Mortal Ties

by Eileen Wilks

  After a brief pause she went on. “But whatever label we give Jasper, he knows things we need to know. Talking has to be part of whatever deal we make.”

  “Obviously. Information is all he has to offer, if what he said about the device being stolen from him is true. I don’t know what he wants in return, but I’d guess that staying out of prison is involved.” He paused. “I would prefer that he not go to prison.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. I think I should do the dealing.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “I’m quite capable of—”

  “Yes, but it gets you two off to a difficult start if you have to be a hard-ass.”

  “Considering that our relationship began with him stealing from the clan, I’d say we’re already well into ‘difficult.’ ”

  “Then let’s not make it worse. Besides, you can’t agree to grant him immunity from prosecution, which he’ll likely insist on.”

  He suspected that technically she couldn’t, either, but she could neglect to arrest Machek. She must think she could keep this under the table. He considered a moment longer, then nodded. “Am I supposed to be the good cop, then?”

  “You can stand there looking mysterious and vaguely scary. You said he wouldn’t talk about what he wants until we get there.”

  He nodded, toying with the ring on her finger. His ring.

  “Can you give me your impression of him?”

  “He knows what he wants, even if he wasn’t willing to tell me. He was calm, in control, when he might have been panicky or angry about losing something he’d gone to great trouble to obtain.” He thought a bit more and added, “He’s educated, or knows how to sound like it.”

  “He’s got a degree in art history and owns a small gallery.”

  Art history. Why did that surprise him? He’d known about the man’s existence for less than twenty-four hours. Surely that wasn’t enough time to develop preconceptions. “Last night I wasn’t ready to learn about him. I am now.”

  She cocked her head. “I’ve got the FBI’s file on him, plus some recent stuff Arjenie dug up. You want to see it?”

  The FBI didn’t keep files on everyone. “Do you mean a file or a rap sheet?”

  “No rap sheet. He’s never been arrested, but several years ago he was a person of interest in a theft at the National Gallery in D.C. That made it an FBI matter, see—National Gallery, federal law. They never had enough evidence to make an arrest, but it’s clear the lead agent had him picked for the perp. He put together the file.”

  “He is a pro, then. As you suspected.”

  “Looks like it, though there’s—”

  Cullen interrupted. “What was stolen?”

  She looked at him. “That was odd. Only one item went missing—a thirteenth-century chalice, solid gold with precious gems. No one could figure out why he targeted that one item. It was worth plenty, sure, but there were other things he could have grabbed that were worth more.”

  “No, there weren’t,” Cullen said.

  “What do you know about this?”

  “That chalice was an artifact.”

  “An artifact?” Rule said, startled. Artifacts were major magic—so major no one on Earth knew how to make them. It took an adept to make an artifact, and the knowledge had been lost even before the Purge. “What did it do?”

  “No one knows. At least I never heard a whisper that anyone had figured it out, and I sure as hell couldn’t. I studied the damn thing for days, but all that showed was the trigger—and that was locked.”

  “Locked,” Lily repeated.

  “Locked as in keyed to someone who has probably been dead for a few hundred years, so no one could use it. Resetting the key would take knowledge we just don’t have.”

  “And you studied it for days?”

  “That was about three months before it was stolen. And no,” Cullen added with preemptive irritation, “I didn’t have anything to do with that. Not from any moral objection on my part, but I couldn’t afford Umbra.”

  “Umbra.”

  “That’s the name your thief goes by. Or used to. Kind of pretentious, isn’t it?’

  “I don’t know,” she said dryly. “What does it mean?”

  “It’s the scientific name for one part of a shadow. Anyway, everyone assumed Umbra was the one who took the chalice because it was such a slick, high-dollar job. There was a lot of speculation about who his client might have been, but it was bullshit. No one really knew anything.”

  “Who’s ‘everyone’?”

  Cullen waved vaguely. “People. You know.”

