SPELL TO UNBIND, A

by Laurie, Victoria

  “What the hell do you mean, what about it?!” I snapped. I wasn’t into this little game. I didn’t have time for it.

  Kincaid sighed audibly into the phone. “Esmé, I just got to the station. There was an explosion at an apartment complex last night, two people were killed, and there’s a description of a suspicious person fleeing the scene that sounds a lot like you.”

  I shook my head, wanting to push away everything he’d just said. “What do you mean, you just got into the station?!” I knew seeing him at Big Mike’s had had a crazy effect on me, but it hadn’t actually made me crazy. “I just saw you at Mike’s!”

  “What do you mean you—?” And just like that, Kincaid’s voice cut off as if he’d caught himself before saying anything more. A moment later there was a muffled sound against the microphone of his phone, and I could hear some garbled words as he spoke to someone in the background. Then I clearly heard a string of expletives before he came back on the line. “That son of a bitch!” he groused. “I’ll arrest him myself as soon as I see him.”

  I sighed wearily, and maybe with a little relief. I didn’t seem to be having nearly the same reaction to the sound of his voice that I’d had earlier. In fact, as I listened to him, all I really felt was annoyed.

  “You know what?” I said. “While you’re out making arrests, how about you let me go so I can continue to work this case for you?”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “Esmé, that wasn’t me at Big Mike’s.”

  I rolled my eyes. Here comes some line, I thought. “Really,” I said flatly. “It sure looked like you. It sure sounded like you when I called your office line and you said to meet you there.”

  “Not surprised,” he said. “I have an identical twin brother. Finn.” Kincaid cleared his throat before continuing, as if it was hard for him to talk about his brother. “We haven’t spoken in a while, and I think he was trying to check up on me. He was the one who asked you to meet him at Mike’s.”

  My mouth fell open because I completely believed Kincaid’s explanation. Nothing else could account for the sudden insane desire I’d felt for him other than that it hadn’t been the same man who’d arrested me the day before.

  “You … you have a twin?”

  “Yes. Identical. He’s four minutes older.”

  A thousand questions exploded into my mind. “Is he a cop too?”

  “No.”

  Just that. No further information.

  “Is he also a mystic?”

  Kincaid cleared his throat again, obviously uncomfortable with this line of questioning. “He is,” he said. “And now I know for sure that you’re working for Elric.”

  I blinked again, still trying to take all that in. “Why do you think you know that?”

  “Because Finn works for Petra. If you worked for her, you’d definitely know about him. He’s her new lieutenant.”

  My hand went to my forehead as a bead of sweat broke out across my brow. “You’re telling me the Flayer is your twin brother?”

  “Yes.”

  I took the phone away from my ear and held it between my clasped hands while I growled out a long stream of expletives.

  When I felt I could speak calmly again, I put the phone back to my ear and said, “That would’ve been very useful information to share prior to muscling me into mentoring you, Kincaid.”

  “If I’d told you, would you have agreed to mentor me?”

  “Fuck no,” I said bluntly. Because it was the truth. The last thing I needed of all the other bullshit I didn’t need right now was to have a kin connection to Petra’s lieutenant. If Elric found out, he’d immediately assume Kincaid was a spy, and he’d kill me, Kincaid, and anyone else within a ten-foot radius. And if Petra found out, she’d assume the same thing about me, and while Kincaid might be spared, I sure as hell wouldn’t be.

  “Then I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t tell you, huh?” Kincaid said.

  I desperately wanted to punch him in the throat.

  “Kincaid,” I said hoarsely, once I’d had time to consider all the many ways this new alliance could get me killed.

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re right. We need to meet. Now.”

  Kincaid hesitated, then, “Fine. But I should warn you, Esmé, that assaulting a cop is a felony.”

  “Least of my worries, pal. Least of my worries.”

  Kincaid and I met up at a bar called Gert’s near the warehouse. It was a place Dex and I often frequented because it was open twenty-four hours a day and run by a mystic who, for some reason, liked me. Or she just liked that I brought Dex around. It was hard to tell.

