No sense trying to avoid the news. He heaved a heavy sigh and went to the crystal, hesitating only before a moment before tapping the base to activate it.
“This is Raven.”
Chapter Ten
“This is Craig. Sheriff Schmidt. There’s a situation. I need you to come out right away.”
“I’ll consider it if you tell me where, what, why, and whether I should have my attorney present.”
“What? No, it’s nothing like that. Look, I owe you an apology, and you’ll get one, in full and in detail. But there’s no time now. I have a hostage situation. No time to explain on the crystal. I could really use a combat magic heavy hitter with reliable accuracy.”
Trap! Raven pushed the thought away, blamed it on his early history. He didn’t think the sheriff would use such tactics, especially when Raven had done nothing illegal and had the might of GII behind him. Besides, the sheriff sounded frantic. If he was playacting, then he could replace the best actors at the Shakespeare festival in Ashland. Raven did not think he was acting. He was certain enough to stake his life and his freedom. Or at least certain enough not to risk the life of an innocent.
A better person than he, someone like Ana or Cassandra, wouldn’t have hesitated for even one moment.
Raven thought for two before he answered. “Where are you?”
“It would take too long to explain. You’re an out-of-towner. On these back roads, it’d take an hour, hour and a half by car if you didn’t want to risk tipping over the edge and into the ravine.”
Raven wasn’t bloody likely to get in a car anyway if there were another option.
“Just use me as a teleport anchor,” the sheriff urged. “Please. Come quick.”
Raven closed his eyes, reached out through the ether until he found the sheriff’s solid presence. The sheriff felt like an ancient stone warmed by centuries of sun, belonging to this land, this desert, this community. Raven followed the pull and found himself at the end of a rutted dirt road, facing into a clearing.
As soon as he had faded in fully a hand grabbed his arm yanking him behind the rusted wreck of a car. “Get down.”
Before he had fully oriented to his situation a bullet whizzed overhead passing through the space he had been occupying to take out a piece from the trunk of the juniper behind him.
Gods. That’s all they needed. Mundane firearms tended to behave erratically around magic for reasons that no one had ever fully explained.
“Is he a Mundane?” Raven asked in a whisper.
“Craft,” the sheriff said in the same hushed tone. “Lots of Craft here have ‘em, even some of Art practitioners. For hunting and such. Putting an animal out of its misery when it’s suffering and the vet is three hours away by truck. ‘Course most folks in this town grew up around guns and magic and they have more sense than to combine the two.”
Raven dared inch up the side of the car, just a little, just enough to catch a glimpse of the shooter through the dust-filmed windows of the wrecked car. He saw a tall, broadly built, red-haired man with the red-red skin that comes with sunburn, not genetics. He had one arm over Morgan’s shoulder and across his neck, not quite a chokehold, but not far from it. In his other hand he held a nasty-looking revolver pointed at Morgan’s head.
Raven ducked back down again, hiding behind the door of the car before he could draw the attention of the gun man. “What the hell is going on?”
“That’s Harvey Heilman. Harvey the hay man.”
“The one who reported finding Morgan’s parents?”
“Yes. We’re still not sure if he had any involvement in that mess. The magic seems too strong for what we know of Harvey’s abilities. As I said, he’s a Craft practitioner, not Art, and not terribly powerful at any rate. But what we know for sure is Morgan found out what happened at his parents’ farm and drove like a bat out of hell to Harvey’s hay barn. Harvey had just finished deliveries for the day. Our one surviving witness says Morgan had heard that Harvey reported it and just wanted to know what happened. What Harvey had seen, knew. I guess word had reached Morgan that he was wanted and he knew better than to come to the police. Or maybe not better. If he had come to us at least he wouldn’t he wouldn’t have a gun to his head right now.
“The only surviving witness said that Harvey went nuts. It was like he didn’t even hear what Morgan was saying, what Morgan was asking. He started shouting crazy things, accusing Morgan of being after him, of accusing the police force of being after him, of half the people in the Valley being after him. There was something about demons and a rain of blood. There’d already been gunshots by the time Morgan got there, and one of the neighbors had already called the police.
