Heart of Malice (Alice Worth Book 1)

by Lisa Edmonds

  Lake’s stare became impersonal. Apparently, we were going to pretend not to know each other, which was fine with me.

  “Sorry, wasn’t looking where I was going,” I said politely.

  “Not a problem.” Lake studied us for a moment, then stepped aside to hold the door open for us to walk past him into the alley. Behind me, I heard the door close.

  The tension faded from my shoulders with every step away from the diner. “I think I’m parked on the fourth level,” I told Natalie, heading to the garage elevator. “I’ll drop you at your car and follow you back to your house.”

  “Thanks!” Natalie hummed quietly to herself as we took the elevator up.

  I ferried Natalie to her car in my blue Toyota, a nondescript three-year-old sedan that worked well for surveillance. To my surprise, she drove a bright red Mustang convertible, which was definitely not the type of vehicle I thought she would be driving. I followed her out of the downtown area and toward the west side of the city.

  As I drove, I thought about Special Agent Lake. Two days after Grierson’s death in Fields Park, SPEMA announced the half-demon the media had dubbed the “Full Moon Stalker” died trying to elude capture. The public reacted with predictable horror at the news that Grierson had sacrificed the six known victims as part of demon-summoning rituals. Lake and Parker appeared on a handful of national news channels for bringing Grierson’s reign of terror to an end. I watched one of their interviews on CNN. Lake looked uncomfortable in the spotlight, but Parker seemed more than happy to take the credit for catching Grierson.

  I never did send an invoice to the Hills. I don’t know what Lake said to them, but they mailed me a sizable check anyway. I made a donation to a women’s shelter in Maggie’s name and sent flowers to her memorial service.

  After a fifteen-minute drive, Natalie turned into the driveway of a tidy single-story house, and I parked at the curb.

  There was a Lexus SUV parked in the driveway when we arrived. The back window featured several stickers representing extremist anti-magic organizations and anti-supe hate groups. Fantastic.

  Natalie parked next to the SUV and flew out of her car to confront a middle-aged bleach-blonde in a lime-green designer track suit. The woman stood on the front porch holding a high-end digital camera. I watched for a moment to gauge their interaction.

  When Natalie started yelling, I decided it was time to find out what was going on. I grabbed my bag and exited my car.

  “You have no right to be here,” Natalie shouted as I strode across the yard. “The court has ordered you to stay off my property. Get out of my house!”

  “I am not in your house,” the woman said, in a snotty tone I would have thought was impossible for someone who was not sixteen years old. “I am on the porch of my mother’s house, and by the time my lawyers and I are done, you won’t be living in it.”

  This must be Aunt Elise. “Excuse me,” I said loudly.

  The woman turned on me. “Who the hell are you?”

  “An order of protection prohibits you, your vehicles, and your agents from stepping foot on or in property owned by Ms. Newton. At this moment, you are in violation of the law and I am dialing the police.” I held up my phone and began hitting buttons.

  “Who is this?” the woman demanded of Natalie.

  “I am Ms. Newton’s representative.” I advanced on Natalie’s unwelcome guest with an expression that caused her to step back before I got within ten feet of the porch. “I have one more number to push before I hit Call, so you have approximately five seconds to get out of here before you’ll be needing bail money.”

  Elise glared daggers at me. “This is my mother’s house,” she hissed, but she headed toward her SUV.

  “What’s on the camera?” I asked.

  Elise clutched it to her chest. “None of your business,” she spat. Then she saw my crystal jewelry and her face switched from fury to terror and back to fury as she put two and two together and rounded on her niece. “Who is this freak you’re bringing into my mother’s house?” she screeched. “I won’t allow it!”

  I hit Call on my phone and waved it. Elise’s face turned tomato red as she sputtered expletives. I stared at her impassively. I’d looked full demons in the face and been flayed alive by a blood mage, so the wrath of a soccer mom didn’t faze me in the least.

