Catalyst, p.12
Catalyst, page 12
part #3 of Winter Solstice Series
I stand.
“Mmm. Mmm, girl.” Jade shakes her head. “You definitely got it goin’ on. ’Course, you’re a little lacking in the booty department.”
“Yeah, I noticed. I’m somewhere between starved runway model and a train rail. People shouldn’t be this thin.”
Mr. Moody stretches, yawning. “You’re not human.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.” I stick my tongue out at him. “Be right back.”
I jog to my bedroom to get dressed. FBI crime scene calls for somewhat more serious clothes, I imagine. Jeans, Nike T-shirt, and my leather jacket should do the trick. I also go for my biracial shoes: their father was a pair of sneakers, mom hiking boots. Jade’s fellow agents already think of me as kind of a joke. Walking in there with Uggs on would only add fuel to that fire.
Jade springs to her feet as soon as I walk out into the living room. That weird flirty tension in the air between us is gone. “Wow. That jacket makes you look even hotter.”
Now I know she’s teasing. Or at least being a wiseass. “I’d get a Harley to go with it but I’m too worried about killing myself.”
“Everyone at the bureau who talks about bikes describes getting injured as a ‘when’ not an ‘if.’”
I follow her out into the hall. “Exactly why this elf is currently sans-motorcycle.”
“Your ass is sans-car, too.”
“Yeah.” I pull the door closed and hit it with a reverse Open to lock it. “Maybe I should change that.”
Chapter Ten
Crime Scene Enchanter
Jade drives us to the Museum of Natural History in one of those nice silver sedans that’s so unassuming everyone knows it’s a cop car.
We arrive a little after 9 p.m. and breeze past the police blockade outside. The place is a swarm of flashing red-and-blue light, though most of the cops appear to be standing around keeping people away—not that the museum is drawing a massive crowd this late on a Monday night.
The second we go inside, my skin tingles like I’ve walked naked into a cloud of gnats. There’s definitely some energy here, but it’s not coming from any specific direction. Nor does it feel overwhelming in its strength. More like I’m standing too close to a giant battery.
I keep gazing around at various small exhibits set up in the common areas. Anything with bones gives me the creeps, probably more so than it would have done pre-Convergence. Nothing moves or radiates awareness, but this building is slathered in eek.
Although Jade did say ‘mummy’ back at my apartment, when we head into the Egyptology section, I can’t help but brace myself. Nothing good ever comes from screwing around with ancient Egypt. That stuff really likes to be left alone. Oh, crap. It hits me out of the blue—no wonder we can’t explain the pyramids. Magic must’ve been involved. I’m a little fuzzy on the dates, but I’m pretty sure the Giza pyramids went up in something like 2500 BCE or so. That’s pretty well before the Waning. Heck, they might have been built so long ago that a whole other Waning/Convergence cycle occurred naturally since then.
Thinking that the height of Egyptian civilization probably coincided with a period of magic being strong in our world—okay, fine, the human world—makes me doubly hesitant to touch anything here.
Jade takes a left turn through an archway guarded by four city cops into a larger room full of people in FBI windbreakers.
“Hey, stupid question,” I whisper.
She looks back at me. “Shoot.”
“Why is the FBI investigating this?”
“Probably somewhere between the missing mummy belonging to a foreign government, the NYPD not wanting to deal with it, and them calling us in due to ‘weird shit.’ Most law enforcement around the country is aware of the rise in magic and supernatural things, though I can’t say they all believe it yet. This may just be them trying to push the cost of the investigation off on the Fed instead of eating it here in New York. Stuff’s gotten a bit too widespread to be kept quiet, so the CIA lost interest.”
“They had plenty of interest in me.” I look around at a room made to resemble some old temple. Lots of dusty brown rock and hieroglyphs. “Who steals a mummy anyway?”
“Well, at first the CIA wanted to keep the magical stuff out of the public eye. And mummies are typically taken for ransom,” says Jade, walking past a large display case full of old bowls and pottery. “Or sometimes to smuggle on the black market. I’ve been hearing some wild stories at the office about some stuff going on in China now. Mysticism was pretty big over there before this whole can of worms exploded open. Sounds like it’s going nuts now with trade in shit like dead monkeys, animal bones, even human remains. All supposedly for use by Wūshī.”
