Magic in my Bones (Lesser Magicks Book 1) Page 10

  "Fine," I said, awkwardly trying to stand up from the confines of my seat. "If you won't go, I will."

  "Please," the man said, reaching out but he stopped himself before touching me. "We've still got a few minutes before the bus is set to leave. Hear me out. Then, if you want, I'll go. And I won't tell a single soul where you're headed."

  Glancing around the bus, I weighed my options. I could push my way past him and probably get off the bus within a few seconds. But the bag with my clothes was wedged in the overhead compartment. And this was the last bus leaving that night. If I left now, I'd have nowhere left to go, and I'd probably have to sacrifice my favorite top.

  I sat down, keeping my back to the wall of the bus. "Talk quickly."

  "My name is Tate Beltran. My mother was a pyromancer, my father is a plumber. I'm part of an eclectic group of supernatural beings who are fighting to have their voices heard by the greater magicks before the summit. Before the factions gather here a month from now and make decisions that will affect all of us."

  "Fine, you’re part of the unhappy downtrodden. But since you set out to kidnap a teenager, I'm really not interested in anything you have to say."

  Tate shook his head emphatically. "That was never supposed to be part of the plan. We were running out of time, and things got out of control. No one was going to hurt her, we just wanted to get the attention of people who might actually be able to get something done."

  "Is that what happened to the fae girl too? She had to die so you and your friends could feel included? Or so you could feel powerful, is that it?"

  "What fae girl?" Tate's tanned face had blanched immediately at my words, but I wasn't buying it.

  "Sorry, I call bullshit. You had your chance, now get off the bus."

  "The engine hasn't even started yet, we're fine. Now seriously, what fae girl?"

  "No. This is not our chance to swap info and share theories, this is you giving me information and me deciding what to do with it. What the hell were you people planning to do with Katie?"

  "I wasn't part of that, but I know some of the people who were. They never would have hurt her, she was just supposed to be a bargaining chip."

  "Information is a bargaining chip. Money is. Not kids."

  "Agreed. But people are starting to get desperate, and we're running out of time. If you would just come with me, I think you could help convince people that there's another way to get what we need."

  "Question one. Why me? What do I have to do with any of this? Two. What do you people want? What's the point of all this?"

  Before Tate could answer, the bus rumbled to life. The clock at the front of the bus still showed a few minutes to go before we were scheduled to leave, but the bus driver had taken his seat.

  I whipped my gaze back to the man beside me, suddenly wanting just a few more minutes. I'd had the chance to ask the questions, now I needed the time to get my answers.

  "I don't know how much you know, and it would take way too much time to start from the beginning. But as for why you, because when my friends thought they'd grabbed Katie Murphy this morning, they were somehow both stupid and lucky enough to grab someone far more useful than a human girl. You worked some sort of impossible magick on the van this morning to escape, didn't you?" Tate watched me, probably trying to gauge my response. "It took a lot of work to find out who you were and where you lived. Time that could have been spent trying to save all our asses. But if you did work some sort of tech magick today, that means you're more involved in all of this than you know. Everyone who has magick not encompassed by one of the factions, greater magick, is under attack. We're about to be lambs to the slaughter, and most of our people won't even come."

  Maybe Tate saw the desperation in my eyes, maybe whatever power he had told him just how to get what he wanted from me. But he managed to play me just the right way. "But hey, if I'm wrong, just tell me to fuck off, and I'll go. I'll get off this bus and walk away, leaving you to your little road trip or whatever." I blinked. "If I'm right, then get off this bus with me. Give me tonight and I'll tell you everything I know. If you're not convinced, I'll buy you a ticket for the morning to wherever you want to go."

  Damn it. Tate had me, and by the smug look on his face, he knew it. My life was getting messier by the minute, but if I wanted any chance of actually learning what the hell was going on, Tate looked to be my best chance at getting out of the dark and giving myself a fighting chance.

  With a loud groan, I threw my head backward, knocking it against the headrest. "Fine. I'll come. But drinks are on you, and you're carrying my bag."

  Chapter 13

  The Roisin Dubh was more crowded than usual, which did little to ease my nerves as I followed Tate as he weaved through the open swath of floor that would turn into a dance floor in a few hours. A quartet of half-talented musicians played some trad music from the stage, making my ears ring with the out of tune notes.

  Tate seemed to know where he was going, and I did my best to follow without getting too close. More than ever, I was feeling the need for a particularly large bubble of personal space.

  When Tate stopped at a large booth in the back corner, I had to concede that maybe that wasn't going to be an option. Four people sat around the table, each surrounded by their own shade of magick, and not one of them sporting the colors of the four factions. I recognized the dark-skinned French woman right away, sitting on one of the three-seater benches, across from the young British guy she'd been with first thing this morning, when the two of them had teamed up to try and strongarm a werewolf into doing what they wanted. The other two men, I hadn't seen before.

  To myself at least, I could admit that I was a bit curious about who these people were. However, that wouldn't be enough to make me stay if things started to go south. When Tate ushered for me to sit down, I took a step back. "After you," I said, gesturing for him to take the first of the two empty spots beside the French woman.

