Lucian directs his attention to Foley, who’s still sitting against the pillar but looks considerably more coherent than he did a few minutes prior. He’s contorting his arms and legs to reduce pain as his restored healing factor yanks dislocated joints back into place and realigns broken bones. “There’s your reason,” Lucian says. “Foley Banks, heir to House Tepes. Still living and breathing, thanks to the efforts of a Crow.”
A glimmer of understanding flashes across Ella’s face. “I see. So it’s tit for tat. One of ours saved a vitally important one of yours, so you’re returning the favor.”
Lucian nods. “Exactly. No games. Just a fair exchange. Your organization played a very important role in maintaining the integrity of the most powerful noble vampire house tonight. And it cost you a lot. As an agent of House Tepes, I therefore feel obligated to offer you aid in return.”
Ella hesitates, no doubt weighing how it might look to other supernatural groups if they catch wind of DSI taking favors from the Vampire Federation. But her desire to help her friends and respected colleagues wins out in the end. She acquiesces with a curt, “I accept your offer,” and calls over two of the agents who received more minor injuries than most, Harmony Burgess and a young man from the lower-level team. Ella explains to them what she needs and what it’ll get DSI in return.
The young guy balks at the idea of giving blood to a vampire, but Harmony doesn’t even flinch. She immediately holds out her arm to Lucian, who responds with a gracious nod before chomping down and taking a long drink. Harmony’s jaw tightens at the sting of the bite, though she relaxes shortly after as the venom spreads through her veins.
The young guy shifts back and forth on his feet, ambivalent as he watches the “donation,” but then somebody cries out in agony from the triage area. It must be someone he knows, because he suddenly rips himself out of his reluctance and thrusts his arm toward Annette. To her merit, Annette bites down more gently than Lucian, not wanting to startle the guy. He closes his eyes for a second anyway, like he expects a lot of pain. Then he realizes it doesn’t hurt that much and gives Ella and me a sheepish look.
Ella responds with a thankful smile.
Lucian releases Harmony’s arm when he’s satisfied he’s had enough blood. He closes his eyes as his healing factor accelerates and begins renovating his entire body like it’s a house flip job. The mangled arm is the first wound to regenerate, muscle and bone and blood vessels reforming in seconds. When that job is mostly finished, a second begins. A large, nasty burn on his right shoulder and upper chest, skin blackened and peeling away from muscle, is restored inch by inch along its jagged edges.
As soon as Lucian is strong enough to support his weight, he disentangles himself from Annette and heads toward the triage area. Ella and I follow him, leaving Harmony to take care of the young guy when Annette is done with him. Lucian’s first stop is Desmond, who’s on the outer edge of the triage area. He kneels next to the fallen man and examines the head wound, which looks even worse up close, white skull peeking through the caked blood. Lucian holds his hand over his shoulder and motions with his fingers. “Got a knife I can borrow?”
Ella dutifully pulls one from her stash and hands it to him.
Lucian tips Desmond’s chin back and pulls his mouth open, not unlike what I did with Foley earlier. He then drags the knife horizontally across his own wrist, and presses the fresh wound against Desmond’s mouth, careful not to spill a drop. The amount he gives Desmond isn’t large, but the effect is almost immediate. The laceration on Desmond’s head starts to close, and the man himself comes around to muddled consciousness less than a minute later.
Ella bends down to speak with him, grasping his shoulder and murmuring in low tones, while Lucian moves on to the next critically injured agent, a guy whose face is in such tatters that I can’t recognize him. As Lucian is administering his blood to this man, Annette joins us in the triage area and saves the life of a thirtyish detective named Olivia who I’ve spoken to a couple times in the past. She has two children under the age of ten.
I let the two vampires work without comment, and check on each agent briefly when they move on to the next casualties in the lineup. A few times, I look over my shoulder to make sure the paramedics aren’t in the building yet, because we’d have a really hard time explaining this blood exchange to people who don’t know about the supernatural. Thankfully, the paramedics don’t appear until Lucian and Annette are nearly done. The first wave makes it through the empty frames of the front doors just as Lucian is standing up and tidying what remains of his suit.
