CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Jade couldn’t
get either Rabbit or Myrinne on her cell, she and Lucius headed
over to their summer sublet. The apartment proved to be the top
floor of a detached garage. The main house was a good-size,
brick-faced residential house with freshly painted white trim,
ruthlessly shaped shrubs, and a perfectly trimmed
lawn.
“Huh,” Lucius said.
“Doesn’t look like either of their styles.” It was the first thing
he’d said since they left the art history building. He’d just
walked beside her, grim faced and stone silent.
Jade slid a glance
over at him. The fierce tension that had gripped his body seemed to
have eased slightly, but his expression still had all sorts of Keep
Out signs plastered across it. She didn’t blame him; the past half
hour had been a serious shock to her system, and she hadn’t had
nearly the relationship with Anna that he’d had. Unconsciously, she
touched the bulge beneath her shirt made by the skull effigy. She
felt a faint hum of power coming from it, but not one that
resonated with the way she usually experienced the magic. That
confirmed what Anna had said about the skulls being bloodline- and
seer-specific. She didn’t think it would affect her magic, or
Lucius’s . . . at least, not directly. Indirectly, though, its
presence was a heavy weight between them, as was the bare spot on
his forearm where the slave mark had been. She didn’t know what
Strike and the others were going to think about that. Heck, she
didn’t know what she thought about it.
All she knew was that her plan of talking to Lucius about the
emotional component of the magic on their drive home wasn’t seeming
like such a good idea now. He might be standing right next to her,
but he’d never seemed farther away.
Hoping he just needed
time to work things out in his head, she focused on the task at
hand: finding Rabbit. And Lucius had a point on the digs. Although
the relative isolation was consistent with Rabbit’s fierce need for
distance from everyone but Myrinne, the suburban-USA surroundings
and soccer-mom minivan in the driveway didn’t jibe. If they had
just been normal students, Jade would have assumed it was a cost
thing, but the Nightkeeper Fund had been set up to support an army
of hundreds, if not thousands. It was beyond sufficient for the two
dozen survivors. Heck, she’d heard Jox urging the kid to just buy a
damn house rather than worry about a sublet. Granted, the
winikin had followed that by muttering
something about getting as much fire insurance as possible, but
still.
So why the
sublet?
“Can I help you?” A
dark-haired woman nudged open the storm door of the main house with
one foot. She wore sweats, was jiggling a swaddled baby in one arm,
and had a why the hell did I sign up for
this? look on her face. In the background, an older kid was
screaming something about spaghetti.
Jade took a step
toward her, smiling. “We’re friends of Rabbit’s. Are he and Myrinne
around, do you know?”
“Sorry, I haven’t got
a clue if they’re home. I saw them headed out this morning; don’t
know if they came back or not.” The woman tilted her head. “They
expecting you?”
“Not specifically.”
Though Rabbit had to know Strike wouldn’t put up with being ignored
for long, and would have seen her number pop up on caller ID just
now.
“You can go up and
knock. Be careful on the stairs; a couple of the treads are loose.
They’ll be fixed by the end of next week, though.”
“Thanks.” Jade headed
toward the garage with Lucius falling in beside her, back in silent
mode. Something—instinct, maybe?—told her that the apartment was
empty. She figured it couldn’t hurt to fake a knock. The woman had
retreated back into the main house and shut the door, but Jade
would’ve bet money she was watching through one of the curtained
windows. At least Rabbit seemed to have landed in a decent living
situation. The surveillance would, however, limit their options in
terms of peeking through windows, trying to figure out what, if
anything, he and Myrinne were up to.
On the way up, they
discovered more than “a few” loose steps; the whole staircase
groaned precariously under Lucius’s weight. “What do you want to
bet they’ve been on the fix-it list for ‘the end of next week’ for
a while now?” he asked, not seeming particularly worried either
way.
“She should ask
Rabbit to fix them.” Jade grinned. “Might be interesting to see
what he’d come up with.” Though in all fairness, the in-Skywatch
buzz said that the young, powerful mage had cleaned up his act in
recent months. When they reached the landing, she motioned him to
shield her with his body. “Stand there so she can’t see
me.”
He obliged. “What’s
your plan?”
