Thaumatology 09 - Dragonfall

by Teasdale, Niall

  ‘Which is wrong,’ Ceri said, ‘since we’re using facilities at UCL too.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t think I’d be missing much,’ Ed admitted, ‘so I stopped off at my hotel and dumped my suitcase before coming here.’

  ‘I’d have had you stay at High Towers,’ Ceri said, ‘but Cheryl’s in the spare room and I didn’t think you’d appreciate the couch.’

  ‘I assume there’s some reason why Cheryl isn’t in her own home?’

  ‘We’ve been threatened with death by some mad American scientists,’ Cheryl said as though she were discussing the weather. ‘You may have noticed there’s more security than usual.’

  ‘There did seem to be more police than at Cambridge,’ Ed said, nodding. ‘Someone actually checked my badge. Why would scientists threaten you?’

  Ceri grinned. ‘Not just us and they’re some reactionary types who think “magical science” is an oxymoron. Keep your eyes open, they’ve threatened to disrupt the conference too.’

  ‘I see.’ Something about the way he said it made Ceri frown. There was a hard edge to his voice she was not used to hearing from the man. ‘What’s new with your research?’ he went on, and the edge was gone so completely that Ceri was not certain she had not imagined it.

  ‘Ceri had a brilliant idea which might well make our generator system far more efficient,’ Cheryl said. ‘Based on Stonehenge.’

  ‘Based on Cheryl’s brilliant transducer design and Stonehenge,’ Ceri corrected.

  Peter laughed. ‘Will you two just live with the fact that you’re both brilliant thaumatologists and stop trying to one up each other with praise.’

  Ceri and Cheryl looked at each other. ‘No,’ they said.

  Kennington

  ‘We’ve spotted three people we’re keeping an eye on,’ Michael said. He was sprawled at Ceri’s feet, in front of the big, wing-backed, leather chair she usually sat in. Lily was perched on the foot stool at Ceri’s right side, leaning on the chair arm. Cheryl sat on the other wing-back with the conference schedule book in her lap, though she had stopped reading it. ‘They aren’t particularly good, if it is these “Scientists.” They’re trying to look like tourists, but what tourist in their right mind takes snaps of the Holloway campus.’

  ‘You’re sure no one saw any of your people?’ Mayhew asked. She was sat, a little stiffly, on a straight backed chair near Cheryl. Her discomfort likely stemmed from the fact that neither Michael nor Lily were dressed.

  ‘They probably did,’ Michael said, ‘and then they forgot about it. People don’t take a lot of notice of beggars.’

  ‘If they’re better than you think they might notice people acting like beggars.’

  Ceri smiled. ‘You don’t understand. They aren’t acting. The Battersea pack are street people. Beggars, hookers. Some of them do odd jobs. But they’re all trained observers and the Guards, like Michael here, are trained to military level at unarmed combat.’

  Mayhew had been trying her best to avoid looking at Michael, but the mention of his name drew her eyes downward and she swallowed convulsively. He was a handsome young man with long, unkempt black hair, clear, blue eyes, and longish, straight nose. His body was tightly muscled from exercise and combat practice. There was an air of animal power about him, hardly surprising since he was a werewolf, and a fairly powerful one at that.

  Ceri felt amusement from Lily and glanced at her. The half-succubus’ dark eyes were looking straight at Mayhew. The binding between Ceri and Lily’s demonic side let them feel each other’s emotions, and Lily found something about Mayhew funny. Ceri could guess what; Mayhew seemed like a rather repressed personality.

  ‘You’re not a field agent, are you Miss Mayhew?’ Ceri asked.

  ‘I’m an analyst. And you can call me Jenny.’

  ‘You don’t get out much?’

  ‘Uh, no. This is my first, well, my first assignment like this.’

  Ceri smiled at her. ‘And they landed you with dealing with werewolves and a half-succubus. Did you kick Sachs’ puppy once or something?’

  Mayhew’s cheeks coloured and she covered her embarrassment by picking up her notepad, though she did not seem to be reading from it. ‘We think the disruption on the rail lines was caused by the Scientists. A car was driven onto the line and then set on fire. There was a similar attempt to block the East Coast line, but that was spotted and dealt with before it caused problems.’

