“Erica could throw something that strong.” I mentally thumb through all her impressive displays of magic strength. Kicking cars hundreds of feet into the air. Taking down multiple enemy practitioners at once. “At best, I’d be evenly matched with another experienced high-level practitioner. Which is good, but certainly not the miracle you’re implying it is.”
Lucian rubs his chin. “You’re still not getting it. Milburn is twice your age, and she’s had decades of formal magic training. She knows something you don’t: efficiency. What seems like Milburn and other practitioners using up vast amounts of energy to throw impressive spells is actually them using as little of their magic as possible to produce the strongest bang for their buck. But you? You wasted a cubic shit-ton of magic in that atrium, Kinsey—I could practically taste it in the air—and yet you still threw a lightning strike so powerful that it reduced Lizzie to ashes and produced an earthquake that probably registered on some seismograph two hundred miles away.”
He chuckles. “Christ, kid, you brought down a giant stone staircase and nearly blew out a supporting wall a hundred feet long and fifty feet high. They’re probably going to have to tear down a third of the museum in order to fix what you broke.”
A sense of awe sneaks in beneath my undulating anxiety. “But I still don’t understand. Where did all that power come from? Sure, I died after Lizzie stabbed me in the heart, but death doesn’t cause people to suddenly acquire magic, does it? And just because I have some nonhuman ancestry doesn’t mean I can gain magic from nowhere for no reason, right?”
Lucian hums. “Yeah, I was getting to that. I have a hunch, see…”
He shoves his hand down my shirt and presses his freezing fingers flat against my chest. I yelp and backpedal, only to bang my head against the metal vent shaft with a resounding clang. Rubbing what will be a huge knot on my head, I say, “You better have a good reason for fondling me with your icicle fingers, or so help me god, I’ll push you off this roof.”
“Hush, kid. I’m trying to concentrate here.” Lucian closes his eyes. I feel a faint pulse of warmth sink into my chest. He’s casting some kind of spell.
After about forty-five seconds, when I’m starting to get antsy about Lucian awkwardly holding me against the vent with his hand under my shirt, his amber eyes snap open, sparkling with a bright revelation. “That’s what I thought,” he says.
“And what did you think?” I retort.
“You have a life seal on your soul.”
“Huh?” I grab his wrist and tug it until he finally removes his hand. “What the heck is a life seal?”
“It’s a very complex binding spell you place on someone’s magic directly at the source—their soul.” He rocks back on his heels, thoughtful. “Life seals are rarely used because they’re difficult to cast and even more difficult to maintain for long periods of time. The favored binding method of the ICM is to use an external charm, usually cuffs to symbolize shackles. They’re really easy to create and replace quickly if the binding spell fails. Simple magic. Like arithmetic. In comparison, life seals are like theoretical calculus.”
I stare at my chest, half expecting the seal to reveal itself as some complex array of symbols. “I’m not sure I understand where this is going.”
No, I understand exactly where this is going. I just don’t like it. So I’m going to verbally deny my comprehension until Lucian crushes it to a pulp.
He happily obliges. “That seal is the reason you didn’t have any magic until today. Life seals are powered by your life force. When you died in the hallway, the life seal started to decay, releasing a big chunk of the magic sealed inside. If you were simply a human practitioner, that sudden release wouldn’t have mattered. You would have stayed dead because human magic can’t resurrect people from the grave. That’s one of its major limitations.” His gaze roves over my body, as if he expects to find obvious physical changes in addition to my spiritual ones. Though there aren’t any. I hope. (I haven’t had time to check thoroughly.)
“But you see,” he continues, “nonhuman magic is more versatile than that, simply because there are so many varieties. Clearly, whatever your nonhuman parent is, they possess an insanely impressive flavor of magic. It takes quite a punch to bring someone back to life and heal all their wounds almost instantly. Shit, even a vampire running on a full fuel tank wouldn’t have healed so fast. Besides your old scars, you don’t have a scratch left on you. You look like you stole a murder victim’s clothes.”
