I enter through the main doors of the library—at the exact same time the goons enter on the opposite side of the main room, through the set of doors that let out into the courtyard at the center of four academic buildings. They must’ve cut across campus from the south side.
Blessedly, the goons don’t notice me right away because there’s a giant crowd of students between us. It’s getting close to finals time for the fall semester. The library’s always over capacity for the weeks leading up to winter break.
I duck down low so they can’t spot me over the heads of the other students, and break to the left. I dart behind the tall stacks of reference books that are organized in rows down the center of the main room, and head toward the back end of the library. On either side of the stacks, there are numerous wooden tables and chairs, most of them already filled with students preparing study sheets, working on papers on their laptops, and doing other perfectly normal student things.
None of these kids have any idea they’re in the presence of vicious killers. And god, I hope it stays that way. These mooks really wouldn't make a scene here, right?
Foley’s where I left him, seated in a single-person study nook in a big cluster of them along the back wall. He grabbed a book from somewhere and has been pretending to read about obscure science topics since I left, fitting in perfectly. He spots me coming when I’m ten feet away and closes the book, then tilts his head up as if to question me. I make a yikes face and gesture with my eyes, pointing back toward the entrances. Foley gets the message and hops up, closing the space between us.
Without speaking—because vampires have super-hearing, remember?—I point to a side door that lets out onto a walkway between the library and the mathematics building. We skirt a cluster of students huddled around one person’s study nook and slip quietly out the door. But as it’s closing behind us, I glimpse the lead mook marching up to the exact nook where Foley was sitting a moment ago. He stops, tips his chin up, and sniffs the area.
Oh, hell. Super-smell. He got a whiff of the blood on my pants.
I grasp Foley’s arm and lead him around the corner of the mathematics building in a hustle, releasing him when we reach a scenic copse of evergreen trees with a bench situated in the middle. It was a popular make-out spot back when I was at Waverly, but it’s unoccupied at the moment. “Can you do a spell that’ll throw off another vampire’s sense of smell?” I ask Foley. “They tracked me across the library using the scent of the blood on my clothes.”
Foley rubs his hands together and closes his eyes. “I can manage that.” A soft sea-green glow rises around his hands, and he mumbles a short phrase in a language that sounds like Latin. The aura then envelops his entire body and stretches out toward me, wrapping me in a faint warmth that lasts a couple seconds. When the glow dissipates, I’m left with the sensation of a light blanket hanging over my head. “There,” Foley says, eyes fluttering open. “That should last a good half hour.”
“Let’s make it count.” I jut my thumb over my shoulder. “Follow me.”
Navigating the complex layout of the Waverly campus that has baffled many a freshman over the years, I lead Foley on a winding trail back to where I parked my truck. We don’t run into any of the mooks again, so we hop into my truck and take off for another long drive. Foley immediately grabs the books from the console between us, flips open the first one, and starts hunting for relevant spells in the hand-inked table of contents.
While he’s busy, I take us on a confusing ride through Aurora. I know every backstreet and dead end by heart, so I take every one of the former, including two that lead out of the city limits, and avoid the latter at all costs because fights in cul-de-sacs don’t end well. The whole time I’m driving, and obsessively checking the gas gauge, Foley is flipping through chapters of interest in the books and skimming instructions that are written in multiple languages and appear to contain complex mathematical formulas, along with process maps I can’t hope to decipher.
Eventually, after about an hour of aimless wandering, Foley smacks his palm down on the open book in his lap. “I found it!” he says. “I think this is the exact spell Lizzie is using. And there’s a counter-spell for it.” He runs his finger down the page, perusing a long, bulleted list. His budding smile wilts into a tight frown. “Oh, but there’s a complication. Because of course there is.”
“What is it?” I glance at the rearview mirror, searching for a tail. Nothing. Yet.
“It’s a medium-dependent spell. That means I can’t perform it without physical ingredients.”
