Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3)

by Schwartz, Jenny

  He hadn’t doubted Gina’s magic or honor. He had tasted her passion.

  The silver light dimmed and vanished as he brought the sight under control.

  If he accessed a new level of power, would he tell the Collegium? Did Gina expect he would? Had she told Morag as much? He knew his reputation. He had cultivated it. He was a Collegium guardian to his soul, everything sacrificed to serve. And it was true. However, first as commander of the guardians and now as president, he’d learned that service didn’t mean sharing everything.

  There were enemies, either purposely or by stupidity, within the Collegium. People he couldn’t trust. The idea of having power they didn’t suspect tempted him.

  The measure of power was like the measure of money. It didn’t matter how much you had, as long as you had more than the person next to you. At the moment, the senior mages of the Collegium didn’t consider him competition, and so, they were less guarded with them. He could read them, their secrets and fears, their ambitions and motivations.

  Or was it that with the absence of magic, he was leaning on his mundane skills, using the cold reading talent of his parents’ act to decipher people’s intent? People revealed more than they knew in body language, tone of voice and facial expression. Ask the right questions and they spilled even more. Then a smart man paid attention to where words and behavior contradicted themselves.

  Gina was authentic. The truth of her was in her home.

  He’d had to wrench himself out of there. His soul had craved its peace, and his body craved her.

  Dew wet the legs of his jeans. When he arrived in New York, he’d have to stop at his apartment and exchange jeans for a business suit; personal preoccupations for pure Collegium affairs.

  He recognized Emmaline’s cottage, a traditional Cape Cod structure with a steep roof and uncompromising geometry. He tapped at the back door and walked in.

  Porters seldom locked their doors. Ownership of the portal gave them enough raw power to ensure their security by other methods. And people needed entrance to the portal.

  Silently, he descended the stone stairs to the basement. He wouldn’t have been so free at a strange portal, but Gina had negotiated his welcome here. He reached the basement and it was empty. He set his bag down and sat beside it, back to the wall. He’d wait for Emmaline or her apprentice, Riaz, to awaken. Meantime…

  The silver light flared as if it had been barely restrained.

  He’d seen portals before in mage sight. Then, they had glowed golden and blazed in a wide solid circle, even as mundane sight had shown them as shifting pools of mercury.

  Now, the circle of the portal vanished in an intricate lacing of silver. Patterns to make his brain ache wove a rectangular arch over the portal, and reflected beneath it, as if the floor of the basement vanished. Yet, even as the rectangular arches remained, they multiplied and interlocked, built up and around. Built into a spiral that—

  “Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I stayed up late and the portal’s alarm had a hell of a time getting through to me.” A tall, lanky black man charged down the stairs, taking them three at a time. “Hope you weren’t waiting long. It would be just like Aunt Emmaline to make you suffer to punish me. That stone floor is cold.”

  He paused for a breath, stuck out his hand. “I’m Riaz.”

  Lewis shook hands. “Lewis Bennett.”

  “President of the Collegium, which is cool.” Riaz grinned. “So you need to get back to New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will Paul what’s-his-name, O’Halloran? Will he be expecting you?”

  “He’ll wake up.” The Collegium paid him enough. Porters tended to set up alarms that alerted them to incoming travelers, but there was no necessity for them to do so. They didn’t have to allow anyone through their portal.

  “Yeah, but you’ve got the right to use his portal?” Riaz pushed.

  “Yes.”

  A beaming smile, interrupted by a yawn, answered him. Riaz flapped a hand in apology. “Why wake him up? I’ll walk the in-between with you. I need the practice.”

  “You don’t need to hand me off, porter to porter?”

  “Not if you have Paul’s permission to use his portal, and as the Collegium president, I bet your name’s on his register. I’ll make sure you don’t get lost on the way, and you just step out.”

  No other porter had ever offered Lewis that way of travelling the in-between. But the kid was a trainee. Enthusiastic.

  “Thanks.”

  Riaz held out his hand.

  Lewis took it.

  Physical contact was the only way for non-porters to safely traverse the in-between. Usually that meant being handed from one porter to the next. So, Lewis had expected to grip Riaz’s hand while stepping through the portal, only to grasp Paul’s hand and be hauled out. Space behaved oddly in the in-between. It seemed to collapse.

  Without Paul to haul them out, Lewis counted seventy one heartbeats before Riaz pushed him through the New York portal.

  He emerged into the empty basement and swiftly took the stairs up and out, glad to avoid Paul.

  New York had its own beauty at this early hour. The streets had traffic. Cabs, trucks and cars cruised them, getting ready for the day, but the sidewalks were clear of all but a few people intent on exercising. Walking to his apartment in the quiet, he called up the silver light and saw it as a spider web spinning through skyscrapers and swirling into pools. He’d have to ask Morag to interpret what he saw.

  He’d be taking lessons from a dragon.

  The thought brought a small smile as he swiped his security card to enter his apartment building.

  “You’re looking happy.”

  Lewis turned as a man stepped out of the shadows.

  Shawn Johnson, one of the guardian babysitters that Kora, commander of the guardians, insisted Lewis needed.