“Lovely.” Wūshī, I’d heard through the grapevine, was the Chinese equivalent of sorcerer. And some of their magic tended to be on the darker side of the spectrum.
Sounds like there’s big trouble in little China, says Mr. Moody in my head.
I bite my lip. Stop trying to make me laugh.
Jade stops and gestures.
A phone-booth-sized cabinet, front door smashed open, holds an empty wood-walled sarcophagus at an almost vertical angle. Gold leaf and red paint decorate the outer surface in an ornate pattern. The dull brick-red interior has a body-sized cavity with nothing in it but some creepy dark stains. Three bodies lay nearby, two covered in black plastic sheeting, the third presently under examination by a man and a woman in blue jumpsuits. The dead guy is wearing street clothes, a dark blue shirt and grey pants. His facial expression is frozen in a grimace that could mean extreme agony or shock.
I invoke what I think of as my ‘magical feelers.’ And since my magic feelers don’t really have a name, I decide to call it Sensing. Not sure holding my hands out helps at all, but it kinda feels like using antennas, so I do it anyway.
The instant the magic flows from my fingertips, a heavy foreboding doom falls over the whole room. My inner child screams and runs crying out of the room. Alas, the rest of me stays put. Someone used magic here within the past day or so, and I am assuming it to have been necromancy. Mom mentioned that Val’nathiri are more closely aligned to life energy than humans, so we have a bad reaction to death magic. As in, elves who try using it wither up into horrible abominations. Humans can wield it without much of a problem.
“Someone used some really dark magic here,” I whisper.
Jade nods once to me and approaches the forensic tech. “Any idea how they died?”
“Who’s that?” asks the woman in the CSI jumpsuit, jabbing a thumb my direction.
I attempt the gnomes’ cheesy smile. “I’m the CSE.”
“Huh?” asks Jade and the woman at the same time.
“You’re CSI. I’m CSE.” I fold my arms. “Crime Scene Enchanter… or something like that. Magical investigative consultant.”
I’m impressed, says Mr. Moody in my head. That almost sounded professional.
“Whatever,” says the forensics woman, leaning down over the body. “Just started my exam on this one. The tall guy back there had a pretty clear case of blunt force trauma to the head. It’s not an official COD for the third man, but my money’s on a myocardial infarction.” She pauses. “Hmm. What the…?”
Jade takes a step back as the woman pulls a set of forceps from a kit and sticks the end into the dead guy’s mouth. She extracts a large, black insect leg. Right as she does that, I feel a spike of dark energy come off the body as a handful of lumps race across the chest under the shirt.
“Get back!” I yell, while leaping away.
The corpse’s chest explodes open, releasing a shower of black scarab beetles bigger than chicken eggs. They coalesce into a dark tornado of buzzing awfulness—and start to engulf the forensic tech. My overwhelming revulsion at the sight—and the sense of darkness—makes me act before thinking. Aiming for the low left end of the swarm, I throw a Lightning.
A searing crackle of bluish electricity hits the bugs, leaping from insect to insect, creating a sort of freestanding Lichtenberg figure. The resulting boom from the spell shatters a few nearby display cases and sends most of the FBI and NYPD to the ground.
The scarab swarm bursts in a mixture of black ichor and smoke, though about a dozen bugs survive, clinging and biting the poor forensics tech. Three come for Jade and me, but she stomps them into slime splats. The screaming tech struggles to peel the flesh-eating insects off herself. Jade runs in to help.
Me… I really don’t want to touch them. If Mom, Dad, or Eva had one on them, sure, but a total stranger? Yeah… Jade can handle this. I just stand there trying to blink away the ghost of the lightning on my retinas.
It doesn’t take Jade or the female tech too long to stomp the last of them, though they left bleeding wounds that’ll probably need stitches.
“Jesus effing Christ what the hell was that?” yells the woman, staring in horror at multiple bleeding wounds on her chest and arms.
