Trinkets, Treasures, and Other Bloody Magic (28 page)

Gran texting. Yep, it was the end of days.

∞

The gold sphere led us seriously west. As in, all the way to the Oregon Coast.

“Where are we?” I asked, after peering out the window at the waning sun over the Pacific Ocean failed to illuminate me.

“Near Florence,” Kandy answered. That really didn’t offer any clarification.

We were driving up a steep hill that offered a craggy cliff drop to our left and what looked to be a series of hiking trails to our right. If I glanced back, south, I could see the famous Oregon dunes, but the sphere had tugged me north when we’d reached the end of west.

A building, perched on the edge of the cliff, came into view as we rounded an S-curve. A building with a rather touristy billboard.

“Turn in here,” I said.

“What?” Kandy answered, as the SUV sped past the entrance.

“Turn here!”

Desmond reached over from the passenger seat and cranked the wheel left. Kandy hit the brakes and we skidded into the half-empty parking lot through the exit.

We all sat quietly. I, somehow forced to sit between Scarlett and Kett in the back seat, eased myself off the vampire where I’d been thrown against him. My mother and Kett had left their car at the strip mall, deeming that smarter than taking a chance on us getting separated.

Desmond let go of the wheel. Kandy half-heartedly straightened the SUV into an actual parking spot and then turned off the vehicle.

We all cranked our necks to stare up at the billboard. It read
Sea Lion Caves,
with the subhead
World’s Largest Sea Cave
beside a life-sized picture of a sea lion. Though I’d never seen a golden sea lion before.

“Okay. What the hell are we doing here?” Kandy said.

“I wasn’t going to be the first to ask,” I muttered.

“The sphere is directing you to the building, Jade?” Scarlett asked. The building in question was a rectangle of beige siding with a red clay-tile roof. It was surrounded by — of all things — a white picket fence.

“I don’t think so. Farther away. Down? Maybe the beach? Can we get to the beach here?”

“No. Fuck,” Desmond said. Then he all but threw himself out of the SUV and stomped into the building.

“I’m missing something.”

“The caves, Jade,” Scarlett said. Then she also exited.

I climbed out as well. Kandy and Scarlett followed Desmond into the gift shop, but I wandered over to the edge of the property. I stood on a cliff that looked like it was the end of the world, which was exceedingly appropriate based on how I was currently feeling … or, rather, trying not to feel.
 

It wasn’t the end of the world. Just the end of North America, which for some was the same difference. I hadn’t ever been off the continent myself. There was too much old magic, I now knew, in Europe. An Adept of power would take one look at me and know what I was … or rather what I wasn’t, which was not purely a witch. I still couldn’t wrap my head around how Gran had persuaded me not to travel after high school. She was that good.

Waves crashed into rocks hundreds of feet below me, with nothing but ocean from me all the way to China … or maybe Japan. I always got that mixed up.

The gold sphere urged me to continue, but there was no more road or path.

I turned as I felt Kandy approaching from the gift shop. “Closes in thirty minutes,” she said. “We’ll hop a ride on the elevator and take a look around after.” She handed me a brochure.

“America’s biggest sea grotto,” I read from it.

“You think the chocolate is any good here?” Kandy asked.

“Since when does chocolate need to be a certain quality for you?”

Kandy laughed. “You’re a bad influence.”

Scarlett and Kett, who was hiding out behind his baseball hat and sunglasses again, approached.

“Caves,” I said to them. “You think Blackwell is hanging out in some sea lion cave with a captive werewolf and necromancer?”

“What do your senses tell you, dowser?” Kett asked.

“Nothing.” I snapped. I wasn’t interested in being schooled right now.

“He won’t be in the main cave,” Scarlett murmured. She looked over the pictures in the brochure she’d lifted off me while I was gearing up for my hissy fit.

“Then there must be others, perhaps hidden,” Kett answered.

I walked away. The sphere wanted me to move, so I did. I crossed the strip of grass toward the walkway that led to the side of the building. I leaned against the fence. From here, I could see the carefully manicured paved paths on the property about twenty feet below. One led south across this wide shelf, jutting out a hundred feet or so over the ocean, to a lookout point complete with coin-operated binoculars. The second led north to — according to the helpful sign — the elevator and another lookout point. Farther north, I could see a picture-perfect, red-topped white lighthouse. Too bad it wasn’t a picture-perfect sort of day.

