Agent of Magic Box Set

by Melissa Hawke

  I’d never get over the beauty of Paris, even if I spent the next decade staring at it. Moonlight and old-fashioned gas lamps illuminated the cobblestone streets. The scents of fresh bread and lavender vied for my attention. The ornate architecture made me feel like we’d stepped back through time, though it could also have had something to do with the 17th century attire Grieves had dressed us in. Dom grabbed my hand and beelined toward a house situated on a narrow road. The houses seemed to be pressed side to side, with very few spaces between. Growing up in New York, I was accustomed to some urban sprawl and being close to one’s neighbors, but this street took it to the next level.

  The pale salmon shade of the homes was muted somewhat by the darkness. Dominic strode purposefully forward, leading the way with vampires trailing like secret security. Seeing them all together was jarring enough without the Parisian architecture, and at the moment it seemed positively ludicrous. But we had a mission, and I couldn’t get distracted by the unholy alliance we’d formed. Dominic paused before a small, one-story home. The flowers in the planters were shriveled and ivy grew unchecked up the eves.

  “Where are we, exactly?” I whispered. “This isn’t your place.”

  Unless he’d relocated in the past two years and neglected to mention it to me. I supposed it was possible but thought it unlikely. Dominic’s home had been in the family for generations and I doubted he was going to part with it any time soon.

  “My uncle Fabian’s house,” he said offhandedly, stooping to rummage around in the perennial graveyard that was the planters. He produced an old-fashioned brass key. “My father never got along with him, so I don’t visit often. The Trust is most likely guarding my place and yours. Fabian left a key and supplies for me in case I ever needed to use his home as a safe house.”

  Dom slotted the key in the door and twisted, pushing the door inward with one smooth move. He stepped inside, calmly waving the oak wand to dismantle the wards that had been placed on the interior. About sixty seconds later he motioned us forward.

  The interior of the home looked like it had been through a small tornado. Books and supplies had been scattered everywhere. A pestle had been cracked clean in two and the shattered mortar lay not far beyond. The only spot of order in the room was a rack of untouched potion bottles and a very dusty distillery.

  Dominic stood frozen in the middle of the room, staring with a horrified expression at the destruction.

  My hand strayed automatically toward the Beretta, now fully loaded thanks to the munitions Barabbas had provided. Regular rounds this time, but it was better than nothing. If the Trust had been here recently to apprehend Fabian, they were probably still watching the house. What I couldn’t figure out was why. So far as I knew, Fabian hadn’t committed any crimes worthy of this level of backlash. Besides, it wasn’t really the Trust’s style to burst in uninvited. They loved their summons, hearings and official procedure. This looked more like a mafia hit than an arrest.

  I peered further into the gloomy interior of the house, afraid I’d see a foot poking out of a doorway or a blood trail leading to the back door. The only thing that stood out from the destruction was the mass of spider webs that clung to the bare ceiling beams.

  “This happened a while ago,” I surmised, running my hand over a cracked countertop. My fingers came away coated in grime. “I don’t think anyone has been here in years. How long has it been since you’ve seen Fabian?”

  “Two years,” Dominic muttered faintly. “I was going to drop in on him for his birthday but I was summoned to work the Dawson case.”

  Two years, huh? The last time Fabian had been seen alive coincided with my sister’s accident and the frame-up afterward. Dominic’s family were full of powerful mages. All of them certainly gifted enough to pull off something like a ritual summoning.

  I kept my suspicions to myself, however.

  Dominic jerked away from me when I touched his arm. Glass ground beneath one of his boots and a puff of pink dust billowed up in its wake.

  “I’m sorry, Dom. I really am. But we can’t stay here. We need to go.”

  “He’s dead,” Dom said, voice ringing hollowly through the empty interior of the house. “There’s no way he could have survived this.”

  “We don’t know that yet. And I promise you that we’re going to follow up on this. But we have to find Cat and clear our names, Dom. That’s what matters, now.”

