by Lyn Benedict
Wright nodded. “So, you gonna call the cops?”
“And say what? No, I’m going to watch.” She raised the binoculars again, twisted the zoom, trying to get a better look. They were all slim figures, winnowed by shadow, but the way they walked—at least one of them, she thought, was a girl.
They stopped near the mall, maddeningly just outside the pool of light at the front entrance, turned inward toward each other in a close circle, shielding themselves from the sea wind.
“Cigarette break, y’think?” Wright asked, his hand straying to his own pack.
“Nicotine nerve? Seems unlikely,” Sylvie said. “The burglars I’m looking for have no reason to be nervous.” She got why he thought that—something about the way they hunched their shoulders together, bent over their hands, suggested cigarettes lit against the wind. But it also might be something magical, she realized. She could count them now, four slight figures with their backs to each point of the compass: north, south, east, west. Forget thirteen; that was for covens more interested in politics and in having a ready pool of sacrificial volunteers: For a lot of magics, all you needed were enough people to call the compass.
She put a hand on Wright’s shoulder, pushed him back against the seat; he kept leaning forward, trying to get a look on his own, and interfering with her view. “My case,” she growled. She needed a better look. The slim lines of their bodies argued teenagers, argued that her client had been right; Sylvie had no doubts that teenagers would happily burglarize stores—they were walking hormones, paeans to the id—but the how still eluded her. Most teens didn’t just luck into useful magic. Most teens didn’t know magic existed outside of Harry Potter.
One of the teens shifted, gave her a glimpse of a small yellow flame spurting into existence with a familiar flick, flick, spark. A lighter, and this was nothing more than a cigarette break after all. The tiny flamelet moved, guided toward an outstretched hand.
SYLVIE WOKE, BENT IN HALF, THE BINOCULARS PRESSING PAINFULLY into her abdomen, and a deadweight on her back. Her head ached, and as she forced herself up, hands sweating and white-knuckled on her thighs, sliding Wright off her back, something in her body protested. It tasted like the leftover backwash of faded adrenaline, hot and sour, left her trembling. She felt as if she’d been cored, hollowed out, gutted like a fish, and thrown back.
She wiped sweat from her face, her hands barely under her control. Wright’s face was slack, his mouth loose; his skin seemed grey. Marks of exhaustion made his closed eyes look like the black pits of a skull in the low light. Sylvie put a hand to his parted lips, felt his breath warm her palm, and slumped back, her momentary panic over.
But what the hell had happened?
The mall, she remembered. The burglars. Her job.
She glanced toward the mall, a serene pool of light in the darkness, glanced at her watch. Forty minutes had gone by while she . . . what? Slept?
She pushed that aside for the moment—forty minutes. If they’d gone in, they might still be there. From Alex’s reports, it didn’t seem like they were quick-grab artists, snatching at whatever small valuables came to hand. Not when they had taken paintings that measured six feet by eight and pool tables on their previous outings.
She checked Wright’s pulse, wondering if she could leave him safely, or if she should be dragging him to the ER. She had recovered. She still felt shivery and sick, but her brain was ticking over. The thin skin of his wrist throbbed reassuringly under her fingers, then twitched as Wright fumbled his way into wakefulness.
“Shadows—” he murmured. “Are we dreaming?” His hand curled around hers, completing a circuit. His pulse beat against hers, warmed her flesh, slick with fear sweat.
She hesitated. Were they? The world felt disconnected, pulled away, oddly unreal. Like a dream. Her hand cramped, nerves firing to life where it had been bent at an unhealthy angle. Pain.
“We’re not dreaming,” she said.
“Not dreaming,” he echoed. His words were slurred, slow. He pulled away from her, ran a hand along the dash. “Where—” He tried to peer out the window, banged his head on the glass. “Ow.”
“Yeah,” she said, her word drawled out as long as his, but far more certain. Even in her dreams, she knew how to be decisive. And hadn’t she decided? This was no dream, though it might be some type of nightmare. There’d been magic used on them. Inimical stuff. Clinging to her mind and body. “You’re staying in the truck.”