I knew there was a reason I was always last to figure things out. It wasn’t because I was self-absorbed, though I definitely was and that probably didn’t help matters. It was because I had less experience than everyone else. Desmond looked only a few years older than me, but he ran an entire community of shapeshifters. Kett was hundreds of years old. Scarlett had traveled the world many times over. Also, both Scarlett and Kett already apparently knew a lot about Blackwell.

No one knew Sienna like I did, though. And that was scarier than being ignorant and slow. Because once again, this was somehow all tied to my magic. Jeremy and Mory wouldn’t even have met, let alone been kidnapped together, if my magic hadn’t brought me to Blackwell’s attention.

So, yeah. I got that we were walking into a trap so obviously engineered by my sister that I’m sure everyone else got it too. Of course, that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to walk into it. What else could I do?

I thought about leaping the fence and dropping down to the path below, then taking those last hundred steps to the elevator and leaving everyone else behind.

Then what? Threaten Blackwell with my knife? I’m sure he had plenty of magical knives of his own. Plus that nifty amulet that might also be a transportation device. And Sienna had bested me in the alley. It might have looked like I’d won the battle, but I wasn’t going to win the war. You had to kill to win wars. Could I kill my sister?

“You’re dwelling,” Scarlett said as she settled beside me with her back to the fence. “It’s unlike you.”

“I feel like I don’t know anything. Like I barely know myself. I had everything sorted before.”

Scarlett laughed, softly. “Shall I tell you that this is just life? Because it is. Or shall I reinforce your feelings and remind you that three months ago, you thought you were half-human, and that we still haven’t figured out that riddle yet.”

“Or should you just kick me out of the nest and see if I fly?”

“Oh, you fly, my Jade. You soar.”

My chest constricted at the pride in my mother’s voice. Pride I felt utterly unworthy of.

Scarlett laid her hand across mine. I continued to clutch the top of the fence with both hands. Her magic danced across my skin and settled my thoughts.

“Did you always know you could do that?” I asked. “Or did you learn?”

“Pearl Godfrey’s child doesn’t learn,” Scarlett answered. “She is born fully actualized.”

“And when you had to learn?” I was full of questions today.

“I was a disappointment.”

“So Gran was more careful with me, then.”

“Was she? She made it clear I wasn’t to interfere. And honestly, I thought it was better … I thought you’d have a better childhood with Pearl as your caregiver, rather than me. And I was so very scared to lose you. That someone would take you away. Pearl protected you. Pearl loved you so fiercely. I only got in her way. I should have … I should have stepped up quicker.”

Silence settled between us. My mother had said so much in so few words that I wasn’t too sure how to start sorting through it.

“Who were you worried would take me? My father?”

“No, I … How would he know? I looked for him. I asked, but I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t have a baby in Queensland. I had to go home to Pearl.”

“Would he … do you think he would have wanted me?”

“I have no idea. He was magnificent. Strong, fierce, and he laughed. When he laughed it felt like the world laughed with him. But we didn’t talk, you understand. Not more than passing whispers with the magic of the moon and the Kalkadoon … the Aboriginals all around us. We were called together and we answered.”

Scarlett had told me all of this, in slightly different ways, the night Sienna had tried to force me to open the portal in the bakery basement. Then, as now, I could hear so many nuances within her words. My father thrilled and scared her. It was the scared part that freaked me out. What could scare my mother, whose magic soothed all those touched by it?

“Kett says he can tell me what magic is in my blood.”

Scarlett laughed. “Just like a man to tell you anything you want to hear to get in your pants and then forget his promises the next morning. A vampire will say anything for permission to bite you.”

“You think he’s lying?”

“I think there’s no way he’s laid fangs on anyone remotely like your father.”

“You talk like he’s some mythical being. Some demigod manifested through an Australian Aboriginal fertility ceremony.”

“Yes.”

The simplicity of Scarlett’s answer to my outlandish suggestion threw me. A demigod? What the hell?

