by Thomas Green
With a smirk, I put on my leather gloves. I left my hat in the car and readied the pistol and the EMP stick. I breathed in the evening’s air and strengthened my body with aether. As a wizard, my classification was warmage. I couldn’t conjure fire, create force fields, or cast lightning, but I could run through a concrete wall.
I bolted forward, crossing the yard in a second. As I turned my run into a slide, I flipped off the cover of the EMP stick and pressed the button.
A flash of white light blinded me for a split second at the same time my legs hit the basement window. The entire block went dark and the glass shattered upon impact.
I slid through.
Confused by everything going dark, Matt was spinning on his chair toward the sound. I landed and stepped toward him. As he opened his mouth to speak, I clenched my left palm over his face and pressed the gun’s muzzle against his forehead.
He sat wide-eyed and petrified, as if the whole world had stopped.
I didn’t move for eternally long seconds, allowing his shock to turn into terror. To him, I must have been a mere shape in the darkness. But with my magical sight, I could see perfectly. Matt was horribly out of shape, had a nasty beard on his face and neck, and greasy, unkempt hair. He wore a t-shirt, shorts, and sandals.
“Matt?” A woman shouted from behind the door leading to the upper floor. “Is everything all right?”
I leaned down to Matt. “If she finds out I’m here, I will kill you, her, everyone else in the house, and then burn the place down to cover everything up as a gas explosion. Blink once if you understand.”
Sweating, Matt blinked once.
“Good. Make her go away.” I let go of his mouth, and removed the gun from his forehead, but kept aiming at him.
“All’s fine, Mom,” he shouted, voice shaking. “It’s just another blackout.”
“You sound nervous. Did something happen?” she pressed on.
“I was in the middle of something and probably lost a lot of work,” Matt replied, his tone calmer.
“Okay, sorry,” Steps sounded from behind the door, fading away.
“Good,” I whispered and straightened. “Now listen, Matt. I’m here to kill you. But I’ll give you a chance to convince me why I shouldn’t. When DDoSing LCorp’s websites, how did you get past their protective algorithms?”
He gulped. “I… I… guessed them.”
As I thought. “And when you did the guessing for a while, you felt tired and warm, right?”
“No. I was cold… as if I was freezing.”
Correct, the warm part was a trap to verify he wasn’t telling me what he thought I wanted to hear. Getting cold was the aftereffect of using too much aether, of using magic. He was indeed a divination-talented mage, though he had no idea. That made him potentially valuable. “I’m tired of hiring hackers to break into phones for me, so I’ve got a job offer for you. The pay’s hundred thousand dollars a year, benefits are a service flat, car, phone, laptop, full health coverage, and four weeks of vacation. The contract will be for ten years.”
He stared at me blankly for a few awkward seconds. “And if I refuse?”
Did he really need to ask that? “What do you think?” I glanced theatrically at the gun. “The same will happen if you screw me over, try to run, or piss me off in any major way.”
“I accept,” he stuttered.
“Good.” I returned the gun back into its place in my coat. From my pocket, I withdrew the anonymous debit card and tossed it at Matt. “This has twenty thousand dollars. Tomorrow morning, you wash, shave, go get at least a fifty-dollar haircut, and buy new clothes. The dress code is business casual, but if the suit costs less than a thousand dollars, it’s not good enough. By noon, you will be at Lucielle Legal Wall Street headquarters, sixth floor, or I will visit you again, understand?”
“I… guess.”
“Be on time.” I turned, made a few swift steps, used the wall for a support and leapt up, twisting my body to slide out through the broken window. Once outside the house, I cleared the mud off my coat with my hand and returned to my car.
I half-hoped Matt would try to use the money I gave him to run. That would be a fun hunt. The more reasonable part of me hoped he would be smart about this and do as I told him.
The next day, Matt showed up in a new suit. He was pale, eyes darting around. I sent him to HR, where they handled his papers. In the late afternoon, he was back at my office, now an employee of Lucielle Legal and my first subordinate.
I motioned him to the chair across my table. “I’m Lucas Johnson, head of Interventions.”
He said down, his hand trembling slightly. “Matthew Smith,” he stuttered.
