As badass as Lysette was, nothing beats a team with strong unit integrity. Give me a team with mediocre skills but strong unit integrity over a gang of bickering superstars any day of the week.
Lysette’s skillset was off the charts, but I needed those skills working in tandem with the rest of us. Fortunately, two near-death experiences during the prison incident seemed to have driven home the point that she wasn’t as invincible as she appeared. During the last few months, she had started to come out of her shell in tiny degrees, first mostly by trading verbal jabs with Dread, then doing the same with Shifty, and then finally starting to help Mickey to find her fangs.
As far as her relationship with Jolly was concerned… that was another story. That man followed her around like a puppy. Smitten as a kitten. I still wasn’t sure how I was going to handle that in the long term.
“So you’re going to take her to Jolly?”
“Once they say she’s stable enough to move.”
“Okay. Call me once you’re there.”
The line clicked off. I’d barely gotten my phone back into my pocket before Dread started asking questions.
“Kel attacked the hospital?” he said.
“Yeah. Took Oswald.”
“Hmm. Guess I’m not the only one who didn’t like that guy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pretty big risk to go to that hospital to take him out,” he said. “She had to figure that at least a few cops would be there watching him.”
That was a pretty good point. But there was more, something more, something that I was missing. It tickled at the back of my mind, itched like a burr stuck under the clothing.
“Still,” Dread said. “He did work for the Cabal, and they’re apparently enemies, so I guess killing him must’ve seemed like tying up loose ends for her.”
Loose ends. That wasn’t it. Dread was off the mark, but I couldn’t quite sort out how.
“Took him,” I said.
“What?”
“She didn’t kill him. Lysette said Kel took him.”
“Took him, as in, took him prisoner?”
“Right.”
“Damn. Well, I’d say it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, but knowing what Kel is capable of, getting tortured to death by her is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, but my mind was far afield.
Dread was right about one thing. It was a big risk for Kel to go after Oswald. She’d put years of effort, and put herself in significant personal danger, to get her magical sphere into the country. Not only that, she’d exposed her identity in a big way with the massacre she’d caused back at the prison a few months ago.
That was a much bigger deal than it seemed at first glance. Kel had been flying under the radar for her entire life. Her entire life. Never once did she let anyone get a picture of her, or even get so much as a good look at her. Anyone she dealt with either ended up dead, had no idea who she was, or was equally motivated to stay out of sight.
And she’d given all that up… all of her carefully tended anonymity… for this; first, the attack on the prison, and now, whatever she was up to with this Intron Code at Revival Tech. What that told me was, whatever she was planning, it was on the scale of what most of us would call our life’s work. This was her masterpiece; at least, from her perspective. She wasn’t going to risk it all for some simple payback on a bit player.
Dread saw that my mind was spinning. “What are you thinking, Cass?”
“She didn’t take him for revenge,” I said. “Not with everything she’s got at stake.”
“Why, then?”
Images came back to me from the prison. Unpleasant images; Kel’s ghouls, holding me down on my knees, Kel herself gloating in front of me about how she was going to end me in the most horrible manner she had at her disposal.
“The dead hold no secrets from me,” I said.
“What?”
“Something Kel said to me back at the prison,” I said. “The dead hold no secrets from me. I speak to them as I’m speaking to you.”
“So… she can talk to dead people?”
Of course. Of course! How could I be so stupid? Why hadn’t I seen it sooner?
Oswald was a bit player, beneath Kel’s personal attention, except for the fact that he’d been working with Revival Tech for years. Specifically, working for them as a Defense mage, and as such, no doubt had all sorts of knowledge about the layout of their security measures, including what magical wards might be in place to hold back someone like Kel.
“Come on,” I said.
“Where are we going?” Dread asked.
“We have to talk to someone.”
“Cass.”
“What?”
He gave me one of those looks, the disapproving kind that usually meant we were about to have an argument. He’d been giving me a lot of those looks, lately.
“You want to talk to Adjani, don’t you?”
“No, what I want, is to beat the ever-living shit out of Adjani. But I’ll settle for talking to him.”
“You heard what Dennett said. We talk to Adjani, and it compromises the legal case against him.”
“Nobody wants to see that asshole burn more than me. After what he did to us? But this is bigger than whether or not Adjani gets everything that he’s got coming to him. Whatever Kel is planning…”
I stopped. Dread’s eyebrows were raised to full I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-hearing.
“What?” I said.
“No, nothing,” he said.
“What, I can’t set aside my personal feelings for the big picture?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Your eyebrows said it. They were raised so high, I thought they might pop right off the top of your head.”
He gave me that You’re Being Unreasonable look that always made me want to murder him, just a little bit.
“All I’m saying is,” he began, then stopped himself. “Hang on a second. How would Kel know where to look for Oswald in the first place?”
Dread had a point. How would she know that?
“Oh, shit,” I said, and dug my phone back out of my pocket.
