Ilona Andrews: Hex Appeal

She screamed.

Thunder cracked, and the creature leaped away from her, yelping. A second boom sounded, this time accompanied by a flash of light. Less like a lightning strike and more like some kind of explosion in reverse. She covered her head and curled up against the chaos of it. The air smelled of sulfur.

She waited a long time for the silence to settle, not convinced that calm had returned to the hallway. Her chest and shoulders were sore, bruised. She had to work to draw breath into complaining lungs. Finally, though, she could uncurl from the floor and look around.

A dark stain the size of a sedan streaked away from her across the carpet and walls, like soot and ashes from an old fireplace. The edges of it gave off thin fingers of smoke. Housekeeping was going to love this. The scent of burned meat seared into her nose.

Grant stood nearby, hands lifted in a gesture of having just thrown something. Grenade, maybe? Some arcane whatsit? It hardly mattered.

She closed her eyes, hoping once again that it was all an illusion and that it would go away. But she could smell charred flesh, a rotten taste in the back of her throat.

From nearby, Grant asked, “Are you all right?”

Leaning toward the wall, she threw up.

“Julie—”

“You said it was an illusion.”

“I had every—”

“I trusted you!” Her gut heaved again. Hugging herself, she slumped against the wall and waited for the world to stop spinning.

He stood calmly, expressionless, like this sort of thing happened to him every day. Maybe it did.

She could believe her eyes. Maybe that was why she didn’t dare open them again. Then it would all be real.

“Julie,” he said again, his voice far too calm. She wanted to shake him.

“You were right,” she said, her voice scratching past her raw throat and disbelief. “I should have stayed behind.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

When she looked up, the burned stain streaking across the hall and the puddle of vomit in front of her were still there, all too real. Grant appeared serene. Unmoved.

“Really?”

“You have a gift for seeing past the obvious. You were the kid who always figured out the magic tricks, weren’t you?”

She had to smile. For every rabbit pulled out of a hat, there was a table with a trapdoor nearby. You just had to know where to look.

“You are all right?” he asked, and she could believe that he was really concerned.

She had to think about it. The alternatives were going crazy or muddling through. She didn’t have time for the going-crazy part. “I will be.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said, reaching out to help her up. “I really wasn’t expecting that.”

She took his hand and lurched to her feet. “You do the distracting next time.” She didn’t like the way her voice was shaking. If she thought about it too much, she’d run, screaming. If Grant could stand his ground, she could, too. She was determined.

“I was so sure it was an illusion. The players at your table—they had to have been illusions.”

“The guy from yesterday was sweating.”

“Very good illusions, mind you. Nevertheless—”

She pointed at the soot stain. “That’s not an illusion. Those players weren’t illusions. Now, maybe they weren’t what they looked like, but they were something. ”

His brow creased, making him look worried for the first time this whole escapade. “I have a bad feeling.”

He turned back to the door he’d been working on, reaching into both pockets for items. She swore he’d already pulled more out of those pockets than could possibly fit. Instead of more lockpicks or keycards or some fancy gizmo to fool the lock into opening, he held a string of four or five firecrackers. He tore a couple off the string, flattened them, and jammed them into the lock on the door.

Her eyes widened. “You can’t—”

“Maybe the direct approach this time?” He flicked his hand, and the previously unseen match in his fingers flared to life. He lowered the flame to the fuse sticking out of the lock.

Julie scrambled back from the door. Grant merely turned his back.

The black powder popped and flared; the noise seemed loud in the hallway, and Julie could imagine the dozens of calls to the hotel front desk about the commotion. So, security would be up here in a few minutes, and one way or another it would all be over. She’d lose her job, at the very least. She’d probably end up in jail. But she’d lost her chance to back out of this. Only thing to do was keep going.

Grant eased open the door. She crept up behind him, and they entered the room.

This was one of the hotel’s party suites—two bedrooms connected to a central living room that included a table, sofa, entertainment center, and wet bar. The furniture had all been pushed to the edges of the room, and the curtains were all drawn. Light came from the glow of a few dozen red pillar candles that had been lit throughout the room. Hundreds of dull shadows seemed to flicker in the corners. The smoke alarms had to have been disabled.

The place stank of burned vegetable matter, so many different flavors to it, Julie couldn’t pick out individual components. It might have been some kind of earthy incense.

A pattern had been drawn onto the floor in luminescent paint. A circle arced around a pentagram and dozens of symbols, Greek letters, zodiac signs, others that she didn’t recognize. It obviously meant something; she couldn’t guess what. Housekeeping was really not going to like this.

Two figures stood within the circle: a man, rather short and very thin, wearing a T-shirt and jeans; the other, a hulking, red-skinned being, thick with muscles. It had a snout like an eagle’s bill, sharp, reptilian eyes, and wings—sweeping, leathery—bat wings spread behind it like a sail.

Julie squeaked. Both figures looked at her. The bat-thing—another dragonlike gargoyle come to life—let out a scream, like the sound of tearing steel. Folding its wings close, it bowed its head as a column of smoke enveloped it.

Grant flipped the switch by the door. Light from the mundane incandescent bulbs overpowered the mystery-inducing candle glow. Julie and the guy in the circle squinted. By then, the column of smoke had cleared, and the creature had disappeared. An odor of burning wax and brimstone remained.

The guy, it turned out, was a kid. Just a kid, maybe fifteen, at that awkward stage of adolescence, his limbs too long for his body, acne spotting his cheeks.

“You’ve been summoning,” Grant said. “It wasn’t you working any of those spells, creating any of those illusions—you summoned creatures to do it for you. Very dangerous.” He clicked his tongue.

“It was working, ” the kid said. He pointed at the empty space where the bat-thing had been. “Did you see what I managed to summon?”

He was in need of a haircut, was probably still too young to shave, and his clothes looked ripe. The room did, too, now that Julie had a chance to look around. Crumpled bags of fast food had accumulated in one corner, and an open suitcase had been dumped in another. The incense and candle smoke covered up a lot of dorm room smells.

On the bed lay the woman’s purse with several thousand dollars in casino chips spilled around it.

“I think you’re done here,” Grant said.

“Just who are you?” the kid said.

“Think of me as the police. Of a certain kind.”

The kid bolted for the door, but Julie blocked the way, grabbing his arm, then throwing herself into a tackle. He wasn’t getting away with this, not if she could help it.

She wasn’t very good at tackling, as it turned out. Her legs tangled with his, and they both crashed to the floor. He flailed, but her weight pinned him down. Somebody was going to take the blame for all this, and it wasn’t going to be her.