Obsidian Magic (Legacy Series Book 2) Page 6

  “I know I can trust you. I need you to trust that if I could tell you, I would.”

  He opened his mouth to say something but decided against it. “Okay, fine. Let’s go see your boyfriend.”

  “Really, still?”

  “You’ve seen him naked—he’s your boyfriend.”

  “Okay, by that logic, since I once went through Forest Township and saw the naked butts of three men crossing the street, I should really get their names because they’re going to be my boyfriends. And I saw one shifter’s happy parts—I guess he’s my husband.”

  “I swear you have to be making this up. I drive through there every day and I don’t see anything.”

  “Why are you driving by there every day? You live in the opposite direction.”

  “Can’t a person have a hobby?” Responding to my look of disgust, he added, “Don’t judge me. I’m sightseeing.”

  “Sightseeing? Is that what they’re calling it?” I joked and got out of the car. He quickly followed and moved around the car, blocking my advance. He frowned, giving me another scathing look, his lips contorted into something that was a cross between a frown and a miscreant grin. I’d been able to wipe off some of the blood earlier, but I’d seen better days and hadn’t had a chance to look in a mirror.

  He tilted his head, the frown deepened, and then he reached up to touch my hair. I blocked his hand. He tried again with the other. I blocked it again. “For someone concerned about being late, you’re wasting a lot of time trying to fix me. Stop.” Kalen had taken Gareth’s command to be on time a little more seriously than I did. To me, it was just a strongly worded suggestion.

  It didn’t work. He tugged at my shirt until it was straightened to his liking and recuffed the sleeves. I had tolerated it as long as I could. I hated being tugged, poked, and fixed by him. “Stop fixing me. I look fine. We are just going to give a statement, I assure you we don’t get points for looking good doing it.”

  I moved back several feet and glared at the scowl that had become a fixture on his face. “Well, at least you’re pretty.” And then he spun around and started to walk away.

  “You know, there are other people who will give me a job.”

  “Of course, there has to be a line out the door of employers looking for a smart-mouth, bossy malcontent with an obsession for plaid and Converses. Tell me, where do I sign up for another?” He laughed as he opened the door for me.

  Beth was sitting to the side reading a book, while Gareth’s nephew sat at the reception desk. Once again, he seemed more interested in his phone than anything else. “Who are you here to see?”

  “Your uncle,” I offered.

  Avery looked at Kalen, then me, then back at Kalen. “Just a minute.” He made a phone call and then asked us to take a seat. After a few minutes three other people came down with Gareth: Harrah and two men that I didn’t recognize. One was dressed casually and the other wore a tailored suit. Gareth was dressed in a simple button-down and slacks, hair clean and not a single sign of ripping apart a bull-monster less than an hour ago. I joked about his office being an apartment but I wondered if he had a shower and changing area in the oversized room.

  Gareth spoke in a deep, professional voice as he addressed Kalen. “Mr. Noble, please come with us.” Kalen stood. This was more than us giving an official statement. Why was Harrah present? I tried not to panic; Kalen was rather indifferent about it. He stood in silence, and the pleasant smile he’d had on his face didn’t waver as he approached them. I knew I was supposed to stay seated and wait but I couldn’t. I stood and inched closer to them.

  Gareth turned; his blue eyes were hard as they fixed on me. “Ms. Michaels, we will be meeting with you next. Please have a seat.” I didn’t immediately respond as I tried to read Kalen, a more difficult task than it usually was. Was he concerned, scared, as confused as I was? Maybe if Harrah wasn’t involved, I wouldn’t have been worried. But this was a woman who’d commanded that someone be killed so that he wasn’t alive to undermine the optics of the situation. She would do whatever was necessary to maintain the symbiotic relationship between humans and supernaturals.

  I took several deep breaths, but that didn’t calm me down and apparently it was enough to distract Avery from his phone. He nudged Beth and she looked in my direction. I felt the magic coursing through the air, the subtle variations of its existence.

