“You can barely walk, sir.”
“And you can barely run!”
“Sir—”
“Calvin Kinsey, I am your captain and you will listen to me when I say—”
Cooper lets out a strangled gasp. “Erica!”
I wheel around the side of the SUV, Riker a step behind me, and look to the Primrose house. A pulse of power radiates across the neighborhood, and my magic sensing mode switches on at the perfect moment. My vision is filled with a hundred colorful flashes as the intricate webbing of wards threaded into the exterior of the house unravel one after the other. The entire magic defense system collapses like a line of dominoes, leaving the once impenetrable house vulnerable to even the pettiest thief.
Erica backs away from the front door, examining her handiwork to ensure there aren’t any remaining magic traps. But as her gaze travels up and up the redbrick façade of the house, her attention is pulled too far away from the ground.
From the shadowy corner of the porch where a werewolf is prowling toward her.
Donahue.
“Erica!” Riker bellows out the instant before the Wolf lunges.
The witch reels around to face the threat, but the Wolf is too close, too fast, and too large to stop in so little time. She only manages to pull up a small green force field in front of her chest before the Wolf barrels into her. Wolf and witch fly backward, straight through the weak wooden porch railing, and vanish behind a hedge of prickly green bushes.
I act on pure instinct. Adrenaline pumping through beleaguered muscles, I reach into my coat, yank out my .22, and tear through the snow toward the row of bushes. Riker calls out for me to stop, but no way in hell am I letting one of McKinney’s lackeys take another victim.
When I’m five feet from the hedge, Donahue reels up above the bushes, blood on his maw. I don’t know if it’s his or Erica’s, but it enrages me all the same.
I aim at his feral face, defined by red-stained teeth, wild dark eyes, a growl roiling in his throat.
I shoot. Again and again. Empty half the clip.
One bullet nails him in the left eye, another in the neck, and a third in the jaw. He lurches sideways with a pitiful shriek, blood running down his face, broken teeth crumbling out of his mouth. But, not a second later, he staggers up again, turns to look at me, recognition flaring, anger building.
But before the Wolf has the chance to pounce at me, a mighty green flash erupts beneath him. He takes off like a rocket, like the car Erica kicked a few minutes earlier. His fearful howl is muffled by the vicious blizzard winds as he flails through the air. Higher and higher. Fifty feet. A hundred. He vanishes into the murk. And then his large Wolf form tumbles down, down, down, and there’s nothing Donahue can do to stop himself from landing on a sharp-tipped iron fence three blocks away.
There’s a wail of pain. Then nothing.
Donahue’s Wolf body melts away, revealing the pitiful man underneath. Impaled by a spike on the fence, through his chest and out his back—through his heart—he slowly slides down the metal pole, until he comes to rest on the snow. His body jerks several times, trying to heal, I guess, but you can’t heal an injury when the weapon is still inside you. Finally, with a violent shudder that must be the rattle of death, Donahue’s body goes still. For good.
Stunned, I peek over the hedge. Erica is half-buried in the snow, but her little green shield held up. She digs herself out of the bank, coughing from the impact with the porch railing, which must have battered a couple ribs. But other than that, a forming bruise on her cheek, and three fingers wrenched out of their sockets when she pummeled Donahue with that powerful spell, she appears unharmed. No blood. No bites. The witch prevails.
I lean over the bushes and offer her a hand. “You need any help?”
“Nah.” She waves me off and sits up. “Thanks for the assist though. Bastard kept going for my neck.” Checking her dislocated fingers, she cringes, then locks her jaw and whispers what must be a spell. Her fingers magically snap back into place by themselves. A hiss of pain passes her lips, but she shrugs it off much faster than I would have. As she rolls over onto her knees, she asks, “Are your people okay?”
I peer over my shoulder. Riker is about ten feet away—he must’ve been following me—shocked gaze locked on the dead Wolf down the street. Meanwhile, Ella has somehow managed to drag the much larger Desmond to the SUV, in addition to carrying the last remaining plainclothes agent on her back. (Damn. Now that’s strength.)
