Strange Brew (36 page)

Leaving me to chew over that, Nielsen went to an intercom box on the wall and snapped, “Get down here. We’re all waiting on you.”

Bentley herded the children around the perimeter of the room, and then jerked my shackles, bringing me to the center. I looked down at the black paint traveling over the floor. I was in the center of an enormous working circle.

Terrific.

An ancient pulley-operated elevator groaned to a stop, and three of the vapid socialites I recognized from the party last night—tonight? I had lost all sense of time underground—stepped out, clad in plain white cotton pants and tunics, with bare feet. It was all very Jonestown. I hoped the Kool-Aid was cold.

“Bentley.” Nielsen snapped her fingers, and her little toady scurried forward with three vials of blood.

“What on the Hexed black earth are you planning?” I asked Nielsen. She wagged her finger at me.

“Now, now, Miss Swann. I know better than to spell and tell.”

“Oh, you are too cute. I might vomit,” I muttered. Bentley shoved me to my knees in the center of the circle.

Nielsen carefully lifted the emerald off her neck and set it to one side. I felt the magick in the room spike—Bentley’s tainted blood-fueled power, Nielsen’s hard, glittering brand of caster magick, and the children, every one of them, bright as candle flames in the dark. The three puppets waiting patiently at the edge of the paint ring had a few echoes, nothing special—just enough to hold down a charm or two.

Neilsen pulled a sleek ivory caster from her pocket and held it, turning it concentrically in her fingers. She started to pull down power and it lay over me like a wet wool blanket, hard to breathe, musty with the edge of deceit in her workings.

“I see the future,” she said. “I see what
should
be. Do you see?”

“We do,” the three at the edge returned. Nielsen cracked an eye.

“Children, what do we say to Ginger?”

“We see for you,” they chorused unevenly. Their concentration sharpened, poured into her power well. Those poor kids. One of them swayed and fainted. Bentley scurried over and slapped him awake.

Nielsen unstoppered the blood vials and dipped her finger into each one, smearing it down her face. “I take the power to shape the world to what I see,” she said. “I take it
now
.”

One by one, the three witches came forward and let Nielsen anoint their heads. The air around them shimmered as the glamour fought with reality, bruise-purple. I shivered. Blood and caster magick should never combine like this. It was filthy.

“Gets you going, doesn’t it?” Bentley hissed. “Imagine what I did with your blood, Glinda.”

“Go Hex yourself,” I hissed back at him.

The witches groaned and cried out as the glamour took hold, and their bodies changed. One grew tall and bulging like Fisk, the defense attorney, one turned into a prison guard in a uniform, and one turned into Trotter.

Nielsen stepped back, lowering her caster and surveying her work. “You’ll do.” She passed the guard a keycard. “That will get you into the ad-sec wing at Los Altos. Make sure to keep your face out of the cameras.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the witch in a high female voice. Nielsen sighed, and I felt her power spike again. The glamours cemented, all the little details sliding into place—bags under the eyes, messy hair, suits missing a cuff button.

Nielsen was good. Too bad she was such a bitch.

She turned back to me. “We’ll just freshen you up, Miss Swann, and then we’ll be done here.”

Whether or not
Done here
ended with me lying next to poor Matthew, she didn’t give away. I decided that I couldn’t let her get to that point. Bentley produced a knife, sliding the blade open and locking it. “You were tough, I want you to know,” Nielsen said. “Not only looking right, but smelling right. You and that stupid mangy cousin of yours.”

“Gee, I’m so glad I provided a challenge for you,” I said, shying from Bentley’s blade. “My biggest ambition in life, you know.” I was going to have one shot at this, while the magick was up and I had to make it count. Fortunately, I needed only a little, hardly enough for an ego case like Nielsen to notice.

I pulled the magick down to me, feeling it spiral from my forehead down to my fingers. I shut my eyes and thought about locks. Bentley grabbed my wrist and exposed the underside, the veins, and I felt the swoop of air as the knife came down.

Locks. Open. My locks. How I wished I’d paid more attention to Luna…

Focus. The pin, the tumbler, the latch
. The magick found the mechanisms of the handcuffs, struggled in amongst them—gods, I wished I had the kind of memory Luna did for details—and formed my magick into a key.

