“Shailaja somehow bound the souls of a sect of eternal-life sorcerers to a demon entity that feeds on magic,” I said. “They’re like leeches.”
“That’s concise.” Warner snorted.
“I do think about these things, you know.” Apparently, I was only capable of not being a brat for about a minute.
“There is some … conjecture that Shailaja created the sect,” Warner said. “Gathered followers and so forth.”
Jesus. “That was in the former treasure keeper’s journal?”
Warner nodded. He was still studying Drake’s map, probably memorizing every grid point he didn’t know.
“Are these your notations?” Warner asked Drake, pointing to a series of newly inked Chinese characters. About three-quarters of the rectangles scattered across the continents had been labeled.
“Yes,” the fledgling said. “An exercise for the treasure keeper. Homework, Jade calls it.”
Warner grunted in acknowledgement, then continued eyeing the map.
“And these leeches are what? Familiars?” Drake asked. “Soldiers?”
“They allowed her to move through the temple of the braids in the Bahamas,” I said. “Stripping through the magical protections ahead of her, until she triggered the final trap. The rabid koala needed the braids for her master plan, but she couldn’t use the shadow demons to collect them. They would have drained them. I think. They can also leech magic from Adepts. Anyway, she was trapped there for five hundred years, give or take.”
“She also uses the demons as some sort of transportation,” Warner said. “Pulou isn’t sure, but he thinks they might pull her in and out of this dimension. Making her difficult to track.”
Bingo. And just as I’d thought.
“And her master plan?” Drake asked.
Warner glanced at me.
“Immortality,” I said.
“By way of the mantle of the former treasure keeper,” Warner added. “Pulou-who-was.”
“She was going to kill her own father?” Drake asked, aghast.
“Apparently. Just as she attempted to kill Pulou today.”
The fledgling returned his attention to the map he held while he chewed over the information we’d dumped on him.
“Do you have your cellphone?” Warner asked.
“Yeah. Though whether it will work after being in the nexus … and the portal … is always a crapshoot.”
“Passport?”
“Nope. I’ve got some Canadian cash and my Visa card.”
“But the heretic will come for the warrior’s daughter?” Drake asked.
Warner sighed. “Yes, she’ll come for Jade.”
“She needs me to wield the third instrument,” I said. “She intends to take the far seer’s mantle. I guess Chi Wen will do as a fallback.”
Drake snorted. “His guardian magic will consume her.”
“Maybe,” Warner said. “But the far seer will die either way. Hence, the necessity of leaving the third instrument where it lies.” He looked at me pointedly.
“She’s got Jade’s broken sword,” Drake said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I listen.”
“So do I,” Warner said … again, pointedly. “And no one mentioned a sword to me.”
I cleared my throat, trying to formulate the right words. Not only about how I apparently had created a weapon that was capable of harming a guardian, but also how in the process of mangling the katana, I had revealed my ability to drain every last drop of magic from another Adept. Permanently.
Warner raised an eyebrow at me. Drake shuffled his feet. The fledgling was almost as bad as I was about filling in the silent bits of conversations.
I pressed my fingers to my eyes. My vision still wasn’t great, and I certainly wasn’t thinking completely clearly. I was scared and trying to hide it. I was confused and trying to talk my way out of it.
I dropped my hands, then pointed to a sort-of-familiar rectangle on the map. I wasn’t talking about the sword. Not yet.
“That’s our entry point.”
“Alberta?” Warner asked.
“Those look like the Rocky Mountains to me,” I said, drawing my finger down a line of hand-drawn mountain peaks to the left of the grid point I’d suggested using. “So the portal must open somewhere between Edmonton and Calgary?” The cities were identified, but unfortunately I didn’t read … or speak Chinese. None of the North or South American portals were tagged with any of Drake’s notes.
“Yep. It’s the nearest grid point to Vancouver,” Drake said helpfully. “Over land.”
