by SM Reine
“Try threatening them with something they won’t like,” I muttered. Bryce wouldn’t be happy if I was dead, but Aniruddha would probably throw a ticker-tape parade.
“Climb into the borehole, Agent Hawke,” Killick said.
I twisted around to stare at him in disbelief. “The borehole? You mean the flaming, million-degree borehole that will turn me into witch dust if I touch it? That borehole?”
“Witch dust or paralyzed for life,” Killick said, digging the gun into my spine.
“Yeah, sign me up for paralysis.”
He huffed. “It won’t actually burn you. Go down and get the key.”
“Make your friends do it,” I said. They were standing nearby, still holding my crystal, still preventing me from closing that goddamn containment circle.
Killick shoved the gun into my back. Hard.
I lost traction on the edge of the stage and skidded down into the borehole. The debris formed a wall that was nearly vertical. My stomach dropped out as I tumbled head over feet and slipped right into the fire.
I was surrounded by brilliant blue light hotter than the sun. I threw my arms over my head in vain, trying to protect myself from the magical fire.
A shout of pain escaped me before I actually felt any pain.
And then I realized there wasn’t any pain at all.
Slowly, I lowered my arms and lifted my head. I was on my knees at the bottom of the crater. The ground was melted around me, still molten and white-hot, yet somehow hard enough to support my weight.
The fire hadn’t just frozen in time. The whole borehole seemed to have been removed from reality. I might as well have been standing in the Holodeck version of a fire, bright but harmless.
“Huh,” I said.
Squinting up at Killick, I saw that he still had his gun aimed at me. Probably not a good time to make any sudden motions. Drawing the Desert Eagle was also probably a bad idea.
I searched the ground around me. Something shiny jutted out of the molten earth two feet away.
A key.
The metal was platinum-white and cool to the touch. It was a key the size of my hand. Small, but impossibly heavy. Olympic barbell heavy. I struggled to pick it up.
The craftsmanship was beautiful. The flat end was covered in curlicues, while the tip was much simpler. Elegant.
This was Mejía work. I could tell.
Don’t ask me how.
“Get up, quickly,” Killick called down from the stage. “Before the fire starts burning again.”
I tucked the key into my belt and climbed.
About two seconds after I rolled back onto the relative safety of the stage, the fire started moving—slowly at first, then faster and faster, until the flames were licking at the roof at full speed. The pillar reached back toward the sky. The temperature climbed.
“Wait,” I rasped. My throat was dry, lips cracked. “If you’ve got the key, why’s it still tunneling?”
“There’s more hidden deeper in the earth,” Killick said. He wrenched the key out of my grasp. The fire reflected in his eyes, burning with more excitement than a nerd on the release day of a new Star Wars movie. “Finally. Finally. Wait until Lenox sees this.”
“Ha!” I said. “I knew she was guilty!”
A gunshot rang out.
A scream.
Linda, the female witch, hit the floor bleeding from her chest.
Aisha strode out of the wings behind her, swinging her gun around to aim at Murray. He only had an instant to open his mouth in a plea before she fired again.
Bang.
A hole appeared in his forehead.
Murray seemed to fall in slow motion. The last crystal for the containment circle tumbled out of his hands.
His body hit the stage first, and then the crystal followed. It exploded into a thousand fragments, gusting magic into the air and turning useless in an instant.
“Damn!” Killick swore, launching himself away from me.
Aisha fired a half-second too late. The bullet missed him, vanishing into the fire instead.
I got to my knees, drew my gun, tried to aim at him. His feet pounded against the stage as he raced into the wings. I popped off a couple of shots, but neither hit. Killick’s distraction had worked. He had already vanished outside.
Aisha hauled me to my feet. “Sorry I wasn’t faster!” The fire had worked itself up to its full fury again, forcing her to shout over its roar. She dragged me deeper into the wings to escape the heat.
“Your timing could be worse,” I said.
