Smoke and Mirrors

by Jess Haines

He strolled inside like he owned the place, his broad shoulders back and chin up as he breathed in the scents of the café. His dark brown hair was slicked back from the sharp, angular planes of his face. Her Sight showed his black leather trench coat was still trailing elemental sparks in his wake, bright sparkles of color that shimmered like the scales she’d glimpsed outside, but otherwise he’d clamped down tight on his aura until it was difficult to tell him apart from the mundanes around him.

  Kimberly’s back thumped against the counter behind her as he zeroed in on her. His eyes weren’t glowing this time, instead a pale whiskey brown, looking her up and down with obvious interest.

  Don straightened and looked back and forth between them, then tilted his head at Viper in question. Silently asking Kimberly if he was the creep, and if he needed to put his past experience as a bouncer to good use. She gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head, trying to breathe around a throat constricted with fear.

  If Don tried anything, Viper would kill him. She could see it in the set of the Other’s shoulders, the slight curl of his fingers, hooked like they were customarily clawed. It was in the glint in his eye, hopeful for a challenge, searching for something to toy with until it became too tiresome and was put out of its misery.

  Breathing shallow, she moved in a dazed haze behind the register, taking orders. Viper had, in what might have appeared to be an act of politeness, stepped aside and gestured for the other people who had been waiting to go first. Biding his time for his chance to speak with her uninterrupted, she was sure. She got the coffees and pastries and breakfast sandwiches other people ordered, dreading the moment the Other would take his turn in line. On alert to her discomfort, Don stayed up front as much as he could, but a few of the orders required him to go back to the grill in the kitchen.

  Viper must have noticed. When it was his turn to order, he put one arm on the glass display beside the register, leaning in to close the distance between them and giving her a whiff of a woodsy scent tainted with a hint of carrion. His thin, sly smile widened as she jerked back.

  “Good morning, love. I’ll have a coffee and one of those breakfast sandwiches. Extra sausage, hmm?”

  Don muttered something under his breath, but went into the back to cook the order. Kimberly punched the numbers into the register, keeping her voice low as she stared down at the key pad.

  “I’m not looking—I don’t want—”

  He set an empty paper cup from the Black Star down on the counter. Nudged it closer with one finger. “This says you do want. Very much.”

  She gasped and made a grab for it. It must have been the cup Cormac had given her last night. Something she’d owned, however briefly. Something that left a trace of her behind. Viper didn’t bother trying to stop her as she crumpled it in her fist and hid it behind her back, like it would stop him from casting the tracking spell all over again.

  His low voice was pleasant, calm, and completely at odds with the way his fingernail traced a shallow line in the countertop. “You should be more mindful where you discard things someone might use to track you.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “A chance to talk. Not here,” he said, his gaze briefly alighting on the kitchen door before refocusing on Kimberly’s pale features. “I’m sure your friend has been telling you I’m the worst kind of monster and to avoid me at all costs.”

  She didn’t bother to deny it.

  “Give me a chance to tell you my side of things. Perhaps it will clear a few things up for you. Like what he is, which will go a long way toward explaining why he doesn’t care for me. That is, if he hasn’t already told you…”

  Kimberly couldn’t help but make a small sound deep in her throat. A mix of confusion and fear.

  He could tell her about Cormac? Finally clear up the mystery about what he was? If that were true, then Viper was being more open with her straight out of the gate than Cormac had ever been, and she couldn’t for the life of her fathom why. It smacked of manipulation, but that didn’t make his offer any less intriguing.

  Had Cormac lied to her? Was Viper really as dangerous to her as he had said?

  The addition of the stunning aspect to his tracking spell that had been intended to keep her from bolting said he was—but the thought of learning more about Cormac’s nature was too tempting a prospect to ignore.

  She gave a quick look over her shoulder to make sure Don wasn’t listening in before meeting Viper’s bright, avid gaze. “Fine. This afternoon. Say around 3? You already know how to find me.”

