by Janet Tait
His eyes widened, for a moment, then they closed like the shutter of a camera.
“Quite a speech. But you’re on the Makris estate, inside our security grid. You aren’t going home until we let you.”
Her hand lashed out at him again. He stopped her before she’d swung halfway to his face. The shock jolted her already sore arm. Heat rushed through her body, burning her skin and making her muscles tremble.
She would not be his captive, held hostage against her father. There had to be some way out of this.
She didn’t know how to teleport. Oh, she knew the theory. Visualize your destination, fix it in your mind and hold it steady, then merge the symbol for the spell over the picture of where you want to go and tap out the spell. Sounded simple enough. But according to her uncle, not so easy. Make a mistake and she could materialize inside a wall. Or deep in the earth.
But even if she could teleport, she didn’t know how to break a teleport block. An operative learned to break a block, or a security specialist like Victor. Not a student like her.
But there might be another way.
Kate turned around, head down. Let him think she’d given up. She walked a few steps forward on the rocky ground. The less Kristof saw her do, the better. She blocked out the sea, the cries of the gulls, the pain in her head, her rib cage, everything except the power deep inside her.
Running down the staircase in her mind, she threw open the doors that held the power back. The vastness inside lunged toward her. It promised her so many things, if only she would let it out.
Later. I’ll deal with it later. Now, she wanted one thing. To leave.
She touched the dark power and sent her magic out. It searched the Makris’s security grid for the teleport block. There. The violet strands of the block entwined themselves all around the island, from the rocky shores of the beach to the top of the lonely white estate that capped the hill. Break a few strands, squeeze through the hole she’d made, and she’d be home.
Break, she willed.
The strands snapped as if they were guitar strings plucked by a too-rough hand. Two seabirds, fish in their beaks, plunged from the air and hit the ground, their lifeless bodies breaking on the rocks. Now. Quickly. Before he saw his spell had broken and fixed it.
She searched out the remnants of the teleport spell he’d used to bring them here. There, glowing bright orange in her magesight, the last few motes of energy swirling listlessly against the rocks.
She dipped down into that well of darkness again and threw its power into the remains of the teleport spell.
Home. She envisioned the foyer at their Hamptons estate, the black-and-white checkerboard pattern for incoming teleports, the little Queen Anne table, always topped with fresh flowers, the smell of freshly baked cookies from the kitchen. Home.
The sky brightened with a flash of light. A figure darted into view just inside the range of Kate’s vision. A rush of energy hit her, a burst of white light that surrounded her and caused her vision to blur and waves of dizziness to wash over her. Her teleport spell disintegrated, losing all her connection with the feel of home. The orange motes of the teleport spell fizzled and died.
Her head spun. A young woman only a few years older than Kate, with long brown hair trailing down the back of her green dress, strode toward her, light blazing from her outstretched hand. Is that Melina Makris? Kristof’s sister?
Kristof said something in Greek to his sister, then took a step toward Kate.
The woman’s eyes darkened, and she tapped out another spell. Before Kate could even think of willing a spell into existence, the pain in her head flared into an exquisite agony as a tight band of pressure flexed around her skull. The sky, the sea, the cries of the gulls, all faded into blackness. She fell to the ground and knew nothing more.
“Why? I had her under control. What made you—” Kristof rushed toward Kate.
“You had nothing under control,” Melina said. “She was seconds away from teleporting out.”
“She can’t. She’s a Null.” He bent down to check Kate’s pulse.
“I think she’s a little more than that. Your girlfriend broke our teleport block, using a spell I’ve never seen before. The security grid alerted me. When I got here, she had prepped a teleport spell.”
“That’s impossible.”
Melina regarded him with cool green eyes. “That’s what happened.” Her gaze flicked to the laptop bags. “I see you got the stone.” Her tone went cold.
Damn. He’d blown off their plan to hijack the stone so that he could save Kate from Dmitri. A waste of time—he could have left the rescue to her own people. Then he’d wrecked his plans further by coming home instead of taking Kate and the stone someplace secure, like his mother’s old house in Istanbul.
