Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Kit
While the bustling business of hotels, taxis, shops, and people around Bahla Fort gave the impression of a populated city, once Lienna and I had traveled farther north in the ancient town, we discovered that much of it was abandoned.
We hit pockets of townsfolk coming and going from the centuries-old buildings—including a small café from which I acquired a much-needed coffee—but after that, an unsettling quiet took over.
Every sense I possessed was on high alert, assessing the potential threat of each detail. The soft breeze whistling through the ruins. The shadow of a cloud passing overhead. The crunch of the pebbles underfoot that sounded like cannon fire in the silence.
“Are you sure there are no jinn around here?” I whispered.
Lienna rolled her eyes. “Positive.”
Despite her confident reply, her voice was as hushed as mine. Speaking at a normal volume felt like a sin in this narrow alleyway, as though a single shout could collapse the derelict walls like a miniature Jericho.
Of course, it wasn’t really jinn I was worried about—it was the assassin. Between her portal magic and baffling knack for eluding the entire spectrum of my Psychica abilities, she could literally be around any corner.
I rolled my shoulders, my muscles aching from telekinetically yanking Lienna away from the assassin’s open portal. Tossing a whole human body ten feet through the air was a feat of psychic and physical strength that eclipsed what I’d thought I was capable of. Adrenaline was one hell of a drug.
Up ahead, something rattled among the harsh shadows cast by the surrounding structures. I stopped dead in my tracks and clutched the strap of Lienna’s backpack, ready to throw her out of harm’s way.
A small brown bird lifted out of a nook in the rubble and flitted away.
There was a time when such an overreaction to an itsy-bitsy winged creature that weighed less than a chocolate chip cookie—the least violent baked good in my opinion—would’ve been cause for embarrassment. But not today.
“You think she’s following us?” Lienna asked quietly.
“I doubt she’s given up,” I answered. “Especially considering she was waiting for us. That encounter wasn’t a coincidence.”
Lienna’s lips pressed into a thin line. “I can’t figure out how she knew we’d be here. We’ve been so careful.”
“Even if Daoud and Arif sold us out, they could only report where we’d been, not where we were headed.” I rubbed the back of my hand across the sheen of perspiration on my forehead. “And that beach-bag-carrying maniac definitely wasn’t a local.”
Lienna nodded. “I bet she’s a Consilium assassin.”
A conclusion I’d also arrived at. Kade and Soze had stolen Lienna’s portals for the Consilium’s use—as well as duplication, apparently. How industrious of them to copy her most powerful, dangerous magic for their own nefarious purposes.
My hands curled into fists. “That still leaves the question of how the Consilium knew to send an assassin before we even got here.”
We walked in silence, wading through the deeply unsatisfying and unsettling answer neither of us wanted to utter: the Consilium was more powerful and ubiquitous than we’d feared.
The end of the alleyway was getting close. Both my muscles and my mind tensed for what was on the other side. The notion that there could be a little black disc spewing a vortex of light and a telekinetic assassin with murder-needles mere feet away changed everything.
“Maybe we should turn back,” I said in a low voice. “Grab the next car we see and get the hell out of here. Our location was compromised before we even set foot in Oman—first with Daoud’s team, now this assassin. Half the town could be Consilium goons for all we know.”
We’d spent the last three months fending off bounty hunters and disrupting Consilium activities wherever we could. So far, we’d managed to stay just out of the evil cabal’s reach by maxing out our magic and clandestine skills—a grueling lifestyle that we couldn’t keep up forever.
With Lienna now as much of a target as I was and the Consilium sending Psychica-shielded killers to ambush us, the danger felt insurmountable.
Lienna shook her head. “We can’t let them dictate our moves. We need to stick to the plan.”
The alley led us to the corner of what had once been an open-air courtyard.
The square plot of dirt was hemmed in by the buildings we’d just squeezed between on two sides and by a large stone wall on the third.
Opposite us, a ten-foot pile of collapsed mud brick was heaped against more abandoned homes—or maybe it was one big home.
It was hard to tell. The structures resembled a sepia-toned Lego project that had been half-destroyed by the careless jaws of the family dog.
Lienna checked the map on her phone, looked up at the stone wall, then looked back at her phone.
“Is this it?” I asked.
“Somewhere around here.” She scrunched her nose. “I don’t see anything that looks lived in—or anything that someone would want to live in.”
I glanced around, but the structures that could be considered dwellings looked like they’d been uninhabited for decades. My clairsentience wasn’t picking up on anything either, though after my wonky results in the fort, I wasn’t putting money on my own reliability right now.
Lienna and I split up to check the surrounding buildings for signs of life. After inspecting a third clearly abandoned abode, I was stepping over a few scattered bricks from the heap when I paused. Backing up, I canted my head.
