“Aww,” he commented. “Now you’re going to have to spend all the tip money you made tonight getting new tires, honey. Too bad.”
He smiled as he slipped into the shadows and was gone.
Chapter Nine
Kera managed to keep quiet for about a block, at which point she became aware that her fingers were going white from how hard she was gripping the box. She tried to unlock her jaw to speak and only succeeded in making a growling noise.
Cevin shot her a look. “You okay?”
“Of course, I’m not okay!” Kera burst out. She stared at him. “Are you kidding me? That son of a bitch shot my bike!” With each word, her voice rose until she was shouting, and she banged one fist uselessly against the door. She wanted to scream.
It could have been one of them. She’d thought it had been one of them, which made her angry about caring about Zee, but she still did care about Zee, and—
“I’m so sorry, Kera.”
She shook her head and looked out the window so she wouldn’t have to make eye contact. “It’s not—”
“I wish there’d been a way to warn you,” Cevin continued.
She looked at him sharply. I’m so sorry. It hadn’t been a platitude; he blamed himself for her getting caught up in it. She took three deep breaths, counting them. She was fairly sure from what she’d seen and heard that he wasn’t responsible for any of it, and anyway, it wasn’t like he could go back in time and save Zee.
She tipped her head back against the seat.
“Hey,” Cevin said.
Kera looked over.
“I’ll help pay to have someone fix it up,” he told her.
“Cevin…” She couldn’t afford to fix it right now—damn her mother for being right again—but this seemed like too much.
“Shouldn’t cost too much,” he said. “Besides, property damage is part of the deal when you own a business. I’d rather be a boss who treats people right. Besides, I was afraid it would blow up, so I guess we were lucky.”
“You know that doesn’t actually happen, right?”
He shot her a grin. “Joking, joking. Anyway, I’m sure the pros can handle it.”
“Look, I appreciate the offer,” Kera told him, “but that’s a hell of a big favor, and it really shouldn't be necessary. I am a pro. Well, sorta. Just need to fix the holes in the tank and repaint it. I can do most of that with what I have. I even picked the paint job specifically because it doesn’t show every scratch like the shiny ones do.”
“That’s thinking ahead,” Cevin replied with a grin. “You know how I never wear white shirts? Same idea.” He cleared his throat. “Just, you know, not as badass. Also, I don’t remember your address from the background check, so you’re going to have to give me directions.”
Giving him the directions proved to be a good distraction, and both of them relaxed as the drive went on.
“Where should I put this, by the way?” Kera asked at a stoplight, holding up the cigar box.
“Under your seat is fine.” Cevin’s expression was halfway between embarrassed and guilty. “It’s good that you didn’t try to use it. It’s, uh, not loaded, truth be told.”
“Okay, but he also had the drop on me,” Kera told him. “Not a lot of good is going to happen when one person has their gun out and the other person’s is in a box.”
Her employer chortled. “I suppose not. Even less good would have come if you’d pulled the trigger on him and gotten nothing but a click, but I’m impressed that you brought it out. You’re a little feistier than I expected. If someone had asked me to guess who on my staff had shot a firearm before, I wouldn’t have guessed you. No offense.”
Kera shrugged off the comment. “My mom wanted a genteel princess, but my dad let me try whatever I wanted—martial arts, woodworking, motorcycles, guns. I stopped shooting regularly when my ears kept ringing too bad.” She saw Cevin open his mouth and cut him off. “Yes, I was wearing earplugs. Still got tinnitus, though.”
Cevin nodded and followed her silent indication to pull onto her street.
“So, who was that guy?” Kera asked. “Maybe I shouldn’t be asking about it, but let’s say I’m curious.”
“I’m not sure,” Cevin confessed. “He wanted to make some kind of arrangement where I let him ‘do his thing.’ I figured he was there to shake me down for protection money at first, but he claimed that wasn’t his game, so he probably wants to be able to push drugs.”
“Ugh,” Kera groaned. “The joys of operating a small business in a large city. Are you sure it was only one guy?”
Cevin thought it over. “One guy alone in the parking lot as far as I could tell, but I’m sure he’s got other people he works for. Or working for him. Who knows? Might be three assholes in a bargain-basement gang, might be the whole fucking mob.”
“Could be,” Kera acceded. “You can bet they’ll be back to try to force the issue sooner or later, though, especially if he got like this after a single discussion. I don’t have any bright ideas on how to deal with it, but if I think of any, I’ll let you know.”
“Same.” He grunted. “But don’t go thinking this is your problem to solve, okay?”
Kera didn’t comment.
“Kera…”
“Fine.” She shrugged. She knew Cevin wanted to keep his employees safe, and she wasn’t going to worry him.
She also wasn’t going to stop thinking about it. It was the only thing that kept the feeling of powerlessness from swamping her.
When they arrived at the warehouse, Cevin insisted on waiting outside to make sure she got in safely. He stayed until she had opened the door and waved, and it was only when she was inside with the door locked that she heard him pull away.
