Demons and DNA (Amplifier 1) Read online

That was a disconcerting option. A crazy black witch would be far too unpredictable. “Yes.”

  I strode across the field with Daniel at my heels, not at all pleased but trying to keep my uncertainty in check as Paisley led us to the same section of fence where I’d found evidence of Hannah Stewart’s attempt to flee her abusive boyfriend. Another unjustifiable layer of coincidence. But again, I could see no reason for Silver Pine to get involved in the lives of mundanes. Or why she would have masterminded a plan to draw Christopher and me off the property seven months ago, but not follow through until now.

  “How long ago?” I asked, looking over the broken fence at the dark forest stretched out before us. “How long have you been working with Mark Calhoun and Silver Pine?”

  “Mark, off and on for about three years. Silver for about three months.”

  “And how long have you known where we were? Christopher, Paisley, and me?”

  He hesitated, surprised. “Always, Socks. Knox checked in every three months or so at the start. Then more frequently after he figured out how to keep the texts and emails from being traced.” A wind picked up, rustling the looming evergreens. “He didn’t tell you?”

  “I knew. But I thought it might have been Bee he was keeping in touch with.”

  “Her too.”

  “And Zans?”

  He didn’t answer. Which meant that Zans — Samantha — was doing something I wasn’t supposed to know about. Like tracking down the rest of the Collective, as I’d long suspected.

  I turned, eyeing Daniel in the dark. “It wasn’t San Francisco, then. When Christopher had to reveal himself to rescue me. It wasn’t that botched contract that called Silver’s attention to us.” That had happened in October 2017, almost a year earlier. But Silver had only hooked up with Daniel at the beginning of the summer.

  “An amplifier and a clairvoyant working together? That was pretty stupid.”

  “Who would have known outside the Collective, outside of the Five? No one.” I leaned toward him. “If you and Zans have done something … if this is part of some mission you two are working on to take down the members of the Collective that’s gone wrong, and if Christopher is dead because of that, I’m coming after you both.”

  “I won’t be hard to find. I’m standing right next to you. Where I’d always be, if you gave me the choice. Where you should always be, with us.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yeah, I heard you.”

  I vaulted over the fence, following Paisley into the dark woods. Daniel followed and clicked on the flashlight, keeping the beam low and just ahead of my feet so as to not compromise Paisley’s vision. It would call attention to us. But the demons I had no doubt we were about to face lived in the dark, so they could easily track us either way.

  The first trap was set about ten paces into the forest. It ghosted over Paisley’s back and targeted the most magical thing in the vicinity — me. Energy exploded around me, malicious strands of magic that wrapped around my torso, pinning my arms to my sides and instantly rendering my blades useless. Not that they would have been able to cut through the magic anyway. The tentacles of the spell cinched tighter, intending to crush me.

  I didn’t struggle or attempt to free myself. I simply paused, allowing the spell to slide and slip across my arms as if it were unable to maintain its hold. It didn’t find my magic terribly tasty. And with nothing to fuel it further, it shriveled.

  I brushed the remnants of the spell from my arms, already continuing onward through the forest.

  “Is that a new ability?” Daniel asked, as if what magic I might have stolen in the last seven years was a topic for casual conversation.

  “No.” I glanced back at him. “Apparently, I was only raised to be a sociopath. It doesn’t come naturally.”

  His face was simply a lighter point among the dark trees, but I thought he might have frowned. “I’m not judging you.”

  “I am.”

  “You didn’t kill as many people as you think,” he said. “Once you got the … draining under control.”

  “Did their magic come back?” I asked, already knowing the answer but making the point just so he knew where I drew the line these days.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And for an Adept, having their magic stolen is like murder, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I didn’t expect him to. We’d never seen eye to eye about walking the line between being light and dark. I couldn’t live in the light — my soul had been stained from the moment of my birth. But I could try to not be fully dark.

