“I have to tread carefully,” he said to Gina. “Even as we clean out the stench of the demon’s presence, we have to rebuild. We have to restructure to prevent a repeat of the demon’s sly attack, and we have to restore our members’, and the wider magical community’s, trust in us. It is the core of our identity. About ninety percent of the work we do is in response to reports by magic users of suspicious happenings. We investigate and take appropriate action.”
“Ninety percent is a high number.”
“It sounds as if we’re reactive, doesn’t it? That’s a debate in the Collegium right now. However, research falls under that responsive percentage, and we have a significant number of mages involved in research and development. The remaining ten percent of our activity is us anticipating trouble. We look for patterns that indicate undetected rogue mages, demons, and so forth. Magical hazards.”
She frowned intently, analyzing his explanation and making her own deductions. “You saw something in the investigated reports. They’d need sign off from the president. The information crossed your desk and now you want to check something out quietly. The Collegium is unsettled and you can’t risk destabilizing it further.”
Computer hacker, house witch, dragon knight. Gina sat relaxed yet alert in her kitchen, in the house that her magic hid from the world. The electric lighting turned her red hair to fire and showed her clear green eyes, bright despite a long day.
The day had been hard on her. She’d had to watch him achieve her dream. Yet, she’d kissed him with an honest passion that fed his own hunger. Visiting the dragon had left him cold, so cold. The world had seemed distant. And Gina had brought him back, in more ways than one. She was as sexy as hell and just as smart.
“You’re almost right.” He could have let her misunderstanding remain. It was near enough to the truth for her to search the dark web efficiently on his behalf. Instead, he looked at his half-full mug of herb tea. Discussions like these needed more than grass-flavored water. “Do you think I could have coffee, instead?”
“You won’t sleep.” But she stood and made the coffee. Two cups.
He swallowed some of the smooth, caffeinated elixir, and gave her the truth. “My quest started before I became president and before I burned out my magic. It is why I burned out my magic. And I didn’t hear the rumors from a Collegium source.”
She added another slice of pie to his plate.
It distracted him. “Do you feed everyone who enters your house?”
A touch of color flushed her cheeks. “I want another slice to go with my coffee.” Slightly cross. “Do you want cream with yours?”
“No, thanks.”
She dolloped two scoops of cream onto her pie.
Rather than watch her eat, her lips parting and rounding and savoring the cream and pie, he stared at the window, but with night outside, that only gave him the reflection of the two of them. Man and woman alone, even in the ordinariness of a kitchen, had an unsettling intimacy. Perhaps it was the ordinariness of the setting that disconcerted him. He looked back at his slice of pie. The blueberries were plump and oozing indigo sweetness.
He picked up his fork. “In the dragon’s den I told you my parents are stage magicians. They have a touch of real magic, but it’s barely present. They rely on sleight of hand and misdirection for their act. A lot of the people they socialize with are the same. With the way magic talent rises and falls through the generations, those in a magical family have to find careers outside magic, but often they can’t leave it all together.”
She nodded. “It’s the same in my family. On both Mom and Dad’s side we’re mostly house witches. Fortunately, working in hospitality, mundane skills are as important as magic. Those with less magic are never made—never are—lesser.”
“That’s something I remind trainee guardians. Power can blind you. Sometimes stronger magic users forget the skills, intelligence and other talents mundanes possess. My parents spent years travelling around America, performing in all sorts of places and building a network of friendship and favors. Now, they’re mostly based in Las Vegas, but they hear things.”
He ate some pie. He never discussed his parents within the Collegium, so people assumed he wasn’t close to them. He was about to expose that illusion to Gina. “Mom and Dad are my link to those who exist on the fringe of magic. Sometimes rumors are clearest on the periphery, perhaps because it’s where people listen hardest.”
