Blood Relation (Arcane Casebook Book 6) Read online

  Benny led them to a table in the right-side corner and held out the chair for Sorsha.

  “I’m going to go find the cigarette girl,” Alex said once Sorsha was seated. “Give me a minute.”

  Instead of looking for cigarettes, Alex headed to the restroom and quickly chalked a door on the back wall. He’d decided not to give Sorsha the perfume right away, so he left the decorative blue box from Romero’s sitting on a little table he kept just inside his vault door. Moving quickly, he used a vault rune to open the door, reached in and grabbed the present, then shouldered the door closed. Relieved that he hadn’t attracted any unwanted attention, Alex headed back to the corner table.

  Sorsha was sitting with her back to him so she could look out at the city through the massive windows. In the distance, he could see the shining spire that was the Chrysler Building gleaming like a tower of fire in the last light of the setting sun.

  “That’s the strangest pack of cigarettes I’ve ever seen,” she said as Alex placed the box on the table.

  “I might have lied about the cigarettes,” he admitted. “Open it.”

  She gave him a penetrating look, as if some part of her expected there to be a rubber snake inside, then picked up the box and deftly untied the silver ribbon. When she removed the lid from the box, however, her expression changed.

  “Alex,” she gasped, reaching in and removing a sky-blue bottle with a winged fairy of glass on top of the stopper. The detail was exquisite. The fairy’s wings were made of different pieces of glass, making them appear to shimmer and change color depending on which way Sorsha turned it.

  With a smile of delight, Sorsha tipped the bottle upside down, then righted it and removed the stopper. She touched the bottom of the stopper to her wrist, then breathed in the fragrance.

  After a moment of reveling in the aroma, she replaced the fairy bottle in the box and put the lid back. When her eyes moved up to Alex’s, he would have sworn they were sparkling with an inner light.

  “I’m very impressed,” she said. “You really went all out. First you found out my favorite table and arranged for it and this,” she nodded at the box. “Stardust isn’t supposed to be available for weeks.”

  She reached up and touched her neck with her perfumed wrist, then held out her hand to him.

  “It’s been a while since we danced,” she said, “and I like this song.”

  Alex hadn’t been aware that music was even playing for the last few minutes but the mention of it sent the sound rushing in to fill his awareness. He didn’t know the song, but it was something he could dance to, so he took Sorsha’s hand and led her to the floor.

  When he took her in his arms, her eyes had gone from shining to smoldering.

  “Tell me about your latest case,” she said as he pulled her close.

  Alex blinked. The change from dancing to work made him stumble for a second.

  “You’re being too adorable,” Sorsha said, the smoldering look in her eyes dying back to an ember. “I think I’d better keep a clear head, and nothing focuses my mind like work.”

  Alex chuckled, but didn’t argue. He told her about the warehouse thefts and how he’d recovered the stolen property.

  “What I can’t figure out is what the thieves really wanted,” he concluded. “Obviously the thefts were cover for something else, but according to the foreman at each place, nothing else was taken.”

  “Maybe they wanted access to the warehouses themselves,” Sorsha said. “A dry run for another theft.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea, but Alex shook his head.

  “If that’s it, they made a mistake,” he said. “At least two of the warehouses have changed the way their night watchmen patrol as a result of the thefts.”

  “You said that the thieves broke open a bunch of shipping crates looking for what they eventually stole,” Sorsha observed. “Maybe what they were after was in those other crates.”

  “Then why didn’t the owners report something stolen?”

  Sorsha chewed her lip in a way that made Alex want to kiss her.

  “Maybe they didn’t need to steal anything,” she guessed. “Maybe they just needed access to whatever it was.”

  Alex thought about that for a long minute, then slowly nodded.

  “I need to find out what was in the other crates,” he declared. “I bet those were mostly a diversion too. Only one crate in each warehouse held their intended target.”

  Now Sorsha nodded.