  “Waiting for me?” Lewis gestured for Shawn to enter with him.

  “Kora was…perturbed.”

  Kora didn’t get to run Lewis’s personal life, not even his fake one. However, that was a discussion to have with her, not Shawn. It brought back the information that Morag had given him, that he’d been three times bespelled. And that brought back his rage. He didn’t let it show as he hit the elevator’s call button. “I’ll be at the office in forty minutes. The board meeting is at eleven. I want an additional option added to the restructure recommendation report.”

  Shawn was a highly trained guardian. He didn’t roll his eyes. But it was close. Of the three guardians protecting Lewis, he most resented the office work involved in the role.

  But a moment later, he forgot his frustration in shock.

  “Add in the option to disband the Collegium,” Lewis said.

  “Pardon?”

  Lewis stepped into the elevator. He mightn’t have magic, but he knew the timing of the elevators in his building, and how to play an audience. The elevator doors closed without him saying anything further.

  An angry smile drew his lips back from his teeth.

  As per Kora’s instructions to report anything significant involving Lewis directly to her, Shawn would be on the phone to Kora, waking her. That suited Lewis just fine. If Kora wanted to worry about anything, let her worry about the Collegium. Its president could look after himself.

  Gina wound her red hair into a knot and secured it with a pencil. She’d spent the morning meticulously tracing the activities of the people Lewis had noted, paying particular attention to the times leading up to and away from the dates he’d listed. It was fascinating.

  He was right. Money had been made around the events he’d noted. Well, money was always there to be made, if you had the intelligence and ruthlessness to exploit tragedy. Corey Gagnon, Nathaniel Smythe and Brad Wilson apparently had that ruthlessness. Their intelligence, she was less sure about. They were hackers, but not inspired ones. They had the requisite skills and a resentful attitude, but a little cautious prying soon revealed their presence at the end of strings
leading to and from the events Lewis had listed.

  The fourth group member was a woman, Lindsay Perez. She’d hidden her identity more effectively. In fact, Gina had only just cracked it, having broken her hours at the computer with a cheese sandwich and a walk along the beach. Maybe it was the soaring flight of a gull that had inspired her to creep up on the woman’s identity by riding the eddying waves of activity from the other three.

  Lindsay Perez had obscured her links to the events that had caused devastation in thousands of lives, and made her rich. However, she hadn’t been able to prevent the lesser talents of her fellow group members from revealing her. From the movement of their money, Gina had looked for echoes elsewhere. That and their veiled contact with Lindsay had revealed her.

  It hadn’t revealed the fifth member of the group. He or she was smarter than all of them.

  “I will find you.” Gina sipped her lime and soda water, and set the glass down, its ice gently tinkling. But if the fifth member had hidden their identity so well then they’d also have installed virtual tripwires. Gina had to be careful she didn’t alert them to her pursuit. “Good thing I love a challenge.”

  She was whistling in the dark.

  Lewis had understated the Group of 5’s activities. The more she learned of them, the more they scared her. It was the cumulative effect of all they’d done. She was aware of a growing sense of menace. Since she trusted her instincts, she moved even more cautiously online, but she wasn’t abandoning the puzzle. She would unearth the fifth member’s identity.

  So far, the four she’d identified all shared a legitimate public persona. Each either ran, or had founded and sold, a software company. Each had built software that solved a logistical problem. That meant they had minds that saw the world as flows of demand and supply. No wonder they were so good at scheduling disruptive events where relatively minor actions could have cascading, multiplying effects. They saw the world as a set of problems and opportunities.

  But just because four of the five were ex-hackers now supposedly legitimate, didn’t mean the fifth was. The fifth could be a more skilled hacker who’d never surfaced, preferring the dark web. Alternatively, he or she might have limited coding skills, but a grasp of organization and logistics.

  The fifth member might be a psychologist or a confidence trickster, someone skilled in people rather than code, because when she thought of the events Lewis had listed, they shared one other element in common: they instilled horror.

  “Definitely something to consider.” Gina chased an unaccounted-for one hundred thousand dollars from Lindsay’s Cayman Island secondary account. It had been sent two days ago. Where to? For what purpose?

  Bring people’s nightmares to life and they respond with frenzy. Money would be spent beyond rationality—or resources abandoned as they fled. Greed could take advantage of fear. People afraid for their and their children’s lives didn’t think logically, and that’s when the vulpine Group of 5 swooped in.

  On screen, Lindsay’s hundred thousand dollars disappeared into a Swiss bank account. Damn. Gina recognized the bank. It was run by people who understood magic. They’d hired mages to ward their vaults, both the physical ones and those in cyberspace. The bank was not for hacking.

  Gina pushed back from her desk, idly picking up a piece of paper she’d scribbled notes on and folding it into a paper tulip—a trick one of her ten-year-old cousin’s had recently taught her. With the International Children’s Conference convening and children everywhere around the world encouraged to send their wishes written on recycled colored paper to accompany their nation’s youthful representative to the conference in Mexico, children were going wild for origami. Gina found it soothing to fold and shape paper while her thoughts drifted.

