Ashes and Arsenic

by SM Reine

  “The floor is clear,” Alfredo reported, returning to our sides.

  He was wrong. The floor definitely wasn’t clear—not with the way my eyes and nose were streaming. But it wasn’t like he could have missed spotting a major ritual like those I’d seen in the warehouse and mausoleum.

  “There’s still an active spell here,” I said.

  The Union soldiers ignored me, lowering their guns, engaging their safeties. They were convinced the danger had passed.

  My magical head cold disagreed.

  I checked an office directory on the wall. The name at the top was Gareth Milbourne’s. He was at the end of the hall.

  Office on the top floor. Very fancy.

  “I’m going to look,” I said, hands tight on the Desert Eagle. I’d been abducted way too many times that day to feel comfortable with it holstered.

  “Knock yourself out,” Alfredo said.

  They stayed behind as I proceeded forward.

  The offices on the fortieth floor of the First Bank had glass walls, so it was easy to see what everyone had in their offices as I passed—knickknacks from Africa in one, sports memorabilia in another. I didn’t like working in a cubicle, but at least I had a half-wall of privacy. I’d have hated working in one of those rooms.

  It was easy to see why the Union had declared the floor clear so quickly, though. Aside from two unoccupied bathrooms and a break room, every damn wall in the office was glass. We should have been able to see trouble from fifty feet away.

  Gareth Milbourne’s office was largest of all. Great view of downtown Los Angeles. The city glimmered in the night, tinted yellow by smog.

  The sensation of magic vanished as soon as I touched his doorknob. It was easier to breathe within seconds.

  It was like that magic had been waiting for me.

  The executive desk took up half of that massive office, all heavy oak with leather accents. It was arranged in an L-shape so that Manager Milbourne would be able to work while looking at either the view outside or the office inside.

  It was also big enough to hide a small ritual underneath it.

  I rounded the desk.

  There was a body on the carpet, concealed under the shelter of solid oak. I wasn’t sure if I felt smug that I’d thought to look for it, or sickened that it was there at all.

  That body wore a tailored suit. A pentacle necklace had slipped out of his shirt.

  Gareth Milbourne.

  I kneeled beside him, checked for a pulse. I almost jumped in surprise when I felt a responding heartbeat. “He’s alive!” I yelled, looking over the desk at the hallway. “Hey! I found the manager and he’s alive!”

  Only Suzy was near enough to hear me. She grabbed the Union healer and dragged her into the room.

  “What happened?” Suzy asked, scanning the room. “Where’d the magic go?”

  I wished I had an answer for her.

  The healer set her bag of tricks beside Gareth and brushed her fingers over his temples. Her eyes went distant with thought. “He’s fine. There’s no major damage to his head.”

  At her touch, Gareth’s eyelids fluttered. He groaned. “What happened to me?”

  “I’d love to know that myself,” I said, helping him sit up. He was too weak to remain upright on his own. He clutched at his left shoulder as though it hurt.

  The healer dug around in her bag, extracting a few vials from inside. I could tell just by looking at them that they were filled with wholesome ingredients like burdock root, camellia, and frankincense, probably moonlight-infused to boost their healing properties.

  She dabbed one of the salves at the cut on Gareth’s forehead.

  “Tell me what you remember,” I said.

  He flinched at the touch of the healer’s fingers. “I was doing work at my desk. I’ve had a lot of reports to write since the robbery.”

  “Working without power?”

  “Laptop,” he said. “I need to do my work here so I can refer to our paper files. Anyway, I was working at my desk and I heard a door closing elsewhere on the floor. I got up to alert the security guards that were supposed to be watching the lobby, but then…” Gareth frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “You called me,” I said. “You mentioned witches.”

  His eyes lit up. “Yes. People jumped me in the hallway.”

  “How’d you know they were witches? Were they wearing bells?”

  “Bells,” Gareth said. “Yes, they wore necklaces and bracelets with little gold bells, about this big.” He spanned his forefinger and thumb to indicate something the size of a marble.

