Blood Trade

And Eli laughed. “That swear, I like.”



We took a circuitous route to the house, and the closer I got, the stronger the witch stink got. This was the smell I’d found on the wind several times over the past few days, but couldn’t place. And it was no wonder. The spell covering and warding the house was strong magic, highly contained. It was based on a hedge-of-thorns spell, but a hundred times stronger; part of its makeup was a keep-away spell and another part was a containment spell to hide the magics. To get a more complete view, we circumnavigated the house, but made a point to stay far back, as the magics were hard and strong and burned when we got too close. The ward was a sphere buried below the surface of the ground that rose to cover the entire lot and nudge up against the taller buildings to either side. The structures on either side were each three stories tall, though the one on the left had a raised false front to look like a fourth story. Both were empty, with flat roofs and arched windows, and looked as if they were in original condition, unrestored.



The house they dwarfed was in far better condition, but the only way in was a small opening at the top where the magics met. I had only one idea how we might get inside. And it wasn’t something I wanted to do.



It was closer to half an hour by the time the two cars arrived, Rick and his team in one, Bruiser driving solo. Soul hopped out of the car before it came to a complete halt, her gauzy clothes swirling around her like waves of water. She stood in the middle of the street, her eyes wide. Brute leaped to her side, snarling at her.



Rick parked and got out of the vehicle more slowly. He was dressed in jeans and a button-front shirt and a windbreaker with the word PSYLED on front and back. And he wore a Kevlar vest under his shirt. Even money it was one of the new ones just hitting the market—Kevlar to stop bullets, a layer of some new plastic to slow even the sharpest knife blade, and a spell woven in to protect the wearer from attack spells. His earpieces were in his ears, music pouring out of them to hold the need to shift at bay.



His eyes were glowing softly, his cat peering out at the world, and he looked tightly wound but in control. I’d sat through his first full moon with him, before he had the music spell, and it hadn’t been pretty. Rick didn’t acknowledge me at all but walked up close to the house, holding a device, a small black box. A psy-meter, or psychometer, that measured the strength and quality of magics. He walked back and forth in front of the house, holding the meter over his head.



Bruiser stood at his car, studying the entire block, while Eli stood off to one side, his subgun at the ready, his mission look on his face, his body angled so he could see the house, the street, and the SUV with Bobby in it.



“I walked these streets,” Soul said, frustration in her voice, “looking for magic. This was not here.”



“It’s got a powerful ward,” I said. “Only when the moon came up did it become visible.”



Rick swore softly and put his device away. “Too much ambient magic to get a reading. All I could get was a redline.”



Soul nodded, blinking as if her eyes had dried out from staring so long. “Yes. It would show a redline. The ambient magics here are . . .” She shook her head, unable to find a word to express it. She settled on “astounding. We can’t get inside, not from here. It would take the magical equivalent of a nuclear bomb to get through that.”



I sighed, hating what I was about to say. “I can get in.”



They all turned to me, and an acute discomfort sank its claws into me. Beast snarled. No. Will not let you.



You don’t have a choice. Not if you want a chance to save the kit’s mother, I thought back. “I can shift into a bird and fly over it, and dive through the hole at the top and land inside.” I thought Soul’s eyes were gonna pop out of her head, and I tilted my head in a wry shrug. “Only problem is that the magics I’ll be flying through might actually kill me. Or might force me to shift back while I’m in bird form, and I’ll lose too much mass and die. Either way—”



“Mass transference is difficult?” Soul asked.



“Yeah. Dangerous at every step along the way.” Which was all I was going to tell them about me, and way more than I wanted to tell them at all. If not for Misha maybe being trapped inside, I’d have never said anything.



Bruiser, looking like a million dollars, rounded the car he’d driven and said, “I can see the shadows of the spell, but not how high it rises. Is it higher than the buildings to either side?”



I pulled on Beast sight, and Soul stepped back to study the top of the spell. “No,” I said. “It reaches just above the top of the house’s roof, maybe three feet above the central roof beam. And as the spell curls down, the same distance above the chimneys.” The house was old enough to have been heated by wood or coal, and two brick chimneys were balanced at the front and back.



