Trinkets, Treasures, and Other Bloody Magic (12 page)

I leaned sideways to look through the open pass-through doors to note — yes, a little smugly — that there was already a line outside. Bryn greeted a customer with a pleasant ring in her voice. He responded in baritone. I’d have to lay eyes on him, but by the sound of Bryn’s voice, he was worth the effort.

“Hanging around the bakery today?” I said to Kett. Yeah, I was still feeling snippy. “Scarlett is having breakfast with Gran.”

“I’m aware.”

Of course he was. All-knowing stick-in-the-mud.

Kett cast his gaze to my hands and raised an eyebrow a sixteenth-of-an-inch. I was rolling the skinwalker magic-imbued jade stones through my fingers again. I had to stop doing that. The magic in the stones obviously rattled me. I wasn’t sure of its purpose or what to do with it. Not like my necklace or my knife. The magic of those grounded me. I actually felt naked, incomplete without them. Even now, even while baking cupcakes, the blade was invisibly strapped over my right hip.

“There’s a necromancer upstairs,” I said.

Kett’s growing look of interest left his face in an icy wave. Vampires really didn’t get on with necromancers. Necro-controlled zombies were like vamp kryptonite, though it took a powerful necromancer to actually raise a body. Or a witch fueled by blood-magic and willing to eat her boyfriend’s organs to steal his latent powers.

Hopefully — in both cases — such a person was a rarity.

“She’s behind the wards of the apartment now,” I said, “but I’d appreciate you not killing her if she happens to wander down into the bakery.”

Kett looked affronted at this suggestion. Not that I knew so by his facial expression. It was the slight tightening of his shoulders that tipped me off. Yeah, I really was hanging out with him too much if I was actually starting to be able to read him. Now I felt bad about teasing him with the necromancer announcement.

“She’s just a girl —”

“Rusty’s sister.”

Freaking vampire always knew everything. I don’t know why I even bothered to talk to him. Oh, yeah, right. Because Gran had kept me ignorant half my life. That’s why. Never mind that the information had been there for me to seek and I hadn’t bothered to look. I was still pissy about it.

“I have customers,” I said.

“So you do.”

I thought about stabbing him in the stomach, but I’d done that once before and it hadn’t fazed him any more than my sarcasm did. Or any more than the cold shoulder I turned his way now as I stomped into the bakery to help Bryn with the opening rush.

The courier showed up just after ten. I knew that because I actually looked up and saw him barrel into, then bounce right off, the wards protecting the bakery.

He stumbled back and rubbed his nose, affronted and perplexed. So he was magical enough that the wards excluded him from entry, but not enough to be able to feel the barrier before running into it.

Kett was up and moving — at human pace, because the bakery was currently full of the magically lacking — toward the front doors while my mouth was still hanging open in surprise. I’d never seen someone bounce off the wards like they were a screen door before. Any of the Adept in Vancouver could either already enter the bakery or knew to catch my eye and request entry with a wave. The wards on the bakery weren’t as complex as on my apartment. I had always been able to invite people through verbally, or even with a nod of my head. Though now I was beginning to understand how that might have something to do with my ability to manipulate magic with subconscious intention.

The courier wasn’t wearing a recognizable uniform, but he was carrying an official-looking bag and dressed in a generic blue top and gray pants. He also really needed to wash his thin hair, which might have been dirty blond if it was clean. He stepped back as Kett loomed to block the door. Not that Kett physically needed to block a warded door. I gathered this display was for intimidation purposes. The vampire was an inch or so shorter than the courier.

I wiped my hands on a tea towel rather than my apron, which I liked to wear for show even though the pink ruffles clashed with my jeans and Converse sneakers. The bakery and yoga studio were pretty much the only places I didn’t shoe myself exclusively with Fluevogs. My hands weren’t dirty, just clammy. I didn’t like the set of Kett’s shoulders. I also didn’t like that Kandy had just appeared behind the courier on the sidewalk. Like I said, the bakery was full of human customers. Humans didn’t do well caught between Adepts at odds.

The werewolf’s T-shirt was a slightly more lime version of her hair, which was back to its normal vibrant green.