The shackles snapped open and I let go, twisting in Bentley’s grip and bringing my other fist around to whack him right below the belt buckle. It wasn’t the kick I’d wanted, but it would do.

He let go of me, air singing out of him. The knife dropped. Nielsen reached for her necklace instead of her magick. I wasn’t about to tell her that if she’d just pulled down more power, she could have dropped me. She was stronger and a hell of a lot more skilled.

I let her grab for the spell-jammer instead. I was too busy running.

Up the elevator, the pulleys groaning as I hit the lever and set them free, down a maze of hallways through the Hanover house, and out onto the street.

Bluish morning, the sun not quite up yet. Cars and delivery vans poking through the street. I ran into the middle of the road and flapped my arms like a lunatic, attracting the attention of the nearest van driver. “You okay, sweetie?” he called.

“No!” I shrieked. “I need the police!”

The delivery guy lent me his cell phone and I called the precinct, getting Rick, the desk sergeant and then Lieutenant McAllister.

“Mac,” I said. “Mac, we need help… there are kids… they’re in cages…” I managed to spit out the whole story. I don’t know how long it was before Mac and a bunch of squad cars and ambulances and other official vehicles showed up… I sat down on the curb and drifted, shock finally crashing over me. I’d almost died. I’d come within a handspan of it. But I wasn’t—I was here, exhausted and dirty in a dress that was too big for me.

A pair of feet in combat boots came to an abrupt halt in front of me. “Sunny?” Luna choked, dropping her paper cup of coffee onto the pavement.

“Luna!” There was chaos around us, officers carrying out the children, more of them searching the house, radios and sirens filling up the morning like electric birdcalls. Madison looked at me as a paramedic carried her to his ambulance, but she was too weak to do more than stare.

I needed to forget about the night under the ground, the dull hopelessness on the kids’ faces. I went to hug my cousin, and then froze.

I was standing a few feet behind her.

Trying to describe seeing yourself staring back at is like trying to describe a visit to Willy Wonka’s factory—nothing you say will ever do the moment justice.

“Luna,” I heard myself say urgently. “Who’s that?”

“You bitch!” I launched myself at her. “You glamour-wearing bitch!”

Luna held us apart as fake-me cowered and I spat invective that I had learned from Luna but never had the occasion to use.

“I don’t know what’s going on!” Fake-Sunny cried, cowering.

“Luna, it’s a blood witch glamour!” I screamed. “She’s not me!”

“Everybody shut the hell up!” Luna bellowed. She leaned over to me, back to the fake Sunny, and took a deep sniff. Her eyes widened, gold creeping in around the edges. “You need a shower, Sun,” she whispered to me. “But I’ll take it over the stinky perfume you came back with.”

“I’ve been in a freaking cage all night,” I muttered. “Give me a break.”

“What the
fuck
is that thing I’ve been having coffee with down at the precinct?”

“A witch using my blood.”

I was prepared for Luna to turn around and beat seven kinds of hell out of the fake me, but I wasn’t prepared for Not-Sunny to grab Luna’s sidearm out of holster and aim it. At us.

“Nobody move!” he/she ordered. Luna shook her head, rubbing her temples.

“This is the weirdest gods-damned morning I’ve ever had.”

“We’re all going to get in the car and drive out of here nice and calm,” said Not-Sunny, “and nobody is going to be hurt.”

“Oh, dude,
somebody
is hurting for this,” Luna assured it. “The therapy alone is going to take months.”

A shadow loomed up behind Not-Sunny, from around the corner of an ambulance but I kept my eyes on it.

“Get real,” I snapped, to keep her… its?… whatever, eyes on me. “You’re in the middle of a damn police raid. Where are we gonna go?”

Troy materialized, holding a portable fire extinguisher. He said, “Excuse me.”

Not-Sunny spun, and he whammed her across the temple with the metal cylinder.

Luna let out a breath. “Took you long enough, Mac.”

I stood over the glamour, looking at my slack face. “How’d you know that wasn’t me, Mac?”

“Maybe because you’d never go insane and grab my gun?” Luna snorted. “You’re way too mild.”

Troy put his hand on my shoulder. “Sunny wouldn’t need a gun. She’s too stylish for that.” He winked at me, and then called the paramedics over. “Treat her and cuff her. Make sure she goes to the prison ward at the hospital.”

