Dru pretended not to be intimidated by Salem. To cover her nervousness, she stretched up and unpinned the second page. “Maybe forgotten the fact that this journal was originally part of the inventory of the Crystal Connection. It actually belongs to me.”
“Used to.” With his thumb and long forefinger, Salem reached out and plucked the pages out of her hands. “But you weren’t really using the Harbingers’ journal for anything, were you?”
She turned to face him, squelching the desire to yank the pages back out of his grasp. “I need to get that book back. Or at least as many pages as possible. It’s important.”
“Mmm-hmm.” He gave her a look of mock sympathy. “I’m sure it is. But some of us have a more comprehensive view of what ‘important’ really means.”
Dru folded her arms. “I need it to find . . . someone.” A little voice in the back of her head told her that the less she revealed to Salem, the better. That was difficult, since she naturally wanted everyone to team up and work together. Even him.
But Salem wasn’t like that at all. He was a loner. A self-imposed outcast. A believer in the power of one. He didn’t play well with others, and that was an unpleasant fact that Dru kept learning the hard way. He jealously guarded his secrets, for reasons that Dru suspected stemmed from an unhappy childhood. But then again, what sorcerer had ever really had a happy childhood?
As the silence stretched between them, she fiddled with her glasses. With an effort, she forced herself to stop and project a confidence that she didn’t feel. Why couldn’t he just stop being Salem for once and actually try to help out? It was all about him. It was always about him.
Well, if that was the way she had to play it, she would play it that way. She would make this all about Salem.
Deliberately, Dru jutted her chin out. “Look, do you want to get your amulet back, or not? Because I understand that without it, you’re a lot more vulnerable than you’d like to admit.”
Something subtle changed in Salem’s face. His swagger became a little more brittle. His fingers twitched. She knew she had hit close to home. She hated to be mean, but if she was going to get this journal back, she had to press her advantage.
“I’m sorry if you’re feeling like your powers aren’t up to snuff right now,” she said, awkwardly trying to goad him. Deliberately manipulating anyone went against her principles, but it seemed to be working. “If you want to take the night off, I understand. The rest of us can handle this. Don’t worry, we’ll find your amulet for you.” She glanced over her shoulder, looking for someone to back her up, and saw Greyson and Rane approaching, trading worried glances.
Dru gave Rane a meaningful look, which Rane completely misinterpreted.
“No, he’s fine,” Rane said flatly. “Look at him. He’s good to go. No worries.”
Dru sighed. This was turning out to be harder than she thought.
Rane held out a cautioning hand to Salem. “But, dude, until you get your protective amulet back? Keep your head down. Because solid objects are probably gonna come flying your way at the worst possible moment.” She winced. “And you know, without that amulet, you break kind of easy.”
The know-it-all look on Salem’s face slowly transformed into a smoldering anger. The corner of his eye twitched.
Dru felt badly about Salem’s feelings getting hurt, but Rane was actually right. And everyone knew it.
Salem’s flinty gaze slid from Rane back to Dru. “You really think it will make any difference if I give the Harbingers’ journal back to you? Fine. It’s yours.”
“Really?” Dru perked up. “Okay, great. Do you have a stepstool or something? I can find it all. It’s no big deal, really.”
Salem held up a hand for silence. “You’re absolutely right. This is no big deal at all.” For some reason, the smooth agreeableness in his tone gave her the creeps. It was as if he had just won some sort of game that she didn’t even know she was playing. That made her nervous.
Salem’s twitching gaze swept across the doomsday wall as if seeing it for the first time. He raised his hand higher, long white fingers spread out. Jagged sparks of energy buzzed and snapped around his fingertips, leaving streaking afterimages in Dru’s vision.
The air surrounding Salem glimmered with an unearthly light, and his black silk shirt billowed and snapped in an invisible breeze. An itching heat tickled Dru’s skin, making her step back. Shimmering waves of power flowed up and down the length of the cluttered wall, rustling the jumble of maps, photos, and papers. They rippled in the unseen wind that quickly gained strength as Salem’s spidery fingers caressed the air.
All at once, the journal pages snapped loose from their various positions across the wall. They fluttered into the air like a flock of white birds startled into flight. As they sailed toward Salem’s outstretched hand, they were caught in an invisible whirlwind. They swirled around in a rustling funnel until, with blinding swiftness, they reassembled themselves into the journal.
The cloth-bound covers with their ragged edges cartwheeled through the air and sandwiched the top and bottom of the stack of papers, mashing them flat. The torn edges of the spine stitched themselves back together. Tiny particles of paper and dried glue streaked through the air, like dust motes in a sudden breeze, to fit back into the rapidly vanishing cracks in the binding. In moments, everything about the Harbingers’ journal was restored to its original condition, down to the seven-fingered hand crudely drawn on the front cover with countless strokes of a ballpoint pen.
With a sound like air rushing into a long-sealed-up room, the diffused light of Salem’s spell swept back toward him, pinpoints sizzling around his fingers like sunlight glittering off ocean waves. Then the magic was gone, and the reassembled journal dropped softly into his clutching hand.
With a satisfied smirk, he turned and held the journal out to Dru.
She swallowed. No matter how much magic she witnessed with her own eyes, there was always something hair-raising, almost transcendent, about watching a masterful sorcerer at work. Nothing in her world ever compared to the experience of being right there at the moment when a magical spell broke through the natural boundaries of the world and did something incredible.