  So it had definitely been Lenox’s people. Them and their goddamn bells.

  I shouldn’t have let Aisha escape.

  I’d have to get more information from Gareth once he was clearer-headed. I left him to the healer, heading over to Suzy by the door. “The spell vanished when you went into the office,” she said. “And there’s no residue left to find.”

  “That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?” I asked.

  “There’s none of the hallmarks of the other spells here at all. No sign of rowan ash, no fires, no sacrifice…”

  “It doesn’t matter if we find ash here,” I said. “We already know that this is related to the robbery. It’s at the same goddamn bank.”

  “It’s at the same bank, but we have no reason to think this has to do with the developing pentagram,” Suzy said. “Don’t get lazy investigating. Don’t make assumptions.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for her bullshit. “I don’t need a lecture, Takeuchi. I’ve been an investigator longer than you.”

  “Then act like it.” There was no venom in her tone. She reached up to straighten my lapels. “Domingo’s going to be okay, Cèsar. You have to keep your head in the game.”

  Her sympathy stung worse than an insult would have.

  She was right. I was angry, confused, jumping to conclusions. The answers were right in front of me if I’d take the time to think.

  “Okay. There’s no ritual, so Gareth Milbourne wasn’t being prepared for sacrifice,” I said. “Then why attack the bank again? What kind of weird fucking spell are we dealing with?”

  She looked like she was thinking so hard that smoke should have come out of her ears. “What if they left something here when they performed that first ritual? Witches return to clean up the scenes of their rituals all the time.”

  “They’d already cleaned up the robbery.”

  “Maybe they were after Mr. Milbourne for something other than a sacrifice,” Suzy said. “He could have information they need, or…”

  “What if they didn’t want anything from here after all?” I asked slowly. “What did the witches accomplish by attacking the First Bank of the Sierras a second time?”

  “They got us to race to a crime scene,” Suzy said.

  Me, Suzy, and the Union unit staffing the OPA campus after hours.

  “This was a diversion,” I said.

  And I’d played right into their plans.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SOMETIMES, BEING RIGHT SUCKS huevos.

  Suzy and I arrived at the OPA offices to find that a circle of power had been burned into the lawn. The grass was bald in some places, smoldering in others. The pentagram was broad enough that it could have fit a school bus inside.

  We’d called dispatch on our way back, so our security department had triggered a thousand alarms. Several MVD agents had beaten us to the scene and were in a ring around the lawn, casting a second circle to contain the first. Two of them were still in their pajamas. The Union units protecting them weren’t in their pajamas—I was pretty sure the Union never slept.

  “What’s happening here? How did a circle this large get cast too quickly for us to stop them?” I asked Agent Bryce. She was supervising the containment circle while wearing pajama pants with a kitty paw-print pattern.

  “We don’t know much yet.” She smothered a yawn with her hand. “We haven’t had time to break down the spell. We�
�ll have to figure it out once we’re sure everyone’s safe.”

  “Bet you that thing made the circle,” Suzy said, pointing. There was a small statue at the center of the smoldering grass. I couldn’t make out any detail at that distance—only that it was the size of my fist. It looked like another one of the Half Moon Bay Coven’s rare artifacts. “There are statues that can automatically cast circles. I’ve used them before.”

  Magic was still buzzing around the statue. It made my nose itch. “I don’t think so—that thing feels like it’s still casting magic,” I said.

  As if on cue, the agents casting the containment circle started shouting.

  Fire flared from the artifact, arcing in pillars as thick as my arm. The witches nearer the circle turned to run—even though the containment circle wasn’t finished.

  The pillars splashed over the grass, setting what little remained on fire.

  Another surge of magic.

  The statue gushed more flames, sputtering and hissing.

  “It’s going to explode!” I grabbed Suzy, tried to drag her to safety.

  She elbowed me away. “We have to close the outer circle!”

