Chapter 7

 

Darius had a few ideas for interrogating Nick Sheen that he doubted Olga would go along with. They left Nick in the living room and headed for the kitchen. It wasn’t that they couldn’t talk in front of the man—he was temporarily blind and deaf—but Darius was hungry, and Olga had her own concerns.

She walked directly to the scrying tray on the counter and stared down at it. After a few seconds, she sighed. “They’re all still there.”

“Pardon?”

She put her laptop down on the counter. “Nick’s prisoners. I had a sudden belated fear that…well, Nick is treacherous.”

Darius opened the fridge door. “That’s not news.”

“Mob ties. In that world, people take action when they suspect they’ve been double-crossed or betrayed. I thought Nick vanishing would be perceived as a threat, an attack. But…the people he’s involved in, whether it’s Svenson directly or someone else…” She stared down at the scrying tray. “It belatedly occurred to me that they might think Nick vanished because he knew of trouble coming. If they wanted to clean house—”

“Sons a’ guns.” He crossed to her side and peered at the scrying tray, counting the number of orange dots that indicated magic talents. They appeared to be positioned normally in the living quarters of the former equestrian arena. “It seems normal. They’re still siphoning magic into the crystal.” He could see the threads of magic winding from the orange dots to the warded circle. “If we were to ask Nick why they’re ignoring his absence, we wouldn’t get a straight answer.”

She agreed. “We can’t take at face value anything he says, but I think we are learning things?” The tiniest rising intonation transformed her sentence into a question.

“We are.” He put an arm around her shoulders. He’d have offered the same physical encouragement to anyone in his combat unit. Olga was more vulnerable than she let the world believe. He released her and crossed to the fridge. “BLTs?”

“Huh? Oh yeah. Lunch. Yes, that’s fine.”

He got out the makings for bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches.

She studied the scrying tray. “There are two primary methods for attacking a location. One, slow and steady infiltration, gathering data and moving in, almost suffocating the enemy. But we don’t have time for that one. We’ll have to go with the definitive strike-and-retreat. We want to know what Svenson keeps at the hunting lodge.”

“You won’t get any argument from me.” He found two frypans and put them both on to heat before grabbing a knife to open the bacon packet. “But if things do go FUBAR how can we protect the prisoners?”

“Misdirection. We stage our raid to resemble a rival’s attack rather than a government investigation. A rival wouldn’t respond to the prisoners being used as hostages. It’s when you show you care that you’re vulnerable.”

Bacon grease spat from the pan. He licked the hot spot from his hand. “A rival wasn’t in your report on Svenson.”

She turned the tap on. “If I knew enough about Svenson to prove his links to organized crime, I wouldn’t need this covert operation. It’s a calculated guess. Nick mentioned that Svenson placed him with the Mob.” She finished rinsing the lettuce and tomatoes and patted them dry with paper towels before slicing the tomatoes. “There have to be people looking at Svenson’s power and envying it.”

“Like Nick.”

She frowned at the fat, ripe slices of tomato.

Darius didn’t think she felt affection for Nick Sheen, not as he was now, but that didn’t mean there weren’t tangled emotions there. They’d both escaped lives of poverty and powerlessness. She’d thrived, and he’d gone criminal. “When Nick speaks about Svenson sometimes his emotions slip through. He wants to be him.”

“They’re both hedge wizards. Nick might want to believe…” She trailed off. “Do you think he realizes that Svenson made sure Nick could never emulate him?”

“We’re only guessing after a short time questioning him.” Darius qualified his assessment, but in his heart, he had faith in his judgement. “Nick believes he can be Svenson and exceed him. He doesn’t realize that he’s too pretty.”

She froze in the act of opening the mayo jar. “He what?”

“Too attractive, too aware of his assets. I’ve seen pictures of Svenson when he was younger, as well as now. He struck a careful balance. He fitted in with the people he wanted to influence, the wealthy and the high flyers, but he was never competition. He was always the wingman.”

“Whereas Nick wants to be the center of attention.”

Darius nodded. “That’s where he’s aiming. Kingpin. Overlord.” He transferred the bacon to the paper towels folded onto two plates. The paper sucked up the sizzling fat. He used what was left in the pans to fry slices of bread.

Olga was momentarily distracted from discussion of Nick. “That is revoltingly unhealthy.”

He grinned at her. “Tasty, though.”

“Ugh.” She popped her slices of bread into the toaster. “The people Nick wants to impress aren’t going to allow a slave trader into their inner circle.” She waved a crispy rasher of bacon at him. “Not because they have high standard or morals, but because a merchant’s status depends on what he trades in.” She bit off a piece of bacon. “’S good.”