  “No, actually, I don’t. But I’d like to.”

  “I’m not going to tell you about them. First, it was seven years ago, and I don’t remember exactly who I talked to. Second, if any of them had an inkling I mentioned them to someone official, they’d never talk to me again. And that would be bad.”

  “Are they other sorcerers?”

  “Did you hear me say I wouldn’t tell you about them? I could’ve sworn I heard those words come out of my mouth.” Cullen sighed. “I feel a bit better knowing it was Umbra who got through my wards. Not a lot, but some. He was supposed to be the best.”

  Rule’s eyebrows lifted. “Was?”

  “Two or three years ago word went out that he wasn’t taking jobs anymore. Rumor was divided about why. Some said he’d retired. Some said he’d died. Looks like he was just on sabbatical.”

  Lily made a note. “Huh. Guess we’ll have the chance to ask him. How did people reach Umbra to hire him?”

  Cullen considered the question a moment. “I can tell you that much. Here in the States he used an agent, a big fat guy named Hugo. I met him once on an unrelated matter. Back then—this was maybe five years ago—he hung out at a dive called Rats in San Francisco. He’s Gifted—can’t tell you which one because I don’t remember. Maybe one of the Air Gifts. Caucasian, around fifty, bald or else he shaved his head. Tattoo of a lightning bolt on his forehead. Looked like prison work.”

  “Last name?”

  “No idea. He went by Hugo.”

  “How big was he?”

  “About Rule’s height and maybe three hundred pounds.”

  “Okay, I’ll see if Arjenie can do anything with that.” She turned to Rule. “I need to ask Cullen some more questions before we get to the airport. Want to read that file now?”

  No. “Yes.”

  She bent and dug a folder out of the case that held her laptop. It would have been easier to send the material to his iPad, but that left an electronic trail. Technically Lily had the authority to share information with a consultant; technically Rule could be called a consultant. But there was always the chance that someone would decide to make an issue of it.

  He accepted the folder and opened it. The first page was a brief bio.

  Jasper Frederick Machek

  Born: San Francisco, California

  Two years and nine months after she handed me to my father and walked away and never looked back…

  Father: Frederick Alan Machek; b. 12/7/1929

  Mother: Celeste Marie Machek, nee Babineaux; b. 9/27/1928 d. 3/11/ 2006

  Rule stared at the page, his eyes dry and unseeing, his mind blank save for one thought.

  Dead. She was dead.

  SIXTEEN

  LILY did not watch Rule read the file she’d handed him. She wanted to, but she was pretty sure that was a bad idea. When you’re raw you don’t want people studying your reactions, even if you’ve convinced yourself you’re just fine.

  Maybe especially then. She leaned forward and pulled her notebook and pen out of her purse. “Okay, Cullen, I need you to tell me more about the prototype. You’re not the only one working on the problem—everyone from mega-corporations to individual practitioners are giving it a shot. But this is the first really promising device for shielding tech from magic, right?”

  “Wrong.”

  “You said it worked. You said that several times. That isn’t promising?”


  “I mean that it’s not a shield.”

  “But it’s supposed to protect tech from magic.”

  He nodded. “Naturally you think ‘protect’ equals ‘shield.’ I did, too, at first. So has everyone else. The problem is, the only way to absolutely, positively shield against every type of magic is to be you.”

  She blinked. “Ah—be a touch sensitive, you mean?” Able to feel magic, but impervious to it.

  “Right. The first thing you need to know is that no substance shields really well against raw magic. Earth comes closer than most, but it’s too varied to shield predictably. And it takes a lot of dirt to do much good.”

  “Raw magic is what comes from nodes.”

  “Right. Ambient magic is at least ninety percent raw. A small percentage is elemental, but the vast majority is raw—unless you’re in an old forest, of course, but that’s a special case, and there’s not much tech deep in the Sequoia National Forest, so it doesn’t matter. Now, some substances do offer minimal shielding, like the silk case you use for your phone, but they’re ineffective near a node, a ley line, or even the ocean. Or if there’s even a small surge. We don’t get the kind of power blasts we did when the Turning hit,” he added, “but there are frequent small surges, and the level of ambient magic continues to rise.”

