Edge of Magic (Tara Knightley Series Book 1) Page 3

  “Hey, Nolan,” he said. “Sorry I was a jerk earlier. Want to watch TV after I shower?”

  I turned, and my younger nephew peeked around the doorframe at us. His PJs were covered with footballs, baseballs, basketballs, and soccer balls. He’d gotten them for Christmas, and four months later they were already a bit short. Tall for a ten-year-old, he was a phenom athlete who played up an age group. The fees for his club sports were about equivalent to a car payment. Yet another reason I couldn’t abandon my well-paying job with Katerina.

  “What’s grab-ass?” Nolan asked, coming into the doorway. “How do you play it?”

  “We’ll tell you when you’re older,” I said, and was reminded that I’d have to have a conversation with Dom later about condoms. It wouldn’t be the first such talk we’d had, but I liked to do a refresher every so often, especially when it looked like there was a new girl in the picture. The condom talk would have to wait until Nolan wasn’t around. He’d already been excluded enough for one night.

  Nolan came in, and Dom ruffled his younger brother’s hair. Dom was the only one who could still get away with that. Nolan idolized his brother. Sometimes I wished he’d picked a better role model. Dom wasn’t a bad person, but he had a hedonistic streak, which could make him selfish at times. Plus, he was a seventeen-year-old guy, and therefore, mostly ruled by his hormones at the moment.

  “Not too late, guys, and keep the volume down,” I said. I gave Dom a pointed look. “Okay?”

  “Not too late. Volume down,” he repeated.

  He reached up and turned on the slightly scuffed floor model TV perched on his dresser, a seventeenth birthday present from me and Felicity. He’d wanted a car.

  Nolan jumped up onto Dom’s bed and started flipping channels, while Dom followed me out into the hallway.

  He started to turn right toward the bathroom but stopped and looked back at me. “You’re still pretty cool, I guess.” He shot me his thousand-watt smile, the one that made girls like Little Miss Honey Blond want to sneak into his room.

  I clasped my hands at my chest and swooned. “Ohmygod, really?” I whispered. “You think I’m cool?” I pretended to hyperventilate.

  He turned, lifted one leg, and let out a fart in my direction. I jumped for the stairs before it could reach me.

  “You’re disgusting!” I whisper-yelled at him as I made my retreat.

  “I know,” he said gleefully and then disappeared into the bathroom.

  In the dark kitchen, I retrieved my heavy utility belt from the chair. I made a detour over to Mom’s room and found the door closed and the strip of space at the bottom of it dark. Even a decade after the illness that had nearly killed her, I was still tempted to slip in and make sure she was okay. We’d learned the illness was most likely genetic, very rare, and apparently triggered by the magic explosion of the Cataclysm. If not for that event, we might have never known about the disease. It was so rare, it didn’t even have an official name.

  I tiptoed away from Mom’s door, crossed the living room and went back upstairs. The shower in the bathroom was still running, and a glance toward the kids’ end of the hallway showed the flickering light of the TV in Dom and Nolan’s room.

  Dom and I had an interesting relationship. At just shy of a decade apart, I was sometimes more an older sister to him than an aunt, depending on the situation. Dom, as the oldest of Felicity’s four kids and the de facto man of the house, had to grow up fast in some ways. I understood that all too well. Even though my sister was a lot older than me, like Dom, I’d had to take on responsibilities way beyond my years.

  Hell, I’d sworn a blood oath to Grant Shaw when I was Dom’s age.

  Which reminded me, I needed to find out what the bounty was for and how I could get in on it. I was having second thoughts about taking a leave of absence from Katerina Volkov’s, though. Nolan had baseball camp coming up, as well as spring soccer tournaments. Fees for Dominic’s first semester at Boise State University were due in a couple of months. And Luna, Nolan’s twin sister, wanted to attend theater camps this summer. Felicity’s fifteen-year-old daughter Sasha probably needed something, too. Maybe another batch of the black eyeliner she’d been using lately to draw Sharpie-like lines around her eyes. Or a pair of the expensive jeans that came already riddled with holes that all girls her age wore.

  Sighing, I rubbed my temples as I headed to the bedroom where Felicity was already asleep. Sharing a room with a sibling might have seemed weird at my age, but a proper bedroom was a step up from the living room sofa I’d slept on as a kid. Back before Felicity had the twins, she, Mom, Dominic, Sasha, and I had crammed ourselves into one side of a duplex. With only two bedrooms, I never got a real room. We’d had to move to a bigger place once the twins were born. In our current rented house, Mom was the only one who had her own room. I was fine with that. She deserved to have private space, and I didn’t have time to hang out at home much, anyway. And hey, I got to sleep in an actual bed. I’d moved up in the world.

  I slipped past the bedroom door, closed it quietly, and stripped to my underwear and sports bra, letting my clothes fall on the floor.

  There was a piece of paper on my pillow. I picked it up and tilted it toward the window so I could read the note by the light of the streetlamps coming in through the curtains. I recognized Fel’s handwriting.

  I’m sooo sorry I tried to call you while you were working! I’m an idiot, and there’s no excuse for compromising your job. There’s a baggie of apology cookies for you hidden on top of the fridge. I’M SO SORRY!

  The fact that Felicity had managed to make cookies and any of them survived my four nieces and nephews was near miraculous. My sister must have stayed up late and baked after the younger ones went to bed. She was right, the call had been careless, but I should have shut my phone off before approaching the Joyners’.

  I slid into the cool sheets of my bed and burrowed under the blankets.

  Tomorrow, I’d figure out what the hell Shaw was trying to keep me out of.

  Chapter 3

  SATURDAY MORNINGS IN the Knightley household were usually about lounging around in pajamas, eating colorful cereal that would rot your teeth. It was the only day of the week the kids were allowed to eat sugary cereals, and they took full advantage, usually emptying a couple of boxes between the four of them. The rest of the week, Mom and Felicity had them on what I called the Earth Goddess diet—a huge variety of fruits and veggies, unconventional grains like kamut and quinoa, and lots of legumes. Meat was strictly grass fed, pasture raised, wild caught, and free range. It wasn’t a cheap way to eat, but Mom and Fel insisted that it was important, so we only ate meat a couple times a week and we devoted a large chunk of our budget to groceries.

  “There’s some Lucky Charms left, Aunt Tara,” Luna, my ten-year-old niece, offered from the living room sofa as she spotted me descending the stairs.

  She sat cross-legged with a bowl in her lap. The TV was playing some cartoon that featured characters with giant, dilated pupils. Anime? Manga? I didn’t know the difference.

  “Thanks, Looney Tunes,” I said.

  She wrinkled her nose and grinned at the nickname as I went past into the kitchen.

  Nolan, shorts and a practice jersey, was at the counter pouring milk over a giant bowl of Froot Loops. Soccer cleats, socks, and shin guards spilled out of a duffel bag on the floor near the door that led from the kitchen to the laundry room.

  “Not exactly a breakfast of champions,” I said to him, reaching for a mug with one hand and the coffee carafe with the other. “You’re an athlete. You need better fuel than high fructose corn syrup and blue dye number six.”

  He shot me a guilty look, and I arched a brow at him.

  “I know,” he said. “Only one bowl, then I’ll have seven-grain porridge.”

  He scurried out with his Loops, leaving the jug of organic milk on the counter. I splashed some in my coffee before sticking it in the fridge.

  Mom breezed in, her graying bl
ond hair piled in a messy bun on the crown of her head. Her slim, worn jeans hugged her thin frame, and the loose cut of her batik-print blouse partially hid her frailness. Even before the illness that had struck her after the Cataclysm, she’d never been particularly strong. Felicity took after her in both appearance and to a lesser extent in frailty. I looked nothing like them. I was muscular and curvy, and my skin had an inhuman golden tone to it—another quirk of my Fae blood—in contrast to the peachy fair skin of my mother and sister.

