John Levitt - Unleashed

“Beulah, calm down,” she said. Beulah whined and sat down. Morgan sighed. “I originally got her for protection, but that turned out to be a joke. She’s a sweetie, but she’s afraid of her own shadow. Small dogs make her nervous, and she’s terrified of cats.”

Beulah whined again as Lou greeted her. He’s very good with real dogs. He actually enjoys playing doggy games on occasion, and it’s the rare dog who realizes that he’s not really one of them. After the appropriate amount of sniffing, both tails began to wag.

“Morgan, this is Eli and Victor,” I said as we walked inside.

“I recognize you two,” she said. “You’re the ones-” She broke off and glanced over at me.

“The ones you saw in the vision,” I finished. “They’re here to help set up wards around the house, for protection.”

“Oh. How does that work, anyway? Will I feel it, like an electric fence?”

“Not at all,” Eli assured her. “You won’t even be able to tell the wards are there. But they will keep out things that shouldn’t be allowed in.”

Eli and Victor continued their walk-through, examining the back door and the windows. The house was a two-story wooden structure, probably built in the twenties or thirties. Inside, art deco furniture and original artwork crammed every room.

“Very nice,” I said.

“It is, isn’t it. I wish I could take credit for it all, but I inherited the place from my aunt Aida about five years ago.” That explained how she could afford such a place.

“She had excellent taste,” Victor said, looking around approvingly.

“Didn’t she? Not a very nice person, actually, although since she left me the house I shouldn’t say that, but she did have a great eye for things.”

We walked through the house to the kitchen, where the back door opened out onto a wooden deck and stairs ran down to a garden below. Victor was the one who would set up the wards-lots of practitioners can contribute, but the actual warding tends to be a one-man job. Everyone has their own style in setting up protection, and often two people working together don’t mesh. Two differing approaches can result in discontinuities, and the warding often ends up weaker than it would with either person working alone. Victor was the logical choice to do it; his talent is better suited and he’s a stronger practitioner than I am anyway. Eli’s expertise is invaluable, but he doesn’t always have the power to implement his own ideas.

Sometimes practitioners can work together. Victor’s mansion is the best-protected house on the West Coast, a fortress of interlocking grids of energy. Nothing gets in or out unless he wants it to. It has to be that way, since he’s made serious enemies in his day, practitioners who bear him no love at all. That’s what happens when your job is chief enforcer of magical behavior, and your moral code leans toward the ethically rigid.

Quite a few practitioners worked on the warding of that house, and it now looks like a power substation when viewed on the psychic plane. But they’d had weeks to work on it, plenty of time to fine-tune and check every magical seam and rivet where there was a possibility of conflict.

Victor started on the front door, throwing out a line of energy that limned the edges of the doorway with pale green. Of course it wasn’t really green; it wasn’t strictly a color at all. Green is just a metaphor for what could be perceived on the psychic plane. He wove in several other lines, mostly in blacks and grays, then moved on to the windows. Around the back, upstairs, and finally the fireplace in the front room, something I might have overlooked if I’d been doing it.

Morgan followed him around, wide-eyed, although of course she couldn’t see anything of what he had done. Except, she could.

“Why are most of those lines black?” she asked. Eli looked at her sharply.

“You can see them?”

“Well, not really see them, not with my eyes. More like what happens when I get a vision.”

This was unexpected. She was a psychic, to be sure, but she shouldn’t have been able to see the wards. Unless she had more than a touch of the talent herself. This was an interesting development.

“When this is settled, we’ll need to have a talk,” Eli said.

Victor finally finished sitting up the wards and sat down heavily at the kitchen table. Warding an entire house on short notice will take a lot out of you, even if you’re Victor.

“Is it safe now?” Morgan asked.

“As safe as I can make it,” Victor said. “Nothing’s getting in here.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, nothing of the magical variety. No practitioners. No creatures. You’ll still need locks against burglars.”

“What about Mason? Can he come in if I want him to?”

“Sure, as long as you invite him in. The wards are attuned to you.”

“You mean like a vampire movie? He can’t come in unless I invite him?”

“Not the metaphor I would have chosen,” I said. “But, yes, basically.”

“That’s kind of cool, actually.” She looked out a window at the backyard. “What about the backyard? I spend a lot of time out there, in the garden. Do I have to stay in the house all the time?”

“It’s hard to properly ward an open area,” Eli said. “We could make it safer, though, strong enough to slow something down and give you time to get inside.”

Victor looked over at me.

“Do you think you could handle that?” he said.

I was stunned. First, that he was admitting, at least implicitly, that he was worn-out. And second, that he would even think of trusting me to do something like that. Luckily, both he and Eli had taught me a lot about warding last year when my own place had needed serious protection. And since the yard was a separate area my work wouldn’t interfere with Victor’s house wards.

“Sure,” I said.

I wasn’t sure at all, but it wouldn’t help Morgan’s peace of mind if I hemmed and hawed. I walked down the back stairs, and I liked what I saw. A tall ivy-covered fence surrounded the entire yard, no breaks, nice and even. On either side, the fence came right up to the house. I could attach the wards in the yard to the warded house, and the even height of the fence made warding the rest of the yard an easy task.

Most of my talent is the improvisational sort, but I have learned some other skills. I didn’t have enough power to properly ward the entire fence, so I laid a tiny line of force around the top of it, like a guide wire. I poured all the energy I had into one corner and bound it up with the ivy growing on the fence. It sat there quietly glowing. So now, although the rest of fence was basically unprotected, the minute anything tried to climb over or break through, the bound force would travel along the guide wire to the appropriate spot and stop it cold. In effect, the entire fence was now protected as strongly as the small section where I’d put all my focus. Eli was observing, and he smiled approvingly.

“A very elegant solution. You’re learning, boy.”

Morgan was appreciative of our help, but at the same time was understandably disturbed. Eli assured her it was just a precaution.

“You don’t have to hide inside the house all the time,” he said. “Just be careful-don’t go out alone late at night, for example.”

“Like as if I had a stalker.”

“Yes, something like that. And if you’re spooked about anything, give one of us a call.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I will.”

I WENT HOME FOR A WELL-DESERVED REST, BUT had barely managed to sit down when Ruby called.

“Good, you’re home,” she said. “I think I’m onto something. Or maybe something’s onto me. I’m sitting at a café, over on Valencia and Twentieth, enjoying a soy latte.”