  There was absolutely zero chance of me sitting down between any two of these people with no way of getting out, thank you very much.

  Tate sat, placing both of my bags at his feet as he did, and eventually I followed suit. I'd come this far and wasn't about to back out unless given a particularly compelling reason—like finding out the people I was about to have drinks with were even half as messed up as I suspected them to be.

  "Okay," I said, taking my seat, "I'm here, so spill. And no cagey, half-answers. Just tell me who the hell you people are and we can go from there."

  The British guy sitting across from me spoke first, locking his blue eyes on mine. "We," he gestured to the other people at the table, "aren't anyone. We aren't some covert operation with a name and modus operandi. We're all just pieces of a greater whole, or should I say a lesser whole ..." But whatever he said next, I didn't hear it. I'd stopped listening, still stuck on his eyes. It had been his eyes I'd seen first in the van. Looking into them, it was like being taken right back to where I'd been that morning, bound and helpless, at the mercy of strangers.

  No. Not helpless. I'd gotten myself the hell out of there. I'd fought for my life with everything I'd had, and I was still standing.

  Except somehow, I was now sitting in one of my favorite pubs with half of the people who had been responsible for what had happened to me. But only because they were offering me exactly what I needed.

  At least I knew that if push came to shove, I had a real chance of getting out alive. But there was still one more thing that selfishly, I needed answers to before I'd be able to concentrate on anything else.

  "What happened to the other people who were with you this morning?" I asked, cutting the British guy off mid-sentence. Nobody answered, so I shifted forward to look at the only other woman at the table. "Was anyone hurt?"

  "Everyone was hurt," the guy answered as I looked back toward him. "We almost lost Anson, the driver. But lucky for us, Nina is a kick-ass healer. It could have been a lot worse."

  I wanted to snark back someth
ing about how very harrowing it must have been for them, but decided to keep my mouth shut.

  I hadn't killed anyone, and I was prepared to call that another win. "Fine," I said after an incredibly long and awkward moment. "Now if you wouldn’t mind starting over, I swear I'll actually listen this time."

  Of course, that was the same moment that a harried looking waitress stopped by to take our drink orders, forcing a pause in the conversation while everyone made their drink selections.

  After ordering a Guinness for himself, Tate turned to me. "I promised you drinks."

  I briefly considered that I might be better off staying completely sober. Okay, almost definitely. But there was also a very good chance that whatever came next, having a beer in my hand would make it all a little easier to take.

  "I'll have a cider," I said, addressing the waitress. "Whatever's most expensive."

  If I'd been expecting a laugh, it didn't come. But I did get my drink. And my answers.

  Tate restarted our little round-table talk with a quick round of introductions. Across from him, Nina, and I sat Tom—British kidnapper extraordinaire—Jeff, from Blackpool, and Sebastián who had come all the way from Spain for this little adventure. None of them gave me their last names, and I was happy to leave mine out of the conversation as well.

  Tom seemed content to do most of the talking, though some of the others jumped in to fill in the gaps when needed, all of us happy to utilize the nonstop clatter of the pub around us to hide what we were talking about from any mortal ears.

  "So let me make sure I have this straight," I said, nearly an hour later. "You're all here to try and stop the summit, because you already know what the end result is going to be."

  Across from me, Sebastián and Tom nodded in unison. "The faction leaders know that they can't hide for much longer. Humans are uncovering the supernatural underworld every day, and it's getting impossible to stay on top of every leak. There's only so much memory manipulation, compulsion, and forgetting spells they can do. One day, someone is going to get something on film and they aren't going to be able to stop it from going viral."

  "If that happens," Nina cut in, "it's just a matter of if we're looking at war, a witch hunt, mass incarcerations, or something else we don't see coming."

  "So at least some of Europe's faction leaders want to cut this off at the pass," I said, still trying to put all the pieces together. "They'll find a way to leak footage of someone palatable to humans. Not a werewolf or a vampire, not even a witch, or one of those fae that will always look like children, but one of someone whose powers don't belong to any of the factions. Someone easy to control."

  "Someone easy to sacrifice," Tate said from beside me. "First one person, and then all of us. At this point, all anyone can do is guess at how the humans will respond. The world stage is more volatile than ever. It's all too easy to imagine the humans deciding to stop fighting one another when there's a new enemy to focus on. And if that's the case, the factions will at least be able to see it coming, they'll have a head start. Whatever might happen to them, will happen to us first. And they'll happily watch us burn if it means keeping their own safe for just a little longer."

  "Look," Sebastián said, misinterpreting my silence, "I know it can be hard to believe. That we seem desperate. But we are! You've been relatively safe, up here in your little city where no one cares what you do or where you go, but things aren't like that for most of us. In Barcelona, the master of the vampires is old and bored. Humans do not offer enough of a challenge, so his seethe hunts those of us with just enough power to be interesting. Our blood does not even sustain them like human blood, it's just more fun that way. Things like this are happening all over the continent."

  "It's not that," I said, shaking my head. "I've seen my share of destruction at the hands of the wolves, the witches, all of them. But I'm still not sure what you hope to accomplish. Your people tried to take a child today. If anything had happened to her, every wolf on this island would have taken a very happy interest in ripping you, and your families, limb from limb. You're trying to avoid a war with the humans, so you're going to start a war with the factions instead? It's suicide. It's stupid."

