I had tried to let go of most of the guilt I felt for what happened, but Ess had a way of bringing it up that reminded me to be vigilant without bringing all the guilt to the forefront. “Yes, Ess, I’m aware. You know I said I’m sorry for that, right?”
“Well, I’m not mad at you. You’d just think an incident like that would make my security down here the top priority. Nope, we got mages comin’ in here all day long touching things.”
“Yes, Ess. It really is a shame they haven’t made that a crime.”
“Exactly. I’m sending all the information we have to your orb. Thaddeus also wanted me to pass along that the sorcerers are taking this seriously. They’re not trusting us to take care of our own mess. You may run into them out there. Be aware that they’re in a kill first, ask questions later kind of mood. And I don’t know if they can tell what you are, so just assume that they’re gonna think you’re a full-blooded mage.”
“Will do. Thanks for the heads-up, Ess. I won’t keep you any longer. Don’t want anyone touching anything they shouldn’t be.”
“You got that right.” Ess’s face disappeared, leaving me with an orb full of information.
“So where’s everything she sent you? I can’t exactly use an orb, and it’d be nice to be able to go through it all while you and Millhook are gone,” Nicole said.
“That won’t be a problem.” Since Alex was staying behind and he had a little bit of magic, he could probably interact with a piece of magical parchment with all the information on it, but I wanted to make sure Nicole could access it whether we were nearby or not. With a wave of my hand, I produced a stack of papers and proceeded to have the information from the orb magically transcribed onto them. “This’ll take a few minutes, possibly more depending on how much information there is.”
Nicole’s jaw dropped as she saw the words appear on the pages and then the pages neatly stack and collate themselves on the bed.
“There, that should give you plenty to look at while we’re gone.”
Nicole nodded, already reaching for the first page. “I’d say so.”
“Let’s get a move on,” Millhook said as he impatiently clapped his hands.
As I walked over to where he stood, Alex caught my hand. “You heard what Ess said about the sorcerers. They’re not fooling around, Kat. Remember, port out at the first sign of trouble. If you stay alive, we can come up with another plan, but you’re no use to anyone dead.”
“Ah, thanks for the concern.” I grinned.
“You know what I mean. Stay safe.”
I sobered, not wanting Alex to worry that I didn’t take this seriously. “Will do.”
“Do you want to hold my hand to port, or do you think you’re good to do it on your own?” Millhook asked.
“Let’s look at the spot on the map where we’re going, and I think I’ll be good.”
Nicole handed me her phone with the map pulled up.
“I think this spot here will be the best,” Nicole said. “It’s an opening in the trees so you won’t have to worry about porting too close to one, but it’s small enough that you won’t be exposed.”
I showed the spot to Millhook then handed the phone back to Nicole. “We’ll see you guys back here soon.”
I nodded to Millhook, closed my eyes, and felt the familiar squeezing sensation around my body. The next thing I knew, I was standing next to Millhook in the middle of a wooded area.
Five
The area looked completely different than it had the last time I’d been at the Armory. The absence of snow completely transformed the landscape. I searched with my magic, reaching out, alert to any other magic it may encounter. Sadie had told me that the entire Armory was cloaked, which meant it wouldn’t give off any magic. That explained why the CCS had been unable to locate it.
“If the entire structure is cloaked, how are we going to find it?” In Elustria, cloaking an entire building was impractical since magic was omnipresent there. As Sadie had taught me, in a world of magic, having a space completely devoid of it stands out more than the magic itself. On Earth, however, it was the opposite. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a scenario the CCS had trained me for.
Millhook shook his head as he walked around. “We won’t be able to feel any magic from it if it’s cloaked as well as I suspect it is. But the Armory is still there, even if it’s invisible or camouflaged in some way.”
“According to the map, there should be a large clearing up ahead. That has to be where it is.”
“Aye, do you have a cloaker with you?” Millhook looked back at me.
Of course not. Inwardly I cursed myself for not being more prepared. The CCS didn’t regularly use cloakers in Elustria. If I had been at one of our stations on Earth, there would’ve been an ample supply of cloakers to use. “No, the best I can do is camouflage myself.”
“All right, I’ll do the same. There may be some booby-traps that will detect the magic. You feel anything strange at all, port back to the room.”
“Aww, Millhook, I’d expect that from Alex but not from you. I’m a trained agent. I know how to handle myself. Don’t worry about me, just focus on finding a way into the Armory.”
Millhook disappeared before my eyes, and I did the same. Until we got to the clearing, I was able to keep track of him by watching the ground and seeing where his feet disturbed the grass and underbrush.
Once in the large clearing, we both stopped. I couldn’t see any indication that this was the location of the Armory. “Are you getting anything?”
“Nothing. Even knowing that it’s supposed to be here, I can’t make out the edges of it. The cloaking makes it more difficult, but it took somethin’ mighty powerful to be able to make it truly invisible like this.” Millhook’s disembodied voice came from a few feet in front of me to the right.
