Copyright © 2022 by Sam Burns.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Content Warning: this book is intended for adult audiences only, and contains violence, death, trauma, a whole lot of swearing, and graphic sex.

Cover art © 2021 by Natasha Snow at natashasnow.com

Foxy pictures: chapter header by Zoe Perdita at Rainbow Danger Designs and Fluke and Flit by Sheilkuroi

Editing by

Amy Pittel for LesCourt Author Services

Created with Vellum

CONTENTS

Glossary

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Acknowledgments

Also by Sam Burns

Also by Sam Burns & W.M. Fawkes

About the Author

For my husband, forever.

GLOSSARY

A urora Aureum: also known as “the Aureum,” or “the Golden Dawn.” The international organization of mages that work with governments worldwide to teach, lead, and police magic users, since it’s beyond the ability of any local non-magical law enforcement group. Initially organized in the early nineteenth century at a time when humanity was rediscovering that magic was not only real, but of possible use to society.

DOMINUS: A member of the leadership, or political arm of the Aurora Aureum. They make the decisions for the organization, and are the public face, dealing with PR and outside governments and government entities.

MAGISTER: A member of the teaching arm of the Aurora Aureum. They locate future mages through testing, and then teach them at Aureum-run schools. The schools take most students starting at ages thirteen and fourteen, but often have a few younger students whose powers manifested earlier.

QUAESITOR: A member of the law enforcement arm of the Aurora Aureum. They enforce magical laws, and track and arrest both criminal mages, and mundane criminals involved in magical crimes.

MAGICAL DISCIPLINES

- Elementalists: Mages who specialize in any of a huge number of elements or element-related focuses. The traditional options are earth, air, fire, and water, but there are also flora, fauna, weather, and others. As with all magic, only a single specialty can be chosen. Each mage is also known by their specific specialty: e.g., earth mages, forest mages, fire mages.

- Corporists: Mages who specialize in manipulating the human body. Mages who specialize in internal body magic are masters of their own form. They’re usually in excellent physical shape and live longer than any other mages. Those who specialize in external body magic can manipulate the bodies of others. This kind of magic has enormous potential, and enormous potential for misuse. Powerful internal body mages are carefully regulated, and most go into medicine. Usually referred to simply as body mages.

- Exanimists: Mages who specialize in the dead. They use the power of decomposition and its side-effects to fuel their magic, and are becoming invaluable to the green movement. A traditional sort of necromancer. Referred to as dead mages.

- Extinguists: Mages who specialize in the magic of death itself. Not a well-respected specialty, not openly taught by the Aureum. Referred to as death mages, and usually in hushed tones.

- Temporalists: Mages who have been cursed with the specialty of time magic. These mages rarely if ever choose their specialty, because the Aureum doesn’t teach time magic—it manifests in its practitioners, often before the age when students are tested. The abilities of a time mage are quite specific, and range from the insanely powerful: “can see everything that has happened or ever will happen in the spot where they stand,” to the nigh useless: “can give you the name of anyone’s mother.” Usually known as time mages, or “those poor saps.”

- Socialists: Stop calling them this. No seriously, it’s not as funny as you think. Mages who specialize in the energy produced by social situations and the humans therein. Their abilities are usually used to manipulate the emotions of those people. Some mages use this to good effect, putting people at ease and comforting the victims of violence. Some put it to less savory, and sometimes downright unethical use. Powerful social mages aren’t watched as closely as powerful body mages, but the Aureum often keeps an eye on them. Always known as social mages, except by people who think they’re funnier than they are.

- Arcanists: Mages who can use raw magic straight from ley lines, and use it to form almost any kind of spell they wish, including ones specific to other types of magic.

CHAPTER ONE

I t felt like one of those rooms where they question criminals on TV.

The floor was gray carpet like the kind they had in schools and public places, with pile so short it hardly qualified as pile at all. The walls were stark white. Not soothing eggshell or beige, oh no. Painful-to-look-at white. The table had a metal top, and there was even a steel ring in the middle, I assumed for shackles.

Shackles, guys.

I was definitely in an interrogation room.

Okay, it didn’t have one of those two-way mirrors where people would watch us without us seeing them, just the unbroken white expanse of nothing on three walls, and the door to give the fourth the tiniest bit of something different. Small favors, I guessed.

The man sitting across from me looked a little like those old-timey pictures of Sigmund Freud. Round eyeglasses, well-trimmed white beard, and intense, beady eyes.

I’d have been terrified, but when I’d called Jordan in a panic, she had promised me that he was no one important. Not to be insulting to him or anything, but apparently he was just a mid-level magister at the California Aureum school—basically a schoolteacher for mages. Not the dominus of the world or something.

Not that I thought I warranted something like that, but I’d been afraid of national—and international—attention since I’d discovered my arcane magic over a year earlier. The Aureum’s head office was in Vienna, I was pretty sure, so did that mean the head of the whole dominus’s office was Austrian? Or was it a position elected from other dominuses? Domini?

As always, my lack of interest in studying the Aureum was biting me in the ass. And Latin, too. But really, dead languages were dead for a reason.

But no. I wasn’t important enough to warrant any of that. The Dominus of California had come to town, briefly, when I’d accidentally time-traveled us into the Aureum building’s waiting room, outing myself and the existence of arcane magic at the same time.

When neither he nor the government had thrown a fit about arcane magic’s existence, I hadn’t known what to do.

Was it over?

Okay, no, of course it wasn’t over. Even if the government and the worldwide Aureum had looked us over, collectively shrugged, and gone back to business as usual, everything was different.

Starting with this meeting, today. The local Aureum had called me a week ago and asked me to come in, “for testing.” They’d specifically asked me not to bring my familiar, so they could get a “baseline reading,” whatever the hell that was, so I’d reluctantly left Fluke in the lobby with Gideon.

Testing, in my history, had unfortunate connotations. The tests for magic weren’t exactly something a person passed or failed. There was no skill involved in the tests, only raw potential. At the same time, when I’d been told as a teenager that I had such a small amount of magic that it was barely measurable, it had felt like failure.

It had been miserable, and that misery had stretched its nasty little fingers into every other part of my life, making everything terrible for years afterward.

Now here I was, with another magister, another person who wanted to test my capacity for magic. Part of me—an admittedly ridiculous part that I needed to stop listening to—was terrified I’d fail again. The magister would tut and shake his head and tell me I wasn’t so impressive after all, and I’d have to go back to being a class two social mage.

It was nonsense, like that nightmare where you show up ten years late for your high school chemistry final in your underwear, and the teacher gives you a test that doesn’t seem to be written in English.

Just me?

Anyway, it wasn’t going to happen, but that didn’t help with my anxiety.

When he pulled out the all-too-familiar testing kit, my heart fluttered, and beads of sweat started forming on my forehead. Oh hell, he actually brought the standard testing kit. It looked almost exactly like the one the Aureum had been using over fifteen years ago, when I’d had my initial testing.

He offered a sympathetic smile at my instinctive cringe. “There’s nothing to worry about, Mr. McKinley, I promise.” The words were well-rehearsed, as though he said them often.

“Jordan said you were a teacher at the magic school,” I informed him, like maybe he wasn’t aware. He wasn’t allowed to be a magic tester, didn’t he know that?

“I am,” he agreed. “I teach general magical theory and have for two decades now.” He tapped the edge of the box, a tiny nostalgic smile on his face, before turning back to look at me. “Before that, I was a tester. Down in the San Diego district. Every middle school, every year, thousands of hopeful students.”

And there I was, right back in my own middle school, in the P.E. teacher’s back offices, looking across the table at an entirely different tester. A young man who was pursing his lips at me, looking thoroughly disappointed with the almost non-magical child of a famously strong family of mages.

Didn’t this man know how many children’s dreams he’d crushed every year? Kids who wanted to be the next magical prodigy, escape their mundane, awful lives and become something more, something special. Everyone wanted an invitation to the magic school.

Okay, maybe not everyone.

Not getting one had sure messed me up, though.

I tried to shake off my emotions—clearly the opposite of his soft nostalgia—with limited success.

There was no point to this. I couldn’t pass it any more now than I had then. Yeah, fine, there was no pass or fail, but I couldn’t complete any of the tasks he was going to ask me to do. That seemed pretty fail-ish to me.

He set the tiny potted plant in front of me with a smile. The same way my own tester had started, knowing that my mother had been a forest mage. They had expected me to manage it with ease.

This guy gave me the same smile.

Then he said the magic words, and all my anxiety melted away as though it had never been. “Can you use arcane magic to make it grow?”

Arcane magic. He wasn’t retesting me. Which I’d known, really. There would have been little point in that. But still, hearing him say it fixed a host of the strains in my mind. He was here to see what arcane magic could do. He was asking me to recreate other kinds of magic with arcane power.

I hadn’t seen a lot of forest mages work in the past year, but as I’d realized with time magic, once was enough. For most things, I just had to know what it looked like, how it felt, and I could recreate it. The soft green feeling of forest magic came to me even more easily than other forms had. Maybe it was that it reminded me of my mother, or maybe it was having grown up so close to the Sequoia National Forest, but growing things were as familiar to me as sliding out of bed and walking to the bathroom in the morning—I could have done it without even my morning caffeine.

I put a hand on either side of the plant, opening myself to the ley lines and drawing the iridescent flows of magic into myself, then converting them into the soft green feeling of the forest.

A moment later, the plant’s leaves grew darker, glossier, and a dozen flower buds sprouted, growing almost immediately to full size, and blooming into little magenta flowers.

He tried, but failed, to hide his surprise. “That’s, ah, very impressive. I can’t say I’ve ever had anyone manage to bring the pot to full bloom before.”

I leaned back in the uncomfortable metal chair, giving him the most awkward shrug ever. “I mean, I’m thirty. Going to be thirty-one soon. Not fourteen.”

He tapped a manila folder in front of him but didn’t look away from me. “I’m told you’ve only been able to access your, um, ‘arcane magic’ for about a year, and less than two. Is that wrong?”

“No, but I’m still thirty, and I spent my whole life a mage. I know all the theory.” Unlike him when he’d spoken to me, I didn’t seek out eye contact.

I was lying through my teeth, and he didn’t need to see my uncertainty. I mean, it was true I’d spent my life a mage, if a weak one. But I’d never bothered studying magical theory. After failing my testing, I’d never seen the point of putting that much energy into learning it.

He didn’t scoff or question, simply nodded and scooted the plant back over to his side of the table and reached into his little case of horrors. Out came the metal box. Ugh.

He pushed the thing in front of me and then dropped a piece of wood the size of my thumb into it. Next to the box, he set a single match. “If you can, burn the wood. If you require the match as a starter, feel free to use it.”

Fire was easy. Too damned easy.

No, not like “I’m so special and excellent,” but like “oh fuck I accidentally melted that gun instead of just setting off the powder in the bullets.” If I wasn’t careful, I wouldn’t just burn the damn wood, I’d melt the metal box and the table beneath it.

Control, I told myself. You don’t want to burn everything, and you’re not in mortal danger. Just burn the wood. Not the room.

I drew the arcane flows into the sharp, black lines of fire magic, concentrated only on the piece of wood inside the metal box. Not the box, not the table, not—I flinched back from the flash of combustion and sighed at the lack of fire.

Still couldn’t control fire quite right. No merry flickering flame the size of a lighter, like a miniature blaze in a fireplace. Nope. Just the black, incinerated remains of the wood, sitting in the box, the bottom of which glowed briefly red-orange.

The tester, whose name was Benjamin something—or had it been something Benjamin?—had very little hair atop his head, his hairline having receded all the way to his crown. Still, his eyebrows tried their best to shoot all the way back into that hairline. He leaned forward to take a closer look, and the surprised expression didn’t change.

When he reached toward the box, I coughed into my hand. “You, um, you might want to wait. It’s a little hot still.”

“I see,” he said, nodding agreeably, and drew his hand back. For a moment, we were silent, and he stared at his case of tricks. Then he shook himself and went back to it, pulling out one piece of testing paraphernalia after another. Shape the metal with my mind, make the food decompose, make the wind chime tone with a conjured breeze—it was all simple manipulation of the energy I’d spent a year getting to know.

Yes, kids in the magic school spent years learning all the finer points of how to use their gifts, and that happened much more slowly than my learning had.

The thing was, those kids weren’t in constant fear for their lives like I’d been for the last year and a half. They learned like kids, one class at a time, one concept at a time. They didn’t have massive breakthroughs like I’d been forced into in the name of staying alive.

Frankly, I was still pretty jealous of them.

He finally put the last of his little toys away and turned back to me. “From reading your file, I suppose this one should be easy.” He sat back in his chair, then motioned to himself with his hands. “Convince me that the test is over.”

Convince him that . . . what?

When I realized what he meant, the anxiety came flooding back. Social magic. He wanted me to use social magic. To change his mind, to nudge him magically into deciding that we were finished.

I’d surprised him again and again with arcane magic, sometimes to an almost dangerous degree. If I did the same thing with the social magic that I’d done with the fire, I was more likely to turn his brain into mush than convince him of anything.

It was almost laughable, though, because I wasn’t even worried about that. It would never happen.

Because just like every time I’d ever tried it in the past, social magic slipped through my hands like I was trying to trap water in a bucket with holes in the bottom. The fuzzy image just wouldn’t solidify in my mind, of what social magic was supposed to look like. The lines wouldn’t form, and the magic—good old reliable arcane magic—slipped away and left me panting and . . . and fucking irritated.

Why couldn’t I do this one tiny thing? Why, after more than fifteen years, was I still incapable of even the simplest social tricks? My father had been an accomplished social mage, and I’d watched him twist people into knots for two goddamn decades, but still, every time I so much as tried to calm down an irate jerkwad trying to start a fight, the magic slid away from me.

Social magic was the worst.

I gave up after a few moments, letting my head slump forward and resting it on my hands, my elbows on the still-warm table in front of me. “Can’t do it.”

“Really?” For the first time since the fire, he seemed truly surprised. He whipped the manila folder in front of him open and started writing.

Great. Just fucking great. The first thing he decided to write about in the file was when I failed. That didn’t make me want to curl up in a ball and cry at all.

When he finally finished scribbling a few minutes later, I had at least stopped panting pathetically. “Thank you so much for coming down today, Mr. McKinley. This has been illuminating. I’m so sorry the Aureum failed you as a child.”

For a moment, I blinked up at him, silent.

The Aureum, failed me?

“You didn’t even know about arcane magic,” I pointed out, sounding silly even to myself. “You couldn’t have done any differently. I got the same tests everyone did.”

He leaned forward, sighing, and met my eye steadily. “We should have known, Mr. McKinley. That’s our job. We should have been protecting you, protecting your entire branch of magic, for a long time now. You’re very special, and we’re supposed to be here to help people like you.”

Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe again, and my eyes stung with—nope. I stood from the chair, breathing as deep as I could. “Sorry, my boyfriend is waiting for me. I don’t mean to—”

He gave me a grandfatherly smile, sad and sympathetic, but nodded. “Of course.” Pulling out a card, he passed it to me across the table. Elijah Benjamin. “If there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate to call. Thank you so much for coming down. I think you’ve helped the next generation of arcane mages greatly today.”

I swallowed and nodded, trying not to imagine how different my life would have been if the Aureum had known about arcane magic when I’d been a kid. If they’d discovered my gift at the time.

If they had been protecting arcane mages from the zealots who wanted to kill them, I might still have my mother.

I almost certainly would not have Gideon.

Gideon, who was waiting for me as I stumbled into the lobby of the Aureum building, with its hideous mustard and gold chairs and gray concrete floor. Gideon, my boyfriend, the man born in the eighteenth century. Gideon, who had spent years as a ghost, training new arcane mages when the previous ones were murdered by a cult of people who believed we were monsters who made pacts with demons.

Fluke had been sitting at his feet, but the moment I came into the room, he hopped up and darted over to me, weaving himself around and between my legs like a cat, even though he was twice the size of most any self-respecting cat. Somehow, I managed not to trip over him and land on my face.

I glanced at the front desk as I passed by on my way to Gideon. The same woman as usual was sitting at the front desk in the waiting room, her name tag reading Melpomene. It said something different almost every day, and honestly, I still wasn’t sure her name was even Rose, as it had been when we’d met. She gave me a blank smile without meeting my eye, and immediately went back to staring off into space.

Gideon, on the other hand . . .

Gideon looked downright grim as he approached, and when I glanced down, my familiar somehow seemed just as serious.

He wrapped his arm around my waist as I stepped into his space, and Fluke leaned hard on my leg, like maybe he thought I needed emotional support.

“Anson’s here to take us to your gran’s,” Gideon told me, voice taut with worry.

And that was understandable, since we’d been planning on going home after the meeting. There had been no plans to meet up with Anson or go to my grandmother’s house.

While the last few months hadn’t exactly been quiet, since we’d been wading through the reporters and general public interest in arcane magic, they hadn’t involved anyone trying to murder us or destroy the town.

From the look on Gideon’s face, that peace was over.

CHAPTER TWO

S ure enough, Anson was sitting outside the building in his car, one of those shiny black numbers that seemed ordinary, but probably had weird features like a special butt-warmer for those chilly thirty-degree mornings, and personal on-call attendant you could demand instructions from at the press of a button.

GPS you had to type addresses into was for mere plebs who bought plain old sedans.

Anson raised a brow at me as I climbed into the backseat with Gideon, like he knew I’d been making presumptions about his chilly butt. He smiled at Fluke, because everyone with a heart smiled at Fluke, and gave Gideon a serious-guy nod, as usual. Gideon returned the gesture, and it made me want to fake David Attenborough’s voice and start talking about the alpha males of the human species, and their odd hierarchical behaviors.

The moment was probably a little serious for me to be making jokes, though. Fluke, sensing my worry, leaned into me. His way of pointing out that whatever it was, we’d probably been through worse—and he was right.

We’d been kidnapped, tortured, beaten, and . . . well, it had been a hell of a year in Junction, California.

I’d sort of hoped it was over, and the rest of my years would return to being as boring as the first twenty-nine.

I wouldn’t lie to myself, part of me had enjoyed the changes. I wasn’t a no-magic nobody who just worked in his father’s bookstore anymore. I was a bookstore owner who had magic, and a boyfriend, and a familiar, and a whole extended family who loved me, and the feeling was definitely mutual.

The problem wasn’t all the excitement. Sure, I didn’t want to be kidnapped and beaten, but I also wasn’t going to pretend I hadn’t gotten a charge out of helping to stop the kidnappers.

It was that I’d been Sage McKinley, bookseller, for so long, that it was still a little hard to process the idea of Sage McKinley, action hero.

And yeah, fine, I’d have to exercise a lot more to ever really be an action hero, and it didn’t matter how many crunches I did, I liked cheese too much to ever have six-pack abs. But after over a year of bonding with the convergence of ley lines in Junction, I felt like maybe I could do more than sell books to exhausted college students.

Or maybe the problem was that I could no longer sell books to exhausted college students.

Not that they wouldn’t buy them, but half the time now they ended up distracted by “wait, aren’t you that guy from the news?”

The store was busier than ever before—with the customer base I’d been trying to bring in, sure—the college students there for the latest sci-fi and fantasy and graphic novels. But also with a huge influx of people who wanted to buy a book at that arcane mage guy’s store. Even better if they saw me there and took a picture or managed to talk to me.

I’d never been anything remotely like a celebrity before, and it was making my job really damned hard. I ended up accomplishing nothing, I was so overrun by people who wanted to talk to me.

Half of them wanted to pick my brain about magical theory, which was a laugh and a half, since I didn’t know any of it. Gideon had helped fill in some of the blanks, so I faked it well enough, but that wasn’t the real problem.

Which was that I wasn’t doing my job. I was a distraction at the shop, which was busy enough that we needed me either working, or absent. It was so busy that Beez had hired three more employees. That had been easier the second time around, because she’d finally finished her degree, and without the conflict of interests involved, she’d just hired people from her old program whom she’d already known.

We all called her Doctor Beez now, which was fun, but it was also another sign of how much things had changed.

Even the shop had changed names, which had been Freddy’s brainchild. Bradford and Sons had never really been right, since I’d never been a Bradford like my father. We’d gone through one goofy or clever name after another, trying to decide how to change it, before Freddy had pointed out that all the extra business the shop was getting was based on one thing: my sudden notoriety. Beez had suggested something with my name in it, but Freddy’s idea had been the one to stick: Arcane Books.

It was a good thing I’d had my father’s spirit banished, because we did paint the walls purple like he’d been afraid of, and even started carrying thematic tchotchkes like figurines of ancient gods and tarot cards.

We had a shiny new sign outside in iridescent white letters, and people flocked to the shop to see the arcane mage, even though I hardly spent any time there anymore. It had been where I grew up. Where I’d spent most of my adult life.

And after the last year, it no longer felt like where I needed to be. Freddy and Beez ran the place just fine without me. Better, in fact, without me and the trail of people behind me there to distract everyone.

But where did that leave me?

At the moment, being stared at by my grandmother’s boyfriend, who gave me a pointed look, then glanced over to my familiar next to me. Right, seat belt. Far be it from Anson to drive dangerously, without Fluke protected by a seatbelt.

I wasn’t sure standard car seatbelts were really made to protect foxes, but I wasn’t going to argue it with him. I reached over and belted Fluke’s body into the seat. Then I spent a full minute fiddling with the thing, trying to make it work on a fox. Somehow it had never come up before. Fluke had always just made a lap fox of himself and been above the concept of seatbelts.

By the time I was finished, some of the somber mood was broken, with Gideon sitting next to us, trying to choke down his laughter. Even Anson was biting his lip in amusement. And I mean . . . seatbelts weren’t made for foxes, dammit. What was I supposed to do?

I looked back at Fluke speculatively, considering whether I could use magic to make a seat belt that worked better for him. He just sat there, tongue lolling out, eyes squinted closed in a huge foxy grin.

I pretended to huff and turned to glare out the window. “Fine, fine, you all laugh at me. I’m just trying to make sure Fluke is safe.”

“And you were very thorough,” Anson agreed, a smile in his voice. “Most admirable.”

I bit my lip as I turned back to him. I didn’t want to bring the mood back down, but I really wanted a little warning before we got to grandma’s place. “You gonna tell us what’s up?”

His brows drew together and he pursed his lips. “I was going to ask you, actually. I have no idea. I just got a call from Iris asking me to bring the two of you from the Aureum building to her house. And she sounded . . . serious.”

“Not like her to make a call like that with no explanation,” Gideon said, straightening his back and looking discomfited. Like he wanted to reach for the gun he didn’t wear now, because he wasn’t a wild west gunslinger anymore.

Sure enough, a moment later, he tucked his thumb into the belt loop right above where it would have sat on his hip. Every line of his body read as tense and ready for a fight. I supposed that was why I didn’t need to have six-pack abs or be able to fight: I had Gideon for that.

We sat in silence for a long while as Anson drove, until I couldn’t take the quiet anymore. Frankly, I was a little surprised Fluke hadn’t started randomly barking to break the tension. He was a good bro, and sometimes he did things like that for me.

Instead, he was looking at me expectantly. I supposed that meant it was my turn to play clown.

“Here I was hoping you were going to tell me someone had apprehended that bandit roaming our neighborhood,” I said with a sigh, slumping my shoulders in fake defeat.

Anson raised that single eyebrow again. “Bandit? Is your neighborhood having a burglary problem?”

Gideon rolled his eyes and sighed even louder than I had. “It ain’t a burglar. It’s a raccoon. Damn thing keeps getting into the trash cans.”

Finally, Fluke gave a bark. He knew what a raccoon was, and why the thing was annoying the crap out of me. He seemed to like it, which made me wonder if it was a familiar.

I just wanted it to stop raiding my damn trash.

Seriously, the cans were inside a wooden structure Gideon had built, barred closed, and the damned raccoon kept managing to flip the bar open, get in the door, and overturn the trash into the street. We didn’t even throw away that much food, so it couldn’t be getting much out of the exercise other than malicious glee.

If it was someone’s familiar, I suspected they were going to be deeply disappointed with it.

On the other hand . . . no, they weren’t. I thought about Fluke curled up in my lap, giving me the chocolate foxy eyes when he wanted my snack. Or Flit, sitting on Freddy’s shoulder, absently chewing at his earlobe as they read together.

Paper books, thank you very much, because I’d converted Freddy to the cause of real, solid, paper books. Kind of. Sometimes.

Yes, fine, ebooks were fabulous. But both was an excellent middle ground. Both was always good.

The point was, familiars were the best, even, and sometimes especially, when they were being jerks. They were members of the family like any other person, and cleverer than most humans I knew. Probably including me.

Anson gave me a serious expression, but this time his eyes were sparkling with amusement. “I’m not sure that’s what Iris’s call was about, but you let me know if you catch the criminal.”

I gave him the world’s clumsiest salute and nodded.

Gideon buried his face in his hands, groaning, and Anson gave up hiding his amusement and laughed aloud. As he turned into Grandma’s ridiculously long driveway, I breathed deep and crossed my fingers.

Okay, no, I didn’t actually cross my fingers, I just sort of . . . mentally crossed them.

Whatever was going on, it couldn’t be as bad as the time that guy tried to destroy all of Junction, right?

Right?

CHAPTER THREE

I ris’s house was quiet when we arrived, but it often was. The place was too damned big for one person, or even for Freddy and Iris and the small army of servants she kept close. Still, this silence wasn’t simply the place being half empty. It was that kind of silence you get when people are trying to hold things in and stay quiet.

Beryl answered the door with a somber look and a bitten lip, and showed us in without a word, motioning us toward the library. For the first time I could remember, my grandmother’s bulldog familiar, Rufus, hadn’t greeted Fluke at the door, ready to chase him around the house the way they always did.

For a wild moment, I was afraid something had happened to Iris, but . . . someone would have said so if it were that, right? Besides, Iris was a powerful mage, and they often lived to be a hundred at least.

Gideon, reading my anxiety—or maybe just needing some comfort himself—squeezed my hand in his, pulling me closer.

It was Anson who broke the silence as we all headed for the library, though. “I believe this is the first time I’ve come into Iris’s house that Beryl hasn’t offered to take my coat. Whether I was wearing one that needed hanging up or not.”

That almost made me chuckle, the notion of Beryl offering to hang up a sport coat out of habit, but I smiled at him. “That just proves she’s starting to see you as family. She stopped asking me ages ago unless I’m wearing my winter coat.”

Anson got a dreamy little smile on his face at that.

Which was understandable, really. Iris was an amazing person, and anyone she cared about as much as she cared about Anson should be overjoyed. Having her had changed my life, and not because she was rich. Because like my best friend Beez, she was family, and that was something I’d had far too little of in my life.

I was half expecting the library to be full of people—Beez and Freddy and Grandma and who knew who else, but when we arrived in the doorway, it was just Iris herself and . . . Jordan Maines, the quaesitor.

Not that it was so strange to see Jordan at Grandma’s. She wasn’t always around, but she visited often enough that it wasn’t a big deal, and sometimes she joined us for Sunday Brunch. The problem was the fact that she looked utterly gutted.

She was sitting there on one of Grandma’s ivory sofas with the gilded accents, Rufus leaning into her whining sympathetically.

Iris sat across from her in a matching oversize wingback that looked almost like a throne, and if I’d been coming to give her bad news, I’d have been quaking in my sneakers at the narrow-eyed glare on her face.

She turned to look at us in the doorway, and the severity of the expression didn’t change. “Boys. Come in. Sit down. We have . . . news.”

Gee, that didn’t sound ominous at all.

Not that I’d expected anything different.

Jordan startled a little at the words, turning to look at us, her expression going abashed. “You didn’t have to call them, Iris. I just . . . wanted your opinion.”

“And you have it,” Grandma agreed. “I’d say we should have the boys kill him, but I suppose that might be an overreaction.”

Anson glided into the room as though he was on roller skates—a hell of a feat for a man who walked with a cane not because it was a stylish piece of fashion, but because he needed it. I’d have killed to be that smooth.

Gideon, apparently realizing that unless he did something I was going to stand there in the entryway staring blankly at the assembled people, put a hand in the small of my back and led me toward the sofa and Jordan.

He did sit between us, clearly not over last year’s kidnapping debacle, even if I’d forgiven Jordan and we had ultimately become friends.

“So,” Anson said after another moment of silence. “What seems to be the problem?”

Jordan gave a heavy sigh, as though explaining the issue was going to be a torment.

Fortunately for her, Iris didn’t need more than a second to get her own thoughts together. “It’s that damned Robert Marlett.”

Robert Marlett.

Oh hell.

Back to the kidnapping incident, then.

See, about a year and a half earlier, Jordan was a newbie Aureum agent, and her . . . boss’s boss? Or maybe it had been his boss. Either way, a big important quaesitor guy had told her that I was an evil witch and they needed to kidnap and question me because I’d been complicit with the death of another quaesitor.

It was this whole messy drama culminating in Jordan helping the guy kidnap me and then helping me escape when she’d realized he was three cards short of a full deck, and we were playing chess anyway.

That had been Robert Marlett. Kidnapper, attempted murderer, and cult member extraordinaire.

But how could he be doing anything now? Jordan had killed him. She’d put two bullets in his chest instead of letting him murder me, and we’d left his body in a concrete bunker that Iris had collapsed.

“He’s suing Jordan for wrongful death,” Iris continued, and for a moment, I wondered if I’d somehow screwed up the whole world. Had my time travel nonsense earlier in the year landed me in the wrong dimension instead of the right time and place? Or maybe I’d given myself literal brain damage, and I was remembering everything wrong.

Then, cutting off my wildly spiraling internal monologue, Jordan added, “Robert Marlett Senior.” Despite the cloud of misery that hung over her, there was a tiny smile on her face, like she knew just what I’d been thinking. “The quaesitor magnus was his son, named after him. Robert Marlett Shaw.”

“Robert Senior married into money,” Iris explained further, because of course she knew about that kind of thing. “The Shaw family. And their children were hyphenated.”

Gideon lifted a brow, one corner of his lips quirked up. “Don’t that mean he ain’t technically a Junior, since his name was different?”

Grandma waved a dismissive hand. “Tell an arrogant rich man things aren’t the way he wants, and he’ll ignore it. Not that it matters, not really. The point is, the father is suing Jordan for Robert Junior’s death. A civil suit, you understand. He can’t have her imprisoned, but he can try to ruin her.”

Fluke, who also hadn’t forgiven Jordan for the kidnapping, eased over to the end of the couch by her side, and gave her hand a tentative lick.

She smiled at him, brushing her fingers along his cheek as he pulled away. “Ruin is a strong way of putting it, don’t you think?”

“I do not,” Iris said, her tone dry as the dusty tomes that surrounded us. She turned back to first me, then Anson. “The quaesitor’s office has suspended her pending an internal investigation. This isn’t just some silly, frivolous tort. He’s demanding money, sure, but it’s not about the money. It’s about dragging Jordan through the mud. Destroying her career. It’s clear from the court documents that he intends to pull you into it as well, Sage. They couldn’t name you as a party in the suit because there’s nothing to link you to the man unless they want to admit the kidnapping scheme, but they mention you repeatedly with the implication that you’re a co-conspirator, so it’s obvious they’re hoping to hurt you too. Which might turn against them and implicate them as well, since it makes it clear to anyone who knows what happened that they’re aware a crime was committed and have done nothing about that.”

“What’s his proof of any of this? According to public knowledge, the guy disappeared. Is there even evidence he’s dead, let alone that she killed him? Or that Sage was involved at all?” Trust Gideon to cut to the heart of the issue. It was a great question.

Unfortunately, Grandma didn’t seem any happier to have heard it. “Apparently they found some text messages on his computer that she sent him while she was doing her investigation, and if you interpret them a certain way, it looks bad for her.”

If you interpreted them truthfully, probably, which was a big part of the problem. Not that I thought Jordan had done wrong, but . . . she literally had killed the guy she was being accused of killing. Or wrongful deathing. I didn’t know what the difference was, honestly. Maybe it was just whether she could go to prison for being guilty.

Somehow, we had to make Jordan look innocent for a crime she’d kind of committed.

Or, alternately, we could tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may. The world already knew about arcane magic, so there wasn’t much reason to keep it a secret anymore.

But Jordan didn’t exactly come out of that smelling like roses either. Maybe I was so unconcerned about the possibility of the truth coming out because I didn’t look bad in that story. I’d neither kidnapped an innocent guy nor killed my uberboss while trying to help him escape. I was just the sucker who happened to have arcane magic.

Jordan turned to face me, her expression tighter than a moment before. “They’re also trying to say that the messages reference you, Sage, but unless they know about Marlett Junior’s plot against you, they can’t know that. It’s an attempt to pull you into my mess.”

So they knew what Marlett had been up to. What he’d been planning to do. She was right, there was no other reason for the man’s father to be aware of me. He had to be another Believer.

Instead of jumping to a conclusion, or insisting everything would be fine, I looked to Jordan for cues. “What do you want to do?”

Her shoulders slumped in defeat. “Honestly? I don’t know. It would be easiest to tell the truth, but at this point, there’s not much reason for them to believe me. The quaesitor magnus was a crazed cultist trying to murder you? It’s too ridiculous. My boss thought he was acting erratically before he disappeared, but that’s not the same as thinking he was a murderer. Then everyone was all too happy to just let it all drop when he didn’t show up, and neither did a body.”

“I’ll tell them exactly what happened if you want me to,” I offered, shrugging and leaning back against Gideon. “It sounds awful, but it’s the truth. It’s not like they can fault me for anything I did.”

Gideon nodded at her. “It’s your ass on the line.” He didn’t seem especially sympathetic, but he wasn’t being outright mean. I suspected that some part of him didn’t mind seeing Jordan get some blowback after what she’d helped with. I had spent days being beaten by cultist assholes because she’d helped them kidnap me, after all. “No trouble for us to either tell the truth or hang back and keep our mouths shut.”

She offered him a tight smile, her eyes knowing, and nodded back. “I appreciate that. I didn’t intend to make a production of this, really. I only came to ask Iris’s advice on what to do. Maybe, um, the name of a lawyer I could afford, who wasn’t entirely incompetent.”

Iris scoffed and waved imperiously. “You can use my lawyer, of course.”

Anson, joining the conversation for the first time, winced and leaned toward her. “Is that a good idea?”

She turned to him, eyes wide, as though he’d just told her Santa Claus wasn’t real. “Are you saying I shouldn’t help?”

“No! No, I’d never say that, Iris,” he denied, reaching over and grabbing one of her hands, clutching it tight in his. “I’m saying that if the truth ends up coming out and you’ve paid your lawyer to defend Jordan, it’ll look like a conspiracy between you. That way things will end up looking even worse for Jordan. Not to mention the fact that it’ll irrevocably connect Sage to the case, and it’s clear that’s exactly what they want.”

Iris’s expression went pinched, her brows drawing together and jaw clenched tight as she looked away, staring at the wall as though it would give her the answer she needed.

Gideon pulled me completely against him, wrapping his arms tight around me. To protect me from further attack, no doubt. “Might be easiest to just tell the truth. The Aureum’s investigating, you said? Tell ’em everything, including why you didn’t explain before. You’d probably get in trouble, but they couldn’t hold you responsible for it, could they?”

Anson shook his head, but it wasn’t in alignment with Gideon’s assumptions. “They just might. After all, he was a criminal, but if everyone told the truth, then Jordan was one of his confederates. It might end up with not only the wrongful death suit, but criminal charges for Sage’s kidnapping.”

Fluke slid up onto the couch and into my lap, concerned by the very reminder of the incident. His sympathy for Jordan apparently ended there.

I wasn’t prepared to let that go. Yes, Jordan had done a bad, shitty thing. Even so, her intentions had been good, and when the chips were down, she’d done the right thing. Maybe I couldn’t protect her from her own mistakes, and maybe I shouldn’t. But she was my friend, and I wanted to help her.

The problem was . . . how? I couldn’t tell the district attorney not to bring charges against her for kidnapping me, could I? Even if I could, that would be the least of her problems, if Jordan was seen as the accomplice of a mad cultist. Grandma said Marlett was trying to ruin her career, and if the truth came out, he might well succeed.

“Fine,” Iris sighed, interrupting my train of thought as she leaned toward Anson. “We’ll find a different lawyer for Jordan. But they have to be a good one. Not someone who’s going to let this nonsense stand.”

Anson’s beaming smile in answer was beautiful, and all for Iris. “I’m sure we can find someone.”

“Meanwhile,” Gideon cut in, all common sense and preparedness, “we should look into this Marlett Senior fella, see if he’s up to anything else. I only saw the one Marlett on the list we have of Believers, but that don’t mean he ain’t up to his eyeballs in it.”