He tosses Ella’s knife back to her and gives me a mock salute, the cut on his wrist already healed despite the fact he reopened it a dozen times. “So,” he says in a low tone, “it appears I missed a grand finale.” He juts his thumb over his shoulder, pointing to the enormous scar on the wall and the charred bits and pieces collected at the base, all that remains of Lizzie Banks other than the wisps of black dust floating in the air. “How’d that happen?”
“Uh, well,” I start, “it’s a funny story…”
“Cal threw a giant lightning bolt at her.”
Lucian makes a half-turn to reveal Amy standing behind him. She’s so diminutive compared to Lucian, I didn’t even see her creeping up to us. She took a few hits during the battle herself, some broken fingers, a few deep cuts and wide, darkening bruises, but she’s in better shape than most of the agents. Earlier, she was among those carrying the wounded to the triage area, but she vanished after that. Must’ve gone outside to update the agents stationed on the perimeter.
Amy puts her hands on her hips and eyes Lucian with disdain, then slaps the same look on me, plus a cocked eyebrow. “He fried her to a crisp, all right.”
“Did he now?” Lucian drawls. “He also appears to have come back from the dead.”
“Eh?” Amy’s expression hardens. “You weren’t fucking around about that? He really died?”
“I was most certainly not fucking around.” Lucian runs his calculating gaze over me again, lingering on the holes in my clothing that should signify grievous wounds, particularly the gaping tear in my shirt where Lizzie impaled me with her hand. “You’re pulling from a much larger bag of tricks than I thought you had, kid. You been holding back on me this whole time?”
“I’d like to know the answer to that too.” Ella halts next to Lucian. “Honestly, Cal, I don’t understand any of this. You have magic now, but you didn’t before?”
“Not possible in most circumstances,” Lucian chimes in, saving me from having to produce an answer to a question I can hardly fathom. “And I’m pretty sure none of the exceptions occurred tonight.”
“So, what,” Amy says, pointing at me, “you’re suggesting he had magic this whole time but somehow didn’t realize it?”
Ella raises an index finger, signaling for us to stop talking. The paramedics have reached the edge of the triage area and are quickly working through preliminary exams. Lucian turns away from them so they can’t see his exposed amber eyes. He motions for us to walk over to the pillar where I left Foley. Annette is already there waiting for us and has positioned herself in such a way that no one can glimpse her vampire nature or Foley’s. We hurry over, leaving the triage area to the caring hands of the paramedics who are about to be very confused as to why some of their charges have damaged clothing with no matching injuries. Oh, well. We can only do so much.
Halfway to the pillar, Lucian suddenly runs his finger down my arm and tucks that finger into his mouth. It takes a couple seconds of disgusted gawking before I realize he wiped off the half-dried blood around the scabbed puncture wounds where Foley drank from me. Lucian plucks his now cleaned finger from his mouth with a wet plop and smacks his lips several times, brows wrinkled, eyes directed at a distant point, as he appraises the taste of my blood.
“What was that for?” I mutter.
“Testing a theory,” he answers cryptically. “Interesting results.”
“What t
he hell does that mean?”
Lucian grasps my shoulder and leans close to my ear. “It means we need to have a private chat. An hour from now, meet me on the roof.”
“I don’t—”
“Kid,” he says, sincerity overriding his typical flippancy, “trust me when I say this is not a conversation you want to have in front of your friends. Not yet. It’s one of those things people have to process before they let the whole world pick it apart. Else you’re going to fall to pieces along with the lies.”
A shudder runs down my spine. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Don’t freak out.” He slaps my shoulder and smears the false levity back onto his face. “It’s nothing bad. It’s just…big.”
I clench the fabric of my ruined suit pants, crusted with blood and debris. The energized sensation of my magic—god, what a weird thing to say, my magic—has receded to wherever it resides, somewhere in my soul. But I can still feel its echo, a faint tingle under my skin. “Big, huh?”
