The Phoenix Illusion

by Lisa Shearin

  “He took in a little more smoke than you did, plus a knife in the ribs.” I nodded to the far side of the room. “He’s right over there. Dr. Carey said the blade missed anything vital, and that he’s gonna be fine. He just needs rest.”

  Rake turned his head to look. “I need to talk to him.”

  “We’d all like some answers, but for now, Dr. Carey’s calling the shots. That includes you. We need to know what happened, but Tulis isn’t the only one who needs rest.” I glanced over to where Dr. Carey stood in the hall watching us like an overprotective hawk. “She’s only gonna let us talk to you for so long.”

  Rake’s expression hardened.

  Oh boy, here we go again.

  When he spoke, his voice was strong and sure—and stubborn—with no trace of damage. “That will have to change.”

  *

  Within half an hour, we were all ensconced in the monitoring room next door, which had been hastily converted into a conference room by pulling in more chairs. Rake had insisted on being able to watch Tulis, and Dr. Carey had insisted on being able to watch Rake. His only concession to medical care was the wheelchair he was presently sitting in, and the monitoring equipment on a little rolling cart next to him.

  The three of us had been joined by SPI founder Vivienne Sagadraco and her second-in-command, Alain Moreau. Mr. Moreau was also my manager.

  And a vampire.

  But when the founder of the agency was a multi-millennia-old, fire-breathing dragon, having a centuries-old French vampire manager was downright normal. Ms. Sagadraco’s human form looked like a petite and elegant socialite in her late sixties, and Mr. Moreau could’ve passed for Anderson Cooper’s even paler twin brother.

  Right now, Rake was beating himself up for not sensing Tulis sooner.

  “If it had been a normal situation, you would have,” I told him. “Rake, someone picked up your house from another planet and dropped it into the middle of Manhattan. Have you ever seen anything like that in your life?”

  “No.”

  “Gethen?”

  The goblin mage shook his head.

  “Exactly,” I said. “It was magic, and it was huge. I’d think the distortion from that magic would be equally huge. Tulis is alive—thanks to you—and he’s going to stay that way. You did everything you could. Is it possible the distortion was what sapped your magic?”

  “I don’t think so. As soon as I stepped across the threshold, I felt my power being pulled away, toward the middle of the house—where Tulis and the Khrynsani agent were.”

  “And when it was ‘pulled away,’ your shields started failing, leaving you in a burning house with nothing but your bare naked lungs.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t consider letting four fully equipped and highly trained firemen do their jobs?”

  Rake just looked at me like he didn’t understand the question.

  I sighed. “Of course, you didn’t.” That was my Rake, brave to the point of suicide. I couldn’t decide which urge was stronger: kiss him or smack him upside the head.

  Though after I told them about getting attacked, Rake might have similar impulses about me.

  Time to fess up. “Before we go any further, Ms. Sagadraco, I should probably report on what happened to me.”

  Rake went very still.

  “Hey, you were unconscious,” I told him, in what I thought was a fine excuse. “And when you weren’t unconscious, you were groggy. I just didn’t want to have to repeat myself.”

  “Right.”

  Ms. Sagadraco sat a little straighter. “What happened, Agent Fraser?”

  I told her. However, I neglected to put the blame on Ian for breaking my concentration. Any goblin who was powerful enough to potentially be involved in bringing a house here from another world certainly had enough mojo under the hood to magically knock out my lights any time he danged well pleased. He’d probably been waiting for me to get closer before he did anything. The more I thought about it, the more likely it was that I wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to get a good look at their opponent. When Ian had called out to me, the goblin probably figured he wasn’t going to get an up-close-and-personal shot, so he’d best take what he could get. Looking at it that way, my partner had probably saved my life. And even if he hadn’t, he had no way of knowing that I was hot on a trail. I really needed to come up with a way to signal that kind of thing.

  Rake was giving me a level look throughout my entire report. Goblins had raised white lies—and every other color—to a fine art. He knew I wasn’t telling them everything. And it didn’t help matters that I was a bad liar.

