The Secret Coin (Accessory to Magic Book 3) Page 4

  The troll roared and scrambled toward her, blood pouring down his face and staining his teeth as he sneered at her. “He’ll come to us. And when he does, you’ll be dust!”

  Chapter Four

  “Jess, take him out!” Anthony shouted, still spraying attacks from the top of the kitchen counter.

  Jessica had no way to tell him she couldn’t do what the former Corpus members all still thought she could do. She had no time.

  The troll cackled, his yellow eyes wild as he gripped her legs again and tried to crawl up onto her. Hot blood splattered her black jeans. She couldn’t get out from under him fast enough without trying something.

  Jessica’s hand lashed out and found purchase on the troll’s face. Not exactly purchase, though, with his nose broken and his mouth and cheeks already slick with blood. He snarled behind her hand, summoning some glittering attack in his own, and she unleashed whatever she had left.

  Her arm blazed with buzzing, burning energy. The troll shrieked before she fully realized she pumped her half-strength, sputtering magic into his face. Thick tendrils of smoke squeezed out between her palm and the troll’s disintegrating flesh, which wafted into the air as tiny, fragmented particles peeling away from his head and fluttering through the room like a kicked-up pile of ash.

  Jessica roared beneath the heat of her magic flaring through her—and something else. Her chest burned fiercely, not just where the bank’s blue pendant rested beneath her shirt but wider, coursing up and out toward her shoulders and neck. She couldn’t feel her hand.

  Sucking in a sharp breath, she struggled to rise to her feet and found her right leg refusing to do what it was told.

  What the hell? Her magic wasn’t that messed up. Was it?

  She stumbled toward the pedestal again, where the purple light of Leandras’ gúlmai shimmered from beneath the brown leather. Now she couldn’t feel her leg.

  “Whoa, whoa.” Cedrick stood six feet away against the shattered glass shelves along the back wall, but the distance wasn’t an issue for a changeling. His arm shot out toward her, elongating impossibly far to catch her before she would have toppled face-first into the pedestal. Then the rest of his body quickly caught up to her, and he helped right her again. “What the hell, Jess?”

  “Not the time, man,” she growled, pushing him aside. Then she reached for the glowing case beneath her jacket and quickly wrapped every surface in the leather. For a split second, she held her breath, hoping Leandras’ enchantment of her jacket would hold. They’d had to cast the thing together before she’d left, both of them struggling to control what little magic each of them still contained.

  But the gúlmai didn’t explode or incinerate her. The only thing that assured her she was still alive after taking this thing was the faint glow of the fae’s magic seeping through her jacket, the heavy breathing of her friends scattered around the penthouse apartment, and the growing pain above her hip.

  Only then did she realize how silent it was.

  Anthony hopped off the counter with a crunch of shattered glass beneath his boots. He gazed at the destroyed living room, ran a hand through his shaggy hair, and nodded. “Looks like your powerful friend has some pretty powerful enchantments.”

  “Yeah.” Jessica swallowed, her mouth surprisingly dry. “Thankfully.”

  “Got ’em all.” Damian stalked across the floor strewn with glass and bodies and ripped-upholstery stuffing. He didn’t wait for any of the others before making a beeline for the front door.

  “Time to go.” Anthony nodded at the front door.

  Rebecca dusted her hands, lifting her chin as she headed across the room. The heel of her shoe came down hard on a dead Requiem member’s back, and she stepped up on top of him before her footsteps clicked away toward the exit.

  Jessica couldn’t stop staring at the glowing purple light within her jacket. Not until Cedrick grabbed her elbow and urged her forward.

  “You know the drill, Jess. Before anyone else finds out we’re here. Come on.”

  She forced herself not to look at the bodies littering the floor. There was no bank to swallow up the evidence of what she’d done this time. No cleanup to get working on. When Jensen and the Requiem found these bodies in Leandras’ apartment, they’d know exactly what had happened. Maybe even who had done it, if there was anything left of the troll who’d tried to eliminate her by the time anyone else bothered to come looking.

