Ritual Magic

TWO

THE local cops arrived first—two patrol units that Lily put to work right away, herding the abundance of potential witnesses into separate groups. Her own people got there soon after. Ackleford came himself and brought three agents with him. The crime scene team, he said, was on the way.

Derwin Ackleford, aka the Big A, was the special agent in charge of the local office. His nickname did not refer to his size; he was five foot seven with an average build. Nor did it refer to his last name. Lily was convinced Ackleford had some sort of personality disorder. He was rude, crude, and hard to work with, and he always stank of cigarette smoke. He would never have risen to the position he held if he hadn’t also been damn good at his job. The Big Asshole was a workaholic—painstaking, methodical, yet capable of brilliant intuitive leaps at times.

Those leaps were probably due to the tiny trace of a patterning Gift he refused to acknowledge. Ackleford was regular FBI, not Unit, which meant Lily outranked him in the ways that counted, if not on the organizational chart. But the man had a second saving grace: all that mattered to him was the investigation. He didn’t give a damn who was in charge or who got credit. Or, as he’d put it the first time she’d had to work with him, “Every investigation’s got problems. It rains before you get the casts of the tire prints or some asshole in headquarters loses the goddamn form you sent or some idiot chick promoted way past her competence shows up and gets put in charge.” He’d shrugged. “Whatever.”

In spite of his drawbacks, she was glad to see Ackleford. She briefed him and the other agents quickly, finishing with, “We don’t know what we’re dealing with. What I need first is names and addresses from everyone present and a brief statement. You know the drill. We also need to know if anyone left before I got the place shut down. Two of you take the family; two take the employees. Employees are in the kitchen.” She nodded at the door to that region. “I’ll start on the other customers when I can.”

Ackleford looked skeptical. “You’re saying this was some kind of spell.”

“Maybe a spell, maybe something else, but magic is involved. For now, we will proceed on the assumption that what happened was intentional. A deliberate attack.”

“The victim’s your mother.”

“Yes.” Temper flared—but not, she realized, at Ackleford. Deep inside, rage had begun to burn.

“And your uncle owns the place.”

“‘Uncle’ is an honorific in this case. Chen Lin is my second cousin.” Ackleford would be thinking that the husband was the usual suspect, or the kids—people who might inherit or who’d been nursing a grievance. “Whoever did this was Gifted. Of those present at the party, only two have the potential to use magic: my grandmother, Li Lei Yu, and my cousin Lin’s husband, Mack Li. Oh, and one of the servers who waited on us has a slight empathic Gift, but it’s completely blocked. I doubt she could use it if her life depended on it.”

“What about your grandmother? What’s her Gift?”

“Unique to her, I believe, so it’s not named.”

“Huh. And your cousin’s husband?”

“A minor telekinetic Gift. Mack can’t bend a spoon, but he can nudge it a bit. To the best of my knowledge, however, he lacks any training in spellcraft.”

“You left yourself off the list.” That came from the newest agent at the office, a man Lily had met but hadn’t worked with. What was his name? Fields? No, Fielding. Carl Fielding. “You can work magic.”

“Idiots,” Ackleford muttered. “Why do they always send me idiots? She’s a touch sensitive,” he told the man. “Feels magic if it’s around, can’t be affected by it, can’t do shit with it herself. Go away. You and Brewer can make like you know how to interview witnesses.”

“Uh—do we take the family?”

“No.” Ackleford looked at Lily again, eyes narrowed. “Robert Friar’s got a major hard-on for you.”

And that was Ackleford. He’d earned his nickname of the Big Asshole, but he didn’t settle for the obvious if it didn’t fit. “I’d say he wants me dead, but dead probably isn’t good enough. So yes, it’s possible he’s involved, but we’ve nothing to connect him at this time. I’d like you to double up on interviewing the family so we can release them as soon as possible.”

Ackleford grunted. “Who’s handling the woo-woo end of things?”

“I’ve got an expert headed here who can advise us on that.”

“That Seaborne guy or the chick with the tattoos or the one with all that red hair?”

“The Seaborne guy. The family is in the small private dining room. I moved them from the larger room, where we—they—were eating. It’s—”

“Lily!”

She turned. A tall, elegant woman strode toward her. She wore a simple blue sheath, low heels, and a determined expression.

