Secrets and Lies (Cassie Scot)

by Amsden, Christine

  “Intuition is not clairvoyance, but if it helps, I’ll protect her with my life. And I know you and Nicolas will, too.”

  “Great, it’s settled,” I said, grabbing my purse and moving toward the door. “Let’s get going.”

  * * *

  Evan drove, but at least this time there was no time for tense silence, even if my brother and Evan’s friend hadn’t been in the backseat. I got on the phone to Sheriff Adams and had him run a few checks on Henry Warren. He worked quickly, calling me back within ten minutes with the address I needed, which I programmed into Evan’s GPS.

  “There’s one thing, though,” Sheriff Adams said, “I checked on his employment with the Polk County Sheriff’s Department. He’s been working there for ten years.”

  I felt a prickling sense of unease, but I hadn’t yet made the connection that Sheriff Adams obviously had. “What are you saying?”

  “Well,” Sheriff Adams said, “if this guy is harvesting magic, stands to reason he’d move around a lot, doesn’t it? It’s not like Polk County is a hot spot for sorcerers, is it?”

  I turned away from the phone and asked Evan. “Where do you think the nearest node is?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at Scott, then back at me. “The one near Eagle Rock under Table Rock Lake. Next closest after that is probably Hot Springs, unless there’s one west of here I’m unfamiliar with.”

  “Tulsa?” Scott suggested. “I think there’s a minor node there. Not that the one in Hot Springs is all that impressive, either. Why?”

  “Because,” I said, “the Henry Warren on file with the local sheriff’s department has been working there for ten years. Not too likely if, as I suspect, the guy came into town for the sole purpose of acquiring one magic user betrayed by her father.” I turned back to the phone. “What can you find out about Randy Sikes in the next forty-five minutes?”

  “We’ll see,” the sheriff said, hanging up.

  What he found out was that Randy Sikes fit the profile much more neatly. With five minutes to spare, I learned that Randy had been hired as a camp nurse for the summer, and that over the past eight years had worked as a school nurse in five schools across three different states.

  “What does it mean?” Evan asked. “Did Henry Warren just get a taste for power, or is he not Henry Warren at all?”

  “I’m guessing the latter,” I said. “Which means we have to wonder how he’s fooled his coworkers and the residents of a small town who have probably known him all his life.”

  Evan shuddered. “A mesmerist?”

  “No,” Scott said from the backseat. “I’m thinking illusionist fits the facts better. You said yourself that there was some kind of illusion on that haunted cabin when you visited, just before it blew up.”

  Something tugged at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t quite focus on it.

  “An illusionist?” Nicolas said. “If that’s true, we may never find the girls. All he has to do is cast invisibility over them.”

  “Just about anyone can do that,” Scott said dismissively. “With a lot of time and effort, it’s even possible to craft an illusion into a disguise, but an illusionist can do this on a grand scale. He can trick our minds into believing we’re on another world.”

  “Ever met one?” Evan asked.

  “My father did,” Scott said, “right before he died.”

  No one asked for details.

  “They said they found two bodies in the stables,” I said.

  “Hard to trust anything when an illusionist is involved,” Scott said. “Especially one in a position to falsify police reports.”

  “There were never any bodies.” I didn’t make it a question. “Well, except for Mackenzie. Renee said he was in there.”

  “If he’s so good, how do we catch this guy?” Nicolas asked.

  “It’s the same principle as any other illusion, isn’t it?” I dug through my purse and took out my phone. “It’s mind magic. It fools the mind – not technology.”

  “It won’t break the spell, though,” Scott said. “You’d have to keep looking through the camera.”

  Everyone in the car went silent as the full realization of what we were up against sunk in. I stared at my phone for a minute, suddenly realizing something. “Hey, just before the cabin exploded, I used Evan’s phone to take a video of it. I never replayed it afterward but I wonder if there’s anything there.”

