“I hope you watch that as well,” I said. I looked at her and smiled to myself. If she’d cut herself off from her house, where would she go? I didn’t want to leave a young girl on the streets, even though – depending on the exact wording of the oath – she might be able to visit one of her family’s other properties, or stay with friends. “So…”
I considered it. If she were telling the truth, having her along would be useful, if not vital. If she was lying and her father had sent her after me, it would be better to have her somewhere I could see her, rather than somewhere I couldn’t. It would also allow me a chance to evaluate her properly for Guardian training. Wilkinson would go ballistic, of course, but it was definitely within my remit to take an expert along if I felt the need. She was definitely an expert on her family.
She smiled as she saw my expression. “Well?”
“Listen carefully,” I said, firmly. “By rights, if I can’t send you back to your home, I should take you somewhere safe and leave you in protective custody. You’re an inexperienced girl out here – and, worse, you don’t really understand that you are inexperienced. You have plenty of raw power, but any two-bit spell-caster is going to tie you up in knots and end up draining all your power for his own use. It would be quite easy. I could do it easily.”
I allowed a moment for that to sink in and pressed on. “If you come with me, you have to agree to do exactly as I tell you at all times,” I continued. “I don’t have time to constantly explain myself and haggle over every last detail. You tell me when you have an insight, or an idea, but you listen to me. I don’t want you ending up dead on my watch. My boss would never forgive me.”
“I understand,” Aylia said.
She would have said more, but I pressed on. “If you don’t do as I say, I’m going to have to send you into the Iron Cells until the case is concluded, whatever the outcome,” I warned her. “Don’t play games with me. I’m not one of your servants or slaves. Treat me fairly and I will treat you the same. Otherwise…you’re gone.”
“I will,” Aylia said. “You won’t regret this.”
“I already do,” I replied. “Come on. Let’s go.”
I put a handful of coins on the table to cover the cost of the drinks and took her hand, triggering the teleport spell with my mind. I had to hold her as we teleported, or the wards surrounding my house wouldn’t have allowed her to enter unharmed. She didn’t struggle, but looked around with interest as soon as we materialised, perhaps wondering where we were.
“This is my house,” I said. Varsha came out of a side door and looked at us both oddly. “Varsha, can you find Aylia some food and set up a bedroom for her? I’m going to have to make a phone call.”
I was tempted to stay and watch the girls fight it out, but I’d put reporting in off too long. Wilkinson was definitely not going to be pleased.
Chapter Fifteen
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer.
-Sherlock Holmes
“You have who with you?”
Wilkinson sounded utterly stunned. I didn’t blame him. I had briefly detailed the outcome of the visit to the Mound – I saw no reason to burden him with exact details – and ended up explaining that I’d brought Aylia home with me. It said something about how important the entire situation was that I hadn’t had to spend time arguing with Mrs Pringle first, but he hadn’t been prepared for that. Vincent Faye’s tame politicians were probably leaning on him.
“His daughter, sir,” I said, carefully. “She is, apparently, cut off from the rest of the family.”
“I haven’t heard anything about that from Faye himself,” Wilkinson said, equally carefully. He’d recovered from his surprise and was pressing onwards gamely. “Glass, is that really wise? If we lose another of his daughters on our watch, I don’t think he’ll be happy.”
“My instincts tell me that having her along might be a good idea,” I said. I don’t have much truck with the more sensitive sides of magic – which some people dispute even exist – but I do believe in following my instincts. Wilkinson, who lacked magic himself – apart from the wards we’d woven around him when he took on the job – didn’t have that advantage. There were times when I pitied him. It was like having the sheep be in charge of watching the wolves. “Besides, we can’t leave her out on the streets, can we?”
It wasn't a fair point, but Wilkinson didn’t seem disposed to argue. “Never mind that,” he said, finally. “There have been developments. Political developments.”
I rolled my eyes. “How many Congressmen and Senators does Vincent have in his pocket this time?”
“It isn’t just him,” Wilkinson said. He paused. “You know that magic, particularly magic-users who aren’t under governmental jurisdiction, is a major pain in Congress’s ass.” I remembered the truth spell someone had cast on Congress and nodded, although he couldn’t see me. “There are suggestions that Congress might pass legislation requiring all magic-users to register and be drafted into government service.”
I frowned. Most magic-users would make terrible soldiers. My own time in the Army wasn't something I remembered with much fondness; it had really been a familiarisation tour alongside some of the Army mages. It hadn’t been a bad experience, but it had been boring, and some of the glances I had had from soldiers had bothered me. They hadn’t liked me or my kind.
“Is it going to pass?” I asked, finally. “I can’t see us managed to round them all up for registering, even if Congress give us a blank check…”
“I hope not,” Wilkinson said, slowly. “I’ve been discussing the matter with the President and the Oversight Committee, but there is a lot of support for stronger measures from the public. They’re sick of being affected by magical creatures driving them off their land, or getting caught up in the middle of magical battles, or…you name it, they’re sick of it. The man in the street would like nothing more than to out all the magic-users under some kind of control.”
