Enchantress Under Fire, page 26
part #4 of Arcane Artisans Series
“Yes.”
“Yet you’re going to let me take your keys to ensure you don’t follow me.”
Greg merely watched me, silent.
I made a decision. “Keep them. You’re not going to follow me. Even if you were, I know your car, and you’d have a disaster of a time tracking me through city traffic without being noticed.”
Greg’s eyebrows rose, but he nodded. “Thanks.” He started to climb back into his car.
I caught his arm. “Do you really think Meg’s dead?”
He sighed, studying the front tire. “She disappeared the day the Mentor took his last trip. Those trips where he balances magic around the world.”
“You think he flew her somewhere and killed her there to fix that area’s magic.”
He nodded. “Won’t ever see her body. Won’t know for sure.”
I let my hand drop from his arm. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“I know. But I’m sorry all the same.”
Greg didn’t look at me. “Thanks.”
He climbed into his car. I headed for the stairwell. I doubt either of us looked back.
Dawn was just breaking as I reached Sam’s street. I could have made it sooner, but I’d taken circuitous routes and doubled back often to ensure I wasn’t being tracked. Not once did I catch sight of someone tailing me, either by car or on foot. I even kept an eye overhead to watch for helicopters or shifters, but to the best of my observation, my trip had gone unnoticed.
Golden light warmed the grass and gave each blade its own little shadow. The rays warmed my chilled fingers, and I flexed them as I hurried up the steps to the apartment. A locked metal screen obscured the front door. The doorbell rang with a slightly off-key ding-dong, and after a few seconds of no sound from inside, I mashed the button again.
The door opened. It was dark inside. All I could make out through the dense screen was a silhouette. “Who the hell are you?” asked a woman’s voice.
“Adrienne Morales,” I said. “Is Sam here? She’s in danger. Let me in.”
There was a brief pause, then the lock on the screen door turned. “All right, then,” said the woman, making room.
“Thank you.” I pulled the screen door open.
A strong hand seized my jacket collar, dragged me inside, and slammed me chest-first against the wall. Stars filled my vision. A warm metal barrel pressed against the back of my neck. “You have one chance to tell me who you really are,” said the woman’s voice.
“Whoa!” I shouted, hands out to my sides. “I’m not armed! I’m a friend!”
“You’re certainly not Adrienne Morales. I know her, and you look nothing like her.” The gun didn’t budge from my spine.
“I’m enchanted. I changed my face. And if you’re concerned about this, I’m guessing you’re on my side, so please don’t shoot me or you’re going to have a major problem stopping Geralt.”
“Enchanted,” said the voice flatly. “Tell me where.”
“My wrist. Two enchantments. One changed my face. The other masks my magical potential.”
Rough hands yanked on my turtleneck sleeve to reveal the black maze-like circles. “That doesn’t prove anything.”
“Then why did you even ask? Look, I don’t have a lot of time. Ask me something only Adrienne would know.” Something was prickling me about my assailant’s voice, some familiarity I couldn’t quite place.
“What kind of magic did Adrienne’s worthless apprentice slap on me to steal my mind?”
Shock filled me. “Maribel? What are you doing here?”
The gun dug into my flesh. “Answer the question.”
“Stopping magic. She wanted to stop you from attacking her. Instead she accidentally stopped you from wanting to attack her. Or having any other complex thought. What are you doing here? If you’ve hurt Sam ...”
The pressure of the gun left my neck. “I haven’t hurt the kid. I’m protecting her.”
Slowly I turned around, resisting the urge to reach back and rub where the gun barrel had chafed my skin. Maribel stood before me in camouflage pajama pants and a tight-fitting green tank top. Her hair was rumpled from sleep, and a disheveled sleeping bag covered the sagging brown couch that took up most of the small living room. Nevertheless, her eyes were alert and calculating, her movements sharp as she flicked the safety back on the gun.
“Protecting her,” I said. “You’re the one the Union has on guard duty?”
