Ritual Magic

TWENTY-TWO

LILY grinned as she pulled her lunch sack out of the fridge. Workers’ comp for werewolves. Rule hadn’t understood why she found that so funny. It was state law, he’d pointed out. He’d explained—in rather more detail than she required—how he’d been able to pool that obligation with Nokolai, who already self-insured their workers’ comp. “Self-insuring is a better deal than buying it elsewhere,” he’d assured her.

Lily believed him about that. She believed him when he said Leidolf could afford the guards, too. She still started taking her lunch. She had a mortgage now. Saving a little money couldn’t hurt. Besides, as she’d told Rule, it also saved time.

The break room was just across from the conference room. Lily pushed open the door to the conference room. Cynna was telling Cullen how she intended to use the fillings. He nodded and said something about the rashies—at least, that was what it sound like. It was probably Sanskrit or something. Then he looked over at her with sudden interest. “Roast?”

“I don’t know.” She set the insulated bag on the table and popped the tab on her Diet Coke.

“Roast,” he said with certainty. No doubt his nose had informed him of this. “Have any extra?”

“Undoubtedly. Either Rule told the Kitchen Carls to double my portions or—”

Cynna hooted. “Kitchen Carls? As in Isen’s houseman, Carl?”

Lily nodded and opened the bag. Sure enough, there were two fat sandwiches, two apples, and a baggie with a half dozen cookies. Lupi just couldn’t get their minds around the idea that a single sandwich could be a meal. “That’s what I call whoever has kitchen duty. They always put in way more than I can eat.” She took out one of the sandwiches and tossed it to Cullen.

He caught it, sniffed. “This has a mother lode of pickles.”

“I like pickles. Want some cookies, Cynna?”

“No, thanks. I thought you didn’t have a kitchen yet.”

“Rule and I don’t, but the guards do.” Their new property consisted of the house, several acres of land, and a barracks that had been a cheap motel in a former life, then sat derelict for several years. It had been renovated before the house. Friar wanted them dead and he was tenacious about it, so Rule wouldn’t move into their new home until he could house his men. As a result, the barracks had a working kitchen. The guards rotated cooking chores among themselves.

“They were already sending over supper most nights,” Lily said, sitting down and unwrapping her sandwich. “And they buy in bulk to save money, so when I decided to start packing a lunch, I asked Scott to add a few things to the grocery list for my lunches and let me know how much I owed. He agreed. Early the next morning that week’s Kitchen Carl sent me a packed lunch. They’ve been doing that ever since.” She snorted. “And they’re all remarkably bad at numbers. Not a one of them can figure out how much I owe for my share of the groceries. I finally quit asking.”

Pot roast, she discovered when she took a bite. With butter pickles. Yum. She swallowed and chugged down some Diet Coke. “What did you learn from the crime scene pics?”

“The sigil on his chest looks like a sidhe rune.”

Lily didn’t quite spit out her Coke. “God, no. Not another evil elf.”

“Probably not. Not many in our realm know sidhe runes, but they aren’t completely unknown, either. I’ll need to check my source materials to be sure, but I thought I recognized a couple of the runes drawn inside the circle, too. They look more like ancient Sumerian.”

Lily’s eyebrows went up. “Someone’s blending disciplines, you think? I could send copies of the relevant photos to Fagin, see if he can ID them.” Dr. Xavier Fagin was the preeminent authority on pre-Purge magical history.

“Good idea. He’s got an impressive library still in spite of those assholes and their firebomb. Now tell me what you know about the ritual.”

Lily filled him in between bites, ending with their failure to identify the body they no longer had.

“Huh.” Cullen frowned. “Let me know when you get the labs back on those samples.”

He meant the samples taken from the substances used to draw the circle and the runes. “Okay. Keep in mind that the lab may not get consistent results. There wasn’t much magic left on—”

“I thought you said all the magic was gone.”

