“Paisley,” I called softly.
Nothing happened.
I snorted, pulling the ginger snaps out of my jacket pocket. I unwrapped the cookies, lining them up on the side of the cargo bed of Lani’s pickup truck one at a time, deliberately pausing between each one.
Magic shifted as I set down the third cookie. “Paisley,” I said, quietly but firmly. “Time to come home.”
Paisley — blue-furred and the size of a massive pit bull — landed in the back of Lani’s pickup, rocking the entire vehicle.
“Jesus Christ!” Lani shouted, whirling around to look through the back window.
“That was unnecessary,” I said chidingly.
Paisley snorted, her breath coming out in a huff of white. Then she padded over to press her nose into the crook of my neck, chortling slobber all over me. I stepped away, shaking my head at her. She inhaled the ginger snaps — literally — as I pivoted to climb back into the vehicle.
“Are you okay with Paisley riding in the back?”
“As long as you can talk Jenni out of slapping us with a ticket,” Lani said teasingly, then instantly sobered. “I’ll drive slowly. And I doubt there will be many other vehicles out in this snow.”
Paisley prowled back into the center of the cargo bed, lifting her gaze to the second floor of the hotel. Ruwa was standing in a window to the right of one of the balconies directly above the SUV, curtain pulled back in one hand. A smile slowly curled over her face as she swept her gaze over me.
I paused, one foot in the pickup truck, standing out against the snow in my black Gore-Tex jacket and yellow gumboots. At least I wasn’t currently carrying the pink umbrella. The smirking sorcerer raised her free hand, wiggling her fingers. It might have been a wave, but it looked a lot like she was dismissing me.
I climbed all the way into the truck, closing the door and holding the last two ginger snaps in the napkin out to Lani. She took one, biting down on it as she started the truck. Her gaze was also glued to the second floor of the hotel. She touched the gas lightly and without comment, though.
Isa Azar opened the sliding door of the neighboring suite, stepping out onto the tiny patio with his hand raised and his gaze on us.
Lani took her foot off the gas.
“Go,” I said quietly. “Please.”
She pulled out of the spot, then exited the parking lot, heading back through town. The windshield wipers were working overtime to keep the snow cleared from the window.
“The woman?” Lani finally asked. “Is she here for Aiden as well?”
“I don’t know. She might be with Isa.”
“Separate rooms, though.”
I nodded. I had noticed that as well. I glanced back at Paisley in the bed of the truck. The demon dog had tucked herself up against the window, looking back the way we’d come.
“Could be that this Isa guy just likes his space, or she does,” Lani continued, musing over the puzzle she’d just been presented. “Could be she’s someone who his brother thinks Aiden might listen to. If they’re concerned about him. Relapsing or whatnot.”
“Could be.”
She glanced at me but quickly returned her attention to the road. The traffic was lessening as the storm took hold of the town. The roads were actually just tire tracks through the snow now, despite the liberal layers of salt and sand that the district had dumped on them. “She’s something to look at. But she can’t hold a candle to you.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said quietly.
“Right … I just mean … she’s gorgeous. Ironically in the same way that Aiden is. Deadly gorgeous, soul-sucking gorgeous. But I don’t even have to exchange a single word with her to know who she is, what she is. Nasty business.”
“We’re not all just composed of our exterior layers.”
“Please,” Lani snorted. “I mean, that demeaning wave? Ridiculous opinion of herself. And though I haven’t really seen you and Aiden together very much, he came to you when he needed someone the most. He chose you.”
Aiden hadn’t, though. Not in the way Lani was suggesting, but I understood what she meant. “It’s not a competition, Lani.”
“Of course not. But if it was, you’d win hands down.”
“I also don’t know what that means.”
She threw her head back and laughed.
Paisley raised her snout and howled into the thick flurries currently attempting to obscure the sky and all the surrounding buildings.
Lani flinched. But then she laughed again.
I was dreaming.
I knew that without question the moment I opened my eyes, the moment I felt the intensity of the spell pinning me in place. I heard chanting. As I had once before. Multiple voices in a range of pitches.
Sorcerers.
I’d been in this situation before, had felt this magic. Then I’d destroyed this magic, turning it against its casters. But not … yet.
I blinked. The skin of my face felt tight. Something had been painted across my forehead and cheeks.
Runes. Written in blood. But I hadn’t known that, not the first time I’d awoken under the spell that felt once again as if it was crawling over my limbs and torso.
The series of wooden beams crisscrossing high overhead and the concrete under my bare back indicated I was in a warehouse. On the floor, naked.
Again, I didn’t need to piece that together in my current dream state. The information had already been gathered. The situation already experienced.
Power writhed over me, pulling, tugging, trying to grab hold. I flexed against it, testing it. As I had already done once before.
Yes.
I’d been in that warehouse, caught in that spell — contained within a blood-inked pentagram fueled by five chanting sorcerers. Black robed, faces hidden, as those hungry for power always seemed to prefer. Others stood at the very edges of my peripheral vision — apprentices. Those who couldn’t contribute enough power to a spell designed to hold me. Those others were just shadows in the background.
