Karen Chance - [Cassandra Palmer 03] Read online

  He jerked a thumb at the nearest gargoyle, which had a feline head that contrasted oddly with a lumpy, reptilian body. “You think we could hurt them?”

  “I think the bunch I used to run with could.”

  One day in particular came to mind. A couple of drug dealers, who had set up shop in the bottom floor of our building, had decided they could do without additional squatters. They burst in one morning after Tami went to work. I’d been babysitting Lucy, an eleven-year-old empath, and Paolo, a twelve-year-old Were who had been abandoned by his pack. I never knew why, because he hardly spoke the whole time he was with us, which wasn’t long. We found his mangled body a couple of weeks later, after he fled our protection in advance of the full moon. The Weres had been smart enough not to come in after him, and waited until he left. The dealers weren’t so wise.

  Not that they had a chance to find out what even a young Were can do. Lucy had been home with me for a reason. Most of the kids who ended up at Tami’s magical halfway house held things together pretty well for a while. They tried to fit in and avoid calling attention to themselves while they figured out how things worked, so they wouldn’t screw up and be sent away yet again. But something always set them off sooner or later, usually after they’d been there long enough to start to relax.

  When they finally lowered their defenses, it all spilled out: rage at the condition that made them a pariah from birth, pain that the people they loved had turned on them, terror that any minute they’d be caught and dragged back to the special schools that were more like jails. They were supposed to stay there until they were certified safe, as no threat to the magical or non-magical communities. Most would never leave.

  Tami had thought that the breakdowns were positive, letting the kids get it out of their systems and start to heal. Only none of them had previously involved an empath. Especially one who could not only read emotions, but could project and magnify them.

  The other kids had fled, off to find somewhere, anywhere, else to be until it wore off. Tami had been frantic, needing to go to work as she was virtually our only income, but not daring to leave Lucy alone in that state. I’d volunteered to stay with her because she seemed to find being around me soothing. After a childhood monitoring my emotions at Tony’s, I didn’t project as much as most people. But that day, it hadn’t made a difference.

  I’d been watching the door with steadily mounting panic as wave after wave of emotion crashed into me, most of it too close to what I dealt with every day to be easily shrugged off. Paolo, who had stayed behind because he was trying to avoid leaving scent trails for his pack, had been almost literally climbing the walls. And we both had shields.

  When they burst in, the dealers ran straight into the wall of pain Lucy had been building all afternoon. The feelings she’d suppressed since her family had dropped her off at her new “school,” then driven away and never come back, had all spilled over. And her talent had magnified them a few hundred times. Instead of frightening us or whatever the men had planned, they ended up shooting each other to death in a fit of someone else’s rage.

  Jesse was watching me narrowly. “You think we’re the monsters, don’t you?”

  I blinked at him. I’d almost forgotten he was there. I didn’t let myself think about Tami’s too often, and it felt odd to do it now. “I have a broader definition of normal than most people,” I finally said. “But you know as well as I do that having you here could cause…some issues.”

  Jesse stuck his chin out. “Astrid’s a null,” he said sullenly.

  “Astrid?”

  “The girl with the kid.”

  “Ah.” So that was why Françoise had gone to the far side of the stage to work her spell. Nulls exerted a dampening field on magic for a space around them. For the stronger, it could be up to a city block in size; for the weaker, it was much smaller. But even a low-level null would have interfered if she was close.

  “That’s how she got away, after she found out about the kid. They couldn’t track her.”

  I nodded. Nulls weren’t automatically incarcerated like some mages with malfunctioning magic, because they weren’t considered a threat. But if Astrid had been discovered pregnant, a lot of pressure would have been put on her to terminate it, so as not to pass malfunctioning genes along. No wonder she’d run. And nulls were damn hard to find when they didn’t want to be.

  Tami was a low-level null herself, which had helped her to keep the Misfits safe and the chaos to a minimum, at least when she was at home. And her abilities ensured that any runaways she took in didn’t have to worry about registering on a magical tracking spell. Which made it strange that, after so many years, the mages had caught up with her now.

