“You were Hounding the Hungers?”
“No, just looking for a friend.”
She bit the corner of her lip, like she was trying to decide something. I honestly didn’t care what it was.
“Heads up.” Shamus tossed a leather band to Chase, and she snatched it out of the air and clipped it on her wrist. As soon as it closed, I felt a third rhythm tapping at my wrist.
Apparently, she felt it too.
“You’re joking, right?” She looked between Shamus and Zay. “She’s not coming with us, is she?”
Zayvion zipped his coat and made quick work of pulling things out of the trunk and attaching them to his body.
“Yes,” he said, “she is. She needs to touch you, Chase. This is her first time.”
Chase camped back on one hip. “You Read?”
“Sure.” I walked over to her. “Doesn’t everybody?” I placed my right hand below her neck, palm resting flat against her sternum. She was annoyed, a little jealous. That, I could have told just by looking at her. But the last emotion I picked up from her was fear.
Okay, maybe I should turn in my degree in body language. She didn’t look afraid at all on the outside.
“Done?” she asked.
“Uh, yes.” I pulled my hand away, stuck it back in my pocket where I could rub my thumb over my fingertips to try to wipe away the emotions I had sensed. But rubbing at my fingers wasn’t doing me any good. With each of their heartbeats tapping gently at my wrist, I found that if I thought about one of them, I could not only tell that they were breathing and conscious, I could also sense a hint of their mood.
Move over, lie detector tests. These suckers were good.
Shamus had taken his turn stuffing things in his coat pockets. I glanced over to see if the machetes were still in the trunk. They were not. Which meant Shamus and Zayvion had three-foot blades strapped onto their bodies somewhere.
In broad daylight. In the middle of the city.
“Should I take anything?” I asked, as Shamus slammed the trunk shut.
“A healthy sense of self-preservation would be good,” he said.
Zayvion reached over and wrapped his hand around my wrist, his fingertips pressing the medallion closer to my pulse. And I could tell that at this moment, he was intent and focused on nothing except me.
“Stay out of the way, out of reach. Use your defense spells if you must. Run, if you must. Just stay safe.” He pressed the hilt of a sheathed knife into my hand.
I knew that knife. It was the one he had given me when Pike was still alive. It was the only weapon I had ever killed someone with. It knew my blood, Zayvion’s blood. And it knew the blood of my enemy.
“Chase and I will take point,” he said, drawing his fingers away but leaving his heat behind. “You and Shamus will handle cleanup.”
Shamus was in the middle of lighting another cigarette. He gave me a quick wink and exhaled smoke. “Nothing but glamour, this job.”
“This is done.” Zayvion made it sound like a ritual, an ending, a prayer.
He motioned for us to walk away from the cars. There was enough room on the road that we could all walk shoulder to shoulder. Next to me was Zayvion, then Chase, then Shamus. As soon as we were a yard away from both cars, all three of them flicked their fingers, like flicking away a bug or, in Shamus’s case, tapping ashes off a cigarette.
With that one small motion, they each set a spell—I couldn’t tell which one—but I could tell exactly what it did. Instead of looking like three people armed for war, marching around in broad daylight, they looked . . . normal. Average. Zay was his ratty-jacket-wearing, street-drifter self. Shamus passed for goth poser, and Chase looked like the kind of woman who chopped her own firewood, grew her own food, and didn’t take any flack.
None of them looked like they were carrying weapons, and I couldn’t even smell magic on them. I took a deep breath and all I smelled was Zay’s pine, Shamus’s cigarette smoke and cloves, Chase’s vanilla perfume, and the wet, green, rain-drenched soil and trees around us.
“Might want to put that away,” Shamus noted.
“What? Oh.” I belatedly tucked the knife I’d been holding like my life depended on it—ha, not funny—inside my coat, where it fit pretty well behind my belt and lay against my hip.
