Annie Bellet [The Twenty Side Justice Calling (epub)

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.Maybe I was still safe.No more magic though.Not even my stone floating exercises, at least not for a while.Whatever happened with Rose and the ritual mage who was behind all this was Alek’s problem to handle.He was the one trained for this shit.I could provide emotional support to my friends, but I had to stop being involved.I could stay for now.Keep my life here.Decision made, I relaxed a little.Which is when, of course, the universe kicked me in the ass again.Levi and Harper came through the front door in a rush.I knew it was trouble just from the energy they projected, before I even made out their upset faces and heard a peep from them.“Ezee is missing,” Levi said.“What do you mean, missing?” I asked.My heart took up residence in my throat.“He was supposed to meet me at work after his last class got out.He didn’t show and he isn’t answering either his cell or his office phone.”“Maybe he’s at the library? Emergency student conference?” I tried to ignore my painful sense of foreboding.“Did you talk to him today?” Harper asked.Shit.“Shit,” I said.“I did.He said he knew one of the perps from last night and was going to ask around, see who else might be connected to the guy.”“Shit is right,” Levi muttered.“We’re going over to Juniper to look for him.Come on.”How could I refuse that? He was my friend.This felt an awful lot like involvement though.“Where’s the Justice?” I asked.“I think he went to the hospital to see if that guy had woken up yet,” Harper said.“He said something about it when he came to check on mom earlier.”Which meant Alek was at least forty-five minutes away in another town.Wylde wasn’t large enough to have a full hospital, we just had the emergency clinic and a couple doctor’s offices.“Okay, let me lock up,” I said.What else could I do?Juniper College is a private liberal arts university known for turning out a lot of serious students who go on to get PhDs and then work in low level service jobs for the rest of their lives trying to pay off massive student loans.Okay, so maybe not always that last part, but it was one of those elite small schools full of people who seemed more in love with learning than with practical life skills.I’d teased Ezee about it a lot, but in good fun.I mean, I’d been raised by a bunch of professors and gone to a similar school.Once upon a time I had thought I could be happy in academia for the rest of my life.Before Samir and my wild years as a sorceress-in-training, plotting to make the world my bitch.The campus was just outside Wylde proper and butted up against the border of the River of No Return Wilderness.Ezee’s office was in the oldest building on campus, a beautiful five story timber and river stone mansion that sat like a jewel in the middle of a grove of old growth Douglas Fir trees.The sun was low in the sky when we arrived and the campus quiet in the spring chill.Here and there students walked in packs, talking to each other or with heads buried in their phones, and no one gave us much of a glance.Ezee’s office was on the fourth floor.Levi had a key and let us in when knocking clearly showed his brother wasn’t in residence.Books filled one wall on shelves bending a little under their weight.Two overstuffed leather chairs with brass upholstery tacks decorating them in knotwork patters on the edges were positioned by the desk in a way that invited one in for a cozy chat over a cup of tea about the mysteries of the universe, or, given Ezee’s area of expertise, a lively talk about American history and treatment of native peoples.His desk was orderly, his laptop sitting in sleep mode and plugged into the spike bar on one side.A pile of papers sat waiting to be graded or handed back.There was a pink pen, uncapped, lying on the open area of the desk, as though Ezee had just set it down and was about to return to whatever he’d been writing.Even his desk chair was rotated toward the door, as though he’d only stepped out for a moment, and the Armani aftershave he used still hung in the air.“Maybe he’s in the bathroom? Or we could check the library,” I said.“It feels like he’s here.Somehow.” Levi shook his head and sniffed the air.“I think he’s close.I can’t tell.It’s like something is blocking my connection to him.”The twins might be fraternal, but shifter twins were an almost unheard of phenomenon.It wasn’t a surprise that they were bonded in a magical way.We often joked that if you pinched one, the other would flinch.Or at least glare at you, if it was Levi.Flinching wasn’t manly enough for him.“Do you know his computer password?” Harper asked.“Is the Pope Catholic?”“Okay, yeah, stupid question.”Levi sat at the desk and unlocked the laptop.“Nothing immediate that I can see.Let me check his calendar.He writes down everything.”“Can I help you?” A man’s voice from right behind me made me jump.Nausea twisted in my gut and I took a step back into the office as I turned and looked the guy over.He was about my height, maybe five eight, pudgy, close to forty, with thinning brown hair and glasses that exaggerated the bulge of his blue eyes.He wore a brown sweater and a pair of faded khakis and looked utterly unassuming.Yet he set off my creep alert instantly.Maybe it was the nausea.Maybe it was the events of the last day.“Hi, we’re looking for Professor Chapowits,” I said.Despite my no magic vow, I summoned a little of my power and tried to detect if this guy had any magic on him.Nothing.Damn.Maybe I was paranoid.“He’s not here,” the man said.“How did you get into his office?” He seemed weirdly nervous, his eyes darting from me, to Harper, to Levi, and the computer.“I’m his brother,” Levi said, swinging the chair around.“You are?”“I’m Bernie uh, Barnes.I work here.That’s my office,” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder.“Ezekiel is gone for the day.You shouldn’t be going through his things.”“He wouldn’t have left his laptop, and he’d be answering his phone,” Levi said.“Did you see him? What did he say?”“I just saw him leave a little while ago.Maybe he was getting coffee.He likes to get coffee at the student café.You should try there.” Bernie Barnes, whose name sounded like a bad Stan Lee villain’s, smiled weakly at us, nodding as though he’d thought of something brilliant.I really didn’t like this guy.He seemed desperate to convince us that Ezee wasn’t here and everything was fine.I studied him more with my magic enhanced vision.It wasn’t that I was getting nothing, I realized.I was seeing not just an absence of magic but an actual null void.He should have registered as a human, with the little ticks and flurries of ambient power that flowed around all life forms.But to my magical vision, it was like he wasn’t there at all.“Why don’t you come with us,” I said.“Show us where it is.”“Okay,” Bernie said, surprising me.“Let me lock up my office.” He turned and walked down the hall.“That guy seem weird to you?” Harper asked.“Hella weird,” Levi said.I stepped out of the office and saw Bernie disappearing not into one of the offices in the hall but through the stairwell doors.“Shit, he’s running,” I said.We bolted after him, Harper and Levi leaving me in their dust as we raced for the stairs.Bernie Barnes flew down those steps ahead of them, outpacing even shifter speed with his lead [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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