Page 5 of Magic Betrayed (The Shifter of Sheridan Avenue #2)

FIVE

I ended up needing more than just clothes.

My own were soaked in blood, so Kira had left me a spare set she kept at The Portal, along with a toothbrush and a comb. But when I went into the bathroom to change, I took one look in the mirror and let out a horrified squeak that was apparently audible even through the closed door.

“Raine?” The dragon had clearly been hovering just outside. Probably in case I collapsed. “Are you okay?”

Okay or not, I wasn’t about to let him in.

“I’m fine,” I lied through clenched teeth. “Why didn’t you tell me I looked like an extra in a slasher horror flick?”

Blood from my head injury had dried on my face, my neck, and presumably halfway down my torso. My hair was matted in gruesome chunks, providing a startling contrast with the white strands.

“Because I have a mother and a sister and I didn’t want to die,” was the honest answer that came through the door. “Also, after last night, I was just relieved to find out that you’re going to be okay.”

After last night…

When I’d shown up on his doorstep covered in blood and collapsed. Right into his arms.

Well, there was yet another embarrassing thought.

“There’s shampoo in the shower and you can use any of the towels,” Callum told me. “If you’re feeling up to it. Just try not to get the bandage wet. You have eight stitches under there.”

Ouch. Last night must have been worse than I realized if I’d somehow gotten eight stitches without waking up.

I heard Callum’s footsteps fading away, and only once he was gone did I allow my humiliation to fuel a swift cleanup. I managed to wash most of the blood out of my hair in the sink and removed the gore from my skin with a washcloth. Kira’s leggings were short on me, but the t-shirt was soft and the hoodie was loose and comfortable.

By the time I was done, I was feeling weak and a bit wobbly, so I leaned against the vanity as I pulled the door open… Only to take a staggering step backward when I encountered six and a half feet of dragon looming just outside.

He caught me before I could trip over the toilet, steadied me, and then let go. Possibly because he saw me turning six different shades of red.

“You sure you’re ready for this?” he asked carefully.

I scowled at his chest and nodded. “I’m sure. If you’re ready, then we should go. I don’t want to keep Faris waiting.”

One cautious step at a time, I made it to the living room, with Callum hovering at my elbow. Once we reached the kitchen island, he stopped hovering just long enough to pick up a to-go cup with steam rising from the lid, and a packet wrapped in paper.

“Breakfast bagel,” he explained, shoving the packet into my hands. “And coffee.”

Dang it. Just when I thought I had my emotions firmly under control…

At the look on my face, Callum just grinned sympathetically. “Not alone anymore, remember?”

It seemed they were going to hit me over the head with it until I gave in.

“Thank you,” I murmured, unable to keep looking at him without losing what little composure I still had. “We can go now.”

* * *

We took the glacially slow elevator—thanks to my still-wobbly limbs—and approximately three years later, it deposited us on the ground floor. Callum’s phone buzzed twice during our descent, but he merely glanced at it and frowned before stuffing it back in his pocket. Must not have been Faris again.

I managed to walk out to the curb under my own power, then stopped dead at the sight of a familiar-looking custom SUV idling at the curb. It was long and bulky, and built like a limo on the inside, with just two seats in the space behind the driver.

“I thought you were on leave,” I accused, as I eyed the vehicle cautiously. “Usually, that means you don’t bring your entourage with you.” I wasn’t in any hurry to repeat my experiences from the last time I got into a vehicle like this with Callum.

“Entourage?” a horrified voice echoed from behind me. “I am offended by the suggestion that I am anything less than my own unique and memorable self.”

I winced as I looked back over my shoulder. “Very memorable. Mostly because every time I’m around you, something blows up.”

Ryker chuckled wickedly. “Don’t worry. I rarely make the same mistake twice. We’ve definitely fixed the door lock problem, and the engine has a crush-resistant frame.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Avoiding wedding plans, of course,” Ryker responded promptly. “Also, Callum asked me to come, and I always do what I’m told.”

He winked. Callum glared. I decided to shut up and get in the car.

