Karen Chance - Claimed by Shadow

I swallowed and broke eye contact. "Why can't you shrink my stuff, too?”

"Because I am not entirely certain that the reverse spell will work in Faerie, so I am carrying both shrunken backup weapons and regular-sized primaries. Your ammunition is for the primaries.”

I was busy trying to sort through my emotions, which ranged from pissed off to terrified, so it wasn't until we stepped outside that I remembered our wild ride. Freakish though it had been, it actually ranked pretty far down the list of weird things that had happened to me lately. "How did we get here?" I asked Mac.

"I took a short cut," he said, pulling a wide-brimmed hat over his bald head. He turned around and tapped the blank square that decorated his knee. I stared at the very odd sight of a tattoo parlor sitting all alone in the middle of the desert, just before I was treated to the even odder one of it folding in on itself and winking out of sight entirely. Mac grunted and examined his leg, where a miniature version of the front of the shop, complete with bright neon sign reading mag ink, had appeared. It fit perfectly into the bare spot I'd seen earlier.

The little sign on the tattoo flashed on and off just like the real thing. After a second, I realized that it was the real thing. "We've spent the whole afternoon inside one of your wards?" I asked incredulously.

"Right in one," Mac said. "My shop goes wherever I do.”

"What do you do? Pick out an empty lot and then, bam ! New retail location?”

He grinned. "Something like that.”

"What about zoning? What about pedestrians walking by and all of a sudden, there's a building? What about the cops?”

"What about them? Norms can't see it, Cassie, any more than they can one of the tattoos." He took my arm compan-ionably. "You've got to realize that the so-called magic you've seen all your life is only the tip of the iceberg. Those sad bastards the vamps use for warding and such are the bottom of the barrel. If they had any real talent, whatever issues got them disavowed would have been overlooked or they'd have been chastised and put back to work. Or, if it was something truly heinous, they'd have run off and joined the Dark-only even they won't take screwups. The type that ends up working for vamps are those with only enough magic to qualify as menaces-to themselves and everyone else. They couldn't do a complex spell if their lives depended on it. You stick with us, and you'll see some real magic.”

Pritkin stopped and took something out of his pocket. "Good idea," he commented, and a second before he did it, I knew what was going to happen. It wasn't a Seeing, just my kind of luck. The idiot was going to cast the mystery rune.

I hit the dirt and tried to drag Mac down with me, but my feet got tangled in the hem of the heavy coat and I had to let go of him to break my fall. I scraped my palms on rock-hard dirt, and the pain and subsequent struggle to free myself from the leather distracted me for a few seconds. There was a flash of light and a popping noise, like a very large champagne cork. When I looked up again, Pritkin and Mac were gone.

Although I could see a good distance in every direction, there wasn't so much as a shred of cloth or a footprint to show that they'd been there. I felt around with my senses, but there were no unusual vibrations. That was almost as strange as the disappearance-a major magical object had just been set off, yet there wasn't so much as a metaphysical ripple for miles. The only thing I could pick up was the slight buzz of MAGIC's wards off to the northwest.

I didn't understand it. If the rune had killed Pritkin and Mac-even if it had vaporized their bodies-I should be able to see their spirits. And, so far, I couldn't. After walking a large circle around where the mages had vanished and coming up with nothing, I turned my attention to my own position. It wasn't good.

I was miles from Vegas with no food, water or transportation. Worse, the only nearby source of those things was MAGIC, where half the people hunting me currently resided. Breaking in by myself would have been daunting, even if Billy had been there to help. But he, like the mages, was currently a no-show. That thought started me worrying that perhaps the rune could destroy ghosts, too, and that was why I couldn't see Pritkin or Mac's spirits. I shied away from that concept quickly when I began to shake. Billy was a royal pain, but he'd been with me through some pretty crazy times. It was hard to think about being truly alone, without a single person I could claim as an ally-not even a dead one.

The only good news was that I was wearing enough ammunition to wage a small war. Unfortunately, I'd have to drive off my enemies by throwing it at them, because I didn't have a gun. Pritkin hadn't offered to share, and my own Smith amp; Wesson was in my purse, which Mac had stuffed into the backpack-a backpack he had been holding.

I was watching a gorgeous desert sunset with rising panic when I noticed something small and dark in the sky. It was only a tiny spec highlighted by the rays of the setting sun, but it was getting bigger fast. I barely had time enough to think that Mac had been right, it did remind me of Oz, before the thing grew so huge that it blotted out what was left of the sun. I hit the ground, huddling inside the thick coat while my brain flashed on an image of me lying under Dorothy's farmhouse, with only my dead legs sticking out. Too bad I'd lost the shoes from Dante's; they'd have been perfect.

My inner monologue began to babble as something huge hit the ground nearby with a bone-shaking thud. A hail of rocks and dirt rained down on me, and my brain lost it. It was hysterically insisting that getting crushed to death wouldn't be fair-I was only a slightly bitchy clairvoyant, not a wicked witch-when the dirt storm finally passed.

I peered out from inside the coat, but there were no Munchkins or yellow brick roads in sight. Yet there was a house. It took my dust-filled eyes a few seconds to realize that the structure sitting so incongruously on the desert sand wasn't a rogue Kansas farmhouse but an urban tattoo parlor, with its neon sign flashing as cheerfully as Mac's grin.

I was lying in the dirt, shaking, when the door burst open and Pritkin and Mac ran out. They looked pretty forbidding, but then Mac caught sight of me, gave a whoop and sped over to pick me up and spin me around in a circle, lead-lined coat and all. "Cassie! Are you all right? You had us so-”

"Where the hell did you two go?" I was sobbing and half hysterical, so relieved that I felt weak and simultaneously as mad as hell. I hit him in the chest and, although I doubt it hurt much, his eagle screeched and pecked viciously at my hand. I shrieked and tore away, ending up back in the dirt. I had just been attacked by a painted bird that was not now and never had been real. Despite my afternoon crash course on advanced wards, it didn't seem possible, but it was hard to argue with evidence that hurt that much. Then Sheba woke up and things went from bad to worse.

I felt the unwelcome fur ball stretch along my lower back and, when Mac bent over to help me up, she flowed along my torso and down my arm. I looked in surprise at the line of bright red that suddenly appeared on his forearm. Despite the size of her paw, the gash it left behind was three inches long and deep enough to need stitches. Even worse, I had no idea how to call Sheba off.

Pritkin jerked me away from his friend and sent me staggering, releasing his hold quickly before Sheba could get her claws into him. His lips were thin with anger. "Stop it, both of you! Before you activate the wards for real and tear each other apart!”

I looked down at my hand, which now sported a painful two-inch gash, and gulped in enough air to say, "For real?" How much worse did they get? I don't know what else I might have said, but I glimpsed Billy over Pritkin's shoulder and temporarily forgot everything else. I pointed a trembling finger at him. "Where were you? It's almost dark and MAGIC is right over there!”