Lisa Shearin - Con & Conjure

I smiled. “Won’t know until I see it.”

“You’re a bad girl, Raine Benares.”

“You bet I am.” I said, stepping into his arms.

Words couldn’t describe how good it felt to hold him, to be held. Best of all, Mychael smelled like Mychael. Though there was something that I couldn’t feel. Our link was gone. It made sense. No magic, no magical link. Dammit. I might be having that good cry sooner than I wanted to.

I swallowed against the sudden lump in my throat, and gave Mychael a whispered, thirty-second summary of my magic being gone and my theory on how it left.

Mychael pulled me to him again; my head nestled into the warm hollow of his neck. I felt the pounding of the pulse in his throat, the anger. He quickly released me and stepped around Vegard, one hand extended to check for wards. He frowned and moved his hand closer, then looked at me and Vegard and shook his head once.

No wards.

“Let’s hope it’s not a buka on the other side this time,” Mychael muttered. He carefully turned the knob, and the door opened.

No lock, either.

Step into my parlor, and all that.

Maybe when you got your hands on the most powerful magical object in the world, you forgot the little things like locking doors behind you. I didn’t believe it, but it was better than wasting time dismantling wards and picking locks. On the flip side, I’d been around powerful magical talents long enough to know—by learning the hard way—that when it came to outwitting one, there was no such thing as good luck. More than once, what I’d thought was good luck nearly turned out to be good riddance.

Mychael led the way into a big room, or at least one big enough that the Guardians’ lightglobes didn’t reach into all the dark corners. The place was covered in dust and empty bottles. The dust was everywhere, except on the bottles that were scattered across the floor just a little too evenly to be happenstance. Drunks don’t usually abandon an empty bottle every three feet to completely cover a room. These were strategically placed to make the most noise. Sometimes the best alarms were the most basic. The Saghred was here, somewhere below my feet, on the next level down. We were on the ground floor. That meant the Saghred was in the basement.

Naturally.

Scary, evil, bite-your-face-off, suck-out-your-soul magic. Of course it was in the basement.

I pointed down.

Mychael silently mouthed a word that summed up my feelings perfectly. Though actually knowing where the rock was did simplify the plan.

Find the stairs. Find the rock. Get out.

Though the plan did have an unspoken fourth step—try not to think about everything that could and probably would go wrong during steps one through three.

With a few gestures, Mychael ordered two Guardians to guard the door and the other one the stairs. Then he looked at me and mouthed, “Stay here.” The look I responded with didn’t need any words, mouthed or otherwise, to get my message across. Mychael raised my look and gave me a glare.

He scanned the door to the basement and silently raised the latch. No wards, no locks, no goblins. My stomach stayed clenched in terror, just in case.

The stairs were steep and narrow. Beyond that, my expectations were knocked flat.

There wasn’t a lot of light, but there was enough to see that there was nothing to see. No Khrynsani and no Chameleon—unless he could glamour himself as a brick wall.

The air was stale and damp like nothing had been breathing down here for years. The only thing that could qualify as living was the mold. We reached the bottom and near the far corner of the room was a single, battered chair.

The Saghred was on it.

It wasn’t in a casket; no wards held it. An armored glove lay on the chair next to it. The Saghred was just sitting there, its surface a flat, lifeless black.

I knew better.

So did the rock.

I had to get it out of here.

The rock knew that, too.

I looked around. The goblin hadn’t carried it out of the citadel in his bare hands. The Saghred had been in its casket, unwarded, but still in its casket.

“Do you think it ate the goblin?” Vegard asked quietly.

“I wish,” I muttered. “Even without my magic I’d have known.”

“Right, no burp,” Vegard agreed solemnly.

That made me crack a smile.

“Can you sense where . . .” Vegard stopped himself. “Oh, ma’am, I’m so sorry, I—”

I snorted quietly. “I might have to get used to it.” People asking me to use the magic I no longer had.

Bottles clanked and something hit the boards above our heads hard enough to shower us with dust.

I got an even more white-knuckled grip on my daggers, and the glow of Vegard’s ax doubled. Mychael drew his sword.

It didn’t glow.

No glow. No magic.

No Mychael.

Oh hell.

There was a single pop and Vegard’s eyes rolled up in his head as he crumpled to the floor. The goblin thief glamoured as Mychael stood over him, a small dart gun in his other hand. He smiled and pointed it at me.

“This promises to be a very profitable day.”

Vegard wasn’t moving. I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.

I started to go to him, but was abruptly nose to muzzle with the goblin thief’s poison dart gun.

“The Guardian’s alive,” he told me. “I only kill when need demands it.” The thief smiled and pointed the gun at Vegard’s exposed throat. “However, a second dose would be sufficient to kill a man of his size.” His finger tightened on the trigger.

“No!” I shouted, loud enough for the Guardians upstairs to hear.

Silence.

I didn’t think that was good.

The thief still glamoured as Mychael pointed the gun at me. “You on the other hand are rather small. It may be too large a dose.” He took a few steps back, keeping his eyes and the gun on me. “Dalen,” he called, his voice entirely too casual. “What was that?”

“Cahil tripped, sir.”

The thief chuckled. “Human eyes in the dark are worthless.”

“Permission to drop our glamours?” the goblin called back.

“In a few minutes.”

Oh crap.

“Khrynsani,” I said. So much for help—at least for me.

He smirked. “You catch on quickly, but not quickly enough.”

Three Khrynsani glamoured as Guardians. Two had been glamoured as elves in the harbor. Who knew how many more there were in the citadel and around the city? No one knew.

And no one knew I was here.

With the Saghred and a goblin master thief glamoured as Mychael.

Something wasn’t adding up. Like how the hell he was in two places at the same time—running from us with the Saghred one minute, then landing on a sky dragon as Mychael five minutes later? Not to mention, the longer I got him to talk, the longer Vegard and I got to keep breathing.

“You stole the Saghred and brought it here,” I said. “We saw you and chased you. Then you fly in here on a—”

Mychael smiled. The goblin might have looked like Mychael, but he didn’t bother to copy Mychael’s mannerisms any longer. His smile gave me ten different kinds of the creeps. “Did you actually see me on the dragon?”

“No, but—”

“Or any of my men?”

Realization dawned, and I thought it might just be worth taking a poison dart in the gut to get my hands on him. “Four Guardians flew in . . . you and those Khrynsani were there waiting. You killed them.”

“You make it sound simple,” the goblin said. “I assure you it was not. However, their arrival saved us a great deal of trouble.”

“You got what you came for,” I said. “So now you’re hiding in a basement?”

The thief winked at me. “Not hiding, Raine. Merely awaiting transportation.” He looked over my shoulder. “I’ve sent the signal that I have the Saghred; within minutes, we’ll have direct passage home. What would we do without magic?” He laughed. “Though it looks like you may be finding out; what a pity.”