“There are three of us on the building, two outside and one inside. We take twelve-hour shifts, and it’s boring as hell. What are you doing here? Kendall keeps assuring us you’re on some super-secret mission out of state.”
“I was, but not out of state. Geralt’s about to attack today. I don’t know the exact time.”
She blinked. “Is he out of his mind? This is Underground territory.”
“That doesn’t matter. He’s got people on the inside. Geralt wants her bad, Maribel. Worse than he wants me. When he comes for her, it’ll be in full force. Get Sam, tell her to grab the bare essentials. We have to leave. You also need to call whoever’s in charge of this area. Geralt’s planning some kind of distraction, and I’ll bet money it’s going to kill people.”
Maribel pulled out her phone, though doubt still clouded her face. She pressed a button and spoke curtly when someone answered. “Hey. Get over here. Yes, now.” She hung up.
“Is something wrong?” asked a voice from the hallway.
I turned to see Sam rubbing sleep from her eyes. Her pajamas consisted of sweats and an XL t-shirt with a concert logo from before she was born. She spotted me, and her outward fatigue vanished. Her hands rose, aiming enchanted rings at my face. “Who’s that?”
“It’s me,” I said.
For several seconds she stared at me blankly, then recognition dawned. “Adrienne!”
She bounded around the couch and latched onto me like a crab grabbing a rock. “I’m so glad you’re okay! What’s going on?”
“Get your stuff,” I said. “The bare minimum. You’re not safe here, and we have to go.”
She frowned. “What do you–”
“Sam, there’s no time. Hurry.”
Someone knocked on the front door. We all tensed. Maribel drew her gun and answered. Unlike her reception of me, this greeting was warmer. “Come in. Shit’s going down.”
Desmond stepped inside.
He promptly whipped a pair of throwing knives from his jeans and aimed them my way. “Who’s that?”
“Desmond,” I snapped, “it’s me.”
“Adrienne!” He sheathed the knives and yanked me into his arms, pressing his mouth to mine with an explosion of pent-up passion. Around the kiss, he managed one phrase at a time. “Didn’t. Recognize. Your new face. For a second.”
For just a few heartbeats, I gave myself over to the kiss, savoring the taste of his lips, the flickering touch of his tongue. My body lurched within me, aching for closeness, primal feelings burning deep within. I hadn’t acknowledged my building loneliness, the empty space beside me that Desmond had always filled. Now that he was here again, months’ worth of repressed feelings burst out into the open and melted away in the heat of his arms around me. His body felt strong, his wounds healed. A pale scar lined his light brown cheek, but the bruises had all faded. I hadn’t realized until just this moment how badly I’d wanted to see for myself that he was whole and safe.
It killed me to do it, but I finally pushed him back. “You’re in charge of the Voids in this area?”
“Yeah.” An embarrassed red undertone tinged his ears.
Apparently the other Voids really had put aside their mistrust for him. “Then you have to alert your teams. Geralt’s people are coming for Sam. They’ve got spies in your ranks. We’ve got to get her out of here before they arrive, so your people can handle whatever distraction he ignites to keep you busy.”
“What about my dad?” came a voice from behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder to see Sam paused halfway to the hallway. “Get moving, Sam. We don’t have much time.”
“Yeah, but what about my dad?”
Maribel scoffed.
Sam glared at her. “I can’t just leave him to the fleshwriters. That’s who’s coming after me, right?”
I sighed. “All right, we’ll bring him, too. Where is he? I’ll convince him to cooperate.”
“In the den,” said Maribel, jerking her head down the hall. “We explained the paranormal stuff to him when we started posting a guard here. He hasn’t been taking it well.”
“Five minutes,” I told Sam. “Necessities only. Clothes, toothbrush, schoolwork ...”
“Current art project?”
That managed to coax a small smile from me. “Yes. And I want to see it once we’re safe. Go.”
She bolted toward the bedrooms.
Maribel was quickly stuffing a small quantity of personal items into a black miniature backpack. “I’ll be ready in two minutes,” she told me. She set about rolling up the sleeping bag into a tight, neat bundle.