“Over land is a necessity for the alchemist,” Warner said. “She doesn’t like to get her feet wet.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. Apparently, two could play the pissy game.
“Who does like getting their feet wet?” Drake said, interrupting the tongue-lashing I was about to apply to my snarky boyfriend. “You’re either in the pool or not.”
“Fine,” Warner said. “The walk from Alberta to Vancouver will give you plenty of time to tell me the tale of a sword powerful enough that it has given the guardians something to talk about.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But we’ll have to figure out transportation and passports quickly, because we’re going to Portland first.”
“I thought we were going back to the bakery,” Drake said. “Vancouver would be a solid base of power. A good place to lure the heretic.”
“Shailaja isn’t going to follow me to Vancouver. She’s annoying and seriously screwed in the head, but she’s not stupid.”
“She’ll only follow if she thinks you’re going after the instrument?” Drake asked.
“I don’t think she’d risk coming after me under any other circumstances.”
“But if we stay somewhere long enough,” Warner said, thinking out loud, “she might show up simply to see what you’re doing and give you a push. Actually, Vancouver might be the best choice.”
“But I still don’t think she’d show in Vancouver. She might not be able to track me behind the wards on the bakery. So even if I had already collected and secured the third instrument, she wouldn’t know it. Plus, Gran and Scarlett kicked her ass once already, and now they’re forewarned.”
Warner scrubbed his hand across his face. “She knows you don’t hold the third instrument.”
My heart pinched … just a tiny irrational pinch. “Because you told her?”
Warner grimaced, then sighed. “She caught me off guard. Her questions seemed … innocuous at first, then concerned for your well-being.”
“My well-being?”
“Jade …”
I opened my mouth to interrogate Warner about when, where, and why a conversation had taken place between the rabid koala and him, but he looked so pissed at himself that I didn’t articulate any of it.
Blithely ignoring the weird tension ebbing and flowing between Warner and me, Drake spoke. “How is Portland any better? That’s pack territory.”
“The far seer isn’t the only one who sees,” I said. “As he was annoyingly insistent about earlier.”
Warner rolled his shoulders but kept his mouth shut. I told myself I wasn’t going to feel guilty, like I was withholding information. It wasn’t as though he gave me a detailed list of his daily activities. Plus, we hadn’t exactly had time to chat, what with removing sentinel spells and getting trapped in the portal system.
A grin spread across Drake’s unusually dour features. “Chi Wen gave you a clue?”
“A clue to what?” Warner asked.
“We’re going to see the oracle!” Drake hooted.
“Yeah,” I groused. “Freaking delightful. And apparently we’re walking from Alberta.”
“The vampire owns a jet,” Warner said, blithely ignoring my sarcasm.
“Yeah, the idea of you and Drake in a jet shutting down the engines and the navigation system with your magic isn’t scary at all. Plus, we can’t use Kett. That’s … rude.”
“I was thinki
ng more that his immortality is definitely a bonus when facing an unstable and unpredictable opponent. And he’s bored. Bored elder vampires aren’t a good thing in general. So we’d be doing the world a service by inviting him.”
“And dragging him into all this mess … again? Shailaja practically killed him last time. And I’m not sure his snack break actually slowed her down at all.”
Warner shrugged. “I doubt you’d hear him complain.”
“I like the vampire,” Drake said. “He’s cool.”
I laughed, completely involuntarily. “You can say that again.”
“Why? You clearly heard me the first time. And what do you mean by snack break?”
Warner shook his head, grinning despite being in stern sentinel mode. “If we’re going to move, we need to go now. Before any of the guardians return.” He eyed Drake, then me. “Going now might be overlooked. Breaking out is entirely different.”
“We’re going to need snowshoes,” I muttered, turning to the door that led to the grid points in North America. Needing snowshoes might be a huge exaggeration, but for a West Coast girl, the idea of trekking through Alberta in January was seriously daunting.
