Allie Beckstrom 09 - Magic for a Price Read online

  “You were always in my life. I didn’t push you away.”

  “No, you just didn’t tell me the truth. I hate being lied to.” She scowled and hooked her thumb in the bowl, scooping out dough.

  “Okay,” I said, “it wasn’t the most honest thing I could have done. But I was trying to keep you safe. And”—I held up my hand to cut off whatever she’d been about to say—“I wanted you safe for purely selfish reasons. You’re my best friend. If it came down to it, if I had to do this last year over again, I might try to do it differently.”

  Memories of Grounding a wild magic storm, walking through death, fighting and failing to stop Leander and Isabelle as they dragged me out of my body and tried to kill me and all of my friends stuttered through my mind.

  I winced.

  “I’d definitely do things differently. For one thing, I’d try to tell you about all of this—the people, the secret magic, the risks—sooner. But, Nola, if it all goes to hell again, I’m still going to try to protect you from the worst of it.”

  She shook her head. “Have you ever thought about just leaving?”

  Huh. Strangely, I hadn’t. “No. This is my home. Well, not right here at Kevin’s, but this city. No one can make me leave it. Even my dad couldn’t make me leave it, and he drove me nuts.”

  She smiled and finally popped the dough in her mouth. “Now that so many people know about the Authority, what’s going to happen to us and our memories?”

  “Honestly? I have no idea.”

  The kitchen door opened and in walked Kevin Cooper. Sandy-haired, sad-eyed, he was one of Zay’s long-standing friends. He was also a hell of a magic user. He’d somehow gotten himself assigned, by my dad of all people, as a bodyguard to Violet, my dad’s wife. Somewhere along the way, Kevin had fallen in love with Violet, and he was still her stalwart guard.

  “Allie,” he said, “we have a problem.”

  “We have a lot of problems.”

  “Seattle’s been scrambled.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  I’d never seen Kevin shaken. I’d never even seen the man sweat, and I’d seen him in the middle of a magical battle against overwhelming odds. He was sweating now.

  “The Authority members in Seattle have been ordered by the Overseer to secure Portland.”

  “Secure?” I asked. “How?”

  “They are going to lock us down so that no one can enter or exit, and Close or kill any member of Portland’s Authority who stands in their way.”

  “My God,” Nola said.

  “It’s okay.” I gave her an encouraging nod, which was a big fat lie. “We can handle this. Right, Kevin?”

  He didn’t say a word. Just stood there looking grim.

  Note to self: Kevin sucks at the big fat lie.

  “What can I do to help?” she asked.

  “Right now? Don’t burn the cookies.”

  “Allie,” she admonished.

  “As soon as I figure out how bad it is, I will tell you what we need to do. Give me a second or two to talk to a few people, okay?”

  She nodded. “Paul said he’d be here in a half hour or so.”

  “Good.” Paul—Detective Paul Stotts—was her boyfriend, and was now just as deep in Authority business and end-of-the-world magic users targeting Portland as any of us who had been a part of the Authority for years. It would be good to have him on our side. I had the feeling we were going to need the cooperation of the police to get through this.

  I jogged out of the kitchen, Kevin right on my heels.

  Kevin’s place had the feel of a grander sort of living, of balls and ceremonies and social events from a century prior. Not a speck of dust though. Kevin may not be living here, but he still had someone come in once a week to clean and air out the place.

  “How bad is it?” I asked.

  “They’re coming to kill us.”

  “Right. Heard that. Can they do it?”

  “With magic poisoned and most of us still not recovered from fighting Jingo Jingo? Yes.”

  Not the answer I was looking for. My heart was beating too fast. All I wanted to do was run, hide. Get the hell out of town. But too many people were relying on me being here, and hadn’t I just told Nola I’d never run?

  “How much time do we have before they get here?” We crossed the long, carpeted hall accented with woods and paintings that were probably priceless. I took a left, heading to one of the smaller meeting rooms.

