by Shannon Page
He looked up at me, blinking rapidly. “Callie, what do we do? If this is true—and I can’t think of an innocent explanation, as much as I’ve tried—then he, I mean, he’s—” He bit his lip, unable to even finish the sentence.
So I said it for him. “Dr. Gregorio Andromedus, the leader of our Elders and the oldest and most powerful warlock in our community, is preying on all of us, and lying about it. And he’s probably been doing it for quite a long time.”
We sat there with that for a minute. Well, I let him sit there with it; it of course wasn’t the stunning, world-changing revelation for me that it was for him, just another brick in a really ugly wall.
Finally, he said, “We need more evidence. The other Elders and the rest of witchkind aren’t going to understand the science.”
“We need to find the missing subjects,” I said. And save them, if there’s still time, I didn’t need to add.
Sebastian nodded. “We have to go to Berkeley.”
I left a decoy of myself at my house, in case Gregorio was somehow still monitoring me. It wouldn’t stand up to deep scrutiny—it was just a ball of substrate, spelled to give my energetic signature—but behind my wards, it should give the impression that I was there, and sleeping.
After I was reasonably confident that it would hold, I took Rosemary to the coven house. My sisters were thrilled to have the opportunity to babysit. “I shouldn’t be very long,” I told Maela, “but I’ve expressed some milk just in case she gets hungry.”
She smiled and took the bottle, spelled to keep it body-warm and fresh. “Selfishly, I do hope you’re gone for hours,” she said, gazing down at Rose in her little carrier. “Even overnight.”
Behind her, Leonora smiled indulgently. “Do hurry back, though, Calendula. We don’t want to test your baby’s remarkable temperament. This may be what she needs in order to learn to cry.”
“Honestly, a little crying would be all right with me,” I told them, leaning down to kiss my child. “Just a little, though, sweetie. Understood?”
She blew spit bubbles and punched at me with her tiny fists.
Maela handed the milk bottle to Leonora and bent down to pick up the baby. “Oh, who’s the sweetest girl? So much fun we’re going to have!”
Back out on the sidewalk, Sebastian said, “Everything all right?”
“A-okay,” I told him, though it felt really weird to just walk away from her. Like I’d left an important limb behind, or something. “I just hope they let me have her back when we return.”
He chuckled as we headed for the major ley line leading across the bay.
We emerged in Oakland. Usually, of course, we’d have taken the line straight to the junk shop at the edge of the Berkeley campus, but that was guarded, and would be far too obvious. We stood at the edge of Jack London Square while I showed Sebastian how to use my cell phone to call for a car.
“Neat trick,” he said, as a nondescript beige sedan pulled up five minutes later.
“Humans have some uses,” I said, smiling.
We had the car leave us at the north end of campus. It was a little less crowded than the south side, though if Gregorio was watching, he’d be looking in all directions. Still, it felt more prudent.
After we turned past the pelican, I paused on the path beside North Gate Hall, looking around. Nobody was in sight. “Here,” I said, raising my hands. We built matching zones of inattention around each other—the thought being that the magical resonance would be stronger with our interlocking spells, rather than if we had each covered ourselves. Kind of the same theory behind Jeremy and me building house wards together.
“Well?” Sebastian said a moment later, stepping back. At least, I thought he stepped back, judging from the sound of his voice; my eyes couldn’t find him at all. I had trouble even forcing them to look for him.
“Pretty good,” I said. “What about me?”
“Not even a blip.” He coughed. “Of course…”
“Yeah,” I said. He didn’t have to finish the thought. We both knew that this was basically a party trick, a cheap piece of misdirection. If Gregorio were looking for us, he’d find us in a heartbeat.
What we had to do was not attract his attention in the first place.
I took a moment to check on my illusion, back across the bay at my house. Yes, it was still in place, and giving me a weird, giddy feeling of dissociation as it insisted that I was there, not here.
I brought my attention back to campus. “All right, let’s go.”
Sebastian and I walked carefully along the path between Davis and O’Brien Halls, taking care not to step on any crunchy leaves or brush any tree branches. A few humans passed us, their eyes flitting past us as though we weren’t there. One young woman glanced back over her shoulder, frowning, before turning back and walking on. I double-checked our spells. They were fully powered, covering us completely. Maybe the woman had been looking for something else.
As the Doe Library building came into view, I put a hand on where I thought Sebastian’s arm must be, missed it, and had to push my focus to find it. “Wait here a second,” I whispered.
I think he stopped. I took my hand away.
“Is he there right now?” I asked.
We both stared at the fourth floor of the building, where Gregorio’s hidden laboratory was. It was warded so tightly, we almost couldn’t aim our faces in that direction, but a little patience and persistence at least let us find the edges of the lab. More gentle probing revealed either no living beings inside…or someone so closely shielded that his presence wasn’t leaking through at all.
“Wow,” Sebastian whispered after a minute. “I gotta…” Then he went silent.
“Dude? You still there?”
“Callie,” he said with sudden urgency. “Look down.”
“What do you mean?” I wished I could see him. Was he pointing? Where was he looking?
