Federal Agents of Magic Boxed Set

by T. R. Cameron

  The dog’s expression didn’t change.

  Yes. Language troubles.

  The troll pantomimed what he wanted, and the dog’s tail wagged. Rath climbed back onto his nose and crouched, and Max lowered his head gently.

  “Max. Launch. Go.” The Borzoi’s neck snapped up, and his passenger was thrown in an arc toward the center of the bed. He tucked and rolled at the apex, held his weapon out to one side, and landed in perfect balance, the spear in guard position before him. He growled at the invisible enemies arrayed in a circle around him and leapt to the attack. Several minutes later, his foes had been vanquished and Rath was exhausted. He crawled to the edge of the bed, and the Borzoi stretched his neck out. Rath made it onto his nose and hugged it. “Max. Good. Living room. Slow. Go.”

  The little warrior was snoring softly by the time they arrived. Max rolled him gently into the corner of the couch and climbed up beside him, his head inches from the troll’s sleeping form. Rath stirred in his sleep and yawned. “Partners. Good.”

  The dog’s tail thumped once before he, too, succumbed to the wisdom of resting between battles.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The lead agent watched as his team underwent a close-combat training session. The morning had been spent on the rifle range, where everyone had performed with the same excellence they always did. Diana had proven to be a match for anyone other than Brenner and Johnson, the preternaturally skilled snipers. Bryant had cautioned the team against using magic, without providing an explanation. He wanted a clear assessment of Diana’s mundane skills before moving on to the magical ones.

  She sparred with Davis, the ninja she’d temporarily replaced, armed with stiff rubber Bowie knives. They each used classic positioning with the offhand blade forward and pointed at the opponent and the dominant hand knife reversed along the forearm to allow forehand slashes and backhand stabs. Davis made use of his longer arms to frustrate her attempts to get close. The rules prohibited anything other than knife fighting, or she’d doubtless use some of her MMA blocks and kicks to eliminate his advantage.

  Diana attacked and had to duck as he swung at her head with his main blade, then stumbled back as the other stabbed at her. Her shout carried across the room and engendered a round of laughter from those not engaged in their own bouts. “Damn it to hell, man, what are you—part giraffe?”

  She dashed in again and thrust with her offhand, but Davis delivered a brilliant one-two move. He slid to the outside of the strike to sweep his main blade in a block, then knelt to lunge up with the other. It looked awkward, but the blow would have cut deep into her triceps to disable her arm at a minimum and almost certainly cost her the fight.

  The woman sighed and lowered her arms. Her expression was as upset as Bryant had ever seen it, but it had an edge of recrimination that told him it was self-directed. She pushed the frustration aside with a visible effort and turned to Davis. “Will you teach me?”

  He nodded and started to do exactly that.

  Taggart’s voice sounded from behind his right shoulder. “She handles herself well.”

  Bryant swiveled to his superior who stood barely step away. “You still have those ninja skills, boss.” He turned back to face the fighters. “Yes, she does. I thought she would lose it there for a second, but we haven’t managed to push her that far.” He paused, then grinned. “Yet. I’m sure I can get there eventually.”

  Taggart laughed. “It’s true, there are few people on Earth with the ability to be more annoying than you.”

  The agent waited, but his boss didn’t continue. “So, did you come down only to watch?”

  He grunted.

  “Bad news then?”

  The other man sighed. “It seems that’s all we get these days, isn’t it? Yes. The investigation team we sent in after you cleared the place found a number of artifacts in addition to the one the mage used. All but a few are powerful enough to be of concern on their own. That collection in one place is downright frightening.” Taggart intruded into his peripheral vision, holding a phone. On it was a symbol that looked like it had been carved into metal. It was a pair of intersecting figure-eights arranged in an X shape. A glyph sat within each oval.

  Bryant shrugged. “It’s pretty, if a little simplistic. Where did you find it?”

  “In the remains of the desk in the upstairs office. We would never have discovered it, the agent said, except that one of the blasts from your fight destroyed its hiding place.”

  He laughed. “Go me. That lady sucked.”

  “They all suck.” He stowed the device in an inside jacket pocket. “The code breakers are working on it now, but there are no records in our history or in anything the Oricerans have provided that corresponds exactly to this image. Basically, we’ve never seen it like this before.”

  “What are you not telling me?”

  Taggart sighed. “It bears a resemblance to a…well, a cult might be the best word for it, from a while ago. The followers of Rhazdon.”

  Holy Hell. There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.

  “Which is definitely a worry, I guess. I’m unclear as to why, though. Is there something other than the image that’s relevant?” He clapped his hands and barked support as one of his people made an impressive double stab.

  The SAC’s voice was more serious than Bryant would’ve liked and sucked all the fun out of the moment. “This was etched into a coin.”

  He sighed. “And there’s never a reason to make only one coin.”

  “You have it in one.”

  “Dammit.”

  His boss clapped him on the shoulder. “That does about sum it up, doesn’t it? Bring Sheen over once you’re done.” The agent turned and watched him enter the unmarked door that connected this boarded-up, soundproofed, and highly secure office park warehouse to their base through an underground tunnel.

