By the time we returned to the bakery, it was after closing, though it felt like we’d only been gone an hour or so. The more guardians I interacted with in the nexus, the worse I found that time differential. Evidently, three quick conversations with three guardians equaled approximately ten hours.
I stepped through the portal and made a beeline to the stairs up to the pantry with Warner trailing behind me. The sentinel hadn’t spoken a word. He didn’t come across as the thoughtful type — more like the break-and-tumble-and-figure-shit-out-later type — but he was obviously working through centuries of shock now.
I could taste Kandy’s distinctive berry-infused dark-chocolate magic in the bakery storefront. I’d completely missed our mani-pedi appointment, but found the green-haired werewolf contentedly mowing her way through leftover cupcakes and playing chess on her iPad.
I normally donated the day-olds to the daycare at the Kitsilano Neighborhood House. But apparently not on my best friend’s belated-birthday weekend. And yes, the green-haired werewolf was crazy good at chess. She was a complex person. I adored every inch of her every quirk.
The green of her shapeshifter magic rolled over Kandy’s eyes as Warner and I crossed around the empty display case and joined her in the small seating area by the French-paned front windows. She had about two dozen cupcakes arranged by frosting color on one of the tall, circular tables. Her legs were curled around the legs of the high stool she was perched on to overlook her purloined loot. Kandy, the cupcake pirate.
“He’s staying?” she asked with her mouth full of the first bite of a Tart in a Cup, a mouth-watering blackberry cake with blackberry buttercream icing, which also happened to be another of her birthday cupcakes.
“Pulou thinks he might be helpful,” I answered.
Kandy snorted. “Dragons use that word too loosely.” She stuffed the rest of the cupcake in her mouth and then licked the icing off her fingers.
“The practically immortal often do,” I said as I sat down at the empty table next to her. I pulled the map out of my satchel and unrolled it before me.
Kandy snagged two more cupcakes, then wandered over to stand by me, peering down at the tattooed dragonskin. She handed me one of her birthday cupcakes — Tease in a Cup, a delectably moist chocolate blackberry cake with blackberry buttercream. Sharing food was a pretty big gesture from a werewolf, especially as I’d pretty much missed the second day of her belated-birthday weekend. But I figured creating four cupcakes in her honor was the same as banking a bunch of IOUs.
“He’s catatonic now?” Kandy asked.
I glanced up at Warner, who had followed me only as far as the first set of windows and now seemed to be mesmerized by the trinkets hanging there. Before I’d known I was an alchemist, I used to collect bits of natural or residual magic — stones, jewelry, sea glass, broken china — and fasten them together into pretty wind chimes or window decorations. I had no idea at the time that I was actually making magical objects capable of holding various spells or charms, if the holder knew how to work an object’s magic that way. My sister Sienna had figured that out, not me. She’d used my trinkets to hold or focus the magic she stole from other Adepts. She killed three werewolves and her own boyfriend — a latent necromancer — using my trinkets as magical anchors before anyone figured out what she was doing.
“He’s absorbing, I think,” I answered Kandy. Dragons were fascinated by magic, and often got caught up watching it for hours. Even I, who saw and tasted magic more intensely than anyone else I knew — except perhaps Pulou — grew bored more quickly. “He’s slept for four hundred and fifty years.” Then I lowered my voice out of respect, though not secrecy. Dragon hearing was even better than that of a werewolf. “And his mom is definitely dead.”
Kandy grunted sympathetically, then said, “He’s going to need new clothes.”
I shook my head. Werewolves didn’t have a deep well of empathy to draw on. Life was pretty cut and dried, black and white to them. Eat or be eaten. That sort of thing. Whether you needed it or not, Kandy was always ready with a kick in the ass.
Though she did have a point. Warner drew a lot of attention, and I imagined he would even without the leather getup. Then I stopped myself from attempting to figure out what sort of chest — hairy, smooth, somewhere in between — his leather vest covered. I was going to have to take him clothes shopping. There was a Mark’s Work Wearhouse just down the street. And now I was trying to visualize him in 501s and an unbuttoned blue plaid work shirt. The blue would bring out his eyes …
“Can he read it?” Kandy asked, referencing the map.
