Silver Bullet (10 page)

We were just going to let it go? Blood was smeared on the floor from where it had been shot in the doorway, across the landing, and down the black stairs. “But it’s almost dead. You slit its throat!”

“Ha,” Malcolm said. “Almost dead. Funny.”

Bellamy wasn’t laughing. “Only silver can kill werewolves, Agent Hawke. It will heal those wounds within minutes.”

I wasn’t sure if it was shock or the injury or what, but standing suddenly seemed too difficult. I sagged against the wall, clutching my burning wounds.

“That was fun,” Malcolm panted, hands braced on his knees. “Woo! Wasn’t that fun, gentlemen?”

If I’d been able to breathe properly, I would have told him
exactly
how fun I thought that was. I had to settle for shooting him an “are you crazy?” look instead, which went right over Malcolm’s head.

“Lucky thing he wasn’t expecting us—and that we were in such a small space. Gave us a big advantage. Hey, Cèsar, remember what I said about positioning being more important than strength?” Malcolm grinned. “Made that fight easy!”

“Easy?” I peeled my hands away from my shirt. The wounds were shallow but bleeding profusely. “
Easy
?”

“Easy,” Bellamy confirmed.

I’d hate to see what fighting a werewolf would be like when it was hard.

WE CLEARED OUT THE living room of the penthouse so that Suzy and Bellamy could cast a circle of power on the parquet flooring.

Though ritual had never been my thing, I probably could have helped them with the circle. But when I got back, Fritz took one look at my bloody chest and said, “Rest. Now.” Call me wimpy if you want, but I didn’t feel like arguing with him. Resting sounded like a mighty fine idea.

So I rested. I kicked back on the couch with a bandaged chest and pretended to drink a foul-tasting cup of fancy coffee that Isobel had brewed using Fritz’s fancy coffee beans, even though I didn’t particularly like coffee, just because it was better than having to work.

I watched Suzy set up the altar at the center of the circle while Bellamy finished lighting candles around the circumference. She looked even worse than I did. I
felt
like one giant bruise, but she
was
one giant bruise. Her whole face was purple.

Fritz had tried ordering her to rest, too, but Suzy was a hell of a lot more stubborn than I’d ever want to be. She’d been pissed that Fritz wouldn’t let her go after David Nicholas with us. She wasn’t going to get left out of spellcasting, too.

“How’s it going over there, Suze?” I asked.

“Everything’s coming together,” she said. “Just a few more minutes.”

Malcolm entered the condo carrying yet another bin. The OPA had sent a big shipment of fresh supplies while Suzy and I were at the mine: some additional herbs and crystals, along with new suits for all of us, but mostly just guns. Lots of guns. Malcolm had been spending his afternoon converting the den into a small armory.

“Hey,” I said as he passed. “Am I going to turn into a werewolf?” I pulled up the hem of my shirt, prodded the edge of my bandages.

“Nope,” Malcolm said. “It takes a bite to turn you, not a bitty baby scratch.”

Bitty baby scratch?
The wound wrapped around half my torso.

“At least you won’t need to start waxing,” Isobel said, hurrying over to take the opposite end of Malcolm’s bin as it began to slip.

“Yeah, good thing.” I’d actually been waxing my chest my entire adult life—ever since I had more than three chest hairs to remove—but nobody needed to know that. It was a bodybuilder thing. Helped show the muscle definition. Plus, the ladies liked smooth pectorals. Or at least, I was pretty sure that the ladies would have liked smooth pectorals if I ever got a life outside the job.

Small details.

Suzy made a triumphant sound. “There!”

I could tell that the circle had closed because I sneezed hard. It hurt for my abs to clench and I couldn’t help but groan.

Suzy and Bellamy kneeled on cushions they had placed on either side of the altar. They’d built a pretty fancy circle, marking the outer edge with salted chalk and decorating the altar with a big glass sphere. I’d seen the diagram of the layout for scrying—the fancy word for “remote viewing spell”—in the company-approved Book of Shadows, but it looked much cooler in reality.

Bellamy rested his hands on either side of the crystal ball, and Suzy touched his fingers.

Isobel lingered outside the circle. She was watching with extreme interest, like she’d never seen anything like it. Considering what she’d done when we tried to make potions that morning, she might not have. “What is this…thing?” she asked, pointing around the circle.