“Hey,” I heard the courier say to Kett as I rounded the corner of the display case. A breeze stirred my trinkets in the doorway and they tinkled. This sound was normally a comfort, but today it sent a shiver of worry down my spine. Why was this obviously magical person dressed like a courier? Not that the Adept didn’t have jobs as I did, but like I said, Vancouver was a really small community. I might not know every magical person among the two-million-plus human residents of Greater Vancouver, but I should know anyone with enough magic to be bothered by the wards so much that they couldn’t enter.

“Hey,” Kett replied. The vampire’s hands were in his pockets as if he was laid-back, easygoing. His voice was a welcoming drawl. I didn’t like the look or sound of either.

Kandy wasn’t any better. She was sporting that predator grin. Her eyes narrowed, maybe from the sun but probably because she was honed in on prey. Or, more specifically, imagining ripping the courier’s spine free from the back of his neck.

“I … that was weird, hey?” the courier asked.

Jesus, only seconds had passed. How had I noticed so much and moved so close to the door in seconds?

“What was weird?” Kett asked. He didn’t step out from the bakery.

Kandy, outside, stepped closer to the courier and actually sniffed him. She wrinkled her nose with a frown and shook her head at Kett, who didn’t react.

Oh, God they were working together. That wasn’t good.

I stepped up behind Kett. He was actually only a couple of inches taller than my five feet nine inches, but he could make himself feel like he was blocking the entire door.

“Hey,” the courier said again as he caught my eye. An admiring grin spread across his face. It was a look I was accustomed to. He wouldn’t have even noticed me if Scarlett had been in the room, though, and she was double his age. He really needed to get his teeth whitened and straightened. “Jade Godfrey?”

Kandy shifted her stance, legs slightly apart, and arms ready. I was unconsciously playing with the stones in my left hand again. The skinwalker magic tingled in my palm.

“Yes,” I answered.

“I have a letter for you,” he said. He reached into his satchel and pulled out a thick, unusual-sized envelope. It was hand folded and sealed with wax. He wasn’t wearing a name tag. I didn’t recognize the logo on his bag.
 

My name was written on the envelope in pitch-black inked handwriting that borrowed heavily from calligraphy. The courier tried to pass the envelope to me. It met the ward and crumpled against it. His mouth dropped open again.

“Shit,” I muttered, and tried to pass by Kett before one of my customers saw an envelope crushed against an invisible wall.

Except before I could move more than a step, Kandy grabbed the courier by the back of the shirt and began hauling him down the sidewalk.

“What the hell?” he yelled.

“Deliveries in the back,” Kandy said with a cheerful chime I wouldn’t have thought her vocal cords capable of.

I met the concerned gazes of a couple of pedestrians with a sunny smile. “She’s just enthusiastic.” Yeah, lame, but what the freaking hell? I cast my voice low and kept on smiling. “Manhandling couriers isn’t great for business, vampire.”

“Neither is accepting magically sealed correspondence. And he doesn’t work for any local courier company.”

Kett turned and crossed back through the bakery toward the kitchen.

I, dodging a couple of exiting customers less gracefully than the vampire, followed.

∞

Kandy had the courier pressed against the building wall behind the dumpster. He looked more angry than freaked. His ears were red with it, actually. What regular courier wouldn’t be freaked by a girl a third of his size pinning him against a wall? A courier well versed in the Adept world.

Had running into the ward just been for show? His magic was unfamiliar to me, but the magic radiating from the envelope in his hand was obvious.

“Sorcerer,” I murmured to Kett. “The letter, anyway.”

“Makes sense.”

It did. Sorcerers derived their power from books and magical objects. The written word was — for the more powerful — potent for them as well. Among the Adept, sorcerers were almost as numerous as witches. But no sorcerer of power resided in Vancouver, which was witch territory because my grandmother deemed it to be.

The fact that my name was on the outside of a letter written by a sorcerer was definitely troubling. I was oddly glad it was Kett rather than Gran looming over the courier right now. I knew Gran would see the letter as a threat, whereas Kett would simply be mildly interested. Vampires got bored. A lot. Sometimes they went randomly rogue just to spice up their eternal lives.

