Quelling a look of annoyance, the Gendarme held up a finger to Trudy. She leaned toward Kristoff, murmuring no doubt the usual about being in touch before stepping away. She beckoned the teen over.
“All I wanted to do was study.” Hannah bowed her head, grabbing her phone and following the Gendarme. Trudy guarded their flank with the intensity of a mother dragon.
“Red, you look spacey. Do you need to sit down?” Lucas asked.
Red snapped off her witchy sight, realizing she had left it on and had zoned out on the strange energies coming out of the corridor behind them. The academy police weren’t just dusting for prints in the nightclub. She shook her head. “Just still pumped from the action.”
“Speaking of, was it a bald bloke who attacked you?” Lucas asked. “I chased one through the parking lot until he shifted. Found the security in a fuss when I came to report it in.”
“No, it was a bearded dude who was entirely too comfortable being naked with his equally as creepy sister.” She shook her head. “She tried to convince Hannah to sacrifice herself to save me.”
Black bowler pulled low over his brow, Ian strode out of the hallway. “Red, I need to take your account.” Hand on the utility belt under his trench coat, he eyeballed the vampires. “Stay close, you two.”
Kristoff exchanged a glance with Lucas as Ian led her away.
“Be good,” Red said to them.
“What happened tonight?” Ian asked her, tipping his hat brim higher as he lifted a notepad.
Summarizing how their study session ended up a werewolf attack courtesy of Nuno and Gloria Lopes, Red kept one eye on the two vampires murmuring too low for her to hear to each other.
Ezra in tow, Vic walked up to Lucas. “What did I miss? You could have texted me before. I was just at the bar.” His eyes widened on Kristoff and he nodded, grimly. “Novak.”
Kristoff smiled, entirely too chipper. “You missed a wolf hunt.”
“I bet you’re disappointed,” Lucas commented, wryly.
“Only if you didn’t get the pelt.” Vic crossed his arms. “I’m gonna assume my intern saved the Hero again?”
“Hey, she’s just a kid,” Ezra chided.
“A little distracted?” Ian prompted Red’s attention back to him. He pointed his pen at her friends. “What is the deal with them? Neither of those vampires are locals.”
Red nodded, licking her lips. “You already know Vic’s deal. I worked with the vamps in LA. It’s complicated.”
“I’m ready to bet on it.” Ian squinted at her neck. “I see the mark. I assume it belongs to one of them.”
“Is this a part of the investigation, Ian?” Red kept her voice calm but fought the urge to cross her arms and get sassy. She figured sassiness went as far with magical cops as it did with normal ones. She managed to keep her arms at her sides. “I’m ready to bet on the fact that you probably know exactly who they are. Your Gendarme probably documents any supernatural that floats into town.”
Shrugging modestly, Ian closed his notepad and tucked it inside his breast pocket. “I’m curious. It’s not on the record. A good alchemist does his research on new elements to his environment. This case is hot. There are more players on the field than you know. Keep your friends out of it.”
Red tilted her head. “Why can’t you find these wolves? Couldn’t you just use a locator spell?”
“Not at liberty to say,” Ian said, voice pitched to a gruff finality.
“Gloria Lopes said something about her dad having a good luck charm. Picked it up from some wolfmage named Archibald Fowler.” Red tossed out the information like a bribe to the academy cop, hoping for some quid pro quo. “Look, I’m being fully transparent here.”
His brow furrowed. He didn’t have his notepad out, but she could tell he itched to take notes. “You can join your friends now.”
Red filed his deflection away as she walked back to her friends. Ian completely faded from her mind when she heard Lucas say her name. She stopped behind him.
“They’re after Red, I know it.” Back to her, Lucas rocked on his heels, hands in his pockets. A deadly restraint stiffened his arms. “Selene saw her fighting in a cemetery in the rain. She said Red looked dead in the vision. Bullocks to that. We can’t let it happen.”
Vic asked, “What’s the game plan, then? We keep the princess in the tower and knight up to fight some wolves?”
