red and black and vicious had sprinted back down my torso to perch on my knee, and I could swear it was laughing at me. Caleb lunged for it with another numb stick, but it darted back up my thigh. He was too late to pull up and my right knee collapsed.
“Don’t help me!” I panted, as the damn thing reappeared on my stomach, its painted wings fanning out just above my belly button. It was 2D, as all wards are on the skin, merely thin black lines and brightly colored paint. But I swear it felt heavy, warm and all too real.
“Give me your stick,” I told Caleb, as the ward eyed me warily, a tiny cloud of painted smoke issuing from its nostrils. “I’m going to trap it between two of them.”
“And if you miss? That thing was taken off a dark mage, Lia,” he reminded me, suddenly serious. “I’m guessing it can do more damage than we’ve seen. A lot more.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“Not to mention that you’ve been hit with a numb stick twice already. Once more and you’ll be out cold.”
A few stray sparks tickled my stomach, glowing gold against my skin for a moment, before dissipating and leaving tiny scorch marks in their place. “I’m not going to numb myself,” I told him through clenched teeth.
“Uh-huh. And what am I supposed to tell the doc if—”
“Just give me the damn stick!”
The tat didn’t wait for Caleb to make up his mind. It suddenly dove for cover again, making it as far as the pink satin rose on the front of my panties before Caleb and I almost simultaneously stunned it. “You all right?” he demanded, as the tat froze against my skin, still wearing a small smirk.
“Ask me that in half an hour, when I can feel my butt,” I told him unsteadily, as I gave the thing a careful poke. It didn’t move, but it didn’t come off, either.
Magical wards appear as tattoos on the body, but in their inert form, they’re small gold charms that fall easily away from the skin. Only that wasn’t happening here. I poked it again. Nothing.
“Why isn’t it coming off?” I demanded, trying not to sound as freaked out as I felt.
One look in the reflective side of the nearest shelf told me I wasn’t fooling anybody: my gray eyes were wide and startled, my color was high, and my long brown hair was everywhere.
“I told you it was taken off a dark mage,” Caleb said, squatting down to have a closer look. He muttered the standard release spell we used on especially stubborn charms, and nada.
I glared at it, fresh out of ideas. I hadn’t worked in what the Corps only half-jokingly called the dungeon for very long, and wasn’t an expert on magical wards. I had one myself—a small horned owl that had been a present from my father when I joined the Corps—but it had never gone bat-shit crazy and attacked me. At least, not yet.
Caleb tried again, this time with a spell strong enough to raise goose bumps on my skin. But the tattoo was still a tattoo, its colors glowing warm and jewel-bright against my stomach. “It must be a talisman,” he informed me.
“So what? My owl’s a talisman.”
“Your owl is part talisman. It gathers energy from the natural world or pulls it from a built-in reservoir to avoid draining you every time you use it. But there are rare wards that are pure talismans—that don’t draw from your own magic at all. It looks like that’s what we have here.”
“That still doesn’t explain how we get it off!” I said, brushing at it uselessly. I could feel the raised outline against my fingertips, but there was nothing to grab hold of. Just skin and ink.
“That could be a problem,” Caleb said, helping me to my feet. “Talismans like that are illegal because they’re made by draining the magic of a living creature into the tat. It gives them a large reservoir, but sometimes characteristics of the creature are passed on as well. Tats like that have their own minds, in a way.”
“So you’re saying it’ll turn loose when it wants to?”
“Or when it runs out of power.”
“And that will be when?”
He smiled like a man who didn’t have a dangerous magical weapon stuck under his belly button. “No way to know.” He picked my jeans up off the floor and tucked the numb stick in the pocket. “I’d keep this,
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