by Lisa Edmonds
“Not at the moment. Happy searching.” We said our goodbyes and I disconnected just as Sean and I arrived at our destination.
Sean turned into a long, winding driveway that led to an imposing mansion hidden from the street by trees. He parked out front and the mobile team pulled in next to us.
As we exited the SUV, the house wards tingled on my skin. Sean and I walked to the front door as Tom emerged from the mobile team SUV and took up a position next to it, scanning the yard.
The front door opened as we approached, revealing a stern ash-blonde woman in heels and a dark green suit.
I held out my hand. “I’m Alice Worth. Are you Ms. Aldridge’s assistant?”
“Yes. I’m Christina Harris.” Her handshake was brisk. “Ms. Aldridge told me to expect you. Please come in.”
As I walked inside, I sensed only deterrent wards, set to incapacitate anyone who tried to get through, and no deadly black wards. Those were illegal, but some unscrupulous mages used them anyway if a client paid them enough. We stepped into an enormous entryway and Christina closed the door behind us.
As Sean examined the security system keypad by the door, I placed my hand against the wall and closed my eyes, assessing Kendall’s magic.
He was an air mage. The wards were well-made but simplistic. That didn’t necessarily mean he lacked skill, but considering the wealth and status of his client, they were woefully inadequate, even without taking into account the passkey spells. A loud sneeze could break them. The shoddy workmanship alone made me angry.
I sensed the trace linking the wards to their anchor. It was a pulsing white line leading somewhere in the house, to the item providing the wards’ power. I followed that line to its source, expecting to find an object charged with Kendall’s own magic, and instead found something else.
I sucked in a breath and yanked my hand off the wall.
“What’s wrong?” Sean asked.
“I’m not sure,” I lied. I turned to Christina. “Can you show me the anchor, please?”
“Of course. This way.”
We followed her through the entryway, down a long hall, and around a corner. She opened a pair of doors and ushered us into a large office overlooking the garden behind the house.
Sean went to close the curtains immediately, but my attention was on a ceramic figure of a nude woman on a small table next to a wall of bookcases. It pulsed with magic.
The statue was about two feet tall and surprisingly heavy. I turned it around, then picked it up and checked the bottom.
I glanced at Christina. “Do you have something I can put down on the floor, like a drop cloth?”
Her eyebrows went up. “I can bring you something. One moment.” She left the office. I listened to her heels clicking down the hallway.
“What’s going on?” Sean asked in a low voice.
“We might have a problem. I need Malcolm.” I closed my eyes, found the cool blue-green trace in my mind linking me to my ghost, and tugged. I felt a few seconds of dizziness, and then it faded.
About ten seconds later, I sensed Malcolm had jumped to a crystal on my bracelet. I touched the crystal with my other hand. “Release.”
Malcolm appeared next to me. “Hey, Alice. Hey, Sean.” He glanced around in appreciation. “Nice digs.”
“I need your help,” I said. “Tell me what you sense in this statue.”
He stared at the ceramic figure, then cursed and flitted back four feet in the blink of an eye.
“What’s in the statue?” Sean asked.
Malcolm was swearing a blue streak, so I answered. “There’s a ghost trapped in the statue. That’s what Kendall’s using to power the wards instead of his own magic.”
Sean stared at the statue in horror. “There’s a person in there?”
Footsteps approached. “Malcolm,” I hissed. I didn’t know if Esther’s assistant had any ability to sense a ghost but I didn’t want to take any chances.
Malcolm cut himself off in mid-curse and went invisible.
Christina reentered the office, carrying a folded piece of heavy cloth like the kind used to drape over furniture in storage. She handed it to me. “Will this work?”
“Perfect.” I unfolded the cloth and spread it on the floor. I glanced at Sean. “Would you mind?”
“Not at all,” he said, picking up the statue.
“Wait,” Christina began.
Sean raised the statue and smashed it on the cloth. Esther’s assistant stumbled back, shocked, as pieces of ceramic scattered across the floor. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Ms. Aldridge instructed me to break the wards,” I told her, using the toe of my boot to nudge the debris. “I’m working on doing that. You need to go into another part of the house while we work. We’ll find you if we need anything.”
Without a word, she spun on her heel and left.
Malcolm reappeared next to me. “Where’s the crystal?”
I crouched and poked around carefully until I uncovered a marble-sized blue crystal embedded in a chunk of ceramic.
“How long do you think the ghost has been in there?” Malcolm asked me.
“I don’t know. I can’t tell how old this statue was. It could be months or years. Or decades.”
We stared at the crystal.
“What do you want to do?” Malcolm asked.
“We have to release the ghost,” I said. “We don’t know what kind of shape it’ll be in, so we need a circle to contain it. If it’s gone wraith, I’ll have to discorporate it.” I looked at Sean. “You need to be outside the circle. Malcolm and I will handle this.”
Reluctantly, he moved away. I took a piece of chalk from my bag and drew a circle around the drop cloth, closing myself and Malcolm inside.
“Charge the circle and hold it. Don’t let the ghost break it,” I told Malcolm. “Sean, stay out of the circle, no matter what.”
The circle flared around us, its power tingling on my skin.