“Why did you put Sam here, anyway?” I asked Desmond quietly. “This is the first place Geralt would look.”
“It wasn’t our idea,” Desmond said. “Someone spotted Sam on a mission and alerted the police. They escorted her back home.”
“To her abusive father.”
“She refused to tell anyone about that. She agreed to stay at home with him, in exchange for her dad getting the police off her back. They’re convinced she was kidnapped, and they’re trying to figure out who took her.”
I looked at my six foot tall, muscular, brown-skinned boyfriend. “One guess who they would have arrested if they’d learned where she was hiding.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“I understand. You’ve got to go organize your people. Prepare them for an explosion, a car accident, something big and dangerous. We need to protect Sam, but I don’t want to sacrifice innocent normals, either.”
“I’m on it.” Desmond pressed another quick kiss to my lips.
“I love you,” I said softly.
“I love you too.”
I hurried toward the den as Desmond let himself out. Both of us looked back.
But only once.
The den lurked down another cheaply carpeted hall, past the kitchen. There was a second TV in here, still on and playing some part of the twenty-four hour news cycle. The earnest-looking anchor was covering a strange outbreak of a rare disease in a retirement home in Arizona. “None of the residents or staff have left town in months, so it’s unclear how the virus was brought into the building,” the woman said.
“Magic,” I told her, and grabbed the remote from the coffee table to mute the TV.
Sam’s father lay sprawled on the room’s couch, which sagged worse than the one in the living room. It was also a hideous shade of yellow that might have been popular in the sixties and had been inflicted on subsequent generations through yard sales. Six empty brown bottles lined the floor beside the sofa, three of them upright, the other three apparently lying where they’d been dropped.
Mr. Lindholm wore faded flannel pajama pants and a baggy green t-shirt. His pointy nose and blue eyes marked him as Sam’s father. He’d shaved since I’d last seen him, though the farmer’s tan on his arms had deepened with summer work.
He snored softly, his mouth partially open, his arm sprawled under his head to supplement the couch’s thin brown pillow. Forgoing time-wasting attempts at subtlety, I grabbed his shoulder and shook him roughly. “Wake up. We have to leave.”
He flailed into a half-sitting position, leaning on his elbow and blinking red-rimmed eyes at me. “What ... who are you? Are you the new guard? I told you people to leave me alone.”
“I’m not with the Void Union. I’m here to make sure Sam isn’t captured by the people hunting her, and since I’m here you get to be rescued too.”
He gave me a bleary look. “Who are you?”
“Adrienne. Now get up.”
He shot to a sitting position, then had to catch himself on the back of the couch. “You! I’ve got the cops looking for you. You’re the reason my girl ran away.”
“Your daughter ran away because you’re an abusive and neglectful parent who doesn’t give a shit about her,” I snapped. “Fortunately she gives a shit about you, and I give a shit about humanity in general, so if you get on your feet and out to the car right now, you get to avoid being tortured for information by the people currently trying to hunt your daughter down and murder her. Now. Get. Up.”
The haggard man stared up at me bleakly. “Doesn’t give a shit?” he asked quietly. “Is that what you believe?”
Sighing, I wedged an arm under his shoulders and tried to heave him onto his feet. He wasn’t fat, but a life of manual labor had hardened his body, and I couldn’t support him. He managed to rise at my insistence, but his steps wove unevenly. I wondered how long it had been since that last bottle was emptied.
“I give a shit,” he mumbled, his tongue slurring over the sibilance. “She may not see it, but I do.”
“Yeah, my parents claimed that too,” I said. “All of you have a confusing way of showing it.”
We made it to the door of the den. There were two steps leading up to the hallway, and Sam’s dad carefully staggered his way up.
We were moving too slowly. “Maribel!” I shouted. “I need your help.”
She appeared at the top of the steps in seconds. With a disgusted grimace, she took Mr. Lindholm’s other arm and helped him to the front door, where we leaned him against the wall.