“He says not,” I answered, though I wasn’t completely sure. Warner, despite Pulou’s suggestion, didn’t seem like the helpful type. His current introspection could totally just be passive resistance in disguise.
I peered down at the tattoo. As before, I found the mix of images baffling. Branches of flowers and leaves, circles slashed with colored stripes, and interconnected blocks that looked vaguely mechanical ringed the edges. The center of the tattoo was filled with splotches of green and blue, and with the tiny black triangles that I still thought might be mountains or other geographical indicators.
Warner, still completely ignoring us, reached out and ran his fingers across the five trinkets hanging before him. They clinked together, sending a sweet chime through the room. The dragon breathed in deeply, almost as if he was inhaling the sound. Then his body settled. I hadn’t noticed that he’d been tense before. But then, I didn’t know him at all.
I returned my attention to the map. “Maybe the symbols on the outside edge are clues to the object, not the location?”
Kandy shrugged and retrieved another cupcake.
My stomach grumbled. I was starving. Warner turned his gaze on me. I couldn’t read anything in his look, but I wasn’t going to be embarrassed about a rumbly tummy.
“Do you know what we’re looking for or not?” I asked him.
“Not,” he answered, terse but not angry.
“You’ve been guarding this thing for centuries, but you know nothing about it?”
“I know it needs to be protected.” If Warner had been a werewolf, he would have bared his teeth at me. As a dragon, he kept his tone evenly aloof.
“Rainbows,” Kandy said. Her mouth was now full of Sex in a Cup, a cocoa cake spiced with cinnamon and topped with dark-chocolate buttercream. It was a standby favorite of mine.
“What?”
“Well, almost rainbows.” The green-haired werewolf pointed at the striped circle in the top right of the map. “See? Just missing green.” She moved her hand diagonally to point at the striped circle in the bottom left corner of the map. The colors of the thin stripes ran red, orange, yellow, blue, and violet, skipping the green that would normally sit between yellow and blue in a rainbow.
“Maybe the circle represents the earth?” Kandy said. “You know, with the rainbow arching over? Everything in the middle is just mumbo-jumbo, though. Doesn’t look like a map to me at all.”
I stared at Kandy.
“What?” she snapped. “Don’t you go to grade school in Canada?”
“We call it elementary here,” I murmured as I transferred my attention back to the map.
“Well, if you’d had to be graded, maybe you would have recognized a half-assed rainbow when you saw one.”
I didn’t correct Kandy on the grades/grade school versus no grades/elementary school thing. Warner had stepped closer to peer at the map just over my shoulder, but he didn’t contribute to the conversation. I wasn’t sure that the rainbow notion helped to decode the map, but I had an idea about who could.
“You know who we need.”
“Don’t say it,” Kandy said. “We don’t need an old, long-toothed xenophobe.”
“I could at least text him,” I said.
“If he wanted to hunt treasure with us, he’d be here,” Kandy snapped. “Plus, no one wants him around anyway, Mr. Icy Know-It-All.”
“A vampire?” Warner asked. He didn’t sound overjoyed. But then, Drake was the only dragon I’d ever met who didn’t loathe vampires, and the fourteen-year-old just wasn’t completely indoctrinated yet.
“Yeah,” Kandy answered. “An older-than-your-ass, too-powerful bloodsucker who collects knowledge and people like Jade collects magical bits.”
Warner glanced over my head at the trinkets in the window, then looked back at me. It had been a long time since I’d wondered if someone found me attractive — me, not my magic — and I found myself wishing I’d put on lip gloss. Just a sheer pink that would pop against my tanned skin. Warner’s brow creased, and I realized I’d been staring at him.
Damn it. He was a freaking dragon. I wasn’t lusting after someone more powerful than I was. That was just asking for trouble. And I was really, really tired of trouble.
“Other than Pulou,” I said, putting myself back on point, “Kett’s the oldest Adept we know … well, at least of those who’ve been roaming the earth for centuries. It isn’t like Chi Wen gets out much. This could be a map of someplace we just don’t know. Which, honestly, could be a lot of places.”
