by Karen Chance
I squirmed uncomfortably, both because Sheba’s lazily twitching tail was ticklish, and because of Mac’s easy nonchalance about defying the Circle. “What’ll happen when they catch you?”
He shrugged. “Likely nothing. It won’t be a slap on the wrist and Bob’s your uncle, I’m back on the streets. But I know a trick or two. With a little luck, I should be able to convince them that John put me under a compulsion spell and forced me to help.”
“And if you’re not lucky?”
Mac grinned and patted me on the shoulder. “That’s why we’re going tonight. My old mates may not be happy to see me, but neither is likely to kill me. I pulled their nuts out of the fire a time or two—they owe me.”
“But the Circle—”
“You let me worry about them,” he said as Pritkin stuck a suspicious face through the curtain.
“What’s going on?” I saw him mouth before Mac dissolved the shield around us with an unobtrusive flick of his wrist.
“Finishing clogging our arteries,” Mac said cheerfully. “I’d ask you to join us, but I know you’ve stretched your rules once today.” He winked at me. “Never let John be in charge of the food, Cassie. He’ll poison you with wheatgrass and prune juice.”
“It’s better than the kind of thing you call food,” Pritkin said, but he disappeared back out front as if satisfied.
I ate a little more of my burger, but the grease had started to congeal, and anyway, I’d lost my appetite. I was tired of other people getting hurt because of me, and falling into the Circle’s hands definitely came under that category. Maybe people did owe Mac a few favors, but would it be enough? What if they tortured him to find out what he knew about me? I wouldn’t put it past them, old soldier or no. I felt sick again, a combination of the type of food I’d consumed, nerves and worry. Mac didn’t seem to have that problem, and ultimately finished off my burger himself.
I wandered back out front to find that Pritkin was loaded for bear. The mass of weapons was gone, but he didn’t appear any more weighed down than usual. I realized why when I saw him clipping some very unusual charms to a link bracelet. “Iron,” he explained as he fastened it around his wrist. “It saps Fey energy, tears through their defenses like silver does to a were.”
“I didn’t peg you for the jewelry type,” I said, although I’d pretty much figured out what he’d done. Not even a homicidal mage wears a charm bracelet with tiny machine guns, rifles and what looked suspiciously like a grenade launcher dangling from it. The latter was especially telling, since he’d pulled a life-size model out of his sack earlier.
“I shrank them,” he said impatiently. “It’s the only way to carry that much weight for any distance.”
“I thought you said our stuff doesn’t work there?”
“I said our magic may not work properly, if at all. This”—Pritkin tapped the Colt on his belt—“isn’t magic. And it’s loaded with iron bullets. Speaking of which, here.” He gave me a long coat that almost matched his own. “Put that on.”
I took it from his outstretched hand and almost collapsed to the floor. It felt like it was lead lined. After a minute, I realized that was pretty much the truth. The added weight came from boxes and boxes of bullets of every conceivable caliber that had been stuffed into the coat’s many pockets.
“You have got to be kidding,” I said, dropping the thing on the floor. It landed with an audible thud. “I won’t be able to run in that! I doubt I could walk in it!”
“You won’t be running.” Pritkin picked it up and stuffed it back in my arms. “We would never outrun the Fey on their own turf, so we won’t try. If we come across any and they’re hostile—”
“And they will be,” Mac put in, emerging from behind the curtain. He had a small backpack into which he put the contents of my duffle and, with a wink, a couple of beers.
“Then we stand our ground and fight,” Pritkin finished. “Running is a waste of time and would play into their hands if it separated us. No matter how grim a battle seems, don’t panic.”
“Of course not. I’ll stand my ground while they mow me down.” I was struggling into the hot leather and feeling cranky.
Pritkin checked his shotgun and, for the first time since our incident, he met my eyes. “If you’re with me, you won’t die,” he said. He sounded so certain that, for half a second, I believed him.
I swallowed and broke eye contact. “Why can’t you shrink my stuff, too?”
“Because I am not entirely certain that the reverse spell will work in Faerie, so I am carrying both shrunken backup weapons and regular-sized primaries. Your ammunition is for the primaries.”
