Page 12 of Magic for Nothing

Dominic’s transformation was more subtle but almost as striking once I started looking for it. Instead of his cheesy leather duster, he was wearing a denim jacket over a button-up white shirt and had his hair slicked back with so much pomade that I could smell it three feet away. He looked like he was preparing to be an extra on Law & Order, and that, too, was a uniform of a sort. Neither of them was going to stand out in a crowd.

I wasn’t either. My hair was tied in a thick, frizzy braid, and I was wearing the Toronto version of Verity’s outfit: fuzzy boots, blue jeans, and a “Canada Proud” sweatshirt I’d purchased at the Vancouver airport with a credit card issued under the name “Marigold Price.” I’d cut the card up and dumped the pieces in five different trashcans before catching a bus back to Seattle and taking a plane from there to Toronto. Elsie would be calling to report the card stolen in three days, and the beat would go on. The beat always went on.

There was a cab waiting on the corner. More uncharacteristic behavior for Verity: she hates being cooped up, and she hates being cooped up with strangers even more. I was about to ask if she was feeling okay when the cab window rolled down to reveal a gorgeous, sour-faced blonde woman.

“Are you getting in?” she demanded. “I can’t take real fares when I’m stuck chauffeuring you around.”

“We paid your Nest-mother for your time,” said Verity wearily. Apparently, this was a conversation that had been going on for a while.

“She’ll give me less than half. I get to keep more than half of my usual fares. Get in.”

“I can pay,” I said, before Verity could object. “I have a travel budget.”

Verity gave me a sharp look. “She’s already been paid,” she said. “Get in the cab.”

I rolled my eyes but didn’t argue. The last thing I wanted to do was have a sister-fight on the sidewalk, especially when I only had eight hours in New York to shed this identity before I flew to London. I was going to arrive jet lagged and exhausted in a foreign country, which was just going to make this mission even more fun than it had looked on paper.

My suitcase went in the trunk; my backpack went on my lap. Dominic wound up in the front seat with our dragon driver, leaving me and Verity in the back. She waited until we’d pulled away from the curb to pull a glass-and-tourmaline charm from her pocket. She passed it up to the driver.

“Get us out of here,” she said.

The driver nodded and slipped the charm onto the rearview mirror. Then she hit the gas, accelerating faster than was strictly a good idea, given the traffic. The other drivers let us know they didn’t appreciate this approach by honking their horns and flashing their lights and, in several cases, sticking their hands out their windows and flipping us off with enough vigor to give themselves carpal tunnel. Our driver flipped them off right back and kept on driving.

“So, how was your flight?” asked Verity blithely, apparently unbothered by the fact that we were hurtling through traffic at unsafe speeds.

“The flight was fine. Long and cramped, but fine. The train was better. The subway was horrifying.” I tried to keep my eyes on the window without being too blatant about it. Streets and landmarks I’d only ever seen on television flashed by outside, temptingly close, impossibly far away. Even if I’d been here to play tourist, there wouldn’t have been time, and it wouldn’t have been safe.

Speaking of safety . . . I turned to Verity, frowning. “I thought somebody from the Freakshow was going to pick me up.”

“They’re a little preoccupied right now,” she said. “Arson tends to distract people.”

“As we said before, the Covenant currently has no presence in Manhattan,” said Dominic, in what was probably meant to be a soothing tone, but mostly made him sound like a condescending asshole. I considered telling him that. I decided it wouldn’t do much to help maintain the already tenuous current peace.

See? I can have self-control. I can.

“As long as the Covenant doesn’t have a field team on the ground, we can move around freely,” said Verity. “We’ve been sweeping the airports and major transit hubs for cameras and listening devices daily. Even if they had the sort of tech they could hide from us, they wouldn’t be able to hide it from the bogeymen or the mice. New York is as safe as it gets, for the moment. Besides, this way you can dump your old ID and change into your new one someplace private, where no one’s going to walk in on you.”

“It will be nice to henna my hair in a bathroom I don’t have to share,” I admitted.

“And I wanted to apologize.”

Okay. On a scale of one to “that’s never going to happen,” I’d been putting the chances of those words somewhere around “none.” I stared at her.

Verity grimaced and shrugged at the same time. “This is my fault. Well, technically, it’s the snake cult’s fault, but if I hadn’t been on that show, I wouldn’t have blown my cover, and we wouldn’t be in this mess. I’m sorry. I’d take your place if I could.”

“Well, you can’t,” I said. “You look too much like Grandma.”

“I know. That doesn’t mean you should have to be the one who pays for what I did. Look, Annie, I know we’re not the best of friends, but we’re still sisters, and I’m really, really sorry that this is landing on your shoulders. It shouldn’t be.”

Part of me—the part that’s been fighting with her since I was a little girl—wanted to snap and say that she was just jealous that I was going to have a big adventure and she wasn’t, for a change. The rest of me knew better. Verity looked like she meant every word she was saying, like my believing and forgiving her was the most important thing in the world.

And I felt like a jerk, but I couldn’t do it. There’s too much bad blood between us to fix with a “sorry” and a smile. “Yeah, well, it is,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I got the same training you did. If you can go undercover on that silly dance show, I can handle going undercover with the scary para-military organization of murderers.”

“They’re not para-military,” said Dominic. “They are military. Do not make the mistake of thinking of them as anything short of an army. They’ll destroy you if they catch you. More importantly, they’ll unmake you, and take whatever they learn from you to use as a weapon against your family.”

“They can try,” I said flatly.

“And what will you do when they ask you to kill for them? Because they will. They train soldiers. They train assassins. Neither is useful if it can’t finish the job.”