by Paul Duffau
“Thank you, Jules,” Kenzie whispered.
Chapter 7
Mitch squeezed his eyes shut. The afterimage of the schematic for the robotic arm linkages painted itself in bright lines against the black. He rubbed his face vigorously until it stung. Too little sleep after he’d split Mercury’s place and vivid dreams of robots and monster dogs left him exhausted and his bed thrashed.
The office was empty except for him and a dark-haired intern two cubicles down, named Garrett. The University of Washington master’s candidate pored over his own, more complicated, set of documents. In addition to being a very bright electrical engineer, Garrett was dating one of the daughters of the chief financial officer, a point of grim amusement to Mitch. For Leo Warnicke, the floor supervisor, it was a point of annoyance.
As if summoned like a demon, the waspish voice belonging to Leo interrupted his thought. “Mitch, what are you doing here on Saturday? Don’t you have anything better to do?”
Mitch blinked and spun his seat away from the monitor in his cubicle. Leo was eyeing Garrett’s trash can with an aggrieved expression. Garrett was a junkie for caffeine, and his black trash can overflowed with coffee cups. Mitch suppressed a smirk and answered, “I wanted to get ahead on the tool extensions for the upper appendages on Bob. There’s still a problem with getting them to fully retract, especially with the larger stuff. There’s not enough room against the torso.”
Mitch’s current project was destined to be a carpentry machine, capable of working unsupervised on a job site, replicating the more repetitive aspects of house construction. Input the plans and the machine would cut the lumber, set the joists and trusses, and sheath the house in half the time of a man, with greater precision. The restrictions of the uneven and often muddy ground at construction job sites meant that the carpenter bot, nicknamed Bob, needed to be unnaturally stable. The project was ambitious. The countervailing requirements for strength and stability made it a tremendous challenge, but successful development would allow an army of metal tool-wielding woodworkers to enter into fields that only flesh-and-blood men could fill for now.
“Which is why the engineers are recommending that the tools get removed before the unit gets stored,” said Leo. “Wrap up what you’re doing. We’re going to start a system upgrade in ten minutes.” The boss turned.
Mitch objected. “It’s just the torso is nine percent oversized—”
Leo let loose a mild expletive under his breath and stopped. He pointed at Mitch. “Lock it down.”
Mitch clenched his jaw. “Yes, sir.”
He rotated back to his screen. His hand hesitated as he reached for the mouse. If I bypassed this connection and shifted the servo higher up on the shoulder, he mused, then the clearances would improve enough to fold the arm all the way in. I think . . . He tapped in commands to the CAD software to make the changes to the drawing, saving it as a separate file to avoid contaminating the original. The new position of the motor shortened the lever arm. With a few efficient strokes, Mitch set up the equations to determine the loss of power output from the change, and the changes to the balance points for Bob.
The computer ripped through the calculations. The good news was the effect on stability was negligible. The bad news was a power drop of nearly thirty percent.
The computer chirped and the screen flickered. The system upgrade had started. Mitch snatched the mouse and hit Save. The hard drive chattered as the data wrote to the disk. Mitch frowned. It was taking a long time to save the file. The sound of the disk starting and stopping continued for a full minute before it quieted. Mitch clicked on the shutdown and the computer dutifully packed up its electrons and turned off.
Mitch pushed away from the cubby, stood, and stretched up, reaching for the drop-tile ceiling. Still pondering the nine percent excess volume in Bob’s torso, he swiped his ID card at the exit. The wasted space offended him.
Still disturbed, he punched the gas and rocketed past the security gate and out of the lot. He had one stop to make before he headed out to find the Rubiera homestead.
Mitch slid his car into the angled parking space and slapped the manual transmission into neutral. He fished a piece of yellow sidewalk chalk from the console and got out. He strode across the asphalt to a flight of stairs that trickled down through wild vegetation. On the fourth riser, he saw a pair of vertical lines. Kenzie wouldn’t be running today. Disappointed, he drew an arrow pointing to the right on the fifth riser.
