It took Mai a while to regain consciousness. Far longer than she was used to.
She’d been knocked out before, plenty of times. She’d been concussed, punched out, and stupefied enough times over the course of her career to develop a bitter familiarity with unconsciousness. Yet, as she emerged from her stupor, she felt distinctly out of her element. This time around felt different.
Her mouth was thick with a noxious dryness, her tongue was swollen, her head was pounding in strange, nauseating waves. Her eyes swam, trying and failing to focus in the dim, clammy light of wherever she was. She didn’t feel particularly battered, though. Had she been drugged? She wouldn’t know. As far as she could remember, she’d never been drugged before.
“No two days are the same,” Salman had told her, back on her first month in the department. The memory, Salman’s baritone chuckle, the glint of dark humor in his eyes, was vivid, even with the fog in her brain. “It’s a perk of the job, or a complete nightmare, depending on who you ask.”
She was sitting, her arms bound behind her, that much she could tell. Her restraints felt smooth, rigid. Plastic? She’d figure that out later.
She began to register a dull ache in her left calf. She blinked at the sterile fluorescent light shining down at her from a fixture on the ceiling (bare concrete, was she underground?) and craned her neck down to get a look at the source of the pain.
A spike was lodged directly into the meat of her calf. A fresh, sharp wave of agony radiated from the wound the instant she noticed it. She gasped, and a spurt of adrenaline quickened her heartbeat, cleared some of the haze in her mind.
Focus. Focus now and panic later.
She squinted through the pain, examined the weapon lodged in her leg. It was thin, metallic, barbed. A harpoon? A thick cord trailed from the end of the implement, snaked onto the floor, back behind her, over toward-
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” drawled a voice from behind her. Mai stiffened, froze. She tried to swivel her head, just enough to glance at whoever was standing there, but the restraints limited her movements.
“You’ll be fine. I made sure not to nick any arteries,” the voice continued. Mai focused, tried to glean as much as she could from sound alone.
Whoever was speaking was male, almost definitely, but his voice was reedy and thin. Exhausted, or sick? Maybe just naturally soft. He had an accent, too, vaguely Appalachian, which wasn’t all that surprising, considering she was in Richmond. Well, she had been in Richmond, before she’d been presumably drugged. From where the sound of the voice was coming, her captor was close by, and almost definitely standing. Whoever he was, he was tall.
“Where am I?” Mai said. The question came out weaker than she’d have liked; her mouth was painfully dry. She cleared her throat and repeated the question, this time with a layer of that practiced MACUSA authority: “Where. Am I?”
“Homemade bunker. Not gonna say where. Besides, doesn’t matter-” her captor gave the cord attached to the harpoon a light tug, and a fresh wave of pain shot through her leg. “I wouldn’t try teleporting away if I were you. I’ve got a weak current running through your body right now. It’s low amperage, too low to hurt, but, if I’m right, it’d be enough to seriously throw you off if you tried to disappear on me. And we wouldn’t want you popping yourself halfway into a wall.”
Mai blinked, sucked her dry tongue, tried to make sense of that paragraph of half-nonsense. “‘Teleporting?’”
“Yeah. Or whatever it is you folk call it, when you,” the man paused, and Mai could almost hear the vague gesturing of his hands, “presto-disappearo poof yourself away.”
Mai took a second to decipher that. “You’re saying I can’t disapparate?”
“If that’s what you call it, then-”
“Who are you? What do you want?” Mai decided to push on. She’d cross the “apparition” bridge if she had to come back to it. It’d been months since she’d had to disapparate from an active perp, though, and she didn’t quite feel like giving the hick behind her the satisfaction.
“Oh, don’t worry yourself about that,” the voice said. “You’re here, and that’s what’s important.”
That was worryingly vague. Mai decided to change tack, put some pressure on him. “Detaining me, like this, it’s gonna get you in deep shit with the Congress. Do you have any idea who I am?”
There was a pause. “You’re Field Agent Mai Tran of the MACUSA Aurors, Central US Division. Badge number 3811-NY88”
Mai’s heart jumped. He knew her name- he knew her badge number? “Wait, hold on-”
“You started as, as far as I can tell, some sorta desk jockey filing paperwork in the Obliviation department before getting promoted when you passed your Auror certs, with flying colors, congrats, and getting moved on up to Woolworth. At least, that’s what your file says. Hey, what’s ‘obliviation?’”
