by R. L. King
“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“You did.”
He shrugged. “Your mum was quite a lady. At that point, I hadn’t met too many younger, female mages. Most of them were much older, like Lavinia there.” He pointed at the plump lady in the shawl. “She was one of the few who didn’t treat me like a junior interloper. And she didn’t even tease me too much when I freaked out in the Overworld. So yes, I had a bit of a schoolboy crush on her.” His expression clouded. “Never got to see her again after that, though. You can’t see it in that photo, but she was already fairly ill when it was taken.”
Verity closed her eyes a moment, suddenly sad as the reality came crashing back, shattering her pleasant memories: her mother had died of cancer shortly before her own first birthday. It wasn’t fair—she should have lived a longer life than a mundane. Mages weren’t supposed to die of stupid diseases. But they did, sometimes, just like mundanes did.
She gathered up the rest of the photos into an untidy stack—she hadn’t found any more with Stone in them—and put them back in the box. “I’ll look at these later,” she said, wanting to change the subject. “Jason…Doc…thank you so much, both of you. This was the best birthday ever. I’m glad I’ve got two such amazing guys to count on.” She smiled. “Doc, I’ll call you and we can talk about housesitting. And have fun with your TV thing. When you’re rich and famous, I’ll be able to make a pile of money co-authoring a tell-all book with Raider.”
“I’d be careful about that,” he said. “He’ll have good dirt on me, but he also knows some top-flight lawyers. Before you know it, he’ll be blowing all your royalties on catnip and…er…lady cats.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jason called Verity two days before she was planning to head up to Stone’s place. “V, I have some bad news.”
Uh oh. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. But I’m not gonna be able to take you up to Al’s this weekend.”
“Why not? Did something happen?” They’d planned to drive up together in Jason’s Mustang and visit Stone before he headed off.
He sighed. “We got a new case a couple days ago. Fran’s got me working on it, and I’m not having any luck at all. I thought sure I’d have run it down by now, but it’s not happening. She made it pretty clear that taking off for two days and letting it hang won’t be my best move, career-wise.”
Damn. That was inconvenient, but didn’t completely mess up her plans. “I can take the bus, I guess. Not a problem. What kind of case is it?”
“Missing person. Some guy was supposed to be at a business meeting, but he never showed up. His wife’s worried sick, and wants to know where he is.”
“Probably ran off with somebody,” Verity said. “It happens.”
“The wife claims that’s not an option,” he said. “Apparently he’s a real devoted family man, and she’s never had any reason to suspect he’s running around on her. And I haven’t found any sign of it, either. No credit card records, no hotel check-ins, airline tickets, ATM hits…it’s like he dropped off the face of the earth.”
“Huh,” Verity said. “Weird. Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about me—I’m fine taking the bus.”
“Thanks for understanding. You know how Fran gets about work.”
“Yeah. Okay, I guess I’d better get a—hey, wait a sec!” Verity nearly facepalmed when a solution suddenly popped into her head. “You said a missing person?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you let me help you find him? Then you can look good for Fran and still have time to drive me up to Palo Alto.”
There was a pause. “You mean…with magic?”
“Yeah, why not? Tracking’s easy, especially if he hasn’t gone too far away. Even if he has, I should be able to give you a general idea where to look.”
“I dunno, V. I’m not sure I should—”
“Why not?” she asked impatiently. “Magic’s just a tool. If you had access to a tool that would help you fix something on your car, would you just not use it because you didn’t feel comfortable about it?”
He paused again. After several seconds, he asked, “Well…what would you need?”
She smiled. That was more like it. “Just something that belongs to him. The closer he is to it, the better. Favorite clothing item, some other thing he interacts with regularly, that kind of thing. Or blood, if you can get it.”
“Yeah, I don’t think his wife keeps a stock of his blood in the fridge or anything. Lemme get back to you. If we can wrap this up today, I should still be able to take you up this weekend.”
“Great. Come by when you get something. We’ll use Edna’s ritual space. I’m sure she won’t mind.”
Jason showed up at Edna’s place later that afternoon, carrying a paper bag. “Where’s Edna? She okay with this?”
“She went into town to do some errands. She thinks it’s a great idea. Anything to help me practice magic.”
“Okay,” he said, almost as if he’d hoped Edna wouldn’t approve so he could back out of the plan. “Now, you know this is just this one time, right, because I promised to take you up to Al’s. I don’t want to get in the habit of asking you to help me find people. It’ll make me lazy. Besides, the clients and Fran kinda want me to show my work, y’know? They aren’t gonna buy ‘oh, yeah, my sister did a magical tracking ritual and they popped right up.’”
“Whatever,” she said, shrugging. “I’m glad to help. I don’t see what the big deal is. So what did you bring? I’ve already got the circle mostly set up—just gotta customize it for your guy.”
He pulled a faded L.A. Dodgers hat from the bag. “She says this is one of his favorite hats. So it should be good, right?”
