After downing two glasses of water, she tiptoed across the kitchen and into the corridor, listening for any signs of life. The building was quiet except for the rumble of voices and the tinny crackle of a radio emanating from the basement.
Stopping in front of a door, she pressed her ear to it. No sound on the other side. A crude lock spell glowed across the wood and she dissolved it before trying the handle. It jiggled but wouldn’t turn, physically locked.
Adding a magical boost, she shoved down on the handle. The lock snapped with a loud crack and she froze. No change in the rumbling conversation downstairs.
Pushing the door open, she rushed into an office dominated by a large mahogany desk. Despite the opulence of the woodworking, the room was cold and businesslike, the desktop empty, and the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with bland leather spines.
She jumped over the desk and grabbed the first drawer. Locked. She used magic to break it open and rifled through the contents, finding nothing resembling keys. She broke open the next drawer and dug through it, dumping folders of paper on the floor in her haste.
“Damn it,” she hissed as she broke into the third and final drawer. Boxes of envelopes, paperclips, and other office supplies. She flung them onto the floor and sifted through the pile. Nothing.
“What the hell are you—”
Clio shot to her feet. The young apprentice girl stood in the threshold, one hand on the door. Her furious glower morphed into surprise.
“Clio?”
“Piper?”
“What are you doing?” Piper demanded. “This is the Head Consul’s office! You’ll be blacklisted for this.”
“I don’t care. This is urgent.”
“What’s urgent?” Piper pointed accusingly. “You and that incubus stole my father’s car when you left, didn’t you? When did you come back?”
“Just now.” Clio clenched her jaw. “Piper, I need another car.”
“What? You already stole our good one! How can you even—”
“I need it!” Her voice went higher as the frantic need to move, to keep going, to reach Lyre before she lost him pounded through her head. “I don’t have a choice.”
Piper blinked, her anger subsiding. She lowered her hand from the door but didn’t move from the threshold, blocking Clio’s path. “What’s going on? What’s so urgent?”
“My friend—the incubus—he’s been captured.”
“Captured?” Piper’s green eyes widened. “By who?”
“I can’t tell you, but his life is in danger. I have to reach him before—before it’s too late.”
Piper looked from Clio to the mess on the floor and back again. “He’s in that much danger?”
Clio nodded. “I have to get to him as fast as possible.”
“Where is he?”
“In the city. I’ve already lost too much time running from the ley line—”
“Running? You ran the whole way?” Piper’s gaze snapped over Clio from head to toe as though reassessing her. The girl shifted her weight, a furrow forming in her forehead. “Damn it. I’ll get grounded for a month for this.”
“For what?” Clio asked blankly.
“For helping you.” The girl’s hesitation vanished behind an excited grin. “Let’s rescue your incubus friend!”
Clio blinked. “Let’s rescue …?”
Piper marched across the room to the bookshelf, rose onto her tiptoes, and grabbed a thick volume from the top shelf. It jingled as she flipped the cover open. The interior was hollowed out, and inside it sat several sets of keys.
Piper lifted out a key chain, shut the book, and replaced it on the shelf. “Let’s go!”
“But—but Piper, I can’t take you with me.” Clio rushed after her toward the door. “It’s too dangerous for—”
“You’re not stealing our only other car,” Piper said, waving the keys over her shoulder as she strode into the hall. “I’m going with you.”
Clio bit her lip, then raised her hand at Piper’s back. The binding spell hit with a flash and Piper pitched forward, landing with a loud thud. The keys skittered across the floor.
“Hey!” Piper yelled. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t let you come.” Clio stepped over the girl and grabbed the keys. “I’m sorry. It’s too dangerous.”
“I can help!”
“No, you can’t. You don’t understand.”
“Wait!” Piper squirmed, furiously trying to free herself. “Do you even know how to drive?”
Clio hesitated, biting her lip. “It doesn’t look that difficult.”
Piper’s eyes bulged. “You’ll wreck our car! Let me do it.”
“You know how to drive?”
“My uncle taught me.”
Clio bounced from foot to foot, anxious to keep moving. How much time would she lose figuring out how to operate the car? She hadn’t paid all that much attention when Lyre had driven them into the city before.
Whirling back around, she crouched in front of Piper. “You can drive me, but once we get there, you’ll drop me off, turn around, and come right back here. Agreed?”
Piper grimaced. “Agreed.”
Clio touched the girl’s arm and the binding spell dissolved.
Piper popped back up and bounded ahead of Clio, leading the way to the kitchen. “I’m going to kick your butt later for putting a binding spell on me.”
“You can try,” Clio muttered. Piper might have better hand-to-hand combat skills, but Clio could out-spell the girl in her sleep. Based on the girl’s strange aura, she didn’t have enough magic to cast anything, let alone defend herself.
In the garage, Piper wrestled the overhead door open, then jumped into the driver’s seat, grinning the whole time. For the girl, this was a grand adventure—a daring rescue mission to save a handsome incubus.
As Clio climbed into the passenger seat, sending up a cloud of musty dust from the upholstery, she wished she could feel that kind of innocent excitement. But this journey wasn’t an adventure for her or for Lyre. She wasn’t sure what it was, but as Piper revved the engine and the car peeled out of the garage, Clio couldn’t shake her growing dread.
