Justice Calling (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 1) (6 page)

“It runs in my family.” He set the medallion down on the counter and pulled open the door. The silvery shield he’d cast on the room dissolved. “I’ll be back,” he said over his shoulder.

Harper lurked near the door and ducked into the bathroom as soon as Alek left.

“He managed not to make that line sound ironic at all, wow,” she said. “What were you guys doing in here?”

“Staring contest,” I said. “And I don’t think he was actually trying to quote
The Terminator
. You going to sleep over?”

“That okay?” She sounded so young and vulnerable. It was easy to forget sometimes that she was nearly twenty years younger than I was. I might look like I’m in my mid-twenties, but I’m a lot closer to fifty than thirty.

“Of course,” I said. “I don’t really want to be alone, you know?”

Apparently I wasn’t done lying after all.

I didn’t want to get up when my alarm blared to life, but the smell of waffles and bacon summoned me. I’d slept fitfully with weird dreams. The final dream ended with the sound of my alarm and the feel of Samir’s hands around my throat as he whispered he would be here soon.

For a moment I wondered who was making bacon, but remembered that Harper had slept on my couch. At least she was earning her keep. I sat up too quickly and my hip pinged me with a reminder that I’d been shot the night before. I stumbled to the bathroom with a muttered good morning to Harper and peeled up the Band-Aids.

There was a pretty amazing green, yellow, and purple bruise, but the cuts were all closed. A gaping wound would close within minutes. A bruise? That would stick around for days. Maybe it was my body’s way of telling me I should really avoid taking damage.

I pulled on clothes, shared a somewhat awkward and quiet breakfast with Harper, and then went down to open my shop. Harper took her laptop and said she was going to go over to Dr. Lake’s and sit with her mother, then she planned to go home and talk to her brother Max about what was happening.

After the craziness of the day before, a quiet day in my shop seemed eerie. I kept waiting for something else horrible to happen, but the hours went by without anyone ending up dead or frozen or any other hot strangers with guns barging in.

Harper called the land line in the shop around four to tell me she was heading to the B&B to talk to Max. I felt weirdly isolated without my cell phone. I ordered a replacement online, but I wouldn’t have it until the following Monday.

I had no word from Alek. Ciaran dropped by to say he’d solved everything with the cops, at least for the moment, and that the second kid was in a coma at the hospital. The sheriff was going to write it up as a robbery gone wrong. Nobody had any explanation for how Jimmy had died. It appeared his heart had stopped, just like that. I didn’t envy Sheriff Lee her job explaining it to his parents or the admins at the college.

Ezee called the store as well, sometime after noon when I’d given up on doing inventory and was distracting myself by painting orc miniatures. He said he recognized one of the kids from school and was going to ask around, see who they might have associated with. I told him to be careful and asked if he’d seen or heard from the Justice. He hadn’t.

The medallion off the kid in the coma was upstairs. As the day faded, I thought about it more and more, trying to anticipate the questions Alek might have and how to answer them in a way that would make sense but not give away more about myself than I already had.

No good. I dropped a mini back onto the newspaper and gritted my teeth.

Thoughts of Samir flooded in. Had even the relatively small amounts of magic I’d used yesterday been too much? Was he even now on his way here to finally kill me? The tracking spell wouldn’t register, I didn’t think. Way too much ambient magic in this area for that to stand out. But the circle of protection I’d thrown up to fend off whatever killing ritual the shadowy man behind Rose’s paralyzing was performing, that wasn’t exactly minor magic. I mean, in the scale of things for me, it was. Or it would have been, once upon a time when I was in practice and in shape magically speaking.

I looked around my shop. Pwned Comics and Games. It was home, the kind of place my teenage self had dreamed about all those years ago after my second family opened my eyes to the world of all that is nerd. I liked my life here. I didn’t want things to change. I didn’t want to have to run again.

Maybe I was still safe. No more magic though. Not even my stone floating exercises, at least not for a while. Whatever happened with Rose and the ritual mage who was behind all this was Alek’s problem to handle. He was the one trained for this shit. I could provide emotional support to my friends, but I had to stop being involved.

I could stay for now. Keep my life here. Decision made, I relaxed a little.

Which is when, of course, the universe kicked me in the ass again.

Levi and Harper came through the front door in a rush. I knew it was trouble just from the energy they projected, before I even made out their upset faces and heard a peep from them.

“Ezee is missing,” Levi said.

“What do you mean, missing?” I asked. My heart took up residence in my throat.

“He was supposed to meet me at work after his last class got out. He didn’t show and he isn’t answering either his cell or his office phone.”

“Maybe he’s at the library? Emergency student conference?” I tried to ignore my painful sense of foreboding.

“Did you talk to him today?” Harper asked.

Shit. “Shit,” I said. “I did. He said he knew one of the perps from last night and was going to ask around, see who else might be connected to the guy.”

“Shit is right,” Levi muttered. “We’re going over to Juniper to look for him. Come on.”

How could I refuse that? He was my friend. This felt an awful lot like involvement though.

“Where’s the Justice?” I asked.

“I think he went to the hospital to see if that guy had woken up yet,” Harper said. “He said something about it when he came to check on mom earlier.”

Which meant Alek was at least forty-five minutes away in another town. Wylde wasn’t large enough to have a full hospital, we just had the emergency clinic and a couple doctor’s offices.