“That one of your family?” Ackleford asked.

“My sister Susan. Susan Wong. She’s a doctor. She and Grandmother have been staying with . . . with the victim in the ladies’ room.”

“I need to transport my patient to the hospital,” Susan said crisply as soon as she reached Lily. “I’ve called an ambulance.”

A jolt of fear made Lily stiffen. “Is she—”

“No, no—there’s been no change. She’s not in physical distress, but we don’t know what was done to her. It was some kind of spell, wasn’t it?”

“Magic was involved.”

“It might have physical effects that haven’t shown up yet. She needs to be checked out.”

“Yeah, well, I need to talk to her first,” Ackleford said.

Susan turned a polite frown on him. “Who are you?”

“Special Agent Ackleford, ma’am.”

“Well, no one is interrogating my mother right now. She’s suffered serious trauma, and questions increase her distress, potentially deepening the trauma.”

“It’s a funny thing, but the FBI doesn’t let the victim’s family determine who we talk to and when.”

“In this case,” Lily said, “the family member is also the doctor in charge. She’s stated that the victim is not fit for questioning and is about to be taken to the hospital. Pretty clear rules about that. You might try to remember that I gave you an assignment.”

Ackleford rolled his eyes. “C’mon, Parker. Let’s get started.”

“Second door on the right,” Lily told him.

“Yeah, yeah. The one that’s not being secured by the uniforms. I might’ve figured that out all by myself.”

Ackleford stomped off. Rickie Parker—who was thoroughly female in spite of the nickname, which was short for Fredericka—gave Lily a single, sympathetic glance before following him.

“Who is he?” Susan asked, staring after them.

“He’s in charge of the Bureau’s office here. He is not, however, in charge of this investigation. He’ll forget that several more times before we’re through. Susan, how is she really doing?”

Susan sighed and looked tired and worried and not doctorish. “She needs a psychiatric evaluation.”

“She isn’t crazy!”

“We don’t know what she is at the moment. I wasn’t exaggerating about the trauma. Mentally, she’s twelve years old. She remembers nothing later than February twenty-fourth, 1968. At a minimum, we need to monitor her for shock and determine if medication will be helpful.”

Lily didn’t like it, but . . . “I won’t tell you how to do your job.”

“Good. Rule will have to go with her.”

“Rule? I mean, that’s okay, but I would have thought Grandmother or maybe Aunt Deborah—well, no, not her.” Deborah would be collapsed somewhere, sniffing damply. Aunt Deborah was as soft and huggable as a teddy bear, but she did not deal well with crises. “But Aunt Mequi—”

“Not Aunt Mequi,” Susan said grimly. “She insisted on coming in to talk to Mother, but when Mother saw her, she freaked. I think she recognized Mequi, but the sister she remembers is fifteen years old, not next door to sixty. Even Grandmother couldn’t get her calmed down. Rule did, though. He came right into the ladies’ room and let her grab hold of him while he patted her back, and she settled down. Only now she’s latched on to him like a toddler with a security blanket.”

“Then he’ll go with her. Have you called Beth?” Their youngest sister was in San Francisco. The day before the party, she’d claimed that a work emergency was keeping her from coming to San Diego. Lily suspected that Beth had decided the guilt involved with missing their mother’s birthday celebration would be easier to deal with than the furor if she showed up with her new boyfriend . . . Sean Friar. Robert Friar’s half brother.

“Dad did. She’ll be here sometime tomorrow.”

With or without Sean? Lily decided not to ask. She thought of someone else who had to be called. “What about Grandfather Lin?” Her mother’s father was not exactly an involved parent, but he had to be told.

“Grandmother called him.”

Lily’s eyebrows shot up. “She used the phone?”

“Weird, isn’t it? She demanded my phone and called him. He’s going to make an appearance, but not right away. He’s got some kind of important meeting.”

Lily grimaced. Typical. “How’s Dad holding up?”

“He’s quiet. Really quiet.”

Lily bit her lip and nodded. Edward Yu dealt with rough emotional waters by going silent. The quieter he got, the worse things were.

Susan sighed. “Thank God for Grandmother . . . and that’s not something I say every day. But no one else could’ve gotten Aunt Mequi out of there so quick. She sure wasn’t listening to me.”

