Chapter Seven
I could see the air shimmer as a gate came into sight. Most mundanes wouldn’t have noticed it, or blown it off as a heat shimmer in the air. With my mage sight, I was able to see the very fabric of being pulled aside, and saw when Vivian stepped through. I shut my sight down as magic from the office behind her blinded me. She was wearing a not so serious skirt and white blouse. Her long brown hair was in the same loose curls as I remembered from the casino. She closed the gate behind her and looked around.
I sat back and waited. I wanted to see how good her memory was. After a moment, she saw me and started walking over. She looked good, fit. I hated to look, but I could see that the woman I’d met in Vegas wasn’t a glamor, she was real. Over her shoulder, she carried a slightly oversized purse. That made me a little nervous, but I was ready and I had my invisible secret weapon hanging onto my shoulder, ready to hex her if needed.
“Mr. Wright,” Vivian said, “May I sit?”
“Please do,” I told her and scooted over. She took the spot to the right of me, near the end of the bench.
“I never come to a first date without a gift,” I said, and pulled a small box out of my right inner pocket. I could feel the left pocket warming up from the heater’s chemical reaction.
She flinched, but not terribly. I took the lid off the box, showing her a small golden bracelet with a locket on it.
“What is it?” she asked after a moment, seeing the runes on the charm.
“It’s to protect me. I give you my word, on my magic, that if you mean me no harm, no harm will come to you.”
She bit her lower lip and then nodded. I gently pulled it out and put it on her wrist and then activated it with the force of my will as the clasp closed. The magic snapped shut as the circle was completed and then I took Vivian’s hand. It was soft, and I felt a tremor of muscles.
“The knife…” she said, reaching for her handbag.
I activated the gate spell I had stored in what looked like a clear piece of crystal on my necklace.
“Please come with me,” I told her, pulling her gently to her feet.
Her eyes opened and then she followed. I stepped through and waited. She stepped through just as the gate closed and put a hand up to cover her face from the howling wind and almost a foot of snow.
“This way,” I shouted to her, and felt Rose scurry inside my jacket and into my inner pocket like we had practiced.
Vivian didn’t say anything, but wrapped her arms around her body as I led her into the ice cave. Inside was just as I left it a decade before. An old dented fuel can was nearly frozen to the ground and wood had been laid out into a fire pit, nearly twenty feet back. She walked towards that as I yanked on the tarp, which was nearly frozen to the roof of the opening, till it fell down. The heat from our breathing and the fire would finish thawing it some, allowing it to block out the wind slightly better than it was doing right now. I walked back towards the fire pit and grabbed the fuel can and went to the wood. I splashed diesel on it and then pulled a small box of matches out of my pocket. The cold was getting to me, but I wasn’t going to let that show to the half-frozen woman who was definitely not prepared for this. I lit a match and threw it down.
Within a moment or two, the fire took off on its own, no longer needing the diesel to sustain it. The wood had stayed dry, despite being stored and laid out in this cave that was half rock, half ice.
“What is this place and where are we?” Vivian asked with chattering teeth.
“Get closer to the fire,” I told her, pulling on her elbow as both arms were wrapped around her chest.
She did and I got close, feeling the warmth of the heat.
“We’re in the Himalayas,” I told her, “one of my many hideouts. I have a hundred such places,” I lied. “And that bracelet I put on you has two active spells. One is a time lock. You can’t remove it for an hour. The second spell prevents you from gating while wearing the bracelet.”
“Why?” she asked me simply.
“If I needed to get away, I can gate out of here at any time. By the time the lock wore off, I’d be long gone and you couldn’t follow. I knew I had enough wood in here that if you tried anything funny that you wouldn’t freeze to death before the time lock wore off and you could remove it. Sort of like a gun safety.”
“You aren’t very trusting, Mr. Wright.”
“Let me see the knife.”
“You can’t keep it, but I can show it to you,” she said, digging in her purse.
