Shame pulled out of the parking lot. “Where?” he asked.
“Stotts said on the corner of Southeast Tolman and Twenty-eighth. That’s out by the golf course, right? Do you know what’s there?”
He thought a minute, turned the car north and toward the bridge. “Isn’t that where Beckstrom’s labs are?”
“What?”
“Oh, come on. You don’t even know where your dad set up labs for Violet’s research?”
“Didn’t like him, didn’t know her, didn’t care. Which means no, of course I don’t know where the labs are.”
“It never came up in board meetings?”
Interesting question. It hadn’t come up in board meetings, but Violet had told me the subject of the lab, and more specifically the disks that were being developed there, was causing all sorts of suspicions among the stockholders and higher-ups of the company. So much so, she’d moved in with Kevin because of threats.
I felt like I was working a crossword puzzle with no clues. I should be guessing what was going on, but didn’t even know where to begin. People in the company were upset with her for something. The only thing I could put my finger on was that the disks had been used for a lot of bad things. And now Stotts wanted me out at the lab where the disks were made, to Hound something when there was very little magic left in the city.
A break-in? Maybe someone on the board got a judge on their side and was seizing property.
Whatever was going down out there, Stotts had not sounded happy.
“That’s a hell of a long time to think over your answer,” Shame said. “Try a short word like ‘no.’”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just-I think I’m missing something. That maybe Violet said something.” I pulled out my notebook and scanned back through the entries. Nothing that immediately looked like a clue. “And no, the lab hasn’t come up in any of the Beckstrom Enterprises business I’ve been involved in. But I’m not the CEO. Violet is.”
“And?”
“She told me there was some contention among the board members. They didn’t like not knowing what, exactly, she was developing, and why she wouldn’t let them get their hands on it. Plus, she moved in with Kevin.”
“Cooper? Her bodyguard?”
“She said she received threats. Why don’t you know about this? Kevin’s a part of the Authority. Doesn’t he report in or something?”
“Not to me. Any field agents-hell, all of us-report in to Sedra. She’s the mastermind.”
Yes, I knew that. I’d just never needed to report to her myself. Things had been really quiet the last couple months. All I’d been doing was training and learning. My teachers reported in for me.
“Do you think they can help Zayvion?” I asked. “Maeve, Jingo Jingo?”
Shame was quiet. “You said he went into a gate.”
“Yes.”
“He might find his way back. If a gate were opened near his body.” Shame took a breath and wiped his hand down his face, as if trying to mop off exhaustion. “Complicated by Jones using light and dark magic, all the disciplines. Opening a gate for him might go bad fast. Or it might help him remember what it’s like to be alive and bring him back.”
“So why aren’t they trying that? Hells, you and I could open a gate.”
Shame wiggled the fingers of one hand. “No magic, remember? It takes magic, a lot of it, or a lot of different kinds working together, to open a rift between life and death. Gates aren’t easy.”
Maybe not, but I’d watched Chase open and close them with a snap of her fingers. But then, she was Greyson’s Soul Complement. And they could break magic’s boundaries.
I rubbed at my forehead. The left side of my face still hurt. I’d probably be half tanned for the next few months. Since I had my notebook out, I made notes about everything that had happened. City lights, just electric, no magic, washed the pages in white and yellow. I finished my notes and gazed out the window at the magicless city.
Cars that were just cars, nothing shiny, nothing magic, drove past. In the low light of the sky’s exhalation into darkness, people walked the streets.
Mostly they looked the same. Oh, maybe a few older coats, maybe more bad hairstyles, thicker waistlines, and a limp or two. But mostly, the kinds of magic people used to enhance themselves were noticeable only close-up-the perfect noses, teeth, complexion, sparkling wit, dulcet voice, and so on.
We’d gotten so used to taking care of flaws with easy fixes. What’s a little headache now and then for the illusion of youth? Seeing people with their true faces on was odd. Fascinating. The big noses, laugh lines, thin lips, frowns, crooked teeth-the imperfections somehow caught at the soul of humanity, and left it bare to be seen, the beauty and ugliness. It felt like suddenly we’d become what we were. For good, and for bad.
That lack of magic gave me a glimpse of something I didn’t know I was missing. A reality, an honesty, magic could not create. And like seeing a foreign land for the first time, I was caught by the beauty of it.
Lead and glass lines and conduits still wrapped like steel ivy up the outsides of the buildings, crawled up and up, and met at building tops where the gold-tipped spires of Beckstrom Storm Rods stood like beacons to the stars.
