Eileen Wilks - Death Magic

He looked tired. “Do you think I haven’t considered this? Law enforcement in this country is designed to operate openly. We hold power over people’s lives. That power must be tempered by accountability. By establishing a shadow organization, I eliminate that accountability, making abuse more likely. It’s my hope that there won’t be time for corruption to set in.”

“If you think you can stop her in a month or two—”

“A month or two. Interesting that you chose that interval. Without the Shadow Unit, the United States has approximately two months left before it collapses.”

He stopped there. Rule didn’t speak. Neither did Fagin. Lily sat motionless, her mind skittering away from his words while her stomach clutched up tight, as if it could tie a knot in the silence, hold on to it, so she didn’t have to hear . . .

It didn’t work. She had to ask. “All right. All right. Tell me.” “The third thing that happened to change my mind was a series of visions.”

Ruben’s Gift meant he had the best hunches ever. He knew, without knowing why, that he needed to take a certain action, or avoid an action. He’d proved his accuracy time after time. But he didn’t normally see the future. She knew of one occasion when he had, though. When a three- or four-thousand-year-old being who could not die was about to manifest herself and her power fully on Earth, dragging California and God only knew how much of the nation into chaos and nightmare.

Because of those visions, he’d been willing to hold back, to trust Lily, even when she couldn’t tell him anything. Because he trusted her and his own hunches, in the end he’d exerted his authority in the only way that would help.

Now he wanted her to trust him—and his visions.

“Without the Shadow Unit,” Ruben said quietly, “in approximately two months, perhaps one-third of the Gifted in the country will be dead. The Unit will be gone, its people dead or imprisoned or in hiding. The president and possibly the vice president will be dead. The nation will be in a panic, with mobs killing anyone suspected of magic. Some Gifted will strike back, killing large numbers of civilians and police alike. In one scenario, the surviving lupi retreat to Canada. In another, they pull back to their clanhomes, but after the military coup—”

“The what !?”

“I’ve seen five detailed scenarios. One of them results in an enormous physical cataclysm on the West Coast, the nature of which is unclear. Four of them end in a military coup a few months from now. It supplants civilian government in the West, Midwest, and Central U.S., and succeeds in restoring order at the cost of martial law and the end of elective government. The South descends into anarchy. Canada and Britain send troops to support the remaining fragment of U.S. government in the Northeast, but the world economy is in shambles due to the collapse of the United States. The dominant power that emerges in the new world order is the military dictatorship that arises from the coup, which is run by religious zealots who—some wittingly, some not—are her agents.”

Lily’s hands were cold. She wanted to disbelieve him. He was so certain, so damnably certain . . . “You said that’s without your Shadow Unit. With it? What happens then?”

“We have a decent chance of averting the incidents that precipitate the crisis.”

“What . . .” Lily’s mouth was too dry. She had to pause and summon enough spit to speak. “What incidents?”

He shook his head.

He didn’t know? No—if that were true, he would have said so. He meant that he wasn’t going to tell her.

Fagin spoke, his voice dreamy. “We know what Gift Friar received from the enemy.”

Dazed, Lily looked at the older man. Belatedly her mind caught up with what he’d said. Robert Friar had been imbued with some sort of Gift by the Old One he worshipped—the one Ruben referred to as their enemy. The one lupi often called the Great Bitch because it was dangerous to speak any of her names. Lily and Rule had been present for part of the ritual that invested Friar with his new power, but unable to stop it . . . Rule because he was in a cage. Lily because of all those elves trying to kill her. Soon after that, the node used to power the ritual turned unstable, bringing down half the mountain, burying Lily’s SIG Sauer and presumably Robert Friar as well.

Lily had never believed that. “How could you know that?”

Fagin just smiled. “Patterning. Friar is a new and incredibly powerful patterner. Ruben discovered this soon after Friar supposedly died.”

She looked at her boss. She’d placed her life on the line based on his hunches more than once. But to take his word—unsubstantiated, unsupported—for everything . . . he could be wrong. He was good, but he could still be wrong. “How do you know? Another hunch?”

“My knowledge is subjective, but not a hunch. Lily, you know that normally my Gift grants me knowledge of events in the near or very near future. More distant events are too fluid for a sense of them to emerge.”

“But you’ve seen some pretty damn specific events this time. Events that are more than a month away.”

He nodded. “That’s what raised my suspicions. My visions started after the node collapsed.”

“I don’t see why—”

“If you’ll stop asking, you’ll get your answer faster. I have to explain a bit about how my Gift works. I seldom receive hunches, much less visions, about events more than a few days in the future. Even a week away, the future is usually too fluid for me to pick up much.”

He’d spoken of this before. “Too many decision points, you told me once. Too many possibilities, choices, and people are involved in determining events, and the more distant a possible event is, the more these multiply, until it’s all static.”

He nodded. “Yet suddenly I was having explicit visions about events that were, at that point, three months distant, and some of them six months or more. I could only find one explanation for this abrupt explicitness. The future had been artificially constrained. I realized that an extremely strong patterner was manipulating events, forcing a single channel through which events flowed. Once I understood this, I consulted Sherry. You know that her coven observes node action throughout the nation through a simulacra map.”

Lily did know that, even if she was fuzzy on what a “simulacra map” might be. She nodded.

“We’d hoped she could reconstruct what was done through the node used to imbue Friar with his Gift. So far she hasn’t been able to. In the process, however, she discovered that virtually every node in the nation is being drawn upon by what appears to be a single, albeit untraceable, source.”

“Every node? But that’s not possible. That’s . . . don’t practitioners have to be in physical proximity to—”

“So we’ve always believed. But it would take a great deal of power for a single patterner to influence events across the entire country.”

Fagin spoke up suddenly. “They call it the Gift of the gods, you know. Patterning is the most subtle and dangerous of Gifts. I think you encountered a patterner once.”

Lily shot Ruben a hard glance. Apparently he’d been sharing a lot with Fagin, some of it highly classified. “I’ve run across a couple of them, actually.”

“Oh?” Fagin’s bushy brows shot up. “The one I was thinking of was named Jiri. You had some difficulty overcoming her.”

“I didn’t overcome her,” Lily said dryly. “I managed to stay alive. She didn’t, but that’s because she only cared about one thing. And she got that.” Her daughter’s life. Jiri had not been a good guy by any means, but she’d given her life so her daughter would live. The child had been adopted by the Leidolf Lu Nuncio.