  “As long as you don’t pull the same trick you did last night. Bugger and blast, but I’d love to pick your brain about that.”

  Swallowing hard, she nodded. “As long as you promise not to try to pin me like a bug again while you’re at it, I won’t.”

  “Cross my heart,” he said, making an exaggerated “X” over his heart with the same finger he’d used to cut into the counter. “Ah, that smells delightful. Don, is it?”

  Don leaned around her to pass the wax paper wrapped sandwich over the counter, giving the Other the hairy eyeball. Viper accepted the food without further comment, leaving a twenty on the counter. He also waited patiently as Kimberly got him the coffee she’d been too flustered to remember he’d ordered.

  He then dipped his head in a slight nod to Don and gave her one last, wicked smile before he slipped out into the sun, hiding those strange eyes behind a pair of reflective shades.

  Kimberly wished she had some way of knowing whether she’d just signed a deal with the devil or if she’d found the answer to all of her prayers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Kimberly kept her head down for most of her shift. She was both concerned and relieved that Cormac didn’t come by to check on her. When she’d found the courage to ask Don if he’d swung by after she left the night before, he shrugged and said he hadn’t seen him.

  She would probably end up having to go to his shop to apologize, but she wouldn’t do it until after meeting with Viper.

  She also wasn’t sure what it said about her that she was more excited about the prospect of uncovering some of Cormac’s secrets than she was about meeting with an honest-to-goodness dragon.

  Xander showed up promptly at noon, grabbing one of the tables when Kimberly gestured for him to get one before anyone else in the growing line could. She wasn’t able to join him until Annabelle showed up a few minutes later and took over manning the register so Kimberly could take her lunch break.

  Annabelle managed to snag her for a moment before she took off.

  “Are you playing the field?” she asked with a grin and a nod in Xander’s direction. “What happened to your guy in the fancy suit?”

  Kimberly flushed and pulled away to grab a couple of sandwiches she’d had Don make for her and Xander before the lunch rush started. She gave Annabelle a “drop it” look before answering her.

  “It’s nothing like that. We go to school together. We’re helping each other with homework.”

  Annabelle gave her a knowing glance before hustling over to the register. Kimberly huffed and stomped over to join Xander, bringing the sandwiches over and settling into a seat across from her schoolmate. She had a hard time staying annoyed at Annabelle’s interest in her love life when she got close enough to see just how wound up he looked.

  He was practically vibrating with excitement, brown eyes alight. His sandy-colored hair was a bit tousled, and his shirt was clinging to him with sweat, like he’d run a long way to get to the café on time. Leaning forward, he stage whispered across the table, not yet touching his food.

  “You are not going to believe what I found out!”

  Wide-eyed, Kimberly paused with her roast beef on sourdough halfway to her mouth. “What? Something about Cormac?”

  “Sort of. Nothing you probably don’t already know. You heard he’s a dealer in arcane objects, right? Owns a weird store not too far from the school?”

  She nodded, then took a bite out of he
r sandwich, rolling her other hand in a motion for him to continue.

  “He’s no one you want to mess with. He’s got some powerful friends. Dragons, gryphons, unicorns, gargoyles—all kinds of strange creatures. Apparently he acts as a liaison between magi and earthbound elementals they want to contact for spell components. Phoenix feathers, dragon scales, unicorn hair—whatever you need, he can hook you up. So there’s that.”

  Kimberly mulled that over as she chewed. While not unexpected, it did make more sense why Professor Reed had sent her to him in the first place. If he was supposed to be some kind of middle man between magi and the rest of the Other community for requests of such a sensitive nature, it was no wonder he took such care not to take her straight to a dragon. Announcing what she was looking for in the Black Star instead of going directly to one of his friends made a bit more sense. No Other would ever trust him again if he had taken her straight to some unsuspecting dragon’s lair.

  By letting them come to her instead of the other way around, it kept him safe from retaliation or sullying his reputation and scaring off his sources of income. It didn’t tell her everything she needed to know about Cormac or his motives, but it did make a lot of sense why he had taken such care not to put her directly in the path of a dragon.

