Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kit
After over ten hours of international travel, including a layover at Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi, Mr. and Mrs. Hanson—a young Minnesotan couple on a globetrotting adventure—arrived in Barcelona, Spain.
They grabbed their backpacks, hopped on the metro inside the arrivals terminal, and rode the train into the heart of Catalonia’s capital.
Finding a quiet corner in the underground station at their destination, the Hansons stashed their passports in the hidden compartments of their backpacks, alongside their other fake IDs.
Returning to their true identities as the two most wanted mythic fugitives alive, they adjusted their ball caps and sunglasses before rejoining the flow of travelers.
“I preferred Glenn and Sherry from Saskatchewan,” I said to Lienna as we rode the escalator out of the metro tunnel. “Remember that couple I bored to tears with an exhaustive history of canola crops engineered on the Canadian prairies?”
Lienna rolled her eyes. “I still don’t understand why you needed to torment them.”
“Glenn is a third-generation farmer. He’s passionate about agriculture.
” I wagged a finger at her. “You need a proper backstory to sell your character. Sherry could really have used a life-altering event—one that made her run away from the city and fall in love with a small-town farmer. How about dropping out of art school?”
Lienna’s second eye roll was so exaggerated that her pupils momentarily disappeared. “Oh, yes. She wanted to be a famous potato painter, but her instructors didn’t understand her vision.”
“A potato painter?”
“Potatoes are one of Saskatchewan’s top specialty crops.” She smiled smugly. “That seems like something Glenn should know.”
Damn it.
I sighed, then looped my arm around her and leaned into her side in a quick embrace while we walked. “Did you look up Saskatchewan’s agricultural exports just so you could one-up me on my needlessly detailed Farmer Glenn persona?”
She tipped her face toward mine, a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. “Or was I already well informed about Saskatchewan’s agricultural exports? You’ll never know.”
God, I loved this woman. “I have one more question. Is Sherry the Potato Painter painting potatoes, painting on potatoes, or painting with potatoes?”
“All of the above.” She checked her watch. “We have twenty minutes.”
Putting the tuber mystery out of my mind, I focused on our surroundings as we stepped off the escalator and onto the tiled concourse of an open plaza in the middle of Barcelona.
The block-length urban park had a smattering of trees and was surrounded by apartment buildings, an old church, and the Universitat de Barcelona, one of the biggest post-secondary institutions in all of Spain.
The afternoon sun was sinking toward the horizon, but the cool overcast sky diffused any shadows.
Stretching my clairsentience as far as possible, I searched for any mythic minds—not that I could count on my psychic senses to catch early signs of trouble anymore. Maybe if I could wield archmythic power like Bodil, my clairsentience would be able to pierce anti-Psychica protections.
As I’d done a dozen times since my insightful chat with the hell-mouthed hyena, I listened for that buzzing white noise—the power source the fae had drawn on in the crossroads. But all I sensed was the psychic hum of the hundreds of citizens in the immediate vicinity.
“Kit?”
Blinking, I realized Lienna was several steps ahead of me. I’d stopped walking. Annoyed with myself, I hastened forward.
“Trying to figure out how to power up again?” she murmured as I fell into step beside her.
“Yeah.” I pulled the brim of my ball cap lower over my face. “I thought all the cryptic shit the hyena roared at me meant archmythics needed to ‘draw’ power, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe Fire Breath cooked its own brain cells over the centuries.”
“Your powering-up theory is solid,” Lienna said.
“It makes sense that Bodil and the Sha’ir would’ve required an external power source for the huge feats of magic they accomplished.
It also lines up with our theory that reality warps sapped all your magic for days because of the insane amount of magical energy they required. ”
Theories were all fine and dandy, but unfortunately, they didn’t amount to a practical method of supercharging my archmythic abilities.
We stopped at a busy intersection between the plaza and the university, waiting for the traffic light to change.
“Since leaving the crossroads,” I murmured, keeping my voice low as a handful of pedestrians joined us, “I can’t even sense the power the fae drew on, let alone do anything with it.
What if the technique is a Spiritalis-only thing and not how Bodil and the Sha’ir supercharged their other abilities?
Maybe it’s only good for making plants grow or something. ”
Lienna linked our arms and tucked herself against my side.
