Magic 101 (A Diana Tregarde Investigation)

by Mercedes Lackey

  If the vision was right.

  Sometimes the visions weren’t. Even though Di had “seen” Tamara, it didn’t follow that Tamara had actually been there. Someone else could have been responsible, but was using Tamara’s powers to keep the child hidden. Or, it could be someone connected with Tamara, living in the same house perhaps, but because Tamara’s was the only face Di knew, that was the face the vision showed her.

  Twice in the past, she’d gotten it wrong. Once, when she thought she’d pinpointed a murderer, and once when she thought she had witnessed a particularly brutal rape. Fortunately Memaw had stopped her before she had gone rushing out to report what she had “seen” to the police. In the first case, it had been a murder that was long solved; the vision had only been meant to warn her not to stir up old, terrible memories for someone. In the second, she had been right about the rape, but wrong about the rapist; what she had seen was what the victim “remembered” and the victim herself had been wrong. Of course, neither of those had been connected to a Guardian thing, but it just proved that the visions often only showed you things shaded by what you yourself knew.

  But there was a connection to the kidnapping, and Melanie was in danger. That much she was completely convinced of.

  The problem was, she didn’t have a shred of evidence. There was no point in taking this to Joe; without evidence, he couldn’t do anything either. For that matter, she didn’t even have a location, so all she could do was to tell him that what everyone hoped was right—Melanie was alive—and what everyone feared was right—she was in great danger. What could she do with her information other than make Chris Fitzhugh more miserable?

  For that matter, although she herself was strongly convinced that this vision had taken place in present/concurrent time, it might be in the past.

  “Damnit,” she said aloud into the dark. She tried to think. What could she do? There had to be something…

  Maybe protection? Could she do something that would make it difficult, or even impossible, for anyone to harm the child for a while?

  Not through those shields…at least, not without something that belonged to Melanie. That was the problem, she had no personal connection to the girl. She’d need something very personal, hair, saliva, blood, to get through the wards in place around her.

  She ground her teeth until her jaws ached, then went to the locked cupboard that held her magic books and grimoires, brought them all into the bed, and spent the rest of a sleepless night leafing through them, looking for something, anything, that would help, and coming up with nothing at all.

  #

  She didn’t realize that she had fallen asleep over those books until she woke with a start, books piled around her, a crick in her neck, and the phone shrilling away. Heart pounding, she shoved everything aside and scrambled out of the bed, hoping to get to the phone before whoever was on the other end gave up.

  “This is Joe O’Brian,” said the tinny voice on the other end of the line in response to her “Hello.” “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

  “Good news?” she faltered.

  “The bitch won’t be bothering Chris Fitzhugh anymore.”

  The way he said it made her heart sink.

  “Because?” she asked.

  “She’s bolted. We got a warrant for her based on your work—good job, by the way, the Captain’s impressed—and came around for her last night. We knocked on the front door, and near as we can figure, she went out the back.”

  Di closed her eyes as her heart plummeted. She wanted to ask, “Why didn’t you have someone watching the back?” but in the first place, that wouldn’t do any good, in the second place it wouldn’t win her any points with Joe, and in the third—only she knew that Tamara was something more than just a fraud and an extortionist. It all came back to the evidence, of which she had exactly none.

  “Any idea where she might have gone?” she asked instead.

  “She’s a gypsy, she’s probably halfway to Chicago by now.” She could almost see him shrug. “At least that is one complication in this case that we won’t have to worry about. Thanks, Tregarde. I owe you.”

  “That’s all right, Joe, I wish I could have done more—” she said, but he had already hung up the phone.

  She put the receiver back carefully down on the cradle, because if she wasn’t careful she was afraid she just might smash it.

  So, there it was. Tamara gone—and maybe that vision last night had indeed been of reality, in fact, in sync with reality. She could well imagine why Tamara was angry, if she’d had to flee a half step ahead of the law.

  Now she cursed herself for not taking something of the woman’s with her when she had had the chance. With a physical object, she might have a chance of finding her. Without one? Not with those shields in place. She stood there next to the phone in her underwear, feeling utterly helpless. And again, utterly alone.

  Why am I doing this? she thought in despair. Why? What’s the point? I’m not actually succeeding at anything. Tamara isn’t in custody, I have no idea where Melanie is, something horrible is going to happen to her and I can’t stop it. What good is all this power, all this sacrifice, if I can’t save one little girl?

  She wanted to howl, scream, tear handfuls of her hair out, break something. She wanted to hurt something.

  And she couldn’t help it. How much of her life had she given up? The chance for a normal life, for friends, for guys, for—well, everything that everyone else took for granted. She’d done it all in the name of helping people.

  And now she couldn’t even manage that.

  What good was all this if whatever had given her this power couldn’t even give her the tiniest little sign, the smallest bit of help, so she could—

  Her thoughts shattered at the tentative knock at the door.

  “Um. Di?”

  It was Emory’s voice.

