“Zay’s?” I asked.
“Maybe. But he’s not a Voice. It’s not very often the guardian of the gate has to take all the responsibility of something going wrong. More likely it will fall to the Voices. And since your father is gone . . .”
I scoffed.
“Well, isn’t in control of his own body, and Liddy is dead, that leaves Victor, Maeve, and Sedra. Sedra is the logical one to blame. She is the one who made the plans and decided on the actions.”
“Or inactions,” I added.
“Yes. But anything that has happened since she’s been kidnapped will fall to the people acting in her place.”
“Victor and Maeve,” I said.
“A lot of hard hits to take.” He walked over to my cupboard and opened it. “Syrup?”
“I don’t think so. Jam, though. In the fridge.”
He pulled out the jar of homemade strawberry jam Nola had sent me for Christmas.
“That’s what Bartholomew is coming to deal with, right?” I asked.
He nodded. “He’ll want a recap of everything that’s happened. We will likely be called on to testify in the reckoning. After that”—he shrugged—“I can’t say. I’ve never been a part of a review. Probably won’t really be a part of this one.”
He slid two pieces of amber toast onto a plate and handed it to me, served himself the other two, then dropped four more egg-soaked slices on the griddle.
I used the jam—didn’t have any butter in the house, but didn’t need it with how sweet those berries were. I stood there; Terric did too, our backs to the counter, plates in one hand, forks cutting savory sweet bites out of the bread, scooping up ruby, spring-scented jam on our tines, and eating it all down without another word. The only time I paused was to wash my mouth with hot, richly bitter coffee.
Terric checked the griddle once, flipped toast, and went back to eating.
“So are you headed out of town soon?” I asked.
He put his plate in the sink and ran some water. “Not soon. I can’t leave . . . don’t want to leave all of you shorthanded. This used to be my home once.” He smiled, but his eyes were sad. “I never thought it’d end up like this. Chase, Greyson. Shame.” He shook his head. “We thought we were invincible. Now. Such a mess.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I said. Maybe I didn’t have any good reason to be hopeful, but hell, I’d walked into death and back for Zayvion. I figured we could weather this tough time too. At least none of us were in a coma.
“I smell pancakes,” Shame mumbled from the kitchen doorway.
Terric held my gaze a little longer, looking to see if my confidence was going to waver. Nope. I really did believe we could figure this out—find Dane, save Sedra, and send Leander back to death. So long as we worked together.
He finally looked away from me. “French toast,” he said. “No syrup, though.”
“Powdered sugar?” Shame asked hopefully. He scratched at the back of his head, messing up his already messed hair so that it stuck up like a porcupine’s quills.
“Better. Allie scored homemade jam. It’s homemade, right?”
“Nola made it. Strawberry.”
Shame yawned and shambled over for a plate and held it out for Terric to deposit the toast on. He took a plate, a cup of coffee—which he had not added milk or sugar to—and the entire jar of jam out into my living room and sat at the table.
I walked out with him.
“Zay up?” he asked me.
“I don’t think so. You won’t like that coffee. You forgot the milk and sugar.” I sat on the other chair so I could look out the window. The morning was gray and wet. It had rained last night but was clear now, the early light making the world look fresh and new.
He slurped his coffee. Made a face. “You’re right.” Then got busy eating.
Terric stayed in the kitchen, and after the first two pieces, Shame rambled off to refill his plate.
I didn’t know where Stone was. He hadn’t let himself in the house last night. That wasn’t all that unusual. With Cody in town, maybe he really had decided to sleep on Detective Stotts’ roof.
If that big rock wasn’t careful, he was going to get spotted in broad daylight, and then what would I do? Let someone put him on display at a museum? A zoo?
I wasn’t really all that worried about him. But thinking about Stone kept my mind off other things. Chase’s eyes, wide with shock and pain as the bullets and magic killed her. Greyson’s last whisper, his blood covering my hands. Leander’s eyes as he’d tried to kill me, my father in me, and Zayvion.
Zay’s anger, his pain, his sorrow, his guilt.
Sweet hells, I wished things would just go back to normal for a day or two.
