Strange Brew (16 page)

He hesitated, blinking a couple of times. At some point, he’d gotten doused. His lashes were clumped into dark spikes and his T-shirt was wet down the back. Physically, he looked better than me, but the skin under the stubble-darkened throat was pale.

“Cyrus?”

He swallowed. “It wasn’t your fault,” he told me, upping the sick feeling in my stomach by at least a factor often.

“Move.” I started pushing at him, but budging a full-grown werewolf who doesn’t want to go is nothing more than a good workout. “Cyrus! I mean it, let me by!”

He finally stepped aside to reveal a far less chaotic scene than the kitchen. The sun was streaming through the small laundry room window, and dust motes were slowly turning in the air. Maybe it was the poststress endorphins running through me, but all the colors seemed extra sharp: the yellow on the walls that the paint store guy had called butter cream, the blue-and-white Laura Ashley curtains at the window, and the bright white appliances that were still in one piece. It looked cheerful and almost normal.

Except for the young blond man sprawled against the far wall, his blue eyes wide and gaping, his hands outstretched against the blood-spattered paint.

The lack of sleep, the pain, and the destruction of my house had crippled my brain, because it took me a full three seconds to process what I was seeing. It was Adam, one of the youngest recruits, whose ability with magic far exceeded his seventeen years. He’d just started training, and wasn’t set to take the trials for another year.

My hand had dropped to my belt, but it fell away as understanding finally hit. Adam was still on his feet, but only because a section of the laundry room door had embedded itself in the wall through his abdomen, holding him in place like a bug on a pin. The sickeningly sweet smell in the air was blood, which had poured down his body in wide streams to puddle on the floor beneath him.

I felt the muscles in my legs liquefying, my fingers knotting in Cyrus’s sleeve to keep from falling. Past the rushing in my ears, I could hear him saying, “Things happen in battle, Lia. You know that.”

Things, I thought blankly. Like a random, meaningless death. Like a spell that sent a door flying off its hinges, practically bisecting a young man.

My spell.

My new supervisor had wavy silver hair, a skeletally thin frame that he hid inside old-fashioned three-piece suits, and a pinched, displeased mouth. He was doing something strange with the last. It took me a minute to realize that he was trying to smile and it wasn’t working.

God, I must really look bad if Hargrove was trying to be nice to me.

I was currently in the new Vegas HQ, where the Corps had set up camp after the old headquarters was obliterated in the war. It was a thirteen-thousand-square-foot warehouse on a couple of acres in the vicinity of Nellis Air Force base. The upper level was mainly taken up by administrative offices, training areas, and housing for new recruits. The newly created subterranean sections hid the harder-to-explain stuff, like the interspecies medical facilities, the weapons storage, and the labs.

I’d spent the day there, getting patched up by the doctors and grilled by a series of progressively more senior detectives. It was now 11 p.m., and I was in yet another meeting, this time with my very unhappy boss. “Mage de Croissets!”

I jumped slightly. “Yes, sir.”

“Kindly pay attention. I have a seven a.m. meeting tomorrow. I would like to get home before midnight!”

“Yes, sir.”

So much for the fatherly bit. I wondered why he’d trotted it out at all. Richard Hargrove was old school, brought out of retirement because of the war, to fill an important desk job and free someone in fighting form for more active duty. He’d made it clear that he didn’t like my gender, my service record, or the fact that my mother had been a Were. I’d tried to lie low and stay out of his way, but it hadn’t seemed to help.

Of course, it’s a little hard to build a relationship with your new boss when you’re best known for killing your old one.

He pushed a photograph across the desk at me. “Martina Colafranceschi—that’s her birth name. She’s going by Ophelia Roberts at the moment.”

The woman in the photo was not what I’d have called pretty, but there was something undeniably arresting about her. She was tall, judging by the height of the man standing next to her, with olive skin and short hair gone half-silver. She was well past her prime, but there were traces of beauty in the face—high cheekbones, almond eyes, full lips.

