Twenty-Sided Sorceress 3 - Pack of Lies (8 page)

There was nothing unusual about him. His face was bland, almost forgettable. His eyes were dark, though not as dark as mine. He was tanned, more so than heritage would dictate, which fit with a man who spent lots of time outdoors taking pictures. His fingernails were trimmed and he ate with a polite tidiness that drew no attention.

Maybe it was because someone had tried to kill me. Maybe it was the Lansings’ deaths or Dorrie’s poisoning. I felt on edge, paranoia damaging what should have been a happy evening. I shoved the feeling down and decided to make small talk.

“Kami is an unusual surname,” I said. “Where in Japan did you grow up?”

His eyes flicked to me and he brought his napkin up, carefully wiping his mouth and finishing chewing before he spoke.

“A tiny village in the Oki Shoto islands,” he said. “It is very remote.”

“I’d love to go to Japan,” Harper said. “I’ve been to South Korea for tournaments, but never any further.”

“Tournaments?” Mr. Kami asked.

“Oh God, don’t get her started,” Levi said with a mock groan.

“But I am curious. Please tell,” Mr. Kami said.

Which led into an explanation about what Harper did for a living with videogames that Mr. Kami listened to with very polite attention.

I’d heard of the Oki Shoto islands. Kami means paper, or spirit. It’s a weird last name. Japan has a huge diversity of surnames, it’s true, but it was the only odd thing about a man who was otherwise completely normal-seeming. Human. Boring. Everything about him from his appearance to his mannerisms said “nothing to see here, move along.”

I was so fucked up that his sheer normalness bugged me. Or maybe it was that curling slip of paper earlier. What were the odds that in a tiny town like Wylde, someone would show up using Japanese on a spell scroll and it not be remotely related to the one Japanese foreigner in town? I didn’t believe in coincidence. Not today.

I closed my eyes for a moment, listening with my other senses to the conversation, to the people around me. I pulled on my magic, spooling up a thread of power from the huge well within. I touched my wards, letting my consciousness spiral to the outermost circles around the property. Nothing unusual. I pulled myself back in, listening with magically enhanced senses to my friends. I felt their own thrumming power, the soft rhythms of their hearts, the tickling feel of their sleeping animal selves. I could identify each just by his or her energy signature, that metaphysical something that helped define what they were. This awareness of life power in others, this second sense was a gift, of sorts, from an asshole murdering warlock whose heart I’d eaten to save Rosie and Ezee’s lives only a few months before.

Mr. Kami, however, didn’t even register. It was like he wasn’t there. He might have been part of the chair on which he sat for all my metaphysical senses could tell.

He should have shown up. I could sense the horses in their stalls, sense the fat tabby cat out on the porch swing. Not Mr. Kami. He had less presence inside my wards, against my magic, than a cat. I opened my eyes and looked at him.

Then, deliberately, carefully, I prodded him with a touch of my power. To a human’s senses, it should have felt like something brushed against him, a phantom touch. A truly oblivious human, like our friend and fellow gamer Steve, might have felt nothing at all.

Mr. Kami tensed and flicked his dark eyes to me. For a moment it was like a mask slipped out of place and his gaze went beetle-black and hard, intense and focused like a predator’s. Then the bland look came back, but I felt an answering push of power. Just a touch, the smell and feel of it hot and alien.

Ink and earth, smoke and gunpowder.

I was sitting at dinner with the man who had tried to blow off my head only hours earlier.

I smiled at him, all teeth. “Have you seen the barn?” I asked him. I wanted to take his head off right here, but he had magic. I couldn’t predict what he would do. His actions earlier had indicated a total disregard for collateral damage and we were sitting around a table full of people I cared about.

Not exactly an advantage.

“Yes,” he said, his mask back in place. “Max showed me earlier. It is very nice. This is a very nice place.”

I gathered my power, letting it spread through me, ready to blast him or shield my friends. “We should go outside,” I said to him in Japanese.