  Feeling slowly returned to her hand, bringing pins and needles with it as she slipped out of Leandras’ apartment behind the others and limped toward the elevator, breathing slowly.

  Cedrick made sure to shut the door behind him. That was their thing—get a changeling to open and close all the doors, because he didn’t have to worry about leaving prints behind. Not when he could eradicate them from his own flesh at will.

  The elevator doors opened immediately when Rebecca pushed the call button, then they all stepped quickly inside. Still last, Cedrick reached up into the corner of the hall beside the elevator to switch the security camera back on. His unnaturally long arm snaked through the closing elevator doors before returning to its normal length, then they descended.

  Jessica’s stomach lurched more than it should have when the elevator moved. Something was wrong, but her head spun too much to put her finger on it. Or maybe it was just the fact that if any single part of her jacket slipped from around the gúlmai, she and every other magical in this elevator would cease to exist.

  “Check-in,” Anthony muttered. “Everybody good?”

  The elevator was silent.

  Jessica blinked heavily. Her legs would give out any minute. She was sure. When had she gotten this weak? What they’d just done in there was nothing compared to the higher-bounty jobs they’d done in the past.

  Except for in the past, she’d had the full extent of her magic on hand. In the past, she’d been a vestrohím—the last face seen by anyone who was stupid enough to stand in Corpus’ way.

  “What was that?” Rebecca muttered, staring at the seam where the elevator doors connected.

  Jessica swallowed. “Like I said. Been a long time.”

  “Bullshit.” The elf woman tossed her hair away from her face but still didn’t look at Jessica.

  Cedrick cleared his throat. “You hesitated—”

  “That wasn’t hesitation, man.” Anthony shoved his hands deeply into his pockets and slowly turned his head to scowl down at Jessica. “You didn’t jump in at all.”

  “I jumped in to grab this.” She would have lifted the leather bundle for emphasis if she’d had the strength. But that was quickly seeping out of her too. “I—”

  “You froze. Only took down that troll ’cause he was on top of you. Hell, we might as well have gone in without you.”

  “Not to grab this stupid thing,” she muttered, blinking heavily again. Why did her hip hurt so much?

  “You didn’t call us in for heavy lifting, Jess. You called us in as a team.”

  Damian grunted. “More fun for me.”

  “Yeah, we all know you like to be the center of attention.” Cedrick scoffed and punched the Umbál’s shoulder. “But that’s not the point.”

  The elevator stopped at the lobby, and the doors opened with a ding.

  “The point is Jessica didn’t lift a finger to—”

  “Get to the car,” Rebecca said as she stepped onto the lobby’s polished marble floor. “She’d better have a good explanation for what happened back there.”

  Cedrick and Anthony exchanged a quick glance as Damian stepped out, then they followed in tense silence. Jessica shuffled slowly out of the elevator. The lobby floor seemed farther and farther away with every step.

  Why couldn’t she walk in a straight line? Why couldn’t she feel anything?

  She stumbled sideways, and her back thumped against the wall beside the elevators. The stabbing pain in her hip ignited at the contact, and she cried out despite how hard she clenched her teeth.

  “What ar
e you doing?” Rebecca hissed and spun around. Her eyes widened.

  Jessica felt herself slowly sinking to the ground but couldn’t get her body to respond.

  The rest of her friends turned around to look at her too. Cedrick’s face paled instantly, and he leapt toward her just as she thumped against the cold floor, the entire world spinning around her.

  “Jesus Christ, Jess. Come on, we gotta get you up.” He hauled her to her feet again, and when she noticed the look of horror on Anthony’s face, she turned slightly over her shoulder to see the wall smeared with blood.

  “Is that…mine?”

  “Yeah, apparently. What the hell happened?”

  Jessica grunted. “We have to—”

  “I’m on it. Just get her to the car.” Anthony stood a foot from the wall now, his hands outstretched toward the bloodstain on the clean, off-white paint. A faint light shimmered around his palms, and Jessica couldn’t even hold herself up anymore to make sure he’d covered up her idiotic DNA trail. She couldn’t even walk.

