Magic Without Mercy

  “How long?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what being inside an Animate will do to it,” Shame said, “but I’d say we have about eight hours left before it fades.”

  “And by ‘fades,’ you mean the spell breaks and we lose our sample?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I turned to Maeve. “How long does your sample have?”

  “Maybe sixteen hours.”

  “You used the flask, didn’t you?” Shame asked.

  She nodded.

  “Show-off,” he said.

  “Then we need to get Stone,” I said. “I’ll take care of that while you Unclose Collins. Maeve, will you keep an eye on Davy for me?”

  “Of course,” she said. And the way she said it, I knew she also planned on keeping an eye on Victor and Collins too.

  “Hayden—,” I started.

  “I’m staying here.”

  “That’s what I’d hoped you’d do. Shame, you’re going.”

  “Damn right I am.”

  I walked toward the other room, toward the outside door. He followed like I knew he would.

  “You’re not going with us,” I said.

  “Where else would I be going? Think I’ll leave you and Zay out there summoning a gargoyle on your own? And why can’t you just do that here, anyway?”

  “I do not want to summon Stone to the warehouse because if he is being followed, I don’t know that he’d be smart enough to know it.”

  “Who would follow Stone?” Shame asked. “Hell, who even knows he exists?”

  “Nola. Cody. Detective Stotts,” I said.

  “Ah.” Shame nodded. “Didn’t think of that. Must be the lack of fun numbing my brain. So, you going to summon him, magic girl?”

  “No. Zay is. And you”—I zipped up my coat and pushed my glasses back on my face—“are going to try to get a sample from the Death well. If, for any reason, it looks dangerous, I want you to back out. Repeat what I just said.”

  “Allie doesn’t think you can handle yourself, Shamus,” he mimicked in a high voice. “Not only that, she thinks you’d walk stupidly to your death.”

  “Would you?” I asked.

  “Not stupidly.” He gave me a grin. “I’m not one of your puppies. You don’t have to worry about me. And by the way, when I walk to my death? You will fall on your knees in awe.”

  “We don’t have time for awe,” I said. “We have time for careful, quick, and come back here immediately.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  We stepped out into the garage area. I heard the door behind me lock, and a bolt slide into place. Good.

  “Later, lovelies,” Shame said. He got into Maeve’s car and rolled out of the garage.

  “Zay,” I said. “Can you tell Terric he needs to go to the Death well and help Shame?”

  “I can tell him to go to the well. I think it’d be better not to mention Shame.” He adjusted his cuff and tapped at the bracelet.

  “Ready for this?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s just one little gargoyle. How hard can it be to find him?”

  An hour later, sitting as close to my apartment as we dared to park, with Zayvion casting a third Summon spell, I had decided it was damn near impossible to find one little gargoyle if he didn’t want to be found.

  “Nothing?” I asked Zay, who had cast a short tracer on the Summon to see if he could at least track down which side of town Stone might be clambering around in.

  He shook his head. “I think I need to throw a Tracking spell.”

  “Tracking spells are too easy to follow back to the caster,” I said.

  “And?”

  “And it’s too dangerous. You cast that and any Hound in the city working with the cops or the Authority will see your signature and point to you from half a city away.”

  “Three Summon spells will do the same,” he said.

  “No. Summon has a way of screwing up its trajectory. They’re notoriously difficult to follow back if you aren’t the person who’s being summoned.” I rubbed at my hair, tucking it behind my ears even though there was nothing really to tuck anymore. I felt twitchy, trapped.

  It didn’t help that I could see the Veiled walking the streets, more of them—a lot more—than real, living people. The Veiled were searching for magic to eat, stopping at permanent spells to open their wide, black-hole mouths and drink down the magic until the spell broke. And then moving on to another spell.

  Zayvion had been very careful to cast only when I’d told him I didn’t see any Veiled in our vicinity. But we were running out of time.

  For all I knew, Roman had made it to the Overseer, and she’d decided we were the dangerous ones. She might be sending forces to Portland right now to make sure we were taken in, or taken out.

  Shame said there were only eight hours left on the spell Stone held. And I had no idea how long it would take to actually test the purity of the magic.

  It was getting dark, which was probably good as far as cover went. Every time a cop car cruised by, it took everything I had not to hide my face.

  “Sorry, babe,” Zay said. “It’s time to track Stone. At least to which quarter of Portland he’s in. Or if he’s not.”

  “Wait, what? You think he’s not in town? Of course he’s here.”

  “It wasn’t just Detective Stotts. People in the Authority knew about Stone too,” Zay said. “They could have taken him.”

  Hells. He was right.

  “Something light and fast,” I said. “What Tracking spell do you do best?”

  “All of them,” he said, and I knew he was not bragging. “Ping is the most subtle.”

  I liked Ping. It was a little unreliable, but usually got the job done. And it was almost traceless. “Okay,” I said.

  “Tell me when it’s clear.” Zay drew the multilegged glyph for Ping, and it spun there in his hand, not yet holding magic, looking like a ball of twine with twelve legs wriggling off it, giving it a cartoonish, excited, wavy look.

