Athena, Artemis and I departed for the Fishers' early the next morning.

The Fishers' home was a lovely little two-story brick house near Chiswick Park. It had gabled windows on the second floor, with cozy-looking burgundy drapes just visible inside and matching shutters on the outside which blended nicely with the bricks. It was surrounded by a yard that was coming into full bloom. The last time I had seen it, the lawn and beds had been groomed for winter - now everything was green and growing.

As we got out of the cab in front of their house, I felt the energies that indicated an approaching Sending. A moment later, a spectral wolf appeared several yards away and trotted over to me. It stopped in front of me, sat down, and became a life-sized translucent image of Ben Donovan.

"Alys," his image said, "There have been some developments in the case that've caused the Yard to step in and take over. I've been made lead investigator because of my involvement to date, which means I'll be back in London in a couple of days to give a report. I was hoping we could get together, maybe go out and do something." He actually paused to nervously toe the ground. He was so cute when he was being shy. "Also, I was hoping to hire you as a consultant on the case, maybe Wizard Ellister too. I have a feeling I'm going to need help with this one."

He smiled his most charming smile at me and something in my stomach fluttered pleasantly. "Send me when you have a chance, let me know what you think. I hope to see you soon." He lifted his hand in farewell, and the Sending faded away.

"He's sweet on you," Athena said beside me, grinning a little.

I felt my cheeks heat up.

Athena giggled. "I take it you're..."

"Hush," I said gently, still blushing. "We can discuss it later. It's time to work."

She nodded, but she was still smiling as the three of us approached the Fishers' big oak front door. I could feel the energies of the wards I'd raised around the house, still strong and solid, but there was something a bit off about them - as if part of them was wobbling and ready to fall.

"Athena, let Mrs. Fisher know we're here," I said, slowing. "I want to get started checking the wards right away. Something feels wrong."

"Yes, Mistress." Athena continued on towards the door as I veered off towards the front left corner of the house, Artemis close on my heels.

I began by walking the perimeter of the wards. When I was setting it up last autumn, I'd made use of a small pile of flagstones the Fishers' had left over from bordering their flower beds the previous spring. Four goodly sized pieces (about seven or eight inches square and an inch thick) were more than sufficient for my purposes. Onto each one I 'd used magic to engrave a different rune: Thurisaz, for protection against adversaries; Elhaz, for protecting people and property; Dagaz, for stopping harmful energy while allowing beneficial energy to pass through; and Sowulo, for shedding light in dark times.

I felt the first three made a powerful base for the protective layers, while the fourth anchored the alarm (so to speak).

Once that was done, the stones had been planted in the ground at the corners of the house with the runes visible, facing the sky. I hadn't been using geomancy in the wards, so having them facing skyward would make it easier for them to channel energy.

Now I checked each runestone in turn, both visually and with my magical senses. I walked counter-clockwise around the house with my left-hand outstretched, letting my natural energies interact with those of the wards so that I could feel their overall integrity and hopefully find any weak spots.

The runestones themselves were undisturbed and in perfect condition. I had felt pretty confident that they would be, since very few Hermetic Mages would even consider doing what I had done in using them. Most Hermetic spellcasters preferred to use colored chalk (which is very temporary) or different colors of paint when laying the foundation for a ward. I preferred something a bit more permanent, if less flexible.

By the time I made my way back around to the front of the house, I had spotted two points where the wards felt...not weakened, but strained, as though something had been pressing on them for an extended period. As I came around the front left corner of the house, I saw Athena and Margaret Fisher - a pretty, black-haired woman in her mid-forties wearing wire-framed glasses and a casual outfit of blue denim pants and a cream-colored blouse - standing together on the front steps and talking softly.

I paused for a moment and looked down at Artemis. "Did you smell anything out of the ordinary, pet?"

Artemis shook her head and blew out a frustrated breath. <> She twitches her nostrils and whiskers, then rubbed her nose with her paw. <> She huffed. <>

"Ozone," I supplied.

<> she said slowly, testing the word and nodding. <> she agreed firmly.

"That's the wards," I said thoughtfully. "Or more likely the wards interacting with whatever hit them."

As I approached the front door, Athena and Mrs. Fisher turned to face me. I smiled at them. "Good morning, Mrs. Fisher." Up close, I saw the strain on her face and the dark circles under her eyes.

