Lisa Shearin - Con & Conjure

The elven embassy looked like it was expecting a full-scale attack at any moment. The guards appeared ready to shoot anything that moved wrong. And to put the paranoia icing on the cake, the embassy actually had battlements complete with armed and patrolling guards. Some of those guards had partners—nearly waist high, dark, sleek, and red eyed. Werehounds.

Rache had tried to kill Prince Chigaru—a goblin. There were plenty of goblins who wanted him dead, but so did a lot of elves.

Left or right. Elf or goblin.

Take your pick.

I didn’t want either one.

“This is a quandary,” Vegard noted.

My Guardian bodyguard had the gift for ultimate understatement.

I looked back toward the elven embassy. A man I knew only too well stood on its marble stairs, watching me, wearing the same smarmy and smug expression he usually did.

You could see Taltek Balmorlan in a room and look right past him—which was exactly what the elven inquisitor wanted. The word that described him best was average. His hair and eyes were an unremarkable shade of dull brown. He was of average height with average looks. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about his appearance.

It was perfect camouflage for the predator he was.

Balmorlan wanted war with the goblins. Balmorlan would want Prince Chigaru dead.

Taltek Balmorlan wanted me.

He was an inquisitor for elven intelligence. That was his job title. What he actually did was deal in weapons, and in a world of magic, mages were weapons—so Balmorlan dealt in mages. I called it kidnapping; Balmorlan called it doing business. Guess who was at the top of his shopping list?

I stepped out into the street.

“Ma’am,” Vegard cautioned.

Mychael didn’t say a word either out loud or inside my head. He knew what Balmorlan had planned for me.

Unable to get his hands on the Saghred, the elven inquisitor had found a way to bond other mages to me, which would allow them to tap and use the Saghred—by using me. He’d had a warded cell built in the elven embassy with Level Twelve wards, detainment spells layered for strength, and magic-depleting manacles bolted to the walls.

All he was missing was me in those manacles.

I was Balmorlan’s target.

And he was mine.

Rache’s trail ended here. With all the wards and spells protecting both embassy compounds, he could be in either one, though I was leaning toward the elves as Rache’s latest clients. Taltek Balmorlan and his elven government allies had access to more money than was in the elven royal treasury.

He could afford Rache. Easily.

Besides, Imala Kalis was firmly in control of the goblin embassy. She was working every waking hour to plan the coup that would kick Sathrik off the throne and put Chigaru on it, not put the prince in the Mal’Salin family crypt.

I stood there, letting Taltek Balmorlan get an eyeful. It was all he was going to get, and I gave him a smug smile of my own to let him know it.

“Is he in there?” Mychael asked out loud and from right behind me, then he stepped up to stand by my side. I felt a surge of satisfied delight. Mychael and I were in the middle of Embassy Row. Vegard wasn’t with him, so he’d obviously asked him and his men to wait on the other side of the street.

Mychael beside me was an obvious challenge to Taltek Balmorlan—or Rache. Mess with my woman, and you mess with me, his posture said.

“I want you now,” I murmured.

“Right here in the street?” I heard the smile in his voice.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“You’re a bad girl, Raine Benares.”

“You bet I am.”

“Can you sense him?”

“Not with all the distortion.”

“Those aren’t the same wards the elven embassy typically uses,” Mychael told me.

“Heavy-duty mage work?”

He nodded. “They’re blocking anything from getting out.”

I didn’t need three guesses as to what—or who—that something was.

“Can you get in?” I asked.

“Not without a warrant, and by the time I got one, Rache Kai would be long gone.”

That was when the shot came. It didn’t come from the elven embassy or the goblin embassy. It came from the building behind us.

I heard the whistle of an incoming bolt.

Everything went into slow motion. Mychael shoved me away from him and twisted his shoulders and chest sharply to the right. The bolt glanced off of Mychael’s breastplate with a metallic spark.

Armor-piercing bolts.

Rache wasn’t aiming at me.

That shot was intended for Mychael. If his reaction time had been any slower, he’d be dead.

I clearly saw Rache in a third-story window of the building behind us. The bastard wanted us to see him—wanted me to see him kill the man I loved. Then in a blink, Rache was gone and the window empty.

So were the stairs of the elven embassy.

No Rache. No Balmorlan.

No answers.

I thought I would be the one sharing Rache’s crosshairs with Prince Chigaru.

I was wrong.

We searched the building Rache had used for a killing perch, which conveniently for my homicidal ex was a Conclave office building that was being renovated, so there were no occupants who would have been very-much-needed witnesses. Even more frustrating, the workmen who were there had been on the lower floors and hadn’t seen anyone.

Right now I didn’t know if someone had paid Rache to kill Mychael, or if he was making this hit a personal vendetta. The potential who, why, and how much didn’t matter. The bottom line was that Rache wanted Mychael dead, and if no one was paying him that meant that in some twisted way, it was my fault.

And to make the situation worse—if that was even possible—I hadn’t known he was there until his bolt hit Mychael’s armor. That meant a veil of some kind. Rache didn’t have magical talent, but it was possible that his employer had given him an amulet personally keyed to him whose purpose was to veil his presence. I’d encountered them before, but they were obscenely expensive. But if Taltek Balmorlan could afford to fund the start of a war and retain Rache’s services to help that war happen, he could certainly afford a custom-made magical trinket.

We were walking quickly back to the Greyhound Hotel. Mychael had set the fast pace. He wasn’t trying to put distance between him and the man who tried to turn him into roadkill. Mychael wanted to get back to the scene of what he considered the bigger crime and Prince Chigaru as quickly as possible. There were plenty of Guardians there, and a senior knight to act in Mychael’s stead, but when a hopefully future head of state was poisoned, shot, and nearly blown up, that was a situation that needed to be handled by the paladin himself.

Mychael’s scowl mirrored my own. We’d chased Rache halfway across town, and now we were coming back emptyhanded. Mychael took that personally.

So did I.

Rache had gotten away from me twice in one day, and that pissed me off. Though Rache had missed his target twice, and I knew that would piss him off. Rache didn’t miss.

Though what bothered me the most was that for all intents and purposes, Mychael completely blew off the fact that Rache Kai had just tried to kill him. And Vegard and the other Guardians didn’t seem all that bent out of shape about it, either.

I nearly had to run to keep up with Mychael’s long strides. “So world-class assassins take shots at you every day?” I snapped.

“What?”

“Rache just tried to skewer you and you don’t care.”

“Trust me, I care.”

“You don’t act like it.”

“Because I have a worse situation on the waterfront and at the Greyhound. We didn’t catch Rache, and my time was wasted.”