Once he’d left, she dropped her backpack on the floor and stood staring at her room. When she’d left this morning, she’d been annoyed at her mother, sure she was doing the right thing with her life.
Right now, she wasn’t sure what she thought about anything. The crash was coming after the adrenaline rush of their confrontation in the alley, and she wasn’t sure what to do to keep going.
She rubbed her face. “Shit,” she muttered into her hands, then she took a deep breath. “Food. Change. Come on, MacDonagh, keep moving.”
She brought her backpack over to the table and went to the fridge, where there were the remains of some pad thai she had ordered two nights ago. She set it to heat in the microwave, then changed out of her work clothes into pajamas.
When the pad thai was gone, along with two full glasses of water, she allowed herself to consider going off autopilot. She looked around. She could hang up the gym equipment, except she would certainly need another shower, and probably some tools she’d have to go to a store to get…
Which she couldn’t do without Zee.
She could do some martial arts forms, she supposed, but her stomach was too full for that.
She rubbed her face again and went over to the bed to check her phone. Since she hadn’t used it for most of her shift, it still had an almost-full battery. When it opened, it was still on the reading app she had used.
“Ugh.” She was not up for staid business reading tonight.
Then she remembered what the book was. Grinning, she sat up and scooched over to the wall so she could sit and read.
To her surprise, there wasn’t much in the way of an introduction. She would have liked to have read the history behind this book, like where it had been found and who was thought to have written it. The title seemed modern, but the wording in some of the spells was archaic, which led her to believe that it had been written in some sort of old English.
“Ye olde spelle booke,” she mused to herself as she flipped to the end. No appendices or ‘About the Author’ pages there, either. “Curiouser and curiouser. What d’you think, Zee? Someone dug up an old grimoire, scanned it, and gave it a fancy modern title?”
She looked up as she finished speaking and her smile faded. Zee wasn’t there, of course. In fact, Zee wasn’t
even in an auto shop, warm and toasty while waiting for repairs. No, her bike was out in the rain with a punctured gas tank.
The craziness of the night threatened to overwhelm her for a moment, and her chin trembled.
There was one thing the jerk hadn’t counted on, though: anyone who tried to scare her or browbeat her into doing things their way was in for a big surprise. It hadn’t worked in grade school when Eva Lucas had tried to get everyone to stop talking to Amanda Maynor. It hadn’t worked in high school when her mother tried to keep her from learning how to shoot guns. It hadn’t worked in college when several professors and her cheerleading coach had tried to keep her from majoring in Computer Science.
And she sure as hell wasn’t going to let some jerk who didn’t understand the word “no” shoot up the bar. Cevin might be blaming himself, but Kera knew where the shooter had first started disliking the Mermaid—and she knew that people like him wouldn’t just take one concession. They’d walk all over you if you gave them the first chance.
When he came back, she was going to be ready for him. She had no idea how, of course, but she’d come up with something.
Maybe there was a spell somewhere in the book.
That was the dose of humor she needed to get back on an even keel. With a grin, Kera tapped over to the table of contents and scanned through the spells.
“Forgetting something… Oh, shit, is that really brain bleach? Maybe even the ancient druids had stuff they wanted to forget.” She snickered as she tapped to turn the page. “Purifying water, probably useful. Finding water, also useful. Ah, here we go: fire spells.”
Once she was in the relevant section, she scanned it. There were spells for extinguishing fire, spells for lighting candles or creating a spark in kindling, and several warnings about starting a fire you couldn’t put out without magical means.
If this weren’t a book of magic spells, Kera would say those warnings came from experience. As it was, maybe they just had good sense.
One section in particular caught her attention: Fire. Kera didn’t have to think for more than a second.
“Yeah, fire sounds good, and I know just where I want that asshole to feel it. So, ancient book, how do I do this? Is there a potion, or…”
There was no potion. Instead, one was supposed to move one’s fingers much in the same way as snapping them, the idea being to conjure the mental image of a spark striking from flint. At the same time, one must seek to connect one’s inner power to the ambient power that covered the world. The book noted that what had primarily been thought of as ‘ley lines’ were not lines and tended to shift over time.
“Whatever,” Kera muttered. “I don’t care where they are. I just want to light this guy’s crotch on fire. All right. One, two…”
The flare of light caught her by surprise. She yelped and scrambled back on the bed, running into the wall immediately. Her fingers were smarting. She looked at them, then at the empty air where she knew she had seen a flare of magic.
“No way,” she breathed.
Chapter Ten
When James awoke, it was not to the pale sky of an early winter morning, but instead to the strong, direct rays of midday sunshine.
For the first time in weeks, he felt well-rested. He sat up and stared out at the blue sky with a smile on his face before pushing the covers back and standing up to stretch. He pulled the spread up his bed. He used magic for things such as drafts, not for smaller things like making a bed.
Besides, it was always better to start a day with attention to form and detail.
He came downstairs in a chipper mood and was nearly done with breakfast when Mother LeBlanc arrived in the kitchen. She poured herself a small cup of coffee, laced it liberally with sugar, and came to sit with him.
“You look restored,” she told him.
