[Twenty-Sided Sorceress 01.0] Justice Calling

by Annie Bellet

  “Jade!” Harper’s voice.

  Ciaran threw on the lights and I winced, blinking rapidly to try to adjust. Harper came up, kicking the gun further from the man’s hand. Boy, really, now that I had a look at him. I doubted he was over twenty-one.

  “It’s a trap,” I said, waving at Harper to back off. “Get an axe.”

  “Trick, not trap. Geez.” She poked him with her shoe.

  Misquoting Army of Darkness. I really was hurt. I crawled forward, trying to keep my weight off my injured hip. I felt the bullet inside me, my body reacting to the unknown object and trying to heal it out. I needed to get out of here before I did fully heal or there would be some truly uncomfortable questions.

  But I wanted the boy’s medallion. I yanked it off his neck as I pretended to feel for a pulse and slid it into my bra as I curled my body to keep the bleeding side out of Harper’s vision.

  I failed.

  “Did you get shot? You’re bleeding.” Harper yanked off her teeshirt and bent over me, trying to press it to my hip.

  “My phone broke when I dove under the table,” I said, taking her shirt and covering the bloody patch as best I could. I didn’t want to look yet. If it looked anything like it felt, my side was a disaster. “Just cuts. I’ll be fine.”

  “We called Sheriff Lee, she’s on her way,” Ezee said. “Bloody hell, did you get shot?”

  I had to get out there. Like, now.

  “No, just cuts. I’m going to my place to clean up. This guy needs a medic or something. I don’t know what happened.” I tried to stand and regretted my life.

  “This one is dead. I’m not sure how.” Alek’s voice.

  Dead? Oh, that was bad. It was getting harder to think. I decided to worry about one thing at a time. Step one was figuring out how to walk out of here, up the stairs to my apartment, and if I could make it to the bathtub before I fainted from the pain. Be a lot easier to clean blood out of the bathroom than my living room carpet. I’d never get that security deposit back. Which was okay, since I owed it to myself, but still. I was a mean landlord.

  “Harper, go with Jade. The less people messed up in this, the better, no?” Ciaran said.

  “I’ve got to stay, since I called the sheriff,” Levi said.

  “And I do also, since she’ll never believe only one of us was here,” Ezee added.

  “I’ve got her,” Alek said. He moved with insane speed to my side and then somehow I was in his arms. “Don’t protest,” he whispered in Russian, his breath warm on my hair. “Clearly you don’t want them to know you’ve been shot, so shut up and let me carry you.”

  Since the Zerg queen of white-hot pain and all her little pain-filled broodlings were currently setting up a summer home in my hip, I decided to shut up and let him carry me.

  Harper tried to follow us into my bathroom, but I shut the door in her face, muttering something about too many cooks in the kitchen. I hoped I made some kind of sense, but I was in too much pain and panic to care.

  I’d used my magic—like a lot of magic. Maybe too much. My head certainly thought I had used way too much. I was out of practice, and I felt like a former athlete who’d spent a couple years on the bench suddenly trying to beat Usain Bolt in the hundred-meter dash.

  Plus the more passive side effects of not being human were taking a toll. My body was shoving shards of cell phone and what felt like a million pieces of bullet out of my hip, with what looked like a million gallons of blood.

  Alek set me down as gently as he could in my bathtub and then pulled out a knife.

  I flinched and held up my hands, but he just sighed and reached for my pants.

  “I need to cut those away, take a look.”

  “Harper,” I whispered, then switched to Russian. “She can hear us.”

  A weird warmth slid over the room, and I watched as the walls took on a slightly silvery sheen.

  “No one outside this room can hear anything now,” he said.

  “Guess being a Justice comes with bonus features.”

  “First we take care of your wound. Then we’ll talk.”

  I wasn’t sure which part of that I looked forward to less. He cut my jeans away and it wasn’t anything like the fantasies I hadn’t let myself have about him cutting my clothes off. I was too busy trying to seal my teeth to each other with my jaw muscles to tell him that, thank the universe.

