Julia was waiting for us. She looked much better than the last time I saw her. Her dark hair had been washed and brushed. Her dark eyes were prominent in her pale face. A pretty girl. Even without any makeup, she would turn heads. But at the moment, she simply looked like a scared little child.
“Julia, I’m Captain James, Arcane Division. I’m investigating the deaths of your family. Are you aware of what happened to them?” I figured it was a good idea to reintroduce myself, since I had no idea what she understood or remembered from our previous meetings.
Her voice was quiet, almost inaudible. “You said they were poisoned.”
“Yes. Your parents, brother and sister, all of the servants, and two of the security guards.”
“The servants?”
“Yes. Everyone who ate at your house that day—the day when you took off with Freddy.”
Julia sat quietly, her expression unchanged. I waited. Gradually, I saw something change in her eyes. And then a tear broke free and trailed down her cheek.
“We found a can of salt in the kitchen pantry,” I said. “Salt magikally bound to thallium sulfate. The cook used it in the food, everyone ate it, everyone died. Now, we found traces of thallium sulfate in that lab in Freddy’s basement, and Headmistress Stolnikova told me that you had conducted unsanctioned experiments using magik with chemistry. So, what I want to know is, why you wanted to kill your family.”
“There has to be some kind of mistake,” she wailed. “You’re lying. Why are you doing this?”
“What else were you playing with? Potassium cyanide? Ricin? The HLA are not a bunch of selfless revolutionaries. They’re ruthless thugs. You made them a batch of poison, and they tested it on your family. And if you had stuck around for lunch instead of running off to get high, you’d be dead as well.”
Ruth reached out and touched my arm, shaking her head, and I realized I’d pushed too hard.
“Freddy said he was selling it to a guy who owns a pest-control company,” Julia sobbed. “They wanted it for rats from the Waste. I never would have done it if I knew they were going to use it on people.”
I relented and let Ruth take Julia back to her room. I had what I needed. The girl had been foolish, and the drugs hadn’t helped her make good decisions. But from my point of view, her actions were only borderline criminal. Counseling and restrictions were probably enough to turn her around. I wouldn’t be recommending any prison time. Her Family would take care of her.
Chapter 12
Mark Clifford’s age bothered me. He was old enough to have fought in the Rift War, and he’d survived. I called my boss, another survivor of that war.
“Do you know a man named Mark Clifford? He’s an instructor at UM, and our databases don’t have much on him, but he’s about your age.”
“Hang on,” Whittaker said. “Let me pull up his picture.”
I waited, hearing typing in the background.
“Ah, yes, but not under that name. I know him as Jonas Clifford. Pyromancer, and a strong one. He was against the formation of the Magi Council. Thought we should have a democracy, with everyone over eighteen having a vote. Needless to say, that didn’t make him too popular among other mages.”
“What was his position back then?”
“A high level field commander who led the defense of Atlanta. He was a university professor before the Rift War, and I guess he returned to it afterward.”
More typing in the background.
“Here it is,” Whittaker said. “Full name is Jonas Marcus Clifford. I’ll send you the link to where I found it. Old database. Why do you want to know?”
“Because I think he’s HLA, in league with Susan Reed, and behind the thallium poisonings.”
Whittaker cursed. “You’d better take some serious firepower with you if you try to arrest him. When I say he’s a pyromancer, that’s like saying your grandmother is an electrokinetic. Factual, but understating his power.”
“Wonderful.”
“Take Jim Conway’s SWAT team with you,” Whittaker said. “And tell him you need his spirit mages.”
I suddenly felt numb and cold. In the past, I had worked with Captain Conway’s team and the three spirit mages the police department employed. If Whittaker was that concerned about Clifford, I knew enough to be afraid.
It was mid-afternoon, and I knew coordinating the SWAT team and other people I needed would take time. I called Conway and arranged a meeting with him the following morning. Then I called Mychal. Carmelita was a strong aeromancer, but Mychal was stronger and older.
Mage power tended to grow with age, then plateau at each person’s peak power when they were about a hundred fifty years old. That meant neither my grandmother nor Tom Whittaker nor Mark Clifford had reached their peak yet. And if Whittaker considered Clifford to be impressive seventy years before, the only way his powers could have diminished was through alcohol, drugs, or injury. Even lack of use wouldn’t cause a serious deterioration.
Figuring the following day was going to be a doozy, I took off a little early and walked over to Kirsten’s shop. On the way, I stopped by a fish monger’s shop and picked up a whole flounder for dinner.
The wood sculpture of the elven goddess sat in Kirsten’s front window, as breath-taking and beautiful as the first time I saw it.
“Hey, you’re off early,” Kirsten said when I entered the shop. “Slow day for crime?”
“Slow day for results.” I held up the wrapped fish. “Think you can do something with a flounder and a pound of crab meat?”
She grinned. “I’ll figure out something. Are we having company?”
“I hope so, but I haven’t called Aleks yet.”
I put the fish in the fridge in her back room, then called Aleks and invited him to dinner. I had seen his refrigerator and knew he wasn’t much of a cook. That worried me since I didn’t trust any of the fancy restaurants he tended to frequent. I doubted the HLA would target crab shacks, pubs, and diners outside the richer neighborhoods.
