Magic Breaks

“If you assault an officer of law, the Pack will retaliate,” Jim said.

“Your best people are gone,” Ghastek said. “You’re at half-strength at best.”

I nodded. “Yes, most of our young single people have gone to hunt. You’ll be facing parents whose children are in that Keep. Have you ever tried to take a cub from a wolf? You’re welcome to give it a shot.”

Hugh’s hand was on his sword.

I reached for Slayer. Laughter bubbled up. “Go ahead, Hugh. Make my day. I’m really frustrated right now. I need to vent. Please.”

He glared at me.

“You lost,” I told him. “I called your bluff. Take your goons and go home.”

“We have no legal standing to attack a sheriff,” Ghastek said.

“You’ll do what I tell you,” Hugh told him.

“No, he won’t,” I told him. I could tell by Ghastek’s eyes that he was out. Whatever Hugh decided now, I had done my job. I had stopped this war from happening.

A roar rolled through the snowy field, shaking the winter air like a sudden, terrifying clap of thunder. Hugh’s Friesian jerked. The roar cascaded, frothing with menace and fury, awakening some long-forgotten instinct that severed the rational part of the brain from the body and left only three options open: fight, flight, or freeze.

Curran.

The relief drowned me, turning me weightless, and for a short blissful moment I was completely and utterly happy. Curran!

The trees at the north edge of the field shook as a flock of birds took flight. Curran leaped into the snow. He rose almost eight feet tall in warrior form, a muscled terrifying blend of a man and a predatory cat, sheathed in gray fur and armed with claws the size of my fingers. His head was pure lion. He opened his mouth and roared.

An enormous Kodiak bear emerged from the brush, shaking his big furry body. Next to him a bouda giggled. I’d never been so happy to hear that eerie hair-raising cackle in my entire life.

Shapeshifters poured out of the woods, ten, twenty, more . . . Where did he get them . . . ?

He must’ve gone to the Wood and pulled our people off the hunt. He’d brought an army. Yes!

Curran broke into a run. The shapeshifters followed, raising powdery snow into the air.

“We’re done here.” Ghastek turned to the sea of vampires. “Mission aborted. Bogey to mother.”

The vampires streamed off the field.

I laughed.

Hugh turned his horse, facing me. “I tried to be nice, but I have my limits. You want to be treated like an animal, I’ll treat you like one.”

He opened his mouth. Magic ripped from him like a tidal wave and snapped, catching me. A power word.

The right side of my face turned hot. A pale gold light spiraled around me. Next to me, Ghastek jerked, caught in an identical glowing tornado.

On the wall behind me, Christopher screamed, “Mistress!”

Hugh smirked.

Whatever was happening, he would die before it was over. I dashed to him across the snow, sword out. The light moved with me, streaming around me in bright sunny ribbons. I leaped over the thorns.

Hugh slid off his horse.

Curran sprinted to me, his eyes pure gold.

I struck. Hugh’s blade met mine. He bared his teeth at me.

The tornado of light around me pulsed with red, slicing through Slayer’s blade where it touched Hugh’s sword. The blade snapped in half.

No!

The field, Hugh, and Curran vanished.

13

SOMEONE JERKED THE ground from under my feet. I hurtled through empty air, weightless, my arms transparent. Bricks flashed before me. I was falling through a round shaft. Directly below me a thick metal grate blocked dark water.

I’m going to die.

I hit the grate and passed through it, as if it were air. My body plunged into the water.

Lukewarm. Wet.

My body turned solid. I kicked, surfaced, and stared at half a sword in my hand. Hugh broke my sword. He broke Slayer.

He broke my sword.

I curled into a ball around my saber, plunging into the water. I’d had Slayer since I was five. Voron gave it to me. I had slept with it under my bed almost every night for the past twenty-two years. Slayer was a part of me and now it was broken. Broken in half. It felt like someone had cut my arm off and it just kept hurting and hurting.

I would kill him. It wasn’t an “if.” It was a “when.”

He broke Slayer.