“Working on it.” She
knocked, but wasn’t surprised when she didn’t get an answer. The
place felt empty.
“Want me to kick it
in?” He paused. “It’d make me feel better.”
She grinned, glad he
was thawing a little. Wait a minute . . . thawing. “Be my lookout, will you? I’ve got an idea
that’ll do less damage.” I
hope.
The ice magic came
quickly, without even a blood sacrifice. Keeping her inner rheostat
turned low, she pushed a small quantity of the magic into the dead
bolt and regular door lock, where the forming crystals would expand
and create pressure inside the mechanisms. She hoped.
Heat poured through
her, lighting her up and bringing a prickle of sweat to her
forehead and behind her shoulder blades. The locks clicked in
one-two sequence, like she’d planned it that way. Holy crap, I did it!
She wasted a couple of precious seconds staring at the door as
excitement skimmed through her, warming her skin and making her
want to dance. She’d actually—finally!—used magic for something practical and
tangible, something more than just finding a reference that another
mage could use instead of her.
Then, aware they were
probably still being watched, she called, “It’s me. Can I come in?”
Pretending she’d gotten an answer from within, she opened up and
stepped through. Lucius followed, shaking his hand at the sting
from the ice-cold metal doorknob.
“Nice job,” he
breathed in her ear, sending shimmers through her. For half a
second, the world seemed to shift a few degrees on its axis and the
air sparked red-gold.
Steeling herself
against the tug of lust—or rather, filing it for a “maybe
later”—she lifted a shoulder. “I’m not sure I should be proud of my
B-and-E skills when we’re talking about a teammate.” Still, though,
personal space was something of a fluid concept among the magi, who
lived a lifestyle that landed somewhere between communal and
private, with blurred lines separating the two. Shandi came and
went freely from Jade’s suite, and the magi above her in the power
structure could, theoretically, invade her space with impunity. The
surviving Nightkeepers had tended to stick closer to the human
theory of privacy, but there were exceptions. And this was one of
them, she assured herself, even though there was a kernel of fear
that Rabbit would come home, realize he had company, and fireball
first, ask questions later.
On the theory of
better safe than sorry, she reached into her pocket for one of the
small, portable motion detectors they had used to secure their
hotel room the night before, and set it up on the kitchen counter
facing the door.
“We’re supposed to
make sure he’s not in trouble,” Lucius said, paraphrasing Strike’s
order as he scanned the room. “Okay. Where do we start? Or rather,
what are the odds that Rabbit and Myrinne, who are both of
above-average intelligence and deviousness, would leave something
important just lying around?”
“Slim to none,” she
agreed. “So let’s think devious.”
The door opened into
a kitchen nook that was separated from the main area by a half
wall. Doors on the far side of the main room opened into a bedroom
on one side, a bathroom on the other. The furniture was upscale box
store, the built-in shelves were filled with anatomy and physics
texts, and the wall art leaned toward Things I Like to Stare at
While I’m Stoned. The few photographs racked on the shelves showed
a doughy-looking guy posing with carbon-copy parents and what
appeared to be his sister. Or maybe a brother with low testosterone
levels? It didn’t take a psych expert to guess the place had come
furnished, and little—if any—of what they were looking at belonged
to Rabbit or Myrinne.
Leaving the main room
to Lucius, Jade moved into the bedroom, feeling seriously
uncomfortable to be invading the space of two people she might not
consider friends, but who were certainly allies. She found a few
fat red candles and some pretty crystals she could easily peg as
Myrinne’s. She thought she recognized some of the clothes tossed
over a chair in the corner as belonging to Rabbit, and the pair of
Dark Tower books on the nightstand could’ve been his. But other
than that, there was little for her to go on. It was like the mage
and his human girlfriend hadn’t left any mark on the space, even
though they’d been living there a few weeks already.
Unless . . . “What
about magic?” she murmured to herself. Granted, the mental blocks
meant that Rabbit theoretically couldn’t use his powers outside of
Skywatch, but he’d already circumvented those strictures at least
once, when Myrinne had talked him into using a pseudo-Wiccan ritual
in an effort to call a new three-question nahwal. It was possible he’d done something like
that again. Or, if she wanted to be cynical about it—which was a
good bet when trying to outthink Rabbit—he could’ve left himself a
loophole or two when he’d installed his mental filters. Just in
case.
