Black Magic Sanction

Energized, I gave the woman the once-over to see if she’d had enough. Her tailored coat was a mess, and her hair had lost its perfect symmetry, lying in lank blond strands where there had once been perfection. Seeing her stare up at me, finally able to take a breath, I fell into a ready stance with my hands in fists. “Still think you’re tougher than me, Strawberry Shortcake?” I said, not moving as Ivy settled in beside me. Hands on her hips, she breathed deep—and smiled. I knew Ivy had too much control and class to go for her, but it was unnerving as she somehow grew sleeker and sexier, eyes dilating to a full, hungry black.

From nowhere, a quiver rose through me at the memory of her teeth sliding into my neck, and the exquisite feeling of rising pleasure mixed with the blood-boiling sensation of coming ecstasy. Closing my eyes briefly, I pushed the feeling away. Beside me, I felt Ivy quiver, scenting my reaction. No, Rachel. Everlastingly no.

The kneeling woman watched as Ivy flicked first her bag, then her ID at her, both sliding to a stop before her. Motions unsteady, she got to her feet. She wasn’t afraid, she was angry.

“It would have been easier had you come with me,” she said, and Ivy cleared her throat in challenge. Lips pressed, the woman brushed off her skirt, picked up her handbag, and, leaving her ID, walked to the door, her head high and looking tiny next to the overweight manager in a white shirt and blue tie yelling at her.

Ivy slid up to me, and I held my breath. “You want me to stop her?”

I shivered, remembering how much she had held in her chi. My gaze slid from the subsiding mass of toxic bubbles to Ivy’s arm, damp from the lobster tank. “No. You okay?”

“Yeah. It went numb is all. Like zombie prickles. How about you?”

The automatic doors slid open and she was gone. “Okay,” I said, then picked up her ID. Vivian Smith, from California. It had to be fake, and I shoved it in my pocket.

A nervous patter rose from the watching employees. It was all over but the lawsuits, and I edged away from Ivy, slipping on strawberries as I gave her some distance to allow her a chance to get a handle on her instincts. The manager was at the service counter, fuming. He was working up his courage, though, and it wouldn’t be long before he’d bring his high-pitched voice to me, a convenient scapegoat in heels and stringy, strawberry hair. This wasn’t my fault!

The goo covering the floor looked like a bloodbath. A glint of silver among the red caught my eye, and I searched the produce section until I found my bag. The manager’s complaints grew louder as I dug out my lethal-spell detector and my heavy-magic ley-line charm. I wouldn’t put it past Vivian to leave a booby trap, but both spells stayed a nice healthy green. The silver was just plain metal with no charms attached. At least, no lethal ones.

“What is it?” Ivy asked as I picked it up. Wiping the goo off, I felt myself go cold and my knees go wobbly.

It was an exquisitely tooled silver brooch in the shape of a Möbius strip, and I swallowed hard, my shaking fingers curving to hide it. My gaze went to the floor, seeing the tile unmarked as the bubbles subsided, then to Ivy’s arm—numbed, she said—and then to the broken strawberry display, realizing that that, too, could have been white magic. Extremely strong, but technically white magic, not black. I am such an idiot.

Over the last year or so, I’d been attacked by militant Weres, run down by elves on horseback, smacked around by angry demons, bitten by political vampires, eluded assassin fairies, and fought off angry banshees, deluded humans, and black-arts witches. But never had I made an error of judgment this bad.

I’d just publicly embarrassed a member of the coven of moral and ethical standards, the same group that had legalized my shunning.

Holy freaking hallelujah.

Three (#ulink_6728de42-e8ca-5cc3-bde4-f294f6784932)

The stuffed rat was pointed at the wall, staring at nothing as it crouched atop an overfilled file on the five-foot-tall cabinet in Glenn’s office. The FIB detective was currently downstairs. As I’d figured, the grocery store had called the human-run FIB, not Inderland Security. Lucky for me, the I.S. hadn’t even shown up. Long story short, I’d been asked to accompany an FIB officer downtown to file a report. They’d even let me sit in the front, sticky as I was. Ivy had followed in my car and was waiting downstairs. It was good to have friends.

