Wish (Supernaturals of Las Vegas Book 3)

by Carina Cook

  Well, she’d prove herself here and now. She’d show Rebecca the lamp, and her reputation would stay intact. She couldn’t stand it if Darius thought she was inept. It would hurt her business, sure, but it would also hurt her feelings. She could admit that and still not break her word on the whole dating thing. After all, she cared about what Beef thought too, and dating him would be like dating a brother.

  Of course, Beef hadn’t answered any of her texts last night. Not even the one that explained that there had been a fire at the pawn shop, and she’d had to stay to make her report to the fire department. Either he was deep in a snit or he hadn’t woken up yet. He tended to sleep like a mummy—deeply and for decades.

  Darius gestured, urging her to move on, and Audra realized with embarrassment that he probably had places to go. A business to run. And really, she needed to finish this task before her employees showed up for the day. So, without further ado, she took a moment to push all those emotions away and center herself, breathing deeply and feeling for the magic that ran in trickles underneath her skin. When she was frightened or elated, it came to the surface and threatened to burst free, but right now it ran in quiet streams through her body. Becoming aware of it was like being aware of your heartbeat—it was always there, but you didn’t realize it was happening unless you thought about it.

  It was reassuring to feel her magic strong and unaffected by last night’s strangeness. She’d completely depleted herself a few times before, but not so spectacularly. Clearing out the building had required her to move a lot of air very quickly, and that took a tremendous amount of power. While she’d known that rest would set her to rights, it still relieved her to find that it was true.

  She found the right tether easily. It would be a struggle to explain to a non-elementalist how she did it. After all, there were hundreds of tethers tied to her in different places on her body. Uncle Grey had carried even more of them when he died. But somehow, she just knew which was which. It was tougher to locate things that other people had tethered in the storage room, even when they were as close as she’d been with Uncle Grey. So there was some personal element involved, but she couldn’t have explained it any better than that if she’d been asked.

  Once she’d focused on the correct tether, she pulled her hands apart, ripping open the air. Uncle Grey had made fun of her for being so stuck on physical motions, like the ripping movement or the way she whistled when she did air magic. She could summon her power without the motion, but it felt much harder that way. She’d always told him that if you weren’t cheating, you weren’t trying. He’d stopped lecturing her after that, but he’d always shake his head in exasperation every time he caught her doing it. She could almost picture him rolling his eyes right now, standing off in the corner and watching her. Then again, if he had been here, she wouldn’t be. This wouldn’t be her shop, and she wouldn’t have met Darius. He wouldn’t have brought her the lamp.

  The lamp wasn’t there.

  It should be tucked away in the little pocket dimension of her own creation. She made them to shape, so it was obvious that this was the right one. She knew it. But if it wasn’t in the void, and it wasn’t in the storeroom, where was it? It hadn’t fallen out onto the ground; she would have seen it in the storeroom. Had she put it somewhere and blanked it out? A lamp with a dangerous djinn in it wasn’t a thing you just misplaced. The djinn would seek out an owner to corrupt, offering wish after wish with a side helping of seductive magic, trying to get the owner to give in to their impulses. To inadvertently make the wish that would set it free. In the meantime, the djinn would feed on the corruption it caused, twisting the words of its master and delighting in their fear and sadness when the things they wanted most went horribly awry. It wasn’t the kind of thing you left sitting around, not even by accident.

  Something caught her attention in the void, something that shimmered in the expanse of nothingness. After a moment of horror, she knew exactly what it was. A fingerprint.

  Uncle Grey had spent long hours over the summers teaching her about the void. About what to do if a tether broke. How to ward artifacts with particularly violent magics to keep them from breaking free of their prisons. And how to tell if someone else entered your pocket reality.

  Void magic was tuned to the mage. The pocket dimensions she summoned were different than Uncle Grey’s. And when she’d opened a pocket dimension and he’d reached inside, his fingertips had left orange trails on the inside of the cell.

  “Remember this,” Uncle Grey had told her. “If anyone else tries to enter your dimensions, you’ll know. They leave marks, but you don’t.”

  She’d rolled her eyes at him. “Who would do that, Uncle Grey? Most people don’t even believe in the void. My own parents don’t really believe in it, and they’ve seen me hide in there when I wanted to get out of chores. They always made excuses about why they couldn’t find me.”

  He’d shook his head in fond exasperation.

  “What if there’s another elementalist in town? A bad one? And he wants to take all the artifacts and sell them on the black market? Or use them himself in a bid for power? Then you might find those fingerprints would come in handy.”

  “So how do you know whose they are? Do I go around fingerprinting people and seeing if they match what I see in the void? It doesn’t seem very practical.”

  “No, the word fingerprint is a bit of an imprecise term. It’s less of a print and more a streak of color like you see there. Yours is a kind of grey-blue. Mine is more yellowish-orange. You can look at people and see their colors as a kind of aura that hangs around them, but as you can imagine, there are a lot of grey-blues and yellowish-oranges. So you won’t know for sure if a person did it, but you can eliminate a lot of innocent people if their colors don’t match.”