Though I did end up holding my breath most of the way to our apartment, especially when we drove past the exact spot where a team of Blake’s henchpeople had dropped a rock on our SUV and then tried to fry us to death on the inside. We’d survived, thanks to Ryker’s shifting into a dragon and tearing the doors off the vehicle, but I wasn’t sure we would be as lucky a second time.

Thankfully, we arrived without incident, and Ryker let us off at the curb before heading off to find parking.

I managed the short distance from the curb to the stairs, but the stairs themselves were too daunting, so we took another elevator ride. This one was faster, but the moment the doors opened, I felt my chest grow tight with remembered terror.

Unlike last night, the lights were on. It was a bright, sunny day, and I wasn’t alone. But with every step I took towards the open door of our apartment, the fist around my heart squeezed tighter until I almost couldn’t breathe.

“Oh good, you’re here.” Faris appeared in the doorway and gave me a critical once-over before beckoning us in with a jerk of his head. “I have another crisis to deal with, but I need to show you this first.”

“What crisis?” Callum followed me in, casting an assessing glance over the interior of the apartment while he waited for Faris’s response.

I tried not to think about what it must look like through his eyes and was only mostly successful.

“Glamour failed on the front of the club,” my boss admitted with a bit of a growl in his tone. “I hired an expert, and she was supposed to fix it last night, but she never showed. So this morning a human wandered in, spotted Chicken and Waffles and Hugh in his draperies and ran off in a huff to report us for health code violations.”

I wanted to care. I really did. On a normal day, I probably would have found the situation mildly amusing. But my eyes were glued to the wide, dark stain of dried blood in the middle of the floor. There was so much, and all of it was mine. I really was lucky to be alive.

Faris was still talking to Callum. “…the city is already giving us the side-eye after Blake sent that anonymous message accusing us of kidnapping and abuse of humans, so now I have to go play nice and explain why they shouldn’t slap me with fines.” His eyes were starting to glow with frustration, and for good reason.

Humans and Idrians did frequent many of the same businesses—particularly in a place like Oklahoma City where there were no official enclaves—but in Faris’s case, the liquors he sold could be dangerous for humans to consume. Thanks to the glamour anchored on the trees along the curb, the front door and windows of The Portal appeared to always be dark. There was a “Closed for Renovation” sign on the door, and only the local Idrian community knew what actually went on inside.

Without the glamour, anyone walking by could see the bar, the stage, the dance floor, and the customers, many of whom wore no glamour of their own on the average night.

This was going to be a genuine headache for Faris—and yet another thing we had to thank Blake for.

“So, what did you find?” I probably sounded rude, but my family… I might not be able to breathe again until I knew they were safe.

Faris let out a deep breath and visibly reined in his annoyance. “It’s more what I didn’t find, but I needed you to come down here to confirm it.” He gestured in an expansive circle. “I initially assumed this was either a case of your friend Kes panicking when someone broke in, or a contract kidnapping, connected to your role in the final hours of the Symposium. Carried out by some idiot mercenary or bounty hunter who thought they could collect on my territory.”

A small part of my tension eased as I realized Shane hadn’t shared his warning with Faris.

The elemental’s glower turned puzzled. “But there’s no evidence of magic anywhere. Just a lot of pieces that suggest this was done by someone with a strong grasp of human technology. The electricity was shut off at the main breaker. The security cameras have battery backup, but they show nothing out of the ordinary which means someone must have tampered remotely with the recording system. Even the door locks were compromised but not broken, and there’s no sign that the intruders even tried to search once they were in here. No sign of any foul play, other than the break-in, and this…”

My heart sank as he held up the missing phone—clearly smashed beyond all possibility of repair. But who had done it and when? There was no way to know.