I heard the shower turn on and knew Zay was awake. He came out in pretty short order, dressed in clean jeans, a black T-shirt cut so close to his body I could see the muscles beneath the fabric, and his boots.
He had the bandage in his hand again. “Do you mind?”
“No problem.” I stood, and he shrugged out of his T-shirt, painfully, I noticed. I rewrapped his ribs. He seemed less swollen than yesterday, and after I pulled the bandage tight, I held my palm out for the metal hook thingy. He dropped a safety pin in my hand.
“Hook got lost,” he said.
I nodded. I hated those things. They never worked. I attached the safety pin to hold the wrap in place; then he twisted to see how much movement he had. Pretty good. Certainly improving.
Come to think of it, my arm was feeling a little better. It was still sore when I tried to raise it above my head, but so long as I didn’t try out for the rowing club, it felt almost normal.
Zay shrugged back into his shirt with a grunt, then caught my hands. “Thank you.” He leaned forward, gave me a kiss.
“What’s for breakfast?” he asked.
“Terric made French toast,” I said.
Terric walked out of the kitchen with a plate in his hand. “This is the last of it.” He put the plate down on the table, and Zay thanked him and sat, emptying out the last of my strawberry jam over his toast.
“Has anyone checked in yet?” Shame asked, looking much more awake than he had four slices of bread ago.
“No,” Terric said. “Thought I’d call Victor. See what he has to say.”
Shame groaned. “He is going to hand us our asses.”
“You,” Terric said. “He’s going to hand you your ass. And you should have thought about that before you went out there. What I still don’t understand is how Shame talked you into it, Zay. You know better than to listen to him.”
“We had a chance to take Leander down. We took it.” Zay shoveled the last half of the toast in his mouth and chewed, washing it down with coffee.
“That’s not how Victor saw it,” Terric said. “He saw Shame—who should not have even told you where the prison was, much less how to break into it—with both of you alongside him, putting himself and each other in danger and letting the Veiled and Leander free.”
“Mum knows?” Shame asked.
“I don’t know. I got the call from Victor and headed out. But I’m guessing, yes, she knows.”
“Bloody hell,” Shame said. “Start planning the wake. I’m dead for sure.”
“I’d argue that how Victor should see it,” Zay said calmly, “is that we stopped Leander from walking out of that place with a body, a disk, and a gun.”
“And how is that worse than letting him loose in the city?”
“It’s clear he needs a body supported by a disk to possess. Not a lot of those available. It’s also clear that other than throwing the damn rift at our heads, he doesn’t cast magic in spirit form—he either needs the energy of a lot of Veiled, which explains why he was opening gates over the well in the graveyard and beneath the inn, or he needs the disks to draw energy from, which might have been why he wanted the disks at Maeve’s.
“No body, no magic. All we need to do is track him down and send him back to hell.”
Terric shook his head. “Yes. That’s all we have to do. But not without Victor’s or Maeve’s permission.”
“Oh, would you let off the by-the-rules crap?” Shame said.
“No. Breaking the rules didn’t do that much more good than bad. Sure, you kept Leander from possessing Greyson, but maybe if he’d been in that body, in that prison, we could have kept him there. Maybe Greyson wouldn’t be dead, if”—he raised one finger to stop Shame’s protest—“enough people, or the right people, had gone out there prepared.”
“You are mildly delusional, you know that, Ter?” Shame said. “He would have blown the walls off that place, and then we’d be doing nothing but running these streets trying to trash bag the prisoners who got loose, and picking up the dead they left in their wake.”
“Might still have to,” Zayvion said.
“What?” Shame asked. “Why?”
“Someone opened a gate.”
“Oh, you are shitting me. Where?”
“In the prison. When Leander was trying to escape. I Closed it. Nothing got through from the other side.”
“By other side, you mean death, right?” Shame asked.
Zay took a drink of his coffee.
“Z, don’t fuck with me. Tell me it was a gate to death and nothing came through.”
“It wasn’t a gate to death.”
That surprised me. It seemed like every gate we’d had to deal with lately had led to death. “So where?” I asked.
“Did you see?” Shame asked.
My phone rang, and I got up to answer it.
“Where did the gate open to?” Shame asked.
“Forest Park.”
