by Sam Cheever
Deg was right. We were going to get him. We were going to bring my mother and Grandmama home. And what I was looking at was never going to happen again.
“...gone. Just a cosmic flare in energy and then nothing.”
I turned to find Brock and Deg standing near the door, away from the gaping, charred hole in the outside wall and the super-heated air blasting through it. A soft hand touched my arm and I looked into the pretty face of Celeste’s assistant. She frowned, tucking a strand of gold hair behind one ear. “I’m so sorry, LA.”
I shook my head, thinking she referred to the loss of Jacob Withers, whose tattered corpse lay at my feet. “He was a good man,” I said automatically. And though he’d driven me absolutely crazy at times, I knew it was true.
The woman blinked and I realized she’d been talking about my missing family. It made me angry. “All of these people,” I said, swinging a hand around the devastated office where Celeste had apparently been holding a staff meeting when whatever it was hit. “They’re all important. We need to avenge all of them.”
The woman’s face grew taut, her lips compressing, and she stepped back, away from me. Her gaze scanned toward Jacob, brows lowering in thought.
I realized I’d spoken harshly and clamped my lips closed. “I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “It’s okay, dear. I understand. This has hit us all hard.” Despite her words, her tone had turned cool.
“LA?”
I kept my gaze on Jacob, trying to see past the gore to the man I’d known. Deg stopped beside me, nodding toward the receptionist, whose name I’d never bothered to learn. I frowned on the thought. Why had she been spared?
“LA, we need to form a plan.”
Yes. We did. “I’m going to get this bastard,” I told him. “That’s my plan.”
“Considering this,” Brock joined us and nodded toward the massive hole in the wall, “and what Deg just told me happened at your place today, I think we need a few more details in our plan.”
I shook my head, frowning.
“You can’t do this alone, LA,” the Demon said.
I clenched my hands, wondering whether it would make me feel better to punch his too-pretty face.
“LA?” Deg’s soft reprimand eased past the rage and I sighed, nodding. “Okay. So let’s plan. I’d like to suggest that the first step in the plan is to get this bastard.”
Deg smiled. “Noted. A good step. But not a first step.”
“We need to figure out who’s behind the explosion and why,” Brock said.
My head snapped up and I glared at him. “Who? It’s the person who’s been kidnapping Familiars,” I barked.
Deg shushed me as several curious gazes slid our way. “LA, we need to keep that quiet.”
“We don’t need a full scale panic right now,” the Demon agreed.
I sighed, scrubbing a hand over my face. They were right. As much as I hated to admit it. I wasn’t thinking straight and it was going to get someone else killed if I didn’t pull myself together. I spoke more softly. “Okay. So obviously I need to track this guy.”
Deg shook his head. “And suffer a repeat of this morning? I don’t think so.”
“It’s the only way,” I argued.
Brock nodded. “You’re both right. LA does need to track him. But she can’t do it alone. With an entity this powerful, we need safeguards and we need to proceed very cautiously.”
I nodded in agreement. Deg didn’t look happy but he finally nodded too. “Agreed. With emphasis on the safeguards.” He shook his head. “You have no idea what we’re up against, Brock. This...thing...whatever it is, blew right through LA and me. We were lucky to survive the attack.”
“And that was just because I started my preparations,” I said softly. “I hadn’t even begun to track it yet.”
Staring at the gaping hole, Brock looked thoughtful. “We might need some additional help.”
“What did you have in mind?” I asked.
Deg’s gaze found his cousin’s and widened. “Oh no.”
Brock grinned. “It’s the only way, cuz.”
“There has to be another way,” Deg said, still shaking his head.
“If you can come up with something I’m all ears.”
I was growing intrigued, despite my numb horror. “Is somebody going to tell me what you’re talking about?”
Brock’s grin widened. Deg looked like he wanted to melt into the floor. “It’s not a what, it’s a who. I think.”
“No,” Deg said, “it’s a catastrophe.”
“Tell me,” I urged, losing patience.
Deg sighed. “He’s talking about using a tracking expert.”
Despite a quick surge of anger that they thought my abilities wouldn’t be enough, I realized that, given the circumstances, another set of skills might be useful. “Why is that bad?” I asked, frowning.
“Because it’s Deg’s girlfriend,” Brock said on a husky chuckle.
“Ex,” Deg said, skimming me a quick look. “Very ex.”
The girlfriend thing didn’t take me to my happy place. In fact, it plunged me into a considerably darker place than I already inhabited...which was really saying something.
I didn’t like the implications of that feeling. But I was determined not to explore it too closely. I forced myself to shrug. “If she can help us beat this monster I’m certainly willing to listen to her.”
Deg winced. “That’s good, because Mandy requires everyone to not only listen but to obey.”
“Oh come on, cuz,” Brock said, grinning, “she’s not that bad.”
“No,” he said, looking about half angry. “She’s worse. I’m downplaying it.”
“Do you want to contact her or do you want me to do it?”
Deg expelled a frustrated breath. “I’ll do it. If I don’t she’ll think I’m pulling a fast one on her.”
“It could take a while,” Brock told them. “She’s been overseas on a special mission for a few weeks.”