“They attacked me with some kind of clubs or batons,” I reminded him. “They hit hard, and they hit fast, so they may have smashed the phone to keep me from calling for help. And the others…” I swallowed my panic. “If Kes and the kids were still here when the apartment was broken into, they would have had no real defenses. Ari has no defensive magic other than teleporting. Logan still needs physical contact to manipulate earth, so he would be helpless up here on the fourth floor, and Kes…”

Neither Faris nor Callum knew the full truth about Kes yet, and I wanted to keep it that way. There was no telling how they would react if they knew it was her magic that had enabled Elayara’s experiments. Her particular “gift” that stole others’ magic and created artifacts using that power. Not by choice—never by choice—but because the fae queen had used everyone Kes loved against her.

“Kes would have had no way to defend herself either.” Not against humans. Her only magical ability was taking away the magic of others. Ironically, if she were attacked by Idrians, she would have a better chance.

Faris shot me a look that suggested he knew I was hiding something, but did not pursue it. I suspected most of his people had secrets, so he was probably used to ignoring small omissions like this.

“Just in case we missed something,” he rumbled, “I wanted a shifter in here to sniff out any hints of magic.”

So he’d called for a dragon and… me.

Yes, technically, I had shifter magic—I could turn into a tiny, fluffy white fox. But I’d only done it once, and I had no idea if I could do it again, or even how to use my shifter senses properly once I was in my other shape.

Callum, on the other hand, could shift just fine, but if he tried it in my apartment, he would destroy the whole building and everything in it.

Some team we were.

“Evidence or not, I’m not letting this go, so you two see what you can figure out,” Faris ordered, while heading for the door. “And keep me updated on your progress. Whatever you need in order to find whoever did this, you’ll have it. And I’ll get my people in here to replace the lock with something more secure.”

“Faris?”

He looked back over his shoulder.

“Thank you.”

He gave me a nod.

“I know you’re busy with the wedding, so don’t feel like you have to keep checking in. I can handle this. Just… I don’t know how long it will be. So if you need to hire someone to take my place, I understand.”

The look he shot me mingled long-suffering and annoyance with a flash of sympathy, just before he turned his attention to Callum.

“Don’t let her out of your sight if you can help it,” he suggested. “I don’t want her going off and getting herself killed before she figures it out.”

That stung a little. Figured out what ? All I could sense for sure was the growing weight of a debt I could never repay. Faris said I was one of his people, and I was thankful for his acceptance. But what had I contributed to his court except enemies, destruction, a troubled teen elemental, and a distressing number of broken cocktail glasses?

“We’re fine,” Callum promised. “Go put out fires.”

With one last grunt, Faris disappeared, and I shifted my narrowed gaze to my former employer.

“What was he talking about?”

“I will explain it… after we search the apartment,” Callum countered stubbornly.

Whatever. Bossy dragons and high-handed elementals weren’t the worst of my problems right now. I could come back and demand answers later.

So I changed the subject. “Have you smelled anything weird?”

One eyebrow went up. “Define weird.”

Fair point. To most shapeshifters, my entire family probably smelled odd. Apparently, when in human form, a shifter’s sensitive nose was more attuned to differentiating between different kinds of magic than the scents of individuals. Mundane humans all smelled very much the same.

So there was Kes, who was half-fae, and probably smelled slightly of fae magic. Ari and Logan were technically human, so unless they used magic, they had no defining scent. And I had no way of knowing whether Ari’s teleporting left a scent trail, because…

“If it helps, I don’t detect anything that smells like unfamiliar magic. Without changing shape, the only Idrians I can tell were here are Kes and Faris. So I guess the next question is, have you been practicing your shifting?”

And there was the question I’d been desperately hoping he wouldn’t ask me.

“No.” I didn’t see any point in lying.

“Why not?”

The answer was complicated. Yes, I’d decided to embrace these powers I hadn’t asked for, and to use them to protect other victims like me. But I’d had no one I felt comfortable asking for help. No one I hadn’t feared would hate me for the source of my power.

I probably could have asked Kira, but she’d given me so much already. And our friendship was so new and tentative, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to remind her of my origins. Or of the Idrians who’d had their magic—in some ways, their very identity—stripped away with no hope of return.

