Ilona Andrews: Hexed

We stepped out into the night. Painted an ugly olive color, the office looked like two separate buildings had been jammed together: The left half resembled a ranch house while the right was a two-story Queen Anne with green shutters.

The wind brought with it a salty metallic scent that burned my tongue. Blood. Jim bared his teeth at the building.

I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to sense the magic. In my head, the house turned dark. Long translucent tentacles of magic slivered from inside it, sliding back and forth over the walls, out the windows, over the roof, clutching at the siding and tiles.

I pushed a tiny step farther. The closest tentacle rose, hovered above the roof for a long moment, and snaked over to us. Magic lashed at me in an icy wave, fetid, terrible magic. I didn’t know what it was, but every cell in my body shrank from it. My eyes snapped open and I jerked back.

Jim caught me from behind. “What is it?”

The house looked mundane again, just a drab olive building. I swallowed. “We’re going to need protection. Lots of protection.”

I set my wooden box on Pooki’s hood and flipped it open. Jim peered at the calligraphy set inside. Most shapeshifters didn’t do magic, because we were magic enough as it was, and most didn’t trust magic. I totally understood why. Magic was iffy, but claws and fangs produced the same result every time. However, I was born to a long line of magic users, so concerned with tradition that they passed on their knowledge and rituals even when technology was at its strongest and almost no evidence of magic remained. My family took my education very seriously.

Half of the time my magic didn’t even work, but Jim had seen me pull it off once or twice. It’s not that he was impressed—he was far too cool for that—but Jim treated my talent with respect. He was in trouble and he trusted me to get him out of it. I had to step it up.

Jim nodded at the house. A pale yellow light appeared in one of the upper-floor windows, as if someone held a candle up to the glass.

“Isn’t it cute,” I murmured. “It’s saying hello.”

Jim smiled at the light. The only time a jaguar showed you his teeth was when he was about to sink them into you.

I pulled two thin strips of hanshi paper out, dipped my brush into the ink, and wrote the string of characters for general protection on each piece.

The ink shimmered a little in the moonlight. I held my breath.

Please work. Please, please, please work.

The magic snapped, sparking through the paper. I exhaled and tossed one strip at Jim. The paper sliced through the air, stiff like a blade, and stuck to his chest. He stared at it.

“Don’t mess with it. It’s a defensive spell.” I tossed the other piece of paper in the air, stepped toward it, and it adhered to me, over my left breast. “Let’s go.”

Jim pondered the little piece of paper. “You want me to go back into that house protected by a magic sticky note?”

“Don’t even start,” I told him. “It’s working. If it weren’t working, you couldn’t drag me into that place.”

“What did you write on here? ‘Don’t die’?”

“No, I wrote, ‘Don’t be an a-hole!’”I headed for the house.

“On yours or mine?”

“On yours.”

“Well, in that case, your magic isn’t working. I’m still an asshole.”

Grr, grr, grr.

Twenty feet to the house. A shiver shook me and I clenched my teeth. You can do it, White Tiger. Don’t be a wuss.

Fifteen feet. I could see it now, the translucent mess of sliding tendrils, ready to grab us, like a nest of colossal dark snakes about to strike. The bad magic would hit us any second.

Ten feet. The tentacles rose as one.

Screw it. I reached over and grabbed Jim’s hand. His fingers closed on mine, warm and strong.

The magic shot toward us. I clenched Jim’s hand. The paper on my chest sparked with pale blue and the tentacles fell away, as if singed by fire.

Oh gods. Oh phew. My heart pounded in my chest at about a million beats per minute. Pheeeww. Okay, alive. Alive is good.

I realized I was still clutching Jim’s hand like a moron and let go. He was looking at me. “Is everything cool?”

“Mhm.” I nodded, my voice a little too high. “Everything is great. Let’s go.”

We walked between the tendrils of magic to the door. A long scrape marked the dark green paint, exposing steel underneath. I could tell by Jim’s face that he didn’t remember it. We both leaned close and sniffed.

Smelled like paint.

Jim tried the handle. It clicked under the pressure of his thumb. The door swung open slowly, revealing a gloomy large room, as if the house had yawned and we were staring straight into its maw.

He said he had left the door locked and I knew he would have.

Jim stepped through the doorway and I followed him.

The inside of the house smelled wrong: hot and sharp with an undercoating of dust, like rusty iron scrap left to bake in the sun. Through it floated the stench of burned coffee and a faint scent of blood, fouled with a hint of decomposition. The blood was old, at least twelve hours, probably more.

The front of the room lay empty. Ahead, a large counter cut the room nearly in a half. To the right, a small stove supported a teakettle and a coffeepot. Gloom pooled in the corners, and if I squinted just right, I could see the faint tentacles of magic snaking their way in and out of the walls.

Jim skewed his face in a silent growl, stalked over to the counter, and leapt on it, landing with easy grace. He did it in absolute silence.

Wow.

I would’ve given anything to be able to match him, to be sleek and elegant, like a supple phantom. But no, even in my animal form, I was a klutz. The change dazed me and it took me about two minutes to figure out where I was or why. It took Jim about two seconds to kill something. If we both shifted in the middle of a room full of ninjas, by the time I could see straight, they would all be dead and Jim would be wiping blood from his hands.

All my life I was told I was special, the mystical white tiger. Guardian of the West, King of Beasts, Lord of Mountains, Slayer of Demons. Majestic of bearing and fierce in battle. The irony was thick enough to swim through.

Jim pointed at the floor. I looked down. Gashes scored the wood, digging deep into the floorboards. Something had clawed the floor, something large and powerful. Here and there small sections of black marker lines peeked from under the scratches, but no force on earth could decipher what had been written there.

I glanced at Jim and shook my head. He jumped down and I followed him deeper into the house. We passed a small file room on the right, separated from the counter by a partition. If people had died here, something must’ve taken their bodies.

The doorway to the stairs waited, a darker rectangle in the dark wall. I took a step forward. Magic washed over me, bad, terrible magic, smelling of death and blood and corpses, as if someone had taken a piece of ice and dragged it from the base of my neck all the way down my spine. The paper on my chest shivered. I froze, trying to catch every tiny noise, every hint of movement.

Jim was looking at me.

“Bad,” I mouthed, letting him read my lips. “Bad magic.”

Above us the ceiling creaked. We looked at it.

Another creak. Something heavy moved across the floor over our heads.

Jim pushed ahead of me and we padded up the wooden steps upstairs.

THE STAIRCASE WAS narrow and Jim’s muscular back took up most of it. I gave him a couple of feet to make sure he had room to strike if we ran into something unpleasant.

Magic saturated the staircase. It dripped from the rail in long viscous droplets, it slimed the steps, it boiled in long coils along the wall so thick and potent I wished I’d brought a rain slicker. Now, that was a totally irrational thought. It seemed insane Jim couldn’t see it, but I knew he couldn’t.