He frowned. “Are you sure?”
What an odd question. She frowned back at him. “Of course I’m sure. I set my finder’s magic to find something that would enable Naomi to see through glamour and it led me to this. Well, it led me to an old farmhouse.”
“When you look at the bird, what do you see?”
She swiveled in her seat to stare at the bird of paradise on the back seat. “Is Karma magical?”
The bird blinked at her, head tilting. It preened a wing.
“What do you see?” Marcus repeated his question.
“A black bird with yellow feathers on its head and the most ridiculously beautiful tail.”
“How big?”
She measured with her hands. “Bantam-sized.” Her mamaw had kept chickens. Sadie had preferred the bantams to the noisy, unfriendly leghorns. “Is Karma magical?”
“Tell me about the amulet.”
Her hand curled around it. “Your habit of not answering my questions but expecting answers to your own is annoying.” However, when he simply stayed silent, she sighed and gave in. After all, she’d started this discussion. “The amulet is silver, shaped vaguely like an owl.” Since he was driving and couldn’t look, she described it, running her fingertips over the palm-sized form. “It’s old. The edges feel worn smooth. It’s flattish, just hollow enough for something to be hidden inside, but it’s sealed.”
The fact that the amulet had the stylized form of an owl appealed to her. She felt an illogical connection to it and a belief that it was destined for her friend, Naomi. They’d both attended the select British boarding school, Minervalle. Most everyone pronounced it as Miner Valley. Its students, staff and alumni knew it as Minerva Hall.
Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom and magic, and was often pictured with an owl. When Minervalle School had started in 1919, its founders had taken the name as a secret yet profound statement of intent. In their school they would nurture girls’ wisdom and magic.
Not all the students of Minervalle possessed magic. “To rely on magic or to think it makes you special is to be a fool,” Headmistress Genevieve Lowan warned. The school stayed true to its founders’ principles: to educate girls who through intelligence, talent, wealth, social position, profession or sheer persistence could shape the world—secretly.
People spoke about the Old Boys’ Network. After the First World War, in the smoking ruins of that cataclysm, the founders had wanted a feminine equivalent, one that valued and used women’s strength and fought without ego or publicity to improve the world. They had wanted “their girls” to belong to something bigger than themselves and to always have each other’s loyalty.
When Marcus broke Sadie’s heart, it was her Minervalle friends who were there for her. The Old School hadn’t criticized her for cutting and running. There’d been no disappointment or disapproval that she’d left college. They’d simply helped her find a new path.
Sadie hadn’t dreamed of spending her life picking, but it provided excellent cover for a lot of different activities. She was mobile back-up for a number of her more adventurous friends in their covert operations.
Her hand closed around the amulet. “The owner of the amulet was waiting for me,” she said to Marcus. “Millie Tremblay lives—lived—in an old farmhouse with an apple orchard out back.” Fallen apple blossom had littered the ground beneath gnarled and lichened trees when Sadie arrived. Two old barns leaned in toward each other near the house. The house itself was beautiful, in the way of old buildings that were loved and lived in. “Millie waited on the porch.”
“So she’d had time to tell others you were coming.”
“No.” Sadie shook her head vigorously. “No. I didn’t know where I was going. I was following the pull of my finder’s talent. Miss Millie didn’t know it was me who’d come for her amulet.”
In her fifties, Millie Tremblay wasn’t old, but she’d looked it. She’d been the frailest soul sitting in a rocking chair on her porch, face tilted to the sun.
“Millie has lung cancer,” Sadie said. “She’s dying.” And for a woman she’d met for only a couple of hours, Millie had made an impact. Sadie mourned that she’d die too young, even if Millie seemed to have made her peace with death. Either it freed her or Millie had always been recklessly brave. “We drank hot tea on the porch and she told me that she’d had the amulet thirty years or more. She’d thought that being able to see through glamours might help a journalist…but then she said she’d learned to see evil with her own eyes. So she buried the amulet in one of her barns.”
“Earth would hide it,” Marcus said.
