I stared at the pattern of syrup left on my plate, pushing the crumbs around with my fork until they resembled Pleiades. It would be a miracle if Sanadzi didn’t rescind her job-offer or call the police. After all, didn’t most people try to reunite runaways with their erstwhile families?
Sanadzi shepherded Krista up to bed, and my muscles tensed at the silence as Eugene and Jaesung waited for her return. I knew what was coming. I just hoped I could convince them to let me leave without alerting the police. When Sanadzi clomped back down the stairs, she sank into an armchair with a gusty sigh.
“Hel, come on over here,” she said, pointing to the couch.
My body resisted the movements, and walking across the room felt like trying to walk through water. I sank onto the opposite side of the couch from Jaesung.
Sanadzi pressed her hands to her knees, looking at them for a moment as she considered her words. When she looked up again, her amber eyes settled on me.
“I want you to know,” she said, “that whatever is going on, you’re safe here. We won't send you home.”
I fought to process her words. “But…. Aren’t—I mean—isn’t it what you’re supposed to do?”
One corner of Sanadzi’s mouth turned up, though it wasn’t a happy smile. “Baby-girl, anyone who spent five minutes with you can tell you shouldn’t go back where you came from.”
My fingers convulsed into fists. I’d known they thought me different, but not how plainly I wore the violence I’d grown up with. What could I say to that? I had not prepared for acceptance.
“Look, we’re in the business of rescue,” Eugene said. “I've worked here long enough to say we understand how sometimes the best choice is to get out.”
I thought of some of the cowering and growling dogs caged below, and the loving ones who’d once been so untrusting. The normal thing right now would be to say thank you, but something stopped me. Pride? I swallowed. Nodded.
Jaesung shifted his weight, and I glanced to the side to see him massaging a hand. He inhaled sharply, but the breath halted in his lungs. He held it. Both Sanadzi and Eugene had transferred their gazes to him, and there was something in the look they gave him—some discomfort or anxiety.
I remembered the way he’d caught me in the pub, how he’d stopped me first from bolting, then from throwing him off. How he’d reminded Eugene that they didn’t know why I’d run away.
Sanadzi interrupted the discomfort. “Look, you don’t have to tell us anything about why you left just yet. I’m sure the power surge freaked you out enough as it is.”
I glanced at her, panic prickling across my cheekbones. No, no—she meant an electrical power surge. That would be how they explained the bulbs shattering.
It didn’t explain the cracked windows, but people accepted all sorts of things when they didn’t want to believe in magic.
“The people who are coming,” Eugene said. “Your family, if that’s who they are. Will you be safe with them?”
“Yes,” I said. My voice came out raw, scraped by screams and magic. “My cousin. He’s—he’s safe.”
They relaxed a little, but whether it was because I’d finally said something or because they knew who was coming for me, I didn’t know. Maybe it was some of both.
Eugene gathered up his coat, and Sanadzi gave me another one of her hugs before they left. It was gentler this time. She rubbed my shoulder blade. “You can talk to them,” she said.
“Jaesung and Krista, or the dogs?” I said. She chuckled.
“Both. Either. Any of them will understand at least a little.”
They left, and it was just Jaesung and me sitting on the couch, not looking at each other. He had switched which hand he was rubbing, and one foot sat on the coffee table next to my dog-bed full of things.
He toed my sketchbook, which had half-slid from my backpack. “You draw?”
It was a graceless change in subject, but relief washed through me all the same.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty much the only thing I’m good at.”
His serious expression eased, lips quirking. “Can I look?”
I thought of the mandalas, which were the only things I’d drawn besides a few quick sketches of passengers on the train to loosen up my hand.
Part of me wanted to be paranoid enough to still suspect him of being a Sorcerer—it would mean I hadn’t dropped my guard. But the barrage of contrary evidence had weathered away my suspicion. Jaesung wasn’t a Sorcerer and wasn’t working for one. All those surreptitious glances, the moments of seriousness, the cryptic statements—he’d been the one to realize I’d run away. He’d been trying to let me know.