  Even coming out of my mouth, it felt cruel. Watching the agony play across his face as he processed it was worse. I wanted him to call me a filthy hypocrite for saying it. I’d done everything within my power to bring Cat back from the brink, including sacrificing my own life. Telling Dom to abandon his family at this crucial juncture felt like the blackest sort of blasphemy. I wouldn’t have been able to do it, put in his place.

  But as always, duty won out. Dom’s face hardened into an expressionless mask and he strode forward, stepping over the skeletal remains of an office chair and an overturned cauldron to reach the desk shoved into a far corner. He yanked open the drawer in one powerful movement, jostling its innards. After a few seconds of perusal he selected a pair of black gloves and pulled them on. He produced a pair of metal electrodes next, each long and sturdy, like the sort used in arc welding.

  He shoved them into his pack along with the oak wand and the handgun he’d been provided. Then he stalked toward the door, pushing past the vampires blocking his way as though they weren’t even there.

  “Let’s go,” he called back in harsh, clipped tones. “We’re burning moonlight. And we have a crypt to desecrate.”

  chapter

  17

  THE PUBLIC ENTRANCE TO THE catacombs were located in Paris’ 14th arrondissement, at 1, avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy.

  I’d been through the portion open to the public with Dom on my first visit to France. He’d indulged me, giving me the tourist’s experience by taking me the champs-élysées, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and the Paris Catacombs. The peek I’d gotten into the latter had been a little spooky that first time. There were reasons that all cultures had a method of laying the dead to rest, often in the ground. An unpleasant spiritual residue clung to the walls of the catacombs, leaving an odd taste in my mouth and a chill in my spine. So many restless dead, wandering without being properly laid in their own graves.

  Now, with Valerius stirring in the back of my mind once again, it was a thousand times worse. The chilly fourteen-degree dankness of the tunnels plummeted to below zero when I sensed the specters that haunted the narrow passageways. We hadn’t even entered the rooms containing the bones of ancient Parisians and I already wanted to turn back and go the way we’d come.

  Only pride kept me from suggesting we go another way. There were seven vampires tailing Dom and I down the corridor and to reach the exit, I’d have to go through them, showing weakness to a pack of bloodthirsty animals. I might as well tear my own throat out while I was at it.

  My teeth clacked together from the cold and I drew the overcoat tightly around my body, trying in vain to leech more warmth from it. The skirt and thick wool stockings I’d been given left my thighs bare. I’d be grateful when Valerius fully manifested. At least I’d be warm again.

  After breaking in and allowing Grieves to befuddle the night guards with his eyes and voice, we descended down into the catacombs, taking a sharp detour from the path I remembered. The new corridor we walked wasn’t lit by the bare bulbs common in the tourist’s paths. Only the skinny beam of Dom’s flashlight illuminated the space.

  “Where are we?” one of the vampires asked. I was secretly glad he’d broached the question. I hated appearing out of the know, but I was just as curious about our final destination as they were.

  The only thing Dom had told me before our hasty escape from the ironclad had been that we’d be taking a dangerous route to reach the coordinates. I knew that some of the catacombs were flooded, and others unstable. I’d been expecting to be wading
through stagnant water to get to our destination. Instead, we were stumbling through a sea of cobwebs and dodging rats.

  “The Finch family crypt,” Dom replied tersely. “Set up in the 18th century to house our dead. Almost every Finch has been laid to rest there. Watch your step. There are some very nasty magical protections set up to protect it. The head of the family normally keeps the talisman to dismantle them on his person at all times. My father currently has possession of it and I don’t think he’d relinquish it to me, given present circumstances, even if I’d been able to track him down.”

  Guilt flooded my sternum. I’d had a good long sulk after finding out my sister had written me off as a terrorist, not stopping to realize that Dom was in exactly the same boat. Pompous, prejudiced bastard that he was, Dom’s father had probably swallowed the vampires’ lies eagerly. Anything to prove that I’d been the wrong sort of influence on his son all these years.