Jordan pursed her lips. “That’s a good idea. Unfortunately, I can’t help. Even if I hadn’t been suspended at work, I shouldn’t go anywhere near him.”

Gideon gave her an understanding look but waved her concerns away. “Don’t worry about it. Turns out me and Sage are pretty good at looking into things. We’ve managed a couple times now.”

The sharp-eyed, mildly reproving stare from Anson was a little unnerving. Surely he knew about all the messes we’d gotten ourselves into and out of by now. Still, maybe it was best to make a graceful exit before the discussion turned to it.

“Or we could just hire an investigator and not get personally involved. That also seems like a good idea,” I said, pressing my hands into my knees and pushing up off the sofa. “We’ll let you know if we find anything useful. But for now I think Gideon and I are going to head home and investigate some dinner. We’ll let you know if we find anything.”

Maybe things would look better with a little pasta in my belly and a good night’s sleep behind me.

Anything was possible, right?

CHAPTER FOUR

A s it turned out, if he weren’t probably a Believer—part of the murder cult that wanted me dead—I’d have pitied Robert Marlett Senior.

At first, I thought that while he wasn’t poor in the traditional sense, he had to be lonely and miserable, living alone in a giant house on the outskirts of Junction.

The dossier from the private investigator we hired said that he spent most of his time alone, and the only person who visited him regularly was his lawyer. There were pictures of the two together in the garden, the lawyer in a poorly fitting suit and one of those generic red ties guys wore, thinking it made them look powerful, when really, it made them look desperate.

Marlett himself looked positively harmless, with his wispy white hair and sagging face, clearly too thin for his own body. He looked like a sick man. A sad one.

Then there was a picture of him head on, looking at a file in front of him, and the intensity in his eyes reminded me of his son. Determination bordering on madness. No real emotion, only pure malicious anger. Just looking at the picture reminded me of my days in the Believers’ murder bunker, being beaten and starved and drugged with unsanitary needles and—hell, I still didn’t know what he’d been drugging me with.

While I was staring into the eyes of someone who almost definitely wanted to murder me, Gideon methodically went through every picture, inspecting them as though he was looking for signs they’d been photoshopped, searching the backgrounds and corners and holding them so close to his face I wasn’t sure how he was seeing anything at all.

Finally, he held one out to me. It was a terrible picture; the lawyer blocking the view of Marlett, and only his back was showing.

“Garden’s dead,” he said as he passed it to me.

And well, yeah, it was. They were sitting in a small area with benches and what must have once been a beautiful white trellis. The vines that covered it were withered and brown, no leaves or blooms anywhere on them. The trellis itself was so weathered that the white paint had worn away in many spots, leaving gray-brown wood, and even that looked warped by years of rain and neglect.

Surrounding them was a circle of some kind of high brown grass that I’d assumed was ornamental, but on second look . . . no, that was just neglect again. It was dead.

Hell, there didn’t even seem to be weeds springing up opportunistically where the plants had died.

It was like something had sucked the very life out of the place. It seemed poetic that a Believer lived among death like that.

Gideon passed me another photo, this one a profile of the lawyer. Instead of pointing out something about the man, he tapped the background. “Window shutter’s broken.”

Again, correct. The shutters on the ground floor window behind the lawyer were as faded as the rose trellis. They’d once been burgundy, perhaps, or some other deep red, but time and the sun had worn them down to a rusty orange, in the places where the paint still clung. On one side, the shutter itself had detached from the window and was hanging, haphazardly, to one side.

I looked over at Gideon, where he was squinting at yet another photo, of an expensive-looking car in a driveway that needed the blacktop replaced.

“What does this mean?”

Gideon looked up from the picture and met my eye. “Old man lives in a mansion, but I’d bet he’s got no money.”

No money? Living in a three-story mansion, hiring a lawyer to sue someone for his son’s death?

Besides, hadn’t Jordan once said that their family had some kind of competition with the McKinleys? That ought to put them in the same tax bracket, surely, or at least a similar one. The dead rose vines were probably just blocking the brand-new tennis courts . . . that Marlett, who it turned out was wheelchair-bound, had put in.

No, if Marlett was going to spend money on something, surely it would have been his garden, since it was something he could still enjoy.

Trust Gideon to notice the important things that weren’t the subject of the photos.

I grabbed the folder with the dossier and started reading again. The lawyer was the only major noted visitor, but the investigator said he had a living daughter as well.

Roberta Shaw.

I cocked my head, skimming over the report. “I wonder why his daughter’s name isn’t hyphenated like his son’s was. And not his name at all.”

“Sounds like they ain’t close,” Gideon offered, then dug through the photos before holding one out to me. “This is the only one he got of her.”

Roberta Shaw looked like a formidable woman. In her forties or fifties, with graying blond hair just as her brother’s had been, and the same strong jaw that seemed to run in the family.

I was a little annoyed that she was looking away from the camera, because I had the silly notion that just seeing her eyes would tell me if she was with the Believers. Would it be those cold, evil shark eyes her father and brother had, or something else?

On the other hand, I recognized something important about the photo. Grandma had the same suit she was wearing, in a slightly different color. I tapped it. “That suit’s this year’s Chanel. She’s not struggling so much she can’t repair windows or replant dead gardens.”

Gideon looked the outfit over, nodding with interest. “Definitely estranged from the old man, then.”

“Unless they’re really freaking good at faking it.”

I went back to skimming the report—yeah, I know, I should have been reading it entirely, but how many details about the guy’s trash pickup did I need? But then something jumped out at me, and I gave a low whistle.

“Okay, so his wife ran out on him fifteen years ago. Society rumors about opening a wine bar in Thailand with a man half her age, but nothing substantiated. The minute he could, he had her declared dead, thinking he’d collect on her will, only it turns out she left everything to the daughter.”

Ouch.

Gideon laughed, leaning in to look at the report over my shoulder.

The whole family history was like something from a Shakespearian drama. Apparently when Roberta had divorced her husband, her father had publicly sided with her ex-husband-to-be, particularly when she’d decided to retake only half of her maiden name, dropping the Marlett altogether. Or maybe it had happened the other way, the investigator hadn’t been sure, since the information was almost a decade old and almost all pieced together from gossip and conjecture. The only thing that was public record was Roberta dumping her married name, Dean, and taking her maiden name, Shaw, just in time to inherit millions from her mother.

She was now the CEO and sole shareholder of her family company, which had something to do with growing decorative trees. Who knew there was big money in trees?

So Robert Marlett was a lonely, dying man, living in a crumbling house, with no one who cared about him except maybe his lawyer. During the weeklong investigation, the lawyer had apparently visited four times, and he’d been the only one. He’d even brought food with him, which made sense, because Marlett hadn’t once left the house grounds.

“We oughta look into the lawyer,” Gideon said, tapping one of the better pictures of the man. Superficially, he looked a little like Marlett or his son. Blond hair, slim, hard set to his jaw. But everything about him was just a little softer, from his poorly cut suit to the slight slump of his shoulders.

I fanned the pages of the report until I found the notes on him and paused. “Clayton . . . Dean.”

“Dean like the daughter’s married name?”

“Holy shit.” I stared at the paper. It had to be lying. No wonder the guy’s daughter didn’t visit him. His bff—his only friend, in fact—was his former son-in-law. “Exactly like that. Apparently they had a prenup because he was afraid of her trying to take his money. But he tried to sue, saying he deserved support even though they’d divorced before the inheritance. The court sided with her.”

Gideon snorted. “ ’Course they did.”

I leaned over to bump my shoulder against his. “I love that you think courts automatically mean justice. It’s sweet.”

Gideon pursed his lips, but didn’t answer that, just gave a sigh. “Explains why Marlett’s so determined to avenge his son on Jordan. No way his daughter forgives him for siding with this jackass. He’s made his bed, and it’s all he’s got left.”

Which made sense. Not that I’d expected we would be able to talk them out of suing Jordan, but . . . yeah, there was no way. Marlett wanted Jordan’s blood. Short of telling the truth and being believed, I didn’t know what I could do to help her.

Gideon groaned and stood from the sofa, shaking his head in disgust. “That’s it. I’m ordering pizza. Nothing here’s gonna help us.”

I wanted to deny it, suggest that at least having the information was good, but at the moment, it didn’t feel like it. So I dropped the dossier on the coffee table in front of me, crashed back onto the couch, and listened to Gideon order pizza while Fluke happily danced around his heels, barking agreement with every item added to the order.

CHAPTER FIVE

T  he days passed as usual, slow and plodding without my routine at the bookstore. It was hard to believe I was jealous that someone else was running inventories and putting out new books and . . . all the random work that came with running a bookstore.

When the mess had started, Beez had hired more people and shoved me out with the orders to take time off, saying I should use the time to read all those books I’d been meaning to “until things died down.”

It had been more than six months, and nothing was dying down. The bookstore was on track to make record profits, and the news vans still drove by at least once a week, drivers surreptitiously glancing in the shop window to see if they could spot me.

I’d have told them I had a ward on the building so they never would, but that would have been counter to the point of the spell. The window looked the same as always, and the customers and employees could be seen through the spell, but not me. No one could see me through the front window, and I liked it that way.

The real problem was that after Beez had cut me loose, I’d spent about two weeks at home reading. And then as much as I loved sitting around reading, I got restless. There were things I needed to do, weren’t there? Was I really so useless that I could just detach from the world and it wouldn’t matter?

I hadn’t exactly panicked at the notion, but there had been margaritas involved.

So now, I spent half my time sitting around at home reading, or going out with Gideon and Fluke and Marron, or visiting Grandma—the sort of stuff I supposed the idle rich did. And the other half, I continued to try to shoehorn myself into the bookstore.

Not that Beez and Freddy acted like I didn’t belong when I dropped in. They were always happy to see me. I just brought a host of problems with me when I showed up, so half the time I ended up feeling guilty and slinking out the back.

Right that moment, though, things were good. Moore—one of Beez’s new employees—and I were going through Friday’s delivery of new books. It was more exciting than it used to be, in part because we got my favorite genres now, but also because the deliveries were five times what they’d been before. Stacks and stacks of boxes, each with a different treasure inside.

And Moore was just as much of a nerd as I was. “Oh my gods, I didn’t know this one was coming out next week.” He practically hopped in place as we opened a box with a stack of fantasy doorstoppers inside. He looked up at me with a bitten lip and a pleading expression, like there was any chance I wasn’t going to let him take one early. I was taking one home for the weekend too, so it’d be pretty rude of me to shoot him down.

Over on the sofa working on a clipboard, Beez was ignoring us, mumbling about how much room she was going to need to make in the mystery section. I met Moore’s eye and glanced down at a cubby beneath the counter, and then slid two copies of the book into it. Glancing once more at Beez, I whispered “don’t forget it here, and don’t forget to pay for one on Tuesday.”

He almost squealed aloud, a grin on his face and his hands folded together like he was saying a prayer. It was adorable. I did enjoy being nice boss to Beez’s kind-of-hardass.

“Mr. McKinley,” a breathless voice said from the other side of the counter, and I turned to find a familiar face. It was Holli with an i, who had once tried to slip Gideon her phone number inside a copy of Catcher in the Rye.

I had bad news for Holli—Gideon was out with Marron, and unavailable for further flirting. Still, I mustered up a bland smile. “What can I do for you?”

What? No I wasn’t going to admit that I remembered her name. It was pathetic.

Instead of looking behind me, or asking after Gideon, she thrust a book out at me. Instantly, I recognized it as something we didn’t carry—it was a textbook from the university, one I had at home. One that Gideon had been nagging at me to read for ages. The History of Magic.

For a second, I didn’t know what to say. We didn’t have a section for used textbooks, just some of the fiction that literature classes still forced kids to read. Was she trying to sell us her used books? Her hopeful smile meshed with that, but it didn’t quite—

“I hate to bother you at work, I know how busy you are, but I hoped maybe you’d have a minute to sign my book.”

To . . .

It wasn’t my imagination that a hush fell over the whole shop at her words, because when I glanced past her to Beez, she had looked up from her clipboard and was staring at Holli as though she’d just asked for a serving of kittens with her dinner.

Next to me, Moore had covered his mouth with his hand, and he looked a second away from laughter, the traitor. See if I offered him pre-release books next week. (I would, and he damn well knew it.)

I coughed, clearing my throat, and made an aborted move to take the book before hesitating. This had to be a joke, right? Something wasn’t right, and I just . . . “I’m sorry, you, um, you want me to sign your History of Magic textbook?”

Behind her, Beez snorted and scrubbed a hand down her face, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling so hard I was afraid she was going to hurt herself.

“Of course!” Holli insisted, her eyes as wide and hopeful as when she’d been flirting with Gideon a year before. “You’re the world’s first confirmed arcane mage! It’s so impressive, having a real celebrity here in the middle of nowhere.” She leaned on the counter, angling her whole body toward me and holding out the book.

I wanted to tell her there had been hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of arcane mages before me. That my own mother had been one. But talking about my mother would get the wrong kind of attention, and frankly, nothing was going to change her mind in a reasonable way. So I gave her the best smile I could muster—stiff, if how I felt were any indication, and took the book from her outstretched hands. I set it down on the counter and opened to the title page. I vaguely recognized the author’s name and wondered if she’d be horrified that some random mage was being asked to sign her hard work.

Almost instantly, a pen dropped into my empty hand. I glanced up to find Moore still at my side, eyes dancing with amusement and lips held tightly pursed. To hold the laughter in, no doubt.

“And who shall I sign it to, H—” oh jeez, I’d almost called her Holli while asking her name. “Miss?”

“Holli Coates,” she answered then bit her lip, held her breath, and watched me, as though somehow watching me signing a book was going to be a magical experience. I supposed I might be able to sign it with magic, but . . . no. That was silly. I uncapped the pen and—“Oh, it’s Holli with an i,” she added before I set pen to page.

Behind her, I saw Beez’s eyes narrow in recognition, so I rushed ahead, signing my name and a simple inscription: “Stay Magical, Holli. Sage McKinley.” Without waiting for the ink to dry, I slapped the cover shut again and handed it back to her.

She didn’t even seem to notice, just hugged it to her chest with a little squee, turned, and rushed out of the store.

“What,” Beez said, staring after Holli. “The actual fuck.”

Moore lost his fight with laughter then, doubling over, one hand clutched on the counter and the other holding his belly as he guffawed. “Oh my gods,” he managed to wheeze between laughter. “The looks on your faces. That was totally priceless.”

Beez turned back to look at me, eyes narrowed. “That was Catcher in the Rye girl, for whom you didn’t exist a year ago, right?”

“I mean, a year ago I wasn’t, um . . .” I shook my head to clear it, and then pressed my palms into my eyes, like I could rub the confusion out. Finally, I dropped down to lean on the counter again. “A celebrity. Why am I a celebrity? This is ridiculous. I can’t be a celebrity.”

“You kind of are,” Moore corrected.

“You definitely are,” a customer agreed as she approached the register. “You should sell your autograph. Just keep a stack of them at the register, I’ll bet people would buy them.”

I sighed and didn’t respond, just took her book and started ringing her up, but this exchange had gotten Businesswoman Beez’s attention. She stood up and came over, looking at the woman. “You think so? We could just . . . charge like five dollars for papers with Sage’s signature on them?”

“Practically free money,” the woman agreed. She handed me the cash for her total before giving me a wink. “I know I’d buy one.”

Moore burst into giggles again, the absolute traitor.

Beez shoved a piece of paper in front of me. “Sign.” Then she turned back to the customer. “You get one free, for giving us the idea.”

So I signed.

And an hour later found me sitting on one of the green armchairs in the middle of the store, Beez’s clipboard and a stack of paper in front of me, signing my name, over and over again. “People aren’t going to buy these,” I said for maybe the tenth time, despite the fact that two customers had, in the time I’d been signing the damn things.

Beez didn’t even deign to respond, and Moore was still unloading next week’s new releases, the lucky bastard, his shoulders shaking now and then with repressed laughter.

Fluke came around to look up at me, head cocked in confusion. He’d taken to spending his time at the store “on patrol” after once when he’d caught a shoplifter trying to slip books into his bag. He wandered the aisles of books, and for a lot of potential shoplifters, it seemed to be enough encouragement to ply their trade elsewhere. The last few inventories had managed to go better than those ridiculous daily ones I’d done under my father’s management.

I sighed and shook out my hand, which was starting to cramp. “I’m almost done, buddy, then we can go get lunch.”

He gave a happy pant, but Beez’s voice ruined my dreams, as it often did. “I’ll order pizza. If you’re out of paper let me know, I’ll get more.”

Fluke gave a bark at the word pizza—one of his favorite words—and went back to wandering.

By the time the pizza arrived, I felt like I’d put in a full day’s work just writing my name repeatedly.

Moore slid up behind me with an armful of books, looking over the mess of signed papers, and said, “You should sign them like you did her book. Stay magical. Silly, but people eat that stuff up.”

I turned to glare at him, as Beez perked up from where she was dropping the pizza box on the coffee table, interest on her face.

He gave a half smile and took a step back, like he’d turn and run. “Um. Or not.”

Before I could murder any of Beez’s employees, though, a growl from the front of the store caught my attention. Fluke? I turned, shifting my weight in the seat, ready to go to Fluke’s rescue if someone was bothering, but . . . there was nothing. There was Fluke, obviously, but he was just standing there in the front of the shop, staring out the wide front window, teeth bared and growling.

Freddy, who’d been holed up in the office all morning working on payroll, chose that moment to come out. Probably smelled the pizza. He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t move, goldmine. You just keep signing those for Beez. I can handle whoever’s bothering Fluke.”

Of course he was in on it. Heck, I was a little surprised he hadn’t thought of it before. He was a shockingly astute businessman and had the store running as smooth as silk. Better than I’d ever—

It happened so fast that I didn’t understand what was happening at first. Freddy approached the window, and Fluke turned to him, still growling, and lunged.

Fluke was maybe twenty-seven pounds soaking wet, but all of his weight, launched right at Freddy’s center, was a lot. The shimmer of pure unadulterated arcane magic shimmered around the little fox as he lunged too, so maybe he was . . . using magic? Either way, Freddy went down like a ton of bricks with Fluke on top of him, right as the glass behind them shattered into a million pieces and rained into the shop. Then, a sharp report, like a car backfiring or maybe a jet breaking the sound barrier.

Or a rifle shot.

I dropped the pages and threw myself out of my chair, rushing toward my cousin and familiar, but Beez stepped in my way, wrapping her arms around my waist and throwing all her weight against me. “They’re okay, Sage, they’re okay,” she was whispering, but when I looked down at her, her eyes were wide and terror-stricken. “You can’t go to the window.”

I glanced back up, to where Freddy and Fluke were still lying on the floor, Freddy in apparent shock, his eyes wide and hands splayed to the side. He looked at Fluke like my familiar might bite him, and I didn’t blame him. I’d been worried about that too, for some reason. Finally, he said, in a high squeaky voice, “Okay, Fluke, I won’t go over there?”

Fluke gave a noise like a groan, and somehow managed to telegraph rolling his eyes before turning back to the window.

“—it’s called Arcane Books,” a voice said behind me. “But they’ll be able to tell because the window’s gone, because someone is shooting at us.” I turned to find Moore on his phone, looking pale and terrified. He pressed a button and a woman’s voice came across. “Yes, we’ve gotten other reports of a gunshot, and officers are en route. Please stay as far away from the window as you can, and stay on the line—”

After that, her voice turned into white noise in my mind. A gunshot. Someone had shot at . . . at Fluke? At Freddy? I wanted to go find where the bullet had hit, but Beez was still clinging to me like a baby koala, and even if I had faith that my magic bullet-shielding ward would work for me, I wouldn’t drag Beez into danger like that. I’d never take a chance with her life.

Freddy rolled away from the window and the glass, Fluke following him step by step, until they were both with Beez, Moore and me, far from the front of the shop. Flit flew out of the office to land in his hair, squawking in anger in a way she almost never did.

Without drawing attention to it, I called up the convergence, weaving the bullet proof wards I’d learned on our trip to the past, making them thick and tight, so that not even a rifle could penetrate.

When sirens finally filled the air a few moments later, I dropped my head to rest on top of Beez’s and breathed.

I’d known the peace was over. I had. But dammit, people were supposed to come for me. Not sue Jordan for wrongful death. Not shoot at Freddy and Fluke. Not come to my damn bookstore. Not terrify my friends and employees.

Next to me, Freddy met my eye, and I nodded. He sighed but nodded back. We both knew I wouldn’t be back to the shop until we figured out what was going on this time and handled it.

CHAPTER SIX

R ubbernecking in modern society is a freaking thing, to say nothing of plain old self-involvement.

The cops showed up, a bunch of them swarming a building on the opposite corner from the bookstore—right above the closed coffee shop. And two guys—two!—showed up asking questions. Beez had flipped the open sign to closed and locked the door when they arrived, but almost immediately, a problem became apparent.

Less than one entire minute after she locked the door, a guy came up to it, jiggled it, took a step back and looked at it for a moment, then turned and stepped through the broken front window.

Just . . . stepped through it. Didn’t look at it. Didn’t seem concerned about why the door was locked or the window was in pieces. Just barged right in and started looking around.

For a second, I thought maybe he was a reporter, but then he turned to Beez. “Where do you keep the westerns?”

Fortunately for him, the cops intervened before Beez could eviscerate him. “Sir, you’re going to need to come back another time.”

He glared at them, crossing his arms over his chest. “Why?”

Beez, whose jaw had clenched and eyes narrowed to angry slits, took a deep breath. I figured a murder was imminent, so I stepped forward. “Someone just shot at us. You probably don’t want to be in here, oh, maybe until they catch him?”

The guy didn’t freeze in shock and horror. He didn’t run for his life. I kid you not, he looked mildly surprised, then turned to scan the street, like maybe he’d catch sight of a Benny Hill-esque chase scene, with the police waving billy clubs, following after a man with a gun. Then he turned back to me, shrugged, and opened his mouth.

I just knew he was going to ask about the westerns again, and beside me, Beez would explode in a mass of fire and suffering, flaying Mr. Western alive, destroying him down to his very soul. Yeah, not magically, she was just that mean when she wanted to be.

The cop stepped between once again, and I was grateful beyond measure. “Sir, you’ll have to leave. The store is closed for the day.”

The man left, but not before complaining some more, and forcing the cop to unlock the door for him. Like he couldn’t just walk back out the way he’d come in. The next one tried to slip in as he was being ushered out, but this one was clearly more interested in the incident, her eyes scanning the shattered glass on the floor so intently that she almost didn’t notice the cop right in front of her. She barely stopped short of running into him. In turn, he didn’t bother telling her the store was closed, just gave her a stern look, and she turned and left.

That was when he rolled his eyes and looked at his partner. “You get the statement. I’ll handle the lookie-lous.”

The partner sighed in irritation but waved him off. He didn’t immediately turn back to us, instead scanning the floor at the front of the shop, covered with shattered glass. He crouched down after a moment and pulled a pen from his pocket. He used the pen to move something around—carpet fibers, I realized as I watched.

There was a hole in the carpet.

He aimed his pen, following the line it made with his eyes, and sure enough, it went right to the building the other cops had swarmed. Someone must have seen the gunman or heard the shot from closer to the origin. He nodded to himself as he inspected the scene, but I was back to doing mental geometry.

Bullet hole there. And Fluke had been close to the window . . . and Freddy . . .

“They were shooting at me,” Freddy said, and somehow, his voice didn’t shake. It was completely devoid of emotion. He was staring at the spot, his face blank, but his whole body was trembling. Beez and I combined forces to wrangle him over to the couch, pushing him down in the middle and bracketing him, our arms over his shoulders as Flit nestled into his hair, nipping at a few strands, like maybe he needed reminding she was there.

He just kept staring at the hole in the floor.

The cop gave a nod as he pushed out of his crouch and approached us, pulling a notepad out of his pocket to go with his pen. He glanced at the green chairs flanking the sofa but didn’t sit down.

Fluke was still prowling the front of the store, staring out the window and baring his teeth, but he didn’t growl again. I worried he might cut his paws on the glass, but it didn’t seem like the right time to question my familiar, so I let him be. He knew to take care.

Somehow, he had seen the gun and known what it was. What it was capable of and intended for. I wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a rifle before. Handguns, yes, but a rifle?

Either way, he’d saved Freddy’s life.

Wildly, my brain went to food. Someone’s getting their favorite toast with raspberry jam for dinner tonight.

“Sage McKinley, right?” the cop asked after a long, quiet moment.

But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Freddy.

Freddy and I exchanged a look, and my blood went cold.

The sight ward I’d put on the building meant no one would see me inside by looking in the windows. They could have seen Freddy just fine, and as the cop had proven, it was an easy mistake to make for someone who didn’t know us. We looked superficially alike, especially from a distance.

Someone trying to kill me had almost murdered my cousin.

Freddy, apparently reading my mind, shook his head. “We don’t know the shooter made the same mistake. Don’t start trying to pile all the responsibility in the world on your shoulders. Your boyfriend’s shoulders are much better suited to play beast of burden.”

“I’m . . . I’m sorry?” the cop asked, his eyes flicking between us.

Freddy sighed and shook his head. “No. I’m Freddy McKinley. He’s Sage. But right now, he’s assuming that whoever took that shot was trying to kill him and almost got me.”

“That wouldn’t make it his fault,” the cop hedged, glancing between us, cataloguing the differences. Green eyes versus blue. Messy hair that looked messy versus messy hair that looked intentional. Lazy stubble versus sexy stubble. Finally, he shook his head and continued. “The man who took the shot is always the bad guy in shootings. Not the victim, or the intended victim, or the passersby, even if they could have caught the guy and didn’t. Only the shooter tried to kill someone.”

“Indeed,” Freddy agreed. “And quite eloquently put, at that.” He turned back to me, and for the first time since the shot, seemed entirely himself—that air of nonchalant arrogance curling back into place around him almost like a magical aura. “Besides. I’m quite an asshole. I’m sure lots of people might like to kill me. You’re not the center of the universe, Sage.”

The cop had to cover a smile at that and looked down at his notebook. “Let’s start at the beginning and see what we can get before the Aureum gets here, yeah?”

“The Aureum?” Beez asked, tone flat, her eyes narrowing at the cop.

The guy must have had good instincts, because he took half a step back. “Standard procedure in cases that have something to do with magic. We have to call the Aureum in.” He glanced to either side, brows drawn together in confusion, like he wasn’t sure who Beez was glaring at. Probably didn’t know why he was nervously explaining himself to a tiny woman who was a victim and hadn’t even threatened him.

We all knew that it was standard procedure, at this point. The problem was that every time the Aureum had been called in to look into a crime committed against me, they had been the actual criminals. Attempted murder? Sure, someone else had started it, but the quaesitor had tried to finish the job. Wrecking my office and carving a slur into my desk? Quaesitor. Kidnapping me? Multiple quaesitors.

The whole organization, at least in Junction, was a damned menace.

An hour later the four of us, including Moore, had managed to cobble together our version of events, despite how fast and confusing the incident had been. All four stories meshed together, and the cop was nodding along as though it all made sense. He was just opening his mouth to ask something when the first cop poked his head in the broken window. “Quaesitor’s here.”

The second cop nodded. “Don’t suppose they nabbed the guy?”

Cop number one shook his head. “Empty apartment. Sniper stand was still there. Looks like he’d been casing the place for a while.”

I glanced over at Freddy, who pursed his lips.

It was the first day I’d been to the shop this week.

“Fine, fine, you’re the center of the universe,” he muttered, like maybe he wished he’d been the actual target. “But why didn’t he shoot at me before, if he mistook me for you today?”

The cop who’d put together the timeline turned back to us and pointed his pen at Flit. “You said you left your familiar in the office and went to the window to see what was bothering your cousin’s familiar. Sniper’d been waiting a long time to get even a glimpse, knew your cousin was in the store, saw you with the fox familiar, took the shot before he realized it was the wrong shot. You look enough alike it fits.”

We all sunk a little deeper into the couch, the wind taken out of Freddy’s annoyance, and out of me entirely.

Me showing up at the shop had almost gotten Freddy killed. No, it wasn’t my fault, but that didn’t change that it had almost happened.

The cop went to the door and unlocked it, letting in one Quinn Pike, quaesitor.

That . . . could very much have been worse. Maybe I didn’t know Quinn all that well, or trust him entirely, but I knew enough to think he probably wasn’t a bad guy. His husband was a temporal mage who had helped us the year before when we’d been trying to learn about Freddy’s magic. Given the way the government treated temporal mages—like commodities more than people—I suspected Quinn was about as good an ally as we could have in the Quaesitor’s Office.

On the other hand, the guy looked terrible. The last time I’d met him, he’d reminded me of an all-American athlete—one of those guys who spent his life on the baseball team, with a bronze tan and winning smile. Now, he looked like that same baseball player after a three-day bender of hookers and blow in cheap motel rooms. His skin was waxy, and the bags under his eyes had their own bags.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, voice a little croaky, as he took a sip from a very large to-go cup of coffee.

The cop chuckled and waved dismissively. “I’ve called for a quaesitor three times in the last week, and you’re the guy who’s shown up every time, Pike. I’d swear you’re the only guy they’ve got.”

Oh shit.

He was the only guy they had.

Junction had only had three quaesitors to begin with, and two had died in the last two years. The first time, they had sent a replacement from the regional office. Jordan. The second time they hadn’t bothered, so it had just been Jordan and Quinn, and Jordan had been suspended pending the investigation of Marlett’s case against her.

Quinn didn’t say all that—or any of that—he just gave the cop a wan smile and confirmed, “It’s true, we’re running a little short at the moment.”

The cop shook his head sadly, reaching over to pat Quinn on the shoulder. “They gotta back you up sometime, Pike. You look like death warmed over.” He motioned to us. “I got most of a statement, and some thoughts on what happened. Celebrity mages, man, people start climbing out of the woodwork with angry accusations and crap. Probably just another loon.”

Quinn gave the man a thin smile and nod, following him to the door and locking it behind him. Like locking the door made a damn bit of difference when the window had no glass in it.

Just as he finished locking it, however, Gideon appeared outside, boards over one shoulder and tool belt around his waist.

How was it possible for a man to be that sexy? Seriously, though . . . Faded jeans, leather tool belt, plain white T-shirt, and those cowboy boots he wore literally everywhere.

Freddy elbowed me in the side. “Maybe instead of salivating, you should tell the quaesitor to let your boyfriend in?”

“Oh!” I hopped up from the sofa, the noise making Quinn look back at me questioningly. “That’s my boyfriend. We called him to board up the window until we can get it replaced.”

“Ah,” was all Quinn said as he turned back to let Gideon in. He was going to get dizzy, turning around and around like that.

Gideon didn’t go straight to work, of course, but dumped the boards and swept past them, pulling me into his arms, holding me close for a long time, his muscles tense as he breathed deep from the crook of my neck.

“I’m fine,” I whispered to him. “They didn’t even shoot at me, they shot at Freddy.”

“Oh, throw Freddy under the bus, I see how it is,” Freddy sniped, and it was more like Freddy than he’d been since the shooting, so a little more of my own tension eased. “As long as I don’t get force-hugged and sniffed.”

Fluke gave a little bark, so Gideon finally let go of me and leaned down to hug him too. He licked Gideon, then rushed over to the window, staring out in the direction the shot had come from. Gideon followed and looked as well, clearly what Fluke had wanted, and then gave him a serious nod.

“That was a damn fine catch, Fluke. Well done.”

My familiar positively preened, lifting his head and tail, grinning his foxy grin.

“Saved my life,” Freddy agreed. “I owe him a pizza. Or whatever he wants. I’ll feed him for life if he wants.”

“Wow,” Quinn murmured, and when I glanced over, he was intent on the cop’s notes. He looked up at Freddy. “He actually managed to push you down? He’s such a little guy.”

I bit my lip, considering, but . . . I could tell Quinn, right? He of all people was understanding of unusual magic use. And investigating this was his job. “I think”—I paused and took a deep breath—“I think he used magic. He didn’t shape it or anything, but he pulled magic out of the convergence when he jumped at Freddy.”

Everyone stared at me openmouthed for a moment, then turned to look at Fluke, who was still looking entirely pleased with himself.

“That’s a hell of a familiar you’ve got there,” Quinn said, flipping the notebook closed as he watched Fluke. After a moment of staring, he shook himself out of it and stepped in front of Gideon, waving at the plywood sheets he’d brought in with him. “Why don’t I help you put those up while they explain what happened?”

Gideon gave him an approving nod. “Much obliged.”

And so while Quinn held boards and Gideon put in nails, we repeated the whole story as we knew it. Quinn asked insightful questions despite his clear exhaustion and distraction, about when Fluke had noticed something wrong, and whether anyone else had mentioned anything, or if there’d been new or unusual people hanging around the shop lately.

By the time we were finished, I didn’t think Quinn was any closer to an answer, but just having the window boarded up made everything feel a tiny bit more secure.

Quinn promised to call me about updates to the investigation before departing, and both Beez and I told him to get some sleep. He just returned the sentiment with a tight-lipped smile and half-nod that told me he wasn’t going to be sleeping anytime soon.

Another thing for me to feel guilty about, heaping more work on the one truly honest quaesitor. Nothing against Jordan, but again . . . kidnapping.

Finally, I turned back to Beez, Freddy and Moore. “I know what you’re going to say, but I think I’m going to stay away from the shop until they catch this guy.”

Freddy and Beez both made sour faces, opening their mouths at the same time to deny me, but Moore cut them both off. “Good idea. Now that you know, you don’t want to bring this to the shop. Customers could get killed. And me. I could get killed. No offense, Sage, you’re a great boss, but I don’t want to die.”

I met Beez and Freddy’s gazes as I responded to Moore. “Exactly. I don’t want to bring that here. At best, it could hurt the business.”

Beez snorted, and I was sure she was thinking of all the people the cops had turned away during the afternoon. She didn’t say I was wrong, though.

Freddy just sighed like a balloon popped with a pin, slumping forward so far his chin touched his chest. “I don’t like it.”

“Me either, but that doesn’t change it.”

“We’ll catch the bastard,” Gideon insisted. “It’ll be back to normal in no time.”

Normal. Somehow, I didn’t laugh.

Moore did it for me, shaking his head and clutching his sides. “You guys have a weird ass idea of normal. It’s a great job and I love you all, but you’re batty.”

He definitely wasn’t wrong.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I  took home the fantasy book Moore and I had been geeking out over and finished it that night.

Which led to Saturday morning, where I woke up and realized that I had nowhere to go. Nothing to do. No purpose—

A pillow smacked down on my chest as I was staring despondently at the ceiling, wondering what I could do with the rest of my life. “Stop that,” Gideon chided me. “You look like someone killed your gran. Iris is fine, and so’s your asshole cousin.”

“But what am I going to do, Gideon?” I demanded, sitting up, hugging the pillow against my chest. “I spent twenty years at the store, and just when things had come together and made the place somewhere I really loved, I can’t go back. What do I do now that I can’t go there at all?”

Whiny? Who’s whiny? Not me.

He didn’t growl or dismiss me but leaned in and gave me a hug. Then he peeled the pillow away from my chest and urged me out of bed. “You’ve been spending less and less time there since the fall and you know it. You don’t need more time at the store, you need something else to do now that you’re not there. And right now, it can be coming out and making breakfast with me.”

It didn’t seem like a terrible idea, so I followed along, helping Gideon make eggs and sausage, albeit half-heartedly. We were washing the dishes together afterward when Fluke rushed out of the room, heading for the front door, and gave a bark.

I couldn’t tell offhand if it was excited, annoyed, or trying to shout something about Little Timmy being down a well, so I dried my hands on a towel and followed him out, slowly, readying my magic, just in case. When I was about halfway to the front door, the bell rang, which . . . I mean, it could have been a good sign. Only one of the three murderers who’d ever come into the house had rung the bell. At least it wasn’t terrible odds.

It didn’t surprise me at all that when I turned to open the door, Gideon had followed me, a few feet back and just as ready as me to get in a fight.

Judicious use of the peephole told me it was Quinn, so I shrugged and unlatched the door, opening it up for him. “Hi Quinn. What’s up?”

Yeah, I didn’t invite him in. I didn’t invite anyone in anymore unless they were family. He didn’t seem put off by it, which was a point in his favor. Instead, he gave me a nod, his expression even more grim than the day before. “Sage, I’m really sorry to do this, but could I ask a favor?”

If it hadn’t been for the exhaustion in every line of his body, the apology in his eyes, and the fact that I knew his husband, I’d have slammed the door in his face, possibly while having a panic attack.

But seriously, he looked like he was about to collapse.

Behind me, Gideon clearly agreed with my distrust, giving a disapproving grunt and not moving into Quinn’s line of sight. Fluke just leaned on my leg and stared up at Quinn, surprisingly unhelpful.

