Chapter 9
NINE
Joan had never been to the Night Market before.
For a witch, going to the market meant giving up any means of personal protection.
Channeling was suppressed by the wards, and as such, witches at the market were little more than humans.
Out of their depth and surrounded by both predators built to drain the blood from other beings and tricksters like the fae aiming to trap them in eternal servitude.
In Brooklyn, they approached Owl’s Head Park from the south, and CZ stepped confidently onto a path leading into the trees. During the day, the park was an entirely normal place for humans. At night, a warded section unfolded for the magical world.
“One more time,” CZ said.
Joan huffed a breath. “Don’t talk to anyone, don’t touch anything, don’t make eye contact. Definitely don’t drink any of the pretty fae drinks.”
CZ gave her a long-suffering glare.
“Fine,” Joan amended. “Don’t drink anything, period, and especially not from the fae; they will turn me inside out and laugh.”
CZ shifted, crossing his arms as he stared into the shadowed trees.
He was in a black hoodie and dark pants.
He could walk around the Night Market because he was a vampire.
Better, a LaMorte vampire, and his mother ran his pack.
To outsiders, the Night Market was a spooky place full of illegal dealings and illicit goods.
To CZ, it was like a big family bazaar, in the way that all vampires were family to him, and even the fae wouldn’t mess with him.
There were rules here, but none of them protected humans or witches.
“Bad fucking idea,” he muttered. For the thousandth time.
“There isn’t a better one,” Joan said. “We’re losing our head start in this race. We keep needing a witch or three to help us, and we have precisely none.”
“It really be two dumbasses deciding the fate of everything,” CZ muttered.
“Only if these two dumbasses find this witch first,” Joan replied.
Rubbing a nonexistent headache at his temple—vampires didn’t get sick, a fact Joan, who did get sick, loathed with a passion—CZ started forward, stepping between two trees.
Similar to the HERMES stations, Joan met slight resistance as she passed through the wards, an elastic film pressing against her body. She gasped, but CZ’s grasp was steady.
On the other side of the trees and wards, Joan stumbled slightly. Magic remained around her, but it was like she was in a winter coat and the cold couldn’t penetrate.
A clearing spread out before them, grass defiantly lush beneath their shoes.
It curled over Joan’s Vans, making her steps a bit tougher, like she was walking on sand.
Multicolored tents had been erected, and it looked rather like a farmer’s market, just at night.
People chatted at the stalls, and various magical creatures wheeled bikes around, putting odds and ends in the baskets up front.
Music was playing from somewhere, and sound washed over her as she entered this new world.
To her right, a fae was peddling an array of pretty pink drinks in tiny bottles.
It was a cash-only market, and to her left, a grizzled human was dealing out hard bills like an ATM.
See, Joan tried to say with her eyes. A human is safe here, I’ll be safe here.
CZ wasn’t paying attention to her. He’d grabbed her hand to weave through the tents, but it was slow going because people kept stopping to greet him.
Vampires especially melted from the sides to throw him laughs, clap him on the back, and ask about his parents, aunt, brother, or job. CZ responded in turn, asking about children, how sales were going, passing jokes left and right.
Joan’s chest warmed at the sight, CZ surrounded by people who loved and knew him. For all he worried about not being useful, and all the guilt he’d started carrying around when he moved out of LaMorte territory and into Manhattan, he was still a vital member of his pack.
Joan attracted some stares, but that was the extent of it.
Every time someone asked about her, CZ brushed them off easily.
Witches sometimes came to the Night Market, but they didn’t come to hold sway.
They came to buy or to sell illegally. Cursed magic objects changed hands.
One stall they passed was selling antique mirrors, but none reflected the world around them.
Joan leaned up to whisper at CZ. “We’re going to where you found Mik?”
CZ’s face was grim. “Abel will meet us there.”
A fae brushed past Joan, close. CZ snarled, all predator, with his fangs flashing in the dim light of the market as he pulled Joan toward him.
The fae backed off with a start, Joan’s phone tipping from their hands.
CZ caught it and handed it back to Joan, who—well, of course she’d gotten pickpocketed.
She probably looked like an easy mark. She was an easy mark.
“Alright, big guy,” Joan said, pulling CZ back and tucking her phone into her pocket, deeper this time. “Let’s just get through this.”
