The Isis Collar Read online

  Like a lot of schools in the district, Abraham Lincoln was built on a single story and every classroom had a fire door that opened directly onto the playground. As principal, Sanchez had a key. The first thing she did was unlock the door and prop it open. It was the smart thing to do. She must have been a firefighter in a previous career, too, because she picked up the teacher like she was a cardboard cutout and tossed her over one shoulder before heading out the door. I did the same to an older brunette girl sitting in a chair in the corner. I was guessing she was a student teacher or a college intern.

  More people had arrived because of the smoke and were being directed by Jamisyn, who either had gotten away himself or must have been pulled out by a passerby. Sirens in the distance were getting louder. I set the girl down and shook her lightly to clear her head. While I was explaining what had happened to her, I spotted movement near the end of the building.

  I had turned, taking a couple of steps in that direction, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned my head and was surprised to see Terrance Harris, one of the Santa Maria de Luna cops. He was a recently arrived Haitian immigrant, a level-six mage. He’d been brought in to be part of the magical enforcement squad. I’d met him once before, at a Christmas party. He nodded toward the school, but I noticed that he was looking at a point near the rooftop of the building, on a ledge. I followed his gaze. I didn’t see anything. “I knew when I saw you over here that this wasn’t just a building fire. You set off smoke bombs because of the curse, didn’t you?”

  The distinctive accent didn’t distract me. Instead, the words made me look at the unobtrusive middle-aged man suspiciously. “What do you know about it?” He looked like he was off-duty, because he was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, but it seemed awfully convenient to see a powerful mage at a place where an equally powerful spell had been cast. That “they always return to the scene of the crime” thing is mostly true.

  He pointed at the ledge. “I can feel it. The source of the spell is up there. It’s a powerful one. I’m thinking it was done last night and set with a trigger or timer. It’s too complicated and too public for someone to have done this just now.”

  Could I trust him? Would either of the mages I knew be able to tell me all that about a spell just by encountering it on the sidewalk?

  Actually, yeah, they would. Bruno could for sure, and probably Creede, too. Bruno was a level nine. Creede an eight plus. So maybe I shouldn’t shortchange Harris. I turned to ask him if he could tell anything specific about the curse but was distracted when I spotted more movement in the place that had caught my attention a moment before.

  A basement window was being opened … from the inside. Okay, that just screamed sneaky. There were plenty of exit doors; why crawl out of a window unless you were up to something?

  I gestured silently toward the dark-skinned man emerging from the open window. He was trying hard to use his camo clothing to blend in with the shadows. Terrance followed my gesture and started heading that way, pulling what looked like an actual carved wand from a holster on his belt. I don’t know a lot of witches or mages who use wands, although I’ve seen them for sale in weapons stores.

  Harris shouted, “Police! You in the window. Freeze. Don’t move!”

  Crap. I’d been hoping for a little more … subtlety. I know there are laws that say they have to give that warning. It just seems like it gives the bad guys an edge when you can’t sneak up on them. The man in the window pulled down on his cap and it became a face mask, just in time to keep me from getting a good look at him. As I expected, instead of not moving, he started moving faster, kicking to get out of the window before we could get to him.

  Go figure.

  Terrance raised his wand and twirled it in a fast circle before throwing power at the masked man. “Glacia!”

  I knew that spell, which was, literally, “freeze.” It should have stopped the guy cold in his tracks. Except that I was right about him being a spellcaster. He threw his hands sideways and deflected the magic. Toward me. Then he took off running down the street.

  A wave of ice cold hit me and made my muscles tense. But there’s a reason I spend serious money on protection charms. It only took a second for the medallion around my neck to heat and push away the cold. I didn’t wait to have something more serious hit me. The best defense is a good offense. I put a hand inside my blazer, extracted a charm disk as I ran, and brushed my fingertips over the raised lettering to be sure I’d drawn the one I wanted. Pouring on the speed, I hit the guy from behind with a flying tackle. We tumbled to the ground in a tangle of limbs and dirt. Before he could utter the next curse, I stuffed the charm in his mouth and slammed his jaw shut. The Speak No Evil charm is specially made for spellcasters. For the next hour, he wouldn’t be able to say anything that could be harmful.

  He gagged and coughed as the liquid in the charm slid down his throat. “You folking titch!” He spat out the words and then realized what I must have done. He tried to curse me, but it came out as “Beneficent Harmony!”

  Terrance, breathing hard from the run, pulled handcuffs from a holster on his belt. His skin was at least two shades darker than that of the man under me as he slapped the first cuff against the caster’s wrist. “Good thing you did that. You don’t want to even know what that curse would have done.”

  He was probably right. I kept my weight on the guy until the cuffs were on and then got to my feet. “Stay with him until the other cops get here. I need to find out what he did inside the building. I heard a small explosion coming from the basement a few minutes ago.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Graves. Let us take care of it. I’ll call for reinforcements; they’ll be here—”

  “Too late,” I completed. “They don’t even know they need to be here yet. Call it in, but I have to keep getting those kids out. That’s the important thing. I’ll see what caused the explosion.”