Red gritted her teeth. Was she some damsel in distress to be saved now? Vic used to have her play bait on hunts. Her so-called knights weren’t even plotting to save the right woman. Crossing her arms, glaring at Vic and Lucas, she wondered how long it would take them to include her. She’d thought she hated them going behind her back, but she hated being talked about as if she weren’t there even more.
“We’ll take them all out.” Lucas laid out the plan, counting of the beats with his fingers. “They’ll be armed when they aren’t furry. So first off, we gather up some hunters. Second, we smoke them out with a lure. Third—”
“There’s a problem with your plan,” Kristoff said dryly, glancing at Red.
Ezra crossed his arms. “She can hear you, fellas.”
“She can, and she’s not impressed,” Red said, stepping up to the men. “First off, I’ve already fought in a cemetery in the rain. That was one of the trials in my ranking exam. I brought down a ghoul. Just like in the vision. Prophecy fulfilled.”
“But Frank wasn’t there!”
“He was the first time I faced his pack. Time doesn’t mean the same thing to your sire that it does for us. It’s all wibbly wobbly in her head,” Red reasoned. “Hannah is the one in trouble. For once, it’s not me.”
“You’re on their radar,” Lucas insisted. “You can’t stay in this city. Call this holiday off.”
“You’re not my master,” Red snarled, then pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to repress the dawning headache. Bowing her head, she missed Lucas’s expression as he jerked back. Her unruly subconscious seemed ready to uncover another useless drive-by image. She fought to bury it. That sweaty pre-flashback feeling nagged her. Red calmed herself before trying to reason with him again. “I’m here to discover my magical birthright. I’m not hanging out by the pool.”
“At least, don’t walk there alone,” Lucas cajoled.
“Fine. Safety in numbers.” Turning on her heel, she didn’t even acknowledge Kristoff’s smirk as she regarded her choices. She stopped at the bartender. “Ezra. Have a moment to play chaperone?”
Cool as a scotch on the rocks under Lucas and Kristoff’s intense stares, Ezra nodded.
Red stalked away without looking back. She didn’t trust herself to speak to Ezra without ranting until they reached the Pyramid.
She tried to explain herself without sounding like a crazy person. “I’m not one of those chicks who can’t stand a man helping her. We all worked together in LA, but they have just been aggravating lately with not telling me things. Seeing them planning stupidity on my behalf without even consulting me… It was either walk away or put a hex on them. Something with boils.”
“Classic move,” Ezra said, deadpan. “You don’t often see a vampire with boils. They don’t really turn the ugly ones. There’s probably a Brotherhood study on that.”
Red cocked an eyebrow at him. “You’re pretty calm in the face of the brooding undead, for a guy who says he’s too sensitive to be a hunter.”
“I’m not scared of the monsters.” He shrugged. “I just can’t shake off the sight of what they leave behind. I’m glad there are people like you who can.”
“Thanks.” Red felt herself flush around the edges.
Nervousness flickered across Ezra’s smile as he handed her his phone number scribbled on a napkin. “I’ve been meaning to give you this. You can take it from here, but in case you want company later. Let’s say tomorrow, possibly at a pinball museum around seven. It’s my day off.”
“I like pinball.” Red smiled at him, deciding in a snap. Her treat day had
been interrupted. She enjoyed his easy-going company, and he was certainly easy on the eyes too.
“I promise I won’t try to save you once.” Ezra grinned. “The most unsolicited chivalry you’ll get is if I manage to win you a toy from my tickets.”
“I’ll hold you to that promise. Meet you out front at seven.” Red tapped his number against her palm, then walked away. A date. She had encountered alchemists, vampires, and werewolves tonight, but that surprised her the most. She tugged her dress strap up as she looked over her shoulder and caught Ezra looking at her. Her cheeks warmed.
Clad in a marigold turtleneck and worry, Basil appeared at Red’s elbow. Under the weather since his guest lecture debut, he’d missed her ranking yesterday. A sickly sheen clung to his thin features. “Red, you’ve been summoned by the Alchemical Synod. We all have.”
Red sighed. So much for ending the night on a high note with a date invitation. This day kept rolling out the stress. It was doubtful the Synod had summoned them for tea. She wasn’t going to be able to write in her journal anytime soon, and she had more and more she needed to get off her chest.
