Arcane Heart (Talents Book 2)

by Angela Knight

  Sweat trickled down her spine, cold against her heated skin. If it doesn’t work…

  She sucked in a breath, gaze fastened on the weakness orbiting toward her. As it started to revolve past, she flung the spear of power into the gap with all her strength.

  The probe bounced off the spell like a raindrop against a car windshield. Pain exploded behind her eyes and she staggered, barely catching herself in time to keep from hitting the floor on her ass. Shit piss fuck!

  She’d never hit a ward with that much juice. I don’t have the power to break it. Genevieve might, but BFS was on the other end of the county and it would take her half an hour to get here. Judging by the crazed glitter in Ray’s eyes and Noah’s weakening aura, they didn’t have that much time.

  The amplification spell!

  She sidestepped over behind Jake, who was glowing in full manifestation like something out of a Spielberg movie. He made a damn good distraction.

  “Let me in,” Erica murmured, knowing his Clarence-enhanced senses would make out what she was saying. Ray didn’t hear her. He was too busy ranting about Meghan smoking a cookie of Tink worth four hundred dollars… Suddenly she remembered Meghan’s excuse for ripping off Wanda Jeffries, something about owing money to her boyfriend. Meghan, you have lousy taste in men.

  The back of Jake’s manifestation thinned, and Erica stepped into it, knowing Ray wouldn’t be able to see her from his spell circle. Leaning in, she murmured, “That’s one of the strongest wards I’ve ever seen. No way can I break it by myself, but Genevieve showed me how to draw on someone else’s magic. If I can use yours, I think I can do it.”

  “Then do it,” Jake told her, without taking his eyes off Ray.

  “You’ll have to drop your manifestation to feed the magic to me. I’ll be drawing a lot of juice, and it may knock me on my butt, but it won’t hurt me. If I go down, you stay focused on the asshole. Take him down and grab Noah.”

  It occurred to her that she was giving him orders -- normally the kind of thing that could set a cat off -- but Jake only nodded, his Glock steady in one big hand. “I’ll take care of it.”

  And he would, too. She laid a hand against his broad back, wishing she could feel his body through his winter jacket and bulletproof vest. Pushing the thought away, she reached into his aura as he opened his consciousness to her.

  The ability to touch another’s thoughts was the core of Feral magic -- the Talent for twining your soul with another’s. She felt the soundless mental click of connection, felt for a moment the dark male swirl that was Jake and his cat -- the strength, the stubborn nobility. And under it all, his hunger for her.

  The last time we did this, we were making love.

  But she didn’t have time to explore those seductive feelings, so she stepped back. He thinned the manifestation to allow her to leave, but even as she moved away, a thin shining cord of aural energy stretched between them. The weapon in his hand was unwavering, though Ray’s spell could probably bounce a bullet, just like Jake’s manifestation.

  “I told the little bitch what I’d do if she didn’t get my money, but she didn’t listen,” the Alchemist snarled. “Now she’s going to learn her lesson. And so are all of you…”

  He broke off as they stepped closer to the rotating sigils of the ward. “What the fuck are you doing?” Ray lifted the athame, his face contorting in a snarl. “Do you want me to kill the brat?”

  Peering through the spell’s glow, Erica saw Noah’s eyes were closed, and he lay too still. At least his chest still rose and fell. This had better fucking work.

  The gap in the spell drew level with them. Erica sank a hand into Jake’s manifestation, which vanished as he blasted his magic into her.

  The power slammed into her in a white-hot explosion of pain that seemed to sink fanged jaws into her brain. Teeth clenched, Erica snatched the power into a spear and drove it into the gap between the sigils. As she blasted their joined magic into the spell, the pain increased, burning, blinding until she could have sworn she smelled smoke. Gasping, she jerked away from Jake, trying to break the link between them.

  Ray’s spell popped like a soap bubble. She tripped as her knees went weak, and she went down hard. Crushing pain tore a scream from her throat -- feedback from breaking the spell.

  * * *

  From the corner of one eye, Jake saw Erica hit the ground with a cry of pain, but he didn’t dare look away from Ray as the Alchemist rose with a screech of outrage. “My spell! What the fuck did you do my spell?”

