Blu introduced herself to Savannah using the same rehearsed line she’d used on me, explaining that her name was Blu without an E. And blaming the odd spelling on her jazz enthusiast parents whose artistic nature couldn’t allow them to be so pedestrian and just spell it the typical way. They needed her to be unique.
We followed her farther into the house. “I want you to relax. If you are able to do magic, I will guide you and it will be easy. Okay.”
But Savannah couldn’t relax, she was hyper by nature. And I knew she wouldn’t be able to relax, because in her mind, her life was about to change. And mine was, too, because for the next few days I would have to deal with woefully deflated Savannah, whose dreams had been crushed. While Blu set things up, Savannah perused the many books on the shelves and fixated on the herbs, candles, and various sigils and symbols on the walls. She seemed more tense and hopeful than ever, and a part of me wanted there to be something, too. For her to be able to protect herself with more than a knife, which she was getting better at using; protest gear; and a handful of legal terms that I was sure weren’t right.
When Blu called her to the table, she offered her herba terrae to get her to relax, and Savannah was about to take it—or I assumed she was, because it took her a while to decline it.
“Can she try without that, please?”
Blu nodded and started. I split my attention between watching them start with simple spells and looking at the many books on the shelves. Most of them were in English, but several were in Latin. I started to go through them, trying to commit some of the spells to memory. I was sure these were books I wouldn’t find in a magic shop and that probably had spells in them that my parents hadn’t taught me. Wards, location spells, memory manipulations, and defensive magic were the only arrows I had in my quiver to protect me. Conner could teleport; could Legacy do that as well, or was it exclusive to Vertu? He also had skills of animancy. Although I didn’t like the idea of controlling someone against their will, it seemed like a good tool to possess if I were ever confronted by a misbehaving shapeshifter.
Blu continued working with Savannah, for nearly forty-five minutes, failed spell after failed spell. She even assisted with one, igniting the herba terrae. The herbs that were gathered in an oddly shaped container illuminated orange, red, and silver, Blu clasped her hand with Savannah’s, and the colors brightened. Vibrant movement occurred inside the container and smoke swirled around it until thick puffs choked from it. Blu quickly dropped Savannah’s hand and the colors died down, muted to nearly nonexistent.
“Hmm.” Was that the only thing she would offer? Her brows pulled together as her lips twisted into a moue.
“What?” Savannah asked, concerned. I waited for Blu to gather her thoughts, which seemed to be taking an awfully long time.
“I will need to take some time to consult with my mother and a couple of people in my coven. I don’t think you’re a witch or mage, but there is something.” At first I thought she was just offering something to placate our fire enthusiast, but she wasn’t. A combination of confusion, interest, and concern melded and settled over her forced smile. “I think she’s an ignesco. Very rare, which is why I need to discuss it with others. If she is, she can’t do magic herself but can assist others during spells to make them stronger.”
Blu was more anxious than she’d ever been and kindly invited us to leave. “Are you interested in that book? You’re welcome to borrow it.”
Yes. “Some of it is quite interesting. It’s our history and a few basic spells.” I grabbed a couple more. “Do you mind if I borrow these as well? I’ll bring them back in a couple of days. I’m just interested in them.”
She looked at the books, took two of the four I’d taken off the shelves, and agreed. I was happy with what I had. A spell was a spell, but how it responded was contingent on the wielder’s magic. A witch could erect a ward, just as a mage could, but he strengthened it. What a ward could block was based on whether it was done by a mage, witch, or even a Legacy.
Savannah and I both left Blu’s a lot happier than we’d arrived.
The unknown number had come up on my phone for the third time when I finally answered it. It was Clive. I didn’t expect him to hold me to my commitment of meeting with them. I’d figured by now Conner had taken the Necro-spears and HF would be too preoccupied with trying to get them back from him to be concerned about meeting with me. Then I realized Conner was probably all talk. I recalled his assertion when I’d told him Humans First shouldn’t have the Necro-spears. “Done”—yeah, right. The ironclad deal he had with Clive and Humans First was most likely better than my “no way in hell” offer.