He sucked at subtlety.
“Yeah, if you want,” I said. “It’s mostly just mandalas right now.”
“Like Buddhist mandalas?” He teased the sketchbook from my bag, flipping it open before I could answer. “Whoa.” I saw his eyes spring wide behind his glasses, flicking this way and that as he scanned over the page. I watched, still afraid he would follow the flow of magic in its specific pattern. He didn’t.
“Damn. That’s some detail. Oh—that one’s ‘hwa’,” he said, pointing to one of the Chinese characters. “Fire.” He flipped through, picking out several others. “How long do these take you?”
I shrugged. “Most of them are copied from other stuff, but I can do them pretty fast, I guess. I remember patterns.”
He’d stopped on a sketch of a train passenger, blowing out a long breath. “You should be an art student. These already look professional.”
Heat flashed across my face, startling me for a moment before I realized it wasn’t magic, or illness, or something else sinister. I was just doing something I wasn’t sure I’d done in years: blushing.
While he flipped through the next few mandalas, I searched for something to say to distract myself from the unaccustomed reaction.
“What—I mean, do you…” He looked up when I spoke and I tried again. “Is it boxing? Martial arts?”
He was silent a moment, just looking at me. Then he set down my sketchbook, stood, and went to the bookshelf. A moment later, he’d set a jangling jar down on the coffee table in front of me. It read “racist” in bloody letters.
“I said boxing first! I didn’t say martial arts because-”
He was grinning. “Nope. You owe the jar a quarter. And now I’m making you guess what it is.”
“Soccer? Basketball? Football?”
He was shaking his head, laughing.
“Come on! Is it yoga?”
He rolled his eyes. “I do some yoga, but that’s not my ‘martial art’, so to speak.”
“Is it a martial art?”
“It’s not. I did some tae kwon do as a kid, but only because my best friend did it. It’s not what I do now.”
I lifted both hands in surrender. “Track?”
He laughed, tapping the back of the couch twice before he headed for the stairs. “Keep guessing, Miami.” Then he was climbing, weight creaking every step.
In the vacuum of his absence, unwanted thoughts moved to the forefront of my mind. I’d made a mistake tonight, letting my magic explode like that. It was lucky there hadn’t been any Sorcerers nearby. If one had been trailing us, he’d stayed back from the chaos.
Which made no sense. If I'd had a vulnerable moment, it was in that beer garden.
It was possible no Sorcerers had trailed me, though that was as unlikely as the thought of being truly safe with a bunch of mundanes. Even if they hadn’t followed, they’d hear about the ruckus tonight. Did they feel magical explosions? Did they have some way to tell when people nearby used magic? I couldn’t fathom any other way they could find the rogue Sorcerers they so despised.
Which meant that, if they hadn’t known where I was before, they would have a general idea now.
I swallowed, glancing at the open sketchbook sitting next to the racist jar. Why was it so hard to control my magic now when I’d done it for my entire life?
; A horrible thought crystalized, and I reached up to cover the destroyed mandala on my shoulder.
That spell had done more than just tether my body to Gwydian’s will. He had known about my magic and kept it under lock. I couldn't control it now because he'd been using it all along.
Food threatened to rush back up my esophagus, but I clamped it down as I dug in my backpack for the book, flipping through the pages until I found the enslavement spell mandala. It only took an instant to recognize it as the one that had been on my mother, Morgan, and Eamon.
I clamped my eyes shut, drawing up my father in my mind. I hadn’t seen his tattoo as often as my mother’s—he’d already had them on his shoulders, so Gwydian had put his enslavement tattoo directly over his heart.
Something had always been a little off about dad's, the same way something had always been a little off about mine. I’d never been sure why, or if it even mattered, but now the truth arrived in my mind, sharp and certain: our tattoos had been different because we were both different. I hadn’t been the only one in my family with magic. My father had had it too. Gwydian had used us both as batteries.