  He let out an exasperated sigh as he pulled the other mage to his feet. “Then let me go. If it’s another spell, you can’t disarm it. If it’s a bomb … well, you don’t have authority to do that, either. There could be chemicals or toxins, and I’ve trained with them. Stay with the prisoner; I’ll go.”

  I shook my head and finished picking up the charms I’d dropped when we tumbled. “I also don’t have authority to keep a prisoner in custody. Remember that most of the cops around here don’t like me. They’d love an excuse to lock me behind bars for the rest of my life.” It was a painful truth to admit. There were cops—people I’d gone drinking with, shared stories with—who now wanted me dead or locked up because a master vampire tried to turn me. They considered me evil, despite the fact I could stand in a church, wear holy items, and walk in the daylight. And since the “Zoo,” otherwise known as the California State Facility for Criminally Magical Beings, had been reduced to a wide piece of glass in the desert by a massive explosion, they’d have to find somewhere else to put me—probably somewhere far worse. No, thanks. I’d rather take my chances with whatever I found inside the school. “As for chemicals, I’ll stand a better chance than you. Vampires heal faster.”

  Harris winced at my crack about his fellow officers, but he didn’t bother trying to deny it and I didn’t give him the chance to argue. I just sprinted back toward the building. He could either leave the prisoner and follow me, or stay where he was.

  I really wanted to know what was going on in that basement, and call me crazy, but I figured the quickest route to find the trouble was to backtrack the crook. So I slipped into the building using the basement window that he’d left so conveniently open and took a look around.

  I’d expected to find myself in a furnace room, maybe a closet. Instead, I was standing in a music storage room. A beat-up old upright piano was tucked into a corner and a host of noisemaking implements like triangles, kazoos, and tiny brass cymbals were stored in stacked and labeled clear plastic totes. A battered metal file cabinet had drawers marked with the names of various instruments.

 
I stopped, stilling my breathing, extending all of my senses to the max. I’ve developed quite the sensitivity to magic with my other predator senses. There are some less happy vamp side effects as well, but I didn’t have time to think about those right now. I wanted to find whatever it was the bad guy had been up to.

  Nothing. At least not in this room. Crap. I moved toward the still-open door, listening as hard as I could.

  The alarm was a distant rumble below the thick concrete slab above that all the older buildings in town have. The school on top had been scraped and rebuilt when I was a kid, but the foundation and main-floor slab are probably a century old. Either the lower rooms didn’t have bells or they’d been disabled. That’s how I was able to hear the distinct sounds of someone fiddling with something. The noise was similar to when I’m having the oil changed in my car. Fabric rustling, the tink of different metals meeting, the squeak/scrape of screws or bolts turning under force. Subtle but noticeable.

  I took off my heels and crept down the hall in nylon-clad feet, staying on my toes so there was little sound and varying my steps so it was hard to determine the source. A hiss of air behind me made me turn. My Colt 1911 was in my hand and pointed at the hiss before I even remembered moving.

  Harris was there, gun likewise drawn, but his was carefully pointed at the floor as he stared down my barrel. I opened my mouth to ask him what the hell he was doing there, but he responded by raising one finger to his lips, so I mouthed the words, Where’s the prisoner?

  A quirky smile pulled at one side of Harris’s mouth. He motioned his hands together in front, wrists touching like handcuffs, and then showed a long, straight vertical line and mouthed, Flagpole.

  I grinned. Good move. I knew the guys on the hex squad were assigned magical handcuffs and they had some way of knowing whose cuffs they were when another officer came upon a cuffed prisoner. I don’t know the science or metaphysics of it. I should probably ask some of the cops I know someday.

  I let Harris slip ahead of me to take point. I had no way of knowing whether he was lying. I didn’t think so, but having him in front of me meant I could keep an eye on him. Never a bad thing.

  We walked down the hallway, checking the storage rooms for potential danger. I was sure we’d checked them all. Except … we hadn’t. We got to the end of the hall and I realized that while my eyes saw four doors on either side, my internal count said we’d only checked seven rooms. I frowned and that made Harris frown, too. He shrugged and motioned to my worried face with a What’s up? expression.

  I didn’t know if he’d understand, but I mouthed the words one through eight as I pointed to each door. He nodded. Then I pointed to both of us, made walking motions with my fingers, and extended five fingers and then two so I didn’t have to lower the Colt.

  His brow furrowed and he thought for a moment. Then he had the same realization as me and he mouthed, We missed one.

  I nodded while realizing I didn’t know which one. Spell? I mouthed again.

  Now his jaw set and I realized he was angry. He nodded and closed his eyes briefly. I could feel his magic swell out in a wave that crawled along my body like bugs. I wanted to flinch or scratch but didn’t dare take my attention off the hallway.

  For a long moment, I did move my eyes to watch Harris’s face while he searched. Alex once told me that for every expression we see a person make, there are a dozen or more micro-expressions we don’t. It’s one of the first things an interrogator is trained to look for, because they’re nearly impossible to fake. A twitch of the lip, a wrinkle over the bridge of the nose, even an eye flick away from the questioner—they’re all indications of guilt or innocence.

