Lock & Key Read online

  “I…” He had to swallow twice before his throat moistened enough to let him continue. “Your office appears to be out of step with the season.”

  Caoimhe sharpened her smile the way you sharpen an axe. “My favorite time of year is early June. I like to see it out the window while I work. So I finagled a little spell together to keep my office there. All the time. Not so hard to do when you’re sitting on a dimensional rift.”

  Temporal distortions. The mere thought made Liam sick. The fae were infamous for screwing with time, holding people hostage in the faerie hills for days, only for the poor victims to emerge back onto Earth and find out they’d been gone decades. Or vice versa, keeping people prisoner for entire lifetimes while the world outside crept along at a snail’s pace. They often used the distortions to their personal advantage as well, spent years in their hills planning major actions while only minutes or hours passed on Earth, giving them tactical advantages that other supernatural races could only dream of.

  And humans? Bah. What were humans to the fae but puppets, pulled about on strings?

  Strings that were usually attached in the form of dangerous deals.

  Exactly what Liam was about to propose.

  “So I’m guessing,” he said, “that practically no time has passed in the present?”

  “Correct.” Caoimhe pushed back her expensive chair and rose, and even though she was shorter than him, he felt as if he stood in her towering shadow. Liam chanced a glance at Yun, only to find her practically huddled in a corner. He couldn’t imagine what her own senses were screaming at her brain right now. Yun largely felt human—or at least, she thought she did—but the hazy memories of dozens of lives, one reincarnation after the other, lay in the back of her mind, and all of them had molded her thoughts and feelings and desires and instincts, her consciousness, into something that was distinctly detached from a normal human’s.

  He suddenly, desperately wished he hadn’t let her tag along. Liam felt like he was standing in enemy territory, surrounded by danger. But Yun clearly felt like she was staring down the barrel of a gun, judging by the terror in her soft brown eyes.

  “Fine,” Liam said at last to Caoimhe. “So we have all the time in the world to chat, but I don’t really want to use it. Let’s get to the point anyway.”

  “And what point would that be?” She pressed her palms against the desk and leaned closer to him.

  He struggled not to recoil. “As I said before, you already know. You approached Kat earlier today, tried to trick her into asking you for help. You’ve had your eyes on her since she arrived in town, probably because one of your ‘little birds’ witnessed the fight with the magician in the McDonald’s parking lot. You’re interested in her, in what she can do, in what she can do for you, and so you’ve been following her every step, including when she entered my house and stayed overnight. And when she was abducted a short time ago by the people who were previously holding her captive.”

  Caoimhe tapped her red nail on the desktop. “I will take your assertions as compliments and ignore the tone in which they were delivered, because you’re correct about my interest in this ‘Kat.’”

  Liam raised an eyebrow, because Caoimhe could only be telling the truth about the “compliments” thing. “Okay, and the deal? What’s on the table?”

  Her smile skewed to the right, a wicked smirk. “What makes you think I want to deal with you, former Detective Crown? With this ‘Kat’? Certainly. She is one of a kind, and her power is quite valuable in many respects. But with you? What do you have to offer me that I could not wrench from a hundred other would-be, low-caliber magicians? You’re not particularly talented. You’re not particularly smart. You’re bold, certainly, for a human, but boldness is just a degree of recklessness, and that is an unbecoming quality to the fae. What can you give me that I cannot get elsewhere?”

  She rounded the desk in a series of model-esque strides, running her fingernail along the wooden edge, scraping a line into the varnish. “Provide a suitable answer, and I will use my ‘little birds,’ as you put it, to locate your new replacement for Julia.”

  Liam stiffened. “What did you say?”

  Caoimhe halted. “Nothing that wasn’t true, as you’re aware.”

