Heartache (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 5) (9 page)

“We stopped reporting to him,” she said after choking back a few more sobs. She scritched the cat’s ears. “Is that why he did this? I told her it was a bad idea. I told her.”

“You have to get the coven out of town,” I said to Joyce, glancing at Hattie and Salazar. The agent and the detective were being very quiet for people interviewing a witness. “He’s not going to stop. Samir wants your powers, but I think he really wants your memories, your knowledge.”

“Stop saying his name,” she whispered, looking around as though he might pop out of the shadows.

“He’s not Voldemort,” I said more sharply than I meant. “He’s a man, an evil, awful person, but still just a man. His name isn’t going to summon him. Hell, who fucking knows if it is even his real name?”

“You should never have come here,” Joyce said.

“It’s about five years too late for that, lady. Have you contacted the rest of the coven? I’m serious. Wylde isn’t going to be a safe place for witches for a while.” I glanced at Hattie again as I said it. Peggy had known about her; that much was obvious, since Joyce knew who she was. And what Peggy had known, Samir now knew. My brain balked at the possibilities.

“I already activated the phone tree, right after I called nine-one-one and asked for Hattie here.” Joyce pulled the cat into her lap.

“How much does Samir know?” I asked her. “What did you tell him about me and my friends?”

“Everything,” she said in a whisper, not meeting my gaze. “He knows about the Macnulty girl, her family. Those handsome twins. Your store. We told him whatever details he asked. It was all very mundane, harmless knowledge, really.”

I stood up and yanked my phone out of my pocket. This was worse than I’d thought. He had Peggy’s memories, but he also had years of reports on me and my new life. Years to get to know where I went, what I did, whom I saw.

Where I went.

Harper. The Henhouse.
Shit
.

As if by fucking magic, my phone rang, playing Harper’s song.

I flicked it to answer and put it to my ear as dread turned my stomach into self-animating ropes.

“Jade? They’re being attacked. Mom said there were men. At the house. Levi’s driving us there. Please, Jade. Come.” Harper’s voice cracked into a shriek.

“On my way,” I said. I jammed my phone into my pocket and crossed the living room. “I need a ride,” I said to Salazar and Hattie as they followed me.

“What is it?” Salazar asked as I threw open the front door.

“Samir is attacking my friends. I have to get to the Henhouse B&B, do you know it?” I directed the last part at Hattie as I strode toward the SUV parked outside the crime scene next door.

“I do,” she said, huffing as she tromped over the un-shoveled snow, her shorter legs sinking her deeper. “But the roads aren’t good, and besides, I can’t just leave the crime scene.”

I stopped, shivering in the cold air. My coat was still hanging inside Joyce’s house.

“You saying you won’t get me there? You won’t help me? Don’t you want to catch the killer?”

“Jade,” Salazar said in a hushed voice, glancing around. No one was still lingering in the cold now that the body had been removed. We stood alone in a tomb-quiet sea of white. “We can’t. We’re no match for a sorcerer. I’ve been ordered to spin the story for the humans, and then back down.”

So. He was saying it wasn’t their fight.

Well, fuck them. They were right. It wasn’t their fight.

It was mine.

And I didn’t need a damn car. I gathered my magic, power filling my blood, racing along with all the strength of my fear and anger.

I was a motherfucking sorceress and I was going to fly.

I’d never managed to fly before. I could leap and glide, sort of an extended long-jump where I just refused to touch the ground for as long as I could suspend my disbelief and trust my magic to hold me aloft. But flying had been out of my grasp.

No more. I shot into the air a good fifty or sixty feet, Superman-style, one fist thrust ridiculously in front of me, the other clinging with total terror to my D20 talisman. Tears streamed from my eyes and froze to my cheeks until I shoved magic out in front of me, pushing a shield out to block the worst of the wind and the cold.