I took a picture of the map and texted it to Kett. Kandy stuffed an entire cupcake in her mouth. She seriously liked to pretend she hated Kett, but was actually upset that he’d been gone for so long. I don’t think the werewolf was accustomed to her pack being so tiny. It pretty much consisted of Gran, Scarlett, and me when she was in Vancouver.
“Maybe he’ll recognize it. If not, we’ll have to start randomly clicking around on Google maps.”
“Forget that.” The werewolf wasn’t a fan of computers. They were too sedentary for her.
“Kett?” Warner prompted. He looked as though he completely expected us to dutifully spill every little thing we knew.
Kandy narrowed her eyes at the dragon. “None of your beeswax, buddy,” she growled. “We don’t need the vampire or you — except if the bloodsucker knows how to read the map. You’re just prettified, useless muscle.”
“Excuse me, wolf?” Warner’s voice was suddenly low and dangerous. Kandy had plucked him out of whatever funk he’d been burrowing into as easily as she now picked up another cupcake and idly licked off the icing.
I unsuccessfully suppressed my smirk. Werewolf games were always amusing — unless you were the besieged puck at center ice. Unsurprisingly, Kandy was a hockey fan. She’d been seriously pissed when the Canucks hadn’t made the playoffs last April, and had actually forced me into a sports bar to see LA take the Stanley Cup.
My cellphone pinged.
“Quick,” Kandy said. “Where is old fangy anyway?”
“You know,” I said, “if you really miss him, you could call.”
“I’m going to have to hurt you for that crack.”
The text message on my phone read:
> What is this?
I typed back: A map? I hit send.
> Where is the key?
The key?
> Every map needs a key.
“He says we need a key,” I said.
“He doesn’t mean an actual key,” Kandy said, peering over my shoulder at my phone. “He means, like, a legend. You know, something that tells us how to decode the symbols.”
Like a decoder ring?
Kandy snorted at my text.
“You’re communicating with the vampire now?” Warner asked. “Through that? It’s not magical.” The centuries-old mighty dragon was baffled by a cellphone.
“It’s a phone. We’re sending text messages.”
“Human technology,” Kandy offered.
“Don’t touch it,” I said.
Warner frowned at my warning, like a toddler about to dispute his bedtime. No matter how young the sentinel claimed to be, all ancient beings hated being told what to do.
“Your dragon magic will break it,” I said, hoping to stop the tantrum before it began. My cellphone pinged.
> Perhaps.
I smirked. Yeah, the vampire didn’t know what a decoder ring was, but he wasn’t about to clarify and lose face. My phone pinged again.
> There appears to be too many layers. You must look at it a different way.
Helpful.
The vampire didn’t get sarcasm when it was directly in his face. I was fairly certain he’d miss it in text form as well.
> You’re welcome.
Yep. I was brilliant at being right about all the little things.
Layers, Kett had texted. Maybe that was why the green and blue and black marks didn’t actually look like a map? Maybe they were all jumbled up and on top of each other? I touched the edge of the map. I’d avoided doing so before, not because it thrummed with dragon magic but because it was just plain icky to touch dried skin.
I could tap into and pull out this magic. I could transfer it or meld it with other residual magic. Or with another magical object. But I couldn’t pull off layers and look at them like … a picture.
Layers of pictures.
“Wisteria,” I murmured.
“The reconstructionist? From London?” Kandy asked.
“Yeah,” I answered. “That’s what she does, isn’t it? Pulls images out of residual magic?”
Kandy shrugged. I wasn’t clear about how Wisteria Fairchild’s magic worked either, though I’d seen the results of it two times now. She worked as a reconstructionist for the witches’ Convocation — or, specifically, for the Convocation’s investigative teams. Yeah, the witches had formed and employed supernatural investigative teams. Who knew? Not me.