“Who are you calling?”
“Local PD. By the park where Kel killed that family after the mall,” I said.
After going through the normal routine of having to identify my credentials, I asked the detective in charge of investigating the death of the family in the park if they had any officers who had gone missing.
“How’d you know about that?” he said.
“So you are missing an officer?”
“Yeah. We found his cruiser by the coroner’s office, but he’s nowhere to be found. Doesn’t respond to radio, cell, anything. How’d you know about that?”
“Call it a hunch,” I said.
The dead hold no secrets from me. I speak with them as I’m speaking with you.
“Well, did your hunch tell you about the coroner’s office, too?”
I frowned at that. “What are you talking about?”
“For starters, the coroner’s dead. Looks like he was torn up by wild animals. Two bodies are missing; the two from that crazy fiasco at the mall. And one of the county’s vans.”
Caleb and Martin. Kel had taken the bodies.
I wriggled out of my conversation with the detective and filled Dread on what he’d told me as soon as I hung up the phone.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “She wouldn’t need to interrogate them. They were on the same team, presumably anything they knew…”
Something clicked into place in my mind. “Remember Stephen?”
“Our Stephen, from Squad Four? Of course. I remember he betrayed us to Polonius back when this all started.”
“Yeah, he betrayed us, but more importantly, Stephen was far more powerful after he’d been Revived. He knew Tricks he’d never known before, and his abilities overall were…”
“…really ra
mped up,” Dread finished for me. “Damn. Kel wants to upgrade her troops.”
“Right,” I said. “And they were already no slouches to begin with.”
“This could get bad, Cass. I mean, really bad. Something big is coming.”
“Exactly. Do you still want to talk me out of interrogating Adjani?”
Dread cracked his knuckles audibly. It was a little habit he had, right before he would lift weights, or spar, or generally kick the shit of out of something.
“Hell, no. Let’s squeeze that little bastard until he pops.”
“Text Shifty. Tell him to stay in there and keep that Egghead guy and our bosses busy.”
“Right,” Dread said. “Wait… you call that FBI guy Egghead?”
“I mean, in my head, I do. Why, what do you call him?”
“Super Nerd. I like Egghead better, though.”
He started punching out the text with his over-sized fingers as we made our way to the interrogation room where Adjani was still being held. There wasn’t anybody else there… what few agents we had left were either stuck in that conference room with Egghead or otherwise occupied… so we were able to just walk in without any difficulty.
Adjani barely reacted when he saw us. The only acknowledgement that he recognized who we were was a tiny movement of his left eyebrow and an almost imperceptible snort of derision.
“You’re making this too easy,” he said.
“Is that so?” I asked.
“Yes. I am somewhat familiar with the legal system. Given our history, any attempts on your part to interrogate me will greatly undermine…”
Dread interrupted him by picking up Adjani’s chair… with him still in it… and slamming it on the floor as hard as he could. The chair’s wooden legs splintered underneath the little bastard, and he sprawled to the floor in a tangle of human legs and chair legs and terrified prisoner.
I don’t care how much ice water you have in your veins. When a mountain of muscle like Dread smashes apart a chair right out from underneath you, you’re going to shit in your pants. Metaphorically, if not literally.
Adjani was no exception. His cool façade cracked; maybe not completely, but he cringed and cowered and tried to cover his head with his hands, his eyes going wide. When his hands lowered, they were shaking visibly.
“Given our history,” I said, “I would think you would watch your fucking step with us.”
“You can’t do this,” he said.
His voice was shaking as much as his hands. After a glance at the two of us, and the hard looks on our faces, he started speaking to the one-way mirror covering the far wall of the interrogation room.
“You’re going to let her do this?” he said. “You’re going to let her ruin your case against me?”
“Nobody’s behind that mirror,” I said, leaning in close for emphasis. “Everybody’s off chasing your buddies. It’s just you, and me… and Dread.”
Dread flexed his arms hard, snapping the last bit of the chair in his hands into two pieces. That was the last straw for Adjani. Any vestiges of a cool demeanor fell away and his voice went from smooth and measured to quick and desperate.
“I saved… I saved your lives. Back at Revival Technologies. Back with Polonius.”
“You didn’t save shit,” Dread said.
“I did. I did. You were both dying, and our Healers kept you alive long enough…”
“Kept us alive long enough to make us think we’d been Revived, for your sick little experiment at the prison,” I said.
“Four months,” Dread said, poking Adjani with one of the broken chair legs. “For four months, I sat in a jail cell alone, every single day thinking that today might be the day I was going to lose my mind to Revival Psychosis. Your lies about our being Revived were the cause of that.”
“Not to mention the only reason we were in prison in the first place,” I said.
“I didn’t force you to try to bomb the building,” Adjani said. “You did that of your own free will.”
“Because you made us think that we were the walking dead,” I said. “Every Vive Job goes insane. Every one. We knew it better than anyone. So yeah, if you inflicted that on us, doomed us to certain insanity, you’d better believe we wanted payback.”
