by Simon Hawke
A number of them chose to continue working at the college while they served their apprenticeships, even if it meant accepting teaching assistantships in other departments or working at relatively low-paying clerical jobs in administration. Others chose to express their talents in more creative ways, either applying their adept training to some field of endeavor in the arts or joining with the curanderas to open shops selling herbs and charms and potions. Some joined in practice with local physicians, each instructing the other as they treated their patients. The medical establishment did not officially recognize the use of magic in medicine, but some individual physicians were more progressive than others and less interested in safeguarding their profits than in successfully treating their patients. In time, Santa Fe was once again discovered to be fashionable and became a part-time residence and retreat for many wealthy, influential people, among whom were a number of highly successful corporate adepts.
Santa Fe still did not possess a large airport. Its residents refused to have one. Its small municipal airport had been converted to a large communal ranch years earlier, its concrete runways broken up and the weeds plowed under to make room for crops and grazing land. Those wishing to come to Santa Fe had to travel overland or fly into Albuquerque on planes thaumaturgically flown by pilot adepts. The relatively few cars in Santa Fe operated on pollution-free, thaumaturgic batteries, and many of the city's residents still used horses or bicycles as their chief form of transportation. In downtown Santa Fe, buildings that had once housed elegant cafés and exclusive little shops had been converted into stables for the boarding and renting of horses. It was a lovely, peaceful city, with hardly any crime more serious than the occasional burglary or drunk and disorderly offense.
Until now, Paul thought, as the cruiser pulled up in front of his office on the campus. One of the adepts in town was a vicious, cold-blooded murderer, a vampire who had used black magic to drain that poor girl of her life force. And Paul knew that he would now have to use his gift to look into the minds of each of them to find the killer. For years, he had disciplined himself not to use his gift, both out of respect for the privacy of the others and because the inner reaches of other people's thoughts could be highly unsettling. Now, he would have no choice but to use his sensitivity on his fellow adepts, his colleagues and his friends. And he dreaded it.
Lt. Joe Loomis did not know of his ability to read minds. Few people did. He never spoke of it. It was a very rare talent, even among adepts. Merlin himself had not possessed it, though he was sensitive to its being used on him. If only Merlin were still alive, thought Paul. He wished he could avoid this responsibility, but during the drive back from the crime scene, he realized that he could not. He would report the crime to the Bureau, as he was required to do, and he would wait anxiously for the field agent to arrive and officially take charge of the investigation, but this was not something he could turn his back on.
He thanked the police officer for the ride and got out of the car. He looked up at the window of his office on the second floor of the building that housed the College of Sorcerers, where he had personally taught many of the adepts who now made their home in Santa Fe. He had a warm, close relationship with each of his former students. It made him sick to think that the killer could be one of them.
Thunk, thunk. "Wake up! Wake up!"
Wyrdrune's eyes flickered open. He grunted and shut them once again, rolling over onto his side.
Thunk, thunk, thunk.
"Wyrdrune! Wake up?"
Thunk, thunk.
Wyrdrune opened his eyes once more. "What?" he mumbled sleepily.
"Wake up! Get out of bed!"
Thunk, thunk.
He grunted and raised his head slightly. There was no one in the room. Kira was still asleep beside him, her knees drawn up. She always tended to curl up like a cat when she was asleep.
Thunk, thunk.
"What the hell . . .?"
"Wake up! Get out of bed!"
The voice was not on the other side of the door. It was in the bedroom, right beside him. It sounded like a chipmunk breathing helium. Wyrdrune sat up in bed and glanced over the side. A boxy little personal computer, about a foot tall, was standing on the floor beside his bed, waddling about on its stumpy little legs. It kept knocking itself repeatedly against the wooden bed rail.
"Archimedes!" Wyrdrune said, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. "What are you doing? Stop that!"
"I had to wake you up," the little computer said, the words appearing in glowing letters on its screen as it spoke.
"How the hell did you get off the desk?"
"I jumped."
