Chapter 14 Silver
SILVER
The next time I even thought of letting Cas take control, I needed someone to slap me in the face and dump a bucketful of freezing water on my head.
Of course the entry was rigged. Magical drug dealers didn’t just rely on simple locks and keys.
I took the time to glare at Cas before scooping Amavi up in the crook of my arm and leaping up to avoid the wave of bright green curse flying across the carpeted floor.
I leapt to the top of the sideboard. Cas didn’t bother to move, lazily blocking whatever nasty curse magic towards him by stomping his foot.
I watched his lightning marks brighten, and he winced, visibly in pain.
“Your blocks aren’t that good, huh?”
He sniffed haughtily. “Even if I hadn’t bothered to block, that stupid spell wouldn’t have frozen me in place for more than five seconds. The price I pay to use magic is far more annoying.”
“Price?” I frowned.
He didn’t elaborate, simply striding in the dealer’s house as if he owned it.
“What if he’s inside?”
“There’s no one inside. I would have sensed it.”
“Well, there could be an alarm to warn him of intrusions—and more curses, too, if he’s gone.”
“So?” Cas shrugged.
The house was no less beautiful than the apartment next door, but unlike Eris, who kept hers tidy, welcoming and bright, Mattis hadn’t dusted since he moved in. Most of his belongings were still in boxes, and there was a faint aroma of damp, dirt, alcohol, vomit, sex, and magic.
I had to dodge seven poisoned darts shot through the next wall—Cas waved them away—then a good old slicing hexagonal hex, which imprisoned me in a sphere. I backflipped twice in a row and the spell still got some of my hair.
Cas smirked, leaning against the wall as he observed me.
“I will murder you,” I informed him, preparing for a third jump because the bloody hexagon was still keeping me locked inside it.
“You remember you have magic, right?” he asked casually while I was in the air.
Fuck.
I was an idiot.
I stared at the closest of the points marking the trap, and willed it to explode. It instantly did, and the invisible wall caging me in dropped.
“Couldn’t you have reminded me sooner?” I groused as we walked into what appeared to be a storage room. “Or, I don’t know, undone the hex yourself?”
“What would have happened to you if you’d taken that hex full-on?” he asked.
I blinked. In truth, probably not much, but he wasn’t supposed to know that. “How—”
“You’re Artemis. The day a bargain basement mage manages to harm you is the day the gods have died.”
I bristled. “Yeah, well, my clothes, my hair, and my dog aren’t ironskin.”
“Ironskin,” he repeated. “An old word. Odd, too. It’s not iron that makes you indestructible.”
“What is it, then, if you know so much, oh wise amnesiac?” I hated how he clearly knew so much and yet pretended to be completely ignorant. Mostly because everyone else seemed to fall for his bullshit.
“Ichor. That’s what runs through your veins and makes it impossible for anything crafted, made or imagined by man to affect you. Gods can only be harmed by godly weapons. Can you feel anything?”
At first I wondered if he was asking a philosophical question about divine inner powers, but then I remembered we were in the overfull, untidy room for a reason. I made myself focus, and followed the familiar feel and scent of Kleos’s distinctive energy—sea and sunshine—to a drawer in a desk.
I sighed, spotting a handful of crystals. “That’s all there is here. I mean, everything in this room is illegal, and enough to lock him away under the Guard for years, but I don’t sense any more of Kleos’s crystals.”
“Hand me one. I need to familiarize myself with it.”
I did as I was bid, frowning. “Wait, you’ve met Kleos.”
He nodded. “I’m hardly familiar with her, or her magic. This will help me identify what we’re looking for next time.”
He closed his hand over it and shut his eyes for several seconds.
While he was still, not smirking or opening his mouth, it was hard not to notice how ridiculously beautiful he was.
Someone had to convince him to wear a bloody shirt.
He snorted. “Odin’s tits, your friend’s boring. All sunshine, happiness, and rainbows.”
I should be annoyed, but I remembered thinking the exact same thing when we first met. Kleos had always been so fucking perfect.
Getting to know her allowed me to see more under the surface, but she was inherently so very good.
