“How will we find it?” asked Tiro.
“Magic,” Amber said.
Rafe appeared a little askance. He’d spent the day using his body and his mind in sport, as he was accustomed to.
“Hard going back and forth between mindsets?” Amber asked.
“Yeah. A little.” He looked at the shield. “But that’s sort of a link.” His shoulders shifted. “I know it’s there and it’s mine—or rather a Davail’s. Mine for now.”
And the shadow of the death curse fell over the room.
“But I can get the Cosmos Dagger and learn to use it.” Again his gaze focused on her.
“I’ll be right back.” Amber rose and went to her consultation room, pulled out the book of Denver maps from a bookcase, then opened a box and twined a chain around her fingers. By the time she returned the dining room table was not only cleared, but it also gleamed like it had been recently polished. Instead of the bowl with fruit as a centerpiece there was a stack of cork place mats that had been in a drawer in the pantry under a candle. Sizzitt sat on the wick.
“What do you have there?” Rafe asked.
She let the pendulum dangle from her fingers. One end was a stone cut into an elongated pyramidical shape, the other had a bead of a different stone.
“Hmph,” Tiro grunted as Rafe took a small step away. “If you can dowse with a divining rod, you can work a pendulum.” Tiro grimaced. “More a work of air magic mixed with earth, than just earth, though.”
“He has air. More air than earth inside him,” Hartha contributed, joining her husband on the chair.
“First,” Amber said, “why don’t you close your eyes and try to feel in what direction the dagger might be and how far away?”
Looking doubtful, Rafe did, slowly turning in place until he faced southeast toward downtown Denver. Amber wasn’t too surprised, and opened the book to the pages showing the offset grid of the oldest part of the city.
Rafe huffed a short breath, opened his eyes and pointed. “I followed Speer past Cherry Creek.” He shrugged. “Then I lost the exact direction. Can’t tell how far away.”
“All right.” Amber flipped over a few more pages, offered him the pendulum again. “Take it by the top and hold the pointed end over the map.”
He grasped the bead with his forefinger and thumb warily.
“I know you’re easier with fighting than with magic. But you’re going to need both,” she said. She was never more certain of anything. He put the pendulum over the map book and she stilled it.
With narrowed eyes and flexed jaw, he stared at the map and the pendulum rock. It stayed motionless and he made a disgusted sound.
“Think of it as your stick,” Amber said.
Rafe opened his fingers, reached into his pocket and said, “We should have done this in the first place.” He smiled as he held the tiny rod.
Tiro said, “Yes, that has much more magic, and your magic.”
Tiro’s point was demonstrated when the map book’s pages fluttered, then opened to a new section of Denver. Rafe’s stick zoomed to a large gray building as if pulling his fingers, not being directed.
“What’s that?” Rafe asked.
“The Museum of Nature & Science.” She shook her head. “You manifested the knife in a museum. No doubt with top-of-the-line security. Nice going, champ.” His dismissal of her pendulum still stung.
He raised his brows. “It’s an old thing. It was probably drawn to other old things in Denver. Not a helluva lot of them.”
“Somehow I don’t think the objects in Jamestown, Virginia, are older than the dagger and the shield.” She looked at Tiro. “Do you have any idea when they were made?”
Pred spoke up. “Made for Davails at the time when Lightfolk changed Davail bloodline. Gave Davails magic so they can kill evil bad ones.”
Amber hesitated, walked over to the shield. “It looks older than that.” Which wasn’t true. It appeared as if it had been magicked into being the day before. “I mean, it seems like it might have been made at…the beginning of the universe.” That was true and she felt herself flushing.
Pred sniffed and hopped down to join her. Ran his long, thin four-knuckled brownie fingers over the shield. “Time of Davail change.”
“Humans call it the fifth century,” Hartha affirmed.
So the Cymbler curse and the Davail change might have happened close to the same time. No wonder the men of those families seemed drawn together. Both were magical.
Amber left the shield, walked into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee. She was pretty sure how Rafe would react at her next bit of information. Sipping her drink, she leaned on the wall with pocket doors that could close off the kitchen from the dining room and looked at her lover.
His virility and vitality blazed to her magical sight, as if all the many years of his life were compressed into these past months. Her heart clutched. He was becoming so dear after such a short amount of time. Maybe because they were going through this experience of learning about magic together. It would have been awfully lonely if she had no one to talk to. Unlike Jenni and Tamara, Amber didn’t have a lot of Lightfolk blood, just a trace of elven and a gift that was more a curse.
Tiro was frowning at her. He was, as ever, of the opinion that she would lift Rafe’s curse and age those many years of the rest of her life.
“…and we can go tomorrow morning to check out the museum, huh? I’m sure I’ll know the dagger when I see it, or feel it. It might not be in the museum at all, maybe just on the grounds.” Rafe was there, taking her mug and stealing a swallow or two.
Amber cleared her throat, reached out and got her mug from Rafe. “The Denver Museum of Nature & Science opened a new exhibit yesterday.” She inhaled, then let her breath out. “Pirates.”
Rafe whooped and said, “Aarr!”
