Magic Breaks

by Ilona Andrews

  “Mind your own business,” Brook snapped.

  “He won’t,” I told her. “He wants to see what’s inside the desk.”

  Barka grinned.

  The lock clicked and the drawer slid open. Rows of apples filled it. Large Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, green Granny Smith and every color and shape in between, each with a tiny sticker announcing its name. Even a handful of red crab apples the size of large cherries, stuck between Cortland and Crimson Gold. I had no idea so many varieties of apple even existed. None of them showed any signs of rotting either. They looked crisp and fresh.

  I concentrated. My sensate vision kicked in. The apples glowed with bright green. Now that was a first. A healthy hunter green usually meant a shapeshifter. Human magic came in various shades of blue. Animal magic was typically too weak to be picked up by any of the machines, but I saw it just fine—it was yellow. Together blue and yellow made green. This particular green had too much yellow to belong to a regular shapeshifter.

  Most shapeshifters were infected with Lyc-V virus, which let them turn into animals. Sometimes it happened the other way and animals turned into humans. The human-weres were really rare, but I’ve met one, and the color wasn’t right for them either. Human-weres were a drab olive, but this, this was a vivid spring green.

  “What kind of magic did Ashlyn have?”

  Brook and Barka looked at each other. “I don’t know,” Barka said. “I never asked.”

  Whatever she was, she didn’t advertise it. Totally understandable. Seeing the color of magic was an invaluable tool for law enforcement, for mages, basically for anyone who dealt with it, so much so that people actually made a magic machine, called an m-scanner, to imitate it. My magic wasn’t just rare, it was exceptional. I was a hundred times more precise than any existing m-scanner. But in a fight, being a sensate didn’t do me any good at all. If I walked around telling everyone about it, sooner or later someone would try to use me and I had to use other means than my sensate ability to protect myself. It was easier to just keep my mouth shut.

  Ashlyn could be that kind of magic user, something rare but not useful in combat.

  Still didn’t explain her obsession with apples, though. Maybe she was using them to bribe her teachers. But then her grades would be better.

  The shorter of the three girls to our left glared at me. Her magic, a solid indigo when I came in, now developed streaks of pale celery green. Normally the magic signature didn’t change. Ever. Except for Kate.

  Hello, clue.

  I pretended to look at the apples. “Did Ashlyn have any enemies?”

  Barka picked up a pen and rolled it between his fingers. “Not that I noticed. She was quiet. A looker, but no personality.”

  Brook pushed her glasses up at him. “Pervert.”

  The girl took a step toward us. “What are you doing?”

  “Dancing!” Barka said.

  Brook didn’t even look in her direction. “Mind your own business, Lisa.”

  Lisa skewed her mouth into a disapproving thin line, which was quite a fit because she had one of those pouty-lip mouths. Eyebrows plucked into two narrow lines, unnaturally straight hair, carefully parted, pink shiny on those big lips . . . Lisa was clearly the Take-Care-of-Myself type. Good clothes, too. Girls like that made my life miserable at the old school. I was never put together enough, my clothes were never expensive enough, and I didn’t stroll the halls broadcasting to everyone who cared that I was much better than they were.

  But we weren’t at my old school, and a lot has changed since. Besides, she could be a perfectly nice person. Although somehow I doubted it.

  “You shouldn’t be doing that,” Lisa said, entirely too loudly.

  If I poked her, would her magic get even veinier? Was veinier even a word? “I’m looking for Ashlyn,” I told her.

  “She’s dead,” Lisa announced and checked the room out of the corner of her eye.

  Don’t worry, you have everyone’s attention.

  “Here we go,” Brook muttered.

  “How do you know that? Did you kill her?” Poke-poke-poke.

  Lisa raised her chin. “I know because I spoke to her spirit.”

  “Her spirit?” I asked.

  “Yes, her spirit. Her ghost.”

  That was nice, but there was no such thing as ghosts. Even Kate had never run across one. I never saw any ghost magic and I had seen a lot of messed-up things.

  “Did her ghost tell you who killed her?” I asked.

  “She took her own life,” Lisa declared.

