But when I stepped over the wards at the end of my driveway, my memory returned with full force.
And I realized I’d learned nothing about how I’d gotten home that morning. I shook my head, disgusted with myself for being so easily stupefied by a crew of Protectorate agents, most of them Flint, when I should’ve been completely prepared to fight off their predictable spells. As I went into my house, feeling my head clear of intrusive magic on my own turf, I allowed myself the excuse that I had still been weak from the battle with the demon. And my necklace and bracelets had been taken. I had come to rely on those, perhaps too much, to focus and enhance my natural powers.
Who’d taken my jewelry? Who’d brought me and my car home?
Chapter Three
Because of my exhaustion, I didn’t talk to Raynor until late that evening after I’d had a nap. I’d slept through Birdie bringing Random back from a walk, a Protectorate visit to my heavily warded front door, and three calls from the big man himself, whose message told me if I didn’t call him back before moonrise, the agents would break through my boundary spells and haul me to San Francisco for questioning at dawn.
And so, when there was the faintest hint of moonglow on the horizon, I called him. A woman answered the phone.
“May I speak to Director Raynor, please?” I asked.
“He’s retired to his private residence for the evening,” she said.
I stifled a snort. She made it sound like the White House, but Raynor didn’t live like other Emerald witches. Usually the upper ranks of the Protectorate demanded they be treated like kings and presidents, with housing and clothing and formalities to match, but Raynor had chosen to sleep in the Diamond Street office like a lowly Flint agent. His private residence was a pull-out bed next to his desk.
“Please put me through,” I said.
“Code word?”
He’d left me one, but I felt silly using it. He was determined to make me into some kind of secret agent. I sighed. “It’s about a female bear with young offspring.”
The woman on the phone hesitated. “That’s not exactly… Well, I guess that’s close enough.”
In a moment, Raynor picked up. “The code word is mama bear.”
“I’m not a spy,” I said.
“No, you’re a mama bear,” he said. “Fiercely protective of the vulnerable, underestimated at your enemy’s peril.”
I smiled. It was hard not to like Raynor, in spite of the way he liked to throw his weight around. Just recently I’d discovered we shared a dangerous secret in common—we each bore the mark of a demon ancestor. I’d had no idea until about a month ago when a witch had used an opal ring to expose the trait in other witches. The only clue I’d had before then was my ability to hear and see fairies, even when they didn’t want to be seen, which was highly unusual. In fact, Raynor was the only other human I’d ever met who had the same ability. Apparently it indicated a demon possession somewhere in the family line, possibly generations ago. Because it was taboo, the trait hadn’t been studied openly.
I was still struggling to come to terms with what this meant for me. I’d never known my mother, not even her name, and it was hard not to blame her, whoever she was, for the trait. Was I part demon? I didn’t feel evil, but maybe it was lurking deep inside me, just waiting for the right moment. The thought woke me in a panic sometimes in the middle of the night, and I’d have to pet Random for comfort before I could go back to sleep. A good dog would know if I was a Shadow threat, right? I’d always felt different from other witches, but I’d thought it was just my lonely upbringing. Would I discover my great-grandmother had left a wake of terror and death, some of it lingering in my own DNA?
That seemed to be the opinion of hardliner witches in the Protectorate. They called the trait demon “stain,” although I thought “print” was more polite. Whatever it was called, both Raynor and I had to keep it to ourselves. If anyone else found out, it could end our careers and possibly limit our freedoms within the witch world. Raynor would certainly lose his job as director. But even I would suffer because most of the jewelry I made was magical, priced much higher than my Cypress Hardware display, and sold to other witches. Prejudiced witch customers would be reluctant to buy “demon-stained” focus beads, bracelets, and other crafts. I couldn’t pay my rent from only the cheaper nonmagical designs. My reasons for staying away from Raynor and the Protectorate weren’t just to protect my ego from the embarrassment of being fired—it was to protect my life.
“If I keep my head down and stay away from the Protectorate,” I told him, “I won’t have any enemies.” In fact, the events of the morning suggested I had a guardian angel.