Zay turned to face the cars for a second. He wove a spell and knelt. His middle finger and thumb were pressed together. He opened his fingertips, and pressed his fingers into the wet gravel. I smelled the wash of a spell, slightly buttery and sweet. Then the cars were covered with leaves, and looked like they’d been there awhile, like maybe they were one of the neighbor’s cars or belonged to someone staying overnight.
The amazing thing about that simple spell was that it not only gave a visual camouflage, but it also gave off an emotional ping—that the cars belonged there and weren’t anything for anyone to take much note of. Subtle and natural, no one—not even the best Hounds—would think there was magic going on here.
“Wow,” I said.
Zayvion stood and gave me a short nod. “Thank you.” We walked to the end of the road and turned toward the park. It wasn’t far, but before we got there, Shamus touched my arm.
“Let’s get some coffee while they start,” he said.
“Don’t you need me to show you where I saw the gate and the Hungers?”
“No,” Chase said.
I looked at Zayvion. “We can tell. It’s about midpark, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “But I saw them while I was driving out of the parking lot.”
“We’ll go to the origin point,” he said. “Close the gate. Track out from there.”
“You mean the gate might still be open?” It had been hours since I’d been there. If the gate had been left open this entire time, there could be dozens, hells, hundreds of the Hungers on the street.
“Gates don’t Close on their own,” he said. “Someone always has to Close them.”
He and Chase continued walking, and Shamus tugged on my elbow again. He started walking uphill into the neighborhood and toward the main street. “Let them do this part. You and I can scout to find the Hungers’ nest.”
“They nest?”
Shamus shook his head. “Your da, he didn’t tell you a damn thing about magic, did he?”
And it was strange, now that we were a good distance away from Chase and Zay, I could feel the weight of my father in my mind again. Could feel the scratch behind my eyes that was going to drive me bat-shit crazy pretty soon.
“No.” I pressed at the bridge of my nose to keep from rubbing my eyes out. “Want to give me a quick rundown on procedures?”
“Easy. Z and Chase will stroll into the park clothed in Camouflage spells. Zay will close the gate—he’s the guardian; closing gates is his shtick. There are specific cancellation spells that you use for gates. They are hard as hell to cast and take a shitload of training and magic to work. Good Closers can use some of the magic that is suspended in the gate itself to fuel the spell, but still, it takes balls to shut those things out here in the dead zone. Probably another reason Tomi cast it out here. Harder to close.
“But as you intimately know,” he added, “Jones has balls. When it comes to magic.”
“Do you even listen to yourself?” I asked.
“And ruin the surprise? Once he closes the gate,” he said without breaking verbal stride, “the Hungers will know it. That’s where you and I come in. The Hungers should be nested, waiting for dark. We kind of hit the shiny side of luck with that one. If these things cross in the night, there’s no nesting. They’re everywhere. Get your workout trying to run one of these bastards down. Coffee?”
We’d made it up a couple blocks and a coffee shop was just across the street.
“We have time?”
“How fast can you drink?”
“Let’s do it,” I said.
Lucky for us, there wasn’t anyone in line. I ordered a cup of house brew, black. Shamus ordered half a cup of house bre
w. Then he proceeded to fill the cup up the rest of the way with milk and sugar. Lots of sugar.
“Sure you got enough milk in your sugar?” I asked as we strolled out of the shop and headed south.
He flipped me off. “You drink your coffee your way, and I’ll drink my coffee the right way.”
And we did. Quickly. My cup was almost empty and my throat almost burnt by the time we reached the end of the next block. We threw our cups in the garbage, and kept walking downhill toward the river and Cathedral Park, the St. Johns Bridge to our right.
“What do we do when we find the nest?” I asked.
“Kill them. As many as we can. You know how to set a Drain, right?”
“Let’s pretend I do.”
“Okay, in that case, you stand back like Zayvion said. I’ll set the Drains. Too bad you and I haven’t cast together before. If we were Complements or Contrasts, you could pour magic into the spells I throw.”
“We could try now,” I said. My dad, behind my eyes, fluttered and scratched. I don’t know what he was all worked up about.