He smiled. He flipped his fried bread onto a plate, and used a cleaning cantrip to scrub the frypans and stovetop. The cantrip even removed the grease splatter from his sweater. “You think Svenson placed Nick with the Mob on purpose to taint him with a criminal background. Can you convince Nick of that and turn him to testify against Svenson?”

She cut a sandwich sharply in half. “First, I want to know what Nick’s game is.”

 

Olga put her plates of sandwiches on the table—one for her, one for Nick—and returned to the kitchen to grab coffees for all of them. Then she unlatched the bracelet on his wrist.

He focused on her and the wildness in his green eyes faded away to be replaced with hate and anger. “Next time, knock me out. Being blind and deaf is awful.”

“Demonstrate you can be trusted and maybe I won’t have to constrain you. Food’s on the table.”

He headed for the stairs, instead.

“Where—”

“Bathroom.”

Darius replaced his sandwich on his plate and trailed Nick up the stairs.

Ordinarily, Olga would have taken her turn at guarding their prisoner. It wasn’t as if they had to remain in the bathroom with Nick. They just couldn’t let him go wandering around alone. However, these weren’t quite ordinary circumstances. Darius was right to be cautious about her history with Nick, given her meltdown last night.

She stared at her sandwich. The crucial decision at this point was where she and Darius allocated their time and energy. They’d been interviewing Nick, but was he a distraction? If they hadn’t kidnapped him, they’d be reviewing his data. “And finding nothing,” she muttered, recalling the results of her quick skim through it.

Of course that wasn’t true. She was just feeling impatient. The data she’d stolen contained details on the operation of the human trafficking network. It was important. However, the fact that Nick seemed relatively unconcerned at that information falling into 13OPS hands made her extremely curious about what else was going on.

Where were the other crystals? Twenty powerful crystals. There had to be a record of their transaction somewhere.

Her thoughts slowed as she groped for an idea flickering at the edge of her mind. The men’s footsteps descending the stairs didn’t distract her. She’d missed something, something obvious. This nagging feeling with thoughts jumbling and circling was familiar from other investigations. But in those, she’d had a whole team to back her up.

She looked at Darius as he sat down and reached for his sandwich. “Nick didn’t sell the crystals. He didn’t trade them. That’s why there’s no record. He gave them to someone. There’s someone he trusts close by—close by the hunting lodge, I mean. Not at the lodge itself. The crystals aren’t there. Nick was amazed I’d tracked down Svenson’s ownership of the compound land. What if Svenson owns other properties nearby under different names? I need to scry wider.”

Nick filled his mouth with huge bites of his BLT. Evidently, he thought a bulging mouth would hide his reaction to her guess.

She kept rolling with her surmises. “Whoever he gave the crystals to, Nick is in the habit of visiting. That’s why there’s no confusion in the compound or hunting lodge at his disappearance. No one’s panicked at Nick’s absence because he does this. And wherever he goes, it has to be close enough that he doesn’t have to drive there because we left his car at the compound.”

Darius scrutinized Nick. “Maybe we have a different target, tonight. Not the hunting lodge, but this mystery location.”

“I’ll find the crystals,” she promised.

“And when we go in,” he continued. “It’s not just reconnaissance. We take the crystals. Removing that power source will delay whatever they’re planning. Anyone who tries to stop us, I’ll deal with them.”

Nick glared at him. “I know what you’re doing. You’re using threats to try and psych me out. I don’t care. Do whatever you want.”

Darius’s smile was downright nasty; a feral thing of anticipated violence and death. “I intend to.”

That ended any further discussion over lunch. Olga ate quickly. Scrying the land surrounding the compound would either validate or disprove her hypothesis. She used magic to levitate Nick and deposited him on the sofa. “Knock him out,” she requested of Darius. It was safer if he did so since he’d be standing guard while she scryed.

The process wasn’t quite as slow as her cautious infiltration of the hunting lodge’s wards. She’d learned from that. Nonetheless, it took her two hours to find the crystals on a property north of the compound. Her mental exclamation of “bingo!” was one of both relief and vindication. This had been time well spent. After another hour she had a map of the property and a sense of who inhabited it: witches. Their magic showed up differently to other magic users, an apricot rather than tangerine shade of orange—and their presence on this property served to highlight that none had been imprisoned at the compound.

She released her magic into a holding pattern and withdrew her active attention from the scrying tray. Yawning, she stretched, and winced as her stiff muscles protested.

Darius massaged her shoulders.

