Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  “You the PI?” he asked Liam.

  “That’s me.” Liam dug his wallet out of his pants pocket and showed the guard his license. “And this is my assistant, Katherine.”

  Kat gave him a friendly wave.

  The man nodded back politely. “Mr. Cunningham’s office is on the second floor. I’ll take you up there and unlock it for you so you can poke around. But fair warning, the cops took most of his personal stuff when they swept the room a few days back, so you’re not going to find any ‘big clues,’ like his wallet or keys.”

  “No worries.” Liam tucked his own wallet away. “I’ll make do.”

  “All right. Come on then.”

  The guard took them up to the second floor in a painfully slow elevator. It spit them out in the middle of a hallway whose scuffed tile floor and faded beige walls indicated that nothing beyond the reception room had been updated since the building was first completed circa 1975.

  From the elevator, the guard led them to a faux-wood door with a frosted-glass window at the end of the hall’s west wing. The little black plaque on the door read simply, luther cunningham, as the expectation was that everyone knew exactly what role he served at the Cunningham Media Group.

  Unlocking the door with one of the keys on his extendable belt ring, the guard gave it a gentle push and ushered them inside. “I’ll wait in the hall until you’re done. If you need to check out any other rooms, just ask. I’ve got the keys to every room in the building, and Mrs. Cunningham said you can have the run of the place for the evening, as long as you put everything back where you found it before you leave.”

  “Will do,” Liam said.

  The room had a fairly plain office setup. Dark-blue carpeting worn thin by too many passes with the vacuum. Long window with off-white blinds bent in a couple places. A cheap bookcase with sagging shelves. Three dented gray filing cabinets. And an IKEA desk whose legs were slightly uneven, likely due to a minor assembly error.

  Either the business is doing very poorly, Liam thought, or Cunningham is exceedingly frugal. If the former’s the case, then it could be he disappeared intentionally to escape his debts and make a clean start. If the latter’s the case, then it could be someone disappeared him in order to gain access to his hidden millions.

  Since Liam had never met the man, it was impossible to tell which of the opposing scenarios rang more true. He had been hoping to get a clear read on the man’s personality based on the layout of his office space. But this room had so little flavor that it implied Cunningham didn’t inject much of his personality into his work.

  That or he didn’t have much of a personality. Perhaps he was just a very boring person.

  “So where do we start?” Kat asked as she shut the door behind her.

  “Preferably with something he made skin contact with every day.” Liam motioned to the desk. “Like his keyboard, stapler, favorite pen, etc.”

  Kat rounded the desk and examined the neatly arranged items. A ten-year-old computer monitor set atop a five-year-old computer, with a seven-year-old keyboard plugged in via USB. A set of inbox-outbox trays that had broken at one point and been repaired with duct tape. A short stack of manila folders stuffed with stapled packets of paper. And a ceramic coffee mug whose design had mostly peeled off after a few too many washes in the break room sink, and which had consequently been relegated to pen holder duty.

  “I see one fancy pen in here,” Kat said, pointing to a fat black fountain pen with gold accents. “Think this is the one he uses to sign important documents?”

  “It’s worth checking out.” Liam ambled up to the desk and plucked the pen out of the cup. “Here’s a quick teaching moment for you: how to glean the spiritual signature off an object that belongs to someone who doesn’t possess magic. It’s a little more difficult than seeing active magic auras, but once you figure out how to do it, you can get the hang of it real quick. Let me show you.”

  He held up the pen for her to observe and threaded the barest hint of magic through the metal. “When two competing spiritual signatures come into contact with one another, it causes a faint flare, even if one of the signatures belongs to someone with no magic. Look closely at the pen now and ignore the blue of my magic. What do you see?”

  Kat leaned closer to the pen, nearly going cross-eyed. After five seconds of staring, she let out a little gasp. “Ah. I see it. A hint of beige.”