  In the depths of his mind, Clarence roared his need to make the bastard pay for torturing the child. Jake’s lips peeled off his teeth as he shared the cat’s craving to manifest and rip the bastard apart. He clamped down hard on their shared rage. We’d never be able to clear the distance in time!

  “I warned you!” Ray’s wild eyes narrowed as he raised the knife over Noah’s chest. “The kid’s dead, fucker! And it’s all on --”

  Jake shot him. Twice.

  The double blast thundered in the enclosed space, hitting his Clarence-amplified ears like a fist.

  The Alchemist looked down in shock, then collapsed with a crimson splash. Jake leapt into the circle, boots slapping down in the red puddle of Noah’s blood. Kneeling, he unbuckled the Alchemist’s belt, dragged it off, and whipped the leather strap around the boy’s forearm below the elbow. Pulling his ASP baton, he slid it beneath the strap and began to twist the makeshift tourniquet. The child didn’t stir.

  Jake laid his fingers on Noah’s throat, and was relieved to feel his pulse still throbbing, if dangerously weak. In the distance, he could hear the distinctive wail of an approaching ambulance.

  “Fuck, that hurts.” Erica sat up, bracing her head with both hands as if it might fall off.

  “You all right?”

  “Fine. Is Noah okay?”

  “No, but I hear an ambulance pulling into the development. I hope they have enough blood on board, or he’s not going to make it.” Glancing at the sprawled corpse of the Alchemist, Jake wished he could kill him all over again. With a sigh, he rose and started to collect cushions from the couch pushed haphazardly against one wall, evidently to clear a space for the circle. They needed to elevate Noah’s legs to keep his blood pressure from sinking any further.

  Erica began to swear in a string of profanity so inventive, his Arcane Corps DI would have been impressed. Alarmed, he stared at her as she reeled to her feet. “What?”

  “The inner ring of that spell is still active. And it’s pumping a hell of a lot of magic somewhere.”

  “Oh, crap.” Jake closed his eyes and looked with his magical senses. Sure enough, sigils still revolved slowly through the air. “I thought you broke it!”

  “I broke the ward, but I wasn’t able to touch the inner sigil rings.” She paced around the spell, studying the sigils in frowning worry.

  Jake bent to tuck the cushions under Noah’s legs. “What does the spell do?”

  “What does any human sacrifice spell do? Collects the life force released when someone’s killed.”

  Jake stared at her, feeling sick. “You mean I just fed it by shooting the son of a bitch?” He frowned. “Wait a minute, that makes no sense. If the Alchemist is dead, who’s it feeding power to?”

  “I have no idea, but I’m going to have to try to break it as soon as I get my magical wind back.” Erica stepped into the circle and stalked over to the Alchemist’s body, staring down at it. Her eyes widened, and she bent to jerk up the man’s T-shirt, baring a hairy potbelly and a pair of man boobs. “Oh, fuck me!”

  He rose to look over her shoulder. An upside-down pentagram was tattooed in the middle of Ray’s flabby chest. Judging by the raised red flesh around it, the tatt was no more than a couple of days old. “He’s a Satanist?”

  “No, the pentagram’s camouflage for a sigil tattooed underneath. And it’s active.” She looked up at him, her expression grim. “This bastard was working with somebody.”

  Chapter Seve
nteen

  It was like taking a hammer to the face. White exploded in his skull, and Adrian Fleming hit the cement floor on his back with a high, wheezing scream of pain.

  Backlash. Somebody broke my fucking spell!

  Magic poured into him, a searing wave of psychic energy that bowed his spine. He dimly realized it was somebody’s life force, being funneled to him through the circle at Ray’s house. But instead of triggering the usual intense orgasmic pleasure, the power collided with the backlash, searing his brain.

  Adrian convulsed, his body writhing in the center of the magic circle. One kicking foot hit one of the bottles standing around him. It flew out of the circle, hit the wall, and shattered. The air filled with the smell of spilled vodka.