  At the time, she’d thought this lesson was stupid. She’d been much more interested in going down to the corner market, where the cashier had been flirting with her pretty heavily. He’d told her she looked more like a sixteen year old than thirteen. Later on that summer, he’d given her a spiked punch and tried to take advantage of her. She’d lit his pants on fire, and that had been the end of that.

  She’d put them out before he got badly hurt.

  Now, she wished she’d asked more questions about the fingerprints instead of being so preoccupied with that stupid cashier. But at least she had that to go on. The fingerprint was a kind of shimmery pink color, and her mind went immediately to someone she knew with that same color aura. She’d fired him for screwing someone on her desk. Had he come back to the office to take his revenge on her? Maybe she hadn’t just passed out after all. Maybe he’d whacked her on the head, and she hadn’t even realized it.

  No matter. She would visit Chad and his sparkly pink aura and beat the crap out of him. And get the lamp back.

  “Uh…Audra? Is everything okay?” asked Darius.

  She realized she’d been standing there, staring into thin air, for lord only knew how long. Even Rebecca was starting to look concerned.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Just fine.”

  He looked relieved, and she felt really bad about lying to him. But what other option did she have? If she told him that she didn’t have the lamp, no one would trust her any more. A lot of dangerous artifacts would be floating around Las Vegas, all because her ex-boyfriend had decided to be an idiot and meddle with things he didn’t understand. She just hoped he hadn’t started making wishes yet, because the djinn would have a field day with an egotistical dudebro like him.

  No, her best bet would be to get the lamp back before anyone realized it was gone. If she couldn’t get it back from Chad, she’d tell Darius right away. That seemed like the most prudent course of action to her.

  “Cool,” he said. “So all the magic is working fine? Because I really don’t want to be rude, but I should probably be getting to work. I could swing by later and check on you, though. If that doesn’t bother you?”

  “You don’t need to do that
,” she said.

  “It would make me feel better about myself,” he said with a rueful smile. “I can’t help it.”

  “Then I’ll see you later.”

  “You sure will. Come on, Rebecca. We should get moving.”

  “It’s about time,” grumbled Rebecca, but Audra was so distracted by her plans to shove Chad’s head up his own butt that she didn’t even notice.

  By the time Audra pulled up in front of Chad’s condo, she’d worked herself up into a real fury. He could have killed somebody! He could have killed himself! Although maybe that wouldn’t be such a great loss to the world. But still, even if he’d been mad enough at her to come barging back into the pawn shop and try to take something, he should have known not to take anything from the special storage. She’d explained to him once how dangerous it was, when he’d come in late one night and discovered the secret door open. It was just one in a series of events that proved to her how stupid she’d been to give her boyfriend a job. She would learn from her mistake this time. She swore it.

  But first, she’d get the lamp back.

  She stalked down the sidewalk and stabbed the doorbell repeatedly like it had done something to offend her. The bell went off over and over again, until Chad threw open the door in his tiny red briefs, an angry look on his face. It settled into wariness when he realized who it was.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said with his usual knack for brilliant observation.

  “I need the lamp, Chad,” she said, surprising herself with how calm she sounded. “I’m not going to give you a hard time for taking it, but it’s dangerous and you need to give it back. I might be mad at you, but I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  His face brightened as he listened to this, and he turned on his megawatt smile, leaning against the door frame and displaying his physique to good effect.

  “You still care about me, don’t you?” he said.

  “I do, but that won’t stop me from punching you in the face. Where’s the lamp?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. In fact, I think you made this whole thing up so you could come over and we could have fabulous make up sex on my living room rug. You want to come in?”

  She took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. Then she shook her head.

  “No thank you.”

  “Well then, what do you want, Audra? I don’t understand you,” he said, running his hands through his hair in exasperation.

  “I just want the lamp, Chad. Like I said, it’s really dangerous. Can you just hand it over, and we’ll pretend this never happened?”

  “Pretend what never happened? I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

  She was starting to lose her cool, but she tried her best to keep her temper. “I’m talking about the lamp that you broke in and took from the pawn shop last night. Did you hit me over the head, or did you just see me fall unconscious and decide that it would be a good idea to take the lamp instead of helping me out? Jeez, Chad. I knew you were self-absorbed, but I didn’t know it was that bad.”

  “If you knew I was self-absorbed, then why did you date me in the first place?” he asked indignantly.

  “Because…”

  But she didn’t know how to finish that sentence, or more accurately, she didn’t want to finish it. She didn’t want to admit to herself that she’d made a fool out of herself over him, just like she’d done with all of the other guys before him. She had bad taste in men, and it made her act stupidly. She was an intelligent, talented person. Even Darius had seen it. But put a desirable man in front of her who seemed like he was vaguely interested, and she turned into a raving idiot. Even if the guy in question was an asshole. She always refused to see it. If she was going to be honest with herself, she didn’t need to stop dating because men were scum. She needed to stop because she quit thinking the minute she started dating. This incident with the lamp had opened her eyes to the truth, and she wasn’t about to make the same mistake again. She’d fix this, and then she’d start working on herself. Maybe get a therapist. Figure out who she really was and what she wanted before launching herself into yet another relationship.