It had been his Dad’s idea. Selwyn Bennett had almost no magic, but he was brilliant at reading people and predicting what they’d do. When Lewis graduated from guardian training, Selwyn had suggested an illusion. If Lewis and his parents cultivated an impression of distance, people would ignore their relationship. People on the fringes would tell his parents things they’d hide from the Collegium, and those Lewis dealt with would forget that he had connections to another life, one outside of true magic.
It had worked. Lewis heard rumors that others within the Collegium missed. But the price was the growing truth of his isolation. When he’d burned out his magic, he’d chosen not to go home to be fussed over by his mom. A grown man didn’t need fuss—but perhaps everyone needed reminders they were loved?
“Dad heard the rumor from a travelling conjuror. Valenty Smith came from a family that possesses thieves’ magic. In him it was so diluted that his magic was barely a breath. But he still specialized in escapology, unlocking padlocks, unknotting ropes, all those open-sesame tricks. He wasn’t very good and that got worse as he started drinking.”
“You’re using the past tense,” Gina observed when he paused to swallow some coffee.
“Valenty was a conspiracy theorist as well as a failing conjuror. Most people ignored the various illogical tales he believed in so fervently, and given his alcoholism, no one was particularly surprised when one of his tricks went wrong and he drowned.”
“Ugh.” She shuddered. Her head turned so she faced the ocean, unseen and unheard, but ever-present to Cape Codders. “A horrible death. You don’t believe it was an accident.”
“No. A week before he died, Valenty sent Dad a letter. If the postal service was more efficient, maybe Dad would have thrown it out, but the letter arrived the day after Valenty’s death. Dad read the letter, he inquired quietly among his friends if anyone else had received communications from Valenty—three had—and then, he contacted me.”
Gina put her elbows on the table, leaning forward with her coffee mug cradled between her hands. “What did it say?”
“Valenty rambled. His hand writing was atrocious and deteriorated as the letter continued, probably because he was drinking as he wrote. He warned Dad of a Group of 5 who knew enough to be dangerous. Outcasts like us, he said. People who knew of magic, but whose families’ power had faded. Resentment, greed and fury. They’ll use us, he told Dad. And they’ll destroy everyone. He wrote on paper, he said, because they could trace anything he sent online.”
“Paranoia or truth?” Gina queried softly.
“What if it were the truth? Some people think the internet is magic. What if people who know of real magic but lack it substituted computer skills? They’d be nearly undetectable and they could organize in secret.” He drew a breath. “I believe they hire rogue mages for specific jobs. But the initiating events are so minor, they don’t show up in the Collegium’s reports. I’ve found them by tracking backwards, which isn’t particularly helpful, to find what triggered a major change. Magic and mundane sabotage are changing the world. It’s like chaos theory. One flap of a butterfly’s wings in the right place at the right time and a hurricane can flatten a city. This group knows where to flap its wings.”
“What do they gain? Is there a money trail you can follow?”
“That’s what I hope to do while people believe I’m visiting you. When the ice storm in the North West Passage burned out my magic, it was staged. I’d been lured up there. I thought I detected a pattern, everything falling into place to indicate that a geomage had been hired t
o sabotage test drilling for oil and natural gas beneath the ice. The result would be an eco-disaster to be supplemented with an oil tanker sabotaged by mundane methods to create a gigantic spill, one that would trigger political clashes among the nations trying to claim the Arctic as their own.”
“It didn’t happen.”
He saluted her statement of the obvious with a lift of his coffee mug. “No. Instead, while I was endangering everyone’s lives by chasing the false trail up to the Arctic, the Group of 5 initiated turf warfare in the narco-gangs of Mexico. And I know they did because there were tales of mythological creatures from Aztec carvings coming alive and killing key personnel. An illusion a mage could achieve. I think I even know which mage. He was my first target. He’d know something of who hired him. Seven months ago, he died.”
“How?”
“A Mexican drug lord shot him.”
Her eyes opened wide. “Wow.”
“Yeah. Apparently, some of the narco-gangs have magic. This drug lord, either by natural aptitude or an amulet, saw through the mage’s illusions.”
