Bitter Thirst

by SM Reine

  She’d have looked happier if I’d suddenly Animorph’d into a giant alien cockroach. “He died.”

  “Oh, shit. Should we get a case open?”

  “It was old age,” she said in a clipped tone. “Weston, this is Agent Hawke with the Office of Preternatural Affairs. The OPA has been secretly meddling in the lives of witches for years, and they’ve just gone public with their meddling. Isn’t that nice?”

  “Get the fuck out of this house,” Connors said. Nice guy.

  “I would love to,” I said. “I’ll get out of here once you tear apart the big-ass spell you’re casting.”

  Lenox chewed her cookie loudly at me. “You didn’t need to make up an excuse to enter my home.”

  “Trust me, I wouldn’t. Whatever you guys did set off a whole lot of alarms. If it wasn’t some kind of magical protest, then you guys picked a bad time to cast something that big.”

  “I haven’t cast a darn thing! There was no magic on the grounds today.”

  I pulled out my phone and opened my alerts. Yep, the magic had shut down. But we’d definitely gotten the signal from this location. “Then you won’t mind if I look around?”

  “I do mind. I had a liaison assigned to me once, when the OPA pretended to respect me. Where’s Agent Banerji?” Lenox asked.

  Jesus, it must have been months since she’d gotten a visit from the OPA. Aniruddha hadn’t been with the OPA for as long as my partner Suzy. He’d been sold into slavery in Hell, which is exactly as not-fun as it sounds. “Agent Banerji is not employed with us anymore.”

  “Well you can’t look around. I don’t want PRAY supporters seeing my private ritual space. Goddess only knows how the government would take advantage of that information.” She stirred sugar into her tea, as if dipping cookies in it wouldn’t have made it sweet enough. She tapped her spoon on the rim. “Do you support PRAY, Agent Hawke?”

  “I don’t see how my personal feelings are a factor,” I said.

  “Your brother could be locked away for life under the laws of that bill.”

  “He could be locked away for life after his mundane crimes too.” They’d have to catch Domingo before they could arrest him. He’d stolen millions from Lenox and taken off, and he was smart enough to never stop running. “Again, my personal feelings aren’t relevant. There’s a temporary ban on spellcasting as a coven. I have to ensure it’s shut down and fine you for it.”

  Lenox’s eyes wouldn’t have looked out of place on an angry eagle. “I’ve a tenth of your kopis’s wealth. No fine could make me bat an eyelash, so I wouldn’t go through the effort of hiding it from you.”

  “Then show me where the spell is,” I said. “Or else I’ll arrest you and go find it myself.”

  Weston Connors stood. He was taller than I expected, almost as tall as me. His mustache was shot with gray. “I cast the spell. Alone. Not as a coven, and not with Lenox’s permission. There are no limitations on solitary practitioners.”

  Chances were good that Connors was covering for his whole coven. Frankly, that was fine by me. I didn’t want to fine or arrest anyone.

  I also didn’t want the Half Moon Bay Coven hexing anyone to smithereens.

  “Prove it,” I said.

  Connors led me into the gardens. You can tell a winter garden apart from a summer garden in Los Angeles because, in the winter, the yellow grass doesn’t look at risk of spontaneous combustion.

  A lot of the yellow grass out back had been removed. They were converting the garden into xeriscaping, which is where you rip out the pretty stuff and replace it with ugly rocks. Behind the new xeriscaping there was a permanent circle of stone. Someone had been casting magic there, all right. Melted wax was cooling on the rocks as we approached. The magical residue was even stronger, and I had to swim through the air to get to the edge of the circle.

  I gagged on the power of the magic. “What’s the spell for?” I asked, throwing an arm over my nose even though it wasn’t a smell issue. Magic didn’t really smell.

  “Daily ritual,” Connors said. “I do it every morning.”

  That was an awe-inspiring amount of bullshit right there. If we’d detected daily spells like the one that had rung alarm bells that morning, we’d have already arrested him—or hired him to work for us. “Daily ritual? You want to revise your answer to that, or is that the line you’re pushing?”

