by R. L. King
I clear my mind and begin the ritual, consulting my notes one last time. It is coming back to me—tracking rituals are among the easiest and safest, so apprentices learn them early. Mara used to have me locate various family members at least once every couple of weeks.
As I finish the incantation, the familiar tendril forms, twisting back and forth as I focus my concentration on Twyla. I hold my breath: this is the most crucial part of the ritual. The tendril’s action in the next few seconds will tell me what I need to do next. If it simply winks out, it means Twyla is dead—you can’t track a dead body with magic. If it zips away but can’t trace a location, it likely means she’s either behind wards or in some other a place magic can’t reach.
But if it streaks up through the ceiling and locks on a location, I can follow it. It will either fizzle out, which will show me the right direction, or, if she’s in the spell’s range, it will locate her and point me at where she is.
It all comes down to the next few seconds.
The little tendril twists a couple more times and then shoots upward through the ceiling. Heart pounding, I quickly send a corner of my consciousness after it.
She’s not dead! It’s found something!
Please don’t be out of range…
Quicker than I expect, the tendril dives down and settles almost proudly onto a location. On the plate in front of me, the two strands of hair light up with a little whoosh of magical flame and turn to a tiny pile of ash.
We’ve got her!
My heartbeat quickens even more as I snatch up the map. I can’t really explain how I can use a map in conjunction with a tracking spell—it’s one of those you just kind of know things, where the location stays in your head long enough so you can pinpoint it. It’s harder if you aren’t familiar with the area, but after five years I know Los Angeles. I stab my finger down on a spot as the candles sputter and die.
Yes!
The circle’s dead now. I grab a pen and replace my finger with a red dot before the image fades, then scramble up to let Rory out and call Nick.
He must have run up the stairs, because he’s at my door less than a minute after I reach him. “Did you find her?” he demands, breathless.
“Yes!” I thrust the map toward him. “She’s in North Hollywood.”
“That’s not too far from here—only a few miles. Do you know where, specifically?”
“No—the ritual doesn’t give you that much detail. But I can find her! She’s alive, and apparently Selene doesn’t think I’m worth warding against.”
“She probably thinks that as far as you’re concerned, Twyla’s on her way back to New York on a plane right about now.”
“Yeah, or that. Either way, we’ve got a window.” I glance at my watch. “We should go.”
“Yeah. We should. But we need a plan first.”
“We don’t have time. Let’s make a plan on the way over there. Selene could be killing her. We need to hurry.”
“What about Grandfather? Should we call him? If Selene’s as powerful as you say, having his people along might help us out.”
My mind is spinning again. All I can think about is Selene possibly torturing Twyla, but Nick’s right—a half-trained mage and a magic-glitching wild talent running into the middle of what’s probably a bad situation without any backup isn’t the greatest idea.
“Yeah,” I say at last, reluctantly. “Call him, if you can even reach him. But we need to go. We’re closer to her than they are—I can’t risk waiting.”
Nick tries calling as I gather a few things to take along—including my gun, which I stow in my bag even though I don’t have a concealed-carry permit. I don’t give a rat’s ass about mundane law right now.
“Voicemail again,” he mouths, frustrated. Then, aloud: “It’s me again—Nick. Our situation is getting worse—Selene’s got Twyla, and we think she’s going to kill her.” He consults the map and describes the location. “We’re heading over there now, but if you can help us out, that would be great. Thanks.”
I throw on my leather motorcycle jacket as I follow him out of the apartment. “Be good,” I call back to Rory. “We’ll be back soon with Auntie Twyla.” I hope.
We’re on the road before Nick speaks again. “So how are you going to find her if you don’t know exactly where she is? Will you have to do the ritual again once we get closer?”
“No. There’s a residual sense of the location that lingers for maybe an hour or so. It’s not exactly magic, which is probably why being near you isn’t messing it up, and it’s not as precise as what I get right at the end. But it should be enough to get at least the general area. Unless she moves, of course.”
“You can’t track a moving target?”
“It’s possible, but way above my skill level. So we’d better hope she doesn’t move.” As he’s driving, I’ve got my phone out and I’m trying to match up the red spot I’ve made on my big paper map with one I can zoom in tighter on.
I hear his sigh in the darkness. “So much stuff I don’t know. I thought I had all the answers with my books, but most of what I’ve got is a big pile of crap.”
“At least now you can learn the right answers,” I say, trying to sound reassuring. “You can learn from your grandfather—and maybe even from me, at least a little. I can’t help you with controlling your glitch thing, but I can probably teach you some basic magic theory stuff.”
“You’d do that?” His eyes glitter as he shoots a quick glance at me before turning his attention back to the road. The traffic’s not too bad right now, but that doesn’t mean we have the road to ourselves.
I shrug. Would I? I’m having a hard time changing gears between “I don’t want anything to do with magic” and “That doesn’t have to be true anymore.” Avoiding magic has been such a core of my life for so long, it’s going to be hard to make that kind of paradigm shift fast. “Maybe, yeah. Don’t count on me for much—I’ve made a specific effort to forget a lot of that stuff. But I guess there’s no real reason for me to do that anymore.”