When the restaurant doors swung open, both sisters turned to look. It was the CSI squad. “My people, not yours,” Lily said. “I have to go.”

“I need to get back to her anyway.”

“Over here,” Lily called. She wasn’t sure what good CSI would do. Magical evidence was hard for nulls to collect even if they could spot it, and it couldn’t be tested in a lab. Which reminded her that she needed to call Ruben. Cullen was good, the best, but the courts only accepted magical evidence from accredited covens, plus there were some spells that needed to be a group effort. She had to get the coven the Unit used out here, and she needed to report.

Lily pulled out her phone and moved toward the squad so she could tell them to hold off until her magical consultant checked the scene.

Ruben answered right away. While she briefed him, two more patrol cars arrived; she broke off to direct the officers to start getting names and addresses of the sixty-odd customers in the main dining room. The ambulance arrived just as she finished reporting.

“That does explain the disruption I felt in the probabilities,” Ruben said. “Which in turn suggests that Robert Friar may be involved.”

Ruben was an off-the-charts precog. Friar was an off-the-charts patterner. The two Gifts worked differently, but Ruben usually sensed it when Friar was manipulating the probabilities in a major way. “Does that translate into a hunch you can share?”

“I’m afraid not, but the level of perturbation suggests this event may have wider repercussions than is immediately apparent. Lily, I’m going to allow you to remain in charge for now because you’re on-scene, but you can’t keep the lead. Not when the victim is your mother.”

No. No, he was right. She was too damn angry. “I understand.”

“Ida will send the coven to you ASAP. I’m going to send Abel Karonski. He’s in Kansas City tying up the last dangling ends of a case, but that can be left to the junior agent he’s been training. He should be there tomorrow. I’ll have him contact you.”

“Okay.”

“I’m very sorry about your mother.”

The EMTs were wheeling an empty gurney across the dining room. “Yeah,” she said, her voice thick. “Me, too.”

She’d barely disconnected when her phone gave a drumroll. That was Cullen’s ring tone. She answered. “Yes.”

“I’m pulling into the parking lot now.”

“Good.” She glanced at her watch, frowned. Maybe thirty, thirty-five minutes had passed since Rule had called him. “How did you get here so fast?”

“Rule said to hurry. I need you to have a chat with the guy who pulled in behind me. Surly-looking fellow. He’s got a flashing red light on top of his car.”

The patrol officer did not want to leave Cullen free to wreak havoc on the streets of San Diego. At the very least, he wanted to explain to Lily in detail how many traffic violations Cullen had racked up. “Officer, you can hang around and write tickets for Mr. Seaborne all night if you like, but you will have to wait to deliver them. I need my consultant now. Cullen, come with me.”

As she turned and started for the front door of the Golden Dragon, she heard the officer mutter, “Goddamn feds.”

“Rule said your mother suffered some kind of magical attack,” Cullen said, keeping pace beside her. “What do you know?”

“Too damn little. She thinks she’s twelve years old and that today is February twenty-fourth, 1968. I confirmed that magic was involved, but it . . . no, I want to find out what you see before I tell you what I felt.”

He grunted.

The double doors opened just as they reached them. Mark held one of them wide. Rule held the other. Rule looked at her and nodded in a way meant to be reassuring. The gurney the EMTs pushed out those double doors was no longer empty. Susan walked beside it. Grandmother and Lily’s father followed. His face was tight and pale and she didn’t think he saw anything but the gurney carrying his wife.

Lily stopped moving. Someone had scrubbed some of the mascara streaks off her mother’s face, but she still had the raccoon look going. Beneath the smeared makeup, her eyes looked lost. Bewildered.

“Hey,” Cullen said as he stepped up to the gurney. “Hi, Julia. You’ve had a really rough night, I hear.”

“Sir, you need to step away,” one of the EMTs began.

“Susan,” Lily said, “Cullen isn’t going to question her. He just needs a minute.”

Susan frowned hard, but she told the EMTs to wait.

Julia’s jaw tightened pugnaciously. “I don’t know you. I’d remember you if we’d ever met, and I don’t.”

Cullen was memorable. On the one-to-ten scale of male beauty, he was an eleven. Lily had seen passing strangers stop in their tracks to stare. Especially women, but men did it, too, sometimes. “Well, now,” Cullen said with a smile, “if you don’t want us to be on a first-name basis, you’ll have to call me Mr. Seaborne. I’d rather be Cullen to you, but if you insist . . .”