Lucian flashes me a legitimate look of sympathy before flipping back on his trademark grin as Amy and Ella, marching in front of us, arrive at the pillar and stop at nearly identical angles that will prevent them from showing their backs to any of the vampires. They might’ve accepted help from Lucian and Annette, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be implicitly trusting anybody with sharp fangs anytime soon. There aren’t normally many vampires in Aurora, and the ones who put themselves on the radar are almost inevitably dangerous criminals. Lucian was among that number once, back when his job as a Federation spy was still under wraps. It’s hard to trust a guy—or his friends—after he serial murders his way through your city and instigates a reign of terror destined to become a highlight in the annals of criminal history.
Annette ignores their open hostility and says to Lucian, “We should leave while there are still exits not guarded by the human authorities. I think we’ve caused enough scenes for one night. We can only hope none of the gala attendees got a good look at the Knights who were prowling around the party at the time the fire alarm went off. When we followed Lady Banks back here, those idiots were already revved up for a fight. They weren’t even hiding their eyes. And there were still humans clogging the doorways.”
Lucian shrugs. “If they did see something, the authorities, sans DSI, and the medical personnel will simply disregard their stories. Think they witnessed some totally normal phenomenon that got warped by the fear and confusion during the evacuation. It’s well known that human memories are unreliable in times of great stress.”
For some reason, I feel like that statement is directed at me.
Annette and Lucian help Foley to his feet—he’s able to stand on his own, but his legs are still wobbly—and guide him around the pool on the floor, toward what remains of the grand stone staircase. The door that opens into the maintenance stairwell is still intact because it stands about twelve feet to the left of where my lightning bolt struck the wall, so there’s a good chance the basement is still accessible from here. Meaning the three vampires can sneak away from the museum without being seen by anyone, and without being caught on camera by the army of news crews that are doubtlessly prowling around the area by this point.
Even if you only catch a vampire’s speed blur on camera, that’s still more than enough to raise suspicion with a particularly keen journalist.
While Lucian and Annette are busy clearing the rubble around the door, I ignore the pointed stares from my teammates, who still want to know about my sudden proclivity for magic, by kicking around a few clumps of ash on the floor. It’s not until I prepare to crush a finger-shaped piece under my shoe that I remember most of this ash is what remains of Lizzie Banks. I hold my shoe over the crooked black finger for a second. Then I stomp on it as hard as I can and kick up the remnants into the air, where they puff away to nothing.
A sense of bitter satisfaction courses through me, and I seek out another piece to smash into nonexistence. Only to glimpse a gold, glittering object hidden under what looks like a length of Lizzie’s arm. I pluck it out of the ash pile and wipe it clean with one of the few white spots left on my shirt, revealing that the object is the charm bracelet Lizzie used to threaten me.
My stomach folds over on itself.
Lizzie claimed each of the dangling charms contained a shade she sealed away so that she could torture selected victims in perpetuity by forcing them to watch her commit heinous acts from a prison they could never escape. Back when I was in the abandoned office building, I sensed that the bracelet was indeed imbued with magic, which I took to mean her threat was real. Now that she’s dead, however, are there still shades trapped in the bracelet, or were they freed when Lizzie died and her magic energy dissipated? Concern growing cold in my chest, I flip on my magic sense and examine the bracelet more closely.
I almost drop the bracelet in shock. Not because I see anything terrifying but because my magic sense has changed substantially. The clouds and fogs and drifting ribbons of magic energy I’m used to have now been joined by geometric shapes, some with hard borders and some with soft, fraying edges. These shapes are scattered throughout the atrium, an assortment of circles and triangles and squares of various sizes and colors, along with thick lines and thin lines slicing the room into hundreds of segments.
I’ve seen the occasional line before, during times when I’ve concentrated really hard, but I’ve never seen anything like this.
Most of the lines and shapes are either toxic yellow or sea green. I’m looking at an exact map of the final showdown between Lizzie and Foley. The different shapes and lines must indicate different spells they used throughout the battle. If I knew where they began fighting in this room, and if I knew enough about different spell types, I could conceivably retrace almost every step they made until Foley tumbled out of the side hall.
Holy crap. Is this what practitioners always see?
As freaky as my sudden magic gifts are, this skill could definitely come in handy.
