by John Levitt
“Ahh,” I said. “Inkromancy.”
Cassandra turned her head and fixed me with a glare. Not a trace of that previous good humor I’d seen remained on her face. This was clearly not a joking matter to her.
“Sorry,” I said, retreating away from the table. “My bad.” She turned back and bowed her head over the pan, examining the patterns in the water.
“I see a face,” she said. “A man, strong, handsome.” Sherwood nodded slightly. “But he seems troubled.”
No indication of power or talent was in evidence. She was doing a cold reading, speaking in generalities, using logic, and taking cues from Sherwood’s body language.
A “handsome man” was a fairly safe bet. Sherwood is a very attractive woman; slim, strong-featured but not harsh, with dark shoulder-length hair shot through with purple highlights. Sure, she might have hooked up with some poor schlub, but the odds were against it. Attractive people usually end up with other attractive people. Maybe that’s not fair, but it’s a fact of life.
And “troubled” was another good bet. If relationship problems had arisen, he surely would be troubled about that.
Still, no power was apparent as Cassandra gazed into the water. I don’t think she was pulling a con; she probably thought she really saw things in those swirling patterns. Maybe she did, but they were all in her mind.
I edged back toward the table to get a better look. All I could see were swirls of ink, but Cassandra seemed to have no problem in discerning a pattern. I wondered what she would do if something truly recognizable were to appear in those twisting strands of ink. No sooner thought than done.
I don’t have the artistic skill to create a portrait from scratch, so I just let out a little talent, ran the energy through my body, and let it flow into the pan of water. The curls of ink immediately started to form a picture of my own face, like a fine-lined pen-and-ink drawing. Sharp angular features formed, a shock of dark hair, and a dark, brooding expression on the face that was a caricature of my real self. The red ink pooled around my eyes, giving the face a demonic air. Sherwood saw what I was doing and glared at me.
Cassandra drew her breath in sharply as the face in the water became more detailed and lifelike. She looked up at me, then back at the water, then at me again. Then she spoke, but the words were not anything I expected.
“Who sent you?” she said. “Jessie?”
I was caught off guard and stammered incoherently for a moment. Cassandra pushed her chair back and stood up slowly. She fixed her gaze on me and advanced, all four foot eleven of her. It should have been funny, but there was nothing funny about her. I could feel the energy crackling around her. I’d made a bad mistake; she was a practitioner, all right. The second I’d let down my shielding and used some talent, she’d pegged me. That residue of talent I’d sensed floating around earlier wasn’t the random emanation of a meager talent at all; they were wisps that had escaped her own shielding. I backed up instinctively as she approached me.
“Take it easy,” I said. “We don’t mean you any harm.”
She laughed, barking it out like a curse. “Don’t you, now? Well, that’s good of you, a very fine thing.”
Her lilting Jamaican accent grew more pronounced, at odds with the angry intent of her words. She broke off her advance and walked over to the door, fast but not panicky. When she reached it, she turned and faced the room, clasping her hands above her head. “Go free,” she said, and unlocked her fingers, clearly implementing a spell. She stared at us, opened the door a fraction, and squeezed through. “Good luck.”
The moment Cassandra passed through the doorway, Sherwood sprang up from her chair.
“Shouldn’t we go after her?”
That question was answered by the unmistakable sound of the dead bolt being slotted into place. As if the sound had triggered it, a set of wards sprang up around the door, glowing with jagged lines of force. Not literally—wards are perceived on the psychic plane, and you don’t exactly see them—that’s just a metaphor. But the important thing was that Cassandra wasn’t running from us at all. She didn’t have to—she had neatly trapped us in her basement room.
Usually wards cover an entire house, or at least a room. And sometimes you can locate weak points. But this room was cement, and underwater. There was no need to ward the entire area—just the door, the only way out. So they could be concentrated there, making them all the more difficult to defeat.
I was sure that between Sherwood and myself we could dismantle them, given enough time. But there was still the dead bolt. Getting out was going to pose quite a problem. Meanwhile, a more pressing issue presented itself.
The whirling stars on the ceiling had grown brighter and were moving faster, now with urgency. I didn’t like the looks of them, and neither did Sherwood. She walked over to the laser projector, searched for the on/off switch for a moment, and finally just unplugged it. The light went out, but the moving points of light didn’t. If anything, they blazed brighter, and now they occasionally detached themselves from the surface of the ceiling and whizzed around a few inches below it.
As we watched, the points of light dropped down even farther, now just brushing the tops of our heads. Lou liked this new development even less than we did. He quickly headed toward the table, intending to take cover underneath. Right before he reached it, one of the bright sparks flew out of its orbit and struck him squarely on his back leg. He yelped and dove under the table, finding relative safety for the moment.
A second later one of the light points swooped down and nicked my forearm. I almost yelped myself; it felt like the sting of an angry wasp. The room was now thick with the swirling points of light; they didn’t appear conscious or malevolent, just random. But there were enough of them so that soon intent wouldn’t be an issue. We were in serious trouble.
Sherwood grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the far corner of the room.
