“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because I want to know your maximum power with the staff and how inaccurate your aim is.” Okay, so maybe he
had
realized I’d been going for the skull and crossbones and not the middle of the pirate ship hull.
I held the staff up and aligned it with the clown’s big, blue right eye. The eyeball was easily three feet wide, but the staff seemed to kick left so I adjusted my aim a few feet to the east.
Gathering as much physical energy as I could summon without a concentrated buildup, I fed it all into the staff, and the ropes of flame came out wider, brighter, and faster- moving than anything I’d produced so far—so much that I jerked my arm a little to the right.
The flames went wide, hitting a wooden equipment shed behind the clown head. It whooshed into a massive bonfire, the likes of which only a pile of dried wood could produce.
“You. Are. A. Menace.” Adrian elbowed me aside and starting his hand motions again, muttering and weaving a spell I hoped would dampen the fire, which had spread to an adjacent building with fast-growing flames. It seemed to tamp briefly, then flared again.
Damn. His magic wasn’t working. I scrambled in my right jeans pocket and pulled out my flame-retardant charm. Thumbing off the top, I ran toward the burning buildings.
Adrian grabbed the back of my sweater as I passed him, pulling me to a halt. “What in bloody hell are you doing?”
“Trust me.” I wrenched free of him, got as close to the fire as I dared, and tossed the charm. Adrian came to stand beside me, and we both watched in awe as a plume of bright purple smoke shot into the air so high it briefly dwarfed the roller coaster. Too much Chinese beautyberry in the mixture, maybe.
On the positive side, the buildings were no longer burning. They simply crackled and turned black, sending occasional plumes of purple smoke skyward.
“You might wish to adjust that recipe a bit.” Adrian and I stood and watched the purple geysers erupt. They were kind of pretty, sparkling magenta and violet as the sunlight hit them.
Adrian spun in alarm as the distinctive whoop of a siren sounded in the distance. “It’s the constabulary. You’re going to get us arrested for arson.”
“Holy crap.” I raced back to the bench for my backpack and hooked fingers through the handle of Adrian’s briefcase. “Let’s go.”
“The transport,” he shouted, running for the patch of weeds. I set my backpack and his briefcase inside the transport next to him, rummaged in the backpack a split-second, and pulled out one of my premixed camouflage potions. I couldn’t leave my SUV here for the cops to tow away.
“You’re going to get us arrested, you stupid woman! Leave the vehicle!” His voice had risen about three octaves and I’m sure at some point I’d think his falsetto was funny.
Not that he’d be able to hear me laughing. As I turned to answer him, he disappeared. The SOB had taken the transport and left me—and he took my backpack.
Cursing, I sprinkled the camouflage potion in a circle around my Pathfinder so I wouldn’t have to steal it out of impound later. Damned hysterical Blue Congress wizard. Like waiting another thirty seconds for us to transport together would have killed him. Now I’d have to track him down to get my stuff back.
I ran into the transport just as blue flashing lights turned in at the entrance to Six Flags. In the distance, I heard fire engines on their way. Behind me, purple flares continued to shoot almost as high as the Jocco’s Mardi Gras Madness roller coaster. I had no idea what the fire department would make of it.
Just before time and space compressed around me, taking me to the transport nearest Adrian’s apartment, I spotted a pair of NOPD officers running breakneck toward the enormous, grinning clown with purple smoke drifting from behind its head.
I
sat on a bench near the French Market on Decatur Street with my cell phone, squeaky clean tourists giving me wide berth on their way to drink hurricanes and soak up the New Orleans ambience. Probably thought I was a gutter punk, between the jeans I’d ripped the knee out of scrambling away from the clown fire and hair that was more pony than tail.
My backpack, retrieved from Adrian’s apartment after I’d tracked him down, leaned against my leg, the elven staff sticking out the top. It completed the picture of what the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce would not want to show off about our fair city: eccentric and possibly dangerous locals of questionable mental health.
Alex answered on the first ring. “Toxic purple smoke being reported at Six Flags. What did you do?”
If it weren’t true, I’d resent his assumption that I’d caused the incident. “A spell went a bit south. And it wasn’t toxic.”
He chuckled. “Where are you?”
