Kai sprang from our hiding spot, and I was right behind him, my hand clenched around a small object, its leather tie looped over my wrist. The agent looked up at the sound of our steps, saw two masked strangers charging him, and stumbled back in shock.
Going from a sprint to a low kick with perfect grace, Kai swept the agent’s legs out from under him. As the man pitched over backward, Kai caught his shoulders so he wouldn’t split his skull on the sidewalk.
I jumped on the guy’s chest, ramming all the air out of his lungs, and slapped my ruby crystal against his face. “Ori decidas!”
The man slumped bonelessly. Kai heaved him up, a hand clamped over the agent’s mouth. I snatched up his dropped food bag while holding the artifact to his cheek.
Kai dragged our victim behind the restaurant and into the shadowy gap beside the dumpster. The man grunted and squealed unintelligible words against Kai’s hand, his eyes showing white all the way around.
I glanced at the street, waiting for the outcry. We’d just abducted a man in broad daylight.
And it had worked?
“Hurry up,” Kai whispered.
Right. Keeping my fall spell pressed to the guy’s face, I lifted my other hand, the tie for a second crystal looped around my wrist. I laid it on his forehead. “Ori ostende tuum pectus.”
The poisonous-green crystal shimmered and the man’s face went eerily blank, his eyes staring at nothing. I shuddered, remembering what it had felt like to be under the interrogation spell’s power. I really hated this spell.
Kai lifted his hand off the man’s mouth. The agent blinked slowly.
“Are you an MPD agent?” I asked in a firm whisper.
“Yes. I’m an auditor,” he droned. “I’ve worked here for eight years and I don’t like it much but I’m hoping to finally get promoted to—”
“Were any rogues booked today?” I interrupted, remembering the black-magic artifact’s side effect: unrestrained babbling as you spilled your heart out to your questioner.
“They booked six rogues since my shift started. We don’t usually have that many in one morning, so Annie was talking about that part, but what had everyone gossiping were the two druids. I’ve only ever seen one druid before, and today a guild dropped off two. Everyone is talking about it. And then we heard that—”
“What do you know about the two druids?”
“Only what Enrique told me. He said one is the Sand Druid, wanted for selling fake fae artifacts on the black market, but Enrique said he isn’t a very good druid and maybe he’s actually a witch faking it, but we don’t know yet if—”
“What about the other druid?”
“Enrique said he hasn’t been identified yet, but everyone is curious because he hasn’t said a word and we can’t find any record of him and—”
“Where are the druids?”
“In the holding cells. The Sand Druid is in regular holding but they put the unknown druid in solitary because we don’t know if he’s dangerous or just unregistered but Enrique said he has a dangerous look about him so—”
“Where are the holding cells?” I asked as Kai shifted impatiently beside me.
“In the basement. They’re much nicer here than the ones at the precinct in San Diego, where I used to—”
“What’s the best way to get into the holding cells?”
Glazed eyes staring, the agent described the various routes to the basement. I asked him about security, safeguards, and possible traps, and he blurted everything and more. Damn, no wonder this spell was illegal. I felt bad for the guy, knowing that, while he babbled on without a care, on the inside he was screaming at himself to shut up—but no amount of internal resistance would dull the magic’s compulsion. I knew from personal experience.
“Is that everything?” I whispered to Kai, palming the agent’s ID card.
He nodded. “We need to get moving.”
I pulled my gun from the built-in holster on my belt. The agent’s hazy eyes widened with muted terror.
“It’s okay,” I said reassuringly. “It’s just a sleep potion.”
“Don’t talk to him,” Kai growled. “Just shoot him.”
I aimed at the agent’s chest, the barrel wavering left and right. “But it’s going to really hurt at point-blank range Where should I—”
“Just do it!”
I cringed. “Sorry, dude.”
The CO2 canister popped as I pulled the trigger, and the shot splatted over the agent’s chest, soaking through his shirt. Pain rippled over his face before it went slack. Hoo boy, that was gonna leave a bruise.