But stripped free of Illusion, Glamour, or the comfortable blur magic offered, crumbling brick, peeling paint, rust, and disrepair showed through. The sidewalks were not as clean, the plants not as tended, windows dirty, broken, or boarded. Safety inspections had to be done to assess a building’s health without magical enhancements-I’d just been through a barrage of them with the leasing of the warehouse by Get Mugged-so I knew the buildings were stable. They were also old, showing their history, their lives, in every crack and slant.
I loved it.
This was not the Portland I knew. Rust-streaked pipes and mechanical units on rooftops-air conditioners, vents, and the like-sat like squat warts against the sky, changing the familiar horizon. I wondered if Stone was up there somewhere. I hadn’t seen him since the fight.
“Have you seen Stone?” I asked Shame.
He licked his bottom lip. Shame still looked like hell, and the anger that had brought him back to life at the inn seemed to be wearing off, leaving a sickly sweat behind.
“You know Stone’s an Animate.” He looked at me. Waited. I had no idea what he was getting at.
“An Animate is an inanimate object infused with magic,” he went on. “Magic puts the life in them. And when magic is gone, there is nothing. . ”
“No. Absolutely no. You did not just tell me Stone is dead.”
“Allie. .”
“Shut up.”
Stone was fine. He was smart enough to track me, he was smart enough to curl up around a backup spell or something. I refused to believe he was dead.
But the more I looked at the city around me, the more dread sank in. There just wasn’t that much magic left. Not for generators. Not for illusions. And not for a gargoyle, no matter how smart.
Shame said quietly, “When magic kicks back up after the storm hits, he’ll come to.” It was sweet, but I knew he didn’t think that would happen.
Stone was just a statue. A big stupid rock who left dust all over my apartment and wore my socks on his nose. But he was my big stupid rock. I was going to miss the hell out of him.
I tried not to think about it. Because I didn’t want to show up in front of Stotts crying.
Shame drove like he knew right where the lab was. And maybe he did. Maybe the Authority kept the lab on its watched list. But even if Shame hadn’t been driving, it wouldn’t have been hard to find the place.
Three police cars blocked the street. Beyond them the big white van of Stott’s MERC team parked half on the elm-lined sidewalk. A few police officers stood outside the building, which was more of a house, and two more at the street to keep people at a safe distance. I didn’t see Stotts’s crew: Julian, Roberts, and Garnet.
More police tape, a sullen yellow smear in the dying light, roped off the sidewalk outside the building.
The building really did look like a house out of a storybook. Old hand-placed stone walls scalloped the edges of the sidewalk. The Tudor-style house was set up on the small hill and faced the trees and golf course across the street. At least two stories, the house looked like a home rather than a lab, brick and stucco on arched doorways beneath steeply gabled roofs. The windows, slender and multipaned, had little light behind them.
In the driveway was Violet’s Mercedes-Benz.
My heartbeat did double time.
“Stop,” I told Shame. “I need to get out.”
Why would she be here? I thought she was moving in with Kevin. I thought she was being smart, being safe. Making baby blankets or knitting diapers or something.
Stress is a weird thing. I got out of the car and heard the door slam shut, but I didn’t hear the car drive away. I didn’t know what the cop asked me when I jogged past her. I didn’t feel the police tape skim my back as I ducked under it and made it to the driveway up the walkway.
No blood on the concrete. No blood anywhere that I could see. That was something. Maybe Violet had arrived after the break-in. That made the most sense. Stotts must have called her. Like he called me. To look at the damage inside. To fill out an insurance form or something.
I turned to go into the building.
Stotts’s hand landed on my wrist, warm and callused, and brought the world suddenly back to me.
“Stay out of the way.” He pulled me to one side, near a line of bushes. Didn’t let me get close to the door.
There wasn’t any room for me to go anywhere. Men filled that door and came through it with stretchers.
One stretcher carried an unconscious and pale Kevin Cooper. Blood had been wiped off his bruised face, but still leaked in his light brown hair, turning it dark on one side. An oxygen mask fit snug against his face. They moved him past me so quickly, I couldn’t see where else he might be injured. But I could smell magic on him. A lot of it, a lot of spent magic.
“Who?” I said. “Who did this?” I was trying to ask who could do this. There just wasn’t that much available magic to be able to do this much damage. “How long? When? When did that happen to him?”
Stotts hadn’t let go of my wrist. Smart. I’d probably go in there and ruin evidence in this state of mind.
