Shadow Magic (Darkling Mage 1)

Prudence grabbed him by the wrist. “Jesus, Bastion, you started it. Just leave the kid alone. Honestly.” She shoved him back, and sure, maybe Bastion had several inches on her, and a couple dozen pounds of muscle to boot, but Prudence had this way of making people stop and pay attention to what she was saying. It might have to do with how she could crush skulls into powder with her bare hands.

“You really should pick up,” she said, nodding at my necklace.

“Yeah. Sorry. Gotta take this.”

I went into a corner, returning Bastion’s last dirty glance with one of my own, then touched a finger to my pendant. That was how Thea taught me to establish the connection. The gem was enchanted to enable an intently private form of communication between us. Telepathy, essentially.

Maybe Thea was especially mistrustful of cellphone technology, or maybe she just didn’t want anyone snooping. I just found it amusing how it felt almost exactly like picking up a phone anyway. The opal was how I reported the Pruitt situation to the Lorica – well, to Thea – in the first place.

I cleared my throat, then felt silly for doing so since we only ever spoke with our thoughts. “Thea,” I said, or thought. Bear with me. “What’s up?”

It wasn’t just words that got channeled when these conversations happened, and sometimes I could get glimmers of emotion, or flashes of imagery too. Something reddish pulsed in my mind’s eye, like a kind of concern, or a quiet panic. Maybe it was just our dynamic, but I knew what Thea was going to say before she even transmitted it.

“We need to talk.”

Chapter 3

Bastion zipped up his leather jacket, then paused as he held his motorcycle helmet just above his head with all the pomp and ceremony of a king at his own coronation.

“You can make your own way back, can’t you?” he said, barely containing his snigger. “I only have the one helmet. It’d be super illegal, not to mention irresponsible, to have you ride with me.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, doing my best to overlook his false concern. I didn’t want to be caught dead riding pillion on Bastion’s bike, because first of all, being in the same room with him was already too close for comfort, and second, that thing was a certified death trap. I was willing to take a couple of risks at work, but I had no intention of meeting my second death in a flaming motorcycle accident.

Bastion shrugged, slipped on his helmet, then blew me a mocking kiss. Even through the tint of glass I could sense his eyes laughing at me. Then he revved the engine a couple of times – loud and hard, like the jerk he was – and took off on his motorcycle, looking for all the world like a massive asshole.

The cleanup had taken so much time and detail that the sun was already up. There were still a couple of people in the Pruitt house working on concealing the last of the supernatural evidence, but the rest of us were clear to head out. I was so looking forward to reporting to Thea, then possibly begging off for the rest of the morning to get some shuteye. I asked Prudence if she wanted to head back to the Lorica together.

“Sorry, champ. I’m actually off to another assignment.” She tapped at her cellphone, lips pursed as she called for a car. “And HQ isn’t on the way. You going to be fine?”

“Yeah. Sure. Don’t worry about it.”

“You should call a car, too. Put it on the Lorica’s dime.”

I shrugged. “I might just walk it. I could use the exercise.” I smiled and waved, stuffing my hands into my jacket pockets as I turned to go. “See you around.”

Prudence waved back, then turned her attention back to her phone. I could use the exercise? What the hell was I saying? I was exhausted. I’d been up the whole night, and I was still tired from breaking into the Pruitts’, not to mention the fact

that I hadn’t eaten in hours.

I guess I didn’t want to hang around and wait for her car to show up, or for mine to come when I got around to requesting one. I mean I was generally great with people, but something about Prudence intimidated me a little. She was only a bit older than me, probably in her late twenties, but she had her shit together, whereas I had only just started my shit-togethering journey.

I had the Lorica to thank for that. Hell, I had the Lorica to thank for a lot of things, but especially how I had a better understanding of what it was that made me so different from any other idiot kid on the street. It was Thea who explained that we discovered the arcane within us at different paces, and through different means. Mine just happened to be triggered by extreme stress.

Who could say if there were plenty of triggers that could be considered more dire than a knife through the heart, but I suppose that counted as extreme enough. It was the Lorica that took me in after that whole bloody incident, and it was the closest thing to stable employment as I’d ever gotten. The biggest perk, of course, was getting to learn more about what I could do – what I am – and how I could use that to make the world a little less crappier in general.

My stomach grumbled again. That was right. I still had the truffle I’d appropriated from the Pruitts’ kitchen. I pried it out of my pockets, fumbling to unwrap it, maybe a little too excited to pop it in my mouth. Give me a break, okay, that sandwich I had for dinner clearly didn’t last. I let the truffle sit in my cheek, the cocoa powder spreading across my tongue, dark chocolate slowly melting.

I wondered how many of these Hank Pruitt liked to eat in a day. I wondered if he had any inkling last night that he didn’t have much time left to enjoy more truffles, or much of anything else. I shook my head and sighed. It was like Thea and the Scions always tried to impress upon us at the Lorica. We did our jobs to make sure people like the Pruitts didn’t end up the way they did.

Protection was our purpose, and that was what the word Lorica actually meant: armor. Thea had told me that the day she recruited me, and I looked it up after, just to be sure. It was body armor, specifically, the kind that the ancient Romans wore as breastplates. So the Lorica was the torso, and the rest of us functioned in concert as its parts, the Hands, the Wings, the Eyes, and so on, working together to guard both the regular world and the arcane underground from the very worst that magic could do. But I couldn’t help thinking that we had stumbled. We had three corpses on our hands, after all.

Still, we couldn’t very well save everyone, and we were doing everything we could to mop up in the aftermath. I sighed, my breath tumbling out in a puff of fog. Valero could get pretty chilly in the morning, and I was lucky at least that it wasn’t so windy out in the streets that particular day. I eyed the shadows cast by the buildings in the neighborhood, so sorely tempted to step into them and make my commute that much shorter, but that would have been about as subtle as taking off my pants and screaming “Look I’m a wizard” while streaking down the boulevard. Sure, I was entering a commercial district, and not a lot of people were up and about just yet, but it was the type of thing that Thea would have been quick to label as showboating. The Lorica didn’t like that.

They didn’t like it when their people got too flashy, or took dumb risks, especially when the risk wasn’t just exposure. I was told that I could make greater leaps, bigger steps once I had a better handle on shadowstepping, but I was supposed to stick to line of sight for now. I’d heard way too many horror stories about Lorica Wings and teleporters who bit off more than they could chew and ended up shifting themselves into unfamiliar spaces – like the middle of the ocean, for example.

I very briefly reconsidered calling a car, but after finding myself a little bit out of breath from having walked just two miserable blocks, decided that I probably did need the exercise after all. Not so far now anyway, I told myself. I could just make out HQ from where I was walking, this squat, ugly building just on the edge of Central Square. It made me chuckle every time I saw HQ from this vantage, how it looked like a lumpy sack of potatoes next to the glamor of so many glitzy office buildings, hotels, and restaurants.

I pushed the white plastic button on the facade of the little structure the Lorica called home. It had a concrete exterior, the kind that looked like it was studded with pebbles so that it was all knobbly, making it seem almost vintage, nostalgic. It made the building just shy of hip enough to fit in with the heart of Valero, despite being so bland and uninteresting. The best word to use to describe HQ was nondescript, just the way the Lorica liked it. In modern parlance, it was very “Meh.”