“Down,” he hissed. “There’s a basement, under the library building. Look there—under where the first floor is.”
I followed what I thought he must be talking about. I hadn’t known the library had a basement, but it made sense. Decades earlier, the university had built underground stacks just below where we were standing to house its ever-growing collection of books without adding more tall buildings to the park-like campus. It would make sense that those stacks would be connected to the main building by a passageway of some kind.
But that’s not what he was talking about. Because when I turned my attention to the area beneath the corner housing Gregorio’s lab, I saw an ancient, abandoned warren of rooms and corridors. And not just that, but it was riddled with magical obscurations. “Oh…”
“There,” Sebastian said. “We have to look there.”
Now came the moment I’d been dreading. I had already known that Gregorio used storage rooms that weren’t on the same floor as his lab. He’d never let me go there, and I thought now I knew why. “I want to go in alone.”
“What?” I could tell from his voice that he’d turned to face me. “Callie, why?”
“A couple reasons. I need you out here keeping watch. If it’s a trap, one of us needs to be free to go for help.” These were both pathetic excuses, but I hoped he’d go for them.
“No way,” he said. “That means I should go in and you should keep watch. You’ve got a newborn at home who needs you.”
“I’m stronger than you,” I argued. “I’ve been working with Gregorio longer than you have. I know much better what to look for. And I have a better chance of getting away with it.”
He sighed.
I went on, before he could muster another objection. “Besides, having a baby at home is actually an advantage. Gregorio won’t hurt or imprison a new mother, particularly not the mother of his own grandchild. Even if he’s lost all his moral sense, he wouldn’t do that to the community—he wouldn’t be able to get away with it. He wouldn’t take the chance.” I shut my mouth, hoping this was true. Because how the heck di
d I know what Gregorio would or wouldn’t dare to do at this point?
This was what I intended to find out. If I could just get into that basement.
“And finally,” I added, “I’m familiar with Gregorio’s door-wards and charms.”
“Hey, I am too, I work with him at the clinic.”
I shook my head, even if he couldn’t see it. “He’s just got something really basic at the clinic—he wants people to visit him there. Here, at the university? He’s got layers of charms and spells that go back decades. And I’ve been working with them almost that long.”
Finally Sebastian sighed again, this time in clear defeat. “All right. You go in. But let’s make some ground rules.”
“I need just a few minutes,” I said. “Either the subjects are there or they aren’t; I’ll get out as soon as I see what’s there.”
“Of course, but I mean more specifically.”
We retreated back behind Evans Hall to plan. By the time we returned to the library building a few minutes later, I felt as prepared as I was going to get.
— CHAPTER THIRTEEN —
Keeping the zone of inattention comfortably around me, I walked up the steps to the library’s north entrance. I didn’t pause to admire the lovely lobby, just marched straight ahead through it, jogged left, and made my way into a narrower hallway. Once there, I turned again, heading for the ladies’ room.
As I put my hand on the bathroom door, I reached a toe to the very small ley line there and let myself drop down through to the basement floor. My nose tickled; I wondered if I was going to indulge in a fit of sneezing, as Elnor always did after ley line travel, but I managed to hold it together.
I stood there for a long moment, holding perfectly still, sending my senses carefully out to see if my arrival had been detected, by means magical or mundane. It seemed I was in luck: no alarms rang out, no hands fell upon me.
I wanted to send a ping out to Sebastian, to let him know I was in, but we’d agreed: no ætheric communication while I was inside, unless it was a call for help. We had no idea what Gregorio might be tracking. No sense taking unnecessary risks.
My eyes were adjusting to the dim space, lit only by the occasional dusty bulb. I looked around. It was a classic basement: a small room with low rafters, uneven concrete floor, piles of forgotten stored stuff…I almost expected to see half-empty paint cans stacked against the wall.
In any event, there was nothing suspicious here. None of this was Gregorio’s, or had any magical residue around it; this was clearly human library storage. But this was only the first room. The warlock’s space would be much better disguised.
I poked around anyway, to be absolutely sure, before making my way to the back of the room. There I found another door hidden in the gloom. With my hand on the knob, I sent my senses through but found nobody within. Then I tried to turn the handle. It was locked, but only physically; a simple spell undid it. The door creaked open, sending dust into the stale air.
I walked through into a narrow passageway with curved walls—an old steam tunnel, maybe?—one of the many we’d seen as we’d scanned the building from the lawn outside. It was similarly stacked with cartons and crates, heavy with dust and cobwebs, many not even labeled.
I opened each door I came to along the passageway, even after I noticed the glow of magical protection near the end of the corridor. Some rooms contained empty crucibles and bottles I recognized from the lab, and stacked cardboard boxes. It was clear he used this space.
Then I got to the last door. I stood there a moment an inch shy of touching it, mustering my courage and my strength before reaching out. The door tried to repel my hand, but I was ready for it. I drew on all my power, plus the power that Sebastian had loaned me, and I slowly, carefully unmade the spell on the door. I smiled as I worked. I’d been right about this, at least; this was the same charm that Gregorio had used a few years ago on the lab upstairs, with only a minor tweak to take advantage of the minerals in the walls around this room.
