Djinn Justice (The Collegium Book 2) Page 12

  However, before the rogue mage self-destructed, Fay needed to learn the reason for siphoning dream essences to a were. She had a haunting feeling that there was more to the test Uncle had set Steve than any of them imagined.

  She looked at the bear-were, who was busily smearing yet more honey onto another bread roll.

  “It’s wild honey,” he said in answer to a protest she hadn’t made. Apparently, wild honey justified gluttony.

  It was good, but not that good. Fay stuck with the main issue. “I need to borrow your car. The woman I’m after is a rogue mage and it’s dangerous for you to be near her."

  The bear frowned at Fay for a long time, chewing steadily as he did so. Then he fished out his car keys from a pocket. “Drive slow. Conditions here are different. No city streets.”

  “I’d noticed.” She took the keys. “Thanks.”

  He nodded. His voice caught her as she walked to the door. “If you don’t return, what should I do? Do I contact your mate, the leopard I smell on you? I need a name”

  “Steve Jekyll.” Fay looked back and saw the bear-were’s surprise. She left him staring after her.

  The road to Victor Gustev’s house was muddy with melting snow. The borrowed vehicle, although sturdy and built for extreme conditions, jolted and jounced from one large rut to the next.

  “On the bright side,” Fay said as she wrestled with the steering wheel. “It’s not tropical mud.” She wasn’t dripping sweat and driving without air-conditioning through an Indian jungle in monsoon season. Been there, did not buy the t-shirt. Some experiences she could happily live without repeating.

  In front of her, new tire tracks in the mud showed that the rogue mage hadn’t had the same hazardous driving training as Fay had endured. The tire tracks floundered this way and that. If they were any indication, the rogue mage’s progress was appallingly slow, which meant Fay might be able to catch up with her before they reached the tiger-were’s house. The pine forest that surrounded them would hide their encounter from any mundanes.

  Fay slowed her borrowed vehicle to concentrate on a quick search spell. She wanted to know how far ahead of her the woman was.

  Not so far. And barely a fraction beyond the woman, Fay’s magic bounced against a warding spell. A strong one.

  Relief unknotted a degree of the tension in Fay’s spine. She slowed the vehicle even further, guided it to the side of the road and stopped. From here, she’d walk. In a healthy forest like this, trees muffled some sounds, especially if a person wasn’t familiar with the environment. Over the murmuring sound of the pine trees, the rogue mage wouldn’t have heard the distant vehicle.

  Victor probably had and the tiger-were didn’t know Fay was a friend. She had to be vigilant or she’d be victim of the man she came to save.

  Fay wrapped a blanketing spell around her, to mask her magic in case the rogue mage had, herself, set a warning spell. Fay would definitely trigger such a spell since she represented a threat to the rogue mage’s intentions. However, Fay suspected that the other mage’s focus was solely for breaking the ward around the tiger-were’s home. As frayed as the woman’s magic appeared, she probably couldn’t sustain dividing her magic or attention, and splintering the warding around Victor’s home would require all her concentration.

  Unlike the wolf-weres of Carolina, Victor had employed a mage.

  No. Fay concentrated. The magic of the warding was different. Powerful and raw. Victor had used a shaman. It made sense. Siberia’s shamans had survived even the Stalinist era with their traditions intact. They were embedded in the local culture and Victor would trust them over a mage; especially if he shared the general were disdain for magic. Shamanic power was closer to were reality, more grounded in the natural world.

  Fay spun around, knife in hand and a thunder-blast spell ready.

  A tall man, dressed in hunter’s gear, looked at her calmly, his hands empty and unthreateningly by his sides.

  “Victor Gustev?” she asked low.

  A curt nod. “Faith Olwen?”

  She blinked, head tilting a fraction in surprise and question.

  “You smell of leopard and my nephew is a marshal. He emailed me a photo of you. He was at the Suzerain’s fort when Steven Jekyll brought you there.”

  “Ah.” Fay put away her knife.

