Best learn some manners while I wait, blondie.
If he weren’t a thaumaturge, James would not drive vintage cars. There was a stately elegance to them that could not be matched, but they were finicky and prone to breaking down.
Since he was a thaumaturge, however, he had all of the skills necessary to keep rust from accumulating and parts from breaking. As with most thaumaturgical skills, it took less magic the more you knew about the subject. A luck spell on an entire engine would quickly drain power; very targeted spells regarding certain chemical reactions and heat distribution points achieved a smoother result with less of a draw.
All of which meant James could take a road trip of any length in his Phantom in unsurpassed comfort without worry that any pieces of the car would break.
He was going to squeeze as much enjoyment out of this trip as possible.
Mother LeBlanc had her own worries. “Don’t you think it will attract a great deal of attention to travel in such a luxurious vehicle?” she inquired when she first saw it.
“Probably,” James said cheerfully.
“All of a sudden, reports of strange occurrences begin,” she said. “Then a vintage car with northern plates appears, and someone from the town disappears.”
“You make us sound like serial killers.”
“More importantly, like people who end up on the radar of intelligence agencies,” she said severely as he loaded their suitcases into the trunk.
“You’re no fun, you know.” James went to hold her door open.
She did not immediately move to get into the car. “James, surely I do not need to explain my reasoning?”
“Of course not.” James nodded. “At the first sign of undue interest, we will find a place to store the car and continue on in something unremarkable. A station wagon, perhaps.” He shuddered.
She smiled as she got into the Rolls. “I don’t think we need to go quite that far.”
They set out as the sun was near its peak, and James took a few moments to study the house in the rearview mirror as it curved out of sight amongst the hills and trees. Like many old houses, it lay at the end of a long driveway, far from the road…and difficult to navigate in the snow or rain.
When it came to avoiding attention, every little bit helped.
Their first stop would be Charleston. While James was surprised not to see any lights in New York City—the sheer number of people suggested that someone qualified would be there—he was looking forward to a leisurely drive down the coast. He intended to cut over south of Philadelphia and go through Delaware, rather than taking the more utilitarian drive down Route 95.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to do a proper stop in New Orleans?” he asked Mother LeBlanc.
“If the candidates remain, we certainly should.” She nodded at him.
“No, I mean a proper stop. Not business.” He gave her a smile. “I’ve never been.”
“And?”
He looked at her. “And what?”
“There’s something more behind your question.” She was smiling at him.
“And I’d like to know more about you,” he told her honestly.
“I do not think you will learn as much as you hope,” she told him with a smile. “The city hides many more secrets than even I know. That is one of its charms.”
He accelerated onto the highway and gave a contented smile. This car drove like a dream.
He spent a moment enjoying it before returning to the subject at hand. “Why did you come north?”
She did not respond at once. Then she asked, “Why did you leave the city?”
“To be honest, I appreciated the solitude.” He occasionally missed things about New York City, but its frenetic pace exhausted him. “I’m much more suited to being a hermit than a businessman, and I appreciated the slower scale of the workings we do.”
She absorbed that with interest. “Interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
“Strange, how many years you can live in close proximity to someone and not learn the details of their life.”
“Strange, indeed. And to answer your question, I left because magic in the bayou is a solitary thing. One is not shown the way or even the path. I came to magic on my own, making sense of a question in my soul, but I was not content to practice it alone.”
James, who had always thought of her as very solitary, began to wonder if he had misunderstood her all these years.
“In a sense, I suppose I always expected to leave,” she said after a moment. “Just not to go quite so far.”
“And now you want to help others find their way instead of making them go it alone,” James said quietly.
“Yes.” The word was simple.
“And if the ones we find aren’t good candidates?” James had been turning the possibility over in his head.
“Then nothing is lost, and the world is a bit safer.”
Magical explosions were rare and often explained away by earthquakes or gas leaks or strange malfunctions in equipment, a symptom of aether destabilizing around an individual. It was not uncommon that stronger thaumaturges would begin to destabilize as they delved too far into their power, necessitating a memory wipe and a power block.
Such measures were both essential and painful for those who carried them out.
“Do not borrow trouble, James,” he murmured to himself.
“Hmm?” LeBlanc glanced at him.
“Something my grandmother used to say: don’t borrow trouble.”
“A wise woman.” She settled back in her seat. “Let us enjoy the drive.”
While Sven and Johnny worked the streets and bars, Pauline was working the networks that held the up-and-comers, the most successful in the city. She smiled, laughed, shook hands, hugged people, and kissed them on the cheek as needed. In all things, she was pleasant and unremarkable. Everyone might know her face, but it was her goal that once this city was hers, people would not know she ran it. She would still be one of them, mingling and hearing their opinions.
They would know she supplied them with the things they wanted, but they would never realize that she used that to guide them.