The courier’s face blanched at the sight of Kett. Or, rather, the sight of a vampire outside the bakery wards, as he’d already seen Kett but hadn’t twigged to the vampire part yet. The wards kept magic in as well as out.

Kandy leaned in, her hand still on the courier’s chest and pinning him to the wall. She gave the guy’s neck a long sniff. “Spellcaster, low grade,” she said, assessing the courier’s magical power.

“All spellcasters are low grade,” Kett replied mildly. He tilted his head in his very deliberate fashion to look at the envelope the guy still clutched at his side.

“What?” the courier sputtered. “I’m not —”

“You don’t interest us, guy,” Kandy said.

“Dowser?” Kett asked. “The envelope?”

I stepped to the vampire’s side but not in front of him. It was always better to stay out of a predator’s path. The courier looked at me as if in assessment. Normally, if an Adept of any power came to Vancouver, Gran would keep me behind wards. Not that I had any idea she’d been doing so for years. But it was rare that someone so low grade, as Kandy assessed the courier, could actually see magic. So he shouldn’t be able to see that I had powers beyond that of a normal witch with a rare specialty, namely the dowsing.

Kett had known of my power the moment he saw me outside the wards of my apartment, of course. He’d known I was more. Same with Desmond.

I focused on the letter clutched in the courier’s hand. It didn’t feel malicious. But then, I didn’t have much experience with that sort of thing. Glimmers of magic twinkled from my inked name. This could be evidence of a spell, or it might just be a trace embedded inadvertently in the ink. Whoever wrote it might just be powerful enough that such an effect was commonplace. I didn’t mention out loud that though I could see similar glimmers in Gran’s spellbooks, such residual energy didn’t appear in her casually jotted notes.

“This isn’t some big secret,” the courier said. He attempted to hold the envelope out to me again. Kandy grabbed his arm by the wrist and twisted. He shrieked.

Jesus. Any neighbors along the alley with the day off were going to be making 911 calls soon.

“Drop it,” Kandy said. She twisted the courier’s wrist a second time.

The courier whimpered but didn’t let go of the letter. “I can’t,” he said, choking through the pain. “I can’t drop it. From my hand to hers. Get it?”

Ah, that made some sense.

“Who sent it?” Kett asked.

“Mot Blackwell. His instructions were explicit. He said there were other witches —”

Kandy twisted the courier’s arm up until it was level with her nose. Then — careful not to come into contact with the paper — she sniffed the letter. She shrugged and stepped back from her hold on the courier.

“Who’s Blackwell?” I asked. I had seen Kett go even more motionless than usual in response to the name. This usually meant he was thinking … or bored.

The courier was rubbing his arm and massaging his wrist while casting baleful looks at Kandy. The green-haired werewolf ignored him as she prowled a ten-foot perimeter of sorts around us.

“Blackwell?” I asked again.

The courier shrugged. “A sorcerer I run errands for.”

“And you? You’re a spellcaster?”

His thin face stretched to accommodate an unusually wide grin. “Curser, actually. There ain’t anything low grade about me.”

Kandy sniffed. Kett was still zoned out, so I continued with my personal line of questioning.

“You write curses?”

“Not always. I’ve got some personal ones on my fingertips.” He showed me his unremarkable fingers. The ones not holding the letter

Spellcasters, sorcerers, and witches all shared the ability to cast or call up magic. Witches could access magic from natural power sources — namely the earth or their own reserves. Sorcerers, as the name seemed to suggest, needed a source for their magic such as a written spell or magical object. They could create these written spells through trial and error, but they couldn’t simply draw a circle in the sand, light some candles, and make magic do their bidding as witches could. Spellcasters were even more limited than sorcerers. They usually relied on spells written by others, unable to access magic beyond their own. So they were usually low on the power scale.
 

Curses were a specialty I’d never heard of, and I was hoping there was no demonstration scheduled in my future. The courier’s magic didn’t look powerful enough to kill anyone. It was rather tasteless, like hothouse cucumbers or day-old water.

“Don’t worry,” the courier said. “You’re way too cute to curse.”

“Moron,” Kandy muttered to me as she passed behind in her pacing sequence. She appeared to delight in the courier’s stupidity.

The courier ignored the werewolf. That was never a great idea, but I wasn’t one to randomly give advice.