Paranoid Mage Book Two: Renegade Mage

After escaping from the Guild of Arcane Regulation and the Bureau of Secret Enforcement, Callum has lost his greatest protection: his obscurity. Now the powers that be know who he is, and hiding is harder than ever. Nor is hiding a plan, just a reaction.

Now Callum is forced to decide how he wants to approach the supernatural world, and how he’s going to keep himself secure when the apparatus of government is arrayed against him. Even if he wanted to live as a mage, that bridge has been thoroughly burned, and even if he wanted to live as a normal person, he is far too deep to close his eyes to what he’s seen.

He has to make his own terms.

Foreword

This book would not have been made without the tireless work of my editor, Kaorin, and the support of my many patrons and readers. Here's to more Paranoid Mage!

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Renegade Mage Copyright © 2022 by InadvisablyCompelled

Table of Contents

- Chapter 1 – Hiking

- Chapter 2 – Hunting

- Chapter 3 – Destinations

- Chapter 4 – Portals

- Chapter 5 – Dragonblooded

- Chapter 6 – Night Lands

- Chapter 7 – Pursuit

- Chapter 8 – Recovery

- Chapter 9 – Inquiries

- Chapter 10 – Target

- Chapter 11 – Reconnaissance

- Chapter 12 – Jailbreak

- Chapter 13 – Involvement

- Chapter 14 – Bunkering

- Chapter 15 – Grievances

- Chapter 16 – Groundwork

- Chapter 17 – Blame

- Chapter 18 – Ramifications

- Chapter 19 – Recriminations

- Chapter 20 – Heretic

- Chapter 21 – Rescue

Chapter 1 – Hiking

“Man, so, yeah, there’s all kinds of ghost stories down there. Dogs baying and horns in the night, all kinds of creepy stuff.”

“Dude.”

“What?”

“There’s a ren faire there.”

“Oh.”

“I keep telling you, that stuff isn’t real!”

“Ghosts are totally real!”

Callum finished paying for his bottled water at the supply outpost, wishing he could say something to the group of teens chattering behind him. He’d like to tell them that while perhaps ghosts weren’t real, other things were. Real and dangerous things, that he’d just escaped from. But it wouldn’t do any good, and if anything might endanger both himself and them. Instead he just sighed and packed away his supplies before heading back out onto the trail.

Callum really felt his age. For all that mages were supposed to have some unreasonable longevity, he hadn’t gotten any younger since he started using vis. Maybe a bit healthier, but that might just have been down to magical healing fixing things he hadn’t been aware of. The healing didn’t help his back be any less sore when he woke up from sleeping on a cot out the wilderness.

He’d been practically incapacitated for a couple days after his emergency teleport, nauseous and achy and bleary-eyed. Something he hadn’t known about the paste-and-powder method of enchantment was that the stuff degraded. Callum wasn’t sure if it was time or use or a combination of the two, but the already nauseating transfer had become something truly hellish, and he could sense some wobbles in the enchantments that just trying to refresh it didn’t fix. He wasn’t sure he trusted it, but he didn’t have a way to replace it just yet.

His emergency cache had a lot in it. Clothes, weapons, cash, backups of all the literature he’d gotten and CAD drawings he’d made, everything he needed to start over. What it didn’t have was any enchantable material. That was gone, along with his motorhome, a good chunk of his resources, and all the focuses he’d made, both temporary and permanent.

Pleased as he was to have successfully gotten away from the Mages In Black, he was keenly aware of how damn badly he’d screwed up. His greatest protection had been obscurity, and now all the scary magical people knew who he was, what he looked like, and that he was a threat. They knew his type of magic, and they knew what he was capable of.

In hindsight he really should have waited to escape, maybe built on the bluff about the secret organization they assumed he was part of. If he could have made it look like he was being rescued by someone outside the BSE compound, it may have disguised his ability to teleport out of custody at least a little bit. Now, of course, he didn’t even have that, since he really didn’t trust his homebond after forty-plus hours of semiconscious suffering.

For the moment, his only goal was to let the excitement die down. The MIB were probably still on high alert, but they couldn’t remain so for weeks and months. He just had to lay low, be careful, and avoid any place with concentrations of supernaturals. If he did use magic, he needed to make sure that he was nowhere near anyone and that he cleaned up after himself. In a less obvious way than random ball bearings, at that.

Callum could probably have laired out in the mountain wilderness for a while. Possibly for a very long time, just hiding away from the world, if he was willing to. But that wasn’t living, that wasn’t even properly surviving, that was cowering like a beaten dog. Someday, he wanted to go back to Tanner, which he still thought of as his real home. He wanted to walk around without fearing a black ops team ambushing him from the shadows. Even with his newfound abilities as a mage, he still wanted to keep his hand in with architecture, since he genuinely found it interesting.

All of that required that he do something other than vanish to some desert island somewhere, though he didn’t have an actual plan just yet. He just knew he had to do more than hide. For the moment there was an easy cover nearby and something to do while he was thinking: the Continental Divide Trail. Walking it was only natural since it passed not too far from his cache, and nobody would question a random, disheveled hiker who was traveling it. He had no idea what evidence had been left in his motorhome, so he had to write off everything except the cache, and maybe Lucy’s phone number.

He wouldn’t really need magic to just hike, and the places nearby would be used to scruffy strangers wandering in to rest and resupply. While he’d lost a lot of his stuff, he still had a lot of cash and enough changes of clothes to start. The problem was what else could fit into a backpack, since he couldn’t take everything he’d cached and with the homebond on the fritz he couldn’t casually return once he started off.

He had the normal backpacking essentials, which added up to be heavier than he expected, and he couldn’t lighten his load with a little bit of surreptitious gravitykinesis. Or rather, he didn’t feel comfortable doing so. What he really wanted was a spatial container. Callum had only found references to them, so he had no idea how common they were, though his guess was not very. Aside from the teleportation network, it seemed that spatial stuff was very rare. He wasn’t sure if it was a materials or labor issue, or both.

The extra guns and gold had needed to stay. He had zipped up his coat and settled his backpack into place. Considering the time of year, he was heading south. He didn’t want to deal with heavy snow, though he intended to stop well before Mexico on the southerly route.

According to the maps he’d gotten from Lucy, there was only a light supernatural presence in the areas he was traveling. Certainly no vampires or mages, but there was one area that was a distinct fae region, and he’d have to skirt around that. The normal glamours to keep people out wouldn’t apply to him, so he might walk into a place he didn’t want to. There were some places that went through the outskirts of shifter regions, but nobody really wanted to live in a desert.

He felt a little out of place waving to people who were enjoying an autumn hike along the trails, both because he wasn’t doing it for fun and because he’d spent so much time avoiding people. Even when he went into towns he kept to himself. Out on the trail, though, people were friendly, reminding Callum of his hometown but at the same time making him a little uncomfortable. Intellectually, he knew that people would forget him the moment he was around the next bend but any attention made him a bit twitchy.

The up side was that there was absolutely nothing magical in his perceptions. There were just trees, bushes, rocks, and occasionally people. That was quite relaxing, but it also reminded him that he needed to drastically increase the range of his spatial sense. Slightly over five hundred yards was impressive, but if he wanted to be able to catch mages before they noticed him, he needed more like five thousand yards. Which probably wasn’t possible, but he could still do better than he was.

Setting up the tent at night, he realized how much he’d been spoiled by the shed. It might have been small and uninsulated, but it was more shelter than just the tent’s walls, even if it was a pretty good tent. For some reason it seemed absurd that he was able to use magic but he couldn’t use it to make himself more comfortable, even if he dared use as much as he liked.

After a few days on the trail to distance himself, he followed the signs and asked a few hikers, and made his way to the nearest bastion of civilization. There he had his first hot meal in days, and after a shower groped habitually for a razor before reminding himself that he needed to keep his facial hair. The bed and breakfast even let him use their phone in privacy, which he did. Lucy’s number was one he’d memorized.

“Big man!” Lucy sounded absolutely gleeful as she answered the phone. “I’d say you started a firestorm when you broke out but it’s been dead fucking quiet which is more impressive. Nobody’s admitting anything, so you must’ve pushed someone’s nose in.”

“All I did was leave,” Callum said, somewhat amused by her enthusiasm. “Though I’m sure that they weren’t happy about my doing so.”

“Well they got you labeled a terrorist now, so yeah, very unhappy.”

“Terrorist, huh?” Callum grimaced. That wasn’t all that surprising, but for some reason it still hurt. Maybe he wasn’t exactly a hero, but he’d taken care of murderers and monsters. “Sure you want to be associated with me?”

“Bah, they’re just mad you pushed their noses in, big man. Now spill! What was it all about?”

“Maybe I can tell you someday, but at the moment I don’t think it’d be that good an idea. I’m pretty much hiding out for now—”

“Even more than before?” Lucy said. “What are you going to do, live in a cave?”

“I thought about it,” Callum told her.

“Wait, you’re serious? What do you—”

“Hang on,” he told her. “I’m just borrowing a phone for the moment so we can’t chat overlong, but I wanted to make sure that none of you had any troubles after they found me? Pretty sure they took my stuff, and I don’t think any of it implicated any of you.”

“Nah. Well, someone got kind of bothered about the magic books they found but I made sure those were scrubbed before they got to you.”

“Great,” he said. “Next time I call I hope I’ll have rebuilt some of my resources, but I have some requests for research.”

“Hit me, big man.”

“Since the cat’s out of the bag, I want everything you can find on spatial magic and enchanting. Also some way to buy enchanting supplies. Blanks? Material for permanent enchants.”

“I’ll start working on the first, but I already know the second. It all comes from the portal worlds so it’s all highly regulated by the Guild of Enchanting. They decide who gets it.”

“Of course they do.” He considered that and put it off for another day. “Then can you get me all the information you can on portal worlds? And the text of whatever agreements GAR has with vamps, shifters, and fae. Maybe some common knowledge type stuff for dealing with them.”

“That’s a bit of a list,” Lucy said, and he could hear fingers hitting keys on the other end of the call. “Some of it might be harder than others.”

“That’s fine. I have time. Not like I can do anything while GAR is still on edge anyway.”

“You probably could, but point taken.” More tapping at keys. “Give me a few days, and the next time you call me I’ll set you up with a document download.”

“Works for me,” Callum said. “Any advice before I go?”

“Yeah, Archmage Duvall is pissed. She’s a right harridan so, uh, don’t let her get near you.”

“I’ve seen her name online, but I don’t really know who she is,” Callum told her.

“Oh! She is the spatial Archmage. Came up with all the techniques, is in charge of all the spatial stuff. There aren’t any other spatial mages at her level and they’re rare enough that she mentors them all. More like owns them all, if you ask me. You barely hear anything from any of them but Duvall!”

“I see,” he said. That was exactly the kind of person whose brain Callum would like to pick, but if Lucy was warning him off, she was also exactly the kind of person he couldn’t afford to. Besides, even if he didn’t know what exactly being an Archmage entailed, they were clearly bad news. “Well, thanks for the warning. I’ll make sure we never meet. Can you send me information on the mage Houses, while you’re at it?”

He wished that he’d remembered to cache the book he’d gotten on the mage Houses, but no, that was gone. Loading Lucy up with a bunch of stupid simple information requests felt bad, but he wasn’t about to go visit a bookstore anytime soon. Or any supernatural business, for that matter.

“I won’t charge you extra for just throwing you digital copies of books I’ve got anyway,” Lucy said. “Fifty bucks a night, same as usual.” Callum laughed once again, despite himself, then shook his head.

“That works for me, Lucy. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Hope to hear from you soon, big man!”

“Yep, I’ll call you in a few days,” he told her, and hung up. Though he felt a little guilty about cutting her off, he quashed that reaction pretty ruthlessly. Acting like a normal human being against his own judgement was what had gotten him in trouble before. He didn’t want to slip back into the same habits. Lucy was nothing like Gayle, and he didn’t think she’d slip and give him away somehow, but it would be stupid to be too incautious.

He paid the owners of the bed and breakfast with cash peeled from the supply he kept accessible. The excess, something around fifty thousand dollars, was sorted and packed at the bottom of his backpack and took up a surprising amount of space. It was one of the major reasons he really wanted spatial bags. If he was going to have to carry around his stuff all the time, he would have to make hard choices about how much to carry and how much to cache, and where.

Then it was back out on the trail. In spite of his worries and woes, it was actually a gorgeous hike, even if the autumn was maybe a little too crisp for his tastes. With his self-imposed ban on using magic, he had little more to do all day than stretch out his spatial sense and try to go further. It was already clear he had a finer resolution than most, and it was really difficult to focus on range and finesse.

Partly, he used his perceptions to study himself. The nausea from the teleportation had lingered longer than he thought was appropriate, and he’d still not been able to crack his glamour blindness, so a bit of self-reflection was in order. Gayle hadn’t given him any reason to think internal vis was complicated, but she’d also been someone who hadn’t even had their apprenticeship yet.

From what he could tell, vis saturated his entire body, even flowing along with his blood, but there didn’t seem to be anything like a specific core within him. When he extended a strand of vis it just seemed to be from the nearest point, although if there was some generative structure inside him, it was lost among the rest of it. The only major feature seemed to be that the vis concentration in his brain was significantly higher than the rest of his body, and he shuddered away from inspecting that organ too closely.

The best Callum could guess was that his brain, eyes, and ears were so saturated with spatial vis that it overrode whatever magic was coming in with the glamour. Though even that didn’t really make sense, since supposedly he should have developed magical sight as he used magic. What he did conclude was that there was nothing he could do to change himself, at least not without the help of a specialist, so he’d have to let it go for the moment.

Instead, he turned his regard outward. He’d never used his extra senses to just appreciate nature before, though it did lose something since he couldn’t exactly see colors. On the other hand, if he was just relying on eyesight he couldn’t have spotted rabbits, deer, and even a bobcat stalking its prey a couple hundred yards away from the trail.

It was a welcome bit of fresh air, both figuratively and literally, and a reminder that his problems weren’t all-consuming. That his magic wasn’t just for causing trouble and getting from place to place without having to travel the intervening space. It made him wonder if other mages used their talents to just enjoy themselves, like air mages flying around for the heck of it.

By the time he reached the next stop, some three days later, he was in a better mood than before. Less grumpy, anyway, thought he still kept caution well in mind. Instead of just shopping around the small rest stop, he consulted his GPS on a phone he’d never used to call anyone and went to another, nearby town with an electronics store. He needed at least one burner phone to call Lucy, and some wifi to get the documents.

“Hey, big man,” Lucy said cheerfully. “Got your stuff here. Maybe less than you want, some of it is under lock and key, and I mean that literally. No digital copies of most actual magic stuff beyond the basics anyone can find online.”

“You mean the GAR network?”

“Yeah, though I guess you don’t have a login for that? I could make you one, though you’ll need to obfuscate your IP if you use it. Someone might notice an active account belonging to a fake identity.”

Callum could have kicked himself. Lucy had said that she was IT for GAR, so of course she could have gotten him an anonymized account. But he’d never asked or even implied that he needed access to the GAR sites. He should have, but he’d already mentally filed it away as out of bounds by the time he’d met Lucy.

“Yes, please do that. I hope I still have credit with you.”

“Oh, you’re fine,” Lucy said dismissively. “Most of what you want is easy enough, just a little tedious. I’ll let you know if you’re getting low.”

“Thanks, Lucy. I’d be flailing around in the dark without you.”

“It’s nice for a girl to feel appreciated,” Lucy replied.

“Believe me, I always appreciate you,” he told her. “Speaking of, any news on the hunt for me?”

“They’re keeping mum. I haven’t wanted to pry too much because it involves the Bureau of Secret Enforcement, and they don’t joke around.”

“Yeah, they seemed pretty serious folks.”

“You’ve no idea. They’re the ones who go around putting down renegade mages or supernaturals that have started getting too big for their britches.”

“So their name means they enforce secrets, not that they’re secret enforcers?”

“Ehh. I mean, you know about them, I know about them, but I bet the average mage has never heard of ‘em. Or if they have, it’s very vague. One of those things that those who need to know, know. Those who don’t, never will.”

“Kind of wish I’d never known,” Callum said wistfully, but the fact of the matter was that it was inevitable the moment he decided he didn’t want to bow and scrape under some supernatural bootheel.

“Well you’re in it now, big man. Gotta suck it up.” Her tone made him laugh.

“Yeah, yeah. In the process. I’ve gotta sit back and rethink my approach anyway.”

“Ooh, now that sounds ominous. Ready to tackle the big bad secret police by yourself?”

“Hardly!” Callum snorted at the idea. “That’s a good way to get dead. That said I don’t know how I’m going to approach things yet.”

“Well, let me know when you do! I want to know where to look for the fireworks. Maybe win a few rounds of the office pool, laugh up my sleeve at the bosses falling over themselves.” Lucy was rather more sanguine about potential mayhem than he expected, but if she was practically mundane he could see her nursing a grudge toward those who thought themselves her superiors.

“If I can, I will,” he promised her.

He ended up chatting for a while longer. After cooling down a bit more, he’d realized that he needed to have someone he could talk to or else he’d go crazy. Besides, Lucy already knew everything that could compromise so he didn’t have to watch himself or put on some kind of act. She was a small bit of sanity.

That said, when he hung up he made sure to vacate the area quickly. Not that he thought Lucy didn’t cover her tracks, but she was the only connection anyone had to him. Magic could be capable of many things, even things Lucy didn’t know about, and it was faintly possible that someone was headed his way. The GAR teleport network didn’t have any public terminals nearby, but who knew what the spatial Archmage was capable of.

After going through the rigmarole to get the supplied documents and transfer them to his tablet, because it was less battery-hungry than his laptop, he studied them while he ate lunch. Or a small subset, because he had a lot of material to go through. It was good that he wasn’t really planning to do anything else for months.

The technical stuff was too dense to get into over a burger, but he did skim the common information on the Fae since he was going to be near a fae area when he got further south. Callum was dead set against vampires and tentatively on good terms with shifters, but he didn’t know much about fae, aside from them looking fairly inhuman at times.

It was interesting to find out that the whole thing about fae not being able to lie had some truth to it, though it was mostly restricted to fae royalty. The humans that had settled in Faerie had been changed by the environment, but the actual royalty came from interbreeding from other beings that had arrived in the portal world. None of the portal worlds had any intelligent native inhabitants, so far as anyone knew, but they did have portals to further places with varying degrees of stability. Everything that wasn’t completely human ultimately traced back to one of those far distant shores, rather than the portal worlds themselves.

Aside from that, the most interesting bit was that their magic didn’t work like vis, even if the literature claimed all supernaturals had it. Fae could do things completely impossible under magical theory, though for the most part they were not particularly powerful. Not a threat to a competent mage with proper shields and standard foci, Callum translated, but considering he wasn’t that and didn’t have those things, he was definitely going to have to swing very wide indeed.

Once he was fully fortified, he finished his shopping and laundry and headed back to the trail. He couldn’t read the notes while he was walking around, so he stopped a little earlier at night, letting the solar charger top up his tablet during the day. While he got used to sleeping in a tent, it took longer for his new beard and moustache to stop itching. Though, checking himself in his phone camera, he had to admit that he didn’t recognize himself.

His practice with his range did bear some fruit. Though he wasn’t improving as quickly as when he’d first started, he managed to bump his maximum perception from about five hundred yards in all directions to about six hundred, which wasn’t much in terms of range but was huge in terms of volume. Not that volume was all that useful. He couldn’t actually pay attention to everything in that sphere, and most of it was either air or ground so it didn’t really account for much in the end.

It did show that he’d been pretty halfhearted about it back when he was driving around in his motorhome, but then he’d had other demands on his attention. Out hiking there was literally nothing to do but look. It didn’t seem like he’d get the range to spot distant snipers any time soon at the rate he was improving, but even a little bit of extra distance was welcome.

From what he could find in some of the less common literature, even that much range was abnormal. Passive magic sensing was limited to sight, with all the restrictions thereof, and direct contact with vis. People could sense their own magic just fine even without any sensory methods, but that’s because it was basically connected to them and acted like proprioception.

It explained why Gayle’s sensory range seemed so myopic. She was basically limited to her bubble. In fact, most people were without active sensing, so he was really damn glad he’d never revealed how much he could see to anyone. Being able to just sense everywhere was definitely not usual, at least not without pushing out vis and making it active.

When mages did that, their senses could have an enormous range, if one restricted to the appropriate aspect. An air mage could only sense through air, and an earth mage through the ground. That implied to Callum that there ought to be some trick to turning his passive space sense into an active one, pushing vis out to massively extend his range, but he had no idea how to go about it.

Nothing in the pile of documents helped either, because it seemed that almost all spatial magic was in what Callum tagged as House Duvall secrets. Once again, he’d run into the fact that everything advanced was considered restricted, only available to a master’s apprentice or a ward of the House. There was probably a lot of spying and digging going on somewhere, but none of it revealed any tricks to the public.

Callum wasn’t really one to resort to criminal activity if he could help it, but he was probably uniquely suited to stealing that kind of thing. Assuming it was kept in papers and books and not just in the mind. Going after a House’s valuables seemed a really stupid thing to do, though, so it’d remain a fantasy.

Sorting through some of the common instruction that Lucy had sent him, he did notice a rather glaring omission. One that he wasn’t too surprised by, considering his experiences with Gayle. There didn’t seem to be any attention paid to normal science and history at all.

“Well yeah,” Lucy told him when he asked her about it, several days later and some miles down the trail. “Mage Houses kind of live apart, some of them in or near the portal worlds, where the mana’s thickest.”

“Then what about the magical internet? And all the other obviously modern conveniences I’ve seen.” The magical community obviously wasn’t stuck decades or centuries in the past.

“That’s mostly from people like me,” Lucy told him. “House family members who don’t have the gift don’t get magical schooling, so we go out and get a normal education. Plus the shifters mostly grow up here. Some fae can manage it, others can’t. Vamps usually have their thralls deal with anything related to mundane matters, but none of them are stupid. They like guns and phones because they’re handy.”

“All that, but they don’t seem to instruct mages on the sciences,” Callum observed.

“Well, why would they? Magic takes instruction enough, and none of them are going to grow up to be engineers or rocket scientists.”

“…huh.” It seemed obvious to Callum that any standard education should include the basics, but he’d never considered it from the mage point of view. Of course they didn’t care; it wasn’t their world. It was likely that a fire mage would learn about thermodynamics at some juncture, but it might come well into their lives when they were only ready to start making their own spells or something.

“A lot of mages never interact with mundanes at all,” Lucy told him. “I mean, a bunch of GAR people work in offices they only enter and leave by transport network. Houses have servants to supply them. Something I’ve learned working here; lot of people, mundane or supernatural, don’t ever go outside their little circles.”

“They don’t even go on the normal internet?” Callum asked skeptically.

“Some of them do, but a lot of them don’t. There’s no internet access in the portal worlds, after all, plus you can’t talk about anything magic-related on mundane channels unless you want GAR on your case.”

It still seemed unlikely to Callum, but it wasn’t like people had nothing to do prior to the advent of the internet. Besides, the point about the portal worlds was very well taken. Mages only lived half on earth, and the other half was some weird magical realm that might have different rules entirely.

Between his discussions with Lucy and the literature she provided he felt like he was starting to get a bit of a handle on what mages were like. A bit late, but he’d been trying to come to terms with basic magic before. Unfortunately for him, he had an entire society that he needed to learn about, made worse by the secrecy surrounding it all.

The official reason for which was some generic line about how the mundanes couldn’t handle or be trusted with the intricacies of magic. Which didn’t satisfy Callum at all. He had the feeling it was more that they didn’t want to give up all the unsupervised power they had, all their little fiefs and feudal kingdoms.

He spent the next few weeks heading south, reading up enough that he wouldn’t totally embarrass himself when he interacted with people in the supernatural world, and taking out his tattoo. It was not pleasant, but his finesse was good enough to pull out little tiny bits of flesh. He targeted the magic in the mage mark, which he still didn’t understand but could at least sense, and tore out pinpricks to toss into the fire at night. That meant some truly lurid bruising, and it was extremely tedious, but he was able to do eight or ten at a time if he spaced them out well enough.

The double band with its braided motif was essentially gone by the time he reached the pit stop just north of where he’d have to start his detour to stay out of the fae areas. There were a few spots of ink left, and he was still working on those, but he’d compromised the magic enough that it had all dissipated. That was a major relief, even if it meant he absolutely did not fit in as a mage anymore.

The pit stop wasn’t a town so much as a little outpost with showers, water, and a specialty store selling equipment and supplies. For the most part he’d been carrying only a few days’ worth of supplies, but to skirt the fae he’d need a bit more than that. He availed himself of the facilities, looking at himself in the mirror to trim the brown beard that he’d grown. That combined with the moustache and long hair made him look like some weathered mountain-man, not an architectural consultant, which was all to the good. Though he’d probably get some strange looks when he finally strayed away from the trails.

Though he’d become used to sleeping in the tent, things still woke him up at night. Usually it was just rustling from some animal, which he’d quickly see with his spatial senses and go back to sleep. When something roused him just before dawn, it was more than just an animal. It was a whole troop of people, and they weren’t human.

He quite nearly took off then and there, freezing in his bedroll, but all they did was settle into the equestrian area of the outpost, some of the members heading over to the store or the facilities. Callum didn’t know why they were there, but they didn’t seem to be interested in the few humans who were sharing the camping area.

Most of the fae he’d seen in cities were basically oversized or undersized humans, often in different colors, and there were four in the group that looked human enough but had something off about them, making them more disturbing than the ogre types. They all rode fanged and clawed horses, which rather underscored their inhuman nature. They were joined by tiny flying things that made him think of pixies, and a set of five ambulatory trees, with only vaguely noticeable faces set high up.

Then there were the shifters. He probably would have marked them as fae hounds if he hadn’t had a chance to closely examine beast-form shifters back in Winut, because they were all prowling around on four legs. So far as he could tell they seemed pretty happy, and it wasn’t like the fae were holding leashes, so they were probably cooperating with the fae. That didn’t bode well.

He started hastily packing his things, nerves on edge as the fae milled around, watering their unusual horses and eating rations. Callum studied them carefully, alert for any danger, but his exploration with his senses became more and more grisly the longer he looked. Even the most human things among them had too-sharp teeth and claws instead of nails, and the ones riding the fanged horses had something proud and terrible about them even through his spatial sense. They wore ornaments of bone, carved bracelets and rings, the decorations savage and snarling.

He was on the verge of teleporting out of the tent, quite willing to leave it behind and get another one, when he noticed the necklaces. Rather than bone, they were ears. Fresh, and human.

Callum closed his eyes for a moment, then conjured his pistol into his hand, along with the magazines of ironite and silverite. He didn’t have enough bullets to take care of all the supernaturals, or the firepower to deal with them in other ways, but he had enough to make the ones in charge think twice about hunting humans. Or rather, never think again.

He was considering whether he would be best served by teleporting out first, to find a location such as the bathrooms to ambush the lead fae, when a horn blew in the distance. The entire gaggle of fae and shifters jumped to attention and started off again, back into the woods.

Callum cursed to himself. It was one thing to deal with them then and there, and it was another to follow them. If he went after them and whoever they joined up with, he was taking more risks, and asking for more trouble. All he had to do was stay in his tent, and they wouldn’t even notice him. But he’d know that they were out hunting people.

He shrugged his backpack on and followed.

Chapter 2 – Hunting

Callum was vaguely aware of the statistics on the people who went missing all over the country every year. Before his encounter with the supernatural he hadn’t thought about it overmuch, willing to believe it was mostly people being stupid. Someone who didn’t know what they were doing could easily get lost and starve to death in ten square miles of forest. He hadn’t really thought too strongly that there was some agency involved, snatching people or disappearing them.

Now that he’d had some contact with the supernatural he was far more willing to believe in malicious intent. Vampires obviously contributed to the numbers, but they preferred the cities, so people who vanished in the countryside fell victim to something else. He didn’t see people like the Langleys or Chester being responsible, but it seemed they didn’t represent all shifters.

While he knew now that most of the legends surrounding the fae were just that, it was getting on toward Halloween. Or rather, Samhain. It probably didn’t matter, since it wasn’t like mana or vis changed with the year, but fae magic was a bit weird and maybe the holiday was important somehow. Either way, the Wild Hunt was one of those enduring ideas that seemed not to be a complete invention.

Callum was not a fan of it.

Following was an absolute risk, but if he’d just stayed in his tent for fear of being caught, it’d be the same thing as being under GAR’s thumb. They wanted to control him, to remove his freedom and his self-determination. If he did that to himself for them, he wouldn’t be a man, he’d be a wretch.

Since Callum wasn’t a wretch, he followed.

He wasn’t a stealthy tracker, and besides which, there was no way that he could keep up with the fae horses and shifters as they went haring off into the woods. Instead of running around in the dim predawn light, he transferred himself after them, staying well away from the bulk of their forces.

With a range of six hundred yards, nearly two thousand feet, he could stay at least a thousand feet back or to the side at any given time, with something solid between him and the hunting party. Even with that he made sure to stay downwind, not knowing exactly how keen the senses of the fae or shifters were. In truth he was more worried that they’d notice his teleporting around, since he didn’t have time to scrub his presence with every single shift, but they were generating so much disturbance in the local mana that his impact was a falling leaf to their thunder of hooves.

He still kept a sharp eye on them for any reaction to his stalking them. They were supernatural entities and he was just an unskilled mage, so if they caught onto him he’d be running. Fortunately, his perceptions were so long-range and omnidirectional that it was basically impossible for anything to sneak up on him. Unless they could hide their magical signatures too, which he didn’t totally discount, so he watched for any of their number suddenly vanishing.

Callum reflected it would be a lot easier to follow and hide in the dense forests of the Appalachian mountains, instead of the lighter scrub and pine of the Midwest, but at the same time it meant he had plenty of open space for teleporting around. The hunting party headed deeper into the mountain and forest, covering the rough terrain far more easily than any normal person, displaying a chilling amount of grace and dexterity. He definitely would have no chance if they got anywhere near him.

While they moved, he considered exactly what he was going to do about them. The pistol magazines held twelve bullets each, so he had at best twenty-four kills, split between the fae and shifters. That would actually mostly take care of the warband he was following, but he had to assume that he couldn’t be as efficient and there were others he needed to deal with besides. Someone else had blown that horn.

His primary goal was actually to rescue any people who might have gotten caught up in this supernatural nonsense. Though this time he wasn’t going to be calling in Chester to clean up, that was for sure. These fae and shifters had decided to prey on humans, and there was no abiding predators on humanity. If he was forced to let them be in order to save lives, so be it, but Callum didn’t want to have to make that choice. So he started considering ways and means to dispatch the perpetrators.

Unlike other mages, he couldn’t attack directly. Even if he could he was pretty sure that’d be useless against so many fae, some of whom were clearly quite powerful. Which was fine, because using the environment was more powerful anyway. Callum was pretty sure there was some Sun Tzu quote about that.

He began sweeping the terrain around him for ideas. They were heading into an area where there were sharp slopes, if not actual cliffs, and he entertained the idea of a rockslide or the like. Unfortunately there just wasn’t that much loose scree, and considering the extraordinary physical abilities they had, falling rocks probably weren’t all that much of a threat.

The same objection applied to dropping fallen logs on top of them, aside from the fact that there were a lot of them. What Callum needed was something broadly and instantly lethal, or at least untraceable. This wasn’t like ambushing vampires who were asleep in their beds.

With the constant sweeping through every direction of his perceptions, he noticed something in a direction he normally took for granted. Underground. He hadn’t really been looking directly below his feet, but with the slopes rising ahead of them he had shoved his perceptions through solid rock and found, a few hundred feet below the surface, an open space.

Callum had almost forgotten about caves.

The entire area was riddled with them, along with old and defunct mines. While he had focused more on commercial buildings, he’d studied such things back in college and was aware of the dangers. It didn’t take much to realize how damn dangerous just teleporting into a closed cave could be, since it was as likely as not that the air there wasn’t breathable. That was ignoring the potential of collapse from people disturbing things that had been quietly eroding for millions of years.

The extra hundred yards of range helped a lot there, as it massively increased the volume of the earth he could sense. Five hundred yards was already some very deep caverns indeed, and the extra range he’d gained was like putting a twenty-story building below even that. He was tempted to just start picking off members of the warband as soon as he had the chance, but he had to be patient. That could come when he knew more.

Callum teleported ahead, anticipating the fae’s line of travel, and a second warband appeared in his range. That one had little flitting things that he could reasonably call pixies, rather than giant treefolk, but the small fae weren’t any less savage. The things carried bone hooks and had breastplates made out of what seemed to be teeth. The way they darted about reminded him less of hummingbirds and more of wasps, though that was probably just his own bias.

The two hunting parties converged, high and inhuman laughter as well as the unnatural bark-growls of shifters reaching his ears even as far away as he was. He stayed crouched behind a jut of rock on a ridge above them, eyes not looking at anything in particular while he watched them form up again. The shifters arranged themselves into a loose wedge, and behind them the riders formed a parade triangle. The one with the fanciest uniform and most decorations was at the front, with the rest of them behind, while pixies buzzed around as outriders.

One of the fae made some gestures with his clearly magic sword, probably some kind of speech, and suddenly the shifters all bayed. The sound sent chills up Callum’s spine, the noise both creepy and clearly bloodthirsty, and the whole thirty-some strong assemblage took off along the valley floor. For a moment Callum had second thoughts, seeing what he had to contend with, but then he considered the severed ears and steeled his resolve. It was an aphorism that all it took for evil to triumph was to do nothing, and doing nothing just wasn’t in his nature.

The problem was finding whoever they were hunting. He sure as hell couldn’t track faster than they could, but he could move faster than them and probably had a better perception range. If he were quick he could range ahead of them and maybe find whomever they were after, though there was the risk the hunt would notice his presence.

