A tingle creeps across my flesh. None of us felt anything when we drove through the ward. Which might mean the ward is down now. Either through tampering or it failed.
“The ward didn’t work too well for Sophia, did it?”
A frown forms on Gwendolyn’s face. “She was beyond the ward when she was attacked.”
“Was there anything different about Justin’s casting that day?”
“I have no idea. I wasn’t there.”
“Can you find us someone who was?”
“No. I won’t subject anyone else to being bound to you.”
I smile. “You play with fire, Gwendolyn, you’re going to get burned. How about the job you hired Bart for—what did that entail?”
“He has an affinity for animals. I think this time he came in to cast health and pain nulling charms for the animals we’re planning to sacrifice at the winter solstice tomorrow. He was cheaper than the vet and faster than us doing something similar.”
“Purifying and improving the health of your sacrifice, and removing their coming pain, sounds like something a witch would want to do on her own, not hire out.”
“Not when you’ve got an entire flock of chickens and a small herd of goats to prepare—and the spells you’re using must be cast individually over every animal. Bart was a better choice.”
Gwendolyn reaches a shaking hand out to her tea mug, taking a sip to fortify herself. “I’ve told you everything I know,” the witch scowls again. “I think it’s time you all leave.”
I slide the blood across the table to her. “Thank you.”
“Hmph.” The witch snatches up the ceramic pot.
“My blood is very strong. Use it sparingly in your spells and it will last you a while.”
We leave, the door slammed unceremoniously behind us.
“Your blood seems to be a popular request lately,” Rafe says.
“Of course. Whenever you deal with magic users that’s a given. But I never give without protecting myself first. They’re idiots if they think anyone my age would hand over that much power with no constraints in place. One drop and they’re bound for thirty days. Not a bad bargain in my mind. They have to use the blood before it spoils.”
“Now what?” Jon asks on our way to the car.
“Now, we face the uncomfortable fact that Justin is our primary suspect.”
The phone in my pocket rings. I don’t recognize the Argentine prefix, but answer it anyway.
Justin’s desperate voice comes crackling over the line. “I need help. I think I’m the source of the imbalance. My neighbor is dead and the cops are swarming outside.”
“We’re on our way.”
Our mad dash through the crowded streets amps up the tension level in the car.
“How the hell could we have missed that he’s the source?” Jon asks. “I know the guy is cocky and arrogant, but come on… it didn’t occur to either of you?”
I grind my teeth and stare straight ahead, annoyed with myself for thinking Justin was more capable than we thought. “He hid his weakness well. Confident, arrogant swagger… he had the all-powerful mentality down pat.”
“Jesus, Jon,” Rafe barks from the front seat. “If we knew, don’t you think we would have stopped him immediately? Do you think we would have hired him?”
“How the hell should I know? Vivian has a way of jumping into the fray whenever it suits her. And you just blindly follow her, never stopping to say no.”
My anger pulses under my skin, making me wish I could lash out and humble the out-spoken Were. But I don’t. He’s right, but I’ll be damned if I tell him. While I have been more impulsive the past few days, in my defense, all this crap is not something I deal with on a regular basis. Will that matter to the hotheaded Were? Probably not, so I keep quiet and let him vent his frustrations.
Rafe grips the wheel tighter, also refusing to rise to Jon’s comment and start a fight. “If you’d like to go back to Alaska, we can arrange it.”
“No way in hell! You really think I’d walk away and leave her to your protection again? That worked so well last time, didn’t it? She was almost killed while you were on the job, asshole.”
“Enough!” I screech across the car, loud enough to echo back at us. “In the end, no one is responsible for my safety but me. It would be best if you both remembered that. Jon,” I say, turning in my seat and facing the agitated young man. “I know this crap from you is coming out now because of what happened to me recently.
“But one thing I didn’t tell you about my torture and why I almost didn’t pull through—I thought Rafe was dead. Taken from me forever. At the moment, my pain was so great I had no desire to continue fighting. I was ready to die. I hoped my death would reunite me with him.
“My love for you, the resort, our lives… none of it mattered in the end. Rafe is what keeps me sane and solidly in the here and now. Without him, I didn’t want to face another moment of pain and torture. I know it’s hard to hear, and even harder to accept, but when the day comes for me to die, it will be a day of my choosing and no one else’s. Not even Coraline could have taken from me what I was unwilling to give.”
Jon looks shocked and hurt. “But if I was here you never would have been in that position. Never would have had to make the choice of life or death.”
I smile, hoping he can see what I can’t put into words. “We don’t know that, Jon. It all happened very fast. We were taken in our bedroom, minutes before sunrise, in a place where we’d been promised no harm would come to us. You don’t sleep with us. You wouldn’t have been there to stop it.”
Rafe makes the turn onto Justin’s street and stops the car with a hard braking to avoid the police cars. “Shit. We’ll have to park on the next street over and come in through the back.”
“I could have found you faster, saved you from the pain.”
“Dammit, Jon!” My anger getting the best of me. “It’s the past. Let it go.”
