“Sure.”
“I wish you’d shown some sense! We could have broken this cabal up for good! What’s got you so distracted?”
Corvin raised his brows and looked toward Reg.
“Oh, good grief,” Jessup grumbled. “Can’t you forget your appetite for once and think about the bigger picture? Think about someone other than yourself?”
Anger flashed over Corvin’s usually good-natured features. “Why do you think I came here? What do you think is in it for me? If I ever did anything altruistic, this is it!”
“Yeah, sure,” Jessup said. “I’m sure the thought of a warehouse full of rare magical ingredients had nothing to do with it.”
Corvin laughed and didn’t disagree. Reg looked back and forth between the two of them. “So how do you guys know each other? You’re friends?”
Jessup snorted. “Adversaries would be more accurate. Enemies doesn’t quite catch the essence of it.”
“Respected adversaries,” Corvin clarified. “Among other things.”
“Huh. You wish.”
Reg tried to imagine their position inside the building. “So if we tried to go back out the way we came, we would just keep encountering more roadblocks. But what if we went out this way.” She indicated the window. It was, as far as Reg could tell, right at the edge of the property line. If they could get out the window, they could get off the property without having to deal with any more traps.
“How are you going to do that?” Jessup demanded. “Those are burglar bars. You can’t get through unless you have the ability to shrink yourself down to the size of a coffee cup.”
“One problem at a time.”
“Unless you can walk through walls…”
That, unfortunately, was not a skill Reg had mastered. It certainly would have made it easier for her to have escaped some of the more abusive homes. Or school. Or interrogation rooms. A quick escape was always better than trying to fight.
Reg examined the window. She touched it, as if she could learn more about it just by being in physical contact with it. Had it been enchanted as well? Maybe there was no point in even trying to escape through the window.
“What do you think?” Corvin asked.
“The grille is over the inside.”
“Making it pretty difficult for us to break the glass. Or to get the grille off without any tools.”
Reg followed the grille around the edge of the window. At first look, it was attached directly to the wall with concrete screws. Pretty impenetrable. But it wasn’t actually. She could see hinges along one side so that it could be swung open away from the window.
“For people to get out if there was a fire,” she murmured. She went to the opposite side of the window and gave the bars a tug. There was a clang when they moved and then were stopped. Reg found a padlock through a loop that locked the entire structure in place. That was the weak point.
Close beside her, Corvin reached up and examined the lock. “We still don’t have any way to get it open.”
“Maybe.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
She gazed up at the lock. “When you were at my house and you knocked those papers down, and you made a whirlwind that attacked Hawthorne-Rose…”
“Uh-huh…?”
“Was that your power or mine?”
He chuckled. “I haven’t ever shown any talent for telekinesis before.”
“So it was mine?”
He nodded.
“I didn’t know… I never realized I could control objects without touching them. I mean, I’ve done it before…” She was aware that she sounded like a loon. “But I just brushed it off, you know? Said that it was just a coincidence or my imagination.”
He looked up at the padlock. “You think you can work the lock?”
“I don’t know. I never tried before.”
He shrugged.
Jessup had been listening. “Well, give it a try. What’s it going to hurt?”
“I don’t know. Could it make something bad happen? I mean… I trigger some spell that starts the room filling up with water? Or snakes?”
Jessup laughed. “I don’t think you need to worry about that!”
“You think it’s safe to try?”
The police woman hadn’t moved from her spot on the floor. She gazed up at the lock, squinting. “I don’t think that thing’s been touched in years. I doubt if they even saw it. They just thought the grille was installed directly into the wall, like I did.”
“Okay.” Reg breathed out a puff of air and looked at Corvin. She rubbed her fingers together, limbering them up. “Any tips?”
“It’s your power. You know it better than I do. You’ve been using it your whole life.”
“And I gather by the way you got into the building that you’re not an expert lock-picker.”
Jessup snorted again. Corvin looked at her. “That hurts, woman.”
“It’s a simple tumbler,” Jessup told Reg. “You put a key in, and the points of the key press the pins. When the pins are pushed in, the tumbler can turn and unlock the padlock.”
“How do I know which pins to press?”
“Any that are sticking out.”
That didn’t sound too complicated. If she were trying to insert a tool to find and press the pins, that would be more difficult, but she only had to feel for them with her mind and press them in. No clumsy tools.
Reg thought about the lock. She thought about the parts Jessup described and how they moved. About the purpose of the lock. Its purpose wasn’t just to lock, but to unlock. If the people who had installed the bars hadn’t had need for them to open, there would have been no need for a lock. They could have just screwed them into the wall.
The purpose of the lock was to allow access, so Reg concentrated on that, talking to the inanimate object in her mind, reminding it of its reason for existing. She felt for the pins and pressed against them, waiting patiently for everything to come together and for the lock to pop open.
Nothing happened.
⋆ Chapter Twenty-Eight ⋆
Reg was sweating. The room was getting hotter and her mental work was taxing. She wiped her forehead and looked at Jessup, shaking her head.
“I can feel it all, but… it’s like there’s something pushing back against me. I can’t get it to cooperate.”
