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  Slaski laughed. “That’s a very optimistic view, my boy. You will in fact be anything but fine if I don’t finish my treatment in the next twenty-four hours.” The healer turned his attention towards me. “Chase here would have died had you brought him to me even twenty minutes later than you did. He suffered severe internal hemorrhaging and lost a lot of blood. I’ve put him into a sort of walking biological stasis, but the effect is only temporary. Have no doubt, he will suffer a prolonged and painful death if the treatment is not completed before the timeframe expires.”

  “I guess this is where I ask what you want from me?”

  “There’s an old woman out in the forest who’s been causing trouble. A few hikers have gone missing, and she’s been terrorizing the local logging operations. Cursed machinery, and whatnot. Just last week a truck’s axle broke on a dangerous curve in the road. The whole rig plunged off the edge of the ravine, killing the driver instantly when eighty thousand pounds of tree trunks slammed through the back of the truck’s cabin.”

  Dammit. As if I didn’t have enough on my plate. Locating the voodoo poppet had only been half our original job. We still had to find the person who’d created it. I didn’t have time to go running around the woods hunting evil old crones. I wondered idly if Slaski might have been the one responsible for making the poppet, but he didn’t seem the type. It wasn’t like I expected to find a blind Haitian woman holding a beheaded chicken or anything, but that kind of magic wasn’t the kind of thing people did as a side hustle. Nothing about the healer’s trailer or underground medical facility gave any indication he was into ritual-based sympathetic magic. Though the techniques required for healing weren’t that far off from what someone else might use for torture, the opposing mindsets didn’t usually mingle nicely in one person all that often. Slaski could probably have cast the spells to power the poppet targeting our client, but there was no real evidence to suggest that he had a motive to do so. Not yet, anyway.

  “So I find the old bag, shut her down, and you heal Chase for real?” I said with as much calm in my voice as I could muster.

  “If there was any other way,” Slaski said, rubbing his hands together nervously. “I wasn’t lying when I told you I abhor violence. I’ve tried everything in my power to stop the woman, but I find myself woefully deficient in this particular area.”

  “We,” croaked Chase. “I’m going with you.”

  “No way, bud. You look like something a dog threw up, ate, then crapped out again.” I put my hand on his arm, and I had to force myself not to recoil at how cold his skin was beneath the cheap white T-shirt Slaski had given him. “I think it’s best if you stay here and rest.”

  Chase pushed himself off the table. His legs wobbled visibly, but before I could grab him, he forced himself to stand tall and steady. “I’m coming with you. I’m tired, but I feel fine, Alex. There’s not even any pain.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Slaski said when I turned to him. “Kid’s got the constitution of an ox. You leave him here, he’s probably just going to go crashing into the woods after you. Plus, I’m not feeding him. Speaking of which, you get my bologna?”

  “Fine.” I knew a losing battle when I saw one. Slaski had hit the nail on the head with his ox comment. Chase was one of the most stubborn people I’d ever met. It was one of the things I loved most about him, but it could be infuriating at times.

  “What’s the deal with Rosina Leckermaul?” Chase asked Slaski. “We on the lookout for a gingerbread house or something?”

  The healer seemed as confused as I was.

  “Leckermaul?” Chase continued with obvious annoyance. “As in the witch from Engelbert Humperdinck's 1892 opera adaptation of Hansel and Gretel?”

  “What in seven hells would make you think I’d know that?” I asked.

  “I actually should have picked up on that reference,” the healer added. “I borrowed a wonderful performance MET Opera on DVD from the library a few years ago. The mezzo-soprano who played Hansel was wonderful, but I’m still not sure how I feel about the decision to cast a man in the role of the witch. It was a decade ago, sure, but—”

  “Are we really having a discussion about opera right now?” I needed to get out of this damned cave before I throttled Chase and Slaski both. “Be absolutely clear that I am only agreeing to help you just because you’re holding my friend’s life hostage. If anything happens to him, I’m going to come back here and destroy you. Tell me what we need to know to find this old woman.”