After a moment’s stillness, she relaxed into his touch. It wasn’t just the physical tension leaving her muscles that relaxed her. His massage grounded her here at the cabin, rather than following her magic through the scrying tray. “Thanks.”

He ended the massage with a thumb stroke across her nape. She shivered. It felt like a caress. It felt possessive.

“We have witches,” she said. “The ward around the perimeter of the property is a standard wizard’s casting. However, once inside, and particularly around the houses, there are witch wards, protections and charms. They’re not subtle, so I avoided them easily. Apart from the main house, which has the warded room with the twenty crystals in it, there are an additional five buildings. They seem to be vacation cabins, although there’s no official record of them existing.” She paused. He’d been watching the slow emergence of details on the scrying tray, so her recap was to clarify that they were on the same page with regard to interpreting what they’d seen.

Twisting to look at him, she found that his expression was furious, but there was another element to it.

Sick apprehension. She identified his hidden emotion with a shiver of fear. In massaging her shoulders he’d been taking comfort as well as giving it. Given all the things she believed Svenson had instigated, from sabotaging Darius’s army courier combat team’s final mission to human trafficking, leaping to the worst possible scenario was rational. Believe the worst, and you might be prepared.

“What have you seen?” she asked

Scowling down at the scrying tray on the dining table, Darius released Nick from unconsciousness. “The number of witches and their housing arrangements promises trouble. Trouble we have to stop.”

Their prisoner sprang up, rubbing at his arms.

“We have to eliminate the head witch,” Darius said.

Nick froze.

“We take him or her out from a distance,” Darius ordered.

“No. You can’t kill someone—”

He cut off Nick’s protest. “I’m not risking Olga or myself to keep a terrorist alive.”

Nick shouted. “Staci isn’t a terrorist!”

We have a name, Olga thought. But she couldn’t rejoice. She’d never seen Darius afraid before.

He wasn’t scared for himself, but for whatever he believed was coming. He yelled at Nick. “She’s a hellborn demon.” It had to be an exaggeration. The scrying tray hadn’t revealed any demonic presence. “Do you know what this shows?” He stabbed a finger in the direction of the scrying tray. “Five groups of five witches.”

Nick shrugged aside the observation. “I know. I supplied the witches.”

“Then you should die with them.” Fury and determination burned in Darius’s eyes.

Nick reared back. “What the hell? They’re not going to die. Staci’s going to channel the power of the—”

When he didn’t continue, Darius let the silence stretch out before he slowly filled it with an explanation of his freak out. “A few years ago I encountered a coven who unleashed a curse. To cancel the curse, we were instructed to kill those involved.”

“And you call me a terrorist,” Nick exclaimed, disgusted.

“Killing the coven members would have cancelled the curse, although its consequences wouldn’t have been reversed. We found another way, one that involved other witches in the aftermath. They healed the coven members. One of those witches was an Estonian-born woman in her nineties. She survived terrible things during the Second World War.”

Darius tapped a fist into the open palm of his other hand. “Evil things. She told me that killing a single coven, undid its spells. Witches never combine covens even for major spellcasting, but she’d seen it done. She warned against it, and against interfering if it ever occurred again.”

He paused. “I was curious, so I reached out to some of the witches in the military. One of them had a grandfather who researches witch history. Combining covens isn’t done because of the consequences. The witch channeling that much power either has his or her abilities burned out or they die. The effects also hit the coven members. If people are ambitious enough and disciplined enough to mesh their five covens for a spell despite the integral forces pushing them apart, the format is called a death star. Everyone involved dies.”

“You’re making this crap up.” Nick gripped the back of the sofa, denting and squeezing the cushioned headrest.

Darius stared at Olga. “The name, death star, isn’t because all those involved die. Unlike with a single coven, their deaths don’t undo the spell their combined covens cast. Their deaths fuel it. Five covens combining always produce malignant magic.”

“Five chalets doesn’t necessarily mean a separate coven in each.”

“I’m not willing to take that chance.”

Nick launched himself from the back of the sofa to physically attack Darius, who simply blocked his first hit and folded him over with a brutal punch to the stomach. Nick curled up gasping on the floor.

“That’s why he’s dealing in slaves.” Darius scowled at Nick with deadly animosity; uncaring of, or unsatisfied by, the pain he’d caused him. “They had to find witches malleable enough to be trained and who wouldn’t be missed. They couldn’t have family or friends inquiring after the people they’re setting up to be murdered. We have to intervene.”

 “We will,” she promised. “We’ll infiltrate the witches’ land, tonight. I’m not authorizing the use of lethal force against—what’s her full name, Nick?”

