“Some heads-up would have been nice,” I said.
Paisley snorted derisively.
Apparently, we were simply idiots to not have noticed the shifter following us. Either that or the demon dog’s opinion of the shifter in question was so low that Paisley didn’t think she bore mentioning.
I sighed, shaking my head.
“I don’t think this is a laughing matter,” Jenni Raymond snarled, jutting her chin out at me. “This woman is obviously in trouble. And you’re just going to leave her here?”
Daniel started laughing.
I ignored him. “When you had the witch make the charm you’re using to sneak around, did you use DNA samples collected from my home, shifter?”
“What?” Jenni Raymond’s false bravado slipped slightly. She glanced back and forth between Daniel and me.
Fish wiped his eyes. “It’s like …” He started laughing again. “She has no idea … no concept … how dangerous you are.”
“She doesn’t,” I snapped. Then I leveled my gaze on the shifter. “I’ll take the charm.”
She stiffened her shoulders. “No.”
I leaned toward her. “Think carefully, shifter. You’re in the middle of the woods with three killers. If you’ve stolen our DNA and given it to the witch that made that charm for you, we will kill you. We don’t even have to hide your body.”
“Yeah.” Daniel chuckled. “Paisley will just eat you. Yum.”
“You are both certifiable.”
I was so done with being screwed around with. So, so done. I grabbed the shifter by the throat, yanking her toward me.
Her eyes rounded, then she started to twist, fighting my grasp.
“The charm,” I said to Daniel.
He reached into the pocket of her jeans, pulling out an old-fashioned pocket watch.
Jenni Raymond started gasping, clawing at my hand and arm, but her wholly human fingernails couldn’t even begin to scratch my skin.
Daniel opened the watch, and the charm held within it immediately dispersed. “Amateur,” he murmured, examining the watch further. “Tied to the shifter, not to any of us.”
I let go of Jenni Raymond. She fell to her knees, clutching her neck and gasping.
“You …” She struggled to speak. “You are a terrible person.”
I crouched next to her, just so she could meet my gaze. “If your foolishness ever brings harm to anyone under my protection, I won’t even need permission from a pack to deal with you. That’s how large of a transgression stealing any Adept’s DNA is.”
“An offense that comes with a death sentence,” Daniel said coolly. Then he tossed the pocket watch into the dirt next to Raymond.
She snatched it up, immediately tucking it in her pocket.
I glanced at him questioningly.
He shrugged. “It’s engraved. A family heirloom, I assumed. And the shifter might be useful after all.”
“How so?”
He nodded toward Becca. “You said Silver Pine knows us.”
I looked at Jenni. She stared back at me with a mixture of fear and defiance. “But the shifter would have been beneath her notice,” I said.
“Yes.”
“The spell wouldn’t be set up to thwart her.”
Daniel chuckled. “It wouldn’t.”
I laughed. “Well, Officer Raymond, I guess you’re going to get your wish to serve and protect.”
She glanced between us. “You are both fucking assholes. I can’t believe you’re related to Christopher at all.”
Daniel started laughing again.
I’d never known him to be the jovial sort, but obviously the shifter’s false bravado tickled him.
“If we’re going to do something, let’s do it quickly,” I said.
Still chuckling, Daniel waved Officer Raymond to her feet. She complied, brushing the dirt from her jeans and staring at me balefully.
Fish crouched down next to the stone-marked ring that encased Becca. “I’ll need you to be ready, Emma.”
“I always am.”
He snorted, then looked surprised when I flashed him a smile. He tucked his chin to his chest, pointing at the two rocks nearest to him. “It’s easy, shifter. All you need to do is move these two stones out of alignment.”
Jenni Raymond hunkered down next to Fish. “And that will do what? Disrupt the spell? I can smell magic.”
Daniel grunted. “Residual, probably from the casting. The genius of this spell is that it’s dormant. So you wouldn’t be able to pick up a scent yet.”
Jenni nodded, reaching for the rocks.
