Page 86 of Tricks for Free

If it hadn’t been for the fence between us, I would have kissed him. “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Or not.”

The voice belonged to Mary. I turned. There she was, glowing faintly against the dark. She looked sad. That wasn’t unusual. Being dead seems to come with a lot of sorrow. She also looked scared. That was a little stranger.

“Hi, Annie,” she said. She glanced past me. “Hi, Sam.”

“Hi, Miss Mary,” said Sam. “You’re looking, you know. Spectral and sort of creepy tonight.”

“Flatterer.” Mary turned her eyes back to me. “You shouldn’t go back in there.”

“I have to. My friends—”

“Aren’t in there anymore.” She shook her head. “You broke a sorcerer’s wand. Do you know what that does to the wards and enchantments on a place like this? Their ambulomancer shifted them away as soon as they realized what you’d done. The blast killed their witch and her trainee. They set their chained guards on the hunt for you, but those can’t leave the building. Your former employers are out for blood now.”

A strange calm settled over me, spreading out from the pit of my stomach until everything else was washed away. “And they have our friends.”

Mary nodded. “Yes.”

“Fern, Cylia, and Megan. The cabal has them.”

“Yes,” said Mary again. “They’re lost, Annie, you must see that. Your magic has been almost entirely siphoned away, Sam is hurt—”

“Wait.” I turned. “You’re hurt?”

Sam shrugged, looking sheepish. He took his hand away from his side, revealing a torn shirt and skin that was ripped and red with blood. “It’s just a little road rash,” he said. “No big.”

“Very big,” I said firmly. “Any injury is very big as far as I’m concerned. Do you need to go back to the apartment? I won’t be angry if you sit this out.”

“Are you going to sit this out?”

I shook my head. “I can’t.”

“Then neither can I.” Sam shook his head. “Where you go, I go. That’s the rule. The only reason I let you walk away before was because I’d just been shot for the first time. I think I was allowed a little lapse in judgment.”

I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to hug him. The damn fence was still in the way. “I love you,” I informed him, and turned back to Mary. “Sorry, Aunt Mary. No can do on the leaving our friends to the tender mercies of people who think luck theft and magic siphoning is a fun thing to do. If you want to tell me where they are, we can get this over with quick. If not, I’ll figure it out.”

“You know what it would cost for me to give you specific information,” said Mary. There was a challenge in her voice. “You think this is worth that?”

“It would be if I needed it,” I said. “Luckily, I don’t need it, because I know where they are.”

“You do?” asked Mary, with the ghost of a smile.

“You do?” asked Sam, sounding bemused.

I shifted so I could beam at both of them at the same time, each out of one corner of my mouth. “We’ve damaged their power. They’re going to go where the heart of their empire lies. They’re going to go to Lowryland.”

The nice thing about old cars is how easy they are to hotwire. Cylia was probably going to be pissed that I’d cracked her steering column. I’d make it up to her. Not being dead would be an awesome start.

Sam sat in the passenger seat, still in his human form, clutching the grip above the door with white-knuckled fervor. The gauze I’d found in the glove compartment stood out starkly white where I’d covered his scrapes and bruises. Mary was in the back, occasionally flickering out of existence when I took a curve too fast, only to reappear a second later, keeping easy pace with the car. From the way Sam rolled his eyes at her, I guessed her impermanence wasn’t helping.

Oh, well. There’d be time to worry about my boyfriend’s nerves later, when we weren’t racing an unspoken deadline for the lives of our loved ones. I kept my foot down and tried not to think about how much I hate driving, or how I didn’t have a license, or how easy it would be to crash into something big and solid and die horribly. (Okay, I was failing at not thinking about any of those things, but I could pretend. Boy, could I pretend.) In what felt like no time at all, we were rocketing into the virtually deserted employee parking lot, rolling past the cars of security staff and janitorial workers to park as close to the doors as I could get us.

Mary grimaced as soon as the engine died. “Bad news, kiddo,” she said, through gritted teeth. “I can’t get out of the car.”

“What?” I twisted in the driver’s seat to frown at her. “Why not?”

“Your routewitch has apparently decided you don’t get any more help tonight. She doesn’t want me even this close to her territory, but this car has a lot of miles on it, and it’s shielding me from her repulsion charms. At least a little. If I tried to get out, I’d find myself slammed back into the twilight before I could say ‘boo.’”