“You’re sure she’s the one?” It came out remarkably calmly, considering what I’d just learned. I was still in shock, and grateful for it. Because I had an inkling of what I was going to feel when the numbness wore off, and it scared me.

“The trace was ninety percent positive,” the man at my elbow said. He was slightly built, almost scrawny, with thinning brown hair and shirtsleeves rolled up around his stringy forearms. They showed off the perpetually pallid skin of someone who does his work inside—in this case, underground.

Benedict Simons was the head technician in the Corps’ version of a forensic lab. The magical community long ago gave up on the idea that magic is some mystical, indefinable quantity. There’s still a lot we don’t understand, but there are some hard-and-fast rules—like the fact that everyone’s energy signature is slightly different. No two people cast the same spell in quite the same way. It amounts to a magical fingerprint that allows the caster to be identified in certain circumstances, such as being able to test four people who were still under her spell.

“Ben performed the trace himself—there’s no mistake,” Hargrove said brusquely.

“And her motive?” I pushed the photo back at him. “I don’t know this woman; I’ve never even heard of her. Why would she go to so much trouble to have me killed?”

“Colafranceschi was one of the founding Assassins.”

I frowned. “If she was an assassin, why didn’t she just do the job herself?”

“Not
an
assassin,” he said impatiently. “One of
the
Assassins. They were a group of hit men—and women—who styled themselves after a sect of eleventh-century Islamic extremists. The modern-day Assassins were wiped out twelve years ago. The mage who led the investigation and the final raid was Guillame de Croissets.”

I blinked. “My father.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay.” I rubbed my eyes and tried to ignore the throbbing headache that had been building all day. “I see why this woman might target his daughter. But why in such a convoluted way?”

“Because Colafranceschi specializes in weaving illusions. Perhaps she liked the irony of destroying you using one of our own spells.”

And that hurt worse than anything—the idea that Adam had died attempting to impress me. He and the other students had attacked me while under a carefully crafted illusion. It was officially known as the Trials, although the local slang term was “Vegas Odds,” because you had about as much chance of beating it as you did of hitting a million-dollar jackpot. Of course, that was kind of the point—this was one game you weren’t supposed to win.

Students were led to believe that the Trials would give them a chance to demonstrate the skills they’d acquired by the end of basic training. In fact, it was a test of character. The specifics of the test varied from person to person, because each instructor designed and supervised their own. But they all had one thing in common: a no-holds-barred fight where your friends all died around you and you were left with the decision to either finish the allotted task and die, or save yourself and fail.

If you chose the latter, no matter how good your performance otherwise, you washed out. And if you chose the former, you found out how you faced death by actually doing it. The test was brutal but necessary. If a dark mage covertly entered the program, he or she wouldn’t learn anything new in basic training. But the apprenticeship phase was much more advanced, and no one liked the idea of someone picking up the latest magical breakthroughs only to turn them on us.

Adam had been a year or more away from the Trials, but someone had spelled him and the other four to believe that they were undergoing it now and that their mission was to assassinate me. Of course, had they really been in the Trials, they would have been closely supervised, with someone in the illusion along with them to guide it and chart their progress. Nothing they experienced would have actually taken place—not my death, not their own. As it was, the Trials had wreaked the usual havoc, but this time, everything had been very real indeed.

“If the Assassins
are
reforming, it could explain the unusually high number of losses we’ve sustained in recent months,” Hargrove was saying. “More than two dozen mages have been killed in suspicious circumstances, to the point that we started an investigation into a possible leak in the department. But it found nothing—possibly because there was nothing to find.”

“The Assassins usually worked for profit alone,” Simons added. “But in our case… it is conceivable that they bear enough of a grudge to forgo that in favor of revenge.”

“And picking off our operatives would ensure that we were stretched too thin by the war to come after them,” Hargrove added. “Now, I want to know everything that happened today—every detail—and don’t tell me it’s already in the reports.”

I didn’t bother arguing. It was too late and we were all too tired. Besides, if there was anything in what had happened that might help catch Colafranceschi, I wanted it as much as they did.