He looked at her, frowning. “But—”
“No. It’s not safe. You sit tight. I’m going to see what’s happened. It has to have been some kind of sleep spell that hit us. No one got close enough for it to be gas.”
“So paranoid,” he said, but he slumped back against the seat gratefully. His face was drawn tight with shadow and fatigue. The spell had hit him harder.
Sylvie was briefly, annoyingly grateful for her family lineage. Lilith might have been a dangerous, power-mad anarchist with aspirations toward godhood, but she gave good genes. Sylvie was resistant to a lot of magic.
“Just stay here, okay?” She slid out of the truck on his complaining mutter and let the door slip closed, careful not to let the sound of its shutting carry.
Her body felt shocked, her muscles shaky, but she warmed with each movement she took until she felt more solid, more awake, less like a sleepwalker.
Watch yourself, the little dark voice said. Like her, it was weaker than normal. Tiny fingers of dread crawled along her spine, stroked her nape, set her to shivering even in the sultry night air. She reached for her holster, took the gun in hand, and let the weight soothe her.
Now she felt like herself.
She hesitated, wobbling foot to foot, torn between destinations. Head for the mall, where she might catch them in the act? Then what? There were four of them, armed with a magic that had put her out once, silently and swiftly. One encounter had left her vision blurry around the edges, her head swimming. Courting a second encounter with only a gun would be risky at best.
The voice whispered, Shoot fast enough, and their magics won’t matter.
This is not the Wild West, Sylvie reminded herself. Besides, she had a groggy cop in her car, and one thing she knew about cops was that gunfire tended to wake them up. And wake them up cranky.
She chose her second option. Make a quick sortie around the parking lot and nearby street, hunting the car the burglars arrived in. A license plate would go a long way to helping her out; even if they escaped tonight, she’d have a start at tracking them down.
Footsteps sounded behind her, cat-soft, a little uneven, and she spun, gun raised. Wright’s hand caught her wrist, a single moment of physical lucidity, and tilted the gun barrel away from him. His face was sober and still, his emotions masked for the first time since she had met him. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “It’s only me.”
She swallowed. Him, yes, but disoriented from the spell still? His pupils were blown in the low light, his voice gone husky. His hand on her wrist trembled but stayed tight. He seemed more a sleepwalker than her talkative client.
“I told you to stay in the truck,” she said. She could smell his sweat in the breeze: salt and fatigue, the acridity of fear held tight; she could smell the gun oil she’d used last night. He leaned an increment closer to her as if to join in on the scent parade, his mouth hovering near her ear.
“But then who would watch your back? Who would take your orders?”
She jerked free of him, twisting sharply against the thumb joint, and he stepped back, wordless and waiting for her reply.
Her heart thumped unevenly in her chest. Anger, pain, a raw spot unexpectedly touched; inevitably, Wright’s words had taken her to Demalion, to his compliance with her wishes, to his death.
She turned away from him. She wasn’t going to think about it. Couldn’t think about it. Not and do her job. “I’m looking for their car. You do whatever the hell you want.”
He tucked his hands into his jeans pockets and walked al
ongside her, slinkier than she had expected, given his prior twitchiness. “There are a lot of cars,” he pointed out.
“It’ll be a four-door. We heard that. And it won’t be on my list.” She finagled the sheet of paper, folded in eighths, out of her pocket. “These are the cars that were in the area when I started surveillance.”
“Organized,” he said. She would have bristled, but he didn’t attach any judgment to the word, not surprise or skepticism or amusement. Just a fact. She still wanted to explain, in small sentences, that this was her job—of course she was organized and good at it. It wasn’t the kind of job that suffered fools.
“Can I see the list?”
“Can you read in the dark?” Sylvie said. She wasn’t handing over her key-ring penlight.
She’d stopped moving for a moment, and he was back in her personal space.
“You might be surprised at what I can do,” he said, taking the paper from her. He tilted it this way and that, trying to read her pen scratches, and ultimately failed.
“Yeah, not so much,” Sylvie said. “There’s another penlight in the glove compartment. Why don’t you go get it?” She half thought, given his obvious disorientation, that he’d get back to the truck and pass out again.
