Salem emerged from a pool of shadow just inside his own doorway. His slender fingers, surrounded by the faint glow of magic, moved as the music played. He was playing the organ from across the room, she realized.
His eyes glittered at Dru from beneath the brim of his top hat. “Evening, sunshine. Friday night a little slow down at the rock shop? I thought you got your kicks from staying home and reading immensely unpopular old books.” A sardonic smile quirked up the corner of his lips, but there was an unmistakable fury in his wide gray eyes.
His anger wasn’t directed at her in particular. Salem shifted his glare to Greyson standing just behind her. Judging by the way his fingertips stabbed at the keyboard, even from a distance, Salem carried his fury around with him. That didn’t come as much of a surprise. But considering the way Greyson puffed up and moved in protectively closer to Dru, clearly he didn’t understand the distinction, and instead saw Salem as a threat.
Dru intervened before the situation escalated. She laid a calming hand on Greyson’s muscled arm and beamed her best customer-service smile at Salem. “Salem, hi! Have you seen Rane? Because she’s not answering her phone.”
It wasn’t a lie, exactly. More of a distraction. But it worked.
After a moment of glowering, Salem turned his head and called out, “Buttercup! Your entourage has arrived.” Then he gave Dru a bored look. “I’ll let you two catch up. Meanwhile, I have some vengeance to plan.” With that, he turned and disappeared into the labyrinthine clutter of his apartment, still ghost-playing the organ. His voice drifted out of the shadows. “Go ahead. Make yourself at home. Please hold your applause until the end of the performance.” The organ blared even louder.
As Dru hesitantly made her way inside, Greyson leaned close to her. “This guy takes himself pretty seriously,” he growled in her ear.
“They all do. Sorcerers are just that way for some reason. You should see the egos I have to deal with sometimes down at the shop.”
He gave her an appraising look. “You’re a sorceress. But you aren’t like that. You’re more down to earth.”
She felt her cheeks flush. “Oh. Well. Thank you. But it’s kind of a new thing for me, thinking of myself as a sorceress. I still kind of feel like I’m just pretending to know what I’m doing, and sooner or later everyone else will figure that out.”
“Modest, too,” Greyson said, putting a warm arm around her. “I’m just starting to get a grip on this whole sorcerer underground. I get the feeling none of them know how weird they are.”
Dru nodded, basking in the feeling of his arm wrapped around her, the closeness as he walked next to her.
“You’re not like them,” he said. “You’re different.”
“Because I know how weird I am?”
He drew up short. “Not exactly what I meant.”
“I know.” She couldn’t resist wishing they were alone together, anywhere else but here. Someplace quiet and safe, and romantic. Mentally, she kicked herself for not taking Greyson up on his offer of a candlelit dinner. But first, she had to find the Harbingers’ journal. And that meant she had to explain a few things to Greyson in order to keep him out of trouble.
“So, listen, I’m not trying to say that all sorcerers are jerks. But the ones who are tend to wear it on the outside. You know how some tropical insects and amphibians are brightly colored to warn you that they’re toxic?”
Greyson nodded solemnly, then glanced down around their feet as if checking for creepy-crawlies.
“No, I mean metaphorically. Salem gives off certain signals as an indication that he’s dangerous. There’s a reason for that. It’s best to keep your distance, or at least keep your cool around him.”
Greyson didn’t look convinced. “If I had to, I could take him.”
She wasn’t sure if he was serious, and she couldn’t tell from the look on his face. Maybe he was just trying to reassure her. She patted his arm. “That’s sweet. Let’s never let it come to that.” Having Salem as an enemy was a terrifying thought. She’d seen him blast things apart with just a pointed finger, or send cars flying with the flick of his wrist. That was why she tried as hard as she could to keep him on her side. Unfortunately, she didn’t always succeed.
They came to a sort of a clearing in the center of the clutter of old junk and antiques. A few mismatched chairs from a previous century stood arranged in a row, as if lined up for a table that had inexplicably vanished. She wasn’t sure if they were meant for actually sitting on or not.
Before she could decide whether to sit down, Rane padded in on bare feet, blonde hair sopping wet, wearing nothing but a beach towel emblazoned with rainbow-colored parrots. At just over six feet, she stood as tall as Greyson, and the beefy muscles in her bare arms rippled as she dunked a protein bar into a glass of thick green smoothie. “D! What’s shakin’?”
“Big trouble. Just now, somebody—” Dru was interrupted by Rane loudly slurping the protein bar clean. “A sorceress named Lucretia broke into the shop. Stole an evil artifact that could kill millions of people. And then somebody else trashed Opal’s car.”
“Ouch. Bummer about the car.” Rane tilted her head back and chugged down the protein shake. With her back arched, and her bare skin shining in the candlelight, she somehow managed to look like a bodybuilder posing on a very strange stage.
Dru cleared her throat and awkwardly motioned toward Rane’s towel, which was barely holding on by a twist of damp terrycloth. “Careful. Maybe you should keep a hold of that. You don’t want to accidentally, you know, drop anything.”
Rane shrugged and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Don’t worry. I’m basically dry by now. So what’s your plan?”
“We already have plans,” Salem called out from the darkness. “In fact, some of us are already ready to head out again, Buttercup. So, chop-chop.”
“Hey, relax, will you?” Rane shot back. “You’re not the one who had to ride into the danger zone on a shopping cart.” She took a bite of her protein bar and turned to Dru, chewing. “Shopping cart went flying, by the way. With me on it. It was so rad.”