  She pointed to a section of the pen just south of the center, right about where a person would clutch it with their fingers when writing. Rippling beneath the brighter glow of Liam’s magic aura was a thin film of beige energy. Beige being a fairly standard hue for the spiritual signature of a mundane individual.

  “Yup. You got it.” Liam smiled at her. “Of course, the spiritual signature of a mundane isn’t very useful by itself, as most of them tend to look pretty similar. When it comes to hunting down magic users though, a quick examination of a latent magic signature can narrow your list of suspects considerably. Magic users can have signatures in every hue on the color wheel, and it’s rare to find more than a handful in any given city that could possibly be mistaken for each other.”

  He tossed the pen into the air and caught it, nib side up. “Anyway, back to tracking down our dear Mr. Cunningham. I’ve got three different scrying spells of varying difficulty I can try, so I’ll go in order from easiest to hardest.”

  “The hardest one gives the best results, I’m assuming?” Kat asked, plopping down into Cunningham’s desk chair.

  “Actually, they can each give equivalent results. It’s just that the more difficult spells have better defenses against interference.”

  “So the easiest spell to cast is also the easiest for a person to hide from?” Kat tapped on her bangle. “A charm like this would render it useless?”

  “A masking spell like that would render all three of my scrying spells useless,” Liam said with a snort.

  “Why?”

  “Because while that particular spell is vulnerable to your internal magic fluctuations, the strength of its ability to repel outside magic is proportional to the size of your magic store,” he explained. “So you don’t ever need to worry about anyone scrying you, unless you accidentally overpower the spell.”

  “Ah. Gotcha.”

  “Anyway, scrying has a lot of limitations like that, which is why high-level magicians often forgo it in favor of more advanced tracking techniques. But those techniques take a lot of preparation, and a lot of energy. Most of them can’t be performed on the fly. The good thing about scrying is that you can do it anywhere, anytime, as long as you have one of these.”

  He slipped a small mirror out of his coat pocket and waved it around like he was showcasing some kind of priceless gemstone. “All scrying spells can be performed with nothing but an adequately reflective surface, a modest amount of magic energy, and a well-rehearsed incantation.”

  “Would you care to demonstrate, Professor?” Kat teased, sticking her tongue out.

  “Of course, my diligent pupil.” He set the pen on the corner of the desk and cupped the circular mirror in the palm of his hand. Touching a single finger to the midpoint of the pen, he focused his magic on both the pen and the mirror, then spoke the incantation for the easiest scrying spell.

  As the last word rolled off his lips, he expected the surface of the mirror to ripple like a disturbed pond, and for its reflection to change, showing a view of another place. But to his astonishment, nothing happened.

  “Does that mean he’s dead?” Kat asked softly. “Or does that mean someone blocked the spell?”

  A low wave of discomfort rolled through Liam’s gut. “The latter. If he was dead, the mirror would show the resting place of his body, because a highly concentrated spiritual signature lingers in the body for several days after the soul passes on.” He tapped the pen with his finger. “It looks like Mr. Cunningham may have gotten himself into trouble on our si
de of the tracks.”

  “Could he have just been a random victim of a supernatural? Like a vampire or a faerie?”

  “Possibly. But if the fae are responsible for his disappearance, our odds of locating him are slim, as you well know. So we better pray he was abducted by a creature less skilled at obfuscating people’s whereabouts.”

  “You going to try the other scrying spells?”

  He nodded. “There’s no point in trying the mid-level spell. Any ward or charm that can render the basic spell completely nonfunctional will result in, at best, an unclear result when using the mid-level spell. So I’m going to skip straight to the big gun.”

  Pressing a second finger to the pen and clutching the mirror more tightly, he began the much longer incantation for the high-level scrying spell. This spell was a stretch for his current magic store—it had been difficult for him even three years ago, when his store had been at its largest—but he thought he had just enough to successfully cast and hold the spell for the requisite seconds needed for the mirror to produce a viable image.