“Yeah. Better than I expected, actually.” She headed off toward the back of the house, motioning for him to follow her. “What did you tell her about why you wanted it?”
“I told her I had a friend who’s a psychic. Said it was a huge long shot, but there was precedent for it working so it was worth a try. She was upset enough she didn’t even argue with me about it. Here’s a pic of him, too, if that’ll help. His name’s Gary. Gary Woods.” He gave her a headshot-type photo showing a balding, slightly pudgy white man in his middle forties. He hadn’t been kidding: if Gary Woods had been any more suburban-dad-looking, he could have posed for the dictionary definition of “boring.”
“Great,” Verity said. The psychic thing was the standard lie Stone used, too—people wouldn’t believe in magic even if you told them about it, but most of them had no trouble accepting the possibility of “psychic powers,” especially if they were desperate enough to locate some person or object. “Okay, give me a little time to customize this circle and I’ll get right to it. You can go watch TV or something while you wait if you want.”
Verity hadn’t done that many tracking rituals, but as magic went, it wasn’t a difficult skill, and Stone had drilled it into her from the early days of their training. It wasn’t something you forgot how to do. She double-checked the circle against one of her textbooks, then settled into the center with the hat and lit the candles around the perimeter.
She liked Edna’s ritual space, which had been set up in a solarium-type room attached to the back of the old woman’s home. The heavy wooden framing and soaring windows gave it an outdoorsy quality, but the trees surrounding the area guaranteed no curious onlookers would observe anything going on inside—at least not without getting close enough to spot. Like everything else about the old woman, it had an earthy quality to it, rough but dignified.
She put the hat in her lap, fingering its fabric as she entered a meditative state. She figured this would probably only take fifteen minutes or so. The distance could be a problem—if the guy was supposed to be in Los Angeles, she wouldn’t get
anything like a precise location. But unless he was either dead or behind magical wards, she’d get something. At least she’d know whether he was alive, which was more than Jason knew now. If they needed to, they could drive to Los Angeles and repeat the ritual, though she’d need to get a new tether object if that happened.
She reached out with her senses, getting a feel for the faint traces of Gary Woods’s aura lingering around his baseball cap. When she had a good grip on the energy, she began murmuring the spell under her breath.
Before long a thin tendril snaked upward, ranging out in search of the larger concentration of the same energy that would be swirling around Gary, wherever he happened to be. All she had to do was concentrate on keeping the tendril in sight, and follow it until it either reached Gary’s current location, or fizzled out. If the latter happened, the precise nature of the fizzling would tell her whether Gary was merely out of the spell’s range (in which case the tendril would slowly dissipate the farther out she went) or dead (the tendril would abruptly vanish).
That was what was supposed to happen, anyway.
She frowned, concentrating harder. The tendril seemed…confused. It stretched out, appeared to hunt around for a while, then turned back on itself as if it couldn’t determine a direction. It was acting like a bloodhound who kept thinking he’d caught the scent, only to be thwarted before he could get a fix on it. She’d never seen the spell do anything like that before. Had she gotten something wrong? She didn’t think so, though—the tendril was definitely there, and it was definitely originating at Gary’s hat, just as it was supposed to.
She focused again on concentrating her power around the hat, starting over at the terminal point and retracing her mental steps along the meandering path. She got a definite direction, so that was a good thing—but the direction wasn’t the one she’d expected. If Gary was in Los Angeles, she’d have expected the tendril to reach in a generally southerly direction. Instead, it kept straining toward the east before once again becoming confused and milling around. Oddly, a couple times she felt as if the tendril either changed or wasn’t alone—almost as if it were entwined with a second aura. That was crazy, though: auras didn’t mingle. Even two people standing next to each other would still display distinct and discrete auras. The only exception she knew of was in the case of a pregnant woman, when the mother’s aura would mingle with the fetus’s half-formed one. But she doubted that was a good excuse for Gary Woods, unless there was a lot more going on with him than his wife was telling. More likely she was just picking up some astral oddness because of the distances involved.
She kept trying for several more minutes, but finally had to give up when she grew too tired to keep the spell going. She slumped in the circle’s center, clutching the hat. Since the spell hadn’t found its quarry, the tether hadn’t been consumed.
“V?” Jason’s voice came from far away. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, panting with exertion. Slowly she stood, stretched, and went around blowing the candles out around the circle’s outer edge.
Jason led her over to a chair. “What happened? Did you find him? I thought the item went whoosh when you found who you’re looking for.”
“It does. I didn’t find him.”
He frowned. “What’s that mean? Is he dead?”
“Maybe. Or outside the spell’s range. Or behind wards, though I doubt that’s what’s going on. I kinda don’t think he’s dead, though, either. And whatever’s going on with him, I’m pretty sure he’s not in L.A.”
Jason looked perplexed as he stood over her, clearly eager for any details she could provide. “Huh? How do you know that?”