  “Right,” Slaski said with a grim smile. “The hermitess lives about twenty miles from here. You can take the road all the way up to the end where it turns into the parking lot for the Highland Trail, but you’ll have to hike the last few miles. I don’t know exactly where she lives, but that’ll get you close enough to zero in on her.”

  “So we find her, convince her to stop harassing the locals, then you finish healing Chase.”

  Slaski plucked a scalpel from the tray by his side. He inspected the edge before setting it down again. Body turned half away from me, he said quietly, “I’m afraid that won’t be quite enough. You’ll need to kill her.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Nuh uh. I don’t do murder for hire.”

  “Let’s get out of here, Alex,” Chase said. He took a few steps towards the door before stopping and waiting for me to follow. “We’ll find someone in the city to fix me up.”

  It was easy to forget that Chase was new to all of this. It hadn’t even been a year since I’d let him in on the secret that magic was real. He’d accepted the concept and fallen into his role as my partner so easily, I sometimes forgot how little he really knew about this world.

  “It won’t work,” I told him.

  “Listen to your girlfriend here,” Slaski said. “I’ve woven a very particular arrangement of healing energy into you. It’s the only thing keeping you alive right now. Should anyone without the exact knowledge of what I’ve done try to heal you, they will almost certainly cause everything to unravel, killing you in the process.”

  “There has to be someone who can undo this without killing me,” Chase said. “I refuse to let this asshole blackmail you, Alex.”

  “I don’t doubt there are people who could fix you up, but what are the odds we find one of them in time?” I looked from Chase to Slaski. “We’re still hours away from home, and none of the healers I know would even touch you in this state.”

  “The world will be a better place without the hermitess,” Slaski snapped. “Believe me when I say I act only out of desperation. I’ve tried everything. I even appealed to the Conclave. Those elitist bastards don’t care what happens to us out here in the middle of nowhere, though. No one cares about us. When you showed up here, I sensed your power immediately. I knew what I had to do, and I don’t regret my actions if they will save more lives in the end.”

  Situations like this made me wonder if maybe I wouldn’t have been better off taking a regular old nine-to-five job a windowless office. I could be using my abilities for inane little tasks like magically filing paperwork instead of finding myself drained, exhausted, and being put in yet another ridiculous situation because some fae or practitioner was trying to use me to do their dirty work.

  “Fine,” I said to Slaski. “We’ll get rid of the hermitess for you.”

  “Alex, you can’t be serious?”

  I silenced Chase with a slight shake of my head.

  “Two days,” Slaski said as I move to join Chase at the operating room’s exit. “Our deal is null and void if you don’t eliminate her before then.”

  I looked back over my shoulder to stare at the stunted little man. “You better hope I’m back before then. Otherwise things will not go well for you.”

  Slaski snorted doubtfully, but he said nothing else while Chase and I walked away.

  Chapter Five

  It wasn’t until we were back at the car that Chase exploded.

  “What the actual fuck, Alex?” he said after slamming the
driver’s side door closed. He ripped the key from my hand and jammed it into the ignition so hard I thought he might snap it. “Why would you tell that asshole we’re going to kill someone for him? I know we’d do anything for each other, but there has to be a line we don’t cross, right?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time I killed someone,” I said calmly. “Truth is, there are bad people in this world. Not all of them deserve to live. Or maybe they do, I don’t know. At a certain point, people in my world become more monster than human. Once they’ve hit that point, there aren’t a lot of alternatives for dealing with them.”

  Chase started the car and backed out of the spot. Gravel pinged off the side of the car when he peeled out of Slaski’s driveway and turned onto the logging road to take us deeper into the forest.

  “Those deaths were last resorts,” Chase said. “I’ve never known you to set out with the intention of murdering anyone just because some stunted med school dropout told you to. We’re not contract killers.”