A memory.
That was also somehow a dream.
If I concentrated, I could feel a bed underneath me instead of concrete. Soft cotton sheets and the weight of the doubled-up quilt pressed against me, rather than the magic scouring my bare skin.
Sorcery. Trying to hold me, to use me, to drain me, forcing a mass amplification.
I tested the binding again. I could break free easily. Wake myself up. Just as I could have broken free that evening in San Francisco.
Except.
Except the girl.
I turned my head, and the movement hurt with an echo of the wound I’d sustained that night. I was experiencing magic intense enough to make me feel echoed pain, to make me believe I was somewhere I wasn’t. But the spell currently invading my mind wasn’t as expertly wielded as the spell that had held me that night. Only a powerful telepath could have possibly fooled me into believing I was actually in the warehouse, in San Francisco, and under magical attack. And only the magic embedded into my spinal cord could have allowed that telepath access to me. Bee, aka Tel5. One of the Five.
But this wasn’t one of Bee’s psychic manifestations.
A girl was laid out on the concrete floor to my right. Her body was deliberately placed between two points of the pentagram holding me. Her carefully slashed wrists were bound with ropes of dark-blue energy, shackling her to the edge of the boundary. Her witch blood was feeding the spell holding me, the casting that was trying to drain my magic.
I could break free. I could have broken free that night. But I knew — as I’d known the moment I’d seen her for the first time — that doing so would kill the girl.
I hesitated. Then and now.
Almost a year and a half ago now, the sorcerers had had their way with me while I assessed the situation. I wasn’t an idiot. I wasn’t going to sacrifice my life for that of an unknown witch child’s. But my magical reserves were vast enough to allow me a moment of consideration.
Then I’d risen, leaving her behind to survive or not survive. I exacted my revenge on those who thought they could hold me. On those who had decided to sacrifice a witch child in the attempt. Those who had chosen to darken my soul further with her death.
Except she hadn’t died.
Not that night, at least.
I blinked, focusing on the girl’s face as it appeared in the dream — the magic attempting to pull forth my memory. She opened her sky-blue eyes, near enough to me — then and now — that I could see brown flecks the same shade as her skin within. Her dark-brown hair had been streaked by the sun, kinky curls now soaked in the blood on the concrete.
That night, after meeting my gaze, she had opened her mouth, trying to speak but panting in disoriented pain instead. Her eye teeth were crooked, which was unusual for a child of witches. She’d been stripped down to a ragged tank top and cotton panties.
She looked to be around nine years old. Underfed. Slowly dying, drip by drip. The magic in her blood taken without permission, sacrificed to quell me. To steal my power.
Rage rolled through me in the present dream — as it had done that night. I’d held it in check then, worried that I would tear through the magic holding me, magic fueled by the child. Worried that in doing so, I would also take her life, absorb her power.
I didn’t want her magic in my veins. Or her death on my dark tally.
Now, though, that rage was different. Directed toward whoever thought they could walk through my dreams, toward whoever thought they had the right to rampage through my memories and pull this particular moment to the forefront.
“Emma …” the girl whispered in the dream.
A girl who had never known my name. A girl who hadn’t spoken a single word that night. A child witch who I handed over to Ember Pine’s extraction team after she’d watched me drain and slaughter every sorcerer who’d thought they could kill her without retribution. Sorcerers who had thought the witch magic in her veins useless, except to help hold me.
The young witch had seen Christopher and Paisley by my side. Her gaze never left me as I carried her from the warehouse, amplifying her magic even as I walked, bathed in the blood of her would-be murderers. In the parking lot, the salt breeze crusted that blood on my skin, and I passed her wordlessly to the first sorcerer in tactical gear who reached for her. His light-blue eyes above his face mask had been wide but resolute as he told me he’d been sent by Ember Pine, as per our contract. The others in his team had streamed past us into the warehouse — where they discovered they were suddenly a cleanup crew, rather than an extraction team sent to rescue me.
I had walked away, climbing into the Mustang where Christopher had left it, forced to drive because his sight was compromised by his magic. Paisley was tucked in the back seat. We left the city, carrying only what the clairvoyant had shoved into the trunk before coming to rescue me.
I’d been flushed and heady with the magic from the sorcerers I’d slaughtered, and was shaking by the time Christopher forced me to pull into a rest stop. Forced me to bathe as best I could with cold water in the tiny sink, to wash the blood out of my hair, to put on some clothing.
I remembered it now as if it had happened only hours before. Remembered the runes that had been inked in blood — the witch child’s blood — on my forehead and cheeks. Remembered the freezing water running over my head, remembered mopping up the mess with all the paper towels in the rest stop bathroom.
And there, bare feet on cold tile, all powered up with no one left to fight, I realized that I should have killed the girl. She’d seen enough to expose us. Christopher, Paisley, and me. She could have been used to confirm our continued existence to the Collective.
Instead, I had left the young witch alive, not even contemplating murdering her to protect myself. I had amplified her magic, hoping it was enough to heal her, then walked away.
