Rising to our feet, we scurried along the edge of the property until we got to the house. Every light both inside and out was off, and from what I could see through the window, the place looked like no one had used it in years. Drop cloths covered every surface, and a thick layer of dust was clearly visible where moonlight illuminated the hardwood floors. There were no signs that anyone had so much as walked through the room, and my sight revealed no indication of any spells in place to protect against entry.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” whispered Chase.
“It’s warded like it must be, but now I’m having second thoughts.”
We moved cautiously to the back door where I tried twisting the handle on the off chance it had been left unlocked. It hadn’t been, so I positioned my fingers in front of the keyhole and twisted, activating my lock pick spell and pushing down on the handle once again.
The door refused to budge. I hadn’t felt the telltale click of the tumblers settling into place, yet I’d been sure I’d cast the spell perfectly. Mage sight revealed no counter-enchantment on the door or lock itself, yet my attempt had fizzled out completely before the spell had shifted the tumblers into the unlocked position.
I tried it again, this time paying attention to the energy leaving my fingers and entering the lock. I watched in awe as the spell unravelled once again. I could see perfectly formed strands of magic twisting into the keyhole, but the energy dissipated the second it made contact with the lock itself. Any attempt to focus magic on the house was immediately reversed and weakened to the point of uselessness. It was like trying to fling handfuls of glitter into an industrial strength fan pointed directly at my face.
“Everything okay?” asked Chase.
“Not really,” I admitted. “Although the good news is that I’m now a hell of a lot more sure this is where Eddie is hiding out.”
“Do you want me to try to get us in?” asked Chase.
“I already tried an unlocking spell, but it’s like the house is repelling any attempts to use magic against it. I’m going to try one more thing, then I guess we smash the glass if we have to.”
I went over to the nearest window and peered inside until I located the catch. Manipulating a simple object was about the easiest spell a mage could cast, and it should have been no problem for me to shift the catch so we could simply slide the window open.
As with the lock, my spell couldn’t penetrate the house. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out how to get past whatever was blocking me. Thinking that maybe the barrier was tied to the physical properties of the house, I attempted to slip a thread of magic between the window and the seal at the edge of the frame. This too proved useless. There was simply no way I was going to get into this house unless I broke in the old fashioned way.
I walked over to a flower bed on one side of the backyard, picked up a baseball sized decorative rock, and went back to the window.
“Woah, woah, woah,” said Chase. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to get us inside.”
Chase pointed to the top of the window frame where a thin wire was barely visible between the panes.
“Alarm sensors,” he explained. “The whole house is wired. Shatter the window, and we might be dealing with the police before we can even find Eddie and the amulet.”
“Fuck,” I growled. “How the hell are we supposed to get in there?”
“Sit tight a second, okay?”
Chase eyed me warily until I tossed the rock back onto the grass.
“What are you going to do?” I asked as I turned back to the house.
But it was too late. Chase had already disappeared around the corner. I figured if no one had spotted us and come to interfere yet, no one was going to, so I took a seat on a carved rock bench near the garden. The stone was cold on my ass, but the tall flowers created enough of a shadow from the bright moonlight to keep me somewhat hidden. As sure as I was that Eddie hadn’t bothered with hired goons to watch his back, it didn’t seem worth going out of my way to look conspicuous, so I sat and waited as patiently as I could while Chase did whatever he’d gone off to do.
“Give me ninety more seconds,” he said when he came back around the corner.
Chase removed a small leather case from his pocket. He unzipped it and revealed a set of well worn tools I recognized as lock picks. I watched as he selected two of them before going to work on the door.
“What about the alarm?” I asked.
“I rigged a looping bypass on the outside line, and then I shorted the system on the house. The alarm company computer won’t think anything is wrong, but the entire system is completely offline.”
The door clicked open a second after he’d finished speaking.
“How the hell do you know how to do this?” I asked in a loud whisper.
He tucked his picks back into their case before zipping it back up.
“You’re not the only one with secrets,” he said.
“Dude, you just bypassed a high tech alarm system and picked the lock like it was nothing. Remember the time I told you that magic was real and that I’m a mage? I think you can share this one thing with me.”
“Really?” he whispered angrily. “You want to do this now?”
“I need to know who has my back in there, Chase. What’s this all about?”
“Fine,” he said. “Inside first.”
We crept inside and Chase closed the door gently behind us. The back entrance had let us into a large kitchen. Chase held a finger over his lips and motioned for me to follow him past a counter block and into a walk-in pantry on the other side of the room.
“This should be soundproof enough, but keep your voice down, okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “So what’s with the spy shit?”
After learning that Jessica had secretly been a Chronicler the entire time I’d known her, you could say I’d become a little sensitive to the idea that my supposed friends weren’t quite what they seemed.
“It’s not spy shit,” he said with a sigh. “I sometimes do freelance acquisitions work.”
