Ritual Magic

THIRTY-FOUR

THE Torrey Pines Reserve was closed at night, but people interested in committing murder often don’t worry much about park rules. Maybe the killer hadn’t realized that rangers sometimes work late. Two rangers had been busting some asshole for camping on the beach below the bluff when they heard gunshots. When they checked that out, they found a bloody scene complete with arcane symbols.

“You sure the EMTs knew to keep latex between them and their patient?” she asked T.J. as they headed up the Guy Fleming Trail. The body was at the north overlook; no one waited there but the dead. Once T.J. arrived, he’d kept everyone away except for the EMTs.

“I told ’em. Sent word to the hospital, too.” T.J., aka Lieutenant Thomas James of the San Diego Police Department, looked less like Santa Claus than he had a few months back, when he’d grown a beard. He’d made a saggy Santa, but he did have the white hair and twinkle. Behind that twinkle was a canny and suspicious cop’s brain. The SDPD had been warned about the steps to take if they found an apparent ritual murder. T.J. had followed that directive.

“I guess you haven’t heard anything more about Ms. Ward’s condition.”

“Not yet. You a fan?”

“I saw Duck Walk five times when I was a kid.” Not to mention the Pygmalion remake a couple years ago, plus a dozen other movies that every person in the country must have seen at least once. Angela Ward was an old-fashioned, capital S Star. Four Oscars, more than any other living actor; four husbands, too, though she’d been single for years now. She called herself retired, though this or that director was always coaxing her back for a part. She’d chosen San Diego for one of her homes, though she spent most of her time in Hawaii.

She’d be wishing she’d stayed in Hawaii, if she lived to make wishes. She’d been tied up when they found her. Unconscious. The EMTs said she’d damn near bled out. Bullet wounds in the abdomen and upper arm.

“You see anything?” she asked the man ahead of them.

“Trees.”

Trust Cullen to find an excuse for sarcasm. She needed him along, though, and for the same reason he was up front now. He’d see any icky magic before stepping in it. They made quite a cavalcade. Cullen first, then her and T.J. with Rule right behind. Behind Rule, two cops with some of the gear they’d need at the scene if they were able to enter it. Behind them, the six lupus guards Rule considered necessary.

Lily hadn’t argued. Not after the dworg.

On the way over, she’d tried talking to Sam. Either he was finished chatting or he hadn’t heard her. The latter was possible. Likely, she supposed. Even the black dragon might find it hard to eavesdrop telepathically on so many people in different locations, none of them near him, while keeping watch over Nettie. She hoped he’d be available for questions when she finished with the scene. She had several.

The two rangers who’d found the victims were back at the park road. So was the scene-of-crime squad. Lily had checked the rangers for traces of icky magic. Nothing on them. Maybe no icky magic here at all. Maybe she wasn’t needed. “Doesn’t make sense,” she muttered. “Bullets?”

“That part doesn’t,” Cullen agreed, “but the location does. There’s a baby node on the lookout.”

She wondered if Cullen knew the location of every node in a hundred miles. Probably. “They used a ley line the first time. Why change? Maybe this isn’t the same bunch.”

“Maybe, but not for that reason. A lot of spells and rites can use either one, depending on the skill of the caster. They could’ve used a ley line the first time because it was their first time. Ley lines aren’t safe, but they’re safer than nodes. Even a small node has a lot of raw magic.”

The trail wound around and up. They moved slowly, giving Cullen time to study both the trail and the area near it. The wind off the ocean was strong and cold, whipping Lily’s hair around and making her think again about cutting it. Assuming the fabric of time held together long enough for her to get an appointment . . . she dug in her pocket and pulled out an elastic. A couple of quick twists and one problem was solved.

What happened when time was damaged? When the fabric of the realm was damaged?

What did the Great Bitch want to happen?

It was, maybe, a mistake to try to get inside the head of a being older than the cosmos, due to being impossible. Lily still had to try. G.B. thought her goal was noble. She wanted to save humanity from itself. Therefore, she didn’t want to destroy humanity . . . but anything short of utter annihilation might work for her. Might work out great. Knock everyone back to the Stone Age, flash some power around, start helping the survivors of the devastation you’d caused, and bingo. Before you knew it, you had everyone worshiping you, just like they ought to.

Maybe understanding that much helped, but trying to figure out what kind of damage might occur was a distraction. She didn’t need specifics to know it would be a heaping helping of world-class horrible. She didn’t need to prepare for the horrible. She needed to stop it. That meant stopping Friar. How did you stop someone if you couldn’t find them? If—

“Now I see something,” Cullen said.

Lily stopped, her arm flashing out to bar T.J., who’d already stopped. “What?”

“Leakage from the node. It looks . . .” He tipped his head to one side. “Well, that’s not good. Wait here.” He left at a run.