The reconstructionist’s job was to go to scenes of magical crimes or mysteries and collect the residual magic into something that resembled a video playback without a computer or TV, which she then stored in a cube thingy. I’d seen her recording of my sister — along with her boyfriend Rusty — murdering Hudson, a werewolf who’d been the beta of Kandy’s pack and someone I’d seriously considered seriously dating for far too brief of a moment. Then I’d seen a similar reconstruction of Sienna murdering Rusty.
I’d avoided viewing Wisteria’s reconstruction of the triple demon summoning Sienna had engineered in London. My sister had murdered three sorcerers and tried to murder Mory — a teenaged necromancer friend of mine, and Rusty’s sister. Then she had kicked Kett’s, Kandy’s, and my asses to get away unscathed … with the sacrificial knife that I’d thought was carefully hidden until Warner busted into my safe.
“Reconstructionist?” Warner asked. “Witch magic?”
“Yep,” I said. “You got a better idea, leather pants?”
Warner screwed up one side of his face at this terrible attempt at a nickname. Unfortunately, this quizzical look made him adorable. No one needed an adorable, dangerous dragon grumping around the bakery. Least of all me.
“We aren’t allowed in London,” Kandy said.
It was kind of Kandy to say ‘we,’ though it was really only me who was banned from London. Maybe even all of England. Yes, I wasn’t allowed to enter an entire country, based on the say-so of one uber-powerful super-old vampire. A vampire I hadn’t even met. I had, however, seen his magic running through the veins of his blood grandson Kett, who had returned from true death a second time through the intervention of his grandsire.
When vampires shared blood, they literally gave away part of their magic to make fledglings — or, as in Kett’s case, to resurrect other vampires. The big bad of London was seriously pissed that he’d had to divide his power because I got Kett killed … yeah, with that same knife I was trying to keep locked away.
“Wisteria doesn’t live in London,” I answered. “Gran might know where to find her.”
I’d only spent about two hours in Wisteria Fairchild’s presence, and I was concerned that she wouldn’t be receptive to repeating the experience. I scared her, like the guardian dragons scared me. I also had a habit of dragging mayhem and chaos in my wake, and Wisteria had intimate knowledge of the end results.
Though I was seriously hoping that had just been one bad year that was way behind me now.
Kandy pushed her second-to-last Flirt in a Cup across the table in Warner’s direction with a wolfish grin. He regarded her with narrow-eyed suspicion, but didn’t even blink before consuming the cupcake in three big bites. Kandy, still grinning, wagged her eyebrows at me.
I couldn’t help but laugh as I peeled the paper off a Rapture in a Cup myself. Werewolf games were always more fun when paired with a swirl of yellow and chocolate cake with cream cheese chocolate icing.
Gran entered the bakery kitchen, her fresh-cut-grass-and-lilac-scented magic sparking behind her eyes in a way I’d never seen. Warner immediately slid from his stool, but he didn’t move out from behind the stainless steel workstation. I’d texted Gran right before ordering Chinese food from Connie’s Cookhouse. We had spread just about every dish of takeout we could order on the workstation, because I wasn’t interested in bringing Warner through the wards up to my apartment. Not yet, anyway. I was especially a fan of Connie’s cod in black bean sauce, and Kandy had a bit of an obsession going with their ginger beef. Warner wielded his chopsticks as if he’d grown up using them, even with the gai-lan in garlic that I had to be taught how to eat — thick end up — by a friend.
“Gran,” I said. I stood for a hug as she set her purse on the steel counter between the fridge and the ovens. “Everything okay?”
“Yes,” Gran replied. Her eyes flicked over my shoulder to Warner. I had the same color eyes — indigo blue — as Gran and my mother, Scarlett, but that was where the resemblance stopped. As it was today, Gran’s silver hair was usually pulled back in a long braid, but like Scarlett’s, it had been strawberry blond. Neither my mother nor grandmother had my height or … other assets. No matter how many yoga classes or how much dragon training I did, ‘petite’ would never be a word used to describe me.
I stepped to the side to introduce Gran to Warner. “Pearl Godfrey, Convocation chair —”
“Grandmother of Jade, alchemist and slayer of demons,” Gran said. She raised her chin with pride.
