Chapter 2
Locke
“I thought you were tracking down Isaiah Holmes.” The voice emanating from his speakers belonged to Zev Aslanov, the intimidating Cordova Family Arbitrator but, more importantly, Locke’s friend.
“I am.” As soon as Locke cleared the sedan, he glided back into the left lane. “Does the name Leo Starini hit any bells?”
“Nothing’s ringing,” Zev said. “How does he tie into the Forge Foundation?”
“Other than being a Traditionalist, I haven’t a clue, but according to Jigz, he’s not only a friend of Isaiah’s but is flashing around a new product as well.”
“You think it’s the stuff I’m looking into?”
“I’ll find out tonight.” As Locke passed the sign for Twenty-Fourth Street, he angled the wheel to the empty right lane to catch the exit for east I-10.
“Are you hitting another club?” Zev asked.
Locke’s lips twitched as he steered into the highway’s connecting arc. “Check the time, old man. Clubs are closed.”
“Fuck you, bro.” Zev’s refrain carried a familiar affectionate dryness.
“Lovely offer, but I’m going have to pass. You don’t have enough curves for me,” Locke shot back, but his amusement was short-lived. “I had Roxy dig up Leo’s address. I figure if he’s not already home, he should be soon.”
“And you’ll be waiting,” Zev said grimly.
“And I’ll be waiting,” Locke agreed, his foot pressing down as the road ahead straightened out.
“Tag me if you run into trouble.”
Locke stifled an amused snort. “Please. This will probably be the easiest thing I do tonight.”
“Fine. Then how about you tag me if you get anything useful?”
“That I can do.”
Zev’s grunt was followed by a moment of silence before the familiar heavy beat and down-tuned guitars of Chevelle resumed. Locke let the music wash over him and rolled his tight shoulders. It didn’t loosen shit.
That night had featured an annoying trek through a series of hot spots filled with the university students.
It was not his scene. At the age of twenty-nine, Locke had long since left behind the overpriced clubs crammed with a glittery, hectic throng wanting to be seen.
He preferred higher-end venues that understood the true meaning of ambience and served quality drinks to a less frenetic crowd intent on enjoying the moment and getting their money’s worth.
As if it had just been waiting for a chance, the familiar image of a dark-haired siren hit his brain.
With a low oath, he forced her back into the box she refused to stay in and turned his attention to the job at hand—a byzantine one guaranteed to keep him from dwelling on one frustratingly tempting bar owner.
Close to two years back, the sister-in-law of Locke’s boss, Emilio—head of the Cordova Family—had been killed in retaliation for stealing highly classified biotech research that she’d hoped to leverage into a paycheck.
She’d made the mistake of locking the information behind a blood ward keyed to her young son.
After she and her husband were killed, the interested parties decided kidnapping the kid was worth the risk of angering one of the most powerful Arcane families in Arizona.
This proved to be a mistake on their part.
Emilio, determined to retrieve his beloved nephew and the information in question, set Zev out to hunt.
As the Family Arbitrator, Zev was judge, jury, and executioner for anyone stupid enough to cross the Family.
It didn’t take Zev long to track down the boy and the Guild Transporter who had accepted an off-the-books job involving an unknown package.
That initial meeting of the Hunter and the Transporter had led to a shit ton more drama, which had uncovered a secret project that twisted inherent magic and a complicated conspiracy that stretched its sticky fingers to the highest corners of the Arcane society.
Locke’s tracking skills had earned him a seat on the wild ride late in the game.
As a Hound for the Cordova Family, he was privy to certain sensitive details the majority of the Arcane society would never hear.
Like the very real possibility that the Delphi serum—a drug created from the stolen research—had not been contained by the Arcane Council and was now making its insidious way through the Arcane population.
The situation had come to light a couple of weeks earlier when, through a series of strange coincidences, two incidents were brought to Emilio’s attention, and he, in turn, had called in Locke and Zev.
The first involved Lilly Wright, a seventeen-year-old water mage whose father was a midlevel manager at one of the Cordovas’ research facilities, and the second was twenty-two-year-old Micah Holmes, an earth mage and intern in the law offices of Cortez, Hamlin, & Blythe.