  Halfway through the tangle of words, an itch started nagging at the back of his throat. When he reached two-thirds, that itch had grown into a stinging burn, as if someone had poured acid into his mouth. Liam almost choked on the tail end of the incantation, but he held out long enough to spit the last word before he doubled over coughing.

  As the spell went off, it took his entire magic store with it. The sudden energy drain slapped him with such an intense wave of dizziness that he stumbled backward and fell into the uncomfortable chair in front of Cunningham’s desk. Luckily, he managed to hold on to the mirror, and the desk was just close enough to the chair for him to maintain contact with the pen.

  Kat lurched around the desk and gripped his shoulder to steady him. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine, fine,” he rasped. “Look at the mirror.”

  The image on the mirror cupped in his palm had shifted from a reflection of the room into an opaque white mist that indicated the scrying spell was searching for its target. After about ten seconds, Liam’s soul straining every step of the way as it ran on magic fumes, the mist dissipated to reveal an image of an average-looking residential neighborhood.

  Square lawns with brittle brown winter grass. Overly sculpted hedges marking property borders. Bare trees with children’s swings hanging from broad branches.

  The focal point of the image was a pale-blue two-story house with a screened front porch and a single-car garage. The image wasn’t sitting at the right angle for Liam to glean the number off the mailbox post, and no street signs were in view. But there was a recognizable landmark sitting on the far right edge of the image: a very tall, gnarled oak tree that was nearly four hundred years old.

  That tree had been planted in the early days of Salem’s Gate, back when it was nothing more than a village used as a rest stop for horsemen and carriages on their way to Philadelphia. A few decades ago, the tree, which sat in the middle of a small park, had been given protected landmark status by the city government. It was now marked on the local maps as “Heritage Tree.”

  Judging by the position of the tree in the image, the house was located half a mile or so northwest of the park. That meant it could only be on two or three different streets. So to find the right house—in which Luther Cunningham was presumably lurking, voluntarily or otherwise—they’d just need to spend a few minutes cruising around…

  “Uh,” said Kat, disrupting Liam’s thoughts, “is that supposed to happen?”

  Liam’s focus sprang back to the pen, which had started to smoke. Little gray wisps curled up out of the narrow gaps between the various parts, as if something inside it had caught fire. “No,” he replied, baffled, “that is definitely not supposed to happen.”

  The image in the mirror flickered out and was replaced by what appeared to be a screen of gray, crackling static. Then, without warning, the mirror shattered, flinging shards of glass every which way. Some of those shards bit into Liam’s hand, and he yelped in pain.

  Kat grabbed his arm and roughly hauled him behind the uncomfortable chair—not a moment too soon. Just as his head dropped beneath the top of the chair, the smoking pen exploded like a grenade. Flaming pen parts careened across the office, pinging off the window and the bookshelves.

  A fat cloud of smoke puffed up toward the ceiling. And tickled the sprinkler positioned overtop Cunningham’s desk.

  “Oh shit.” Liam scrambled up, trying to recall a spell that would stop the sprinkler from activating. Only to remember that he didn’t have the power to cast such a spell, as the second scrying attempt had sucked him dry. “Kat,” he said quickly, “focus on the sprinkler and repeat after me.”

  Kat, ever the diligent student, hopped to attention. But it was all for naught. Liam didn’t get four words into the incantation before the smoke tripped the sprinkler, and a deluge of pungent brown water gushed out.

  Squealing, Kat brought up a simple shield, and the dome-shaped pane of energy repelled the disgusting water. They stood there under that shield until the sprinkler ran dry, watching in dismay as everything in Cunningham’s office was ruined by the gross brown spray.

  “Oh hell,” Liam muttered, “I’m going to get fired for this.”

  3

  Kat

  Liam didn’t get fired, much to Kat’s surprise, but the irate security guard did kick them out of the building, back into the bitter cold. As they shivered in the SUV, waiting for the heater to warm up, Liam called Mrs. Cunningham and explained what had happened in a roundabout way that didn’t put the mundane woman off.