Moving to the edge of
the sitting room, which put her in the approximate middle of the
apartment’s footprint, she turned toward Lucius and crooked a
finger. “Come here a minute.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Why?”
“Humor me. It’s an
experiment.” Under other circumstances she might not have tried it,
but she was all too aware that Strike was going to be furious over
Anna’s decision. Fortunately for them, he wasn’t the sort to shoot
the messenger. But the news they were bringing home was going to
seriously taint the king’s perception of the trip . . . and
potentially of her. More, she thought she and Lucius needed the
same thing just then, albeit for different reasons.
He moved into her,
going toe-to-toe, the spark in his eyes suggesting that he’d
guessed her plan. “This close enough?”
“Almost.” She closed
the last little gap between them and, when his lips curved, moved
in for the kiss. But whereas the taste and feel of him might have
become familiar, what she put into the kiss now wasn’t. She leaned
into him, offered herself to him, invited and then demanded a
response that he gave readily, sliding his arms around her and
crushing her up and into him. She felt deliciously feminine, almost
overpowered, yet strong at the same time.
Then, deliberately,
she sent her mind back to the previous spring, when he’d
disappeared into the desert and they didn’t know where he’d gone,
whether he was alive or dead. She remembered praying for him at the
chac-mool altar back at Skywatch,
remembered trying to bargain with the gods for his life. When those
memories made her feel sad and small, she brought herself forward
in time, to when he’d come back to Skywatch, hurt and angry. She
thought of how she’d hoped their reunion would be. And in doing so,
she fell into the fantasy.
You’re back, her kiss said now. I missed you. I didn’t realize how much our time together
meant to me until you were gone. And now you’re back. Did you miss
me? Did you think of me? He made a noise at the back of his
throat, surprise and desire mingled into a low growl that shot
straight to her core and left her wet and wanting. His hands
stilled on her body; he gripped her hips, holding her against him
as he focused on the kiss. The feel of him against her shifted the
memory to that of their first night together with him in his new
body. Although she had told herself it was just sex, that they were
together because of the library, she’d gone to him because of the
reunion they had missed out on, and the heat they’d made together
before. She’d been nervous and determined not to show it. And he’d
been . . . himself. The outer shell might be different, but the man
within was largely the same, with impulsivity offset by
intelligence, a checkered history but a fierce focus on the
future.
It was that man she
kissed now.
“Jade.” He whispered
her name against her mouth as she took him deep again, fisting her
hands in his hair and giving herself over to the moment and the
sensations. And within her, around her, red- gold sparkled in the
air. The world shifted on its axis and stayed shifted.
Easing back, she let
her eyes open. And she saw the magic. It was gathered around her,
formless red-gold power waiting to be harnessed. She didn’t see
glyphs now; she saw the raw shape and flow of the energy that could
be bound into a spell, just as she’d seen the barrier energy
before, the code beneath the chatter.
Lucius said her name
again, this time as a question.
“I’ve got the
scribe’s magic,” she said, keeping her voice low, almost a whisper,
as though she might somehow scare it away. “I’m going to check for
spell structures.”
“You—Oh.”
She couldn’t read his
expression, but couldn’t worry about that right now. She didn’t
know how long the magic would stay with her, and needed to do her
duty. They could deal with the rest of it later. Opening herself to
the magic, she started moving around the apartment.
“What are you looking
for, exactly?” Lucius followed, watching her scan the
room.
“I’ll know it when I
. . . Ah! Gotcha.” She ducked into the bedroom. “There’s a bright
glow here, a place where the power flow is
concentrated.”
“Power
flow?”
“You know how Sasha
senses life force? I think I’m doing something similar, only with
the energy that can be shaped into a spell. Logically, sensing the
magic and its structure is probably a requirement of creating a new
spell that works structurally. At least, that’s my guess as to why
this looks and feels different from the magic I used to tweak the
existing fireball spell.”
He took a moment to
digest that. “And you think there’s a spell at work in here? I
thought Rabbit wasn’t supposed to be able to do magic outside of
Skywatch.”