Lily tucked her flashlight under her arm, pulled off her shoes so she’d know if she hit a patch of icky magic, and jammed them into her purse. “Do like he said. Wait here.” She gripped the flashlight and set off the way Cullen had, only slower. Three footfalls later she added, “Dammit, Rule!”

“You’ll let me know if there’s contagion.” He ran easily just behind her.

“I could lie.”

“You won’t. Not about that.”

Wisps of power brushed her face as she ran—overflow from the node. Her feet didn’t touch anything icky, just rocks and sticks that jabbed. There wasn’t much brush at the crest of the trail, but the lookout was at a high point and it was dark. Lily didn’t see what waited there until she reached it.

A man’s body lay facedown on the flat, sandy ground. Near one outflung hand was a small wooden altar, tipped on its side. Near his feet was a small duffel bag. A large shape—a pentagon? No, a hexagon had been drawn or painted on the bare ground of the overlook. Under the beam of her flashlight it glowed a bright, cheery yellow. Six dark candles were distributed evenly around the painted shape, which enclosed the body and the toppled altar. Cullen stood in front of it, glaring at them. “Does anyone listen to me? Does anyone ever freaking listen to me?”

“There’s no contagion.”

“No, there’s a goddamn major working that got interrupted at the worst goddamn time possible, so instead of dissolving like it ought to, it jammed. Then it got fed a lot of blood. And it’s still tied to the goddamn node, and now it’s about to blow up. So sit down out of my way and shut up.” He began pacing around the hexagon, eyes narrowed as he studied the ground.

Sometimes you really had to listen to the experts. Lily sat on the trail. Rule dropped down beside her. After a moment, she turned off her flashlight. It might be a distraction.

Cullen made a slow circuit of the hexagon. There was barely room for him to stay outside it in one spot; the overlook was enclosed by a low pole-and-cable fence meant to keep idiots from straying off the trail or falling off the cliff on the ocean side. He crouched twice, tilting his head, and muttered under his breath now and then. At last he stopped, nodded briskly, and raised his arms. He began chanting too low for Lily to hear the words. All at once he snatched something invisible out of the air, flung it up, and shouted, “Ak-ak-areni!”

Fire shot up from the candles—fire as red as molten lava. It leaped from candle to candle, then inward to the center of the hexagon, where the six crimson flows collided with each other—and with a seventh, this one from Cullen’s other hand. Rainbow fire, that one, green-blue-orange-purple-yellow, every color but red. It merged with the lava fire and exploded into eye-searing white. White that shot straight up in a brilliant column three or four stories tall . . . and gradually dissipated, like the slow, shiny fade-out of fireworks.

THREE miles away, a woman sat cross-legged on the beach, her head tipped back, her mouth round in a silent “oh” as the brilliant white light faded. It was time to go, and yet she lingered. The wind off the ocean was chilly. It felt good on her hot cheeks . . . hot cheeks, shivery stomach. She’d felt so odd ever since she picked up that knife. For just a moment longer she’d sit here and smell the ocean . . . brine and fish, the Mother’s moist breath. Only she wasn’t thinking of the Mother. She was wondering if anyone had died in that beautiful flash of light. If she’d killed people she didn’t even know.

You are sad, F’annwylyd?

“A little.” Apologetically she added, “I’ve never killed anyone before.”

They would die anyway. Does it matter greatly when?

It did to them. And to her, too, though he wouldn’t understand that. She hoped no one had been near when the node exploded. The others . . . no, she didn’t regret them. She’d been shocked by how loud the gun was, that was all. She’d owned the weapon for ages and dutifully took it to the firing range two or three times a year to make sure she stayed familiar with it, but she’d never fired it without the protective gear at the gun range. She’d never really thought she’d shoot it anywhere else.

You grieve. A ghostly warmth stroked her cheek. Though it is not the dead who grieve you. I wish I could put my arms around you. Comfort you.

Tears sprang to her eyes. Ah, look at her, indulging in melancholy when there were important things to do! Vital things. “Soon. Soon I’ll feel your arms—and all sorts of other parts of you, too.” She laughed, suddenly flooded with a wild, exuberant energy, and bounced to her feet. She had places to go, things to do.

People to kill. On purpose.

LILY was still blinking bright spots out of her vision when Cullen plopped to the ground with a satisfied sigh. “Glad that worked.”

“So am I,” Rule said dryly.

“The node’s still not entirely stable. I think . . .” Cullen tipped his head, studying something only he could see. “Yeah, it’s settling down. Should be safe enough, but I’ll keep an eye on it.”

“My turn, then.” Lily stood. “I guess you don’t see any power radiating from an ancient artifact or you’d be rooting around, looking for it.”

“No, but if this Nam Anthessa is as good at hiding as Sam said, maybe I wouldn’t. If you see a knife, don’t touch it.”