“She dug it up the day before yesterday. Said she had a feeling someone would come for it.” Sadie shivered, although the cab of the truck was warm and the sun still shone. “Millie reckoned she didn’t have magic herself, only a touch of second sight. Enough to know trouble was coming. I told her how Naomi, my friend, is a marine biologist on Catalina Island and would use the amulet to study but not harm fantastical creatures there. Apparently, it’s a hotspot for them.”
Karma hopped through from the back seat and perched on the cup holder, head turned to stare at the amulet.
Sadie rubbed the stylized silver owl, but Karma remained an ordinary bird in her vision. On impulse, she unlooped the chain from her neck and passed the amulet across to Marcus. “Here. You can detect magical signatures. Is this magical?”
He accepted the amulet, driving one-handed for a couple of miles, before giving it back. “It’s magic. An enchanter’s work. I can’t always discern the nature of a spell, but it feels like one for seeing truly.”
Sadie turned the amulet over, studying it. She’d thought it an anti-glamour spell, but if it was to see truly…
She gently nudged Karma aside to put the amulet in the cup holder. Then she studied Marcus.
He looked just as he had a minute before: handsome, powerful, scary, tired.
Tired?
Ridiculous to think that the amulet had let her see Marcus clearly. There was no difference between viewing him with the amulet’s assistance or without.
Karma dipped a claw into the cup holder and hooked some of the silver chain. It rattled faintly. The bird chirruped, sounding entertained.
Sadie left the amulet where it was and continued her story. There wasn’t too much more to it. “Millie seemed to enjoy my visit. She told me she picked up the amulet when she was twenty, from an old boyfriend. He was a street wizard, literally so. A hustler who was often homeless, sometimes crashing with her. When they broke up, she kept the amulet.”
Uncomfortable, remembering the wry yet wistful look in Millie’s eyes, Sadie reached for the amulet.
Karma brushed her beak along the back of Sadie’s hand.
“Thank you, sweetie.” Sadie smiled at the bird. “May I?” She retrieved the amulet and slipped the chain over her head. “Millie said she thought her old boyfriend would come looking for the amulet one day.”
“Yet she hid it,” Marcus said.
She froze in tucking the amulet back beneath her sweater. “I thought Millie wanted to meet her old boyfriend, but you’re right. She hid his amulet.”
“And then she gave it to you.”
“That’s because when she finished her cup of tea, she read the tea leaves.” Sadie waited for a comment on the unreliability of folk magic. Marcus merely changed lanes, accelerating around an elderly man driving a 1980s rattletrap, and waited her out. “Millie saw fire. She told me to take the amulet and run. I tried to convince her to come with me.”
The silver owl seemed to heat in her hand. She hastily finished stuffing it under her sweater. “Millie wanted the amulet safe. She said she had her own plans and I wasn’t to mess with them. She made that the price of the amulet, to deliver it safely to Naomi.” Sadie stared at the motorhome ahead of them on the highway. Stickers plastered the back of it in a colorful statement of travels undertaken. “I was driving back down the road to Millie’s farm when the two Stag mercenaries th
at ended up chasing me passed me on their way to the farm. Their car stood out.”
“Too shiny and new.” Marcus shifted his hands fractionally on the steering wheel of his own unremarkable truck. As camouflage went, his was excellent. The Stag mercenaries could learn a lot from him; not least, how to fight.
“I don’t know if I imagined it or if somehow Millie’s second sight touched me…a few minutes later, in the rearview mirror, I saw smoke. Then I didn’t. Marcus, I think they burned Millie’s home.”
“Or her barns.”
“Why would they burn her barns?”
“It makes a dramatic threat and if the amulet was buried beneath one for a few years, some of its signature magic might have leaked. They’d have tracked it to there, and then, lost it.”
“Do you really think they could have tracked the amulet’s magic? Oh God, I hope so.” Self-consciously, she explained. “I thought, perhaps, they’d tortured Millie and that’s how they knew to follow me.”