  Brook pushed her glasses up. “Don’t be ridiculous. This whole ‘I see spirits’ thing is getting old.”

  Lisa rocked back on her heels. Her face turned serious. “Ashlyn! Show yourself, spirit.”

  “This is stupid,” Barka said.

  “Show your presence!” Lisa called.

  Yellow-green veins shot through her magic, sparking with flashes of dandelion yellow. Whoa.

  The desk shuddered under my fingertips. The chairs around me rattled.

  Brook took a step back.

  The desk danced, jumping up and down. The two chairs on both sides of me shot to the ceiling, hovered there for a tense second, and crashed down.

  Nice.

  Lisa leveled her stare at me. “Ashlyn is dead. I don’t know who you are, but you should leave. You disturb her.”

  I laughed.

  Lisa turned on her heel and walked out.

  • • •

  “SO LISA IS a telekinetic?” I asked.

  Brook shrugged. “A little. Nothing like this. The chair-flying thing is new. Usually she has to sweat to push a pen across the desk.”

  And this new power wouldn’t have anything to do with those lovely yellow-green streaks in her magic, would it? Like Ashlyn’s apples, yellow green, but not the same shade. Two weird magic colors in one day. That was a hell of a thing, as Kate would say.

  “You’re not leaving?” Barka asked me.

  “Of course she isn’t leaving,” Brook told him. “I haven’t finished the tour.”

  “When people tell me to leave, it’s the right time to stick around,” I told him. “Did Lisa have any problems with Ashlyn?”

  “Lisa has problems with everyone,” Brook said. “People like her like to pick on you if you have any weakness to make themselves feel better.”

  “She’s a dud,” Barka added. “Well, she was a dud, apparently. Her parents are both professors at the Mage Academy. When she was first admitted, she made a big deal out of all this major magic that she supposedly had.”

  “I remember that.” Brook grimaced. “Every time she opened her mouth, it was all ‘at the Mage Academy where my father works’ or ‘when I visited my mother’s laboratory at the Mage Academy.’ Ugh.”

  “She claimed to have tons of power,” Barka added, “but she couldn’t do anything with it, except some minor telekinesis.”

  “Let me guess, people made fun of her?” I asked.

  “She brought a lot of it on herself,” Brook told me. “Not everybody here has super-awesome magic.”

  “Like Sam.” Barka shrugged. “If you give him a clear piece of glass, he can etch it with his magic so it looks frosted. It’s cool the first time you see it, but it’s pretty useless and he can’t control it very well either. He doesn’t make a big deal out of it.”

  “It’s in Lisa’s head that she is super-special,” Brook said. “She feels entitled, like we’re all peons here and she is a higher being. Nobody likes being treated that way.”

  “Does she get picked on?” I asked.

  Barka shrugged again. “Nothing too bad. She doesn’t get invited to hang out. Nobody wants to sit with her at lunch. But that’s just pure self-defense, because she doesn’t listen to whatever you have to say. She just waits to tell you about her special parents. I guess she finally got her powers.”

  “Did she get them about the time Ashlyn disappeared?”

  “Yeah.” Barka grimaced. “Then she
started sensing Ashlyn’s presence everywhere. Who knows, maybe Ashlyn is really dead.”

  “Location spell says she is alive. Besides, there is no such thing as ghosts,” I told them.

  “And you’re an authority on ghosts?” Brook asked.

  “Trust me on this.”

  Ghosts might be better. I had this sick little feeling in my stomach that said this was something bad. Something really bad.

  I could call Kate and ask her what would cause the magic of two different colors to show up. The colors weren’t blended or flowing into one another the way Kate’s colors did. They were distinct. Separate. Together but not mixing.

  Ehhh. There was some sort of answer at the end of that thought, but I couldn’t figure it out.

  Calling Kate wouldn’t be happening. This was my little mission and I would get it done on my own.

  I tried to think like Kate. She always said that people were the key to any mystery. Someone somehow did something that caused Ashlyn to hide and Lisa really didn’t want me to keep looking for her. “Did Ashlyn have a best friend?”