I was going to have to revisit my previous assessment of the shifter’s bravado. Maybe it wasn’t all false. Maybe it just got shaky around me.
“Wait,” Daniel murmured, glancing over at me.
I stepped up behind Jenni. She flinched, then remained tense.
“Steady,” I said. “The spell might try to grab you. But shapeshifters are naturally resistant to magic, and this casting wouldn’t be keyed to you.”
“If the spell transfers to you, Emma and I can neutralize it easier. And you should be harder to kill than a sorcerer.”
“Should be,” Jenni muttered, but her still-outstretched hand was steady.
“Now.” Daniel hovered his hand over the shifter’s, at the ready but not touching her in case the spell sensed him. In case Silver Pine had tied any of his DNA to the magic she’d set for us to trigger.
Jenni touched her forefinger and middle finger to the stone closest to her.
Nothing happened.
She applied pressure.
Still nothing.
“It’s stuck,” she muttered.
“Leave it,” I said. “We’ll come back.”
“No.” She grunted. Then her magic welled, as if finally waking, rolling down her arm. The stone shifted. Jenni grunted again, wrapping her fingers around the rock. Then she slowly pulled it out of the ring.
Nothing more happened. “That’s a strong spell,” I murmured.
Daniel nodded, then shifted to his right. “Now this one.”
Jenni shuffled over, closing the space between her and the nullifier. She touched the second stone, then shifted it out of alignment with more ease than the first.
Becca arched up, screaming.
The spell embedded in the circle spiraled through the stones, reaching the weak point — the opening Jenni had created — and slamming into the shifter’s chest. She flew backward.
Daniel darted back, grabbing Jenni, who was writhing and convulsing.
I lunged forward to Becca, who had collapsed in silence. Magic lashed around my arms, biting and scratching as I grabbed the sorcerer and dragged her out of the circle.
Once her feet cleared the stones, she gasped, then started coughing. She was conscious, for now at least.
“Emma,” Daniel snarled, kneeling with the convulsing shifter in his arms. She was foaming at the mouth, eyes rolled up in her head.
I knelt beside her. “Jenni. I need to —”
“Just do it!” Daniel snarled.
“That’s invasive —”
“Emma, goddamn it. You know she doesn’t want to die.”
I sighed, placing my hand around Jenni Raymond’s neck for a very different reason now. I reached down deep within the shifter, coaxing forward what felt like almost-dormant magic from her. Then I amplified it, filling it with my magic, boosting it.
She stilled.
I forced more magic into her, stirring up her natural healing abilities, pumping up her strength, her natural resistance to magic.
“Shit,” Daniel muttered. “She really is suppressed.”
“Wait for it,” I whispered.
Jenni Raymond’s eyes opened. They blazed green with her shifter magic. She threw back her head and howled — a high, quavering cry, accompanied by a wave of magic that flowed over her.
She convulsed again.
Daniel gently set her on the ground.
A gray-brown fu
rred canine form tore through Jenni Raymond’s human visage. Her magic rose up, forcing the transformation to mitigate the spell’s effect.
A panting coyote pushed itself up on shaking legs.
“Coyote,” Daniel said. “Not wolf. Unusual.”
I stepped away, crossing to Becca, but she waved me off when I reached for her. “Save it, Socks. I’m not dying. But even amplified, I’d only slow you down when you face the witch. She’s Silver Pine, in case you didn’t know.”
“We know.”
Becca swore under her breath. “She went for Christopher. I didn’t see what she was before … but she couldn’t hold the masking spell and command the demon at the same time.”
“Is everyone still alive?” I asked.
“Best as I know.” She looked up at the sky. “But it wasn’t fully dark when Mark and I attacked her. We didn’t know, Emma. You know we would never …”
“I know, Becca. Try to stay out of it now, okay?” I glanced over at Daniel as I straightened up. “We have to go.”
Becca nodded wearily. “I’ll look after the coyote. What’s her name?”
“Jenni Raymond.”
