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  As a matter of fact, I was beginning to build up a nice little phobia around guns.

  Dash killed the engine and got out of the car. Terric remained in the passenger’s seat.

  “Are you going to be okay on this?” he asked.

  I could try to bullshit him and tell him I was fine. Wouldn’t work.

  He could feel the cold sweat of fear I was trying to ignore just as clearly as I could feel his calm concern.

  “Getting tired of being shot,” I said.

  “You don’t have to go in there with us,” he said. “I’d actually rather you didn’t.”

  I pulled a cigarette out of my pocket and tapped it on the back of my hand. “I know. But I can’t let you go in there without me either. You want me to try to talk Dash into staying behind?”

  He shook his head. “We’ll keep him safe. I don’t think he’s in a stay-behind mood lately anyway.”

  “Terric. Talk to him. Make it right for both of you.”

  He inhaled, his mouth pressing in a frown. “Let it go, Shame.”

  “I just think Y “

  “Please.”

  And the emotions behind that, the mix of love and guilt and hope and pain, were enough to shut me up.

  “All right,” I said. “All right. So let’s go talk to the lawyer.”

  I opened the back door, stood into the brace of wind. It was cool today, cloudy, the road and trees shadowed.

  I walked around to the back of the car. The trunk was open.

  The memory of the woman I’d loved all too briefly, Dessa Leeds, appeared out of nowhere and stopped me flat. She’d drugged me and thrown me in a trunk a lot like this one, then tied me up and interrogated me in a cheap motel.

  I couldn’t help but smile.

  It was the best first date ever.

  Damn, I missed her.

  Terric clapped his hand on my shoulder as he walked past me. At that contact, the memory of Dessa and the pain of her death was gently pushed back into all the other pains of my life that would never fade.

  I took a breath, and focused on the arsenal in the trunk. Whistled.

  “I had no idea we were gunning for bear,” I said. “Or elephant?” I bent my head against the wind and lit my cigarette. Filled my newly healed lungs with tar and nicotine.

  My head cleared instantly.

  Nice.

  Dash slipped an Uzi over his shoulder and tucked a Baretta in his belt.

  Terric stood with his arms crossed over his chest, the epitome of calm, and stared at the contents of the trunk with a mixture of amusement and worry. “I see you got into Shame’s no-no room in the basement.”

  “It’s called an armory, thank you very much,” I said.

  Dash handed Terric a revolver. “I know neither of you can throw magic like the old days. It’s all a hands-on kind of thing now. We might not have a chance to get that close.”

  See, here’s the funny thing. Terric and I had closed magic away a year ago. Dash had been living with us for nearly that entire time. And we hadn’t really sat down and told him how we could use magic.

  Or at least I hadn’t.

  From the way Terric nodded, I realized I hadn’t been invited to their heart-to-heart talks about magic.

  Not that I expected Terric to keep Dash in the dark about this stuff. If I had a lover, if I had anyone who cared for me as much as Dash cared for Terric, I’d tell them all my deep dark secrets too.

  Well, most of them.

  Okay, some of them. Maybe.

  Relationships needed a little mystery, right?

  Terric took the gun, checked the chamber, accepted the extra ammo Dash offered.

  “Shame?” Dash asked, waving a hand at what was left in the trunk.

  The sight of all those guns made my stomach turn again. But I was not going to get into another shootout without at least some of the bullets coming from my side.

  I chose a handgun, stuck it in my waistband and took an extra clip.

  “That it?” he asked.

  “How many people do we think might be in there?” I asked.

  Dash shrugged and shut the trunk. “Could be a dozen. Could be no one. We couldn’t get any good leads on the comings and goings out here.”

  “Swell,” I said. “Let’s go introduce ourselves to Mr. Thorne and find out why all those men who knew him are dead.”

  I started down the dirt driveway between the trees, Terric to my right, and Dash on my left.

  Chapter 12

  The driveway curved back into the trees for about a quarter of a mile, and a narrow wooden bridge just wide enough to roll a car across spanned a creek that was fast and swift from early snow melt.

  Right on the other side of that bridge sat the cabin. It really was a small place. Single story, cedar shake shingles on the walls and roof, two small windows on either side of a narrow, windowless door.

  No smoke coming out of the stone chimney. No light coming through the windows. A small moss-covered garage was attached to the left of the building, door shut. From the growth of weeds and moss covering the driveway, vehicles hadn’t been down this way for months.

  We stood on one side of the bridge, tucked in an overhang of trees that hadn’t been trimmed in a year at least.

  Dash pulled binoculars up to his eyes and scanned the house and the area around it.

  “I don’t see anyone. Or any signs of habitation,” he said.

  Terric glanced at me. I shrugged. Either one of us could use magic to sense if there were any hearts beating in the area. But if someone was out here who could use magic, would they feel Terric and me using it?

  That’s not the way magic used to work. I thought it was worth the risk.

  I reached out with Death magic. Could feel the strong rhythms of Terric’s and Dash’s hearts, the faint tapping of birds and squirrels and other small creatures. Didn’t feel any other breathing human in at least a mile radius.