“Acquisitions?” It took a few seconds for the meaning to sink in. “You mean burglary?”
“It’s usually a little more upscale than busting a window and snatching grandma’s jewelry, but yeah, I’m a thief.”
I shook my head and tried to rationalize this new information against the chubby video-gaming nerd I’d always known him as. The very idea of Chase dressed all in black tiptoeing over a series of laser beams was so absurd it was comical. Then again, what I knew about breaking and entering came entirely from Hollywood capers, so maybe assuming he wore a skin-tight catsuit on his jobs wasn’t entirely fair.
“Your parents have more money than most of the people in this city combined,” I hissed. “What the fuck are you doing working as a thief?”
“We had a bit of a falling out when I didn’t finish college,” he said. “I had some cash stashed in personal investments, but it wasn’t going to last forever. I knew this guy who needed an electronics guy, and I sort of stumbled into my first job. It turns out I’m kind of a natural.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“Oh, you can cast spells and hang out with murderous double-crossing vampires, but it’s weird that I steal stuff from rich people and corporations?”
“Corporations?”
“Corporate espionage pays super well,” he said with a grin. “And I can do most of it with a phone and a handful of remote virtual systems that protect me from being traced.”
Individual memories clicked together, and in retrospection I saw hints of Chase’s alter ego for what they were. Odd absences from regular gaming sessions he’d brushed off without explanation. Puffy dark circles under his eyes from late nights I’d been too quick to write off as partying. I’d been so wrapped up in the danger around us that I hadn’t fully registered how out of character it had been for him to recognize the model name of the security system outside D.O.I
., or how easily he’d hot-wired the SUV after we’d escaped Eskola’s mansion.
The reality of his other life had been barely hidden beneath his jovial and seemingly irresponsible personality. I had no idea how I’d never noticed that side of him before, but after everything we’d been through together in the last couple of days, learning he was a practiced thief wasn’t nearly as absurd as I’d first thought.
“Any other dirty little secrets I should know about before we do this?” I asked.
Some people are good at looking you dead in the eye and feeding you a flat out lie without so much as a twitch of their eyebrow. Chase was not one of those people. As good as he might be at breaking into buildings, I could see there was something more he was keeping from me.
“Spit it out,” I said. “Unless you’d rather I spell the truth out of you.”
I didn’t actually know how to follow up on the threat, but Chase didn’t need to know that.
Chase shifted a little, then reached behind his back. I saw him lift the hem of his shirt, and I stepped backwards so quickly I bumped in to a shelf full of cans and jars. They clattered forward, making a terrible noise that I had to quickly snuff out with a dampening spell. Using far too much of my precious stores of magical energy, I cradled each individual item, softening its wobble or fall until they were all back in place.
“Why the fuck do you have a gun?” I said as loud as I could mange without breaking a whisper.
“Skreek brought it to me,” he explained. “Don’t worry, it’s not like that. It’s my gun. He just grabbed it from my house while you were at the library last night.”
I put my hands over my face and pressed my fingertips against my eyeballs while inhaling sharply. I held it in my lungs, then blew out a long soothing breath. It was something I did when I was incredibly frustrated or angry. The technique usually worked pretty well, but in that moment it didn’t do a damn bit of good.
I dropped my hands to my sides. “What the actual fuck?”
“You have questions,” he said calmly as he slipped the gun back into his waistband. “You know, I’m starting to see why you got so annoyed when I kept asking you about the Conclave and stuff.”
“I’m sorry, but you didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who carries a handgun in his pants.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I don’t normally carry it with me, but after having my arm used as a vampire pixie stick, I thought I needed some extra protection. Maybe you haven’t realized this, but you’re not exactly the safest chick to hang out with.”
“You know bullets aren’t going to stop a vampire, right?”
Chase pulled a magazine from his pocket and showed me the top bullet in the cartridge.
“Wooden bullets?” I asked. “Where did you even get these?”
“Skreek,” he said as casually as if he’d run down and picked them up at 7-Eleven. “The other clip is loaded with nine millimeter hollow point. I don’t know where he got them, but that kobold is wicked resourceful.”
“I can’t believe Viktor let this happen,” I muttered. “And I can’t believe neither of you told me about it.”
“You’ve got your magic, and I’ve got my gat,” he said.
“Please don’t call it that.”
“What, a gat?”
“Yes. It sounds ridiculous.”
“Well whatever you want me to call it, don’t expect me to tag along without being able to defend myself.”
“Fine. But don’t expect me to heal you if you shoot yourself in the foot.” I groaned as he tucked it back into his waistband. “Or your ass.”