I sat there for another hour, recounting yet again a detailed description of the attack. It was starting to sound like a catalog of personal failures: caught half-asleep with inadequate weapons—check; let them get past the front door and thereby through the wards—check; unable to capture them without leaving one dead on the ground—check. It was hard to see how I could have screwed things up any worse.

Hargrove obviously agreed. By the time I finished, his mouth was even tighter than before and his shrewd blue eyes were slits. “Fortunately, there is a way to redeem your error,” he told me sourly. “Colafranceschi has been located. She has a loft downtown in a converted office building.” He gave me the address, and I had to admit, it was impressive work for the time they’d had.

“How did you get this so quickly?”

“We turned young Markham loose a few hours ago. He led us right to her.”

“What?” I was certain I’d heard wrong. “You sent Jason
back
to that creature?”

“He remains under her spell,” Hargrove said impatiently. “They all do.”

“So you decided to use him as bait?!”

He flushed puce. “Better that than young Adam’s fate,” he hissed.

And that was enough to send me over the brink into anger so intense that I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even
splutter
, because all the fury—at Hargrove for being such a cold-hearted bastard, at the Assassins for existing, at the fucking universe for not letting me pause for
one second
before muttering that spell—was choking me, cutting off my breath.

“Illusions that deep are notoriously difficult for another mage to dissolve without damage to the mind in thrall,” Simons said, glancing back and forth between the two of us. He looked a little spooked. “We… we tried, of course, but without her cooperation, I’m afraid there isn’t much hope. Lifting the spell would likely shred their minds along with the illusion.”

“That doesn’t justify sending him back! Jason failed her. Do you really think she’s going to keep him alive?”

“No,” he said quietly. “But if the spell is not lifted soon, they’ll all die. They will continue to attempt to carry out her last command to the exclusion of everything else. They won’t eat unless fed intravenously, or sleep unless sedated or do anything except to search for you.”

“Then we’ll make them believe I’m dead,” I said a little unsteadily. “We could fake—”

“Yes, but then they would be like robots on standby, waiting for the next order. Which would never come. A zombie, in effect, for life.”

I had a sudden visual, and it was horrible. I strongly suspected that they’d prefer Jason’s fate—whatever it was—to a future as drooling vegetables or comatose druggies. For that matter, so would I.

“If you want to help your students,” Hargrove said, “I suggest you use the opportunity to remove this creature from my territory.”

“We could call upon our own assassins, of course,” Simons offered. “But you have one great advantage over them—your Were blood leaves you impervious to illusions. Her greatest weapon will be useless against you.”

“Unless you would prefer someone else to clean up your mess,” Hargrove said silkily.

“No,
sir
,” I snapped. Hargrove was a
dick
, but he was a dick with a point. Adam’s death was my fault, and if I didn’t get this bitch soon, the others faced something even worse. I was suddenly, fiercely glad that this assignment was mine.

“Then you’re dismissed.”

I pushed through the front entrance a few minutes later, practically blinded by tears and guilt and rage, and nearly leapt out of my skin when I came right up against the solid wall of Cyrus’s body. His hands shot out to grip my sides, and I flinched. He pushed my shirt up, revealing the purpling bruise that covered half my left side, and sucked a hot breath between his teeth. “Christ.”

“The docs checked me out; it looks worse than it is. What are you doing here?”

“Availing myself of some free medical. Like I told the guys at the house—if the Corps can mess me up, it can damn well fix me up.”

“You’re hurt?” I didn’t give him time to reply, just turned his arms over and pushed up his sleeves. The red gashes he’d sustained from fending off a knife attack while I ran for weapons had already faded, with only a few white scars and irregular patches of skin remaining. But some of the deepest lines were still puckered, with a faint ridge of flesh running down his right forearm. Another bisected his left palm, like the seam on a glove.

“I’m sorry.” I hugged myself, staring at the signs of what friendship with me had cost him. It made me remember the way I’d felt when I’d seen him dive for the kitchen floor, unsure whether he’d been hit, like my insides were tumbling out onto the linoleum. The scars would probably fade completely in another day, Were metabolism being what it was. But if he’d been a little slower…