Dru nodded sagely, as if she had any idea what Rane was talking about. Sometimes, it was best not to ask. “These things happen,” Dru said.
“Damn right they do.” Rane stuffed the rest of her protein bar into her mouth, making her cheeks bulge. She talked around her food. “Salem’s paranoid we’re being spied on. Somebody stole his man-jewelry earlier, and he’s totally convinced it was a setup. He thinks somebody’s watching us.”
That was a creepy thought. Dru looked around nervously. The majority of the vast room was in shadow, beyond the rosy pools of light from the scattered lamps. “Do you think he could be right?”
“Maybe.” Rane tossed back her damp blonde hair. “So I figure, if they’re watching, why not give them a show?”
Dru took another look at Rane’s damp towel, this time with an uneasy feeling of dread. “Please don’t take off that towel.”
Rane frowned. “You know who you sound like? Every roommate I’ve ever had.”
“Opal is waiting outside,” Greyson broke in, much to Dru’s relief. “She’s afraid to come in. We were attacked.”
Rane nodded. “Protein sorcerer?”
“Um, protean?” Dru said.
Rane snapped her fingers and pointed at Dru, then nodded. “Bingo. It was a giant bat, and it nabbed Salem’s amulet. So now he’s all pissed off because he’s, like, naked.” She turned her index fingers inward to point at her own towel. “I mean, not naked naked. Metaphysically.”
“Metaphorically,” Dru offered.
“Whatever. He’s totally defenseless.” Rane dropped her voice to what was probably supposed to be a whisper. “So he’s ready to head back out tonight and kick ass. Me too. I just had to get a shower first. Because, river water.”
But Dru wasn’t listening. She was still stuck on the part about the protean sorcerer. “I thought protean magic died out thousands of years ago. How could anybody even learn those spells today?”
Rane shrugged. “All I know is I kicked his ass until he was naked, and then he flapped away with the amulet.”
Greyson bent closer to Dru. “Sounds like we should be worried about this protean thing.” There was an unspoken question in his statement. He didn’t know what they were.
Dru nodded. She kept forgetting Greyson didn’t have any background knowledge about magic, because he wasn’t a sorcerer. Not in the traditional sense, at least. “Protean magic goes all the way back to prehistoric times. Think about Neolithic shamans wearing bear skins, dancing around the cave, all freaking out, until they actually become the bear. That sort of thing. Protean magic is based on shedding your higher humanity and giving in to wild, raw animal instinct. Going feral. They literally transform into their totem animals. Bigger, faster, smarter versions of them. But still animals. Lions, hawks, crocodiles—”
“Bats.” Rane folded her arms.
“Bats, sure,” Dru agreed. “It could be any kind of animal.”
Greyson seemed to chew that over. “So, they’re werewolves.”
Dru blew out her cheeks. That was a vast oversimplification. And also technically incorrect. But still . . . “In the sense that they transform into animals, yes, essentially. At least, according to the legends. But you have to keep in mind that everything we know today comes from ancient texts written by outside observers, who considered them savages to be eradicated. I mean, there were protean sorcerers among the Celtic people, but even the word ‘Celtic’ comes from the ancient Greek name Keltoi, which means ‘the hidden people.’ We don’t know what the Celts actually called themselves, because they didn’t leave a written record. As far as anyone knows, protean sorcerers are extinct.”
“Guess not,” Rane said flatly.
“And yet someone figured out how to bring back protean magic. Maybe the Harbingers discovered something while they were searching for the apocalypse scroll.” Everything started to click together in Dru’s mind. “Clearly, there’s a pattern here. Someone managed to steal enchanted amulets from Salem, Opal, and me, all in one night, in different locations. So these attacks aren’t random. They’re coordinated. Someone is targeting us. And we have to find them before they strike again. I need to find that journal fast. Like, right now.”
“What journal?” Rane asked.
“I’ll explain later.” Dru threaded her way through all the junk until she reached the far wall, where Salem had pinned up everything he could find about the Harbingers. His doomsday wall had grown considerably since the last time she’d been here, and now it was truly massive, at least thirty feet across. Her gaze roamed over the shaggy collection of pinned-up newspaper clippings, maps, photos, and sketches, some of them connected together with lengths of string in different colors.
Finally, she found what she was looking for: a yellowed page torn out of a half-century-old hardcover journal. She recognized the handwriting instantly, a sort of manic scrawl made up of sharp little jabs of the pen, as if the author was attacking the page. As Dru skimmed the dense handwriting, she tried to make sense of its ramblings. It described the author wandering the deserted cobblestone streets of a place called the Shining City, preparing for doomsday. The wrinkled corner of the page was adorned with a doodle of a seven-fingered hand. It was definitely taken from the journal of the Seven Harbingers.
Dru carefully unpinned it from the wall and looked around for more pages like it. The sheer mass of material on this wall had grown to unwieldy proportions. She had no idea how anybody could find anything in this mess. Finally, she spotted another journal page high up on the wall and reached for it.
She didn’t notice that she had left Greyson and Rane behind, or that the organ music had stopped, until Salem suddenly appeared beside her. He nonchalantly leaned one shoulder against the wall and fixed her with a half-crazy stare, made even starker by the black eyeliner around his eyes.
Dru swallowed nervously.
“Do you actually need me to ask you what you think you’re doing?” The cold tone of Salem’s voice held an unspoken threat.