“Outside Aunt Sally’s on Decatur. My SUV is still at Six Flags.”
“On my way.” He hung up without a good-bye. A half hour later, I spotted Alex’s Range Rover inching toward me down Decatur and hefted the pack over one shoulder. There was no place to pull over, so as soon as he stopped, I quickly opened the door and scaled the half- mile incline into the passenger seat.
Alex had bought the Range Rover when he got the job as DDT director, since his Mercedes convertible wasn’t suitable for transporting massive amounts of concealed specialized weaponry. Whether it used prete ammo or premium unleaded, the man liked his toys, and damned the price of gas. A pickup truck like Jake’s wasn’t cool enough and, besides, Jake had one so it wasn’t suitable.
I slammed the truck door behind me. “What a horrible day.”
“I thought every day you got to commit arson was a good day.” Alex stared straight ahead, eyes focused on traffic, but his mouth twitched.
“Go ahead and laugh. You can’t help yourself.”
The twitch turned into that crease at the corner of his mouth, just on the left side, that was about the sexiest thing going. Plus it felt good to share a joke, even if it was at my expense.
“Other than the fire, how’d the lesson with Adrian go?”
Better than I’d expected, overall. “He’s still a pain in the ass, but I think we’ll get through it okay. Too early to tell whether it will actually help me manage my elven skills. Today, I mostly showed him what I could do.”
“Like start fires?” Alex laid on his horn, scaring the crap out of a small flock of tourists wandering across Decatur.
I groaned. “Adrian got a firsthand view of my little aiming problem. It undid all the brownie points I’d earned showing him my other skills. I think the hydromancy freaked him out.” “He underestimated you,” Alex said, turning down Esplanade and heading away from the river. “We’ve all underestimated you at one time or another.”
This was the closest he’d ever come to admitting he’d been wrong not to take me or my magic abilities seriously when we first met after Katrina, which left me pathetically warm and fuzzy. “How’d things go with Ken today?”
“We should have done this a long time ago—set up the DDT unit and brought him in. He’s the perfect liaison with the NOPD. He doesn’t care if the department gives him shit. He just ignores them.”
Good for Ken. “He’s not freaked out by”—I fluttered my hand between Alex and me—“us?”
We finally escaped the Quarter and began winding along a back route to New Orleans East to avoid the interstate glut. “He’s good.”
“Mmm-hmm.” I might or might not have said more. Truth was, I passed out and didn’t awaken until Alex bounced his truck over the rutted entrance to Six Flags. I’d done enough physical magic to wear me out.
“Where are you parked? Oh, never mind.” Alex squinted across the lot near the turnstiles and navigated to within three feet of the Pathfinder.
“You can see it?”
“Sort of—only because I knew what to look for.” He took the keys out of the ignition and looked at me a little too closely. I had an annoying urge to comb my hair. “You fell asleep pretty fast. Have you been tired a lot the last couple of days?”
I unbuckled the seatbelt. “Just a lot going on and too little sleep. Plus, I used a hefty dose of magic today.”
I opened the door and got out, digging my keys from the backpack and using the staff to break the camouflage charm on the car. I didn’t have enough juice left to do it on my own.
“Walk around with me a few minutes and give traffic time to clear out. I want to check out your latest handiwork. You’ve become quite the arsonist.” Alex sat on the top of the fence and swung his long legs over while I struggled through the turnstile. I caught up with him near the clown head, which no longer smoked. It held small pools of water, like the ruins of the buildings at its back, and stank like a dirty ashtray left outside in the rain.
“Impressive. Your fire-setting skills are improving.” He sat on one of the carousel swings nearby, testing his weight against the rusted chains before shifting all the way back.
“Let me give you the guided tour.” I did a game show hostess pre sentation. “Behind Door Number One: the now-halfsunken Jean Lafitte Pirate Ship—only half sunken because Adrian used his pretty Blue Congress magic to undo some of the fire I set.” I twirled dramatically. “Behind Door Number Two: the great Smoking Bozo, which I was trying to blow apart when I hit the building behind him.”
Alex didn’t smile. In fact, he frowned.
“Hey, you gotta laugh. I don’t do my
Price Is Right
impression for just anybody.”