  “If you encountered him again, would you be able to recognize him with your seer senses?” Rake asked.

  I resisted the urge to rub my jaw, which had been the first of my pieces and parts to slam into the concrete sidewalk. “Oh, I can guarantee it.”

  “Good.” With that, Rake let it drop. I knew it wouldn’t stay dropped.

  Gethen leaned forward. “The Khrynsani, sir. What happened?”

  “He was dead at Tulis’s feet in the hall outside my study,” Rake said. “I had to reach Tulis before the firemen. They would have seen that he wasn’t human, and he wouldn’t have known the silver-clad beings walking through fire didn’t mean him harm. They wouldn’t have made it out alive.”

  Rake paused and tried to swallow. I had water ready for him.

  “How about just give us the Reader’s Digest version for now,” I told him.

  “The what?” he rasped.

  “Short version now. Details later.”

  Rake nodded. “By the time I got to Tulis, he was unconscious beside the Khrynsani agent. I took the lifestone off the body. My magic was nearly gone, so I dropped the cloak so I could disguise Tulis as human.” He paused and drew a few ragged breaths. “I didn’t run into the firemen until I’d reached the front door. They didn’t see anything they shouldn’t.”

  “The body should still be in the rubble,” Moreau noted. “Lord Danescu, you said you found Tulis and the body near the center of the house?”

  “Yes.”

  Moreau stood and took out his phone. “I’ll have the remains found and brought here,” he told Ms. Sagadraco. He turned to leave.

  Gethen spoke. “Mr. Moreau, I need to go with whoever retrieves that body. Whatever affected Lord Danescu’s magic was nearby. I need to find it before anyone else does.”

  “With the intention of bringing it to our labs for study?”

  “But of course.”

  Alain Moreau hadn’t lived as many centuries as he had by making assumptions. Gethen Nazar had loyalties, and they weren’t to SPI. It might have been his boss’s house, taken from his boss’s world, and dropped on his boss’s vacant lot, but this world and especially this city was SPI’s responsibility.

  This wasn’t just Rake’s problem, now it was ours.

  5

  We were confident that Rake wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, if only because Tulis was still unconscious, and Rake wasn’t about to leave him alone until he was awake.

  But when it came to Rake, you didn’t take chances. Gethen had called in two of his staff security mages to stand guard—one in Rake’s room, the other guarding the only door in or out. Our agents had the exits to the medical center covered.

  Rake got the message.

  When we arrived at the scene, it was apparent that Vivienne Sagadraco had been pulling strings. My seer vision told me that half of the two dozen or so individuals inside the barricades were supernaturals. Most of those were on the team going through the embers. Five of them were from SPI’s lab. Kenji Hayashi was slowly walking through the rubble, intent on the small screen of a handheld device. All were focused on their tasks.

  We had one thing in our favor as far as keeping the situation from going up in flames like Rake’s house had—the mortal authorities’ refusal to believe anything that smacked of the supernatural, and the
reluctance on the part of their investigators to include any such explanation in their reports. No one wanted to be the wack-job who believed in woo-woo. And certainly no one wanted their superiors to order a psych evaluation for anyone who did.

  SPI had raised low-key to a high art. Ian, Gethen, and I were posing as insurance adjusters, and were dressed much like the NYPD folks on the scene in jeans and dark windbreakers. We wore ID on lanyards around our necks with photos that matched our glamours.

  The NYPD arson investigator in charge of the site would be expecting us—the glamoured versions. Gethen appeared to be shorter than his actual height, with dark blond hair and blue eyes. Being a mage, he’d taken care of doing his own glamour. The mages in our R&D department had developed amulets that they could pre-charge with a time-released disguise that was undetectable by anyone except seers. Ian and I were wearing their work underneath our shirts.

