I savored the smell of leather and whiskey, maybe with a hint of dust and cigars. They smelled like him. Or maybe he had smelled like them. I pulled out the first one and leather was still smooth like I remembered it. I cracked open the cover to see his familiar handwriting.
Maybe there was something in there. Maybe there wasn’t. Downstairs, we had enough books to fill another library, but this one was all about me, about my Legacy. About the magic that I apparently carried with me.
I tucked it under my arm and bounced back down the stairs empty handed.
Rafe was standing on a chair drawing something onto the doorframe.
“Hey!” I protested.
“Would you rather be dead?”
I huffed. “I didn’t find paint, so carve away, but explain as you carve.”
And he did. He pulled a pocket knife out of his pocket and started to etch a circle into my wooden frame. I had to turn away, a new pain of home ownership.
“Old Speak is the language that binds the magic inherent in the universe. It’s the language of spells. Words that give name and power to things and can change how the universe reacts to something.”
“And what exactly are you carving into my house?”
“Your home contains your energy, it’s a place where you feel safe. Unlike where we were last night.” His hand paused, then dropped to his side. I knew he was re-seeing, re-smelling, reliving what he’d been through. After a deep breath, he started his work again. “This is a sigil for protection against harm. Nothing with ill-intent to your person as the person who has filled this place with your energy will be able to get through that door or through this window.”
It either made perfect sense, or I had been lulled into submission by his accent. How did the co-eds contain themselves around a handsome professor who could lull you into a dream even when speaking of decay? Perhaps they didn’t contain themselves.
At least the symbol was small; it was sort of a circle with a Wi-Fi signal around it. He jumped down from his chair and moved to another window.
“So this Old Speak is how they are working their spells?”
“Aye. Like a computer command. Protect, sacrifice, and so on. I mean, it’s a wee bit more than that, but we don’t have years to teach you the nuance of spellcraft. The basic premise is magic is the catalyst, fueled by the universe’s power or potential energy, and driven by the willpower of the practitioner.”
“So the ‘they’ that we have been dancing around would need to know exactly what sigil to carve into something to get the result they wanted, but it doesn’t have to be Warlocks if a Shifter like you can know the nuance of spellcraft?”
“Aye.”
“And, from the evidence of the body and your assessment of the space, the sacrifice spell sucked the energy out of the place and the person?”
“Aye.” Rafe kept carving as I questioned away.
“Then where did the energy go? Or is the conservation of energy not a universal standard when we are talking about magic.”
He paused. “Are you a physicist as well?”
“I know enough about a lot of things.”
He chuckled and went back to his work. “That’s the part of this we need to figure out. It went somewhere, but without the pattern, the will of players, I can’t tell you where.”
“So we have the how and the what, but we need the who and the why?”
“Exactly. Someone carved that into her arm with the intent to kill her.”
As if summoned, the wound on my forearm started to itch. I’d been attacked and carved into. Could Ethan and I have been a target of this thing too?
The fear crept across my skin like spider slowly stalking its meal. Could my attacker have been trying to carve that sigil into me? If I had gone alone that night, could I have been the first in this pattern? Would Ethan and Rafe be investigating my murder? I mean, what if Beakman was just filling in where I was supposed to be?
Rafe jumped down from the second window and pulled the chair back to the table.
“Something bothering you?”
I stumbled into those deep blue eyes and had to gulp to catch my breath before I fell into them. “Can I show you something?”
His eye brow did wicked arch. “Like what?”
My mouth ran dry. “Hypothetically, if maybe the shadows I saw that night were magical, and hypothetically, if maybe Ethan’s death was connected to the other bodies, because hypothetically there is something very evil in this city …”
God, this was insane. I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my own mouth, but without the sour taste of the lie and the questions that swirled around me, it was a line of questioning that I had never sought out, a kite string I’d never followed, but with the openness of his eyes and the warmth of his body beside me, the words pattered out.
“Could those things have been trying to sacrifice me and Ethan?”
I slowly drew up the sleeve of my left arm and peeled off the thin gauze. The wound was crusted now, and within a week, might be only a faint reminder of what had happened.
I held it out between us. “Could they have tried to carve something into me like they carved something into Tay-Tay?”
Rafe was so close that I heard the moisture from his lips as they parted. He exhaled slowly and his breath played along my exposed flesh.
He held my arm as he would a bird, his touch light and open, not exactly holding so much as caging between his fingers so I wouldn’t fly away. He ran his fingers down the scar. It was very clearly a straight line with an acute angle at the end, reminding me of a harpoon in this semi-healed state.
I waited unmoving for what he might say.
Rafe finally spoke. “I don’t know, Merci. Run me through that night again?”
He gently pulled me into a chair at the table, never letting go of my arm.
“Benny called me and I went, because I’m one of Pavlov’s dogs for danger. We were standing there in the store.”
The flashback tore across my eyes, and Rafe’s fingers lightly gripped my arm, anchoring me as he surrounded me in that warm scent again.