  Which was why I’d tried to save my team seven years ago from the greater demon I was fairly certain Paisley was currently tracking through the woods. Because sacrificing them — including Mark and Becca — hadn’t even been an option, not even a thought. That choice was still the linchpin moment of my life. The transition between being Amp5 and becoming Emma Johnson.

  In rescuing my team instead of draining them or dying myself, I’d unwittingly drawn the ire of a black witch. And her vengeance now had me tromping through the forest, partnered with a man who wasn’t my sibling, my lover, or my friend. But still, his magic thrummed lightly against my spinal cord, binding us in life and undoubtedly in death.

  The forest slid sideways and tried to swallow me.

  More dark, dark magic shifted through the branches and roots of the evergreens surrounding us, causing them to reach, grabbing, tugging at my ankles, legs, arms, and neck.

  Ahead of me, Paisley snarled and snapped.

  Daniel grunted, straining against the spell we’d triggered. The magic was trying to compress my lungs.

  Another trap.

  I squeezed the words out, breathless. “It’s an illusion.”

  Fish’s nullifying magic welled up, rolling out from him, pushing back the spell attempting to suffocate us with our own minds. His magic crashed over me, chilling me through. His fingers brushed the back of my neck.

  Without further prompting, I grabbed the power already emanating from him intensely. Then I doubled it. Tripled it.

  He grunted, gathering the magic I’d amplified. Collecting the energy into a huge invisible cloud of power, he cast it out in an arcing wave before us. It stormed through the dark forest, subsuming the active spell as well as absorbing what felt like two more traps set ahead of us before it faded.

  Paisley glanced back at us, snarling and completely disgruntled.

  I understood her perfectly even without words. Daniel’s magic was numbing, dampening.

  “All right, all right,” Daniel said to the demon dog, laughing breathlessly. “You’re the one triggering all the spells.”

  He moved to take the lead. But he hesitated as he passed me, leaning in to murmur, low and intimate, “I’d forgotten … what it feels like to be touched by you, Socks. How could I forget?”

  “It’s my magic, Daniel. Not me.”

  He laughed again, his own fully primed magic prickling coolly against my neck and face. “After this is done, you’ll admit you had fun. You’ll admit you missed me. And you’ll admit you want to do it over and over again.”

  “You are an arrogant asshole.”

  “So are you. We were made for each other. Literally.”

  “No.” I locked my gaze to his, trying to force him to see and acknowledge my seriousness, my certainty. “It’s our magic that was made to match, along with the magic of three others.”

  “Well,” he drawled, not at all put off, “I never had a problem having all four of you. When you’re tired of running from yourself, let me know.”

  I wasn’t running from myself. I was done running. I knew that with utter certainty, because when I’d laid eyes on Aiden I knew he didn’t come without consequences. And I had chosen to stay anyway.

  I smiled.

  Daniel frowned. Then he stepped away, crossing over to Paisley. I automatically closed the space between us, close enough that I could touch him if necessary. Our training still
ingrained after seven years.

  Fish’s nullifying magic snapped forward, then wrapped around us in a tight dome. “Stay close,” he said to Paisley. “Or I’ll accidentally nullify you.”

  She snorted, informing him that he was the idiot, not her.

  Tightly grouped, we moved forward more slowly. Our footsteps in the dark underbrush broadcast our every move, though on her own, Paisley wouldn’t have made a sound.

  It didn’t matter either way. The witch already knew we were coming. She’d known the moment she sent a demon that couldn’t teleport, the moment she’d taken Christopher. But she’d had to play her best card to foil a clairvoyant and a sorcerer — the greater demon. She had no idea I hadn’t amplified Aiden’s magic. She assumed I had, actually.

  So she’d wanted to get me and Daniel out of the way momentarily, and …

  Wait …

  “What came for you?” I asked. “You and Paisley? You came to the Grants’ looking for me. Then you said Christopher texted?” Because of course he would have. “With a vision of the demon in the house?”

  “Yes. But we encountered resistance on our return.” He cleared his throat. “My vulnerability to the assault makes a bit more sense now.”

