“Okay.”
Arlee walked to the window and picked up a pot of purple-flowering African violets. “I’m going to sacrifice these—” Lightning cut jaggedly across the sky.
“Use the pink one.”
Arlee froze, arms extended, holding the pot plant.
Delphi felt a bit silly, but not enough to fall silent. “The pink violet is showing some disease. I think it’ll die anyway.”
Silently, Arlee swapped the plants, then put the small pot of pink African violets on Delphi’s desk.
Delphi swiveled around in her chair, still gripping the hilt of the sword.
“Are you ready?” Arlee touched one finger to a leaf of the plant.
Delphi gulped. Arlee obviously hated killing even the diseased plant. She was doing this so that Delphi could learn the feel of death magic. So Delphi had better learn! “Ready.”
“Darkness at midday,” Arlee began a small death magic spell, pushing her entropic power into it.
Abruptly, light glowed from under Delphi’s hands.
Arlee broke off the death magic spell. The glow vanished.
“That wasn’t me!” Delphi said. “It was the sword.”
They stared at one another.
“Darkness at midday,” Arlee whispered.
The sword glowed faintly, then faded.
With a thought, Delphi switched on the overhead light. The electric lighting vanquished the storm’s gloominess. She turned the sword over in her hands. “Shawn Jackson brought this in, claiming it was Excalibur.”
“It lights up in the presence of death magic,” Arlee said.
“Or in the presence of evil?” Delphi suggested.
“Could be.” Arlee set the still-living African violet back on the bookcase by the window.
“Excalibur. What if I’m truly holding King Arthur’s legendary sword?” Delphi ran her fingers along the flat of the blade. “It was first mentioned in the Dark Ages. Light when light wasn’t to be obtained by the flick of a switch would have been stunning. Awe-inducing.”
“It would have signaled a hero.” Arlee nudged the visitor’s chair away from the door. “Let me get something evil and we’ll test this.”
“What evil thing do you—?”
But Arlee was gone.
Delphi studied the sword. “Excalibur?” A sword for a king. And what sort of sword did a king need? One to kill evil—or one to summon everyone to fight the evil?
Arlee returned with a lump of gold. “It used to be an enchanted ring. I destroyed it, but evil should still cling to it. I can feel it as an oily sheen.”
Apparently, the sword could, too, because it glowed.
“Here, catch.” Arlee tossed the lump of gold to Delphi, who caught it. “Give me the sword and I’ll see if it works for me.” But as she took the sword, its glow faded.
Returned to Delphi, the glow shone again.
“Maybe it’s something I’m doing unconsciously,” Delphi said.
“Right. So, we need to test it. Some neutral objects, some evil, and you not knowing which is which.” As Arlee dashed out to scavenge objects, her activity caught their colleagues’ attention. Soon Delphi was out of her office in the center of the staffroom and people were entering and leaving with objects.
Everyone tried holding the sword, but it wouldn’t glow for anyone but Delphi. On the other hand, it was a hundred percent consistent, always glowing in the presence of evil. And it was a bit scary how many knickknacks of evil the alchemists had in their offices!
“It could be Excalibur,” Delphi and Arlee’s boss said, waving the sword to the imminent peril of the people around him, before returning it to Delphi. “Fascinating. You’ll need to work with it, discover what else it’s capable of doing, and of course, determine whether it could be Excalibur. Incredible to think we might actually possess King Arthur’s sword.”
As the excitement quieted, Arlee followed Delphi back to her office. They stepped inside and Arlee released a death magic spell.
The sword barely showed a glimmer before Delphi zapped the death magic spell to metaphorical dust. She didn’t think, just reacted, adapting the instantaneous block that demonologists used against hell spawn to thwart the death magic.
“Good.” Arlee nodded, satisfied. “You’ll be fine.” She relaxed into a grin. “And no violets were hurt in the testing of the Lady of the Lake’s defenses.”
“Oh, funny.” Delphi pulled a wry face. The Lady of the Lake, according to legend, had given Excalibur to King Arthur.