The landscape was black and white from up here, houses zipping away beneath me as I hurtled through the air in the general direction of the Henhouse B&B. With the snow covering roads and landmarks, I could only go by the sun and my own sense of direction. The Henhouse had a bright red roof on it, with enough of a slope that I figured some red would show through even with the heavy snowfall.

Horror pictures flickered through my brain. Rose and Junebug strapped to a giant bomb. Samir torturing them. My friends arriving before I did and being cut down by screaming men with giant machine guns. Images of me arriving and finding only silence and everyone dead, bodies laid out, throats open, eyes staring blank and cold at the sun.

I shoved those thoughts away, shoved them into my power, gathered my anger and my fear, and fed it all into the magic. No one was going to die. Only Samir.

A giant plume of black smoke drew my gaze as I soared over the trees. I corrected my course, heart in my throat. The Henhouse was on fire.

I tried to drop down near the clearing where the buildings were burning, but landing proved harder than it looks in the movies. I didn’t so much glide down out of the sky as plummet like meteor into the snow.

Fresh powder snow? Not as soft as it looks. Shivering, the wind half knocked out of me, I climbed to my feet and ran toward the burning house. The roof had caved in and taken most of the second floor with it. Acrid smoke, tasting of ash and the sickly sweetness of Samir’s magic, filled my nose and mouth. I plunged through the door, yelling for Rose. Paper curled with heat and caught on the walls, the curtains burned, and a huge burning beam dropped as I charged into the entry, cutting off the stairs and living room. I sent my magic out like a wave, trying to feel for life, for anything. Only fire.

“Jade!” Harper’s voice reached me through the roar of the blaze and I stumbled free of the house as something else crashed behind me. More beams. The whole place was burning to the ground with a vengeance.

Harper, Ezee, and Levi had just arrived, Levi’s four-wheel-drive still steaming in the parking area, his tire chains packed with snow. I stumbled toward them, going for Harper as she tried to rush past me.

“They weren’t in the house,” I said, remembering. “No one is there.”

I hoped I wasn’t lying. The house had felt like no one was alive—no one, not even a shifter, could live through that kind of blaze. If Rose or Junebug were in there, they’d have escaped or already be dead.

“The barn,” Harper said. Her expression went from relief back to panic and she turned and bolted for the barn.

The barn wasn’t on fire, but it had taken a lot of bullets. The wood was chewed up with hundreds of holes, chunks and splinters sticking out from the doors like spines.

The horses were dead. Something had ripped apart one of them; the other two had died from gunfire. Though my ears rang after the mad flight and the roar of the house fire, the barn felt eerily silent and still.

“Oh God,” Harper whispered, looking into each stall, her movements growing more panicked as she went. “Oh God.” She slammed shut a stall door and kicked over a bucket, a litany of curses pouring from her mouth as she searched.

My legs felt like lead but I climbed up the ladder into the loft. Sleeping bags were still laying on mounded up hay. A turned over milk crate had a thermos and a stack of playing cards on it. A broken mug lay on the floor nearby. No sign of Harper’s mom or Levi’s wife. The upper door was open, a rifle on the floor by it. Hay was everywhere.

Something glinted in the hay by the door, too big to be spent casings and too small to be a gun or knife. A cell phone.

“Is that Mom’s?” Harper said. Her voice was soft, flat, as though she’d shouted herself out.

I held up the phone. “Yeah,” I said. “They aren’t here. There aren’t any bodies. No blood. Maybe they escaped?”

“In this snow? Junebug could fly off, but Mom couldn’t get away without leaving a trail. Come on.” She didn’t wait for me as she turned and climbed down the ladder.

“Blood,” Levi said as we met up with the twins on the side of the barn. “Junebug’s.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“I know my wife,” he said grimly.

“No fox tracks?” Harper said, looking around.

The ground here was a mess from boots tramping it down. I was no tracker, but I could recognize boot tread and that many feet had been here. Samir had brought in help. It figured. He’d used people to abduct my family, too. The bastard seemed to hate getting his hands dirty unless he had to.

