Inked

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, if I were you. The effect wears off after a while.”
    Great. I grabbed my jeans and assessed the damage. On the plus side, the stinging pain in my backside was no longer noticeable, thanks to the numb stick’s deadening qualities. On the negative, the knee that had been hit didn’t seem to be working too well, and threatened to give way whenever I put any weight on it.
    And then a flash went off, almost blinding me. “Jamie!”
    “Now we’ll talk about those pictures,” he chuckled, clicking the door shut.
    I threw my clothes back on and barreled through the door. “You conniving little bastard! Fork over that camera right now or I swear—”
    “Mage de Croissets! What precisely is going on here?”
    I stopped, jeans unzipped and shirt askew, blinking away afterimages. Shit. The boss never came down here. It was practically the only advantage to working in the dungeon. And now it didn’t have even that much going for it.
    My eyes slowly adjusted to show me the wavy silver hair, high forehead and sour expression I’d feared. Richard Hargrove, better known as Dick to his friends or The Dick to the rest of us, had been brought out of retirement after the war started. He was old-school, demanding things spit-polished and perfect, like his excruciatingly correct posture. It made his too-thin form, which as usual was encased in a dark-colored three-piece suit, look even more skeletal than it was. I didn’t like the guy, but I kept wishing he’d eat a sandwich.
    “Well?” The barked word surprised me, and these days, that wasn’t good. The piece of contraband we’d been working on before the ward went nuts flew off the examining table and through the air—straight at the source of the disturbance.
    Hargrove ducked as the five-foot-long metal staff tore through the air just over his head. It went on to shatter a reinforced glass door, obliterate a computer, take a bite out of a wall and lodge like a quivering spear in one of the steel-plated elevator doors. That would have ended it, except that this was a wizard’s staff, which apparently still had some juice left in it. It melted a chunk of the door into a sizzling silver mess.
    And then it