by AJ Sherwood
Dieter wasn’t the only dragon in the room, of course. The spouses of the other mages were present too, and they were also holding up the wall. Ready to lend a hand, but out of the way as their mages worked.
Melissande stood ready over the map. As the person who had driven through the town, she knew it better than anyone else at the table. She was the one actually in charge of navigating the cat-drone. At her side was Elissa, ready to act as support. It would take a considerable amount of magic to do this, even with the spell elements of dragon’s fire, stillness of a moonless night, and black sand. They couldn’t do a typical casting, after all. No simple release here. They would have to cast and maintain then withdraw the spell. It was why every mage’s spouse stood at the ready, nearby to help boost their power if so needed.
Frankly, it sounded like a headache. Cameron felt just as glad he wasn’t over that part.
No, he and Cassie were in charge of maintaining the recording from mirror to crystal. Lisette had had them practice it multiple times, but it was an easy spell. Like pushing record. They could manage this no problem. Halmeoni stood at the crystal to make sure it recorded properly, and to pull in a second crystal if the first one became full.
Lisette herself wasn’t going to actively participate, instead reviewing all of the spells and monitoring them. She’d jump in as support where needed. And axe it all if something went wrong, before it could backlash. No one said that last part out loud, though.
Going from one end of the table to the other, Lisette reviewed it all one more time before giving a grunt of satisfaction. “Eure Majestät, we’re ready.”
“Then begin, please.”
Cameron dared a glance at his lover. Alric looked beyond tense, his body nearly rigid as a plank. He’d been angry with himself ever since the Jaeggi Clan had been discovered. Angry and determined to keep them from re-enacting the same sort of disaster of five hundred years ago. Cameron understood those emotions, he didn’t blame Alric for feeling that way, but he needed to relax at some point. It had been three nights since he’d last slept over with Alric. The sweet man was clearly torn between wanting to please Cameron and worrying about his people. Cameron didn’t mind giving him the space he needed to concentrate on his duties…for now. But that much tension held for too long led to bad decisions. Cameron was afraid he’d snap under the strain at some point.
Lisette took in a breath and then gave Melissande a nod. “Begin.”
Melissande lifted her hands and spoke in tandem with Elissa beside her. “Umba fela gev adi.”
Lisette gave a pat to both women’s shoulders. “Good. Gisa, Carla, go.”
“Dene zold gev adi,” they intoned in unison.
The cat’s ‘senses’ connected with the mirror in a sudden splash of sound and color. The cat had appeared in the alley between two businesses, standing perfectly still. Under Melissande’s direction, it turned its head and surveyed the street.
It looked like every other small German town Cameron had seen. The buildings were built in snug together, the streets themselves of cobblestone. A charming sort of tourist trap, all of it clean and well-tended. Some of the stores were more modern, looking only thirty years old instead of a hundred, with glass fronts and brick structures. Cameron’s nerves jittered as he read the signs, what he could of them. He didn’t always know the words, but he could see the Jaeggi name crop up often in different store front windows—places that looked like pharmacies, dry cleaning, hardware stores.
Oh wow. Gunter was right to be freaked out. They really had survived and even thrived as a clan.
“Cameron, Cassie, start.”
“Memen apud hic gev adi,” he and Cassie managed more or less in unison. He felt the crystal in their joined hands light up with faint heat, a sign the spell had taken hold and worked. Good. All he had to do was maintain the energy flow and not drop the crystal and they were golden. But it also meant they had to stand right next to the mirror, which semi-blocked the view for everyone else.
Alric came to stand right at his back, hand resting on Cameron’s hip. He didn’t say a word, just stood there silently and watched through narrowed eyes.
Melissande navigated the cat about, walking casually along the streets. She’d added a cloaking spell onto the cat’s design, not wanting to catch the attention of any mage nearby. The cat was the easiest form to use as a drone, as it was versatile enough to climb under and over things. But no one wanted it to be seen or detected—not in that town.
The cat went up and down several streets before Melissande stopped it, right at the edge of a larger building with a security gate in front of it. It was the only building without a sign in front of it. Just the black, iron-wrought gates and two security guards standing on either side of it. The building beyond it was a depressing, unrelieved grey. Blocky, nearly windowless, it looked like a prison but didn’t have enough security around it for that.
“That looks suspicious,” Lisette murmured. “Hoheit?”
“Yes, investigate.”
Melissande turned the cat in, slipping through the gate, and took it around the outer grounds for a while. Nothing from the outside looked unduly suspicious, but it was odd. Aside from a parking lot, there was nothing out here. Not even an outdoor space for people to eat lunch in. Just grass and walls.
“Go inside,” Alric directed. He sounded calm, on the surface. Cameron could clearly feel his tension, though, pressed up against his back.
That turned out easier said than done. Melissande took the cat around the building three times, looking for any opening—an open window, a door cracked open, something. Anything. No luck. Cameron frowned at the building, not sure how to get past this. Should they even exhaust their magic trying? Or look through the rest of the town and come back here if they came up empty?
“We can’t see anything from here,” Ravi complained to them. “What’s happening?”
