Treasures, Demons, and Other Black Magic (18 page)

I flattened myself against the wall beside the door and Drake did the same next to me. Yeah, just like they did in the movies. I pulled my jade knife, switched it into my left hand — though I wasn’t exactly ambidextrous — and awkwardly reached across to open the door with my right hand.

In one breath, Drake and I spun through the door, crouching low and to the sides. We waited. The fog was thicker again. I could no longer see Drake. The door snapped shut behind us. Nothing else moved or sounded out. Everything was muffled by the fog.

Think. Think. Think. Wandering in the fog was just plain stupid, but I couldn’t channel its magic into my sword because I couldn’t feel the source of the spell. I was also worried I might end up trying to pull all the fog’s diffused magic — Drake, Kett, Kandy, and Jorgen included — into my sword. If that was even possible.
 

“A fan would be great,” I muttered. I peeled myself away from the door and stepped sideways — hand extended — along the wall. “I figure we can follow the wall around the entire floor, back to the door we came out of.”

“Okay,” Drake said, far too agreeably. I grabbed the back of his hoodie and continued moving. We found the first car right after we hit the white aluminum railing I’d seen from the street, which made sense. Drake leaned over the railing, legs in the air, as he stuck his head out through the fog.

“Can you see?”

“Yes. It’s clear here like it was at the entrance.”

I crouched down and looked closer at the bottom of the railing. The line of sand appeared there as well. “It must have taken hours to set up this spell,” I murmured. Hours that overlapped Sayers chatting in the hotel lounge with me? Maybe I’d been wrong. Or had he spent all day setting the spell, then come to the hotel?

I resisted the urge to scrape away the sand to see if that would release the spell. I was terrified by the thought that a fog like this would just spread and spread until it enveloped the entire city, and then country, perhaps only caged in by the ocean.

Then we’d really need witches, and it would be my foolish, foolhardy fault. “Not this time,” I muttered to myself. Then to Drake, I asked, “Anyone on the street?”

“No. The perimeter spell must be keeping the humans away,” he answered, then pulled his head back in from over the railing. “There are two floors above us.”

“Great,” I said, continuing along the white railing in front of a long line of cars, front bumper after front bumper. This must be long-term or overnight parking.

As we neared what I guessed was the center front of the parking lot, I thought I heard something. I paused and lost Drake as he took off in a swirl of fog. Damn it, I’d loosened my hold on him when I crouched to check the sand.

I was going to have to follow him. His hearing was better than mine, so obviously the noise meant something to him.

Knife drawn and back in my proper hand, I darted forward between two cars. I crossed the center lane and stepped between two other cars, which were parked facing the other direction.

Then I nearly fell through the center of the building.

Well, that was an exaggeration. I would have had to leap a four-foot-high concrete wall to fall through, but it was still a shock. The parking lot was built in a rectangular spiral that left the center open through all five storeys, a space about twelve feet across.

Of course, that wasn’t as much of a shock as seeing Edmonds suspended in the air directly in front of us, three storeys up. He was held by thick ropes that formed a pentagram, lashed to the columns in the very middle of the open well at the heart of building.

The fog was thinner here, but I still couldn’t see more than a few feet below or above Edmonds. I guessed I could only see the unconscious sorcerer because whatever spell coated the ropes of the pentagram also kept the fog spell at bay. He looked way younger than his forty plus years and vulnerable without his tortoise-shell glasses or elbow patches.

Drake stepped out of the fog to my left. He was walking along the edge of the short wall that had stopped me from falling through the center of the building, as if he’d just circled the perimeter.

“I can’t tell if he’s alive,” the fledgling guardian said. His voice was unnaturally grim.

“He’s alive.” As I watched the too-pale sorcerer, I saw his chest slowly rise and fall.

“Spelled?”

“Most likely. As is the rope.”

“So we cut the ropes and free the sorcerer.”

“Right. Except we don’t know if the spell is anchored here or below or above. Also, we don’t know that if we cut the rope, we won’t trigger the spell.” I called to Edmonds. “Ummm, Professor? Professor, can you hear me?”

The spelled sorcerer didn’t respond.

