Some people were able to make the spells work. Others were not. None of them mentioned looking for the publishing company, however.
Kera swore quietly and sat back against the wall, tapping her fingers on the base of the laptop.
She did not like this. Like it or not, worried or not, she was going to have to ask Mr. Kim what had happened in his past. She had no idea how many other people could use the power she was summoning. She also didn’t know if there was some sort of hierarchy.
What were groups of witches called? Covens? She did a quick search.
Yep, covens.
Since she now knew that magic was real, it stood to reason that covens might be as well. She also found herself wondering if events like the Salem witch trials had been based on more than wild lies.
She should probably be careful of that in the future.
It didn’t solve her problem now, though. She briefly pondered requesting data from the sellers and decided that none of them were going to give them the time of day. Besides, if these people wanted their tracks covered, which it seemed they did, she wondered if even the sellers would know anything.
Was there something in the grimoire itself, perhaps?
Kera scanned through the appendices and held pages up to the light. She felt stupid, but she had no idea if there were hidden messages. Whatever they were, they must be in both the print and ebook versions, so she supposed it wouldn’t be anything in invisible ink.
The appendices gave no clues, nor did the front matter.
There was, however, a section on spells to be used for finding things. The authors stressed that one must have a good mental image of the thing in order to scry for it and that unknown individuals were nearly impossible to find. It obliquely referenced that the spell could be modified to find “forces” but was not clear on whether those were the same “miraculous forces” that the book referred to instead of using the word magic.
It also did not mention how the spell would be modified.
She considered, then sat bolt upright. If the spells could be used to find magic, that meant every working she had done from torching the Mustang to healing Mrs. Kim could have been sensed.
And if these people had an endgame, they had probably been watching for it.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Kera stood up to pace.
They were looking for her, and she didn’t even know who “they” were. Some normal, reasonable part of her brain that sounded a bit like her mother asked her if she was just being paranoid, but her mind would not stop circling.
If these people were benevolent, that was one thing. She could cross that bridge when she came to it. But it could be deadly to bank on their goodwill. They had gone out of their way to hide.
She reminded herself that the people who had done this didn’t know her. Just like the jerk who’d shot up her bike and threatened Cevin, these people had no idea how much Kera hated being intimidated and jerked around. Whether this was a test or something much less benevolent, she strongly disliked being left in the dark. If they were hoping to track her down…
She’d make sure they found someone much, much more capable than they were expecting.
With that in mind, she strode back to the table and started laying out a lesson plan for herself. She was good with fire, but she would get better. She was stronger already, but not strong enough. She would double down on training and begin researching how to shield magic. She would start learning more spells like pinches and disorientation.
If these people were good, that would be just fine. If they weren’t, though, they were going to regret messing with her.
Chapter Eight
Projecting one’s consciousness took a great deal of magic. It was the reason the council generally met in person: the inconvenience and cost of travel was a minor concern compared to the misuse of a vital and important resource.
Right now, however, there was no time to do things the resource-effective way. LeBlanc and James put Do Not Disturb hangers on their doors, locked them, and prepared to project themselves into the council meeting.
James grinned as he looked at the wreckage of their massive breakfast. “This reminds me of my early days.”
“In magic, or as a teenage boy?” Mother LeBlanc queried. She had taken a seat in one of the chairs, and her skirts were billowing around her.
“Ha! In magic. My poor mother thought she had it bad raising an athlete, but she would have had heart failure if she saw how much I could eat when I started to learn magic. One weekend, I bought all the food at the local corner store.” James shook his head wryly. “They loved me.”
She smiled. They were bantering to distract their conscious minds, allowing the projection trance to take hold in their deeper thoughts.
Between one breath and the next, James’s unfocused eyes stopped seeing the dim hotel room and snapped into focus on the vaguely-defined projection plane. Everyone saw it slightly differently. To James, it looked like a small pocket of clear air in the morning fog.
The other members of the council appeared one by one. Greetings were quickly exchanged, then everyone’s attention shifted to James and LeBlanc.
“The update is quick,” James said. “We won’t waste your time or your power. The long and short of it is that the book was far more successful than any of us expected.”
“Far from being a less effective way to learn magic, it appears to be a more effective way.” LeBlanc was all cool competence. “One important thing is that the percentage of magic users who have cracks in their power or an incorrect temperament seems to be in line with what we would expect. There are simply more than any of us foresaw.”
“This is dangerous,” Mary Mitchell said at once. “If thousands begin to practice magic, how will we keep our existence hidden?”
James had anticipated the reaction, but it still rankled. As smoothly as he could, he said, “Dozens, not thousands. Since we have found more recruits than expected, we removed the book from sale, used marketing principles in reverse to bury and discredit it, and are dealing with the potential recruits one at a time. We have done in-depth research on social media, news sites, and message boards to determine whether noteworthy events have occurred. Thankfully, there have been very few, and the media have treated those as ‘one-in-a-million’ chance events.”