Yep. Definitely hadn’t seen it before.

She’d told me once that she had been trained by a bunch of powerful native shamans to cast magic. It was becoming more and more obvious that she’d been full of shit, and now I was pretty sure that she’d also never met a shaman, much less been taught by one. Everyone who cast magic knew what a circle was.

Everyone but Isobel.

Not for the first time, I wondered who she really was.

The witches inside were starting to quietly chant, so I took it upon myself to explain. “It’s a circle of power. It helps witches build up energy and keeps it all within the border. Where you place it, and how it’s oriented to the cardinal directions, changes the nature of the energies. Gotta be pretty careful about that.”

Isobel pointed to the low table between Suzy and Bellamy. “And that?”

“Altar,” I said.

“I know what an altar is. I mean
that
.” She jabbed her finger again, more insistently. “Is that a crystal ball?”

“Actually, yeah.”

“Officially speaking, it’s a scrying mechanism,” Fritz said from the kitchen. His fingers flew over the keyboard of his laptop as he worked, ever-present BlackBerry pinned between his ear and shoulder. He wore thick-framed glasses with square lenses that put librarians to shame. “Crystal balls are used by psychics, mystics, and frauds.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s a crystal ball,” I said in a stage whisper to Isobel.

Suzy suddenly spoke. “Well, this is…”

“Weird,” Bellamy said when it seemed she couldn’t come up with the word. They hadn’t moved their hands from beside the crystal ball. Or the scrying mechanism. Whatever the fuck the official OPA Book of Shadows wanted to call it.

“Can you see, Bellamy?” Suzy asked. Her eyes were glazed over and focused up at the ceiling.

“No. I can’t. You?”

“Me neither.”

I glanced around the room. Was I missing something?

Apparently not—the others looked just as confused as I was.

“What can’t you see? David Nicholas?” Fritz asked.

“Anything,” Suzy said. “Hey Bellamy, could you hand me something of yours? Your earpiece, your left shoe…” He pulled off his watch and handed it to her. I noticed (with no small amount of amusement) that even the face of his watch was black with blocky white numbers.

Suzy rolled it through her fingers and continued staring at the ceiling, eyes glazed with magic.

“Can you see me?” Bellamy asked.

“Sure,” I said. “You’re sitting right there.”

Isobel poked me in the chest, right over my bandages. I winced. She was obviously taking lessons in Cèsar Management from my partner.

Suzy blinked rapidly, clearing her vision. “I couldn’t find you, Bellamy. You’re in the circle with me and I still couldn’t find you.” She turned to Fritz. “Something is preventing me from remotely viewing the city. There’s kind of a gray haze over everything. It extends over the desert to the north, just beyond Fallon, and out to Lake Tahoe. I can’t see David Nicholas. Or even our group.”

Fritz slid his reading glasses down the bridge of his nose to stare at her over the frames. “What does that mean?”

“We’ve never been able to remotely monitor Reno’s activity all that accurately,” Malcolm said from the doorway to the den. He blew into the barrel of a disassembled gun, poked a rod through the center to clean it. “Our working assumption is that it’s got to do with the geography. The Truckee Meadows are in a valley. It funnels the natural energies down from the high-elevation lake to the west and turns the whole region into a giant natural circle of power. It distorts everything.”

Isobel looked askance at me. “Bodies of water attract magic,” I explained. “Like a sponge. Or a crystal. Actually, more like a crystal.”

“That shouldn’t completely neutralize my view of the city,” Suzy said, talking right over me. “Not from inside of the valley. And the lake might distort it, but not blank everything out.”

Bellamy looked thoughtful. “You’re right. There’s something else at play here.” He got up, scuffed out the edge of the circle, washed his hands off in the sink.

“Active obfuscation?” I suggested. It wasn’t something I knew how to do, but my brother, Domingo, had always been able to mess with other witches’ spells.

“David Nicholas doesn’t have any witches on his payroll strong enough,” Fritz said.

“How do you know?”

He turned his laptop around so I could see the screen. He was logged in to the OPA database and working with a table of data I didn’t recognize. “His witches are all level twos or less.”

“Wait, we have a database of witches? We have witches
ranked
?”