He laces his fingers together. “Your magic also negated the vampire blood in your system, which I didn’t know was possible. I’ve seen people who ingested blood get turned from their hearts stopping for ten or fifteen seconds. You were straight-up dead for at least ten minutes, and your brain was still intact. Those two factors, duration of death and body integrity, are the top two things that determine whether someone gets turned or not. You were in what we call the ‘prime zone’ for transformation. And yet, it didn’t happen. Here you are, no fangs, no fancy eyes.”
“Thank god for that.”
“Screw you too, kid.”
I roll my eyes. “Back on topic. This life seal thing. You keep talking like it’s still there.”
“It is.” He points at my chest. “I felt it just now. Life seals don’t collapse instantly when you die because they feed off your life force continually and build up a surplus of power in case your life force gets disturbed. Problem is that, like I said before, life seals require maintenance by the practitioners who cast them. Even the best ones have to be reinforced with external magic every few years or they’ll start to malfunction. Eventually, a life seal left to its own devices will be overwhelmed by the magic energy its trying to contain and break down entirely, releasing the magic.”
“So, what you’re saying is”—I pause to think for a moment—“my seal was already fragile because no one had been performing ‘maintenance’ on it, so it degraded very quickly after I died and released a portion of my magic. When I came back to life, the seal stabilized itself, but it was too late to recover the magic that had escaped.”
“Exactly.”
“But that means I’ll eventually get more magic, doesn’t it, when the seal finally fails completely?”
Lucian bobs his head, eyebrows raised.
“But you said my magic was already impressively powerful.”
He keeps nodding.
“How much more magic are we talking here?”
Lucian shrugs. “No way to tell. I can’t see past the seal. I can tell you the reformed seal is heavily cracked though. And that some of those cracks aren’t new. The restoration of the seal upon your resurrection didn’t fix the prior degradation of the spell’s underlying construction. I suspect the seal has been slowly leaking for some time, due to the lack of maintenance. Based on its current condition, I’d say you have a couple years left before it collapses.”
“Leaking.” I roll my tongue over the word, tasting the implication. “What effect would that have?”
He shrugs. “Could be anything. Like a heightened magic sense compared to most normal humans. Or…”
I bang my head against the vent again, intentionally this time. Because I feel like the most oblivious idiot in the world. “The beggar rings. Of course.”
“What are you talking about?” Lucian grabs my shoulder and tugs me away from the vent so I can’t keep hurting myself. “Those dinky charm rings you Crows use? What about them?”
“I suck at using them. I always have.” I groan. “This whole time, I thought I fundamentally misunderstood how to use them, that I couldn’t grasp the mental process as well as other people could. So I kept breaking them over and over again. But that wasn’t what was happening at all. Beggar rings are only made to channel environmental energy…”
Lucian throws his head back and laughs. “I get it. You were instinctively channeling the escaped wisps of your own magic energy into the rings, causing the charms to overload because they can’t handle inter
nal magic.”
“The truth was staring me in the face all along. I feel so stupid.”
“Don’t.” He flicks my chin. “No one could’ve guessed the whole truth. It blew my mind when I saw you standing there, alive and well, in the atrium, having defeated Lizzie Banks herself in an epic magic showdown. Whoever put that life seal on you did a damn good job.”
“Whoever did it.” I bite my lip. “It had to be my mom.”
“Your mom?” Lucian balks. “Who the hell was your mom?”
“Publicly? A baker. Secretly? A witch,” I say. “But I didn’t find that out until Delos tried to brainwash me and inadvertently broke a memory-altering spell my mom had cast on me. She replaced my memory of the day she died with a fake version that depicted a normal tragedy. The truth is she died fighting some kind of nasty Eververse monster…that was after me.”
Lucian has enough tact to look shocked. “Jesus, kid. You’re a whole barrel of mysteries, aren’t you?”
“So it seems.”
“Your mom cast the life seal to protect you, I guess?” Lucian runs his hand through is debris-ridden hair. “Your nonhuman magic would’ve been like a beacon to that monster, so it needed to be suppressed.”