“Or he could have just gotten lucky, firing at random,” she said.
“Lucky, or the Group of 5 sold him the amulet.”
“Wait. What? They turned on the mage they’d hired?” Her disbelief was cute.
He shrugged. “They have no loyalty, and this disposed of the mage just before I could question him. Plus, now the drug lord owes them a favor.”
She pulled a face. “Depending how you look at it. They’re also the ones who sent the rogue mage in to attack the drug lord in the first place. Although, I guess they wouldn’t tell him that bit.” She frowned at Lewis. “You’ve tried following the magic. That didn’t work. Now you want to follow the money. Have you told anyone in the Collegium about this quest?”
“No.” Without hard evidence it was impossible. It would be no more than a conspiracy theory such as had gotten Valenty Smith ridiculed, and with his magic burned out, Lewis couldn’t afford to give anyone further reason to question his fitness to serve the Collegium. But it had meant he was on his own—till now.
“Oh boy.” Gina rubbed her arms. “Goose pimples.”
“You don’t have to do this for me,” he said. “I can look for the money trail myself.”
“How good are your hacking skills?”
He refused to answer.
“Yeah. I thought so. You’ll alert them as soon as you go hunting online.”
“Which is why I tried tracking the mage first,” he admitted grudgingly. “Hell.” He stood. “Maybe I shouldn’t even be here. I don’t think the Group of 5 consider me much of a threat, not since I so stupidly followed their false trial and their weather mage burned me, but I shouldn’t risk bringing you into this.”
She stood, too. “You took a risk for me. You met a dragon. I can do a bit of hacking.”
Gina watched Lewis struggle with the idea of accepting help, of needing it.
“Thank you.” His large hands tightened on the back of his chair. “Don’t put yourself at risk.”
“I’m actually pretty good at hacking.” A wry comment in its understatement. She was an excellent hacker. Her brain worked that way. People thought house witchery was a warm, cozy magic, a lesser kind of talent, but in fact it had orderliness at its heart. She saw patterns, and especially anything out of place, because of her talent’s need for tidiness. “I’ll show you your room.”
He had to stay the night. What sort of pretend boyfriend left half-way through? The uncommitted kind, and that wasn’t Lewis.
She decided the blue and cream bedroom at the front of the house would suit him. It was spacious and serene and if he opened the windows, he’d hear the ocean. After how eerily detached he’d been during his experience of clarity of sight, she wanted him to have that reality.
The whisper of the waves or their crash in a storm always helped her. Gentle or fierce, the ocean had a relentless power. It endured.
She intended to sleep with the windows open in her own room that occupied the other front corner of the second floor. She would concentrate on the ocean’s sounds and not on the man who’d be sleeping nearby.
He walked beside her up the main staircase. No small talk. No comment on the age or beauty of her home. But his hand touched the bannister lightly in a tap of appreciation.
She left him at the door to his room and heard it shut as she walked along the passage, the lights extinguishing behind her. Her room was soft shades of green and sand, a room to ground and restore her. She walked to the windows, opened one, and sat on the window seat. The ocean glinted silver and darkness, reaching out to the horizon.
Clarity of sight. Lewis had called it silver light. What had he seen?
He hadn’t said. He’d been intent on his own quest, this mysterious Group of 5. Did they even exist?
When she’d entered his office with her story of a secret dragon-alien, he’d undoubtedly questioned her sanity. Everyone knew dragons were mythical, so she had to be delusional.
Now, he spoke of a mysterious group that he hadn’t told anyone in the Collegium about, and she questioned if it was post-traumatic obsession. She didn’t think it was. The group probably existed. She’d track their money trail, provide the evidence to Lewis, he’d pass it on within the Collegium, and the group would be dealt with. Undoubtedly, they’d be far less than Lewis’s experiences had exaggerated them in his mind. Then he’d be free to journey the Deeper Path.
