Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  That John Murdock didn’t recognize the angel—that she was now lessened—it all surely had to do with that meta-mystical moment when the universe had rung like a bell, and that could only be because the Seraphym had somehow sacrificed herself to save the dying man. There was no other possible explanation, as unlikely as this one seemed. Occam’s Razor and all.

  She didn’t know why Johnny was—well, whatever he was. Rebooted? Maybe, it kind of made sense. Maybe it was the sheer trauma of whatever had happened to him. As for the Seraphym, well…

  There was still Celestial energy about her. After nearly getting knocked on her keister just trying to examine Johnny, Vickie was not at all inclined to make a second trial on the Seraphym. But now, the Seraphym was more like a welding torch than the sun. And she had said in her own words she had lost everything that had made her angelic. Vickie had a vague notion of what that meant, and “bereft” didn’t even begin to cover it, yet it looked as if she had been holding herself together right up until Johnny had looked at her without recognition.

  At that moment, seeing the Seraphym’s reaction to John literally looking past her, Vickie’d had another idea of just what had linked the two, a crazy one but—well, as a mage, she had heard crazier things. And the legends of the Nephilim, the alleged offspring of angels and humans, had had to come from somewhere…

  Well, she needed confirmation, which the Seraphym, who was so silent on most subjects she might as well be mute, was not going to give her. And she needed to find some things out about Murdock—more than she had been able to get on her own. For it all came down to John Murdock and his past; from six years ago to—well, the moment he showed up starkers in the break room.

  Time to research. Time to call in a few more of those favors she’d been earning. And work on some family ties.…

  She picked up the phone. “Mom? I need you to dig up things in some secret, dirty places…”

  * * *

  There was very little that the Nagys couldn’t get their hands on. Whatever black ops program John Murdock had been a part of…well, Vickie had learned a lot of her tricks in obtaining documents by means deep and arcane at the feet of her mother. Things like—getting just one little blank scrap of a piece of paper in a file in a locked file cabinet meant you could, with enough work, reproduce every single piece of paper in that file. Provided it wasn’t warded. And even if it was…well, you could still get a lot. And things like “telling” a censored document to restore itself to the original, uncensored version. These were things that most government agencies were not aware of…

  Well, maybe the Russians were. There had been plenty of talk of the Soviet Union experimenting with the occult to gain an upper hand during the Cold War. Most people took that to mean psionics… but it might have included magic. The very few Russian magicians she knew never spoke of anything of the sort, so all she actually knew about were the rumors of psionic experiments.

  If there had been dabbling in magic, that would explain why Saviour initially wanted to burn her and Grey at the stake… Or maybe there was an easier explanation. Saviour kept calling her “Daughter of Rasputin,” and one thing Vickie did know was that Rasputin had been everything he’d been rumored to be, and worse. So…if Saviour knew all those dirty, dirty secrets from the last days of the Tsar, she’d have had plenty of reason to be wary of magicians.

  Once the expert had done her work, and everything that could be dug up, had been, Vickie pondered her own next move.

  Forensic magic at Murdock’s squat, she decided.

  Which made her more than a little nervous. She didn’t like going out alone, particularly not to that neighborhood. On the other hand, who was free to go with her? CCCP and ECHO were both stretched thin, even though the elimination of the Thulian North American HQ seemed to have shut them down for at least a little while. All that meant was that all the rest of the cockroaches came boiling out to fill the vacuum; Reb activity had been on the rise again, several meta-criminals were flexing their muscles for position, and so on down the chain. Everyone she could call on for backup was either sleeping the sleep of the exhausted or out on patrolling shifts…

  Except…just maybe…

  “Overwatch: Open: Private: Gamayun,” she ordered aloud, as she began to suit up for this. Chainmail over nanoweave, and thank god it was late fall and kind of chilly. Glock and spare magazines. Mind, she wasn’t going to risk driving or, gods forbid, walking. The ECHO jetpack came out of the closet, and with her magic kit in hand, she went out the window. She’d had a little faux balcony put out there since the Djinni came crashing through her window. It made a good launching pad. And this way if he ever saw the need to come in that way again, at least now he could pick the window lock instead of leaving broken glass all over the living room.

