Chapter Ten
Chapter
Ten
“So you gotta find this vampire’s girlfriend,” Fitz said. “I don’t get it. You can’t get her hair or something?”
“Already tried,” I said. “The thing possessing her cleaned out the apartment before it vanished with her.”
I finished hand-driving a screw into the T-brace attached to the cardboard plank on the floor of the castle’s gunnery range.
The city had pulled our permit for it when they had retracted all the other benefits Marcone had wrested out of them, but no municipal codes existed to address the indoor use of tactical magic.
“Could the White Council help?” Fitz asked.
“They won’t,” I said.
“Not like the official guys,” Fitz said. “I mean more like people you know there. When I was on the streets, we’d never have called the cops for help, right? But I knew a couple that were okay, and sometimes we could talk to them.”
“Get that end,” I said, and we set up the target.
It was a rectangle about five feet tall and three across.
I had taken some black paint and sketched in the rough form of a ghoul, complete with googly eyes and cartoon-quality teeth.
“If I was going to go to anyone, there’s this contractor I know.
And the money is right. But he already got a bite of this case during the battle and he doesn’t want anything else to do with it.
” I stood up and walked back to the far end of the shooting range.
“It would need to be someone based in mainland Europe, and my contacts there are pretty limited. No one I know there would stick their neck out.”
Fitz frowned. “Well. How are you going to find her, then?”
“The spirit world might have answers,” I said.
“You don’t mean, like, shades, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Shades can be a really fantastic resource. But they can also be patchy and weird. I’m talking like voodoo-level stuff here. Entities that exist on a level of power somewhere between the shades of regular people and blue-collar angels.”
“So let’s get us a Ouija board and go to town.”
“Isn’t that simple,” I said. “Those spirits are dangerous, and they want what they want. Call up the wrong one, get the offering wrong, or ask them the wrong question, and I’ll have more troubles, not less.”
I didn’t want to mention that dealing with spiritual entities was very much a matter of focus, will, and intent, and I was still a wreck. Call up a spirit when you weren’t certain of yourself, your boundaries, and your power, and you could wind up just as possessed as Justine currently was.
“If you didn’t have any hair, how’d you try tracking her already?” Fitz asked, frowning.
“I had hair, actually. And some of her possessions,” I said.
“Favorite jewelry, books she liked, that kind of thing.” It had actually felt a little creepy, building what amounted to an altar to my brother’s woman and using it in a painstakingly slow and careful ritual.
“I barely got a reading, and that was only as specific as ‘Europe.’ There was too much water between us, and I suspect the entity is suppressing her personality full-time.”
“That’s fu—”
I glanced at him. Fitz was learning mental discipline. I’d had him quit cursing two weeks ago.
“Screwed up,” he corrected himself.
I nodded approval. “The vampires are running the mortal circuits,” I said.
“They’ve got operatives in the field looking, trying to track her down by purely mortal means.
” Which wasn’t quite true. A White Court vampire had senses to rival those of any predator on earth.
If one of them ran across Justine’s scent, they could track her like a hound.
“Couldn’t you ask, like, an angel?”
“They have really limited avenues to exercise their power,” I said. “They only mix it up in human affairs when Hell crosses a line.”
“So ask Hell,” Fitz said. “On the streets, I knew outfit guys, too.”
“They only trade in names,” I said. “And they’ve got all but one of mine already. Last thing I need is to go all Linda Blair.” I cleared my throat and gestured down the range. “Okay, kid. Show me what you’ve got.”
“One fire coming up,” Fitz said, and lifted his hand.
I caught his wrist. “Fitz,” I said. “What happens when there’s a fire in a closed room?”
He paused. “Smoke?”
“Air gets burned up, too,” I said. “And fire tends to be a little hard on buildings sometimes. Fire’s for outdoors and emergencies only.
” I nodded up toward the ducting mounted on the walls and ceiling.
“This place is ventilated for propellant fumes, so we probably wouldn’t run out of air.
But that also means the fire has what it needs to spread to other fuel. ”
Fitz frowned. “So what do I do?”
“You’ve read McCoy. What would he say?” I asked him.
Fitz screwed up his face, thinking. “Long, closed, narrow space. Not really a lot of air to work with. It’s dry, so water is out. I’ve got to use either earth or force.”
