“The police issued a BOLO, be on the lookout, on him, right? As a person of interest in the case? I’m calling the station.” Holly pulled her phone from her clutch, but before she flipped it open, a scream rang out down the street.
For one stalled moment, the café went quiet as all conversation stopped and the patrons turned to look. My gaze tore free of the fae and I whirled around. A block up the street, cars slammed on brakes, horns blaring, and pedestrians ran inside buildings. Tamara jumped to her feet, Holly right behind her.
I glanced back to where the fae had stood, but he’d vanished. Of course, that didn’t mean he was gone. What is going on?
A car swerved, wheels screeching as it braked, and my attention snapped back to the commotion in the street. More screams sounded as people ran, and the air tingled with dozens of charms being activated at once. Then the cause of the panic became sickeningly apparent.
A hulking form lunged onto the hood of a car, which buckled under the beast’s weight. I stared, rooted to the spot. I’d never seen anything like it. I would have said the creature was a wolf, except it was the size of a grizzly bear and covered in shaggy moss green fur. A fae beast. It tipped its head back, its nose working the air. Then its red-tinted gaze swung toward the café. Metal bunched under its claws as it hurled itself off the car.
Oh, crap. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, snagging my purse. “Two steps ahead of you,” Tamara said, already breaking into a run. The air around her tingled as she activated a charm.
Between one step and the next she vanished behind the invisibility charm. I only wished I had one as well, but the best thing I had was my ability to run. So I did. Fast.
I’d just reached the door of the potion shop next to the café when the air around me chilled. Death appeared in front of me, his tight black T-shirt pulling taut over his muscles as he stepped forward into my path.
Soul collector, Grim Reaper, Angel of Death—whatever you called him, his job was to gather the souls of the dead and dying. Which meant, unless he’d picked a damn funny time for a social call, someone was about to breathe their last.
Who? I mouthed, not wanting to be seen talking to someone no one else could see. Not that anyone on the street was likely to notice amid the panic.
Death looked away, his heavy lids drooping to mask his deep hazel eyes. I turned, looking back at the street. Holly hadn’t run, hadn’t moved.
We were in the center of the Magic Quarter, so magic abounded. Almost everyone—witch, fae, and norm alike—was getting the hell off the street, but a handful of witches had hung back, magic snapping and crackling around them. Holly also held her ground. She stood facing the street. I could see only her profile, but her eyes were closed, her fingers twitching.
She’s crafting a spell.
A web of magic catapulted across the street from one of the pedestrians. It snarled around the beast, but with a shake, the creature shrugged off the spell and kept running. It was headed straight for the café. And Holly.
I turned back to Death. “Not her,” I whispered.
He didn’t look at me.
No! I dashed back through the tables, tripping over toppled chairs in my haste. I reached Holly just as her eyes popped open. She lifted her hands and a ball of fire burst into existence, building between her palms. The rubies she wore on her fingers—gems where she stored raw magic—glittered in the flames, and the ball of fire burst forward.
The fireball exploded against the beast’s chest, the backlash of heat slamming into us. But the beast didn’t stop. It didn’t even pause. Holly’s eyes went wide as she backpedaled. The cool and collected assistant DA was gone. The confident witch? Gone. All that remained was a mortal staring at her doom.
And behind her, Death, his expression grim.
Holly’s legs tangled in a chair, and I grabbed her arm, trying to keep her standing, to get her moving. Too late.
The beast’s red eyes locked on us, and it tipped its head back, releasing a bloodcurdling howl. It was the first sound it had made, and all other sound fell away under that howl. Then the beast was suddenly there, filling the sidewalk. Its breath, thick with the smell of rotted meat, tumbled over us. Holly could hurl fireballs, but I had no offensive magic. Hell, I could barely cast a circle. Grave magic wasn’t exactly effective on things not already dead. But it was all I had, so I reached for it.
I dropped my mental shields so fast that pain stabbed through my head. The street washed out into shades of gray, the concrete crumbling in my sight, and the chairs rusting as the land of the dead snapped into focus. Brilliant wisps of raw magic swirled through the air. The ground throbbed with the signatures and emotions absorbed from those who’d crossed it.
And the beast disappeared.
It simply vanished. A faint shimmering outline remained, but nothing substantial. In the very center of the strange shape hung a clump of glowing magic.
Beside me, Holly screamed and slammed backward into the concrete. The front of her blouse ripped open, rent by unseen claws.
Glamour.
The beast was a glamour surrounding a magical construct.
“Holly, it’s not real!”