  “She used demons rather than magic.”

  “Yes.” Daniel’s tone turned wry. “Most likely targeted to me specifically, because apparently I should have used a condom.”

  I didn’t bother reconfirming what he already knew. What any male Adept sleeping with a morally questionable witch should have known.

  “Paisley saved my ass,” Daniel said, lightly petting the demon dog’s head, which currently came up to his waist. “But I was still knocked out for long enough that she got back to the house before me.”

  She had, despite being badly wounded. Dying. I rested my gaze on what little I could see of Paisley in the dark, shoving away the remembrance of her magic dying under my hands. Her blue-furred skin was still crisscrossed with scars that appeared white, making me realize they were catching the moonlight. I glanced overhead. The forest was still dark, but a shimmering of light had appeared, filtering through the thick boughs.

  “Silver Pine is flinging a lot of magic around,” I mused.

  “You wondering how she’s fueling it?”

  “I am.”

  “I always forget you can’t feel magic like I can.”

  Daniel had to feel magic in order to nullify it. I usually only picked up magical beings easily. Though I could feel magic used against me, obviously, and potent magical objects.

  Fish swept his hand forward. “I’ve been feeling it since we entered the forest. First the absence of magic at the Grant farm, and then …” He shook his head. “It’s localized ahead. Something ridiculously horrendous happened near here, a long time ago. A mass slaughter, if I was going to take a guess. And it saturated the earth, the area, with untapped malignant energy. A necromancer without proper shielding would go nuts out here.”

  Even nonmagical blood, nonmagical deaths, could leave an imprint on the land — and on the souls of their murderers. Tyler Grant had chased Hannah Stewart into these woods, and she’d run through the clearing I knew was just up ahead. If what Daniel was surmising was true, I wasn’t surprised that Hannah had been drawn to this place. And I also wasn’t surprised that she’d fought Tyler off and fled farther into the forest. Hannah carried a glimmer of magic, enough that she might have been able to tap into some latent power in the forest. Something that made her fight for her life and win.

  The problem was that a black witch could tap into that same energy. And as far as I could theorize without actual evidence, a mass slaughter even far back in the past could and would provide Silver Pine with practically endless fuel.

  I was no longer surprised that she’d held me at bay with the doll. Or sent the demons for Aiden, or almost murdered Paisley. The black witch was powerful. Too powerful. Perhaps even impossible to defeat when backed by her pet demon.

  But I didn’t believe in the impossible. And I most definitely loathed having to acknowledge that I might be wrong.

  “We’re going to have to kill her,” I murmured. “To vanquish the demon.”

  Daniel grunted in agreement.

  There was just one problem. Together or apart, and even backed by Paisley, neither of us was a match for the demon I’d confronted on the roof in LA seven years before. A demon that had already trounced me once — so badly that it had taken me three months to walk again.

  We stepped into a moonlit clearing that I recognized even in the dark, including the makeshift firepit set by a decrepit hunting shed. Seven months before, Christopher, Paisley, and I had tracked Hannah Stewart through the clearing, finding evidence that she had hurt her abuser — specifically, his blood on a rock. Then we’d followed her trail deeper into the woods.

  The woman currently spread-eagled on the ground by the firepit was a surprise, though. For more than one reason.

  Becca Jackson.

  Unconscious. Maybe even dead, because I couldn’t feel any magic — not from her or from any spell or artifact she would have been carrying as a sorcerer who specialized in demolition magic. Specifically, runed spells.

  I stumbled forward, pressing against Fish’s nullifying shield. He dropped the magic barring my advancement, but yanked me back harshly enough that he wrenched my shoulder.

  “Watch your feet,” he hissed.

  I glanced down. A circle of smooth stones ringed Becca, barely discernible in the moonlit darkness.

  “A spell,” I whispered.

  “A curse, more like it.” Daniel knelt down beside the stone-denoted circle, gazing at whatever magic he could see that I couldn’t.