I was still trapped in the dark, but no longer panicked. “It went dark, like pitch black. Ethan told me to run, but I didn’t. I turned toward him, reached out for him, and then two guys tackled me.”
“Two men?”
I nodded, remembering the feeling of their hands on my body, on my wrists. “Huge hands and they smelled like … sausage.”
My eyes popped open. “I don’t think I’ve remembered their smell before.”
“Keep going.”
I closed my eyes and went back there with Rafe’s touch as a tether to safety. “He tore my jacket and starting cutting my arm and then there was this noise this …” The howl reverberated through my memory. “I think Ethan shifted.”
“We are stronger in wolf form.”
“One of the men on me went to help out the other two, and then the guy just stopped and the men vanished.” I opened up my eyes again. “I didn’t even hear them run away, but by then I was concussed, broken ribs, and bleeding out.”
His thumb arched up and down the skin on my arm. “I can’t say for sure. I mean, this could be a million things.”
“But that center stroke, it matches the sacrifice sigil. That angle at the bottom could be the beginning of the diamond.”
My heart scampered into a full run and began leaping against my rib cage. My vision tunneled to the red line down my arm and I could see the outline of Tay-Tay’s body on my fair skin.
Rafe squeezed my arm and lifted my chin to meet his gaze. “Take a deep breath.”
I did and then another. Until my heart was only a light tap dance in my chest.
“Let’s maybe get something to eat.”
I pointed to the kitchen. “Food’s on the fridge.”
Slowly, he pulled away from me and went into the kitchen. “Chinese or pizza?” Rafe called out.
I was cold without him, the skin on my arms pric
kling. I ran my own fingers over the wound, tracing the line where his fingers had just been. “Let’s be cliché. Chinese.”
“Done.”
Before I knew it, Rafe was whistling in the kitchen, probably on hold. I sighed.
I kept my eyes to the line down my arm, letting my mind drift to that night, knowing I was safe here. Had they not finished the job because Ethan had fought to save me? Had they not completed the spell because Ethan was a shifter and it had taken three men to take him down?
Truth or just a story I wanted to believe, they hadn’t gotten me and they wouldn’t get anyone else.
Rafe walked back out into the living room. “Food should be here in about thirty.”
He paused at the end of the table. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
I needed a distraction and found it in the red leather book between us. “If you were a Legacy, why did you have an Idiot’s Guide to Being Magical?” I held up the little red book.
It was the right question, even with the right vocabulary. It hummed through my skin, the Charm telling me I was on the right path. Even in my head it was already the Charm, Ethan’s vernacular still helping me frame this power, this cloud that I’d been living under my whole life.
Rafe’s skin paled and something just north of my stomach churned. He hadn’t had time to lie yet, so I wasn’t sure what it was, but the shade in his eyes made me feel ill. “I’m sorry. I really don’t need to know.”
His rose lips parted for a long moment before he spoke. “No, it’s all right. It actually might help.” He went back to the table to stack his books into another order. “As horrifically trite as the story is, there was a girl. And we went out a few times, and then she had her first vision. Turned out she was a Seer, a psychic. Enough wandering blood that she could see the future. I tracked down a copy of the book to help her ease into the world.”
“Didn’t last long after that?”
His lips quirked up into a half smile. “She didn’t like what she saw.”
God, I wanted to ask what she saw in his past, but I would wait. Just like divulging that I was a Wanderer was my story, this one was his, and he obviously wasn’t ready to tell me the whole truth, so I would wait. That was enough questions for right now. No need to open any more doors. “So what did you order from Chan’s?”
It took him a moment to follow the turn of the conversation, his mind on other things. “Oh … Beef and broccoli and orange chicken with steamed rice and an order of noodles.”
What was I going to do with him? With this man who had so easily integrated himself into my life and fit so naturally in my Spartan living room? With Rafe it had been less than six weeks and he already knew the layout of my kitchen and my usual order from Chan’s. This was getting annoying. “That’ll work.”
With a little more time before the food arrived, I curled up on the couch with my dad’s journal. Despite stubbornly saving them from my mother, I’d never read them before. They were literally his blood, sweat, and tears.
I took in a deep breath before I started flipping through the pages. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but the familiar smell of the pages and the curl of his handwriting gave me a little hope that the answers I needed might somehow be in these pages. And it was a nice break from Witches, and Warlocks, and Wanderers.
Once back in high school, my dad had walked me through his notebooks, showed me how he organized his thoughts on paper as he was working through a story. The shorthand he had developed. And though I really hadn’t needed to use most of it (I was only reporting on football games and academic decathlon winners at that point), I still used the system myself. Questions in the margins on the left, answers in the main section on the right. Answers that needed to be confirmed were circled and facts that were confirmed were put into a square. Random thoughts to investigate later were scratched perpendicular to the rest of the story.