More information about him, but useless unless I could find a way to turn it to my advantage. I sighed and followed Ezee and Levi through the snow. My skin was turning from brown to blue in the cold and I pumped more magic through myself to keep from shivering.

“Where is your coat?” Ezee asked.

“I left it in town.”

The blood droplets ended in the trees, as did the boot tracks. Someone, or maybe two someones had come in here and tried to follow Junebug, but given up quickly.

“Just drops,” Ezee said to Levi, rubbing his twin’s shoulder reassuringly. “Takes more than a flesh wound to hurt your girl. She’s okay.”

“Unless they got her,” Levi muttered, shaking Ezee’s hand off.

“We need to go back, look for where the tracks go.”

Something rustled above us and I readied magic, pooling purple fire in my hand.

Junebug, in owl form, dropped gracefully out of the trees and shifted as she hit the snow, effecting a far better landing than I had. She practically jumped into Levi’s arms, tears on her cheeks.

“No point tracking them. They came in snowmobiles,” she said, then looked at Harper. “Rosie’s gone.”

“The house is burning. No one is in the barn,” Harper said. “What happened?”

“She made me fly away. I got hit, just a graze,” she added quickly as Levi growled. “I didn’t want to leave her, but, nobody argues with Rose.” Junebug turned imploring eyes on Harper. “She said she’d be right behind. But they had her pinned. I tried to fly back, but two of the men came after me. They took her. There were too many, Harper. I’m sorry.”

“No,” Harper said, her voice still deadly quiet, as cold as the snow surrounding us. “Not your fault. Was she still alive?”

“Yes,” Junebug said. “I heard her swearing at them.”

“He’ll keep her alive,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster. “He’ll use her as bait for the rest of us. This is what he did to me before. Taking people I love and hurting them to hurt me.”

“So we go get her. And kill him.” Harper turned and strode back through the trees.

My cell phone rang. I fumbled it from my jean’s pocket. Unknown number. But I knew who it was.

“You fucking bastard,” I said as I answered. “Is she alive?”

“Jade, of course she’s alive.” Samir’s slimy, smooth voice was jarring in my ears. I wanted to reach through the phone and rip his heart out from here.

If only I could figure out that spell. Fucker.

“What do you want?” I said, playing the game.

Harper had stopped and turned. Everyone gathered closer, their shifter senses allowing them to hear the phone call just as well as if I’d put him on speaker.

“I want Clyde’s heart. It’s mine. So nice of you to keep it for me, but I think one life is worth another, no?”

“I give you the heart, you give back Rose? Unharmed?” I ground the words out, looking at Harper.

“Well, she’s not entirely unharmed. Put up quite the fight for an old fox. But she’s alive. For now. Bring me the heart, and she can stay that way,” Samir said.

I didn’t need Alek’s power of truth detection to know he was a lying son of a bitch. Harper growled, her lips curling back in a snarl that looked at odds with her human face.

“I don’t have the heart,” I said. “I don’t even know where it is.”

“But you know who does,” Samir said. It was not a question.

“I do,” I said, thinking of Alek. I had no idea where Alek was, however. “It will take some time.” I needed to buy us time. Buy Rose time. We had to have a plan, and maybe I could get ahead of Samir, use this to lure him into a trap of my own. Something, anything. I hadn’t saved Rose from that evil warlock Barnes just to let her die like this.

“Call this number in two hours. I don’t hear from you, it’s only her body you’ll find.” Samir hung up.

I shivered, nearly dropping the phone. Harper wrapped an arm around me and we leaned into each other for a long moment. She was warm and solid and I wanted to hug her forever. To keep her safe, to wipe the anger and sadness from her unhappy face.

“He’s not going to release her, is he?” Harper said, pulling away so she could look me in the eye.

I swallowed the giant lump in my throat. “No,” I said softly. “He’ll find a way to screw up the trade, turn it into a trap.”

“It’s freezing out here,” Ezee said. “The barn still stands. Come on. We can talk and form a plan. We will figure this out.”