Natural Mage (Magical Mayhem #2)(43)

“He just wants a powerful dual-mage partner.”

“Well, right. For him, that counts as smitten. He’s a douche. Anyway, he was hanging around, and then Mary Bell came over out of the blue. She wondered where you were, too, and spent the rest of the time giving John the side-eye.”

Tingles crawled up my spine. “Dizzy told me Mary Bell has had a somewhat foggy past.”

“I know,” Veronica said in a heavy voice. “Callie filled me in. She was doing human sacrifices at one point!”

I curled up and hugged my knees to my chest. I had liked the old mage’s approach to magic…theoretically…but murder was categorically wrong.

“They wanted to try and sacrifice a vampire, so her and her dual-mage guy tried to capture one. Well, her dual-mage guy got killed. That was when she changed her ways. Callie said it was the heartbreak that did it, not a return to morality.”

“Goodness,” I breathed out. “And yet Callie has this chick hanging around?”

“She’s powerful. Callie is keeping an eye on her, or so she says. I really think they all like to keep tabs on one another. I wouldn’t say they’re friends.”

“Well with a past like that…”

“Right. And then…” She let her words trail away, and I knew she was conflicted about telling me something.

“What?” I prodded.

“Well…Dizzy says it was nothing, but you know how he is? Everything is nothing until he’s knee deep in blood.”

“That’s not…” I blinked, trying to match up our different takes on his personality. Maybe I’d just spent too much time around blood lately.

“But I don’t know. Lately there’s been more people around this neighborhood than normal. And, I mean, no, they don’t seem particularly suspicious, but I get the feeling they are watching me. Like, when I go around fixing the grammar on signs, I always feel eyes on me, you know?”

I nodded, forgetting we weren’t speaking face to face and she couldn’t see my silent cues.

“And then last night,” she went on, “I glanced out my window because I thought I heard something bang, and I could swear a person slipped into Dizzy’s shed. I could swear it, Penny. Dizzy says he has a good warden or something on it, and that the warden or whatever was fine in the morning, but…” She sighed forcefully. “I don’t know. Maybe magically it doesn’t make sense, but I know what I saw.”

“I could probably take down a ward, then put the same ward back up.” I chewed my lip. “But there aren’t a lot of people with enough power to do that to one of the dual-mages’ spells, I don’t think.”

“Right. That’s what he said. But…”

“Well, keep your eyes out. If you saw one, you’ll probably see more. Information can be just as important as spell work.” Reagan had said that to me once, and it seemed to fit my life pretty well lately.

“Yeah,” Veronica said, letting go of the thread of the conversation. “Well, anyway, Callie and Dizzy are certain you’re in the safest place. Especially because they said you put some sort of warning or something on Reagan’s house.”

“Ward. The same thing Dizzy had on the shed.”

“Ah.”

“I have to physically bring people into Reagan’s house, or they can give a blood offering.”

“Gross. Really? Isn’t that dark magic stuff?”

“It’s like giving a DNA offering, basically. A way of getting foolproof ID.”

“Oh. Okay, then. So yeah, you should stay there.”

“Does anyone know where I am?”

“No. Callie and Dizzy won’t say—she gets hostile about people asking—and I try to make myself scarce when they come around. Which has been more frequently lately. They were impressed by the warehouse thing. Word has spread that you are a bona fide natural.”

“The failed practice session, you mean?”

She started laughing. “The ones with all the power know you can do better, and the ones without it think you’re fabulous. I don’t know heads or tails about magic, but I’m getting a pretty good idea about the mage social structure at this point. Because here I am, stuck in the middle, breaking the magical rules because I’m a normal human who is privy to this stuff.”

“So Dizzy and Callie have been filling you in?”

“Yeah. I think I am actually getting your lessons. They really did want to teach someone. You know what’s funny?” She shifted again. “I’m editing this paranormal book right now that is depicting vampires completely inaccurately. I want to do up notes about each point that’s incorrect, but the author thinks she’s writing fiction. So I can’t say anything. She’d think I was crazy.” She paused and then mumbled, probably to herself, “I think I have to stop editing that genre. It’ll drive me bonkers.”

A knock sounded at the door.

I hopped up, then regretted it the moment my body screamed in protest. “Oh, that’s the nightly maid crew. I gotta go.”

“You are so lucky,” she said before we said our farewells.

I was so lucky, that was true. Somewhere along the line, Darius had paid people to “plague” Reagan, as she called it. They looked after her place, stocked her fridge, cooked food, and cleaned up. Now that I was living here, I got the same benefits.