He chuckled. “Can’t. That kind can only be transferred once a day. Sorry.”
He didn’t look sorry, and I had no way of knowing whether he was telling the truth. I frankly doubted it. “Mac!”
“You may need her, Cassie,” he said more soberly. “You let me reactivate your ward, but it’s like John said: your power may not work in Faerie, and if it does it could be sporadic. If the energy isn’t flowing to fuel it, your ward won’t function. Sheba’s going to tag along to make sure you have some protection even if your main ward fails—think of her as a slightly temperamental backup. There aren’t many wards that’ll work in Faerie, but that one will. I bought it off the Fey who enchanted it. And I wouldn’t be much of a gentleman to let you go off defenseless, now, would I?”
“But I’m not going alone.” Sheba had now climbed around to my back and was doing something with her claws that was less than pleasant. I reached around to get her to stop and got swatted at by a small paw for my trouble. Fortunately, the next minute she curled up in a warm ball at the base of my spine and went to sleep. If I concentrated, I could hear her purr contentedly.
“You’re assuming we’ll all get past the guards. But it won’t be as simple as just walking in tonight.”
“You said you know them.”
“I do, but they know me, too. I used to be John’s partner before I retired. He’s a wanted man now, after that exhibition you two put on this morning, so my walking in there out of the blue and making small talk is going to look strange. The idea is that I create a diversion and you two run into the portal while the guards are busy with me. But there’s no saying it’ll work. Even if it does, you and John are going to be on your own after the guards apprehend me.”
I squirmed uncomfortably, both because Sheba’s lazily twitching tail was ticklish, and because of Mac’s easy nonchalance about defying the Circle. “What’ll happen when they catch you?”
He shrugged. “Likely nothing. It won’t be a slap on the wrist and Bob’s your uncle, I’m back on the streets. But I know a trick or two. With a little luck, I should be able to convince them that John put me under a compulsion spell and forced me to help.”
“And if you’re not lucky?”
Mac grinned and patted me on the shoulder. “That’s why we’re going tonight. My old mates may not be happy to see me, but neither is likely to kill me. I pulled their nuts out of the fire a time or two—they owe me.”
“But the Circle—”
“You let me worry about them,” he said as Pritkin stuck a suspicious face through the curtain.
“What’s going on?” I saw him mouth before Mac dissolved the shield around us with an unobtrusive flick of his wrist.
“Finishing clogging our arteries,” Mac said cheerfully. “I’d ask you to join us, but I know you’ve stretched your rules once today.” He winked at me. “Never let John be in charge of the food, Cassie. He’ll poison you with wheatgrass and prune juice.”
“It’s better than the kind of thing you call food,” Pritkin said, but he disappeared back out front as if satisfied.
I ate a little more of my burger, but the grease had started to congeal, and anyway, I’d lost my appetite. I was tired of other people getting hurt because of me, and falling into the Circle’s hands definitely came under that category. Maybe people did owe Mac a few favors, but would it be enough? What if they tortured him to find out what he knew about me? I wouldn’t put it past them, old soldier or no. I felt sick again, a combination of the type of food I’d consumed, nerves and worry. Mac didn’t seem to have that problem, and ultimately finished off my burger himself.
I wandered back out front to find that Pritkin was loaded for bear. The mass of weapons was gone, but he didn’t appear any more weighed down than usual. I realized why when I saw him clipping some very unusual charms to a link bracelet. “Iron,” he explained as he fastened it around his wrist. “It saps Fey energy, tears through their defenses like silver does to a were.”
“I didn’t peg you for the jewelry type,” I said, although I’d pretty much figured out what he’d done. Not even a homicidal mage wears a charm bracelet with tiny machine guns, rifles and what looked suspiciously like a grenade launcher dangling from it. The latter was especially telling, since he’d pulled a life-size model out of his sack earlier.
“I shrank them,” he said impatiently. “It’s the only way to carry that much weight for any distance.”
“I thought you said our stuff doesn’t work there?”
“I said our magic may not work properly, if at all. This”—Pritkin tapped the Colt on his belt—“isn’t magic. And it’s loaded with iron bullets. Speaking of which, here.” He gave me a long coat that almost matched his own. “Put that on.”
