Devon Monk - Magic on the Storm

When I. . when I was alive, they had yet to degrade. At all.

The reality of what this meant was slowing soaking in. Someone, maybe more than one someone, had more than a hundred disks, all filled with magic.

Hundreds of magic disks that caused no price of pain to use, filled with magic, in a city currently empty of magic.

Holy shit.

My father’s grim agreement didn’t do much to steady my nerves.

Do you know who would do this? Who would want this? I thought.

Who wouldn’t want it? he asked.

Yeah, I got that. When there is no magic, the person who has the remaining power wins. But he had to have some idea of who would know how to break into the lab. Who would know that the disks were here.

If I could Hound it, I’d know. I’d be able to read the spell used to take the disks, because even to my untrained, un-police-officer eyes, I could tell this wasn’t a standard break-in. Magic had been used.

And I needed magic to Hound.

“Are there any of the disks left?” I asked Stotts.

“Not in the drawers.”

“Anywhere else in the building?”

“There hasn’t been anything else taken,” he said. “We haven’t begun looking for other disks. There are no other storage rooms, no other walls like this.”

I paced, looking at all the closed cupboards, thinking of all the rooms in the building. There might be a disk somewhere, a reject, a defect, a trial run. How much time did I have? How much time before the storm hit, before Zayvion stopped breathing, before the hospital’s backup spells gave out and Violet lost the baby?

Dad? I thought. Are there any other disks stored here?

A strange papery scrub flicked at the corner of my mind. Kind of like pages being fanned by a thumb.

There might be , he whispered. In our. . office. Down the hall.

“I need to look down here,” I said.

Stotts took my declaration in stride. He was used to working with Hounds. Everyone knew Hounds were quirky at best, and more often crazy. I found the door my dad had remembered, tried it. Locked.

Oh, come on.

“I need in there,” I said.

“Why? Crime happened back there.”

“Listen-” I looked over at Stotts, realized he had not been in the loop of my conversation with Dad. “Listen,” I said a little softer, “there might be another disk in there. And the disks hold magic. I can use that small amount of magic to Hound the scene.”

Stotts was already nodding. “I won’t ask you how you know there might be a disk in there,” he said. “Yet.” He tried the latch. “Do you know what this room was used for?”

“Maybe an office?”

He pulled something out of his coat pocket. A key or a lock-picking tool, I didn’t know. But whatever it was, Stotts knew how to use it. He unlocked the door on the first try, and pushed it open. He stepped in front of me, blocked my access, and scanned the room, then flicked on the light switch. Fluorescent lights crackled to life, revealing a room filled with mahogany furniture and expensive glass artwork tucked into bookshelves. The desk in the middle of the room probably cost millions and was dead-on for my dad’s tastes. So were the luxurious couch, chairs, and wet bar along one wall. The carpet probably cost more than the building I lived in.

Stotts’s eyebrows perked up. This room was decadent, but just understated enough to say it wasn’t merely money behind the arrangement; it was a fortune.

For her , I heard Dad whisper. I made it for her.

Okay, I did not need a lovelorn ghost in my head. Not right now.

Change that: not ever.

You thought she’d like this? Did you even ask her what she wanted? I asked.

Do not- his words were a little louder now- speak to me in that manner.

Okay, a pissed-off ghost wasn’t going to do me any good either. Especially since he knew where the disks might be.

Where is the disk?

He hesitated and I wondered whether I’d be able to strangle an answer out of him. Considering he didn’t have a neck, and I didn’t have mental hands, it offered some interesting difficulties.

The shelf.

Terse. Good going, Allie, piss off the dead guy.

I walked across the room to the shelves behind the desk. Stotts was dividing his time between watching me and taking in the details of the room.

The shelves were beautiful and smelled of polish and something that gave the faint perfume of jasmine blossoms. Books, all leather bound, probably worth thousands, lined the middle shelf. Below that was intricate glass artwork. Lights cleverly positioned in the shelf brought the art to life, glowing deep blues, red, yellow, and smoky gray. Beautiful. I lost a second staring at them, and wondered why they reminded me of magic, of the different disciplines of magic being worked together.

Wondered why they reminded me of Zay.

I swallowed hard. I’d been trying not to think about him. Every time I did, a knot in my throat and a weight in my chest made me want to cry, to go to him, curl up with him, as if somehow touching him and being with him would make the world go away.

As if somehow just being with him would bring him back to me.

I cleared my throat and blinked until the room was no longer blurry. The disk. Maybe there would be more than one. And I could use one to find out who did this, then use the other to go kick their teeth in.

On the top shelf were notebooks, a leather bottle, probably antique, and a lovely collection of crystals.

And one of the crystals looked a lot like a disk.

Well, not exactly a disk. It wasn’t a perfect machined circle like the disk in Greyson’s neck; it wasn’t silver, slick, glyphed. This disk was made of crystal, and looked like it had been carved, magical glyphs scoured into it, deep in some places, barely a scratch in others. It was white, with highlights of soft pink and blue. And it was beautiful.

Did you make this? I asked Dad.

Grew , he said. We grew it.

I didn’t have to touch it to know it was filled with magic. I could smell the magic in it, a sweet scent like roses in the rain. It looked harmless.

Is it going to hurt me if I pick it up? I asked.

Not that I know of. And if he hadn’t been suddenly so curious to see what happened when I touched it, I would have just gone right ahead and done that. Instead, I decided to clue Stotts in on all this.

“I think this is a disk. A prototype of some sort. It’s holding magic.”

Stotts strode over to me, his loafers hushed against the deep, soft carpet.

“The crystal?” he asked.

I pointed. “That crystal.”

“Do you want me to pick it up?”

“No, I just thought I’d tell you what I was doing in case I ended up on the floor or something.”

“Maybe I should pick it up.”

“Let me. I’m the Hound.”

I reached over, careful not to touch the other crystals, and put one fingertip on the disk.

My dad, in my head, chuckled.

Shut up , I thought at him.

Of all the times in your life, it is now that you develop a sense of caution? he asked.

Okay, peanut-gallery dead guy wasn’t working for me either.

No buzz, no shock, nothing beneath my fingertip but the slightly oily feel of the magic-infused crystal. I didn’t absorb it like a sponge-yes, that thought had gone through my mind, since I usually carry magic-and it didn’t explode or anything.

So far, so good.

I picked it up.

If the crystal had been beautiful from a distance, it was absolutely mesmerizing in the palm of my hand. Soft, pink, it didn’t seem to sparkle so much as glow against my skin. The glyphs carved or maybe grown into it seemed to shift, slowly, slowly, as they made a snail’space path through the crystal.