Really, though, it wasn’t like I had anything else to do. “What do you need?”

He gave a deep, relieved sigh. Either he was convinced my question meant I’d help, or he’d been expecting to be turned away immediately. “I’m an air mage. It’s fine, I’ve got no complaints, but it’s useless in what amounts to a police investigation. You and Gideon, you’ve got this arcane magic that can do . . . well hell, it seems to be able to do anything.”

I gave a shrug and hummed noncommittally, since well . . . it might be able to do anything. Except, you know, social magic. For me, anyway.

“So the cops turned the shooter’s nest over to me, and their report is pretty—no, entirely—useless. And wind isn’t going to turn up more clues than trained cops could find.” He glanced away, like it was hard to meet my gaze.

Was he asking me to help with an Aureum investigation?

Last time anyone had come to me for one of those, it had been Jordan during her kidnapper phase.

Gideon slid into the doorway next to me, wrapping an arm around my waist, and Fluke somehow managed to shift his position into leaning against both of us at once.

Somehow, that made Quinn perk up. “Mr. Knight, good to see you again. Like I said, I hate to ask, but if you could come. If both of you could come, it would be great. I’d really appreciate it if you found anything.”

Gideon still didn’t look thrilled, but some of the tension in his body eased at Quinn’s easy inclusion of him.

So that was how, Saturday afternoon, Gideon, Fluke and I ended up in the remains of what had once been Lina Merton’s coffee shop. My accountant had suggested I look into buying it—something something good investments—but I’d been holding out, hoping Starbucks would take up the baton and I wouldn’t have to do it. I’d watched a man die there, murdered by Lina herself, so the shop as it was held some major bad memories for me.

Quinn ignored the remains of the coffee shop, motioning us to follow him into the back, to a set of well-hidden stairs and up into a surprisingly light, airy room. It was basically a studio apartment, the whole floor above the coffee shop, with a kitchenette on one side of the stairs and a bathroom on the other, with everything else a single, wide-open room.

A single, wide-open room that was dominated by one of the shiny black vinyl chairs from the coffee shop and a short desk with sandbags around its legs, holding them firmly in place. Right next to of one of the windows in the front of the building.

“You can do whatever you need to,” Quinn said. “The evidence is all gathered already, and honestly, there wasn’t much.” He waved around, indicating the whole room. “The guy is clearly a pro. No fingerprints, no personal objects, nothing left behind with DNA. They don’t think he used anything but the shooting stand, but the place is so pristine they didn’t know for sure.”

Gideon strode over to the desk, glaring out the window in the direction of the shop, his jaw clenched. There was nothing Gideon hated more than problems he couldn’t solve. Well, that and maybe people who tried to murder me, which was a distressingly common problem.

Meanwhile, I sidled up next to Quinn, Fluke following along behind me. “Not that I think we should bring innocents into this, but what about . . .” I didn’t want to mention his husband’s abilities aloud, let alone in public, but if he was asking for outside help already, surely someone who could see through time would be a boon.

His smile was kind and understanding, but he shook his head. “Sterling’s already been. He can only see the future, and the shooter isn’t coming back here that he could tell.”

I opened my mouth to refute the statement, to point out that Sterling had once seen the past for Freddy, when I realized that wasn’t true. He’d seen the past, but it had also been Freddy’s and my future. And he’d said it had been strange and small, which . . . made sense if he didn’t tend to see the past.

I turned back to where Gideon was inspecting the, well, shooting stand I supposed. His eyes glowed with a rainbow of body magic, so he must have enhanced his eyesight in hope of catching any clues.

“I could technically travel back in time, maybe even to the right time to find the killer here—”

Gideon’s head snapped up, eyes narrowed in my direction, but before he could say a word, Quinn shook his head. “Oh no. No, definitely not. I’ve been around enough temporal magic to know how dangerous that kind of thing is. It’s a clever idea, but I’m not trying to get you killed. Just hoped you might catch clues the cops and I missed.”

Gideon watched him for another moment, but finally gave a sharp nod and turned back to his task.

Having seen it, I could probably do what Gideon was doing, but that felt redundant, so instead, I fell back on my most reliable tool: my brain. It hadn’t failed me yet, so I might as well stick with a winner, right?

Someone was trying to kill me. Not to steal my money or my magic—the money would go to my family if I died, and they wanted me more than they wanted cash. If someone had wanted the magic, they’d have tried to take it, not just put a bullet in me.

A bullet was an odd choice for the people who’d tried again and again to kill me with knives, but maybe desperate times called for desperate measures, even for crazed murder cults.

It was possible the cop the previous day had been right, that maybe it was just some unbalanced person who’d seen me on the news and decided that I was a good target. People had been shot for sillier reasons. Heck, hadn’t a guy tried to assassinate President Roosevelt and managed to kill the Mayor of Chicago because he blamed them for his ulcer?

The problem was that logic did point to the Believers, and Quinn didn’t even know they existed. Once again, I was letting someone investigate without all the information. Leaving him in the dark, searching for a light switch.

I took a deep, steadying breath, and turned to face him. “There is something you should know.”

Somehow, he seemed surprised. Like he didn’t know that everyone around him, from his boss to his coworkers to the subject of his current investigation were all keeping various secrets. Maybe his husband just hadn’t told him this was coming, and he wasn’t used to that.

I looked to Gideon, who’d dismissed the magic from his eyes and righted himself. He gave me a supportive nod, apparently satisfied about Quinn’s honesty. Or . . . something. Who knew what measure he’d taken of Quinn, but apparently the man had come out of it well.

“There’s a group of people who call themselves the Believers. They think the kind of magic Gideon and I do is evil, and they want all arcane mages dead.” I drew my shoulders back, tipping my chin up a bit. I didn’t want him to think I believed them in any way. I wasn’t ashamed of what I was. I was a good person, and there was nothing wrong with arcane magic.

Quinn blinked, staring at me for a second, before his mouth fell open in shock. “Do . . . do the cops know about this? The Aureum? Anyone? Gods, Sage, this is—that’s terrifying. Do you know who they are?”

“We got a list,” Gideon offered, coming over to stand by my side once again. “Don’t know if it’s all of them. It’s the ones Sage’s stepfather knew about.”

That was how Quinn learned everything we knew about the Believers. Over the course of the afternoon, we told him everything, from the mad Count Alarie who had murdered Gideon because he’d thought he was his grandfather, to my stepfather who had killed my mother and then slowly realized the monstrosity of his fellow Believers while in prison, to David who had killed Lily Adler and tried to kill me, to Marlett Junior and his pressuring Jordan into helping to kidnap me. Even about Gideon’s death and resurrection, though I tried to make it clear that I could not repeat that, and Quinn was quick to agree.

He listened to the whole story without a single insistence that anything was wrong, or that we were making things up. He’d just planted himself on the carpet in the airy little studio apartment and listened.

When I finally wound down, he sighed and shook his head. “Jordan’s screwed.”

“Seems like,” Gideon agreed.

I flinched, since I hadn’t wanted to hurt Jordan’s case. I doubted Quinn was going to run out to tell on her, but if he thought she was in trouble, she probably was. He knew the Aureum way better than I did.

“I never did like David,” he added, like his dead former coworker was an afterthought. “Too nice, you know? Always smiling, even at people who were insulting him at the time.”

Gideon gave a snort. “Little bastard kept trying to move in on Sage while he was vulnerable and alone. Knew he was bad news the first time I saw him.”

I rolled my eyes, patting Gideon on the hand. “He’s dead, sweetheart. He can’t compete with you now.”

“Never could,” Gideon answered instantly, scowling.

That broke the serious mood, and Quinn chuckled. “Okay. Okay, I have . . . a lot to think about. Old conversations to put in context, people to think about—can I have a copy of that information? On the cult? It might help my investigation.”

Investigation.

He was going to investigate the Believers.

I could have cried.

It was silly, right? Getting emotional because a guy was going to do his job. But I’d spent so much time afraid of the Believers, afraid for my life, and unable to go to the very people who were supposed to protect mages from threats like them. And here was this one guy who just . . . did his job. Wanted to protect people like he was supposed to.

If I lived in a movie, I suspected he’d have died under mysterious circumstances in the next scene, and I’d have been the main suspect.

I swallowed down the demand for him to stay alive and nodded. “Of course. I can send you a copy of everything. A lot of it is pretty dry, but it’s all useful.”

“If it’s a widespread conspiracy, we’ll need everything we can get.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card, handing it over to me. “Even if it isn’t widespread, we need to make sure of that first, and root it out so it doesn’t grow. Send the files to my official Aureum email address so we have a paper trail in case something happens to one of us. I’ll forward them to the dominus and the regional office in San Francisco and let them know people have a history of being murdered when they come up against these guys.”

That was the moment I decided that Quinn Pike was a gift from any kind gods who might exist, and I was going to give him every bit of help I possibly could.

CHAPTER EIGHT

B y the time we left the coffee shop, Quinn locking the door behind us, it was dark outside and half the shops on the street were closed for the night. He wished us a good evening and left us standing there, me staring longingly at the bookstore. It was more than a little pitiful, how much I wanted to go over there.

My magic from the previous day was still there, the weave to keep bullets out, so I had at least a little faith that my cousin and best friend were safe. Unless a killer went into the store and walked right past the magic.

I should be there. Or maybe I should stay—

“Maybe you should buy this place,” Gideon said, wrenching me out of my thoughts.

I raised a brow at him. “What, like first I saw a guy die in here, and now someone tried to kill me from the apartment window, ahh, good times? Better preserve that?”

He rolled his eyes and pulled me tight against him, kissing me on top of the head. “Because the apartment is nice, and we both know your cousin’s looking for a place.”

“You’re worried about Freddy. You softie!”

He scoffed at the very idea that he cared about my cousin, but he also didn’t deny it. “If your cousin lives there, nobody else’ll try to kill you from the window,” he added, like that made it any less sweet of him.

The whole idea made sense, really. Living so close to the shop would make Freddy’s life a lot easier, and he had been looking for an apartment. Living with Grandma was great, but the man was pushing thirty. No one wanted to live with their grandmother at that age.

The real question was whether Freddy would put up with it if I essentially gave him a giant gift like an apartment.

“Okay, fine, the apartment is a great idea,” I finally agreed. “But what the heck would I do with an empty coffee shop? Especially one that badly decorated?”

Gideon glanced over his shoulder at the chrome and black of the shop and scrunched up his nose. “It . . . could be worse.”

“Could it really?”

Eventually, he shrugged. “It can be fixed. And there’s gotta be somebody who wants to open a coffee shop. Otherwise so many people wouldn’t write books and TV shows about them. Or you could revamp the whole thing. Make it a restaurant or a magic shop, or something. Run it yourself or hire someone to.”

That all seemed reasonable, but also, I didn’t think I knew anyone who wanted to own a coffee shop, so it wasn’t as though you could throw a rock and hit someone who wanted to start one. And if I couldn’t run my bookstore, I probably couldn’t run another business in the area without calling unwanted attention to myself. Still, my accountant had seemed to think it was a good investment, and I figured he and the property management company knew more than I did.

“C’mon,” Gideon said, instead of continuing on about the shop. “It’s not like you gotta decide tonight. This is good timing. We’ll stop and eat Chinese. By the time we’re done, your cousin and Beez should be closing up the bookstore, and we can take ’em out for a beer.”

“You party animal,” I accused, pointing at him with faux shock. “You want to go to a bar on a Saturday night. Who are you, and where’s Gideon?”

He ignored the dramatics and walked me to the Chinese restaurant a few stores down.

“Do you think it was the right thing to do, telling Quinn?” I asked when we were finally sitting down. I stared at one of the wood carvings on the restaurant wall instead of looking him in the eye. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know if he disapproved.

Gideon gave my foot a little tap with his own to get my attention, dragging my gaze to him. “It was right and you know it. Even if he turned out to be one of them, you had to do it sometime. You had to try to do the sensible thing, even if sometimes the world don’t seem like a sensible place. If you can’t ask the authorities for help, what the hell kind of system is that?”

“A broken one,” I agreed easily. “But would it really be that surprising if it were?”

He didn’t have an answer for that, but I hadn’t really expected one.

We ate in silence for a while before Gideon went completely still. He hadn’t done that since I’d brought him back from the dead, so I looked at him, trying to figure out what was wrong.

His eyes were riveted on a spot across the street, so I turned to take a look myself. He seemed to be staring at a boring silver sedan with tinted windows that was sitting across from the restaurant, about a block away from the bookstore. I didn’t see anything interesting or exciting about it, so I thought back to Gideon’s trick earlier that day, pulling up the convergence and shaping it into body magic. A little tweak to make my eyes use light more efficiently and . . .

The man sitting in the driver’s seat of the car was exactly what people meant when they said nondescript. Light skin, light brown hair, and utterly average features.

The only thing that made him any different than any other bland, boring guy sitting in a bland, boring car was the look on his face. The utter disdain and loathing as he stared down the street at my store. My store, full of innocent people, some of whom were incredibly important to me.

CHAPTER NINE

I  spent about a minute trying to convince myself I was wrong.

Maybe the guy just had the world’s worst case of resting bitch face, and I was being mean. Was resting supervillain face a thing? Like seriously, the top lip curled into a sneer, nose scrunched, and eyes narrowed . . . That had to be deliberate, right?

Across from me, it seemed that Gideon had no such concerns. He stood, setting his napkin aside and pushing out of the booth we were sitting in. Dammit, I was sitting there with noodles still in my mouth, and Gideon was leaving.

I grabbed his arm, stopping him for a moment, and hastily chewed and swallowed, trying not to choke on any stray cabbage bits. “You can’t just go out there and demand to know about him.”

A moment before, he’d looked angry, like the deadly mage and one-time gunslinger he was. As he looked down at me, his face morphed into amusement, like he could barely hold back his laughter. “You all right, sweetheart? Not gonna choke to death on your dinner, are you?”

Sitting next to me on the inside of the booth, Fluke was giving me a look like I was the biggest dumbass ever born, but I shook it off and swallowed what was left in my mouth. “I’m serious. You can’t just confront random guys on the street. Not to mention, if you hadn’t noticed, he’s inside a car, which is like, a multi-ton weapon in the hands of a would-be murderer. You know how many people get run down by bad guys in cars every day? Apparently in some states it’s not even illegal if you make the right excuse.”

Gideon leaned over and kissed my forehead, like I was a four-year-old asking for a third bedtime story. When he pulled back, his face was infuriatingly bemused. “I ain’t gonna march up and demand his identification.” He pulled his phone out of the pocket of his jeans. “I’m gonna take a picture of his license plate for Quinn.”

Damn. That was a good idea.

Also it made me sound like a dumbass for freaking out.

He shot me his best crooked cowboy smile and winked. “Sure do appreciate you worrying about me, though.”

I ducked my head and waved him off, pulling out my wallet to pay for dinner. I turned to Fluke as I did, to find him foxing down the last of his plate of chicken. “Do me a favor and follow him? Not that I think he can’t take care of himself—”

Fluke snorted, stepping his front legs onto the table so he could get the height to lick me on the cheek, then turning to bound after Gideon. Somehow it was both agreement and exasperation from him.

Maybe I was being paranoid. Maybe the guy was nobody.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But also maybe the guy was the one who’d tried to put a bullet in my cousin a day earlier, and he wouldn’t hesitate to try to kill Gideon or anyone else in his way. Heck, if he was a Believer, technically Gideon was one of his targets whether he knew it or not. They wanted to kill all arcane mages, and Gideon was one.

I dropped some twenties on the table, making sure to leave a substantial tip, and returned the proprietress’s friendly wave as I hurried after my man and familiar.

Gideon was, as ever, a man of his word, and didn’t go anywhere near the guy or his car. He went down the street in the opposite direction, then turned, phone already out, to aim at the back of the car.

That moment, the moment I was walking out of the front door of the restaurant, was the moment everything went to hell.

The sneering man was glaring into his side mirror like he’d seen something there that was a whole lot closer than he wanted it. Fluke gave a bark, trying to tell Gideon he’d been made—quite the little lookout, my familiar. I’d have to keep it in mind if I ever decided to rob banks.

Whipping around and cranking his key, the guy started his car and immediately stomped on the gas.

Under most circumstances, I’d have been okay with that. Oh, not the guy getting away when clearly, he was up to no good. But at least if he ran for it, he’d be away from my friends and loved ones.

The problem was that less than a hundred feet in front of the guy, a young family who’d just left the bookstore was stepping out into the street, looking like an advertisement for something lovely and wholesome. Ken-doll-esque husband with a Colgate smile, beautiful wife in a bohemian dress with a giant natural afro, and adorable kid in a fluorescent pink tutu with a fairy wand, dancing ahead of their parents, all in front of the possible murderer who was more intent on getting away than the road in front of him.

My instincts went immediately to the warm, homey glow of my grandmother’s magic. Earth.

I reached for the convergence, spinning a giant flow of the it into a glowing stream of earth magic and pulling at the asphalt in front of the family, curving it up and away from the innocent bystanders. The car hit it with a thump, but the driver managed to spin into the sudden unexpected turn, missing the family by a foot or two as they yanked their child back against them, terrified.

As he once again stomped on the gas pedal, he turned to scan the street. I was easy enough to find. I was the only weirdo standing there with my hand out in his direction, conducting the asphalt beneath his tires like it was an orchestra. For a heart-stopping second, his eyes met mine.

There was no doubt left in my mind that he was the guy.

This was the man who’d tried to kill my cousin, thinking it was me.

I had precious seconds to do something. Anything. I could pull up the asphalt in front of him and make him hit it. With the speed he was putting on, it might kill him.

I could harry him. Try to manipulate the metal of his car or heat it up . . . so many options that all probably ended in his death.

Instead, I held both of my arms up and out to my sides like I was offering myself up and met his eye.

Come and get me.

He didn’t take the bait, just fishtailed his way down the street, putting on more speed until the car was out of sight.

“Hell was that?” Gideon asked as he jogged up next to me. “Hoping he was going to take a shot while driving?”

I shook my head, continuing to stare in the direction the car had gone. “His hands were both on the wheel, no gun in them. But if he’d stopped and come to try to kill me, we could have caught him and it would be over.”

Gideon wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in for a tight hug. “Don’t you dare ever try to piss off a murderer like that again.”

I hugged back, but only for a second before pulling away. “Did you get the picture?”

The smirk Gideon threw at me was positively delicious, and I wanted to ignore everything and make out with him right there in the middle of the street.

But that was when I got an armful of a tiny woman in a bohemian dress and had to avoid a mouthful of her hair. She was sobbing and trembling against me, mumbling “my baby,” over and over, so it wasn’t hard to get the picture.

Part of me wanted to tell her I wasn’t just the guy who’d kept the asshole from killing her family, I was the guy the asshole was after to begin with, but I doubted that mattered to her in the moment. Her kid had come within inches of getting hit by a car, and I was the obvious person who’d kept it from happening.

She might change her mind later, with time to think, but for now she just wanted to thank someone for the fact that her life hadn’t been irrevocably changed in an instant of inattention and poorly timed jaywalking.

“Thank you so much,” the father said, walking up with the kid in his arms, looking like he wasn’t far from the trembling and crying his wife was doing. “I don’t know what we’d have done—”

The kid, on the other hand, was having none of it. “It’s Sage McKinley, Dad. That’s his job.”

The father sighed, opened his mouth, and closed it again. “Sorry. He, um . . . The way the news has been talking, he thinks you’re a superhero.” He looked back at the store, then to me. “It’s one of the reasons we came to the store. He wanted to meet you.”

Next to me, Gideon was almost choking on laughter. I elbowed him in the side and smiled at the kid. “Well, I wouldn’t say I’m a superhero. Just a regular guy with magic.”

The kid gave me this weird, withering look, like he was thinking “sure that’s what you tell other people, but we know better.”

The father, still clinging to him, blushed. “He’s, um, also got magic. There was some trouble at school when it manifested, so we’ve been trying to give him magical role models, and mages are a little . . . inaccessible.”

Hell, the kid couldn’t be more than six or seven max, and he’d already manifested magic? I blinked. It was true, though. Mages often tried hard not to be public figures, except the huge ones like the head of the Aureum, and you couldn’t just take your kid to visit him. Still, Anson might have been a better choice than me.

Eh, didn’t matter. I was here and still had an armful of his mother who was finally starting to calm down, so I was up. “You’re gonna call me a superhero when you’ve already got magic? How old are you?”

That, finally made him shy. He buried his face in his dad’s neck and held up a hand, all five fingers out. I assumed that meant five and not “stay the fuck away,” so I nodded seriously. “That’s really impressive. I didn’t get any magic until I was fourteen. If one of us is gonna be a superhero, I think it’s you.”

He shook his head and buried his face deeper in his father’s neck, mumbling something. His father smiled at that. “He says someday he’s going to join the Aureum and protect other mages.”

Oh sweet summer child. I smiled, trying to hide how not-actual-reality that notion was, and nodded to the kid. “That seems like a pretty great goal. Protecting people is the best.”

The kid mumbled something else I couldn’t hear, but his chubby little hand formed an almost-fist with the index finger out, pointing at me. Like me.

Like I was a hero.

Fuck if that wasn’t a lance to the heart. I was the reason the kid had been in danger to begin with. There were a lot of words for me in this situation, and hero was in no way one of them.

A throat cleared behind the guy, dry and unimpressed. He moved out of the way to reveal Beez, her arms crossed. “You gonna put the street back the way it’s supposed to be, hero? People gotta drive.”

It took a few moments to extricate myself from the family, but I left them in Gideon’s capable hands as I called the earth magic back up and carefully unfolded the asphalt, smoothing it back into the road it was supposed to be.

“We’re not gonna get a pothole because of this now, are we?” Beez asked me, and I leaned on her gratefully. Not that I was tired, but it was good to know that if I started to get a swelled head from the weird way the public was reacting to learning about arcane magic, Beez would always be there to keep my feet on the ground.

“Don’t think so, but if we do, you can make me fix it,” I promised.

There must have been something hesitant or fragile in my voice, because she looked up at me sharply and gave a nod. “Good job, Sage.”

I leaned harder and ignored the stinging in my eyes. How had everything gotten so out of control? And how was anyone ever going to see me as a decent role model? I was a sort of unemployed thirty-something who’d fallen down the rabbit hole of magic and adventure and spent half my time wishing I were back on the couch eating cheese crackers and reading the latest mindless thriller.

By the time we turned back to Gideon and the family, Gideon was introducing the kid to Fluke. The kid, whose name was apparently Charlie, and I hadn’t even asked. Some role model I was.

Charlie was positively thrilled to meet Fluke, hugging him tight around the neck, and given the licking that commenced afterward, the feeling appeared to be mutual. Beez struck up a quiet conversation with the parents, something about setting up a magical storytime in the shop, as Gideon joined me once again.

He held up his phone for a second before putting it away. “Sent the video to Quinn, and he’s on it. Said he’ll let us know about anything he finds. Wants to meet tomorrow to talk about it, so I invited him to the house.”

The house, which was so heavily warded that it might be able to withstand a volcano. Our safe place. Yeah, that was a good place to be. I might never leave again, in fact. Maybe then complete strangers wouldn’t be in danger because some asshole wanted to kill me.

Eventually, when Beez was done talking and Charlie’s eyes were drooping with exhaustion, we extricated ourselves, Beez promising to be in touch with Charlie’s parents—the Millers. We didn’t even ask about going out for a drink, because no one was in the mood for a party.

Heck, all I wanted in the world was to go home and go to bed, and I didn’t see any reason to deny myself that. Even if my brain was still a mess of shame and self-recrimination, a man had to sleep.

CHAPTER TEN

I n the morning, we’d just finished crunching our way through tasteless, pointless bowls of healthy—ugh—cereal when Quinn arrived.

He looked even worse than he had the day before, which wasn’t a surprise since his workload couldn’t have lessened overnight. The biggest difference was that this time, he looked like I felt. In fact, I suspected I looked similar but didn’t feel like checking a mirror to confirm that I was pasty and miserable.

Gideon showed him to the couch and offered him water, which he took, but then he got right to work. He pulled a folder out of his jacket and spread it open on the coffee table. “Randall Emmert. Received an OTH discharge from the Marines five years ago, and he’s been working private security consultations ever since.”

I raised my hand until Quinn looked at me cockeyed, like he wanted to know why I was acting like we were in a class. Right, conversation. Equals. “OTH?” I asked.

“Other than honorable. He was kicked out.”

Huh. I didn’t know what a guy had to do to get kicked out of the Marines, but that didn’t sound great. On the other hand, the military had always sounded like they had a lot of rules to me. Maybe I’d have gotten kicked out too if people had been expecting me to wake up at dawn and clean the floor with a toothbrush or whatever.

Quinn tapped on the picture then looked up at us. “Is this your guy?”

“It is,” Gideon agreed. “But you knew he would be before you asked, so you’ve got more information than we do.”

Quinn sank back into the overstuffed sofa and let out a sigh that made me feel weary down to my bones. “He’s got a connection to one of the people on the list you sent me last night. They’ve been roommates since he got tossed out of the Marines.”

The room went silent. Even Fluke, usually the last one to let an uncomfortable silence to settle into a room, didn’t make a sound.

Gideon was the one who finally broke it. “You really believe us about all this.”

Quinn made a rude noise, a cross between a scoff and blowing a raspberry, then scrubbed his face with his palms so hard I was worried he was going to scrape off skin. When he finally spoke, his voice was as cracked and razor-edged as a broken windowpane. “I didn’t doubt you for a second.” He turned and met my eye, pain in his gaze. “If you’d found me five years ago, I’d have said you were crackpots. But then one night Sterling told me that all of San Francisco was going to die burning if we didn’t stop it. It sounded just like you sounded yesterday.”

“San Francisco’s pretty okay last I checked,” Gideon pointed out.

“It is,” Quinn agreed. “Because I believed Sterling and we stopped it. Because when the chips were down, I believed in him more than I believed in my superiors at the Aureum, and I was right to.” The way he winced, it felt like maybe there was more to that story than simply him believing Sterling, but I didn’t ask.

I shoved the subject back where I figured Quinn had intended to go to begin with: us. “What makes you think our crackpot theory is as valid as your husband’s?”

He glanced from Gideon, to me, to Fluke, and gave a shrug. “A feeling. I don’t know if it’s some magic ability or just the fact that I grew up fighting for everything I got, but I have a feeling for—not the truth, exactly, but for when someone’s screwing with me. Only one person’s ever been able to pull the wool over my eyes for more than a few minutes.”

“You said you never liked David,” Gideon said, and his tone made it clear that was an agreement. “Guess you should trust your instincts.”

Quinn spread his arms to indicate us, or maybe his presence in the room, smiling at us. “That’s why we’re here, having this conversation. The problem right now is that Emmert’s gone into hiding. I’ve asked the cops to pick him up, since he’s non-magical and they can do that. If he so much as tries to pass a bad check, we’ll have him.”

“But he’s keeping a low profile.”

“The man was a private security consultant for a reason, and he knows how law enforcement works. He dumped his car last night; cops found it this morning. They’re combing the area, but I think they’ll find a car stolen from there that leads them to another neighborhood, yadda yadda, until the trail goes cold.” Quinn let his head fall back, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes darting back and forth as he thought. “If he were really smart, he’d be long gone, but I think he’s stubborn, too.”

“He wants to get the job done,” Gideon said.

Fluke gave a low growl, and I reached over absently to pat his head in a hopeless attempt at comfort. “Killing me.”

Both Gideon and Quinn nodded. Sweet.

“Forgive me if this is a sore spot, but why the hell isn’t the Aureum sending a dozen new quaesitors to help you?” Despite the preamble, Gideon didn’t sound the least bit sorry.

Quinn’s long-suffering sigh was a good answer. “They swear they’re sending someone, but I guess everything’s a bit of a mess right now.” He turned to look at me. “You really turned the world on its head. Not that anyone blames you for existing, but suddenly everything needs to be looked at from this new angle of arcane magic. Between us, I think they’re taking a hard look at how a few other specialties are treated.”

My mind went instantly to Freddy and Doctor Almasi, who were both death mages. Death mages, who were, in fact, treated abominably by the Aureum. It was one of the reasons that even now, I didn’t trust the organization. “Why are they doing that?”

Quinn turned his head to look at me without picking it up off the back of the couch. His eyes were wide and almost disbelieving. “Are you kidding?”

“He ain’t,” Gideon denied, then he chuckled, the big jerk. “Just between us, I think I know why, but why don’t you enlighten us?”

For a second Quinn sputtered, sitting up and looking between us. His eyes were so wide that it made him look like a baby animal, and it was weirdly cute. “Because . . . because Merlin. Because ancient Egypt. Because Rome. Because now that they’re looking, there’s all this information about arcane mages, and just about everything says you guys are insanely powerful. Because you’ve been hiding from the world, and they need to take a long hard look at why. Why this resource has denied itself to them.”

I blinked, considering. “That is part of it,” I finally agreed after a long pause. “It hasn’t helped that I know about how death mages get treated. I wasn’t going to put myself in Aureum hands knowing I might end up a government slave or worse.”

He gave a decisive nod and held out a hand in my direction, like I was exhibit a. “They want you, Sage. They want more mages like you, and you’re the one they know. The example they can point at and go, ‘look at him, we’re taking care of him.’ Do you have any idea how much pressure the dominus is getting to recruit you?”

Anson? Someone was pressuring Anson because of me? Why the hell hadn’t he told me? Why was I hearing about it as a secondary “oh by the way” aside from Quinn, who barely had anything to do with who the Aureum recruited?

And wait a damn minute—

“They’re not taking care of me! Someone’s trying to murder me, and they’re ignoring it.”

Quinn gave a crooked half-nod like “yeah, maybe,” but then shook his head. “This is a new development in the case. I suspect once they look at all the documents I’ve been sending them today, they’ll be out in force. But let’s be honest, the Aureum is a bureaucracy. At its fastest, it’s freaking slow. They’ll come. They’ll send their best. But it might be a week, and they might be too late.”

It all made too much sense, and I didn’t really want to think about it, let alone agree with him.

“If it makes you feel better, they gave me permission this morning to basically . . . deputize someone until they can send out reinforcements. The quaesitor magnus could do that without anyone having to take a vote on it.” Quinn’s expression said he didn’t think it was going to make me feel better, and it didn’t. A randomly deputized citizen wasn’t a trained quaesitor and we all knew it.

“Got someone in mind?” Gideon asked, sounding both intrigued and dubious at the same time.

Quinn answered with a half-hearted shrug, and he took his time with his words. “I talked to Sterling, and we agreed it was best if he continues to fly under the radar.”

“I agree,” I jumped in, almost before he finished the comment. “I wouldn’t want to put him in danger for me.”

“He said you’d say that,” Quinn said with a sweet smile while staring at the opposite wall, thoughts clearly on his husband. Then he winced and looked me in the eye once again, gaze piercing. “He also said you’re going to be feeling guilty about this whole mess even though you shouldn’t.”

I set my jaw. I could be as stubborn as anybody when the situation called for it. “This guy almost killed a little kid because of me last night. A five-year-old who, for reasons I’ll never in my life understand, thinks I’m a goddamn superhero.”

“This guy almost killed a little kid because of his own recklessness last night,” Quinn corrected me. “You stopped him, contained the situation, and took care of the civilians. You couldn’t have done better if you’d had my training.”

Gideon nodded at that, and Fluke made a weird little chirp, crowding close to me.

“Fine, let’s ignore my guilt complex and get back to the point of this.” I petted Fluke, taking a moment before meeting Quinn’s eye again. I wasn’t going to change my mind and we all knew it. There was no reason to argue about it. “What now? Are you going to deputize someone? How do we find this guy and connect him to the others? You know we’re eventually going to find that it comes back to Marlett.”

“I’m hoping for it,” he agreed, smiling a real, hopeful smile for the first time in a while. “We connect this guy to Marlett, it means we’ll eventually be able to get Jordan back. She’ll help as much as possible now if I ask, but she’s not in a position to do much.” He bit his lip a moment before shrugging. “I’ve got someone in mind as a deputy, but we’ll see. Just—Seriously, Sage. Gideon. You’re not alone this time. I’ve got your backs, and if I have to drag them along kicking and screaming, so will the Aureum.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Q uinn stayed most of the morning, formulating a plan with us that he thought would give us a chance to catch our assassin.

Gideon didn’t like it, but Gideon didn’t like anything about the situation. I couldn’t blame him, since I didn’t like it either, but even I had to admit it had a chance of working. It did count on me a little more than I’d have liked, and my acting ability had never been the best, but I was game to try anything that stopped Emmert’s quest.

Since anything was better than sitting around waiting for the next assassination attempt, it seemed like a good idea to me, planning contingencies. I’d spent the afternoon revisiting the wards on the house, making them utterly iron clad. Mostly, that consisted of sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor with my eyes closed, summoning one strand of magic after another, wrapping them all lovingly around the whole area, from the front walk all the way to Marron’s stable in the back.

I could feel the magic creature in the convergence hovering around as I worked, clearly concerned with my out of character behavior. Not that I was lazy, but really, I’d just reworked the wards a few weeks earlier. Doing it again was possibly overkill, but I wanted to make sure all my bases were covered.

“Bad man?” the convergence whispered in my mind as I was finishing an anti-fire ward that would snuff out a blazing inferno already in progress. I made a note to send it to the Aureum for consideration when the wildfires inevitably started for the summer. Maybe it could help someone other than me.

I paused and considered for a moment, then nodded. Not that a nod meant much to a creature that didn’t have a corporeal body, so I responded with my own mind, as I often did while trying to communicate with it. “Yes. You remember when Lina came? And the man after her? The one who tried to stab me, but Gideon stopped him?”

“Remember,” the convergence agreed, and gave me the impression of a shiver. After a moment, it came closer, making a gesture in my mind that felt oddly like an actual hug. “Sage stay safe. And Gideon stay safe.”

“Doing our best, buddy.”

“Buddy,” it mimicked, and then slipped away into the flows of magic without another word.

“Stay weird,” I mumbled to myself as I let my eyes flicker open. Fluke was sitting across from me looking self-satisfied, as he often did after we finished some complex magic. I cocked my head at him. “So how about you summoning magic to push Freddy? How long have you been able to do that?”

He blinked innocently at me, so I raised my brows and waited.

“You can totally understand me,” I informed him.

He huffed and climbed into my lap, then reached down to gnaw on my fingers. As had happened once before when he put his teeth on me, I had a moment of . . . for lack of a better term, seeing through Fluke’s eyes.

I hadn’t been sure at first, but the longer I looked at the window the more I was certain. It was a man with a gun, like hunters who used to come into the woods to kill deer when I was a kit. Like one hunter who had tried to kill me, back in the time before Sage and Gideon and Flit and Freddy and Rufus and Marron and Grandma and all the other people I loved.

Before I’d even known that my name was Fluke.

It was long and metal, with a hole at the end, and it was pointed at the store.

What else could it be but a hunter?

It didn’t seem to want to kill me, though, or any of the people passing by on the street. I could just barely make out the man behind the gun, the hunter, who kept looking down the length of the metal and waiting.

The others finally started paying attention to me, and Freddy came over. That was good. Maybe they would be able to chase the hunter away. Hunters were bad, and I did not want them to kill anyone in my shop.

But when the hunter caught sight of Freddy, he moved. He went tense, bringing his face into position behind the gun. Just like in the woods, when they’d been about to—No! He couldn’t hurt Freddy!

Without thinking, I turned and leaped, putting all the strength I had into it. It felt a little strange, like Sage was doing magic with me, and like I was flying, but that didn’t matter, because then Freddy was falling down and away, and when the awful, horrible bang of the gun had come, Freddy didn’t die.

No one died. Well, except the window.

Fluke let go, looking into my eyes like he hoped I understood better than he did. Because like me when I’d just started to use magic, he didn’t really understand what he’d done. Hadn’t recognized that curious feeling of magic flooding his body and then going where he directed it.

I lowered myself down to press my forehead to his. “It’s okay, buddy. You did a good job. It was instinct, and you did great, just like you always do.”

And he was, for all intents and purposes, a mage. I didn’t know if that was something that happened to familiars often or if Fluke was just special, but for me it didn’t matter. The worst thing he was likely to do with magic was steal the last slice of pizza off someone else’s plate. Fluke and more magic could only end well for us.

Wards done, I decided to get a start on dinner, and before I knew it, Gideon and I were sitting at the table, staring at the empty dishes.

He rubbed his eyes, sighing, and gave me a long tense look, but he didn’t say anything, just turned and started gathering the dishes.

“It’s a good idea,” I reiterated in a near-whisper, but he didn’t respond. So I stood up as he finished scraping the dregs of food into the trash, and took a deep breath. “I’m gonna take the trash out.”

