She arranged the shopping bags on the furniture. She’d only been to Vegas a few times, but she’d chosen Planet Hollywood Casino because of the attached shopping mall.
“Clothes for our growing boys,” she said. She’d had a hell of a time finding clothes that fit her altered figure. The ones that did were snugger and far more revealing than her preferred style, but that was the best sort of disguise, wasn’t it?
Baring cleavage and skin had turned out to have other benefits. She pulled a newly-purchased purse out of her shopping bag. Opening the purse, she produced a roll of cash large enough to choke the proverbial horse.
Kelsey’s eyes bugged out. “Where did you get that? Gambling?”
Helen snorted. “Even if I pushed a blackjack dealer to keep losing to me, there are enough cameras in this place that security would pick up on it.” She smiled and started handing out wads of bills. “But there aren’t any cameras in the rooms.” Helen winked. “Watch long enough, you see a high roller getting ready to cash out. A few words in his ear and he’s all mine.”
Giselle giggled. “You screwed a guy for his cash? You slut.”
She rolled her eyes. “Hardly. Oh, I played the game. But as soon as we were up in the room I asked him to hand it all over, then told him he lost at the tables. Poor guy’s working his way through the mini bar as we speak.”
Roxanne laughed, then adopted a thoughtful look as something occurred to her. “You can change memories, just like that? How effective is it?”
Helen shrugged. “They’ll believe it’s as real as anything memory in their head, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary.” Roxanne still stared off into space, but she snapped out of it as Helen continued to unload items from the shopping bags. “Clothes, toiletries, more bags if you need them, ladies. There are a few electronics stores in the mall. Split up and get yourselves prepaid cell phones. You need to ditch your old phones.”
“Ugh, seriously?” Kelsey whined.
“Yes, absolutely,” Helen replied, putting a harsh pitch to her voice. “It’s only a matter of time before they’ll use them to track the three of you, and the rest of us, down. We’re not ready for that fight, not yet.”
“What, cops?” Giselle rolled her eyes. “So you tell them to put their guns down or we fire them up. We handled the prison guards, no sweat.”
She remained silent for a moment, then murmured, “I’m not talking about cops. I’m talking about Division M. They’ll go through the three of you and your familiars without breaking a sweat. Who did you think cleaned out my archives?” She grimaced. “You think I didn’t have wards to secure them from prying eyes?”
The girls glanced at each other, confused. She supposed it was a bit like being told the sky was really blue.
“How big a problem are we talking?” Kelsey demanded.
“It depends,” Helen said with a shrug. “We could run into a Glenda, or a standard-issue G-Man. There are rumors out there that they’ve got other sorts of magical creatures working for them, but that could be an urban legend. Either way, we need to stay one step ahead of them until we can get the book back. It would surprise me if any of them know how powerful it really is.” She waved the cash. “So, go. Shop.”
They were hesitant, but the prospect of unbridled consumerist consumption was too much to resist. The three took their shares and headed for the door.
Roxanne held back. Helen thought she might know what was coming, though she adopted a look of cool surprise on her face when the girl cleared her throat with one hand on the door handle.
“Yes?”
“I wanted to ask—we’ve gone through all the pages we recovered, and there’s no spell that does what you did to yourself. Can you—I don’t know, teach me?”
Helen favored the younger girl with a warm smile. “Now? No. But once we retrieve my grimoire—yes.” The lie came easily to her lips. The spell, so far as she knew, wasn’t in the grimoire. But the girl didn’t need to know that. She hesitated, then said, “I can’t imagine you want to be younger.”
“No, but I...” Roxanne flushed with embarrassment. “Please don’t make me say it.”
She patted the girl’s cheek. At once, a memory of doing something similar to Paxton when he was younger came to mind, but she forced herself to tamp it down. She had a mission to complete, and extraneous emotion would be more of a disservice than anything.
