Silver Bound (Sammy Davis Book 1)

by Holly Rutan

  "You can get lost easy in a place like that. We'll take the long way out when we leave," Smith decided. "I am not up to corralling both of you at once."

  "It's like a carnival in there," I said, both relieved and disappointed. "Maybe Moira will take me in our off hours when she feels better. When we're done with this, of course."

  "What does she have, anyway?" Smith asked. "I've heard of her; she's supposedly made out of cast iron."

  I shrugged. "No idea. We spent a long time in cold mud, in the rain, and there was a lot of crap in the water. She must have picked up something nasty."

  As we drifted to a stop in front of a blown-out house, conversation faltered. This was where Georgia had died and where Tamara caught a piece of shrapnel in her chest that tore her up so much she was still fighting for her life.

  Two thugs in gang colors that I'd thought were just idling about stood up straight when we approached.

  "ID?" one of them asked, holding out a dirty hand.

  Thorough of them, and more professional than I had expected. Smith held his and Irwin's out for inspection, and Antonio's boy examined it closely before handing it back and indicating our clearance with a jerk of his head. He waved his hand dismissively when I started to pull out mine, and I shrugged and put my wallet back.

  Irwin was already drifting through the remains of the building, holding his hands out like he could feel the magic residue. Maybe he could; I knew very little about his abilities. His chipmunk poked its way through the rubble, providing a squeaky commentary.

  I called Madeline, who turned out to be at lunch. It took five minutes on hold to get my clearance to shape-shift from the interim operator. Smith just waited, his expression impassive, but I could smell his increasing annoyance; it matched my own. Finally, I was able to hand off the stupid chunk of metal and do my job without getting killed for it.

  I shifted all the way down to my beast form, a thin gray wolf, and then joined the search, circling around to the back of the building so I wouldn't interfere with Irwin's results while I gathered my own information.

  The house had been a three-bedroom, single-story building. It had burned down completely, leaving only a few charred beams here and there standing like sentinels in the rubble. Ash puffed up in a small cloud every time I took a step. Plenty of time had passed where the site could dry in the hot California sun, assuming anyone had attempted to put out the blaze at all.

  I found the places where droplets of blood had landed from the victims. Here, Georgia. There, Tamara. Over here and here, Antonio and two fellows that I presumed to be some of his boys. In the middle of the ruins, greasy blotches were all that was left of the people who had been inside—either some of the perps or more of their victims. Impossible to know which.

  I tilted my head and howled a few inquiring notes, getting a feel for the local energies now that I was far enough away from the Valerio spring to work. The air seemed remarkably dead. After another fruitless attempt, Irwin and Pyggie joined me, the three of us combining our notes in an extensive diagnosis. We found precisely nothing.

  Had the explosion sapped out all the magic in the immediate area? Something seemed off to my sensitive ears. Since magical current flowed from one place to the other, the drained place should have traveled away from the site where it had been created and gradually filled in over the course of a few hours. Some song must be anchoring it in place and continually siphoning energy away, although for the life of me I couldn't understand why a mage would want to do that. If the magic were drained away, there wouldn't be any to work with, after all.

  Something Irwin and I can't hear is draining the current, I said to Pyggie in beastspeak, the language shared by weres and intelligent animals. We'll have to look for it the old-fashioned way.

  Pyggie squeaked an agreement and translated for me, and before long, the two of us were sifting through the filth, using our keen animal senses to search for anything strange.

  It was Pyggie who finally found it. By that time both of us were ash covered and coughing. He had leaned down to inspect a charred knothole and slipped with a shocked, "Oh, crap-crap-crap!" into a small chamber below. Irwin hurried over to save his familiar, scooping away ash with his hands to reveal a trap door. Irwin opened it hastily and held the chipmunk in trembling hands.

  I peered inside, ears perked.

  The three-foot-by-three-foot chamber appeared to have once housed an underground safe. Now it was empty, the supposedly fireproof concrete mix crazed with fine cracks. Ash sifted in from the open door, making me sneeze.

