by M. J. Scott
"Was it Lizzie?" Cassandra asked.
I grimaced. "No. He came to the house yesterday."
"Does that happen often?"
"I haven't seen him since Nat's funeral. As I'm sure Lizzie has told you."
Cassandra pursed her lips. "I think you overestimate our interest in your love life."
"I don't have a love life. And if I did, it wouldn't be with Damon Riley."
"Then why did he come see you instead of just asking Lizzie for help?"
"Because his initial problem was something that involved me."
"This is the same problem you mentioned last night? The reason you couldn't work on your magic today?"
Gah! "Yes."
"And you didn't want to tell us that?" She peered at me over her glasses.
Cassandra would have made an excellent high school principal. I wanted to squirm. I resisted. She wasn't, despite what she might think, the boss of me. "Since when does the Cestis deal with fake emails?" I said grumpily.
Cassandra looked confused. "Fake emails? Whose fake emails?"
"Damon was getting some threats. His security team insisted it was coming from me. I proved otherwise. I went to see him to tell him so. Told him to look elsewhere. That's when he mentioned Lizzie."
"Did he say why he thought we should take a look?"
"No. He said he was just being thorough. If he has another reason, he didn't tell me."
"But he asked you about the emails?"
"Because it looked like they were coming from me. He wanted to give me a chance to clear my name."
"I see." She turned back to Lizzie. "I know you gave him the all clear last time, but this isn't something we can ignore. Do you think you have time to help him? I can ask someone else."
Lizzie shook her head. "It’ll be faster if I do it. I know what's involved."
"All right. Maggie can help you."
"What?" I squawked.
"Lizzie needed a hand with the technology aspects last time. You know more about computers—and Damon's company—than anybody else we have. It makes sense."
"What if he doesn't want me there?" Okay, I had officially turned back into a whiny teenager. I gave myself a mental slap and straightened my shoulders.
"Well, if he wants our help, he can just suck it up," Cassandra said. She smiled smugly. "Besides, if Radha and Lizzie are right and your magic has something to do with trauma from the demon, then he's part of that. Maybe spending some time with him might shake something loose for you."
"Man, you really believe in tough love, don't you?" I muttered. "Damon and I...it's hard for me to see him."
"I appreciate that. And I made you cookies, so you can wallow with those if you want to," Cassandra said. "But I'm not going to coddle you about your magic. You need it back or we'll have to spend way too much time checking up on you. So when Lizzie is feeling up to it, you'll help her with this. And I expect to see you at the store tomorrow at some point for some more practice. Yes?"
Saying no didn't seem to be an option. I’d have to call my client and tell them I'd be working off-site for a few days.
I looked at the cookies. She should have made a bigger batch.
"Did you know she was going to say that?" I asked when I came back to the kitchen after showing Cassandra out.
Lizzie was at the dishwasher, stacking plates one-handed. "I didn't know Damon was going to ask for help, so how was I supposed to know that Cassandra would say you should help me?"
"Educated guess?" I shooed her away from the dishwasher. "Let me do that."
"I have a fracture, not a head wound," Lizzie said. "I can handle putting some plates in the dishwasher."
"You're supposed to be resting. I fractured my arm when I was twenty. I was exhausted for a few weeks."
"Yeah, but you didn't have a witch speed up the healing, did you?"
"That's tiring, too." I knew that from experience.
"I have Cassandra to nag me," she said, then winced. "Sorry, bad mood. I'd rather be at work."
"Does Evie really need you right now?"
"Yeah, we do a big push as the school year wraps up and then set up for our holiday campaigns."
"Anything I can help with?"
"You have a job of your own," Lizzie said, but she smiled.
"Not one I'm much good at for the moment."
"So we need to fix that," she said. "But if you're interested in volunteering at some point, I'm sure Evie will find something you can do. We always need more hands."
"Okay." I closed up the dishwasher. "I will." It seemed the least I could do to start paying Lizzie back for all the help she’d given me. "What are you doing this afternoon?"