“You’re here for that,” he said. “To Hound the scene. Tell me what you see. There’s more.”
And he was right. There was more.
More EMTs, men and women, and another stretcher. This one with tubes and monitors. I knew who it was from the shape of the prone figure even before I could see her face.
Violet.
Dad scratched at the backs of my eyes, no longer a moth-wing flutter, but something made out of sharp edges and teeth.
I exhaled to stay calm and pushed at Dad, needing him in a corner, away from my conscious thoughts, away from seeing Violet on a stretcher. I must have tried to pull away from Stotts too.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t get in the way. Let them do their job.”
Violet, my dad said. No. Please, no.
I pressed my lips together to keep his words from forming in my mouth. He was in my head, but he had no right to use my body. Even if Violet was hurt.
She was in better hands than mine right now. I was not a doctor, and neither was my father. Getting her to the hospital as quickly as possible was the smart thing to do.
As they passed, she opened her eyes.
My dad struggled, shoved at my control. Violet, he thought.
“Daniel?” she whispered.
No. Hell no. I didn’t care how much they loved each other-I was not going to let my father talk to her, was not going to let him use me or my mouth or thoughts that way, and was not going to stop the EMTs from getting her medical attention.
The EMTs moved swiftly past me. With Stotts’s hand still clamped to my wrist, I held my ground while Dad battered the edges of my control. Then the EMTs were gone. Violet was gone, placed very carefully into the back of an ambulance that drove away, lights flashing and sirens blaring. I pulled my hand away from Stotts.
Dad went dead silent. Angry.
Too bad.
Okay. Regroup. First the job. Hounding. Hounding the crime. Without magic. Then checking on Violet.
“Anything you’d like to tell me about this before I go in there?” I asked.
He looked at my expression, puzzled. Then glanced over my shoulder at the ambulance. Maybe at something beyond that. “Violet and Kevin were here when it happened. Violet was semiconscious when I arrived. She can’t remember anything.”
“Head wound?”
“She’s been hurt,” he conceded.
Yeah, well, I figured that out all on my own. “Is she going to be okay? Is the baby in danger?”
He looked down at his shoe, then back at me. “They don’t know yet.”
Fuck.
And the cool wash of my dread and my father’s anger melded into something else. Resolve. Whoever had done this, whoever had attacked my wife-I mean my friend-and my unborn sibling, was going to suddenly have a very bad, very short life.
I strode into the building, past the fallen door that looked like it had been blown off its hinges, and into the main room.
Stotts followed.
The first room was a reception area, though there was no desk. Just a couple small clean couches, a TV mounted on the wall, and a computer and a phone on a table.
I didn’t have magic at my disposal. None of us did. I glanced over at Stotts to see if he was uncomfortable with that. He looked calm, composed. Didn’t look like having magic or not having magic made any difference to him. Sort of an “If I don’t have my gun, I can kill you with my hands” kind of look.
Very cop of him. And it meant he wasn’t all that surprised that magic had suddenly died out.
“Do you know why magic’s gone?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’m thinking it might have something to do with that gut feeling of yours. The storm. We’ve had magic black out on us before. But never this long.”
“Okay, so you know I can’t Hound without magic.”
“I’d just like your eyes on the place.”
There were already police officers and other specialists working the scene. Stotts’s MERC crew was inside, using a few gadgets that looked like they were low-magic but useful, like the glyphed witching rods, and nonmagical things like cameras and fingerprinting tools. Very old-school police procedural.
I felt out of place-I didn’t know what all the stages of investigation would be. All I ever did was Hound magic, track spells, identify casters, and not get involved in the cleanup and meticulous recording of the event.
Stotts had once told me that I was different from other Hounds he’d used, and I saw things in more detail than they did. I guess we were about to find out if that was still true without magic.
I walked through the room, careful not to touch anything, looking at the tables, the couches, the shelves, the walls. I inhaled through my nose and mouth, taking in the scents of metals and plastics, carpet cleaner, and the musty-closet smell of old books.
If magic had been cast here, in this room, I could not smell it.
“How’d the door get bashed in?” I asked.
“Police.”
Okay, so that was good. No magical battering ram. “Is there another room?”
I knew there had to be. There had to be a research room-maybe a clean room, a room glyphed and warded and I didn’t know what all else-to actually produce the disks, if the disks were made here.
“This way.” Stotts led me down a short hall, where windowed rooms lined either side. I followed, tasting the air, listening, looking. I might not have magic, but my senses were acute.
