The Aurora ICM branch has been transformed into a Methuselah operations center.
Clever bastard, I think of Delos, I’ll give him that. Playing his games in plain sight, where everyone would least expect them.
“Cal Kinsey,” hisses the wizard, advancing toward me one menacing step at a time. “I don’t know how you outwitted Robert, but if you think you’re walking out of here and squealing like a pig to DSI, boy do I have bad news for you.” A murky blue aura ripples through the air, caressing the ceiling, the walls, the floor, and the temperature in the building drops at least twenty degrees. The conversation around the corner abruptly stops, and several sets of footsteps come barreling down the hall. Three more practitioners appear, two more wizards and a witch, all from the watchdog crew who barred Team Riker entry to the building.
“What the hell?” says the witch. “How’d he get out? Where’s Delos?”
“Don’t know,” the black guy replies. “Why don’t you go check on him while the rest of us teach Kinsey a lesson about hospitality?”
The witch frowns. “Don’t kill him now. We need him, remember?”
The black guy waves her off. “I know. He’ll still be breathing when I’m done. He just won’t be happy about it.”
“Whatever you say.” She rolls her eyes and slips through the door to the cellblock, leaving me with three angry-looking men who could beat me up without using magic, even if I was a hundred percent. Which I’m not. I’m at somewhere close to eight percent, and that’s being generous.
A steady mantra of Shit! consumes my thoughts. I can’t take on three wizards. I have no weapons. I have no strength. The only thing I can do is run for the door and hope for the best, but I know that’s a pipe dream. They can stop me a hundred ways before I take three steps. But I have to do something. I can’t go down here, not when the citizens of Aurora are at stake, not when people are actively dying from Delos’ curse, not when these MG assholes are trying to set me up to take the fall for their disgusting scheme.
No, I can’t fail here. But what the heck can I do?
Turns out, as I discover after seven seconds of growing terror, I don’t have to do anything at all, except stand there and look pretty. Because just as the three wizards are about to dash forward and pummel me to a fine pulp, the window to my right implodes with a mighty flash of green energy, and a rain of glass shards gives way to a witch, who lands directly in front of me, awash in an aura so powerful it fills the entire room.
Erica Milburn rises to her full height, gives me a passing glance—and a flirty wink—and then wheels around to face the three stunned wizards, who look like they’re about to piss their pants.
And no wonder. Erica could kick their asses in her sleep.
Awake? It’s not even a fair fight.
The black guy pauses for only a second, then unleashes a brutal ice spell. A miniature glacier forms instantly in the stretch of hallway in front of him before shattering into a hundred massive, sharp-edged pieces. With a flick of his wrist, they shoot away from him, slicing through the air toward us, followed by a frigid gale-force wind that shrieks across the cramped office space. But Erica hardly spares the attack a thought. She raises a hand, pumps a surge of magic through her arm, and snaps her fingers like an irate high-school prep. A shield that reminds me way too much of the one my mom used in the strange dream-memory appears, and the icicles shatter on contact, pinging harmlessly away.
Erica doesn’t give the black guy a second chance. Both palms up, she sends energy flying into the ceiling and walls around the practitioner trio, and with a single yanking motion, collapses a fifth of the ground floor of the entire building. Concrete crumbles. Plaster shatters. Steel beams and iron pipes shriek and moan as they bend and break. The black guy tries to raise a shield of his own to protect himself and his two compatriots, but he vanishes underneath the storm of debris before his spell fully flickers into existence.
I don’t know if any of them survive or not, and quite frankly, I don’t care. Getting crushed by a ton of debris is the least they deserve for plotting to infect hundreds of innocent people with a death curse.
As the dust from the collapses billows over Erica and me, choking the hallway, we both back toward the sign that points to the exit, hands over our mouths to ward off the particulates. My every instinct screams at me to take flight, run as fast as I can out of this godforsaken building. Because everyone in a three-block radius must’ve heard the collapse, and the office will be flooded with more practitioners, and the cops, in a matter of minutes. But a nagging idea encroaches on my panicked thoughts, nudging me to make a different choice.