“Lot of good that did. The thing still found me.” Bitterness bleeds into my voice. “And my mom paid the price.”
“How old were you when she died?”
“Eight. Why?”
“Then it didn’t find you because she failed, that’s for sure.” Lucian pokes me in the chest. “Your mom must have been a fearsome witch to behold, if she could produce a life seal that lasts over a decade and a half.”
“So, you’re saying the creature didn’t actually track me down? I didn’t draw it to the bakery? It found me some other way?”
“That would be my educated guess. Maybe it got information from someone. Who knows? But I can tell you that your magic didn’t lead it to you, not with that seal on your soul. At age eight, not even a hint of your magic would’ve been able to escape.”
“Well, I guess that’s one less thing I have to feel guilty about.”
He snorts. “You feel guilty about way too much shit.”
“And you don’t feel guilty about enough.”
A crooked grin stretches across his face. “If you want to believe that, go right ahead.”
Lucians stands up and stares out over the sprawling park in front of the museum. Below, the din of the crowd gathered outside the entrance rises and falls, mixes with distant car horns, the hum of engines, the occasional siren. An urban ocean of background noise. Something vast and dark and chilling overcomes Lucian’s body language for a moment, and I think it might be the weight of the world in the form of Foley Banks, who now rests almost solely in Lucian’s care. That and a burning desire to stamp out the Black Knights once and for all. He lets the anger go, however, and throws me another casual smile as I rise next to him.
He pulls a slip of paper from his tattered back pocket and offers it to me. “This is a list of all the covert operatives the Knights installed before tonight’s festivities. Most of them have probably flown the coop already, but you Crows might get lucky and catch a few of the slower ones. I doubt they’ll have much intel about any other Knight cells, but I suppose it’ll feel nice to throw them in jail and toss the key all the same.”
I accept the paper. “Thanks. I’ll pass it on to Riker.”
“Well, I think this wraps up our latest adventure quite nicely.” He gives me another mock salute. “See you next time the world goes to shit, Kinsey.” He takes a few steps back, and by eying his trajectory, I figure out he’s planning to make a jump for the roof of the building next to the museum, which is roughly forty feet away, across a busy street. On any other night, I’d wish for him to fall and get run over by a bus. But I can’t be that big of a bitch tonight, not after all he saved…and all he lost.
“See you around,” I reply.
I wonder for a brief moment if I should mention my trip to the Eververse, the overheard conversation between Don and Pell, the references they made to the Knights and the recent massacre. But I decide to hold that back for now, simply because I don’t know enough about those people yet, about their motives, about their identities, about how beings literal worlds away could possibly factor into what’s happening here on Earth. I want to do some digging first before I spill such information haphazardly. I don’t know what sorts of ripples it could cause, who it could tip off, what disasters it could trigger. I don’t want to do something stupid. Again.
Lucian takes off running. He crosses the gap in a single bound, lands on the other roof with hardly a sound, and then vanishes into the night as a blur, heading off to rejoin Foley and Annette, to recover control of House Tepes, to save vampire society from the tyranny of the Black Knights.
And me?
I just stand there in the cold for a long time, feeling very, very numb.
Chapter Nineteen
The top news stories splashed across my phone notifications include such gems as “Gas Leak Causes Explosion During Charity Gala” and “Deputy Mayor Calhoun Dead at Thirty-Four, Natural Causes Suspected.” I peruse all the carefully disseminated lies, snorting at some, frowning at others, as I sit in an uncomfortable plastic chair outside the large conference room on the third floor of the new DSI office being used for depositions this morning.
I’m the only remaining “key witness” yet to give my statement to an investigative panel consisting of Commissioner Riker, all the elite team captains, and the high-level administrative staff. According to the whispers I heard downstairs when I was coming in, Lucian swung by to tell his side of the story at the ass crack of dawn before taking off for Europe with Foley and Annette. Lassiter, Mahoney, Pillsbury, and Burbank himself followed in his footsteps, telling the panel all they knew about the events of last night. Even Ribald, laid out in a hospital bed at St. Bart’s, called in to give an account of her experience.