“I’m not sure what
I’m seeing, exactly. There are two brighter spots under the bed, or
maybe one bright spot and an echo? Let’s see what we’ve got.” She
skirted the bed, got down on her hands and knees, and followed the
magic sparks to a long cut slit into the underside of the box
spring. Gingerly, she reached inside. Her fingers found a
reinforced envelope. She drew it out and stared down at it for a
moment, wondering whether she was about to do something she would
regret.
“Maybe we should take
it straight back to Strike,” Lucius suggested.
She was tempted, but
shook her head. “I don’t want to bring him something that turns out
to be nothing.” Taking a deep breath, she flipped open the envelope
and dumped its contents. And stared at the pictures that landed in
her palm, quelling an urge to let them fall to the floor. “Okay.
Ew.”
She didn’t have
anything fundamental against porn. But these photographs were . . .
unattractive. It wasn’t just that the guy in them was pudgy and
unfit, and had too much hair in some places and not enough in
others, either. Her squick factor came more from the sheer lack of
artistry as he posed his way through a variety of odd contortions,
all of which managed to aim his startlingly erect member at a
camera she thought—hoped?—was on autopilot. Even worse was the
scanned printout of a paragraph that came off as so demented, it
took her a moment to realize she was looking at a very unfortunate
personal ad starring the apartment’s primary tenant. The face
matched the pics out in the other room.
“He’s trying to get a
date? With that?” Lucius sounded like
he was caught between horror and laughter.
“Either that or he’s
been asked to participate in a psych thesis on why women are
staying single longer and longer as the Internet age progresses,”
she said dryly. “Okay, that was disturbing.” Stuffing the pictures
back in the envelope, she filed the whole mess back in the box
spring. “Why in the hell did he hide the photos if he intended to
put them online? And why is there a power hot spot?”
“Maybe Rabbit found
them and had a good laugh?”
“I wouldn’t put it
past him.”
“More likely, the
magic was attracted to the highly sexualized resonance of the
pictures.” He paused, frowning. “Except that the pictures
themselves aren’t sexual, unless the guy actually looked at them
while he—” He held up a hand. “Okay. Not going there.”
Jade thought it was
more likely that the magic was pulled to things and places that
carried a significant emotional charge for the user, but it wasn’t
the right time for her and Lucius to go there, either. She might be buzzed from the magic
and excited by the breakthrough, but she was achingly aware of what
she’d given up to get there. She was raw and needy, all too
conscious of his every move and breath, and the way his raspy-edged
voice brought a long, liquid pull of desire regardless of what he
was saying.
Even as nerves
sparked at the realization that her defenses against him were far
too low, the magic dimmed around her.
“What about the
second place you saw? The one you said looked like an
echo?”
She shook her head.
“It’s gone now.” And so was the magic, which had disappeared when
her inner barriers came back up. That was going to be the
trade-off, she suspected, and hoped she could find a way to strike
a balance between vulnerability and magic.
“Okay, so we do it
the old-fashioned way.” They spent the next half hour searching the
apartment, focusing on places where her training suggested
addicts—and deviants—would hide things they didn’t want their
friends, parents, and other authority figures to find. They came up
with a big fat nothing, which gave them two positive results to
report back to Strike. Although they hadn’t physically put eyes on
Rabbit and Myrinne, the landlady said they were around, and the
apartment didn’t show any evidence of magic or other misbehavior.
And Jade had managed to tap into the scribe’s magic and make it
useful.
On the theory that
the landlady was guaranteed to say something to Rabbit, Jade pulled
a blank sheet of paper out of the printer in the main room—which
wasn’t mated to a computer, suggesting that Rabbit and Myrinne were
both schlepping their machines—and scrawled a quick note:
Strike sent me and Lucius to find out WTF is
going on with you two. I’d suggest you phone home soonest.
She signed her name, left the note on the kitchen counter, and
pocketed the motion detector.
Lucius held the door
for her on the way out. As she passed him, he leaned in and
whispered, “That was a hell of a kiss. What do you say we get on
the road so we can stop sooner than later?”
The heat in his eyes
twisted something deep inside her, making her want so much more
than he was offering. Self-protection said she should find an
excuse, but she was weak enough, wanting enough, that she smiled
and hit him with a quick kiss that landed a little off center.
“It’s a date.” Or, more technically, a booty call.