Wicked Words

by M. J. Scott

  At the other end was an identical door and a second scanner. We passed through that and emerged into a very short corridor that had a more normal-looking blue door halfway down its length, then a third solid metal door at the opposite end.

  After a third scan, Cassandra pulled that one open.

  "Stay there," she said to me as she and Lizzie walked through. They took position on either side of the door and pressed their hands to the inner walls. There was no flash of red light to indicate a body scan. A ward, then. Good to know. Even if someone broke through three doors, they risked being fried by something nasty if they couldn't take down the wards.

  As Cassandra and Lizzie finished whatever they were doing, I hovered in the doorway, watching as rows of lights blinked into life down the length of a very long room. Cassandra's house was nice—an homage to the old bohemian-style houses—but it wasn't massive. The room was bigger than I thought should fit under its footprint. Maybe she had accommodating neighbors.

  Most of the room was filled with rows of dark metal bookcases arranged like the stacks of a college library. They were an unusual style, the books pushed deeper in the shelves than normal. That made sense when I spotted the tracks cut into the edges of the front of each one. The sort of track an automatic door panel might slide down. Which would perhaps make them fireproof and quake-proof.

  Along with the bookcases, there were shorter, stouter file cabinets tucked against the walls and a couple of smaller desks like you might find in a college library, each with one or two chairs. What I didn't see was any kind of monitor to indicate a comp system, though one had to exist to run the scanners.

  In the remaining spare space sat a solid-looking metal and glass table with eight chairs around it. The room was cool and the air clean smelling. Filtered. And temperature controlled. Someone had spent some serious cash setting this all up.

  Even though I wasn't keen on the subject matter of the books, part of me itched to step into the room. I'd always loved libraries. They'd been a haven for me in small towns where I had no friends and didn't stay long enough to make any, even if there'd been girls my age willing to overlook the fact that I was always from the wrong part of town and ignore the rumors about my mother that never seemed to take long to start swirling around.

  Librarians, for the most part, had been welcoming to a quiet bookish kid. And Sara had been happy enough to have me not underfoot in the tiny RVs or apartments we'd lived in. As long as I didn't rack up any fines, she was glad to let books babysit me.

  The smell of paper and ink equaled escape and safety. Ironic given I now lived so much of my life digitally.

  "It's safe to come in now," Lizzie said, beckoning me forward.

  Cassandra was already pulling chairs back from the table. I joined her, unpacking printouts of the reports and my datapad.

  "Have you been studying?" she asked.

  "As much as I can," I said.

  "Does that mean doing as little as you can and telling me you're too busy or actually studying?"

  "It's been a busy few days. But I've been reading your book. Ask Lizzie." I waved a hand at the papers. "But this is more urgent."

  "Protecting your power and yourself is always a priority," she retorted.

  "I'm protected. I have Lizzie. And the rest of you." It was perhaps an overly optimistic view of the world, but I really didn't want a lecture.

  Cassandra hmmphed but didn't press. Instead she turned to Lizzie and asked about her arm.

  Lizzie's face looked much like I imagined mine did as she waved Cassandra off. "It's fine. Radha will check it again in the morning. Maggie is right, this is more important." She got a hmmmph, too.

  We talked fast to explain to Cassandra what had been happening with Damon and the analysis we'd done of the messages.

  As she started reading the list of words and phrases—both translated and originals—her expression, much like Lizzie's had, turned serious.

  She sent Lizzie and me into the stacks several times—Lizzie to find books, me to carry them, much to Lizzie's disgust. Cassandra flipped through pages and made notes on a legal pad as she went. Her ability to know exactly what she was looking for in each of the books—not to mention where exactly each book was—was impressive. And a little intimidating. She didn't so much as glance at a catalog.

  I didn't know whether there even was a catalog.

  The thought of this much valuable information just lying around in hard copy and not backed up somehow made me twitch a little. But I wasn't here to critique their information management practices. Not today, at least.

