by Jayne Hawke
There was another vase on the far side of the staircase, and I debated leaping to its shadow, but I decided that maybe vases had something to do with it and opted to move into the shadow of the stairs themselves. I learned two things on that jump. The first was that the problem was not anything limited to that vase’s immediate area. The second was that it was possible for pain to be literally blinding. I all but blacked out as I came back into existence in the new shadow, struggling and failing to keep my feet under me and falling backwards into the moonlight.
As with all the best breakthroughs, this was accidental. The half of me that was looking up into the moonlit sky was able to move with no more sensation than the cool marble under me. I dropped my shadow reflexively, more willing to be caught as a killer than a shadow walker, and dragged my legs out with an effort of will. They, too, were free of pain, and its absence was euphoric.
That meant that it was probably the shadows that were trapped, which was a logical choice on reflection. I wondered if he had the traps on some sort of switch when he went to bed or if he just spent all day dodging shadows to keep guests on their toes. Maybe it was only moonshadow that triggered it. That sounded like a fae thing. One way or another, this was clearly trap o’clock and that meant that those were very probably not the last I’d see. I debated just throwing a fire spell on the place and hoping it wasn’t warded for fire, but that seemed unlikely to work, and it was a shame to destroy all these antiques in any case.
Master bedrooms tend to be on the top floor, which made that the place to start. With any luck, he wouldn’t be tucked away in some secret trap-maker’s workshop cum panic room after getting a notification on his phone that the shadow trap had been tripped. I hopped up on one of his banisters and climbed, a touch of magic making my feet sticky enough to keep from sliding back down. No reason to take the obvious path if I didn’t have to, under the circumstances. That brought me to a long hallway, the entirety of which was in shadow since the skylight had provided the only light. I stared at it for a long moment and concluded that the only way the trap could work was if it didn’t affect the entire house. The definition of a shadow is kind of shaky, after all, but at a practical level he wouldn’t be able to go to the bathroom until sunup without... Right. Light bulbs still a thing. Apparently my brain wasn’t quite back to functionality after the pain of the shadow trap.
There were two switches on the wall, which in a trap-filled house seemed a bad sign. The first turned on the light, the second trapped me in a hell dimension from which there could be no escape, maybe. I felt both for magic with every fibre of my being, but all I could tell is that both of them went to the overhead lights. They couldn’t both turn them on and off, which meant one of them did something nasty. No time like the present to find out, I thought, and flipped the one on the right. It burned my finger, which seemed a little petty all things considered, but it also turned on the lights.
I flipped the other one as well, on the principle that he wouldn’t want to flip the pain switch every single day. I refused to let myself contemplate the thousand different ways that that assumption could be wrong and I could be dead in the next few minutes. It was as good a reason as any to flip them as good a way as any.
The light showed the hall to be stark, almost barren, with no decoration except for intricately patterned hardwood floors and chunky crown moulding. The pattern on the floors was beautiful, somehow calling to mind every kind of magic I’d ever felt. I wondered if this was what magic looked like to James, remembering that one of the manifestations of his magic was the ability to see magic with perfect clarity. My luck held as I went down the hall, grateful that the patterning on the floor was made up of small enough pieces that there was no chance to end up in some weird the-floor-is-lava tile pattern crap, and before long I found myself standing in front of the first door.
This door, and the hall around it, were every bit as magically saturated as the rest of the house, and that meant I couldn’t reach beyond it to see if anyone was there. It occurred to me that the magic was probably decorative for someone who saw things the way he did. Though, the shameless display of wealth probably played its part as well. I reached for the doorknob, but before I could touch it the door opened a hand-sized mouth and chomped down a hair’s breadth from my retreating fingers. I congratulated myself on my reflexes, unsure whether my gloves were strong enough to protect me from mystical wood or not, and began pulling on fire magic from the charm at my waist. Bypassing the door, which tended to be the most secure part of most magically secured homes, I created a me-sized stonebreaking spell and pulverized a hole in the plaster wall to the door’s left, entering a half bathroom as rendered by one of Jackson Pollock’s less restrained trainees.
Having left behind all semblance of subtlety, I crafted another spell identical to the previous and crashed through the left-hand wall, following the path of the hallway. I had come into a library. I took a moment to glance over the titles, seeing if there were any grimoires or other useful magic tomes, and as I did my vision began to blur. I blinked my eyes repeatedly, but it didn’t clear. It was like looking through a dirty window. I wasn’t going to tumble off any balconies, but it would be a serious issue in a fight.
I reached for life magic in a charm and tried to heal my eyes, but I found them as healthy as ever. Reaching my hand up to touch the eyeball itself, check for something covering them, I found the socket full of some sort of semi-transparent goop, something hanging on the border between Vaseline and pus. I cleared it from my eyes with the backs of my hands, and my vision cleared, but almost immediately whatever it was returned. I knew a purification spell that seemed applicable, but since I still had no idea how these traps worked I was as likely to need a head transplant as I was purification.
