Kindling the Moon (23 page)

“I-I don't think so,” he cried.

“Sure I do,” a raspy voice said from behind us. We swung around to find a petite young woman standing in the doorway, patting the front pocket of her leather pants. “I just don't need to use it,” she finished with a dark smile. “Yet.”

There she was, exactly as she looked in my servitor's transmission, dressed like a slutty road warrior with too much makeup.

“So, this is the big bad Moonchild,” she observed as she slowly walked around the teacher's desk at the front of the room. “Now that I see you, I'm not sure what all the fuss is about.”

Jupe's sobbing stopped immediately. He retreated back into the closet before Lon could stop him. Not good. Best to be calm about it, and lure her away from them so that Lon could get Jupe out of there.

“Luxe sent you?” I asked, moving away from the closet.

“Luxe made me, baby. Despite what they say about you, I think they might have made me a little better than Eleusia Ekklesia made you—or maybe all that running away that you did made you miss out on some important training.”

I took several more steps forward as she paused in front of the desk and fiddled around with some of the papers stacked there.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Let's see, first off, it took me like one day to kill your guardian.”

“Yeah, thanks for that.”

“You're welcome. Second, your servitor magick stinks. I was able to put a tracer on it with no effort.”

“The green dot.” I knew it.

“Very good. You spy on me, I spy on you. I'd been warned that you're hard to trace, but that little boy over there was quite easy. Nice and earthy.” She punctuated her words by scraping a couple of long fingernails across the chalk-board.

“Yeah, well, you kinda fucked up when you decided to mess with him.” I stole a quick glance behind me. Lon had managed to get Jupe back out of the closet and on his feet.

“Look,” she reasoned, “if you had just come quietly when I sent that Pareba after you, we could have avoided all this. All I wanted was for you to come with me so that you could stand trial for your psycho parents. But now you got these people involved. So all three of you are coming with me now.” She
looked behind me and called out, “I see you trying to leave back there.”

She patted her gun again, still looking at them, then smiled at me.

“That seems like a lot of trouble,” I said, pressing the tips of my fingers together to reopen the wounded hangnail. “Why don't you just take me and save yourself the hassle?”

She laughed, tapping one of the heels of her boots on the floor. “This isn't up for negotiation.”

All right, then. No chance of a peaceable outcome now.

I couldn't escape, because she'd only hunt me down again. She might have been an overconfident bitch about my magical training at the E∴E∴, but she was right about one thing: She knew how to detect servitor magick and tag it well enough to find Jupe. I didn't. Maybe if my parents hadn't been so overprotective and had taken the time to teach me, I might've known better; as it was, I did the best I could on my own.

But even if she
could
track me down, I sure as hell wasn't going to give myself up to her, either. I hadn't stayed alive all this time just to kowtow at the last minute to someone like her.

Still, fight or flight, after years of considering only my own survival, it really came down to one crucial thing that had nothing to do with me: she had hurt Jupe. And she was going to pay for that.

“Oh, well,” I lamented as I smeared the tiniest drop of blood on my invisibility ward and erected it one more time. The air wavered in front of me, and for a second, the nausea almost dropped me to the floor. Drained from the first time I put it up, I was afraid it wouldn't work. But in the middle of trying to keep my balance, the bewildered look on Riley Cooper's face said it all—she couldn't see me.

Better act fast, before she wised up and realized what I'd done.

You hear about adrenaline giving people access to superhuman strength during moments of crisis. I'd experienced this twice—once when my parents and I faked our deaths, and the other time about a year later, when a cop almost blew my alias.

I probably didn't have enough adrenaline in me now to lift a car or anything quite that spectacular. I did, however, have enough to unhinge the wooden top off the school desk next to me. Bracing my foot on the seat, that's exactly what I did.

The desk creaked and protested as I twisted it, then the screws popped out. I flew back a step with the flat weapon in my hand. It must have looked as if it were floating in air, because Riley Cooper's eyes went wide. Jupe whimpered behind me after my name died on his lips.