“The contagion was completely gone. There was still a tiny tingle of magic in the circle itself—about what I feel if I walk in Isen’s house barefoot.” Which was not, as she used to think, entirely from the traces of magic left on the floor by so many lupus feet. There was some kind of stealth node under the deck behind his house—one that didn’t give off the usual drifts of stray power that Cullen called sorceri. Whenever she asked Isen about it, he smiled and changed the subject. Isen could be really annoying sometimes. “And no, it didn’t feel like arguai. And no, I can’t describe the difference, but I can feel it.”

Cullen’s frown tightened a notch. “Describe the contagion again. Your experience of it.”

“Icky. Gooey. Like something that had been dead a long time and was soft with corruption. A lot like death magic, really, only mushier, and without the ground glass. And it moved. Maybe that’s why it seemed alive to me, as if it had intention. As if it really wanted to crawl all over me.”

“Huh.” He thought about that a moment. “Maggots?”

“What?”

“What was the movement like? Like maggots crawling around inside the corruption, or like the magic itself was in motion?”

She had to stop and think. “More like it was made up of maggots—soft, putrid, dead maggots that were still moving and wanted to get on me.”

“Now there’s an image I didn’t need to have in my head,” Cynna said.

“Tell me about it.” Cullen had fallen silent, as if she’d given him something to think about. She couldn’t imagine what. “Why did you want to know, Cullen?”

“Trying to figure out if something was moving the contagion or if it moved on its own.”

“Miriam thought I was projecting. She said the contagion couldn’t have intention.”

“Miriam lacks imagination sometimes,” he said absently, bending to pull a small spiral notebook out of Cynna’s purse. “If something’s never happened before, she thinks that means it can’t happen.”

Lily tended to think that, too, but she’d had enough evidence to the contrary in the past year to understand how wrong that was. “I figured you’d ask me about the body dissolving.” That being the spookiest thing she’d ever seen.

He didn’t answer, busy thumbing through his little notebook.

“How can you figure out if the contagion was moving on its own without looking at it?”

“I’m thinking. Stop talking to me.”

“See? Grumpy as a gorilla with a cold,” Cynna announced. “It won’t bother him if we talk because he won’t notice, and I want to know about the body dissolving.”

“It seemed to go through all the stages of decomposition, only on fast-forward. They ran some tests on the soil and found the kind of organic traces you’d expect to find in a burial site . . . about fifty years after the burial.”

Cynna’s forehead wrinkled. “Do you think it was a way of getting rid of the evidence? They couldn’t have expected the body to be found as soon as it was, so they could have done something to make it self-destruct. Not that I know of any way to do that, but it happened, so it’s possible. If Hardy hadn’t gone looking for the body—oh, that reminds me. I’ve got a message for you from him.”

Lily’s eyebrows shot up. “You do?”

“Isen wanted me and Cullen to meet Hardy, or for Hardy to meet us, or maybe he thought Hardy would talk me into staying at Clanhome. Or maybe, being Isen, he had something else in mind altogether. I went along with it because I was curious. I’ve never met a saint.”

“Do you think you have now?”

“I don’t know. I liked him, even though he’s got this way of looking at you as if he’s been reading your diary. Not that I’ve ever kept a diary, but . . . how do you know if someone’s a saint or not?”

Lily had no idea. “He seems to know things he shouldn’t. Not without getting tipped by, uh . . . someone or something. The question is what side is tipping him off.”

“Even people without magic can have visions. If drugs or magic aren’t involved, then spirit is. Would that mean he really is a saint?”

“It means that he had a valid warning for me once, so if he gave you a message for me, I’d probably better hear it.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Hardy kept singing ‘I’ll be calling you,’ emphasis on the ‘you,’ until I asked if he had a message for you. He nodded a lot, then he went like this.” She hummed the refrain from “Riders on the Storm,” then switched to singing, “‘There’s a killer on the road . . . da-da-da . . . squirming like a toad.’ Just like that, with some of the words left out.”

Lily huffed out a breath. “Unless he’s trying to warn me about a killer toad, I don’t get it.”