“Sam made that clear. It’s safe to cross the line?”

“Sure. Not a whiff of power left in it. I may have damaged some evidence. Couldn’t be helped, so don’t bitch at me about it. But the missing blood isn’t my fault.”

“What missing blood?”

“There’s no blood on the ground inside the hexagon. Some outside it, but none inside. I think the übrik rune drank it.”

That was seriously creepy. Lily flashed her light over the ground. “I don’t see any runes.” Though there was a drift of ashy residue of some sort she hadn’t noticed before. And the once-yellow line of the hexagon was burned black.

“No runes?” Cullen stirred himself to come look. “Huh. That’s weird.”

“Meaning?”

“I guess my pyrotechnics burned them up.”

Lily decided not to worry about it. The scene was already thoroughly compromised—first by the rangers, then by the EMTs, and now by Cullen’s efforts to keep something—either the runes or the node, she wasn’t sure which—from exploding. “Rule . . .” She realized he’d moved. He was a little ways down the trail, talking to Scott. And when had Scott come up past T.J. and his two cops?

Rule looked at her. “Scott, Barnaby, and Mike are going to stay with you. I’m going to take the others for some four-legged sniffing.”

“Okay. Before you Change, would you let T.J. and the rest know they can come up?” Time to put her shoes back on. Lily took out the baby wipes she kept in her purse for occasions like this. By the time she’d wiped both feet—which were scratched and tender in spots, but she didn’t find any blood—and put her shoes back on, Scott and T.J. were coming up the trail together. She didn’t see Rule, but she knew where he was—about forty feet away, and not sticking to the trail.

“I’ve got to say,” T.J. said when he reached them, “you do know how to mess up a scene, Seaborne.”

“Would’ve been a bigger mess if the node had exploded.”

Lily shivered. That answered that question. “T.J., you said you took some pictures from the scene earlier. We need to document what’s changed. Can you have your guy snap some more while I look things over?”

“Will do. We need the SOC squad. They’re going to bitch enough as it is.”

“You can send for them now.”

T.J. called the scene-of-crime people in and gave instructions to his two cops—a woman whose name Lily hadn’t caught and a grizzled sergeant named Armstrong whom she knew slightly.

While the woman set up a pair of small floodlights, Lily pulled on a pair of the disposable gloves she kept in her purse. She approached the body carefully, avoiding the ashy smears that had been runes, and crouched.

The burned smell was strong. Some of it was from the dead man’s exposed skin.

He lay facedown in the dirt. Might not be much face left of it to see when they turned him over, judging by the way the back of his head looked. High-caliber rounds made a mess. A couple feet from his outflung hand lay a weapon—a Sig Sauer P226, either new or nearly new, she thought, playing her flashlight over it. Good gun, but no weapon’s much use if you’re shot from behind. She directed her light at his head, hoping to learn his hair color, but he’d worn a ski mask. What was left of his head was covered by knitted stuff.

The rest of his body seemed unmarked, aside from postmortem burns. He’d been maybe one eighty, one ninety, and under six feet. Dark turtleneck, dark slacks, dark athletic shoes, all good quality. His right hand was underneath the body. The outflung left hand lacked a wedding ring. No visible calluses. No sign of defensive wounds.

And the wrong build for Friar, dammit.

The floodlights came on. Lily put away her flashlight. Sergeant Armstrong began snapping pictures.

“I’m going to check out the spot I picked for the shooter,” T.J. said.

Lily looked at him, then studied the way the dead man had fallen. The bullets had to have been fired from the east . . . she shifted to check. “That patch of brush about thirty feet southeast of us?”

“Not a bad spot to hide while waiting to pick off your targets.” T.J. turned and headed for it.

Shooting uphill could be tricky, but the slope wasn’t bad there. “You think the perp was already in place?”

“I don’t see how he could’ve gotten there without being heard,” he said without turning around, “if anyone had been around to hear.”

Some lupi could move that quietly, but otherwise he was right. So why had he or she waited until the rite was under way? Could the shooter have wanted to create the instability Cullen had shut down with his pyrotechnics?

A large, black-and-silver wolf slid out of the darkness to meet T.J. at the brushy spot. T.J. froze. “Uh, right. Which one are you?”

“That’s Rule,” Lily called and went back to studying the scene.

No knives of any sort visible. The altar, singed now, was next to the body. Things had spilled when it tipped over—a metal chalice and some other stuff too crispy to identify right away, but no knife. “Why didn’t they use a circle?” she asked Cullen.

“They had one. It poofed when the rite was disrupted, leaving the hexagon. Which is not a stable array for a node.”

“They didn’t drive stakes through Angela Ward’s hands and feet like they did Debrett’s. Or this guy’s, for that matter.” Though she suspected he’d been one of the ones throwing the party, which someone else had crashed.