He was actually a little surprised they hadn’t noticed already, what with all the stories on the superiority of supernatural senses. Those were fiction, and it was clear a lot of the fiction was wrong, but they did have better than human reflexes so it wasn’t complete bunk. Admittedly, keeping a distance of several hundred yards and making no sound of footsteps because he wasn’t walking probably made him hard for anyone to detect without active senses.

Callum followed the fae for a minute or two, making sure they were headed along the narrow valley, further into the mountains, and then teleported ahead. The valley made it easier for him, since it wasn’t likely whomever they were chasing would have climbed the steep walls, and he didn’t have to scan as much area. He popped ahead six hundred yards at a time, taking a second to scan the area before moving onward, walking his way back and forth across the valley floor. He made sure to probe the ground around him as well, looking for handy caves for when things came to a head.

It took longer than he thought. Fortunately, it seemed the time off from doing heavy teleportation hadn’t dulled his abilities. If anything he seemed to have more magical stamina than before, since he didn’t feel too strained by dozens of rapid-fire transfers across the length of his perception. Though the distance had never seemed to actually matter.

There was a couple maybe five or six miles ahead of the fae, two young hikers who were panting and puffing as they scrambled along the valley, heading for god only knew what. Callum suspected it was more a matter of getting away from the things behind them than looking for somewhere in particular.

He quashed his first impulse to immediately teleport them out of harm’s way, trying to consider how he wanted to do things. There was still some time before the fae got there, but not that much time, and they’d know there was a mage around if the trail ended in the middle of nowhere with lingering vis trace around. If he wanted this to work, he needed to finesse it a little.

There were actually two likely caves in the five mile stretch that he could use, one of them small but completely enclosed, the other one sloping down past what he could actually sense, and both of them over fifteen hundred feet below the surface. He couldn’t have even reached them before, which would have made his plan pretty much impossible, but since they were comfortably within his range now he was confident in using them. The issue was that both of those were behind where the couple were, and to the south. It wasn’t much likely the fae would get near them, not if they followed the current trail. So he formed a very small portal, the size of a dime, between himself and the pair.

“I can save you, but you’ll need to follow my directions.” His voice came out a little hoarse, but that was not a bad thing under the circumstances. Unfortunately it seemed to scare the ever-living daylights out of the two, the woman actually screaming and the two of them jerking backward. Callum had more than a little sympathy; they clearly knew they were being hunted and that would strain the nerves of anyone. He’d been there.

“Don’t worry, I’m on your side,” Callum assured them through the portal. “I need you to turn left and head across the valley floor. Your target is about two hundred yards back up against the escarpment, that scraggly pine that’s right on the slope.”

“How,” the man spluttered. “What—”

“Hurry!” Callum snapped. “The sooner you get there the sooner you’ll be safe. I’ll warn you if the hunting party gets too close.”

The two of them glanced at each other, then started off in the appropriate direction. Callum could hear them gasping for breath through the portal, and had to firmly step on his empathy. He needed them to lay a trail for the fae so he could get rid of the entire hunt, to ensure they wouldn’t kill anyone in the future. The couple wasn’t actually in any danger anymore; he could teleport them away just fine. He had an excellent sense of direction so he could get back the pitstop, too, given the time.

He popped back over to the escarpment in question, where he could see further than he could sense. It was a weird sensation, considering that most of the time his spatial sense rendered his sight practically useless. Peering over the edge he could spot the movement in the distance, even if he couldn’t hear anything.

It might actually be a fairly close race, though if it got too down to the wire he’d just get them out of there. The pair were definitely doing their best, though they had to be absolutely exhausted. They had proper hiking clothes on, but no backpacks or anything, so they’d probably been captured and released somewhere nearby.

For some reason, Callum doubted that the fae wanted to give anyone a chance to actually win the Wild Hunt. Assuming there were win conditions to begin with; he was well aware his vague notions weren’t reality. For all he knew the story came first, and the fae thought that sounded like a grand lark. He popped back to within range of the pair, keeping them between himself and the fae in hopes that none of them would smell a rat. Or a mage.

“A little to your left,” he sent to the couple, and got a groan in response as they labored across the rugged, wooded floor of the valley, or really something more like a defile or a ravine. It wasn’t more than a mile across, either way, but on rough ground that took some time to cross.

He helped by steering them away from the worst of the underbrush, providing running directions while he recovered some of his vis. Callum wasn’t any good at gauging it, though he knew there was a standardized unit and various tests to figure it out. He didn’t think he was down by much even after all the rapid-fire teleports, but he’d need every bit to deal with the fae.

The tiny portal didn’t take much effort to keep up. The fact that the expense was based on size and nothing else was a good incentive to keep things minimal and precise, something Callum felt he was pretty good at relative to other mages. It was true that some aspects of his control were terrible, but from what he’d seen of Gayle’s mana control most mages used ropes where he used threads. He wasn’t completely sure of the full implications yet, but it did mean his minimum size of construct was smaller.

By the time the pair reached the area Callum wanted, where the caves were in easy range of his perceptions, they were totally done in. Not that he blamed them; even though he did his best to keep in shape, running flat out through wilderness was exhausting. As they lurched toward the tree he teleported them from below in the valley to the far end of his range up on the escarpment, putting them almost a thousand yards from their original position.

“Oh, god—” The man’s exclamation was cut short by the sounds of nausea, which took Callum by surprise. Though, he hadn’t really followed up on the other people he’d teleported. Apparently the process wasn’t as smooth for everyone else as it was for him. Another point toward his control being actually kind of terrible.

“Just lie there. You’re safe now. I’ll lead you back to civilization soon,” he sent through his portal, keeping his voice hoarse to disguise it. Though he’d have to caution them about mentioning their experiences. Considering what happened the last time GAR got ahold of normal folk it was clear that it was better to pretend nothing had ever happened.

“Thank you,” the woman said faintly. He hadn’t really been expecting it, but those two simple words affected Callum more than he’d anticipated. It didn’t totally wipe away his concerns, but it certainly soothed some of his anxiety.

“Can you tell me how you got into this?” He asked them, while he waited for the fae. There was still time before he committed, and if there was a chance the situation was not all it seemed, he wanted to know.

“Hiking,” the woman replied, gasping for breath. “Walked under a tree, everything was different. Said, we make it to sunrise, we live.”

That was enough for Callum. Nobody should be playing games with human lives. There was only one way to deal with that, and it was a permanent solution. One that Callum was willing to provide.

He didn’t dare poke his head above the ridge to spy on the fae, and they weren’t quite yet within his perceptions, so he formed a portal in front of his face and another high up. This gave him a better vantage than he would have had otherwise and he mentally berated himself for not thinking about such an application before, even if he wasn’t all that comfortable with having a potential attack vector so close to his head.

Callum was pretty sure he could move it in time if a fae decided to snipe him through the tiny hole, but it was still uncomfortable enough that he didn’t keep it open. He only used it to catch a glimpse. The fae were right about the point on the trail where he’d had the couple break from their forward path, wheeling their mounts around as the shifters sniffed out the change in direction.

Seeing them all crowded together like that made him question again whether he was capable of dealing with them. He had a brief moment where he considered grabbing the pair that he had rescued and running off, but they seemed to still be having trouble moving. Exhaustion aside, he was genuinely a little worried that rapid teleportation might kill them if they were already having issues.

When the fae started coming his way, he closed his eyes, dropping all his portals and focusing solely on his spatial perception. He did send out a couple tiny threads of vis to the caves below, in anticipation of the portals he’d be making, but he didn’t manifest any actual structures yet. Like all his attacks, it would be an ambush, and he didn’t want to provide any hints of what was coming.

The shifters came first, then the riders. The little pixie things buzzed back and forth and out and in, fast enough that Callum wouldn’t have been able to keep up with reflexes of muscle and blood. He loaded his pistol and took a moment to survey the hunters, getting a feel for their locations and movements, then got to work.

***

Anandell, son of Anradale, son of Andan, was in a grand mood as he steered his cabyll along the track the shifters had pointed out for them. The Wild Hunt was one of the best inventions of Earth, because there was really no thrill quite like hunting mundanes. Except maybe hunting other fae, but outside of Faerie that was frowned upon.

That year’s hunt was getting near to finishing. The pair that he’d sent off into the corrugated ravines along the mountains had been told if they made it to sunrise, they could live. Of course, with the height of the mountains and the steep walls of the ravines, the sun didn’t actually “rise” for hours and hours. It was a little trick, but it still made him laugh.

“Oh, what fools mortals be,” he said to himself. Anandell had no idea where the line came from but he’d loved it ever since he’d heard it. The little mundane things were such fools.

The only thing dampening the enjoyment of his hunt was the stalker they’d picked up somewhere. He didn’t know who or what it was, but Anandell was a noble fae and he knew when someone was spying on him. The quiet word he’d passed the pixies hadn’t resulting in turning up anyone, though.

His biggest worry was that it was one of his opposition come to spoil his hunt and claim the prey for themselves. It wasn’t exactly Misrandith’s style, but he could see Bellona or Nisae imposing on him like that. They were both properly sneaky and underhanded, and it might be their influence that had caused the prey to suddenly change direction.

He held up his hand, making a circling gesture with one finger, and waited. Then waited some more, frowning as he looked around. The pixie captain should have reported to him almost instantly, but it hadn’t. In fact, when he peered around, he didn’t see any pixies, nor did he hear the buzz of their wings off in the distance.

“Isain, where are the pixies?” Anandell demanded. Isain reigned in his cabyll and frowned, looking around.

“That is odd. They were—” He was cut off by the terrified scream of his cabyll as it dropped straight down. Anandell saw a pit of black beneath him as his own cabyll fell, and he vaulted out of his saddle, doing a somersault and landing on the ground as he touched the pin affixed to his cloak. Mystical protections instantly covered his skin, and he glanced around to see that his fellows had all been attacked by the pits to some extent or another.

Isain and Lenneth had managed to leap free as well, while Zbevney was clinging to the ground, half of him dangling. Even as Anandell watched, the pit seemed to flex, and flowed up over Zbevney, swallowing him before vanishing. Of the nine of them, five were just gone, and the rest dismounted.

Anandell sank his perceptions into the ground, communing with the land and intending to get his men back out of those pits but finding that there was nobody underground. While he still didn’t understand exactly what was going on, it was clear they were under attack, so he flexed his will, stilling the world around them as he let the trees whisper what they had seen. As a fae noble, he was more than a match for anyone who needed to resort to such underhanded tactics.

“Isain! There’s someone on that ridge there!” He pointed, and his faithful retainer nocked arrow to bow, taking aim and loosing. Anandell watched in grim satisfaction as the arrow smashed through the side of the ridge, sending an explosion of rock into the air and gouging a hole straight through.

“Ha, take that!” Anandell shouted, finding a little tussle like this one to be just as fun as hunting. “Shifters, up the ridge!” He ordered, and there were howls as they surged forward in response. Only for the blurring forms of the beastly shifters to vanish, all falling away into terrible holes in the ground.

A chill stole over Anandell as his men spread out, taking shelter behind trees as they readied themselves for battle. This had the stink of something far larger than one of his normal rivals. Perhaps it was a different fae enclave making a move, because he could sense the faint malaise of human-magic, but this was a more serious fight than he had first thought.

He touched another one of his trinkets, breaking the runed length of bone to block hostile magic anywhere nearby him, and gestured for his people to form up behind him. Anandell tapped into his inner well of energy, letting him command the wind and earth even if they weren’t on Faerie, and reached out to find who was attacking them.

Incredibly, there only seemed to be three humans nearby! The prey, of course, somehow up above of the ridge, and a third one that he hadn’t accounted for, but it didn’t have the stink of a mage surrounding it so he almost dismissed it until he heard the sudden report of a mundane weapon and Isain toppled over. He reeled in shock before realizing it had to be cold iron!

“Illisiwithraisal!” He shouted at his saporling captain, who had stopped and dug its roots into the ground. “Go report to the monarchs!”

Illisiwithraisal groaned in acknowledgement, moving off more quickly than anyone might have thought likely. Saporlings had amazing speed across forested areas, borrowing from the trees already there. All he had to do was hold out until the message went through. Yet before the captain had gone far, a massive boulder smashed out of nowhere and crushed him to the ground, both then vanishing into blackness.

Then Anandell knew fear.

***

“Shit, shit, shit,” Callum swore under his breath. The ambush had started well enough, with the pixies being surprisingly easy to sweep up with tiny little portals that joined to the lesser cave below. There were seventeen of them, and he’d done them in three batches, so it had taken about five seconds. None of the larger forces had even noticed, at least at first.

The reason he used portals was that a teleport just didn’t work. He’d tried it with the first pixie, but the framework had just slid off the fae’s own vis. He wasn’t sure it was right to call it vis exactly, but it was close enough, and while they didn’t have mage bubbles they did have defenses of their own. So he’d switched to portals, because once they were made the interior didn’t have any magic to disturb. Sweeping a portal over them worked just fine.

He’d tried to take the riders next, on the idea that if he removed the leadership the others would be easier to deal with. That had not gone as well as he had hoped, and not because they’d had forewarning, but because he hadn’t anticipated the sheer reflexes of the fae. Sticking to six portals at a time, since that was something he was comfortable with, he’d targeted the ones with the fanciest decorations.

Half of them had managed to jump out of the portals he’d put beneath their creepy horse-things before he could close them. One of the others had sort of done so, hanging on to the ground outside the portal as he’d dismissed it. Which had demonstrated what would happen when the portal collapsed on someone or something with vis, if nothing else. Instead of tearing the fae apart, it had bounced off the vis and sort of squirted along the path of least resistance, the portal rolling up along the fae’s body.

That had worked for him, since it had ended with the fae in question in the cave below, but it did give him another thing to be careful of. It also made him feel less stupid about never thinking to try and kill people directly with portals, even if he’d always been concerned about making sure there was no trace of space magic.

He only barely noticed it when one guy aimed a bow in his direction, and even though it was just an arrow he hurriedly teleported out of the way. Thank heavens he took the weapon seriously, because the thing had hit like an artillery round. If he’d stayed crouched behind his cover he’d be nothing more than a wet smear.

There was plenty of other fae magic going on, but Callum had no idea what any of it was. It just massively distorted the local mana, rushing here and there without any of the structure he associated with magic. If mages built houses with walls and ceilings for their spells, the fae version was all streams and waterfalls, not something that anyone could build a stable structure from.

It was a little bit like a ward, actually, and made threading vis inside rather difficult. He felt like he was splitting his attention far too many ways, but when all the shifters surged over toward him he swept his portals forward and dropped them at the top of the larger cave, letting them tumble downward. They were actually easy to deal with; what worried him was the guy who had an antimaterial gun for a bow.

Callum opened a tiny portal and shot him in the head with an ironite bullet.

That had worked surprisingly well, the bane ammunition cutting through all the magic rigmarole and dropping him like a puppet with its strings cut. That was fantastic, but it apparently inspired some kind of fear because one of the treefolk bolted. It was surprisingly quick, and frankly they were the ones that Callum was most worried about, because they were large and rooted into the ground, so the portal trick wouldn’t work as well.

He cast about for anything he could use, and found a boulder a few hundred yards distant. Since he didn’t have the concentration to spare to try and teleport it up then catch it as it fell, he just opened a portal above it and applied a very strong gravity field straight up. That took way more out of him than he would have liked but the boulder moved much faster than he had anticipated, crushing the treefolk and giving him time to portal it back down to the caves.

Callum took a moment to breathe, then started swearing again as other treefolk scattered while the fae riders drew together. He threw caution to the wind and made a big portal, sweeping it down over the clustered riders, the other side inverted so gravity pulled them through. One of them somehow remained on his feet, clinging to the ground, so Callum shot him in the head.

Then he had to teleport away again because he sensed a surge of some kind of magic headed his way from the treefolk, and a massive lashing thornbush appeared where he had been. Which would have been an even less pleasant way to go than smeared by some kind of insane explosive arrow.

“Where’d I put that boulder,” he muttered to himself, feeling that his tank was starting to run dry, though at least he’d successfully stashed all the riders in his makeshift oubliette. The problem with the fleeing treefolk was that he wanted no witnesses, and they moved quick. He popped himself over next to the boulder so he could move it alongside himself as he went after each the trees in turn.

The first he managed to catch up to before it went too far, and he dropped the chunk of rock on it from above. That wasn’t lethal enough to let him teleport it directly, or vis took time to drain out after death, so either way he had to use portals to bring the corpse back in stages. That was when magic surged through the ground, down at the edge of his perceptions where he’d dumped everyone, as one of the fae did something.

He’d forgotten that some fae had earth magic, too.

Callum opened another portal to introduce the fae to bane ammunition, and the thing actually was fast enough to jump aside. For a moment Callum was stunned that he’d missed, considering that he was aiming by way of point-blank portal. That was an insane reaction time. It also showed that Callum was being sloppy, though he felt he had an excuse since he was trying to do so many things at once.

He fired once more, missed again, and then got it the third time, while it was still recovering from the dodge. Then he doubletapped it, for good measure, because he didn’t trust that one bullet was enough. He was rapidly running out of ammunition, so he had to hope that there weren’t more earth-power fae to deal with.

Besides, he had treefolk to catch. He had to pop himself in a widening spiral to find them, given how weirdly fast they could move, and if it weren’t for how their vis stood out in his perceptions he probably wouldn’t have been able to locate them. With that speed he didn’t bother following up after he smashed them with the boulder, instead moving right after. Every second meant they were getting further away and harder to find.

The first few were easy enough to find, and they didn’t have any defenses against his boulder of death, so he could deal with them easily enough. By the time he got to the last one, though, he was a little bit panicked since he simply couldn’t find it. It wasn’t until he’d gone a long way down the valley that he finally found it, apparently merging with one native tree and emerging from another one nearby, before leaping across to the next and merging again.

He didn’t understand what was going on at all, but he didn’t have to, and caught the thing in a transition. With the last one down, he jumped back to the cavern just to make sure that there wasn’t someone else trying to break out. Only to find out that he’d vastly overestimated the air reserves of the caverns or, more likely, that a thousand feet down there wasn’t good air to begin with.

Callum felt sick as he felt so many bodies slumped down on the floor, with some of the riders still clawing at their throats before they dropped, but the presence of the pair that he had saved soothed his conscience somewhat. The fae and shifters had chosen to become human predators, and that was something that could not be tolerated. Part of him wished that GAR was actually trustworthy and would take care of that kind of depredation, but that wasn’t the world that they lived in.

Despite being bone-tired, he forced himself to go back and collect the remnants of the treefolk and dispose of them as well. He scoured the area for any stray vis, both his or any fae bits, and used some spare camp cookware to hold his cleanup enchant to disperse his trail, at least. A fork half-buried under leaves probably wouldn’t really draw much attention.

There wasn’t much he could do about the obvious damage that had been done, but at least there was no sign of what had once been a Wild Hunt. Or a pretension at it, anyway. Once he was satisfied he’d done the best he could, he lay back, aching all over, and tried to figure out how he was going to get the couple he’d rescued home.

Chapter 3 – Destinations

In the end he ended up opening portals end-to-end to get the couple back to the campsite.

Not only did he not want to hang around in case he’d missed something, but the couple had already seen magic. He’d even teleported them, so if they were inclined to spill the whole story it’d be obvious to whoever was in charge that a spatial mage was involved. Given that, there wasn’t any extra harm in using magic to get them back to a place they could rest a little earlier.

“I advise you not to talk of this to anyone, ever,” Callum cautioned them through his portal-phone. It would have been compounding foolishness to meet them in person. Hopefully they would think he was also some kind of fae. “I can’t stop you, but if you do that, I can’t protect you, either. Not a second time.”

“We understand,” the man said. Callum hadn’t introduced himself nor had he asked for their names. The best thing he could do for them was bring them back to civilization and ensure they pretended it had all never happened. He was pretty sure they were never going to hike there again, that was certain.

“Do we owe you anything, for…?” He added uncertainly.

“No,” Callum said curtly. “It’s safest for everyone if we forget all this happened.” He wasn’t entirely speaking to them, either. While he had committed great and terrible violence upon a number of people, it wasn’t something he enjoyed or really took that much satisfaction from. The sensation of watching the fae suffocate still haunted him, no matter how deserved it was.

Callum’s sense of direction, something he assumed was related to his spatially-enhanced ability to grasp relations and dimensions, meant that it didn’t take them all that long to get back. It was a further drain on his already-depleted vis reserves, but so long as he only teleported himself and kept the portals merely person-sized, it was manageable.

“The campsite is just ahead,” he told them. “Good luck.” With that he teleported himself back to his tent, flopping down and suppressing a groan. He really, really wanted to go back to sleep, but he even more wanted to be away from scene of a crime as quickly as possible.

He forced himself to finish packing his bedding, crawl out of the tent, and fold it up. By then the couple had made it to the shop at the middle of the campsite and were on the phone. Hopefully they were calling someone to come pick them up, because he really couldn’t do anything else to help them.

With one last look around he headed off onto the trails, popping away from the mountain the moment he was out of sight. He’d have to take a good couple days off after making his escape, because he was already feeling the all-over fatigue that came of overstraining his vis, but he really wanted to get far away. It was a shame he didn’t have any reasonable way to gravitykinesis himself about, but at the same time, he wasn’t sure he could manage something that difficult at the moment.

Once he got out to a highway, he started walking, taking out one of his burner phones. Since he was limited to one big backpack, he didn’t have too many burners available, both for space reasons and because he couldn’t just spend the money for them all the time. This kind of demanded it, though.

“Hey, big man!” Lucy’s voice came, cheerful as always, which did lift Callum’s mood a little. Not much, because he was still a bundle of nerves and nausea, but it helped.

“Hey, Lucy,” he said, and his voice must have carried something.

“What’s wrong?” She asked, dropping the playful tone.

“I ran into some issues. Can you put me in contact with Chester? You can join in too, I suppose, I’ve got something important that it’d be dumb to keep from you.”

“Yeah, can do,” Lucy said seriously. “Hang on.” There was a silence as Callum hiked down the road. He was hoping to hitch a ride in eventually, but he had some questions to ask first. After a few minutes there were assorted clicking noises from his phone, and Chester’s deep burr came on.

“Chester here.”

“It’s me,” Callum said. He wasn’t sure if his name had gotten to Alpha Chester or not, though he wouldn’t have been surprised. That didn’t mean he was going to say his name over an open call. “I’m out near the Creede fae enclave, and I ran across a group of fae and shifters hunting humans.”

“I see,” Chester said, but that was all.

“And you’re okay with that?” Callum said, maybe sharper than he intended, his nerves still on edge.

“You do not get to speak to me that way,” Chester said coldly, and Callum could feel Chester’s power from the other end of the phone. It wasn’t magic, it was just the sheer authority of someone used to wielding it, and it shocked him out of his dark introspection.

“Right, sorry,” Callum apologized. He didn’t respect Chester’s authority as such, but he had been rude without cause. “Given the shifters, I had to wonder if it was something you condoned.”

“I had heard of that kind of thing,” Chester admitted after a moment of silence. “Believe me, none of my pack would be allowed to indulge in such idiocy. I don’t think King Ravaeb would either, but the Creede area is out of either of our jurisdictions.”

Callum grunted. He wasn’t really happy with that denial of responsibility, but it wasn’t like Chester could be responsible for the whole wide world. If anything, it was probably for the best that Chester wasn’t involved. The man was one of the few supernaturals outside of Winut who seemed a reasonable and responsible guy.

“So what would happen if such a group simply vanished?” He could have been more direct, but he was feeling a little twitchy and defaulted to deniability.

“The entire hunt? Describe who was involved.”

“Well, I don’t know what the official names are, but I’ll do my best. Seventeen pixies, nine shifters. Five treefolk, and nine elf types? Riding fae horse things, with claws and teeth.”

“You need to leave right away,” Chester told him bluntly. “Those are fae nobles. The local monarch will know if they’ve been killed, no matter how well you covered your tracks, and you might end up with a fae king or queen looking over the area themselves. If they can’t find anything, they’ll bring in others. I don’t care how well you hid things, fae magic is likely to turn it up eventually.”

“Oh,” Callum said. “Is anyone else in danger? There are other people nearby, too.”

“I doubt it,” Chester said. “They’re going to be after you.”

“I see.” Callum considered it. He was already on the run from GAR, so he didn’t see how having a bunch of fae out for his blood would be any worse. Then again, more people was more people and the fae might have resources that GAR lacked. He understood that fae magic worked oddly and could do stuff that human magic could not.

“I have an offer,” Chester said abruptly. “You come work for me, I’ll keep those types off your back. I’ve got experience protecting people from the rest of the supernatural word.”

Callum had to stomp on a rude reply. Not that he thought Chester was trying to trap him, but Callum had already seen what happened when he trusted someone enough to be a physical point of contact. The best Chester could do would be to stash him in a safehouse where he didn’t go out, and Callum was capable of that much himself.

There were a lot of things that having a backer could get him, but he’d be beholden to what Chester wanted done, which was something he was not willing to do. The entire reason he’d struck off on his own and was willing to flaunt GAR was to keep from being put under someone’s thumb. Being shackled for his own good was not much better.

“No,” he said. “I appreciate it, but no. I’ll just make myself scarce for a bit.”

“Hard to make yourself scarce from fae lords,” Chester said dryly.

“That makes your offer kind of silly,” Callum replied. “Where would you put me? The Deep Wilds?” There was a moment of silence from the other end and Callum realized it wasn’t really a terrible idea. He wasn’t sure if other supernaturals could even enter any portal world not their own.

“I do not advise you go there on your own,” Chester warned him, as if reading his mind. “Not only are both sides controlled by GAR, it’s very dangerous in the wilds for anyone who is not a shifter.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t. But thank you for the information. And, I’m glad you weren’t involved.”

“What are you going to do?” Chester asked.

“Goodbye, Chester,” Callum said, and hung up. He frowned at the phone for a little bit, mulling over whether he was being too hasty. Or at least, ungrateful, since Chester had actually been trying to help, rather than being controlling or obtuse. Unfortunately, it was better if he didn’t know what Callum was up to.

His phone ringing startled him so much he nearly dropped it, because he only ever used it to call out, and usually powered it down when not in use. He simply hadn’t gotten around to turning it off due to his navel-gazing. It was pretty obvious who the caller was, though, without even looking at the number.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey, big man. You okay? You seem kind of, ah, on edge.”

“I am,” he admitted, sticking out his thumb as the sound of a car came from behind. It passed by him without slowing.

“If you don’t mind my asking, why’d you go and rile up the fae?”

“They were hunting people. People, Lucy. That can’t be allowed to happen,” Callum said, voice coming out harder than he told it to. “I couldn’t live with myself if I let it happen.”

“That’s,” Lucy said, and he couldn’t exactly tell what emotion was in her voice. “That’s a lot to shoulder, big man.” Whatever she was feeling, she didn’t try to dissuade him. Or encourage him.

“I know,” he said. “So I’m going to have to make some preparations. I’ll talk to you later, Lucy.”

“Alright, big man,” she said, pausing a moment. “Stay safe,” she told him, just before he hung up once again. This time he did turn off the phone, sticking it in his pocket and holding out his thumb for the next car coming along the road.

Portal World 2, the shifter’s Deep Wilds, was probably off-limits. So was Portal World 1, Faerie, for obvious reasons. Portal World 6 had him deeply suspicious, and he was not confident enough to brave something that was probably above top secret. But he needed to get enchanting materials and the other Portal Worlds should have some. He just needed to decide exactly where to go.

***

Alpha Chester looked grimly at his phone. He wasn’t used to being dismissed so suddenly, especially by other supernaturals. Even mundanes gave him the proper respect. But that wasn’t really what was bothering him.

“What the hell is he thinking, Lucy?”

“I can’t tell you much of anything, boss man,” Lucy replied, still on the line. “Not that I know myself. He hasn’t said much since the, uh, incident.”

“I’m somewhat worried,” Chester said frankly. “He seems to be getting more unstable.”

In truth Chester had not expected that the man would ever be caught. That he was, and by happenstance, was actually something not well known. But Alpha Chester had enough pull and connections that he’d gotten the identity of Callum Wells and the fact that Callum had somehow vanished from BSE custody.

Mister Wells presented a very strange puzzle. He’d had some of his other contacts dig into the man’s public records, but they’d presented the same thing. Up until the previous year he was fully documented, with school and college records, credit cards, car loans, tax returns. But there were holes.

His parents didn’t match at all. They were too old, and yet the archival photos next to Callum’s made it absolutely clear they were related. They’d died of old age, which had been actually verified by GAR, so they weren’t mages, but only mages would have a son that late in life. Not to mention, there were no indications of what mage family the Wells might be related to. He had to be related to someone, since mundane families hadn’t been allowed near the portals for hundreds of years.

Then, his records with GAR. No mage tattoo, an absolutely bizarre test which was actually redacted from normal access and had required him pulling a few strings to get, and vanishing in the night. It was hard to square his sedate history with the nonsensical magical background and an absolutely terrifying killer that felt confident in taking out fae nobility. Or, alternately, was able to but ignorant of what that meant.

“Yeah, he seemed to be doing okay after he broke out, but he’s definitely a bit shaken right now. He might be going a little crazy out by himself, but I hope not,” Lucy said.

“Someone like that going crazy is not something anyone can afford,” Chester pointed out. “It’s a shame he didn’t take my offer. I really think he needs a safe place to bunker down for a while.”

“You don’t think he’s part of some big renegade group, then?” Lucy asked him idly.

“No. I wish I knew why they think that, but I’m almost certain he’s by himself. He doesn’t seem the type to take orders, anyway.”

“You gave him an offer,” Lucy said.

“I had to make some kind of effort.” Chester sighed. “I wish I knew what he wanted. It’s hard to even articulate a deal when all I know is that he’s capable of incredible violence, and is extremely slippery. I know he claims he’s not looking to be a mercenary but it seems he’s really good at it.”

“You know what,” Lucy said, “I’ll talk to him. If there’s anything I can tell you in good conscience, I will.”

***

Callum was headed overseas. Specifically, to Europe, where a good half of the portal worlds were located. Keeping Chester’s warning in mind, he decided he didn’t have any time to spare. He’d move first and dicker over details on the way.

He put his mouth on autopilot as someone picked him up, someone who was willing to bring him into nearest town, being polite while he considered how he was going to do it. The problem with air travel was that it wasn’t like hitchhiking. Deadheading without an ID was only really possible for small private planes, not big international jets. There were probably private jets making the trip, but he didn’t know anyone with one. Aside from Chester, maybe, and he’d already decided against putting himself in Chester’s care.

Callum would have to stow away, and spent some time dwelling on the logistics. He could probably fit in the baggage section easily enough, but that was unpressurized and unheated. Trying to figure out the best way to deal with that, up to and including maybe opening and maintaining a tiny portal into the cabin, took up most of his trip into town until he realized he was being stupid. If he had the time to rig together some sort of airtight suit or insulated tent or whatever, he had the time to remake his glamour focus.

With a glamour to make him invisible or at least ignorable, all the ridiculous security requirements that were heaped onto passengers would only help him. There’d be fewer people, more places to sit that nobody would have claimed, and nobody would think that someone who was already on the plane had gotten there in any way but through security.

Having to actually steal a place rather than paying for one properly did rankle, but there was no way he could do it the normal way. At least, not in time. If he weren’t worrying about powerful fae on his trail he’d probably wait to get a proper passport ID or something, maybe even take a boat rather than a plane. Admittedly, he had paid for a ticket and never used it before, so maybe he could view this as balancing the scales, but that was a slippery slope. Justifying things just made them easier every time, so he had to make sure this was the last time.

The closest international airport was in Denver, which was quite a ways away, so he just had his ride drop him in the nearest town and he went around getting things together as quickly as he could. The backpack was exchanged for a giant rolling luggage duffel with much more capacity. He kept the camping equipment, since he didn’t think there’d be any friendly place to stay inside any of the portal worlds, and added new clothes, finishing with his electronics, money, guns and ammunition. One nice thing about not flying legally was that he didn’t have to worry about his baggage getting stolen or held up. Best of all, he could actually carry things that would normally be impossible to bring on a plane.

The long hair got cut, the moustache removed, and the beard trimmed into a goatee. He stopped to get a bunch of brass and then called a taxi service to take him to Denver. Or at least partway there; over two hundred miles was a long drive, after all. All that took less than an hour, which Callum mostly spent with his senses fully extended and looking for anything suspicious.

It was only twenty minutes after he’d left the town behind that Callum relaxed at all, taking out his laptop and one of the brass plates to try and reproduce the glamour enchantment. Thankfully, while he was pretty tapped out in terms of vis, enchanting didn’t need much in the way of capacity. Not that he was particularly good at the process to begin with, but the car bumping around was more of an issue than his low battery.

Even cruising along on the highway, Callum felt it was way too slow. Partly because he could go faster, at least when he hadn’t run himself out of vis, and partly because he was painfully aware of the GAR teleport network. If he could have used it, getting to London or Paris would probably be less than an hour’s trip, and that mostly to wherever the nearest teleport was.

The up side of that network was that it was extremely unlikely there were many supernaturals, or at least mages, at the airports. If he could use the teleporters, he sure wouldn’t fly. At least not on a plane. Being able to soar around on the basis of his own magic was pretty appealing, though. Eventually he’d fix the problems with his gravitykinesis and be able to do it himself.

He changed taxis a couple times on the way to the airport, and went through four brass plates until he finally got a working glamour enchantment. Even with a reference, even having done it before, the process was incredibly tedious and involved. A failure to keep up his practice over the past few months certainly didn’t help, either.

Callum paid the taxi driver when he was dropped off at the parking lot of the airport, and took ahold of his glamour focus as he walked toward the entrance. Sweeping his perceptions over the place, he could see there actually were wards up in addition to the mundane security. They weren’t everywhere, and he had no idea what they were tied to, but it seemed at least some areas were protected. There was one faint one across the entrance back of the security checkpoint, which would catch anyone who arrived, and a stronger one at the entrance to a private area deeper in the airport.

That was a little bit curious, but it might well be something like what he was thinking earlier, a place for someone like Chester to get on a private plane. He surely didn’t run everything through GAR, even if the teleporters were incredibly handy. No matter who it belonged to, though, he didn’t need to mess with it.

