Justice Calling (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 1) (5 page)

So, I was down to just winging it. No magic. Maybe I should have gone to my place first and grabbed a knife. I recalled some saying about bringing a knife to a gun fight and it not being a good thing. Okay, we were down to hoping I could take out two men with only my wits and a scratchy wool blanket. Great plan.

“Ciaran? I’ve got the fox,” I called out as I carefully wove my way through the shop. I didn’t want to surprise anyone with a gun.

“In my office,” Ciaran called out.

I saw a shadow move in the hallway beyond the office. It was way too big to be the leprechaun. One of the gunmen?

Then I caught a gleam of eyes, the way a cat’s eyes pick up light and shine in the dark. Alek stepped just enough forward that I could make out his features but he hung back so that he was still hidden from anyone inside the office itself. He raised a finger to his lips, and then made a get away motion. I shook my head.

“Ciaran,” I called out again. “It’s really dark out here. Can you come turn on a light or something? I feel like I’m going to kill myself running into something and this fox is super bulky.”

There was muttering from the office. I crept forward, trying to be stealthy and not knock over anything. I let the blanket slide down my body to the floor and kicked it under a table, ready to follow it if bullets started flying.

“Be right there,” Ciaran yelled.

He emerged from the office, a taller, thinner man standing directly behind him. I assumed that guy had the gun pointed at Ciaran’s back.

“Drop the gun and tell your friend not to do anything stupid.” Alek’s voice was calm and deep. And cold enough to send chills down my spine.

“Fuck man,” said the guy behind Ciaran. He twisted his head and saw Alek’s huge form in the shadows, pointing a big hand gun at his head. “Jimmy, don’t do anything stupid.”

“There’s a guy here with a gun,” someone, I assumed Jimmy, said from inside the office. “What do we do? What? No, don’t. Don’t do that. We’re sorry. We can fix this. Shit!”

The guy in the hallway turned slightly toward the door. “What’s he doing?”

Ciaran chose that moment to sprint forward and then duck aside, behind a large oriental cabinet. Panicking, the guy with the gun started shooting into the dark shop as he swung around toward Alek.

I dove for the floor as well as something hot hit my hip. I felt as much as heard my phone shatter and then lightning pain shot through my side and down my leg. I crawled with zero dignity under the table.

From my agonizing but safe-ish position, I saw Alek jumped by another man, this one shorter and bulkier than the first. They grappled and the first guy ran right at me, though I wasn’t sure he could see me. In a brilliantly thought-out move, I shoved the wadded up blanket next to me out in front of him and he sprawled into the table, knocking down the universe knows what around us.

The pain in my leg nearly blacked out my vision but I grabbed at the guy. He knew what had been done to Rose. He was the key; I couldn’t let Harper down just because of a stupid wound.

“No. You. Don’t,” I hissed.

He stopped fighting me so suddenly I actually lost my grip. For a moment he froze and then he ripped at his neck, pulling out a medallion on a chain. I couldn’t make out the details in the dim light but nausea hit me and I felt the same kind of weird magic that had trapped Rose at work.

“No no no nononono,” the man’s voice became a litany as the medallion started to glow a sickly green.

In pain, bleeding, and out of options, I reached for my power almost on instinct, throwing my power into a giant silver circle around us both, trying to lock out the foreign magic. Whatever that thing was doing, it didn’t seem good.

The other gunman was screaming and I dimly heard Alek cursing. Then it stopped, the sickly green light winking out as though I’d imagined it. The man in front of me lay still, his chest slowly rising and falling, but for all appearances he wasn’t conscious.

“Jade!” Harper’s voice.

Ciaran threw on the lights and I winced, blinking rapidly to try to adjust. Harper came up, kicking the gun further from the man’s hand. Boy, really, now that I had a look at him. I doubted he was over twenty-one.

“It’s a trap,” I said, waving at Harper to back off. “Get an axe.”

“Trick, not trap. Geez.” She poked him with her shoe.