Alric turned his head slightly to answer. “The building is very secure, and we can’t find a ready opening. Lisette, how much time do we have left before we have to retreat?”
“An hour, two at most. Otherwise we exhaust ourselves.”
“An hour, then,” Alric directed her. “We can’t afford our mages to be magically depleted, nor do I want to abuse you so. Melissande, do one more circuit around the building. We’ll mark it as suspicious if we can’t get in, and look at the rest of the town.”
“Understood, Hoheit,” Melissande responded in her low contralto.
“Oh!” Elissa suddenly piped up, pointing. “Hurry, Melissande, there’s someone coming out a door.”
Melissande hurried the cat along and it sped through, slipping past someone’s ankles and through a side door at the last second. It shut with a hard clang and an electronic beep as the security system on the door reengaged.
Lisette leaned around Cassie to get a firmer look. “Melissande, turn the cat’s head to look at the door. Now that is odd. Why do they have electronic security up? Where are their wards?”
Cassie canted her head in question. “Sorry, why can’t they use both?”
“It’s not that they can’t, it’s just usually more trouble than its worth,” Lisette explained, still frowning at the door. “Electronic devices and magic don’t usually marry well together.”
Cameron had gotten this explanation already, and Lisette’s way of explaining it had been long-winded and somewhat confusing. He gave his sister the answer in a way that she could instantly grasp. “It’s like trying to run a Linux program on a DOS system. The two don’t like to talk to each other.”
Her expression was one of instant understanding. “Gotcha.”
“Now I’m confused,” Dieter muttered. “Was that supposed to be English?”
“Dieter,” Ravi sighed, shaking his head. “You’re so old.”
“Shut it, you,” Dieter growled back without heat.
Melissande fortunately remained undistracted by the sideline commentary and was weaving the cat through the building.
It reminded Cameron strongly of a hospital facility. The back rooms of one—the part of the hospital that didn’t see patients but where all of the testing and such happened. It was uniformly white—the walls, the tiles on the floor, even the trim—all white. The doors had only labels of numbers on them, no words.
And there wasn’t a soul anywhere to be seen.
“This is just getting creepier and stranger by the second,” Cassie muttered. “Are we in a Stephen King book?”
“It reminds me of one,” Halmeoni muttered in agreement. She leaned over to peer into the mirror better. “What is this place?”
Ravi snorted. “Watch it be some government agency building and all they do here is file and screw up people’s taxes.”
“I hope that’s all it is, but something about this building doesn’t feel right.” Alric cocked his head slightly. “I hear voices. Where is that coming from?”
Elissa tweaked the spell a little, adding a layer of hearing onto the cat to enhance the volume, and the voices came through a little clearer. Melissande followed the sound down another hallway and to a door that was opened a crack.
One voice was speaking in German—yelling it sounded like—the tone angry and frustrated. Cameron shifted from one foot to the other, frustrated because he wasn’t catching even one word in twenty. His German wasn’t anywhere close to understanding this yet.
“Lisette?” Alric requested softly. “A translation spell for those who can’t understand.”
“Oh, of course.” Lisette moved forward and touched the edge of the mirror lightly with her fingertips. “Gabofozatta gev adi.”
The words took a moment before gradually switching. “—komme U.S. Amerikan und still you lost her! And where’s the agent who went missing? Have you found him yet?”
“No, sir,” a woman answered with an audible grimace. “Our tracking spells indicate he’s dead, though. We can’t lock onto him when searching for him alive.”
“You’re telling me we lost a field operative?!”
“I’m afraid so, sir.”
“And she’s gone, the mage we discovered? Gone where?”
“She boarded a flight for Berlin, but after that we’re not sure—”
Cassie and Alric hissed in an angry breath at the same moment. Cameron swore mentally, biting the words behind his tongue. How had they known that? How were they tracking her?
“Just her? No one else was with her? And I want to know how an untrained mage was able to kill our field operative, dammit! That shouldn’t have been possible. Did she have help? Has the Burkhard clan already latched onto her through her brother?”
You better believe it, fuckers, Cameron fumed mentally.
“The flight itinerary read that Noh Ha Na, Cassie Parks, Sasha Burkhard and Baldewin Burkhard all boarded the same flight to Berlin,” another female voice inserted timidly.
“So they have latched onto them! Shit.” Two hands slammed against the top of the desk. From this angle of the cat’s perspective, he could just see through the door and the back of a broad man. There were multiple women sitting around the table, a few men’s heads visible further down. The room was obviously a conference room, the lights dimmed to allow a projection on the far wall of the room.
“Sir,” another man said from further down, “I think this calls for another plan. A simple snatch-and-grab isn’t feasible at the moment. Their guard is up. And we don’t know how much information our operative gave them before he was killed. It could be they know who we are.”
“Oh, I think they do.”
The door abruptly opened wide and a man looked down at the cat as if he could see it perfectly even through the cloaking spell. His eyes were flat grey, no true emotion showing in them. There was a smile on his face that didn’t touch the rest of him, the lines around his mouth cruel. He leaned down and picked up the cat under its front arms as easily as he would a corporeal being.