  Flustered, she looked around frantically for a bathrobe.

  “You there?”

  “Just a second, I’m not exactly decent—” She wrenched open the closet door and grabbed the first thing that came to hand, one of her old granny-dresses, and pulled it on over her head. It was a light yellow cotton with short sleeves, wildly inappropriate for the season, but at least now she wasn’t three-fourths naked. She ran back to the door, and flipped the locks, then opened it.

  She didn’t think it was possible for her heart to sink further, but it did. All four of them were there, looking somber, and very much as if they, too, had had a sleepless night.

  “Can we come in?” Emory asked, somberly. “We’d like to talk to you.”

  Numbly, she nodded. So they’ve come to tell me to bugger off in person…

  At least they were going to give her that much courtesy and not treat her like she had suddenly contracted leprosy.

  They filed in, and she closed the door behind them, then turned to face them.

  They exchanged a look, then Emory took a deep breath.

  Here it comes. “Sorry, we just can’t handle—what happened. So…just let’s say we don’t know each other, okay?”

  “We talked things over last night,” Emory said, brows creased. “All four of us. We went off to the Dudley and stayed there most of the night, talking. That stuff that happened—it was kind of hard to—” He took another deep breath. “I mean, it’s not something that’s easy to accept, even when it happened to you and you’ve got the evidence right in front of you—and—we wanted to talk it over somewhere normal, where we could look at things objectively and—”

  “We want to help,” blurted Marshal.

  That was so unexpected that for a moment she didn’t believe what she’d heard. “Um—say again?” she said stupidly.

  “We want to help you,” Emory repeated. “That’s what we were talking about all last night. I mean, you didn’t just pull all that stuff last night out of your ass. You weren’t surprised, you weren’t running around screaming, you recognized what you saw and you knew what to do
about it. You’re like Dr. Paranormal, or something. You do magic to help people, and we think you’ve been doing it a while. So we want to help. Not sure how, but somebody like you shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

  All she could do was stand there and blink at them.

  “Look,” Emory said, “I know the only one of us that can actually do anything like you do is Zaak and he’s like the bumbling apprentice—”

  “Hey!” Zaak said indignantly.

  “Shut up, Zaak,” all three of them said, simultaneously.

  “Anyway—” Marshal made a helpless little gesture with his hands. “The thing is, we know this stuff is real now, and we can’t un-know that. It’s got to be a pain, not being able to talk about it, right? And we all work pretty good together. I mean, when you’re running the show. So—um—can we, like, sign on?”

  She felt as if her jaw should be hitting the floor and shattering at this point, she was so shocked. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening—

  She watched their faces start to fall in reaction to her stunned silence, and realized that she had better say something before they walked out the door, thinking that she had rejected them.

  “Yes!” she blurted. “Oh hell yes!”

  For a moment, they stood in stunned silence. Then Zaak let out a whoop, and the others began punching fists in the air and generally carrying on as if she had just offered them all brand new Ferraris.

  For the life of her, she could not imagine why they would feel that way—but she joined the celebration.

  #

  The celebrating didn’t last forever of course. In fact, it didn’t last for very long. She took a minute to change into something more practical, then brought them quickly up to speed, including that horrific vision of last night. They all sat around on the floor, using pillows from the bed, while they ate deli bagels and cream cheese and lox that Marshal brought down from his place. Marshal took notes—it turned out he knew shorthand—while the other three listened with frowns of concentration.

  “So why can’t you just find Tamara or the kid?” Em asked, finally, before she had a chance to get into explanations of what she could and could not do—mostly, could not do. “Zaak found my keys this morning.”

  “Because she needs something personal either from Tamara or Melanie,” Zaak supplied before Di could say anything. “The more personal the better. Right?”

  “Sort of,” Di replied. “The problem is that if my vision is right, Tamara has her place shielded, and even if I had something from either one of them, I still wouldn’t be able to find them, though I might be able to affect them. It’s like…okay, like they’re lights, and the shields are like boxes. I can’t see anything past the boxes. Better yet, camouflaged boxes. They blend in with the background.”

  Marshal was drumming his fingers on the floor. “Okay, but can you tell one box from another? Could you tell by looking at the outside if Tamara was the one that made the box?”

  She grimaced. “Technically…yes. Practically speaking…I’d still have to have something personal of hers. I could look for her signature energy, it’s pretty unique, if I had that.”

  Marshal got up. “Then let’s go.” He offered her his hand; she stared at it.

  “Go where? Tamara’s place? The police have probably got it locked up tight—”

  Marshal snorted. “I doubt there’s any lock in this town short of a bank vault that I can’t pick. Come on. We’ll take the car.”

  She took his hand and scrambled to her feet. “Car? You have a car?”

  Emory made a face. “Why do you think we let an egghead like him hang out with freaks like us?”

  Marshal swatted him. “Di, have you got some kind of traveling kit? You know, magic emergency supplies? From what you were saying it sounds like we’ll have to move fast if we can get something.”

