“The Segue Institute is your best resource. Tell them Mason Stray referred you.” The man put his wallet away. “Cari, are we done here or do you have work?”
“I have to pick up a few things,” she answered.
The man moved in to Ms. Dolan. He had his hand around her upper arm, keeping her close to his body, while blocking Leah as they walked past. Leah watched them walk away from her, leaving the heartache and nightmare of her sister behind them.
“Witch!” Leah yelled after Ms. Dolan. Desperation overcame her. She drew an even deeper breath to shriek it so everyone would hear. “Witch!”
Chapter Four
Cari was relieved when the door closed behind her and shut the woman’s cries outside. Cari was breathless with shock. Less than a week ago, she’d been ready for the future. To take over the future. She’d felt strong and secure. Dolan was rising.
And now? “I’m going to need to increase security.”
“Yes, and fast.” Mason walked at her side toward the elevator. “I’ve seen some disturbing things in my work, but the implications of that woman screaming witch has to top the list.”
Pitchforks and torches came to Cari’s mind. The last female Dolan to inherit the House had been hanged as a witch in the seventeenth century.
“The world is changing.” Every day seemed more wild and unstable. Magic was covering the Earth and it could not be undone.
“The world is going backward,” Mason said. “Information would help.”
The elevator closed, so Cari could speak freely. “That her sister had to choose to become a wraith?” Because the woman was right: it wasn’t an accident. Her sister had to have wanted immortality, and wanted it desperately, and that’s exactly what she’d gotten. Wraiths couldn’t die, couldn’t be killed by any mortal means, but gradually devolved into monsters unless kept on a steady diet of human souls. But how to explain that, especially to a sister? Cari had two of her own.
“I’d rather know,” Mason said darkly.
“You grew up with magic. I don’t think humans can cope.”
Which just made Mason give her a long, dry look. Maybe he didn’t know his mage history. She’d been tutored at length since she was five. Case in point: it started with one woman screaming witch. She wished she could talk to her father about it; he would’ve understood. He would’ve known what to do.
But now she was in charge. And that look from Mason made her think that her tutors hadn’t quite covered everything. It occurred to her that a stray might know things she hadn’t learned or couldn’t learn from the safety of her House.
Frustration made her stand up straighter. Why had Kaye Brand wanted Mason here? All he did was make Cari feel seventeen and unsure again, when she really needed to be the Dolan now. She had work to do.
Cari went to her office first, called security to alert them to the problem outside, then began gathering her papers. She touched base with Special Projects on DolanCo’s big advancement in Shadow. The idea was simple: A container with magic held inside. A little vial of concentrated Shadow. Mages were all able to direct Shadow in some way, but none could actually hold and transport it. Shadow was chaos; it smoked through all barriers. But a little more work, and Dolan might just have the solution—a new kind of synthetic membrane.
Mason waited in the doorways of the various offices she stopped in. She could feel him looking at her, though when she glanced his way, he was always examining her father’s personal art collection, exhibited throughout DolanCo offices.
“One last stop, and I’ll be done,” she said to Mason.
She picked up the membrane prototype and put it in her purse for safe-keeping. Then she had to make it clear to staff that Erom Vauclain would no longer be working on the project.
Today of all days she didn’t miss the irony that her company’s big advancement was mentioned in the faelore of the Old Ones. Mason was right in that respect: the world was going, or at least reaching, backward. Or maybe time moved in circles. And if that were true, then magekind had no hope at all.
Gary Skinner, a human who’d worked for Dolan security for many years, found her just as she was ready to leave. He’d been aging into his pot belly since she’d started at DolanCo six years ago, but he was loyal and had good timing. She’d wanted to have a word with him anyway about keeping things calm now that it was public knowledge that DolanCo was a mage-owned company. He’d known for some time now.
“It’s too late to try to calm them down,” Gary said. A crowd—including a local news van—had gathered at the courtyard exit to the parking lot.
She and Mason looked out of an upper story window to assess the situation. The overcast sky put a gray ceiling above. Below at least thirty people had congregated to blame her for the darkness now shrouding the world, when she’d been born with it in her blood. If she listened closely, she could almost hear them chanting: “No more Sha-dow. No more Sha-dow.”
What did they think she could do about it? It was like protesting oxygen. Magic had always been a part of the world, to one degree or another.
“And so it begins,” Mason observed.
“Police are on the way,” Gary said.
A second news van turned into the lot. They’d only been there a half an hour. How could one woman screaming “witch” grow to this?
“Why here? Why now?” Cari wondered aloud. She left off Why me? But it didn’t seem fair that she should be singled out when there were so many other Houses that used humans for terrible purposes. Feeding their wraiths being one. Dolan had never used wraiths. And her father had always paid the humans that worked for them over the national average.
“They finally have a target,” Mason answered. “Someone local and accessible to blame. We need to get out of here while we can.”
Each chant struck her mind. No more Sha-dow. No more Sha-dow.
Several years of fear growing in the world—monsters in alleys, talk of black magic, the fae closing in—and now people knew her for what she was.
The exposure felt like a hot sun blazing down upon her, just her, while everyone else was safe in the shadows of the gray day. Panic, her constant companion these last few days, flared in her chest and battered her ribs with the beat of her heart.
“Let me get some more men.” Gary lifted a walkie.
It had been an egregious oversight not to have hired more security following her father’s death. But then she’d been ill, and was just now getting back up to speed.
No more Sha-dow!
She should have insisted on her House guards accompanying her today. That would be two more men, Shadow-born, to see to her safety. But it was too late now for recriminations and I-told-you-so’s to Mason Stray. She was in charge; he was only the stray Brand had forced upon her. Why had she listened to him?
“You might not be coming back here for a little while.” Mason didn’t seem all that concerned, but then this wasn’t his business, his family’s livelihood at stake.
She’d thought she wouldn’t be back because she’d be elsewhere looking for the source of the mage plague. Now this. “I’ve got everything I need.”
Three other security staff members joined them on the ground floor main exit. They were all DolanCo had on site, and they were humans, too.
The chanting was louder down here. The plan was to exit in force and quickly get to Mason’s car before a real mob could form. When she was back at Dolan House, she could figure out what to do. At least there the wards would keep everything and anything out.