Chapter Twenty #2
EJ gave a battlefield smile, all teeth, as he came to his feet. “I had to shoot a good friend in the war. He shouted, ‘Friendly.’ He was demon-ridden. I barely got away with my life. May I suggest instead that you evaluate faster.”
Grizz’s eyebrows went up.
Boots said, “Humph.”
EJ found his balance and set Delta Mode aside, folded tight.
His knees buckled. He nearly hit the floor again. Grizz caught his weight. Without a word, she led him to the sofa.
A few seconds later, he found his usual sweet-kid facade and slid it back over him.
EJ levered himself to sit upright and managed to stay that way.
He leaned forward to see Walter up close.
There was a soft sound of magic from his face.
“Get Walter to my sister. She said we need to look at the vids from the queen’s event. She said we’re missing something.”
“No shi…kidding,” Boots said, changing the word. “First asshole in that door ffffuuu…messed up my boot.” She tilted her fancy boot to the light. There was a scratch along the toe. “I find that asshole and his head is gonna adorn the pike outside my door.”
EJ blew out a laugh and said, “You have a pike outside your door?”
Without a change in expression, Grizz turned her head to him and said, “Doesn’t everyone?” It wasn’t exactly a question. She waved it away as if it was unimportant, adding, “It’s become a saying among some units in the queen’s guard.”
There was clearly more to it, but EJ didn’t ask.
Angie
I was so tired my ribs hurt with every breath.
I had finally looked at my hands, turning them back and forth.
They were dangerously frozen. White, bloodless.
Numb and yet screaming with pain. Specks of black where the flesh had died and dried in the cold of the interdimensional energies I had been exposed to.
I scratched at a tag of skin curling up, crinkled and dead. Got a fingernail under it and tugged. A couple layers of skin sloughed off. Gross. But at least it doesn’t hurt worse. Yet.
I wrapped my hands in a room-temp towel that was packed with healing amulets and sprigs of Mama’s rosemary plant. It felt like putting my hands into a fire. EJ was studiously ignoring me. And he looked just dandy, no frostbite, no exhaustion, no nothing.
I remembered the way our magics had twisted and coiled together.
The way his own magic had expanded, intensified with power, as if unfolding within us both, and sped, giving me power that wasn’t mine.
Creepy. We’d have to talk about that, and also about the ley line below the apartment building.
I hadn’t known it was there. I was pretty sure EJ hadn’t been aware of it either.
But our family and coven had known. Why the hell hadn’t they told us about that unlimited reservoir?
Except maybe they had. They had told us the wards collected and ran on passive magic.
I hadn’t paid attention to that, not really.
What better source for passive energy than a ley line?
My brother and I had stuff to work out, and when the easy stuff was hashed out—easy, ha!—there would be a discussion about the ley line and the fact that we had used the coven to obtain the ley line’s energy. We might still be free-ish. Or we might not.
I had left to marry a vampire, divorce a vampire, and killed people to get free.
EJ had left high school and joined the war effort, returned, and was discharged.
I had no idea what he did between discharge and showing up at my door one night.
It was months after I killed people, when EJ walked into the empty building I had bought with my divorce settlement, and looked around at the construction.
I had stood up, watching, tape measure and notepad in one hand, as he stood in the hallway between open metal studs, and ignored me.
Silent, hands in his pockets, appearing innocent and nonthreatening, he had walked around the building, going up and down stairs, checking out the structure and the changes I was making. Me. Alone. Without a coven or coven backing.
Later, he’d found me in The Firm’s office, sitting on the floor cross-legged, drawing out niches for electronics, storage—electrical and paper—furniture, and making notes on potential color schemes.
Propping himself in the doorway, slouching, he watched.
I didn’t look up. I had assumed he had come to try to talk me home.
Just like my aunts and my parents and half of the queen’s dignitaries had done. He would get no encouragement from me.
Eventually he said, “Hi, sis.”
“Good morning, EJ,” I said, without looking at him.
I could hear the grin in his voice when he said, “Mama says you’re starting a business of your own, no coven, no family. I have no intention of being part of a coven, soooo…Wanna be black sheep together?”
