Black Magic Sanction (58 page)

I shook my head, brow furrowed. Dropping back to where Jenks hovered, I fidgeted. Beyond the door were untold riches—my ticket to getting Trent, the coven, and Al off my case. Was I a thief if I was going to give it back? Did I care?

"Are you sure those cameras aren't recording?" I asked. Down at the end of the hallway, Jax huffed, and I tossed a strand of hair out of my eyes. "I feel like I'm being watched."

"This would be
easier
if it was
quiet,"
Nick said, and Ivy frowned. Nick took his fingers from the keypad and cracked his knuckles. A slip of pixy dust dropped down to lubricate the electrons as much as for luck, and Nick hit the big green button.

The red light on the pad went out, and the green one lit. There was a faint buzzing, and Nick grabbed the card out of the reader with jaunty swiftness and turned the handle. My gut clenched, but the twin doors opened silently. "QED," he said, gesturing for me to go first.

Ivy caught my shoulder. "In my family, that means quite easily dead. I'll go first." Giving Nick a mistrusting once-over, she went into the dark room. Fluorescent lights flicked on at her presence. It worried me, but it was unlikely they'd monitor the lights when there were other ways to detect people.

"It can't be this easy," I said as I followed her with Nick tight on my heels. Jax was with him, and Jenks slipped in an instant before the doors shut.

"Maybe because it isn't," Ivy said, and I stared at the blank walls of the large room.

"Where's the vault?" I asked, then turned to Nick. "Where's the freaking vault!"

"Right in front of you," he said, and I spun, in a really bad mood. "Rachel, where's the ley line?" he added, and frustrated, I hesitated.

"Uh, right here," I said, eyes going wide. "You don't think the way into the vault is... through the ever-after?" I asked, and Nick smiled deviously. "But you can't do that!"

It was a beautiful thought if it could be done, though. The perfect door. If the magnets were unpowered, the line wouldn't even come close and the door wouldn't even exist. Closing my eyes, I reached for the ley line, shocked when I found it, bent and running through the wall just as he'd said it might. A quiver went through me. Trent's dad had gone into the ever-after with my dad and come out, not bought a trip from someone. He could shift from reality to the ever-after and back using a ley line. And so could Trent, apparently. He must
really
not want me to know he could if he had risked everything last summer buying our way in and out of the ever-after.

Nick's smile was wide when I opened my eyes, and he pushed himself from the wall. "So where's the door?"

Heart pounding, I scanned the empty room. "Right in front of us. Let me pull up my second sight and see what's going on." Damn it, Nick knew witches couldn't do this.
But he thought I could?

It was weird, how the magnets had pulled the line deep into the earth. Weird, and really clever. But even that thought vanished when I brought my second sight up to find that instead of the expected rock and rubble of being underground, we were in an open space, with tall ceilings and flat floors, colorful banners, and the phantom sound of eighties music done instrumentally.

"Holy. Crap," I gasped, shocked when I recognized it. It was the demons' mall. Al had taken me here once when he was out of powered rock from Pompeii. My hand went to my throat as I saw the demons and familiars going about their business. I'd be unseen unless they used their own second sight. I was like a ghost, not really in the ever-after but just looking at it. I turned to the wall, blinking. It was gone, a coffeehouse catering to demons and familiars alike in its place.

"Whoa. Dudes," I said. "Ivy, you're not going to believe this. It's a mall." It was times like this that made me glad demons couldn't pop over to reality whenever they felt like it but had to be summoned. Nothing could stop them from looking, though.

Nick grunted, and I turned from the juxtaposed views of the wall and coffeehouse to see him, seemingly standing in the mall, oblivious to
demons
going past. Nick's aura was a lot darker than the last time I'd seen him. Jax, on his shoulder, was a spot of rainbows. "Can you get in?" Nick asked.

Feeling ill and disoriented from holding two visions of reality, I blinked, deciding that his black smut was a lot thicker. The mark that Al had given him was like a black hole, sucking in all the light around it, twin to the new one on his shoulder. Seeing him waiting for an answer, I nodded. "Probably." Witches couldn't shift realities by standing in a ley line, but I wasn't a witch.
Shit.

