by SM Reine
“This is still coven business. You want to hear what the high priest has to offer. I swear.”
“If you’re serious about talking with me, then you’re going to have to do it in a public place. Now get out of my car before I hit the rocket ejector button.” Note to self: Install a rocket ejector button later.
Brogan pulled a box out of his pocket and opened it. The quartz crystal inside was the size of Brianna’s fist. “Trust me,” he said, turning the box so that the crystal caught the hazy autumn sunlight. “You want to talk to this man.”
Once she was looking at it, Brianna couldn’t tear her gaze from the quartz. It smelled like magic—and not the kind of magic that made people see quaint bridges in tea leaves, but the kind of magic that could set fire to cities and crack the Earth in half. That one crystal had more magic than all of the high priests and priestesses she had spoken to combined. The kind of spells she could perform with that power…
Brogan closed the box before she could reach for the crystal, and all of that magic was silenced.
“Well?” he prompted.
Brianna’s mouth had gone dry. She licked her lips. “You solemnly swear nobody’s going to try to kill me in there?”
Brogan looked horrified. “What gave you that idea?”
Yeah, as if abandoned warehouses don’t give a bad first impression.
Brianna’s fingers turned off the car and unlocked the door without her permission. Even if her somewhat less-than-impressive common sense was screaming at her, Brianna’s sense of adventure was winning the battle.
This is a terrible idea, she told herself.
What could infuse a crystal with that much magic? It should have been impossible for a witch to harness that much power, much less imbue it upon an inanimate object. If it was the work of a coven, then Brianna had to see what kind of coven could do that.
Brogan looked relieved. “Thank you,” he said. “You won’t regret this. The high priest has been really hung up on getting you over here.”
Brianna just smiled. It was a multipurpose kind of smile—equally as good for disarming potential homicidal maniacs as it was for total morons.
They entered the warehouse through the hole in the wall.
All conversations cut off as soon as Brianna and Brogan entered. Brianna made a quick head count. There were nine witches: four men and four women. Now that Brogan and Brianna had arrived, that brought the total to five men and five women. There was a disturbing trend toward symmetry there.
Not many spells required a full coven of thirteen witches to cast anymore. Any coven that strived for that number was trying to make itself feel undeservedly cool, or was up to something dangerous. Considering the warehouse setting, Brianna doubted that feeling cool was high on the priority list.
Brogan led her deeper into the warehouse. When she rounded a few piles of rotten crates, she found a ritual space—a circle painted onto the floor with a dozen spots marked by crystals and candles. Instead of the usual altar at the center, there was a stone pillar. Brianna thought it kind of looked like it was made of marble, but she had never seen marble with such deep black veins in it before.
Outside the circle, the concrete floor was stained with brown splatters, and water dripped from the rafters. But the witches had made obvious attempts to tidy the place; buckets had been placed under a lot of the leaks, and stray leaves had been swept into a corner.
“Is this the one?” asked a black man with silver pentacle earrings.
“Yep,” Brogan said. “This is Brianna.”
“Fantastic. I’ll go get him.”
The man disappeared around a row of crates. Everyone else continued to stare at her hard, tracking her movement through the crates into the center of the room. She felt like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. “I bet you guys had fun filling out this address on the coven registry forms,” Brianna said, shoving her hands in her pockets and rocking back on her heels. “What did the inspectors think of your sweet digs?”
Brogan’s cheeks turned pink under his untrimmed sideburns. “The coven hasn’t registered.”
“Pending approval?” Brianna ventured.
“Not exactly,” he said.
This kept getting better and better.
The Preternatural Registration Act had only been in place for three months, but the grace period for late registries had already ended. Without an inspection and a lot of paperwork, this new coven was likely to face a lot of fines if they got caught—and a lengthy prison term for all of them.
Brianna didn’t have a lot of hard lines, but registry dodgers were one of them. Mostly because of the prison thing.
“Well, thanks for having me,” she said, backing toward the hole in the wall. “Enjoy your big rock…thing. Looks like a great pillar. Very nice.”
Brogan frowned. “But—”
“Stay where you are,” said a masculine voice.
Brianna felt the high priest approaching before she saw him, and her senses jangled. She knew immediately that he wasn’t human. He tickled Brianna’s nose like cut summer grass—a smell that she had once been told was ethereal—yet still managed to hum with infernal power, too. And all of that was on top of the witch powers.
Brianna had only ever met one person that conflicted before.
“Oh, no. You have got to be kidding me,” she said.
James Faulkner stepped around the crate. The air around him throbbed with active glamor magic, which explained why he managed to look like an ordinary black-haired, blue-eyed, middle-aged man instead of the creepy asshole that had ditched Brianna by the side of the road months earlier.
They had both come from the White Ash Coven, although about twenty years apart. James was the favored son, meant to take over the high priest duties once the former leader died, and considered to be the most powerful witch in the world. He and Brianna had only worked together a couple of times, but both times he had abandoned her without so much as a goodbye.