  Criminals aren’t the only ones who need glamours. To keep from freaking out their human neighbors, supernaturals need to wear a glamour or some other magical disguise to hide what they are. Elves have it easy; they just have their ears to contend with. The rest of their bodies look pretty much human, albeit an inhumanly perfect human. But with all the kinds of plastic surgery available now, even humans can look as good as elves. When they came here, elves spread out and settled all over the place. However, a lot of them gravitated toward places like Los Angeles and New York to become actors, singers, models, and dancers. If your favorite celeb looks or sounds too good to be human, chances are they’re not.

  Criminals have always had a thing for disguises. While humans are stuck with things like hats, wigs, glasses, and fake noses to keep from being picked out of a lineup later, supernaturals have a nearly limitless selection to choose from, that limit being their ability to produce a glamour themselves or pay a mage to create one and place it in an accessory that the supernatural wears all the time, such as a watch or ring. The spell needs to be recharged every so often, and the mage gets paid again. Glamour mages can make some serious money. If you’re rich enough, you can basically design your own face and body. The look you’ve always dreamed of can be yours. Glamour mages are a lot like plastic surgeons, though. Some do beautiful work, others utterly suck. It’s buyer beware, and always ask for references.

  An NYPD officer was standing guard at the police barriers. He checked our IDs and let us through. He was an elf, not human. Like ourselves, he was glamoured to pass as what he wanted mortal New Yorkers to see, an average-looking human man. To fit in with mortals, you had to blend in and be someone that no one gave a second glance, and barely a first.

  We were inside the crime scene perimeter, but others weren’t going to be allowed anywhere near it. Once investigators were finished with their work, the lot would be cleared, the debris hauled away by SPI contractors and destroyed.

  The press was behind the barricades across the street recording everything with cameras that could zoom in close enough to count the pores on your nose. Hence our glamours. Gethen was well known as Rake Danescu’s bodyguard among the press that covered the lives of New York’s hoity-toity set. I was even more well known to the paparazzi as Rake’s serious girlfriend. Ian was just trying to go through life being as unnoticed as possible.

  Thanks to the electrical outage caused by the event, there was no video of Rake Danescu, billionaire and ex-playboy, coming out of a burning building with a man over his shoulder.

  But there had been hundreds of eager eyewitnesses.

  Rake was being hailed as a hero in the press and public.

  It was driving everyone in both groups nuts that Rake and the mystery man he had saved were nowhere to be found. They hadn’t been admitted to any of the local hospitals. Witnesses had seen them loaded into ambulances and watched those ambulances drive away, but oddly enough, no one remembered the company or hospital name on the side.

  Score another point for SPI’s R&D mage geeks.

  But the thing that had set the press to salivating was that until the fire, this had been a vacant lot. Rake Danescu’s vacant lot. And no one was drooling more than Baxter Clayton.

  An investigative reporter for one of the local network affiliates, Baxter had been trying to get dirt on Rake for years. When you’d once owned a high-class sex club, people didn’t have to dig far to hit pay dirt. Baxter had no clue that Rake wasn’t human—and we were here to make sure he didn’t find anything to tell him otherwise.

  Ian made a beeline for a man of average height and unusual aura. Gethen and I followed. The arson investigator was a firemage. This guy’s aura was the color of flames. SPI had several firemages on staff, and one of them was among those presently going through the blackened rubble of what used to be Rake’s house. There were actually a few walls left standing, but most of the rubble was just that, piles of blackened wood and stone.

  The fire had been extinguished, but there were still hot spots. A couple of firemen were working on those to keep any embers from flaring back up. The brimstone stink from last night was still hanging in the air, but now my olfactory experience was being raised to whole new levels of nasty. The only thing worse than brimstone stink was wet brimstone stink.

  We began picking our way through the rubble. We wore boots developed by SPI’s R&D folks that looked like what arson investigators wore to a crime scene, but were infinitely more fireproof. Our director of demonology, Martin DiMatteo, routinely made field trips to Hell, and as a mere human, needed the extra protection. My tootsies appreciated their temporary safehouses. Since there were still a few walls remaining upright, we were also wearing hard hats.