  Admittedly, I’m not well trained in such things, but from all indications, Harris was frustrated and annoyed. Whether with himself, me, or the person we were searching for I didn’t know. Harris leaned toward me until his lips were right next to my left ear. My peripheral vision revealed he was carefully keeping his 9mm pointed low and away from me. “I’m going to walk back and touch every door. See which one I miss.” His words were so low and soft that without the vamp senses I would have missed them entirely.

  I nodded and he moved away from me, crouching low enough that he couldn’t be seen through the reinforced windows in the doors. I mouthed the words one through seven as he touched, but my mind said eight—the exact reverse of earlier. At the end of the hall, he looked at me with a question on his face. I just frowned, shook my head, and raised five and two again.

  My skin itched furiously from the high levels of magic around me. There was definitely a spell going on … some sort of powerful distraction or aversion charm. It didn’t buzz against my skin the way wards usually do, but I could definitely feel it. Probably a good thing, too. If I hadn’t I might never have even noticed the extra door.

  Wait … doors. What if it was just about the doors?

  I had an idea. I motioned for Harris to stay put. Crouching down, I moved slowly toward him, but instead of looking at the doors, I kept my eyes on the floor and counted the tiles. There should be eight oversized tiles between the doorways and six across the hall. At the point where the first doorway should be, I could see out my peripheral vision two doorjambs. I counted another eight squares and again, two jambs.

  But eight more tiles and … I could only see one jamb. On my left. Without looking up to see Harris, I pointed to my right. I crouched down on the third tile, closed my eyes, and felt along the floor, sliding fingers along the edges of the tiles. Sure enough, when I reached the edge of the third tile, there was a gap between the floor and the bottom of an invisible door.

  The problem I saw was that if the caster had spent the time and energy to do the slow-mo spell and the aversion spell, why not booby-trap the door as a final fail-safe? I would. And I always try to credit the bad guys with being at least as smart as I am.

  I could still hear that shuffling and tinkering sound behind the door and would bet even money there was a person behind the door I couldn’t see.

  Harris joined me on the tile facing what appeared to be a blank wall. He mouthed, You’re sure?

  I nodded and raised my gun, aiming for a spot at about knee level. I moved over until I had my back against the wall. Harris followed and grabbed my gun arm and tried to yank my Colt away. He stank of sudden panic. But he was just plain human as far as physical power and … I’m not anymore. My arms didn’t move.

  Harris is a cop. Cops don’t get to fire into blind doorways. Actually, bodyguards shouldn’t, either. But I was aiming low enough that it wouldn’t be a kill shot, and I knew what ammo I’d brought. When I go into an unknown situation, I take the time to balance my bullets. One copper-jacketed safety round, one snake-shot round filled with salt and iron beads, and one soft lead filled with holy water. Then the same over again. Various supernatural beasties react to different things, so usually one of the three will have an effect. Spells often don’t account for mechanical threats. They’re geared toward the human brain but not the tools it can use.

  Before Harris had time to react and do anything more aggressive, I fired three quick shots. The gunfire echoed through the hallway and a sudden scream followed.

  I dropped into a crouch, spun, and kicked with all the strength I could muster from that position. A part of the wall flew inward on oiled hinges I couldn’t see. It hit the drywall with a sharp bang and did not bounce back. I guessed that the force of my blow had embedded the knob in the wall.

  A burly, tattooed man was rolling on the floor, shouting four-letter curses that had nothing to do with magic, his hands pressed tight over a bleeding wound in his calf. The air filled with the scent of burning flesh. Either the iron or holy water had done the trick.

  Harris gave me a hard look, but moved swiftly through the door. Raising his wand, he threw a wordless spell at the man on the floor. He was instantly silent, though his lips kept moving. Hate-filled eyes glared at the two of us.

  “Holy Crap, Graves!” Harris shouted. There was
no need to keep our voices down anymore, but the sound seemed to echo off the walls and blast into my ears with the force of an air horn. “What the hell were you thinking?!” The caster raised a hand and started to make movements in the air, but Harris grabbed him and threw him facedown, wrestling with him until he could get a pair of flexible cable ties out of his pocket and around the guy’s wrists. This time he didn’t need my help, so I didn’t offer. “You could have blown us both up!”

  I didn’t bother to respond. I was busy looking around the room. I saw the charred remains of a side of the ductwork. It was a small hole, not really big enough to do more than blow a hole the size of my head. The edges were wet but not with water. I just couldn’t tell what it was over the scent of charred metal.

  But that’s not what worried me. There was a … contraption in the center of the room. It was black metal and round, about twice the size of an ancient cannonball, and had what looked like valves coming out of the metal at odd angles. I’ve seen a variety of bombs before in training videos and this didn’t look like one. Frankly, it looked like something that should be attached to an old furnace. It glowed with powerful magic that pressed against my chest hard enough to hurt, and had a digital display with a countdown timer, so a bomb definitely came to mind. Two of the three bullets I’d fired were floating in midair right in front of me. Marks on the floor showed that they’d bounced off the tiles before becoming trapped in whatever spell was around the object. Apparently, it was sheer luck I hit the other caster with the snake shot, which hadn’t ricocheted like the larger rounds. He must have some fae in his background to have the iron shot slip through his personal magic.