  ‘They really mean business, don’t they?’ Cheryl commented.

  ‘The profile of the kind of people they induct which the FBI sent us suggests fanatical personalities. Science has become a religion to them. They are usually atheists, many of them deluding themselves into thinking that supernatural creatures don’t exist.’

  ‘How?!’ Ceri said, bemused. ‘They don’t see what’s around them?’

  ‘They rationalise it. Vampires are people with blood disorders. Werewolves are deluded into believing they can change shape. Magic is trickery they can explain with science given the chance. I did say they were delusional.’

  ‘Huh. You study wizardry, yes?’

  Mayhew looked up from her notepad. ‘I’m not particularly good at it. I know some information spells and I can set light to things. As you said, I don’t get out much.’

  ‘Everyone has to start somewhere,’ Lily said. ‘You’ve more talent than I have.’

  ‘Nothing like yours, Doctor Brent. I’ve read the reports on your, um, activities. You’ve come a long way incredibly fast.’ There was a shrewd look in the analyst’s eyes which Ceri did not like. Once again she wondered what the government really did know about her. Surely if they knew she was a sorceress they would have done something about it…

  ‘I make it up as I go along, mostly,’ Ceri replied. ‘Learn where I can, but there’s a lot of improvisation.’

  ‘She’s an exceptional thaumatologist,’ Cheryl said smoothly. ‘She understands the theory behind magic better than anyone I know which makes her improvisation better than most practitioners’ learned spells.’

  Mayhew gave a short nod. ‘I have a degree in thaumatology and I couldn’t understand half the stuff you were working on when we met.’

  ‘Partially it’s the notation,’ Ceri explained. ‘Try to make time to attend my lecture at the conference. I’ll be explaining some of the terms there.’

  ‘I’ll try to do that, thank you.’

  Ceri nodded back to her, smiling, but she was worried. She was worried that Sachs had an ulterior motive for assigning Jennifer Mayhew to this detail.

  July 10th

  Ceri opened her eyes, wondering why she had for several seconds before she felt it again. It was like a pressure on part of her mind; the house was telling her about someone trying to get onto the grounds. The light in the room grew brighter a second later as Twill swept into the room, but the tiny woman just nodded as she saw Ceri awake.

  Climbing out from between Lily and Michael woke both of them up, of course. ‘Someone’s trying to get through the side gate,’ Ceri said.

  ‘And they’re failing,’ Twill added. ‘If the gate wards are stopping them, they have particularly malign intent.’

  Michael nodded. ‘I’ll slip out the other side of the house and circle around.’

  ‘It’s stopped,’ Ceri said as he was moving for the door. She moved past him, heading for the stairs hidden away in a corner which led up to the attic, and then via a ladder to the roof. As she was lifting the hatch she paused. ‘They’re trying the front gate.’ She looked down at Michael. ‘Can you slip out one of the doors without being seen?’ He looked back at her. ‘Sorry, of course you can.’

  By the time Ceri and Lily were up on the roof looking down there was no sign of anyone near the iron gate at the front of the house. At a motion from Ceri, Lily went to the northern side of the roof. A second or two later she was shaking her head; there was no one there either.

  Ceri concentrated, focussing on Michael and working through the mental exercise required to li
nk their minds. A second later she could see him near the front gate and knew instantly what he had found at the side gate. She turned as Lily returned. ‘Lil, go call the Greycoats. Tell them we need bomb disposal.’

  Lily’s eyes widened and she headed for the roof hatch.

  ‘There’s another trip wire across the front gate.’ Michael’s thought was clear amid the jumble of other thoughts and impressions coming from him. ‘I guess they wanted to put them on the doors, but couldn’t get in. It’s thin wire, I doubt you’d have spotted it. I nearly didn’t. I’ve got a scent.’

  ‘Can you track it?’ she thought back. ‘I’ll be down in a minute to watch the gates.’

  He looked up at her, and she caught an image of herself standing there on the roof and felt the flicker of attraction and lust which he could not supress even under the less than ideal circumstances. Not that she was going to blame him; she felt much the same way herself.