If we simply ran up to the Armory with our arms outstretched and touched it, there was a good chance a security charm of some kind would go off. We couldn’t do anything until we found the outline of the building. Not wanting to trigger any alarms or draw attention should someone be watching, I summoned a gust of wind to rustle the grass. The walls of the Armory should stop the wind, but the grass all over the clearing swayed with the breeze.
“Well I’ll be. That shouldn’t have happened like that,” Millhook said. It was comforting to know I wasn’t the only one perplexed, although it was a shallow comfort.
I’d have to do something a little more substantial. I conjured a pile of dirt and then blew it with the wind. The arc of the dirt stopped against a plane, but instead of tumbling to the ground like I would’ve expected from hitting the wall, it simply disappeared. “What do you think that means?”
“I have no idea,” Millhook said as he crept forward toward the plane. He reached out his hand to touch whatever had stopped the arc of the dirt, and then I lost track of his movement.
“Millhook? Millhook, are you there?” I hoped he had merely camouflaged himself better or maybe pushed open a door of some kind. Only the twittering of the birds answered my calls. If Alex were here, he’d want me to port back, but I needed to know what had happened to Millhook. I walked to the same place I’d last seen his movement, reached out my hand, and felt momentarily disoriented. When I looked around, Millhook stood beside me outside the clearing. “Millhook, are you all right?”
“Aye, I’m fine,” he said as he looked around.
“What the hell just happened?” At first glance, it seemed like nothing had changed, but we’d peered at that clearing looking for the Armory long enough for me to tell this wasn’t the same place. There were differences in the trees, a large boulder off to my right hadn’t been there before, and when I turned around, a moss-covered tree trunk sat where one hadn’t been before. “We’ve ported somehow.”
“Yeah, no mage did that on their own. Casper must’ve gotten help from someone to enchant the Armory like that.”
“Where do you think we are?” I looked around, as if expecting to see a map with a �
��You are here” sticker stuck in the ground.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care to find out. Let’s get out of here before something else surprises us,” Millhook said. “You go first, and I’ll follow. I don’t want to risk leaving you behind by accident.”
I nodded and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was back in the hotel room. A second later, Millhook appeared beside me.
Nicole and Alex stood from where they sat at the desk. Alex crossed the room in two long strides. “Are you all right? What happened? Did you find anything?”
“I’m fine.” I met his gaze and nodded to reassure him. “We didn’t find anything. There was nothing there.”
“Oh no, we found plenty. We found ourselves some advanced magic that no mage did on their own,” Millhook said as he plopped down on the bed.
“I’m confused. I thought for sure that was where the Armory was,” Nicole said.
Alex gestured toward his vacated seat next to Nicole, and I took it gratefully. My mind still couldn’t fully process what had just happened. In all my training at the CCS, I hadn’t come across anything quite like this. “As expected, the Armory was completely cloaked. We couldn’t get a read on any magic, couldn’t see it, nothing. We were able to find what we assumed was one of its walls by throwing dirt up against it and seeing that it didn’t fall on the other side. But when we went up to touch it”—I shook my head, still confused by what had happened—“we ported somewhere. Wherever we ended up, it looked very similar. But instead of the regular feeling of porting, I just felt confused. It was more like stepping through a portal than it was teleporting. I don’t understand it.”
“The fuzziness in your mind was from some enchantment. Ain’t no reason for us to feel that confused. Mark my words. There ain’t no way we’re going to get into the Armory.” Millhook shook his head. “Not unless whoever’s in there wants us in.”
“I suppose it was designed to throw off any hikers who come across it by accident. They end up in a similar area, feeling confused, and probably think that they just got lost or dehydrated or something. We’re going to have to come up with some other plan though, because Millhook’s right, we’re not getting in there.”
“Luckily we had a much better time of it,” Nicole said. “The information from Ess provided a lot of interesting reading.”
The situation at the Armory so befuddled me that I’d completely forgotten that Nicole and Alex had been working while we were away. “Good. Tell me everything. Were you able to get through it all?”
“We didn’t read every word, but we got all the salient details. You’re never going to believe it. Lewis and Belinda, the triplets’ parents, were approached by the CCS.”
“Were they being recruited? Or were they moles?” I’d had no idea that they’d had any sort of contact with the CCS.
“They provided intelligence to the CCS.” Nicole’s eyes lit up as she revealed her findings. “Everything they provided panned out. However, the contact was initiated after a successful CCS raid on a Directorate station. There was concern that they were trying to hedge their bets. It seemed for a while like the CCS would take down the Directorate, and they wanted to make sure they didn’t go down with it. They didn’t provide anything of too much value, but just enough that the CCS would be indebted to them should the shit hit the fan or they decided they wanted to get out.”
I sat back in my chair, trying to see how this fit in with Sadie and Mikael’s worldview. “Does the CCS know who killed them?”
“Yep.” Nicole smiled. “The Directorate ordered their deaths. They were discovered and killed by a Directorate operative who made it look like a car accident. The CCS found out when the accident was reported in the news. It’s assumed that’s why they staged it to look like a car accident, so the CCS could see what happened to the people they used as double agents.”
