Lock & Key Page 12

  The van hit a pothole in the road, and Kat lifted off the floor of the van before slamming back onto it with a grunt. Someone inhaled sharply, and Kat realized she’d given herself away. An unconscious person wouldn’t have made a sound.

  Irritated at the loss of her ruse, she cracked her eyes open to check out her surroundings. The cramped back of the van was totally empty, except for Reagan, who was seated along the wall opposite her, a gun in one hand, a smile on his face. Kline, Kat figured, was driving, and Marta was in the passenger seat. Apparently, the magician would not condescend to play guard duty in the dirty metal box that was the back of an A9 van. This did not surprise Kat one bit.

  Reagan leaned forward, his smile stretching wider across his ugly face as he spoke. “Hey there, kitten. You know where you are?”

  She didn’t answer, only scowled.

  He chuckled. “This is your carrier, and we’re heading back to your cage.”

  She remained silent, evaluating him. He didn’t think she was a threat with her magic bound, and to some degree, he was correct. He was twice her size, with biceps as big as her head stretching the fabric of his suit jacket, and a chest like a barrel that Kat was pretty sure she could crack her skull against. In a regular fistfight, Reagan could break her neck with ease, or pummel her face in, or simply strangle her. There would be little she could do to defend herself, other than run and hope to find a narrow place to hide.

  But with magic, Reagan, like all other normal humans, was a mop Kat could easily wipe the floor with. Even wielding a gun, he wasn’t much of a threat. Kat had healed from gunshot wounds before, typically in seconds. At best, all a bullet did was slow her down. That was the reason Marta was always so brutal when she attacked Kat. She didn’t have to worry about killing her quarry because the “kitty cat” was practically indestructible.

  Unfortunately, functional immortality meant nothing if Kat’s opponent was strong enough to restrain her indefinitely. Which Reagan was, as long as Kat had no access to her magic. She had to slip these bindings. Somehow.

  She considered the problem for some time, never taking her eyes off Reagan, until the man became so disconcerted by her flat stare that he turned away and started humming a tune. The only ideas that popped into Kat’s head involved cutting the rope—which she was pretty sure wouldn’t work unless she had a magic knife like Liam’s—or simply unlocking the door and leaping out the back of a moving van. Which would probably get her run over by another van that was doubtlessly following as part of a convoy heading out of the city.

  Kat replayed the memory of her first experience with the rope again and again, until the ghost of a hunch settled in her gut. Right before Liam showed up and shot one of the men, Kat, in the throes of agony from the backlash of the binding spell, yet still instinctively trying to strike out with her power, had felt a very vague sense of something giving way. At the time, she hadn’t thought much about it. She’d classified it as an injury, maybe a muscle tear or a burst blood vessel, but thinking back on it now, when she was more clearheaded, she realized it hadn’t really felt like an injury. It sort of felt like relief.

  Could it be that if she tried to drum up enough magic at once, she could overwhelm the ropes? If so, what were the odds that she passed out from the “weight” before the spell broke? Could she charge up her magic faster than the weight could increase, or would the spell’s safeguards outpace her?

  She contemplated the conundrum for a few minutes, then realized the answer didn’t matter. Even if the odds weren’t in her favor, she had to try something.

  Kat closed her eyes again and let her entire body go lax, so that Reagan didn’t notice she was up to something. He would assume, perhaps, that she was giving up and let down his guard a bit more, which, if Kat’s attempt to subvert the binding spell was successful, would make him that much easier to take down in the aftermath. She listened to his movements to make sure he didn’t tense up or raise the gun, and heard nothing. Assured he wasn’t paying her too much attention, she slowly took a large breath—then called up her magic.

  The familiar spark of rage welled up inside her, followed almost immediately by a proportional increase in weight on her chest. Almost. But there was a lag. The binding spell was reactive, not predictive. It couldn’t anticipate when she would try to raise her magic or how much she would try to pull, so it held off on the weight until about a fifth of a second after it registered a magic flare. Kat let the rage dissipate, and as her magic fell away, the weight lessened.

  Okay, she thought, so if I get pissed enough fast enough, I can probably break this thing.