  With the wound washed off—which, let me tell you was a peachy experience I never want to repeat—it didn’t look so bad. Kind of like a steak after you take out your aggression on it with a hammer. And bonus, I now knew what my hipbone looked like and I had a nice collection of metal fragments to show the grandkids. My phone seemed to have eaten the worst of the bullet, and it was super FUBAR.

  I lay back in the tub once we got the wound clean, focusing on breathing and not passing out.

  “The bleeding has stopped,” Alek said. Helpful guy.

  “Yeah. Give it a little while. I’ll heal.” I wished he would shut up and go away.

  “You are no hedge witch.”

  “You are amazing at pointing out obvious things,” I said, opening my eyes. “How did you know I’d understand Russian?”

  “Call it a hunch.”

  He leaned against my bathroom counter, looking entirely out of place in the small room. I turned my head, choosing to look at the Dragon Ball Z poster I had on the bathroom door instead of into those speculating, piercing blue eyes.

  “What happened back there? What kind of magic was that? And how did you save that boy?”

  “That’s way too many questions for my brain to handle right now,” I said. All questions I didn’t really want to answer. Some I didn’t even have the answer to, anyway. Like what kind of magic this was. Human magic, I was pretty sure, so that meant ritual most likely. But it wasn’t like just anybody could use a ritual any more than a kid could open up the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Guide and cast Magic Missile. Magic was everywhere, in everything, but it was like sunlight or carbon molecules. If you don’t have the tools to use it and the ability somehow to even tap in, there’s no way you can make it work just by trying.

  To work a ritual, you’d need knowledge, time, a power source you could access, the right ingredients and foci, combined with a strong enough will to bind it all together. It wasn’t those kids, not working alone. Jimmy, the dead one, he’d been on the phone with someone. Someone who had tried to kill both boys using their medallions.

  “You are thinking very hard for someone who pretends to know nothing,” Alek said, interrupting my half-conscious train of thought.

  “I don’t know anything, not really. It’s all speculation.”

  Cat-quick, he bent over me and slid his large, warm hand into my shirt. When I pictured him groping my breasts, it wasn’t exactly like this. He pulled the medallion out of my bra and dangled it over me. I made out a pattern of circles on its stained black surface and it looked to be molded from clay.

  “You pictured me groping your breasts?” he asked, and he had that smirk I’d seen a million years ago this afternoon, before everything went to hell on the handbasket express.

  Clearly, I’d spoken aloud. “Blood loss talking,” I said. I swiped at the medallion. “Give that back.”

  “Tell me what it is,” he said, standing up out of my reach.

  “I don’t know.” I gave him a smile to show that hey, I could tell the truth sometimes.

  “But you can find out.” That wasn’t even a question. No fair.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Not tonight. I’m kind of in heal mode here. Why don’t you go away? I’m rescinding your invitation.”

  “I am not a vampire.” He cocked his head, those ice-chip eyes of his narrowing as he looked me over. “You can’t order me out.”

  “Vampires don’t exist,” I muttered. I blushed and wondered if I had the blood left in my body for it. I was lying in a bathtub with half my pants missing and only a scrap of black panties covering my girl bits. I
wished I’d worn nicer underwear. Or shaved in the last two days. He was a shifter, though, so maybe he preferred his women furry.

  Ho-kay. That was definitely the blood loss talking.

  I looked down at my hip. The wounds were mostly closed, looking a lot more like a bad abrasion than a bunch of stitch-worthy cuts. Time to get out of the bathtub and find if I had any Band-Aids.

  “Still here?” I said. “Help me up.”

  He pulled me out of the tub as though I were no bigger than a kitten. I lost the scrap of panty but managed to yank a towel over myself as I leaned heavily on the bathroom counter.

  “Okay, I need to clean up here, and you really need to leave. Maybe that kid will wake up and tell you what’s going on.”

  He caught my chin in his hand and tilted my head toward him, leaning in close. He smelled like vanilla and sun-kissed hay. “I will come back tomorrow. And you will tell the truth, Jade Crow.” All trace of smirk was gone from his face.

