CHAPTER ELEVEN

NEGOTIATED POSITIONS

HIS IRE SEEMED as restrained and formal as the morning coat he wore. Archer flicked off an invisible bit of lint from one cuff, frowning, but when he looked up, he nodded. “Your proposition is accepted. The main intention of the Society is education, after all, and you’ve offered to participate in that. We will, of course, insist on the remittance of our nullifier—and it isn’t the only such relic we have in our possession, merely the one at hand—for your information.”

I didn’t appreciate the threat even as he agreed to a deal. I’d remember that. “Done. I shall work diligently on getting that relic returned. But you’ll have to schedule any classes you want me to take around my college and athletic obligations.”

“Field hockey, I was informed?”

“Yes.”

“Your season is finished, then.”

And, it was, but that didn’t mean the coach would let us go fallow. No, indeed. Most of us were added to the track and field team, to take advantage of the “legs” we’d already developed. “I still have classes.”

“You shall have to forward me a calendar of the best available days, then.” He produced a business card with a fluid movement of his hand. Archer must have been, at one time, a very adept magician with astonishing sleight of hand. Trickery, I knew, but still impressive. The professor wouldn’t have thought so. I could almost hear his cantankerous bluster. I missed him, almost as much as I missed my own father. The business card held a private postal box as well as his email address.

“I’ll get my hours to you as soon as the school has confirmed them for the spring semester. That should be any day now.” He nodded briskly and then turned to the double line of students. “Dismissed.”

I watched them scatter, rather hoping that they might take flight like refugees from Hogwarts, but none of them did. S’Mores dared a half-smile as she disappeared into the crowd, veered to grab some food goodies from the table, and then whisked out a side door.

Archer waited until the students had all dispersed before leaning in and saying, “If this trade of ours doesn’t work out, we shall have to take steps.”

I didn’t think he meant baby steps either.

A corridor opened, leading back to the double doors and beyond that, the car park steeped in night shadows. I took it as a sign that I should leave posthaste, and so I did. The driver opened a door for me, I stepped in—and found Miss S’mores waiting for me.

She tilted her head and smiled at me. “Hi! Archer sent me to start your lessons.”

“Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

She giggled. “My day starts at sundown.” She put up a window between the front and back and did a little finger wave. I hoped she was soundproofing the car.

“You’ve got my name. Fair is fair . . . yours?”

“Sophie,” she told me as she leaned over to offer her hand.

“Sophie,” I finished. She looked like one.

With a laugh, she tapped her hand on her jeans as if I had static-shocked her. Maybe I had.

Sophie glanced at me. Now her eyebrow went up. “That’s a bit of a burden.”

“What?”

“The power snapping at me. See, that’s telling people what you are. You’ve lost any advantage you might have.”

“But you can handle it, right? I didn’t hurt you.”

She stared at me solemnly. For an eerie moment, I saw what she would look like as an adult—chiseled face, serious eyes, intelligent consideration, and—perhaps—even a tinge of sadness. Sophie gave an abrupt nod. “Of course not. The issue is control. And there won’t be anybody but Master Thigpen about tonight who can report on you, and he won’t know.”

“He won’t?”

“First lesson. I’ll show you how to distract being assessed.” Her mouth thinned in thought, before she knocked on the glass to tell the driver to leave. “All ready.”

“That’s a deal, then.” I reached behind me to lock the door and off we went.

My experience with unknown cars and drivers made me look back, over my shoulder, as we pulled away. I turned back, settled in the car seat, and gathered a bit of power to my stone.

In the car, she tapped the back of the driver’s seat, and the window obligingly rolled down between us and him. Sophie waved her hand again. “Catch that?”

The barrier stayed down, but I detected a muffled sound to her words.

“Sound waves?”

“Yup. I’ve cut off one of his major senses, so he will disregard us.” She made the motion again as I looked at her warily.

“It’s not so much the sigil you’re sketching but the intention behind it.”