The sorcerer laughed quietly, reaching out for the shifter. “Thanks for rescuing me, Jenni Raymond.”
The coyote hunkered down, ears flat against its head.
“She won’t be so useless now,” Daniel said.
He was most likely right. But I had no doubt that Jenni Raymond was going to regret following us into the woods, regret needing to be powered up by me. I hoped she wouldn’t be stuck in her animal form for too long. I didn’t want the responsibility for that, but I also didn’t want to have to call in the West Coast pack to deal with her. And I certainly didn’t want to hear her whine about amplifying her without her permission.
I pushed those thoughts away. Taking Becca at her word that she was okay and could watch over the shifter, I crossed toward Paisley. Daniel followed.
We had already delayed too long. I knew Christopher was valuable, but the witch was too erratic to be trusted. She could lose hold of herself and her magic at any moment. Then she’d lose her hold on the demon.
A demon that ate magic, or at least that was my best sense of its power at the time. And having gone up against that creature myself, I wasn’t certain that Christopher, Daniel, and I could take it down. Not even backed by all three sorcerers and a coyote — even assuming that Aiden and Mark Calhoun were still alive.
Chapter 11
Silver Pine had set up a macabre tableau for me to stumble upon in the middle of the forest. So I did just that, feigning disorientation from the bright witch lights she’d placed in the upper branches of the massive fir trees ringing the clearing.
Blinking, I gasped as if I hadn’t already seen the steel cages glistening with magic, or Christopher and Aiden trapped within them. As if I hadn’t noted the churned dirt between the witch and me, or Mark Calhoun lying unconscious and bleeding at the black witch’s feet from the wound slashed across his bare chest. A wound that might actually have been a sigil of some sort. A symbol that undoubtedly tied Mark’s magic, his life force, to the summoning of a greater demon.
That same demon was currently hulking among the deeply shadowed trees behind the witch, at the back edge of the clearing.
I stared at the massive creature — red eyed, black scaled, double horned — pretending to be struck dumb by its appearance. Though being overwhelmed wasn’t particularly difficult to feign. My previously steady heart rate spiked upon actually laying eyes on the creature that had almost killed me.
The witch cackled. As Becca had mentioned, she had dropped the illusion spell, presenting herself in her natural state — black veins webbed prominently across her pale skin, black-orbed eyes, dark hair hanging limply around her robed shoulders. She was barefoot, her fingers crackling with dark magic. Blood magic. The perfect image of a black witch on the edge of madness, driven insane by the deeds she did in order to gain near-limitless power.
All as expected.
It was still disconcerting, though, that Silver Pine would go to such trouble to set a scene at all. She could have killed me much, much easier with the demon fighting me one on one. As such, it was clear that she wanted something beyond simply being the agent of my death. And that was more troubling than anything else, because I couldn’t fight whatever madness was in her head.
The black witch had torn up a stand of large evergreens to create the clearing, then had discarded the trees around the edges of that clearing like trash, their tangled roots creating an intermittent barrier. I made certain to keep the roots of the fallen tree to my right in my peripheral vision, as I didn’t want to step into and inadvertently activate any barrier circle the witch might have set in place.
I thought about making a crack about the black witch using her demon pet as a gardener, but some of the fallen trees had likely stood for forty or fifty years. Maybe even longer. And the needless, wanton destruction incensed me so much that I couldn’t be flippant about it. Silver Pine had once forced me to destroy a huge swath of a South American rainforest in a similar fashion. I had traded that ruthless annihilation for my life, for the lives of the Five. I would do it again, and again if necessary. But that still didn’t make it the moral choice.
To my right, behind and to the side of the black witch, Christopher sat cross-legged in the center of his magic-coated cage. He appeared to be meditating, pale but otherwise unharmed.
In the second cage to my left, Aiden was a different story. As I had first stepped up to the edge of the clearing, he’d propped himself up on one hand, pinning his intensely blue eyes on me. He bore signs of a fierce struggle — crusted blood and bruises welling on his face, claw marks across his chest and upper arms.