“The entire reason for the experiment was to try to determine the precise cause of Revival Psychosis. If we could…”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t care about your bullshit reasons. But you know what? As it turns out, this is your lucky day.”
Adjani looked from me to Dread, who was standing uncomfortably close to him, and said, “What do you mean?”
“What she means is, payback on you isn’t our priority today,” Dread said.
Now it was my turn to lean in close. “Maybe. Maybe it isn’t.”
“You… you want to know about Kel, and the Cabal.”
“No shit, Brainiac,” I said. “I want to know why Revival Tech is so interested in this sphere she’s created. I want to know what this Intron Code is you assholes were all talking about.”
“How do you…” Adjani began to say, then he stopped himself.
Know about the Intron Code, was what he was going to say. I’d forgotten who I was dealing with. Adjani might have been some sort of intellectual genius, and maybe he was ruthless in his own way, but he wasn’t a criminal in the classic sense, and so he wasn’t used to thinking like one.
The first thing an experienced street criminal would’ve asked after the mall fiasco went down, was this: how would the cops have known to be there? An informant, would be the obvious assumption, which would also lead to the assumption that someone at that table would have been wearing a wire.
But Adjani was used to his ivory tower, and used to having his little minions handle any dirty work out there in the real world, and so he was clueless as to what we might or might not know. That’s a huge advantage in an interrogation. It was time to pour it on.
“We already know it’s got something to do with genetics,” Dread said. “Introns being the non-coding bits of DNA.”
“Well, that’s correct,” Adjani said, looking a little surprised that Dread seemed to know what he was talking about. “In a given strand of DNA, portions of the strand will code for various amino acids…”
“We didn’t come in here for a biology lesson,” I said. “What’s the code? Some way to improve the Revival process? Keep people from going insane?”
“No, no,” he said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Revival. It has to do with…”
“With what?”
“Transformation.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Dread said. “Transformation? Into what?”
“Something more,” I said. He’d said those words back at their meeting at the mall, before everything came apart in a bloody tornado. You want to be something more.
“Yes,” Adjani said, as if he were happy that I understood where he was coming from.
“What does that mean?” Dread said.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to be something greater than what you are?” Adjani said, sneering at Dread over his glasses. “No. As dull as you are, probably not.”
“Watch it, beanpole. I still haven’t decided on whether or not to snap you in two.”
“It’s about power,” I said.
Again, Adjani seemed to be happy that at least someone in the room was on the same page that he was. “Yes. Yes. It’s about unlocking potential. We saw early on in our Revival research how those mages who were Revived ended up with significantly stronger abilities than while they were alive.”
“Yeah. We’ve seen that during our, uh, research as well,” Dread said. “Of course, our research isn’t done in a pristine lab with bunch of glass beakers. It’s done out there in the world, with guns and knives and the bodies of innocent civilians everywhere. Civilians you kill with your…”
“Dread,” I said, holding up a hand.
When Adjani spoke again, he spo
ke to me, as if thinking we were somehow on the same wavelength. As cliché as good cop, bad cop might seem, the truth of the matter is, it’s cliché because it works. So I let it work, and let him talk.
“Tell me you haven’t thought about it,” Adjani said. “Tell me, with all the years of watching what these mages can do, that you haven’t fantasized at least once about being able to do some of the extraordinary deeds that they can accomplish.”
Dread and I locked eyes for a second. As a matter of fact, I had. More than fantasized, really. While I was locked in a cell with Lysette back at the prison, I’d spent my time starting to learn the basics of Physical Magic.
Dread hadn’t been exactly thrilled to find out about that. Learning magic off the books, outside of any formal training… what we called a street mage… was seriously illegal.
Magic is dangerous. Not only in the splashy Striker Mage sense, with lightning bolts and exploding magespears… there’s plenty of Tricks that a mage could use to commit a crime and nobody would ever know the crime had happened. Imagine what a Mentalist like Mickey could do if they were off the books and, shall we say, morally flexible?
It could be something as innocuous as working as a car salesman and magically forcing someone to buy a car they never would’ve bought. It could get worse, like forcing someone to love you, or sign over their finances to you.
It could get homicidal. A high-end Mentalist might be able to put suicidal thoughts in your mind, suicidal thoughts you couldn’t suppress.
In any of those cases, without oversight, without control of access to that kind of power, there would be literally no way to know that the crime had ever occurred. Why would someone even think to suspect such a thing? People buy cars they can’t afford, fall in love with unlikely partners, and end their own lives all of the time. Nobody jumps to the conclusion of magical shenanigans.
So it was illegal for me to train in Physical Magic unregistered and off the books with Lysette. I’d done it more as something to pass the time, keep my mind occupied and off of my lousy situation; the reality was, to get any kind of real traction in Physical Magic, you had to start young, so I would never be able to progress very far with it.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 60
