Read Online Twenty-Sided Sorceress 3 - Pack of Lies by Annie Bellett - Free Book Online

He was tanned, more so than heritage would dictate, which fit with a man who spent lots of time outdoors taking pictures. His fingernails were trimmed and he ate with a polite tidiness that drew no attention.
    Maybe it was because someone had tried to kill me. Maybe it was the Lansings’ deaths or Dorrie’s poisoning. I felt on edge, paranoia damaging what should have been a happy evening. I shoved the feeling down and decided to make small talk.
    “Kami is an unusual surname,” I said. “Where in Japan did you grow up?”
    His eyes flicked to me and he brought his napkin up, carefully wiping his mouth and finishing chewing before he spoke.
    “A tiny village in the Oki Shoto islands,” he said. “It is very remote.”
    “I’d love to go to Japan,” Harper said. “I’ve been to South Korea for tournaments, but never any further.”
    “Tournaments?” Mr. Kami asked.
    “Oh God, don’t get her started,” Levi said with a mock groan.
    “But I am curious. Please tell,” Mr. Kami said.
    Which led into an explanation about what Harper did for a living with videogames that Mr. Kami listened to with very polite attention.
    I’d heard of the Oki Shoto islands. Kami means paper, or spirit. It’s a weird last name. Japan has a huge diversity of surnames, it’s true, but it was the only odd thing about a man who was otherwise completely normal-seeming. Human. Boring. Everything about him from his appearance to his mannerisms said “nothing to see here, move along.”
    I was so fucked up that his sheer normalness bugged me. Or maybe it was that curling slip of paper earlier. What were the odds that in a tiny town like Wylde, someone would show up using Japanese on a spell scroll and it not be remotely related to the one Japanese foreigner in town? I didn’t believe in coincidence. Not today.
    I closed my eyes for a moment, listening with my other senses to the conversation, to the people around me. I pulled on my magic, spooling up a thread of power from the huge well within. I touched my wards, letting my consciousness spiral to the outermost circles around the property. Nothing unusual. I pulled myself back in, listening with magically enhanced senses to my friends. I felt their own thrumming power, the soft rhythms of their hearts, the tickling feel of their sleeping animal selves. I could identify each just by his or her energy signature, that metaphysical something that helped define what they were. This awareness of life power in others, this second sense was a gift, of sorts, from an asshole murdering warlock whose heart I’d eaten to save Rosie and Ezee’s lives only a few months before.
    Mr. Kami, however, didn’t even register. It was like he wasn’t there. He might have been part of the chair on which he sat for all my metaphysical senses could tell.
    He should have shown up. I could sense the horses in their stalls, sense the fat tabby cat out on the porch swing. Not Mr. Kami. He had less presence inside my wards, against my magic, than a cat. I opened my eyes and looked at him.
    Then, deliberately, carefully, I prodded him with a touch of my power. To a human’s senses, it should have felt like something brushed against him, a phantom touch. A truly oblivious human, like our friend and fellow gamer Steve, might have felt nothing at all.
    Mr. Kami tensed and flicked his dark eyes to me. For a moment it was like a mask slipped out of place and his gaze went beetle-black and hard, intense and focused like a predator’s. Then the bland look came back, but I felt an answering push of power. Just a touch, the smell and feel of it hot and alien.
    Ink and earth, smoke and gunpowder.
    I was sitting at dinner with the man who had tried to blow off my head only hours earlier.
    I smiled at him, all teeth. “Have you seen the barn?” I asked him. I wanted to take his head off right here, but he had magic. I couldn’t predict what he would do. His actions earlier had indicated a total disregard for collateral