  “They must have had to open the crate they wanted to get at what was inside, so they broke open others to hide it.”

  “And stole something easy to carry to make it look like that’s what they were after all along,” Alex concluded.

  She beamed up at him and this time the urge to kiss her was almost overwhelming. Clearly she felt it too, because she let go of his arm and quickly stepped back.

  “That’s enough dancing for now,” she said. “Let’s order dinner.”

  Alex escorted her back to their table where they found a waiter and a bottle of champagne waiting for them.

  “Compliments of the house,” the man said, pouring the champagne into glasses for them. Since Sorsha had been to the Rainbow Room before, Alex let her order for him and the waiter withdrew. Once he was gone, Sorsha picked up the perfume box and made a motion as if she were setting it on an invisible shelf. When she withdrew her hand, the box vanished entirely.

  “That always amazes me,” Alex said. “How you make that look so easy.”

  Sorsha laughed.

  “It is easy,” she said, sipping her champagne. Right after, she made a face. “Must be domestic,” she said, setting it aside.

  Alex took a drink, but he’d never had champagne before, so it seemed okay to him.

  “Do sorcerers have a problem with backlash?” he asked, remembering the vanishing box.

  “That’s an odd question,” Sorsha said.

  Alex explained about the blood rune and the crumbling crime scene.

  “You had a case like that and you told me about your warehouse robbery instead?” she asked, her eyebrow quivering on the brink of her annoyed expression.

  “Bloody crime scenes didn’t seem like good dance conversation,” he responded.

  “Well, sorcerers don’t really experience backlash,” Sorsha said, a lazy smile spreading across her face. “With us, we either can do something, or we can’t. There are stories of sorcerers who just disappear, and some say that it’s because they tried some great magic that was beyond their power.”

  “So it’s possible?” Alex asked. “Backlash, I mean.”

  Sorsha shrugged.

  “I guess,” she said, losing interest in the topic. “But I…I doubt it. It’s like moving things in and out of a dimensional pocket,” she said, reaching out and miming picking up the perfume box. “We just think about what we want to do and…”

  Sorsha’s jaw dropped open and she stared at her empty hand in shock.

  “What is it?” Alex demanded. Sorsha’s hand seemed to move and twist as he looked at it.

  “I can’t use my magic,” she said at last. Her eyes snapped to his with a look of panic. “I can’t use my magic.”

  It took Alex a moment to understand what she’d said and, now that he thought about it, his head seemed fuzzy. By the time he figured out why, he figured. he was almost too late.

  He stood and offered Sorsha his hand.

  “Pretend we’re going dancing again,” he hissed.

  “But Alex,” she said in a strangled voice, her eyes still wide as saucers.

  “We’ve been drugged,” he said, fighting to keep his balance. “We need to get out of here fast, now stand up and take my arm.”

  She wavered for a second, then seemed to regain some of her faculties. Grabbing his hand, she got to her feet.

  “Follow my lead,” he said, as he grabbed the champagne bottle out of the ice bath.

  Walking slowly, Alex made his way along the back wall, then turned and headed
toward the bar behind the dance floor. As he went, he spotted at least two men that seemed to be moving with them. Neither were remarkable and he was having trouble focusing on them, so he focused on leading Sorsha instead. She stumbled and he had to get a good grip under her arm to keep her upright.

  “I can’t teleport us away, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Sorsha said, her speech slurred and halting.

  As they drew even with the hall that led back to the kitchens, Alex turned, dragging Sorsha inside. At the end of the hallway on the left was the men’s room and Alex ran for it, pulling Sorsha along with him.

  “What are we doing in here?” she said with an amused laugh. She sounded drunk.

  Alex pulled out his rune book and fumbled for a vault rune. Fortunately he’d been in such a hurry before that he’d left the doorway chalked on the back wall of the restroom.

  “I’ll check the kitchen,” he heard someone say, then the outer door was pushed open and one of the men he’d noticed came in. He had his hand inside his coat, no doubt gripping a pistol, but when he saw Alex and Sorsha, he turned to call out to his companion.