It had been a quiet ride through Cincy to the FIB building, my thoughts circling. Had the coven been trying to talk to me, and I’d just flushed my chance at getting my shunning removed? But why not just tell me what was going on? Those charms Vivian had been flinging around hadn’t been peace offerings. Had it been a test? If so, had I failed or passed?

I’d worked myself up into a very bad mood by the time we’d gotten here, but it had eased once Glenn had pulled me aside and snipped my charmed silver off even before I’d crossed the FIB emblem downstairs. Glenn was a good guy, complex in his thoughts and smart. His office, though … I looked at the mess, trying not to grimace.

A new flat-screen monitor was perched on his desk, a stack of files piled high beside it. The in-box was full, and the out-box held a couple of books on nineteenth-century serial killers. We were too deep into the FIB building for a window, but a bulletin board across from the desk gave the illusion of one, the clippings and sticky notes so old they needed thumbtacks. A new pressboard bookcase held a few textbooks, but mostly it was stacks of files and photos. Glenn was meticulous in his dress, and that usually carried over to his car and office. This mess was scary and not like him at all.

The floor was cold tile; the walls were an ugly, scuffed white; and the keyboard was old and stained with dust and coffee. Glenn had been Cincinnati’s FIB Inderland specialist for almost a year now, and I wondered if I was seeing him trying to do everything himself. Even the phone cord was still draped across the floor in what had to be an OSHA violation.

My roving gaze settled on a gleaming glass-and-gold clock serving as a bookend. It didn’t match the rest of the no-frills office, and I got up to read the inscription, grimacing when my coat pulled from the metal chair with the sticky sound of strawberries. The marble was cold on my fingers as I read, MATHEW GLENN, OUTSTANDING SERVICE, 2005. The clock was stopped, stuck at three minutes to midnight.

I set it down and checked my phone. Nine thirty. The sun had been down for hours. I wanted to go home, get cleaned up, eat something. What was taking so long?

Impatient, I went to the rat and turned it to face the room. Glenn had bought it with me at a charm shop last year, and I frowned when I realized the file it was sitting on was Nick’s. Nick as in my former boyfriend Nick. Ex-rat, ex-boyfriend, ex-alive if I ever got hold of him Nick.

My shoulders tensed and I forced my jaw to not clench. Nick had been a rat when I met him. A real rat, with whiskers and a tail, transformed with witch magic by a peeved vampire who’d caught Nick stealing from him. I couldn’t say much about that, though, since I’d been a mink at the time, thrown into Cincinnati’s illegal rat fights for having been caught trying to pilfer evidence of illegal bio-drug activity from beloved city son Trent Kalamack.

Nick and I had helped each other escape, which might sound romantic but should have been a warning. He turned out to be a real gem when all was said and done, selling information about me to demons to help his career as a thief. A not very lucrative but nevertheless busy one, according to the file Glenn had on him. The FIB detective was still trying to track him down, not believing that he’d died going off the Mackinac Bridge last summer. The case had gone cold if the dust was any indication—but the file was still out.

I took a deep breath to wash the reminder of Nick away, and the faint scent of vampire tickled my nose. “Huh,” I whispered and, sniffing, I made a circuit of the cluttered office, ending at Glenn’s short, fashionable coat hung up on a wooden hanger behind the door. Eyebrows raised, I fingered the supple leather. Had Glenn been investigating something that put him in contact with vampires? He knew how risky that was. Why hadn’t he come to us? He knew I needed the work.

Curious, I brought the sleeve to my nose to get a better sniff. I loved leather, and it was a nice coat, cut to show off the man’s small waist and wide shoulders. I pulled the air deep into me to find under the expected smell of masculine aftershave a mellow tang of honey and hot metal. Deeper was a familiar scent of vampiric incense. A very familiar scent. Ivy?

Blinking, I dropped the coat’s sleeve as footsteps approached in the hall. Why does Glenn’s coat smell like Ivy?

Glenn strode into his office, almost shoving me into the wall when he pushed the door open. He slowed, making a surprised sound when he found my chair empty, then started when he found me behind him, pressed into the wall. His brown eyes were wide, and I blinked at the tall, clean-shaven man. “What are you doing behind my door?” he asked, planting his feet. There was a red file under his arm and a ceramic mug with rainbows on it in his hand.

