Cast Into Darkness (8 page)

Kristof set the hoe against a wiry maple and contemplated the tall brick wall topped with a wrought-iron fence lining the estate. The fence was more than iron—inset with silver talismans, each holding a spell designed to keep intruders out and let only the select few inside.

A faint shimmer rose from the wrought iron—red, like a crimson wave. The security grid.

He leaned back against the tree. A raven cawed as it flew through the crimson shimmer, its wings dipping as it sailed across the barrier. The grid kept out enemy casters and other magical threats, not animals.

He couldn’t shape-shift—magic that powerful had been lost after the First Era. But maybe he could fool the grid another way.

Kristof waited until he heard a rustling in the undergrowth. A quick stun spell netted him a squirrel. He held it up to his magesight and probed it with gentle fingers. No point in duplicating how it looked, how it moved. The grid didn’t care much about that. The grid cared about its aura.

The squirrel’s aura shone with a bright-yellow light that surrounded the animal, beating with the rapid pulse of its life force. After a long look, he understood what he needed to do.

Tapping out the points of an illusion spell, he focused all his attention on the squirrel’s aura. He chanted the short words that would duplicate it and quickly followed with a cloaking spell. Then he brushed his fingers across the shining yellow duplicate essence and dragged it into his own rainbow-hued aura.

The yellow in his aura brightened as the other colors faded. He continued to pull the duplicate aura into his own. When his essence pulsed with the same frantic air as the squirrel’s, and shone with the same sunlight-yellow hue, he stopped.

A violet gleam from a nearby trap spell caught his eye. Shit. Had he cloaked his illusion spell fast enough? He hadn’t heard any of the trap spells go off, but that didn’t mean a silent alarm hadn’t been tripped and Hamilton security wasn’t on its way. He should leave—now.

He dropped the squirrel and turned, jogging back to the truck. Then he stopped and took a deep breath, then another.

No. It’s the backlash from casting. The fear isn’t real. Hamilton security isn’t on its way.

He turned back toward the estate. Took a step closer, then another, each time fighting back the terror that threatened to overwhelm him. By the time the brick and wrought-iron fence loomed before him again, the paranoia had become nothing more than background chatter.

Hoisting himself up to the top of the brick wall, he scrambled to find a handhold on the narrow ledge where the brick met the wrought iron. After getting one foot planted on the ledge, he reached up and grabbed the railing. His hand touched the metal, his yellow aura flickering then steadying. The shimmering curtain of the security grid held steady.

So far, so good. He pulled himself partway up the fence, his feet following where his hands led. This idea hadn’t been half bad. Now all he had to do was stay cloaked, slip inside the house, get the stone, and—

A talisman buried in the fence flickered. The yellow in his aura wavered then bled out. His caster aura flared back, the colors as bright as the sails of a fishing boat in his father’s harbor. The grid darkened from red to black. At the edge of his hearing, barely within human range, a hundred trap spells screeched their warnings, their tendrils vibrating as they let go of their perches and rocketed toward him with all the speed of a school of piranhas.

Kristof dropped back to the ground, heart hammering in his chest. He rolled forward, taking too much of the impact on his hand and feeling the snap of the delicate bones inside his wrist. He stumbled to his feet and ran.

Need to clear the teleport block to get out. There, that purple glow around the fence’s perimeter. Probably triggered by the trap spells activating.

A twig snapped off to his side. Then another. A glimmer darted from tree to tree at the edge of his vision. Several more glimmers beyond. Hamilton casters, cloaked like him.

A purple mist swam along the ground between the fallen branches and leaves, searching. The trap spells—now active. They would rip his cloak spell away before smothering him in their vapors, choking the life from him.

He dodged around their perimeter, evading a tendril that reached for his ankle. He tapped out a quick animate spell and aimed it at the hoe, still leaning against the tree trunk where he’d left it. It danced toward the fence, scraping against the ground and catching a tendril of the trap spell in its metal blade. The spell’s energy rushed for it, surrounding it and pulling it into a pile of maple leaves.

He ran, the tendrils streaming past him toward the hoe.

But the trap spells weren’t his biggest threat. A faint rustling in the undergrowth, then his skin stung all over with burning pain, as if a bandage had been ripped from his entire body.

His cloaking spell vanished.

He tapped out a shield spell as he ran, almost stumbling over the short incantation.

There must be three, maybe four casters here. They’re everywhere. They’ve found the truck already, tracked the guy I took out. They know who I am.

He shook off the backlash as the shield’s bright blue glow sprang up around him.

A lightning bolt hit his shield, a sharp buzzing sound and the smell of ozone filling the evening air. Two more followed, then a sonic spell screamed past his ear. His shield’s glow faded to the color of the afternoon sky.

The truck waited ahead, its white body glowing with the last rays of the setting sun. If he could make it past the truck and to the road, he should be able the clear the teleport block.

A force like a battering ram slammed into his chest. He flew backward and onto the ground, the wind knocked out of him, shield ripped away, blood pounding in his ears. The kinetic punch came from the direction of the truck. He couldn’t see anything or anyone there, not even the glimmer of a hasty cloak spell.

Kristof rolled into the underbrush, taking cover beneath a blackberry bush. Leaves crackled nearby—the Hamilton goons closing in. He tried to quiet his ragged breathing.

Have to renew the cloak spell—my best chance with this many enemies.

He cast the spell, waiting until its purple haze covered his form. Then he scrambled up and darted through the trees, putting as much distance between him and his pursuers as possible, shoving away the feeling of eyes on his back.

He found an old fox’s den in a hollowed-out oak a hundred yards away. Crawling inside, he slipped on the pine needles covering the ground, their scent rising in the air. Waiting, he could feel the adrenaline coursing through his system, the bitter, coppery taste of tension in his mouth. Shit. The aura trick should have worked. They must have known he would try something. Did his sister betray him? Someone else?

He breathed in, held it for a four-count, then breathed out. Did it again. And again. While his heartbeat steadied, he observed his mind’s agitated thoughts float by until they were nothing more than leaves in a stream.

A spider hopped onto his arm, then moved across it and down his shoulder. His wrist throbbed as the pain of the fracture finally broke through his adrenaline rush. He lay still, listening. Leaves rustled. A branch snapped. A purple tendril crept by, probed the edge of the den, then moved on.

A few minutes later, voices rumbled in the distance.

“Anything?” Victor Cole. Probably the one who’d fired off the kinetic punch.

“Nothing. He must have slipped by us.”

A grunt. “Maybe.”

Nothing else. He waited longer. He waited until the sun had set and the night air cooled off. How much time had passed? Had they given up the hunt?

He used his magesight to probe for a teleport block.
There.
Set in the fence—and active—a few yards away, it still prevented him from leaving the fastest and easiest way.

Damn. He’d have to extract himself the hard way.

While he whispered the incantation, he tapped out the three points to the spell. A ball of emerald mist formed in his palm.

He peered into the mist. The forest around him glimmered like a tiny model in his hand. Trees, the fence, his truck… Anything else? Yes. Between him and the truck—two guards. One stationed near the truck, dressed in a blue Hamilton T-shirt, and one cloaked, nothing but a flicker near the fence.

Victor hadn’t bought the theory of his escape. But Kristof hadn’t expected him to.

The surveillance spell showed only the trap spells. Nothing else. That he could see. What else couldn’t he see?

Kristof dismissed the green mist with a snap of his fingers. He’d have to trust the spell. Two guards shouldn’t pose a threat.

A quick animate spell and the hoe took care of the one near the fence, the guard’s cloak spell disappearing as he slumped to the ground, his head bleeding. Kristof rolled from the fox’s den and crept along the forest floor until he reached striking distance of the other guard, who was leaning against the truck. He couldn’t afford a showy spell, a kinetic punch or a lightning bolt. Nothing that would bring more guards or make him even twitchier.

Kristof wove his spell and shot it toward the guard. At first, nothing. Then the guard clutched his throat, gasping for breath, his fingers beating with frantic energy against the truck in an attempt to execute a counterspell. Face turning blue, eyes bulging, he fell against the truck. He reached into his pocket for a phone, then dropped it from his shaking fingers onto the forest floor.

A minute or two should do it.
Deprive the man’s brain of oxygen for longer than that and Kristof risked damaging it, or even killing him. No point risking discovery by leaving bodies around, especially on an off-book operation.

A few seconds after the man went limp, Kristof shut off the spell. He glanced over at the truck with his magesight. There, under the hood, was a faint purple glimmer. Victor had almost certainly tampered with it. He’d have to walk instead. Setting off down the road, he kept to the narrow side where the trees provided him with natural camouflage. The more distance he put between himself and Hamilton land, the harder it would be for them to trace his teleport spell.

So much for the direct method. He’d have to come up with another way to get the stone.

His heartbeat slowing to normal, he ran through the options as he left the edge of the Hamiltons’ tree-covered estate and reached the outskirts of the little town of Paumanok. One thought kept returning to his mind.

Kate. She had the stone. She trusted him. There must be a way to use her to retrieve it.

By the time he’d slipped across the old wooden bridge leading into town, he knew what he had to do. But the certainty that his plan would work didn’t settle his nerves or lead to his usual pre-op calmness.

Instead, Kate’s eyes, gazing up at him as she lay against the pillow last night, kept intruding on his thoughts, like a haunting melody that wouldn’t stop playing.

Kate reached the
small clearing a few minutes before 9:00 p.m. Thick with a few old oaks and a dozen tall, gray-barked catalpas, the grove stood past the Sanctum at the far western edge of the estate, near the perimeter wall that ran up against Paumanok Road. Back when she and Brian had been kids, they would run to the grove to escape the pressure of studying. The other students attending the family’s school with them were more interested in playing on the beach and sneaking over the wall into the nearby town of Paumanok. So she and her brother had the little stand of trees all to themselves.

Fireflies hovered around her, darting in and out of the grove. The lightning-struck oak they called the Old Bear still loomed over the clearing. She wondered if anything remained in their secret hiding place under its roots.

The swing survived, hanging above a new growth of blackberry bushes, their aroma sweet in the night air. The thick rope looping the wooden seat around the branch above looked too frayed to hold Kate’s weight, but the big deadfall below provided a good bench. Kate brushed off the dirt and fallen catalpa bean pods and sat to wait for Brian.

She rubbed her fingers against the tree trunk’s rough bark. Brian had missed dinner. And so had Dad—delayed at the office by another one of the hundreds of emergencies that always seemed to come up. Victor had run through, muttered something about reinforcing the security grid at the western wall, and teleported out. Not that she’d missed his company. But Hayley and Grayson sat around the oak dining table and talked magic, and there didn’t seem to be anything for her to do but play with her peas and fret until nine o’clock came around.

She reached into the pocket of her shorts and let the stone slide through her fingers. At its cool, soothing touch she jerked her hand back out. The damned thing would probably cause her to lose more time. The last thing she wanted.

Crickets droned above the quiet grove. No Brian. She checked her watch—quarter after nine. He’d better show. And after all she’d been through, he’d better tell her where he’d gotten the stupid thing and what made it such a supersecret, “don’t tell Dad” big deal.

A hand touched her shoulder. She jumped. “Brian! Don’t scare me like that.”

He stood next to her, wearing a blue Hamilton T-shirt with the double-H logo, but she could see only his face and part of his chest. As she watched, the rest of him appeared, as if she were watching an old-fashioned Polaroid picture develop before her eyes. She’d seen the effects of a cloak spell before, but why did he feel the need to hide in his own home?

He put a finger to his lips, then whispered, “Sorry I’m late.” After sitting down next to her, he scrunched up his eyes and his body stilled. His fingers tapped out the points of a triangle on the log, and he chanted a low incantation.

“What spell did you cast?” she asked.

“I cloaked us.”

“You’re worried about eavesdroppers? Here?”

He gave her a look that made her wonder what she’d missed. “You have it with you?”

Her hand went to her pocket. She slid it inside and touched the stone.

He needs it back? Well, I need some things, too. Like an explanation.