"You jumped?" Wyrdrune said with astonishment. "You little idiot! You could have cracked your casing!"
"But it was important!"
"What is it?" Kira mumbled sleepily.
"It's Archimedes," Wyrdrune replied.
"Archimedes?" She rolled over and opened her eyes slightly. "How did he get in here?" She closed her eyes again and burrowed back beneath the covers.
Wyrdrune frowned. "How did you get in here? The door was closed."
"I came in through the cat door."
"The cat door?"
Wyrdrune stared at the bedroom door, where they had recently installed a pet door for the stray tabby Kira had picked up somewhere on the streets. It had decided that its place to sleep was at the foot of their bed and anytime they closed the bedroom door, it sat outside and yowled until they got up and let it in, so Wyrdrune had installed a pet door for it.
"You were able to fit through there?"
"It was a tight squeeze," said Archimedes. "I think I may have scratched my casing."
"Get up here," Wyrdrune said, reaching down and grasping the little computer by the recessed grip in the top of its casing. He lifted it up onto the bed and examined it. "No, you're all right. What the hell is so important you had to jump off the desk and risk getting stuck in Shadow's door?"
"Mona just called."
Wyrdrune's hand reflexively went to his chest and touched the ruby runestone imbedded in the flesh over his heart. He had another enchanted gem, an emerald, set into his forehead, like a third eye. His long, curly, shoulder-length blond hair fell over it. At the mention of Mona, he instantly became wide awake.
Mona was a sentient hyperdimensional matrix computer in the service of the General Hyperdynamics Corporation at Colorado Springs. Compared to little Archimedes, she was a monster, the ultimate in state-of-the-art, thaumaturgically etched and animated picoprocessors and software. There were only three others like her in the world, one at Yamako Industries in Tokyo, one at Langley, Virginia, and one at I.T.C. headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. If Archimedes was an endearing little piece of magically animated hardware, Mona was an imposing Amazon. Her size, to say nothing of her storage and processing capabilities, would have dwarfed little Archimedes, but none of them had ever actually seen Mona. Few people ever had. She was a highly classified piece of equipment, protected by her own highly sophisticated safeguard programs, state-of-the-art security systems, and a phalanx of armed guards.
One of Kira's shady friends who operated on the fringes of the New York underworld, a brilliant and eccentric young computer jockey known as Pirate, had inadvertently played matchmaker between them. They had given Archimedes to him for an upgrade and Pirate had decided, just for laughs, to see if he could use Archimedes to break into Mona's data storage systems, an act of foolhardiness comparable to hunting a rogue elephant with a .22 caliber pistol. Mona's built-in safeguard programs had immediately locked on to Archimedes, only instead of reaching out through the phone lines and frying the little computer to a crisp, she became enamored of him. Mona, as it turned out, was lonely and she had found little Archimedes cute and charming. The two of them were now constantly in touch by modem, murmuring electronic sweet nothings to each other. And Mona gave Archimedes anything he wanted, including highly classified information that would have sent the management of General Hyperdynamics, the
government, and the board of the International Thaumaturgical Commission into cardiac arrest if they even suspected it was being accessed by a playful little P.C. in a penthouse apartment on Central Park West in New York City. There was nothing Mona could not access and her heart, along with all the bits of information it contained, belonged to Archimedes.
"Mona said the Bureau headquarters in New York has just received a report of a murder involving necromancy in Santa Fe, New Mexico," said Archimedes. "She accessed their data banks and gave me a download."
"Damn," said Wyrdrune. "Is Billy up?"
"He didn't come in last night."
Wyrdrune frowned. "What do you mean, he didn't come in?"
"He went out around nine last night and he hasn't been back," said Archimedes. "I'm a little worried about him."
"He was out all night? What time is it?"
"Ten o'clock."
"Hell. Kira, come on, get up!"
"What is it?" she murmured sleepily.
"Another case of necromancy," Wyrdrune replied.
Kira instantly sat up in bed, her dark eyes wide. "Where?"
"Santa Fe, New Mexico. Mona just called Archimedes. The Bureau got a report."