She beamed. “Fast learner!”

I tapped the back of the driver’s seat, and the window whined upward. She leaned toward me and sniffed. “Do I smell dog on you?”

That unnerved me a bit. “He just had a bath a few days ago, too. But yeah, that would be my pup. Do I reek of it?” I lifted one arm and then the other.

“Just to me. Labrador retriever and . . .” Sophie waited for me to fill in her sentence, but I didn’t.

“And?” she repeated.

I shrugged. “No one is quite sure.”

“Oh, wow. Something magical, then, maybe.” She sniffed again. “Not hellhound. They always have this smell like an old fire pit.”

“Sulfurous?”

“Maybe.” She rubbed the side of her nose with one finger as if the very memory made her itchy.

“So . . . is this a sanctioned lesson, or did you just decide to drop by?”

She gave me a side eye. “You won’t tell?”

“Never.”

“I volunteered. Archer wanted someone to follow you, to put a tracer on his nullifier. I just wanted to see you on your own. I mean, who you really are, you know?”

And she wanted to evaluate me on her own. I wasn’t sure if I found that encouraging or not. Suppose she was a pint-sized Joanna? As nice as she seemed to be, even though her offer might be genuine, I couldn’t discount that she was fully immersed in an organization the professor mistrusted completely. I sat quietly and gave her the merest of nods and tried to think of my curmudgeonly wizard in his grand old tradition.

That made me even more cautious. Though I didn’t think she’d detected my weakened reserves which told me that Miss Sophie S’mores wasn’t as all that as she thought she was.

I was more than certain Master Thigpen would be.

“We’ll be at a neutral practice area in a few.” Sophie lapsed into silence, or perhaps she was working to keep her ward going. The smile on her face stretched thin, and she didn’t really focus on anything but the back of the driver’s head.

Because we’d turned into the quarter of town where I’d gone to high school, I caught a pretty good idea of where we were going this time and paid attention. Next time I’d drive on my own, thoroughly disliking the idea of being at the mercy of a driver/car I didn’t know. The car, however, cruised past and toward the city limits.

Try as I might, I couldn’t catch a glimpse of the driver in the rearview mirror. That disturbed me a little, wondering how it was possible to avoid being seen. I couldn’t even tell if it were male or female although I had a feeling of female. Something about the shoulders and arms in the uniform coat, and the gloves covering the hands. Not delicate but nearly. It crept over me, like an ice-cold feather tickling against me that I didn’t like riding in strange cars with unknown drivers. Nor was I headed toward the Butchery area, which gave me a little comfort . . . but not enough.

I turned around on the car seat to face Sophie. “How much farther?”

“Oh. You know.” She gave a little waggle of her fingers.

“I don’t know, or I wouldn’t ask.”

She didn’t answer right away. I watched her for a moment, noted that her color had paled, tiny drops of sweat trickled from her hairline down her forehead, and one of her hands had begun to tremble. Not, I thought, from the soundproofing spell which didn’t need to hold much power since the window stayed up. What unnerved this young lady so much? She wouldn’t look back at me, her gaze fixed to the front, as landscape blurred a bit around us. The realization I was being taken somewhere I probably didn’t want to go became much more than a suspicion. And Sophie was no more a willing participant than I was—someone had leveraged her. She hadn’t volunteered, whether for Archer or someone else. She’d been forced to participate. That angered me more than my own situation.

I dropped my voice to a barely audible whisper.

“Unauthorized visit. Unknown location. You’ve been manipulated into getting me out to . . . wherever . . . so someone can take a closer look at the maelstrom stone. This isn’t going to be pretty.”

She twitched a look at me. Her lips had paled to nearly the unnatural washed-out color of her skin. She gave a bare shake of her head to steer me away from trouble. It didn’t work.

I put a hand on her arm. “I got this.”