“Son of a bitch,” Shame said.
“Beckstrom,” I answered.
“Allie, this is Hayden. Is Zayvion with you?”
“Yes.”
“Shame and Terric?”
“They’re here too. What’s wrong?”
“Bartholomew is calling a reckoning. That stunt you all pulled out there at Crown Point is the nail in Victor’s coffin.”
“What’s he going to do to Victor?”
“Put him on trial. Weigh the evidence against him. He’ll probably call you all in to testify. Do us a favor. Keep your phones on, stay in town, and don’t do anything as dumb as what you pulled yesterday.”
“We can do that. Anything else?”
“Let me talk to Zayvion.”
“Zay?” I held the phone out for him.
Zay got up and answered it.
I could hear Hayden through the phone.
“We’ve checked the prisoner records. There’s only three people missing.”
“Who?”
“Henry Aslund and Jakob Single. They’ve had as much memory wiped as could be managed before locking them up. We’re hoping they stumble toward the police. We already have people in place for that. The glyphs worked into their skin will keep them in the area and away from the wells.”
“What about the third person?”
“We don’t know.”
“What?”
“The records have been tampered with, or someone’s done a hell of a job Closing the memories of whoever he is—we at least know that. It’s a man. The only thing we can find on record is an off-hand notation about Prisoner X.”
“Do Victor and Maeve know about this?”
“I haven’t talked to them yet. I’m waiting for Bartholomew to get out of earshot. But if he finds out . . . I don’t need to tell you how badly this will look for everyone, do I?”
“No. I’ll take care of it. Do you have a holding place in town, or do I need to haul them back to Crown Point?”
“I had Joshua and Nick secure one of the warehouses out by the airport.”
“The old training shed?”
“That’s it. They’ll hold them and handle transport back out to the prison tonight.”
“We’ll be in touch.” Zay hung up.
“Hayden?” Terric asked.
“Yes. Bartholomew has called a reckoning.”
Terric just nodded.
“Is there anything we can do for that?” I asked. “Call a lawyer? Testify for him?”
“Not yet,” Zay said. “And he has a lawyer. Melba Maide.”
So she
was
a part of the Authority.
“There isn’t anything else we can do?”
“No,” Terric said. “We follow the rules.”
“We follow the rules,” Zay agreed. “First we bring in the escaped prisoners; then we hunt down Leander.”
“Tell me you didn’t just say that,” Terric said.
“You don’t have to come.” Zay gave him a steady stare.
Terric leaned forward, his arms propped across his knees, fingers clasped.
“How are you going to find Leander, Zay?” he asked conversationally. “Do you have some kind of spell that lets you hunt undead magic users? Some piece of tech that will track him? He’s a ghost, a Veiled. He’s thin air and hatred. The prisoners are going to be hard enough. But Leander? If you were thinking straight, you’d know it’s a very bad idea to try to find him right now. The guardian of the gate does not go rogue—ever. The guardian of the gate follows orders.”
“The guardian of the gate takes care of the city,” Zay said. “And hunts down anything that crosses through the gates. Leander crossed through the gate days ago. It’s within my rights to track him down.”
Shame put down his cup and scowled at it for a minute. “Terric, you’re wrong. Zay’s right on this one.”
“I’m wrong? Because it went so well the last time you hunted Leander? You blew the security on the prison. On the prison no one can break out of. That hasn’t happened for at least fifty years. You go against what the Authority is authorizing you to do now, and you risk destroying Victor’s career, your mother’s career, and everything we’ve been fighting to hold together.”
Shame smiled and walked over to Terric, then let his hand drop onto Terric’s shoulder. “One, this job is nothing but risk. Everyone knows that. You used to know that. Two, you worry too much. I say if we get some leads on Leander, it will do a shitload of good for Victor’s case. We’ll prove to Bartholomew we can handle whatever happens in this city, prove to him that he’s just seeing things in a temporarily chaotic state. I’ll get my coat.”
Terric sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “I think it’s a bad idea,” he muttered.
“We know,” Shame said. “And if you
are
coming along? For god’s sake, man, cork it.”
Chapter Fourteen
Z
ay walked off to the bedroom to get his ratty coat and beanie.