  “I think it’s empty,” I said.

  Terric strode across the bridge, I followed, Dash behind me.

  I could tell Terric was using Life magic to check out the cabin too. The weeds in the driveway bent as if a wind had just brushed a palm over them, even though the air was still.

  “Traps?” Dash asked quietly.

  “Don’t think so,” I said. “Terric?”

  “It’s been at least a month since someone’s been out here.”

  “Did they leave any protection behind?” Dash asked.

  Terric paused, his hand halfway to the door handle. Tipped his head down. This time I could feel the light wash of magic he pushed out into the space around us.

  And yes, it felt good.

  “I don’t think so.” He tried the handle. It was locked.

  “Here,” I said. “Let me get that.”

  I reached over for the doorknob and let the Death magic in me destroy the wood holding it in place. I pulled the handle out through the door and dropped it to one side.

  “Subtle,” Terric noted.

  “Efficient,” I said. “And easy. Two of my favorite words.”

  I shouldered the door open. It swung inward easily. Stepped in and flicked on the light switch.

  “Rustic,” I said.

  The single room opened to a small double bed in an alcove ahead and to the left, and a small kitchen with a single basin sink, two burner stove, and mini-fridge to the right.

  A tired couch sat the center of the room, a wooden crate at its side balancing a desk lamp. The card table in the corner of the room stood half - buried under a pile of paper, books, file folders, and dust.

  The largest piece of furniture in the room was a built-in bookcase which began at the wall to my left, continued across the next wall over the table, hopped up and framed the top of the doorway above the sleeping nook, and stretched across the walls to the right.


  Basically, every spare inch of cabin wall was filled with books.

  “So this is where old librarians go to die,” I said.

  Terric strolled off to my right, muttering quietly.

  “See a title you like?”

  Dash frowned, then headed to the left. “Holy shit,” he said quietly.

  I glanced at him. “Really? If this impresses you, we need to take a field trip to a magical place called a > book store’.”

  “They’re more than books, Shame,” Terric said. “They’re magic books.”

  I walked across the room and browsed the pile of papers on the card table, then scanned the shelf behind it.

  There was a lot of homework involved in being a part of the Authority. Years of reading and studying histories. Years of learning and perfecting glyphs, years of bearing the pain for calling on magic, and then making magic do exactly what one wanted it to do.

  That was all on top of the physical training—defense, offense, attack—specific to the branch of magic one decided to specialize in.

  I had read a warehouse full of books on magic—many of them volumes the common magic user had never seen.

  “I don’t recognize any of these titles,” I said.

  “Neither do I,” Terric said. “Not one of them.”

  I had been a good student but Terric had run academic magical circles around me. He was all Honors and Excellents and gold stars with pluses and cherries on top. For him to say he didn’t recognize any of the titles, well, that meant something.

  “None of them?” I tried to get my head around the statistical impossibility that Terric hadn’t heard of, or laid eyes on, at least one of the titles.

  “Not yet.” He continued along the wall, nearly in the kitchen area now.

  “Dash?” I asked.

  Dash had a different history with magic. I hadn’t known him back in the days when the Authority was a secret organization.

  He said he did some bookwork for a few people who had been a part of the organization. But he’d really gotten to know about the darker aspects of magic when he’d come to work for Terric and me when we’d been tapped to deal with the fallout from the Authority’s unsecreting.

  That was of course after magic had been softened, gentled, tamed.

  Then Eli and the government agency he worked for had decided to destroy that.

  In those few years with us, Dash had proven to have a very long reach when it came to records and resources both well known and obscure.

  He was a damn genius at getting his hands on information. Within a year he had done a decade’s worth of studying all things magical.

  “Nothing looks familiar to me,” he said.

  “So we have a bibliophile hoarder of rare magical books?”

  Terric pulled a book off the shelf and thumbed through it. “Very rare. The kind of magic used in this volume isn’t what they taught in the Authority.”

  “So it’s what?” I asked, “Potions? Voodoo?”

  “Some of that, yes,” he said. “This one?” He held it up. “Explains how to access magic in dead zones where it’s unavailable. Also how to store it in objects.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Objects like wands?”

  He shrugged. “Probably.”

  Dash stepped away from the shelf. “Why would a lawyer stash all these books out here? It must have taken years to collect them.”

  “A lawyer should be smart enough to know a remote cabin with a non-existent security system is just asking for these things to be stolen,” I said.

  “And they’re crumbling,” Terric noted. “Some of these are very old. They should be stored in a museum, or at least in a controlled environment.”

  I glanced at the desk again. “Then we’re thinking this was some kind of temporary solution?” I picked up a letter on top of the pile and flicked it to get the dust off. “This is dated two years ago.”

  Terric glanced around the room. “Think he was running?”

  Dash moved into the bedroom area, opened drawers. “Nothing here. If he was running, he didn’t stay.”

  I strolled to the kitchen and Dash went over to dig through the papers on the table. I checked the cupboards. “There’s a couple months’ worth of food.” I picked up a can of chili and read the packing date. “Two years old.”