His voice was quiet. “How are your ribs?”
I laughed. “They’re—” Shit. The world tilted, and I had to rest a hand on the clown head to stay upright. “They don’t hurt at all.” My ribs had still been sore this morning and had healed in the last four hours—to the point I’d forgotten about them?
I needed to take another blood test.
Alex didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. I took the swing next to him and plopped down, daring it to dump me on the ground. I eased the left arm of my sweater up to look at my unmarked arm. “Did you know that when a wizard turns werewolf, the Elders lock him or her up in an institution in Greenland?”
“You don’t know for sure,” he said. “Maybe you just turned a corner with the ribs and they quit hurting.”
He was grasping at wolf whiskers and we both knew it. “Jean Lafitte told me to come to the Beyond if I shifted, so the Elders wouldn’t be able to use me or lock me up, or kill me.”
Alex stopped his gentle swinging. His stillness, the sudden quiet, felt heavy and profound. “You aren’t leaving. I . . . you can’t leave.”
He reached his left hand out to take my right and tugged me toward him.
I had to deal with this. We had to deal with it. “Alex, we just—”
His mouth landed hot on mine, and the world shrank to the two of us. My palms absorbed the heat of his shoulders, and I closed my eyes to block out everything but his big hands circling my back, his breath hot on my lips, my neck.
I pulled away. His long-lashed eyes, rich, dark brown, were half focused on my mouth at first, but finally his gaze rose to meet mine. His voice sounded hoarse. “Come home with me.”
I kissed him again and bent to pick up my backpack. “This is the wrong time for the wrong reason,” I whispered. The waterfall of tears was threatening to start again. I wanted his warmth and his comfort—needed them. But not out of pity.
He focused on the ground, his jaw clenching and unclenching as if he were biting back words. Finally, he stood up and looked down at me with pain- filled eyes. “You’re wrong about both the time and the reason. Just think about it.”
We walked back to the parking lot in silence, the setting sun burning orange and blue and promising another ending. I was sick to death of endings.
It’s just as well we drove home in our respective vehicles so we didn’t have to talk. I knew Alex was afraid for me, and he was desperate. Afraid for Jake, too, because whatever became of me impacted both of us. I couldn’t be sure if he asked me to go home with him because he wanted us to see whether things were real between us, or because he was afraid it was our only chance to be together.
Maybe both.
He reached the parking lot behind our houses ahead of me and was waiting next to his truck. When I climbed out of the Pathfinder, he took my hand and squeezed it. “We do the blood test together this time.”
I nodded. The trip through the kitchen, up the stairs, and into the library felt like a gallows walk. I felt oddly calm, and even though I realized it was probably shock, I welcomed the lack of feeling. It helped me pull a clean slide out of the box, slice my finger, let the blood drop onto the glass, and cover the first slide with a second.
But I couldn’t do anything with it other than stand there, looking down at it. My whole future could rest on the red smudge between those two thick rectangles of glass.
“Here, let me.” Alex took the slide from me, fiddled with the microscope to turn it on and get the slide into the right position. Finally, he took a deep breath and leaned over, closing one eye and squinting into the eyepiece with the other as he focused the image.
“What do you see?”
“Lots of circles, kind of pinkish in color.”
That was good. That was normal. My heart sped up. Maybe the rib thing was a false alarm.
“Anything else?”
“Some brown curvy things, kind of like commas with wide tails.” He looked up from the microscope. “Is that bad?”
I nodded. That was very, very bad.
A
drian Hoffman’s expression told me he was a vampire club virgin, just in case his earlier vamp snark had left any doubts. His eyes bugged out like an anthropologist who’d just uncovered an exotic cultural artifact, and his wizard’s energy buzzed with equal parts fear and excitement. We weren’t even inside the club yet.
I had little patience and no desire to share his feelings. I’d done a long grounding ritual—part meditation, part magic—to keep my empathy under control before leaving the house. I’d be able to absorb what was useful but didn’t have to take it all in like a radio receiver.
My own nerves were bad enough, but the daze that had come over me this afternoon had yet to break. For now, it let me ignore the results of the blood test. I’d even been calm enough that Alex had agreed to go home.