Raven shook his head sharply. Where had those words come from? He felt as though he was in one of those dreams where he just knew things he had no way of knowing, the dreams that made so much sense until he woke.
His thoughts strayed to that long-ago cave in Australia, to the images on the walls there, stylistically different but with the same feel of ancient, unfathomable power. The cave brought thoughts of Bran Tarrant, the odd mage-shaman whose lineage was as mixed as his magic. Of Tarrant’s words, which Raven had tucked away in his memory with other unsettling things.
Raven couldn’t discount Tarrant’s assessment. It had a ring of truth. It spoke to his soul in a way he couldn’t quite put into words. Yet Tarrant himself had said that being a shaman is about being true to one’s deepest self, and that Raven was a mage straight to the core. Had, in essence, given him leave not to do anything with the knowledge, and that had seemed like the wisest and most comfortable approach. Except now he wondered if Tarrant had known all along that Fate would call to whatever strange, latent abilities he might have.
Raven wasn’t a strong believer in destiny, but sometimes the universe fell into patterns that made him wonder.
Perhaps he should reach out to Mother Crone. Although her background was Old World Wiccan, she at least understood Craft, which put her closer to the needed learning. More importantly, she had contacts among the shamanic subset of Craft and could make an introduction. Many of the Native American Craft practitioners were understandably suspicious of Europeans inquiring into their traditions, and with his family history, well. He couldn’t blame them if they warded their crystal against his signature after his first attempted contact.
Best to glean what he could from the articles first; at least he would not annoy any contacts Mother Crone could secure him with questions easily answered elsewhere.
He read the article carefully, including the sidebars. With the librarian’s help, he located the source material quoted in the journal Antiquity. It seemed that the local existent tribes all claimed to have no knowledge of the significance of the petroglyphs, who made them and why they were in the cave that seemed, even before the slide that sealed it off completely, to be little-trafficked.
He looked through the local papers for the accounts of Lansing’s death, and for articles on the proposed golf resort and about the activists committed to stopping it. He even paged through a small, locally-published book titled Legends and Folklore of Devil’s Crossing. For a small town, it seemed to have more than its share of hagiography, most of it surrounding the Butte. The book claimed that the tribes had warned the first settlers away from the butte, stating that the place was cursed. The story was that the tribal name for the place, which the settlers translated as Devil’s Boneyard, came from an epic confrontation between a long-ago medicine man and the devil himself. The devil lost, and the tribe buried him and piled rocks over his grave to keep him down, and that pile eventually became the butte.
The tale had more holes in it than a family-size pack of swiss cheese, of course. Geologists knew the butte was a large section of hard rock, probably the core of an ancient volcano. Erosion carved away the surrounding softer rock and dirt layers to leave the impressively large, block-like structure to stand alone. So far as Raven knew, the devil never figured into the original spiritual beliefs of the local tribes. And, if one took into account the stories of people who did believe in the devil, Satan was alive and well, leading innocents astray and losing bets to fiddlers at any number of crossroads.
The book contained tales of eerie chanting at night that ended abruptly when someone went to investigate; a quiet, reliable family man who came home and murdered his wife and children after a night camping on the butte, and then went mute, never saying a word until the day he was hanged for the crime. There was the de rigueur ghost of the maiden who leaped to her death from the top of the butte rather than betray her true love by marrying the man her father chose. The road to the butte even had the classic disappearing hitchhiker, tales of which supposedly went back to the horse and buggy days. Raven mentally flagged that one for Josiah. His chess partner was interested in origins of folk tales. If the book had the provenance of that particular ghost story correct, the Devil’s Crossing hitchhiker may in fact be the earliest instance of that particular tale.
Regardless of the unlikelihood of the individual tales, Raven did not dismiss the collection out of hand. Josiah tended to ramble about folklore over the chess board, and from him Raven learned that the most outlandish folktales often had a grain of truth. The bloody tyrant Vlad the Impaler became Vladimir Dracula of vampire legends. Unfortunate individuals with extreme hirsutism were killed as werewolves by their superstitious neighbors. Places that in early times were said to be cursed in modern times were found to have unnaturally high levels of arsenic in the soil. Some so-called haunted castles in Europe had been so contaminated by centuries of dark magic that they would likely never be fully cleared of the emanations.
The library closed up for the day much earlier than he was used to, but he supposed even with an endowment a small-town library had to be careful with its budget. He felt like he’d gained very little new knowledge for the time he’d spent. He sighed deeply. Perhaps Cassandra and Rafe would wrap up the case they were working on soon and one or both would come out here for a weekend. Scholarly research, ward-breaking, magical improvisation, those he could do, but he was by no means a trained detective. He was beginning to feel utterly useless here.
He left the library and crossed the street to the tavern for a late lunch—or was it an early dinner? Maybe by the time he ate and returned to his temporary home Cassandra would be off duty and he could pick her brain, if not convince her to teleport to him and rescue him from his own incompetence. With that hopeful thought, he crossed the street to the tavern.