“I am fine where I am,” he responded in the same as he leaned back, scooting his chair out a small ways. He draped one hand casually over the back of Junebug’s chair next to him. “How did you recognize me?”

“You were too invisible,” I said. I wanted to zort him right out of his chair, blast him away and end the threat, but I didn’t know what magic he had, what it might do. There were too many people.

“Jade,” Levi said.

I didn’t dare look at him and risk the man in front of him making a move. “This man is the killer,” I said instead, switching to Nez Perce.

I had engaged in long discussions on the dying out of the Sahaptian language with Ezee, so I knew he at least would understand. And Junebug had been an academic, studying Northwestern Native cultures before she fell in love with a wolverine-shifter mechanic and took up pottery.

Levi, Ezee, and Junebug all tensed. Beside me, Max stood up.

“Anyone want more ice in their water?” he said, too brightly.

Mr. Kami’s right hand slipped beneath the table. I took the risk and threw pure force straight at him, driving into him with my will, wanting to crush him like a bug. As he flew backward and flipped out of his chair, magic flared to life, burning sigils appearing in the air around him and turning aside the brunt of my blast.

On the periphery of my vision I saw my friends all leave their chairs, moving with the graceful speed only shifters can achieve. Ezee and Levi shifted, a huge coyote and wolverine materializing. They sprang at the assassin, snarling.

“No,” I called out as I struggled to my feet, shoving my chair away.

Glittering kunai filled the air as the assassin leapt onto the table. I threw shields up around my friends. Fire started to swirl around the killer’s body, sigils spinning faster and faster. Heat blasted over me and I pushed more power into my shields. The table began to burn.

I had to get him out of the house or he would just burn it down around us. I slammed more force into him as my friends attacked. The assassin jumped away, moving out of the dining room and into the front entry.

I grabbed the pitcher of water off the table as I followed and threw it in his direction, turning the water into a thin spear of ice. Magic raged through me, my blood singing with it, but I felt the edge of fatigue as well. Keeping his fire contained, my friends shielded, and throwing magic at him was taking a quick toll on me.

I gritted my teeth as the front door flew open and he dashed through it, the ice spear melting away before it hit him. He threw more kunai at me, the small dark blades glancing off my shields.

Bits of paper tied to the loop at the ends fluttered as the knives bounced and fell. I threw magic tendrils at them, mage-handing them back out the door as quickly as I could. Explosions rocked the house and I stumbled, smoke and heat filling my nose. A furry body raced past me.

I made it through the smoking ruins of the front entry, rage rising inside me. The assassin was running for his car. He spun as I sprang down the steps, and he fired a pistol at me. The shots hit my shields like punches from giant fists, the force shoving me backward, off my feet.

A fox, her body a streak of red in my smoke-blurred vision, leapt straight through his wreath of flames and latched onto his arm.

Harper.

I rolled to my feet and ran at the assassin. He threw Harper aside as though she were a puppy, not a hundred-pound fox. His lips moved and he thrust his arms out. His shirt curled and burned, the pieces lifting and turning into their own slips of dark paper, sigils flaming to life on the ruins of his clothing. I poured everything I had into my shields as a wave of flame rushed at me.

Belatedly, I remembered the house behind me, the people who might be there. Harper somewhere to the side of me, a crumpled form in the dry summer grass.

My shields took the heat and I threw my will into directing it upward, toward the sky, toward nothing that it could burn and hurt and kill. My eyes squeezed shut against the heat. I held my breath, ignoring the stench of burning hair as I spread my shields as thin as I could, trying to funnel the flame wave away from everything. Away from the people I kept failing to protect.

Pain radiated through my forearms and I felt my own clothing catching fire. It wasn’t going to be enough. I needed more power, another answer. No time. I hung on, gripping my twenty-sided talisman with hands gone numb from pain, pouring all my strength into blocking the flames as the unfamiliar magic roared over me, resisting, almost alive, hungry for death.

