I See You (Oracle 2) Page 13

  “I am what? Certainly not more ruthless than the pack.”

  “More clandestine. More precise.”

  A smug smile spread across Blackwell’s face. He was the sort of man who didn’t mind being called sneaky. Maybe it was a sorcerer thing. I didn’t know. I only knew him.

  “And we have a bargain, you and I,” he said. “You understand our boundaries. You don’t really know where you stand with the pack … or even with your own mentor.”

  We hadn’t spoken much in the past year and a half. I hadn’t had anything but older sketches to finish and sell to Blackwell. But apparently he asked the right questions when we did talk or text. “Don’t head-shrink me, sorcerer.”

  Blackwell barked out a laugh, as if I’d surprised him.

  “Also,” I said. “No Hoyt.” The last time we’d all been in the same place hadn’t gone well. The creep, Hoyt, had attacked Beau, burning him badly with some sort of magical silver ball bearings.

  “The spellcurser has many uses. And is currently otherwise occupied. But I agree he is best kept out of this situation.”

  “Beau would tear him apart.”

  “Indeed. Your shifter’s … enthusiasm was expensive enough to clean up last time.”

  “That was your fault.”

  Blackwell inclined his head, not really agreeing with me but willing to move on with the conversation.

  “And don’t think I trust you,” I said.

  “Of course not. As I said, we have a bargain.”

  I loosened my grip on my necklace, reaching down to unclip the tiny glass vial that hung next to the raw diamond. I held it up for Blackwell to see. The liquid within appeared black in the yellowish glow of the overhead incandescent light.

  The sorcerer’s smile took on a wicked edge.

  “You’ll only need a drop to trace him,” I said, making sure it didn’t sound like a question. I didn’t know much about magic — and knew less about sorcery specifically — but I wasn’t simply handing Blackwell a vial full of Beau’s blood.

  “I assume he wears one containing your blood as well?” Blackwell asked.

  I didn’t answer. The sorcerer’s smile widened to reveal his exceedingly straight, blindingly white teeth. I hadn’t seen him face to face in over a year, and I already knew he wasn’t a toothy smiler. But then, I’d had him in my head since I was sixteen, so I knew exactly how dangerous the man standing before me was. Whether he was playing at being friends or not.

  “The shifter’s idea?” he asked as he reached for the vial.

  I nodded.

  “Smart boy. He’s been training you as well, I see.” His dark gaze swept over me, then he glanced around the garage. “This will do.”

  Disrupting an intricate series of dust-coated spiderwebs, Blackwell grabbed a red plastic broom that I hadn’t noticed propped in the corner. He proceeded to sweep clean a five-by-five space in the center of the floored area of the garage. Then he pulled a piece of white chalk out of his suit pocket and expertly drew a pentagram on the concrete.

  A puff of magic brushed me as he joined the final point. I shivered, wrapping my arms around myself and taking a step back. For some reason, standing on the bare earth closer to the door steadied me.

  Blackwell stepped into the pentagram. He crouched down and carefully allowed a single drop of Beau’s blood to fall onto the concrete at the center of the chalked star. Still hunched, the sorcerer tilted his head to meet my gaze. “I’m glad you texted me, Rochelle. Of all the numbers you must have on your phone, you chose mine.”

  I lifted my chin, mimicking his gesture. Even though we’d already touched on this point, I somehow knew that how I responded to his statement was terribly important. “You said you’d come. You’re the only one I know who will put me, and Beau, first.”

  “Over justice, you mean? Or rescuing any innocents?”

  “Exactly.”

  Blackwell chuckled to himself. Then he dug what looked like a badly tarnished nickel out of his pocket and placed it over the drop of Beau’s blood. “If the blood is older than a week, this might not work.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Smart boy,” Blackwell repeated. Then, as he murmured to himself, his attention shifted to calling whatever magic he commanded into the pentagram. Not that I could feel anything, but I could see something … an almost transparent gray-blue shadow shifting around Blackwell’s feet as he continued to murmur to himself in a language I didn’t understand. Gaelic, maybe. The sorcerer’s accent thickened as he spoke. His tone turned commanding.

