Spell Caster

by Clara Coulson

  The three auxiliary teams also hop to attention at Naomi’s order, and hurry over to their vehicles to head out to the suspect’s neighborhood before the rest of us, so they can secure a perimeter that minimizes negative civilian impacts and hopefully avoids rousing public suspicion. Naomi gives them a five-minute head start, then orders the rest of us to pile into our SUVs and get ready for a final review of the strike plan, followed by a com system check.

  I get to ride with Ramirez’s team because, as it turns out, Harmony Burgess is already staking out the suspect’s house. “She’s been there for the last hour, cooped up in one of her sniper perches and watching the house through a pair of high-powered binoculars,” Ramirez tells me as I climb into the front passenger seat. “She’s been periodically calling Captain Sing to report on activity inside the house. As of her last call, about ten minutes back, she’s spotted our guy four times. Twice in his living room, once in the kitchen, and once in the front hall. He doesn’t appear to be doing anything overtly suspicious at the moment, but Harmony says he looks agitated. Pacing back and forth. Hunched posture. Upset about yesterday’s failures, maybe?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I have to bite my tongue, hard, to stop myself from blurting out any incriminating crumbs of truth.

  “Our guy,” aka Roman Nottaway, a wizard of at least middle age with a chip on his shoulder and four big reasons for loathing every fiber of Robert Delos’ being, is the perfect fall guy for Alexander Targus’ Court-ordered murder spree. According to the handful of public records the ICM didn’t scrub, which Edith emailed out to everyone on the strike team, Nottaway is a Michigan native who’s spent the last twenty years living in an unassuming middle-class neighborhood and working an unassuming middle-class job in an unassuming mid-sized town not far from Detroit. He mysteriously uprooted himself six weeks ago—quit his job, sold his house, the whole nine yards—and replanted himself on the edge of the Aurora city limits. No record of him getting a new job. And the new house is just a rental.

  Those salient details combined with the dirt Edith dug up in his history, namely that Nottaway was once suspected of murdering a man who violently assaulted one of his cousins—though charges were never filed, I assume because the ICM stepped in to clean up the mess—make him a viable suspect for our investigation. Especially because that same cousin died during Delos’ curse epidemic, along with three other people who held the Nottaway surname.

  Wizard with a violent side and a penchant for vengeance. Exactly the sort of person we originally assumed the perp would be.

  If Lucian and Foley hadn’t warned me, I’d have fallen for the ruse just like everyone else. Targus knows exactly what he’s doing.

  “Looking a little distracted there, Kinsey,” Ramirez says as he pulls the SUV into line with the other two heading for the exit. “You all right?”

  My teeth nip my tongue. I taste blood. “Fine. Just bummed my teammates won’t be part of the run to take this bastard down. He deserves to have Ella break his face after the shit he pulled yesterday.”

  Ramirez gives me a sympathetic smile. “I hear you. But I’m sure Captain Sing will give the guy a run for his money. She’s no less intimidating on the battlefield than Captain Dean. And hey, if the guy surrenders instead of fighting to the death, then maybe your teammates can smack him around a bit during the interrogation. I’m sure he’ll be belligerent enough to warrant a few good whacks upside the head. Practitioners always try something when we arrest them. Last wizard I interviewed straight up tried to set me on fire. I decked him so hard I broke his nose and knocked out his front teeth.” He touches his head. “Still had to get a haircut though. I was smoking like a used match.”

  I fake a chuckle. “But you actually have to get your perp to the dungeon in one piece in order to rough them up. And these obsessive vengeance types never cooperate to that degree. I think it’s more likely we’ll be bringing home a body bag.”

  We’ll definitely be bringing home a body bag. Because Targus’ ploy won’t hold up if we have the opportunity to grill his patsy. Not only may Nottaway understandably deny any involvement in the murders, but with the supposed perp still breathing, with the need to secure a conviction, the investigative task force will comb through all the minutiae of Nottaway’s life.

