Death Magic wotl-8

by Eileen Wilks

  But Cullen was shaking his head. “I can’t rule that out a hundred percent, but I really doubt Rethna was good enough at illusion to transfer a solid one to a charm.”

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  “Partly because of how his magic looked—which is a damned unsatisfactory answer, I know.” He looked frustrated, as if he didn’t like it much, either. “But in addition to that, Rethna’s specialty was body magic. Ah . . . something you need to know about elves. The nobility, anyway. They all have a bit of glamour, which is a type of illusion magic. Some of them go on to develop that enough to cast full illusions. And they’ve all got a bit of body magic, enough to heal themselves and change their own bodies to some extent. All those pretty hair colors? They aren’t born with baby blue hair.”

  “Like that spell that elf lady gave Cynna to turn her permanently blond. That’s body magic?”

  “That’s right. Some elves go on to develop their body magic enough to affect the bodies of others. But body magic and illusion are two very different types of magic. The more you develop one, the harder it is to work the other. It may be different with the High Sidhe,” Cullen admitted. “Probably is, but we aren’t talking about High Sidhe. We’re talking about Rethna. He was aces at body magic, so it’s unlikely he could do much with illusion. It would be like a Water Gifted trying to work Fire spells. With a lot of work he might learn a few of the simple ones, but he’d never be that good at them. He’d sure as hell never call Fire.” Cullen waved his hand. For a few seconds tiny flames danced there, then puffed out.

  Lily nodded. “Then if Rethna was really good at body magic, could he have changed someone to look like Ruben?”

  “Probably. I very much doubt he could’ve made someone smell like Ruben, though.”

  “The maid didn’t say anything about Bixton’s visitor smelling like Ruben,” she said dryly.

  Rule answered instead of Cullen. “Matt did.”

  She swung to face him, frowning. “I don’t know Matt. Who—no, wait, I remember. You were going to send someone to check out the trail I followed into that park across from Bixton’s house. That was Matt?”

  “He’s Cynyr, one of those who’ve been guarding Ruben. He knows Ruben’s scent and he has an unusually good nose, even when two-footed. I heard from him this morning. He found Ruben’s scent on that bench in the park.”

  “But that’s crazy.”

  “Actually,” Cullen said, “it’s not. Though I just finished putting together ... can’t call it proof, but supportive evidence for my theory. Which I’m warning you is pretty wild, but the trigger on that dagger wasn’t just meant to be used by a null. It was made to be used by a magical construct.”

  She blinked. “And that helps you how?”

  “I think Friar used a doppelgänger of Ruben.”

  A dopplegänger? “Uh . . . isn’t that some kind of ghostly double, a harbinger of death? You see your doppelgänger and you die. Something like that.”

  Cullen rolled his eyes. “I’m talking about real doppelgängers, not fairy tales. Not that real ones are supposed to be real.”

  “Is there a point you can back up to where you start making sense?”

  “Son of a bitch,” Karonski breathed. “Son of a bitch. You’re talking about a double? An actual, physical double?”

  Cullen’s eyebrows lifted. “Basically, yes.”

  Karonski leaned forward. “I need to tell you about one of my open investigations. The one into the attack on Ruben.” He patted a closed folder. “It’s all in here, but I can sum it up. We know how the potion was administered. According to what Sherry’s group found, it was added to a pot of coffee. The problem is, Ruben says Ida brewed that pot. Ida says she didn’t. She washed out the pot like usual, then went back to her desk and didn’t go back in Ruben’s office until he had the heart attack. Whoever made the pot, it was brewed between five and five fifteen. Ruben had the heart attack at five forty. Three people had access to the pot between five and five forty—Ruben, Ida, and the director.”

  Lily jerked back. “Ida? No. That’s not . . .” Ida Rheinhart had been Ruben’s secretary forever. Sure, she was kind of scary, but scary like Lily’s third-grade teacher. Lily, like the rest of her class, had been convinced Mrs. Brown was an alien. She had to be, since she was either telepathic or really did have eyes in the back of her head. Unlike some of the kids, however, Lily hadn’t thought Mrs. Brown was a kid-eating alien. No one had gone missing, after all.