Even something as deceptively small as putting a book together.
Dru took a deep breath and reached for the journal. But just as quickly, Salem pulled it back out of her reach.
“Nah, ah, ah. Not so fast, Twinkles. First, the million-dollar question. Why do you need it?”
Dru could barely contain her frustration. She wanted to step right up to him and slap him. For an agonizing moment, she entertained the notion of doing just that. “I told you. I need it to find someone.”
He made a rolling motion with his finger. “Uh-huh. Already established that. Moving forward. Whom?” He inched closer, his eyes taking on a crazy gleam. “A protean sorcerer? Hmm?”
“No.” She decided to finally lay all of her cards out on the table. “A crystal sorceress.”
She was about to say more when Salem shook his head dismissively. “No such thing. You, darling, are the only working stiff who punches that particular time card.”
“Lucretia. Does that name mean anything to you?” Dru folded her arms, impatiently waiting for a reaction that never came. “She’s a crystal sorceress, she’s one of the Seven Harbingers, and she’s here in Denver. She stole the enchanted Amulet of Decimus the Accursed from my shop. That’s why I need the journal, to find her. Satisfied?”
He gave her a little smile. “There we go. See, was that so hard?” He turned and walked away, taking the book with him.
Dru followed him. “Hey! Wait! I need that.”
“You’re joking, right? You must be.” He sounded surprised as he turned around to face her. “You can’t be trusted with something this important. You possessed the Amulet of Decimus the Accursed? You? And then you allowed it to be stolen from you. How did you accomplish that particular hat trick?”
Rane reappeared, scrubbing an extra towel against her hair. “Which one was Decimus again?”
“Moldy old Roman sorcerer,” Dru said. “Opal and I outsmarted his ghost a while back. In his time, he was so powerful and evil, and his fortress in Pompeii was so impenetrable, that his enemies assassinated him with a volcano.”
“Oh, that one. Didn’t his enemies have that same badass crystal you used to blow up half the netherworld?”
Dru winced, thinking about the crystal utilized by Decimus’s enemies thousands of years ago. She had found it by accident, and she could still feel its weight in her hand, a fist-sized transparent polyhedron tinted nearly black. The most dangerous crystal she had ever seen. She had kept it in the safe behind the picture of Ming the Merciless, where it had stayed until the night that she’d had no choice but to use it.
At the last moment, when it looked as if they were all doomed, she had charged up that crystal using the destructive energy of the evil spirit that had transformed Greyson into one of the Four Horsemen. Her efforts had drawn that evil spirit out of Greyson and made him human again. The earthshaking fireball she had created with the crystal had wiped out the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but it had also demolished the magical causeway through the netherworld, smashed Hellbringer to pieces, and nearly killed them all. So much had happened since then, good and bad, but none of it could ever erase the heartbreaking memory of that terrible moment.
“What kind of crystal was that?” Rane asked.
“Biotite,” Dru said, trembling inside at the memory. “It was a biotite crystal.”
Rane let out a low-pitched giggle. “That was awesome. Let’s go get some more biotite.”
Salem, meanwhile, paced back and forth in front of his doomsday wall. “I searched for years for Decimus’s amulet. And all this time, you had it. Unbelievable. Is there no justice at all in this universe?”
Rane turned on him. “Come on, really? Cry me a river, dude. Do you even know what Decimus’s amulet does?”
He shot her a dark look.
Dru held up her hands in a placating gesture. “Look, it doesn’t matter. We’re all just trying to get our amulets back. We all want the same thing.”
“We?” Salem snapped. “No. You just want to clean up your own mess. I intend to teach these sorcerers a lesson they’ll never forget. It’s a simple equation: I was attacked, and now I’m vengeful.”
“Fine!” Dru said. “We can do both. Just let me have the journal.”
“Is no one else comprehending what a terrible idea that is?” Salem looked around, and his gaze came to rest on Greyson, who up until now had hung back, staying quiet. “And you, no one should trust. You are a demonic threat bigger than anyone will admit. How long will it be before you let those blinky red eyes of yours get the better of you, and go back to being an active participant in the apocalypse?”
Greyson didn’t visibly move, but somehow he seemed to become bigger. His chiseled chest strained at his shirt as he leveled a no-nonsense glare at Salem. “This is coming from a guy wearing makeup and a top hat.”
Salem’s eyes narrowed, as if he knew he’d been insulted, but wasn’t sure exactly how.
But just then, Greyson lost all interest in the argument. His gaze shot upward toward the ceiling, which was half-hidden in darkness. His red eyes glowed brighter. “Something’s up there.”
As he spoke, something heavy thumped against the roof. In the distance, glass shattered.
A cold shot of adrenaline ran through Dru’s veins. She reached into her purse, digging for crystals, knowing she had only seconds to find something to protect herself. A golden pyrite disk, maybe, or her tiny spectrolite blade. But they were buried somewhere beneath her keys, her lip balm, and an unbelievably thick wad of paper napkins.
Rane’s hand shot out to an antique chest of drawers nearby. She touched one of the tarnished bronze lion heads that served as pull handles. With a scraping metal sound like a sword being drawn from its sheath, her entire body transformed into tarnished bronze, towel and all, making her look like an Amazonian monument to bathing.
“Heads up, people!” Rane’s voice rang as if she were shouting through a metal megaphone. “We’ve got incoming!”
An inhuman shriek split the air as something rushed at them from the darkness above.