“Who the hell knows?”he exploded.“We’ve been running around like hamsters on a wheel all week, getting nowhere!We have every mage we can spare and more brought in from places that can’t afford to lend them, because the Circle agrees: this is top priority.Yet nothing.
“Goddamnit, I wished you’d left Jenkins alive.I’d like to kill him myself!”
Yeah.
Right now, I wished I had, too.
“Lia!”Jen emerged from the back of the house with a green sheen in her eyes and bright pink cheeks.“Is this it?”
She held up a cropped leather jacket in a dark oak color with fashionably wide lapels.It was cute, and not remotely long enough for a proper war mage coat, flaring out from a cinched waist, but only for about eight inches.But then, I’d had my family heirloom when I bought it; I hadn’t needed the jacket except for something to practice on, because no way was I layering any spells onto my treasured main until I was sure I could do them properly.
As a result, the jacket and I had never really bonded, but I’d kept it as a backup in my closet, and it seemed to have resented being a wallflower.After the incident a month ago, when my heirloom sacrificed itself to save me, I’d tried again with this one as a stopgap until I could enchant a new coat.And had gotten the shit shocked out of me for my trouble.
We were never, ever getting back together.
But I had spent a lot of time laying on a nice base layer of spells, which someone else could benefit from.Someone who wasn’t Jen, it seemed, because it was fighting her.And it was fighting hard.
It suddenly jerked, throwing her to the ground, and tried to shock the shit out of her at the same time, only she’d very wisely shielded her hand.It was green, too, a barely discernible sheen on the air around her fingers, but it must have been strong.She didn’t so much as flinch at repeated attempts to curl her hair.
“You, uh, you okay over there?”I called out because I knew the power of the spells I’d used.
“Fine.”The fact that that was said through gritted teeth as she wrestled around in the dirt with my jacket did not reassure me.
But while Jen might look like a delicate flower, nothing could be further from the truth.And the next second, I was proved right when the jacket stopped trying to gnaw her arm off using its fashionable horn buttons as teeth, and started dancing around the “lawn.”Ha.
Good one.
“What the—” Caleb said.
“It’s skin,” I reminded him.“Cow hide.And she’s a necro.”
“Shereanimated it?”he asked, his lip curling.
“Looks that way,” I said, because I’d never had the Corps’ prejudice against necros, maybe because they didn’t like Weres much, either.And God knew what they thought about whatever the hell I was now.
I needed a drink.
Caleb just shook his head.“Anyway, you should know that I’m not the only visitor you’re likely to get.Everybody is striking out, and each day that passes brings us closer to Armageddon if the dark beats us to the Punch.”
I ignored the bad pun because I’d finally figured out why he was here.
“Hargroves wants me on this,” I said, and didn’t make it a question.
“Who else?You have senses we don’t have or even understand.None of us clocked the fact that those assholes had sicced a chindi on the boss, but you did—”
“That was Jen, not me.”
“She identified it, but you already knew it was there.And then figured out that another had been used to infiltrate HQ.The bokors have been testing everyone,” he added, “but the chindi already fled, so all we’re getting is a new level of security to go through every time we return to base.But nobody is sure it’ll be enough.
“But we saw it on the surveillance tape: your nose wrinkled ‘cause you smelled the Relics before you saw them—”
“Now.I didn’t use to.”
“But you can these days, and you can also fight them.”
I just looked at him.
“I mean, when you recover,” he added.“There’s a good chance that if you go looking for this guy, you’re going to cross paths with the Black Circle boys who are also trying to track him down—and any Relics they have left.”
