by Lisa Edmonds
I exhaled. “In a weird way, this is almost good news. Obviously, we don’t have confirmation Bell has the kid, but if that’s the case, Aden is better off with Bell than in the hands of some pedophile. Aden’s abilities make him a valuable asset, one that Bell will want to take care of.”
“I don’t disagree with you, but I hate to think of anyone in the clutches of someone like Bell, especially a kid.”
“I know.” We were quiet for a moment.
“Why do you think Bell wants all these nulls?” Sean asked me. “What could he be planning?”
I’d been wondering that myself. “It could be a number of things. If Bell was attacked by mages, he could use the nulls for defense. Most nulls have to touch a mage to drain them, but some can form wards, which would mean that any mage who crossed that ward would be nulled and their energy drained into the ward. Considering how much damage Bell’s companies have taken from Murphy’s attacks over the past few months, that’s a likely scenario. If he can get enough nulls who can make wards, he could protect himself better.”
“But someone like Aden, who doesn’t have those skills?”
I sighed. “Aden’s ability to not only drain a mage’s power, but also weaponize that energy and offload it in a single blast, makes him more likely to be used as a weapon than for defense.”
“Bell’s last attempt to take the fight to Murphy didn’t accomplish much,” Sean pointed out. “If he wanted to use Aden as a weapon, who or what would the target be?”
“It’s hard to say.” I considered the possibilities. “Catherine and Moses are at the compound in Baltimore, as far as anyone knows. Darren Walker is still here in the city, but he’s not one of Murphy’s lieutenants; he’s a businessman. That doesn’t mean Bell won’t go after him, but killing Walker won’t do much to Murphy’s organization. I’m not sure who Bell would go after at this point if he wanted to go on the offense.”
“Did you get anything from your canvassing?”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve got an image of Aden getting into a car at the convenience store down the street from his house. Jana doesn’t recognize the car and I can’t see the license plate, but it looks like a dark-colored two-door Mazda that’s about ten years old and has a large dent on the passenger side. We’re looking for the driver of that car.”
“Has Jana mentioned the name Ashley Brown to you?”
I frowned. “No. Who is Ashley Brown?”
“I don’t know, but Aden was searching for her on social media and online up until yesterday. I’m not sure if he found her or not, or who she is—there are quite a few Ashley Browns in the city.”
“I’ll ask Jana. Anything else interesting on the laptop?”
“Looks like he recently got a trial membership to that website you use, Magic and Objects of Power, and has been doing a lot of reading on magic, especially nulling.”
“That’s not surprising. He wants to know more about his abilities. He needed a teacher, not just to be told that he couldn’t tell anyone about having magic.” I rubbed my forehead. “Jana did the best she could to protect her son, but magic wants out. It itches when you don’t use it.”
“I’ll keep looking and see if anything else jumps out at me. Most of his other searches are the sort of things you’d expect a twelve-year-old boy to look up. He’s really into Pokémon, huh?”
I smiled slightly. “You should see his room. It’s all Star Wars and video games.”
He chuckled. “Sounds like Aden and I would get along pretty well.”
“You probably would.” I spotted Jana at her front window. “I’d better get back to the house. Let me know if you find anything else.”
“I will.” A pause. “Be safe.”
“I’ll do my best.” We said our goodbyes and ended the call.
“You know he’d prefer to be here with us instead of home,” Malcolm said.
I pretended to still be talking into the phone, so Jana wouldn’t wonder why I seemed to be having a conversation with thin air. “I know he would, but I’m not sure Jana would be comfortable with anyone else knowing about her situation.”
“Is that why you’re keeping him at arm’s length? Or is something else going on?”
I frowned. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Usually when you guys are together, you touch each other constantly. Little nudges or touching hands, stuff like that. Shifters love physical contact, and you’ve picked that up from Sean. Today when we saw him at the library, you acted like you didn’t like him touching you. It’s weird, that’s all. You mad at him?”