  Paisley paced to the far edge of the clearing, then glanced back over her shoulder and snarled at us, impatient.

  “We’re coming,” I said to her. Then I asked Daniel, “Is Becca still alive?”

  The nullifier held up one finger, his eyes glued to her.

  She drew in a shallow breath, her chest rising almost imperceptibly.

  He nodded.

  “Unconscious? Or placed in some sort of stasis?” I asked. “Is she fueling the spell?”

  “Maybe. Or she’s the trigger,” Daniel murmured, training his flashlight on the stone nearest to him. “Unmarked.”

  “Witch magic.” Witches rarely used runes, and sorcerers rarely used circles to contain a casting. “So it isn’t a barrier spell erected by Becca.”

  Daniel grunted, agreeing with my assessment.

  “We leave her then?” I’d intended that to be a statement, not a question, but I couldn’t take it back once I’d voiced it.

  Daniel eyed me. “Whatever it is could still kill her. If it’s a timed release.”

  Spells with delayed triggers — meant to release on their own, rather than be triggered like the traps we’d encountered earlier — were a very specific branch of magic. Normally they were delicate. Precise. But that seemed out of sync with who we were dealing with.

  “I doubt Silver Pine is capable of such casting. Her magic is … on the edge of imploding.”

  Daniel snorted. “Not soon enough. But I agree. I would have said the same for the doll likeness you said drove you all the way to the river, though. And it ensnared you easily enough.”

  I ignored his attempt to needle me — again. “She could have another witch working for her.”

  “No. Silver Pine isn’t the coven sort.”

  Paisley started pacing and grumbling.

  “We have to go,” I said.

  “You’d leave Becca here, then?”

  “She might be so deeply tied to whatever spell is set here that she’s already dead. Or maybe we’re supposed to try to save her, and whatever lies dormant here is meant to hurt us. Not enough to kill us, but enough that we won’t be able to help Christopher.”

  “You’ve changed.” Daniel slowly stepped around the stone ring encasing Becca, tracing it with his flashlight as if looking for a weak entry point. �
��You once risked all our lives to save your team.”

  “I didn’t know that’s what I was doing at the time,” I said stiffly. “And Christopher is my sole responsibility now.”

  “Your sole mission?” he asked mockingly.

  “I’m not going to stand around taking insult after insult from you,” I said coolly. “I’ve always understood my responsibilities.”

  “While I haven’t?”

  “You’re here, aren’t you? You’ve put both me and Christopher in danger because you had to mix business with pleasure.”

  “Well, I learned that from you, didn’t I?”

  “I never mixed. I knew the difference between you in your bed, and you on mission with me.”

  “Yeah, that was always clear to you.” He gestured toward Becca. “What if I can neutralize the spell?”

  I stalked forward. “Think for one minute, Daniel. This is Silver Pine. Not only does she know every aspect of our training, she also understands our magic. And maybe even how we’d react to seeing a team member in jeopardy.” I glanced at Becca, seeing her take another shallow breath. “At least she knows how I’ll react, because she saw it on the roof in LA.”

  Daniel let out a harsh sigh. “We’ll come back for her. Ironically, she might be safer here than where we’re going.”

  I nodded, already stepping away toward Paisley.

  “What!?” A woman shouted from the dark woods behind us.

  It took me a moment to recognize her voice.

  Jenni Raymond.

  The shapeshifter charged out from between a tight grouping of evergreens at the edge of the clearing, where she’d obviously been listening to our conversation. I didn’t pick up the tenor of her magic until she was only steps away. It was even more muted than usual.

  I glanced at Daniel.

  He was watching Jenni Raymond with narrowed eyes. “Witch charm,” he muttered, indicating that the shapeshifter was wearing magic that helped shield her from our senses.

  I nodded. But even so, I knew such a charm shouldn’t have shielded the sound of her passage through the forest. Raymond wasn’t that kind of shifter. I glanced over at Paisley. The demon dog was sitting with her back to us.