CZ put his fangs away. “Bad fucking idea, this whole thing,” he said, but steered her forward.
The Night Market must have benefited heavily from witch magic, despite the clear aversion to them, because it never ended.
The clearing stretched large and deep around them.
Even the wards smothering Joan’s magic and making her chest tight must have come from witches, even if they were witch-fae or witch-vampires. It was all casting magic.
Joan tried not to stare too hard at everyone around her, instead letting CZ pull her ahead.
But the air was charged tonight.
She caught herself staring down alleyways, watching shadows morph before her eyes.
“Cane!” Abel called, as they approached a gap in between two tents.
He was tall and broad, taller and broader than even CZ, his skin dark and his hair in short little twists.
They had the same smile, Abel and CZ, wide and guileless, and Joan saw both on display as they dapped each other up, CZ’s posture straightening a little.
“And Joan,” Abel said kindly, pulling Joan into a hug. “I hear you’ve managed to get yourself into trouble already. So soon after your return too.”
“I couldn’t run the risk of life being too boring,” Joan returned with a laugh, as they pulled apart. “How’re the students?”
“On summer break now,” Abel said. “Just in time for all my attention to be occupied by the… situation. I’ve done what research I can.”
“Do you know where this spell could have come from?”
Abel shook his head. “I know people were theorizing it was an old one, but I can’t imagine a historian uncovering this in some archive and not taking credit for their find, and no archives I know of have reported anything missing.
There’s no history of humans being granted casting magic, this would have come out of nowhere. My knowledge isn’t complete—”
“—but it’s pretty comprehensive, nerd,” CZ mumbled.
Abel cuffed him across the back of the head. “But it’s extensive, and unless someone somehow made a completely unforeseen discovery in some very obscure archive or archaeological site, there is no historical precedent. I suspect we’re looking at something new.”
CZ rubbed the back of his head and sighed. “Well, we’ve kind of been operating under that assumption, but I guess this more distinctly confirms some sort of spellmaker did this. Let’s hurry through this so we can get Joan out of here,” he said.
Abel and Joan put on their best listening faces.
“I was here,” CZ explained. “I’d been hanging out with Jeremiah and was heading home for the night when I saw Mik standing there.” He pointed way down the gap in the tents they stood in. “They didn’t seem okay.”
“What kind of not okay?” Abel asked, arms crossed as he contemplated the information.
“Shaky, haunted. And I know humans get tormented here all the time, that’s just the way things go, but something felt different here.
They turned and started eyeing the fae food, and I’ve seen that go wrong too many times, so I walked over…
” CZ started walking down the gap, and Abel dutifully followed.
Joan had made it only a few steps when she felt a whisper across her back.
She whirled, clamping a hand down on her nape, searching for the source of the sensation, but there was no one there.
Her eyes saw nothing, but her body was sounding all sorts of alarms. The grass waved frantically at her feet.
There were eyes on her back. Eyes on her front. Eyes, watching from everywhere.
CZ called her name distantly, but Joan was frozen in place, reaching out with every single one of her senses to try and determine what had just happened.
A heavy hand landed on her shoulder. She inhaled a gasp, and her breath frosted in the air, even in the warm night.
Her mind fractured like a kaleidoscope, spinning through images. The party uptown, taking the N to Brooklyn. Hell’s Kitchen—
“Jo, what is it?” CZ said urgently, and his voice rang like a thousand bells, and Joan’s lips were numb. She couldn’t think or breathe or—
There was a rush of warmth, and the pressure in her mind cut off abruptly.
Sounds resumed at a normal cadence as she heaved in a breath and blinked frost from her eyelashes to find Abel holding her shoulders and CZ several yards to her left, holding the wrist of a woman who was furiously talking at him.
Joan blinked again and the image crystalized.
CZ, fangs out, eyes an incandescent red, hand rising to grasp the woman’s throat.
And the woman—not just anyone.
“Grace?” Joan said around a dry mouth. She lurched forward, Abel moving with her. “CZ, don’t hurt her.”
CZ paused, thrumming with violence. “What the hell just happened?”
Grace snatched her wrist back, rubbing it unhappily. “Someone fished around in Joan’s memories. I stopped it. You’re welcome.”
“Grace, what are you doing in the market?” Joan gathered her wits, leaning heavily on Abel, who was scanning their surroundings.