Shoving my gun back into its holster, I snatched up my spent artifacts, stuffed them in my belt pouches, and jumped to my feet. Kai waved at me to follow as he started out from behind the dumpster.
“Wait!” I darted back, snatched up the guy’s food bag, and tucked it beside his limp arm. Rushing to Kai, I whispered, “He deserves his burger after all that.”
Kai’s silent pause was full of commentary he didn’t say aloud.
Together, we faced the street and the building on the other side. It resembled a warehouse more than an office building—and it was hella big. Two overhead doors, large enough for cube vans to drive through with room to spare, dwarfed a single person-sized entrance with a metal door. Long horizontal windows ran along the uppermost level, too high to be used as an illicit point of entry.
It wasn’t a glamorous building, but it was strategic. Surrounded by parking lots on three sides and a street on the fourth, the location wasn’t conducive to stealthy breaking and entering. Discounting the handful of fire exits, we had two choices: the front doors or the back doors.
Guess which one we were using.
We wheeled around the corner and into the largest of the three parking lots around the precinct, ignoring the security cameras mounted high on the walls—we weren’t worrying about those ones. Two more overhead doors faced the lot. Unloading rogues in public was a definite no-go, so when guilds arrived with criminals to book, they unloaded their catches in the privacy of the building’s interior.
Kai and I raced to the small access door beside the large ones. Pulling ahead of him, I slapped our stolen ID card against the nearby black panel. A light blinked green and the latch clicked loudly.
Too easy? That’s what we would’ve thought, but as our poor informant had explained, magical security created a big, ugly pit of complications. What sort of complications, I wasn’t sure, but he’d started a story about one precinct implementing arcane security, only to have all the agents who weren’t sorcerers accidentally lock themselves in or out of rooms all day long.
So, MagiPol relied on mundane tech—which, with an electramage on my team, was better than I could’ve hoped for.
Putting my shoulder against the metal, I cautiously cracked the door open.
Inside was a concrete pad slab large enough for four vehicles to park and open all their doors. A glass wall on my left, reinforced with metal, revealed the intake area—a desk at one end and some uncomfortable seating opposite.
Two obvious challenges awaited us: the two men behind the desk, and the fact that the wall behind them was also glass. Beyond it was the precinct bullpen—dozens of desks, cubicles, and offices bustling with agents and analysts hard at work. Or hard at slacking. Either way, it was a terrifying number of eyeballs that could spot us.
Steeling myself, I leaped through the door and slapped my stolen ID to the next door’s panel. As I burst into the intake area, the two agents looked up and saw my gun aimed at them. I pulled the trigger twice—and the lights went out.
Two dull thuds sounded as the mythics collapsed forward onto their shared desk. Beyond the glass wall, muffled voices exclaimed in shock, and the solid darkness broke as spots of light flared—agents turning on their phone flashlights.
“Keep moving.”
I almost jumped out of my skin at Kai’s whisper right beside me. Scarcely able to see where I was going, I homed in on the three lights
glowing on the far wall—the call buttons for a freight elevator and the security panel for the door to the stairwell. Both must be on separate circuits from the one Kai had fried to take out the lights.
With another tap of our stolen ID, we were away from the glass wall and unconscious booking agents. Kai flicked on the light attached to his vest, the muted glow just enough to guide us down the stairs. We trotted to the bottom, every sound echoing, and I pressed the ID to the pad beside the door.
A red light blinked.
“Shit,” I muttered. “That analyst doesn’t have clearance down here? He didn’t say that.”
Kai touched two fingers to the panel and a spark erupted. The red and green lights flickered wildly. He puffed a breath, shoulders tense. Another spark, brighter this time—and the lock clicked.
“You did it!” I whispered gleefully.
He flung the door open. I launched out first, gun clutched in both hands.
The lights down here must have been on a different circuit too, because the room was brightly illuminated. A security desk blocked our way forward, and two agents sat behind it, staring at their computer monitors. Their heads snapped up as I flew into the room, gun waving.