But it could have been better, too.
We couldn’t finish the containment circle and the fire was only growing.
Aisha shielded her eyes from the fire with a hand. Her hair was frizzing from the heat and sweat. “Who was that guy?”
“Killick,” I said. “The high priest who left before you joined the Half Moon Bay Coven. He’s behind all of this. He’s been sacrificing people, setting up the ritual, trying to get to some key.”
“Key?” she asked.
“Yeah, I have no idea. Don’t ask me.”
There was a side door that let us get off of the stage and back into the audience without having to approach the fire.
My fellow OPA agents were still by the altar.
“Did you place it?” Aniruddha asked.
“The crystal’s broken. We can’t finish the circle with this ritual now.” I kicked the side of the box. “We need another plan.”
“The fire’s growing,” Agent Bryce said, coughing into her arm. The ash was getting worse, too. “We should escape before the building collapses.”
“And let that thing burn the whole neighborhood? We can’t go anywhere,” I said.
“So what do we do?” Aniruddha asked.
“We close it another way.”
Suzy had only managed to contain the smaller version of the statue with a word of power, after all. The circle was wider and the statue was more powerful, but another word of power would have to work.
I didn’t know how to use words of power. Neither did Aniruddha and Bryce—I’d reviewed their files just that week, and that was well outside their abilities. We couldn’t close the circle like she had.
But Aisha could.
“I need you to use a word of power to close the containment circle,” I said.
Aisha looked at me like I was crazy. “I already used a word this week. Another one might kill me.”
Agent Bryce’s eyes brightened. “You could do it with our help.” She held a hand out.
Aisha grimaced, but she took Agent Bryce’s proffered hand, and then mine. I was the only one with a hand free to grab Aniruddha. Dude had sweaty palms. Pretty sick.
Once we were linked, I could feel the power flowing through all four of us. Agent Bryce was surprisingly strong. As strong as Aisha and Aniruddha combined.
Four witches wasn’t enough. I’d never heard of a single coven in the entire world that only had four witches, and for good reason—you either worked alone, or you gathered enough friends to round it out to a dozen.
But it had to work.
Magic throbbed around us as the fire grew to consume the entire stage. Using my grip on Aisha and Aniruddha, I pulled the group back a few rows, where we could almost breathe.
“Go, Aisha,” I said.
Her hand tightened on mine. “We could all die if this doesn’t work.”
“We’ll burn to death if you don’t.”
Aisha faced the flame, set her shoulders, and took a deep breath.
And then she spoke a word.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I WOKE UP IN the crater.
It was a lot bigger than when Aisha’s word of power had knocked all four of us unconscious. As in, it took up the entire theater.
But the fact that I wasn’t on fire or otherwise dead seemed to be a pretty positive sign.
Call it a win.
My arms and face were covered in ash. I felt like I’d spent all day in an oven
at low temperature, sucking the juices from my muscles and shriveling me into jerky. Sitting up with a groan, I found myself resting between Agent Bryce and Aisha, who were as coated in ash as I was.
Waking up between two ladies. Nice. Under other circumstances, I’d have had to mark that kind of day on my calendar.
Too bad it wasn’t that kind of day.
Aniruddha was in the crater, too. And so was the statue, which was now a formless gray lump at the lowest point of the crater. It was still burning hot, but the containment circle had clamped down on it tightly, keeping the fire inside a hemisphere of power no bigger than a car.
It provided enough light to tell that Killick wasn’t in the half-collapsed theater with us, alive or dead.
“Fuck,” I grumbled, clambering to my feet.
My body didn’t hurt too bad, all things considered, but I felt like there was a hole in my gut. My magic had been drained. Aisha had taken everything for her word of power. It was going to be a long time before I’d be able to use magic again.
When I got up, the movement stirred Agent Bryce. She wiped a hand down her face, trying to clean off the ash. She only succeeded in smearing it around. “What happened?”
