Maps, Artifacts, and Other Arcane Magic (Dowser Series Book 5) (4 page)

Tonight the kitchen was already dark, though a quick glance at my cellphone informed me it was only 5:37 p.m. I protected the cellphone in a lead-lined pen case from the magic of the nexus and the portal. That didn’t protect it from multiple near drownings though, so this was yet another new iPhone. I’d charged the guardians for the replacement. They could afford it, and could have mentioned the possible water issues on my last assignment.

The bakery kitchen was only lit by the digital clocks on the oven and microwave, but I stopped to admire it for a moment anyway. I pressed my hand to the cold, smooth, stainless steel of my workstation, and allowed the remaining adrenaline in my system to drain away. Getting attacked by books might have seemed amusing from the outside, but it wasn’t pleasant in the experience. Though it was the encounter with Qiuniu that really had me on edge.

I could taste Gran’s grassy lilac witch magic and my mother’s strawberry from the storefront, but I couldn’t hear them talking. Unfortunately, that wasn’t unusual. Gran and Scarlett — even after everything we’d been through in the last year and a half — weren’t ever going to be friends.

Still, I liked the idea of them enjoying a coffee and a cupcake after closing together. Maybe they were sitting underneath my trinkets by the French-paned front windows …

My phone pinged, and I checked it to find a text message from Kandy, who was still healing in Portland. She’d come for a visit at Christmas, and we’d gone skiing up in Whistler. Well, she and Jorgen, her Norwegian friend from London, had skied. I’d gone to the spa, then poked around the town under the guise of shopping. I was eyeing a couple of empty retail locations for a possible bakery. I’d been thinking of expanding, but the rent in Whistler village had put me off. Plus to expand, I’d have to lose Bryn — my part-time baker and full-time employee — from the current store, because she was the only person I trusted to run a new location. Though Whistler would put her closer to her extended family in Squamish, so she was open to the idea.

My phone pinged again, reminding me of the text I still hadn’t read. I peered at the incomprehensible series of symbols before I realized that Kandy was now sending me obscene emoticons that I probably didn’t want to figure out.

I typed back.

Miss you too.

And hit send.

That would satisfy her. She hated it when I got mushy.

I wandered out into the bakery storefront. The shop was closed and buttoned up already. January was a quiet time for cupcakes, though I’d needed to extend my hours throughout December. Gran and Scarlett were sipping lattes and nibbling on cupcakes at one of the bistro tables by the French-paned front windows.

Scarlett lifted her strawberry blond head and flashed her signature smile as I entered. She was reading a spellbook. I could pick up the hints of witch magic from it even with the bakery display case between us.

I smiled back. It was actually impossible not to smile at Scarlett when she smiled at you. Her witch magic was heavily flavored in charm and charisma. Hence the reason my cupcakes
Charm in a Cup
and
Love in a Cup
were frosted with strawberry buttercream.

Gran swiveled away from her laptop to look over at me. Behind her green-rimmed reading glasses, her indigo eyes were an identical match to mine and Scarlett’s, but her gray hair was neatly pulled back into a thick French braid that reached her tailbone.

Eye color was the only physical characteristic I shared with this side of my family. I was taller, bigger, and snarkier than the petite, polite women before me. I might be considered pretty by most, but Gran and Scarlett fell firmly into the ‘beautiful’ class.

“Hello, my Jade,” Scarlett called. “You’re back early. I saved you some of Bryn’s hot chocolate.”

“Perfect.” I abruptly changed directions, crossing behind the counter over to the espresso machine. A small warming carafe sat to one side of the machine, where I assumed I’d find the chocolate fix I suddenly needed.

“You look nice,” Gran said.

Poor Gran. She held out hope that one day I’d bring Qiuniu into the Godfrey clan. She had a thing for the Brazilian demigod. And honestly, who wouldn’t? If you liked your men prettier than you could ever hope to be. And, you know, it didn’t freak you out that he was one of the nine guardians of the world and all the magic in it. Thankfully, Gran seemed to like Warner as well.

Yes, I got all that from a fairly neutral comment about my outfit.

“Thanks,” I answered. “I have a dinner date … hopefully.” Warner didn’t exactly wear a watch. Or own a calendar.