“Hey, Lienna?” I called, removing my sunglasses and peering into the shadows beside the pile of debris.
Popping out of a doorway across the courtyard, she hastened to my side. “What is it?”
I pointed.
“Oh!” She leaned around me for a better look. “Is that a path?”
“Sure looks like it.”
We exchanged grins, then scooted into the narrow passage between buildings.
I assumed it would connect with a different street, but after a dozen paces, the mud-brick wall on our left disappeared, revealing a small stone square with someone’s front door set in a sand-colored wall.
A proper front door made of weathered wood and metal hinges that was at least a century newer than anything else I’d seen around here.
It was impossible to guess how large the residence on the other side was since all the structures around us abutted each other.
With eager anticipation and sharp impatience quickening my pulse, I stepped up to the door and raised my hand to knock.
“Wait!” Lienna hissed.
I aborted my knock with an ungainly jerk of my arm, afraid I was about to high-five a scorpion’s tail. “What?”
“Look.” She pointed at the edge of the door. Etched into the wood all around the door were lines and runes. “Abjuration spells.”
“Multiple spells? Are they going to electrocute me if I touch the door? Will they stop me from busting it down?”
“Maybe for the first one, definitely for the second one.”
I swore. “We don’t have time for you to break through a dozen abjuration arrays.”
She arched an eyebrow with an unexpected mix of disbelief and amusement. “I don’t need to break them.”
“You don’t?”
She poked one of the arrays. “Ori ne fiat.”
A faint glimmer of light passed over it. She touched another, muttered an incantation, then did the same to a third array. The door handle clicked as it was magically unlocked.
“Whoa,” I said. “How are you doing that?”
She smiled mysteriously. “Shall we say hello?”
I completed my previously unfulfilled knock on the door, waited about three seconds, then pounded on the wood again. The impatience and urgency I’d been fighting since the assassin’s attack scraped at me. Grabbing the handle, I flung the door wide open.
I got the barest impression of a long hallway with a lovely, red-patterned rug marking the entrance before my attention locked on the man standing at the other end of said rug. He was in his sixties, medium height, maximum scowl, with a wiry frame and short, steel-gray hair.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, his rough voice layered with indignation. “Don’t take another step.”
“Dr. Sorensen,” I began in my warmest tone as I crossed the threshold. “Or rather, Theodore. Can I call you Teddy?”
“Ori fac impellaris.”
Pale light flashed beneath the entryway rug, and an invisible force hurled me backward out the door and past Lienna as though I’d been punted by a giant boot. An instant before impact, I brought myself to an abrupt halt so that I was levitating horizontally a foot above the ground.
“Whatever you fools are here to steal,” the old man growled, “you won’t get it. Ori vinciaris!”
“Ori absis!” Lienna barked, her incantation overlapping his as she stepped in front of the open doorway. Light flared again, her spell countering the magic set off by the old crank.
I levered myself up like an irate vampire rising from his crypt after being rudely awakened from his eternal slumber.
“So you’re an abjuration sorceress,” Sorensen scoffed. “Did Ballester or one of his handlers send you? Of all the arrogant thieves—”
“We’re not here to steal anything!” I yelled over Lienna’s shoulder. “We need your help!”
That gave the man pause—for a nanosecond. “Sure you do.”
“Really, we—”
“I don’t care.” He pointed at Lienna. “Ori vinciaris!”
Another flare of magic leaped from the key-sized artifact in his fist. Lienna started an incantation as she backpedaled into me. The golden light hit her and she froze in place, a binding spell glowing across her body.
Enough of this shit.
Storming around Lienna’s frozen form and back into Sorensen’s entryway, I focused on the artifact in his hand and yanked it with telekinetic fingers. The pull was so strong that the old man lurched off balance as his artifact flew straight into my waiting palm.
I ground my heel into the floor. In vivid detail, I imagined a hundred cracks breaking apart whatever array was hidden beneath the rug. A faint shudder rippled through the earth, and stone chips shot into the air.
Sorensen’s wide eyes flashed to my face.
I held his artifact in my palm—a smooth rune-covered piece of wood about the size of a domino. Flames as bright and hot as the ones I’d hurled at the assassin erupted over my palm.
Turning my hand, I let the artifact slide free. It fell to the floor where it continued to burn like a merry little candle.
“Dr. Sorensen,” I said in a slow, measured tone that still held an edge of a growl despite my best efforts. “We aren’t here for some nefarious purpose. We just want to talk to you, so stop attacking us.”
He lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. His gaze flicked to the cracked floor, the burning artifact, then back to me.
“Very well,” he said, relaxing his arms. “You may step inside.”
Then he turned on his heel and vanished into the shadows of his well-guarded home.