“Don’t move!” I commanded.
Kai was right behind me, one hand already thrust out, and electricity burst over both men simultaneously. Discorporate ignition of his magic—without a switch. Kai was a serious badass.
As the two men crumpled, I fired a shot of sleep potion into each of them. They went limp.
Kai swung his hand toward the security camera in the corner. A crackle rushed across its metal body and smoke boiled out of it. He jumped the desk and crouched between the agents, then rose again with a new ID card and a fat set of keys.
Behind the desk was a heavy-duty door. With a touch of the card, the light blinked green. He opened the door.
A long hall stretched away, the concrete floor and walls painted a plain white that had faded over the years. On one side were open doors to interrogation rooms, currently empty. Across from them were two long stretches of bars: the group holding cells for short-term inmates.
At our appearance, the dozen mythics—eight men in one cell, four women in the other—stirred to alertness. I could feel their eyes on us as Kai zapped two more cameras. We sped to the end of the hall, where four more doors on heavy sliding tracks waited. The solitary holding cells.
Our informant hadn’t known which cell the mysterious druid was in, so Kai and I split up to peer through the tinted, barred windows. The first one was empty. I checked the second one on my side—empty too—then Kai and I swung toward the final door.
I pressed my nose to the glass.
A man sat on the bench-like bed attached to the wall, the only furniture in the cell aside from a steel toilet in the corner. His arms were folded, back against the cinder blocks, tense and glaring at the blank wall across from him. The tinted window was too dim to see more than that—a privacy thing for inmates?—but I recognized that tall, fit, menacing build easily.
We’d found the Ghost.
Chapter Six
I nodded to Kai and he shook out the keys. Only a few matched the bright, shiny steel of the bolt, and Kai slid one into the keyhole. It turned with a loud clack. I grabbed the door and slid it open with a dramatic flourish.
Zak looked up—and a lash of fear hit me so hard I almost stepped back.
He hadn’t changed much in the four months since I’d last seen him. His dark hair had grown long enough to look shaggy—except, being an Adonis-level hunk, he just looked tousled and extra sexy. His jaw was dark with stubble, suggesting he’d gone several days without a razor. Lallakai’s feather tattoos were missing from his muscular arms, bared by his sleeveless shirt, but the druid tattoos on his inner forearms were dark and bold, the intricate circles filled with colorful fae runes.
His appearance wasn’t what had triggered cold adrenaline in my veins—even with the scuffs, scrapes, splattered blood, and generous coating of dust that adorned him. No, it was his green eyes. They weren’t bright and inhuman with Lallakai’s power.
They were dark and inhuman with blood-chilling hatred.
Frozen in the doorway, I didn’t move as he glanced up and down me as though deciding how best to skin me alive, no recognition in his expression. Then I remembered.
“Oh!” I grabbed the bottom of my ski mask and pushed it up to reveal my face. “I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.”
He blinked, shock dousing the fiery loathing in his eyes. He blinked again—and his mouth fell open in a very non-deadly-rogue way. “Tori?”
“No names,” Kai barked from behind me. “Let’s move.”
Zak pushed to his feet, and I noticed the heavy cuffs chaining his wrists together, the wide bands carved with hundreds of runes. Pulling my mask back into place, I zipped out the door and followed Kai down the hall, Zak right behind me.
A low whistle brought me up short. The mythics in the two large holding cells were crowded against the bars, watching us pass.
“You gonna let us out too?” one asked in a slow drawl.
“Yeah,” Kai said, striding past. “Wait a minute while we get ready.”
The convicts exchanged confused looks.
“Is he serious?” a woman muttered to her cellmate as we reentered the security vestibule where the two guards were out cold behind the desk.
Kai rifled through the keys and slid several off the ring—ones that matched the bolts on the large holding cells. He tossed me the leftovers and I sorted through them for a handcuffy-looking one. According to our informant, Zak’s cuffs were anti-magic artifacts—meaning we needed them off him ASAP.