I narrowed my eyes and desperately tried to anchor my dowsing senses in my necklace and knife. I thought I could see a line of magic running up and down from Edmonds, as if bisecting him through his heart. “Do you see that?”
 
I asked Drake. “That line of magic, blue-black? There! When the fog shifts?”

He peered where I indicated, but then shook his head.

“Okay,” I said, preparing to come up with some plan. I was way, way out of my depth here, and feeling just as lost in the fog as was intended. I didn’t think my next confrontation with my sister would go like this … I thought I had prepared, trained.

I peered up and then down over the short concrete wall and through the ropes, but I couldn’t see the next floors. I looked at the concrete pillars on either side of me, to which the pentagram was lashed. They were smooth and free of handholds, which made total sense safety-wise but was still a bitch. Drake might be able to jump up from floor to floor. Hell, the fledgling might be able to jump off the top floor and land without hurting himself, but I couldn’t. Not without seeing where I was going, at least.

“Back to the stairs?” I didn’t like leaving Edmonds, but I also wasn’t sure I could rescue him without finding the origin of the spell. “The source is probably on the first floor, where they could actually anchor it to the earth. At least, that’s how witch magic would work.” But if it was, then Kandy and Jorgen would find it — if they could sense the magic once they got near enough, despite the diffusion of the fog spell. I pulled out my cell phone, half-heartedly hoping it worked in the fog. It didn’t. I sighed. “Or it's a series of pentagrams suspended over open air from here to the top floor.”

“You’ve seen this magic before?” Drake asked as we cut through the fog directly west, or maybe it was east, to find the door. I assumed there was a second stairwell at the opposite side from which we’d come, so either direction worked. They’d both lead up. The car bumpers made it a little easier to find our path through the fog quickly.

“No,” I replied. “I’m just guessing. Three demons, three pentagrams.”

“All with sorcerers in them.”

“I hope not.”

“Your sister is powerful enough to capture or compel three sorcerers?”

“I hope not.”

We found the stairs to the fourth floor and headed up. Thankfully, Drake kept his mouth shut — and kept to himself his dragon philosophy about the futility of hoping for something you already knew wasn’t possible.

∞

For a moment, as we approached the center of the fourth floor, I was able to hope I was wrong about my multiple-pentagrams-all-connected-by-a-single-spell theory.

Then, with my hands set on the low concrete wall as I peered ahead, the fog parted and I saw Clark spread-eagled and trussed up in a roped pentagram suspended across the open air, directly above Edmonds. Not that I could see Edmonds below.

For some reason, seeing the older man strung up like that — his comb-over fallen to the wrong side of his head — made me even angrier. It was so undignified. So unbelievable that my sister would come into London and treat people like pieces on her own personal chess board.

“Pawns,” Drake said, stepping out from the fog after walking the perimeter of the concrete wall.

“What?”

“Like pawns on a chess board.”

“Was I talking out loud?”

“Yeah. You do that a lot.”

Shit. “Is the pentagram set up the same way?” I shelved the discussion of my sanity for later, but was really hoping I didn’t have entire conversations out loud. Especially not conversations with my sister.

“Looks like it. Tied to columns at five points. Magic on the rope.”

“No fog within, though,” I said.

“So the pentagram is sealed with a spell?”

“Above and below, I think. And the same column of magic rises out from Clark. See directly above and below his heart?”

I could see the deep blue line more clearly now. Either I was more in tune with the magic, now that I knew what to look for, or the fog was dissipating.

Drake shook his head. Not counting the exceptional power of Pulou the treasure keeper, all dragons could see or feel magic, and the fledgling was able to identify specific types of Adept easily. My dowsing abilities seemed to be connected to my witch magic more than my dragon side, though.

I peered upward but couldn’t see to the next level. “Want to bet on door number three?”

“Four,” Drake answered. “We’re going to the fifth floor next, right? The doors were numbered from the ground floor up.”

“I meant … never mind. It was on the edge of sick and twisted anyway. Door number four it is.”

∞

Except it wasn’t Sayers as I thought it would be, strung out in the pentagram within the empty space of the fifth floor.

It was Mory.

The fog had parted as it had each time we’d neared the well. Drake stepped up on the ledge to walk the perimeter, just as I laid eyes on the fledgling necromancer.