Mai’s mind was racing, too preoccupied with panic to register the man’s last question. File? He had her file? She had a file? Who was keeping files on her? The admins back at the Department sure as hell weren’t; she hadn’t seen Dempsey so much as fill out a form since autumn, and she was pretty sure he was the only one with this kind of intel on her.
“Your parents are Van and Lucy Tran, formerly Zhang, on your mama’s side. They met in Hanoi in the 80s, moved to the states sometime in ‘89, had you in ‘91. You’re an only child-”
“Stop.” Mai barked.
“Hey, you asked if I knew who you were.”
“How do-” Mai stopped herself. That line of questioning wasn’t going to lead anywhere. Better to act. Her wand was gone, obviously, she couldn’t feel it on her belt, and any captor worth their salt would’ve removed it the second he’d got his hands on her anyway. But she’d picked up a couple Wandless tricks in her self-defense courses, and if nothing else she’d definitely be able to get herself out of these restraints.
She reached for a basic combustive hex, something just strong enough to break her cuffs, an action so practiced and unconscious that she was already thinking ahead of it, planning evasive movements, in case her captor was armed.
The spell bloomed in her hands and suddenly fizzled with a loud clap, sending a spray of sparks skittering up her arm. Her head throbbed, and a wave of profoundly uncomfortable tingles raced up her spine, down her limbs. Her restraints stayed intact.
“Told ya,” the man said. “The current’s gonna throw most of your tricks off.”
It hadn’t worked? Mai tried again, but this time all she could muster was an even weaker flurry of sparks and a muffled snap. Her headache swelled and her limbs tingled again.
“What did you-” Mai sputtered. “What’d you do to me?”
“I already said. Low-amp current. Looks like it screws with your cognition, muddles up some witchy part of your hindbrain. Not enough to turn the magic off, just enough to make it risky for you to try to use it.”
Mai swallowed, sorted those words in her head. Hindbrain? Amp? He was talking about electricity, that she was pretty close to sure of. “Let me go.”
“Nah,” the voice behind her took on a tinge of detached amusement. “I obviously went to a bit of trouble to get you here. I’ve got plenty I want to ask you.”
“Let me see you.”
“What?”
Mai’s head was still reeling. There was a conclusion to be drawn, a piece of information that she knew she still had to put together, and she wanted to buy some time to do so. “I’m not willing to talk with someone who’s standing way behind me. Show me your face.”
There was a moment of silence. Somewhere, distantly, behind the thick iron door that served as the concrete room’s only exit, Mai thought she heard the faint echoes of footsteps.
“Guess I don’t see why not.”
Mai’s captor paced out from behind her, dragging a metal folding chair along with him. He snapped it open, set it down, and sat a few feet away from her, lanky frame falling jarringly into the seat.
The man was tall, easily six and half feet, weighing maybe a buck-eighty soaking wet. More startling than that, though, he was young. Practically babyfaced. The only hair on his otherwise shaved head was a thin swath of brownish peach fuzz on his jawline. Two baggy eyes regarded her from sunken sockets; this kid looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
His eyes were alive, though, as lucid as can be, crackling with something that could have been interest or malice. Mai hoped it was the former.
The man--the boy?--gestured to himself. “Welp. This is me.” He tugged absently on one sleeve of the baggy jacket he was wearing. “Name’s Pike. Nice to meet ya.”
Mai frowned. “That’s not your real name.”
“Well yeah, no magic shit, magic sherlock.” Pike leaned back in his seat, tucked his hands into his lap. “I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on how your powers work, but I still feel like giving my birth name to a witch has gotta be a bad move. Call me superstitious.”
That crucial conclusion finally locked itself into place. Mai’s eyes widened in realization. “Wait, hold on.”
Pike saw her recognition, cocked an eyebrow. He was enjoying this.
“You’re a No-Maj?”
An incredulous smile crept across Pike’s face. “Oh, God, that’s not really what you call us, is it? No offense, lady, but that sounds dumb as hell.”
“You are. You’re not a wizard at all. Not even a squib.”
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Bingo. I am a regular-ass human.” Pike’s grey eyes hardened just slightly. “Very much unlike you, a lady who’s been blessed with powers that 99% of the planet would kill to have, unimaginable, godlike talents, that she used to become what’s basically a magic narc. Like I said, nice to meet ya.”
Mai reeled again for a second, then relaxed. Now it was her turn to smile. “Oh, thank God.”
Pike’s brow furrowed, just slightly. “You’re relieved?”