“It will take a week for her to cross the ocean on her broom,” I said with what I hoped was a neutral tone of voice. Brock snorted out a laugh. “Don’t get all catty on us, beautiful. If this is going to work we’ll need to work together.”
“Trust me,” Deg said on a frown. “LA isn’t going to be the problem in that area.”
“If she can’t join us right away we already have a problem,” I told the two men. “I’m not going to sit on my hands while my mother and grandmother are missing.”
“You don’t have to,” Deg said. “You shouldn’t try to track the evil force we encountered this morning, but I don’t see any reason you can’t try to track one of its victims.”
Hope surged. “I can put feelers out for my mother or Celeste...”
“No,” Brock said. “Someone less powerful. Whatever or whoever this is, getting hold of your family is a real coup. He’ll be monitoring them closely.”
That made my pulse pick up. If someone was looking to grab members of my family, I wondered if I was a target too. Then I realized that morning’s attack proved I was. “Wait a minute.” I looked at Deg. “We assumed this morning’s attack was a response to my preparations for tracking the entity. What if it was totally unrelated?”
Deg’s expression told me he’d already considered that possibility. “I’m afraid we have to assume it was.” He looked at Brock. “Which means she doesn’t try to track anyone without my help.”
“Hey!” I glowered at him. “You can just step back right now, mister. I don’t work for you and I don’t take orders from you or anyone.”
Anger flashed briefly through Deg’s gaze before he inclined his head. “Sorry. That came out wrong. Believe me that my insistence comes from a place of concern for your safety. That’s it. I’m asking that you allow me to be part of your tracking efforts. I really think you’re in danger, LA.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to smooth the frown from my face. When he put it so reasonably I could hardly refuse. No
t without seeming like a total Bee-eye-itch. So I shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind a little unobtrusive backup. But that means you let me do my work without interference.”
He lifted his hands. “You have my word. I’ll be there if you need me and other than that you won’t even know I’m there.”
I looked into his sexy dark silver gaze and knew he was wrong.
There was just no way I’d ever miss his presence in my general vicinity.
Not an angel’s chance in Hades.
CHAPTER SIX
DESPITE WHAT I’D SAID to Brock and Deg, I fully intended to try one thing alone. It was my most basic of skills, but one that sometimes achieved the best results. And I didn’t share it with anyone. Not even family.
Some things were too personal to share.
Even with those you loved.
Deg closed my car door for me and leaned on the window frame. “I’ll be over in an hour?”
I shook my head. “Make it two hours. I have something I need to do first.”
He narrowed his gaze at me, his sexy lips tightening. I shook my head, cutting off any argument he might decide to make. “This isn’t up for discussion.”
He shook his head and backed away, shoving his hands into his pockets. I felt his assessing gaze on me as I started the car and backed out of my spot. I could still feel it as I pulled out of the lot and drove away, passing a long line of fire trucks as I left.
The council must have decided to allow the human emergency folks in on the fire. Or the lack of a web took the decision out of their hands. Generally the magical community chose to block our issues from the non-magic crowd, preferring to handle our problems ourselves. But without a web of magic to buffer the Familiar, Inc. building from humans, we apparently had no control over human intervention.
And it was that reality that worried me the most. Our ability to survive unimpeded in the human world was tied to the web. The loss of that cooperative link could endanger all of us. We needed to figure out what had happened and fix the breach. I knew the answer was connected to the abductions of the Familiars...including my family. And it seemed it would be up to me and a few others to get our people back.
Unbidden, that morning’s terrifying event came roaring back to me. I shivered against the memory. I’d never felt so helpless, or been as frightened as I’d been that morning. If Deg hadn’t shown up when he had...
I shook off the thought. That way lay trouble. I would have found a way to get away. I always had. There was no reason to suspect I wouldn’t have prevailed again.
Except for the fact that I’d been fighting a power multiples of ten times stronger than any I’d ever encountered. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The energy itself was unlike anything I’d encountered. We were dealing with something new. Something we had no experience defeating. It had no discernible signature, or a thousand signatures, depending on how you looked at it. When I’d tried to grasp a thread and tug, attempting to identify the source of the devastating force, I’d sensed more than one signature trapped within the power.
An impossibility.
I drove beneath the metal and stone entrance for Illusory Park
and wound my way past a grassy area surrounding a sparkling pond with a unicorn fountain at its center. A small group of Illusion City residents lounged near the pond on folding chairs and blankets. A man and a small boy guided remote control boats across the pond’s silvery surface.
The happy normalcy of the scene made what I was dealing with seem even worse. If we didn’t get a handle on what was happening in the magical world, it was a real possibility that it could bleed into the non-magic world. And the thought of something that powerful stalking helpless humans struck terror in my heart.
I kept driving as the road disappeared beneath rows of overarching trees, the trunks thick with age and the gnarled branches forming an almost impenetrable umbrella over the asphalt ribbon of road.
Passing a large sign declaring the road a dead end, I kept driving. A wide wall of rock centered by a roaring waterfall appeared a half mile ahead. The intimidating wall loomed higher as I barreled toward it. Glancing into my rearview mirror, I made sure there was no one following as I hit the gas and sent my little sports car at a speedy trajectory directly toward the craggy rock face.