  Ida didn’t eat children, either. Or FBI agents who failed to file a report properly, however much it might seem that way at times. And if you pulled out her fingernails one at a time, she’d give you the Gorgon gaze, but she would not betray Ruben or the Bureau. “But it can’t be the director, either. Can it?”

  “None of the above, if Seabourne here’s right.” Karonski’s eyes gleamed. “We’ve been looking for some kind of compulsion charm, which is several shades of unlikely, especially since Ida claims she doesn’t have any blank places in her memory. But compulsion is all we could make fit—until now.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Cullen was almost purring. “I don’t feel quite so crazy now. I don’t suppose you found any puddles or wet places near Ruben’s office?”

  Karonski frowned. “Nothing like that in the reports. I didn’t arrive on-scene until long after puddles would have dried up.”

  “A wet spot.” Lily frowned. “Water, or something else? The carpet was damp near Bixton’s body.”

  “Hot damn.” Cullen’s eyes glowed almost as brightly as his wiggly lines had—and a lot more blue. “Hot damn, it fits. It all fits.”

  “Explain,” Rule said.

  “Okay.” He brooded a moment, probably translating his jargon into something resembling English. “A doppelgänger is supposed to be a temporary magical construct that exactly duplicates a living person. Or a cat or a canary, for that matter, but most people are not interested in going to that much trouble to get a spare Tweety Bird. Problem is, doppelgängers are like the lead-into-gold bit early alchemists wore themselves out on. Or like cold fusion is for physicists these days. It seems like it ought to work, but no one can get it to. Every century or two there’ll be a flurry of rumors that someone’s cracked the problem, but those stories are like Elvis sightings—the true believers get excited, and everyone else rolls their eyes.

  “So ‘doppelgänger’ crossed my mind when I heard about Ruben’s apparent double, but only in the way ‘alien abduction’ might pop into your head if you hear about mysterious lights in the sky on the same night someone disappeared on a lonely road. It fits the plot, but the plot’s screwy. Then I saw the runes on that dagger, and it didn’t seem quite so ridiculous.”

  Lily drummed her fingers. “Are doppelgängers an elf thing?”

  “Maybe. I should probably tell you about the guy who wrote the grimoire. Eberhardus Czypsser chased doppelgängers back in his day—it’s one reason he was discredited for a century or two and most copies of his book disappeared. But never mind that for now. He claimed to have successfully made a doppelgänger of a bumblebee.”

  Rule’s eyebrows lifted. “A bumblebee?”

  “You start small, especially if a spell takes an ungodly amount of power and you aren’t willing to use death magic.”

  “Death magic.”

  “Yeah, which is another way doppelgänger fits. If you could make one at all, it would take mega-oomphs of power. Magic had thinned out by Czypsser’s time, so he made something small. A bumblebee. Or so he claimed, but he refused to demonstrate or prove his claim in any way, saying he didn’t give a damn if anyone believed him. And sure enough, people mostly didn’t.

  “But there’re two reasons he might not have been just passing gas. Number one is that in his youth he was apprenticed to an honest-to-God adept. His master was said to have spent time in one of the sidhe realms and returned knowing a lot about sidhe spellcasting—including their runes. Czypsser’s grimoire has a list of runes passed to him by his master. It
may or may not have details about his purported creation of a bumblebee doppelgänger, but there will be something about it, even if he didn’t put it all down.”

  “What’s reason number two?” Lily asked.

  “Ah.” Cullen leaned back in his chair, smiling like the proverbial cat with feathers stuck to his mouth. “Reason number two, children, is the type of magic I think it would take to create a doppelgänger. You’d need someone who was naturally Gifted in some form of body magic and had spent a few centuries getting better. An elf lord, in fact. Someone like our dear departed friend, Rethna.”

  “That’s it. It fits. Why didn’t you say something earlier?” she demanded. “We spent hours at Fagin’s place and you didn’t say one word about this.”

  “I didn’t tell you the aliens ate my homework, either. You don’t get how outlandish this would sound to anyone who knows anything.”

  Rule chuckled. “He didn’t say anything because he hadn’t put it all together until just now.”