After having their phones compromised by Lassiter, Mitch and Kenzie had devolved their communications to more elemental systems. Kenzie marked the face of the step using a simple code. One slash meant she’d be running the next day. Two meant she wouldn’t be. That simple, he’d know when he could find her. Not that he always needed it—she seemed to live in the back of his head. If she’d left a note in the waterproof can hidden in the brush next to the concrete steps, there would be an A.
His arrow showed that he had checked in. To the right, he was okay. To the left, he had news.
After last night, he’d contemplated telling her about the sapphire. He decided against it, reasoning that it might be dangerous to Kenzie. He’d stashed it in the garage, in the wall cavity behind a loose piece of wood planking. Short of the house burning down, it was as safe as he could make it. He hefted the chalk, bent, and drew another sign. It was not a sign they had agreed on, but Mitch figured that Kenzie would get it.
Now to find Hunter.
Chapter 8
Kenzie turned on her blinker. “I’m going to take the scenic route,” she explained to her father as he shifted in his seat. She monitored his reaction from the corner of her eye. His eyes flicked forward and to the sides, a constant cop-scan that snatched details with the accuracy of a high-speed camera. Satisfied, she continued along the winding road speckled with bright spots of sunlight that splattered past the overhanging greenery.
At the intersection with Lake Washington Boulevard, she would turn right, toward home, with the lake on her left, and toward the concrete steps that she and Mitch graffitied, in what she had dubbed the low-tech message board. He’d agreed, saying, “Yeah, but low-tech is hard to hack.” His smile hadn’t reached his eyes.
She eased in to the stop sign, waited for the bounce of the car coming to a full stop before proceeding.
“You forgot your turn signal,” admonished her father. He made a lousy passenger, always squirming in the seat and pointing out every little mistake that she made.
Kenzie scrunched up her face. “Sorry.”
He gave one nod and reverted to his restless search, his expression impassive.
Kenzie practiced easy breaths as she came up to the staircase, a scant half mile from her front door. The location made it easy for her to check in when she went for a run, but required a detour from the normal route to and from her parents’ house.
There. She spotted the parking lot and the vegetation breaking around the cascading steps. Maintain speed.
Kenzie glanced to the right just as the vehicle rolled up next to the steps, read the sign at a glance, and her muscles relaxed.
Her father stirred, followed the track of her eyes.
No, no, no . . .
Kenzie punched the accelerator, and wrenched the wheel to the right and immediately back to center. The violent adjustments knocked them about in their seats.
“Squirrel,” she explained, as he jerked in his seat.
His eyes darted to the side-view mirror, and he half-turned in his seat. “Don’t leave the road for anything smaller than a moose. Better to run over a squirrel than put yourself into a tree.”
She glanced at him and nodded. He met her gaze, the corner of his left eye narrowed so slightly that most people wouldn’t notice. Kenzie did, though. She knew that expression. She broke contact, getting her eyes back on the road. She could feel his boring into the side of her face, probing for a secret.
He knew she was lying about the reason for the evasive maneuvers. Silently, she
prayed he hadn’t seen the chalk markings on the steps. Let him look anywhere else except there.
“You okay?”
Kenzie nodded. “Scared me, that’s all.” That is, after all, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, officer. Having a cop for a father was a gigantic pain.
Two minutes later, she pulled in past the gate of her Tudor home, crested up the driveway. Behind the house, where the garage extended out to the back of the lot, she parked in the first bay. She unbelted and got out of the car.
“Let’s see if your mother has cooled off,” said her father, shutting his door.
Not too likely, Kenzie thought. A thud echoed from the bare walls as she slammed the driver’s side door.
Five yards along the breezeway that connected the house to the garage, she sensed the attack. A prickle at the nape of her neck raised hairs. She halted, and almost got run over by her father.
“What’s—” He froze, confounded.
Her hands were in motion, building a tracking spell to locate the wizard.
Graham pivoted. “Go to your mother, now.” He saw her hands, grabbed her, shoved. “Move!”
Kenzie stared at him while she finished the spell, hurrying to tie it off, and then sprinted for the house. A roaring chased her. Her father stood in the middle of the yard, braced by a pair of pines, staring up at an emerging funnel cloud.