Her male partner runs over, staring at the open, hollow torso of the dead man. Those bugs ate everything inside him from shoulders to hips other than bones. I glance between that ghastly sight and the woman, pretty much convinced she would’ve been stripped to her skeleton on her feet in seconds had I not nuked that swarm.
“Uhh… I really don’t want to say what I think would’ve happened, but yeah. Some kind of magical bomb. Whoever did this left that behind as a giant middle finger to anyone trying to chase them down.”
Everyone looks at me.
“Need a medic over here,” yells Jade, pointing at the female tech. “Damn those little fuckers bit deep.”
“How long ago did this happen?” I ask, pointing at the empty sarcophagus.
Jade pulls out a small notepad. “We’re guessing about two hours. Security cameras started showing people avoiding this area around six. Almost like no one could even see the archway into this room. At 7:02 p.m., the camera display freezes and jumps to 8:11—and voila… the bodies are there.”
“Okay. So those beetles were inside that guy for about an hour and cleaned him to the bone.”
“Like damn piranha,” says the female tech.
I cringe. “Probably worse. Piranha on crack.”
Jade gives me the side eye. “It’s not the eighties anymore, girl. No one adds ‘on crack’ to anything to make it nastier.”
“Piranhas from hell?” I ask.
“You’re going back in time. That sounds like a 1960s movie.”
Someone big walks up on my left. I turn and peer at the chest of a cop. Dude is not small. Looking him in the eye almost hurts my neck. His chin’s so wide his head’s basically a cube.
“Did, umm, you really just make lightning fly out of your hand?” asks Copzilla.
I glance down at the seven-foot-long black jagged burn on the floor by the body and the dusting of insect bits. “Yeah. Too many bugs to do anything else. I hoped the lightning would travel from bug to bug, and it did.”
“That’s pretty damn cool.” He smiles.
“You got a permit for that?” asks a highly-Italian looking, smaller cop only one head taller than me.
My turn to give someone the side eye. I can’t tell if he’s serious or if he’s making fun of the city’s overly aggressive bureaucracy. Shit. Of course. A year from now, practitioners will probably need a license just to cast Fire in their stoves. Any excuse to squeeze a couple more bucks out of people.
I decide to hope he’s kidding and chuckle.
He smiles back at me. “Nice job. Hey, umm. Any chance I could take a selfie with you? My kid would love it. She’s into elves and stuff.”
“Sure, I guess. Maybe afterward?”
“Definitely.”
Meanwhile, two EMTs attend to the tech. The scarab bites penetrated about an inch deep and sliced laterally around the same width. Shit, she’s losing a lot of blood from even a handful of bites. She winds up going out the door on a stretcher.
Jade walks up to me. “So that’s a definite on magic then. That means the case is sticking to me, and I’m gonna need you. Can you check the other two bodies for nasty surprises?”
“Sure. Though if they had anything like this, it would’ve already triggered. Didn’t that woman say they’d examined them?”
“True.”
I Reveal both of the other bodies and get the impression that the guy with the broken face and the scarab bomb had both been magical practitioners. Hmm. On a lark, I crouch by the third, non-practitioner, and rest my hand on his shoulder—still with the plastic sheet in place. Sensing targeted on the body instead of the area gives me a strong surge of the dread I’m starting to believe means necromancy, as well as a sudden spike of terror. His terror, that is. Not mine.
“Crap. That’s not good.” I stand and wipe my hand off on my jeans, even though I only touched a tarp.
Jade waits, expecting me to continue.
“This guy died directly from magic. Someone hit him with… I think a spell that causes fear, but so much of it so fast he had a heart attack. Pretty sure these three came here together. Two are practitioners and one is not. Maybe they turned on each other, or whoever hired them—the necromancer—didn’t feel like paying.”
“So you’re saying wizards did this?”
“We tend to use the term practitioner. ‘Wizard’ sounds too much like something out of the movies. But yeah. And worse, I’m also inclined to think one is a necromancer, which is a practitioner of the darkest of arts.”
She shivers. “I know.”
“You know how? Ran into one before?”