I have no sympathy for bullies. Never have had, and even more so after what I went through in high school when my father disappeared, thought to have been killed. Now that I was adult, I knew how to fight back even better. I slipped my gloves off my hands and put my palms together, to feel the stone warm up. My bracers warmed as well.

I murmured, “Ready.”

I knocked on the driver’s partition. It lowered slightly. “Pull over. I’m going to be sick. Spent too much energy.” My voice wobbled convincingly.

Sophie rolled an eye at me. I shrugged.

The window came down all the way. “Sick?”

“Seriously, pull over unless you want puke all over this back seat!”

The car slowed quickly and headed toward the berm. I muttered to Sophie, “Run as soon as you get out.”

I don’t know if she trembled or shook her head in acknowledgment because I was throwing open my door and getting myself onto the street.

The driver moved also, quickly, and I found the two of us nearly toe-to-toe. I’d thought the driver female but that mostly definitely was not the case. Maybe half elven, but he glared at me over the collar of his long coat, and I caught a gleam in his eyes. I knew dark elves when I met them. I reacted with a low growl that would have made both the professor and my dog proud. The driver retreated two or three steps quickly, one hand up in the air as if to forestall anything I had planned.

Or get off a blistering magical attack.

I put up my own hand, letting the stone deploy my shielding. It spun out in a golden disk, covering not only myself but also Sophie who’d run all right . . . directly behind me. Bite me, but I still didn’t know if I could trust her.

I spun my defensive shield out a bit more as I faced the driver. “Thigpen, I presume?”

“What’s in a name?” His lips twisted, and his long face pulled a bit to match the sneer, lanky brown hair hanging down from what passed for a chauffeur’s cap. The suit, however, was both too fine and too outdated to be a uniform. And he had, heaven help us both, a Confederate flag pin stuck on his lapel.

Now, because my mom is from the North (and west), we’ve always been considered Yankees here in Virginia. It’s a thing. Unfortunately, it’s become more and more of a thing in the last few years and I have worries for the future. But that’s in the big scheme, and—frankly—I have enough to worry about with me and my mom and our close friends . . . and Aunt April. The rest of the states need to get together to take care of themselves. All the same, I can feel the prejudice and so can she. It might even be one of the reasons the university is holding back on her finalizing her dissertation for her doctorate. We don’t know. It’s not always obvious. But she will always be a Yankee.

I raised an eyebrow at him as he curled the fingers of his left hand about that self-same pin. I caught, for a brief second, the bitter copper tang of blood and thought he’d cut himself on the stupid thing before realizing it had been intentional. That was no ordinary pin. Dude was about to send some dark, dark blood magic at me through his charged relic.

Anger surged through me. “Stealing power? Not got the spine to learn it on your own? You think you have to rip it out of someone? You’re not getting anything from me or Sophie. I’ll take you down first.” And I would. I was a fighter and had earned my scars the past few years, mostly on the field hockey grounds, but I didn’t intend to roll over and let this ugly string bean of a being take the stone from me. Over my dead body.

Which might be exactly what he intended.

I narrowed my eyes. “You’re not powerful enough to do this on your own. Who’s pushing you?”

“Shut up,” Thigpen said. “Give it over. You will save yourself a great deal of pain if you do.” His gaze shifted to somewhere behind me. “Or save her. You can’t control the power you think you have to stop me.”

“You haven’t got what it takes. You’ll have to scamper back to . . . could it be Judge Parker . . . and admit you failed.”

“I won’t fail! You’re as good as dead! I will have it one way or the other.”

The stone coughed. Or hiccoughed. Neither of which it had ever really done before, and I prayed it wasn’t staggering to a powerless halt. I didn’t feel fatigue, but maybe the magic Thigpen had begun to drum up had closed off my connection with the maelstrom. I felt an icy coldness wrap about me, gripping tight. My arms and legs went half-numb, tingling with pins and needles. I stomped both feet to restore sensation as I advanced. Another two feet and I would be within kicking or punching distance.