She pulled out an object that was wrapped in silk cloth, and handed it over to me. I unwrapped it slowly to find an iron knife, one that had been forged a long time ago. On the side, runes were carved. I knelt down closer to the fire, where the light wasn’t flickering so badly from the dancing flames, and started to examine it. The handle was some sort of bone or ivory. It had been epoxied in place by a natural material. Without further examination I wouldn’t be able to tell, but that wasn’t what had my attention. The runes were.
“Life magic, a rune of unbinding, and something else…” I muttered to myself.
“We got that far, but why the life magic?” Vivian asked me.
“Life magic can’t be blocked or shielded against,” I told her quietly without looking up.” These runes, if nothing else, would allow the knife to cut through any magical shield. The unbinding is sort of a Celtic rune, one similar to the one I used for the undead.”
“Zombies and Vampires?” she asked.
I nodded without looking up. “And the last one here,” I traced it with my finger, “I am not for sure, but it almost looks like it’s… I’ve seen something like it before. It reminds me of the case you were talking to me about earlier.”
“The necromancer,” she said, her teeth chattering less.
I looked up to see her holding her arms out over the fire, despite the sparks. Color was coming back into her features as her body got over the shock of the cold. It did all kinds of things to her figure that I tried not to focus on, yet I scanned the futures to see if there were any lurid ways I could entice her to share her body heat—
The pinch on my chest hurt and I resisted the urge to slap at it. Something in my thoughts or expression must have leaked out enough to cause the pint-sized fairy to get me back on track.
“Yeah, the rune is a death rune for sure, but I am not sure what it’s for, exactly. Have you tested it?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “If pierced, it strips the magic from the mage.”
“You actually tested it on a mage to find that out?” I asked her, outraged.
“No, it’s what happened to the man who was going to take over the job as the Librarian. His magic was stripped and, despite our best healer’s efforts, he died of his wounds.”
I winced. That sucked. I looked into the future where I stabbed myself with the knife. My sight left me, and I felt like my heart was exploding on my chest, then only darkness. I let go of that future and looked up at Vivian.
That reaction meant it had a soul drain effect on it. A human, mundane or mage, had their souls. You could see it in their aura. For all I knew, the aura was the visible soul of a person. Vampires didn’t have an aura, as they were already dead. The re-animated corpses I’d put down in a former life were the same. Other than that, every living human, mage, animal or whatever, had a soul. Everything except mosquitos. Apparently, even the gods hate those bastards.
“It’s a soul trap,” I told her softly, memorizing the shape of the rune, so I could copy it into my notebook later on.
“It… oh, wow. That’s some dark magic.”
“Yes,” I said softly and pulled my phone out and turned on the camera.
I was about to take a picture when I felt my pocket wiggle and Vivian reached for the knife.
“No pictures—”
“No hakuna on his matattas!” Rose shrieked, becoming visible, and pointing her small wand at the mage.
“Holy shit,” Vivian screamed, falling backward
s, landing on her ass.
I sighed and snapped a couple of pictures. “Rose, you’re going to freeze your wings off and then you’ll really have to ride on my shoulder.”
“I feel fine in the thermal updraft of the fire, boss,” she said smartly.
“You’ve a bound Fae?” Vivian said getting to her feet, clearly still shocked.
“Yes,” Rose answered for me, “and even though he keeps trying to set me free, I won’t leave his service,” she said, using her wand for emphasis. Fairy dust from her motion fell like glitter into the fire, making the flames change colors, and the gray stone and ice around us danced with a rainbow of colors.
“You have a choice at freedom and you don’t take it?” Vivian asked, now confused.
“Yeah, I’m still curious about that one myself, short stuff.” Rose spun in the air and stuck her tongue out at me before turning back to Vivian. “This hunk of male flesh saved me. I was already under contract by another, who had poor intentions. Since he won me fairly,” she said, pointing her wand in my direction, “I gave him my allegiance. Twice now, he plied me with honey and, even though he can be a bit boring, I’m safer in servitude to this mage than I am free. Unless you want to get me to Ireland, that’d be cool. I’d totally go there, I hear the guy fairies there are hung!”