I took it from his outstretched hand and almost collapsed to the floor. It felt like it was lead lined. After a minute, I realized that was pretty much the truth. The added weight came from boxes and boxes of bullets of every conceivable caliber that had been stuffed into the coat’s many pockets.
“You have got to be kidding,” I said, dropping the thing on the floor. It landed with an audible thud. “I won’t be able to run in that! I doubt I could walk in it!”
“You won’t be running.” Pritkin picked it up and stuffed it back in my arms. “We would never outrun the Fey on their own turf, so we won’t try. If we come across any and they’re hostile—”
“And they will be,” Mac put in, emerging from behind the curtain. He had a small backpack into which he put the contents of my duffle and, with a wink, a couple of beers.
“Then we stand our ground and fight,” Pritkin finished. “Running is a waste of time and would play into their hands if it separated us. No matter how grim a battle seems, don’t panic.”
“Of course not. I’ll stand my ground while they mow me down.” I was struggling into the hot leather and feeling cranky.
Pritkin checked his shotgun and, for the first time since our incident, he met my eyes. “If you’re with me, you won’t die,” he said. He sounded so certain that, for half a second, I believed him.
I swallowed and broke eye contact. “Why can’t you shrink my stuff, too?”
“Because I am not entirely certain that the reverse spell will work in Faerie, so I am carrying both shrunken backup weapons and regular-sized primaries. Your ammunition is for the primaries.”
I was busy trying to sort through my emotions, which ranged from pissed off to terrified, so it wasn’t until we stepped outside that I remembered our wild ride. Freakish though it had been, it actually ranked pretty far down the list of weird things that had happened to me lately. “How did we get here?” I asked Mac.
“I took a short cut,” he said, pulling a wide-brimmed hat over his bald head. He turned around and tapped the blank square that decorated his knee. I stared at the very odd sight of a tattoo parlor sitting all alone in the middle of the desert, just before I was treated to the even odder one of it folding in on itself and winking out of sight entirely. Mac grunted and examined his leg, where a miniature version of the front of the shop, complete with bright neon sign reading MAG INK, had appeared. It fit perfectly into the bare spot I’d seen earlier.
The little sign on the tattoo flashed on and off just like the real thing. After a second, I realized that it was the real thing. “We’ve spent the whole afternoon inside one of your wards?” I asked incredulously.
“Right in one,” Mac said. “My shop goes wherever I do.”
“What do you do? Pick out an empty lot and then,
bam
! New retail location?”
He grinned. “Something like that.”
“What about zoning? What about pedestrians walking by and all of a sudden, there’s a building? What about the cops?”
“What about them? Norms can’t see it, Cassie, any more than they can one of the tattoos.” He took my arm companionably. “You’ve got to realize that the so-called magic you’ve seen all your life is only the tip of the iceberg. Those sad bastards the vamps use for warding and such are the bottom of the barrel. If they had any real talent, whatever issues got them disavowed would have been overlooked or they’d have been chastised and put back to work. Or, if it was something truly heinous, they’d have run off and joined the Dark—only even they won’t take screwups. The type that ends up working for vamps are those with only enough magic to qualify as menaces—to themselves and everyone else. They couldn’t do a complex spell if their lives depended on it. You stick with us, and you’ll see some real magic.”
Pritkin stopped and took something out of his pocket. “Good idea,” he commented, and a second before he did it, I knew what was going to happen. It wasn’t a Seeing, just my kind of luck. The idiot was going to cast the mystery rune.
I hit the dirt and tried to drag Mac down with me, but my feet got tangled in the hem of the heavy coat and I had to let go of him to break my fall. I scraped my palms on rock-hard dirt, and the pain and subsequent struggle to free myself from the leather distracted me for a few seconds. There was a flash of light and a popping noise, like a very large champagne cork. When I looked up again, Pritkin and Mac were gone.
Although I could see a good distance in every direction, there wasn’t so much as a shred of cloth or a footprint to show that they’d been there. I felt around with my senses, but there were no unusual vibrations. That was almost as strange as the disappearance—a major magical object had just been set off, yet there wasn’t so much as a metaphysical ripple for miles. The only thing I could pick up was the slight buzz of MAGIC’s wards off to the northwest.