"Good morning, Alys," she replied. "It's nice to see you again, even under the circumstances." She clasped my hand warmly before continuing. "Athena was just telling me about the letter you got from Billy."

I smiled. Billy had decided to correspond with me as a sort-of-mentor figure, someone he could brag to about his accomplishments who wasn't his parents. Maybe it was because I'd saved his life, but he seemed to crave my approval...maybe I'd just made that big of an impact on him. Either way, it was fun to get the occasional letter from him.

"He was so proud of having cast his first light spell," I said with a smile. "I remember the feeling myself. The moment where you learned that you were really going to be able to do it, by yourself, using your own power. It's a pretty spectacular feeling."

Mrs. Fisher nodded. "I can imagine. Did you find anything?" She asked with a mixture of hope and fear in her voice, gesturing towards the nearest runestone.

"Yes, and no." I pursed my lips and frowned a little, half turning to look at the stone she'd indicated. "The runestones are all intact and undisturbed, and the wards I put up are holding strong. But I found two places where they were a bit...warped, for lack of a better term. Was the alarm set off again last night?"

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"It was," she said quietly. "A little after three o'clock this morning. Only for a few moments, but long enough to wake us. None of us got back to sleep."

"I don't think I'd've been able to get back to sleep either," I said with a sigh. "It had to be a bit frightening."

"More than a bit," Mrs. Fisher agreed. "Do you think it was similar to the thing that took my Jane?"

Jane had been the Fishers' youngest daughter. Her life force had been completely drained by a conjured spiritual predator, which had then gone after Billy for reasons as yet unknown. Artemis, Athena and I had dealt with it, but it hadn't left enough evidence behind to trace back to whoever had summoned it.

What she was really asking me was if the same person was behind it.

I thought hard and came up empty. "I want to take a closer look at the wards," I said finally, evading the question for the time being and hoping she wouldn't call me out on it. "Thanks to the way I wove them, whatever's been hitting them should have left some traces behind. Are Phil and Rose around today?" Phil and Rose were Billy's older siblings, seventeen and fifteen respectively. In spite of several visits to the Fishers' home, I had yet to actually meet them in person.

Mrs. Fisher either hadn't noticed my evasion (unlikely) or was willing to take my answer for what it had been: temporizing. I was willing to lay odds that she understood my reluctance to answer her question without having more information. "They're off to school for the day. They won't be home until dinnertime. Joseph should be home by then as well."

I nodded. "Good. I'll get to work, then."

For the next three hours I poked and prodded the wards - metaphysically speaking - to learn as much as I could from them. I'd woven the most sophisticated recording and identifying spells I knew into the wards when I raised them. Which, granted, aren't the best - I know for a fact that there are more sophisticated and detailed ones I have yet to learn. But I did the best I knew how, and even modified one of them to give what I hoped would be clear images of whoever (or, more to the point, whatever) had tried to breach the wards.

Evidently, I had even more left to learn about wards than I thought. My image-recording modification hadn't worked at all, and had effectively short-circuited that part of the wards entirely when it was triggered. It hadn't weakened the wards' defenses at all - I was clever enough not to tie them together that closely - but the end result was disheartening.

Just shy of noon, I stopped at the back of the house, planted my hands on my hips and growled a soft, frustrated sound. "Bugger. The wards didn't record so much as an energy signature. The recording spells are still active, they just didn't do anything." I sighed. "I must have mixed them into the wards wrong, and they're just plain not working."

"Could that have been done intentionally?" Athena asked curiously. "I mean, could whoever was doing this have...I don't know...put a spin on the spells they were lobbing at the wards to cause the disruption?"

Although my darling Athena wasn't a spellcaster herself - familiars rarely had enough Anima left after being Elevated to do more than light candles with magic - she was my study partner and knew almost as much about magical theory as I did. Some of that knowledge she'd...inherited from me, for lack of a better term, when I Elevated her. The rest she'd picked up along the way as she'd helped me study.

"It's technically possible," I replied slowly, running the idea around in my mind. "But it would have been very difficult. It's hard to disrupt wards like that."

"Without tearing them down, anyway," Athena finished the thought for me. "True."