“Me, neither. Isen told him that probably wasn’t enough information to help, so . . .” Cynna launched into another song.

Lily stared. “The candy man? He’s warning me about killer toads and the candy man?”

“He added a few bars from something called ‘I Want Candy’ by the Strangeloves.”

“That can’t be a real band.”

“I never heard of them, but Isen has. I guess they’re an older band.”

Lily shook her head. “I suppose Hardy means well—saints have to mean well, right? But I don’t see how that helps. Unless he’s not a saint and is getting his information from the dark side of the Force, in which case he doesn’t mean well. And it still doesn’t help.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Cullen said.

Surprised—and too inured to Cullen’s habits to be any more than a little annoyed—Lily looked at him. He’d put away his little notebook. “Was that a general suggestion, or were you actually listening?”

“I meant,” Cullen said with exaggerated patience, “that of course the man’s a saint. Isn’t it obvious?”

“No. And you wouldn’t be my first choice for spotting holiness.”

“He made me want to squirm. Made both of you feel like that, too, didn’t he? When he looks at you, it’s like he’s shining a light right through to the back of your skull. Shine a light in a dark place and you get roaches scurrying for cover. We’d all rather think we weren’t full of roaches.” He raised his eyebrows. “What, did you think saints were supposed to make you feel good about yourselves? That’s Sesame Street’s job. Saints make people uncomfortable, which is why people usually kill them.”

After a moment Cynna said, “He has a point.”

It was more insight than Lily was used to from Cullen, and it made her uncomfortable. Kind of the way Hardy had. Which was practically proof Cullen was wrong, because she was abso-damn-lutely sure that Cullen Seaborne was no saint.

“What spell is Abel planning to use to reconstruct the runes?” Cullen asked.

“Something that requires an Earth witch. Beyond that, I have no idea.”

“Probably one of the variants on Cyffnid’s Dire,” Cynna said—which set her and Cullen to arguing in technobabble about the Law of This and the Quadrant of That and synchronicity. Lily tuned them out and thought about a saint who couldn’t talk. Was Hardy’s message supposed to be a warning? The “Riders on the Storm” made her think so, that being such an ominous song, but maybe it was intended as a clue about the killer. Or the victim’s identity? Maybe their victim had written the damn song back in his younger days. Hell, maybe he’d been the lead singer in The Strangeloves.

No, not that. Hardy communicated through song lyrics, not by playing some kind of music trivia game. So . . . assume it was a warning. What did he mean by singing about the candy man? Should she be on the alert for a Willy Wonka lookalike? If she spotted one, was he supposed to help, or was he the killer toad? Toad-on-the-road . . . roadkill. Candy roadkill. A smashed chocolate bar. Smashed into the shape of a toad. Don’t take candy from strangers, little girl . . .

The door swung open and Fielding entered, carrying a small plastic bag. “Here they are. What in the world are you going to do with them?”

“Cast spells,” Lily said, standing up and grabbing her Coke.

“Huh. You Unit people are weird. Can I watch?”

Lily exchanged a look with Cynna, who shrugged. “All right, on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You leave the iPod unplugged the rest of the day.”

CYNNA needed to go outside to set her circle, since she couldn’t draw on carpet. First Lily notified her guards. They—Santos, Joe, and Andy today—were waiting for her in the public reception area. They’d prefer to be a lot closer, but she’d tried bringing them into the offices once. Lily could have put up with the comments and funny looks she got for having bodyguards, but the men were just too much of a distraction. Because they were lupi, yes, but also because they weren’t FBI. Civilians aren’t supposed to hang around in law enforcement offices unless they’re witnesses or under arrest.

She notified Santos of where they were going and why. That was part of the deal, that she let them know if she was going to stick her nose out the door. Cullen had already headed for the conference room door; Lily, Fielding, and Cynna followed.

The Big A ran into them in the hall. “Fielding. Why don’t I have that wit report yet?”