She screamed, thrashing under something I could barely see. Around me, the Aetheric thrummed, the swirls of raw magic scattering as someone threw a spell at the beast. The spell hit the construct and then dissolved into the space that the beast only appeared to occupy.
“It’s a glamour!” I yelled as a ring of bloody bites sprouted on Holly’s shoulder.
Holly’s back arched, her arms thrashing at her sides. I reached for her, and the beast’s head snapped up. Unreal eyes focused on me, narrowed. Then it lunged.
I jumped sideways, out of its path. Its flank slammed into my side as it turned, and I stumbled. The thing might look insubstantial, but it had some mass behind it.
Dammit. No, it didn’t.
Glamour was an illusion magic so strong that reality believed it to be true—at least for a while. If you knew something was glamour, and your will was strong enough, you could disbelieve it out of existence.
But it’s hard to disbelieve in an animal actively trying to rip your throat out.
The beast’s gaze locked on me, and again it howled. The sound made me flinch. The urge to hit the ground and cover my ears gripped me, but I couldn’t. Holly’s too-still form lay between the beast and me, far too close to its massive claws. I’d seen what those claws could do to a car. I didn’t want to know what they’d do to a woman. I had to draw it farther from her.
Death stepped closer to Holly, momentarily attracting my attention as he crouched beside her. No, she can’t be . . .
I shook my head, and the beast must have sensed my distraction. Its back legs bunched, preparing to attack. And Holly would be caught in its charge.
No! I didn’t believe in the beast. In fact, I knew it didn’t exist, and reality had bent to my will before.
I dove forward, into its attack. I plunged my hands into the misty form just as one of its huge paws landed on Holly’s chest.
“What I see is true,” I whispered, willing with everything in me for reality to agree. To confirm that there was no beast.
Holly screamed, and the street hung on her high-pitched note. Then the beast dissolved.
A cloud of pale mist exploded around me, and a small disk fell from where the clump of magic in the beast’s center had been. It hit the sidewalk with a ping, a sound quickly overwhelmed by dozens of yelling voices. Shouts and screams that I’d zoned out when I’d been facing the construct.
Footsteps rang out over the sidewalk, people heading toward us from every direction. Doors banged open as more people poured onto the street. Holly pushed herself up from the sidewalk, her hand gripping her savaged shoulder.
“Alex? Oh, my God. It’s just gone? Alex, how did you . . . ?” She threw her arms around me, dragging me down. “Thank you,” she whispered. Her cheek was wet where it brushed my neck.
I stiffened under her touch, her skin hot enough that I winced, but I didn’t pull back. “It wasn’t real.”
Someone in faded jeans, the knees slightly worn, stepped nearer, and Death knelt behind Holly. I stared at him over the top of her head.
“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered, the words as much to comfort her as to question Death.
He held my gaze, and then nodded, his dark hair brushing his chin with the movement. “She’ll be fine,” he said, but he frowned.
He stared at the thin cloud of mist hanging in the air around us. If the cloud had been natural water vapor, the midday sun would have evaporated it in minutes, but this mist hadn’t dissipated. It hadn’t even thinned after I’d first disbelieved the beast.
Death reached out and twisted his hand as if he could wrap the mist around his fist. Then he gave a small jerk. The cloud vanished.
I gaped. The thing about soul collectors was that they collected souls. But how could a glamour construct have a soul? Was that thing alive?
I couldn’t ask. Not here. Not with people crowded around us. No one else could see Death.
Death brushed an escaped curl back behind my ear. “Be careful, Alex,” he said. Then he vanished as the first Good Samaritan reached us.
“Is she all right?” a man asked and someone else yelled, “What was that thing?”
An overweight witch in a hat wider than her shoulders lowered her heft to the pavement beside me. “I’m a certified healer,” she said, reaching out to take Holly’s shoulders. “Let me see her.”
I let her strip Holly’s arms off me, and as I felt the tingle of a healing charm being invoked, I slammed my shields back in place. My vision didn’t immediately revert to normal, and I squinted in the bright midday light, which I now perceived as dim and full of shadows. In the dimness, I searched out my purse. I’d dropped it—I didn’t remember when. Sometime between Holly’s fireball and my disbelieving the construct.
I finally spotted the red bag a couple of feet away. As I stooped to grab it, I noticed a small copper disk. The charm from the beast. I pulled a tissue from my purse, and, as inconspicuously as possible, plucked the disk from the sidewalk. Through the thin paper, the spells charged in the disk hummed faintly, but whatever they had been, they were defunct now. The sound of sirens rang in the distance, and I backed away, carrying the disk with me.