  “Okay, I need a little help here,” Cedrick hissed as he hauled her stumbling body across the floor.

  Someone’s shoes squeaked across the marble, and she realized they were her shoes. Scuffing across the floor. By their tops. She barely had time to consider the fact that none of them had ever had to carry her out of a job before. But that was exactly what Damian did as he scooped her off her feet with Leandras’ jacket-wrapped gúlmai cradled in her lap. Then everything went dark.

  Everything hurt when she came to, though fortunately, wherever she was now was darkly lit and didn’t immediately blind her when her eyes fluttered open.

  “No, I don’t know what happened,” Anthony hissed in a harsh whisper. “We didn’t exactly have a heart-to-heart over the phone. She said she needed our help, and I just figured it was another job. That’s it.”

  “She needs help, all right.” That was Rebecca, though Jessica couldn’t see any of her friends from where she lay on something soft and a little scratchy. “Just not the kind we thought. Someone needs to ask her about it.”

  “Yeah, when she wakes up, go right ahead.” Anthony snorted. “You know Jess. She wouldn’t answer a goddamn thing about her personal life even if we tried to torture it out of her.”

  “Maybe we should—”

  “Christ, don’t say shit like that,” Cedrick whispered. “Come on. She got us into that place, and she got us out.”

  “And she clearly doesn’t have the same means of doing that the way we thought she did.” Rebecca cleared her throat, and the room fell silent. “You guys notice how long it’s taking her to heal, right? Something’s really wrong. If she has some other kind of stake in this, someone on her tail or she’s caught up in—”

  “She took the fall for all of us, Rebecca.” Anthony’s voice took on the low, commanding tone he only used when shit got tense and he was the only one stepping up to take control of the situation. “No way did she lead us right back into something just to snare us up in whatever else she’s got going on. No way.”

  “She did get out early,” the elf woman snapped. “You know how that happens? When people make deals with the MJC—”

  “I told you,” Jessica croaked, shifting on whatever mattress they’d placed her on and trying to sit up. “Early parole for good behavior.”

  She had to put a stop to all this speculation. No, it wasn’t exactly surprising that Rebecca would jump immediately to the worst-case scenario; the elf had never really liked her from the start. But Jessica couldn’t lie there feeling like death—and probably looking like it too—while her friends had a little powwow over whether or not she was following in Mickey’s footsteps. Whether or not she’d betrayed them too.

  “Shit,” Cedrick whispered. He was the first one at her side and reached out to touch her arm. “You probably shouldn’t get up right now, Jess. You’re still, uh…”

  “Healing?” She gripped his arm and used it to pull herself up all the way until she sat hunched over her lap on the bed. “Yeah. I noticed.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” From anyone else, it would have sounded like an accusation. But there was no malice when it came from Rebecca, who might’ve been the bluntest of them all.

  Or she just had the shittiest bedside manner.

  “That’s a short question with a really long answer.” Jessica looked up at her friends, then glanced around the room. A small living room, where they’d laid her out on a bunch of towels on the couch—not a bed. Behind Cedrick, the coffee table was littered with old beer cans and empty chip bags. And a bong. She would’ve laughed if the searing pain in her hip didn’t threaten to split open with the slightest movement. “Where are we?”

  Cedrick gave her a thin, humorless smile. “My place.”

  “It was closest,” Rebecca added, as if she had to make sure everyone knew the changeling’s tiny, dirty bachelor’s apartment would never be her first choice.

  “Huh. Like what you’ve done with the place.”

  Cedrick’s smile grew at her comment. “Yeah, well. I’m working on it. And you should work on resting up so you can—”

  “So you can tell us what the hell happened back there with your magic, Jessica.” Rebecca folded her arms and raised her eyebrows. “Because that went sour really quickly.”

  “Give it a rest, huh?” Anthony shot the elf woman a sidelong glance and shook his head. “She just woke up.”

