Paranoid mage, p.10
Paranoid Mage, page 10
part #1 of Paranoid Mage Series
He pulled stuff from the storeroom to him, including empty luggage that had clearly been used to transport the guard’s guns. In addition to weapons and ammunition, there was also cash, laptops, jewelry, phones, and from the mage’s quarters, stuff that was clearly magical. He separated out the electronics, hastily cracking them open and yanking out memory cards and hard drives. The remains went back to the motel. While Callum didn’t have time to count it, looting the vampires looked to have at least doubled his cash on hand, not to mention the value of everything else he’d taken.
While part of him wanted to leave all the guard’s equipment with them, he was planning to burn the motel down and ammo cooking off would do nobody any good. So he swept it all up and stuffed it into anything that was still empty, having freed up a lot of space by ditching the computers. He felt a few pangs of guilt at stealing everything, but that hesitation was almost funny considering how deep he already was.
Once again he opened up a small portal, but it led from the underground tank of gasoline at the station into the hotel. Callum jumped it from room to room, letting a couple gallons spill here and there and making sure to douse the vampires before he lit one of the road flares. The first one he actually teleported into the vampire’s room, but for the second he used a portal to jab the lit end into a number of the rooms before finally tossing it where the mage had been. The actual packaging followed, just so there wouldn’t be anything left to indicate what he’d done.
Then he was finished. The duffles and suitcases, filled with guns and ammunition and everything else he’d taken, got teleported into a utility crawlspace under the gas station, and he looked around to make sure there was nothing different in the saferoom. The plastic tub had turned out to be useless, but that was fine, he could barely remember what he’d wanted it for in the first place.
His hands were definitely shaking, and he shoved them in his pockets, filling himself up from his makeshift batteries while waiting for his siphon bearings to clean up the lingering spatial magic inside the room. While he hadn’t really expended that much, aside from teleporting Clara, it felt like he’d run a marathon. He knocked on the door, and Arthur opened it.
Unsurprisingly, Clara was already out. He’d missed it while he was concentrating on getting the job done, but there was nobody else the half-sized not-a-wolf curled up in her father’s lap could be. Arthur, still in beast form, sniffed at Callum and sneezed.
“Gunpowder, but no magic,” he noted. “How did you get her?”
“No questions,” Callum reminded him. “And I was never here.”
“The vampires?” Arthur questioned, but he was answered by someone thumping down the stairs.
“The motel is on fire!” He shouted, and Arthur looked from him to Callum. Callum shrugged.
“Can I get a ride home?” Callum asked.
***
Arthur Langley watched the maybe-mage but definitely-dangerous man who had singlehandedly wiped a vampire nest in under five minutes exchange some surprisingly heartfelt words with Clara’s parents and Jessica, and even awkwardly address the still-shifted Clara, before following Gerry up the stairs. He stood there for a moment, ears canted and teeth bared before he forced himself to shift back to human and take out his phone. He dialed a number, and tapped his foot as he waited for the man on the other end to pick up.
“Alpha?”
“Ron,” Arthur said. “I want a fire containment on the Flats Motel.”
“You don’t want it put out?” Ron sounded surprised.
“No. Let it burn, just don’t let it spread.”
“Yes, Alpha.” He asked no questions, and Arthur hung up, then dialed another number.
“Chester here.” His Alpha’s bass voice made his phone vibrate.
“Arthur Langley again. That issue with the vampires I reported a few hours ago? It’s resolved.” There was a long silence, then a heavy sigh came from the other end.
“What did you do?” Chester asked ominously.
“I didn’t do anything,” Arthur told him. “In fact, I can swear that no member of the pack was involved, or even crossed into the land that the vampires had claimed for themselves.” There was another silence.
“Let me rephase. Tell me what happened,” Chester ordered, and Arthur winced. Just because he was glad to see the bastards burn didn’t mean he should be flip with his Alpha.
“A man offered to help. He told us that he was not there, that he was never there, and we didn’t know him.” Arthur considered how to put it. “The name I know him by is obviously not his real name, but I wouldn’t want to even say that one out loud on the phone.”
“A man.” Chester said, less oppressively. He understood how delicate Arthur was trying to be. “A shifter? A mage?”
“I’m not actually certain. He clearly wears makeup on his wrist where a mage mark could be, but there’s no magic scent near him. Jessica said she smelled magic there once, but not since the one time and of course I never have.”
“It wasn’t even that strong that time,” Jessica said from the side, her hand on Clara’s head to soothe her. With shifter hearing, any phone conversation included the entire room. “But I know I didn’t imagine it.”
“He asked for earplugs, went into one of our panic cells, and shut the door. We heard gunshots, and two minutes later Clara walked out of one of the other panic cells. Maybe five minutes after that, he walks out, smelling like gunpowder but not like magic, and the motel is on fire. Not to mention, the room’s completely empty, no guns or casings or the like.”
“The individual in question was afraid the whole time he was here,” John rumbled. He was one of the Wolfpack, Chester’s enforcers, and they’d eventually report everything in their own way. For the moment, they were polite enough to respect Arthur’s boundaries and not mention Chase Hall’s name. “But not of us. It seemed to be just general anxiety. He got angry too, but at the vampires and GAR, in my estimation.”