  “Three hours at the least. Four at the most.”

  “Then it’s time to make some plans.” I pulled open the double door to the room and strode into the sparsely furnished space.

  “About time you got here,” Shame said as soon as I crossed the threshold. “I was getting tired waiting for the world to end.”

  Chapter Two

  There were three people in the room: Zayvion, Maeve, and Shame. Shame sat in a bright red cushioned arm chair with gold tassels across the bottom of it. It did not fit in with the rest of the room’s decor of silk white wallpaper, dark wooden central table, matching chairs, and gigantic lead crystal chandelier.

  Okay, maybe it fit with the chandelier, but it was obvious someone had dragged it in here from one of the other more elegant sitting rooms.

  He wore a heavy, black cabled sweater with a black turtleneck under it, black fingerless gloves, black beanie, and blue jeans.

  Out of all that blackness, his eyes shone through, startlingly green against his sallow skin. I could still see magic with my bare eyes, which was, as far as any of us could tell, a side effect of magic being poisoned and me hitting my head on concrete a few days ago.

  Sometimes, when I had a spare minute to give in to my fears and suspicion, I wondered if it was being possessed by my dad for nearly a year that had changed me.

  Looking at Shame made me wonder how much I was seeing him, and how much I was seeing what magic had done to him.

  He wasn’t just wearing dark clothing; he was surrounded by shadows.

  Shame looked like death.

  He’d been on the thin side lately, but the fight with Jingo Jingo had made it only worse. Every angle of his face stood at hard relief to the shadows surrounding him. Both physical and magical blackness covered him and roiled like inky smoke, licking outward with questing tendrils, as if looking for something to taste.

  Shame sat in the center of that sliding darkness, burning like a hard white flame.

  I didn’t want to admit it, but the shadows reminded me of the souls and Veiled I used to see hovering around Jingo Jingo. Except the darkness and magic around Shame wasn’t made of dead people, it just seemed to be made of magic and death.

  He gave me a slight smile. Suddenly it was the very much alive Shame staring back at me.

  He might have been changed by magic, but he was still Shame.

  “Done getting your beauty sleep?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t sleeping. I was talking to Nola,” I said. “And if I remember right, we were waiting for you to wake up.”

  “Behold my awakeness,” he said, spreading his long, thin fingers. “Let’s party.”

  Zay, in jeans and a T-shirt, had been leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest. He strode toward me, his left hip bothering him enough that he didn’t try to hide the catch in his stride with his usual swagger. The doctors had done a lot of good for us over the last two days, but anyone who had been a part of that fight in St. Johns was still nursing pain.

  Zay’s dark, thick hair was cut short against his skull, giving his high cheekbones a prominent angle beneath golden-brown eyes that seemed to see right through my soul. He wasn’t scowling, but his eyebrows were creased in question and concern.

  Beyond the physical Zayvion, I could see the magic that marked him—that had always marked him since I’d first met him. Glyphs of spells branded into his dark skin burned with silver fire tipped in red and blue. He’d told me once they were the mark and power of his position as Guardian of the gate. Th
e glyphs were part of why he could work both light and dark magic for short amounts of time, which was in turn why he was such a strong magic user.

  Some of those glyphs no longer burned. They traced dusty gray lines of ash across his bare arms and hands, used, exhausted, burned out.

  Ever since he’d fallen into a coma, fought Leander and Isabelle, then Jingo Jingo, the glyphs had changed. The magic he carried, magic spells he wore as part of his job of Guardian of the gate, were burning out. I didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Allie?” Zay took my hands. His pain and fatigue rolled through me, just as I was sure mine carried to him.

  My heart literally skipped a beat. Not because we were both hurting and tired. It seemed like we were always hurting and tired.

  But because I loved him, and I hated knowing that we were both headed into a fight underpowered and outmatched. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. There was no guarantee either of us would get out of this alive.

  What he needed, what we all needed, was about a month of sleep. What we didn’t have was one damn second to spare.