  Once she understood that something supernatural had interfered with the spell Liam tried to use to find her husband, her tone abruptly shifted from annoyed to concerned. She actually offered Liam extra money since he’d gotten injured by the shattering mirror. Liam, acting almost overbearingly gracious—and it was definitely an act, one designed to make him more likable to even the most ornery of clients—turned down the offer and said they could call it even.

  “Put the money into repairing your husband’s office instead,” he told her. “I’m sure he’ll appreciate that.”

  “Are you going to keep looking for him tonight?” asked the woman, Kat’s sensitive ears picking up her high-pitched tones of worry.

  “The spell did produce a potential lead,” Liam answered. “I’m not promising any further developments tonight, but I’ll look into the lead and make an evaluation from there. I’ll send you an email with all the latest updates before I turn in for the night.”

  “Thank you so much for your hard work, Mr. Crown.”

  “No need to thank me yet, Mrs. Cunningham,” he said, sugar sweet. “I still have a job to do.”

  They exchanged a few more mindless pleasantries, then ended the call.

  “Okay, spill,” Kat said immediately. “What the heck happened with that scrying spell? And is your hand okay?”

  Liam unfurled his fingers, revealing the blood-soaked tissue crumpled in his palm. Tiny pieces of glass had nicked his hand in nearly a dozen places, and he’d had to break out a pair of tweezers to remove a few shards that had been sticking out of his skin like splinters.

  “My hand will live,” he grumbled. “But I may need to rustle up some band-aids.”

  “And the spell?” Kat pressed.

  He sighed. “Whoever blocked the low-level scrying spell must have sensed my second attempt as well. Instead of blocking that too, they decided to send a firmer warning. They used the spiritual connection that Cunningham had to the pen in reverse, flooding the connection with more energy than the pen could withstand. Because the mirror was connected to the pen via me, it also suffered the brunt of that attack.”

  “Sounds like we’re dealing with someone who really knows their way around magic.”

  “We are. That is not an easy trick to pull off.”

  Kat grabbed another wad of tiss
ues from the glove box and swapped them out for the soiled one, tossing the bloody paper into a plastic evidence bag Liam had stuffed under the driver’s seat. A good habit he’d kept from his cop days, he claimed, as he sometimes had to collect evidence for PI cases, like DNA swabs, that needed to be kept clean for lab processing.

  “Do you have a first-aid kit in here?” she asked, feeling under her own seat.

  “Kit’s in the back.” He jutted a thumb over his shoulder. “But you don’t have to get it. I can drive like this just fine.”

  She emphatically shook her head, annoyed by his blasé attitude. “What have I told you about taking care of yourself?”

  “It’s just some superficial cuts.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.” Kat opened her door, letting in a wave of cold air. “You promised me that you would do your best to keep yourself fit and healthy from here on out. That involves more than just cutting out the alcohol. You’ve got to get into the habit of treating your body with respect, even when it comes to ‘little things’ like…eleven cuts from sharp glass.”

  Liam pouted. “You’re not my mom, you know?”

  “Nope, I’m even worse,” she retorted. “Parents, you can send to voicemail. But nosy roommates are unavoidable.”

  Kat slipped out of the SUV and jogged around to the rear. She found the first-aid kit under the floor panel, wedged in between the spare tire and the jumper cables. A few minutes later, she had Liam’s hand slathered with antiseptic cream and covered with an inordinate number of band-aids, plus a gauze pad taped to his palm for good measure.

  Setting the first-aid kit on the back seat, she indicated that she was satisfied with the level of care. Muttering rude things under his breath, Liam put the SUV into drive and pulled out of the parking space. They left the aging building of the Cunningham Media Group behind and turned back onto the main road, heading toward the neighborhood where Liam believed the house shown by the scrying spell was located.