I really, really wasn’t looking forward to walking through the portal. I hadn’t quite shaken the lingering effects of my last attempt to cross through the nexus’s transportation magic. Plus, I was seriously aware that I was still riding an adrenaline high triggered by the sight of my father and Pulou so badly diminished. But that fear wasn’t going to get me far.
Warner wrapped his hand around my waist, leaving my right hand free in case I had to pull my knife.
Drake reached for my left hand.
Thus flanked and more than well supported, I nodded and opened the door before me. “Alberta. Here we go.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Warner, Drake, and I stepped through the magic of the portal, hand in hand. Apparently, the three of us commanded its power so definitively that I didn’t even have time to build up to a panic attack. The portal magic wasn’t going to trap me, cage me, confine me, swallow me, drown me …
Okay, maybe I had enough time to freak out a little. At least for the brief moment that I could feel my left foot behind me on the marble of the nexus and my right foot ahead of me, hovering over nothing. Then I completed the step and found my boot buried in about seven inches of snow.
Drake dropped my hand and immediately began casing the snowy, tree-shielded hollow we’d arrived in. The light-blue sky was clear. And while the immediate area was covered in snow, it was not as deep as I’d imagined it would be in Central Alberta at this time of year.
It was, however, cold.
Warner had pulled his knife sometime during the crossing, but as the portal snapped shut behind us — and since we weren’t immediately attacked by some nefarious force — he sheathed it.
The curved blade of the knife always reminded me of the atrocious things Sienna had used it for, and the fact that I had then altered the weapon with blood magic to free the fledgling necromancer Mory from certain death in London. But Warner was meant to wield that knife. I had smoothed the wicked curve of the blade and added to its magic in the hopes of tempering it, but it was Warner who’d tamed it. So much so that I could taste only his magic now whenever he held it.
I rarely had any reason to manually sheathe or unsheathe my jade knife these days. It just magically came and went from my right hand as I willed. Just as Shailaja had inherited her miniportal trick from her father’s guardian magic, I had apparently created a similar bond with my knife in mimicry of how my father wielded his weapon. Of course, Yazi’s broadsword was a manifestation of his guardian power. My knife was carved from a pretty green stone I’d found on the edge of a river.
Following the scattered path of my thoughts, and before I spent any time taking in our surroundings — other than to note that it was cold and everything around us was blanketed in snow and teeming with natural magic — I turned to Warner.
“Shailaja can open miniature portals and throw things … weapons … through them.”
Warner nodded. “The warrior mentioned that. And by weapons do you mean some mysterious sword that apparently everyone knows about but me?”
I swallowed, then cleared my throat. “Not everyone. Just Pulou and me. And my father … as of a few hours ago.”
“I’m listening.”
“My katana. Or at least it was a katana until I twisted it around my foster sister’s neck, then drained every last drop of her magic out of her and into the blade.”
Warner raised both his eyebrows. His green-blue eyes were a vibrant contrast to the white background of snow-covered trees behind him. “All of her magic?”
“Everything she’d stolen from the Adepts she killed … and also all her natural magic … her binding powers … her witch magic. She was purely normal … human … when I was done.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Drake prowling the line of trees behind us. Though I’d faltered in recounting the sword’s creation, it seemed terribly important to keep my gaze locked to Warner’s.
“That’s …” He hesitated but didn’t break eye contact with me. “That’s unprecedented.”
“That’s why the treasure keeper took the mangled katana. That’s why he suggested I might want to keep that information to myself.”
“How many Adepts did Sienna kill?”
“I don’t know … I’m not sure all the bodies were recovered. Too many.”
“And now Shailaja has this sword. She used it against a guardian? Successfully?”
I nodded, then forced myself to elaborate. “She threw it like a Frisbee. Except, you know, a Frisbee created through blood magic bound to a deadly sharp blade.”
