Chapter 5: Investigation
“But Mom!” Freddy protested.
Wren tried not to smile when the twelve-year-old’s voice cracked. “I’m not saying you have to go to sleep right away. Just put on whatever you’re sleeping in and get in bed. I don’t want you falling asleep on your beanbag chair in your sweaty clothes again.”
“Fine.” The single syllable seemed like a concession on the scale of those made by Chamberlain at Munich.
Wren knew her role in the Munich scenario and tried, again, not to smile at the drama her son managed to inject into any situation. She put her arm around his bony shoulders and kissed his cheek.
Unlike most twelve-year-olds, Freddy was deeply asleep when his head came to rest on his pillow. Wren knew, from talking to his friends’ parents, that cell phones and video game systems keeping their kids awake until the wee hours were a near-universal problem. Freddy had those things and was normally no less prone to sleep deprivation, but not tonight. Tonight, Wren had used a little sorcery.
In the master bedroom Marisol sat on the bed, mating socks and rolling them into balls. “Is he actually in bed?” she asked Wren, who nodded. “I’d better go tell him goodnight.”
“He was pretty tired,” Wren lied.
“I’ll just go and give him a kiss.” When she returned, closing the bedroom door behind her, Marisol asked, “Aren’t you going to get ready for bed?” She glanced down, drawing her wife’s attention to the slender, bosomy figure her otherwise modest nightgown did little to conceal.
After nine years Wren knew her wife’s signals. Why tonight? Their love life had slowed down enough in recent years to make any night they were both in the mood something of an event. Dang it! I so don’t want to have to go out tonight.
“Why don’t you lie down and let me give you a back rub?”
ͽʘͼ
Wren chastised herself as she drove. I am a total jerk. I’ve got a beautiful wife who still wants me at least as much as I want her—and I just did the magical equivalent of drugging her into unconsciousness to avoid sex, because I have a secret life that I refuse to share with her. Geez! I am a jerk!
It was not right, she knew, to use sorcery to control the actions of her loved ones to make her own life more convenient. She hated herself for having done it. Sure, it was Guild business, but was it a matter of life and death? Well, yes, actually. It is—or if it isn’t, then it wasn’t for want of trying on somebody’s part. Was there another way she could have handled this? Maybe, but this was the least compromising way she had been able to devise. Compared to what I could have—
No. I will not rationalize this. Power corrupts because those with power rationalize its uses. If I start rationalizing now, I know I will never stop. I’ll wind up having Mari and Freddy as accessories, instead of as a family. I will not allow myself to rationalize what I have done tonight.
Her mind, as it had so many times through the years, began to run through the list of pros and cons of just telling Mari that she was a sorceress. She could demonstrate, warp reality in such a way that it would prove the truth to her wife. Then, Wren could stop manipulating her family with magic to cover her work for Adelaide and the Guild. If she told her wife the truth, however, it would reveal a fundamental crack in the foundation of the life they had built together. Even if Mari accepted the truth, she might no longer accept Wren.
Hmph! I have this same argument with myself every time and I never get past the part where I’m scared of losing my family. Fear always wins.
“Dang it!” she said aloud to herself as she realized she had missed the exit. “C’mon, Wren, get your head in the game. You’ve got a job to do.” She took the next exit and doubled back to the correct one.
Wren’s afternoon inspection of Adelaide’s Coupe deVille had done little to help her identify who had made the attempt on her former mentor’s life—or even how they had done it. The would-be killer—or killers—had used methods that left almost nothing that she might have used to identify them—and most auras or sorcerous residues that might have remained would likely have been scrubbed clean when the car crossed the threshold of the magical defenses that protected Miss Adelaide’s estate. The few traces that she had found, however, let her make some educated guesses about how the vehicle had been attacked. Her goal tonight was to trace the route Adelaide had traveled last night to see if those educated guesses held up and to find whatever else she could.
At her first stop, the hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant where Adelaide had eaten the night before, Wren found the spot where the Coupe deVille had been parked. She used her second sight to inspect the surroundings, detecting nothing, then got out of her car. From her pocket, she produced an arcane tool of her own creation. It appeared to be just a small flashlight. Moreover, it appeared to be broken because, when she switched it on, it produced no light. To someone with the second sight, however, it illumined traces of nearly every variety of sorcery, magery, witchcraft, and other things a layperson would describe as “magic.”