I raised my head and studied him in the doorway, not reacting. I said, “You’re standing in a money pit that has the chance to pay for itself through apartment rentals on the upper floors. My investigative firm will be on this floor. If I can find the money to pay for the rest of the construction.”
He had pursed his lips, stared at the unfinished ceiling, and asked, “Queen’s money? Family money?”
“No. Never. The family patented a working based on my work when I was a kid. I’ve got investments from that and a hefty settlement from Asshat.” Then I named a sum that made him wince. “That’s how much I need to finish.”
“Money pit is right. I like the investigations idea. I have some cash. Want a partner?”
EJ standing in the doorway, me on the floor, we had hashed out the ideas and haggled some.
Then we shook hands. Not that there had been any question that we’d work together.
Not from the moment he had walked in the door.
Alone. No family, coven, or queenly help.
EJ and I had opened The Firm and stayed financially, physically, and, damn it, successfully independent.
But we were so close to losing that freedom. It made me want to weep.
We were reattached to the queen. Maybe to our family coven.
In my brother’s eyes, I could see all that and more.
“Yes,” I said. “We have things to talk about.”
His mouth twisted into a wry expression that might have meant anything.
I turned from EJ’s guileless blue eyes to Walter, lying on the floor of my apartment beneath my null cloak, staked with two stakes, hoping the null cloak and the stakes would keep him in stasis, while one stake should have been enough to paralyze any vamp.
Vamps had a small circle of neurons and nerves just below their belly buttons that, when pierced by wood, rendered them more undead than usual.
Normally, as in always, that meant suckheads couldn’t move, not so much as to twitch a finger.
They were most often mentally inactive as well. Until Walter.
He had been trying to pull out his stake, while staked.
I leaned closer. How much of that was the working in his brand?
The brand on his face was no longer glowing, and with him out cold, I felt safe studying the working in the initials scarred into his flesh.
In a basic seeing working, and with my own magic, the layered working was a tangled mess, unlike anything I had ever seen.
A dozen shades of green and purple, like yarn knotted by a destruction of kittens, and then half melted together and lit with an illumination working.
Complex. I’d never be able to unknot it.
I reached out, preparing to place my deadish fingers on the old wound, when a single tread of purple-scarlet uncoiled from the edges. WY gleamed on Walter’s face.
Leaving my hand inches from the undead skin, I said, “EJ? Can you hear if there’s an attack working blended into Walter’s brand?”
From close by, EJ whistled a soft note.
The bluish-purple thread of intent and power glowed brighter. I pulled my hand back.
“I’d say so,” EJ said. “Let’s not try anything fancy. Or anything at all.”
I sat back and Villetti readjusted the plushy blanket around my shoulders.
I leaned into him and his arm went around me.
This was the weirdest thing of all—this syncing with Lee was even stranger than the magical bond with my baby brother.
Not as if Villetti and I had fallen back to our college relationship, but as if some new pattern had been woven into an existing but long-forgotten template, altering it, evolving it into something totally new.
Something that was both comfortable and…
and whatever the heat warming down low in my belly meant.
Out of the blue, we had clicked.
My attention was yanked from my thoughts into a discussion that made no sense.
I had drifted off. My clue was the wall screen.
It had changed from Ojos’s security protocols and camera views to a split screen showing the queen’s social and political event of the season.
On the screen was a static shot of the reception room, an unmoving line of dignitaries, an unmoving line of people to greet them.
Ivyanna, our missing subject, was standing in the reception line.
The event when this all started. The place where, somehow, we had been drawn into the web of the queen’s rivals.
“Commencing, real time,” Peg said.
On-screen, Ivyanna shook the hand of several human, local and state government dignitaries, the governor, and then the hand of Edmund the First. There was a bit of chitchat.
She moved on to the Consort, where she tilted her head at him in that particularly feminine way that showed interest. The Consort lifted an eyebrow in amusement.
Ivyanna bobbed a tiny curtsy and shook the hand of the Dark Queen.
Nodded to the royal security guards flanking the queen.
Their subject moved away and swayed slowly across the room.
I tallied the number of eyes on her as Ivyanna progressed. A significant number of people watched her, human and vampire.
“Again, please?” I asked.