by Rachel Aaron
My voice trailed off. When the rubber-tipped tongs had closed around the box, the ward on its surface had vanished. There was no crack, no snap of power. It just stopped glowing, as if it had turned itself off.
Scowling, I set the tongs on the floor and grabbed the box with my gloved hands, bracing for the bite, but nothing happened. It was just a box. An actual shoebox this time for a pair of faux-leather loafers in men’s size ten. Hopes sinking, I pulled off the lid, and then I groaned aloud.
“Oh, come on.”
It was full of papers. Yellow legal-pad papers this time, all folded in half and covered in the same janky, chicken-scratch handwriting I was starting to loathe.
“This guy really needs a better filing system,” Sibyl said as I dumped the papers out into my lap. “So what is it? More spellwork?”
It wasn’t, actually. When I spread the papers out flat in the light from my headlamp, I saw that the writing was plain old-fashioned English. There was still a good bit of spellwork notation in the margins, but most of the pages were just long columns of short sentences that said things like “Confirm stabilization at 9.4” and “Double-check for containments RE transmorph vivication.”
“Great,” my AI said. “You found his to-do list.”
“That’s still something,” I said stubbornly, thumbing through the pages. “He wouldn’t have hidden it if it wasn’t important.”
There had to be something here. I read each page all the way through, but they were all just more of the same lists and notes that meant nothing without context. The only really remarkable thing I found was an old staff ID from MIT Thaumaturgical with a picture of a stately-looking gentleman in his fifties that vaguely matched the decaying corpse I’d found this morning. There was also a name.
“Dr. Theodore Lyle,” I read. “Huh. Looks like our guy was a professor.”
“That’s not surprising,” Sibyl said. “This is Magic Heights. And he’s a former professor. According to the MIT’s online staff directory, Dr. Theodore Lyle retired two years ago.”
I sat back on my heels to think that through. This was a pretty nice house by Underground standards. Too nice to afford on a university pension. Add in the rent on his basement bolt-hole and two hundred grand he’d spent on reagents, and it was obvious someone was providing Dr. Lyle with supplemental funding. Probably someone not very nice given the state of his house and how he’d died, but that actually worked out in my favor. I would have felt bad taking the life’s work of a poor dead mage from his next of kin, but I was totally fine with ripping off house-smashing sleazebags. It wouldn’t even be stealing. By the law of the DFZ, everything in here belonged to me now, including any clues to potential giant payoffs. I just had to figure out where it was, because I didn’t see anything like the big circle from Dr. Lyle’s ritual notes glowing through my finding spell. It had to be somewhere, though.
Frowning, I turned back to the pile of paper in my lap, paging through the lists for an address or coordinates, anything that might tell me where he’d actually done all the magical minutiae he’d written these lists to remind himself to do. But while I didn’t find anything actually useful, I did notice on my second time through that the pages were dated at the top. The latest was just over a month ago, probably only a few days before he’d died. It was also the messiest, the lined paper crinkled and torn at the top as though it had been ripped out in a hurry. I was scanning the list to see why this one was special when I saw something at the bottom that made me freeze.
- Burn material links
- Stock food (sixty days)
- Move final reagents to ritual location
- parse coords to VCI
They were all crossed out, but that only made me more excited, because this proved I was right. There was a separate ritual location! All the materials had already been moved there, too, which meant that somewhere—presumably wherever VCI was—there was a ritual worth two hundred grand just waiting to be scooped up.
“Sybil,” I said, shoving the new notes into my bag next to the old ones. “What does VCI mean?”
“A lot of stuff,” my AI said, bringing up a depressingly long list of acronyms. “Venture Capital Investments, Vital Communications Infrastructure, Veterinary Council of Indiana. Take your pick.”
With a huff of frustration, I started reading, flicking my finger to scroll the list as I searched for the combination V, C, and I words that would make sense in this context. I was still looking when I got that watched feeling again.