“No, that… thing you helped me track down in the subway a while back. You called it a ghoul. Undead, right?”
“Oh. Yeah. Necromancers can theoretically summon the undead. Probably why they stole the mummy. Could be a novice who wanted to study an ancient corpse. I don’t know anything about the inner workings of necromancy. It’s anathema to me. Fire to ice.”
“Oh?” Jade gives me the suspicious smirk. “You’re just that innocent?”
“Hah. Hardly. No, it’s the elf thing. We hug trees, not dead people.”
Special Agent Walter Prince, Jade’s official partner, trots in, thwapping a notepad on his hand. The guy still looks uptight, but after them rounding up the OSA cultists in the field, he’s stopped teasing me about ‘the magic stuff.’ Still, I’m tempted to poke fun at his thick hair helmet, but I don’t. No shame in posing for the ‘government agent’ calendar.
“Four security staff plus a janitor are missing,” says Prince.
“Missing?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus.”
Agent Prince spots me. “Hey, Sol.”
I roll my hand up in a greeting wave.
“There must be some weird shit going down if you brought her in,” says Prince.
Jade pats me on the arm. “She saved two lives while you were having coffee with the museum manager. She’s just about to magic up an arrow or something that’ll point right at that mummy.”
“Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t quite work that way.” I wander the room, looking around for anything my elf eyes can pick up that the humans missed while simultaneously feeling for any kind of magical trail. Unfortunately, this room has too much background energy for me to get much of a mystical sense of where the mummy went.
Jade fills Prince in on what he missed while I wander the room.
On the opposite side of the main set of cases holding the exhibit associated to that mummy—Khaled II according to the signs—I spot a smear of violet residue on the floor. It’s faintly glowing, which means it’s either magical or someone spilled a high-octane energy drink. I haven’t the faintest idea what it is other than ‘arcane residue.’ Though I am curious how none of the people here noticed this rather obvious glowing puddle. Probably because they can’t see it glowing, and looks like water to them.
As I look around the room, I realize I’ve reached the limit of my magical bag of tricks. Other than the obvious—a stolen mummy and three murders—I can’t get a handle on what went down here and why. Hmm. No, not quite out of all options. There is one more thing I can try.
Divination is the art of seeing the future, but also the unknown. In this case, the latter is of keen interest to me. As a kid who used actual magic, I somehow never believed the whole crystal ball seeing stuff really worked. Of course, events as of late have caused me to reevaluate a lot of stuff I didn’t used to take seriously. Luckily, I knew just enough about divination to, as they say, get myself in trouble.
After a few minutes of trying to simultaneously clear my mind while reaching out mystical feelers, I pick up the distinct impression something dangerous and powerful shuffled through here at a not-quite-human gait.
“Oh, shit,” I mutter.
“What?” asks Jade—right behind me—unexpectedly.
I scream like a kid in a funhouse, nearly jumping out of my skin.
Jade grabs me before I flip out and fall on my ass. “Sorry for sneaking up on you. Didn’t want to disturb whatever you were doing. Looked like something intense.”
I stare at her for a moment, hand clamped over my chest. “Damn… I’m already on edge from the energy in the air here and you just about killed me.”
“Sorry. Again.” And I’m pretty sure she murmured “drama queen” under her breath.
“I am not a drama queen.”
“You heard that? And you kinda are sometimes.”
I pull at one of my pointy ears. “These aren’t just for kicks and giggles.”
Now she really does giggle. “Sorry. So what’s going on that we can’t see?”
I slump against her, head on her shoulder, breathing until the heartbeat in my ears slows enough that I’m probably not going to pass out. “I have some bad news.”
“The missing people are dead?” asks Prince, coming up behind her.
I stand straight and clear my head. “I can’t say either way on that, but… I think the mummy stole itself.”
“Oh, fuck,” says Jade. “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”
“Makes sense though,” I say. “A necromancer showed up here not to steal the remains but to wake him up. I don’t think any living practitioner created that bug bomb. The guy with the broken face probably got a good close look at a mummy’s fist. And of course, the sarcophagus case exploded outward.” I point at the glowing puddle. “Do you see that?”
