The Phoenix Illusion

by Lisa Shearin

  “And now you’re going to tell the rest of us what Gethen was right about,” Ian said. “Correct?” From the tone of my partner’s voice, it was clearly a rhetorical question. Rake would tell us what was going on, or the folks in the organics lab across the hall would be calling in a security emergency.

  Rake turned to Gethen. “Do you have Padiri constantly trying to reach Tam?”

  “Yes. And I’ve told her to contact Imala Kalis if she can’t reach him.”

  Rake stood there, never taking his eyes from the flickering stone.

  Ian cleared his throat. “Rake,” he growled in warning.

  Rake blew out his breath. “My cousin Tamnais Nathrach recently led an expedition to an uninhabited continent on our world. It was once home to an ancient goblin civilization. Legend said they used ‘crystals of flame’ to power their city—lights, pumps for a water system, heating and cooling, everything.”

  “Sheesh, it does sound nuclear,” I muttered.

  “When he and his team arrived,” Rake continued, “the Khrynsani had gotten there first.”

  “And started a rock collection,” Ian surmised.

  Rake nodded. “It does appear that way, though intergalactic teleportation was not on the list of the crystals’ capabilities. That this one was in the hands of the Khrynsani, and that they were able to somehow use it to bring my house here…”

  Someone in a white lab coat stepped up beside me.

  It was Ben Sadler—now Dr. Ben Sadler. Curly blond hair, blue eyes, in his twenties and still didn’t look old enough to shave. He was SPI’s new consulting gem mage. He was also a Level Ten, the tip top of the talent pool.

  In his pre-SPI life of only a year ago, Ben had been a diamond appraiser at Christie’s. After an incident involving seven cursed diamonds, three harpy jewel thieves, and one Russian dragon/oligarch, Ben had been identified as a rogue talent—untrained, untested, and unpredictable, dangerous to himself and everyone else.

  Aside from that, Ben was just a sweet guy who occasionally made questionable life choices, like tangling with harpies in the midst of a diamond heist.

  Ben stood on tiptoe to see over Rake’s shoulder at what all the hubbub was about.

  He blanched. “Another one?”

  I froze. “You mean another rock, like the cube over there, right?”

  Ben pointed at the flickering crystal. “No, I mean another one, just like that.”

  7

  SPI’s job was dealing with the unexpected, but some things were more unexpected than others.

  “It came in an hour ago,” Ben told us as we followed him to the middle of the lab to where the twin to our recent acquisition waited, sealed in its own protective observation box.

  “We” included Ian, Rake, and myself. Dr. Carey had taken charge of Tulis, and Gethen had stepped out of the lab to make a few calls. Thanks to the glass walls, Gethen was able to have privacy for his calls, and make good on his vow not to let Rake out of his sight.

  “We only have the basics of the report,” Ben continued, “enough to know it needs to be in a containment case until we find out more. It was found on a newly empty plot of land outside Sawpit, Colorado. Newly empty, meaning an old lumber mill had been there the last time anyone looked.”

  “Sounds like our softball from outer space,” I noted, “only in reverse.”

  Rake gave Ben the condensed version of our past twelve hours.

  “Where’s Sawpit?” I asked Ben when Rake finished.

  “Northwest of Telluride. Population of less than fifty. The mill hasn’t been operational since the 1950s. We got lucky. The couple who noticed the mill being gone are clued in to the supernatural. On weekends, they like to photograph abandoned buildings. The first weekend they went, the mill was there. The next weekend it was gone, even the foundation, nothing left except the ground underneath.” Ben stopped in front of a case identical to the one we’d just left. “And this little guy.”

  Our cosmic softball had a galactic golf ball friend.

  When Ben referred to it, I could swear its flickers turned coyly flirtatious.

  “That rock wants you to pick it up,” I muttered.

  Ben stayed put. “Yeah, we’ve decided I shouldn’t do that quite yet.”

  “Wise choice.”

  “The couple called a friend of theirs who works in our Denver office,” Ben continued. “They sent a team to investigate, and the first thing our people did was pack up this crystal and send it here for study.”