Erica observes the settling dust and the pile of shifting debris beyond, searching for any signs of life. Finding none, she turns to me and says, “Jeez, hot Crow, you really know how to get yourself into a jam.”
I smile, then realize she can’t see it through the hands covering my mouth. “You got your memories back, huh?”
She blinks at me, confused. “Didn’t you break the watch spell?”
I shake my head. “Cooper had the watch. He must’ve done it.”
Unease settles over me. Cooper wouldn’t have risked Erica’s safety by restoring her memories if he’d felt there was another option for handling the situation. Maybe he just freaked out after Barnett captured me and broke the watch spell because he knew he’d never be able to save me under his own power. But then, maybe he got jailed after the cam footage revealed his role in my escape, and he released Erica’s memories so she could help me in his place. Maybe he’s in big trouble right now. Maybe he needs help.
But—and it pains me to think this—I have more important things to do than rescue Cooper from DSI holding. Just like the unfortunate souls in Delos’ personal dungeon, Cooper comes second. Aurora comes first.
I reassure myself with the belief that Cooper will understand. He joined DSI for the same reason I did, and he knows that the job involves sacrifice. In fact, Ella ripped me a new one once for questioning Cooper’s willingness to put himself in the line of fire.
Weakly bolstered, I shake thoughts of Cooper away and grab Erica’s arms, trying my best to make an expression that reads gratitude instead of exhaustion. “The watch thing doesn’t matter right now. We can talk about it later.”
“True.” She glances again at the pile of debris twenty feet away, and searches for signs of more oncoming practitioners. “We need to get out of here. I probably tripped a dozen wards.”
“We can’t leave yet,” I say, swallowing hard.
“What? Why not?” She gives me a concerned once-over. “You can’t tell me you want to stay for round two. You barely lived through round one, Cal.”
“I don’t want to fight anyone. I want to find Delos’ notes on the curse, and the counter-curse he’s already created.” I run my tongue across my dry lips. They taste like blood and ash. “He admitted it was his, Erica. Admitted everything to me. He’s a big league MG leader, come to clean up the mess left by Marcus and Feldman and their cohorts. He was going to deploy the counter-curse after he set me up as his fall guy, which means he must have the setup for it on hand. I figure his notes are either in his personal office space or at his house.”
Erica’s frown tightens. “That rat bastard. I knew he was up to no good, but without my memories of the past year intact, I couldn’t quite put two and two together. There were too many answers missing for me to reliably peg him as the big villain.” She plants her hands on her hips and huffs. “But you’re right. He’s got to have notes on that curse somewhere he can easily access, yet somewhere no one else would think to look. Practitioners like their sneaky hiding places. A guy like Delos, my guess would be…” She looks thoughtfully at the direction sign behind my shoulder. “Hidden desk compartment. Come on. His office is upstairs.”
Erica half carries me up to the next floor, and we emerge from the stairwell into another generic beige-colored hallway. Delos’ office is the first one on the right, a warded door stan
ding between us and his desk. Erica makes quick work of those wards though, like she’s studied them before. She probably has. She’s been hanging around Delos for the past few months, looking the part of the innocent mook, a relative nobody in Delos’ entourage, placed there by the man himself to disguise the fact that half of his close contacts were MG plants. And all the while, she was collecting invaluable data about Delos’ operations, unbeknownst to both Delos and herself. An unwitting spy.
As Erica kicks in the door, revealing a sparsely decorated office, a faux-wood desk in the middle of the room, I smile at the thought that her memory-wiping spell succeeded in the most spectacular fashion. She used one of Iron Delos’ tactics against him.
Erica leaves me leaning against the doorframe while she takes two steps into the room and then unleashes yet another powerful spell. Every piece of furniture in the room opens its compartments and empties their contents: the file cabinet, old records and manila folders flying everywhere; the desk drawers, pens and pencils and boxes of staples battering the walls; the briefcase in the corner, blank white sheets of printer paper raining through the air. The only thing that resists the spell is the left bottom desk drawer, which is what reveals its significance.