The party—or networking event, as the hosts preferred to call it—was mostly confined to the first floor of the house. A few people had drifted out into the gardens, though the night was chilly enough that they came back in before long. The upper floors were off-limits aside from a carefully marked stairway path leading to a spare bathroom.
Pauline had noted this with approval when she’d first arrived; keeping everyone together would make it easier to work the crowd. The hosts knew she was involved in something less than legal, and her invitation meant she had their approval to cultivate relationships with those here.
And she did, shaking hands and introducing herself as well as letting others introduce her to their friends, or letting those friends find her on their own. Many were reckless, but some were nervous, afraid of their own curiosity.
Pauline had streamlined her process. They had already made their decision before they came to her, and all that remained was to remove the obstacles in their way. She listened to them, and she steadied them when they were nervous. In some cases, she slipped small packets into their grip while shaking their hands, and in other cases, she dropped merchandise into their pockets during hugs. She savored their grateful glances. They wanted her. They needed what she could do for them.
Once she’d made the rounds and relieved herself of the supply she’d brought, Pauline slipped away from the main crowd into a pleasantly cozy little alcove where a couple of faux-Greek busts looked down from a banister draped with ivy. She pulled out her phone.
The banking app she used was exceedingly good at updating its information within a single minute of any changes to her account. Reviewing the details of her balance, she nodded with approval. Everyone had paid her.
Save one.
She was patient. She took the moment to clear her mind and relax while she counted to sixty in
her head and refreshed the app.
Nothing.
The delinquent individual’s name was Darius Landham, and Pauline found him after a short scan of the main crowd. He was loitering in one of the corners, chatting up a curvy, naïve-looking girl.
Likely, he was distracted instead of intending to default, so there was no need for unpleasantness, just a reminder. Pauline carried that certainty with her as she moved toward him. She walked with a steady, deliberate stride, different from her movements during other parts of this party.
She knew the angle of approach that tended to catch someone’s eye, and it wasn’t long before his gaze flicked up to assess what he was seeing.
The look on his face said it all. From the sudden wary shift in the eyes to the way his breathing paused, it was clear that he realized the mistake he had made.
He coughed, cleared his throat, and nodded to the girl. “Excuse me a sec.” Then he turned away from her and pulled out his phone, busily tapping the keys. When he pivoted back around, it was to give an almost imperceptible nod in Pauline’s direction. He resumed his potential conquest, but the tension remained in his shoulders.
Pauline slid into the shadows and checked her phone again. The final payment had come in, and her balance was what it should be. She smiled.
Her business concluded, she excused herself from the rest of the party. She had business at the office, after all. She would let the rest of the ones here enjoy their night, well-supplied with her goods.
They would be back for more.
Chapter Sixteen
Kera lay face-down in her bed. She was not asleep, but it would be ridiculous to say that she was fully conscious or functional.
“Oh, man,” she moaned, rubbing the side of her face and the back of her neck. “I should have taken up running marathons. I swear, that would be a less-painful day-after than this is.” She sat up and rubbed her forehead, where she could feel either the beginning or the end of a massive headache.
She could only hope it was the end.
She stumbled to the coffee maker and prepared a pot of extremely strong coffee, and returned to bed as it brewed.
The floor beside the bed was strewn with notebooks. She had ordered a batch of them rush-shipped, and it looked as if she had filled over half of them already. She flipped through the pages, some spotted with water or vaguely singed, her writing growing neater or more of a scrawl by turns. Some of the notes were to remind her of things that had happened recently or could not be ignored, mundane things.
Others had to do with the plethora of spells she’d tried out—specifically, which effects she needed to be most aware of. It was good information, just impossible to search through quickly. Even now that she was clear of the worst effects of the brain bleach spell, her practice was simply generating too much data for her to hold in her head at once.
She had thought this would be better than the sticky notes, but she was going to need another filing method. Something on her phone, perhaps, that she could search by keyword.
She definitely didn’t have the energy for that right now. At the moment, she had what felt like a bad sunburn on her shoulders and lower back. She had cast the strongest healing spell she could manage on herself before she fell asleep last night, but it hadn’t been enough. She’d just been so exhausted that she fell asleep anyway.
She sighed as she came to the relevant note, the final one from last night.
Do not perform the Firefly spell. It sets your ass on fire. Not fun.
The other fire spells had been relatively straightforward, more a matter of changing the type and intensity of fire than anything else.
Firefly was different.
“God, seriously?” she muttered. “What kind of sadistic prick puts spells in a book that noobs can use to make themselves burst into flames?”
Having achieved precisely that last night, she’d fallen to the floor and rolled around until the flames were extinguished.
After that, she’d been done for the night.
She went to get a cup of coffee and returned to bed to read more carefully through the night’s notes.