  A Veiled walked in front of the car, and I shivered a little. It was weird to know I could see them plain as daylight, but Zayvion wouldn’t be able to see a Veiled unless he drew a Sight spell. And if he drew a spell, the Veiled would be all over him to get at the magic.

  “Hold on—Veiled man walking down the street. He just turned the corner,” I said. “Okay, you can cast it.”

  I loved to watch Zayvion cast magic, but right now I loved even more that he could do it quickly and with minimal draw on the networks. He knew exactly how much magic it would take to power a spell, and didn’t waste any time doing it.

  Magic filled the Ping and Zay threw it out through the car window. The spell rose, then hit a building, paused, and pinged off to another building, leaving very little trace behind.

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “Be more impressed if it finds Stone.” Zayvion started the car and we followed the spell.

  “How long will it last?” I asked.

  “Fifteen minutes, tops,” Zay said.

  Which was smart. Short spells were harder for Hounds to track. Hopefully this spell was short enough to disappear before anyone got a read on us, but long enough to point out where Stone might be.

  “Think it would be easier to just go back to the Life well and get a new sample?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But if this doesn’t work, we might have to.”

  Walking back to a crime scene where we’d left five men dead was not my idea of a fun way to spend the evening. Of course, neither was hunting a gargoyle.

  Zayvion glanced down at his wrist.

  “Pooh-gram?” I asked.

  “Yes. Do you still have the book?”

  I dug in my back pocket. “I thought you had the entire thing memorized.”

  “I do. I’m just a little busy.”

  Oh. Right. Driving a car, following a spell, and reading secret codes. “What’s the numbers?”

  “Three, one, sixteen. Three, one,
twenty-one. Shit.” Zay slammed on the brakes and the car skidded out into the intersection on a red light, traffic coming at us. He put it in reverse, and glanced up at the buildings around us. “Do you see it?”

  I bent so I could get a better look. “It’s headed west.”

  “Got it,” he said. He glanced at his wrist. “Forty, three, twenty-two, twenty-three.”

  “Is that all of it?”

  “Most. I think I missed a sequence.”

  I pulled the book out of my pocket and thumbed through it. “Head. Is. Hostile. Intent,” I said. “Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Must be from Terric,” Zay said. “Head of the Authority is hostile intent toward us, probably.”

  “That’s news?” I asked.

  “He knows who the head of the Authority is. That’s news.”

  “There,” I said, pointing. “I think Ping found him.”

  The spell settled on the side of a building, then sank into the ground, spent. But it hadn’t just faded away to ashes. Good. That meant it stopped because it found something, not because it ran out of energy.

  “Do you know this place?” I asked.

  Zay circled the block. “No. Offices of some kind?”

  “I don’t think so. Didn’t it used to be an electrical store? Housewares or something?”

  “Antique shop,” Zay said.

  “That’s right.”

  He parked the car up the block. Didn’t turn off the engine yet.

  “You don’t think Stone’s alone in there, do you?” I asked.

  “Do you?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not like him to not answer a call, or not to be somewhere around my apartment. He made it all the way to Multnomah Falls when Shame called him. There’s no reason he shouldn’t answer your Summon in a few minutes, max.”

  “Which means he’s trapped,” Zay said.

  I nodded. “I have no idea what can trap him.”

  “We’ll find out.” Zayvion didn’t pull his weapons. Neither did I. Didn’t mean we left them behind either.

  We got out of the car and strode down the street. I suppose we could have taken the back alleys and tried to find a back entrance. But it was dark. There were no streetlights shining on the building, and very little traffic. Whoever had picked this place wanted it to be out of the way, but not too out of the way.

  I wondered how they’d lured Stone in. I wondered what they did to him.

  “Anything on the door?” Zay asked as we approached.

  “No magic,” I said.

  “Good.” Zayvion rolled his fingers, making it seem incredibly easy to pull a glyph together without looking, then held whatever he’d just drawn in his fist, ready to use it, but without pouring magic in it yet.

  He pushed the door. It was unlocked.

  I was right on his heels.

  The empty room was dark, but light spilled out across the floor from an open door on the other side of the room. The sound of a TV playing quietly reached me, along with the scent of hot rocks—that would be Stone—and a familiar, orange-heavy cologne.

  Footsteps from the other room approached us. But only one set. A man. And then that man stood in the doorway, blocking the light. He did not look happy.

  “Allie, Zayvion,” Detective Paul Stotts said. “Drop the magic, unload your weapons on the other side of the door, and you can come in.”

  “Do you have Stone?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He turned and walked back into the other room.

  I looked at Zay. “Why don’t you stay out here? In case.” It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Paul. Okay, that was a lie. I mostly trusted him, but he was a police officer, and I was currently up on embezzlement charges, and if anyone had found Bartholomew’s smoking corpse, I was also up on murder.

  I’d tried to tell him before about the Authority, about dark and light magic, the Veiled, and everything else, but he’d wanted proof. And that was the one thing I was short on.

  “Come in, Allie,” he said. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  “Don’t,” Zay started.

