The Shadows and Sorcery Collection

by Heather Marie Adkins

  “This isn’t a good idea,” I said.

  She grinned, not a hint of nervousness in her. “Afraid you won’t remember how?”

  I slapped a hand to her ass and jerked her groin into mine. I reveled in the gasp that fled her lips as she felt my desire between her legs.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I said roughly. “And you won’t either.”

  Yulian cleared his throat, the sound oddly amused.

  If ever a man could have worse timing.

  Dom jumped, her thigh coming down hard on my groin. Pain ratcheted through me, reminding me how thin the line between pleasure and pain could be.

  “My preparations didn’t take as long as I assumed,” Yulian remarked. “Should I come back in a few minutes?”

  Dom slithered off my lap, embarrassment turning her face red.

  “So sorry to break up the party,” Yulian said gaily, his robe swirling around his feet as he swished farther into the hallway. “We are lacking one last ingredient. Dominika, the frankincense and myrrh blend. Can you retrieve it from home?”

  Dom stood and reached for her jacket. “Of course.”

  “We have very little time, so do be prompt. Do you remember the way to the tunnel?”

  “I do.”

  “Lovely. We’ll go ahead and get started. Fetch the herbs, and we shall meet you on the platform.”

  Dom spared me a look that promised we weren’t done, and then left, her boots fading into the depths of the cathedral.

  Yulian rocked back on his heels, his lips pressed into a curved line beneath his white mustache.

  “What?” I snapped, avoiding his gaze.

  “Nothing at all,” he chirped. “Think you can pull yourself together and help me get the spell started?”

  “You want me to help with magic?”

  “Don’t be a ninny. You won’t burst into flames, you know.” He shouldered his battered backpack, stooping slightly under the weight. “We haven’t time to waste. If I hadn’t forgotten the frankincense and myrrh blend to begin with… Well, there’s no excuse. I’m simply getting old and senile.”

  “Hardly. You’re barely out of your thirties,” I joked. “Just a baby.”

  “From an immortal fallen angel to an aging old witch,” Yulian intoned. “I won’t be around forever, Gadreel. I’m afraid these old bones don’t work like they used to. No offense, Drake,” Yulian added, addressing the weapon-in-progress beside me.

  I donned my boots and coat, trying not to think too hard about Yulian getting older. Or Yulian dying. I had lost so much time with him just being an asshole. Reconnected now, I couldn’t imagine losing him for good.

  He was my family.

  Instead of expressing myself like an empathetic human being, I clung to my crabby nature and remained silent as I followed Yulian out into the evening.

  The market had packed it in for the day, but a handful of bundled figures strolled the Square in twos and threes, taking a brisk walk before the last of the sun faded for the night. Nobody paid us any mind, even though we marched from the cathedral as if we owned the place. We probably owed their obvious inattention to Yulian’s special talents.

  Thankfully, we didn’t travel far from St. Basil’s. Being close to the old church comforted me—like maybe if something went wrong, we’d have a chance to run and hide. Not that I could verify the grounds as consecrated after all these years. Maybe it was simply the spirit of Vasily giving me a sense of protection.

  Yulian led me to a short, squat brick building with boarded windows. We passed through a set of glass double doors and into a dusty lobby.

  The original entrance had been sealed with concrete, which seemed like overkill. But Yulian bypassed the defunct staircase and took a side hallway, past empty, doorless bathrooms and the mirrored window of a security station.

  We stopped in front of an innocuous metal door. Yulian waved a hand over the notched handle, and the lock released with an audible click.

  This particular service door hadn’t had oil on its hinges since before the rift. Yulian yanked open the heavy metal, and an ungodly squeal echoed through the building.

  Yulian stepped aside to let me pass and then struggled to close the door. I reached past him and shoved until the door closed on the frigid night.

  Yulian dusted his hands together and resituated his pack. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  We descended a narrow stairwell. The constant circling made me dizzy, and I lost count of how many levels we passed. The bottom came up unexpectedly, and I stumbled as I realized we weren’t circling to another staircase.