“The sentinel looked in about an hour ago,” Scarlett said, her smile indicating that she more than approved of Warner as boyfriend material. “Said he’d be back soon. He promised to help Pearl move some furniture.”

I laughed. I couldn’t imagine Warner doing something so mundane.

“I’m renovating the back bedrooms,” Gran said coolly. “Adding an en suite and a walk-in closet.”

I lost the smile. She meant Sienna’s old room. “Okay,” I said as I applied myself to carrying an empty mug and the entire carafe of hot chocolate toward the high round table my mother and grandmother occupied.

Scarlett’s face fell and Gran’s shoulders stiffened, but they didn’t speak. That was also okay. We were all talked out about Sienna.

I placed the full carafe on the table and turned back to snag a third stool. I might bury my feelings about Sienna, but I never kidded myself about chocolate. I was going to drink the entire jug, savoring every last drop. Why deny it? Why make multiple trips to fill my mug?

I slung the strap of my satchel across the stool, intending to sit on it because there was no way I was resting such a pretty new bag on the floor. Gran and Scarlett managed to fill the table they shared without actually occupying the same space. That was a feat, but the distance between them must take so much energy to maintain. I kept my mouth shut about it, though. Scarlett and I might have both been raised by Gran, but we’d had exceedingly different childhoods.

Gran returned to hunting and pecking on the keyboard of a brand new laptop. She was creating some sort of calendar. I could taste the protection spells Scarlett and I had arranged to have placed on the computer as a joint Christmas gift. Gran’s magic wore away at technology. The spells buffered that wear, though they wouldn’t last. Adhering magic to technology was a super-specialized gift, but Scarlett had discovered that Wisteria the reconstructionist had a good friend and second cousin, Jasmine, who was particularly good with technology. She’d laid the wards for us.

Anyway, it appeared I was interrupting a coven prep meeting. Apparently, the bakery was neutral territory.

“Some nasty spells in that book,” I said to Scarlett as I poured myself a mugful of bittersweet hot chocolate made from ganache and steamed two-percent milk. Most places used whole milk, but I found that coated the bite of the chocolate in too much cream for my taste.

“Yes,” Gran answered tersely. “We’re discussing its … review at the next meeting.”

Scarlett brushed the curls off my right shoulder, leaving a trace of her calming magic behind.

I smiled at my mother, then stole her cupcake.

She laughed as I dug into another of my limited-edition creations,
Blitzen
in a Cup
 — a rich but airy chocolate cake that was heavy on the mocha and iced with eggnog buttercream. I was removing these from the menu next week when I ran out of eggnog, so I was pleased there were a few left over today. I might not be a fan of coffee as a drink, but I never turned it down paired with chocolate.

Someone knocked at the window.

I glanced up into the eyes of a four-year-old child and froze with the cupcake an inch from my mouth.

The preschooler grinned. Her brown eyes were still way too large for her face, but she didn’t look quite as starved as she had three months ago while wrestling me for the instrument of assassination in the Bahamas. My right knee — which she’d shattered with a single kick — still ached when it rained. And it rained a ton in Vancouver. A remembered jolt of pain ran through my knee and up my right thigh at the sight of her … here … in Vancouver, not buried in the ruins of a fortress at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

I never had been the lucky sort. I didn’t even bother to buy lottery tickets anymore.

She’d found normal kid-sized clothes somewhere. If you called a four-year-old wearing only a yellow-print sundress in January normal.

“Jade?” Scarlett prompted.

The kid rapped her knuckles against the French-paned window again. A tremor ran through the glass. Gran let out a low hiss.

Yeah, I’d felt that too.

A child shouldn’t be able to rattle the glass of my bakery front windows, because they were protected by wards. Wards primarily constructed by Gran and designed to keep out any Adept I hadn’t granted entrance to.

“Do you know that child?” Gran asked.

“She’s not a child,” I answered. “And yes. Unfortunately. She’s the crazy dragon kid from the freaking fortress.”

I placed the cupcake down and stepped away from the table toward the front entrance. I kept my body parallel to the windows and my hand on my invisible knife at my hip. “You need to go up to the apartment,” I said, speaking to Scarlett and Gran behind me. “When did Warner say he’d be back? Did he go through the portal or out into the city?”

