“He probably is,” Ezee said. He leaned forward, looking at the paperwork upside-down. “I mean, how likely is it that some middle-aged dude from Boise drove all the way out here to sell a stuffed fox? It’s more likely a fake or stolen ID.”
“I have his signature on the sale, and his finger prints, there, see? I do everything above board,” Ciaran said. He folded his arms and pressed his lips into a line, muttering in Irish about idiot dogs.
“So what, we just go start knocking on dorm room doors until Ciaran recognizes someone?” Levi asked.
“If that’s what it takes,” Harper said. The hope in her eyes had turned into anger.
I resisted making a comment about anger leading to hate and hate leading to the dark side, but the tension and level of predatory desire to kill was pretty palpable in the room. While it made a lot of sense in a “someone did something awful to someone I love” way, unleashing the hounds, so to speak, on the mostly normals population of Juniper College seemed like a pretty bad plan in actuality. For all we knew, some kid had found the be-spelled Rose on the side of the road with a “free” sign on her and figured they could score a little extra cash.
“There’s a better way,” I said, mentally kicking myself even as my mouth kept moving. I shouldn’t do magic. I shouldn’t get involved. I felt like Sarah in Labyrinth when she falls down into the chute full of hands and chooses to keep going down. Too late now.
“I can do a spell,” I continued. “There’s enough with the signature and fingerprint that I can probably design a tracking thingy. If he or she is within twenty miles, it’ll point right at them.” There, that was more or less the truth. I carefully didn’t look at Alek, though I could feel him looking intently at me. He didn’t trust me anyway, so fuck him.
Hmm. Fucking Alek.
My brain hung up on that idea for a moment and I had to ask Harper to repeat herself once I realized she’d asked me something.
“What do you need?”
Technically, I didn’t need anything. But I wasn’t about to go along. This was clearly Justice business. If the kid was involved, nothing I could do would stop the death sentence on his head for messing with shifters. Justices were judge, jury, and executioners. In most of the world outside the shifter-dense population of Wylde, shifters hid, maintaining a careful line between themselves and normals. Anyone stepping over the line risked humans finding out about the things that go bump in the night on a larger scale and nobody wanted that. The Inquisition? The Nazis? Not just about persecuting humans. A lot of shifts, warlocks, and witches had gotten caught up in human madness over the centuries.
The Council of Nine and the system of Justices keeping peace and shifter law had come about sometime after the worst of the Inquisition, from what Ezee had told me. Compared to outright slaughter and experimentation the inflexibility of shifter law was pretty understandable.
“A compass,” I said. “I have the rest of what I need here.”
“I will be right back,” Ciaran said, turning and dashing back out my door.
He came back with a brass compass done up to look like an old fashioned pocket watch.
“Perfect. Just give me a minute.” I took the compass and the folder and went into my bedroom, locking the door behind me.
Deep breath. This wouldn’t take a lot of magic. We’d still be safe. Wylde has so many ley lines, a full coven of witches, a couple thousand shifters, and probably a few other paranormals I didn’t yet know about. One tiny spell wouldn’t give me away. Probably.
Wolf materialized from thin air, like she does, and jumped up on my bed, watching me with her head cocked and ears perked. I couldn’t tell if she approved or not.
I sank down onto my knees and put the compass on the floor on top of the thumbprint. Wrapping one hand around the large silver polyhedral die that hangs around my neck, I focused, bringing my magic up from the deep well inside.
This kind of magic isn’t my specialty. In my old life, before I almost got killed and eaten, I was more of a fireball throwing, showy sorceress. Form a magic sword instantly out of ice that won’t melt? No problem. Want to cause a localized earthquake or rain down acid? Again, I could do that, once upon a time. Samir and I used to train in an abandoned bunch of warehouses he’d bought up in Detroit, sometimes going out to lone islands in the Great Lakes to do the really spectacular stuff.#p#分页标题#e#
I’d grown up and honed my magic on Dungeons and Dragons manuals in the nineteen eighties, raised by an awesome bunch of programmers and gamers after my family kicked me out. Todd, Kayla, Sophie, and Ji-Hoon had taken me in after I’d spent a hellish year on the streets of New York. They had been the closest thing to real family I’d ever had after my birth family kicked me out. Until Samir destroyed that, too.