  Yulian chuckled. “We’ve arrived. No need to keep going.”

  “This place is like Dante’s seventy levels of hell.”

  “Posh. You’re exaggerating both that fable and this stairwell.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be old?” I griped. “Remember, ‘old bones’ and shit? You aren’t even out of breath.”

  “I’m old, Gadreel. Not an asthmatic.” He winked one cloudy blue eye. “Come. We’re losing time.”

  “That’s all life is. The steady loss of time.”

  Yulian glanced at me sidelong as he yanked open another screeching door. “I somehow recall a less existential angel married to my niece.”

  “Ex-angel,” I corrected automatically.

  Yul paused in the doorway, lit only by the flame burning steadily above his long, thin fingers. “I wish you wouldn’t cheapen yourself like that. Just because you no longer have wings doesn’t mean you’ve ceased to be an angel. You cannot lose that which shaped you, Gadreel.”

  “I’ve fallen out of favor with God. That is the core of why I am no longer an angel.” I couldn’t keep the note of bitterness from my voice.

  “God has fallen out of favor with you,” Yulian corrected. “And if I may, that is his loss.”

  I couldn’t respond to that. The old witch’s faith in me encircled me like a life raft and buoyed me from the depths of my self-hatred. For the first time in a lifetime, I felt seen and understood.

  Wouldn’t that be my kind of luck? Rediscover my family just in time to die saving the Circle.

  God may have fallen out of favor, but he hadn’t lost his sense of humor.

  20

  I cleared my throat before my emotions could make an appearance. “His loss,” I agreed. To keep my emotions from becoming even more of a problem, I hefted Yulian’s bag and said, “All right, boss. What first?”

  “There are twenty candles in that bag. I’ll need a circle made on the floor. Right over there should be fine.” Crouched over his special spell bag, the one I wasn’t allowed to carry, he motioned to a large open area that had once housed turnstiles. Pale squares in the concrete showed where the people of Kremlin once passed to reach the subway.

  “A perfect circle? Geometry isn’t my strong suit. Would an imperfect circle be good enough?”

  Yulian laughed. “There’s no such thing as perfection in magic.”

  I crouched to empty the bag, pulling out exactly twenty short, squat candles. Handmade, from the looks of it. I wondered if Yulian had made them himself, or if Dominika had. I felt a thrill at the thought of her but quashed it immediately.

  Once I’d constructed a non-geometric semblance of a circle, I joined Yulian. “What next?”

  “One of these at each corner of the circle.” The old witch passed me four large pillar candles in four different colors.

  “Circles don’t have corners.”

  Yulian held up a compass. “The magnetic corners of the earth, Gadreel. Don’t be facetious.”

  I grinned, swiped the compass from his fingertips, and set about navigating the directions.

  While I wandered uselessly, pinpointing where to find magnetic north, Yulian glided smoothly to the center of the circle and began setting the stage for his magic. I couldn’t help but watch from the corner of my eye as he worked, his sure hands fluttering over a vast array of tools I had no names for. Yulia
n seemed to embody magic himself, so confident he was in his motions.

  Meanwhile, I had the damndest time finding true compass points.

  “Every time I think I have it, the needle moves,” I said. I shook the compass like it was a can of spray paint that needed priming.

  “You’re overthinking.” Yulian retrieved his compass and set about doing the rest of the directions. “Unpack the vials we need for collecting the blood.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In the main bag.”

  As if I had any idea what that meant, considering we had three bags, and one of them—the one I would consider the “main” bag—I wasn’t allowed to touch.

  I chose the bag that hadn’t held the harem of candles and was pleasantly surprised to find a cloth full of clinking glass vials. I also found a handy stand with small holes meant to hold the vials. The old witch had thought of everything.

  I put the vials next to Yulian’s makeshift altar in the center of the circle.

  “Are you ready?” Yulian placed the compass on the ground next to an androgynous idol I didn’t recognize.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be to do magic.”