"More exciting sofa time, I guess." Lizzie looked less than enthused. "How about you? I could talk you through some of the stuff in that book Cassandra gave you. Easier than just reading about it?"
"Actually, I have some work-work to do," I said. "Sort of."
"Oh?"
"Damon is supposed to be sending me a data dump of everything related to the emails he's been receiving. I’m going to run some pattern analysis on them, see if anything leaps out at me. You can help if you want. You need to know what's in there anyway, I guess." And Lizzie would see things that I wouldn't even know to look for if there was something magical going on.
"Sure," she said, brightening. "I can do that from the sofa. Then no one can accuse me of not resting."
"Is anyone else likely to check up on you today? We're getting low on syncaf." And a lot of other things, particularly if we were going to be feeding a teenage boy. If Yoshi had time later, I would get him to keep digging around, see if he could find any trace of how my system could have been cloned. The methods for doing that weren't going to be strictly kosher, but I suspected he knew how even if he was a white hatter.
"I'll order groceries while you're running whatever analysis you're going to," Lizzie said, heading toward the living room. "Out of curiosity, when did Damon say those messages started?"
I frowned, trying to remember. "Back at the beginning of the month, I think."
She turned to look back at me, eyes wide. "May first?"
"I'd have to check. Why?"
"That's Beltane."
Beltane. Pagan festival. That was about all I knew about it. "Does that matter?" I tried to see if anything else popped up in my head about it. "Isn't that a ritual all about fertility and harvest?"
"Traditionally, yes, and no, we don't necessarily pay much attention to those historic days, but some people think that the energy of such days is enhanced. It would be a good day to start a big working of some sort." She shrugged. "Or it may be just a complete coincidence. So, you run whatever it is you want to do, I'll make sure we can eat for another week, and then we'll see what there is to see."
Chapter Ten
Running a basic analysis of the information Damon's team had sent me didn't take too long despite the thousands of emails. Apparently fake me had been a busy girl.
The ones that contained the threats were easy enough to separate, but there were others that appeared to be spammy gibberish, and then a subset that my system quarantined and shunted off to my vault to be transferred to an isolated computer before it would let me open them. Those would be full of viruses and malware and all the nasty things the dark side of the web could dream up. I sent a bot to scrape the text and basic identifying data off those and shunt the results into a safe file that I sent through my various levels of cleanup before the system agreed it was safe to add that file at least back to the analysis queue.
By the time our groceries arrived in the automated delivery car, my system was starting to dump reports into my inbox. I told it to send them to Lizzie as well and went to fetch the groceries.
I unpacked, stashed everything back in its place, made tea, and plated up some of Cassandra's cookies before I went back into the living room. Lizzie was curled on the sofa, frowning as she read.
"Anything interesting?" I asked. I set her tea on the coffee table an
d peeked at what she was reading. A breakdown of the dates and times of all the emails.
Her frown deepened. "I need to check a few things." She changed screens on the datapad, projected a keyboard, and started typing.
"Should you be using two hands?"
She didn't look up. "It's fine. This won't take long." She tapped the screen a final time and then sat back, chewing her lip.
"Spit it out,” I said. "Something's bothering you."
"The first big wave was on May first," she said.
"Beltane, right."
"Then there's another spike seven days later, which happened to be the new moon."
"And that's bad?"
"Some people think the new moon is the best time to do bad magic."
Huh. I should have remembered that. Sara, my mom and a witch who had not been scared to dabble in the darker side of things, had paid attention to the lunar cycle. And other things I wished I had paid more attention to now. "Anything else?"
"There's another spike two days ago—coinciding with the next moon phase. But if I had to guess, I'd say we'd find patterns in the time the emails were sent, too. Either correlating with the moon's movements or something else that's significant."
"Is the moon thing true?"