  Painted on the concrete was a spiderweb of blackened runes. My nose told me they had run red with blood before they had dried and then been superheated by nearby flames. At the sight, my skin tightened with fear, raising my ruff in a bristle. I felt the runes pulling at my gut, eagerly trying to devour my essence to power its malevolent purpose.

  A deep, guttural growl bubbled up from my chest as a brief sensory memory—the scent of blood, too much blood, a child's crumpled body thrown like a discarded doll, the sensation of pulling, of devouring—shivered through my mind and disappeared. I shook my fur, setting it, and grunted thoughtfully. The memory tried to recede. I stilled, meditating, and shelved it with the other small scraps of recollection that were waiting for the time when I had the leisure to address them.

  When I was finished, I looked up at Irwin and then shifted to human form. My head spun. I knelt in the charred remains of flooring and waited for the dizziness to recede. Ash coated my black uniform in gray.

  "Here's the anchor to that song. It's still sucking in energy. Can you sense where the flow is being taken? I can't hear their melody at all," I said.

  Irwin narrowed his eyes, cradling Pyggie against his chest. "Down, that's all that I can tell. It might be changing direction at some point, but it is too far away for me to see."

  "Well, let's deactivate it. There's no reason to leave it live. Lord only knows what song it's feeding." I sighed. Losing the evidence it presented was bad, but allowing it to siphon from the Valerio current was probably worse.

  "Can you provide the melody? I'll power it." Irwin's gentle voice was hesitant. Among some mages, power issues were very sensitive.

  With all the ambient energy being sucked away from the area, I really couldn't sing the deactivation song by myself. "That sounds like a good plan. Let's do this."

  Composing the melody from scratch to combat a strange song took several hours. Pyggie acted as a sounding board while we worked out our harmony. The familiar was a Source but not a mage, which meant he would provide nothing but raw power. It was up to the two of us to channel and direct the magic. I hadn't composed harmonies with multiple mages often, and most of those times were during school. It was an intricate, difficult process. The runes were silent, so we had to work our way through the scale for each runic component until we found a note that had the correct harmonic resonance to counter it. If Irwin hadn't been a visual mage, we wouldn't have been able to disable the song at all; I had no way of knowing what worked. The end result was an ugly mishmash of random chords.

  Smith stood guard outside. He took some time to interrogate the thugs who'd been keeping the area clear of visitors. I had to give it to him, from what I heard, he was smooth as silk and might ferret out some new information.

  After we'd created the melody, Smith came to stand with us and keep us anchored. That precaution was more for Irwin than for me. While some mages got lost in the bliss of singing, I'd never had problems staying grounded. The current was beautiful and compelling, but my wolfish nature warned me away from that danger.

  We sang the counter-melody without a hitch. Irwin was a good power source. For all that his little familiar seemed more like a snack than a fully functional Source, he provided a lot of punch. The song ate itself, and the residual energy dissipated into the current. The pulling stopped. I expected that the dead spot would slowly fill in as it drifted downstream until it eventually ceased to exist.

&n
bsp; By then we were exhausted. Composing such a complex harmony in a relatively short period of time had drained my reserves. My palms were itching, and I felt myself tremble. Smith took careful photos of the anchoring chamber and then escorted Irwin and me away from Valerio and back to the station.

  Chapter Eight

  Agent Smith deposited both of us in my office.

  "You're tired. Stay put. I'll be back in a bit," he ordered the mage.

  I showed my teeth when Smith turned toward me, and the werehunter grinned at my expression, not voicing whatever command he'd been about to utter. Nodding at me, he slipped out of the office door and let it fall shut behind him. With a cranky snort, I decided to sift through the evidence Investigations had forwarded to my account.

  Agent Smith returned after half an hour with an armload of brown paper bags decorated with a familiar logo, and my mood improved immediately as the scent of fried chicken hit my nostrils.