  Evan wordlessly handed me his phone, and I set about looking for the short video I had taken of the explosion. I saw the cabin for a few seconds, the details too small for me to see on the tiny screen. Then the view went wild. I saw flashes of Evan and flashes of trees, then a view of a tree and a tranquil blue sky for a couple of long minutes.

  Tranquil and wrong.

  “The tree isn’t moving,” I said.

  “What?” Evan asked.

  “Is it possible for an illusionist to fake an explosion?”

  The silence that met me was answer enough.

  “I think the girls are in that cabin,” I said. “I don’t think it ever blew up.”

  Evan didn’t even question my conclusion. He simply made a sharp turn and headed in the direction of the camp. “Everyone have camera phones?”

  We all nodded.

  28

  THE CABIN LOOKED MUCH AS IT had when we last saw it – a big crater in the ground – until we looked at it through our video phones. Suddenly, the cabin was back and the earth around it looked peaceful.

  “Wow,” I said, looking through my phone. “What does a guy who can do something like that want with more magic?”

  “My guess is he’s doing it for money,” Scott said. “Someone else is usurping the power.”

  Tension nearly crackled in the air as everyone got out of the car. Evan turned to me and handed me the keys. “I want you to stay here and get ready to leave in a hurry if you have to.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Evan cut me off. “Don’t even think about arguing.”

  “I wasn’t. I just wanted to say... good luck.” It wasn’t what I had wanted to say. Going into that house would be very dangerous and I wanted to give him words of love as he went into the thick of it, but I was painfully aware of my brother standing quite nearby.

  Then he turned and, phone held high, headed toward the cabin.

  I ducked into the car, turned the key in the ignition, and watched their progress through my phone. They were nearly to the front porch when the door banged open and Randy Sikes charged out. Behind him, the illusion faded back into reality. Nicolas and Evan lowered their phones, but neither Scott nor I were lulled into doing so, even though at the moment, the cabin looked peaceful.

  Randy looked supremely confident for a man who was supposedly outnumbered three to one. Was he the illusionist or was that the other one? The illusionist had to be nearby, since he had let his illusion of the cabin slip away. I let the camera slide around the surrounding landscape, looking for any signs that something was out of the ordinary, but everything looked just as it should.

  “We’re here for the girls,” Evan said.

  Randy leaned against a post. “Am I just supposed to give them over? We’ve got clients paying $10,000 a day for the magic drain and it looks like they may have been stronger than we thought. Afterward, the same men are interested in taking the leftovers for $25,000 each.”

  The leftovers? I felt bile rise in my throat at the casual and heartless way he talked about two young women.

  “Now,” Randy continued, “if the price is right, we may be able to work out something else. They’ve probably got about three or four days left to drain, so how about...$100,000 per girl?”

  Flame leaped from the ends of Nicolas’ fingers and a slight breeze rustled around Evan.

  “You can afford it,” Randy said. “I checked.”

  Evan took a menacing step forward. “Money isn’t the issue. The issue is what happens to the next girl. And the next.”

  “Evan,” Scott said. “Something�
��s not right here.” He wasn’t looking through his camera, he was looking at Randy and frowning.

  After that, things happened so quickly I wasn’t even sure until afterward that I saw it. Evan aimed some kind of telekinetic burst at Randy, but instead of Randy flying backwards through the wall of the cabin, Evan flew backwards toward the car, hitting his head hard against a rock on the ground.

  At the same instant, Nicolas aimed a ball of fire at Randy, but it didn’t touch him. Instead, Nicolas’s clothes caught fire. He threw himself toward the lake, around the side of the building.

  Completely disregarding Evan’s warning to run if anything went wrong, I set the emergency brake, left the engine running, and leaped out of the car. Rushing to Evan’s side, I saw he was still breathing, but the force of the blow had knocked him unconscious.

  Randy laughed. “Oops. Did I forget to mention I’m a mirror? Magic doesn’t work too well against me.”