  That wouldn’t be too hard.

  She exhaled quietly, then sucked in another breath, bringing with it all her anger and frustration with her situation, all her fear and fury from the previous run-ins with A9, all the desires and hopes she’d had regarding Liam and his plan to save her, and the devastation of having that ripped away by Marta and her goons. Kat let these negative emotions fill her to the brim, until she felt ready to burst wide open and spill her guts all over the floor of the van. And then, right as she was about to pop, she dumped all that shit into her soul, into the low-burning flame of the rage that somehow drew her unnatural magic from within her.

  The rage exploded.

  The weight followed.

  Kat choked despite her best efforts as her lungs were practically flattened by the binding spell’s backlash, but she didn’t let up on the magic. She pushed outward, aiming for the ropes, imagined them burning off her wrists and ankles. She pushed farther, aiming for the startled Reagan, who’d jumped up at the sound of Kat’s labored breathing. She pushed two years of pain and suffering, two years of gross injustice, from her tainted soul in the form of pure and utter magic. She pushed—too hard.

  The binding failed, the ropes disintegrated, and Kat King’s magic blasted out in all directions, destroying everything in sight. The back of the van exploded, shredded shrapnel spinning through the air. Reagan was ripped apart and flung away in bloody pieces. The passenger cabin shot forward, Marta and Kline screaming as they barreled away into the woodlands that bordered the road. Pieces of the annihilated van flew backward into another vehicle and forward into the tail-end of the van leading the convoy. Both vehicles crumpled under the impacts and spun out, crashing into the ditches.

  Kat, at the center of the chaos, remained stationary, suspended in the air where she’d been lying in the van because her magic was pressing on her equally hard from all angles.

  Then the magic bomb fizzled out as fast as it had come, and Kat fell back to earth.

  13

  Liam

  Caoimhe O’Connor’s lair was a faerie hill disguised as a law office, tucked in between a bank and a bakery on Carter Lane. Yun parked her ridiculously oversized Ford pickup in a narrow street-side space across from the building, and after scoping it out for suspicious faerie activity—of which there was none—she and Liam hopped out and headed toward the front steps. The sun was starting to sink low in the sky now, and Liam picked up his pace, worried that if this took too long, they’d end up hunting for Kat in the dark. It would be far more difficult to find the A9 convoy in the winding back roads during the night.

  As Liam stepped onto the sidewalk, Yun grabbed his wrist and hissed in his ear, “Last chance to turn back.”

  Liam gave her a feeble smile. “There is no turning back. We have to help Kat, and the most expedient way to do that is to utilize Caoimhe’s resources.”

  Yun worried her lip. “She’s not going to show you any mercy.”

  “She doesn’t show anyone mercy. That’s why everyone’s afraid of her.”

  “You don’t seem very afraid.” She released his arm. “You seem determined. The way you did back when you were a cop.”

  Liam’s stomach clenched. “Yeah, well, something was bound to spur me into action eventually. Isn’t that what you always used to say when I wandered into the Thunderbolt at two AM drunk off my ass?”

  “
This isn’t what I meant.”

  “Rarely do things play out the way we want.” He climbed the five steps up to the front door. “But they do play out.”

  “Please don’t sign your life away.” Yun hesitated at the bottom step. She’d had bad encounters with the fae during her first few years in Salem’s Gate. The fae weren’t kind to any supernaturals that moved onto their turf without permission, or at least an announcement. Yun had abruptly blown into town on the run from her overbearing parents and decided to stick around on a whim, much to Caoimhe’s chagrin. But Caoimhe had shaken the irritation from her shoulders and collected it into a little ball of possibility, as the fae were wont to do. She’d ruthlessly pursued Yun for months, trying to trick the young thunder god into a destructive deal.

  Yun hadn’t fallen for it.

  Now Liam was about to go do the very thing Yun feared the most.

  “I’m not making promises,” Liam said. “Except that I’ll do my best.”

  Gingerly, he knocked on the door.