Amy, too, has made her own way over to the vehicle, her broken arm cradled to her chest, the compound fracture weeping blood onto the snow. Everyone is accounted for, except the plainclothes man who died earlier.
“Alive,” I reply to Erica. “But we’re in bad shape. Auxiliaries might be here soon, but…” I nod at the broken living room window. “Did you see who threw that spell? The one that blew up the car?”
Erica shakes the snow off her coat. “Didn’t see him. But I heard him cursing through the wall.”
“Marcus?”
She scowls. “Who else?”
“You think he’s still in there?”
“Absolutely.” She waves her hand, and the bushes in front of her part, letting her through. “And if I was him, I’d be heading down to my secret basement lab right about now to perform the summoning spell I’ve spent the last several weeks planning.”
“You think he has everything he needs?” I drop my gun to my side. “The sticky note message suggested he wasn’t ready. Can he still do the summoning without all the necessary elements in place?”
“It’s not a matter of doing, Cal,” she answers, surveying the front of the house. “It’s a matter of doing safely. You can cut corners on any complex spell, including a summoning. But you do so at your own risk. If you deviate from a spell’s prep instructions, you’re bypassing safeguards that were put into place for particular reasons by the practitioners who came before you.”
“So he can summon Ammit now, but it might backfire on him?”
“Exactly.”
The snow crunches behind me. Riker, who’s been listening in on the conversation. “You think he’s desperate enough to attempt the summoning in an unsafe manner?”
Erica bites her lip, contemplating. “My gut feeling is yes. This whole summoning conspiracy clearly goes pretty deep into the Aurora magic community—which pisses me off to no end—and it’s possible it goes beyond the city too. All the way up to the High Court?” She wrings her hands. “No clue. I would hazard a guess that somebody in the upper echelons of the ICM knows about this, High Court practitioner or not. Maybe this was sanctioned by somebody fearing a major attack on the Council, somebody with more knowledge than we have, and Marcus ended up being the scapegoat in case something went wrong. In which case…”
She sighs. “My point is, I think if this summoning scheme wasn’t vital to some big name’s plan, Marcus would have abandoned it already. Trashed all the evidence. Covered up all the clues. Marcus is an asshole, but he’s not stupid. He knowingly gave himself away when he sent his goons after the plainclothes agents. Even if I wasn’t trading info with you all, you’d have figured him out eventually. There’s no way he could have hidden his involvement in a straight-up practitioner assault on DSI.”
“So you think he’s in that house right now,” I say, “about to perform the summoning without its safeguards in place. Because summoning Ammit is more important than his own well-being, than his life?”
Erica huffs out a steamy breath. “That’s my hunch.”
“Who the hell is this enemy?” Riker barks. “How powerful must they be to make a self-centered ass like Marcus risk his own life?”
“About that…” Erica shifts uncomfortably.
“What?” I cut in. “Do you know who—?”
A flicker of energy in the corner of my eye cuts me off. My magic sense is picking up a faint, intermittent glow resonating up from underneath the porch. Underground. Where the basement would be. “Um, guys,
hate to say this, but I think we’re running out of time. I’m picking up magic fluctuations in what is probably the secret basement lab.”
Erica follows my line of sight. “Good catch, Cal.” She sounds more surprised at my magic sensing skills than I’d like. “He’s probably going through summoning setup procedures. You have to seal all summoning circles with a standard set of safety wards before you attempt anything—unless you want to commit suicide. We have a few minutes, ten, twelve, but not much longer.” She addresses Riker. “I can beat Marcus in a one-on-one fight. But it’s possible there are still other conspirators on the premises. I might need some backup.”
Riker digs his heels into the snow and throws a despondent glance at the SUV, where most of my team is down for the count. He looks from me, to Erica, to Ella, who’s helping Cooper staunch the bleeding from Amy’s compound fracture. “Damn it,” he mutters. “Where are all those auxiliaries I asked for? We need more manpower.”
I stick out my hand and watch the falling snow caress my glove. “Waylaid. It’s the storm. It’s snowing way harder than it was when we left the diner. The plows go by on thirty-minute rotations. We’re between sweeps. The auxiliaries are probably on their way, but the drifts are too high to drive through quickly. We may be on our own with this, if ten minutes is all we have left.”
