CHAPTER 1
The Fist of a Child
The prickly sensation crawled over my left fingertips, up my fingers, and snuggled into my palm like the fist of a child. For a moment it was pleasurable, and in my dreams, my heart warmed. I thought of my goddaughter, Angie Baby, and smiled in my sleep.
Then something exploded up my hand and arm and into my torso, a magical bomb going off. An electric sensation, like a burning cactus, the thorns on fire, the blooms as weapons blossoming open through me. Scorching thorns ripped through my flesh. The blooms detonated like heat-seeking missiles.
I gasped a single breath that sent a shock wave of pain through me. Opened my eyes as I woke. But I didn’t move otherwise. Lying in the dark. Terror rising. The heat and power of a magical working—a spell, to the mundane world—rolled through me.Reading me. My heart raced. My breath came too fast.
Familiar... I had felt this—or something like this—before. With a tearing sensation, the working ripped out of me and across my bed. And I could breathe. The fear-stinkof my own sweat filled my nostrils, tart and acerbic. My heart raced, an uneven thump against my ribs.
For a moment I knew it, remembered it, and then the memory faded, like a dream upon waking, as if the working was designed to be forgotten. But my Beast reached out and swiped it into her claws, keeping it for me.
Beast shoved her night vision into me and I saw the energies of the working on the walls and ceiling and floor as it roiled slowly, a pale green power that licked its way forward, through my room, leaving nothing in its wake but shadows. Nothing happened. So... it wasn’t a magical trigger waiting to be set off. It looked as if it was taking a 3-D picture of everything, like a 3-D laser recording of the room. In preparation for... what? Nothing. Yet.
The moment it moved off the bed, I picked up the unsheathed vamp-killer and nine-mil on the bedside table, only inches from the hand where the spell had commenced. Rolled to my feet, careful to keep my soles away from the searching magics. I was dressed in leggings and a tee, both in shades of charcoal so that I could move through the house, only slightly darker than a shadow, without being seen from outside. Or inside, for that matter.
My palm, where the magics first touched me, sent a sizzle of pain up my arm when I gripped the vamp-killer.Not lightning,I thought, calming my racing breath.Not lightning. I was still getting over having been hit by lightning, but the panic attacks weren’t totally gone yet. The feel of the vamp-killer hilt in my palm settled me, the crosshatched grip, the fourteen-inch silver-plated blade, the perfect balance for hacking.
Forcing calm into myself with each breath, attempting to quiet my heart rate, I tried to decide if running was smart or playing dead was smarter. Since I wasn’t actually dead yet, and since the magics might have been intended to flush me out where someone could hurt me worse, I decided to stay in the house, silent.
As a skinwalker, one who also carries the soul of a mountain lion in my body, I knew not racing away, not taking the offensive, was the more difficult choice. Especially when attacked in my home. Flight or fight was more natural, butthat might get me killed this time. Might get my business partners, sleeping upstairs, killed. They were human. I could heal from most wounds and injuries; humans might not. My heart raced. Breath sped. Muscles tightened.
With my Beast-vision, I followed the magics as they moved slowly through my bath and into my closet. I had left both doors open and so was able to watch as the working rolled through the spaces and the piles on the floor. Sometimes it paid to be a slob. Without a pause, the pale green energies swept over the sabertooth lion skull on the top closet shelf. But the working hesitated and hovered over the small wooden carving of a crow. The carving was positioned over my stash of magical trinkets given to me by my best friend, Molly Everhart, long ago, the crow and its workinghedge, recharged on her last visit. The box of magical doodads were protected by the crow and its upgradedhedge of thornsward, which spat and spluttered as the magics feathered their way over them.Hedge of thorns, renovated tohedge of thorns 2.0, had been tested recently. It was, so far, unbreakable, but... there was always a first time.
The working brightened and turned reddish, as if trying to read the spells, even encapsulated in the spelled box containing them. The magics grew brighter, a sparking purple, edging toward grape, and then back to scarlet as they tried to penetrate and read. I smelled ozone and a stink like hair burning as the sizzling increased. The meeting of two such workings might trigger something more catastrophic than the sparks and shadows I could see now. I needed to get the guys.
Whatever the working was, its attention was not on me at the moment. I drew on Beast-speed and her energy flashed through me, an adrenaline flush of my skinwalker magics. Slipping the H&K into my right hand, the blade in the other, I leaped over the edge of the pale green working where it had paused and thinned on my floor, its attention in the closet. I landed, a tingling of magic passing through me, my braid slapping my butt. But nothing changed. The scan hadn’t noticed me move. Heart still pounding, I sped out of my room and into the foyer, up thestairs, three at a time, using Beast-stealth to keep my passage from creating any vibrations that the working might pick up.
