Before Harris had time to react and do anything more aggressive, I fired three quick shots. The gunfire echoed through the hallway and a sudden scream followed.

I dropped into a crouch, spun, and kicked with all the strength I could muster from that position. A part of the wall flew inward on oiled hinges I couldn’t see. It hit the drywall with a sharp bang and did not bounce back. I guessed that the force of my blow had embedded the knob in the wall.

A burly, tattooed man was rolling on the floor, shouting four-letter curses that had nothing to do with magic, his hands pressed tight over a bleeding wound in his calf. The air filled with the scent of burning flesh. Either the iron or holy water had done the trick.

Harris gave me a hard look, but moved swiftly through the door. Raising his wand, he threw a wordless spell at the man on the floor. He was instantly silent, though his lips kept moving. Hate-filled eyes glared at the two of us.

“Holy Crap, Graves!” Harris shouted. There was no need to keep our voices down anymore, but the sound seemed to echo off the walls and blast into my ears with the force of an air horn. “What the hell were you thinking?!” The caster raised a hand and started to make movements in the air, but Harris grabbed him and threw him facedown, wrestling with him until he could get a pair of flexible cable ties out of his pocket and around the guy’s wrists. This time he didn’t need my help, so I didn’t offer. “You could have blown us both up!”

I didn’t bother to respond. I was busy looking around the room. I saw the charred remains of a side of the ductwork. It was a small hole, not really big enough to do more than blow a hole the size of my head. The edges were wet but not with water. I just couldn’t tell what it was over the scent of charred metal.

But that’s not what worried me. There was a … contraption in the center of the room. It was black metal and round, about twice the size of an ancient cannonball, and had what looked like valves coming out of the metal at odd angles. I’ve seen a variety of bombs before in training videos and this didn’t look like one. Frankly, it looked like something that should be attached to an old furnace. It glowed with powerful magic that pressed against my chest hard enough to hurt, and had a digital display with a countdown timer, so a bomb definitely came to mind. Two of the three bullets I’d fired were floating in midair right in front of me. Marks on the floor showed that they’d bounced off the tiles before becoming trapped in whatever spell was around the object. Apparently, it was sheer luck I hit the other caster with the snake shot, which hadn’t ricocheted like the larger rounds. He must have some fae in his background to have the iron shot slip through his personal magic.

Harris had been right that I wasn’t qualified to do anything about the … whatever it was in front of me. But I remember from college that any spell that required a physical casing to keep the caster safe was a nasty piece of work, so in my mind it was a bomb. The best thing I could do now was to call this in to the bomb squad and get the rest of the people out of the building.

I turned my attention to Harris, who had not only gotten the caster into the ties, but had also dialed for the bomb squad on his cell phone and was explaining about the masking spell. I waited for him to hang up the line and asked, “Do you need me to stay here, or should I go back and help the others?” I really, really hoped he’d say no. Yeah, I had come down to investigate, and I’d stay and help if I had to. But I have my limits. I’ll fight me some monsters, face bad guys with guns. I’ll even face demons. But bombs?

The prisoner was now sitting sullenly against the wall, ankles and wrists both bound tight. It would make it impossible for him to walk, let alone run or fight. I put my Colt back in its holster.

Harris smiled while the other man glowered. “Nah. Nathan and I are old friends, aren’t we? He won’t try to escape and embarrass himself. Besides,” Harris assured me, “the ties are spelled higher than he’ll ever get out of. He’s not going to get away. Let me get him in a fireman’s carry and I’ll go up with you. He nodded at the machine. “We’ll leave this to the experts.”

Fine by me. More than fine. Really. I turned to go through the door, as he bent to grab the prisoner, but the moment I reached the threshold, things … changed.

A subtle whisper of will pushed at me. It was magic all right, but not the brute force of the two men we’d encountered thus far. This was something entirely different. It eased through the protection of my charms like water seeping through microscopic cracks in rock.

Touch it …

What the…? I could swear I heard a woman’s voice, a warm alto that beckoned to me. I grabbed the doorjamb to steady myself. “Harris? Something’s wrong.”

His voice was breathy and panicked when he responded. “I know. I hear her too. We need to get out of here. Now!”

Nathan was smiling slightly, apparently listening to the voice. But he wasn’t able to respond and I knew that I certainly had no plan to do what she was telling me.