  While SPI had offices worldwide, our New York lab had the fanciest gizmos and gadgets for finding out what made supernatural stuff tick—without blowing everyone up in the process.

  “What have you determined so far?” Rake asked him.

  “That we’re way out of our league.”

  *

  While Rake wanted to question the dead Khrynsani now, finding out as much as we could about what we were dealing with would go a long way toward asking the right questions. As we’d experienced with the soul of Alastor Malvolia—aka the dead goblin lawyer baked in the cookie oven—you had one chance and limited time to question a disembodied soul. You needed to ask the right questions quickly because once that soul began to fade, you weren’t going to get a second chance.

  We finally got some good news. One of Gethen’s calls had been to Padiri, who’d been charged with contacting Rake’s cousin. She’d finally gotten through, and Cousin Tam would be paying us a visit as soon as he could finalize arrangements on his end.

  Rake had told me that the goblin king and queen had not only elevated Tam to chancellor, they’d appointed him their heir until they produced one of their own. Like Rake, Tam was a dark mage and closely involved with the goblin intelligence service. To me, it sounded like Tam and Rake were two branches of the same inscrutable tree. I wondered if Ian would feel an urge to punch Tam, too.

  That was another reason for holding off on the questioning—Rake wanted Tam to be here. He might know this particular Khrynsani, which could be a huge help.

  The softball had been collected two hours ago. The golf ball had been found early this morning and flown directly to New York on one of Vivienne Sagadraco’s private jets. Strange things from all over the world were sent to our headquarters’ labs all the time; on our world, that added up to a lot of weirdness. It might have taken another hour or two, but it would have been noted that the lab had two of the same kind of crystal from two different locations. Thanks to Ben Sadler’s curiosity, the math had gotten done a little faster.

  Now, we were in Ms. Sagadraco’s office suite overlooking SPI’s agent bullpen. The boss had a private conference room adjacent to her office. That’s where we’d gathered. Dr. Claire Cheban, SPI’s lab director, had joined us, as had Kenji Hayashi and Alain Moreau.

  The boss had arranged for a teleconference from the site of the building disappearance in Sawpit.

  To my surprise, Kitty Poertner’s face appeared on the screen. It looked like somebody had been called in from vacation.

  Kitty’s family lived near Casper, Wyoming. Last week, she’d taken Yasha out to meet her folks. Luckily for us she was only one state north of Sawpit.

  While Kitty could see all of us seated around the table, she zeroed in on me first. “Sorry we missed your party.”

  “No worries,” I said quickly. “Yasha meeting your folks was more important.”

  Especially when the new man in your life was a werewolf.

  I didn’t ask how the meeting had gone. After all, the big boss was sitting right here. I was sure it hadn’t been completely uneventful, but since Kitty and I were besties, she’d tell me all the awkwardness later. I couldn’t see Yasha, but I also couldn’t see Kitty leaving him with her parents. He was there somewhere.

  I took a sharp left back toward business. “And it looks like you were in the right place at the right time to help us out.”

  Kitty was another of SPI’s consultants. Her day job was ow
ning and running a bakery on Bleecker Street in the Village, but her family came from a long line of portalkeepers. They could open, close, detect, and destroy them. Kitty was one of the best.

  “What do you have for us, Ms. Poertner?” Ms. Sagadraco asked. “I realize a building disappearing doesn’t meet the usual criteria for a portal, but are we dealing with a portal-like phenomenon?”

  “Not in any sense I’ve ever encountered. Thanks to the couple who reported it, we’re able to say the disappearance happened more than eight days ago. Unfortunately, that’s long enough for most magic signatures to have faded. Most, but not all. We’ve detected magic, and a technology we only refer to as alien because we have never seen anything like it.” Kitty glanced back over her shoulder. Occasionally while she spoke, we could see people moving back and forth behind her. I assumed they were our Denver lab team. “Carter Bates—he’s in charge of the local team—could explain the technology angle better, and he should be available in a few minutes. As to a more mundane explanation, there was no sign that the building had been destroyed or taken apart and hauled away. In fact, the only tire tracks were from the Sawyers’ ATV from last weekend and this one. That’s Chuck and Didi Sawyer. They’re the ones who found and reported it. No one else has been up here in the time in between. It was as if the sawmill was lifted right off its foundation.”