  “Don’t,” I said firmly with enough edge to my tone that she sat up, her eyes narrowing on me before she relaxed back into her position. I didn’t want to be calm because it bred complacency. I needed to be alert and aware of what was happening.

  Kalen had only been gone ten minutes but it seemed like longer and sitting just wasn’t an option. I paced the length of the long room, feeling Avery’s eyes on me.

  “Who makes you nervous, my uncle or the suit?”

  Harrah. But I didn’t say it because, like everyone who dealt with her, Avery probably didn’t see her as the face of fear.

  “The suit,” I lied.

  One sweeping look let me know he wasn’t buying it. Shapeshifters. Lying to them was rather useless. I still didn’t believe that they could smell a lie. Really, what would it smell like—god-awful black licorice? But their acute senses made them adept at detecting variations in physiological signs: blood pressure, heart rate, eye blinks, and breath sound. They all changed when a person lied—even in me, and I’d been lying about who I was most of my life.

  “You don’t have to worry about the suit,” he said. Then he returned his attention back to his phone.

  “What about your uncle?”

  He shrugged, his thumbs dancing over the keys. “It depends if he considers you a danger or not and what side of the law you’re on. He’s a good guy when he’s not trying to teach me a lesson.”

  “I have a feeling he has to teach you a lot of lessons.”

  He cocked his head and scowled. “He’s known me all my life, I would think he’d have learned by now. He likes a challenge.”

  I laughed. His youthful defiance was funny, but the years that Gareth had on Avery made him a worthy adversary. “I don’t think you’re going to win with your uncle.”

  “You sound like my mother.” He shrugged, his eyes firmly fixed on his phone. “He’ll wear down.” I’d known his uncle for less time than he had and realized that Gareth had the tenacity of a pit bull. He wasn’t likely to wear down anytime soon.

  And just as I was about to say something to that effect, a hand snaked behind Avery and snatched the phone out of his hand. “You’ll get this back when the workday is over,” Gareth said, the suit and Kalen to each side of him.

  The same limpid smile was on Kalen’s face, as if it was frozen there and he had no other response but to wait for it to be over.

  “Ms. Michaels,” Gareth said.

  “Levy,” I offered.

  He waved for me to follow, but I couldn’t. My attention stayed on Kalen and the suit, who had directed him down the hall.

  “Ms. Michaels.” Gareth’s voice was harder, a direct command that I ignored.

  “No.” I shifted my weight to get a better look at where they were going.

  “Ms. Michaels, your defiance is unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” he said in a cold, cutting tone. I glanced in his direction but just couldn’t move until I knew Kalen was okay.

  “Is he okay?” I said under my breath. Come on, Kalen, just look at me. I hadn’t moved my eyes from his direction, and just before he followed the suit into the opened office, he looked at me and smiled, a crooked, relaxed smile. Relief came over me quickly and I turned to follow Gareth, who had stood just inches from me, his arms crossed over his chest as he waited.

  “Sorry, I just—”

  “That’s fine.” But based on the tone of his voice, everything wasn’t fine. The full scope of what my behavior could have led to hit me all at once. Odd things were happening—bull-creatures coming through veils, chaos mages escaping their otherworld prison—and peculiar ma
gic was involved. Did he think I had something to do with it?

  Once the elevator closed behind us, I blurted out, “Do you think I had something to do with this?”

  He looked up at the top corner of the wall, where I assumed the camera was placed, and remained silent. And the silence continued until we were in his office and he had closed the door.

  “No, I don’t think you had anything to do with this, but there is a link between you and what has occurred in the past few days. Tell me what happened today.”

  I told him everything, from the call from Ms. Neal, her persistence about keeping the stone, my initial contact with the minotaur, to how I’d tried to help keep him from attacking more of the SG men. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop him from eating the other one.”

  His lips pressed into a thin line. Several moments passed before he spoke again. “It wasn’t your job to do so. It’s one of the hazards of working here. It doesn’t happen often.” His eyes wavered from mine as he took in a slow breath. I was sure it didn’t happen a lot, but once was too often.

  “That thing was immune to magic like shapeshifters. What was it?”

