Claimed by Shadow Page 0,74
separated us. No matter how grim a battle seems, don't panic.”
"Of course not. I'll stand my ground while they mow me down." I was struggling into the hot leather and feeling cranky.
Pritkin checked his shotgun and, for the first time since our incident, he met my eyes. "If you're with me, you won't die," he said. He sounded so certain that, for half a second, I believed him.
I swallowed and broke eye contact. "Why can't you shrink my stuff, too?”
"Because I am not entirely certain that the reverse spell will work in Faerie, so I am carrying both shrunken backup weapons and regular-sized primaries. Your ammunition is for the primaries.”
I was busy trying to sort through my emotions, which ranged from pissed off to terrified, so it wasn't until we stepped outside that I remembered our wild ride. Freakish though it had been, it actually ranked pretty far down the list of weird things that had happened to me lately. "How did we get here?" I asked Mac.
"I took a short cut," he said, pulling a wide-brimmed hat over his bald head. He turned around and tapped the blank square that decorated his knee. I stared at the very odd sight of a tattoo parlor sitting all alone in the middle of the desert, just before I was treated to the even odder one of it folding in on itself and winking out of sight entirely. Mac grunted and examined his leg, where a miniature version of the front of the shop, complete with bright neon sign reading mag ink, had appeared. It fit perfectly into the bare spot I'd seen earlier.
The little sign on the tattoo flashed on and off just like the real thing. After a second, I realized that it was the real thing. "We've spent the whole afternoon inside one of your wards?" I asked incredulously.
"Right in one," Mac said. "My shop goes wherever I do.”
"What do you do? Pick out an empty lot and then, bam! New retail location?”
He grinned. "Something like that.”
"What about zoning? What about pedestrians walking by and all of a sudden, there's a building? What about the cops?”
"What about them? Norms can't see it, Cassie, any more than they can one of the tattoos." He took my arm compan-ionably. "You've got to realize that the so-called magic you've seen all your life is only the tip of the iceberg. Those sad bastards the vamps use for warding and such are the bottom of the barrel. If they had any real talent, whatever issues got them disavowed would have been overlooked or they'd have been chastised and put back to work. Or, if it was something truly heinous, they'd have run off and joined the Dark-only even they won't take screwups. The type that ends up working for vamps are those with only enough magic to qualify as menaces-to themselves and everyone else. They couldn't do a complex spell if their lives depended on it. You stick with us, and you'll see some real magic.”
Pritkin stopped and took something out of his pocket. "Good idea," he commented, and a second before he did it, I knew what was going to happen. It wasn't a Seeing, just my kind of luck. The idiot was going to cast the mystery rune.
I hit the dirt and tried to drag Mac down with me, but my feet got tangled in the hem of the heavy coat and I had to let go of him to break my fall. I scraped my palms on rock-hard dirt, and the pain and subsequent struggle to free myself from the leather distracted me for a few seconds. There was a flash of light and a popping noise, like a very large champagne cork. When I looked up again, Pritkin and Mac were gone.
Although I could see a good distance in every direction, there wasn't so much as a shred of cloth or a footprint to show that they'd been there. I felt around with my senses, but there were no unusual vibrations. That was almost as strange as the disappearance-a major magical object had just been set off, yet there wasn't so much as a metaphysical ripple for miles. The only thing I could pick up was the slight buzz of MAGIC's wards off to the northwest.
I didn't understand it. If the rune had killed Pritkin and Mac-even if it had vaporized their bodies-I should be able to see their spirits. And, so far, I couldn't. After walking a large