I took water magic from a charm at my waist and the magic of a driving winter wind from another. Mixing them just so, I took the purifying force of the wind and combined it with the timeless purity of the water and pressed both into my eye sockets. The result felt cold but good as the gunk in my eyes was washed away and replaced with a sensation of newness and success in a difficult trial. I went to bottle some of the gunk to see if we could figure anything out about it, but the spell seemed to have destroyed all of it, even what I’d wiped on my clothes. Better too much purification than too little, I decided, and pushed on.
The library wall fell to dust like all the rest, and when I came through it I found myself in a big closet full of random bric-a-brac of the sort I didn’t imagine a fae household having. Somehow I imagined everything in a sidhe house being exactly what they needed at that moment, each thing blinking into and out of existence as the requirement came and went. The closet hadn’t merited a trap of its own, thankfully, nor did the smallish bedroom after that.
A final wall came down, and I was in the master bedroom, a perfectly made bed of immense proportions directly in front of me with a blanket made of an iridescent fur I couldn’t quite place draped over it like some barbarian warlord’s trophy. To my right was James, sitting at a desk working, seemingly indifferent to the intrusion.
“It’s bad sleep hygiene to have your office in your bedroom, you know,” I said glibly, turning and moving towards him, stepping up on the bed platform rather than taking the obvious path.
The moment my foot touched it, everything in the room began to float as if the gravity had been turned off. James, floating as helpless as me and everything else, looked up at me at last.
“Oh, good!” he said. “I never get to use this one.”
“How is this even possible?” I asked. “Magic doesn’t work like this, not even sidhe magic.”
“Sidhe magic works however we want it to, Lily. This in particular is a trick from the fae plane.” He paused. “You never did ask me what the other way my magic manifests is, by the way. It’s important to take an interest in people around you. How else will you ever learn?”
“Yeah, I feel pretty confident I can solve the puzzle on that one, Alex
.”
“Hugh Downs hosted Concentration,” he said drily.
“Remake was Alex Trebek. Why put all these traps in your house but leave it practically unwarded? Is it just to draw people into the hall of mirrors and get some use out of your little superpower?”
“Imagine if you were good at something, Lily. Wouldn’t you want to watch it work?”
I bit back a retort about my being the best at lots of things and asked the real question.
“What do you really want, James?”
He smiled sadly at me.
“We could still make it work, you know. There’s so much I could teach you. So much we could do together.”
I made no attempt to repress the shudder that resulted from his words. He was good looking, but he’d always set me on edge.
“Or! I could slit your throat and be done with this whole mess.”
He snorted, a delicate and somehow dignified thing.
“Don’t tell me that you’re not tempted. That wolf can never give you what you really need.”
What was with all the creepy guys telling me Elijah couldn’t give me what I need?
“How would you know what I really need?”
He pushed off the wall behind him and swam towards me in the zero gravity, twirling gaily as he went.
“Because I know you, Lily. Better than anyone else has ever known you.”
He was really turning the creep factor up to a thousand. I didn’t know what he planned to do when he reached me. Kiss me? Flying tackle me into the wall behind me? Whatever it was, I didn’t want any part of it. The weightlessness was weird enough, having to deal with it while the creepiest guy alive (my late stalker being the creepiest guy dead) was floating at me with a self-certain smile on his face wasn’t helping.
I knew using my shadows was likely to trigger the pain field trap, but I needed throwing weapons and I hadn’t brought any. Making as little contact as I could, I brought through and tossed a throwing axe, the force of throwing it sending me spinning even as it caught James directly in the head. He was still alive, shouting curses and gripping onto the weapon, when I slammed into the wall hard and found my momentum checked in the least pleasant possible way. I braced myself this time and summoned a second and third axe, throwing them as hard as I could, burying another in his chest and the third in his neck to form a full vertical line of Viking-style death. When he finally croaked, the trap spell went with him. I landed gently on my feet at the edge of the room, and he landed far harder by the bed. One of the axes broke free of him, and the shadow took the opportunity to return to its normal form and wander the room. I let it go for a while, encouraging the other two to do the same in the spirit of fairness and in celebration of a strange, smug thorn no longer in my side. After a few minutes, they returned to their plane voluntarily, and I began the task of exfiltrating, hopefully far easier than the infiltration had been.
Seventeen
Getting back out of James’ house had proven to be a breeze. I debated seeing if there was anything worth taking with me, but I didn’t want to push my luck. Pausing in the doorway, I chewed on my bottom lip. No, the risk of trying to sell his stuff on was too much. It would make it far too easy to put the kill back on me, which I didn’t want. James wasn’t what you’d call loved, but he was still well connected. I had enough stalkers and wannabe murderers on my tail.
I texted Castor and Elijah telling them the job was done before I headed back to the pack house. Things were getting messy. I should have felt better having James out of the picture, but the weight had settled into my chest. This was only the beginning. All of my hard work to stay hidden and carve a comfortable life out for myself was slowly coming undone. How many more people would I have to kill to keep the events hidden?