“Mmm. Mmm, girl.” Jade shakes her head. “You definitely got it goin’ on. ’Course, you’re a little lacking in the booty department.”
“Yeah, I noticed. I’m somewhere between starved runway model and a train rail. People shouldn’t be this thin.”
Mr. Moody stretches, yawning. “You’re not human.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.” I stick my tongue out at him. “Be right back.”
I jog to my bedroom to get dressed. FBI crime scene calls for somewhat more serious clothes, I imagine. Jeans, Nike T-shirt, and my leather jacket should do the trick. I also go for my biracial shoes: their father was a pair of sneakers, mom hiking boots. Jade’s fellow agents already think of me as kind of a joke. Walking in there with Uggs on would only add fuel to that fire.
Jade springs to her feet as soon as I walk out into the living room. That weird flirty tension in the air between us is gone. “Wow. That jacket makes you look even hotter.”
Now I know she’s teasing. Or at least being a wiseass. “I’d get a Harley to go with it but I’m too worried about killing myself.”
“Everyone at the bureau who talks about bikes describes getting injured as a ‘when’ not an ‘if.’”
I follow her out into the hall. “Exactly why this elf is currently sans-motorcycle.”
“Your ass is sans-car, too.”
“Yeah.” I pull the door closed and hit it with a reverse Open to lock it. “Maybe I should change that.”
Chapter Ten
Crime Scene Enchanter
Jade drives us to the Museum of Natural History in one of those nice silver sedans that’s so unassuming everyone knows it’s a cop car.
We arrive a little after 9 p.m. and breeze past the police blockade outside. The place is a swarm of flashing red-and-blue light, though most of the cops appear to be standing around keeping people away—not that the museum is drawing a massive crowd this late on a Monday night.
The second we go inside, my skin tingles like I’ve walked naked into a cloud of gnats. There’s definitely some energy here, but it’s not coming from any specific direction. Nor does it feel overwhelming in its strength. More like I’m standing too close to a giant battery.
I keep gazing around at various small exhibits set up in the common areas. Anything with bones gives me the creeps, probably more so than it would have done pre-Convergence. Nothing moves or radiates awareness, but this building is slathered in eek.
Although Jade did say ‘mummy’ back at my apartment, when we head into the Egyptology section, I can’t help but brace myself. Nothing good ever comes from screwing around with ancient Egypt. That stuff really likes to be left alone. Oh, crap. It hits me out of the blue—no wonder we can’t explain the pyramids. Magic must’ve been involved. I’m a little fuzzy on the dates, but I’m pretty sure the Giza pyramids went up in something like 2500 BCE or so. That’s pretty well before the Waning. Heck, they might have been built so long ago that a whole other Waning/Convergence cycle occurred naturally since then.
Thinking that the height of Egyptian civilization probably coincided with a period of magic being strong in our world—okay, fine, the human world—makes me doubly hesitant to touch anything here.
Jade takes a left turn through an archway guarded by four city cops into a larger room full of people in FBI windbreakers.
“Hey, stupid question,” I whisper.
She looks back at me. “Shoot.”
“Why is the FBI investigating this?”
“Probably somewhere between the missing mummy belonging to a foreign government, the NYPD not wanting to deal with it, and them calling us in due to ‘weird shit.’ Most law enforcement around the country is aware of the rise in magic and supernatural things, though I can’t say they all believe it yet. This may just be them trying to push the cost of the investigation off on the Fed instead of eating it here in New York. Stuff’s gotten a bit too widespread to be kept quiet, so the CIA lost interest.”
“They had plenty of interest in me.” I look around at a room made to resemble some old temple. Lots of dusty brown rock and hieroglyphs. “Who steals a mummy anyway?”
“Well, at first the CIA wanted to keep the magical stuff out of the public eye. And mummies are typically taken for ransom,” says Jade, walking past a large display case full of old bowls and pottery. “Or sometimes to smuggle on the black market. I’ve been hearing some wild stories at the office about some stuff going on in China now. Mysticism was pretty big over there before this whole can of worms exploded open. Sounds like it’s going nuts now with trade in shit like dead monkeys, animal bones, even human remains. All supposedly for use by Wūshī.”