I raced forward several steps with the desktop and as Riley stepped back, her spiked heel caught on the sunken grout between two cracked floor tiles. She faltered as I dropped my ward and materialized a couple of feet away from her out of thin air. As Lon had noted in my backyard, it was, indeed, one hell of a spell. Guess this untrained girl knew a few tricks after all.

When Riley saw me, her hands automatically went to her gun. I'll admit, her reflexes were pretty fast, but I was faster.

With both hands, I gripped the desktop and reared it back over my left shoulder, swung with all my strength, and nailed her right in the side of her face. Hard. The hollow
crack!
of wood hitting bone reverberated around the room. Her body slammed against the teacher's desk, knocking a flurry of papers and books into the air.

A slow trickle of red blood began seeping from her hair-line above her ear. Her arms flailed as she struggled to get a grip on the corner of desk and pull herself up. Not gonna happen. I brought the board down on top of her head. The wood fractured in two and fell apart on impact, sending a sickening jolt of pain through my arms. She went down face-forward. Her chin hit the tile and one of her teeth popped out and skipped across the floor in five quick hops.

Lon and Jupe said, “Fuck!” in unison from the back of the room.

Chest heaving, I tossed the split desk and dropped to my knees, tugging the edge of a pair of shiny handcuffs from her back pocket. She lay still on the floor as I straddled her legs, twisted her limp arms back, and cuffed her as tight as I could. It was the first time I'd ever gotten to do that; it felt a little satisfying.

As I stood up, she still didn't move. I worried for a second that I'd killed her.

Lon sprang toward us as I bent down to flip her over and check her pulse. The side of her face was splotched with crimson. Blood was also leaking out of her mouth.

“She's alive,” I reported with relief.

“Jesus Christ,” he mumbled. Then he repeated it. Twice.

“Cady!” Jupe yelled as he shuffled over to us. “You saved us!”

Lon did not echo his son's sentiments.

“This ends right here,” he said bitterly, surging with restrained rage.

“Lon, I'm sorry that—”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “That girl hurt Jupe because she was trying to track you down. This is your fault.
You
put my kid in danger by doing magick in front of him.
You
turned him into bait.”

Jupe's words streamed out in a long, flat note as he tugged on his father's shirt with his good hand. “I asked her to, Dad. I made her do it. She didn't want to but I begged her. You know how I am—you always say that I could wear anybody down and—”

“She's the adult here, Jupe.” He glared at me. “At least I thought she was.”

Jupe's mouth fell open. I wasn't the only one in shock. “Shut up, Dad—she rescued us. You're being an idiot.”

“Stay out of this, Jupe,” Lon warned, then barked at me, “This is just business as usual for you, isn't it? Danger? Violence?”

He shook his head, covered his eyes with his hand, then he resumed speaking in a distracted voice, as if to himself, “I can't raise my son around that. What was I thinking? This is happening all over again. I'm a horrible father.”

“Lon!” I said, tears threatening to spill from anger and confusion. “I said I was sorry about the servitor. I wouldn't put Jupe in danger on purpose, and as far as violence goes, you probably would've shot and killed Riley if you'd had a gun.”

“Maybe. It doesn't matter.” He sounded weak and defeated.

“I didn't have a choice,” I protested, my confidence shattering as I said the words. “She would have killed me or taken me in. She hurt Jupe.”

“You might not have had a choice, but I do. Right now I'm taking my kid to the hospital, and you're going to stay away from him.” He put his hand on Jupe's back and tried to push him forward.

“Dad!” Jupe cried. “Cady, I'm not mad, don't listen to him.” He was still crying a little. I wasn't sure if it was from
pain or shock, but he was trying so hard to be grown up. “I know you didn't mean for this to happen. It's not your fault.”

“I said stay out of this, Jupiter!” Lon yelled.

“I'm so sorry,” I whispered.

Lon gave me a blank look then herded Jupe toward the classroom door. When he got there, he paused. “What are you going to do with her now?”

