Stray Magic Read online

  He looked up, his headlights alternating red to blue, washing the dark bedroom in an ethereal glow. More tears streaked his cheeks. “They killed Ambrosius,” he said. “Two hundred and seventy-eight years had he been mine. A lover in life and death, he shared my bed for forty years before our attentions turned elsewhere. He was beautiful.”

  “I’m sorry.” The dreaded platitude slipped out before I could stop it.

  “Six are gone. Please, Shiloh.”

  I’d ponder the revelation of Tennyson’s male lover another time. I crossed the bedroom and stopped an arm’s reach away, strengthening the grip of our wish tether with proximity. I ignored the bone-deep chill and head-aching spice of his emotional output, and I focused on him. Braced myself for was about to happen. “Make a wish, Tennyson,” I said. “Be specific.”

  “I wish . . .” He grimaced, as though the words tasted like shit on his tongue. “I wish for you to bear the burden of my emotions for the next quarter hour.”

  Our tether shimmered and glowed red, an intangible bond he couldn’t see or feel. The power of his request settled bone-deep, and the magic of the djinn was forced to comply to the wish of he who held me in his grip. I licked my lips, mouth suddenly dry, needing to speak the final words aloud and seal the wish.

  “Granted,” I said hoarsely.

  The tether pulsed as my magic fed toward him, and then reversed course to send the weight of his emotions right back at me like a heat-seeking missile. I stumbled backward from the blow, until my knees hit the bed and I dropped into a sitting position. My vision blurred. My stomach twisted and churned. I sobbed out loud, tears falling, as the memories began.

  A nimble blond man in breeches and a waistcoat, rosy-cheeked and delicate-boned, smiles at me with devotion in his eyes. Bluest eyes open wide and he takes me into his body as no one else has—as I have never wanted before. Then he shrieks in agony and fright—I feel the silver in his flesh, taste the blood welling in his mouth, know his certainty of death. I am heartbroken by it. Ambrosius, we have loved each other.

  A raven-haired man in a World War I uniform bares his fangs and then winks in greeting. He’s a free spirit, left to die on the German front by his retreating platoon, and I can’t bear to let this gentle soul die. He accepts my gift willingly. We are good friends, Leonardo and me. He feels every draw of the saw’s blade as chunks of flesh are removed over a matter of minutes. Silver floods his body, and I mourn another death I cannot prevent.

  Three woman, another man. Four more faces, four more histories. Four more gruesome, painful deaths that rend my soul with their losses.

  I curled into a ball, hugging my knees to my chest, sobbing hard enough to choke on my own snot. Head throbbing, I gasped for breath, trying hard to push the grief away. No use. My chest ached, as though someone had reached in and crushed my heart into a bloody pulp, then filled the void with boiling oil. Empty. Used. Destroyed.

  And then, when I thought it was over, two more deaths came one after the other. The first was a girl with a crooked smile, turned at the time of the Spanish Civil War, and love for her rivaled only what I felt for Ambrosius. The second was a strapping young man of twenty, turned a mere six months ago. Both losses left another empty hole in my heart, a mark on my soul. My people were dying, being ripped away, and I was helpless to stop it.

  The last were murdered as horribly as the first, each death a white-hot spike to my psyche, a physical loss that fueled my wracking sobs. I’d failed them. Let them die. A mournful wail bubbled up, and then arms were around me. Someone tugged me close, cradled me in his arms, and I pressed my face into a cool neck. Sobbed onto equally cool skin, so familiar, but uncomforting.

  “Let them go, Shiloh,” Tennyson whispered, his breath puffing near my ear. “It’s over. They’re gone. Give them back.”

  “Can’t.” Why couldn’t I? I struggled to remember through the gauze of grief weighing down my brain. This was important. Hadn’t he wished for something? “Can’t undo a wish.”

  His embrace tightened. I fisted his shirt in my hands and held on, allowing someone I barely trusted and disliked on principle to hold me. I couldn’t seem to remember why I was crying. The memories were distanced from the grief, until the grief was a sentient thing. It beat me down and tore at me until I thought I might shatter.

