by SA Magnusson
My heart began to hammer. If Darvish was unable to separate this from me, I would be the reason behind my own downfall.
Darvish stared. He hesitated barely a moment, but then magic built.
He swirled his hands in a pattern and then pointed them at me. Magic burst, and it disrupted the connection holding on to me, but it also disrupted the spell on the ground.
The cold sense along my spine began to abate. I took a deep breath, my throat already opening up once again. Thankfully, I shared one piece of mage magic, and that was the ability to heal myself. Without that, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.
I stumbled forward, getting out of the center of the circle, wanting nothing to do with it. Darvish grabbed me, propping me up, and I looked up at him.
“Am I still swollen?”
“It’s improving,” he said.
I took another deep breath, the swelling in my throat better than it had been. Thankfully it was improving, and I was hopeful that in a little longer, it would be completely improved.
Testing my connection to magic, I felt for it, thankful that it remained present. I had worried that whatever the allergic reaction to this spell had been would somehow separate me from my magic. That connection was still there.
I breathed out in a quick sigh. There was a time when I hadn’t wanted anything to do with my own magic, but that time was long since gone. Now that I had invested myself into the magical world, I wanted to continue to be a part of it, and the more that I was, the longer that I remained connected to the magical world, the more that I felt as if I needed to be a part of it. As if what I could do was somehow helpful.
“What happened?” Florence asked.
“I’m not entirely sure,” I said. I stared at the ground, but Darvish’s spell had changed the pattern, disrupting it enough that it no longer carried with it the same sense of power as it had before. Had I gotten lucky?
Or could the slight differences in the patterns make that much of an impact with how I connected to magic?
“I thought you said it connected you to power on the other side of the Veil,” Florence said.
“That’s just it. It did. That power was there, but…”
“But what?” she challenged.
“But I wonder if I might not have been meant to use it.” I looked over at Darvish. He frowned, his attention focused on the ground, staring at it.
“We don’t really know what these were for,” Bernard said. “Because someone decided to remove the only person who might have an answer.”
My gaze followed his, drifting to the far side of the room. There, covered by a blanket, had to be a body. I started toward it, but Darvish caught my arm.
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t want to see that.”
“I’m sure I’ve seen worse. I am an ER doctor after all.”
“I’m well aware of that fact, but this is particularly gruesome. They put up a fight trying to place the pattern, and…”
“Just one person?”
“Here, but there have been enough of them, and all with nearly the same structure,” Florence said.
Which meant others with an ability to use runes. “But that’s what I was trying to get at. The structure might appear the same, but it’s not. It’s similar. The spell here was just a little different than the one that was on the soccer field.”
“A soccer field?” Bernard asked. He glanced from me to Darvish. “Why would there be a pattern like this on a soccer field?”
“The same reason there’s one out in the middle of the cornfield,” I said.
“Here we are closer to—”
Florence silenced him with a hard stare.
“Closer to what?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Florence said.
“I think I will worry about it, especially as I was very nearly attacked by it.”
“Because you were foolish enough to attempt to use magic you shouldn’t have. There’s a reason we were studying it. We were trying to understand it.”
I glanced over at her computer and saw a series of patterns on screen. There were nearly a dozen, and all of them were similar to what we had encountered here, but none were quite the same.
“Where did you get that?”
Florence stared at me.
“Where?”
Darvish turned to me. “You have to understand, Dr. Michaels, that after the last attack, Barden was most interested in understanding what had been done to us.”
“With the runes?”
“The runes. The way the vampires were able to leach power off of us. All of that. We do not want the same thing happening again. It was hard enough nearly losing Barden once, and I wasn’t about to have the same thing happen once again.”
“Well?”
“Well what?” Darvish asked.
“Well, did you find anything?”
“Not so far. They have records of patterns, but it seems as if even the mage council wasn’t entirely certain what to make of them.”
“No, because there was someone there who was something of a rune master but also something of a dangerous mage. A man named Odian.”
“How do you know of Odian?” Florence asked.
“You know of him?”
Florence tapped on the stack of books and sorted through them until she reached one. She pulled it out and flipped through the pages. “When Barden instructed us to understand the runes, we came across several volumes of likely knowledgeable sources, but most of them are sparse. Every so often, we come across a particular marking, and it’s consistent, though we don’t understand the meaning behind it.”
“What is it about the marking that you identify?”
“We identify a name.”
She tapped on the corner of one and switched books, opening another. This one was old, the pages faded, written in a strange yellowish ink. She tapped on another marking. It was similar to the last, but everything else around it was enough different that I could tell they weren’t the same. She headed to the computer and started scrolling through images before stopping and pointing to one, and then another. With each one, I thought I understood.
“You think these were made by Odian?”
“No. I think these call to Odian.”