Lizzie shrugged. "The moon affects the earth's gravity. Which changes the energy flows. So in that sense, yes."
"So you think someone is using these emails to what...do bad magic? Aimed at Damon?"
"I don't know yet," she said. "But the pattern seems to fit. If someone was trying to curse him or something." She nodded toward the printer. "Did you do an analysis of what was in the emails? Or read them?"
"I looked at a couple that contained actual threats. But not all of them do. There's a lot that are just gobbledygook, the sort of stuff you send to clog up someone's emails. And there's a bunch that the system quarantined. Delving into what's in those is trickier."
"Might be safer to leave them alone for now," Lizzie said. "And don't read any more."
My stomach sank. She really was worried if she was warning me off. "How are we supposed to figure out what's going on if we can't read them?"
She waved her hand over the screen. "We do this. Analysis. If we need to go digging into what's in the ones you quarantined, then we take precautions."
"I've already taken precautions. They're sent to a clean system, which I disconnect before I do any work on them."
"Not that sort of precaution," Lizzie said. "Though that sounds like a good start."
"Can someone send a curse through a virus?"
Her eyebrows lifted. "If a demon can use virtual reality to get to people, are you surprised? Curses are about intention, and repetition helps cement the intention."
"Crap," I said. "Damon really is going to hate this." Much like I was hating the idea that I’d be needing to see him again.
"Not much we can do about that," Lizzie said. "But if we can figure this out, we can clean it up, find who's behind it, and, hopefully, problem solved."
I didn't like that "hopefully." I wanted a “definitely” solution. One that would mean I had as little exposure to Damon as possible. The man was my own form of a virus. He got under my skin. "Okay, so what do we need to do?"
She chewed her lip. "What else have you run already? Keyword searches? That might help us narrow things down."
I grabbed my datapad, flipped through to find the right report. "I did a frequency search on some of the terms in the threats. And other things I could think of. I wasn't thinking of curses though." And that was a sentence I'd never thought I'd utter. "If you give me more keywords, I can run more."
"Let's see what's in here. It's hard to know what to look for without an idea of what the spell is trying to achieve. Maybe something in here will give me a clue."
"How does a curse work exactly?"
"The basic idea is you're trying to leach energy from your victim. Cause them bad luck, or worse."
"Does it work?"
"If someone knew what they were doing and had the power, yes," Lizzie said. "Otherwise, it's like the love potions and that sort of stuff the—" She broke off, looking up, cheeks reddening.
"The witches like my mom do?" I asked. "The ones who prey on the normals and rip them off? It's okay. I know my mom wasn't a nice person. Or a good one." Finding out she'd bound me to a demon had killed any lingering regrets I might have had about the less-than-stellar relationship I'd shared with Sara. And she'd been dead a long time. My grandparents had managed to patch up the worst hurts her lack of maternal feeling had inflicted.
I didn't know exactly how much Lizzie knew about my past. The Cestis kept tabs on any witches doing shady things. They hadn't stopped Sara at the time—more's the pity—but apparently she'd fallen off their radar. Which, knowing my mother, meant she'd done her best to hide away once she'd had me. I didn’t know if she’d planned to bind my power to a demon from the outset—Cassandra had suggested it was possible, but I didn't want to think that Sara really was as evil as that would suggest—but she'd obviously come up with the plan some time between my birth and my thirteenth birthday. She wasn't one of the good guys. But I didn't know exactly how much they knew about what she'd gotten up to before I came along. I'd never asked. Either Gran or Cassandra. I wasn't sure I wanted to know. The uncomfortable truth was that Lizzie might know more about my mother's shady past than I did.
"Hey, my folks were no picnic either," Lizzie said.
My own brows lifted. "They weren't?" She’d never mentioned her family. Maybe that should have been a clue.
"That's a story for another day," Lizzie said. She tapped the printouts. "Let's focus on working out who's trying to turn your ex into a frog or whatever."
