Because lying behind the skinny trunk of the dying tree is Lassiter, body slumped on the sidewalk, an arm and a leg hanging off the edge, resting in a thin film of stagnant drain water and motor oil. I slip around the tree, check the upper branches—it could collapse at any time—and make a split-second decision to haul Lassiter out of immediate danger before I check his injuries. If a flaming tree falls on us, we’ll both be in for a bad day.
I slip my hands under his arms, hoist him up slightly, and then drag him farther down the block, until we clear the tree and his heavily dented car, all of its windows shattered by the shockwave of the explosion. When I think we’re far enough away, I set him down, check his pulse to confirm he’s still alive, and then look him over to figure out why he’s unconscious.
The nasty laceration on his temple answers that question. It’s a wicked, curving cut extending to his cheek bone that missed his eye by less than half an inch. Whatever caused it struck him so hard that it peeled a couple inches of his scalp back too, revealing a small portion of his skull, bright white and streaked with blood. The skull doesn’t appear cracked, but you can develop a serious concussion without a skull fracture. So Lassiter’s almost certainly out cold due to brain trauma. Which is bad. Very, very bad.
As I’m unwinding a small reel of medical tape and ripping open some gauze packets, I wonder how Lassiter got such a serious injury in the first place. He told me he shielded himself from the blast with his car, but I found him on the wrong side of the car, on the deli side, not the street side. And when he called me, he didn’t sound like he was seriously injured. No slurred words. No confusion. Now, he could’ve been hit by falling debris in the aftermath of the blast, but that still doesn’t explain his position on the sidewalk. He wouldn’t have rounded the car and exposed himself to the fire, or to the criminal wizard who was potentially still alive in the building.
Lassiter doesn’t know that much about the supernatural, but he’s not stupid. He’s a savvy detective. So why…?
Déjà vu.
I spring up, spin on my toes, and latch my hand around the wizard’s wrist as he lunges from his hiding spot in a narrow, smoky alley between a vacant office and the convenience store next door. With a jerk, I redirect his fist away from my head and point it upward, so the powerful spell in his palm discharges into empty air and not into my face. Fire belches out of his hand and shoots into the sky, so hot it sears my cheek and ear, singes the ends of my hair.
The wizard, thrown off by my quick reaction, fails to plant his shoes against the sidewalk and pull away from me, so I follow through by yanking him forward, slipping past him when he stumbles off the sidewalk, compelling him to spin around toward me or risk breaking his arm, and jamming my fist into his gut.
I stare into his puzzled, drooping eyes as I activate my force ring and spit out, “Shoot!”
The funnel of force slams into his abdomen and slings him ten feet out into the road, in plain view of fourteen other DSI agents. Every black-clad figure in the street looks up and freezes for a second, then half of them break away from the injured civilians and dash over to the stupefied wizard, guns raised, rings charged, shouting seven iterations of, “DSI! Lie on the ground. Hands behind your head.”
The wizard, a grizzled man who looks about seventy, all wispy gray hair and deep wrinkles, wobbles up to his knees, hands on his stomach, gagging from the beating his intestines just took. I step off the sidewalk with my own gun pointed at his chest, in case he decides to go out in a blaze of glory.
But as I inch closer and examine him more thoroughly, a few odd details coalesce. Most practitioners cast spells to make themselves look younger, but this guy looks like he should be in a nursing home on hospice care. He’s frail, hunched in on himself, and shaking like he’s cold even though it’s the middle of August and blazing hot from the fire burning in close proximity. The force blast I shot at him wasn’t strong enough to do lethal damage, and yet he’s gasping, pale faced, with a glazed look in his eyes, like I broke his every rib and ruptured every organ and he’s on the verge of bleeding to death internally.
Zhane sidles up next to me in a sideways SWAT shuffle and says, “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I mutter, then sneak a peek over my shoulder at the unconscious Lassiter. “He’s not though.” I gesture at the downed cop with my elbow. “That’s the detective who contacted us. He’s seriously injured. Major head trauma. Can you give him first aid while the rest of us take care of this bastard?”