  She swallowed her food, then nodded. “Okay. That puts a few pieces of the puzzle in place for me. What about the Black Star? Or Rieva? Find out anything about them?”

  His eyes lit up, and he was practically laid out on the table in his efforts to go unheard as he leaned in to excitedly whisper his findings.

  “That’s where things get weird. Check this out—when I asked my parents about the Black Star Café, they both flipped out. Told me to stay away from it and pretend I never heard about it. It took me a while, but I managed to get the story out of them.

  “Rieva is some kind of draconic shifter, and she used to be a familiar. She killed her master. Can you believe it? Not let him die, not arranging for someone else to do it—she managed to resist the bond and used her own two hands. Claws. Magic. Whatever.”

  Kimberly’s eyes were wide as saucers. She’d never heard of an Other having the power to break a familiar bond. By its very nature, the bond should have made it impossible for Rieva to do harm, directly or indirectly, to her master.

  The bond filled the Other with a strong urge to protect their master, and was designed to prevent a familiar from doing any knowing or active harm to the mage who controlled them. Passively? They could sit back and watch as a car mowed down their mage—but they were supposed to be driven by an impulse to help or heal him if he survived.

  If the bond was strained and the familiar was powerful enough, as Kimberly had noted when James brought Sam the naga to her classroom, it was in the realm of possibility the familiar might think murderous thoughts really hard. Even say them, and spit out threats. He just wouldn’t be able to act on them, except indirectly. Even if something had hurt James, Kimberly was sure Sam would have been driven to do something to help him, no matter how much he hated the guy’s guts.

  While her first reaction was to dismiss the story as some kind of exaggeration or urban legend, she paused upon recalling how powerful and deadly accurate with her throwing knife Rieva had been. The changeling had been ready to kill her for stepping foot over her threshold. Hell, she’d tried to kill her. The only reason Kimberly was still alive was due to Cormac’s intervention.

  “I’d ask if you were kidding, but after what I saw, I can believe she’s capable of it. Whoever bound her must have been horrible to her. She’s not overly fond of us.”

  Xander gaped at her, then snapped his mouth shut when he remembered he had just taken a huge bite of his sandwich. He got it down and choked out a few words.

  “You met Rieva? And lived to tell about it?”

  Kimberly arched a brow. “Yeah. So?”

  “So? So? She’s like our personal bogeyman! She keeps that café of hers as a safe place from magi and vampires for—get this—mundanes and Others. She kills any of us who cross into her territory, and there are rumors she hunts vampires for sport. Mom would barely whisper her name when she told me the story.”

  It was a little late for it now, but Kimberly thought that would have been good to know before she’d gone traipsing into the woman’s lair.

  “No freaking wonder she hated me on sight,” Kimberly whispered. “I’m going to throttle Cormac for taking me in there. Cripes.”

  “Whoa, hold the phone. You’ve been inside the Black Star Café?”

  “At the risk of sounding redundant—yeah, so?”

  Xander slumped back into his seat, agape as he stared at her. She flushed and dropped her eyes, picking at her sandwich and rolling tiny balls of dough between her fingers from the pieces she broke off the bread.

  “It’s not like I would have gotten in without Cormac,” she said, not sure if she was making the excuse for him or herself.

  “Mom said finding that place is like stumbling on the lost treasure of Cortés. Rumor says it’s full of powerful unbound supernaturals at any hour of the day or night, and there isn’t a mage alive who knows where it is. Well, except for you now, I guess.”

  She frowned at him. “There’s no way I’m the only one who knows. Cormac does, so it can’t be that big a secret.”

  “Are you kidding? I bet The Circle or one of those other big covens would pay out the nose to know where it is. It’s not like any of us would know who to ask, or like any of the elementals would give up their safe house. I doubt even a familiar bond could make one of them tell. I mean, that’s the point of the place, isn’t it? To keep them safe from us.”