Now it’s my turn. Or it will be. As soon as the people behind the imposing double doors I’m sitting across from decide to stop talking amongst themselves and let me in. I’ve been sitting here for half an hour already. I’m starting to get nervous. Even though I know everyone in the room and call most of them friends. Hard not to be nervous though, I remind myself, after the death glares I got when I returned from my meeting with Lucian.
Legitimately thought Amy would beat my ass into the floor.
I’m pretty sure the only reason she didn’t is because we had an audience.
Regardless, I managed to escape the museum in one piece and find a ride home. Only to discover my apartment was a total wreck. After Foley and I beat the Knight goons and escaped, those bastards ransacked my entire apartment. Probably looking for clues to my identity. Lucky for me, I had a mail forward in place due to my temporary relocation, and all my old trash had been cleared out when my teammates cleaned the place. My most important documents—birth certificate, tax returns, and the like—were hidden in a box in a secret compartment in my closet.
Yes. I am that paranoid.
Good thing too. The goons didn’t find the box.
However, they left no stone unturned. And by stone, I mean furniture. Everything was broken. I’ll have to replace it all, plus pay out the ass to have the hole in the floor fixed before my landlord has a stroke. So much for my retirement account. I’ll be lucky if I’m not flat broke by the end of the month. Not to mention—
Someone clears their throat.
I glance up from my phone, expecting to see someone holding a conference room door open and ushering me inside. Instead, I find Zhane Carpenter standing between me and the doors. Her lips are pulled down into the angriest frown her normally jovial face can manage. Her arms are crossed so tightly, she’s compressing her breasts to what must be a painful degree. Her posture is as rigid as a steel bar, muscles stiff and strained. And her dark eyes are narrowed to slits, a warning that needs no clarification.
Ah. I owe her an apolog
y, don’t I?
I clear my throat. “Hey, Zhane. Just the person I wanted to see.”
“Uh-huh.” She takes a menacing step toward me. “You threw me to the dogs. I got reamed out by my captain, had a formal reprimand stuck in my personnel file, got reassigned to desk duty for a week, and had my probation period as a rookie detective extended for another three months. All because I trusted you. And all you have to say to me is ‘Just the person I wanted to see’?”
My heart drops. “Oh, shit. I’m so sorry that happened.” I raise my hands. “Look, I’ll talk to Delarosa, okay? Tell him to pin the blame on me. I’ll take the punishments instead.”
“And that’s supposed to make it all better?” She drops her hands to her hips, raising her voice. “You lied to me! I trusted you, and you lied to my face.”
I resist the urge to groan. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry about that too.”
“Oh, really?” she snaps. “What else are you sorry about?”
I know I shouldn’t let her get a rise out of me—she’s understandably upset about what happened—but I’m so tired after everything I went through yesterday, and my neck hurts from sleeping in a lumpy motel bed last night because my apartment was still cordoned off with police tape and I wasn’t allowed to stay there, and I’m freaking out about what fate awaits me behind those stupid double doors, that I just…I just lose it.
“I’m sorry about everything, okay?” I practically shout. “I’m sorry about the damage to the gun store. I’m sorry about the flaming ruins of my truck lying in Erica’s front yard. I’m sorry I kicked Riker’s cane and hurt his knee. I’m sorry I got kidnapped by evil vampires in the garage and scared you all again. I’m sorry Calhoun got murdered and replaced by an evil shapeshifter. I’m sorry most of Lucian’s team got killed in the museum battle. I’m sorry two vampires self-destructed and nearly took down the entire second floor of the museum. I’m sorry DSI agents got killed and injured in the atrium fight. And lastly, lastly, I’m sorry I blew up a staircase while trying to kill a complete and utter maniac bent on world domination. I’m fucking sorry!”
Day Killer (City of Crows Book 5) Page 24