Zhane looks from Lassiter to the kneeling wizard and frowns at the idea of losing “a piece of the action,” but she ultimately decides that taking care of an injured cop is more important and backs off behind me to help him. Another good decision. She’s two for two on her first real disaster situation. Now I feel even worse about how our introduction ended. If she was a hapless screw-up, this would be so much easier.
I advance on the wizard slowly, in pace with everyone else; we now have the wizard surrounded in a tight circle. He wouldn’t be able to escape us, even hiding under a veil. But as we close the bear trap on him, he doesn’t respond like a cornered animal, choosing to simply sit on his haunches and stare at us like he’s not quite sure what’s happening. When he attacked me only a minute ago, he exhibited more energy and a lot more critical thinking. Now, such a short time later, it’s like all that life has bled right out of him and spilled into the storm drains.
There’s something off about this, but I can’t put my finger on it.
Giving the guy another look, I try to pick out any detail that doesn’t fit with the situation, leaving my fellow agents to continue shouting orders the wizard won’t follow. His expression is slack and lost, eyes looking more liquid and detached as the seconds tick by. His hands are empty, save for a faint aura hanging around the hand where he…The aura. That’s what I haven’t checked yet.
I’ve mentally collected a verifiable catalogue of auras over the course of numerous raids on suspected MG rogues in and around Aurora over the past several months. While we haven’t caught anyone, we’ve gotten close several times, close enough for me to observe many of the distinct hues and strengths of the magic each suspect wields. Identifying a practitioner by their aura is more an art than a science, of course, but it can point us in the right direction.
I close my eyes for a second, suck in a deep breath, and flip the spiritual switch that controls my magic sensing ability. Immediately, the entire street is bathed in the yellow glow of the wizard’s aura, a fog hanging in the air, thickest around the deli where his attack originated. It’s already rapidly dissipating, however, vanishing into the ether at its edges, as the wizard is no longer actively slinging magic around. After a cursory check to make sure no other practitioners are hanging nearby, I home in on the suspect’s aura and prepare to flip through my “catalogue” to hunt for a match.
Except there’s a problem.
When I track back to the source of the aura, the man himself, sitting there in the street with eight DSI agents converging on him, I notice something I’ve never seen before in a practitioner’s aura. Once upon a time—that is, during the pursuit of Feldman—I made the mistake of forgetting that practitioners’ auras don’t change color, ever. And as a result, I got myself thrown into a tree and nearly murdered by a wizard whose identity I still don’t know. That experience sucked ass, but it taught me a lesson: Pay attention to the aura color.
Based on the bright yellow haze of magic all around me, the aura clinging to this wizard’s body should be yellow too. But it’s not. The wavering edges of the aura are yellow, but closer to his skin, it becomes a tarnished bronze color, and where it touches his skin, it’s a sickly muddled brown. On his skin, on his arms and face and neck, it’s black. It looks like he fell into an oil slick, smears of viscous fluid clinging to his every wrinkle.
That is not normal. At all. What the heck is going on here?
I blink away my magic sense, relieved when the gross sight of the decayed-look
ing aura fades away, and stare at the man who I now realize must be feeling that aura coursing through him. Is it hurting him? Is that why he looks so dazed? Is that why he looks so…?
Sick. He’s sick.
No, it can’t be.
“Don’t get any closer!” I shout to everyone.
They all stop cold less than ten paces from the wizard.
Newman, adjusting her grip on her gun, asks, “What is it, Kinsey?”
“This guy,” I murmur, unsure of myself, not wanting to sound like a fool, “I think he might be sick.”
“Sick?” Amy taps her foot impatiently against the asphalt. “Sick how?”
“Sick like Brittany Regent and that woman from Kelly’s.”
“Why would you think that, Calvin?” Desmond calls out. He’s directly opposite me in the circle, looking over the wizard’s head.