“What do you mean, no matter what?” Sean demanded.
“The ghost may be violent, but I won’t let it hurt me.” I crouched and picked up the piece of ceramic that contained the crystal. As I stood, the ghost’s power buzzed on the edges of my senses. The question was: how stable would he or she be, after being trapped in the crystal for so long?
I pressed the crystal into the palm of my hand, and a jolt of power made my head jerk. I braced myself, focused on the crystal, and spooled my blood magic. With a single blow, I severed the binding spell holding the ghost in the crystal and released it.
A piercing scream filled the air as the ghost emerged in a wave of madness. The spirit wasn’t a wraith yet, but it was only a matter of time. Like a poltergeist, she no longer looked human, but I saw two crazed eyes in a formless face a split second before she picked me up and slammed me against the barrier of the circle, my feet dangling eighteen inches from the floor.
Outside the circle, Sean growled and paced, but my attention was on the tormented spirit.
“You’re all right,” I told her, though she was too far gone to understand me. “You’re free of the crystal now.”
She made a heartbreaking keening sound. Sean couldn’t hear it, but Malcolm and I could. A white ribbon of trace bound her to Kendall. She’d been his bound ghost and he’d trapped her in the crystal to use as a power source.
I felt a spike of fury and realized it was Malcolm’s. “Discorporate her,” my ghost pleaded. “Please. She’s suffered enough. Do it before he realizes she’s been released and summons her.”
Malcolm was right; the moment Kendall sensed the ghost had been freed, he could pull her back to him and we might never find her again.
There was no time to be kind or gentle. “May you find rest,” I whispered, and used my blood magic to pull her apart.
Her wail was excruciating. I dropped to the floor on my hands and knees as the ghost disintegrated. Kendall’s binding broke with a sound like a snap.
A strange surge of fa
miliar blue-green magic flared as Malcolm vanished. He was trying to follow the link back to Kendall.
“Malcolm, no!” I shouted. I grabbed my ghost and yanked him back. The hard ricochet of magic left me dazed.
I huddled on the floor, disoriented, trying to shake off the effects of the magic. Malcolm and Sean were shouting, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Malcolm sounded angry with me and Sean was worried. I heard a female voice and Sean’s angry reply, followed by the sound of a door slamming.
Malcolm broke the circle and Sean picked me up. “Alice, talk to me,” he said urgently. He carried me over to a sofa and put me down.
I forced my eyes open and blinked slowly, focusing on Sean’s face as he crouched next to me. “I’m okay,” I told him, squeezing his hand.
Malcolm appeared in my line of sight. He was so furious he was flitting in place, flickering in and out. “Why didn’t you let me go after him?” he shouted. “He had her trapped in there for years. Why did you pull me back?” His anger sizzled on my skin and I flinched.
Sean turned toward the sound of Malcolm’s voice and snarled, “Back off, right now.”
I pushed myself up until I was sitting. “He could have broken our binding,” I told my ghost angrily. “He might have been able to take you from me, you idiot. What if he took you and put you in a crystal and I couldn’t find you? You’d end up like her, or worse. Did you even think of that? I would never have forgiven myself!”
Malcolm disappeared. At first, I thought he’d jumped somewhere else, but I realized he was on the other side of the room, by the bookcases, his back to me.
I struggled to get to my feet. Sean helped me up and I stumbled across the room. “Malcolm, I’m sorry. I can’t lose you like that. I can’t.”
The ghost turned around. He looked anguished. “She was suffering so much.”
“I know. We did what we could to help her.”
When he spoke again, it was in a tone of voice I’d never heard him use before. “We have to find this guy and make him pay for doing that to her.”
“I agree, but for now we need to remove the house wards and Sean needs to figure out how the burglars got past the security system.”
“Are you okay?” Sean asked me.
I took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m all right. Did Christina Harris come in here while we were dealing with the ghost?”
“She came running when we started yelling. I got her out of here.”
“I’ll have to go apologize for all the chaos. Malcolm, can you unweave the wards while I go find her?”
“I can do that. They’re basic wards. It won’t take me ten minutes.”
“Thank you.” I touched his hand. It was a strange feeling, like touching thick fog. “Be careful, you jerk.”
He gave me a lopsided smile and turned to face the exterior wall, his fingers moving as he traced the wards.
Sean and I went in search of Christina Harris. We found her at a desk in a solarium down the hall, working on a laptop, a stack of papers at her side. She looked up as we entered and gave us a hard stare as Sean moved to stand between me and the windows.
“I apologize for all this,” I told her sincerely. “We uncovered something very unpleasant in regard to the house wards and it was a difficult and dangerous situation to resolve.”
She looked surprised. “I thought it would be a simple matter to deal with the wards.”
“So did I, until we got in there,” I said. “The mage who set up the wards was rather unethical in his methods. I’ll report what we found to Ms. Aldridge.”
“What can I help you with at this point?”
“Sean needs the information for the main security system, if you have that handy. Meanwhile, I’d like you to show me where the magical items were kept.”
Christina rose and handed Sean a folder. “Those are the codes and the rest of the information about the security system.”