“Arcana spells and artifacts are powered by sources from the world around us—ley energies, astral forces, magnetic fields, the consumption of elemental materials and alchemical compounds, and so on. Loads of alchemy recipes use plants and fungi as ingredients. It’s all connected.
If you can draw on an external power source—any source—it’s plausible you could use it to power up any ability. ”
I nodded slowly. “That fits Teddy’s idea about the original mythics wielding all the magics—that there were no classes way back when.”
The traffic signal changed, and we started across the street, letting the Catalans draw ahead of us.
“But I still can’t do it,” I continued in a frustrated mutter. “Whatever ‘it’ is. Not a druid but sing to the earth like one. Not a fae but call power into yourself like one—would it kill fae to be straightforward for once in their stupidly long lives?”
“The hyena was very straightforward about wanting to kill you,” Lienna pointed out.
Touché.
“Our fae friend’s lack of clarity won’t matter once we have the grimoire,” I said, brightening at the thought. “Between her and the Sha’ir, Bodil was the real powerhouse. If anyone wrote about epic power techniques, it would’ve been her.”
“Let’s hope Teddy’s old colleague got her half of the grimoire translated. If he didn’t, we’ll need to steal some books on the Futhark language before we leave.”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, don’t you think?” I asked with a laugh. “One step at a time.”
We trailed after the students into a massive stone structure that had all the vibes of a nineteenth-century European palace, including a main lobby boasting white marble pillars, lofted archways, and a sweeping staircase that looked like the perfect setting for anthropomorphic cutlery to serenade an animated bibliophile and her beastly boyfriend.
Our destination was the library. Its main room, a long rectangle three stories high, bustled with students and librarians.
We scooted through the scholars in search of a quieter spot and ended up in a room full of rare manuscripts.
Wooden shelving stuffed with leather-bound tomes was juxtaposed against plastic blue chairs and thin tables.
Figures in moody Renaissance paintings gazed down on the smattering of students focused on their laptops or the books piled around them.
The whole place smelled of old paper and sleep deprivation.
I checked my watch. We had less than five minutes.
“Back corner,” I said to Lienna, gesturing at a lone young man poring over a pile of open textbooks in search of the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Beside him, a closed laptop rested on the table.
Target acquired.
I hid Lienna and myself from his perception, then duplicated the young man’s laptop so he wouldn’t notice it moving of its own accord.
Lienna sat across from him, pulled the laptop in front of her, then inserted the USB stick and turned the machine on.
It ran through its start-up process, and the mole chat window popped up, empty as usual.
I checked my watch again. Just in time. “I hope they found some juicy details for us. And by juicy, I mean details that might keep us unassassinated for the duration of our Spanish vacation.”
“They didn’t sound confident yesterday.” Lienna drummed her fingers on the table beside the laptop. “Hacking SI-restricted information is probably beyond the mole’s capabilities. They’d need MPD credentials for someone higher ranked—someone in the SI, probably.”
“Or they need to get their rodent paws on copies of the physical version,” I countered. “But all the ideas that come to mind for accomplishing that fall into the same ‘dangerous’ category as taking a midnight stroll through a fae crossroads.”
On that unhelpfully ominous note, we waited, the cursor blinking like a countdown timer.
“How long did the mole say we should wait around?” I asked.
Lienna opened a second window and split the screen so we could still see the lonely cursor blinking in the mole chat. “They said if they didn’t show within fifteen minutes, they wouldn’t show at all.”
I watched her start a search for short-term vacation rentals in Barcelona. “Were those their exact words?”
Her fingers paused on the keyboard. “Their exact words were: ‘If I don’t show in fifteen minutes, I’ve been compromised. Don’t try to contact me again.’”
Well, that increased my sense of foreboding nicely.
As the list of luxury apartments and condos scrolled by on one half of the screen, I kept my attention on the chat window.
The mole had been a constant for me during the long months Lienna was in LA and I spent my evenings working alone in my condo.
Now that we’d finally reconnected, I’d hoped—or maybe expected—that we’d be able to stay in touch.
That I’d get to keep that link to home intact.
Would I lose it again so soon? Had the mole been caught taking extra risks to get us information on the SI assassin?