by Lila Dubois
“Call me the instant you know more.”
“Of course.” Tray ended the call and stood. He’d book the flight when he got there, and if he had to, he could sleep on the floor of the airport. He had a fresh go bag stuffed in a filing cabinet in the corner of his office, so he didn’t even need to stop by home on the way.
Slinging the long strap of the bag over his shoulder, Tray looked around his spartan office, gave his desk chair a loving pat, and left.
Iris met him by the elevator. “You’re still here?” she asked. “I thought you were flying to Montana.”
“That would have been a waste of time.”
Iris arched one black brow. “Oh?”
“Yes. Sarah is brilliant, suggested we do some preliminary work before booking. I found video of Harris Barclay being loaded onto a private plane and flown to California. I’m going directly there.”
Iris frowned. “You’re not going to the site of the kidnapping?”
“No. Why would I?”
“You might need to know what the kidnapper is capable of. What if they’re a practitioner?”
Dixon Securities had developed several tools over the years to help with the detection of magic. The tools were delicate enough that they could sense residual magic up to a week old.
Tray shook his head. “It would just be a waste of time. If the kidnapper were a practitioner, we would know. Harris will try and use his magic to escape, and if the kidnapper were a witch…” Tray spread his fingers wide in an explosion motion.
A second too late he realized what an ass he was.
Iris cleared her throat. “Something horrible would happen if he did that and the kidnapper was a practitioner.” She tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace. “You make a good point, cousin.”
It was only with a valiant effort of will that he was able to stop from staring at the black streak in her hair. He mashed the down button. “I’m going to fly to San Francisco. I’ll rent a car in the morning and drive up to the small airport the jet flew into. With any luck I’ll be able to escort Harris Barclay home tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll be back by tomorrow night, Saturday morning at the latest.”
The elevator doors opened, and he stepped in, shooting his cousin a small salute with two fingers.
Her hair stirred in an unseen breeze. “There are ways to hide power. Please be careful.”
The doors closed before he could respond.
Chapter 6
Nim swallowed, trying to force down the knot of fear in her throat. Harris was powerful. Really powerful. More powerful than she’d imagined. She’d assumed that his attack with the wheat had been strong because he’d been reacting to a threat, and emotions could add power to magic.
Now she suspected that surprise had actually weakened his attack, because the magic he could call when he was working was awe-inspiring.
The forest glowed, as if the veins that ran through the trees and plants were made of those flexible glow necklaces. The lights were brightest in the plants closest to him, and the biggest trees were, ever so slightly, leaning toward him. She could see all this even though she was wearing the dampener. It was a truly awesome display of magic.
He’d pulled off his shirt an hour ago and knelt half-naked in the middle of the forest, the last rays of the sun beating down on him. His glistening skin and the power that radiated off him made him glow like a god of old. She’d heard the stories, that the pantheons of old gods had really been the most powerful of her ancestors. She got her coloring from ancestors who had been members of the various Eel River Athapaskan tribes that had inhabited these lands for thousands of years. When the first European practitioners had arrived in the magic-dense land that was now Humboldt County, they’d kidnapped the powerful female practitioners, and killed the powerful males. Through rape and forced marriage, the various tribes had interbred with the new white settlers. Many native peoples were wiped out by disease and war, their magic all but gone. The women of Nimue’s coven had kept the old stories alive, passing on the tales of native gods who were practitioners so powerful they became legends and lived for a thousand years.
Looking at Harris made her appreciate just how easy it would have been to start thinking of the most powerful of their kind as gods.
His eyes were open, burning bright gold. As the sun dipped low enough that the verdant forest blocked its light, his eyes glowed more brightly.
He was murmuring in a language she didn’t understand. Many powerful covens had their own languages, a relic of the time when spells were guarded like gold. If a rival coven couldn’t read a spell, they couldn’t use it. Some of her coven’s spells used words and phrases in various dialects of the Wailaki language.
Harris’s hands were dug into the soil, and the roots of the closest cannabis plants had risen and stretched until they crossed under his circle and touched his hands. She could see the glow of the roots through the two inches of dirt that lay atop them. Even the earth was glowing brightly in response to Harris’s working.
She’d stayed on her rock for most of the day, jumping off only to trek back up the hill to her bunker to get them food and drinks. After several hours wearing the dampener, she hadn’t been able to stand the throbbing in her leg anymore, so when she came back after lunch she brought a plastic bag, covered the rock with it, and then sat on it. Instead of fastening a dampener in place, she clenched the pendant tight in her fist, one sharp edge piercing the skin of her palm. The plastic was a backup measure to keep her from touching the rock and accidentally calling magic if her grip faltered.
She was breaking one of the oldest cabal laws—she should be at least a mile away. Holding tightly to a small bit of meteor was not nearly as safe as buckling on a meteorite studded belt or anklet.
But it had worked, keeping her own power muted so there was no interaction and resulting catastrophic event. She’d be able to watch with growing trepidation as Harris poured power into his casting, every living thing around them glowing in response.
The lights within the plants and trees began to dim, fading from the farthest items first, until there was a small core of growing plant matter around him. Harris pulled his hands from the soil and sat back on his heels, tipping his face to the darkening sky.