Once the spell unraveled and fell away, I opened the door…and gasped.
Bodies. Rows and rows of bodies, laid out neatly on little beds.
I shook my head and closed my eyes, but when I opened them, they were still there. The room was huge, cavernous—far larger than any of the other rooms had been. Impossibly large, to be under the building here; it occupied some fold of space, clearly, and I was focusing on the size of the space because the nature of it was still too horrible to contemplate…
It was kitted out as a creepy, dark mockery of a hospital or research facility. Peculiar lab equipment—stuff even I didn’t recognize, couldn’t identify—lined the walls, with some pieces hulking here and there in the middle of the floor.
I swallowed, bracing myself yet again, and stepped into the room. I barely gave the equipment a glance. Because…the bodies.
Dozens of sterile cot-like beds, containing dozens of lifeless bodies.
My heart pounding, I just stood in the room for a minute, trying to regain my equilibrium. Making sure I wasn’t going to faint. Then I walked farther in, approaching the closest body. It was a young witch, someone I didn’t know, entirely drained of essence. And yet, like Logan had been, she looked as though she had perished a moment ago.
Oh, Blessed Mother…
I walked slowly through the room, looking at them all, my brain refusing to take it in. I saw mostly witches, mostly young, but I also saw warlocks and a few older witches. Every one of them in this weird, undecayed state. More than dozens—nearly a hundred. Who were they all? Where had they come from?
How long had Gregorio been feasting on witchkind this way?
By the time I reached Logan’s body, I was pretty much expecting it. What did surprise me was finding the bodies of her parents lying beside hers.
“Logan…” I moaned, sinking to the floor at her feet. I wept there a while, stunned, bewildered, and grief-stricken. She looked so much more dead here than she had in Leonora’s office. So much more…victimized.
I forced myself to stop sobbing; my time here was limited. I’d found what I needed to find, and now I had to get out, back to Sebastian, to make a plan…
I got back to my feet and gazed down at Logan. My best friend. She still had that almost dewy blush of color in her cheeks, nearly a droplet of moisture at the corner of one eye.
Could she really be dead?
What did death mean, when something held the body in this bizarre stasis?
Magic could do so much, I knew that. But magic could not stop the progression of time, could not halt the flow of all things. Bodies died; spirits left them, and the dead meat decayed, returned to the earth, providing nourishment for the living. The cycle continued.
But her spirit had never entered the Beyond. Nor had those of her parents. And they looked as undecayed as she did.
Everyone did. It was a roomful of nightmare Sleeping Beauties.
Were all their spirits still here, somehow, somewhere, in these bodies?
Bending over Logan, I examined her again, though I had done this so many times before. Putting one hand on her forehead and the other over her heart, I probed and delved and scryed and insinuated my senses down through every cell in her body.
She was not there.
I withdrew my hands after a long time and just stood there. Then I moved to her mother—gone these many decades, yet looking ready to draw a breath. I put my hands on her as well and searched just as thoroughly, though I knew I would find nothing. And I did not. Lorenna was as empty as her daughter.
These vessels were all empty—a ghastly room full of them. Where were their souls?
I had to find them.
I walked slowly back toward the door, past the still, silent not-corpses. I glanced at the weird machinery as I passed. If I had more time, if I felt it was safe, I’d examine them, try to figure out their use, but—
Something caught my eye on one of the machines. It was a tall, narrow mechanism with a bell jar at the
top, empty, at least apparently. The bell jar led to a funnel that pointed straight up. The device was near the door, and it wasn’t nearly as dusty as a lot of the other machinery. I could almost taste the magical resonance it emitted; it had been used recently.
But it was the sign at its base that snagged my attention.
GRAND LAUREL MERENOC
ENCHIN ABERRA
ZCHELLENIN
Zchellenin. The town in the Old Country where Logan’s parents were from.
Not only that, but half the words were in the language of spells.
This machine…
I hurried around the room, now looking at the other unfamiliar devices, brushing dust and cobwebs off their signs and labels when I could find them. They all had the same first and third lines; only the middle line differed. Enchin was a borrowed word from the English “engine”; aberra was not a word I knew, but it modified enchin on the first machine. A few of the other devices also had enchin in their names, but there were at least four other nouns.
None of these devices made any sense to me. And I’d been doing complex biological research for decades.
“I have to go to the Old Country,” I whispered.
It was all I could do not to rush outside. I forced myself to move as carefully as I’d come in, relocking the door behind me, resetting the spell, picking my way through the hallway, floating up the tiny ley line to the library’s first floor, walking calmly out of the building. I held the zone of inattention tight as I walked across the lawn toward where Sebastian had promised to wait, though of course I couldn’t see him there.
“Hey,” I whispered, to what might be a shimmer in the air.
“Callie!” he whisper-shrieked. “Oh, Great Father, are you really there?!”
“Yes, jeez,” I said. “And I’m fine. Come on.”
I walked back toward the edge of campus, trusting him to follow. “You were in there forever,” he muttered as we rounded O’Brien Hall.
