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Ask and Answer Page 19

by Clara Coulson


  The magician brought up a second shield in the nick of time, but it wasn’t as stable as his first, and the bullets cracked the shell. Before he could form the shield properly, Yun came charging in and punched the shield, releasing a massive electrical discharge that brought the whole thing down again.

  Yun’s fist kept on going, and the magician reeled back to avoid it. But a bright arc of electricity jumped from her knuckles and zapped him right between the eyes. His muscles seized up, and he lost his footing, tripping over the chair that belonged to the table Liam was trying to throw off his chest. The magician fell and whacked his head against the damaged bookshelf.

  Had the man been mundane, that head wound would’ve been the end of the fight. But before he even came to a full stop, legs in the air, tangled in the chair, shoulders planted against the floor, a charm on his belt flared to life.

  The bloody gash on his temple healed almost instantly, nothing but a smear of blood to indicate it had ever been there in the first place. The crack in his skull and the bruise on his brain got the same quick repair treatment; Liam knew that because the man climbed back to his feet without so much as a wobble.

  On his way up, he kicked the chair at Yun, and she had to throw herself to the side to avoid the impact. While she was spinning out, the magician’s attention jumped back to Radigan, who had abandoned his gun and hightailed it for the door.

  With a wave of the magician’s hand, the door slammed shut in Radigan’s face. Radigan cried out in terror, grabbed the doorknob, and tried his hardest to wrench the door open. It didn’t budge. The magician’s telekinetic hold was far stronger than anything Radigan’s muscles could muster.

  The magician whistled, and a dagger on his belt unsheathed itself, rose into the air, and turned its sharp tip toward Radigan. Just before the dagger launched across the room, Liam grabbed the magician’s legs, causing him to stumble. The dagger shot forward, but at the wrong trajectory, and struck the wall right next to Radigan’s head.

  Swearing, the magician tried to kick Liam in the face, but Liam snatched up the knife he’d dropped earlier and rammed the invisible blade into the magician’s oncoming leg. The blade drove straight through the man’s calf, splitting muscle and severing blood vessels—then the shock charm activated and walloped the man with ten thousand volts.

  The magician crumpled and hit the floor with a loud thud.

  Yun, fists still raised and sparking, said, “Is he out?”

  Liam tugged his knife out of the man’s profusely bleeding leg and scrambled to his feet. “I think so. But he’s got a powerful healing charm on his belt, so we need to tie him up and spell the bindings before all the damage is rep—”

  The same healing charm as before flickered to life, but this time, it didn’t activate alone.

  A second charm, potentially triggered by the man’s unconscious state, glowed bright red and began to pulse. In a reducing cadence. Like a countdown.

  A third charm activated on its own a second later. The resulting shield encapsulated the entirety of the magician’s body. Except the pulsing charm. The shield cut that charm off the magician’s belt, and it hit the floor, rolling to a stop at Liam’s feet.

  Two prominent symbols were etched into the little medallion. One for fire. One for force.

  “Fuck, it’s a bomb!” Liam backpedaled toward the door, only to find that the magician had pulled a sleight of hand and sealed it shut with a ward at the same time he’d been holding it closed with telekinesis. The seal was simple, but it would still take Liam more than a minute to break it. And if his ears weren’t deceiving him, the pulsing charm had ten seconds left before it blew.

  Nine.

  Eight.

  Seven.

  “Out the window,” he said quickly. “Out the window!”

  Liam grabbed the cowering Radigan and dragged him toward the room’s lone window. Yun beat them there by half a second. She hurled herself through the thick pane, arms raised to shield her face from the hail of broken glass, and sailed off toward the courtyard below.

  Liam followed her without a second thought. He hauled the flailing Radigan onto the windowsill, pointed one of his rings at the floor, and shot off a wave of reciprocal force that flung him and his cargo twenty feet through the air. Then they fell toward the covered courtyard.

  Impressively, Yun distributed her weight so that she hit the glass roof without breaking it. She slid over to the edge, where she dropped off and landed on the grass in a controlled roll.