“I don't know,” I admitted. My hands started shaking.

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you gave her a fucking concussion.”

“Maybe.” My voice barely carried.

“Find your own way home,” he said, laying a protective palm around his son's neck.

Jupe sobbed, screaming at his father, “I hate you,” as they walked out the door.

My basement looked like a mobile field hospital. I didn't want Riley Cooper to be able to use spells to escape, so I painted four old sheets with sigils that blocked magick and hung them around a small area of my basement that the previous owners had intended to convert into a bathroom. An old toilet and a drain for a shower were as far as they'd gotten.

Adding grand theft auto to my list of crimes that night, I'd managed to get Riley back to my house blindfolded in a hot-wired Ford from the school's back parking lot; I had to plaster the backseat in old newspapers so she wouldn't bleed all over it. Once we got home, it took me fifteen minutes and several tries to remember the counterspell that would allow her to breach Lon's house ward. Then I had to contend with all my other minor wards; every time I tried to get her through the door, a series of irritating warnings ballooned in my head and she started moaning and shaking, but I finally managed a successful cloaking spell.

I found the key to the handcuffs on a small key chain in her pocket. After digging out a length of rusted chain from the shed in my backyard, I shifted her hands to the front of
her body and cuffed her wrists to one of four metal support posts that were bolted into the cement floor. Nothing within her reach but the toilet and a musty couch I'd dragged to the metal post. I brought down a satellite radio and switched it on, then left her there and locked the basement door.

It was nearly six in the morning by the time I crawled into bed.

I slept a few hours, woke around noon, then fired up the courage to call Lon. He didn't answer. I sent him a text and told him that I hoped Jupe was okay, and waited for a response, but it never came. If he was serious about my not seeing Jupe again, then he was serious about my not seeing him either. All the work we'd done was for nothing, and I was back at square one.

Not only was the possibility of helping my parents look like the biggest long shot in the world at this point, but I couldn't even focus on the futility of it, because Lon's words were competing for attention:
This is your fault.
The accusation repeated in my head ad nauseam, along with the blank look he'd given me. My heart felt like it'd been buried under a pile of rocks.

Dazed and drained, I plated some fruit and crackers and carried it down to my kidnapping victim. She was asleep on the couch behind the makeshift antimagick curtains. I woke her.

“Do you want to eat?” I asked.

She stuck out her handcuffed hands and raised both middle fingers.

“Look, I don't have any problem leaving this food on the floor, but you're going to drink the water before I leave.”

She initially resisted but gave in without too much prodding. It took her two tries to empty it.

“How old are you?” I asked after she'd finished.

Water ran down her chin. “None of your business.” She threw the empty plastic bottle in my direction.

“Eighteen?” I guessed. “Seventeen?”

“Twenty-one. Where are we? Are we still in La Sirena?”

She didn't know where I lived. That was good.

“We're in Fresno,” I lied.

“Fresno? What are we doing here?”

I ignored her. “What were your instructions from Luxe?” She shifted her legs to curl up on the couch, facing away from me. She looked uncomfortable. “Bring you back to San Diego … alive, unfortunately.”

“Why me and not my parents?”

She laughed. “My brother's hunting your parents in Mexico, don't worry.”

“I doubt he's having better luck than you are, then. I'm sure they're already farther away than that.”

“But you don't know? Interesting.”

“Whatever. The less we know about each other's whereabouts, the easier it is to stay hidden. So it's kinda useless, you see, trying to bring me in to get info on them. Because I don't have it.”

“Hmph.”

“Why did your order kidnap our caliph?”

She wrinkled her nose. “What are you talking about?”

“The head of Ekklesia Eleusia. Why did you kidnap him?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about. Nobody's kidnapped anyone except you, and you're going to regret that when my order finds out.”

Perhaps they hadn't told her about the caliph, or she wasn't high up enough in the hierarchy to know—just a bounty hunter instructed to do a job.