“Well, I, it’s just…” I scrutinize the wizard one last time, searching for anything to back me up that everyone else can see. I’m the only agent here who can reliably sense residual magic, so I’m the only one who can tell this scenario is strange. To the rest of them, this looks like a standard sorcerer attack. And to suggest it’s connected to our analyst and a random woman slowly but surely dying in hospital beds—I must sound like a moron.
This wizard isn’t unconscious like Brittany and the other woman. He didn’t collapse in the middle of his usual routine. He lost his mind and blew up a deli and killed a bunch of innocent people. He doesn’t match the budding profile of this possible illness. And yet, my gut is telling me they’re connected somehow, and if I can only find one physical clue to prove it…
A physical clue that’s been staring me in the face this whole time.
Holy fuck.
“The suit,” I mumble.
“What?” Jake and Joe Adelman ask me in sync.
“The suit,” I repeat. “He’s wearing a tan suit.”
“And?” Amy presses.
“And this morning, when I was at Kelly’s, there was a guy in line in front of the woman who collapsed. A guy wearing a tan suit just like that.”
Except that guy was much younger than this man. Or at least, he appeared to be. Could his anti-aging spell have collapsed due to whatever the hell is happening to his magic? Is this what he really looks like, under that manufactured youth, a frail old man? Is this—?
That’s when it hits me. That damning sort of solution only obvious in hindsight. The reason the “illness” isn’t spreading like a typical contagion. The reason Brittany Regent and the woman at Kelly’s fell so fast and hard, while this wizard here is slowly succumbing. Because this “illness” isn’t attacking just anyone. It’s attacking a certain subset of the population. A small subset of the population. A subset of the population with a certain quality that varies significantly in degree by individual. A quality whose variety would inevitably cause each individual to feel the effects of this “illness” differently. A quality known as magic.
Oh, my god.
“It’s not a disease,” I say, to the horror of everyone around me, with a hellfire raging behind me, spewing smoke and ash into the air, at the exact moment the wizard before us seizes up, jerks his head back as if choking, and slumps over onto his side, dead before he hits the ground. “It’s a curse.”
Chapter Five
“Panic mode” doesn’t adequately describe my mentality in the aftermath of the deli attack. A dozen cop cars, two fire trucks, and nine ambulances show up not half a minute after the wizard croaks, and the first responders flood the scene, paramedics taking over emergency medical care from DSI, uniformed cops cordoning off the area from the growing crowd of onlookers on either end of the street, and detectives demanding from the DSI captains to know what the ever-loving fuck happened here. One of the cops spots Lassiter being tended to by Zhane and flips out on Naomi, only for Riker to give him a glare that makes him choke on his words.
Meanwhile, I’m standing there like an idiot, gawking at the dead wizard a few feet in front of me. Everyone who heard me say “It’s a curse” is similarly stunned, unwilling to move any closer to our perp. But a couple ignorant paramedics shuffle toward us, eying our guns with unease, and ask if they can check the fallen man for vitals. When none of us answer immediately, one of them tries to push past the Adelman brothers, and I throw up my hands—and my gun with them—and shout, “No!”
The paramedic looks at me like he thinks I’m nuts. “I need to see if I can revive this man.”
“He’s dead,” I say with certainty. Not only is the guy motionless, but I checked his aura again after he collapsed. It’s rapidly dissolving, which means his soul has already left his body. There’s no coming back from that. “And his body shouldn’t be handled by anyone who hasn’t followed proper hazmat protocols.”
“Hazmat?” the other paramedic, a woman, asks. “What the hell’s going on here? Is this some kind of terrorist attack?”
Ella marches up beside her with a posture of authority. “The nature of this incident is unknown at this point. However, that deceased man there is our top suspect for the destruction of the deli. The medical examiner will handle him. Please tend to the wounded civilians on scene.”
The paramedics are uncomfortable being corralled by DSI agents, but they acquiesce and head toward the bank to help the group of survivors we moved off the road. Once they’re out of earshot, Ella draws closer to our circle and peers at the dead wizard lying crumpled in the center. “Okay, will someone explain to me what the heck happened with this guy?”
