No, strike that. That kind of question only opened her up for a whole slew of even more screwed-up things to come dropping down on her head. She had to get back to the damn bank.
It took her twice as long to get back to 8th Street and the front doors of Winthrop & Dirledge. She’d had to go ten blocks out of the way just to find another bus that transferred to the westbound Colfax ride—and that didn’t have magicals coming out of the woodwork to shoot her creepy stares or try to ask her when she was going to open it.
The Gateway. That stupid fucking door upstairs that glowed green and whispered sometimes in the middle of the night. If it was her job to protect it, why did everyone want to know when she’d stop protecting it? No way was every single pedestrian magical in the state part of some feudal cabal intent on taking the bank and the Gateway for themselves. That didn’t make any sense.
Better to just stick with the half-cocked plan she’d barely made and try to find the guy from the picture before she got herself into any more shitty situations.
Except for the fact that she’d have to leave the bank again to find the guy. Scrying was great for finding people and magicals and things, but there wasn’t exactly a spell for looking up someone’s last name, phone number, and known address. As far as she knew.
Jessica’s fingers fumbled with the keyring as she pulled it out of her pocket and extended the key toward the bank’s front door. The lock pulsed with blue light, echoed by a brief flash from the pendant tucked under her shirt, but the door didn’t unlock or open on its own like it had over the last few days.
She unlocked the door and shoved it open before immediately closing it again to lock back up behind herself. “Still freaking out in here?”
Of course there was no reply.
“Right. And I guess there wasn’t any chance of you telling me this place doesn’t exist in any magical database before I left?” Jessica stalked across the lobby, peeling off her jacket in the comfortable heat. “No, I guess not. Well here’s the thing. You ready to hear what I did find out?”
She withdrew the photo of Ben and Tabitha before draping her jacket over the desk, then pulled her phone from her back pocket. “First, there’s a seven-hundred-year-old law against publishing any kind of useful information about you. Which means the only way I’m figuring any of this out is by asking someone whose ability to talk doesn’t just disappear when I get thrown around that vault.”
A warning hiss came from the back hallway.
“Yeah, lizard, I get it. Something went wrong in there, and it’s still wrong. Thanks for telling me nothing’s changed in the last four hours. Item number two. Every single magical on the street apparently knows who I am and what my new job is. Even the ones who haven’t been here to see my face behind this desk. Any pointers on how that’s remotely possible?”
She wasn’t really expecting an answer, but not receiving one was still slightly disappointing.
Jessica shrugged and pulled up the screenshots she’d taken of the scrying spells, then dropped her phone on the desk. “Three. Denver’s magical library does have scrying spells. So that’s what we’re going with first, okay? I told you I’d figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it, so we’re starting with this guy.”
She stabbed the crumpled photo of Ben and Tabitha with her finger, then took a deep breath. Besides whipping up a not-so-simple ward potion two weeks ago to help protect the bank from the assholes trying to break in and take it from her, Jessica hadn’t had to refer to someone else’s spells in a long time. The scrying mishap in the library three years ago was probably the last time, and even then, she and Mel had cast that spell on a whim. Mel’s magic had centered around illusions, and Jessica’s repertoire was more suited for breaking and entering. And killing. Rufus had only come along as backup power.
Rufus.
Grimacing, she shook her head and pushed the image of the mage out of her mind. Rufus had nothing to do with this. And it certainly hadn’t been a scrying spell that killed him. No, that was all on Jessica and her unyielding need to be better than everyone else. To get more done in less time, and to hell with the consequences.
Not anymore.
“We’re going completely by the book this time.” She readjusted her phone on the desk and shrugged. “Or the screen. Same thing.”
The most promising-looking spell was part scrying, part summons in reverse. As far as Jessica could tell from the weirdly vague phrasing, the spell worked as a tracker for someone else’s energy and then built on the caster’s own magic to pull her toward whoever she was trying to find.
So all in all, if she cast this correctly, she’d end up pinning this Ben guy down and would then be guided toward him without having to refer to a damn map and crystal the whole time. Perfect.
“Ingredients. Okay. Bowl, Heartstring potion, labradorite, a piece of me, and a piece of him.” She looked down at the scrabble of Confucius’ claws across the floor as he zigzagged toward her. “If this picture doesn’t do it, I guess we’re screwed. Worth a shot, right?”
The lizard blinked and stayed where he was.
“About as useful as talking to a lizard.” She clapped her hands together and moved around the desk to head toward the shelves crammed with more artifacts, potions, trinkets, boxes, and randomly stacked items than she could ever possibly know what to do with. “But if talking to you helps me find these things faster, I’ll keep it up.”
Confucius opened his mouth and let out another loud series of clicks.
Jessica turned halfway to shoot him a sidelong glance. “You’re harder to understand than the bank, you know that?”
He took off toward the opposite wall of the lobby, his tail thumping on the floor every time he switched directions.
“Focus, Jess.” Her hand went automatically to the pendant resting against her chest, and the cool glass made her pause. New habits only took two weeks to form, after all. At least, that was what she’d read in a self-improvement book offered by MJ Pen’s disappointing selection of available prisoner reading.