“It won’t work,” I said. I didn’t even want to think about the possibilities for disaster. There were thousands of magic-users, of varying strengths, in America, and perhaps millions in the entire world. Most of them had very little affection for the government; hell, most of them hated the government. There were dozens of different reasons – some felt the government picked on them, others were merely nasty bastards – but, so far, they’d never got organised as a unit. If they did, they would prove formidable enemies. “All we’d do is drive it all underground.”
“I know that,” Wilkinson snapped. “I’ve been explaining that to every Congressman and their aide who has passed through my office, but most of them aren’t listening. There’s a whole alliance forming up in Congress, demanding that we do something about the spread of supernatural forces and creatures, and they may manage to force some legislation through. Finding Faye’s brat and saving her could be the thing that tips the balance over to our side.”
I nodded. That explained a lot. Vincent Faye’s success had been in commercialising magic, but even he hadn’t been able to bring magic into everyone’s life. Magical tools – I remembered the Faerie device, something else I hadn’t mentioned to Wilkinson, and smiled – tended to be hard to produce. Most of them had to be made by the magical equivalent of skilled craftsmen, who could command considerable wages, just by having a talent they’d honed and developed. They couldn’t be mass-produced and no one, even Faye, had been able to figure out a way to lower the prices. The craftsmen would demand their pay or they’d take their services elsewhere.
And so the common people on the street rarely saw any of the benefits of magic, such as they were. They rarely saw healing spells or healers, or teleporting and glamour charms, but they always saw the downside. They saw the creatures that lurked in the shadows, the monsters that hunted and preyed on a helpless humanity, immune to all conventional weapons and the ever-present Faerie Mounds. They saw a country slowly coming apart at the seams, whi
le a handful of people with the talents were benefiting and causing havoc. No wonder they were pressing for stronger measures, even if there was no way to make them work; they saw no other alternative.
“I’m still working on finding her,” I said, firmly. “What about my other cases?”
“Drop them all,” Wilkinson said. “If you can send the details to Mrs Pringle, she’ll have them farmed out to the other Guardians and they’ll pick up the slack. The Faye case is your sole priority until you find her or confirm her death. If the Faerie don’t have her, Glass, she must be in our world. Find her!”
“Yes, sir,” I said. Wilkinson meant well, after all. “I think I need your permission for something. I want to approach a Sensitive.”
Wilkinson swore. “That would have political implications as well,” he said, flatly. He knew which one I intended to visit, all right. “Do you think that it’s absolutely necessary?”
“I’m very much afraid so,” I said, as calmly as I could. I should have expected that reaction. There were factions in Congress who would make a mountain out of a molehill when a Guardian visited this particular Sensitive. “If it wasn't the Faerie who took the girl, sir, there aren’t many others who would have wanted to take her and also had the ability to do so. Now that we’ve tried necromancy – and we can’t try to summon the girl’s bodyguard again to answer more questions – we’re running short of other options.”
There was a long pause. “I never heard about it,” Wilkinson said, finally, “but if you have to go, then go.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, relieved. It might have been better, however, if he’d forbidden it and I’d disobeyed his order. There were more implications than I cared to think about. “Before I go catch some sleep, sir, has there been any report from the forensic team that visited the scene of the crime?”
“The Team Leader tells me that you owe her dinner for all the blood they had to clean up,” Wilkinson said. I chuckled to myself. Didi and I had left the room in a terrible state when I’d gone off to confront the Faerie. “They went through that room with a fine-toothed comb and only found one odd point. There were parts of the room that were covered in Pixie Dust.”
I frowned. Modern-day forensic teams were a mixture of science and magic, combining techniques that Sherlock Holmes would have invented with spells and magical tools that came out of fantasy novels. Actually, I believed that most of them had been developed after some theorist had read a fantasy novel and started to develop the ideas in real life. If they had found only Pixie Dust…
“There were no other traces of the attackers?” I asked. “No DNA or any other residues?”
“They couldn’t find any,” Wilkinson said. “I’ll forward the report to your computer, but all they could find was Pixie Dust…they can’t use that to fool a necromancer, can they?”
“Not as far as I know,” I said. It was quite possible that someone had found a new use for Pixie Dust, but all it was normally good for was a magical ingredient in a number of different potions and dust-packs. It was also illegal, given that it came from dried Pixies, tiny humanoid fairies with wings. They were a protected species and hunting them was illegal. They weren't dangerous, although they were definitely supernatural, and they were cute. They showed Congress a handful of photos of the tiny creatures and Congress couldn’t move fast enough to ban hunting them. “I’ll look into that as well.”
“It could have come from Faye himself,” Wilkinson added. “There’s another complication right there.”