“All right. When the time comes, we’ll need to find someone close to your age or a little bit younger. It’s an average, I suppose you could say.” Helen indicated herself. “I’m not nearly as stacked as that young lady at the party. In your case, you’ll want something more like what I used to look like, I imagine. But yes, what you want can be done.” She paused. “I just need you to promise me that you’re willing to do what it takes. Some of it might be—distasteful. But it’s for the greater good.”
Her acolyte’s eyes glittered with an avarice that dimmed just a bit as she realized her own naked greed. “I’ll be ready,” she promised. “When the time comes, I won’t hold back.” Roxanne beamed. “I want to help you.”
Paxton
Albuquerque, New Mexico—Tuesday evening
Cassie let the spine of the grimoire hit the surface of the dinette table. The meaty thump seemed far louder than a book of its size should have been able to produce. I couldn’t say that I was surprised. At certain times it felt like an anchor in my shoulder bag, while at others it seemed to weigh next to nothing at all. Right now, I was sore enough from our morning workout that I was just happy to sit down. The dull ache in my legs eased a bit, though it was still there in the back of my mind.
I’d almost killed myself using healing magic on Cassie, and I was reluctant to push myself too much until I recovered a bit more. But if this worked, she’d be able to help that along a bit.
So far, no such luck.
“Unbelievable,” she said. “And you’re sure this is the healing spell?”
I rotated the book and glanced at the stylized writing and drawings on the pages. “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t get it, either.” I frowned and shook my head. “What do you see?”
She laid her index finger on blank space and recited, “Essence of lupo mannaro. Grind freshly-gathered wolf’s claw in a granite mortar. Mix the paste with ethanol at a ten-to-one ratio. Cure in sunlight in a sealed glass jar for twenty-eight days. The resulting mixture should be the consistency of thin mud. Keep away from open flames.”
I rubbed my face. “This is insane. Hang on.” Pulling the grimoire closer, I closed the cover and thought about the time when I’d learned the TK spell. When I opened the book to a random page, there it was. “Try this.”
She studied the book for a moment, then read, “When properly prepared, ashwagandha root can temporarily boost strength and stamina, but care should be taken not to…” She trailed off and gave me a quizzical look. “It’s a gardening book?”
“It is for you,” I said, resisting the urge to laugh as I pulled it closer and checked the page. For me, it was the TK spell. In retrospect, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that a book that defied all logic should be so illogical. I gave it an annoyed look, then raised my eyes to meet Cassie’s.
“Okay, Velma, you want to see if the third time’s the charm?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Wrong hair color, no glasses…” She winked and added, “Much cuter.”
“Serious? Velma grew up and married Hawkeye. She’s a babe.” Cassie gave me a one-eyed squint of confusion, and I hurried past the moment. “Beside the point. Okay. The book responds to thought. Focus on what you want to learn, then open the page and see what you’ve got.”
Cassie shrugged and closed her eyes for a moment. She reached out blindly, opened the book, then leaned forward. She didn’t recoil in terror, which was a good sign. I’d once made the mistake of wondering what Mother had intended to use the book for, and even a momentary glimpse had chilled me to the bone.
For a moment I worri
ed that it wouldn’t work for Cassie. For all I knew, I was some weird freak and magic wasn’t something anyone could learn.
“Huh,” she said. “Weird.” And then—it happened.
I hadn’t seen my own reaction when I’d first studied the book, for obvious reasons, and being honest it was creepy to watch from this side. Cassie’s face went blank, and for half a minute or more she didn’t so much as blink as she stared at the pages laid open before her.
At once, as though returning to herself, she shook her head and took a deep breath. She noticed my look but didn’t say anything.
A few moments later, I couldn’t take the silence, and I said, “Well?”
“You said it’s like a control panel in your head, right?”
“Basically, yeah. That was the easiest way I could visualize it.”
She grinned. “You are such a nerd. It’s like a yoga pose, almost, except I’m not moving.”
“Well, at least you don’t have to wave your hands and shout made-up words,” I pointed out.
“There is that. So, aren’t you curious?” She raised an eyebrow, and her smile turned mischievous.