Rafe turns the car around and in a minute we’re parked and spilling out into the darkness of the deserted street. We scan the narrow road and Jon points toward the opposite end. “Down there. I see an alley. We can move quietly between the houses and make our way over to Justin’s street.”
We walk briskly toward the alley, unwilling to call attention to ourselves by running, just in case anyone is looking outside. The alley is more of a narrow side street between the older homes. We scuttle over the older pavement, on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary pursuing us.
After much slinking and avoidance, we make our way to Justin’s back door. One light rap and he opens it, hustling us inside his kitchen. The lanky man looks shaken, his demeanor completely changed from earlier. His gaze shifts over our shoulders, to the darkness beyond, as if he’s searching for someone or some thing. The door closes behind Jon with a thud, blocking out the sirens on the street. I think I hear an ambulance arriving.
“What happened?” I ask, my voice soft and reasonable, hoping it helps to reduce his distress.
He runs one shaking hand through his hair, shoving the longer strands back. “I… I don’t know. I was following the steps for the tracking spell like I always do. But when it came time for payment, my blood was… I don’t know… rejected. It turned to dust when it hit the ritual bowl. Ruining all the ingredients. That’s never happened before.”
“Did you feel anything happen around you? Like that tingle we feel when we cross a charmed ward?”
“No. Nothing.”
“You didn’t sense a disruption of any kind, but you still think you’re the source?”
“My blood turned to dust! Did you not hear that part? That’s fucking freaky and—just wrong! There’s no other word for it. Wrong.” He paces, hands on his hips, head down. “And to make matters worse, I think I saw the invunche leaving my neighbor’s house. It’s here. That creepy little fucker is here!”
“Okay, man,” Jon says, his hands moving in a slow-down gesture. “You’re good. No need to f
reak out.”
“No need to freak out? Are you fucking kidding me?” He faces the unflappable werewolf, looking a bit like he’s about to burst a vein in his head. “Something I did may have caused the death of five innocent people! How much more serious can it get?”
“Six?” the wolf offers, with an unsympathetic look on his face. “Come on, dude. You fucked up. We’ll help you fix it.”
“Can you save my nice neighbor who used to bake cookies for me, or bring those other people back to life? No! You can’t.”
“Beat yourself up over it on your own time. Right now, we need to concentrate on stopping whatever is killing people.”
My husband isn’t much better than Jon. Rafe looks like he wants to smack Justin. Instead, I step in and rest a hand on the frantic wizard’s arm. Cool, tranquil energy flows from my touch over his skin. Instantly, his face loses tension and his shoulders release from the bunched-up position around his ears.
He looks at me, surprise in his eyes. “Whatever you did, vampire, it worked. I don’t feel like I’m going to run out of the house screaming anymore.”
“Who would have guessed you were the panic and run type,” Jon says teasingly, trying to get the wizard back to normal. Or at least I hope. With Jon you never know.
Rafe’s deep voice booms across the kitchen, bringing us all back on track. “If you’re the cause, what does that mean? You never sensed an imbalance.”
The young man shrugs, the lost look from earlier threatening to creep back into his gaze. “My blood was refused. The payment wasn’t accepted.” He swallows. “My blood is no longer strong enough to work magic.”
“Isn’t that what Bart said happened to him?”
Justin whips his head up to look at Rafe. “That’s why he uses animal blood? His own blood is no longer valued as payment to work a spell?”
I remove my hand but stay near the on-edge wizard. “From what he described, it may not be a permanent… shunning… for lack of a better word. He mentioned ways to restore or shore up your aura from the draining that using magic can take on a wizard.”
“Is it that meditation and chakra balancing crap? He’s mentioned it to me before.” His shoulders slump in defeat. “But I was too sure of myself to listen.”
“It’s never too late, Justin. You can recover from this.”
“Never too late? I should be in jail for the people who died.”
“Did you intend to kill anyone when you did your job?” Rafe asks, his voice detached and clinical.
“No, obviously.”
“Did you even know the homeless guy or the delivery man?”
“Nope. But would their families care that I didn’t know them, or intend to hurt them? Would a court of law?”
Rafe steps forward, getting into Justin’s face to get him to listen. “Don’t kid yourself, Justin. Even if you’re responsible because you inadvertently caused the magical imbalance that brought those creatures to this plane, there is no judicial system that could persecute you based on the evidence.”
“Do you think that matters to me?” He steps back, unable to meet Rafe’s gaze. “I know what I did.”
“Then you must work to make amends,” Rafe says, “instead of placing blame on yourself. Even if it takes you the rest of your life to pay restitution. Be part of the solution. Not the problem.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? I was the problem, man.”
“It means,” I butt in. “Those things are still loose in your city. What do you intend to do about it?”
Justin straightens, a determined look finally replacing the despondent one. “We have to hunt them down and kill them.”
“Starting with that deformed little person who lives outside a wizard’s cave,” Rafe says.
“Did you see where it went when it left her house?” I ask.
He nods. “To the storm drain out front. Right where the cop car is parked. And don’t kid yourself. They’re going to be knocking on my door any minute to ask me if I saw or heard anything. I’m lucky they haven’t made it here yet.”
Rafe nods, glancing toward the front of the house. “Probably still processing the scene for evidence.”