I was busy trying to sort through my emotions, which ranged from pissed off to terrified, so it wasn’t until we stepped outside that I remembered our wild ride. Freakish though it had been, it actually ranked pretty far down the list of weird things that had happened to me lately. “How did we get here?” I asked Mac.
“I took a short cut,” he said, pulling a wide-brimmed hat over his bald head. He turned around and tapped the blank square that decorated his knee. I stared at the very odd sight of a tattoo parlor sitting all alone in the middle of the desert, just before I was treated to the even odder one of it folding in on itself and winking out of sight entirely. Mac grunted and examined his leg, where a miniature version of the front of the shop, complete with bright neon sign reading MAG INK, had appeared. It fit perfectly into the bare spot I’d seen earlier.
The little sign on the tattoo flashed on and off just like the real thing. After a second, I realized that it was the real thing. “We’ve spent the whole afternoon inside one of your wards?” I asked incredulously.
“Right in one,” Mac said. “My shop goes wherever I do.”
“What do you do? Pick out an empty lot and then, bam! New retail location?”
He grinned. “Something like that.”
“What about zoning? What about pedestrians walking by and all of a sudden, there’s a building? What about the cops?”
“What about them? Norms can’t see it, Cassie, any more than they can one of the tattoos.” He took my arm companionably. “You’ve got to realize that the so-called magic you’ve seen all your life is only the tip of the iceberg. Those sad bastards the vamps use for warding and such are the bottom of the barrel. If they had any real talent, whatever issues got them disavowed would have been overlooked or they’d have been chastised and put back to work. Or, if it was something truly heinous, they’d have run off and joined the Dark—only even they won’t take screwups. The type that ends up working for vamps are those with only enough magic to qualify as menaces—to themselves and everyone else. They couldn’t do a complex spell if their lives depended on it. You stick with us, and you’ll see some real magic.”
Pritkin stopped and took something out of his pocket. “Good idea,” he commented, and a second before he did it, I knew what was going to happen. It wasn’t a Seeing, just my kind of luck. The idiot was going to cast the mystery rune.
I hit the dirt and tried to drag Mac down with me, but my feet got tangled in the hem of the heavy coat and I had to let go of him to break my fall. I scraped my palms on rock-hard dirt, and the pain and subsequent struggle to free myself from the leather distracted me for a few seconds. There was a flash of light and a popping noise, like a very large champagne cork. When I looked up again, Pritkin and Mac were gone.
Although I could see a good distance in every direction, there wasn’t so much as a shred of cloth or a footprint to show that they’d been there. I felt around with my senses, but there were no unusual vibrations. That was almost as strange as the disappearance—a major magical object had just been set off, yet there wasn’t so much as a metaphysical ripple for miles. The only thing I could pick up was the slight buzz of MAGIC’s wards off to the northwest.
I didn’t understand it. If the rune had killed Pritkin and Mac—even if it had vaporized their bodies—I should be able to see their spirits. And, so far, I coul
dn’t. After walking a large circle around where the mages had vanished and coming up with nothing, I turned my attention to my own position. It wasn’t good.
I was miles from Vegas with no food, water or transportation. Worse, the only nearby source of those things was MAGIC, where half the people hunting me currently resided. Breaking in by myself would have been daunting, even if Billy had been there to help. But he, like the mages, was currently a no-show. That thought started me worrying that perhaps the rune could destroy ghosts, too, and that was why I couldn’t see Pritkin or Mac’s spirits. I shied away from that concept quickly when I began to shake. Billy was a royal pain, but he’d been with me through some pretty crazy times. It was hard to think about being truly alone, without a single person I could claim as an ally—not even a dead one.
The only good news was that I was wearing enough ammunition to wage a small war. Unfortunately, I’d have to drive off my enemies by throwing it at them, because I didn’t have a gun. Pritkin hadn’t offered to share, and my own Smith & Wesson was in my purse, which Mac had stuffed into the backpack—a backpack he had been holding.