  Selfish, selfish, selfish.

  Withdrawing a pen from my overcoat pocket, I pulled a loose skull out of the wall and carved a few rough runes across its forward. I muttered a word and it filled with blue flame, casting a shaft of pale light onto the ground before me. Not great, but certainly better than being blind. Normally, Valerius would feed on the magic, and at this point I’d practically throw him a welcome party. But these small bursts of magic weren’t enough to rouse him.

  Yards later, Dom came to a complete and sudden stop. I smacked into his back painfully and groaned.

  “Warn a girl next time, okay?”

  Dom shushed me and I fell silent, too unnerved by the aura of menace clinging to the walls of the place to argue with him. A few seconds later I understood the reason for his trepidation. The closest comparison I could draw to the sound echoing toward us was the clatter of my grandfather’s deer-bone wind chime banging against the side of the house. My mother had detested the thing and taken it down when I was little, claiming the sight of it was going to give us nightmares. I suspected she just thought it looked tacky.

  The sound coming from the darkness was similar, but increased about tenfold. The tap of bone against stone had me reaching for the Beretta before I consciously knew what I was doing.

  “Shit,” Dom hissed, backing up a step, slinging his pack off of his shoulder. He rummaged around for a few moments before producing the oak wand. With Fabian gone and no new wands to be found in his home, he was just going to have to make do with the replacement Findlay had offered.

  “What?” I hissed back. “What’s up ahead?”

  “It’s called Medea’s bane. One of the vampires must have tripped the switch. Most of the traps can be avoided by purely mortal people. Many of these were set up as fail-safes to keep demi-humans and the undead from dragging away the remains.”

  “Medea? As in Jason and the Argonauts? That Medea?”

  “The same,” he said with a grimace.

  “Why didn’t we leave the vampires behind if they were going to make this difficult?”

  “You really think that they would have waited patiently in the lobby?” he snapped back.

  Barabbas shouldered past me, bringing his sword to bear. There was only enough room in this corridor to let four people stand shoulder to shoulder. There definitely wasn’t enough room for all of us to stand side by side and face the oncoming hoard. I was forced to take a step back to allow him free range of movement. I’d be of more use behind him anyhow. I was one of the few people in the group that didn’t have at least one melee weapon.

  “Quit squabbling, children,” Barabbas purred, staring into the darkness with an eager smile creasing his handsome face. The damned bastard looked giddy at the prospect of facing the oncoming monsters. “It is time to focus.”

  I would have snapped at him to stop acting like my father if the first of the warriors hadn’t stepped into sight. By all rights, it shouldn’t have been able to move without musculature on its yellowed bones. Leathery skin clung to its body in places and tendons strained in its calves as it sprung forward, raising a dagger to strike. Whatever magic held it together hadn’t given it much animation, because the thing was fairly slow. If I hadn’t been busy sniping at Dom, I could have shattered its skull like a porcelain pot with just one round. Its eye sockets glowed with an eerie blue light, freezing me to the spot for a moment.

  Barabbas leaped forward, twisting the skeleton’s arm out of its socket with a sound like a tree limb snapping. The dagger in its hand hit the ground with a dull thunk and the skeleton swiveled to face him, maw open wide.

  The vampire was fast, dodging out of the way of the thing’s broken teeth in one nimble move. Barabbas brought his sword up, severing the head with just one swing. It went bouncing into the darkness, the light in its eyes dimming as it skittered out of sight.

  The sudden attack shook me out of my frozen stupor and I withdrew the Beretta with one fluid movement and aimed right between the eyes of the skeleton advancing on me. Its bony fingers clasped around my wrist with inhuman strength before I pulled the trigger and watched its skull shatter.

  I’d seen the damage that a bullet could do to the human skull, but watching the bare bones explode was like watching a crime scene show or a medical drama. It didn’t seem quite as real or horrifying as watching a real person die. These things had to have consciousness of some sort, so perhaps it was still killing. It just felt inordinately easy.