  I peeled open another chocolate bar. I was starting to wish I’d bought a lot more junk food. “Have a little faith. I don’t exactly plan on killing anyone just yet. You’ve got a short expiration date though, and it would have been a waste of time arguing with Slaski. Better to have him think we’re going to do exactly what he wants. I’m hoping we can figure out some other way to deal with the hermitess in a way that Slaski stays ignorant of the fact that we didn’t kill her. All we need to do is convince him we did what he wanted long enough to get you fixed up again. And if it turns out this old lady really is the evil menace he made her out to be, we’ll deal with her accordingly. Stopping monsters is in the job description. You knew that from the beginning.”

  Chase rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry for doubting you. I’m feeling pretty out of it right now. I don’t know what Slaski did to me, but I definitely do not feel okay.”

  “We’re friends, so I’m not going to bullshit you,” I said around a mouthful of chocolate. “You’re in a bad place, bud. Slaski stopped your internal bleeding and closed up your wounds, but from what I can tell, he left you in some kind of cellular stasis. Think of it like dissolving duct tape. As long as you’re stuck like this, your body won’t be able to heal itself. When the stasis spell starts wearing off, your injuries are going to go right back to where they were when I dragged you out of that warehouse. I don’t know enough about healing magic to figure out exactly what he did, but I pretty much guarantee any application of magic that doesn’t match Slaski’s signature will trigger some kind of defensive measure that’ll speed up the deterioration. You’re on borrowed time until we find this hermitess. One way or another, she has to be dealt with if you’re going to live.”

  “Awesome,” Chase muttered. “So where do we start?”

  “Let’s park at the trailhead Slaski mentioned. If she’s using magic, hopefully I can spot some of her traps or whatever warding she has in place to keep people from finding her. That’ll at least give us a direction to search in.”

  We drove the rest of the way in silence. My mind spun between concern for Chase and trying to formulate a plan for actually finding the hermitess. Using magic to keep the ungifted from finding you was easy enough, but it would flare like the beacons of Gondor to anyone with the ability to see that kind of thing. Though, if she was skilled enough, she’d be able to hide the telltale signature of magic use. At this point, I was really hoping it wasn’t the latter. I’d been training harder than ever, but most of my time had been spent on high priority things like offensive and defensive magic. The jobs we’d been taking lately had certainly been paying better, but they’d also been a hell of a lot more dangerous. Not being able to uncover obfuscated magic had screwed me over a few times, but it was a nuanced art and not one I’d had enough extra time to even begin looking into.

  “How’re you feeling?” I asked Chase when he pulled into the trailhead parking lot.

  He cut the engine then sat staring straight ahead. “Thin. Kind of… stretched out like a piece of taffy. My skin is all tingly, but nothing hurts. I saw my reflection when I adjusted the mirror. There should be pain from all those cuts, right? I shouldn’t feel this numb?”

  “Magic is a hell of a drug,” I said with a forced smile. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Slaski probably just muted your pain receptors or something.”

  Chase turned to look at me. His hollow eyes didn’t seem focused. It was like he was staring through me instead of at me. “I feel like a zombie.”

  “If you start craving brains, I’ll do you a solid and put a bullet through your dome, okay?”

  Getting nothing but a weak half smile in return nearly broke me. Chase was probably the most positive and silly person I’d ever met in my life. I’d heard him crack lame jokes during some of the darkest times of his life. If his sense of humor was already fading, he was further gone than I thought. I had to find this hermitess and figure out her deal. And I had damn well better do it fast.

  I got out of the car and went around to the trunk. We’d packed an assortment of gear before setting out from home, so I quickly filled a backpack with whatever food we had in the car, a couple of water bottles, and some extra clothing in case the weather shifted. I started packing a bag for Chase, but seeing him move like he was underwater when he got out of the car made me stop. He’d be slow enough as it was, and I didn’t want to weigh him down any more.