  Terric walked into the room. “Are we ready?”

  “I’m okay,” I said to Zay, then, “I have some news.”

  I turned toward Terric.

  Shame was darkness and death, but Terric seemed to glow as if moonlight pooled beneath his skin. His white hair, now streaked with black, gave him an edgier look, and his face, which I’d always thought was handsome, carried that underlying light. It was hard to look away from him, especially when he lifted his gaze to me, catching me with his clear blue eyes.

  “Oh,” I said. “Wow.”

  Terric’s chin lifted just a fraction more and I found myself fascinated by the hard line of his jaw, the soft curve of his lips, the set of his wide shoulders tapering down to a narrow waist.

  “What wow?” he asked.

  His voice buzzed under my skin, soft as a lover’s finger.

  Influence? Some kind of Illusion, or mesmerizing spell? One thing was for sure, I’d never felt like this looking at Terric before. He wasn’t my type. I certainly wasn’t his either.

  It had to be magic.

  “You’ve kind of got your charisma set on high beam,” I said, breaking eye contact and looking instead at my shoe.

  As soon as I did so, my head cleared. It had to be magic.

  “It better be magic,” Zayvion rumbled, catching both my thoughts, and probably all my emotions too.

  Fabulous.

  “Did you cast a spell?” he asked Terric.

  “No.”

  “What do you see, Allie?” Zay asked.

  I blinked a couple of times, then looked back up at Terric.

  Magic shifted around him in a golden white light that illuminated every lovely feature that boy had. He looked like an angel. I wanted to touch him. Wanted to stand nearer to him and be touched by him.

  “It’s magic,” I said, managing not to add “of course” to it. “Terric looks like he’s made out of sunlight and sex, and Shame looks like the dead.”

  “The sexy dead?” Shame asked.

  Zayvion shot him a look, then glanced over at Terric.

  “I’m not seeing what you see,” he said.

  “Maybe cast Sight?”

  “I have. But I can again.”

  He let go of my hand and I tucked it into my pocket, laying my palm against the warmth of my hip so it wasn’t empty, hollow.

  Every inch of my body wanted to be closer to Zayvion, held by him, holding him far from the danger I knew was coming.

  “Make it quick,” I said. “I do have news.”

  “Just tell us,” Shame said. “Z has ears.”

  I shook my head. “After he casts.”

  Zay took several steps away from me, putting himself between Terric and Shame, and I strolled over to the other side of the room, closer to Maeve. Magic made me sick. Getting too close to someone using magic made me sick too.

  Zay drew a Disbursement, which he Proxied.

  Huh. I didn’t know the Authority was using Proxies again. I wasn’t sure that I approved of other people bearing the price for the magic we were using. Especially when that magic was poisoned.

  Zayvion set magic into the glyph and the Disbursement formed in front of him, then sifted away, as if tugged apart by a breeze. A pink string of magic circled his wrist.

  The Disbursement glyph should find the person who was holding Proxy and attach to them in some manner.

  In just a moment, a pink string slipped back in through the wall and drifted across the room, tying to the magic band on Zay’s wrist. His Proxy was set.

  Zay cast a nice tight Sight. He held it over his fingertips as if balancing a globe, and looked through it at Terric.

  “The light around him?” Zay asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Light?” Terric asked. “Seriously?”

  “Look at Shame,” I said.

  Zay pivoted so he could see Shame through the spell.

  Shame made a kissy face.

  “Shadow,” Zay said. “I see darkness around him.” Zay dropped the Sight spell, which was good because it was starting to stink up the place.

  I liked it better when I couldn’t see magic with my bare eyes and smell it like it was hot garbage.

  “All you saw was light and darkness?” I asked.

  Zay nodded. “None of it particularly sexy.”

  “But then we all know you have no discerning taste, mate,” Shame said. “And why does it matter? Let’s hear the news.”

  “Seattle has been scrambled,” I said.