  Rule looked up from the folder. He was on the second page, she noted. “A company came up with a polymer that showed promise initially, but they can’t make it work longer than…what was it, thirty minutes?”

  “Thirty max,” Cullen agreed. “Theory suggests that no substance can shield well against raw magic for long because matter is, by definition, not magically inert.”

  Lily’s eyebrows went up. “By definition? No, wait—don’t explain that.” Once Cullen got going on theory it was hard to shut him up.

  His grin flashed. “I’ll spare you. Mind, not everyone agrees with that theory, but most do, which is why most everyone is looking to combine some type of natural shielding with shaped magic. Charms, in other words. I won’t go into all the reasons that’s so hard to do, but one big problem is that tech isn’t very useful if it lacks input and output. You can build an underground bunker and shield the hell out of it and be pretty sure the computer inside is protected, but as soon as you hook that computer up to something else—even if it’s a wireless connection—you’ve breached the shield.”

  “But you’re not going to go into that.” Her hand moved automatically, jotting down notes that would help her remember later: even wireless = shield breach.

  “Right. Because the real drawback to creating a shield isn’t the difficulty, though that’s huge. It’s that even if you succeed, all you’ve done is deflect the magic. Say you’re Delta Airlines and the shielding on your big 747 deflected the hell out of a magic surge, but that deflected power hit the cell tower you were flying over and now the phone company’s suing you. Or maybe it hit a small plane that couldn’t afford fancy shielding, and that plane crashed.” He shook his head. “Shields are not the answer.”

  “You found another answer.” Shields = deflected magic = collateral damage.

  “Damn straight. Based on you and dragons.”

  Her forehead wrinkled. Dragons were magical sponges. So was she, to a much lesser degree. “You want to soak up the magic instead of deflecting it?”

  “Soak it up and store it…that’s the way to go. We do know something about storing magic. Not as much as the sidhe, but something. Enough to get me started, but I wasn’t making much headway until I started playing around with truth charms. You know that Arjenie burns them out?”

  “That’s what you said, yeah. Something about her Gift overloads them.” Benedict’s new Chosen had a rare Gift, a variant of the sidhe ability to cast illusions that let her go undetected. It wasn’t true invisibility. It was better, because it also baffled hearing, scent, and most wards.

  “I was curious about that, and so was she, so we experimented a bit. We figured it out, too. Her Gift is essentially the ability to lie to the mind. Even when she isn’t actively lying, the kind of magic she uses overloads any truth charm touching her.”

  “That makes sense.” Arj. magic mental lie—overloads trth charms, her pen noted. She snuck a glance at Rule. He was on the last page, but she wasn’t sure he was reading it. He seemed to be off in some private world, staring at the words without seeing them.

  “But the cool part is what that meant. It meant the charms were soaking up some of her magic. They had to be, or they wouldn’t burn out. Only a teensy trace, sure, but when I looked into it, I found that truth charms sample a trace of whatever magic is around—including raw magic.”

  Trth charms sampl magic. “No one knew this?”

  He shrugged. “No reason to. They’re designed to work on nulls as well as Gifted, so why would they sample magic? Plus the amount of power they sample is so tiny…it took a lot of tinkering with my magnify spell before I could see it, but I did see it. That was the first time I’d seen any formed magic work at all the way your Gift does—by sampling a smidge of magic—so I knew I was onto something. After a godawful amount of trial and error, I made a charm that does more than sample. It acts as a funnel, sending all the magic it comes in contact with into an array of lemon quartz crystals.”

  “Why lemon quartz?”

  “Trees are too big and diamonds cost too damn much.”

  “Okaaaay.”