“I do give a shit,” he repeated, without looking at me. “Nobody knows how it’s been since her mom left. Then the jobs left. Damn state is too expensive, but can’t afford to move. I do what I can. You understand that? I give every shit I’ve got. It just ain’t ever enough.”
Maribel shook her head, turning away. I stood on the balls of my feet, itching to get moving. Magic beat strongly here, Kadum! Kadum! Kadum!, a weapon looming over the impending battle. Though it had only been seconds, I felt the jagged teeth of the trap closing on us.
Sam reappeared at the end of the hallway, dressed in street clothes and carrying a bulging backpack. “I’m ready! Let’s get out of here.”
She made it halfway to the living room before the ground shook. A steady rumble vibrated the foundation of the building. It didn’t build or subside, but seconds stretched by as it continued.
“That’s not an earthquake,” I said.
The low boom of a distant explosion rattled the windows in their frames. Screams of alarm came from outside.
“Neither was that.” Maribel yanked her gun from the holster at her waist and switched the safety off. “Stay back. If they come in, take the girl, force a way through them, and run.”
“You might need me to ...”
“You’re the ones they want,” she said sharply over her shoulder. “You’re the ones they can use to kill the rest. If they come in, you get out. Understood?”
I couldn’t argue with her logic. Swallowing, I nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Too late for that.” Maribel ventured to the door, placed her back against the wall, and peered quickly out the front window. “Two white vans, unmarked. No drivers or passengers. Could be over a dozen fleshwriters here.”
Sam let out a little moan. Her father stared at her, then at me, then Maribel. His eyes closed.
“Can you see what’s causing the shaking?” I asked.
Maribel shook her head. “No sign of people. But it’s obviously magic. I’d guess something to keep us from escaping.”
“So much for the get-out plan,” I said. “I can still sense magic in the area, so they aren’t drawing all of it. We can defend ourselves. And they probably aren’t expecting you to be here. If they do, they’ll assume you’re a Void. That’s an advantage.”
She nodded, her eyes flicking around the room. “The den is the most defensible position. Everyone in there, double-time.”
Maribel went to drag Mr. Lindholm away from the door. Sam disappeared into the den, and I was about to join her when the front door, main window, and at least one window in the bedrooms all broke at the same time.
Glass sprayed across the carpet, sparkling flecks catching rainbows from the dawn now streaming through the open door. That was all I had time to notice before enchanters came rushing in, their clothes nondescript, all of them wearing the white wristband of Geralt’s Mediation force.
Maribel’s gun echoed three times in rapid succession. Two of the fleshwriters tumbled to the ground, though they continued moving and groaning. No telltale blood streamed from their chests. “Bulletproof vests,” I shouted as a conjured sword swept toward me. I tapped the magic in my palm and raised my empty hands to block the blade. Just before my arms would have been severed, my own blade appeared in my hands, taking the impact and glittering with white-gold fire.
KADUM! KADUM! KADUM! Magic beat frantically against my skull, drawn by so many enchanters using it in one space.
My attacker was a middle-aged white woman with dark green eyes and red hair tied in a tight bun. I’d seen her once or twice in the compound, but I didn’t know her name. Apparently she knew me, though. Her eyes widened as she stared into my face. “Traitor!” she snarled. Her next sword swipe went for my throat.
Maribel took her down with a shot between the eyes. She fell backward, dead before she hit the floor.
More fleshwriters charged through, and I reached into my pocket for the items Fael had procured for me before my escape. One was a handgun. I aimed it at the door and held down the trigger.
Instead of bullets, a cloud of gas sprayed from the barrel. A pleasant aroma filled the room, but the fleshwriters struck by the gas went rigid, their bodies freezing in place. They toppled to the floor, paralyzed by the stopping magic I’d trapped in the gun a lifetime ago.
The enchantment on the gun ran out. I emptied the actual bullets left in the magazine into the next wave of attackers, then dropped the expended gun.
KADUM! KADUM! KADUM!