“Staci Smith.”

“But if she threatens us, we’ll protect ourselves.”

 Nick uncurled tentatively, one arm cradling his stomach. “Staci wouldn’t be involved in killing people. She wouldn’t sign up to die herself. This isn’t…this death star crap is wrong. It’s a fairy tale. He just wants to go in there and…maybe he hates witches.”

Olga shook her head. She hadn’t heard of covens joining up to share power. It was one of those things that wasn’t done. She’d always assumed that the integral force Darius had referenced—the core of a coven—repelled outsiders. But if covens could be trained to counter the integral force and unite, if only briefly, then the fact that the possibility wasn’t known even to an experienced 13OPS agent raised a red flag. It meant that the prohibition against combining covens probably did have a basis in the bad things that happened when it occurred.

Besides which, she trusted Darius.

Trusting him didn’t mean she lacked questions. “What role will the crystals play? To power the covens? Do they need the crystals to counter their covens’ integral force?”

Darius scowled at Nick, who was dragging himself up from the floor to lean against the back of the sofa. “Or this Stacy thinks she’s found a way to protect herself from the magic she’ll be channeling. The crystals might be to power those protective charms. The sole figure in the main witch house is carrying numerous, and powerful, charms already. We saw their signature.” He glanced significantly at the scrying tray.

Olga nodded. She needed to think about their objective. She needed to decide how much this new information changed their mission. They were making assumptions about the use of the witches gathered on land near Svenson’s hunting lodge. Maybe there were no plans to cast a death star spell. But the evidence was compelling; strong enough to warrant checking in with her boss.

She frowned at Nick, hesitating momentarily before casting a sleep spell on him. Her levitation spell caught him before his head hit the floor. She let him lie there as she pulled her phone out of her pocket. “I need to call Gregory.” She didn’t try for privacy.

Darius bent over the scrying tray. He began sketching the layout of the witches’ property, its buildings and their exits and entrances.

Having texted the coded message that she needed to speak with Gregory, she put her phone down on the table. Five seconds later, it rang.

“Good timing,” her boss said. “I’ve sent a couple of agents to collect Nick Sheen from you in Minneapolis. Four o’clock at the sculpture garden by the temporary bone treehouse.”

Darius could hear Gregory’s side of the conversation. He grimaced, but nodded. Delivering Nick to the city meant an hour’s drive there, and a minimum of two and a half hours to Svenson’s land. The drive would probably be nearer to three hours.

“I’ve been using a scrying tray…” Olga led into her report on the development regarding the witches.

Darius picked up the remaining dishes from lunch and carried them through to the kitchen.

She wandered over to Nick as she continued filling Gregory in on events, and on her and Darius’s plan to investigate and prevent a death star.

Collapsed on his right side, there was little of the boy she’d known in Nick’s slack face. She levitated him up and onto the sofa. Leaving him to unconsciousness on the floor was an unnecessary punishment. She adhered to standards, even if this covert operation stretched the rules of the agency; rules that were already more flexible than in most government agencies given the unexpectedness of supernatural happenings.

Walking to the window she was glad to see patches of blue in the sky. Good weather would make things easier.

She answered Gregory’s questions professionally. She hadn’t thought he’d forbid tonight’s activities, even if he stressed that they should stick to sabotaging the death star rather than actively intervening. “Get the crystals. And remember you—”

“…don’t have a warrant,” she mouthed silently along with him. She’d gone into this operation accepting that she’d be acting in a gray zone.

The conversation wound up as the smell of coffee reached her. Darius carried in two mugs. She ended the conversation with Gregory and smiled at Darius. “Thanks. Good news. Gregory has approved—”

Hot coffee splashed down her shirt and jeans. She murmured a healing cantrip automatically, but despite the pain of her burned skin, all of her horrified attention was on the scrying tray.

She’d left it with her magic suspended, feeding it just enough to show an up-to-date model of the magic of people and objects, including wards, on the witches’ property.

The twenty six orange dots that had indicated witches were gone. But now there were twenty six black dots.

“No.” She instinctively retreated, and came up hard against Darius. He cradled her against him. “I wasn’t watching. I was at the window. It was only ten minutes.”

“Fifteen.” He’d been in the kitchen, giving her space to talk on the phone with her boss.

“It can’t…this can’t have happened in fifteen minutes.”

“What’s happened?” That was Nick, waking up.

In her distress, Olga’s magic had slipped. “We were too complacent,” she whispered. “We assumed they hadn’t noticed Nick’s absence, but they had. Svenson must have told them to act normally. Normal patterns right up until…this.”