  Wow. Marshal was good. And sharp. “Yeah, it’s under the bed—but I’m out of consecrated salt and water—”

  “Zaak, you can do that right?” At his nod, Marshal made shooing motions. “Make with the magic.”

  “Can any of you use a gun?” Di asked, deciding that if they wanted to be in, they were going to be in.

  Emory and Em both raised their hands. She looked from one to the other of them. “Bottom drawer of my dresser. Should be two handguns in there, one’s a .38, and one’s a .45. Make sure they’re clean, I can’t remember if I cleaned them when I put them away last, and make sure they’re loaded. Then make sure the reloaders are full, you’ll find the ammo in there with them. Special loads. Every other bullet should be the silver ones.”

  Emory stared at her for just a fraction of a second, then nodded. “We’ll take care of it. You guys go.”

  Marshal headed out the door at a trot, Di hard on his heels; Zaak closed the door behind them, and they pounded down the staircase to the first floor entryway. “Ya can’t pahrk yer cahr in Hahrvahrd Yahrd,” he deadpanned, as they sprinted past the wall of mailboxes and shoved open the door, getting a slightly hysterical giggle out of her. “But I have a secret parking place. Tell no one.”

  Considering that parking places were more valuable than diamond-encrusted platinum tiaras, she wasn’t at all surprised at his admonition. What was absolutely astonishing was that he had a parking place for his tiny little Austin Mini-Cooper within a quick sprint of the apartment building.

  It was a little nook that would never have fit a car that was any bigger, in an alley half a block away. He rolled a dumpster out of the way, pulled the car out, and she helped him push the same dumpster back into the nook he’d just vacated. They both squeezed in and he shot the tiny car out of the alley and into Sunday morning traffic, what little there was of it.

  “I give magic lessons to that building’s super’s kids,” he said, maneuvering the little beast around a dinosaur of a station wagon.

  “What?” she said absently, trying to think how she could use Tamara’s object to find something that didn’t want to be found.

  “The parking space, that’s how I got it. I use my powers only for good.” He glanced over at her. “Sorry, bad time for a worse joke.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m just thinking—”

  “That’s fine.” He grinned. “You do the heavy lifting, I’ll do the driving.”

  It took a lot less time driving than by the bus route. When they arrived at Tamara’s street, though, he didn’t stop, even though the house was obvious even if he hadn’t known the address, because of all the yellow “crime scene” tape crossing the door.

  “But—” she protested as he drove past.

  “We don’t want to be seen, do we?” he countered, and she subsided.

  He circled around the block and ended up tucking the car into another alley, parking between two garages. All the houses here had walled-in back yards; they counted houses until they came to Tamara’s, and tried the gate.

  It was locked, but Marshal solved that in next to no time. They slipped inside and closed it behind them.

  There was police tape over the back door too, but they simply took it off, carefully, so that they could replace it, and Marshal went to work on the locks of the back door. There were glass panes in the door, and she supposed that they could have broken one to get in, but then the cops would know someone had broken in and….

  Not a good idea.

  This took a little longer; there were three of the locks, including two dead-bolts. But out of his jacket he took a roll of felt, and in it was a complete set—so far as Di could tell—of professional lock-picking tools.

  “Funny thing, not even the police would ever question you about these if you have business cards showing you’re a pro magician,” he said, under his breath, as he worked on the locks. “I’ve even gotten gigs doing kids’ parties when cops asked me about it. And that’s one.”

  She heard the lock click open.

  “Back home, all the neighbors knew to come get me when they locked themselves out of their cars, or their houses
,” he continued. There was another click. “And that’s two. We’re lucky, these are really old-fashioned. She never changed them.”

  “Maybe she didn’t think she needed them,” Di said dryly. “She might have had other protections.”

  He froze. “You don’t think she—”

  Di shook her head. “I’m not getting a sense of anything dangerous waiting, at least not on the door and not for a good way beyond it. For one thing, anything that was there, the cops probably already sprung, tossing the place. For another, I think she left in too big a hurry to actually set something up. I honestly think she thought she was immune from getting arrested, and it never occurred to her that her house could be invaded. Gods know she’s got the entire neighborhood spooked. I bet there isn’t anyone around here who would dare break in even if she left her doors wide open.”

  “That’s comforting.” He finished with the third lock, and the door swung open. “Nevertheless, after you.”

  She gave him a little mock bow, readied her defenses just in case, pushed the door completely open with her foot and stepped inside.

  She knew as soon as she crossed the threshold that whatever had been here was gone. There wasn’t even that faint sense of menace there had been when she’d come here as the faux teenager.

  But the cops had done a real number on the place.

  They stepped into a kitchen that looked like an explosion had gone off. Tamara hadn’t been all that good a housekeeper, but drawers and cupboards were all yanked open and left, pots, pans, and dishes had been pulled out, canisters dumped out, flour and sugar and coffee all over the floor—