She loved her brother. She was sure he cared about her too, and no matter what happened, she shouldn’t be afraid of him. But deep in her heart, icy fear pulsed in time with the tracking spell.
Cherished sibling or not, she couldn’t trust Bastian, not with Lyre’s life … or her own.
This wasn’t an adventure. This wasn’t a rescue mission. It was a life-or-death confrontation with a daemon who had the power to destroy everything that mattered to her.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Lyre’s back hit a hard surface. Hands grabbed his shoulders and forced him down until he was sitting, then the blindfold was pulled off his head.
Daemons circled him. The chimera guards had shifted into glamour, their uniforms replaced by unremarkable dark clothes. They didn’t hold weapons, but all it would take was a quick shift out of glamour to rearm themselves.
The nymph prince stood directly across from Lyre, arms folded as he surveyed his prisoner. He, too, had donned his glamour. His stylish black coat and slacks gave him the look of a young, wealthy businessman about to sit down at a fancy restaurant with some clients.
Lyre glanced past them, trying to get a handle on where he was. A human city, obviously, which he’d known by the stench of garbage and damp pavement. They were in an abandoned park, surrounded by dead or dying trees with a few yellow leaves clinging to their branches. Rotting wood benches lined the cracked pavement, and across from him was an old fountain, no water flowing from it. A war memorial, as broken and dirty as the rest of the park, acted as his backrest, the once polished surface carved with hundreds of names, now illegible and forgotten.
Surrounding the park, the shadows of old buildings with elegant architecture were visible through the trees. Behind them, skyscrapers rose—including a distant pale tower that looked white even in the dar
kness. It was familiar and unmistakable: the Ra embassy.
So they were back in Brinford, where all the assassins and bounty hunters were waiting for him. Lovely.
With a clatter of wood on stone, a chimera guard dragged over a simple wooden chair and set it down behind Bastian. The prince sat and crossed his legs at the knee, getting comfortable.
Steepling his fingers, he studied Lyre. “Shall we begin?”
“One thing first.” Lyre shifted uncomfortably with his arms bound behind his back from wrists to elbows. “What’s with the chair?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That chair.” Lyre pointed at it with his chin. “Where’d it come from? Why do you have a chair in the middle of an abandoned park? Do you perform interrogations here so often that you keep a stash of furniture handy?”
“I prefer to be prepared for all occasions,” Bastian replied coolly. “From this point onward, I will ask questions and you will answer.”
“And if I don’t answer?”
“Then my guards will persuade you to be more cooperative.”
Standing just behind Bastian’s left shoulder, Eryx flashed an eager grin at Lyre.
When Bastian first captured him, Lyre had assumed the prince would hide him somewhere in or near the nymph city, giving Clio plenty of time to arrange a rescue. He hadn’t expected the prince to whisk him right out of Iridian territory. On Earth, there would be no rescue.
He sighed. It was going to be a very long night.
“Start asking, then,” he said dully.
Bastian folded his hands into a more relaxed position. “We will begin with the clock spell.”
“Kinetic Lodestone Obversion Construct.”
“What?”
“That’s what it’s called. KLOC for short.”
Bastian’s eyes narrowed.
“Kinetic means moving parts,” Lyre explained, oozing as much condescension as he could while sitting on the ground with his arms bound behind his back. “I designed it to clear remnant weaves from lodestones, hence the next part of the name. Obversion means—”
“What does the spell do?”
“It obverts magic. That’s why I called it the Obversion Constr—”
“The spell consumes magic. That is not the same as obversion.”
“Obversion is a more accurate word.” Lyre arched an eyebrow. “It means to turn something into its opposite, which is what the KLOC does. When it contacts other magic, it converts that energy into more of itself.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning it turns regular weaves into … shadow weaves.”
“Shadow weaves,” Bastian repeated.
Lyre nodded. He wasn’t keen on sharing anything about the KLOC, but he would reveal enough tidbits to make Bastian think he was being open about the spell. The information wasn’t any more dangerous than what Bastian would have learned from Eryx or deduced from his own examination of the clock.
“What is a shadow weave?”
“Well, you looked at the KLOC, right?”
“Of course. You mean the dark tint to the weaves. How did you create it?”
Lyre rolled his shoulders, the muscles aching from too long in the binding. “I’m not sure.”
The prince scrutinized him, debating how much he wanted to push. So far, Lyre was cooperating and Bastian probably wouldn’t apply significant pressure over one evasive answer.
“How does the spell work?” he asked.
Lyre relaxed against the wall. No torture yet. Hooray. “Once triggered, the initial outflux of the shadow weave will obvert any magic it contacts, at which point the converted magic will undergo an outflux as well, expanding by a factor relative to the input energy. If it contacts more magic, it will obvert and outflux again, continuing the chain reaction until it ceases to encounter any more fuel and exhausts its reach.”
Eryx blinked stupidly and looked at Bastian.