  Alex slammed the heavy champagne bottle into the man’s jaw, and he crumpled to the floor.

  “That was amazing,” Sorsha purred, leaning heavily against him.

  It took Alex a minute to find a vault rune. It would have gone faster had the book not been swimming from side to side in his hands.

  “That won’t work,” Sorsha giggled as Alex licked the rune paper and stuck it to the wall. “You won’t be able to use your magic.”

  “That’s the…the great thing about runes,” Alex managed to say as he reached for his lighter. “You only need magic…to write them.”

  He touched the flame of his squeeze lighter to the paper and it burst into flame. A moment later he felt the smooth metal of his vault door as he leaned against it, struggling to stay awake for just a few moments more.

  14

  Hangovers

  Alex shivered, reaching out to grab his blanket but not finding it. For some reason, his side hurt and his jaw ached. He tried to wake up, but couldn’t seem to manage it. The cold began to seep into him in earnest and he felt the first stages of real panic. He was asleep, and he knew he was asleep, but so far, he was powerless to change that.

  The creeping cold finally managed to pull him up to a groggy awareness. Somewhere above him a light was shining brightly. Not with the warm, yellow color of sunlight, but with the more amber shade of a magelight. Squinting, he finally managed to focus his eyes, revealing a ceiling of plain gray stone with a simple magelight suspended from it. Since magelights received electricity through Barton’s power projector, there weren’t any wires on the ceiling, just the light.

  Alex recognized the ceiling, of course. He’d dug it out of solid rock with his own hands. Rolling painfully onto his side, Alex found himself lying on the bare floor of his vault, in the aisle between his work area and his library.

  The vault was naturally cool, like being underground, and the floor was cool to the touch. Alex had offset this by using rugs under his drafting table and the comfortable chair in his library. A boiler stone in the fake fireplace would heat the vault if it got too uncomfortable, but Alex only used it when he wanted to read in the library.

  Shivering again, Alex pressed himself up onto his elbow, which took far more effort than it should have. He was about to try sitting up when a hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled him onto his back again.

  “-n’t go,” Sorsha’s voice slurred from his right. “S’ cold.”

  She lay on the carpet just beyond the bare floor. She was curled up on her side with her arm now across Alex’s chest. Her hair fell in a white-blond curtain, obscuring most of her face, and it shifted and moved with her breath.

  “S’ better,” she mumbled, pulling herself close.

  “Sorsha,” Alex said, a bit more forcefully than he intended.

  The sorceress’ head shot up and she looked around in confusion.

  “Alex?” she began, but as her eyes found his face, she blushed to the roots of her hair. “Wha-what happened?”

  Alex forced himself to sit up over his body’s protestations.

  “This,” he said, reaching for the heavy champagne bottle that lay a few feet away. “You didn’t like it, remember?”

  She looked confused, then nodded.

  “Someone drugged it,” she managed. “Kept me from using my magic.”

  Alex had a rush of memories involving dragging Sorsha into the men’s lavatory at the Rainbow Room and managing to make it into his vault. The blank wall where his door would appear was only ten feet from where he lay, a mute testament to how close they’d both come to being grabbed by whoever drugged the champagne.

  “You got us in here,” Sorsha said, putting it together. “Good work. Now help me up.”

  Alex wasn’t sure he could get up himself, but after a couple unsteady starts, he managed it. He pulled Sorsha to her feet, but she immediately lost her balance and he had to grab her to keep her from falling.

  “Someone wanted you pretty badly,” she said, leaning against him until she got her balance.

  “I don’t think so,” Alex said, his head finally beginning to clear. “Whatever they spiked our drinks with was designed to stop a sorcerer from using magic. That suggests they were after you.”

  “How did they know I’d be there? Did you tell your friend who you were bringing?”