  The shadow coalesced around the coin. Then, in a flare of green that I associated with Beau’s magic, it disappeared as if it had been absorbed into the metal.

  Blackwell picked up the tarnished nickel. Not even a hint of blood remained on the concrete. The sorcerer straightened, scuffed the chalked edge of the pentagram with his foot, then stepped out to stand a few steps away from me.

  He dangled the vial of Beau’s blood before me. “Blood magic, by your command, oh oracle,” he said. His tone was mocking, yet a seriousness I didn’t fully grasp lurked underneath it.

  Forcing myself to not simply snatch the vial from him, I took it carefully, making sure the stopper was secure. I was careful to not touch Blackwell as I did so. The last time I’d touched the sorcerer while he was performing magic, I’d burned him somehow. I hadn’t mentioned that side effect to anyone but Beau, who thought that maybe it was some offensive aspect of my oracle magic. Except I hadn’t burned Cy today, nor had I meant Blackwell any harm at the time it happened, so I wasn’t sure.

  I clipped the vial back onto my necklace and kept my questions to myself. Now wasn’t the time for magic lessons. Now was the time to find Beau, hopefully unharmed.

  Blackwell’s gaze snagged on my mother’s gold chain as I clipped the vial back onto it. For a split second, I saw his dark magic roll over his eyes.

  I shuddered at the sight, tucking the chain underneath my tank top to hide it. The sorcerer’s gaze lifted to mine.

  He tossed the coin up in the air. It glinted with green as it fell back into his palm.

  “Since you don’t trust me,” he said without malice. Then he tossed the coin up for me to catch.

  I snatched it out of the air, afraid to touch it but also afraid to let it hit the ground. The metal was cool in my palm. Up close, I could see that it actually wasn’t a nickel, though it was too small and thick to be a quarter. I didn’t recognize the coin or the letters etched into it.

  “Hotter, colder,” Blackwell said. “A child’s spell, learned at my grandfather’s knee. Effective but short-term.”

  “Okay.”

  “Fix your mind on your boy and lead the way, oracle.”

  I swallowed my fear, wrenched my gaze away from the sorcerer, and gripped the coin in my left hand. I held this hand palm up, elbow bent at ninety degrees, and waited.

  “The butterfly …” Blackwell furrowed his brow at the tattoo on my left wrist. The butterfly wasn’t moving, so I wasn’t sure what had drawn the sorcerer’s attention. But I didn’t wait for him to complete the thought or question me further.

  I exited the garage, quickly crossing past the house and through its overgrown holly hedge to the sidewalk. Then I waited to see how the coin would lead me to Beau. Apparently, it was my turn to rescue him. It was a good thing we alternated.

  Having a powerful sorcerer at my back gave me a confidence that I never would have had on my own. Based on Blackwell’s reputation with the pack and Jade Godfrey, that feeling might get me blacklisted in the Adept community. But I didn’t care.

  Magic had brought me to this place.

  And I wasn’t leaving without Beau. For better or worse.

  “The coin?” Blackwell prompted as he stepped up beside me to survey the block of suburbia in which we were standing. He had to be sweltering in his suit, but he appeared cool and collected as he withdrew a pair of metal-framed sunglasses from his pocket. “Any change in temperature?”

>   I eyed his suit suspiciously. First chalk, then the coin, and now sunglasses? Yet not one unseemly bulge in the fabric?

  Blackwell was grinning at me. “I’m an open book, Rochelle. For you. Ask me anything.”

  I kept my mouth shut. The suit jacket was obviously spelled somehow. Asking the sorcerer about it would only serve to stroke his massive ego.

  Blackwell chuckled to himself. He held up his hand, appearing to randomly flag down a car driving along the street. The gleaming black luxury sedan slid to a stop before us, parking between a beat-up coupe and a minivan along the sidewalk.

  A young redheaded guy jumped out of the sedan, leaving it running. He half-waved, half-saluted at Blackwell, then hopped into the passenger side of a second car that had pulled up alongside the first. The second car drove off.