  After about an hour, Cassandra finally put her pen down.

  "What's the verdict?" Lizzie asked.

  "Well, I don't know much about technology, but if someone was using these words in a normal way, then I'd guess they were trying some sort of summoning." She tapped the notepad. "But how that works via email, I don't know."

  “Not a curse?” Lizzie asked.

  “No,” Cassandra said. “It doesn’t feel quite right for that.”

  "Lizzie said repetition helps curses. Would it help a summoning?" I asked.

  "I don't really know. A summoning involves sinking your power into something specific to bring it into our reality. A curse is more general, usually. Aimed at bringing bad luck or ill will to a person but not setting an imp or any sort of demonkind on them." She tapped her pen on the pad, a series of short fast beats. "You think a curse sent over and over again might work?"

  "It's possible," Lizzie said. "Lots of little bites at someone's energy field could have an impact. But if the person doesn't read the messages...I'm not sure if it would be effective. Not on its own, anyway."

  I waved at the stacks and the multitude of books. "Isn't there something in here that might tell us?"

  "Most of these books were written well before computers were invented," Cassandra said.

  "Well, how do you share information now? There are Cestis in other countries, right? And you must have...what do you call them...operatives or something throughout the country here. Using technology to curse someone can't be a completely new idea, can it?"

  Granted, Sara hadn't exactly been a tech head, but even she had a datapad and used the web for shopping, planning our next moves when we had to flee, and researching her marks. Other witches must have decided to see how the digital world could help their magic. But Cassandra was still frowning, which didn’t make me think she’d come across this exact problem before.

  "We do share information, but each Cestis maintains their own records and research,” Cassandra said.

  "Archived and backed up?" I said hopefully.

  Lizzie snorted. "I asked that when I first joined. I thought they were going to rescind my nomination."

  Cassandra tapped her legal pad with a finger. "We've done very well for hundreds of years without computers."

  "They might make life easier for you all," I said. "If all this was digitized and archived, along with whatever collections the rest have, you'd have access to all of it. You'd be able to tag and search and find stuff fast."

  "Or make it easier for this knowledge to fall into the wrong hands," Cassandra objected. "Not to mention there are spells in here that could be quite dangerous if you mixed them up if there was some sort of glitch."

  I hadn't thought about that. But I wasn't sure the risk of the wrong person getting access to a digital archive outweighed the benefit of ensuring that if something happened to the physical one—if there was another quake or something and this place got damaged or caught on fire even—all the information wasn’t lost for good. "Security is getting better and better. There are ways to protect the information."

  "The Cestis doesn't have unlimited funds. It's not as though we can tax magic. And the government, much as they claim to appreciate our services from time to time, don't provide us with funding. Apparently the cooperation of the police and various departments is enough. We rely on investments and donations."

  They’d ha
d enough to set this place up in the first place. But I'd never stopped to really consider what running an organization that kept watch over an entire country—even though the magical population within that country was small—might take.

  "Well, we're about to have a grateful tech genius on our hands," Lizzie said. "Maybe we could hit him up for some advice."

  "I'm not sure the man who let demons invade one of his games is the best person for the job," Cassandra said.

  I bristled on Damon's behalf. "Actually, the fact that he understands there are demons and what the risks are make him more qualified than most, I’d say. Or do you have a lot of rich geeks beating down your door?"

  "There's you," Lizzie said. "You’re the Techwitch. Well, if you get your powers back, you will be. You can't claim it's just marketing forever."

  "I’m not beating down your door," I said. "And I'm not rich. I need to work. And you couldn't afford me."

  "Damon can afford you," Lizzie said.

  "Damon isn't hiring me," I retorted. "He came to you." I turned my attention back to Cassandra's notes, wishing I hadn't brought up the subject. If there wasn't a fast way to search for what we needed, we'd have to do it the slow way. "So, if this is supposed to be a summoning, is there any way to find out what is being summoned?"

