Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4)

“If that doesn’t stop him?” Occam asked.

FireWind flashed us the first real smile I’d seen, one full of joy. “Then I will.” His expression held something like the exultation of battle. Delight, fierce and brutal. FireWind wanted to fight the black-witch. He was an idiot. Jason had a lot of power. A lot. Unless we were very lucky, he would soon have even more, thanks to the thing below the ground.

A boom sounded. The building shook. The hallway door rammed open. Jason, reed thin, dressed in black, his black hair flying, stepped into the hallway. He was outlined by the door for a half second. FireWind shouted, “Kent! Now!”

T. Laine threw … something. A black, sparkling net of magic shot out. Visible even to human eyes. Filling the hallway. Obscuring the witch at the end. We heard a thump and my heart stuck in the top of my throat. Is it going to be that easy?

Jason laughed.

T. Laine cursed.

Jason strode out of the fog. He shouted, “Fulmen!” and threw something at our witch.

T. Laine collapsed, her body jolting as if she was having a seizure. FireWind dropped beside Lainie, his body twitching like hers. A sensation of sleet slammed into me. My fingers clenched on my weapon, but I couldn’t fire. My fingers were frozen. The team simply dropped to the floor, the others shaking and twitching, though not as bad as T. Laine and FireWind, who were struggling even to breathe. Slowly, I fell.

I realized that those of us at the back of the hallway had absorbed less of the magic. I could think, I could breathe, but I was lying, immobilized. My body had fallen in an odd position, twisted. I could see Jason’s passage. He smelled like fire as he passed by me, the fire of a burning house, of burning garbage, burning filth. He was wearing three bracelets on his bare lower left arm, wide silver cuffs or bracers set with blackened stones. They glowed.

He reached Rick’s office and raised his cuffed wrist. Margot threw something at him. It hit Jason. He staggered back. Screamed a wordless challenge. He drew a gun from a pocket and fired, multiple shots, fast, frenzied, ripping all sound from the air.

Margot did not return fire. Jason took a step into the office. Moving fast, he bent and opened Rick’s cage. Leaned in and shoved his arm at the wereleopard. Rick was farther away from the source of the spell, not so deeply affected. He tried to pull away. Jason cut his arm on the leopard’s teeth. On purpose. He then raked the wound against Rick’s bloodied side. Infecting himself with the were-taint.

I struggled to grip my weapon. It felt like frozen steel in my bloodless hands. But I got my fingers around the butt. Lifted the muzzle from the floor. The weapon was shaking like a leaf in a winter wind.

Loriann threw herself down the short hallway. Leaped at her brother. Trying to stop him. In midair she shouted, “Quiesco!”

Jason whirled at the sound, weapon up. Firing.

Loriann fell.

Jason screamed. Reached for her.

“Run,” Loriann said, her lips moving in the single word, the sound buried beneath the weapon-fire deafness.

Jason stepped back, eyes wide.

Two grindylows flew down the hallway. They attacked Jason. Which made no sense. Except Jason had infected himself, given himself the were-taint, which was a killing offense for grindys.

Jason flinched. Raised his cuffs at the grindys. He shouted a wyrd. “Admordeo!”

The grindys hit … something. It sliced into them, spilling their blood. Jason reached out a finger and wiped up the grindy blood, then smeared it across the black stones on his cuffs.

My body weighed a ton. But … I tightened my hands on the grip. Steadied my weapon. Squeezed the trigger. The ten-millimeter bucked slightly and my hands dropped to the floor.

Power exploded into the hallway. Jason disappeared.

Like magic.

Loriann fell back against the wall. Blood pulsed through her clothes. She dropped next to me, and even over the deafness caused by the gunfire, I half heard her say, “Transport spell. He did it. He really did it. Oh shit. He shot me.”

And I had shot Jason. As my body returned to my control, I felt his blood on the floor.