“No, I guess there isn’t.”
The silence stretches out for a couple of minutes as I lean back in my seat and watch the traffic, wishing there was some spell that would let us lift up and float over it or make it get out of our way. Then he speaks again, softly: “Bron?”
“Yeah?”
“When this is all over—when we get Twyla back and deal with Selene—are you planning to move back to New York to be with your family?”
I tilt my head. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I mean—I guess it makes sense. What happened wasn’t your fault, and they’ll all know it so they can’t blame you for it anymore. You don’t need to feel uncomfortable around them. So moving back seems like the logical thing to do.”
He’s right—it does. I love my whole crazy extended family, even though they drive me nuts sometimes, and if I don’t have any reason to avoid magic, I can probably find at least a half-dozen people who would be willing to continue my apprenticeship. I’d have a place to live, a whole support system, and a bunch of people who care about me. Wouldn’t anybody want that?
“I…don’t know yet,” I say at last.
“No?” He sounds surprised. “Why not?”
“Hard to explain.”
“Try?” He indicates the traffic. “We’ve got some time.” Another sigh. “I don’t want to pry or anything, but…I guess my family situation has always been so weird, it almost seems like a no-brainer that if you have a loving family who wants you back and can teach you magic, you’d be all over it.”
“Yeah, but it’s not that easy.” I sigh. “I do love them. I miss them sometimes, I don’t mind admitting it. But they can be kind of…stifling. In a good way, but one thing I’ve got out here that I never had back there is independence. I had to rely on myself because I didn’t have a whole big safety net under me. And I like that.”
“So you’re not thinking of staying here because you can’t bear the though
t of being away from me?” His voice drips with good-natured mocking.
“Yeah, that’s it,” I reply in the same tone. “I can’t get enough of you, Nick.” But then, more seriously: “That might be part of it, though.”
“Really?”
His voice holds surprised pleasure, but none of the hope I’ve detected before. Maybe he really does finally get it. “Yeah. Like I said before, I haven’t had too many friends outside the family. But don’t get a big head about it or anything. I don’t want to leave my bookstore after I’ve finally got it going, and I like the weather a lot better out here.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Plus, Rory would probably skin me in my bed if I tried to move her all the way across the country.”
“Well, that’s the most important thing. Gotta keep the cat happy.”
“Damn straight. They can be vicious little beasts when you piss them off.”
I grin, surprised at how relaxed I feel, but then Twyla’s image pops back into my head and I tense up again. Is she still alive? The residual energy from the ritual’s still giving me a sense of where the tendril was pointing, but it won’t give me updated information. If she moves, or dies, I won’t find out until we get there.
Nick seems to pick up on my concern. “What do you think Selene is doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…if she came all the way out here and grabbed Twyla—why? That’s the part I don’t understand. I mean, if she’s pissed at her for some reason, why not just kill her? Sorry—I don’t mean to sound morbid,” he adds hastily. “I’m just trying to think this through.”
I’ve been doing the same thing. “Yeah, I don’t get it either. The only thing I can think of is that if she knows Twyla’s been talking to me—if she somehow figures out we know what she did to Mara—maybe she wants to do the same thing to Twyla.”
“That’s pretty vindictive, though, isn’t it?”
I give him the side-eye. “This is the woman who framed her best friend’s apprentice for her horrific murder. I’m guessing vindictive kind of goes with the territory.”
Nick shakes his head. “I’ll never understand that kind of thinking.”
“That’s a good thing. I’d be worried about you if you did.”
Still, his words nag at me. There’s got to be more to this puzzle than we’re seeing. We still don’t know who the mysterious Razakal is, and if he (or she, possibly) has anything to do with what’s going on now. Selene was working with him five years ago—is she still working with him? Is that why she’s grabbed Twyla?
I let out a loud, frustrated sigh. There’s no point in speculating about all this now, without any facts.
It won’t stop me from doing it, though.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I had a few guesses about what kind of place Selene would take Twyla to, but they all turn out to be wrong.
My sense of her location fading with each passing minute, I direct Nick to take the next exit. After spending a short time crawling along increasingly deserted streets, we pull up in front of a closed gate with a high wall stretching off to either side as far as we can see.
There’s no light beyond a few dim streetlights, but I don’t need light to figure out what’s going on. Even from here I can make out the large, warehouse-like buildings beyond the gates.
“This is a film studio,” I say in a hushed tone. “Those are old soundstages.”
He nods. “Yeah. And it looks abandoned—or at least most of it doesn’t get used much.”
Why would Selene bring Twyla here? When I pull up the map application on my phone and zero in on our current location, I see that I’m right. “The place is called Halcyon Studios. I’ve never heard of it, have you?”
“No, but there are quite a few smaller ones scattered around this area.” He pulls off and parks, switching off the lights. “So what do you want to do?”
I’m already plugging “Halcyon Studios” into Google. “It is abandoned. Looks like it used to be owned by a larger studio that rented the soundstages out to smaller production companies, but they went out of business and the whole place is caught up in legal snarls. Nobody’s used it in at least two years.”
“And you’re sure she’s here?”
