Chapter 7
We found the lot of them in the amphitheater classroom. Gordon, Demidova, O’Carroll, Reynolds, Chapman, Westing, another Gordon, the telepath Nika (I didn’t know her last name), another O’Carroll, the two Velasquez women, Jenks, Boklund, and Jensen.
“Good of you to join us,” Katrina snarked as we entered the room.
I scanned the intents of every person in the room, triaging them by level of hostility. Oddly, Katrina’s wasn’t hostile at all. Caeco was right up there, though, along with Lydia and Chris, although really all of those intents were mostly just hugely suspicious—of me. Again.
A bunch of equally snarky replies came to my lips: What better place to hold a witch hunt than at a school for witches? I’m always up for a good bonfire; who brought the marshmallows? Is this an Inquisition just for me? Can’t keep a good Inquisition down.
Instead, I just kept my mouth shut. Vesta didn’t.
“He’s not going,” she said simply.
Vesta’s dad glanced at me, surprised. Chris Gordon frowned, his deadly vampire queen looking at me with cold blue eyes
“Not surprising,” Caeco Jensen said, her arms crossed and dark eyes hard.
“Well, no, dear, it isn’t, is it now?” Ashling O’Carroll countered. “Why would he head into danger with a partner who has no faith in him?”
“Faith?” Caeco asked, incredulous. “Faith in a seventeen-year-old kid nobody knows the first thing about with a mysterious past, hunted by shadow organizations, and capable of things that don’t rightly seem possible?”
“Were we talking about Craig, dear, or you?” Ashling shot back. “It seems that’s exactly as you were when you appeared in me place now, isn’t it?”
Caeco frowned, opened her mouth to repudiate the claim and then shut it.
“Personally, I just want to hear what Katrina has dug up,” Erika said with a shrug.
“Hush now and let the drama run,” Katrina said, her eyes glittering with interest.
“No drama,” Vesta’s dad said. “Clearly our lead investigator has serious doubts so yeah, no portals to Greenacres,” he said with a frown directed at Caeco.
Vesta’s mom moved over alongside her daughter and hugged her one-handed, giving me a supportive smile. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a witch hunt. Everyone else stayed quiet.
“Shit. Okay, I guess I’m on,” Katrina said.
“I too was interested in how a human witch kid could perform so well on Jenks’ simulator, so I tried my own hand at it.
Couldn’t match it. Not even close. Kind of a blow to the old ego, eh Jensen?
Anyway, it seemed unlikely. So I queried Omega.
He said that the magical Intent skill could add speed to Craig’s shooting and his aiming thingy would help his shots strike true, but neither of those fully accounted for how fast he was doing it.
Even if he hit all his targets and I didn’t, I still should have finished the course faster on raw time, never mind penalties.
But I didn’t. Ergo, there is something else at work here. ”
She moved with a dancer’s grace, spinning to wave a hand at the empty wall above us. It lit instantly with a picture of a set of five documents, research papers by the initial look of them. Then I noted my mother’s name in the author’s line.
“I didn’t really participate in the academic portion of Arcane,” Katrina said, earning a snort from Gina Velasquez.
“But I know most students have some papers to write for Mistress Gina. Yoon Da-Ni wrote these. Is Magic a Force of Evolution. A History of the Warlocks of Ireland. A Long-term Analysis of Warlocks. Direct Applications of Magic to the Human Body. The Sigils of Flesh.”
“Girl had an obsession, huh, Gina?” Katrina asked.
“She definitely had a focus,” Gina mused, her eyes on the picture of the papers. “She did solid work. Those papers were very well researched, her ideas and thesis strong and well supported.”
“And her most advanced teacher was a warlock, no?” Katrina asked, looking at Vesta’s dad.
He was frowning, one hand rubbing his chin. “Where is this going, Katrina?”
“She was obsessed with warlocks and the application of magic directly to the human body. Her final two papers propose not only continuing the warlock line but improving the process with additional applications and… starting the process much younger.”
“It was just a thought question Katrina,” Gina said. “I required them to suggest other lines of thought in their work to get them thinking.”