“Oh, you have no idea,” Mai said. “Up until just now I was pretty sure you were one of Snarl’s guys, or with those Thunderbird poachers, or something. Underground crime, part of a syndicate. I thought I was about to get chopped up as part of some hostage extortion scheme.”
“How do you know my intentions aren’t that bad?”
“Oh, I’m sure you think you’ve got some sort of sinister plan,” Mai sneered. “But you’re just a No-Maj. I’ve got no idea how you managed to get this far, but give me twenty minutes and I’ll have you obliviated and I’ll be on my way.”
Pike’s frigid smile widened. “So, ‘obliviate,’ that’s your word for the mind-wipe you do? That’s what I figured.”
Mai was already ignoring him, turning her attention back down to the cable in her calf. Her arms were fixed behind her back, but she was able to move her leg slightly, just enough to prop the harpoon against the edge of her chair, to brace it to be pulled out. She flexed and tried to ignore the wave of pain that erupted as she tried to leverage the protrusion against the chair and, hopefully, out of her body.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Pike said. “It’s barbed, like a fishhook. Not something you can just-”
The instant Pike glanced down at her leg she let another spell loose, this time a crude solid-to-liquid Transmutation that she vaguely remembered from her school days. She’d never done it on anything made of plastic before, let alone without a wand, so when her restraints mostly just sort of violently melted in the middle instead of turning into a neat pool of water, she was anything but surprised. A splash of molten plastic scalded her wrist, but she was free.
Mai was already on her feet and pivoting toward Pike when her captor, eyes wide and clearly surprised, threw himself to the ground.
“Kate!” He shouted as he scrabbled away from Mai, as evasive as someone his size could manage. “Katie! Now now now now now!”
Mai took practiced aim at Pike’s center of mass, mouth already forming familiar syllables, preparing a concussive spell sure to send her captor sprawling. Instants before the incantation took form, however, there came the sound of distant machinery whirring to life, and every muscle in the Auror’s body seized at once. Her hex shot off, ricocheted against a few walls, and fizzled out.
Mai yelped through involuntarily gritted teeth and fell, hard, to the ground. She landed awkwardly, without any way to brace herself, and cracked the side of her head on the concrete, setting her ears ringing and her vision swimming. A current crackled through her muscles, thrumming painfully and constantly, as Pike picked himself up.
“Okay,” he said, breathless. “Okay, I’ll give that to you, I didn’t think you could do that. Good to know for the future.”
Mai’s teeth were grinding painfully now, her vision was blurring. She could feel her extremities going numb.
“Kate? We’re probably good. Don’t wanna cook ‘er.”
The muffled mechanical humming stopped as suddenly as it had started, and Mai’s body went limp. Her chest heaved as she tried to take stock, regulate her breathing. What had that been? It felt like petrificus, sort of, but far more agonizing, more bewildering, than any exposure she’d had to that spell before. Crucio maybe? She’d never been tortured, but from what she’d seen, crucio was worse than what she’d endured.
She caught a whiff of what smelled like burnt hair and ozone. Electricity? She’d been zapped? Her eyes found the harpoon, still stuck firmly in her leg, and the cord that snaked to a port in the wall.
“Hey, neither of us want you dead. So I’m gonna recommend that you don’t pull any more Houdini routines.” Pike scratched at his scruff. “I’m pretty sure that amperage is nonlethal, in spurts. But only in spurts.”
Could be a bluff, but Mai suddenly found herself very reluctant to try calling the kid on it. She leveraged one trembling, jellied arm against the ground and rolled herself onto her back. She worried at how laborious even that simple movement had become.
“What…” Mai said. “What do you want? Explain.”
Pike paced over to her and hooked one hand under her arm before she could react. He hoisted her up, surprisingly strong, and hauled her back into her seat. In an instant another set of restraints had been clapped onto her wrists. He reset his chair and sat facing her again as he dug a smartphone out from one pocket.
He fiddled with it, turned the screen toward her. “Tell me what you see here,” he intoned.
Mai blinked at the display, her eyes taking a beat longer to focus than she’d have liked. Her breath caught, just briefly, at the image in front of her.
A young boy, probably no older than eleven, crumpled on wet grass. His body was limp, sprawled in a careless rictus reserved for the severely unconscious or definitely dead. That wasn’t what had startled Mai, though; she wasn’t the most grizzled Auror, but she’d been working long enough to get desensitized to bodies.
It was the boy’s face that had struck her. His skin was hanging loose, corpselike and sallow, on his face. His mouth drooped open, palsied and slack, half stroke victim and half exhumed mummy. Yet his eyes were unmistakably alive. Sunken and glazed, unfocused, empty, but alive.