Misquoting
Army of Darkness
. I really was hurt. I crawled forward, trying to keep my weight off my injured hip. I felt the bullet inside me, my body reacting to the unknown object and trying to heal it out. I needed to get out of here before I did fully heal or there would be some truly uncomfortable questions.

But I wanted the boy’s medallion. I yanked it off his neck as I pretended to feel for a pulse and slid it into my bra as I curled my body to keep the bleeding side out of Harper’s vision.

I failed.

“Did you get shot? You’re bleeding,” Harper yanked off her tee-shirt and bent over me, trying to press it to my hip.

“My phone broke when I dove under the table,” I said, taking her shirt and covering the bloody patch as best I could. I didn’t want to look yet. If it looked anything like it felt, my side was disaster. “Just cuts, I’ll be fine.”

“We called Sheriff Lee, she’s on her way,” Ezee said. “Bloody hell, did you get shot?”

I had to get out there. Like, now.

“No, just cuts. I’m going to my place to clean up. This guy needs a medic or something, I don’t know what happened.” I tried to stand and regretted my life.

“This one is dead. I’m not sure how.” Alek’s voice.

Dead? Oh, that was bad. It was getting harder to think. I decided to worry about one thing at a time. Step one was figuring out how to walk out of here, up the stairs to my apartment, and if I could make it to the bathtub before I fainted from the pain. Be a lot easier to clean blood out of the bathroom than my living room carpet. I’d never get that security deposit back.

“Harper, go with Jade. The less people messed up in this, the better, no?” Ciaran said.

“I’ve got to stay since I called the Sheriff,” Levi said.

“And I do also, since she’ll never believe only one of us was here,” Ezee added.

“I’ve got her,” Alek said. He moved with insane speed to my side and then somehow I was in his arms. “Don’t protest,” he whispered in Russian, his breath warm on my hair. “Clearly you don’t want them to know you’ve been shot, so shut up and let me carry you.”

Since the Zerg queen of white hot pain and all her little pain-filled broodlings were currently setting up a summer home in my hip, I decided to shut up and let him carry me.

Harper tried to follow us into my bathroom, but I shut the door in her face, muttering something about too many cooks in the kitchen. I hoped I made some kind of sense, but I was in too much pain and panic to care.

I’d used my magic, like a lot of magic. Maybe too much. My head certainly thought I had used way too much. It was out of practice and I felt like a former athlete who’d spent a couple years on the bench suddenly trying to beat Usain Bolt in the hundred meter dash.

Plus the more passive side-effects of not being human were taking a toll. My body was shoving shards of cell phone and what felt like a million pieces of bullet out of my hip, with what looked like a million gallons of blood.

Alek set me down as gently as he could in my bathtub and then pulled out a knife.

I flinched and held up my hands, but he just sighed and reached for my pants.

“I need to cut those away, take a look.”

“Harper,” I whispered, then switched to Russian. “She can hear us.”

A weird warmth slid over the room and I watched as the walls took on a slightly silvery sheen.

“No one outside this room can hear anything now,” he said.

“Guess being a Justice comes with bonus features.”

“First we take care of your wound. Then we’ll talk.”

I wasn’t sure which part of that I looked forward to less. He cut my jeans away and it wasn’t anything like the fantasies I hadn’t let myself have about him cutting my clothes off. I was too busy trying to seal my teeth to each other with my jaw muscles to tell him that, thank the universe.

With the wound washed off, which let me tell you was a peachy experience I never want to repeat, it didn’t look so bad. Kind of like a steak after you take out your aggression on it with a hammer. And bonus, I now know what my hip bone looks like and I had a nice collection of metal fragments to show the grand kids. My phone seemed to have eaten the worst of the bullet and it was super FUBAR.

I laid back in the tub once we got the wound clean, focusing on breathing and not passing out.

“The bleeding has stopped,” Alek said. Helpful guy.