Conner had left me no other choice. If he wasn’t going to get the Necro-spears, then I had to meet with HF, if only to retrieve them myself. That was my sole intention as I walked into the small tan brick building and glanced into the only office in the place. It was empty. Instead of going in, I went across the hall to the training room. A large window that covered a little over half the wall gave a perfect view into it. One person was in there, working a heavy bag. A large mat covered most of the floor, and far off in the corners were free weights, a few pieces of cardio equipment, benches, and a large cooler. They had several training dummies crowded in the nearest corner. On each wall was their mission statement and a reminder that their sole purpose was to inflict their help on other people who didn’t have a problem with supernaturals. A constant presence, a chastising organization to ridicule those who openly accepted and actually liked supernaturals.
“Do you like it?” Clive’s voice came from behind me. I turned and took several steps back from him. A smile flicked at his lips. He liked the idea that I was afraid of him, and everything in me wanted to dispel that myth, but him thinking that I was afraid of him worked in my favor. He wouldn’t be as guarded and reactive. I kept my hand on one of my sai for a while longer. I wasn’t afraid of him, but I didn’t trust him at all. He focused on my hand that remained on the sai. He chuckled. “We’re all friends here, there’s no need for that,” he offered.
“Hmm, we definitely have a different definition of friendship. I generally like my friends alive. But that’s just my silly preference, I guess,” I shot back.
The smile, genteel and welcoming, was firmly planted on his face. “I don’t want you dead, Levy. I actually like you. Perhaps if you were the face of magic, then it would be more palatable for me.”
Is he flirting? Based on the crooked smile that he had given me, I guessed he was. But all I saw was a wolf baring his fangs, who would gut me the minute he thought he could.
He turned and started toward the office that was across from the gym, and when I didn’t follow him, his brow rose in confusion. I went after him into the room, and sitting behind a large executive desk was Daniel, the founder of HF. I remembered seeing him at the auction where Kalen and I had acquired the first Necro-spear. Now he had four, and I was curious as to how he’d acquired them.
Unlike Clive, who was dressed in their traditional clichéd outfit of fitted black t-shirt and jeans and a wry half-cocked smile that sealed the badass spy guy look, Daniel wore a neatly pressed black dress shirt and slacks. He wore a business look on his face that mirrored his clothing. Deep, expressive dark brown eyes revealed that this was nothing more than a meeting and he wasn’t even going to bother himself with giving me a smile, which I suspected he gave sparingly. The chilling look coursed its way to his eyes, where it remained. He sat upright in his chair, and everything from the cool, intrigued look, the thin rigid line that his lips formed, and the way he clasped his hands in front of him telegraphed that this was a business meeting. Plain and simple. He had one objective, and if I didn’t comply, then he had no use for me.
“Ms. Olivia Michaels, please have a seat.” His voice was soft, lighter than I would have expected from him, but firm.
“You can call me Levy,” I offered, although I doubted he would.
“I’ll remember that.” He waited for me to
get seated. But I couldn’t get comfortable until Clive wasn’t behind me. I didn’t think he was above stabbing me in the back, metaphorically or literally.
“Clive and the Justice League said you wanted to talk to me about purchasing the Necro-spears. What do you want for them?” I asked.
That pulled a laugh from him, dark and ominous. “Clive said you were quite … let’s just say witty to keep it cordial. Ms. Michaels, you are aware of why we are having this meeting. Conner is a good person, someone I can definitely get on board with, but he seems to be reluctant to go forward, and you seem to be the reason. I wanted to meet with you to see if we can discuss matters and come to an agreement so that we can move this forward in a timely manner.”