“Uh—I thought, after making that mistake about Agent Yu’s Gift, I’d better learn more about how the Unit operates. I wanted to—”

Ackleford rolled his eyes. “Get me that wit report.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ackleford shoved open the men’s room door and went in.

Fielding said quickly, “I’ll be right out, okay? I’ve almost got the report done. I’ll be just a minute.”

“He’s eager,” Cynna commented.

“He’s new,” Lily said dryly. “He’s still trying to get on the Big A’s good side. He hasn’t figured out that the Big A doesn’t have a good side. Why do you need a circle?” She’d seen Cynna cast for a pattern plenty of times without setting a circle first.

“There’s a wee chance that if Miriam is able to banish the contagion from your officer, it will sort of rebound into the fillings.”

“Mind you,” Cullen put in, “it’s a very slim chance. The resonance would be very slight, considering how little the fillings had to do with generating the contagion and, I suspect, with containing it until it was called or decided to move out. If the—”

“Don’t explain.” Lily looked at Cynna as they turned into the hall that led to the stairs. They’d go out the back way, which was really on the side of the building, but everyone called it going out the back. “Is this going to be safe for you?”

“Ought to be. I’m not impervious to magic the way you are, but I’ve got pretty heavy-duty protections these days. And I set one hell of a circle. I won’t open the baggie until the circle’s set.”

Just how much power did Cynna have available as Rhej? She probably shouldn’t ask. Rhejes kept a lot of things secret. “How much power do you have now, anyway? On, say, a scale of one to dragon.”

Cynna grinned. “Less than Sam, certainly.”

She hadn’t said less than a dragon, but less than Sam, who was the oldest of the dragons, and presumably the most powerful. “Does that mean—”

“It means,” Cullen said, “that your question can’t be answered. In the first place, magic isn’t electricity. You can’t break it down into neat little quanta like ohms or volts or whatever. In the second place, the real question is how much power someone can safely handle. There are casters with minor Gifts who can cast quite powerful spells because they’ve mastered the use of external power. Abel Karonski, for one. Then there are people with powerful Gifts who can’t channel external power worth a damn. Like you.”

“But—”

“And then,” Cullen said as they reached the door to the stairs, “there are a few rare souls like me.” His grin flashed. He swung the door open with a flourish. “Strong as hell and masterful, too.”

“Not to mention pretty,” Cynna said, patting him on the cheek as she passed. “But not modest. Somehow he missed the modesty gene altogether.”

“I thought about adding modesty to all my other wonderful qualities, but decided it would be too much.”

“Couldn’t squeeze it in past your ego, you mean.”

Lily smiled, but she couldn’t help noting that, between the minilecture and the banter, Cullen and Cynna had done a fine job of changing the subject. Rhejes did get to have secrets, she reminded herself as she started down the stairs. But Cullen didn’t. “Why did you say I can’t channel? I can’t, of course, but doesn’t that go without saying with a Gift like mine? I can’t use magic, period.”

“You can’t use spells. You use magic all the freaking time. You soak it up, mostly unconsciously, but you’ve done it on purpose, too, though that nearly killed you precisely because you couldn’t dump it fast enough. I don’t understand why Sam hasn’t taught you how to avoid that.”

“Oh, gee, maybe it’s because I can’t do it.”

“You probably can’t learn to channel, but you can learn to get rid of excess magic. You already do, just not consciously.”

“No, I don’t.” Her Gift soaked up magic and made it hers, which was how she was able to read magic with a touch and why she couldn’t be affected by it. Throw a spell at her, and her Gift ate the power. And yes, like he said, she could use it to suck up magic on purpose, although doing so bothered her. But . . . “That’s why I can’t cast spells. You told me that yourself. To cast a spell you have to be able to use whatever magic you’ve got, you said, and mine isn’t available for that. My Gift hangs on to all the magic it absorbs.”

Cullen snorted. “Why is it that your brain works fine on other subjects, but not about your Gift? I said one of those things. The other is your unconsidered assumption. Think about it. Your capacity to absorb magic is not unlimited. Your experience with the Chimea proved that. So why didn’t you exceed your capacity years ago?”