Julia blushed. Lily had never seen her mother blush. “I—I guess that’s okay.”

“I’m going to make some funny gestures,” he told her, “so I can get a better look at the magic used on you. You won’t feel a thing, except maybe like giggling if I look silly.”

Julia’s eyes got big. “Can you fix me?”

“First I have to figure out what’s wrong. What I’m going to do now . . . think of it like going to the doctor and getting a thermometer stuck in your mouth. He usually has to do other things, too, to find out why you’re sick, like look in your ears and your throat. And sometimes that isn’t enough and they have to do more tests. Right now, though, I’m just taking your temperature.”

“Mr. Turner,” Julia said, and tried to sit up, but they’d strapped her in. “Mr. Turner—?”

“I’m right here,” Rule said and moved to her and took her hand.

She blinked up at him. “Is this your friend that you said was coming?”

“It is. Cullen is very good at magic.”

“I’m the great pooh-bah of magic,” Cullen assured her. He drew a sign in the air, whispered something, and put his two hands together, then separated them slightly, thumbs and forefingers extended and touching to shape a crude circle. He moved that empty circle around, staring through it, ending with it framing Julia’s forehead. He frowned, muttered something that wasn’t English, and shifted his hands a couple millimeters. Then he dropped his hands and smiled. “Thanks for staying so still, Julia. I’ll see you a little later, okay?” He winked and stepped back.

“Is he going to be able to fix me?” Julia asked Rule as the EMTs got her moving again. She was still clasping his hand.

“Everyone is going to work together to fix you,” Rule said firmly. “It may take awhile, though, so you’ll have to be patient.”

“I guess that’s why they call a patient a patient,” she said as they stopped at the back of the ambulance. “Because everything takes so long, and you have to be patient.”

“You may be right.”

Getting her loaded created a problem. Julia wanted Rule with her in the ambulance, and there wasn’t room for both him and Susan, and Susan was the doctor. In the end Julia did let go of Rule, but he had to promise he’d do his best to be there as quickly as possible.

As soon as the ambulance doors shut, Rule came to Lily. He put his hands on her shoulders. They felt warm and large and familiar, and she wanted to burrow into him and hold on. She didn’t reach for him. She didn’t trust herself to let go.

“I’ll stay with her,” he told her. Just that. He didn’t ask if she was okay or how she was doing, for which she was grateful. She wasn’t okay.

But she was functioning. She’d keep doing that. “Go,” she told Rule.

“I’ll leave the car for you.”

“No, take it. I’ll have a uniform or one of the agents bring me when I’m through.”

“All right.” His hands fell away. “Mark, you’ll drive. Barnaby, with me.” He went from motionless to a lope in the blink of an eye, his guards trailing after.

This whole time, Lily’s father hadn’t said a word. He’d kept his eyes fixed on Julia, then on the ambulance as it backed up. As it pulled away, he turned and started for his car.

“Edward,” Grandmother said, “you are not driving.”

“I’m perfectly fit to drive,” he said without looking at her. But he stopped at the Nissan he’d bought the previous year and didn’t open the door.

She didn’t answer, but walked up to stand in front of him. She put her hands on his arms and looked up at him—not very far up, for Edward Yu was not a tall man. For a long moment they simply stood there looking at each other. Suddenly his face crumpled, and he whispered something in Chinese that Lily didn’t catch.

Grandmother reached up and patted his face, leaving her hand on his cheek as she answered in that language. “You will do what you have to, my son, until you can’t. And then you will rest while others do what needs doing.”

Edward Yu reached up and placed his hand over his mother’s. A stiff little smile curved his lips as both their hands fell away at the same time. He responded in English. “I will. And as I am fit to drive, I will begin by driving you to the hospital.”

Grandmother’s smile sparked briefly. “Ha! Everyone contradicts me.” With that blithe disregard for truth, she went on to dispose of her troops—which in this case meant everyone within earshot and many who weren’t. Lily was to pursue her work here. The rest of the family would remain here and obey the officers of the law. “We will leave now,” she informed her son. “Sam will meet us there. It will take him two hours.”

“Sam?” Lily said, startled. “I thought he was leaving for one of his sing-alongs.”