  Terric pinched at the bridge of his nose. “So he...what? Thought he needed a place off grid to hide and brought all these books out here, stocked the place, then never set foot in the cabin again?”

  “Maybe,” I said. I opened what I thought was a pantry door. Saw stairs leading down. “I’ll check the basement.”

  I tugged on the pull string light, glanced at the wooden stairs—dust and no footprints—then started down. The ceiling was low, open framework with electrical wires strung through the strips of insulation. The walls were made of concrete foundation blocks and the floor was dirt.

  The man stripped half-naked and lying in the middle of the room, however, was dead.

  Fuck.

  “Shame?” Terric walked down the stairs. “Oh, shit.”

  “I’m assuming this is our lawyer,” I said.

  It was a little hard to tell since the body was decomposed to the point past both bloat and stink, but I was pretty sure magic was involved in the death.

  For one thing the dirt floor around him was carved with glyphs that ringed his prone body in a circle.

  For another, glyphs were burned into his flesh across forehead and bare chest. A dark tattoo that might have once been a fish curved out from beneath the glyph burned into his chest.

  “Do we know what he used to look like?” I asked.

  “Hey, I think I found something.” Dash came down the stairs. He stopped when he saw the body on the floor. “Jesus.”

  “Do you have a picture of Harold Thorne?” Terric asked.

  Dash opened the file folder he was carrying and pulled out a photograph. “This is him,” he said.

  Alive Harold Thorne looked to be in his late sixties. He also looked like a guy who didn’t smile much and spent too many years hitting the bottle. He was dressed in a white shirt and tie, all buttoned up so there was no chance to see the tattoo.

  “About the same build,” I said. “Could be him.”

  “Check his pockets,” Terric said.

  “What do I look like? Frisker of the dead?” I whined, even though I was already kneeling beside the corpse and making busy.

  Terric was getting that dangerous look in his eyes. I could feel Life magic pushing at him, though the very idea of him resurrecting this guy was pure horror-movie fodder.

  Dead guy wore dress slacks, a belt, and still had on dark socks and shoes. I searched his front pockets. Nothing. Checked to make sure I wasn’t going to step in the middle of a glyph carved in the floor, then propped him up enough I could slide my fingers into his back pocket.

  Tugged free his wallet.

  Flipped it open and stood.

  “Harold J. Thorne,” I read from his driver’s license.

  “Shit,” Dash said. “The one guy all the other dead guys are connected to. And he’s inked with the fish.”

  “So how does this break down?” I asked. “Was there some kind of secret they shared? Something to kill them all for? This cabin? These books? That tattoo?”

  “If it was the books, they wouldn’t still be here,” Terric said. “Same with the cabin.”

  He walked around me to stand on the other side of Mr. Thorne. “The glyphs burned into him aren’t the same as the other glyphs on the other victims.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Binding carved on the forehead though, right?”

  Terric squatted down on his heels, hands propped on his knees, fingers pressed together. “Yes, though with the decomposition it’s hard to make out. Chest is...” he tipped his head sideways. “Does that look like Proxy?”
r />   I shook my head. “No Proxy glyph I’ve ever seen. Well, half of it might have been a crap attempt at Proxy. What’s the other one? Surrender?”

  “Maybe,” Terric agreed. “But it’s rough. Glyphs that far off shouldn’t be able to hold magic for a split second. And this looks like...”

  “Like a four-year-old carved it mid-temper tantrum?” Dash asked.

  I nodded.

  “So here’s a theory,” Dash said. “What if those aren’t the glyphs we think they are?”

  I waved a hand at the corpse. “They’re glyphs, Dash.”

  “Yes. They are glyphs. But what if they’re not sloppy? What if they’re modified? Changed so they can actually pull magic out from where it’s locked away? You changed the rules of magic. Maybe the rules of how it can be accessed and what kind of glyphs will hold it have changed too.”

  “Fuck,” I said.

  Magic was a lot like water—it got where it wanted to go no matter how convoluted the route to get there might turn out to be.

  “What did you find?” Terric asked.

  Dash handed him the file folder. “Pictures of the other dead men and Harold. Two other men and four women we haven’t seen. And a print out of names and numbers.”

  “Phone numbers?” I asked.

  Terric shook his head. “Three digits.”

  “Address maybe? Area code?”

  “I don’t think so.” He fingered through the pages. “Looks like an inventory list maybe?” he said. “Or a cataloguing of something?”

  Dash nodded. “There’s a name on the back of the last page.”

  Terric turned to it. “Pisces,” he said. “Zodiac sign of the fish?”

  “Name of the organization, or group they belong to,” Dash said. “There are other files up there. Lists of names, all under the heading of Pisces. Dating back at least two decades.”

  “Birthday and horoscope club?” I said.

  “Part of the Authority?” Dash asked.

  “It’s possible.” Terric stood. “There were always subgroups and politicking going on. It wouldn’t surprise me that there were a few secret groups within the group.”

  “What does the fish have to do with it?” I asked. “And what the hell was their group a part of that lead them to this kind of death?”