“I’m going to take a guess that it’s neither healing nor telekinesis, is it?” To the extent that a magical book made sense, the fact that Cassie’s perception of it was entirely different from my own made sense in a stupid sort of way. I thought of a computer control panel because that was the way my mind worked. She saw yoga because that was how Cassie clicked. Of course, now that I thought about it, it was odd that I saw the same things that mother did. There must be more to it than mindset. Genetics, maybe, or innate talent. We had a book, but it wasn’t like it was an instruction manual.
That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. The instruction manual for the last stereo I bought was poorly-translated from badly-worded Japanese. It was a wonder I got the thing hooked up. Shaking off my woolgathering, I added, “Well?”
“I can neither fetch you a beer, nor heal a scratch, but I can…” She frowned. “I’m not sure how to phrase it. It’s not a lie detector, and it’s not reading minds.” Cassie snapped her fingers. “Do you remember Counselor Troi?”
I tried not to laugh. “From Next Generation? You’re starting to lose jock points here, Cass. Next time you call me a nerd I’m throwing that right back at you.”
“Shut up. I used to watch reruns with my dad. And Geordi was hot.”
“All right, truce. So, it’s empathy, then?” I tried to keep the doubt of my voice. Being able to detect emotions didn’t strike me as useful. It was pretty much the world’s worst superpower save for a very few specific situations.
“Kind of,” Cassie temporized. She looked down at the opened pages and shook her head. “This thing has a lot of ten-dollar words in it. It’s pretentious.” She drew back from the book, then laughed. “And a smart ass.”
“Takes one to know one,” I said. I craned my head, trying to see what the grimoire was showing her, but it was illegible, from this angle. Was that a feature or a bug? Handy, either way.
“It dumbed it down for me. It’s an objective truth spell.”
“I doodled my way through English Lit. What does that mean?”
She closed the book and thought about it for a second. “Okay, so say someone is blackout drunk, and runs someone over them and kills them. The cops arrest them and hook them up to a lie detector. ‘Did you kill this person?’ The drunk driver says no, and from their perspective, they’re telling the truth. They don’t remember it happening, so in their subjective reality, it didn’t happen. They’re not lying, technically.”
“Okay.”
“So, the objective reality is, yes, they did kill someone. This would show me the truth of what happened, I guess.”
I leaned back in my seat and raised my eyebrows. “Wow. Wow. You know, it’s a good thing my mom never passed this one on, because it would have made things difficult down in the basement.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when Melanie pushed me to tell her where the grimoire was, I told her where I’d pushed myself to believe it was. I believed I was telling the truth, and she had no reason to doubt otherwise.” I shuddered. There was still a bit of a disconnect in my head, even after the spell effect had ended. I could still see myself doing something that was an aspect of my imagination, and it felt as real as any of my true memories. I vowed to take that as a warning to avoid that usage in the future. Too many fake memories chasing real ones, and it wouldn’t take long before someone could lose track of reality.
“If we’re going to help solve a murder, sounds like this will come in handy.”
She was right. It would have been great to have her able to TK or heal, on the off chance that I was otherwise unable to, but yeah, knowing whether or not someone was lying to us would simplify things.
“Wait,” I said, excited. “What’s the limit? I mean, try this. Ask me who’s killing all the people in Phoenix!”
She hesitated for a second, then said. “Who’s the killer that Kent is looking for?”
“The anchor on the Channel 5 news,” I said after a moment, going for the most nonsensical thing I could think of.
Cassie frowned. “I know that’s not true, but I don’t get anything other than that. I think it’s limited to something directly associated with you.”
“I guess I’ve already used up my deus ex machina quota for the month.”
At once, she favored me with a mischievous smile. “Well, answer me this, Mr. Locke. Is our affiliation purely professional, or is there more to it?”
“I have no idea what you mean,” I stammered. If the sudden clumsiness of my tongue wasn’t answer enough, she must have gotten plenty more from the spell, because she blushed and pressed her lips together to hold back her smile.