Also, the first time I’d shifted, I’d had no idea how to shift back. I might still be stuck as a fox without Kes’s help, and I could never ask her to do that again. Every time she used that power, it hurt her—in more ways than one—and I refused to do that without a very compelling cause.

“Raine.”

I reluctantly turned to face Callum.

“I’m not your enemy,” he said softly.

Something about that statement stabbed deeper than it should have. As if I’d been waiting to hear those exact words. Waiting to weigh whether or not it was actually true, because for some reason, I still hesitated to believe it.

Why would he help someone who wasn’t even a real shifter?

“I haven’t tried shifting because… I’ve been busy,” I muttered. Part of me wanted to tell him the truth. But how could I explain my fear when he knew I’d already shifted back once? He would ask how I’d done it, and I couldn’t share that information.

“Busy?” His eyes seemed to see right through me. “Or afraid of how the rest of the shifter community will look at you?”

Drat him.

“Maybe.”

“Then today is a good day to try putting that aside.” His gaze was still steady. Compassionate. Without a trace of judgement. “First of all, when you shift to your other form, it accelerates healing even more. And second, you’ll have a much more acute sense of smell. You should be able to identify magic—if any was used—and possibly even catch small details about your attackers that you otherwise wouldn’t notice.”

A compelling argument. However…

“And I can help you shift back if you get stuck,” he said quietly. Almost like an afterthought. As if he’d somehow read my mind.

He’d said the same thing the first time I shifted, but I hadn’t trusted him then. Hadn’t been willing to make myself that vulnerable in his presence, especially not after I’d bitten him… I felt my cheeks flush at the memory.

Did I dare be that vulnerable now? Did I trust him enough?

The answer was surprisingly easy. “All right. I’ll try.”

I stepped away from the island, shut my eyes, and then opened them again in dismay.

“Um… how do I…”

The first time I’d shifted had not been a conscious choice. I’d been feeling angry. Trapped. Desperate. How did it work when I was actually trying to shift?

But Callum remained unperturbed. “Can you identify the fox?” he asked calmly. “She may feel as if she’s a separate person sharing your space, with her own thoughts and preferences. Or she may feel like another facet of your own personality. It’s different from shifter to shifter.”

It was kind of him not to point out the truth—that I wasn’t really a shifter at all.

But I shut my eyes again and tried to remember what it had felt like to be the fox. To view the world from so much closer to the ground, my vision extending in a wide arc around most of my body. I’d been able to hear what had seemed like every sound in the universe—a cacophony of noise, from the whispers of a sleeping gargoyle to the roar of traffic on the interstate. And the smells… varied and pungent, many of them unpleasant.

My paws had been tiny and white, my tail a long fluffy thing that wanted to wrap around my feet when I crouched low to the ground. I’d experienced an overwhelming desire to hide from danger, but also a surge of bloodlust when I’d tried to rip out the throat of the teen who’d attacked me. I’d felt the roughness of concrete beneath my pads. The rasp of a whine in my throat…

And then she was there inside my head, or maybe my chest—somewhere at the very core of my being. A beautiful little bundle of white fur with bright eyes and a soul brimming with curiosity. She was not me—not exactly. She was more capricious, more brash, and I wondered distantly whether those were echoes left behind by the person she’d once been.

But somewhere in that inner space, I chose to abandon caution. Crouched down, opened my arms, and felt her leap right into my heart.

I opened my eyes, and everything was dark.

I was trapped. My arms and legs were wrapped in some kind of fabric, and I whimpered as I began to thrash against the bonds.

Until my head found the collar of my t-shirt and popped through it.

I looked up. Way up. And felt even my fox heart skip a beat when I spotted Callum, smiling at me as if I’d done something miraculous.

“You found her, didn’t you?”

The fox did not appreciate being ignored and yipped at him. She was a strong-willed little creature, and I had to force her to focus. We had a job to do.

“All right then.” Callum crouched down so he was closer to my level. “The first thing is to identify the scents that should be here.”