Once Lizzie started giving me words to search for, the queue of reports got longer. And she grew quieter. Finally she said, "Right. We definitely need to talk to Damon about this. You should call him."
I glanced at the time. "It's late."
"You're telling me he clocks out before 9:00 p.m? In a launch week?"
"You could call him. He asked for you."
"I'm supposed to be resting." She batted her eyelashes at me.
I scowled, leaning back on the sofa. "If you're trying some convoluted method of getting us back together, then forget it. Not going to happen."
"Just call. See if we can see him tomorrow."
"You're supposed to be resting," I parroted back at her.
"I think I can manage a meeting," she said. "I wasn't planning on getting into any combat situations."
"I'm doing this under protest," I said, reaching for my datapad, wishing I could just send an email. But I assumed his team would still be monitoring any communications coming from me, and he'd said they didn't know about the magical implications of what happened with Archangel. So better to speak to the man himself.
As luck would have it, Damon actually answered. "Maggie?"
"Lizzie says she'll take a look," I said. "So, she wants to meet with you." I'd kept my video stream turned off. I might have to talk to the man, but I didn't have to look at him.
"Sure. Just let me check my diary." He paused. "I take it you don't mean right now?"
"No." I wasn't sure how much I should say over the phone. "But sooner would be better than later."
"Well, as luck would have it, I'm giving a guest lecture at UC Berkeley tomorrow. I'm sure they could lend me a meeting room afterward. That would save Lizzie the trip into the city."
"Guest lecture?" I said stupidly.
"They have one of the best game design and VR programs in the country,"
And I guessed his PR team would have him taking any opportunity to get his name out there doing good things. Like volunteering his time at a university. Or maybe that was just me being horribly cynical.
"Unless you'd prefer me to come by your house afterward," he said.
"No." That shot out of my mouth a little too fast. From the sofa, Lizzie snorted. I stuck out my tongue at her. "UC is f
ine. Just let me know where and what time."
"Lecture finishes at two. I'll get Cat to send you the details." He cut the call. Which I should have been happy about—making one round of awkward chat with him earlier had been hard enough—but there was a part of me that wanted to keep talking. I dropped my datapad and reached for a cookie, chewing with more force than may have been strictly necessary.
"Well?" Lizzie said as though she hadn't been listening to the conversation.
"Tomorrow," I said. "He's going to be in Berkley. We'll see him at the university."
"I noticed you didn't mention it was 'we,' not me," Lizzie said.
"It was you he wanted."
She smirked. "I think that depends on your definition of 'wanted.'"
"Are you sure Cassandra or Radha didn't give you some sort of weird drugs that have addled your brain? I just want to get in and get out. No, correction, I want you to get in and get out. I don't want to do this at all."
"That's the spirit," Lizzie said.
"Go team," I said sarcastically. My team was Team Don't Get Burned Again, not Team Yay Magic. "I'm just saying that I'd like to keep this simple. So I'd appreciate it if you'd ease off."
She held up her hands, palms out. "Okay. You win. You and the D-man are just business. So let's figure out what we're going to tell him tomorrow."
Chapter Eleven
"So, there's a possibility that you may be cursed," Lizzie said. No beating around the bush for her.
"Excuse me?" Damon said. The day was warming up, and sunshine filled the swanky meeting room with light. One of the beams fell across his face, highlighting the laser-blue eyes and bone structure that made him a favorite of the vidsites and gamer groupies alike. What it didn't do was hide how taken aback he looked.
I pretended I wasn't there. I'd been the one to bring mayhem into his life last time. This time Lizzie could be the bad witch.
"Cursed," Lizzie repeated. "As in someone is trying to make bad things happen to you." She looked him up and down. "Have bad things been happening to you?"
He folded his arms, posture stiff. "Define 'bad.'" The tension in his voice made my stomach tighten. Shit. I'd hoped he'd say everything had been fine; then we'd organize the checks Lizzie needed to do and get out fast. So much for that plan.