“As soon as Harvey heard the sirens, he grabbed Morgan and the gun and hauled them into the truck. One of my deputies pursued and that’s how we ended up here. The deputy followed him this far. We think Harvey’s truck axle broke on the rocks up ahead and he decided to make his stand.” The sheriff shook his head. “I don’t understand it. I just don’t understand it. I’ve known Harvey for going on twenty years now. Bought hay from him every year back when I kept a pony for the sister’s kids. Everyone knows Harvey. Everyone likes Harvey.”
“You said the last survivor. So people were killed up at Heilman’s place?”
“Yeah. Good thing that one of our deputies got out of the car and looked around to see if there was anyone who needed help instead of joining in the chase with the truck. Harvey’s wife and his four kids were all shot. Only the eldest one survived by playing dead. She was in shock, and I’m not sure how much sense there is in the tale she told. I almost hope she doesn’t completely understand what happened. There was blood and brains everywhere from what the deputy said.”
Gods. Raven’s thoughts went unbidden to his own little Ransley Zachary. He couldn’t imagine what would drive someone to kill his children like that, to kill his wife like that. Even Raven’s father had had enough natural instinct not to kill his own offspring.
“It’s still feasible that Morgan could have killed his own parents and that was a separate incident,” the sheriff said. “But in light of this afternoon’s events I’d have to say that looking less likely.”
It was not the time for I told you so. “How do you want to do this?”
“I’ll be honest, I’m not really sure. But I figure with all your experience with the GII you’ve seen a lot more of this than we ever see in a lifetime out here. I think I’ve only heard of one hostage situation my whole life in Devil’s Crossing and that was a man who got drunk and beat up his wife, and panicked when the cops came. My dad was sheriff then, and he said it was the toughest situation he’d ever faced in his life. That man was drunk, yes, but he wasn’t acting like he was lost in a totally different reality. Anyway, I was hoping with your experience. . . At the very least I’m guessing you’ve had much more practice at targeting spells.”
As a matter of fact, he was one of the best in the field, beating out even seasoned GII agents on the target range. But still, no one could be certain enough of their aim for this scenario.
“They’re coming,” Harvey screamed. “The shadows. You think I don’t know, but I can feel them coming closer.”
“What shadows?” Raven whispered to the sheriff. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”
The sheriff shook his head. “As far as we can tell he’s delusional.”
“You’ve been working for them for years,” Harvey continued. “You think I don’t know what you’re up to? You and the Jansens, the men in black coats, you’re all in league.”
In league? Raven was fairly certain that in league was not a phrase in Harvey’s daily vernacular. It sounded like a phrase he might have picked up from a book, or a horror film.
“You see why we believe that we’re not going to be able to talk our way out of this one. And it would take too long to get a sharpshooter from the state police or the Feds. We can usually get support from Bend, but they’re dealing with an unusua
l spike in serious crime for some reason. Harvey could snap and kill the kid at any moment. Targeted combat magic may be our only hope of a positive outcome,” the sheriff said.
“No one is good enough to guarantee the results in this situation,” Raven said. “We would be risking the kid’s life. Even if I was able to aim the spell lightning to avoid hitting Morgan while trying to take out Harvey—and mind you that’s with less than six inches margin of error. I don’t know many people who are that confident, even in GII, and most of my early training was not intended to avoid casualties. Even if I could make the strike, there’s the risk that Harvey could still get off a shot, intentionally or as a reflex. His finger could pull on the trigger as he fell.”
“But it could be a bigger risk to Morgan if we do nothing.” The sheriff looked over his shoulder. “In about another five minutes the sun is going to start slipping down the horizon, and the glare will be full in Harvey’s eyes. That will be our best chance to strike. Otherwise, I’m afraid Harvey will get more and more desperate as fatigue sets in, and shoot the kid no matter what we do.”