Mary Mitchell did not look pleased, but she had no comeback for that.
“Are there any promising recruits?” Lauren asked.
James smiled at her. Now more than ever, he appreciated her positive focus. “At least one, a green witch with a good temperament. Her powers are growing steadily and without any flaws. We’ve put limits on them and implanted the suggestion to reach out to us, and we’ll be following her progress. I’ll send you the details.”
Reluctantly, he also nodded at Mary Mitchell. He might be almost eternally annoyed with her, but she was also a green witch, and she would need to take a hand in this girl’s training.
As usual, she managed to find a shred of supercilious annoyance even when she was happy. “Of course this young woman has a good temperament. Green witches have a unique appreciation for the structure of magic.”
I could say some pretty choice things about your temperament, James thought. He only nodded at her again, not wanting to say something as barbed as her statement.
“Obviously, we must discuss the fact that there are many more potential recruits than we imagined,” Mother LeBlanc said, skipping them ahead with efficiency. “We will likely need years to develop a cohesive strategy for recruitment, given this new information. All of us must begin researching and planning.”
Damian nodded. He looked the most pleased of any of the council members. Turning to James, he said bluntly, “I had my doubts when you presented this plan. It appears I was wrong.” He smiled. “I am glad about that.”
James nodded back at him. “I had my doubts as well. Now we know there is good reason to have great hope.”
“Does anyone have any more ques
tions?” Mother LeBlanc asked, guiding the meeting back to its intended purpose.
“How many recruits do you have left?” Mary Mitchell asked.
“With serious potential? Only a few. Then we will need to deal with those who are drawing small amounts of power to see if there is any reason to set limits of our own.”
The other members of the council nodded.
“Thank you for your time,” LeBlanc told them as if she had called this meeting instead of them. “We hope to return with not only one potential recruit, but two or three. We will keep you apprised of our results.”
The dismissal was clear, and no one wanted to argue, especially not when this meeting was using so much of their magic.
James let the projection trance go and returned to the hotel room. After the experience of being in a formless plane, he was pleased to see floors and walls. He looked over to find LeBlanc opening her eyes and stretching slightly.
“That went well, I thought,” she told him.
He nodded. He had expected some pushback, and they had gotten it, but they had also evaded censure by taking corrective measures quickly and proactively.
“I wondered if you would bring up the healer,” James told her.
“I didn’t want to raise anyone’s hopes prematurely.” She looked almost sad. “How long since we’ve had a truly talented healer, James? I knew one or two in my day, but…”
“But?” he asked when her voice trailed off.
She took a moment before answering. “But they were killed as witches,” she said finally.
A cold pit opened in James’s stomach. He was lucky, he knew. Young compared to most of the council, he had been born after the worse of the inquisitions and witch hunts. For the rest, however, those things were not merely a cautionary tale, but a memory filled with fire and pain.
He wondered now if there would ever be a world where their kind was accepted. The world had come so far in some ways…
LeBlanc seemed to understand what he was thinking. “Best not to wish for it,” she advised. “There has never yet been a world where we could be open about what we are. Everyone has burdens to bear, and this is one of ours. It’s why we need to get to Los Angeles quickly.”
With a new appreciation of just why this was so important to her, he reached out briefly to clasp her hand. They stared at each other for a moment, both of them measuring sadness and fear against hope.
“Let’s find our recruit,” James said. “Los Angeles, coming up. No stops.”
“Spoken like a young man.” Her teasing tone was back. “If we skip all of the wonderful food in the Southwest, I will be very disappointed.”
“Right. Los Angeles, coming up. Some stops.”
“That’s better.”
The three men worked in silence, bagging up rifles, submachine guns, loaded magazines, armored vests, and masks. The other gear was already packed. This was all that was left.
When they were done, they hauled the bags into a dilapidated old shed, its wooden sides worn and leaning slightly in the light of the setting sun. It might be spring, but in the desert, even spring was hot, and they were sweating by the time they were done.
They didn’t talk much. They’d spent the past few weeks together in the confined space of an abandoned mineshaft, and all topics of conversation had been exhausted within the first few days.
Mick closed the door to the shed and wiped the dust off his hands. He was a beefy man, his backward baseball cap and t-shirt making him seem younger than his forty-eight years. There wasn’t much gray in the stubble on his cheeks yet.
“There should be a spell for lifting shit,” he told the others. “Free workout, I guess, but come on! Isn’t this magic shit so we don’t have to do all the grunt work?”
Tariq, his thinner, darker companion, sneered at him. “Pussy. Save that wad for when you need to blow it on something fun, like making the ladies forget what happened last night.”
Mick laughed and opened his mouth to take a shot right back, but Gage brought the others back to business. He was older than the other two and stood a diminutive 5’4”, but anyone who’d heard his reputation knew better than to doubt his abilities, knowledge, or ruthlessness.
