Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  The IDs were all returned without issue, and the men strolled over to the third truck.

  Three minutes later, the men gave the all clear to the guard at the gatehouse, and the guard hit the open switch. The black iron gates that separated the sprawling Radigan estate from the city’s riffraff parted with nary a squeak, and the trucks drove on toward the two-story mansion where a killer lived and a demon lurked.

  They were in. Now all they had to do was win.

  16

  Liam

  The interior of the Radigan mansion was a testament to the fact that money did not account for taste. Numerous rooms had been added to the building since its original construction four generations earlier, and even the untrained eye could pick out the awkward transitions between each era of renovation.

  The original oak flooring in the main hall clashed with the walnut in the living room and the maple in the library. The main kitchen had been done up in the modern style, with dark cabinets and white-marble countertops, but the formal dining room right next to it had an antique table and a carpet that might’ve actually been purchased in Persia.

  Delivering orders in her gruff alto, Patricia had the catering team haul out all the stuff they’d spent so long packing and pile up most of it in the wine cellar underneath the kitchen. The cellar was accessed through a narrow staircase connected to a door in the kitchen pantry, but as Liam was setting down a couple boxes of utensils, he noticed that the cellar had another exit, presumably one that opened into the basement proper.

  He nudged Kat, who’d just dropped off a box of napkins, and inclined his head toward the door. Kat got the message—she and Gabby should try going that way first—and nodded.

  All the nonperishables unloaded, they moved on to the more delicate task of chaotically dumping food containers onto the kitchen countertops. Once every scrap of food had been dug out of the trucks, the cooks got back to work, finishing what they’d started at the Arnold’s building. Patricia led everyone else to the one room in the whole mansion that Liam actually thought beautiful: a large courtyard set between the indoor pool and the fifteen-car garage.

  The courtyard had a glass ceiling and walls with large windowpanes that could be opened in the summer to let in the breeze. Now, of course, they were all shut to block out the winter chill, and the vents in the floor were steadily blowing in heat to warm the courtyard before the guests arrived.

  Perfectly manicured trees and shrubs bordered the courtyard, and at the center lay a small flower garden with a burbling fountain as its feature piece. All around the garden, circular metal tables with delicate designs had been set out, along with matching chairs. On the far side of the courtyard was the stage where the auction would take place, and across the back were the long folding tables where the brunch would be served.

  The next forty-five minutes were spent laying out plates, utensils, and napkins for each table. Near the end of this exercise, Arnold himself arrived. He took one peek into the courtyard and huffed in irritation that they weren’t already finished with the setup. Then he stormed off into the kitchen, where he immediately started yelling at people in both English and very poor French.

  Liam was suddenly glad that none of them had ended up with cooking jobs.

  Another half hour passed in relative peace—Arnold’s scolding eventually faded into white noise—while they worked on the finishing touches for the courtyard.

  And then Samuel Radigan walked into the room.

  The man in real life looked the same way he did on TV. He had a distinguished air amplified by a touch of gray at his temples and a pronounced brow that made it seem as if he was always contemplating important issues. His brown eyes swept the room, sharp as a tack but sagging at the edges, like he’d been working too hard lately. And the smile that he slapped onto his clean-shaven face wasn’t entirely genuine.

  “Good work, everyone,” he called out. “It looks lovely. Thank you for all your effort.”

  “Only the best for you, Senator Radigan,” replied Patricia, who had swept all her vulgarity under the rug. “Please let me know if you’d like any changes.”

  “Afraid I’m not much of an interior designer.” He chuckled, but the sound was flat. “I’ll ask Sally to swing by and take a look.”

  At that, he turned tail and retreated back into the house.

  Kat caught Liam’s eye and mouthed, Something’s definitely up with him.

  Liam wholeheartedly agreed. Radigan’s demeanor didn’t scream guilt, but he’d clearly been under tremendous strain in recent days.