“Why not?” Shamus ducked into the mouth of an alley and leaned against the wall. “I’m going to weave a simple Light spell, right?” He did so, quickly. Watching him made me feel like I was all thumbs. “A little magic.” He exhaled, and the Light spell glowed soft white in an orb the size of a golf ball.
Even though I was watching, I was pretty impressed with his reach. Magic did not pool naturally beneath St. Johns. He had to access it about five miles out, over on the other side of the train tracks where the city had stopped laying the networks and lines.
“Now you,” he said, “make it bright.”
The spell was tiny. Even if my way of casting and his completely clashed, the worst we’d probably get would be a flash and then nothing. Like fragile wire, the glyph he cast wouldn’t hold very much magic before it self-destructed.
I cleared my mind, set a Disbursement, and thought about how I could best feed magic into his spell.
Like this, my father said. And I knew the way to cast the magic, almost with a flick of my wrist, so that the magic would catch and wrap naturally, matching the pulse of Shamus’s spell.
And sure, I could have ignored my dad. Could have decided he was just trying to screw me up. And sure, I thought about it.
Stubborn, my father sighed. I have not always tried to make your life miserable, Allison. Far from it.
I ignored his comment. If I were ever going to listen to him, this seemed like a fairly harmless time to do so. The light would either get brighter, or it would go out. No lives on the line with this spell.
So I cast magic the way he had shown me, pulling just the barest amount of it out of my flesh and bone and into Shamus’ spell.
The orb glowed brighter, doubling in intensity, but did not burn out.
“Sweet,” Shamus said. “Might be Complements, you and I.”
“I thought I was Complements with Zayvion.”
“Soul Complements, maybe, that whole rarest-of-the-rare, only-one-for-the-other thing. There are other degrees of magic use that complement one another. That aren’t as powerful and are still fairly rare. Mostly, there’s Contrasts or nothing. Course, you and I might be that too.”
“Contrasts?”
“Means our magic blends, sometimes perfectly, sometimes not so much. Do the same thing twice and get different results. Never know when it will work and when it won’t.”
He unwove the spell, then traced a new orb of Light into the air in front of him.
“Here’s the same thing I just cast. You do your part again. Exactly the same. Let’s see what happens.”
I cleared my mind, set a Disbursement, then drew magic through me just as my father had showed me, just as I had done the last time, and added it to Shamus’ spell.
Instead of growing brighter, the orb sizzled, filled with black specks, then went completely black. It snapped like a firecracker and was gone.
It happened so quickly, neither Shamus nor I had time to flinch away from it. I felt the failure of the spell like a quick headache behind my eyes that was gone almost as soon as it registered.
I dug my left thumb into my temple.
Shamus nodded. “Give you a pain?”
“Yes.”
He rubbed his hands over the thighs of his jeans, as if trying to wipe away sweat or pain. “Thought as much. We’re Contrasts. That means you keep your magic to yourself, missy.”
I gave him a sour look. “Like I’d want my magic mixing with yours anyway.”
He chuckled. “Ooh. Spunky. I like. No time, unfortunately. Z and Chase should be done digging at the gate. Ought to have it closed anytime. Which should flush the Hungers from their nest.”
“And how, again, do we find them?”
“We don’t. They find us. Me,” he amended. “They find me. You stay quiet and don’t call attention to yourself.”
He headed down the sidewalk. “We need a side street, alleyway, abandoned building. Best would be a spot out of sight—especially since it’s still light out—but open enough we have room to maneuver.” He tipped his chin toward the left, where a broken-down metal shed that might have once been a workshop or warehouse huddled behind half of a rusted chain-link fence. Next to the shed was a patch of dirt and weeds.
Here, huddled between the rise of the bridge to our left and the untended bushes and scrub of the empty lot, we had everything Shamus had said he was looking for. Enough area to move in, and privacy from prying eyes.
He strolled through the gap in the fence and then over to stand beneath a sickly hemlock. I followed him.
