Djinn Justice (The Collegium Book 2) (13 page)

Gordon threw his car keys to Steve. “Leave it at the airfield. I’ll stay with Barbara until a couple of the pack can get here.”

“Thank you.” Barbara didn’t move from the porch, but as she gripped the railing and stared at Fay, her intensity and honesty were obvious. “You saved me. Anything you need from me, ever, is yours.”

Fay opened her right hand a fraction, her fingers subtly flicking away the wolf-were’s vow. “Free gift.” Barbara needed all her energy for herself.

“Nonetheless, we won’t forget,” Gordon said. He looked from Fay to Steve. “The wolves will support your choice of mate.” He walked back up to the porch.

“Does he have the power to decide that?” Fay asked when they were in the car and naturally, without magic, out of earshot.

“No.” A grim smile curved Steve’s mouth. “He doesn’t speak for the wolf-weres. Perhaps in America. It doesn’t matter. You and I are the only ones who decide our relationship.”

“True.” She settled more comfortably in the passenger seat. It wasn’t as if the Collegium, her former home, accepted him as her partner. “Who are the marshals Gordon mentioned?”

Steve flicked on the car’s headlights. Evening had claimed the mountains. He could see clearly, but other drivers weren’t weres and mightn’t see them. “As Suzerain, Granddad administers justice for the weres, using the power Uncle gave him. But gathering the evidence for his decisions and bringing the suspected weres in for judgement is a job for the marshals.”

“Not you?” she queried. “It’s the sort of thing you could do, easily, but you sound as if it’s not your job.”

“It’s not. I was specifically told I couldn’t be a marshal because I’m to be the next Suzerain. The decision was Granddad’s, influenced by a number of were leaders. They didn’t want to blur the line between those who apprehend and prove a case, and the one who judges it.” Echoes of old anger laced his voice. He’d hated the decision.

“Did Uncle agree with them?”

He turned his head momentarily to stare at her. “No one ever asked.” A pause. “Uncle never interfered with the decision.” Until now. Until this test which, in effect, sent Steve out on a marshal’s job.

“So you did the next best thing. You trained and went to work as a mercenary, the on-the-ground equivalent of a marshal.” Fay understood her lover.

His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “I had to know what the marshals experienced, what I would be asking of them as Suzerain.”

She nodded. It was what her father had lacked, and what the Collegium’s new president, Lewis Bennett, would never forget: the soul anguish of encountering evil; of tracking it, capturing it, and resisting the natural urge to rid the world of it. The weres had been wise. It was too great a burden for one person to be marshal, judge and executioner. But the temptation was always there. Steve understood it. He’d lived it.

“They’ll respect you,” she said to him. “In a different way to your granddad. He’s a diplomat.” She smiled wryly at Steve’s fractional head tilt of surprise. “I mightn’t have met Tomy for long, but it was obvious. He builds and sustains alliances, bring peace.”

“I won’t,” Steve said.

“In your own way, you will. There can’t be peace, not true peace, without justice. If Uncle has maintained the Suzerainty for millennia then he must know that you’re the right person for the job, now. Otherwise he could choose your sister or someone from a different family.”

“I wouldn’t want Liz to have to deal with the Suzerainty’s problems.” He was instantly protective of his sister. Then a long drawn out sigh. “But I’m bringing you into the heart of them.”

“I’m bringing myself,” Fay said confidently. “I was raised to fight. I wouldn’t know how to be a diplomat or to walk away from injustice.”

He slowed the car, leant across, and leopard-swift, kissed her.

She blinked at him as the car accelerated again.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me the full story of what you saw in the rose garden and what we need to do.”

So she did, and he wasn’t happy.

“I don’t want us to split up,” he said as he drove through the gates to the airfield.

“Nor do I. But it’s logical.”

“I could simply phone Granddad and have him search out likely jackal suspects. He can ask the marshals and Uncle—”

“Will Uncle accept that or will he think that you’re evading the test? You’d be outsourcing part of the hunt.”

“Do
not
use managerial jargon,” he growled.

She put a hand on his knee as he parked the car at the airfield. “It’s hard for me, too, Steve. This rogue mage has managed to siphon off dream essences to feed the jackal-were. I don’t know what sort of monster that has turned him into. He might even be able to use the power of the dream essences in a manner akin to magic. I’m trying really hard here not to ask for your promise to wait for me before pursuing him.”

“I don’t need a babysitter.” He leaned back against the seat. “Which is exactly your point in reverse?” He swore. “Damn Uncle for making everything complicated.”