Returning home while under fire was a reflex drilled into him since childhood—the Makris estate had close to invincible shields. After casting so many spells, his paranoia about the Hamiltons had gotten the better of him. Damn, damn.
“We can still—” he began.
His father’s voice, from behind him. “I see you carried out the mission, my son.”
Kristof turned around slowly. His father stood on the beach, no bodyguards, only his ever-present shield protecting him, holding out his hand.
I could strike now. I have a chance, a small one.
He glanced at Melina. The brief shake of her head told him everything. He unslung the laptop bag from around his chest, handing it to his father. “Of course. That’s my job.”
I hope you choke on it, monster.
His father took the case containing the stone from the bag, then tossed the bag at Kristof’s feet. “We’ll discuss the mission later.” He nodded toward Kate. “Lock her up, Melina. With caster bonds.”
Kristof started. How did he know about Kate?
“Papa—”
His father stopped and turned his deep-pitted eyes on Kristof. “What?”
“We have the stone. We don’t need Kate. You should return her—”
“If your brain wasn’t so addled by the girl, you’d realize that she is far more than she appears. Perhaps the stone had something to do with making her a caster or perhaps Hamilton has been lying about her Null status all along. Until your sister figures out the answer, I’m not giving her back.”
“Holding her is against the Rules. Hell, you’re begging the Hamiltons to throw everything they have at us.”
“You brought her here. Deal with them.” His father turned and strode up the stone steps to the estate house.
When his father’s form had disappeared over the rise, Kristof yanked the remains of the monitor talisman from his shirt and dashed its broken form against the rocks.
Melina looked up from Kate’s unconscious body and frowned.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“Yes,” she replied. But her eyes said something more. They said he wouldn’t enjoy that conversation.
Kristof trudged up the wooden steps set into the hillside to the stone courtyard behind his father’s estate house. He didn’t have much time before his father got tired of admiring the stone and summoned him for a report. Minutes, perhaps. Not enough time to consider all the implications of Kate being a caster.
But he had an eternity to consider his monumental screwups. Bringing the stone with him instead of carrying out his and Melina’s plan. Grabbing Kate and teleporting home, like a first-time operative too tweaked to consider a better alternative. A strategic retreat may have been his only option, but he’d picked the worse possible location.
And what had brought him into such a fucked-up situation? Ah, yes. There was more than time enough to consider what he’d found in the tree house and stashed in his pocket. He reached inside and fingered the smooth surface of the pearl buttons ripped from Kate’s shirt.
He had business with Dmitri.
He rounded the courtyard and found his cousin lying on the floor of the columned portico at the rear of the house, where the
automatic retrieval spell in his talisman had brought him as soon as Kristof had taken down Victor’s teleport block. Still out cold. He bent down and gave Dmitri a hard slap.
Dmitri groaned and opened his eyes, blinking against the harsh sunlight.
“Wake up. We have things to discuss.”
“Are they gone? Did you get the stone? What happened?”
Kristof grabbed Dmitri by the front of his shirt, jerking him to his feet. Dmitri’s eyes still had a slight glaze to them—the aftereffects of the stun spell.
His hand tightened on Dmitri’s shirt. “You’re going to tell me exactly what you did. Leave nothing out.”
Pulling a struggling Dmitri with him, he walked off the intricate green-and-blue mosaic tiles that mirrored the frescoed ceiling and threw Dmitri down on the stone courtyard.
Kristof circled around his cousin, his hands fingering the pearl buttons in his pocket.
“Tell me. How did you lose a Null in under an hour? She bash you over the head with a bottle? Or did she scratch you with her nails?”
Dmitri got to his feet and brushed the dirt off of his jeans. His eyes held his customary sharpness—the glazed look was gone.
“She had help.”
“I told you she might. Was it too much for you to handle?”
“No. It wasn’t a problem. Dylan Pearce was there when I took her. I knocked him out, but he must have traced the teleport.”