Oof. With the wide variety of smells assaulting my nose, that wasn’t going to be easy. I needed to isolate them. So I nosed my way out of the heap of my clothing and trotted into Logan’s bedroom. Jumped up on his bed and took a good sniff…

…then gagged and almost threw up on the bed. I knew teenage boys smelled bad, but this? Stale sweat and socks and old food all overlaid by a pungent musk that was probably his deodorant. If there was any hint of his earth magic, I didn’t think I could identify it with any accuracy. But if this was what Logan smelled like to my shifter nose? I could track this hideous miasma to the ends of the earth.

My disgust must have been visible even on my fox face, because I heard a huff of amusement from the doorway.

“Not exactly roses?”

I meant to wrinkle my nose, but instead felt my lips peel back from my teeth in a silent snarl. The dragon only grinned as I leaped off the bed and trotted back across the living room to the bedroom that Kes and I shared with Ari.

First, I nosed at a sweater Ari had left on the floor, then the blanket she’d taken to carrying everywhere. Just the sight of it stung my human heart to near-tears, but the fox was too busy cataloging scents. There was something different here… In addition to shampoo and apples and dirt. Something airy and bright. Something like the first spring breeze. Was it her sprite magic?

“I’ve never been around enough sprites to know what you might be able to smell,” Callum noted, “but even half-fae have a distinctive scent—like winter woods, sometimes with a hint of chocolate.”

Kes’s favorite sweater was lying at the foot of the bed, and I suppressed the fear that filled me at the sight long enough to take a deep sniff. Sure enough—something piney and brisk flooded my nostrils.

And with all three scents rattling around my head, I returned to the living room. What could the fox detect that my purely human senses had missed?

The smell of dirt and growing things. A small puddle of spilled juice beneath the table that was just beginning to go sour. The trash needed to go out. And the blood… I tried again not to gag, but the fox remained unbothered. Taken together, though, the scents were just too strong to catch anything else in the area of the kitchen and living room.

But what about the utility room? When I’d walked in last night, I’d sensed something off. Maybe one of my attackers had been hiding there.

I trotted over and nosed my way through the partially open door. The light was off, but I didn’t need it.

We didn’t use the utility room for much of anything yet—we hadn’t been able to afford a washer and dryer, so the space was empty except for a few pairs of shoes and a set of hooks we used for coats.

Which made it much easier to identify something that didn’t belong in our apartment at all—the faintest whiff of stale beer.

Before she died, drinking had been one of my mom’s many vices, so I recognized the smell. Neither Kes nor I drank, and the kids certainly wouldn’t have access to beer, so this must have come in on one of my attackers.

Which, again, suggested humans. Most Idrians preferred their own brews, as alcohol didn’t really affect them the same way.

But why would humans other than Blake’s have broken into our apartment? What could they possibly have wanted, and why take Kes and the kids with them?

It suddenly occurred to me that there was one other possibility I hadn’t considered. What if Kes had gone with them on purpose ?

There was still a lot I didn’t know about her. Could she have chosen to leave without telling me, taking the kids with her?

No. I wasn’t ready to believe that just yet. Not to mention, she would have had to convince Ari to go with her. There was no holding Ari anywhere she didn’t want to be, and she’d been happy here.

It was still possible that Blake’s people were responsible. If they’d found out Kes was here, they might have avoided using magic in order to throw us off the trail. Might have decided to take the risk of doing the job themselves in order to avoid paying a bounty hunter. But why take the kids? Unless… Blake would know how much Kes valued them. How much easier it would be to control her using hostages.

Rage and desperation flooded my tiny body, and I abandoned the utility room, nose to the floor.

In the open doorway, I caught that same hint of alcohol, then again in the hallway outside the apartment. With the scent fixed in my nose, I leaped forward, following it down the hall to the stairs. The door was closed, so I whined briefly at Callum as he jogged up behind me. He hit the bar, and I flew down the steps, pausing only at the landing as I detected hints of piney woods and stale, sweaty musk—Kes and Logan. But was that from last night? Or could they have left those scents at any time in the past few days?