  I stared at Blackwell as he casually stepped forward to open the passenger door of the sedan.

  Sorcerers.

  Man, they liked their tricks.

  I climbed into the car without remarking about its sudden appearance.

  Blackwell slipped into the driver’s seat, then pressed a button that appeared to automatically shift the seat and adjust the rearview and side mirrors so everything was perfectly aligned for him. He looked at me questioningly.

  I made sure my face was completely blank as I leaned forward to turn down the fan. The air conditioning was way too intense.

  Blackwell raised an eyebrow at me.

  I held the coin up in my open palm. “Nothing.”

  Blackwell nodded. “We’re not close enough to the trail perhaps. Lead me back to where the kidnapping took place.”

  Okay, easier said than done. I’d been pretty freaked out when I followed Sara off campus, and she hadn’t exactly been using the main roads to get us here.

  “Okay,” I said. “It happened at Coulter Hall at the university.” I glanced around, attempting to get my bearings, but everything looked different from the perspective of the passenger seat.

  “Coulter Hall.” Blackwell spoke as if addressing the interior of the car, activating the GPS. He glanced at the map that appeared on the screen on the console.

  “It won’t continue to work for long around us.” He put the car in gear and drove up the street.

  “What won’t work?”

  “The technology. You haven’t noticed?”

  “No.”

  “I can see how you get by with the Brave. It’s older, and I gather Beau keeps it in good shape. But magic wears on technology. I would have thought your computer and phone would be a problem.”

  “They’re new. Used, but pretty new to me.”

  Blackwell glanced down at the hand in which I held the coin. Then he checked both ways before turning the corner.

  He was looking at my butterfly tattoo, not the coin. I quashed the impulse to hide my inner wrist from his sight. If Beau had taught me anything, it was to never show fear in the face of a bigger predator. It always cracked me up that he said ‘bigger’ like that, as if I could be a threat to anyone.

  The coin warmed in my hand. I might have missed it if the car hadn’t been so chilly. “Warmer,” I said, as relief flooded through my limbs.

  Blackwell nodded and kept driving.

  ∞

  We kept driving as the sun set, following the path the coin set out for us and circling back every time it cooled. The path took us from the university and along the highway, heading back to Southaven, which wasn’t surprising given that Byron seemed to be gunning for Cy. But we exited farther south than I remembered having turned off for Beau’s old house.

  Following the main streets, we found ourselves in the midst of a pocket of shops within a residential area. The coin led us to the gray van, which was parked along with four other cars in a lot behind a brick building at the edge of the retail zone.

  We circled the block, approaching the building from the front.

  The neighborhood wasn’t scuzzy. Just older and beginning to get run-down. By the general age of the buildings, it might have been the neighborhood’s local commercial center at one point. But all that was left now were a few mom-and-pop shops, a couple of cafes, and what appeared to be an old bank in a brown brick building.

  Yeah, the drug lord who’d kidnapped Beau had inexplicably parked his getaway van behind a bank.

  The streetlights along the block flickered on to herald the evening as Blackwell pulled up across from the bank, parking in front of a closed used bookstore. Both sides of the streets were lined with parked cars; Blackwell had scored the last open spot. A few pedestrians wandered the sidewalks, but the cafes appeared to be the main draw this late in the evening. The sorcerer carefully checked the parking restrictions, but then he stopped me from exiting the sedan when I went for the door handle.

  “Wait.”

  “The coin is burning up. Beau is near.”

  “The vehicle’s coated with a weak distraction spell, but opening the doors and getting out is too much of a disruption for it to fully cover,” Blackwell said. Then he nodded toward the brick building.

  A couple of guys were loitering outside the front doors, but I didn’t recognize either of them from the university lab. A night deposit box had been cut into the brick at some point. I couldn’t see much of the building’s interior beyond the well-lit reception and waiting area, but the bank appeared to have been recently renovated into office space.

  “Humans,” Blackwell said as he rolled down his window.