Outside the window, the storm had grumbled on past. Even the rain was letting up. Her office was less gloomy. Delphi dropped into her chair.
“No, you don’t.” Arlee grabbed her arm and hauled her back up. “You’ll sit and think and try to marshal an argument to defend your idea that crime lords are benefiting from death magic transmutation. You need to face Jet and the guardians working with him, and confess that you’ve stuck your nose in.”
“Investigated,” Delphi tried to dignify her interference.
Arlee ignored her interjection, taking Excalibur from her, and pushing Delphi to the door. “Now it’s time to stand behind your idea. Just you. No formal report.” A grimace said everything Arlee thought of written reports. “Go.”
Delphi gripped the doorframe and resisted. “Go where? I don’t know where Jet is.”
“Don’t you?” Arlee raised an eyebrow. That was the worst thing about friends. They knew when you were trying to weasel out of things.
Delphi intended to speak to Jet, after careful thought, after combing her hair and renewing her lipstick, and—she sighed. A moment’s quiet scrying, searching inside herself, and she knew where Jet was: at Collegium headquarters. Perhaps because she’d grown up in such a close family, the ability to find the people who mattered to her was part of Delphi’s natural talent. “He’s here.”
Arlee grinned. “I knew he was important to you.”
In the end, Delphi didn’t so much go in search of Jet, as run from Arlee’s unhidden glee that Delphi was falling in love. She found Jet on the guardians’ training floor, in a cramped meeting room with two guardians. She tapped on the room’s internal window.
Jet stared at her a moment, then got up hastily and opened the door. “Delphi, is something wrong?”
The two guardians watched them curiously.
Delphi looked steadily at Jet. “I’ve had a thought about the rogue mage you’re chasing.”
Jet fought his instinct to hustle Delphi away. He wanted her to be safe, not involved in an investigation into ritual murder. But one look at the determined if wary expression in her beautiful eyes and he gave in. “Come in.”
Introductions were brief since it seemed Delphi already knew the two guardians, Seleste and Martin, at least by sight. Now, they knew she was his neighbor. A neighbor who proceeded to turn his case upside down by her analysis of it.
“Not a simple trade in banned spells,” she concluded. “But a high-level, exclusive scheme to provide criminals with completely new identities.”
“Transmutation. It’s possible.” Martin rubbed a hand over his bald patch in a circling motion, one that evidently indicated significant distress. He stared through the internal window of the meeting room to the large office on the far side of the training ring. “Kora is going to kill us.”
Kora was the commander of the guardians. She’d assigned Martin and Seleste to work with Jet to discover who’d killed his cousin and to halt the trade in banned spells. On his one meeting with her, she’d struck Jet as a woman with a low tolerance for sloppiness. He wouldn’t, necessarily, say that Martin and Seleste were sloppy, but they had obviously assigned working with him a low priority. If Delphi’s idea proved true and crime bosses were using magic to reinvent themselves, under few circumstances would that be considered low priority. Martin and Seleste were going to get their asses kicked.
“What else can you tell us?” Seleste asked Delphi tightly.
“I don’t have any
evidence,” Delphi repeated a theme she’d insisted on throughout her presentation.
“We’ll look for it,” Martin said.
Delphi nodded. “You know the criminal investigation process better than I do.”
Maybe not, Jet thought. Not when you added in her mom and brother’s police work and her own research experience.
Martin and Seleste waited.
Delphi sighed. She sat to Jet’s right at the round table and her foot nudged his when she re-crossed her ankles. She wasn’t playing, though. Her expression was serious and worried. “The only thing I can think to add is that it seems to me that the person masterminding the sale of spells and,” with an apologetic look at Jet, “sacrifices, is here in New York. They don’t travel to enact the transmutation, which means that wherever a spell is couriered to, the criminal there has to have a mage lined up who is willing to use death magic.”
“And there aren’t that many who are both willing to ritually murder someone, suffer the taint of death magic, and have the ability to do so. Transmutation of a person is a major magic.” Seleste was scrawling notes as she spoke. “So, how are the crime bosses recruiting? And can we track back from their activities?”