And yet I found my head turning, until I felt like an owl, with my face pointed so I could nearly look down at my backside. The muscles in my neck and shoulders began to protest; a throbbing rose in my left temple. But these minor pains were no distraction from the words that hounded me.

Touch it.…

My fingers started moving without conscious thought, trying to reach for the glowing aura that raked along my skin.

“Don’t do it, Graves!” Harris was apparently fighting his own battle against the voice, because my glance revealed he’d moved as far away from the machine as the room would allow and was now sitting on his own hands.

“I don’t want to. Do something, Harris. You’re the mage. Haven’t you got anything in your bag of tricks to make us both deaf or something?”

He let out a laugh that was part sarcasm and part fear. “I wish it was that easy. It’s in our heads, not our ears. I could knock us both unconscious, but then nobody will find the bomb before it blows, and they’ll have more people in the building searching for us.”

He was right. Bomb teams usually have a mage, a straight human, and a psychic. If the psychic foresees that the bomb will go off before it can be disarmed the squad simply evacuates everyone and puts a containment field on the area but doesn’t go in. Standard practice, which is why the psychic is usually the team leader.

Touch it.…

The cracks in my protection were widening. I could feel the muscles in my arm tingling. My hand was beginning to disobey my command to grip the jamb. I tightened my grasp with what felt like my last ounce of free will. The wood splintered under my fingers as my knuckles grew white and the tendons of my hand locked into position.

But I had two hands … and while I’d put all my energy into keeping my left hand still, my right had developed a mind of its own. When my right arm began to rise and reach backward, I started to panic. It wouldn’t be easy for me to touch the shield with that hand, but if the voice could make my body contort or dislocate, it would be possible. The pain in my head had grown from an ache to blinding agony. Muscles aren’t intended to be stretched to their limit and kept there—even vampire muscles that heal constantly. “Harris, you’ve got to do something! This is magic … you’re magic; do something. Freeze me in place if you have to, or knock me out or make me start screaming so people can find us.” Because now I was part of the problem. I just knew that if the voice wanted me to touch the shield, that touch would either set off the bomb or cause other things to happen that I wouldn’t like. I could feel it in my bones.

I heard voices outside now, but they seemed too far away, given the size of the building. Maybe that’s how we were able to sneak up on Nathan in the first place—sound dampening on the room kept him focused on his task.

I was beginning to think he wasn’t the bomb’s creator. He was likely just a hired hand brought in to make sure nobody got to it before it blew. Maybe he was the intended trigger—the one the voice we were hearing was meant to control.

Another sharp pain stabbed through me. My right arm was struggling to touch the glowing sphere, even as I fought to keep a grip on the doorjamb and keep my feet planted firmly on the floor. I was not going to take even a piece of a step back toward that thing. If my body was going to betray me, it was damned well going to have to work at it.

So why not make the problem part of the solution? “Harris? Can you cast at all?”

His voice was breathy when he started to reply but strengthened as he talked. “Little bit. Nothing too complicated.”

Thankfully, what I hoped for wasn’t complicated at all. But it was only going to work if Nathan wasn’t in here with us or just outside. By now, I didn’t think that either of the mages Harris had caught was the creator of our little problem. This magic felt … feminine somehow. And I was the only woman here to my knowledge.

“I need you to make a trip wire. Cast a spell so that if the voice does make me touch the bomb, the second spell will go off.”

“And what’s the second spell?” Harris sounded skeptical, probably because he realized I was admitting we might fail here. I was going to fail pretty soon. He was right.

“Set the bomb to implode. We contain the blast in this room and force the bomb in on itself.”

His voice was flat now and sounded hollow. “That would kill us.”

I forced my eyes to the right as far as they would go so I could at least meet his wide brown eyes. “But the kids won’t die, and the building won’t be turned into little pieces that will punch through the neighbors’ roofs.” I paused long enough to pull on my shrinking reserves, keeping my body from obeying the powerful force that was turning me into a puppet.

I stated the reality for the first time, and I hated saying it. “Face it. We’re probably going to die today, Harris. Let’s make it have some meaning, huh?”

He was silent long enough that I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me. But then his voice came, sturdy and resolute. “Okay. For my little girl upstairs, I’ll do it.”