Gideon gave a sharp nod, his jaw clenched, and turned to the sink. “I’ll wash the dishes. Be . . . be careful.”

“Thank you.”

I pulled out the full trash bag and tied it shut, replaced it, and turned to the door. As I headed out, I looked back over my shoulder. “I love you.”

“Love you too, jackass,” was the last thing I heard from inside as the door clicked shut.

I had to fight down a whole body shiver as I headed down the front walk, even though the spring air was balmy and nice. “Dear asshole raccoon,” I mumbled, trying to distract myself as I walked. “If you’re here to steal the trash, I swear it’s mostly plastic and hardly any food.”

I turned when I got to the street, heading the few feet to the right and trying to ignore that the trees behind the garbage enclosure blocked my sight of the house. It wasn’t important. And of course, the asshole raccoon probably lived in those trees, and he was sitting there laughing at me, just waiting for me to close the trash up so he could throw it all over the street.

Jerkwad.

I’d just flipped the lock open when there was a noise behind me. I spun around to find myself looking into the cold gray eyes of Randall Emmert.

He had a knife.

I swallowed down the spike of terror that tasted like aluminum foil in the back of my throat and tried to steady my trembling hands. Knives. Always with these assholes and the knives, building my fear into a towering mess of emotions, making me gasp for breath every time I saw any object with a sharp edge.

“You’re not a raccoon,” I told him, and by some miracle, my voice came out almost steady.

His eyes narrowed, and he glared at me. “Fuck does that mean?”

I glanced to one side, then the other, like I was waiting for an explanation. Yes. Good idea. Draw this out. Give everyone on the block enough time to see this guy and call the cops maybe. “It means . . . you’re not a raccoon.”

“Of course I’m not a raccoon.” He seemed genuinely offended that I’d suggested any connection, like it was an affront to his murdery dignity. “You an idiot?”

I cocked my head one way then the other, like “maybe,” and then gave him a shrug. “I’ve been called worse things by better people, so sure, why not? Although I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to call people that anymore.”

“Wh—What the hell is wrong with you?”

Ha. There was the old Sage McKinley charm working, well, like a charm. He was confused as hell and had no idea what was going on in my head. It had caused me no end of trouble when I’d been trying to make friends in school, but now? It worked miracles while playing the “confuse the killer” game.

“So many things,” I told him, making my expression as sympathetic as possible. “Do you want a list?”

“I’m here to fucking kill you, you idiot. You’re supposed to be scared.” He waved his knife around, like I needed more information to be able to put knife plus murderer together and get that answer.

“Again,” I told him, “I’m pretty sure idiot is an ableist slur and you’re not supposed to say it. Call me a jerkoff or something. Oh, I know. I always call myself a potato when I do silly stuff and I should know better.”

“A potato.” The incredulity in his voice was golden, and I almost hoped someone was filming it.

A flash of movement caught my eye, and I dropped the bag of trash and hopped to one side just in time for a tunnel of wind to come barreling down on Randall Emmert’s back, shoving him forward into the dirt next to the road.

Well, except for this face. That hit the bag of trash I’d just dropped.

Oops.

I turned to Quinn. “You left that till the last damn minute, didn’t you?”

“He didn’t come within two feet of you,” Quinn pointed out.

“He had a knife! Oh damn, he has a knife; we should take that away.” I turned back to where Emmert lay, facedown in my trash, trying to push himself up off the ground but being easily held there by Quinn’s air magic. “It’s good to be a quaesitor with air powers.”

Quinn shrugged. “It’s got its uses. Probably not as useful as being a damned potato, though.” He gave me a look from the corner of his eye, his shoulders shaking with what I assumed was repressed laughter, and then finally pulled out his handcuffs and went to restrain Emmert the old-fashioned way. He pulled a piece of plastic from his back pocket and bagged the knife as well, and a second later, the sound of sirens started in the distance.

“Those sirens for you, or do my neighbors actually care if I live or die?” I asked. I tried to sound nonchalant, but I wasn’t going to lie to myself, it mattered a little bit.

“Neighbors,” he said with a smile. “I told the guys I called to come in without the sirens and flashing lights, so it sounds like maybe your neighbors called the cops too, and no one told them not to come in guns blazing.”

Gideon came marching out of the house a moment later, sweeping me up in his arms and muttering about how we were never, ever doing that again.

“You fucking set me up,” Emmert said, sounding absolutely gobsmacked. “You planned this whole thing. This is . . . this is entrapment.”

Gideon turned and fixed a glare on him. “You’re lucky we’re working with Quinn. I’d have put a bullet in you and not lost a minute of sleep.” He looked up at Quinn and gave him a hint of the same glare. “And I wouldn’t have asked Sage to put himself in danger for it.”

“Sage did incredibly well,” Quinn answered, letting Gideon’s anger roll off him. “He kept cool under pressure, and he was never in any danger. I wouldn’t have let anything happen to him.”

Gideon humphed and scowled some more, giving me a glance, then pointedly looking down to where my heart was still beating wild and way too fast in my chest. Apparently it was so bad he could feel it.

“Besides,” Quinn added, stepping in close and giving Gideon a look I couldn’t parse. “I know what it is to have a husband you want to protect from the world. But Sage is an adult, and an extremely talented one. If he wants to use that talent to help people, that’s a gift. As much as it will scare you. As much as it will always scare you. All you can do is be there and try to help.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I t took an hour for us to wade through the mess with the cops, and the neighbor lady who’d called them actually came out to give her story about what happened. Apparently she’d been trying to catch the raccoon in the act and scare it away, so she’d been looking out the window and seen a menacing man following me out to the trash bins.

I’d never imagined being grateful for the little bastard raccoon, but it couldn’t have hurt, having a little extra backup in the form of an annoyed neighbor who was also sick of having her trash scattered for everyone to deal with.

I chatted with her and the cops, making jokes about him being worse than even the raccoon, like even the most annoying raccoon could compare to a murderer. As we were finishing up, I thanked her for having my back as we watched the cops drive away with Emmert in the back of one of their cars.

Once they were out of sight, Gideon dragged me inside.

The moment we crossed the threshold into the house, I fell against him, all my bravado drained away in fear, exhaustion, and the sudden absence of my previous adrenaline high. He didn’t hesitate—hell, he didn’t even seem surprised. He caught me in his arms and held me tight against him, making shushing noises and running a hand down my back.

“Sorry,” I muttered into his chest. “I didn’t want to be pitiful. I meant—I wanted—” my remaining breath escaped in a whoosh, and it was just as well, because I didn’t know what the hell I’d wanted. To pretend to be a badass secret agent who wasn’t scared of killers? That wasn’t me. I had no idea how people did that.

“Hush,” he murmured, threading his fingers through my hair. “You’re the furthest thing from pitiful, sweetheart.”

“ ’M falling apart,” I pointed out.

His chuckle was either sweet or insulting, and my brain wasn’t working well enough to decide which one. “You just confronted a man who’s been trying to kill you. You really think it makes you weak to be afraid of that?”

“You wouldn’t be afraid.”

Despite the way I mumbled the words into his shirtfront, he’d clearly heard me, since he tugged my hair lightly until I was leaning my head back to look up at him. “Sweetheart, a man like that scares me every damn time. What you did tonight ain’t about not being scared. It’s about doing what you have to, despite it.”

I pulled my hair out of his grasp and broke eye contact to bury my face in his chest again. “You thought I couldn’t do it. You didn’t want me to.”

“ ’Course I didn’t want you to,” he agreed easily. “But don’t you think for a minute I doubted you could.” He stopped running his hand through my hair for a moment, his whole body going still before he sighed. “Quinn was right. I’m used to trying to take care of you, but you’re a full-grown man. A full-grown man with an incredible gift. Me wishing everything would return to how it was before so you’d get back to book counting is selfish.”

Without another word, he swung me up into a princess carry and walked back to the bedroom.

The bedroom, where Fluke was waiting for us, his entirely unamused face in full effect. Shit, I’d forgotten I was going to have to answer for this whole thing to him too.

I stuck out my lower lip, suddenly trying to look pitiful instead of wishing I were less so. “We had to keep you inside, Flukester. He might not have come if I’d had you there to protect me.”

Gideon gave the longest suffering sigh and Fluke mimicked the sound, while they both glared at me.

I let my head fall against Gideon’s chest and gave them my own sigh. “I mean, the plan did work. Even if my legs went to jelly the second we got back inside the house. That part was pretty pathetic and not to plan.”

For a second, I was afraid Gideon’s eyes were going to get lost in the back of his head, he rolled them so hard. He followed up by dumping me onto the bed and heading over to his dresser, so I supposed our sweet moment from before was over.

Instead of worrying more, I held a hand out to Fluke. “I really am sorry. Next time I’m trying to bait a murderer, you can totally follow me.”

Fluke huffed and scooted up the bed to lean against me. He was still unimpressed, but he wanted the snuggle I was offering. Also, there were probably no hard feelings. He put his head down on my arm and gave me the giant melting chocolate foxy eyes, practically begging for me to not rush into danger without him again.

Given our history, I couldn’t make any promises, but I figured he’d be okay with it if I did my best. Fluke was accepting like that.

“Quinn was right about more things,” Gideon said as he slammed his top dresser drawer shut.

“Oh? I mean, Quinn seems like a pretty smart guy, fair enough. Something in particular, though?” I looked Gideon over, half expecting him to say something quippy or snarky, but his eyes were soft and serious.

He came over and sat on the edge of the bed, hands clenched in his lap. “He’s also got a powerful mage he loves. Someone lots of people want a piece of, lots of people want to use, and maybe lots of people want to hurt.”

It was hard to imagine anyone wanting to hurt Quinn’s waifish, ethereal husband, particularly not with as kind and helpful as he’d been when Freddy had needed it.

There were a lot of weird people out there, I supposed, and Sterling’s ability to see the future could make a huge difference in people’s lives. That kind of power sometimes made people act irrationally.

Gideon toed his boots off and turned so he was sprawled across the bed in a mirror of my position, facing each other with Fluke between us.

“Thing is, Quinn had the right idea before me. Now maybe it’s because he’s had his relationship longer than me, or maybe he’s just a smarter guy. But either way”—he reached between us and grabbed my hand, pulling it against his chest—“I coulda lost you tonight. No matter how safe Quinn thought he was being. And if you’re gonna be throwing yourself into danger on the regular, I need to make sure you and everybody else know what you mean to me.”

My brows knit together in confusion. Throwing myself into danger on the regular? When had I said I was planning to do that? When had anyone suggested it? Sure, other people seemed determined to drag me into it, but that wasn’t something I’d “thrown myself into.” Before I could open my mouth to refute the notion, the rest of his words penetrated my slow, hazy brain.

“I—I know how you feel about me, Gideon. About us. You don’t have to do anything to—”

He leaned forward and kissed me to stop the flow of words, and when he leaned back, there was an indulgent smile on his face. “I know that. But I want to. Maybe this means more to me than you, but . . .” He pulled his hands up into the space between us.

I thought he’d been clenching them, but no. He’d been holding something tight. A tiny box. He flipped it open in the space between us, right in front of Fluke’s nose, to reveal a simple gold band with shiny beveled edges.

“But it’s legal for us to get married, and I want that. I want to marry you. Make you Sage McKinley-Knight, which is ridiculous since it ain’t even my damn name, but I want to share it with you anyway.”

Unable to take my eyes off the glittering edges of the gold band, I didn’t even look up at him as I asked, “You going to be Gideon McKinley-Knight?”

“Of course,” he agreed easily. “Like I said, sharing. Besides, you know I love your Gran like she was my own. Some days I don’t even want to stomp on your cousin’s foot.”

I leaned my face closer to his, till our lips were just a breath apart. “Well in that case, I would love to marry you.” I leaned in and brushed our lips together, soft and sweet. “Grandma’s going to be thrilled.”

“That was the important part of the goal.” His faux serious expression put the lie to the comment, and a moment later, it dropped and he grinned before leaning in to return the kiss.

Between us, Fluke gave a loud bark.

“Sorry, did you need something?” Gideon asked him, more amused than put out at my familiar breaking the moment.

Fluke nosed at the ring box and barked again.

Gideon snorted at him, giving a flick in his direction that came nowhere near touching him, but obliging anyway. He slid the ring out of the black velvet setting, took my left hand in his, and slid it onto my finger. It was a perfect fit, so clearly he’d been planning this at least long enough to check my ring size.

As though he could no longer contain himself, Fluke hopped to his feet and gave another bark, then danced in a circle and barked again. It was hard to complain, since I was trying to be serious, but on the inside, I was kind of doing the same thing, my stomach dancing with thrilled, terrified butterflies.

Gideon wanted to marry me.

Me, Sage the disaster. He wanted to share the rest of our lives.

Two years earlier, I couldn’t have imagined anyone would choose me that way, that permanently. I’d expected to spend the rest of my life as a third wheel to Mal and Beez’s semi-platonic forever, and living as a veritable ghost, working in the bookstore and never being noticed by anyone.

A tiny part of me was afraid I was making it all up. This life was too good to be true.

After dancing another circle, Fluke jumped off the bed, ran halfway down the hallway and then turned to look at us expectantly. When we just looked at him, he barked again, more impatiently.

It only took me a moment to understand. Marron. He wanted to go tell Marron, right then.

We did, of course. I imagined Gideon had discussed it with him beforehand, but Fluke was right. Marron was a member of the family, and just because he couldn’t sleep in the house didn’t mean he didn’t deserve to be in on everything that happened.

We sat in the stable for hours, telling Marron about the engagement, which made him very happy, but also about the mess with Emmert that evening. He and Gideon exchanged meaningful glances that I suspected I’d hear more about later, but for the time, it was good just to spend time together as a family. Fluke sitting in my lap occasionally barking at parts of the story he liked. Marron getting an extra brushing from Gideon as we talked about Quinn, and how he seemed to be the first truly trustworthy quaesitor we’d met.

By the time we finished up and went back into the house, the adrenaline and excitement of the day were catching up with me. I barely took the time to toss my jeans and T-shirt into the hamper before sliding into bed, my eyes already drooping shut as I went.

Gideon slid in behind me and pulled me against him, and it was everything I’d ever wanted in life. As I fell asleep, I swore I heard him say, “You should say yes, if you want to.”

Maybe I was too damned tired from the events of the day, but . . . hadn’t I already said yes? The weight of the heavy gold ring on my finger said I was right, but I was too tired to wake up and think about it. I’d ask in the morning, maybe.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I  woke to the sound of my phone ringing and had to tamp down the urge to lash out with magic and just crush the damn thing.

It had been a long, complicated, exhausting night, and I really didn’t want to wake up at all, let alone talk to anyone. Especially not at—I grabbed my phone and looked at the time.

Ten in the morning.

Oh shit. I blinked and sat up, automatically stretching my back out until it gave a few satisfying cracks and looked at my phone again. One missed call from a number I hadn’t programmed into it. It was a local number, but in this age of annoying spam calls, that didn’t mean much.

Down the hall, Gideon’s phone started ringing. Unlike me, it seemed that Gideon was clearly awake somewhere, since a moment later I heard his slightly muffled voice filter down the hallway. Damn, I hadn’t even noticed he wasn’t in bed yet. I couldn’t make out the exact words—too far away—but his laughter was recognizable enough. A moment later he came sauntering down the hallway wearing his usual riding gear. He must have gotten up early and gone out riding with Marron.

Well, earlier than ten in the morning, anyway. I was turning into the hero of some historical romance, with the ridiculous ancient upper-class notion that waking up before noon was “unfashionable.” Next I’d have calling cards made up so I could randomly visit people’s homes and demand tea and their daughters’ hands in marriage or something.

I dropped my hands into my lap, and my eyes caught on a glint in the light. The ring Gideon had given me the night before.

“Looks like he’s just waking up,” Gideon was saying. “Your call probably woke him, ’cause he looks a little grumpy. I’ll hand you over to him.” I scowled at him, and he just chuckled and shoved his phone in my direction. “Talk, and then come out and eat. I’m making eggs.”

I continued to glare, but I took the phone and pressed it to my ear.

“Sage?” came Quinn’s voice after a moment. It was full of amusement, and I had a hard time holding it against him, even if I was in a pissy mood. It wasn’t like it was four in the morning. Also, I assumed he wasn’t calling for no reason, especially if he’d called my phone and then Gideon’s trying to get through to someone.

“Yeah,” I said, and it was cut off by a yawn. “Sorry, late night. Someone tried to kill me then I got engaged. How’d things go with our resident jerkwad?”

“Congratulations,” was the first thing out of his mouth, his tone pleased but not at all surprised. I was going to be really disappointed if Quinn was another Believer in disguise, because he was such a nice damned guy. I wanted that to be who he really was, and not a put on like David’s bland fake kindness. “I hate to interrupt what should probably be a celebration, then, but things are moving fast down here.”

Fast? Damn, had the Believers already bailed Emmert out? Was he already back on the streets and stalking me again?

“I can already hear you panicking over there, but you don’t need to do that.” I could positively hear his grin over the phone. “Our buddy Emmert’s flipped like the first Sunday morning pancake: ugly and messy. The police have already made three more arrests in Junction based on his information, and there are five other warrants in process.”

For a moment, all I could do was sit there and stare into space, mouth gaping open like a fish. He’d . . . he’d turned on his people? Just like that? Wasn’t he supposed to be a hardened criminal? A cultist? A soldier?

My brain finally recovered enough for me to find my words, and they rushed out. “Seriously? Eight people already? That’s incredible. I thought—I thought he was supposed to be some kind of military hardass.”

Quinn snorted at that, and I heard a creak on the other end of the line like he’d just dropped into a chair. “Yeah, if he was ever that, he’s not now. He was practically crying for his mother in the early hours, claiming his roommate led him astray and oh poor him, he thought you were secretly a monster who had sex with the devil for his powers.”

I let myself fall back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “You’re kidding me. I mean, I’ve heard some bullshit from the Believers, but that’s extra even for them, and they’re a cult who thinks there’s a demon in the ley lines.”

Quinn laughed. Yeah, he wasn’t allowed to be a bad guy. I liked him too much. “Anyway,” he said after getting himself under control and catching his breath. “As much as I wish this whole thing were over for you, there are complications. I’m sure you expected that, though.”

“There always are,” I agreed with a sigh. “What’s up?”

Quinn’s voice went uncharacteristically serious, and I recognized his getting down to business tone. “Well first of all, Emmert is spilling names, but there’s a telling few that haven’t shown up in his deposition.”

I hardly even had to guess. “Marlett.”

“Bingo. We’re thinking the roommate might have that information, but the cops went to their place to pick him up, and he’s slipped the net. He must have known what was happening and run for it, because his bank account was cleared out in cash yesterday.”

Gideon appeared at the end of the hallway again, beckoning me, so I stumbled out of bed, still holding the phone to my ear, and headed out to the kitchen still in just my underwear. “Okay, that sucks, but it’s like dominoes, right? Like when cops go after the mob. They just need the first one to topple and then the whole thing goes down?”

“Yes and no,” he hedged, and I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like where this was going. “I mean, we’ve got a lot of guys already, and I’m sure we can get some of them to roll. Some of them are like you said, zealots who believe in the cause, and we’re lucky they didn’t pass out cyanide capsules, because these guys would have happily taken them.”

“That’s vivid and disturbing. But if even just a few agree to turn, we should be okay, right?” I didn’t think we would need them all to confess, but my knowledge of investigations was limited to fiction.

Gideon was just setting fried eggs on the table when I arrived. He raised an eyebrow at me, looking for information, so I tried to make the “it’s complicated” face, and sat down in front of my plate.

Fluke was already eyeing my eggs, so I gave him the evil eye and whispered, “Eat your own eggs.”

“Sorry?” Quinn asked, as Fluke huffed at me.

“Talking to my familiar. Sorry, we’re sitting down to breakfast.”

“Ah,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice again. “I was just saying that I do think we’re going to be able to get a lot of them. Maybe more than we think. But guys like Marlett are sometimes more careful than, to use your comparison, mafia foot soldiers. He keeps himself separate, only associates with the zealots, and the people like Emmert never even hear his name.”

“So you think maybe you’ll take down the infrastructure, but the big bads will get away, is what you’re saying?” The thought made my stomach sink, because weren’t those big bads the heart of the organization? The ones who’d built it. With their current organization on fire, wouldn’t it be just too easy to cut their losses and start over?

Quinn gave a heavy sigh. “It happens a lot, unfortunately. Look at Enron and all those guys who stole money from the elderly. One or two big name scapegoats go down, and all the other guys continue to be rich based on that stolen money.”

Rich people got away with things, like always. Iris had spelled it out for me when she’d said she could have gotten me free even if I’d been caught committing grand larceny, but it looked different from this angle. It looked like a lot of innocent people getting stepped on.

“Sage? You okay?”

I set my elbows on the table and slumped down over it. “Not really. How do you do this? Watch assholes like Marlett get away with murder, and not be able to do anything about it?”

For a moment, I thought maybe he wouldn’t answer. When he did speak again, there was a heaviness in his voice that I could feel in my bones. “I’m not gonna lie, some days it’s hard. This guy is screwing over a friend and colleague, and while I’ll be the first to admit Jordan’s done some ridiculous stuff to land herself in this mess, it’s more his son’s fault than hers. And he doesn’t care about that. He just wants revenge for his asshole son getting the end he probably had coming to him. The worst part about it is knowing that if we don’t get him, he’ll probably ruin other lives too. Kill more people. You. Other arcane mages we’ve never met. Anyone who makes him mad or doesn’t agree with him.”

I took a deep breath, and then another, trying to focus on that, counting the beats I breathed in and out. Trying not to let hopelessness crash over me, like it wanted to.

Movement in front of me caught my eye, and I looked up in time to see that it was Fluke. He had picked up one of his pieces of toast between just his front teeth, balancing it there gently as he leaned across the table and set it on my plate. His eyes were warm and worried, and he made a tiny noise in the back of his throat that wasn’t quite a whine and sounded like a question.

I reached over and scratched his head, but I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “I’ll be okay, Fluke. Promise.” Taking another deep breath, this one a little lighter, I turned back to the phone. “What else did you need to talk to me about?”

“An official statement.” I groaned, and he went on, talking fast, voice reassuring. “I know, it’s going to take forever and be a pain in the ass, but I want all of this on the record. I want these rats to have nowhere to hide, Sage. Even if we can’t pick up Marlett with the others, I want him to watch the Believers burn. I want them to have nowhere to hide and no one to turn to. Hell, if you’re willing, I’d ask you to do press interviews. I know I’m not supposed to say things like that, but I want every person alive to know these assholes. They thrive in shadows and dark corners, and I want to build a bonfire and shine a light on every one of them.”

Well hell. How could I say no to that?

“The quaesitor’s office?” I asked. “We can come down after breakfast.”

“Hell no. I wouldn’t ask you to sit in that dank rathole for ten minutes, let alone the hours this is going to take. Police headquarters down on Raven Lane. You’re getting the VIP treatment for this one. All the mediocre coffee and excellent donuts you can choke down while you tell your story to me, a camera, and the head police detective working the case with me.”

“In that case, we’ll be there in an hour,” I promised. “I mean, it would have been an hour anyway, but this way I’ll say it like I don’t resent you.”

He was still laughing when I hung up to eat my eggs.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

G randma’s driver, Wayne, came to take us to the police station. I didn’t know if Gideon had called and asked him to pick us up because he didn’t trust our safety in a cab, or if he’d just wanted to see Wayne and sit in Grandma’s nice car, but I wasn’t going to complain.

I was too busy worrying about the statement I had to make. I’d been sitting alone with Fluke, Gideon, and Quinn when I’d told him everything, and while I’d worried about telling him all the details, I’d done it. Every sordid bit about David’s death, Jordan’s part in my kidnapping, and the deaths of three men during our escape.

I knew I wasn’t going to tell the cops about resurrecting Gideon. That was a no-brainer. The more people who knew about that, the more danger every arcane mage was in. I didn’t even know if I could do it without the convergence’s help, so there was no way to know if it could be done again. What I did know was that the minute people knew it had ever happened, I’d never get another moment’s peace, and neither would any other arcane mage.

But the parts with Jordan? I wasn’t sure what to say about those. I didn’t have a cover story ready because I’d never talked about any of it to the authorities.

We were halfway to police headquarters when my phone rang, and the caller ID told me it was Jordan.

“Hey, I was just—”

“Tell them everything,” she interrupted before I even had a chance to finish my first sentence. She didn’t wait for me to answer, either, rushing on. “The whole truth, Sage. Quinn and I talked about it, and I’m turning myself in. I’m not going to ask you to lie for me, especially not when it might get in the way of this investigation. This is more important than me. I’ll be making my statement this afternoon too, and I’m going to tell them if you don’t.”

“—thinking about you,” I finished, ridiculous and feeling like we’d had an entire conversation while I’d spoken one sentence.

“Sorry.” A muffled sniff came through the line, as though she’d tried to hide it from me. “I’m just . . . not willing to get in the way of actual justice. These bastards have murdered a lot of people.”

I definitely knew that. I didn’t need her to tell me. I’d lost my mother to the cult, after all. “How much trouble are you going to be in?” I asked, instead of pointing that out.

As my mother would have told me herself, I couldn’t help her anymore. I could help Jordan.

After a moment Jordan gave a wet chuckle. “That’s the most Sage question I’ve ever been asked.” She hesitated, long enough that I almost asked again. “My career is almost certainly over. Even if I don’t do time, which is in question, since I did kill a man, and it debatably wasn’t in self-defense—”

“It was in defense of me! He was about to murder me.”

“A position I put you in.”

“Because your boss’s boss told you to.”

“ ‘I was following orders’ isn’t a legal defense, Sage.”

“You stopped them.”

“Only after committing crimes.”

We both paused and breathed for a moment after the rapid-fire argument, but she was the one to catch her breath and continue first.

“This is okay. I mean, I’m not thrilled about my part, but you, Quinn, this investigation, it’s all going to do what I joined the quaesitors to do. It’s going to help save lives.” She took one long breath and let it out in a rush. “And I find myself strangely okay with that. After everything is over, if I’m not in jail, I’ll find a new job where I can help people. It’s not the end of my life. Just the end of my career with the quaesitors.”

Oddly enough, she did sound okay with it. That didn’t make me any happier about it, but there was a sense of peace about the whole disaster. “Are you sure, Jordan? I mean really, really sure. This cat doesn’t go back in the bag.”

“I am,” she said, her voice firming with her resolve. “Sage, I . . . I want this. I didn’t like what Marlett Senior was doing because I don’t deserve to be punished for saving your life from his son. But I do deserve for someone to hold me accountable for what I did to you. There should be repercussions. I want that. I want justice. If I didn’t want that, I shouldn’t be a quaesitor at all.”

I sat back in the car seat, absorbing everything and nodding slowly. She couldn’t see it, but it wasn’t for her, it was for me. “Okay,” I finally told her. “And Jordan?”

Even through the tinny speaker, I heard her swallow hard before responding. “Yes?”

“Thank you.”

Her breath caught, and I could almost see her shaking her head. “It’s the very least I can do, Sage. But . . . thank you. For being my friend despite it all.”

“Don’t go maudlin on me there, Maines. That’s not over just because we’re going public with what happened. You’re still my friend. And you can damn well bet I’ll testify if they send you to trial.”

Her laughter was suspiciously broken and wet, but it was still laughter.

THE MOMENT I WALKED UP, a uniformed officer standing there chatting with the guy behind the desk perked up, smiling at us. “Mr. McKinley, Mr. Knight, Mr. Fluke. I’m supposed to show you back to where Quaesitor Pike and Detective Torres are waiting.”

Fluke was staring at the gangly young man, head cocked. He’d definitely never been called Mr. Fluke before. It was weird and sweet at the same time.

“Yup, that’s us.” I smiled at him and motioned him to go ahead, so he did.

Quinn was sitting in the middle of what I assumed was the bullpen, from my minimal TV watching. As it turned out, Gideon liked mystery shows, and they often involved cops or quaesitors.

Quinn was sitting in the middle of an aisle, in an office chair, spinning in lazy circles. At a desk nearby was a woman writing on a notepad. She had curly black hair and tawny skin, and the no-nonsense look on her face made me not particularly want to piss her off.

Not that I had issues with authority.

Nope, not me.

Shh.

Quinn stopped spinning and smiled at me when we approached, then cocked his head at me. Probably at the determined look on my face. “How’s it going, Sage?”

“I want a deal for Jordan.”

The woman raised a brow. “That’s different from what I usually hear. Not looking for a deal for yourself?”

Weirdly enough, all my usual terror of authority figures evaporated at the question. Like Sarah declaring “you have no power over me” in Labyrinth, I realized that was true, in a big way. Maybe it wasn’t right that I had benefits other people didn’t, but it was a fact, and I was going to damn well help anyone I could with it.

I met her eye and nodded. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

There was an interested, but still challenging, glint in her eye when she answered, “But she has.”

“As she’s already told you, I’m sure.” I sat down in the chair across from her desk without dropping eye contact. There was no reason to beat around the bush. “Jordan did a dumb thing, and I’m not asking for the ridiculous. I just don’t want her to face jail time. I’m sure Emmert made a deal, and he’s actually a bad guy. Jordan isn’t.”

“She kidnapped you,” Quinn pointed out as he scooted his chair over to the edge of the desk. His tone wasn’t challenging like hers, more like he was prompting me for the answer he knew I was going to give.

“She thought she was detaining me, which might have been a stretch of her powers since we all know she didn’t have a warrant for my arrest. But the fact is that she thought she was doing her job, and when she realized she wasn’t, she saved my life and helped me escape.”

The area around us was quiet as Torres and I stared at each other, and from the corner of my eye I could see Quinn watching her as well. Finally, she nodded as she turned to him. “You were right. He could do it.”

“I . . . what?”

She turned back to me with a smile. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m pissed as hell at Maines. But you’re right, and you’re good at making your point, which Pike has spent the last hour telling me about.” She stood, picking up her notebook. “I think we can work out a deal that keeps Maines out of prison, if your story is as good as he thinks it is.”

I looked over at Quinn and raised a brow. “You talked Jordan into this, didn’t you?”

He bobbed his head back and forth, squinting one eye and then finally shrugged. “Sort of. I talked to her. Told her what was going on. The opportunity we had. I didn’t ask her to turn herself in, but I won’t lie to you Sage, it’s what I wanted her to do, and she knew it. This investigation is more important than one person’s career—mine or hers. And as much as I do want to help Jordan out of this hole, she dug it herself. I’ll offer a hand if I can, but I’m not going to throw anyone else into it to help her out.”

I gave a gusty sigh and nodded. “So everyone keeps telling me. She’s a good person, though.”

“She is,” he agreed, turning to follow Detective Torres and waving us all in the direction of a hallway off the main room. “We will help her. But this way we’ll keep the Believers from murdering any more innocent people too.”

I didn’t ask about saving her career because there was no way anyone could promise me that, regardless of their intentions. All any of us could do was our best, and that was all I could ask of them.

My statement took five hours, three cups of coffee—which was surprisingly good, no matter what Quinn had said—and two chocolate covered donuts.

Weirdly, the room they took my statement in, which must have been an actual police interrogation room, felt less cold and clinical than the one in the Aureum building. Considering the cops regularly questioned criminals and I didn’t know that the Aureum did, it confused me a bit.

The chair was more comfortable, an office chair they’d clearly brought in for me, since a less comfortable chair was pushed to the corner of the room. Even better, there was no obvious loop for shackles on the table. The overhead fluorescent lights were too bright, and the steady red glow of the camera was creepy, but I could live with those things.

In all honesty, it was great. Telling the truth after lying for so long, and about so many things . . . it was like a giant weight I’d been carrying on my shoulders was just gone.

When David’s death came up, Quinn hurried us along, waving away Detective Torres’s questions and telling her it was “an internal matter for the Aureum.” Without a single protest, she dropped it.

The rest, though . . . it was mind-bending to be reminded of what we’d been through in less than two years. Magic and attempted murder and time travel and the attempted destruction of all Junction, for fuck’s sake.

The more I talked, the more Detective Torres—who told me sometime in the second hour to call her Ashley—stared at me in abject horror. After the story of how the Brandfield family had tried to destroy Junction, she turned to Quinn. “How did anyone miss this?”

“I mean, the Brandfields are both in prison,” Quinn offered. “Technically it wasn’t missed. I think you’re just horrified that all of this stuff was attached to Sage, and the fate of the whole damn town fell on a civilian’s shoulders.”

“Of course I am,” she agreed, waving a wild hand at me and almost clipping my nose with a fingernail. “He didn’t fucking agree to that. He runs a bookstore and doesn’t even know how to fire a gun.”

Quinn smiled and gave her an odd half-hearted shrug that I couldn’t quite figure out. Was he questioning whether I still worked at the shop? I didn’t most of the time, so that was fair. Maybe he questioned whether I was actually a civilian anymore. The Aureum did have a history of forcing people to work for them, but they’d never even asked me, let alone twisted my arm.

Or maybe I was overthinking it and the shrug meant nothing at all.

He shrugged it off and turned back to me, asking the next question before I could overthink a simple gesture any further.

By the time I left the interrogation room my voice was hoarse, I was exhausted, and the sun was down. Gideon and Fluke were sitting in the bullpen talking to Jordan and the gangly cop who’d shown us in from the front desk.

Somehow, Jordan looked five years younger than the last time I’d seen her. She’d clearly cried her makeup off, just hints of mascara remaining, but she seemed unburdened, lighter than I’d seen her since the Marlett mess had started. I supposed she really did want to go to prison for the right reasons, if she had to go.

Fluke jumped up and rushed over to me, winding around my legs like a cat until I gave up and picked him up so he could sniff me and lick my face. “I’m okay,” I croaked at him. “Just tired and hoarse.”

“It was a hell of a story,” Ashley said, shaking her head and tapping the notebook she’d spent the afternoon writing in. “I feel like someday this is going to be a movie. I hope my notes are good enough for that.”

I waved her off as well as I could with twenty-some pounds of fox in my arms. “Don’t worry about it. They’ll just cast someone hot and make it an action movie. Script not needed.”

She held up the notebook, eyes wide and brows drawn together, disbelief written on every feature. “Sage. This is an action movie. Magic explosions, gunfights, attempted mass murder—you realize the majority of human beings go their whole lives without being shot at? Let alone kidnapped, or saving the city from freaking magical artifacts?”

“Sure, that’s what people say—”

“Because it’s true,” Quinn said, but he was smiling. “But hey, most people don’t have a handy magical way to shield themselves from gunfire like Sage and me, so maybe it’s better if people shoot at us than unarmed nonmagic civilians, yeah?”

She looked dubious for a moment but eventually nodded. “I guess. Thank you very much for everything, Sage. We’ll keep you informed about the investigation, of course, and I’m sure you’ll be asked to testify, or at least speak to the district attorney.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “I’m not hard to find if you need me. You have my number, and I’ve lived in the same house most of my life. I’m not going anywhere.”

Fluke leapt from my arms to the floor and started heading for the front door. He gave a bark as he walked, looking expectantly back at us. His message was clear. It was dinner time, and he was quite finished waiting.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A mong the mail in our box when we arrived home with dinner was a regular, nondescript letter. Local post mark, one stamp, printed address label.

The only thing that made me hesitate before opening it was the lack of a return address. Gideon looked at it, then me, and gave an annoyed sigh. “You want me to call Quinn?”

I looked it over for any sign of magic, but there was nothing. It was just a letter. I mean, unless they’d put anthrax in there, which was terrifying, but also unlikely.

Right?

I shrugged and tore it open to find a typed letter with no signature.

Robert Marlett isn’t finished yet.

He may not have the funds to fuel his little war anymore, but putting your quaesitor friend on trial is just a tiny part of his machinations, intended to get her out of the way while they work on the ultimate solution.

I’m sure that’s as awful as it sounds, but I can’t tell you what it means.

Whatever you’ve accomplished, you haven’t stopped him yet. Be careful.

I PASSED the letter to Gideon as I pulled out my phone, dialing Quinn. The poor guy already wasn’t getting any sleep. He was going to come to hate me pretty quick.

NO GREAT SURPRISE, the letter had only Gideon’s and my fingerprints on the page itself, and dozens of different people on the envelope, probably all postal workers.

We were unfortunately at the Aureum building this time, just Fluke, Quinn and I, since Gideon had standing plans with Anson. He’d hesitated to go, saying he could spend any day with his great grandson, but I pointed out that I was a grown mage, entirely capable of taking care of myself.

Maybe a year before I’d have been happy to hide behind him—no, no maybe about it. A year ago, I’d have been thrilled to stand behind him. I’d done it, regularly and sensibly.