  “Gamayun here, comrade,” came the answer.

  “Gamayun, are the Bear or Chug free?” she asked.

  “Borzhe moi. Bear is patrolling with Upyr. Chug is playing with paper dolls in break room.”

  “Spasibo. Is Sovie free to take him over to Murdock’s old squat?” At this point she was about halfway there. The jetpacks were a literal dream come true for Vickie; she had always, always wanted to fly, but her levitation spells didn’t work all that reliably on herself.

  “Is about time for her to take him to park, am thinking.”

  “You are a treasure. Overwatch out.” She waited for the connection to drop and issued another command. “Overwatch: Open: Soviette: Private.” and as soon as the feed came up live, followed it with “Privyet, sestra. Are you about to take Chuggie for walkies?”

  “Am thinking you are to be psychic as well as magic,” came the amused reply. “Shto?”

  “Could you take him over to Murdock’s squat? I need some bodyguarding while I do some snooping into the mystery of why he doesn’t remember anything. I’ll walk him back for you. We’ll visit his squirrels and I know a couple places where there’s some snacks for him.” At this point she was landing on the roof of Murdock’s building, coming in like something from an old 1930s Commander Cody serial. If things hadn’t been so serious, she would have been grinning from ear to ear. Gods, this is fun…

  The locks on his door were no barrier to a technomage. One by one, they flipped open in response to her cajoling—and the bit of his hair she had. When the door opened, she found herself in what used to be the caretaker’s apartment, back when this place was a factory. Now it was pretty much a concrete box with the basic amenities. She was a little surprised by how clean the place was—not that she expected Murdock to be a troll, but this was an old, dirty, industrial building and she had expected years of grime to have coated the walls. Instead, the place looked scoured.

  Scoured, and baked into the walls was an aura of Celestial energy. The plot thickens.

  As for the furnishings, they were pretty much as she had expected. A mattress on the floor made up as a military-style bed, blankets and sheets so tight she could easily have done the quarter-bounce on them. Makeshift bookcases with a selection of battered books in them. Scrounged things like lamps, a fan, a TV, and a little fridge that looked as if it might have been pulled out of an RV.

  Just as she had gotten done taking the basic inventory, she heard Chug thudding up the concrete staircase, followed by Sovie’s lighter footsteps. She shucked off the jetpack and handed it to Soviette after Chug had squeezed in through the door. “Here, sestra, take this. You can take the short way home, then I can use it to jet home from CCCP HQ. Keeps us both off the street.”

  “Spasibo. I had rather not be walking without my bodyguard.” The Russian healer patted Chug affectionately. “Chug, please to be staying with Vickie. She needs you.”

  Chug’s eyes lit up. He always liked being told that someone needed him. The poor thing was, in Vickie’s opinion (and Soviette’s as well, she suspected) too often treated as a large inconvenience. “Chug stay,” he rumbled, and turned his craggy head towards Vickie. “What need?”

  “
I am going to be doing some pretty things, Chug, and I need you to make sure no bad people come bother me while I do them.” One good way to keep Chug from being frightened and make him happy would be to add some harmless lights and music to her forensic magic. He always liked anything that looked like the pretty magic he saw in cartoons.

  His brow stopped furrowing, and he smiled, though you would have to know Chug to know that he was smiling. “Chug watch for baddy bad mans,” he said obediently.

  “And when we are done, there will be Mr. Squirrel and ice cream,” Vickie promised, and he rumble-chuckled with glee.

  That settled, Sovie headed for the roof, Chug settled right in the door, and Vickie went to work.