  Patricia clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention. “The guests will start arriving in just under an hour. So wrap up all the decorating and get your butts back to the kitchen. There’s an assignment schedule taped to the fridge, broken down hour by hour.”

  She swept a critical finger back and forth, warning them all that punishment would be swift if they didn’t listen to her every word. “Adhere to your schedule at all times. If anybody screws up, it’ll disrupt the whole flow of food from the kitchen to the courtyard, and inevitably, some rich asshole will complain. Now chop, chop, people.”

  Everyone started moving again, with a bit more pep in their step.

  Liam and the others regrouped in the hallway on their hustle back to the kitchen.

  “I don’t want anyone to realize we’re poking around too early because the catering system gets disrupted,” Liam said. “Hunt, can you handle all our tasks by yourself?”

  “I assure you, I’m excellent at multitasking,” Hunt answered.

  “Without magic?” Liam pressed.

  Hunt’s eyes twinkled in amusement. “Without noticeable magic.”

  Liam scowled. “If the rogue magician senses the energy spike when you cast—”

  “No one will sense me,” Hunt said firmly. “I’ve been practicing serious magic since you were running around on the schoolyard playground, Mr. Crown. I can manage a few clever tricks without bringing down the whole house of cards.”

  “If you’re sure…”

  “I am.”

  Well, Liam couldn’t argue the point any further. Not only because he had no other rebuttals, but also because they’d arrived at the kitchen.

  At first, everyone adhered to the schedule, helping the cooks plate the abundance of food and ferrying it to the courtyard. But one by one, at Liam’s signal, they abandoned their duties and snuck away.

  Kat and Gabby slipped downstairs to the wine cellar under the pretense of grabbing more serving platters, but didn’t come back up. Then Yun took a detour on one of her trips from the kitchen to the courtyard and hid inside a closet.

  As Liam and the partner he’d been assigned were returning to the kitchen to grab a tote containing champagne glasses, Liam made an excuse about needing a pit stop and split off toward the one bathroom in the whole mansion that the help was allowed to use. A bathroom that happened to be just past a certain closet.

  Checking both ways down the hall for prying eyes, he knocked softly in a predetermined cadence, and Yun opened the door. Liam slid through the gap and closed the door behind him.

  “Time to hope Hunt’s skills live up to his self-confidence,” he muttered.

  “Guy was an Enforcer. I’m sure he can handle a little subterfuge.” Yun shrugged off her white coat and tossed it aside. “I’m more worried about our skills. We aren’t exactly trained spies.”

  Liam followed suit, balling up his coat and throwing it into a corner. “We’ll manage.”

  “Can we not just wear a veil?”

  He shook his head. “We need to be strategic in our magic use. It’s likely that the downstairs wards, at least in this wing of the building, have been deactivated to account for the morning’s event. But the farther we get from this area, the higher the chance that we run into wards. And I guarantee you there will be a magic-sensing ward among them.”

  Yun scrunched her
nose. “I thought veils obscured magic energy output after the initial activation.”

  “They do, for a while,” Liam said. “But veil spells are hard to hold stable for long periods of time, and when they grow unstable, they bleed energy. And because there’s an initial release of energy during the activation process, we also can’t keep cycling through fresh veils.”

  “Oh.” She ground her shoe against the floor. “Bummer.”

  “Yep. Magic does have its shortcomings.” He pressed his ear to the door, listening for voices and footsteps. “The coast sounds clear. Time to channel your best Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.”

  Yun smiled. “Now I’m going to have that song playing in my head the whole time.”

  The first leg of the journey was the one most fraught with obstacles. Several rooms had open layouts and sparse furniture arrangements, so there were few places to hide when somebody walked by.

  To avoid everyone they came across between the closet and the closest set of stairs, Liam had to cram himself behind a sofa, duck down behind a fake plotted plant, dive around a flower-patterned Japanese room divider, and finally, throw himself into a cramped storage space underneath the stairs. Yun didn’t fare much better.

