Hexed

Fremont, Cassandra, me, Mick. I had no idea where Coyote had got to.
    When Nash realized there was no immediate threat, he pointed the pistol at the floor. “Janet, what is this?”
    Pamela rushed past him and caught Cassandra in a crushing hug, lifting her off her feet. “Are you all right, baby?”
    Nash pinned me with an ice gray stare. “Ms. Grant charged into my office, insisting there was something wrong at your hotel. So what are you up to?”
    Bang! Bang! Bang!
    Nash looked past me to the kitchen door. “You have someone back there?”
    “Nash,” I said. “Touch the walls. Hurry. Please.”
    Nash completely ignored me to listen, his gun held ready.
    “That’s just Ansel,” Maya told him. “He started going crazy, so we locked him in the refrigerator.”
    “Nash, the walls. Please!”
    Nash started for the kitchen. Mick was on him before he’d gone three strides, but Nash, combat-trained, knew how to fight. He had himself out of Mick’s grip in a flash, the pistol now pointed at Mick’s head.
    “I suggest you start explaining, Burns, before you spend the night in my lockup.”
    “Fine by me,” I said cheerfully. “Let’s go.” Get out of cursed hotel now, finish breaking the hex later.
    Coyote came bounding out of the kitchen. In his coyote form, he was the size of a large wolf, and he sprang full force onto Nash. The momentum, with an assist by Mick, carried Nash the five feet needed to land him against the lobby’s brightly painted wall.
    The hotel shuddered. I screamed as I felt my wards, as infected as they were, stream from the brick and plaster into Nash’s body. I was deeply connected to the wards, and through them, to the hotel, and so was Mick.
    Mick doubled over in pain, but this purging was necessary. All the wards had to go, no matter how much it hurt us. Then Mick and I would reset them, clean and free of the hex.
    It was hurting Nash, too. Nash clenched his fists, the pistol still in one, eyes shut in silent agony.
    “What are you doing?” Maya shouted. “Nash!”
    “He’s negating the curse,” Cassandra said from within the protective circle of Pamela’s arm.
    “ Nash is?”
    “He’s a magic null.” Cassandra sounded tired. “His touch renders anything magical harmless. Spells don’t work on him, and he can pull in even the strongest magic and dissipate it.”
    I yelled again, my voice breaking as I collapsed to the floor. Mick tried to get to me, to help me, but his knees buckled as soon as he took a step.
    Fremont crouched down and touched my shoulder, but Mick snarled at him. “Get away from her!”
    Fremont raised his hands and backed away. “Easy there, big fella. Easy now.”
    There was something wrong. Nash continued to suck in the wards, and I felt the last of them rush into him and vanish. But whatever was inside Nash didn’t stop at the wards. It reached out to me and then to Mick and began to drain us dry.
    My Beneath magic flared up to stop him, but Nash sucked that in, too. The white-hot aura of it streamed into Nash’s body, and the agony of that had me falling flat to the tile. I saw Mick’s fire being pulled from him while Mick fought a losing battle to keep it.
    “Ow!” Fremont said, slapping his hands to his head.
    A tiny stream of yellow light—Fremont’s magic—yanked from him to Nash’s body. Cassandra was on the floor now, Pamela with her, as Nash drained their magical essences as well. A scream so high-pitched it was on the edge of human hearing streamed from the saloon, the magic mirror singing no longer.
    Coyote shimmered and became the man Coyote, lying naked, facedown on the floor. Ansel stopped banging in the kitchen, and I wondered if he were dead, the magic that kept him alive stolen by Nash’s magic suction. Ansel might be nothing but decaying blood and bone on my refrigerator floor.
    “Nash, stop,” I gasped.
    He didn’t, and I had the feeling he had no idea how to. Mick lay next to me where he’d crawled in an effort to protect me. His tattoos faded to thin lines of ink, and then those shrank and disappeared. Cassandra struggled to breathe, and Pamela lay limply next to her. Coyote didn’t move.
    Maya wasn’t affected, being the only non-magical one among us. She stared at us as we slowly died, the magic that had been part of us all our lives draining away.
    Then she looked at Nash. I watched Maya draw a breath for courage, and then she stalked across the floor in her milehigh heels, grabbed Nash, and jerked