by D. R. Perry
I shook my head, snapping myself out of it. Kimiko still sat in my lap, but her eyes were glassy and far away, still lost in the hidden memory our first kiss had returned. I studied her face, finally reaching out to brush aside her bangs. The tiny star-shaped scar there was familiar because it mirrored mine. I finally understood why Mother had passed the responsibility of dealing with our intruder to me, and why she seemed to approve of and even like our would-be burglar despite her actions.
Kimiko Ichiro was my betrothed, had been since we were barely out of diapers. I could have someone take the tithing bracelets off, but I’d be stuck with her forever. And it didn’t matter one bit to either of our families whether or not we liked it.
Chapter Twelve
Kimiko
Blaine Harcourt was my betrothed. And someone had erased our memories of the whole entire event. I opened my eyes to find myself in his arms, his face bent over mine. Blaine’s eyes softened with concern, the amber-brown color reminding me of scotch. I reached up, touching the side of his face. My thumb strayed to the corner of his mouth and stopped. I felt my heart thud in my chest. Should I get so intimate with him right after finding something like that out? Maybe he wasn’t okay with being betrothed in general, or maybe not to me in particular.
“Thank Tiamat you’re okay.” Blaine stood up, carrying me to a chaise in the corner near his desk. “I wasn’t sure you’d come out of that trance on your own.”
“Well, I did. Sucks to be you.” I blinked. “What happened?”
“Memory suppression broke is my guess.” Blaine sat at his desk, fingers hitting the keys on his laptop. “But I’m asking the expert right now.”
“Expert?”
“Henry Baxter, Psychic vampire. He’s a Memory Psychic and a student at PPC, so if there’s some type of Magus who can take a memory like that and make it come back, he’d know about it.”
“Wait, you think the guy in the hat was a Magus and not a Psychic, even after the conversation we overheard this morning?”
“Um.” His fingers froze, hovering over the keyboard like a pair of umbrellas. “Huh. Good question, good point.” He stood, cracked his knuckles, and paced a couple of times in front of the chaise. “It’s just that, you know, when you’ve watched six of your friends go through near-death experiences at the hands of a mysterious Extramagus, you jump to conclusions.”
“I understand. But Occam had a Razor, and he knew how to use it. Simpler is better. Doesn’t it make sense that at least one of our parents wouldn’t want us to remember we were betrothed until we were old enough to lip-lock on our own? Maybe our parents hired him.”
“Oh, definitely. Thanks for pointing out my paranoia.” He glanced back at the screen. “Ha! Are you a Ravenclaw or a Gryffindor?”
“Um, Slytherin.” I rolled my eyes. “Duh.”
“Oh. Well, nobody’s perfect. I forgive you. Also, ten points to Slytherin!” Blaine chuckled. “Henry’s a Hufflepuff, but he totally agrees with your idea. It’s most likely a Psychic because Magi with that kind of power are extremely rare. Except, he says, it’s got to be a master-Level psychic. Someone who’d be qualified to teach doctoral-level stuff at PPC. And he only knows of one person like that who was around back then. His old mentor.”
“Awesome, so Henry can tell us if he looks like the guy in that vision thing we both got, and we can rule out the Extramagus.” I caught myself twirling my hair. Thinking about the Extramagus and our wrong-way Luck had me more upset than I wanted to admit.
“No such luck.” Blaine ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Ten more points to Slytherin if you can tell me why Henry can’t give us a description.”
“Master-level Mentor Man decided to wipe himself out of bunches of memories and hide for some reason.”
“Bingo.” Blaine pointed one finger at me, then winked. If I hadn’t been sitting, I might have fallen over in a swoon. He was downright sexy when he got studious like that. “Damn, girl. You’re going to win the House Cup for Slytherin all by yourself.”
I smirked, thinking of at least seven other things I’d rather win than some fictional award from a series of novels about a magical school. Blaine slowly opened his eyes, the smile draining from his face. I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he took one step closer to me, but he stopped and turned back to his computer.
“So, how are we going to find out who the black-hat guy is if Henry doesn’t know?”