  Brook paused. “She and Sheila hung out sometimes, but mostly she kept to herself.”

  “Can we go talk to Sheila?”

  Brook heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Sure.”

  “You’re leaving? In that case, Brook, hold this for me for a second.” Barka stuck the pen he’d been rolling between his fingers at Brook. She took it. Bright light sparked and Brook dropped the pen and shook her hand.

  Barka guffawed.

  “Moron!” Brook’s eyes shone with a dangerous glint behind her glasses. She marched out of the class. I followed her.

  We went down the hallway toward the staircase.

  “He likes you,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Brook growled.

  Sheila turned out to be the exact opposite of Ashlyn. Where Ashlyn’s picture showed a petite cutesy girly-girl, Sheila was muscular. Not manly, but really cut. We caught her in the locker room, just as she was going out to play volleyball. It’s not often you see a girl with a six-pack.

  She sat on a wooden bench by the small wooden room inside the locker room that said sauna on it. I wondered what the heck sauna meant. It was a first-class locker room; the floor was tile, three showers, two bathrooms, “sauna,” large lockers. The clean tile smelled faintly of pine. Special locker room for special snowflakes.

  “I don’t know why Ashlyn pulled this stunt.” Sheila pulled on her left sock.

  “Was she worried about anything?”

  “She did seem kind of jumpy.”

  “Did she have a problem with Lisa?”

  Sheila paused with the shoe on one foot. “Lisa the Dud?”

  Okay, so I didn’t like Lisa. But if they called me that, I’d get pissed off really quick, too. “Lisa who senses Ashlyn’s ‘presence.’”

  “Not really.” Sheila shook her head. “One time someone left a paw print on Ashlyn’s desk. She got really upset.”

  “What kind of paw print?”

  “Wolf,” Brook said. “I remember that. She scrubbed her desk for ten minutes.”

  “How big was the print and when did this happen?”

  “Big,” Sheila said. “Like bowl-sized. It was about a week ago or so.”

  Prints that large could indicate a shapeshifter, a werewolf, possibly a werejackal or a werecoyote.

  “If anybody had a problem with her, it would be Yu Fong,” Sheila said.

  “He is the only eighteen-year-old sophomore we have,” Brook said. “He’s this odd Chinese guy.”

  “Odd how?”

  “He’s an orphan,” Sheila said. “His parents were murdered.”

  “I thought they died in a car accident,” Brook said.

  “Well, whatever happened, happened,” Sheila told me. “For some reason he didn’t go to school. I heard he was in prison, but whatever. Anyway, he showed up one day, talked to Master Gendun, and got himself admitted as a student. He tested out of enough credits to start as a sophomore. He’s dangerous.”

  “Very powerful,” Brook said.

  “Uber-magic,” Sheila said. “You can feel it coming off of him sometimes. Makes my skin itch.”

  Brook nodded. “Not sure exactly what sort of magic he has, but whatever it is, it’s significant. There are three other Chinese kids in school and they follow Yu Fong around like bodyguards. You can’t even talk to him.”

  “And Ashlyn had a problem with him?” Somehow I couldn’t picture Ashlyn deliberately picking a fight with this guy.

  “She was terrified of him,” Sheila said. “One time he tried to talk to her and she freaked out and ran off.”

  Okay, then. Next target—the mysterious Yu Fong.

  • • •

  THE SEARCH FOR the “odd Chinese guy” took us to the cafeteria, where according to Brook, this uber-magic user had second-shift lunch. Brook led the way. I followed her through the double doors and paused. A large skylight poured sunshine into the huge room, filled with round metal tables and ornate chairs. At the far wall, the buffet table stretched, manned by several servers in white. Fancy.

  The students picked up their plates and carried them to different tables. Some sat, talking. To the right, several voices laughed in unison.

  To the left, a wide doorway allowed a glimpse of a smaller sunroom. In its center, right under the skylight, grew a small tree with red leaves, all but glowing in the sunshine. A table stood by the tree and a young guy sat in a chair, leaning on the table, reading a book. He was too old to be called a boy, but too young to be called a man, and his face was inhumanly beautiful.