  "It would be difficult from just this," Cassandra said, waving her hands over the notes. "Is this everything you have?"

  "Everything so far. We're running more analysis." Every variation Lizzie and I had come up with.

  Her mouth twisted. "It's hard if we don't have all the information. Even with it, it will be slow to do a deep dive into what this—" She tapped the notepad with her pen. "—might mean. And given that it doesn't seem to have been effective so far, I think Lizzie's instinct is right. Even if we're going to look into this, we need to check Damon's house and where he works and see if there are more summonings or hexes planted anywhere. If they're clean, we can come up with Plan B to work out what's going on."

  By the time we reached Damon's house, my spine was doing a good impression of a steel bat and my jaw ached. The last time I'd been here, Damon and I had been happy. Together.

  Was it shallow to hope that he was the kind of gajillionaire who got bored easily and redid his entire house and gardens every year? It would make it easier if I wasn't faced with memories of what we'd shared every few feet. Maybe I'd stick to the gardens. I'd never really gotten the chance to explore them fully. At the time, Damon and I had been more interested in, well, indoor activities.

  "Relax," Lizzie whispered as the car Damon had sent for us turned into the drive and paused while the gates drew aside before rolling smoothly forward.

  "I am relaxed," I said through clenched teeth.

  She rolled her eyes at me. "You haven't been relaxed for a single second for the last few days except when you've been asleep."

  She was right about that. Not that there'd been much time to sleep. Damon's press commitments had given us a single day of breathing room. I'd tried to cram in doing enough work to keep my client from firing me, working with Yoshi to finish the disarming of all the crap infecting the rest of the emails and running every kind of pattern analysis we could come up with over them, and working with Lizzie to start planning how to tackle the Riley campus. Not to mention candle drills with Lizzie and trying to get through more of Cassandra's book.

  "Relaxation is for wimps." At this point I was probably about 70 percent syncaf anyway. It would take me days to unwind under the best of circumstances.

  Searching my ex's house and garden for magical traps wasn't the best of circumstances.

  "This will be easy," Lizzie said. "Just follow my lead."

  It wasn't as though I had a choice. Without my magic, I was just here to fetch and carry for Lizzie. But perhaps she was right. This would be easy. After all, if Cassandra had been seriously worried that we would run into trouble, she would have provided Lizzie with better backup than me.

  The car came to a halt near the front door. As we climbed out, me hefting my backpack onto my shoulder, the front door opened. Damon stepped onto the porch.

  Darn. Part of me had been hoping he'd be caught up in something at work and we'd be left alone

  No such luck. Judging by his well-worn jeans and gray tee shirt, both of which were just that bit more casual than anything I’d ever seen him wear at Righteous, he was working from home.

  "Ladies," he said, tipping his chin at us. I nodded back. He shoved his hands into his pockets, looking, I thought, slightly wary.

  Good, I wasn't the only nervous one.

  "Nice day for it," Lizzie said.

  It was starting to feel almost hot after the morning fog had burned away. The sun beat down, and I was glad I'd chosen to tuck my hair up under an ancient Yosemite cap. From what I learned, imps and such tended to lean toward nocturnal. So, if there was anything magical concealed anywhere in Damon's house, hopefully it wouldn't be awake to try to eat us.

  Cassandra and the other Cestis members had agreed that the snippets we'd found in the emails could be a summoning, but over the course of a long night, they hadn't reached any kind of agreement as to what might be summoned.

  "I guess," Damon said. "Come in. We'll have coffee, and then you can get started."

  "We can just start—" Lizzie began, but I cut her off. I maybe had already overdone the syncaf, but nothing was keeping me from Damon's never-ending supply of real coffee.

  "Coffee would be great," I said far too brightly.

  He lifted an eyebrow but just took us through to his kitchen. It was still a cook's dream of steel and glass and marble and blonde wood. True to his word, the tantalizing scent of fresh ground coffee filled the air. Damon did complicated things with the coffee machine, then came back with two elegant blue mugs.