Above me someone else was falling down, through the grate, and into the water. I choked and swam up. A moment later and Ghastek surfaced next to me with a gasp. He splashed around in panic. I gave him room. About ten seconds later, he stopped thrashing and stared at me.

“It was that water. It marked us and made us vulnerable to d’Ambray’s magic.”

“Yes. Hugh must have bribed one of my people. Or blackmailed them. Or threatened.”

It was Jennifer. It had to be, and if that was the case, Hugh wouldn’t have had to threaten very hard. She must’ve sat there with that bottle in her hands and tried to scrape enough courage together to throw it on me. She couldn’t.

This would not break me. My sword might snap, but I couldn’t. I would win. I would get out of here. I would live. I would see the people I loved again.

This wasn’t my first rodeo. I slipped into a quiet, cold calm. Voron’s voice murmured from my memory and I leaned on it like a crutch. “Exits first.”

“Yes. I remember.”

I bent in the water, trying to slide what was left of my sword into the sheath while staying afloat. I missed.

I f**king missed. I hadn’t missed in two decades.

“You were the target,” Ghastek said. “I’m an unfortunate bystander.”

“It looks like that.” I finally managed to slip Slayer’s stump into the sheath.

“Where are we?”

“I have no idea.”

“He knew we would be teleported here. He knew, and he did nothing to stop my teleportation,” Ghastek said.

“It appears d’Ambray believes you’re expendable.”

Ghastek looked at me for a long moment. A muscle in his face jerked. With a guttural snarl, Ghastek punched the water. “That’s it. That’s f**king it!”

Uh-oh. In all the time I’d interacted with Ghastek, he never swore. Ever. The “premier” Master of the Dead was about to throw a tantrum. I braced myself.

“He comes into my city, he throws away my people, he orders me around like I’m his servant and now this? How dare he!”

I sighed. “How dare he!” came out. Could “Does he know who I am?” be far behind?

“I’m not some illiterate he can push around. I won’t be treated this way. I worked too damn hard, for years. Years! Years of study and that f**king Neanderthal comes in and waves his arms.” Ghastek skewed his face into a grimace. He was probably aiming to impersonate Hugh, but he mostly succeeded in looking extremely constipated. “Ooo, I’m Hugh d’Ambray, I’m starting a war!”

Laughing right now was a really bad idea. I had to conserve the energy.

“A war I’ve been trying years to avoid. Years!”

He kept saying that.

“Does he think it’s easy to negotiate with violent lunatics, who can’t understand elementary concepts?”

Good to know where we stood with him.

“I won’t tolerate it. Landon Nez will hear about this.”

Landon Nez was likely in charge of the Masters of the Dead. My father liked to divide his delegated authority. Hugh ran the Iron Dogs, the military branch. Someone had to run the People, the research branch. It was a position with a lot of turnover. Landon Nez must be the latest.

“Troglodyte. Dimwit. Degenerate!” Curses spilled out of Ghastek. “When I get out of here, I’ll throw every vampire at my disposal at him until they drain him dry. Then I’ll cut him to pieces and set his disemboweled body on fire!”

“You may have to get in line.”

He finally remembered I was there. “What?”

“I’ll give you a piece of Hugh to play with when I’m done.”

He didn’t appear to have heard me. “Nobody does that to me! I’ll rip his heart out. Does he know who I am?”

“Okay,” I told him. “Get it all out of your system.”

Ghastek dissolved into a torrent of obscenities.

I turned away. We had to get out of this mess and I had to check the place for the possible exit routes.

The grate above us was a pale color that usually meant the metal contained silver. Above the grate a shaft, about twenty feet across, rose a hundred feet straight up. Blue feylanterns thrust from the walls at regular intervals, illuminating the bricks. Too sheer to climb.

The grate itself consisted of inch-wide bars set in a crisscrossed pattern. Usually grates like this had crossbars that were welded or locked in by swaging, but this one showed no seams at all. It had to have been custom made specifically for this shaft.