I picked up my coat from the back of the door and realized it had been a while since I’d added anything to my journal. I pulled it out of my coat pocket and turned to an empty page, adding everything I could think of that had happened.
“Staying or going?” Shame asked.
I looked up. He was standing in the doorway, holding the door open. Zay and Terric were both gone.
“Going.” I pulled on my coat and walked out past him. I locked the door. As soon as the lock clicked into place, the wards kicked in.
Shame was already headed down the stairs, and from the sound of the footsteps, Zay and Terric had a flight lead on us.
I put my journal in my pocket and zipped up my coat.
I caught up to Shame, who was moving a little slower than he usually did.
“You up to this?” I asked.
“Please. I’ve had worse hangovers. Z’s got a fire in him today, doesn’t he?”
“Do you have any idea how he’s going to do this?” I asked.
“Probably by the book. For all Terric’s bellyaching, we haven’t stepped outside the bounds. Much. Well, except the breaking-into-prison thing. I figure we’ll hit the street, Zay will tune in on the gate that opened, and we’ll see if Leander left any trails we can follow.”
It sounded reasonable. Except no one had had any success hunting Leander in the last several days. It was a fluke that he had tried to use Cody, a fluke Shame had thought he might be looking for a disked body to possess. And I was pretty sure that kind of fluke wasn’t going to happen again.
“And the prisoners?”
“They’re marked. Doesn’t mean they won’t try to Shield or Confuse, but if we work it right, they shouldn’t be too hard to find. Did you happen to overhear how many of them were out?”
I gave him a look.
“Come on, now. I know you have good ears.”
“Three. Henry Aslund, Jakob Single, and Prisoner X.”
“You shitting me? Prisoner X? Very spook and spy, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. We were out the door and into the early morning. The rain made everything feel crisp and clean, and the smell of breakfast from a nearby restaurant, along with sunlight catching gold in raindrops and puddles, gave the day a glorious, hopeful feeling.
It was a sing-out-loud-with-the-bluebirds kind of day.
And we were off to hunt magical prisoners.
For a brief, weird minute I felt like Dorothy in Oz, walking down the street with Terric the doubtful, Shame the brainless, and heartless Zay.
I took a deep breath and smiled despite myself. Lord, I needed to get more sleep.
“Two cars,” Zay said. “And we wear cuffs. Terric, go with Shame; Allie, with me.”
Well, look at who had woken up on the bossy side of the bed today.
“One car,” Terric said. “It will take the four of us to bring any one of those escapees down. Are you going to give us names?”
“Aslund, Single, and a man no one can remember,” Zay said.
“Closed from us?” Terric asked.
“I wish I knew.”
“Is this common?” I asked. For all I knew, the Authority always wiped away the memories of criminals from the victims of the crime. Maybe so others wouldn’t remember the details. Maybe so others wouldn’t be angry about how the Authority ruled the criminal be punished.
“No,” Zay said. “We lock away prisoners who are resistant to being Closed. When someone has committed a crime, but we can’t take away their memories or their ability to do magic, they end up in prison. I have never heard of the memory of a prisoner being Closed from the people who are guarding him. I’ve never heard of a prisoner being removed from the records.”
“Who could have done that?” I asked.
The three of them stopped, gave me a look. “Mum, maybe?” Shame said. “Or Victor?”
“No,” Zay said. “I don’t think they have that pull. Anything that happens at the prison has to be approved by the Head of the Authority.”
“So, Sedra?” I asked.
He nodded. “That’s the rules.”
“Why would she want someone erased out of all of your memories?” I asked. “What could someone do that was so heinous she didn’t want anyone to know about it?”
“Lord, woman,” Shame said. “Don’t ask that question. You don’t want to know the answers. Let’s get moving. My car.”
“Mine,” Zay said.
“More room in my trunk for bodies,” Shame countered.
We were walking again.
Zay didn’t stop walking, but he half turned. Shame and he pumped fists. Zay threw scissors; Shame threw rock.
“Sucker,” Shame said. “This way.” He strode off to his car, and I had to put a jog in my step to catch up to him.
Zay stopped at his own car first, opened the trunk, and withdrew his sword and the katana I’d been using. He handed me my sword, then closed the trunk. He walked over to Shame’s car and opened the front passenger’s door.