Rounding the desk, Erica crouches and tugs the drawer open manually. She uses her manicured nails to prop up a false bottom, a thin panel, which she tosses aside. Beneath the panel is a rectangular box, made of real wood, finely carved and lacquered. Light glints off the finish as Erica examines it, poking and prodding the seams until it gives off a faint magenta flash. The box is more heavily warded than the office door.
“That box looks big enough to hold some important papers,” I note.
Erica nods. “Probably his latest grimoire. Like a journal. Where practitioners record their finished spells. Given his age, he probably has dozens at home. But this is the one we need.” She tucks the box under her arm. “We’ll break the wards later. I don’t want to risk the box self-destructing if I try to unravel the wards in a rush.”
“Good plan.” I peek back into the hall, at the stairwell we entered through. Heavy footsteps are pounding upward. “But, uh, I think we may need another avenue of escape.”
Erica passes me and examines each end of the hall. “That brick building next door is two stories, right? And it abuts this office, no alley?”
“I think so. Why?”
“Because I don’t want to fall twenty feet onto the pavement.” She grabs my wrist and coaxes me to follow her toward a blank wall. Handing off the grimoire box to my shaking hands, she takes a position like she’s about to punch some idiot out, and with another jolt of magic, she actually makes a punching motion. Her fist doesn’t make contact with the wall, but the wall doesn’t seem to realize that. A perfect circle blows outward as if struck by a wrecking ball, hits the outer wall of the adjoining building, and then keeps on going like the building next door is made of construction paper.
Luckily, there’s no one in the men’s bathroom on the other side of that wall. Unluckily, the debris hits a urinal, breaking the pipe, and water blasts outward from the wall, spraying the entire room.
Oh, well. I need a shower anyway.
Chapter Fourteen
Under a veil, Erica sneaks me through the streets of Aurora, now crawling with DSI agents and cops and National Guardsmen. It looks like a police state, the public spaces all but empty of civilians, law enforcement watching from every corner, newspaper racks devoid of new editions as if the press houses have been shuttered. But considering that the death toll from the curse is still crawling up, that’s hardly surprising. I’d be more disturbed if there weren’t military helicopters circling the city every thirty minutes, blaring a warning for citizens to obey the curfew or else.
Still, it breaks my heart to see Aurora edging closer to an apocalyptic urban hellscape.
And all because of that fucker Iron Delos. If he doesn’t have brain damage from that backfire, there is no justice in the world.
After a tense thirty-minute walk where DSI patrols nearly smack into us twice—Ramirez passes within five feet of me, and Delarosa skirts right by my shoulder—we arrive not at Erica’s cozy house but at a rundown apartment building I’m pretty sure would’ve been labeled a tenement back in the twentieth century. Erica, holding my hand to maintain my veil coverage, tugs me up the steps, her keen senses searching for any prying eyes in the vicinity.
We slip inside the building quickly to avoid detection, and take the stairs up to the second floor. The inside of the building is even worse than the faded, crumbling stone exterior. Peeling wallpaper. Chipped paint. Floorboards decorated with a thousand nicks and ruts. Wooden steps that sound as if they’re on the verge of collapse.
But thankfully, we don’t fall through the floor and plummet into a grimy basement. We arrive at a heavily warded apartment, Erica’s signature green aura shining brightly to my enhanced vision. As I step within five feet of the door, a sudden desire to pass the door and keep on walking nearly overwhelms me, and I start to pull away from Erica before I catch myself. One of the wards, I realize. It must be designed to deter people from trying to enter.
Erica disengages most of the wards, then unlocks the door and ushers me in. Once the door shuts and the wards are reactivated, she finally strips the veil, and the sensation of gliding silk caresses my skin as the magic dissipates. Everything grows a shade brighter, even in the dimly lit studio apartment, like the veil was partially blocking out the light and color of the world.
“Welcome to my home away from home.” Erica makes a sweeping motion, presenting the crummy apartment in all its complete lack of splendor. “That is, my safe house.”
