Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic (Dowser Series) (23 page)

In the other corner, my sister cowered in a protection circle, though I wasn’t completely sure in that first glance if she wasn’t dead and the circle wasn’t actually a prison.

I turned and vomited bile all over the doorframe as Desmond and Kett brushed by me. Only a second or so had passed.

Sienna screamed. I looked up, still fighting my heaving stomach to see her scream again and press herself as far away from the oncoming wolves as the circle would let her. She raised her badly slashed forearms to cover her face. The wolves stopped before they crashed into her circle, then nosed around it.

Kandy was suddenly back at my side and urging me forward to the body in the pentagram, but I really didn’t want to see it. I wiped the spittle from my face, a sudden tenderness in my jawline calling my attention to the fact that I had a splitting headache — the instant kind you get from champagne, but far worse than I’d ever felt. Like my brain was bleeding.

Rusty was the bloody body sprawled in the pentagram.

Something had eaten his eyes out, as well as all the soft parts of his belly … and below —
 

I moaned and turned away to heave again. Nothing came out this time, but still my stomach tried again and again. A cool hand held my hair away from my fevered, drenched face. It felt good so I didn’t fight the touch.

As I straightened, using various parts of Kett as handholds, I was aware of Desmond and Kandy stepping away from Rusty’s body to cross to Sienna’s circle.

My body trembled with post-vomiting shakes. Maybe thirty seconds had passed.

“Can you break the circle, dowser?” Desmond asked over his shoulder.

Sienna raised her eyes from her hands and saw me. “Jade! Oh, God, Jade!” she screamed. “Please, please, Jade. Help me.”

I rushed toward her. Desmond stepped back, but Kett was there to block my way. “Is it a prison or a protection circle?” the vampire asked.

“What does it matter?” I hissed as I tried to dart around him.

“Did she close it herself or not?”

“Of course I closed it,” Sienna shrieked. “That thing … that thing was eating Rusty!”

Relief flooded through me. I know, weird timing, but if something else, some other creature was involved, then … “It wasn’t Rusty, Sienna? He wasn’t killing and —”

“No, it was him, Jade,” Sienna sobbed. “I didn’t know. He was drunk on the power. He tried to call something into being, but it was trapped in the pentagram with him. It ate him. When Rusty died, it … it faded away, but first it tried to get me. Jade, please.” Sienna’s terrified eyes darted around at the werewolves and the vampire. She didn’t need me to break the circle; she could do that herself. She was just too scared to do so.

A lot of things didn’t make sense, like why Rusty would have been in the pentagram in the first place instead of casting from safety, or how a being trapped there could have forced Sienna to slice her own forearms to create the protection circle. But I knew nothing about the dark side of blood magic, and I just saw my terrified sister and wanted to take her home. I held my hands out to her.

“Safe passage,” she said. It was an oddly formal request.

“I’ll take you home,” I answered.

“No, Jade. It’s them I’m worried about.” Sienna, not quite so terrified now, was looking beyond my shoulder. And, indeed, all the eyes on Sienna were glowing in a most intimidating way.

“I’m going to take my sister home,” I declared.

After a moment, Kett nodded his head. Desmond turned away with a growl.

Sienna sighed and scrubbed her foot across the edge of the circle. She’d sealed it in blood — her own, I imagined — for it to work. The blood smudged underneath her foot. The magic protecting her fell as she reached forward to grasp my hands.

Her magic felt odd. But then, I wasn’t sure I was exactly in tune with it anymore. I felt coated in the ‘unliving’ magic Rusty had been wielding. I didn’t want to think about Sienna cutting herself to inscribe a rudimentary but powerful protection circle. She must have been terrified and out of options. Blood magic was temperamental and addictive. A last resort. I was probably just picking up on the residual of that.

“We’ll have questions,” Kett said.
 

Once again, he sounded like he was standing too near me. I turned my head to find he was at least a couple of feet away, so maybe the room just had weird acoustics.

The vampire stared at me for a moment, then turned back to the body in the pentagram. The wolves and Kandy were sweeping the room, presumably for clues.

Sienna hadn’t moved out of the circle. “I’m scared, Jade,” she whispered.
 

I almost told her not to bother, that every ear in the room could hear her anyway. Instead, I squeezed her hands. They were cold. I couldn’t remember what Desmond had done with her sweater, and I’d wrapped the spellbook in her baby blanket and locked it in my office safe before I’d left the bakery. I had nothing to warm her with.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said. “Gran is on her way —”

“Tonight?” Sienna interrupted.

“Yeah, so it’ll be okay soon. Well, except for … except for —”

“Rusty.” Sienna spat the name like she was more disappointed than upset. I guess if my boyfriend had used me as a power boost, I wouldn’t be happy either.

“It’ll take us awhile to clear up here,” Kett called out as he fished what looked to be an iPad mini out of his invisible satchel. As he started shooting pictures of Rusty’s body with the device’s camera, I tried to not boggle at the idea of a tech-savvy vampire.

“Will they let me pass?” Sienna asked. She looked ready to open a vein to reform the circle.

“Yeah. They said so, didn’t they?”

“Jade, I … thank you for finding me.”

I smiled and loosened my hands from hers to pull my necklace off. I dropped it over Sienna’s head and neck, and she clasped it with surprise. I’d noticed she wasn’t wearing any trinkets. “There. That’s the best protection I can offer.”

I let go of the necklace. Instantly, I felt the sickening magic surrounding me dig a little deeper into my skin.

“Thank you,” Sienna said. She cast her eyes oddly to the ground. The gesture was similar to the deference the wolves used with Desmond, but it also looked like she might be hiding her thoughts. I was so overwhelmed and so over reading every little thing.

“I can’t stay here any longer,” I said, and Sienna dutifully stepped out of the circle. I quickly crossed back to the door with her trailing behind me. I couldn’t look at the body, and Sienna couldn’t look away.

“I have to get out of here,” I said to no one in particular, but it was Kett who responded by pressing a set of car keys into my hand. Sienna had shied away from him when he approached.

“All right to drive?” he asked.

“Once I get away from here.”

“I’ll call,” the vampire said, his eyes and frown now focused on the necklace around Sienna’s neck.

“We’ll be by later, dowser,” Desmond called after me.

But it was Sienna who looked back, not me, as I shouldered my way out of the door and away from the terrible magic as quickly as possible. Without the protection of the necklace, I was so nauseated I couldn’t think. Funny … I hadn’t even known what I’d made or was making as I collected those rings and their residual magic together. And now I could barely function without them around my neck.

“And who was that?” Sienna asked as we hit the stair landing.

“Who? Kett?” I had a feeling she’d been talking and asking questions all the way down the hall without me hearing her.

“No, all muscle and lots of trouble.”

“Desmond, Lord and Alpha of the West Coast North American Pack.” I said it without any of the humor the pompous title should inspire.

“Tasty,” Sienna said.

I was awed at her ability to prioritize. “Yeah, he’d say the same to you, right after you said ‘what big teeth you have’.”

“Oh, he’s a wolf.”
 

I shrugged. And breathed in deeply as we exited the warehouse. I noticed the malignant ward seemed to have dissipated as we crossed through the parking lot to the sidewalk. Sienna was still holding me like I might fall, and I shifted my arm behind her until we were both half hugging each other.

“Are you … are you going to be okay?” I asked, aware my question was premature, but childishly needing some assurance.

“Yeah … they seemed … cool,” Sienna answered.

“Who? The wolves and the vampire? Cool is not the word I would use.”

“Powerful then. It’s never a bad thing to have powerful friends,” Sienna said, her voice verging on wistful.

“They’re not my friends.”

“They had your back when you came to rescue me.”

That wasn’t exactly how it went down, but I didn’t want to get into explaining the sequence of events to Sienna. I didn’t want her feeling like a footnote in all of this.

“No. We have each other’s backs.”

“Sister-witch power. Just us against the world.” Sienna murmured the silly childhood mantra we always evoked whenever teenaged life had gotten one of us down.

“Exactly,” I tried to laugh, but it came out forced and a little shrill, so I gave Sienna a reassuring squeeze. Her sharp intake of breath reminded me that all wasn’t right with my sister. “Hospital?”

“No,” Sienna quickly answered. “These cuts are shallow, and … you know they’d call the police and a shrink probably. Will you just take me home, sister?”

I shifted my arm up around her shoulder and led my sister from the warehouse to the SUV. I’d thought the worst tonight. I’d thought her dead. I wasn’t sure what I would have done if that had been her half-eaten in the pentagram, rather than Rusty. I pushed the nasty thought away and took Sienna home.