Grandmother snorted. “Hardly that. In any event, he has postponed his departure.”

Edward had opened the passenger door for his mother and stopped with his hand on it, staring at his mother in consternation. “Surely you aren’t talking about—”

“Of course I am. Doctors are all very well.” Grandmother slid into the car. “I do not object to doctors. But in matters of magic and mind, I think the black dragon will be more useful.”

The car door shut.

“I hope she’s right,” Lily said too softly for human ears.

Cullen, of course, wasn’t human, and he stood only a few feet away. He heard and moved closer to say softly, “You felt what I saw, didn’t you?”

She wanted to tell him she had no idea. She didn’t know what he’d seen, did she? Only she was pretty sure she did. “It’s not exactly magic that was used, is it?”

“No. I’d hoped to see an intact spell in place, suppressing Julia’s memories. That was the best-case scenario. Remove the spell and she’s back to normal. Next-best case would be a potion that—”

“A potion could do that?”

“It’s not likely, but there are some that cause forgetfulness. They don’t make you lose most of a lifetime, though—more like a couple hours. I’ve heard of one that could make you lose up to a month, but . . . well, I’ll skip the technical stuff, but theory doesn’t support any potion causing the loss of more than a month because of the tie to the moon’s cycles. But potions aren’t my thing, so I wasn’t going to discount the possibility. A potion wouldn’t have been too bad. Sometimes their effects wear off spontaneously, but if not, there’s the potential for an antidote.”

“You’re dragging this out.”

“Yeah.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, making it stand up in spikes. “Worst case, I thought, would be a spell that had actually destroyed her memories rather than suppressing them. Just because I’ve never heard of such a spell doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And at first that’s what I thought had happened, because the lingering trace of magic was so small I could barely see it. When I looked with my magnifying spell, though . . . whatever it is, it doesn’t look like mind magic.”

“Arguai,” she said flatly. “That’s what it felt like.” She ran her thumb over the toltoi in her ring . . . which held arguai. Or so she’d been told. Her mouth twisted. “Not that I know what that means, but that’s what the elves call it. Some kind of power that isn’t magic. Magic can tell me it’s present, but can’t identify it.”

“Arguai,” he breathed. “Shit.”

“You know what it is?”

“Oh, yeah. I can tell you that much, at least. We have another word for it. Spirit.”

“That’s just a word to me. What does it mean?”

“It means,” he said grimly, “that you might need to find a holy man or woman, because I’m not going to be much help. Not any old monk or shaman or priest will do, either. If arguai was used on your mother, you need a truly holy person. A saint.”

Lily wanted to grab her hair with both hands and yank. Or throw something. Or punch something. Her eyes welled up, and that infuriated her even more. “Any idea where I find a saint? They aren’t exactly listed in the Yellow Pages! Unless Miriam . . . she’ll be here soon, with the coven. Does it have to be, like, a Catholic saint?”

“Holiness isn’t dependent on creed, but if you’re talking about Miriam Faircastle—”

“You know another Miriam? She’s a Wiccan high priestess, so I thought maybe she’d do.”

Cullen snorted. “Miriam’s no saint.”

“You don’t like her?”

“Woman completely lacks a sense of humor.”

It figured that Cullen would see that as a prerequisite for sainthood. “She’s a bit intense, but . . .” Her voice trailed off as her eyes widened in shock.

Cullen spun to face the spot she was staring at. “What is it?”

“Mist.” White mist that rapidly pushed out blobs so it was shaped like a starfish with a stump where the top limb should be. Four of the blobs coalesced into arms and legs as the one on top became a head and everything sprang into focus. A lean man with slicked-back hair stood there, smirking at her. He was as translucent as the mist he’d formed himself out of.

Al Drummond. Former FBI agent. Former bad guy, though he’d redeemed himself. Currently quite dead, but that didn’t keep him from smirking at her. “Surprise.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Don’t get all soppy, now.”

“Drummond—”

“I can’t stay, but I wanted you to know, first, that Friar’s in this up to his grimy neck. Second, I’ll be working this one with you, but mostly from my side of things. I won’t be able to chat much.” Far faster than he’d come into focus, he winked out.

Lily stared in disbelief at the empty space. “I need a saint, and that’s what I get?”