  The bubble of loss I’d existed in for what seemed like days finally shrank and coalesced into a manageable nugget, pulling out of me and into itself. It shot away from me, across the tether, leaving me exhausted. Physically wrung out. Sniffling away errant tears.

  Tennyson groaned. Instead of letting go, he held me impossibly tighter. If I’d been fully human, his strength may have broken a few ribs. The spicy-cold sensation of his grief returned, surrounding me from the outside, rather than from within.

  “It’s over,” I said. The fifteen minutes was up. My voice was hoarse, my throat sore.

  His arms withdrew immediately, and my ribs thanked him. I sat up. His eyes were closed, his head tilted up. I didn’t move, and he didn’t shove me out of his lap. Sitting there felt strange, but I didn’t want to startle him. Not with his fangs peeking down from beneath his upper lip.

  He lowered his chin and opened his eyes. I expected the red glow, and instead, got his unhidden eyes and saw the color for the first time—brilliant coppery brown, like two shiny pennies. The whites of his eyes were tinged pink. Gratitude and determination flickered in those expressive orbs.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Your wish is my command.” The quip fell flatter than intended, but he didn’t seem to notice. I also realized I was looking him right in the eye and shifted my gaze to the bridge of his nose.

  “I was able to focus beyond the emotion. I’m uncertain as to the benefits of this information.”

  “What did you sense?”

  “I smelled many things, among them those herbs we found in Virginia. I smelled blood and sweat and tears, as well as something else. Farm smells, such as straw and baling rope and motor oil. I was uncertain, at first, but I also believe I smelled cow manure.”

  “Cow manure? How do you know?”

  “When you’ve lived many years in many different places, you come to learn the subtle differences in excrement. It is, after all, merely the product of what is ingested.”

  He had a point. “I don’t know how well that narrows down our choices, though. The Eastern Shore itself has dozens of bovine farms.”

  “Yes.” His gaze darted away a moment as he thought. “I heard a bell. Not quite a church bell, but large and rung in a similar fashion. I was able to get into Luisa’s head before she passed, and she distinctly recalled the face of one of her captors.”

  “Could you see him through her eyes?”

  “No. I have an impression of him through her senses, though. He is physically large, golden-skinned, midnight hair, with a scar above his left eyebrow in the shape of a sickle.”

  I tried hard to place such a description. “Doesn’t sound like anyone I know.”

  “I did not assume you would.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Doing so would just make my headache worse. “Be a nice coincidence, though, at this point.”

  “Yes.” He brought his gaze back to me, and I met his copper-penny eyes without fear. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh sure. My eyes are bloodshot, my nose is swollen, and I feel like my head is stuffed with wet sand. I’m great.”

  “Your sarcasm is not entertaining.”

  Oh, well, it entertained me quite a bit. “Look, I haven’t cried that hard in a long time. I wasn’t really expecting it to hit me like it did.”

  “I apologize for not properly preparing you.”

  “You’re a vampire with several centuries of emotional memories, Tennyson. I should have expected it.”

  A sharp knock on the door preceded it opening. I tumbled out of Tennyson’s lap and hit my knees. Okay, so my balance wasn’t quite back. Novak filled the doorway, thick arms cros
sed, silent anger radiating.

  Tennyson stood and offered me his hand. I let him pull me to my feet. The tether flickered on the edges of my vision—two more wishes.

  “Well, you aren’t dead,” Novak said to me. “You get anything useful?”

  I made use of the dresser’s box of tissues while Tennyson repeated what he’d learned. By the time I could breathe properly through my nose, Novak seemed at least partially convinced my decision had been a good one. Not that he’d ever admit it. But he looked less ready to rip Tennyson’s head off with his bare hands, and that was something, at least.

  “I’ll get K.I.M. working on a list of cow farms and slaughterhouses on the—you get any sense of distance from here?” Novak asked.