As the pattern went, as he got closer to the truth, the squares gathered at the end, culminating in the perfect opening paragraph containing the five W’s of the story. But there were breaks between stories. Ideas. Random questions. Investigative reporters follow the general trends, so it’s more like amassing complaints to see if there is a story. Figuring out patterns to see if a tragedy was just a tragedy or if it was a symptom of something bigger. When he got to random tragedy number three, he would start investigating. Three was a pattern.
His past was painfully similar to my present. Painfully familiar to my own process. But the real question remained—Did he have my power? I mean, the guy could crack a story like no one else and never got the recognition he deserved. That had to mean he had the same Charm, but why had he never mentioned it? Why had he remained silent when I was uncovering steroid use in my high school’s football program and purposeful lice infestations at the cheerleading retreats? Surely he would have recognized it? Why hadn’t he told me anything about it?
I scanned through the pages and saw another familiar sight. A page so filled with questions there was barely any white space left. Questions circling other questions like a story web from hell. Like a thundercloud that swarmed around him.
Just like me.
I wasn’t exactly sure when the doorbell had rung or when Rafe had gone to get the food, but suddenly the smell of beef and broccoli filled the room. My stomach growled and I was forced to joined him at the table, leaving my father’s legacy on the couch, far enough away that I could avoid psychoanalyzing my entire life.
Again.
Both of us kept reading while we ate, me the Guide and him some crusty looking book in Latin that would have killed my appetite with some of the lithographs. Long after we had both cracked open our fortune cookies, Rafe leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “What part are you to in the Guide?”
I’d read through the first section that covered most of the breeds of Wanderers, your vampires, guardians, shifters, etc. Each section was like a dictionary with their natural abilities, strengths, and then method of death, which I found disturbingly clinical but good to know. Rafe hadn’t been lying when he said the book was thorough. “Nearly done with Notable Events. I just finished the Great Shifter War.”
Rafe looked away. “Once you know the truth, the world does make a little more sense.”
I desperately wanted to know more about what happened during the War. The Guide read like a textbook and what Piper had told me was vague at best. I knew he’d been there, but what really happened? But for once I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to force the story.
I leaned across the table and squinted the text he was reading. “What are you reading? That doesn’t look English?”
“It’s Russian, actually, but here’s our sigil.” He pointed to the diamond with a cross sticking out of the top that now automatically came with a flash of Tay-Tay’s dead body. I wasn’t sure I wanted it to stop. The image rustled up the bees in my brain and kept my skin and the Charm humming.
“I think it might be Demon specific. I haven’t found it any Fey lore or Warlock text.”
“What do you mean?” I picked up the discarded box of noodles and fished one out. Nothing like research snacks.
He searched the living room for an explanation. “Old Speak is like any language. Certain words have different meanings depending on who says them. Sort of like how I’d call it a torch and you’d call it a flashlight.”
“So you know Demon semantics?”
He only shrugged and started to poke around at his remaining orange chicken still cluttering the table with the demon grimoires and spell books. “I know that if a Fey used this symbol for sacrifice, it be a good thing, an offering to the earth. But I can’t imagine that a Fey would offer up a human life.”
“But a Demon would?”
“In two seconds. Demons are pure hunger. Their power comes from what they feed on and they have abilities to lure their food to them. So, classic example: an incubus Demon feeds on sexual energy, so it has the ability of glamour to look like an object
of desire. Following?”
“Unfortunately,” I responded.
“But Demons don’t have corporeal bodies on this plane of existence. They’d need a host to even survive here.”
“You mean possession?”
“Top marks. You know your horror movies. But before they even have a host body, they’d need servants to carve the marks into people so they could feed to gain enough energy to pierce the veil and come across into our world. But I can’t find a spell in any of these Warlock texts that matches the pattern we have here.”
“Why are you only searching in Warlock texts?”
He looked at me like I had spoken in his mother tongue; part confused and part awe.
I set down the carton of food. “Why does everyone have to abide by what’s written in the books? We have evidence they aren’t doing things by the book, so why are you limiting your thinking?”
A crease formed between his brows. “Breeds operate by a finite set of rules. Its why we have such a hard time relating to one another. Without rules, there is chaos.”
“Why? Maybe this is something brand new that’s never been in one of your books before. Maybe this is special.” And maybe I was letting my issues bubble to the surface a little too much. I hadn’t found anything like what I could do in this book and wasn’t sure that I wanted to be limited like these other breeds were limited.
It was a light show behind his eyes and a dance across his brows and jaw. And I felt it— the shift in his energy at the table as he glanced between the books and me. He finally leaned back in his chair and regarded me, this time only in awe. “I guess that is the beautiful thing about this world, Miss Lanard. With enough will, anything is possible.”
Rafe rubbed his eyes and ran his fingers through his thick hair. “Good Lord. Look at the time. I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.”
I stretched in my chair. It had been a while since I’d gotten lost in research, like the good old days when I was waist deep in IRS returns and loving every minute.
He stood and reached for his jacket.
“Without you getting the wrong idea, I have a guest bedroom and fancy protection sigils carved into my walls. You’re welcome to stay.”
The Truth About Night Page 15