Kristof stopped pacing. “That’s impossible. No one can trace a teleport through that many blind routings.”
“Pearce did.”
“How?”
“How should I know? I was busy dealing with the girl.” He leaned back against a stone column. “She put up quite a fight.”
“I told you not to hurt her.”
“Hey, I didn’t do anything. I just asked her if she wanted to play.” He smirked, then a frown settled on his face. “She wasn’t so enthusiastic about it.”
Kristof’s hand clenched around the buttons in his pocket.
“Then she pulled a nasty little trick and burned me. It must have been an incendiary device of some kind.” Dmitri shrugged. “Got me with my guard down. I wasn’t expecting a Null to fight back.”
“I bet you couldn’t handle it when she did.”
Dmitri’s cheeks flushed a deep scarlet. Then he took a step toward Kristof, hands balled into fists. Kristof locked his gaze on Dmitri, and Dmitri stopped. His cousin’s arms were red and blistered, even after whatever healing spell he must have done. Incendiary device? Not likely.
“So you tried to assault her and she burned you? Good for her. What happened next?”
The smirk crept back on Dmitri’s face. “I had to teach the little bitch a lesson, didn’t I?”
“What did you do to her?” Kristof’s fist spasmed.
“I gave her a taste of the latest version of my pain spell.” He chuckled. “She took it for longer than anyone else has. I wonder if it’ll leave permanent damage.”
A red haze fell over Kristof’s vision. His body moved of its own volition, his fist shooting forward and striking Dmitri in the face. He watched as Dmitri fell to the ground. Stepping forward, he grabbed his cousin’s shirt, lifting him up. His fist smacked Dmitri—two, three times, each impact a loud crack that echoed across the courtyard. He was aware, somewhere in the back of his mind, of Dmitri’s wildly flailing fists, his cries, his own bloody knuckles. He had no idea if any of Dmitri’s punches landed. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that the throbbing pain in his fist cleared his mind. The haze receded. He dropped Dmitri to the ground and backed away.
What the hell was he doing?
He stared down at Dmitri’s bruised and bleeding face. Shit. Dmitri would retaliate. And the retaliation wouldn’t stop. Unless Kristof made it clear, once and for all, who was fit to be heir.
“I gave you strict orders not to harm her. You disobeyed me.”
“I don’t care what you ‘told’ me to do. I don’t report to you.” Dmitri got up and wiped the blood from his mouth. A flicker of jade-and-silver energy crept around the edge of Dmitri’s hand, the cloaked spell barely visible to Kristof’s magesight. Kristof got his own spell ready, hiding it from Dmitri’s view.
“When you’re on a mission you do what you’re told. If you can’t follow orders, you’re useless. You might as well be a Null.”
Fire rose in Dmitri’s eyes, a split second before Dmitri let loose his spell. A ball of green-and-silver lightning struck Kristof, arcing off the bright-blue glow of the special, reflective shield that sprang into place around him.
The ball boomeranged to its maker. Dmitri screamed as his own pain spell hit him, his back arching in agony, hands clutching his head as his fingers tore at his eyes in anguish.
How long should I let Dmitri enjoy a taste of his own spell? A smile flashed across Kristof’s face. A long time. Just like he did to Kate.
A single pair of hands clapped three times, echoing through the walkways of the courtyard. Kristof spun around. His father, expressing his appreciation for Kristof’s brutality, his two bodyguards flanking him.
“Very nice, my son. Turn off the spell while your cousin still has a brain cell left.”
Kristof hesitated but a moment, then ended the spell with a snap of his fingers. Dmitri whimpered, a long, low sound.
“Now heal him.”
“No.”
“Perhaps you did not hear me, my son. Heal him. If you want your Hamilton girl healed.”
Kristof closed his eyes for a moment. Then he stepped to Dmitri, knelt, and took his head in his hands.
I could cave his head in with a kinetic punch. Or slice his throat open with a kinetic knife spell. No one could stop me. Not my father, his bodyguards, and not Dmitri.