  Kimberly brushed the crumbs off her fingers and shoved her paper plate to the middle of the table. She’d completely lost her appetite, and was feeling more and more like she’d been railroaded into a position far above and beyond her capability to handle. Cormac hadn’t said a word about any of this to her. Hadn’t warned her or breathed a word about the importance of staying quiet about what she had seen.

  More important than that, he hadn’t told her what he was. The first time she’d glimpsed his aura, she would have sworn he was some flavor of earthbound elemental. Yet the second time she’d seen it, the sparks had led her to believe he was some kind of powerful mage. If that was the case, why would Rieva let him anywhere near her café?

  She needed answers. If even a fraction of Xander’s story was true, it was in her best interest to keep everything she had learned about the Black Star Café and its owner very much to herself. Something told her that her knowledge of its location might be dangerous, but that sharing that information could have deadly consequences.

  It was either terrifically flattering or horrifying that Cormac trusted her enough to show her the way. She wasn’t sure which yet, but she hoped the meeting with Viper in a few hours would clear up some of her questions.

  Xander took advantage of her momentary brooding to polish off what was left of his sandwich. With a shiver, she answered his questioning look at what was left of her lunch with a flick of her fingers for him to go ahead. She would have to work out something else for her dinner. He scarfed what was left down in just a couple of bites, licking a smudge of mustard off his thumb.

  “Listen,” he said, “I know you’re a little freaked out right now, but try not to worry. I didn’t tell my parents about you, I just asked a few questions. Your secret is safe with me.”

  Kimberly’s lips curving in a tremulous smile. “Thanks. I never doubted you—I was having one of those ‘look at your life, look at your choices’ moments.”

  He chuckled. “I doubt you’ve got anything to worry about. You walked in and out of the Black Star Café and met Rieva Ke’rin and survived. I know you had a rough time with some classes, but you’ve got a unique talent. All that has to count for something.”

  “Maybe. I could really use some help with some of the basics, though. Some of the conjuration stuff and a couple of the charms are still giving me
trouble.”

  “Sure, no prob. I’ll help you with that if you’ll lend me a hand with enchantments. You always ace those. Maybe you can tell me what I’m doing wrong. And show me some of those illusions, too.”

  “You got it.” Her smile eased into something a little less strained, a little more natural. “I’ve got to meet with someone later this afternoon and run an errand. Are you free tonight?”

  “Not tonight, but I’m free all day tomorrow. My place? I’ll take care of lunch this time around.”

  He wrote down his address for her on a clean scrap of napkin, and she tucked it away in her jeans pocket. As they got up to clear the table so she could finish her shift and make room for a waiting customer, he patted her shoulder on his way to the door.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her, tipping her a wink and a nod. “You’ve got this.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Kimberly wrapped up her shift at work, leaving Annabelle and Don to handle the rest of the heavy weekend traffic. Fridays and Saturdays were always the busiest, though Sunday afternoons tended to leave Don and whoever was on shift swamped. Kimberly, Annabelle and Thomas, one of the other two clerks who worked days, usually switched off on Sundays. Kimberly needed the paycheck, but she had promised her hours to Thomas when he begged for it last week to make the extra cash he needed to pay for some concert tickets.

  That was before she heard about the issue with paying the rent from her mother. She didn’t want to disappoint Thomas, but her mom had not left a note, and she had no idea if the rent was paid on time or not. The last time they had received a pay-or-quit notice had been early last year, and the two of them had to work around the clock picking up every shift and odd job they could to pay it off before they could be evicted. Kimberly had ended up missing two days of school, and would have had a third if not for the advance Don had given her when he noticed how ragged and stressed she was.

  He wasn’t always a bad guy. He had a protective streak a mile wide, but that only extended to those he thought were mundane like him and his wife and kids. Considering how he was on his last rope with her and how she was counting down the days until she could quit, she didn’t feel right asking him to extend her the same kindness this time around. It might save her and her mother from a few premature gray hairs, but she still had her pride, and she wouldn’t go begging for a handout unless she had no option left open to her.