  “Which doesn’t explain why you are here, in my territory.” A tiger’s purr, deadly and threatening.

  “Have you seen the woman ahead of me?”

  “Pah. She stinks of magic worse than you.”

  Fay smiled wryly. “She’s a rogue mage. And despite your nephew being a marshal, Steve orders that what I’m about to tell you stays with you.”

  “I don’t scent Steve near.”

  “He’s in Alexandria.” She had no need to claim Steve’s presence or protection. In fact, with Victor watching her with fierce eyes, she suspected that doing so would only undermine her status. “I’m after the rogue mage currently testing your warding.”

  “And the reason she is doing so must remain a secret?”

  “Yes.”

  “My nephew says you kill demons.”

  A non sequitur? Fay doubted it. Victor was both displaying that he knew of her and assessing her power. To trust her or not to trust her? “I don’t kill demons. I banish them. But if your nephew has looked into my background”—already. She’d underestimated the weres’ interest in her and how closely they monitored the happenings of the Suzerainty—“then you’ll know that I did far more than banish demons in my time as a Collegium guardian. The woman ahead of us isn’t the only rogue mage I’ve tackled. How many have you defeated?”

  The challenge provoked a dry, silent laugh from the man in front of her. “My father’s father ate one.”

  “Ew.”

  “But that was a harsh winter, and the mage was sent from the human government. I haven’t had to fight magic, although I pay a wisewoman to maintain the wards against magic that her grandmother set. Why, then, has a rogue mage come to me?”

  Fay’s toes were freezing inside her boots, her body cooling in the cold air and from lack of exercise. Nonetheless, she couldn’t move until she’d enlisted Victor’s aid. She couldn’t afford to have him running around at risk of the rogue mage, or interfering. “She is harvesting dream essences from weres. Two dozen so far, and you are next on her list. She is going after solitary weres. The siphoning of your dream essence enslaves you. Your will is reduced.”

  “She would steal my spirit?”

  Words were clumsy. That re-framing of the concept would do. “Yes.”

  He stared at her for a long time, his eyes seeming to gleam with orange and silver flames. His tiger nature was very near the surface. “How do I help you?”

  Fay refrained from showing her relief. He wasn’t going to cause trouble and he was giving her the authority to direct their attack on the rogue mage. “I need to question the woman, so I aim to disable her magic and capture her. She uses an unstable tangle of magic to drain weres’ dream…uh spirits. If you stay out of sight till I’m sure she can’t work magic against you, that would be good.”

  He nodded. Once.

  “And if you could lead me the shortest path to her…”

  A sly, satisfied expression crossed his face.

  It confirmed her suspicions. Like any wary hunter, he’d used his own prey’s tactics and made the approach to his house more difficult and less direct than it could be. The road curved, snaking among the obscuring pine trees.

  Without a word, Victor set off through the forest. His progress was silent.

  Fay did her best to move, at least, without clumsiness.

  Around them, the forest was alive with little sounds beneath the relentless soughing of the pines. Evidently, Victor didn’t hunt near his home. The small creatures that rustled the undergrowth were unafraid of his and Fay’s passing.

  For Fay, her sense of the protective warding grew stronger and stronger, so she was somewhat prepared when Victor stopp
ed and gestured. Fay stepped around a wide pine tree and had her first sight of the rogue mage.

  She was a few years older than Fay, maybe thirty. Her face was oval and healthily plump. Her cold weather gear disguised her figure. She was average height. Her eyes…

  Fay stepped back into the shadow of the pine tree.

  Magic was eating out the rogue mage from inside. Whether it was the mess of the spells she used or an effect of channeling dream essences, the woman was eroding. Hunger, fear and agonized determination burned in her brown eyes. Madness existed on the edges. The human mind needed limits, and to respect those limits. The rules taught to magic users weren’t just to protect mundanes from them, but to protect magic users from themselves. When the magic users wouldn’t listen, Collegium guardians like Fay were sometimes the kindest intervention. Misuse magic and it tortured you.