Instead he ducked into a bathroom and activated the glamour focus. At some point someone might realize he never left the building again, but he was pretty sure people weren’t watching that closely. He threaded through the weave of the ward and popped himself to the other side of security, making sure to appear in a secluded area even with the glamour active.

From there he parked himself at a nearby table and referenced flight numbers and destinations. While it was more important to get going as fast as possible as reach a specific destination, his chosen portal world had its entrance near Matterhorn, so he’d prefer to be closer than further away. Actually looking at the numbers, he was astounded by just how many aircraft were actually going overseas on that day alone, so it wasn’t hard to find one. It wasn’t direct, but at least the layover was short.

He drifted off toward the departure gate, waiting for the plane and keeping his senses extended. It still felt weird to be around so many people, especially since he couldn’t sense any supernaturals. Though in the end, supernaturals were apparently less than a tenth of a percent of the population, and spreading to the portal worlds cut down their presence further.

When he found the appropriate plane, the numbers on the side matching the flight records he’d found, he popped himself aboard back in the stewardess area. There he wedged himself out of the way with the glamour tight around him. He really wished he could hurry the plane up, but all he could do was wait. Eventually, though, it went through the slogging process of boarding and the interminable wait at the runway.

The entire time he’d been waiting for some supernatural to appear on the edge of his perceptions, but nobody did. Only when they were in the air did he relax. It’d be a few hours until they touched down, and he didn’t think anyone would be able to catch an airplane traveling at speed. Finding several empty seats near the back of the plane, he teleported there and settled in for a nap. He really needed one.

***

King Jissarrell of the Moiral Enclave scowled as he walked deliberately through the valley. Lingering remnants of a fight were everywhere, the mana disturbed with the aftereffects of protective spells and treestepping. Yet for all the evidence of a terrible battle there were no bodies, no pieces of bodies, and not even any blood.

He had no great love for any of the noble fae that had met their ends, useless chattering hangers-on that they were, but he did have an obligation to them and their families. The crunch of leaves and grass underfoot was interrupted as his boot kicked a steel fork, and his hand clenched briefly as he turned the offending item into a flitting butterfly in a fit of pique. The useless mundanes and their slovenly habit of leaving detritus everywhere offended him, but there was little he could do about it at the moment.

It didn’t take much of an eye to see the course of the fight. Trampled grass, disturbed stone, the damage to the ridge. Branches broken from saporlings, hair from shifters, even traces of pixie dust here and there. Anyone with eyes could trace the battle, just as anyone with eyes could see there was no record of who they were fighting.

“Remember,” Jissarrell said quietly, and the earth shuddered as it obeyed. The ghostly forms of Anandell and his hunt sprang into being, laughing and chattering away as they followed their shifter guides. Jissarrell observed silently, pacing alongside the cabylls as the hunt found the point where their quarry had turned. They rode forward with only a little caution, not noticing when the pixies all disappeared in the space of a few breaths.

Jissarrel froze the memory with an effort of will, studying the black disks that swallowed the pixies. It wasn’t clear exactly what magic it was, but it certainly wasn’t fae. He would have felt that. Perhaps the human magic, but their clumsy fumblings were usually smeared across the landscape, and they announced themselves with beacons wrought of their own power. There was none of that here.

He let time flow onward, and watched as those same black disks pulled shifters and cabylls underground, though he could sense no disturbance in the ground at all. One of the nobles shot at something on a far ridge, which he would get to in time, and was dropped in turn.

Time once again froze as he inspected the distortion made by cold iron. Its very presence disrupted the magic that reconstructed the scene, but it implied that the black disks could be used to conjure the stuff. Though after seeing certain nobles only partly swallowed by them, and emerging none the worse for the wear, perhaps it was better to think of them as holes.

He turned widdershins and appeared on the ridge above. There was nothing there where the damage from the arrow had been wrought, so he had to turn back time to find the target. It was a scruffy human, barely more than an ape, with overgrown beard and hair and tatty clothing, crouching behind the rock and his right hand fuzzed with the presence of cold iron. When the bow was drawn, he vanished.

Jissarrel raised his eyebrows. That was unusual. There was no bright beacon-smear of power emanating from the man so he didn’t seem to be a mage, but that was clearly the work of magic. He strolled to the point where, later, a saporoling had attacked something, and found the man there instead, still sheltering, but apparently doing nothing else.

The scruffy man vanished once again, just before ghostly vines climbed out from the rocks. Jissarrel surveyed the area, but the only other humans he saw were the prey. He watched them, and saw them eventually vanish through the same holes that had taken his subjects.

That was somewhat interesting; perhaps the pair were important to someone, despite being obviously mundane humans. He would have some of his servants track them down and see who they were connected to. Whatever organization was responsible for this would have be made example of.

In the meantime, he would find the man with the cold iron. That one was involved, personally, and Jissarrel wanted to question him, personally. He would be sure to teach everyone that he would not stand for anyone interfering with his subjects in any way.

Jissarrel returned to the ghostly memory of the scruffy man, scowling down at the hazy outline. Then he reached down, fingers plunging through the surface as he gripped the beating heart within the memory, and tore it out. The outline of the man collapsed as Jissarel held the essence in his hand, an echo of the life it represented.

Good. The memory was fresh enough, and Faerie’s touch close enough, that it had worked.

He wove a cord out of sunlight and strung the heart on it, letting it float behind him as he turned to the nearest tree. Circling it thrice, he was back in the heart of his enclave, the light and airy palace glowing above him. Jissarrel brushed past the bowing and scraping attendants as he crossed to the stables, eyeing his beasts.

“Saddle the windmare,” he commanded. “I may have to cover a great deal of ground.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” the sprightling groom said, bowing and withdrawing to do just that. A windmare could cover a hundred miles in an hour, but the mundanes’ infernal contraptions could go almost that fast and the man already had several hours of lead time.

Jissarrel swung onto the windmare the moment she was saddled, wheeling her around in the direction the heart showed and letting her have her head. They were a stiff breeze racing along the ground, blowing through the nearby town and snatching hats from heads as they circled before heading off in a new direction. He followed the heart as they raced along the mundane roadway, leaving a path of frost behind them.

The trail led a surprisingly long distance before it reached its end. Or, not an end, but an annoyance that made Jissarrel snarl. It was one of those damnable mundane airports, where they unnaturally hurled themselves through the air faster and higher than birds. The heart still beat, and he could almost scent the trail going up into the air, but it would be a further journey than he had planned.

He was going to have to resort to something other than a windmare.

***

Aside from a brief bout of heartburn the plane ride was fairly relaxing. He didn’t quite drift off, but came close. The jolt of landing brought him to full wakefulness, and he reached out to the airport itself to get himself off the plane. Like Denver, it had some warding around it but nothing like what he saw around GAR offices. Unlike Denver, O’Hare seemed to have a few shifters hanging around, though whether they were staff or passengers he couldn’t tell.

It did mean he had to be a bit circumspect about his movement. He popped over to inside a bathroom, and fished around for a bit of something he could enchant to cover his tracks. It took him a moment of staring right at the door lock while he cast about to realize that it was metal too, and he could just add a little vortex enchant to it directly.

Once he started thinking about it, he really didn’t need to use any sort of metal scrap in most places. The modern world was practically made of the stuff, so there’d be something handy in most places. Screws, brackets, locks, a car chassis, all that was a potential bit of metal to use because it wasn’t like it had to be loose. Just nearby.

That didn’t mean he could completely ditch his scrap metal collection, because there would always be places without something appropriate, but it did mean that he’d be far better served by choosing his teleportation points with care. The vortex enchantment didn’t fix the residue left by glamours, though, so he turned his off for the moment to prevent the shifters from sniffing him out and wheeled his suitcase out into the terminal.

He had to exchange a bunch of cash for the appropriate currency at absolutely ruinous rates, but that was expected. It was rather unpleasant how fast the money went, even if the vampires had supplied him with a truly absurd amount. Of course, it would have been nice if he could bring his entire cache with him, but he was still lacking in the skills for that.

Then, while he waited, he had a surprisingly good but vastly overpriced meal and figured out his later connections. One of the shifters gave him a bit of a scare while he was eating by heading his way, but when the person came into view it was just a harried-looking manager in deep discussion with an off-duty pilot. The pair strode past the restaurant without even a glance.

The layover wasn’t very long, only an hour and a half, so the connecting flight arrived shortly thereafter. Since it was a triple-seven it was actually extraordinarily easy for him to stow on board by just popping into the crew rest compartment. It was a little room with bunks and not much else, and suited Callum’s purposes perfectly.

He couldn’t stay there the whole flight unless he was willing to keep the glamour up the whole time, and considering that he wanted to get some actual sleep that wasn’t the case. While the plane was loading, though, it was a nice place to hide out. Once they were in the air and the empty seats were obvious, he found a likely place to rest and settled in.

While he did so, he reflected on how absurdly easy it was to abuse magic. At least his magic. Someone with the ability to control fire probably wouldn’t get very far trying to bluff their way onto a plane, but his talents meant that he could bypass almost any barrier in the modern world. He could be the absolute best thief anyone had ever heard of, if he was of a mind to.

Considering he felt guilty simply deadheading on a jumbo jet, costing the airline tens of dollars at most, that was not really in the cards. He wasn’t the only one with such talents, though, and considering the attitude of the supernatural world toward the normal one, there was going to be someone who’d do that kind of thing. The protections of GAR just weren’t enough, since it seemed they mostly only stepped in when it was supernatural interests at issue.

He had no illusions that he’d be able to change any of that. All he could do was deal with people who were obviously preying on normal folks and keep himself safe. To do any of that, though, he needed tools, and that was what he hoped to get on his trip.

Chapter 4 – Portals

He’d been out of the country exactly once before, for his honeymoon with Selene. They’d gone down to the Caribbean, taking a cruise among the small islands there. His work had never really demanded much travel, since he was a consultant rather than an on-site type. Looking at the Swiss countryside, he wished he could have toured it with Selene. She would have enjoyed it just as much, if not more, but they’d never had the chance.

The cities were not as amazing as the brochures’ breathless endorsement, but Callum had never been a city person to begin with. Besides, Geneva had more than its fair share of supernaturals. There was a lot of disturbance from mages in various parts of the city, and he could spot a number of shifters and fae, so he got out of there as fast as possible.

While Callum stood out a little bit, it was mostly as an American tourist, and heaven knew there were enough of those about. Not that he stayed in the populated areas too long. It was easy to forget that he was on the run when he’d spent the past hours sleeping on a plane, but he couldn’t linger and see the sights.

Fortunately, the Matterhorn was less than one hundred miles away in a straight line. It was a considerable trip if he followed the roads, but he didn’t need to, and at this point each teleport was somewhere around a third of a mile. Several hundred teleports was a lot, but the hours of sleep on the plane had helped with his vis-induced strain and he was ready to go. So long as he didn’t have to transport other people or something like a car, he’d be fine.

The compass from his camp kit actually came in handy, as he mostly just had to set himself a direction and follow it. Since he just had a phone and not a proper GPS unit, he couldn’t use that to find his way, though for all he knew an active GPS device near the portal location would throw up flags somewhere. That was certainly a security precaution he would use, that or just blocking GPS like the military did.

Even the compass was barely necessary, though. The ambient mana was thicker in Switzerland than it had been in the US, and he could tell he was going in the right direction because it was somewhat like going upstream. He figured the thicker mana helped with his teleports, too, since he had more overall energy. Some of the early literature had mentioned that mage Houses had more mana locally, but he hadn’t really understood how much of a difference that made.

He only stopped once, to get out a heavier jacket, as he made his way into the Alps. It was probably for the best that he was taking the direct route through wilderness, since he couldn’t speak the language. Or read it. Sadly, he didn’t have any translation magic to hand and without an internet connection he didn’t have translation technology either.

It only took him half an hour to get to where he wanted to go, in the rugged terrain away from the trails that crisscrossed the mountains and glacial kettles. That was a pretty ridiculous speed, though not one he could keep up for long. It was a fairly tedious and grueling process, finding the point on the edge of his perceptions that he could transfer to, forming the teleport, and popping forward.

The flow of mana made it obvious when he was near his target. The ambient mana did move, but generally it was slow enough that it was barely noticeable, not that it seemed to exert any affect on the real world to begin with. On the slopes, though, it was cascading down, obviously originating from a point higher up in the mountains.

There was no visible infrastructure until suddenly there was. No power lines or roads or radio towers were in evidence, but after the next few teleports he could suddenly see a structure built into the mountain. It looked like a house had been merged with the mountainside, solid stone with windows indicating two stories and a door letting out onto a small porch.

When it came within range of his spatial perceptions he could tell that it had a number of wards surrounding it, as well as glamours, so it was effectively invisible to normal people. It also had a teleport, which was a little worrying, but he didn’t think it was likely that they’d anticipate someone entering that particular portal world. Indeed, the house was empty, though there was a bunch of active enchantment around.

He couldn’t help but appraise it from the point of view of his former profession, finding that despite the sturdiness of the construction it was clearly made by an amateur. The floors weren’t perfectly level, the hallways were too narrow, the rooms were almost perfect cubes. Which meant they had different ceiling heights, most of them too high or too low, and it was only the fact that it was made completely out of stone that kept the structure from being completely compromised. If he had to guess, some earth mage had worked it together rather than it being properly designed.

The back of the house opened into a cave, which to Callum’s inexpert eye looked coarse but not quite natural. He threaded his vis past the house wards and popped into the cave, blinking as his eyes adjusted. The mana flow was even faster in the narrow confines and he almost felt like he was walking against a current, though it was all in his head. If he pulled back his perceptions and waved his arm around, he couldn’t feel anything at all.

The portal itself came into sight and perception at about the same time, as he walked down a tunnel lit with soft white from crystals overhead. Visually, it looked no different from any of his portals, though somewhat wider. It was just a hole, a doorway to somewhere else, though one tall and wide enough to drive a big rig through. To his perceptions, it was far more complex.

His portals were basically just a ring made out of vis, tearing open a hole between the two ends. There was some structure there, but nothing fancy. The magic holding open the entrance to the portal world, by contrast, was fantastically complicated, with intricate loops and swirls and branching fractal patterns. There were different sizes of magical threads, even, with different densities of unformed vis between them, and even that was made more complex by the mana rushing through the portal.

He wanted to stay and study it, his brain tickling with ideas, but he had to remind himself that he was here to get away from any possible fae pursuit, not to gawk. The portal would be just as visible from the other side. What was better, he was pretty sure that no fae was going to want to follow him into the dragonlands, even if they could.

The dragonlands were theoretically off-limits to GAR, which was why it only had a little outpost and not a full complex. His choice had been made by default, since he wasn’t going to go to Faerie or the Deep Wilds, and wandering around the Night Lands seemed particularly foolhardy. He couldn’t breathe underwater, and the supposedly empty portal world was in a nasty part of South America and he’d stand out there far more than Europe. Besides, that one just smacked of military-grade secrets.

Dragonblooded didn’t come through the portal often, though, so it was essentially unused. If it weren’t for the fact that humans were absolutely forbidden from going through, it’d be completely perfect. He figured it was a calculated risk; even if something was off-limits, if nobody was around to actually check he wasn’t going to get into trouble.

Without any further rumination, he popped himself right up to the portal and walked through. Given that the center was basically just open space, he probably could have teleported through instead, but he didn’t know for certain and it wasn’t like he had to be sneaky. Besides, he could see through to the other side and there was certainly nothing worth speaking of there, just bare rock and moss. It was only when he stepped through that he realized what an alien place it was.

The rock and moss was mundane enough, but the view was that of sky. The portal was set into a cliff, but one of such scope that the mind boggled. Looking out from the ledge he couldn’t see a bottom or a top, with blue sky in both directions. There was just an uninterrupted length of near vertical rock slope, dotted here and there with straggles of green.

It was enough that he took several steps back from the edge just to stop the vertigo. The space beyond the cliff was an absolutely enormous expanse of nothing, and it was completely impossible. He had known intellectually that the portal worlds were a bit weird, but that was a far cry from seeing something so staggering.

Nor was it just the visuals that were astounding. With his spatial perceptions he could tell that the fundamental nature of space itself, perhaps the underlying reality of the portal world, was different. He couldn’t articulate exactly how, and he hadn’t really ever noticed the flavor of space on Earth, but then, he’d never much thought about the color of sunlight either.

Along with the change in flavor, for lack of a better term, was an absolutely massive amount of mana. It was no wonder it was pouring from the portal on the other side. He felt energized and suppressed at the same time, unused to the amount of ambient energy.

After a moment he focused on the actual cliff face rather than the general sensation of weirdness he was getting from his surroundings. It was considerably more difficult to push his perceptions through the rock there than it was back home, and the cliff face seemed to be solid, anyway. There were just lots of protrusions or dents, one of which held the portal. There were another few places he would trust his footing within range, so he popped himself up to a little niche about two hundred feet above the portal itself.

That way he was gone if anyone poked their head through the portal, and what was better, he could still inspect the portal structure itself. It looked like it might be more difficult than he’d thought to find enchanting materials in this portal world, since there wasn’t anything approaching normal terrain nor any civilization he could use as a guide to find the raw materials. He’d do some surveying himself, but between the dimensional portal and ditching any fae tail, he definitely didn’t count it as a wasted trip.

Callum pulled out his laptop and booted it up, only belatedly realizing he was lucky that electronics worked at all. He could tell that space was different, and it might well have affected his computer, or fried it. Since it worked, he pulled up his CAD program and started transcribing the portal.

***

King Jissarrell of the Moiral Enclave growled in frustration as the heart he’d been following suddenly evaporated in a puff of mana. The spell had only a few hours left in it anyway, but it was still an affront. It had been irksome enough to track it to one of the big human cities, and then the trail had gone over the ocean and he’d had to call in a favor to travel across the waters.

The fae of the Old Country thought themselves as far above King Jissarrell as they did their own subjects, but they did respect his pursuit. Revenge was one of the most time-honored traditions, after all. There was some scoffing about him pursuing a mere human, but only some. They did know what human mages could do, after all.

He reigned in the zephraim he’d been using to follow the trail from the Black Forest. All he knew was that his target had vanished somewhere in the south of Europe. Which was more than he’d known before, but he had been so looking forward to tracking the man down and peeling his skin off his body. Now, that pleasure would have to be delayed.

There weren’t many things that could break that tracking spell, but any sufficiently powerful fae, like another king, certainly could. Even would, given sufficient inducement or simply knowledge that they’d be irritating another powerful fae without any risk. Spite was another one of those time-honored traditions.

He wheeled around in the air and headed back north, the zephraim stomping on the air, jagged antlers of lightning crackling as it made its displeasure known. He kept a firm hand on the reins, however, and steered it back to its home. Jissarrell dropped it off at the stables and proceeded further into the enclave.

The scent of proper fae magic was rich this close to Faerie, tempting him to cross back over, but he resisted. That would just put him under the control of the great faerie lords, and he was quite happy being his own monarch with his own land. The magic was weaker on Earth, and the mortals annoying, but it was better, as one wit had put it, to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

Instead, he made his way to the Door of Glass, pricking his finger and letting the blood drip onto the frame. The transparent crystal drank in the offering, red spreading up and out to cover the entire door. Once it had sucked in the appropriate amount of magic, the Door swung open, and Jissarrell stepped into the Ways.

They were few and hard-built on Earth, compared to their counterparts on Faerie, but with that came a lessening of danger. It was very little trouble at all to walk to the New World, with barely anything that would try to eat him, no matter that he was a fae king. Unfortunately the Ways didn’t reach to the Moiral Enclave yet, but he could use the human transport network to return to an area within reach of home.

He could have taken it to the Old World, or to return for that matter, but that would have involved letting the humans know where his business was. Besides, it was far better that they didn’t know about the Ways, thinking that everyone relied on their own transportation or movement overland. It kept them happy and foolish and easy to trick.

Alas, he was going to have to engage with those very same humans. With the trail broken, he’d have to resort to the unimaginatively named Guild of Arcane Regulation, who were supposed to police their own. It pained him to admit to the humans that he’d been unable to bring vengeance upon the offender himself, but he could at least take comfort that he’d be making annoyances for all the fae that lived in the Old Country.

The white-trunked trees and blood-red roses of the Ways rose on either side of him, screening out the great nothingness that was between, razorgrass bowing before the power he carried with him rather than cutting his legs to ribbons. A small stream trickled across the path, and Jissarrell stepped over it very carefully. To dare the stream would be to dare an entire ocean at once, and even a fae king would be foolhardy to try that.

Trees and roses eventually gave way to a marble and glass arch, and Jissarrell stepped out of the Ways, emerging in the heart of the White Mountains in the northeast of the New World. He was on good terms with King Guisame, and servants came to attend to him the moment he emerged, offering him freshly gathered dew and the still-beating heart of a deer on a tray of polished maple. It was good to be shown the proper respect.

He took a bite out of the heart, blood dripping down his chin, and headed through the palace of living trees. Guisame would probably be holding court, and Jissarrell wanted to remain on good terms with him so he proceeded to the gardens, certain that the servants would inform Guisame of his whereabouts. Indeed, in fairly short order King Guisame arrived, his antlers bare and dry with the season and with Queen Lorenn on his arm.

“Brother!” Jissarrell clasped forearms with Guisame and bowed over Lorenn’s offered hand.

“Brother,” Guisame returned. “Was there any success in your hunt?”

“No, brother,” Jissarrell replied. “Something drew a veil between me and my prey after I arrived in the Old Country. I will have to go to the human mages and let them know that one of their kind has broken the agreements.”

“Ah, a shame you could not find him,” Guisame said, then brightened. “At least it shall provide some way to make the humans squirm!”

“It will indeed,” Jissarrell said with satisfaction. “Perhaps even make trouble for some of those in the Old Country, if they can find who might be shielding him.”

“Ah, I look forward to that! You need not go to them, either. I can send a servant through the transport booth; might as well get some use out of the cursed thing.”

“That would be most welcome,” Jissarrell agreed. Guisame crooked a finger, and a brownie went scampering off to fulfill his king’s wishes.

“You must tell us the full story of the one who has incurred such wrath,” Lorenn said, eyes sparkling in anticipation of a gory tale.

“I would be happy to.” There wasn’t much to it, but what there was had some interesting flourishes. Besides, there was nothing a fae king liked so much as a good story.

“That is fascinating,” Guisame said once Jissarrell had finished. “I have not heard of humans doing anything like that! One wonders what dark and desperate plots they have brewing.”

“Perhaps the humans will shed light on it, loath as I am to suggest such a thing,” Jissarrell said. “For no other reason than I believe human magic is involved. They do claim to have dominion over it.”

They frittered away the time on trivialities until a pixie returned with a human in tow, showing their age as humans did, even the mages. At the very least the man showed the proper courtesies, bowing and waiting for introductions. Jissarrell forgot the name as soon as it was said, since it was hardly relevant.

“I was told you had something to report about a renegade mage?” He asked after he was given leave to speak.

“Perhaps.” Jissarrel flicked a finger, knitting an image of the scruffy man from sunbeams and an errant breeze. “I can only tell you what I saw, but I believe that the holes in space were some form of human magery.”

“Holes in space?” The man repeated in that tiresome habit they often had. He took out one of those mundane contrivances and tapped at it in a disharmonious clatter. “Your majesty, could you explain exactly what you saw?”

For a second time Jissarrell told his tale, but the human didn’t seem to appreciate it, which was rude. When it was over, the man chewed his bottom lip, glancing from his laptop contraption to Jissarrell and back again. Finally, he seemed to come to a decision.

“King Jissarrell, we believe the man you describe may be the renegade mage, Callum Wells. He is considered extremely dangerous, as he has been involved in the recent vampire massacres as well as escaping from GAR custody. Can you be any more specific about where you may have tracked him in Europe?”

That sparked Jissarrell’s interest. A random assault was one thing, but a visit by a renegade was far more interesting. Not to mention one that had already given the vampires a black eye!

“You know that is not sufficient,” he told the man. “Give me a proper story.”

***

Callum found the portal world very strange indeed. It had taken him a little bit to realize it, but there was no sun. There was light, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere in the endless sky, and didn’t vary in brightness at all. Besides which, he hadn’t seen a single cloud, and while it was chilly it wasn’t cold or windy like he would have expected a cliffside to be.

On the other hand, just because it seemed to be stark didn’t mean it was lifeless. He had seen winged shadows in the far distance, seeming to be incomprehensibly vast, hazed by atmosphere as they were, but that was only a guess with no real backing. The rustle of wings had come on occasion from somewhere nearby, and it sounded more normal sized, but he hadn’t actually seen what was making the noise.

He’d been snacking from his camp food and drinking from the water bottles he’d brought, and considering the lack of any local water he had a pretty strict limit on how long he could stay in the portal world. Admittedly, he could just pop back over to the other side and gather snow to melt, but he wanted to wait until the last possible minute for that.

That meant he needed shelter, and not just the tent. Callum was genuinely worried about something very large trying to investigate him in the middle of the night or something, and there was a particular dearth of places to hide on the exposed cliff space. Except for one bit.

The portal back to Earth wasn’t flush with the rear wall of the depression in which it was located. That was actually true on both sides of the portal, so the pocket formed a very odd, narrow room with two rock walls from two different worlds. Portals were two-way, after all, and while he hadn’t yet found a reason to use both sides at once, the fact remained that the back of a portal was just as much a window as the front. Or rather, there really wasn’t a front and a back, save for what he was working with at the time.

Even though it was probably fine, he swept the air in the hidden alcove with a portal, exchanging it for the atmosphere outside. The way his perception worked as it went through the portal was somewhat brain-twisting, since he could sense the same area relative to him from two different perspectives, but other than the magic-sense equivalent of eyestrain he adapted easily enough. He even found that he could thread his vis through the portal, so long as he didn’t get too close to the edges. If the vis strand got anywhere near the mana threads that defined the hole between realities, it got horrifically shredded.

Working with his magic on the portal world was a bit different from Earth. It was definitely easier in terms of strain, because the extra mana available meant he could do more at a time. At the same time, it was harder because it took more effort to make and hold the magical structures. He could, somewhat grudgingly, see how it was useful for mages to train on portal worlds if they were all like that.

He set up his tent and checked his phone for the time, finding that despite the brightness outside it was after nine. After the day he’d had that was good enough for him, so he wedged himself up near-ish one of the portal edges, where there would be some airflow, and tried to get some sleep. It wasn’t very comfortable, the differences in the environment nagging as his senses, but eventually he did manage to get some semblance of rest.

It wasn’t the best sleep he’d had, especially when something passed by outside that was loud enough to sound like thunder but came and went almost as quickly. Whatever it was didn’t pass close enough for his perceptions to catch it and he only thought of opening a spy-portal belatedly, after his heart had calmed down. He was glad he’d not tented out in the open, with something that big around.

Still, it was enough that he could feel his brain working again once he’d gotten up. For one thing, he was pretty sure the portal was artificial. It wasn’t wholly out of the realm of possibility that it had spontaneously formed, but there were too many flourishes for him to really believe it.

For one thing, it had mana intakes regularly spaced around the portal’s structure, taking advantage of the portal world’s excess. He could have believed one was some random manifestation of magical nonsense, but purposely load-balanced like that seemed unlikely. There was also the plain fact that it looked like a portal made out of vis, if one far more complex than he was used to, even if after however many hundreds of years it was composed completely of mana instead.

If someone had made it, that launched an entire fleet of new questions, none of which were particularly relevant to him. What was relevant was that it demonstrated a number of techniques that he could use, or at least crib from. He might even be able to cover some of the weaknesses of being self-taught.

His self-appraisal, at least compared to Gayle, was that his fine control was terrible. While that was still true, after studying the portal he had some insight into why: his threads were too small. It seemed counterintuitive that having a finer structure meant less ability to manage the details, but his little threads didn’t handle the power quite right so things kind of smeared. The containment for his vis fields wasn’t entirely static at the edges. It was something he’d only really seen after noticing the filaments in the portal that matched the size of his threads were very low energy indeed.

Not that making thicker threads helped at all, since they were just as overloaded and at that scale the subtle trembling of the outlines was even more visible, not to mention taking more vis out of him for no real benefit. He couldn’t even figure out how to begin to flex things to change the power per volume, and none of the literature had mentioned anything about vis power density. Which had probably contributed to his oversight. It was probably possible to change, considering that there were variations in the portal structure, but since the portal was the first place he’d seen that it wasn’t a common technique.

He didn’t know whether that was just some natural inclination or a peculiarity of spatial aspect or his lack of formal training, but the same thing that let him sneak vis threads through wards meant that he had a huge problem when it came to the actual structures. Fortunately the portal had answers for that, too, because the magic that made it was big and energetic and it used tubes rather than threads for the most high-powered parts of the portal structure. There was no reason he couldn’t do the same thing on a smaller scale, provided he could figure tubes out in the first place. Not a sure thing, but at least a direction.

Along with a potential solution to his control problems, there were bits of the portal that seemed to recirculate the energy so it didn’t use nearly as much to keep itself open. That might possibly help with his scaling problems, where the maximum size of any portal or teleport he could manage was about the size of a car. He’d seen energy recirculation in the glamour enchant, so he knew it was possible, but he just was not good enough to translate it from the glamour to a portal. Now that he had a working model, it was worth a shot.

Callum popped back to his original niche and set out his solar charger while he took notes by hand. At some point he’d digitize them but he wasn’t sure the solar charger would even work despite the brightness. For all he knew there weren’t any actual photons arriving and it was all some magical handwave.

While he trusted in the accuracy of his notes, they weren’t as good as studying the whole thing in motion, so he planned to stay and study the portal for as long as his supplies held out. The biggest thing he risked was that someone would be waiting on the other side, but if so he could take a gamble on his homebond enchantment, even if it was a terrible experience.

It was just too bad that there was no obvious source of enchanted materials, though he was seriously contemplating trying to chisel some rock off the cliff face. The stone didn’t quite seem as mana-infused as the stuff he’d gotten from the vampires, but it was better than brass or other non-magical materials. Plus there was an infinite amount of it. If he could actually quarry the stuff he might even be able to build a house out of enchantable stone, which had all kinds of implications.

For a while he enjoyed the light and fresh air, and simply lost himself in sketching and note-taking. He tried forming tubes like the ones the portal had and, while he didn’t get very far, he didn’t get nowhere, either. That was better advancement than he’d gotten from vis density, and the portal was obviously the work of a master, so he wasn’t worried overmuch. It wasn’t something he could expect to master first try.

Even if he was absorbed in his work, he hadn’t entirely forgotten that he was somewhere off-limits. He kept his perceptions stretched outward, and glanced at the sky in case he saw any of those giant shadows coming his way. Still, considering that he was in the middle of a bare expanse of infinite cliff he didn’t expect many visitors. He was more concerned with someone coming through the portal, but so far there had been neither hide nor hair of anything on that end.

So when something did happen, it came with no forewarning at all and took him by complete surprise. The mana shuddered and froze and his perception fuzzed painfully, forcing him to pull it in even as he tried to pop himself back by the portal. The frozen mana made it almost impossible to push his vis through, and he hadn’t gotten far when the stone to either side of his perch pulled away from the cliff and slammed together in midair.

He couldn’t help but gawk as the granite fused into a marble dais, more pieces slamming in to form distinctly Greek columns and an ornate dais. An alien crystal vine sprouted from the base of each column and wound itself up to the top in the matter of a second or two, flowering into black leaves etched with a unfamiliar script in gold. Finally with a clap of thunder, a dragonblooded appeared atop the dais, looking stern and imperious.

“Mortal!” He thundered. “You have violated the laws of—” The dragonblooded faltered and blinked at him, continuing in a much more normal voice. “Wait, Callum? Callum Wells?” For his part, Callum was just as confused.

“Mister Shahey?”

Chapter 5 – Dragonblooded

“You know, if anything I’m surprised it took this long for someone to give them a run for their money,” Shahey mused. “Five hundred years and there hasn’t been a serious threat to GAR. I’ve heard that some have tried before but didn’t get very far. Spatial, though. Kind of odd. If anything I would have bet on a force mage being the one to upset their apple carts.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m even doing that, sir,” Callum said, cautiously sipping at the odd fruity-spicy drink that Shahey had conjured. Literally conjured. The dragon had literally made it from nothing in a dizzyingly complex dance of more vis than any dozen mages could field.

It wasn’t something simple like temporarily summoning water or earth, like Callum had read mages could do. Shahey had created something with complex organic molecules inside of a decorated glass tumbler from absolutely nothing, and as far as Callum could tell it was completely real and solid. Shahey had also demonstrated that he could unmake matter, destroying the dais and pillars in flagrant violation of the laws of conservation.

He knew that each supernatural species had its own unique magics, but he hadn’t run across anything solid on what the dragons could do. The answer, it appeared, was that they could simply create and destroy matter at will. Combined with the immense amount of power Shahey demonstrated, he could disintegrate Callum at a whim.

Callum was being very polite.

“Mostly I’ve been running away from various things,” he continued. “Part of why I’m here, actually. I had to deal with some fae and I was told their king might be on my trail so I figured they wouldn’t follow me into the dragonlands.”

“More like can’t,” Shahey said. “No fae magic here.” He waved a clawed hand through the air. “You basically don’t exist to them now. Not that I want to encourage you to come here, either. It’s still forbidden. You’re just lucky it was me that came by to see who was hanging around the portal.”

“Yes, and I deeply appreciate your forbearance in the matter,” Callum said. He had silently thanked God that he’d known Shahey before becoming a mage, considering the circumstances. On the other hand, it did seem a bit suspect that it was exactly Shahey who showed up, and showed up after giving Callum plenty of time to incriminate himself. Not that he’d accuse Shahey of putting on an act. “I hope that the incident at the gym didn’t result in anything permanent.”

“Well, I had to remake an avatar,” Shahey said with a frown. On the scaled face it looked quite intimidating, though maybe Callum was just inferring that from the suppressing aura that made it impossible to forget exactly how powerful the dragonblooded was.