At the far end and right of the hall was a room with a door open. I stepped through the doorway and covered my nose. Magic had been used here. A lot of magic. I could smell the burnt-wood stink of it, hot as red peppers shoved up my nose. I didn’t remove my hand, instead breathed through my fingers. This was the lab. This was where the disks were made.
Stotts didn’t have to tell me. The magic that was used in here-no, the magic that was stored in here-hung like a flashing billboard that said WATCH YOUR STEP, MAGIC AHEAD.
The room had several long, low working counters sectioning it off, and the walls were bracketed by cupboards and countertops. Toward the back of the room was a wall of little silver-plated drawers, like safety-deposit boxes. Maybe a hundred, two hundred drawers.
All of them were pulled out, broken open, busted.
Drawn forward like a string on a reel, I walked over to the drawers. Black velvet lined the bottoms of the drawers. Glyphs, whorls of glass and lead, were worked into the walls of each drawer, scrolling a repeating pattern around the inside. Hold spells, I thought, maybe Containment. Tricky, intricate stuff. It had taken a fine, fine hand for that. A hell of a magic user had made these boxes and it was clear they were intended to keep whatever was inside them, inside them.
A flutter at the backs of my eyes, feather soft, brushed harder the longer I looked at those boxes.
And for a second my vision shifted. It was as if I were looking at the boxes through someone else’s eyes. My father’s eyes. I remembered-or rather I saw his memory of-the disks nestled in the drawers, one disk per box. And I knew that every disk had been fully charged with magic before it had been placed in the box.
Why would anyone store that much magic in one place?
As soon as I thought it, I heard his answering thought. Experimental. Untested. We were pushing the parameters, calculating the decay rate. Finding out how much magic the disks could hold and for how long.
How long could they hold magic? I asked.
When I. . when I was alive, they had yet to degrade. At all.
The reality of what this meant was slowing soaking in. Someone, maybe more than one someone, had more than a hundred disks, all filled with magic.
Hundreds of magic disks that caused no price of pain to use, filled with magic, in a city currently empty of magic.
Holy shit.
My father’s grim agreement didn’t do much to steady my nerves.
Do you know who would do this? Who would want this? I thought.
Who wouldn’t want it? he asked.
Yeah, I got that. When there is no magic, the person who has the remaining power wins. But he had to have some idea of who would know how to break into the lab. Who would know that the disks were here.
If I could Hound it, I’d know. I’d be able to read the spell used to take the disks, because even to my untrained, un-police-officer eyes, I could tell this wasn’t a standard break-in. Magic had been used.
And I needed magic to Hound.
“Are there any of the disks left?” I asked Stotts.
“Not in the drawers.”
“Anywhere else in the building?”
“There hasn’t been anything else taken,” he said. “We haven’t begun looking for other disks. There are no other storage rooms, no other walls like this.”
I paced, looking at all the closed cupboards, thinking of all the rooms in the building. There might be a disk somewhere, a reject, a defect, a trial run. How much time did I have? How much time before the storm hit, before Zayvion stopped breathing, before the hospital’s backup spells gave out and Violet lost the baby?
Dad? I thought. Are there any other disks stored here?
A strange papery scrub flicked at the corner of my mind. Kind of like pages being fanned by a thumb.
There might be, he whispered. In our. . office. Down the hall.
“I need to look down here,” I said.
Stotts took my declaration in stride. He was used to working with Hounds. Everyone knew Hounds were quirky at best, and more often crazy. I found the door my dad had remembered, tried it. Locked.
Oh, come on.
“I need in there,” I said.
“Why? Crime happened back there.”
“Listen-” I looked over at Stotts, realized he had not been in the loop of my conversation with Dad. “Listen,” I said a little softer, “there might be another disk in there. And the disks hold magic. I can use that small amount of magic to Hound the scene.”
Stotts was already nodding. “I won’t ask you how you know there might be a disk in there,” he said. “Yet.” He tried the latch. “Do you know what this room was used for?”
“Maybe an office?”
He pulled something out of his coat pocket. A key or a lock-picking tool, I didn’t know. But whatever it was, Stotts knew how to use it. He unlocked the door on the first try, and pushed it open. He stepped in front of me, blocked my access, and scanned the room, then flicked on the light switch. Fluorescent lights crackled to life, revealing a room filled with mahogany furniture and expensive glass artwork tucked into bookshelves. The desk in the middle of the room probably cost millions and was dead-on for my dad’s tastes. So were the luxurious couch, chairs, and wet bar along one wall. The carpet probably cost more than the building I lived in.