  “It was a shapeshifter. Similar to how the Legacy are the purest form of magic, it was what shifters are in our basic and purest form. There are very few who can take on larger and different forms, and as you saw, it requires caloric energy to do that.” His hands rubbed over his face before he relaxed against his desk.

  “Have a seat.” I dropped into the chair directly in front of him. He was still rubbing his temple when he finally confided, “I need to figure out what is fact and what is fiction about the Legacy.”

  I really hoped I could offer more insight, but after finding out about Vertu from Kalen, I didn’t feel like I had a firm grasp on it myself.

  “Besides the Necro-spears, how many other things were created by the Legacy or the Vertu?”

  I wanted to correct him and tell him I hadn’t created anything, but that wasn’t what he needed to hear. “You think everything is connected.”

  He nodded. “The Maxwells were locked away for three years, before I even took this position. If they could escape, why did it take so long? Declan”—responding to my confusion, he added, “the shifter I subdued earlier would have escaped again.”

  Ripping out someone’s spine is one way to subdue someone, I guess.

  “He was found unable to be contained by the Magical Council and was given the same fate as the Maxwells.”

  “But the Recludo Stone was only used for Declan,” I offered.

  “Kalen seems to believe the stone is a remnant of the war,” Gareth said.

  I didn’t feel the same magic on it as mine. It could have been Conner’s. But what did he get out of releasing chaos mages and a shifter who had been kicked out of this realm?

  Pulled so far into my own thoughts that for a moment I forgot that Gareth was there, I looked up to find him staring at me. “Do you think there’s any way Conner is involved?” I asked.

  “The interview with Ms. Neal was quite interesting. She wasn’t forthcoming at first. We required the assistance of a fae.”

  I realized why humans didn’t ever want to be arrested by the Supernatural Guild. In a human jail when you were questioned, the truth was optional. In the supernatural world, the truth was forced.

  He paced for a moment, and when he stopped, his eyes focused on me with intent. “It seems like the objective was to get you there. Apparently she was given the box of things to hand over to you by a gentleman who told her that you would pay her well for it. From what I gathered from my team, most of it is garbage. There were just enough things of value to make it look like a good haul.”

  That was generally the situation with most of our pickups but Gareth probably didn’t know that.

  “As much as HF claims to despise supernaturals and all things that are related to them, they seem to be very drawn to many magical artifacts. So after making a deal with this guy she reneged on it after speaking with Daniel, the head of HF. She decided she wanted to keep the stone. Curiosity got the best of her, and as with Pandora and her ubiquitous box, she couldn’t manage to have it in her possession without activating it.” He made a face. “So she did and Declan showed up. She locked him in and decided to let you and Kalen handle it.”

  He relaxed some as he recounted the situation, but his ease quickly faltered and he was frowning again. “She gave a different name for the person she dealt with but his description is similar to the one you gave of Conner. Do you think he could be involved in this?”

  “He’s a sociopath with delusions of grandeur. I wouldn’t put anything past him. I just don’t see what he would get out of it.”

  “Can you find him again?”

  “I don’t know, but I can try.”

  “And the Necro-spears, can you find them, too? They really shouldn’t be in circulation and so easily attainable by the public.”

  He was right, weapons created by the Legacy and the Vertu could be used by stronger magic wielders who could draw upon the magic within them. He had to be more apprehensive about them; while embedded in his kind, they were some of the few things that could prevent them from shifting as well as nullify their immunity to magic. It was rumored that there were only six, five remaining at large since the Magical Council had confiscated one.

  Maybe he considered me to be some type of metal detector for all things Legacy. Finding anything made by my kind was probably easier than finding Conner. I didn’t think I’d found him the first time—he’d wanted to be found.

  I hated feeling the way I did: helpless and anxious. If this was Conner’s doing it clearly wasn’t my fault, yet there was a twinge of guilt that it was. I needed to stop him, but as Gareth and I sat in his office wondering how to do that he was probably building his army that thought that the world needed to consist of only the purest form of magic and everyone else should be disposed of.