Inexplicably, he grinned at me.
So I grinned back.
Silver Pine scoffed. “So predictable. I knew that if you didn’t kill the sorcerer, which would have played into my plans just as well, that you’d fall for him. Poor predictable, broken Amp5.”
Behind me, still in the cover of the forest, Daniel and Paisley split off to either side, circling the clearing. For anyone but me or one of the others, Daniel’s nullifying magic made him almost impossible to track, even by the most magically sensitive Adept. He had clipped a charm to Paisley’s ear to mask her for a short time as well. But the magic embedded into my spinal cord allowed me to sense the nullifier’s magic and track the demon dog’s progress.
I intended to let the witch talk while the other two assessed the terrain. Information was always good to collect, whether as ammunition or for gaining an understanding of your opponent’s weaknesses. And right now, I’d accumulated only a pile of guesses when it came to Silver Pine.
The witch strolled toward Aiden’s cage. The demon watched her. Hungrily, I thought. Now that was useful information.
“I never did get the story out of you, Aiden,” she purred, her chaotic magic laced through every one of her words. “What could you possibly have done to get disowned by a bastard as black as your father? Did you try to kill him?”
“No.” Aiden’s voice was raspy. His neck was raw but not clawed. As if he’d been strangled.
A fierce wave of anger almost had me leaping over the traps that I knew were waiting between me and the witch, though I still couldn’t feel any magic in the clearing. I adjusted my grip on my blades, allowing my resolve to calm me — my understanding that the scene the witch had presented had a beginning, middle, and end.
I had every intention of disrupting whatever ending she’d planned — and every ability to see that disruption through.
Silver Pine glanced back at me, grinning. Then she placed her hand on an intricate rune embossed on the top right corner of Aiden’s cage.
The sorcerer shifted in response, holding his ribs and abruptly standing.
Magic writhed through the bars of the cage, then across its solid metal base. It gathered under Aiden’s bare feet. He convulsed, grimacing.
He’d been attempting to minimize his contact with the floor.
Silver released the trigger, keeping her hand hovering just over it. “Ingenious, isn’t it? It not only nullifies the sorcerer’s magic, but collects it so I can use it against him. Not enough to kill him, of course. But enough to loosen his tongue. It’s a pity you didn’t amplify him a bit more, Amp5.”
I visualized the five steps between me and the witch, and the one downward stroke that was all I would need to take her head. A terrible smile spread over my face. Instead of dampening my anger, I held it close — and I fed it all sorts of dark promises.
Magic prickled along my spine. Christopher’s power. I kept my attention on the witch, who was watching me with a slight smile, as if she expected me to lunge for her. She expected me to react emotionally, irrationally.
She didn’t know me at all.
Whatever spells were built into the cages, they apparently didn’t dampen Knox’s connection with me. And having a clairvoyant on the field would minimize any wrong steps I might take out of anger or fear.
That thought settled me further.
Aiden slumped, hitting his knees hard. His piercing blue eyes sought out and found me. He laughed at something. It might have been the promise of the black witch’s murder in my own expression.
Silver Pine continued, seemingly unaware that she was being stalked by death from every direction. “I only had plans to play with you myself, Aiden. As soon as it became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to get to your father through you. Bare your soul and I’ll give you the amplifier. That would make things even, wouldn’t it?”
Aiden threw his head back, still chuckling to himself. “I tried and failed to kill my eldest brother. My father’s chosen heir.”
Silver giggled delightedly. “Brilliant. Well, we’ll just persuade the amplifier to join our cause. With her power in your veins, your father and brother will both fall.”
Aiden sat back on his knees, his laughter easing to a quiet, husky chuckle. His gaze was still pinned to me. “And how do you plan on doing that, Silver?”
“Shall I tell him, Amp5? Of what you risked when you went back for the others instead of simply breaking out yourself? I didn’t catch all of it myself at the time, but the footage was all backed up off site, of course.” She waved her hand dismissively.
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