The breeze was cool. A tug of her magic brought an afghan folded at the bottom of her bed to wrap around her shoulders. The stars were achingly bright. They spoke of her dreams. When she developed clarity of sight she could start on the Deeper Path. Like her aunt, she’d be able to journey through the galaxy.
Lewis had the opportunity, and he didn’t seem to care.
Obsession.
Her thoughts circled back to him.
He was committed to tracking a shadowy group whose existence he hadn’t revealed to his fellow Collegium.
She wrapped the blanket tighter around her.
Some of her family and friends had served in the military. Others had suffered unrelated traumas. The thing was, she’d seen post-traumatic stress disorder before. People with PTSD could fixate. Lewis was a high functioning individual by anyone’s measure, but burning out his magic had to have been traumatic, and the trauma had been exacerbated because every day he returned to work in an organization where the exercise of your magic defined you.
So his conspiracy group existed. Maybe they had even set up a distraction that had trapped him in the North West Passage while they pursued their plans somewhere else. But she was disinclined to believe that whoever the group was and whatever their agenda, they were worth the president of the Collegium’s time.
Lewis had to let it go.
She’d help. The Group of 5 were trouble, even if only because of Lewis’s obsession with them. She started turning over the problem and how she’d attack it. He’d need to give her a starting point. The deceased conspiracy theorist’s name, Valenty Smith, wouldn’t get her far. She needed the name of the rogue mage Lewis believed the Group of 5 had hired, then killed. She needed specifics. The fact that Lewis hadn’t given her those was worrying. Without specifics, this was just a nightmare fairytale that obsessed him.
She looked at the stars. As attaining clarity of sight obsessed her.
A sheet of paper lay on the kitchen table, in the place where Gina always sat. Crisp white paper without lines, although the writing on it was even and straight, its contents ordered.
Lewis had left a note.
Gina sent out her magic. She was alone in the house.
At some point between midnight and morning, while she slept, Lewis had left without waking her.
“Stupid wards.” They hadn’t nudged her with news of his departure because he was a guest, free to leave.
The note was detailed. She’d wanted specifics on the Group of 5, and he’d given them without her having to
ask. Three tentative identifications of the group’s members, seven people he suspected had been hired by them—four were dead, the other three minor players in…
Gina blinked. The note crumpled in her hand. The other three were people with only a trace of magic, but they weren’t minor in the mundane world. Two were arms dealers and the third managed a media network.
Lewis had listed events: dates, catalysts, consequences and people involved; military coups, natural disasters and political upheaval. At the very end of the note he’d added a message for her. “You don’t have to do this. Walk away if you need to.”
The names listed made this more than a post-trauma fixation. The people on Lewis’s list had real power, even if it wasn’t magic.
Walk away?
She looked out the window, across the garden and out to the country he’d have walked across to reach Emmaline’s portal. He’d chosen to walk rather than ask her to drive him. He’d walked—or ran—three miles at the crack of dawn.
He had to learn he wasn’t alone.
No. I won’t be walking away.
Chapter 5
Four hours of sleep was sufficient. Lewis strode across Cape Cod. The clarity of the predawn light as it stole color from the world reminded him of the clarity of sight Morag had woken in him. He let it seep into his view of the world, catching the silver shimmer of it as it overlaid the contours of the island and centered in on the portal.
Despite himself, his pulse quickened. This was proof that the silver light might replace the magic he’d lost. He hadn’t let himself believe Gina’s talk of the Deeper Path. Yes, Morag was a dragon, and he’d believe, an alien. But he hadn’t let himself consider the implications of this new way of seeing. He’d locked up the wonder of it and left it, metaphorically, in that incredible, impossible dragon’s den.
But, alone now as he hiked across country, he contemplated what the truth of it meant for him. If the Deeper Path unlocked another layer of magic, he wouldn’t be vulnerable, dependent on the magic and commitment of others. He’d no longer have to trust his life to their sometimes shaky magic, and their sometimes shakier sense of honor.
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