“Until what?” Nick stormed to the table. Controlled shock widened his eyes, tightened the skin of his face and thinned his lips. But he didn’t accuse her of lying.

She suspected that her face showed too much distress to allow him to believe it was anything but the truth.

Twenty five black dots were arranged like a snowflake around the central twenty sixth dot.

Nick comprehended the purpose of the scrying tray and how it worked, but now he resisted the truth. His arms were braced on the table, holding up his bowed head. “Their magic burned out.”

“Your witches are dead.” Darius’s words dropped like glaciers cracking, shattering; ice so cold it could burn. “It’s a massacre, a mass slaughter.” He turned Olga around carefully in his arms. A cleaning cantrip brushed against her, removing the coffee from her clothes. “How do we find Svenson? How do we prove he was there?”

“He can’t have been.” Nick straightened. “Something must have gone wrong. Staci was careful. She was training the witches. They practiced.”

Instead of asking what the witches had practiced, Olga answered Darius’s question. “Svenson was scheduled to be in New York this week. The commission investigating…it doesn’t matter. I can find him. I’ll have another agent officially confirm his whereabouts. If he returned for this, flight plans have to have been filed. How did he do this in fifteen minutes? He must have planned every detail.” Her arms were wrapped around her sides. She dug her fingers into her ribs to stop herself babbling.

Darius could find Svenson as easily as she could. A locator spell cast by a sorcerer could cut through almost any masks or wards, especially if the sorcerer was willing to use brute force. As angry as Darius was, he’d be eager to do so. His request for her to find Svenson was an attempt to distract and refocus her, to call her back from being lost to the horror of the massacre and the inevitable haunting regrets.

He was right. She had to shelve her questions and regrets of whether they should have acted faster, not have kidnapped Nick, or taken out Svenson regardless of proof.

Not that they had proof—yet—that this massacre was by Svenson’s order or manipulation.

She managed to stop herself sharing her worries and what ifs aloud, but Nick filled the silence.

“Staci was training the witches to cast a Shangri-La Spell. She wanted to live in paradise. I’ve been looking for suitable witches for two years. Svenson acquired an island. They were to live there. They’d raise and maintain a shield that separated the island from the rest of the world. Svenson’s been obsessed with it—with living forever like some kind of god.”

Olga shuddered. In many pantheons, gods had required sacrifices. They had to stop this, whatever it was that the deaths of twenty six people had achieved, and that meant reaching the witches’ property.

“Ten minutes,” she said. “Grab your gear, get in the jeep. We can be there in thirty minutes.” She wouldn’t be obeying any speed laws.

Rather than argue that they contact Rest and he courier them there even faster via a portal, Darius nodded. “We taking him?”

“Yes,” Nick said fiercely.

“Yes, I have magic-blocking cuffs in the jeep. You can drive and question him on the way. Nick, stay.” She locked him in place with magic as she ran upstairs. Bathroom break first, just like a kid before a road trip, but better to take care of her body’s needs now rather than once they reached the witches’ property. She grabbed her gear and ran downstairs to pick up the scrying tray and her other magical tools and supplies.

“You drive.” She threw the jeep’s key to Darius. “You can question him on the way.” She released Nick from the magical bonds. “I’ll let Gregory know what happened, then scry for Svenson’s whereabouts.”

She packed her gear in the jeep, leaving room for Darius’s bag. “Cuffs.” She slammed them around Nick’s wrists. “Back seat.”

“I want to help,” he said to her earnestly. His green eyes shimmered with emotion.

She didn’t trust him. “Answer Darius’s questions.”

Darius set off before she had her seatbelt buckled.

“Gregory, while we were talking I wasn’t monitoring my scrying tray. The twenty six witches are dead. They show as black dots. Extinguished life. Darius and I are driving up. We’ll be there in thirty minutes. We’re bringing Nick.” She didn’t ask Gregory to send her the agents who’d been intended to collect Nick. The 13OPS response to a death star in Minnesota wasn’t her case—unless Gregory liaised with the local director to make it hers.

“I’m after Svenson,” she added. “This has to be his work. He’s scared of dying. He wants a Shangri-La to live eternally in his own personal paradise, but it’s not just old age that he has to cheat to achieve that. Think about it from his psychopathic perspective. He has enemies. And then there is us, justice. I need to analyze the scene and trace magic, but I think he used the death star to gain himself a protector. It’s the only thing that makes sense of risking this much dark magic now. Svenson has himself a shade.”

Darius swore, and the jeep accelerated far past any speed an ordinary jeep could achieve. At this rate, they’d hear a sonic boom.