James, his mouth full of eggs and toast, nodded.
“You will be pleased to know that the activity on the map continues.” She sipped her coffee. “And though my eyes could be deceiving me, I believe I see some recurring locations.”
“Did you sleep?” James asked her. He had never been sure she did things like that. Mother LeBlanc, in his mind, existed without the constraints of other mortals.
“Yes,” she said in a way that made him wonder further.
He finished his food while pondering the possibility of immortals masquerading as humans. After all, sometimes folktales got things right. Perhaps they were right about vampires, too.
Had he ever seen her teeth? He grinned around a mouthful of food.
“I assume there’s a reason for your mirth,” she commented.
“I was considering the idea that you might be immortal,” he explained cheerfully.
“Ah. Well, in that case, I would have wasted a great deal of time on unnecessary caution.” She sipped at her coffee. “Though, given the aforementioned immortality, perhaps the wasted time should not concern me too much.”
“That’s the spirit. Shall we start working on the changes to our map?”
She nodded and stood, bringing her cup to the sink. She thanked him in a low voice when he took it from her and led the way through the darkened hallways.
In the council chamber, the map lay deceptively still. There were presently no blooms of light on its surface, which disappointed and heartened James in equal measure. He wanted to learn where their new recruits might be.
“We should be able to modify it so that lights don’t show up only when the magic is actually being practiced,” James said. Since he had developed the original spell, he was taking the lead role in modifications. “What I would like to do is add a time component, with the color changing to show how long it has been since the magic was used.”
“That is very clever.” Mother LeBlanc sounded impressed. “I had not thought of that, but of course it will help us determine who is most in need of immediate intervention.” She tapped the corner of her mouth with one finger. “But how exact is it?”
“That’s the question,” James said. “I’ve thought about it two ways. First, should we allow enough variance that someone practicing magic on one side of their living room doesn’t show up as a different event from them practicing it on the other side of their living room? One assumes yes.”
She nodded.
“But what about apartment buildings?” James pointed out. “Multiple people on different stories of the same building, or people who share a wall?”
“I wouldn’t think there would be many of those.”
“Neither would I,” James pointed out, “except that we initially got far more potential recruits than either of us imagined.”
LeBlanc nodded, her eyes distant as she thought.
“How would one make it more or less exact?” she said finally. “You mentioned the mechanics of it in abstract at the meeting, but nothing in-depth.”
James explained, pulling out the notebook he had used to create diagrams of the spell. Not for the first time, he wished there had been more advances in the field of thaumaturgy.
Magic was a force humans could summon, and it could be exhausted, just as human energy could be exhausted. The mechanics of that were not well-known, however. While there had been two notable thaumaturges who’d worked to codify the differences in spell-working techniques, as well as some, like LeBlanc, who had studied the magical fields around the earth, the number of thaumaturges was vanishingly small compared to the number of humans.
Therefore, where science had several hundred luminaries who had changed the course of a field, thaumaturgy could not boast the same thing.
Nor, of course, was it safe to expose the existence of magic in order to gain more insight.
While James explained, LeBlanc produced a notebook and fountain pen from the folds of her dress and took notes. What language they were in, he did not know, but he did not recognize the alphabet. Perhaps it was her own shorthand.
The two of them had rarely worked together, and he was pleased by the questions she brought
to the topic. It did not take long for them to settle on a method of determining individual magic users and less than the usual number of tries to get the spell up and running.
“What we really need,” James said at the end, “is someone to…what do they call it in software?”
“I am not the correct person to ask, James.”
“Fair enough.” James spun his hand to indicate that he was thinking. “That thing where you test something a lot to make sure it doesn’t run into problems? Quality! QA, that was it. I don’t think anyone has ever done that with thaumaturgy before.”
“You have a good point,” she conceded. “Perhaps one of our new recruits will help us with that. In the meantime, we both need rest.”
James nodded. He had only woken up two hours ago, but he was exhausted from the magical workings. Over time, one grew better at using magic without drawing on one’s own energy, but complex workings were always exhausting.
“The one problem with living in the middle of nowhere,” James muttered, “is that you can’t just order a pizza. I could really go for…oh, eight pizzas or so right now. You?”
“Barbecue,” Mother LeBlanc said with a smile. “Slow-roasted meat, freshly-made cornbread, some greens, black-eyed peas…oh, and sorrel.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had it.”
“Then you should hope some of our new candidates are in Jamaica,” Mother LeBlanc said lightly. “Even the chefs in New Orleans don’t make it the same way.”
Sven watched as Pauline marked locations on a map. So far, the group had found success in Little Tokyo and Chinatown, but Sven had struck out at the club he and Johnny had gone to the night before.
Anxious about his tally, he’d gone to two more bars as well to bump his numbers up.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell from Pauline’s demeanor if she was angry. Her face hadn’t so much as flickered when he gave her his stats.
She finished making a note and looked up. “Where is Mr. Torrez?”
“Uh.” Sven scrambled mentally. Was he supposed to be covering for Johnny? That was the general rule, but Johnny hadn’t mentioned anything in particular.
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