It might have been smarter to go inside Eli’s room and speak, but I didn’t know what my partner slept in, and I didn’t need to find out tonight. I stopped outside his door and hissed, the sound softer than air, but I knew Eli would hear it, evaluate it, and determine it was likely me, even in his sleep, picking it out as a “not normal” night sound. You can take the Ranger out of the special forces, but you can’t the special forces training out of the Ranger.
I head a faint shushing sound, maybe a sheet rustling. “Jane?” he whispered from the darkness.
“Magical problems. Silent mode. Weapons,” I said, not much more than a breath, hoping he would understand my intent.
He came out of the room barefoot, his dark skin a shadow in the night, his new weapon harness slung around his head and one shoulder. He was wearing dark pants, his dark skin making him a shadow. He put his head near mine and said, “Deets.”
“Something scanning the house. Magic. Unknown source. I can see it, currently in my bedroom, interested in Molly’s toys andhedge. It scanned me and my room on the way in. Now it smells like something overheating and it might go boom on purpose or accident. Ultimate purpose unknown. Person or persons involved unknown.” Which meant one of two things: it came for the toys it had found, or it was temporarily occupied with the toys it hadn’t expected to find, and would eventually return to whatever it had come to do. If curtain number two was the right one, then the toys sidetracked it. But either way, there could still be an explosion.
Eli gave a single nod and glanced into his brother’s room. “Alex isn’t in his bed,” he murmured.
That meant the Kid, Eli’s teenaged brother, and the brains of our business, was still at his online gaming downstairs or was asleep on the couch, also downstairs. I nodded. “No glow from his screens.”
“Copy.”
We moved down the stairs, silent. Two shadows. Automatically avoiding the steps that might creak or shift or groan under our weight. Old houses have alarm systems built into the floors.
The energies were still at work in the closet when we reached the foyer. The stink of burning hair and ozone had been joined by a stench vaguely reminiscent of iron and salt and the stink of stagnant water. Eli’s nose wrinkled. Even if I had been human, it would have been horrible; as it was, I pressed against my nose to keep from sneezing at the stench.
He leaned into my room and said, “Nothing visible,” which meant humans couldn’t see the working. Alex was sleeping on the living room couch, arms thrown out, legs spread, with one hanging over the back of the couch. He was shirtless, wearing a loose pair of Captain America pants, the kind that kids wear, hanging on their hips, baggy at their knees. I grinned, glad of the dark, so he wouldn’t see my amusement when Eli woke him. Alex was a boy on the brink of manhood, and laughter had begun to sting.
Eli touched Alex’s shoulder. When that didn’t wake him, Eli set two weapons on the floor, covered his brother’s mouth with one hand, and shook him with the other. Alex came awake fighting and Eli avoided the flying fists with ease. It looked like long practice. Despite the magical energies in my bedroom, my smile grew wider. Eli bent over his brother and whispered into his ear. When he let go, Alex slid his feet to the floor, stood, shook himself like a dog to wake up, and made his way to his tablets.
Eli gave me a hand signal that meant, in essence, “Where’s the big bad wolf?” not that I’d say that to him. Hand signals were a military thing and he took that stuff seriously. I looked back over my shoulder and saw that the working was still occupied in my closet. I just hoped that thehedgewas enough to keep the magical attack out and that none of Molly’s toys was accidentally activated. I’d hate to have to rebuild my closet. I pointed to my bedroom and made a chipping motion to suggest it was stillworking there. Eli nodded before moving off to survey the windows and doors and, through them, out into the night.
Yellowrock Securities was a well-oiled team, everyone with a job. This was what it meant to be family. Living together. Working together. Fighting together. If we hadn’t been in danger, I might have gotten all teary. But this wasn’t the first time our home had been attacked by magical means in the last months. It almost felt as if someone had painted a target on us. Or on me. Yeah. That.
I went back to the bedroom to study the magical working, standing well outside the paused line of magical energies that marked my floor. The energies were a line of pale light through the bedroom, faintly flickering. The floor and walls beyond, the ones that the magic had already passed through, were unmarked, and the floor and walls on this side were also unmarked, which, with the exception of the pain in my palm, led me to believe that my first impression had been right—a scanning spell. The energies were much brighter in my closet, in my mixed puma/human eyesight, reddish and greenish with sparks of silver flashing through it, the gray of storm clouds.