  Would it be so bad to hack the bank? She was very tempted. Who owned the account Lindsay had sent her money to? But that was the teenage part of herself whispering temptation, the bit that had only just avoided FBI scrutiny at fifteen. Surely she’d learned prudence since then?

  Gina set the paper tulip down beside her computer, next to a paper rose, three paper irises and a paper peony.

  By some measures, one hundred thousand dollars was a small amount of money. Small enough not to trigger mundane intelligence agencies’ attention unless Lindsay repeated the financial action—which she hadn’t.

  But one hundred thousand was also sufficient to hire a rogue mage to undertake a destabilizing activity; that is, if the activity was small enough and its consequences not immediately obvious. Rogue mages weren’t stupid. They knew the line they couldn’t cross without capturing the Collegium’s attention.

  Gina mulled over the problem. The important thing was not to act impulsively. She had a tendency to do that…as with kissing Lewis. Although kiss was an inadequate term for what they’d shared. Her body heated and melted just thinking about it.

  Work!

  As a distraction, she started typing up the information she had for him. She had Lindsay Perez’s identity and Lindsay had some interesting contacts.

  The attack came out of nowhere. The first of Gina’s alerts flashed across her screen.

  She abandoned her report to Lewis and opened the alert. The second layer of her security pinged. Someone was attempting to uncover her identity.

  Good luck with that. But annoyance flickered. Out of respect for Lewis’s judgment, from the first she’d used one of her most secure identities while undertaking this search, and she’d ventured cautiously. Evidently not cautiously enough. The timing couldn’t be coincidence. She’d tripped some flag set by one or more of the Group of 5, and they wanted to know who was snooping.

  However, she’d spent a week setting up this online identity, and the layers and obfuscations she’d employed would keep a hacker occupied a while. Perhaps long enough for her to circle around and identify them?

  If she was lucky, the person coming after her was the group’s secret fifth member.

  She flexed her fingers and started typing. This particular false identity was one she used when she wanted to elude other hackers. It flaunted its credentials, not too obviously, but enough to support the illusion that she was a teenage boy, someone roaming with aimless curiosity into a lot of not-so-obvious areas. People she encountered might subconsciously dismiss this identity as a lesser threat. Boys will be boys, and all that.

  And if they kept pursuing her, well, she’d installed a virus along two of the paths to her true identity. They were the sort of virus a teenage boy would delight in. It lacked subtlety, but the virus taking over her pursuer’s computer and flashing up pictures of pratfalls would appeal to a teenager. She’d called that virus, “Loser”, as a kid might. Hiding behind the virus was a substantial layer of security, and behind it, her magic wards kicked in.

  No one was going to track her back.

  Three hours later, her confidence received a kick.

  She still hadn’t identified the person chasing her false identity, but that person had deflected her virus and hit her security layer hard. There they’d stopped, apparently defeated by the encryption and server bounces. They might return. Then again…

  Gina stared at her computer screen.

  Her opponent had been fiendishly clever.

  In her false identity as a teenage boy, Gina visited a couple of chat rooms in the dark web on a semi-regular basis. What no one knew was that in yet another false identity, she hosted those rooms. That enabled her to see who joined and participated in the chats. The same newcomer had just joined both chatrooms with the user identification: Believer5.

  That wasn’t the fiendishly clever bit.

  The fiendish cleverness was the all-out attack on the security of the chat rooms, aimed at accessing users’ records.

  As owner, Gina could fight back, or she could allow Believer5 to wrest the false teenage boy’s identity details from the chat room’s data files.

  She fought back, and adrenaline surged as her opponent threw bots at breaking down the chat rooms’ s
ecurity through mass attack. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. A patch here, a workaround there, her own army of bots (legal ones) activated. She lifted her hands off the keyboard and sat on them a moment.

  The risk of vigorously defending the chat room was that in the battle she’d reveal her style of coding. That was a risk all hackers faced. You came to recognize each other by certain characteristics and quirks.

  Already, some of those who used the two chatrooms had picked up the destabilization of the attacks and were curious. She could tell them about the threat to data and unleash them after her opponent, or—

  “We’re under attack. Probably some idiot high on red cordial.” That is, a juvenile hacker. “Don’t have time for the drama, today. Say, bye-bye.”

  Thirty seconds later, time enough for someone to see and repeat the message to other users, she deleted both chat rooms. Then she went back and scrubbed them from the more obvious places. Finally, she sat back and stared at her computer screen.

  Believer5 had to be the fifth group member, and he or she hadn’t wasted any time responding to her investigation. They’d gone after Gina’s false identity with energy and an aura of ruthlessness. It would have been worth it if their actions had revealed anything useful about them, but other than confirming that they did have some tech savvy, Gina had learned no more about them.

  Would they believe she was a teenage hacker?

  In their shoes, she wouldn’t. The name of the game in the dark web was to stay suspicious and stay anonymous. Anonymity gave you power. Believer5 wanted to wrest that from Gina’s teenage boy identity, hence the attack on her chatrooms. People got careless around chatrooms, either in what they said or how they entered and exited. They were a good place to try to track someone back to their real world identity.

  Gina sent her house witchery magic out and felt the reassuring strength of her privacy wards. Even better, nothing had tested them. She’d escaped discovery.