I hadn’t heard anything about a car accident, but given the way Casper and the rest of the Directorate lied, I wouldn’t put anything past them. “And how are we sure it wasn’t just a car accident?”
“Nicole found the original news clipping about it.” Alex nodded to Nicole and she pulled it up on her laptop.
I scanned the article. A witness claimed that out of nowhere the vehicle seemed to have a mind of its own and drove into a tree. That would only make sense if the Lipukins were human. A mage would never let a car go out of control to the point of hitting a tree. They would’ve magically intervened. The only logical explanation was foul play. And if it had been the CCS, they would’ve said so in their internal report. Nothing is falsified in the official record. “So their parents weren’t killed by sorcerers after all. This is good.”
“How exactly are you going to use it? You can’t even get into the Armory,” Millhook said.
“We still need to find out what was in the cave in Scotland, and the only way to do that is to get to Sadie and Mikael. With this information, we may be able to convince them to help us or at least come to some kind of truce. If we can’t get to them, then we’ll just have to bring them to us.”
“And how exactly are you going to do that?” Millhook asked.
“The same way I got their attention the first time.” I looked to Nicole, and she smiled right along with me. Together we said, “The game.”
“Is your account even active anymore?” Nicole asked.
“I’d have to re-up my subscription, but I didn’t completely delete my account. It should work. If it doesn’t, I can try logging in with a new account. They’d probably recognize my magic either way.”
I took Nicole’s laptop and navigated to the Wizards and Fae site. “Do you have the game installed on this computer?”
“Yeah, it should be there. I don’t think I deleted it when I stopped playing. There are probably a few patches you have to download.”
I opened the game client and began the download for the updates. It would take a while over the hotel’s slow Internet connection.
“Wait, are you sure that’s a good idea?” Alex asked. “They could just as easily bring Marguerite with them.”
He had a point, but I didn’t think it was likely that she’d come. I doubted she was with them at all. Whoever was at the Armory monitoring the game wouldn’t be out searching for my mother’s clues. There was nothing more I could offer Marguerite. She had the memories from my talisman, and while she might want me dead for all I knew, that wasn’t enough of a reason for her to stop her search. “Marguerite’s not going to be at the Armory monitoring the game. As soon as I log in, whoever is watching will contact Sadie or Mikael. I’m betting they’re going to want to see me since their sister was hunting me on her last mission. Remember, they can’t port the way I can, so if they want to get here, they’re going to have to walk up to our door and knock just like anyone else. They could burst in here, but that would draw unwanted attention.”
“So when they get here, you’re just going to tell them the truth about their parents and hope they believe you then decide to help us?” Alex asked, the skepticism thick in his voice.
When he put it like that, it did sound like a pretty stupid plan, but it was all I had. Actually, I had a little bit more of an advantage. Since Sadie and Mikael didn’t know the truth, I could manipulate the facts to serve my purpose. “When they get here, I want you all to go along with whatever I say. Don’t show any surprise. I’m going to do what I have to do to get them to help us. Understood?”
Alex nodded and Millhook and Nicole both murmured, “Understood.”
The download finished, and I logged into the game. It took a few minutes to get my subscription restarted, and the game sent a verification code to my email address since I was logging in from a new device. My email account had thousands of unread messages. It was strange to have this connection to my life prior to finding out my magical origins. Everything had changed for me, but the world kept going on as before. The same chain letters, the spam, the newsletters, they were all sitting there in my email account as if I
had never left. There were also messages from Stapleton, the university I’d attended: professors wondering where I was, acquaintances asking after me, invitations to different on-campus events. It was a serious head job seeing it all there.
My avatar, Serafina, dark sorceress, was just as I’d left her, the title “Hades Killer” floating above her head, quests waiting to be completed. Within a few seconds of logging in, some old in-game friends messaged me, but I silenced the chat box. Replying would be a waste of time and serve no purpose. I needed to complete a quest that had some sort of interaction with my magic so it would ping the Armory. Casper had said something about the dailies serving that purpose on a small scale. I selected one of the dailies that would interact with the enchanted code in the game. I read through the quest, including the spell, and cast it on some in-game fire monsters. Just as the first time I’d worn my talisman and done this quest, frost formed on my hands.
I sat back and logged out of the game. “That should do it.”
“So now we just wait?” Nicole asked.
“We can prepare. I want you to stay next to Millhook. If Mikael and Sadie decide to attack, just get out of the way, and Millhook will port you. Same goes for you, Alex. I’ll stay behind and fight them off and port when I’m sure you guys are safe. If we have to leave here, we’ll meet back at Nicole’s apartment. I’m hoping it won’t come to violence. If I end up having to kill them, I’ll also be killing our one chance to find out what was in Scotland.”
“It won’t come to that,” Nicole said.
I remembered something I said back at the Armory. “It’s hard to believe killing has come so easily to me. I can remember telling Casper and Mikael less than a year ago that I couldn’t imagine how someone could kill someone else.”
[The Elustria Chronicles: Magic Born 04.0] Magic Hunted Page 3