“I used to think the same thing. Then one day she humiliated a bunch of kids for bullying me. Over the years, I’ve seen her do things that verge on torture. She knows how to hurt—to be cruel. She chooses not to.” After a moment, I added, “Most of the time.”
“I can respect that.” He handed me the crystals, watching me put them in my pocket. “You should leave them, you know.”
I frowned. “What?”
“Take them, and when Mattis comes back, he’ll know we were here.”
“All his fucked-up spells will tell him that.”
“And what we came for,” Cas continued. “That’s not even a tenth of what we’re looking for. He’ll know to warn whoever he got them from.”
Damn him for being right. Again. “You’re so good at thinking like a criminal, I have to wonder if you were one.”
His booming laugh took me by surprise. “That’s me. A criminal.” He could see the wheels turning through my squinted eyes, because he told me, “I’m not Hermes, doll.”
I crossed my arms, annoyed my thoughts had been so obvious. “Then who the fuck are you?”
He winked. “Cas.”
I couldn’t remember anyone annoying me nearly as much as him. “I really am going to kill you one day, if you keep trying to get under my skin.”
“Feel free to try, doll. That ought to be entertaining.”
“I’d like to request to have Mattis followed,” I conclude after summing up our findings. “He doesn’t have a huge reserve—on hand, in any case—and we might learn more from observing him than from an interrogation that could clue in any partners that we’re on to them.”
Gideon nodded. “We’ll get runners on it. Isla and I had a little chat with Baron Snaith. He was high as a kite so I’m not sure he would have remembered it in, but Isla wiped it out of his head to be safe.”
Cas lifted an eyebrow, impressed. “You can enter minds? A rare skill.”
“Only on weak-ass people with shit shields,” Isla replied modestly, blushing at being addressed directly by the shirtless Adonis. “Thankfully, he was one of those.”
I knew that even doing it to completely magicless regulars was beyond the abilities of most mages. Even Kleos and Lucian were unable to actually read people’s minds, let alone modify existing memories. It was a skill people were either born with or not.
“Useful all the same. So, what did Snaith reveal?”
“He was partying—selling lunar essence to kids, by the sound of it—when a rival he knew offered him some magic reserve, free of charge. Between friends. He didn’t question it.”
“That’s not good,” Isla said.
I nodded. If they were being given away for free in small quantities, there was almost no way to actually trace the source.
“Well,” I stated, “it could be one of two things: a small-minded crook who assumed people would get addicted to using such a high level of magic and be willing to pay him a fortune for a refill. Or a wider plot.”
After recent events, we were all leaning towards the second option.
“I say better safe than sorry. We’ll keep treating this as a bigger issue until we’ve recovered the majority of the stones. I’ll ask Kleos, try to figure out how many crystals we’re looking at. She said hundreds. We have to know if that means something closer to two or seven hundred.”
I winced. “Knowing her, I’d say if she admitted to hundreds, it means she had thousands. She’s sort of trained herself to always downplay just how much she needs to drain her magic—even to us. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did it once per day, for decades. More so in recent years.”
A heavy silence followed as we took in the scale of the problem we were handling.
“All right, I’ll pop by Valesco House tomorrow—see if there’s anything left, and try to check if I can spot any clue.
I think my uncle had a security system, and the maid could have heard something.
Continue with your list and we’ll meet again tomorrow, same time.
” Gideon then turned to me. “Ready for your trip?”
I hadn’t even thought to start packing yet, so I nodded.
“By that I mean, are you ready to play nice with your partner?”
“You should ask him,” I grumbled belligerently. “He let me get hexed a bunch of times at Mattis’s.”
Cas snorted. “If you needed help with those hexes you might be in the wrong vocation.”
It would be a shame to break such a perfect nose, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to.
“All right, that’s it,” Gideon said. “You two, I want you down in the pit for the rest of the afternoon.”
I perked up. “Really?”
“The pit?” Cas drawled indifferently.
Gideon bobbed his head. “You have issues to resolve. So you’re going to spar until they’re out of the way.”
Christmas had come early.