I couldn’t help but choke out a laugh; I wasn’t being condescending or snarky or dismissive. I was flabbergasted by the casual way he was discussing killing off a large portion of the world’s population—as if he was asking if I wanted to get an extended warranty with purchase.
“I’m sorry; shouldn’t we be discussing this over a large quantity of alcohol so we can at least have an excuse for discussing something so reprehensible with a straight face?”
His eyes flew in Clive’s direction and narrowed on him as if he’d been given bad intel. Did he think I was going to be agreeable to doing the Cleanse over, and all I needed was a good talking-to?
But the Necro-spears were in the building—close. I could feel the presence of familiar magic in the area. The aura of its existence. The good fortune of it made me overlook their arrogance. I scanned the room again making sure there weren’t any attached areas where others could be hiding.
A desk was the only thing between me and Daniel, and he moved and carried himself like he was more than just a stone-faced man with expressive hard eyes.
“Ms. Michaels, there are only two sides of this situation: you are either with us or against us,” he said in a breezy tone that held a hint of a threat.
I scoffed. “That’s the same threat Clive made. You know, the whole ‘you are either with us or against us spiel’ is ineffective. Unless you have a cat you plan on pulling from under your desk and stroking while you cackle like a madman, you can just screw off.”
“Ms. Michaels.” His tone was even cooler than before, the edge gone as he came to his feet. “Don’t be fooled, we want the same things. You are just too stubborn to accept it. This is going to happen; the question is whether you will be a victim or a survivor.”
They had the Necro-spears, and the crux of it was they couldn’t be trusted. While Conner was the same diabolical crazy as they were, he seemed to have a plan. I was sure Daniel couldn’t care less if anyone with magic was left in the world. Conner, despite how selfish and self-serving he was, wanted to preserve the Legacy and Vertu—and, for some odder reason, me.
“Show me the spears and then we can talk about it further.”
Daniel’s mouth twisted in derision and his eyes turned cold and deadly as they narrowed on me. “Ms. Michaels, I do believe your perception of your bargaining power is distorted. Your options are limited. If we go to the Council and inform them of your existence, what do you think will happen?” His voice was grating.
“I’m not sure. Why don’t you tell them that you think I’m a Legacy and the reason you’re telling them is because I won’t help you do the Cleanse. I’m sure I won’t be the one coming out looking bad in that scenario. But first you have to convince them of that. Remember, I went before them and walked away with them none the wiser. I know exactly what my bargaining power is.”
His jaws clenched so tight, if they were glass they would have shattered. It seemed like he had to unhinge them just to speak. The moments of silence drifted to minutes, his eyes narrowed again, and I was sure he contemplated several times how he would deliver my death. I thought about how I would disable and subdue them and get to the Necro-spears. I didn’t plan to kill them; there was a part of me that really wanted to, but being misguided twits didn’t warrant a death sentence.
At a single nod from Daniel, Clive lunged for me. I jerked his arm and quickly maneuvered, placing myself at an angle and hip-tossing him to the ground. I snatched my sai out of my sheath and pressed one at his throat, near the carotid, and the other I left pointed in Daniel’s direction, warning him off any further movements.
“Give me the Necro-spears. Now.” Daniel hesitated and looked down at Clive’s sneering face and the blade pressed lightly into his neck. I pressed it hard enough to let him know that I wasn’t playing and was willing to use it. I didn’t want to—I didn’t kill. That had been my mantra for so many years, and the only time I’d violated it was when I’d finally found the Trackers who killed my family. They’d deserved to die, but not this misguided, delusional fool. He deserved to be smacked a bunch of times and given a time-out until he decided that genocide was wrong. The problem was, his beliefs were so heavily ingrained in him that he’d romanticized the Utopic magicless world—a well-deserved ass kicking might not be enough.
Clive screwed his eyes shut for a few moments, and when he opened them they were devoid of emotion, empty, as if he had resigned himself to a fate of death. “Don’t give her anything. Either she is with us or against us.”