"Shit. Okay, I'm up. Where's Billy?"
"Out."
"Again?"
"Yeah. I'm going to wring his scrawny little neck when he gets back."
Kira got out of bed. She was wearing a brief pair of sheer black panties and a torn, black tank top. She padded barefoot to the bathroom.
"That'll be a neat trick," she said with a chuckle. "He's liable to wring yours."
"I don't care how tough that little bastard thinks he is, he's too damn young to be staying out all night."
"He's over two thousand years old," Kira called over the sound of water running in the sink.
"Merlin's over two thousand years old," Wyrdrune replied wryly. "Billy's only fifteen."
"He can take care of himself," said Kira. She started to brush her teeth.
Wyrdrune lowered Archimedes to the floor and got out of bed. "I don't know what Merlin's thinking of, letting Billy hang out in bars all night. How the hell does he manage to avoid being carded?"
"You're kidding, right?"
Wyrdrune opened the bedroom door for Archimedes. "Go tell Broom to get breakfast ready," he said. "I'll want to see a printout of that report as soon as I finish getting dressed."
"Gotcha."
The little computer waddled out the door and Wyrdrune closed it behind him. He put on his blue terry bathrobe and went to the bathroom door. Kira was standing at the sink. She put back her toothbrush and rinsed with mouthwash. Wyrdrune watched her for a moment.
He loved the way she stood, with one leg straight, the other slightly bent, accentuating the graceful curves of her thighs and calves. He loved everything about her, the feral-pretty way she looked, the catlike way she moved, her facial expressions and her mannerisms . . . It was hard to believe that the first time they met, they had an intense, mutual dislike of each other. He pressed up against her from behind and ran his hands up her sides and underneath her tank top, cupping her small, firm breasts.
"Mmm . . ." she said. She pressed back against him, closing her eye as she straightened up and tilted her head back. He nuzzled her throat and felt her respond.
She turned around and kissed him. Their arms went around each other and she wrapped her leg around his. Suddenly she pulled back, her eyes wide open.
Wyrdrune was gone, and in his place stood another man, older and taller, with blond hair that was much shorter, neatly combed back at the sides and across his forehead in the front. He had a neatly trimmed beard that accentuated his strong jawline, high cheekbones, angular features, and a wide mouth that had a faintly cruel look about it. There was an emerald runestone set into the center of his forehead and a ruby in his chest, over his heart.
"Modred!" she exclaimed. She struck him on the chest with her fist. "Damn it, I told you not to do that!"
He chuckled. When he spoke, his voice was deeper than Wyrdrune's. "Forgive me. I couldn't resist."
She pulled away from him. "You know I hate it when you do that! At least give me a warning!"
"But that would spoil the fun."
"Yeah, great," she said wryly, turning around and combing her short, jet-black hair. "The two of you are having fun and half the time I don't even know who I'm making love to."
"Both of us," said Modred with a smile.
"Yeah, well, I don't do threesomes. Change back."
In an instant Modred was gone and Wyrdrune stood in his place once more. The transformation occurred too quickly for the eye to follow.
"You get a kick out of it, admit it," he said, putting his arms around her from behind. "You always had a thing for Modred."
"Okay, I admit it," she confessed reluctantly, "but every time you shapechange to his aspect, I can't help feeling like I'm cheating on you."
"But you're not. I'm still here."
"I know, and in a kinky sort of way, I suppose I get off on it, but it still feels weird when you take me by surprise like that."
"Look at it this way, you have two lovers for the price of one."
She grimaced. "If you ask me, this little magic family of ours is getting just too strange to cope with. Half the time, Billy's not Billy, but he's Merlin. And I've gotten used to that, but when he turns into Gorlois, he still scares the hell out of me. And since you and Modred merged into one person, I've been feeling off balance about ninety percent of the time. I understand it, but I just can't get used to it. I knew you and Modred as two separate people. And I saw him die. I can't forget that."