Then he thought about Kate, suffering the aftereffects of Dmitri’s spell alone with Melina and whomever else his father had sent to watch her. He tapped out the healing spell. The warm, amber light flowed down from his hands into Dmitri’s head, and slowly, the moaning grew softer. When his magesight showed that Dmitri’s aura was in balance again, Kristof stopped.
“Leave him. Come and sit by me. We have much to talk about.” His father motioned to a pair of hovering servants to take Dmitri away.
Kristof obeyed, following his father to the portico. How much of my betrayal did he see through the talisman? Is he planning to have me killed, here, now? I should run while I can.
All that might be true, but the paranoia creeping through his head from the two spells he’d cast was spreading lies as well as truth. Papa wouldn’t kill him—yet. Not after he’d brought back the stone.
He sat across from his father on one side of a weathered cedar table. His fingers picked at its splintered edge, and he wondered how much the old man had seen through the monitor talisman, of Dmitri’s little game with Kate. He certainly hadn’t stopped it. Maybe he had even ordered it. His father could always let Dmitri take the fall for any charges the Hamiltons brought against them for the assault. But at the same time, his father had found a clever way to twist his knife even deeper into Kristof and watch him squirm.
His father tapped him sharply on the chest. “I’m disappointed in you. You risked the stone to go after the girl.”
Kristof straightened, smoothing his clothes back into place. He needed to spin events for his father, keep him as far away from the truth as possible. “I still hadn’t heard from Dmitri. The Hamiltons broke their word. They attacked me. I—”
“Yes, convenient how their attack shorted out my monitor talisman, wasn’t it? It isn’t like the Hamiltons to break a truce, especially when we have such a valuable hostage.” His father drummed his fingers on his chair and regarded Kristof. “Why didn’t you come straight here with the stone?”
“Dmitri missed his check-in. He hadn’t delivered Kate to the rendezvous. Something had to be wrong. I needed to—”
“Don’t try to convince me you were concerned for your cousin.”
“Dmitri’s re
cklessness could have sunk the entire mission.”
“How? You’d already gotten the stone. The girl didn’t matter after that, did she?”
Damn. He wasn’t even convincing himself with these excuses. “I’d given Grayson Hamilton my word to return Kate in exchange for the stone. I wasn’t going to let Dmitri break it for me.”
“Dmitri, Dmitri. This is not about Dmitri.” His father shook his head. “You led the mission. You were responsible. Ah, Kristof, you are learning, but not fast enough. What do I have to do to show you how to manage Dmitri? Look over there.” He pointed to where an unconscious Dmitri was being tended to by two servants. “Now, after today, he may respect you. You punished him when he disobeyed you. You have shown him you are faster, more brutal, than he is. That is what it takes to be a leader.”
Kristof stared down at the blood on his fist, then glanced over at Dmitri, still moaning in pain. How many times had it been Kristof laying on the stone floor, his father standing over him? No. Whatever that was, it wasn’t leadership.
“Despite your other errors in judgment, I am proud of how you handled Dmitri’s disobedience. You are finally understanding what it means to lead this family.” His father smiled, a smile that spread darkness from the sharp points of his teeth to the red pinpricks of light deep in his eyes. “It mitigates some of my concerns about you.”
He motioned to his servants. They swept in and set down a bottle of ouzo and two glasses, poured a splash of the clear liquid in each, and backed away. His father held up his glass.
“To success. May the Makris family always find it, and may the Hamiltons always lose it.” He drank and slammed his glass on the table.
Kristof picked up his glass. He downed it all in one shot. The liquor burned his throat and he struggled not to cough. But it cleared the rage from his head. He could no longer afford it.
“Today you succeeded, my son. Despite yourself. You took unnecessary risks. One mistake, one, and we would have lost everything.” His father slapped Kristof across the face, hard, the smack echoing across the portico.
Kristof took the hit, the pain stinging his cheek, and stared straight ahead, expressionless.