“What kind of stuff do you need?” I pull us to a stop at a red light. I’ve pushed my luck with reckless driving already. No point in going to extreme lengths to avoid the vampire mooks, just to be pulled over and questioned by a cop, losing valuable lead time in the process. Not to mention I’d have to explain the blood spatter on my pants, and I don’t think “running from a team of homicidal inhuman monsters” would go over well with a patrol officer. “Can we get it all at a regular store?”
“No. We’ll need a magic supplier.”
“I could go back to the shop, but…” But the shop is too close to Waverly College. Returning to that area will risk pinging Lizzie’s blood trace again. We need an alternative. “Say, do practitioners keep stores of spell and potion ingredients in their homes?”
“Normally. Why?”
I motion to the backpack on the floor. “Unzip that and find the letter.”
Foley obeys, digging out a folded piece of thick stock paper tucked into a wrinkled white envelope. He slips out the letter and flips it open. “What am I looking for?”
“Just confirmation. Third paragraph from the bottom. Lists the location of a house key and how to obtain it.”
So if you ever need a place to lie low, I recall the words, I left you a key in a cliché place.
Foley reads the indicated paragraph. His eyebrows creep up his forehead, a slight flush crossing his cheeks, as he stumbles over a couple of somewhat intimate lines. But I pretend not to be embarrassed about that and clear my throat, reminding him he’s sitting right next to me. “Oh, sorry,” he mutters and returns to his task. “Says the key is under the front porch doormat, but in order to see it, you have to lift the doormat up from the top right corner and completely turn it over so that the corner touches the leg of a rocking chair next to the door. If you move the mat any other way, the key will remain concealed.”
“Doesn’t sound too complicated, right?”
He shrugs. “Sounds like a pretty standard practitioner trick. A concealment spell with a physical counter as opposed to a magical one.” He glances at the letter again and catches something in the next paragraph that makes him turn beet red. He folds the letter and sticks it back inside the envelope. “So, uh, you and Milburn…?”
“Old news,” I admit. “We had a fling. Then she dumped her own memories to protect herself from Delos, so our relationship fizzled out. We’re still friends though—or, well, again, now that she has her memories back.”
Foley blinks at me owlishly. “She erased her own memories?”
“Extracted. She sealed them into a watch for safekeeping.”
He whistles. “That’s a sophisticated piece of magic.”
“I know.” I stare out the windshield, tracking the bad drivers among the densely packed cars on the highway. “I was there when she performed it.”
He picks at the edge of the envelope with his thumb. “Oh. That must’ve been…hard.”
“No harder than any of the other shit I’ve been through lately. And like I said, we’re good now. Except for the whole indentured servitude in Europe thing.”
“Right.” He winces. “Bad luck. You planning to get back with her?”
“Ah, no.” The traffic slows as we pass the scene of an accident, where someone overcorrected and ran into a light pole. The blue and red flashing lights of the cop cars make the skin on my neck prickle, but no one looks our way as my truck growls by the crash site
. They have no reason to look at me, not today. I’m not in a DSI vehicle, or a DSI uniform. It’s a strange feeling not having the cops give me death glares for getting within twenty feet of “their” scene. Another constant in my life that has abruptly fallen to the wayside. “That ship has sailed,” I finish. “I’m dating somebody else.”
“Oh, I see.” He slides the letter into my backpack again, wedging it between the broken iPad and a folder full of medical documents. “Is your new girlfriend also a practitioner?”
“My boyfriend is a DSI archivist.”
His mouth drops into a little O shape. “What’s his name?”
I cock an eyebrow. “Is there a reason you’re suddenly asking me personal questions?”
“Well”—he fiddles with a loose thread on his new Waverly hoodie—“I thought small talk might help distract us from the fact we’re being pursued by a team of vampire traitors who want to rip us to pieces and throw our dismembered body parts in dumpsters. Is it working?”
