City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set

by Clara Coulson

  “Cal,” Cooper says, “I understand. I’m still irritated, but I understand.” He sets my bandaged hand back in my lap and rises from the bed. “And if you really want to redeem yourself, in a simple, easy way, you can, at some point in the near future, take me—”

  My phone buzzes.

  I unclip the phone and hold it up, spying a new text message from somebody I wasn’t sure I’d ever hear from again: Erica. The beginning of the message in my lock screen preview says, Hey, can you meet me. So I unlock the phone and click through to the full message to find a not-so-sexy invitation to drive over to Erica’s house with Cooper in tow. Yeah, it actually says that, Bring Cooper Lee along, if you can. Which is bizarre, because, as far as I know, the only time Cooper and Erica have ever interacted for a significant period of time was when Erica drove Cooper to the battle on Primrose Avenue.

  Since Erica didn’t bother to say why she wants to meet, I weigh the odds of it being something important versus my team’s urgent need to get the ball rolling on the manhunt for Feldman and the evacuation of any other buildings he’s rigged to blow. Erica’s never let me down before when it comes to helpfulness on our cases, but I’m not sure it’s info she wants to pass. In fact, I have an uneasy feeling she might need my help with something.

  But then again, I owe Erica. A lot. After all, if it wasn’t for her, my entire team would’ve been killed by Ammit. We only won that fight because Erica swooped in at the last second and banished that Egyptian monstrosity back to the Eververse.

  So if she does want my help, then I have an obligation to comply.

  “What’s going on?” Cooper peers over the top of my phone and skims the message. “Erica wants to meet up? What for?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I can try.” I type out a quick response to Erica’s text, saying I’m exceptionally busy and need a good reason to drive all the way to her house. I probably sound a tad douchey, but the discomfort in my gut is getting heavier by the second. I don’t want to go—something bad, I know not what, is going to happen if I do. And I don’t need my déjà vu to convince me of that.

  Erica’s next message buzzes in a minute later. I need your help with my Delos prep.

  As I feared.

  Cooper gnaws on his bottom lip. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Me either.” I mentally override my nervousness, using the threat of the guilt I know I’ll feel if I refuse to help her. “But I can’t say no. She’s done too much for us. If I don’t honor that by returning the favor, I’m pretty sure the universe itself will brand me an insufferable asshole.”

  “Well, that’s…” Cooper pauses. “That’s true, actually. So you want me to tag along?”

  “She asked for you.” I shrug.

  “Okay. If that’s how it is.” He backs toward the infirmary door. “We leaving now?”

  “One sec. I better tell Ella where we’re going. Or she’ll have my ass again.” I find her in my contacts and hit the dial button.

  Cooper snorts. “And you would deserve it.”

  “That I would.”

  Ella picks up. “Something wrong, Cal?”

  I relay Erica’s messages.

  Ella is uncomfortable with Erica’s vagueness, but she lets it slide because she too, I imagine, can sense the underlying importance of whatever the witch needs us for. “All right. Be careful. We’re still in the task room working through Feldman’s file, and after we confirm all the possible target locations, we’ll start trying to recruit enough bodies to search them all in a timely manner. Meanwhile, Naomi is already on the streets with her team, trying to hunt down Feldman himself. Last known addresses have been confirmed bunk, but I’m sure they’ll turn up something sooner or later.” Paper rustles over the speaker. “So, like I said, take care of yourselves. Don’t do anything stupid—I mean, don’t do anything else stupid, Cal. You’ve already hit your quota for today.”

  “Understood, Ella.”

  “Good. So I’ll see—”

  Riker’s voice, loud and rumbling, comes through with, “Don’t forget to pick up some good pizza on your way back. We didn’t give you that wad of cash for nothing.”

  “We?” Ella says, sounding as if her face is turned away from the phone. “That was my money, Nick.” She turns back to the phone. “But he’s right. We still need dinner. Since you’ll already be out…”

  “I catch the drift, Ella.”

  “Wonderful. I like Italian sausage. See you!”