It was a lot stronger this time. I’d been focusing on my AR display, so again, I couldn’t say what had caused it, but my whole body was on alert. I was about to ask Sibyl to play back the last thirty seconds of ambient audio when something slammed into my head.
The first thing I felt was pressure. The impact was hard enough to send me flying back into the pantry, but banging my elbows on the shelves when I caught myself hurt a lot more than my head did. I was scrambling to figure out how that could be when I saw the flattened bullet hit the floor beside my feet with a musical ping.
The world slowed to a crawl. Gasping for breath, I grabbed my warded poncho, which was no longer glowing with the magic I’d put into it. That had all been burned up when my ward against bullets had done its job and stopped the slug on the floor from entering my brain. The pressure I’d felt had been the counterforce of the spell blocking the shot and sending me flying as a result. But while I was definitely going to leave a glowing review for my store-bought wards the next time I was online, I now had a huge problem, because that ward had a one-time use, and I still didn’t know who was shooting at me.
“Duck!”
I hit the ground before Sibyl finished her warning, getting out of the way just in time as the second shot landed in the drywall behind me. My new position had me prone and cornered in the pantry, but at least I could see the shooter.
It was a man. More than that was hard to say since he was wearing baggy black clothes and AR goggles very similar to my own. He must have been in good shape, though, because he was perched in the crown of the dogwood tree just outside the open kitchen window, the one that had given me the creeps before. He was already moving his pistol to adjust for my new position, and I cursed myself for an idiot. I should have listened to my instincts earlier. I should have listened to Sibyl and never bid in the first place. Now I was going to die on the floor of Dr. Lyle’s filthy townhouse, and I wasn’t even getting paid for it.
But then, just as I was pulling magic into my hands for a desperate attack I knew perfectly well I’d never get off in time, something incredible happened. A man wearing a black leather bomber jacket and the same knee-high, everything-proof Cleaner boots that I used walked calmly into my tunneled vision and reached through the window with both arms to shove the shooter out of the tree.
It happened so fast, I wasn’t sure it had actually happened at all until the strange man turned around and grabbed my arm, lifting me off the floor as if I weighed nothing.
“You okay?” he asked in Nik Kos’s voice.
I couldn’t answer. The fight or flight was pounding in me so hard my whole body was vibrating. If he hadn’t had my arm locked in a grip of iron, I would have already been sprinting for the exit. But he did, which turned out to be a very good thing when another man dressed in the same dark clothes and goggles as the shooter, who was now cursing up a storm at the base of the dogwood tree, walked through the kitchen door.
I heard the shot before I saw the gun. The crack went off like a firework in my ear, but the bullet didn’t touch me, because at the last second, the man holding my arm leaned in to block the shot with his shoulder.
It was at this point that my poor, reeling brain seized onto two very important facts. One, it was Nikola Kos who’d come to my rescue, and two, the black bomber jacket he always wore no matter the weather was armored. I saw the ballistics inside it ripple right in front of my nose when the bullet bounced off Nik’s shoulder. He didn’t even stagger, just took the
shot like a wall. I was still staring in wonder when I saw the man who’d fired at us cock his gun to shoot again.
As he re-aimed the barrel at my face, the fight-or-flight instinct that had been warring inside me suddenly and definitively pinned itself on fight. “You asshole!” I screamed, lobbing the magic I’d pulled into my hand earlier over Nik’s shoulder at the shooter. I didn’t even bother to shape it into anything. I just threw the raw power as hard as I could, creating a shockwave that exploded against the man’s chest, flinging him backward into the living room. “Do you know how much I paid for this place?”
I might not have been the best at spellwork, but when it came to fast reactions, no one had me beat. I had the next handful of magic ready before my assailant hit the ground, and I was about to shove it in his face when Nik let go of my arm and pulled a gun of his own.