Nick bobbed his head. "There should be a panel on the other side. Just hit open. You've probably got thirty seconds to get me in so I can enter the code to disable the alarm."

"Alarm?" Ivy said, probably thinking that's why I looked sick. "You didn't say anything about that before."

He turned to her. "And you thought the vault was being hidden in a magnetic resonator. Roll with it, vamp. Or can't you function without a plan to blow your nose?"

"Uh, Rache?" Jenks interrupted, looking worried. Rainbows spilled from him, his aura falling like pixy dust. He knew what it might mean if I could do this, and I hoped he'd keep quiet about it.

"Just... let me see," I said, then faced the blank wall, shaking out my hands and trying to find a sense of calm. This wasn't like trying to jump from one line to another. I simply wanted to slip into the ever-after through a ley line. Just go into the ever-after, walk three paces, then get out of the line. Right into a demon coffeehouse. Great. And hope that when I reappear in reality, I'm in an open room and not buried in dirt. If Trent could do it, maybe I could. I'd never be trapped in the ever-after again, either, provided I could find a ley line.

"Rachel," Nick said, bending close. "There is a room behind the wall. Why have a lock on an empty room? I trust you. You can do this."

I eyed him and his smutty aura, and he took his hand off me. How come he knew I was different? This didn't smell good at all.

But closing my eyes, I strengthened my second sight. Once more, the red-tinted burnt amber smell enfolded me. The ley line ran right through the wall. Best to take two steps maybe.

"Rachel?"

"I'm fine, Ivy," I said, my voice harsher than I had intended. "Jenks, don't even think about it."
Just do it,
I thought, and then I stepped into the line and let it take me.

The smell hit me, jerking my eyes open. Noise jangled, a hundred conversations, arguments, loud gossip. Shit, I'd done it. I didn't know if I should be happy or depressed. It sounded like Takata being piped in. It was hot, and sweat threatened to break out. Pushing my hair back, I took a shallow breath. I was what I was. The door to the coffeehouse was ahead of me, THE COFFEE VAULT painted on it in big silver letters.
You ve got to be kidding.
It was too obvious to ignore. Grasping the handle, I pushed open the door and went in.

Two demons looked up, the laughter of their joke still showing on their faces. Dressed in leisure suits I wouldn't be caught dead in, they looked me up and down, assessing how high I was in the familiar hierarchy. I felt naked without Al, and I gave them a bunny-eared kiss-kiss. "Hey, hi," I said, feeling stupid. "Just passing through." Damn it, I shouldn't be able to do this.

The better dressed of the two eyed me. "Who the hell do you belong

to?"

Ambivalent, I let the door shut behind me. There was a room mirroring this one in reality. I could sense it, like an unheard echo. "I'm Al's student. Nice to meetcha."

The second demon smacked the first on the shoulder. "See, I told you she was alive."

Alive?
I thought, wondering what the gossip had been. "Toodles," I said, blowing him a sarcastic kiss and stepping from the line and back into reality.

The noise cut off with a suddenness that almost hurt. The air was cooler. Dark. Black. In the corner, a shadow moved. Shit, something was in here!
Not a demon,
I told myself, panicking. They couldn't just slip into reality like that. Not like I could.
This is good, right?

Heart pounding, I backed up into the wall I'd just walked through. Not taking my eyes off the moving shadow, I fumbled, finding the light switch. Light flickered into existence, and I sighed. It had been me. The movement had only been me, my shadow reflecting off the ornate mirror propped against the wall.

Slowly my pulse eased. Before me, large racks held old clocks, locked metal boxes with faded index cards, and slatted crates. One side of the room held a huge chest freezer. Actually the entire room looked a lot like Nick's basement in a much higher tax bracket. If I was lucky, there wasn't a camera. I thought of the demons at their table, able to see me with their own second sight but unable to cross over, and I shivered. The Coffee Vault, indeed. At least I'd never be trapped in the ever-after again.

Spinning to the wall behind me, I found the thin lines of a door and the expected keypad. "Come on in, guys," I whispered, and hit the green button.