Stotts’s eyebrows perked up. This room was decadent, but just understated enough to say it wasn’t merely money behind the arrangement; it was a fortune.
For her, I heard Dad whisper. I made it for her.
Okay, I did not need a lovelorn ghost in my head. Not right now.
Change that: not ever.
You thought she’d like this? Did you even ask her what she wanted? I asked.
Do not-his words were a little louder now-speak to me in that manner.
Okay, a pissed-off ghost wasn’t going to do me any good either. Especially since he knew where the disks might be.
Where is the disk?
He hesitated and I wondered whether I’d be able to strangle an answer out of him. Considering he didn’t have a neck, and I didn’t have mental hands, it offered some interesting difficulties.
The shelf.
Terse. Good going, Allie, piss off the dead guy.
I walked across the room to the shelves behind the desk. Stotts was dividing his time between watching me and taking in the details of the room.
The shelves were beautiful and smelled of polish and something that gave the faint perfume of jasmine blossoms. Books, all leather bound, probably worth thousands, lined the middle shelf. Below that was intricate glass artwork. Lights cleverly positioned in the shelf brought the art to life, glowing deep blues, red, yellow, and smoky gray. Beautiful. I lost a second staring at them, and wondered why they reminded me of magic, of the different disciplines of magic being worked together.
Wondered why they reminded me of Zay.
I swallowed hard. I’d been trying not to think about him. Every time I did, a knot in my throat and a weight in my chest made me want to cry, to go to him, curl up with him, as if somehow touching him and being with him would make the world go away.
As if somehow just being with him would bring him back to me.
I cleared my throat and blinked until the room was no longer blurry. The disk. Maybe there would be more than one. And I could use one to find out who did this, then use the other to go kick their teeth in.
On the top shelf were notebooks, a leather bottle, probably antique, and a lovely collection of crystals.
And one of the crystals looked a lot like a disk.
Well, not exactly a disk. It wasn’t a perfect machined circle like the disk in Greyson’s neck; it wasn’t silver, slick, glyphed. This disk was made of crystal, and looked like it had been carved, magical glyphs scoured into it, deep in some places, barely a scratch in others. It was white, with highlights of soft pink and blue. And it was beautiful.
Did you make this? I asked Dad.
Grew, he said. We grew it.
I didn’t have to touch it to know it was filled with magic. I could smell the magic in it, a sweet scent like roses in the rain. It looked harmless.
Is it going to hurt me if I pick it up? I asked.
Not that I know of. And if he hadn’t been suddenly so curious to see what happened when I touched it, I would have just gone right ahead and done that. Instead, I decided to clue Stotts in on all this.
“I think this is a disk. A prototype of some sort. It’s holding magic.”
Stotts strode over to me, his loafers hushed against the deep, soft carpet.
“The crystal?” he asked.
I pointed. “That crystal.”
“Do you want me to pick it up?”
“No, I just thought I’d tell you what I was doing in case I ended up on the floor or something.”
“Maybe I should pick it up.”
“Let me. I’m the Hound.”
I reached over, careful not to touch the other crystals, and put one fingertip on the disk.
My dad, in my head, chuckled.
Shut up, I thought at him.
Of all the times in your life, it is now that you develop a sense of caution? he asked.
Okay, peanut-gallery dead guy wasn’t working for me either.
No buzz, no shock, nothing beneath my fingertip but the slightly oily feel of the magic-infused crystal. I didn’t absorb it like a sponge-yes, that thought had gone through my mind, since I usually carry magic-and it didn’t explode or anything.
So far, so good.
I picked it up.
If the crystal had been beautiful from a distance, it was absolutely mesmerizing in the palm of my hand. Soft, pink, it didn’t seem to sparkle so much as glow against my skin. The glyphs carved or maybe grown into it seemed to shift, slowly, slowly, as they made a snail’space path through the crystal.
Are the glyphs moving? I asked Dad.
Growing, he said. Slowly.
Not so slowly that I couldn’t see it.
Stotts leaned in for a better look. He whistled. “That’s amazing.”
“It is.”
“Does it have magic in it?”
Oh, right. I was here to do a job, not to look at the pretty baubles.
I licked my lips and concentrated on the disk. Yes, it very much did hold magic in it. But it held it in a natural sort of way. The magic didn’t feel like it filled every speck of crystal, but there was plenty enough in there for one spell.
