‘‘Did you see my dad die?’’
Cody stopped rocking and looked at me. His eyes were still summer blue, but they were narrow, as if he were trying to see me through a thick fog.
‘‘The Snake man told me to. I was you. You killed him.’’
I cannot even explain the weird-creepy chill of hearing him say that. I tried to keep my voice level and soft. ‘‘I killed him? Or were you using magic to forge my signature when he died? How did you access that much power, Cody? Where were you? When did you do it? Who is the Snake man? Is he out there?’’
Hells. I had pushed too hard.
Cody’s eyes went wide with panic. He grabbed at his stomach, over his scar.
‘‘Ow, ow.’’ He moaned. ‘‘No, no, no.’’ He looked like he was going to scream or cry. He pulled the kitten close to his chest, dodged past me, and threw himself at the kitchen door. It banged open and Cody ran outside.
I was right behind him.
He ran down the porch stairs, one hand still on his stomach.
I smelled lavender, sweet and peppery. Nola didn’t have lavender plants. I hit the stairs running and made a grab for Cody, but that boy moved fast. He was out of reach, outpacing me, heading toward the middle of the yard running, wild, scared.
‘‘Cody, wait!’’ I ran after him.
The yard was as wide as the house and stretched out half an acre before it reached the road. There were no trees in the yard, no place for someone to hide.
Jupe tore out of the house, snarling and barking. But I didn’t need his warning, because I’d seen it too. A flash of light in the air, silver hot cooling to a burning gold, struck like lightning. But instead of fading, the air where the strike had sliced filled with a flurry of black ash—like a cloud of black butterflies had suddenly appeared. A woman stepped through that wall of flying ash. Solidly built, blond, and stinking of lavender, it was Bonnie. She was reciting a mantra and moving her hands in a very un-Hound-like spell.
Cody ran right toward her. He threw his arms out to his sides and yelled, ‘‘Run! Run fast!’’
Jupe pounded past me. Even though I had long legs and was in good enough shape to run, that dog was all muscle and instinct. He was gaining on Cody. But Bonnie wasn’t standing still; she was headed for Cody too.
I heard footfalls and hard breathing coming up behind me. Risked a glance over my shoulder. It was Zayvion.
‘‘Don’t, Allie,’’ he yelled.
Don’t what? Catch the only person who knew how my father died? Don’t try to outrun Jupe, who was still snarling and barking and about to tear Bonnie and/or Cody into pieces? Don’t pound into Bonnie like she was a lump of clay that needed a whole lot of my knuckle prints?
Bonnie reached Cody before me. Bonnie caught him in her arms, and even though he struggled, she chanted a mantra—hard, guttural words—held her fist high in the air, and a flash of copper lightning struck again, struck Bonnie, struck Cody, and sent Jupe skittering back from the wall of ash, growling and yelping.
It was a flash, a slice of heartbeat. Bonnie and Cody were there. Lightning struck. Bonnie and Cody were gone.
Black ashes drifted down like raven feathers and shadowed a perfect circle on the ground where they had just stood.
‘‘What the hell?’’ I jogged the last few feet to where Cody and Bonnie had disappeared. Disappeared! No one could vanish in a flash. No one. I didn’t care what kind of spells they knew. The scientific improbability of moving that much mass—and the payment for pulling on so much magic in a nonmagical zone so that it shot like lightning from a calm sky—freaked me the hell out.
I tried to pull on the store of magic deep in my bones, but I was too agitated, too angry, too damn scared to think of a mantra, much less speak one. People magically snapping from one place to another was fairy-tale stuff. This couldn’t happen. And for the good of the world, I didn’t think this should be able to happen. This kind of power in the wrong hands could change the way magic was used and abused. In the wrong hands—and as far as I could tell, Bonnie was the wrong hands since she’d just kidnapped a guy from out of nowhere—this ability would make for dark, dark years ahead.
‘‘Holy crap,’’ I said. ‘‘Holy crap, holy crap!’’
I was shaking, breathing too hard. But I was thinking fast. Maybe Bonnie and Cody weren’t really gone. Maybe she’d just found some sort of way to confuse light so I couldn’t see them. For all I knew, they might still be standing right there in the middle of the yard in front of me.
Zayvion came up to one side of me.
‘‘What?’’
I held up my hand to tell him to be quiet. And he did. Okay, there were some things I really liked about that man. I tipped my head to one side and listened for breathing other than his and my own. I watched Jupe, who sniffed at the black circle of ashes, but didn’t step into them. I inhaled, smelled something like burned wood—the charcoal smell of ashes, fresh air, and a hint of chicken fertilizer.