“You will get used to this after a while.” I hid the Sci-Fi novel I’d been reading in a drawer since he didn’t need to see that. “The IT should solve your access. This…” I pushed over the table apartment keys and a note with its address, “is where you will live from now on.”
He stared at it for a second, then back at me. “I’ve got a hard time believing this is real.”
I sighed. This was going to be very tedious. “Yeah, you will get used to that too. Now, IT will get you the laptop and the datacenter access. I will need two things from you. First, you’ll be ready on call to hack into any phone, email, laptop, or anything else I need you to. Your first task is to prepare whatever infrastructure you need for that.”
“Okay… with whom will I work?”
“Me.” I put on a sour smile. “The department is the two of us. Order yourself whatever hardware and licenses you need. Your budget is roughly two hundred thousand dollars for this year.”
After a moment of staring, he realized I wasn’t kidding, and slowly nodded.
“Second, I’ll need you to find someone.” I scratched the top of my head. He probably knew nothing about Secret Societies and that would be necessary for him to make sense of what I wanted. “Okay, first, watch this.” I stretched out my hand and gathered aether into my palm. I made the energy spin and condense, creating a rotating sphere of air. This is how my most destructive spell started, but for the demonstration, this had to do.
He stared at my hand, mouth gaping.
“Long story short, magic exists and I’m an exceedingly powerful mage.” Well, technically speaking, I was a fallen angel. But I figured I would spare him that explanation for now and I let the sphere slowly dissipate. “And I’ve hired you. You have some basic talent for divination magic. That’s how you guessed what algorithm the local IT was using to defend against your DDoS attack. Now, using magic in public is illegal, as is showing its existence to anyone who cannot use it. The principle is called the Veil. Remember that, because the punishment for breaking the Veil is death, usually by the hand of someone like me. Put your laptop on the table.”
With his mouth still gaping, he placed his laptop on the table.
I turned to my PC, navigated to the U.S. Secret Societies website and sent Matt an invitation that was necessary to make his own account. “The supernatural world is governed by what’s called the Secret Societies. Literally everything they use is separated from the mundane world, including banks, social media applications, everything. LCorp mostly operated in the supernatural world. I sent you an invite to the main hub. Still following?”
He shrugged slightly. “Somewhat.”
“Good.” I smiled. He was taking this better than I expected. “You will get familiar with the Secret Societies intranet and search for someone. Her name is Evelyn Natheast and I’ll send you a picture. Any trace is a good one.” Technically, this wasn’t his job since my search for Evelyn was my private thing, but I didn’t care. Four months ago, I returned from prison and found Evelyn missing. And I couldn’t find her, no matter what means I used.
Matt narrowed his eyes. “If you couldn’t find her, how do you know she’s alive?”
“I’ve got a fragment of her soul,” I said. “Which would dissipate if she died. That’s the second part of this task – look
for someone who can find people by fragments of their souls.”
Matt nodded, visibly less terrified than before. Yes, me not being able to find Evelyn was a show of weakness, but I was getting a bit desperate on that front. And the soul fragment in the cross I wore was a constant reminder. “Okay, I think I got the idea,” Matt said.
“Good. Pick a desk in one of the offices. You will sit there from now on.”
He grabbed his laptop, clumsily got from his chair and tumbled away.
At least for now, the fear of death wouldn’t allow him to betray me. And when that stopped working, we would see how this goes. I relaxed into my chair and returned to the Sci-Fi novel.
I didn’t make it through ten pages of space marines shooting bugs before my office door opened and a man stepped in. What the hell did Matt want? Annoyed, I raised my eyes.
This wasn’t Matthew.
A priest dressed in a buttoned-up cassock with a standard priest collar entered my office. His face was clean-shaven, eyes dark blue, and hair short, semi-arranged in a I-did-this-myself type of haircut an aging rock star would wear. “I see you’re working hard,” he said with a broad smile.
How the hell did he get here? I put away the novel, glaring at him. “Who’re you?”
“I’m Father Jack.” He took the chair across the table and sat down. “And I’ve come to order an intervention from you, Lucifer.”
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