by Alisa Woods
“Are you somewhere you can talk? I’m in.” He opened several files as he spoke, getting them ready for her.
“Already? You work fast.”
He grimaced. “I can be persuasive when I need to be.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” The tone in her voice dragged his attention from the screen.
He leaned back in his chair. “What does that mean?” He hated talking on the phone—it was like being blind and deaf, fumbling in the dark while trying not to fall off a cliff. Normally, he could feel every vibration of emotion, every nuance of a conversation. The hidden meaning behind people’s words was spelled out like a voice-over. With none of those cues, he was flying on one instrument only—vocal intonations—and that sucked as an indicator.
She was laughing and not answering his question.
Dammit. “Did I say something funny?” Could he get enough bandwidth for a video channel here in the basement? Flying blind was not okay with him.
“I’m just saying your hotness should be registered as a magickal weapon in the Official Registry of Talents.”
The panic in his chest released. She thought he used his charms on Violet, not his Talent, which he really needed her not to somehow intuit. Why had his brain automatically gone there?
“One does what one has to, when one is a spy.” He was fumbling. Still. “Can you video chat where you are? I need you to see something.” In reality, he needed to see her. But giving her a visual on the data was also important.
“How’s this?” she said in his ear.
He looked at his phone, and her lovely face with the angry red makeup filled the screen. “Much better.” He drank in her expression. Crinkles around the eyes and the sparkle in them said she was still laughing at the idea of him charming Violet’s secrets out of her. Or maybe she just enjoyed teasing him about it. Either was good. Safe. And even stroked his ego a little, which was really stupid.
“So is Violet in love with you now?” She bit her lip, which he found crazy appealing. Holy shit, what was wrong with him? Maybe straight audio was better after all.
“Probably.” He smirked when she rolled her eyes. “But I sent her away too soon. There’s a separate passcode to download the files. Can you help me figure out if this data is what we’re after?”
“Absolutely.” The humor dropped off her face, replaced by an eagerness he found equally appealing.
Head in the game, Swift! Sweet magick. “Okay, we know Raine Magitek was somehow involved in the production, or at least distribution, of our illegal drugs.” He turned the phone to the screen so she could see as he opened the files. “The manufacturing codes on the bottles indicated the pills were processed at a Raine Magitek plant—not here at the headquarters, but a facility out past the suburbs. But the bureau already sent an agent—there’s no equipment there which could manufacture the kind of magic-stabilized, gene-editing drugs we’re looking for. We think the pills were just repackaged at that plant to make them suitable for slipping into the public as common pain relievers. So we’re looking for another location—a small genetics lab maybe—where the drugs could have been made. Could be tucked here at Raine Magitek headquarters, especially given Violet’s somehow involved with the genetic artifact your father found, but then again… could be someone completely different, just using the Raine Magitek facility as a distribution cover.”
“So what am I looking at here?”
He’d opened up several files, the ones he could, anyway. “That’s what I need you to tell me. I’m seeing something that looks like genomic data. Any way to tell if it’s related to the drugs?”
He heard her sigh. “Not without running some analysis. We’d really need the files.”
He clicked open one of the reports. “How about this?” The file was just named Status with a long number attached, and there was a lot of tech jargon.
“Hmm… okay, let me read this.”
While she was doing that, Swift looked through more files. Most were more of the same—genomic data, dense lab reports, some with just reams of data—but then he drilled down and found one folder labeled Manifest. Clicking through that showed a bunch of scans of receipts.
“Okay, this isn’t helping,” Mercy said, snatching his attention back. “I mean, I get what they’re saying here in the report—they ran some trials, the data showed minimal change, they’re working on a reformulation—but it’s deliberately vague. Code names and such for the formulations and processes. I’d need the whole dataset to piece together what they’re actually doing.”
He turned the phone, so he could see her again. “Any hints whether this is the research we’re looking for?”
She frowned. “Could be any clinical trial, honestly. Raine Magitek does plenty of legit research.”