  “Gert,” I said, entering the empty establishment to find the owner behind the bar with a clipboard, taking inventory.

  “Esmé,” she sang, then immediately looked past me. “Sexy Dexy around?”

  “Not today,” I told her, taking a seat at a booth away from the bar. Gert pouted, and I softened. “Hey, don’t be like that. There’s still some eye candy coming in.”

  She brightened. “Usual?” she asked.

  “Coffee,” I said. My usual was a single-malt scotch, and, at six-thirty in the morning, even I felt it was a little too early in the day for hard liquor.

  Gert brought over a steaming cup of joe and set it down, her gaze wandering back to the door as it opened, and Kincaid came strolling in.

  Even though we’d had the conversation about his twin on the phone, I still braced myself against the back of the booth when he entered, fearful that my binding spell would act up again, but as he came forward, the only one turned on was Gert.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” she cooed.

  Kincaid stopped in his tracks and looked over his shoulder, thinking she was speaking to someone behind him. This made Gert and me laugh.

  When Kincaid realized his mistake, his face flushed, and that made us laugh all the more.

  He sat down, with a roll to his eyes, and Gert elbowed him good-naturedly. “What’ll it be?”

  Kincaid pointed to my coffee. “That.”

  Turning to me she asked, “Anything to eat?”

  My stomach gurgled. “Two eggs, over easy, and a couple of slices of rye toast, please.”

  Gert raised her eyebrows at Kincaid expectantly.

  “Got a menu?” he asked.

  She reached into her blouse and pulled out a folded piece of paper from her bra. “Thought you’d never ask,” she said, sauntering off with a chuckle to get the detective his coffee.

  Kincaid frowned, but he unfolded the menu and began to look it over. “What’s good here?”

  “The scotch,” I said, pouring a large measure of cream into the coffee to soften the bite. (Rabid dogs were tamer than Gert’s coffee.)

  Kincaid sighed and looked at me in irritation.

  I ignored him and stirred in some sugar.

  Gert appeared with Kincaid’s coffee, and he ordered a farmer’s omelet and a side of wheat toast.

  After Gert left our table to head into the kitchen, I made eye contact with Kincaid and decided not to mince words. “Spill it.”

  “My brother?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Kincaid sighed again, this time in resignation. “He’s Petra’s right hand. And he’s the reason I’ve never been mentored.”

  “How could he prevent you from becoming mentored?”

  “We were bound young—”

  “How young?” I interrupted.

  “Eleven.”

  “Huh,” I said, sitting back in my seat.

  “What?”

  “Me too.”

  Kincaid’s brow furrowed, as if he’d never imagined more children than he and his brother could be bound. It was common knowledge that binding children was a pretty despicable act, and both Petra and Elric forbade it within their respective camps. It just wasn’t done, and until Kincaid confessed to me that he’d been bound at such a young age, I’m the only mystic I’d ever known—besides Tic—who’d been bound so young.

/>   “What’re the odds?” he asked, and I could tell he was partially joking.

  “You were saying,” I said, rolling my hand to remind him to continue.

  “Right. Finn and I were bound young, and we didn’t even know it for a couple of years. But you know how it is: The power grows, and you think you might be crazy, but for us, we knew it was real because we were each watching the other affect physical objects just by thinking about them.”

  “Or touching them,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he agreed. “Anyway, it freaked me out more than it did Finn. I tried to bury it, while he went looking for answers. He found them in a mentor who had connections, and he introduced Finn to Petra. Around the time that I began coming to terms with the magic and wanted to be mentored too, Finn blocked me.”

  “He blocked you? Why would he do that?”

  Kincaid shifted his gaze away from me, as if the question made him uncomfortable. “I think he was trying to protect me. Finn got in with Petra early, and by the time I expressed an interest in getting mentored, he was in deep. She owned him, and I think he was forced to do things that he later regretted. He also knew that if I became a mystic, anyone could come after me to manipulate him. Petra wouldn’t stand for her right hand having a weakness like that.”