  Liam, bearing the weight of an extra person, couldn’t even dream of replicating that maneuver. So he pulled up the strongest shield he could manage, his ring burning hot, and braced for impact.

  They hit hard, and the glass roof imploded. Glittering shards bounced off the shield and accompanied their graceless tumble to the floor. A table Liam had decorated himself was nice enough to break their fall, the narrow legs snapping in half and slowing their descent just enough to prevent them from snapping their necks. They crashed down among a chorus of breaking plates and plinking glass, the cracking of their bones adding to the clamor.

  Liam blacked out for a handful of seconds, and came to again just in time to watch Radigan’s study explode, the broken window belching out a huge ball of fire. Flaming strips of paper danced through the air, and sharp chunks of charred wood pelted the roof of the courtyard.

  A few of the chunks careened through the hole left by Liam and Radigan’s descent, threatening to burn the two men too dazed to move. But Yun, having rushed into the courtyard through an exterior door, skidded to a stop beside them and shielded them with another table until the debris fall ended.

  “Liam,” she said, concern thick on her tongue, “are you okay?”

  “I’ve been better,” Liam groaned. “It hurts to breathe.”

  His back was on fire. He’d cracked several ribs, maybe even a vertebra, and he’d hit his head against multiple blunt objects, a group of knots already rising on his scalp.

  “Remember that ME friend of yours? Ambrose?” he added. “You might want to give her a call. I’m going to need another patch job.”

  “Screw that. You need a hospital.”

  Liam’s gaze drifted back up to the window of Radigan’s office. A dark silhouette moved within the billowing smoke. “We don’t have time for that. The magician’s already back on his feet.”

  Suppressing a cry of pain, he rolled over and examined Samuel Radigan, who was curled up into a fetal ball. “Radigan, hey.” He shook the man by the shoulder. “Can you walk?”

  Radigan’s fearful eyes cracked open. “Is it over?”

  “No, it’s not.” Liam took three shallow breaths, his ribs screaming, and heaved himself up. “The guy’s going to jump down to the courtyard any second. We need to get out of here.”

  “Who is that man?” Radigan sputtered. “Why is he trying to kill me? Is he an assassin?”

  “Not the kind you’re thinking.” Liam grasped Radigan’s arm. “Yun, help me get him up.”

  “I want to know what the hell is going on here!” Radigan shouted.

  “And I will tell you,” Liam responded, just as loud, “once we get the murderous magician off our ass.”

  Radigan’s face twisted into a petrified sneer at the word “magician,” like he hadn’t quite grasped the the cloaked man who’d somehow strangled him without physical contact was anything more than mundane until now. “Oh hell. The sups have come for me at last.”

  Yun huffed. “Um, hello? Who do you think just saved your life?”

  Radigan’s expression tightened. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  “I’ll make a formal introduction, assuming we don’t die in the next five minutes.” Liam tugged the man with all his strength, even though the pain in his back nearly made him faint. “Now get up and move!”

  Radigan almost said no, almost blabbered out to the stunned caterers huddled agains
t the walls that Liam and Yun were a threat to him, almost called for security to have his own saviors arrested.

  But then he glanced up at the flaming ruin of his office and saw the man in the black coat, standing at the empty window, completely untouched by the raging fire and the churning smoke, staring down at him in fury, dark eyes like burning coals.

  “Okay, yeah,” Radigan breathed out. “Let’s move. Really fast.”

  17

  Kat

  The basement of the Radigan mansion was a maze of narrow halls, dead ends, and dark corners. Though she and Gabby hadn’t run into anything dangerous thus far—they’d found two storage rooms, a home gym, and a sauna—every foot farther Kat crept through the east wing of the basement amplified an odd feeling of static that ghosted across her skin.

  An inhuman instinct inside her had sent up a flare. Something was wrong.

  Gabby, a couple steps ahead of her, inclined her head and sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”

  Kat sniffed as well. The cloying scent of disinfectant left by an overzealous cleaning crew had permeated the basement. But now, another scent, an acrid stench like rotten eggs, had begun to overtake it. “Sulfur?”