  “Do you know what I’m doing better than I do?”

  I loosened my tie to help me breathe. Didn’t help. I wasn’t suffocating because my tie was too tight. “This is a lot of magic for a solitary practitioner doing a daily ritual.”

  “Are you implying that I’m not a strong witch?”

  I knew for a fact he wasn’t a strong witch. On the way into the garden, I’d texted Agent Bryce so she could look him up in our database. According to our scoring system, he was as weak as me. I sure as hell couldn’t make this much a mess out of magic.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Connors said. “Do you think I’m weak? Are you saying I’m weak?”

  “Calm down, sir.” My hand crept toward the earpiece that gave me a feed straight to the Union—and Agent Bryce. I had it muted at the moment.

  “I did my morning ritual here. It was the only magic that happened on the property today. If you want to argue over it, fine! I’ll take you to court! Or is the OPA not even going to pretend that it’s controlled by the law?” There was so much rage in his eyes.

  “My job isn’t to interpret the law, sir,” I said. “Just enforce it. Right now, this looks like an infraction. I have to clean it up. If we break the circle and wipe the residue, I’ll be happy to walk off without leaving any fines behind. All right?”

  Connors barked a mirthless laugh, swiping his fingers along his mustache. “So generous. So fucking generous.”

  “I’m trying to help you,” I said.

  The sense of magic was building again.

  My hand inched toward the headset.

  “The OPA’s garbage,” Connors said. “What are you doing with them? A witch working for the OPA!”

  “A lot of witches work for the OPA,” I said.

  Connors’s fists balled and magical tension snapped through the air. “God hates all of you. Do you think He’s going to protect people like you? The witches who betray Him and disregard His will?”

  “God, huh?” He sounded like that Tate Peterson kid I’d seen on the news.

  “Why would I waste my time talking to you? You’re a hypocrite. You’re weak.”

  “Weston!” Lenox had come to her back door, teacup and all, and she looked angry with him instead of me. Thank fucking God. I stepped aside so she could shuffle at him like a terrier going for a rat.

  “Stand down, Weston,” she said. “Remove your magic. Break the circle.”

  His eyes flashed. “Lenox—”

  “Break it!”

  He flung his hand toward the circle. He was holding a piece of paper—I hadn’t seen that paper before. When it flapped in the air, wind gusted from it, and the rocks kicked up. The circle broke.

  Then the paper incinerated.

  “You idiot!” Lenox snapped.

  “Oh fuck,” I said, stumbling backwards. I hadn’t been hit by the wind—probably would have staggered less if I had.

  Weston Connors had runic magic.

  He had runic magic.

  It was dangerous enough for me to be at a permanent circle of power like this one, where magic had recently been cast. Residue could fuck with witches for ages. But if he could cast spells in a heartbeat, then I could be dead faster than if he’d shoved a bomb down my throat.

  I activated my headset. “Agent Bryce! Move in!”

  It took about two seconds from there.

  If anything could be said for the Union, it’s that they’re not lazy.

  The yard was suddenly filled with a whole lot of guys in black armed with notebooks.

  Notebooks, you ask? Where were the guns? Great question. The guns were strapped to t
he backs of the Union kopides, where they could grab them if they found a problem solved better with shooting than magic.

  Weston Connors got more paper balls thrown at him than a boring teacher. Except these paper balls turned to walls of power around him, locking Weston Connors down while I fell to my knees, sneezing furiously.

  The shields lasted a heartbeat after they were deployed. It wasn’t much—just enough to lock Connors’s arms to his side, make him drop other pages, cut him off of his magic. Then there was a kopis kneeling on his back. Another one came around to cuff him, wrists and ankles.

  “Lenox! Help!” Connors yelled.

  She ignored him and offered a hand to me. I took it so that she could pull me to my feet. She was surprisingly strong for a white-haired lady.

  “It seems I owe you an apology,” Lenox said.

  “I was about to say that,” I said. “I take it your coven didn’t cast the magic?”

  “That’s what I told you!”

  “I know. I just thought you were lying.”