“What is wrong with you!” I snapped. “You aren’t on the right side. I’m not on the right side, but it’s by default. I was born into a group of people who attempted to ruin the world and I have to live my life differently because of it. I’ve had to run from people and live in fear that I would be found out, and you are trying to repeat history. Don’t be a fool.” But I had given up on Clive. His face was fixed in consternation and there was no reasoning with him. “You give me the Necro-spears—I will find a way to destroy them. This will be just a misguided attempt and you can go back to your ‘humans are special snowflakes’ rallies. Buy shirts, I don’t care. But if the Legacy failed before, when there were more and the strongest of their kind doing the spell, do you think you will succeed using the bottom-feeders and those willing to betray their kind for power?”
Daniel bit down on his bottom lip. I had his full attention. Good, you just seem like a sociopath, you might not actually be one. “The Cleanse had several benefits—it secured an alliance between the humans and the supernaturals. The strongest supernaturals exist now, and there are only a few of us. Conner has given you false hope. You might kill a few supernaturals with smaller versions of the Cleanse as you attempted to do with Jonathan. But—”
Daniel dropped to the floor, his head twisted at an odd angle, and Conner stood next to the collapsed body. “Well, he turned out to be quite useless. You nearly had him. Persuasive, a good fighter, and beautiful. I’ve chosen well.”
Clive made a choked gargling noise, and then silence. Next to him was the woman who gave me the final shove through the veil; she dropped the knife she’d used on him next to his body, which was slowly having the life drained from it. Death wasn’t coming fast enough, because her hand illuminated and magic commanded the room. So did the stench of death as he convulsed for a moment and then stopped moving.
Close, I plunged the sai in her direction, striking air. I turned to face Conner and she was next to him. A pulsating ball of magic danced in her hand and anger flickered in her eyes.
“Evelyn, don’t.” Keeping his eyes on me, he opened his hand and the ball vanished from hers and reappeared in his. A show to demonstrate his strength and skill with magic that I was no match for. I was a novice on so many levels and I couldn’t help but wonder how I compared in regards to the others. Was he training them to be as skilled as he was, or was he this skilled because he was stronger than me—than the Legacy?
He frowned. Playing with the coiled magic, twisting it around his fingers, unwinding the various forms of it, only to force it into submission until he entwined it again, moving it effortlessly from one hand to the other. Master of magic would have been impressive if it wasn’t wrapped in the package of a crazy megalomaniac. “We do not attack our own, no ma
tter how foolish they are being. Please, go retrieve the spears for me while Anya and I speak.”
Bile rose in me as I watched how dismissive he was of Daniel’s body as he negotiated around it as if it was inconsequential, and Evelyn scurried off to carry out his orders. What had he said to them to warrant such loyalty and easy acceptance of his commands?
His magic was a thick blanket smothering the air. I had chosen not to use mine because there were people on the streets, some human and some supernatural. I just saw the various shadows that passed by the partially closed blinds. Conner no longer seemed to care about hiding behind the cloak of secrecy, which made things worse. He was gearing up for a war and must have felt confident he could win.
I wasn’t going to allow him to casually dismiss murder victims, even if they were members of HF who considered my kind and other supernaturals reprehensible. I was better than that. My grip tightened around the sai, my attention acutely fixed on him, looking for that moment that only a narcissist like him would have when he was vulnerable because he assumed his presence was enough to disarm anyone. He didn’t present that moment and threw the magic that he’d been playing with like a kitten with a barn of yarn. I blocked it, but it wasn’t enough to stop the powerful bolt that hit my field of magic. I stumbled back and the fraction of a second was all he needed. He had taken that advantage that I’d been looking for myself and had pinned me, arms stretched out with my sai, to the wall.
He made a clicking noise with his tongue as he paced the floor. “You are making this quite difficult for me, Anya.” He spoke in a low, soothing tone. “I don’t want to treat my consort this way. It’s beneath me. It’s beneath us.”
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