  Tennyson tilted his head to the side, thinking. “Distance is difficult to judge based on a telepathic link. However, I would place them within five hundred miles.” It didn’t narrow our search grid down by a whole lot.

  “If they were practicing locally with Piotr,” I said, “it stands to reason they’d be in the area. And there are plenty of cow farms to pick from in Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware.”

  “Yeah.” Novak gave me a critical stare. “Speaking of nearby, once you guys are ready, Kathleen assigned you to interrogate the two semi-locals on our list.”

  “Semi-locals?”

  “Nathan Fowler is a security systems specialist out of Baltimore, and James Caine is a building contractor in Bowie. Julius used both of them to get this house up to snuff.”

  “So calling them isn’t exactly out of the ordinary.” Unless Julius put them into contact with the person who’d paid him off. Now I wanted to talk to them both very, very much.

  “Maybe, maybe not. I don’t recall any new installations last June, so why so many phone calls?”

  “Good point. Does everyone know?”

  Novak frowned. “About these two? Yeah.”

  “About the wishes, Novak,” I said, glaring.

  “No. I said the vampire needed to meditate because he could feel his people.” He gave me a dry look. “If I’d said the word wish if front of your mother, she’d have come up here screaming like a banshee.”

  And likely armed with a solid weapon.

  “So no—I didn’t tell anyone. But I am curious: how come he could suddenly feel them again?” Novak asked.

  “Whoever had them wanted me to feel them die,” Tennyson replied steadily. He’d completely regained his composure, though his face remained paler than usual. “I was lost in their agony, too lost to concentrate. It was the reason Shiloh offered the wish. I was able to concentrate through the pain and grief and glean what little I did.”

  A fraction more of Novak’s loathing melted away. The large incubus looked at me with something very close to respect in his dark face. “Big risk.”

  “It paid off,” I said. So far, so good. And no one had to remind anyone else that I still owed the vampire Master two wishes.

  “I must contact my other people,” Tennyson said. “Drayden needs to know the status of our missing. One of them was his.”

  “Tennyson, do you have a way to contact the other Masters and find out if their missing have been killed, too?” I needed to know if this was going on across the board, or if Tennyson alone had been targeted. Instincts said the latter, but I couldn’t yet discount the former.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Bless it, yes or no!”

  Okay, so the stress was getting to me. But I needed some friggin’ straight answers, not this stupid vampires-versus-humans crap.

  His copper eyes fixed on me, glittering sparks of red. Good, I’d gotten his dander up. “Am I guaranteed that no devices in this compound will attempt to trace the telephone numbers I call?”

  “Yes.” We had equipment set up to handle that sort of spying, but I didn’t tell him so. He was a guest in our compound. He didn’t need a pencil drawing of our security precautions, and I’d just given him my word we wouldn’t betray his secrecy. “Make your calls. We’ve got travel plans to finalize. Come downstairs when you’re ready.”

  I shooed Novak out the door. Downstairs was about as far from Tennyson as I could physically get with our magic wish tether in place. I could definitely do without any more pain today, thank you very much. No more for the rest of the year would be ideal.

  Novak went into the hall. I reached back to pull the door shut behind me and looked up long enough to catch Tennyson’s gaze. His carefully schooled control had fractured, allowing hints of grief to peek through. I didn’t fully understand vampires, or the bonds they forged with those they turned. I never thought of them as having feelings. Emotions, sure—rage and lust and conceit and passion—but not feelings. Feelings that could be crushed when one of their own died.

  I never imaged a vampire could grieve.

  “Shiloh,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “I will not abuse your trust by taking advantage of my other wishes. You have my word.”

  I hadn’t expected such a promise.

  In some ways, Tennyson’s wish had been selfish, but the fact that he made a wish at all broke all known theories about how djinn magic works. He shouldn’t have managed it. Perhaps the rules did not apply. It wasn’t as though the wish had been against my will.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Hold on to them, though. Might come in handy before this mess is completely cleaned up.”

  “Indeed.” A muscle below his left eye twitched. “May I ask you a question?”

