Chapter Forty-Two #2
But that was a little hard with Weres leaping three stories high, trying to get at me.
Which, since we were maybe all of five floors off the ground, did not leave me reassured.
Some tried to grab hold of protuberances in the rock and push off to propel themselves the rest of the way, but got the shit shocked out of them instead as the column was warded, too.
So they started backing up and running from a distance to build up steam. And attempted to launch themselves onto the platform that way. But I suddenly didn’t care about that, and not only because some mages below had started shooting repel blasts at them, knocking them off course.
But because I’d just seen something that was more important—and way more worrying
At the edge of the camp, shortly past where the shields came down, stood a ghostly figure. In daylight, it would have been all but invisible, even assuming it could withstand the day. But the landscape now looked like night.
Which might explain why it had emerged from the spirit world to show itself against the boiling purple energy of the shields, where it was just possible for me to make out the large, elegant shape... of a leopard.
No, I thought, my blood freezing. No, it couldn’t be! But there was just no doubt about it. The creature even held my eyes for a beat before turning and vanishing back through the shield, which didn’t impede it in the slightest.
My old sparring partner’s face appeared in my field of vision, as if wondering what had me so riveted. He looked in the direction I was staring, but didn’t see anything of interest. Except for more leaping Weres, which had him sighing and shaking his head, before looking back at me.
“Are you going to slide out of the chair?”
“No,” I managed to say.
“Good. It’s easier to talk this way.”
Maybe for him. I was thick-tongued with the remains of the paralytic and even more with sheer terror. It was suddenly hard to concentrate on anything except the overriding thought screaming through my brain: I had students here.
I could not have students here.
The mage sat in the chair opposite me, wearing an all-black outfit with boots covered in desert dust. But his nondescript face lacked the snarling ferocity of the clans below. If anything, it was vaguely pleasant.
“Hard day?” he asked, an eyebrow rising as he took in my bare, dirty feet and the tattered remains of the caftan.
“Not yet,” I managed to croak.
“Well, it’s still early.”
I wanted to snap back a response, but didn’t. I also didn’t ask what the hell was going on, what he wanted, or anything else. I couldn’t think, but I had to!
You’re a war mage, I thought desperately.
Remember your training!
But instead, my mouth was doing its own thing while I wrestled with rising panic. “Is that a glamourie?”
The question seemed to surprise him, too. “This?” he made a circular motion with one finger that encompassed the mousy brown bangs, unshaven chin, and mud-colored eyes. “No. I was born this way. It’s rather helpful in my line of work to go unnoticed.”
“But there’s no scent on you, either. No magic.
No... anything.” It was obvious up here, with all the energy being tossed about.
He should have been melting into it, magically speaking, a creature in his element.
But instead, he was silhouetted against the wards like a cardboard cutout, a black hole against all that leaping color.
It was the same void I’d noticed at the grocery store, where Caleb and I had gotten exactly nothing from every detection spell we’d tried. And subconsciously, on the two times I’d met him face to face. Not the presence of something, but the absence.
I blinked as a few things came together.
Someone could hide themselves magically a hundred different ways, everything from blending into the scenery to literal invisibility, although the latter often failed when you moved.
But on a dark night or in a darker tunnel, the rippling effect could go unnoticed.
But not the scent.
Not with a pack of furious Weres after you. Especially not a pack led by Ulmer. And yet the mage had disappeared not once but twice, and the second time, my counterpart had been so near the surface that she’d practically taken over.
Yet we hadn’t smelled a thing.
He gave a small smile, watching me puzzle it out. “It’s a talent.”
“Yeah, I always heard the Black Circle collects those with rare gifts. And now you’re trying to make more.”
“Like you these days,” he countered. “It seems we have much in common.”
“Except I’m kind of unclear on something,” I said, training finally taking over despite everything. Get him talking, form a rapport, make a deal. And do it fast before my students did something crazy and got themselves killed!
“And what is that?” he asked pleasantly.
“You kidnapped Sebastian. To try to force me to trade the potion for him—”
“Yes, that was annoying. I thought Bleddyn could hold you for longer than that.”
“—and when that failed, you rounded up the Weres in Tartarus—for what? Hoping I’d hear and come running, and you could grab Jace?”
“No,” he looked regretful, “although I should have thought of that. Once you knew what I wanted, or would shortly figure it out, we had to grab them before you did, or lose our guinea pigs.”
“But when that also failed—”
“Yes. You’ve been, if you don’t mind me saying so, a real pain in the ass.”
“—you resorted to butchering some street person in a grocery? You already had the potion. We found an empty vial of it at the scene!”
We’d assumed he was searching for the Reaper to obtain the rest of the guy’s stash. But if he was the Reaper, and every failed detection spell we’d used on that sordid little crime scene said as much, then he already had it. So what the...
“Oh, God,” I said, belatedly seeing the obvious. “The man we found wasn’t a victim. He was the Reaper. You located him before we even started the hunt!”
The mage’s eyes flickered. It was so subtle that I almost missed it, lost in my own jumbled thoughts. But I’d been trained to notice everything, and that minute reaction told me I was off base somewhere.
But he agreed readily enough. “We’d been buying his work for a while, after discovering that we got a bit more.
.. firepower... with his enhancements than with others.
But his prices...” he shook his head. “Exorbitant, even by the current inflated standards. But then, he was the only game in town, wasn’t he?
It’s not just anyone who can reap a Relic. ”
“But another Relic can.”
“Hm, I suppose it was a case of getting high on his own supply. And figuring out that he had a little goldmine and starting to get a taste for the finer things in life.”
“The hoodie,” I said, remembering.
“Oh, more than that,” it was dry. “For what he was bleeding us for, he could have bought the damned store—and a dozen more besides. And worse, sooner or later, he was going to run out of potion.”
“Because he wasn’t making it.”
“No, our sources at your HQ told us about the late, great Mage Jenkins—leaving the only supply that which was already on the streets and the bit your Circle had taken from his lab. Fortunately, the Reaper had stumbled across some of the former.”
“So you tracked him down... but came up empty.” I didn’t make it a question because the fence in Tartarus had just died a few days ago. They wouldn’t have needed him if they’d found what they wanted from the source.
The mage confirmed it. “He’d said he’d used up the last of his stash and was preparing to leave town. And when I heard that all my hard work had been in vain, well. I became a little... perturbed.”
“So you reaped the Reaper.” Only he hadn’t.
He didn’t show up at that grocery with a squad—a big one—which would have damned well been needed for something like that.
If he had, they would have been revealed by the forensic spells Caleb and I used.
And while there might be one mage with some throwback ability to camouflage himself, I doubted there was a whole group of them.
Meaning he was lying. He hadn’t taken out a Reaper on his own, powerful or not. And speaking of power, I was pretty sure where he had been getting his.
He shrugged, too calmly. “We could use the parts, and it seemed a shame to leave them behind if that was all I was going to get. I was interrupted by some nosy parker types, but I’d almost finished anyway, so I left them to it. I had another line on what I wanted, after all.”
“Me.”
“And it seems I may have finally figured out something you’ll trade for it, doesn’t it?”
I glanced around the battlefield, half expecting to see Bleddyn.
Maybe because my counterpart was still searching for him, and her eyes didn’t miss much when she bothered to use them.
Like when they suddenly focused back on the mage, and the small mirror he was holding up, showing the image of a man, bound and thrashing inside some little cell.
And utterly furious, but not so much that I couldn’t make out his face.
Cyrus.