Mory wasn’t spread-eagled and tied into the rope pentagram like Edmonds and Clark. Her hands and ankles were trussed with what looked like the same rope, but she was perched with her legs cradled to her chest in the center of the pentagram. She wore the necklace I’d made to protect her from malicious magic. Unfortunately, it didn’t prevent kidnapping.

“Mory!” I cried.

The black-swathed, army-boot-wearing, pale-skinned fifteen-year-old scowled at me. “Stealthy, Jade,” she said.

“Where’s Sienna? What’s going on?”

“What does it look like, duh?”

“Hello, necromancer,” Drake said cheerfully as he crouched on the four-foot wall beside me.

Mory’s hair dye had grown out two inches or so. The lavender tips were washed out and scraggly. She looked like she hadn’t eaten since I’d last fed her. My heart constricted, and for a moment, I couldn’t speak past the pain of it. I thought the feeling might be joy, but I didn’t remember joy hurting so much before. “I thought … I worried …”

“Yeah, well, maybe I would have been better off dead,” the teenager said.

“She’s not a happy person,” Drake said.

“She’s a necromancer,” I answered.

“I see.” Drake nodded, projecting Chi Wen’s sage quality again.

“Who the hell are you?” Mory snapped.

“Drake,” the fledgling guardian replied with a wide grin. “Jade’s friend.”

Mory’s scowl deepened. “Good luck with that, Drake.” The necromancer managed to make the thirteen-year-old’s name sound like a curse word.

Yeah, teenaged angst at its worst. Thank God she was okay.

“We’re going to cut her down,” I said.

“But you said —”

“I know, but —”

“You aren’t going to cut her down.” Kett’s voice came out of the fog to my left. Drake actually flinched. I felt the proximity of the life debt bond Kett owed me a second before the vampire spoke. Even the fog couldn’t dissipate that, it seemed.

Kett stepped forward to observe Mory like she was a bug caught in his web.

“Great,” Mory groused. “You brought the vampire.”

“He’s been hunting for you for three months, Mory.”

“Actually,” Kett said, “I’ve been looking for the witch.”

“Whatever,” Mory snapped. “Took you all way too long. And now if you cut these ropes, we all die. And if you don’t cut these ropes, we all die. Or some sorcerer shit like that.”

“Sayers.”

“Who knows, some guy. She found him online. They don’t talk in front of me.”

“So we counter the spell,” I said, turning to Kett.

He nodded. “It’s anchored on the first floor.”

“But if we cut the anchor …”

“This all collapses.”

“So we still need the source.”

“Try the roof, morons,” Mory said.

I took a deep breath. “Where are Kandy and Jorgen?”

“I sent Jorgen for reinforcements. Kandy is with Edmonds.”

“Three witches would be nice.”

“We’ll have to settle for werewolves. If they get here quickly enough.”

I peered up and saw hints of the starry night sky. The fog was thinning the closer we got to open air.
 

Magic thrummed through the ropes of the pentagram.
 

Mory gasped and scrambled to her feet. She was now standing in the very center of the pentagram, which as I’d suspected was sealed from below. She looked across at me with wide eyes, all her belligerence washed away by fear. “She … she … can’t drain me because of the necklace.”
 

The fledgling necromancer twined her fingers around the necklace resting on her collarbone. I’d made this necklace specifically to protect Mory from Sienna, and from Mory’s brother Rusty. Or his ghost, rather. His spectral energy or whatever he was. The necklace was presumably also the reason the necromancer wasn’t sleep spelled like the two other sorcerers. I imagined that Sienna had deliberately left Mory ungagged. It was just another twisted way of hurting me further. This time with Mory’s own words.
 

“But she can siphon off bits of my magic,” Mory continued. “She thinks she has enough now, and that with the anniversary date and the location, she can raise and control those demons with the knife that raised them before.”

“This isn’t even the correct location,” Kett said.

“All that matters now is what Sienna thinks is true,” I said. “And what she’s willing to do to make something happen. Drake, stay with Mory.” I turned into the fog.

“Jade!” Mory cried after me.

I turned back. “You’re not going to die today, Mory. I’m sorry I left you before. I’m really glad you’re alive, even if you hate me forever. But you’re not going to die today.”