Dammit. Swift scowled. “Okay. I’ve also got some kind of receipts here.” He clicked to open a bunch of the files in the Manifest folder. “A freezer. Centrifuge. Something called an electrophoresis system…”
“That’s for profiling DNA fragments according to their size after a polymerase chain reaction.”
“If you say so.” He picked up the pace in his scanning. “Autoclave. Thermal Cycler… Hang on.” Holy shit.
“What?”
“Is there some reason why Raine Magitek needs a dozen hospital beds?” He tore his gaze from the screen to see her reaction.
Her eyes were wide, her painted-on dagger-eyebrows lifted high. “No. Any clinical trials would be done outside the building. Contracted through a university medical center or something like that.”
He quickly scanned the receipt. “The beds were delivered here.” A rush of excitement and dread filled him. He looked back to her. “The extra victims, the ones who are still missing… they could be here in the building.”
“Holy shit.” Mercy was blinking and sputtering. “Swift, you’ve got to find them!”
He grimaced and looked back at the screen. “But if this is the data I need… I’ve got to get the passcode from Violet first.” But his thoughts were pulled to the tall double doors he’d seen on the way in. Could the victims be literally right next door?
“People first.” She was so resolute about that it dragged his attention back to the phone.
“It could be something completely innocent.” He wasn’t arguing with her. He had a mad respect for her being so focused on helping the victims—he knew this treasure trove of data was just what she was looking for, as a scientist. “Maybe the beds are for something totally innocuous.”
“Hospital beds? A perk for overworked employees, perhaps?” She was scowling at him like she thought she had to fight him on this.
“No, you’re right.” But it was still tricky. “I need to get the data and find the people. Before another one of them is murdered to make some fucking point to the FBI.”
Mercy nodded sharply, once. “Go find Violet. Smile one of your sexy smiles. Get the code quick, then go find these people, Swift. Go.”
“Copy that.” He swiped off the call and stared for a moment at the screen. Could this be the entire thing laid out before him? If so—if he cracked this case wide open—maybe the FBI would let him off the short leash. No time to dwell on that now—he had a very messed up researcher to manipulate.
He wished it would only require a sexy smile, but that’s not how this worked. He couldn’t help the warm satisfaction that Mercy Strange thought it might—which meant she thought it might work on her.
With that thought to console him, he logged out and went seeking Ms. Violet Thorn.
Chapter Five
What if Swift had found the key?
That thought haunted Mercy all the way back to her office at the Strange Hospital and Research Institute. Her driver dropped her at the back entrance, and as she rode the elevator up to the 20th floor, she felt a twinge of guilt that it wasn’t the hospital bed receipt that occupied her brain. Not that Swift might have found the additional victims. No, the image welded to her brain on an endless loop was that research report—the one w
here they said they’d seen unexpected success with the “seeker magick.” There was no evidence these reports were about the illegal med-magick… and yet, that phrase wasn’t anywhere in the standard literature.
She’d checked on the ride over.
And seeker magick, whatever that was, sounded very much like her theory—that the evil genius who’d created the gene drives hadn’t just used magick to stabilize the capsule they were delivered in. That some magick signature spell allowed the gene drives to find the right sequences for turning a Talent on, or off, with no mistakes, correctly, every time. Every technology had flaws—that was why magick was so often used to perfect rather than replace the physical sciences. A loaf of bread was still baked in an oven, but a proofing spell would brown the crust to perfection. Surgery was still performed with stainless steel blades—and increasingly with lasers and automation—but magick guided the cut and kept the veins cauterized. Even in recreation, magick was often used to enhance rather than replace—like with her sister Ever’s favorite thrill sport, free jumping, where people used magick-enhanced gliders to fly down. Pro-level jumpers went extreme, using magick alone, but it was much more reliable—and safer—to enhance something solidly rooted in the real world of physics.
And it was the same with genetic manipulation.