“Lovely.” Wūshī, I’d heard through the grapevine, was the Chinese equivalent of sorcerer. And some of their magic tended to be on the darker side of the spectrum.
Sounds like there’s big trouble in little China, says Mr. Moody in my head.
I bite my lip. Stop trying to make me laugh.
Jade stops and gestures.
A phone-booth-sized cabinet, front door smashed open, holds an empty wood-walled sarcophagus at an almost vertical angle. Gold leaf and red paint decorate the outer surface in an ornate pattern. The dull brick-red interior has a body-sized cavity with nothing in it but some creepy dark stains. Three bodies lay nearby, two covered in black plastic sheeting, the third presently under examination by a man and a woman in blue jumpsuits. The dead guy is wearing street clothes, a dark blue shirt and grey pants. His facial expression is frozen in a grimace that could mean extreme agony or shock.
I invoke what I think of as my ‘magical feelers.’ And since my magic feelers don’t really have a name, I decide to call it Sensing. Not sure holding my hands out helps at all, but it kinda feels like using antennas, so I do it anyway.
The instant the magic flows from my fingertips, a heavy foreboding doom falls over the whole room. My inner child screams and runs crying out of the room. Alas, the rest of me stays put. Someone used magic here within the past day or so, and I am assuming it to have been necromancy. Mom mentioned that Val’nathiri are more closely aligned to life energy than humans, so we have a bad reaction to death magic. As in, elves who try using it wither up into horrible abominations. Humans can wield it without much of a problem.
“Someone used some really dark magic here,” I whisper.
Jade nods once to me and approaches the forensic tech. “Any idea how they died?”
“Who’s that?” asks the woman in the CSI jumpsuit, jabbing a thumb my direction.
I attempt the gnomes’ cheesy smile. “I’m the CSE.”
“Huh?” asks Jade and the woman at the same time.
“You’re CSI. I’m CSE.” I fold my arms. “Crime Scene Enchanter… or something like that. Magical investigative consultant.”
I’m impressed, says Mr. Moody in my head. That almost sounded professional.
“Whatever,” says the forensics woman, leaning down over the body. “Just started my exam on this one. The tall guy back there had a pretty clear case of blunt force trauma to the head. It’s not an official COD for the third man, but my money’s on a myocardial infarction.” She pauses. “Hmm. What the…?”
Jade takes a step back as the woman pulls a set of forceps from a kit and sticks the end into the dead guy’s mouth. She extracts a large, black insect leg. Right as she does that, I feel a spike of dark energy come off the body as a handful of lumps race across the chest under the shirt.
“Get back!” I yell, while leaping away.
The corpse’s chest explodes open, releasing a shower of black scarab beetles bigger than chicken eggs. They coalesce into a dark tornado of buzzing awfulness—and start to engulf the forensic tech. My overwhelming revulsion at the sight—and the sense of darkness—makes me act before thinking. Aiming for the low left end of the swarm, I throw a Lightning.
A searing crackle of bluish electricity hits the bugs, leaping from insect to insect, creating a sort of freestanding Lichtenberg figure. The resulting boom from the spell shatters a few nearby display cases and sends most of the FBI and NYPD to the ground.
The scarab swarm bursts in a mixture of black ichor and smoke, though about a dozen bugs survive, clinging and biting the poor forensics tech. Three come for Jade and me, but she stomps them into slime splats. The screaming tech struggles to peel the flesh-eating insects off herself. Jade runs in to help.
Me… I really don’t want to touch them. If Mom, Dad, or Eva had one on them, sure, but a total stranger? Yeah… Jade can handle this. I just stand there trying to blink away the ghost of the lightning on my retinas.
It doesn’t take Jade or the female tech too long to stomp the last of them, though they left bleeding wounds that’ll probably need stitches.
“Jesus effing Christ what the hell was that?” yells the woman, staring in horror at multiple bleeding wounds on her chest and arms.