  Scott glanced back at me for just a moment. I gave him a quick nod to reassure him that Evan remained alive. Then he launched himself bodily against the overly cocky sorcerer. With a movement so swift I didn’t see it, he snapped Randy’s neck with an audible crack.

  I gasped at the quick, easy way Scott had killed. He let the body fall to the ground with a disgusted look. “Luckily, I don’t need magical attacks to kill.”

  But his guard was down. I knew it the instant he reached for his camera phone. I reached for mine a split second later, but not before hearing the loud crack of gunfire. Blood stained the green t-shirt Scott wore as he fell, face first, on the ground beside Randy’s body.

  Through the camera I saw Hank, no longer wearing his deputy’s uniform and looking quite a few years older. In fact, I’m not really sure how I knew it was him. Perhaps it was something in the way he stood or the way he moved. Once he became visible, I lowered the camera and wondered if I could make a run for it.

  He lifted the gun and aimed it at me. “Don’t try it. Put the phone down and walk this way... slowly.”

  Numb with fear, I did as he asked, my shaking limbs just managing to transport me. At first, I wasn’t sure they would.

  When I approached the porch stairs, Hank stood aside and motioned with the gun. “Go inside.”

  I walked through the door and into a nightmare. It wasn’t the filthy but vacant cabin that Evan and I had explored the week before. There were two couches. Two people sat on each couch, each locked in the grip of ferocious agony. The girls looked beyond sanity. One can only remain in constant torture for so long before it becomes too much for the conscious mind to bear. Their eyes were open, but they obviously saw nothing.

  The men, both relatively nondescript and in their mid to late-twenties, seemed incredibly uncomfortable, though they didn’t seem to be in the sort of soul-wrenching agony that trapped the girls. They were conscious enough to occasionally cry out, but from whatever internal pain, I couldn’t say.

  “You’re the throwback, aren’t you?” Hank asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bad egg, mislaid seed. I did some looking after you and your boyfriend showed up here last week. He’s some hot shot in that small town where you come from, and you’re infamous.”

  “Infamous?” I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Two powerful sorcerers managed to have six powerful kids and you.” Hank chuckled. “Life ain’t fair sometimes, is it?”

  “What are you going to do with me?” I asked.

  Hank shrugged. “I hadn’t worked it out yet, actually. I was kind of wondering who thought to come back here after that explosion.”

  I kept my mouth closed, but my mind was working overtime. I wasn’t sure if he would kill me or not, but the odds weren’t good. He had all the weapons – magic, a strong gift for illusion, and a gun. I knew the gun was real since I had seen what it had done to Scott, who was probably dead now. Nicolas and Evan weren’t going to come to my rescue soon, either.

  That left only me, armed with my brains and a slight talent for telling lies. It didn’t seem like much.

  “Things will go easier for you if you answer,” Hank said.

  “You’ll kill me either way,” I said. “Why should I cooperate?”

  Hank cocked his head to the side. “I haven’t decided whether to kill you or not, actually. I appreciate your friend killing Randy for me, though. That guy’s been getting sloppy, becoming a liability. He drummed up the Regina girl and said he did a proper background check to make sure she didn’t have any powerful connections that would be interested in her disappearance. I think he just took her old man’s word for it. Then he found her friend here at camp, and did another sloppy background check on her.”

  “And now you have two powerful families breathing down your neck,” I finished for him.

  “Exactly.” Hank looked toward the door, as if expecting them to come pounding on it at any moment.

  My whirling mind began forming the beginnings of a plan.

  “I think I need to cut my losses and run. The girls aren’t one hundred percent drained, but the men don’t have to know that. I can cut them off, say it’s all over, and take off with just the down payment they gave me. Since I don’t have to split it with Randy anymore, it’s almost as much as I would have gotten anyway.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” I said, slowly. “Then of course, these two men will be the hunted ones, since they’ll have the girls.”

  Hank nodded. “Exactly. And by the time they decide to come after me, I’ll be long gone. I’m good at hiding.”