“Well, she seemed to think about it a lot,” Katrina said. “Omega?”
“Yoon Da-Ni discussed her ideas in numerous chat rooms across the internet throughout her time on Earth,” Omega said, appearing suddenly. The view on the wall changed to show clips of posts from numerous sites across a number of years.
I sat down in the nearest seat, earning myself a number of stares from the group, but my focus was on the words I was seeing. …human ideal. …erase the advantage of virus-borne modifications. …careful design. …exceed natural limitations.
“So what are you saying?” Vesta asked. “Craig doesn’t have any of the sigils that Dad does.”
“How do you know?” Katrina asked. “I’m sure you’ve been over every inch of that body, but I doubt you were looking for sigils,” she said with a smirk.
“Declan’s sigils don’t show up unless he activates them, but then they are obvious,” Stacia Reynolds said, ignoring the innuendo aimed at her daughter.
“In Yoon Da-Ni’s writings, she proposed the idea that the Irish method of tattooing prospective warlocks with the sigils was primitive,” Omega said.
“She thought there were other ways, other materials to utilize. I believe she had an interest in the use of rhinocodium in such an application. She noted the element’s potential in a discourse she wrote on a witch website two months before leaving for Golf Alpha. ”
“Which brings us to another piece of interesting material,” Katrina said.
“One of Arcane’s grad students, Kiley Price, has recently published a database on Arcane’s internal intranet on the results of rhinocodium scans from various tissues and body parts of Golf Alpha animals, plants, and a small set of scans of human inhabitants.
The human set is very small, consisting of Craig, Ilissa Shenn, Richard Shenn, and the four members of the Chiasson family who visited on parents’ weekend.
Trace elements were found in all participants, but the highest percentages were the Chiasson children and Craig.
Craig’s numbers, though, were multiple times higher than anyone else, causing Miss Price to question their validity.
His handling of animal parts was thought to contaminate the test protocols. I think it was something else.”
“How does the scan work?” Tatiana Demidova asked, speaking for the first time since I entered the room.
“Kiley used a hand scanner that Omega prepared,” Katrina said. “Omega has since reconfigured a drone to hold the same instrumentation.”
Instantly a single silver orb appeared in the air over my head. It didn’t really appear, but it moved so fast and stopped so suddenly that it was if I had apported it.
“Craig, would you push up your sleeves?” Omega asked from his avatar’s place next to Katrina.
I glanced at Vesta, reading her through our bond. Affirmation mixed with wariness. I pushed up both shirt sleeves.
The drone dropped down to hover over my right hand and forearm.
“Kiley’s results were valid,” Omega said. “I can outline the concentrations of rhinocodium on Craig’s skin. Or should I say in his skin.”
A wide blue beam shot out and suddenly a shape appeared on the back of my forearm. A twisting line of silver so thin, it was like finely extruded jeweler’s wire. It wove around, turning back under and over itself in a complex knot.
Ashling and Erika both sucked in quick breaths and Vesta’s dad snorted softly.
“I don’t recognize it?” Gina asked.
“T’would be shocking if ye did, dear,” Ashling said, her eyes wide. “Tibetan, I believe?” she asked her nephew.
“Well, it’s from Tibet but not of Tibet,” he answered. “Older.”
“What era?” the little vampire, Lydia, asked.
“Prehuman, maybe pre-animal.”
“That would be…?” Lydia asked.
“Elemental,” Vesta answered.
“Yes,” he said. “And before you ask, I don’t know what it means.”
“You don’t know?” Tatiana Demidova asked.
“I don’t think any human has even known anything about that symbol. I recognize it as elemental and from the Himalayan region of Tibet, but that’s it.”
“How would she have known about it, let alone what it might do to Craig?” Vesta asked.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait, wait, wait. What are you talking about? What is this?”
Omega’s drone spread its blue light or laser or whatever it was out wide and my whole forearm lit up with shapes that I recognized as magic system sigils and glyphs and a whole lot more that I didn’t recognize.
“It would appear that you are a warlock,” Omega said.
I froze up, mind locked on his words. Warlock.