  “No,” Alex admitted. “But somebody knew. Remember our table? You said it was your favorite, but I didn’t know you had a favorite. I just told Benny to get a good table. What are the odds he chose your favorite without knowing it was you who was coming?”

  “Makes sense,” she said, pushing away from him and standing on her own.

  “That government official that you’re supposed to be protecting,” Alex said. “Just how important is he?”

  “You think this is about my security detail?”

  Alex shrugged at that.

  “Trying to grab a sorceress out of a crowded restaurant takes guts,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing desperate people would try.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how they knew I’d be there,” she said.

  “I bet one of your FBI minders was worried about you going out,” Alex guessed. “That Agent Hill fellow comes to mind. He didn’t seem very happy about me being there, but maybe he was worried you were exposed. Maybe he called the Rainbow Room just to make sure I actually had a table there?”

  Sorsha shrugged, then nodded.

  “That might explain how the nightclub knew, but it would be one heck of a coincidence if whoever tried to grab us just happened to work at the Rainbow Room. How did they find out?”

  “You’ve got a leak inside the FBI,” Alex said. It was the only answer that made sense.

  “I vetted everyone on my team personally,” she said, her brows dropping into an angry scowl. She’d never gotten over being betrayed by Agent Warner.

  “But the FBI keeps track of you,” Alex pointed out. “That means there’s some kind of schedule or calendar somewhere. I bet whoever verified your evening out, called it in to the official schedule in case they had to find you in a hurry. Whoever the bad guys are, they’ve got someone at the New York FBI branch with access to that calendar.”

  Sorsha scowled and tapped her teeth with her fingernail as she thought.

  “That makes sense,” she said, sounding unsure. “There are too many Agents in the field office here to figure out who the leak might be. I’ll have to cut communication with them.” She reached out and took the heavy champagne bottle from Alex, holding it up to the light.

  “Good work bringing this,” she said, sloshing the bottle from side to side. “There’s still some champagne in here, enough for the FBI to test it. The main office in D.C.,” she added hastily.

  Alex looked around but couldn’t find his hat, then he remembered that he’d checked it at the Rainbow Room, along with Sorsha’
s fur wrap. Sorsha seemed shorter than when they’d been dancing, and he noticed that her shoes were missing as well, lost during their flight from the nightclub table. He tried to picture what it must have looked like, him drawing Sorsha through the club and into the men’s room only to vanish.

  The tabloids are going to have a field day.

  “Is that the time?” Sorsha asked, a note of alarm in her voice.

  Alex followed her gaze to the clock on the library wall that read nine-fifteen.

  “Yes.”

  “I need to call my team,” Sorsha declared, taking a deep breath and standing a bit straighter. “Agent Redhorn is probably at your office as we speak, demanding to know where I am.”

  “Why would he go there instead of my apartment?” Alex asked. He was being deliberately provocative and Sorsha blushed slightly.

  “He…uh,” she stammered.

  “This way,” Alex said, heading over to his drafting table. When he reached it, he pressed the call key on the chrome intercom box.

  “It’s about time,” Sherry chided him when her voice emerged from the little speaker. “I’ve had people calling for you all morning.” She sounded stern, but then her voice became amused and conspiratorial. “Apparently you and Miss Kincaid made quite a scene last night.”

  Sorsha groaned and put her head in her hands.

  “Is that…Is Miss Kincaid with you?” Sherry asked.

  “Long story, but yes,” Alex said.

  “I’ve had a few calls looking for her as well. Mostly from that cute Agent Redhorn. He said if I heard from either of you, I was to have you call him right away.”

  “Thank you, Miss Knox,” Sorsha said.

  “When will you be coming in to work, boss?” Sherry asked without even sniggering.

  Alex was about to answer that he’d be right out, but Sorsha spoke first.

  “He’ll be with you in five minutes,” she said, then flipped the key that turned off the microphone.

  Alex raised an eyebrow but Sorsha just picked up the telephone next to the intercom.

  “Can I call my office from this?” she said.