Of course, sensible witches didn’t believe in angels anymore. Modern life had convinced them there was no such thing as pure goodness—only gradations of Shadow. I’d thought the same thing until recently, when I’d met a demon with a heart of gold. What was an angel if not that? There was so much we didn’t understand about the world, especially in the realms of the supernatural.
“You were at the site of the demon attack today,” he said.
Flinching, I rubbed my hand over my face. He was counting on my telling him everything, precisely for the reasons his code word suggested. And since we’d bonded over the demon-print-secret thing, he seemed to expect me to share all my secrets with him.
But what if protecting some people meant leaving one of them exposed to imprisonment, torture, even death?
Samantha’s young face with the perfect eyeliner flashed before me. What if the demon returned to claim her familiar body? The Protectorate had to know how vulnerable the town had become, even if that put Seth in danger.
Maybe Seth had figured out a way to travel by now, I thought frantically. It had been a couple of weeks since I’d talked to him. And ultimately I would have to accept that Seth was an adult—in a stolen body, but one he’d had since infancy—who would have to take care of himself.
“The demon fully possessed Samantha,” I said finally. “I was able to drive it out of her. I’m not sure how, but I did.”
Raynor was silent a moment. “You didn’t alert me.”
“The exorcism wiped me out. I slept most of the day.”
“You were feeling strong enough to hike across town on foot a few hours later,” he said. “Darius didn’t mention you being insensible or otherwise unable to speak.”
I rubbed my temples, wishing I could ask him what he thought had happened to me, how I’d transported home. Was it possible, in my delirium, I’d learned how to teleport like my father could? He’d worked for years to develop that skill. Could I have just learned it in my sleep?
Unlikely, in my weakened state. And it didn’t explain what had happened to my Jeep and jewelry.
I had an obligation to tell Raynor about the demon possession, but not about what had happened to me afterward. The less I exposed of myself, the better. Raynor was somewhat benevolent, but he wasn’t harmless. We shared one secret; that didn’t mean we should share all of them.
“I’m afraid of what you’ll do to Seth,” I said quietly.
“Who, me?” Raynor asked. “I’ve left him alone this long.”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “When your bosses hear there was a full possession, you’ll have to order a complete magical sweep of the town. He might get caught in the dragnet.”
Raynor was quiet.
“Can you at least give me a back-channel heads-up so I can warn him when the Sweep Team is on its way?” I asked. “He can survive a little while away from his death site. Then when the team goes—”
“There isn’t going to be a Sweep Team,” Raynor said.
Exhaling in relief, I sank back into my couch. Raynor would be taking a risk to limit the investigation. I’d been on a similar team when I was a trainee agent, sorting through the crime scenes of departed (executed) demons. A Sweep Team had the time, authority, and budget to comb through every inch within the designated area, every building, every square o
f land. If the Protectorate demanded it, they could catalog every strand of hair on a person’s head. And then do their neighbors’.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “Are you just going to set up wards around Samantha, maybe set a trap to—?”
“A new Protector is being assigned to Silverpool,” he said. “Full-rank Emerald. More assistants than Tristan had. The Protectorate is tired of getting bad news from your neck of the woods.”
I jumped to my feet. “No, now?” My breath caught in my throat. Of course it was inevitable they would eventually replace Tristan, but Raynor had been able to prevent it so far, using it as leverage to pressure me to work for him.
“I’ve been reprimanded for the delay,” he said. “The assignment is being made by some Sapphires in New York. Out of my hands.” Sapphire-rank witches were a step above Emerald.
“But Seth… He’s never hurt anyone. I even think humans and fairies are safer with him here. If the Protectorate would just investigate more carefully before trying to kill things they didn’t understand—”
“I’ll do what I can to suggest they appoint a witch with a more nuanced view of suprahuman beings,” he said, “but the decision won’t be mine.”