He put a hand out and touched her arm in the most fleeting gesture.
Her whole body tingled.
“Sadie, they’re Stag mercenaries. They would have noted your vehicle registration—”
“They know who I am?” she squeaked.
His impatient expression said, of course they know who you are. “I asked if you’d be safe in LA.”
And I said “yes”. Sadie concentrated on breathing evenly and calming her pulse rate. She’d been delusional, thinking that if she made it to Los Angeles, the Stag mercenaries would have lost her. Instead, they knew who she was! Okay. It’ll be okay. She had friends every bit as ingenious and ruthless as Stag mercenaries. She would contact them. They would handle getting the amulet safely to Naomi. No way would she let the mercenaries know where it was going. That would merely transfer the danger to Naomi.
“Is there any reason the Stag mercenaries would be interested in you once you’ve passed on the amulet?”
“No. But I can’t lead them to my friend. She doesn’t have any magic at all.”
“You said she’s on Catalina Island?”
“Yes.”
His hands tightened on the steering wheel. His legs stiffened. “The island is a magical hotspot. Unless the Stag mercenaries have a finder—and people with your talent are rare—they won’t be able to detect the amulet over the island’s ambient magic.”
“So Naomi will be safe.”
He flexed one leg and rubbed the other.
“Marcus, is something wrong?”
“You might need to drive for a bit.” He accelerated, though, ignoring the speed limit till he reached a turn off. He left the highway and parked at the side of a quieter road. An oak provided shade. Blue sage and speedwell ran along the roadside, splashed with the yellow of dandelions. The noise of the highway remained a roar of noise in the distance. “Stay in the truck.”
He got out, moving without his usual prowling grace, and by the way he froze when his feet hit the ground, the slight impact hurt him.
His back was to her and she couldn’t see his face. She slid across to the driver’s seat. “Marcus?”
Scratchy claws scrambled across Sadie and the bird wriggled out. Karma landed on Marcus’s shoulder.
He collapsed to the ground.
“Fudge.” Despite his orders that she remain in the warded truck, she couldn’t. She dropped to her knees beside him.
He was already levering himself up. The soft fabric of his t-shirt strained as his muscles bunched. “Don’t touch me!”
She raised her hands. “All right. Okay.” She watched him closely.
Lines of tension scored his face and his tan couldn’t hide how the blood had receded. He was in agony. “Get back in the truck. I can’t protect you in this state.”
She wanted to touch him. Heaven help her, she wanted to help him. Unwillingly, she retreated to the truck, tucking herself into the driver’s seat, but leaving the door open.
Marcus gripped the door and stood.
Karma fluttered her wings for balance as he swayed. For an instant, a faint scent of sandalwood and spices drifted on the air. Then the bird dived away from Marcus, past Sadie, and perched on the cup holder.
Sadie, who’d flinched and closed her eyes as Karma’s feathers brushed her face, opened them to see Marcus grimly walking around the front of the truck.
He climbed into the passenger seat. “Drive.”
“Not until you tell me what’s wrong with you.”
Marcus rested his head against the back of the seat. The agony in his blood was fading back to endurable levels. It had spiked as he’d realized just how unprepared Sadie was to have Stag mercenaries on her trail.
“When we get to Los Angeles,” he said. “One of your friends, someone you trust, will have to meet us. They need to prepare a containment box to carry the amulet in. They then take the amulet to your friend on Catalina Island. You go somewhere safe where the Stag mercenaries can catch up with you. I’ll be the one who takes the amulet from you and places it in the containment box. I’ll carry it out of your sight. Then you tell the mercenaries the truth. I took the amulet and you don’t know where I am. They’ll believe you. They know my reputation.”
“Then they’ll come after you.”
“Let them,” he said briefly.
“That’s not going to happen,” she said, sounding equally determined. “You’re not fit to take on Stag mercenaries.”
“Use your talent.” He glanced at her and away. It tore something in him to see her worried for him. “Find safety for yourself. Is it still me?”