He had quickly become their group’s de facto leader.
“Wrong,” he said bluntly. “You save that wad for this job. Then you worry about other things.”
He looked at the other two, who nodded and refocused on the matter at hand. This job was going to be complicated. There were locks that had to open, lights that had to come on or go off, and electronics that needed to pause, all at very specific times. They needed shields in case the cops showed up and to have their faces disguised to fuck with the cameras, not to mention witnesses. They desperately needed to practice disorientation spells, pyrotechnics, and more.
The past few weeks had been almost nothing but practice, and Gage still wasn’t sure it was enough.
“I won’t let this job get screwed up because you two have been slacking off,” he warned them.
Tariq didn’t look impressed by Gage’s tough-guy act. He was willing to let the man take the lead, but he wasn’t going to be talked to like he was a toddler. “We’re doing our part,” he told Gage warningly. He jerked his head at the mineshaft. “You’ve seen those green lights going off down there.”
“Yeah,” Mick agreed. He flashed a shit-eating grin. “What he said. Hell, it’s fun.”
Gage nodded. “Good. Don’t think we gotta worry about anyone else who can do this crap noticing us, either. The book said that it’s hard to track magic underground, not that I imagine most schmucks have the talent for this sort of thing anyway.”
“Except,” Mick offered, raising a thick finger, “depressed teenage girls with purple hair writing shit-ass poetry, right?”
Tariq laughed. “Shut the fuck up, Mick.”
While the pair continued to banter and trade insults, Gage surveyed the scene around them. Besides what his eyes and ears could tell him, he had a knack for determining when bystanders might be near or the heat was approaching. They didn’t want anyone close by when they moved on to the next step.
Of course, they were out in the middle of nowhere to begin with.
The desert outside Las Vegas had once been full of prosperous mines, gold and silver mostly. These days, the precious metal was all but gone, but the mine shafts and caves and ruined structures above them remained. It was hard not to feel claustrophobic and uncomfortable in the depths of the mine shaft, but the important thing was that it had given them the opportunity to practice their new craft in secret.
The area, lonely and forgotten, had served their purposes perfectly. It lay a good three miles from the nearest major road, the Joshua Tree Highway that crossed the far southern tip of Nevada. After leaving that highway, anyone wanting to get here would need to access it via a dirt track that looked as if it were barely used, except for the occasional weirdo tourist who liked snapping photographs of desolation.
In addition to the craggy, empty wasteland of the landscape, the minimal facilities that had been constructed over the old mine weren’t in great shape, either. The three buildings consisted of half-collapsed, warped, and sagging wood overlaid with rusty sheets of tin. Obsolete mining machinery, crude cranes and winches and mill-type devices, languished in the dust.
No one was going to miss this place when it was gone. And the daylight was almost spent.
Gage took another moment to scan the area but sensed no one who might complicate their plans.
“All right,” he declared, “put the stuff in the car. Mick, you do it since you complained about carrying stuff.”
Mick grumbled, but not loudly. He knew better.
Gage motioned to Tariq, and the two of them grabbed a couple of oversized jerry cans filled with various substances. Gasoline was one of the liquids, but not the only one. Gage smiled at the harsh smells.
All of this, from the oppressive heat to the darkness and the scorpions, had been
his down payment on the job that was going to set him up for life.
“These goddamn things are probably heavier than the bags,” Tariq was muttering. “Shoulda let Mick handle all of it.”
Ignoring him, Gage tramped down the slope beneath the cracked wooden frame of the mine shaft. They went perhaps a hundred feet into the subterranean realm, then set the cans down next to a pair of bracing pillars.
“Yeah,” said Gage, “we’ll leave these right here. Nothing like gettin’ rid of the evidence, right?” He didn’t think it was likely that anyone would be able to trace them back here, but if they did, they would find nothing.
The pair climbed back out into the gathering darkness. Mick had finished loading the guns and armor into the back of their SUV, and the three of them stood a decent distance from the tunnel opening.
Gage checked his watch. They would leave as soon as they were done. The drive to Vegas would take about an hour, and they would meet Jay’s team outside town. Jay and Gage had worked together before, and he was the punctual type.
Just like someone coming to the mineshaft, it wasn’t likely that anyone would take particular notice of the SUV or its contents, but Gage didn’t like to rely on that. They would meet Jay’s team, go into hiding on private property, and plan the final stages of their job from there.
Mick was jiggling up and down with impatience. “Are we gonna blow shit up or not?”
Tariq glanced at him. “You’re gonna blow something.”
Gage shut them up, and the trio united their focus, their energy, and their will, chanting and channeling as one. The air tingled and grew hotter as they directed fiery, destructive magic down the throat of the earth. It hovered, poised and ready.
“On three?” their leader asked, and his partners nodded. “One...two...three.”
How To Be A Badass Witch: Book Two Page 7