“Call to?” I glanced from Florence to Darvish. “How do these call to him?”
“It’s the nature of the patterns. Some of them are basic, and all of them are difficult for us to understand exactly what it is that is intended by them, but one thing that we have been able to determine is that each of these patterns has an intention to it. The single marking, the one we suspect is tied to Odian, is linked to the rest of it.”
“What do you mean linked?”
“I mean that the power seems to call to it. Linking to it. I’m not exactly sure what else to say about it.”
I looked over to the now-disrupted pattern, and a thought occurred to me. “Was Odian responsible for these?” Sharon said he was dead, but what if he wasn’t?
“Probably not him, but one of his followers,” Florence said.
The same people I’d been trying—and failing—to find. “You don’t know?”
“These are much more complicated. We have them running through an algorithm trying to decipher the rune and tie it to others, but have been unable to do so.”
“Was there anything here that you thought was linked to Odian?”
“Now we won’t know, will we?” she asked.
“What about the others?”
“The mage council has disrupted most of the others,” Darvish said.
“Not the one on the soccer field.”
“That one was different.”
“Why different?”
“Because it seems as if it were incomplete. I suspect that you managed to get there before whoever placed the pattern was able to finish it.”
“Why would the mage council not want to study these?”
“Becau
se the mage council does as they always have. They attack before they have a chance to try and understand.”
I couldn’t even argue with him. When the knights had come across me, they had simply attacked rather than attempting to try and understand what was taking place. Maybe they didn’t care, or maybe they were afraid. With all of the changes that had been taking place recently, I could understand the mages feeling uncertain about their place within the new alliance.
“Then we have to be ready for the next one.”
“And if there isn’t a next one?” Florence asked.
I looked down at the now-disrupted rune. I couldn’t help but feel as if there would be a next one. Regardless of what had happened already, there was a purpose behind these, and if they were meant as some way of linking to Odian, then we needed to figure out what purpose that might be and why they seemed to draw power from the other side of the Veil.
“You never answered why here,” I said, looking at Darvish.
“Because this place, like all of the others, has a proximity to the ley lines underlying the city.”
I stared at the disrupted ground. The ley lines stretched all the way out here? I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me, but it did. When I looked up, I met Darvish’s gaze. “Whoever is doing this knows exactly what they are doing.”
“They know, but within Minneapolis, there are quite a few ley lines running beneath the city. Enough that we can’t monitor everywhere,” Darvish said.
They couldn’t do it by themselves, but if they could somehow convince the council to work together, the way that I had wanted them to, then perhaps we could monitor for attempts at reaching the ley lines.
And once we did, once we figured out who was placing them, then we would have to figure out why.
And if everything worked out, maybe we could reach the followers of Odian and maybe—just maybe—I could find out what happened to my mother.
6
Resting my hand on the door, I sent a surge of magic through it. It was a habit that I’d gotten into, and the protections placed upon my doorway were familiar to me. They were a reminder of what I’d lost, and each time I encountered them, each time I felt that familiar surge of power, I couldn’t help but feel sadness at getting nowhere with Aron. As much as I tried, there was nothing left within him, certainly nothing that I thought should be there. His mind was gone, broken, stolen from him.
And unfortunately, it seemed as if nothing I was going to do would get him answers.
“Kate?”
I turned my head slowly and forced a smile at Marvin. He was an older man who lived down the hall from me and liked to check in on me. He hadn’t stopped by nearly as often as he used to, and I never pushed, figuring that there was a good reason for it, but a part of me actually missed having Marvin stop by.
“Hey there, Marvin. How are you?”
“Oh, you know. The usual struggles with work. It’s been awfully busy down at the post office, especially as we get into this time of year.”
“I imagine you’re starting to sort holiday cards.”
“They come earlier and earlier each year. Sometimes I wish people would just send them online.”
“I’m sure the card companies don’t want that,” I said, smiling. I didn’t take my hand off the door, maintaining the connection to the protections within it. It took little more than a trickle of magic, nothing that Marvin would be able to detect.
“I’m sure they don’t, and to be honest, I don’t either. If they did, I might be out of a job. It’ll probably happen sooner than later anyway. Machines are taking over everything these days.”
“Aren’t you getting close to retirement?”
“I’m not sure that I can retire. What would I do with myself?”
“I imagine you could find a hobby to work on.” I wasn’t sure what sort of hobbies Marvin had anyway, but no one needed to work indefinitely, and since he worked for the government, he would have a pension that he could fall back on.
“I really should look into a hobby,” Marvin said. “What sort of things do you like to do?”
“Right now, I am mostly focused on finishing up with my residency.”
“And then what’s your plan?”
“I haven’t fully decided.”
“I hope you decide to stick around here,” Marvin said.