“He’s got memories stockpiled somewhere.” Blaine rattled a few more messages out on the keyboard. “He’s been checking them, but it’s a tiring thing. Might take him years.”
“We don’t have years.” I sighed.
“I know.” He looked over his shoulder. “We also don’t have much help. No one’s in town. Henry and Maddie are in Vermont, and they can only take the night bus back, Josh and Nox won’t get here until tomorrow, and Bobby and Lynn are in Louisiana. All we have is Tony, and he’s hinkier than a hinkfest in Hinktown.”
“What about Jeannie?”
“She’s not part of the pack.” He shook his head. “Knows nothing about the whole Extramagus thing.”
“Are you sure?” My question made Blaine freeze.
“She shouldn't.” He ran a hand through his hair. Loud music or no, I still couldn’t tell him about Ismail, and where I’d found his lamp in the first place.
“She’s a Resident Assistant.” I shrugged. “The ones at The Academy seem to know everything all the time about all of us. Shouldn’t isn’t the same thing as doesn’t.”
“She did put Nox up in her room during all that Faerie trial business.” Smoke trailed out of Blaine’s nose. He opened his mouth, and a siren went off.
When he bolted for the door, I followed him. There wasn’t any reason to take off after him besides the bracelets, but I did it anyway. Before he ran past me, his face went as white as chalk. Whatever had caused this alarm was beyond serious business.
During the running, I started recognizing my surroundings. We were headed back to the vault, the part of the hoard Blaine had caught me in at the beginning of this whole mess. I almost turned back, feeling like the biggest idiot in the universe for not bringing my bag and Ismail’s lamp. I’d come to realize Blaine wanted to help me, but he didn’t know how. I had the answer to that in the drawer of the nightstand, but I’d never find my way up there and back in time, even if I didn’t get lost on the way. I’d thought maybe it was the perfect situation to get back on track for saving Dad, but I was wrong.
The door was open, sculptures toppled, displays broken, jewelry strewn like bright bits of shattered armor on a silenced battlefield. Blaine didn’t stop for that, and neither did I. Instead, I followed in his wake like a small craft trailing an ocean liner on a collision course with an iceberg. We heard the scuff of shoes on marble scant seconds after the scrabble of little claws.
“Friggin’ cockatrice again already?” Blaine muttered under his breath. I understood. One of those had almost killed Josh Dennison.
But I didn’t smell a cockatrice. I wondered why he didn’t realize that, although whatever had gotten in here was small. It smelled like dank, muddy fur and chitin, with no hint of venom. Almost at the back of the vault, a ring of bookcases towered like Stonehenge. They all faced away from us, plain oaken backs giving a starker and more forbidding feel than if they’d been placed with the book side in view. The space they encompassed was large enough to hold a full-grown dragon shifter and a half. Even Blaine hesitated, an homage to the fact that this was a place even he hadn’t been, and likely shouldn’t go even in an emergency.
A deep growl of frustration came from the other side of stacks weird enough to grace a Scottish heath. That got Blaine moving again. I followed him, dodging around one bookcase and then another until we stood together inside the ring. At the center was an egg the size of a year-old human baby. Its shell was mottled, sky-blue and poison-green. The man on the other side was hardly recognizable as Blaine’s stepfather. His clothing was in tatters,
and his hair was gone. All his visible skin was covered in skim-milk-white scales with blue edging. I watched him duck and bend, missing something that skittered across the floor.
And that was the source of that smell. Herpestidae ichneumon, also known as a Pharaoh’s Rat. I’d studied them for a report in my Fall semester, but I’d never seen one. It looked something like a mongoose, but with long fur standing up in muddy spikes. It had quills along its spine, reminding me of a shoddily-armored porcupine. Because I couldn’t remember whether they had magic, I checked its energy. It gleamed with pure golden Luck as it faked to one side and another, baiting Mr. Harcourt. Movement by the egg caught my eye. The Pharaoh’s Rat Blaine’s stepfather faced wasn’t alone. A second one was going for the helpless egg, and it had good Luck layered on its energy, too. I felt the air change, going warmer next to me. Blaine was either preparing to flame or shift, actions that could get him or the rest of us killed. Pharaoh’s Rats were deadly to dragons, able to burrow in for a long, slow, inevitable kill by internal hemorrhage. I couldn’t let that happen to Blaine.