So why had he turned my father into a Hellhound? Why had he let one of his main sources of leeched magic die?
My fingers trembled on the pages of the book. I flipped through, glancing at the different mandalas, guessing at their effects where not specified. An unformed emotion was expanding inside me, too mercurial yet to risk naming.
I traced a mandala with my finger.
I had enough power that Gwydian had wanted to keep me alive, to siphon it off of me like a vampire. Maybe that meant I had enough power to keep the Guild away and protect my pack.
Despite my exhaustion, I took a long time to fall asleep, and when I did, it was with my sketchbook beside me, filled with the weapons I would use to wage my war.
Chapter Thirteen
Two weeks disappeared into the dog rescue, and all the while the weather got colder. It hadn't snowed yet, but frozen puddles cracked under my boots when I walked the dogs. I'd never been so cold in my life.
I'd also never been so content. It wasn't happiness—I wasn't certain my body still produced that feeling—but I had food and companionship, I was starting to sleep through the night, and I'd seen no sign of the Guild.
Still, doubt gnawed at my thoughts. It all seemed too good to last. I couldn't help waiting for the axe to fall. I kept my eyes sharp on those walks, and every night I bundled up with sketchpad and book and worked through several mandalas.
The sketchbook was two distinct stripes of color—the gray pages, thickened with graphite and abuse, and the flat white layer of crisp, neat pages waiting to be filled. I liked the discrepancy. Knowing more pages waited meant I had more left to do.
By Halloween, I'd memorized the flow of all thirty-seven mandalas in the book. They were all complicated—far more than the Guild’s combat mandalas—but I mentally scrolled through them each night, one by one, until I had each detail perfect.
I saw little of Sanadzi, who came three evenings a week and half of Saturday. I walked the dogs in the morning while Krista bathed and treated them, and Jaesung went to class. He left on foot and jogged until he rounded the corner. By the time he returned in the afternoons, Krista was on the front register doing work for one of her online classes and I finished the easy grooming and cleaning.
I was just clipping Poo-stank's back claws as he distracted himself with a rubber chew when Jaesung returned, smelling of sweat and cold air.
"Hey Stanky," he said. "And my favorite dog."
"Hilarious." I checked the angle of the file on the ragged edge of Poo-stank's claw. "You know, these dogs have better nails than I do. Lacrosse?"
"Wrong," he said, crouching next to me and poking his hand through the bars for a cone-bedecked Pomeranian to lick. "About the lacrosse, not the nails. Your cuticles are atrocious."
I sighed, crossing another sport off the list. He didn't play soccer, basketball, tennis, baseball, water polo, football, or rugby, and he didn't do boxing, swimming, rowing, running, racquetball, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, or any extreme sport. I was out of guesses. Almost.
"Curling."
He laughed. "I’m only good with a broom because Sanadzi's a neat freak."
I stood up, shoved the clippers in my pocket, and dusted my hands on my jeans. I'd left my knife in my bag while I worked in the rescue—I bent and squatted so much there was every chance it would fall out. Though, I wasn't certain the others would be surprised.
"So question," I said. "Is there a place to hike nearby?" A plan was forming in my head, but I needed to be several miles from civilization.
Jaesung frowned, casting his gaze ceiling-ward as he thought. "Uhh, I'm sure there is, but I don't do the outdoors."
"Somehow I sensed that about you."
"I mean, I do outdoors if it's climbing three-hundred foot steel towers, but not if it involves trees and dirt and bugs."
"So no?"
He typed something into his phone. "Why would you want to be outdoors? You're always complaining about the cold."
I shrugged. "Just feeling cooped up. I'm pretty much always at the dog rescue."
"I'm sure we can find something. Do you have a driver's license?"
"Yeah," I said, and didn't mention it was fake.