  “And now’s the perfect time to explain why she didn’t do her job in that penthouse.”

  “Hey, she did her job,” Cedrick shouted, turning around in his crouch beside the couch to glare at Rebecca. “She got us through the wards and snatched that glowing purple box none of us could touch.”

  “And a knife in the hip for her troubles.” Rebecca glared at Jessica and shook her head. “Which would never have stopped you before.”

  “A knife?” Still trying to blink away the grogginess of pain and what was apparently more blood loss than she’d considered, Jessica reached back toward her throbbing right hip and felt a quick patch-up job of gauze and medical tape beneath her shirt and the waistband of her pants.

  “Yes. A knife.” The elf woman tossed her blonde hair over her shoulder. “You’re lucky I haven’t completely forgotten how to cast emergency healing spells. But it’s not enough. And you shouldn’t need healing spells in the first place.”

  “I know.” Jessica scanned the couch, then the floor. “Where’s the gúlmai?”

  “Right. Go ahead and keep deflecting, Jessica. Again.”

  “Will you let up already?” Anthony shouted, storming toward Rebecca. “She could’ve died.”

  “But she didn’t. Thanks to the rest of us. And she can’t even give us a thank you for it.”

  “Rebecca,” Jessica said sternly, raising her voice. When the elf woman looked sharply at her, Jessica sighed. “Thank you. Now where the hell is that magical bomb wrapped up inside my jacket?”

  Rebecca only stared at her, but Cedrick cleared his throat and nodded toward the tiny, cramped “dining room” beside the even smaller kitchen. “It’s on the table.”

  “Great.” Jessica reached into her pocket and painstakingly pulled out her cell phone to check the time—1:23 a.m. “Shit, I really have to go—”

  “We can’t just let you leave like this,” Anthony said. “You need to rest.”

  She shoved Cedrick’s hands away when he tried to guide her back down onto the couch, so he stood with her instead. “If I stay here to rest, the friend of mine that thing belongs to is gonna end up dead in my…living room.”

  She’d almost said “bank”—again—but she just didn’t have the time to answer the barrage of questions she knew that little slip would bring raining down on her head.

  “I have to get it to him tonight. I told you guys this was—”

  “Yeah, life or death, Jess. We get it.” Anthony took two steps after her as she headed for the small dining table and stopped. “But it really looks like
it’s coming down to that for you too.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Damian sat at the table with his back to the far corner of the apartment, staring at the bundle of her brown leather jacket still wrapped around the volatile casing of Leandras’ magic. The purple glow from inside flickered across his face, casting shadows around his deepening frown. “I don’t like this thing.”

  Cedrick snorted. “Says the guy who’s been sitting there staring at it since we got here.”

  The Umbál ignored him and looked slowly up at Jessica as she approached. “A friend wouldn’t ask a friend to pick up something like this as a favor.”

  A knot clenched in Jessica’s gut, but she forced it aside. Or at least forced herself to ignore it. “I know, man. And I’m sorry I put you guys up to this, but now it’s over. Just a one-time thing. So thank you.”

  When she reached for her bundled jacket glowing with Leandras’ magic, Damian put a huge, warm hand down on her arm to stop her. His frown deepened even more, but his dark eyes were shimmering with tears. That sight alone made her freeze. “I meant the asshole this thing belongs to. He shouldn’t have asked you to do it.”

  That took her by surprise, but it wasn’t anything new she hadn’t thought of on her own. “This was a one-time thing for him too. I made a promise, so…”

  Damian finally released her arm with a grunt and kept staring at her with shimmering eyes as she gathered the gúlmai into her arms.

  “Jess,” Anthony started, “whatever’s going on, you know we’re here for you, right?”

  Rebecca glanced at him with wide eyes. “We are?”

  With a growl, Damian turned in his chair and swung his giant arm toward Rebecca to point at her. “Either quit being a bitch or shut up.”

  She glared right back at him but didn’t say anything else.

  Jessica had to get out of here before the whole crew broke down and started going at each other’s throats. All with her at the center of the storm.