Scarlett tapped my chin lightly and I snapped my mouth shut with an audible click. “You look exactly like him,” she said. “Every inch of you, a perfectly feminine version of him.”

Of a demigod. There was no way. Freaking gods didn’t exist. Did they?

“Except my eyes,” I said by rote, following the script we’d written together when I was very young … when she was young …

“You have my eyes,” my mother said. She rewarded me with a full-blown heartfelt smile. “Now, let’s go see what the nasty sorcerer wants. I have some new spells to try.”

Oh, Jesus. Even my petite, sexy, charismatic mother was turning bloodthirsty around the edges. Must. Not. Hang. With. Vampires … Or werewolves. They will warp anyone’s sense of justice and morality to the core.

Then I thought of Mory … and Sienna. And my anger didn’t feel so unjustifiably bloodthirsty anymore.

I grabbed an extra-large hoodie from the back of Desmond’s SUV — it was chilly so close to the open ocean — then we waited until the tourists had cleared out, and the owner/operators were distracted with … well, an actual distraction orchestrated by Scarlett, who swore the fire wouldn’t spread beyond the garbage can in the parking lot.

Not a subtle ploy, but I figured it was way more subtle than what the werewolf or vampire would come up with.

Speaking of vampires, Kett’s cheeks were almost flesh-colored again, which meant that in the forty-five minutes we’d waited, he’d managed to snack on a few tourists. How he did it without anyone noticing, I didn’t know. But I wasn’t interested in getting a close-up demonstration. I just hoped the tourists were happily sleeping off the buzz that I gathered they got from the feeding. A couple of motorhomes were still in the parking lot.

The elevator took us two hundred feet down through the cliff. I worried that the five of us surpassed the maximum weight, but was assured by Desmond that I was just being silly. It was rather obvious, despite the flirting that we’d been indulging in — if that’s what it even was — that he blamed me for everything going on and, specifically, Sienna. Just because he had every one of his pack members at his beck and freaking call, didn’t mean I could control my sister’s actions.

We stepped off the elevator into an educational center. Hardboard posters detailed the history of the caves and the lives of the sea creatures that called them home. A few more steps — past the preserved and displayed skeleton of a female sea lion that I didn’t want to look at too closely — brought us to the observation deck overlooking a vaulted dome easily a hundred feet high. This massive cave looked as if it had been carved into the side of the cliff by the ever-pounding surf. Normally, according to the pamphlet, hundreds of Steller sea lions lounged around the rocks jutting up out of the surf, but this was off-season. A bunch of different birds — the seagulls were all I recognized — nested in the craggy walls and swooped in and out of the cave. The cavern walls were stained green, purple, and rust.

“Take a picture,” Desmond said.

“Take a freaking pill, shifter,” I snapped back.

Desmond stepped toward me, green rolling over his eyes, only to barrel straight into Scarlett as she sidestepped between us. Looking rather startled, he managed to catch her before completely knocking her down.

“Respectfully, alpha,” Scarlett said, as she found her footing on the damp stone floor. “We asked, and Jade agreed to come to your city, because seeing Blackwell’s collection was to the benefit of the Adept community as a whole.”

Desmond grunted and stepped back from Scarlett. My mother, ever the diplomat. Seriously, the world was all out of whack.

I pulled the gold sphere out of my pocket and held it in my open palm. The magic within it glowed more intensely than before. I pivoted until I felt which way the sphere was urging me forward. I was now facing a set of sturdy wooden stairs that led further west and away from the main cavern. “There’s another entrance?” I asked.

“That leads to a lookout point now, but in the sixties, they had stairs instead of an elevator,” Kandy said. “There’s a southwest entrance as well that fills at high tide, but you can only get to it by boat.”

I raised an eyebrow at the green-haired werewolf.

“What?” she asked. “I read the brochure.”

I took a step toward the stairs, only to have Desmond hold me back.

“You tell us where to go, dowser. We’ll lead,” he said.

“Fine. Upward.”

Desmond and Kandy stepped in front of me. Kett brought up the rear behind Scarlett and me. I didn’t know how my mother felt about being in a monster sandwich, but I was especially not a fan of having a vampire at my back.