She jumped up. “Come on. Is Edna back?”
“Yeah, she got in about fifteen minutes ago.”
“I want to talk to her.”
They found Edna Soren in the kitchen, putting together one of her massive pots full of beef stew. “How’d your ritual go?” she asked.
“Weird,” Verity said. “I wanted to ask you about it.” She explained what she’d seen and felt, how the searching tendril had been confused and had pointed off to the east, and how she’d sensed a second aura but couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just a glitch. “What do you think?” she asked when she finished.
“Damned if I know,” Edna said, shaking her head. “That is weird. I’d say the guy’s probably still alive—maybe he’s injured? Or else he’s someplace with natural magical protections?” She shrugged. “Sorry I can’t be more help. Detection spells were never my strong suit. Usually I try to stay away from people, not track them down.”
Jason sighed as they headed back outside. “Well, thanks for trying anyway, V. I appreciate it. I guess you’re gonna have to take the bus after all, though. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said, but her mind was still troubled. That was the oddest result she’d ever got from a tracking ritual, and it bothered her that she wouldn’t be able to run it to ground and find what had happened to Gary Woods. “Tell me if you find him, okay? I’ll be curious to know what was going on.”
“I will. If I ever find out. I just hate to fail on one of my first solo cases, you know?”
Verity couldn’t stop thinking about Gary Woods for the rest of the day. She went to bed early, finally managing to absorb herself in a book she’d picked up at the library before dropping off to sleep. When the phone rang at a little before eight the following morning, it jolted her from a deep slumber and a strange dream she couldn’t remember. “Mmm…hello?”
“V? It’s me.” Jason’s voice was oddly strained.
She sat up. “Jason? What’s going on? Why are you calling so early?”
“Remember you said you didn’t think Gary Woods was dead, and you couldn’t figure out why the spell kept pointing east?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, you part of it right. Just got a call from Fran. They found Gary.”
She froze. “Dead?”
“Yeah. The found his body naked in a dumpster out back of a pretty sketchy area. He’d been murdered. And V…it was in Las Vegas.”
They met over lunch later that day, grabbing a quick burger. Verity, unable to get back to sleep, spent most of the morning trying to figure out what the hell could be going on. She didn’t even greet Jason when he picked her up. “Tell me the story,” she said immediately. “What happened?”
“Fuck if I know,” he said. “This is the weirdest damn case I’ve seen since I started working for Fran. She says so too. Gary’s wife called Fran first thing this morning and told her what the cops said. They found Gary naked in a dumpster like I said—no ID, no nothing. It looked like he’d been tortured before he was killed—cause of death looks like a slash to the throat, though they haven’t done an autopsy yet, obviously. No murder weapon found in the vicinity, and not nearly enough blood, so they think he was moved there.”
“From where, though? L.A.? What was he doing in Vegas?”
“His wife doesn’t know, and there’s no record of him checking into any of the local hotels—at least not on the Strip or Downtown. The Vegas cops are still running down the smaller places, obviously. But there’s also no record so far of him driving, flying, or taking a bus into Vegas. So either he hitchhiked or rented a different car under another name.”
“Or he was damn careful,” Verity said. “Maybe he snuck off to Vegas for some fun. I know you said he was a family guy, but even family guys can cheat on their wives.”
Jason nodded, leaning on his elbows with both hands buried in his hair. “Yeah. Maybe. But it doesn’t add up. Especially with that weird stuff you saw when you did your ritual.”
“Do they know when he was killed?”
“Like I said, it looked like he was tortured for a while first. Killed recently, they think.”
“Like last night, after I did the r
itual?”
“Maybe so.” He sighed. “I gotta go back and talk to Fran in a little bit, figure out where to go with this, if anywhere. Oh—forgot one other odd thing. The cops said they found somebody else’s ID in the dumpster with him. Some other guy.”
“Fake ID, maybe?”
“No, guy looked completely different. Too much to be a disguise, from what they said.”
“Hmm…you think it’s related?”
“No way to know yet. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
He called back again that afternoon. “This case keeps getting weirder by the hour.”
Verity, who’d gotten over the initial shock of finding out Gary was dead and had reverted to the curiosity about anything odd or unexpected she’d picked up from her long association with Stone, perked up. “Oh?”
“Yeah. Seems that Mrs. Woods isn’t ready to give up. The Vegas cops claim that Gary was probably murdered during a drug or prostitution deal gone bad, but the wife’s not buyin’ it. She feels like they’re givin’ her the runaround, so she tried to hire Fran to investigate what really happened.”
“Yeah, that makes sense, since you guys were already on the case.”
“But Fran doesn’t want to do it. She agrees with the Vegas cops, and besides, she’s swamped with work of her own right now.”
“So that’s the end of the line, then?” Verity asked, disappointed.
“Well…no.”
“But you said—”
“Fran said she didn’t want to do it,” he reminded her. “I didn’t.”