Luna sat me on the hood of her car and got me a water bottle, although I think we both wished it was a glass of scotch. “So Nielsen stole your blood from the courthouse, made that thing look like you and sent her back here, while entrapping you and using a bunch of kidnapped kids to raise her power for… what?” She shook her head. “You damn witches never make a lick of sense. Why does she have such a hard-on for you?”

“They turned into Trotter, his attorney, and a prison guard,” I recited. I was tired of telling the story, and remembering the sick, twisted-up magick that Nielsen commanded. And remembering how useless I’d been. I curled my fists in my lap. “Maybe… after the courthouse… they wanted me out of the way.” It couldn’t be because I was a real threat. I was nothing next to Nielsen’s skill. It galled me.

“At least now we know how every witch trying to replace O’Halloran is getting picked off,” Luna muttered. “ASA Batshit has access to all of his case files and known associates. Soon there won’t
be
any competition. Just her.”

My head snapped up. “Luna.” I had it, the flash and the tumbling of dominoes that comes when everything that’s been whirling around your brain suddenly clicks together. It was sort of a rush. Also, sort of nauseating.

Luna blinked at me. “What? You look like you just swallowed a marble.”

“If there’s just
her
, she won’t have a hope of cementing control over the city,” I rushed. “Nobody even knows she’s a witch. She hides it with this big green emerald thing.”

“How very Indiana Jones,” Luna said dryly. I waved her quiet and went on.

“But if she gets
Trotter
on board, then she has a mouthpiece,” I cried. “He’s the last of the O’Halloran circle.”

“He’d never do it,” said Luna. “And anyway, he’s going to prison.”

Her face lost color as she arrived at the same station as my train of thought. “Hex me.”

“Trotter wouldn’t do it, but the glamour would,” I said. “And thanks to that explosion-happy idiot in court, Nielsen will get a mistrial.”

“She’d have to pop the real Trotter.” Luna’s finger drummed against her desk. “Prison guard, you said?”

“Yes…” I started, but she was already in the car. I followed her, and we fishtailed onto the street and the freeway in the direction of the Los Altos federal prison.

We drove northwest through sunrise, and into morning, Luna in grim silence, me in a slightly panicked one. My stomach twisted. What could I do against Nielsen? She’d wipe the floor with me.

Los Altos is a clump of gray at the top of gray cliffs with the blue Pacific washing the bottom. Bolted to the bedrock, it has a reputation of being nearly escape-proof. That is, if you weren’t being set upon by a couple of witches bent on your death.

The guard at the outside wall didn’t want to let me in, but Luna snarled at him until he relented.

We ran through a maze of industrial-lit hallways until we came to the ad-sec block. Luna fetched up against the desk, panting. “You got a Nathan Trotter in custody?”

“Yeah,” said the guard, “but you’re going to have to wait your turn, Detective. He’s meeting with the state’s attorney.”

Luna hit the desk. “Shit.”

“Open the door,” I said. “It’s an emergency.”

The guard yawned. She looked like she was waiting to get her nails done. “Give me one good reason.”

“The state’s attorney is a witch bent on taking over Nocturne City and instigating a new reign of magickal warfare. She’s here to kill Trotter and replace him with a bespelled blood witch. Oh, and she locked me in a cage.”

The guard blinked. She looked to Luna, “An emergency, you said?”

“Lady, just open the gods-damn door!” I bellowed, making both Luna and the guard jump.

“Okay, fine,” she grumbled, buzzing us in. Luna jerked her sidearm out of holster, shoved it at the guard, and stormed through the gate. “Nocturne City cops,” the guard said under her breath, the way you’d say
Donkey-licking bondage freaks
.

Luna ran ahead of me down the hall to the visitor’s room. Through the wire-mesh door, we could see Bentley and Nielsen sitting with Trotter, who was pushed as far back against the wall as he could get.

The guard outside the door was familiar. “He’s the glamour,” I gasped at Luna. She locked on to the guy like a Titan missile.

The guard turned his head, had enough time to say “What?” and went down like a sack full of nails. Luna shook her fist out, knuckle bones popping back into place.

“What was that?” Nielsen said from behind the door.

Bentley stuck his head out. Luna wrapped her hands around his throat before he could say or see anything other than her face. “Lock
my
cousin in a cage?” she growled, and then threw him back into the visitor’s room, where he bounced off the table and into the wall with a
clang
.