  “Here, try to eat this.” I peeled back the wrapper on an energy bar and handed it to him. “Don’t suppose your phone survived the blast back at the lumber mill, huh?”

  Chase looked at the bar like it was a clod of dirt I’d picked up off the ground, but to his credit, he took a bite and chewed dutifully before choking it down. “Probably not. I checked for my phone back at Slaski’s place, and I don’t even have it. Must have fallen out of my pocket.”

  “Damn. Mine’s toast too. Guess we’re doing this without support.” I pointed up the trail. “Looks like there’s a ridge up there. Let’s find high ground so I can scan the area.”

  The first part of the trail was rocky hard-packed earth, and only the sound of Chase’s feet scuffing the ground with every shambling step indicated he was behind me. The steep climb out of the parking lot had me huffing and puffing within minutes, but Chase’s breathing was calm and even every time I turned to check on him. He was easily keeping pace with me, but the hike was taxing him less than it would a normal person sitting on the couch in front of the TV. The guy had always been surprisingly fit for someone so husky, but there was something deeply unnatural about how little effect the exercise was having on him.

  We crested a rise and came to a natural viewpoint. I noticed Chase was still holding the energy bar and had only taken the one bite out of it. “Think you can eat some more?”

  He looked at the bar like he was seeing it for the first time. Again, he lifted it to his mouth and bit off a piece like a robot following its master’s orders. I watched him until he took another bite of energy bar, then turned around to survey the area. With a thought, I activated my mage sight. It would have been much easier to see signs of magic use without brightness of the sun interfering, but even still I should have been able to see obvious flares of magic if the hermitess was using it to protect herself. Tapping a little more energy, I tried to shift focus to a different magic spectrum. It was a technique I’d only heard about from an old friend, and I really didn’t know what I was doing. Maybe that’s why the only thing I got for my troubles was a trickle of blood running from my left nostril and onto my lips.

  “Dammit.” I spat blood away and wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “So much for that plan.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t see anything?” Chase crumpled the energy bar wrapper and shoved it into his pocket.

  “Nothing at all.” I unslung my pack and dug out a water bottle for Chase. “We’re going to have to do this the old fashioned way. How long do you figure we have until dark?”

  Chase ch
ecked his wrist watch then squinted in the direction of the sun. “Four or five hours? Less if we’re down in the valley and the sun sets behind those mountains.”

  I slipped my pack over my shoulders again. “Let’s get moving then. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

  The trail began losing elevation, though not as quickly as it had gained it on the way up to the viewpoint. A spectacular as the view of the valley and surrounding mountains had been, it had done little to point us in the way of our elusive hermitess. It wasn’t like I’d been hoping to see something as easy to follow as a trail of smoke from her cabin’s chimney, but it would have been nice. Without any obvious clues, we’d have to search the old fashioned way. If either of us had a working phone, we might have been able to pull up satellite maps of the area to make our search a little easier. Instead, we were going to have to comb the woods using natural landmarks to make sure we weren’t wandering back and forth over the same ground.

  “So what are we looking for exactly?” Chase asked. His speech was a little slurred, his words a lot more drawn out than usual.

  “It’s tough to explain, but basically we’re trying to find anything that doesn’t feel right.” I mulled over how to explain it while we walked. “If this hermitess is any good at what she does, she’ll be using complex masking spells to hide any trace of her existence. Same goes for the traps Slaski claims she’s set out in the area. If I can’t see them with my mage sight, they’ll be camouflaged well enough that neither of us will be able to see through the illusion.”

  “Are you suggesting we wander around until one of us gets caught in a trap?”

  “Hopefully that’s not how it goes down,” I said. “You ever get the sensation someone’s watching you when you think you’re alone, then you turn around and sure enough someone is there? It’s kind of like that. Even the least magically sensitive person is still attuned to other people’s energy. It’s what people generally describe as a gut feeling. You know something is wrong, but you can’t exactly put your finger on why.”