  Almost immediately, as if they were expected, the door swung inward to reveal the small waiting room of the office. There was no one at the door. Liam steeled himself and walked in, ignoring the sensation of soft fabric gliding over his skin. He was crossing into interdimensional space, where Earth gradually blurred into the pockets of Otherworld from which the fae had carved their “hills” thousands of years ago. Each hill was linked to a specific place on Earth, and the hill for the Salem’s Gate fae community sat directly behind a door in the basement of this building.

  Liam prayed that Caoimhe wasn’t down there, doing judge work, that she was still in her regular office, doing regular law work for regular people. If he had to venture down into the actual hill to confront her, he really would be lucky to make it out of this building with his soul intact. The fae became exponentially more powerful in the Otherworld. The confines of Earth’s dimension restrained their magic, their forms, for some reason relating to natural energy and ley lines and things Liam had never fully understood. (The education he should’ve had about the fae was lost to him when he was denied entry into the Circle.)

  So he wasn’t totally blind when it came to dealing with Earth-bound fae, but on their own turf, he’d be as helpless as a child.

  Clenching his fists a few times to release the tension in his muscles, he headed over to the receptionist’s desk on the right. Yun closed the door behind her but didn’t budge from the entryway, refusing to step off the patch of tile cut out from the carpet, where people left their coats and umbrellas and rain boots on separate racks when they entered. Liam knew she would accompany him to the hill if he was forced to go—Yun was no coward—but he wouldn’t make her uncomfortable by demanding she follow him every step of the way. Caoimhe was the stuff of nightmares even to the sidhe, the noble fae.

  He knocked twice on the glass window that blocked off the receptionist’s desk, and shortly thereafter, a plump woman in a cardinal-red suit ambled in from a back room, stirring sugar and cream into a fresh cup of coffee. She smiled at Liam, but there was something off about it, a slight glassiness to her eyes, a looseness to her lips. She was under the control of some mind-altering spell—he could feel the undercurrent of inhuman magic running through her—probably because she was a temp assigned to the desk. When she was let go after the permanent fae employee started work, she’d likely remember her time in this office as a faded dream. If she remembered it at all.

  Liam shivered. He hated the way the fae used human beings. And if he’d been a cop still, he might’ve cited the law office for their misuse of magic; it was illegal to mind control somebody. But he wasn’t a cop anymore, and if he reported Caoimhe to the police for this indiscretion, there was a very low chance somebody would actually act on it. The cops did not challenge Caoimhe unless they had no other choice. And “looking the other way” over a magic misdemeanor was a perfectly adequate other choice, considering the circumstances.

  He staunched his discomfort and smiled at the woman. “Hello, I’d like to meet with Ms. O’Connor. It’s concerning a current criminal case.”

  “Do you have an appointment, sir?” the woman replied in an unnaturally cheery tone.

  “I don’t, but she’ll want to see me regardless.” Liam hesitated, his throat dry, before forcing himself to add, “Tell her it’s Detective Crown, and he’s here regarding a deal.”

  The woman stared at him blankly for a moment, like he’d happened upon a topic she didn’t have a response for in a limited list. Like she was some kind of robot with preprogrammed thoughts. And just like a robot, after an awkward ten-second delay, she turned mechanically and trudged through a narrow door, which let out into the main hall of the building, lined by the lawyers’ individual offices and flanked by a small cubicle area for interns. Liam pressed his face to the glass window in front of the desk and peered through that doorway, searching for any sign of Caoimhe—only for the corresponding door to the waiting room to fly open right next to him.

  He jumped back, startled, and turned to see the receptionist standing in the hall, too far from the door to have opened it herself. He glanced at the door inside her office again and then at the one in the waiting room, calculating the distance between them in his head. By his reckoning, she shouldn’t have been able to reach the hallway so quickly—especially with a detour to announce his arrival to Caoimhe—unless she’d started running as soon as she was out of Liam’s sight. But he would’ve heard her running, given her weight and the high-heeled shoes. So she must’ve moved between the two doors…another way.

  An uncomfortable itch crawled up Liam’s spine. This whole building was wrong.