“Now you sound like him,” I said, irritated. “No, I’m not mad at him; I’m just focused on finding Aden. Just because I didn’t want to have sex behind the library doesn’t mean I’m mad about something.”
“I’m not talking about sex, Alice. I’m talking about any kind of physical contact.”
“Can we please just focus on the missing kid and save all this nonsense for another time?”
I stuck my phone in my pocket and frowned. For a moment, I wondered if Malcolm and Sean were right about me acting oddly, but the feeling faded quickly. We had a lost kid to find. I was focused, that was all. Now was not the time for twenty questions from nosy ghosts or needy werewolves.
I headed back to the house with Malcolm trailing along behind me.
5
When I got to the porch, Jana opened the door and stepped aside for me to enter. Malcolm followed me in and retreated to the living room.
When the door was closed, I said, “I have a colleague looking at Aden’s laptop to see what he’s been looking up online lately, and a name came up. Do you know anyone named Ashley Brown?”
She frowned. “Ashley was Aden’s babysitter for about two years, from when he was about eight until he was ten. After that I let him stay by himself after school before I got home from work. She was a senior in high school and a freshman at the community college at the time. I haven’t seen or talked to her since. She’d be twenty or twenty-one now, I think.”
“What kind of car did she drive?”
Her eyes widened. “A little two-door, dark blue car. Could that be her at the convenience store picking Aden up?”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t believe in coincidences. Do you still have her phone number, by any chance?”
She headed for her laptop, which was sitting on the dining table. “No, but it’ll be in my phone records from back then. We called and texted every school day for nearly two years. I just have to find it.”
Jana logged into her cell phone account to get the phone number.
“Try calling her,” I said. “If she answers, ask if she’s seen or talked to Aden lately and then we’ll go from there. If she doesn’t answer, just leave a message asking her to call you back.”
She called the number. After a moment, she said, “It’s going straight to voice mail.”
“Is it her on the recording?”
She nodded and listened to Ashley’s pre-recorded greeting. When it ended, she said, “Ashley, this is Jana Peters. Please give me a call as soon as you get this message.” She left her number.
I sent Sean a quick text: Ashley Brown was Aden’s babysitter. Here’s her cell number. Can you get me an address? I sent the number Jana had called.
The response came back almost immediately. Wolf: Give me a few minutes.
Jana went back to watching out the window. “I don’t know why Aden would have been trying to get in touch with Ashley, or why he would be getting into her car to go somewhere without telling me,” she said, peering out through the curtain. “I want to believe there’s an explanation for this, like he wanted to surprise me with something and thought maybe Ashley could help him pick it up, but he’s been gone too long.” She turned to me. “What if they’ve been in an accident and he’s at the hospital and they don’t know who he is or how to call me?”
“Why don’t you call the hospitals?” I suggested. “We don’t want to tip them off that
he’s missing, so instead of asking about Aden, ask about Ashley.”
“That’s a good idea.” She took out her phone and started looking up numbers.
I used the bathroom while I waited for Sean to text me back. I washed my hands at the sink, soaping all the way up to my elbows. I rinsed, then repeated the washing, scrubbing my arms until they turned pink. I rinsed again and then dried off, scowling at my reflection in the mirror. I really wanted another shower, but that would have to wait until I got back home.
My phone buzzed on the counter. It was a message from Sean with Ashley’s full name and address, as well as confirmation that she drove a dark blue fourteen-year-old two-door Mazda. He gave me the license plate and added a note that she had four arrests for prostitution and two for possession of drug paraphernalia.
He also sent her driver’s license photo. In that picture, Ashley was cute and blonde, with a big smile and bright blue eyes. A few moments later, he sent a second picture, a mug shot dated one month ago. It took me a moment to realize it was the same person. The Ashley in the mug shot was thin and defiant looking. Her eyes were deeply shadowed and her shoulders looked bony and hunched. The before-and-after contrast between the photos was startling. It looked like Aden’s former babysitter was struggling with substance abuse.