I turned and opened the pantry door, ignoring Chase’s retort about how much time he’d spent at the shooting range. Instead of wasting energy getting mad at him, I cast the most low-profile cloaking spell I could muster in case there were human guards in the house. Once I was sure we wouldn’t be heard from three rooms away, I pushed deeper into the house, looking for some sign of Eddie or the Amulet of Duan Marbhaidh.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The main floor of the house was exactly as empty as it had looked from the outside. We went from one room to the next, peering around corners and moving through the mansion in our best impressions of ninja assassins trying to avoid discovery. After nearly an hour of searching, we hadn’t found even the slightest trace of Eddie or the stolen items. It was as though no one had been inside the house for years. There wasn’t even a hint of trace magic to indicate that someone had covered their tracks after coming through. Had the place not been so heavily warded with magic that practically shouted Eddie’s name, I’d have guessed we were lost on a wild goose chase.
“Should we check upstairs?” asked Chase.
“No, he wouldn’t be up there,” I said. “Gaelic war magic tended to be big and showy in order to scare the shit out of the enemy. If Eddie is here working to unlock the power of the amulet, he’s probably underground somewhere. If he was on a higher floor, we’d have seen evidence of it through the windows.”
“It’s weird that we didn’t find an entrance to the basement, isn’t it? This place has to have a cellar or something. Where’s the door?”
“I noticed that too.”
I’d had my mage sight active since we’d crept out of the pantry, and I hadn’t seen any sign of a concealed entrance. In fact, the weirdest thing about all of this was how magically void the interior of the house was. The obvious wards outside were too powerful to have been left behind as a ruse. It didn’t make sense that there were no active spells or enchantments inside the house. Unless…
“Back at my apartment,” I began, “Eddie bypassed my protective wards like they were nothing when he set that trap for me. I’ve also scanned him dozens of times, and I’ve never detected so much as a glimmer of an active spell on him.”
“So you think he’s not using magic?”
“Kind of the opposite,” I said. “I think he’s using magic so advanced I can’t even detect it.”
I hadn’t even known such a thing as possible, but I couldn’t see any other explanation for it. There was obviously something out of the ordinary happening in this house. I could feel it in my skin the way a name or word can seem so clear yet just out of reach when you want it. The house should have crackled with energy if I stopped to feel out for it, yet according to my mage sight, the place was a magical vacuum. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt such a complete absence of magic. Every living thing contains at least some small trace of a magic spark that contributes to the subtlest of magical vibrations, and if I really quieted my mind and used only my second sight to reach out around me, it was as though not even Chase was in the room.
“It’s too empty,” I said to myself. “I should be able to feel something, at least a bit of magical bleed from the wards, but I can’t feel anything at all.”
Viktor’s explanation of the black hole came back to me. The complete lack of magic was a sign in and of itself.
Chase frowned. “I don’t have the first fucking clue what you’re talking about.”
“Where would you expect to find a basement entrance in this house?” I asked him. “Think about the floor plan and every room we’ve been in. Which one should have a door in it?”
Chase walked through a spacious dining room, down a hallway, and into the kitchen where we’d first entered. He scanned the walls for a minute, then went up to one blank section he inspected with the tips of his fingers.
“I feel like it should be here,” he said. “Look how empty this spot is. We’ve been all the way through the house, and I can account for the space between most of the walls, but what’s on the other side of this?”
He walked to the edge of the wall and followed it around the corner. A short hallway led to a staircase that only went up.
“The wall between here and the next room is way too thick,” I said, feeling the wall for myself. “The only question is, how do we get in if we can’t use magic and we can’t find a physical door?”<
br />
Chase went to the kitchen counter and removed a paring knife from a drawer. He returned to the wall and tried to scrape the edge of the blade down the surface, but he couldn’t even manage a scratch in the paint. He then switched his grip so the blade pointed down from his closed fist, slamming the knife into the wall with quite a bit more force.
“Ow, fuck!” cried Chase.
He dropped the knife and clutched his bleeding hand. I went to the counter to grab a dish towel. I couldn’t heal others the same way I naturally healed myself, but I could channel a tiny fraction of that healing energy into his wound. It wouldn’t be enough to fully close the wound, and he’d probably need a few stitches when all was said and done, but my spell and the makeshift bandage would at least keep the bleeding to a minimum.
I bent to pick up the knife, and I saw that the tip of it had been chipped clean away from the force of the impact. On a hunch, I crossed the room and stabbed the wall there, sinking the knife deep into the soft drywall.
“What if you use a spell?” said Chase.
I cringed at how loud he was talking, but after his accident with the knife, keeping a low profile didn’t seem to matter much any more. It gave me a good excuse to kill the cloaking spell that had been sapping my energy since we’d entered the house.
“My magic doesn’t work on the house. I’ve already tried several spells, but they fall apart before they can do anything.”
“Let’s think about this for a second.” Chase went to the freezer. He removed an ancient bag of frozen peas, shook off the crust of freezer ice, and placed it over his injured palm. “You can cast spells on us, right?”
“Yeah. I used one to partially heal your hand just now.”
“So it’s not your magic that doesn’t work, but rather that the house itself is blocking any attempts to break its security?”
Black Magic (Black Records Book 1) Page 26