Magic on the Storm (17 page)

I licked my lips, tasted the echo of him on me, in my mouth. “I’ll be fine. I
promise.”
“Oh, for the love of all that’s holy. Get a room,” Shame said, “or I will bring
out the ice.”
We stepped apart. “You throw any more ice at me, Shame,” Zay said as he stalked
over to the trunk of the car, “and I will shove it up your hole.”
“No, no.” Terric said. “Flynn likes that.”
“Bite me, you flaming prick,” Shame said with absolutely no heat.
Terric grinned, and Shame flipped him off. They were both smiling.
I intended to keep it that way.
“Let’s leave our issues, and ice, at home,” I said. “We have hunting to get
done.”
I stepped up on the other side of Zay, and took the machete he offered me. It
was a good thing I’d brought my heavy coat, because otherwise I didn’t know how
I’d hide this much steel.
And not just average steel. The wicked blade only mimicked a machete. It was
really a bladed, deadly length of razor-edged metal and magical glyphs. One
swing with this baby, and the right word or two, and you could cut an
old-growth oak down with one smooth slice.
Next, I pulled a thin chain over my neck and felt the tongue-on-battery tingle
of it rattling down around the void stone and resting against my skin. Not so
much a weapon as a sort of enhancer for defensive spells, blocks, wards, those
sorts of things.
I didn’t like to carry anything else. Had never gotten the hang of the bladed
whip Zay wielded like he was skipping rope. Didn’t like the double axes that
Chase, and apparently Terric, preferred. For me, a knife, a machete, and a
magic chain were all I needed for a good time.
What could I say? It’s the simple things in life that make me happy.
“Right, then,” Shame said, lighting up another cigarette already. “That’s it.
Who calls shotgun?”
“That is not it.” Zayvion pulled a cloth package out of the trunk and carefully
unwrapped the contents. The contents were several leather wrist cuffs in small,
glyphed boxes that were probably ancient and worth millions. He pulled out four
round amulets. They weren’t the same size and heft of the disks my dad and
Violet had invented, but I was pretty sure they had given my dad the idea that
magic could be contained in something similar to these things.
Unlike the disks, these amulets could be used for only one thing—sensing the
heartbeat of another person who wore the amulet. They were all carefully carved
from a stone that had been found hundreds of years ago in China, I think. It
was the stone itself that had been shaped by magic, infused in such a way to
make it sensitive to itself and to the living things in contact with it.
Dad’s disks were pure technology that could hold magic, raw, uncast magic, for
any amount of time, be used, and then, with the right spell, be reloaded again.
The disks Dad invented would make magic portable. They would allow magic to be
called upon out at sea, or in unnetworked lands, and act as a battery for
people like doctors and rescue crews who needed to access magic quickly,
sometimes in out-of-the-way places, to save people’s lives.
Plus, there was absolutely no price to pay once the magic was in the disks.
That meant I could pay the price of casting the spell to charge the
disk—probably something little, like a runny nose, or itchy scalp. But Zay
could then use that magic to burn down a house—something that would usually
carry a high magical cost.
It was an amazing advance for magic and technology.
And scary as hell.
Zay held out a leather cuff for each of us, and then gave us each an amulet. I
snapped the amulet into the circle carved in the leather cuff and it fit into
place with a heavy thunk I felt at the back of my teeth. The faintest scent of
moss filled my nose. I strapped the cuff to the inside of my right wrist, snug
against my pulse.
Everyone else did the same, but I felt only two other heartbeats. Terric and I
both looked at each other. We’d never hunted together before, so I, at least,
needed to touch him once to attune the cuff so I could feel his heartbeat too.
I stepped over to him. “Mind?” I held my palm out toward his chest.
“Help yourself,” he said.
Charmer. I pressed my palm against his chest and concentrated on the rhythm of
his heart. Strong, a little fast. I also caught the faintest hint of his
emotions. Anger. Sorrow. I looked into his eyes, and he gave me the convincing,
friendly smile. But behind that were a lot of emotions. Emotions I knew were
for Shame.
“Thank you,” I said.
He nodded. At the edge of my peripheral vision, Shame stood smoking, his back
toward us. If I focused on him, I would feel his emotions too.
One look at his body language told me how he felt.
Terric placed his fingertips lightly in a small circle just below my
collarbone, and above my heart. One of the bullet scars I carried was right
there, and even though he couldn’t feel it through my thick coat, it still made
me a little uncomfortable to have him touch me there.