Emotion momentarily stopped my words. I’d never heard Gran title herself that way. It was a prideful acknowledgment of my accomplishments, and also a thinly veiled warning to Warner. Kandy must have given Gran a blow-by-blow account of the sentinel’s appearance in the alley while he and I were in the nexus. Normally, the werewolf wasn’t so verbose.
I nodded, then continued. “Meet Warner, sentinel, son of Jiaotu-who-was.” I deliberately didn’t mention the ‘instruments of assassination’ part of Warner’s sentinel title. After London and Tofino, I figured Gran was looking for any hint of a reason to lock me away in a protection circle and never let me out.
“Tasked by the treasure keeper to aid, not hinder, the warrior’s daughter,” Warner added. Then he inclined his head toward Gran.
She nodded in return but didn’t smile.
Well, that was tense.
Gran finally turned to me. “Wisteria Fairchild is in Seattle …” — her eyes flicked to Warner and then back to me again — “… on Convocation business.”
“Ah. There isn’t a portal into Seattle,” I said as I turned to look at Warner as well. Still swathed head to toe in black leather, he looked completely out of place in my bakery kitchen. He hadn’t returned to eating.
“Then you will have to wait a few days until she can come here,” Gran said.
“We could drive if we borrow Gran’s car. It’s spell protected,” I said, though I wasn’t jazzed about it. “There’s no way we can fly, not with a dragon.” Not with a dragon powerful enough to rip through the reinforced door of my safe and my wards like they were made of marshmallows, at any rate. Warner’s magic would disable the security scanners way before he got anywhere near enough to mess with an airplane’s electronics.
“Yeah, I’m not getting on a plane with him,” Kandy said as she slathered a package of plum sauce on a spring roll. “Hell, I’m not going into Seattle with him dressed like that.”
“We will make a request of the treasure keeper,” Warner said. “And how should I be clothed?”
“I can’t just ask Pulou to open doors on a whim,” I said.
Kandy sucked plum sauce off her fingers, then reached for her iPad.
“You indicated that this witch in Seattle …” — the city name was unfamiliar to Warner — “… could read the map.”
“I said I thought she might be able to.”
“We’ll buy you something like this,” Kandy said. She was holding her iPad up for Warner to look at.
“The treasure keeper will oblige,” Warner said as he reached for the tablet.
“Don’t touch …” Too late.
Warner frowned at the iPad for a moment, then handed it back to Kandy, who was grinning rather manically. Oddly, the iPad seemed unscathed, though it had flicked to sleep mode before I could see what Kandy had shown the sentinel.
I sighed. “Kandy …”
The green-haired werewolf turned the smile on me. “Captain America on his day off.”
What? Oh, no.
Dragon magic — spicy, dark chocolate with a smooth, creamy, sweet cherry finish — rose to tickle me along my left cheek, shoulder, and ribcage. Oh. My. God. Chocolate cake, whipped cream, and cherries … Warner’s magic tasted exactly like the black-forest-cake ice cream they served at Mario’s Gelati, which I had yet to replicate to my satisfaction in a cupcake. I hadn’t realized how much he’d been dampening his power until now.
My stomach fluttered in anticipation and my heart rate picked up a few beats. I slowly turned to look at Warner as his dragon magic settled around him.
He was wearing a dark gray T-shirt, cut low enough at the neck that I could see a patch of chest hair and the edge of a tattoo across his collarbone that had been hidden by the leather vest. My mouth ran dry, and I inhaled deeply instead of giving in to the appreciative moan I could feel aching at the back of my throat. The tight T-shirt stretched over a muscled physique that I would have sworn had been Photoshopped had I seen it on Facebook, then tapered down into low-slung dark blue jeans. A distressed leather jacket hung off Warner’s broad shoulders like it was tailored to him … and I guess it was.
Oh. My. God. Times two.
Kandy whistled. “That’s a useful talent.”
Warner shrugged, perfectly mimicking the green-haired werewolf. Then he flashed me a movie-star grin that turned my knees to goo. Thankfully, I was leaning back against the counter.
I checked my chin for drool, then crossed my arms and tried to look unimpressed. “Fancy, but what else can you do?”