  Lenox sighed. “I miss Agent Banerji.” Probably the only woman to have said that ever.

  She circled the ritual space while Connors kept shouting for her attention. Lenox held her hand out to feel the energy of the circle.

  “What in the world was this, Weston? How did you prevent me from feeling it within the house?”

  “I’d like to toss in another question,” I said. “Where’d you learn runic magic? That’s proprietary tech.” The Union had developed it recently and we didn’t share the information with anyone. Only our guys were supposed to be able to use runic magic.

  “I’ll never tell,” Connors said. “I won’t tell any one of you anything.”

  I folded my arms over my chest, lifting an eyebrow at him, Fritz-style. “You know, the OPA waterboards.”

  He looked so horrified for a moment that I thought he’d spill. But Agent Bryce looked even more horrified. “No, we absolutely do not waterboard,” she said.

  Oh fuck. “Thanks, Agent Bryce,” I said through my teeth. “I know we don’t waterboard. I’m just kidding around.”

  That didn’t make her less pale. She pulled me aside and spoke to me in a lowered tone. “You can’t joke in front of suspects, Agent Hawke. We’re going to be under so much scrutiny now! You’ll get in trouble for threats like those, regardless of who your kopis is.”

  Aw man, that would have been a hell of a lot less annoying if she hadn’t been right.

  I turned back to the scene. “Toss the high priest in one of the cars. We’ll take him back to the facility and work on him—not with waterboarding,” I added when my partner looked like she was about to explode.

  “Thank you, Agent Hawke.” Agent Bryce hefted Weston Connors to his feet and marched him toward the fence, where an SUV had been backed up. He didn’t have a black bag over his head yet. He might even get all the way to an OPA facility instead of vanishing in a Union dungeon.

  I took a Steno pad out of my jacket pocket and started sketching a picture of the circle of power. We still hadn’t invented a camera that could reliably take pictures of ritual spaces. Magical distortion is a bitch. “I know you’re sick of me by now, but just so you know, we gotta send out a forensics team to figure out which spell he cast,” I told Lenox.

  She muttered something that was probably too obscene for a tea-drinking old lady. “Yes, I understand.”

  “Do you have any guesses what Connors might have been doing?”

  “Penis-enlargement spells, knowing the man,” she said.

  I grinned at her. “Lenox, you do have a sense of humor.”

  “I wasn’t joking.” She stepped aside to let a few Union men pass, presumably to start locking down the circle.

  Except they started scuffing up rocks and splattering spells everywhere.

  “Hey! Wait!” I ran over, but it was too late. The evidence had been destroyed and taken Lenox’s ugly xeriscaping with it.

  Worse, I saw around the fence that Agent Bryce was arguing with a Union soldier. A soldier who was taking cuffs off of Weston Connors.

  My headset crackled to life. “Let him go.” That was Fritz’s voice. “Orders have come down. Connors goes, and no forensic study of the scene. Inadequate resources.”

  “Orders came down from where?”

  “Gary Zettel,” he said. “Now get back here. I told you to help Agent Bryce, not follow her into the field.” Ooh, I was in trouble.

  Connors shot an ugly glare at me from the other side of the fence, whipped a piece of paper out of his pocket, and vanished.

  Chapter 5

  “Mishandling of evidence? Bullshit,” I said. “That was deliberate destruction.”

  Fritz rose from his desk, leaning heavily on his cane. He’d been sitting too long for a phone conference with the upper echelons of the OPA. Holding still for very long always fucked with his knee. “The team is being cited for incompetence, but no criminal charges.”

  “Bullshit,” I said again.

  Swearing didn’t change anything.

  Nothing was going to fix what had been screwed up.

  At this point, a few weeks had passed since Senator Peterson’s assassination, visiting Lenox, and the Union ruining my crime scene. There was still no indication of what they’d destroyed, so I had no clue what spell Weston Connors had been casting.

  Now it looked like there’d be no punishment for any of it.

  “The word came down from Zettel and I can’t argue with him,” Fritz said.