There was another option. If Raven were anyone but himself, this choice, this test, would not be before him. If he had been anyone else, he wouldn’t be standing here with the power of the dark magic still flowing in his memory and his veins, and the desperate need to atone forever burning in his soul. For his work in bringing down his former master, Raven had been granted a full pardon by the Joint Council of the Three Communities, provisional on his forsaking dark magic. He had only broken that vow once, in the heat of the pitched battle when William had resurfaced to threaten all that Raven loved.
Many of the laws regarding what was and was not dark magic were somewhat arbitrary. Combat spells such as magefire and spell lightning, even Hammerhand, were not considered dark per se. Like Mundane weapons, their use was legal or illegal based on circumstances. Raven didn’t disagree with the classification of some dark magic; death magic had left a stain on his soul that might never wash away. The law said that any magic that subsumed one person’s will to another was automatically dark. In some ways, Raven understood where the lawmakers were coming from. To completely lose one’s will, to have one’s mind and one’s power taken over by another, that was one of the worst nightmares Raven could imagine, and his years with William had given his imagination plenty of fodder. Not to mention that the addictive nature of dark magic meant that a strict ban made sense. Once a mage found justification to take over someone’s will once, it became that much easier to find a reason to do it again, or to perform some other act of dark magic. Raven, having spent much of his adult life as a dark mage, still policed himself for signs of recidivism although several years had passed since his return to the light.
It was far easier, far safer, to reject dark magic altogether. But in circumstances like these, where the alternative would risk the life of at least one civilian as well as a number of law enforcement officers, the choice seemed less clear.
“So, given your assessment of Harvey’s magical abilities,” Raven said, “I should be able to overpower his will, even from this distance. Take control of his thoughts, make him drop the gun.”
“You can do that? From this distance? Without prior contact?” The sheriff sounded suddenly wary and Raven couldn’t blame him. It was a frightening thing to think that your thoughts and decisions might not be your own.
Usually it took familiarity with and some cooperation from the victim, even if that cooperation came from either coercion or subterfuge. Or else the mage casting the spell had to rely on a charmed object somehow slipped into the victim’s possession to boost the magic.
“I couldn’t manage it with anyone with any real power. And not for any length of time. Mind control like in a Mundane’s silly vampire movie doesn’t exist. Harvey appears panicked, exhausted. I might be able to grab him for just a few minutes, long enough maybe for Morgan to get clear and your men to move in.”
The sheriff said nothing for a moment, but his voice when he spoke held no hesitation. “Do it.”
“It’s dark magic,” Raven reminded him.
“I don’t care.” The sheriff took a deep breath. “Look, half the men here are Mundane. The others have been around the block long enough to know that good policing is — situational.”
Raven hesitated. He agreed that it was the right thing to do. What would Cassandra or Ana tell him to do? Or Sherlock, the director of GII and Cassandra’s boss, who pulled him out of his isolation and proved to him he had a place as a consultant? They had put their own reputation, their own careers on the line, to stand up for him. Was he risking all that if he used dark magic again, here in front of strangers and near-strangers?
“I’m senior officer here,” the sheriff said. “I’ll take responsibility.”
For a lot of reasons, it was not that easy. For one, obeying orders did not give absolute protection when one knew that the orders were illegal. For another, Raven was a consultant with GII and not here in it in an official capacity. Arguably, he either outranked Craig Schmidt, or was not in the chain of command at all.
Alexander Chen had gotten people off with a lot less to work with. But that really wasn’t even the point. He hadn’t been able to save Adam. He could save Morgan, maybe. He was damned if he would let him die over what was illegal but not, in this instance, actually wrong.
He was trusting the sheriff to keep his word. It would be easy enough for Craig to deny that he had told Raven to go ahead with the dark magic. It wasn’t even twenty-four hours since this man all but threw him out of his bar. A few years ago he might not have accepted the risk. But trust came easier to him these days. He believed that Craig was a decent man, an honest man.