“Avatar, sir?” Callum asked. It wasn’t lost on him that the dragonblooded and dragons were referred to as distinctly different things. Shahey regarded Callum, looking less like a jovial gym owner and more like something old and alien and dangerous.

“This isn’t exactly a secret, but I would ask you not to speak of it too much,” Shahey said. “This is just a puppet.” He thumped his chest. “Used up the last one with that dragonfire. Which isn’t actually something we do, but I liked the lore so much I had to add it.” He smiled indulgently at the memory. “Anyway, the real me wouldn’t exactly fit through a portal, and just existing over on the other side would probably come with catastrophic consequences. So I have a few of these running around on Earth.”

When Callum had caught references to dragons, they’d just been described as powerful. He’d taken that in the same way that a tank was powerful, or a strong mage was powerful. Apparently he should have been taking it the way a god was powerful. He’d known that he was swimming around in deep waters, going to a portal world, but he hadn’t realized that they were abyssal.

“Ah,” he said faintly. “So those shadows in the distance are your people?”

“You can see those?” Shahey gave him a sharp look. Callum blinked at him and debated how to answer. So far he’d not informed anyone in the magical world of his glamour-blindness, and barring an exigent reason he’d rather keep it that way. Unless Shahey demanded answers, of course, because Callum was rather at his mercy.

“Just shadows, sir,” Callum said. “Nothing more than that.”

“Huh. That’s interesting, though it’s not like we get many mages here. I’m not sure why you can see even that much, though. Maybe it’s something you got from your father.”

“I assume you don’t mean Callum Senior?” Callum managed after a moment, struck completely sideways by the comment.

“No.” Shahey tilted his head at Callum. “Did you not know?”

“I had my suspicions,” Callum said. “Mom and dad were far too old for it to be the usual process. But I never asked for the story because it didn’t seem important. Now, it might. You knew my parents, then?”

“I know everybody in Tanner,” Shahey proclaimed. “It’s one of my project towns.”

Callum made an inquisitive noise. Shahey was more voluble than he expected a massively powerful individual to be, but at the same time Callum had already made it clear he didn’t know much about the supernatural. After seeing Shahey at the gym and as the enforcer of the dragonlands portal, he had a strong feeling that everything was an act.

“All the world’s a stage,” Shahey said. “Brilliant man. Anyway, dragons mostly just watch people. Earth isn’t our territory and we don’t want it anyway, so we’re, in a sense, tourists. We don’t interfere with local matters,” Shahey said, with a level look that made it very clear Callum couldn’t ask him for help “But we might give a nudge here or there to help one of our favorites on a purely mundane affair.”

“So you really were trying to set me up with that lady at the gym?” Callum asked, mind leaping to an absolutely irrelevant matter for some reason. At least he knew he hadn’t been imagining things; Shahey was acting. He wasn’t human and never had been, and all the expressions were put on solely for Callum’s benefit.

“I was!” Shahey laughed. “I didn’t know about your talents at the time. Maybe I should have suspected, though. Supernaturals tend to be more comfortable in each other’s company, so maybe your grandparents had a few drops of blood from somewhere. Fae or mage.”

Callum nodded, a little bit disturbed. Less at the implications for his heritage than at the concept that he was being influenced without his knowledge. Perhaps the reason he’d settled so quickly on Winut, without looking at other properties, was some subtle urging of his hindbrain he hadn’t noticed. Or he’d gone deeper into fae territory than he meant to, just because of that small nudge.

“So far as your actual parents go, really there’s not much to the story.” Shahey tapped a claw against the table, something he’d also conjured. “When Callum and Mary moved to Tanner, they had a daughter. I don’t know what went wrong with her, but she turned into a trollop pretty early on and wouldn’t clean up her behavior. They had a falling out, kicked her out, and disowned her. She vanished for a while, turned up pregnant, had you and left you with Callum and Mary.”

“…I see why they never told me themselves.” It was hard not to take it personally, that he was the bastard son of a woman of ill repute, but at the same time, that clearly hadn’t mattered in the end. He’d turned out just fine, and he owed all that to his real parents, not the biological ones. Though it did raise the question of who exactly the father was, and how much those genes were responsible for Callum’s magic, and glamour-blindness.

“You turned out well, there was no need to weigh you down with it,” Shahey agreed. “I never thought you had any particular supernatural talent myself, so it’s not surprising nobody else did. Though if they’d known, they’d have snapped you up immediately. The weirder aspects are in high demand. As it is, I’m surprised they let you slip away so easily.”

“I was careful they didn’t think much of me,” Callum told him. “It’s much easier to trick someone when they think you’re stupid.”

“Ha! I like it.” Shahey favored him with a toothy grin. “Just don’t be actually stupid, like wandering into our territory uninvited.”

“No, sir, I will not. You have my word I won’t return without an invitation,” Callum said. He meant it. Shahey had been fairly easygoing throughout the conversation, but at the same time, the mana had remained frozen as a reminder of the power the dragon held. At least on his side of the portal. He wasn’t sure if it was a threat or just a consequence of having the attention of Shahey’s real body.

“Good,” Shahey said. “Then it is time to go.”

“Do you have any advice you could offer me before I leave?” Even if Shahey, or dragons in general, wouldn’t help him or oppose him in any substantive way, he might be able to get some useful information. Politeness went a long way.

“If you’re looking for enchanting materials, you’ll want either the Night Lands or the Deep Wilds. Faerie is rather like here, and you won’t go unnoticed.” Shahey stood, waving his hand and creating a staircase down toward the portal out of thin air. “Of the two, I’d suggest the Night Lands. The Deep Wilds are more hostile, and it’s easier to get mordite anyway. You just need to root around at the bottoms of the cenotes there.”

“Surely enchanting material isn’t just limited to bane metals,” Callum said, following Shahey carefully. It was a very, very long way down.

“I suppose not, but I’ve only passing familiarity with the details.” It only made sense, since nobody but mages could make enchanted items. Or even use them, unless they were completely passive. “By the way, you should stop by Tanner again when you get the chance. Nobody there believes you’re some kind of murderous terrorist.”

“I’d love to,” Callum admitted. He still thought about the people he’d left behind on occasion, though he didn’t let himself dwell on it. It wasn’t like he could go back. “But if I did, GAR or the feds would pester them or worse.”

“That’s true,” Shahey said. “I suppose you’ll have to get far more terrifying, enough that nobody will dare to cross you.”

“That’s the dragon way?”

“It is.”

“I will keep that in mind, sir,” Callum said.

“If you want to talk to me again, stop by the gym,” Shahey said.

“Out of curiosity, why a gym? I mean, you’re a dragon, it seems a little ordinary.”

“Because it’s interesting,” Shahey said cheerfully. “I get to meet all kinds of people. I met you, for example.”

“I don’t think I was too interesting before I found out I was a mage.”

“Oh, you weren’t that bad. Admittedly, you’re much more entertaining now.”

That made Callum laugh. They stopped in front of the portal, everything that Shahey had summoned dissolving back into nothing. It was going to take a while to digest the conversation, since Shahey had given him a lot to think about along with a number of hints.

He was a little regretful Shahey hadn’t offered to help, but at the same time, he was glad. Although it wasn’t likely that dragons could exert their full power on Earth, if Shahey did make a move Callum would be beholden to the dragon’s interests, rather than his own man. Callum would far rather take the harder road and remain independent than rely on someone else’s strength to protect him.

“What about the people who attacked you? It seems like a terribly stupid idea.”

“It is,” Shahey said cheerfully. “But some people just can’t suffer wounded pride.” He rolled his eyes. “I might have to go remind someone of the foolishness of such an action. But it need not concern you.”

“Fair enough,” Callum said. “I suppose you’ll just fire-breath them like you did those trolls or whatever they were.”

“It’s kind of funny,” Shahey said musingly. “We don’t actually breathe fire, but in Earth lore dragons could, so why not? It’s a great idea, actually. Very imposing.”

“It is at that,” Callum said, wrestling his luggage around as they reached the bottom of the stairs. It was much harder to maneuver without gravitykinesis. The portal back looked just the same, its magical construction resisting the freezing effect of the dragon’s presence.

“If I may ask, did you make that portal? I’m pretty sure it’s artificial.”

“Alas, no,” Shahey chuckled. “I think we’d have more of them if we did.”

“Huh,” said Callum. That implied that it was a human mage that had made it. Somehow. He wanted to ask more, but there was a glint he didn’t like in Shahey’s eyes that reminded him the dragonblooded was only a tiny extension of a larger, vaster, and far more dangerous being. Especially when Shahey tilted his head toward the portal meaningfully, which was definitely his cue to go.

“I’ll stop by if and when I can,” Callum said instead, stepping toward the portal and pulling his luggage along behind him. “But it might not be for a while. Years, I guess. Any last thoughts before I go?”

“The strong do what they can, and the weak endure what they must,” Shahey quoted at him. “You’re taking the path of the strong. Think about it.”

“I will,” Callum promised, though he wasn’t entirely certain some quote from ancient Greece was entirely relevant. Though considering the architecture he’d used, Shahey clearly had a soft spot for the time period. He gave Shahey one last nod and stepped back through the portal.

***

“This is an official request from the Department of Arcane Investigation,” Ray Danforth said, trying to be patient.

“There’s nothing I can tell the DAI that I haven’t already told you,” Arthur Langley said mildly, but there was no give in his expression.

“There are not many people who had close contact with Mister Chase Hall.” Danforth clasped his hands together. “In turn, he is one of the few people we know has had contact with Callum Wells. We acquired information recently which suggests a new line of inquiry.”

“Oh? What might that be?” Arthur looked skeptical.

“We have confirmation that he has contacts in Europe.” Ray would have rather kept that detail private, but King Jissarrel, who’d supplied the information, had other ideas. To a fae, the idea of being involved in the story of some ghostly murderer was too good to pass up, so he’d been telling everyone who listened. It wouldn’t be long before it reached Callum himself, or whatever organization he had, so they needed to move quickly.

At least Jissarrel had been able to track the airports he used, so they had a number of feds and their image matching programs combing through footage to see if they could find a recent photo. The fae king had provided a ghostly image of his own, but that was hardly useful. Even if Callum hadn’t shaved off the mess on his face, the apparition was a hazy magical conjuration that’d be difficult to process into something the average Interpol agent could use.

“Europe is a long way away. I don’t think anyone here would know about it.”

“Perhaps not, but now that we know there’s something there, we can ask specific questions that might jog people’s memories. Whether Chase Hall mentioned anything about Europe, had an accent, talked to anyone with an accent, any of that.”

“He sounded purely American to me,” Arthur said. “Honestly he mostly kept to himself. Came here for mental health reasons, like I said last time. The only people who had much interaction with him were myself, Jessica, and Gerry.”

“Could you arrange for interviews with them? It won’t take long, I simply want to see if I can get them to recall anything.”

“Hm.” Arthur eyed Ray distrustfully, but eventually nodded. “I’ll have them come by.”

“Thank you,” Ray said, sitting back in his chair. It seemed like the Wells case was the only one he’d been working on recently. Or the Ghost case, as some still called it, since it wasn’t like escaping from BSE custody had made the name any less apt. For himself, he preferred not to romanticize someone as clearly dangerous as Callum Wells.

It took some time for the witnesses to arrive, since they all had jobs, and the results were mutually unsatisfactory. For him, nobody had any information that might hint at a link between Chase Hall and Callum Wells or Europe. He didn’t even think they were sandbagging like they had before, though at the same time nobody had yet admitted they knew anything about the hotel massacre. For them, it was just another round of annoying questions and having to take time out of their days.

When he stood up, he was not very hopeful. It seemed like it had just been a waste of a trip and a day, especially when this was mostly BSE’s case anyway. They probably wouldn’t even thank him for his trouble, and might blame him for the lack of information. He found Felicia waiting outside the office he’d appropriated for the interviews, and she reached out to grip his arm.

“We need to go,” she whispered in his ear, and he nodded, escorting her out the door. He wasn’t sure what she had for him, but it was not something for shifter ears. Ears that were far too sharp for them to speak freely.

They took the teleporter back to GAR, heading into the back to the secure areas that led to the DAI compound. The US branch adjoined the GAR headquarters, so it wasn’t necessary to go through another set of teleport pads. It wasn’t like the BSE black site, which didn’t have any other way in or out. He followed Felicia into their shared office, closing the door and waiting for whatever she obviously wanted to tell him.

“I got the story out of one of the young shifters,” Felicia said. “Clara.”

“You did?” Ray stared at her. Her siren blood meant that Felicia didn’t talk too much around others, because when she did it was generally a compulsion. That could be blatant, or it could be subtle. Often she used the former, in her capacity as an agent, but sometimes it was the latter. “Alpha Langley will have our hides. Hell, Alpha Chester will demand them, and get them!”

“It’s fine, she doesn’t know,” Felicia said, waving it off. While sometimes they had to bend the law as DAI agents, fae also had odd ideas of morals. Normally it was fine, and Ray rather liked Felicia, but sometimes she took a line that struck him oddly. “The point is, the victims did kidnap a shifter. Clara. She’s too weak to fight compulsions properly.”

“Oh?” Ray leaned forward, objections forgotten. “I mean, we can’t possibly use the information officially, but what happened?”

“She was teleported out. That’s not what she said, but she described a sudden displacement with extreme nausea. I’m not sure why the nausea, but since we already know Hall was working with Wells, that seems relevant. Also, that Hall came out of a closed room smelling like gunpowder. It’s pretty clear that Wells was playing porter for him.”

“That is some excellent corroboration,” Ray admitted. “We can’t use it officially, but I can write up a report that still gets the necessary information up the line. It’ll be easier to look for two people than one.”

“I’ll make sure Interpol has Hall’s name and information, too.” Felicia said with a sigh. “He and Wells seem to have the mundane act down pretty well so they might have more luck than we do.”

“Time for paperwork, then,” said Ray, turning to his computer. He still missed the click-clack of a proper typewriter, but computers were just so much easier to work with.

“Oh boy,” Felicia said, without enthusiasm. Ray snorted and pulled up the email client, flashing as it was for his attention. There was some of the usual inane stuff, commentary about cases neither of them were involved in, but one of them was from BSE and it caught his attention.

Baiting Callum Wells

Agent Danforth;

I need your input on a proposal for potentially entrapping Wells using known associates. Duvall is pushing hard and the Europe lead is far too vague.

Zhen.

Ray groaned. The Wells case just seemed to generate work out of thin air. He couldn’t wait for it to be over.

***

Fane Sen was in a foul mood. He had not exactly covered himself in glory when he had allowed Callum Wells to escape, but it was in the end a minor matter. Some new and incompetent mage wouldn’t make it far before GAR picked him up again. Except they hadn’t.

Then it turned out Wells was somewhat more valuable than he’d thought. Not only was Archmage Duvall absolutely furious about losing a very rare spatial mage, but somehow the man was a dangerous renegade. He hadn’t impressed Sen as anything of the sort at the time, and even now he doubted it, but he’d read the reports and certainly something had happened.

If anything, learning that Wells was some kind of spatial magic mastermind should have excused the escape, but for some reason it just made Patriarch Fane more angry. Sen was suffering under a cloud from no fault of his own, and a displeasure that had resulted in him being assigned to support the Bureau of Secret Protection that was deploying to Europe. Not to head the team, no, just to play backup, despite his demonstrated prowess with wind and fire.

He knew that the Patriarch had leaned on someone to make sure he was included. Sen wasn’t stupid; he realized that the idea was that he’d be able to redeem himself by bringing down Wells, but he thought this was all rather much for one man. Though it was true he was looking forward to seeing that bastard brought appropriately low.

“It’s all hurry up and wait,” one of the other men grunted, some agent with a completely nonsensical European name, something Polish or the like. The relations between the Chinese mage clans and their European counterparts were not as strained as the mundane ones, but neither were they particularly warm.

“Why do we have to sit here all suited up if nobody knows anything about the guy?” Another complained, though he didn’t stop sorting through his combat foci.

“Because he’s a spatial mage and he’s not going to stay in the same place for long.” Sen explained the obvious, ignoring the answering glare. “The moment we get anything I bet you that Duvall herself comes to deploy us.”

“Possibly, but it’s unlikely.” Zarin, the BSE leader with a surprisingly pronounceable name, disagreed. “Archmage Duvall is incredibly busy with the portal worlds and has better things to do than our job. Besides, she has an aversion to violence. She might make an exception for a spatial mage, but we expect to find more than just a spatial mage.”

“I don’t like how little information we have,” the first agent complained.

“Neither do I,” Zarin said. “But considering what this group’s already done we can’t sit back and wait.”

“What worries me is the reports that he’s associating with the dragonblooded,” said the man with the annoying name. “That’s not something even we should be tangling with.”

“They’re not really that impressive,” Sen said. “My Patriarch has killed several.”

“Yeah? And how has that worked out for him?”

Sen scowled. The feud wasn’t active anymore, but there had been some rather vicious fighting between the dragonblooded and the Fanes around the turn of the eighteenth century. Some of the older members of the House still didn’t like leaving the bounds of the Middle Kingdom.

“That’s just a rumor,” Zarin chided them. “The dragonblooded don’t align themselves with any factions on this side of the portal. If there’s one around, we ignore it.”

“Yes, sir,” said the annoying man. Sen sighed, and went back to checking his foci.

***

Callum wasn’t really eager to go into the vampire world, for many and obvious reasons, but it was clear he had two choices. One was to take a few risks and get the materials he needed to set up infrastructure, or hide under a rock. Even if he chose the latter, all that meant was that it’d take longer for GAR to find him and he wouldn’t be prepared when they did. In the end, it wasn’t a choice at all.

Contrary to expectations, the vampire portal world, the Night Lands, didn’t have its entrance in Transylvania. In fact, the locations of the portal worlds seemed rather disconnected from their mythological sources, as the fae portal wasn’t in Ireland, but rather the Black Forest of Germany. Considering Shahey’s mention that the legends of dragons came before the dragons themselves, Callum had suspicions that supernaturals were not as old as they liked to style themselves.

From the official history he’d found, the fae portal was far and away the oldest, since it had been around long enough for people to actually colonize it, but it was in Germany, which wasn’t generally connected to Titania and Oberon in legends. The Alps didn’t really seem like the best place for dragons, and the Ardennes, in France, didn’t scream vampire.

Those three places were, however, nicely remote areas for someone to experiment without being disturbed while still being close to civilization. Or, alternately, they were areas where a portal could be moved to that were not in the path of common travel. The limited amount of literature he had access to didn’t hint anything about their origins, but there was no reason they’d always been where they were now. After all, he could move his own portals without dismissing them.

He was fresh and recharged after spending time in the dragonlands, so he wrapped himself and his luggage in his vis and started teleporting northward. The one ID he had was only good for the states, certainly not for Europe, and he wasn’t sure how well just paying cash or hitchhiking would be taken. They were used to American tourists, certainly, but he didn’t have a passport and he wasn’t sticking to the tourist traps.

That said, it was still two hundred miles from the Matterhorn to the Ardennes, which was a fairly long haul. If he could take what Shahey said at face value then the fae shouldn’t have been able to track him after he entered the dragonlands, and the same would be true in the Night Lands, but it was a tossup as to whether they could locate him in between.

Accordingly, he traveled quickly, with his senses spread wide, ready to head off in another direction if he caught a hint of anything supernatural. Even if the area was remote and so perfect for a fae enclave, the preponderance of dragonlands mana probably kept them away. Even so, he made sure to teleport to spots screened by trees or brush, because he’d learned his lesson about snipers.

An hour or so later, he’d slowed down on his teleports as there didn’t seem to be any pursuit happening. With a little bit of breathing room, he decided that he’d be perfectly capable of fleeing from a moving train if someone did catch up to him, so he made his way to a train station and bought a ticket to Basel. He found his nationality and complete inability to speak anything other than English was not a problem, though he was warned that crossing the Swiss border was a little more involved. Not that he had to worry much about that.

The train ride gave him a little bit of time to try and ponder the new insights he’d gotten from the portal worlds, but he didn’t have the ability to actually practice anything. He’d leave smears behind him in the mana field as the train moved, and he still felt that masquerading as an ordinary person was the easiest way to hide from supernatural attention. Instead he got out his laptop, reading up on the Night Lands while the back of his head marveled at how bizarre the encounter with Shahey was.

There was no telling how old the dragonblooded was, but by his own admission, Shahey had been in Tanner throughout Callum’s entire life. It was hard to believe the dragonblooded didn’t know more about his parents or even Callum’s talents, but at the same time he wasn’t someone Callum could push for answers. Although, Shahey had been remarkably forthcoming about the nature of dragons and Callum’s parents, which made Callum wonder what exactly Shahey was trying to manipulate him into doing.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know enough to figure out what Shahey’s angle was, or if he was just messing around. The uncertainly made him even more anxious, chewing his lip as he looked out the window at the landscape passing by. Eventually he wrestled his thoughts back around to being careful in the moment, rather than in the future.

Each time the train entered a major city, he got a little twitchy because there were obviously supernaturals around, and he ended up teleporting off the train before it actually arrived at the station. There were too many mage trails to be comfortable and some obvious fae, so he decided to circle around and pick up the train on the other side whenever there was such a stop. While he’d done it before, teleporting from a moving place to a stationary one or vice versa was a bit weird, the relative positions changing constantly.

He wasn’t sure what happened to the velocity difference, but he certainly felt no deceleration. It did imply that he ought to be able to fling stuff if he had a moving teleport anchor, though the logistics for that were somewhat fraught. It was one thing to have himself and a stable piece of land to reference, it was another thing to move the framework willy-nilly. Portals might be better, and he added that to his notebook as a topic of practice.

Callum got off the train for good just before he reached Basel, leaving behind a cleanup enchantment in the screws of the seat he’d been using, and made his way northward a few score miles until he found a French train station. There he purchased another ticket, one for his real destination of the Ardennes. Something he did note as he traveled was the shifting mana as he passed by the fae portal, somewhere over in Germany. Even though he couldn’t really tell the difference between the different types, there were definite currents.

With the precautions he was taking, there were only two times when he got really alarmed. Both times he saw mage bubbles moving in his direction and he popped himself orthogonally a few times and waited to see if he was followed. Fortunately he wasn’t, but that still was an unpleasant experience.

Callum wished to himself that he could afford to be less jumpy as he finally got off near his stop. Just like when he was near the Alps, he could sense a higher flow of mana coming from somewhere out in the Ardennes. Also like the Alps, it was quite picturesque despite the chilly weather and he wished he had the time to actually enjoy it, rather than blaze through as fast as possible.

He sighed and headed inward toward where the map marker placed the portal, though with somewhat more caution than he had approached the dragon’s portal. He expected one that was actually trafficked would have more infrastructure, and indeed it didn’t take him long to find the edges of a ward. Of course, it was made easier by how quickly he could move with teleports; as far as walking went it would have been quite a trip.

Unlike the dragon’s portal, the vampire portal was a full GAR installation, which was actually more worrisome than actual vampires. He had a number of advantages, but enough people and defenses could make any kind of infiltration impossible. No matter how much he needed materials, if it was too busy he wouldn’t even dare.

Upon actual surveillance, though, it wasn’t actually that large a compound. While he was intellectually aware of how much the teleport network changed things, it was weird to see a large building off in the woods and completely disconnected from anything else. At the very least it should have been a small town, if it was a staging point for the draft and a connection to one of the major supernatural races, but it wasn’t.

The building reminded him more of a courthouse than a castle, large and squat with a single oversized story, the walls all a single piece of smooth stone. There was only a single set of windows by the door, which was a heavily reinforced number facing north. It was pretty boring to look at, really.

The outer wards were probably actually glamours, designed to hide the place from prying eyes. They didn’t have the rotating connections that he’d seen in more advanced wards, and were just a loose screen that was easy to get past. Beyond those there was some heavier warding that seemed like actual security systems.

Even if there weren’t any windows he located a tree for cover before he teleported himself through the outer wards, so he could bring the entire building inside the range of his perceptions. It took him a while to see through the weave of vis that made up the security ward, but the interior wasn’t complex either. The actual portal was in the center, inside of a room that looked fairly fancy and even included a ramp going through the center of the portal to the other side. There was a guardpost set at the door leading into and out of the room, with some complex enchantments that he couldn’t even begin to puzzle out.

That guardpost had a pair of mages, but neither of them seemed to notice Callum. In fact, they were reading and not really paying attention at all. The rest of the building was given over to facilities for the guards and a set of GAR teleporters. One of the normal ones, and one that had a far, far larger pad, presumably for cargo. It did make sense that they didn’t need more than a set of observers and access control on the Earth side of the portal, but it still felt weird.

The portal itself was not the same as the one which led to the dragonlands. In a way that was obvious; it was some other weird dimension, of course it wouldn’t be the same. But it was also a massive tangled snarl of mana rather than the coherent and structured ring of the dragonlands. At a guess, it was actually natural, or mostly natural.

There were structured portions tacked onto the snarl, possibly so it could be moved, and the weird twists and turns of the rest of it were, after a closer look, not actually random. While it was still complex, he could see some familiar patterns. The actual portal anchor structures; the bits that pulled in mana to fuel it; all the usual features were there. They just looked messy and were probably very inefficient, but he could at least believe they’d been made by natural processes.

On the other side of the portal was another, larger room, which he assumed was likewise guarded or at least controlled. That could have been a serious issue, since he absolutely needed to get through unobserved. He was confident he could bypass the wards, but less confident he could bypass actual observers.

Fortunately for him, the vampire portal was positioned very similarly to the one in the dragonlands, where there was a definite front and back. Though the area around it was artificial rather than natural, there wasn’t a wall flat against the unused side of the portal. It made sense, since the actual rim was thicker than the flat plane of the hole it made, but the upshot was that there was a few feet of empty space that he could hide in.

Before he went in, he made sure to charge up his emergency escape. It wasn’t pleasant to deal with, but if he got caught sneaking in he’d need to use it right away. Once the focus was tingling unpleasantly, he sent a thread through the gaps in the warding and popped himself behind the portal.

Chapter 6 – Night Lands

Callum stood in the dusty darkness of the portal rear for a few minutes, feeling the homebond vibrate his vis while he stretched out with his senses to make sure that nobody had noticed his entrance. The little space he was in was screened from either side and there was a lot of mana pouring through, so he hoped that it wouldn’t be obvious that he’d teleported there.

He was proven right when the mage bubbles didn’t move. That was true on either side of the portal, as both sides had an access chamber guarded by people. The difference with the Night Lands was those people were vampires.

Now that he was more familiar with things, he could tell the difference between them and a normal human solely from the vis they carried inside them and not just the change in features. Actually, Callum was a lot more worried about them than he was about the mages. It had become clear that mages didn’t generally have the senses to pick him up so long as he was being quiet and out of sight, but a vampire might well see or hear or smell him and move faster than Callum could react. He didn’t want to stay in close proximity for very long.

The building in the Night Lands actually was a castle, and like in the dragonlands the area was absolutely saturated in mana. It took more effort than he liked to get his perceptions through the thick stone walls and figure out where he was in relation to everything. Like every castle it was far larger than was strictly practical, with a truly fantastic number of rooms and broad, tall hallways. Unlike the compound on the other side, it was built with quarried blocks and practically oozed age.

It was definitely inhabited, or at least staffed, with a mix of vampires and mages and, uncomfortably, normal people. Or at least humans without the standard mage bubble. It made at least a little bit of sense, because a castle demanded menial labor and he couldn’t see mages stooping to cooking and cleaning. But in an off-Earth, vampire-filled castle, that seemed like a pretty terrible existence.

Or they might just be people like Lucy, supernatural duds employed by GAR in whatever jobs. It was a mistake to think that just because the people weren’t supernatural, they’d be on his side. He didn’t notice any marks of blatant slavery so there was at least some measure of civility. It was something to look into after he was finished, because he’d need a hell of a plan to think about dealing with an entire castle in any meaningful way.

Fortunately, castles were not exactly tall. Even if it was a magical castle, the roof overhead was well within Callum’s range and, what was better, had some nice sheltered areas he could put himself in. Selecting an alcove at the base of a turret, he popped himself to the outside.

The first thing he noticed was the moon. It was enormous and full, covering half the sky, seeming almost close enough he could touch it. Unlike the silvery illumination of Earth’s moon, the one in the Night Lands gave off a sort of weird, grey-blue glow, even if it made no sense for glow to be that color. That rendered everything outside dim and dark, somewhere past twilight but not the deep dark of a moonless night.

The moon itself wasn’t crater-scarred and barren like Earth’s moon either, instead slowly rippling as if it were made out of water. It was just as alien a sight as the endless cliff face of the dragonlands, and in many ways far more breathtaking. The utter blankness and blackness of the rest of the sky only emphasized the way the moon dominated everything.

Despite the dragonlands being in eternal day, or at least having a cycle longer than he’d been there, the Night Lands being, well, night still somehow surprised him. It was stupid, especially since the name told him all he needed to know, but actually crossing from day to night so sharply was disconcerting. He was just glad he had his spatial perceptions, because his night vision was not anywhere good enough for the Night Lands.

Not that it was particularly dark in the town. Unsurprisingly, the castle and the portal was surrounded by more buildings, though he wasn’t sure town was the quite the right word for the sprawl of civilization. There were lights along the streets and shining through house windows, a blue-white that reminded Callum of natural gas more than anything, though he suspected it was all enchantment-based. Trees and gardens shone green under spotlights

The layout was a little weird too, the building clustered together, and it took him a bit to understand that he was seeing a bunch of close estates rather than a normal town.

He’d known that mages had a significant presence in the portal worlds, but it was still odd to see. Since it seemed quite likely the night was a permanent one, he didn’t know how any person could stand to stay permanently, but the huge estates probably had more than enough light. It wouldn’t be too different from people who stayed indoors all day anyway, and there was always the teleportation network if they wanted to get somewhere on Earth.

Considering the abundant mana, he could even see why people would want to live in a portal world, though he found it far too strange for his tastes. Part of that was how, just like the dragonlands, the space itself seemed a little bit weird, a little bit off. He didn’t know how he’d articulate it, but if mages didn’t notice it, they’d probably only enjoy the benefits of the mana. At least sprawling out on this side of the portal meant they messed with the real world less, or so he hoped.

There was a lot to learn in the town, since as he focused down on some of the streetlights he could see they were far more complex light enchantments than anything he’d seen in his books. If the estates held full mages and the sort of magical technology they were used to, he could figure out a lot of useful things. But that was only if he was willing to stick around, and he really wasn’t.

He wasn’t sure if it was local day or night or if that was entirely irrelevant, but there were people moving about outside, probably vampires, and he did not want to attract any attention. If he pretended to be mundane, he wouldn’t know how to act, and if he pretended to be a mage, he didn’t have a functional tattoo or knowledge background to pass any real scrutiny.

From his vantage point he couldn’t tell exactly which direction was the shortest way to get out of the town, though he figured he was near the center, so he chose the darkest direction and went that way. Since there were mages around muddying up the local mana, he decided against making any cleanup enchantments from some of the spare metal he was carrying. In fact, he wasn’t sure it would work the same considering the far more intense mana, and he castigated himself for not experimenting back in the dragonlands.

Instead he popped himself along the path of the roads, using trees to keep out of the sight of anyone nearby and keeping far away from any pedestrians. As annoying as it was, the sickening tingle of the primed teleport was what gave him the courage to do it, though it was vanishingly unlikely anyone would really stop him. The security checks at the portal meant that they wouldn’t be on the alert for a random mage who wasn’t supposed to be there.

He followed the lit road until it left the surrounding estates and carved a path off into the darkness in a long trail of faint illumination. There he took a sharp turn to leave the trappings of civilization. While he’d noticed the difference in the spatial feel between Earth and the Night Lands almost immediately after arriving, the border between the settlement and the wilderness was even sharper. The pressure against moving his vis threads was higher even than the dragonlands and the general weirdness of the way things were put together stronger. The wilderness definitely felt unsettled.

Even if the darkness wasn’t welcoming, he wasn’t going to try and get what he needed from the town or follow the road to whatever its ultimate destination was. Whatever passed for civilization in the night lands would be too full of either mages or of vampires for his tastes. Not only were people the real danger to him, but if he wanted enchanting materials he didn’t want to compete for them.

It wasn’t to say that the Night Lands were harmless aside from the vampires. There had to be something for drafted mages to fight, after all. There was a front, somewhere out in the darkness, that held the line against the hostile denizens of the Night Lands, both intelligent and not. From what he read, not only were there hostile vampires not aligned with GAR, but also entire regions that seemed to spawn predatory horrors. Considering vampires fit that description, Callum wasn’t surprised.

The literature Lucy had provided contained lurid descriptions of possible beasts that ran the gamut from formless, gibbering masses of teeth and darkness to massive wormlike creatures the size of skyscrapers, encroaching on the safer parts of the Night Lands. Personally, Callum suspected those were things of ages past, if they’d ever existed at all, but it was the only information he had so he had to give it some respect.

However, all that was out at the front, and back closer to the portal the Night Lands were semi-tamed. Which wasn’t to say that the wilderness was completely safe. Away from the front, the main threat was apparently from something called a moon-stirge, basically a cow-sized wasp with a matching temperament. Clearly they weren’t any significant threat near the portal settlement, since there were no walls and people out in the open, but it was something he’d have to keep an eye out for once he got further into the wilderness.

What there weren’t any of were zombies, ghouls, ghosts, ghasts, or other sorts of greebles. In fact, the entire portal world had a weirdly truncated ecology. There was a type of grass, looking nearly black in the unnatural light of the moon, and here and there were gnarled trees with ghostly gray leaves, but there weren’t any insects. Nothing buzzing or humming. No bird calls, nothing but silence.

It was incredibly oppressive, and Callum found himself holding his breath at times as he headed off perpendicular to the road. He was extremely glad that he had a superb sense of direction thanks to his spatial magic, because the lights faded very quickly into the distance and he was surrounded by an endless plain of black grass broken up by the gray spots of the weird trees.