He smiled, a real smile this time, something that looked a little like an
apology, and drew his fingertips away. He’d probably gotten a sense of my
discomfort.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Just twitchy about my scars.”
“I know the feeling,” he murmured.
Right, that was more of the issue stuff we weren’t going to get into right now.
“Shame,” I said, “give me your keys.”
“What? No.” He turned. “Wait—let me rephrase that. Hell no. I’m driving.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Terric said. “You were unconscious less than ten minutes
ago.”
“And you were a dick. One of us got better.”
Terric the nice killer smiled. “A man with a concussion should not drive.”
“And you think a woman who’s having fainting spells should?”
“Wow. Could you two give it a rest?” I asked. “I’m driving.”
Shame looked over at Zayvion like calling the ref in for a replay. “Are you
seriously going to let her drive?” Shame asked.
“No.”
Shame flipped his hands out in a told-you-so gesture. “Terric’s going to
drive,” Zay said. “Give him your keys.”
At Shame’s look, Zay added, “We don’t have time. Just get in the damn car—your
car—and let Terric drive.”
If his words didn’t clue Shame in, Zay’s heartbeat, pounding strong, impatient,
would.
Terric held his hand out to Shame.
You would have thought Shame was removing his own spine for the look on his
face, but he finally dropped the keys in Terric’s hand.
The keys hit his palm, and Terric glanced down. I caught a glimpse of a man’s
ring, gold and silver and glyphed, on Shame’s key chain. Terric’s eyebrows shot
up in surprise. He looked up at Shame.
Okay, maybe I was wrong. Maybe there was more between them. Shame said he
wasn’t gay, but that ring could mean something else. A brotherhood-of-magic or
class-ring sort of thing.
Shame just gave him a steady stare. The kind of look that started bar fights.
“Okay,” Terric said softly, as if he was trying to regain his breath. He closed
his hand over the keys. “Where are we going?”
They all looked at me.
“Seriously? How were you people going to track him down if I wasn’t here?”
“Through a process of elimination,” Zay said.
“Why doesn’t anyone in the Authority Hound?” I asked.
“Huh,” Terric said. “She’s right. Why is that?”
Shame just exhaled smoke.
Zay shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s probably a part of the history.”
“No,” Terric said. “There used to be Hounds. A couple of them. Remember? Theo
and Kaida? Back when Mikhail was the head of the Authority. What happened to
them?”
“I wasn’t involved,” Zay said, “Wasn’t old enough, or around then. Neither were
you. Do you think you can Hound Greyson, Allie? If not him, Chase?”
“Chase ran down that road. I know that. But if she got in a car, and wasn’t
casting magic, I won’t be able to find her.”
“Do you swamp-walk?” Terric asked.
Color me impressed. I didn’t think anyone in the Authority kept up on those
kinds of things. Swamp-walking was pretty woo-woo, even for people who threw
magic around on a daily basis.
“I can. Do any of you have something that belonged to her? Or that she’s
recently touched?”
“How about a car?” Shame suggested.
Yes, I was full of smart tonight. “Yeah, I think that would work.”
I crossed the parking lot to Shame’s car and felt the gossamer caress of Zay’s
Illusion sliding away from me. The night felt colder outside that spell,
outside his touch.
I opened Shame’s car door again, but instead of casting spells for my senses, I
simply knelt down and placed my fingers on the seat of the car. I could still
smell too many scents, and still smell Shame’s blood and sweet cherries over
them all. I wondered if they’d gotten into a magic fight before she knocked him
out.
I pulled on the magic inside me and drew a glyph for finding, then concentrated
on it, letting the magic pour through my fingertips and wash over the seat of
the car. It picked up on the high emotions Chase had left behind, picked up on
her energy—not on a particular spell like Hounding.
That was another problem with swamp-walking. The emotions any person left
behind on any object were transitory at best. If the person was in a
high-enough state of emotion, a good swamp walker could sense at least something
of which way that person had gone before the emotions faded away.
Chase had very high emotions. The magic Ouija’ed my fingers east, and I got the
faintest impression of green. Lots and lots of green. Like Forest Park.
“East,” I said. “Maybe Forest Park. Would she go there?”
Zay, who had been pacing behind me, started off toward his car. “We’ll find
out.”

Chapter Thirteen
I
jogged back across the lot to Zay’s car, glancing over my shoulder
once. True to their word, Terric was driving, and Shame got in on the
passenger’s side.