  She hangs up.

  Twenty-two minutes later, Cooper and I pull into the driveway of Erica’s cozy house in a borrowed office SUV. (My truck lost its windows in the strip club explosion, and is still waiting for a tow in Gloston Square.) The house hasn’t changed since my last romp with the witch; it’s got the same narrow front porch, the same windows with white curtains, the same (I assume) wards that’ll electrocute your butt if you accidentally lean against the siding. But there’s something about this visit—besides Cooper tagging along—that feels starkly different than all the others. A whisper that might be the barest hint of déjà vu warns me it’s a sense of finality.

  We hop out of the SUV and walk up to the front door, where I knock in a rhythm Erica and I developed last year, in case someone tried to jump us when we were expecting the other to visit. I hear Erica’s soft footfalls draw close to the door, hesitate for a second, and finish the trip. The door unlocks, and my magic sense catches a brief, dim flash as Erica’s security wards temporarily deactivate. Then Erica the witch opens the door to invite me inside for what I worry will be the last time.

  She stands in the foyer, dressed in rumpled casual clothes, her appearance more unkempt than usual, the faint wrinkles around her eyes more visible, as if she hasn’t put any needed maintenance into the spell that keeps her looking decades younger than she really is. It seems she hasn’t left her home since our meeting at the diner, or slept, or eaten, or rested at all.

  Like she’s been hard at work on the most important project of her life.

  Erica looks from me to Cooper to me, and sighs. “I’m glad you could come. I really need your help with this.” She steps out of the doorway and gestures for us to enter.

  But I stand my ground, look into her tired eyes, and ask, “What is it exactly that you need help with? Because from where I’m standing, it appears to be something I’m not going to like.”

  Erica smiles, remorseful. “Perceptive as always, hot Crow.” She opens the door wider, to reveal the expanse of her dining room. The huge table has been pushed against the far wall and strewn with all manner of magic paraphernalia. Mortars and pestles. Live insects in jars. Dry spices, some whole, some crushed and stored in small bowls. Books, thick and thin, old and new, all filled with magic spells. And some objects I can’t identify at all (and am not sure I want to).

  On the bare wooden floor where the table used to be is an equilateral triangle drawn with what looks to be table salt. A triangle large enough for a person to sit inside. Each of the three points of the shape is marked with a lit red candle, slowly dripping wax onto the floor. In the center of the triangle are symbols I don’t recognize, symbols written in recently dried blood.

  “Uh, Erica,” I say, concerned, “what the hell is all that for?”

  Erica drops a reassuring hand on my shoulder and says, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, “I need you to help me erase my memory.”

  Chapter Twenty

  It’s the craziest plan I’ve ever heard—and it just might work.

  Over cold beers in her living room, Erica the witch recounts the weeks of planning that went into the spell now prepared on the hardwood floor where her dining table used to sit. When she first heard about Delos’ impending arrival, her instinct was to run—and admittedly, if I’d been in her place, I probably would have chosen that option. But Erica is smarter than me, and more magically inclined. So she tossed aside her flight reflex and put her min
d to crafting a more academic solution: selective memory alteration. In short, she’s going to use Delos’ own magic specialty against him.

  “It’ll work like this,” she says, setting her beer on the coffee table. “I’ve crafted the spell to extract memories containing any incriminating details: my meetings with DSI agents, my actions against the rogues at Primrose, my phone calls and texts that included helpful information the ICM would be pissed to know I provided to our ‘enemies,’ all the way down to individual thoughts I may have had about illicit activities.

  “It is at once the simplest and most complex spell I’ve ever attempted. The parameters are basic—target relevant memories—but the effectiveness of the execution is up in the air. The brain is a complicated organ; mind and memory are delicate, easily bruised. If I make a mistake, I’ll end up comatose, a vegetable, or dead.”

  I wipe a bead of sweat off my beer bottle, staring down the neck so I don’t have to make eye contact with Erica. “I mean, is it really worth the risk? I know Delos is a dick, and I know you’ll be punished, severely, if they find out you’ve been aiding DSI behind the scenes. But the chance you’re about to take here…is there really nothing safer you can do?”