“It’s all in the timing. Look in the duffel. Uh . . . carefully. Just in case something else is there.”

She moved to the dead guy’s feet, where the duffel sat, unzipped. Sure enough, it held four metal stakes and a mallet. She rooted around, checking. No knife. “Why hadn’t they used these?”

“Most rites have three stages,” Cullen said. “First stage is traditionally called the invocation, though I prefer the term ‘definition.’ That’s when you invoke or define the powers you’ll work with and your intent. Second one gathers power. In this case, that meant tying in to the node, which would have happened at the very end of that stage. Third stage shapes and directs that power. They didn’t get that far, but it says nasty things about the kind of shaping they had in mind that it called for a form of crucifixion and murder.”

She chewed on that a moment. “You think they were planning to use the knife the way they did on Debrett.”

“Looks like, yeah.”

“But they were interrupted at the end of the second stage, when they’d tied in to the node. That’s why it went unstable?”

“Basically. I’ll spare you the long explanation of why this rite would do that when others wouldn’t. Short version: nodes are not safe.”

“I’m wondering if the shooter knew that would happen. Picked that moment on purpose. If the node went boom it would get rid of the bodies, wouldn’t it? And any other evidence the shooter might find inconvenient. Would he or she need to be familiar with the rite to know when they reached the end of the second stage? Or would they have to be able to see magic the way you do?”

“Huh.” Cullen’s eyebrows lifted. He looked over his shoulder at T.J., who was crouched on the near side of the brushy thicket, shining his flashlight over the ground. Rule was sniffing nearby. “From that distance . . . maybe not. It depends on a lot of variables, but it’s certainly possible he could feel it when the node was brought in. Likely, even, if the shooter was an experienced spellcaster himself.”

“Or herself.”

“You have someone in mind?”

“No, just keeping mine open.” Lily stood. “Would this hypothetical spellcaster know how long it would take for the node to go boom?”

“Without the Sight? No, and even with the Sight you’re just guessing. There are spells that would tell him it was unstable, but not how long it would take to hit the threshold. Well, there’s one that might, but it takes a couple hours to cast. He’d have to be remarkably stupid to hang around an unstable node that long.”

“Not to mention a body or two.” She nodded, satisfied. “Our perp didn’t hang around. He or she got the knife and got the hell out. Either he didn’t bother to make sure both victims were dead or he didn’t care. When the node went, it would take out anyone nearby. He wasn’t counting on the rangers hearing the shots. Or on you being able to do whatever you did.”

“I am a wonder and a half,” he agreed.

“Rule thinks he’s found something,” T.J. called, “but damned if I know what.”

Lily turned to see Rule loping up the slope toward them. The young patrol officer squeaked like a mouse, but she didn’t reach for her weapon, and the sergeant was made of sterner stuff. His eyes widened, but that was all. Rule stopped at the edge of the hexagon, his head lifting in surprise. His nostrils flared. He walked up to the body and lowered his head.

“He isn’t going to, ah . . .” The sergeant looked worried.

Lily pretended he wasn’t wondering if her fiancé was likely to eat the victim. “Wolves’ sense of smell is better than just about any other mammal’s, except for bears. His nose can be very useful.”

After giving the body a thorough sniff, Rule moved outside the hexagon—this time to the side near the drop-off. He sniffed that thoroughly, too, then peered over the edge. The drop-off was steep there. A cliff, really, with a rocky bit of beach below.

He Changed again. The patrol officer squeaked a second time, probably because Rule was now very naked. “Lily,” he said, “the dead man is Armand Jones.”

“Friar’s lieutenant?” She turned to look at the body. It was the right height and build. She’d hoped it might be Friar, been disappointed that it wasn’t, but Jones . . . that fit, too. “You’re sure.”

“Oh, yes. I made a point of learning his scent.”

“A falling-out among thieves, then. Not the way I first thought. Jones must have taken the knife. Sam did say it’s persuasive. Maybe it called to him or something, or maybe this was a power grab, pure and simple. Friar wanted the knife back. He would have known exactly when to fire to make the node unstable—”

But Rule was shaking his head. “Friar was here, yes. I found some of his blood outside the hexagon. I suspect he spilled quite a bit more inside it. He was among those shot, not the shooter.”

“But—is there a trail? Did he—”

“I think he went over the edge. I don’t see a body.”

She chewed on that in silence a moment. “Friar’s dead or badly hurt. Jones is dead. And whoever shot them must have the knife.” It didn’t make sense. Had the Great Bitch decided to ditch Friar and sent a new henchman to get the knife?

“T.J. and I found bullet casings by those bushes. That’s where the shooter was. That’s what I came to tell you. The scent I found there belongs to Miriam Faircastle.”