Devon Monk - Magic on the Storm

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.”