The prince drummed his fingers on his knee. “So, in essence, this spell doesn’t consume magic so much as transforms it into more of the shadow weave, perpetuating its existence … and its reach.”
Hmm. A deceitful, conniving, and intelligent prince. He understood the nature of the spell better than Lyre had expected.
“How fast is the chain reaction?” Bastian asked.
“Up to a radius of a hundred feet, its near instantaneous. It may slow as it expands, but I haven’t tested it on a larger scale.”
“What kind of magic can it obvert?”
“All kinds.” Lyre hesitated, but Eryx had already overheard the next part. “From embedded weavings to a daemon’s power reserves.”
“What happens to a daemon when their power is consumed?”
“Beyond having their magic completely wiped out? Physical weakness, severe fatigue, loss of glamour.” He shrugged. “It isn’t fun.”
Bastian considered his next question. “Where does water come into play?”
“The fluid resistance slows the shadow weave’s expansion, reducing its reach.”
“So you used the KLOC in a bathtub to limit it.”
Lyre nodded, tension threading through his muscles. Bastian had asked all the easy questions, and he would soon run out of queries that Lyre was willing to answer.
“How would I safely use the KLOC?”
“Put it in water. The more water, the better.”
“How would I safely use it for a purpose?” the prince clarified impatiently.
“If you want to clear lodestones, put them in the water with the KLOC.”
Bastian observed him for a long minute. “How do you activate it?”
A sharp breath slipped from Lyre. There it was. The question he couldn’t answer.
When he said nothing, Bastian straightened. “Lyre, I recommend you continue to cooperate. I will have the answer regardless.”
Again, he held his silence. What could he say? There was no plausible lie for how to activate the KLOC that Bastian wouldn’t see through.
The prince leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. “This has been nearly pleasant so far, Lyre. Consider my earlier proposal. Working for me would not be taxing or demeaning. I would treat you well. You would have reasonable freedoms.”
“I don’t consider basic autonomy a ‘reasonable freedom.’”
“It would be a better life than what you’ve come from. Would you rather die here in this reeking hole of a human city?”
Lyre met the prince’s ice-blue eyes. “Actually, I would.”
Bastian sat back. “You will answer no more questions, will you? Why did you answer any of them?”
Lyre twitched his shoulders in a shrug. “Did I tell you anything you hadn’t already guessed?”
Bastian’s lips thinned. “I see. Well, we will begin with the question of how to activate the KLOC. Once you answer it, we will move on to the next.”
He waved at Eryx.
Grin returning, Eryx walked up to Lyre, grabbed him by the arm, and hauled him up. The other guards closed in, and together they pulled Lyre past Bastian to the fountain. Two tiers in the center stood about eight feet tall and the main basin was a large square with high walls. Murky water from the recent rainfall filled the basin, reflecting the city lights.
Lyre’s stomach dropped sickeningly, then someone behind him pulled the blindfold back over his eyes. He tensed, unable to stop himself from resisting as they dragged him over the sidewalk, then pushed him down. His stomach hit the basin’s lip, crushing his diaphragm and ramming the air out of his lungs.
A hand grabbed his hair, and before he could catch his breath, they shoved his head into the cold water.
Clio clutched the interior door handle and wondered if she should have driven the car herself. If she died in a wreck, who would save Lyre?
Piper grinned fiercely, clutching the steering wheel as the car tore through the streets and dodged garbage. There were so few running vehicles left in the city that other traffic wasn’t a concern, but Clio still feared f
or her life.
“Is the signal still straight ahead?” Piper asked, slamming on the brakes to whip around a dumpster sticking out into the street.
“Yes,” Clio gasped breathlessly, gripping the chest strap of her seatbelt. “You should slow down. We should approach cautiously.”
Piper let off on the gas pedal, her young face alight. “Not much farther, right?”
“Not much.” The pulse in Clio’s head was growing stronger and stronger, coming from a point dead ahead. “We’re almost there.”
Slowing the car, Piper adjusted her grip on the steering wheel. “How are you going to save the incubus guy?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Can you do it all by yourself?”
Seeing exactly where the girl’s line of questioning was headed, Clio nodded firmly. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to have backup?”
She shot Piper a stern look. “The daemons who have my friend are expert magic users. You can’t help.”
Hurt flickered through Piper’s eyes and her face fell.
“I’m sure you can fight,” Clio added quickly. “But you’d need a lot of magic to stand any chance against these daemons.”
Piper flexed her jaw. “How did you know I don’t have magic?”
“I … I can tell.”
“I’m a haemon,” she muttered tersely. “I should have magic.”
Clio didn’t know what to say. The girl might be a haemon, but her aura was far from normal.
The road ended at a T-intersection, and directly ahead was a thicket of trees with a paved walkway that disappeared into the darkness.
Piper stopped the car and squinted at the park. “Should I go around?”
“No.” The tracking signal pounded in her skull. “This is close enough.”
Piper reached for the key in the ignition. “I can—”
Clio grabbed the girl’s hand, stopping her from shutting off the engine. “You will turn around and drive home. You don’t want to lose your apprenticeship, do you?”
Alarm flashed in her gaze as though she’d never considered the possibility.