I was watching a gorgeous desert sunset with rising panic when I noticed something small and dark in the sky. It was only a tiny spec highlighted by the rays of the setting sun, but it was getting bigger fast. I barely had time enough to think that Mac had been right, it did remind me of Oz, before the thing grew so huge that it blotted out what was left of the sun. I hit the ground, huddling inside the thick coat while my brain flashed on an image of me lying under Dorothy’s farmhouse, with only my dead legs sticking out. Too bad I’d lost the shoes from Dante’s; they’d have been perfect.
My inner monologue began to babble as something huge hit the ground nearby with a bone-shaking thud. A hail of rocks and dirt rained down on me, and my brain lost it. It was hysterically insisting that getting crushed to death wouldn’t be fair—I was only a slightly bitchy clairvoyant, not a wicked witch—when the dirt storm finally passed.
I peered out from inside the coat, but there were no Munchkins or yellow brick roads in sight. Yet there was a house. It took my dust-filled eyes a few seconds to realize that the structure sitting so incongruously on the desert sand wasn’t a rogue Kansas farmhouse but an urban tattoo parlor, with its neon sign flashing as cheerfully as Mac’s grin.
I was lying in the dirt, shaking, when the door burst open and Pritkin and Mac ran out. They looked pretty forbidding, but then Mac caught sight of me, gave a whoop and sped over to pick me up and spin me around in a circle, lead-lined coat and all. “Cassie! Are you all right? You had us so—”
“Where the hell did you two go?” I was sobbing and half hysterical, so relieved that I felt weak and simultaneously as mad as hell. I hit him in the chest and, although I doubt it hurt much, his eagle screeched and pecked viciously at my hand. I shrieked and tore away, ending up back in the dirt. I had just been attacked by a painted bird that was not now and never had been real. Despite my afternoon crash course on advanced wards, it didn’t seem possible, but it was hard to argue with evidence that hurt that much. Then Sheba woke up and things went from bad to worse.
I felt the unwelcome fur ball stretch along my lower back and, when Mac bent over to help me up, she flowed along my torso and down my arm. I looked in surprise at the line of bright red that suddenly appeared on his forearm. Despite the size of her paw, the gash it left behind was three inches long and deep enough to need stitches. Even worse, I had no idea how to call Sheba off.
Pritkin jerked me away from his friend and sent me staggering, releasing his hold quickly before Sheba could get her claws into him. His lips were thin with anger. “Stop it, both of you! Before you activate the wards for real and tear each other apart!”
I looked down at my hand, which now sported a painful two-inch gash, and gulped in enough air to say, “For real?” How much worse did they get? I don’t know what else I might have said, but I glimpsed Billy over Pritkin’s shoulder and temporarily forgot everything else. I pointed a trembling finger at him. “Where were you? It’s almost dark and MAGIC is right over there!”
“Calm down, Cass—it’s okay. Everything’s fine, but you need to get a grip or your new pet is going to do some serious damage.”
“My ward didn’t flare.” I stared at Mac, who was busy healing his wound. Lucky him—I’d wear mine for a while. Yet, although it was Mac who was bleeding, it was Pritkin who was glowering at me. That was so unfair it was breath-taking, considering that all of this was his damn fault.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Mac said. “It’s a bit more advanced than those. It’s designed to sense intent, and I didn’t mean you any harm.” He had managed to stop the blood flow, but a raw red weal remained behind to mark his skin, leaving a gap in the leaves that they brushed against but couldn’t cross. “I’m sorry, Cassie—I shouldn’t have grabbed you. But when you disappeared we—well, we didn’t know what had happened.”
So they’d thought I was dead, too. Mac’s confession that he, at least, had been worried helped me calm down—that and the fact that I wasn’t about to face an ambush alone. “I’ve been right here,” I told him shakily. “You two are the ones who disappeared. Where did you go?”
“You were aware that we were gone?” Pritkin asked with a frown. He glanced at Mac. “We were wrong, then.”
“Not necessarily.” Mac looked at me keenly. “Maybe time displacements don’t affect her like the rest of us. That could be why she didn’t come along for the ride even though she was as close to you as I was.”