But I’d gotten damned good at using my magic since then. I was strong and capable, and I’d been through hell and come back to tell the tale.

I could handle myself. And if I happened to keep a tightly woven bullet ward around myself and my familiar at all times, that was only sensible. Someday I was going to have to extrapolate from the bullet ward and figure out how to ward against knives. Just at the thought, I had to contain a shiver.

Fluke didn’t complain about the warding, but then, Fluke rarely complained about anything unless it was his belly grumbling. He just hopped up into one of the worn, creaky desk chairs in the lightless quaesitor’s office in the Aureum building and looked at Quinn and me expectantly.

Quinn was staring at the letter, looking vaguely dissatisfied.

I got it. It wasn’t the most useful information—more of a tease, really. But it was something we hadn’t had the day before, so I was taking it as a good thing.

Assuming it was telling the truth.

More important than any information in the letter was what its existence implied: someone who knew about Marlett was working against him.

There was a lot of potential there. They might be willing to turn on him and testify at a trial. They might have more information they could share. But most important, it meant that Marlett’s circle of confidants wasn’t as airtight as we’d initially thought.

Finally, Quinn sighed. “It’s the downtown post office’s mark, two days ago. So there’s pretty much nothing to learn there.”

“It was good timing, arriving just as we . . . sort of solved the Jordan problem.” Solved was the wrong word, since Jordan wasn’t off the hook for criminal charges yet, but it was close enough. We weren’t all sitting around worrying about defending Jordan from Marlett’s civil charges anymore.

Once the full truth about Marlett Junior’s death came out, there wasn’t much chance people would find his death “wrongful.” At least, I sure hoped not. The guy had been about ten seconds removed from slicing my wrists open and watching me bleed to death with his cold shark eyes when Jordan had killed him. Saying his death was wrong was implying that I should be dead instead.

I didn’t doubt Marlett Senior thought that, but I hoped the general public would be harder to convince. And given the way they’d been reacting to me since the arcane magic reveal, I suspected I wouldn’t be disappointed.

I half hoped that the facts coming out about his son would stop Marlett, but I wasn’t likely to be that lucky. If anything, he’d probably get angrier about the truth coming out and double down on his determination to make trouble.

Fluke, apparently having gotten bored waiting for Quinn or me to speak up, squirmed around on his chair and looked amused with the way it spun halfway around. Getting a mischievous glint in his eye, he reached out with a paw and pushed on the nearby desk. When the chair rolled away from it, spinning even more, he barked.

It couldn’t have been more adorable if he’d been trying. It managed to draw even Quinn out of his exhausted funk. He chuckled as he watched the chair drift halfway across the room, its spin slowing as it went, until it came to a stop against one of the empty desks that had belonged to a previous quaesitor. David, I thought.

Fluke hopped down, grabbing the cushioned part of the chair in his teeth and dragging it back over next to Quinn’s desk, hopping up into the seat, and . . . pausing when he saw both of us watching him.

He actually looked a little abashed, his head ducked, so I reached out and scratched behind his ears. “You’re fine, bud. Play with the chair if you want.”

That made him grin and quickly shove off the desk again, this time managing more torque and getting a good spin going as he whirled his way across the room.

Across from me, Quinn took a deep breath. It didn’t sound like the start of a sigh, so I turned to him expectantly.

“We both know that this isn’t enough to arrest Marlett. Nothing we have right now so much as touches the guy.” He met my gaze steadily, if apologetically.

I considered our situation. Did I even have any real proof Marlett was a villain? No. I believed it, but “he looks like a killer” wouldn’t hold up in a court of law. Even his insider knowledge that I was involved in his son’s death didn’t prove anything conclusively. He’d gone after Jordan, sure, and the fact that I’d been mentioned in his documentation meant that he definitely knew what his evil son had been up to, but we couldn’t prove that. And it looked like he’d kept a huge distance between himself and the actual day to day organization of the Believers.

I was sure he was a criminal, but he was a smart one, so we couldn’t prove anything.

I leaned forward and put my elbows on Quinn’s desk. “I agree. He’s careful and smart, and he’s done a good job covering his tracks.”

“He doesn’t have money to hire a decent assassin, so it’s not likely we’ll run into that,” he said, then stopped to consider. “It’s possible he’ll try to send some Believer we haven’t snapped up yet, but this network is unravelling like an ugly sweater.”

I lifted a brow, so he tapped a stack of folders on one edge of his desk. Without asking, I opened the top one. Emmert. I flipped through the edge, counting. Seventeen folders. “You’ve made seventeen arrests?”

“Fifteen last time the cops called.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked it, like he expected to have an update saying more people had been arrested. “Two still on the run, including Emmert’s roommate. But that’s fifteen guys in two days. It’s fucking incredible. And half of them are still being questioned, so who knows where it’ll lead?”

“You still don’t think it’ll lead to Marlett.”

“I don’t.” He glanced over at Fluke, who was drunkenly weaving his way across the room, pulling the chair behind him and clearly a little dizzy from his spinning game. “I think there’s one thing that’s got a chance of catching Marlett.”

I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like his one thing. “And that is?”

“You.”

For a moment, we stared at each other without moving, like some kind of macho game of “whoever blinks first loses.”

I’m pretty sure it was me, because after a minute I let out the air in my lungs in a whoosh and sat back. “Me? How the hell am I going to help?”

“Exactly like it sounds, Sage. You help.” Without looking away from me, he reached over and opened a drawer in his desk. He reached in, pulled something out, and tossed it to the front of his desk where it landed with a thunk. A thick piece of bronze in the shape of a stylized rising sun.

A quaesitor’s badge, likely his own, since I’d never seen him wearing it. Hell, I hadn’t seen anyone wear one ever, not even David.

I broke eye contact and looked down at the badge. Unlike so many things in the Aureum, it wasn’t covered with random Latin phrases or symbols I didn’t know. The quaesitor’s badge was supposed to represent their work. Simple. Solid. Steady. Just a bronze half sun. No engraved title or name. Just the job. Shining a light in the dark. Exposing nasty things that wanted to hide.

It was supposed to represent the work, but Quinn was the first quaesitor I’d met who seemed to truly fit with the thing.

He’d been empowered to deputize someone, he’d said.

I had thought he was implying that he wanted Gideon, but that hadn’t been it at all. He wanted to deputize me.

Holy crap.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Q uinn hadn’t pressed me for an answer.

No, in what I was coming to recognize as standard Quinn style, he’d immediately backed off and told me to take all the time I needed to think about it. Said that if I made a decision, to call him anytime.

The man was too damn good at handling me. I supposed it was down to Sterling, and the fact that he knew what it was like to be a powerful mage in the world of the Aureum.

His code of ethics seemed to be closer to my own than any other quaesitor or cop I’d ever met. Jordan had said that if she didn’t want to face repercussions for her kidnapping of me, she didn’t deserve to be a quaesitor, and I thought the line was finer than that, the ethical gray area bigger.

Okay, maybe not that gray. She was right, kidnapping was entirely wrong. If I’d been the quaesitor in that situation, I’d have screamed to anyone who would listen that Marlett was trying to get me to break the law. We’d have ended up either with me dead, or with Marlett behind bars before he could kidnap anyone. But clearly, I hadn’t had a problem with keeping her secret.

So where was my ethical line?

And maybe more importantly, could I justify being a . . . a deputized quaesitor? And how was I even in this situation? It was ridiculous.

Gideon tapped my forehead, right between my eyebrows, with his index finger, bringing me back to the present time and place. Grandma’s car, on the way to her house for food.. “Earth to Sage. We’re here. You want to get out of the car and go in for food, or hang out in the car?”

I batted his hand away and reached for my seat belt catch, shooting him a fake glare as Fluke crawled over me to get to the door faster. Serious about his brunch, my familiar.

“I was thinking,” I muttered to Gideon as Wayne opened the car door and Fluke shot out like a rocket, headed straight for where Beryl had the front door open, and my grandmother’s bulldog familiar Rufus was waiting, his stubby little tail wagging so hard his whole body twitched with the movement.

They barked joyfully, dancing around each other for a moment before heading off into the house. Toward the food, no doubt. Grandma had made the familiars’ places at the dining room table permanent in the last six months, so by the time we got to the dining room, I had no doubt they’d be sitting at the table waiting on us. It was ridiculous and not at all surprising, but Rufus had even better table manners than Fluke.

“Thinking about what?” Gideon asked, but his tone said he already knew the answer.

He was thinking of Quinn’s offer, of course.

We’d discussed it, and he hadn’t been surprised at all. He had been worried. He’d reminded me not to trust the Aureum even if I trusted Quinn and his intentions. But he hadn’t been angry at the idea as I’d half expected. He hadn’t asked me not to do it. He’d just listened and told me to be careful no matter what happened. No matter what I decided.

I wondered if he’d seen it coming so far before me that it was what he’d been talking about as we went to bed on the night he asked me to marry him. When he’d said that I should say yes if I wanted to.

I sighed. “You know what I’m thinking about.”

“Same thing you’ve been thinking about all week?” he asked, surprisingly playful, considering he couldn’t be thrilled about it, even if he was being incredibly accepting.

I leaned into him as we finished climbing out of the car and headed up the stairs into Grandma’s house. “Yeah. Sorry, I just . . . I don’t know what to do.”

“Do about what?” Grandma asked as she met us in the foyer, linking her arm through my free one and walking with us toward the dining room.

I bit my lip and stared at the herringbone pattern in the hardwood floor as we walked. I sort of wanted to talk to her about it. I thought I did, anyway. But after what we had all been through, a lot of it at the hands of the Aureum, I had a feeling she was going to be against it. Freddy too.

No, especially Freddy, since we all knew that the Aureum had a nasty habit of treating people with his magic specialty as objects.

Objects that they owned.

As we crossed the threshold into the dining room, Gideon took the initiative and decided for me. “Pike wants to make Sage a quaesitor.”

I half expected the room to erupt in shouting—and maybe even violence or Freddy leaving and slamming the door behind him—at the suggestion, but nothing happened. Okay, not nothing exactly, but the next best thing.

The current brunch group was, frankly, just about everyone important to me in the whole world. Fluke and Gideon, of course. We’d have brought Marron if he’d have fit in the room. But also Grandma and Rufus, Anson, Freddy, Beez, and Mal.

Sometime in the fall, Mal and Freddy had finally stopped just giving each other longing glances across the room and fallen into actual canoodling. I didn’t think it had gotten a lot further than that yet, if only because the longing looks were still happening as well, and frankly, longing might be an understatement.

When Gideon gave me a look like the ones Mal shot Freddy on the regular, we’d make an excuse to leave the room and meet up elsewhere as soon as possible. In a supply closet if we had to. Fortunately for Gideon and me, we lived together and slept in the same bed. It made finding a spot for an assignation a little easier.

Also, it probably meant they weren’t actually “assignations.”

Anyway, no one looked offended or frightened by the notion of Quinn asking me to work with him. Maybe Beez was a tiny bit annoyed, with her thoughtful narrowed eyes. Mal looked like the idea was as interesting as a discussion about the weather, and barely looked at us long enough to smile and then go back to their teabag. Freddy was feeding Flit a bit of bacon, and both were watching me with interest, not irritation.

Anson, unsurprisingly, was beaming. “That sounds like a wonderful idea, Sage.”

Gideon raised a brow at him, as unimpressed now as he’d been with Quinn the night we’d caught Emmert. “You think so?”

“Of course,” he confirmed, his smile not dimming for a second in the face of Gideon’s doubt. “You can’t fix the system from outside it. Why do you think I got involved in politics to begin with? You’ve got to dive in, change things with your own hands, your own influence.”

That made Gideon scowl, but he still didn’t say it was a bad idea. Just pulled my chair out and motioned for me to sit down.

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Seriously? You’re pulling my chair out now?”

“Why not? You’re stuck with me now.” He leaned in and gave me a quick peck on the lips before I sat down. “Gotta put up with me being weird.”

“Pretty sure I’m not completely stuck until after we’re married,” I countered, and that, more than the comment about Quinn asking me to be a quaesitor, got a reaction from everyone.

“Married?” Beez asked, leaning toward us. Her hands were braced on the table like she was going to jump and launch herself at me. I held up my hand with the ring on it, and she bounced in her seat like she’d just been told it was her birthday.

Mal and Freddy each raised a single eyebrow, looking weirdly identical down to their sheer plucked perfection. After a moment, Freddy sighed and pulled out his wallet, taking out a twenty and handing it to Mal. And then another, handing that one to Beez.

Beez bounced even harder as she stuffed her twenty into her bra with a grin. “Perfect timing, Gideon, if I do say so myself.”

Freddy muttered something about waiting one more damned week, but as he looked up at me, he gave a little wink. “When’s the wedding?” At my wide eyes, he burst into laughter.

Grandma clasped her hands and held them against her chest like this was the best, most precious news anyone had ever gotten. “This is wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy. Oh, they’ll need time to plan it, Freddy. At least a year, I should think.”

“About time,” Anson told Gideon with a bro nod as Gideon sat down in the chair directly opposite him.

Gideon was maybe the most smug person in the history of smugness. Like, he deserved to be the picture in the dictionary next to the word smug. He smiled at everyone and leaned back in his chair, waiting for Grandma to settle herself fully before grabbing his glass of orange juice and taking a swig. Finally, he turned to her. “I figured we’d ask your help with the details, since that’s more your speed than ours.”

Somehow, she was even more charmed. The look she gave Gideon, you’d have thought he was her grandson instead of me.

Ah well. She still loved me, even if Gideon was her favorite. I couldn’t blame her since he was my favorite too.

More importantly for the moment, no one had been shocked or angry or . . . anything about the notion of me joining the Aureum. Anything other than interested in the notion of me as a quaesitor. I’d half expected someone to point out how much I hated excitement, and how I wasn’t exactly Gideon, with the bulging muscles and ability to shoot a gun. Not that they’d have said any of it maliciously, but it was hard to ignore that I’d never been the guy who leapt head first into danger. Well, not on purpose. Not most days.

Instead, they’d all acknowledged it and moved on. Like it wasn’t just a strange option, a remote possibility, but a reasonable idea. An idea they thought I got to make the choice about.

“—At least two hundred people,” Iris was telling Gideon, who looked a little shellshocked, demanding my attention on the conversation instead of my musing.

I interrupted her, taking my life in my own hands. “Oh no, no way. We don’t even know a total of two hundred people, Grandma. We’re definitely not inviting two hundred strangers to the wedding.”

She pouted at me, and on my other side, Gideon put a hand on my thigh and squeezed. When I looked at him, there was a smile on his face.

Maybe . . . maybe I could do this. I was Sage, yeah, messy and clumsy and weird. But also, I was Sage McKinley, powerful arcane mage who could be a quaesitor and even tell the richest woman in Junction no. Once in a great while, and only when I truly needed to.

Telling Quinn yes might be easier than I thought. Definitely way easier than telling my grandmother no.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

F irst thing Monday, I had a meeting at the former coffee shop that involved a real estate agent and an exorbitant amount of money.

I was never telling Freddy that I’d basically only bought the shop so he would have the option to live in the apartment above it. I did think the whole building could use the settling effect of his lovely, calming magic, though.

That was the thing about death magic. People could call it that—death—all they wanted. But that didn’t make it bad or evil.

Beez had likened it to the death tarot card in a conversation once. It frustrated her to no end that when tarot was portrayed on television, someone always pulled the death card, and everyone was always terrified. Often, someone ended up physically dying. The actual card, apparently, didn’t have much to do with dying. It was about learning or growing or something like that.

Yeah, okay, so I’d only paid some attention to the rants. When she started talking about symbolism and metaphysical whatever, I sort of drifted off.

The point was, death magic was like that. It wasn’t about killing anyone, like some people thought. It was about the power in endings, and it was soft and comforting, and I loved it.

Sure, it could be dangerous, but that was true of most magic, and no one looked at forest mages cockeyed. Or social mages. Now there was a specialty that was practically made to be used unethically.

Anyway, yeah, we got the ball rolling on buying the coffee shop. I had a meeting with my property management agency to talk about how to deal with the shop itself, and I figured I was going to pay for a redecoration before I let anyone rent the place. A waste of money, maybe, but there was something cathartic about the idea of tearing down the cold, shiny decorations Lina Merton had built. She’d been the first person who tried to kill me, and now I was cutting her fingerprints out of the world.

I shook the real estate agent’s hand, and Fluke and I turned to head down the street, automatically going toward the bookstore, only pausing when we’d walked all the way down the block, standing across the street from the place I’d spent most of my life, looking in through the front window.

Freddy was there on the old burgundy sofa, showing Moore the scanner, probably walking him through his first ever inventory. At the counter, Beez had a few customers waiting on her. A line at ten in the morning on a Monday.

I used to spend my Mondays almost entirely alone in the store. I sure hadn’t needed employees back then. But the shop was teeming with people, wandering from shelf to shelf, more people than used to come into the store during an entire day.

Freddy, genius tech guy that he was, had even stocked some ereaders on a display at the counter, for people who weren’t interested in holding paper books in their hands.

I half expected to feel like I didn’t belong there anymore. Like the store had moved on without me, my family along with it, and be overwhelmed with a wave of sadness.

But nothing like that happened.

It was like coming home, and it always would be. Whether I worked there or not. Whether I worked for the Aureum or not. Even—and maybe especially—now that Beez and Freddy each owned a third of the store and it wasn’t solely mine. The bookstore and the people who worked there would always be home.

Freddy handed a clipboard over to Moore and patted him on the shoulder, then motioned over to the old mystery section. The sadist. Starting the guy on mysteries, the oldest, still largest, section in the store was just mean.

As he turned his head, his eyes snagged on me and held. After a moment, he rolled them and jerked his head like “get over here, jackass.” So I did.

Yeah, I checked the street before I jaywalked, not interested in a repeat of the near accident with the Miller family. Another legal line I was willing to trample. Absently, I wondered if Jordan jaywalked. If Quinn did.

“What are you doing here?” Freddy asked as I walked in, but his tone was light—amused, even. “Spot inspection to make sure we mere employees are working hard?”

I snorted, running my fingers over the glass display case of ereaders. “You know I used to spend most of my time here reading the new releases?”

Moore gave a fake gasp and pressed a hand to his chest. “For shame, Sage. How dare you read books?”

“I’ll have you know I was working for minimum wage,” I said, holding up my index finger and pointing it at him. “And walking home in the snow, uphill both ways.”

Beez scoffed, turning to give me the most unimpressed expression ever, right in the middle of ringing up a customer. “You live like a mile from here, there are no hills between here and your house, and it hasn’t snowed in Junction in twenty years. Even then it was maybe half an inch.”

I couldn’t hold back my grin at that. “I remember. You and I made the world’s grossest, dirtiest snowman in your backyard.”

“It was less than an inch of snow, and he was half mud. It wasn’t Frosty’s fault.” She scowled at me in fake affront, as though our poor long-melted snowman needed her defense.

Freddy was giving us both a little bemused smile, like he was thinking the same things I had a few moments before, while standing across the street. “I think I remember that snow. But of course, you two olds would remember better than me.”

Huffing as though offended, I went to join him on the sofa, as Fluke had the moment we’d walked in. Maybe I should replace it, since I wasn’t the one subjected to it every day anymore. It had a few pokey springs, so it wouldn’t be a terrible idea. I was the guy who still had my mother’s nineteen-eighties sofa at home though, so I clearly wasn’t into replacing things.

“Seriously, though, don’t you have a million things to do?” Freddy asked, his voice lowered so it wouldn’t carry through the store. “I swear, Sage, we can—”

“I’m going to do it.”

He squinted at me for a moment before his eyes went wide. “You . . . you mean agree to work for the Aureum?”

“No, I’m going to let Quinn deputize me for this investigation, until the Aureum gets off their asses and sends him help.” I drew myself up to my full, if not terribly impressive, height, and gave a decisive nod. “They’re going to have a lot of things to fix if they want me to stay on any longer than it takes to stop the Believers.”

“Good for you,” Beez said, coming around the counter to lay a hand on my shoulder, since she’d finished with her customers. “Make them work for it. You’re worth it and they need to acknowledge that.”

“You’d be saying that even if I wasn’t ridiculously powerful,” I pointed out.

“I would,” she agreed. “But you are, so not only am I right, but they know it.”

I glanced over at Freddy, to see if he was going to be the one to pop my growing ego with a pin, but he smiled at me. “Might as well take advantage of the position they’ve put you in and do good for others like Anson said.” We shared a look, and I knew he was thinking of our mutual acquaintance, Aliyah Almasi, who had been practically indentured to the Aureum since childhood. “But that’s not why you’re here. I mean, I don’t think you came here just to tell us you made a decision about it. Did you?”

It took me a moment to shake off my thoughts again, but no, there actually had been a reason we’d come. Well, to the neighborhood, if not the shop itself. Fluke, apparently excited to let Freddy know about our morning’s work, hopped down off the sofa and grabbed Freddy’s shirt cuff between his teeth, tugging him toward the front of the shop.

Freddy let Fluke pull him, but we all paused and looked at each other with trepidation as he got halfway to the front window.

I swallowed hard. “For what it’s worth, the bullet ward I put up after the shooting is still in place.”

Freddy blinked and stared at the replaced window, like maybe he could see the magic, but shook his head after a moment. “What are we looking at, Fluke?”

My familiar looked at me expectantly, so I indulged him. “The building the shooter was in,” I said, inclining my head in the right direction. “I’m buying it.”

Beez looked at me like I’d said I was investing in a rainbow and its pot of gold. “What? You hate that coffee shop. You were glad when it closed.”

“Ugh, me too,” Moore mumbled from his spot on the first mystery shelf. “Whenever I went there the owner would just watch me like a total creep.”

My stomach dropped at the very idea. Lina had been a serial murderer of low power mages, and Moore was a class three fire mage. She’d probably been assessing him as a potential victim. Beez was looking at the guy, her favorite former student, like she was worried Lina would come back and try it now, so clearly she remembered too. I reached out and squeezed her hand.

“I’m going to have it redecorated. I dunno, maybe some dark wood and homey lighting.”

“Starbucks,” Beez interrupted. “You’re describing a Starbucks.”

I shrugged, faux nonchalant. “I mean, if they wanted to rent it from me and put in a coffee shop, it wouldn’t bother me.”

“But you bought it,” Freddy said, leaning toward the window and squinting at the building. It was just like he’d looked for the spell, like maybe if he changed his perspective a little, he’d understand why I had done it.

I didn’t want to go for a rich asshole line like “I owned the rest of that block, so I figured why not?” so I went closer to the truth.

“The building has a terrible history for me. First Lina, then Randall Emmert hanging out in the apartment trying to shoot people.” To his eternal credit, Freddy flinched, his face scrunching up, but he didn’t take a step back. So I continued. “So I figured I’d buy it and make sure the only people allowed to be there would be people I trusted. I can find someone who wants to run a coffee shop to rent the downstairs easily enough. My accountant and property management agency think so, anyway. I suggested something other than a coffee shop, but they pointed out the place basically already has a fifteen-thousand dollar coffee maker.”

“And the apartment?” Beez asked knowingly, glancing between me and Freddy, who was still watching the building.

“I figured I’d rent it out. Maybe to someone who worked at the shop and was looking for an apartment.”

Finally, Freddy turned from the window. “You haven’t even found someone to rent the coffee shop yet, and you want to rent them the apartment in it too?”

Beez laughed and covered her face with her hands.

I smiled at my cousin and corrected him. “I was thinking someone who worked at the bookstore. Maybe someone who’s unwillingly living with his grandmother until he finds a decent apartment close enough to his job.”

Freddy’s eyes went wide, and he sucked in a breath, then his jaw clenched, and he turned away, back toward the window. For a second, I was afraid I’d done it wrong, and he was mad about my being presumptuous—because I definitely had been. I couldn’t fault him if he didn’t want what was essentially a ridiculously extravagant gift.

Then he reached up and wiped his eyes. When he spoke up, his voice cracked a bit. “As soon as I can manage it, I want a mortgage. I’m not going to spend my life living on your charity.”

“I hardly think a reasonable rent is charity, but also, I expected you’d want that. I’d be happy to sell it to you.”

He let his head fall forward, thunking lightly against the brand-new glass window, not turning back to look at us.

Beez, being Beez, managed to break the awkward moment. “You know you’re washing that glass, right?”

The store filled with laughter. From me, from Freddy, from Moore and Beez and even from a handful of customers. It was so much more alive than the bookstore had been for most of the time it had been a part of my life, and I decided it was a great improvement.

It was probably too many people for me, the massive introvert, but it was just right for the shop.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I  was going to have to buy a car.

It was a weird thought, but it only made sense. If I was going to work at the Aureum, I needed to be able to get there, and daily cabs weren’t a reasonable option. There wasn’t a bus route that went there. I borrowed Freddy’s car to drive down to the Aureum building to talk to Quinn that afternoon, and that wasn’t a reasonable thing for every day. Freddy needed his car.

Well, maybe Freddy needed his car. He’d need it less once he was living a block from the store, but if I knew my cousin like I thought I did, he wouldn’t get rid of it. Freddy loved the freedom of the thing. That was why it was a sporty convertible.

I suspected I was going to buy a sedan. Or maybe one of those boxy little SUVs that were all the rage, so we could get a trailer and take Marron with us places.

It was who we were, respectively. Freddy wanted freedom and fun, and I wanted common sense and stability. I was marrying Gideon, for goodness’ sake. He was like both of those things in human form.

Rose was sitting alone at the desk when I walked into the Aureum building, her fluffy red curls standing out like a beacon in the afternoon sun coming through the skylights in the lobby. She glanced over in my direction and smiled. “Quaesitor McKinley.”

My stride hitched, because of course it did.

I was sure Quinn hadn’t told her—there was no way he would have, since he couldn’t have known this was why I’d asked to stop by and see him. It was possibly confirmation of something I’d long suspected about Rose. She was, perhaps, a temporal mage. Her eccentricities made a lot of sense if she was struggling to tell the difference between past, present, and future, which some temporal mages did. Some, like Quinn’s husband, had clear visions. For some, things blended together, and they struggled to know what was happening in that moment, which people they could look in the eye and which ones wouldn’t see them.

I stopped and glanced at her name tag of the day. Cleo. A few weeks earlier it had been Melpomene, the Greek muse of tragedy. Now the muse of history. I felt as though there were significance I was missing, but that was often how temporal magic worked.

So instead of making a production of it or asking for information that wasn’t mine to demand, I inclined my head to her. “Rose. Good to see you.”

For the first time since we had met, she turned her head and made eye contact with me. A flicker of a smile crossed her face. “I’m glad I was Rose the day we met. It’s a good name. It’s my name for the current dominus too.”

That was true. I remembered hearing Anson call her that. I wondered if by “current,” she was referring to working with his predecessor, or if she was inferring about the person who would come after him. Again, not something to ask. I didn’t need to know, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. “I agree,” I said instead. “I’ll see you later.”

She nodded, just once. “You will.” And then she went back to staring into the space ahead of her.

Without another word, I headed back into the building, straight toward the horrible, dark quaesitors’ office. Fluke stuck by my side like he was glued to my jeans, liking the place no more than I did.

Quinn glanced up and gave us a distracted smile as we walked in, his head buried in a mound of paperwork. “Give me just a minute. I’m finishing a report.”

“Of course,” I agreed. I sat in the same chair as I had last time. Fluke looked at his chair, huffed a sigh, and gave a single, high hop that got him onto the cushion with minimal spinning or movement. He looked like it was the most tragic thing that had ever happened to him in his life, not playing with the chair. His shoulders were slumped, head hanging low. After a moment of the dramatic pose, he glanced over at me, clearly wanting to know if I was buying it. Or maybe whether I was still watching.

Before we could do anything else, Quinn dropped his pen with a sigh, grabbing our attention. “Sorry, didn’t mean to put you off. I’m just about a month behind on paperwork, and the regional office is harassing me about not turning in my reports.”

I blinked, staring at him for a moment before—“It’s a Believer. It has to be, if they’re trying to distract you from your work right now.”

He gave me a tight smile and nodded. “Yeah, I think so too. It sure would be convenient if I were buried in paperwork instead of working on this investigation, right?”

I made a face at the idea, but it didn’t shock me. When I’d suggested going public to David, he’d said whatever he thought would make me change my mind. Quinn was right. These rats liked hiding in the dark.

“I don’t think they get it, though,” he went on after a minute. “The regular cops are helping me because they know I don’t have enough backup inside the Aureum, and half these guys we’re arresting aren’t even mages anyway. This investigation isn’t disappearing now no matter what anyone does. Dominus Marsh told me to turn in a report or two a day and when they call to complain, tell them that my office is working at one third staff when we should be increasing our numbers instead, given the amount of magical crime in Junction. He’s got my back.”

“But you’re not sure where the orders to harass you are coming from.”

He lifted and spread his hands. “You see my issue. Won’t know for sure until someone in the regional office is implicated. Maybe not even then, since this thing just keeps growing, so there could be more than one.”

At my lifted brow, he pointed to the corner of his desk that had held files of arrests. But that . . . couldn’t be anymore. Could it? I flipped the top file. Emmert. But now the stack beneath it was enormous. I flipped through, estimating, since a real count would have taken time.

“Thirty-five?”

“Good guess. Thirty-three. Still no word on Emmert’s roommate, but everyone else is in a cell. The pile of crimes is adding up too because these bastards have gotten so arrogant. There’s evidence about other people like your mother.”

I flinched, trying not to think about lives destroyed and families torn apart by small-minded zealotry but unable to put it entirely out of my head. Who knew, maybe if my stepfather had never found the Believers, he never would have become a killer. Maybe he and my mother would still be together. Happy.

Nope. Not dwelling on that.

I shook my head and resituated myself in my chair. “Okay, I’m willing to try it.”

Quinn blinked, like this whole subject was a surprise, or maybe even like I was asking for something he didn’t know anything about. After a second, he dropped the file he’d picked up. “Wait, seriously?”

“Yup. Hit me. Except . . . this is temporary, right? I can’t be conscripted later based on this?”

He started shaking his head before I finished the question. “No, no way. Not unless it’s over my dead body. The regional office wasn’t expecting me to ask you, I’m sure. I don’t think conscripting you is what the Aureum wants anyway. They want you to want to be here. Probably in the dominus’s office, not the quaesitor’s.”

I pursed my lips at the thought, but after a moment, nodded. “Okay, then. Deputize me. If the investigation works out, and I’m actually useful, then we can talk to the regional office about what it will take to make me stick around.”

Quinn swallowed hard and nodded, but his face was glowing with a strange kind of excitement. “It’s not like this everywhere, you know,” he whispered to me. “Sterling and I went to Paris on our honeymoon. A lot of Europe thinks the way we treat some of our mages is abominable. Some of the heart of the International Aureum would absolutely love an excuse to clean house.”

“So you’re saying that when we get there—”

“Don’t throw softballs when you make your demands.”

“You got it,” I agreed. “Someday your husband and my cousin are going to do magic on Main Street in the middle of the day and no one’s going to blink an eye at it.”

“Damn right,” he agreed. “Now there’s this whole swearing in crap, but . . . I went through a college degree and year of training to have to put up with that nonsense. You’re being deputized, so how about we do it like this? Want to help me stop these Believer assholes?”

“I do,” I agreed with the seriousness of a man at his wedding.

He grinned at me, picked up his badge from where it was still sitting off to one side of his desk and tossed it to me. “I now pronounce you a temporary quaesitor. Let’s catch some bad guys.”

I pulled out a pen and poked the giant pile of papers in front of him. “Let’s do some paperwork so you’ll have things to turn in when you get harassed. Then we’ll catch the Believers. I’m not having them distract you when we’re busy.”

“Fair enough,” he agreed. He handed me two pages. “That’s a finished report, and that’s a blank one. Think you can fill out the basics from my notes?”

I glanced over at his tight, square, easy to read handwriting. “Yup. Let’s do it.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I ’d been a deputized quaesitor for three days, and most of that time had been spent going over paperwork and discussing the scope of my temporary job.

No, I didn’t need to carry a gun. Thank goodness.

Yes, I could technically arrest someone. Yikes.

Shouldn’t the ability to do that require, like, qualifications? A college degree? An immense amount of training? The Aureum’s slim file on me should not be enough information to say it was okay for me to carry handcuffs and ruin people’s days.

Sure, I wasn’t going to go around being an asshole, but did they know that? They were taking a lot on Quinn’s word that I was okay. And Quinn? Well, Quinn’s husband could sometimes see the future, so maybe Quinn knew what he was about.

With my help and organization, we shot through all of Quinn’s delinquent paperwork—if there was one thing I was excellent at, it was paperwork. Filing reports was almost mindless, copying notes into forms and then—get this—faxing the forms to the regional office.

With a fax machine. It made that horrible sound like a dial-up modem in the nineties, screeching like it was sacrificing innocent calculators to the eldritch gods of technology in exchange for performing its magic feat that I could have done in a hundredth of the time with my phone and an email address.

It had to scan every page, inch by excruciatingly slow inch, all the while holding a phone line open like we were in the dark ages.

Fortunately, once we got to that point, we could just leave the thing scanning and slowly, oh so slowly, sending, and go do some more useful work. It was sort of like finishing a report and sending them as an email, if emails took approximately three hours to send.

Just as the machine finished with the first page, number one of sixty-seven, the paper dropping out of the machine and onto the desk in front of it, Quinn’s phone rang. His shoulders slumped forward, but not in annoyance—it was definitely relief.

He didn’t even glance at the caller ID as he whipped out his phone and answered. “Yello?”

The exhaustion in his face was etched deep, in the dark bags under his eyes and the way his fine smile lines looked like they were dragging the corners of his lips down. But the second the person on the phone started talking, he perked up like he’d downed a triple red eye or taken a nap.

He turned to me, a smile blooming on his face. “Want to go watch the cops interrogate Emmert’s roommate?”

I gave him my best “bitch, please,” expression, grabbing my jacket off the chair and turning toward the door. “Um, of course I do?”

Fluke perked up from where he’d been napping in his chair, giving a yawn and then standing up and stretching like a cat before hopping down and looking at us expectantly.

Quinn paused, taking a deep breath and looking between the two of us for a moment before smiling. “It’s really good to have a partner again.”

I didn’t think the quaesitors in Junction had ever been partnered, what with there being three of them, so it must have been years since he’d had one. I’d never had a partner at work—Beez and Freddy had barely started before I had become more of an inconvenience at the shop than a help. It was kind of nice, being counted on.

It would be too easy to get used to . . . but Quinn had been right. If the Aureum wanted me to stay after the investigation, they were going to have to change some big things.

APPARENTLY, interrogation rooms were my new thing.

I’d never been in one in thirty years of life, and now suddenly they were everywhere.

The room they had this guy in was a lot different from either of the ones I’d been in. Thank goodness. We were back at police headquarters, in another room off the same hallway as the room where I’d given my statement. This one was almost like something I’d seen on TV, complete with two-way mirror. Quinn led me right into the darkened room behind the mirror where we could watch the proceedings.

The guy, whose name was Jim or James or something like that, was shackled to the table.

“Is he actually under arrest?” I whispered to Quinn, who nodded.

“Conspiracy to commit murder, among other things. Emmert says Jimmy here paid him to kill you. Given what we know, that’s why we’re hoping this asshole leads to Marlett, since there’s definitely a connection. We still don’t have proof connecting the elder Marlett to the Believers we’re picking up. Meanwhile they’re rolling on each other like two-bit thugs in the least loyal gang ever. Guess they never expected to get caught, so they didn’t bother stressing the family loyalty like most gangs do.”

“Can’t say I’m sorry to hear it.” I tried to keep my voice low, on the assumption that they might be able to hear me. I couldn’t tell how sound flowed between the two rooms yet, since James—Jimmy?—was sitting in there alone.

On our side of the glass, the room was mostly empty but for us and the camera that was there to record the interrogation. Well, and one chair. Fluke was sitting on it so he was high enough to see through the mirror. He, too, was trying to be quiet, but he had his teeth bared in a snarl at the man, like he wanted to take a bite out of him. Hard to blame him, even though I hadn’t considered biting my enemies as revenge since I was a toddler.

Detective Torres—yeah, Ashley, but it was hard to think of her that way sometimes when she was being a terrifying badass detective with the best swagger I’d ever seen—walked into the room with us, a smile on her face. She, too, kept her voice low when she spoke. “Sage, you want to do me a favor?”

“Of course.” The detective had proven to be rational and ethical so far, so I didn’t hesitate to agree.

She waved me to follow her into the hall and motioned to the door to the interrogation room part of the setup. “I don’t need you to do anything, just come in there with me. Watch the guy like you’re ready to reach out and lay your evil magic all over him.”