  “Is there anything you need to do this?”

  A time machine to go back to the last time I saw Conner and get rid of him.

  I had resolved to do what I had to do. I needed to find Conner and stop him. Reasoning wasn’t working. If he was behind this, I had no idea what his plans were. Neither I nor Gareth seemed relieved or confident after our conversation. When you knew a person’s intentions it made it easier to anticipate their actions, but Conner’s behavior didn’t have any rhyme or reason. As I left Gareth’s office part of me wondered if we had attributed these things to the wrong person. Could it have been someone else?

  Kalen was waiting for me in the lobby, studying Avery, and I couldn’t tell how he felt about the man bun. But he was relaxed; the placid fake smile that had been plastered on his face earlier was gone and had been replaced by a genuine one.

  “Your boyfriend’s kind of a jerk at work, isn’t he?” Kalen said as we walked to the car.

  “Stop calling him my boyfriend, and yes, he’s his own special blend of stubbornness and ego. What happened?” I asked, getting in the car after he unlocked it.

  “Before or after their little spiel where they told me that if I didn’t cooperate things wouldn’t go well for me, blah blah blah?”

  “Yeah, after that part,” I said, laughing. It couldn’t have been that bad—he didn’t seem very distressed by it as he did a theatrical retelling.

  “I told them everything and then Richard, that was the guy in the suit who was born without smile muscles or that’s what I suspect since he didn’t do it and I’m a delight—”

  “So delightful. It’s like hugging the sunshine and cuddling with fluffy puppies.”

  “I’m going to take that as a compliment and not your poor attempt to be witty.” He grinned and handed me a check. A check with a lot of zeroes. “Mr. No Smiles gave me this. They will be confiscating everything found and will drop off anything they don’t keep in a couple of days.”

  “What is this, hush money?”

  He shrugged. “I signed several confidentiality agreement
s, and of course Harrah wanted to mine for memories, but I stopped that real quick. Instead, they gave me the not-so-subtle threat that if I didn’t comply with the agreement…” He made a choking noise and sliced his fingers across his throat.

  I guessed Gareth didn’t need a confidentiality agreement. He’d keep my secret as long as I kept theirs that there was a new brand of malicious magic out there.

  It was surprising that Kalen didn’t ask more questions about the meeting with Gareth, but I suspected he thought I couldn’t tell him anything. I was grateful for it because I hadn’t had time to come up with a Kalen-safe version of the story.

  CHAPTER 3

  Savannah didn’t ask a lot of questions but instead looked at my dirty, bloodstained clothes and gave me “it’s been one of those days” looks as I passed her on the way to the shower. I spent several minutes cleaning the blood off my sai before I hopped in. As I stood with the warm water beating over my skin I tried to relax my mind, which was going a million miles a minute. There were too many pieces missing and not enough connections. Why would Conner release the chaos mages? It didn’t make sense.

  The smell of beef and cheese met me soon as I opened the bathroom door. Please don’t be some weird vegetable wrap with some peculiar stock to make it smell like beef. Please be cheese—real cheese.

  I rounded the counter, and when I sat at the table, she pushed a bowl of macaroni and cheese with chunks of steak toward me. Yes.

  Then came the salad. Once I’d pushed the damn tomatoes and cucumbers out the way I found several pieces of bacon. The lettuce was a problem, because it was everywhere. Savannah sat across from me, eating what looked like grass stuffed in a wrap, and on the side were the egg-white muffins she’d been peddling the other morning.

  Between big bites out of her grass sandwich, she asked about my day. Frowning, I stopped eating—just thinking about the day made me lose my appetite. I told her everything. I was always torn between the fact that I had irreparably changed Savannah’s life and possibly put her in danger and the comfort of having someone that I could be totally honest with. She listened, hanging on to every word, and I paused often trying to eat a forkful of food and let her process it. With each moment, a dark cast of despair washed over her fair skin. Whenever she leaned forward, her blond hair draped over her face, hiding it. I knew she did it on purpose to hide her expression, the fear and dread that she was probably feeling.