Craig wasn’t behind the bar. This early in the day Raven would have been surprised if he were. He was, however, on the customer’s side of the bar, accepting from the waitress a large to-go bag with grease stains starting to show near the bottom. His hair was ruffled, his face tired and uncharacteristically grim. He smelled like a fireplace.
Raven stepped forward to greet the man, but as soon as Craig turned and saw him, his eyes narrowed.
“You have a lot of nerve coming in here!”
Chapter Nine
Raven stepped back in surprise at the cold rage in the man’s voice. He’d guessed that Craig wouldn’t be happy about him making Morgan’s bail, but he had no idea that the man would take it this personally. “What I did was within the law, both the letter and the spirit.” Out of the respect the sheriff had previously won from him, he kept his voice conversational, his posture unthreatening. This was not the time for Bad Old Raven to resurface, no matter what instinct demanded.
He did, however, strengthen his shield to combat-readiness. There was no sense being a fool. By the way the sheriff’s eyes darkened, he had sensed the change. Everything Raven knew about the man said that Craig wasn’t stupid enough to have a go at him if Raven didn’t make the first move. He hoped he was right. Not that the sheriff’s magic would pose any challenge to him in a real fight, and not that he would likely end up in any trouble that couldn’t be managed by the combined forces of his GII contacts and Alexander Chen, attorney at law, but he didn’t want to break the longest streak being out of tabloid headlines in his adult life. Not to mention that he had an aversion to being imprisoned behind magic-dampening fields, and third time was definitely not a charm. Besides, he rather liked Craig.
“Legal.” The sheriff spat out the word as if it were a curse. “Oh, yes, it was all legal. Why don’t you explain that all to Morgan Jansen’s parents? Though you’d have to dust off your necromancy.”
“What?” Raven hadn’t cared much for necromancy even when he was a practicing dark mage, but he let the verbal slap pass in his shock at the deeper implication. “What has happened?”
“The local hay man was making a delivery over at the Ja
nsen’s farm. He found Sam and Lucy Jansen in the front yard of their house, exsanguinated. Their house burned to the ground. The whole place reeked of dark magic. Morgan is nowhere to be found. There’s an APB out. I warned my officers to consider him extremely dangerous.”
“What? None of that makes sense.” Raven realized he sounded like the civilian he was, and naïve, which he was not. “But why?” Sam and Lucy had always stood by Morgan. They were the only family he had ever known.
“Who knows?” The sheriff growled. “Maybe they asked him to take out the trash before he could use the truck. We all know Morgan doesn’t like to be thwarted.”
Thoughts whirled through Raven’s mind, too fast for him to make sense of them. “I’m sorry.” It was the one thing of which he was certain. “If I had known—I had no way of knowing.”
“Of course not,” the sheriff said. “And, of course, you couldn’t listen to me. Or the prosecutor’s office. I’m guessing you knew they argued against bail at all.”
Raven nodded. No point in making things worse by playing dumb.
“Just because I’ve known the boy for longer than a day, just because I’m a law enforcement professional, well, that’s no reason to listen to me. Not when you’re the great Corwyn Ravenscroft.”
Raven flinched. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “If there’s anything I can do to help—”
“I’d say you’ve done enough.”
All eyes in the bar turned to him. It had been a while since he had felt such weight of public condemnation. He hadn’t realized that one could fall out of practice with bearing such things.
Under the circumstances, he didn’t linger to ask if the bar sold bottles to go. He schooled his face to an emotionless mask, squared his shoulders, and strode from the bar with a confidence he did not feel. Daring the deli-and-bait store, he found they offered a surprisingly acceptable wine aisle. He selected a bottle of Willamette Valley merlot and another of pinot noir, then picked up some packaged Tillamook cheddar and a box of crackers. Wine selection or no, he wasn’t about to dare the questionable-looking chicken nor the Jo-Joes, which were apparently fried somethings.
He returned to his temporary refuge. The message crystal was flashing the clear light that signaled a non-urgent message. He tapped the base of the crystal and felt instantly better for hearing Cassandra’s voice.
“Raven, love. Sorry I missed you. I just wanted to let you know that it doesn’t look like either I or Rafe are going to get loose from here to come out any time soon. Things are crazy. We’ve been working with the locals. . .there’s a weird surge in magic-related crime in Portland. No one can figure out what’s going on.”
Raven poured himself a glass of wine, and stared at the food. He had no real appetite, though he knew wine with dinner was healthier than wine as dinner.
Raven stared morosely at the ceiling of the cottage, letting his eyes follow the grain of the wood on the exposed timbers, trying to let his mind numb itself.
No help coming from GII. He wondered if he should just go home. He had been worse than no help here. The sheriff was right. He didn’t know the community, didn’t know the dynamics.
Maybe he wasn’t a dark mage anymore. That didn’t mean he was a good man.
He had tried to be, these last few years. He had tried. He longed for home. Not just the comforts of Ravenscroft Manor, though shutting himself up in his study with his books and his brandy certainly had its appeal. He missed his city. He knew it streets, its politics, its people. Even when he was notorious, at least he knew where he stood.