  My mother gave me a smile, the outer corners of her eyes crinkling. She raised her hand to brush a strand of hair behind her ear, giving me a glimpse of the simple band inlaid with a thin strip of white stone she wore on her middle finger. It was the Faerie-magicked charm I’d gotten from Grant Shaw that had saved her life. My sister wore an identical one.

  “What’s on your agenda for the day?” she asked.

  “I’m going into Faerie.” I said it bluntly, probably more so than was necessary.

  Her mouth tightened as she went to get a mug for herself. “Were you summoned?”

  “No.”

  She filled her mug with coffee and added a dropperful of the liquid herbal sweetener she preferred.

  “Why are you going?” She faced me and brought her mug up to her lips, blowing across the steaming surface of the dark liquid.

  “There’s a rumor about a big job Grant Shaw’s put out.”

  She grimaced when I mentioned Shaw’s name. “Wouldn’t he have summoned you if he wanted you on it?”

  My mother had always been extremely wary of Faerie, barely even acknowledging my Fae blood when I was a kid. But since I’d sworn a blood oath to Shaw, her disapproval—of Faerie, all things Fae, and Shaw in particular—had deepened to something akin to quiet loathing. It wasn’t that she wasn’t grateful for what I’d done. She just hated what it had cost me. And she went downright grim anytime I had to go across the hedge into Faerie, her distrust flaring anew whenever Shaw came up.

  I sighed. “He summons me when he wants me specifically, but there are other jobs that come up, too. Ones where he wants his people competing.”

  Her face pinched. “That sounds dangerous.”

  “Yeah. It can be. But I was trained by the best. I know how to take care of myself, Mom. I’ve been doing this for a long time. You don’t need to worry.”

  Damn, but I was way too old to be having these kinds of talks. Too old to be cornered by my mother in the kitchen on a Saturday morning. Not for the first time, I felt a visceral stab of longing to have my own place.

  “Of course I worry.” Her pale-blue eyes turned sad. “I’m your mother. It’s my job to worry.”

  I tried to tamp down my impatience. “This could be a chance to pay off a lot of what I owe.”

  She nodded, her gaze sinking downward to the floor. The air in the kitchen suddenly felt too heavy. My mother’s guilt, my obligations—they seemed to thicken the space like cornstarch in gravy. I needed to escape.

  “I’m just looking for info right now,” I said, starting to edge toward the back door. “I should be home by dinner.”

  I gulped my coffee, letting it scald my mouth and throat, and left my mug in the sink.

  “Be careful,” she called after me as she went through the laundry room and outside.

  “Always,” I said.

  I nearly sprinted to my car, finally letting out a sigh of relief when I slid into the driver’s seat of my Land Rover.

  The nearest doorway into Faerie was a few miles away, under the freeway overpass at the edge of downtown. I parked near a fish market, locked up, and strode toward one of the giant concrete columns holding up several lanes of road. Cars zoomed overhead, the ground vibrating a little each time one passed.

  The faint shape of an arch had been etched into the column, easy to overlook if one didn’t know it was there. I stepped up close to it and began a low chant, reciting the words that would let me into the doorway. At the same time, my index finger traced the sigils that were unique to a doorway just outside Shaw’s estate—the sigils a sort of key that would tell the doorway system where I wanted to come out.

  As I finished the chant, the area under the arch began to shimmer like a heat mirage.

  I stepped forward, sliding into the doorway.

  Then all sensation save for bone-chilling cold disappeared as I plunged into the netherwhere, the void between doorways.

  When I emerged, I stood in the bright sunshine of Faerie. A tingle of magic quickened in my veins, a greeting between my small bit of Fae blood and the homeland from where it came.

  From the copse of trees where I’d come in, I could see the gate of Grant Shaw’s place several blocks away. As a sworn subject of the Duergar kingdom, Shaw’s home base was located not far from the kingdom’s palace. He rarely left his sprawling, gated grounds.

  My face tensing with determination, I set off.

  Homer was at Shaw’s front gate. I liked Homer.

  “Tara,” he greeted me, giving my name a bit of a roll with his faint brogue.

  “Hey, Homer. I need to see the big man.”