  Everyone in the room went silent.

  Shame finally whistled quietly. “You ever heard of an entire city being sent to lock down another city, Mum?”

  Maeve, who had been quiet all this time, shifted in the chair at the table. She had braided her hair back in a single band, and it somehow made her look younger even though she still had to use a cane to get around since Jingo Jingo had tried to kill her. Dark circles stood out like bruises against her pale skin. “No, I haven’t. Do you know when they’ll be here, Allie?”

  “Kevin has the details.”

  “Three or four hours at the most,” he said. “They have orders from the Overseer to lock us down, refuse any magic user entrance or exit and to Close or kill if we don’t like it.”

  “To what ends?” she asked.

  “Buying time,” Zayvion said. “Keeping us under their thumb until Leander and Isabelle can get here.”

  “Swell,” Shame said. “Other than a fight for our lives in a few hours, is there anything else I have to know about? Tired, hungry, and in a foul mood over here.”

  “Which is different than when?” Terric said.

  “Fuck you is when,” Shame said.

  “We need to make a plan,” I said.

  “You need to make a plan,” Shame said. “You’re good at that.”

  “Fine. My plan is this: Kevin, call every member of the Authority you can reach and tell them to get out here in the next half hour. We need to explain this once, to as many people as possible.”

  Kevin pulled out his phone and was already talking to someone by the time he left the room.

  “Shame, Terric,” I said. “I want you to use magic together so we know what you can and can’t do with it.”

  “Like hell,” Shame said.

  “Now?” Terric asked.

  “Yes, now.”

  “So, you want us to waste time messing with magic when there’s an entire city of people coming our way to fight?” Shame asked. “Forget what I said about plans. You suck at them.”

  “We do this now because I don’t want to be on the front line with you and have something unexpected happen.”

  “You’ve fought alongside us before,” Terric said.

  “Magic changed you. Changed both of you when you died for each other on the battlefield.”

  “No,” Shame corrected. “No, we did not die fo
r each other. We died to kill Jingo Jingo. Isn’t that right, Ter?”

  Terric didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t care how you want to remember it, Shame,” I said. “I want to know what you can do with magic before we are in another life-or-death situation.”

  “Did I mention I hate this idea?” he grumbled.

  “Don’t care.”

  “Let’s be done with it then, Son,” Maeve said. “It should only take a minute or two.”

  She obviously wasn’t in the mood to deal with delays either. Shame had killed Jingo Jingo, and changed greatly to come back from that. Her boyfriend, Hayden, was recovering in one of Kevin’s bedrooms, heavily medicated and missing a hand.

  It had not been a good last few days.

  “We need someone to Ground,” Maeve said.

  Zayvion held up his fingers.

  “Good.” She walked around the edge of the table to stand at the foot of it. “Zayvion will Ground and I will Block the room.”

  Shame clapped his gloved hands together and pushed up out of his chair. “Fine. I’m starving anyway.”

  Maeve looked surprised. “Didn’t you just eat?”

  “Dying makes me hungry.”

  “Shamus. Don’t,” she said quietly.

  “Die? Not planning on it. Once was enough.” He didn’t say it like he was angry or worried. Just maybe…resigned to the way things had turned out. “The sooner we find out that Terric and I cast magic exactly the same as we always have, the sooner I can eat something, or hell, get a damn smoke.”

  Zayvion positioned himself near the door.

  Terric, who still had a case of the glowing gorgeous, moved to stand in front of Shame.

  I wasn’t sure where, exactly, I should be. Didn’t even know what good I was since I couldn’t use magic.

  “Shamus and Terric,” Maeve said, “I will tell you each what spell to cast. You will do so, in the order I tell you and at the smallest level possible. If it becomes too difficult, tell me immediately. We’re going to see what you can and can’t do alone, then together.”

  “Bullcrap,” Shame said, shaking out his hands as if getting ready to arm wrestle. “You’re going to test to see if we’re Soul Complements.”