“It’s aimed primarily at children.” She tried to sound stern. But he picked her up and swung her around and she thought he was gaining strength, too. His magic was certainly leaking more from under the confining rune. Her mug tipped and fell from her grip.
And Hartha was there to catch any coffee that streamed from the cup, and Pred caught the mug, and Tiro crossed his arms. They all looked at her and Rafe with sad and brooding eyes.
She and Rafe arrived at the museum ready to view the pirates exhibit along with forty children and a few patient teachers. Since the exhibit was actually the salvage of a pirate ship, the first thing Amber saw as the escalator rose to the third floor was a large thing that looked like a meteorite with a trickle of water running over it. As a fountain it wasn’t very good.
She went over to look at the hunk of iron, delaying their entrance until the children were all seated in the movie program. The mass was a concretion, objects from the ship becoming embedded in sand, rock and whatever else might be lying around on the ocean floor. After three hundred years, they’d all cemented together. Above the concretion were digital X-rays of items that had been discovered in the conglomeration…gold dust, pistol balls, coins. Most of the lump was a dense gray, hiding other treasures.
“The film’s starting.” Rafe hustled over, frowned at the lump of stuff, twined her fingers with his and took her away.
She and Rafe didn’t do museums the same way. She was still in the first room, studying every artifact and reading information on the slave trade and the building of the ship, when he came back to her and muttered, “There isn’t one knife in the exhibit.”
“No?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “The closest thing I saw was an iron spike and it’s too small.” He looked at a picture of a boat stacked with bodies—slaves—and then glanced away.
“The museum is a big place, and this exhibit is late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, certainly not having the oldest artifacts in the place.”
“We passed a T-Rex on the way in,” he grumbled. “That’s plenty old.” Then his face lightened with a smile and he patted his jacket over the pocket that held
his small dowsing stick. “The big guy didn’t do anything for me.”
“You went through this place pretty fast, did you try—”
He lowered his voice. “The kids’ energy messes me up. It’s too volatile.”
“Then why don’t you actually look at the exhibit and the artifacts? I think it’s fascinating so far.”
Rafe grunted. “And this is just the slave part. The pirate stuff is better, they have mock-ups of one of the decks and the back cabin. Not to mention the dark room with water and lightning when the ship goes down.” He shuddered. Then he angled to see the portraits of the pirate crew—all good-looking men of different races, an artist’s conception of how the individuals might look. They appeared pretty damn romantic to Amber.
“Pirates,” she said lowly, hopefully temptingly. “Arr. This is your best bet to get easy, accurate information on pirates for the rest of your—” She stopped. She’d actually forgotten.
They stared at each other. She narrowed her eyes, spoke even lower. “Your…disability…is being overshadowed by your gift. At least to me.” A knot in her stomach twisted tighter as she admitted to herself that he—his energy and magic and strength—was so much more overwhelming to her than the curse. Was it as deadly? She was sure of it, but she didn’t sense it as much as she did the simple presence of her lover.
He angled and kissed her mouth, a fast press of lips, then those lips smiled. “It’s getting lighter, isn’t it? My disability.” His brows went up as punctuation of his pleasure. He lifted his arm and flexed a biceps. “I’m training, feeling better.” Again he patted his pocket. “In many ways.”
“Go pay more attention. I bet that if you stood near the entrance, they’d let you get one of the kids’ audio treasure-hunt deals.”
“Yeah, yeah. The treasure looks good.” Again he glanced around and his shoulders twitched. “This slave stuff is hard, though.”
“Very hard.”
“Tell me my guys weren’t into this.”
“What?” she asked.
“You’ve seen my ancestry time line.” He jutted his chin at a dated information board. “We came over to the new world pretty early. Tell me they didn’t do this sort of thing.”
She hadn’t studied his time line, but had recognized a few prominent names in it and could give him a truth. “I’m not an expert in the slave trade, but I never heard the name Davail in connection with it, and I’ve done quite a few traces that have bumped up against it. Anytime I work for a black family, it’s pretty much a given. But I’ll send an email to one of my contacts to make sure.”
“Appreciate it.” His mouth went grim again. “We were too busy living with the curse. Felt too trapped by our own circumstances to want to trap others.”
“That might be.”
He lifted and dropped a shoulder, stared at her. “I suppose you’re going to take your time here.”
She hated being rushed in an exhibit. “Yes. But the Egyptian mummies are right down the hall and we passed the gems and minerals gallery when we came in, you can look through there, too. It’s a pretty day. We’ll walk around the building outside, just in case your lost item is there.”
“Uh-uh.” He touched her cheek with tenderness. “I can stick. Folks think I can’t, but I can and I will.”
“All right.”
She read every plaque, looked at every object. The next time she caught up with him, he was hunkered in front of one of the cannons, peering down the muzzle. Now that she studied him, there appeared to be a pallor to his skin. He stood when she drew near, flipped a hand at the exhibit around her. “This didn’t end well for anyone.”
A woman gave them a dirty look as if she still hoped the pirates could escape doom.
“Shipwreck and lawless pirates,” Amber said. “No way there could be a good ending.”