  I shook my head in awe of the utter idiocy that had led Kincaid to the conclusion that I should mentor him. “She’s right, you know,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Petra. You would be a weakness for the Flayer. She’d demand your execution, and she’d demand that her lieutenant carry out the act in order to reaffirm his loyalty to her.”

  Kincaid tried to cover it, but I saw the way the color drained from his face. “Then I guess it’s a good thing we’re going to be keeping this on the down-low.”

  I wagged a finger at him. “You’re forgetting something.”

  “What?”

  “The Flayer and I have already had a conversation where he pretended to be you. Not knowing you had a twin, I felt free to remind him that he needed to procure a gift to me prior to our mentoring ceremony.”

  The rest of the color drained from Kincaid’s face. “Fuck.”

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed. “So, no way can we go through with the mentoring ceremony now.”

  Color rushed back into Kincaid’s complexion. “No way can we not!”

  I sighed and rolled my eyes. This was my one chance to get out of this prickly-pear agreement, and I wasn’t going to waste it. “I’ll still help you with the investigation, Kincaid, but mentoring you is a death sentence for both of us now that your brother knows.”

  “He would never tell Petra, and he would never kill me,” he said.

  Gert came by with a pot of coffee to refill our mugs, and her brow arched as Kincaid blurted that out. I didn’t say a word and avoided Gert’s gaze while she topped off my coffee. Waiting until she left again, I said, “Your brother might not whisper a word of it to Petra, but he sure as hell would kill me. I’m the one putting you in the most jeopardy by bringing you into the mystic world, where you’ll definitely draw notice.”

  Kincaid shook his head. “He won’t kill you if you’re already my mentor. If we go through with the ceremony, then we’re bound to protect each other and, if one of us is killed by another mystic without just cause, then we’re bound to seek revenge for the killing, right? Finn wouldn’t kill you because he knows that I’d be bound to kill him in revenge.”

  Dammit. He’d done his homework. “Would you?” I asked him, still trying to convince him that the price he’d pay would be too high. “Would you really kill your twin?”

  “How could I avoid it?” he answered in return. “The bond between us as mentor and protégé would compel me, right?”

  “It would,” I said, irritated that he still seemed to have the upper hand in this. “How long have you and your brother been estranged?” I asked next. I needed to understand the dynamics of their relationship because I still wasn’t convinced—at all—that Finn the Flayer would just ignore the fact that an employee of SPL was mentoring his brother.

  “A while,” he said, twisting his wedding ring.

  Mystics who married each other rarely wore symbols that announced such bonds, so I pointed to his ring and asked, “Are you married to a mortal?”

  Kincaid covered the ring with his right hand. “I am.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That’s gotta be tough.”

  “It’s not,” he said curtly.

  I knew he didn’t want to talk about it, but I couldn’t help probing the topic a bit. If I was going to mentor this man I needed to know his vulnerabilities. “Hasn’t your wife noticed that you’re not ageing and she is?”

  Kincaid shrugged. “A little,” he said.

  “What happens when she turns fifty and you still look like you’re in your early thirties?”

  He looked up at me with a tinge of anger. “If there’re spells that can keep you young, then there are spells that can make you to age.”

  My brow shot up. Now I understood more about what was motivating his sudden immersion into the mystic world. He held some romantic notion that he could grow old with his wife. And maybe he could. There were spells to affect all sorts of physiology, so why not something to age a mystic who didn’t want to remain young?

  I moved off the topic of Kincaid’s wife but was still curious about the detective’s background. “Why didn’t the mystic who bound you offer to mentor you?” I asked.

  “She wasn’t the nurturing type.”

  I took a sip of coffee. “You’re pretty defensive for a guy who’s about to commit himself to a mentor.”

  Kincaid frowned. “Force of habit. I’m protective of my family and my past.”

  “I get it. To survive straddling both worlds like you’ve been doing, you’d have to be. Does your wife know you’re a mystic?”