I gave myself a mental shake to get the thoughts moving. “Uh, admiring your coat,” I said, giving the brown leather a last touch. I wanted to sit down, but he was standing next to my chair. “I, uh, like the no-hair thing.”

“Thanks,” he said suspiciously as he moved his compact frame behind his desk. When we’d first met, he had short hair and a goatee, but this smooth-shaven nothing was nice. The coffee went on the corner nearest me, and the file was dropped beside the keyboard. He saw me eye the clutter, and I think he blushed through his dark, beautifully mahogany complexion.

I went to ask him about Ivy, then reconsidered. He and Ivy? No way. Though if they were, they’d look great together. His height was just a shade more than hers, and with his trendy clothes and attention to detail, he could play the part of a living vampire’s boyfriend without missing a beat. Glenn was ex-military and worked at keeping his trim look. Right now, he’d gone no hair, and it made his stud earring stand out all the more, the glint giving him a hint of bad boy. The story he gave his dad was that he’d gotten it pierced so he could blend into the darker elements of Cincinnati, but I think he liked the small bit of bling.

Glenn looked up at my silence, his eyebrows raised as he indicated the rainbow mug. “I thought you’d want some coffee. This might take a while.”

“Okay …” He brought me coffee and rainbows, I thought as I reached for it and sat down, feeling the bump my phone made in my back pocket. “They’re pressing charges? For what? Killing a strawberry display? That wasn’t even my charm. I told you, I didn’t use magic. I know better. Get an I.S. team in there. None of the magic will have my aura on it.”

He chuckled, irritating me even more. The painfully slow sounds of him typing clicked key by key as he worked off the open file beside him. “The I.S. is ignoring the incident completely, so sending a team to ascertain it wasn’t your magic? You’re going to take the hit for this,” he said, his resonant voice dark and sexy. “Nice bit of passive harassment.”

My eyes flicked to my strawberry-covered bag and the little silver broach tucked inside. Passive harassment was a good story, but I think the reason the I.S. didn’t show was because the coven told them to back off while they brought me in themselves. Guilt and fear kept my mouth shut. Crap on toast, what if I’d ruined my only chance to rescind my shunning?

“I got the store to agree to disorderly conduct if you pay for the damages,” Glenn said, starting as he noticed the rat looking at him. “Unless you know who did it?” he added, gaze alternating between me and the critter.

I thought about the ID in my bag, and I shrugged. “Vivian Smith from California?” I volunteered. God, I’d called her Strawberry Shortcake. Could I dig my grave, or what?

Glenn made a sound of both amusement and sympathy, his eyes on the screen. “I hope you make more than I do. I had no idea strawberries were that expensive out of season.”

“Swell,” I said, then sipped my coffee. It wasn’t bad, but nothing tasted good since having that raspberry-mocha-whatever-it-had-been Al had ordered me last winter. I set the coffee aside and leaned over to get a look at Glenn’s neck. He might not know that he smelled like vampire, but any Inderlander could tell.

Glenn felt my gaze and looked up from his slow excuse for typing. “What?”

I pulled back, worried. “Nothing.”

Clearly suspicious, he pulled a paper from under the stack in the red folder and handed it to me. “Damages.”

Taking the paper, I sighed. How come my file is red? Everyone else had a normal-colored one. “Hey!” I exclaimed, seeing the total. “They’re charging me retail. Glenn!” I complained. “They can’t do that.” I shook it at him. “I shouldn’t have to pay retail!”

“What did you expect? You can keep that. It’s your copy.”

I sat back in a huff and shoved it in my bag with my sticky scarf as he typed his slow, painful way through my report. “Where’s this human compassion I keep hearing about?”

“That’s it, baby doll,” he said, voice smoother than usual. He was laughing at me.

“Mmmm. Can I go now?” I said dryly, not liking the “baby doll” tag but letting it go.

Glenn searched out a key and hit it with a sound of finality. Leaning back, he laced his dark fingers over his middle like I’d seen his dad do. “Not until Jenks posts your bail.”