“Yeah. Give it a little while. I’ll heal.” I wished he would shut up and go away.

“You are no hedge witch.”

“You are amazing at pointing out obvious things,” I said, opening my eyes. “How did you know I’d understand Russian?”

“Call it a hunch.”

He leaned against my bathroom counter, looking entirely out of place in the small room. I turned my head, choosing to look at the
Dragon Ball Z
poster I had on the bathroom door instead of into those speculating, piercing blue eyes.

“What happened back there? What kind of magic was that? And how did you save that boy?”

“That’s way too many questions for my brain to handle right now,” I said. All questions I didn’t really want to answer. Some I didn’t even have the answer to, anyway. Like what kind of magic this was. Human magic, I was pretty sure, so that meant ritual most likely. But it wasn’t like just anybody could use a ritual any more than a kid could open up the
Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Guide
and cast Magic Missile. Magic was everywhere, in everything, but it was like sunlight or carbon molecules. If you don’t have the tools to use it and the ability somehow to even tap in, there’s no way you can make it work just by trying.

To work a ritual, you’d need knowledge, time, a power source you could access, the right ingredients and foci, combined with a strong enough will to bind it all together. It wasn’t those kids, not working alone. Jimmy, the dead one, he’d been on the phone with someone. Someone who had tried to kill both boys using their medallions.

“You are thinking very hard for someone who pretends to know nothing,” Alek said, interrupting my half-conscious train of thought.

“I don’t know anything, not really. It’s all speculation.”

Cat-quick, he bent over me and slid his large, warm hand into my shirt. When I pictured him groping my breasts, it wasn’t exactly like this. He pulled the medallion out of my bra and dangled it over me. I made out a pattern of circles on its stained, black surface and it looked to be molded from clay.

“You pictured me groping your breasts?” he asked and he had that smirk I’d seen a million years ago this afternoon, before everything went to hell on the handbasket express.

Clearly, I’d spoken aloud. “Blood loss talking,” I said. I swiped at the medallion. “Give that back.”

“Tell me what it is,” he said, standing up out of my reach.

“I don’t know.” I gave him a smile to show that hey, I could tell the truth sometimes.

“But you can find out.” That wasn’t even a question. No fair.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Not tonight. I’m kind of in heal mode here. Why don’t you go away? I’m rescinding your invitation.”

“I am not a vampire.” He cocked his head, those ice chip eyes of his narrowing as he looked me over. “You can’t order me out.”

“Vampires don’t exist,” I muttered. I blushed and wondered I had the blood left in my body for it. I was lying in a bathtub with half my pants missing and only a scrap of black panties covering my girl bits. I wished I’d worn nicer underwear. Or shaved in the last two days. He was a shifter though, maybe he preferred his women furry.

Ho-kay. That was definitely the blood loss talking.

I looked down at my hip. The wounds were mostly closed, looking a lot more like a bad abrasion than a bunch of stitch-worthy cuts. Time to get out of the bathtub and find if I had any Band-Aids.

“Still here?” I said. “Help me up.”

He pulled me out of the tub as though I were no bigger than a kitten. I lost the scrap of panty but managed to yank a towel over myself as I leaned heavily on the bathroom counter.

“Okay, I need to clean up here, and you really need to leave. Maybe that kid will wake up and tell you what’s going on.”

He caught my chin in his hand and tilted my head toward him, leaning in close. He smelled like vanilla and sun-kissed hay. “I will come back tomorrow. And you will tell the truth, Jade Crow.” All trace of smirk was gone from his face.

“Fuck you,” I said, jerking my head away. Mistake, that. Red and black dots swum over my eyes and the headache vise tightened another notch.

“I thought you had revoked my invitation,” he said, and just like a freakin’ Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he was smirking again.

“Do they train you to be this annoying at Justice Academy, or does it come naturally?” I said as I turned carefully around, deliberately not looking in the mirror, and pulled open the medicine cabinet. I did have Band-Aids. Score.