So I pushed him. Blaine toppled directly into one of the bookcases, sending it crashing into the one beside it. He scrambled to stop the avalanche of shelves and tomes and I stepped between the second Pharaoh’s Rat and the egg, taking the action Blaine and his stepfather shouldn’t. Herpestidae ichneumon preyed on full-grown dragons and their eggs, a dragon shifter’s only natural predator. They had little to fear, especially since they could make themselves look like a ferret or a weasel even to Psychics and almost every kind of Magus. But Pharaoh’s Rats feared Tanuki. We saw through their illusions and were too small for their burrowing tactic to work. We also matched them in speed, but only when shifted.
My skin furred over, the old familiar itch covering every inch of my body. I felt myself change in the shoulders, hips, and hands. Losing my thumbs always sucked. If I’d been a raccoon shifter instead of a canine resembling one, we wouldn’t be packing the kind of magic I’d need to defeat this weaselly little rat in time.
I dashed directly toward the Pharaoh’s Rat going for the egg. It dodged just a hairsbreadth short of me, and I discovered it was female. One touch would be all I needed to turn her Luck bad. I might even be able to figure out where she and her mate had come from. Pharaoh’s Rats weren’t shifters, or even sentient. They couldn’t manipulate magic. They also couldn’t break into locked vaults, so someone must have sent them in here. Whether it was an inside job or magic, I didn’t know. The rat tried to get past me again to the egg, and that was when I caught her by the tail.
I stared, watching the gold in her Luck energy tarnish, turning dull and brassy like mine. Bad Luck was contagious, and although she couldn’t make hers affect mine, the reverse was not true. My Luck had tap-danced all over hers. She locked gazes with me, then looked over my head, and a trilled call something like a chuckle left her throat. I bit down harder and shook her. The creature’s head hit the floor, rendering her an unconscious heap.
I shivered at the displacement in the air and a chilly breeze that couldn’t have come from outside. When I turned to leap at the male, it was too late. Mr. Harcourt had fully shifted in order to use the full force of his magical Air breath on the male Pharaoh’s Rat. His open mouth made him vulnerable, making me think he was either stupid or so desperate to save his egg that he didn’t mind risking death.
I made one last desperate lunge at the creature’s hindquarters and tail, but missed. It had gone down poor Wilfred Harcourt’s throat.
Only one thing could save him now. I’d have to use one of the Luck charms I’d come here to steal.
Chapter Thirteen
Blaine
“Dad, no!” My tongue didn’t care that Wilfred wasn’t my bio-dad. Neither did the rest of me. I dashed across the room, unable to believe what I’d just seen. I could have been a victim, too, if Kimiko hadn’t knocked me out of the way. Pharaoh’s Rats could burrow into a dragon shifter in human form, though it was harder for them to get in.
My dragonish eyes had let me track her movements, so I knew she’d tried to stop the beast from entering my stepfather’s belly. After that, Kimiko took off, a howling brown-beige streak, and I didn’t know why. She sounded nothing like a wolf, more like a fox’s high-pitched wail. My stepdad shuddered all over, then coughed. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth, but no gore stained his teeth. Wilfred hadn’t been able to bite down on it in time, then. He flopped on his side and scrabbled at his chest as though something in there hurt him. I knew it did. I gulped.
My legs wouldn’t hold me up anymore. I sank to my knees next to the wintry-scaled and twitching form of the guy who’d taught me to knot a tie and fold a pocket handkerchief. Living with Wilfred had been a little like living with a Vulcan most of the time. His lack of demonstrated emotion didn’t make me immune to mine. Watching him die felt like watching an old and solid boulder on the cliff walk topple into the bay during a storm surge.