“Is that right?”
“It’s been nice having you around. Most of these units are owned by us older types. Having an infusion of a little younger blood helps the rest of us feel a little bit younger.”
“I think if you ask Mrs. Marbles, she’d tell you that you’re only as old as you feel.”
“Sometimes, I feel pretty old. The old bones don’t work quite like they once did.”
“Just keep active,” I said.
“I try. That’s why I walk. I’ve got to keep up with the young blood in our units,” Marvin smiled. “Oh. That reminds me. I saw a friend of yours recently.”
“That might be Jen. She had a fire in her apartment, and she might need a place to stay for little while. Don’t worry, though. She’s another doctor like me, and she’ll be pretty quiet.” Especially since I intended to make sure Jen didn’t bring anyone back to my place.
“It wasn’t her. She’s been by often enough that I recognize her. A pretty one, she is. If I were twenty years younger…”
I smiled to myself. Twenty years younger, and Marvin still probably wouldn’t be quite Jen’s type. He was a little too innocent for her. She liked someone who was willing to be a little bit more adventurous, and I didn’t have the sense that Marvin was the adventurous kind.
“I’m not sure who you might’ve seen, then,” I said.
“The big guy. He used to come around. I thought the two of you might have something, but since he hasn’t been coming by nearly so often, I guess it didn’t work out.”
My mouth was dry. How would Marvin have seen Aron? As far as I knew, he hadn’t left the council house ever since he’d recovered, and so for him to have been out had to mean something, but what?
“Kate?”
I blinked, shaking my head. “Sorry about that,” I said. “It’s been busy with work.”
“Oh. So the two of you are still—”
“We’re just fine. Anyway, Marvin, I’m really tired. It was another long day at work.”
“I imagine it was, especially since you’re getting home now. We can talk later.”
He continued down the hallway, whistling softly. Marvin like to patrol, thinking that he was some sort of neighborhood watch, and considering that he was otherwise harmless, no one really seemed to mind. I wondered what Marvin would do if he actually encountered something dangerous.
Pressing a hint of magic into the door, I released the spells protecting it and stepped inside. Jen lounged on my couch and she looked up at my arrival, a wide smile flashing across her face.
“It’s about time.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. Something came up.”
“And by something, you mean your magical world crashing into your real world?”
“Unfortunately.”
I dropped onto the couch next to her and looked over. “How is your apartment?”
“Well, it’s not a complete loss. Everything is soaked, and quite a bit of char covers most of my belongings. But a few of my toys survived.”
I arched a brow. “Toys?”
“You really want me to go into that with you? I figured with as hard up as you been over the years that you wouldn’t need me to explain, but I’m more than happy to go over the basics of—”
“I’m just fine, thanks.”
Jen smiled. “Your loss. I’m a pretty good instructor. Just ask Johnny.”
“I’m sure you were. Did you lose anything important?”
“Most my pictures are digital, and I keep them backed up to the cloud. There are some things from medical school that I lost, but even that isn’t irreplaceable.” She shrugged, turning her attention back t
o the TV. A rerun of Friends was on, the one where Ross was trying to get a new couch up to his apartment. Jen stared blankly.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
She took a deep breath. “I lost everything I own, Kate. I know it can be replaced, and I know that there are others who have it worse than me, but… I lost everything I own.”
I took her hand, squeezing it. “And I told you that you’re welcome to stay here.”
“I know you did, but you got your own thing that you’re working on. I don’t want to get in the way of you learning your magical world.”
“I doubt that you’re going to get in the way of it.”
“Maybe I should phrase it differently. I don’t want to get involved in your magical world. I think I liked it better when I thought it was some sort of sex cult.”
“You’re safe enough here. Aron placed protective spells around the room so that you shouldn’t have to worry about somebody attacking here.”
“You know, just because there are protective spells around your home doesn’t mean that we’re safe. The fact that you needed them in the first place is enough to tell me that it’s not necessarily safe here.”
“Aron thought it was safe enough to bring an injured shifter here.”
“There is that,” Jen said. “How is hot shifter doing?”
I shook my head and ignored the question. “Besides, now that the various factions of the mage society are no longer warring, there really isn’t much of a reason for you to be worried.”
“No? Then what were you doing tonight?”
“Chasing down a source of magic.”
“Chasing it down? And why were you doing this?”
“Because I want answers. The person who is responsible for what happened to Aron and my mother had a past with him. They’re some sort of rune master, and I need to find out as much as I can about the runes so that I can make sure that…”
“That what? Do you intend to try to be the one who stops the placement of these runes? I don’t know how much time you think you have for this, Kate, but you still have to finish residency, and the longer that you spend on this, the more time that you take with it, the more distracted you will be with residency. You’re so close to finishing.”