  The agony went on and on, feeling as if someone had turned his brain inside out and was dragging it out of his skull through his eye sockets by the optic nerves. Minutes went by before the pain faded enough that he could think again. He lay on his side in a pool of something that stank. Grimacing, Adrian rolled out of the vomit, wiping at his bare skin in disgust. The nauseating reek warred with the potent odor of spilled alcohol.

  Panting raggedly, he stared up at the basement’s ceiling, trying to figure out what the hell had gone wrong. His head ached as if his skull was the clapper of a huge bell, banging against the bronze walls.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d suffered backlash, of course. Nobody in his line of work escaped having a spell broken. But it was the first time he’d experienced it on top of having someone’s life force driven into his brain using the same magical conduit. Turned out that was a really bad idea.

  Moving like an arthritic old man, Adrian struggled to sit up and arrange his legs in the lotus position. Glancing around, he saw only six of bottles of liquor had survived. He’d have to make do.

  He badly needed to talk to Ray, but he didn’t want to call the Alchemist if the man was surrounded by cops. And he must be, because it certainly wasn’t Ray who’d broken that ward.

  In the distance, Adrian could sense the two inner rings of the spell circle still operating. That wouldn’t last long. Whoever had dropped the wards would take the rest out next.

  Gingerly, he reached out along the link to Ray’s tattoo. He’d had a hell of a time talking the Alchemist into that tatt. Ray, unlike the Human Heritage suckers, knew exactly what Adrian could do with something like that. He’d agreed only if the sigil was strictly one way. It could send energy to Adrian, but Adrian couldn’t use it to send Ray a magical heart attack. Even so, the Alchemist had charged him $10,000 to piggyback on the sacrifice.

  There was no sense of Ray’s magic on the other end of the link.

  “Well, shit. He’s dead,” Adrian said aloud.

  What the hell had happened? Somehow the cops had gotten wind of the plan to sacrifice the kid. They must have brought Genevieve Briggs on board to break his spell. Harris didn’t have the juice.

  Damn it. He’d known there was a risk Nolan and Harris would show up, simply because Ray lived in Nolan’s patrol zone. That was why he’d sent John Reese and Bill Garrison to the other end of the county to take potshots at cops and bystanders from the thick woods there. The idea wasn’t so much to kill anybody as to stir enough shit to keep every cop in Laurel County busy for hours.

  It should have worked more than long enough for Ray to take his time with his sacrifices. If things had gone according to plan, no one would have found the bodies until Ray was halfway to Cuba.

  Meghan must have managed to get out a 911 call, the bitch. He hoped she’d died hard. That was the whole point of the entire scenario -- not just to kill Noah, but to do it as slowly as possible, inflicting the maximum amount of pain and despair to harvest as much juice as possible from both mother and son.

  All of which should add up to a fat magical payoff for Adrian, which he could use for the next step of his plan. It was too bad Ray had died, but in the plus column, he now had even more life force to use. And he was going to need it for the spell he had in mind.

  Except… Adrian frowned, considering the psychic sizzle of magic he could feel burning in the background of his consciousness. The life force of three people should have a greater kick than…

  “Ray, you fuck up!” he snarled as realization hit. “You didn’t manage to complete the sacrifice, did you?” Judging by the amount of power the spell had liberated, it felt as if Ray was the only one who died. Still, if the kid ended up dying of his injuries before Genevieve Briggs broke the rest of Adrian’s spell, he’d…

  The hammer came out of nowhere and hit him in the face again. It was even worse than the first time.

  * * *

  Erica sat on the living room floor, ignoring the cops bustling around the crime scene collecting evidence as she struggled to draw whoever had cast the lethal spell. She was willing to swear it wasn’t Ray. She doubted the Alchemist had had that kind of power, judging by the strength of his aura.

  Unfortunately, the sketchpad, like her mind’s eye, remained stubbornly blank. She was having a hell of a time drawing on her magic through the waves of pain throbbing in her temples.