  “I bet you are.” It was time to stroke his ego. “I’ve never met someone as powerful as you before.”

  He didn’t look amused. “No tricks. Now, I think I’d be better off if I didn’t kill you, since your parents would probably decide to come after me instead of rescuing some distant cousin, but I will if I have to.”

  “You should take me with you.”

  The words had precisely the desired effect. He looked up, utterly perplexed. “Why would I want to do that? Why would you want me to do that?”

  “You said yourself that this went wrong because Randy didn’t do the right background checks. I’m an investigator. If you want to be able to get away with this kind of thing in the future, that’s what you need – not some overly confident mirror with a bit of skill studying blood.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long minute, and when he did, he didn’t talk to me. He went to the couples sitting on the couch and began saying the words of a spell that would unlink them. Even not being attuned to magic, I could almost feel the moment when the draining stopped. The two girls collapsed backwards onto the sofa into instant, exhausted sleep. The men looked dazed, though sleep was slower in coming to them.

  “They’ll be out of it for a few hours,” Hank told me. “Now, why in the world would I want some throwback tag-along? You think I’m going to let you at some of this magic?”

  I shrugged, trying to look casual as I took a step toward him. My skin prickled at the increased nearness, but I pushed the revulsion away. “I’ve spent my life trying to attach myself to the most powerful person around. When my parents kicked me out of the house, I turned to Evan, the most powerful sorcerer in town, but you...”

  “Enough of that,” Hank said. “Why in the hell would I want anything to do with you? Throwbacks don’t even make the best breeding stock.”

  “But I’m not a throwback,” I said. “How do you think my parents made all their money?”

  Hank frowned deeply. “What are you getting at?”

  “They sold my magic when I was a little girl. When I found out, I ran away from home. Trust me when I say, I owe them nothing.”

  “I can tell with a blood test, you know.”

  I didn’t know, but I feigned total lack of interest in the news. If this scheme went long enough for him to run a blood test, it would be too late anyway. “I figured.”

  He hesitated, his gun lowering to his side. I drove home the slight advantage
with a finishing touch to the story. “Look, damn it! I’d love to get my hands on some magic. It’s been this gaping hole my entire life, and my parents pretend like I was born dry, which makes it that much worse. It’s like I failed instead of them. But there are things I can offer you in return.”

  Hank licked his lips and scrutinized me. “If you’re telling the truth, then I want something besides your investigating skills.”

  I’d been waiting for this, but it was best if he brought it up. “Oh?”

  He pushed himself forward a few steps. “I want you. It’s not every day you run across a drained woman with as much lost potential as you’re talking about. Usually that kind of power is protected. I could probably get a million dollars for you.”

  My face paled. If he thought to sell me, then this would never work. Of course, it wouldn’t go that far because the blood test would prove my lie, which would probably result in my death instead.

  “But,” Hank went on, “I’m almost forty. I’ve got some money tucked away, and I could be persuaded to use you myself.”

  I didn’t have to fake the sigh of relief.

  “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?” Hank said.

  I looked him straight in the eyes and nodded, once.

  “Come here.” He reached for me and pulled me to him, still holding his gun in one hand. I could feel the cool metal against my back.

  Fighting down an urge to flee, I let him touch me, let him tip my chin upward with his free hand, and let him lower his lips to mine.

  The ward Evan had woven around my lips would last a week or two, he had said. He cast it a week ago, so I sent out a quick prayer that the duration would be closer to two.

  His lips met mine, wet and open, his tongue trying to gain entrance practically before his lips arrived. A shudder of revulsion crept down my spine for the space of a heartbeat.

  Then the pressure was gone, and I heard a distinctive CROAK!

  29

  THE FROG HOPPED OUT OF THE cabin, but nobody bothered to go looking for him. I found my phone among the leftover pile of clothes and put in a desperate call to my father, who managed to stop arguing with Victor long enough to give him the message that both of their sons were hurt.