  Damn, damn, and double damn.

  Diana had showered and dressed in what had become her usual training uniform—sneakers, jeans, and an FBI Academy t-shirt. Only the SAC felt obligated to dress up most days.

  Taggart greeted her as she sank into the seat across from him. “So, you got stabbed.”

  She shook her head. “Seriously, he must’ve spent his formative years hanging on a rack or something.” She grinned. “Knife fighting isn’t my strong suit, but I’m getting better.”

  “That is why we train.”

  Bryant lowered himself into the chair beside hers. “You haven’t made it to a session in a while, boss. Maybe you should go a few rounds with our newest recruit.”

  The SAC shook his head. “Those days are behind me. I’ll stick with things that kill from long range, thanks.” His chair squeaked as he rotated back to Diana. “How do you think the raid went?”

  She took a second to order her thoughts. “The initial strategy was sound and worked well. They were reasonably easy to take down in the chaos. It helped that they weren’t particularly good at their jobs.”

  “You get what you pay for,” Bryant interjected, “and that group comes cheap.”

  Diana glared briefly at him and continued. “It might’ve been better to bring in a second team, so we would have had more support up and down.” Taggart nodded. “But from what Bryant told me and from what I encountered, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. The whole thing was a setup. We’re merely lucky they underestimated us.”

  The SAC nodded again. “We are indeed.”

  She frowned. “How did we not know it was a trap?”

  “The analysts are working that angle right now. Clearly, we were fed information, but we’re still not exactly sure how. Our systems gather stuff from all over, and then they do the initial sifting and matching. There’s too much data coming in for humans to take care of that part. Somewhere along the line, false intel got in and made it through the system. We will find the hole and either plug it or turn it to our advantage, rest assured.”

  Diana nodded, despite the unsatisfying answer. Taggart stood and gestured
for the other two to rise. “Let’s relocate to the core. There are some things you should see.”

  A brown-haired, skinny tech awaited them in the core, which had privacy mode activated with the wall panels fully extended. They all donned their AR glasses, and he called up a display on the center table. On one side was a strange, etched coin with interlocking ovals and some symbols. On the right side, half the area was devoted to blown-up versions of the images, each in its own separate square. The other portion showed an analysis in progress, similar to facial recognition, which apparently tested the symbols against pictographic languages.

  “What are we looking at?” Taggart asked the tech.

  His voice made her subtract a few years from her guess at his age. “An ancient Dwarven language at the moment. The systems work from the most likely matches down to the more obscure ones. It’s run for twelve hours and hasn’t found one yet. We’ll move on to records from Earth once the Oriceran languages are complete.”

  Bryant leaned forward to peer at the symbol. “What’s it made of?”

  The tech pressed some buttons and an analysis drew in on top of the coin’s image. “Thirty percent gold, sixteen percent copper, and the rest are substances our computers don’t recognize.”

  “So, Oriceran, then.”

  “We’ve reached out to an expert,” the man confirmed. “We should have the data into the system soon.”

  Diana pointed at small raised bumps at the cardinal points of the coin. “Are those significant?”

  Taggart and the tech both smiled and the latter answered “Good catch, Agent Sheen. Hidden under there are tiny chips of power stone.”

  She frowned. “So, the coin is an artifact?”

  The tech shrugged. “We haven’t definitively verified that. It could be simply a power source or even a trigger for a different artifact rather than one in itself—kind of like a portable battery.”

  Bryant’s voice was dark. “Or a detonator.” The tech assistant paled at the suggestion. Diana’s stomach didn’t like the idea either.

  “What about the glyphs, other than pattern recognition?” She pointed again. “Do you have anything on them?”

  “All we’re sure of is that they’re so smooth that the coin is most likely cast from a mold.”

  She looked at him, and he raised his hands placatingly.

  “I know, that’s not helpful. We will continue to work on the problem. Hopefully, we’ll have something more soon.”

  Taggart thanked him and secured the room after his departure.

  “Our working hypothesis is that these are membership tokens. It’s essentially a covering-all-the-bases perspective, as it assumes that this is not an isolated incident and there is a group of connected people at its core.”

  The two agents nodded simultaneously. She exhaled to discharge her frustration at the lack of clarity. “So, where do we go from here?”

  Their boss smiled. “Same as always, Agent Sheen. We let the techs do their work. We heal, we train, and we investigate every angle we can think of.”

  “We could steal some anti-magic bullets in our downtime, ”Bryant suggested.

  Diana ignored him. “So, hurry up and wait.”

  Taggart laughed. “You’re fitting right in.” He withdrew a small case from under the table and pressed his hand against the sensor on the top before he dialed in a code. The latches released with a synchronized clack. The container held a pair of smaller boxes with their names on them.

  Bryant received his with a smirk. “Presents, boss? You shouldn’t have.”

  The other man’s reply was good-natured. “Shut the hell up, Bry.” He gestured at the packages. “It seems our enemies are fond of using illusions. These will help with that.”