  Suzy leaped in, drew her hand across the gap in the containment circle, and shouted.

  What came out of her mouth was a word that wasn’t a word, a sound that didn’t reach my ears but made the whole OPA campus shake like there was an earthquake.

  A word of power.

  My eardrums popped at the force of it. Suzy’s magic punched me in the chest, closed my throat, and blurred my vision.

  The circle slammed shut.

  All that fire erupting from the statue smashed against the interior of the circle in a wave of molten fire. But nothing passed the line our agents had drawn.

  Suzy collapsed to her knees as the fire continued boiling inside the circle. She glared at the flames in furious triumph. “Nice trap, assholes,” she growled.

  Now that the statue’s flames were contained, the other agents moved back in even though it was too late for them to do any good. Nobody could disarm the artifact without breaking the containment circle, so we were just going to have to let the thing burn itself out.

  Hopefully we weren’t going to have a permanent fire fountain on our lawn. That’d be hard to hide from mundane eyes.

  This time, when I grabbed Suzy, she let me drag her away from the circle. Her legs were spaghetti. She stumbled when I tried to help her walk.

  “Jesus, Suze.” I couldn’t bend low enough to pull her arm over my shoulders, so I had to pick her up. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “What, and let the statue set the whole campus on fire?”

  She had a point. But that didn’t change the fact she’d wiped herself out with a single word.

  “Let the team handle it next time,” I said. “A dozen witches speaking a word of power is safer than a solitary practitioner.”

  “Nobody else was going to do it. The other agents are pussies. That includes you and Aniruddha, for the record.” That didn’t come out with her usual vehemence. Her eyelids were dropping.

  “I’m taking you to a healer.”

  “Like hell you are. Get me to my desk. I need to see the inventory, figure out what they stole from us.”

  “I’ll check the inventory.” If they’d left a fire-spewing statue behind at the crime scene, then whatever they’d come to the OPA to take had to be worth the loss. That kind of artifact was worth more money than most people earned in a lifetime.

  The wreckage inside the MVD building was just as bad as the fiery mess on the lawn. All the windows on the first floor were shattered. Scorch marks burned a path up the carpet. The walls were coated in ash.

  Agent Bryce caught up with me as I approached the elevator.

  “I just got word that they robbed processing, Agent Hawke, sir,” she said breathlessly, showing me a photograph. “This is what’s missing from our inventory.”

  It was the lumpy bronze statue that had been confiscated from the illegal archaeological dig. Ivy’s wrinkled hands held a ruler beside the statue for scale, so the picture must have been taken at least a week ago.

  “They stole that hideous thing?” I asked. “What is it?”

  “Nobody knows, sir. That’s why it was still in temporary storage.” Agent Bryce got onto the elevator with Suzy and me. “Ivanna’s helping our other agents look into the statue. We’ll try to figure out what it does as soon as possible.”

  “Great,” I said. “Grab me when it’s done. I’ll be at my desk for a while.”

  All night, at this rate.

  Not that there was much of the night left. It was already two in the morning. An ungodly hour to be awake and on the job.

  It wouldn’t just be the MVD pulling overtime, either. Our security team, the Union, everyone we could wake up—we’d need them all to set new wards, figure out how they’d been broken, and find the perpetrators.

  Yeah, it was going to be a long goddamn night.

  I dragged Suzy out of the elevator on the MVD floor, which was buzzing with activity. A couple guys were casting temporary wards on the shattered windows while others were on the phone, trying to get a hold of agents who hadn’t come in yet.

  There was no way our budget could accommodate this much overtime.

  So much for Christmas bonuses.

  I dropped Suzy off at the desk. She sagged into her chair, using mine as a footrest, and pulled a spare sweater over her eyes for shade.

  “Is it still burning?” she asked.

  I peered out the nearest hole that used to be a window. The fire had grown to consume the entirety of the circle so that it looked like we had a glowing half-globe on the lawn. “You could say that. Looks like you saved the OPA a lot of money.”