Zay took a cautious step forward, and he was quiet, working his way around the circle of ashes.
I mentally intoned a mantra, calming, centering, set a Disbursement, then pulled on the magic from my bones. A flare of heat winged from my right hand up my arm to my eye. The magic followed the path of the marks on my arm—but it wasn’t a painful sensation. It was a comfortable heat, like thrusting that limb into a warm bath. My left hand felt cool, and that was nice too. Magic, no longer small inside me, sprang from my body quicker than it ever had before, and I had to do some fast maneuvers to keep hold of it, keep focused, and draw it into my senses, especially my sense of smell.
The world exploded into smells. The greasy tang of ashes hit my sinuses and made me choke, coupled as it was with the dusty stone scent of pavement, the thick smell of mosses and rot and fungus from the field, decaying leaves, and decomposing organics from the distant chicken coop. Grass was green, bitter, oily, textured with the cold scent of dew. I could smell the river, tart and rushing with a silty mix of minerals, and I could smell Zayvion, the heavy pine of his cologne warmed and complicated by the stinging potency of his sweat, his fear, his anger.
And his shock.
I glanced at him. He was watching me with as close a look to awe as I’d ever seen on someone.
Oh, right. Magic. This was a dead zone. A magic-free zone. The only way to tap into magic here was to access the network that didn’t reach this far—that didn’t cross the river.
No one could do that. Unless they carried magic in their body. And no one I’d met could do that, except me.
‘‘Allie?’’ he breathed.
‘‘Later,’’ I said.
I Hounded the traceries of the spell Bonnie had cast and smelled the copper-burn stink of spent magic coming from the circle of ashes.
The glyph of Bonnie’s spell lingered in the air, and it was like nothing I had ever seen before. Not just a cabled line of intricate linked spells, this glyph was jagged, knotting back into itself to form a circle, like an incredibly intricate spider’s web, with a black, black hole into which all the threads fell and stopped completely.
This spell wrapped in on itself. There were no trailing lines leading back to the caster. If I hadn’t seen with my own eyes that Bonnie had been the one to cast this spell, I would have absolutely no clue who had cast it, where it had come from, or what it had done.
And knowing those things was my job.
‘‘Holy crap,’’ I said again, quieter.
The one thing I did know was that Bonnie and Cody were not still standing in the yard.
‘‘What do you see?’’ Zayvion asked.
‘‘It’s a spell, feeding into itself, and leaving no trailing lines. They aren’t here, Zayvion. I don’t know where they are, but they are not here.’’
Zay took a deep breath and rubbed at the back of his neck.
‘‘What?’’ The scent of him had changed, and with my übersharp Hounding senses, I knew his level of fear and anger had just spiked. ‘‘
Good love, Zay. If you know anything about this, will you just come clean with me? That kid knows who killed my father.’’
His scent changed again, back to the sugary wash of surprise. He looked up at me from across the black ash circle. I don’t know what it was, instinct maybe, but neither of us wanted to touch the ashes.
‘‘He knows who killed your father?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Did he tell you who?’’
Served me right. If I was demanding he had to level with me, it was only turnabout-fair that I tell him what I knew. Lovely.
‘‘He wasn’t very clear, but he mentioned a snake man, and that it was done with magic, and that I did it, or he did it as me.’’ If I hadn’t still been hyped up on magic, I was pretty sure I’d feel naked-at-the-table vulnerable for placing my last chip in Zayvion’s palm. As it was, I just wanted him to give back as good as he got.
‘‘So he was involved in the hit.’’
‘‘Sounded like it to me, but before I could get anything more specific, he ran out here.’’
Zay went back to rubbing his neck. He muttered something and stared at the horizon for a second, long enough for me to consider kicking him in the shins until he talked.
‘‘Allie, I’m breaking a lot of rules talking to you about this, but it seems stupid at this point not to.’’
‘‘Good. Tell me.’’ I was getting a little tired from holding the level of concentration needed to keep my Hound senses open, but what surprised me was that I did not feel a decrease or lack of magic pouring from within me. The small magic in my bones was a limited quantity, a small flame, and was usually depleted pretty quickly. Not this time.
‘‘I don’t know what she did—I don’t even know who that woman was,’’ Zayvion said.
‘‘Bonnie.’’
‘‘Really? Okay. So I don’t know what Bonnie did, but I do have an idea what she used to do it.’’
Anyone could tell she used magic. ‘‘Spill it.’’