  I practically drooled as I reached for mine and took an ecstatic sniff.

  His mouth quirked, and he passed the other mug to Lizzie.

  "No sling today. Is your arm feeling better?" he asked.

  "It is, thanks," she said.

  "That's good," he said. He produced a plate of beautifully arranged fresh fruit, crackers, and cheese from the fridge. The handiwork, I presumed, of his housekeeper, Amy.

  "Who else is in the house and grounds regularly besides you?" Lizzie asked. "Still just the gardener and your housekeeper and your driver?"

  Damon nodded. "Yes. No new staff."

  "You said you haven't been home much in the last two weeks," Lizzie said. "Have they still been here?"

  "Amy has been in to clean. She stocked the fridge yesterday. Frank, my gardener, has had a week off. He's got a new grandkid in Arizona and went to meet him. He's back in a few more days. And Boyd has only been here to pick me up or drop me off. I gave him the day off today, so he’s not here."

  I'd met Boyd a few times. He was loyal and discreet. No way he wouldn't tell Damon if he'd noticed anything out of place. I couldn't imagine any of his staff would.

  I could dig into their backgrounds, see if anything happened in the last nine months to turn them against Damon, but I assumed his security team would keep tabs anyone who had easy access to him. Still, maybe it would be a good task for Yoshi. But that would have to wait.

  "That makes things easier," Lizzie said.

  "How exactly?" Damon said.

  "Fewer people in the house equals fewer energy patterns. I know how you and Amy feel. If someone else has been using magic in here, then if they left any traces, they'll stand out. But that's a big 'if.’ Any sensible witch would hide their tracks if they were working something bad." She shrugged. "Of course, if it's a curse trigger or a hex, then they could be planted by someone without magic."

  I drained my coffee. "It doesn't really matter who did it if we don't get started. I'll take the garden. Lizzie, you do the house." We'd already agreed on this split. Lizzie claimed her arm felt fine, but I didn't want her doing something dumb like climbing a tree and hurting herself again. Houses at least had stepladders.r />
  "I'll go with Maggie," Damon said, carrying my empty mug over to the sink.

  Lizzie smirked at me, and I dragged a finger across my throat at her before he turned back. She just snorted as I pulled what I needed out of my backpack and headed for the back door without waiting for Damon.

  Chapter Fourteen

  "You know," I said, heading to the right fork of the path through Damon's garden, "you don't have to follow me round. I won’t steal your prize rosebushes or anything."

  "I don't have any prize rosebushes," Damon said mildly.

  I glanced back over my shoulder. "Priceless ancient relics, then?" The garden was big, as one would expect for his house. But it was cunningly landscaped with lots of trees and curves and plantings that meant you couldn't see exactly how large it was.

  Lots of nooks and crannies.

  Lovely if you were lord-of-the-universing and enjoying some sun and sipping a cocktail or whatever it was Damon did there, but less good if you were hunting for signs of dark magic. Still, Lizzie had managed to clear it all last time, so it must be doable. But I'd work faster without the weight of Damon's gaze burning into my back and making me annoyingly self-conscious.

  "No priceless ancient statues either. Not recommended in an earthquake zone."

  Was that a not-so-subtle reminder that he could have all the ancient priceless things his heart desired?

  "Absolutely no reason for you to trail around after me, then."

  "Maybe I just like your company," he said. "We said we’d keep things civil. So we need to practice just hanging out."

  I really didn't think that was a good idea, but it seemed rude to tell him that straight up. "Lizzie could be cleaning out your house as we speak."

  "No prize rosebushes or priceless antique statues there either," he said.

  Not strictly true. There was plenty of expensive stuff in Damon's house. Any burglar who actually had skill enough to break in would think they'd hit the jackpot. Until the weight of his security team fell on their head.