Warner’s grin widened into a smile. He didn’t answer. Instead, he took off the jacket, flexing biceps the size of my freaking thighs as he did so. Oh, God, really? How the hell was I going to be at all effective with that around? Then he reapplied himself to the Chinese food with a renewed vigor.
Ever since seeing the latest Marvel Comics box-office hit, I’d had this ongoing fantasy that involved a certain muscle-bound superhero, a motorcycle chase, then an alien brawl that ended in a steaming shower for two.
“That was not helpful,” I hissed at Kandy.
“Really?” She eyed Warner appreciatively. “I think it was very helpful.”
“Wisteria Fairchild?” Gran called my attention off the suddenly too-accessible sexy dragon scarfing Chinese food in my bakery kitchen. She was genuinely unimpressed. She had eyes only for beautiful Brazilian guardian dragons. Qiuniu was an impossibly high bar for any man … you know, if you were into that sort of thing.
“Right. Seattle. Treasure keeper,” I said.
“The reconstructionist is prepared to meet you,” Gran said.
“Prepared? Had to twist her arm, did you?”
Gran offered a tight smile but no reply. Yeah, Wisteria Fairchild was probably as reluctant as I thought she would be. “Tell her I’ll double her fee.”
“She agreed to triple, plus expenses, and a healer on call.”
Jesus. The witch really didn’t like me. And I really, really couldn’t blame her. Though the healer provision smarted.
“Tell her we’ll meet her at the Bacco Cafe in two hours, depending on how long we need to wait for the treasure keeper to open a direct portal. Though without mentioning the portal or treasure keeper part of that. So … just two hours, Bacco Cafe.”
“For triple, she’ll wait all night.” The blue of her witch magic rolled over Gran’s eyes. I wouldn’t have risked pissing off the head of the Convocation if I were Wisteria Fairchild. But then, I’d seen Gran in action.
“You ready for your first trip to the nexus?” I directed this question to Kandy, who answered with her patented nonsmile.
Nothing daunted the werewolf.
I wished I could say the same.
Warner wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. Then he carefully started replacing the lids on the containers that still had food in them. I turned away to retrieve the sacrificial knife and some American cash from the broken safe, pushing away thoughts of strong fingers doing delicate tasks. With the safe broken, I couldn’t leave the knife here if I wasn’t going to be back soon, even if the bakery was closed tomorrow. Maybe I’d finally convince Pulou to keep it.
I rolled the knife in a red-and-white-striped tea towel, then tucked it into my satchel while I paused in the office doorway to look back into the kitchen. Gran was picking at some Szechuan green beans and texting. Kandy was looking up maps on her iPad.
Warner looked up from wiping the workstation and snagged my attention with his green-blue eyes. The knife made my bag feel epically heavy hanging off my shoulder. It felt filled with all the guilt I carried over the blood magic I’d practiced to save Mory’s life. It reminded me of the darkness that had swallowed my sister … that had entered the perfect life I thought I’d been building. Now, arrayed before me — only steps away in my bakery kitchen — was another glimpse of that unattainable, perfect life. A life that the darkness that had taken up residence within me would never let me have.
I dropped Warner’s gaze and tugged at my necklace, willing it to buffer me from the power of the knife. The shielding magic of the wedding rings responded instantly, but the weight of the bag didn’t change.
“Ready?” I called to Kandy and Warner as I turned to the pantry. What the necklace couldn’t fix, chocolate would always soothe. And I just happened to have about ten pounds of the good stuff on hand.
To that end, I tucked a couple of Valrhona chocolate bars in my satchel as I crossed through the pantry. The satchel pretty much operated as a go-bag for treasure hunting now, rather than just a fashion accessory. I even had one of those hotel sewing kits in it, along with cash, a lead-lined case to protect my phone from the magic of the portals, and chocolate. But extra chocolate was always a smart idea and never went to waste.
As I jogged down the stairs to the basement and reached out for the magic of the portal, I reminded myself that there was no such thing as a perfect life, and it didn’t do me any good to stare after something I could never have.