  Eventually, somebody—my money’s split between Edith and one of the keen-eyed forensics techs—will come across a handful of things that don’t fit neatly into the narrative of Nottaway as the killer. They’ll pass their doubt up the ladder, and a more important somebody will begin asking the questions that Targus doesn’t want asked. And then all hell will break loose.

  So Roman Nottaway has to die today.

  The mere idea of allowing him to die makes me sick. I want nothing more than to spill the whole truth, to call off the strike operation and leave Nottaway alone, to turn DSI’s full and furious attention on the scheming snake of a Rook who dared to walk into our office with a smile on his face. But if I do that, Sadie’s life will be as good as forfeit.

  The second Targus realizes his frame job attempt is a nonstarter, he’ll cast all efforts at subterfuge aside and double down on his efforts to complete his mission, to scratch off the next target on his hit list, and as he’s already demonstrated, he’ll have absolutely no qualms eliminating any DSI agent who gets in his way.

  I have no illusions that Targus will be deterred by any of the DSI building’s security, or the prospect of fighting countless DSI agents. He’ll march right through the front doors without a care in the world and tear the place apart until he finds Sadie Wheeler. Because without the need for secrecy and artifice hanging over his head, with the directive to keep his mission under wraps a moot point, with DSI starkly aware of his treachery, and that of the High Court, why would he bother to go easy on us? We’d already be enemies of the ICM at that point.

  So, Roman Nottaway or Sadie Wheeler? That’s what it all comes down to. The wizard who likely committed a murder in the heat of the moment some years ago, and who may be so prone to anger that he’s committed more passion crimes since? Or the innocent two-year-old werewolf child left emotionally scarred after witnessing the brutal and unjust slaughter of her mother? I can spare only one of those two people. And sparing the first could lead to war.

  Does it make me a bad person if I say the choice is easy? I’m hoping the sheer level of guilt I feel means no.

  Ramirez drives the SUV into the gravel parking lot beside a shuttered convenience store a quarter mile north of our destination. Naomi’s vehicle should now be coming to a stop at a mechanic’s garage roughly the same distance away on the opposite side of the house, and Delarosa should be hunting for a place to hide his SUV in the woods off to the east. Nottaway’s property backs onto a patch of dense woods, so the objective of Delarosa’s team will be to make sure Nottaway doesn’t flee past the tree line and initiate a dangerous pursuit after the rest of us break down his doors and attempt to arrest him for a bunch of murders he didn’t commit.

  We all exit the vehicle, a series of slamming doors and heavy boots shuffling across gravel, and convene at the rear, where Delarosa opens the trunk to reveal the weapons cache. Everyone except me grabs either a shotgun or a rifle, along with a pack of spare ammo that attaches to their belts. Someone offers me a choice of weapons, but I turn him down with a shake of my head and gesture to my suppression rings. Hauling around bulky weapons will only impede me if I get into a close-quarters battle with another practitioner inside a cramped house.

  The five of us quickly skulk down the street toward the target house. Which turns out to be a small one-story structure with white vinyl siding that faded to gray sometime in the nineties, windows whose screens are torn or missing, and two entry doors: a wooden front door with a crack down the middle, as if someone kicked it with all their strength, and a grimy sliding-glass back door that lets out onto a rectangular concrete slab I’m sure some realtor called a patio in the online listing for the place. The house sits between two equally drab nei
ghboring properties, each of the narrow yards separated by chest-high chain-link fences rusted over from years of heavy rains and snows. All in all, this isn’t the sort of neighborhood the average middle-class, middle-aged bachelor would choose to move to—in his right mind.

  I have a terrible feeling about the mental state of the wizard living in that house.

  This is going to get really, really ugly.

  We hunker down behind the next-door neighbor’s house and wait until we spot the moving shadows that constitute Naomi’s team creeping up to a similar position on the other side of Nottaway’s property. As they crouch beside a scraggly hedgerow, black-clad shapes break away from the darkness in the woods behind the house, indicating Delarosa and crew have also arrived. Delarosa’s agents hurriedly spread out across the edge of the woods and either take up defensive positions behind thick trees, or duck into the tall brush so they can pop up and surprise Nottaway if he comes gunning for the tree line.