“Couldn’t have rented a safe penthouse?” I murmur. The adrenaline of my escape from Delos’ dungeon is rapidly fading now that I’m not stalking around the streets, surrounded by enemies on all sides. My injuries from Barnett’s pursuit ache deeply, sapping my energy. Dizziness rocks me every few blinks, and I’m not quite steady on my feet.
Erica notices my physical state and leads me over to an old sofa that I’m not convinced wasn’t scavenged from a dumpster. “Sorry, hot Crow. I’m not a young witch, but I’m not old either. I haven’t had time to amass a vast fortune yet and build myself a luxury doomsday bunker.” She yanks Delos’ magic lockbox out from under my arm and sets it on a worn wooden coffee table in front of the sofa. “So this will have to do for now.”
“When’d you get this place? You didn’t tell me about it.”
“Because I scrapped the idea of using it.” She holds up an index finger—wait—and trudges off to the small bathroom attached to the living area. She returns a minute later with a heavy-duty first-aid kit and a plastic bag of unlabeled pharmaceutical bottles. Sinking onto the sofa beside me, she rifles through the first-aid kit and says, “Before I came up with the memory spell, I rented this place through October, in case I found myself on the run from Delos. Of course, once I wiped my memory, I forgot all about it. And then, today, out of the blue, all my memories came rushing back. So here we are.”
“Good thing you didn’t pick a shorter lease.” I laugh dryly.
“I like to plan ahead.” She rips open a pack of alcohol pads. “Though I heard that you weren’t too bad at thinking on the fly. Holed yourself up in a motel, yeah?”
I snort. “Barnett tracked me down easily.”
“Delilah Barnett’s job is to track down people,” she counters, “and you don’t have the benefit of magic to help you hide from her. You’re a sitting duck for an ICM bounty hunter. Through no fault of your own.”
“I didn’t even know the ICM had bounty hunters.”
“They’re only called in to hunt for major fugitives who are considered too dangerous or whose capture too time sensitive to leave to volunteers.” Her delicate fingers tilt my head to the side, allowing her a better look at the laceration on my scalp. “Never thought I’d see you counted among that number. Want to tell me how that happened?”
I
snap my gaze toward her, eyebrows rising. “Are you telling me you came to save me without knowing I was innocent?”
“Cal”—she smacks an alcohol pad against my open wound, and I nearly shriek—“I slept with you, for months. I worked with you, for months. I know you, and because I know you, I know damn well you couldn’t possibly have been involved in the creation of this curse. You freak out when you fail to stop bystanders from getting paper cuts during supernatural showdowns, fights that would otherwise obliterate countless lives. No way you’d murder dozens of people for some vague payoff. Your motivations are noble, and very simple to understand. They’re written all over your face.”
“Really?” I wince at the sting of the alcohol as Erica dabs sticky blood off the wound. “But if I’m that obvious, then surely my teammates don’t believe…”
She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear and gives me a reproving look. “You honestly think your team would so easily vilify you? The people you’ve fought beside over the past year? The people who’ve seen you risk your life a half-dozen times in deadly combat to protect this city? They aren’t fools, Cal. They’d struggle to believe you were a traitor even with overwhelming evidence, which, as far as I know, Delos has not provided.”
Finished with the cleansing, she grabs a stack of gauze pads. “But then again, I don’t know exactly what Delos was planning to do with you.” A worried frown draws across her face. “Or what he did, for that matter, during the hours you were in his ‘holding’ cell. You want to tell me the whole story?”
I lean back into the sofa cushion, a bone-deep tiredness weighing down my body. Gnawing on my dry lips, I think of everything that happened in the basement cell, including the dream-memory of my mother, which felt so real, too real for me to deny its validity without further examination. I stare up at the ceiling for a long while as Erica works on my wounds. She doesn’t push me to talk, doesn’t cajole me in any way. We might never have been madly in love with each other, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a bond forged in fire. It’s just that our fire isn’t romantic passion. It’s battle. The ongoing battle to protect our home.
Doom Sayer Page 15