Despite the immodest amount of wine he consumed, he had trouble falling asleep. He rose several times to pace the floor, trying to no avail to wear himself out. He even considered going outside to walk, but he’d heard that there were venomous snakes in the area and had no idea if they were active at night. It hadn’t been the queasy feeling in his stomach that kept him lying awake, staring at the ceiling long after the clock on the wall had chimed midnight, however. He kept on playing over the events of the last day. His interview with Morgan. The discussions about Morgan he’d had with both the sheriff and with Scott before he made his decision to make the boy’s bail. The harsh and very likely warranted accusations from the sheriff last night.
Raven woke the next morning with his stomach reminding him that it preferred a better food to wine ratio. He got up, poured himself some water, made himself drink it despite his stomach’s opinion on the decision. He flipped open the napkin that covered the basket on the center of the table and decided he didn’t have the will to eat right now, no matter how tempting the coffeecake within would have been otherwise. He made a cup of Earl Grey, and tapped on the message crystal, reaching out to the crystal on his mantel at home. It was early enough that Cassandra might not have left yet for work.
“Raven?”
Cassandra’s voice always felt like grace, a benediction. As though he could not have possibly have screwed up all that terribly, not have been such a terrible person, and still have her in his life. Love welled up within him. Would he ever fail to be reduced to a sappy teenager by the mere sound of her voice? He hoped not.
“Things are a mess here, Cassandra,” he admitted. “And I fear that I may have just made them even worse. Something big is going on though, bigger than one boy could account for, even with a lot of talent and some major sociopathic tendencies.”
He filled her in on the events of the last day and half.
“I know you’re to say it’s just like Adam. I guess I haven’t learned my lesson.”
“Oh no, love, you can’t blame yourself. Not this time. You did everything you should have done. You have the opinion of his parents and a social worker familiar with him. You considered things carefully, discussed them with the lawyer. Yes, it turns out that the sheriff was right and the social worker was wrong, but you couldn’t have known that.”
“I really think the situation warrants an official GII investigation,” Raven said.
Cassandra groaned. “I wouldn’t want to be the one to have to explain that to Sherlock. She’s already ripping her hair out.”
It took a lot to rattle Cassandra’s supervisor; she was normally as cool-headed as the fictional character from whom her nick-name derived. “What’s going on?”
“It seems like every nutcase and wanna-be dark mage in the Portland area decided to go off at once. We have some sort of a doomsday cult situation out in Molalla. Up until Monday they weren’t even on our radar—just an ordinary-looking organic produce co-op. I think I even have a flyer for them around here somewhere. I was thinking about signing us up for a fresh produce subscription delivery. Now there’s been shots fired and they’re talking about the end of times. They’ve barricaded themselves in and set booby-traps, Mundane and magical both. We reached out to the Seattle office for reinforcements, but they have a situation of their own, a fundamentalist group that’s gone from annoying to dangerous with no prior warning. And those are just the highlights. The Eugene office just messaged us for help and we had to turn them down.”
Raven sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He couldn’t expect Sherlock to send someone out to investigate something he could not even define while there was an active situation going on.
“Look at it this way,” Cassandra said. “You always wanted to be a Guardian. Now’s your chance.”
“When I was in General Academy. What, are you going to give me one of those gold-badge stickers they hand out at classroom visits?”
“I’m sure I could track one down. Look, I hate to do this, but I have to dash. I was supposed to be meeting Rafe, like, five minutes ago.”
“Right, then.” Raven said. “Stay safe.”
“Always do.” The crystal went dark, signaling that Cassandra had deactivated at her end.
It was so, so tempting to pack up and teleport home. He was a civilian, not even here as a consultant. No duty held him here. So far, he couldn’t even claim he had done anyone any good. Except that someth
ing involving dark magic was going on. While any legal obligation from his pardon ended when he brought down his former master, Raven felt a duty to use his rare and ill-gotten knowledge of dark magic for good whenever he could.
Even if that knowledge, though extensive, fell short of the current demands.
Raven showered, dressed, and returned to the library. Fortunately, there were no other patrons and, if the librarian had heard of last night’s disruption at the Devil’s Pitchfork, she was too professional to glare. Raven poked around the town’s historical records for a while. Other than the local myths and legends, none of which seemed terribly out of the ordinary, he could find nothing. No credible history of curses. No recent or even distant record of notable dark mages. He gave up and teleported back to the B&B long before the library’s closing time.
Jasmine had left a packet of local information for guests, sitting on the desk by the landline telephone. There was a pizza place in the next town that would deliver as far as Devil’s Crossing for an extra surcharge. While he wasn’t a fan of pizza, it was the only option other than the convenience store and Devil’s Pitchfork, and so he called in an order.
The pizza arrived an hour and a half later, small for the price but surprisingly edible. His growling stomach reminded him of the number of meals that he had skimped on or skipped altogether, and he found himself finishing the whole thing. In the resultant food coma, he eyed the bed. Though it was only late afternoon, he thought maybe he could catch up on some of the sleep he had missed.
A flash of red drew his eyes; the message crystal, signaling urgent. Had he caused some other disaster?
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