“I’ll take the back,” he said, doing so.
“Get in,” Shame said.
“What, you and Zay don’t want to sit together to do the buddy-cop routine?” I asked.
Shame laughed. “Shut up. Oh, and dig the cuffs out of the glove box, will you?”
I buckled my seat belt but didn’t touch the glove box. Last time I’d opened it, Terric had pulled out a capstone to the Death magic well. And stabbed me to use Blood magic.
Shame noticed my hesitation. “Oh, come on, now. There’s nothing in there that’ll bite you. Today.” He put the car in gear and headed into the heart of downtown.
I opened the glove box, trying to be nonchalant about it. No boxes, just papers and a leather-wrapped package. I could tell even before my fingers brushed the leather that the wrist cuffs were wrapped within.
The cuffs were fitted with slices of stones that allowed us to feel other magic users who wore the cuffs. I unwrapped the leather and handed cuffs over my shoulder to Zay and Terric.
I felt more than heard the connection as they snapped the cuffs into place. I handed one to Shame, and he snapped it on his left wrist as he drove. I put the last cuff on my left wrist too and felt the thrum of it vibrate through me, deep in my bones, like a bass drum in the distance. The scent of moss and cool, rain-drenched forest filled my mouth.
And then three heartbeats tapped at my wrist. Shame, Terric, and the strongest, Zay.
“Allie, can you cast a one-mile Sight while we drive?” Zay asked.
“Sure. What kind of glyph am I looking for?”
“Shackle.”
I shook my head and looked back at him. I’d never seen Shackle before. He traced a glyph in the air, not adding any magic to it.
“Like Hold?” I asked.
“No, more like a variation of Bind. Give me your hand.”
I offered my left hand, palm up. He put his finger on my palm, over the cold mark of death there, and quickly drew his finger away. “Other side.”
He drew the glyph again, this time on the back of my hand. Again, he put no magic into it. But magic flew easily to my fingertips. Magic rose, and it wouldn’t take anything more than a thought for Zay to pull it out of me, to use me like my father had used me.
“Stop!” I yanked my hand away from him before he finished the spell.
“Shit,” he said. “Let me see.”
“No. It’s okay. I’m okay. It didn’t set.”
“Let me see it.”
“Al,” Shame said, “let the man see it.”
“How about you drive and don’t run into anyone?” I snapped.
“Allie, give me your damn hand,” Zay said. “If there’s a Shackle there, I can cancel it.”
“Oh, for the love of—Fine. Don’t believe me.” I shoved my hand in front of him again.
He pressed the fingers of his right hand in a line from my thumb to my pinky.
“It’s not set,” he said.
“That’s what I told you.”
“Then why did you pull your hand away?” Zay asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Yes, it does.”
“I didn’t want you to touch me.” As soon as I said it, I realized how bad it sounded.
“Argue later,” Terric said. “We’re losing ground.”
Zay frowned, his nostrils flaring. “All right,” he said. “So. Do you have it?”
“Have what?” I asked.
“The spell.”
Since the trail of it was currently stinging the back of my hand, yes, I was pretty sure I’d be able to Hound it. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”
I turned around and cleared my mind. Sang my songs, calmed my pounding heart. Shackle was a heavy spell. It was the sort of spell that not only did as you wanted it to, but also mimicked its namesake. My left hand ached from supporting it, even for that short while. If the other magic users had marks like that and had been carrying them for years, they’d be easy to spot. That spell was going to weigh them down.
I traced Sight with my palm, creating a wider cast zone, and set within it my intention to see around me in a mile radius.
I pulled magic from the networks beneath the street, light touch, like when I’d been out with the Hounds, and let it fill my body, then pour out into the glyph.
The spell cast up, popped open like an umbrella, then sank into the ground. Glyphs and spells washed past my eyes like tangled streams of finger paint and ink.
I recognized a lot of those signatures, recognized a lot of those spells. Nothing too illegal. But there was no heavy mark of Shackle among them.
“Can they cover it up?”
“The mark?” Zay asked.
“Yes. With Illusion or something?”