“We’re going to have to tell Kora.” Martin seemed fixated on that.
“Later.” Jet was ready to change the focus of the meeting. “Delphi, before you arrived I was about to bring Martin and Seleste up to speed on Ian Lewis’s background. He may be another way to track back to the rogue mage running this scheme. Possibly a more direct path.”
“Do you want me to stay or go?” She put a hand on the edge of the table, ready to leave if he requested it.
He’d wanted her to stay safely out of the investigation, but learning about Ian Lewis couldn’t hurt her and he owed her more than a snub. “Just leave the active investigation to us. Please.”
She nodded vigorously enough that her black curls bounced. “Absolutely.”
He hoped he could believe her. However, he suspected that Delphi’s loyalty and caring were stronger than her instincts of self-preservation. It was a problem for later, when they were alone. “Ian Lewis.” He focused on Seleste and Martin. “Thirty eight years old. He’s served four and a half years in jail for his role in organizing drug shipments. That means he has the logistical skills to run a trade in banned spells and human sacrifice.”
Seleste scribbled another note. “We’ll look into whether he has magic.”
Jet nodded, but kept going. Ian Lewis didn’t have the feel of a major player. “Magic or not, my sense is that Ian isn’t the mastermind. He’s a follower, not a leader. His gang treated him as a step-up from a delivery boy, nothing more, and no one else seems to have time for him at all. He’s lost contact with his family. In jail, he had no visitors. His parents are dead, and his brother and half-sister are respectable people without a hint of magic or criminal behavior. I expect they’ve cut ties with him.”
“Probably.” Martin drummed his fingers on the table, staring uneasily out the internal window toward the office of the commander of the guardians.
Seleste nudged him. There were standards expected of Collegium guardians, and dreading their boss’s condemnation wasn’t one of them.
“Harrumph.” Martin pulled himself together. He passed a hand over his balding head. “So you don’t think this Ian Lewis is our rogue mage?”
“He’s too much a hanger-on,” Jet said. “Admittedly, that’s only from reading his record and trial notes, but…a man like Ian Lewis, a born follower, would need to belong somewhere or to someone?” He barely paused for their agreement. “But Ian has cut all ties to his old gang.”
Delphi frowned. “He couldn’t have gotten free of them in prison. The gangs are strong inside and they don’t let people go.”
“Unless something or someone more powerful intervenes.” Jet studied the three mages. “Is it possible that a powerful mage could be jailed?”
Delphi’s frown deepened and gained a worried edge.
Seleste put down her pen. It rolled click-click-click and stopped just short of the table’s edge. “A rogue mage might choose to go to jail if doing so kept his talent and activities from the Collegium’s notice. He’d suffer one punishment to be free to pursue his schemes unnoticed.”
“Who did Ian Lewis share a jail cell with?” Delphi asked, demonstrating that she’d followed Jet’s thoughts clearly.
It wasn’t Ian who mattered, but who he led to.
Jet looked approvingly at her. “For the first couple of years Ian was in with fellow gang members. Then a man with no known gang ties became Ian’s cellmate for the remainder of Ian’s sentence. The man got out of jail two months after Ian, a year ago, and vanished.”
“Name?” Seleste picked up her pen.
“Graham Monroe. ” Jet glanced at his notes. “Ian stayed on the radar. He has an apartment in Long Island, a driver’s license, car registration, all the usual bills. Graham Monroe, it’s as if he vanished, but there’s no death certificate in his name. No missing person’s report either.”
“Family?” Martin was showing an intelligent interest, at last.
“I haven’t had time to look into him yet. But no one visited him in jail, either.”
“We’ll look into him.” Seleste made a note.
Jet would, too, no matter what they said. However, he’d do so cautiously. If Graham was the rogue mage, Jet didn’t want to give him any warning that he’d been identified as a possible suspect.
He must have frowned, because Seleste added, “We’ll look discreetly.”
