Page 5 of Transfiguration
Con’s phone rang about twenty miles outside of Henderson, Luca’s ringtone. Con flipped the phone in the cup holder to put the mic side up and hit the speaker button. “Hey babe.”
“Hey, you’re okay, right?” Luca asked, sounding worried.
“Yeah? Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Any chance you’ll be home soon?”
“Uh, I am following a lead and then hope to be on the road north by this afternoon. Something wrong?”
“It’s happening,” Luca said quietly.
That could mean a thousand things, and Con didn’t know which one it could be. Was Hart being taken down for his shady side stuff? Did everyone know Sam was a mobster enforcer? Maybe the Dominion had swept in and taken out their secret magic organization? “What’s happening?”
“Everything. Hart is worried. The Dominion is unraveling. Rou has abandoned his role with them…”
That wasn’t something Con expected to hear. Rou was as straightlaced and by the book as a Dominion witch could be. Or at least that’s how he played it. Careful to protect his kids, but something had really grown dark and cold in him in the past decade. Gone was the flirty smile and teasing personality, and in its place, he’d become quiet, calculating, and more than a little terrifying. Not everyone saw him that way. Most just thought of him as a friend or the Pillar of Earth, but Con wondered how long it would take until he realized that Hart wasn’t one of the good guys? Which meant that Sam, Luca, and Con didn’t work for the good guys. He hadn’t come for any of them yet.
“Is he coming for us?”
“He’s at war with the Dominion. He is using his power to tear them apart,” Luca said. “And there’s more. Attacks all over the country, world even. The Dominion is dissolving. Attacks on witches are rising. I don’t know if Rou is on our side or not. But the removal of the Dominion means a lot of protections for witches will be stripped.”
That idea made Con have to slow down and pull off to the side of the road. The Dominion had been the cult of his upbringing, the reason his sister had been murdered, the entire downfall of fucking humanity. It was a strange control over witchcraft, claiming to protect the people, only it was an oligarchy of families with power, cultivating their daughters and torturing their sons, all in the name of a greater good. Con had called bullshit on all of that when they’d put his sister to death and called for his own. Twins and best friends, he had lost half of his soul the day the Dominion had given her true death ruling. He hated the fucking Dominion so much.
“Good,” Con said after a minute of breathing hard. “They can all burn in whatever hell there might be in the afterlife.” He couldn’t imagine it meant good things for Rou and his kids coming out against one of the most powerful organizations in the world. The Pillar of Earth was damn near god level in power. Con had always thought it stupid of the Dominion to mess with him.
“It could come back on all of us,” Luca said. “The Church is using this as a reason to rise. Witch burnings are up in the South. And there might be a mess of laws coming. The next few days, and probably weeks, are going to be brutal. Someone is killing vampires, and we don’t know who or why. It puts a target on Sam’s back. Hart is saying he might move us all to Europe for a bit?”
“Okay,” Con agreed. He wasn’t afraid of the Dominion, not anymore, but someone after vampires? He would not risk losing Sam. “I still gotta finish this job.” Or at least this lead. Then it was a good seventeen-hour drive home.
“Can you drop your car off at one of Hart’s places? Fly back? Ship the car home?”
Con hated that idea. Cramped with someone else steering, the wind outside the plane whispering of things he wished he could do.
“If you need me to,” Con said. There were a handful of hills to die on. This wasn’t his. If either of his guys needed him, he’d be there. They worked, even if sometimes he felt dreadfully lonely and like something was missing from his life. He knew what that void came from, and there was no way to bring back the dead, not even with a book on necromancy.
“I do. We do. Sam is here, too. Lots of crazy stuff happening. Did you know Santini is a necromancer?” Luca said.
That was a bombshell. He’d seen Santini’s return right before he’d started this mission, but that was news. The man had been scattered and broken, a shell of who he had once been. Newly risen from a long stretch in the ground, he didn’t seem to remember who he was at all.
“What?” A necromancer. Was that possible? Did power keep growing for the super old vampires, or had he hidden it?
“He is. He had some memory issues that are resolving, but he’s been hiding the power. Hart says he’s always had it.”
“Legit a necromancer?”
“Probably one of the most powerful that has ever lived,” Luca agreed.
Con had to think through that for a minute, his heart pounding. How many times had he read about the dark rising again? Ravings of lost witches who prophesied the return of the elements long buried by the Dominion. Returning with a vengeance. “Dark is rising.” Did that mean the rest would, too?
“Yes. You know more about this stuff than Sam and I. We need you home.”
“Okay,” Con agreed. He would finish up the lead today and head home, no matter what.
“Our official instruction from Hart is to lie low and be cautious, do not seek any Dominion help, do not mention you are a witch. Do not bring up Rou, or association to any witches. You have your other ID on you?”
“I do.” Con always had options. Male witches were not well liked, no matter where they went. His Dominion issued IDs all designated him a witch, even keeping a class four level felony posted on it because they enjoyed having him forever marked by events of the past. Didn’t matter he’d been a puppet to someone else’s power. “I’ll switch everything out after I follow up this lead, leave that stuff hidden in the car, and send you flight details as soon as I have them,” he promised. It would suck that he’d have to leave his car. He liked the remodeled Mustang. But someone would deliver it back home in a week or two. And they had other vehicles.
“Keep me updated and SOS us if something goes wrong,” Luca sounded really worried.