“Sure,” Malcolm said. “Union uses it all the time for reference on cases. Bellamy’s a six.”

I must have looked offended, because Fritz’s tone went soothing. “Your security classification hasn’t been adequate to access our databases of preternatural citizens before. It’s nothing personal.”

That wasn’t why I looked surprised.
Databases of preternatural citizens
. My skin crawled at the sound of it.

Working for the government was normally pretty awesome. It usually gave me a warm, patriotic tingle to think about how much pay I was sacrificing in pursuit of the greater good.

Databases of citizens did not give me warm tingles.

“What am I ranked at?” Suzy asked as she swept the circle’s salt into a pile with a broom.

“Seven,” Fritz said. “Cèsar’s a three.”

Ouch.

I thought about asking how they picked those numbers, but decided I didn’t want to know. That wasn’t going to do any favors for my pride. At least I was still more of a witch than anyone working at Craven’s.

Hey, it’s the little pleasures that make life worthwhile. Even when they were petty.

“If David Nicholas isn’t obfuscating scrying spells in the region, then what else could it be?” I asked, tactfully redirecting the conversation to less insulting territory. “Could the werewolf have anything to do with it? I assume he left that thing in his office for a reason.”

“He probably suspected we would retaliate against him for luring us to the daimarachnid nest,” Suzy said. “That was just another trap. Werewolves can’t have magic power, so this is something else.”

“Another coven of witches?” Bellamy suggested. “Or—”

He cut off, whipped around to stare at the door. The blood drained out of his face.

“What?” Fritz asked.

“The wards,” Bellamy said.

The fire alarms squealed, shattering my skull with a high-pitched whine.

I fell off the couch at the sound. The alarm itself flashed with brilliant white strobe, reducing our motions to a series of stop-action moments. Fritz grabbing Isobel’s wrist. Malcolm drawing his gun, mouth opening in a silent command to Bellamy. Suzy bolting for the table of guns.

I was closest to the entrance. I reached it first.

The alarms were howling in the hall, too. The door to our surveillance condo was open and I could see that all the security monitors they had arrayed across the kitchen counters were fuzzed with white noise.

Darting to the end of the hall, I leaned over the half-wall to look down the spiral staircase.

I should have been able to see all the way down to the administrative assistant manning the lobby desk. But below the second floor, everything was…black. Nighttime dark.

Cold tendrils of fear slithered over my heart.

“Guys?” I called over my shoulder.

Nobody responded to me.

The shadow was creeping up the stairs, oozing onto the second floor. There was something moving inside of it. Legs and arms and narrow shoulders.

My heart was slowing. Struggling to pump blood through my body. The walls were creeping toward me, narrowing the hallway as the roof dropped inch by inch. The building was closing in. Collapsing. Shrinking the distance between the landing that I was standing on and the darkness on the second floor.

Death had come for us, and there was no escaping now.

A familiar face flashed in the shadows below.

No, not Death.

David Nicholas.

“OY! DON’T LOOK AT that!”

Startled, I whirled and swung my fist at the same time. Malcolm ducked under it easily. He hooked his arm around my neck, pulled me down to his level.

Reflexively, I wanted to fight and run, wanted to escape the fear. I pushed down the panic reaction, clinging to the knowledge that Malcolm was my ally. I even forced myself to allow him to drag me down the hall.

“Those are nightmare demons down there.” His mouth was close enough to my ear that I could hear him over the shrieking fire alarms. “You don’t need to be bonded to a kopis to keep them from hurting you. Soon as you realize you’ve got thrall creeping up on you, move your body, get the blood pumping, and get the fuck out of there.”

He shoved me toward our penthouse. I could take a hint. I ran.

I reached the door in time for Suzy to shove a shotgun into my hands.

“We’re not getting our asses kicked this time,” she said, wide eyes blazing with anger. She’d propped a second shotgun against the door. She picked that one up for herself.

The shotgun wasn’t much of a safety blanket. I’d never shot one before. Not that it’s all that different from a pistol, as far as the mechanics go. Point the end with holes at whatever you want dead. Pull trigger. Done.

But there wasn’t anything to shoot at. I could pump a shadow full of lead, sure, but it would pass right through that shadow and hit whatever was on the other side.