“Something up, Cal?” Ella asks.
I realize I’m gawking at what appears to be empty air to anyone without magic sensing skills. I snap my mouth shut and reply, “Uh, no, everything’s fine.”
She doesn’t believe me, and neither does Amy, who purses her lips in that way she does when she wants to clock somebody in the jaw. But neither of them press me. Presumably because they know they’ll have plenty of time to interrogate me later, after they drag me to Riker’s intimidating commissioner office, or maybe even a cozy dungeon room, if they’re pissed enough. Though I doubt they’ll resort to that. I mean, it’s not like I’m liable to break out of the DSI office and run…
Oh, wait.
Yep, I’m heading to the dungeon.
Mortified, I throw them a strained smile and slap my attention back onto the charm bracelet. The bile in my throat almost chokes me when my new and improved sense reveals that Lizzie’s magic is indeed still active inside the bracelet. Thin yellow lines snake across the links and baubles, the highest concentrations at the center points of the charms. Practitioners must be able to partition their magic into objects, entirely separating it from their person, so that using up their stores doesn’t affect the integrity of spells they want to operate in the long term. Charms are like rechargeable batteries then. When they run low, you just pump some more energy into them.
Which means the poor shades trapped in Lizzie’s bracelet won’t be freed until the charm runs out of fuel or another practitioner breaks it. I don’t know how much magic Lizzie charged the thing with, but she didn’t seem like the type to skimp on the setup for her most sadistic plots. These people could suffer for much, much longer if no one intervenes.
I glance at Lucian and Annette, who are clearing the last bits of debris from around their escape hatch, and at Foley, who’s leaning against the wall. Foley, whose sister started all this chaos. Foley, who didn’t get the opportunity to defeat that sister personally and avenge his family because she was so much strong
er—so much older—than him. Foley, who has to travel back across the Atlantic and immediately take the heavy mantle of a powerful and broken home upon his shoulders. Foley, who deserves an easy goddamn task, something he can achieve and feel good about, after all the shit he’s been thrown into over the past day.
I tap Foley on the shoulder.
He flinches and looks at me. “What?”
“Your sister had this on her.” I offer him the bracelet. “You think you can free the shades she trapped inside?”
Foley takes the bracelet and scrutinizes it. “What an awful spell, sealing shades.”
“Yeah. Not the first time I’ve seen it.” I recall the soul clocks used to summon Ammit. Most of those shades were devoured. At least the people in the bracelet have a chance at a good afterlife. “Seems to be the calling card for the worst of the worst.”
“It should be simple to break.” He gives me a curious look. “Why don’t you do it?”
“Foley,” I say, “I don’t know how to use magic. I was running on instinct when I…” Reduced your sister to a blackened husk.
“Really?” He shakes his head, pieces of drywall and wood chips falling out of his thick locks and plinking across the floor. “That’s strange, to think you didn’t have magic before.”
“As strange for you as it is for me.” I gesture to the bracelet to drive us back on topic. “How about it?”
“Oh, sure.” He points at the maintenance door with his elbow. “As soon as we get downstairs. The shades might appear to human eyes for a few minutes after being cooped up in the bracelet for so long, due to an energy concentration effect common to this type of seal. Don’t want to scare any normal humans and inspire conspiracy theories about ghosts at the scene of a major disaster.”
“Ah, yes.” I chuckle dryly. “Conspiracy ‘theories.’”
Chapter Seventeen
The basement is easier to navigate the second time around. We find the tunnel as we left it, unguarded, no enemies or curious city cops standing in our way. Annette volunteers to scout ahead anyway, to be sure there’s no one lying in wait at the other end. The Knights who were installed as spies throughout the various government offices of Aurora have likely caught wind of the failed assassination plot by now, thanks to the local media. And with all their captains killed in action at the museum tonight, we can’t predict how they’ll act. Some of them may simply retreat to Europe to receive new orders, but some could try to strike out on their own for a slice of glory. So it can’t hurt to be careful when moving the last Tepes heir around in the open.
Day Killer (City of Crows Book 5) Page 21