And he was dying. The Pharaoh’s Rat was in his belly, tearing him up. My teeth gnashed, my fists clenched in my hair, my eyes searched the room as my mind cycled through every item in this vault that might save him. There had to be something, a magic trinket or an ancient device to stop this. I didn’t understand why he’d shifted until I really looked at the egg. The pale blue splotches on the shell meant it was his. Wilfred had finally gotten the heir he’d always wanted. And if I failed to think of something, he’d never live to see his whelp hatch.
A flurry of light footsteps and the scent of Chanel Beige brushed past. Mother. Her face held a static expression as she took in the scene as immobile as an ancient Greek theater mask. Except hers wasn’t Melpomene’s tragedy or Thalia’s comedy. Mother’s features paused somewhere in between. And that’s why I didn’t see it coming in time to stop her.
A bright flash of reflected light, a sound like a ruptured tire, a smell like rusted-shut ingots pried open, and the acrid taste of bile in my mouth. Blood like a fountain from Wilfred’s throat, Mother’s hand embracing the hilt of a stardust-bladed dagger, more tightly than she’d ever clasped his in affection. He stilled immediately, except for the Pharaoh’s Rat writhing beneath the thin flesh under his ribs. Mother drew her blood-soaked arm back, plunging the dagger against him one more time. A muffled shriek blossomed, unfolding in pitch and volume as she twisted, killing the rat. And it was over.
Kimiko lowered her head and crept practically on her belly toward me, dropping a pair of gold cufflinks between us. She quivered against my side, shifting back to her human shape, as shameless of her nudity as Eve that first day in Eden. She clung to me, eyes on Mother, who’d paced over to the egg. With her clean hand, she caressed the shell, humming some lullaby I wasn’t sure I could recall. Maybe I didn’t want to remember it. No one had ever told me how my father had died. If it’d been like this, I definitely didn’t want to find out now.
“He wanted to disinherit you, you know.” Mother’s voice was husky, low but not sweet. “Cut you off completely once you graduated, and all because of the little one in here. I was having none of that. But he wouldn’t agree to an equal split. I found papers. He’d been trying to use his title as leverage with the Flights to get them changed behind my back.”
I wanted to ask her so many things. Why the flurry of excuses? All I could think was, had she talked this way about my father when he died?
“Mother, you don’t have to—” I couldn’t listen to her trash Wilfred like this now.
“Oh, but I do since it should have been me.” She turned, her eyes boring into mine but her hand still on the egg. She clenched her free hand, blood dripping from it. “I was supposed to be down here, but he gave me a break so you and I could have our discussion earlier. Otherwise, I’d have gone to my grave thinking it was he who did me in.”
“Wait.” Kimiko peered around me. “This is going to be a big problem for you, Mrs. Harcourt. You’ll be a suspect in his death.”
“I know.” She turned that Eye of Sau
ron gaze on Kimiko. I wrapped one arm around her in an instinctive gesture of protection. “You won’t, Kimiko.” Mother kicked the unconscious Pharaoh’s Rat. It was only then that I noticed her feet were bare. “In fact, I’d let you take those Lucky cufflinks you were burgling last night and let you go, but I can’t now. At least, not until Blaine does something for me.”
I glanced at the girl in my arms as the hope lighting her eyes plunged into a desert island despair. Her silence was an epic to rival The Odyssey. She had to save her dad, and I was more determined than ever to help her do it. I stood, scooping up the cufflinks and helping her up along with me. I dropped the Luck charms in the front pocket of my overshirt.
“What’s your price, Mother?” I shrugged off my flannel shirt and wrapped it around Kimiko’s shoulders. She put her arms in the sleeves.
“Take this thing and examine it for psychic and magical tampering.” Mother kicked the weaselly little would-be killer harder, propelling it in my direction. “Go down to Newport PD and tell the police everything you find out about it. After that, she can take her prize wherever it needs to go.”
She knew. Mother had known all along what Kimiko had been after, and maybe even why. She’d made an agreement with Mr. Ichiro to betroth us, wiped our memories, and let her future in-law suffer through rapid aging. I couldn’t imagine a legitimate reason for even a woman as ruthless and hard-hearted as my mother to do those things.