I’d never been so relieved to feel the protection wards on my apartment slide over me as I did that night. In fact, I’m not sure I’d ever noticed them as intensely before. My sense of relief was palatable, and coming home tasted a lot like my go-to one-bowl chocolate cupcakes.

The apartment felt foreign, though, like I’d been gone weeks instead of hours. Sienna, still clutching my necklace around her neck, fell onto the couch and instantly burrowed underneath one of Gran’s woven blankets. She refused to move further, muttering that she’d shower the blood off later.

No matter how exhausted I was, leaving my sister bloody and bruised on the couch wasn’t going to happen. I bathed her arms in diluted tea tree oil and wrapped them in strips torn from an old cotton pillowcase. I had no idea if that was the correct approach, but I had to do something.

Sienna watched me with sleep-hooded eyes but didn’t pester me with questions. I, on the other hand, desperately wanted to ask her about Rusty. About his mother and his other friends, and how this could have gotten so out of control. When had Sienna known? Not until tonight? How had Rusty hidden everything from her? How and when had Rusty managed to kill Hudson?

Sienna sucked in her breath as I dabbed the tea tree oil-soaked cloth over a particularly deep cut on her left forearm. I quashed all the questions in my head and just focused on caring for my sister. Someone would have answers tomorrow — probably Gran when she swept into town to clean up the mess.
 

“We’ve never left such a big pile before,” I said. And felt instantly deplorable for referring to the bodies of Hudson and Rusty as a ‘pile’.

“What?” Sienna asked. I shook my head and tucked the blanket up higher underneath her chin. “Thank you,” she murmured as I stood to take the bloody rags and used tea tree oil into the kitchen. I left the light on over the stove so Sienna wouldn’t wake and find herself in darkness, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t enough to give her sweet dreams.

I was dead on my feet, and didn’t manage to do more than brush my teeth and strip down to my panties and tank top before I crawled into bed.

As I drifted to sleep, I was acutely aware that there were many things Sienna and I hadn’t talked about. Gran would show tomorrow — I assumed I’d see her bright and early — but I didn’t have any of the answers she would be seeking. Perhaps Sienna did. Perhaps ‘why’ wasn’t important at all right now. Perhaps all we could do was figure out ‘how’ and hope there wouldn’t be any sort of further retribution. It wasn’t as if I or the shifters or Sienna had killed anyone, but Rusty’s mother was a necromancer. Presumably they had rules of conduct as well?

I was starting to think like the vampire, Kett. Gran wasn’t going to like him at all. And with that delightful thought in my head, I sunk into blissful unawareness … for a moment, at least.

∞

Though I had fallen asleep with no problem, I almost immediately began dreaming of being surrounded by different levels of blackness. Rationally, I knew my brain was just trying to work through the previous terror of feeling trapped in the warehouse and walking through the dark, with no idea where each step was going to take me. Unfortunately, the rational side of my brain didn’t conquer the dream. The inky blackness shifted — now pressing against me, not just surrounding me as before. I was actually having a difficult time breathing, but fighting the dark oppression only made it worse. I began to panic, then to hyperventilate. Right before I thought I might be dying, might be suffocating in the blackness, a shudder ran through the darkness and it released me.

I woke sitting upright in bed with the taste of Rusty’s ‘unliving’ magic in my mouth. I was covered in rapidly cooling sweat, shivering in it. My hand was wrapped around the hilt of my knife. I was holding the blade before me as if warding off an attack. It should have been sheathed in the pile of clothing at the side of the bed. How had I laid hands on it in my sleep?

My heart was racing as if I’d been running or … fighting. Fighting off the effects of a spell … I breathed in deeply and slowly exhaled, attempting to gain control of my body and mind. Where had that idea about the spell come from? I’d only been subjected to ill-intended magic a few times in my life — most notably and recently when Kett tried to compel me in the morgue. It hadn’t felt like that oppressive darkness.

I toweled off my sweat-soaked limbs and torso with the bed sheet, managing to keep the knife in hand while doing so. And then I did something I’d never attempted to do before, never thought to do before. I reached out with my dowser senses and tasted the magic of the apartment wards. Lavender and berries filled my senses, calming my heart rate further. The wards felt fine, uncompromised. I was sure no malignant spell could have gotten by them.