  The warding around Victor’s house sparked in Fay’s mage sight.

  The rogue mage recoiled. She swore in English, her voice too high and shrill, scared and frustrated. She slammed magic at the warding.

  It blazed. The shaman who’d designed it had been good. The more magic threatened it, the deeper the warding sank into its environment. Land, sky and air reinforced it.

  Fay considered the magic the woman threw at the warding. Fay had stopped using such ragged power in her early teens. Perhaps the rogue mage was regressing; that would make her even less predictable.

  A fast, hard hit was the only solution. Or would be if Fay could be certain that her usual spell for strangling magic would stop the rogue mage drawing on dream essences. But Fay couldn’t bet on it. She steadied herself, sinking into the strength of her own magic coiling in her center, then reaching out with her mage sight. She ignored the green glow of the warding and studied the tangled spells around the rogue mage.

  The woman was wrapped in a snarl of magic, but as Fay concentrated, the threads of magic appeared to center at the woman’s throat. She wore an amulet. And it was probably the grounding addition of an amulet that kept the dream essences spell from shattering.

  Fay flexed her gloved fingers once, and acted.

  A grabbing motion tore the rogue mage’s shaky personal warding and it disintegrated halfway between the woman and Fay.

  Even as the woman turned, searching for her attacker, Fay sunk all her power into a translocation spell.

  The rogue mage screamed as the chain holding the amulet around her throat snapped and the amulet flew through the air to Fay.

  Fay caught it, and only the discipline engrained in her from fighting demons enabled her to hold onto it despite the powerful wrongness of it. The amulet was leaking, spilling dream essences in an ugly betrayal of the enslaved weres’ right to wholeness and independence. Fay wanted desperately to destroy the amulet, but she had no idea what that would do. By what she’d perceived in Barbara’s rose garden, just over fifty percent of the stolen dream essences went to the jackal-were. She couldn’t recklessly break the amulet and potentially leave the enslaved weres forever separated from their own selves. No matter how much she wanted to.

  Grateful for her leather gloves, which at least prevented the loathsome amulet from touching her skin, Fay gently set it on the ground. She couldn’t risk holding it and perhaps having it interfere with her own magic.

  The rogue mage seemed to have forgotten she had magic. She ran at Fay. Rage twisted her face. Her hands rose to scratch and claw.

  Or perhaps the woman hadn’t forgotten her magic. The Ancient Egyptian spell had warned of poison on a toad’s claws.

  Rather than engage the woman, Fay slammed a stasis spell at her. It wouldn’t work on a were, not direct magic, but despite the weres’ dream essences that she’d channeled, it worked on the rogue mage.

  She froze. Fear flickered in her eyes. Her own magic writhed and faltered.

  Fay could almost feel sympathy. To be entrapped, separated from her magic, would be hell. But hadn’t the rogue mage done just that to the weres?

  Grimly, Fay pulled a gold thread from a pocket. This was something the Collegium research mages had prepared. It was rarely used, but it worked. “Magic manacles” the guardians called it, trying to hide their own fear. Someone should have asked Fay to return it and the handful of other tools she’d retained after separating from the Collegium. But no one had.

  Fleetingly, she thought of Lewis Bennett, who overlooked nothing. He’d wanted her to have these tools. An ally. She hadn’t been wrong to approach him about this rogue mage even if he hadn’t offered a solution.

  But even as the thought passed through her mind, training had her smoothly translocating the gold thread. It wrapped around the rogue mage’s wrist, sealed and closed.

  Fay released the stasis spell.

  The rogue mage screamed and clawed at her wrist.

  Fay turned her head. “You can come out, Victor.” He seemed to materialize out of the forest, a few meters from her. She picked up the amulet.

  He stared at it. “Is this so easily resolved?”

  “I wish.” Fay’s face was stiff with cold and tension. “I need to question her.” The other mage had fallen to her knees, still clawing at her wrist. The hood of her coat had fallen and showed a spill of black, wavy hair. “I can sit in the car to do so.” She had to get out of this cold.