It reminded me of the void stones, reminded me of the cuffs we wore to feel one another during a hunt. It felt natural enough, I had a hard time believing it had been made in a laboratory.
It wasn’t, Dad said. We simply enhanced it in the lab. He was proud of that.
Where did you find it?
He hesitated and I could feel his unease. In St. Johns. A long time ago.
Strange. St. Johns had no naturally occurring magic. A magical stone out there didn’t make any sense. Unless someone had taken it there, left it there.
Is there more of that I should know? I asked.
No.
That was quick. He was lying. I could taste the bitter wash of it across my thoughts.
Just tell me if it’s going to blow up on me, okay? I thought.
“Allie?” Stotts asked.
How long had I been standing there staring at the rock and talking to my dad? “Sorry,” I said to buy myself some time to think of what he had last said to me.
He wants to know if it has magic in it, my dad offered with droll patience.
Okay, it was beyond strange to have my dad helping me out at all. He’d never been this helpful in all the years I had known him. It made me suspicious. The man never did something without getting something out of it for himself.
Hound the spell, he said, not angry, just calm and quiet, the way he always sounded right before he got killing mad. Find out who hurt Violet.
Ah. Revenge. Now, that I could understand.
“Yes,” I said before my silence got out of hand again. “It has magic in it. I think enough for a spell. Maybe just one. I’d like to Hound the safety-deposit boxes. Does that sound good?”
Stotts let out a breath he’d been holding. I had to give it to him. He put up with a lot of crazy to get information out of Hounds, and I wasn’t doing much for Hound reputation right now.
“I think so.” He motioned for me to leave the room in front of him, which I did, holding the crystal away from my body like it was going to turn and bite me at any minute.
Which it might.
Stotts shut the door and then we were both in the other room again, in the lab. A couple people from the police department, I assumed, were there, taking pictures. Stotts asked them all to leave so he and I could look at the room alone for a few minutes.
They left and I walked around the room, deciding what my best view would be if the magic gave out quickly.
“Were Violet and Kevin in this room when they were attacked?” I asked.
“I didn’t tell you they were attacked.”
“They were taken out on stretchers. What was I supposed to think?”
“It could have been an accident in the lab.”
Huh. He was right. It could have been. But one look at the empty drawers told me it was not.
Stotts knew that too.
“Well, that looks like a robbery to me,” I said, pointing at the wall of boxes.
“Anything you want me to do?” he asked.
Since there was no magic, Stotts couldn’t even cast Sight to watch what I was doing.
“Nope, I’ll do this old-style. I’ll repeat everything I see. If you want to take notes, that might be good.”
He pulled something out of his pocket. A tape recorder. He held it up, then thumbed the button down.
Good idea.
I calmed my mind, sang my jingle, set a headache Disbursement, then traced a glyph for Sight and Smell. “Sight and Smell. I don’t know how much magic I’ll have at my disposal, so I don’t know how strong the spells will be.”
Then I very carefully closed my hand around the crystal and urged the magic out of it and into the glyphs that hovered, invisible, in the air in front of me.
Magic didn’t so much flow as uncoil out of the stone and then stretch out into the spell. A tendril of magic stayed hooked in the stone, like a root set deep.
I shook the crystal a little. The tendril, the root, did not let loose. Okay. Strange. But then, I’d never used magic by pulling it out of something like this. Maybe it was supposed to stay attached.
My dad didn’t have anything to say about it, and I didn’t have any time to waste.
“Using Sight and Smell,” I said again. “There was at least one caster here. A man, I think. Give me a minute.” I took a couple steps toward the wall of boxes. “There’s a spell here, maybe more than one. But they’re really tight. Tangled. Like they collided or were crushed. Hold on.”
I leaned in closer to one of the spells that clung like a spit hair ball the size of my head, near the middle of the boxes. “Okay, there’s a big spell here. Not Illusion. Something with force. Impact? Oh.” It came to me in a rush. “Unlock. Nice. It’s masterfully cast,” I continued. “Even wadded up and kind of tangled, I can tell someone knew exactly how to throw this spell.”
“Blood magic?” Stotts asked.
“I’ll check.” I took a deep breath, through my mouth and nose to get the taste and scent of the spell at once. And it was not the sweet smell of cherries that I caught. It was the heavy mineral stink of old vitamins.
I knew that smell.
When? Where?
“No Blood magic,” I said to give myself time to think. “But I have smelled the scent of this spell before. Have smelled it on someone.”