He knew he was looking for cenotes, but with the completely uniform terrain he didn’t know what the signs would be. Though he figured that any deviation would be worth investigating. Even his ability to see straight through the ground didn’t seem to help, since the soil and bedrock seemed to be just as monotonous and featureless as the surface. The only things that seemed to break the sameness of the layers were the extensive root systems the trees had.

Still, he could scan six hundred yards in every direction, so he felt he had a pretty good chance of running across something that would give him a lead. If not, he’d just go back and rethink things. For the moment he let the vis he was trickling into his focus fade, sighing in relief as the harsh jangling sensations abated. He could keep it mostly charged, and for the moment he needed all his focus to pay attention to the Night Lands.

***

Nasser Tannenhaur sniffed curiously as he passed the High Road out of Weltentor. Then he sniffed again, following a faint scent to the edge of the lanterns. It was not strong, but it was clear that someone had gone out in that direction, and if he was not mistaken, that someone was a mage. That was a very curious thing, since anything beyond the lights was fair game for whatever roamed the black plains. Or whoever.

There were other settlements, true, but not of mages, so none of them could be the destination. The only reason the mages left Weltentor and went out was to acquire pearls from the wells of moonwater that dotted the Night Lands. All the ones from the well at Weltentor were long since spoken for, and besides, clearing out the wells as they appeared nearby provided useful extra stocks of moonwater.

Such expeditions were always in groups, however, with a vampire guide to sniff out any recently manifested well. The moon had been quiescent for weeks, as well, so all the nearby wells had already been claimed and harvested. There was not a single reason he could think of for a lone mage to stray outside the light.

It wasn’t exactly his problem. He just kept an eye on Weltentor’s boundaries by order of the Master, just in case some new arrival or even a rival Master decided to make trouble. A human mage wandering off wasn’t a threat to Weltentor, but it was strange enough that he decided he’d report it. He reached up to touch the scry-com on his lapel, activating the enchantment that connected it to the operator back in Weltentor Keep.

“Acknowledged,” came the cool female voice of the operator.

“Nasser, reporting,” he said. “I have the track of a lone mage heading out along the High Road.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know, I just have a faint scent. Possibly an air mage, moving quickly? It’s too faint for someone not using travel magic.”

“Acknowledged,” the operator replied. “Wait one.”

Nasser did, drumming his fingers against the hilt of his blade. He knew that on Earth, they used bullets forged of pearls rather than blades, but the Night Lands were still civilized. He just hoped that he wasn’t supposed to go out after the lone mage. Without light, the land itself changed with the whims of the moon and could make it difficult to track anyone who didn’t have proper illumination.

“Nasser, return to base,” the operator said.

“Acknowledged,” he replied, and headed back to Weltentor Keep, breezing along at speed. It was best not to keep his superiors waiting, and besides, he’d have an opportunity to refill on moonwater. He’d tried the blood the wretches on the other side of the portal had to make do with, and was not impressed. Moonwater was better, though even blood was preferable to the ashes he had available before he came through the portal.

He entered Weltentor Keep, bowing his head to higher-ranked guards and following the hallway to the security office. There, he expected to see the Warleader, or perhaps a representatives of the humans, considering the subject of his report. What he did not expect was the black uniform of no House and the pin of the Bureau of Secret Enforcement.

Nasser stood somewhat straighter at that. He understood the deference to their mage allies, but he generally did not find them particularly impressive. The BSE men, however, were colder and harder than a Master and wielded their magic with deadly efficacy. The sight of the black uniform was enough to make Nasser even more cautious than usual.

“Grand Magus Taisen,” Warleader Van Harr introduced the man. Nasser inclined his head.

“Grand Magus,” he greeted the man.

“You said you found the track of a lone mage,” Taisen said. “Could you identify the person?”

“I do not think so,” Nasser said thoughtfully, after considering it for a moment. “The track was very faint, but it very clearly went outside the light border. It was a single scent, but I could not swear I would be able to pick it out from any other mage scents.”

“That is unfortunate,” Taisen said, in the sort of dead tone that the Master used before someone died, but fortunately Taisen did not have that kind of authority. Instead he just turned to Warleader Van Harr. “We have been pursuing a renegade mage. While it seems unlikely one slipped past the guards here, we are taking this seriously. There is no point in pursuit, not in the Night Lands, but we want to be on high alert if and when they return to cross back to Earth.”

“I will report this to the Master,” the Warleader said. “I am certain he will marshal our forces as you request.”

“Excellent.” Taisen said. “Show me to him.”

Both Nasser and Van Harr bristled at that, but the aura of power Taisen had gathered about himself demonstrated why it was not a good idea to take offense. Aside from the fact that it would raise hell with GAR and make the Master displeased. Warleader Van Harr scowled but turned to point deeper into the keep.

“This way, Grand Mage Taisen. Nasser, you are dismissed.”

Nasser saluted Taisen and hastened away, down to the canteen where he could get some moonwater. It sounded like he’d be pulling double shifts for the next few days, and he was going to need it.

***

The literature on the Night Lands was very much not sufficient. It wasn’t that there were creatures stalking him or anything, the place might as well have been a desert. The emptiness was creepy, but he wasn’t overly worried about that. The problem was that the landscape changed.

That particular shift had only happened once so far, the moon above beating like the pulse of a giant heart, and everything just rearranged itself in a mass of flickering shadows. The space and magic in his perceptions shuddered, twisted, and warped in a convulsive burst before it snapped back into place, his surroundings suddenly different. Where there had once been a grassy plain, there were rolling, scrubby hills of dark gray rock and blue moss. It seemed like everything outside him had been squeezed and reassembled without regard for what was already there.

Callum cursed to himself and started teleporting back the way he’d come. While the phenomenon was as interesting as it was horrifying, it made him fear that he’d just gotten himself lost in the portal world. The intense spatial distortions were probably how the portal had formed in the first place, which would have been fascinating if he weren’t terrified he was lost in an alien world.

It was a massive relief to see the lights gleaming exactly where his sense of direction said they should. He stood on the black grass and stared for a bit, reassuring himself the town was really there, before heaving a sigh and turning to head back out. If the change didn’t move him or the buildings, the landscape changing wasn’t a huge issue. At least, if it didn’t decide to bury him or the like. That said, he was uniquely immune to being buried, and if the settlement was still around it seemed that turning everything into a towering ocean was not to be expected.

He had wasted a lot of time backtracking, though. Callum took an angle to his original path, since he’d already established there were no cenotes that way, and teleported his way through the newly-created hills that were just as silent as the plains before. What was interesting was that they only appeared out of sight of the settlement, so perhaps there was something about magic or people that stabilized the landscape.

At least the prevalence of mana helped with the exertion of rapid-fire teleporting, though he made sure to just hike for a while after each spate. He was forced to haul his luggage along with gravitykinesis, though, since the uneven stone underfoot didn’t lend itself to the little wheels. Plus, making any kind of noise felt like a mistake, and he even found himself breathing quietly as he walked.

Eventually he started yawning, since his clock and his body agreed it was late, and the dim surroundings didn’t help. Callum really didn’t like the idea of camping out in the open, despite not having seen any trace of anything living, but he wasn’t really going to have a choice. Even though it was likely to change at any moment, Callum found as sheltered a nook as he could manage and broke out the tent.

He was glad he’d resupplied himself before coming, and could fill himself up on jerky, trail rations, and water. For some reason making a fire seemed an exceedingly bad idea, if for no other reason than it’d be a beacon in the darkness. Eventually he compromised by setting up a small hand-crank battery lantern inside a firmly zipped tent, just so he’d have something to look at other than grey-blue darkness.

While he’d have to catch some sleep, he did while away a little bit of time practicing with the new magical structures. He still had no luck dialing down his thread power, but flexing threads to make them flatter seemed at least possible. It was a bit of a road from flat threads to tubes, but he’d at least made a start.

Adjusting his normal, simple, and intuitive portals so they had recirculating structures was actually more of an issue. He’d gotten so used to making them that trying to alter them felt uncomfortable. It didn’t help that trying to add in the new structures meant that the portal never formed, or the entire mana structure collapsed. Or blew apart.

He wasn’t completely disheartened, since the trick was obviously an advanced one, but it didn’t exactly put him in the best mood. Still, he dutifully recorded his attempts in his notebook before snuffing the light and closing his eyes. In the end, he only caught fits and snatches of sleep, the overwhelming silence and heavy mana making him restless. Callum decided that once he was done with his foray he would have to find a good safehouse and just crash for a few days.

For better or for worse, there wasn’t another moon-pulse and landscape-rearrangement during what passed for night, and when his watch told him it was early morning he figured he might as well get up. Actually, he would have preferred it return to the grassy plain because the rocky hills made digging a hole for his morning ablutions rather difficult. He really wished he had foci to take care of certain biological realities.

He scrubbed his face with a moist towelette and packed up, heading onward and outward to find a cenote. Frustratingly, it seemed that he’d given up just slightly too early the night before, because in less than an hour his spatial sense found movement off to one side. He couldn’t see it with the naked eye, or even hear anything, but as soon as he focused on it he could tell it was one of the stirges.

The thing was under one of the grey trees, chewing on it with horrific mandibles. That was actually fairly ordinary, but the fact that the root system of the tree kept trying to stab the stirge was not. They hadn’t looked like anything special to his senses before, but the tree was using them as spears, albeit to not great effect. Still, he was glad he hadn’t actually gone near one of the trees. Maybe he would have been fast enough to get out of the way, maybe not.

Callum flattened himself against the ground and teleported himself in a big circle around the stirge, hoping that its presence meant there was a cenote around. He absolutely did not want to get any closer than he needed to. Wasps were bad enough; a wasp with a stinger like an icepick was pure nightmare fuel.

Before he could investigate that much the stirge finished whatever it was doing and extended its wings, which were completely silent as it flitted off. He followed at a distance, the maximum distance he could, only able to perceive it with his spatial senses. The total flight wasn’t far, though, two miles at most before the cenote he’d been looking for came in view.

It was maybe fifty feet across and almost perfectly circular, like someone had drilled a hole into the ground. It was also over two hundred feet deep, about half of that full of some kind of liquid that was even stronger in mana than the surroundings. In fact it seemed like it was the source of mana, energy oozing up out of the cenote.

He could guess right away that it normally took multiple mages to clear such a thing. First of all, there was an appropriately large nest of stirges, living in the stone walls of the well. There were too many to count, and they made the idea of getting anywhere near the well a non-starter. While Callum had plenty of tricks, he didn’t fancy his chances against a swarm of oversized wasps.

That wasn’t even accounting for what was in the waters, or whatever the cenote was actually filled with. There were fleshy pods clinging to the walls with long, spiked tentacles. Whenever one of the wasps drifted down to drink from the water surface, the nearest tentacle-pod would try and grapple it, churning up the surface of the water.

There were also smaller shapes in the water, arrowpoints of some kind of fish, and round lumpen things at the very bottom. While neither of them seemed particularly offensive to his senses, he was entirely certain that, considering every other form of life he’d seen in the Night Lands, they were quite nasty.

Even with all that, he was sure that it wasn’t too dangerous for competent mages to clear out. True, he didn’t know how magic-resistant the life might be, since it was very clearly more energized than anything on Earth, but they were still animals. Group tactics and probably some flamethrowers would account for the stirges, while the tentacle things could be taken care of with old-fashioned dynamite.

Hopefully actual mages would have better tools than those.

At the very bottom of the cenote, scattered among the lumpy things, were small spheres resting on the rock that had the weird, dense feel of the vampire seal or, to a lesser extent, the bullets and enchanting materials. It was immediately obvious that was the mordite he’d come for, but so far as he could tell there wasn’t anything overly special about it other than the amount of mana inside it.

Carefully, ever so carefully, he stretched out a thread of vis to wrap a teleport construct around the spheres. So far, he’d seen it was very possible for people to notice and react to his magic, and there was no reason that animals couldn’t do the same. This time, he didn’t even have any handy walls and portals to hide behind, but if he was slow and subtle about it, he might be able to grab the stuff without disturbing anything.

He’d half-expected it to be hard to handle the mordite, given the energy density, rather like Clara or the pixie, but there was no resistance at all when he teleported it away. The sphere, about the size of a grape, appeared in the compartment in his luggage he’d reserved for enchanting stuff. At the same time, a ripple ran through the not-water, something slightly different from the splashing and thrashing of the tentacled limpets.

That wasn’t good.

Either his magic was more noticeable than he’d liked or removing the mordite spheres was more disruptive than he’d hoped. There was a little bit of a stir from the fish and the lumps, but nothing major. Yet.

Callum took a moment to consider, then made himself a little action plan. First, he wrapped his teleport framework around some of the not-water and teleported it into one of the empty water bottles in his luggage. Even if he had no idea what it was, or what it was good for, it was magical and worth having some to fiddle around with. Then he reached out and got ready to take as many mordite spheres as he could in one go.

Eight seemed to be his limit, but that was fine. That’d still be quite a bit of raw enchanting material, at a quality far higher than anything he’d seen. It was certainly a far cry from the powdered stuff, and possibly even purer than what he’d seen in the teleportation network or the homebond. It was hard to tell with those, because they were just thin wires, which raised the question of how people with larger native vis threads enchanted them.

He made a mental note to write down that question later and yanked on the teleports. The eight spheres of mordite dropped into his luggage, and the cenote went wild. The not-water started to fizzle and bubble, the lumps at the bottom of the cenote unfolded into long, snakelike things that shot toward the surface, and the stirges exploded into the air.

Callum teleported directly away from the mess, and quickly, with an involuntary shiver. It was the first time there was actual noise in the Night Lands, a combination of hissing and buzzing, and it sounded incredibly angry. He didn’t know whether the cenote inhabitants would be able to track him down, but even if they didn’t, that might well draw other creatures or even vampires or mages. The latter would be a problem, since he had no time to clean up after himself, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

Several miles later, he stopped and waited, listening and straining his perceptions for anything that might be following him. There was silence and stillness, so far as he could tell, and he let out a long breath and sat down to take a look at his loot. He didn’t want to touch any of it, because for all he knew it was toxic, so he just got out his lantern and shone it into the luggage container briefly.

The nine mordite spheres he had looked like tiny versions of the moon overhead, slowly rippling surfaces and all. In his perceptions they were solid, so the visual effect wasn’t entirely real, but since he couldn’t see mana visually, glamours and all, it wasn’t that either. He’d need better light to study it more, and that wasn’t going to happen in the Night Lands.

For once things seemed to be going fairly well, so he zipped up the container again and started back toward the gate. Since he hadn’t been ambushed between the portals, the fae might have lost the trail by now, and if they hadn’t, hanging around in a portal world wouldn’t help. While he would have liked to think that stowing away on an intercontinental flight was enough, he wasn’t sure about that. He did know that there were limitations, else he’d have been found far earlier.

All he needed to do was get back through the gate and he could settle down to make some serious items and do some serious practice. His notebook held a number of half-coherent thoughts for foci that he could work on, and ways he could protect himself or others. He still was determined not to be a mercenary, but he could at least be more considered in his responses.

***

Bartholomew Janry’s Shift Survey was going well. They’d already found and cleared five wells in the controlled lands around Weltentor, which was near the limit for the normal appearance rate. The only issue had been the update by scry-com to be on the lookout for a lone, possibly rogue mage wandering the Night Lands, but they hadn’t seen anything like that. Even if they had, Bart’s team could have handled it.

“There’s some noise to our eight o’clock,” Garan’s voice came over the scry-com, the wind mage being their dedicated listener as well as their transportation.

“Combat ready, everyone,” Bart instructed. “Take us there, Garan.”

They readied their shields, pulling up their active combat forms. Shards of force whirled around Bart, air congealed in front of Garan, and Christopher crystallized shards of ice. Edgar formed four sets of portals, the logistical support meaning there was no chance of any of them being flanked, let alone surrounded.

Most mages didn’t actually fight with a spatial talent on their side, given how rare they were, but Shift Surveys always needed one. Not only was their absolute sense of direction necessary to keep from getting lost, especially if a Shift happened outside the bounds of an illuminated area, but they could energize a large enough portal to siphon the moonwater off to Weltentor. Bart had found that even without any offensive abilities, the flexibility of instant movement was very helpful.

A few minutes of flight brought them within range of a cenote that seemed to have already been disturbed, the stirges swarming and the moonwater thrashing with barbed limpets and the guardian kraken. He flexed his vis through the flight focus and took point, with Garan and Christopher flanking. Edgar, of course, stayed back, but his portals darted ahead.

The stirges swarmed up at them, and Bat sent his force darts arcing through them. Like most animals in the portal worlds, they had some resistance to magic, but not enough to stop the spell form of a competent mage. Their torsos exploded in a shower of gore, and Edgar caught the falling corpses in one of this portals.

They were used to fighting together, ice and force projectiles wreaking havoc on the stirge swarm while wind broke up groups or smashed the creatures together. Portals let them reposition at will, bouncing back and forth and utterly ignoring the stirge’s attempts to surround them. Not that the creatures were all that dangerous, but those harpoon stingers actually could punch through a mage’s shield, and none of them wanted to take the risk.

In a few minutes they’d eradicated the swarm, with the carcasses piled up in a gory heap, while the limpets and kraken snapped and strained madly from their places in the cenote. Edgar came closer and took the paired focus from his backpack, setting it on the ground as he focused his vis through it. The portal manifested in front of him, and he sent it flying off over the cenote and down to start taking in the moonwater.

The aquatic beasts flailed at the portal but Edgar held it together, draining the moonwater into the immense cistern in Weltentor. The net there would catch the fish and other things floating in the water, and without the moon-water to float in and absorb, the kraken and limpets would be easy enough to dispatch. For Christopher to dispatch, anyway; they were tough, and had to practically be frozen solid to die.

Neither he nor Garan were going to get near those flailing, razored tentacles.

“So, why was this already active?” Bart asked aloud.

“Another well nearby? Maybe they fought?”

“I’d give you five to one odds it was that lone mage we’re suppose to be watching for,” Edgar said, concentrating on holding the portal intact against the flailing tendrils.

“Could be, but it would be pretty stupid to rile up a cenote like this by yourself,” Bart replied.

“You wouldn’t get much out of it,” Edgar agreed, using a smaller portal to get a better perspective on the cenote as he lowered the drain. The reflection of the moon in the glowing water was dead and dry rather than shimmering and liquid, a reminder of how different the intrinsic magic of the Night Lands was from the familiar spell forms of human magery.

Christopher approached and started to freeze the bits of flesh that were revealed by the dropping water, staying well out of range as frost coated the inside of the well. For his part, Bart stayed back by Edgar, watching through the perspective portal and holding several force magic constructs ready just in case. While it seemed routine, every single creature in the Night Lands could kill an unprepared mage in a single blow, so nothing could be left to chance.

As the drain portal reached the bottom of the cenote, the moon-water reduced to a few inches, the lumps of mordite came into view. Only, most of them were gone. Bart stared at the empty depressions where the bane-metal should have been, and then lifted his scry-com to report in. No matter how their lone mage had done it, they had definitely been there.

Chapter 7 – Pursuit

“We’ve got a potential hit at Weltentor Landing.” Zarin said. “Everyone, sound off.”

It only took a few seconds. They had their armor on, their foci primed, and auxiliary charges at their waist if necessary. Sen had been given an air mage’s standard loadout, which was essentially what he had worked with during his service, though of higher quality. The armor had built-in flying foci, with subordinate resonators to link up with his teammates, and the gauntlets had heat projectors for both the standard bolt spell and a few variations.

The built-in glamour was potent, probably strong enough to render them invisible to most mages at a distance, or at least those not using active sensing. Even Sen found it difficult to focus on the team when the glamour was active. The earpieces, though, were fairly standard, even if such things were a relatively new development. At some point in the distant past they would have needed dedicated far-speaking foci, rather than automated relays, but that sort of thing was irrelevant now.

In all, he was impressed by the quality of the equipment, and while some of it might be restricted to BSE he’d have to see how much of it could be gotten for House Fane. It was better than what he’d been issued for his service and, of course, better than his own personal foci. Similar, but crisper and more responsive.

He linked the mage’s mark on his wrist to the transporter pad and it resonated through his vis for a fraction of a moment, bringing them from the staging complex through to France. The moment they were through he keyed his flight focus to his partner’s subordinate focus, both of them lifting off the floor slightly. So long as they stayed near enough, the force mage could fly almost as well as an air mage thanks to Sen’s vis.

The others in their six-man squad joined him in a powered hover, darting out the door and crashing through the ward-line. The other two squads arrived just behind them, as soon as the transporter cycled, all of them spreading out into the air. They all ignored the alarms that set off, and Sen sent out his senses, taking in the surrounding miles and listening for any stray people. There were the ones inside Weltentor Landing, at their stations, but beyond it—

“South, two klicks!” Zarin snapped. “Go!”

Sen sent his partner and himself speeding south after Zarin, locating the target only belatedly. Down in the forest there was the sound of human breath and the radiant heat of a living person, and there was not supposed to be anyone in the exclusion zone. They had their glamours wrapped tight around them, and Zarin’s partner hefted a heavy arcane rifle. It was not a weapon that Sen wanted to be on the other end of, considering the massive spelled rounds the thing fired. He couldn’t imagine how expensive each round was, but it wasn’t like BSE needed to worry about the scarcity of good enchanting materials.

They were a good fifty meters up as they closed in on the target, the other teams moving to block off the escape routes. They did have an unconfirmed report of a homebond implant, which meant they needed to scramble the mage’s vis and incapacitate him as fast as possible. It was only if that failed that lethal force was authorized.

The moment they got within maybe half a kilometer, there was a subdued flare of magic and the target vanished. Obviously the mage was using active senses, but it had to be something subtle, considering that there was no clear sweep of vis to accompany it. Sen had a number of choice words spring to his lips but before he could actually say them, Zarin snapped more instructions.

“Teleport! Half click west! Two-Gimel, take the shot!” Even as he spoke they were altering course to head after the teleport, with Sen pumping vis into the flight focus to keep pace with Zarin. Somewhere ahead of them there was a bright flare as callsign Two-Gimel fired, a glowing ball of tight wards appearing among the trees.

“Miss,” came the terse statement. “West again.”

“We’ll go ahead, herd him toward us,” Zarin decided, and went faster. Their team zipped higher in the air, vis pulsing out into the surroundings as they scanned the terrain for their target. Sen knew they only had a limited time before the man used the homebond, assuming it existed, so they needed a clean hit.

Zarin hadn’t yet signaled they were in position when there was another blip of magic, just below them, and the sharpshooter jerked his arcanorifle around. Force magic launched the capture round, which smashed through the tree cover toward the target below. Sen winced as it impacted, the unleashed vis blazing.

It didn’t need to hit the target, and in fact, wasn’t designed to. What it did was deploy a sphere of interlinked wards and shielding, to keep the mage physically and magically isolated. Not to mention a burst of light and sound, coupled with the Special Target Access Bypass, meant to disable any renegade mage. STAB had a chance to permanently impair someone’s spellcasting, though, so it was rarely deployed. Even at that distance, he could feel it tingling through his mage mark.

“Target neutralized,” Zarin said, confirming that the wards were up. “Moving to— damn!” He spun, and Sen followed the motion to find that somehow, some way, the mage had gotten out of the capture area. He was almost half a klick westward, crouched down at the base of a tree.

“Goddamn,” Zarin swore. “How the hell—” He stopped himself. “Capture failed. Lethal force authorized.”

“Finally,” Sen said, and conjured flame into his hands.

***
Callum hoped that he hadn’t given himself away. There seemed to be more vampires out and about when he returned to the settlement, and he didn’t know if that activity meant he’d been spotted or if was just that local morning had arrived. No matter the reason, there were people walking the streets and the perimeter than when he had left.

That meant he had to be more careful, but it wasn’t an impenetrable surveillance. It did mean that he needed to get out of there quick, though, since he could only assume the trend would continue. Whether the vampires were waking up, were preparing for something, or suspected he was around, he wanted to slip out before it got worse.

The castle was essentially in the middle of the group of estates, so there wasn’t a significantly better approach from any direction, but he still circled around the town to make an entrance from a different angle than his departure. The actual estates were so very tempting, but there was no way that old and powerful mages didn’t have something impressive to protect their actual homes. Especially since he couldn’t see whatever glamours were in place, which no doubt spruced up the dark stone buildings and would signal to people where they ought to actually go. The mage equivalent of a welcome mat or a no trespassing sign.

Unfortunately, he wouldn’t find out anytime soon. Or maybe ever.

The added patrols meant that he had to take a slightly circuitous route into the keep, making sure to keep well away from any vampire that might possibly spot or sniff him. Once again, there were at least enough traces of mages about that his passage would blend in, but at the same time the increased patrols meant something was going on. It might be that his passage was far enough from normal traffic patterns to be suspicious in and of itself.

For that reason he popped up to the castle roof, inside the wards, as quickly as he dared, sending his perceptions down and through the portal. The moment before he teleported into the room behind the portals, dark and smelling of stone, he thought he sensed one of the vampires turn in his direction, blurring into motion. He couldn’t be sure it was him that they’d sensed, but Callum was absolutely not going to wait and see.

He threaded his vis through the wards and popped back out into the woods, behind a tree, then popped another few times before pausing to figure out where he was going. The train station was the obvious choice, but part of him wanted to refrain from retracing his steps. It might be better to go north to Belgium, or maybe even head over to Luxembourg.

Even though he hadn’t stopped for more than a second, orienting himself toward the borders, it apparently was too long. A set of mage bubbles appeared in his perceptions, high up in the air and moving quickly in his direction. It was so unexpected the sudden jolt of adrenaline practically paralyzed him, then he frantically cast his perceptions off in the opposite direction and teleported.

Only to find there were more mages there. Callum swore to himself as he scrambled to re-orient, popping in another direction just before something flashed and rumbled behind where he’d been, all kinds of magic strobing on the edges of his perception. Somehow, he’d given his location away.

Almost belatedly, Callum started charging his implant again. It wasn’t entirely discharged to begin with, since he’d kept it close to topped off, or as close as he could get without it triggering and resonating through his vis. It was hard to teleport with it up, so he always had to trade off between being ready to bolt and ready to evade.

He popped in a few random directions while he charged it, finding there were at least two teams flying through the air. There was no telling how many personnel they’d sent out after him, or what had prompted it, but he absolutely had to get the hell out of there. He had to teleport a few more times, staying ahead of the teams, until the thing snapped into full activation and made him grit his teeth against the feel. He paused as another team approached and pushed the focus.

Nothing happened.

The teleport matrix around him just sputtered out and collapsed without taking him anywhere, leaving him completely stranded. His contingency had failed. He gawked at it, completely startled, for long enough that someone overhead took a shot at him.

It landed a dozen feet away, bursting into light and cacophonous sound that sent him reeling away, along with a swirl of complex magic that did absolutely nothing so far as he could tell. What did work was a framework that sprung up in a sphere around the source of the impact, trapping him inside.

Callum groaned, dazed and reeling, half-blind and half-deaf, but still clutching his luggage. The flashbang had done its job, but if the magical flares were meant to suppress his spatial perception, they hadn’t worked. Shahey’s frozen mana had been far more painful and far more effective.

The framework glowed bright with power, but it wasn’t so tightly woven that he couldn’t get a vis thread through. There were multiple layers there, some obviously wards, some obviously not, but it was only the work of a panic-fueled moment to sneak past them and push out to the edge of his perceptions. He pushed another teleport, finding himself hunched under a low tree.

He knew he couldn’t stop there. There was still a group on the edge of his perceptions, and it was obvious that they could sense him about as well as he could sense them. Away from the wards of the portal facility, he could tell there were active senses at play, diffuse vis clouds riding along the mana, and he hated himself for missing them to begin with. The excuse that he’d gotten too used to the overly-dense mana of the portal world wasn’t good enough.

The next transfer was punctuated by the roar of fire as a spell lanced out where he’d been and set the entire area ablaze. It wasn’t just flame, since there was plenty of vis lingering where it struck, and his instincts screamed at him that it was terrible and horrible and he should not be anywhere near it. Callum hastily popped himself ahead again, zigzagging at angles so it wasn’t obvious where he’d appear, and had his forethought rewarded by an obviously leading shot missing. Instead, it flattened a stand of trees with a horrific crunching noise, as if it weren’t already obvious they were trying to kill instead of capture.

Callum focused on just teleporting as fast as possible. He didn’t know if it was possible for them to keep up, because six hundred yards per second translated to over one thousand miles per hour, but at the same time, he didn’t have the time to clean up after himself, so they’d be able to track him easily. Plus, he couldn’t keep up such rapid-fire teleports for an hour.

As he figured, he left the mages behind once he got going, but that absolutely wasn’t going to matter for long. This was hide-and-seek, not a footrace. He was headed west, more by circumstances than by choice, and with at least two teams following him, he cared more about outdistancing them than trying any circumlocution. If he were them, he’d be casting a wide net just to prevent that. Maybe put a person at every teleportation point, though there were surely limits to their manpower.

The moment he encountered a road, less than a minute later, he shifted trajectory to follow it. What he needed was a town, somewhere he could blend in and physically move away from his trail. Even if they had some way to unerringly pick him out in a crowd, which he doubted since they hadn’t before, just being in among buildings and people would force them to slow down.

It wasn’t much longer until he landed in a small French town. Ten seconds at most. He normally didn’t chain teleports that quickly, since he needed time to appraise things within his sphere of perception, so he wasn’t prepared for exactly how fast it was. A six-hundred yard radius was an awful large circle.

He popped into existence between two buildings and leaned against the stone wall of some ancient courthouse or something, squinting and blinking. Everything was a big blur, his head was pounding, and his ears were still ringing from the flashbang. Callum felt concussed, though he was pretty sure he wasn’t. Under the circumstances he didn’t trust his ability to walk without falling over, so he just pressed his cheek against the cold stone while he sorted through all the people and buildings suddenly within his perceptual range.

Under the circumstances he was somewhat less concerned with glamours, but he still waited until he could find a small, empty restroom, and teleported himself and his luggage over. Callum fumbled to lock the door, then slumped down to rub at his eyes. He had no illusions he was safe, exactly, but he should at least have time to think.

***

“The STAB must have damaged his implant,” Zarin decided. Sen’s assigned partner, the guy with the annoying Polish name, had been tracking the vis traces for the past ten kilometers, and they’d been consistent. It was a little too faint for Sen, but that wasn’t his specialty anyway.

“He barely needs it, considering how fast he moved,” someone else’s voice came over the scry-com. “We’re back at the teleporter.”

“Team Two, wait in Saint-Quentin. Team Three, Reims. I’ll let you know.” Zarin said, flying after the tracker.

“Any intel on the endurance this guy has? He could get to the other side of the country before we catch up with him,” said Zarin’s partner, another man whose name Sen hadn’t bothered learning. Just his callsign, One-Bet.

“No, but we have watchers at the airports. We do know that he uses planes, presumably to avoid GAR.” They took a sharp turn in the air to follow a road, cars driving unaware some fifty meters below. “If we need to we can shut everything down. The French government already knows we’re pursuing a renegade.”

“What are they going to do?” Sen asked scornfully. “Wave as he goes by?”

“If he can’t use GAR transport, then he has to rely on mundanes, so even just delaying things would be helpful.” It wasn’t exactly a reprimand, but Zarin’s tone of voice was warning enough. “Though, if we can track him now, it might be worthwhile seeing where exactly he runs to.”

“These traces won’t last all that long,” the man with the Polish name warned. “Given a day or so of lead time, these teleports wouldn’t be traceable.”

“Let me call it in,” Zarin said, and lifted a hand to his lapel. “Grand Magus Taisen? Yes, we have an opportunity here…”

Sen half-listened as Zarin spoke with his superior, frowning at the mundanes below. It was genuinely disappointing that Callum Wells, if that was indeed who it was, had fled so quickly. He’d been looking forward to paying back some of what he was owed for Wells making him out to be a prime fool.

Still, at least that bastard hadn’t completely vanished on them. There’d still be time to deal with him when they caught up. Maybe letting the man expose his entire operation would be more satisfying. After all, someone like him had to have a hole to crawl back to. They hovered for a moment while Zarin discussed it, then he waved them on.

“We’re still capture-or-kill, but if his homebond doesn’t work, only use lethal force if you’re forced into close proximity, or to defend yourself. Remember, he has demonstrated extreme lethality, so do not let your guard down.”

“But he’s a space mage,” Sen complained, though quietly. When he’d been performing his tour of duty, the space mage that had been their porter at the front hadn’t done anything but open portals and hide behind the walls. Well, there had been something she’d done with the quartermasters that he wasn’t quite clear on, but she’d mostly provided transportation for forays out into the wilds. He saw the value in not needing any break in the fortress wall, but without someone who could apply force it wasn’t exactly a fearsome repertoire.

The trail bent abruptly again at an intersection, heading toward a small town. Sen had to fly the perimeter with his partner, sweeping for a trail, but after they’d done a full circle the man grunted.

“Nope. He’s still in the town. No perceptible vis use there, though.”

“Odd.” Zarin’s voice came over the scry-com. “Spread out, going to incap, make sure you take care of the cars and the like. Ready?” Affirmations came from the rest of the team. Sen added his own, begrudgingly.

“Mark.” The ability to incapacitate mundanes with a mana pulse was a well-known one – and it had to be mana, not vis, for some reason – but harnessing that on any scale took work. Normally that was charged wards, though Sen wasn’t sure why they kept such a large presence in the mundane world at all. He knew that some people made noises about things like smartphones, but such inventions were so clever they had to be mage work to begin with.

Zarin’s vis reached outward, grabbing onto the local mana in an impressive display of control, and flung it downward. All the mundanes stumbled and slumped, while Sen and his team made sure to stop cars in motion and prevent any major damage. Sen found it a little silly that BSE had to hide its own actions, but nobody wanted the mundane world at large to know about mages.

He could only imagine how much clamor there’d be from the mundanes for mages and other supernaturals to solve all their problems. To clean up their messes. To do this and do that. They fought among themselves so much that he couldn’t imagine what a pain it’d be to deal with them if they thought they could bring mages into the mix.