As the sun rose on the West Coast, I had emailed Ember Pine to make certain that the girl would be cared for, receiving an almost immediate response indicating that the child’s needs would be covered through the damages clause in my contract. A clause that my would-be captors had agreed to in order to get me to willingly walk into the warehouse in the first place.
I had never asked after the little witch with the brown-flecked blue eyes again. Never wanted to tie her to me too tightly, not even in my lawyer’s mind.
And now someone was using her — the memory of her — against me.
“I’m not so easily fooled,” I said. “So easily manipulated.”
The girl frowned, her brow creasing in confusion or frustration as it hadn’t that night in San Francisco.
Letting my power loose, I allowed my rage to tear through the magic that had slipped into my dream. I tore through the memory.
Then I was sitting up in my bed, in the dark. Heart beating fast — but in anger, not fear. The house was quiet. Still. My fists were clenched. My magic raged around me, spilling everywhere.
My bedroom door crashed open and Christopher charged into the room, clad only in boxers, with his steel short sword in hand, and eyes glowing bright white.
“Just a dream.” I inhaled deeply, reining in my power.
“A dream?” he echoed, striding forward, then lunging left into the bathroom. The metal rings of the shower curtain scraped along the bar. Then he returned before I could elaborate, circling the bedroom, looking for enemies in the dark.
I tamped down on my anger and my frustration, drawing my power as deep inside me as possible. I didn’t want to trigger the clairvoyant, not unintentionally. Not any more than I already had.
“A telepathic attack?” he asked, pausing at the foot of my bed and slowly scanning left to right. But he was looking beyond the four walls of the bedroom, feeling for foreign magic.
“I thought so. But it didn’t feel malicious.”
“San Francisco?”
That had me moving, up and out of the bed, barefoot on the fir floor as I also reached out with my senses, seeking the magic that had tried to invade my mind. It took a powerful telepath to manipulate two people at once. “You were dreaming as well?”
He shook his head. “Reading. In bed. I felt a flood of your power and thought you were gearing up for something big. But I’m getting echoes now. Glimmers of that night.”
“That’s unusual. Isn’t it?”
He shrugged, crossing to pull the curtains slightly back from the east-facing window, then from the window to the south. “I can’t feel anyone on the property. Can you?”
I shook my head, but I knew I would have to walk the perimeter of the property to be sure. I pivoted slowly once more, spotting a folded piece of paper sitting on the corner of my bureau. It was resting over the rune carved into the wood. I picked it up, unfolding it to reveal a simple, scrawled note.
I’m already heading your way. — A.
An odd heat bloomed in the middle of my chest, flooding swiftly through my limbs. I ignored the feeling, passing the note to Christopher. The clairvoyant nodded after reading it, setting it back on the bureau.
I opened the second drawer and pulled on socks, then grabbed my robe from the hook on the back of the bathroom door. “Where’s Paisley?”
“Guarding the incubator in the barn.”
“I doubt anyone is getting on the property without her knowing.”
Christopher smiled wryly. “I doubt anyone is casting that level of magic on the property without you knowing.”
“Or you.”
He nodded, heading toward the hall.
“Maybe it was just a dream.”
He glanced back at me, his expression grim. “Or one hell of a powerful telepath, to cast from that far away. Let me get some pants and I’ll join you. It’s still snowing.”
I nodded, reluctantly tugging on leggings myself. I had never met a telepath capable of invading someone’s mind and pulling forth a dream without actually being in the same room, or at least the same building, as their target. I’d never met a telepath capable of invading my mind at all, not without me feeling it and thwarting their attempt.
Except for Bee.
I reached over my shoulder, brushing my fingers across the blood tattoo on my T2 vertebra where Bee’s blood and magic were tied to me. But that magic was dormant, as expected. As it had been for almost eight years now. Even if Bee had somehow been compromised and forced to send the vision, I would have recognized her magic.
For the briefest moment, I allowed myself to miss the yellow-haired, quick-to-smile Tel5. Bee, so nicknamed by Christopher because of how her magic felt in his head. Then I shoved the thought and the emotional response away. None of the Five would ever attack another, not unprovoked, not in the thick of the night.
No. The dream was something else altogether.
Instead of joining Christopher in the hall, I flicked on the bedroom light, momentarily blinking at the sudden brightness. Starting at the doorway, I systematically scoured every inch of the room, tracing my fingers over the baseboards and bed sheets, lifting and moving the bed, examining the windows and the curtains.
I found nothing out of the ordinary.
No runes, no magic. Nothing that didn’t belong to me.
I tucked Aiden’s note into the pocket in the waistband of my leggings, no matter that it was idiotic to carry his words with me since I’d already read the note. I was past fretting about my reaction to the sorcerer, past the idea that I would eventually develop an immunity to everything he made me feel, even just by jotting a few simple words on a piece of paper.
I would see him soon. And then we would figure out if his brother was a threat … Isa.
Bonds and Broken Dreams (Amplifier 2) Page 6