  “She’s not my…” Heat crept up his neck. Shame. Guilt. “She’s not a replacement for anyone. She’s a new friend, and a victim who I intend to free from a criminal element. That’s it.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Caoimhe replied, slinking closer to him with silent steps, like she was hovering over the ground. “She reminds you of your dead wife. It’s the stubbornness. The determination in her eyes. The angry pout. The strong demeanor, even in the face of defeat. The way she doesn’t want anyone else to get hurt in the name of helping her. The way she resists showing weakness, except when approached in an oblique way—something you’re quite good at, due to your time in the police. The—”

  “Stop!” Yun shouted.

  Liam jolted out of his trance.

  Caoimhe was less than a foot from him, her hand only inches from his face, the red-tipped nails heading for his cheeks, fingers hooked like claws, as if she was preparing to draw blood. He’d been so focused on her words, the anger and resentment and horror and sorrow building up inside him, pressurized. All the memories of Julia, of their dates in shoddy movie theaters, throwing popcorn, of their wedding, washed out by a sudden midsummer rainstorm, but still somehow priceless, of the birth of Hayden, premature, and all the plans they threw away spending their savings to save him, of the crash…of the crash…the fire and the thunder and the wind and the metal strewn across the road, and the sensation of lying in a pool of blood slowly soaking into dirt, while Julia hung from her seat, perfectly in view, in view so he could see her neck…and Hayden…in the back…and he was…

  Liam’s hand shot up and grabbed Caoimhe’s wrist, jerking it away from his face. He sneered at her. “How dare you bring up Julia in front of me, you bitch? You think because you’re a goddamn faerie, you can play with me like I’m some toy? Like I’m a funny little thing you can poke with a stick, until I finally have so many holes torn into my flesh, I bleed to death with no resistance?” He yanked her forward, their faces an inch apart. Her hazel eyes, flecked with unnaturally bright shades of gold and green, widened almost imperceptibly. He’d actually managed to shock her.

  “A point to remember, faerie. You command my fear only because I have things I care about, and because you can care about nothing but yourself, with that gaping hole in your chest where a heart should be. But if you push me too damn far, past the point of caring, if you drive me to act like you, I’ll do it. Just as viciously and heartlessly and brutally.” He lowered his tone but not his volume. “Don’t think that because I’m a cop at heart that I can’t be a cold and nasty son of a bitch in the right situation, given the ‘right’ kind of push.”

  He released her wrist and jabbed her in the stomach.

  Caoimhe didn’t stumble back, but she did step away, putting enough space between them that Liam could finally breathe again. The fire in his chest was still raging, but he was quickly running out of steam, and he was glad for it. He hadn’t been that angry in years, not since his release from the hospital, not since he returned to an empty home filled with the ghosts of his past. For Caoimhe to bring that up, to bring any of that up, it incensed him in a way he couldn’t frame in words. If he’d had a gun on him, he honestly believed he would’ve shot her.

  For his sake—and for Yun’s—all he had was his knife.

  They couldn’t rescue Kat if they were dead.

  Caoimhe glued the fragment of her composure he’d shaken loose back into place and threw up her haughty smile again. “I see there truly is no point in beating around the bush with you, former Detective Crown.”

  “No,” he grumbled, “there isn’t.”

  She slipped back around her desk, bent down, and retrieved a sheet of paper from a desk drawer, then plucked a nice fountain pen from a stand n
ext to her laptop. Instead of writing anything, she pressed the pen to the paper, and ink flowed out of the tip, spreading across the page in thick black rivulets that branched and curled and shot jaggedly in different directions, until the system of liquid roots abruptly resolved into a flawlessly penned contract with two signature lines at the bottom.

  Caoimhe slid the paper across the desk and sat the pen on top of it. “This is my standard contract for a single exchange of favors. Both favors will be carte blanche, and each may be redeemed at any time, per the respective party’s wishes. There need not be any equivalence involved in the nature of the favors, nor will the favors have a deadline to be requested. The only limitation of the favors is that they may not compel either party to act contrary to their nature. If these terms are acceptable to you, please sign on the bottom line.”