Rafe took her fingers. “The historians make the case that there was more democracy and equal rights on the pirate ships.”
“Uh-huh,” Amber said. She stared at him, then shook her head. “No, I can’t see your family as slave traders.” She lifted her brows. “I could as pirates.”
He laughed as she’d meant him to, and when they went to the next room, he had more of a swagger in his step. But her words were all too true. Most of the pirates were men with nothing to lose.
By the time they were in the last room and staring at more concretions in aquariums, she was feeling a little depressed. No good ending for anyone except the salvager and history buffs. And their trip had been a bust, too.
They spent most of the morning at the museum, and Rafe picked up a brochure that showed the floor plans. He bought some iron pyrite, fool’s gold, for Amber as well as some fake doubloons for both of them and a book on the exhibit. They walked through the galleries and around the building until the wind came up and they returned to the car where Sizzitt was stretched on the dashboard, looking like a plastic figurine from an animated fantasy film. None of them talked on the way back, and Rafe dropped Amber off at home, then went on to the lyceum. Amber ran with the dogs, played with them, sent emails out on things she had to check, including Rafe’s question about the slave trade and her own curiosity about pirates.
She spent some time reading information on the Third Crusade in the twelfth century from scholarly volumes she’d loaded on her own tablet, then took the dogs for a walk down to the Sensitive New Age Bean.
The pups loved hanging out on the sidewalk and watching other dogs walk by. And they were trained well enough to focus on her inside rather than every passing, waving tail.
As soon as she got her coffee and turned toward the inner rooms, she sensed it.
It was just a little curse.
A cough.
Chapter 22
THE COUGHING CAME from a young woman Amber had often seen studying at that round table, big books open and scattered around and stacked atop each other.
Another cough, this one deeper in the chest, and longer.
Amber sensed that if the cough wasn’t taken care of, it would develop into something worse, something that could harm the girl for her entire life.
She should be in bed, not studying and abusing her body. Determination radiated from her.
Amber hesitated. But again there was a change for the worse in the balance. Right now the curse was small, but she felt it would become cumulative the more the girl fought it. And it was not a curse that had been laid with words and intent by someone with a lot of magic. That would make it easier to break. Someone with a little gift had thought ill thoughts at the girl before her. Literally.
With a curse this small—minor with growing consequences—only her strongest bonds with others would be affected, the golden ones with the pups. Right now, thankfully, her connection with Rafe was in flux, sometimes strong, sometimes vanishingly thin. And the dogs were in close proximity, too. That added. She’d have to close those links down as much as possible so she took the greater hit.
She wasn’t too surprised to see a small thread between herself and the girl…the medical student. Amber had spoken to her a couple of times, even shared a table when the coffee shop was packed. She didn’t think the girl recalled her name, and Amber didn’t remember hers, which was unusual because Amber liked knowing people and their names, whether she might have seen such names on any of her charts. But the student’s escaped her. The bond she had with the young woman would help in lifting the curse, not harm. When the curse was lifted, there would be no backwash of aging to the student.
If Amber were going to break the curse, best do it quickly. It wouldn’t cost her or the puppies much. Not enough to show.
And if she visualized her bonds with her dogs, as she’d learned to do much better in the last weeks, she could pinch it down to a thready mouse’s whisker. Take most of the aging consequences herself.
She glanced around the coffee shop. No one was paying attention to her. She moved so she was blocked from the view of everyone except the coughing student, if she turned around
. Amber set her mug of coffee down on a table and spread the fingers of both hands stiffly, reached for the little patch of mist floating in the girl’s chest and yanked, quick and hard.
The mist stretched, thinned, snapped and vanished. A huge cough racked the girl.
Amber felt all the cells in her body sag a little, a draining of her vitality, a bit more energy that was gone forever. Then a feeling of euphoria welled through her, and a lightening of the atmosphere around her, of the girl’s spirit, as the curse was broken and the shadow of it on her life lifted.
Going over to the student, Amber asked. “Are you all right?”
The young woman leaned back and wiped her sweatshirted arm across her beaded forehead, gave a soft groan. “Guess this will teach me to be more compassionate.”
“What?” Amber asked.
With a weary smile, the student said, “I had a friend who was sick a whole semester and couldn’t get her work done. I helped her, but wasn’t nice about it.” Another small smile that included a hint of self-disgust. “I really didn’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“That she could only do so much because she was sick.”
“She was doing the best she could,” Amber said.
Nodding, the young woman pulled out a tissue and honked into it. “Now I know.”
A tingle started in the soles of Amber’s feet, whisked up her whole body, and she knew. That had been the release for the curse. For the woman to understand what her friend was going through. Her sick friend had had a touch of magic to bind the girl.
“Are you still friends?” Amber asked.
“Not so much. She transferred out of state, is taking it easier at a less competitive school.” A pause. “Better for her, I understand that now. Guess I’ll email her an apology, though.”
“Always good to stay in touch with true friends.” But were the two of them that close? Not Amber’s problem and she shouldn’t interfere. She already had, and had used her major magic to break a curse, when just talking with the girl would have done that—hit the release point.
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