The ends of the bars disappeared into the wall. I kicked to propel myself up, stretched, and caught the grate with my fingers. So far so good. I brought my legs up and kicked the grate with all my strength. Not just solid. Immovable. Well, at least the holes between the bars weren’t tiny.

I shrugged off my jacket, stuck one sleeve through the grate, and tied it to the other sleeve. Good enough.

I took a deep breath and dove into the murky water. Not cold, but not especially warm either. Evdokia’s sweater would buy me some time. Wool kept you warm even when wet. I swam down along the wall. Darkness and bricks. No secret passages, no tunnels, no pipes with covers that could be pried loose.

Blood pounded in my ears. I had to turn back or I’d run out of air. I did a one-eighty and kicked for the surface. Above me the liquid sky promised light and air. I kicked harder. My lungs screamed for oxygen.

I broke the surface and gulped down air.

“. . . does he think he is?”

This was a prison cell meant to hold a shapeshifter. The silver in the bars would keep them from screwing with it. The water was too deep to kick off the bottom and try to ram the grate. Even if I somehow managed to pry the bars of the grate loose, which wasn’t bloody likely, the grate would fall on us and its sheer weight would drown us. My mind served a nightmarish view of the grate landing on me and pushing me deep into the dark water. No thanks.

The lanterns just added insult to injury. You could see exactly how hopeless the situation was.

You want to be treated like an animal, I’ll treat you like one. Thanks, Hugh. So glad to know you care.

I could do this. I’d trained all my life for it.

Ghastek had fallen silent.

“I don’t suppose that fancy uniform comes with a flotation device?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“A girl can hope.” I dove down and untied the laces on my left boot. The right boot followed. I surfaced to grab some air.

“What are you doing?” Ghastek asked.

“Lightening the load.” I dove, carefully pulled off my left boot, surfaced, caught the grate, and looped the shoelaces over the bar. I tied a knot and left the boot suspended, then did the same with the right boot. “I’ll get tired in an hour or two and I’ll need the shoes if we get out of here.”

I pulled off my belt, threaded it through the bars, and locked it into a loop. Ghastek raised his eyebrows. I thrust my arm through the loop and held on to the grate. The belt kept me in place without treading water.

Ghastek’s face fell. “How long do you think he’ll keep us here?”

“I have no idea.”

He sighed and began stripping off his boots.

• • •

I HUNG MOTIONLESS in the water. Time crawled by. I had no idea how long we’d been here. We had taken turns diving to search our surroundings but found no exit. Eventually we stopped. Sometime while we were diving, the magic wave ended. Now four dim electric lamps lit the shaft. The light, dim and watery, felt oppressive, just another form of torture.

We’d used Ghastek’s jacket and his belt to fashion two loops to hold him upright. With two supports each, we would be able to sleep. Small comfort, but it was something.

A while ago my mouth had gone dry and I had drunk a little from my canteen and passed it to Ghastek.

“Do you always carry a canteen?”

“It’s force of habit.” You could survive many things as long as you had a canteen and a knife.

He had taken a swallow and passed it back. “What happens when we run out of water?”

“We drink this.” I’d nodded at the dark water flooding the shaft.

“It doesn’t seem clean, and even if it is, it won’t stay that way for long.”

“People dying of thirst can’t be choosers.”

We hung in the water.

“What did you do with Nataraja?” I asked.

Ghastek blinked, startled.

“I was always curious. He just kind of disappeared.”

Ghastek sighed.

“We’re not going anywhere for a while,” I told him.

He raised his gaze to the ceiling, pondered it, and shrugged. “Why not? Nataraja was always fond of hands-off management. I never understood why he was placed in charge in the first place. He looked impressive but had very little to do with the actual function of the office. I oversaw research and development, and Mulradin handled the financial aspects. A year ago Nataraja’s behavior became increasingly erratic. He wandered around, mumbling to himself. He killed that monstrosity he kept as a pet.”

“Wiggles? His giant snake?”

“Yes. A journeyman found sections of her strewn throughout the upper floor. A report was made to the main office. A high-ranking member of the Golden Legion arrived and conducted some interviews. Nataraja disappeared. We were told he was recalled.”