It was his fault that the White Ash Coven wasn’t in Colorado anymore. It was also his fault that Brianna was stumbling from coven to coven, begging for anyone to take her. She shouldn’t have been surprised he was responsible for a registry-dodging coven in an abandoned Canadian warehouse.
She was, however, surprised that he had the nerve to come crawling back to her.
Again.
“Hello, Brianna,” James said.
She marched over and punched him in the chest. Her fist bounced harmlessly off of his pectorals. “You fuck face! You giant, raging douche nozzle with an ego the size of Panama—”
James caught her second attempt at a punch, and the third. Brianna wasn’t much of a boxer. He had the courtesy to resist looking amused by her attempts. “I need your help again,” he said, while Brianna continued to spew insults.
“—phallus-nuzzling jerk with no manners that doesn’t even know how to use a phone—”
“I’ve reformed the White Ash Coven, and there’s a vacancy for a high priestess with your unique abilities.”
“—creepy-ass son of a cow—”
The corners of his eyes crinkled. “Well, there’s no need to bring my mother into it.”
Brianna’s mouth clapped shut, and she glared to keep herself from laughing. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
At almost six and a half feet of freakish tallness, James had no problems owning every room he walked into. He moved with the quiet grace of a dancer, too. All eyes were on him as he paced the warehouse.
He didn’t have to raise his voice for everyone to listen to him. “We can begin now that you’re here, at long last.” The coven stirred, whispering to each other. She heard at least one person cheer. Brianna did not agree with their enthusiasm.
“Whoa, hang on,” she said. “You haven’t told me what you’re doing, and I definitely haven’t agreed to work with your coven.”
James settled a hand on her shoulder. It was way too familiar a gesture for Brianna’s taste, and she tried to shake him
off. “Let’s speak in private,” he said. “Sophie, would you mind setting things up for the initiation?”
A witch with mom hair nodded vigorously, and everyone jumped into motion.
He steered Brianna to a back room. She imagined that it might have once belonged to the administrator of the warehouse, although James had obviously been occupying it for quite some time; it was immaculately clean, and there was a futon in the corner.
“Please, have a seat,” he said. “Would you like tea?”
“Sure,” Brianna said, voice strained. She sat on the edge of his futon. “Tea would be a good start. And then you can move onto apologies, groveling, and, eventually, an explanation.”
He turned on an electric kettle and sat on a crate across from Brianna. “Let’s skip to the explanation, shall we?” he said, grabbing a metal case from underneath the counter and resting it across his thighs.
“Okay. Why are you trying to get yourself arrested?”
“Because this coven is going to end the Office of Preternatural Affairs,” James said. “More importantly, we’re going to crack open the Garden of Eden and save the entire world.” He said all of this so matter-of-factly, like it was no big deal.
Brianna stared. “Uh…does the world need saving?”
“More than you know,” he said.
“And I’m sure you’re exactly the kind of asshole that thinks he can save it.”
“You’ve gotten feisty,” James said. “You didn’t used to talk back nearly this much.”
“I used to think that you had something to offer me, so I put up with a lot of crap. Now I’m three years older than the first time we met and a lot more annoyed with you,” Brianna said.
He laughed as he opened the latches to the case on his lap. “Good. That’s good. I need feistiness in my high priestess.”
The way he said that—“my” high priestess—made Brianna feel kind of tingly.
She wasn’t the only one who had changed. James never used to try to be charming with her. In fact, he had been consistently rude and condescending. The fact that had changed only made her more suspicious. He definitely wanted something from her, and if he was working that hard for it, what he wanted could only be unpleasant.
“I’m going to lay this out right now,” Brianna said. “I’m not ‘your’ anything, especially not your high priestess. I’m not interested.”
“Oh? Then why have you interviewed with every coven in the United States these past few months? Did you really want to work with that feminist coven?”
“Well, no, but—wait.” She frowned. “Have you been stalking me?”
“Scrying, actually,” James said.
“Magical stalking.”
“I keep track of my assets.”
“First I’m your high priestess, now I’m one of your assets? You wouldn’t even let me call myself your apprentice last spring.”
“Apprentice implies that we aren’t equals,” James said. “In this venture, we will be partners. All you have to do is say yes.”
He opened the lid on the case, tipping it so that she could see inside.
Brianna’s eyes widened. “Wow.”
“It will be yours if you agree to be my high priestess.” She reached for the case, then hesitated. James wasn’t just turning on the charm. Now he was outright trying to bribe her. But when she withdrew, he pushed the case into her hands. “Take it. You’ll need it soon enough.”
This is a really bad idea, said her common sense.
Ooh, shiny! said her sense of adventure.
Brianna’s hands weren’t listening to either one of those urges. They drew the case into her lap and traced the protective runes branded into the sides of the case greedily.
She had wanted a coven. She had wanted prestige and power.
And now she had it all.
“All I have to do is say yes,” she said suspiciously. “Sounds simple. Like, probably too simple.”
“It will be more complicated than that,” James admitted. “We’ll have to take some risks together. You will be making yourself a target for some of my most powerful enemies. But I swear that I shall do what I can to protect you while giving you more power than you could have ever dreamed of possessing. I will make this worth your while.”