  “And lives,” Suzy said.

  “Guess which one the OPA cares about more.”

  She grunted.

  Suzy’s desk was at peak disaster level. It always got to be a mess in the middle of cases, but it was even worse than usual. She must have slaughtered an entire forest’s worth of trees to generate all that paperwork.

  There was also a big roll of papers on top of everything.

  “What’s this?” I asked, sliding the rubber bands off of the roll.

  Suzy only glanced at it before draping the sweater over her eyes again. “Blueprints for the First Bank. I had them pulled earlier because you mentioned that the building was shaped for spellcasting. I thought there might have been useful information in there.”

  “And?”

  “If there is, nothing jumped out at me. The architect isn’t even in our database. It’s a dead end.”

  I unrolled the blueprints on my desk, just enough that I could see the name of the architect.

  Graciela Mejía.

  One of my family members—one of the great witches who used to make magical foci—had designed the building owned by Lenox.

  Aniruddha appeared out of nowhere. Dispatch must have called him in because he was in jeans and a t-shirt instead of his usual suit, which didn’t make him look like any less of a douchebag. I was surprised he didn’t have a pocket protector.

  He dropped to his knees by Suzy’s side, taking her hand. “I heard what happened. Are you okay?”

  “She’s just fucking fine,” I said.

  “I can speak for myself, Hawke,” Suzy said. She patted Aniruddha’s arm without looking at him. “I’m just fucking fine, stop worrying about me.”

  Aniruddha shook his head with a sigh. “Good, because the specialists are here. They want to speak with all three of us.”

  By “the specialists,” he meant Lenox and the small team of witches who had shot at me in the warehouse. They emerged from the elevators and Aniruddha waved them over.

  Aisha stood in the far back of the group, like she was trying not to be noticed. She was too tall to conceal herself. In boots, she was a full head taller than everyone else. She pointedly didn’t make eye contact with me.

  “Thanks for
coming, ladies,” Suzy said without moving. “Sorry, I can’t stand up right now. I used a word of power and I’m regretting it.”

  “I understand,” Lenox said. “Agent Hawke, good to see you again.”

  “How do you know Graciela Mejía?” I asked.

  “She’s an artist. I’m merely a fan of her work.” Lenox’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “She designed your bank’s building. I assumed you contracted her for a reason.” I tapped the thumbnail version of the building’s exterior. “What’s it supposed to do? Is it just one big magical focus?”

  “Agent Hawke,” Aniruddha said warningly.

  But Lenox held up a hand to silence him. Her lips were so tense that they were rimmed in white. “It’s a magical focus. It’s also registered with the OPA and completely legal, though it was built prior to the OPA’s laws.”

  “Did you know someone broke into the bank again tonight?”

  “The break-in at the bank is why Agent Banerji called me,” Lenox said. “That, and to analyze the artifact currently burning your lawn. I’m somewhat of an expert in magical artifacts.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” I said.

  I caught Aisha looking at me. As soon as our eyes met, she found something else to look at.

  “We’ll be in the meeting room,” Aniruddha said loudly, like he was trying to keep me from throwing more accusations in Lenox’s direction.

  They walked away, and I let Lenox go.

  Didn’t have much choice. I didn’t have evidence that she was guilty.

  Yet.

  “Someone from the archives dropped a box off for you this evening, by the way,” Suzy said. She sounded like she was about to fall asleep.

  I had to move about half a ton of paper to find the box underneath. The label said that the files had been ordered by Director Fritz Friederling.

  I’d forgotten that he’d agreed to order the Half Moon Bay Coven’s files for me. Good timing.

  I opened the box. It was almost completely full of papers grouped into handfuls with rubber bands. There was also one small folder in the back.

  The folder held the classified OPA files on Domingo. Only two pages—we were lucky. The first one was a basic dossier, like we had on all witches that we came across. The other was a list of his relations. I was on there, and so were Abuelita and Ofelia. They didn’t have anything on Pops. Lucky again.