Shadows, Maps, and Other Ancient Magic (15 page)

My hand was still moving — as if in slow motion — toward the five-colored intersected circle, which now appeared to be a rune-etched banded artifact made out of gold. Thin strips of gold inlaid with gems stretched across its open interior to form the colored lines. The artifact was hanging haphazardly off the cross guard of the sword, like a coat about to slide off a coat rack.

My fingers closed over the edges of the gold and gem band. Earthy sorcerer magic flooded my mouth.

Still caught in this same breath — this same endless motion I’d begun in the hotel and was continuing in the treasure trove — I lifted the circle off the cross guard of the sword. Holding it aloft before me, I started to straighten and look around. I could feel the press of magic from all directions, tasting the fact that I was surrounded by thousands upon thousands of magical objects.

The Buddha was wearing my mangled katana like a crown. The sword — which I’d twisted around my sister’s neck ten months ago and used to drain every last drop of her magic, stolen and natural — sat lopsided on the statue’s head. Swirls of magic — blue, green, and black — rolled through the folded blade. Dried blood had flaked from its edges to rest on the Buddha’s shoulders like horrific dandruff.

“What?” I cried.

I was back in the hotel room.

I was sitting cross-legged by the coffee table as before. My arm was extended into the witches’ circle, hovering in the 3D image of the tattoo. I was holding the banded artifact.

“ — don’t!” Wisteria cried.

Not even a second had passed.

“Oh my God,” I breathed.

“What’s that?” Kandy asked cheerfully.

“Was I here? Am I here?” I asked. “Did I go?”

“You have your arm jammed into my circle,” Wisteria snapped. So she could be bitchy when pressed. Good to know. “And you just plucked something out of the residual magic.”

“But I didn’t disappear?”

“Nope,” Kandy said.

“Where did you find yourself, alchemist?” Warner asked. His voice was soft, so as not to startle me.

I pulled my hand out of the witches’ circle. A little abruptly, perhaps, because the magic collapsed with a pop of blue and gold.

Warner hunched down beside me, his gaze on the artifact in my hand. “You reached into the witches’ circle,” he prompted.

“Yes. Then into the residual magic.”

“And saw … this?” He gestured toward the artifact I still held aloft on the fingertips of my right hand.

“Yes, and … other treasure.” I corrected myself before mentioning my katana. The sword, what it contained, and what I had the ability to do — drain all the magic from an Adept — was a secret between Pulou and me. Pulou was of the opinion that I would be feared — maybe even hunted — if that little trick of mine became general knowledge.

“You reached into the residual magic of the former treasure keeper and pulled out treasure,” Warner said. He wasn’t speaking to me, but that was a fairly succinct way of putting it. Except …

“I pulled out this treasure,” I said. “I’m not sure I could have grabbed anything else. The former treasure keeper obviously left this, somehow, in the magic of his tattoo.”

“He left that thing in his skin?” Kandy asked. “Seriously disgusting.”

“That’s pretty judgy coming from a werewolf,” I said.

“Hey, I don’t go around embedding metal objects into people … not unless they really deserve it. I have these.”

She flashed her claws. The rest of her hand remained human.

Wisteria flinched. She’d been so still and quiet I’d all but forgotten she was here.

The windows began to rattle. Now that the witches’ circle wasn’t cloaking the magic of the tattoo anymore, I gathered the shadow demons were looking for entry again.

I passed the artifact to Warner, who took it from me, but only after he’d deliberately placed his fingers exactly where I’d held mine.

Then I pulled off my necklace and untwisted it to its full length. I laid the thick gold chain with its wedding ring charms on the coffee table so it encircled the tattoo.

The windows stopped rattling.

“Now that’s interesting,” Warner murmured, far more intrigued by my necklace than he had been by the ancient artifact he held.

Wisteria stared at me. Her wide-eyes and carefully measured breathing betraying her usual poise. I imagined that Kandy could probably smell her fear.

“Thank you, reconstructionist.”

Wisteria nodded stiffly and started shoving her candles back into her purse. She obviously wasn’t going to be sticking around for a chat. I assumed that seeing someone pull a physical object out of residual magic had freaked her out. It certainly freaked me out, but I had a better understanding — in my limited capacity — of how the treasure keeper’s magic worked.