  “Fuck you,” I said, jerking my head away. Mistake, that. Red and black dots swam over my eyes and the headache vise tightened another notch.

  “I thought you had revoked my invitation,” he said, and just like a freakin’ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he was smirking again.

  “Do they train you to be this annoying at Justice Academy, or does it come naturally?” I said as I turned carefully around, deliberately not looking in the mirror, and pulled open the medicine cabinet. I did have Band-Aids. Score.

  “It runs in my family.” He set the medallion down on the counter and pulled open the door. The silvery shield he’d cast on the room dissolved. “I’ll be back,” he said over his shoulder.

  Harper lurked near the door and ducked into the bathroom as soon as Alek left.

  “He managed not to make that line sound ironic at all, wow,” she said. “What were you guys doing in here?”

  “Staring contest,” I said. “And I don’t think he was actually trying to quote The Terminator. You going to sleep over?”

  “That okay?” She sounded so young and vulnerable. It was easy to forget sometimes that she was nearly twenty years younger than I was. I might look like I’m in my mid-twenties, but I’m a lot closer to fifty than thirty.

  “Of course,” I said. “I don’t really want to be alone, you know?”

  Apparently I wasn’t done lying after all.

  I didn’t want to get up when my alarm blared to life, but the smell of waffles and bacon summoned me. I’d slept fitfully with weird dreams. The final dream ended with the sound of my alarm and the feel of Samir’s hands around my throat as he whispered he would be here soon.

  For a moment I wondered who was making bacon, but remembered that Harper had slept on my couch. At least she was earning her keep. I sat up too quickly and my hip pinged me with a reminder that I’d been shot the night before. I stumbled to the bathroom with a muttered good morning to Harper and peeled up the Band-Aids.

  There was a pretty amazing green, yellow, and purple bruise, but the cuts were all closed. A gaping wound would close within minutes. A bruise? That would stick around for days. Maybe it was my body’s way of telling me I should really avoid taking damage.

  I pulled on clothes, shared a somewhat awkward and quiet breakfast with Harper, and then went down to open my shop. Harper took her laptop and said she was going to go over to Dr. Lake’s and sit with her mother, then she planned to go home and talk to her brother Max about what was happening.

  After the craziness of the day before, a quiet day in my shop seemed eerie. I kept waiting for something horrible to happen, but the hours went by without anyone ending up dead or frozen, without any other hot strangers with guns barging in.

  Harper called the landline in the shop around four to tell me she was heading to the B&B to talk to Max. I felt weirdly isolated without my cell phone. I ordered a replacement online, but I wouldn’t have it until the following Monday.

  I had no word from Alek. Ciaran dropped by to say he’d solved everything with the cops, at least for the moment, and that the second kid was in a coma at the hospital. The sheriff was going to write it up as a robbery gone wrong. Nobody had any explanation for how Jimmy had died. It appeared his heart had stopped, just like that. I didn’t envy Sheriff Lee her job explaining it to his parents or the admins at the college.

  Ezee called the store as well, sometime after when I’d given up on doing inventory and was distracting myself by painting orc miniatures. He said he had recognized one of the kids from school and was going to ask around, see whom they might have associated with. I told him to be careful and asked if he’d seen or heard from the Justice. He hadn’t.

  The medallion off the kid in the coma was upstairs. As the day faded, I thought about it more and more, trying to anticipate the questions Alek might have and how to answer them in a way that would make sense but not give away more about myself than I already had.

  No good. I dropped a mini back onto the newspaper and gritted my teeth.

  Thoughts of Samir flooded in. Had even the relatively small amounts of magic I’d used yesterday been too much? Was he even now on his way here to finally kill me? The tracking spell wouldn’t register, I didn’t think. Way too much ambient magic in this area for that to stand out. But the circle of protection I’d thrown up to fend off whatever killing ritual the shadowy man behind Rose’s paralyzing was performing—that wasn’t exactly minor magic. I mean, in the scale of things for me, it was. Or it would have been, once upon a time when I was in practice and in shape, magically speaking.