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ he thought at her before he ran off on the trail of the scent he had found, and she broke the connection before he noticed she was embarrassed.

  ~~~

  ‘Fairly basic booby trap,’ the man in the heavily padded suit said holding up something which looked vaguely like a metal pineapple. ‘They used M-thirty-six’s. That’s the basic fragmentation grenade the Army used up until about seventy-two.’

  ‘So they sourced them in this country?’ Kate asked.

  The ordnance officer nodded. ‘Likely anyway. The US military have their own designs. These things were made by the bucket load and they have gone missing occasionally. They started making them just after the first world war. There were crates of them lost in Europe when the Shattering started.’

  Ceri looked at the grenade with the length of wire tied carefully around its lever to hold it in place. ‘What would that thing have done if we’d tripped it?’

  ‘Well, the fragmentation on these was never that great. It’s a four second fuse… It would have trashed your gate and probably maimed you pretty badly. Unless you were standing right by it when it went off.’ He glanced at the arbour. ‘If you were filing through one at a time, one of you might have been killed. Badly hurt at least.’

  Ceri gritted her teeth. ‘Thanks, Captain. If you ever come across a magical trap you need disarming, you know where to find me.’

  ‘I’ll keep that in mind, Doctor Brent.’ He turned and headed for the armoured van he had arrived in, waddling a little from the ballistic padding.

  ‘Thanks for turning out, Kate,’ Ceri said. ‘You want to come in for a bit?’

  ‘I’ll need to make a report out for the spooks, so yes.’

  They started walking toward the house. ‘HQ dragged you out of bed?’ Ceri asked.

  ‘Uh-huh. I told them to leave John in bed. No point in both of us being awake this early.’

  ‘You know, I didn’t expect either of you…’

  ‘We told dispatch that we should be contacted if something urgent came up and the Chief agreed. You and Lily are too valuable a resource to let someone blow you up.’ She gave Ceri a quick glance. ‘And you’re a friend I’m not willing to lose.’

  Ceri smiled. ‘Thanks, Kate.’

  Michael, Lily, and Cheryl were waiting in the hall. ‘The trail stopped at the station,’ Michael said as soon as the door was closed. ‘Northbound platform. It was a woman, smelled of violets.’ His nose wrinkled. ‘Rather a lot of violets. A body spray, I think. I’d guess she was trying to mask her own scent, which means they know you’ve got werewolves helping you.’

  ‘Which means they’ve done their research,’ Ceri said. ‘Though I expect they think you’re “a man with an amazing sense of smell.”’

  ‘You’d know the scent again?’ Kate asked. Michael just looked at her. ‘Sorry, of course you would.’

  Lily patted Michael on the arm. ‘They’re going to start questioning my ability to seduce people soon. It’s nothing personal.’

  ‘Well, if Michael’s nose can keep an… ah, a nostril out for this one, maybe we can get a lead on these people.’ Kate grinned. ‘When I joined the police force that was not something I ever expected to say.’

  Ceri smirked and started for the kitchen; she needed coffee. ‘I never thought I’d be threatened by militant fundamentalist scientists. We live in interesting times.’

  Bloomsbury

  Theodore Barrowman-Leigh was a geek’s geek. Tall, stringy, unfit, drastically in need of a good barber and someone to dress him in the morning. He stood on the stage at the UCL campus facing probably the largest audience for his work he had ever had, but that did not bother him. Ted had a very great need to concentrate on that audience and not think too much about his partner for the “show and tell,” as Lily had been referring to it. That was, of course, because Lily was his partner and Ted’s stutter went from mildly irritating to indecipherable when he looked at her.

  Ceri, Cheryl, Ed, and Peter all sat in the front row of the lecture theatre. They had got there early on the suspicion that it might get crowded. Cheryl had suggested to the organisers that they should put the presentation on in the largest auditorium they had, but they had ignored her and now the back of the theatre was crammed full of people standing to see the lecture. Some hasty work with cameras had arranged for it to be seen on screens outside the room as well.

  To be fair to the huge assembly, they were not all there to gawk at the attractive young woman in the simple, black, cotton tank dress who stood there with a smile on her face and her hands clasped behind her back. Metagenetics, the study of the rather peculiar genetic inheritance which happened when certain magical creatures had cross-species children, was a subject which had gone nowhere for a long time. Ted had got further in the last year by studying Lily’s genome than anyone else had in decades. Everyone was fascinated.