  Despite the fact that it was now after dark, stifling heat swamped us like an electric blanket on overload.

  “So?”

  “So, Adepts don’t tangle with humans. Well … I won’t with you in tow.”

  He fished his cellphone out of his pocket and snapped a couple of pictures of the bruisers. One of them was sipping from a huge soda cup. “That tattoo is distinctive.”

  I squinted at the loitering muscle. They both had tattoos, but I couldn’t see anything distinctive about their ink. Maybe I needed my eyes checked. A nearsighted oracle. Now that was ironic.

  Blackwell attached the pictures he’d taken to a text message he was about to send to some guy named Marshal. He showed me his screen, zooming in on the tattoo on the neck of the nondrinker.

  “A swastika?”

  “Prison tattoos.”

  Blackwell added the address of the bank to his text message and hit send. Then he went back to observing the building.

  “So we just wait?”

  “We wait.”

  “But —”

  “What do you see across the street?”

  “An old bank.”

  “And?”

  “Two guys. Both smaller than you.”

  Blackwell snorted.

  “So?” I challenged. “What do you see?”

  “An armored building in the middle of suburban America, possibly filled with human thugs working for your possible drug dealer. Humans who have the will and the capability to capture two shapeshifters in full sight of a campus filled with students, then bring them here. Not some clandestine location down by the river where the alligators roam.”

  “I think that’s Florida. And they didn’t know they were shapeshifters.”

  Blackwell ignored me. “Two guards out back watching a fortified door. Two guards out front, plainly packing. They have absolutely no concern about local police. Plus, the vehicles in the parking lot put the minimum count of hired guns up to five.”

  I tried to come up with a snippy response, but I honestly hadn’t seen the guards at the back, or the fortified door. I’d honed in on the van, wanting to simply rush the building and find Beau.

  Blackwell’s phone pinged. I read over his shoulder.

  >Both pictured have outstanding warrants. But why do you care?

  Blackwell texted back. They work for a possible local drug dealer and are currently holding a shapeshifter who is under my protection.

  >Since when do you work for the pack?

  Consider it a favor.r />
  >I’m hours away.

  I’ll come get you.

  >Yeah, it’ll be easy to explain that one to the office.

  Blackwell didn’t text back. He handed his phone to me and started the car.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “Pay attention, Rochelle.” Blackwell pulled away from the curb. “Even shielded, if we linger, we’ll draw attention. A sorcerer is only as good as the tools he wields.”

  “I’m not a sorcerer.”

  Blackwell smiled, then deliberately eyed my butterfly tattoo again. This time, I turned my wrist away.

  The sorcerer’s phone pinged. Flipping the phone up to read the text would put my wrist back into the sorcerer’s questioning view. Though I really wasn’t sure why I was attempting to hide anything from him. Instinct, maybe.

  He slowed the sedan a few blocks down from the bank, indicating left into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. Then we waited for oncoming traffic to clear.

  “The text?” Blackwell prompted.

  I glanced at the phone.

  >Ah, shit.

  “ ‘Ah, shit,’ ” I repeated as another text appeared with a ping.

  >This will void our debt in full.

  I repeated the message to Blackwell, who sighed. “Text yes.”

  He pulled the sedan into the parking lot.

  I texted. Yes.

  >Then meet me where I had the unfortunate experience of meeting you the 1st time. 15 minutes.

  I read this message to Blackwell as he backed the sedan into a spot across from the front door of the restaurant.

  Blackwell laughed. “Not everyone likes me as much as you do.”

  “I don’t like you at all.”

  “Exactly.”

  Only a single table situated at the front window appeared to be occupied. But judging by the bags being loaded out of the kitchen door into an idling red hatchback, the place did a brisk takeout business.

  Blackwell shut off the car, then turned to face me. “You will stay in the car.”

  “Ah, really?”

  The sorcerer made a show of dropping the car keys into his suit pocket. “You will not wander back to the bank. You will not call attention to yourself in any way.”

  “This guy owes you something?” I asked, avoiding acknowledging his orders to stay put.