“Good,” I said. “Earth is a hell of a lot harder to use without years and years of practice. You’re going to start that, but I’ve been slinging evocation for a couple of decades and change now, and I don’t trust myself to use earth magic in a real fight yet.”
“So, force?” he asked hesitantly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Force is the least efficient way to translate your will into energy, but also the most flexible and it’s the easiest to control. You pick out your word yet?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Forza.”
I tilted my head and looked at him.
“I figure Italian kinda learned from Latin, only it’s not old as sh— as hell,” Fitz said. “Like me and you.”
“Hah,” I said. “Okay. But don’t just go around saying the word. Use it only when you use the spell, or you’ll wind up burning out things in your brain. Okay?”
“Right,” he said.
I nodded at him and stepped back.
Fitz closed his eyes for a few seconds and drew in his breath slowly. I didn’t press him to go faster. You don’t learn to shoot a gun as fast as you can when you start. You learn to make it go bang while pointing it in the right direction and not getting anyone killed when you do it.
It took him about ten seconds to draw the energy together, making the air around him crackle, and then he opened his eyes, his young face set in dark, intense focus. He held up his right hand, pointed his index finger at the cartoon ghoul, and snarled, “Forza!”
Magic lashed downrange in a wave and a cascade of sparks and small shrieking sounds like runaway fireworks.
Fitz hadn’t been able to focus all the power he’d poured into the spell into pure directed force, and the inefficiency spilled out into other expressions of energy.
By the time the invisible wave reached the target, it had dissipated severely.
The plyboard plank rocked about half an inch off the floor and then wobbled back down. The cartoon ghoul grinned triumphantly.
Fitz gasped and fell to his hands and knees, his head down. He breathed hard for half a minute, then groaned and fell over onto his side.
I dropped to my heels beside him. “Actually, not that bad,” I said to him. “The first time I tried force, I threw myself into a chain-link fence. You could play tic-tac-toe on my back with markers for a week. You paid attention to your McCoy.”
Fitz nodded, bringing his breathing back under control. “Use as much force to stabilize yourself as you throw out.”
“Correct,” I said approvingly, rose, and offered him my hand. “We’ll try it again, but we’ll try to focus the energy better. This time don’t just point your finger. I want you to visualize poking that ghoul in the eye with it as you release the power.”
“Wait, I gotta add another layer to all of that?”
“Gets easier with practice,” I said. “You’ve got the mind for this. Use it.”
Fitz grimaced down the range, clenched his jaw, and took my hand, rising. “Okay. Why was that so hard? When I set that thing on fire the night of the battle, I just kept running.”
“Hell of a lot of power in the air that night,” I said. “Made everything easier. And you just threw your instincts into that one, all unconscious thought. You had to piece this one together.”
He frowned, panting. “So how come I don’t just do it all by instinct?”
“Good way to get killed,” I said. “Happens to a lot of untrained practitioners. Things happen when you get upset. Or don’t happen when you really need them to.
It’s better to learn the process, so you have control over when something gets set on fire.
That’s the whole reason Mort brought you to me.
That’s the whole point of what we’ve been learning. ”
Fitz frowned and chewed over that thought for a moment, and I let him. It was pretty important that he was on board with the concept. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Okay. But it gets easier?”
“With practice and greater discipline and the development of your personal will, yes.”
“Guess nothing’s easy at first, is it?”
“Nothing worthwhile.”
He huffed out a laugh. “How come I’m so hungry?”
“You just packed the output of maybe twenty minutes of exercise into about a second of effort,” I said.
“Your body is trying to catch up. You draw a lot more energy from your body until your will works up to the job. Probably why wizards are generally skinny.” I nodded at a backpack in the corner.
“Bunch of fruit snacks in there. Go eat some, and we’ll try it again. ”
“Nice,” Fitz said with some enthusiasm and seized the pack.
I let him get a few mouthfuls in before I said, “You said you could talk to some folks on the street.”
“Sure,” he said, munching.
“About what?”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Shelters giving out food. Places to stay in bad storms. Jobs for a little money. Stuff like that.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Who’d you talk to about important things?”
Some of that alley cat wariness came back into his expression. “Like what?”
“Life. The future. Pain. That kind of thing.”
He stared at me for a long minute, chewing slowly, his eyes opaque. “You were in the system, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said.