I snickered and Vivian gave her a ghost of a smile. “Yes, his preparations border on insanity and he’s obviously paranoid. Yet he was able to keep himself safe, wasn’t he?”
“You know he wasn’t joking about wiring the whole mountain to blow up, right?” Rose asked.
I winced.
“I could see enough with my mage sight that I knew there was no way out. It was stupid of me to come to you and your master in such a fashion.”
She was buttering up short stuff, but I was scanning the futures. I wrapped the knife back up, being careful not to get cut or nicked by it. Now that I knew what it was, I was wary of it, and put it under my arm before pulling my phone back out. I held the button down, turning it off and then pulled my battery out. After I pocketed those, I handed the knife back to Vivian, who put it in her purse. Then I pulled my suit jacket open and waited for Rose, who had her arms out wide and was spinning circles in a thermal of hot air. She saw me motion to her. She flew over and pulled herself down inside my pocket.
“Don’t I have to wait an hour?” Vivian asked me.
“If the mage who triggered the spell gates you, no.” I walked over and took her hand.
“Let’s get outta here boss, it smells like a truck stop in this joint.”
I snickered and triggered my third gate charm. It opened on the other side of the fire and Vivian and I walked over and stepped—
The casino was loud, and I grinned as her eyes widened and closed. I kept ahold of her hand and walked towards a garbage bin. I pulled the heater out of my pocket and dropped it inside and felt Rose climb out of my pocket and pull herself onto my shoulder, near my left ear. We’d planned this part and she knew to play the invisible girl act.
“You want to play some cards?” Vivian asked, confused.
“It’s where we met, and anyways, it’s got a free buffet. Let’s get some lunch and then I’ll release the spell.”
She nodded and let me lead her to the buffet. I started loading up a plate and added a small side plate with an apple, orange and a few grapes. Rose was whispering directions and, when we got to the end, I grabbed a few honey packets to go with my tea. Well, one of them was for my tea. Then we found a table to sit at.
“So how did you get into this line of work?” Vivian asked after a minute.
“I’m still not comfortable giving you too much information about me,” I admitted.
“Ok, then what is the information you seek?” She asked, exasperated, as she stacked meat and cheese on a large cracker.
“Mary Wright,” I told her, “Murdered in Las Vegas, about eighty years ago.”
“Eighty… wait, is that your mother?”
“Yes.”
“You said you wanted to keep your personal life close, but you just gave it away,” Vivian said, surprised.
“He’s a dumbass,” an incorporeal voice said, somewhere near my left ear canal.
“She was murdered by Enforcers for the Council of Mages. I want to know who did it and I want to know why. I spent my childhood hunted by you people, and I have no idea what we ever did. If you’re really on the up and up, you’ll understand why I want to know what my family did that deserved my mother’s death.”
I tried not to spit the words out, but I hadn’t spoken to an Enforcer willingly most of my life. To admit this to one was stretching the limits of my self control.
“I don’t know that case specifically, but I can look it up. Can I reach you at the number you called me from?”
“Yes,” I told her and dug into the food, even though I wasn’t hungry any longer. I set the small plate to my left a little bit and was amused as a grape was lifted into the air by invisible hands and was gone in seconds. Then another one was lifted to repeat that.
“Where does she fit it all?” Vivian asked, making loud the question I didn’t dare ask. Her question didn’t seem to need an answer, so I didn’t say anything.
I heard a huff and another grape was lifted, and then I started working on my own food again. I ate in silence and wondered if I was about to get the answers I had been looking for, after a lifetime’s worth of running and hiding. Was this all a big misunderstanding? I mean, if Vivian wanted to stun me, wait for the time lock to end and then gate me back to her headquarters, she could, in theory, try that. She hadn’t so far. If she hadn’t by the time I left Vegas, it’d be telling. But what would it be telling me?