I also called Diana Benning. When she answered, I said, “Diana, this is Danica James. I was wondering if you have a little time for me this afternoon.”
“Of course, I do, Danica. Stop by the house.”
Telling Kirsten I would see her at our home, I drove up to the Benning residence in Roland Park. I hadn’t seen Diana since the ambush that took her husband’s life and put her in the hospital with major injuries to her head and face.
Security guards checked my ID at the gate to the Benning estate. A human butler answered the door. I noticed a bulge in his coat where a person would wear a shoulder holster. It appeared that Diana had bolstered her security. Neither of those things were evident the last time I visited the house.
The butler showed me to a cozy parlor with a fire in the fireplace. A tea service and biscuits sat on a low table between two comfortable chairs facing the fire. Diana rose to greet me.
“Danica. It’s been a while.” She pulled me into a quick hug and motioned for me to sit. I did and watched her pour tea.
“So, what can I do for you?”
I told her what we had discovered about her missing truck and how we suspected the HLA was using it.
“Each of our trucks is numbered,” she said when I finished. “I can send an email out to all of our customers, but I can’t guarantee they’ll read it.”
“And we can’t guarantee that there aren’t any HLA radicals among your customers’ employees,” I said, “but it’s better than nothing. Tell them to simply set aside anything delivered by that truck and call my office.” I handed Diana a card with Luanne’s phone number. If she wasn’t at her desk, the call would route to the main Arcane Division receptionist.
“And how are you doing?” I asked. I could see a couple of faint scars—one on her forehead and on her left cheek.
“Fairly well. The hospital and doctor’s bills were fairly staggering. I now know how the Silverman Family ranks in the Hundred. I’m still not used to being alone. I miss
Justus far more than I expected I would. I find myself wanting to tell him something, and then realize he won’t be coming home. It’s the worst at night. I sit here alone, and then get in a cold bed. Danica, I’ve always considered myself a strong woman, but I’ve discovered I need a man in my life. We got married right after I graduated university, so I’ve never really been alone.”
Diana was much younger than her husband, and perfectly fit the image of a trophy wife. But I knew she was far more intelligent and capable than the average arm candy.
After I cleared the dinner dishes and Aleks opened the second bottle of wine he’d brought, I told my friends about Mark Clifford.
“I’m not sure what the best approach is,” I said. “The homes in his neighborhood are close together like we are here. We can try to intercept him when he’s out somewhere, but I don’t know if he drives or takes the train to work. And trying to arrest him at the university has its own problems with the number of people around.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask why so many houses on your street are for sale,” Aleks said with a raised eyebrow.
“We had a minor demon problem,” Kirsten said. “The neighbors’ insurance companies were a pain in the ass.”
“That’s why I’m pulling as many aeromancers on the force as I can for this operation tomorrow,” I said. “If Clifford resists arrest, we’ll need as much shielding as we can muster.”
“And what are you going to do?” Aleks asked.
“Make Mychal hold my hand.”
“Why don’t you make a magitek device to shield you?” Kirsten asked.
With Mychal and Aleks jumping in to second her, that is what I spent the rest of my evening doing.
In my workshop behind our house, I had a supply of the silver boxes that magiteks used to capture and store magik, as well as manipulate mechanical and electrical devices.
I set up one of the boxes, then asked Mychal to cast a shield spell at the box. Instead of the box being shielded, it sucked up the magik. After an hour or so working on it and fine-tuning it, I had a box that would project four different magikal shields of various strengths. The strongest of the shields used Mychal’s air magik enhanced by Aleks’s spirit magik. My testing showed that it worked, but none of my friends was trying to toast me with steel-melting fireballs.
When we finished, Kirsten asked, “Isn’t there any way to make one of those boxes multi-functional? I mean, you have that electrical box, and an airshield box, and converters and enhancers, and what all else. It seems you’re carrying a lot of little boxes around.”
I shrugged. “I’ve built some multi-function boxes, such as the ones that run your greenhouses, but the various spells need to be kept separated from each other. If I were to load several different kinds of magik in one box, differentiating them would be impossible. Too chaotic. Besides, several small boxes are easier to carry than one the size of a soccer ball.”
Chapter 13
Jim Conway, Mychal, and Janice Clarington—a spirit mage I had worked with before—met in my office at eight o’clock in the morning. I told them about my concerns of arresting Mark Clifford, then sat back and listened. Even though I was in charge of the operation, Conway had a lot more experience than I did, while Mychal and Janice had talents that might help mitigate any resistance from Clifford.
We brainstormed several possible scenarios, and in the end, everyone sort of threw up their hands, turned to me, and asked, “So, how do you want to handle this?”
I decided that participatory democracy was highly overrated.
“We know where he’ll be today at noon,” I said. “Walking out of his class on the Catonsville campus. We encase him in an airshield and haul him off in a containment van.”
“Sounds good to me,” Conway said, and the others nodded.
A containment van had null-magik spells built into its walls, just as the cells in our jails and prisons did. Even the strongest mages and witches were powerless inside.