“If we fly back to New York, we can use Cynthia’s portal. You to return to Alexandria and identify the jackal, and me to travel to Vladivostok. I’ll catch a plane, and then, hire a car from there.”

He picked up her hand as it rested on his knee and interlaced his fingers. “If it wasn’t for what we saw at Barbara’s, I’d wear the delay and go with you. However, since your magic can’t find the jackal, we divide and conquer. I find him, while you go after the rogue mage. But I still don’t like you facing her alone.”

“She’s less powerful than me and less well trained.”

“And more unpredictable as a result,” Steve said, proving that he understood the risks Fay faced. “However, I’m aware that if I went with you, you’d divide your attention to try and protect me from a dream essence enslaver. Are you sure you don’t want someone from the Collegium with you?” His voice revealed his reluctance.

She squeezed his hand, loving that his concern for her over-rode older suspicions. “I’m sure. I’m used to working alone.”

They got out of the car. As they walked towards the airfield’s office, he put an arm around her waist.

She smiled up at him. “We have a couple of hours on the plane…”

His frustrated bad temper faded. He ignored the man coming out to meet them. “Is that an invitation?”

A faint smile on the approaching stranger’s face told Fay he could hear their quiet talk. She didn’t bother with a privacy spell. “Absolutely.”

Steve’s hand slid from her waist to her hip.

“Gordon phoned,” the stranger said. “I’m Arturo, his second. The plane’s waiting for you.”

“Thanks.” Steve tossed him the car keys. “And thank Gordon, please.”

“From what he said—just to me, his second in the pack—the thanks are ours.” Arturo’s dark eyes dwelt on Fay. “Barbara’s a friend.”

“She’ll be fine,” Fay said quietly.

His gaze shifted to Steve. “Catch the bastard.”

Vladivostok was cold. There were glimpses of spring, but winter hadn’t accepted that its days were over. Fay bought a few essentials, packing them into a new bag before flying on to Magadan. From there, a hire car and driver would take her deeper into Siberia. Steve had already texted her the name of a bear-were who could be trusted.

She discovered that though the bear might be trustworthy, he wasn’t chatty. It didn’t bother her. She accepted his gruff offer that she sleep in the backseat of the heavy vehicle, and dozed with her head on her bag and a woolen blanket over her. She thought of Steve.

In this state between sleep and waking, she was close to her own dream essence. Now that she’d touched the spirit of Barbara’s territory, Fay had a new sense of how the weres interacted with the world. They were more connected to it, so much so that she suspected their dream essences were stronger than non-weres.

Uncle had said that the dream essence was what you encountered that became part of you. It was what contributed to who you were becoming.

As she dozed, her mage sight shifted slightly, as if awakened to new possibilities, and she “saw” Steve’s mark on her. It held similarities to the spirit of Barbara’s territory. The mark was a link to Steve, something of him that connected them together. It was love and something else, something just as primal and linked to it. They were part of each other, their future selves building in love for the other.

Words were clumsy for the rightness of what she felt.

She sent a surge of love through the link and “saw” it shimmer. Then warmth, love and the memory and promise of pleasure enveloped her. She smiled as she slid into proper sleep. Steve had returned her mate-kiss.

The bear-were woke Fay ten minutes from the small village where Victor Gustev, the Siberian tiger-were, lived. Or rather, the village nearest Victor’s remote house. From the village, they’d have to ask directions. Fay stretched and yawned. She’d have to convince the bear to let her drive his vehicle alone. If she was reluctant to risk Steve encountering the rogue mage, she was totally committed to keeping all other weres away from the woman.

Time enough to argue when the bear for control of his car
after
he’d translated her questions to the villagers.

They shuffled into a small house where there was hot tea without milk and fresh bread rolls topped with a soft white cheese and honey. The chill air of early morning nipped at Fay’s face and made her fingers tingle.

A question as to the tiger-were’s house elicited the information that they weren’t the first to ask after him. Fay caught their host’s leer in her direction and the sketching of a female figure, an hourglass shape, in the air. Another woman had been asking after Victor Gustev.

“Victor is a hunter and a guide,” the bear-were said as he translated between mouthfuls of roll that dripped honey. “Our host asks if you are a photographer, like the first woman?”

“You can tell him that it is the woman I’m actually trying to catch up with.”

Their host nodded at the translated message and pantomimed extravagant impatience.

“What?” Fay asked.

The bear rolled his eyes. “He is blaming the poor phone coverage. It makes messaging difficult, and Victor is bad at leaving his radio on to be contacted.” A pause as the host continued. “He says that your friend is only half an hour ahead of you. She left not long before we arrived.”