  "Here," Smith said, presenting his offering. "We missed lunch. Sorry, Davis. I won't let that happen again. You should say if you're getting hungry."

  "She's a were, she's always hungry." Irwin chuckled, taking possession of his much smaller portion.

  "Truth," I admitted. "Moira keeps dog biscuits in her saddlebags for emergencies."

  "Dog biscuits?" Smith asked.

  "I don't mind dog food," I said between bites, happily peeling meat away from bone with my teeth. "It's high in protein and efficient, and peanut butter biscuits are really good. DogmaTreats has a line meant for canine weres, but we all know the only difference between the ones for us and the ones for dogs is the price and the picture on the box."

  "Ah," Smith said, amused. "Things must be different in Los Angeles. My mother's pack is very strict about keeping a human diet."

  "They probably have money down there," I replied. "When you grow up poor, you learn not to be picky. Getting enough protein and the right vitamins in your diet can be expensive."

  Having nothing to say about that, Smith nodded and started leafing through printouts, addressing the occasional question to Irwin. I scarfed my food while the two men talked, and returned my attention to my fellow agents only after every crumb had been devoured.

  "No, I've never seen anything like it," Irwin was saying.

  I padded to the men and looked over their shoulders, examining the glossy photos laid out on Irwin's borrowed desk. I hadn't had time to review them before we divided up our duties, and I'd given them to Irwin on the off-chance he would see something that I couldn't. As far as I was concerned, magic was meant to be heard, not seen.

  The discordant runic pattern we'd found in the rubble shared many characteristics with the one painted in the cabin in Santa Cruz. They were both spiderweb patterns, and the runes looked very similar. I thought they might have been from the same alphabet. I rubbed my crooked nose, glaring at the designs in the photographs.

  "Hey, Smith?" I asked.

  "What do you need?"

  "I think this pattern looks familiar. These"—I stabbed at the Santa Cruz photographs, then the Valerio ones—"are the same."

  He nodded. "We'd established that, and?"

  "My memory has more holes than Swiss cheese, but this looks familiar." I chewed my lip unhappily and then continued as though the words were dragged from my mouth. "Check my files. They say they pulled me from a milker's den when I was young. Did that blood runner from Valerio ever talk?"

  "Closed his mouth tighter than a virgin on her wedding night, then died in his sleep. Heart stopped beating on its own. You think there's a link?" Smith peered down at the carefully labeled photographs strewn all over Irwin's desk. His nearness brought his scent to my nose, and the tight muscles in my shoulders relaxed. I swallowed. The werehunter smelled good.

  "Yeah, but I'm not allowed to read my own file. Maybe you and Irwin could explore that angle?" I asked.

  "No problem. We'll cross-reference it with other cases, maybe there's a pattern." Smith gave me a quick half grin, which I echoed, relieved.

  Smith seemed in no hurry to move away, instead picking up photographs one by one and examining them. I gave up any pretense of working and breathed, drawing air in through my mouth and nose and rolling it over my tongue, tasting it and trying not to look like I was drooling. Humans smelled like prey. The kin next to me, who wore my death in two holsters on his waist, smelled like predator. Dangerous. I liked that.

  He met my eyes in a sidelong look, and I felt my cheeks go warm.

  Irwin was oblivious to the two of us. He had his head bent over a yellow notebook, and he was writing furiously. Pyggie was leaning over his notebook, reading his notes upside down and making whispered suggestions. Abruptly, the mage stopped writing and dropped his pencil with an exclamation of frustration.

  "What?" Smith and I asked in unison, turning away from each other.

  "Samantha, do you have a divination song we can use on those bodies that were found at that house? Something just to reconstruct them visually. I have nothing. This stuff is totally unfamiliar."

  "No, since necromancy is illegal," I replied, the flush in my cheeks abruptly draining away.

  "But would it really be necromancy?" the mage asked wistfully. "I understood that to be only animation."

  "Any melody that has an effect on a body is considered necromancy. That's Article IX in the International Accords. You should know that. They made us memorize them during training." I nodded toward a collection of folders on the shelf above my desk.