“You went somewhere in time?” What, could anybody do it anymore?
“We think that thing”—Mac gestured at the rune Pritkin still held in his fist—“is a do-over.”
“A what?”
“It carries the caster back in time about twenty minutes. So if you get in a tight spot, you cast it and have a chance to redeem a mistake.”
I sent Pritkin a less-than-friendly glance. “Something that might have been very useful where we’re going.”
“I’m sure it will be,” he commented, tucking it out of sight inside his coat.
I would have reminded him that the rune was mine, except that he would almost certainly have replied that I’d just stolen it first. I glanced at Billy and nodded slightly toward the mage. He floated over while I started an argument to distract Pritkin. “Well, it’s useless now, at least for a month.”
“We could not risk employing it without first learning what it does,” Pritkin insisted, his eyebrows drawing together in their usual expression. “If it has not been used in as long as we think, it should be possible to cast it again soon.”
“But you don’t know that,” I pointed out angrily. “You can leave rechargeable batteries plugged in as long as you want, but they only hold one charge. Maybe the rune works the same way.”
“Permit me to think that I know a little more about magical artifacts than you,” Pritkin replied with disdain as Billy slipped an insubstantial-looking hand into his pocket. A few seconds later, my rune floated out as if levitated. It made its way to me and I surreptitiously pocketed it. “I am reasonably certain it will work,” the mage added. “Now, if you have finished having hysterics, we should be going.”
I said nothing but retrieved the backpack from Mac and took out my gun. It was fully loaded, but I checked it anyway. Pritkin’s lips thinned out even more as he watched; pretty soon he wasn’t going to have any at all. He obviously didn’t like the idea of my carrying a weapon—maybe he was afraid I’d shoot him in the back—but he refrained from comment.
He struck out across the desert and I followed. Mac and Billy Joe trailed after us as soon as the mage again absorbed his mobile business. Not a word was said for half an hour, until the dim outline of MAGIC spread below us.
The complex is designed to look like a working ranch, just in case any norms with a little talent wander by and manage to see through the perimeter wards. But it’s centered in a canyon with high si
des, far away from any tourist facilities, so that isn’t likely. Not to mention that there are all kinds of metaphysical KEEP OFF signs everywhere, starting about a mile out, that make norms very uncomfortable.
The starlight had turned the landscape into something like the moon’s surface—all mysterious dark craters and endless silver sand. MAGIC itself was dark and quiet, with all the external lights off and no movement among the buildings. It looked like whatever was happening tonight was taking place underground.
I collapsed onto a relatively rock-free piece of sand while Mac and Pritkin debated approaches. The hike had been a bitch. I’d stumbled through the growing darkness, stubbing my toe about every fourth step and falling on my face twice. The coat kept getting tangled around my legs and made me feel like I was carrying another person on my back. I’d been too busy lately for regular gym visits and it showed. Running for my life was obviously not giving me enough exercise.
“Is he in there?” Billy asked, hovering a few feet off the sand.
I hugged the coat around me, grateful for its thickness now that the desert had started to cool off. “I don’t know.”
“Want me to check it out?”
“No.” If Mircea was there, I didn’t want to know. With luck, we’d escape into Faerie before he figured out that I’d been crazy enough to drop by.
“Is your ghost here?” Pritkin interrupted to ask. He surprised me by being cautious for once—maybe the idea of breaking into MAGIC scared even him. He had Mac describe his guard friends to Billy, who agreed to go see whether anyone had changed the duty roster unexpectedly. He streamed off across the sand, quickly becoming invisible against the night. In the meantime, we waited.
Once upon a time, when I was a child reading fairy tales, I’d ached to have my own adventures. Not that I’d wanted to be some drippy heroine languishing in a tower, awaiting rescue. No, I’d wanted to be the knight, charging into battle against overwhelming odds, or the plucky country lass who gets taken on as the apprentice to a great wizard. As I got older, I’d found out the hard way that adventures are rarely anything like the books say. Half the time you’re scared out of your mind, and the rest you’re bored and your feet hurt. I was beginning to believe that maybe I wasn’t the adventurous type.