The clear feeling I got at the end of the ritual is almost gone now, but it’s still strong enough to point somewhere past the gates. “Yeah, she’s here. Doesn’t look like there’s much going on, though—no shafts of green light shooting up from one of the buildings or anything. Maybe Selene is holding her prisoner here and we can get her out before anybody realizes we’re here.”
“Yeah, and maybe flying monkeys will show up and lift us over that wall, too.”
“Nice optimism, Nick.” But I agree with him—there’s no way we’ll get that lucky.
He gets out of the car and approaches the gate. It’s locked with a heavy chain and a padlock the size of my hand. “How are we gonna get in there? Can you magic the lock open?”
“Not one that big. I didn’t get that far in the curriculum before everything went to hell, unfortunately. I never learned how to do more than small, simple ones.”
“And I’m guessing you can’t levitate us over?”
I study the wall. It’s at least eight feet high. “You, definitely not—too much chance the glitch will screw it up. Me maybe, but I wouldn’t trust it if there’s another way.” Damned if I’m not starting to regret now that I didn’t keep my skills up. What the hell is happening to me?
Nick eyes it too. “If I get a running start, I think I can pull myself up, but I’m not sure I can pull you up once I get there. It would be pretty embarrassing if I dropped you on your ass.”
“Yeah, that’s not my first choice either.” I pause, thinking. “Okay. You see if you can get up there, and then I’ll try to levitate myself. But I’ll have to do it farther down the wall so you don’t glitch me.” Seriously, this is like some kind of Keystone Kops caper. All we need is the Benny Hill theme.
“Hang on a second.” He pulls out his phone and begins texting.
“What are you doing?”
“Telling Grandfather where we are. I have no idea if he’ll get the message in time, but at least if he wants to send reinforcements, he’ll know where to send them.”
I hadn’t even thought of that. “Okay, let’s do this.”
Getting over the wall proves to be anticlimactic. Nick goes out into the middle of the street, pauses a moment, then takes off at a run toward the wall. At the last second, he leaps up and catches the edge. A moment later he’s scrambled up and perched on top.
“Nice,” I call under my breath. “I’d hold up a sign with a ‘10’ on it if I had one.”
“Hurry up. I feel really exposed up here.”
I make sure my bag with the gun inside is secure, then take a few deep breaths, visualizing the pattern for the levitation spell. That’s another one Mara taught me early, but I was never very good at it. After five years of no practice, I don’t have high hopes.
It’s a good thing I don’t need Nick’s help. I lift myself off the ground and float up about six feet before I lose control of the spell, but manage to grab the top just before it fails and haul myself up. It’s not pretty, it’s definitely not graceful, and I’m very glad I wore my leather jacket, but I get there.
I want to lie there and pant for a few minutes, but we don’t have time. Instead, I slide over the other side, holding on to the top, and drop down. Nick joins me a second later.
“Hope they don’t have guard dogs,” he says nervously, looking around.
“Yeah, you could have gone all day without saying that.” I move away from him again so I can shift to magical sight and scan the area, but don’t see either magic or any living things larger than a cat.
“We good?”
“Yeah. Let’s go. We’ll need to poke around some—the spell won’t pinpoint one specific building.”
“Yay. Wandering around a deserted movie studio
in the dark. Everybody ever tell you you’re a fun date, Bron?”
“Oh, yeah. The legions of guys I go out with tell me that all the time.”
Fortunately, this isn’t one of the big studio lots with a whole bunch of warehouse-sized soundstage buildings, but it’s not tiny either. I pause a moment; now that my vision’s adjusting to the low light, I can see two smaller structures off to our right and left, three big buildings ahead of us, and I think I can make out at least two more behind them. Farther off to the left, the elements and neglect haven’t been kind to some crumbling outdoor sets.
“Any idea which building they’re in?” Nick asks, looking around.
“Nope. We’ll have to check them all. With any luck I might spot something with magical sight.”
“I’d suggest we split up, but I’ll be honest: I really don’t want to do that.”
I chuckle. For all his curiosity, Nick’s never going to be the square-jawed action-hero type, charging into danger with fists up and eyes open. “I don’t really want to do that either, so we’re in agreement. But we might have to put some distance between us so I can get some readings. If we’re lucky, I’ll spot magical traces when we get close to one of these buildings.”
“I hope so. Because trying to break into them all sounds like a bad idea. And judging by your graceful trip over the wall, levitation isn’t an option.”
“Shut up,” I mutter, amused. Can’t fault him for speaking the truth.
I wish I’d brought a flashlight, but it’s probably best that I didn’t. We’ll stand out like crazy if we walk along with a bright light announcing our presence, especially if there’s a security guard on patrol. Selene can use magic to hide (or to kill the guard—she doesn’t seem to mind killing) but we can’t. I pull my gun out of my bag, make sure the safety’s on, and stuff it in my jacket pocket.
The two buildings directly inside the gates are a security post, currently deserted, and what’s probably a canteen. When we peer in through the large windows, we spot a bunch of overturned tables and chairs, but nothing else interesting. I point toward the back and we continue walking down the rutted, cracked road.