There was the hum of machinery, and I backed up. The two panels slid apart like the doors in a science-fiction movie to show Ivy, Nick, and Jenks, hovering with brow furrowed. "Rache?" Jenks questioned.

"We'll talk about it later," I said, and Ivy bumped Nick when he bent to pick up his stuff. Scowling, he caught himself and followed her in, immediately plugging his card into the panel.

"Cameras?" Ivy asked, scanning the room, and when negative wing chirps came from both Jenks and Jax, she went to the canvas display. "So this is Trent's basement," Ivy said as she started leafing through the hanging canvases, arranged like posters in a pagelike display. Nick made a satisfied grunt and pulled the card from the reader.

"We're good," he said, his gaze fixing on the picture Ivy had turned to. "That's it," he said, eyes eager as Ivy paused at a really small painting. It was hardly a foot by a foot, showing a dark background of snowy mountains and a castle, the foreground taken up by a satisfied-looking young man in a red robe and funny hat, fur around his collar and three downy feathers in his lapel. That the man looked like Trent was almost anticli-mactic.

"That's it?" Jenks said, landing on my shoulder as we eyed it. "It's not very big."

"Kinda ugly, too," I said, getting a funny feeling about this. I didn't want to say this was too easy, seeing as I'd used a door neither a witch nor a demon could open, but everything was going too well.

Nick was spreading a black silk cloth on the coffin-size freezer. "It's not the size, Jenks, it's how you use it," he said, smirking. "It doesn't need to be big if it looks like Trent."

Well, it did look like Trent. Jenks wasn't laughing, his hands on his hips as he moved out of the way while Ivy took the picture to Nick. "It stinks. Almost as bad as you, Rache," he accused.

"I smell?" I said, flushing.

Holding the canvas at the unpainted corners, Ivy frowned at him. "You were in the ever-after," she said, one shoulder lifting in a shrug, and I took a step back from them, feeling unclean. Great, I hadn't even noticed.

Oblivious, Nick carefully took the picture from Ivy, making a production out of rolling it up in the black cloth to put into the mailing tube he'd been carrying across his back like a sword. I couldn't help but sourly wonder if it was stamped and addressed to his latest girlfriend.

While the two of them discussed who was going to carry it, I unzipped my belt pack and brought out the hoof pick. I'd leave it here where Trent would be sure to find it. If he didn't make the connection that he was going to get the painting back, I might be in trouble.

Jenks joined me, and together we looked at the beautiful inlaid wood one last time before I set it on an open display case, bright with mirrors and lights. "I should have done this a long time ago," I said softly, wondering if I'd ever get my entire memory back. But who really remembered anything about being twelve?

"Oh my God," Jenks said, eying the statue next to it. It wasn't any bigger than he was, but I felt myself warm as I looked more closely. It was two men and a woman, buck naked, doing the nasty. At the same time. One in front, one in back. She looked like she was enjoying herself, though, ample breasts heaving and back arched, which kind of made it hard for the guy in back, but by his expression, he didn't care. They had pointy ears, the woman sporting a cute pageboy haircut and the men having hair past their shoulders, wild and feral.

"What is it?" I said, wanting to pick it up but feeling it might leave me sullied.

"Tink's dildo, you're asking me?" he said with a snort, but he didn't elaborate. Not even one rude gesture or comment. The unusual restraint was clear evidence of his depressed state.

"Ivy?" I called. This was too good not to share, timetable or not. "You gotta see this."

She came closer, Nick trailing behind as he capped the top of the tube the picture was now stashed in. "Whoa," she said, nose wrinkling. "Elf porn?"

"It's my ticket out of this life," Nick said, and Ivy grabbed his wrist when he reached for it.

"Hey!" I said as he twisted out of her grip, frowning at her. "We're not here to steal a statue. Didn't you learn anything from last time, Nick?"

Expression angry, he picked it up, the small statue fitting neatly in his palm. "I'm not walking out of here without something to show for it. And don't tell me you didn't expect me to help myself. That's the only reason I agreed to this, and you know it." His blue eyes were mocking, daring me to say anything. Just once, I wished I could be wrong.

Pissed, I barked, "Put it back!"

Jenks rose from the shelf, and Jax chimed out, "Uh, Nick? An alarm just went off."