“Dementor,” Mai muttered, partly a question, partly an answer.
Pike snapped a finger, loud. “There it is. That’s what I was looking for.”
He stuffed the phone back into his pocket, glowered down at her.
“That was… your brother?” An educated guess, but Mai was hoping that, if she was right, sentimentality or grief might distract her captor, buy her a little more time to plan.
“Might as well have been. His name,” Pike hit the word hard, “was Lee. He was my nephew. Great kid, real bright, real kind. Just about to go into sixth grade, when, wouldn’t you know it, a goddamn actual, real ghost monster blew through town and ate his soul.”
Mai narrowed her eyes. “No-Majes can’t see dementors.”
Pike glared back at her. “I wasn’t the one who saw it.”
Mai couldn’t even begin to untangle what that was supposed to mean. “My condolences? I guess? What do you want me to do about it?”
“These, what, these ‘dementors,’ can they be tracked?”
Ah, so it was revenge. Poor kid probably thought dementors worked like people, that taking “revenge” against one would make even the slightest bit more sense than taking revenge on a bolt of lightning or a flash flood. Maybe if she played into that instinct, he’d let her go? “Yeah. Congress’s got a registry of all of them, I’m pretty sure.”
“And can they be killed?”
“They can be fought. Not killed.”
“Can they be driven off, then? Banished or something?”
“Easy. Not that someone like you could manage it, but scaring off dementors is kiddie-level magic, basic-”
Pike shot a look over Mai’s shoulder, nodded almost imperceptibly. Mai’s teeth clacked together as another wave of that crackling hot paralysis surged through her body, just for an instant. She slackened back against her chair, pain giving way to indignation.
“What’d I do wrong?!” She hissed. “I wasn’t lying.”
Pike stood, closed the distance between the two in one stride, loomed over her. His face was stone, hard-lined and clenched. “If getting rid of them’s so easy, if you can keep track of every single one of them, then why the hell was there one floating around Bakersfield goddamn Elementary?”
Mai’s first response died in her throat, and she set back against her chair. That wasn’t a question with a simple answer, not one that would work. The kid staring her down was putting on a tough act, and she could admit to herself that she was at least a little scared of him, but the naked hurt in his eyes was obvious. He was clearly furious, and still mourning, and so out of his league.
Her stomach sank. He wasn’t looking for money, acting out of self-interest. That she had experience with, that she could handle. Self-interest is logical, easy to deflect. It responds to intimidation and reason and bribery.
Pike, it was obvious, was acting out of fury, and, probably more likely, out of fear.
That made him dangerous, even for a No-Maj. Mai withdrew, mind racing, blatantly focusing all her energy on formulating another escape plan.
“I’m sure you wanna kill me and leave,” Pike said after a steadying breath. He stood, his head wreathed by the room’s only light source, casting his eyes in shadow. “I’m pretty sure you can’t, but I’m not gonna act like I’m totally on top of what you’re capable of. So I’ll just say, again, that that would be a bad idea.”
“What, you gonna shock me? Kill me with whatever machine you’ve got me hooked up to?” Mai went for a bluff. “You really think that’d actually work on a witch?”
Pike shrugged. “No reason to think it wouldn’t. Far as I can tell, you’ve still got a regular old nervous system. But no, that’s not why.” He nodded up at an innocuous black half-sphere set into a corner of the ceiling. “You’re on camera.”
It took Mai a second to even discern what he was insinuating. She cocked an eyebrow. “So?”
“I was under the impression that your kind don’t want my kind up in your business.”
Mai scoffed. “Hate to burst your bubble, but I’m not gonna show up on any film.”
Pike barked a laugh, short and derisive. “You think I’m using film?”
“Well, no, but-”
“You don’t show up on digital?”
“Course not,” Mai said. A very small part of her twinged; she was pretty sure she wouldn’t show up on the most cutting-edge digital recording, but she wasn’t 100%.
“At any possible ISO, any shutter speed, in any medium? You don’t show up on Infrared? You’re completely positive?”
Mai narrowed her eyes. Was he making those terms up, was he testing her? What was his angle? “Yes.”
Pike fished his phone back out, swiped at it, smirked. He flipped its display toward her. “Doesn’t look like it to me.”
The footage was grainy, glitching, warped in places, but the image was clear enough. She was looking at a high angle of herself, slumped in her chair, wire snaking out of her leg. Pike turned toward the camera and gave it a stiff little wave.