“I could smell it too,” Arthur agreed. “In fact, every time I’ve met him he’s seemed severely stressed. I’m not sure what to make of it.”
“He did say he moved here for health reasons,” Jessica pointed out.
“That is quite odd,” Chester said thoughtfully. “I know mages can hide their presence, but they rarely do. There’s no point, and I understand it weakens them. Perhaps he is fae, instead?”
“I hadn’t considered that,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “He didn’t seem the type, and usually I can smell them anyway.”
“In a sense, it doesn’t matter. The vampires will scream bloody murder, but if all you know is a man who doesn’t exist stayed in your basement and then all the vampires died of extreme incompetence, there’s little they can do.”
“They’re going to want to know who he is,” Arthur warned.
“Oh, they’ll probably even pull strings to get a GAR investigator out there. I expect they won’t find anything.” The tone of voice made it obvious Chester was making it an order, not a hope.
“As I said, the motel is on fire. I suppose we’ll have to save the bodies, but I doubt any other traces of whatever he did will remain.”
“Good. Now, how did he find out about it? You only called me an hour ago.”
“I went and got him,” Jessica volunteered. “I saw him in town earlier, and he told me if he could help, he would. When they took Clara, I just thought—” She paused, then continued. “If he was a mage, he could do something.”
“Hmm.” The sound of Chester’s fingers tapping something glass came over the phone. “That’s a point for fae, actually. Breaking all the GAR laws to keep his word.”
“Either way, Alpha, we owe him.”
“Yes,” Chester agreed. “The question is: who, exactly, do we owe? We want to make sure we’re not getting into something worse than what the vampires were up to.”
“One more point,” John put in. “The number of gunshots was exactly the same as the number of vampires and thralls. Plus their mage.” That pronouncement was met with a thoughtful silence.
“So, investigate, but discreetly,” Arthur concluded.
“Very discreetly.”
Chapter 7 – Consequences
Callum was a wreck for the rest of the day. Not because it had been hard, but because it had been easy. So easy. Terrifyingly, horrifyingly easy. He was a terrible newbie mage with all of three or four tricks and he’d destroyed the vampires and their thralls. If he lost his mind and went on a rampage, there wasn’t a single mundane in the world who had a chance against him, and he was just starting to learn.
It was almost enough to make him understand the restrictions GAR put on mages, but fortunately after a few hours of showering some semblance of sense returned. The only reason he’d gotten away with it was because their mage had been stupid and careless, the defenses were geared against shifters, and because he had a completely safe area coincidentally close enough to actually reach. In the real world, he couldn’t fire a gun off willy-nilly even if he could displace the bullets a hundred feet away.
When the adrenaline high finally left him, he actually fell asleep in the shower, only waking up after he had exhausted the tank and the water turned cold. He tried crawling into bed but slept only fitfully, starting awake every time a car drove down the road. By the time he dragged himself out again it was evening and he was feeling a little more human, but there was still a tight knot in his stomach that he couldn’t do anything about.
Callum went ahead and burned the clothes that he’d been wearing, though it wasn’t likely that anyone could track them. In fact, it was far more likely that he’d be traced through one of the Langleys spilling what happened than it was from some forensic investigation of the scene. There wasn’t much he could do about that.
In fact, in hindsight, it would have been far better if he could have taken care of everything without going down to that basement at all. Not that he regretted saving Clara one bit, but it would have been far better to agree, leave, and do things out of sight from everyone. He wasn’t sure how he could have gotten Clara out of there without teleporting her, but if he’d done it somewhere other than the saferoom, it might have been easier to explain.
Either way, he was stuck with it. He couldn’t change what he had done, just make sure he was better about it in the future. Part of him was actually surprised someone hadn’t been by yet to follow up; it had been hours and the motel fire was probably out. The best case scenario was that the Langley shifters, or whatever they called themselves, had collectively decided to keep Callum a secret, but he couldn’t plan for that.
He hoped he wouldn’t have to abandon Winut, but he probably would. Which meant he had to plan for that, and that meant he needed to get the stash of loot. Callum cast his senses outside and, finding nothing suspicious, got on his remaining jacket and started his car.
Instead of going into town the usual way he circled around, coming at the gas station from the other direction. Unsurprisingly, the actual street where the motel had stood was blocked off, but he only needed to get within range of the gas station in order to teleport all the luggage into the back of his car. He replaced the entire bundle with a single screw enchanted as a siphon, in the hopes that if someone actually looked there wouldn’t be any traces.
By the time he got back home he had been up and moving long enough to realize he was absolutely ravenous. He basically hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day, so he made himself a sandwich from the stuff in the fridge as he teleported all the loot into the main room of his house. Eight duffle bags of weapons, six large cases of ammunition, two briefcases with the hard drives he’d purloined, and then several large lockboxes with money and valuables. Finally, one loose duffel with the magical stuff he’d looted from the mage’s room.