  Because if there was one single thing that the old Murdock was…it was introspective. He liked to pretend he was a simple country boy, but that was a load of baloney. Look at the books he read! All the standard anarchist tomes, poetry by Dylan Thomas and others, Kierkegaard…she would bet money he’d been keeping a journal of some sort all these years. And the secret of what tied him and the angel together was—had to be—in it.

  She just had to find it.

  Which, given Johnny’s justifiable paranoia, could be a lot harder than it sounded.

  * * *

  She could almost hear Murdock in the back of her mind. “Make with the finger-wiggling, Vix.” So she conjured up some pretty visual illusions for Chug, then held that strand of hair between her fingers and set up the equations.

  In mathemagic, it was the equivalent of saying show me what has the strongest connection to what I have in my hand. And this was not going to be easy. This was the man’s sanctum. Everything here had meant something to him. One by one, she was going to have to mathemagically eliminate items in the room from the answer to the equations—define things like book and bed and…well she hoped it wasn’t going to get any more intimate than that, but it might…and find the one thing she hoped she would find and thus, find the place where Murdock had hidden it. One thing that stood out was that the apartment was filled with weapons; rifles, pistols, and knives of all sorts. Not to mention the ammo, which looked like enough to start—or withstand—a prolonged siege. There was one handgun in particular that had a larger signature than the rest; a battered 1911. She didn’t have to handle it long to recognize that it had had custom work done to it; she pocketed it for the moment, then resumed her search. This was tedious; eliminating variable after variable, and occasionally renewing Chug’s viewing pleasures. Fortunately, like most “toddlers,” he liked seeing the same thing over and over again.

  It took two solid hours of work, but she finally not only found the battered journal in its hiding place, she managed to get it out without triggering the booby-traps; one a decoy with some flash powder, the other a very real grenade. She’d been trained to deal with that sort of thing because of parents—you didn’t partner with FBI Division 39 experts without picking up a lot of tricks—but there was a real pucker-moment when she spotted the live trap. Jeezus, Johnny…you really didn’t want anyone getting at this thing. Or at least, if they got it, you wanted them to pay for it.

  The signature of faint Celestial magic was everywhere, including the hiding places, which by this point was making her really itch to read what was in that journal. She walked Chug back to the HQ, with two stops; one in his favorite park to feed the squirrels sandwich bits she made with the peanut butter and stale loaf of bread she found in the squat, and the other at the dumpster behind a newly-reopened ice cream shop where Chug dove into the pile of discarded ice cream tubs with joyful abandon, topping it off with the full 5 gallon tub of vanilla she bought him. With Chug returned to CCCP, she jet-packed back to her apartment, settled onto the couch with meal-in-a-can and finally got to get into the guts of the journal.

  Or, to be precise, the end. Just at the moment, she really didn’t need to know about his life before Atlanta—just since the Invasion. Johnny’s handwriting was tiny, neat, and precise; the writing of someone who has to conserve paper. It was just barely larger than the type in a paperback book, in fact. But she wasn’t here to marvel over penmanship. She was here to find out his secrets.

  About two hours later, she finished, and closed the journal with wide eyes. “Bloody hell,” she said aloud into the silent apartment. “I never saw that coming.…”

  “Overwatch: Open: Murdock: Private,” she said after a few more moments. “Comrade fire-chucker, got a couple hours to spare? There’s beer in it.”

  The comm crackled in response. “Murdock here. Anything would beat cleanin’ up the garage bay again. Count me in.”

  “Come on up to my place. I have some more information on your ‘lost time.’”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Roger that. You’re gonna have to give me some directions to get to you; don’t know where your place is, ma’am.”

  “Follow the yellow brick HUD,” she told him, authorizing the Overwatch system to give him detailed guidance to the apartment. Then she dug out a blank journal-like book and a bottle of ink and while she waited, magically duplicated every page of the original over into it. She’d give him his own book back, but there was way too much in there that she was sure she needed to know. Maybe once she would have felt unease about jumping right into the guts of Johnny’s private life, but not anymore. As she had told him when he’d first joined CCCP and she built Overwatch 1, she was the poster-child for paranoia. There was no such thing as knowing too much about someone. The only downside was how they reacted if they found out what you knew.