  I looked around my shop. Pwned Comics and Games. It was home, the kind of place my teenage self had dreamed about all those years ago after my second family opened my eyes to the world of all that is nerd. I liked my life here. I didn’t want things to change. I didn’t want to have to run again.

  Maybe I was still safe. No more magic, though. Not even my stone-floating exercises, at least not for a while. Whatever happened with Rose and the ritual mage who was behind all this was Alek’s problem to handle. He was the one trained for this shit. I could provide emotional support to my friends, but I had to stop being involved.

  I could stay for now. Keep my life here. Decision made, I relaxed a little.

  Which was when, of course, the universe kicked me in the ass again.

  Levi and Harper came through the front door in a rush. I knew it was trouble just from the energy they projected, before I even made out their upset faces and heard a peep from them.

  “Ezee is missing,” Levi said.

  “What do you mean, missing?” I asked. My heart took up residence in my throat.

  “He was supposed to meet me at work after his last class got out. He didn’t show and he isn’t answering either his cell or his office phone.”

  “Maybe he’s at the library? Emergency student conference?” I tried to ignore my painful sense of foreboding.

  “Did you talk to him today?” Harper asked.

  Shit. “Shit,” I said. “I did. He said he knew one of the perps from last night and was going to ask around, see who else might be connected to the guy.”

  “Shit is right,” Levi muttered. “We’re going over to Juniper to look for him. Come on.”

  How could I refuse that? He was my friend. This felt an awful lot like involvement though.

  “Where’s the Justice?” I asked.

  “I think he went to the hospital to see if that guy had woken up yet,” Harper said. “He said something about it when he came to check on Mom earlier.”

  Which meant Alek was at least forty-five minutes away in another town. Wylde wasn’t large enough to have a full hospital; we just had the emergency clinic and a couple doctor’s offices.

  “Okay, let me lock up,” I said. What else could I do?

  Juniper College is a private liberal arts university known for turning out a lot of serious students who go on to get PhDs and then work in low-level service jobs for the rest of their lives trying to pay off massive student loans. Okay, so m
aybe not always that last part, but it was one of those elite small schools full of people who seemed more in love with learning than with practical life skills. I’d teased Ezee about it a lot, but in good fun.

  I mean, I’d been raised by a bunch of professors and gone to a similar school. Once upon a time I had thought I could be happy in academia for the rest of my life. Before Samir and my wild years as a sorceress-in-training, plotting to make the world my bitch.

  The campus was just outside Wylde proper and butted up against the border of the River of No Return Wilderness. Ezee’s office was in the oldest building on campus, a beautiful five-story timber and river-stone mansion that sat like a jewel in the middle of a grove of old growth Douglas Fir trees.

  The sun was low in the sky when we arrived, the campus quiet in the spring chill. Here and there students walked in packs, talking to each other or with heads buried in their phones, and no one gave us much of a glance.

  Ezee’s office was on the fourth floor. Levi had a key and let us in when knocking clearly showed his brother wasn’t in residence.

  Books filled one wall on shelves bending a little under their weight. Two overstuffed leather chairs with brass upholstery tacks decorating them in knotwork patterns on the edges were positioned by the desk in a way that invited one in for a cozy chat over a cup of tea about the mysteries of the universe, or, given Ezee’s area of expertise, a lively talk about American history and treatment of native peoples.

  His desk was orderly, his laptop sitting in sleep mode and plugged into the spike bar on one side. A pile of papers sat waiting to be graded or handed back. There was a pink pen, uncapped, lying on the open area of the desk, as though Ezee had just set it down and was about to return to whatever he’d been writing. Even his desk chair was rotated toward the door, as though he’d only stepped out for a moment, and the Armani aftershave he used still hung in the air.

  “Maybe he’s in the bathroom? Or we could check the library,” I said.

  “It feels like he’s here. Somehow.” Levi shook his head and sniffed the air. “I think he’s close. I can’t tell. It’s like something is blocking my connection to him.”