  "That wasn't us," Tate said before correcting himself, "well, not all of us. It's not like we got an invite to the summit. I only found out about any of this two weeks ago, and now those of us who were either already in Ireland or could get here on short notice are trying to come up with something, anything."

  "Okay, so you're stupid and poorly organized."

  "We weren't going to hurt you," Nina said, cutting in. "We'd only planned to take the human girl to get her father's attention. The idea was to get her out of the country and keep her long enough to make the Irish wolves cancel the summit. Then she'd be returned home, safe and sound."

  "I'd find that easier to believe if some poor fae girl hadn't ended up dead only a few hours later, whoever killed her made a pretty good showing of trying to frame the wolves for her murder. What's plan C here, getting the factions to go to war with each other? Because if that's the case, I'm walking away right now. You'll all have gotten yourselves killed by the end of the week, and I don't want anything to do with this."

  "We didn't kill anyone," Tate insisted from beside me. I didn't get a chance to look at him though, as I was too busy watching the uncomfortable glance pass between Tom and Nina.

  "No, no," Tom said when I caught his eye. "That wasn't us. No one was ever supposed to get hurt. Greater magick or otherwise."

  Against my better judgement, I wanted to believe him, I really did. No part of me was ready to believe that I'd been here all night with the same people who had somehow torn into a living being in hopes of getting their own way.

  But I'd trusted Taya, and look where that got me. And she at least had given me a lot more reasons to give her the benefit of the doubt than these people had.

  "Not good enough. I'm going to need one hell of a good explanation to how someone ended up dead on the same day as you lot storm into town and start fucking everything up. You guys cost me more than you know, and I'm still inclined to just get out of here and be done with all of you."

  In that at least, I wasn't bluffing in the slightest. I tried to tell myself that the only thing still up for discussion was whether I called Ethan to give him the location of his daughter's would-be kidnappers on the way out.

  But I wasn't quite convinced that I wanted to be responsible for the deaths of everyone sitting at the table unless I knew for sure that they'd already killed someone else, and might do it again.

  Hell, I still didn't want anything to do with any of this.

  From his spot squished against the wall, Jeff spoke up for the first time that night, his accent thick and difficult for even me to understand. "It's not like there's some sort of central community or government for the lesser magicks. We're all on our own. And not everyone has the same ideas about what our next moves should be. People are angry." He must have seen the flash in my eyes because he managed to raise a hand up to pause me before I could get a word in. "I'm not trying to justify what happened, just to explain."

  When I didn't come back with anything right away, Tate spoke up. "Look, I know you have absolutely no reason to trust us. And we won't ask you to do anything you're not comfortable with. But you're one of us, and you're familiar with the city. And apparently with the wolves that are here now. You could be a huge asset, or at least help us navigate through and make sure no one else gets hurt."

  "What exactly can you do anyway?" Nina asked before I had a chance to refuse. It was a question I'd been hoping to avoid, mostly because I wasn't quite sure how to answer. If my secret was about to be out in the open, it would be easy to get caught in a lie, but I also had no reason to tip my hand. "What you did in that van, I've never seen anything like it. Magick and technology don't get along, and you can, what, interact with it somehow?"

  "Something like that."

  "And how do you know the wolves?" Nina co
ntinued. "Are you snuggling up to Ireland's Alpha to keep yourself safe?" The loathing in her voice was less than subtle.

  "No! I chose this city to make it easier to avoid anyone remotely faction-related. I didn't even know who the Alpha of Ireland's pack was until yesterday. But I've got posters all around the city, and he needed his Wi-Fi fixed. It was a pretty classic case of being in the worst place at the worst time."

  "Or," Tate said, "it was the right place at the right time. Fate intervened so you'd end up here with us tonight."

  "I don't really believe in fate."

  His eyes darkly serious, Tate's gaze held mine. "Well lovely, fate seems to believe in you. And when the universe drops hints, I do my best to listen. So here we are."

  I was saved from having to respond when my phone buzzed in my pocket. "One second," I said, holding up a finger while I awkwardly half-stood up in the booth to free the device from my jeans.

  Ethan. Finally. I was prepared to have been a little pissed if the whole night had passed and he hadn't bothered to give me any update at all.

  Unfortunately, the news wasn't good.

  Ethan: I hope you're halfway to wherever you're headed by now. The witches weren't happy when they realized I didn't have you with me. I managed to keep them busy until everyone else arrived, but they just left and I think they're headed back to the city.

  Chapter 14

  "Sorry kids," I said abruptly, already gathering my stuff together from underneath the table, "but it's time for me to go."

  I was already standing with my backpack over my shoulder and my laptop bag in hand by the time Tate managed to jump up beside me. "Go? But I thought we were making progress here. I thought maybe you could help."

  "She's not going," Jeff said from the corner without a hint of uncertainty, "she's running. I can't tell from what, but she's definitely running." His eyes locked on to mine, challenging me to argue.

  I probably should have led this by learning exactly what powers each of my table mates had.