  Beside me, Dom had conjured his malleable metal shield and sent it flying like a Frisbee toward the oncoming mass of soldiers. Instead of taking off the heads as Barabbas and I had done, he aimed for the midsections, cutting the skeletons off at the pelvis. When they impacted the ground their bones shattered on impact.

  “Don’t take off the heads,” he barked. “If you decimate one of these defenses, my father’s talisman is going to flash. If he has even an inkling we’re here, he’s going to bring Trust backup to purge the tunnels. I don’t think any of us want that.”

  I exchanged a glance with Barabbas. His too-handsome face was set in a scowl and he gave off the disappointed air of a kid who’d been told Christmas was canceled.

  “Take all the fun out of things, why don’t you?” he grumbled.

  I half expected the war-like vampire to ignore Dom’s order and continue hacking the soldiers’ heads off. Thankfully, he complied, just as leery of facing a full squadron of Trust soldiers as we were. Grieves was strong and fast, but against a full complement of mages in tight quarters, he was at a distinct disadvantage. He hacked through an oncoming line of them, taking care to kick out their teeth and remove their hands so that the ones on the ground couldn’t claw or bite our ankles as we passed.

  I swapped to the short blade I’d been gifted, my gun a little superfluous if I wasn’t going to be getting a kill shot on the walking corpses. It wasn’t like hitting a fleshy target, where a shot to the thigh or guts was going to keep a person down for a while. These things didn’t feel pain and nothing short of total destruction was going to make them stop.

  It took all nine of us to hack a line through the walking corpses. There had to have been at least five or six hundred of the damned things, and it took a further six or seven minutes to clear a path through the bones that was large enough to let us through.

  “Are you okay?” Dom asked, glancing down at me. I’d received several scratches and bite marks while cutting through the bags of bones. I examined the red marks on my forearm with a frown.

  “If I were alive I’d be a little worried about catching something. Can syphilis be contracted through contact with bones?”

  Dom shrugged. “I don’t think so, but it never hurts to get tested.”

  “I don’t think Valerius would ever allow me to contract something as embarrassing as an STD,” I said with a light laugh.

  We walked slowly onward, keeping our weapons at the ready. The vampires were being especially careful not to trip anything. When I spotted a faint golden glow up ahead I paused, glancing up at Dom with
a raised brow.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve only ever heard stories. I think it’s probably the shield of light.”

  I was sorely disappointed to find we weren’t actually facing a flaming medieval shield when we rounded the corner. Instead, a portion of the corridor was lit with what appeared to be shimmering summer sunlight from wall to wall. If I squinted I could just make out darkness beyond its border.

  Dominic held his hand up, signaling the vampires hold.

  “You guys should stay here,” he cautioned. “It’s not safe for you. We’ll go on ahead.”

  One of the younger buggers strolled right past him with a sneer.

  “You do not command us, human. Your weak mage enchantments do not scare me.”

  The pasty vampire had more balls than brains, because he strode toward the shield as though it were nothing more than a smokescreen. No one had ever credited House Grieves with a great deal of intelligence. The entry-level requirement was a liking for danger and a temper that led one to do impulsive and idiotic things. The man ahead of us was a prime example of why vampires from that house were easier to kill.

  He barely even paused when he reached the border of the golden sunlight. He stepped through into the golden mist and, for a moment, nothing appeared to happen. Then his eyes popped wide and his mouth fell open in a silent scream. All at once his skin began to peel away from his muscles and sloughed off onto the well-lit stone floor beneath him. The tendons that held the muscles in place snapped and he fell apart like an underdone cookie, shedding bits of himself one by one until there was nothing left of him but a crimson stain on the floor. Even that rapidly disappeared as the light sponged away any trace he’d ever been there.

  “I’ve known that fool for over a hundred years,” Barabbas said. “Never was very bright though.”

  “Is it real sunlight?” I asked.

  “No, it’s magically forged, but it’s almost as good as the real thing. I think this is where we leave our vampire entourage.”