Page 19 of Snag
Rought whistles under his breath, quietly impressed.
Kris’s dirty-blond hair is up in a few curlers, and she’s wearing a sage-colored printed T-shirt over blue jeans. The print on the shirt is a faded sunset, trees, with a rock formation jutting out of a beach. Maybe it’s a vintage tourist design?
Not what she was wearing when waiting tables at the Tasty Tart diner where we met, and not what she was wearing to the rave later that same day.
The person talking to Kris is partially cut off on the edge of the vid screen. They’re seated across from each other on either side of a narrow table. The type usually used to do manicures. The angle of the vid isn’t quite wide enough to fully cover that corner of the salon. Or the camera has been subtly nudged out of alignment …
There are other people moving around in thebackground of the salon, but I focus on the stranger across from Kris.
Is this the dire mage? Bellamy? She’s very … average looking. But I can’t see her eyes— or sense the corrupted essence I already know she wields.
“Recognize her?” Coda asks, grabbing a series of still shots of the stranger in profile, shifting them over to a neighboring monitor, then triggering some sort of facial-tracking algorithm.
I mean, I’m guessing that’s what they’re doing, but it seems like a logical conclusion.
“No,” Rought says, settling a hand on Coda’s desk and leaning forward to peer at the screen with a frown. “Is there something wrong with the vid or the feed?”
“Essence interference,” Coda says. “I can work around it.”
Apparently, I’m not seeing the same images or vid they’re seeing, presumably because of my inherent resistance to essence-laced … well, anything to do with essence, really. No matter that my hold on it all is still shaky, it’s difficult to fool the senses of the Conduit, through whom all the essence that fuels the world flows. Supposedly.
“Like … a cloaking spell?” I say. “Or a glamour?”
Coda shakes their head. “Not certain. Yet.”
“Cay and Doc Z are right there in the room with them,” Rought says grimly. “Kris hadn’t manifested her beast yet, but there’s no fucking way that a mage powerful enough to obscure their identity could be sitting only feet away without two shifters noticing. Not only do dire mages stink, but shifters with the … talents of those two would pick up more than just scent. Cloaked or otherwise.”
Kitsune and pegasus, he means. Both beasts likely lend their human counterparts extra abilities, even while nottransformed. Rought’s being circumspect about the nature of Cay’s and Doc Z’s beasts, but Coda already knows.
The problem with being powerful? I often don’t notice things such as glamours or other essence spells, not even when they’re directed toward me. Not even before I was the Conduit. Though if this is the dire mage who compromised and killed Kris, they’re powerful enough to have armed Chains with spells so malignant that they took down a club full of shifters. And those spells, I felt.
As well, even when wielding essence through Kris, the dire mage erected a shield barrier that momentarily stymied my senses last night. That level of essence-wielding isn’t as simple as a nasty spell that can be precast and contained in an essence-twisted object.
Not that there was anything simple about the casting that forced an entire motorcycle club to wither in pain, transform to save themselves, then seemingly get stuck in their beast forms. And my eyes would have adjusted to the dire mage’s barrier spell that Rought’s gryphon easily tore through. Eventually.
Speaking of rare shifter abilities— the gryphon not only sensed the barrier, but dispelled it without any blowback.
“I just see a dark-haired, tanned-skinned woman,” I say. “Heart-shaped face, big eyes, thinner upper lip. She’s got a set of oracle cards, or a custom tarot deck maybe, laid out on the table before her. Her nails are extra long, painted dark red.”
Both Coda and Rought turn to me, mouths slightly agape.
“Why?” I ask, just a little pissy. “What do you see?”
They both look back at the monitor.
Rought grunts.
Coda mutters, “What the fuck?” Then they capture a new set of screenshots.
“What?”
“That’s what, or who, we see,” Rought says quietly. “Now that you’ve pointed it out.”
“That a new party trick, Conduit?” Coda asks, like a total asshole.
I sigh. “I need to know if the dire mage is still in Cascadia.”
“And if she’s not?” Rought asks.