Sen left his companions to deal with the mess, not having any wish to baby the mundanes. Besides, force magic was far better with handling that sort of thing than wind or fire. Instead he focused on finding who wasn’t affected by the mana pulse, because if the man really was in the town he’d be the only one to shrug off the effect.

Indeed, he found someone, standing inside a coffee shop while everyone else was preoccupied with falling over.

“Contact!” Sen snapped, then shaped a double-layered spear of air and fire through his weapon foci and launched it in the man’s direction. It crashed through four walls, but the man vanished right as the projectile exploded through the front of the coffee shop.

“Dammit, Sen!” Zarin snapped. “Stop making a mess!”

“I almost had him!”

“Stow it! Brzęczyszczykiewicz?”

“On it.” The tracker’s vis spread out as he looked for the mage’s trail. The hunt was on once again.

***

Callum knew he had only a few minutes, but he needed to consult a map and he couldn’t do that while half-blind. He managed to pry himself upright and stagger out of the bathroom, leaning against the wall of the coffee shop and taking out his phone in an attempt to look at least vaguely normal. The luggage was what marked him as out of place more than anything, but he didn’t think too many people were looking.

He blinked rapidly, hands trembling as he tried to poke at the phone. It was obvious he needed to stop being found by people and go back to ambushing people so hard they couldn’t shoot back. Or better, not deal with any of this at all, but that was a choice long since flown.

It was hard to see through the spots dancing in front of his eyes, but it looked like he was east and north of Paris, assuming the café’s wifi had him at the right spot. The best thing would be to completely change direction and head to a different country, preferably by train, so he wouldn’t leave any traces. Unfortunately, he didn’t think he had time to find a train station and wait. It wouldn’t be hard for them to simply blockade streets or shut down transportation.

Aiming for a major nearby city had a similar problem with the added issue of a native supernatural population to marshal against him. He could blend in better, true, and the mess of native magical trails might well disguise him, but he didn’t fit in. Callum wasn’t French, didn’t speak French, and despite not having a bubble had far more vis than any normal human. It wouldn’t take much searching to find him.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to consider it much. He was still trying to focus on the map and failing when the traces of active senses swept over the town. He’d put an enchantment in the bathroom to sweep up his teleport track, but he wasn’t sure whether it’d be sufficient, or if the enchantment itself would give him away, so he stretched out a single vis thread, ready to bolt at the slightest provocation.

If they had to search manually, he could probably slip out. His perception gave him a massive leg up in that regard. Even if he didn’t use it for teleportation, he could just take routes that avoided the mages. If he was feeling clever, which he wasn’t, he could even make it look natural. At best, he hoped that they’d take time to decide what to do.

He had no such luck.

The sheer scope of the mana manipulation that one of the mages performed was absolutely terrifying, showing how far down the totem pole Callum really was, despite his advantages. It wasn’t clear exactly what was going on until the mana pulse suddenly swept down over the town, shredding his vis thread. But that was not the reason for the attack, because everyone just slumped over.

He’d completely forgotten about the way mana knocked out regular people. Or some such explanation; he had doubts about that exact wording since there was mana everywhere and it couldn’t be the simple presence that did anything, it had to be an actual manifestation. That mana pressure wave was something, but he had more important things to worry about.

Like the spell bearing down on the coffeeshop.

Even though he knew that mages didn’t care overmuch for mundanes, there was a difference between knowing it and seeing someone lob a bomb at a bunch of helpless folks. There was nothing he could do about either, since it was all he could manage to shove a thread of vis out to the edge of town. He was pretty quick at it, but it still took a finite time, and it was only by dint of long practice that he didn’t fumble the framework. He shoved himself through in the same moment as the wall exploded, the sharp report cutting off abruptly. Not quite fast enough, though.

A chunk of wall hit him just before the transition, slamming into his ribs at an angle and sending him reeling as he dropped down from the hastily-placed teleportation field. He landed hard and awkwardly, mostly on his right leg, and something in his knee popped as he collapsed. He didn’t quite scream, but he did wheeze miserably, still gamely clutching his luggage.

The searing pain scrambled him for a moment, unable to focus on anything else as he lay on the ground, clutching his knee. It was only dread that forced him to send out his perceptions, the knowledge that he had to keep going. He didn’t need to be able to walk to be able to teleport.

Callum put a hand over his ribs as he moved himself along, feeling gingerly where the debris had hit him, but he didn’t think it had done more than bruise under the winter jacket he had on. The knee, on the other hand, was less pleasant, already feeling swollen and stiff and throbbing painfully at the slightest movement. There wasn’t anything to be done about that, though, other than take it as a reminder that he was not an actual mage with proper shields and ways to deal with high-powered magical combat.

Not that the bystanders were any better off. Callum had made a grievous error to think that he could simply hide in a town, that simply being among mundanes would make any difference. His presence had gotten people killed, because mages simply didn’t care. It wasn’t good enough to just hide from GAR, he had to get away from everyone, so there wouldn’t be any collateral damage.

The answer came to him as he clutched the luggage and randomly teleported himself into the French countryside, and he could have kicked himself for not considering it earlier. The mages could trace his teleports, and he didn’t have time to clean them up, but he did have a method of travel available to him that didn’t leave a trail and was definitely too fast for them to follow. Not to mention, it wouldn’t put any more bystanders in harm’s way.

He just hadn’t thought about it because he’d decided to associate self-gravitykinesis with the idiotic flying chair, after finding he couldn’t sustain a gravitykinesis field on himself without completely losing his lunch and his bearings. Callum didn’t actually need his terrible chair for it, though. His big rolling luggage was large enough to hang on to, and in fact had a number of straps that would make it viable for the purpose. It’d be even more rickety and makeshift than the stupid chair, but would probably work, and it should have been his first thought.

He wound his arms through the luggage straps, giving them several twists to make sure he wouldn’t fall, then hugged it to himself as he wrapped the vis frameworks around it and himself. His knee refused to cooperate as he shifted to try and get a better grip, but he gritted his teeth and flexed the field to counteract his weight.

It jerkily rose into the air while he dangled below it, feeling like a complete fool and with the straps digging into his arms. Callum didn’t need to get all that high, but he did need to at the least clear the height of trees and local terrain if he didn’t want his jaunt to be cut abruptly short. It would be pretty damn sad for his amazing getaway to get stalled ten feet away because he hit a tree or a phone pole.

The problem with getting airborne, aside from the precarious position, was that it made him a target. The pursuing mages were way beyond his spatial sense, but he could see the blurry specks of things that weren’t birds suddenly turn toward him. At least, he thought so; his eyes still hurt too much for him to put too much stock in what they told him.

Before they could start targeting him with any proper war magic, he put a second field around both himself and the luggage and dragged. The world blurred by with the monstrous acceleration, and he released the kinesis part almost instantly. His already abused ears popped and frigid cold smacked him as his surroundings resolved into being very high up. He shuddered and aimed himself down at the ground, a shoreline, pulling again and finding himself pressed up against the ground somewhere.

He really had no idea where he was. Not the ocean, not a city, that was about all he could tell. It was warmer, which made sense since he’d been aimed straight south, but that was it. Still, the change in climate was enough to imply that he’d at least gone quite a few hundred miles, although admittedly without a glamour. Hopefully that didn’t really matter, and if anyone caught the second or so blur of him moving about, it was marked down to imagination or something.

The mana density was noticeably lower too, so he couldn’t be as prodigal as he’d been in France and Switzerland. His reserves were near empty after that jaunt, and they weren’t being refilled particularly fast, but he was far enough away from his origin point that he could move a bit more cautiously. Even better, he could clean up after himself.

Gravitykinesis left a bit more of a signature than teleportation, so he stuck a fork from his camp kit in the ground with a vis scrubber enchant and reclined against a nearby rock. He had aimed more or less south, which encompassed a lot of territory but shouldn’t be complete wilderness. He’d dropped the phone at some point during the attack and subsequent flight, so he had to use local landmarks. After searching with his spatial sense, he did find a rough trail and followed it.

It turned out it was a hiking trail. He kept himself hidden from the hikers, since his winter clothing and rolling duffel would probably draw a certain amount of commentary, but following it downhill finally sort-of answered the question of where he was. There was a seaside town with fantastic Mediterranean architecture, which he couldn’t help but admire for being so much more interesting than the steel-and-concrete boxes so prevalent in cities. Even better, it seemed to be a tourist town, which meant a lot of people probably spoke English.

He shucked his coat and disguised his hobble as best he could before entering the town, finding a small hotel that let him make an international call after he showed a twenty-euro note. There was only one way to know how the search for him was going, and how safe it’d be to travel. Hopefully it wasn’t too early or late wherever Lucy was.

“Big man! How’s Mallorca?” He could barely hear her over the persistent ringing in his ears, but her voice was still as cheerful as ever. That was something he needed under the circumstances.

“Oh, is that where I am?”

“You’re in Mallorca and you don’t even know it? Come on!”

“It’s, ah, been a day,” he told her, keeping an eye on the people wandering by the hotel. There weren’t any supernaturals around, but maybe they didn’t take Mediterranean vacations. For all he knew, Faerie was the prime getaway for the discerning mage on holiday.

“Yeah? What’ve you been up to?”

“Mostly getting chased around by some mages,” he admitted. “They jumped me, but I’m pretty sure I got away clean. I was hoping you could find out for me whether or not they have any idea where I am or what I’m doing.”

“Oof! Let me take a look, big man.” He waited for a short time while she did whatever it was that got her access to GAR goings-on. “Man did you stir them up! Lotta messages flying. Nothing in your neck of the woods though, far as I can tell. I think you might want to avoid airports for a while.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Callum said. “What about the fae? Did they stop tracking me?”

“Ahaha, so, Jissarrell has been telling that story for the past few days! How he followed a deadly and dangerous assassin to Europe before they noticed and severed the tracking spell. Yeah, you’re fine, unless they get another fae king to go after you.”

“How likely is that?” Callum frowned. “I mean, I did kill a bunch of them.”

“Yeah but you’re famous now so that’s practically an honor! I dunno, though. Let me look at something real quick.” There was another silence. “I’m not seeing any history of them helping anyone. It may be they can’t do it randomly. Fae magic is weird.”

“Thanks, Lucy.” He let out a long breath, not sure what to think about those tidbits. “I wasn’t sure whether I’d be dodging high-powered fae forever or what. Glad to know they have limits, too.”

“That’s what I’m here for, big man. Now tell me what you’ve been doing!”

Callum considered a moment. In general he didn’t tell anyone what he was doing, because it was safer that way, but it wouldn’t hurt to give her an edited view of events. She was actually inside the magical culture, so she might even have some insight on what had happened, and it would be nice to tell someone. He’d cut out Shahey and the dragonlands, but everything in the Night Lands was probably fairly harmless.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll give you the edited version.”

***

“That’s not spatial aspect,” Archmage Duvall said with flat certainty. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not spatial aspect.” Duvall was the expert but Zhen knew a lot of magic and had no idea what it might be, if not spatial. The report had described the man gripping some kind of bag and floating in the air without using air aspect, which might well be gravity, but then apparently the man shot off at supersonic speed without leaving any trail or making any noise, which definitely was not.

Spatial was the only human magic it could be.

“When we tested him, he only manifested the spatial aspect,” Zhen said cautiously, not wanting to get any further on Duvall’s bad side. “We’re assuming this is Callum Wells, of course. Though I doubt there are many unknown spatial mages wandering around.”

“That test was terrible and you know it. A full one hundred thaums emptied? That’s as much as I’d absorb. No, he faked it. Oh, sure, the spatial results were real, but you missed another aspect.”

“There haven’t been any spatial mages in the past who manifested additional aspects,” Zhen said thoughtfully. “I would find it more likely he had some strange focus or even some fae artifact.”

“Then you’d better find who gave it to him,” Duvall said flatly. “I am very disappointed here! You failed to find my mage until some fae wandered by and then when you do find him, BSE can’t even capture him!” Her vis crackled around her as she eyed him. “If BSE cannot make use of the special privilege of having my apprentices tend to your needs over everyone else’s,” she said, her finger stabbing at his face with every word, “it may be time to revoke them.”

“He has twice escaped through novel methods, Archmage,” Zhen told her. “We are not experts in spatial magic.”

“A homebond isn’t new, you just failed to find it.” Duvall leaned forward, tapping her finger against the report sitting on the desk. “I have far more important people than you that need my time, and if I have to keep cleaning up after you I will make sure they know exactly why. If I am forced to personally take command of this situation, I will make sure to rebuild the Bureau from the ground up. This time without the incompetence.”

Zhen suppressed a wince. That was a major threat, and coupled with Duvall’s total control over the transport system, she could well cripple BSE for some time to come. Hopefully the others would talk her around, but Duvall was well-known to have strong opinions.

He hated dealing with Archmages.

Chapter 8 – Recovery

After recovering some sanity by way of a long talk with Lucy, he crashed at the charming Mallorcan hotel and slept for a good eighteen hours. When he woke up, he was at least rested, but his knee was no better, something which sent the back of his mind into a little bit of a panic. One that he ruthlessly suppressed, to only fair success. That was something he’d have to address when he got somewhere with a hospital he could trust.

He had to assume all the international airports in Europe and in the US were being watched by supernaturals, or at least covered with something that’d alert them if he came around. It probably only took one watcher, since he couldn’t cover up actually using a teleport or portal, and they’d showed that they could track him easily enough.

Callum still wanted to get home, though. Not that he had a particular home in mind besides the United States, a realization that made him stop and think. He wasn’t willing to give up on his home country, or even his home state, but thinking that he needed to only be in one place was a mistake. Once he made teleports, it didn’t matter how far away anything was.

So long as the enchantment actually worked.

Some perceptual poking and prodding provided the reason his contingency had failed. The enchantments themselves were breaking down, very much like they did with mundane materials, though far slower. Apparently even enchantments weren’t immune to the march of time, though he was sure the substandard substrate didn’t help. He probably should have melted down those seals and used them instead, but he’d been far too worried about their destruction backfiring. He just hadn’t known enough at the time.

He suspected it was the receiving plate that had completely failed, considering that his implant had accepted vis and was mostly intact. If anything, he was lucky that he hadn’t torn himself apart with some malformed teleport or the like. The little chunk of titanium was pretty worthless without it, though, so he made a very, very careful survey before delicately teleporting it out from its place in his guts for later disposal. Fortunately it hadn’t been in long enough, or the medical-grade titanium had done its job well enough, that it wasn’t attached. Removing it did feel very weird, though.

While he was self-inspecting he took a look at his knee, but he frankly didn’t know enough about anatomy and couldn’t distinguish well enough between all the various bits to make any kind of guess. He’d be better off diagnosing by symptom, but of course there were a million things that could go wrong with a knee and it’d be better to get actual medical attention first.

He didn’t want to get stuck in Mallorca, since it was still uncomfortably close to France and he didn’t know how quickly and how far they’d widen their search. At the same time, he wasn’t all that far from Algiers. He wouldn’t fit in and he couldn’t speak the language, but he was pretty confident nobody would be looking for him sneaking out through the airport there.

He burned a couple hours searching through flights and planning his route and timing, because he did not want to go through Europe. In the end he plotted out a couple transfers that took him over to Sao Paulo before heading up to Mexico City. He knew that Mexico had plenty of health tourism, so finding a doctor to treat him that also wouldn’t keep records would be possible. Perhaps not easy, but possible.

A very nice employee from the tiny hotel somehow found a cane for him to lean on, since he could barely put any weight on his knee, and directed him to where he could buy a tiny inflatable kayak. Part of Callum wanted to just stay and relax, bum knee or not, but he was running low on money and unless he started cashing out his gold he’d be broke pretty soon. In fact, given he was in some tiny tourist town on an island, cashing the gold might well be impossible. Just the kayak would blow through most of his remaining funds, and that was basically a one-use item.

Besides, complacency would get him killed.

It had already gotten other people killed. Callum knew he wasn’t actually responsible for their deaths; that burden was on the mages who felt it was a good idea to attack a café full of incapacitated people. But he still felt responsible, and he knew that he could have done better. Could have avoided involving others.

It was something to keep in mind for the future. GAR and its agents were the ones responsible, were the ones causing the issues, and there was no temptation to turn himself in to save people the trouble. There was no way he was submitting to such an authority. But he would be more circumspect, so others weren’t involved. If other people were involved, he’d do his best to get them out of the blast radius.

It wasn’t exactly a solution, but it was the best he could decide on for the moment. To distract himself, Callum decided to examine his spoils in the light of day, before he went globetrotting. In sunlight, the mordite spheres didn’t look like they were made of rippling water, but instead some dull grey-blue metal. At least, until he brought them near the plastic water bottle full of the stuff from the cenote, which glowed with the same light as the Night Land’s moon.

It was the Night Land light that made it look weird, too, not simple proximity. He played around with it a little bit and found it would change if he reflected the light using a mirror, but mere proximity did nothing. Through his spatial sense he could only see the faintest of fluctuations within the mordite, and nothing from the liquid, so it was a mystery to him. The only thing they had in common was a touch of the weird spatial flavor of the portal worlds.

He did find it a little wondrous that, even if he could sense mana, and vis was very structured and organized, magic could still act like magic. It was also a sobering reminder that he knew really nothing about how magic worked, and couldn’t assume anything at all.

Sorting through all the books he’d gotten from Lucy and Harry, there wasn’t any reference to mordite being toxic, but there also wasn’t anything useful like its melting point or other standard properties. It obviously could at least be used for wire and bullets, but that didn’t really say much. Especially when he was fairly certain the mordite bullets he had were an alloy of some sort, since they seemed less magical to his senses.

He packed away the stuff, replenished his stock of food and drink, and limped his way over to the shop with the kayaks. They seemed a little dubious about him getting one given his obvious issues with walking, but he managed to convince them and get it inflated. Once that was done, he simply energized his glamour enchant, climbed in, and teleported himself out into the ocean.

From there he just went south, lifting the kayak just a little bit with gravitykinesis and give it a brief bump of Alcubierre movement before continuing with normal teleports. He certainly didn’t want to overshoot. The Mediterranean was actually quite calm, so he didn’t have to tire himself out with rapid-fire teleportation, making landfall a few hours later on the north coast of Africa. A thought that was actually quite surreal to him.

It turned out that he had actually managed to land within ten miles of Algiers itself, so it was fairly easy to make his way in toward the airport. Once again, he couldn’t read the local signage, but there were at least icons. Rather like Mallorca, there didn’t seem to be nearly as much supernatural presence in the area as he would have suspected from such a large city. There were some traces, and he was pretty sure he spotted a few fae, but maybe most mages lived near the portals. So far as the literature went, there weren’t any in Africa.

That didn’t explain the United States, but that might just be a function of wealth. Since mages used gold, they almost certainly hung out with the owners of gold mines or oil barons. World leaders, too. Regardless of the reason, though, that just made it easier for Callum to teleport into the airport and from there onto his target aircraft.

He still hated stowing aboard, and would far rather have just flown normally, but lacking a passport meant that he was certainly not going to be able to pass through customs legally. Not to mention the guns and ammunition in his bag, or the glowing water or weird metal balls. He still purchased a ticket though, under Keith Summers, which was the license he had on him, after observing that nobody’s passport was checked against their ticket at boarding. That satisfied both his need for fairness and anonymity, even if he did skip baggage weighing and security.

Porting his duffel into the cargo compartment wasn’t a problem, either.

The actual trip to Mexico City was long and boring. Callum tried to just sleep for most of it, still emotionally and physically wrung out from his ordeal. Aside from that, he pulled up the enchanting literature on his laptop and tried to slog through it. Even if he’d glanced at most everything they’d given him, it was a lot, and quite a bit of it didn’t make any real sense to him without the proper educational background.

When that got too painful for his tired brain, he took out his old drawing tools and started sketching. His realization that he could, with the mordite, actually make a miniature teleportation network inspired him a little bit to start making plans. Maybe it was too early, but he’d need some kind of bunker, eventually.

It was over thirty hours later when he actually arrived in Mexico City, thanks to layovers, and he was feeling pretty grungy despite taking a shower at one of the nicer airports. The moment he landed, he could tell there was more mana around than there was in the states, but it wasn’t anything like Europe. Which was probably for the best, really, since he was sure supernatural density more or less correlated with mana.

He really didn’t like Mexico City. It was too close, too crowded, too loud, and even if there weren’t many supernaturals relative to Europe, there were enough that he felt overly watched and studied. With his perceptions sweeping around him he was pretty sure nobody was actually following him, but he definitely felt closed in and would be glad to be on his way. He had to stay for a while though, since it took some hours to find a doctor willing to look at him on short notice and for cash.

“You’ve torn your ACL,” the doctor said bluntly, and went on to cover, exhaustively, the required care. Exercises, braces. He was admonished for continuing to walk on it, but it wasn’t like Callum had a choice. At least it didn’t need surgery, yet.

The fact that he couldn’t just walk off what had really been only a simple fall made him feel really old, which was not pleasant. How bad it was remained to be seen, but Callum would be using crutches and cane for a while, so he sure wasn’t going to be going out hiking again. He was certainly not enamored of being so immobile but it wasn’t like he actually needed to do the walking.

Callum tried to look on the bright side. It would give him an excuse to really work on his kinesis and turn teleportation into a reflex. The doc gladly took US Dollars, and Callum got a taxi back to the hotel. There, he made sure to get new clothes, get a haircut and some dye to give himself some extra gray, and a knockoff but good-looking suit to make it look like he was not a refugee. Then he was ready to leave.

Getting back into the United States wasn’t overly difficult. There weren’t even any mages or supernaturals manning the checkpoints, and of course the normal setup had no chance of stopping someone who could teleport. From there, he just paid a taxi to take him deeper into Texas.

The fact that he looked respectable and was on crutches actually made it much easier to work his way back out to his cache in the mountains, and pick up the rest of his supplies. He’d been chewing over exactly how to bunker down for a while, considering what he needed access to, but what he’d seen on the drive through Texas had given him an idea. There were enormous numbers of trailer homes for rent, entire ghost towns where he could get at least shelter, electricity, and internet. With barely anyone around, there was also no real danger of involving other people in the event of supernatural troubles.

He didn’t even need ID, if he paid for it in advance, with cash.

As a bonus, while Texas was home to two major shifter packs and had vampire Masters in Houston and Austin, the bland, hard desert areas didn’t seem to be appealing to anyone. He had to admit even the mana seemed somewhat scarcer there, even though there was supposedly a portal somewhere in South America.

Callum didn’t really enjoy the neighborhood, but it was in the middle of nowhere, and a beat-up, third-hand, used white pickup truck meant he could drive out into the scrub to practice magic. Which was something he very, very badly needed to do. First, though, he had to replace his contingency.

The original was slated for melting down, but he’d kept it for reference. It was obvious both the implant and the receiver plate had degraded pretty badly, but Callum had high hopes for a proper enchant with purer materials. The only problem was how to make his metal spheres into those enchants.

Once again, it was micro-industry to the rescue. Some scouring on the internet and he found a metal shop a few hours drive away with all the toys, and he still had all his old CAD files. The only difference was that instead of filling it with paste, he’d be pouring in molten mordite. At least, that was what he thought, but the folks at the metal shop suggested hammering wire in, instead.

Mordite looked and felt sort of like lead without the light of the cenote water, so he just claimed the stuff was an alloy but he wasn’t sure exactly what. In the end, the melting temperature wasn’t all that high, so it didn’t take them long to turn half of the hundred or so ounces of mordite he had into very fine wire, and the other half into a flat ribbon. The former for generic enchanting, the latter for the twin-type enchantments like homebonds.

He kept a close watch on the process with his senses, a little worried that just normal metalworking processes might ruin the magical properties, but that didn’t seem to be the case. In the end, he ended up with not only the processed mordite, but five sets of receiver plate and implant blanks. Just one was not enough; he needed to have an actual network.

The wire wasn’t quite as ad-hoc as the paste, but it meant he could still make some mistakes without having to start completely from scratch. He could even use a basic acetylene torch to melt the wires together at intersections. The only weakness, then, was his issues with terrible vis control.

The fact that he could only make overloaded vis threads, for lack of a better term, had to be at least part of why the teleports were so bad. He was fine, but it was probably because it was his vis all the way. With the homebonds, it was like someone else doing it with his technique, so he suffered just as badly as the couple he’d teleported before. For that matter, probably as badly as Clara and the teens he’d taken from the vampire nest.

Though he hated to do so, he made a new homebond implant before trying to fix his vis, just because he didn’t want to be caught without it. He could always make a new one, but he couldn’t make a new him if he got caught again. It was a tedious process, but made far easier by being something he’d done before.

With the wire segments he could still work piecemeal, like with the paste, but he had to be careful when joining things. If he melted the metal or even flexed it too much, the enchantment degraded or vanished. From what he could tell, the enchanting structure was bound into the physical matter, and if that started to break down, the vis that was entrained with it did too.

Unfortunately the improved materials didn’t really translate to an improved experience, and it still was like a punch to the gut to go through. That said, it was notably better than the last use of the original model, when he’d escaped from GAR and been laid up for multiple days. He took a full two days to relocate his emergency escape cache, driving up to Montana and placing down another shed-cache before returning to Texas.

Then he called Lucy again.

“Heeey, big man! How was your vacation?”

“I wish I could have stayed longer,” he told her, absently rubbing his knee as he sat in the back of his pickup. “Alas, it was not to be. How about you? I think you’ve answered like, ten seconds after I’ve called you, every time I’ve called you. Don’t you ever rest?”

“Haha! I think I’m owed a ton of vacation time, actually. You gonna take me somewhere?”

“You know, I’d like to,” he said, and stopped for a moment to consider what he’d just said. But it was true; Lucy was about the only person he actually enjoyed talking to. She was fun and sharp, and though he hadn’t really found anyone interesting since Selene died, she ran more to his tastes than the gym bunny that Shahey had tried to set him up with. She was the only one where it didn’t feel like he had to hide everything about who and what he was. Sure, he kept things from her, but she knew it and didn’t mind, even if she did keep cheekily asking for details.

“Gonna show me a good time, big man?” Lucy asked with her usual playful tone.

“I would, but it’s just not possible right now,” he told her regretfully.

“Oh? Oh!” Callum smiled to himself as Lucy made sudden, stuttering flustered noises rather than her usual playful banter. “I, uh. Um.”

“I need to maintain my security, so I’ll just have to be satisfied with hearing your lovely voice,” he told her, still a little bit teasing.

“Wow. You really go right at things, don’t you, big man?” Lucy said, a little faintly. “Whew! You can’t see it but I’m fanning myself right now.” Callum laughed.

“I’ve learned to be direct, yes. But I’m kind of GAR’s Most Wanted, so it’s all academic.”

“I suppose it is,” Lucy said. “I, ah, wasn’t expecting that, though.”

“You don’t have anyone trying to date you over there?” Callum asked, a little curious. He didn’t actually know anything about her besides her voice.

“Ah, man, nah. I’m not a mage or a shifter, so the dating pool is basically other duds and most of them are pretty miserable bastards to begin with. Not that I blame them, but GAR isn’t really a hotbed of romance.”

“To be fair, most offices aren’t. I don’t imagine mages are much different from anyone else when it comes to being boring.”

“Hah! If anything, they’re worse! Mages and Grand Mages and Archmages love their titles and procedures and every little thing being just so. I guess if you’re two hundred years old you don’t like surprises, or something.”

“I imagine not. Back when I did office work, the people who had been around two or three years were crusty. If that went on for decades or longer, I imagine they’re totally ossified.”

“Ossified, ha! Yeah, that’s exactly it. Thankfully I don’t work for them, otherwise there wouldn’t be an IT department and I’d be doing laundry or something.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t sound fun.” It made a bit of sense that non-mage descendants were stuck with more menial jobs, even if it wasn’t particularly fair. If it took relatively rare materials to make enchantments, then they couldn’t automate all the labor they needed, and he was sure mages weren’t interested in doing their own cooking and cleaning. Bringing in regular mundanes had its own issues, so of course there was an underclass.

“Actually the shifters do a lot of that now. Vamps and thralls staff things too. Not the Masters or Alphas, but, you know. Lower tiers,” she told him. “There just aren’t enough duds anymore. Mages are careful about bloodlines and stuff.” Callum suppressed a laugh at that, considering what he now knew about his parentage.

“Well, all that bloodline stuff seems really archaic to me,” he told her.

“I can tell!”

“Anyway,” he said, letting the implied topic drop. It wasn’t something he really wanted to dwell on too much. “As much as I love calling just to talk to you, I do have some business, too. I was wondering about selling a teleport enchantment. A homebond. Basically, who would I sell it to and for how much.”

“Oof, you’re not asking for much, are you? I’ll have to get back to you but I don’t know how many people are actually going to be interested in black-market magecraft. It’s probably like a million-dollar item but who’s gonna buy it? I dunno.”

“There’s no rush,” he assured her. “I haven’t even made it yet. But it would be nice to get that kind of cash infusion.”

“Ha, I bet! But yeah, I don’t think there’s all that large a market for enchanting stuff that isn’t, you know, official. I’ll check around a bit, but it’s possible it’s just not something you can move.”

“Well, if I can’t, I can’t,” Callum said, but he grimaced. He could take some shortcuts with his magic, but it took labor and materials to build a bunker, no matter what form that bunker took. He was going to take it seriously, so it needed to be livable, not something to just hide in for a few hours or days, or even weeks.

That meant he really needed a cash infusion. While he still had a good chunk of gold and some cash from the vampires he’d raided, he was intimately familiar with how expensive buildings could get. A full million dollars could actually be a fairly limited budget, especially taking into account furnishings and equipment.

“I’ll get back to you when I can,” Lucy promised him. “I hope I’ll have some good news for you, but that’s a pretty hot item you’re trying to move.”

“I appreciate it,” he told her. “How’s my deposit holding up?”

“Ah, well, I could use another kilo or two soon,” she said. “Moving it originally was a bit of an adventure, but I’ve got that squared away. Funny, that stuff’s actually a pretty common medium for the Houses, but I hadn’t handled it myself before you paid me.”

“I’ll do another dead drop soon then,” he promised. “I wouldn’t want you to think I didn’t appreciate you.”

“Oh, I’d never think that, big man.”

He stayed on the phone a little bit longer, trying to corral his vis threads into making tubes while he talked, but it was actually Lucy who rang off that time. She did have a day job and couldn’t sit around all the time talking with him. Part of him wondered if talking so blatantly about stuff while at the job was actually a good idea, but Lucy seemed to know what she was doing.

It was just as well, since he needed to properly focus on his exercises.

He'd been using the basic magical structures like balls and bolts and beams as practice, even if they didn’t do anything. While he was fiddling around with casting multiple things at once he’d accidentally shot one of his own constructs, and it had promptly collapsed. That had made him sit up and take notice, because he thought it might give him a way to punch through other mage’s spells, but a little bit of experimentation kicked that idea in the head.

It turned out it wasn’t the vis interacting that was the problem, it was the spatial distortions they made. Even a small amount of disruption to the portal’s frame was enough break the structure and collapse it. The same was true for a teleportation frame, but a simple box or sphere without any twisting or vis fill passed right through. Really, it was the attack forms that had the effect, which implied some deeper substance to their pattern than just the shape of ball or bolt.

Callum already knew that his stuff could be disrupted, but it was good to find out there were more ways than just brute force to mess up magic. He added some way of hardening his spells to his list of things to figure out, as if he didn’t have enough to research. For the moment, he was focused on changing his threads.

He was actually somewhat pleased to have something specific to work toward that he could see palpable progress in. At no point could he figure out how to make vis threads with less energy in them — or more, for that matter. When he overcharged a teleport it was more a matter of increasing the fill portion of the framework, not adding energy to the threads.

Changing the shape, though, that was within his grasp. There were two ways to get a tube; he could flatten the threads and roll them, or try to inflate them from the center. The former seemed like it was easier to work toward incrementally, and he’d already made some strides, but that would make deploying his vis threads into a finnicky multi-step process. Something that was probably a nonstarter for anything but enchanting.

Inflating the vis threads by filling them with the unformed stuff seemed way faster and easier, if it was possible. Considering how they were formed, he gave it a decent chance that it wasn’t, but he still wanted to give it a shot. Besides, he’d not actually tried playing around with his magic for far too long. Especially since he had a self-imposed ban on using it while he was in hiding.

That didn’t mean he hadn’t been thinking about it, and since there was nobody around out in the ugly scrub deserts of west-central Texas he could fiddle around as much as he wanted. Which was good, because progress was slow.

The breakthrough came after about a week of fiddling, when he finally managed to make a strand of vis thread swell up like a balloon. Sort of. It looked like it was full of unformed space vis but at the same time, like it wasn’t, in one of those weird perceptual tricks that his magic could play sometimes.

Naturally, he poked it with a stick.

Actually it was more of a splinter. Callum’s vis threads were really the size of a thread, something like one-tenth the cord thickness of a normal mage’s working, so he had to use a very small test piece. The splinter seemed to distort as it passed through the bubble, but failed to come out the other side. When he withdrew it, though, it looked undamaged. It took him a little bit more poking and prodding to figure out exactly what was going on, but when he did, he threw up his hands and grinned.

“Ha, ha! Yes!” He would have done a little jig, but his knee reminded him that it did not like being used. What he’d done was make an area, however small, that was larger inside than outside.

Admittedly, he had no idea how to make any use of it, both because of the size and because he had to hold the vis in place, so it wasn’t like he could just set it and forget it. It was a pretty great feeling to figure out some new piece of magic by himself but there was a lot of work to do in order to make it at all useful. Like figuring out how to turn a construct into an enchantment, and vice-versa.

Obviously, just turning a tiny speck of space into a slightly less tiny speck of space wasn’t useful in and of itself, but finding out it was even possible was the hardest step. He dismissed the vis bubble, then made a new thread and tried again, repeating the process until he could do it at will. Only then did he try reproducing it on a larger scale.

