“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 b
ehind 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.