Half an hour later, I tossed my backpack into Jaesung's battered truck and started the ignition. Part of me wondered why he trusted me with it. If it were me, I'd be afraid the runaway girl would do just that—run away. With my car. But two weeks was apparently long enough for Jaesung to trust me. While he took over the evening shift at the rescue and Krista retreated upstairs for dinner, I drove.
The little wooded parking lot was empty, and there was enough undergrowth creeping out over the trail that I was fairly certain I wouldn't meet anyone on my hike. It was cold, but by the time I had hiked to the first campsite clearing, I steamed inside my coat. I shucked my outer layer. Sweat dampened my shirt where the backpack pressed it to my skin. For once, I enjoyed the punishing cold and approached the little fire ring. Someone had left a pile of firewood between two trees, but, if everything went well, I wouldn't need it.
I unzipped my backpack, feeling almost reverent as I slid the book out into my arms. The embossed "Master and Commander" had lost most of its foil, and the corners of the hardback were mashed in and dirty. It looked like such a well-loved novel. I opened the front cover, just to remind myself that it wasn't a book I was about to burn, but the spells that had enslaved my pack for decades. The spell that turned my father into a monster. I flipped to that page and stared at it, letting the anger and hate and grief consume me.
For several long moments, I burned as hot as the fire I planned to set. Gwydian was dead, and this was the only instruction for that mandala. He’d made certain of it. There would never be another Hellhound.
I swallowed, then set the book among the stirred ashes in the fire ring. I knew the spell, though not from the book itself. I remembered it, flashing bright in my memory every time we fought the Guild.
I knelt, the edges of the stones biting into my knees as I took a deep breath and searched for the bright turquoise light inside me, found it waiting deep in my chest, as if it hid there between my lungs and my throbbing heart. I imagined it buzzing in my arteries, shunting down my arms with each pulse of blood, carried to the capillaries in my fingertips.
My hands moved almost of their own accord, drawing the mandala in the same order I'd watched Guild Sorcerers do it; I pushed energy out of my fingertips, imagining them like the open-tipped syringes Sanadzi used, bleeding out magic like ink in the air.
I gasped when the first mark of turquoise appeared in the air. Concentration broken, it disappeared almost at once. Then my hands were shaking.
It wasn't that I hadn't expected it to work, so much as that I hadn't been ready to see my magic in that form. I'd known that I would draw a mandala in the air like a Sorcerer—inscribing it as if on
a pane of glass, watching it light up like a neon sculpture. But it was different to actually do it. To face the truth of what I was.
I breathed deeply, centering myself in my body as I fought to reclaim the feeling of power in my fingertips. This time, I didn't let myself falter. I drew the outer circle, the inner circle, the four directions. The spiral of glyphs followed, directing power through the spell's circuitry.
Then it was done. I lifted my hand, staring for a moment at my creation. I felt what I needed to do next—the mandala pulled at me—it asked for energy, sucked at the thin threads of connection between myself and it. Little crackles of energy reached back to my hands like tiny lightning bolts, drawing at the power still buzzing in my fingertips.
I peered through the mandala at the lit pages of the book, at the Hellhound spell staring me in the face, and opened myself to the pull.
For a moment the draw felt like putting my fingers over an open bathtub drain, the light tickle of whirling water sucking at my hand. I watched the brightness sparkle across the mandala, illuminating the turquoise with an extra layer of crackling static. It wasn't until the added power reached the center of the mandala that the draw went from drain to riptide.
The center glyph erupted. Arcs of energy leapt from the four anchor points and a jet of fire shot straight down. I watched the first page catch fire. A bright line of amber ate through its center until the page ripped loose.
It soared up on super-heated air, burning and blackening as it went. A page of slavery. A piece of my past I could never forget. I memorized the way it looked against the sky, crumbling black edges against the blushing blue and peach of sunset.
The flames licked and curled the book’s thick cover, eating down into the thick-packed center pages. I had won.
Unleash (Spellhounds Book 1) Page 11