Fay swallowed bitter tea, dark with tannin, to hide her reaction, which wasn’t the expected disappointment. It was better that she encounter the rogue mage away from the village, where mundanes might be injured. The rogue mage was unlikely to consider their safety. Also, away from mundane eyes, Fay wouldn’t have to hide her magic.

However, Fay didn’t want to be too far behind, not if she had a chance to prevent the rogue mage enslaving the tiger-were. Fay was unsure what interrupting a spellcasting that involved dream essences might do. She feared Victor’s dream essence could be trapped or irrevocably entangled in a badly cast, disrupted spell. It could disintegrate.

The rogue mage’s control was fraying. The Ancient Egyptian spell that Uncle had shown Fay and Steve had warned of the mage swelling like a toad as she swallowed others’ dream essences. But possibly because the mage had syphoned off much of the essences to the jackal-were, she was fragmenting rather than bloating. Fay had seen it in her own spell-casting at Barbara’s house. Something still held the rogue mage together, but for how long? The magic she used, so inexpertly, was not intended to serve such perverted purposes. It would destroy the one who wielded it.

However, before the rogue mage self-destructed, Fay needed to learn the reason for siphoning dream essences to a were. She had a haunting feeling that there was more to the test Uncle had set Steve than any of them imagined.

She looked at the bear-were, who was busily smearing yet more honey onto another bread roll.

“It’s wild honey,” he said in answer to a protest she hadn’t made. Apparently, wild honey justified gluttony.

It was good, but not that good. Fay stuck with the main issue. “I need to borrow your car. The woman I’m after is a rogue mage and it’s dangerous for you to be near her."

The bear frowned at Fay for a long time, chewing steadily as he did so. Then he fished out his car keys from a pocket. “Drive slow. Conditions here are different. No city streets.”

“I’d noticed.” She took the keys. “Thanks.”

He nodded. His voice caught her as she walked to the door. “If you don’t return, what should I do? Do I contact your mate, the leopard I smell on you? I need a name”

“Steve Jekyll.” Fay looked back and saw the bear-were’s surprise. She left him staring after her.

The road to Victor Gustev’s house was muddy with melting snow. The borrowed vehicle, although sturdy and built for extreme conditions, jolted and jounced from one large rut to the next.

“On the bright side,” Fay said as she wrestled with the steering wheel. “It’s not tropical mud.” She wasn’t dripping sweat and driving without air-conditioning through an Indian jungle in monsoon season. Been there, did
not
buy the t-shirt. Some experiences she could happily live without repeating.

In front of her, new tire tracks in the mud showed that the rogue mage hadn’t had the same hazardous driving training as Fay had endured. The tire tracks floundered this way and that. If they were any indication, the rogue mage’s progress was appallingly slow, which meant Fay might be able to catch up with her before they reached the tiger-were’s house. The pine forest that surrounded them would hide their encounter from any mundanes.

Fay slowed her borrowed vehicle to concentrate on a quick search spell. She wanted to know how far ahead of her the woman was.

Not so far. And barely a fraction beyond the woman, Fay’s magic bounced against a warding spell. A strong one.

Relief unknotted a degree of the tension in Fay’s spine. She slowed the vehicle even further, guided it to the side of the road and stopped. From here, she’d walk. In a healthy forest like this, trees muffled some sounds, especially if a person wasn’t familiar with the environment. Over the murmuring sound of the pine trees, the rogue mage wouldn’t have heard the distant vehicle.

Victor probably had and the tiger-were didn’t know Fay was a friend. She had to be vigilant or she’d be victim of the man she came to save.

Fay wrapped a blanketing spell around her, to mask her magic in case the rogue mage had, herself, set a warning spell. Fay would definitely trigger such a spell since she represented a threat to the rogue mage’s intentions. However, Fay suspected that the other mage’s focus was solely for breaking the ward around the tiger-were’s home. As frayed as the woman’s magic appeared, she probably couldn’t sustain dividing her magic or attention, and splintering the warding around Victor’s home would require all her concentration.

Unlike the wolf-weres of Carolina, Victor had employed a mage.

No. Fay concentrated. The magic of the warding was different. Powerful and raw. Victor had used a shaman. It made sense. Siberia’s shamans had survived even the Stalinist era with their traditions intact. They were embedded in the local culture and Victor would trust them over a mage; especially if he shared the general were disdain for magic. Shamanic power was closer to were reality, more grounded in the natural world.

Fay spun around, knife in hand and a thunder-blast spell ready.

A tall man, dressed in hunter’s gear, looked at her calmly, his hands empty and unthreateningly by his sides.

“Victor Gustev?” she asked low.

