Devon Monk - Magic on the Storm

“Who?” I said. “Who did this?” I was trying to ask who could do this. There just wasn’t that much available magic to be able to do this much damage. “How long? When? When did that happen to him?”

Stotts hadn’t let go of my wrist. Smart. I’d probably go in there and ruin evidence in this state of mind.

“You’re here for that,” he said. “To Hound the scene. Tell me what you see. There’s more.”

And he was right. There was more.

More EMTs, men and women, and another stretcher. This one with tubes and monitors. I knew who it was from the shape of the prone figure even before I could see her face.

Violet.

Dad scratched at the backs of my eyes, no longer a moth-wing flutter, but something made out of sharp edges and teeth.

I exhaled to stay calm and pushed at Dad, needing him in a corner, away from my conscious thoughts, away from seeing Violet on a stretcher. I must have tried to pull away from Stotts too.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t get in the way. Let them do their job.”

Violet , my dad said. No. Please, no.

I pressed my lips together to keep his words from forming in my mouth. He was in my head, but he had no right to use my body. Even if Violet was hurt.

She was in better hands than mine right now. I was not a doctor, and neither was my father. Getting her to the hospital as quickly as possible was the smart thing to do.

As they passed, she opened her eyes.

My dad struggled, shoved at my control. Violet , he thought.

“Daniel?” she whispered.

No. Hell no. I didn’t care how much they loved each other-I was not going to let my father talk to her, was not going to let him use me or my mouth or thoughts that way, and was not going to stop the EMTs from getting her medical attention.

The EMTs moved swiftly past me. With Stotts’s hand still clamped to my wrist, I held my ground while Dad battered the edges of my control. Then the EMTs were gone. Violet was gone, placed very carefully into the back of an ambulance that drove away, lights flashing and sirens blaring. I pulled my hand away from Stotts.

Dad went dead silent. Angry.

Too bad.

Okay. Regroup. First the job. Hounding. Hounding the crime. Without magic. Then checking on Violet.

“Anything you’d like to tell me about this before I go in there?” I asked.

He looked at my expression, puzzled. Then glanced over my shoulder at the ambulance. Maybe at something beyond that. “Violet and Kevin were here when it happened. Violet was semiconscious when I arrived. She can’t remember anything.”

“Head wound?”

“She’s been hurt,” he conceded.

Yeah, well, I figured that out all on my own. “Is she going to be okay? Is the baby in danger?”

He looked down at his shoe, then back at me. “They don’t know yet.”

Fuck.

And the cool wash of my dread and my father’s anger melded into something else. Resolve. Whoever had done this, whoever had attacked my wife-I mean my friend-and my unborn sibling, was going to suddenly have a very bad, very short life.

I strode into the building, past the fallen door that looked like it had been blown off its hinges, and into the main room.

Stotts followed.

The first room was a reception area, though there was no desk. Just a couple small clean couches, a TV mounted on the wall, and a computer and a phone on a table.

I didn’t have magic at my disposal. None of us did. I glanced over at Stotts to see if he was uncomfortable with that. He looked calm, composed. Didn’t look like having magic or not having magic made any difference to him. Sort of an “If I don’t have my gun, I can kill you with my hands” kind of look.

Very cop of him. And it meant he wasn’t all that surprised that magic had suddenly died out.

“Do you know why magic’s gone?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I’m thinking it might have something to do with that gut feeling of yours. The storm. We’ve had magic black out on us before. But never this long.”

“Okay, so you know I can’t Hound without magic.”

“I’d just like your eyes on the place.”

There were already police officers and other specialists working the scene. Stotts’s MERC crew was inside, using a few gadgets that looked like they were low-magic but useful, like the glyphed witching rods, and nonmagical things like cameras and fingerprinting tools. Very old-school police procedural.

I felt out of place-I didn’t know what all the stages of investigation would be. All I ever did was Hound magic, track spells, identify casters, and not get involved in the cleanup and meticulous recording of the event.

Stotts had once told me that I was different from other Hounds he’d used, and I saw things in more detail than they did. I guess we were about to find out if that was still true without magic.

I walked through the room, careful not to touch anything, looking at the tables, the couches, the shelves, the walls. I inhaled through my nose and mouth, taking in the scents of metals and plastics, carpet cleaner, and the musty-closet smell of old books.

If magic had been cast here, in this room, I could not smell it.

“How’d the door get bashed in?” I asked.

“Police.”

Okay, so that was good. No magical battering ram. “Is there another room?”

I knew there had to be. There had to be a research room-maybe a clean room, a room glyphed and warded and I didn’t know what all else-to actually produce the disks, if the disks were made here.

“This way.” Stotts led me down a short hall, where windowed rooms lined either side. I followed, tasting the air, listening, looking. I might not have magic, but my senses were acute.

At the far end and right of the hall was a room with a door open. I stepped through the doorway and covered my nose. Magic had been used here. A lot of magic. I could smell the burnt-wood stink of it, hot as red peppers shoved up my nose. I didn’t remove my hand, instead breathed through my fingers. This was the lab. This was where the disks were made.

Stotts didn’t have to tell me. The magic that was used in here-no, the magic that was stored in here-hung like a flashing billboard that said WATCH YOUR STEP, MAGIC AHEAD.

The room had several long, low working counters sectioning it off, and the walls were bracketed by cupboards and countertops. Toward the back of the room was a wall of little silver-plated drawers, like safety-deposit boxes. Maybe a hundred, two hundred drawers.

All of them were pulled out, broken open, busted.

Drawn forward like a string on a reel, I walked over to the drawers. Black velvet lined the bottoms of the drawers. Glyphs, whorls of glass and lead, were worked into the walls of each drawer, scrolling a repeating pattern around the inside. Hold spells, I thought, maybe Containment. Tricky, intricate stuff. It had taken a fine, fine hand for that. A hell of a magic user had made these boxes and it was clear they were intended to keep whatever was inside them, inside them.

A flutter at the backs of my eyes, feather soft, brushed harder the longer I looked at those boxes.

And for a second my vision shifted. It was as if I were looking at the boxes through someone else’s eyes. My father’s eyes. I remembered-or rather I saw his memory of-the disks nestled in the drawers, one disk per box. And I knew that every disk had been fully charged with magic before it had been placed in the box.

Why would anyone store that much magic in one place?

As soon as I thought it, I heard his answering thought. Experimental. Untested. We were pushing the parameters, calculating the decay rate. Finding out how much magic the disks could hold and for how long.

How long could they hold magic? I asked.