Artemis, who had been sniffing around the back yard, loped over to stand on my other side. <>

"That's an excellent question," I said, rubbing her ears gently. "Tightly woven wards can take either a lot of time to bring down, or a lot of brute force to tear down. It could be that whoever's doing it doesn't have the raw power to simply destroy them, and hasn't learned enough about them yet to unravel them and bring them down."

"Or that they’re trying to determine how much brute force it'll take to bring them down without damaging the house or killing them in the process," Athena added quietly. "Didn't one of those books we were looking at a few weeks ago say something about overloading wards?"

I grimaced and nodded. "I'd forgotten about that. Thank you, pet." She was right. We'd read a footnote in one of the books in Hollis' library, to the effect that brute-force removal of wards could sometimes cause them to overload instead of come down. The result being explosive and relative to the size and power of the wards.

For wards like the ones I'd put up around the Fishers' home, the result of overloading them would be - if I may be completely immodest for a moment - sufficient to destroy the house, the houses on either side, and leave a fair-sized crater. So it was quite possible that someone was testing them to determine how much power was needed to bring them down without making too much noise.

Why put up wards if they're potentially that dangerous? Because the Anima feedback from destructively bringing down wards like that would be more than sufficient to turn the spellcaster doing it into a pile of smoking ash along with whatever was near the wards. Intentionally destroying large wards is pretty much guaranteed suicide. I haven't heard of it ever being done outside of wartime conditions in desperate situations.

Perhaps it might be worth trying to figure out WHY someone was trying to get through their wards. What could they possibly have in their house that was worth killing their children for? Or was it motivated by revenge for some reason?

I pinched the bridge of my nose and squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. I felt Athena's hand gently squeeze my shoulder, and Artemis press against my leg. Their complete confidence in me was a balm, soothing my nerves and easing my tension. I smiled, reached up and laid my hand atop Athena's, reaching down on the other side to rest my other hand on Artemis's head. <>

How had I ever made it through the day without them?

We sat down to a light lunch with Mrs. Fisher a few minutes later. As we ate, I slowly explained that the wards were still strong and that I hadn't found anything of any particular use. I then carefully went over the different reasons why someone would disrupt and test wards that way, trying not to alarm her. But she realized the seriousness of the situation and took it with a quiet, strained gravity that impressed me.

"So, what do we do now?" She asked as Athena quietly gathered up our lunch dishes.

I folded my hands on the table in front of me. "Before I answer that question, there's a few questions I need to ask you."

"Of course," she replied immediately. "Ask."

"Is there anything of great value in the house?" I asked. "Of either monetary or magical value?"

She considered the question carefully, her eyes losing their focus. I guessed that she was mentally running through the contents of her home, trying to think of something that fit the bill. After a few minutes, during which Athena returned and sat beside me, Mrs. Fisher spoke slowly. "There are a few items of jewelry that would be worth a tidy sum," she said, thinking out loud, "And one or two pieces of art. But nothing I can think of that would be worth the death of a child."

That was, I thought, a personal opinion. But I agreed with her, so I didn't say so out loud. "What about of magical value?"

Mrs. Fisher shook her head. "Nothing that I know of."

"Would you mind if I had a look around the house?" I asked gently. "It's possible that you have something here that's a lure for whoever or whatever is doing this."

She shook her head again. "Not at all. Please, go over the house with a fine toothed comb if you feel it'll help. Do you think it could be that?"

Now it was my turn to shake my head. "I'm not jumping to any conclusions yet. Even if I find something, I think we should be prepared for me to stay the night."

"Of course," she said immediately. "You can stay in Bobby's room, if you'd like, or..."

"I'll probably set up shop in your kitchen or living room," I replied. "I'll need to be up all night, keeping an eye on things."

"Oh..." She smiled sheepishly. "I should have guessed that."

I reached across the table and took her hand, squeezing it gently. "You're under a great deal of strain right now," I said softly. "Let me worry about this. You worry about your family."

She closed her eyes for a moment and tightened her grip on my hand, then released it and opened her eyes again. "I'm so glad you're here, Alys," she said quietly. "I know I'm in good hands."

I smiled reassuringly. "We'll get this sorted out," I replied. "And we'll stop whoever or whatever is trying to hurt your family."

I hoped that I was right.