  “Thankfully, our building materials are primitive by Earth standards,” Gethen said quietly from beside me. “Wood, brick, and stone.”

  I also kept my voice down. “Rake calls home ‘the Seven Kingdoms.’ Doesn’t your world have a name?”

  “While we have abundant magic, our technology—if you can call it that—is such that we have never seen our world or any other from space, so no one has ever seen a need to name it. The elves and goblins of our world have spent millennia trying to annihilate each other. For either to admit that they share anything such as a world that they cannot forcefully take from the other… Well, it simply doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  I nodded slowly. In a strange and twisted way, that made sense.

  “If someone went to all the trouble to bring a building from…your home, why would they torch it once they got it here? A Renaissance-style house popping up on a vacant New York lot makes one heck of a statement, but not if you immediately burn it down.”

  “I believe we will discover that the fire was an accident,” Gethen said. “Or an unforeseen result of whatever magic was used to bring it here.”

  Before we’d left, I’d asked Rake what exactly we were looking for. He’d given me a typically cryptic goblin answer: He didn’t know, but chances were good that Gethen or I would know it when we saw it.

  Suddenly there was a flurry of activity near the center of the ruins.

  Ian started toward them. “They’ve found a body.”

  Oh boy, had they ever.

  I’d only seen a burnt-to-a-crisp corpse once before—a goblin lawyer who had been baked inside a cookie oven by a disgruntled client.

  This body was also a goblin. But this time, it was worse.

  I stood close enough to see, but far enough away to be downwind from most of the stench that’d filled the air once the searchers had uncovered him.

  The body was blackened and burned—with the vivid exception of an area over the goblin’s heart that had been tattooed with two bright red serpents twining around each other.

  “Khrynsani,” Gethen hissed from over my shoulder.

  “Is that normal, for some tattoos not to burn?” I asked the medical examiner who had made the discovery.

  “No,” she said, snapping on a pair of blue latex gloves. “It is not.”

  Dr. Anika Van Daal ough
t to know. She had more experience than every doctor in New York combined.

  Dr. Van Daal was a vampire and mage, and a true New Yorker. She’d been here since 1625, when the city had been taken from the Dutch by the British and the name changed from New Amsterdam to New York.

  She’d gone from midwife to the city’s first licensed female doctor. Every few decades, she “retired” from one position and took another. She’d been in her mid-twenties when she’d been turned, so she didn’t stand out when she went back to school after one of her retirements to catch up on the latest medical advances. She’d learned to glamour and glamour well, aging her glamour along with what would be expected in a human. As a result, she’d never had problems blending in or with being found out.

  As a mage, she could place a glamour on a dead supernatural that would remain until the body was turned over to the family, or if it was unclaimed, until it was cremated or buried by the city. Dr. Van Daal wouldn’t need to do that here. She had a body bag ready to receive the dead goblin for transport back to SPI.

  Rake and Gethen, along with SPI’s resident necromancer Bert Ferguson, had a few questions for the departed. I was not looking forward to that.

  “When a supplicant is accepted into the Khrynsani brotherhood, they are tattooed with the order’s mark,” Gethen was saying. “It cannot be removed by any means, including fire.”

  We had no problem leaving Dr. Van Daal to her work. The Khrynsani was only one of the things we’d come to find. The other was still buried somewhere in the blackened rubble around us.

  Even if we’d known what we were looking for, I didn’t think it would’ve been much help.

  I was standing roughly in the center of the structure. I turned in a slow circle. My human senses were uncomfortable here to say the least. The smoke stung my eyes, and it’d be a long time before I got the brimstone stink and oily taste of smoke out of my nose and mouth. Then there was the noise. This was an active crime scene. Phones and cameras worked now. The danger and the excitement were over for the gathered crowd, but not the insatiable curiosity. Large groups of people plus curiosity equaled noise. Yes, it was in the background, but it was still distracting, especially the press’s shouted questions to anyone working the site who might be willing to stroll over to the barricades and answer them.