His fledgling telekine skills were one of the things that set him apart from the full-bloods—no true Nightkeeper had multiple nonspell talents—but that was the one area where being a half-blood was actually an advantage. Nobody knew where the limits were on his magic, and he sure as hell hadn’t bumped up against them yet. He knew it made some of the others—especially the winikin—nervous when he experimented or did something he shouldn’t have been able to do in their limited view of the world, but he didn’t care, not really.
They could have their suspicions. He had the magic.
He let himself into the front room of the tea shop, with its glass cases and tables for two, one of which held a single kerosene lantern that provided thin yellow light. He didn’t see any surveillance or catch the faint background hum of electrical power going to a security grid. There also weren’t any of the magic prickles that warned of spell-cast wards, but he hadn’t expected there to be. He’d figured out pretty much right away that Mistress Truth was a poser; she had props from half a dozen so-called
“magicks,” yet the only thing that’d held actual power was the knife.
She had the trappings but didn’t know what to do with them, and he was kind of disappointed. From the way the taxi driver’d been acting, he’d halfway hoped they were onto something interesting, something’d that’d disprove the Nightkeepers’ bloody-minded insistence that the only workable magic was theirs. Rabbit’s gut told him there were other types of magic out there, and that his mother had used it. That would explain why his power was different, stronger. If he could figure out who she’d been and how her magic had worked . . . well, it’d be a hell of a benefit come the zero date, if nothing else. As would gaining possession of the artifacts bearing the demon prophecies, he reminded himself, forcing himself back on task when a part of him wanted to just stand there and absorb the weird energy within the tea shop.
Wait a minute . . . energy?
The buzz was new since before, he realized on a spurt of adrenaline. Something had changed in the air. Damning himself for daydreaming when he should’ve been paying attention, he tensed and cast his senses outward, trying to pinpoint the alteration and its source. It wasn’t magic, precisely. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but he liked the way it feathered across his skin and curled inside his chest, and the way everything tightened and lit up, as though he’d inhaled the promise of sex along with air.
“It’s okay,” he said softly, somehow knowing it was the girl with the worked-over face. “I won’t hurt you.”
“Yes, you will, but you won’t mean to,” came the whispered answer. The sound seemed to come from all around him, and the lamp suddenly cut out, plunging the room into darkness lit only from the neon out on the street.
Rabbit heard movement and the rustle of clothing, and knew she was waiting to see what he would do next. Showing off, he held out his hand, palm up, and whispered the word that was burned into his soul and woven into the fibers of his being: “Kaak.” Fire.
A red-gold flame flared to life, warming his palm and lighting the room.
A shadow moved over by the first row of bookcases, and the girl stepped into the bloodred light.
She wasn’t smiling, but her eyes were clear and unafraid as they met his. “Nice trick.”
The red firelight faded the bruise to a faint smudge and sharpened the contrast between her pale complexion and her straight black hair, dark lips, and dark blue eyes. She was wearing low-rider jeans and a tight hoodie that’d been cropped off just above her waistband to show a strip of flat stomach and a starburst tattoo centered on her navel. She was lean hipped, slight, and tough-looking. And, Rabbit realized with a start, she was gorgeous. Somehow he’d missed that earlier, or maybe he’d gotten it but hadn’t quite grasped the actual degree of her hotness. He’d been mostly focused on the shiner and the slump of her shoulders, the whipped-dog air he knew all too well from back in high school, when he’d been the daily target of three of the biggest bullies in town. He’d recognized the victim in her because like knew like. Now, though, she was straight shouldered, with her chin up and her eyes assessing, as though she were measuring him, trying to figure him out. She didn’t look put off by the magic, but didn’t look impressed, which meant that either she’d seen real magic before, or she’d seen so much of the fake stuff that she was automatically assuming the fireball was an illusion.
Rabbit had been prepared for the victim. He wasn’t so ready for the girl who faced him now, unafraid. He was even less ready when she withdrew the carved obsidian knife from the back pocket of her hip-hugging jeans and balanced the blade on her palm. “You want this?”
Power sang in the air and made him think about being a hero, about proving that he wasn’t as much of a fuckup as everyone thought. He nodded, his throat going dry. “Yeah. I want it.”
She nodded, and her expression firmed. “Take me with you, and you can have whatever you want.”
Nate hung on to the door handle in the backseat as their cabbie—a twentysomething who was thrilled with his “follow that car” fare—gleefully chased the dark sedan carrying Mistress Truth along the twisty streets of the Quarter. Eventually the sedan pulled up in front of the closed, locked entrance of an aboveground cemetery. Nate and Alexis’s driver parked a block over and down, looking sorry that the ride was over.
“Let me guess,” Alexis muttered. “She picked the location.”
“She doesn’t seem the sort to miss the opportunity for some drama,” Nate agreed as he paid the driver, adding a twenty so the guy would wait.
They got out of the cab and worked their way back, making like tourists by holding hands and gawking at the carved marble pillars and ornate iron grillwork of the fence surrounding the cemetery, even though it was late and the area wasn’t exactly a primo stop on the haunted walking tours.
As they neared the cemetery the sedan rolled past, heading back uptown.
“Think it’s headed out to get our Xibalban?” Nate said, more thinking aloud than really asking.
“He can ’port,” Alexis said with a bit of duh in her voice.
Nate would’ve argued that Strike didn’t ’port everywhere he wanted to go, but didn’t bother because he didn’t want to buy into the fight. And yeah, he knew damn well it wasn’t really a fight that was looking to spark between them, not this close to the eclipse. The electricity that pulsed on the night air was way more sex than anger, or maybe a mix of the two. Part of him was annoyed that his body had no problem buying into the destined-mates thing. The rest of him didn’t give a crap about that, just wanted her against him, underneath him. And she was feeling it too. He could see it in the pink blush that crept up her long throat and high-boned cheeks when he caught her looking, and when they brushed up against each other as they walked, still holding hands.
“It’s a one-way trip,” she said, and it took him a few seconds to realize she wasn’t talking about the two of them; she was talking about Mistress Truth and the limo, and she had a point. The sedan’s departure suggested that whoever hired it didn’t expect the wannabe witch to need a ride home.
“Come on.” He sped up, and they came into sight of the cemetery entrance just as the witch’s purple-jacketed figure disappeared through the arched gateway.
Nate and Alexis followed. The cemetery gate opened onto a main drag paved in pressed white gravel, with offshoots leading away at right angles, intersected by narrower pathways running parallel to the main drag, creating a regular gridwork of roads crisscrossing around straight rows of monuments and elevated crypts, all built well above normal flood height. There’d no doubt been some serious posthurricane rebuilding necessary, but in the moonlit darkness Nate saw no sign of the destruction or repairs. The cemetery looked secure in the silence. Peaceful. For now, anyway.