I moved through my living room to the windows overlooking the street. Seth’s bungalow next door was snug and tiny under a redwood tree, like mine, and a faint yellow light glowed from its windows. “You know he doesn’t deserve to die,” I said. “Please tell them that.”
“I’ll do what I can, but you need to lie low,” he said. “Things are about to get tricky.”
Although I respected Raynor’s advice to lie low, going completely underground wasn’t possible.
For one, I couldn’t rest until I’d warned Seth, and as of Saturday afternoon, he wasn’t answering his door. If he had a current cell phone, which I doubted, I didn’t know the number. I called Birdie, who told me she’d seen him walking along the river, and then I talked to another neighbor, Madge Souter, who told me he’d mentioned going to the beach. Born a lake fairy in Minnesota, Seth liked the water. So I drove around until dark, looking for him, but no luck. The thought of him wandering around, not knowing the Protectorate might be sending an agent to kill him, made my stomach hurt. I didn’t want to worry about him—I had no obligation to—but I did. I’d given up fighting it.
Sunday morning, I had to take a break from looking for him to drive the two hours south to San Francisco. My father was getting married in less than a week to a woman I’d never met and had booked a table for brunch at the Top of the Mark, a penthouse restaurant and bar in a hotel overlooking the city. As I hiked up Nob Hill from a distant parking spot, I told myself that I’d had to come, that I couldn’t spend all my days looking for a reclusive changeling who wasn’t my responsibility anyway. This unknown woman was going to become my stepmother on Wednesday. I had to size her up.
My father, Malcolm Bellrose, was a complicated figure in my life. Although he never talked about the past, I suspected that becoming a father had never been one of his plans—and as an infamous thief of magical antiquities and treasures, he was better at plans than anyone I’d ever met. He’d spend a year plotting a heist, and the fact that he’d never been convicted of any crime, in spite of everyone knowing he was a criminal, proved how brilliant his plans were.
But they’d never included me. I’d tagged along on his burglaries, occasionally helping when I was too young to know better, but for the most part I stayed in a hotel room, friend’s cottage, or boarding school, waiting for him to show up again.
The last time he’d shown up, a few weeks ago, he’d handed me a wedding invitation. He’d dated all kinds of characters over the years, but none had been serious. The wedding was days away, and I still didn’t know anything about the woman he was about to marry. But what had most disturbed me about his delivery of the invitation was how he’d dropped a hint about how his new bride reminded him of my mother.
My birth mother.
Nobody had ever been able to give me any details about her, and I’d been unable to find any on my own. And in all my years growing up, Malcolm had never once told me a thing about her, no matter how many times I’d begged to share the simplest of details.
So when he’d implied he’d finally tell me something, I’d been weak enough to fall for it—for a few minutes. A day at the most. But then I’d wised up, realizing he was just manipulating me, trying to get me to come to the wedding, betting my pathetic, childish need to know my mother would make it impossible to stay away.
He shouldn’t have bothered, because I would’ve attended anyway. I had my safety to consider. Knowledge of all kinds was power, and I had to protect myself. That didn’t mean I was going to expect to get anything from him.
I paused at the top of Mason Street to catch my breath, gazing around at the plunging, rolling streets, the stone and steel buildings, the white-capped and sailboat-dotted bay beyond.
Of all places, why had Malcolm chosen this restaurant? Didn’t he remember what had happened the last time he’d brought me there? Granted, it had been sixteen years, more than half my life ago, but it had changed everything.
The cable car tracks rumbled along the base of California Street, and tourists took pictures from each corner. It was a stunningly clear day, blue and gleaming, and I could see for miles. I wondered if my father had cast a spell to chase the fog away for a few hours or if he’d just gotten lucky. Malcolm Bellrose had always been very, very lucky. An essential quality for a thief.
I myself didn’t seem to have inherited that luck; never having known any other family, I’d had to rely on him and his erratic, felonious ways my entire life.