If I could make it that far. Despite my vows, the power he summoned fastened around my chest and then my throat. I had my arms up in hope the bracers could block it, but they didn’t. Whatever he cast pulled the breath from my lungs and blocked me from getting a new gulp.

The spell he coiled against me wrapped around my throat, getting tighter and tighter, and I suddenly, desperately, needed air. I fought it, afraid to drop my shield and expose Sophie to the attack, and I doubted she had the power available right now either. I wrenched myself a step forward even as my lungs began to scream to breathe. What air I did have was sucked away from me, and I could see from the glitter in his eyes he didn’t intend to stop. If I could get closer for a good kick, I’d drop him to his knees.

But my own knees threatened to give way, my limbs shaking from lack of oxygen. Black spots danced in front of my eyes. I wanted to claw at my throat, but I needed to keep the shield up. If I did drop it, I didn’t know if it would protect me or if we’d all be at Thigpen’s dark magic mercy. He laughed, but I barely heard it. My blood pounded in my ears. My left leg buckled, and I went down on that knee.

“Not so brave now, are you? I am moments away from taking everything you have. Your stone, your life . . . even that mongrel family of yours. As for Sophie, she won’t remember a thing.”

I couldn’t find what I needed to answer, but I knew the anger flashed in my eyes. Then, slowly, I saw the Eye of Nimora awaken in my palm. I wasn’t about to give up or give in. White spots joined the black ones dancing in my vision, and I swiped at my eyes with my right hand. Still wordless, still gasping in hope for air.

The stone coughed again, then I saw it burp out that pewter-gray ingot it had swallowed, courtesy of Archer. It hovered in front of my nose and practically danced into my free hand. I grabbed it out of midair and wrapped my numbed fingers around it, wondering if Thigpen had seen it. Hopefully not. I levered myself back onto two feet, two legs. It hurt yet, at the same time, felt incredibly numb and unfeeling. Did I have asphalt, the edge of the berm, under my feet or what? I stepped forward. Well, truthfully, it was more of a collapse against Thigpen as my vision threatened to black out entirely. I felt his hands grab my elbows as he gave a triumphant crow. Then I jammed the nullifier against Thigpen’s lapel and bloody pin. It sucked at him greedily.

Air rushed back into my body like the surf at high tide, carrying feeling and strength with it. Not all my faculties yet—but enough. I twisted slightly out of his hold and put my knee where ladies were told never to hit a man. Crude, but effective. Thigpen yelped and toppled, hands cupping himself. His eyes rolled up, and he passed out from the magical and physical attacks.

My shield collapsed. I slipped the nullifier into a pocket while I stepped back and shook Sophie loose from my protection.

“I’m s-sorry. I didn’t want to.”

Anger still burned throughout me, and I think Sophie saw it because she scuttled to the far side of the car, watching me from behind the fender.

“You know who he is?”

She gave a slight nod, before adding in a burst of words, “Not well. He’s just an elder, and I don’t get lessons from him, and I would have avoided him if I’d known what he was going to do.”

“I take it his actions aren’t exactly sanctioned by the Society.”

She shook her head abruptly. “Never. Archer will be furious.”

“He a friend of Judge Parker?”

“I don’t know.”

I scanned her face a moment before accepting what she said. I didn’t like myself for being skeptical, but I could almost hear the professor inside my head, repeating what he’d always said: the Society was not to be trusted.

I motioned to the car. “Get in. I’ll get you home.”

She hesitated. I shrugged. “Unless you want to stay out on the road with him.” I scanned the roadway. We were slightly west and north of Richmond, in the country, with little traffic. She might have to wait a long time for a ride, and I could almost guarantee Thigpen would awaken before that.

She hopped into the front seat. I slid in and checked the dashboard. Yup, he’d left the keys in the car. No imagination.

When we were all buckled in and headed back, I told Sophie what I wanted her to tell Archer and made her repeat it back to me until she got it perfect.