  Carte blanche. Liam groaned inwardly. That meant she could compel him to do pretty much anything, at any time. Although the nature clause meant she couldn’t make him kill or grievously harm someone he didn’t think deserved it. Which was a relief. Of course, she’d probably put that clause in there because if she didn’t, people could attempt to force her to do things that went against her fae nature, which could get her into trouble with the local faerie court. So it wasn’t meant to help him; it was just a side effect of her pragmatism.

  Either way, he had a choice to make.

  Sign the contract and help Kat, or refuse and protect himself.

  Some choice.

  Before he lost his nerve, he swiped up the pen and signed. To his shock, the ink came out red, and he felt a slight, painful tug in his palm that indicated he wasn’t imagining the consistency. The damn magic pen was pulling the blood right from his veins. He grimaced, then wiped the expression off his face when he caught the devious glint in Caoimhe’s eye. He finished the last few letters of his name and dropped the pen on the table, then slid the paper back across to the faerie. She signed it swiftly, and that was that. They now owed each other one favor.

  Caoimhe walked over to her file cabinet, opened the top drawer, and stuck the contract in a fat manila folder. The label read BINDING MAGIC CONTRACTS. There were a lot of papers inside it.

  Sweet Jesus, he thought, what have I gotten myself into?

  Slamming the drawer shut, Caoimhe spun around and gave Liam the most obviously fake innocent smile he’d ever seen, including the ones he’d witnessed interrogating murderous psychopaths. She said, “I assume you intend to cash in your favor now?”

  Liam cleared his throat and mumbled, “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Very well.” She whistled a sharp note, a call to summon somebody. “What exactly do you want?”

  “I want you to help me find”—he paused and considered his words carefully—“and free Kat from the underground organization who abducted her a few hours ago.”

  Caoimhe didn’t hesitate. “Favor approved.” She snapped her fingers, and the door swung open.

  Liam spun around to find four large men waiting in the hall. He sensed magic buzzing through their veins, but it wasn’t entirely fae. They were part human. Half and half probably. The faerie courts employed a lot of them, primarily because they could lie. Just what I need, he thought sourly, a bunch of brutes with faerie magic who can lie to my face.

  Yun emerged from her corner and stood between Liam and the men, sparks at her fingertips. She was rightfully afraid of Caoimhe, but she had no reason to fear the half-fae. She’d beaten up a crap-load of them a couple years ago, when some lowlife faerie who wasn’t even close to Caoimhe’s caliber had tried to extort Yun into selling the Thunderbolt so he could replace the café with some high-dollar vegan restaurant. He’d gotten a black eye and several burns for his trouble.

  The men weren’t intimidated by Yun, but they were knowledgeable enough not to smirk at her in a derisive manner. They knew who she was, and that she’d be a formidable opponent.

  Liam turned away from the group, back to Caoimhe. “Are they the help?”

  “And the birds,” she confirmed. “They had eyes on your Kat until she passed the city limits about twenty minutes before you walked into my office. There are others farther out who are watching still, and who reported a most interesting development right as you came through the front door.”

  “What development?” Liam frowned.

  Caoimhe smeared that damn grin across her face again. “Well, it seems one of the vans in the convoy mysteriously exploded, killing at least one member of the organization and destroying two other vehicles in the process. The entire convoy is currently stalled out on Mangrove Road, and Kat is no longer bound in the back of a van, at the mercy of a man with a gun. So if you hurry along”—she gestured to the window again, indicating the altered time stream—“you may be able to reach her before they recover her again, thus increasing your chances of successfully rescuing her.”

  Liam felt a simultaneous rush of dread and excitement. A van had exploded? Could it be that Kat had made that happen? Or had something else gone wrong? He had no way of knowing—though Caoimhe probably knew, he wasn’t going to ask her—and thus, couldn’t predict whether Kat was in good enough shape to fight and run from the A9 goons long enough to cover the travel time from Caoimhe’s office. Even with the uncertainty though, I have to try my best to get there in time. We have to leave. Now.

