I See You (Oracle 2) (18 page)

“They saw their strength and assumed they were in a meth rage?”

“So I gathered.”

Blackwell met my gaze in the rearview mirror. I looked away.

Henry’s phone pinged again. “Shit. I told you the office would question how the hell I got here so quickly.”

“What will you tell them?” I asked, honestly interested in how a sorcerer worked with humans and technology all day.

“I backdated the tip. I’ll just say I was on my way and hope no one thinks to double-check.” The marshal looked up from his phone, then pivoted around in his seat to pin me with his cobalt-blue gaze. “Tell me about the drug connection.”

Neither Blackwell nor I answered.

“I’m about to execute drug possession and drug trafficking warrants. Drug lords don’t generally go around kidnapping innocent people.”

He paused, waiting.

Again, neither of us spoke.

“I’m going to need to call the local authorities.”

“But the locals are in Byron’s pocket!” I cried.

“Byron who? And you know this how?”

“Blackwell …”

The marshal turned to look at the sorcerer.

Blackwell sighed. “It was a guess, based on their open display of fortification and force.”

“Accusing the locals of being on the take isn’t going to be helpful.”

“We just need you to occupy the humans while we free the shapeshifters,” Blackwell said.

“It’s not just a badge,” Henry said stiffly. “And I’m not drug enforcement.”

“Beau and Kandy aren’t involved,” I said. “But Beau’s family might be into something. We’ve just gotten in the way.”

“Adepts running what? Meth?”

Blackwell glanced at me in the rearview mirror. Then he raised his eyebrow, making it my choice as to how much I wanted to tell a U.S. Marshal. Problem was, I didn’t know what — if anything — I needed to be circumspect about.

“Apparently not,” I mumbled. “Beau and Kandy think it’s something similar, but different. Cy, Beau’s stepdad, was amped up enough that he was faster and stronger than Beau thought he should be.” I kept the tidbits about Cy smelling like Ada’s magic and that Ettie was selling something called crimson bliss to myself, hoping it wasn’t relevant to the current situation.

The marshal stared at me hard for a long moment. Then he nodded. “Fine. But I’m not covering up any crime.”

“You won’t have to,” Blackwell said. “You deal with the humans and I’ll deal with the Adepts.”

“You’re not a member of the League, Blackwell.”

“And we’re not dealing with sorcerers.”

Henry pointedly glanced at me over his shoulder. “No?”

“No,” I said, though I wasn’t actually a hundred percent sure about my magic anymore.

“Just the pack,” Blackwell said. “They can police themselves.”

“Let’s hope,” Henry muttered, returning his attention to his phone. “Okay, I think I have enough to go in. Blackwell, you’ll create a distraction out front.”

“Obviously.”

“That’ll pull these guys from the back so I don’t have to mess with the door. I’ll head in and arrest everyone on the premises while you look for the shapeshifters. You’ll exit through the rear. I’ll ignore you leaving, then call in the locals to sort out the warrants.”

“Who do I go in with?” I asked.

“No,” Henry answered.

Nothing else. Just ‘no.’

“She’ll come with me,” Blackwell said.

“Absolutely not. It’ll be bad enough to have drug dealers yammering about a guy in a dark suit wandering around the place. I’m not exposing a tiny teen covered in distinctive tattoos to this. A teen without offensive magic.”

“As far as you can tell,” Blackwell said.

Henry cranked around in his seat, frowning at me. “It’ll be your funeral.”

I bared my teeth at him, mimicking Kandy’s smile. Though the marshal didn’t flinch, so apparently I didn’t pull it off. “I’m valuable to the sorcerer.”

Henry snorted. “Good luck with that.”

Blackwell laughed, then climbed out of the car.

I followed, wishing I’d worn long sleeves or had a hoodie to throw on over my tank top. I hadn’t really thought about how distinctive my tattoos were. Apparently, I hadn’t planned well for a future of jacking drug dealers.
 

∞

As we strode through pools of triangular light cast by the streetlights that sporadically illuminated the residential sidewalks, Blackwell tucked his hands casually into the pockets of his dress pants, causing his suit jacket to buckle. Any time before that, I would have thought him completely incapable of marring his appearance. Maybe I didn’t know him as well as I thought.