In Tofino, I’d seen Pulou somehow shrink down my sword and tuck it into an inner pocket of his fur coat. By the haphazard look of the treasure trove I’d just seen, a lot of objects were likewise tucked away there. The banded artifact had obviously been specifically tied to the tattooed map.

Wisteria skipped the stockings and slipped on her shoes. “I have an apartment in town,” she said. “But I fly out in the morning.”

“Thank you for casting for me, reconstructionist,” I said.

“It’s my job,” Wisteria said. “And your grandmother has been supportive of my career for a long time.”

Kandy padded over to the door and Wisteria followed. Witch magic boiled out of her eyes and hands, telling me that despite her outwardly calm demeanor, she was absolutely desperate to get out of the room — but far too professional to flee.

I realized I was the big bad in the room now. That was odd, and disconcerting. I didn’t feel dangerous or especially powerful. Not compared to everyone else … Kett, Warner, all of the guardians … even Drake. They were way scarier than me. Weren’t they?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kandy shut the door behind Wisteria, then whirled back into the room. “It’s the key,” she hissed.

“What?”

The green-haired werewolf pointed to the artifact Warner still held. I’d stood to say goodbye to the witch, but Warner was still hunkered down over the coffee table and staring at the map thoughtfully. “Kett said we needed a key. That’s it. Like, literally.”

I really wasn’t following. The banded artifact looked nothing like a key. Plus, how the hell was a physically manifested key supposed to help us unlock a map?

Kandy squatted down next to the coffee table. “Look,” she said, pointing at the upper right-hand corner of the tattoo. “Red, orange, yellow, blue, violet. And missing green.”

“Right. I already pulled the artifact out of that part of the tattoo.”

Kandy, ignoring me, shifted her gaze to the tattoo of the intersected circle on the bottom left corner of the map. The one that had appeared as a 3D tattoo in Wisteria’s reconstruction, not a thicker line like the one I’d pulled the artifact from. “This one is red, orange, yellow, green, blue. Missing violet. Interesting.”

“Okay, I’m missing it all.”

“The color sequence of the stripes is a clue.”

“To?”

Kandy shrugged.

“To unlocking the map,” Warner said.

“Yes!” Kandy exclaimed. “Gimmee, gimmee.” She extended her arm, then opened and closed her hand.

“Can you be gentle?” I asked.

The green-haired werewolf growled.

I grinned as I dropped the artifact into Kandy’s open palm. The werewolf held it by the edges gingerly. I supposed she could have removed the cuff, but if I’d received a gift at the far seer’s behest, I’d never take it off either. The concept of fate or destiny was much scarier when you actually knew someone who saw the future.

Kandy lined up the color sequence with that of the intersected circle in the top right corner. They matched perfectly — which made sense, since I’d just pulled it from there. Then she carefully placed the artifact gently down on its tattooed counterpart.

Nothing happened.

Kandy frowned. “I thought …”

“What about the one missing the violet?” Warner prompted. Suddenly someone was actually interested in treasure hunting and attempting to be helpful. Though I had to begrudgingly admit that he had also ripped a shadow demon in two earlier, so that had been plenty helpful.

As Kandy reached to remove the artifact, it occurred to me that no one but an alchemist — or Pulou himself — could have seen and then removed the object from the map in the first place.

“Wait,” I said. “Leave it for a moment.”

I knelt between Warner and Kandy, then reached across the map to touch the edges of the artifact where it sat lined up with the tattoo. I didn’t pick it up. I just let my fingers — and my magic — rest there lightly.

The magic of the map shifted. The center of the tattoo blurred, then swirled, and then solidified into something that looked a lot more like an actual map.
 

All three of us leaned forward, so that we smacked our heads together.

“Ow!” I cried, lifting my hand to my forehead.

Kandy snickered. Warner remained his stoic self, of course.

The magic of the map shifted back to its multilayered aspect, rendering the map unreadable once again.

“You have to hold it,” Kandy said helpfully.

“Got that, Einstein.”

“Hey! Who figured out the whole key thing being an actual key thing?”