“We need to set up a barrier shield,” she said.
I nodded and yelled over at Lou to join us. His hiding place under the table wasn’t going to be effective for long. Sherwood and I had worked together long enough to be an efficient team. Usually two practitioners using talent end up at cross purposes, but we’d found ways to divide up tasks without getting in each other’s way. We used the two sides of the corner walls as a natural barrier and quickly set up an energy shield to cover the rest.
But this was only a temporary fix. Protective physical shields are an active use of talent, and take a lot of energy to maintain. A static shield, like a warding, is different. It’s like putting up a barbed-wire fence; it takes some time and effort, but once it’s up, it’s done. You don’t need to expend energy to keep it in place. You need to keep up maintenance, like if you had to replace a rusted wire or loose post, but otherwise it’s just there.
Same goes for aversion spells, and passive spellwork like personal shielding of talent or creating illusions is even easier. You have to keep your concentration, but a trickle of energy will suffice to keep them going.
But an energy shield is like an electrified fence, and the power has to come from somewhere—usually from your personal store. The stronger you are, the longer you can hold it steady, but sooner or later you tire and run out of energy. Then the shield collapses. But we had a moment’s respite, and Sherwood took out her cell phone.
“I think we could use a little help,” she said, and started to punch in a number. Then she stopped and stared at the phone.
“Let me guess,” I said. “No service.” I waved at the flecks of light. “The energy animating those things is going to disrupt any electromagnetic signal.”
“Of course. Otherwise it would have been easy. So what now?”
“Just the question I was asking myself.”
“How much time do we have?” she asked. “How’s your energy holding up?”
“Not bad. I’d guess we’ve got an hour, give or take.”
My forearm was still smarting from where the speck of lig
ht had grazed it. I examined it, expecting to find a welt like from a bee sting, but it was more like a burn. An angry red line, turning black around the edges, ran down the arm. I showed it to Sherwood, who whistled.
“Nasty,” she said. “Those little points of light must be super hot, like little flecks of molten metal. What do you think—can we douse them?”
“I don’t see how. Too many of them, and they move too fast, anyway.”
The air was now thick with them. Another problem was the nature of the energy shield. It protected us, but it also protected the lights. In order to deal with them, we’d have to drop the shield, and we might not last long enough after that to do anything much.
“Fuck!” Sherwood yelled, and slapped at her neck. An angry welt appeared there as if by magic. Which of course was precisely what it was. “One got through.”
Still another problem. The lights were too minuscule to be blocked completely. The shield was like those Kevlar vests police wear—they’ll stop a large-caliber bullet with no problem, but narrow the point of focus and now it’s trouble. A stiletto, wielded with sufficient force, will punch right through it because the point of the knife is small enough to squeeze through the fibers. And these little fiery points of light were small enough to squeeze through the shield.
And each time one broke through, it weakened the shield and made it just a bit easier for the next one. We didn’t have an hour to figure things out; we had minutes.
A disturbance toward the back of the room caught my eye. The random pattern of swirling flecks coalesced into something less random there. All the points of light that entered that specific area suddenly glowed brighter and swooped off in the same direction for a short distance before dissolving into chaos again.
What was causing this? Of course. The fan, sitting on its table, blowing air. When the air moved, so did the flecks, and the extra breeze energized them like a bellows stoking up a fire, making them light up like fireflies on steroids.
I could use this. My strength lies in improvisation, taking cues from the environment around me, weaving in various aspects and using my talent to effect spells. But that sort of thing isn’t instantaneous. It always takes a little time, and we’d have to drop the energy shield for me to put things in motion. And the second the energy shield came down, we’d be riddled with white hot holes.
“Sherwood,” I said. “If we drop the shield, how long could you protect us?”
“Completely?”
“No, just enough so that I can do something about these things without getting fried.”
She looked out at the swirling points of light. The room now looked like a miniature snowstorm.
“Maybe a minute if I can keep total concentration. Maybe less if I blink.”
“Plenty of time. If it works.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“People will remember us fondly, I’m sure.”
“Hmm. Me, perhaps. And Lou, of course.” She looked out into the room again. “You hold the shield in place for a minute. I’m going to need all of my energy for this.”
I could feel talent moving as she gathered energy, even taking some from the shield itself, forcing me to pour even more of my own into it to keep it up and running. She flexed her arms, and energy was coursing down them into her hands. She took a deep breath and nodded.
“Ready,” she said.
I dropped the shield, redirected my energy out into the room, and the flecks of white-hot light swarmed in. I was focusing on the task at hand, but from the corner of my eye I saw Sherwood whip out both hands and let loose concentrated pulses of energy. Every time a group of spots intersected with Sherwood’s energy pulse, they flared brightly and winked out of existence. It was like a 3-D video game or a miniature fireworks display, inches from my head.