  “If I explained about trees, you’d yell at me for getting sidetracked. As for diamonds, they are the best portable way to store raw magic, no question about it. But they don’t provide a great matrix for elemental magic, and the power the charm funnels is…you might say it’s predisposed toward becoming mind-magic. It’s not there yet, but the potentialities have been changed by the charm, giving it an affinity for Air, which is the element for mind-magic. Mind, all this classifying by element type is as imprecise as most generalizations. We’re really talking about how the magic gets shaped by whatever absorbs then releases it, so—”

  “Cullen.”

  “Too much? Okay. I used lemon quartz because Air magic can’t be stored, but mind-magic can, and lemon quartz is generally the best matrix for mind-magic. But in this case, the power settles easily into lemon quartz.” He stopped. His expression shifted to gloom. “And that’s the problem.”

  “I thought the problem was that the device makes the unGifted have false memories. Memories of weird stuff.”

  “It does that when the array discharges suddenly, and it does that because the magic is unstable when it enters the array. It finishes transforming into mind-magic while it’s in there, but the initial instability messes up the matrix.” He brooded on that a moment before adding, “At least I think that’s what’s happening.”

  “Why does the discharge only affect nulls?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve told you what I know. I need the damn prototype back to run more tests.”

  “You can make another if you have to, right?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Tell her,” Rule said.

  Okay, he had been listening, after all.

  “But…” Cullen’s gaze went significantly toward the front seat.

  Rule closed the folder. “Oh, very well. Scott, you will not speak of or otherwise reveal what Cullen says about his prototype to anyone who is not present in this car now. José, the same instruction for you, with the exception of your Rho. That was unnecessary,” he added to Cullen, “but I trust you feel better now.”

  Cullen scowled and looked at Lily. “No notes. This does not go into your report. It doesn’t get written down.”

  “I’ll agree to keep it off the record for now. I can’t agree it will never go in the record.”

  His scowl didn’t ease. “Rule—”

  “You mistake my authority if you think I can tell Lily what to do.”

  “I just thought…never mind.” He looked directly at Lily. “No notes.”

  She clicked her pen and set it down.
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  “I made the prototype over five weeks ago. It’s still working.”

  “Okay.”

  He made an impatient sound. “Five weeks, and I haven’t renewed the charm.”

  “But you told me charms couldn’t last beyond one moon cycle without being renewed. Only artifacts can.…shit. You mean—”

  “It’s not an artifact. Not really. It has about as much in common with real artifacts as Alexander Volta’s ‘voltaic pile’ would with a modern lithium battery. But it is the first self-renewing charm created in our world since the last adept died, and it is possibly a first step toward creating a genuine artifact.”

  “But that means…” Her fingers twitched. Writing things down helped her think, dammit. “That means that whoever took it may not be interested in how it protects tech, or in creating weird fake memories. They may have had it stolen because it’s a…a quasi-artifact. Who else knows about this?” she demanded.

  “Three more people than did a minute ago,” he said dryly. “The only ones I’ve told until now were Cynna, Rule, and Isen. But it’s possible the wrong person saw the prototype. I’m no adept. I don’t know how to hide the guts of a spell or charm the way they did. If a sorcerer saw my prototype, he or she might be able to figure out what it was. What it could do, if not exactly how it worked.”

  “So now we’ve got sorcerers as well as several major corporations for suspects.” Not that this expanded their pool enormously. Sorcerers were extremely rare. But they were also extremely secretive, which meant they’d have a helluva time figuring out who, exactly, went on the suspect list. “And you’re just now mentioning this?”

  He sighed. “We probably have to add one more group to your list.”

  “Who?’

  “You know that trade delegation that arrived in D.C. via the Edge gate about two weeks ago? First inter-realm trade in hundreds of years.”

  “Of course.” The news had been full of it.

  “The delegates include three elves, several humans who seem to be servants, and a halfling of some kind.”