  But first, she needed the lamp.

  “Look,” she said as patiently as she could, “I’m sorry I insulted you. I really am. I’m a bit of an idiot sometimes. I don’t think we should be together, and I really don’t think you should have screwed Lara on my desk, but that’s not the point right now. The point is that I need the lamp you took from the pawn shop last night.”

  “I wasn’t at the shop last night. You took my key, remember?” he said bitterly.

  “You could have gotten in. Borrowed someone else’s key. I know you were there, because…”

  But she didn’t want to talk about the auras. She didn’t want to tell him anything else about her magic, especially now that they weren’t a couple.

  He shook his head. “Well, I didn’t take whatever you’re looking for. You fired me and kicked me out, and if you’re not here to make up with me, then this conversation is over.” He waited a moment to see if she’d relent. She didn’t.

  “Fine then,” he said, and he shut the door in her face.

  She stood there for a moment on the sidewalk, tempted to break the door down. She could have, quite easily. One big gust of wind, and she’d be in like the big bad wolf. But then what? She’d have to find the lamp. Tentatively, she reached out, feeling for the magic. That lamp had practically knocked her flat the first time she’d seen it, so if it was in his apartment, she felt confident that she’d know. After a few moments of searching, she felt certain that the lamp wasn’t here. He’d stashed it somewhere else.

  Okay, then. She knew just what to do. She pulled her cell out of her pocket and dialed.

  “Hey, Citrine? I need you to keep an eye on somebody for me.”

  CHAPTER 8

  After Darius and Rebecca left the Desert Oasis, the truck was silent. Darius thought about how to break the ice as he steered his way through the crowded Vegas streets. Construction choked the wide street down to two lanes, and they were stuck behind a city bus, so he had plenty of time to think about it. Finally, he decided that he didn’t want to upset her further. She wasn’t much for talking about feelings, and he thought making her admit that she’d felt left out when he was talking to Audra might embarrass her. The best move would be not to bring it up at all, but to make a special effort to connect with her. To be the kind of friend he should have been all along. If he kept at it, she’d thaw eventually.

  So, finally, he said, “How was the ketchup soup last night?”

  She grunted. “I ordered pizza.”

  “I got chicken nuggets and dropped them on the ground, so I think you came out on the better end of the deal.”

  “You should have stayed for pizza, then.”

  Ouch. That hadn’t gone well. He fell silent again, watching the lights at the intersection up ahead turn yellow and then red again. The truck had barely moved two inches since the last green. It looked like they weren’t going anywhere. He put the truck into park and turned up the fan.

  Rebecca got on her phone again, playing some game that required her to match brightly colored pieces with other brightly colored pieces. She loved that kind of thing, but he found it incredibly boring. He’d much rather watch a cooking show. Which brought up another potential topic for conversation.

  “Hey, so I saw a new recipe for gumbo on the Food Network last weekend. I was thinking about trying it. You busy on Friday? I’ve got gumbo and a hot tub.” He paused. “But not at the same time.”

  “Gumbo in the hot tub would be a bad thing,” she said, her voice softening ever so slightly.

  “That’s an understatement. So what do you think?”

  She shrugged, slumping slightly in her seat. Now she looked exhausted, with that tightness around her eyes that suggested a long and sleepless night. He couldn’t decide if he preferred it to the pissed look s
he’d worn earlier or not. Probably not. Something was wrong, and he didn’t like it.

  “Bec,” he said, using the nickname she hated. The one she let only him get away with. He didn’t pull it out often, but it was a nickname that carried the weight of years of friendship behind it. They didn’t pull out nicknames unless shit had gotten real, and it felt like this was one of those times. “I know something’s wrong. Either tell me, or tell me to back off.”

  “I’m that transparent, am I?” she asked.

  “Only to me. I know all your secrets, remember?”

  “Not all of them.” She shot him a familiar wicked grin that made him relieved and worried at the same time. Relieved because she wouldn’t be grinning like that if something really terrible had happened, and worried because that grin usually meant trouble. “See, I’ve got this birthmark you’ve never seen…”

  She began tugging at the waistband of her shorts as if she was going to show him, and he shielded his eyes and began to shriek in pretend fear.

  “No! No! Anything but that.”

  “You’re scaring the dude in the car next to us,” she said, amused.

  He put his hands back on the wheel and shot an apologetic look to the dude in the car. He was a scrawny little guy who immediately started staring at the road, like he was afraid Darius might beat him up for looking at him funny. It was hard to be a big guy with a sense of humor. People always expected him to punch things, and they seemed afraid to laugh at his jokes. Or maybe his jokes just weren’t funny. He’d have to ask about that sometime, but this wasn’t the right moment.

  “I think he’ll survive,” he said, inching forward a little closer to the intersection. “But you can’t change the subject. What’s going on? Is it Audra?”

  “Audra?” Rebecca gave him a blank look, but eventually comprehension dawned over her face. “Oh. I was really bitchy to her, wasn’t I?”