“It worked,” I said, giving her a hand up. “We’re alive.” I nudged Aniruddha in the side with my foot. Someone else might have called it a kick, but I didn’t break any ribs, so I wasn’t going to call it that. It was a nudge. All right?
Flashlights shone down at us.
“What’s your status?” It was Alfredo again. The Union had found us.
“We’re alive,” I called back. Somehow, against all odds, even though we’d almost been consumed by fire, we were alive. “Killick escaped. Did you catch him?”
“We didn’t see anyone escaping.”
Damn. They’d missed him.
“We need to search what’s left of the building,” I said. “Can you do that for me? Thanks.”
Their voices mumbled, receded.
Aisha was on her feet now, too. She looked the worst of all of us. Her skin was the same color as the ash in the theater and exhaustion made her waver on unstable legs. “This isn’t over,” she rasped. “Killick’s going to be back.”
“I know,” I said.
I was counting on it.
Alfredo returned and dropped a rope down into the crater. I grabbed the end, used it to climb out.
The theater was totaled. Only the topmost row of seats had survived. Everything else was a pile of debris, including the skeleton of the walls. I could see outside onto the street, where the Union was using yellow tape to hold back reporters and gawkers.
No wonder it hadn’t taken Alfredo long to search the building. There wasn’t any building to search.
“Did you find anyone?” I asked as he dropped the rope down again to pull up Aniruddha.
“No, sir,” Alfredo said. “Killick is gone.”
My Bluetooth earpiece beeped. I’d forgotten I was wearing it, so the sound startled me.
“Excuse me,” I said, stepping out of the wreckage of the theater.
The earpiece beeped again before I managed to push the button.
“You have to get out of there, Cèsar.” That was Suzy’s voice.
She was alive. The word of power hadn’t killed her. Another one of the night’s victories. “What are you doing on this line?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’re at the office when you should be sleeping.”
“Get to the hospital. Right now.”
“But I feel fine,” I said. “Nothing that drinking a few gallons of Powerade and a long shower won’t fix.”
She made an exasperated sound. “It’s not about you. It’s about your brother. I think I know where Killick went.”
St. Agathon’s was under lockdown when I arrived.
Never a good sign.
My FBI badge got me through the front door. The main lights were off, leaving nothing but the glow of the red emergency lights to illuminate my path.
The elevators were dead, too. It took me too long to get up the stairwell to the ward Domingo was in. Everyone was rushing between floors using those goddamn stairs. It made for a traffic jam of apocalyptic proportions.
Finally, I hit his floor and kept running. The hallway doors that were normally locked hung open. Nurses were talking in clusters, too busy to notice me.
I caught Dr. Rashida by the nurses’ station.
“What happened here?” I asked.
Her hair was coming out of her bun, flying around her shoulders. “There were some noises—the generator—” She cut herself off. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hawke, but I have work to do.” She rushed away without looking back.
I slammed through the door to Domingo’s hospital room.
The curtain had been yanked down from the track. It puddled on the floor, sticky and black. Blood spattered the walls. The window was covered in a spider web of cracks. The couch against the wall had been upended, splinters of wood jutting from the wall as if its frame had exploded.
Kind of looked like there were pieces of two separate dead bodies in all that wreckage, but it was hard to tell. There weren’t many big pieces left.
And in the core of calm at the center of it all sat my family.
Pops and Domingo were encircled by a circle of power. There was no visible sign of it—no line of salt, no candles, no crystals. Nothing. The only way I could tell it existed was because the debris stopped abruptly in a two-foot radius around the hospital bed. Carnage on one side, shiny floors an inch away.
Domingo was still unconscious, but unhurt. The IV dripped saline into his veins and the monitor beeped in time with his heart, slow and steady.
Pops was kicked back beside his bed, reading Neuromancer. He didn’t look up when I came in.
“Did you blow the power?” I asked.