When I had ten minutes left on the time lock, I excused myself and headed to the bathroom. She had to have known it was coming and I really didn’t care if she knew where I lived, because she couldn’t get to me without losing an entire strike force, unless they nuked me and then came for me… but I didn’t like to think about that…
I was stepping through the gate when somebody opened the bathroom door behind me. I heard Vivian’s voice and smiled as I stepped through and closed the gate behind me. I checked my watch. Nine minutes. I walked over to the cabin and unlocked the front door and went inside. After opening the vault, I locked it back up and fired up my monitoring systems. Nobody was coming down the gravel road that ran between mine and Cindy’s houses. I changed the camera angle and grinned.
I could see the bare plywood on the roof of the trapper’s shack and I zoomed the camera in to see that a shirtless JJ was up there, stapling tarpaper on, a line of packages of shingles near the peak. One thing about having a Were around, they were inhumanly strong. He’d have the roof completely torn off and replaced today. If he finished that, the facia was another matter altogether. I pulled my phone out and hooked it up to the computer. I didn’t need to have it on to pull the images off the SD drive the camera used, and soon I was looking at that soul trap rune in high definition.
“Hey, boss, about those honey packets…?”
I had forgotten about Rose. I pulled the three remaining packets of honey out of my right jacket pocket and dropped them on the table.
“If you need me, just give a whistle,” she said, taking them in her arms, and was gone in a poof of purple smoke.
“Damned junky,” I murmured, and started searching the web for the rune.
Chapter Eight
I’d been avoiding the magical world for so long, that it was second nature for me to keep doing it. I’d checked in with Jeremiah, but he was out hunting. Rose was around, but when I told her I was heading into Sandy, Utah, she made a ‘meh’ sound and waved at me. I grinned. I didn’t think she’d want to go where I was headed anyways. See, Sandy is just outside of Salt Lake City. Lots of concrete, not a lot of forest, flowers, grass, or anything green for that matter.
It was perfect for what I wanted though, or rather, for who was there and who was going to be there. I�
��d gotten a text message from Vivian’s mundane assistant to meet me there for information. I knew it seemed a waste to have a human there, but the only way for mages to use technology was for them to either be technomages, or have a mundane do it… or be me. Stunted in magic. I’d spent the last couple days recharging my gate charms and, for this trip, I went out with both pistols, along with my Gerber. It was cool outside with the clouds rolling in, so instead of my insulated flannel, which was ok for the country, I wore a fleece lined denim jacket and a white cowboy hat.
The drive on a normal day was about forty-five minutes and traffic seemed light. I was wary, because asking to meet me somewhere where I didn’t have oodles of explosives just screamed trap to me, so I’d called ahead and made sure I had a friend there as backup.
I pulled into the dive bar called Boondockers, barely after noon. It took me a few seconds for my eyes to adjust and I walked up to the bar when I was sure I wasn’t going to trip over somebody. The woodwork and dim lighting didn’t make it easy, but this was a place I knew well and I loved the stuffed mounts on the walls and the way the bar was real lacquered teak.
I grinned when I recognized the Native American woman on the barstool at the bar. She was dressed much like I’d seen her before. A loose fitting button up flannel shirt was left untucked over blue jeans. She was wearing a straw cowboy hat with her black hair falling down her back.
“Yolanda?” I asked and she spun, a grin on her face.
“Carl said to tell you that he appreciates you taking the young pup in. He couldn’t say anything in front of the others. Pack law, and all that macho bull.”
“He’s a good kid. Too much testosterone. I don’t know if he’ll stay with me long though.”
“Oh?”
“He doesn’t have much land to hunt, plus, when he finally gets the urge to find a mate of his own…”
First Sight: The Rune Sight Chronicles Page 7