I brushed the hair out of my eyes and inhaled the chilly, sea-scented November breeze, reminding myself to let go of the past and be grateful for the present. I was alive and well. I didn’t need him anymore. Whatever scheme he was hatching now had nothing to do with me. If he was planning a heist at the hotel, and the brunch with me and his fiancée was all a cover for him to slip away and break into one of the rooms and steal a magical valuable of some kind—as it had been on my tenth birthday—I was prepared. I’d learned to expect the worst from him. I’d learned to expect nothing.
Dodging tourists, I crossed the street and walked to the corner entrance. Nothing had been the same since that birthday over sixteen years ago. On that day, I’d thought the celebration at the cool restaurant with the three-sixty views was a treat for me, a genuine present to make me feel special. But at a key moment, when the waiter had brought out the cake and began to sing, my father was gone. The bill had been paid, but he’d vanished. I’d sat alone with my uneaten slice of cake until a witch named Bronze, one of his associates, had appeared and said he was driving me home. At our apartment the next morning, Malcolm had woken me to show off the amulet he’d stolen as if he fully expected me to be happy for him.
But I’d finally seen him for what he was. Before the sun had set on the first day of my eleventh year, I’d insisted on going to boarding school far away, and never again went “home” (we’d never really had one anyway) for breaks, instead staying at school or with friends.
Hauling myself back to the present, I looked up at the landmark hotel rising above me like a fortress tower and tapped into the new redwood necklace at my throat for strength. I needed to maintain my composure. I’d never forgive myself if I showed how much it hurt to return to this place, if he ever learned how much he’d hurt me and still had the power to hurt me.
I walked over the brick drive and up into the ornate lobby, past the gold and shimmering holiday decorations, and got in the elevator. As it rose to the nineteenth floor, I scanned the rooms for anything especially odd or dangerous. If my father was here to steal something, it would be valuable enough to require magical wards, perhaps a witch or two standing guard.
Although I’d made my new necklace twice as powerful as my old one, I wasn’t able to detect anything unusual. A few witches here and there, that was to be expected, but
none of the magic felt particularly strong, dangerous, or deceptive. But an advanced ward could fool me from this distance. There could be anything hiding in the hotel.
A hostess greeted me at the top and escorted me across the maroon carpet to a table in a far corner where my father sat with a surprisingly ordinary fortysomething woman in a turtleneck sweater. I pretended to admire the view of the city, the azure water of the bay, Alcatraz and the rest of the postcard panorama, but all my real attention was on the blondish, roundish woman smiling at me through her glasses. She looked like a woman in a laundry detergent commercial. I realized I’d been expecting someone sexy and sophisticated, a witch of the world—like Malcolm.
But he’d said she was like my mother. Had he meant she looked like her? Or was it her personality? Her magical talent?
“Alma, how lovely to see you,” Malcolm said, as if meeting had been an accident, rising to greet me without moving his hand from the woman’s shoulder. “Would you like to join Vera and me with a glass of champagne? Bottomless, they call it, but nonmagicals don’t mean it the way we do. Our waiter has to fill it with a bottle.” He turned to his fiancée and winked.
She smiled at him, then at me. “It’s so nice to finally meet you,” she said, her smile widening. Her unblinking stare suggested she’d been very curious about me too. She didn’t extend her hand, which was good manners among witches who didn’t want to invade another’s personal space, unbalancing their personal wards or spells, but she did get up and lean toward me as if she wanted to hug.
I quickly sat down on the other side of the table and grabbed a water glass, alarmed by the threat of contact. No hugs on my menu today. Too many emotions were swirling inside me—fear, curiosity, disgust, anger, longing. This woman was like the mother I’d never known? Was that why I felt drawn to her?
I looked away to clear my head, belatedly noticing the opulent spread on the buffet tables. I saw raw oysters and caviar, steak and eggs, pastries and pancakes, fruit and salad, desserts. On my fateful tenth birthday, it had seemed like a cartoon feast, thrilling me with its opulence, more food than I’d ever seen in my life. But today I wasn’t sure I’d be able to swallow a single bite. Old memories were crowding in, pulling childish emotions to the surface.
A Spell to Die For Page 3