Lisette gasped in surprise and quickly darted over to Melissande’s area.
“No,” Alric told her firmly. “Wait. I want to hear what he says next.”
The mage lifted the cat to eye level and the room behind him erupted as people bit off oaths, scrambling out of their seats and staring at the cat in abject horror.
“Seems we have a little spy in our midst,” the man said in curt tones. That strange, eerie smile on his face never faltered. “A gift from the Burkhards, no doubt. I recognize the spell. Hello. I have no doubt you can see and hear me, even though I can’t see you in return. Pity, that. Regardless, tell that king of yours he can’t have the mages. He owes us more than he can repay.”
Alric gritted out between clenched teeth, “Lisette, connect me.”
Lisette shot him a look but didn’t argue, speaking the spell quickly. Alric moved as she did so, putting himself squarely in front of the mirror and blocking the view to the rest of the room. He stared the mage down with visible fury, heat waves pouring off of his skin in a wave both seen and felt.
“Jaeggi,” Alric’s voice was ice, it was fire, it was fury itself, a fury controlled and ready to pounce at the slightest provocation. “You have taken too much from this world. From my clan. From me personally. You do not have the right to lay hands on something that has not been given to you. Kaiser Jaeggi failed to understand that and decimated most of the world. If you insist on repeating his mistake, then I will meet you on that battlefield. But you cannot have something of mine ever again. Lisette, end it.”
Lisette spoke sharply, “Aese!”
All of the spells cancelled at once. The mages let them go with a sigh of relief, then looked at Alric in worry.
Cameron didn’t like what he’d heard, not one iota. They’d known someone had hunted him for his mage ability. They’d gone after Cassie for the same reason. But somehow, suspecting it and hearing a man admit to it openly were two very different things. It shook him more than he cared to admit. He didn’t want to be hunted by that clan. He didn’t want to be taken from the happiness he’d finally found here.
And if they tried, well, Cameron would fight back tooth and nail. He might only know the basics in magic, but he wasn’t easy to take down. He’d already proven that once.
Alric turned to him, catching the back of his neck and tilting his head down to rest lightly against Alric’s own forehead. He closed his eyes for a moment, breathing this man in, feeling the heat of his anger even now.
“They will not have you,” Alric promised him in a low, rough voice as if he were roaring on some internal level. “I swear to you on that.” Lifting his head, he looked to Cassie and Halmeoni. “They will not have anyone from the Noh Clan. We know where our enemy is, who they are. And that’s all I need to know.”
Cameron shivered a little under the intense expression on Alric’s face. He’d never seen fury like this, with his teeth bared, eyes hard, and a visible tic at the corner of his jaw. The world had already been through the ringer once because of that clan. And Alric was perfectly willing to go to battle with them again.
And damn the consequences.
Alric slammed the door to his private chambers shut with a loud bang and stalked across the room. Fire dragons had a horrible reputation for being short-fused hotheads, but Alric was proud to say it was rare for him to lose his temper.
But this—the Jaeggi’s return, the threat against Cameron—he couldn’t stomach it. Couldn’t fucking think past the rage boiling in his blood.
How dare they even think they could touch Cameron? Did they believe him to be so weak he couldn’t protect his mage? His clan? It was utter nonsense.
When he’d been a young dragon, he’d shift and take off. He’d fly high and far from his clan. The world, his problems, his clan would all fall away and there was only the sound of wind rushing by his face. He’d fly until his wings burned and ached from exhaustion, until there was only a cold numbness in his chest that allowed logic to claim his mind again. Only then would he think about turning back to his home.
But now he w
as stuck in this wretched, weak and damaged body. There was no more flying to escape and clear his mind.
Snarling, he snatched up a ceramic vase and threw it as hard as he could against the stones of the fireplace. The crash and explosion of porcelain was satisfying but not nearly enough. His dragon roared in his head, demanding he summon all of his people to fly to that town and burn it to ash. Wipe it off the face of the earth and erase all evidence the Jaeggi existed.
His human brain struggled to come up with a good reason why they couldn’t do just that.
Instead, his eyes darted around the room, searching for something else to throw. Maybe if he smashed enough things, his temper would finally cool enough to figure out how to take care of this problem once and for all.
There was a knock on his door and Alric jerked. “What?” he barked.
Now was not a good time to be disturbed. He needed to be alone, to give in to his anger and pain for just a little while. He deserved that one luxury after centuries of tight control and bottling everything up for what was best for his people.
He knew before the door even opened it was Cameron. The last time he’d caught his scent, but this time, it was a feeling. There was a tug deep in his soul, and he just knew Cameron was coming to check on him.
His dragon roared again. He didn’t want Cameron to see him like this. He didn’t want Cameron to steal away his fury. The anger and destruction were better, powerful.
The mage entered Alric’s chambers and closed the door behind him, his dark brown eyes worried as they swept around the room. They paused for a second on the vase shards in front of the empty fireplace, then moved on to Alric again.
“Hey.”
“It’s not a good time, Cameron,” Alric ground out in a low voice.