“You’ll want to be over there.” He pointed at the rusted shed.
“Couldn’t you have said that before I walked all the way over here with you?” I kicked my way through the wet weeds that slapped at my shins. I put my back against the shed.
“And?” I asked.
“And don’t use magic. At all. Period. Not even Sight. Nothing. Got it?”
“The first time.”
He flashed me a grin, then shook out his hands and held them up, chest high, palms facing outward. He pulled on magic. Not just a small amount to fill a spell; Shamus accessed enough magic that I could taste it, feel it on the back of my throat like hot peppers when I swallowed.
He chanted, or at least I think he chanted. His lips moved and he was half whispering, half humming words I could not understand. A glow, something that didn’t look like anything more than weak sunlight through the storm clouds, surrounded him. That was not sunlight. It was magic.
The heartbeats against my wrist changed. The one I knew belonged to Shamus slowed and pumped harder, like he was falling into his stride in a marathon. But the other two rhythms, Zayvion and Chase’s hearts, suddenly quickened. I turned my thoughts toward Zayvion’s heartbeat and could feel his strain as he drew magic toward him, from the stores out past the rail line, from the stores on the other side of the river, and then could feel him focus all of that magic into one place.
A rush of heat flooded my body—it felt like I was blushing from head to toe. I swayed and took a step to right myself. Hells, he was pulling on so much magic, I could feel the drain in my bones. I bit the inside of my cheek and recited my Miss Mary Mack jingle to keep my head clear.
The heat rushed out of me. Zayvion’s heartbeat skipped, paused, long enough that I wondered whether his heart would beat again.
Chase’s heartbeat continued on, strong, heavy, almost as if she were trying to make up for the lack of his. I felt Shamus’ heart and I felt Chase’s heart. But not Zayvion’s.
The only emotion I could feel from Shamus was a sort of grim patience. When I focused on Chase’s heartbeat, I could feel her anger, her worry.
I opened my mouth to say something, and then I couldn’t move.
They had arrived. Nightmares, monsters. The Hungers I had seen running through the edge of the park loped up to the broken chain-link fence. And paused.
They look
ed more solid than when I had seen them in the park. They had killed, fed, devoured.
But if I had not been staring at them—if I had not been expecting them to be there—I would not have noticed them. They were silent. I couldn’t hear their breath, couldn’t hear their paws on the concrete. I breathed in, caught no scent other than the rain and green of the nearby river and the slight meaty tang from the sewer processing plant.
My senses said that they should not be there, that nothing but shadows hovered beyond the rusted gate. But a chill down my back raised every hair on my arms.
I looked into their eyes and knew I was gazing into death. It took everything I had to look away from them. Away from their eyes. It took everything I had to look instead at Shamus, softly glowing, chanting, with his feet spread wide, his face tipped up to the sky, eyes closed, as if caught in some sort of exaltation.
And it took everything I had not to run as the nightmares, the creatures, pushed through the gate—all of them just solid enough that they could not pass through the chain links, but instead had to squeeze through the hole between two fence posts. Silent, even in the wet, tall, noisy grass. Silent as only predators could be. Silent as winter’s killing cold. As death.
They ignored me, drawn to the magic Shamus was using.
Shamus did not move. There were a dozen of them, all bigger than a Saint Bernard, all muscled and thick. Tanks. Killing machines. They spread out, half stalking around behind Shamus, the rest in front and beside him, keeping equidistant and in a circle, maybe three yards between themselves and him.
They paused, tasting the air. Scenting their prey.
Every nerve in my body told me to run. And if not that, then to cast magic, to fight. To save Shamus before these things jumped him and tore him to shreds. But he had told me to hold still and not use magic, not smell like magic, not even look like I’d ever been around magic.
The Hungers stepped closer to Shamus.
Shamus pulled on more magic. The yellow-white glow didn’t grow bigger, but it brightened enough that I thought it might catch the eye of a casual passerby.