“I suppose,” I said. If Faye had had Pixie Dust, we’d never be able to condemn him on that ground alone, not with his connections. There were plenty of corporate interests who would gladly back him – possessing it isn’t proof that he actually produced it – and with his friends in Congress, it wouldn’t even come to trial. There were plenty of illegal drugs labs who might have produced it. I’d have to give some thought to the matter. “How often do you want me to report in?”
“Only if you have solved the case or if you need political support,” Wilkinson said. “I don’t want to be constantly peeking over your shoulder on this one, Glass.”
He meant he wanted to be able to cut me loose, so that the wrath of Congress would fall on me, rather than the Circle itself. I couldn’t blame him for that, much. Part of me wanted to hate him for it.
I cut the phone line and smiled. This would all be a great deal simpler without politics attached. Wilkinson hadn’t said the half of it, but the supernatural had been pressing on America so hard that there was a deep public revulsion building up, a demand for action. Would they demand war against the Faerie? If we tried to attack them, as the Russians had found out, the result would be disastrous, but how long could the country remain intact with the supernatural affecting every walk of life?
My computer pinged and I opened the email inbox, skimming through the forensic report. The team had been very through and had noted – apart from all the blood – traces suggesting that all of the Faye family had been in the room recently, apart from Alassa. It didn’t prove anything. If Cecilia had been the baby of the family, they might have all been in her room, without any criminal motives. The servants hadn’t been into her room so often, I was surprised to read; the only non-family person who’d been in there constantly had been Felincia. And she was definitely dead. The ghost had proved that it had been her body I’d seen.
I leaned back in my chair and tried to think. I was tired, but I didn’t want to go to sleep, not yet. The criminal mind had been exercised by the appearance of magic and had grown adept at working out ways to limit the use of magic by law enforcement agents. It was possible to evade a truth spell, under the right circumstances; it was even possible to kill someone without being seen, or tricking them into believing that they had seen someone else. All magic had limits, after all, even if the limits were sometimes counterintuitive. If someone had managed to slip through the wards, it wouldn’t be hard to convince Felincia that she was seeing Faerie, rather than human beings. A simple illusion spell should suffice.
But how had they broken through the wards?
I sighed, rubbed my eyes, and stood up. I hadn’t sensed any problems anywhere in the house, but I wanted to know how Varsha and Aylia were getting along before I did anything else, such as going to bed. People were probably going to talk about me having two teenage girls in my house at one time, but I was too tired to care. Let them think what they liked. The media probably wouldn’t notice. The lawsuits for using magic to pry into a person’s residence had cost them colossal damages…and, in any case, the house was warded. They couldn’t see in.
“And I know how to cast Merlin’s Whisper,” Aylia was saying, as I walked in. The two girls were sitting at the smaller table, facing each other…and apparently having a one-upmanship competition. It sounded friendly, so I relaxed slightly. “Can you do that?”
“I can do the Dance of Shiva,” Varsha replied, equally challengingly. “It’s dangerous to do it too far from the hills of India, but I can perform it…”
“It’s good to see that the two of you are getting along,” I said, before that discussion could go any further. The Thugs had tried to teach Varsha some of their most dangerous magic tricks. I had hoped that she would never have to use any of them again in her life. The Dance of Shiva summoned an aspect of the Death-Goddess herself and always had to be paid for with a human life, the more willing the better. “There are some issues I have to discuss with you both, so…”
I smiled as they both sat upright. They made an odd contest, but they seemed to fit together in some nebulous pattern. Varsha was dark and surprisingly tall, Aylia was pale, but the same height, with longer brown hair. She might have to cut it down a lot when – if – she went in for Guardian training. The supernatural creatures, given a moment of inattention, were known to try to grab someone by the hair. I knew from personal experience that it was painful.
“Aylia and I are off to New York tomorrow,” I said, before either of them
could ask questions. “Get a good night’s sleep. We don’t want to walk into New York tired and cross.”
“New York?” Aylia said, puzzled. “What’s in New York?”
“Someone I want to meet and have a few words with,” I said. I wasn't playing with her mind. I just didn’t want her to know where we were going, just in case she was a spy. I hadn’t discussed her Guardian potential with Wilkinson for just that reason. He would be so delighted at the thought of a new Guardian that he'd overlook the possible dangers. “I trust that you are still interested in coming with me?”
I had wondered if she would insist on a new outfit, but she just nodded. It seemed that she wore that brown dress most of the time. It made a change, I suspected, from her sister. The forensic report had noted that half of the clothes in Cecilia’s bedroom were Alassa’s and had probably been stored there because her room was too full of other clothes. I found that unbelievable. Someone with Vincent’s connections should be able to get wardrobes with pocket dimensions that rendered them far larger on the inside than the outside, unless he was unwilling to risk using them. It wasn't an uncommon fear.
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