“Forest Park?” Zay said. “That’s a lot of ground to cover.”
“Get me there, and I’ll try to Hound her. Or him.” Once we were there I could
use a Seek spell. Seek had a pretty limited range, so we’d need to be close for
it to do us any good.
Zay put the car in gear and with Terric following, we made good time heading
through the city, then up along Highway 30 to Forest Park. Ahead and to our
right, the Gothic arches of St. Johns Bridge flashed with red and white lights,
the broad cables scalloping the skyline. St. Johns lights were electric yellow
and white, without fancy magical enhancements. Since St. Johns was off the
magic grid, it looked like it belonged to an entirely different city from
Portland.
Zay pulled off in a gravel lot in front of a spooky old brick building with a
clock tower and enough peaks on the roof, it looked like it belonged to another
century. The old Portland Gas and Coke had been abandoned for years.
“Here?” I asked. “We can’t get into the park from here.”
“Best to check again before we go in.” He paused, and the headlights from
Shame’s car slid across his face.
“Don’t trust my swamp-walking abilities?”
“I don’t trust Chase.”
Right. I got out of the car. Still no rain, only clouds clotting the dark sky.
I saw a spark of a star against the black, before the gray snuffed it out.
Terric killed the engine. He and Shame got out. Zay walked with me, though he
gave me plenty of room.
I cleared my mind, something that always seemed a little easier when I was
close to St. Johns. I didn’t know what it was about that part of town, but it
always made me feel better.
I set a Disbursement, then drew the glyphs for Sight, Smell, and Taste. I drew
magic out of my bones and blood and poured it into the glyphs.
The world came into hard focus, every color brighter, every shadow sharper.
I looked for magic. I looked for Chase. I looked for Greyson. And I looked for
signs of blood and violence. Spells pulsed against the chain-link and
barbed-wire fence that cut the forbidden building off from street access. In
that building was something else. Something magical. I couldn’t tell what it
was. But none of that magic, not the ward spells nor whatever magic lay
crouched in that building, smelled, tasted, or looked anything like Greyson or
Chase.
“Not here. Not them,” I said. “Something, though, but not them.” I walked along
the road. Scented, maybe, just the slightest hint of vanilla and blood up
ahead.
Crazy. This was no way to track someone. I could try Seek, but if they were in
Forest Park, they’d be out of the spell’s range. I returned to Shame’s car.
“Shame, ride with Zay,” I said. “Terric, I’m going to swamp-walk, and you’re
going to drive.”
And, wonder of wonders, all the men listened.
I let go of the sensory spells and got in the passenger’s side of the car. I
closed my eyes and pressed my fingers down on the seat next to me, focusing on
the emotional residue there to sense Chase. Got a flash of Shame, angry, and,
strangely enough, hopeful. But there was still a hint of Chase’s emotions
beneath that, her emotions vibrating even higher than Shame’s, high enough for
me to follow.
“Okay, we’re going in the right direction. Right. Turn right.”
“Over the bridge?”
“If that’s a right.” It was hard to sense the subtle tugs of the swamp-walking
in a moving car with quickly fading emotional energy.
I heard the sound of tires on the bridge. Just as Chase’s energy faded for
good, I felt a tug to the north.
“Shit.” I opened my eyes. “That’s it. All I got was a slight shift north. Where
are we?”
“St. Johns,” he said. “Does she have a place out here?”
“I have no idea.” I didn’t feel like I had been much help at all. As a matter
of fact, I might have just led us on a wild-goose chase. I needed something
more. Something that was still connected to her. And the only thing I could
think of was Zay.
“Stop the car, okay? I need to regroup.”
Terric found a grass and gravel stretch along the road, and Zay pulled up next
to us.
I got out of the car and jogged over to Zay’s window. He rolled it down.
“Listen, I lost the trail. I need something else that Chase has touched, some
other way to connect to her, and I have an idea.”
“What?”
“I want you to call her.”
Zay’s eyebrows rose. “Because?”
“I’m going to try to follow the connection.”
“Have you ever done that before?”
I wanted to say yes. Wanted to tell him I could track down people by cell
phones in my sleep. “No.”
“Then we do it my way.”
“What—get out the search-and-rescue team?”
Zay ignored me. He pulled his cell out of his pocket. “You think she’s in this
area?”
“This is as far as I could track her. She may not still be here. Does she have
a house here? Family?”