At the foot of the stairs I had to pause to wait for Callum to open the door again, but then I was loose in the lobby, suddenly assaulted by a dizzying array of new smells and sounds.

But the fox would not be deterred. We circled, ignoring the sidelong looks from a couple of startled residents, then bolted outside, nose to the ground, following that faint hint of stale beer. Across the sidewalk to the curb, where the trail went right into the street…

I stepped off the curb. Horns blared. Brakes screeched. And then I was dangling off the ground, my scruff caught in a firm hand as I was lifted back onto the sidewalk.

“Raine.”

I squirmed and snarled. I needed to follow that trail.

“You need to separate yourself from the fox. Her reasoning is bleeding into yours, and you almost ran right into traffic.”

I heard the command in that voice, turned my head, and was caught in the glow of burning amber eyes. The king of the shifters was crouched in front of me, but I felt no urge to cringe or to obey. Instead, I flattened my ears and barked. A warning, that if he tried to stop me, I would fight back.

“Raine, it’s me. Callum. You need to trust me. We will follow the trail, but only once you remember who you are.”

I snapped my teeth at him. Of course I knew who I was. I was a hunter, and I was tracking… But what was I tracking? Dinner? Family?

No. I was tracking the one who’d attacked me. The one who might have taken my family.

My people. I was human.

And I had almost forgotten where I was.

I whined, hoping Callum would hear it as the apology it was.

He nodded and released me. “We can cross, but I think as long as it’s daylight, you shouldn’t be out here without a leash.”

My ears flattened again, making it fairly evident what I thought about that.

“Not for you, for them.” He jerked his chin at the cars streaming past. “You are clearly not a dog, and you don’t want anyone freaking out and assuming you’re a wild animal.”

Okay, that was fair. But we didn’t have a leash, and I didn’t want to wait to follow the trail.

“There is a way…” Callum hesitated. “For right now, I can carry you across. If you’re okay with it. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

Hah. The thought was definitely uncomfortable, but not for the reasons he was thinking. And right now, I didn’t care whether I was comfortable or not. I only cared about figuring out what had happened to Logan, Ari, and Kes.

So I nodded my little fox head and bounced on my little white paws and an instant later my breath left me in a whoosh as Callum picked me up, cradled me in his arms and headed for the crosswalk.

I froze, mostly from the disorientation of being so suddenly scooped off the ground, but also from the sensation of being so close to him. My fox nose informed me that he smelled… good. So good. It was the same scent I remembered from that first day in his apartment, and somehow it steadied me, helping me to center myself. As did the brisk, steady rhythm of his heart, so loud to my fox ears. I felt less divided, less scattered. More attuned to the fox without being consumed by her.

In this form, I was so tiny in comparison to his tall, athletic frame, but I still felt safe, just as I had before. Back when he was simply my enigmatic employer. I’d never been able to make sense of it then—not when Callum had logically posed the greatest threat to my safety—so I’d decided not to try. And now, I didn’t have the luxury of divided attention.

But just as I had before when I touched him, I caught the edges of a flood of emotions and sensations that seemed to come out of nowhere. A sense of protective determination. Patience. Power—so much power it staggered me. And a strange kernel of something else. Something spiky and raw, filled with tangles and knots and confusion, but also with warmth.

But then we were across the road, and he was setting me down. The moment my paws hit the sidewalk, I raced forward, up and down the curb, desperate to find the trail. Searching intently for any hint that might tell me which direction my attacker had gone. For any whiff that suggested Logan or Kes might have come this way.

There was nothing. Only the mingled scents of a thousand faceless pedestrians, the sting of exhaust, and the cold, bitter smell of city air.

So where had they gone? And where was the one who carried the miasma of stale beer? He’d run from me, gone downstairs, and…

I was an idiot.

I’d probably walked right past the intruders last night. As I’d made my way into the building in the dark, barely even glancing at the windowless van parked at the curb, with the name of an electrician on the side…

There was only one way to be certain. I needed to call Faris to confirm, but if I was right? I’d just found our first clue.