My mind drifted over to meaningless idle thoughts like how I really wanted a pixie dust laden hot chocolate. Or brownies. Anything with chocolate and a nice hit of magic to shake off the residue from James’ traps would be amazing. I made a detour to the chocolatier a block over from my office. They were open 24/7 because they knew that sometimes you just really needed a chocolate fix at three in the morning.
“Lily, what can we get you tonight? We have some lemon meringue chocolates in. Or there’s a new batch of those cookie truffles you really like,” Bec asked.
She was about my age with startling silver eyes and a permanent genuine smile etched across her face.
“I don’t know. Everything looks amazing. Can I get a huge double-tier box of everything with pixie dust?”
“Ouch, one of those nights?”
“You know it. Castor spent the last couple of hours kicking my ass in sparring,” I said.
It was a reflexive lie. I regularly swung by there after really intense shadow training sessions.
“He looks like such a sweetheart, but damn, he pushes you hard.”
She began carefully placing a myriad of chocolates into a deep box that would fill the passenger seat of my car. It was an expensive indulgence, but I felt like I’d earnt it. That shop was far from small, and yet every wall was covered in glass cases full of the most glorious chocolates. They came in every form you could possibly imagine. From mint ganache to sunshine caramels and raindrop pralines. Then, of course, there was the section of chocolate-covered things. Pretzels were a personal favourite. They had boxes of small bite-sized pretzels wrapped in divine chocolate with sea salt. I wondered if I should get a box of those, too.
Bec wrapped the box in a pretty gold ribbon, but we both knew I’d start munching them as soon as I got to my car. I appreciated her faith in me, though. I handed her a three-figure sum, complete with tip as it was an absurd time of night.
I was mostly back to my car when my phone started ringing.
“What’s up?” I answered.
“We just spotted one of the thieves on a camera near the Pavilion; where are you?” Liam asked.
“A block north of my office.”
“I’m five mins away from the Pavilion,” Jess chimed in with.
“Both of you get there as soon as you can,” Elijah said.
I bristled at his command but let it slide.
“You’re looking for a tall guy, dark blond hair, electric-blue hoodie. He’s in his early thirties and carrying a leather satchel with him,” Liam said.
“On it,” I said.
I dove into my car, carefully placing the chocolates on my passenger seat and securing them with a quick nature spell, forming thin vines around it to hold the box in place. I had my priorities straight. Speeding off down the road, I was glad there was barely any traffic on the roads. I broke every speed limit while blaring Pop Country, because why not? This was what I was made for. Breaking the rules, hunting bad people. I needed a fun soundtrack to do it all to.
The guy was casually wandering down the path next to the expanse of lawn wrapped around the Pavilion. The old Royal Pavilion looked like something a fae had dropped in without any real thought or planning. It was an Indian-style palace right in the middle of the very English city. To say it stood out was a gross understatement.
The overall style of it reminded me of the Taj Mahal. I thought that was the point, but I’d never looked into the history of it to be sure. Jess was racing down the path towards the guy on silent feet. He had no idea. That was, until I screeched to a halt behind him and jumped out of my car towards him. He turned and looked at me jaw slack, eyes wide, before he bolted.
“Well done!” Jess shouted sarcastically.
I locked my car and took off after the guy. He was faster than he’d looked. Jess was catching up with me. I pushed myself harder. I’d never hear the end of it if she caught him after my screeching onto the scene.
A section of grass lifted up revealing a hidden trap door down into the gods only knew where. The guy leapt down like into it like he was a cartoon. I dove, trying to catch the door and hold it open. It slammed shut with my fingertips barely an inch away. Landing with a thud, I groaned.
“
A pox on his family,” Jess said.
“What?” I asked as I stood.
She shrugged.
“I heard it in a movie earlier.”
Reaching out with my magic, I tried to re-open the door, but it was sealed shut with some serious magic. My own magic washed over it like Teflon. I couldn’t get a grip. I tried bashing it with earth magic, and that did nothing but leave a few small divots in the area around it.
“You can tell Elijah,” Jess said as she turned towards my car.
Maybe screeching up behind him hadn’t been my best move...
Eighteen
I’d had to wrap my chocolates in a mix of air and water magic to keep Jess from eating them for me. The air formed a rapidly moving barrier, and the water splashed in her face every time she tried to sink her claws in. Droplets dripped down her cheeks as I pulled into my spot in front of the pack house. I took the box from her and got out.
“What happened?” Elijah asked.
“She thought she was in an action movie,” Jess said with a scowl.
“What can I say, I was in a pretty good mood, and I scared him off. I thought I could catch him, but he was speedy.”
Elijah said nothing.
“How did he get away?” Castor asked.
“There was a weird door in the grass outside the Pavilion. He dove down it and we couldn’t open it again,” Jess said.
“I battered it with magic, but I couldn’t get any form of grip on it. There was a weird barrier around it that I couldn’t get through or around,” I said.
“Fae or god magic,” Castor said.