“Okay, let me lock up,” I said. What else could I do?

Juniper College is a private liberal arts university known for turning out a lot of serious students who go on to get PhDs and then work in low level service jobs for the rest of their lives trying to pay off massive student loans. Okay, so maybe not always that last part, but it was one of those elite small schools full of people who seemed more in love with learning than with practical life skills. I’d teased Ezee about it a lot, but in good fun.

I mean, I’d been raised by a bunch of professors and gone to a similar school. Once upon a time I had thought I could be happy in academia for the rest of my life. Before Samir and my wild years as a sorceress-in-training, plotting to make the world my bitch.

The campus was just outside Wylde proper and butted up against the border of the River of No Return Wilderness. Ezee’s office was in the oldest building on campus, a beautiful five story timber and river stone mansion that sat like a jewel in the middle of a grove of old growth Douglas Fir trees.

The sun was low in the sky when we arrived and the campus quiet in the spring chill. Here and there students walked in packs, talking to each other or with heads buried in their phones, and no one gave us much of a glance.

Ezee’s office was on the fourth floor. Levi had a key and let us in when knocking clearly showed his brother wasn’t in residence.

Books filled one wall on shelves bending a little under their weight. Two overstuffed leather chairs with brass upholstery tacks decorating them in knotwork patters on the edges were positioned by the desk in a way that invited one in for a cozy chat over a cup of tea about the mysteries of the universe, or, given Ezee’s area of expertise, a lively talk about American history and treatment of native peoples.

His desk was orderly, his laptop sitting in sleep mode and plugged into the spike bar on one side. A pile of papers sat waiting to be graded or handed back. There was a pink pen, uncapped, lying on the open area of the desk, as though Ezee had just set it down and was about to return to whatever he’d been writing. Even his desk chair was rotated toward the door, as though he’d only stepped out for a moment, and the Armani aftershave he used still hung in the air.

“Maybe he’s in the bathroom? Or we could check the library,” I said.

“It feels like he’s here. Somehow.” Levi shook his head and sniffed the air. “I think he’s close. I can’t tell. It’s like something is blocking my connection to him.”

The twins might be fraternal, but shifter twins were an almost unheard of phenomenon. It wasn’t a surprise that they were bonded in a magical way. We often joked that if you pinched one, the other would flinch. Or at least glare at you, if it was Levi. Flinching wasn’t manly enough for him.

“Do you know his computer password?” Harper asked.

“Is the Pope Catholic?”

“Okay, yeah, stupid question.”

Levi sat at the desk and unlocked the laptop. “Nothing immediate that I can see. Let me check his calendar. He writes down everything.”

“Can I help you?” A man’s voice from right behind me made me jump. Nausea twisted in my gut and I took a step back into the office as I turned and looked the guy over.

He was about my height, maybe five eight, pudgy, close to forty, with thinning brown hair and glasses that exaggerated the bulge of his blue eyes. He wore a brown sweater and a pair of faded khakis and looked utterly unassuming. Yet he set off my creep alert instantly. Maybe it was the nausea. Maybe it was the events of the last day.

“Hi, we’re looking for Professor Chapowits,” I said. Despite my no magic vow, I summoned a little of my power and tried to detect if this guy had any magic on him. Nothing. Damn. Maybe I was paranoid.

“He’s not here,” the man said. “How did you get into his office?” He seemed weirdly nervous, his eyes darting from me, to Harper, to Levi, and the computer.

“I’m his brother,” Levi said, swinging the chair around. “You are?”

“I’m Bernie uh, Barnes. I work here. That’s my office,” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Ezekiel is gone for the day. You shouldn’t be going through his things.”

“He wouldn’t have left his laptop, and he’d be answering his phone,” Levi said. “Did you see him? What did he say?”

“I just saw him leave a little while ago. Maybe he was getting coffee. He likes to get coffee at the student café. You should try there.” Bernie Barnes, whose name sounded like a bad Stan Lee villain’s, smiled weakly at us, nodding as though he’d thought of something brilliant.

I really didn’t like this guy. He seemed desperate to convince us that Ezee wasn’t here and everything was fine. I studied him more with my magic enhanced vision. It wasn’t that I was getting nothing, I realized. I was seeing not just an absence of magic but an actual null void. He should have registered as a human, with the little ticks and flurries of ambient power that flowed around all life forms. But to my magical vision, it was like he wasn’t there at all.

“Why don’t you come with us,” I said. “Show us where it is.”

“Okay,” Bernie said, surprising me. “Let me lock up my office.” He turned and walked down the hall.

“That guy seem weird to you?” Harper asked.

“Hella weird,” Levi said.

I stepped out of the office and saw Bernie disappearing not into one of the offices in the hall but through the stairwell doors.

“Shit, he’s running,” I said.

We bolted after him, Harper and Levi leaving me in their dust as we raced for the stairs. Bernie Barnes flew down those steps ahead of them, outpacing even shifter speed with his lead. Of course, even with super-speed, there’s only so quickly they could charge down four flights of stairs.

Make that five. Bernie headed for the basement and there we lost him.

The bottom floor stairway opened into a cramped hall with three doors leading off. No sign of Bernie. The hum of a furnace room greeted me as I slid to a stop beside Harper.