“Thank you,” Sean said. He squeezed my hand, then headed for the front door as I followed Esther’s assistant back to the office.
Malcolm had gone invisible but I could sense his presence near the bookcases as he worked on unweaving Kendall’s wards.
Christina led me to a corner of the room, where she slid a panel aside to reveal a large safe. She punched in an eight-digit code, turned the handle, and opened the door. The safe was empty.
“Was everything in the safe taken?” I asked.
She shook her head. “The only things taken were approximately five thousand dollars in cash, some heirloom jewelry, and the three magical objects. We cleaned everything else out and moved it to a different safe when this one was compromised.”
The safe had no wards, which meant any mage who entered the house would probably be able to sense the magic trace emanating from the objects stored inside. I shook my head. This sort of thing happened often when people without magic dabbled in collecting magical objects as a hobby. They didn’t really know what they had or how to keep the items safe and hidden.
I reached into the safe and closed my eyes so I could focus on what little magic trace was left behind by the missing items. The white air magic was undoubtedly an echo from the mirror, since memory spells were a form of air magic. The cup had left behind blood and earth magic, as I would have expected from an object designed for vampire use. The hint of fire magic was probably from the cuff. I committed the traces to memory so I could identify the objects when I found them.
The mirror seemed to be the strongest trace, so it had probably been in Esther’s possession the longest. I wondered if she used it regularly, and if so, what memories it showed her. While the cup was intriguing and the cuff was maybe the oddest item I’d ever been hired to find, the mirror was certainly one magical object I wanted nothing to do with. My past had few good memories to offer. I had a hard enough time keeping the ones buried I remembered; I certainly didn’t need to dredge up any of the ones I’d managed to forget.
When I opened my eyes, Christina Harris was sitting in a chair, leafing through an architecture magazine, and Malcolm had finished unweaving the house wards. I realized with a start that I’d been standing at the safe for almost fifteen minutes.
“I’m done with the safe for now,” I said. “I think I’ll go check on Sean.”
As she closed up the safe, I headed down the hall, following the sound of voices. When I rounded the corner, I found Sean and a young, dark-haired man in a tool belt and a Maclin Security shirt by the security system keypad. The younger man had a small laptop.
Sean smiled as I approached. “Alice, this is Ben, head of our installation division and a member of the pack.”
Ben shook my hand and gave me a cheery smile. “It’s nice to meet you, Alice.”
“Nice to meet you.” I smiled back. “You guys getting to the bottom of the security system breach?”
“We’re getting there,” Sean said. “It looks like whoever got in here bypassed the system with some pretty advanced equipment. What did you find out?”
“The thieves cracked the safe to get to the missing items.”
“What kind of safe? Biometric scanner? Fingerprint? Voice identification?”
“Eight-digit code.”
Sean shook his head. “You’re kidding me. Might as well have been keeping the stuff in a cardboard box labeled ‘Valuables.’”
“I suppose if you’ve never had a break-in, you might get a little too complacent.” I pulled the folder containing the pictures of the missing items from my bag. “I’m going to work in the office for a while and make some phone calls.”
“I’ll join you soon. The rest of the installation crew will be here any minute.”
“Sounds good.” I headed back to the office.
Christina had gone back to working in the solarium, so I sat down on one of the couches in the office.
Malcolm reappeared and floated over to me. “All done with the wards. They were a joke.”
“I know. Thank you for unweaving t
hem.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You should probably jump back to the basement for now. I’ll summon you if something comes up, or I’ll see you when we get home later tonight.”
“Okay.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry I tried to follow the trace back to Kendall. That was stupid.”
“It’s okay. I understand why you did it. As awful as seeing her in that condition was for me, I’m sure it was ten times worse for you.”
“That could have easily been me. If I’d ended up back at Bell’s cabal as a bound ghost, that would have been me, trapped in a crystal until I went wraith. Remember what I told you when we first met, that I’d rather you discorporate me than let that happen to me?”
I nodded.
“Nothing’s changed about that. If they ever come for me, send me on if you can, as long as it doesn’t put you at risk.”
“I will,” I promised, though my stomach hurt to even think about doing to Malcolm what I’d just done to Kendall’s bound ghost.
“Thanks, Alice. That lady’s coming back. I’m out of here.” He disappeared.
Christina appeared in the doorway. “I’m about to make some coffee. Would you like a cup?”
I sighed. “More than just about anything in the world. With cream and sugar, please and thank you.”
As she headed back down the hall, I opened the folder Esther had given me and studied the pictures of the missing magical items. “Okay, my pretties. If I were a recently stolen magical object, where would I be?”
No answer from the photos, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. I tapped my fingers on the arm of the sofa. “I’d be on my way to someone who could sell me, that’s where I’d be.”
This kind of hardware couldn’t be fenced or sold very many places. If it was still in the city, there was a short list of possible buyers and sellers, and I knew a couple of them personally.
That was when I felt it: a distant surge of magic, not nearly as formidable as the one that had destroyed Darius Bell’s cabal compound, but powerful and deadly nonetheless. It washed over the house like a gentle tide.
The other shoe had finally dropped.
“Oh, Moses, you old bastard,” I whispered. “What have you done?”