  Shortly after she finished, there was a cautious knock on her door. Glancing up at her security monitor, she made sure it was Murdock, and that there was no one with him, before letting him in. He looked nervous and a bit sheepish as he stepped through the doorway.

  “Evenin’, ma’am.” He glanced around at the apartment. “Nice place y’have here.”

  “It’s not home, but it’s much,” she replied, once again feeling her own nerves wind up tight at the presence of someone who wasn’t Bella, Red or Grey in her space. “Have a seat and I’ll get that beer.” John nodded, taking up residence on one of the chairs in the main living room. He sat up straight; the old John would’ve probably stretched out a little more comfortably. He was still in the standard issue CCCP overalls, with the sleeves rolled up. She noticed him tracing the scars on his arms with a finger, and looking at the tattoo on the back of his hand. To wake up and have your body not be your own anymore… Something they had in common, that. Although she had all-too-clear memories of how that had happened, there were still times when she woke from a dream of being her old, unscarred, pain-free self to find herself once again imprisoned in her own scarred skin, and being completely disoriented.

  She fetched a Guinness from the bottom of the fridge, and on second thought, added a double-shot of single malt for each of them. She handed him the shot and beer, sat down on the couch opposite him, and tossed her whiskey down without tasting it. “We’ve done some snooping,” she said. “And by ‘we,’ I mean I had help. Some of your old files only exist on paper, the better to keep them ‘eyes only.’”

  “Snooping?” He downed the shot and chased it with a swig from the Guinness. “Snooping where, or do I not want to know?”

  “You don’t want to know, and you’ll know why when you read through this.” She shoved a file across the coffee-table at him. “This starts where your memory ends.” She considered a second double and decided against it for now. He was probably going to need another beer though, and soon.

  John started reading through the file purposefully. He worked steadily on his beer as he went; Vickie didn’t see his expression change, except for one moment when he lost his composure and a brief flash of anger, disgust, and horror washed over his face. After that, though, he was ice. He had downed three beers by the time he finished the file, setting it down and closing it. There was a long silence before he turned to look at her. “Do you have any more of that whiskey? I think
I need it right now.”

  She nodded, and got the bottle. This time she poured only for him. “Now, as you can tell, that’s pretty explosive stuff. We can destroy it, you can keep it, or I can, and you can come look at it any time you want. Your choice.”

  He thought for a moment, choosing his words carefully. “You got this, so you know; people that have this sort of information when they aren’t supposed to usually end up dead. You sure y’wanna hang on to it?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve got other intel in here that is just as hot. That’s off my digital copy anyway. Nobody gets that.” Mom might not be a techno-shaman, but there were plenty of things she could do that worked with Vickie’s magic. Like…she could load up the storage crystal she had, that was twinned crystal with one that Vickie had, with the information she had gotten. That made use of the Law of Contagion and the Law of Similarity; what was loaded into one crystal duplicated itself into the other. Once Vickie had transferred the intel from the twinned crystal to her storage crystal, she’d wiped the twinned ones clean. There was now no evidence that the twins had ever held anything at all. Anybody who suspected what she had would have a damned hard time finding anyone who could ID the crystal she’d stored it in for what it was, and as for cracking a code to access it that was half magic and half bytes…well, good luck with that one. “So, what’s your choice?”

  “I’ll hold onto this. There’s…parts that I have to go over. A lot.” From the look on his face, she hoped his liver would survive the amount of booze he’d be drinking while he did so. She knew exactly what was in the file, and could only imagine how he must have felt after finding out what had happened to him, and what he had done. Poor schmuck. How disorienting was that? Reading about yourself, reading about things you’d done and had been done to you, and not remembering one single moment of it?