  Diana opened her box to find a metallic broken-circle bracelet. It shone silver with balls on each end to help keep it secure on the wrist and was covered with engravings. She held it up to the light but couldn’t make sense of them. “Is that a language?”

  Taggart chuckled. “Probably. All I can say for sure is that we had to get them made on Oriceran, they were very expensive, and they’re attuned to your auras, whatever that means.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “How did you manage that? Has Bryant been stalking me again?”

  He gave her a thin smile. “Remember the VIP who visited a while back?”

  Diana’s brow wrinkled. She’d taken no particular notice of the person at the time since the woman had been escorted by Taggart.

  “She took care of the attunement. These will give you a warning when an illusion is present by growing colder the nearer you get to it.”

  “How do they do that?”

  He shrugged. “Something about different kinds of magic having unique signatures that can be detected. It’s actually less complicated than being able to detect all types of magic. Or so they said.”

  Bryant laughed. “Having someone else make gear for our agents will piss Kayleigh right the hell off.”

  Taggart nodded and grinned. “Kayleigh is aware and is planning to collaborate with the creators on several projects. So is Emerson.” An authoritative tone entered his voice. “Okay. Break time’s over. Back to work.”

  Bryant slipped through the dilapidated entry to the Stagecoach Bar. It was a dive populated by middle-level unreputables from both Earth and Oriceran. He spotted two gangsters and a suspected arms dealer in a booth together and made a mental note. His contact waited at a table in the far corner, her back to the wall. She hid her pointed ears and long black hair under a watch cap, but there was no missing the peculiar darkness of her skin that marked her as a Drow Elf.

  Kienka had been one of the first to cross over, she’d explained, and had made a lucrative living ever since by trading on the margins of legality. She professed to be unconcerned with the nature or purposes of her clients, only in their ability to pay. Bryant slid a purple Crown Royal bag across the table as he sat in the booth opposite her. He had liberated all the power stones he could find at the raid scene, except for the ones obvious enough to be missed. The woman only accepted payment from him in magical items.

  “Very nice, Bryant.” She drew out the T, which made his name sound vaguely threatening. “What do you need?” On another woman, the voice would’ve been sultry. On her, it called to some instinct deep inside that made him want to run.

  “Another shield and something to replace the light charm.”

  She chuckled darkly and hefted the bag. “This will cover the first but not the second. Are you sure you wish to be in debt to me?”

  Bryant had little tolerance for her games tonight. “Whatever. You know I’m good for it. How long?”

  “A week for the shield, another three for the offensive spell.”

  “Will it be as powerful as the light charm?”

  She nodded. “At a minimum.”

  “See you in a week, then.” He turned and strode toward the door. There was an argument at the arms dealer’s table, and one of the gang members tried to draw a gun from his shoulder holster, only to be held back by the other. Bryant shook his head with a sickly smile.

  There is more opportunity than ever before with the worlds coming together and these idiots are still obsessed with turf wars.

  When he cleared the door, he sent a text through a series of ARES proxy servers that would hide the source to inform the FBI that two persons of interest were meeting with a person of much greater interest. He thought for a moment about warning Kienka that the authorities might show up but had little doubt she was already gone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Taggart stepped out of the Uber he’d caught halfway across town from the ARES base and stared at the Capitol Building with its instantly recognizable rotunda that reached for the sky.

  Sometimes, all this need for secrecy is damn annoying.

  He gathered with the crowd that prepared to take one of the regularly scheduled tours of the landmark and paid for his ticket. The drone of the tour guide faded into the bac
kground. He’d heard it all before. A search of his memory revealed this was actually his third trip inside as a tourist. His clothes were a far cry from his daily uniform but blended well with the tourists in the group. Especially the Capitals baseball cap. He wore glasses with thick lenses and shuffled a little as he walked.

  They entered the inner lobby and he stepped aside as if heading for the marked restroom. Once out of sight, he tapped his ID card on a dark panel beside an unmarked door and quickly slipped through when the lock released. Several twists and turns followed along a hallway that he imagined most senators never saw but their aides and interns were very familiar with. Finally, he located the next unmarked door he sought.

  Seventh on the left.

  He tapped his ID again and the door opened to reveal a small conference room about twice the size of his office. Another entrance was visible on the far wall.

  The space was sparse, merely a brown oval table and six chairs, a large display mounted on one wall, and a low credenza opposite it. Taggart crossed to it, placed his hand on the side of the carafe resting on the top, and smiled. The coffee on Capitol Hill was some of the best he’d ever had.

  Gotta keep the elected representatives well caffeinated so they can dole out the tax dollars and fight over image rather than substance. He snorted. Thank God ARES doesn’t have to deal with any of that nonsense.

  A stack of heavy mugs was artfully arranged beside the carafe, and he took the top one, careful not to disturb the rest. He pressed the button to release the life-giving liquid and inhaled the scent as it filled his cup.

  Amazing, as always.

  He had barely settled into a seat along the side of the table when the door opened and Aaron Finley hustled in. The junior senator from Rhode Island was in the second year of his six-year term but had been in military intelligence during his twenty-year Army stint. ARES had done its due diligence and requested him when a rare opening on the oversight council had appeared.