  “Okay. I’m relieved to hear that.” And I was. Astrid’s presence might help tone things down, but she couldn’t be everywhere, and there were seven kids to watch besides the baby. I needed to know what I was taking on. “But we both know that not everyone here is a null.”

  Jesse kicked concrete with his heel and said nothing. “Jesse.”

  “I’m a fluke, okay?” he blurted, in the same tone someone might once have used to say “leper.”

  “That doesn’t tell me much.” “Fluke” is a catchall term for magical oddities dealing with what humans call luck. Not good luck, not bad luck, just…luck.

  A famous example, even among norms, is the odd experience of the French writer Émile Deschamps. In 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger, Monsieur de Fortgibu, at a Paris restaurant. Ten years later, he saw plum pudding on the menu of another establishment and tried to order some, only to have the waiter tell him that the last dish had just been served, to a customer who turned out to be de Fortgibu. Much later, in 1832, Deschamps was once again offered plum pudding at a restaurant. He laughingly told his friends that only de Fortgibu was missing to make the cycle complete—and a moment later de Fortgibu showed up.

  Of course, what the history books don’t say is that de Fortigbu was a fluke. His magic associated certain things with particular people, places or events. Every time he saw one of his cousins, for instance, she was wearing blue; the scent of oranges accompanied every visit to his favorite bookseller; and if he got within a few yards of Deschamps, pudding invariably appeared.

  Most humans claimed that events like these were mere coincidence. Magical healers, on the other hand, speculated that they were somehow linked to memory. Images of people or places are stored in everyone’s brain in connection with some type of sensory data. A flower a man’s grandmother liked, for example, might make him think of her whenever he saw one. Being a mage, de Fortgibu had simply carried that to a new level: his malfunctioning magic insured that when one cue appeared, the other also did.

  But not all flukes had magic that manifested itself in the slightly batty but mostly nonthreatening way of de Fortgibu’s. One young man caused massive undertows whenever he got within five miles of the shore and had to be banned from any access to the beach. Another caused seismic activity and was restricted from going anywhere near an active fault line. That particular group of flukes was memorable enough to deserve their own name: jinx.

  A jinx was basically a walking Murphy’s Law, with “accidents” caused by out-of-control power cropping up on a regular basis. And unlike the random stuff that most flukes caused, a jinx’s actions were invariably harmful. There was a time, a few hundred years back, when they’d been killed on sight. I really, really hoped that wasn’t what I was dealing with here. Not that Jesse was likely to admit it, if it was.

  “How strong are you?” A jinx of any type was dangerous, but a strong one would be a walking disaster. Literally.

  “Not strong,” he assured me fervently. “Not strong at all! And I’m the only one. The others are…pretty harmless.”

  “Uh-huh.” None of the kids, most of whom appeared to be around seven or eight, had looked like a threat. But, then, neither had Lucy. “Define ‘pretty harmless.’”

  “If you’re gonna thr
ow me out, just do it!” Jesse said furiously. “But the others are okay. I’ll clear out if you’ll let them—”

  “I didn’t say I wanted you to leave! I just want to know what I’m dealing with here.”

  Magical children didn’t fall through the cracks for no reason. It was almost a certainty that the kids all had some kind of talent that made them persona non grata in the magical community. Yet Jesse would admit only to a null, a fluke and a seer, swearing that the other five were just scrims, the current PC term for mages with little ability. I had my doubts. Scrims formed the largest population of magical runaways, but Tami hadn’t concentrated on them when I knew her because they didn’t have handicaps that could benefit from a null’s calming influence. They could also pass for norms, avoiding the magical community and its laws altogether if they chose. That was not an option for people like Lucy.

  But doubts or no, I couldn’t force him to tell me the truth. And with Astrid around, hopefully it wouldn’t matter anyway. Her power should negate the kids’ abilities, whatever they were, as long as they stayed close. Giving me time to find out what had happened to Tami.

  I decided to change the subject. “How did the mages find you?”