Tense and lost in lost, Basil directed them to marble corridor, then through a hidden passageway under a tapestry. “Diego is missing. Really missing.”
“Are we sure? He was at my ranking. Not that it helped me.”
“No, he wasn’t. I read it off another Synod member. They just stuffed a clerk into his robes to make it look like there were twenty.” Basil quieted as they approached a doorway guarded by Gendarme in bowler hats who opened the door for them.
Red took a deep breath as she entered the room. Nineteen alchemists on two rows of high raised benches loomed in a semi-circle around cleared space in the center. Nervous adepts shooed out of the room by Gendarme blocked her vision for a moment, but she could have sworn this was the same room she had met the Synod in before. Ushered to wait by the wall, she crossed her arms beside Basil. She lifted her eyebrows when she saw who else had been summoned.
Standing gracefully in silk, Perenelle held her hand to a glass sphere on the podium. It was the one that had drawn the sight of the werewolves out of Red on her first morning in the academy. An illusion flashed above the glass ball of the Immortal Alchemist passing Diego in a hallway. She inclined her head as the Synod accepted her testimony.
The First Alchemist addressed the newcomers. “Step forward, Basil, and show us when you last saw Diego Blanco. Understand that this device can pierce through your perceptions for the truth.”
Stiff backed, Basil trod to the podium and set his hand on the swirling glass sphere. Translucent figures rose above him like a mystical hologram before taking the shape of two men sitting at a table. Basil’s teal shaman tunic top and Diego’s golden suit marked it as after the guest lecture, two days ago.
“You son of bitch. I keep saying it, but you did it!” Diego clinked his beer mug against Basil’s. “I put you up to that guest lecture because I thought you’d run. I thought you were the same guy who left. Just with a different name.”
“Technically, I am.” The hologram version of Basil grinned, teeth nearly transparent.
“No, you’re not. The soulmancer finally had some soul growth.” Diego gulped his beer. “I’ll drink to that, my friend, and I insist that you drink to my upcoming ranking.”
“I nearly got you kicked off the Synod the last time. Now I’m a good luck charm?”
“We won’t go that far. You just won’t be the reason I might lose.” Diego set his mug down. “Now, back to the laboratory so I don’t.”
“Yes, yes, more mad wizardry to impress your friends and defeat your enemies.”
“Drink’s on me for sticking around.” Diego tossed a handful of bills on the table. “Be a champ and make it sound like we were carousing all night. I still like ’em to think all I do is sing.”
The floating illusion of the soulmancer said goodbye, but Diego had already disappeared, and the rest of the image faded above Basil’s head. Stirring in their seats, the Synod murmured, hooded heads together. The First Alchemist stood to dismiss him and call Red forward.
Passing Basil on the way to the podium, she shot his wan face a glance of concern. She put her hand on the smooth glass orb and thought of Diego. The last she could remember was seeing him shake Basil’s hand after the applause had died down for the soulmancer’s guest lecture. Memory become a projection on the ceiling before dimming.
The First Alchemist nodded his satisfaction, then fell into a hushed discussion with his Synod.
Red backed away to find Basil by the wall. She had only begun to try to comfort the soulmancer when a Gendarme pulled him aside, leaving her awkwardly loitering out of hearing range.
Waiting by the door, Perenelle beckoned Red. She leaned in to whisper, “Don’t be alarmed. They’re just acting so stridently public because I am here to observe. You’re not in trouble.”
“Not with them. I might have pissed off some werewolves tonight though,” Red commented, quickly summarizing what had happened—leaving out the personal stuff. The Immortal Alchemist didn’t need to know anything about how confusing it felt to have both Lucas and Kristoff in Las Vegas.
“And you just connected your magic to Hannah’s? What was in that were-mace, as you call it, to create such a chemical reaction?” Perenelle murmured the questions to herself as if not expecting an answer. “The wolf couldn’t even look upon the barrier to speak to you…?”