As I searched, I flicked a glance at the druid standing in front of me, waiting to be freed. “Hey, so, long time no see. How’ve you been?”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Glad to hear you’re enjoying your SoCal vacay.” I pulled his hands toward me and tried to insert a small key. “Weather’s nice, isn’t it?”
“Do you have a plan for getting out of this building?”
I shot him an irritated look. “Bet our plan is better than yours was when you got your dumb ass tagged by a guild.”
“You don’t have a plan, do you?”
I jammed another ill-fitting key in his cuffs.
“Getting in is always easier than getting out,” Kai said, rolling his shoulders. The electrical sockets near him sparked ominously. “We’re making a run for it. Fast and hard, straight for the exit.”
Zak’s cold green eyes slashed to the mage. “Do you really think that will be enough?”
Kai stepped back into the hallway and tossed the keys into the holding cells. The rogues shouted in surprise and delight, scuffing on the floor for the keys.
“A little chaos can go a long way.” Rejoining us, he pulled throwing stars from his pocket, holding them between his fingers so that his fists bristled with short, sharp blades. “Get those cuffs off him.”
“I’m working on it.” I slid a third key into his cuffs as a metal clang echoed from the hall—the rogues opening the holding cell. “We—”
The door to the stairwell flew open.
A group of agents burst in, all urgency and tension, but whatever they were all worked up about, the sight of two masked intruders and an inmate standing where the guards should’ve been didn’t match. Their expressions went blank with disbelief, and for a single heartbeat, no one moved.
Kai flung a fistful of bladed stars into the group. Cries of pain rang out—then lightning burst from Kai’s outstretched hand. Three agents collapsed in convulsions.
I released the key ring and yanked out my paintball gun. My first shot hit a guy in the chest, splattering yellow potion everywhere. As he fell, the woman behind him dove through the open door and into the stairwell. I fired two more shots, emptying my clip. The last one just missed her as she shot up the stairs.
An agent in her forties cast her arms
out. A gust of wind straight out of a tornado struck me and Kai. We flew backward and slammed into the wall. The air punched out of my lungs and I barely hung on to my gun as I slid down to the floor.
A shrieking alarm erupted from a small speaker beside the fried security camera. The aeromage and another agent, the last two standing, ducked into the stairwell—hiding on either side of the doorway, meaning we’d have to walk between them to get out. Waiting for the elevator wasn’t an option, and I hadn’t seen any other exits.
Kai slapped his hand against an electrical outlet and white light blazed up his arm. The lights flickered wildly. I popped the magazine out of my gun, stuffed it in my pocket, and fumbled for a new one. A cautious rogue stuck his head through the thick security door to check what was happening.
Crouched behind the desk between the two unconscious desk agents, Zak twisted the key in his remaining handcuff, the first already hanging open. The bulky cuffs dropped off him. He tossed the keys aside and slowly curled his fingers into fists, an almost exhilarated expression passing over his face.
Footsteps thudded down the stairs, loud enough that the alarm couldn’t hide their approach. A stream of agents filled the landing as they lined up around the door, preparing to charge us.
We were so screwed.
Kai pulled his hand off the socket and clenched his fist, vibrating with the amount of electricity he’d absorbed. With the ski mask covering his face, I couldn’t guess his expression, but if it was anything like mine, then “stark terror” would be pretty accurate.
Zak turned his left arm over, baring his druid tattoos to the ceiling. He ran two fingers from his wrist up to the chartreuse rune emblazoned in the topmost circle. As the alarm blared, his lips moved with words I couldn’t hear.
The rune lit with a faint glow. It rippled, then turned to liquid light that dribbled off his arm in radiant droplets. They splashed onto the floor and sank into the solid concrete.
Breathing fast, I jammed the new magazine in my paintball gun and prepared to attempt the impossible. On the plus side, the MPD agents would probably try to capture us rather than kill us. Maybe.
Druid Vices and a Vodka: The Guild Codex: Spellbound / Six Page 6