“No, but this is the only place in Portland off the grid. It’s a good place to
hide. Except she knows we know it’s a good place to hide.”
He pressed a button on his phone. I was pretty sure my phone didn’t have that
button. Then he chanted, pulling the tiniest bit of magic up from five miles
away, on the other side of the railroad track. And he did it like it wasn’t as
hard as sucking water out of stone.
The glyphs encasing his phone rolled with silver light, then went dark.
“She’s not close,” he said.
And then his phone rang.
Zay frowned at the caller ID. “It’s Chase,” he said calmly.
“Chase,” he said.
He didn’t tip the phone so I could hear. He didn’t have to. I was a Hound. I
had good ears.
“I knew they’d send you out to look for me,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“I’m safe. I know where Greyson is.”
“Are you with him? Are you hurt?”
“You don’t understand. You just believe everything they say. But it’s not true.
Lies. It’s all lies. You’re on the wrong side, Zayvion. You can trust me on
that. Don’t come looking for me.”
Zay’s lips pressed in a thin line. Chase sounded a little hysterical, and out
of breath.
“Tell me where you are.” Zay traced a glyph in the air, drew a circle and line
through it to cancel it, turned south, did the same thing, until he had drawn
four spells, one at each compass point.
Chase’s voice changed, went down a little, trying for normalcy. “Don’t do it.
Don’t look for me. Or him. You can’t . . . I don’t want you mixed up in this.
Two of us is enough. This is war, Zayvion. War.”
The connection ended and Zay put the phone in his pocket.
“Anything?” Shame asked.
“She’s on the other side of the river. Vancouver,” Zay said.
So it had been a goose chase.
“Goddamn it,” Shame said. “Let’s go.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Can you sense her here?” Zay asked.
I shook my head. “I thought so. Nothing I’d swear on, though.”
“She’s good, Allie,” Zay said like I shouldn’t blame myself. “One of the best.”
That was what I was worried about. If she was good enough to get us out here,
she’d be good enough to lead us to where she wanted us to be.
Shame stayed where he was in Zay’s car. Terric nodded to me, offering a ride
again.
“We’re better than her, right?” I asked Zay.
“We are.” He hesitated. Nodded. That worried me, but I didn’t tell him so.
I got into Shame’s car next to Terric.
“How good is she, really?” I asked Terric once we were on the road and speeding
to Vancouver.
“I haven’t worked with her for a couple years.” He was silent for a minute,
navigating traffic. “She is very good. I’ve always thought Zayvion was better.”
“Is he?”
“He is if he doesn’t pull his punches.”
“Which means?”
Terric rubbed the side of his nose, then brushed his hair back, even though it
was banded at the nape of his neck. Boy had a lot of nervous twitches. I
wondered if he was always like this or if this kind of thing made him nervous.
Wondered if I should get my worry on too.
“What does that mean, Terric?”
“They used to be lovers.”
“And?”
He glanced at me, maybe glad I already knew that. “How easy do you think it
would be to kill someone you’ve loved?”
A knot in the pit of my stomach clenched. Memories of Zayvion flashed through
my mind, his smile, the easy sense of humor that he kept so carefully hidden
under his dutiful exterior. His touch, the weight of him next to me, in me.
Could I kill him if I had to? If he did something stupid like what Chase was
doing?
“He doesn’t have to kill her,” I said a little doubtfully.
“Maybe not. But he might need to.” Terric shifted his grip on the steering
wheel, and pushed his shoulders down as if settling an uncomfortable weight.
“It is always possible when you’re a Closer.”
“To kill?”
His eyes were a darkness in the night. “To destroy the ones you love.”
Creepy. Sad. And so not what I wanted to deal with. “We’ll all be there. Enough
of us to stop her and find Greyson, and what? Does the Authority have a jail?”
“There are . . . places. Out of the way. Guarded. Betraying the Authority
doesn’t always end in your death. There are worse punishments.”
There he went with the creepy again.
“So that’s where they’ll take Greyson. And her?”
“That’s where I’d put them.”
We were on the other side of the river now. Ever since magic had been found and
piped, Vancouver had become Portland’s darker sister. Maybe it was because
there were so many wells in the area, or maybe it was just geographic luck, but
somehow all the light seemed to shine on Portland, while Vancouver huddled in
Portland’s slick, dusky shadow.