It was actually too much. He didn’t have anywhere he could hide it all from a determined search. There were hollow spaces in the walls, of course, and some odd nooks and crannies, but the sheer amount of weaponry alone meant he needed to find or make a stash somewhere else. Callum summoned his notepad to his hand and wrote that on his list before digging into the actual specifics of what he’d acquired.
The weapons were, to his disappointment, just normal commercial weapons. He’d been hoping for some magically enhanced ones, but no. Not that he could really complain, since now he had enough armament to outfit an entire platoon. Callum itemized the actual numbers of pistols, rifles, and shotguns as he went. The pistols seemed to be mundane armament, since they were merely standard nine-millimeter types, but all the rifles and shotguns were big and heavy.
The magic, as it turned out, was in the ammunition. There were cases of normal commercial stuff, but most of it was not normal or commercial. The bulk of it was labeled silverite, engraved on the cases of rifle and shotgun ammunition, but there was a decent amount of black mordite and silver-grey corite stuff too. For use against vampires and fae respectively, he assumed. What people used against dragonblooded was anyone’s guess.
While he could manipulate the silverite and mordite and corite with his magic, he couldn’t see inside them. With a little effort he could sweep his spatial sense into a material, like a rock or a wall, but the magical ammunition completely resisted that. Which was a little discomfiting, but it at least meant he’d be able to identify the stuff easily enough in the future.
When he took a closer look at it, a good amount of the stuff he’d looted from the mage was the same way. There were a few jars of liquids and powders, with labels in a script he couldn’t read, and trying to push his senses into them was difficult. They weren’t quite as bluntly impossible as the anti-supernatural weapons, but it seemed anything that held magic was hard to sound out.
Aside from what he’d made himself, of course. It was an interesting question whether or not his little ball bearings would be magically opaque to another mage, or if he needed to do something special to get the effect. Unfortunately, there wasn’t another mage to ask.
Along with the components there were a set of ceramic slates with designs on them, clearly made with the liquid and the powder. Probing them with his senses he found that while some of it was just as hard to read, the center was completely open with a loop of magic in it not unlike the vortices. If he had to guess, the plates were magical tools and the center was where the user fed mana.
He didn’t try to use them. He had no idea what they did, and no matter how curious he was he didn’t want to take the risk of blowing himself or his house up, or igniting some magical beacon that would draw attention down on him. The magic stuff became a note on his notepad to investigate later, and he put them aside.
The other source of magic was something that looked like a woman’s compact, but the interior had a set of thin metal plates with etching similar to the ones on the slates, arranged so the user could flip through them. The main difference seemed to be that the compact’s plates were far simpler. It was all very mysterious and he didn’t dare supply it any mana or vis without knowing what it was.
Callum was really starting to get irritated, so he turned to the last bit, the lockboxes and the cash. At the very least, the more fungible part of the loot would cheer him up. Even though he didn’t have the keys and hadn’t learned lockpicking, he could simply teleport the stuff out of the locked containers.
There was just shy of one hundred thousand dollars in cash, but that wasn’t really the main haul. The gold plates, each of them labeled at one hundred grams of 999.9 pure gold and stamped with an unfamiliar logo, were. Ten kilograms of gold was a lot of money. A lot of money. Callum’s consulting business had put him comfortably right at six figures for income, but actually staring at so much money gathered in one place was something else.
There was also some sort of elaborate crest, the kind that used to be used for sealing wax on documents, that looked like it was gold but resisted his senses enough to be an alloy of one of the supernatural metals. It had some sort of abstract logo on it, nestled in among a bunch of baroque swirls, which if he was fanciful might represent vampire fangs, but it was difficult to tell. That, unfortunately, was something he couldn’t sell. It might be magical, and it was definitely traceable.
Callum opened up the briefcase with all the hard drives he’d taken and stared at them. It had seemed like a good idea at the time but he actually had no idea what he’d look for. He had no tools for cracking open encrypted files, he didn’t have the resources to reference phone numbers or account numbers, and he didn’t have the contacts to make use of any information he did manage to get.
Not to mention he didn’t have the know-how to make sure his computer was safe from any malware or whatever that was encoded in the hard drives. Sure, that might be giving them too much credit, but he couldn’t think of a single reason to take the risk. At the same time, he was loath to simple toss them, so he got a bottle of rubbing alcohol and wiped them off to get rid of his prints in case he ever did pass them on.
He wasn’t sure he would. The only person he could give them to was Arthur Langley, and for all he knew shifters would be able to smell his scent on them unless he gave them a bath in alcohol or something. Obviously Arthur already knew Callum was involved, but whatever specialists would be trying to get at the data did not. The same was true of the crest.
Callum felt woefully underprepared. He had originally thought that he’d stay in Winut for years, slowly working out magic details while lying low, then when he knew more he’d know what the next step would be. Now it was clear that not only would that not be happening, he didn’t have even the basic supplies for dealing with brushes with the supernatural.
The list on the notepad got longer. He could have used his phone, but he didn’t entirely trust the sanctity of his data there. It might be excessively paranoid, but anything connected to the internet could be compromised, and without a supernatural-friendly phone he was probably even more vulnerable. The people at the top of GAR certainly didn’t have to worry about their electronics being hacked. Or at the very least, didn’t have to worry about the consequences if they were.
