Laurell Hamilton - Divine Misdemeanors

He collapsed on top of me, his head cradled in the bend of my shoulder. I lay on my back, his heartbeat pounding against my chest as he fought to catch his breath. I had to swallow twice past my own pulse before I could whisper, “They’ll have to wait dinner a little while.”

He nodded, wordlessly, and then took a deep, shuddering breath and said, “Totally worth it.”

I could only nod wordlessly as I stopped fighting for enough air to talk and relearn how to breathe all at the same time.

I was dressed for dinner, which had become a semi-formal occasion, which meant I was a little overdressed for the police forensics lab, magical division. Jeremy had phoned before we could actually eat because he’d been called by one of the police wizards to come and give an opinion on Gilda’s confiscated wand. The one that had made a policeman fall down and not wake up for hours.

Jeremy wanted some of us to look at it, because he thought it was sidhe workmanship. He’d offered for me to stay home and eat because he really needed some of the older sidhe guards, Rhys had gone early to commune with his new sithen, and Galen was, like me, too young to know much about our older enchanted sidhe items. But the three of us were the only ones with private-detective licenses. The others could only come as bodyguards. The reporters going through the window had been on all the news and YouTube, so the police believed that I wouldn’t go out without a shitload of guards. So I was “protected” and Jeremy got the sidhe he wanted to look at the wand. The only downside was I had to eat something quickly in the car, and the yellow high heels dyed to match the yellow, belted dress, complete with crinoline to make the skirt sit right, were the wrong shoes for standing on the concrete floors.

The wand was in a Plexiglas rectangle. There were symbols literally pressed into the case. It was a portable anti-magic field so that if something was found the police could put it inside the case and negate it until forensics could figure out a more permanent solution.

We all stood around staring down at the wand, and by all I meant the two police wizards, Wilson and Carmichael, plus Jeremy, Frost, Doyle, Barinthus (who had shown up just as we were leaving), Sholto, Rhys, and me. Rhys had cut his sithen exploration short to solve crime.

The wand was still two feet long but now it was only two feet of pale white and honey-colored wood, clean and free of all the sparkle that Gilda was so fond of, and that I remembered clearly. “It doesn’t look like the same wand,” I said.

“You mean the star tip and the flashy outer covering?” Carmichael asked. She shook her head, sending her brown ponytail bobbing over her lab coat. “Some of the stones had metaphysical properties that helped amp up the magic, but it was all just to make it pretty and to hide this.”

I stared at the long, smoothly polished wood. “Why hide it?”

“Don’t look at it with just your eyes, Merry,” Barinthus said. He towered over all of us in his long cream trench coat. He was actually wearing a suit under the coat, though he’d left the tie off. It was the most clothes I’d seen him in since he got to California. He’d put his hair back in a ponytail, but even contained, the hair still moved a little too much for ordinary hair, as if even standing here in this very modern building with all the latest, greatest scientific equipment around us there was still some invisible current of water playing with his hair. He wasn’t doing it on purpose; it was just his hair this close to the ocean, apparently.

I didn’t like that—it sounded like an order—but I did it, because he was right. Most humans have to work at seeing magic, doing magic. I was part human, but in one way I was all fey. I had to shield every day, every minute, to not see magic. I had shielded heavily when I entered this area of the forensics labs because it was the room where they kept the really powerful magical items that they didn’t know what to do with, or were in the process of de-magicking, or figuring out a way to destroy that wouldn’t blow up other things. Some magic items once made are difficult to destroy safely.

I had upped my shields because I didn’t want to have to wade through all the magic in the room. The anti-magic boxes kept the things from working, but didn’t keep the wizards from being able to study them. It was a very nice bit of magical engineering. I took a deep breath, let it out, and dropped my shields just a little bit.

I tried to concentrate on just the wand, but of course there were other things in the room, and not all of them reacted to just vision. Something in the room called out, “Free me of this prison and I will grant you a wish.” Something else smelled like chocolate, no, hard cherry candy, no, it was like the scent of everything sweet and good, and with the scent there was a desire to find it and pick it up so I could have all that goodness.

I shook my head and concentrated on the wand. The pale wood was covered in magical symbols. They crawled over the wood, glowing yellow and white, and here and there a spark of orange/red flame, but it wasn’t fire exactly, it was as if the magic were sparking. I’d never seen that before.

“It’s almost like the magic has a short in it,” I said.

“That’s what I said,” Carmichael said.

Wilson said, “I thought it might be extra power like little pieces of magical battery meant to up the spell.” He was tall, taller than all the men except for Barinthus, with short pale hair that was going from gray to white. Wilson was barely thirty. His hair had gone gray after he’d detonated a major holy relic meant to bring about the end of the world. Anything meant to bring about the end of the world that might actually do it was always destroyed. The problem was that destroying something that powerful wasn’t always the safest occupation. Wilson was on the magical equivalent of the bomb squad. He was one of a handful of human wizards across the country certified for high-holy-relic disposal. Some of the other magic bomb techs thought Wilsonhad literally had a decade of his life span blown away with his old hair color.

He pushed his wire-framed glasses more firmly up his nose. He still looked like a really tall bookish computer nerd, and he was except that he was a bookish magic nerd, and according to the other magic techs either the bravest of them or one crazy motherfucker. I was quoting. The fact that only Wilson and Carmichael were still working on it and that it was in this room meant that the wand had done something unpleasant.

“Did the policeman who Gilda hit with this wand die or something?” I asked.

“No,” Carmichael said.

“No. What have you heard?” Wilson asked.

She frowned at him.

“What?” he asked.

I said, “This room is only for things that scare the police. Major relics, things designed to do bad things that you haven’t figured out how to de-magick or destroy yet. What did Gilda’s wand do to earn a place here?”

The two wizards looked at each other.

“Whatever you hold back,” Jeremy said, “may be the key to deciphering this wand’s power.”

“Tell us what you see first,” Wilson said.

“I’ve told you what I think,” Jeremy said.

“You said this might be sidhe workmanship. I want to know what some sidhe think of it.” Wilson looked from one to another of us; his face was very serious now. He was studying us the way he’d study anything magical that interested him. Wilson had the unsettling tendency to see the fey as another type of magical thing sometimes, as if he’d study us to see what we’d do.

The men looked at me. I shrugged and said, “Magical symbols in white and yellow are crawling over the wood with those odd sparks of orangey red. The symbols aren’t static but seem to be still moving. That’s unusual. Magical symbols glow sometimes to the inner eye, but they aren’t this … fresh, like the paint hasn’t dried.”