He closed his eyes, focused his own will, then reached out to Heilman’s. He found no resistance, not even the natural barrier of a Mundane. Instead, the man’s consciousness grabbed onto Raven’s will like a drowning man clutching a lifeline. Fear clutched Raven’s throat. The man’s mind was a maelstrom of terror, confusion, and a strange dark hunger that seemed alien to the rest of his thoughts and emotions. And that maelstrom was drawing Raven in.
Chapter Eleven
He pulled back, panicked, only managing to stop from fully disengaging when he realized that he was freed from the danger. What the hell was that? Did Heilman have multiple personalities? Is that what Raven sensed? Or was something equally strange going on, beyond even Raven’s experience?
No matter. Time enough to analyze that later.
He reached out, twined his will with the panicking, confused part that he identified as the primary personality, let it cling to him. I know you’re scared. I have a plan. Yield to me.
Right now, he needed to get Morgan safe. He held Heilman’s will gently, but firmly. It was as though he were picking up a wild animal, and didn’t want to scare it but didn’t want to risk it is escaping. Just as gently, he molded that will with his own. Let Morgan go. You’re safest if you let the boy go. Let the him go, and all will be well. You’ll be safe from the guns, safe from the shadows. Just let him go.
It wasn’t working. The anger, the rage, the darkness in Heilman’s mind fought him, clamoring for violence, for blood. Shrieking that the only way to be safe was to kill the threat.
No. You’re safest if you give up the boy. You’re safest if you give up Morgan. The shadows will leave you alone if only you give up Morgan. You can be at peace. It wasn’t working. Gods damn it, it wasn’t working. And then suddenly Harvey shoved Morgan away, sending him stumbling toward the officers on legs shaking with shock. Morgan tripped, fell to hands and knees, scurried to cover behind the wrecked car without taking time to get to his feet.
It had worked. Oh, powers of light and dark, it had worked. Now all he had to do was convince Heilman to put down the gun. Raven took a deep breath, and then another. Focused his will, shaped what he wanted in Heilman’s own thoughts. He saw the gun hand lower, just by an inch or so, then lower again a few more inches. He almost
had it. Almost there.
The maelstrom madness in Heilman’s head spun even faster in fury, too fast for Raven to parse out individual thoughts. Heilman’s will jerked away from Raven’s hold. Raven’s thoughts were still too close to Heilman’s; the man’s darker emotions almost overcame Raven’s own, almost became Raven’s own. Raven sensed the fear, the despair, the horror. Their gun hand, no Heilman’s gun hand moved faster than thought. Raven reached out with his own thoughts, but before he could exert his will the barrel found its place under Heilman’s chin, and a finger moved on the trigger.
A bang like the amplified slamming of the door echoed against the rocks as Heilman’s body dropped to the ground and was still. The silence that followed was deafening. No one moved, no one even spoke. It was as if the world itself held its breath.
Raven’s feet took him forward, the gritty soil crunching beneath his hard-soled shoes until he stopped just short of the body. The spirit he had so briefly tangled with, had struggled with, had tried to help, was gone. Gone as surely and completely as if William’s most spectacular and most destructive spells had hit the man and torn him apart. Except this body was intact, nearly unchanged except for a singed hole under his chin. Scarlet blood poured from his open mouth. From his ears a yellow fluid leaked. Brain matter? Spinal fluid? The yellow fluid had streaks of pink. More blood, mixed into other fluids.
The gun was still in Heilman’s hand. Mostly metal, a little wood, some black powder and the bullet. No power as Raven understood power, and yet it had achieved one of the oldest, most common and yet in its own way the most profoundly dark magic the world had known since its beginning. This Mundane object had taken a living thing, a living man, and transformed him into nothing more than meat and bone.
The sheriff and his deputies were surrounding the body now. They kept a careful distance as though an invisible line around the corpse must not be crossed for fear of destruction of evidence, or out of respect for the life that had once been and now was no more. Raven heard them talking quietly. The voices seemed so very far away, as though he were hearing them from a television screen in another room. Something about the type of ammunition that was used, a type commonly sold to farmers who loaded their pistols for snakes and other small vermin.
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