Her male partner runs over, staring at the open, hollow torso of the dead man. Those bugs ate everything inside him from shoulders to hips other than bones. I glance between that ghastly sight and the woman, pretty much convinced she would’ve been stripped to her skeleton on her feet in seconds had I not nuked that swarm.
“Uhh… I really don’t want to say what I think would’ve happened, but yeah. Some kind of magical bomb. Whoever did this left that behind as a giant middle finger to anyone trying to chase them down.”
Everyone looks at me.
“Need a medic over here,” yells Jade, pointing at the female tech. “Damn those little fuckers bit deep.”
“How long ago did this happen?” I ask, pointing at the empty sarcophagus.
Jade pulls out a small notepad. “We’re guessing about two hours. Security cameras started showing people avoiding this area around six. Almost like no one could even see the archway into this room. At 7:02 p.m., the camera display freezes and jumps to 8:11—and voila… the bodies are there.”
“Okay. So those beetles were inside that guy for about an hour and cleaned him to the bone.”
“Like damn piranha,” says the female tech.
I cringe. “Probably worse. Piranha on crack.”
Jade gives me the side eye. “It’s not the eighties anymore, girl. No one adds ‘on crack’ to anything to make it nastier.”
“Piranhas from hell?” I ask.
“You’re going back in time. That sounds like a 1960s movie.”
Someone big walks up on my left. I turn and peer at the chest of a cop. Dude is not small. Looking him in the eye almost hurts my neck. His chin’s so wide his head’s basically a cube.
“Did, umm, you really just make lightning fly out of your hand?” asks Copzilla.
I glance down at the seven-foot-long black jagged burn on the floor by the body and the dusting of insect bits. “Yeah. Too many bugs to do anything else. I hoped the lightning would travel from bug to bug, and it did.”
“That’s pretty damn cool.” He smiles.
“You got a permit for that?” asks a highly-Italian looking, smaller cop only one head taller than me.
My turn to give someone the side eye. I can’t tell if he’s serious or if he’s making fun of the city’s overly aggressive bureaucracy. Shit. Of course. A year from now, practitioners will probably need a license just to cast Fire in their stoves. Any excuse to squeeze a couple more bucks out of people.
I decide to hope he’s kidding and chuckle.
He smiles back at me. “Nice job. Hey, umm. Any chance I could take a selfie with you? My kid would love it. She’s into elves and stuff.”
“Sure, I guess. Maybe afterward?”
“Definitely.”
Meanwhile, two EMTs attend to the tech. The scarab bites penetrated about an inch deep and sliced laterally around the same width. Shit, she’s losing a lot of blood from even a handful of bites. She winds up going out the door on a stretcher.
Jade walks up to me. “So that’s a definite on magic then. That means the case is sticking to me, and I’m gonna need you. Can you check the other two bodies for nasty surprises?”
“Sure. Though if they had anything like this, it would’ve already triggered. Didn’t that woman say they’d examined them?”
“True.”
I Reveal both of the other bodies and get the impression that the guy with the broken face and the scarab bomb had both been magical practitioners. Hmm. On a lark, I crouch by the third, non-practitioner, and rest my hand on his shoulder—still with the plastic sheet in place. Sensing targeted on the body instead of the area gives me a strong surge of the dread I’m starting to believe means necromancy, as well as a sudden spike of terror. His terror, that is. Not mine.
“Crap. That’s not good.” I stand and wipe my hand off on my jeans, even though I only touched a tarp.
Jade waits, expecting me to continue.
“This guy died directly from magic. Someone hit him with… I think a spell that causes fear, but so much of it so fast he had a heart attack. Pretty sure these three came here together. Two are practitioners and one is not. Maybe they turned on each other, or whoever hired them—the necromancer—didn’t feel like paying.”
“So you’re saying wizards did this?”
“We tend to use the term practitioner. ‘Wizard’ sounds too much like something out of the movies. But yeah. And worse, I’m also inclined to think one is a necromancer, which is a practitioner of the darkest of arts.”
She shivers. “I know.”
“You know how? Ran into one before?”