  “Believe it or not, Cal, out of all the options I’ve considered since hearing about Delos’ assignment, this memory manipulation scheme is actually the safest, by far.” Erica’s doleful gaze drifts up to the ceiling as she recalls her aborted ideas, failed plans, crazy plots. “Trust me when I say you don’t even want to hear half the stuff I came up with during my initial panic. After the dust settled, after I calmed down a bit, I set out to design a spell that had a high chance of keeping me alive and functional. And this is it.” She gestures to the setup in the dining room. “This is the culmination of all my best ideas. And we’re going to find out, right here, right now, whether I’m as good a witch as you think I am, hot Crow.”

  Cooper Lee fidgets uncomfortably in the chair next to mine. “I don’t mean to sound rude, Erica, but why am I here?”

  “Because I need you. See that triangle over there?” She points at the shape made of salt on the floor. “This spell requires three focal points, two of which need to be people. Not practitioners, per se, just people. The basic spiritual energy you both have in your souls is more than enough for what this spell requires. All you have to do is sit there, at the two bottom points of the triangle, and not move until the spell is complete.”

  Cooper frowns. “What’s the third focal point? You?”

  “No, I sit in the middle of the triangle, because I’m the object the spell is acting on. The third focal point is this.” She pulls a fancy gold wristwatch out of her pocket and holds it up for us to see. “Ironically, I got this idea from our good friends the Jameson trio. From the clocks they used to store souls leading up to the summoning of Ammit. I’m going to use this watch here as a charmed storage device for my extracted memories.”

  “Storage?” I grip my beer bottle harder. “Does that mean we can restore your memories at a later time?”

  “That’s the plan.” Erica swipes her finger across the watch’s crystal face. “Once Delos is finished with his city-wide practitioner interrogations, however many weeks or months that takes, you can manually set the watch to a specified time, let’s say 3:15. The action of the manual reset to that time will trigger the embedded spells to release my stored memories, like a password of sorts. My original memories will instantaneously overwrite the fakes I replace them with today, and my mind will be rendered intact once again.”

  I take a deep swig of beer, trying to quell the worry churning in my gut. “So you’re not going to leave holes in your memory? You’re going to try to fill them in with forgeries to make yourself appear innocent if and when Delos tries to access your mind for incriminating evidence? Can you really create such elaborate fakes? Fabricated memories that function exactly like real ones?”

  Erica clenches her jaw. “If Delos can do it, then so can I. He might be a master of mental magic, but I’m no spring chicken myself, Cal. I’ve made more than a hobby of learning complex magic on the fly, and now that the ICM’s political situation in Aurora has come to a head, it’s time to pit my skills against a master’s and prove I can come out the other side in one piece.”

  What if you don’t? I think to myself, but I dare not ask the question aloud. Because that will make the possibility that Erica fails here, that she breaks her own mind by accident, that Delos finds a flaw in her fakes, that something else goes horribly, horribly wrong, all the more tangible, all the more real. Erica and I might not be head over heels in love with each other, but she’s still my friend and I care about her well-being. I don’t want to watch her go down in flames. I don’t want to watch her die.

  But I can’t walk away from this situation. It’s too late for that. It was too late the first night we ate together at the Mom and Pop diner, and the crafty witch hoodwinked me into a tryst. We exist, Erica Milburn and I, within a delicate system of exchange, one that was tipped out of balance when she saved my entire team that snowy night on Primrose Avenue, when she killed her own traitorous colleagues without hesitation, when she faced a vicious monster from the Egyptian Underworld with no fear, and won. From that point on, it was only a matter of time before the piper came to demand his fee—and I was always doomed to be the one to pay the price. No, there is no walk away. There is only grin and bear it.