  Ms. Sagadraco arched a silvery eyebrow. “Lifted?”

  “Dr. Bates says that’s apparently what happened. Like a big hand reached down and scooped it up.”

  “Could it have been vaporized?” Dr. Cheban asked.

  Claire Cheban didn’t look old enough to be out of college, let alone have a PhD and be in charge of a lab like SPI’s. That she was in charge and had not one, but two hard science doctorates, said all that needed to be said about SPI’s chief scientist. That she had asked if an entire building had been vaporized said everything about what SPI dealt with on a daily basis. Yes, it was possible. It would be classified as magic, but it was possible.

  Kitty shook her head. “There was no sign that heat of any kind had been involved. No scorched earth or signs of a fire. The Sawyers thought it was bizarre enough that the building was gone, but then they found the crystal. They’d never seen anything like it. That’s when they called their friend in Denver. While the crystal may not have had anything to do with the building’s disappearance—”

  “We believe it did,” Ms. Sagadraco said. “Lord Danescu, if you would, please.”

  Rake told Kitty what had happened.

  Kitty just stood there for a few blinks. “Wow.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

  Coming from a woman who had single-handedly collapsed and sealed a gate to Hell to prevent Earth from being overrun by a demonic invasion, that “wow” carried a lot of weight.

  Kitty glanced off to the side. “Dr. Bates is available now. I’ll turn you over to him.”

  The man who took Kitty’s place in our screen had short dark hair and wore black-rimmed glasses on a narrow face. He appeared to be in his mid-forties.

  “Director Sagadraco, my apologies for not being able to speak with you sooner.”

  “No apologies needed, Agent Bates. Did you hear Lord Danescu’s account of what has happened here?”

  “I did, and I share Ms. Poertner’s opinion. Impressive.”

  Ms. Sagadraco scanned through a document on her tablet with her index finger. “I asked Agent Hayashi to join us because he’s just completed his report on the incident here.”

  Dr. Bates grinned. “I have to say I’m jealous, Kenji.”

  “We saw the end of it, not the during, unfortunately,” Kenji told him. “And we didn’t get visuals from any of our surveillance cameras. We’ve covered the entire Washington Square Park area, including the Full Moon. We picked up the flame-colored lightshow above the vacant lot, but at the instant before the building appeared, every camera we had stopped working. It was probably about the same time the lights went out and our phones died. How are your electronics doing there?”

  “No problems, though we have detected higher than normal levels of electromagnetic radiation.”

  That didn’t sound good. “Do you mean like when a nuclear bomb goes off and anything electronic gets fried?”

  “Not to that level, Agent Fraser,” Dr. Bates assured me. “Electromagnetic radiation is produced by medical equipment such as X-ray machines and ultrasounds, down to microwave ovens, laptops, and cell phones. By higher than normal levels, I was referring to how unusual it is to detect any EMR out here, let alone to the level of…say a medical research facility.”

  “Were there any reports in the past week of an unexplained power outage?” Kenji asked.

  “Let me check. The local sheriff’s here. He’s a werewolf, which has been invaluable for keeping a lid on all this.” Dr. Bates stepped away from the camera, returning a few minutes later.

  “That’s an affirmative, Kenji. Five nights ago, there was what sounded like a muted explosion and all electronics stopped working for nearly two hours, from Sawpit down to Telluride. It was a clear night with no storms in the area.”

  “Then that’s when your sawmill vanished,” Kenji told him.

  There was a knock at the door, and Mr. Moreau went to answer it, then slipped outside, closing the door behind him.

  He was back in less than thirty seconds, his expression grim.

  “We’ve had five more building disappearances.”

  8

  In the past hour, two incidents had grown to seven. Seven buildings vanished without a trace. Well, six disappearances and one rather spectacular appearance.