Jessica snorted and dropped the pendant again. When all this was over, she’d get a brand new set of books and focus on clearing all the garbage in her head left over from twelve months consuming it behind bars.
Now where was that Heartstring?
She had no idea what it looked like, so she spent the next twenty minutes going through the assorted vials resting on their sides on the shelf between the stuffed owl and the pincushion studded with sewing needles that glowed with bright silver light every time her hand got close.
Good idea to stay away from those.
Finally, she found a square vial with black liquid inside, marked with a jagged piece of tan masking tape. The words “HString 4yrs” were scrawled across the tape in Tabitha’s crimped handwriting. Jessica wrinkled her nose and turned the vial over. For as much as the scryer could see of her own future, she really hadn’t done much to ensure Jessica would be able to understand her labels in Tabitha-specific shorthand.
“Confucius.” She turned around just as a large ball of red leather stitched with golden thread bounced off the shelf on the opposite side of the lobby and rolled toward the front. The lizard froze, half buried in the items on the bottom shelf with his back legs and tail sticking out. A hiss rose from the pile of loose yarn covering his front half. “I’m guessing you haven’t found the labradorite.”
The reptile jerked away from the shelf and scrambled after the red leather ball, opening his mouth wide. His jaws shut with a click against the side of the ball and sent the thing rolling farther across the room until it settled beneath the armchair. He raced after it, skittering across the floor to disappear after the new lizard toy he’d made of whatever that ball was supposed to be.
Jessica rolled her eyes. “Just know I don’t play fetch. So don’t even try.”
Confucius’ creaking clicks rose from beneath the armchair in reply before the leather ball bounced back out across the lobby.
She clenc
hed her eyes shut and shook her head. Just when she’d thought she was getting the hang of things here, the bank went mute, and now the lizard was trying to play. Was she the only one here who had any sense of urgency about this?
The pendant on her neck flashed once with a weak blue light, and she snorted. “I get it. Just seems a little counterproductive when you can’t actually say anything. How about a little help with the labradorite, huh? Otherwise, I’ll be here all the way through the night looking for the one rock we need to—”
Confucius let out a creaking moan that sounded oddly like a yelp of surprise when his next attack on the leather ball sent the thing bouncing three feet into the air against the shelf in front of Jessica. It knocked against a steel rod jutting over the side of the shelf. The end of the rod knocked over a vase of clear green glass, which toppled into a small box standing longways on its side.
“Whoa, whoa. Hey!” Jessica raced down the shelf, trying to stop the domino effect as item after item fell onto the next beside it. She almost stepped on Confucius’ tail and reeled away when his hiss joined the crash and jingle and thump of Tabitha’s collection knocking itself over across the long shelf. “Why are you always right here under my feet, you—”
A wooden herb cabinet ten inches tall teetered at the far end of the shelf, then finally toppled over and crashed to the ground. The hinged double doors flew open and spilled the contents all over the floor—twigs and stems bound together with leather thongs, an open bag of dried herbs, and a dozen crystals.
Jessica’s gaze settled on the edge of the labradorite lying halfway beneath the fallen herb cabinet.
“Huh. Well that’s one way to find what we need.” She pointed at Confucius. “Count yourself lucky you didn’t break anything.”
The lizard flicked his tongue out at her, then took off for the cabinet’s spilled contents. In a flash, he snatched the labradorite in his jaws and tugged it out, his claws scrambling madly over the other crystals and the bundled twigs before he darted toward the back hallway.
“Oh, no you don’t.” Jessica took off after him, kicking the red leather ball aside when it rolled back toward her. “Get back here!”
She chased the lizard down the hall, through the narrow kitchen in the back, and back up the much smaller hallway on the other side past the dusty, cramped office. But when she stepped back out into the lobby, there was no sign of the Halibus Racerback lizard scrambling across the floor.
“No. Come on…” Puffing out a sigh, she ran a hand through her hair and gazed into the dark corners of the room. “Seriously? You’ve been around longer than anyone, lizard. Do you really want to stand in the way of me finding this Ben guy so I can fix things around here? Just because you wanted to hoard a shiny—”
A loud metallic clang made her whirl toward the desk. Confucius stood on the surface beside an iron cauldron that definitely hadn’t been there when she’d stepped away to find her ingredients.
She scowled at the walls and ceiling of the lobby with the distinct feeling that if she could hear the bank in her mind right now, it would be laughing at her.
“Fine. You and this crazy-ass lizard play Fool the Witch all you want, but I have no idea why it has to be this hard.” She stormed toward the desk and pointed at Confucius again. “Off.”
The lizard stared at her until she raised her hand to swat him away. Then he booked it over the side of the desk and thumped to the ground. The scrabble of his claws retreated down the back hallway and ended in a loud thud.
Maybe he’d run into a wall. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Jessica peered into the cauldron and found the labradorite right there where she needed it. “You’re killing me with this.”
Leave it to a bank and an immortal lizard to nail down their roles as the world’s two weirdest spellcasting assistants.