The seeker magick in the report might be the key—the one thing it would be near-impossible to replicate, even if she could reverse engineer the gene drives tucked in the pills they’d recovered. She’d stolen one just for that reason—in case she couldn’t decode its mystery. Then she could simply take the pill itself, with all its sordid past and ill-gotten methodology, and take the chance of side effects… even if one of those was death.
A chill rode her back as she strode through the lab, heading for her office. Some compulsive part of her wanted to make sure the pill was still in its box—not to take it, but to know that it was there. She was so fixed on keeping her head down, ignoring the weak greetings from some of the techs working hard in the lab, that she didn’t notice the small crowd gathered at her office until she’d nearly arrived.
She checked her pace, nearly tumbling in her high-heeled boots.
Verity.
“Hello, big sister!” her exuberant younger sibling called from Mercy’s office. She followed her greeting with a wave that involved her entire arm. Their father stood next to her, beaming, clearly happy to have his youngest daughter home from her latest world travels. Ever was also there, looking a little less thrilled, and Zane—always inscrutable—leaned on Mercy’s bookcase, watching the reunion with careful interest.
Mercy gritted her teeth and forced herself to continue her march to the office. She needed everyone out so she could mull the toxic potentials of the pill and decide if and when she would be ready to take it. And she wanted to be ready to help Swift if he called again. But Verity hadn’t been home in at least six months, so a perfunctory reunion was unavoidable. And everyone was probably congregating in her office for a reason.
Her younger sister was the opposite of Mercy in almost every way. Mercy was short, dark-haired, and wore her Victorian death couture and an artist’s palette of paint. Verity was tall and lithe—like a faery if such things were real—with mile-long, wildly-red hair, and she wore a plain style that recalled the pagan witches of pre-High Magick lore. Between her tall, brown lace-up boots, her low-cut, flowing green dress, and the brass-studded gauntlets on her forearms, there wasn’t a stitch of witch-normal black anywhere on her sister’s body. Where Mercy’s magick was meticulous and practical—and her secret magick was deadly—Verity was a hedge witch, resurrecting a branch of the Strange family tree that had died off generations ago. Or so everyone thought. But Verity had shown unusual powers from the time she was a girl, long before most witches came into their Talents. Hedge witches supposedly straddled the mortal and supernatural worlds, a “hedge” or dividing power between life and death. They practiced divination and communed with the supposed spirit realm, a thing Mercy didn’t even believe in. She was grounded in science… and the science of magick. Hedge witches weren’t even a thing, as Mercy had insisted all their childhood, but Verity had set out to prove her wrong. She didn’t have a job so much as a calling… one that took her on one “spiritual retreat” after another, learning who knew what kind of dark magick from warlocks all over the world.
The one thing they shared was their mother’s blue eyes… and Verity’s were sparkling with some mischief.
“Verity,” Mercy said, forcing a smile. “You’re back.” She couldn’t help glancing behind where her sister stood, at the box that held the pill on her shelf. It was still closed.
“What kind of greeting is that?” Verity hustled across the short span of the office and threw her arms around Mercy. “I missed you, big sis!” Her exclamation was mixed with an overly effusive hug.
Mercy caught her father’s frown just as she remembered to hug back. Not that she hated Verity—she loved both her sisters and would do anything for them. It was just that Verity and she were always on the opposite ends of… well, everything. Somehow the sisterly bond that escaped Mercy had rebounded onto Ever—the two had always been close. Not that Mercy was odd girl out—Ever had always included Mercy in everything—but it just wasn’t the same.
Mercy had managed to conjure a real smile by the time Verity released her. “You’ve been gone for a while.” Mercy dashed a look to their father. Had he told her he’d nearly died? And that Verity, while she was out chasing nirvana and illumination or whatever, had missed the entire drama that had unfolded in their family, their company, and their city?
“Yes!” Verity clapped her hands together as she settled back in Mercy’s chair, which was completely on the wrong side of the office—not that you could go far in her tiny space, but her sister had obviously made herself at home. Verity leaned forward, perched on the edge, hands gripping it so she wouldn’t fall while she tucked her boots back underneath. “So much has happened! Seriously, Mer—you’re like in the middle of a real medical mystery!”