  Jesse shook his head. “I don’t know. They just busted in one morning and Tami screamed at us to run. Astrid tried to drain them, but there were too many and they had guns. She didn’t stand a chance.”

  “But she got away.”

  “’Cause they didn’t want her. They were all about Tami. They hardly even looked at the rest of us until they caught her.”

  “Why?”

  Jesse fidgeted with the sleeves on his god-awful pea green sweatshirt. “Uh, I don’t know?”

  “That sentence would work a lot better without the question mark at the end,” I said dryly.

  When he stubbornly stayed silent, I sighed and gave in—for the moment. If and when he learned to trust me, his memory might improve. Any lies now would only make it that much harder for him to admit the truth later.

  “I’ll see if I can find out what happened to Tami,” I told him. “I know a few people who may be able to tell me if the Circle has her.” Jesse’s expression clearly said that he didn’t give much for my chances. Knowing the Circle, neither did I.

  We got up to rejoin the others, but were stopped at the door by a small parade. A line of little bird bodies was climbing out of a large trash can and slowly lurching inside. They’d obviously been in the trash for good reason: no feathers, skin or even flesh was in evidence, just brittle bones held together by cartilage and, apparently, thin air.

  Jesse said a word I’d have preferred he didn’t know at his age, and looked at me fearfully. “He doesn’t do it all the time, only when the baby’s fussy or…or something.”

  I followed the trail of pigeon corpses inside, where they joined a bunch of others, who were doing an odd shuffling motion on the floor around Miranda. I finally realized it was supposed to be a dance. The baby was happily waving a sauce-covered spoon at them, while a maybe eight-year-old Asian boy grinned proudly.

  “Necromancer?” I asked softly.

  Jesse scuffed a shoe over the now quite filthy tile. “I forgot about him.”

  “Uh-huh.” I wondered what else he’d “forgotten.”

  I explained the situation as well as I could to Miranda. “Yesss, okay,” she hissed, wiping a lump of sauce off the baby’s chin. “Yum, yum, yum.” The little girl burbled at her and Miranda bared her fangs in the closest she could get to a smile. I gave up.

  I cautioned Jesse to see that everyone stayed out of sight and close enough to Astrid to decrease the likelihood of any accidents. Then I went looking for my partner. I needed to clear a few things off my to-do list before I had to start keeping it in volumes.

  Chapter 7

  Finding Pritkin wasn’t difficult. He and one of his buddies were where they’d been most of the week—holed up a storeroom in the lower levels of Dante’s, poring over ancient tomes. When I opened the door, he looked up from a giant volume with the trapped expression of a hunted animal. His hair, which usually defied the laws of physics, was hanging in dispirited clumps and a smear of red decorated his forehead and one cheek, courtesy of the book’s disintegrating leather binding. I’d gotten the impression that research wasn’t his favorite thing. Maybe because he couldn’t beat up the books.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “Show was canceled.”

  Nick looked up from the middle of a ring of books, scrolls and, incongruously, a modern laptop. He appeared harmless, a bespectacled redhead with so many freckles that he almost had a tan, his hands and feet too big for the rest of him, like a Great Dane puppy. But the gangly young man was actually a mage, and since he was a friend of Pritkin’s, he was probably a lot more dangerous than he looked.

  He took in my ensemble, which had settled on a watery gray afternoon. A few random orange blossoms scattered across the silk intermittently, as if blown by gusts of wind. It looked a little tired. “Any particular reason?”

  “It’s raining.”

  Nick’s eyebrows drew together. “I thought you were showing in the ballroom.”

  “Frogs,” I clarified.

  The small doll-like creature perched on a stack of books at Nick’s elbow finally bothered to acknowledge my presence. “Did you say frogs?”

  “Kinda put a damper on things.”

  Nick glanced at Pritkin, who sighed. “Go.” Nick didn’t need to be told twice. Maybe he was tired of research, too.