A curt nod. “Faith Olwen?”

She blinked, head tilting a fraction in surprise and question.

“You smell of leopard and my nephew is a marshal. He emailed me a photo of you. He was at the Suzerain’s fort when Steven Jekyll brought you there.”

“Ah.” Fay put away her knife.

“Which doesn’t explain why you are here, in my territory.” A tiger’s purr, deadly and threatening.

“Have you seen the woman ahead of me?”

“Pah. She stinks of magic worse than you.”

Fay smiled wryly. “She’s a rogue mage. And despite your nephew being a marshal, Steve orders that what I’m about to tell you stays with you.”

“I don’t scent Steve near.”

“He’s in Alexandria.” She had no need to claim Steve’s presence or protection. In fact, with Victor watching her with fierce eyes, she suspected that doing so would only undermine her status. “I’m after the rogue mage currently testing your warding.”

“And the reason she is doing so must remain a secret?”

“Yes.”

“My nephew says you kill demons.”

A non sequitur?
Fay doubted it. Victor was both displaying that he knew of her and assessing her power. To trust her or not to trust her? “I don’t kill demons. I banish them. But if your nephew has looked into my background”—
already
. She’d underestimated the weres’ interest in her and how closely they monitored the happenings of the Suzerainty—“then you’ll know that I did far more than banish demons in my time as a Collegium guardian. The woman ahead of us isn’t the only rogue mage I’ve tackled. How many have you defeated?”

The challenge provoked a dry, silent laugh from the man in front of her. “My father’s father ate one.”

“Ew.”

“But that was a harsh winter, and the mage was sent from the human government. I haven’t had to fight magic, although I pay a wisewoman to maintain the wards against magic that her grandmother set. Why, then, has a rogue mage come to me?”

Fay’s toes were freezing inside her boots, her body cooling in the cold air and from lack of exercise. Nonetheless, she couldn’t move until she’d enlisted Victor’s aid. She couldn’t afford to have him running around at risk of the rogue mage, or interfering. “She is harvesting dream essences from weres. Two dozen so far, and you are next on her list. She is going after solitary weres. The siphoning of your dream essence enslaves you. Your will is reduced.”

“She would steal my spirit?”

Words were clumsy. That re-framing of the concept would do. “Yes.”

He stared at her for a long time, his eyes seeming to gleam with orange and silver flames. His tiger nature was very near the surface. “How do I help you?”

Fay refrained from showing her relief. He wasn’t going to cause trouble and he was giving her the authority to direct their attack on the rogue mage. “I need to question the woman, so I aim to disable her magic and capture her. She uses an unstable tangle of magic to drain weres’ dream…uh spirits. If you stay out of sight till I’m sure she can’t work magic against you, that would be good.”

He nodded. Once.

“And if you could lead me the shortest path to her…”

A sly, satisfied expression crossed his face.

It confirmed her suspicions. Like any wary hunter, he’d used his own prey’s tactics and made the approach to his house more difficult and less direct than it could be. The road curved, snaking among the obscuring pine trees.

Without a word, Victor set off through the forest. His progress was silent.

Fay did her best to move, at least, without clumsiness.

Around them, the forest was alive with little sounds beneath the relentless soughing of the pines. Evidently, Victor didn’t hunt near his home. The small creatures that rustled the undergrowth were unafraid of his and Fay’s passing.

For Fay, her sense of the protective warding grew stronger and stronger, so she was somewhat prepared when Victor stopped and gestured. Fay stepped around a wide pine tree and had her first sight of the rogue mage.

She was a few years older than Fay, maybe thirty. Her face was oval and healthily plump. Her cold weather gear disguised her figure. She was average height. Her eyes…

Fay stepped back into the shadow of the pine tree.

Magic was eating out the rogue mage from inside. Whether it was the mess of the spells she used or an effect of channeling dream essences, the woman was eroding. Hunger, fear and agonized determination burned in her brown eyes. Madness existed on the edges. The human mind needed limits, and to respect those limits. The rules taught to magic users weren’t just to protect mundanes from them, but to protect magic users from themselves. When the magic users wouldn’t listen, Collegium guardians like Fay were sometimes the kindest intervention. Misuse magic and it tortured you.

The warding around Victor’s house sparked in Fay’s mage sight.

The rogue mage recoiled. She swore in English, her voice too high and shrill, scared and frustrated. She slammed magic at the warding.

It blazed. The shaman who’d designed it had been good. The more magic threatened it, the deeper the warding sank into its environment. Land, sky and air reinforced it.

Fay considered the magic the woman threw at the warding. Fay had stopped using such ragged power in her early teens. Perhaps the rogue mage was regressing; that would make her even less predictable.