She returned to her car. The “flashlight” had shown her nothing. Adelaide’s car had powerful magical defenses, piled atop even more powerful magical defenses, which should have protected it against loss of control and colliding with a dumpster. Whoever sent the Abyssal wolves had somehow gotten through that protection in order to make the attack work. She felt sure that the magic that had compromised the car’s defenses would have left traces wherever it had been cast, but the restaurant’s parking lot did not seem to be the place.
An hour later, a pothole jarred her out of her thoughts as she followed Adelaide’s route via Google Maps into what anyone who did not live there would have called a bad part of town. None of the other likely places had revealed clues. She had been reduced to simply driving along the route the Coupe de Ville had traveled the night before just to see what she might see. The next pothole was so large that she would have been worried about her tires, if they had not been sorcerously protected from damage.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
After that second pothole, she kept close watch and avoided two more. When the idea struck, she almost slammed on the brakes in her “eureka moment,” but managed to resist the impulse and merely pulled to the side of the road. Attacking a car protected like Adelaide’s while it was moving was nearly impossible. That was why Wren had assumed it had happened in the parking lot one of the places Adelaide had stopped last night.
But what if spell that had compromised the car’s defenses had been laid out like a pothole, or a landmine? This “landmine” could be set to affect only things similar to its intended target. It would’ve been set ahead of time, allowing whoever laid it to retreat out of harm’s way and be long gone before the wolves attacked. If it acted like a magnetic mine, it might have been designed to attack Miss Adelaide’s model of car, or even the defensive spells that were supposed to protect the car. Wren wondered how the would-be killers knew which route Adelaide would take.
“Duh! They wouldn’t have to know her exact route if they laid out the mines in several locations!” She felt mildly embarrassed talking aloud to herself, then felt silly for imagining that there might be anyone around to have seen her doing so here on this dark, empty street in the wee hours of the morning. She jerked in shock as someone tapped at her passenger-side window.
Through the window stared an old black man in a white T-shirt. His dark arms were scrawny, and he seemed emaciated, but for a round belly that lapped over his belt. He made a circular motion, indicating that she ought to roll down the window.
Does this guy think that a woman—any woman—all alone in this part of town at this time of night is going to roll down her window for a skeevy-looking stranger? She pushed the thumb of her left hand against her wedding band. Several spells, both offensive and defensive, had been set into that slim gold band. Well, I’m not just any woman. Let’s see what the old guy wants. She pushed the button on her door and rolled down the window.
He waited until the window was completely down, then rested his forearm against the door as he leaned down to speak to her. His voice was mellifluous, a richly modulated baritone that belied his appearance. “You lookin’ for somethin, darlin’? Old Bobbie can help you find almost anything.”
“And that’s you?” What the heck? How often do you meet skinny drug dealers with a voice like James Earl Jones?
He winked. “You know it, darlin’. What you lookin’ for?”
Should I tell this guy, this ancient drug dealer, I’m looking for clues to discover who tried to assassinate a high-ranking sorceress? A feeling of whimsy rose within her. Why not? The ridiculousness of it created an almost irresistible impulse, but she backed away. Instead, she asked, “You see anything weird around here last night?”
His gaze held a truly unfathomable sangfroid. “Sure,” he said.
“Like what?”
He shook his head once. “I guess that depends on what kind of weird you talkin’ about. They got all kinda weird goin’ on ‘round here all the time.”
Wren produced a fifty from the pocket of her jeans and held it toward the man. “Take this and tell me everything you saw last night.”
In a surprisingly smooth motion, the man who had identified himself as “Old Bobbie” reached out and palmed the bill. It seemed to disappear with the movements of his slender fingers. When it was gone, he said, “You mean everything? Or just the weird stuff?”
She looked him in the eye. “Tell me everything you think I might possibly be interested in from last night—and don’t waste my time. Tell me about things that you don’t normally see around here.”