  ‘P-perhaps the most p-perplexing part of the genetic transfer,’ Ted said, his stammer becoming more noticeable as he prepared himself to actually look at Lily, ‘is that genes which have little or nothing to do with physical structure have affected L-Lily’s physical development.’

  He turned a little and raised an arm, indicating Lily standing behind him and to the right without actually bringing her into his field of vision. ‘As I previously indicated, L-Lily has a partial trisomy of the second chromosome, which I have discovered does affect her perceptive abilities, l-likely providing her with the b-basic neural functions she uses to sense magic and d-desires. However, this cannot explain the obvious physical ad-daptations to her nature as a s-succubus. While one could suggest that she inherited her attractiveness from her human parents, there are several characteristics which appear to stem from the physical form her incubus p-parent took at her conception. Both her hair and eyes follow this p-pattern and so she appears to have inherited morphic characteristics which come from a t-temporary shape.

  ‘Beyond the specific f-features o-of course, are the other d-developments, p-primarily the highly exaggerated s-secondary s-s-sexual k-k-characteristics.’ As Ted’s stammer headed toward critical mass, the other reason why Lily was there became obvious, at least to Ceri. Her pupils glowed a dull red and Ted let out a slight sigh, visibly relaxing, as her defensive aura rolled over him at its lowest level. ‘Increased breast size,’ he went on without a hint of a stutter, ‘lengthened legs, wide hips. While these could be entirely natural, they are also an aide in seduction, the forte of the succubus. Our current theorem is that Lily’s development at puberty was heavily influenced by her brain, though unconsciously. Her unconscious mind pushed her body into a shape which would be more appropriate for her demonic side.’

  Reaching forward, Ted pressed a button on the lectern and the slide behind him showing Lily’s genome switched to show another set of what Lily liked to call “wiggly worm things.” ‘I have also been lucky enough to obtain blood from another supernatural, though this one is a little less useful for study since the donation was anonymous. However, what we can see here is genetic donation resulting in a similar a
neuploidy. In this case, however, it is a complete trisomy of the second chromosome. Interestingly, while the third strand here shows distinct non-human elements, it also shows more human components and complexes. We believe that the owner of this genome is more distantly related to their non-human ancestor than Lily is.’

  Ceri looked up at the slide, at her own genome. Ted was right, of course; the third strand on her second chromosome had had thirty thousand years to drift away from the dragons who had provided it. Really it had not changed nearly enough in that time.

  The questions, when they came, were actually pretty on subject, until the last one. A woman standing at the side fielded it. ‘Andrea Haversham, I’m a meta-psychologist from MIT. Most of the half-demons who have been born since the Shattering have drifted toward anti-social behaviour. Miss Carpenter seems very well adjusted. What’s her secret?’

  Ted looked around. ‘I think that’s a question for L-Lily to answer.’ In her seat Ceri grinned; Lily had turned off her aura.

  The half-succubus stepped forward so that she was closer to the microphone. ‘I have friends,’ she said. ‘I met someone who gave me a chance to get out of that downward spiral, and then I met the person I live with and she helped me keep out of trouble. We also discovered that I had a mental connection with my father which tended to push me toward more demonic behaviour. Things got a lot easier when we were able to screen me from that influence. I doubt most other half-demons have that luxury.’ She smiled. ‘And another part of it was learning more about my demon side. That’s why I offered to help Ted with his research, and for a girl who dropped out of school without taking her exams I’ve learned a lot. I even know what a trisomy is.’

  That got a laugh. Ted leaned forward to the microphone. ‘Don’t let L-Lily’s appearance fool you. She’s an intelligent w-woman, learns quickly, and l-l-looks g-good doing it.’ Lily giggled and patted Ted on the shoulder while the audience laughed. Ted went a delightful shade of scarlet.

  ‘Put the paramedics on alert,’ Ceri muttered to Cheryl. ‘The last time she touched him he almost passed out.’