“I’ve been recording the whole time,” he said. “Got some great video of you popping those cuffs off and shooting some sort of death blast at me. And if I’m not around every day to log into a specific program, that footage is getting auto-posted to a few websites every few weeks from now on. As well as a little manifesto I whipped up with all the info I’ve managed to gather on magic thus far, backed up by some pretty darn verifiable data. Sure, it might not go viral the first time, but hey, internet fame’s a numbers game. It’ll catch on eventually, especially with content this spicy.”
Mai scoffed. “You’re not the first No-Maj to threaten snitching. Obviously it’s never worked before. We have ways of handling this situation.”
Pike leaned down, got close to her again. “You’ve got ways of wiping people’s minds, yeah. In person. But, as far as I can tell, magic really only affects the physical world. The internet, that belongs to my kind, and it’s a hell of an equalizer.”
“We’d still handle it.”
“You’d track down every single person who saw the video and wipe them? Millions of people, in hundreds of countries. You have the infrastructure, the time, the resources for that? And even if you do, my script’s just gonna start the wildfire all over once it reposts the footage a week down the road, and you’re in the same mess.”
“We’d figure it out.”
Pike stepped back, regarded her for a second. His self-satisfied grin went crooked, sour. “God, you’re arrogant. All of you.”
Mai smirked right back at him. “You wouldn’t be?”
“Sure, if I were a wizard up against a society of seventeenth century dirt farmers, yeah, I’d feel real high and mighty,” Pike said. “But your kind, the big mistake y’all made, is you got used to it. The power dynamic. You got complacent. You let us surpass you, and you’re not even pretending to try to catch up.”
Pike paced back to his chair, sat down, propped his elbows on his knees. “You should’ve wiped us all out when you had the chance, if I’m bein’ honest. Because, barring that, we’d be bound to find out eventually.”
“Find what out, that there were people out there who had gifts? People a half-step higher up on the ladder than you?” Mai glared at him. “Oh, boo-hoo, poor No-Majes. You’ll just have to settle for bullying literally every other form of life on earth. Go wipe out a whale species, maybe that’ll make you feel better.”
“No. We’d find out that everything, all the pain, all the fear, all the senseless, stupid suffering that regular humans have endured with since our species first climbed down from some trees in the savanna, that y’all could’ve fixed it.”
Mai frowned. “Hate to break it to you, but the magical world isn’t exactly a utopia.”
“That’s because y’all are morons,” Pike said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re either stupid or selfish,” he said, matter-of-fact. “You can bring clean water out of thin air, cure diseases and injuries with the wave of a stick, you can make a mansion’s worth of housing out of a tent in a dirt lot. There are billions of human beings on the planet who are miserable because they don’t have one of those three things, and y’all could fix that, and y’all don’t.”
“That’s because the instant we came out of hiding, you’d eat us all alive.”
Pike’s mouth widened into a thin, lupine smile. “Oh, we’re going to eat you alive anyway.”
It was clear this conversation wasn’t going anywhere. Mai thought about disapparating, very nearly tried it, but the subtle electric hum sounding in the back of her brain made her think twice. Pike could’ve been lying, when he said her aim would be off if she tried. But he might not have been. And Mai wasn’t desperate enough to risk fusing her skull with a wall if she was wrong.
“So, what, you capture a witch, kill her?” she probed. “Try and get some sort of crusade going that way? No-Majes have tried that before, it never turns out the way they’d like.”
“I’m not gonna kill you,” Pike sighed. He stood, retreated to the door, and punched a code into a keypad on its handle. “I’m not a psycho.”
It was Mai’s turn to bark a laugh. “Then I’ll ask what I asked before your little monologue. What do you want from me?”
“Just some info,” Pike said. He opened the door, turned to step into the dark hallway beyond.
“Hey,” Mai snarled. Pike paused. “There’s no way you’re going to come out of this unscathed. I don’t care how clever you think you are, this isn’t ending well for you.”
Pike shrugged. “Honestly, I reckon you’re right. I’m no genius. But I’m not doing this because I think I’ll be okay. I’m doing it because it’s what y’all deserve.”
And with that, her captor swung the door shut, leaving her alone in her cell. Mai glanced up at the camera, glared right into whatever electronic eye was watching her, unblinking, behind the black glass.
She smirked. She’d been in worse situations. She’d get out of this. Everything would go back to normal. She was certain.
She shifted in her seat, and felt the alien hum of electricity coursing through her brain.
She was mostly certain.