A thought occurs to me. “You haven’t been to her house recently, have you?”
“No, thank God. At least I won’t have physical evidence tying me to the crime scene.”
Rafe motions him toward the spell ingredients on the table. “All right then. You clean up the remains of your spell casting and get ready for your guests, and we’ll slip out and hunt down the invunche. Hopefully he won’t have gone far.”
“Would you like me to stay and help?” I offer. “You need to redo the tracking spell, right?”
“And how will I pay for it?”
“With my blood, of course.” I smile, trying to reassure him. “And the good news? You’ll need much less than you think.”
We watch as Justin clears away the ruined herbs before setting up the new ingredients. “I’m not taking any chances on the previous spell. I’m starting from scratch.”
“What happens if the cops knock while he’s busy?” Jon asks. “Can you stop in the middle?”
“Good point,” I say. “Why don’t you two go out the front—let the cops see you. You can pretend to be residing here or visiting, but manage to reveal you saw nothing and waste their time while you’re at it.”
Rafe nods. “And then when they’re done, Jon can track the invunche and destroy it.”
“Am I going after it alone?” the Were asks.
My husband walks toward the front door, calling over his shoulder, “Is the big bad wolf afraid of the deformed little person?”
Jon cocks his head to the side. “When you put it like that, how can I possibly say yes and keep my balls?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Rafe
Jon and I spend the next twenty minutes outside the front door, slowly answering the police’s questions, feigning we don’t speak Spanish, which delays the officers more. When they’re sure we have no information of any importance to relay, they leave us, moving on to the next house.
The Were casually walks to the nearest storm drain, pretending to pick something up from the ground, and takes a deep breath. He looks back at me and nods. He returns to my position, speaking out of the side of his mouth. “It’s down there all right. What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go back to where the car is parked, get into the sewers there, then track back here.”
Jon’s face scrunches up. “That was what I was afraid you’d say. Shit. It’s gonna be messy.”
“Look on the bright side,” I say.
“Oh yeah, and what’s that?”
“These are storm drains. Not sewage lines.”
He snorts. “Yeah, big difference—and yet, I’m still going to be covered in filth. I can almost guarantee it.”
“Quit your candy-ass bitching, pretty boy. Time to get dirty.”
“Spoken like the man who’s staying up top.”
“If I was a small as you, maybe I could fit down there.”
“Hah! Didn’t realize I was working with the Hulk. However do you fit your huge head through the average door?”
I shake my head at the nervous banter. “Sideways, asshole.”
We hustle to the other street, avoiding police on the way.
I pry up the closest manhole cover and motion for Jon to proceed me. “All yours.”
“Seriously, you’re not coming to help?”
“You really think you need help with one little invunche?” I know questioning his ability is the best way to ensure he’ll boast he can do it himself.
“Nah, you’re probably right.”
“How about I watch the exits in case he makes a break for it?”
Jon nods and drops into the man-made hole. “Frakin’ dark down here,” the Were says, using his old favorite “swear” from Battlestar. Despite the job he has to do, he still aims for humor. Gotta love that about the guy.
> “Use your other senses.”
“Yeah, I know how to hunt. You can shut up now.”
I close the lid and move to the nearest drain, listening for sounds of the werewolf. To Jon’s credit, I don’t hear so much as a scrape of shoe or foot shuffle in the dark. He’s gone into wolf mode rather quick.
I extend my senses, just like my lovely wife has taught me, hoping to catch a mental trace of the furball. I walk down the street to a nearby alley, staying close to the storm drains. After a few useless minutes, I admit defeat. I’m not mentally connected enough to Jon to sense him or his movements. I’m sure Dria would have no problem, but I’m out of luck.
Best bet might be to return to the drain outside Justin’s house and see if there’s any noise coming from there. I make my way past the police cars to an open stretch of street. It appears the big push of investigating is done, there’s only two cars remaining on the block, and the ambulances are gone.
I stand next to a lamppost and wait, mere feet from the storm drain closest to Justin’s front door. After a time, I wonder if Jon’s okay down there. It’s been quiet. Surely a big, bad werewolf can take care of one hunched and deformed little person, right?
It’s way past two a.m. All the homes on the street are dark, despite the excitement since midnight. Checking right and left to make sure I’m not seen, I sit on the curb next to the drain. I relax, taking a deep breath, and extend my senses out and down into the darkened opening.
There! I sense something. Movement, a shuffle of some kind. Before I can blink, there’s a blur of a small form creeping out of the storm drain. Dammit. Looks like the creature is quietly slipping away from Jon.
The streetlight shines down on its deformed head, with what looks like a small leg poking out from behind its skull. I draw back my fist and slam it forward against the creature’s head, forcing it to the pavement and momentarily stunning it.
I grab the slight form and pull it the rest of the way out of the drain. It’s light, probably weighs under a hundred pounds. I know I’m supposed to kill it, but pity washes over me. Who brought this kind of thing to life in the first place? Why twist a little person to become… this. I flip it over on its side and drag it away from the opening.
Blood Legacy: Adult Urban Fantasy (The V V Inn Book 5) Page 15