“You.” I spoke as if pained to admit it, but I was only playing at the begrudging tone. I touched the key a second time. The magic of the map percolated, then settled.

“What does that look like?” Kandy’s voice was cast low, as if she was worried about frightening the magic of the map. I looked to where her index finger hovered just above a low point on the map.

“To me? As incomprehensible as before.”

“Think alligators, hurricanes, and white sand beaches.”

I peered at what appeared to be a pinky finger jutting into the sea. You know, if green was land and blue was water. “Florida?”

“Hell, yeah. That’s Florida.” Kandy moved her finger slightly. “But here … all the little green dots and that black square thing? That looks a hell of a lot like Bermuda.”

The ‘black square thing’ Kandy referred to glinted gold around the edges when I tilted my head to look at it.

“Green for land,” I murmured.

“Blue for water,” Kandy said. She grinned at me toothily. “I always love a reason to wear a bikini.”

“Of course you do.”

“Bikini?” Warner asked.

“Never mind,” I answered. “You don’t wear a bikini on a work trip.”

“I ain’t getting paid,” Kandy said.

“You get paid in cupcakes, chocolate, and cookies.”

“Yeah? I’m good with that.”

“The square,” Warner said. “Did you see it glow, alchemist?”

“Yeah, weird huh? What do squares mean on regular maps?”

“It’s a grid point portal,” Warner said, answering my question by not directly answering it. “The most southern in Haoxin’s territory, I believe.”

Still operating on pure instinct — because the accumulation of actual knowledge took way too long — and keeping the fingers of my right hand touching the key, I pressed my left forefinger to the black square. The magic of the map tingled, actually making my finger ache. Then the map blurred and reformed into a swath of green and blue, similar to how zooming in worked in Google Maps.

Kandy placed her palms down on either side of the map, then rose up to lean all the way over the coffee table. Warner did the same. My arms and the map were sandwiched between them like a weird game of Twister, where I was the only one touching the board.

“No landmarks?” Kandy asked.

“Perhaps we’re too far away,” Warner said. “Once we step through the portal, the magic may register the proximity of the instruments of assassination or the fortress that hides them.”

“Fortress?” I asked. Even with my head canted to the right to make room for him, my left cheek was hovering up against Warner’s right shoulder. His magic — all black forest cake, whipped cream, and cherries in deep, dark chocolate — emanated off him in a layer of heat. Or maybe the heat part was just the blush slowly spreading across my face.

Okay, admittedly it wasn’t just a blush … it was a flush of desire, which also happened to be slowly uncoiling in my lower belly like a sleeping … dragon.

Warner shrugged. His shoulder touched my cheek and his tasty magic flooded through my mouth, causing me to actually salivate. I flinched away, losing contact with the map. I really, really didn’t want to be sitting here lusting after a five-hundred-year-old dragon who was prejudiced … elitist … massively hunky —

“It’s an assumption,” Warner said. “Wars have been fought over less. An item such as this would be respected and feared. Hence, a fortress.”

“You said you didn’t know what we were looking for.”

“I don’t, not specifically.” Warner shifted back on his heels, then rose to pace the room. I could almost see the gears turning in his head. “But I understand its significance.”

“You’re worried about something. Something other than the instruments of assassination.”

“The shadow demons are not … what I expected.”

“That’s okay, neither am I.”

Kandy snorted.

Instead of answering, Warner leaned over me to press his hand in the middle of the map. The magic of the map shifted underneath his touch. Actually, it appeared to writhe as if attempting to reject him.

“Of all dragons, I was uniquely qualified to be the sentinel of the instruments of assassination,” he said. “Had I not accepted the duty I might have worn the mantel of a guardian one day.”

I kept my eyes on the tattoo, worried that if I questioned Warner it would interrupt his hushed confessional.

Runes appeared on the top edge of the map. No, not runes. It was more like ornate, but blocky-looking, calligraphy.

“What’s that?” Kandy murmured. “English? I can’t read it.”

“Where dragons dare not tread,” Warner said.

“I’m not a dragon,” I said. I was being flippant, but then unknown magic and uncertain circumstances brought that shortcoming out in me.

Warner lifted his hand off the map but remained standing behind me. The letters disappeared. I didn’t look up at the sentinel.