Bruiser picked up some stones from the street, small rocks used in the paving, and tossed one at the front of the house. It bounced back with a sizzle of sound and a shower of crimson energies. The second stone went higher, and would have landed on the roof had the hedge not been in the way. He studied the entire structure and pulled back his throwing arm. With a careful release of strength and precision, he tossed the stone up. It arched over before dropping, and passed through the energies escaping out the top. A shower of blue sparks rained down as the rock fell through, into the center of the sphere, and hit the roof before bouncing slowly down the incline and off the eave to the ground.



“Yeah. That’s the hole I could get through,” I said. I hadn’t known until now that Bruiser could see magics. Most humans couldn’t. But, then, Bruiser wasn’t human. Not anymore.



“If we could span a line over the house,” Eli said, “from the buildings at either side, we could reach the spell’s center opening and drop through, crawl to a chimney, and shimmy down it.”



“We would still have to pass through the energies that are escaping from the opening,” Soul said, “and to me, it looks like enough magic to fry a human body.”



“I’m not human,” Bruiser said, shocking me that he would admit it aloud. But, then, with humans and witches missing, a lot of things that were better left in the dark were being exposed to the light. “And neither is Jane. Soul, can you make an amulet of death strong enough to fool the sphere for perhaps twenty seconds?”



I raised my brows. “Death? Oh. The sphere thinks we’re stones or bones or something and doesn’t react to us? Much?”



“Precisely,” Bruiser said, his eyes on Soul.



Soul went still, her body seeming to hunch in on itself before she straightened, looking poised for flight or fight. A silence stretched between them as they measured each other, Soul not at all happy that Bruiser seemed to know something about her nature that she hadn’t told him, Bruiser looking unmoved. He had access to the database of the biggest, baddest Master of the City there is. Heck, he had probably compiled most of it. Did she think he wouldn’t know something about her? But he hadn’t known about Leo’s own son or about me either, so he wasn’t omniscient. Finally she spoke. “And if I can do this?”



“Then Rick and I will run a line from the roofs of the buildings to the side, and Jane and I will drop through.”



Beast pressed down on my mind, her claws out and piercing me with a headache. She peered out through my eyes. Fun!



I just shook my head in disgust at the plan. “I always hated gymnastics in school.”



“Why not Jane and me?” Rick asked.



“Because the magics might short out your electronics,” I said, pointing at his earpieces. “I’d rather not be trapped on the roof of a spelled, warded house with a screaming, half-insane black panther in a human body.”



“She has a point,” Eli said, trying to be helpful.



Rick snarled, turned, and walked away, around the building and to the left of the house we were trying to enter. So much for teamwork and effort.



“How long to make a death charm?” I asked.



“Before dawn,” Soul said.



“Eli, nothing we can do here. Let’s get some shut-eye. And hey, Soul?” She looked up at me, her platinum ponytail falling over one shoulder. “Before we head out, would you take a look at Bobby’s hands? They got burned when he was dowsing for the magics.”



Bobby—healed and out of pain—was asleep in his bed when we again slipped quietly out of Esmee’s and into the SUV, to meander our way back to the warded house. Rick was still there, and so were Bruiser and Soul, and none of them looked very happy. I got out of the vehicle and looked over the house. Nothing was different except for the thin line that ran from the front of one roof to the back of the other roof of the three-story buildings standing on either side of the warded structure. Someone had found mountain-climbing devices and lots of rope. On the highest point hung woven mesh straps and buckles and more metal, like a zip-line trolley and harness. With Beast vision, I could see that the rope passed directly over the opening of the hedge ward.



Eli followed me from the SUV, our feet silent on the sidewalk, our shadows long and diffuse in the light of the moon that appeared to be falling off the edge of the world. The magics of the first full-moon night were more muted now, many witch circles closed after the witching hour, others just closing down as dawn approached. There was a strange smell on the air, like burned hair and hide and odd chemicals, but it was old and faint, and I couldn’t place it. When we were close enough to be heard without raising our voices, I said, “Hey, Eli. How come I think our little experiment is gonna be way more dangerous than they expected?”



“Maybe because they look like death warmed over themselves,” he said. “What’s up, guys?”



Soul examined me. It was a way more intense examination than I’d ever gotten from her before, and it made me feel the way I used to when a schoolteacher suspected that I had done something wrong in class behind her back. I’d learned to stare back, mostly expressionless, a little curious and a lot bored—a look teenagers master early—and I used it on her now. She gave me a small, unamused smile. “Are you willing to risk death to possibly help your friend, who may not be inside?”