the two army boys bonded immediately over weapons and blast radii and other weapons-porn, and discussed what they needed to take cover behind to be protected. I let them talk and make decisions and move the other cops back and generally handle all the details while I studied the grounds with Beast-vision.
The night grew deeper and artificial lights came on from all around, throwing long grayed shadows and shorter black shadows, which interfered with my Beast-vision and made it harder to find the pale greenish energies I was hunting for, buried beneath the grass or in flower beds. I found three probable sites of unexploded focal icons in the backyard, one to the very back of the property, and the other two out to the sides of that one, positioned halfway between it and the exploded ones. There were probably more in the front yard, and since magic was mathematics and geometry, there would be a specific number and placement of them, oriented along specific lines and compass points. We had blown two, with injuries, at east and west, near the house. With three more in the back, that was five, and covered a shape that might be a triangle, which would intersect with similar shapes in the front yard. However, the front and side yards were minuscule as compared to the back. The mathematics were going to be either magnificent and complicated or overly simplistic and imbued with raw power. I was going with curtain number two, but none of the witches were available to help me with my speculations.
“Jane, we’re ready,” Eli said.
“Okay. Here’s how it will work. I’m going to walk up close to a location that looks likely to hold a focal item, point at it, and then I’m going to back away and you are going to shoot it. There may be an explosion or there may be nothing. If it explodes we’ll know we were successful. If it doesn’t we won’t know diddly-squat and we’ll have to figure out something else.”
“How come you can see the magic stuff?” Eli’s new partner asked.