The doorbell rang. I sent Sean a quick thank you and headed for the front room.
As I came around the corner, a blast of air magic hit me square in my chest, throwing me back into the wall hard enough to knock the wind out of me. The powerful stream of magic pinned me to the wall like a butterfly on a collector’s board. It hurt, but it gave me a moment to figure out what was going on.
The air mage was a brunette woman in a dark suit. She held me in place, her hand raised, palm out to focus her magic. I didn’t know her, but I recognized the cold way she studied me, assessing my threat potential with a glance. Everything about her said professional killer.
The enormous blond man with her was evidently the muscle for the operation. He had the same flat affect as the air mage. His eyes were the color of glacier ice and twice as cold. He stood over Jana, who was sprawled on the floor, unconscious. It looked like she’d tried to run toward the hallway before one of them knocked her out, probably with a sleep spell.
“Get the mother,” the air mage ordered.
The big man took one step and dropped in a heap, unconscious. I couldn’t see my ghost, but I knew he was here. Malcolm with a sleep spell for the win.
Unfortunately, the air mage couldn’t be spelled, since high-level mages could resist basic spells with their natural shields, but now it was two against one and I liked those odds a hell of a lot better—especially since my own magic was depleted after getting nulled.
The air mage’s concentration wavered when her partner fell, which was the chance I’d been waiting for. I pulled my own air magic to the center of my chest and fired a blast directly into her stream of magic, breaking it and sending her stumbling. She knocked over a small table. A lamp and several knickknacks shattered on the floor.
I landed on my feet and blasted her again, this time with my hands so my aim was more precise. She moved like lightning and dodged the majority of the attack, which probably meant she drank vampire blood regularly to increase her speed and reflexes, like a vampire’s enforcer. A mage with enforcer speed and strength was rare. Someone had sent their heavy artillery after Jana. I had a pretty good idea who was behind this attempted kidnapping.
The air mage rolled to a combat stance that indicated she was former military or had equivalent training. She held a pistol with a suppressor in a two-handed grip.
I raised my hands and formed a shield with my air magic, but I wasn’t her intended target. Without hesitating, she fired two quick shots into the blond man’s head.
I heard a shocked expletive from my left: Malcolm, stunned by the air mage’s ruthless method of disposing of her incapacitated partner. It was a move straight out of the cabal playbook: never let yourself or anyone on your team be taken prisoner.
The air mage looked in Malcolm’s direction. Most mages could sense ghosts in their vicinity. I didn’t like that she seemed to know exactly where he was, however. Either she also had earth or blood magic—which made her more sensitive to ghosts—or she had extrasensory abilities. Who was this woman?
The air mage traced a rune in the air and held her left hand palm out toward Malcolm. “Detego.”
“No!” I hit her with a blast of air magic, sending her flying, but the blood magic spell she’d unleashed had already hit Malcolm.
The ghost became visible, shrouded in a red haze. The spell wouldn’t last long—a minute or two at most—but until it dissipated, Malcolm was visible to everyone, not just me.
The air mage got to her feet. Her smile was even colder than her eyes, and it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
“Well, hello there Malcolm,” she purred. “We wondered where you were.”
Malcolm froze, his face a mask of terror.
Well, if I’d had any doubt as to who’d sent the air mage after Jana, that dispelled it. Malcolm had once belonged to the Bell cabal, and Darius Bell himself had sent Malcolm to be tortured to death by a blood mage. The air mage was one of Bell’s henchmen and she knew Malcolm by sight. This was very, very bad and getting worse by the minute.
My fingers itched to send Malcolm to safety in my heavily warded basement, but I had to trust he would jump there on his own if he felt he needed to.
She turned her attention to me. “And you’re the mage he’s bound to, the one who managed to keep him when we pulled the ghosts back last month. You must be good. He’s the only ghost we didn’t get back, and he’s the one we wanted the most.”