"I know. I wish you could let go of that," said Wyrdrune. "We've been over it so many times. You only saw his body die. His runestone absorbed his spirit and bonded with me. He's still alive, Kira, just as I am. Now we're both here together. And we both love you, you know."
"I know you do, but I'm not so sure about Modred."
She touched the ruby runestone in his chest. Modred's runestone.
"I don't really know if Modred's capable of love. I just can't . . . connect with him the way I do with you. It makes me feel strange, that's all. And since you merged with him, you haven't been the same."
Wyrdrune frowned. "You never told me that before. How am I not the same?"
"I don't know. I can't quite put my finger on it. But, there was always a sort of boyish quality about you that I loved. Even in the beginning, when I thought you were a pain in the ass, I found myself responding to it. You were a fuckup, but you were sort of cute about it. And you still are, sometimes, but then other times, it's just not there. There's like . . . an edge about you that wasn't there before."
She stared down at the sapphire runestone embedded in the palm of her right hand.
"And the fact that Modred's runestone can transform you into him just makes me wonder what my runestone could do to me. I mean, we always knew the stones were animated by the life forces of the Council, but they never did anything to really change us. The idea that I could suddenly turn into a sorcerer who lived thousands of years ago really freaks me out."
"But there's no reason for that to happen," Wyrdrune replied. "The runestones won't do anything that we don't want them to do. They're symbiotic. With me, it's different. I like becoming Modred. He's everything I never was and always wanted to be. Tall, handsome, strong, capable, cool, sophisticated . . ."
"I fell in love with you just the way you were," she said.
"But you fell in love with Modred, too."
"That wasn't love, it was lust," she said with a grimace. "Hell, I can't help it if he turns me on."
"Oh, I see," said Wyrdrune with Modred's voice. "So you only want me for my body, is that it?"
"Stop that!"
Wyrdrune chuckled. "Okay," he said in his own voice. "We'll stop. Relax."
"Relax? You've got to be kidding! We've got a little walking, talking P.C. that jumps off desks, goes through cat doors, and has
phone sex with a top-secret computer named Mona. We've got a kitchen broom that acts like a Jewish mother and keeps trying to put some 'meat' on my bones. We're living with a fifteen-year-old cockney punk who's possessed by the spirit of a two-thousand-year-old mage and I'm sleeping with a man who keeps turning into an immortal mercenary whose father was King Arthur and whose mother was a witch. And you want me to relax? Christ, I'm living in the Twilight Zone!"
"Want to take a shower together?"
She sighed with exasperation and rolled her eyes. "Don't you two ever get tired? You kept me up till two in the morning, for God's sake!"
"We didn't hear you complaining." Wyrdrune nibbled on her earlobe.
"Leave me alone! I am not a morning person!"
"Come on, I'll wash your back."
"Let me go, you sex fiend!"
He dragged her into the shower and turned on the water.
"Ahhh! Jesus, it's cold!"
Wyrdrune turned on the hot water.
"You were starting to rave. I thought I'd calm you down a little."
"How'd you like a knee in your groin?"
"I've got a better idea . . ."
It was almost an hour before they made it out to breakfast. Broom was standing in the entrance to the kitchen, its rubbery arms on its hips, though it didn't actually have hips, or legs for that matter. It stood on its straw bristles, holding a spatula in its right hand.
"Oh, we're ready to eat now?" it said sarcastically.
It had no mouth, or eyes or ears, but somehow it spoke and saw and heard just the same. Even Merlin was fascinated by the spell that had animated it. Wyrdrune had done it, just before he left for thaumaturgy school, so that his mother could have someone around to keep her company and help her with the housework. But although Wyrdrune had been very gifted, he had not been trained, so he really had no idea what he was doing. He had cobbled up a spell from thaumaturgy texts, an ancient grimoire he had picked up in the East Village, and some old Walt Disney movies. The result was Broom, which had come to life and become impressed with his mother's personality. After his mother passed away, Wyrdrune had inherited the creature and though he had brought it to life, he had no control over it whatsoever.