The meeting wound up. Seleste and Martin marched off to their doom, heading for the commander of the guardians’ office.
Jet and Delphi were left together, him holding his folder of notes and his phone, her empty-handed. He was aware of their audience, guardians covertly watching them through the internal window of the small meeting room, but he was more concerned by her wariness. For all their instant attraction—and attraction was an inadequate word for the intensity of his reaction to Delphi—they didn’t know each other. She didn’t know how he’d react, how he truly felt, at her involving herself in his investigation against his stated wishes. Before they left this room, she would.
“You’re smart, you have magic, you care about people, and I can’t dictate what you do,” he began, and her expression of wariness intensified. She seemed almost to hold her breath. “But you should know that my priorities are Tony and Grace’s safety first because they’re young and can’t save themselves. Then your safety. And only then, the identification and halting of the man responsible for Emma’s death and the others. Justice for the dead doesn’t trump the well-being of the living, not with me.”
Delphi’s expression remained anxious, although she reached out to rest her hand on his arm, acknowledging without words his statement that she was important to him. “Others will die if this person isn’t stopped. Maybe hundreds more if he’s enabling crime bosses to evade capture.”
“I’ll stop him.”
Her hand tightened on his arm. “Remember that you’re important to me, too.”
Delphi spent what remained of the afternoon studying the sword. Whether it was Excalibur or not, it was definitely magical, so why hadn’t she detected its magic in her earlier tests? European fairytales were filled with tales of…well, fairies. No one in the Collegium believed in fairies or a faery court filled with elves and goblins, but there was a strand of alchemical study, purely theoretical, that hypothesized that such stories were the folk memory of a form of magic that the wider world had forgotten. Iron Age magic.
Open on Delphi’s desk were books on weaponry and smithing. The hilt of the sword was a copper alloy, smooth, the pommel rounded without detailing and showing the wear of much use although the blade itself was unmarred. Not a nick broke its cutting edge.
The sword could be Celtic, in which case, Arlee’s earlier joke labelling Delphi the “Lady of the Lake” might be true. Would she have to find a brave
warrior and condemn them to battle by handing them the sword?
“No,” she whispered. The burden of sending someone in to fight would be too great.
Yet there were people who took the warrior role willingly. Jet did. Like her mom and brother, the drive to protect and to pursue justice was his calling. She couldn’t—and didn’t—expect that would change for him.
Forget magical swords. She could best help Jet by providing him with information on the nature of the rogue mage he sought.
“Oh fudge ghouls,” the Halloween-inspired expletive slipped out. Who was she kidding? She was too concerned about Jet’s case to concentrate on her own work.
She crawled under her desk to stow the sword in the evidence locker, a narrow chest, and crawled back out, tugging down her short dress. Through the window she could see that the rain had started again. With a sigh for what the rain would do to her shiny red shoes, she unhooked her raincoat from the back of her door and shrugged it on, cinching the belt at her waist. She was going home. Not all her research resources were in the Collegium.
Home wasn’t quite what she expected. For a start, her front door stood open. Since her wards were intact and her family were loudly busy working on Jet’s house next door, she wasn’t too worried, especially when she followed her nose. “Fish stew.” Which could only mean Nan was on the premises.
Children’s voices indicated that Nan wasn’t alone.
Tony and Grace ran out of the kitchen, saw Delphi and shouted “hello”, but kept running. Their tiny feet thundered up the stairs.
“I sent them upstairs to choose their favorite toys from the toy box and bring them down to the living room,” Nan explained after she’d greeted Delphi. “Jet brought them home from school. He mentioned something about cooking dinner for you.” She beamed at Delphi. “But since I already was, he’s gone next door to work on his house.”
“Only to be sent back to ask if you have still have your aunt Zara’s old hoover and can Uma borrow it, please?” Jet walked in the back door, bent slightly, and kissed Delphi’s cheek. He was so casual and natural, that Delphi’s heart glowed at the gesture—until she saw her nan’s expression.
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