Riker curses. Then he rubs his face, straightens his back, and calls out to the SUV, “Ella! We need you.”
Ella’s head pokes out of the SUV, which she just climbed into. “Coming!” She bends down to speak to Cooper, who’s still outside the vehicle and is now wrapping Amy’s broken arm in gauze. He hesitates at her words, then nods. Ella responds by tugging something from her belt—one of her guns—and handing it to Cooper. The archivist stares at it like it’s a ticking time bomb, but after everything he’s seen so far tonight, he can’t refuse protection. Double-checking the safety, he sticks the gun in his coat pocket and returns to finishing Amy’s patch job.
Ella hops out of the vehicle and trudges through the snow until she’s close enough to hear us without shouting. Riker fills her in on the situation in twenty-two seconds, talking so fast that I miss most of the words. But Ella, who must have heard Riker speak this way in a hundred other combat scenarios, absorbs every piece of relevant information. When Riker is finished, Ella says, “In that case, I’ll lead the raid to the basement, Nick. You go help Cooper Lee with the injured.”
Riker looks taken aback. “Ella, you have no reinforcements—”
Ella holds up her hand. “I have the witch. And Cal.”
The captain blanches. “Cal is on medical leave.”
“And you should be too with your leg like that,” she responds. “I saw you stumble, Nick. I’m not an idiot. If we need to make a fast getaway, Cal can push himself, even if he rips a stitch or snaps a rib. He’s young. He’ll heal. But if your knee blows out, and no one’s close enough to help you, you may very well die. Medical leave or not, Cal is in a better position than you.”
Riker opens his mouth to protest, but Ella gives him a pleading look, and he deflates. Something silent and profound passes between them—an understanding of one another that only blooms after so many years of working together—and without further argument, Riker hobbles off to the SUV. As he’s leaving, he partially turns his head and says, “If you need me, Ella, I will come. Don’t expect me to sit by and do nothing while the specter of death hangs over one of my subordinates. I won’t do that again. Not even if you beg me to.”
Ella wipes a spot of blood off her cheek with her thumb. “I would never ask you to do that, Nick.” A thin smile crosses her lips. “In fact, if I end up a damsel in distress, you better damn well come save me, oh mighty Captain.”
The ghost of Riker’s laugh fades into the wind. “Good luck, Ella. You too, Cal. And Erica. Go kick that bastard’s ass for me, will you?”
Ella and I look at each other, nod, and reply as one, “Yes, sir!”
Erica chimes in a moment later: “Get in line, Crows. I got dibs on that ass.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Luck is only on my side in the most ironic situations.
We enter the Primrose house through the window Marcus blew out a few minutes prior. Stepping over glass and splintered furniture, Erica takes the lead as we advance. If another wizard or witch conspirator is hiding in a dark corner, Erica is the person most equipped to defend us against their attacks.
Ella has been at DSI for a long damn time, and I’m sure she could whip a practitioner’s ass under the right conditions, but we have too little time and we’re working with minimal information regarding Marcus’ mysterious underground group. We can’t afford to assume that anyone we come across will easily go down to a DSI handgun or a set of beggar rings or even Ella’s fists of fury. And let’s not get started on me—a strong wind could blow me over right now.
The living room is clear, and Erica signals for us to continue into the hall, to a door that can only lead to the basement. Ella and I fan out in different directions, guns raised, while Erica checks the locked door for wards. To no one’s surprise, the door is laced with three wards that would either electrocute or disintegrate anyone who tried to pick the lock or kick the door down. But the wards must be rudimentary, despite the danger, because after Erica explains what they can do in a hushed voice, she proceeds to disable them in less than fifteen seconds.
Scoffing, she presses her ear to the door, listening for any movement. “Clear,” she whispers. “Let’s hurry down. A lot of practitioners have multiple labs for research projects, so there could be several rooms down there, and each one could have warded doors.”
Ella and I fall back to Erica’s position as she carefully turns the knob. The door swings open, and we don’t die instantaneously, so I assume we’re good to go.
