Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Kit
Green light spiraled from the disc, and the assassin burst from the portal like a pop star after her mid-show wardrobe change.
Gone were the baggy jeans and beach bag—she was now in full combat apparel with a black vest and elbow-length gloves, a variety of nasty things clipped onto them for easy access.
I saw all this in a fraction of a second before violet light exploded across my vision.
Concussive force hurled me several feet through the air. I hit the floor, my backpack doing little to soften my landing. The crash of falling stone was deafening, and debris pummeled me as sunlight surged through the busted ceiling.
Pain throbbed through my rib cage, and groggy confusion slowed my thoughts. Beside me, Teddy was coughing and cursing in the same breath as he struggled to sit up. I pushed onto my hands and knees, chunks of mud brick tumbling off me.
Where was Lienna?
The assassin stood amid the rubble. On the other side of the debris, through the billows of beige dust, I spotted Lienna, a streak of blood running down her face.
She twisted her Rubik’s cube. “Ori te—”
The artifact flew out of her hands, yanked away by the assassin’s telekinesis.
As it landed amid the ceiling’s remains, I sprang to my feet, visualizing a fireball large enough to roast the murderous telekinetic in a single white-hot blaze.
But she was already whirling toward me, her gloved hand making that same tossing motion from our last encounter.
A trio of silver needles popped free from her wrist and flew at me.
I doused my fireball and tried to grab the needles with my own telekinesis, but they were so tiny I could barely see them. I dove to the floor. The minuscule projectiles shot over my head. Yes, I’d like to cancel this impromptu acupuncture appointment, thank you very much.
Half tripping on Teddy, I rose again, and the assassin launched another needle barrage.
I imagined ice—a glimmering, transparent wall covered in a sheen of meltwater from the desert heat. A Vinny-worthy barrier spread out from my palms just in time to intercept the little murder-spikes.
“Ori inicio ballistam!” the assassin barked.
How many charges did that stupid artifact have?
Violet light refracted through my ice shield, and an explosion shook the other side of the house.
“Lienna!”
She didn’t have her cube. Didn’t have her shield. And the assassin’s second blast had turned Teddy’s sitting room doorway into a jagged chasm. I couldn’t see Lienna—or much at all—through all the roiling dust.
I dropped my ice shield, and it shattered against the floor. Before I could sprint away, a rough hand grabbed my arm.
“You idiot!” Teddy yelled. “You led an assassin to me!”
“No, I led an assassin to me!” I yanked my arm away. “She’s not here for you.”
“Then deal with her!”
“I am—”
He lunged into his workroom with surprising speed and slammed the door shut. Blue light from some sort of protective Arcana spell shimmered across the door.
I spun back around. Where the hell was Lienna? Had she managed to duck into the sitting room before the explosion?
Looming in the sunlit dust cloud, the lethal acupuncturist fired a new spell into the haze, this one a spray of pink arrowheads that blew ten-inch holes in the mud brick on contact.
I rushed forward and grabbed the assassin with my full telekinetic strength, hauling her toward me. I wouldn’t be catching her in my arms like I had Lienna, however. I’d be catching her face with my fist.
Except she didn’t fly toward me. She staggered, caught her balance, and whipped around to face me. Did this woman have an adamantium skeleton or some shit?
The assassin snarled an incantation, and a wide beam of sizzling green light streaked toward my knees. I leaped into the air with a boost of levitation. The spell slashed beneath me, hit a wall, and burst like a firecracker in a way that would have pulverized my kneecaps.
As I levitated higher, a blue-tinged ripple swept across the floor—Lienna’s holding spell. It caught the assassin, and her arms windmilled as she struggled to balance atop her suddenly immovable shins.
Framed in the demolished sitting room doorway, Lienna stood with her holding spell knife in one hand and a short metal wand in the other.
The assassin yanked another artifact off her glove and aimed it at Lienna, the incantation already spilling from her lips. Lienna pointed her wand at the woman.
Letting go of my levitation, I wrenched the artifact from the assassin’s fingers with my telekinesis.
“Ori notatus morti,” Lienna chanted.