“No, that… thing you helped me track down in the subway a while back. You called it a ghoul. Undead, right?”
“Oh. Yeah. Necromancers can theoretically summon the undead. Probably why they stole the mummy. Could be a novice who wanted to study an ancient corpse. I don’t know anything about the inner workings of necromancy. It’s anathema to me. Fire to ice.”
“Oh?” Jade gives me the suspicious smirk. “You’re just that innocent?”
“Hah. Hardly. No, it’s the elf thing. We hug trees, not dead people.”
Special Agent Walter Prince, Jade’s official partner, trots in, thwapping a notepad on his hand. The guy still looks uptight, but after them rounding up the OSA cultists in the field, he’s stopped teasing me about ‘the magic stuff.’ Still, I’m tempted to poke fun at his thick hair helmet, but I don’t. No shame in posing for the ‘government agent’ calendar.
“Four security staff plus a janitor are missing,” says Prince.
“Missing?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus.”
Agent Prince spots me. “Hey, Sol.”
I roll my hand up in a greeting wave.
“There must be some weird shit going down if you brought her in,” says Prince.
Jade pats me on the arm. “She saved two lives while you were having coffee with the museum manager. She’s just about to magic up an arrow or something that’ll point right at that mummy.”
“Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t quite work that way.” I wander the room, looking around for anything my elf eyes can pick up that the humans missed while simultaneously feeling for any kind of magical trail. Unfortunately, this room has too much background energy for me to get much of a mystical sense of where the mummy went.
Jade fills Prince in on what he missed while I wander the room.
On the opposite side of the main set of cases holding the exhibit associated to that mummy—Khaled II according to the signs—I spot a smear of violet residue on the floor. It’s faintly glowing, which means it’s either magical or someone spilled a high-octane energy drink. I haven’t the faintest idea what it is other than ‘arcane residue.’ Though I am curious how none of the people here noticed this rather obvious glowing puddle. Probably because they can’t see it glowing, and looks like water to them.
As I look around the room, I realize I’ve reached the limit of my magical bag of tricks. Other than the obvious—a stolen mummy and three murders—I can’t get a handle on what went down here and why. Hmm. No, not quite out of all options. There is one more thing I can try.
Divination is the art of seeing the future, but also the unknown. In this case, the latter is of keen interest to me. As a kid who used actual magic, I somehow never believed the whole crystal ball seeing stuff really worked. Of course, events as of late have caused me to reevaluate a lot of stuff I didn’t used to take seriously. Luckily, I knew just enough about divination to, as they say, get myself in trouble.
After a few minutes of trying to simultaneously clear my mind while reaching out mystical feelers, I pick up the distinct impression something dangerous and powerful shuffled through here at a not-quite-human gait.
“Oh, shit,” I mutter.
“What?” asks Jade—right behind me—unexpectedly.
I scream like a kid in a funhouse, nearly jumping out of my skin.
Jade grabs me before I flip out and fall on my ass. “Sorry for sneaking up on you. Didn’t want to disturb whatever you were doing. Looked like something intense.”
I stare at her for a moment, hand clamped over my chest. “Damn… I’m already on edge from the energy in the air here and you just about killed me.”
“Sorry. Again.” And I’m pretty sure she murmured “drama queen” under her breath.
“I am not a drama queen.”
“You heard that? And you kinda are sometimes.”
I pull at one of my pointy ears. “These aren’t just for kicks and giggles.”
Now she really does giggle. “Sorry. So what’s going on that we can’t see?”
I slump against her, head on her shoulder, breathing until the heartbeat in my ears slows enough that I’m probably not going to pass out. “I have some bad news.”
“The missing people are dead?” asks Prince, coming up behind her.
I stand straight and clear my head. “I can’t say either way on that, but… I think the mummy stole itself.”
“Oh, fuck,” says Jade. “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”
“Makes sense though,” I say. “A necromancer showed up here not to steal the remains but to wake him up. I don’t think any living practitioner created that bug bomb. The guy with the broken face probably got a good close look at a mummy’s fist. And of course, the sarcophagus case exploded outward.” I point at the glowing puddle. “Do you see that?”