“No. Even if they tried, it would still be visible. You’ll see a trail once we get close enough.”
He cast magic; I wasn’t sure what spell, but I could feel the wash of magic through the heartbeat in the cuff. Zay was working very quietly and with incredible precision. Boy may not be a Hound, but he knew how to hunt.
I cast again. Muscle aches for today, and a wish for a hot tub before night fell and the pain kicked in.
More spells in this mile swath. A few signatures I didn’t recognize. That worried me a little. A Hound was only as good as her ability to memorize magic users in the city. Looked like I was going to be spending some time at city hall refreshing my memory on local casters and learning the new people who were using in the area. Just because I was spending my days chasing magical criminals for the Authority didn’t mean I could let my Hound skills get rusty.
“Nothing,” I said.
Shame drove; Zay cast. Terric was throwing a lot of magic around too, though you wouldn’t notice it unless you were a Hound. He used magic in a way very similar to Zay. You could tell that they’d been trained by the same man.
The three rhythms at my wrist beat even and strong. I could tell, if I thought about any one of them, that they were all unharmed and all concentrating. I think Terric was also casting some kind of Search spell, though something that dissolved a lot quicker than what I was throwing.
I knew Terric was good. I didn’t know he was that good.
Another half mile, and I threw again. This time I caught the heavy-metal taste of Shackle on the back of my throat.
“I got one. There’s a mark.” I dropped Sight and recast, narrowing the search to the street ahead of us, felt the echoing spells from Zay and Terric homing in on what I’d sensed, like hands gently brushing past mine, fingers extended. “Keep driving; we’re close.”
Shame did so, but the spell I maintained pulled to the right, and he pulled to the left. “Stop. You’re off the trail. It’s that way.” I pointed, not really seeing the city other than a blur of buildings and a street. That was the street we wanted. I was sure of it.
“This is as close as I can get,” Shame said. He parked, and we got out of the car. I still hadn’t dropped Sight, hadn’t lost my concentration. I held my breath a second and blinked so I could better see the world around me.
“That way?” Zay asked, already moving.
I strode off with him. “Yes. Down that street. I don’t know how far.”
“When we get close enough, you will.” Zayvion pulled his sword, and Terric threw a very nice little Illusion so that it looked like he was carrying a grocery bag instead of three feet of steel.
“Terric, Shame, and I will take point,” Zay said. “Allie, I want you to handle Shield and Block, but no attacks unless necessary, okay?”
“No, that is not okay. I can throw magic just as hard as any of you.”
“Listen.” He paused, touched my arm. “I need you—we need you to tip the scales. It will probably take everything the three of us can muster to take him down. But if he has a trick up his sleeve—if he has some advantage we don’t know about—I want you to hit him with everything you have. You’re our fail-safe. Understand?”
“Stand back, let you get the bruises, then ride to the rescue. Check.”
He searched my face, looking to see if I really understood.
“I got it,” I said. “I’ll do my part.” And I would too. I understood that hunting in a group meant using each member to the best advantage. And I could even handle the idea that Zay wanted me on the back lines because he was trying to protect me too.
We stalked down the street. The trail clung to the damp concrete, rolling out like a length of black chain ahead of us.
Terric cast a quick Sight of some kind and held it low in his left hand before lobbing it off his fingertips, bowling-ball style, his right hand holding the two axes he liked to fight with.
I was suddenly very glad Zay had remembered our weapons.
Terric’s spell rolled out along the chain, holding tight but not touching it, not touching the spell I was maintaining before it unraveled and sank like soft ashes into the rough concrete.
We’d made it a block, crossed an alley. The trail led down the next block and took a hard right turn.
“There,” I said quietly.
Zayvion nodded. He drew another spell and hooked it in his left hand.
I dropped Sight and set a Disbursement for Impact instead. I didn’t know what kind of trouble we were walking into, but my game plan was to smash something first before I got smashed.
I pulled my sword.
“Do we wait?” I asked.
“For what?” Zay asked.
“More backup?”
“Don’t know why we should start that now.”
Man was true to his word. Shame strode up to the door, which was held shut by a rusted chain and a padlock, and blew the chain with a spell that sparked blue light but gave off no sound or smoke.