His naked upper body, roped with muscle and damp with sweat, glistened in the green glow of the plants he’d grown to form his circle. As his power continued to recede, the healthy green luminescence in the cannabis disappeared, showing the sickly grey-yellow glow of the blight.
Nim made a noise of distress low in her throat. Damn it, she thought he’d gotten rid of it, but the blight was still there. It actually looked worse—misshapen blobs of blight clung to the base of the cannabis plants closest to where Harris knelt, like pulsing grapefruit-sized blisters. She suppressed a gag and averted her gaze.
Maybe he was using his power to worsen the blight, as revenge for the kidnapping. That was a possibility she’d considered, but from what she’d learned of Harris, he didn’t seem like the type of man to do that. She’d assumed he would either stubbornly refuse to help her, or help her for the sake of the plants.
Whatever he’d done, it had wiped him out. His posture spoke of exhaustion. He’d rolled forward, braced on his hands and knees, his head hanging with exhaustion.
Nim was overcome with a need to feel Harris’s power, to taste it. She released the pendant. As soon as she did her passive field sprang up, and she could feel his magic in the air, like a change in bariatric pressure. If she’d been in San Francisco that feeling would have been her warning that another practitioner was nearby, and to be extra vigilant that she didn’t use any magic.
This was a bad idea.
Nim carefully gathered up some of the plastic bag, and then placed her bare foot on the stone, sending out a needle-thin spike of inquiry. It was a minuscule amount of magic, so small that it might not have even been enough to travel through the rock and reach the soil.
The earth rumbled, and for a momen
t the soil glowed a bioluminescent mahogany and gold, the ground-level aurora borealis springing up and drowning out the fading green of Harris’s magic.
Harris jumped to his feet, shaking his hands as if they’d been burned where they touched the ground.
“Sorry!” She jerked her foot up and clenched her hand tight around the pendant.
Her heart hammered in her throat. That should not have happened. It was like lighting a match, but instead of a single small flame the result was a grenade going off.
“It’s okay.” He sounded weary, and when he turned there were lines bracketing his mouth and he was squinting, though that might have been because of the gathering darkness. “It didn’t hurt. Just surprised me.”
“It didn’t hurt?”
“No. It felt…” Harris’s words trailed off and he swayed side to side.
Nim leapt off the rock and dashed toward him. At the last minute she remembered to tuck her hands into her sleeves before touching him. She wrapped her arms around his waist, careful to keep her bare cheek away from his deliciously naked chest.
“Don’t fall, don’t fall,” she pleaded.
“Tired. Need sleep.”
“Sleep and food, I know.” Nim looked up the slope of the hill, clicking her teeth together as she thought.
“Just bring me a blanket,” he muttered.
“If you were planning on passing out, that would make this easier.”
“Make what?” Harris wrapped his arm around her, leaning on her heavily enough that Nim had to bend her knees and brace herself. The soil under her feet firmed, pushing back, helping her.
She clenched her teeth, realizing a moment too late that she’d unthinkingly used her power.
But there was no reaction. That made no sense, unless…
“You’re drained?” she asked him.
“Mmmm,” he replied.
“Okay, good. Good. That will make this easier.” If he’d exhausted his magic, however temporarily, she could use her own. Though that didn’t explain the wild flare of magic she’d experienced when she sent out a little pulse of inquiry.
“Don’t panic, I’m going to get you back to the bunker,” she told him.
“Now that you said ‘don’t panic,’ I sort of want to panic, but I’m too tired.”
“Take a deep breath.”
“Why?”
The glow of magic as she gathered power in preparation for the spell blinded her. The moonlight-white glow of her magic shone from her eyes, obscuring her field of vision.
“Goddess.” Harris breathed the word.
A moment later Nim finished forming the spell in her head, crafting the power in a clear image of what she wanted and how the earth should behave. The magic, spindled inside her until even her skin began to glow, rushed out of her, through the tips of her fingers and the soles of her feet.
The earth under Harris’s feet opened, as if a sinkhole the exact width of his shoulders had suddenly formed. He looked at her, horror writ large on his face, and then he disappeared, sucked down into the earth.
Nim turned and started up the path to the crest of the valley wall.
* * * *
“I said I was sorry.”
“You… You…” Harris stalked toward Kim, with every intention of shaking her. She looked lovely and deceptively nonthreatening this morning, in a long black wrap dress. Idiot that he was, he’d stared at the knotted sash that held the dress closed, wondering how long it would take to untie it.
The same idiotic impulse had him thinking that it might be better to kiss her than to strangle her. He hadn’t forgotten that they’d both admitted to desiring a kiss. She wasn’t using dampener and he could feel her passive magic pulsing around her, a presence in the air that could be felt and not seen, different to the feeling of another Saol practitioner’s, but now he recognized it.
He stopped a foot in front of her, raised his hands, and pantomimed strangling her, then turned and walked away.