He moved so fast, I didn’t even see where the weapon came from. The sleek black pistol just appeared in his hand and fired, sinking a bullet deep into the right calf of the man I’d just knocked to the floor. The scream wasn’t even out of his mouth before Nik was on top of him, kicking the dropped gun away and planting his steel-toed Cleaning boot on the man’s chest.
The guy started thrashing when Nik’s weight landed, his wounded leg getting blood all over the floor I’d just swept up. I was worried he was going to kick his way to freedom by pure panicked accident when Nik calmly reached down and ripped the AR goggles off the terrified man’s face before pointing his gun at the spot where they’d been. He was tightening his finger on the trigger when I finally realized what was happening.
“Hey, whoa!” I said, running forward to grab Nik’s elbow before he executed a man in front of me. “Don’t kill him!”
Nik’s gray eyes flicked back toward me. “I wasn’t going to,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. But why do you care? He was going to kill you.”
That was a good point. But while I’d been totally okay with crushing him to death myself not ten seconds ago, that had been in self-defense. This was just murder, and despite what some people assumed about me, I was not okay with that.
“Well, he’s not killing me now,” I said, glancing out the kitchen window where I could see the first guy, the one Nik had pushed out of the tree, sprinting down the street as fast as his legs could carry him. “Crisis has been averted, so let’s take it down a notch.”
“Yeah, man,” the guy on the floor said in a panicked voice. “Listen to the lady and take it down a—”
He cut off when Nik’s eyes flicked back to him, his arms shooting up over his head in surrender. “Good,” Nik said, though he didn’t lower his gun. “Now, who hired you to watch this building?”
“We weren’t watching nothing,” the man said in a panicked rush. “We were just scoping the neighborhood when we saw the Cleaner go in, and we thought—”
He cut off with a curse when Nik fired a shot into the floor beside his head. I jumped, too, flinging up my hands to protect my face from the wood the shot sent flying. “Who hired you?” Nik asked again in the same calm voice he’d used when he’d asked me about being sold a coffin.
“No one!” the man cried. “Who’d hire guys to watch a house that’s already been robbed?”
That struck me as a sensible question, but Nik didn’t even blink. “If you knew it had already been robbed, why would you set a trap for the Cleaner?” he asked, pointing his pistol dead between the man’s eyes. “You knew she wouldn’t have anything. But your partner was already in that tree when she arrived, so clearly something else was going on. Why don’t you stop lying and tell me what it was?”
“Wait,” I said, frowning at Nik. “How do you know he was in the tree when I got here?”
“I don’t know, man!” the guy on the floor said at the same time. “It was just a job! We got it off the freelancer board. We were supposed to watch this place, and if anyone came looking for stuff, we were supposed to take whatever they found and bring it to a drop box downtown.”
Nik tilted his head. “Just take? Not shoot?”
“That was Andy’s idea,” the man insisted, flicking his eyes frantically toward the kitchen window where the first guy had been waiting. “He was the one who said we should shoot first ’cause it was a mage. You have to get the drop on mages before they see you or they’ll fry you like a catfish.” He glanced at me. “No offense, miss. We didn’t mean nothing by it. It was just a job.”
He gave me a little shrug as if that excused everything, but I take getting shot very personally. I was about to tell Sibyl to call the cops when Nik lifted his boot off the guy’s chest.
“Get out.”
The man on the floor blinked. “Wait, for real?”
“Are you serious?” I said at the same time. “He tried to murder us!”
“He tried,” Nik agreed, hitching the bottom hem of his jacket up to slide his pistol into the chest holster hidden beneath it. “But he failed.”
“So what?” I cried. “Even in the DFZ, attempted murder is still illegal. We should call the police!”
Nik arched a dark eyebrow at me. “The average DFZ PD response time for a non-life-threatening event in the Underground is two hours. Do you really want to stand around watching him for that long?”
Not particularly. Still. “You can’t just let him go!”
“Why not?” Nik asked, tilting his head as though he truly did not understand the question. “You heard what he said. It was just a job. It’s not like he’s a stalker who’s going to hunt you down, right?” He glanced at the man, who frantically shook his head no. “There you go,” Nik said, turning back to me.