“And leave you out here all alone in the dark?” he said. “I can manage.” He kept hold of the paper, drifted over to the nearest streetlamp, and read off the information by its dim light.
“They moved young,” Sylvie said, remembering the moment when they had first crossed the pavement. “Bar-hoppers, teenagers, gangs, or thieves. Or a fun combination of the above.”
“I don’t follow,” he said.
“Your words, not mine.” She left him there in the lot and headed farther out, trading asphalt beneath her feet for the damp grass of the medians between street and lot.
There were two new cars on the street, tucked a discreet distance from the mall but still close enough to walk to, even carrying heavy items. One was a sporty little Spyder, black in the dark, red when her flashlight hit it. She noted it and moved on, not bothering to take down the plate: She had heard more than two doors closing.
The next one was an Audi sedan, which gave her the requisite number of doors, and the space for four people. She fed her flashlight’s beam through the tinted windows, spotlighting a scatter of CDs over the dash, some fast-food bags on the floor. Sylvie took down the license number, juggling penlight, new scrap of paper, pen. She didn’t think it would pan out to anything much. For one thing, by the time you got four people into the sedan, there wasn’t that much room for loot. And these kids were greedy.
“Shadows,” he said, a hiss that carried easily in the night breeze. Her pulse jumped at the sudden summons.
Sylvie turned, found Wright two rows down on the far edge of the lot, standing beside an SUV. “Not on your list,” he said.
“And big enough to carry pretty much anything,” she said, joining him.
Wright nodded, bent over the list with his pencil stub, not only putting down the license plate but going around to the front and collecting the VIN. He passed the paper back to her, his numbers script-elegant at the bottom of her scrawled notes. She copied the information onto her own paper and passed it back before heading back onto her own circuit.
She finished her circuit, and her nerves began to complain. Maybe the burglars weren’t even there. Maybe they’d been and gone while Sylvie and Wright had folded into people origami. They’d been out the better part of an hour. That was more than enough time, if they had a specific target, if they weren’t just window-shopping.
She eyed Wright, a long, lean shadow wandering aimlessly about the parking lot. If she went toward the mall . . . She took a purposeful set of steps in that direction, and, as she had expected, he fell in just behind her. Being helpful. She bit back the command to return to the truck. He hadn’t listened to her yet, and she didn’t want him to get in the habit of ignoring her orders. Sylvie said, “Let’s go see what we can see. If we’re lucky, they’re slowpokes and choosy.”
“You don’t want to call the police?” He shook his head before she could respond. “No, of course you don’t. You’re the vigilante in the dark.”
“Hey,” she snapped, unexpectedly stung. “If you want me to keep you as a client, play nice.” Cops never did appreciate PIs, but she’d have thought the fact that he needed her would keep his contempt at a civil level.
Sylvie stalked toward the mall, keeping to the shadows clustering beneath royal palms, the fronds high above rustling in the breeze, hiding her footsteps’ soft rasp against the asphalt. Hiding his. He followed on little cat feet, as silent as she, and clinging to the shadows with a tenacity born of practice.
Beat cop, she thought. Really? They tended to walk the centers of streets, the better to see what could be seen, what could be coming at them. Wright looked far too comfortable skulking along like a stray dog for it to be foreign to his nature. Alex was going to have to dig deeper. The clients always lied. Always.
The fragrance of jasmine reached out delicate tendrils to her, a scent warning that she had reached the edge of the parking lot. Wire-mesh benches lined one side of the smooth concrete path, paint-scored where people had chained bicycles to them, bounced skateboards off them. Stepping onto the path to the door showed her lights glimmering inside the mall’s main promenade, a faint flicker visible even against the store’s emergency lights. Something about the little glow made her queasy, dizzy, that disorientation growing again. She took a step back, bumped into Wright, standing skin close.
“They’re still there?” he asked, a breath in the shell of her ear, his hands resting on her hips.
She twitched him off. “Yeah, but that’s no flashlight they’re carrying. It’s something else. Something like a torch.”