We were following Zay. He drove like he knew exactly where she would be. Terric
and I didn’t say much. Zay took the exit right on the other side of the Interstate
Bridge that dropped us immediately on the other side of the river.
Fort Vancouver spread out to our right, a collection of historic buildings in
brick and clapboard, with barracks and winding neighborhood-like streets, huge
oak trees, and fields surrounded by split-wood fences.
Zay stopped by the brick three-story buildings down in Officers Row. It was
late. There were no lights on, no one out on the street. Zay killed the engine
and got out of the car, striding, then bolting into a run, heading between two
of the big brick houses. I couldn’t see where he was running, but I felt his
heartbeat, kicking strong against my wrist. I felt his emotions, grim
determination with the heady thrill of the hunt. Shame was out of the car too,
not running.
He walked a short distance from the cars, turned on his heels, spinning so he
faced the cars while he walked across the street. He had a lit cigarette, and
held it in his mouth, the cherry glow of it marking his place in the shadows.
He motioned with one hand for us to get out of the car.
“This is it,” Terric said. “Ready?”
“Always.”
He didn’t give me flak, just got out, paused as if scenting the air, then
headed to the left of where Zayvion had gone, breaking into a jog.
Shame waited until I was next to him. He hitched his hands forward, which drew
the sleeves of his jacket off his wrists, and flicked an Illusion over the two
cars so that they faded from casual observation.
He grunted, and swayed, his heartbeat under my wrist missing a beat, then
pounding hard to make it up. I reached over and caught his elbow. He was
shaking.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He pulled the cig out of his mouth. The cherry trembled and jumped as he tried
to push his hair out of his eyes. “Just. Fucking tired. I’m okay.”
And that was when I smelled the pain on him, and the blood.
“Bullshit. She hurt you, didn’t she? Where? How?”
He gave me a considering look, noticed I was fuming mad. He exhaled. “My gut.
I’m fine.”
I gripped his elbow tighter and dragged him back to his car. “No, you’re not.”
“What part of the language don’t you understand, Beckstrom?”
The very fact that I could actually force him to walk with me told me just how
badly he was hurt.
“You need a doctor?”
“No.”
“Stitches?”
“No.”
We passed through the Illusion he had cast, the slippery green scent of aloe
filling my nostrils and throat. I opened the front door of Zay’s car. “Get in.”
“For Christ’s sake,” he started.
“Duck.” I pushed on his shoulder at the same time I shoved him into the car.
He gave in, or more correctly, his knees gave in, and he folded down into the
seat. Groaned.
“Let me see.”
He turned his pale face in my direction. “I’ll call my mum. Honest.” He pulled
out his cell phone and flipped it open. “You go make sure Z. and . . . Make
sure Zay’s okay.”
He looked sick, greenish even in the low light. Casting that spell must have
exacerbated his wound.
“How badly are you bleeding? Don’t bullshit me, Shame.”
“She stabbed me once. With a knife. I remember that.” Dead serious. What did
you know? The man could tell the truth without going up in flame. “The bleeding
isn’t too bad. She planted a Blood glyph and when I cast that spell, it started
bleeding. It’s not enough to kill me—you can trust me on that, Beckstrom. But
she is seriously fucking up my fun.”
“Show me.”
He scowled. Gave in. Lifted his jacket. Even in the low light, I could see the
glyph of Blood magic spread out across the width of his flat stomach, just
catching on his hip bone. It bled—not badly—from one edge, probably the entry
of the wound. The rest of the glyph snaked out under his skin, like deep red
ropes. Blood magic was strange stuff. The glyph formed itself to the caster’s
will like a time-release capsule after the incision was made.
He pushed his shirt back down.
“You’ll call your mom?”
He held up the phone again. “Go. No one’s gonna find me under this Illusion,
and if they do, I’m not without weapons. And a phone.”
I nodded, and shut the door. Shame tipped the seat back a bit, and I saw a
brief flash of the phone’s blue light against his cheek and jaw before I was
out of the umbrella of the spell, and then couldn’t see the car at all.
I started off in the direction Zayvion had run, concentrating on the heartbeats
at my wrist. Shame’s was slow, labored, but even. I was glad he’d stayed
behind.
I shifted my focus on Terric’s heartbeat, fast, like he was running. His
emotions: angry, but calm.
Then Zayvion. His heart beat in the steady rhythm of a marathoner or an
athlete. Someone who was used to this kind of exertion. But his emotions hit me
like a brick wall falling. Surprise. And fear.