“A Frisbee.” Warner echoed the word, carefully mimicking my pronunciation. He did the same thing every time he heard, then immediately learned, a new word or phrase.
“Like a chakram,” Drake said. “Only larger. It’s about double the typical size.”
“Sorry?” I asked. “A chakram? And how do you know?”
“A circular throwing weapon with a sharpened outer edge,” Drake elaborated. “From India. And I overheard the warrior discussing it with the healer. The cut was deep.”
My stomach squelched at the thought of bringing harm to my own father. A cut deep enough that a healer as powerful as Qiuniu would question its origin was … disturbing.
Warner nodded thoughtfully. Happily, he still wasn’t running away screaming.
“Okay. A chakram, then.” It was my turn to carefully pronounce the foreign-sounding word.
“Shall we text the vampire?” Warner asked.
“That’s it?”
“Do you have more to tell me?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“So, yes. That’s it.”
I stared at Warner. “But …”
“But?”
“Jade thinks she’s evil,” Drake said oh-so-helpfully from somewhere above and behind me. “Because she created this evil thing. And now the heretic has use of it.”
I turned away from the intense huddle I had going with Warner, looking up to see that Drake had climbed a large winter-bare, snow-shrouded tree.
I shivered in my quilted silk jacket, turning back to Warner and seeing him watching me.
“Evil?” he asked softly.
I shrugged, glancing toward the ground. But then my gaze caught on his knife. Another of my wicked, thoughtless creations.
“Ignorant, maybe,” I mumbled. “That’s worse, isn’t it?”
Warner huffed out a laugh that I thought was terribly inappropriate.
I glared at him.
He grinned down at me. “You’re cold. Text the vampire.”
“There’s no point in texting. First, the magic around here will probably fry the phone. Second, I doubt there’s any signal. Third, we don’t even know where the nearest airport is. We’ll probably need to jack a car and drive into Calgary or Edmonton.”
; “Jack?” Warner asked, laughing.
“Yeah, you know. It’s best to sound tough when discussing criminal activity.”
“We could always ask her for directions … or a car,” Drake said. Effortlessly, he dropped some twenty feet out of the tree, landing with his hand pointing behind me.
I spun, but I saw only more trees.
“She’s coming from the farmhouse. They’ll probably have a phone.” Drake took off in the direction he’d indicated.
Warner choked back another round of laughter.
I gave him the evil eye.
He smirked at me, then shrugged. “The gatekeeper. I didn’t expect her to necessarily be so close.”
I absolutely adored looking like an idiot in front of my boyfriend. I knew the grid point portals usually had gatekeepers who watched over them, such as Amber Cameron in Scotland. But the portal in Peru hadn’t, so I had factored in the fairly remote location here and decided that this one probably wouldn’t either.
“Peru didn’t,” I said snottily as I turned on my heel to follow Drake.
“Actually …” Warner started to contradict me, but he swallowed his words when I rounded on him. “Right. Peru didn’t.”
I laughed at his too-obvious lie.
He smiled. Then, wrapping his arm around my shoulders, he tugged me forward to press a soft kiss to my lips.
I allowed myself to breathe in his warmth, just for a moment. I was still jumpy, and my dowser senses felt wonky from having been immersed in the portal magic for too long. Warner’s black-forest-cake magic was a tasty comfort.
“There isn’t a speck of evil in you, Jade Godfrey,” he whispered as he brushed his lips across my cheek.
He released me. Then he took a few quick steps to catch up to Drake, who had ducked between the trees and out of sight.
Warmed within and without, I smiled and followed, telling myself that we all had our own definitions of good and evil. I knew how close I walked the line between the darkness and the light. Hell, I leaned toward the light as fervently as others embraced the darkness. Cupcakes, trinkets, chocolate, Warner, Drake, Kandy … and even Kett were my anchors.
I just needed to remember to remind myself of that … like, constantly.
Artifacts, Dragons, and Other Lethal Magic Page 11