My father brushed the back of my mind. Gently. Like he was thumbing through paper again. It was odd and made my teeth itch.
And then the memory came forward. A memory of my old apartment torn apart, my furniture and belongings broken, trashed. This was the same scent that was left behind. Whoever had broken into my apartment had also broken in here.
“The spell’s hard to parse. The casting is really tight. I don’t even know how someone could cast magic with the network down,” I muttered.
“The disks?” Stotts suggested.
“Maybe.” I walked to one side to get a different view on the scene. And that was when I could tell. I knew who cast the glyph because I had seen him recently.
Sedra’s bodyguard, Dane Lannister.
Which meant the Authority had broken in here.
Which meant the Authority had broken into my house.
There was another, more frightening, sickening memory attached to that smell, but I could not pull it to the front of my mind.
Dad? I asked.
He did not respond. If he knew where that memory was, he didn’t seem willing to kick it forward.
“Uh, I still think it’s a man’s signature,” I said.
“Who?” asked Stotts, the magical police detective who did not know about the Authority, who should not know about the Authority, and whom I should not tell the Authority even existed, much less that its members broke in and stole the disks.
And even that didn’t make sense. My father had been a part of the Authority. Kevin currently was a part of the Authority. Violet had a passing knowledge of the Authority.
So why would the Authority break into the lab if they could, as far as I could tell, just ask Violet for the disks, or, at the very worst, tell Kevin to steal them from her?
Maybe he had.
Maybe this spell had only been cast to act like it was cast by Dane.
Which left me one hundred percent confused about what I should tell the nice detective.
So I went into default mode: the truth.
“I think a man named Dane Lannister might have been involved. But the spell is tangled, collapsed. It could be someone trying to make it look like Dane Lannister is involved.”
“Anything else?”
“I’d say get another Hound in here to double-check my findings, but since that isn’t going to happen, let me do a little more footwork.” I checked the spell again. Yep. Still looked like Dane’s. “Still seems to be Lannister’s signature,” I said. I checked the boxes. “None of the glyphwork has been broken.” Which meant he had taken the time to Unlock each box instead of just blowing the thing apart.
“The disks were in here. I’d say one per drawer.” What else? What was I missing? I looked around the room, and caught the angry red slash of a spell hovering about midway across the room.
That was not Unlock, or Hold, or any of the kinder spells. That was Impact and I could tell the target had been Kevin.
Dane attacked Kevin?
I looked the opposite direction to see if a spell from Kevin was there.
“Allie?”
“Just checking a few other spells. Cast in about the same time period as the Unlock,” I said. “Similar decay rate.”
Beyond the desk, where maybe Violet had been sitting, was the tattered remnants of a Shield spell.
Kevin had tried to keep Violet from getting hit with magic.
Dane had been here to kill Violet?
“Uh, one of the spells is aggressive. Not sure what kind, but in the category of Impact. Not one I recognize. That’s midroom. There’s another spell over here, a Shield. Tattered, like it withstood a blow or flux of magic.
“Is this where they found Violet?”
“Yes.”
Okay, so my theory about attackers seemed to be holding up.
I walked to the opposite side of the room and looked for anything Kevin might have cast.
Holy crap. Kevin had cast at least a half dozen spells. Hold, Freeze, Impact, something that involved blood and pain, and more. And they had all fallen-no, they had all been drawn-to this side of the room, and smashed together into one big tangled, useless spell.
Kevin had hauled on a hell of a lot of magic-recently, like after the magic had turned off-and it had all been batted aside and crushed like empty beer cans.
The smell of minerals and old vitamins was stronger here.
Okay. I didn’t know why Dane and Kevin were fighting. Sedra’s bodyguard fighting Violet’s bodyguard, but they had both accessed a hell of a lot of magic with the grids down.
Maybe they had disks to drain, but I didn’t see any discarded empty disks on the floor.
“Allie?”
“More spells over here. There was a fight. All these spells are collapsed in on themselves and tangled together.” I shook my head. “It’s a mess, but they still bear Kevin Cooper’s signature.”
The crystal in my hand was feeling heavy and cold. “Is there anything else you want me to look at, because I think my battery’s going dead.”
“This is where they found Kevin.” He pointed to a place near the door of the room. Like Kevin had been trying to get out and leave Violet behind. Strange.
I walked over to the door without losing my hold or concentration on Sight and Smell.
