block, looking my way.
“Hey,” I said when I got close enough. “Show me where you need me.”
Stotts was a good-looking man. Latino heritage gave him soft eyes, heavy lashes and eyebrows, and an easy smile that had caught my friend Nola’s heart and not let go.
So far, their long-distance relationship was working. But she lived three hundred miles away on a farm, and he was a detective. Stotts had gone out and visited her for a week, but other than that, it was all about the phone.
Well, that and the computer. Nola had finally given in and had a computer with Internet access installed in her old farmhouse. Love. It finds a way to make a person want to change.
Tonight Stotts was wearing what I usually saw him in—a trench and scarf, slacks, nice shoes. No hat.
Even before he said anything, I knew something bad had happened here. Something wrong. Really wrong. I’d felt this before. But I couldn’t remember where.
“Over here.” He started down one of the paths beneath the old elm and gingko trees. “That Davy Silvers with you?”
“Yes. He followed me to a business meeting. When I got your call, I made him let me use his car.”
“Hmm. Any other Hounds out here?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t even know Davy was following me. And Bea didn’t say she was going to be here tonight. Are you sure she was Hounding?”
“Someone was throwing magic around.”
He didn’t have to point to where Bea had been hurt. I could feel it, taste it on the air.
Stotts didn’t give me any more information. And he wouldn’t. Police never wanted to influence a Hound’s initial response and reaction to a magical-crime site. So I didn’t waste my time asking him any more questions.
I cleared my mind, mentally singing my little “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack” song to settle my racing thoughts. Magic pressed in on my head, a heaviness, like the air was thickening for the storm. It wasn’t my dad, and didn’t seem to be coming from the void stone.
Weird.
I set a Disbursement, my latest favorite—muscle aches—and then traced the glyphs for Sight, Smell, Taste.
Magic within me stuttered, like a smooth stone rubbing across my skin. It didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t comfortable either. I inhaled, exhaled, and urged magic up through my bones, my muscles, my blood. Magic stretched out slowly, thick, heavy. I traced the glyphs again, more to keep my concentration while I waited for magic to respond than out of need to redraw the spell. The heaviness in my head, in the magic, suddenly lifted and magic flooded through me. Too fast. Too much. Too hot.
The glyphs caught fire, wild jeweled colors of raw, deadly magic, licking down my arms, into my fingertips searing the glyphs into the night air.
Magic is fast. Too fast to see. But I wasn’t the only one who saw it.
Stotts lifted his hand and traced a dampening spell—I think Smother or maybe Cancel.
“Wait,” I said. But it was too late. He threw his spell at my spell.
There is a reason why people don’t walk around throwing spells at each other, or getting into wizards’ duels like you see in the movies. Every user casts magic differently from other users. Like handwriting, magic follows the form each user casts for it. When two forms clash, you never know if they will blend, extinguish, or go up like a barrel of gunpowder in a bonfire.
Right now, I was betting on the gunpowder thing. I didn’t have control of the magic pouring out of me. I was a leaky powder keg, and Stotts’s spell was a tossed match.
I clapped my hands, breaking the flow of magic. Yes, it stung. No, it didn’t knock me unconscious. Thank you, training sessions.
Stotts’s spell slammed into mine.
There was a terrific flash—a blast of green lightning—but no sound. Magic clashed and sucked all sound out of the air, leaving behind painful silence.
I inhaled, exhaled.
And then the night was just the night again. No thickness in the air from the encroaching storm, no strangely heavy magic. The night filled with sounds of traffic and, somewhere farther off, a train. I could smell the damp pavement and trees again.
“Allie?” Stotts said. “You’re burned.”
Wrong. I was angry.
“What the hell?” I wiped at the sweat running down the edge of my temple. I was suddenly very, very hot, and very, very cold. “Never get in the way when I cast magic. If you want me to Hound for you, you stay the hell