He found out very quickly that a thin framework of vis threads, like he used for portals and teleports and even his gravitykinesis, was not sufficient. He had to build an actual box, and then shove a bunch of unformed vis into it. Considering how small his vis threads were, that was a problem.

Fiddling around with the tiny box, he naturally poked at it and tried to destroy it just to see what would happen. If he just let it unravel, it was equivalent to a teleport, where the extra space appeared or disappeared slowly enough that the only thing that happened was some mild air movement. With the thin walls of the box, made from flattened vis threads, it wasn’t too hard to pop it instead.

Rather like a portal, it fell apart if he hit it with too large a stick, the rapid passage of matter overloading it. The spatial attack spell burst it too, and either way he could sense a ripple as space realigned itself. He wasn’t sure what he’d do with that, but it was another tool to practice with nonetheless. It seemed that his attempts to flatten his threads had more than one application, so he focused on that when he went out to practice magic.

Even without being able to enchant with it, something that was bigger on the inside had all kinds of uses. Especially when he could collapse it, too. His initial experiments were only on the order of ten or twenty percent before they collapsed, but he could probably improve that. So long as he kept his head down in the meantime.

***

“How the hell can these people just vanish?” Archmage Hargrave scowled, looking at the reports strewn over Agent Jahn’s desk.

“Well, sir, they do clean up after themselves.” Jahn had actually been impressed by the makeshift enchantments they’d found on Callum Wells. They were remarkable in their crude efficiency, while at the same time used such a delicate framework that it was clear special tools were at play. While there were foci to reduce the impact of a mage’s vis, they were generally foci that muddled the local mana field, smearing it and destroying the details of what had been used. Wells’ approach of pulling the vis out and leaving no traces at all only worked because he had an extremely light touch to begin with, and didn’t seem to use any normal mana foci.

Jahn still wasn’t sure whether or not Wells had BSE training. The handwritten notes they’d found seemed to be a random assortment of action items for novice mages, but his capabilities and subtle vis were the marks of someone far more advanced. BSE agents could be remarkably slippery themselves, but there had been actually zero trace of outside vis at the vampire sites and, once they had known about it, the place the fae had disappeared. No mage he knew, not even BSE folk, operated with such a minimal footprint.

“I think we need to give serious thought that they have contacts inside GAR who are covering for them.” Hargrave clasped his hands together, giving Jahn a stern look. “Maybe BSE itself. Ignore that old harridan Duvall. I need you to lead an internal inquiry.”

“With respect, sir, I’m an external agent, I don’t deal with internal affairs.”

“That’s exactly why I’m giving you the job. Neither the Master of Paris or King Suine have found any traces of them in France. Or what that artifact was that he was using to get around.” Jahn nodded. The description from the team implied something very strange indeed, maybe even something from out of Faerie itself.

There was no real worry about the fae as a whole backing Wells. The fae didn’t do anything as a whole, and if one of the fae kings on Earth was starting to get restive, the others would sabotage him out of spiteful glee. But even if one was doing so in secret, the ability to stay so completely off the radar of both magical and mundane authorities was suspect.

“I suppose I could try, sir,” Jahn conceded. “There are other agents more qualified…”

“You’ve met the man personally, you didn’t completely shirk your responsibilities like some people, and we’ve got a lot of other people out sweeping Europe. Some people think the earth mages are going to find a bunker somewhere.” Hargrave rolled his eyes. “Only BSE is taking this as seriously as it should be and, like I said, I suspect they’re compromised.”

“The BSE folks aren’t going to like me stepping in,” Jahn said. “Do I get a crest?”

“Yes,” Hargrave said. “You’ll be doing this on my authority. And Fane’s. He may not be happy with whatsisname, but he’s less happy with Wells.”

“Understood.” Hargrave was a powerhouse, but Fane was a terror. Jahn had never met the man personally, but rumors abounded, and he knew enough to know a lot of them were true. “I’ll start with Black and Danforth. They’ve done the most work on the case, so they’re the most likely source of any leaks. If it’s not them, they’ll be the best ones to handle some of the grunt work.”

“Whatever you think best,” Hargrave said, brushing it aside with an indifferent wave of his hand. “I just want you to find whoever they’ve got inside GAR. Or whatever. We know he can bypass wards; there may be sabotage or surveillance enchants in place. There’s really no telling.”

“Yes, sir. Do you have the crests with you?” Archmage or no, Jahn wasn’t about to start bossing people around without an actual symbol of authority. He already had a significant amount of authority, with a deliberately vague rank and no clear chain of command, but that also meant that anyone high up could boss him around and he’d have to take it.

Hargrave dug into the pocket of his double-breasted suit and took out two crests, one bearing the Hargrave Seal and one bearing the Fane seal. As a matter of course Jahn pushed a little vis out and brushed over them to assure himself of their authenticity. Even if he couldn’t compare signatures right there, they both were energized as proof of an Archmage’s backing. Not that anyone would dare falsify them.

“I’ll get started right away,” he promised.

Chapter 9 – Inquiries

“Well big man, it’ll be a little complicated on this end, but the best buyer for your piece of merchandise is a certain Alpha we both know and, well, maybe we don’t love but we at least get along with.”

“That seems a little too convenient. Is he willing to buy it just so I owe him a favor or something?” Callum asked.

“Honestly, maybe a bit? But like I said, I don’t actually have much in the way of, ah, criminal mage contacts. BSE and GAR keep a very tight lid on that. And homebonds are basically special order from Duvall, so one just showing up is bound to create questions.”

“But the Alpha can handle it?”

“Well, shifters and vamps do hire mages. So I guess the idea would be for him to have a mage charge things or something, not sure.”

“Mm.” Callum was pretty sure that Chester was still trying to do him a favor, more than buying something he really could use. That was something he was quite leery of, but he also needed the cash infusion for a bunker. Preferably in gold, or something that would easily and untraceably convert into other currencies. “Well, once again, I haven’t made it yet, so if there’s some specifications on size or the like, I’ll see what I can do to accommodate him.”

“You’d do better to talk to him directly, big man. I can set that up for you, tomorrow?”

“That sounds great, Lucy.” Their calls had been maybe a little awkward on occasion after he’d admitted a more-than-professional interest, but not much. He had the feeling that she was as strained for proper human contact as he was.

When he hung up he bent himself back to the task of practice and study. If he was going to be making another homebond, this time for an actual customer, he needed to get the enchantment right. Alpha Chester probably wouldn’t appreciate needing antacids and pepto-bismol after every use.

His progress on turning threads into tubes was not going too badly, but it was becoming pretty obvious that he’d never have the facility at it that he did with his threads. He could, with effort, flatten out a thread and roll it into a tube, at which point the structure was stable. It was a tedious and finnicky process, though, and he was far from being able to do it ad-hoc.

Trying to make structures with them clarified a lot of differences between himself and regular mages, though. The tubes were stiffer and larger, not as easy to manipulate but not as prone to deformation. That meant there was none of the vibration or oscillation his threads always had while the frameworks were energized, but it wasn’t possible to match the outline as well. So it actually required less total vis, was presumably not nauseating, but it was far slower and left behind a lot more evidence.

Sadly, it was not the cure-all that he’d been hoping, but it would at least mean his enchantments could be less terrible. Especially since he’d been making at least a little progress with the actual literature and theory. Enough that he could identify some of the simpler aspects, anyway. If nothing else, he could make a larger receiving plate, something more along the lines of the GAR teleporters, so multiple people could fit through simultaneously.

The derivation from construct to enchantment and back still escaped him. It was, apparently, hard to begin with, and the advanced stuff was of course restricted to the Guild of Enchanting. At least the more basic techniques were widely known simply because every mage wanted to turn their spells into foci instead of having to construct them manually every time. Not that he blamed them.

His gravitykinesis was actually the perfect candidate for turning into a focus. It was basically impossible for him to lift himself because of the impact his blurry vis threads had on things like guts and the inner ear, but having to construct that from tubes every time would be exceedingly difficult. Unfortunately, there was just too much involved in that process to even start at the moment, so he’d have to stick to the floating chair or flying luggage version until he found some better references.

Callum had also spent a lot of time drafting up plans for his bunker. Which was, despite the name, not something he wanted to build underground. With air and earth mages, that wasn’t that much protection anyway. No, the value would be in making it difficult to find for anyone, mundane or magical. Doing that while still being able to have things like power and internet might be more difficult, but magic would help.

Now that he had the materials, he really wanted to enchant permanent portals. Not big ones for people or vehicles, but something small enough to run a cable bundle through. He was pretty sure that was what GAR used to increase the amount of mana at their offices, since they very definitely had more than the surroundings. The only issue was whether there was enough ambient mana around, though he’d been making strides on reducing the costs for his own constructs.

He’d kinda-sorta cracked the recirculation issue, after much study of the CAD drawings he’d taken from the dragonlands, but what he could manage thus far was a pretty crude approximation. Eventually, he was confident that he’d be able to manage a proper one, though, since he was ever so slowly learning some of the principles behind the structures. Trial and error weren’t nearly as good as instruction, but he wasn’t sure he’d trust any mage at this point.

The copious notes he was taking, on the other hand, might well help someone down the line. He didn’t know who, or when, since it wasn’t like he was in the running to get his work immortalized by the magical authorities. Still, there was no telling what the future held. Plus, he’d long ago gotten into the habit of sketching or writing down everything, and so much magic was relative distances, curves, and angles that it shared a lot of commonality with his architecture training.

In anticipation of the cash infusion he’d be getting from Chester, Callum drove all the way to Dallas to trade in a couple of his gold plates for money. There was nothing particularly exciting about the trip, save for the fact that there was quite a bit of supernatural presence there and he felt a little weirded out having a heavily warded building within his perceptions.

With his tattoo gone, he couldn’t pose as a mage anymore, so he had to make do with a normal buyer for his gold, though he didn’t cash out more than one plate at a time. If he looked hard enough, he could find people who were happy to take bullion, no questions asked. One particularly seedy place, though, sent someone to trail after him when he turned down their laughable offer. That was kind of hilarious, since he just discreetly turned a corner and teleported to the next block.

It did drive home why he was staying out in a sparsely-populated area in a trailer home, despite the drab surroundings and occasionally sketchy neighbors. The whole thing made Callum miss West Virginia, or even South Dakota. Anywhere with more green. But even that was better than the sea of uncaring faces and bland concrete of a city.

After he refreshed his cash reserves, it was a long tedious process of shopping around and doing the minutiae of getting his plans fleshed out. He had, somewhat regretfully, decided that his bunker couldn’t be in the United States, if for no other reason than the surveillance everywhere. Or rather, the fact that every transaction and phone call and so on was so interlinked and the requirement for identification so ubiquitous.

Eventually, some facial recognition database somewhere would flag him on a store camera or something, and he’d have another GAR kill team after him. Considering the way the last one acted, that wasn’t something he wanted to deal with. Especially since they didn’t seem to have much care for other people or infrastructure. He had to wonder how many “industrial accidents” and “tragic fires” were the result of such things.

Though from what he’d seen, there probably weren’t too many rogues like him. Enough that they had a black ops force, sure, but for all he knew they mostly operated in the portal worlds. Or their magical cleanup squad was really good, which was equally possible, since there weren’t overt signs of major magical battles anywhere.

The secrecy still bothered him, because from what he saw it wouldn’t have been that hard for mages and assorted supernaturals to establish themselves on top. Sure, there weren’t that many of them, but they were so obscenely powerful that they ought to have been at the top of all the classical civilizations. But there were no real hints of that.

Either history worldwide had been thoroughly scrubbed, which didn’t seem likely, or supernaturals hadn’t actually been around in antiquity. It was one thing if they’d been there to found Rome or Babylon, but it was another if they would have had to compete with the Holy Roman Empire. Now, of course, he was sure they’d inveigled their way in with the elites of the world, who could use things like healing magic. Or instant teleports.

The mages, he could understand. They had the portal worlds and probably not a huge need for normal technology. The vamps and the shifters seemed like they’d benefit far more from positions of power, though he supposed they might have issues that weren’t clear at first glance. Even with glamours, things like not being active during the day would make it difficult for them to rule over humans.

Or maybe they just wouldn’t be able to restrain their appetites.

For the moment that secrecy did help him, or rather, the disconnect between the magical world and the real one. It meant he could wander around a showcase on solar panels without having to worry that something would mark him as a rogue mage. Partly because no normal person knew about mages, and partly because solar panels just weren’t something the magical world especially cared about.

He doubted they spent much time in the offices of civil engineers, either. Which Callum did. He couldn’t get his plans properly certified since he hadn’t located the actual land he wanted to put his bunker, but he could at least get someone qualified and start running it through the process of figuring out electrical and plumbing. Not that he even wanted to get it officially certified, since that would risk his ID and he’d rather not.

As it stood he’d at least learned from his past mistakes and had his pickup under a different name than Keith Summers, amateur metalworker and the actual purchaser of the various services and material. The amateur was not a stretch, either. After watching the mordite processing, Callum figured that he might as well get a crucible and some other equipment so he could do it himself in the future, or if he needed to recycle his wire.

His knee made it essentially impossible for him to move heavy stuff with pure muscle, but that was what magic was for. He could even transfer molten metal with gravitykinesis, and probably more easily and safely than physically pouring a crucible. At some point he wanted to see if he could get anything of value from simulating microgravity, but that was pretty far down the list in his notebook.

Callum also picked up a new cane while he was out, something with a bit more style than the generic medical one from Mallorca, since despite all the exercises he was still feeling a bit lopsided. With that, he was ready for his call with Alpha Chester. Mostly, anyway. He still felt that same tension as he used to whenever he met any client for the first time, that little niggling worry that he’d come off as a complete idiot. Of course, he’d dealt with Chester before, but not in this exact way.

“Chester here.” The man’s voice came from the phone as Lucy linked him into the conversation. Callum wasn’t entirely certain what technological witchcraft she had worked so they could talk anonymously, but he figured she had to know what she was doing. “You say you’ve got a homebond to sell?”

“More like I can make one to sell,” Callum replied, sitting in the back of his pickup out at the edge of cell service. “Considering you’re not a mage, I was thinking you might like something a little different from the ring-plate setup. Like maybe two plates that connect to each other?”

“That would be excellent,” Chester said. “How would I use it, and how big can you make it?”

“Well, you’re still going to need a mage to activate it, unfortunately. I can’t change that just yet, nor the fact that you’re going to need a mage or some kind of mana source to charge it up. But as for size, probably a meter diameter circle.”

“Wait one,” Chester said. Callum tapped his pencil against his notebook while he waited, thinking. The paired-plate thing was actually a fairly simple evolution of the homebond, since the actual teleportation enchantment was symmetrical. It wasn’t nearly as complicated as what GAR used, but it also didn’t have any protections or security or anything. Which was why he wasn’t going to make one for himself.

Chester might be able to secure both ends of the teleport, but Callum sure couldn’t. Teleport pads would probably be more pleasant to use than a homebond, but it’d also be an open invitation for someone to wander into whatever secure area he used. That wasn’t even counting that he wasn’t sure how the teleport overcame the vis resistance people had.

When he fed it directly, it was linked in, so that made sense. But mages that just shoved mana into it, rather then vis, didn’t have that benefit, and that wasn’t mentioning the bubbles and shields and so on. Nor did he know how a non-mage like Alpha Chester would use one, given the difficulty he’d had teleporting Clara.

“We can manage that,” Chester said after a moment. “One meter is acceptable.”

“It also doesn’t have any of the flourishes the GAR system has,” he said. “There’s no security, nothing. It’d just teleport from point to point.” He was planning to leave some room on the pads for Chester’s pet mage to add any extra stuff to address that, though maybe it was just a matter of raw power. Either way, he needed to make it clear because it wouldn’t do to sell Chester a lemon.

“That’s actually better, for our purposes,” Chester assured him. “The more stripped-down, the better. ”

“That’s handy,” Callum said dryly. “Though that means no safety features, either.”

“But it will work?”

“I’ll test it myself before I send it over,” he said. “I assume we’ll use a dead drop again.”

“Of course,” Chester said, with some degree of amusement. “I’ll have Lucy supply you with a map of my territory.”

“Works for me,” Callum replied. “Speaking of Lucy, I’d like you to pay her out of whatever this is going to run. Say, ten percent finders fee and ten percent more for a deposit.”

“So, twelve kilos to you and three to Lucy,” Chester said, without skipping a beat.

“Works for me,” Callum agreed. “I’ll let Lucy know when it’s ready.”

“That is acceptable,” Chester told him.

“Sounds great to me, big man,” Lucy said happily. “Another couple like this and I can retire!”

***

Most of the official work correspondence Lucy got was routine. For her, it was all through email, because fortunately enough her bosses were technology-literate. Most of GAR proper was, in fact — all the bureaucrats and decisionmakers for the day-to-day operations. The Houses themselves still lagged behind. There was also the fact that GAR employed a lot of non-mages, so they couldn’t use foci.

Lucy was pretty sure they’d come up with scry-coms solely to avoid using mundane-produced goods.

The email that dropped into her inbox that morning landed with an almost audible thud, marked with importance flags and all caps and exclamation marks. That by itself wasn’t really an issue, but the contents were a little unsettling. Orders for every employee at GAR Midwest to report to the main floor, with the implicit threat that anyone who didn’t would be at best fired. Considering it was GAR, the penalties could run a lot more severe than just job termination. Like life termination.

“Well, shit.” She scrambled to flip a few switches on her various machines and peripherals, burning her secretly routed connections and purging a few bits of local storage. Most of her illicit work was kept offsite, with only a few connections that she had full control over. It was probably a little cheeky to route anything to GAR Midwest, but she was the one who was in charge of the network and had as anonymous and encrypted a connection as could be managed. Besides, it wasn’t like she had anything else to do most of the day. Her job was mostly a game of waiting until something broke.

This seemed like it was a little more than something breaking though, and she could always re-establish things if it wasn’t anything unusual. Or maybe she’d just leave them off. Given how stirred up things were at the moment it was probably a smarter idea, but she’d always enjoyed sticking it to the mages higher up who were supposed to be supervising her and had no idea what she actually did.

She locked down her workstation and got out of her chair, patting herself down for a quick inventory to make sure she had everything before heading out of her dungeon. The IT center was, in fact, underneath the main part of GAR Midwest, a flight of empty echoing stairs taking her up to the ground floor and in among the people who were emerging from various offices.

There was various confused conversation, the crowd naturally splitting into the duds and the lower-level supernaturals who worked at GAR. Lucy was by far the youngest of the duds, most of the others being well into middle age and about as cheerful and exciting as could be expected from a group of office drones. She was technically an office drone herself but she preferred to think she didn’t count.

“What’s going on?” Albert, the facilities clerk, asked her.

“I don’t actually know,” Lucy said, which was the concerning part. Usually she caught wind of anything unusual going on by snooping on emails, but there had been nothing to indicate some kind of emergency all-hands. Which meant it had come through purely supernatural channels, mage-to-mage.

“Huh,” he said, and they continued on out into the main floor. Everyone else was there, with some of the mages and a couple of the fae floating above the gathered employees. Supervisor Lowell stood at the front, flanked by people in black uniforms. In fact, she realized, the entire area was surrounded by the black-uniformed types, scattered about the edges, which made Lucy very uneasy.

“Hello, everybody,” Lowell said, a false smile plastered on her face. “There have been some internal issues of late, so the BSE is here to do some interviews. If you don’t have anything to hide, you don’t have to worry about it. All interviews will be confidential, of course.”

A thrill of fear shot through her, but she tried not to show it. Of all people gathered there, she was the one who actually did have something to fear. There wasn’t any way she could bow out of it either, if the Bureau of Secret Enforcement was about. At least she didn’t stand out because everyone was nervous, and a dozen people started talking at once.

“Silence!” The speaker was a small woman next to one of the BSE folks, and her voice carried enough magic with it to still the tongues of everyone who was speaking. Lucy found she couldn’t even open her mouth, and shuddered involuntarily. She hated compulsion, and she hated more that she had no real way to stop it.

Usually she had some resistance to that kind of thing, even if she was a dud. While she couldn’t exactly see magic, she could still sense it, and sort of brace herself against it. Not so in this instance, since the woman’s magic was so powerful, some fae thing of frozen rose petals reaching into her brain.

“Thank you, Agent Black,” one of the BSE members said. “Now, M-0 follow Agent Carter. M-1, Agent Jay. M-2 and above, Agent Black.” The agents raised their hands as their names were called. Lucy gritted her teeth and started making her way toward Carter.

The compulsion was already fading, but there were only a few mutters here and there. Nobody was happy, but at the same time, nobody was going to risk the wrath of BSE. They were the real deal, and they had no sense of humor whatsoever.

What was even worse than being separated out that way was the fact that they were being taken to the teleporters. There were some interview rooms on-site, but they were just meant to deal with low-level supernaturals who had been caught being naughty. Going off-site meant they were anticipating something serious.

She found herself maybe third in line, ahead of Albert but behind two of the switchboard operators. A quick glance showed that there were more BSE personnel up there, working the teleporters and determining the destinations. They were definitely taking this seriously.

The line shuffled forward as a BSE agent processed them through the teleporter one by one. When it was Lucy’s turn, the room blinked and she found herself in a bare, white alcove behind a security station. The atmosphere was oddly oppressive, so it was probably in a portal world, but there was nothing to indicate where. Yet another black-clad BSE agent, this time a vampire lifted a crest marked with the symbol of House Fane, and the tattoo on her wrist tingled.

“You will state your name,” the agent instructed, the vampire’s voice compelling her to speak. She couldn’t even brace herself against it that time, her mouth opening of her own accord.

“Lucile Harper.”

Some of the fae and vampires employed by GAR pushed around their dud coworkers, so it wasn’t like she’d never been the target of compulsion before. It was kept to a minimum, since even if they were duds they were still part of GAR, but that didn’t stop the occasional instruction to forget what they’d walked into the room for, or eat the wrong lunch. So she wasn’t completely unfamiliar with nature of such things, even if she’d never felt it hammer home so hard before.

“You will proceed through the gateway.” She had no choice but to comply, in that horrible feeling of doing something against her own better judgement. Of knowing that something is a mistake and doing it anyway. It wasn’t like there was even any need to use compulsion to simply wave her through into the facility, but they did it anyway.

Her feet carried her forward past the warded gateway, skin crawling at the feel of the vis scan, and she stopped. The facility was chillingly bland and unmarked, a dull gray hall with dull gray doors and sourceless lights stretching out in front of her. The door to her left opened and another vampire stepped out, also clad in BSE black.

It could have been the brother of the one at the security station, but most vampires bore at least a vague resemblance to each other. They could be taller or shorter, paler or darker, but there was something about the eyes and the mouth that they all had in common. Maybe it was just the inhuman interest and the faint sneer, but Lucy didn’t need to see fangs to know it was a vampire.

“You will follow me,” the new one instructed, and proceeded down the hallway, forcing her to walk along behind. A few moments later she heard the agent at the security station instruct someone new to state their name, and heard Albert answer.

“Halt,” the vampire told her, forcing her to nearly fall over as she stopped abruptly. He opened one of the unmarked doors to reveal an empty room with two chairs, a table, and some cameras. “You will enter the room,” he instructed, and she was compelled inside.

“You will sit down. You will not speak until you are told.”

Lucy seated herself on the nearest chair in a kind of nightmarish haze, unable to ask questions or even protest her treatment. Not that she thought BSE would listen, but this was far beyond bullying or poking fun. It was like they’d already judged her guilty.

What was worse, they just made her sit there for a good ten or fifteen minutes before the vampire agent returned. For some reason the compulsion never waned, and all she could do was stew in fear and anxiety, not knowing what was going on or whether they knew anything about her. When the agent did come back, he had a small folder that he set down on the table as he took the seat across from her, his nametag labeling him as Agent Blanchet.

“This interview will be recorded,” Blanchet stated flatly, and Lucy would have scoffed if she could have. It was hardly an interview when she couldn’t say anything of her own accord.

“You will answer all questions truthfully and completely,” Blanchet said, and opened the folder.

“What is your name?”

“Lucile Rosetta Harper.”

“What are your duties at GAR Midwest?”

“Information Technology management. I run the servers for GAR.” Even if she couldn’t fight against the requirement to speak, she could at least control the precise words she used. The first few questions were innocuous enough, which she was glad of. It gave her some time to regain her bearings and start actually thinking rather than reacting. The introductory portion of the interrogation was probably to get people used to answering questions, since even under compulsion people could trip over their tongues, but for her it was an opportunity to clear her mind.

“Have you given anyone, for any reason, any information restricted by GAR?”

“No.” It wasn’t a lie. She had never given anyone any information. She had always sold it, never given it for free. Although part of her struggled to elaborate on that, the flat no was far better than a twisty truth that might invite further questioning.

“Are you aware of anyone who has, for any reason, supplied restricted information to individuals opposing GAR’s interests?”

“Five years ago, Lucian Friar supplied the preferred pastry choices of the lower office pool to Gran’s Doughnuts across the street. Four years ago, in August, Albert Lan gave the bid data for office supplies to a wholesaler friend so they could underbid.” She had almost five years of personal experience with all the little, petty, harmless sort of peculation that could be considered restricted information and individuals opposing GAR’s interests, without even touching on the sort of nonsense more important people got up to.

Tattling on anyone of real importance would generate questions of its own, but she had plenty of little things to get through first. It was the best bluff she could think of to screen anything she had done, because while she couldn’t refuse to answer, she could answer in the least helpful way possible. Blanchet listened for a few minutes, frowning, before finally getting fed up with her increasingly petty and convoluted stories. He held up his hand, then realizing that didn’t do anything, actually commanded her to stop.

“You will stop talking,” he said bluntly, and then referred to his paper again. Lucy rubbed at her throat, glad that she hadn’t been specifically commanded not to, wishing she had something to drink. Wishing she could ask for something to drink.

“What are your duties with regard to Alpha Chester?”

She’d been expecting that one. It was no secret she was on retainer for Alpha Chester, and even had her physical residence near the pack headquarters. It wasn’t like she could stay in the House she’d been born to.

“I provide technical support and troubleshooting,” she said. “I make sure his networks function, his phones are supported, and supply teleconferencing services.” Those were what she was hired for. Anything beyond that was freelancing and not, strictly speaking, a duty.

“Do you have significant relations with anyone outside of GAR aside from Alpha Chester’s pack?”

She struggled with that question a fraction of a moment, completely unable to keep herself from answering it, but not willing to betray the big man. The thought of which sparked enough of an idea that she could harness her tongue in the instant before she actually started speaking.

“My big man calls me up sometimes and we flirt a lot. Last time we talked he wanted to take me out somewhere and I think that would be really great because I haven’t had a proper date in—”

“You will stop talking,” Blanchet said, with a long, flat look at her. Contrary to mundane literature, vampires were not sexy at all. They weren’t sexual at all. They couldn’t reproduce and had no interest in anything related to it. Finally he stood, closing the folder and tucking it under his arm.

“You will stand up and follow me,” he instructed her, and brought her back along the sterile, featureless hallway. Back through the gateway, and the vamp there lifted the crest again. Suddenly the irresistible compulsion faded, and she staggered suddenly, gasping and heart hammering like she’d run a marathon.

“You will go back through the teleport,” the security guard said, but it lacked the bite of before. Not that she was about to disobey. She wobbled through and found herself back in GAR Midwest, where she was directed to sit off to the side with the others who had finished their interrogations.

Lucy knew she was incredibly lucky that they’d not asked more specific and pointed questions, ones that would have been harder to answer without betraying herself, but it wasn’t all luck. She had always known she could be compelled to speak, which was why she separated everything. Why she always worked by individual contract, why she didn’t call her clients by name, nor ask them for their names. Even Alpha Chester.

Even so, she’d never thought it would be needed. Not beyond, at most, deflecting a too-curious fae. She’d never considered that she’d be treated like some criminal renegade and deprived of even the ability to speak for almost an hour. Lucy slumped down and put her head in her hands. Her jaw ached from gritting her teeth and her palms smarted from where her fingernails had been digging into them.

She sure as hell wasn’t getting anything else done today. Being angry was one thing, but Lucy was too pissed to even think.

***

“So, nobody admitted anything.” Agent Jahn looked at the reports from the BSE folks that he’d cleared to work on the case. He’d known it would be a headache from the beginning, but not this much of a headache. Part of him thought wistfully of the large television at home and the stack of those animated foreign shows he had yet to get through.

Not that he’d ever admit to such a thing.

“I wouldn’t say anything. We did get a lot of confessions of minor wrongdoing,” Agent Lavigne, of the Lavigne nest, pointed out.

“None of which we will be doing anything about. Well, except for Ms. Janry.” Jahn grimaced. He didn’t care about stealing paperclips or salting doughnuts, but a full embezzlement scheme was something GAR would have to address. Not that it was his problem.

“It would be easier if we could have told people what we’re looking for,” Agent Belas said, his bald head reflecting the overhead lights like a mirror.

“That’s against policy,” Jahn told him brusquely.

“For internal investigations, especially,” Agent Danforth added. “The fae spreading around their stories is bad enough, but to admit we think GAR is compromised? We’d have entire Houses pulling their members out, not to mention packs and nests.”

“And the duds would gossip about it,” Agent Blanchet said. Jahn had given him the job of dealing with the duds, though he hadn’t been aware the vampire would be so annoyed about it. “They chatter on and on about such pointless and stupid mundane things!”

“Keep it professional, people,” Jahn warned them. “Danforth, what about the magic sweep? Find anything?”

“Only a few people with extra privacy wards on their office,” Danforth said. “If there were any other foreign enchantments, they’ve been integrated into the base structure, and Tarson checked against all the renovation records. Nothing’s out of place.”

“I don’t like it,” Jahn sighed. “But sometimes you don’t find anything because there’s nothing to find.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Danforth looked over at Jahn.

“No.”

Chapter 10 – Target

Callum emerged on the other side of the trailer house, stepping off the receiver plate. Tedious as it was, using the tube structures for enchanting worked far better. Getting the vis to bond cleanly and smoothly was much easier, and didn’t require nearly as many tries. There were some scraps of mordite wire that would require recycling, because vis certainly did not come off of that without melting it, but it had been far easier with the new technique.

What was better, for the first time he could use his own teleport enchantment without any real issues. There was more of a jolt than with the official GAR teleporters, from what he could remember, but it was far from the near-incapacitating nausea and disorientation of Callum’s own homebond. Which, itself, was far better than the original one he’d made with less robust materials.

The pads worked both ways, and had a mana acceptor with a converter structure he didn’t understand but could still copy. The conversion rate was usurious, but it did mean that he could empower the teleporter without using his vis directly. Unfortunately, if he did that, he couldn’t actually use it since the teleporter didn’t grab him. It tried, but it just couldn’t get a hold.

It was a weird feeling from his end, though it did imply he had least some ability to resist other mages. Not much of one, though, from his experiences. Admittedly there was a difference between a low-powered, non-weaponized teleport and something designed to deal damage to another mage.

To make it work for him he had to feed his vis in directly, which mitigated the resistance enough for it to move him. It didn’t completely eliminate it though, not like the implanted, vis-resonance version did. In exchange, the plates and their teleportation framework were large enough take multiple people through. It worked from either end as well, so it was a two-way transport.

Callum was pretty pleased, despite the mordite he’d have to recycle and the fact that it didn’t even have the recirculation stuff to reduce the cost of sustaining it. Compared to the GAR stuff, or even the homebond he’d looked at, it was crude and ugly, but so long as it worked he was fine with it. So long as it worked.

He was still worried that Chester’s pet mage wouldn’t have whatever trick it was that made it so the teleport could take along supernaturals, but there might well be a super simple solution. Something that could turn off that resistance. In fact he was pretty sure that was the case, since it wasn’t like Gayle’s bubble changed when she went through a teleporter.

While he’d been working on that, he’d also used some of the fine wire and some key fob blanks to make himself a new glamour focus and a telekinesis focus. He still had gravitykinesis, and he preferred using it over the focus, but telekinesis was so easy a focus he figured he might as well have it. Plus, gravitykinesis couldn’t really apply any pressure without him trying to shift the orientation of the gravity field around, and that usually just ejected the object in question.

The new foci, made with tubes, took noticeably less mana to manifest their effects, admittedly with a commensurate increase in residue. That restricted their use to cities with an already-heavy supernatural presence, or really, really out of the way spots. Even if he hadn’t actually seen any signs of supernaturals around his trailer house, he couldn’t be sure that some shifter pack or something wouldn’t swing by on patrol.

For all he knew, doing too much magic practice would make that more likely. He’d been thinking about Shahey’s comment about how supernaturals tended to be more comfortable around each other, and how mana was so disturbed in cities. Callum’s theory was that all that churned up mana was similar to the dense flow near the portal worlds, meaning it gave mages more energy.

He wasn’t sure about other types of supernaturals, since he hadn’t seen anything unusual in Winut, but it might just have been something he couldn’t directly sense. After all, it wasn’t like he could tell the difference between the type of mana coming from the Dragonlands versus the Night Lands. There had to be subtleties he hadn’t noticed yet.

Callum already knew he disliked where he lived, necessary as it was. What he didn’t know was how much of that was something in his hindbrain, and how much was just that west-central Texas was an ugly place to live. That the trailer was a depressing place to sleep. That the pickup made a weird rattling noise that the mechanic hadn’t quite been able to fix.

All these things bothered him, but now he had to wonder if they bothered him more than they should. He had to wonder if the idiosyncrasies of the old house in Winut hadn’t annoyed him as much as they should have. There was no telling what instincts he needed to doubt.

An instinct he didn’t doubt was the alarm in the pit of his stomach when he called Lucy and it went to voicemail. That had never happened before, and any break in normal patterns was suspect. If he’d bugged out the moment he’d seen something was off during the last disastrous visit to Gayle, he never would’ve been caught.

The sudden change meant he wasn’t even sure if the number was safe to call anymore. It was true he’d never called her at an unreasonable hour, but at the same time, she’d answered pretty much immediately every single time. It didn’t even ring, it just flipped straight to a machine-generated message about reaching the inbox of a different number than one he had dialed.