FireWind sucked in a breath and said the words again, words that might have been cursing, or maybe angry prayer. He shoved to his feet and stumbled down the hallway, glancing at Loriann, stepping over the injured grindylows. Disappearing into Rick’s office. I wondered fleetingly how FireWind and I were able to breathe on our own.

I struggled up. Couldn’t find a way to make my hands holster my weapon. I didn’t have that much finesse yet, so I carried it with me to T. Laine, where I placed it on the floor. Lainie was still not breathing. She was turning blue. I rolled her to her side and slapped her on the back. With each slap, a sensation of icicle electricity rocketed through my hand, up my arm, and down my spine. It hurt.

On the third slap, T. Laine sucked in a breath that was part scream, part moan, and all pain. I made it to Occam and slapped him too. Then Tandy, and last I slapped JoJo, who cursed long and foul as she caught her first breath. Then I remembered the training I got at Spook School, to help someone breathe—to make a fist and rub their sternum, in the upper center of their chest. Too late now. I picked up my weapon, holstered it, and fumbled my way to Rick’s office.

I passed T. Laine, who had scrambled on all fours to kneel beside Loriann, opening a first-aid kit. She pressed a wad of gauze against the wound on the other witch’s chest. JoJo was calling for backup and medic for “multiple victims with GSWs.” GSWs. Gunshot wounds. Occam and Tandy were clearing the floor, weapons out, ready to fire, to make sure Jason was really gone, and not hiding.

I picked up a wad of bloody gauze from Loriann’s side and put it in a pocket. If I needed it, if I needed to feed her to the land … I stopped that thought and went to the opening to Rick’s office.

Rick was out of his cage and shifting back to human. He was naked, his lower half cat, his upper half human, and he was whispering, “Nononononono, sweet Mary, Mother of God, nonononono,” in a steady lament. I didn’t think were-creatures shifted halfway. It looked painful and anatomically impossible, but it was perhaps due to the wound in his human-shaped shoulder. It looked like a half-healed gunshot. The werecat would heal fine.

Margot was frozen in place. Hunched in the small space behind Rick’s desk and his cage. She had a GSW too. FireWind was bent over her and looked fierce. An expression I couldn’t have described except for intense, inscrutable, and detached—vibrantly emotionless. He was sniffing Margot’s arm wound, the action dog-like. He eased back and pressed a handkerchief to the bloody place, which looked like a long graze. Margot looked … horrified.

FireWind murmured, “It make not take. There may not have been enough.” Margot sobbed once, the sound arid and petrified. Rick continued his dirge.

I didn’t understand what was going on. Her wound wasn’t that bad.

I swiveled and saw the grindylows, curled up together like neon green kittens against the wall. Grindylows. Something stirred in the back of my brain. Grindys were the judges and executioners of the were world, and though there had been no grindylows in the Western Hemisphere until the last few years, it was thought that a litter had been born in the United States. The fuzzy little green killers were now changing the way were-creatures passed along the taint. When a were shared the were-taint, the grindys appeared and executed the offender. Not always and not always right away. There had been tales of times when the grindys hadn’t shown up at all.

Two grindys had attacked Jason. Two. One would have been enough. Why two?

I looked back at Rick’s office. Rick was shot. Margot was … The evidence settled in my mind, blooming, unfolding, revealing itself to me. Jason had fired at Rick. The round had passed through him, in cat form, picking up his blood, and wounded Margot. Margot stood a chance of going furry at the next full moon. Rick had infected her. And Jason had intentionally infected himself with Rick’s blood. Two evils. Jason was a witch; he might be able to hide himself from grindylows hunting him to pass judgment and kill him. But Rick was a dead cat walking if the grindys decided to pass judgment on him.

Quietly, I told Ayatas, Rick, and Margot what Jason had done. How Rick’s blood had been used to try to give himself the were-taint. This was why Rick had been targeted. So that Jason might infect himself. I went to the sleeping room, passing the null room on the way. It had been jimmied open, Loriann having used brute force and intellect where magic wouldn’t work.