David Coe - Spell Blind

“Yes, if you shield only your heart. Warding your entire body will weaken the magic too much, but if you focus the warding entirely on your heart it might work.”

“I’ve never done that before. I’ve never even tried it.”

The runemyste shrugged. “You may have to, if you insist on facing him.”

I took a long breath. Maybe I was crazy to try this. “All right. Anything else?”

Namid started to say something, then stopped, his bright gaze snapping toward the front door of my house.

“What?” I said, fear gripping my heart. “Is he here again?”

“No,” he said. “The woman is.”

“The woman?”

He glared up at me. “Your friend. The distraction.”

Billie.

“Damn,” I whispered. I went to the door and pulled it open.

Billie stood on the path leading up to my house, staring at the burn marks and the squares of cardboard that covered the empty panes of my living room window. She glanced my way as I stepped outside and joined her there, but she didn’t say a word. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she was thinking.

“Like what I’ve done with the place?” I asked. Kind of lame, I know.

She didn’t deign to respond.

“I’ve been pretty tolerant so far,” she said instead. “All the talk about magic, that scene in the bar, your night in jail. You know, Fearsson, I’ve never been with anyone who was arrested.” She turned to me. Her face was pale, her eyes hard. “I’ve been thinking about all the other things that make me like you so much,” she said. “The desert. The way you are with your dad. The fact that, when the rest of this crap goes away, you’re a lot of fun to be with. You make me think about. . about everything, in ways I never have before. And I’ve been getting through this week by thinking that once this case is over, and your life gets back to normal, it’ll all be great.” She looked at the door again and shook her head. “But there’s no such thing as normal with you, is there? It’s all like this.”

“Billie-”

“What the hell was with you on the phone last night?”

And there it was. The Question. I doubt that she knew it, but she’d come to the very crux of it all: of me, of us, of any future we might have together.

“Was it this?” she said, gesturing at the door. “Were you attacked again? Were you hurt? If so, tell me. I don’t know how much more I can deal with, but I know that I can’t even try if you won’t tell me what’s going on.”

“Come inside with me,” I said, gesturing toward the door.

“Not until you explain what happened last night.”

I faced her and our eyes locked. “I will,” I said. “But not out here.”

“Why? Are you in danger again?”

Yes. So are you. I had a feeling that right then, those words would have sent her away for good. “I don’t want to have this conversation in front of my neighbors,” I told her instead, which was also true.

She twisted her mouth, but when I walked back up into the house, she followed me. As I closed the door again, a small cloud of plaster fell to the floor, like a tiny flurry of snow. I hoped that she hadn’t noticed.

Not that it would have mattered. Taking in the appearance of my living room, making myself see the damage from last night as Billie must have seen it, I felt my heart sink. I wouldn’t want any part of this life either.

“Good God, Fearsson,” she muttered. “You’re lucky you’re not dead.”

So many secrets. So many lies. I was on the verge of losing her, and I had no idea how to keep it from happening. The truth would drive her away, but I wasn’t at all certain that piling on more lies would do any different. And even if I had been, I didn’t want to build a relationship on deception and half-truths. So I began there, with the simple statement. You’re lucky you’re not dead.

“To be honest, luck had very little to do with it.”

She turned, perhaps hearing something in my voice. “What do you mean?”

I wanted to sit on the couch, but it was covered with shards of glass and dust from the cracked plasterboard.

“When I got home last night, I saw that the same sorcerer who tried to kill me in Robo’s had put a spell on my house. The magic’s hard to explain, but it was as if he’d rigged a magical bomb to the whole place. If I’d opened the door or tried to break in through a window, it would have blown up, taking me with it.”

I could see the skepticism in her eyes. “So what did you do?”

“I did this.” I closed my eyes and began to chant aloud. I knew I was scaring her, but with her there in the house, and the phasing underway, I was having trouble concentrating. And I couldn’t think of another way to make her believe me. The living room, where I was; the kitchen where I wanted to be; and me. I must have said it eight times before the spell worked. But at last, for the second time in as many days-the third if you count what I did to get Cahors out of my bedroom-I pulled off a transporting spell. One second I was standing in front of her in the living room, and the next I was in the kitchen behind her.

“Fearsson?” she called as soon as I vanished, or at least appeared to. Her voice was high; she sounded terrified.

“I’m right here,” I said.

She spun and stared at me, her eyes so wide I almost laughed out loud.

“How the hell did you do that?”

“Magic,” I said, smiling.

“I-” She stopped herself. But I knew what she had intended to say.

“You don’t believe in magic.”

She hesitated. “No, I don’t. I didn’t.” After a moment she frowned. “Can you do that again?”

I walked to where she was standing. “Do I really need to?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “So you’re a. .”

“I’m a weremyste. Not a very good one. But I’m working on that.”

“A weremyste,” she repeated. “You’re better than most of the ones I know.”

I grinned. At least she could still joke. “I used a transporting spell to get from the living room to the kitchen. Last night I used it to get into the house, past the magic of the red sorcerer’s booby trap.”

“The red sorcerer?”

“Sorry. To those who can see it, magic shows up as a sort of colored light. Different sorcerers have different colors. The guy who’s been giving me such a hard time-his color’s red.”

“All right.”

“After I was inside-”

“What color is your magic?”

“Bluish green. Like the sea. Once I was inside, I set up a warding-a shield of sorts. Also magic. Then I managed to open the door to set off his conjuring. If I’d opened the door from outside, I’d have died. I guess Red didn’t know that I could do transporting spells.”

“I guess not.”

“Are you following any of this?”

She shrugged. “More of it than you might think. Last night, after you dropped me off, I spent some time online, looking for information about magic. You’d be surprised at the number of sites there are for people who want to be sorcerers.”

I started to respond, stopped myself. “So you already knew most of this stuff.”

“Not really. As many sites as they were, they weren’t very helpful. They were vague and more New Age than nuts and bolts. None of them said anything about transporting spells or colors or any of that. You should start your own site; you’d get lots of hits.” A faint, thin smile drifted across her face, but I could tell that she was brooding on what I’d told her. “A few sites said that you had to be born a sorcerer; others said you could learn spells and train. Which is it?”

“Both. You either have Runeclave blood in your veins or-”

“Runeclave?” Before I could answer, she shook her head. “No. I don’t want to know right now. Just go on.”