“Ask Kinsey,” mutters Joe Adelman. “He’s spouting shit about a curse.”
Everyone looks at me expectantly.
I try to come up with a coherent answer, but my head is full of shrieking alarms, and it’s all I can do not to scream. After swallowing eight times in a row, I finally scrounge up enough moisture in my throat to rasp out, “You need to call Navarro, right now, and tell him and every other practitioner in the infirmary to stay away from Brittany Regent. And any practitioner who got near her while she was being examined needs to be immediately quarantined.”
“Calvin,” Desmond says, brows furrowed, “what are you talking about?”
“It’s a curse,” I manage to repeat at last. “It’s a goddamn curse masquerading as a disease. That’s why it’s able to strike so fast; it’s magic, it doesn’t have an incubation period. That’s why it doesn’t respond to medications or even Navarro’s magic; the strength of the curse is stronger than anything Navarro can throw at it. That’s why it appears to go after random people; it’s not infecting anyone it comes into contact with, only those with magic it can latch onto. It’s a goddamn curse that specifically targets practitioners.”
“How the hell can you know that?” Amy stuffs her gun back into its holster and gestures to the dead wizard. “He didn’t say a word.”
“He didn’t have to.” I run a trembling hand through my hair. “I saw it. His aura looked diseased, like a festering sore.”
All the agents in earshot digest that information, and the expressions around me violently shift from confusion and disbelief to abject terror. Everyone but me backs away from the wizard’s body, even though it probably poses none of them any danger. Whatever damage this man did beyond Wayland—infecting every magic user he met over the course of the morning—can’t be rectified by caution this late in the game. If I had realized the potential for an epidemic back at Kelly’s, I would have quarantined everyone in the restaurant. But I didn’t. The picture wasn’t clear then.
It’s clear now. That we have a goddamn catastrophe on our hands.
“Ella,” I say, “the infirmary staff was exposed to Regent.”
“Oh, god.” She rips her phone off her belt and wheels away to call Navarro.
As she’s waiting for him to answer, she waves Riker over to us. He abruptly ends his chat with the cops and strides away with nary a farewell, not caring if they perceive him as rude. Doesn’t matter anyway. They won’t scold him for it.
Even with the cane and the limp, he strikes too imposing a figure for anyone lower in rank than the mayor to openly judge. And after he put the fear of god into a group of cops at ground zero during the Wellington crisis, rumors of his wrath spread through the Aurora PD like wildfire—or so Lassiter told me—and no cop is willing to even mildly confront him about anything.
Ella points Riker my way and snaps her fingers at me, indicating I should tell him what I just told her. Riker gives her a questioning glance then zeroes in on me as he nears the fractured circle around the dead wizard. “We have some answers?” he says.
I finally holster my weapon and attempt to work the tension out of my shoulders, but all I do is give myself a cramp. Cursing under my breath, I observe the dead wizard before acknowledging my captain. “I have a working theory.”
“Let’s hear it.”
I repeat my earlier ideas in a slightly more coherent manner.
When I’m finished, Riker is rigid as a statue. “You better be so off base that we all laugh at you later,” he says darkly, “because if you’re right, we’re looking at a possible outcome worse than the Wellington disaster.”
“I know.” I rub my cheeks and grind my heels into the asphalt. “I hope I’m wrong too.”
“You’re not,” Ella says, dropping the phone from her ear, devastation flooding every joint in her body, liquefying her to a point of vulnerability I don’t think she’s ever shown. “Since we left twenty minutes ago, four doctors and three nurses in the infirmary have gotten sick, five with symptoms similar to Regent’s, three with symptoms of extreme aggression that appear to be gradually ebbing into total lethargy.”
Riker wheels around toward the wizard’s body. “That’s what happened to him. He caught this curse and flew into an uncontrolled rage. He wasn’t a criminal, he was just sick.”
“Which means the responsibility for this death and destruction,” Desmond says, giving the man’s body a wide berth as he walks closer to us, “lies with the person who created the curse.”
Doom Sayer Page 6