  I check on Cooper out of the corner of my eye. He looks nervous, brows furrowed, frown deeply cut into his cheeks, but he doesn’t appear to be unraveling at the seams yet. I get the sense, from his tapping shoe on the floor, that he’s psyching himself up for the task ahead. He’s willing to go through with the plan, and if the often nervous, frequently stammering Archivist Lee is strong enough to put on a brave face for the nasty job we’ve been assigned, then I have to do the same. I’m the detective here, the elite detective. I’m supposed to be the most courageous of them all.

  It’s time to live up to that ideal.

  “Okay.” I set my beer next to Erica’s on the table. “If you’re sure this is what you want to do, then let’s get it done.”

  The tension in Erica’s back relaxes. “Thanks, Cal.” She rises from the sofa and motions for us to follow her into the dining room. “The whole spell should only take three or four minutes to execute, and when it deactivates, I should promptly pass out. Once I’m unconscious, move me to my bedroom, clean up the dining room—you should throw away everything spell-related and take the garbage bags to the end of the driveway for pickup—and then leave before I wake up. The only thing you should keep, of course, is the watch. Put that in the safest place you can think of. Make sense?”

  Cooper and I nod in unison as we crowd around the salt triangle on the floor. Erica directs Cooper to the left-hand bottom point and me to the right-hand one, then she places the watch directly in front of the candle at the top of the triangle, so that the watch face lines up with the exact center of the array of geometric shapes inside. Next, she instructs Cooper and I to sit cross-legged in front of our respective candles and place our hands on the waxy rims, our fingers close enough to the lit wicks to feel the fluctuating heat of the tiny flames. Erica stands outside the triangle for a moment longer, scratching off items on a mental checklist. Finally, satisfied, she steps into the triangle and sinks to the floor atop the blood-drawn shapes.

  Pressing her palms against two of the shapes, she begins to chant a spell in a language I don’t know, tongue clicking against the roof of her mouth, syllables rushing off her tongue. Her eyes slip closed, and the speed and intensity of the spell incantation tick up. The flames of all three candles grow taller and thinner, turn blue, then red, then violet, then the earthy green I recognize as the aura of Erica’s power. My magic sense trips on, and suddenly the whole dining room is bathed in that same green. Erica’s energy swirls about in a convoluted, four-dimensional, star-like array that some obscure bit of mathematics knowledge from a dusty closet in my brain proc
laims a Schläfli–Hess polychoron.

  The tempo of the incantation changes again, and the array of magic begins to spin on an axis. As it speeds up, wisps of green peel off and float down to the face of the watch. I look on in stunned silence as the entire polychoron, which must be the sum total of Erica’s extracted memories, systematically deconstructs itself, unfolding into two-dimensional planes that dissolve into a fine green mist and then follow the pre-established lines of magic leading to the watch. The magic energy collapses into a vortex, spinning faster and faster around the watch as it funnels into the device through the crystalline face. And in less than four minutes, the energy is gone, fully stored in the watch, the last swirling tendrils vanishing inside.

  All of Erica’s memories of DSI—of me—are locked away.

  The candles go out with a puff of smoke the same instant Erica stops talking, and then the witch keels over, breaking one of the salt lines as she slumps against the floor. A spike of fear pierces my chest, but as I take my fingers off the extinguished candle, I notice Erica’s chest rising and falling in a slow, even motion. She’s not hurt. At least not physically.

  Cooper leans away from the triangle and lets out a haggard breath. “Do y-you think it worked?”

  “Well,” I say, peeling a bit of dried wax off my finger, “we can’t stick around to find out. There can’t be any suspicious memories of us inside Erica’s mind. So we need to do what she told us and get the heck out of here before she wakes up.”

  Cooper massages his temples. “God, how do we get ourselves into these messes?”

  “We don’t.” I climb to my feet and brush stray salt grains off my pants. “We get pulled into them by the absolute insanity known as supernatural community politics. Now let’s get Erica to her room.”

  I lift Erica into my arms and carry her down the hall, Cooper striding ahead of me so he can open her bedroom door. Inside, Cooper pulls the sheets and comforter back, and I lay Erica on the mattress, pluck a few pieces of salt out of her hair, then step back to let Cooper tuck her in.