  “You would prefer my house?”

  “Warmth and room to maneuver. Yes. But this.” Fay lifted the amulet fractionally. “I can’t guarantee what you’d be letting through your protections.”

  Unexpectedly, he grinned, revealing that the villager hadn’t been so wrong to suspect Victor of being chased by women. Older he might be, but tough and charming. Handsome with the danger of his tiger nature showing through. “I would be welcoming into my home the most powerful mage the Collegium ever lost and the mate of the next Suzerain. I think it is safe.”

  The rogue mage ceased tearing at her wrist and stared at Fay. “You.”

  Victor gripped the woman’s upper right arm and lifted her. “Into the house.” The warding’s glow subsided. “Faith Olwen, you are welcome in my home.”

  Fay crossed the warding. The amulet she held shuddered gently. She followed Victor and his prisoner around a stand of trees, and there was his house. The timber structure and how it blended into the forest were normal enough, but the roof bristled with an array of antennas. In winter, with the snow and storms, repairing them probably called for all of Victor’s tiger sure-footedness. So he might live remote, but he kept in contact with the world.

  When he felt like it, Fay amended, recalling the villager’s comments about Victor’s refusal to answer the radio.

  “I won’t go in.” As they approached the front step, the rogue mage attempted to dig in her heels. Given Victor’s greater strength and relentless forward progress, it had no effect. “Let me go.”

  “As you would have let me go?” Victor growled.

  “That was different. He needs you.”

  Fay controlled the impulse to question the identity of that “he”. Currently, the woman could lie. Give Fay a few minutes and that would change. She hated compulsion spells, but a truth spell would ensure that the answers she got wouldn’t have to be sieved for their veracity.

  “Do you have salt?” she asked Victor.

  “No!” The woman pulled back against Victor’s hold.

  He opened the front door and pushed her through. “Salt is in the smokehouse. I will bring you a sack.” He tramped out, leaving the women alone.

  The rogue mage hugged her arms around herself, looking forlorn and resentful. Beaten. She huddled just inside the door.

  The one room living space was dim, the windows small, the walls covered in prints and maps above a large worktable with computer equipment claiming half of it. A long sofa against one wall had a blanket folded over an arm and a television opposite. The room was dominated by a central woodstove, unlit.

  “I know who you are.” The woman looked at Fay through the tangle of her long black hair. “You a
re the false heir’s lover.”

  The nape of Fay’s neck tingled. No one had ever, in her hearing, as much as alluded to any challenge to Steve’s right to inherit the Suzerainty. But command of the weres might be a position coveted by some—if they didn’t realize that the authority rested on the approval of a capricious djinn.

  On the other hand, the woman could be playing games. Fay couldn’t believe a word she said until the truth spell lit.

  Keeping a distance between them, Fay waited for Victor’s return.

  A sink, cupboards and a table occupied a quarter of the space. His kitchen. It was spotless, evidence of an organized personality.

  He returned with a canvas bag of salt.

  “Watch her, please.” A nod of Fay’s head indicated the mage. Then she turned her attention to the amulet she held. Quite apart from the dream essences leaking from it, its powering spell had warped the smooth pattern of magic. It was unstable and skin-crawlingly wrong, and it evidently didn’t need Narelle’s magic to sustain itself since she wore the magic-sucking manacles. They was self-maintaining. Fay would have felt happier slipping a live grenade into her pocket than this.

  If she wrapped it in a containment spell, she risked severing the enslaved weres’ links to their dream essences. If she didn’t contain it somehow, it could simply destabilize, taking her and anyone near her with it in a magical explosion.

  “It’s a mess,” she said aloud, but to herself.

  “It works.” The rogue mage was defensive. “No one else managed to magick weres.”

  “I think there could be a good reason for that,” Fay said. She wove a loose mesh of magic around the amulet and floated it up to the ceiling. It was the best she could do for now, limiting the distraction of the amulet, while she questioned its maker. “But first, let’s find out what you’ve done.”