  I expected him to whistle for a runner, but instead, he gave his head a shake.

  “He won’t give you audience.”

  My brows rose. “Me, specifically?”

  “Aye.”

  I made a low noise of frustration at the back of my throat. “What the hell is going on? And don’t say nothing. I’ve heard there’s something big rumbling through the network.”

  He crossed his arms. “I can’t tell you, sorry.”

  My eyes widened. “Seriously?”

  “Aye. We’re all forbidden to talk to you about it. I don’t know about the others, but I had to swear a little oath.”

  For a moment I just stared at him, my mouth open. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Afraid not. He doesn’t want you on this one.”

  I shook my head, my confusion morphing into anger. “Well, the news is out. A guy who isn’t even in the network tipped me off.”

  “Sorry, Tara.”

  I held up a hand. “It’s not your fault. I know how these things work.”

  I spun on my heel and stalked away from Shaw’s estate. The bounty had to be a huge one if he put that much effort into keeping me out of it. And that meant I needed it. Badly.

  When Grant had first given me my pendant, he’d failed to specify how much credit I’d get for jobs, how much the rings for Mom and Fel were worth, or how my payments on the debt would even be determined. He’d done that purposely, and at the time I’d been too naïve to realize it. Later, I’d cornered him on it, and he’d finally agreed to give me points commensurate with the Faerie currency he would pay his other people. I started with a deficit of half a million points. In ten years, I hadn’t paid down even a hundred thousand.

  I turned down a quiet lane lined with cottages and went up to one with a blue door and a carpet of little white flowers instead of a lawn in front. I knocked.

  A woman with rosy-orange irises, pale-blue hair shot through with silver streaks, and a quick smile answered.

  “Hi, Heloise,” I said.

  “Tara, what a surprise,” she said, the lines of her face deepening as she smiled. She opened the door wider, inviting me in. “Won’t you come in for tea?”

  Heloise looked like a grandma, and she was plenty old enough to be one, but she was also lethal with throwing knives. She’d trained me when I’d first come into Shaw’s network, and she’d been my mentor for years. She’d retired not long ago.

  “I’d love to stay and visit,” I said. “But I’m kind of on a mission. Do you know anything about what’s buzzing through the network right now?”

  Her warm smile sobered, her brows lowering. “You know I’m not privy to that information anymore.”

  My shoulders slumped.

  “Come, sit for just a minute,” she said. I started to protest, but she pulled me out to the little courtyard behind her cottage and sat me down i
n one of the two wood chairs angled slightly toward each other. “Tell me more about this rumor.”

  I knew she really wanted to ask me about why I was so worked up but wisely took a different route. I was never eager to talk about my feelings.

  “There’s a big bounty, and he doesn’t want me on it,” I said. “He even made people in the organization swear oaths to keep me from finding out.”

  “Well, that does seem extreme. But it’s not the first time Grant’s excluded you from certain jobs. He’s doing his best to keep you in his employ.”

  Letting out a long breath, I shook my head. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Back when I first came to Shaw, my talents were so weak no one seemed to think they were even worthwhile. I guess the blood oath he wanted should have tipped me off that he saw some value in what I could do.”

  “Well, it was a gamble on his part,” Heloise said. “Your talents were weak back then, but your ability to sniff out magical objects so perfectly aligns with his . . .” She trailed off, as if pausing to come up with the appropriate word.

  “Single-minded obsession?” I supplied.

  “Obsession, yes,” she conceded. “He loves nothing more in the world than valuable things.”

  “And the power and leverage they give him,” I added dryly.

  “Now that your talent is so much more powerful and honed, you’re that much more valuable to him.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “I’m never going to pay off the debt.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek, resisting the urge to spew the same complaints I’d said to Roxanne the previous night. I hated being repetitive.

  “Do you want my opinion?” Heloise asked.

  I nodded.

  “More money can always be made, found, or manifested. But you’ll never be truly free with the debt hanging over you.”

  “So, you’re saying I should just pour all my efforts into paying off Shaw?”

  “That’s what I’d do.”

  If only it were that easy.