  I pulled my gun out of the holster and pressed it in his hand. I also unpacked the clips and the knives.

  Zayvion’s eyes were glowing gold in the low light of the room.

  “You’ll know if I’m in trouble,” I said. “Just try not to kill my best friend’s police officer boyfriend if you come riding to my rescue, okay?”

  I turned and walked into the light, leaving Zayvion behind. I didn’t have any magic on me, and I couldn’t use it even if I did have a spell planned.

  I’d just given Zayvion all the weapons I owned. And I was walking into a room with at least one police officer who was armed and skilled with magic.

  Not my smartest moment.

  “Like hell,” Zayvion said behind me. He strode up, and was thrown off his feet from the barrier over the door. I hadn’t even felt it when I passed through. Hadn’t seen it. It must be some kind of Ward that activated only when someone with magic, or weapons, crossed the threshold.

  Holy shit.

  “Listen, Stotts,” I said as I turned back to the room.

  To find him standing against the far wall, a gun in his hand, pointed at me. Stone was chained at the wrists, ankles, and neck to a metal loop in the wall, his big mouth duct-taped closed, his fingers also duct-taped together, his big round eyes glowing with anger.

  “Have a seat, Allie,” Stotts said. “The Ward has a Knockout spell on it. Zay will be unconscious for plenty long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?” I asked.

  “For us to have a little chat.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “I didn’t bring any weapons in here. I can’t use magic. So I’d really appreciate it if you put the gun away.”

  He considered me. I’d known Paul for a pretty long time now. Long enough to know he was a decent man, and in love with my best friend. I’d never seen that hard look in his eyes. I’d never seen him behind a gun. I’d never seen him look at me like he was looking at a criminal.

  “Do you know you have been implicated in a crime, Allie?”

  I nodded.

  “Embezzlement from your own business. And then we get a tip about one of your investors—a man who recently made a deal with Violet Beckstrom for part ownership in your father’s company. We find that man dead. Killed. By magic.”

  He must be talking about Bartholomew. I didn’t know how public Bartholomew had gone with his intent to screw over everything my father had ever planned and built. Public enough Stotts had found out about it. Which meant whoever was running the Authority had wanted him to find out about it.

  “Just shortly after his death there was a spike on the grid. The mid cistern is blown like an old fuse. Someone reported seeing a rock creature climbing up a building right after the cistern went out.”

  He waited. Waited for me to say something.

  “What?” I asked quietly. “What do you want me to say, Paul? I tried to tell you what was going on before, but you wanted proof. What I had to say wasn’t enough for you.”

  He pressed his lips together, then holstered his gun. “Talk. I’m listening.”

  I didn’t know where his crew was, didn’t know if he had already called in police, FBI, hell, maybe even a SWAT team.

  “I’ve already gone over this,” I said. “There are a group of magic users who use five disciplines of magic, and have been doing so for centuries. They call themselves the Authority and are in charge of how much information the general public knows about magic. They have infiltrated into every level of society worldwide. They have the ability to wipe memories—they have many abilities.

  “I got involved with them because my dad was involved with them. At that time the organization was breaking apart and each faction wanted magic in their hands. The right to say who could use it, and how it could be used.

  “But they opened a door into death, and something—someone—got through. Now thos
e someones want to rule magic in this world. The… things they released from death are soulless, heartless, insane. They’re called the Veiled.

  “Some people have sided with them. Some people are trying to tear the Authority apart from the inside out. Some of us left the group and are trying to take care of the real problem.”

  “And what is the real problem?” he asked. I couldn’t tell by his tone of voice if he believed anything I was saying.

  “The real problem is that the people who came through from death have poisoned magic—at least that’s what we think has happened. And now the walking dead—the Veiled—are spreading that poison. It’s why people are getting sick. It’s why people are dying. It’s why Anthony Bell died.

  “And I’m doing everything I can to find out how magic has been poisoned, what has poisoned it, and how to stop it.”

  “Alone. Without the police. Without going through any of the proper channels,” he said. “What you’re doing is illegal, Allie.”

  “What I’m doing is the only chance we have to make this right. If I go to the police, to the proper channels, they won’t believe me. And they’ll want proof too. The members of the Authority inside those departments will make sure I’m dead long before anyone gets the proof they want.

  “I’ve been framed, Paul. I didn’t embezzle from the company.”

  “What about the cistern?” he asked. “Were you involved in destroying it?”

  “Yes. But the cistern was booby-trapped, set to spread the poison as fast as it could through the network. I was trying to stop that.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then, finally, “You told me you would name names.”

  “And I will. But I don’t have time to fill out paperwork.”

  He sighed. “I think you do. I think you have to.”

  I did not want to fight him—hell, I didn’t think I could and come out on top. I couldn’t even cast the simplest Block spell. I was tired, weaponless. He was a trained man of the law who had all the equipment he needed to put me down.

  And Stone was tied and taped.

  “Paul,” I said. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Doorways into death? Monsters on the loose? Secret societies?” He shook his head. “Until I get names, dates, specifics, Allie, those are all just stories to me.”