  “I just figured out the Vodun trigger,” Cullen said, “in spite of constant interruptions.”

  Rule grinned at his friend. “You also just realized—because Lily said it—that Rethna could have made the necessary charm or whatever it is before he was killed.”

  Cullen scowled. “An amulet. It’s probably an amulet.”

  “Whatever you say. You were thinking we had a second elf hanging out with Friar, weren’t you?”

  “Sure, it sounds obvious now, but I had to swallow two impossible ideas to get there. Number one being that dopplegängers are even possible. Number two was that Rethna was not just good enough to make a dopplegänger, but so ungodly good he could make a dopplegänger amulet that others could invoke a month after he died. One that outlasted the limit on charms. You don’t have any idea how crazy that sounds. He’d have to have been a goddamned adept.”

  Lily tilted her head. “Isn’t that exactly what he was? You’ve got that gem he wore. The bullet-stopping one. You called it an artifact. It takes an adept to make an artifact, so—”

  “So we don’t know that Rethna made it himself.” Cullen grimaced and ran a hand over his head, making his hair stand up. “But yeah, okay, maybe he did. Only it gives me retroactive creeps, thinking we went up against an adept. We shouldn’t have won. He was away from his realm, his land, so he didn’t have the power to draw on that he would have back home, but still.” He shook his head. “We shouldn’t have won.”

  “We wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for Dya. So is the dagger an artifact? It lasted more than one moon cycle, but the spell on it isn’t hidden. You said you couldn’t see the spells on artifacts.”

  Cullen grimaced. “That’s another thing that kept me from fingering Rethna at first. All the artifacts I’ve seen have the spellwork hidden, but I was extrapolating from too small a sample. Maybe Rethna didn’t know how to do the hiding trick. Maybe he just didn’t bother, since almost no one here can see magic.”

  “I imagine it’s a lot of work to—hey!” Movement glimpsed out of the corner of her eye had Lily spinning around.

  He stood in the doorway to the dining room grinning at her. He was brown all over—shaggy brown hair, skin midway between caramel and chocolate, brown cargo pants with oversize pockets, brown sweater, brown loafers. And green eyes. Grass green, leaf green eyes with crow’s feet tucked in the corners. Eyes round and large like a cat’s set low in his face, giving him the look of an oddly aged child. He had a little dab of a nose and a wide, merry smile. He was about eighteen inches tall.

  He was freaking adorable. Lily smiled back. She couldn’t help it. “Harry, I presume?”

  Rule’s eyebrows shot up. Karonksi looked baffled. Cullen rolled his eyes. “Oh, great. The runt’s here.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE pinkie-swearing took less than five minutes and was, indeed, a solemn business. Cullen left the room right after that, saying he wanted to call Fagin’s lawyer then talk dirty to Cynna . . . “and you know how that makes Lily blush.”

  Though Harry was the only brownie Lily met, the rest of his troop was nearby—out in the backyard, having fun hiding from the guards. Whatever magic brownies used to hide in plain sight didn’t work on Lily or Cullen, who was shielded against mind-magic. It worked great on everyone else. Very good spies, indeed.

  “Dul-dul works on scent,” Harry said when Lily asked why the lupi couldn’t find him or his troop. He was perched on a small stack of books set on one of the chairs so he could join them at the table. “Not hearing or touch, though. Just sight and scent.”

  “Why scent but not hearing?”

  He rolled his big green eyes. He had long lashes and cute little eyebrows that made perpetually surprised arches. “Because we need it to work on scent, of course. We can learn how to move silently, but we can’t learn how to not smell, can we?”

  That wasn’t exactly an answer. “How did you get in? Everything’s locked.”

  That just made him giggle.

  Before asking him about his ability to hide, Lily had asked several questions about Parrott’s meetings with Chittenden. It turned out that brownies loved watches and clocks and had a keen sense of time on the hours, minutes, and seconds level. They had very little grasp of calendars. Harry knew Chittenden’s last visit to Parrott had taken place the day Sadie’s cousin Hermie let the pigeons out of that coop over by the park with the cannons—and hadn’t that been fun? He didn’t have any idea what day that was. After some nose-wrinkled thought, he decided it might have been ten days ago. Or maybe five. Or fifteen?