I laid out the plan for the rest of my team, and we headed out to Catonsville.
There hadn’t been any official announcement of Freddy’s arrest or Julia’s recovery, but I suspected the word about our bust had probably filtered out. To have Freddy and three other drug dealers just disappear was bound to attract somebody’s notice. And who knew how many people living on their street might have known them or noticed all the cop cars and the ambulance?
So I wasn’t surprised when our plan went sideways almost immediately. Most buildings have at least four sides. Conway and I had seven aeromancers and three spirit mages, so it left us a little thin trying to cover all of the exits. Clifford also let his class out early. That shouldn’t have been a problem if everyone had been focused and vigilant. But a little bit of wandering attention meant that Clifford made it out of a side door of the building in the midst of a crowd of students.
“Captain, subject in sight, but he’s in a crowd,” Carmelita said when I answered my phone.
“Surround him at a distance and move with him,” I responded. “I’ll have reinforcements there in a minute.”
I contacted Conway, and he began directing people. Mychal, Janice, and I were standing across the street from the main entrance, and we took off toward the side Carmelita was covering.
When we rounded the corner of the building, we ran into a crowd of students. They were armed with signs supporting the HLA, and a fierce determination.
My phone rang again. “Captain, we seem to have walked into the middle of an HLA demonstration.”
Looking around, I saw several large groups scattered around the area, carrying protest signs.
“Where is Clifford?” I asked.
“Headed in the direction of the student center. It looks like they plan to use the front porch for delivering speeches. I can see some loudspeakers and a microphone stand.”
“Don’t let him out of your sight.”
Mychal was on his phone as we trotted along. We reached an open plaza along with several hundred students. They milled around, some seemed curious, some boisterous, a few had serious expressions. Those carrying placards appeared excited. I hadn’t been around many campus demonstrations when I was a student. Engineering students usually didn’t have time for such frivolity. We were too afraid of flunking out.
“This demonstration was announced this morning,” Mychal said as he put his phone away. “The university hasn’t granted them a permit, so technically it’s an unlawful gathering.”
“Right. Somehow, I can’t see anyone being stupid enough to start arresting people. I’m sure the campus cops don’t want a riot any more than we do.” I called Carmelita. “Where is he?”
“Standing at the front with a mic in his hand.”
Mychal and I made our way through the crowd and took up positions to the right of the makeshift stage in front of the building entrance.
“Conway,” I said into my direct connection to him, “keep the uniforms back. I don’t want to spook him.” It was bad enough that Mychal and I stood out—Mychal due to his suit, and both of us due to our ages. But as I looked around, I saw others in the crowd as old or older than we were.
What followed were speeches by Clifford and three other people denouncing the Magi, demons, and Rifters in general, and the unfairness of life under the current system. Their complaints primarily targeted the oppression of the Magi, and the economic control the Families held over the far more numerous normal humans.
I kept my focus on Clifford—who he stood with, and who he spoke with when he didn’t have the mic in his hand, as much as what he said and his body language when he addressed the crowd. His thick hair was salt-and-pepper, his face strong and handsome, and he looked fit enough to hold his own in a fight. He looked the part of a distinguished professor—tweed jacket, necktie, swaggering confidence. I wondered why he was still at an instructor’s rank. He certainly had the seniority and credentials.
I mentioned that speculation to Mychal.
“His politics,�
� Mychal said. “His views. No one is going to promote someone who is anti-Magi and make it look like the university endorses his radical views.”
I didn’t reply. A lot of the HLA’s views coincided with mine. The Thousand controlled ninety percent of the world’s resources and wealth. They horded when millions were starving. They accrued power and lorded it over everyone else, and I intimately knew that many of them were personally worthless, with the intelligence, morals, and ethics of alley rats.
But I couldn’t condone the HLA’s methods. Lawlessness and slaughter weren’t the way to change the world.
One of the speakers excoriated the Magi for their deal with the demons that ended the Rift War. He said we had sold out humanity. It was a common gripe, but one that ignored reality. The magik users—mages and witches—weren’t numerous enough or powerful enough to truly defeat the demons. And there was no way to repair the Rift. No matter what we did, demons would continue to come across, and since the Rift constantly and randomly moved around, there was no way to construct viable defenses.
“He’s moving,” I said, elbowing Mychal in the ribs. Clifford was edging away from the center of the speaker’s stage. He climbed down from the tables that had been pushed together and stood there, looking around.
Mychal spoke into his collar mic, “Subject is moving. Everyone stand by.”
Gradually, Clifford began sidling away from the center of attention, reaching the edge of the crowd, and then slipping in amongst them.
“Let’s go,” I said and stepped forward. I halted when Mychal put a hand on my shoulder.
“Cast your shield.”
“Oh, right.” Without taking my eyes off Clifford, I reached in my pockets and pulled out both my lightning box and the new airshield box.
It actually would have been difficult to miss Clifford in a crowd. The man was huge, a head taller than anyone around him and built like an armored car. I tracked him, keeping my distance, until he reached the fringes of the crowd. Then I moved in, Mychal and Janice close behind me.
Soul Harvest (The Rift Chronicles Book 3) Page 7