I was practically having to jog to match his long stride. It was never this awkward walking next to Beau, even though he was easily four inches taller than the sorcerer.

The marshal was currently circling one block over in the opposite direction from us so he could approach the bank from the back.

As soon as I thought Henry was out of earshot, I hissed, “I think the tracking spell on the coin is fading.”

“Yes, effective but short term, as I said.” Blackwell was systematically scanning the quiet neighborhood as we crossed between a couple of parked cars to the opposite side of the street.

I wanted to say something pissy back, but I was too jittery and nervous to come up with anything appropriate.

“So our main concern,” he said, “specifically when figuring out how we’re going to penetrate these defenses, is why hasn’t the werewolf or the shapeshifter freed themselves?”

“The van is gone. Maybe they’ve been moved to another location?” No matter how rational I was attempting to be, I couldn’t stop the hitch of fear I felt over the idea of Beau being taken again.

As we left the shadow of the houses to pass alongside the parking lot at the back of the bank, Blackwell glanced down at something hidden in his left hand.

The van might have been gone, but five cars still remained in the lot. So according to Blackwell’s logic, there was at least one person inside the building. Two guards at each entrance plus one inside equaled five cars. That was as long as the bad guys didn’t prefer to carpool or park on the street.

“The werewolf is an enforcer of the pack,” Blackwell said. “I’m actually surprised she isn’t the beta. She leaves a trace … leading to the rear entrance of the bank but not back out, based on the fade of the residual.”

“You have something that traces magic?”

“Of course. Adepts of a more … animalistic connection to their power don’t take well to captivity.” The sorcerer didn’t appear remotely concerned about the bruisers at the reinforced back door, though they were eyeing us aggressively as we walked by. “They tend to … forget themselves when under stress.”

The guy whose wrist Beau had broken barely glanced at me, focusing his attention on Blackwell. I probably should have told the sorcerer of the possibility that he might recognize me. Oh, well. Next time.

“Like Beau in the restaurant?”

“Admittedly, the boy got caught in the amplifier in that case.”

“So, your mistake?”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Blackwell’s tone was easy. Amused. He didn’t seem remotely tense.

“Your point?”

“There is a reason the pack operates as it does, with such a tight structure and zero tolerance for human-witnessed violence.”

“Because it happens.”

“Yet these guards and this building appear undamaged. Which makes me wonder how humans are holding two shapeshifters. Both of them powerful. One of them is young and separated from his chosen mate, whose fate he must be unsure of and concerned about.”

“So Byron, the drug lord, isn’t human?”

We turned left around the corner of the building and onto the sidewalk of the main street. So much light was streaming through the front windows of the converted bank that I actually had to squint my eyes even behind my tinted glasses.

“Perhaps.” Blackwell lowered his voice. The two guards posted by the front entrance were about a dozen feet in front of us, but both were peering down at their phones. The sidewalk was otherwise empty of pedestrians. “Yet I feel no evidence of other Adepts at work here. No wards, no spells.”

We kept walking, crossing directly in front of the bank and the two guards. Blackwell lifted his hand from his pocket, touched his forehead, and said, “Cheers,” as we passed.

“Cheers?” I said mockingly. I was wondering when Blackwell was going to get to the distraction part of our mission.

The sorcerer wrapped his right hand around my forearm, squeezing way too tightly. I instantly leaned my weight away from him and opened my mouth to protest.

Then a bomb went off behind us.

I jerked forward, and would have done a face plant onto the sidewalk if Blackwell hadn’t been holding me.

A sudden wave of pressure boxed my ears, making me so disoriented that I couldn’t find my footing for a second. I managed two more awkward steps before the feeling passed.

Blackwell let go of me. “I didn’t know you were so sensitive to magic.”

I wasn’t a fan of intriguing the sorcerer. At least not any more than he already was. I grunted my pissed-offness, but I couldn’t find the will to articulate it with actual words.

Not a bomb, then.
 

Magic.

Blackwell casually spun around to face the entrance of the bank. The two guards were slumped on the ground on either side of the glass door. They’d been knocked out cold. They’d also dropped their phones on the way down, presumably smashing them in the process.

