Page 37 of Contested Crown

“What do we do next?” His voice was low. “We don’t have a car anymore.”

“Or our things,” I agreed. “You have your ID?”

Cade pulled it from his wallet and presented me with the phone before I could ask. I patted my pockets, relieved that I hadn’t lost my own wallet or phone while we’d been running. At least we had money.

“What does House Morrison need so many mages for?” I asked. “It can’t be legal to justkidnappeople on the street.”

“I’m sure it’s not,” Cade agreed. “But they’re a mage house. Who will challenge them?”

I glared. “The other mage houses won’t do anything?”

“Against House Morrison?” Cade exhaled. “You’d need one of the older houses, one of the houses that might have enough allies to go to war.”

“And on this coast, that’s only House Bartlett,” I said. “It would make a stunning way for Leon to assume the throne. Sentence you to death, go to war with House Morrison. They’ll start calling him the Red King.”

“No, if he goes against House Morrison, he’ll use it to hold power over as many of the smaller houses as possible. He’ll ‘save’ them and their people from the threat.” Cade frowned, his eyes moving back and forth, although I could tell he wasn’t seeing the crowd.

As Cade frowned at nothing, clearly running through the politics of the situation, I turned back to the throng of tourists. Sitting on a shady bench behind an ice cream vendor, with the dancers in the pavilion drawing all eyes, no one was paying attention to us.

A crowd was its own entity. It moved and shifted in predictable ways. It made it easy to spot when someone was acting out of the norm.

I nudged Cade with my elbow, leaning forward to rest my forearms on my knees. “Mages, three o’clock.”

He turned his head too quickly, and I grabbed his arm tight. “Slower.”

He turned, as though looking directly at me, but his eyes were over my shoulder. “The same ones from earlier. They must have used spellwork to track us.”

“Did they leave another piece on us?” I looked Cade over, but he shook his head.

“Probably a tracing spell. It takes longer—that’s why they aren’t coming straight for us.” Cade looked around the crowd. “We need to get out of here.”

“We need to change our appearance,” I said. With the brown hair, Cade looked different enough, but they’d remember the six-foot bodyguard he’d had with him.

One of the dancers had tossed his suit jacket over the rail around the edge of the pavilion, and I stood, stretching and leaning my arms on the railing, as though watching the dancers. After a moment, I straightened, taking the jacket with me.

I slipped it on. “You still have the glasses from Krista?”

Cade’s nostrils flared. “The Clark Kent disguise?”

“Hey, if it’s good enough for Superman,” I said. “Put them on.”

Shaking his head, he pulled them out of his front pocket and slid them on, adjusting them so his hair fell near the frames. I grabbed his hand. “Come on.”

Before we passed the ice cream vendor, I pulled to a stop, buying a couple of cones and smiling, chatting with the guy. He was happy enough to tell us his life story as he loaded the cones with sprinkles and chocolate.

The mages split up, each going in a different direction, pushing through the crowd in a way that made it easy to follow their progress. So, they could track us this far but couldn’t tell exactly where we were. Either the number of people made it hard, or their spell had run out of juice. I hoped it was the latter, but my intuition told me that that wasn’t likely.

Beside me, Cade was tense, startling when I shoved his ice cream in his hands. He turned to me, his arched eyebrow incredulous.

I grinned with all my teeth. “Eat it. Walk casually.”

His brows drew down, but he followed my direction, licking at the cone and turning his head as I pointed out some of the statues.

“There’s the asshole who conquered something. The native population, maybe, or the Spanish, who knows,” I said, indicating a statue of a man on a horse. “And over there is a dolphin.”

“Didn’t you live here for years?” Cade asked. “And that’s the best you have to offer?”

“Of all the jobs I’ve done,tour guidewasn’t one of them,” I said. “Unless you want a tour of all the places a nice boy like you shouldn’t visit.”