‘‘It’s a technology your father was developing. A way to make magic portable.’’
Holy shit. Portable magic would change the world. If magic could be carried in some easy little package, instead of gathered and stored in lead and glass networks running beneath and throughout an entire city, anyone could access it. Anywhere. Even in the dead zones.
‘‘I have never seen anyone use magic to shift mass like that,’’ Zayvion said. ‘‘Much less open up a portal or door or whatever that was. I mean, there are stories....’’
‘‘How could anyone Proxy the Offload of that powerful of a spell?’’ I asked.
Zay’s mouth became a thin, straight line. ‘‘There are ways. They are not legal.’’
Said like that, flat and unaffected, it gave me the chills.
‘‘Fine. This is technology I could see someone wanting to steal. But who would kill for it?’’ I asked.
Zay gave one short laugh. ‘‘Who wouldn’t? This is going to revolutionize everything we know about and do with magic, Allie. This will put someone in a position of worldwide power and influence. It is why we were being so careful not to let the technology get out before laws and enforcement were in place.’’
‘‘Dear loves, Zayvion, did you just say ‘we’?’’
‘‘No.’’
We stared at each other for a moment, but it didn’t matter what he denied. I knew what I heard. ‘‘You want to tell me how you’re involved in this?’’
‘‘No, but I know who we should go talk to next.’’
‘‘Ooh, let me guess. The police? The FBI?’’
‘‘Violet.’’
‘‘Who?’’
‘‘Your stepmother.’’
I groaned. ‘‘Run back into the city to the one place the cops, the Hounds, Bonnie, who may or may not still be working for whoever may or may not want me dead, probably have trip-wired and staked out to try to catch me? Great idea.’’
‘‘It is a good idea,’’ he said. ‘‘You just don’t know it because you don’t know Violet very well.’’
‘‘At all. Never met her.’’
He gave me a funny look.
‘‘Listen, I gave up caring after replacement mother number two.’’
‘‘Abigail?’’ he asked.
‘‘Yeah, I think so. You know an awful lot about my life, Jones.’’
‘‘I’m a big fan of the Beckstrom legacy.’’
I tried to parse out what he really meant behind that and gave up on it. ‘‘Well, whatever. If you screw me over, I’ll hunt you down and tear you apart. Got that?’’
His eyebrows arched up, but instead of looking worried, like he ought to, he was smiling. ‘‘I wouldn’t expect any less of you, Allie.’’
I stepped to the edge of the ash circle and knelt. My senses were still sharpened by magic. I leaned over the circle’s edge and inhaled with my mouth open. Magic, burned, coppery, and thickened with other metals and oils. Something more too, something I could only describe as slick-tasting hit the back of my throat.
‘‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’’ Zay said. ‘‘This is untested.’’
‘‘Where’s your intellectual curiosity? Your sense of adventure?’’
I glanced up at the circular spell glyph that hovered in the center of the circle just above the level of my head. I reached into the circle and ran my fingers through the black ash.
Not ash. More like feathers. But feathers so delicate that they crumbled, or melted, at the slightest of contact. And also unlike feathers, the ashes felt warm against my fingertips, like menthol soaking in. I had a wild desire to stick my finger in my mouth and taste it.
I opened my mouth, but before my finger could even get close to my tongue, Zayvion’s hand clamped down around my wrist.
‘‘Bad idea. We don’t know what that is.’’
‘‘If you let go of my arm, maybe we can find out.’’
‘‘Or maybe it will kill you. I’m the guy who doesn’t want to see you dead, remember? Don’t be stubborn and stupid.’’ His hand was hot and felt good.
‘‘You so aren’t winning any points in my book, Jones.’’
‘‘You’ll get used to it.’’
We had a little glaring match that made me want to throw him down and bed him again. What was it about him that was so irresistible? He was bossy, secretive, maybe even condescending. But he was also thoughtful, kind, and heaven help me, he was looking out for my well-being whether I wanted him to or not. I liked that about him. His tenacity to stick with me, no matter what I got into.
‘‘Fine,’’ I said. ‘‘Let go.’’
He did and I brushed my fingers on my jeans to cover the fact that I already missed him touching me.
I stood and released the draw of magic, pulling the power away from my senses of smell, hearing, and sight. The world snapped down into more tolerable olfactory levels, and I couldn’t help but sigh at the relief of normal perceptions.
The strange thing was, I didn’t feel as tired as I usually did when I worked magic. And I did not have the feeling of emptiness I always got when I drew upon the magic I stored in my bones.