Devon Monk - Magic on the Storm

“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.