  I acted like someone had answered the phone while it rang in my empty office. “Yes, this is MPI number 230492-394.” I rattled off my license number. “I would like to report a violation of a protection order—”

  “Bitch!” Elise screamed and hurled a small potted plant at me before running to her SUV. I flicked out a finger and used a tiny stream of air magic to soften the plant’s landing so that it came to rest unharmed in the grass three feet to my right. Elise jumped into her SUV, slammed the door, and backed out of the driveway, narrowly missing my car. She flipped me off and shouted a few more curses out her open window before peeling out, tires squealing.

  I sighed and joined Natalie on the porch. She sat on the front step, sobbing.

  I stuck my phone in my bag, returned the plant to where it belonged, and leaned against the porch railing while my client cried herself out. It took a while.

  Finally, Natalie wound down. Sniffling, she got up and unlocked the front door. I paused outside the threshold, getting a sense of the place.

  Someone who had lived here was definitely magical. Judging by the faded magic I could sense, I was betting it was the recently deceased grandmother. Odd that Natalie had no such talents; they usually ran in families. There were wards on the house, but they had faded without upkeep from their creator.

  I touched the doorframe gently, running my fingers along its smooth wooden surface. I closed my eyes and listened to the house.

  It sang. It was beautiful. There had been a lot of love within these walls.

  “What are you doing?” Natalie’s voice was curious.

  Slowly, I opened my eyes and looked at the young woman as she stood, still shaken, in the entryway to the home her grandmother had left to her. Strangely—since such sentimentality was very unlike me—I felt compelled to do what I could to find the secrets of this house and protect both it and Natalie from those who would wish them harm. This house had told me it was worth saving—that they were both worth saving.

  “Listening to the house. May I come in?” I asked.

  She looked surprised. “Do you have to have permission, like a vampire?”

  “No,” I replied, smiling despite myself. “It’s just polite to ask. And also, incidentally, it’s not true about vampires either.”

  She paled.

  *

  Looking around Natalie’s living room, I wondered if she had changed much of anything after her grandmother’s death.

  The deceased had been very fond of cats, it would seem; in addition to four actual cats living there, the décor was cat-themed. There were cat sculptures, cat paintings, cat knickknacks, cat-shaped rugs, cat refrigerator magnets, photographs of cats in cat-shaped picture frames, and even a wall-mounted grandfather clock with different breeds of cats as the hours. Normally this level of obsession would have irritated me, but for some reason, it didn’t. It was like a peek into a world of a sweet, cat-loving, old granny I’d certainly never known.

  The grandmother’s room had been kept more or less the same since her passing; Natalie confessed a reluctance to clean it out and use it as her own. I made a noncommittal sound. Due to my unique upbringing, I lacked not only social etiquette but also most of the sentimentality that seemed to make life difficult for those who were more sensitive. The master bedroom was much larger and had its own bathroom. From my perspective, it would be a better room for Natalie to live in.

  The master suite also connected directly to the library, the room I was most excited to see. Natalie opened the door and walked inside. I started to follow her in—

  —and was promptly knocked on my ass with a hard zap of magic that singed my shirt, sucked the
air out of my lungs, and left me seeing honest-to-God stars.

  Startled, Natalie yelped as I fell. Since she was nonmagical, she could not have seen or felt the bolt that hit me; it would have just looked like I ran into an invisible wall and went down.

  Dazed, I propped myself up on my hands and wheezed.

  The library door pulsed with wards that had been dormant probably since the grandmother’s death. They’d flared to life with my attempt to unknowingly trespass, and now I could feel them sizzling on my skin.

  The power of the wards was enormous. That probably meant the library had been where the grandmother practiced her craft and kept important books. It would be warded with the strongest whammies she could cook up—spells that would not have faded as easily as those around the house. The wards seemed designed to permit passage to specific individuals, since Natalie was able to come and go freely.

  I was furious with myself for not being more cautious. Even though I hadn’t sensed any magic inside the house, I should have used a spell to detect hidden wards. In fact, I was lucky I hadn’t blundered into deadly black wards. Mistakes like that can cost a mage her life.