  By the time they literally crawled, army style, up the stairs to the second floor, they’d both accumulated an impressive array of bumps and bruises.

  Peeking over the top step, Liam was relieved to find that there wasn’t nearly as much foot traffic on the second floor. He rose to his knees and hurried across the gap between the stairs and a small reading nook with a bay window that overlooked the courtyard. At his signal, Yun followed him, and the two of them hunkered down in the nook to discuss their next steps.

  There were a great many rooms on the second floor, and they needed to organize their search by priority. Searching random guest bedrooms for an hour wasn’t likely to result in any significant findings.

  “I say we go for his office first,” Yun said. “Any physical records of his arrangement with the rogue magician might be there, hidden in plain sight among all his other paperwork.”

  “I agree.” Liam poked his head out of the nook and looked both ways down the hall. “Second to last door on the left has a gold plaque that I think says ‘Study.’ Might be what Radigan uses for his office, so let’s start there.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Yun cupped her ear. “I don’t hear anybody coming.”

  “And I don’t see anybody.” He scanned the hall again and found no one. “But that doesn’t mean the rooms aren’t occupied. Radigan or his wife might be up here, along with any number of staff. The daughter lives here too when she’s not at college, and it’s winter break, so she might be in one room or another.

  “In short, don’t let your guard down. If one of those doors opens all of a sudden, we may have to take ‘evasive maneuvers.’”

  “Great.” Yun rubbed her back side. “My ass still hurts from the last evasive maneuver.”

  “Too bad. Suck it up.”

  Liam crept out of the nook and pressed himself flat against the wall so that he wasn’t in view of anyone looking up the stairs. Yun mimicked his movements, and together, they shuffled sideways down the hall, pausing only to make sure each door they encountered wasn’t about to fly open and whack them in the face.

  Upon reaching the door to the study, Liam tugged Yun’s sleeve to get her attention.

  She peered over his shoulder and made a soft grunt. “Wards?” she whispered in his ear.

  “Mhmm.”

  Two different ward arrays had been written into the door, one on the doorknob and another on the panel, frame, and hinges.

  The former was a basic security system. If someone tried to open the door while the wards were active, five different alarms would sound. Two of the alarms were audible, covering the first and second floors, to ensure the security staff was alerted to the intrusion. Three of the alarms were psychic, each one keyed to a different person.

  The second ward array was a set of physical deterrents. If you tried to break down the doors, a wall of force would erupt from the panel and blast you backward. The wards on the frame would then activate and electrify the door, so if you dared to touch it a second time, you’d receive a heart-stopping jolt. And if that didn’t bring you down, then the wards on the hinges would shoot streams of fire at you until you were a charred corpse smoking on the floor.

  Luckily, all of the wards were currently inactive. Because somebody was in the room.

  Putting his ear to the door, Liam heard the muffled yelling of a male voice he recognized as Samuel Radigan’s. All the tired geniality in the man’s tone had now been swapped out for anger. Radigan was in the middle of a tirade against a person who Liam guessed was on the other end of a phone call, as it didn’t sound like there was anyone else in the room.

  Listening intently, Liam tried to parse Radigan’s half of the conversation to get a gist of what he was discussing.

  “You promised me this was a done deal,” Radigan growled, kicking over something hollow and metallic, perhaps a trashcan. “You can’t go back on your word now, not when you’ve already mucked everything up.”

  Is he talking to the magician about the murders? Liam wondered.

  Liam signaled for Yun to stay on the lookout and dug a small circular piece of silver out of his pocket. The disc was an audio recording charm, and the spell embedded within it was capable of holding ten minutes of audio.

  That wasn’t much, but a more powerful spell would require a bigger disc, and it would produce a more noticeable magic burst when activated. This tiny version radiated so little energy that even the strongest magic-sensing wards would miss it half the time, and people who could sense magic were highly unlikely to spot it unless it was pointed out to them.