“Smoke detectors?” he asked, but he shook his head. “Maybe not. Not if it’s magical. Then the rules don’t necessarily apply.”
She gave him a longer, warier glance. “You’re getting the hang of this world pretty damn fast, Wright.”
“Good teacher,” he said, bared his teeth in what should have been a grin but came out a grimace.
She got closer to the mall doors, leaning on the stucco when her body felt iffy again; she squinted inside at the alarm pad. “Alarm’s still active,” she murmured. “But the door’s unlatched.” That close, she could see the bolts drawn back, the gap between the door and the frame.
He caught her hand. “The alarm will go off.”
“Not if they know their business as well as I think they do,” she said. The flickering light grew stronger, and she yanked her hands away, suddenly nervous, suddenly dizzy. Suddenly scared of the dark. Not the dark. The light in it.
She steeled herself and grasped the handle and pushed, just as the torchlight shifted and dimmed, the weight of shadows stepping before the flame.
“They’re coming,” Sylvie muttered. The alarm system showed active, but it also showed the door still shut. She fumbled for the touchpad, for the emergency call button, but a flu wave of dizziness, nausea, and terror slammed into her. She fought it, pulled her gun, felt Wright collapse behind her, a sliding, silent weight along her calf and foot, then the torchlight was on her. She bit her lip, fought the vertigo, fought the exhaustion long enough to get a glimpse of a startled, underlit face, made skull-like by a sulfurous glow.
“Get back—” she said, tried to raise her gun with hands that felt miles away.
SHE ROLLED AWAY FROM THE BOOT PUSHING AT HER HIP, HER GUN hand clutching at nothing, nails scrabbling on the concrete, collecting sand and splinters.
“Easy, now,” the voice warned. It vibrated with tension. Sylvie rolled to her back, squinted up at the man looming over her, backlit by the rising sun. Yeah, she’d thought so. Cop.
Hell. Worse than that. Cop with a gun pointed down at her.
“I’m unarmed,” she said, and wasn’t that a concern? Her hand twitched against the concrete again, still trying to find her gun
. A quick glance around gave her nothing at all. She pushed herself up on her elbows, as slow as a yoga movement, both for the sake of the patrolman’s nerves and her own trembling weariness.
What the hell kind of spell was this? She hadn’t heard anything, no trigger words, no incantation, and anyway, teenagers were unlikely to be skilled at magic. The talent was rare enough, thank god, and the training, rarer still. Yet here they were, teenagers with power.
Her head throbbed, but she folded the pain back and forced herself to think. Witches tended toward elaborate plans, careful preparation, long buildups to ensure everything went off exactly as planned. This power was overkill for a witch, who tended to be sparing with power. An illusion would have done the job just fine; a repulsion glamour could clear a stadium if done well.
Sorcerers, on the other hand, loved splashy. The more power, the better, but they wouldn’t have walked on by Sylvie. Sorcerers, faced with an unconscious obstacle, would have killed her where she lay.
Talismanic, she thought, and groaned. She always forgot that one. Borrowed power.
Borrowed power was like handing a gun to a toddler.
“You hurt?” the cop said.
“Only my pride,” she muttered. Finally, her body cooperated enough to let her sit upright, one leg crossed beneath her, one knee up. Another moment, and she’d stand.
That plan fled her mind when she saw Wright. Disoriented indeed. She’d forgotten about her client.
He lay sprawled a bare body’s length from her, supine, legs dangling limply over the curb, another patrolman bent over him gingerly. Wright’s hand twitched, and Sylvie relaxed. Still alive, then. Good. Her rep was iffy enough without getting a client killed.
“Up,” her patrolman said. His name tag read ROSS. “And go easy. What are you doing here? This isn’t the Grove—you can’t sleep on benches around here.”
She licked her lips, waiting for him to point out that the doors to the mall were ajar, that the store shutters were open. That would be embarrassing; to explain to her client that no, she hadn’t seen enough to identify the burglars, hadn’t caught them, and pretty please could Lisse Conrad admit to hiring Sylvie and tell the police that she wasn’t the burglar?