He scratched one of the gray patches in his close-cut natural hair, then wiped his hand down, across his mouth. “Well, let’s see. A white fella came walkin’ though in tiny short pants and—”
“What’d he look like?”
Old Robbie shrugged. “Bald. Had himself a bushy beard. Hairy. Had runnin’ shoes. Said he was walkin’ home.”
Was that the guy who helped Miss Adelaide? She made a note to find out. “What else?”
“Well, this white lady came speedin’ through here, like a bat outta hell in her big, yellow Cadillac.”
Wren nodded. This guy saw Miss Adelaide last night? What are the odds? What else did he see? “Go on.”
He shook his head. “That’s ‘bout all.” He straightened and took a step back from the car and then another.
“That’s it?” Wren knew it was an almost-miraculous happenstance that she had run into someone who had seen any part of last night’s events, but her experience as an investigator compelled her to push for more, for everything she could possibly discover. “That’s all I get for fifty bucks?”
Old Robbie made a dismissive slashing motion with his hand as he walked away from the car. She heard him muttering in that smooth, deep voice as he retreated. “…’Spect me do all your work…Aldaba…triad…wolves…”
What the heck? She unfastened her seatbelt, threw open her door, and launched herself from the car with impressive speed. As she rounded the car, she found the sidewalk empty. Her second sight revealed nothing. The man had vanished without leaving a trace that even Wren with her substantial skills could follow.
She returned to the car and tried to process the encounter, but she soon gave up on making sense of what happened. Someone knows what happened—and they want me to know that they know. But who? Why? She waited, parked next to the curb for another hour, but Old Robbie did not return. Finally, she shifted the car into drive to resume her retracing of Adelaide’s path.
She found the dumpster with which the Cadillac had collided and stopped to inspect the surrounding area. The invisible beam of her arcane flashlight revealed bright traces of Adelaide’s struggle with the triad of Abyssal wolves but, it also outlined a dark, spattered oval at the road’s edge. It looked for all the world like a pool of black blood. Then, she remembered Miss Adelaide’s good Samaritan jogger. This has to be where the guy somehow killed the Abyssal wolf. How did a civilian even manage that?
She turned, but something caught her eye and she turned back. There, in the puddle of near-absolute blackness revealed by the beam of the clever device she had disguised as a flashlight, was something.
ͽʘͼ
Wren’s brain continued to process what she had learned as she headed toward home. If I needed access to Adelaide for an attack, where would I do it? The club. If I were trying to lay mines for Miss Adelaide’s car, she’s at the club every Wednesday—and it has the fewest routes in and out that would have to be mined to guarantee she would hit at least one. So, she might have hit the mine on her way to or from the club, then gone to the restaurant, then came the crash and the attack. If its effect were on a timer, or if it could be activated remotely, or if it just took some time before it could chew through the Cadillac’s defenses…
She dialed Miss Adelaide’s number and the older woman answered almost immediately. “Yes, Wren?” The older woman’s voice had its usual pleasant tone.
“Sorry to bother you, but I need to know which streets you used to get to and from the club yesterday.”
“It’s no bother, dear. I took Bill Street to Leigh and turned right into the parking lot. When I left, I took the same route.”
“Thanks, I’ll let you know when I have something. Oh, and I’m sending over an interesting souvenir from the site of your ‘accident.’”
“Important?”
“Probably not, but it’s kind of weird-interesting, something up Marci’s alley. Do you know if she’s up? It’s stupid late, but I’m headed to the club and would be happy to drop it by.”
Just down the block from the club, Wren found the tell-tale traces of the magic she suspected was responsible for disabling the Coupe deVille at the intersection of Bill and Leigh. Under the influence of her flashlight, faint residues of magic revealed themselves. She found two, one in each lane of traffic and it looked like Miss Adelaide had managed to trigger both, one coming and the other going.
Unfortunately, even with the flashlight, the traces were too faint for her to do more than guess at the details of the spells’ construction. She reached into the minivan and took the granny glasses from the center console. It was late and the streets were mostly empty, but she checked to make sure no traffic approached. Kneeling, in the street, she donned the glasses.