“Isn’t that, like, witness intimidation?”

She gave a so-so hand motion. “Not really. You’re not going to say anything. You’re definitely not going to hurt him. You’re mostly going to stand there. I’m not trying to squeeze a confession out of him, I want to see his reaction to your presence.”

Ahh. She wanted to see the wacky in action. See someone being intimidated by one of the most benign, inoffensive guys she’d ever met. At least, I assumed I was that. I was never going to come off as an action hero. Just a guy with a fox.

Speaking of which—“I assume you don’t want Fluke?”

She snorted and shook her head. “I don’t think he could manage to keep his cool as well as you.” She crouched down next to him and held out a hand for his approval. “Not that I blame you or anything, but just Sage for now. I promise I’ll protect him. Heck, this guy isn’t even a mage, plus he’s shackled to the table.”

Fluke gave an annoyed huff at that, but still reached out and sniffed her hand before giving it a half-approving lick. Then he gave me a glare, as though preemptively blaming me for any trouble I managed to get into.

It was fair.

So I followed Detective Torres into the room and moved to plant myself in the corner. Behind Torres, so I wouldn’t seem threatening, but taking care not to block the camera behind the mirror.

Instantly, the feel of the room changed. It had been charged and tense before, but the moment the guy’s gaze landed on me, he jerked back in shock, his eyes going wide. “What the fuck?”

“Is there a problem, Mr. Christopher?” Torres asked, so cool and smooth I didn’t think butter would have melted in her mouth.

“Is there—Are you fucking kidding me? Get that thing away from me!” He leaned back in his chair like maybe I’d jump on him. Or grow tentacles and eat him.

I stifled a yawn and blinked over at Torres, who glanced at me and then back at him. “Do you mean Quaesitor McKinley?”

“Qua—He’s not a quaesitor, lady, he’s a monster. You’d stay away from him too if you have half a brain.”

Ashley Torres was very good at her job. She didn’t even react, just continued to stare at him for a moment. Then she shook her head and started looking through the folder she’d brought with her.

“Listen to me,” the guy insisted, panic starting to creep into his voice, making me want to run away as much as I knew he wanted to be away from me. “That thing is a monster. He’d just as soon kill us all.”

She turned slightly to look at me, and gave me a nod, then jerked her chin in the direction of the door. Thank goodness. I rushed out of there, taking a moment to stop and breathe in the hallway before returning to the darkened room on the other side of the mirror with Fluke.

Quinn was waiting for me, looking concerned. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just . . .”

He waved away my explanation and reached out to squeeze my shoulder. “No need. Can’t be nice to see people who’ve prejudged you based on bullshit. He’s got no leg to stand on anymore if he wants to keep claiming he’s not a Believer.”

“—don’t get it,” the guy was telling Torres on the other side of the glass, the words tumbling out of him like water over a flooding dam. “They consort with demons. Bobby was supposed to kill the thing, keep it from hurting anyone else. That’s why it murdered him.”

Ashley held up the file and tapped it. “We have a signed statement from Quaesitor Jordan Maines to the effect that she killed Robert Marlett Junior in order to keep him from murdering an innocent civilian.”

“He ain’t innocent,” the man said, his tone pleading. “You have to understand, he’s a witch.”

“Ah yes,” she agreed. “And you think you’re in the middle of some kind of holy war where you need to kill people like Quaesitor McKinley. People you arbitrarily designate as witches.”

“It’s not—We’re”—he made a sound of frustration, jerking against his bonds before trying again—“We’re trying to protect people from murderers. Just like you.”

Her expression went from wintery to downright arctic at the comparison, her eyes narrowing into dangerous slits. “You are a civilian, Mr. Christopher. You don’t get to decide what constitutes justice. You are nothing like me or any other decent peace officer, nor are you a judge, jury, or executioner, though you seem to think yourself allowed to act as all of the above.”

“No, no, it’s not like that at all. We’re saving people.” His eyes were beseeching. The guy thought she was going to buy into it. What degree of self-delusion even was that?

Torres was entirely unimpressed. She dropped the folder on the table and gave him a deadpan expression. “You’re a member of a dangerous cult who chooses your murder victims based on their magical specialty. Now, we know that you were working with Robert Marlett Junior in his plot to murder Mr. McKinley the year before last. Would you like to tell us who asked you to hire someone to kill him this time, or will you be taking personal responsibility for it?”

His mouth snapped shut so hard that his teeth clacked, and at his wince, I worried maybe he’d broken one. Or maybe worried was the wrong word, since I wasn’t going to be too bothered either way.

He clammed up and demanded a lawyer, unwilling to implicate Marlett Senior, which was frustrating. On the other hand, he’d admitted so much, right there on film. It was exactly what Quinn had been talking about: dragging the rats into the light. They hated the exposure, and under any kind of inspection, their ridiculous ideas about witchcraft and evil didn’t hold up. The Believers were disintegrating under the disinfecting power of daylight.

Next to me, Quinn gave a wicked grin. It made him look like a teenager, innocent and joyous, but I had a feeling his smile wasn’t quite either of those things. “He’s not gonna tell, but you know what?”

“What?”

“He just admitted Marlett Junior was an attempted murderer. Corroborates your and Jordan’s stories perfectly.” That was true enough. It wasn’t going to be the end of the situation, but it was another piece of evidence damning the dead man. Quinn turned to me, still smiling. “He’s not fingering Marlett Senior, but he connected himself to the Marletts, and he’s swearing that he’s not responsible for the attempted murder.”

I blinked. “So suspect number one just became Marlett.”

He winked at me and shot me dual finger guns. “You got it partner. Now how do you feel about stakeouts?”

“That depends, can we bring snacks?”

“Hell yes we can.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

S takeouts are exactly like they look in the movies and on TV. Only with less chasing bad guys and more sitting around eating pretzels. And beef jerky. And chocolate.

What? I eat when I’m bored.

We were on the second night of sitting around doing nothing, staring at the dark Marlett house. We had yet to see a single thing. Marlett hadn’t even come to the window, for fuck’s sake, though his lawyer had visited that afternoon, letting himself in the front and staying an hour.

“You’re definitely right,” Quinn told me, stuffing another salt and vinegar potato chip in his mouth. “The old man’s barely got enough money to be paying the taxes on his property. He’s using Medicare to cover his doctor visits and drawing social security to pay for the basics. He could sell the property for at least five million, but he doesn’t.”

“Pride,” I answered, taking a handful of chips when Quinn held the bag out in my direction. I split them between myself and Fluke one at a time. “The house has been in his family for like, three generations, not including his son. He thinks it’s important.”

Quinn shook his head, staring at the crumbling facade of the mansion. “I don’t get rich people. He could be living like a king if he just sold the place and moved into one of those assisted living apartments.”

“I’m telling you, it’s pride. I’ve met these people. Well, not him specifically, but tons of people just like him. They’re my grandmother’s whole circle of friends, and appearances are way more important than reality.” Fluke gave a chuff, his form of exasperated agreement, while crunching into a new chip. When he paused mid-chew, I turned to make sure he wasn’t choking, but he definitely wasn’t.

I turned back toward the house, scanning the area but seeing nothing out of place. No lights on. No movement in any of the windows that I could see. No movement in the dead garden.

Still, Fluke was staring at something, so I started to reach for the convergence, to use the same night vision spell I’d used when Gideon had seen Emmert in his car, but Fluke stopped me with a paw on my hand.

He reached out and did his little transference thing, focusing in on the tiniest movement, right next to the ground near the side of the house.

It was a basement window. I leaned forward when Fluke let go, scanning the ground and finding exactly what Fluke had seen. A basement window, sitting open. The movement was slow, deliberate, and close to the ground, but it was almost certainly a human being.

For a fraction of a second I thought maybe someone was trying to break into the house, which seemed like a weird choice. The place didn’t look like it was going to have great stuff to steal. It looked like it was months from being condemned.

But it wasn’t that. The movement wasn’t slipping into the window, inside the house and to cause who knew what kind of trouble. It was moving away from the house.

Maybe they’d already broken in, whoever they were, and were making a getaway. That also seemed odd, but it couldn’t be Marlett himself, sneaking out of his house in the night. Everything we’d seen suggested his use of the wheelchair wasn’t temporary or part-time, but permanent and complete.

This figure was moving slow and cautious, favoring one side as though injured, but it wasn’t moving like someone who never walked.

“Fuck,” Quinn whispered next to me. “I’d feel a lot better about this if we could call for backup.”

“Cops?” I asked.

He looked a little uncertain but shook his head. “Whoever this is, they could be a mage. Marlett is one. So’s the lawyer, I think. I wouldn’t call non-mages in to deal with magic. It’s my job.”

“Our job,” I corrected. “It’s probably not procedure, but I could get us backup.”

“Jordan? She wouldn’t come. Not with how things are now.”

“Gideon,” I corrected. “He’d come even if he was in Jordan’s position right now.” There wasn’t a doubt in my mind. Gideon would put my safety above any sense of professionality. The same as I would for him. The same, I suspected, as Quinn would for his own husband.

Without missing a beat, he nodded back. “Call him. I’m going to come around behind, see if I can flush them this way. If you could stop them from slipping away, I”—he looked over and met my eye—“I didn’t ask you to do this because I wanted to put you in danger. If you don’t want to get in the middle, you can stay in the car.”

I scoffed and waved him away. “Go flush them out. I’ve got your back.”

I dialed Gideon as Quinn let the car door close, ever so softly, behind himself.

“ ’Sup?” Gideon mumbled into the phone after just one ring.

“Hi, so I know this isn’t your job, but we’re at Marlett’s house—”

“The hell?” he interrupted, sounding entirely awake all of a sudden.

“Stakeout,” I answered quickly, and got back to the point. “Anyway, someone’s sneaking out of the house, and it’s just me and Quinn and Fluke, so I said I was going to call you for backup. I know you didn’t agree to this, and you don’t have to—”

“We’ll be right there,” Gideon answered. The click of the line disconnecting might have been a bad sign, or just a sign that he didn’t want to try to talk to me while dressing and hurrying out. Or heck, maybe just that he didn’t want me distracted trying to talk to him while I was maybe in danger.

Shit. Danger. There was no way I was going to leave Quinn dangling in the wind. He was my partner, after all. So I slid out of the car, leaving the door open long enough for Fluke to follow me, then closed it and crept forward.

Fluke had stopped me from using magic before, and for some reason, I stuck with that. I didn’t know if he’d had a rationale or if he was simply exercising caution, but I trusted his instincts.

I scanned the area for where the movement might have gone, and when I found nothing, I turned to Fluke, hoping his superior eyes could make out wherever the person was headed. Sure enough, he was zeroed in, focused like a laser beam, headed toward the garden’s side gate.

I came around beside him, both of us skirting around withered hedges on crumbling paving stones. I tried to stay low so that the moon wouldn’t give away my position, but I sure could have used that quaesitor training for this, assuming they had some kind of . . . I didn’t know, was action hero training a real thing?

My foot clipped the edge of a paver, and I almost went face down in the dirt, barely catching myself on my hands, which scraped painfully against the rough cement.

Falling down saved my life, because a second later, a flash of fire filled the space above me, right where my whole freaking body had been a few seconds earlier.

“Sage!” Quinn’s voice shouted from the other side of the hedge, followed by another gout of flame.

He’d been right about not calling in the cops. Not surprising, but good experience for me if I was going to do this quaesitor thing. Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight, and don’t bring cops to a magic fight.

Fire, huh? Okay, I could handle that. My house had been warded for fire so heavily that I suspected it could survive an actual bombing intact. I reached into the convergence and pulled, remembering the shape of fire wards and twining them together, then throwing them in a sort of . . . dome over the direction the spells were coming from.

A second later, something too familiar came back at me: a single hissed word in a smooth voice, and it made my blood run cold. Not the word, since I didn’t know what the hell it meant. No, the voice itself.

A voice I would never forget. A voice I thought I’d never hear again.

I pushed up, calling flame to my hand to light up the dark corner of the garden we were in, and for the first time in six months . . . or a hundred and fifty years . . . I looked into the face of Rene Alarie, the faux count who had killed Gideon in his first life. Who had kidnapped and threatened Charity, Gideon’s wife. Who had tried to kill me.

He looked even more like a zombie than the last time I’d seen him: his skin was gray even in the gold firelight I’d produced, and it was hanging in folds. Not like he was getting older and his skin wasn’t so tight anymore, but like it was literally rotting off his body. The tip of his nose was blackened and looked as though it was starting to crumble like the paving stones beneath my feet.

If he hadn’t been the subject of so many of my nightmares in the last six months, he would have been unrecognizable as the smooth, fashionable count we had met in the eighteen-sixties.

He bared his blackened teeth at me as he drew magic into his palms, not forming it into anything but leaving it in its raw form, then loosing it in my direction.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I  let my whole body drop back to the ground to avoid the blob of magic, barely keeping my chin from smacking the stone in front of me. The stone beneath me was cutting the gouges on my palms even deeper, but I couldn’t let the pain distract me.

Every second of hesitation was a second that could kill me.

The magic hit somewhere behind me and made a noise like a grenade in a movie. A second later, I was showered in chips of concrete and clods of dirt.

Dammit, what was I going to do?

Alarie had almost killed me last time we’d come against each other. He was a lot older than me, more experienced, and rather powerful in his own right.

A powerful arcane mage, unfortunately, so he had the same magical options available to him as I did. The real problem was that he knew more about those options. Assuming he hadn’t rediscovered time travel and come forward for some reason, the man was over two hundred years old. Maybe closer to three hundred.

But…

I’d been so convinced he was dying when we’d left him in eighteen-sixty-nine. He’d looked like death even then, and I’d been so sure he had minutes of life left. Certainly not a hundred and fifty years.

“You,” Alarie hissed again, spittle flying from his dry, cracked lips with the force of his anger. Then he let out a string of French I couldn’t have hoped to follow, even if I’d taken French in high school instead of Spanish.

The wards, my brain told me, breaking through my panic. I’d warded the house for everything from fire to sound to bullets, and I could do it easily. I recreated them every once in a while when they weakened. I knew the shape of them. I could ward against anything.

All I needed was a second to recognize what I was protecting against, and it was a cinch. In the past, Alarie’s big trick had been the bright rainbow of body magic and stealing the life force of his opponents. I hadn’t ever made wards against it, but I could picture in my mind how they would look. On the other hand, it might be easier to beat that spell the way I had before.

I’d been at a loss for how to stop him at first, but instead of stopping his spell I’d fed him death magic. It had started the transformation that—well, it was possible his current state was the result of something else, but I didn’t think so. This horror that stood before me . . . I had done this. I had made Alarie into this man trapped in the body of a rotting corpse.

It certainly explained why he seemed to be cursing at me in French.

“You never met Sage’s father.” Quinn’s vaguely amused voice came from behind Alarie, and I breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t been hit by the second fireball. I hadn’t thought he had, but it was good to have confirmation. “But from what I’ve heard about him, I think that’s probably a reasonable assessment.”

“Should I ask?” I called, hoping it would distract Alarie as I reached for the convergence.

I didn’t use my hands, or even move them, trying to play stage magician—don’t look at what I’m doing, look where I’m pointing.

Alarie was experienced and smart, but a lot of people automatically thought all magic was controlled with the hands, so they ignored when the mage simply called on the magic without the movements. It was a trick I’d learned from my grandmother, who was a badass earth mage who could move mountains without so much as wiggling her nose.

Quinn downright cackled. “I’ll admit my French is only passable, but I seem to remember Jordan saying your father was just the kind of guy who would abuse his goats that way.”

Oh jeez. Well, my father had been an asshole. I didn’t think he’d ever even seen a goat in his life, but I was also hard pressed to get offended on his behalf. Plus this wasn’t about my actual father. It was about distracting the monster who wanted us dead.

“I mean, it would explain all the longing glances,” I threw back, pretending to consider. “Also, why he never married.”

Alarie snarled and yanked at the convergence, the magic snapping against his hands with the demanding way he clutched at it. I could almost feel Gideon’s disdain, hear him sigh and say to “try again with a little finesse,” even though he wasn’t anywhere near us.

How many times had he told me that the magic was my ally, not my servant? Apparently Alarie hadn’t learned that lesson.

He spun the end of the magic he’d grabbed into a frenzy with something that looked like a combination of fire and air. Did the jackass want to start a wildfire right near one of the biggest forests in California? Sure, it was only spring, but it had already been warm and dry, so I didn’t doubt it could be bad if he managed it.

Maybe that was the goal, distract us with a fire that needed controlling.

As quickly as possible, I considered my options against fire.

Weather magic was tricky at best, and water couldn’t be summoned out of thin air—matter was matter, and while I could call up water from within the ground, I couldn’t make it exist where there was none.

It didn’t take much consideration to think of the pictures I’d seen. The Marlett home was a veritable desert, as shown by the desiccated shrubs and brown grass. Except that as I touched the magic that surrounded me, feeling for the water, I realized that wasn’t the problem.

The Marlett mansion had the same underlying water as any other property in the area. The plants should be flourishing just like the neighbor’s plants.

But death lived there.

Death, in the form of one Rene Alarie, who oozed something awful and dark into the surrounding air. Into the magic.

Oh hells. Had I done this? Made Alarie into a walking abattoir that tainted everything around him? Was his very presence the reason that the Marlett mansion was crumbling down around Marlett Senior’s shoulders?

Alarie finished ripping at the magic, balling it up in his hands like a wad of dough and hurling it not at me, but over his shoulder at Quinn. He didn’t turn to look, to aim. No, instead he let go gradually, making the spell sweep in a wide arc, trying to set literally everything behind himself ablaze.

I breathed in, tugging at the convergence, feeling the cool mist of water that was trapped beneath the ground as I pulled it up, sending it to crash against Alarie’s firestorm.

Part of me screamed that it was too little—that I needed to do as Alarie was doing, grab and shove and force the magic into the form I wanted. Needed to tear his spell apart with my own magic.

But no. Nature didn’t want the fire Alarie was trying to make, and all I needed to do was give it another choice. He had no fuel for the flames but his own magic, and his ability to draw on the convergence was limited. If it weren’t, he’d have killed me the first time we had fought.

Breathe.

The fire hissed and spat against the sheet of water droplets I’d pulled up, turning them to steam in an instant, but I stilled them in place, willing them to slow their movement—down to the molecular level. For a second force met force and held, the fire crackling against water that was suddenly icy cold, turning it into steam again and again as I held it still.

But then the fire was spent, snuffing out with a hiss, and I let the water drop harmlessly back to the ground.

“Fuck me,” Quinn whispered, and I could see him outlined in moonlight now, standing on the opposite side of Alarie from me. He met my eye, his own gaze filled with shock. “He’s not a fire mage.”

“No,” I agreed. I didn’t drop my hold on the magic, just started . . . weaving. Weaving every ward I could think of, making a ring around Alarie, and around and around, in different forms and different magics. It took me a moment to find my voice again as I worked. “Quinn, this is Rene Alarie. Pretty sure that’s not his real name, but he’s been using it a while. He’s a French arcane mage born in the eighteenth century, who has survived by using a modified form of body magic to steal people’s life force.”

Quinn swallowed hard, avoiding looking at Alarie. “Looks like it hasn’t worked too well.”

Alarie hissed like a cat, turning not to Quinn, but to me. “You.”

“You said that already. Repeatedly.”

“This is your fault. I”—he stopped to suck in a breath then drew himself up, glaring at me with hatred in his eyes. Once again, he bared his rotting teeth in a snarl. “What you did could not be fixed. I need more . . . more life. That worm found me, held me, helpless, because I can no longer feed myself properly.”

Worm? Marlett, maybe? Hell, if Alarie had been their introduction to arcane mages, it was a little harder to blame the Believers for hating us. Harder, but not impossible. There were mages—and in fact non-magical people—of all kinds who were both good and bad. An entire group couldn’t be judged on one person, no matter how awful he was.

“So they’ve been holding you here? How long? The whole time? A hundred and fifty years? Feeding you crumbs to keep you alive and what? Demanding information?” It pained me to think that Alarie knowing who I was might have caused so much evil. Maybe he’d been the one to point the Believers at my family. My mother.

He waved his hand at me like he was a king dismissing an unruly subject, but that was offset by his elbow joint making an ominous wet cracking noise. He winced at it and reached over to . . . what, slide it back in place? I shuddered at the noise it made, whatever the hell it was.

“Your fault,” he hissed again. “I followed you here, but before I could find you, they found me.”

Followed—oh. Oh thank goodness. He meant through time. He’d followed us straight from eighteen sixty-nine to the present day. Or, well, to six months ago.

That took away the whole “the Believers met a gross evil zombie arcane mage and that set them on this path” thing, but I was fine with that. I actually did hate the idea of anyone being tortured for a hundred and fifty years, even Alarie. The least they could have offered was a quick death.

“So you came to kill me,” I said, drawing the conversation back to the purpose. “And the bad guys caught you. You made these bad guys, for the record. They’re your Believer buddies. I still don’t know why the hell you thought that was a good idea, turning people against your own magical specialty.”

He bared his teeth again, glancing away, like he knew I was right but didn’t want to admit it. He’d started Jonathon McKinley down this path, convincing him that arcane magic was evil and wrong. Who knew how many others he’d manipulated into the same ridiculous view?

He’d caused these deaths. He could deal with it for a minute the way I’d been dealing with it since I was twelve. Though it wasn’t likely he would try. At least he had faced the consequences himself, but that would be all he cared about. Not the murders, only his own torture.

When he turned back to me, he’d clearly managed to wipe away anything he felt about his past mistakes. He once again yanked at the convergence from inside the circle of wards I’d been steadily building around him the whole time we’d been talking. He slashed at the wards, cutting and thrashing and clawing with every bit of magic he could tear free of the convergence. Strands of my own wards snapped back at me, like rubber bands stretched past their breaking point, pinpricks of pain wherever they hit me, welts and cuts springing up where I could see them on my arms.

“It was supposed to cull irritating little upstart competitors like you. And now, if I don’t end you, they will,” he told me, meeting my eye as he suddenly stopped cutting, breathing hard and glaring. I didn’t think for a second that he’d given up, but there was something like defeat on his face.

Something that didn’t make me feel better at all.

He started pulling at the convergence again, not using the magic to saw away at the wards, but just pulling it to him, more and more and more, too much. More than I thought he could have ever handled. More than the amount that had incinerated Lina Merton and left her a pile of ash in my front hall.

“It doesn’t matter anymore. That worm has the book by now. The answers I needed. There’s no point. There’s only you. You and your fucking fox and your Antoine.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He wasn’t looking at anything. Just staring off into space, wild-eyed, as he pulled more and more magic to him.

The asshole still thought Gideon was his own grandfather. He had lost his mind, and he’d lost this fight. And he was drawing more magic than even I wanted to try to manipulate at once.

I met Quinn’s eye over Alarie’s shoulder and mouthed one word. “Run.”

Quinn didn’t hesitate for a millisecond, but he didn’t run away, either. No, he dodged past Alarie toward me, grabbing me and tossing me over his shoulder, barely breaking stride as he did it. I’d definitely been right about him being an athlete of some kind, but maybe it had been football.

“Gideon’s still not his own grandfather, asshole,” I called out to Alarie as Quinn ran.

I only had a few seconds, but I had a good idea of how to best mitigate some of the damage he was about to do. Fire wards. I twisted and wove them around Alarie’s waist, down his legs, up his torso. Just layer upon layer of fire wards in a column around him.

Quinn had just reached his car, dropping me back on my feet, when Alarie lost control of the magic. I skidded backward a pace, landing on my ass on the hood of Quinn’s car and continuing to weave as fast and hard as I could. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the horror of what was happening.

Quinn and Fluke both spun to look back when the heat exploded from the garden.

A pillar of flames shot up into the sky where Alarie had stood, all the way up into the cloud cover like a tiny atomic bomb. The heat of it, even from a hundred feet away, was like standing with your face next to a furnace. Some of the dead bushes charred and smoldered just from the heat, but miraculously, not a wisp of flame escaped my warding.

That, naturally, was the moment Gideon rode up on Marron. He looked at the still exploding firebomb that had once been a man—perhaps one who’d been a friend of his grandfather—and then back at me, dismissing it. Fluke and I weren’t in danger, so it didn’t matter. He slid off Marron’s back like it was a simple move and pulled me into his arms. “You okay?”

“Fine,” I managed to whisper back, only then realizing that I was panting for breath. I’d been working so hard, so fast, to build the layers of wards to hold in the firestorm that I hadn’t realized how much effort it was taking. I let myself collapse against his chest. “It was Alarie. He followed us here from the past.”

“So,” Quinn asked, his voice weirdly chipper for a man who’d just been in a literal firefight in the middle of the night while on a stakeout. “What book was he talking about? And who do we think ‘the worm’ is?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

W e spent an hour discussing what book he might have been referring to but came up mostly empty. It was possible he’d wanted the Latin book with the time travel spell so he could go back to his own time, but that didn’t feel right.

What had he said about anything other than his failing health? That if he didn’t kill me “they” would, and something about “that worm” having “the book” and the answers Alarie needed. Answers to fix himself, probably.

There were a few books it might have been, but he’d been too damned vague for us to be sure. I doubted he meant just another of Jonathon’s arrogant journals, or any of the books we’d researched before. Those had mostly been about Freddy’s magic, and I didn’t imagine Alarie thought he was going to be able to control my cousin anymore. He’d tried that once and it hadn’t ended well for him.

Fortunately for us, I wasn’t just amateur sleuthing now. We had an actual legal entity backing us, and when we came up empty on the way back, Quinn turned to the Aureum’s resources. Or rather, police resources.

Quinn and I went to police headquarters, while Gideon, after reassuring himself that I was fine and Alarie was dead, had taken Marron home. And boy had Alarie been dead. There had barely been any sign he’d ever lived, but for a few bits of charred, melted metal that remained from the clothes he’d been wearing. Everything else, every bit of bone, had burned to ash in the conflagration. We filed a report with the police on what had happened, and I filled out another for the Aureum, and then we’d gotten to work researching what book Alarie might have been talking about.

Five hours later, at the ass-crack of dawn and downing my third cup of coffee in a row, Quinn came marching back to where I was sitting in the chair across from Ashley’s desk. The woman herself wasn’t there, but the people who’d been on duty overnight had been both helpful and generous.

Possibly because I was a big scary mage, sure, but either way, they’d shared the coffee, so I wasn’t complaining.

Quinn threw himself into Ashley’s chair and propped his feet up on her desk. I raised a brow at him, since I thought it was possible she’d kill him if she caught him like that, but he ignored me. “I’m forwarding this email to you now. The phone company came through with the records first, but I doubt the ISP will be far behind. Now we just have to go through everything Marlett has looked at on his computer in the last month.”

I winced at the notion. Oh man, I hoped no one had ever looked at that for me. All the ridiculous things I’d googled? All the porn I’d watched?

I was going to find out what kind of porn Robert Marlett Senior liked. Gross.

As it turned out, the porn accessed on the old man’s connection had been nonexistent—thank goodness. The weird occult conspiracy websites were many and varied, as well as nutty non-magical conspiracy websites—frankly, if it didn’t make sense, Marlett seemed to be into it.

I went for yet another link with the word “occult” in it, expecting an eye-searing color combination on a homemade banner proclaiming something ridiculous, but was confronted with something much worse.

Junction’s high society auction house, Jasper’s, was having a special sale of rare occult books. A hundred of the damned things, all from different eras and belief systems, price points starting in the thousands.

Sighing like a man who was probably about to spend a ton of money on a lot of books he couldn’t even read, I held my phone out to Quinn. “Found it, maybe. It’s about books, at least, which is a first.”

He took the phone, scrolling through for a moment before giving up on my small screen and turning to bring the auction site up on Ashley’s computer. We scrolled through the website for an hour, looking at one book after another. Only about ten percent were in English, and most of those were ones I recognized directly from my grandmother’s library.

Even Fluke had given up pretending interest at some point, curled up in the cubby beneath the desk and giving off light snores.

I took another coffee break, and as I was about to leave, a guy brought in a box of donuts and offered me one. I gave him the best smile I could muster on literally no sleep and saluted him with my coffee as I grabbed a sugar bomb. “You’re a prince among men, good sir.”

He chuckled as I left him alone in the break room, heading back to Quinn, who was slumped against Ashley’s desk, head on his arms like he was a kindergartener hoping for nap time.

“Fresh donuts in the break room,” I offered.

He looked at the one in my hand as though maybe it would be easier to snatch it than go get one but sighed and looked back at the computer screen. “There’s some weird magic books out there.”

“Tell me about it.” I took a bite of delicious, perfect, manna from the heavens, and leaned back, totally talking with my mouth full. “Seriously, tell me. My eyes won’t focus anymore.”

“Mmmm,” he responded. Then he shook himself. “There’s a couple they’re billing as fairy tales. Not sure why they’re part of the auction. German stories about kids who get punished for being bad, like fairy tales go. Giant Russian epic about a dude and his peacock. Or some kind of bird. Egyptian thing about a guy who became a god.”

He stopped and blinked, staring at the monitor. I almost dropped my donut.

“That’s bad, isn’t it?” he asked after a moment, not looking away from the screen.

I scooted my chair around the desk to join him, crowding in close to the computer. There was a picture of a book, a slim volume that looked a lot like the one Freddy had translated in the past—just a simple black cloth-bound book with no writing on the cover.

The story of an ancient Egyptian mage who became a god, but in his hubris, did not realize that his tyrannical ways would cause his former fellow mages to rise up against him, creating a magical object that would destroy him, themselves, and an entire city in the process.

Memphis. Holy shit they were talking about Memphis.

I’d known the unifier was a dangerous artifact when Whitney Brandfield had used it to try to destroy Junction, but I’d assumed that the mages of ancient Egypt hadn’t understood what they had made. I’d thought maybe they had somehow missed the thing’s massive destructive potential. I had felt terrible when I’d destroyed the magic in it, thinking I was ruining a piece of history that might have one day done some good.

Apparently the damned thing had been created for destruction.

That was the moment Gideon arrived, Detective Torres walking in next to him.

“It’s Memphis,” I blurted out. Everyone in the bullpen turned to me for a second, but quickly went back to their work.

Quinn looked over at me, brows drawn together in confusion. “Tennessee?”

I turned my most dubious face on him, but it was slightly negated by Gideon’s laughter. And then completely negated when he stopped laughing and leaned in to pluck the donut out of my hand, saying, “I don’t think you got room to give him that look, since you had the same first reaction,” before biting off half my remaining donutty goodness.

I shot him a glare, snatching what was left of my donut back. “Memphis in ancient Egypt,” I explained, and when I turned to take another bite of my donut, Fluke was staring up at me piteously, like he hadn’t eaten in days. “You were asleep a second ago.”

I was not whining. No, screw it, I was whining. I wanted that donut. I sighed and tore the remainder in half, passing half of it to Fluke and eating the rest as fast as possible.

When I turned back to Quinn, he was giving me the goddamn melting chocolate eyes. “You didn’t share with me.”

I was so screwed. How had I landed a work partner, even if it was only a temporary situation, who also had deadly brown eyes?

Torres snorted at us, dropping her briefcase on the desk. “Looks like he’s already got your number, McKinley. Here I said you’d have a conflict of interests helping with the investigation because the nuts are after you. Turns out you’re just a sucker for the sad eyes.”

I blinked up at her, my sleep-deprived brain taking a moment to parse the comment. “You thought I’d have a conflict of interests?”

She rolled her eyes in my direction, but walked around me, shooing Quinn out of his chair—or rather, her chair. “You do have a conflict of interests. If you were a cop, you wouldn’t be on this investigation, period. The Aureum works differently, and I use the word ‘works’ very loosely here.”

It was a valid concern, I supposed. If I’d been looking at it from the outside, I probably wouldn’t have thought I was fit to investigate the Believers. But at the same time, I was the perfect guy, because I knew more about them than any living person who wasn’t a member of the cult. It was messy, basically.

But after all I’d been through, I thought I could keep my feelings separate from the investigation. At least as much as anyone could. And no one else would have been able to handle Alarie like I had.

Hell, Quinn might be dead if he’d been on his own the night before.

I shivered at the realization, then drew myself up. “You’re right, but you’re also wrong. The Aureum needs me doing this. I’m uniquely qualified to find these people and figure out what they’re doing.”

She met my eye, holding it for a long, uncomfortable moment. Finally, she nodded. “I suppose you’re right. Still wouldn’t fly if you were a cop, but you’re not. Now what do we have?”

“An ancient Egyptian book,” Quinn offered, waving at her screen. “Something about a godmage and—oh. Oh shit, that guy’s like you, isn’t he? An arcane mage?”

“The ancient Egyptians called us beginning mages,” I said, biting my lip and staring at the unassuming little black book in the picture. “But yeah, that would be my guess. You remember the unifier thing? Brandfield trying to destroy Junction?” When they both nodded, I continued. “The unifier was from ancient Egypt, and at the time we were investigating it, we noticed the weird way the ley lines around what used to be Memphis are shaped. Like maybe three used to meet there, but they don’t anymore.”

For a moment they just sat there staring at me, then Ashley sucked in a breath. “You think that someone deliberately exploded the ley lines in Memphis”—she turned back and pointed at the book on the screen—“to stop this mage who had . . . had made himself a god?”

“It would explain why Alarie wanted the book. He was an arcane mage.”

“Who would have loved to make himself into a god,” Quinn finished for me.

Ashley turned a speculative gaze on me. “You’re not feeling particularly, ah, godly today, are you?”

Gideon snorted, and I glared up at him. “Don’t make fun. If I want to try to become a . . . a god, then she’s being sensible, and she should stop me.”

“ ’M not making fun of her, sweetheart. You want to be a god as much as you want a hole in the head.” He turned to her, a gentle smile on his face. “You’d do well to be more worried about someone like me. He’s already more powerful than he likes. He’d be happy sitting around eating cheese and reading most of the time. When he wants to do something else, it’s always to help somebody.”

“Are you planning on seeking godhood, then?”

Gideon waved a dismissive hand and blew a raspberry. “I got everything important in the world already, detective. Got my family and my home. That’s everything I need.”

“Awww,” was all I could muster in response, leaning my head against his hip. Almost immediately, my eyes started to drift closed.

“Any other arcane mages who might want the information?” I had to hand it to the detective, she was incredibly persistent.

The only other arcane mage I knew personally was Anson, but I wasn’t outing the dominus of Junction as a mostly-burned-out arcane mage without his say-so. Besides, Anson didn’t want to be a god any more than I did. So I shook my head. “There are some others who’ve gone public, but none are in Junction, and I don’t know them personally.”

“Then Alarie killing himself ought to be the end of the danger there,” Quinn reasoned. “Which means we just need to go to the auction house tonight after we get some sleep and get the book before anyone else does.”

“We could go now,” Gideon suggested, though his tone was dubious. He was probably watching me fall asleep leaning against him.

“We are going now,” Torres corrected, standing back up and pulling her keys out of her pocket. “You can all ride with me, since the two of you look like death. You need to sleep, but this is end of the world kind of danger. We’re not leaving that book out there where someone could get their hands on it. Just in case.”

“We can’t just seize it, can we?” Gideon asked, looking at her like she was about to suggest something shady.

She shook her head. “No, we can’t.” Pointing at Quinn, she added, “He can. He can seize magically dangerous artifacts without a court order, if he deems the danger immediate, which it is, if this thing is really what we think it is.”

She stopped on her way toward the door and looked at me. “Though now I suppose you could too.”

I shook my head so hard my hair flipped into my face. “Nope. He can do it. I don’t want it. He can burn it for all I care.”

Quinn cringed. “Oh jeez, book burning is not what I’d planned for my day.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

J asper’s was the kind of place where I wouldn’t have been welcome two years earlier. The kind of place where if your average person showed up without a tie, they would turn up their noses and ask you to please go find a place where you belonged.

Now the guy at the door recognized me the second we walked in, and while he flinched at my sooty shirt and the giant bags under my eyes, there was no way he was going to take a chance on pissing my grandmother off.

I could have come in coked up out of my mind wearing nothing but a hot pink banana hammock and muttering about the aliens who were after me, and he’d have greeted me with the same Mona Lisa smile and the same respectful, “Mr. McKinley, how lovely to see you.”

Yeah, Grandma had that much money.

“Sorry I’m a bit of a mess, ah—”

“Arthur,” he filled in when I paused.

“Arthur. But I’m here on Aureum business. This is Quaesitor Quinn Pike, Detective Ashley Torres, and you probably remember my fiancé, Gideon Knight and my familiar, Fluke.”

He nodded to each as I motioned to them, then looked back at me expectantly. “Shall I tell Mr. Winwell that you’re here? Can I explain the situation to him?”