A fast, hard hit was the only solution. Or would be if Fay could be certain that her usual spell for strangling magic would stop the rogue mage drawing on dream essences. But Fay couldn’t bet on it. She steadied herself, sinking into the strength of her own magic coiling in her center, then reaching out with her mage sight. She ignored the green glow of the warding and studied the tangled spells around the rogue mage.

The woman was wrapped in a snarl of magic, but as Fay concentrated, the threads of magic appeared to center at the woman’s throat. She wore an amulet. And it was probably the grounding addition of an amulet that kept the dream essences spell from shattering.

Fay flexed her gloved fingers once, and acted.

A grabbing motion tore the rogue mage’s shaky personal warding and it disintegrated halfway between the woman and Fay.

Even as the woman turned, searching for her attacker, Fay sunk all her power into a translocation spell.

The rogue mage screamed as the chain holding the amulet around her throat snapped and the amulet flew through the air to Fay.

Fay caught it, and only the discipline engrained in her from fighting demons enabled her to hold onto it despite the powerful wrongness of it. The amulet was leaking, spilling dream essences in an ugly betrayal of the enslaved weres’ right to wholeness and independence. Fay wanted desperately to destroy the amulet, but she had no idea what that would do. By what she’d perceived in Barbara’s rose garden, just over fifty percent of the stolen dream essences went to the jackal-were. She couldn’t recklessly break the amulet and potentially leave the enslaved weres forever separated from their own selves. No matter how much she wanted to.

Grateful for her leather gloves, which at least prevented the loathsome amulet from touching her skin, Fay gently set it on the ground. She couldn’t risk holding it and perhaps having it interfere with her own magic.

The rogue mage seemed to have forgotten she had magic. She ran at Fay. Rage twisted her face. Her hands rose to scratch and claw.

Or perhaps the woman hadn’t forgotten her magic. The Ancient Egyptian spell had warned of poison on a toad’s claws.

Rather than engage the woman, Fay slammed a stasis spell at her. It wouldn’t work on a were, not direct magic, but despite the weres’ dream essences that she’d channeled, it worked on the rogue mage.

She froze. Fear flickered in her eyes. Her own magic writhed and faltered.

Fay could almost feel sympathy. To be entrapped, separated from her magic, would be hell. But hadn’t the rogue mage done just that to the weres?

Grimly, Fay pulled a gold thread from a pocket. This was something the Collegium research mages had prepared. It was rarely used, but it worked. “Magic manacles” the guardians called it, trying to hide their own fear. Someone should have asked Fay to return it and the handful of other tools she’d retained after separating from the Collegium. But no one had.

Fleetingly, she thought of Lewis Bennett, who overlooked nothing. He’d wanted her to have these tools. An ally. She hadn’t been wrong to approach him about this rogue mage even if he hadn’t offered a solution.

But even as the thought passed through her mind, training had her smoothly translocating the gold thread. It wrapped around the rogue mage’s wrist, sealed and closed.

Fay released the stasis spell.

The rogue mage screamed and clawed at her wrist.

Fay turned her head. “You can come out, Victor.” He seemed to materialize out of the forest, a few meters from her. She picked up the amulet.

He stared at it. “Is this so easily resolved?”

“I wish.” Fay’s face was stiff with cold and tension. “I need to question her.” The other mage had fallen to her knees, still clawing at her wrist. The hood of her coat had fallen and showed a spill of black, wavy hair. “I can sit in the car to do so.” She had to get out of this cold.

“You would prefer my house?”

“Warmth and room to maneuver. Yes. But this.” Fay lifted the amulet fractionally. “I can’t guarantee what you’d be letting through your protections.”

Unexpectedly, he grinned, revealing that the villager hadn’t been so wrong to suspect Victor of being chased by women. Older he might be, but tough and charming. Handsome with the danger of his tiger nature showing through. “I would be welcoming into my home the most powerful mage the Collegium ever lost and the mate of the next Suzerain. I think it is safe.”

The rogue mage ceased tearing at her wrist and stared at Fay. “You.”

Victor gripped the woman’s upper right arm and lifted her. “Into the house.” The warding’s glow subsided. “Faith Olwen, you are welcome in my home.”

Fay crossed the warding. The amulet she held shuddered gently. She followed Victor and his prisoner around a stand of trees, and there was his house. The timber structure and how it blended into the forest were normal enough, but the roof bristled with an array of antennas. In winter, with the snow and storms, repairing them probably called for all of Victor’s tiger sure-footedness. So he might live remote, but he kept in contact with the world.