Lucky Break (Chicagoland Vampires 10.5)

He sounded earnest. Maybe he thought the pretense was necessary if he wanted to take Cadogan House. Or maybe that was just the magic, slowly transforming whatever might have been left of the man into the one he sought to emulate.

Whether lie or delusion, I was done being a pawn. “You are not Balthasar.”

He yanked my hair again, reared back to slap me with his free hand. I blocked the shot with my forearm, and he dropped my hair in surprise. We broke apart, but I’d snagged the raven bracelet on his jacket. It broke open and fell to the ground.

No longer dammed, his magic spilled across me like dark wine, and suddenly the air was too thick to breathe. I hit the ground on my knees, sucking in air as his magic, angry and biting, spun around me like a typhoon. He wanted me under his control, imprisoned by his magic, a pawn he could use.

My instinct was to fight, to strike out and strike back, to push his magic back with magic of my own, however poor an opponent it would have been. And then I remembered what Lindsey had reminded me.

“You’re a rock in the current,” I heard her say, either from memory or through the earpiece I still wore. “Let his magic flow around you. It doesn’t penetrate, doesn’t affect you, just moves like the breeze.”

There on the ground, mud seeping through the knees of my dress, I closed my eyes and let my breath come softly, in and out.

His magic advanced again, determined to cow me, control me. I acknowledged his magic, took its measure. It was hot, biting, and remarkably insistent. Rejection made him push harder, but I made no answer. I was sweating with the effort of not responding, ignoring every instinct to fight against the glamour that sluiced over me like suffocating water, that sought to convince and compel.

Like a breeze, I said to myself. Like a breeze. Maybe I was no longer immune to glamour, but I was still stubborn. Those words became my mantra, and I repeated them over and over as the barrage continued.

As suddenly as it had begun, the magic dissipated. In apparent shock that he hadn’t managed to move me, Julien had dropped the glamour, stepped back.

I opened my eyes again, breathed deeply, and found his magic had fouled the air with bitterness.

“Bitch,” he said, chest heaving from the effort. “You bitch. I own you, just like I own him.”

“I’m not a bitch for saying no, Julien. You’re just an asshole.”

Fury rolled across his face. “I am Balthasar.”

“You are Julien Burrows.”

We both glanced back, found Ethan behind us. His expression was utterly blank, but his body was primed and ready for battle.

“You bastard,” Julien said.

“I’m not,” Ethan said. “And as Merit explained, we already know who you are. We know the Circle is paying for you to be here. We know about the Memento Mori, your time with them. And we know about Reed.”

To his credit, Julien took a step back, breathed deeply, and reassessed. He’d been discovered, his lies realized, and he looked to be considering his next steps.

“He talked about you often,” Julien said. “How he loved you. How you were his proudest creation. How you’d betrayed him. He knew that—that you’d betrayed him. That you’d given him up to the relatives of the woman he’d fucked.” His smile was reptilian. “He never said her name. Just called her ‘the girl.’ She was human,” he said, as if the implication was obvious—that, her being human, her name wasn’t worth remembering.

“But he mentioned you frequently,” Julien continued. “Your betrayal. His capture and torture. The fact that Cadogan House should have been his. That it certainly shouldn’t have been held by a deceiver. So I’ll do what you failed to do—protect your Master—and I’ll take it back for him.”

“You won’t,” Ethan said, then casually removed his jacket, tossed it aside, began to roll up his sleeves. “But would you like to try it?”

“I have power you can’t imagine.”

“I look forward to seeing it.”

Julien belted out his glamour again, its claws snatching like rabid animals. Catcher and Canon were fond of repeating that vampires didn’t really make magic, we only spilled it. It was just a byproduct of who and what we were. Glamour, by that theory, was a fluke.

But this was no fluke. It was powerful and unrelenting, and it demanded an answer.

Julien might have managed to glamour Ethan the first time around, but this time Ethan had known it was coming, and he was prepared. And he wasn’t exactly a psychic slouch. His expression was mild, but he let his own glamour spread, clean and bright and sharp as newly honed steel.

Their magicks mixed, mingled, flowed through each other like two storms meeting, growing as their energies collided, burst, spilled tingling ions into the air. Julien growled in frustration, screamed as his magic erupted forward again. Sweat beaded across Ethan’s face, but he pushed back with his own glamour, a swell that flooded forward over Julien’s and slowed its surge.

They pushed their magicks back and forth until their clothes were damp with effort, until their faces streamed with sweat, until the air vibrated with power, drawing a crowd that gathered on the edges of the carefully sculpted grounds to watch the battle.

No, vampire magic was no fluke, and these men were masters of the craft.