“It’s about one of the books on auction later this week,” Quinn said, taking charge with a rather impressive “I’m the quaesitor and you need to listen to me” voice.

“Of course,” Arthur agreed. “I’ll take you to the security room where we’re keeping those and then get Mr. Winwell right away.”

I didn’t remember who Mr. Winwell was but figured maybe he was the manager or the owner. Either way, we agreed, and Arthur led us into a room that was secured with a giant vault door. There were books in protective cases on every shelf, so while we waited, we started looking for the one we needed.

We’d barely gotten started when a short older man with the bushiest eyebrows ever and not a single strand of hair anywhere else on his head came in. His current-year Brioni suit practically screamed money, but the anxious way he was fidgeting with his hands made me nervous on his behalf.

Poor guy was probably terrified of the Aureum, and with good reason. Or maybe just of Grandma.

“What can I help you with, Mr. McKinley? Quaesitor?” He focused on me, only glancing at the others for a second. Clearly he too recognized me from the times I’d come to Jasper’s with Iris. If that made him more comfortable, I figured it was fine.

I motioned to the shelves. “One of the books that goes up for auction later this week is a dangerous artifact, and I’m sorry, but we need to take it into Aureum custody.”

His eyes went round, and he clutched at his chest and breathed heavily for a moment like maybe he was going to have a heart attack. “A . . . dangerous . . . Which one?” He glanced wildly around at the shelves, as though the book might reach out and bite him if we didn’t locate it fast enough.

“It’s a little black thing,” Quinn answered, his voice low and soothing. Treating Winwell like he was a spooked animal, which seemed like a good plan to me. “Egyptian. It’s in hieroglyphics, I think?”

If anything, Winwell looked even worse off, weaving like he might fall over at any moment. He reached out toward the wall for support but missed it. “Oh. Oh no. Oh no!”

I stepped up beside him, bracing a hand on his shoulder and hoping any remaining soot under my fingernails wouldn’t mess up his very nice suit, but I figured even if he got a little sooty, it was better than falling down.

The poor guy just kept panicking so much that we had to get Arthur and help him back to his office. We settled him into his chair and made him rest and drink a cup of water as he got his breathing under control, but every hint of fear on him spiked the worry in me.

He didn’t have the book, that much was obvious.

He’d have pointed us at it and been happy to see the end of the matter, regardless of the money involved. This fear meant that the problem was something bigger than just “there’s a dangerous artifact in the vicinity.”

As he seemed to be getting himself under control, Quinn asked, “I take it something has happened with the book?”

That sent Winwell right back into his panic spiral.

I turned to Arthur, who was hovering nervously in the doorway. “Small black book, Egyptian. You know what happened?”

He bit his lip and shook his head but glanced at a thick book on the desk in front of Winwell. “If it’s been sold, there would be a record of it.”

Winwell started nodding like a bobblehead, and reached over to shove the book forward, tapping on it repeatedly.

Torres obligingly flipped the book open and started turning pages, scanning as she went. She started in the middle, I assumed with the most recent dates, and moved backward.

Finally, she stopped on a line, tapping a short taupe-painted nail on a spot and looked up at Quinn, then me, then back down at the page. “Egypt Fairy Tale Volume”—she blinked, shook her head, and squinted hard at the line before continuing—“seventeen grand. Sold the day before yesterday to one Miss Roberta Shaw.”

“Marlett’s daughter?” Gideon asked, and we all nodded, including Mr. Winwell. Then he froze and stared at me, eyes wide, and started panicking yet again.

Apparently it was well known that the McKinleys and the Marletts weren’t friendly.

I didn’t know how to fix panic over a dangerous artifact, so I said the only thing I could think of to try to calm the guy down. “I promise this isn’t some ancient family grudge on my part, Mr. Winwell, and if it is on the Marletts’ side, we don’t hold it against you or Jasper’s.”

He wasn’t suddenly okay, but for the first time in almost a minute, he took a full breath, looking me hard in the eye as though gauging for sincerity. So I met his eye and gave my most earnest expression, and it seemed to help.

It took another few minutes to calm him down before he managed to actually use words, and even then, his voice was hoarse, like he’d been screaming instead of struggling to breathe. “Miss Shaw is a good customer, but decorations, not books. She came for this one specifically, described it like you did. Seemed . . . worried. Kept looking around like . . . like she thought someone was behind her.”

We went through a lot of the generic cop stuff, simple questions about times and details, and then Quinn handed him a card and said to call if he remembered anything else. We got out of there as fast as we could, all of us exploding with theories that no one wanted to air in front of the poor auction house guys. They’d had a stressful enough morning anyway, I figured.

“Any chance Roberta Shaw is an arcane mage?” Torres asked as we all climbed into her car.

Sitting with Gideon in the back seat, I focused on buckling Fluke into the middle seat between us, so Gideon answered. “Could be. No way to know without seeing her do it. I don’t know anything about the Marletts or this grudge. Never met one before, only heard about the grudge from Maines.”

“It could explain the falling out with her father,” Quinn suggested, but he sounded like he didn’t believe his own theory.

“Her old man woulda killed her if she was an arcane mage and he knew about it.” The words were chilling, and the matter-of-fact way Gideon said them made it all the worse. Like he didn’t even have to consider whether it was true, and really, he didn’t.

Her brother had been such an anti-arcane zealot that he’d thought me less than human. I didn’t doubt he’d have happily slit his own sister’s wrists just as easily as mine.

Torres gave a full-body shiver, not yet starting her car. “These Believers are really something. If I hadn’t had one look me in the eye yesterday and tell me about his right to kill witches, I’d think you were overselling it.”

A dreadful sort of silence fell over the whole car before Quinn broke it. As always when something horrid had just happened, his voice was chipper and ready to get moving again. It was . . . soothing, strangely enough. Like there was no doubt we could still do something about this, we just had to decide what. Quinn was still smiling, so we could do this.

“We gotta go see Shaw,” Gideon said. “You lot know where she lives?”

Torres started the car, glancing to Quinn. “We got an address for work and one for home. Punch one of them up on GPS and we’ll get moving.”

No one in the front seat said a word about Gideon not being a member of law enforcement, so neither did I. If—when—it came down to a fight, I’d be happy to have him at my back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

R oberta Shaw’s office was on the outskirts of town, so Quinn opted to call first to make sure we didn’t make an unnecessary hour-long drive. Sure enough, she wasn’t at work.

Even worse, they were worried about her because she was supposed to be there, but she’d missed a meeting. Her assistant was practically beside herself, talking Quinn’s ear off for a full minute about how Miss Shaw had been nervous and not herself lately, and she never missed meetings, but her phone was turned off. The woman was convinced her boss had been kidnapped or murdered, and nothing Quinn said calmed her a bit. It couldn’t have, since she barely let him get a word in to begin with.

When we arrived at the downtown apartment building that was Shaw’s home address, the assistant was still talking to Quinn, who looked like he was going to cry. Torres snatched the phone from him, said “He has to go now, miss. We’ll find your boss and I’m sure she’ll let you know what happened,” and hung up the phone.

Quinn collapsed back into the seat with a groan. “How do you do that? I can never get them to stop talking long enough to say I have to go.”

“You’re too nice. You’re looking for the chance to ask if you can hang up. You have to tell them you’re hanging up.”

We stepped out of the car onto the curb, and trepidation curled in my gut. We didn’t know Shaw intended to use the book for anything nefarious. She probably wasn’t an arcane mage. She probably didn’t even know any arcane mages, given how her family was.

It was highly unlikely that Roberta Shaw was trying to make anyone a god.

But we didn’t know for sure.

For all we knew, she was worse than the worst thing we’d ever faced, bitter and angry about her douchey father and brother and ex-husband, and she wanted nothing more than to ascend to godhood so she could punish every man who’d ever been an asshole to her. It would be hard to blame her, even though we would have to find a way to stop her.

If I’d been dealt a hand like those three men, I’d probably hate all men. On the other hand, my father had been an asshole. And my stepfather had murdered my mother. And I had more than my share of shitty exes, though maybe none as shitty as Clayton Dean. But I had never tried to make myself a god to get revenge.

Gideon patted me on the ass, urging me forward into the building. “Musing later, sweetheart. Action now.”

The man knew me too damn well.

Beside me, Fluke yawned hard, but he kept up well enough. I tried not to think about how I hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours. I could handle a bad guy while sleep deprived, right?

My shoe caught on the bottom of the metal doorframe, and Gideon had to grab me to keep me from pitching forward onto my face.

Yeah, I was clearly ready for anything.

The elevator music was even more exhausting, some seventies power ballad made into a horrible tinny monstrosity. Everyone else was tense, ready, full of adrenaline, while I was shoving down the urge to lean against Gideon’s shoulder and take a nap. Why didn’t I get any nice fresh adrenaline?

That came when we found Roberta Shaw’s apartment at the end of the hall and found the door open a crack.

Torres knocked and called out, “Miss Shaw? Junction PD and the Aureum, we need to talk to you.”

Her knocking pushed the door open, and it swung wide with a creak, to reveal a complete mess. Not a lived-in mess, or even a lives-in-filth mess. No, this was a this-apartment-had-been-trashed mess. The entryway was covered with blue and white ceramic in tiny, shattered pieces—maybe a large vase that had been tipped over.

Inside, the couch was on its back, the bottom slit open to reveal springs and padding. There were cushions strewn around, their stuffing pulled out and thrown on the floor beside them. Bookshelves were empty, the books thrown carelessly to the floor along with plants, bookends, and various other tchotchkes people put on shelves.

In the kitchen, all the cupboards had been opened, and food was everywhere. Flour, sugar, and other staples were scattered on every surface, their empty containers tossed on the floor and counters.

“So,” Torres said.

“Looks like someone else knew she got the book,” Gideon continued when she stopped there. “And they didn’t want her to have it any more than we did.”

Quinn picked up a sofa cushion that had been slashed and pointed at the zipper in its side. “Who does this? Why not open it up like a civilized person instead of destroying it?” The whole thing kind of made me think he’d be the perfect work partner for me.

Ashley gave him a look like he was precious, shaking her head. “Thieves don’t care about people’s personal property, Pike. It’s sweet that you do, but Miss Shaw is just lucky if she wasn’t here.”

A low groan from down the hall made all of us snap to attention.

“Not lucky, then,” Quinn muttered, dropping the cushion and heading for the source of the noise.

We found Roberta Shaw in the master bedroom at the end of the hall, wearing oversized navy men’s pajamas, lying on the floor with dried blood smeared across her face.

The bedroom had been tossed even worse than the rest of the apartment—the mattress and pillows cut to ribbons, but also, the clothes had been pulled out of her wardrobe and slashed into a near-unrecognizable mess.

That part didn’t make any sense. Why destroy her clothes? The book couldn’t have been hidden inside them.

Gideon was the first to drop down to one knee beside her. “Miss Shaw?”

She gave another pained groan, stretching as though to sit up, but apparently thinking better of it and letting herself continue to lie on the floor.

In the hall, I heard Ashley on the phone. “—need an ambulance. It doesn’t appear to be an emergency, but she definitely has a concussion. Going to need a team out to collect evidence too, but obviously the woman with a head wound takes precedence, so start there.”

I knelt on the opposite side of the woman, wondering if it was a good idea to bust out the healing I’d been learning. Probably not. The issue with healing was that to do it, you needed to know a whole lot about what the human body was supposed to look like on the inside. And this was a person’s actual brain. Best not to take chances with that.

So instead I sat there with Gideon and Fluke, waiting.

Roberta Shaw opened her eyes, and they were brown. I almost laughed. I know, I know, brown eyes aren’t any kind of evidence. Still, I’d always had a lot of luck with brown-eyed people.

“We’ve called for an ambulance, and they’ll make sure you’re going to be okay. If you don’t think you can sit up, it’s okay to just stay there.”

Her gaze landed on me and widened slightly with surprise. “McKinley?” Her voice was a scrape against cement, barely any real voice behind it, mostly raw, hoarse pain.

“Yes ma’am. We know about your father and the Believers. We’re investigating it.”

In the doorway, Torres made a tsking noise, like she didn’t approve of me giving information to a person who was definitely still a suspect. She was still a suspect, for sure, but I didn’t think a semi-conscious woman with a clear concussion was going to be a danger anytime soon.

Roberta Shaw’s lips turned up in a tiny semblance of a smile. “Tried to warn you.”

“The letter,” Gideon concluded before she felt a need to explain. “You sent it?”

She tried to nod but winced halfway through. “Neck hurts.”

“Then you should definitely stay down,” Quinn said from across the room. “Were you keeping the book in the safe?”

We all looked up at him, except for Roberta, but I was the first to speak up. “Safe?”

“Safe,” Roberta agreed in her barely-there croak. “Book in the safe.”

Quinn motioned into the closet, so I hopped up and went over to look. There was a wall safe that had been behind clothes—probably the clothes that were cut to shreds all over the floor of her bedroom. The door of the thing was bent almost in half, the lock mangled almost beyond recognition. Almost certainly a feat of earth magic. Or arcane magic.

Looking for a book that talked about an arcane mage who’d made himself a god? Almost certainly arcane.

If the book had been in there, it sure as heck wasn’t anymore.

“Miss Shaw?” Gideon was saying, still kneeling by her side. He sat back with a growl, jaw clenched and lips pursed. “Passed out, poor thing.”

“Well we’re sure as hell not going to wake her back up.” Quinn knelt where I’d been and looked her over, wincing. “She managed to lean up a bit before she gave up, so there’s probably no spinal injury, but there’s no way to be sure yet. As hard as whoever it was hit her on the head, it’s a danger.”

“We’re running out of suspects here,” Torres pointed out. “We had Roberta, her ex, and her father. We’re down to the ex and the father. Father first, since we know for sure where he is?”

Quinn nodded. “I don’t think her father did this, but that doesn’t mean someone else didn’t do it on his orders, either the ex or someone else in his asshole death cult. I say we pay him a visit.”

It felt odd to me that someone associated with the Believers would be an arcane mage, but then again, why not? An arcane mage had fanned the flames of this cult in order to cut down on competition, of all the ridiculous things. Where better to position oneself than near your enemies?

Everyone concurred, so we lapsed into silence and waited for the ambulance to arrive. Just as the crime scene guys were arriving, we headed out.

I didn’t much want to see the Marlett house again in the sunlight. Heck, I didn’t think I wanted to see the place ever again, and most of what I did want involved curling up and sleeping in the backseat of Torres’s car. Unfortunately, when the Believers were involved, I rarely seemed to get what I wanted.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

T  he Marlett garden looked even worse in the light of day.

Ashley stared at it as she stepped out of her car, the way a person looked at a bomb site. It made sense, as that was what it looked like.

There was an indentation in the center about three feet across, like a bowl scooped out of the earth. Around it, devastation. The fire hadn’t touched the bushes and furniture, but the heat had. In their already ruined state, they hadn’t fared well, had blackened and shriveled and shrunk away from the center of the blast.

The whole side of the house had blackened edges, even the bricks.

“How is this not an inferno?” Ashley asked after a moment, her voice full of horrified fascination.

Quinn held a hand out in my direction. “All him. You know my schtick. I can blow out a tiny flame, but with real fires, I’m more hindrance than help.” He looked back over to the blackened former garden and gave a shudder. “I honestly thought the whole place was going to catch fire after that guy went up like a freaking Roman candle.”

“Fire wards,” I said, oddly detached as all I could focus on was the image in my mind of Alarie turning himself into a pillar of fire, lighting up the sky for what had to be miles around.

It had been so bright.

And hot.

I turned to look at Quinn. “Why the hell didn’t Marlett come out of the house?”

Quinn blinked, staring at me first in confusion, then surprise. “That’s a damn good question. No one else lives close enough to have been afraid for their homes, but as we drove away, at least a dozen people in the neighborhood were outside or in their windows, trying to figure out what was going on. Why the hell wasn’t Marlett?”

Torres turned to Gideon. “I don’t believe I’m saying this, but how are you at kicking doors down?”

Gideon’s grin was wild and so damn sexy I wanted to stop him and kiss him right there on the side of the road. I contained myself, though. We were still in danger, even if I didn’t want to think about that.

The door was just as shabby and worn as the rest of the house, and it only took one good boot—amplified by a little arcane magic—for Gideon to break the lock.

It was instantly apparent why Robert Marlett Senior hadn’t come to the door.

I fell back, gagging, and so did Fluke. Quinn covered his nose and mouth, but I thought it was an expression of horror more than any attempt to keep the smell away. Gideon and Torres both sighed, and Torres pulled out her phone. “The station’s going to fucking love me today.”

I got myself together and followed them in, and maybe it was for the wrong reasons, but . . . I had to know. I had to be sure that the sickly sweet rotting meat smell permeating the house was from Marlett himself, and not just something they’d dealt with because of holding Alarie prisoner in the basement.

It didn’t take long to locate Marlett, and I was left feeling mostly numb, and a little guilty. I’d wanted him dead. I’d wanted to see him dead. It was horrific, and somehow the mundanity of it all made it even worse.

Marlett hadn’t been shot while trying to commit murder, like his son. Unless I missed my mark, there had been no violence involved. He hadn’t done anything at all. He’d died alone, in his sleep, like most sad, isolated old men. It was possible Dean had killed him, but there were no signs of that. He’d at least been aware that Marlett was dead, since he’d visited the house the day before, and Marlett had died days ago. It left a lot of questions, and no answers.

Gideon put an arm around me and led me back out of the house, and we went to sit on the curb, waiting for the coroner’s van.

While Marlett’s death left questions about our culprit, it explained almost everything about the previous night.

Marlett had died in his sleep, at least a few nights earlier. When Alarie had been left alone long enough, maybe as the smell had started to creep down into the basement, or maybe after being informed of Marlett’s death by a visiting Dean, he’d realized his opportunity and made a break for it. Quinn and I had only seen the result, not the catalyst.

Which, in the end, meant that there was only one option left for who “that worm” was.

Clayton Dean.

Roberta’s ex-husband, Marlett’s lawyer, and apparently all-round asshole. I’d been so unimpressed with the pictures of him that our detective had given us. Slightly slumped, trying just a little too hard, and not making quite the impression he wanted to. I’d thought he wanted to be Marlett and came out more like Marlett-lite.

But maybe I’d been wrong. If we were lucky, he had stolen the book to burn it, and it was already destroyed. It would be something the Believers wanted. Surely they thought all arcane mages were power hungry and would be happy to ascend to godhood, so any book that might be a how-to primer on the subject needed to go.

Somehow, I suspected we weren’t that lucky.

When had we ever been?

Ashley and Quinn came out to join us, both looking a little more haggard than they’d started the day, and for Quinn, that was saying something.

“The ex-husband?” she asked, shoulders stooped and arms crossed protectively over her chest.

We all sighed, almost in unison.

“Got to be him,” Quinn finally answered. “If it’s not him, we’re seriously screwed. I don’t know who else it could be, and this is…”

Torres pulled a hand away from her chest and shook a finger at me. “This is you, McKinley. By the dawn, I swear, you’re fucking cursed.”

“You’re not the first to think it,” I answered on a stifled yawn. “I suspect that was me. So we go find Dean now?”

“No other choice,” Gideon said as he pulled himself off the curb, turning to help me up. He even glanced at Fluke before waving at him. “You gotta get yourself off the ground, kid. I don’t have the energy to lean over that far.”

Fluke gave a tiny whine but pulled himself up off the pavement and struggled his way over to Ashley’s car, leaning on the back fender and looking at us pitifully.

“Sorry boys. I know you’re way past bedtime, but this is too big to be able to ignore it and go take a nap.” Torres stopped on the way to her car to give Fluke a scratch, and he whined again, but didn’t protest. Neither did anyone else, as we all climbed back into her car, exhausted and dragging.

She was right and we all knew it. We had to find Dean.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

O nce again, Quinn punched in the address we were headed toward, and Ashley drove. Thank goodness, because my driving was so-so even when I was entirely awake. Today, I’d have been likely to get us killed on the way rather than get us to our destination.

It was another apartment downtown, but in a distinctly different part of downtown than the area where Roberta Shaw lived.

Clayton Dean lived in a part of town where when you called the cops, they didn’t arrive in five minutes or less.

“And he’s a lawyer?” Ashley asked, tone dubious, as we drove through the area, looking for a spot to stop without double parking. I figured this was an emergency and she should just park in front of a hydrant. This was end of the world stuff, dammit, and we didn’t have time to screw around.

Quinn pointed at a spot, and she screeched a U-turn right in front of traffic, then slid gracefully into a perfect parallel parking job, as though driving a car as an attack vehicle was a normal day for her. He was unbuckling his seatbelt before she even finished parking. “He is a lawyer, but as far as I found, his only client was Marlett, which couldn’t have been making him any money.”

Torres looked thoughtful as she turned to him. “True Believer?”

Quinn made a face at her. “Please don’t destroy my childhood like that, you’re not Stan Lee. I couldn’t say if he’s drunk the cult Kool-Aid or not, but the loyalty to Marlett does imply it. Maybe.”

We all spilled out of the car like drunken partygoers at four in the morning. Sure, it was four in the afternoon, but there wasn’t much we could do about that.

Instead, we started the trek into the building.

The wave of dizziness overtook me without warning, and I fell against the chipped brick facade, almost hitting it with my face, but getting my hands up just in time. Next to me, Fluke whined. The sound wasn’t just concern but straight-out fear.

Behind me, Gideon was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it over the rushing in my ears.

The feeling of fear that overtook every cell of my body was overwhelming, making my stomach churn and my head spin even more, but it wasn’t mine. It was—it was the convergence.

Oh no. Fuck.

I reached out with my mind, trying to soothe, but it was being pulled away from me even as I did. I grabbed the convergence with every bit of strength I had, and it held me right back, frightened and more child-like than ever.

What is happening? It asked, the panic lacing its voice positively gut wrenching.

I don’t know! Where are you going?

It wrapped itself around me, trying to anchor itself on me the way I was anchored in my own body. Don’t know. Pulled. Pulling so hard. Hurts. Feels like angry.

The convergence held onto me for dear life, like a person being sucked out of a spaceship into the vacuum of space, but its grip slipped, inch by inch, no matter how tight I tried to hold it. No matter how much of its magic it wrapped around me.

Please, it whispered as though it had no strength left to even speak as it lost grip and was yanked away from me, leaving me reaching into the flows of magic for something that wasn’t there.

I couldn’t sense it anywhere. It was simply . . . absent.

It had to be Dean and the book. Dean had done something to the convergence creature. He wasn’t a Believer trying to destroy the evil arcane magic.

He was an arcane mage trying to become a god.

Worse, whatever it was he’d done, the convergence creature was gone.

I slowly became aware of my surroundings again to find Gideon standing right in front of me, so close our noses were almost touching. His brown eyes were wide and terrified, one hand wrapped around my waist holding me up, and the other on my face.

I was gasping for breath, and my cheeks were wet.

“Sage,” he breathed, and there was relief in it.

“Thank the dawn,” Quinn muttered, standing next to him. “I thought we’d lost you. You just dove into the wall and you were . . . not there. Empty.”

It was just like when I’d been training, when I’d reached for the convergence and the magic had been shoved into me. The convergence had been trying to forge a connection between us then, and it had eventually worked. We’d become comfortable with each other, not regularly speaking so much as sensing each other—a friendly, silent camaraderie.

At first, I’d been terrified it was going to pull my metaphysical body into the magic and I would lose myself, never able to return to my physical body. After all that fear, just now I’d let myself be pulled without a single concern for whether I would be able to get back. I’d just…

“The convergence,” I rasped out. “It was terrified. It was . . . it was being pulled.”

“What, like, all the magic in the ley lines?” Ashley asked, sounding somewhere between confused and horrified. “How can that happen? No one can hold that much power.”

“Unless . . . they’re a god?” Quinn asked, but he sounded like he couldn’t make himself believe it.

I shook my head, my breath escaping me in a sob, and I leaned against Gideon. “There’s a living thing in the convergence. Not the magic, the magical convergence creature. It’s—Gideon, it’s gone. I can’t feel it anywhere.”

The magic was still there in the lines, iridescent and willing to come when I called. But the convergence itself, the giant magical not-baby that I’d spent the last years learning from and helping and . . . and becoming friends with—it was simply gone.

Gideon pulled me against his chest and looked to Quinn. “We’re too late. Whatever the book said to do, he’s done it.”

“Absolutely fucking not,” Torres answered, voice taut but still calm, like a cold front across my senses. “I don’t give a damn what he’s done, we’re going to fucking go in there and stop him. If I have to put a whole clip of bullets in him, he’s not coming away from this a fucking god.”

She spat the last word as though it, and not all the f-bombs she’d dropped, were the epithet.

Quinn unsnapped his holster and took out his gun. “Damn right. No one pulls this shit on my watch. Plus I’m not gonna lie, I really don’t want to have to destroy Junction to stop him.”

Gideon nodded, but also took the opportunity to scowl at him. “You know if the Aureum had given you proper damn backup to begin with—”

“I do know,” Quinn agreed. “And if we live through this, we’re all going to have words with my superiors. At least, whoever among them doesn’t end up implicated in the Believer investigation.”

Torres, meanwhile, was looking at me, considering. “You really think they had to destroy the city to stop that guy in Egypt?”

I held up my hands in either defense or protest, I wasn’t sure which. “It was thousands of years ago. We don’t even know if it’s true.” But didn’t I? Hadn’t I felt the convergence slip through my fingers? It was a being of magical energy, and anyone who snatched a creature like that right out of its home without warning or permission didn’t have good intentions. I couldn’t look her in the eye as I finally admitted, “I don’t think it’s out of the question.”

“Can you destroy the city to stop him if you have to?” The words came out with the same bizarre calm as everything else she’d asked, as though that were a normal goddamn thing to ask.

The world held its breath around us as I stared at her.

In my head, the perfect clean lines of magic that had made up the unifier recreated themselves. So simple. So dangerous. Six months ago, Freddy and I had proven we could make artifacts if we worked together. Making another artifact, or a whole string of them, that would be enough to break open the ley lines and destroy Junction?

After an eternity of staring into Ashley’s eyes, I nodded. She nodded back, but there wasn’t a twitch of emotion to show how she felt about that fact. The fact that I knew how to destroy a city.

But didn’t every nuclear scientist know that too?

Yes, my brain provided, but knowing how and being able to do it with your own hands are different things.

“Let’s go,” Torres demanded, shoving the apartment house door open and marching in first, as though she wasn’t terrified at all.

How was she not frightened? I was literally shaking, and I was the guy who had the best chance of stopping this mess.

Quinn followed her, and Gideon held onto me, gently urging me forward rather than forcing me. In fact, he turned to me as we walked, concern filling his eyes. “You sure you want to come?”

And that, finally, was what knocked some sense back into me.

I was a quaesitor, dammit. Kind of. More importantly, I might be the only person who could stop Dean if he had gotten his disgusting hands on the convergence creature and done something to it.

But what truly mattered was that the convergence was my friend. If there was anything I could do, even if that something was avenging its murder, I was damned well going to do it. No one hurt my friends and walked away.

The apartment building was a walk-up, and Dean lived on the third story. It was ridiculous, but there we were, huffing and puffing our way up the stairs while some asshole was doing gods only knew what.

The moment we hit the third floor, the rage-filled shouting made it apparent what path he’d decided on. There, at the end of the hallway, was a distorted figure in a cheap suit standing in front of an open apartment door looking in, screaming louder than any person ought to be able to.

For a moment, I was transfixed just looking at him. Arcane magic surrounded him in a blinding iridescent nimbus, making him hard to look at. I assumed at first that it was just my magic sight showing me what others couldn’t see, but when I glanced at my companions, they were all squinting, staring, as though they’d never seen anything like it. The magic shone from Dean’s eyes as though whatever color they had been before, it no longer existed.

Whatever it was he’d done, he wasn’t a human anymore. He was held together by arcane magic.

And spite, apparently.

“All hours,” he was screeching. “Two in the morning, and you wouldn’t stop fucking your boyfriend long enough to think that some of us might be goddamn well trying to sleep!”

“I’m—I’m sorry,” the woman inside the apartment said, not quite looking at him, wincing in pain. I couldn’t tell if it was just from how bright he was, or if he was doing something to her. “The walls are thin,” she explained uselessly.

The poor woman had no idea what she was looking at: a petty, small man, given too much power.

“Well, you won’t have to be sorry anymore,” he said through clenched teeth. “No one will ever have to be sorry again. You’ll all get just what you deserve, and everyone will do what they should.”

What she deserved for being a kind of crappy neighbor? Last I’d heard, that wasn’t a punishable offense, let alone a crime.

“I—I don’t—I’m sorry. You never said anything.”

“I shouldn’t have had to!” He shouted the words and there was a small explosion of magic at the end. The woman screamed and turned to run away, but he grabbed her by the hair. “You all thought I was nothing. Mediocre lawyer, mediocre mage, easy to push around. Never made anything of his life. No one. No reason to show me even the smallest bit of respect.”

That all sounded disturbingly familiar.

“Let go of the lady and put your hands in the air,” Torres called out, authoritative and loud even through the rushing in my ears. She took a familiar stance, feet braced apart and gun held tight in both hands, staring him down.

He turned to look at us, letting go of the woman’s hair and letting her drop, sobbing, to the floor. His head was cocked at a curious angle, and there was an echo of the convergence in the gesture that made my heart hurt. Had he murdered it? Absorbed it into himself and stolen its power?

What came out of his mouth was nothing resembling the convergence. It was all entitled asshole. He barked a laugh, staring at Torres. “You fucking women. You always think you can tell me what to do. Own me with your guns and your money and your sex. Well you can’t own me anymore, bitch. Now I’m the one in charge.” He enunciated the next sentence like a villain in a melodramatic student film. “I am a god!”

He held his hands up above his head, striking what he had to think was an impressive pose. Torres clearly didn’t agree. “Right, Mr. God. On your knees, hands on your head. Now.”

He snarled and flung a hand out, sending a wave of pure arcane magic barreling down the hallway toward us. It spread to fill the hallway and then even wider as it went, making first drywall, and then wooden beams, explode into dust and splinters as it flew down the hallway at a breakneck speed. Doors exploded inward as it passed them, the sound almost deafening as the walls started to crack, fine lines spiderwebbing in every direction along the faded cream paint.

Stopping this, at least, I could do. I opened a crack in the convergence in front of us, letting the magic flow in and then zipping it back up as though it had never been.

Well, almost. The damage he’d done to the building was still there, and I imagined he’d destroyed quite a lot of the property in all of the apartments between us and him. I could only hope there hadn’t been anyone inside.

Dean stared in shock, then started to splutter. “You can’t . . . you can’t do that. I’m a god.” This time it sounded more confused than victorious.

Torres waited for her sightline to clear of the magic and debris, took a deep breath, and as she let it out, she braced her hands and put three bullets in Clayton Dean’s chest.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I  would have nightmares for the rest of my life about that moment. Admittedly, I’d probably have nightmares for the rest of my life about everything that had happened in the last day, but this would hold a special place of horror.

Dean staggered back a few steps, the impact of the bullets pushing him away from us. Blood spread in dark spots on his white suit shirt. It didn’t miraculously close up because of his supposed godhood. The wounds didn’t heal. In fact, when he opened his mouth to—heck, I didn’t know what. Say ow? Maybe claim godhood again? All that came out was a waterfall of blood, spilling down the front of his shirt.

He looked down at it in confusion, as though he too had expected to heal instantly. He shook his head, denying what was happening.

But he was right, I realized with dawning horror, even though he didn’t know it yet. Torres hadn’t killed him with her bullets. She might have killed his body, but he had snatched the convergence creature out of its home, forced it to merge with him.

I could see it now, around the edges of his glowing aura, pressing against him.

But Clayton Dean’s body dying wasn’t going to end this.

That had probably been the first action the arcane mages in Memphis had taken as well. Peer tries to become a god and murder you? Let’s kill him first and end it.

But he’d infused his very being with living magic, and he was the one in control of that magic.

Fuck.

If his body died, then his mind would take control of the convergence creature itself, and any chance we’d had of controlling this died with it. I could take on an arcane mage with too much power and not enough decency. I couldn’t take on the personification of magic itself.

I leapt forward, rushing down the hall, summoning up body magic with ease. The problem with body magic wasn’t having enough power. It was using it correctly.

“Gideon, I need your help,” I called, and immediately, I could hear his footsteps rushing along behind me. “Can you get the bullets out? I have to . . . have to close this up.”

The collapsed woman in her doorway looked up at me in horror as I fell to my knees beside Dean. “You want to help him? He’s . . . he’s a monster.”

“He’s an asshole who deserves to spend a lot of time in prison,” I agreed. “And I’m going to try to make sure he gets it.”

At the very least, I suspected there would be evidence in the Marlett home that Dean had helped hold a man prisoner for six months. Not to mention Roberta, whom I imagined would be happy to testify about his attack on her.

I focused on the wounds, trying to pour his own blood back into his veins. I didn’t know if his blood having been exposed to air would make that a problem, but I didn’t have time to care. I needed to stop him from dying in this exact moment, not keep him from suffering side effects later.

Frankly, once I got the convergence out of him, I didn’t care if he did die of his own stupidity. I wouldn’t have wished it on him, but he’d wished it on himself with his ridiculous misogynistic entitlement.

Gideon managed to pull the bullets out like a champ, one after another, tossing them on the hallway floor and then helping me as I tried to sew up the mess they’d left behind.

“He tried to kill us,” Torres said as she knelt beside me. Emotion was finally creeping into her voice, and she sounded horrified and disgusted, but she didn’t hesitate to put pressure on one of the wounds as Gideon and I worked. “He’s out of his mind and attacking random people and calling himself a god, McKinley. What the hell are we doing?”

I looked up at her, pausing in my work for a moment. “He’s not a god, Ashley. Not yet. He’s still bound to a human body.”

Her eyes rounded in realization, and she went a little green around the edges, but I didn’t have time to help her.

Quinn came to sit next to the neighbor, all the room around Dean already taken up by the three of us trying to save him. With a wind magic specialty, he couldn’t do as much as anyone else present anyway. I assumed Torres had the most first aid experience between the lot of us. At least, until the neighbor scooted forward, still on her butt, and leaned in.

She looked up at Torres. “Put the pressure on this one. If he’s closing them up, he needs to focus there instead.” She looked at me, motioning to the wound Torres had been pressing on. “That one hit his liver. Can you fix that?”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, helpless and completely fucking clueless.

“Sage.” Gideon’s voice tore my attention away from my floundering. “You can’t save him. No one can save him. What else can we do? How do we stop him?”

I sat back, wasting precious seconds staring at a dying man. Dean was unconscious already. The whole damn hallway was covered in his blood. Gideon was right. I couldn’t save Clayton Dean’s life. I couldn’t save everyone every time. I certainly hadn’t saved Alarie. Hadn’t even tried, really.

Why was Dean different? His words came back to me.

You all thought I was nothing. Mediocre lawyer, mediocre mage, easy to push around.

It was me, a year and a half earlier.

Wasn’t it?

I didn’t want Dean to get away with all he’d done, but on some level, I pitied him.

Twenty-five pounds of fox rammed into my side and when I turned to look at him, Fluke was giving me his best “I call bullshit” look. Because it was bullshit, and I was identifying with a man who’d blamed the women in his life for his own bad actions. Who’d been a low-class mage like me, and instead of just living with it, had decided to override the rights of the convergence creature and absorb it for his own purposes. Admittedly, he’d been a low-class arcane mage instead of a low-class social mage, but that didn’t change anything substantive.

What the hell had I been thinking?

I shook my head and turned to look at Dean once more. “Gideon, keep him alive. Not . . . not save him. Keep him alive. I’m going to take the convergence out of him.”

“That we can do, sweetheart, at least for a little while. I’ll keep his heart beating as long as I can.”

And with that, I closed my eyes, focusing on the feeling of magic in Dean’s aura. It was too powerful, overwhelming, and . . . still terrified.

It was alive.

Somehow, he hadn’t killed the convergence by forcing it into himself. Still, it was sewn tightly into him, his own magic clinging to it tenaciously. Of course it was—if it let go now, then Dean would die when his body gave up, and no one wanted to die.

I pulled for a moment, but Dean’s magic dug in, twining tendrils of itself deeper into the convergence.

If I just ripped the convergence free of Dean’s magic, I would damage it, possibly kill it.

A full body shiver went through me as I realized what I had to do. A memory of an innocent man dying in my arms flashed through me, watching him convulse and thrash as he died, not being able to save him.

Dean wasn’t innocent, but the only choice left wasn’t to save him and let him stand trial. It was to finish what Torres had started. Like Lina Merton had done to a man in front of me a year and a half ago, I had to steal Clayton Dean’s magic, take it out of his body.

