Magic on the Storm (22 page)

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?”