  “Sure, but I reserve the right not to answer it.”

  He listed his head in that annoying way of his. “Who is Kress?”

  A flush of shame and anger rose from deep in my guts. I’d so break Novak’s nose for saying that name out loud. In some traditions of magic, a name meant power over a person. In the realm of past mistakes and idiotic failures, a name held that same power. Only it turned us into weak emotional blobs we’d otherwise not be reduced to. Kress was one of those names for me.

  “A mistake I paid dearly for,” I choked out. “Years ago, and I’m not airing that laundry today. No, make that ever.”

  “He hurt you.”

  “What part of ‘not talking about it’ didn’t connect for you? Now make your godsdamned calls.”

  I stepped out and slammed the door shut. My shaking knees carried me down the hall to the stairs, where I leaned on the banister for a moment, urging my body to stop trembling. No use. The adrenaline was going. Could he feel it the way I felt his emotional spikes? I hoped so. I hope he choked on my shame and fear.

  Bastard.

  His voice whispered through my head so softly I thought I’d imagined it. Had he learned to stop shouting in my brain? Did it matter? I wanted to be angry with him. I didn’t want him to tell me he was sorry.

  Chapter 15

  Two hours later, Jaxon was driving us over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge toward sunset. We were twenty minutes or so from Bowie, Maryland, and the home of James Caine. Tennyson was stuffed in the far rear compartment of the Element, safe from the lowering sun’s golden rays. The russet orb nearly touched the horizon. It should set completely by the time we found Caine’s residence.

  I glared ahead at the sun and its mocking brightness. We needed a little brightness on our side, maybe even a tiny bit of good luck.

  While Tennyson’s phone calls told us none of the other missing vampires had been killed—at least, we assumed, since their Masters hadn’t felt them die—Drayden’s were growing increasingly restless. The line was going on their fourth night in Myrtle’s Acres, stuffed into trailers like undead sardines, and local authorities had been stretched to their breaking point. A snapping twig could set off a massacre.

  My half-baked suggestion that Tennyson consider moving his people was met with a glower and a growl. He knew the fragility of the situation. Time was short.

  On the heels of that exchange, Kathleen brought up a just-filed coroner’s report for Baltimore County. Nathan Fowler had been found dead in his home, the victim of a poison
ous spider bite. The venom was unknown at the time of the report. I could guess how painfully the man had died.

  Scratch one more potential suspect off the list. It also made locating the others much more urgent. So we split up as planned and left Mom at home to research cow farms and spider spells.

  And to think her life two days ago consisted of reading mystery novels and playing bridge once a week.

  Jaxon impressed me for the entire drive west by keeping his mouth shut. He hadn’t asked about what went on upstairs, even though he had to be champing at the bit for dirt. He knew Novak was in on the secret, which had to rankle. Jaxon and I kept few secrets from each other.

  “Why are we moving so slowly on a multilane highway?” Tennyson asked from the rear.

  “Rush hour,” I replied. Our westbound lanes weren’t as congested as the eastbound traffic heading home from work in the nearby cities, but we still couldn’t manage much above forty miles an hour. Maybe twenty minutes to Bowie was overstating it a little.

  My cell rang. It was the HQ line. “Harrison,” I said.

  “It’s me.” Mom. “Your computer produced something you may find interesting.”

  “You could have had K.I.M. send it to my phone.”

  “Well, yes, if I knew how to do that, I would have. Jaxon only gave me a handful of rudimentary commands.” She had a point. “Anyway, it’s about the werewolf couple who had three children.”

  “Hold on a second.” I set the Raspberry to speaker and turned up the volume a notch. “Okay, go ahead.”

  “As I was saying,” she continued with a hint of put-upon-ness in her tone, “the werewolf pair from Sacramento, Raymond and Alice Anderson, had three children under the age of four who died. The official police report stated carbon monoxide poisoning, even though both parents were home at the time and suffered no ill effects. And as you know, Pack law forbids autopsies.”