is she?”
Zayvion zipped his coat and made quick work of pulling things out of the trunk and attaching them to his body.
“Yes,” he said, “she is. She needs to touch you, Chase. This is her first time.”
Chase camped back on one hip. “You Read?”
“Sure.” I walked over to her. “Doesn’t everybody?” I placed my right hand below her neck, palm resting flat against her sternum. She was annoyed, a little jealous. That, I could have told just by looking at her. But the last emotion I picked up from her was fear.
Okay, maybe I should turn in my degree in body language. She didn’t look afraid at all on the outside.
“Done?” she asked.
“Uh, yes.” I pulled my hand away, stuck it back in my pocket where I could rub my thumb over my fingertips to try to wipe away the emotions I had sensed. But rubbing at my fingers wasn’t doing me any good. With each of their heartbeats tapping gently at my wrist, I found that if I thought about one of them, I could not only tell that they were breathing and conscious, I could also sense a hint of their mood.
Move over, lie detector tests. These suckers were good.
Shamus had taken his turn stuffing things in his coat pockets. I glanced over to see if the machetes were still in the trunk. They were not. Which meant Shamus and Zayvion had three-foot blades strapped onto their bodies somewhere.
In broad daylight. In the middle of the city.
“Should I take anything?” I asked, as Shamus slammed the trunk shut.
“A healthy sense of self-preservation would be good,” he said.
Zayvion reached over and wrapped his hand around my wrist, his fingertips pressing the medallion closer to my pulse. And I could tell that at this moment, he was intent and focused on nothing except me.
“Stay out of the way, out of reach. Use your defense spells if you must. Run, if you must. Just stay safe.” He pressed the hilt of a sheathed knife into my hand.
I knew that knife. It was the one he had given me when Pike was still alive. It was the only weapon I had ever killed someone with. It knew my blood, Zayvion’s blood. And it knew the blood of my enemy.
“Chase and I will take point,” he said, drawing his fingers away but leaving his heat behind. “You and Shamus will handle cleanup.”
Shamus was in the middle of lighting another cigarette. He gave me a quick wink and exhaled smoke. “Nothing but glamour, this job.”
“This is done.” Zayvion made it sound like a ritual, an ending, a prayer.
He motioned for us to walk away from the cars. There was enough room on the road that we could all walk shoulder to shoulder. Next to me was Zayvion, then Chase, then Shamus. As soon as we were a yard away from both cars, all three of them flicked their fingers, like flicking away a bug or, in Shamus’s case, tapping ashes off a cigarette.
With that one small motion, they each set a spell—I couldn’t tell which one—but I could tell exactly what it did. Instead of looking like three people armed for war, marching around in broad daylight, they looked . . . normal. Average. Zay was his ratty-jacket-wearing, street-drifter self. Shamus passed for goth poser, and Chase looked like the kind of woman who chopped her own firewood, grew her own food, and didn’t take any flack.
None of them looked like they were carrying weapons, and I couldn’t even smell magic on them. I took a deep breath and all I smelled was Zay’s pine, Shamus’s cigarette smoke and cloves, Chase’s vanilla perfume, and the wet, green, rain-drenched soil and trees around us.
“Might want to put that away,” Shamus noted.
“What? Oh.” I belatedly tucked the knife I’d been holding like my life depended on it—ha, not funny—inside my coat, where it fit pretty well behind my belt and lay against my hip.
Zay turned to face the cars for a second. He wove a spell and knelt. His middle finger and thumb were pressed together. He opened his fingertips, and pressed his fingers into the wet gravel. I smelled the wash of a spell, slightly buttery and sweet. Then the cars were covered with leaves, and looked like they’d been there awhile, like maybe they were one of the neighbor’s cars or belonged to someone staying overnight.
The amazing thing about that simple spell was that it not only gave a visual camouflage, but it also