Kit looked at the lozenge and picked it up. Then he unwrapped it and popped it into his mouth. It burned on his tongue like acid.
He settled back into the motel chair and waited for his instructions.
The Mage Corps headquarters lay in the middle of Tunsa—a giant complex of state-of-the-art buildings decked out with the finest technology humanity had to offer. Eleven-foot electric fences, motion sensor alarms, body heat detection sensors, andall sorts of advanced technology Kit had no experience with (witches in Skadra depended on magic and cheap cameras for their security).
He would’ve been caught a million times over if it hadn’t been for the memory lozenge. Whoever had leaked the target’s location provided every sensor location, every blind spot, and the easiest path into the facility. A rather ingenious path, really.
Clea had cackled when she’d previewed the plans on the cracked screen of a battered cell phone.Dumb if it works,she’d snickered, and then the memory lozenge had sizzled out on those images, the nasty raspberry flavor dissolving on Kit’s tongue.
As he waited behind the other night shift workers at the entry gate, Kit resisted the urge to scratch at his maintenance uniform, the suit too short and too wide for his lean, tall frame. Part of the prep work had been to slip sleeping potion into a custodian’s coffee mug and to steal the man’s uniform. It’d taken some studying, but he’d managed a tricky bit of illusion magic to blur his features into a semblance of the janitor. As he and the other workers moved up the security checkpoint, he slouched his shoulders and ducked his head in the way he’d seen so many people do after doing the same job for years.
He knew his disguise had succeeded when a coworker shuffled up in the line next to him to complain about an impending divorce.Perfect.He was adept at illusions, but it wasn’t often that he used the trick up close and personal. Any witch worth their salt would be able to see through it. But for the magic-less people surrounding him, it was infallible. He felt further vindicated when a red-eyed guard with mussed hair nodded him through after he flashed his badge.
He separated from his coworkers once they were inside with a muttered excuse.
Kit followed the map he’d memorized carefully, his nerves sizzling at blindly relying on a stranger’s intel. Holding his palms out in front as he walked, searching, he sighed with relief once the insides of his knuckles heated from the pressure of another witch’s magic. Wards. Finally, something he could deal with. The interwoven magic, woven like a web throughout the third floor of the building, was rudimentary at best. He sliced through it like butter, leaving just enough room for his body and repairing the damage as he went. More than once, he paused and double checked to make sure the simplicity wasn’t a red herring. It wasn’t.
So government mages really are as sucky as they say,he thought as he walked through a dreary cube farm full of subpar potion ingredients and barely literate runes scribbled on smeared white boards. He’d been dropped off in Skadra at the young age of eleven, and he’d known nothing about the government other than to not get caught or lest he’d become one of their lab rats. Now that he was older, he knew all that to be make-believe, and that the government played a slow game of tricking desperate parents into thinking they could train their witch children.
Still, he didn’t want to get caught. Convicted witches were conscripted into the Mage Corps. Always. He’d be the laughing stock of the Jumpers, former savior or not.
He slinked out of the cubes and entered a long hallway full of display windows and posters describing the magical ‘demos’ the Mage Corps had accomplished. Then he went through the area labeled ‘Curse Ward’ just as the map had broadcast.
Room 306. 307. 308…Far too soon, he reached the designated ‘X’ on the map. No light glowed through the cracks of the door. Room 308 was as dark as the hallway; his eyes wouldn’t have to adjust for him to slip inside and snap the girl’s neck before she could see what was coming.
The ice in his veins thawed when he touched the doorknob. All that was between him and the target was this meager bit of wood. Soon, Gentry Greenbriar would no longer be on this earth because of him.
An innocent girl, one who’d already been exploited for her lack of magic by a bunch of egotistical assholes who thought they owned the earth. It disgusted him.You’re doing her a favor,he told himself,her life isn’t a life. She’ll never leave this hospital.The evil bastard who put her there would die once he euthanized her. In a way, he was avenging the life she could’ve had.
With that lie circulating in his head, Kit entered the room to dispatch his target. Magic snaked from his palms, searching for whatever living creatures lay in the darkness. It rebounded back to his skin within a second — his target was found.
Ever the quickdraw — because it had to be quick if he wished to kill Drayer Netherton along with the girl — Kit drew his magic close so he could send one explosive shot across the room.
He’d been a millisecond away from twisting his wrist, from releasing the kill shot, when two heavy things hit him at once.
One was a cool mesh and the other was so immensely heavy that it dislocated his shoulder from the impact.
He went down with a shout as bright lights turned on in the room. It took seconds to see past the brightness, to understand where the pain had come from.
Through the holes of the metal mesh covering his face and upper body, he could see that a dresser had landed on him. Large and bulky and it felt as though it’d been filled to the brim with loads of stones. When he twisted his hands in an attempt to levitate the damn thing off him, the fingers numb and uncooperative on his injured side, no magic came. Understanding came immediately.Iron mesh.The pure kind since he couldn’t so much as get one ounce of magic through.
Panic set in as he struggled to draw in breath from the dresser’s weight on his chest. He looked about the hospital-esque room he’d infiltrated. Posters of boy bands lined the walls and an open laptop sat on the bed closest to him. Who’d set off the trap?
A sudden jolt on the dresser added to the already crushing weight, and Kit looked up to see a petite young woman perched on top. She smiled down at him, her pale green eyes far too cold.
“Oh. You’re pretty for a witch. What a shame.”
six
Gentry
Excerpt from Gentry’s research notes:
Third notebook — page 230
Are Favors real?
All legends (57 if I counted right) have these triggering elements:
