“Let him, Janet,” Maya said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing Nash beaten up a little. But don’t hurt him too much. I want a turn at him, too.”
“Enough with the bloodthirstiness, both of you.” I coughed from the thickening smoke. “Right now, we need Nash whole, and we need him here. Mick, you spent lots of time feeling up the wards. Were you able to strengthen them? Can we fight the hex through them?”
Mick let me go, but he remained standing against me. “I don’t think so. It was a stealthy spell, latching onto the wards themselves. From there it spread through the building like a net, affecting everyone within its drag. If we could find its key, we could unlock it, but the hex itself makes anything we try to do against it or every attempt to decipher it go wrong. I’m lucky I could find out as much as I did.”
“So what do we do? How long will a spell like that last?”
He shrugged. “No way to say. It’s growing in intensity. I’m watching everyone become a little crazier as the night goes on.”
“Including you,” I said.
Mick looked surprised. “It’s not affecting me. I feel a bit of demon in the spell, but Cassandra said the ununculous could steal demon powers. And here’s one more interesting thing about it: The caster had to be very close, as in within the building.”
Mick dropped that bombshell and closed his mouth.
Maya’s eyes widened. “You mean, like he’s hiding in the basement?
“I don’t mean that the ununculous is here,” Mick said. “I’d know. So would Janet. I meant that someone brought the trigger for the spell in with them and set it off. One of us.”
SIX
“DON’T LOOK AT ME,” MAYA SAID QUICKLY. “I didn’t set off any curse. I think you two are nuts.”
“We know it wasn’t you,” Mick said, voice soothing. “Of all of us, you are the only one untouched by magic. You’d have to be at least a minor mage to bring it in.”
“A minor mage,” I said in dismay. “Like Fremont?”
Maya snorted. “Fremont? You don’t mean all that crap he says about being magical is true?”
There was nothing like a good, old-fashioned curse to bring out the paranoia. “He wouldn’t do that,” I said. “Fremont’s a nice person who would never hurt anyone.”
“He could be wholly innocent of the fact that he brought in the curse,” Mick said. “He might have carried it like a mosquito carries a disease. This all started when he came to fix your leaky faucet, right?”
“Right,” I said glumly. “Let’s go talk to Fremont.”
I glanced at the brazier. My fire was smoking merrily, sending a heavy gray-white plume into the darkening sky. As I’d suspected, it stopped about fifteen feet up and simply vanished. But that might be enough. “Maya, can you stay here and make sure that the fire doesn’t go out?” I asked.
“Fine with me.” Maya hunkered against the stone wall, out of the smoke. “I don’t want to go back down into Hotel Crazy.”
“Thank you.”
“But go easy on Fremont,” she said as we passed her. “He can be an idiot, but he’s not a bad person, you know?”
“I know,” I said, and I followed Mick inside.
“I SWEAR TO you, Janet, I never met the guy!” Fremont, white-faced, stared at the tribunal of me, Mick, and Coyote. We were in the kitchen again, where the others had decided to at least nibble on the sandwiches. Cassandra leaned against the wall, her arms folded, her face pale, and her eyes sunken into dark sockets.
Coyote remained a coyote, his yellow eyes a study in irritation. The fact that he’d chosen a form in which he could neither berate me nor give sexual suggestions worried me a bit.
As for Ansel—he was still banging on the door of the refrigerator from the inside. He’d slowed from frantic pounding, settling for a bang every thirty seconds or so.
“You wouldn’t have realized who he was,” Mick said, keeping his voice mild. “Someone you talked to at the diner, a tourist passing through, someone you saw at the gas station . . .”
Fremont shook his head vehemently. “I know everyone in Magellan and Flat Mesa, have for years. I know when someone’s new, and I remember every single person I talk to. I didn’t talk to a nasty sorcerer who wants to kill Cassandra. I’d have noticed his aura, wouldn’t I?”
“Not necessarily.” I was amazingly good at reading auras, and I could see Fremont’s magic one now, like pale smoke in sunshine. But Fremont’s magic ability was small, and I doubted he could see them all that well. “If Cassandra’s sorcerer is as good as she says, he’d be able to hide his aura. Very powerful people can do that.” I knew this from personal, and frightening, experience.
“What does he look like, Cassandra?” Mick asked.
Cassandra gave a listless shrug. “Ordinary. So ordinary you wouldn’t look twice.”
“Can you be more specific?” I asked, trying to be patient. Her apathy was grating on me.
“About five foot seven. Dark brown hair. Receding hairline. He looks like any other suit-wearing forty-year- old man in an office.”
“Well, I haven’t seen any men in suits in Magellan,” Fremont said. “They’d stand out. I haven’t talked to any man looks like that who I didn’t already know. All right?”
“Can the ununculous change his appearance?” I asked. “If he’s tracking you, he might use a glamour or even a simple disguise.”
Cassandra gave me a watery smile. “Him? He’s the most arrogant man I’ve ever met. What does it matter to him if one of us identifies him? He’ll crush us and not care.”
“All right,” I said, drawing a breath. “Could he have seeded the curse in Fremont without Fremont seeing him or noticing? Maybe by brushing by him in a store, something like that?”
Mick answered, “Eye contact is better. If the sorcerer greets you, shakes your hand, he can make sure you received the spark. It’s more emotionally satisfying for him as well. But I suppose it could happen with a brush-by. Like a pickpocket in reverse.”
Fremont waved his hands. “What you’re not getting is that I haven’t seen
“I believe you,” I said. He was right, he would have. Fremont loved to watch, and then talk about, his fellow man.
“Thank you.” Fremont let out a sigh and rubbed his hand over what was left of his hair.
“Mick?” I asked. “Have you seen anyone like Cassandra describes?”
“No.”
“Okay, then. Neither have I.”
Fremont glared. “Wait, you believe him without grilling him like you did me?”
“Sorry, Fremont. I’m on edge. Mick’s a dragon—if someone seeded a curse on him, he’d notice right away.” I glanced at Mick. “Right?”
Mick affirmed. I’d like to think I would have noticed right away, too. A spark like that would sting both my magics, wouldn’t it? Then again, if this sorcerer was as powerful as advertised . . .
“It was probably me,” Cassandra said.
Fremont looked at her in surprise. “You saw him? Why didn’t you say so?”
“I mean the last time I met him. Christianson might have had the ununculous seed a hex on me, so that if I