Lily’s mouth opened . . . and closed again.

“You must be shedding excess magic somehow. I don’t know what the mechanism is, so I can’t teach you how to use it consciously. But Sam ought to be able to.”

Thoroughly uncomfortable and not sure why, Lily didn’t respond.

They’d reached the bottom of the stairs, which opened onto a short hall with locked doors on either side—one to the parking lot, the other to the rest of the building. Both doors required key cards; Lily moved to the front to use hers.

“Weird weather,” Lily said as she stepped outside. The air was heavy with moisture and smog. Humidity was always a surprise, and usually the wind off the ocean was a tidy and tireless housekeeper, sweeping the city’s air clean of man-made murk. The air was utterly still today.

A few steps out, Lily stopped and shook her head. “Cullen.”

The parking lot was deep but narrow, with a single central lane and parking slots arrayed along the federal building on one side and an insurance company on the other. The spaces were reserved for Bureau and ATF employees, and there weren’t enough of them. And smack-dab in ATF territory, occupying not one but two spaces, sat a black behemoth of a car. A glossy Lincoln Town Car, to be precise, with armored sides and bulletproof glass. Three less-than-glossy men lounged nearby.

“What?” Cullen said. “You don’t think Cynna should have bulletproof glass between her and possible snipers?”

“Using the tankmobile is a great idea. Parking it illegally, not so much. Isen would be pissed if it got towed.”

“You wouldn’t let them do that.”

“ATF is hugely unimpressed by me. If one of them sees it, they’ll have it towed before I can blink. Hi, José,” she said to one of the men near Isen’s tankmobile.

José had a quick, appealing smile. “It’s good to see you, Lily. Ah . . . Isen said I was to mention the chain-of-command issue.”

Lily looked at the other three men standing about ten feet away . . . Santos, Joe, and Andy. Her Leidolf guards. José and the guards with him were Nokolai. The two clans had been enemies for at least two hundred years. Rule was now Rho of one and Lu Nuncio of the other and was trying to mend that, but some habits were hard to break. At the moment no one looked hostile, perhaps because they were avoiding looking at each other at all. “Right. Santos.”

“Yes?”

“This is José”—she pointed—“and Casey and Steve. While we’re all together like this, José’s in charge.”

Santos’s dark eyes flickered with outrage. He glanced at José, who was a head shorter and about fifty pounds lighter. A decade older, too, but that didn’t show. His response was carefully courteous. “May I ask for your reasoning?”

“First, I’m not going to put you over someone who’s been subordinate to your boss, and Scott was under José in D.C. Second, I’m told you’re good. I believe it, but I know José better than I know you. I know what to expect, how he thinks, how he reacts when the shit hits the fan. That’s an edge I don’t intend to give up just to smooth your ruffled fur.”

Santos didn’t like it. That was obvious in the very blankness of his face, but he nodded.

She glanced at Joe and Andy. She didn’t expect any problems there. Santos was pricklier and more dominant than the other two. They each nodded.

Good enough. Lily turned to follow Cynna and Cullen, who’d headed about a third of the way down the parking lot, arguing cheerfully—something about a ley line. José gave low-voiced instructions for how the men should station themselves. Lily carefully did not check to make sure Santos and the others obeyed. That was José’s job.

“I still say you’re too close,” Cullen said to Cynna, “but have at it. Just because I was playing with ley lines before you were born doesn’t mean you should listen to me.”

“Glad you realize that.” Cynna set her tote down.

He looked at Lily. “José could kick Mr. Macho’s ass.”

“When they’re two-footed, yeah.” Two-footed wasn’t Santos’s best form for fighting, and Lily had seen José take down fighters who outweighed and outmuscled him every bit as much as Santos did. As a wolf, though, Santos was supposed to be one of the best. Lily had heard Benedict’s assessment: superb in wolf form and potentially excellent on two feet, though mishandled and mistrained. Currently a pain in the ass.