  Fortunately, Rule knew what day Harry had reported the meeting to Ruben: a week ago yesterday.

  However lacking they might be with calendars, they were aces at details. The kind of details that interested them, at least. Lily learned a great deal about the flora and fauna in Parrott’s yard and a fair amount about his neighbors. The couple on the west side had three kids, two dogs, and a nanny—who was playing hide the pickle with the husband and oyster diver with the wife.

  It was a rambling report, but there were some good nuggets in it. “I’m wondering if you could follow someone for me.” She glanced at Rule. “That homeless woman you talked to. If we knew where she sleeps, we’d have an idea where to ask questions, see if anyone else has seen anything. I’m thinking we could show pictures of Parrott, Mullins, Drummond, and Chittenden.”

  They arranged for Harry to meet them at the Twelfth Street Kitchen at three. “How do you get around the city?” Lily asked.

  “Cars, mostly. Motorcycles are more fun, but it’s hard to keep from touching the driver.” Harry hopped down—straight down to the floor, which seemed like a long drop for someone only eighteen inches high. But Lily knew Harry could jump a lot farther than that without harm. Like everyone else in the country, she’d watched videos of brownie acrobatics on brownies.com. The Wall Street Journal said the brownies made a tidy amount of money selling ad rights on their site.

  “They perch on the bumpers, I’m told,” Rule said, rising. “Harry, you’ll take my good wishes to the others?”

  “Sure.” Guileless green eyes beamed up at Rule.

  “And this goes along with those wishes.” He knelt and held out a small plastic Baggie filled with Hershey’s Kisses.

  Harry nodded happily as he accepted the Baggie. In the old days, brownies were happy with a saucer of milk. That was before they discovered chocolate.

  Rule went to the back door. “And Harry?”

  “Yes?”

  “Give Lily back her ring.”

  Lily’s gaze jumped to her left hand . . . which was bare. “How the hell—”

  Harry chortled and slapped his thigh. “You’re getting better, big wolf!” He reached into one of his many pockets and took out her ring. “Here you go!”

  Rule accepted it. “This ring is off-limits for the game.”

  “Sure.” Harry nodded, his eyes twinkling. “Whatever you say.”

  Karonski spoke. “Harry, what would you do i
f someone played the game with your grandmother’s ti-tutwelli?”

  Harry giggled. “No one would do that!”

  “Pretend someone did.”

  The brownie wrinkled up his cute little face and thought about it. “I guess I’d pull their guts out through their nose.”

  Karonski nodded as if that’s what he’d expected. “The way you feel about your ancestors’ ti-tutwella? That’s how humans are about their wedding rings. Now, Lily’s ring is an engagement ring, not a wedding ring. An engagement ring is not quite as important as a wedding ring. What would you say, Lily—maybe seventy percent as important? Eighty?”

  Harry squeaked like a mouse. Amber skin paled to an ashy shade. His gaze darted between Lily and Rule. “I didn’t know that. I really, truly didn’t know that. Are we okay?”

  “The ring,” Rule said, “is off-limits.”

  “It is! It is one hundred percent points off-limits!”

  “Then we’re fine. See you at three.” Rule opened the door. The little brownie bounded out as if a werewolf was after him, the Baggie of Hershey’s Kisses slung over his shoulder.

  Lily watched, bemused. “What in the world was that about?”

  Rule shut the door and came to her. “You don’t seem upset.” He handed her the ring.

  “Baffled, more like.” She slid the ring back where it belonged. “But he’s so cute it’s creepy. At least now I know what’s behind all that cute—larceny.” She frowned and took the ring off, then slid it back on. “How in the world did he get it off my finger without me noticing?”

  “That I can’t tell you. Harry would be deeply wounded if you called him a thief, though. Taking your ring was part of the game. Brownies play it constantly. I don’t know all the rules, but I think anything that’s in plain sight is fair game. If they snitch something and leave without you noticing, you have to pay a forfeit to get it back. The forfeits can be quite imaginative.”

  “And if you catch them, they just give it back. They don’t have to pay a forfeit?”