Magic Burns(6)

I told her.

She frowned. “The fact that you didn’t hear the bow go off probably means it’s a recurve. A compound crossbow ‘twangs’ at release. Can I fire it?” She nodded at a man-shaped paper target pinned to the far wall, which was sheathed in several layers of corkboard.

“Sure.”

She put on gloves to keep the magic residue to a minimum, took a small crossbow off the bench, loaded, swung it up, and fired, too fast to have aimed. The bolt whistled through the air and bit into the center of the man’s forehead. Bull’s-eye. And here I was, unable to hit a cow at ten yards with a gun.

The feylanterns flickered and faded. On the wall, a dusty electric fixture flared with soft yellow light. The magic wave had drained and the world had shifted from magic back to tech. Andrea and I looked at each other. Nobody could predict the duration of the shifts: the magic came and went as it pleased. But the waves rarely lasted less than an hour. This one had been what, fifteen minutes?

“Is it me, or is it shifting more than usual?”

“It’s not you.” Andrea’s face looked a bit troubled. She freed the bolt. “Want me to scan it for magic?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.” Magic had the annoying tendency of dissipating over time. The sooner you could scan your evidence, the better your chances of getting a power print.

“Trouble?” She leaned to me. “I’ve been off-line for two months. It’s killing me. I have cobwebs growing on my brain.” She pressed her finger below her right eye, pulling the lower eyelid down. “Look for yourself.”

I laughed. Andrea worked for a Chapter out West and had run into some trouble with a pack of loups raiding the cattle farms. Loups, the insane cannibalistic shapeshifters who had lost the internal battle for their humanity, killed, raped, and raged their way from one atrocity to the next, until someone put the world out of their misery.

Unfortunately, loups were also contagious as hell. Andrea’s partner knight became infected, went loup, and ended up with two dozen of Andrea’s bullets in her brain. There was a limit to how much shapeshifters could heal, and Andrea was a crack shot. They relocated her to Atlanta, and although she didn’t have any trace of Lycos Virus in her blood and wasn’t in any danger of sprouting fur and claws, Ted kept her on the back burner.

Andrea took the bolt to the magic scanner, raised the glass hood, slid the bolt onto the ceramic tray, lowered the cube, and cranked the lever. The cube descended and the m-scanner whirled.

“Andrea?”

“Mmm?”

“The tech’s up,” I said, feeling stupid.

She grimaced. “Oh, Christ. Probably won’t get anything. Well, you never know. Sometimes you can pull some residual magic imprints even during tech.”

We looked at the cube. We both knew it was futile. You would have to scan something really saturated with magic to get a good m-scan during tech. Like a body part. The m-scanner analyzed the traces of residual magic left on an object by its owner and printed them in a variety of colors: blue for human, green for shapeshifter, purple for vampire. The tone and vividness of the colors denoted the different types of magic, and reading an m-scan correctly was practically an art form. The traces of magic on a bolt, probably held very briefly, were bound to be miniscule. I knew of only one man in the city who had an m-scanner high-speed enough to register such slight residual magic during tech. His name was Saiman. Trouble was, if I went to him, it would cost me an arm and a leg.

The printer chattered. Andrea pulled the print out and turned to me. Her face had gone a shade whiter. A wide slice of silvery blue cut across the paper. Human divine. That in itself was not remarkable. Anybody who drew their power from deity or religion registered as human divine: the Pope, Shaolin monks, even Greg, a knight-diviner, had registered silver-blue. The problem was, we shouldn’t have been able to get an m-scan at all with the tech up.

“What does this mean? Is the residual magic just incredibly strong on this thing?”

Andrea shook her head. “The magic waves have been really erratic lately.”

We looked at each other. We both knew what rapid-fire waves meant: a flare. And I needed a flare like I needed a hole in the head.

“You have a petitioner,” Maxine’s voice said in my head.

I grabbed my m-scan and went into my office.





Chapter 2




I landed at my desk. A flare was coming. If normal shifts were magic waves, a flare was a magic tsunami. It started as a series of shallow magic fluctuations, quickly falling and rising, but never leaving the world. During those short waves, the magic didn’t completely fall, coming back stronger and stronger until it finally drowned us in an enormous surge.