  “Yun,” he said, spinning around, “let’s go.”

  She glanced at Liam, eyebrow raised, and pointed at the four men. “Are we all taking my truck?”

  The man at the front of the group nodded. “We’ll find a way to fit.”

  Yun thought about it for a second, then sighed. “Fine. Whatever. But if you mess up my new carpeting, you’re paying for the cleaning.”

  The man shrugged. “Don’t matter to me. Caoimhe pays good.”

  “I’m sure she does,” Liam said as he strode toward the door without looking at the faerie woman now seated again in her lordly chair, watching him go with her unnatural eyes boring into the back of his neck. “But Yun pays back much better, so watch yourself.”

  And with that, he walked past the men, Yun on his heels, down the hall, through the waiting room, and out the front door, back into the real world, back into real time, where he took a deep breath for the first time in what felt like a decade of drowning. Yet according to his phone, which he glimpsed as he hurried toward Yun’s truck, he’d only been in Caoimhe’s domain…for two minutes and forty-five seconds.

  Goddamn faeries.

  14

  Kat

  Kat King ran through the forest, and Advent 9 followed.

  The former didn’t know where she was going, and she didn’t care. She’d rolled off the asphalt, into a ditch, and then bounded past the tree line before any of the A9 mooks had been able to shake themselves from their stupors in the wake of the explosion. Kat’s body was singing with power now, all the pent-up frustration from her second capture burning in her chest like an inferno, and her senses were the sharpest they’d ever been.

  It was getting dark out, but she could see as if it was midday. She could hear the tiniest sounds, the soft scuttling of woodland animals half a mile away. She could feel every streak of sweat smeared across her skin. She could taste blood and ash on her tongue from the ruins of the van smoldering on the roadway behind her. She could smell it too—death. Reagan’s death. The man hadn’t even known what hit him before he was blown into a dozen meaty chunks.

  Good riddance.

  A hail of bullets whipped past her head and slammed into the trees on either side of her, spraying bark like shrapnel through the twilight. To Kat, it almost seemed as if time had slowed, and she easily dodged each sharp piece of wood, skirted around a falling branch that had been sheared clean through, and hopped a dip in the earth that would doubtlessly trip at least a few of the men as they chased her. Someone shouted curses as they realized the volley had failed to even scratch her, and ordered his fellow goons to switch to high-powered rifles instead.

  Rifle
s had scopes. They could aim at her better.

  If they could see her.

  Kat glanced at the ground, which was primarily dry dirt and pine needles and leaves, and directed her energy in a perfect circle around herself, with a diameter of about twenty feet. Then she blasted an invisible wave of magic at the ground. The detritus billowed up, up, up, until Kat was surrounded by a wildly undulating cloud, too thick for normal eyes to penetrate. And too fast. The cloud spun in a powerful vortex like a tornado, and the wind, shrieking in Kat’s sensitive ears, was so fast it nearly knocked her down, even with her supernatural strength.

  Too much, she realized. I used too much power.

  Her magic was unstable again. She’d siphoned too much out of that mysterious pit that Advent 9’s experiments had carved into her soul in order to free herself from the binding spell, and now it was escaping in copious amounts with every exhale. She could feel it thrumming around her, like a steady chord beneath the whipping winds. She needed to bottle it up, let the rage settle, let it retreat back to the shadowy place where it belonged. But…

  A magical aura sparked into existence somewhere behind her. Marta.

  If Kat packed away her magic now, she wouldn’t be on equal footing with the magician. And the delay between pushing her magic back into its box and then carefully siphoning it out again would allow Marta to catch up to her and throw a dozen spells. Marta had too much experience as a magic user and a vicious predator for Kat to let her guard down for even a few seconds. She’d have to leave her magic faucet running on high, even though it was overly destructive, and hope she could defeat Marta before her well finally ran dry, or she accidentally killed herself with a spell she couldn’t control.