“But we don’t know who he’s working for yet,” I pointed out.
“Neither does he,” Nik said.
“And you believe him?”
Nik gave me that infuriating shrug of his, and I reached up to rub my throbbing temples. “Look,” I said at last. “Even if he doesn’t know whom he’s working for, he’s still a dangerous criminal. You can’t just let him run free. What if he tries to murder someone else?”
“That’s their problem,” Nik said. “There’s always someone willing to shoot someone else for money. If he doesn’t take the job, someone else will. But if you get him booked for attempted murder, we’ll be dragged into court every few weeks for the next year. That’s a punishment for us, not him, and I’d rather not pay my time for his crime.”
That made a strange sort of sense, but…
“Look,” Nik said, his voice growing soft, as if he were trying to cajole me. “If you want to see him punished, just think about how much it’ll cost him to get his leg fixed. I can call an ambulance right now if you want.”
“Please don’t,” the man begged, his dirty face going ashen. “I can’t afford that shit. Just let me out of here and you’ll never see me again. I swear.”
He started crawling toward the door before he’d even finished, dragging his shot leg behind him. It must have hurt like hell, because he groaned pathetically every time he moved, leaving a trail of bright-red blood on the floor behind him. Too much blood. He was going to bleed out before he got down the stairs at this rate. From the look on his face, Nik was fine with that. I, however, was not, and after thirty seconds of this macabre fiasco, I broke.
“Stop,” I said. “Just stop.”
The man looked back at me in confusion. The feeling was mutual, because I couldn’t believe I was doing this either, but that didn’t stop me from digging into my bag for my emergency first aid kit.
“Hold still,” I muttered, grabbing a skin-mimicking bandage from my stash and shoving his loose pants up to place it over the hole in my would-be-murderer’s calf. When I had the bandage where I wanted it, I shoved a bit of magic into the machine-printed spellwork woven into the adhesive. When the light faded, the bandage was bound to his leg as if it had grown there, and the man’s face lit up with a euphoric smile as the magic-activated painkillers flooded into his bloodstream.
“Wow, baby,” he slurred,
head listing to the side as he grinned at me. “You got the good stuff.”
“Shut up,” I growled, furious with myself for wasting an expensive healing strip on the idiot who’d shot at me because I was too soft to sit through a little moaning. “That strip will hold for six hours. Get out of here, and if I ever see you again, I’m recouping my costs out of your face.”
The man nodded frantically and pushed himself up, grabbing his bloody goggles off the floor as he went. “Thank you very much, ma’am,” he said as he hobbled toward the door. “You’ll never see me again, I promise.”
I didn’t even want to hear it. I just shoved my first aid kit back inside my bag. I also checked the notes, breathing a sigh of relief when I saw that both sets had made it through this fiasco undamaged. Forget being shot; I would have died of sheer frustration if the only thing I had to show for this mess had gotten destroyed. I was moving the papers to the slightly safer interior zipper pocket of my shoulder bag when Nik said, “What’s that?”
I jumped. His voice was so close he was practically speaking into my ear. By the time I whirled around, he was even closer, hooking a finger over the edge of my bag to peer inside. “Did you find something?”
“What’s it to you?” I snapped, yanking my bag away.
I felt bad about the words the moment they were out of my mouth. If Nik hadn’t shown up when he did, I’d be dead right now. Even if he was invading my personal space, yelling at the man who’d saved my life was a pretty sorry way to behave. That said, now that I was no longer in imminent danger, it was finally starting to break through to me just how little sense this situation made.
“Wait,” I said, stepping back. “What are you doing here?”
Nik gave me an innocent look. “I was following you.”
A chill shot up my spine. “Why?”
“Because you bid two thousand dollars on a unit that wasn’t worth twenty,” he explained. “You clearly saw something here that the rest of us didn’t. I wanted to know what it was.”