Brianna didn’t really hear anything he said. She was too busy rubbing the runes and imagining all of the awesome things she could do with full, unfettered access to James Faulkner’s powers.
She could feel the moment that her common sense pretty much decided to bail out on her, leaving behind nothing but a growing sense of excitement. Her trembling fingers traced the runes on the side of the box again and again.
Brianna gave a shaky laugh. “When do I start?”
James smiled.
Six
The footage was distorted, snowed with static, and pieced together in fragments that lasted only seconds, but the narrative that it presented was unmistakable.
One cold night in December 2012, Senator Peterson had been assaulted in the home he maintained in Washington DC. His home security footage showed a power outage at 12:36 in the morning; the UPS system had kept the cameras recording for six minutes after that.
He emerged from his bedroom, tripped down the stairs, and stumbled onto his street without proper winter attire. The front door camera showed him turning the corner at the end of the block. The footage turned to static three seconds after that. It managed to record four minutes of fuzzy gray-white nothing before the UPS finally drained.
The power had returned at 12:53, but it was too late for the cameras to catch the pursuer from whom Senator Peterson had been fleeing.
The next time that a camera caught him, it was a security feed over a head shop a half-mile away; it, too, turned to static within seconds of seeing him. A few other cameras tracked his flight across the National Mall until he reached the office building where he conducted business.
Not a single camera caught the person that Senator Peterson was running from. The footage that didn’t become distorted was too dark to be useful, even enhanced.
But one camera had caught Senator Peterson and his assailant in the same room. It had been secretly positioned underneath Senator Peterson’s desk lamp—a Union bug. The camera had caught only one grayscale frame per second. It showed the senator entering his office with slow, jerky motions. He shut the door behind him. Turned on the light. And then he had spoken to someone off-frame. Judging by the direction in which he stared, it must have been someone sitting at his desk.
Twenty-nine frames elapsed before the footage showed his killer. Almost half a minute of Senator Peterson’s silent sobbing and begging as he urinated upon himself.
Then a woman stepped into frame. The top of her head only reached the senator’s chin. She had long, inky hair that fell to her waist and full lips that looked black against her pale face. Her eyes were pits. She carried a sword.
She killed him slowly.
“That’s not me,” Elise said, reaching out to start the footage over again. She didn’t need to watch Senator Peterson’s death one more time. She had already memorized it—the swift, skinning strokes of the sword that bared his abdominal muscles, the removal of his genitalia, and the eventual decapitation.
Anthony turned his laptop screen away from her so that she couldn’t restart the video. His opinion was clear on his face. “You weren’t with me and McIntyre that December,” he said. He had a black eye, a split lip, and a splinted arm. The Union had beat the shit out of him before Elise managed to carry them both out of the Bloomfield house.
“It was my birthday.” Elise stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray then lit another. She’d been feeling like shit ever since the Union blasted her with white light. Her fingernails were black, her skin had lost its usual glow, and she had smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes in the hours since. “I never spend my birthdays with you.”
“Then where were you?”
“Not in Washington DC.”
&nb
sp; McIntyre had hacked the Union’s servers to retrieve security footage from the Bloomfield house incident. He had managed to recover those files easily—the five minute firefight, Anthony punching through a wall to break the dining room wards, and the moment that Elise had jumped into shadow to escape. They hadn’t learned anything particularly useful from that data.
But McIntyre had also found the evidence of Senator Peterson’s murder on the same server, and delivered both to Anthony’s email address without comment.
His silence could only mean that, like Anthony, McIntyre thought Elise was guilty.
“Why would I kill a congressman?” she asked, pacing the tiny hotel room. Everything from the walls to the decades-old bedspread was stained yellow with tobacco smoke. The “No Smoking” sign on the wall had been broken in half by the previous tenant. Elise ignored it and took a deep inhale of her cigarette.
“I don’t know,” Anthony said in a level voice. “Why would you?”
“You know I fucking hate it when you just repeat me.”
“I’m not saying you’re lying, Elise, but…” He held the laptop up again so she could see it. He had paused the video on the clearest shot of Senator Peterson’s assassin.
It wasn’t a great picture, but it was good enough. Black hair, black eyes, black jacket, and a sword. Having the light from the monitor fall on her skin stung.
Elise closed the screen with a click. Cigarette ash sprinkled the bed. “It’s fake. Computer graphics or a spell or something.”
“Look, if the Union had an itch to arrest you, they’d just arrest you. They’ve already got enough reason to come after us. You lied to them about your identity, broke a murder suspect out of their custody, destroyed all that equipment in Reno, swallowed half of the European contingent…”
She rolled her eyes. “Not that you’ve been keeping score.”
“You’ve got a history with them. They’ve left you alone because they know they can’t take you. But this…this is bigger than all of that.” Anthony tossed his laptop on the bed. It was his old college machine; he didn’t bother being gentle with it. “For Christ’s sake, Elise. That assassination’s why they’ve got the registry set up in the first place.”