  The receptionist smiled at Liam in a way that made him think she had no idea she’d just been influenced by the wacky space-time disturbances of the dimensional rift where she was currently employed, and she said, in that same overly happy tone, “Right this way, sir. Ms. O’Connor is in her office at the end of the hall.”

  Despite his unease, Liam felt an ounce of relief blossom in his chest. Caoimhe wasn’t in the actual hill, which meant he didn’t have to travel into the Otherworld.

  Even so, this was the part of the trip where things would get rocky.

  Liam looked to Yun, who straightened her back, took a deep breath, and hopped onto the carpet. When she didn’t spontaneously combust, she let out a sigh and then caught up to Liam. Together, they ventured past the waiting room door, into the hallway of a law office staffed almost entirely by beings who could not lie, and who had become master manipulators in their centuries of life as a result. As they were led down the hall by the receptionist, Liam read the gold-plated name plaques on the doors. Every last name was Irish Gaelic, just like Caoimhe’s name. And every last name belonged to a faerie who’d come to America back when it was still called the “New World.”

  Luckily, most of these powerful, immortal, and downright terrifying beings had called it quits for the night. All the office doors were closed.

  Except the one at the end of the hall. The big office.

  The receptionist knocked on the doorframe of that office. “Ms. O’Connor, I’ve brought you Mr. Crown and his friend, Ms. Xing.”

  Yun blanched and shot Liam a look that said, You didn’t tell her my name.

  Liam tightened his lips into a thin line and hoped the expression telegraphed his response. I didn’t need to.

  “Let them in,” replied a voice like a broken harp.

  The receptionist stepped out of their way, and Liam clenched his eyes shut for a split second, just to pump one last puff of air into his resolve. Then he moved forward, crossed the threshold into the office, and came face to face with Caoimhe.

  She was seated at a handcrafted wooden desk that looked to be three hundred years old, in a large leather chair that engulfed her lithe frame yet somehow managed to not diminish the strength of her presence. On the desktop sat a sleek Apple laptop, a standard inbox/outbox tray set, and several stacks of important-looking papers. To
the left of the desk was a plain gray file cabinet, and to the right a small table strewn with refreshments. If it wasn’t for the fact that Caoimhe had entirely stripped off her human glamour and now stared at Liam with a predatory expression emphasized by features too sharp and oversaturated to be human, he almost could’ve pretended he was having a meeting with a normal lawyer.

  Alas, he was in the lion’s den.

  As soon as Yun shuffled into the room behind him, the receptionist slammed the door shut.

  Instantly, Liam felt as if he’d shrunk to the size of a bug and he was caught in a spider’s web with the widow rapidly approaching. Despite the fact Caoimhe hadn’t moved an inch—she wasn’t even breathing, as far as he could tell—an oppressive atmosphere billowed outward from her body like a burst of hot steam, and it was all Liam could do not to tremble. Not that he thought she couldn’t sense his fear. Faeries had many senses beyond the standard human set. She could probably sense his unease a dozen different ways. False bravado was a wasted effort when you faced a creature like this.

  So Liam didn’t bother to reapply his mask of composure. He simply started speaking. “There’s no point in pleasantries, so let’s skip all the crap and get to the point. You know why I’m here, you know I need your help, and you know I have little time to acquire it. Name your terms, O’Connor.”

  Caoimhe blinked exactly once. “Oh,” she said, the syllable slithering in tone, an auditory snake, “you haven’t gotten any less rude since we last met, have you, former Detective Crown?”

  He ignored the jab. “I haven’t, no.”

  “Or any less paranoid.” She pointed at the window, one finely manicured nail glinting bright red in the overhead light. “What makes you think you’re running out of time, hm?”

  Liam half turned his attention to the window, keeping his peripheral vision keyed on the faerie in case she decided to move too close for comfort. Through the window blinds, he caught a peek of a bright afternoon, clear blue skies and lush green trees. His stomach sank all the way to his hips, and he suddenly felt off balance, like his body was finally catching up the fact he’d walked straight off the end of the Earth and wound up someplace human beings were not supposed to go. When we entered the building a few minutes ago, it was midwinter, the trees were mostly bare, and it was starting to get dark.