She raised her gun and fired three shots before she finished speaking, but I’d sensed her intention and got my air magic shield up. All three bullets were deflected into the wall.
Malcolm flashed over to her and tried to use a razor-thin stream of air magic to cut her in half. She dropped her gun, raised a shield of her own with one hand to block his magic, and slashed at him with a blood magic blade, narrowly missing him. He flitted back to stay out of range of her blood magic and became invisible again as her spell faded.
With her partner dead, the air mage was our only remaining source of information about where Aden was, who had him, and why he’d been taken. As much as I wanted to eliminate the threat she posed to Malcolm, I needed her alive.
She whirled, apparently sensing Malcolm to her left, but he attacked from her right, opening a deep gash across her face, neck, and torso. She tried to slash him with a blood magic blade, but missed.
I flicked out my right hand like I was tossing a pair of dice and bright green earth magic spiraled out of my palm, forming a long whip. While the air mage was distracted by Malcolm, I lashed the coil of bright green fire around her and pulled it taut, caging her and pinning her arms at her sides.
She fought the whip, but the only person who’d ever been able to break it was a vampire and even enhanced by vamp blood, she wasn’t strong enough. Her air magic blew papers and small objects across the room but couldn’t displace the coils.
When she stilled, I pulled the whip a little tighter. “Answer my questions and you get to live. Where’s the kid?”
She laughed. “Are you going to torture it out of me, sunshine?”
For the second time today, I let someone see the darkness in my eyes. “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gotten answers that way.”
She was still smiling. “I think I like you. What’s your name?”
“Where’s Aden?”
“Tell me your name and I’ll tell you where he is.”
Call me cynical, but I didn’t think she would keep her word. “Tell me where he is and I’ll let you keep your hands.” I looped my whip around her wrists.
“Stop it. You’re turning me on.” She pulled against the loops, making the whip cut into her flesh. Blood ran down her fingers and drip
ped onto the floor. “You’re an amateur at this, I can tell. You should let Malcolm have a turn. Now there’s someone who knows about inflicting pain. Isn’t that right, Malcolm?” She grinned.
Malcolm’s anger and shame was so intense that it bled over to me and left a bitter taste in my mouth.
It was one thing for her to mock me, but I’d be damned if I’d let her torment Malcolm. The longer she stood there, the more likely she would find a way to escape, and I had no doubt she’d kill me the second she had the chance. She was hard, but I could go harder.
I stretched the bright green coil around her left wrist razor-thin and cut off her hand. My cold fire cauterized the stump so she didn’t bleed to death.
The severed hand hit the floor with a wet plop. She screamed. Malcolm made a choking sound.
“You’ve got three more appendages and I can take them one piece at a time,” I said as she clenched her jaw, her chest heaving. “If you get to a hospital soon or you’ve got access to vamp blood, they can probably reattach the hand. The clock’s ticking on that, though. Give me a location for the kid and as soon as I get him, I’ll let you go.”
“I don’t believe you’ll let me go,” she said hoarsely, her face gray. “I’ll find you and kill you, and take Malcolm back to Bell.”
“Then maybe I’m letting you choose how you leave this world. I can make it quick or I can take my time about it.” I tightened the coil around her right wrist. “Give me an address.”
“I was wrong about you. You’re not an amateur after all.” Her mouth twisted into a smile. “I think I’m the second-coldest bitch in this room, and that’s not something I get to say very often. We might have been friends someday. It’s a shame to kill you.”
Her eyes went white. Her body became a vortex and sucked all of the air toward her as if someone had opened the emergency door on a plane.
I’d thought she wasn’t powerful enough to break my earth-magic whip, but in that second between the air sucking into her body and the blast, I realized she hadn’t really been trying. That whole struggle to escape was pure fakery to make me think she was less powerful than she was. She’d hidden her true ability behind her shields until now, much as I usually did.