Once she’d achieved basic competence, she’d branched out into new types of spells. The one that created a dazzling cascade of colored lights was interesting, though probably not useful as anything except a parlor trick. Maybe a diversion if she ever needed to sneak around. Still, on the plus side, it had been one of the few spells that hadn’t come with any adverse side effects or potential hazards.
Another spell created a miniature cacophony of animal sounds that always seemed to be just around the corner, stomping and scratching and snorting as anyone nearby struggled to figure out where they were but never found them. When Kera had tried it, it had lasted for about five minutes and spooked the hell out of her, despite the fact that she knew it was fake. She could only imagine the effect it would have on someone who was unprepared.
Perhaps the most useful one, though, was a minor enchantment whose effects could be best described as bolstering one’s luck.
After reciting the incantation and performing the necessary hand gestures and so forth, Kera had found herself swelling with manic confidence, under which lay a sense that things would work well. To test it, she’d flipped a coin, picking heads each time.
She’d ended up getting heads on seventeen out of twenty tosses. Technically, that was possible according to normal odds, but it was not very likely.
She’d then conducted a further test by throwing a glass filled with water into the air and trying to catch it at an awkward angle. Somehow, her hand had grasped it perfectly before it could slip away and strike the floor, though part of the water had sloshed out.
She wondered, though, if the spell might have nasty side effects like most of the others. Perhaps it would make her overconfident in situations where the odds were already so terrible that the spell only boosted her up to having a one in five chance or something like that.
Approximately a third of them didn’t produce any effects, something she suspected was a personal failure. She seemed to have a knack for magic, or thaumaturgy, as the book sometimes referred to it, but she was still a novice. They might be worth a try again later.
Of course, given that she kept expecting to wake up from this dream in which magic was real, maybe she wouldn’t get the chance. Her eyes strayed to the phone on her bedside table. She hadn’t told anyone what was going on, though it was a constant struggle not to call someone—anyone—and spill the whole story.
If a bartender does magic alone in her apartment and no one sees it…
By this point, it was very clear that this was real and not a delusion, but she didn’t know how to process that. How could it be that magic existed and no one knew about it? How had she stumbled across the book on Amazon?
Could anyone else see it?
Or was that the “special genetics” her mother had always talked about? Kera laughed and shook her head. There was no way in hell her mother, she of the white-collar job recommendations, would ever believe magic was real.
The pain in her shoulders brought her back to the present. A deep breath escaped her lungs, and she willed away the burning sting. It wasn’t as bad as it had been earlier.
Once her brain had caught up to where she was now and she’d admitted that she was feeling marginally better, she concluded that the apartment needed to be cleaned the hell up and that she needed some food.
Apparently, magic did not help with chores.
Grumbling to no one in particular that it was probably better than getting hit on at work, Kera plunged straight into the tedium of picking up the piles of clothes and minor trash lying around, cleaning up the burnt detritus and smashed object shards left over from her magical experiments, wiping down the major surfaces, and sweeping the floor.
It only took about forty minutes to get things back to an acceptable level of order and decency, by which time the skin on her back was noticeably better. “There,” she muttered, wipin
g her hands against one another.
She looked for her tablet, which she’d tossed on her bed. Annoyingly, a red light indicated that it was almost out of juice.
Sighing, she plugged it into the wall outlet and sat within charging-cable range while pulling up the web page for How to Be a Badass Witch. A couple of quick taps and swipes, and the paperback copy was on its way to her doorstep.
“Eat that, you POS,” she told the tablet. “As of tomorrow, I won’t have to deal with your high-maintenance crap anymore.”
It would probably be easier to annotate, too. As Kera stretched, a vague rumble in her stomach reminded her that she planned to eat now that she was done cleaning. There was a good Chinese place only about ten minutes away on foot, and she could use the exercise and fresh air.
To the extent that LA’s air could be considered fresh, of course.
Her stomach wanted her to go immediately, but a quick look in the mirror told her that wasn’t a wise idea. She hopped in the shower, not bothering to wash her hair or do anything else that might take too much time, then put on fresh clothes and fished out her phone. One brief call later, the restaurant’s proprietors were preparing her Mongolian beef and vegetables, as well as two egg rolls and an order of crab rangoon. She glanced out the window to check the weather. Slightly gray out, but no sign of rain.
“Good.”
The girl tucked her hair into a black baseball cap. It would provide her with some protection if it did start to rain, and, of course, blondes were very much a minority in the City of Angels these days, so she preferred not to draw undue attention while she was on run-of-the-mill errands. The fact that the Firefly spell had burnt the ends into an irregular mess didn’t help, either.
She also made sure to wear a shirt with full shoulders that would cover the lingering burns from her little foray into incendiary magic.
Outside, the air was pleasantly mild. Winters in Southern California did not always have the sunlight that people associated with the region, but the middling temperatures were, in Kera’s opinion, pretty nice—a welcome contrast to the hundred-degree heat waves in the summer.
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