He waved vaguely in the direction of the bodies. “They did, with all their magic. You shouldn’t have bothered coming.” He licked his thumb and turned a page. “I have this covered.”
The bodies on the ground looked female, judging by what little remained of their clothing. Pops didn’t share my hesitance when it came to killing women—not if they’d earned it. That meant Killick wasn’t among the dead.
If the high priest hadn’t come to the hospital to kill my brother, then where was he?
I turned to leave.
Killick stood behind me.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
My reaction time was good, but not that good. I hadn’t drawn my gun earlier to avoid alarming the nurses, so it took time to pop the strap, pull it out of the holster, lift it to shoot.
By that time, Killick had already punched me in the gut.
The breath whooshed out of me. He ripped the Desert Eagle from my hands as I fell to my knees, then struck me across the jaw. Magic erupted when his knuckles contacted my face.
It didn’t hurt and I couldn’t sneeze. I felt nothing at all.
My whole body was frozen.
Killick approached Domingo’s bed. The metal key jutted from his back pocket. There was a second piece of metal in his other pocket, one shaped like a flat disc. Another Mejía artifact. That was what had frozen me where I kneeled.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Pops setting down the paperback and standing up to meet this new foe. I wanted to shout a warning, wanted to tell him that he was in danger, but I could only groan.
Pops seemed to get the hint. “You’re the one after my boy.”
“And you’re the one who just slaughtered two members of my coven.” Killick tossed my gun onto the bed at Domingo’s feet.
“They started it,” Pops said with a shrug.
Killick took the key from the theater out of his pocket. “I’ll take my pound of flesh and be gone from here. I just need fresh Mejía blood, freely offered, and you won’t need to see me again.”
“You won’t get either of my sons volunteering blood.”
A faint smile from Killick. “I already have.”
Killick ripped the IV needle from Domingo’s arm. A bead of blood welled from the exit point. Killick touched the key to that blood.
The key glowed.
Domingo glowed, too. For an instant, his pallid skin shimmered like a jewel, which made him look real pretty. I’d have to pick on him for it later.
For now, I was just pissed.
If my brother had already volunteered his blood to Killick, then that meant they’d been in contact.
Everything fell into place.
Domingo had been working with a murderer and lied to me about it. He’d put my job on the line, along with both of our lives.
“There,” Killick said, grinning at the key. “That’s all I needed. Not so bad, is it?”
“I changed my mind,” Domingo croaked as the high priest stepped away. “I’m not willing.”
My brother was awake.
Five seconds too late to stop Killick from taking his blood, but he was awake.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Killick said, tucking the key into his pocket again. “Fortunately, we’ve both already gotten what we wanted out of this, so I won’t take it personally.”
“You tried to sacrifice me,” Domingo said. “That was never part of the deal.”
If I’d had any control over my body, I would have asked what deal he was talking about. Neither of them responded to my groans, though.
“You were her enforcer, her loyal minion,” Killick said with unnatural calm. “I don’t blame you for my ejection from the coven, no matter the part you played in it. I blame Lenox.” His upper lip twitched. He cracked his knuckles. “But I am still very, very angry with you, Domingo Hawke. Your blood would never have been enough on its own.”
Killick drew a gun and aimed it at Domingo.
Pops lifted his hand as he stepped forward. With a short incantation, his magic stopped Killick dead. It thrummed through the room, making the medical equipment vibrate, sending shivers through the puddles of blood on the floor.
His circle of power was still active. He was prepared to cast one of his trademark curses.
“Don’t touch my kids,” Pops said.
“Your ‘kid’ has lied, killed, and betrayed.” Killick’s arm muscles strained. He was still trying to move the gun, even as Pops’s magic pushed right on back. “He executed the Half Moon Bay Coven’s commands in Los Angeles for years. Then he turned on Lenox to leave with me, and now he’s turned on me, too. If anyone’s earned death, it’s Domingo Hawke.”