  Yulian chuckled. “You act like it’s such a foreign concept. What do you think church is, Gadreel? It’s simply a different kind of magic.”

  “I can’t argue that logic,” I agreed. “Have you seen the guys with the incense?”

  Yulian shook his head. “Brooding, grumpy, and humorous. Whatever shall the world do with you.”

  “You’re abusing sarcasm right now.”

  “Whatever shall we do,” Yulian intoned with a grin. “If you’re done, come stand on the other side of the altar here, facing me.”

  I followed his instructions, a little more nervous than I thought I would be. He handed me a white taper candle encircled by a paper drip catcher.

  “More candles?” I said, amused. “Do we really need five hundred of them?”

  “Fire is the most powerful element at our disposal. And it’s the element my entire foundation of magic has perched upon. Now, hush and do as I say.” He smiled beneath his long beard.

  The words stung—not because he was in any way scolding me, but because they reminded me so much of my wife. Even the delivery—the succinctness of the words, the small smile to follow—it all screamed of Catie. My heart ached.

  “I’m going to call the corners now,” Yulian said, picking up a small blue bowl. “I want you to follow me with the candle and this vessel of water.”

  I accepted the bowl in my other hand, the ceramic chilly against my fingers. I followed Yulian to the northern candle—green and etched with an N.

  “I call upon the guardians of the north,” Yulian intoned, his voice ringing with power. “Guardians, join us this eve to protect us as we perform this magic.”

  He removed a pinch of salt from the bowl he held and dumped it into the bowl of water in my hand before giving the concoction a stir with his finger. He then dipped his hand in the liquid and flung water into the dark abyss behind the flickering candle. To my surprise, he turned and did the same thing on me before anointing himself.

  He must have seen the look of shock on my face, because he chuckled. “Ah, my little magic virgin. Just go with the flow, as the kids say.”

  We visited each corner, invoking the guardians at each point. I also found myself the victim of yet more splashing, and then a pungent smudging of incense in the southern corner.

  As bizarre as the practice seemed to me, there was something calming about the motions. The repetition of Yulian’s invocations, the warmth and goodness that emanated from the man as he performed. By the time we returned to the altar, I’d relaxed into a kind of comfort that did remind me of the many Sundays I sat beside Catie at church.

  Yulian dumped his bowl of salt into my bowl of water. “Gad, can you retrieve the dragon’s blood from beneath you?” he asked, removing the salt-laden water from my hand.

  “Uh, sure. Like actual dragon’s blood?” I gazed at the ground around me, searching for… I didn’t know. Vials of viscous red liquid?

  “Dragon’s blood is an herb, Gadreel. Dragons don’t exist. At least in this time.”

  “They existed in another time?” I knelt and dug through the piles of crap at my feet.

  “I don’t discount much, my friend. A lifetime married to magic does that to a man. Opens his mind. Makes the seemingly impossible possible.”

  I shoved aside a balled-up velvet cape. “Like the impossibility of defeating Belias? Can we make that possible?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  I finally located a glass jar with a barely legible label announcing Dragon’s Blood in Yulian’s loopy, old-fashioned handwriting. As I stood and held the jar out, I hit the white taper I’d placed on the altar, and it tipped over. Hot melted wax spewed across the cloth, and the flame extinguished.

  Yulian eyed the damage, more amused than dismayed. “I forgot how clumsy you are. I see that hasn’t changed.”

  “You try being this big.”

  A new voice joined our conversation. “Oh, please. You’re a graceful asshole. You can move like a dancer when it suits you.”

  Dom.

  I turned to see her striding through the candlelit darkness. Snowflakes dotted her dark hair, and the candlelight gave her face an ethereal glow, enhancing her unearthly beauty. My palms grew hot as I watched her move into the circle. She removed her jacket to expose a long-sleeved shirt that hugged her every curve.

  She sat a jar on the altar cloth and shoved her jacket at my chest. “Go sit down, Gad. I’ll take it from here before you burn down the underground.”