  With all of us now in position, Naomi speaks into her com. “Captain Argent, is the two-block perimeter sealed?”

  The woman leading the auxiliary teams curtly replies, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. Strike teams, prepare your weapons. Those with thermal goggles, don them now.”

  The sound of a sword gliding out of a sheath sings across the feed, and we all take it as a cue to unclip our holsters and switch off our safeties and charge our beggar rings (where applicable). Two agents on each team, including the auxiliaries, are also equipped with the thermal goggles Riker had delivered to the office this morning. They’ll alert everyone if a misshapen monster that radiates heat like an oven appears anywhere in our path. Assuming the polong doesn’t catch on to the strategy and simply impale, strangle, or otherwise murder those agents with its tentacles of doom...

  Jeez, Kinsey, I snap at myself. Cynical much?

  “Kinsey,” Naomi says, curtailing my self-criticism session, “what’s the ward situation?”

  Ramirez scoots out of my way so I can get a clear view of Nottaway’s entire property. I poke my head around the edge of the neighbor’s splinter hazard of a back deck, flip on my magic sense to survey the property…and am practically blinded by an intense blue flare.

  The unexpected pain, a hammer blow to my retinas, knocks me on my ass. I bite back a guttural “fuck” as I slap my hands over my watering eyes. Ramirez grips my shoulder, his voice soft in my ear as he asks if I’m all right. But I ignore him, and everything else, until the deep ache fades. Then I dial back my magic sensitivity as far as I can without turning the whole thing off, and slowly peel my hands off my face, squinting for good measure.

  Nottaway’s yard is no longer lit up like a blue supergiant, but it’s still surprisingly bright. And upon closer inspection of the hectic minefield of wards, it isn’t hard to see why: the ward construction is extremely sloppy.

  Most practitioners design wards to minimize waste energy and maximize two important elements, called “period of integrity” and “period of peak effectiveness.” Because wards decay over time, due to the natural energy of the earth eroding any magic energy expended from a soul, a good practitioner seeking to protect house and home will generally spend months, sometimes years, designing wards that not only last as long as possible, but also maintain an adequate punch for the duration of their existence.

  Practitioners also like to craft wards that are easy to “top up,” so they can repair or refuel any part of their defense before it fails completely, and so they never have to redo the ward construction from scratch. Because drawing good wards is time consuming and tedious, and like most people, practitioners like to be lazy when they can get away with it.

  Nottaway’s wards look less like the work of a good practitioner, and more like the junk I rigged at my apartment this morning that would’ve either had an experienced practitioner rolling on the floor laughing at the sheer awfulness, or fleeing in terror because the level of instability in the construction meant my apartment could go up in flames if someone knocked on the door too hard.

  In fact, I nearly set my apartment ablaze when I rushed back home earlier, because I totally forgot the wards were there and almost triggered the one in the foyer that would’ve spit a flamethrower-grade vortex of fire out of the floor. Before it inevitably collapsed on itself and just plain-old exploded.

  Point is, I’ve been doing self-taught magic for three weeks. I don’t entirely suck at it, but I’m not very good at it either. And that’s okay. Because I’m a novice. No one expects me to become anything remotely close to an expert spellcaster for at least a few years of intensive study and diligent practice.

  Nottaway, on the other hand, is not a novice. The man is at least Erica’s age. While I certainly don’t expect every fortyish practitioner to be as badass as Erica, my encounters with ICM practitioners over the past year have always demonstrated a degree of skill and expertise far beyond the mess I see splashed across Nottaway’s house and yard: ward lines awkwardly overlapping on the long, dried grass of the yard, rendering the spells unstable, a ward on the glass of a window whose basic structures I recognize as those more suitable for embedding in stone, a ward that should be entirely written on the side door but is instead written partially on the wall, and the list goes on. And on. And on. It looks like Nottaway threw up these wards in a drunken stupor.