Jessup banged her head back on the wall. “The protection spells must have included the lock. Good idea, but it looks like they thought of that.”
“So these spells… how do they work? If we cut the lock… would it prevent us from cutting it? Or would the cut heal? Or once you cut it, would that get you to the next step, until you were through all of the layers of protection?”
“If you cut the lock, that protection would fail. But they didn’t leave us anything to work with.”
“No,” Reg agreed. She stared out into the alley, looking for anything that they could use out there. If she could call an object into the room…
But even outside, there didn’t seem to be anything useful to them. The place had been sterilized.
She could hear the calls of birds through the open window. Sea birds calling to each other. They were very close to the water. She could picture them circling over the beach, looking for food.
“Reg?”
Reg startled. She looked at Warren, surprised. He hadn’t shown any inclination to talk to her before that, or even that he knew her name.
“Yes?”
“Do you think you can get us out of here?” He looked down at Ling, leaning against him with her eyes closed. How much longer was Ling going to last? Reg had failed to help her. She had failed all of them.
She stared out at the sky. Freedom was so close. Just on the other side of the bars and glass. She didn’t know whether Hawthorne-Rose expected them to just die of dehydration or whether he planned to come back and kill them when he escaped Reg’s house. So far, he had avoided killing anyone outright. Maybe to avoid the bad karma, or maybe he was ju
st a chicken, Reg didn’t know which.
She pictured him as a strutting chicken, which lifted her mood a little. She wondered when Sarah would get back from her errands, and if the men would still be in the cottage when she got there. She’d head over to have a heart-to-heart with Reg, and find two strangers there.
Though they probably weren’t strangers to her. The magical community wasn’t that large. Uriel and Sarah both frequented The Crystal Bowl, so they undoubtedly knew each other.
Or maybe they were working together; Sarah handy to keep Reg from finding out what was going on.
“No,” Reg murmured.
“You don’t think we can get out?” Warren asked, eyes wide.
Reg ignored him, looking instead to Corvin and Jessup. “Is Sarah involved? Is there any way at all that Sarah’s involved in this?”
Corvin frowned and shook his head. “She’s the ultimate good witch,” he said. “There is no such thing, of course, but… Sarah Bishop would never involve herself in something as dirty as this.”
“Sarah helped you to find Warren, didn’t she?” Jessup asked, eyes narrow.
Reg was surprised. She had been pretty careful not to tell the police that Sarah and Letticia had been involved, not wanting to get them into trouble. But Jessup had known or guessed it anyway. She nodded, thinking about it.
“Yeah. There wouldn’t be any point in helping me to find Warren if she was involved, would there? She’d steer me away. Tell me not to get involved. She wouldn’t have offered to help.”
“That’s right,” Jessup agreed.
“Then I might just have an idea…”
Reg had been at it for an hour, and everyone had given up on her, but she wasn’t giving in so easily.
“Come here,” she said softly through the screen. The pigeon bobbing up and down looked at her blankly, then went on bobbing and scratching away at the pavement.
Reg growled under her breath, frustrated, and the gray pigeon flew away.
“You’re better with cats,” Corvin said, looking up at her from where he sat on the floor, leaning against the wall. Like the others, he was trying to stay out of the sun and to use as little energy as possible.
“I know I’m better with cats,” Reg agreed, “but Sarah doesn’t like cats. It needs to be a bird.”
“Pigeons are stupid animals,” Jessup said. “Talk about your bird brains.”
Reg widened her focus, looking for another bird to try to talk to. Jessup was right about pigeons. Reg hadn’t felt any connection with the creature, other than that watching it eat made her hungry. She hadn’t had anything for breakfast.
She felt pigeons, gulls, other seabirds… none of them seemed like a very good target for Reg’s needs. Then a crow. She’d heard that birds in that family could be very intelligent, and they could certainly be associated with witches. Erin’s witch friend in Tennessee had befriended a crow. It would come to her and land on her shoulder and talk to her.
Reg focused on the black bird, trying to coax it to come to her. Warren said something, and Corvin shushed him. Reg could feel them watching her, but she forced her thoughts outward, calling to the nearby crow. It was some time before the crow put in an appearance, fluttering down from the sky to land on the open window. He made Reg jump, startled, and she was afraid at first that she had lost her connection with him. But he perched on the edge of the window, looking in at her curiously with glittering, beady black eyes.
Reg tried to project images to him. The cottage. Sarah. The lock that was holding them prisoner.
“Bring her here,” Reg told him, concentrating hard. “Bring Sarah here.”
There was no way he was going to do it. Crows were smart, and birds had a good sense of direction, but no bird was going to fly from the warehouse to Sarah’s house just because Reg told him to. And no bird was going to be able to convince Sarah that Reg was in danger and needed Sarah’s immediate attendance. It was a lost cause.
“Don’t give up,” Corvin said. “You’ve got its attention. Keep trying.”
Reg glanced over at him. He was way too good at reading her. Maybe he’d retained just a little of her extrasensory powers.
She looked back at the bird. She wished she could feed it something or promise it some kind of reward. Animals were very primal creatures. They worked well when rewarded.
She repeated the images, repeated her pleas to bring Sarah to them. Begged the bird to listen.