She studied the square vial of black liquid she hoped was Heartstring. “Now would be the time to stop me if I’m wrong…”
But no. She was on her own for this, and the bank didn’t interfere with her again. Which was just as well, because after she plucked a hair from her head and stuck it in the cauldron with the upended vial of Heartstring, there was no going back.
There wasn’t much black potion in the vial. Certainly not enough to fill the whole cauldron. But the cauldron filled anyway, the level of thick black goo rising until it stopped an inch below the top of its magical vessel.
Jessica followed the spell to the letter. As soon as she dropped her own hair into the Heartstring, the whole thing flashed with purple light. Then she sank the photograph into the concoction, careful only to dip the side with Ben’s smiling face and not Tabitha’s into the thick Heartstring potion.
She’d leave summoning the dead to necromancers.
When she withdrew the photo, everything she’d dipped into the cauldron had been eaten away, leaving the charred edge of the picture smoking with the stink of sulfur before she set it down on the desk.
The pendant pulsed weakly.
“Yeah, yeah. Careful. I know.”
With a final glance at her phone for instructions, Jessica hovered the labradorite over the cauldron and muttered the incantation. This one wasn’t Latin or Greek or any language she’d seen back when she’d needed spellbooks and instructions to guide her. But no one had written an instruction manual for the kind of things Jessica could do. At least, what she could do when her magic was fully intact instead of half of it locked away in a box.
She shook her head and focused on the spell, swirling the labradorite around and around over the surface of the potion. Then she dropped the crystal into the goo, which instantly turned from black to yellow. The renewed stink of sulfur made her wrinkle her nose.
“Okay. So now we wait for the connection…”
Nothing happened. She didn’t notice a difference—no pulse of magic, no tug on her core. Wasn’t this supposed to make her feel something?
The potion bubbled once, then stilled.
She stared at the thick liquid almost the color of mustard. “Great. Another dead end.”
Her stomach growled furiously, breaking the silence in the lobby. Fine. If the potion and the spell worked, she’d find out sooner or later. If not, she’d only wasted most of the day searching through useless library databases and performing dud magic.
Jessica drummed her fingers on the desk, then took off for the back hall.
Confucius turned away from the witching vault’s door to face her and hissed again.
“Yeah. I know. But unless you know about some secret owner’s manual lying around somewhere and can actually get it for me, your two cents isn’t exactly helping.”
The doorknob to the witching vault pulsed with the same eerie green light that rippled across the black marble floors inside. The same light that pulsed from behind the Gateway upstairs.
Confucius skittered backward as she approached the door, staring up at her with those weirdly intelligent golden eyes. When Jessica reached slowly for the doorknob, the pulse of green light flared brighter around the brass knob.
She’d taken directions from the bank like this before she’d known about the pendant hanging around her neck and the fact that the entire building could actually talk to her. So if this was some kind of sign…
The bank’s front door rattled on its hinges, and she spun around. A silhouette darkened on the other side of the frosted glass as whoever stood outside tried unsuccessfully to push open the locked door.
“We’re closed,” Jessica called. “The sign says so.”
The rattling stopped, but there was no reply. And the silhouette didn’t leave.
Then the banging started.
“Oh, come on.” She stalked across the lobby again, followed by a wide-eyed, skittering Confucius. Whoever it was didn’t let up on the banging, which only grew louder and more urgent. “Hey, I said we’re closed. Breaking down the door isn’t gonna change that!”
No, breaking down the door would just activate the wards she’d
put up around the bank a week ago to keep anyone else from trying to break in.
Jessica paused when she realized those wards hadn’t activated at all. If this was another attempted burglary, whoever stood out there on the sidewalk should’ve been tossed all the way across the street by now. Why hadn’t they been?
“Please open the door,” the man called from the other side. “I don’t know what happened or what’s going on, but I really need to talk to Tabitha. It’s important. Please.”
Crap. She’d assumed by now that everyone who frequented this place had already heard about the scryer’s untimely—but still foreseen—demise. Now she had to tell one more magical that Tabitha Belmont no longer worked here. Or lived here. Or lived at all.
With a grimace, Jessica turned the lock with a sharp click and opened the door enough to look through the opening and meet her urgent client’s gaze. And he was the last person she expected to see.
“Well that was fast.”
Chapter Twelve
It was Ben. Straight from the picture but standing there in the cold November air and in the flesh.
His eyes widened as he looked her up and down. “Who are you?”
“Jessica.” She opened the door even wider and pointed at him. “And you’re Ben.”
“Yeah, and I’m looking for—wait.” He stepped away from the door and scanned the outside of the building. “How do you know my name?”
“Well, I’d say it’s a long story, but it’s really not. I bet we can answer a few questions for each other, though, if you wanna—”
“I need to talk to Tabitha.” Ben brushed past her and headed quickly across the lobby. He jerked aside when Confucius hissed and darted away from beneath the man’s feet, then he stumbled backward across the shelf beside the front door. A large, heavy globe—its map showing all the countries and continents but in the completely wrong places—wobbled and threatened to fall. Ben spun around to right it again, then backed away as if the thing had attacked him. “This isn’t right.”
The Cursed Fae (Accessory to Magic Book 2) Page 11