  Natalie was speaking to me. “Are you all right? What happened? Did you faint?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said crossly, embarrassed by my carelessness. I swatted her hands away and hauled myself to my feet, shaking my head to clear the cobwebs. Damn it, my shirt was ruined. There was a scorched two-inch hole just to the left of my breastbone. Double damn. Through the hole, I saw an angry red burn over my heart. Triple damn. If I’d walked into those wards right after the grandmother’s death, right now I’d be hanging out in the afterlife with her.

  I suddenly had way more respect for Natalie’s grandmother, and a hell of lot of questions. First, I had to see if I could untangle these wards so I could get into the library.

  “Um, Alice? Ms. Worth?”

  I’d almost forgotten about Natalie, who looked at the hole in my shirt in confusion.

  Well, even I knew this would be an awkward and possibly very upsetting conversation. In a situation like this, there was only one thing to do.

  “Do you have any coffee?”

  *

  Much to my dismay, Natalie was a tea drinker and did not have so much as a single coffee bean in the house.

  Some time later, after we’d consumed an entire pot of tea and I’d eaten several homemade oatmeal-raisin cookies, Natalie sat in stunned silence in the living room, a cat in her lap and two others on the back of the couch next to her.

  I sat in an armchair across from my client, holding a bag of frozen peas to the burn on my chest and waiting for her to process what I’d told her. It was a lot to think about, I supposed, wiping cookie crumbs off my ruined shirt.

  Finally, Natalie stirred and rubbed her forehead. “So…my grandmother was a mage.”

  “Yes,” I said, somewhat impatiently. “She had very strong skills with air magic, and possibly fire. I need to take a closer look at the wards on the library to know for sure.”

  Natalie frowned. “I thought mages only had one kind of magic.”

  “Most do,” I told her. “Magic of any kind is rare; they say less than a half a percent of humans have it. Of those, almost all have only one of the four types of natural magic—earth, water, air, or fire—but some have two kinds. I have both earth and air. Some mages have what’s called blood magic.”

  “That’s death magic, right?” Natalie said.

  I hesitated. “It’s highly volatile dark magic, and it’s illegal, but it’s not necessarily ‘death magic.’ It has other uses.”

  Natalie was quiet for a bit. “This is a lot to take in. It’s not that I don’t believe you….”

  “I understand,” I said, even though I didn’t. Magic just was for me; it wasn’t a thing to be believed or not. “If she never showed any of her abilities to you, and kept them so well hidden that her family didn’t know, she did it for a reason, possibly to avoid the kind of reaction we saw today from your aunt.”

  “Oh my God, my aunt.” Natalie’s eyes widened. “Her own mother was a mage, and she hates supes and mages so much.”

  I shrugged. “People are ignorant. They’re afraid of what they don’t understand. There’s a lot of anti-supe propaganda out there that people like your aunt believe. Maybe if she’d known about your grandmother, she’d think differently, but who knows. Prejudice and bigotry aren’t logical.”

  “Aunt Elise cannot know about this,” Natalie said vehemently. “If she did, she’d burn this house to the ground.”

  I thought about Elise’s hateful eyes and didn’t disagree. “Well, she won’t hear about it from me, but if she came here with someone who was sensitive, they could tell the house has wards. That wouldn’t prove your grandmother was a mage,” I added at Natalie’s sudden look of panic. “Lots of nonmages have protective wards on their houses; it’s more effective than hiring an alarm company. If someone encountered the wards on the library, though, they’d know for sure someone who lived here was a mage. They might think it was your grandmother, or they might suspect it was you.”

  Natalie looked terrified, but she needed to know the truth. Hiding it from her could only do more harm than good.

  “Here’s my thought. I need to examine the wards on the library closely to understand them. If I can take them down, I will, then replace them with my own. That should divert suspicions. I can also put wards on the house to help prevent any more trespassers from getting in, including your aunt.”