While Lilly’s family had already reached out to the Western Arcane Guild to hire a curse breaker, Micah’s friends had tried to keep things low-key by hiring a freelance Key at discounted rates, which only made things worse.
When it was clear Micah wouldn’t be able to make it in to work, they called his supervising clerk and explained that he was dealing with a nasty stomach flu.
That excuse only stretched so far, and on day three, the supervisor got the full story out of Micah’s friends and then took the situation to his boss, Maribel Ortiz, the Cordova Family lawyer.
Mari, who knew all about the conspiracy and mad-science project, called Emilio.
Wanting the best curse breaker available, Emilio had contacted the Western Arcane Guild.
They, in turn, had assigned top-tier Key Lena Davis, who just happened to already be working with Lilly’s father.
At Emilio’s request, Lena had taken on Micah’s case as well.
Long story short, Lilly had been the target of a straight-up curse set by a jealous rival who coveted a spot on the swim team.
Lena removed that hex and then tried to help Micah.
It didn’t take her long to discover that whatever was messing with his magic wasn’t a standard active-level hex but something else, which eluded her.
She suggested tagging a Dual-Key—Grayson Beck, out of Las Vegas—as he specialized in both active and latent curses.
And just a few days ago, Grayson had confirmed Emilio’s dark suspicions about what lay behind Micah’s rapid deterioration and erratic magical behavior.
The earth mage hadn’t been hexed—he’d been poisoned with an unknown substance.
Once tests were run, the results confirmed that whatever he’d taken was based on the Delphi serum.
Not only did it screw with his magical ability, but it was killing him slowly as well.
Currently, he was being monitored in a private medical facility under the name Patient Zero.
Emilio had initially wanted Zev and Locke to hunt down Micah’s supplier and find irrefutable proof of the drug’s origins before he took his next step, which included bringing the Arcane Council in on the investigation.
Unfortunately, while retracing Micah’s last known movements, the Hunter and the Hound had discovered that prior to his overdose, Micah had been trying to locate his missing younger brother, Isaiah.
According to Micah’s circle of friends, for the last five years, he’d been Isaiah’s sole caregiver, taking on the role when he was seventeen and Isaiah was eleven.
While Micah was focused on becoming a lawyer, his younger brother was pissed at the world in general and ran with a much wilder crowd, leaving Micah to habitually drag his baby brother out of whatever trouble he found.
That was how Micah had ended up dosed. Micah’s friends confirmed that the weekend Micah started acting strange had been the one he’d spent tracking Isaiah through a series of underground parties and a handful of clubs that accepted less-than-legit IDs.
At some point, Micah’s behavior started to shift from focused and determined to easily irritated and quick to anger.
Initially, his friends put it down to his having to deal with Isaiah, but when the level-headed law student with a minor earth-magic ability went after a snarky, drunken frat brat and tore multiple massive cracks into the club’s asphalt parking lot—setting off numerous car alarms and rupturing city water lines—the friends knew something was not right.
After hustling Micah away from the scene before authorities arrived—a law student with an arrest never went over well—they hunkered down at one of the friend’s homes in the suburbs.
When the sun rose, Micah was sporting a massive headache and a serious personality change.
When his magic became scarily erratic, they feared he had been cursed.
Cue the panicked hiring of a budget Key.
But as with all things, they got what they paid for, and the inept Key had only made things worse.
By the time Lena got to Micah, his friends had resorted to sedation spells and restraints.
Remorse plagued them, so when Zev and Locke started asking questions, they were quick to spill everything.
They had no idea when or where Micah would have been drugged, but they were able to pin down when his behavior had started to change.
Locke retraced their steps, checking video surveillance and asking questions, finally hitting pay dirt at the second club, the Alchemist, where video footage showed a known small-time dealer placing a roofie in Micah’s drink.
The club’s security tagged the dealer as a regular visitor named Jigz.
Locke waited at the Alchemist, and sure enough, the wiry fucker made an appearance back by the bathrooms. When Locke stalked down the narrow hallway, the nervy dealer scented a threat and started to run.