  I bit my tongue against the immediate need to argue with her and shrugged in defeat. “Fine. I’ll just be over here. Being a graceful asshole.”

  I retreated to the shadows outside the circle, pressing my nose into the soft fur interior of Dom’s coat. It smelled like her — something spicy like cinnamon mixed with an undertone of florals.

  After years of practicing magic together, Yulian and Dom had turned their craft into a work of art. Time had forged an obviously strong alliance between them. Dom hadn’t been born a witch, yet she executed her tasks flawlessly, seeming to know without prompting exactly what her father needed and when.

  As I watched them, I realized that despite Dom’s temper, she was much like the old witch. I hadn’t noticed at first, unable to look past the Yulian I once knew to the Yulian now, who had raised a little girl by himself and turned her into a confident and capable human being. It was a refreshing reminder that some people succeeded against all odds, despite the demon on her throne and constant fear of life in Kremlin.

  Humans had a tendency to be resilient. I often forgot that, lost in my own mind where the only humans I’d ever loved hadn’t survived. Dom made me feel small and incapable, but in the same breath, she made me feel as if I could do anything.

  The two lifted their arms simultaneously to the ceiling. Yulian chanted in a garbled language I didn’t recognize—something with shades of ancient French, Italian, and Russian. The silence after his declaration hung heavy and expectant.

  When one minute stretched to five, I spoke up. “Did it not work?”

  Dom rolled her eyes. “They’re not exactly flying here.”

  “You can’t just magic poof them?” I used my hands to indicate the poof and earned a Dom laugh for my troubles.

  Before I could speak again, a figure materialized in the darkness beyond our circle of candles.

  I leapt to my feet and reached for the dagger at my hip, but Yulian held up a steadying hand.

  A young woman, out of her teens but still with a youthful glow, glided across the platform. She walked right past me without any indication she knew I was there. As she slipped beyond the circle of candles, a heady blast of energy escaped and roared past me.

  I fell against the wall from the force, stunned. It was as if a gate had opened to a world warmer and windier than this one. But no
body inside the circle seemed to be affected by it.

  Magic is fucked up, man.

  The silent witch stopped before Yulian.

  Working quickly, he sliced the witch’s finger and tilted her hand over the vial Dom held. The bloodletting was over in seconds, and the girl hadn’t even reacted.

  “Return home,” Yulian said kindly. “Thank you for your assistance.”

  The witch turned and gently glided away, her eyes fixed on the distance and her face completely unchanged. As she passed the circle of candles, the magic burst through again.

  I stood and brushed off my pants. “What the hell is up with the mini cyclone when she entered and exited the circle?”

  “That is raw power,” Yulian said. “Only the witches being called forth by the spell can pass the threshold of the circle. Anyone else would hit an invisible wall.”

  I stepped closer to the circle as the witch’s silhouette disappeared into the dark tunnel beyond. “Is she okay? She didn’t even blink.”

  “She’s bespelled.” Yulian eyed the vial of blood and settled it into a hole on the stand. “She won’t remember anything. Cleaner and more efficient this way, I think.”

  “No kidding. Would’ve saved us a lot of effort and concussions in the alley,” I replied, giving Dom a pointed look.

  “We needed to call these men and women magically,” Yulian cut in before Dom could retort. “Finding pure humans was easy with the blood tithe. Finding pure witches, not so much. The magic draws only the pure, and only the witches.”

  I found it hard not to marvel at him. His mind, brilliant and detail oriented. In another world, he could have ruled kingdoms.

  Three more witches joined us from the darkness. They shuffled to the magic circle, bundled in coats and boots with snow covering their heads and shoulders. Considering the sheer amount of snow on them versus the dusting Dom had brought with her, I felt it safe to assume the weather had gotten worse outside.

  Hopefully our little blood party wouldn’t get one of our donors killed in a whiteout.

  Yulian repeated his ritual with each of the new witches—two young men and another young girl, none of them older than their teens. Before the girl had been sliced open and sent on her way, two more arrived.