Santos had issues. A lot of issues. Rule hoped to reclaim him. He said that Victor, the previous Rho, had wanted to make a weapon of Santos, alternately petting and punishing, trying to obliterate the man’s sense of right and wrong so that the only “right” was Victor’s word. Victor had been a grade-A son of a bitch. “But Santos has to be able to take orders from people who can’t kick his ass. Me, for one.”

“True.”

The door into the building opened and Fielding hurried out. “Have you started?”

“Not yet. There won’t be much for you to see,” Lily warned him.

“More than I’ve seen until now,” he said as he moved to join them. He glanced around, obviously noting the guards. “What are they—”

“They’re my men,” Lily told him.

He grimaced, but didn’t comment out loud. Maybe he didn’t consider lupi men, or maybe he didn’t approve of her having bodyguards. Either way, he didn’t want to make her mad. He really wanted to watch the magic happen.

Cynna was drawing her circle with her special chalk, using a piece of string.

Fielding whispered, “Is it okay if we talk?”

“Sure,” Cullen said. Not whispering.

“Why the string?”

“Same reason you used a compass to draw a circle back in geometry class. Circles don’t have to be mathematically precise, but the cruder the circle, the more power is needed to close and maintain it.”

Cynna finished drawing, crouched, and touched the chalked line to set the circle. She moved to its center and opened the plastic baggie, shaking the fillings out into the palm of her hand. She spoke a Swahili word and made a quick gesture with her other hand. After that, nothing at all happened, to Lily’s eyes.

Or to Fielding’s. “What’s she doing?” he asked.

“Copying all the patterns imprinted on the gold,” Lily said.

“What exactly are these patterns?”

Lily gestured at Cullen. “You try. I don’t understand it myself.”

“You might think of patterns as words. Both are representations of something, not the thing itself. The analogy isn’t precise, of course. A word is like a basket that lets you carry the idea of the thing around. Patterns actually partake of the nature of the thing, which is why they’re so effective for all types of sympathetic magic.”

Fielding looked at Lily. “Do you understand what he just said?”

“Not really.”

Cullen sighed. “It’s magic.”

Fielding nodded, satisfied.

Cynna made another gesture and then just sat there with her eyes closed.

“Whatever patterns are,” Lily said quietly, “she’s doing the heavy lifting now. First she copied the patterns that relate to those two fillings. Now she has to get rid of everything that isn’t part of the pattern for the victim.”

“Huh.” Fielding thought about that a moment. “How does she know what to take out?”

Cullen took over again. “Part of it is plain old hard work and experience. Part is art. She’ll recognize some of the elements she wants to keep, like ‘human’ and ‘male,’ because she knows them pretty well. She’ll spot some that she wants to remove that way, too. But the art . . . that’s what makes her such a helluva Finder. She’s got a sense for how a pattern flows, what belongs, what doesn’t. She’ll know when she’s got something she can work with.”

Fielding smiled. “She’s your wife, right? I can tell you’re proud of her.”

“Pride would suggest I played some part in what she can do. I didn’t. In other areas, maybe—I’ve beaten a little theory into her thick skull—but not this. She’s just damn good with patterns.”

Lily smiled. Yeah, he was proud of her.

Now and then Cynna gestured or spoke in Swahili. Fielding began to fidget. He dug into one pocket and pulled out a crinkly cellophane bag. It rustled as he dug into it and popped something in his mouth. “Want some?” He held it out.

It was some kind of virulently green candy shaped like . . .

Cynna’s eyes opened. She dropped the fillings back in the bag, sealed it, stood, and stretched. “Well, I’ve got something, anyway.”

Lily grabbed the bag out of Fielding’s hand and held it up. It was full of frog-shaped gummies. Or maybe they were toads. Candy toads. The candy man can. There’s a killer on the road—

“Lily!” José called sharply. “Ten o’clock and twenty feet up! What the hell is that?”