He’d woken up an hour ago back in the deliciously comfortable bed. He’d sat straight up, gasping for breath, his last clear memory of being sucked down into the earth. A moment later there’d been a knock on the door and she’d peeked her head in before nudging the door open with a hip. She’d brought him a tray of breakfast—lovely fruits, cheese, hardboiled eggs, and coffee. Apparently she trusted him enough to let him near uncooked plant products like apples.
Even the presence of apple seeds and coffee hadn’t been enough to distract him from the fact that she’d had the earth swallow him whole the night before.
Or that she had the power to do it.
“Why?” He stalked back to the bed and sat on it.
Kim walked to the small table where she’d set the tray. She picked it up and brought it over to him, holding it out in front of her. “You need to eat. Last night you were so tired I couldn’t get you to wake up to eat dinner.”
“Maybe I’d fallen into a self-protective coma from the horror of being buried alive.”
She rolled her eyes. “You weren’t buried alive.”
He clenched his hair in both hands. “You are maddening.”
With a sigh she set the tray down on the bed beside him, picked up a chunk of apple, and pressed it against his lips. He opened his mouth to tell her that force-feeding him fruit wasn’t going to make him forgive her, but the motion made the apple slip between his front teeth, and as it did, her fingers pressed against his lips.
The earth moved. Literally.
Below them the concrete floor of the bunker rolled, as if they were on a ship.
He expected her to jerk back, so he held still, but she didn’t move. She was staring at his lips, and instinct told him that she was thinking about his lips the same way he’d been thinking about hers. Harris let his gaze roam over her, from the V of her dress, over the not-currently-in-use dampening pendant , up her slender neck to her face.
Their gazes met and held.
The earthquake stopped. Everything stopped. The air around them condensed, as if it were no longer air, but rather crystal-clear amber trapping them forever in this moment. He no longer needed to breathe, and his heartbeat slowed until it stopped.
Her eyes widened, her expression mirroring what he was feeling.
They sprang apart, Kim jumping backwards while he fell back onto the bed.
The world started up again, the air once again just air, his heart beating like it should.
“What was that?” she gasped.
“I didn’t do that. You did.”
“I did not,” she protested.
“Oh really? You just kidnap people and bury them alive, you don’t stop time to try and kill them?”
“Stop time? Is that what that was?” She rubbed the heel of her hand along her breastbone, and as she did so the neckline of her dress shifted, exposing more of her skin.
“You’re not denying burying me alive,” he pointed out.
Kim threw her hands in the air. “I couldn’t carry you back here! The earth transported you for me, that’s all. You were too heavy, and you’d taken off your shirt, so I would have ended up touching you. I didn’t think that was a good idea, and I couldn’t stand to wear the dampener anymore.”
“Oh.” That hadn’t occurred to him. He shouldn’t have worked himself to the point that he hadn’t been able to stand, let alone hike back to her little bunker. He’d pushed himself too hard in his determination to figure out what that blight was. When he’d finally pulled himself out of the working, he’d been shocked to see it was nearly sunset. The coming night had probably been what had stopped him, as sunrise and sunset were instinctive barriers and markers in magical castings.
Then the entirety of what she’d said sank in. “Wait, you had the earth move me?”
She blinked, then grimaced before she smoothed her expression. “Well, not really. I mean, I just had the…”
“No.” He held up a hand. “You’re lying. And not just about that.”
He coul
d tell she was trying to keep her expression neutral, but she failed. He could see the fear in her eyes.
Rather than answer, he picked up pieces of apple off the duvet and put them back on their plate. They’d slid off when he threw himself back on the bed. Luckily she hadn’t yet opened the thermos of coffee. Deciding it was his turn to torment her, Harris took his time, making himself a little breakfast plate and pouring a cup of coffee.
She watched him with her arms folded. “Enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” He sipped and smiled.
“If you weren’t so cute, you’d be annoying.”
She thought he was cute?
“If you weren’t so villainous, you’d be sexy,” he shot back.
“Villainous?”
“Kidnapping. Torture…”
“Torture? Seriously?”
“Yep.”
“Stop being such a baby.”
“You buried me alive.”
“For like thirty seconds. Did you die?”
He set down his cup, raised his hands, and once more pantomimed strangling her.
She tipped her head to the side and raised one eyebrow. “Did. You. Die?”
The urge to grin like an idiot and laugh had him nearly forgetting the important thing he wanted to talk to her about. She was a stranger. A dangerous stranger, and yet he wanted to tease her, watch a movie with her, pick out bathroom tile…
He finished his cup of coffee and set it aside. Bracing his hands on his knees, he leaned forward, staring at her intently. “Tell me about the curse.”
The color drained from Kim’s face. She swallowed once, opened her mouth as if she were going to speak, then turned and fled.
Whoa. That was not the reaction he’d been expecting.
Harris jumped to his feet and raced after her.
*
Nim ran from him. Ran not because he’d figured it out, though that was certainly a problem. She ran because for a few moments when they’d been teasing each other, bantering back and forth, she’d forgotten about the curse. She’d forgotten she had less than six months to live. Less than six months to figure out how to use her own death and the magic she’d been storing in the well to end the curse. It was the only way to save her sister, who would inherit the curse when Nim died.