“Don’t be silly,” Gran said as she closed the screen of her laptop. “We’re not leaving you alone with her.”

I paused, standing face to face with the child with only the glass of the French-paned front door between us.

Shadows deeper than the night gathered around her, obscuring the lights from the stores across the street, the traffic between, and the pedestrians …

Oh, God. West Fourth Avenue was always filled with people. Nonmagical, vulnerable people.

The Adept weren’t supposed to call attention to themselves. There were so few of us, we really didn’t need the scrutiny of nonmagicals. Everyone feared what they didn’t understand, and with Adepts so severely outnumbered, we didn’t need that kind of fear and hate focused on us. We already had different levels of governing bodies — like the witches’ Convocation — which laid down laws governing conduct and the use of magic. We had smaller entities like individual covens that enforced these laws. The shapeshifters had their Assembly and their packs for enforcement. The vampires had the Conclave and — as far as I could tell — Kett for enforcement. The sorcerers had their League.

The child glowering at me from the sidewalk was a dragon, and technically her actions were governed by the guardians — arguably the most stringent and moral of all Adepts. But I didn’t believe for one second that she cared one bit about exposing us all to the humans on the sidewalk behind her.

“Jade?” Scarlett asked quietly from behind my shoulder. “Are you going to ask her in?”

No one with a drop of magic in them could pass through Gran’s wards without an invitation. Normally this wasn’t an issue, because Vancouver was considered a magical backwater. Though lately, more Adepts had been checking in at the bakery instead of seeking out Gran — who was the Adept of power here — to ask permission to visit Godfrey witch territory.

“No,” I said. I tamped down on my instinct to block Scarlett from the child’s fevered gaze. “What do you want, kid?”

The child slowly raised her hand and pointed a tiny finger at my heart.

“You?” Scarlett asked me.

“No. My necklace.”

I pulled my knife, but before the blade had even cleared the sheath, the girl slammed a fist into the magic of the ward between us. The runes along the edges of the doorframe lit up with witch magic.

Gran screamed.

The preschooler somehow grabbed the magic of the wards, peeling it away from the door in a manner I wouldn’t have thought possible.

Gran stumbled. Scarlett ran back to her.

The kid ripped a chunk of the ward magic from the doorway even as I reached out with my alchemist senses and tried to grab hold of it.

Pain seared through my head and I stumbled — my magic was tied to the wards, along with my grandmother’s.

Gran fell.

I pulled on the protection magic stored in my necklace, using it to buffer me from the kid’s ongoing demolition of the wards as I turned to see Scarlett gathering Gran into her arms. Blood was gushing from Pearl’s nose. She was unconscious.

The kid came through the door before I’d managed to clear my head.

Wood and glass exploded. I shielded my face with my arms as I twisted away from the kick the kid aimed at my knee. She grabbed my elbow, yanking me forward and down in order to head-butt me.

Yeah, first the attempted knee kick, then a head-butt. The kid liked to use the same moves, and why not? They obviously worked. I certainly hadn’t figured out how to counter them.

I stumbled back, reeling as I tried to gather the frayed magic around the doorway and knit it back together.

I managed to get a simple magical web woven just before the child decided we were shaken enough for her to press forward. She took a step beyond the doorway. The magic of the ward grabbed hold of her and attempted to eject her. Unfortunately — maybe because Gran was unconscious — the wards weren’t quite strong enough to toss her ass into the street.

The kid fought, clawing and snarling as the magic wrapped around her and lifted her off her feet.

I felt Scarlett’s magic bloom behind me and hoped she was putting up a protective shield around Gran. But I didn’t take my eyes off the dragon child caught in my hastily resurrected bakery wards, and floating about two feet off the ground.

Jesus, what the hell would that look like to passersby?

“Mom, the pedestrians!”

I didn’t have to elaborate. Scarlett’s strawberry magic shifted to run parallel to the bakery wards. A perimeter cloaking spell of some sort, I guessed. My mother’s witch magic wasn’t just limited to charm and charisma.

“I asked you what you wanted,” I said to the snarling kid. “Use your words, you freaking brat.”

It was taking all my focus just to hold the wards around the rabid child. There just wasn’t enough power in the wards without Gran bolstering them to keep her at bay for good.