  “Hell no,” he said. “I cover it pretty well whenever it shows up.”

  “That must be hard,” I said, because it had to be.

  But Kincaid merely shrugged. “I’ve had a lot of practice at it. What other choice have I had?”

  Gert came by again to deliver our breakfasts, and I wanted to laugh. She handed me a plate of two poached eggs and a cinnamon bun, gooey with glaze, and Kincaid got a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of fruit.

  He looked down at the offering as if he couldn’t understand how Gert had screwed up his order so badly when we were the only patrons in the place. “This isn’t what I ordered,” he said.

  “No,” she agreed. “It’s what you need.”

  “What I need?” he asked, looking at me as if I could explain.

  Gert reached down and patted Kincaid’s midsection. “Fiber,” she said. “The oatmeal should do the trick.”

  I stifled a laugh, and Gert padded away.

  Kincaid just stared at me, then Gert’s retreating form, then me again. For my part, I picked up the cinnamon bun and took a big bite. My eyes rolled up and I moaned, it was so good.

  “Care to tell me what the hell she means?” Kincaid asked.

  I chewed for a second and said, “As you might’ve already sensed, Gert’s a mystic …”

  “Yeah, I picked up on that, but what does that have to do with oatmeal and a fruit cup?”

  “Her particular talents lie in being able to read people. It’s how she knows when trouble enters the bar, and she usually knows, even before the troublemakers do, that they’re gonna start something.”

  “Cops have a similar sense,” he said.

  I held back the urge to roll my eyes—but barely. “Anyway, Gert’s senses go deep, sometimes into health, sometimes into feelings.” I lifted the cinnamon bun high for emphasis. “She can read that I’ve had a bitch of a week so far and needed a little comfort food.” Pointing then to Kincaid’s oatmeal, I added, “She can also obviously tell you’ve got a giant stick up your ass, and she’s just trying to do her part in helping you remove it.”

  Kincaid’s expression flashed to
angry, but I just laughed. “Okay, okay, I’ll stop. You were saying about how you’ve tried to live as a mortal …”

  Kincaid shrugged and dipped a spoon into his oatmeal. Gert had softened the blow by sprinkling it with cinnamon, maple syrup, bananas, and walnuts, which was a nice touch. “There’s not much to tell beyond that, after Finn blocked me from being mentored, I immersed myself in the mortal world. I went to the police academy and worked my way up to detective. I got married, got a mortgage, live in a quiet suburban neighborhood, and lead a pretty normal life, but sometimes, when I’m stressed or tired, the magic just … gets away from me.”

  I nodded. I could only imagine how an unmentored mystic left to his own devices might wreak havoc in his own world because he couldn’t control either the impulse to manipulate everyday objects or control the side of himself who wanted to manipulate the mortals all around him.

  I mean, there’s a reason we’re a secretive fringe group who seeks out one another’s company and try very hard to keep from calling attention to ourselves.

  “But why now?” I pressed. “Why try to find someone to mentor you now, after all this time?”

  Kincaid wiped his mouth with his napkin without looking me directly in the eye. “I came across some information that confirms a suspicion I had, and I want to take apart the power structure ruling the mystic world.”

  “What information?”

  Kincaid lifted his gaze to look me directly in the eye. “I won’t tell you that.”

  My brow rose. “Not even if I pinkie swear to keep it just between us?”

  “I’m not kidding, Esmé. I won’t tell you. Ever.”

  I shrugged, pretending I didn’t really care, but the truth is, I did care. I cared a lot because this guy was so obviously insane if he thought he could take on Elric and/or Petra and live to talk about it. And I, as his mentor, didn’t particularly want to be associated with some cocky newbie who thought he was in the same league as Elric Ostergaard. The dude wasn’t even on the same planet, much less ballpark.

  For now, however, there was no point pressing him. He wasn’t going to tell me. Period.

  “Fine,” I said. “But at least tell me why your brother is going around impersonating you.”