Death magic. I couldn’t smell it, but it cast just enough of a shadow that I knew it had been mixed with dark magic. The only people I’d ever seen wield dark magic were Frank Gordon, who tried to raise my dad’s soul from the dead, Zayvion, who used it as well as he used every other discipline of magic, and Greyson, who used it mixed with Blood magic to control Tomi. Since Frank was dead and Zayvion was comatose, that left Greyson.
I inhaled, trying to catch his scent-death and blood and burnt blackberry-but all I came up with was the slight tang from Death and dark magic, and the scent of old vitamins. Beneath that, I caught the notes of Kevin’s cologne, a mix of spices, and blood-his blood.
“There’s nothing here I can testify to,” I started. “Magic was used, but I don’t know these spells.” I didn’t want to tell Stotts it was dark magic. As far as I knew, he didn’t know about dark magic. The entire event in the warehouse with Frank and my dad’s corpse had been chalked up to some kind of mutated Blood magic. That was not what it had been, but that was what the Authority had wanted people to think it was.
And so that was what the lab tests came back with, that was the official police report, and that was what the causes of death on the four kidnapped girls’ death certificates read.
I glanced out in the hall to see if there was anything else beyond the room. Nothing, or at least no spells, that I could see.
The crystal suddenly went so cold it hurt.
“Ow!” The pain in my hand broke my concentration, and the glyphs for Sight and Smell faded.
I almost dropped the crystal, but instead tossed it to my other hand, and then back and forth like a hot potato.
“That it?” Stotts strolled over. He didn’t look at all concerned that I’d gone all Hacky Sack crazy.
“Really cold.” I tossed the crystal at him, and he caught it.
“Huh.” He held it with the fingertips of one hand, and traded off when he couldn’t stand the cold any longer, studying it and holding it up to the light. Then he placed it on a clear space on the counter.
I swear I heard the crackling of ice. I looked at the crystal.
Yep. Froze the countertop out in a foot circle.
“Is this something new Beckstrom Enterprises is developing?” Stotts asked.
“It’s something we’ve looked into. I haven’t gotten reports of its viability in terms of development, manufacturing, or marketing yet.” See, I could lie in business-speak when I had to.
Stotts gave me a funny look. “You have a crystal that acts like a battery for magic, and you’re trying to decide if it’s a good idea to market?”
“It’s the paperwork I hate.”
The ice seemed to be melting some, and I thought the crystal looked a little less white and a little more pink.
Will it recharge? I asked my father.
Yes. Again with the hesitance.
That was good enough for me.
“I’m going to take this,” I said.
Stotts raised one eyebrow. “Why?”
“It is legally my property,” I said.
“True. Property you didn’t know was here until a few minutes ago.”
“Let me put it this way-I’m not leaving it here. I don’t want anyone to break in and take it, and since it wasn’t involved in the crime, I don’t see any reason why the police would have claims to it.”
“And you’re keeping it because?”
“I want it?” He didn’t believe me, and I didn’t care. “Listen, I used all the magic in it. I don’t know how to recharge it with magic, don’t even know if it can be recharged. But I want to keep it. If it’s Violet’s, I’ll return it to her.”
Stotts sniffed and looked down at his shoe. Man had a mess of problems to deal with right now and me pitching a fit over a pretty rock did not rank up there on his list of traumas he had to plow through. Not with magic out. Not with the backups about to go down.
“Do you know why someone would want to take the disks?” he asked.
“They were filled with magic,” I said. “All of them.”
“And anyone can access that magic?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me and I looked at him. In a city suddenly empty of magic, both of us were probably coming up with a thousand horrific things someone would want to do with a hundred disks full of power.
“I still think a storm, a wild-magic storm, is going to hit,” I said. “Maybe it will kick-start magic again.”
Stotts grunted and shoved both his hands in his coat pockets, shifting his shoulders as if carrying a new ache. “Interesting theory.”
“Do you need me for anything else?” I asked before he came up with questions I didn’t want to answer.
Stotts shook his head. “If I do, I’ll call.” He walked me to the door of the room. “I’ll let you know if I find out anything more.”
I pocketed the crystal and started down the hall.
“Allie?”
I slowed and glanced over my shoulder at him.
“Whatever it is that you’re thinking of doing. Don’t. We’ll handle it.”
I wondered what he saw in me. Was it my anger? My fear? Or did I just have a bad reputation for doing stupid things when magic was screwing with the people I loved?
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. Stotts and I were enough alike, we both knew that when people I cared about were hurt, there was no way in hell I was going to just stand aside and let other people handle the problem.