And then, as it had before with the explosion in the parking lot, it suddenly ceased. Blood roared in my ears instead of fire.

I raised my head, catching sight of the retreating taillights of the assassin’s car. Again. He turned a corner, speeding off. I had no energy to go after him. I wanted to breathe. To curl up in a bath of ice and forget what fire tasted like. My body vibrated with spent power. With terror. With pain. My arms were raw, skin bubbling into blisters even as I stared at it, trying to gather my mind back into itself.

Rosie ran past me, toward a charred shape in the smoldering grass to the side of the driveway. Then she started screaming.

Harper was alive, barely. Her scorched chest rose and fell in uneven breaths. Clumps of charred hair fell off her as Levi and I carefully got her moved onto a blanket and brought into the house.

“Why isn’t she shifting?” I asked, ignoring the pain in my hands and arms as the blanket rubbed on raw, burnt patches of skin.

“She’s not conscious,” Levi said. “She’s breathing though. Her body will start to heal.”

“Can you do anything?” Max asked me. “Heal her?”

I shook my head. Healing was complicated. I didn’t know anatomy or what her healthy skin was supposed to be like exactly. I was scared to try using my magic that way. I’d attempted to heal Wolf once and had failed miserably, my magic sliding uselessly off her bloody chest.

Wolf appeared as though thinking of her had called her. I wanted to curse at her, ask her where she had been, but she couldn’t have stopped this. The assassin was human—using some kind of magic, sure, but not a magical being himself, not enough that she would have been able to help.

Still, part of me thought she could have at least warned me. She should have smelled the magic on him. Instead she’d been absent. I felt betrayed, but shoved it away. Irrational anger wouldn’t save Harper.

“Max,” Rosie said. “Go help Ezekiel put out the fires.”

He glared at her but left, throwing a last worried look over his shoulder at Harper.

We put her on a bed in the first-floor guest room. Her fox body was small for a shifter, her normally red and glossy fur charred away in ugly weals, burned to brown and black and patches of raw red flesh.

Guilt swamped me as I stood there, helpless.

“I shouldn’t have come tonight,” I said.

“You don’t know what he would have done if you hadn’t,” Rosie said. “Don’t start blaming yourself, dearie. If we start that game then Harper shouldn’t have run out the door like an idiot. That man was bad news. He is the one to blame. He set my baby on fire.”

“But only because I was here,” I said, turning to her. My vision blurred as tears leaked out my eyes, tears of rage, tears of guilt. “And I didn’t stop him. How can you look at her and not hate me?”

“You saved me from the slowest, most terrible death I could ever envision. You risked your life, your freedom to protect my family. As far as I am concerned, that makes you family.” Rosie’s mouth set into a line and her hazel eyes were uncomfortably kind, full of a deep understanding that wrapped around me like a physical presence.

“Family,” she continued. “Family don’t give up on family just because things get dangerous. Azalea risked her life for you, same as you’d risk your life for her. Don’t belittle that choice by pretending you could make it for her. You don’t have that right.”

She squared her shoulders as I shut my mouth on any protest I would make. I stared down at my burnt arms, my flaking and crisped shirt. Something was hard and uncomfortably hot in my pocket. A fried plastic smell leached from my jeans.

I pulled out my cell phone, wincing. It was dead, totally slagged by heat.

“Jade,” Rosie said.

I looked up. Levi had slipped out of the room. It was only Rosie and I now, with Harper’s heavily breathing body on the bed between us. At least she was still breathing.

“Go get a clean shirt, clean those burns off. She isn’t going to die.”

“I’m already healing,” I muttered, the guilt not quite gone. I did as she asked, however, slipping up the stairs to Harper’s room. Peeling off the remains of my clothes sucked more than I want to say, but the burns on my arms were turning pink now, the blisters fading down into the skin almost as quickly as they’d appeared.