Red shrugged, deciding to take a stab at the first question because she didn’t have answers for the other two. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”
“That is the beauty of an untrained witch. No one ever told you what you couldn’t do, so you do what you want.” Perenelle studied Red with simmering curiosity. She glided from the room after stating in a firm matter of fact tone, “I think if the Synod had seen your battle against the wolves, your rank would be different.”
The comment lingered with Red long after the Immortal Alchemist had left.
After gathering Basil away from the gaze of the Synod, she got him settled in his quarters in the dormitory tower with a cup of tea. They huddled at his small kitchenette table. A hint of gin flavored the chamomile steam.
Basil held his mug in both hands and told her how he had come to the academy the first time. With only a backpack, he’d arrived at the Strip under the name Philip after a run-in with a vampire in Miami. It was just a new alias after countless others (“I rode them hard back then.”) Diego discovered him performing a fake séance for the tourists. They had become friends after that (“He suggested that I should pretend to be a shaman.”) It was a tale filled with chuckles about casino shenanigans and sighs of regret over how Basil left.
“I left because I was scared of the vampires on Fremont street, but now I see a part of me was more afraid of the roots that I had set down in the academy. I have been running for so long.”
“I think Diego understands.”
“They reckon he fled to be alone with some experiment. Stress over ranking.” Basil harrumphed his disagreement. “He missed a show at the Nostradamus. He might bugger off from the rest of it but not that.”
“I know a Gendarme. We can pester him about it tomorrow.” Noticing his fatigue, Red pushed some soup on him, then sent him off to bed. She trotted up the wide brass spiral staircase to her dorm at the top of the tower. The torn strap on her dress had been holding on by a scrap since Nuno the werewolf had roughed her up. She yearned for pajamas and cozy socks.
Pushing open her front door, she idly wondered how long the rest of her new cute clothes would last. This was why she usually stuck to the same kind of black shirt and jeans. A rustle coming from her room stilled her internal dialog.
Hannah snapped her head up, kneeling beside the large hunter’s kit at the foot of Red’s bed. She held a can of were-mace in one hand and a silver dagger in the other. Her mouth flopped open. “I can explain.”
Red closed the door. She crossed the distance
from the sitting room to the open double doors of her bedroom. The clues were everywhere. She didn’t need an explanation. “You have my printouts of Frank Lopes on the kitchen table, there’s a packed bag on the couch next to a note, and you’re holding a werewolf hunter starter kit.”
“Can you blame me? That fucker and his twisted kids killed my Dad.”
She crouched by the girl. “And they want to kill you. Don’t make it easier for them.”
Hannah tightened her grip on the dagger handle. “Everyone wants to keep me inside, safe in my tower. Any of you ever think that maybe I could take them out?”
Red sighed, settling down and crossing her legs. More to stall than for comfort. The girl deserved an answer that wasn’t a pat on the head. She pointed to the teen’s deadly handfuls. “Let’s talk without knives.”
Hannah frowned, setting the mace and dagger down, mumbling about planning to return them anyway.
Chewing her cheek, Red felt a little hypocritical since she’d recently staged her own revolt against being treated like a damsel. The difference was that she knew exactly what lurked outside the tower and how to fight it. Hannah could cast a mean spell with the right tools, but the wolves knew how to mess with her concentration. They had almost succeeded tonight.
Red shrugged. If she couldn’t find the right words, she’d let it out anyway. “Frank Lopes is old for an assassin, and that means he’s clever. He won’t lumber at you head-on like the ghouls in our ranking challenge. Then you gotta account for the three young wolves. They’re family, so they won’t turn on each other when the fighting gets tough like assembled mercs might. It’s not a fight I want.”
“That’s not an answer!”
“Backed against a wall, you could pull it off. That’s a big if, though,” Red said, peeling the truth off like a band aid. “Do you have the power? Yes. The experience to keep your head in a fight. Not yet.” She tried to explain, seeing the hurt in Hannah’s eyes. “It takes seconds for a werewolf to rip a throat out.”
“I’m a Hero that no one believes in.” Bitter harshening her voice, Hannah shook her head and crossed her arms.
Witch On The Run: A New Adult Urban Fantasy (Red Witch Chronicles 4) Page 19