That probably shouldn’t have been my first concern.

“Jesus, everyone is going to …” I glanced around. Granted, there weren’t many people out this late at night in a mostly residential area, but no one appeared to have been drawn out of their homes to point and shout. You’d think having drug dealers hanging out in the old bank on the corner would be of constant interest in and of itself. And then two meatheads suddenly collapsing for no apparent reason should have been an even bigger draw. But nope. The sidewalk and street remained empty. That was … weird.

Blackwell stepped forward.

I followed.

Two steps later, I shivered as a tingling coolness slid over me. More magic.

I glanced around again. Now the street appeared fuzzy, and everything was weirdly warped if I turned my head quickly. Apparently, whatever spell Blackwell had dropped with his ‘cheers’ as we passed the bank had knocked out the guards as well as cloaking the takedown. So that explained the lack of people rushing to investigate.

Blackwell yanked open the door to the bank and flung what appeared to be a tennis ball inside. He quickly shut the door and stepped back.

I was still staring like an idiot, watching the tennis ball through the front windows. It bounced once as a man ran into the front entranceway. He raised a gun. The ball bounced a second time. And he … he just … fell asleep.

“Did you learn that one on your grandfather’s knee?” I asked, reaching for snark to cover my ignorance.

“Practically,” Blackwell said.

He grabbed one of the downed guards by the shoulders, then dragged him toward the entrance.
 

The tennis ball just kept on bouncing farther into the room, taking out another guy. Then it continued into the central corridor and out of my sight.

“Some help?” Blackwell asked.

I stepped over the guard’s sprawled legs and pulled open the oddly heavy door. Blackwell dragged him inside, tucking him along the base of the wall underneath the window, near a massive cherrywood receptionist’s desk.

The sorcerer brushed by me to step outside for the second guard. I continued to hold the door open for him, though I seriously just wanted to rush in and start screaming Beau’s name. However, though love might make me silly, I wasn’t going to let it make me stupid.

The front room of the renovated bank was set up like a waiting area in a fancy lawyer’s office. A gorgeous deep-purple orchid perched on the right corner of the receptionist’s otherwise spotless desk. The plant was still wrapped in plastic, as if it had just been delivered from the florist that afternoon. A matching orchid sat on a cherrywood-framed glass side table beneath the corner window of the seating area to my right.

I moved as far as I could into the lobby and still hold the door open. The receptionist, an impeccably made-up redhead, was curled underneath the desk. She must have taken shelter when she saw the guards drop outside. Blackwell’s shield spell, or whatever it was, appeared to work only in one direction. Then the redhead must have been taken out by the tennis ball spell. At least she hadn’t hit her head on the way down.

“It’s weird, isn’t it? That the receptionist is still here? At what? Nine thirty at night?”

Blackwell didn’t respond. It was an inane, irrelevant question. But I felt the need to answer it, so I did so myself. “I guess drug dealing is a 24/7 sort of business.”

“Or they were expecting someone,” Blackwell said as he dragged the second guard inside.
 

I allowed the door to swing closed behind him.

The sorcerer tucked the second meathead along the wall underneath the window on the opposite side of the door, so that he was hidden behind one of the reception area’s overstuffed dark leather couches.

Blackwell straightened. Crossing back to the entrance, he pulled a slender six-inch-long metal box out of his apparently bottomless pocket and placed it across both door handles. The etching on the box was reminiscent of the design carved into Kandy’s cuffs. I’d seen similar markings on Blackwell’s amulet, but I had never been able to fully capture them in my sketches.

“Are those … runes?” I asked.

“That is how a sorcerer typically articulates his magic.”

Ignoring Blackwell’s snark — I was willing to take as much as I dealt — I pressed him for more information. “A lock?”

“Yes. We’ll collect it before we leave.” He glanced at something in his hand again, turning as if he was following a signal. As he pivoted, I caught sight of a platinum box about the size of a deck of cards cupped in his palm. Symbols swirled and shifted over its smooth face. More runes, maybe.

“And that wasn’t a tennis ball.”

“What? No. Is that what it looked like to you? It’s odd how the mundane part of your brain tries to interpret magic.”