And then it flew away.
⋆ Chapter Twenty-Nine ⋆
Reg collapsed on the floor beside Corvin. She was slick with sweat, her brain wrung out, and she could think of nothing else that could get them out of their predicament. Why was everyone looking to her for a solution? She was the newcomer. She didn’t even know how their community worked, let alone how real magic worked. She didn’t know the extent of her own powers. How was she supposed to get them out of a magically locked room?
“You did your best,” Corvin said, reaching over and rubbing her back, ignoring the fact that her shirt was soaked with sweat. “You’ve had a brutal day of it.”
“You think so?” Reg returned, impotent anger stirring within her. “Starting with waking up this morning to find that you had stolen my powers from me? What’s up with that, by the way? You think there’s nothing wrong with sneaking around, stealing other people’s gifts away from them?”
Jessup looked over, frowning. Corvin raised his hands in defense. “I did nothing against the law,” he insisted. “Everything was by the rules.”
“Rules,” Reg fumed. “You think you can hide behind some set of rules imposed by this community and that makes what you did okay? You violated me! You got me into a vulnerable position and then took away a part of me! That’s not right.”
Corvin shrugged. “I can’t help my nature. No more than you can help yours.”
“Your nature? It’s your nature to prey on people?”
“Isn’t it a cat’s nature to chase a mouse? You don’t blame the cat for that. You might not like him bringing you home dead birds and rodents, but you don’t expect him to stop.”
“You’re not a cat.”
“When you were a little girl and people told you that you shouldn’t see spirits, did that stop you?”
Reg hesitated at that. “No.”
“Did you try to stop?”
“Yes. Sometimes. And by the time I was an adult, I was pretty good at keeping it buried.”
“But it didn’t stay buried, did it?” He smiled. “You decided to become a medium. You decided to come here. You decided to exercise those powers again. And now… everything you buried is coming back up again, isn’t it?”
Reg couldn’t very well deny it. But there was a difference between her trying to bury her gift for communicating with the dead and his victimizing innocent people, stealing away their gifts. There was no comparison.
“What you did was wrong. It was violent. It was evil!”
“You said you wished to be normal and live without your powers,” he reminded her. And despite herself and what she knew about him, she couldn’t help but feel Corvin’s glamour as he leaned in close. He charmed her even though she knew what kind of a predator hid under that enticing exterior. The scent of roses filled her nostrils, cloying in the closeness of the room.
“It wasn’t a wish. It was just… an observation.”
“You did everything necessary to allow me into your home. You yielded to me.”
“Do you really think I wanted you to take it all away? You knew I didn’t. But you did it anyway. You intentionally hid what it was you wanted from me. You tricked me.”
“Certainly. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Nothing wrong with it? Deceit and theft? Violation of… of my spirit? How is that not wrong?”
“Because you allowed me to do it.” He smiled serenely at her. Reg fought her attraction to him. She slipped into his head. If he could steal what was hers, she could at least have a look around his psyche.
When he had helped her to scan the warehouse, she had been aware of his hunger. It was pushed away so she wouldn’t be distracted by it and could just focus on the task at hand, but she had noted it anyway. He was unprepared for her presence this time, and the hunger was almost overwhelming. She backed off, uncertain. For a few minutes, she just observed him, getting used to the strangeness of his mind.
The hunger was like a gnawing in his middle. But it wasn’t physical hunger. He’d had tea that morning and little else, so like Reg, he would have liked a good meal. But the hunger in his brain wasn’t the same as the hunger in his body. It was much worse, almost crippling in its intensity.
He pushed her out. Reg looked down at Corvin’s hand on her arm, warm and friendly.
“You see?” he said softly. “That’s my need. And it isn’t satisfied by food or other pleasures. Those things won’t fill me up. Nothing will. Nothing but… fresh powers. The gifts that others hold.”
Reg’s mouth was dry. She stared at him, trying to comprehend it. How often could that need in him actually be filled? It wasn’t like he could find naive new prey every day. He walked around every day with that gaping hole demanding to be filled, pressing on him during everything he did.
“I’m forced to abide by rules imposed by others. Imagine having to ask for permission for every bite of meat. Not for permission from a parent or teacher or doctor, but leave from the animal itself. Can you imagine?”
Reg nodded. She didn’t need to imagine it, she had felt it. A pain that could only be assuaged by taking what he needed from someone else.
“Is it wrong?” Corvin demanded again. “It is my nature.”
“I… I don’t know,” Reg admitted.
Insisting that a carnivore subsist as a herbivore only resulted in the carnivore starving to death. Wasn’t it wrong to force a predator to go hungry because you were offended by his table manners?
There was a tapping on the window.
Reg was glad to tear herself away from the discussion with Corvin. She didn’t have the answers to their philosophical discussion. She knew how she had felt when he had taken her gifts from her, leaving her feeling naked and vulnerable. But she had also felt his hunger, and she could only imagine what it must feel like to have it satisfied. She had seen that relaxed, satiated expression on his face when she had gotten up in the morning. At peace with himself and with the world. Happy, for however long the new powers would satisfy him.
What the Cat Knew Page 21