  Bringing the disc to his lips, Liam whispered the incantation to activate the spell, and slipped the disc through the gap under the door so that it would more clearly pick up Radigan’s voice. Next, he tapped one of his stud earrings, creating a connection between it and the disc. As the disc recorded Radigan’s words, it also transmitted them to the stud. The stud then passed the audio as sensory information directly into Liam’s auditory cortex so that no actual sound was produced.

  “—and I gave you plenty of money for this,” Radigan was saying. “How could you possibly have spent it all already?”

  A pause, followed by a sharp intake of breath.

  “What are you talking about? I gave you three times that much,” Radigan snapped.

  Another pause, and a fist slammed against something, likely a desktop.

  “I just checked the account last Sunday. All the money was there,” he said, a tide of worry flooding into his voice. “Are you telling me somebody stole it?”

  A long pause this time, followed by Radigan stuttering nonsense for almost a full minute.

  Finally, he gathered himself and weakly whimpered, “That’s not possible. I didn’t authorize any such transactions. And the only other person with access to the account is—”

  Radigan yelped, and something hit a wall and shattered, debris plinking across the floor.

  “What the hell?” Radigan shouted. “Who are you? And how did you get in here?”

  The hair on Liam’s neck stood straight up.

  Oh shit. We’ve been looking at the wrong person the whole time, he thought, dismissing the disc spell. Someone’s been using Radigan as a patsy, and he just figured out the real perp has been stealing money to pay for the murder scheme. And now…

  Liam grabbed Yun’s shoulder and whispered harshly, “We need to go in there. Now. Radigan’s about to get murdered by the rogue magician.”

  Yun swore and situated herself behind Liam as he grabbed the door handle and slowly turned it, hoping that the magician’s attention was focused solely on Radigan. Liam had ten charmed rings, four charmed earrings, a charmed belt buckle, and his trademark char
med knife, but if he and Yun didn’t bring down the magician with the first attack, then all of that might not be enough.

  A Circle-trained magician was a force to be reckoned with, and a rogue didn’t play by the rules.

  Preparing himself for the worst, Liam flung the door open.

  Samuel Radigan lay on the floor in front of a large desk, clutching his throat as he choked on nothing but air. On the other side of the study, standing in the corner where he’d presumably been hiding under a veil, was a man about the same age as Hunt, with a head of thick gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard.

  The magician wore a long black cloak with a silver clasp fashioned into a symbol that Liam did not recognize. Beneath the cloak, his simple dark outfit contrasted with the vast assortment of magical weapons that he had hooked to his belt and strapped to his boots.

  Liam somersaulted into the room. As he rolled to a stop in front of Radigan, Yun, still in the doorway, unleashed a powerful bolt of lightning. The blast struck the magician’s shield, shattering it.

  Liam yanked out his knife, activated the extension charm, and lunged for the man before he could reform the shield, swinging the invisible blade toward the man’s hip.

  But the magician was quick. He parried the blow with a metal vambrace that had been hidden under his shirtsleeve, and the charms in the metal absorbed the electrical discharge from the knife.

  Raising his free hand, Liam activated the ring on his middle finger to throw a blast of force at the magician’s face. The magician grabbed his arm, however, and tugged his fist out of alignment, so the force punch struck the bookshelf behind the magician’s head. Several books disintegrated into a rain of paper, and a number of heavy paperweights hurtled across the room.

  One of the paperweights, a solid metal sphere, struck Liam in the shoulder and sent him reeling into a small table. The table tipped over and collapsed onto his chest, knocking the wind out of him.

  Distracted, the magician had lost his hold on the telekinesis spell he was using to choke Radigan, and Radigan had taken the opportunity to scramble around his desk and retrieve a handgun from the bottom drawer. Taking cover behind the desk, Radigan emptied the entire magazine, the thunderous sound of gunfire resounding through the room.