  His diminutive companion rolled her eyes and went back to ostentatiously ignoring me. The pixie, named Radella, was a liaison from the Dark Fey king. By “pixie” I mean a tiny, foul-tempered creature who made even Pritkin look diplomatic, and by “liaison” I mean spy. She was here to do two things: drag Françoise back into slavery and make sure I didn’t cheat on the deal I’d cut with her king. He wanted the Codex, too, and figured I was the gal to get it for him. The pixie looked like she was starting to have her doubts.

  She wasn’t the only one. I’d agreed to the king’s proposal for a number of reasons. I’d been in his territory and under his control, so saying no might have been very unhealthy. I’d needed room and board for a friend, a vampire named Tomas, in the one place where even the Senate’s long arms couldn’t reach. And the king had promised me help in solving the biggest riddle of my life.

  Tony had always avoided telling me anything about my parents. My guess was that he’d assumed I might be a little upset if I learned about the car bomb he’d used to kill them, thereby allowing him to keep my talents all to himself. Or maybe he’d just felt like being a bastard. He always had liked combining business with pleasure.

  It was the same vindictiveness that had led him to decide that merely killing my father wasn’t good enough. He’d been an employee of Tony’s, one of the humans kept around to manage things in daylight, but he’d refused to hand me over when ordered. And no one ever told the boss no and got away with it. So Tony paid a mage to construct a magical trap for my father’s spirit, allowing him to continue the torment from beyond the grave.

  I hoped to pry Tony’s trophy from his cold dead fingers someday, but that required finding him first. And my last trip into Faerie had proven that I was no match for the Fey. Without the dark king’s help, I would never get anywhere near the bolt-hole Tony had found for himself. And for some reason, the king wanted the Codex as much as I did. A fact that worried me more than a little whenever I let myself think about it.

  “What happened to your neck?” Pritkin demanded.

  My hand went to the scarf I’d tied over the puncture marks. One edge of the gauze pad I’d put over the wound was sticking out above the chiffon. Trust Pritkin to notice, and to comment. “Cut myself shaving.”

  “Very funny. What happened?”

  I hesitated, trying to think up a good lie, and Pritkin snorted. I sighed. “Mircea happened.”

  “Where is he?” Pritkin was halfway
to his feet before I shook my head.

  “Relax. I went to him, not vice versa.”

  “You went to him? Why?!”

  My fingers made patterns in the dust on a nearby book’s cover. The skin below was old and flaking, and looked vaguely reptilian. I pulled my hand away and resisted an impulse to wipe it on my skirts. “I accidentally shifted.”

  “How do you accidentally—”

  “Because it’s getting worse!” I tried to read his scribbled notes, but they were in some language I didn’t know. “Any luck?”

  “No.” He saw my expression. “I told you this could take some time.”

  “And what am I supposed to do in the meantime? I’m sick of waiting tables and doing fill-in work for Casanova. Some days I feel like I’m going out of my mind!”

  “Going?” the pixie muttered.

  Pritkin was staring at the stacks of books as if they’d just insulted his mother. He finally pulled out a huge blue one from the bottom of a pile. “You aren’t in any immediate danger, as long as you don’t have any more ‘accidents’ involving Mircea.”

  “And what about him?” I demanded. “It’s getting worse.”

  “He’s a master vampire. He can take it.”

  Instead of replying, I reached across the table to remove the top from the small white pot by Pritkin’s elbow and looked pointedly inside. The inch of liquid it held was faintly green, with a pleasing floral scent. Chrysanthemum, as a guess. I glanced up to see him giving me the evil eye.

  “Don’t think I don’t know it was you.”

  I’d had Miranda start replacing the black syrup he called coffee with something more organic two days ago, after the last time he got tanked on caffeine and bit my head off. I was pretty sure he was cheating, but I didn’t call him on it. I honestly didn’t think he could survive without his daily fix—or, to be more accurate, that nobody could survive him without it.

  “You’re the best argument for decaf I’ve ever seen,” I said. “And, honestly, you don’t find anything weird about eating bean sprouts and tofu and drinking twelve pots of coffee a day—?”