Two minutes later, she swore.
He took that as reluctant confirmation. He’d also used the couple of minutes to recover. His blood still scorched his veins, but he was in control of himself and his emotions again. “Drive. The sooner we’re in LA, the sooner we’re all safe.” Stag mercenaries included, because if they came after Sadie, threatening her, he’d kill them.
Agony crunched his bones and he breathed shallowly, reminded that volatile emotions were forbidden.
It was the worst possible time to encounter Sadie. He’d had his emotions in deep-freeze for so long. Now, they wanted—were—breaking loose.
“Marcus, I can find a healer for you.”
He laughed, short and faint. “No, you can’t.”
She reached across and touched his face.
Surprised, he looked at her.
Hazel eyes, dark greenish-gold with concern, studied him. Her mouth was tense with unreadable emotion.
He remembered her mouth being soft and warm as her lips caressed him. He shuddered as fever wracked him. “I’ll keep you safe, but you need to drive. Now.”
“Not till you tell me what is wrong with you.”
“Were you always this stubborn?”
“Probably.” She didn’t smile. She didn’t frown and draw away, either.
It was he who turned away, moving away from her touch. “It’s personal.”
“It affects my safety,” she said quietly. “That makes it my business.” Then, at his disbelieving grimace, she did smile, wryly. “I’m a picker. Negotiation is part of my skillset. But this is non-negotiable. We don’t move until you tell me what is causing you this agony. How can I help?”
“You can’t. No one can.” And for all of his prized self-control, the next words emerged involuntarily. Just crashed through and told her the truth he’d hidden from everyone. “I’m an addict.”
“Addicted to what?” She stroked his arm in a petting movement like he used on Karma.
The bird had hopped onto the back of the driver’s seat, watching both of them as Sadie bullied and cared for him.
He closed his eyes. All of his focus centered on the touch of Sadie’s fingers against the bare skin of his forearm. “Does it matter? Addiction—”
“It matters.” Her hand stilled and gripped his arm.
He sighed and surrendered to the inevitable. “I’m addicted to phoenix blood.”
Chap
ter 4
“I’ve never heard of phoenix blood.” Sadie held Marcus’s arm. She could feel his resistance to her and her questions. “What kind of drug is it?”
“It is what it is. Blood from a phoenix.” He slumped against the back of the seat, eyes barely open, staring forward. He seemed to be retreating from her without moving, going deep inside himself.
She shook his arm and he turned his head to meet her gaze. His brown eyes were red-rimmed. No, red!
Then he blinked and they were ordinary eyes again.
Still, she spoke slowly, less certain. “Phoenixes are like unicorns. They’re pure myth.”
“They’re rare, but they’re real. My grandfather held one prisoner.”
“Senator Aurelius? Does he have magic?”
Marcus’s mouth twisted, lips thinned and bloodless. He stiffened as if cramp seized him and locked his muscles.
She rubbed his arm.
“Best not to talk of the Senator,” he said faintly. “Anyway, he’s dead.”
“I hadn’t heard.” But then the death of a Massachusetts’s senator wouldn’t make the popular Tennessee news, and she didn’t watch the in-depth political shows. “When?”
“A week ago.” Marcus was breathing in a controlled way, as if he counted the length of each inhalation and exhalation. Some of the tension left him.
She oughtn’t to ask. He’d said not to talk of his grandfather. But… “A week ago? His funeral?”
“It’s today.”
“I’m keeping you from your grandfather’s funeral!” But then she thought. No, he couldn’t have returned to Boston in time, not from the North Carolina biker bar last night.
“The bastard’s already in hell. Torturing Satan, I expect. I don’t need to see his coffin buried.”
Wow. That was some serious hate. And I thought I hated Senator Aurelius.
The old man, patriarch and powerbroker, had been the primary witness to Marcus’s brutal break up with her. The old man had looked down his beak of a nose, coolly assessing Sadie’s distress and Marcus’s unconcern for it.
Phoenix Blood (Old School Book 1) Page 3