  What if he did? whispers an unsettling voice inside my head. Anxiety blossoms, my throat tightens, and I struggle to breathe, as a flurry of horrid thoughts spiral outward from that question. But instead of alcohol, what if the drug is magic? What if Targus screwed with Nottaway’s head the same way that Delos tried to screw with mine? What if Nottaway actually believes he is the killer? What if the whole reason for his move to Aurora was because Targus mind-fucked him into throwing his life away? What if Targus could just as easily mind-fuck me if I confront—?

  “Kinsey!” Ramirez mutters hoarsely as he shakes my shoulder. “Talk to me.”

  “Oh, sorry.” I banish my dizzying fears to a dusty corner and set my mind on the task at hand. “Got caught off guard there.”

  “You hurt?” he asks.

  “Nah. Just stunned.” I rub my eyes until the dancing spots fade. “Guy’s yard is totally covered in wards. It’s basically one big magic neon sign. Felt like my eyes were going to melt.”

  “Were you able to map them out?”

  “After I turned down the brightness.” I tap my com to turn on the mic and rattle off the placements of all the wards I can see from my position. “Be advised, Captain Sing, that there’s probably a similar number on the opposite side of the house. I recommend you give that exterior wall a wide berth and have your team enter through the back side. That bedroom window on your end only has a ward over one pane. The left-hand pane is clear, and there are no other wards in the immediate vicinity. As long as you don’t disturb the right-hand pane, you should be able to enter without triggering any magic defenses.”

  “Understood,” Naomi says. “What about your team?”

  I address Ramirez but leave the com feed open. “Living room picture window. There’s some kind of explosive ward about two inches under the bottom of the frame, but like with the ward on the bedroom window, it appears to have a contact trigger. Unless someone slips up and kicks the wall, the ward shouldn’t activate.”

  “Sounds good,” Ramirez says, both to me and into his com. He glances over his shoulder at the rest of his team, huddled up against the broken deck skirting. “Unless any of you are feeling particularly clumsy today.”

  The three agents shake their heads in tandem.

  “I think we’re ready to move then, Captain Sing.”

  “And you, Delarosa?” Naomi asks.

  Delarosa chimes in. “We’re all set over here. Woodland perimeter has been established.”

  “Very well.” Naomi’s voice takes on that cool authoritative tone all the elite captains use in the moments before a dangerous battle begins. “Everyone, proceed to imminent strike positions a
nd conduct your final weapons check. Thirty seconds to entry.”

  Delarosa flashes the move hand signal and points to the fence that separates this yard from Nottaway’s property. Crouched low, we all shuffle one by one out from behind the rickety deck and line up roughly three feet apart at the edge of a patch of tall brown grass in front of the fencing that someone was either too lazy to mow with the rest of the yard, or too worried about what would happen if they accidentally spewed grass into Nottaway’s lawn. I haven’t even met the guy, but the mere sight of that monstrosity of a ward array has left me with the impression that the wizard is not the friendliest of neighbors. At least, not anymore.

  A shudder carries up my spine. God, I hope I’m wrong about the brainwashing.

  “Ten seconds,” says Naomi, and a breathless silence falls across the feed.

  I run a gloved finger across the cool metal of my suppression rings. There was really no point in donning them other than to keep up appearances with my DSI colleagues, and as my magic wells up from my soul and butts up against the suppression spell, I give myself permission to break the rings the instant this operation begins to go south.

  “Five seconds.”

  I don’t want anyone else to end up like Ella, Desmond, and Amy, and though Riker might be pissed at me for violating a direct order, ending this battle with as few casualties as possible sits higher on my priority list than going out of my way to avoid ticking off the commissioner.

  Plus, by this time tomorrow, he won’t even be my boss anymore.

  So what’ll it really matter in the end?

  “Go!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ramirez’s force blast implodes the picture window, and I lope over the frame in a graceful arc, somersaulting to a stop on a worn brown carpet that smells like cigarettes and depression. Hands raised to let loose with every spell I know, I sweep the room once for interior wards that could act like booby traps. Finding none, I make a second, more intense examination to hunt for any hints of a veil in use or the telltale glow of building energy that occurs in the seconds before a spell is cast. But nothing sticks out to me. No auras. No strange warm spots. No signs of active human habitation.