The wall loomed. The waterfall rushed and roared, sending a heated mist up from the pool at its base. The vapor settled over me, turned the surface of my car shiny, and made the wide, green leaves encroaching on the path-like road spray as I stormed past.
A foot away from the wall, just as my front bumper appeared ready to crash into the intimidating rock, I hit an electrical barrier, feeling the magical strands of the warding snap like a spider web over my face and shoulders. The wall disappeared, the powerful magic of the ward leaving a phantom mist behind on my damp skin and car.
The asphalt turned to gravel and then to dirt and finally, as my tires went silent over a thick layer of natural mulch, I slowed to a stop and turned off the engine.
The forest around me was thick with silence.
Though it appeared devoid of animal life, I knew that was an illusion—like everything else about the place. The woodland was the core of Illusion City...the pulsing heart of the city and the center of everything magical. The primordial forest was the very epitome of magic, the convergence of all magic types, earth, fire, wind and water magic, threaded together with a thin strand of dark magic to make it completely impermeable to attack.
But it was the forest’s other quality I hoped to use in that moment. The place was also a portal, providing a direct path to every section of the city and the surrounding areas. It served as a multi-layered shortcut if one needed to search a large area very quickly.
But more importantly it was also a barrier...dispersing the signature and trail of magic so that it was impossible to follow. I’d found that particular quality very handy in the past, and I was hoping to make use of it again. When I attempted to track the entity at the crux of our current problem, I wanted to make sure it couldn’t track me back.
I climbed out of my car and stood for a moment, sensing the area for any other auras. I felt something in the distance, but it was far enough away that I wasn’t concerned. It wasn’t unusual to find another magic user in the forest when I was there. In fact it would have been strange if I hadn’t. I just wanted to be sure he or she was far enough away that my work would be undisturbed.
Satisfied it was safe, I quickly stripped, folding my clothes and piling them on the front seat of my car. Then I closed the door and padded into the trees. I stopped and crouched at the base of a thick-limbed Alder tree. The tree’s magical properties would protect and conceal me. The Alder tree heavily favored Air magic, providing, among other things, a deep connection with the otherworld, invisibility and concealment, as well as protection.
I envisioned the world from a different perspective, one in which my vision and scent capabilities were changed and strengthened. The physical changes were softened by the Alder’s healing properties. Delicately sharp fangs dropped into my mouth, claws burst from my fingertips, and my body twisted under the grueling reformation necessary to complete my change. I dropped forward onto delicate white paws, the earth warm and soft beneath my pads. Thick, white fur sprang from my skin in soft, rolling waves.
The world exploded into sound. Bugs sang high above my head, their wings rasping softly on the air. Beneath the ground small, burrowing creatures sifted happily through the rich loam, and under my paws the fertile black earth softened the culmination of my change.
I stood for a moment, stretching my long body languorously, and reveled in the feeling of being a cat. The greenery beneath the Alder rustled softly and my whiskers twitched with interest. My pink nostrils flared, gauging the identity of the creature moving toward me. A recognizable scent made my mouth water, and my human brain immediately recoiled.
But not as much as the tiny, gray mouse that popped, unsuspecting from the weeds. It went comple
tely still, black button eyes bulging in my direction and whiskers vibrating on the air.
I felt sorry for the little creature, knowing just my presence there was causing it pain, but there was nothing I could do about it, except go on about my business.
With a quick twitch of my long tail, I turned away and headed toward the edge of the forest. I could feel the magic trembling there, a gentle hum that sang through my body with every step I took. It was both a compelling and repelling energy, meant to keep all but the most diligent magic users from its use. I understood the resistance. Every use of magic had a price that must be paid. It was one of the reasons I resisted using mine. But if ever there was a time my gift was needed it was that moment. When so many innocent Familiars had become targets.
I pushed through the underbrush, sending out repelling magics of my own to keep small predators like fleas and ticks away from my shiny coat. Just the thought made my lip curl over a fang. For me, nature was as alarming as it was pleasant. A decidedly un-cat-like opinion. But I was okay with that. Unlike some of my people, I held my human side uppermost in my mind at all times. The most terrifying thing I could experience would be to fall victim to the feline part of my makeup. I’d lose the most important parts of myself if that happened.
The thought gave me nightmares.
A barrier of silvery strands thrummed on the path ahead. Beyond the strands the forest disappeared and Illusory Park spread out before me. I stopped, considering if the park was the right place to start. I decided I’d rather begin in the city. And the best spot to start was Gattler’s Antiques. The small, family run business where Brock’s cousin, Tabitha was last seen.
So I envisioned the storefront and, when it replaced the park beyond the barrier, I stepped into the magic.
The spicy scent of Italian food hit me right between the eyes. My stomach rumbled hungrily as I cast a longing gaze toward the popular hole in the wall restaurant next to Gattler’s. Giovanni’s was a tiny, almost tacky spot with the best food in the city.
In my humble opinion.
Their fried ravioli was to die for.