Erica creeps down the stairs first. I take the middle position at Ella’s insistence—the safest position. I don’t know whether she wants me there because she can hear my cracked ribs creaking louder than the old, warped staircase, or because it’s a habit for the hand-to-hand combat expert to take up the rear in case someone sneaks up from behind and tries to pick off the end of the line. Maybe both.
As it is, we reach the main basement unhindered. It’s a long, narrow room. Poorly lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling near the stairs. On the back wall, there’s a stack of soggy cardboard boxes that look like they haven’t been moved in years. Mold has crept up the sides in damp green splotches. The other three walls of the room are totally bare.
Which means the lab, or labs, must be hidden behind a secret door. Like Slate’s clock room.
“Damn,” Erica says. “I’ll have to use a location spell. Give me a minute.”
“We may not have a minute,” Ella retorts, shoving her gun into its holster. She presses a hand to the closest slimy wall and cringes. “Now would be a good time for that déjà vu, Cal.”
“Sorry, Ella. I still can’t control it.”
She points at the wall opposite her, and I march across the room. We start feeling along the cinderblocks for any switches to open hidden doors while Erica moves to the exact center of the room, closes her eyes, and chants under her breath.
I’m halfway to the corner when Erica’s mutters turn into swears. Her eyes flutter open, cheeks red from the effort of spell casting. “That ass,” she says. “He’s embedded markers in the walls to confuse standard location spells. And I don’t have any references with me to cook up a new one. We’ll have to find the lab the old-fashioned way.”
“Good thing we already started on that, huh?” Ella replies. “Thing about working at DSI is that you quickly come to realize magic is not always the answer.”
Erica purses her lips but doesn’t respond. She walks up to the wall in front of her and mimics what Ella and I have been doing for the past couple minutes.
Not wanting to get embroiled in the age-old bitch fest between DSI and the ICM, I bite my tongue and finish searching my own wall, then shamb
le off to the back wall where all the gross boxes are stored. It doesn’t look like they’ve been moved recently, but a simple magic trick could have covered up any tracks from the boxes or footprints on the dirty floor.
The room is quiet for another whole minute, except for the sound of me dragging boxes out of the way. Several of them start to break apart in my hands, mold smearing across my gloves. Ew. To distract myself from the nastiness, I make small talk. “Boy, I sure blew my promise to Cooper to sit this one out, huh?”
“What?” Ella asks, as she clears her own wall and turns to join me at the back. “You made a promise?”
“To stay at my desk like a good little agent until Navarro gave me the okay to return to field work.” I grimace. Navarro. Oh, he’s going to kick my ass when he finds out about this.
Ella passes me and grabs the lip of the nearest box. “I’m sorry then, Cal, for dragging you into this. If Cooper gets upset with you, please don’t hesitate to throw the blame on me. In fact, I’ll speak with him after all this is said and done. Okay?”
“You don’t have to—”
She holds up a hand. “Also, I’m truly sorry we’ve flubbed this case so bad that I had to choose an injured rookie to accompany me on a high-stakes raid.” She drags the box out of the way in one swift motion, then glides forward and takes hold of a second. “I got so accustomed to dominating dangerous cases over the past decade that I became…I suppose complacent is the word. And then Norman happened, which threw Nick off his game. And then the damn Etruscan case blew up in our faces and pissed off the mayor and—”
“Ella”—I yank the last box away from the wall—“I’m not mad at you. Or Riker. The Etruscan case wasn’t your fault. And neither is this fiasco. You ever faced a conspiracy like this before?”
She runs a hand through her cropped hair, the short strands stained with blood and dirt. “No. Not even close. Not in my whole career.”
“Then you have nothing to be ashamed of. You can’t prepare for the unknown, not really.” I spy a defect in a cinderblock near the floor and kneel in front of it. “I couldn’t prepare for Gloston Square. Cooper couldn’t prepare for that Wolf running into his parents’ car. Riker couldn’t prepare for that cave collapse in France. And none of us, except the villains, could have prepared for the shit we’ve been through this week.” My finger slips under the chip in the stone, revealing a switch half the width of my thumb. “So don’t beat yourself up. That being said…”
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