Well, shit.
CHAPTER 8
Valentine
University of Wisconsin, Madison—Wednesday afternoon
“Yeah, that’s Kelsey,” the coed agreed. She handed back the picture to Valentine. “Good drawing.” She rolled her eyes.
He gave Eliot a glance and commented, “Not a fan, I take it?”
The coed’s expression was dubious. “Well…”
Valentine suppressed a smile and raised a hand to soothe her nerves. “Background purposes only. She’s fallen in with a bad crowd. We’re trying to track them down before they do anything they’ll regret.”
The girl stared at Val for a long moment before speaking. “I roomed with her freshman year. She’s a teeny little thing, so you assume that she’s harmless, and maybe that’s true. She’s not the type to get wasted and start pulling hair, but she’s vicious.”
“How so?”
“She’s a—needler, I guess you could say? My grandpa died right before Christmas break. The new semester starts, and every so often at random, she’ll make a comment about what she did with her grandparents over the holiday, that sort of thing. There were two other girls in our dorm room. They both moved out before spring break. I don’t know what she did to them, but it couldn’t have been good.” The coed cocked her head to one side and said, “Just the look in her eyes, sometimes, you know? Like, if you told me she used to fry ants with a magnifying glass, I’d buy it.”
He reappraised the coed. “You didn’t move out?”
“Hell with that bitch,” the girl shrugged. “I went to an IB school, I’m used to passive aggressive garbage.”
“Good for you.” Val passed over a business card. “You think of anything else, give me a call. And I know she doesn’t intimidate you, but if you see her around, get the hell out of Dodge, all right?”
She tucked the card into her purse and nodded. “Will do.”
Eliot waited until she was out of earshot before speaking. “That’s three-for-three, then. The ant-fryer, the bullied one, and the evil queen.”
“Kids really fry ants, like she’s talking about?”
“Beats me. Never had any, myself.”
Val g
runted.
“How do these sorts find each other, you think?” Eliot mused. “Seems like it’s the same story every time.” Both Melanie Gennaro and Trace Jensen had attended Wisconsin. It had been a leap to assume the rest of Locke’s groupies had, as well, but it was one that had paid off.
“Maybe sociopaths can smell each other,” Val guessed. “Let’s go.”
Government credentials were a Godsend when it came to parking on a college campus. George had flashed his ID and waved off any number of ticket-issuing campus police. When he saw the two heading back to the vehicle, he fired up the cargo van’s engine and toggled a switch that opened the sliding door on the passenger side.
The interior of the vehicle was better equipped on the inside than the plain black exterior might have suggested. A workbench ran the entire length of the driver’s side, supporting a few portable computer workstations and other, more exotic equipment.
The passenger side was more open, but the outfitters had installed several comfortable bucket seats there, with plenty of leg room and folding worktops that tucked into a slot on the side of each chair when not in use. Val settled into the seat closet to the slider and rotated to face Morgan. She sat at one of the driver’s side stations, computer logged into the Department of Justice intranet.
He passed over the third and final drawing. Her magic-assisted recall and work with a police sketch artist back in Iowa City had resulted in nigh-perfect portraits. It had taken them a while to find students who recognized the pictures, but once they did it was smooth sailing. “Kelsey Dietz,” he said. He consulted the notebook he kept tucked inside his suit coat and spelled the last name.
While Val and Eliot canvased the student body, Morgan had acquired a blanket FISA warrant. With each name the two agents brought in, she was able to expand the scope of her search wider and wider. Searches through college records and social media accounts had garnered cell phone numbers, which had led to the telecom search. She’d struck out with the first two names, but she dug into the third set of searches with the same gusto, and in this case, the third time was the charm. She crowed in victory. “Got something! One of the little idiots used her cell phone. The last ping was in Newton, Iowa,” Morgan announced. “She sent a text message!” She leaned in, tapping away to bring the message up.
Night's Black Agents (Paxton Locke Book 2) Page 6