  At least she’d finally managed to break the two remaining layers of the spell circle, the one to gather the life force of Ray’s victims, and the second designed to transmit it to the sigil, which would have then sent it to whoever engineered the whole revolting plot. However the second session drawing on Jake’s magic had kicked her ass even harder than the first. Her Talent seemed to be out to lunch, which meant no sketch of Boss Asshole.

  Though Ray had been the one to spill the child’s blood, any third party would have had to use his own blood in the spell itself. But she couldn’t pick up shit right now. By the time her magic recovered, the remaining magical energy would be too degraded to use.

  Maybe she should have tried the drawing first, but she’d been afraid if she left the spell running, Boss Asshole might use it to kill Noah. She didn’t regret the decision, but it meant no sketch.

  It didn’t exactly help her concentration that her uniform pants were sticky with drying blood, making her stomach roll at the meaty smell of it. She’d never craved a shower more desperately in her life.

  At least Noah and his mother were on their way to the hospital, and both were still alive. So far anyway.

  “Oh, fuck this,” Erica groaned and threw the pad aside. Letting her elbows rest on her knees, she massaged her throbbing temples.

  “Anything?”

  She looked up to see Grant Sawyer watching her. The detective had a notebook in his hand and a sympathetic expression on his face. “I can tell you one thing. Somewhere in this town is someone who uses magical tattoos to work death magic.” Wearily, she got to her feet. “Have the pathologist sample that ink for DNA that doesn’t belong to Ray. For the spell to work, the tattooist must have used his own blood to create magical ink. We also need DNA swabs of the spell circle itself. All of which means when we catch him, his defense attorney is going to have a hell of a time arguing his innocence.”

  Sawyer’s brows rose. “Wait, this guy tattoos people with his own blood? Isn’t that a good way to spread HIV?”

  She shook her head. “Not with the spells on the ink. Arcs have been doing magical tats for hundreds of years. The Corps uses them to amplify the Talents of some of our special ops guys.”

  Sawyer perked up. “So all I have to do is find out who in this town does magical tattoos, compare the DNA and…”

  “Maybe.” Erica considered the idea, then shook her head. “But I doubt it.” She gestured at the floor, where the crime scene investigator had sprayed Luminol to reveal the remnants of the spell’s blood-infused paint. Each of the sigils was intricate and crisply drawn. “Honestly, I don’t think any of the local guys would have the juice to do something like this. Laurelton’s got some good Arc tattooists, but this working is on a completely different level. It’s a dense, professional spell backed by a hell of a lot of power.”

  He looked disappointed. �
�So looking for local artists is a waste of time?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, but don’t get your hopes up. This spell looks too much like stuff I saw in the war -- the kind done by serious sorcerers. I wouldn’t have been able to break it if I hadn’t drawn on Jake’s magic.”

  Sawyer stared at her, his eyes widening. “Are you saying we’re dealing with another terrorist?”

  Erica winced. If there was one thing guaranteed to spray gasoline on an already explosive situation, it was the prospect of terrorist involvement in Laurel County. The whole county was still suffering PTSD from the last time. “I don’t know, Sawyer. I hope not.”

  He scrubbed a hand over his face. “And we’ve got that Humanist march next weekend. This town is going to go up in a fireball.”

  They contemplated that for a moment in glum silence. At last, Sawyer sighed. “You really need a shower before someone shoots cell phone video of you looking like the last reel of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

  Erica glanced down at the stiff, sticky fabric of her uniform. “Well, at least the black fabric doesn’t show the blood -- much.”

  “That’s probably the idea.”

  “Probably. Have you seen the sarge? I need to ask him if I can swing by the house to change.”

  He smiled crookedly, as if knowing exactly how little she was looking forward to any conversation with Roger Johnson. “I think he’s outside talking to Nolan.”

  Erica winced, wondering how much shit the sergeant was giving Jake. “Thanks. Give me a call if you need anything.”

  But he caught her elbow as she started past. “You did a good job today. Keep that in mind if Johnson starts giving you a hard time.”

  She smiled at him, pleased with the compliment. “That means a lot.”

  As usual at any major crime scene, the front yard and the street beyond looked like a cop convention. Police units lined the road, and crime scene tape encircled the house. At least this time she hadn’t had to string it.