  Natalie looked hopeful. “Really? That’s great!” She paused. “Will it hurt her?”

  I considered the possibilities. There were aversion spells, or even stronger options, if you wanted to take a more aggressive approach to home defense. My mind conjured up an image of Aunt Elise going up in a bright green fireball, and my mouth twitched. “Not too much,” I said finally. “At least, not unless she gets overly enthusiastic about getting in the house. In that case, she might get a nasty surprise.”

  Natalie grinned. “Good.”

  *

  Two hours later, I sat down on the grandmother’s bed and wiped sweat off my forehead. While the house wards were easy to take down and replace with my own, the wards protecting the library were another thing altogether. The spellwork was exquisitely complex.

  I discovered her grandmother had set the wards so Natalie could come and go safely through them. The intensity of their defense was based on the strength of the mage trying to cross them, which confirmed my initial evaluation that those wards would have killed me if I’d walked into them when they were at full power. Anyone without magical ability would feel an aversion to the library, which probably meant the rest of the family would simply avoid going in without giving it much thought. Whatever was in that library was both magical and worth killing for, but not something the grandmother feared Natalie would find.

  Of course, all this begged the question of how someone would have gotten in there to steal the books Natalie said were missing, but I’d cross that ward when I came to it.

  I had to admit unraveling the wards by myself would take at least a day. Conveniently, I’d recently made the acquaintance of a ghost who also happened to be a very strong mage. I was willing to bet he was at least decent with spellwork.

  I took a piece of chalk from my pocket and drew a circle around myself on the floor, then removed my right earring and held it in the palm of my right hand. Against my skin the earring buzzed as if it held a very slight electrical charge. “Release.”

  “Holy shit!” Malcolm yelled.

  I jumped. Malcolm, still in his cute librarian ghost form, stood in my circle, looking shocked. I broke the circle with the toe of my boot, and he flitted back away from me, half disappearing into the grandmother’s neatly made bed.

  “Holy shit!” he shouted again.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  Malcolm flew around the room, a ghostly whirlwind. “That…freaking…sucked,�
�� he declared as he zipped around. Trying to keep track of him made my eyes cross. “It was so dark. It felt like forever, or a second, or both. I don’t know!” He came to a stop in front of me. “Please don’t put me back in there,” he begged. “It was awful. There has got to be another way.”

  “I’ll try to think of an alternative. But hey, in the meantime, you wanna help me with something?”

  Malcolm paused to take a closer look at the hole in my shirt. “What happened to you? That looks nasty.”

  “It could have been a lot worse.” I gestured over my shoulder at the doorway to the library.

  That brought an end to his snit. “Whoa,” he said in awe, gliding over to take a look at the wards. As a ghost, they would be evident to him, like neon signs. “This is grade-A work. Kind of faded,” he muttered to himself. “They must have been intense.” He sounded impressed.

  “Hey, Alice? Who are you talking to?” Natalie appeared in the doorway to the bedroom, steaming mug of tea in hand, looking around the room as if she thought someone was hiding.

  Well, hell, in for a penny…. I walked over to where Malcolm was reading the wards and grabbed his arm. I funneled energy into him, and Malcolm went from invisible to partially opaque. “Natalie, this is my ghost, Malcolm. Malcolm, meet Natalie Newton, my client.”

  Natalie stared at Malcolm. After a moment’s hesitation, Malcolm waved.

  Natalie walked over and sat on her grandmother’s bed. “Wow,” she said weakly. “This has been a day.”

  *

  I let go of Malcolm’s arm and he went invisible again, but Natalie sat on the bed and watched me have a one-sided conversation with thin air.

  After about ten minutes of careful scrutiny, the ghost pronounced that together he and I could dismantle the wards in a couple of hours.

  “I need to rest for a bit,” I said. “That zap earlier really got me, and that was on top of all the other magic I’ve used.”

  “Take all the time you need.” Malcolm’s eyes were on Natalie. “So, what’s her story?”