  The International Accords of Magery were a series of treaties signed by nearly every civilized country agreeing what types of magery would be legal or illegal. Many atrocities had been committed during the War of Discord in the 1950s. Necromancy, any melody used to animate or tamper with corpses, was one of those hated atrocities, along with the black magic of mental conditioning and brainwashing.

  The Accords were ironclad. The usual punishment for breaking them was death. It worried me that Irwin was forgetting; he seemed awfully young to be losing his grip, unless he was getting lost in the current. Valerio couldn't have been healthy for him.

  "Anyway, why do you want it?" I continued, shaking the thought for more immediate matters.

  "It makes a difference whether they were accomplices or not. The Santa Cruz case had accomplices. Is this run by the same person or someone else?" Irwin said, waving one bony hand in the air. "This melody is so foreign I don't even know where to start. Anything would help."

  I pondered for a few moments before coming up with an answer. Shaking my head, I replied, "Casting on human remains for any purpose is illegal, so far as I understand the law. I don't think we can chase that prey."

  "What about their clothes?" Irwin suggested. "Something to divine what a piece of cloth was once part of and who wore it?"

  I smiled. "I think Missing Persons has a melody for that. Let me check."

  Missing Persons did indeed have a melody to divine the owner of clothing. It was a method they used to assure themselves they were on the trail of the right person. Homicide also used it when no body could be found, in order to make their case against murder suspects. There was no legal reason why it couldn't be used to identify the charred remains that had been found at the scene.

  The limiter was power, and the reason why it was not used as a routine divination tool. Most of the time dental records, prints, or circumstances were enough to at least tentatively identify a corpse. This song required a great deal of strength and finesse to pinpoint the moment in time the illusion would project. It would cost less energy and was simpler to use a less complex melody to get a sense of what the fabric had gone through, but a visual was required for legal evidence.

  It was late, and we were tired and getting kind of punchy, so we decided to break for the night and go get some rest. Smith drove me home before heading down to Headquarters with Irwin. They both had semipermanent rooms there—Irwin had nightmares that made it unsafe for him to sleep near the vulnerable public, and the DMA had a few
shielded rooms that would absorb any stray notes he flung in his sleep.

  I called Moira and sighed in relief when I finally got an answer.

  "Hey, girl, how are you feeling? What is this, the first time you've called in sick ever?" I asked to her sleepy greeting.

  "Ugh. Real crappy. I think I have the flu," she answered and coughed.

  I winced at the raspy, wet undertone.

  "You sound like shit," I commented. "Is there anything I can do for you? Groceries, food? I make a mean chicken soup."

  "Soup sounds pretty good, as long as you're willing to put up with my sorry ass. Been too damn tired to do anything but sleep and watch TV." My partner coughed again. "Sorry," she croaked.

  "I'll be right over," I promised.

  Two things I'll never have to worry about include my safety walking in the city at night and my friends getting me sick. I stopped by a little corner market to pick up ingredients and cold medicine and walked the half mile to Moira's apartment, stinging from how the cashier so distinctly avoided touching my hand when he gave me my change.

  Just as she had promised, my partner was curled up in bed, half-asleep. The television was left on an infomercial for some kind of super vacuum cleaner, and she was watching it with dazed fascination.

  "I really need one of those," Moira commented.

  I snorted grumpily and swept a herd of stray tissues into a wastebasket. "When was the last time you vacuumed at all?"

  "Maybe if I had one of those, I would." She coughed into a tissue, the fit lasting so long her face turned red. She gasped for breath once she was done. "You never know," she finished after a moment.

  "Damn, you're really sick. Maybe you should go to the doctor." I paused tidying up to give her another look and rested my hand on her sweaty forehead. "You're running a fever."

  "It's just the flu," Moira said and sighed. "I'll be down and out for a few days, that's all."

  "You're going to need to go anyway to get a note," I answered.