He didn’t get far before Locke had him pinned to the cement block wall that ran behind the club and proceeded to ask questions.
After a few strategically applied “encouragements,” the story tumbled out.
Isaiah was one of Jigz’s customers, and Micah’s questions had started to interfere with Jigz’s nightly endeavors.
It didn’t help that Micah kept pushing the issue even though Jigz hadn’t seen Isaiah in over a week.
To get Micah off his ass, Jigz decided to spike his drink with a party gift shared by another customer, who happened to be one of Isaiah’s buddies and went by the name Leo Starini.
Jigz had no clue what the party gift did or where it came from, but Leo promised it would rock his world.
He provided a sample and said if Jigz wanted more, for the right cut, he’d be happy to facilitate.
Jigz had no interest in taking on another supplier, but he figured if Micah’s world was rocked hard enough, it would make him stop asking about Isaiah, so when he spotted Micah’s drink at the bar, he dropped the pill and walked away.
Problem solved. Locke had left a battered Jigz slumped in the alleyway and decided to track down this Leo guy.
That was how he’d ended up rolling down Washington in the dead of morning.
He hooked a right on Seventh, grateful that at ass o’clock, the one-way streets of downtown Phoenix were empty.
It was wild to drive here now that high-rise residential spaces had popped up like rabbits.
In recent years, what had once been a small cluster of multistory buildings had grown into a dense urban canyon.
He made a right on Monroe and cruised the narrow two-way road as it carved its way between parking garages and high-rises until he hit First. Rising thirty-four floors into the night sky, the Evermore condos sat on the southwest corner, where a bland beige box of an office building had once stood.
Locke bypassed the underground parking garage and managed to snag a metered parking spot across the street from the entrance.
He took the time to pay the meter, since the HQ for the Phoenix Police Department was just down the road. Then he jogged across the street.
Locke used the access code pulled from the ethernet by Tana—the Cordova e-geek—to open the glass door to the lobby.
Along with the code, she’d shared that no one would be on duty, as the concierge desk was manned from seven in the morning to eleven at night.
He pulled open the heavily tinted glass doors and found the space empty of life.
He headed straight for the elevators, noting the strategically placed security cameras tracking his passage.
He didn’t worry about being recorded. If his conversation with Leo went sideways, Tana would take care of any digital evidence.
The ride to the fourth floor was short and quiet.
He got off and did a check of the two closest unit numbers, 4001 to the right and 4009 to the left.
Since the hall appeared to loop around, he figured there were only nine units on this floor.
He’d started down the right hall toward 4005 when a dark smear on the floor caused a hitch in his stride.
When his magic quivered, he stopped and sank into a crouch to get a closer look, and a touch of iron hit his nose.
Blood.
The smudge held the edge of a tread. He looked at the hall and found a couple more drops staining the floor a little farther down, their shape and spacing indicating that someone had been moving erratically and fast while wounded.
The power that lived inside him came on point, urging him forward.
He pulled a thin blade out of the hidden sheath in his belt and stood up.
Holding the blade down at his side, where it wasn’t easily spotted, he prowled down the hall on silent feet.
At the corner where the hall turned was another smear, almost as if someone had bounced off the wall.
He continued walking and wasn’t surprised to find that units 4004 and 4005 shared that side of the hall.
His pace slowed as he released his magic, letting it sniff over the doorways and draw in the lingering blend of emotions and magic.
It slipped over 4004 and homed in on 4005.
In the entryway, the muddied scents of an illusion mage mixed with the diluted blanks of a nonmagic user.
There was a sharp bite to the fading trace of an illusion mage, a hint of fear or apprehension—it was hard to tell.
He angled his body, putting his back to the door, and let his hand hover over the knob.
A flex of magical muscle determined there were no active runes at play, so Leo used either standard electronic security or nothing at all.
His fingers closed around the cool metal, and he carefully twisted, the knob turning smoothly.
He eased the door open. A rush of cool air curled around him, carrying the sharp sting of fear, the acrid bit of anger, the tangle of an illusion mage, and the burnt ash of a fire mage, but it was the alluring darker scent winding through it all that had him cursing.
“What the fuck, Isa?”