As my feet hit the floor, a rope of scarlet light shot out of her wand and banded around the assassin’s neck. The woman grabbed at the coil of light but couldn’t tear it free.
The glow of the spell, still connected to her wand, cast eerie shadows on Lienna’s face. “Moriatur notatus.”
With a flash of red, the band constricted with brutal force, snapping the woman’s neck. Her body hit the rubble-strewn floor, and a plume of dust puffed into the air, catching the sunlight. The glow of the spell dissipated.
With a clatter of disturbed debris, Lienna rushed to my side. I pulled her against me and pressed my face into her hair. Her hands formed fists against my back.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I think so.” Stepping back, she wiped at the blood running down her face. “Where’s Dr. Sorensen?”
I surveyed the scene. Half the ceiling was gone, along with a chunk of the exterior wall. The door to Teddy’s workroom still shimmered faintly with whatever protective spell he’d activated, and despite the damage to his sitting room, all the glass bookcases remained in perfect condition.
“He’s either barricaded in his workroom, or he used a secret escape hatch to get the hell out of here.” I gingerly prodded my aching ribs. “Can’t blame him.”
“We should go too.”
“Yeah.”
But we had one final unpleasant task to take care of first. I crossed the wreckage to where the assassin lay. Her dead eyes stared at the blue sky through the broken ceiling.
I glanced at the wand clutched in Lienna’s hand. “It worked.”
She gave a small nod. Creating lethal artifacts was neither Lienna’s style nor her area of expertise, but we’d both known we’d end up in a kill-or-be-killed scenario sooner or later.
“We need to figure out how she knew where we’d be.” I kneeled beside the dead assassin and opened the pouches on her combat vest while Lienna checked the pockets of her pants. “She got her orders from someone.”
Searching a fresh corpse wasn’t on my bucket list of secret agent experiences, so I tried to be as quick as possible.
Together, we found an assortment of artifacts, a few empty potion bottles, throwing knives, sunglasses, and a travel-sized bottle of hand sanitizer—can’t commit murder with germy hands, it seemed.
I decided to forgo searching her gloves, which were lined with dozens of poisoned needles.
I was about to give up when Lienna unzipped the assassin’s combat vest and flipped it open to reveal two pockets in the inner lining. Out of one, I pulled a cell phone with a smashed screen. Not helpful. Slipping my fingers back into the pocket, I felt the curved metal edge of a familiar shape.
I yanked out a silver MPD badge, scarcely able to believe what I was holding. “What the hell? She was an MPD agent?”
Lienna didn’t respond. She’d opened the other inner pocket of the vest and withdrawn a small keychain, sans any keys.
She stared at it, her face pale as death. “This … this is mine.”
I examined the charm attached to it—a flat rectangle decorated with a simple flowerlike etching. “What do you mean?”
She turned her eyes up to mine, and they were wide and glassy with shock. “This is mine. Look!”
She stuck the charm under my nose, and I squinted at a set of tiny runes scratched onto the back.
“My dad and I—we made it together when I was a kid. I was eleven, I think? Or twelve?”
She shook her head violently, and I grabbed her arm to steady her.
Tucking the badge into my pocket, I drew her away from the assassin’s body, through the hole in the wall, and into the narrow, sunlit courtyard that ran alongside Teddy’s house.
With a wave of my hand, I lifted her Rubik’s cube out of the rubble, floated it to my palm, and slipped it safely into her satchel.
She hardly seemed to notice, transfixed by the keychain.
“I’d been anxious about Dad dying on the job or something bad happening to him.
” She stumbled on the debris. “Kid stuff, you know? He had this idea—we both had these keychains from a vacation, so we made them into spells. It was the first artifact I ever made. I kept the keychain on my satchel until …”
I wrapped my arm around her, unnerved by how shaken she looked.
“When I learned about the bribes,” she finished in a whisper, “I took it off my satchel. I left it behind in LA. How could this woman have it?”
“And why?” I focused my clairsentience, scanning for anyone nearby. Nothing. “We’ll figure it out later. First, we need to get out of here.”
She glanced back into the house. “Are we just going to leave the body?”
“Teddy’s problem. Come on.”