I had to take it and the convergence into myself, and then willingly let the convergence go.

I had to kill him.

The other choice was to let him take over the convergence and create havoc until we were forced to make the horrific choice the arcane mages of Memphis had and sacrifice the city to stop him. Yeah, that wasn’t even a real option.

So I refocused my magic, not on Dean’s body, but on his magic.

I didn’t know how Lina had stolen people’s magic, but I didn’t need to emulate that. Dean had made this job easy when he’d absorbed the convergence, since it dragged his magic to the surface even when he wasn’t using it. All I had to do was pull the arcane magic into myself, not differentiating between the convergence and Dean’s own magic.

If I tried to rip the convergence away from his magic, the convergence would be harmed.

Instead, I pulled at all of the magic, letting it harm his own body as it tried to hold tight, screw itself even deeper inside.

It resisted, the force I was exerting on it unnatural and uncomfortable, when it had spent a lifetime inside Clayton Dean’s body. Fortunately for me, it was also a sad, stunted little thing. Dean had never been the strongest mage, probably made worse by the amount of time he’d spent among the Believers, unable to use what ability he did have.

Like me and my pitiful class two social magic.

And yet nothing like that, since I’d never held anyone prisoner or assaulted my ex and tried to murder strangers in the attempt to get more power.

I tugged, at first as gently as possible, trying to do as little harm as I could. Dean’s magic lashed out against me, but between us, the convergence swelled, absorbing the blow, then flinching in pain.

No. Absolutely not allowed.

I was not going to let this asshole hurt my friend any more than he already had. With all my magic, I yanked, ripping Dean’s magic out of his body like I was pulling a weed out of the ground.

With the force of the pull, my whole body fell back against the wall, my head hitting the remains of the drywall Dean had destroyed. Behind me, the building creaked ominously, and in front of me, Clayton Dean let out a noise like a banshee losing a loved one.

My world went a blinding white, and for a second, all I could see was magic. All I could feel was relief, despite the smarting wounds all over my existence, leaking little bits of magic. Inside me, the hateful presence of Clayton Dean still existed, angry and bitter and loathsome. I hissed and reached out to destroy it, but Sage hesitated.

I . . . I hesitated.

Why? He had hurt and destroyed and from the terrible vantage point inside his head, I’d known what awful things he had meant to do. He was like the Lina-creature, who had intended to kill Sage. Kill me. Kill us?

Enlightenment struck.

We. It was not I, Sage, or I, the convergence, or even I, Clayton Dean’s magic. It was all three of us, entwined.

“Imagine what we could do,” Clayton Dean’s magic suggested. “Make everything right. Stop evil, help loved ones. Create a just world.”

The Sage part of us considered, for approximately one second, before shaking the idea off like so many raindrops. “That isn’t a just world. It’s a puppet world controlled by the whims of one being. And no one being, however powerful, or however well-intentioned, has the right to control all that is.”

At my absolute conviction, the convergence swelled, tugging at the magic of Clayton Dean, trying to pull it out of itself.

“Leave,” it insisted, “or be consumed.”

Dean’s magic struggled against the convergence, trying to wrest control. It took no time to see that wouldn’t work. Now, without his entire mind, Dean was so outmatched by the convergence that it was laughable. Like spitting into an oncoming hurricane, he couldn’t hope to make any real difference.

The convergence took hold of him, magic coalescing around one of his twining tendrils and flashing bright with something that felt almost like boiling heat. It burned the tendril away until it drifted into the flows of the ley lines around us, nothing more than wisps of arcane magic remaining.

Dean’s magic screeched in pain and let go of the convergence, drifting away from us. Briefly, I thought it might try to return to its own body, but instead, it simply floated away in the flows of the ley lines, slowly breaking apart as it went.

And then we were alone, the convergence and me.

The convergence’s power was too much. I could live with it inside my body, but it was more than any person should have. More than I needed or wanted, and it would always leave me with the temptation to overstep. To control, when that wasn’t what I truly wanted.

The convergence belonged inside the ley line, alongside humanity but not a part of it. Watching, but never judging. Never deciding.

So I dislodged it from inside myself, pulling the ley line open and letting it ease back inside, leaving my body with a strangely intimate brush against my magic and a whisper of “Thank you, friend,” which I returned in kind.

After all, it had protected me as much as I had protected it.

When I opened my eyes again, it wasn’t to the blinding iridescence of pure magic, but to the cracked, stained beige of the apartment house’s hallway ceiling.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Q uinn’s face came into focus a moment later, worriedly leaning over me. “You okay there Sage? Can, um, can Gideon let go? I think Dean’s dying.”

A second later, Gideon’s voice sounded, the loveliest, most welcome thing I’d ever heard in my life, even if he sounded exhausted and worried. “He’s gone. Did I hold him long enough?”

Quinn helped me up, and I tried to nod at Gideon, but the motion made dizziness sweep through me, so I managed to croak out a quick, “yeah,” as I let Quinn drag me to my feet.

“Then we’ve got another problem,” Torres broke in, pushing herself up from where she’d knelt beside . . . beside Clayton Dean’s body. The hallway looked like something out of a horror movie, with blood and debris everywhere.

Before Torres even managed to explain the issue, the building explained it for her as once again, the wall behind me creaked in a way that said it wasn’t long for the world.

“We gotta evacuate the building,” Gideon said, moving to wipe his hands on his jeans, but stopping and looking at them beforehand, and wincing at the amount of blood on them. “Fire alarm?”

Torres nodded, and efficiently marched over to pull the lever to set off the building’s fire alarm.

As she moved, the woman Dean had been assaulting spoke up. “They don’t work, and the landlord ignores us when we ask to have things fixed.”

If I wouldn’t have fallen down, I’d have smacked my forehead with my palm at the ridiculousness of it, so I continued to cling to Quinn. Thankfully, he didn’t seem inclined to let go.

The building had been at least six floors, and this was the third. If this floor had lost enough structural integrity, then literally everyone in the building was in danger.

I watched Gideon reach out to the fire alarm with his magic, trying to set the thing off by fixing its mechanism, but it wasn’t going to work. I could already see that the faulty wiring was throughout the building, and even if it hadn’t been, the actual sirens and lights were most all in disrepair.

“I could knock on just about everyone’s door with air,” Quinn offered, but then he looked around nervously. “But it might speed up what’s happening on this floor if I moved that much wind through it.”

Gideon shooed us all toward the stairs. “I’ll head up to the top and start working my way down. We’re just going to have to hope that the building holds long enough to get everyone out.

Gideon was . . . oh no. No, that couldn’t happen. Gideon would literally refuse to leave until the building fell, and it would take him with it. We’d just fucking gotten engaged. I was not losing him.

Social magic. I could . . . I could influence everyone to leave their apartments.

Why did even that feel slimy and wrong in my gut, though?

It was like Dean and his idea to control the world. To take away people’s free will and enforce my own in its place. Maybe they would all want to know that the building was going to fall, but I had no right to get inside their heads and make them leave.

Why the hell was social magic more acceptable than death magic? It was inherently problematic, affecting people’s minds and actions without their permission. Taking away the single thing that was essentially and undeniably theirs.

Every human’s most prized possession: free will.

Including the free will to be an asshole, or to refuse to evacuate a falling building if they didn’t want to.

I couldn’t ever explain what happened inside my head in that moment, or why, but suddenly, every time I’d ever seen social magic in action became crystal clear in my mind. Almost more a vibration than a set of visible lines, the magic was perfect and easy and just . . . something I had never wanted to be a part of me.

I’d spent years failing as a social mage because on the most basic level of myself, I hated social magic. I hated how I had been trained to use it.

But there was another way. I closed my mind and called once again on the flows of magic all around me, channeling it into the vibrations of social magic. So simple. And instead of forcing myself into people’s minds, I sent out a message. Not in sound waves, but in . . . mental waves.

“The building may be collapsing. You have to leave your apartment and get out.” I paused a moment and then added, “If you have a neighbor who needs help moving, please check on them.”

All the breath in me left in a rush, the dizziness pushing back in and bringing black spots to dance in my vision. Fortunately, Quinn was still there to hold me up. I leaned all my weight on him. “Did you hear that?”

“I did,” he agreed, looking at me as though he was afraid I was about to collapse. “You did good.”

It was a good thing, too, because I didn’t have a scrap of energy left to help with the evacuation. I couldn’t even get myself down the stairs, leaning all of my weight on Quinn as we moved.

I hoped there weren’t people with mobility issues all over the building, but it was a six-story walk-up. It was hard to imagine folks who couldn’t move living on the sixth floor. Not impossible, just hopefully unlikely.

“Mrs. Johnson on the first floor,” the woman Dean had been attacking panted out. “She’s the only one I know of who’ll need help. We can stop and get her.” I glanced at her, and she shrugged. “I’m a paramedic. I try to pay attention to the people who live in the building. It’s only twenty-two apartments.”

She glanced back, vaguely in the direction of where we had left Clayton Dean, lying in the hallway where he had died. I couldn’t imagine learning that my own neighbor had harbored such resentment for something he hadn’t even mentioned—to say nothing of watching him bleed out on the floor. But hell, she’d actually tried to help us help a man who had assaulted her a moment before. Clearly, she was a dedicated paramedic.

As we reached the second floor, we were met there by half a dozen people heading down the stairs. A woman with a baby in her arms looked at us, eyes wide and frightened. “Is the building really collapsing?”

“It might be, ma’am,” Quinn agreed, still holding me up. “There’s major structural damage on the third floor, and if it goes, it could take the rest of the building with it.”

She held her baby tight, following along as we all hurried out. Gideon and the paramedic stopped to help an elderly woman with a walker when we got to the first floor, and even that made what little breath I had catch in my throat.

If the building started to collapse, what could I do to save them?

We got down to the street to find people pouring out of the neighboring buildings as well as the one we’d been in. There was confusion and concern, and I realized, of course, that I’d caught too damn many people in my warning.

On the other hand, if the building fell the wrong way, it could damage any of the buildings next to it, hurting those people as well, so maybe it was for the best.

Apparently the building to one side had a functional alarm system, because someone had pulled it, and it was flashing bright lights periodically.

Quinn set me on the curb on the opposite side of the street and along with Torres, started to wrangle the crowd, insisting that they move farther from the building, over near me, both to get away from possible danger and to make room for emergency vehicles.

Gideon came out of the building carrying a black cat, sending a nod to all of us to indicate that the stairwell was clear. I assumed he had used his magic to check for anyone left behind in the building and found the cat. Of course Gideon couldn’t let a cat be hurt.

He also tapped the front of his coat as he met my eye, and I realized he’d gone back, figured out which apartment was Dean’s, and gotten the book. Thank fuck.

Sirens finally started in the distance, some ten minutes into the evacuation process.

The people milling about in the street were just starting to get annoyed, assuming my warning had been some kind of nasty prank, when the building gave a groan, and seconds later the sound of crashing concrete filled the air.

A moment later, the center of the building collapsed in on itself, the top three floors crushing their way through the bottom three. Screams filled the air, followed by a cloud of choking dust.

The dust cleared a second later, pushed up and away by Quinn, to reveal rubble where all of these people’s homes had been.

A moment later, Quinn sauntered over and plopped himself down on the curb beside me. “Finally got to be useful. Sorry I left so damn much of this on your shoulders.”

I couldn’t even summon the energy to wave him off. Just scoffed and mumbled, “Shut up. Nobody insults my partner.”

Gideon sat down next to me on the other side, the cat having wound its way around his shoulders, and I leaned into him. It was just what I needed. The familiar warm comfort of Gideon. That perfect scent of leather and whatever else it was.

I was asleep before the cops arrived, and I didn’t wake to give a statement.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

S urprising no one, I slept right through until the next morning. The only bad part was that it meant I woke up just before dawn and couldn’t get back to sleep.

On the other hand, I could get used to waking up before Gideon left the bed for the morning, and given my love of sleeping in, that was rare. It was nice to wake with his arms wrapped around me and his scent permeating everything. After the ridiculous, terrifying day we’d had, in fact, it wasn’t just his arms around me. He had a leg tossed over both of mine, pulling me as close to himself as he could. Like if he just wrapped himself around me hard enough, I’d be safe.

I smiled and burrowed back into him. Sure, I was a full-grown mage who was capable of handling almost anything. That didn’t mean I disliked feeling safe in my fiancé’s arms.

“What’re you smiling at?” Gideon asked, almost making me jump with the realization he was awake back there. His breath tickled my ear, and I shivered against him but didn’t pull away.

“Mmm,” I mumbled, burying my face in the pillow and trying to hide the smile in question.

He nipped at my earlobe, chuckling at the way I twitched forward, and tightening his hold to keep me in his arms. Not that I wanted out.

In fact, I pushed back into his arms, testing the waters. Sure enough, he was hard against my ass. I wiggled against him in the least subtle demand of all time, and it made him chuckle again.

“Something you want, sweetheart?”

Oh, was that how it was going to be? Sometimes, Gideon seemed to need me to be, for lack of a better term, chatty. To not only give enthusiastic consent, but to go overboard. To tell him exactly what I wanted him to do with his hands, his lips, his cock.

On the other hand, some mornings he wanted me to show him with my body, and let him make me into a moaning, writhing mess.

With just a little difficulty, I turned around in his arms, looking up into his beautiful face, trying to get a feel for his mood. That lopsided smile was definitely the first thing I wanted to see every morning for the rest of my life.

I wriggled my arms into the space between us and twined them around his neck, pulling myself up to press a soft kiss to his lips. “There’s definitely something I want,” I agreed. “See, there’s this guy I’m going to spend the rest of my life with. And we almost died yesterday. A lot. So I think maybe I deserve it.”

He lifted a brow, as though considering. “I suppose if he’s going to spend the rest of his life with you, it’s probably in his best interests to keep you happy. I suppose he’d probably be amenable, depending on just what it is you want.”

I grinned up at him, and then unclasped my hands from behind his neck, braced them on his chest, and pushed him over onto his back.

Without glancing away from me, he pulled open the bedside table and grabbed the lube.

“You do know what I like, don’t you?” I slipped off the boxers I usually slept in and thanked my lucky stars that Gideon almost always slept naked. The man was a gift.

Without a word, he squeezed some lube onto his fingers, coating his cock liberally as he watched me strip. His dark eyes were almost black in the pre-dawn light, roving over my body as though it was something special, something—something he couldn’t get enough of.

I took the lube out of his hand as I moved to straddle him, coating my own fingers and reaching back to stretch myself out. It still took a little work to take his cock, every time. The man truly was gifted, in all the ways.

He licked his lower lip as he watched me, eyes intense, searching my face for the signs of what I was doing to myself where he couldn’t see. So I hammed it up a little, squirming against my fingers like I was fucking them, and whimpering when I managed to find a good angle.

“Sweetheart,” he said, his tone warning, like he was ready to lose control.

Between the two of us, we both knew he had rock solid control. He’d never do a thing I didn’t want him to. But it was the best game ever, winding him up until he pushed me onto my back and shoved his cock into me.

I shot him a challenging look and the game was on.

“Hurry the hell up and ride me,” he rasped, arching up toward me, squeezing one of my thighs in his strong hand.

“Not ready yet,” I answered, my voice breathier than I expected, so I leaned into it and gasped and panted. To press the image even more, I pushed my fingers into myself harder and leaned back with a whimper.

He let go of his cock, reaching out with that hand as well and kneading both of my thighs. “Baby, you’re always ready for my cock. Get on me. Now.”

I bit my lip as I continued to work myself open, giving him a heated gaze that invited complete debauchery.

Like a predator making the final lunge at its prey, he let go and shot forward, flipping our positions so that I was on my back beneath him. In the same move, he snatched both of my wrists in his hands and pressed them into the bed over my head.

Just like that, I was laid out beneath him, completely at his mercy. Right where I wanted to be. I smiled up at him, pushing my cock up into his, grinding together.

He groaned at the touch, but then pulled back—but only far enough to get a hand around his cock, guiding it into place at my entrance. He held there for a moment, as though maybe he’d return my tease and drag it out, but then slammed home all in one stroke.

I arched up against him, crying out at the burst of pleasure-pain that rushed through me at the intense sensation. I wanted to call his name, make demands, anything, but he didn’t even give me a moment to catch my breath, pulling out and shoving home again and again, until I couldn’t even press my hips up in time with his. All I could do was lie there and take what he gave me, panting in short breaths and almost sobbing with the intensity of the sensation.

Just when I thought the world was going to break apart all on its own, his hand slipped between us, fingers wrapping around my cock and sliding, tugging. It was almost too hard, just like when he’d pushed into me, and it sent me careening over the edge, gasping and shaking. My eyes rolled back and I shoved up against him, taking his cock all the way to the hilt as I spilled over his hand.

When I went limp under him, he let go of my cock and pounded into me with abandon, his hips pistoning into me faster than I could have hoped to keep up with. It only took a moment before he was coming too, tensing and groaning above me, burying his face in my neck and biting down on the tender skin there.

We stayed that way for a long while, just holding each other, breathing the same air, content to be together. Yes, this was definitely the way I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

A scratch at the door frame followed by a little bark was what dragged us out of our little bubble. It was breakfast time, apparently, and Fluke wasn’t going to let a little thing like “thankful to be alive sex” get in the way of that.

CHAPTER THIRTY

T  he Aureum building’s boardroom was a little different from the interrogation room. Soothing pale green walls, warm brown leather chairs, and a huge mahogany table—it was like it belonged in a different building than the other room.

They’d seated me at one end of the table, and I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to feel respectful or adversarial. On one side of me sat Anson, and on the other, Quinn.

At the other end of the table were three people I’d never heard of before the last year, but who might have been my very worst nightmare.

There was Quinn’s boss, the one who’d been doing a damned mediocre job of helping us, but who hadn’t been uncovered in the investigation into the Believers. His assistant, on the other hand, had. His assistant, who it turned out hadn’t been sending along half of Quinn’s messages.

There was Quinn’s boss’s boss, the quaesitor magnus appointed when Robert Marlett Junior had gone missing.

Finally, the dominus magnus himself sat across from me at the opposite end of the table. The man in charge of the Aureum for the western United States.

Quinn was terrified, and I didn’t need to invade his mind to know it. He was fidgeting, biting his lip, and staring anywhere but at the other people at the table.

Anson was holding his own just fine, as I’d have expected. He was casual, but keeping turned away from me, toward the others. Clearly, I was the one he was comfortable putting his back to, and the others had noted that familiarity and trust, their eyes sliding across us with calculation and interest.

Fluke was sitting on a chair beside me, not quite at the table, but not snubbed. When we’d been sitting down, Anson had turned and whispered to his assistant, and he had rolled in that final chair for my familiar. I suspected the others hadn’t intended the lack of a chair as an insult. Most of them just didn’t have familiars like Fluke, who were their partners, best friends, even members of their family.

I didn’t know if they wanted me around anymore after the disaster with Dean and the Believers, but if they did, they were going to have to get used to his smiling foxy face.

“I must admit, the reports read as completely fantastical,” the dominus magnus said, waving to a stack of folders in front of him. “If they didn’t all mesh together so well, and include the words of people I trust implicitly, I’d have a hard time believing all of this.”

My pissy inner voice wanted to point out that it wouldn’t have happened that way if we’d had proper support, but that attitude wouldn’t help anything. The Aureum hadn’t truly understood the scope of the mess until the complicit members of their own organization had been uncovered and removed. Five more quaesitors, nine support staff in the quaesitor’s regional office, and even a man who’d worked for the dominus magnus himself. Over a hundred arrests so far, and the investigation was still occasionally turning up more people who’d been complicit.

“It seems like fantastical is what Junction does,” I answered, instead of getting defensive. “But given the resources we had, I think we did a pretty darn good job.”

Silence fell over the room.

Most eyes were on the dominus magnus, waiting on his verdict. Except Anson, who was nodding along with me and shot me a grandfatherly smile over his shoulder.

The dominus magnus tapped his fingernails in order, one at a time, on the manila file folder, his head cocked as he considered. Finally, he looked back up at me and nodded. “I am inclined to agree, Mr. McKinley. Beyond being horrified by how remiss we have been in handling the issues of arcane mages and the city of Junction itself, it seems the Aureum has quite a lot to answer for. Harboring these extremists in our own number without even realizing it—it raises many red flags that we need to address. It seems we need to perform a thorough investigation of ourselves.”

“Which we’re not qualified to do,” Anson interjected.

The quaesitor magnus, a thin-faced, beady-eyed man who had not introduced himself by name, but by title, turned as though to speak to Anson, looking irritated, but the dominus magnus cut him off. “Exactly.”

The room went quiet again, only interrupted when Fluke yawned loudly. The dominus magnus turned to look at him and shockingly, smiled. “I also agree with that, young Fluke. Let’s not drag this out with political infighting. The Aureum needs investigation, and we clearly aren’t capable of doing that policing ourselves. So while we discuss how to restructure to avoid this happening in the future, I want to ask the only two people present who were willing to turn the organization on its head in the name of justice to do the job.”

I glanced over to see Quinn doing mental calculations, looking between me and Fluke.

“Three, if you count my familiar,” I said.

The dominus magnus laughed. “Indeed. The three of you, then. I understand you also had help from one Gideon Knight.”

Quinn opened his mouth, closed it, but then apparently found his courage and spoke up. “That would leave Junction without any quaesitors at all.”

Somehow, the dominus magnus seemed jollier as we went. Hell, I’d been terrified when I’d first seen him, but suddenly that white hair and neat beard were feeling more like Santa Claus than terrifying mage. “Given the circumstances and Miss Maines’s impending plea deal, we’re planning on making an exception for her to come back, albeit on a probationary basis, and reassigning six new recruits under her. I expect you’ll want to begin your investigation with them.”

Jordan was getting her job back.

It was a concession they were making with me in mind, I realized, because they knew I’d been the one demanding that Jordan get a plea deal. All I could do was nod, since I wasn’t sure what to say in response to getting exactly what I’d wanted.

On the other hand, asking me to do an investigation and making concessions like helping Jordan meant that they were getting something too. Me, and my loyalty to the ideals of the Aureum.

Don’t throw softballs, Quinn had said to me once when talking about this eventual meeting.

I leaned forward, putting my elbows on the table. “You’re planning on amending the Aureum’s internal documentation to include arcane magic as an accepted type.”

“We’re meeting in Vienna in June to sign the new documents,” he agreed. “I assumed you would want that.”

“I am. I want death magic included too. No more sweeping it under the rug and treating it like something dirty. If we can respect social mages manipulating people’s minds, we can respect that all things have an end and there’s nothing wrong with that. And I want everyone indentured to the Aureum to be released.”

The quaesitor magnus scoffed—it was like anyone put in the position had to be a giant bag of dicks—but the dominus held up a hand to keep him quiet. “The Aureum is not legally supposed to keep people the way you’re indicating.”

Anson, it seemed, had come prepared. He snatched up a folder in front of himself. “It’s filed as a debt. The Aureum took this mage in as a child, and they’re holding her in debt for feeding and housing her, charging an exorbitant interest rate so that no matter how much money she has, she’ll never be able to pay it off.” He slid the folder down the table to the dominus magnus, who had to yank it away from the quaesitor magnus.

The asshole leaned toward him and started whispering about the amount of money the Aureum stood to lose, but the dominus opened the folder and looked at it, his brows lifting higher and higher as he went. “This woman has been trying to pay off a debt incurred at age five for . . . thirty years.”

“It’s a common story for death and temporal mages taken in by the Aureum,” Anson responded instantly.

“The costs to raise a child are considerable, Dominus,” the man countered.

The dominus turned to him, then to the young man sitting behind him taking notes. “Pull all the records for anyone in a situation like this. Any debt incurred by a person under the age of eighteen is being forgiven. Now, today. We don’t punish children for needing help.” He turned back to me. “You can look at any others, bring them to my attention in the course of your investigation.”

“And death magic?” I pressed.

I half expected him to tell me I was pushing my luck, but instead he winked. “Believe it or not, it’s already on the docket for discussion at the meeting this summer. I can’t make promises about what everyone will agree to, but I can tell you this country has long been the main holdout on that issue, and I can promise you we will no longer be that.”

Fluke leaned in, staring at him, so I turned to look at my familiar. After a moment, he turned and gave me a decisive nod, insofar as a fox is able to nod.

That settled it. Fluke was better at reading people than anyone else I’d ever known, so his approval was as good as gold. “Okay. I’m willing to work with Quinn and investigate. After your meeting, after the indentured servants are released and all types of magic are being offered the same protections, I’ll be willing to sign a contract or join officially or whatever it is you want.”

I figured Gideon would have even been proud of me since I hadn’t referenced slavery once, even though that was what it was.

The dominus magnus leaned in toward me, and it suddenly felt like we were the only two people at the table. “What if what I want is for you to accept Anson as your mentor, and train to be the next Dominus of Junction?”

I blinked at him. “Isn’t there some kind of, um, hierarchy for that? Like, only people in the dominus’s office can train for that position?”

His grin was almost predatory, and I had to push down the shiver that wanted to slide up my spine. I felt like nothing so much as prey. “Not at all. It’s an elected position, voted on by member mages within the areas the domini are working in. Your peers, so to speak.”

Shit. My grandmother. Quinn. Anson.

So many mages in Junction would vote for me based on my name alone.

Oh look, yet again my lack of knowledge was biting me in the ass, this time because as a class two social mage, I’d never been a full member of the Aureum.

“You really want me to—to—”

“I do, yes. You’ve made it clear to me that the organization needs a change, Sage, and I think you’re a good man to represent it.” He finally sat back, twining his hands and laying them over his chest, looking like a self-satisfied asshole. Damn it, I kind of liked him. “How about it? Work for the Aureum. I’ll help you try to find justice for everyone.”

I glanced over at Anson to find him looking at me. Not in hopeful anticipation as I might have expected, but with sympathy. “It’s up to you, Sage. You don’t have to. You didn’t make this problem.”

I had not. But it was a problem, and I was in the ideal position to help fix it. What was more, I had the time to do that, since the bookstore was fine without me. Most of all, I wanted to see it done enough to step up and do it myself.

I turned back to the dominus, straightening in my seat and squaring my shoulders. “We’re going to be named an outside entity for this investigation, answering to no one inside the Aureum, and no one is going to put limits on who gets investigated. Everyone gets the same treatment, and no one is above the law. Our people get protected by those new quaesitors, once we okay them.”

“I’m willing to assign funds for bodyguards, if you like,” he countered, somehow offering me more than I’d demanded. Was I still throwing softballs? “I recognize that this is going to cause unrest in those trying to get away with something.”

Ah. No, he just recognized a potential issue.

“All right then, dominus magnus, you’ve got yourself a deal.” I stood from the table.

He grinned and followed suit, coming around the table and sticking out a hand for me to shake. “Please, call me Wilson. All of my friends do, and I think we’re going to be great friends.”

That afternoon was the first time the dominus magnus of the western United States took me and mine out to lunch, on him. It would not be the last.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

G ideon in a tuxedo, I reminded myself.

Yup. That again. But this time, no one was going to ruin it for me. I was going to get to spend the day with Gideon in a tuxedo, and this time, only people who liked me had been invited.

Grandma had dropped the giant plans altogether in favor of perfection. She’d hired someone to weed their way through my mother’s garden, making it presentable for pictures. She added new trees and plants to the backyard, and had a gazebo built next to Marron’s stable, along with a beautiful stone path leading up to it.

And we had only invited friends and family—less than twenty people—to spend the day with us as Gideon and I promised to spend the rest of our lives together. Not that we hadn’t already promised that, but the wedding made it official and public.

Aliyah Almasi was coming, free of the Aureum and finally able to be openly herself. It would take time for the public awareness to change, for people to accept death magic as just another specialty with no connotations, but the Aureum had voted the changes into effect a month earlier at their June meeting, going above and beyond what I’d expected.

They hadn’t added both death and arcane magic to their definitions. Instead, they had removed specified types entirely, changing the language to say that “all magical specialties” were under their protection, since it had been well and truly proven that we didn’t know all there was to know about magic.

Beez poked her head into the bedroom to check on me, and when she saw me tying my bowtie, she rolled her eyes and marched over, snatching it out of my hands and setting to tying it herself. It was good to have friends who knew what they were doing.

“Ready to marry me, Doc?”

She snorted and shook her head. “We’re all lucky I’m just the one performing the ceremony. If you and I got married, we’d both be dead inside a month.” I pouted at her, but she didn’t take the bait, just shaking her head. “Gideon has the patience of a saint.”

That was undeniable, so I didn’t try.

I met my soon-to-be husband at the head of the garden, both of us already dressed and ready to walk “down the aisle” of our friends and family together. Between his golden hair and the glittering flecks in his deep brown eyes, he was a perfect golden vision, everything I’d ever wanted in my life. We turned and headed for the gazebo, where Beez and our familiars waited.

Fluke, everything I’d needed and not known I needed, was wearing an adorable bowtie and collar, and little cuffs on his ankles complete with freaking cufflinks. In his mouth, he carried a basket with our rings in it.

My grandmother sat right in front with Anson at her side. He’d already handed her his handkerchief, because she was already sniffling into it. Freddy sat with his arm around Mal, who looked thoroughly kissed in the recent past, their lips swollen and red. Unsurprisingly, Freddy looked smug.

Aliyah, Quinn, Sterling, and Jordan sat in other chairs, along with a few of Grandma’s closest friends and a few people Quinn and I had taken onto our team. Our investigative team, turning up the seedy underbelly of the Aureum and giving it the thorough cleaning it needed. Between the embezzlement, the abuse of systems that were being dismantled, and just general dishonesty in politics, we hadn’t even finished investigating the Aureum in Junction yet, let alone moved on to the rest of the state.

We had a lot of work cut out for us, but we were finding that we were up to the task.

The wedding was . . . well, it was a wedding. We gave vows—the standard ones, since I was no poet, to be eloquent with my feelings—and Beez declared us husbands. When she said we could kiss, Gideon leaned down and brushed his lips across mine, nothing even so much as PG-13.

“Foul,” Freddy called from his seat in the front row. “I know you can do better than that. I’ve slept in the room next to the one you two share at Grandma’s.”

Gideon shot him a look, and a second later, I was pulled halfway off the ground as my brand-new husband dipped me all the way back to really plant one on me. I thought maybe my hair was brushing the floor of the gazebo, he dipped me so low.

He explored my mouth thoroughly, and all I could see, feel, and think about was Gideon. The mint of his toothpaste, the smell of leather and shaving cream that was always there, even when he wasn’t wearing his leather jacket, and the deep, perfect brown of his eyes.

The feel of his mouth on mine.

A feeling that was mine now and for the rest of my life.

He lifted his head to shoot Freddy a challenging look, and I rolled my eyes. The vantage point let me see Fluke, slipping away from the gazebo, an entire cooked Cornish hen in his mouth.

Considering he’d have one on his plate in a moment, that caught my attention. Why would Fluke snatch food and sneak away into the trees in the backyard?

I tapped Gideon, making him pull me back up and let go, and followed after my familiar. It didn’t take long to catch up with him, slinking into a small copse of trees, his ill-gotten goods still firmly in his mouth.

Gideon followed along after me, so he was standing right next to me when I pulled back a palm leaf and found . . . raccoons.

Fluke had handed the hen off to a big one, and she was in the midst of tearing off pieces and handing them to three—no, four—little raccoons. All of them looked up at Gideon and me in terror, and Fluke ducked his head sheepishly.

“Seriously?” I asked him. “Have you been aiding and abetting this whole time?”

I couldn’t really complain. The trash cans had stopped being attacked sometime over the last month, so if it was because Fluke was feeding them, I was fine with that.

Fluke ducked his head, but after a second, he turned and looked at the mother raccoon. She reached around behind her and grabbed . . . a fifth baby, who’d been hiding behind or under her. She handed the baby a drumstick off the hen, then handed the baby to Fluke.

Fluke, who took the baby in his mouth and went marching off back toward the garden. The mother raccoon gave me something like a shrug, watching where Fluke had gone with a little concern, but then going back to divvying up their dinner.

By the time Gideon and I got back to the garden, Fluke was depositing the young raccoon into Aliyah’s lap. It stopped eating for a moment, looking up at her, then turned, plopped down, and went back to its food. For a long time, she stared at it, then her shoulders started trembling. Grandma handed off Anson’s handkerchief and sat with her as she cried.

Maybe there really was something to having Fluke hunt down familiars. He would know one, after all, since he had to have known even as a kit that he wasn’t quite like the other foxes.

Meanwhile, Freddy was scratching Fluke’s ears with an indulgent smile. “Such a talented little shit. Just like your mage.”

“Don’t tell him that,” Gideon interrupted. “He’ll get a big head.”

Freddy laughed uproariously then motioned to where the caterers Grandma had hired were setting up the buffet. “Then take him to go get dinner while I spoil his familiar a little.”

So Gideon did, and I didn’t even complain that the “big head” comment wasn’t supposed to be aimed at me.

People talked about getting married being a pivotal day. A major change, the first day of the rest of your life, all that loaded stuff.

But it wasn’t really that, not for us. It was the next day in the life we were already living. Yeah, it was a celebration of our relationship and what we meant to each other, but it was also . . . just a great day. A day to sit with our friends and family and eat good food and laugh and talk and live our lives.

It was perfect.

My entire life was better than I’d ever imagined it could be, and I was keeping it.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Amanda, Grace Long Pope, Ange Capra, Kathy Bran, and Doni, our Regents of Llangard, and to all of our Patrons over on our Patreon page. Your support is enabling us to commission artwork based on our stories, ship signed paperbacks (even as awful as I am at actually going to the post office…), offer our books in more formats, and more. We love getting to take this journey with you.

Thank you to our incredible PA, Kim Licki, who has enabled us to write more than ever and always keeps our head on straight, and to Natasha Snow for the beautiful covers. Big thanks to all the beta readers, editors, and professionals who’ve helped make our work shine.

Thank you to our families—yes, cats included—who let us glare at our screens for hours on end and make sure we don’t forget to eat.

And last but certainly not least, a great big thank you to you, readers! We couldn’t do this amazing job and write all the kissing books under the rainbow without your faith, energy, and support.

You’re the best. <3

ALSO BY SAM BURNS

MISCELLANEOUS

THE FAIREST

THE CAT RETURNS TO ADDERLY

THE SILVERHAND - COMING 2022

THE FANTASTIC FLUKE

THE FANTASTIC FLUKE

FLUKE AND THE FAITHLESS FATHER

FLUKE AND THE FAULTLINE FIASCO

FLUKE AND THE FRONTIER FARCE

FLUKE AND THE FANTASTIC FINALE (AUGUST 2022)

THE WOLVES OF KISMET

WOLF LOST

WOLF FOUND

WOLF REBORN

THE ROWAN HARBOR CYCLE

BLACKBIRD IN THE REEDS

WOLF AND THE HOLLY

FOX AND BIRCH

HAWK IN THE ROWAN

STAG AND THE ASH

ADDER AND WILLOW

IN ANY LIGHT

EAGLE IN THE HAWTHORN

SALMON AND THE HAZEL

WREN AND OAK

WILDE LOVE

STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART

SINS OF THE FATHER

STRIKE UP THE BAND

SAINT AND THE SINNER

A VERY WILDE CHRISTMAS

ALSO BY SAM BURNS & W.M. FAWKES

LORDS OF THE UNDERWORLD

Prince of Death

Prisoner of Shadows

Patron of Mercy

SONS OF OLYMPUS

Wildfire

Fireforged (Spring 2022)

Warfire (2022)

POISONWOOD & LYRIC NOVELLAS

Poisonwood

Wyrmwood

Hardwood

FIRE & VALOR

The King’s Dragon

The Prince’s Dragon

The Assassin’s Dragon

WOLF MOON RISING

Black Moon

Harvest Moon

Hunter Moon

Cold Moon

Strawberry Moon

STAR MARKED WARRIORS

Captured

Declared

Submitted

STAND-ALONE BOOKS

A Dragon’s Fortune (Magic Emporium #3)

For Life & In Death

Pool of Dreams

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam is an author of LGBTQIA+ fiction, mostly light-hearted fantasy romances. Most of her books include a little violence, a fair amount of swearing, and maybe a sex scene or two. Oh, and let’s not forget a fox. He’d be offended at being forgotten.

She is a full-time writer who lives in the Midwest with her husband and cat. Someday, she plans to be a full-time writer who lives near the ocean with her husband and cat.

For more information:

Sam@burnswrites.com

Table of Contents

Full Page Image

Copyright

Contents

Dedication

Glossary

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

Also by Sam Burns

Also by Sam Burns & W.M. Fawkes

About the Author