  “Sulfur,” Gabby agreed. “While we were setting up in the courtyard, Mr. Huntington told me to keep an eye out for it. Apparently, sulfur is sometimes used in demon summonings. The magician adds it to the chalk they use to draw the array in order to strengthen the array’s protective capabilities.”

  “I didn’t smell it at Maitland’s apartment.”

  Gabby hummed. “Maitland’s death must not have been part of the plan. Glasya-Labolas broke through that array and killed Maitland, either out of anger or amusement. So when the magician made a duplicate array here, they added sulfur to make sure the demon couldn’t pull that same trick twice.”

  Kat frowned. “Couldn’t the demon have just waited until it was let out of the circle to attack?”

  “I imagine the contract terms it agreed to forbid attacking its summoner,” she said, peeking through an open door into what appeared to be another storage room, this one full of fishing equipment and deflated pool floats. “But if I’m not mistaken, every time a demon returns to a summoning array, those terms have to be reaffirmed before it can take a new host.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  I have so much to learn about magic, Kat thought. And I still can’t even properly control my own.

  “The sulfur scent’s coming from that room over there.” Gabby pointed to a door on the left about twenty feet up ahead. “The presence of the array in Radigan’s house isn’t proof enough that he’s involved in the murders. But at the very least, it establishes that illegal magic practices are taking place under his roof. So we should take some pictures of the array and send them off to Mr. Giannopoulos, so he can add them to our body of evidence.”

  “Should we do anything to the array?”

  “Well, according to Mr. Huntington…” Gabby lowered her tone to mimic Hunt’s voice as she said, “‘Since the demon has already possessed Linda Cunningham, nothing we do to the array will inhibit it in any way. The array can only affect the demon when it detaches from its host and reverts to its incorporeal base form.

  “‘The reason being that the array itself acts as a sort of pseudo-host when a real host isn’t ‘in use.’ The array can keep the demon anchored to this plane in perpetuity. Without an array or an active host, the demon will eventually be drawn back into the Inferno.’”

  Kat wrinkled her nose. “So why don’t we destroy the array?”

  Gabby shuffled over to the designated door and tugged out her phone. “‘Because, if the demon loses its current host and the tether that binds it to the array, then in the interim period before the Inferno naturally reclaims it, the demon will be able to do whatever it pleases. Demons have little power in their incorporeal forms, but one thing they can do is make contracts of their own.’”

  Gabby finally dropped her impression of Hunt. “I don’t know much about this Glasya-Labolas in particular, but in my limited experience, demons are incredibly crafty. All it takes is one gullible person, and then…”

  “The demon has a shiny new host,” Kat finished. “Got it. We leave the array intact.”

  Gabby raked her gaze up and down the door. “Do you see any active wards?”

  Kat drew closer to the door and examined it thoroughly. Several wards had been carved into the doorframe, but none of them were glowing in the slightest. “No, I don’t. But you’d think there would be some. This rogue magician’s clearly not an idiot, so why would they leave the array unguarded? Anyone could just waltz in and ruin it, and in so doing, free the demon from their control.”

  “Maybe it’s not unguarded.” Gabby took a step back. “Maybe there’s a trap inside.”

  “Hm. Let me check.” Kat pressed her palms to the door, closed her eyes, and focused not on any mundane sense but on that intangible sensory organ inside her soul that was attuned to magic.

  Liam had told her that sensing minute amounts of magic through physical barriers was an extremely difficult skill to master, and that only a fraction of magicians had a keen enough magic sense to do so. But sometimes, if she was in the right frame of mind, Kat could do it for a second or two.

  She pushed her soul to look past the door, into the room beyond, until it felt like something in her chest was physically straining. Sweat broke out on her face and neck, and her hands began to shake.

  When nothing appeared in the blackness after thirty seconds of straining, Kat wondered if there was actually nothing of concern in the room. But then, out of nowhere, a faint red glow appeared in her mind’s eye, rippling at the edges.

