Cold Burn of Magic(69)

“Packing. We’re leaving town. Today.” Her voice was clipped, as though she thought she could pack faster if she talked less.

Two hours had passed since the fight at the park. After the attack, my mom had hustled me out of the Midway and back to our apartment near the lochness bridge. She’d told me to play in my room while she took a shower to wash the blood off her. After that, she had called Mo and whispered to him for almost an hour, pacing back and forth from one room of our tiny apartment to the next and back again the whole time. Ten minutes ago, she had hung up with Mo, stormed into my room, and opened my closet door. She hadn’t stopped grabbing things since.

“But why do we have to leave?” I asked. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were just trying to save that boy. Nobody even knows it was you.”

She shook her head. “Someone will know. Someone will figure it out. Trust me, Lila. We need to leave.”

“But the summer isn’t even half over yet,” I whined.

I didn’t want to leave Cloudburst Falls. Not now. We hadn’t even been to the lake, the waterfalls, or the bloodiron mines yet, my favorite places to visit. We couldn’t leave without seeing them. We just couldn’t.

Mom heard my petulant tone and stopped packing long enough to look at me. She let out a breath, sat down on the bed next to me, and threaded her fingers through mine.

“I know it’s hard, but we have to leave today. Maybe we can come back next year and stay a little longer, okay? To make up for it.”

I sighed and finally nodded. “Okay.”

“That’s my girl. ”

She smiled, kissed the top of my head, and went into her room. She came back a minute later carrying her blue spidersilk coat, her ironmesh gloves, and her black blade, snug in its scabbard. She paused, rubbing her finger over the star carved into the hilt of the sword, the one that matched her sapphire ring. Then she put the sword and everything else into the top of the suitcase full of my clothes, zipped the whole thing up, and placed it on the floor.

“Here,” she said. “Be a good girl and take that down to the car while I start packing up the next one.”

“Do I have to?” I whined again.

“Yes. ” She slipped the ring off her finger and handed it to me, before digging into her pocket and coming up with a ten-dollar bill and several quarters. “But you can wear that, and you can get us some ice cream from that shack near the river, since we didn’t get to finish ours earlier. Okay? And don’t forget to pay the lochness toll. ”

I grinned, swiped the ring and the money, then hurried over, grabbed the suitcase, and started rolling it toward the front door. Mom’s laughter followed me out of the apartment, although it seemed more sad than happy.

The building didn’t have an elevator, and since we were on the fifth floor, it took me forever to get the heavy suitcase down the back stairs and out to the car. But I managed it, bought a strawberry cheesecake ice cream cone for myself and a double fudge one for Mom, and stopped in the middle of the lochness bridge. I slapped the three quarters on the stone, just like she had told me to, then stood in the center of the bridge and admired the view.

I’d only taken two bites of my ice cream when I heard her scream.

At first, I thought that I had imagined the sound or that maybe the lochness had snagged a bird that was getting a drink of the river. So I took a third bite of my ice cream—

Another scream ripped through the air. Then another one, then another, coming faster and faster, each one higher, sharper, and louder than the last. And I knew that it was Mom screaming, and that she was in trouble.

I dropped the cones in the middle of the bridge and ran the three blocks back to our apartment, my heart pounding in my ears, my breath coming in ragged gasps, my stomach churning even faster than my legs.

Especially since I didn’t hear Mom’s screaming anymore.

I rounded the corner and stopped short. A black SUV sat at the curb in front of our building, about fifty feet away. The fancy car definitely didn’t belong in this rundown neighborhood, and neither did the tough guy with the sword and red cloak who was standing beside it.

I bit my lip, wondering how I was going to get past the guard, when the front door of the building opened and two people stepped outside. One was a boy a couple of years older than me, while the other was a handsome man, with wavy blond hair and golden eyes. He wore a black suit and was wiping something off his hands with a white silk handkerchief.

Mom had pointed the man out to me on the Midway before—Victor Draconi.

And the boy was his son, Blake.

They stopped at the curb, while the guy with the sword hurried to open the back door of the SUV for them.

“Who was she?” Blake asked.

Was? My stomach clenched even tighter.

Victor finished wiping off his hands and balled up the handkerchief.

I didn’t have to use my sight to see the blood staining the silk.

Victor shrugged. “Somebody who got in my way one too many times. Nobody now.”

He dropped the bloody handkerchief into the gutter, then slid inside the vehicle, with Blake climbing in behind him. The SUV rolled away from the curb a few seconds later.

I bolted into action, grabbing the rickety drainpipe attached to the side of the building and climbing up it as quickly as I could, something that I’d been practicing all summer since it was faster than plodding up the stairs.