  That we knew about.

  I was sure there were going to be more. When talented bad guys got rolling, there were always more.

  Crystals hadn’t been found at those additional five sites. Yet.

  Vivienne Sagadraco issued orders to Kenji and Mr. Moreau. Kenji was to contact all SPI offices worldwide, tell them what we had here, and see if they’d encountered more of the same. The additional disappearances had all been in the US, but the boss wanted a complete picture of the problem. And oh boy, was it a problem. Entire buildings going bye-bye wasn’t what you’d call subtle. People would notice. People with smartphones and cameras. Ms. Sagadraco got Kylie to work monitoring news and social media for any mention of building-related strangeness and to report any findings to Mr. Moreau and Kenji. Mr. Moreau would center his attentions on the mortal authorities.

  The boss lady was going with us.

  “Us” consisted of Rake, myself, Ian, and Gethen—and the goblin assassin’s soul trapped in the pendant inside Gethen’s pocket, which I was doing my best not to think about.

  We were going to Rake’s apartment to meet his cousin Tamnais Nathrach.

  Two cases that we knew of involved a crystal not from our world, but likely from Rake and Tam’s. According to Rake, Tam had had first-hand experience with the motherlode where the two crystals in our lab had come from.

  We needed answers. Now.

  Dragons were big on protocol, and Tam was chancellor and heir (albeit temporary) to the goblin monarchs. Protocol dictated that Ms. Sagadraco be there to greet him, but practicality demanded it. Tam Nathrach was an expert on the alien crystals and the Khrynsani brotherhood likely responsible for planting at least one of them. Somehow, I couldn’t see a cadre of evil, Nazi-like goblins running amuck in New York and Colorado, but hey, stranger things have happened.

  Vivienne Sagadraco lived at the same Central Park West address as Rake. He owned many properties in New York, and their apartment building was one of them. Though to be exact, he was only half owner. Ms. Sagadraco had owned the other half since it’d been built, and Rake had bought out her partner when he was ready to sell and go home. I’d always kind of wondered where “home” was. Having met a few of Ms. Sagadraco’s friends, I suspected her former partner’s home wasn’t on our world or even in our dimension.
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  Over the past few months since Rake and I had become serious, I’d been a regular visitor to the building. Rake had given me a key, though I’d never used it. I still maintained my own apartment, and had only been to Rake’s place when he’d been there. Regardless, Rake had made sure that I was welcomed by his staff whenever I visited, from the building’s doormen to his butler, housekeeper, and cook. Once they’d gotten to know me, all had said they were glad that Rake was seeing me, and they felt that I was a good influence on him.

  Since the press had been camped out in front of Rake’s building since last night, the SPI driver took the agency SUV to the private parking garage entrance.

  Rake’s penthouse apartment looked like something out of Architectural Digest. Artsy, yet tasteful. Comfortable, but not cozy. Rake didn’t do cozy, and he didn’t entertain at home. He considered his home his personal refuge. Period. Any and all business was conducted elsewhere. Having an elsewhere at your disposal wasn’t a problem when you owned properties throughout the city, including a five-star hotel that catered specifically to the supernatural one percent.

  On the drive over, Rake had alerted his staff to expect us. After a perfunctory offer of refreshments, which we politely refused, they left us to our business.

  At the center of Rake’s apartment was a midsized room set aside for his magical workings. It was accessible only to Rake and Gethen—by a locking system both mechanical and magical—and to the goblin who awaited us inside.

  Berat Tane was the new portal mage at Rake’s Regor Regency Hotel, replacing Kenan Chaitan, who had been killed recently defending the hotel’s portal from both elven and goblin terrorists.

  In addition to portals, Berat could operate a mirror.

  Rake’s mirror, with its sturdy metal frame, was nearly seven feet tall and three feet wide. It wasn’t a mirror to admire yourself in. It was for transport. Mirror mages could connect two specially constructed mirrors, enabling a person to step into the mirror on their end, and step out of the destination mirror. Distances in miles or between worlds could be covered in a single step.