  I stood and stared.

  I’d seen some handsome guys before. This guy . . . he was magic. His dark hair was brushed away from his high forehead, falling back without a trace of a curl. His features were flawlessly perfect, his face strong and masculine, with a contoured jaw, a tiny cleft in the chin, full lips, and high cheekbones. His eyebrows, dark and wide, bent to shield his eyes, large, beautiful, and very, very dark. Not black, but solid brown.

  I blinked, and my power kicked in. The guy was wrapped in pale blue. Not quite silver, but with enough of it to dilute the color to a shimmering blue gray. Divinity. He was either a priest or an object of worship, and looking at him, I was betting on the latter. Glowing like this, he reminded me of one of those celestial beings of Chinese mythology they made me learn about in my old school. He looked like a god.

  “That’s him,” Brook said. “And his guards.”

  Two boys sat at a second table a few feet away. “I thought you said there were three,” I murmured.

  “There are—Hui has algebra right now.”

  I scanned the two guys sitting next to Yu Fong—plain blue—and let go of my sensate vision. His face was distracting enough. I didn’t need the glow.

  “I’ll go ask him if he’ll talk to you,” Brook said.

  “Why don’t we go together?” They took the pecking order really seriously in this place.

  Brook compressed her lips. “No, they know me.”

  She made it about two-thirds of the way and then one of Yu Fong’s guards peeled himself from the chair and blocked her way. Brook said something, he shook his head, and she turned around and came back to me.

  Of course, it was a no. And now they knew I was coming.

  Well, you have to work with what you’ve got.

  I raised my hands and wiggled my fingers at the uber-magic guy. He continued reading his book. I waved again and started toward him, a nice big smile on my face. I’ve seen Kate do this, and if I didn’t screw it up, it would work.

  The first guard stepped forward, blocking my path. I gave him my cute smile, looked past him, and pointed to myself, as if I was being summoned over and couldn’t believe it. He glanced over his shoulder to check Yu Fong’s face. I drove my fist hard into his gut. The boy folded around my fist with a surprised gasp. I slammed my hand onto his head, driving his head down. Face meet knee. Boom! The impact reverberated through m
y leg.

  I shoved him aside and kept moving. The second bodyguard jumped to his feet. I swiped the nearest chair, swung it, and hit him with it just as he was coming up.

  The chair connected to the side of his head with a solid crunch. I let go and he stumbled back with the chair on top of him. I stepped past him and landed in the spare chair at the table.

  The uber-guy slowly raised his gaze from his book and looked at me.

  Whoa.

  There was a kind of serious arrogance in his eyes, a searing intensity and determination. Living on the street gives you a sixth sense about those things. You learn to read people. Reading him was easy: He was powerful and arrogant, and he imposed control on everything he saw, including himself. He had been through life’s vicious grinder and had come out stronger for it. He would never let you know what he was thinking and you would always be on thin ice.

  I touched the surface of the table with the tip of my finger. “Safe.”

  There was some scrambling behind me. Yu Fong made a small motion with his hand and the noises stopped. I’d won the right to an audience. Wheee!

  He tilted his head and studied me with those dark eyes.

  I smelled incense. Yep, definitely incense, a strong, slightly sweet smoke. “I always wondered, how would one address an object of worship? Should I call you ‘the lord of ten thousand years,’ ‘the holy one,’ or the ‘son of heaven’?” Dali, one of the shapeshifters, was teaching me the beginnings of Asian mythologies. Unfortunately, that’s as far as we got, since I only just started.

  “I am not an object.” His voice was slightly accented. “You may call me Yu.”

  Simple enough.

  “Is there something you want?” he asked.

  “My name is Julie Lennart.” Might as well go with the big gun. Most people didn’t know the Beast Lord’s last name so if he recognized it, it would be a good indication that he was some sort of magic heavyweight.

  “It is a weighty name for someone so small.” Yu Fong smiled a nice easy smile. He would smile like that while he watched a cute puppy play with a butterfly or while his flunkies were torturing his enemy. Take your pick. “The Beast Lord commands fifteen hundred shapeshifters.”