“Not so much.” I merge right at a fork in the road to take us toward Erica’s neighborhood. “You know, not to be rude, but you don’t seem much like the action-oriented type of vampire I’m familiar with.” I pause. “Then again, Lucian is kind of my archetype, and he’s a spy, so…”
Foley draws his lips into a thin line. “While all noble vampires are trained to fight, not all of them engage in fighting on a regular basis. We have guards, spies, and elite strike teams waiting in the wings to do the heavy lifting when necessary. That’s why it was so easy for the Knights to butcher us at the Parliament meeting. The bulk of the attendees were curmudgeonly politicians who hadn’t been on a battlefield for half a century, if not longer. They were out of practice.”
He rips the loose thread from the hem and tosses it onto the dashboard. “And me? I’ve never been in practice. I’m a bookworm who likes calculus and science fiction novels. My combat training was perfunctory, at best. And though I excel at studying magic, I’m not the most naturally talented practitioner, or the strongest in terms of raw power. To be quite frank, Kinsey, I’m a mediocre vampire.”
“And now it’s up to you to save your house from corruption.”
He hangs his head. “I know what you’re thinking. Of all the people you could get stuck protecting, it had to be my weak ass.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking at all.” Okay, maybe a bit. But he needs to be cheered up, not torn down. Plus, I like to pride myself on not being a total bastard on occasion. “I’m thinking this situation sucks, and I’m thinking you shouldn’t have to be in this position, and I’m thinking your sister needs to be kicked down a few pegs, and I’m thinking that sometimes responsibilities sneak up on you and tackle you from behind when you least expect them—and those tackles are rarely gentle.”
I reach across the gap between us and lightly punch his shoulder. “And I’m thinking that while there’s a great deal of pressure on your shoulders now that really shouldn’t be there, there’s also a great deal of opportunity. This might be a shitty experience, might even be the worst experience you will ever have in your entire life, but that doesn’t mean you have to lie back and let it steamroll you. You can take advantage of this.”
He scrunches his nose. “How?”
“For one thing, the fact that you see yourself as ‘mediocre’ almost certainly means that the Knights, including your sister, see you as helpless, an easy target. That’s always how powerful people think of those ‘beneath them.’ But you see, underestimating the underdog is a classic bad guy mistake. You’ve already proven that you’re not some cowering puppy in a corner. You tackled that noble vampire in my hallway without hesitation, and you befuddled their senses with that spell back at the college. And I bet you have a whole barrel of other skills and strengths hiding behind that sexy librarian façade, skills that most people don’t know you have.”
Foley shoots me a glare for the librarian jab, but at the same time, his expression brightens. “I think I get what you mean. Because I’m such an inconsequential person that nobody ever really paid attention to”—oh, yikes, I think, there’s a whole can of worms I just opened—“a vampire who’s never made any notable achievements in the community, the Knights have very little knowledge about my skill set. Which means they don’t know what to expect when they fight me. Which I can use in my favor.”
“Exactly.” I punch him a second time, for emphasis. “You’re not a failure. You’re a wild card. And that makes you dangerous in a way the Knights can’t easily counter.”
“You’re right.” He drops his fist onto the open spell book, a timid smile tugging at his lips. “They don’t know what I can do, and even though I can’t do much, I’m damn well going to do everything I can to get back at these bastards for what they did to my family, to get back at Lizzie for betraying her own father, to—”
“And you,” I say.
“What?”
“For betraying you. Include yourself, Banks. She wronged you just as much as everyone else. You’re worth including. So include yourself.”
Something flickers across those false hazel eyes, something I might call gratitude. “I’m going to make Lizzie regret everything she’s done to this family, and everything she’s done to me.” He plucks the torn thread from the dashboard and sticks it into the spell book as a makeshift bookmark, then slams the tome shut. “But first, let’s cast this spell so we can stop running away.”
“Agreed.”
Chapter Six
Erica’s house looks the same way it did the last time I was here, that awful day the witch wiped her memories to protect herself from Delos’ purge. As I pull the truck into the short driveway, the memory washes over me: backing away from the house unsure I’d ever be allowed to visit again, Cooper demanding he wear the watch with Erica’s memories tucked safely inside, the biting letter that spurred my relationship with the archivist burning a hole in my pocket, threatening to overwhelm me.