This isn’t Kansas; Seattle doesn’t do tornadoes.
She shouted as she barreled through the doorway, the door slamming into the wall. “Mother!” But Sasha was already in motion, a pissed-off cast to her lips. She passed Kenzie without speaking and surveyed the situation outside. Instantly, her expression morphed from annoyance to fear to anger. A glint of steel showed in her blue eyes as she assessed the attack.
“Stay here,” she commanded Kenzie as she went to join her husband.
“He’s up the hillside,” said Kenzie. She tugged on the tracking spell and lent it a pearly, iridescent cast. The line ran up into the trees overlooking the waterfront. A moment later, a counterspell chopped it to ribbons and the stray magic floated away on the wind.
Raymond stood with his feet spread broadly, creating an unfamiliar pattern with a weave of his hands. “Set up a counter to that cloud,” he directed his wife, voice calm but tight. “Let’s give whoever it is something to think about in the meantime.” He finished his counterattack by scooping his arms as though gathering a huge weight and raising them over his head. He clapped once, hard.
Kenzie felt the power of the magic and winced. In the woods, a tree splintered with a boom that reverberated like close thunder.
Meanwhile, her mother had set up a spell to reverse the flow of air, using a variation of the Anemosa spell that Harold had taught Kenzie. That triggered a memory, of blond Belinda knocking Kenzie about with the same incantation. The flavor of the attack—Flavor, thought Kenzie, odd way to think of it—reminded her of the woman, old enough to be her mother but a Wilder, who’d disappeared after the blowup with Lassiter.
Another, more powerful force intruded into Kenzie’s perceptions. Through the kitchen windows, she saw her parents standing in the middle of the yard, exposed.
A trap.
It was a trap, designed to pull them out, get them into the open. The pressure of the new spell pulled the air from her lungs, like a wave sucking all the water out from the beach before it crashed with inevitable fury to smash the shore, and anyone on it.
Panting, Kenzie closed her eyes and let her hands drift into a complex pattern.
“It is a spell of last resort,” Harold had said. “The Shield will protect from the direct impact of a spell, but just as with a metal shield, the force of the blow will follow through to you. In effect, you turn the blade edge of the sword away, to be bludgeoned by the force of impact.”
Grinding her teeth, she forced herself to be precise, not to hurry, all the while waiting for the explosive release of wizard magic that would prove her too slow.
Swirling red fire grew behind her eyelids, and her breath came in clutching gulps. Almost . . .
“Aspísus,” she whispered.
In the midst of the fire in her mind, a placid blue gained hold. It spread, silver at the edges, encompassing her, then her parents. She opened her eyes, relief coursing into her limbs. She held rigid control of her magic.
A second later, a bolt of raw energy, brilliant against the red and the blue, shot forth. The enemy attack struck the shield, making it ripple. The impact blasted into her like a vicious kick to the temple, and she saw a pyrotechnic display shatter into the protective spell. Grimly, she stayed with her spell. A second blast dropped her to her knees. She grabbed at the counter on the way down, but missed, pain blinding her. She toppled, fought for balance, but refused to relinquish her spell.
A wizard war . . . this is what a wizard war is like. . . .
She heard another thunderclap as everything faded to sad nothingness.
Chapter 9
Mitch slouched, head down in the summer heat, headphones over his ears for camouflage. The black sunglasses, white button-up shirt, untucked, and chinos completed his effort at disguise. He ran a hand over his brow to keep the sweat from dripping onto the lenses.
He had wasted three hours on Mercer Island, searching for Hunter’s house. Neighborhoods populated with the kind of wealth that the Rubieras had were plentiful enough in the land of Microsoft and Amazon. Ones that provided the kind of privacy the wizards would seek were a lot harder to find. A couple of places on Mercer fit the ticket, large and imposing, with sturdy fences and extensive grounds. On his second lap around the island, dodging the traffic flowing from I-90, it dawned on Mitch that there was exactly one road onto Mercer Island. No way folks as paranoid as Hunter’s family, people who expunged themselves from the internet, would allow themselves to be trapped by crappy escape routes.