I heard Sherwood curse and Lou yelp, and a moment later I felt burning on the back of my neck. She wasn’t intercepting them all. I ignored the pain and reached out with my talent. I gathered the essence of the electric fan in the corner and enhanced it, both the movement of air and its circular motion. Then I sucked energy out of one side of the room and poured it into the other, creating an imbalance. When I cast out the essence I’d gathered, it created a perfect little whirlwind. The floating points were swept up in the airflow, burning even brighter as the miniature tornado whirled them around.
I brought the whirlwind close to us, where it sucked up the random bits that Sherwood had been fending off. Then I pushed it toward the door, compressed it down, and focused it on a spot just above the doorknob. The heat from the now-concentrated light flecks was palpable even from ten feet away.
The spot on the door started to smolder, then char; then under the onslaught of concentrated heat, a section just dissolved away, leaving a gaping hole with flickers of flame licking around the edges. At the same time, I poured the rest of my energy into the sparks so that it now spilled over, the sparks being unable to contain the extra power. The wards around the door sensed this as a severe magical threat and attached their own energy to combat the threat.
“Push it through,” I said to Sherwood. “I’ve got to concentrate on holding it all together.”
She directed a rush of air toward the hole in the door and the energized points of light streamed through, taking the wards with them. Five seconds after, there wasn’t a single speck of light left in the room, and the wards around the door were gone as well.
I reached through the hole in the door, felt around, and slid back the dead bolt. We moved cautiously out of the room and back up the stairs, watching for Cassandra, but she was nowhere to be seen. I wanted to look around the place, but Sherwood pulled me along.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “She might be back at any time, and we’re both drained.”
“Hold on a sec. I need to do something first.”
I signaled Lou to keep watch at the front door, scanned the front room, and grabbed a couple of dog-eared paperback books and a half-eaten chocolate bar from a table. As soon as we got outside I picked up a smooth twig and put all the items together on the plank leading to the front door. I put out some more energy and diffused it through the objects there, then another, weaker pulse into the plank itself. I ran back in and put the books and the candy bar back where I’d found them. No point in alerting her.
The twig went into my pocket. I now had an efficient alarm system; the twig was keyed to both Cassandra and the wooden plank, and if she returned, it would glow the minute she set foot on it.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.” Lou took the lead, still keeping watch.
Before we even reached the car, the cell clipped to Sherwood’s belt went off. She made a face as she put it up to her ear. Then she made another face, this one directed at me, with sudden interest and raised eyebrows.
“What?” I mouthed. She waved her hand at me for quiet.
“Yes,” she said. “This is Sherwood.” A pause. “Melissa? Yes, I’m looking for a keyboard player.” Another pause. “Bass.” A longer pause. “Mostly originals, a few standards. I’m pretty open to different styles, though.”
“Set up a meet,” I mouthed frantically. Sherwood waved me off impatiently and turned her back, but I waved my hands in her face until she said, “Hold on a moment, will you?” and put her hand over the phone.
“What?” she said.
“Try and set up a meet right away. The next time she talks to Cassandra, we’ll be toast.” She nodded, and went back to her conversation.
“Sure,” I heard her say. “I’m out and about right now, but I could meet you somewhere and we could talk it over. Where? How about Potrero Hill; that’s up where I live. Do you know the Thinker’s Café on Connecticut? ... Good. About an hour, then.” I tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to Lou, and she nodded. “You’ll know me because I’ll have my dog along—he goes everywhere with me. A little black-and-tan guy, like a mini Pinscher ... Okay, see you then.”
“So we’re on?” I asked as she sn
apped her cell shut.
“Apparently. She sounds nice. I’m still feeling a little creepy about this. I don’t like lying to people much, even if it’s for a good cause.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Why all this elaborate make-believe, anyway? Why don’t you just grab her if that’s what you’re going to do?”
“I don’t want to grab her. I want to find out where she lives and what she’s been up to and maybe who she’s hanging with. And if she stole something, and if not, why Jessica’s really looking for her. Grabbing her, as you put it, isn’t going to do a thing for me.”
We walked the last little bit back to the van, Lou keeping an eye out for Cassandra, but she was making herself scarce. Just as well—right now I didn’t want any trouble. The important thing was to get over to the café before Jackie did.
Only one of the outside tables was open when we got there, but that was fine. I parked the van a block away where I could see but not be too close. I didn’t want to take any chance of spooking her. I grabbed Lou by his harness to get his attention. Once he got a good look at Jackie, he’d be able to use his talent to track her down like a bloodhound. Locating her again and finding out where she lived would be simple for him.
“Lou. Go with Sherwood. She’s meeting someone, and pay attention to who it is. And you’re a dog, remember? No tricks; you’ve got to be a dog or she’ll know something’s wrong. Got it?”
He yawned in my face, his way of saying, Of course I’ve got it. He can’t completely understand sentences, though he’s pretty good with words, but I’ve managed to get some complicated ideas across to him in the past. This time it was pretty straightforward.
I wasn’t worried about Jackie tumbling to what he really was, even though she’d obviously know all about Ifrits. But magically speaking they’re amazingly neutral, and most spells slide right off them. Even a practitioner sometimes can’t tell an Ifrit for sure, especially if the Ifrit wants to stay unrecognized.