Who’d have thought back then that my life could get even more insane? Yet here I am, with Foley Banks the noble vampire in my passenger seat, being pursued by a bunch of Black Knights who want to crush us under their heels.
I cut the engine and hop out, signal for Foley to hang back, and approach the house with caution. Erica has never been one to skimp on wards, and even though she’s been away for several months, I doubt any of the spells protecting her home have lost their potency. She’s too skilled a practitioner to make such an amateur mistake, and too paranoid to run the risk of others penetrating her defenses and stealing her secrets. So I creep up the porch steps like I’m traversing a minefield and recite the instructions for recovering the key in a whisper. I follow them exactly, peeling back the mat and placing it properly. As promised, a key appears, and nothing explodes in my face. So far, so good.
Snatching up the key, I wave Foley forward, and as he’s marching up the steps, I unlock Erica’s front door. The second the key turns in the lock, all the wards embedded in the walls and doorframe simultaneously deactivate with a subtle green flash visible only to my magic sense—which I’ve had cranked up to eleven since the attack in my apartment. Because if I don’t want to die today, then I need to see vampire practitioners coming from a distance.
Foley, who also spots the ward shutdown, makes an impressed hum deep in his throat. I wonder if Erica would feel a sense of pride knowing that a noble vampire thinks her spell work is impressive. Maybe once I stop being a total wuss and gather enough courage to write her back, I’ll mention Foley’s reaction and give her a reason to gloat despite her shitty situation. Of course, that depends on me not being six feet under by the end of the week.
The door swings open to reveal the cozy house left untouched since August. Everything is covered in a fine layer of dust, and I make a mental note to clean this place too when I have a chance. Erica only asked me to clean the store, probably because it’s more important to her, as an independent business owner, but she deserves to come home to a clean house as w
ell.
I step across the threshold, pressing the tip of my boot lightly against the floorboards. Nothing makes any loud, alarm-like noises, and nothing kicks me back onto the porch, so I assume it’s safe to enter. I cross fully into the foyer, Foley a step behind me, and say, “Where do you think a witch would keep her personal magic supplies? The basement?”
In the time Erica and I were seeing each other, I never tried to snoop into the details of her magic studies. I didn’t want to press her to reveal more than she was comfortable with exposing, since anything she told me could come back to bite her in the ass, if the ICM found out she was spilling their secrets to a Crow. And yet, she got tangled up in their bureaucratic nightmare of a web anyway. So much for caution. Should’ve thrown that into the wind when I had the chance. More in-depth knowledge about magic practitioners would’ve given me an edge with Delos, and could give me an edge now, with Lizzie Banks the talented vampire practitioner riding our asses.
Hindsight is a bitch.
Foley gives the house a quick scan. “Yes on the basement, based on the layout of the house. She’d want to have someplace she could practice invoking new spells and potions without running the risk of damage to the living space. In a residence, the best place is usually a fortified basement, or an outdoor lab disguised as a shed. Didn’t see a shed in the yard, so basement it is.”
I find the only door I’ve never used in Erica’s house, which predictably opens to reveal a staircase leading down into a pitch-black room. I feel around for a light switch for an inordinate amount of time, before Foley, fed up with my slowness, reaches around my head and pulls a string that was hanging right in front of my face. A naked bulb above the stairs flickers on.
Grumbling, “Stupid vampire senses,” I stomp my way down the stairs. Foley chuckles as he follows me into the basement.
At the base of the stairs, I find the main light switch panel and flick all the available options. Several rows of bright white ceiling lights flare on, revealing an expansive basement that must extend far beyond the boundaries of the house proper. I don’t know whether Erica had the house built this way, or whether she expanded the basement after purchasing the small bungalow, but either way, it’s impressive construction. The massive room is a neatly organized lab space, complete with extensive shelving loaded with all manner of supplies, multiple worktables, cabinets containing glassware, and a large bare space that must be for magic circles and spells that require complex setups.
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