Mercy blinked. She couldn’t decide if that was a back-handed compliment or what. “We have some real problems here. People are dying.”
“Yes, I know.” Verity frowned, and all that bubbly excitement seemed to fizzle out a little. “That’s very unfortunate. Ever was saying how lucky they are to have you on the case.”
Well, now Mercy just felt like a jerk. A way-too-common feeling these days. “I’m doing what I can to help. The FBI is doing the actual hard work.” She tipped her head to Zane and mustered up a smile for him. “Agent Payne has already found something inside Raine Magitek. Has he reported in to your office?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” But Zane straightened up from leaning on the bookshelf. “What did he find?”
“Some data he hacked from one of their servers.” Mercy decided it was better to hold back a little. “Not sure what it is yet—he’s working on it.”
Zane gave a short nod, and Mercy felt a stab of guilt about that too—Swift was right. Who was she to judge Zane for having unusual powers? She’d never seen Ever happier—maybe they made an unlikely match but somehow made it work anyway. She had to admit it reassured her when Swift said it would be obvious if abuse was involved. Mercy had seen her sister through a lot of hard times—she knew what a depressed or anxious or just unhappy Ever looked like. And her sister was radiant.
Although, Ever was frowning at her now. “Did you have any problems getting Agent Payne established in his cover?”
“No. He charmed his way in easily.” Mercy looked to her father. “Tobin Raine sends his best for your recovery. Although, to be honest, I wouldn’t take that as much of a compliment. His creep factor is off the charts. He did say he’d see you at the International Gen-Magick conference next week, so look out for that. Guy’s an asshole. Possibly a criminal as well.”
“Duly noted.” But her father seemed to hold back a smile like he didn’t really believe her.
“
Are you both planning on going to the conference?” Verity asked, super excited.
Which was so out-of-left-field, even for Verity, that Mercy stumbled in answering. “Um, yeah. I guess? You know, if I’ve got time between saving the city from illegal gen-magick and solving the medical mysteries therein.” It was a flippant answer, and her father scowled at her—this was a long-standing thing, both Mercy’s sassiness for Verity’s crazy and her father’s disapproval of said sassy. But what in the world? What was Verity getting at?
“Excellent!” Verity leaned back from her perch at the edge of Mercy’s chair and clasped her hands together. “You’ll get to meet him, then!”
“Meet who?” First Ever had a hot new boyfriend and now Verity? She thought Verity had taken some kind of vow to only participate in “sacred sex”—which Mercy only had a passing knowledge of, but it was something like sex magick only in hedge witch temples. Or something. She could never decide if that meant her little sister was still a virgin at twenty-four or if she’d slept with every monk whose spiritual retreat she’d attended. Given it was precisely none of her business, she’d never bothered to ask.
“I’ve been dying to tell you.” The bubbles were back in Verity’s voice, and she was perched on the edge of the chair again. “Well, not literally dying. Living. Living a full and vibrant existence with a thousand visions of a more perfect future, and I wanted to come back earlier and share, but now is just the perfect time, because he’s coming here, and you won’t even have to come to Tibet, but I couldn’t tell you because he wasn’t quite sure that all the logistics would work out, but it has! And now I’m here, dying—no, living—in great anticipation! To share this with you!”
“You’re killing me,” Ever said, half-laughing. “Who is this guy? Spill it.”
Their dad was likewise laughing at Verity’s exuberance. Even Zane had a bemused half-grin. Was Mercy the only one in the room who saw red flags in her little sister being so wound up about a guy? Especially when she’d never shown much interest in guys as a general rule? Not that she was gay—again, not Mercy’s business, but Verity had at least noticed hotness of the male variety—she just was always so wrapped up in her pursuit of the ethereal. Maybe something as normal as having a boyfriend was a good thing—a settling down to earth again, as it were.