  “That’s funny,” I said, “because Weston Connors is one of Lucrezia de Angelis’s cousins, and I thought Zettel was anti-Lucrezia now.”

  That got Fritz’s attention. “Weston Connors is who, exactly?”

  I slapped my folder of research onto his desk. Even the OPA was more high tech than sharing printed files with each other, but I’d been trying to keep my investigation of Lucrezia off of the network. “Weston Connors is Lucrezia’s fourth cousin once removed. The mustache must have come from his side of the family.”

  Fritz flipped through what I’d found. “You dug deep in birth records to find that connection. I don’t know any of my fourth cousins.”

  “I had to dig deep. I’ve been trying to figure out where Lucrezia is hiding, and nothing came up on the properties she owns. The official records say that she’s taking extended medical leave at her villa in Italy, but surveillance only shows staff activity for the last few weeks. And I could use a locating spell on her villa. All her villas. So…”

  “So what?” Fritz asked.

  “She’s got some kind of charm that blocks location spells,” I said. “If I, of all witches, can remotely scry her properties, then she’s not there with any kind of hiding charms.”

  “Then there’s no way to find her directly, and you looked at family.”

  “Yep. Where Lucrezia’s concerned, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that her distant cousin was casting big bombad spells the day after the OPA goes public,” I said.

  “Probably not. We’re not that lucky.”

  “Not remotely lucky. It’s too bad Zettel, the guy who asked me to take down Lucrezia, is protecting Weston Connors.”

  “Don’t, Cèsar,” Fritz said.

  I spread my hands wide in an innocent gesture. “Don’t what?”

  “I know that tone of voice. You’re asking permission to drop the case.”

  “Well,” I said, “I mean, not getting killed is pretty awesome. I saw Senator Peterson. You can’t tell me he enjoyed being crucified and decapitated.”

  “PRAY is being reviewed in the Ninth Circuit as we speak. They’ll shoot it down, and there will be a writ of certiorari getting it to the Supreme Court,” he said. “Meanwhile, H.R. 2076 has been passed by the House and is going to the Senate. Our window for knocking PRAY down is limited, and we can’t back away. We’ve got to double down.”

  “We could double down on yacht trips to the Caribbean,” I said.

  Fritz stopped in front
of me, searching my face. “You’re serious, aren’t you? I thought you were joking about your reluctance to get involved, but you really mean it.”

  “You haven’t been handling the riots these last few weeks.” Neither had I, to be fair. Being Fritz’s aspis meant I’d gotten a lot of prestige by association. Prestige meant more working at my desk, more delegation, less fieldwork. Delegating to Agent Bryce meant I got to see her reports, though, so I knew how nasty the climate out there was.

  “Stopping PRAY will stop the riots,” Fritz said.

  “Will it? Look, Fritz, look at what our agency’s been doing.” I showed his own iPad to him, forcing him to look at the list of recently resolved cases. “Witches investigating witches. Preternaturals fucking around with preternaturals.” I let out a slow breath. “Maybe PRAY wouldn’t be the worst thing.”

  It was a thought I’d been circling around in recent weeks. I hadn’t said it until that moment. Now that I had, I felt nasty, like I’d been poisoned.

  Fritz’s blank expression made me feel sicker. I kinda wanted to walk back what I’d said, but it was too late for that. The bond made it hard to lie to each other.

  “Before you tell me how much I suck, let me just point out where these problems have been coming from.” I dropped his iPad. “All the rioting? It’s been preternaturals. Witches. Werewolves, in some places. Demons.”

  “They’re the ones hurt most by PRAY.”

  “That’s because they’re deadly,” I said.

  “Anyone can be deadly, Hawke.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. You’re right.” I didn’t want to fight about this. I really, really didn’t. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

  Fritz frowned thoughtfully. He was having feelings—big feelings, loud feelings—that rattled around in my head through our bond. I couldn’t interpret any of them.

  “Interesting,” he said. “You have depths, Cèsar. I think I might have underestimated you again, and my estimation of you is never low.”

  That sounded weirdly like a compliment considering I’d just told him I liked legislation that he hated.