  The glow was some distance from the hall, on the opposite end of the room, but it was situated directly in front of the door. And it definitely wasn’t the array. It was too high off the floor.

  “You were right,” Kat said, pulling away from the door with a gasp. “There’s an active ward on one of the walls. I can’t tell what it does, but it seems fairly small and simple, so my guess is that it’s an alarm.”

  Gabby put her phone away. “Then we’ll come back to grab pictures of the array on our way out. I don’t want to alert the magician to our presence too early.”

  “Right.” Kat wiped the sweat off her face with her shirtsleeve. “Where to next?”

  “Well, if they’ve got the array in this wing, then it’s a good bet there’s some more magic paraphernalia close by. It’s best to keep your magic supplies in a separate space from your practice area. Just in case something goes boom.” She set off at a brisk walk. “But if we don’t find anything on this hall, we’ll double back and try the front…”

  Gabby came to an abrupt halt and sniffed the air, twice. “That shouldn’t be here.”

  Kat hurriedly caught up to her. “What is it?”

  “Wolf,” she replied. “I smell wolf.”

  “As in, a wolf shifter?”

  “Unless the Radigans are keeping an actual wolf as a pet, yes.” Gabby jutted a finger toward the last room on the right. A room whose door had a padlock.

  “You think they’re holding someone prisoner?” Kat asked. “Maybe another relative of Gregory Nordstrom?”

  “Only one way to find out,” she said, tone sharp as a razor’s edge. Her eyes took on a yellow sheen, the jaguar in her soul rising up. “I don’t care if that room has an alarm ward. If there’s a shifter being held captive in there, we’re getting them out, even if we have to fight our way through the demon and the rogue magician.”

  “Fine with me.” Kat took off her glasses and tucked them into one of her socks for safekeeping. “I’m always up for a prison break.”

  Gabby stiffened. “Oh, good lord. I forgot that you were…”

  “I’m fine.” Kat waved nonchalantly, though that padlocked door tickled the memories of her time with A9. “And even if I wasn’t, I’m
not going to turn tail and run every time I come across a scene that might give me bad dreams. If an innocent person is being held captive, I’ll do whatever I can to help free them.”

  Gabby’s expression softened. “You’re a good person, Kat. I’m glad you found Liam. He really needed someone like you in his life.”

  Heat crept up Kat’s cheeks. “Um, thanks.”

  She winked at Kat, then reaffixed her hard stare on the padlocked door. “Let’s see what Senator Radigan is really hiding, shall we?”

  They approached the door with caution, listening intently for sounds that indicated a threat lay on the other side. When they heard nothing at all, confusion reigned momentarily. Until Kat noticed that the doorframe had a soundproofing seal.

  “Oh yeah,” Kat muttered, “they’re definitely keeping somebody in there.”

  “Whoever it is,” Gabby said, “I hope they haven’t been there long.”

  “Me too.” Kat scoured the door for wards, and was surprised when her search came up empty. “Huh. That’s odd. There’s not a single ward on this door, active or inactive.”

  “They don’t need any.” A dark growl rumbled in Gabby’s throat. “Look more closely at the lock. At the doorknob. At the frame.”

  Kat did so, but she didn’t spot whatever had triggered Gabby’s rage. “Can you be more specific? All I see is metal…”

  Suddenly, it hit her.

  The metal.

  “Silver,” Kat whispered. “All the metal parts on the door are silver.”

  “Silver-coated steel,” Gabby corrected, stomping her foot against the floor. “They use the same thing in prisons to keep shifters contained, because many of us are strong enough to break down the doors. When we come into contact with silver, even through clothing, it saps much of that strength.”

  Gabby blinked, and for a split second, the predatory eyes of a large, ferocious cat bore down upon the door. Then she blinked again, and her eyes reverted to their human state. “The other side of this door is likely a solid sheet of metal, so the shifter trapped inside can’t touch it without hurting themselves.”

 

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