He moved on, disgusted he hadn’t thought it through before squandering time and gas.
An online search of property records had turned up a veritable trove of information. Painstakingly cross-referencing the data to aerial maps gave him a basis for selection. He started with two assumptions. First, the Rubieras were arrogant. Second, they were filthy rich, old money in the internet age. He narrowed the hunt to the most expensive but established areas near downtown Seattle. In five neighborhoods, he found large properties, estates really, that somehow did not show up on the tax rolls. He had four more neighborhoods left on his provisional list.
Windermere was exclusive as heck, and they had their own security force. Montlake, almost as spendy, better access in and out. Medina and Yarrow Point on the east side of Lake Washington made the list, but Mitch suspected that the snob appeal of the west shore would factor into the selection for Hunter’s family.
The Camaro was parked a couple of miles away. He’d ridden in on the Metro, jumping off at the stop on Sand Point Way a hundred meters from the primary entrance to the Windermere community. Before he entered, he reconnoitered from under the shade of a broad maple tree.
He took note of the twin concrete columns set like sentries, brass lanterns on top, and the low wrought-iron fence that declared the demarcation of Windermere from the unwashed masses. A private security team served as vassals to the residents. The rent-a-cop, literal in this case if the real estate website was accurate, was on another patrol lap. He had about fifteen minutes.
The plan was simple enough. The mansions with the voids in the records abutted the lake, at the north end of Windermere Road. A secluded cul-de-sac with Lake Washington to the east, Magnuson Park on the north, and the largest plot of ground to form the perimeter, it possessed the best escape routes. Now that Mitch was looking for that feature, the mansion jumped out with a big red arrow.
The light changed and Mitch crossed. He strode past the sentry towers, head down to his phone. Yep, absolutely belong here, he thought, projecting an imitation of Hunter. He scanned the street ahead. Oppressively quiet; he imagined the suspicious ey
es behind the lace curtains.
Chill, dude.
He hummed to himself, bobbing his head to a song, but the headphones were silent so he could monitor his environment. He maintained his steady pace, long legs eating up the distance, with the scent of cut grass and azaleas riding the breeze. The first homes were big, but boring boxes. The houses got progressively more impressive as he got closer to the waterfront as the influence of big money showed in the contemporary structures. One, squat and concrete, resembled a World War II pillbox. Angry windows set high on the flat gray walls glared at him as he passed. Ugly.
High hedges and gated drives cut off his view of some of the homes, but Mitch caught smatterings of natural stone and wood enveloped by billowing maples and vertical conifers. The similarity to Kenzie’s house resonated, and he smiled to himself. It felt right.
A glance down to the screen showed he had another six minutes until the next patrol sweep. The road doglegged to the right, into the dead end. Mitch turned without hesitating. A drip of perspiration traced down his temple. He was close.
Two minutes later, he cruised to a stop, stomach twisting up. The wooden gates of the house across the street lay open to a cobblestone drive, flanked by overarching oaks. Beyond a tall, ivy-encrusted wall, a BMW was visible. It sat gleaming in the sun in front of a detached garage bigger than Mitch’s whole house. The car was a dead ringer for Hunter’s ride.
Gotcha!
In a glance, he memorized the license plate, repeating the sequence of numbers and letters until he was sure he had it. Once he did, he turned his gaze down the long drive to a mansion—it was huge, too big to call a house—with vague Mediterranean appointments: curved archways; slender, graceful windows; and antique white stucco with clay tiles on the roof. The water sparkled in the background.
Ho-ly cre-ap!
Standing there gawking made him obvious. Time to get out. To cover his retreat, he rotated his wrist to bring the phone screen faceup. He swiped as though taking a call, and nodded as he pivoted around. As he did, a wisp of motion at the corner of his eyes made him tilt his head to look more closely. A dark-suited man, powerfully built, had emerged from the shade thrown by the trees and stepped to the middle of the driveway. It took all Mitch’s willpower to not look directly at the guard. Instead, he turned his back and lifted his phone to use the screen as a mirror. It worked, kind of.