I didn’t understand it. If the rune had killed Pritkin and Mac—even if it had vaporized their bodies—I should be able to see their spirits. And, so far, I couldn’t. After walking a large circle around where the mages had vanished and coming up with nothing, I turned my attention to my own position. It wasn’t good.
I was miles from Vegas with no food, water or transportation. Worse, the only nearby source of those things was MAGIC, where half the people hunting me currently resided. Breaking in by myself would have been daunting, even if Billy had been there to help. But he, like the mages, was currently a no-show. That thought started me worrying that perhaps the rune could destroy ghosts, too, and that was why I couldn’t see Pritkin or Mac’s spirits. I shied away from that concept quickly when I began to shake. Billy was a royal pain, but he’d been with me through some pretty crazy times. It was hard to think about being truly alone, without a single person I could claim as an ally—not even a dead one.
The only good news was that I was wearing enough ammunition to wage a small war. Unfortunately, I’d have to drive off my enemies by throwing it at them, because I didn’t have a gun. Pritkin hadn’t offered to share, and my own Smith & Wesson was in my purse, which Mac had stuffed into the backpack—a backpack he had been holding.
I was watching a gorgeous desert sunset with rising panic when I noticed something small and dark in the sky. It was only a tiny spec highlighted by the rays of the setting sun, but it was getting bigger fast. I barely had time enough to think that Mac had been right, it did remind me of Oz, before the thing grew so huge that it blotted out what was left of the sun. I hit the ground, huddling inside the thick coat while my brain flashed on an image of me lying under Dorothy’s farmhouse, with only my dead legs sticking out. Too bad I’d lost the shoes from Dante’s; they’d have been perfect.
My inner monologue began to babble as something huge hit the ground nearby with a bone-shaking thud. A hail of rocks and dirt rained down on me, and my brain lost it. It was hysterically insisting that getting crushed to death wouldn’t be fair—I was only a slightly bitchy clairvoyant, not a wicked witch—when the dirt storm finally passed.
I peered out from inside the coat, but there were no Munchkins or yellow brick roads in sight. Yet there was a house. It took my dust-filled eyes a few seconds to realize that the structure sitting so incongruously on the desert sand wasn’t a rogue Kansas farmhouse but an urban tattoo parlor, with its neon sign flashing as cheerfully as Mac’s grin.
I was lying in the dirt, shaking, when the door burst open and Pritkin and Mac ran out. They looked pretty forbidding, but then Mac caught sight of me, gave a whoop and sped over to pick me up and spin me around in a circle, lead-lined coat and all. “Cassie! Are you all right? You had us so—”
“Where the hell did you two
go
?” I was sobbing and half hysterical, so relieved that I felt weak and simultaneously as mad as hell. I hit him in the chest and, although I doubt it hurt much, his eagle screeched and pecked viciously at my hand. I shrieked and tore away, ending up back in the dirt. I had just been attacked by a painted bird that was not now and never had been real. Despite my afternoon crash course on advanced wards, it didn’t seem possible, but it was hard to argue with evidence that hurt that much. Then Sheba woke up and things went from bad to worse.
I felt the unwelcome fur ball stretch along my lower back and, when Mac bent over to help me up, she flowed along my torso and down my arm. I looked in surprise at the line of bright red that suddenly appeared on his forearm. Despite the size of her paw, the gash it left behind was three inches long and deep enough to need stitches. Even worse, I had no idea how to call Sheba off.
Pritkin jerked me away from his friend and sent me staggering, releasing his hold quickly before Sheba could get her claws into him. His lips were thin with anger. “Stop it, both of you! Before you activate the wards for real and tear each other apart!”
I looked down at my hand, which now sported a painful two-inch gash, and gulped in enough air to say, “For real?” How much worse did they get? I don’t know what else I might have said, but I glimpsed Billy over Pritkin’s shoulder and temporarily forgot everything else. I pointed a trembling finger at him. “Where were you? It’s almost dark and MAGIC is right over there!”
“Calm down, Cass—it’s okay. Everything’s fine, but you need to get a grip or your new pet is going to do some serious damage.”