Callum turned off the phone and climbed back into his truck. He’d have to try again later, in the evening maybe, but part of him was afraid that there was already someone tracing his position. If Lucy was compromised, they’d probably at least know he was in Texas, though Texas was quite the area to search. Maybe it’d be better to take a trip out of state for a while.

He loaded everything important into the pickup, not trusting the trailer to remain unmolested while he was away. Whether it was nosy neighbors or some supernatural stopping by, it was better not to leave anything identifiable or valuable behind. Besides, it wasn’t like he had that much that was irreplaceable in the first place, just the enchanting materials, money, and electronics.

The last thing that went in the back of the truck was version three of the flying chair. He was still very, very leery of using self-gravitykinesis, since the last time had left him however many thousands of feet in the air, and it drained his vis reserves absurdly quickly. There was a very real risk, and even more substantial fear, of accidentally going too high, or even out into space, and killing himself with his stupidity and lack of control.

Even with all that, he couldn’t deny that his personal warp drive could be extremely useful, when used with proper caution and forethought. Callum had no desire to use it to escape again, not when he had a working homebond again, but it was better to have the option than not. Even if it still looked silly, he’d put more thought into making the new version functional.

He’d found a tractor roll cage and installed a seat in it, then bolted some shelving below the seat. The top of the cage got some scrap metal and an army-green tarp covering it. The end result was something that looked like it could go either on farm equipment or some disused carnival ride, but it served his purposes. It didn’t fall over when it was on level ground, it could carry equipment, it kept the rain off, and he could unroll the tarp to camouflage it somewhat. It didn’t even look terribly out of place on the back of a beat-up pickup.

Callum headed north and east since, when he did get in contact with Lucy and Chester, any dead drop would be in Chester’s territory anyway. He called twice more as he drove, at hour increments, and got a different voicemail number and a pizza place. If nothing else it answered why Lucy never gave him a different number to call. Callum wasn’t conversant enough with tech to know how she’d set up some weird number routing system, but he could imagine how that effectively protected her end of things.

If it was broken, that might mean it hadn’t protected her.

He stewed on it a bit as he made his way through Texas, not braving the interstate solely because he didn’t trust his truck to handle anything faster than highway speeds. Unfortunately there was nothing he could do about it; he didn’t even know where she was physically located if he was of a mind to check on her. Which he didn’t, that sounded far too much like some sort of trap and he’d already walked into one of those.

From then on, he made sure only to call while driving on dirt roads, on the off chance someone was tracking locations. It was easy enough to keep changing directions too, since he didn’t have a specific destination in mind. Nobody could get ahead of him if he didn’t know where he was going next himself. It was late evening before he finally got a response, and Lucy’s voice came through the receiver.

“Hey there, big man.” For once Lucy did not sound chipper. In fact, she sounded positively exhausted.

“Everything okay over there, Lucy?” Part of him suddenly wished they’d established a duress code. Though he was pretty sure if someone was there Lucy would be fake-cheerful instead of glum.

“Bit of a few days at work,” Lucy said. She didn’t elaborate.

“Is that why I couldn’t reach you earlier? I was a little worried when I kept getting different wrong numbers.”

“Ah, yeah. Sorry about that, big man. Have to restrict my calls a bit.” Callum chewed his lip as he considered that, stopping at a light and checking carefully before taking a right.

“I take it work got too dangerous for your side job? I’m not accusing, just, if you need me to be more circumspect, that’s fine. I guess I was a bit spoiled before.”

“It’s nothing you did, big man,” Lucy said, then paused. “Well, it probably is, but nothing you had control over.”

“Huh.” Callum took another turn. “Some shakedowns at GAR ‘cause they haven’t found me yet?” Considering the reaction he’d gotten over in France it was obvious they were serious about getting him, but that didn’t mean he had any grasp of what the internal scuttlebutt was. He could have been their number one priority or just another annoying thing between real high level politics.

“That’s my guess.” Another dead stop to the conversation.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s perfectly fine,” he assured her. “But if you want to rant about GAR, I’m all ears. It’s not like I’m going to defend them.” His comment drew a laugh, though not a loud one.

“Yeah, I know,” Lucy said. “I guess, it’s just. I didn’t really think they were that bad, you know? Maybe not the bees knees and all that, and I’m a dud so I’m kind of a whatever, but it was a pretty good gig. But then they came in to audit us or whatever you call it, and it was like I wasn’t even a person. They didn’t even let me walk on my own, it was all under compulsion.” Callum’s grip tightened on the cracked faux leather of the steering wheel and he stepped on the brake, slowing down and steering into a strip mall’s parking lot.

“Are you okay?” He asked again. “I don’t— I can’t imagine what that’s like. That’s got to be horrible.”

“It wasn’t pleasant,” Lucy said. “But, I mean. All they did was ask me questions.”

“And they still let you go?” Callum asked. A slow-dawning alarm crept on him as he processed what that portended, but if Lucy wasn’t urging him to flee, there had to be a reason.

“Not to brag, big man, but just because an answer is truthful doesn’t mean it’s useful. They don’t think I’m more than an empty-headed office drone.”

“Damn, Lucy! That must’ve been some quick thinking.” The bit of burgeoning fear collapsed and he smiled, but it was more vindictive than happy. “I know when GAR came down hard on me I was kind of a wreck.”

“I’ve got a hard time imagining you being anything but a smooth operator, big man,” Lucy said, a little bit of forced cheer in her voice. “I don’t think I’m cut out for your kind of life though. All that was awful, but really, what can I do about it?”

“They say all it takes for evil to triumph is to do nothing,” Callum told her. “But you haven’t been doing nothing. You’ve been helping me, right? Besides, for the moment, nothing might be the better call. There’s no point in getting yourself caught.”

“Huh.” She fell silent for a moment to consider it. “Yeah, I’m gonna be walking the straight and narrow for a while. Nothing risky for Lucy.”

“Welcome to my life,” Callum told her, with as much of a wry twist as he could manage. “It’s fine, though. Better you be safe than get found out by the powers that be.”

“Yeahhhh, I’m with you on that one.”

“You know,” Callum said, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “If they’re willing to use compulsion it might be good to establish some kind of duress code,” he said, following through on his earlier idea. “Not a set phrase or anything, that seems too easy to block.”

“You are crazy paranoid,” Lucy told him. “But in this case, I think you’re right. Umm. Let me think.” Nothing came over the phone for a while, but eventually she had an answer. “If I bring up my House, that should do it. They’ve written me off and I’ve written them off and good riddance, eh? So if I suddenly insert that into the conversation, you’ll know.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Callum said, though he couldn’t help but grimace. Being ejected from the family that way had to be terrible.

“Anyway, I’m guessing you’re calling about my other job? With the boss man?”

“Sure am,” Callum said, letting the subject drop. “I’ve got it finished and it works for me, but I don’t know if it’ll work for him. Under the circumstances I figure I’d better drop it off and let him poke at it rather than demanding money for what might be hard for him to use.”

“I tell you what, big man, I see so many emails about needing new teleport locations and having to do maintenance on the teleporters that if they knew you were making your own, they’d have apoplexy.”

“I can just imagine.” So far as he’d seen, every single spatial thing ran through Duvall, making her a tyrant among tyrants. Obviously he didn’t know her personally, but he’d worked with, though never for, people with the same death grip on their area of responsibility.

“Gimme a minute, see if I can get ahold of the boss man.”

“Sure thing.” Callum turned around and left the strip mall parking lot, turning on the windshield wipers as a November drizzle started. Less than a minute later, a familiar voice answered.

“Chester here.”

“It’s Mister Summers,” Callum said, having decided to just use his current name. Just on the off chance there was some kind of surveillance for Professor brown. “I have a prototype, but you should probably make sure you can get it to work before issuing payment.”

“That was quick,” Chester said. “I was on a waiting list for three years before they installed a GAR teleporter here.”

“I suspect they’ve got more to worry about than I do. Lots and lots of enchantments, lots and lots of mages who need them.”

“Likely so,” Chester allowed. “I’d prefer it if you would leave the package with one of my Alphas. Label it as coming from Clara’s friend. Lucy, would you send him a list?”

“You got it, boss man.” Even with Chester, Lucy didn’t sound quite herself. “Give me an hour and call me back, would you, big man?”

“Will do,” Callum said. Given the phone situation, all her network stuff was probably in disarray, so he didn’t blame her for needing a little bit to prepare. “Vamps still behaving?” He added out of idle curiosity.

“No, but with the sheer devastation of Master Lavigne’s numbers, most of what’s been going on is infighting.” Chester’s voice held a grim satisfaction. Callum found that he suddenly, intensely did not care at all. That was the sort of ridiculous internal politics that he’d wanted to get away from.

He still didn’t regret it, but his success at avoiding magical politics was very much mixed. At least he was meeting them on his terms, though, rather than as some pawn between a bunch of people who didn’t care about him. If he had played at all by their terms, he would have lost.

“Well, I wish you luck with that,” he said, and did mean it. Chester seemed like the sort of man he could have worked with in other circumstances. Even if he had only interacted with the Midwest Alpha a few times, Lucy didn’t seem to have any issues, which was an endorsement.

“Thank you, Mister Summers,” Chester said. “Is there any other business?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Then I look forward to receiving the merchandise.” The line went dead, and Callum hung up, taking out his other phone to look for a hotel sufficiently far away from his current location. Part of him wished that he’d set up a teleport system between his truck and his house, so he wouldn’t have to bother with any of that, but he’d need something more robust than a pickup for that. Preferably something that had an interior that was completely safe, like an armored truck.

He kept driving east, yawning involuntarily as darkness fell, and dialed Lucy’s number at the appointed time. The hotel was still a ways away, since there’d be little point in possibly compromising a place he was intending to spend any amount of time at, and he’d taken the lesson that Chester had given him to heart. There were no straight lines to give away his path of travel.

“Hey there, big man,” Lucy said.

“Long time, no talk,” he replied.

“I’m pretty sure my great-grandparents used that joke,” Lucy accused.

“What can I say, it’s a classic.”

“C’mon, big man, you can do better than that!”

“Probably, but not at, uh,” he checked the clock. “Not at nearly nine.”

“Boo,” she said, still a little subdued. “Okay, big man, I have two things. One of them is the list that Chester wanted me to give you, but the other one is just for you.”

“Yeah?” Callum asked, interest piqued. He couldn’t actually remember if he had any standing requests with Lucy, but it had to be something interesting if she introduced it like that.

“So, yeah, I’ve got to lie low at GAR for a while, but before I shut down all my stuff I grabbed everything related to you. Most of it’s pretty useless, but I did find something I think you might want to deal with.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I’m afraid so. They, uh, tracked down that couple you rescued from the fae out near Creede. Well, the fae did, but GAR’s tagged them and brought them in.”

“They did what?” His voice came out cold, the steering wheel creaking under his hands again. He was only dimly aware of his surroundings for a moment, the back of his head buzzing from the sudden jolt of fury, and he had to steer off the road again so he didn’t cause an accident.

“I mean, good and bad. They’re just being held for questioning, but I mean, they’re sort of officially inside the supernatural world so I guess they’d be considered the fae’s responsibility? I’m not sure, since they’re part of the investigation into you so—”

“How did they even find them?” Callum demanded. “Why? They can’t possibly—” He cut himself off, since Lucy didn’t deserve his ranting. “Right. So. If you’re telling me this then they’re actually accessible, not buried deep in some GAR black site or something.”

Callum was more than willing to do something about the supernatural injustices he saw, but he wasn’t stupid or suicidal. Ambushing a bunch of unaware fae was one thing, but trying to break into a secure facility was something else. Especially since GAR could just teleport reinforcements even if he got the drop on whoever was inside.

He couldn’t save everyone that GAR messed with. Or most, or even many. It was a sprawling bureaucracy in the highest halls of power and he’d have been just as happy never interacting with them at all. But going after someone he’d already rescued made it personal.

He hadn’t forgotten what had happened to the young pair that he’d rescued from the vampires, either. There was still an accounting for that in the offing, once he figured out how. Callum wasn’t prepared to go full vigilante, but some people had something coming to them.

“Yeah, they’re being held at a GAR building in Miami. Guess they’re not important enough to take to wherever BSE keeps the real scary folks.”

“Or GAR is hoping to catch me by leaving them accessible.”

“I don’t think so, since like, there’s only the normal boilerplate DoA reports on them. Hasn’t even crossed the department head’s desk I don’t think. If you want I can send you the email text I found. Just thought you’d want to know about it.”

“Oh, I do, absolutely,” he assured her. “I’ll have to be very careful about what I do, though.”

“If you think it’s a good idea,” Lucy said, seeming a little hesitant. “Maybe it’s not. I mean, if they’re ready for you then you shouldn’t go, either. The DoA handles this kind of thing all the time, they’ll probably be fine?” It was more a question than a statement.

“From what you told me about the Department of Acquisition, they definitely won’t be fine,” Callum told her. “Even if they are lying in wait, I have to do something. If I don’t do anything, then that just means there will be more and more of this. Someone told me recently that the strong do what they can, and if you don’t do good things if you can, then you end up with no good anywhere.”

“So you’re a good guy, huh big man?”

“I don’t know about that,” Callum admitted. “But I do know I’m seeing evil.”

“I guess it’s hard to argue with that,” Lucy said after a moment, suddenly sounding very tired. Not that he blamed her. It wasn’t exactly a fun thing to contemplate.

Eventually Callum hung up, pulling up the promised text and copying the list of names and addresses of Chester’s Alphas. He couldn’t help but dwell in the news that Lucy had given him as he drove toward the hotel, unsettled and unhappy. The big problem with something like GAR was that it was a big machine and getting it to leave anyone alone was difficult. The more effort he put into it, the more of a target he’d make.

He was pretty sure that most people wouldn’t be willing to do what he did and completely opt out of society, change their names, and start over. It wasn’t likely they could go to the mundane authorities either, since they’d either be in cahoots with the supernatural authorities or just completely steamrolled by magical ability. Even normal agencies could fake evidence, so a magical one would have no trouble at all.

It weighed on his mind enough to unsettle his sleep, leaving him tired and grumpy the next day. He got up to deliver the teleport plates anyway, sorting through the fairly long list of Alphas to find one that was near enough that he could actually reach within the day. While he drove along, though, his mind was already skipping forward to what he was going to do rather than the job he’d just finished.

While he wanted to get going and head to Miami as soon as he could, the fact of the matter was that it wasn’t something he could do half-cocked. There wasn’t an immediate threat; the blow had already landed. Besides which, there was no way that he’d be able to sashay in and pull them out without any repercussions. The last GAR outpost he’d looked at had genuine security and staff, plus it was a good bet Miami had a significant supernatural presence for potential reinforcements.

It took more than a few hours of driving to get to Oklahoma and out to the address from Lucy’s list. It was a huge, upscale compound, basically a development unto itself, surrounded by crops and cattle fields, and it would actually be difficult to approach anonymously. He had to park his truck by the side the road and pop himself though the fields toward the central house, which looked like an old plantation mansion.

The package got left on the front step with the note about Clara written directly onto the metal with a marker. He’d splashed the plates and packaging with rubbing alcohol too, in hopes of purging his scent, but he didn’t know if that would really work. It wasn’t even clear whether shifters who did scent-tracking used physical scent or some kind of magical residue he couldn’t detect.

Then he drove off, to find a place with free Wi-Fi so he could do some looking at the local maps. Finding long-term parking was a pain, but if he was going to Florida he couldn’t go in his old pickup. He wasn’t even sure it’d make it that far. Besides which, no matter what sort of approach he ended up taking, he’d need more room than just the pickup bed.

For better or worse he didn’t have to return home. With everything useful already along for the ride, he merely rented a small U-Haul van under the name he used for the truck and transferred stuff over. Part of him would have preferred something more separated, but he was not confident in driving something that large in a city. The motorhome had been large enough and he just knew he’d clip something in the city streets if he took something as big as one of the moving trucks there.

It was times like that where he fully appreciated being able to teleport and float items both small and large. While his knee wasn’t terrible, he definitely would have had issues moving stuff back and forth, especially large things like the chair. What would have probably been half an hour or more of heavy labor took less than five minutes of sitting in the cab and concentrating.

Then it was off to Florida. What would have been something like a three hour flight was a two-day drive, even helping things along with judicious use of portals. It was a lot easier to drive the U-Haul through a portal than it was to teleport the whole thing, given the length of the van, but it wasn’t something he could do too often. Even if a portal large enough for a van was not that much wider or taller than one for a car, the area scaling meant it took a whole lot more vis.

During the drive it was technically his birthday, but he’d not been one to celebrate such things for a while. Birthdays just didn’t seem to be particularly exciting once he’d gotten stable finances and had taken a few vacations of his own accord. Once he didn’t even have anyone to share them with, he’d more or less written them off. The only reason he marked that one was because he felt so damn old, with a bum knee and stiff muscles from spending all day driving.

It was ironic that he was seeing far more of the world as an outlaw than he had when he was a genuine student of architecture. Admittedly, he found that most cities just had the same sort of styles over and over, rather than the far more interesting local construction that had evolved from their own cultures and resources and limitations. Suburbia had the same sort of bland sprawl, which meant a good chunk of his drive was flat-out boring.

At least it gave him time to ponder over options for dealing with the GAR outpost. It might be for the best to just abscond with the pair, because it didn’t sit right with him to try and assassinate some office workers who just happened to be in the building. On one hand, he’d seen a good number of these GAR personnel were complicit in the depredations of vampires and, he supposed, other supernaturals. On the other, there were people like Lucy who just happened to be employed by the machine.

He had second and third thoughts about going after the couple, whose names he still didn’t know, but he had to do it. His own morals aside, he could well see GAR deciding to take and hold anyone he had even the slightest contact with, regardless of how innocent they actually were. Shahey’s presence was probably the only reason that Tanner hadn’t been locked down by GAR, and not everyone had that protection.

Whatever he did in Miami would be a statement, so he’d have to make sure it was the right one.

Chapter 11 – Reconnaissance

Florida was unreasonably warm, at least to Callum’s sensibilities. Despite it being well into November, it was temperate enough he didn’t need a jacket, which just seemed wrong. He had to adjust his attire to fit in, though the license plate of his van still marked him as out of town. Admittedly, most all moving vans had plates from different states, but he still felt conspicuous.

Miami itself was no treat, either, the actual city crowded and claustrophobic, though there was more green than he had expected. The real problem, though, was that it seemed to be quite the supernatural hotspot. He could sense the trails of various mage-bubbles and spotted a number of shifters and fae with his own eyes. They seemed to cluster around the financial district, which only made sense. Even in the supernatural world, money was important.

It wasn’t just individuals, either. There were threads of wards running over the entire city; nothing immensely powerful, just something that linked various houses or businesses that had their own, denser warding schemes. If that sort of infrastructure required actual wire strung along the utility cables, that was one explanation for why it was in short supply. Utilities generally trumped luxuries.

It was the most complex magical infrastructure he’d seen, or rather, the most complex one he’d paid attention to. He hadn’t been looking for such things in other places, not even in the Night Lands, so there might well have been similar setups there he just hadn’t noticed. The one other GAR building he’d sought out had been in a far smaller city as well, so it might just be a scale issue.

Either way, he wasn’t comfortable driving around and possibly tripping some kind of alert. Given that every mage carried enchanted materials in the form of foci, the raw material he had with him probably wouldn’t set anything off, but mages also had the tattoo. Callum had no idea how much of an anomaly he’d look like, but he had to assume there was some kind of surveillance. He’d be far more comfortable if he could work his way around the various lines of wards.

He stowed the van in a parking lot and walked into town. The address of the GAR office was not in the densest part of the urban sprawl, but close enough. There were buildings everywhere, fenced in houses and squat blocks of businesses, pretty much all of which seemed to be owned and occupied by normal people. Still, mixed in here and there he saw some blatantly fae figures, or sensed some shifters by their vis.

It made the back of his neck itch, but there was nothing to make him stand out from the teeming masses, or at least he hoped there wasn’t. With his tattoo long gone and no bubble, plus having the RFID blocker in his wallet enchanted to suck up any stray vis, he shouldn’t have anything to make anyone suspicious about him being a supernatural. Not that he’d stand out in a city like Miami.

Even without the address he probably could have tracked down the office of his own accord. Not only was it at the center of the spiderweb of various ward lines, or maybe they were even mana transmission lines, but there was a subtle flow of mana coming from it. Callum was almost certain his ability to perceive mana had improved, since he was able to tell that not only was there denser mana at the GAR building, it was generating a slight current.

The effect was a very, very underpowered version of the outflow from the portal worlds, enriching the local atmosphere. Since he knew what to look for, it was easy to follow that upstream to the source, which was a fairly ordinary-looking two-story office building. At least, to his eyes it was ordinary; to judge by the layered threads of mana and vis around it, there was some serious glamour at work.

He took a walk around the block as he slowly worked his perceptions past the intricate warding, noticing a number of supernaturals coming and going even as he did so. Not just mages, either. There was a steady trickle of fae and shifters going into the office and leaving again, engaging in some kind of workaday business.

It took him at least twenty minutes of patient and focused inspection, during which he ran across a small gaming store and flipped through books as an excuse to linger, but eventually he was able to see through the outer defenses and into the actual building. Aside from the magic everywhere it was almost depressingly mundane. There were clerks at their desks, a janitorial staff emptying trash cans and vacuuming, and a bunch of offices mostly staffed by mages.

That immediately shut down the vague plans he had of leveling the building somehow. Someone had to answer for the blatant evil of kidnapping the victims of fae tricks, but it wasn’t the people who staffed the computers or cleaned the floors. The bureaucracy was evil, but it would be monstrous to judge all those laboring under it as equally evil. Some were, no doubt, but most people were likely just indifferent at worst.

It took him a bit longer to actually find the people he was looking for. The basement of the GAR office had cells that looked a lot like the ones the shifters had back in Winut, only with an additional layer of warding and shielding. That made them just that much harder to see through, and he actually went walking again in the hopes that the change in physical perspective would help him finagle his perceptions through the walls of vis and mana.

It didn’t, of course. Peering through just took time, and a sensation a little bit like his eyes adjusting to bright lights as his perceptions resolved the strands of energy. He was pretty sure it would be actually impossible for him to push his perceptions through a completely flat wall of vis or sufficiently condensed mana, but nobody used those as structures, save maybe for mage bubbles. Since every functional bit of magic had some specific shape to it, a flat wall would actually interfere with the way that a ward or shield even worked.

There were two normal people in one of the cells, with a woman lying down on a cot and a man sitting in a chair next to the cot, reading a book. He couldn’t precisely judge whether they were the exact same people he had rescued before, but they were a close match and besides, there probably weren’t many non-supernaturals floating around in GAR facilities. At the very least it was good to see they were being treated reasonably well, not that he had expected whips and chain.

It was tempting to try and pull them out right then and there, but Callum knew that he was not ready for such a thing. It’d probably cause a furor that might well bring more kill teams through the teleports, plus he wouldn’t be surprised if the pair had been tagged with tracking devices of some sort. If it were magical he could probably find it, but some little tech bug was probably beyond his abilities.

The truth was he needed some way to keep them safe, and he sure couldn’t do it alone. He could barely take care of himself, let alone some young couple who ought to be off honeymooning in Acapulco. Unfortunately, the only way he could figure that GAR would let them be was if they were taken under the wing of some supernatural force or another. He remembered, vaguely, that Lucy said that once a normal person was in the know they were supposed to be someone’s responsibility.

That was a genie he couldn’t put back in the bottle. The only thought he had to deal with that was put them in the care of someone who was supernatural, and could at least be trusted to be reasonable. He didn’t know enough about supernatural politics to know if it was really possible though, so he’d have to expose himself a little bit.

“What’s up, big man?” It was evening by the time he called, after spending a couple hours observing the GAR office. It had taken him a while, but he’d eventually concluded that some portion of the visitors were simply getting foci recharged. He wasn’t sure how the fae and shifters used magical items, or if they were just passive, but there was a definite exchange of mana-charged crystals.

“Hey Lucy, I’m kind of at an impasse,” he said, walking along a relatively uncrowded side street several blocks from the office. As much as he disliked using anything magic unless necessary, he had a glamour up just in case. “I need to know some political stuff, but the only person I can think to ask is basically you. Maybe Chester, but it might get weird.”

“Ooh, kinky.” Her tone was pitched precisely to pull an involuntary bark of laughter from him. “Whatcha need there, big man?”

“Well, you know those people you told me about? I was thinking about it and what the heck am I supposed to do with them when I get them?”

“Uh. You know what, that’s a good question.”

“Yeah, so at this point GAR knows about them and how they got pulled into the supernatural world, so it’s not like I can vanish them properly. Not unless they’re going to change identities and stuff, which is possible, but they probably wouldn’t be up for that. Most people aren’t.”

“Oof. You’re right, most people aren’t like you. No offense there, big man, I just can’t imagine keeping so low profile for so long.”

“None taken,” he told her. Sometimes he found it kind of weird himself. “You can see how they need to get some sort of supernatural sponsorship so they can live their lives normally, but that is probably quite a bit of an ask since GAR is going to want to use them against me.”

“Hoo boy, you’re not asking for a small thing there, big man. Yeah that’s a problem.”

“Right, so how do I get that protection? I’m not conversant with the internal politics but there’s got to be some way.”

“I dunno, big man. If the people up top want something, and want it hard enough, it’s awful hard to say no.”

“Sure, but, they can’t all be aligned. Internal politics and that.”

“Oh, yeah, no, there’s all kinds of bickering. Let me give it a think, big man.” There was silence from the phone for a little bit. “Okay, okay, I think I’ve got an inkling of a hint. You said you rescued them from fae?”

“A wild hunt,” Callum confirmed. “Or their re-creation of it, anyway.”

“That means that they’re sort of under the fae’s umbrella, then.”

“I’m hardly going to send them back to the people who were hunting them,” Callum said dryly.

“No, no, I mean. Not all the fae are like that, I mean, they’re all a bit weird but that whole human-hunting thing is not normal. Heck, they fight each other way more than they bother humans.”

“Mmm.” He could see that. A lot of the nonhumans he’d seen over the years were fae and for the most part they hadn’t been given anyone issues, even if it was damn weird to see a tusked ogre thing buying eggs at the grocery. “Okay I can buy that much. What are you thinking?”

“Didn’t the fae make that pair an offer of some sort?”

“Hmm, yes,” Callum said slowly, starting to see what Lucy was getting at. “That if they survived to sunrise they’d be free.”

“So there you go. Fae take their offers very seriously, and right now, GAR is breaking that agreement.”

“Huh. I don’t know that I like it, but what do you think are the odds? That the fae would actually make sure they were left alone?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask. I may not be as plugged into the GAR stuff as before but I can get you a direct line. So, some advice: giving the local fae king a reason to stick his thumb in the eye both of GAR and of a different fae king might be enough for him.”

“Mm.” Callum considered it. He didn’t much like the idea of dealing with the fae directly, but he’d always known that at some point he’d have to interact with the frameworks of authority. Most people couldn’t exist outside them, for very good reason, and it wasn’t like he didn’t already have some illicit links in the persons of Lucy and Chester.

The question was how much he was willing to risk. Pragmatically, he couldn’t give up everything to help two people, and just in driving to Florida he’d let emotional reasoning rule him maybe too much. At the same time, he wasn’t going to give up just because he had to do something difficult.

“Can it be done safely?”

“If you mean can I get you an anonymous link to them, yeah I think so. If you mean can you deal with the fae without agreeing to something you didn’t mean to, that’s on you, big man. It’s not like they can bind you to anything over the phone, but, you know. Still don’t want to agree to things you shouldn’t.”

“I suppose I have to give it a try. Unless you think Chester would be willing to help?”

“Nah, not without a lot of finagling. Keeping people unmolested by GAR is a completely different ball game from deniable assets. I could be wrong, but I just don’t see him taking that risk.” Callum had more or less figured that. Just because he avoided politics didn’t mean he was totally unaware of the subtleties of high-level play.

“So what do I need to do to talk to this fae?”

“Weeelll,” Lucy drew the word out, and he could hear papers shuffling in the background. “First I gotta tell you, Jissarrell, the fae king who was after you before, has been telling the story of tracking you over to Europe all over the place. So you’ve got a reputation, and they gave you that scary name and you’re supposed to be some real bad dude with big backers and stuff.”

“I knew I wasn’t really anonymous anymore, but I don’t like that.” He still found being called The Ghost incredibly stupid, but there were probably worse things he could be called.

“Not much you can do about it, big man. Fae loooove their stories.”

“Ugh.” Callum tried to recall what he’d read about the fae, that wasn’t confused with pop culture descriptions. “They actually can lie, right?”

“The less powerful ones, definitely, but the kings and stuff, not really. Supposedly the King and Queen back in Faerie literally can’t, because if they say something it just is true.”

“Well that’s not terrifying at all.” It sounded like Faerie was very definitely not on his list of tourist destinations.

“Eh, yeah, but that’s so deep in Faerie you’ll never see it. Of course, that’s all stories I’ve heard from the fae that moved out here so who knows how accurate it is.”

“Mm, so, they’ll keep their word and not lie, but be careful of what words?”

“That’s exactly it, big man.”

Callum considered. On one hand, he absolutely was not the caliber of person who negotiated with fae kings. On the other hand, something he’d learned while being a consultant was that all that mattered most of the time was projecting that you were, in fact, capable. The old adage about faking it until making it was not entirely untrue, and if he did have a reputation, it was something he should take advantage of.

“Alright, how do I get in touch with the guy? Obviously with the maximum possible mystique.”

“Ha! Yeah okay, so, I can do some telecoms magic on my end if you give me a minute. The King of Miami is named Ferrochar, and I think he thinks he’s part dragon or something. He loves gold and owns a huge bank.” Lucy gave him the name and address, which he marked down in his notebook. “Pretty sure he’s not actually part dragon though.”

“Yeah, I’ve met a dragonblooded. Definitely aren’t going to be any dragon-fae hybrids running around anytime soon.” Even as he said that, he realized he couldn’t be sure, but if they were mostly just avatars he didn’t think any dragon would be too interested. It was a moot point, though.

Callum juggled his phone, retrieving his laptop from the carry-bag he had it in and sorting through the stuff he’d downloaded from Lucy. So far he hadn’t even learned the names of the people he was rescuing and he’d need that for his chat with Ferrochar. The email Lucy had given him had at the briefest possible precis, naming them as Leo and Danika Connors, physical trainer and nurse respectively. Where they were employed and what their current legal status was, it didn’t say, but if they were missing for too long then any cover story would be somewhat strained.

“By the way, Lucy,” he said, scribbling some quick notes to himself on his notepad.

“Yeah, big man?”

“Thanks so much for the help.” Callum couldn’t help but let the genuine appreciation for the one normal human contact in his life bleed through. “You’re just, absolutely the best.”

“Hey! Yeah, you’re welcome!” Lucy sounded a little flustered, but she recovered quickly. “But it’s gonna cost ya!”

“Fifty a night, right?” Callum said. Lucy laughed.

“All right, big man, let me get this set up before we get into trouble,” she said. Callum smiled and tapped a few more notes, keeping a sweep of the area with his perceptions. Despite the hour, there were still an awful lot of people out and about, both mundane and supernatural, though none of them seemed to notice him in particular.

Just tracking them nearby made him twitch, especially since some number of them were undoubtedly murderers, but he wasn’t there to exact vigilante justice. Not exactly. Not unless he saw something that needed it.

If vampires all preyed on humanity, it might well be justified to erase them from existence, but that kind of systematic extermination was not something he could do. Not if he wanted to remain human himself. Even what he had already done had changed him, and although he had every intention of dealing with whatever evil crossed his path, he didn’t want to start seeking it out.

He took a few breaths, trying to figure out his mindset for dealing with Ferrochar. So far he’d been more or less winging it whenever he had to deal with the supernatural world, and while that worked to some extent, he didn’t have the security of obscurity from before. Rather, he had to create an entirely new layer of protection by this persona of the Ghost.

Which was a really stupid name.

“H’okay, big man. According to the records I have I’ll be putting you through to Ferrochar’s general. That’s the closest I can get you.”

“I appreciate it, Lucy. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“You’d better!” With that, the phone clicked over and rang twice. A voice answered, saying something in Gaelic.

“This is the Ghost,” Callum said, not bothering to try and disguise his voice. For this, it was known who he was. “Connect me to King Ferrochar.”

There was silence from the other end, and he could imagine Lucy tittering away somewhere at the introduction. It was a little bit overbearing and ostentatious, but if he understood things right that was just a bonus to the fae. Dragons might see the world as a play, but fae considered themselves actors in a theatre.

“This is King Ferrochar,” a gravely voice rumbled. “To what do I owe this call?”

“I have an opportunity for you to annoy both GAR and King Jissarrell,” Callum said, keeping things short, to the point, and framed in Ferrochar’s interest. While he had never been excellent at sales, he’d learned enough to at least sell his services to his customers.

“Oho? I didn’t realize the Ghost was playing politics now.”

“There are political consequences to any direct action,” Callum said obliquely. He really didn’t want Ferrochar to know that the Connors’ were actually his first priority. “An acquaintance of mine suggested you would enjoy those consequences the most.”

“Enjoy them? Ha! I like the way you put things. And someone I know, knows you? Fascinating…” Ferrochar trailed off, considering, which Callum didn’t like. For all he knew, the fae had some weird spell that could track people along connections like that, so he bulled on ahead before the fae king could pursue that line of thought.

“GAR has annoyed me by taking two mundanes, Leo and Danika Connors, into custody. I do not like that my interests are being meddled with, so they will not be in custody much longer. One of King Jissarrell’s nobles promised them freedom if they survived until sunrise. They are currently not free.” He kept things short and obvious, but tried to avoiding stating his precise intentions. The more the fae read into things what they wanted to see, the better.

“That is interesting,” Ferrochar mused. “Perhaps a little specious, to claim that an agreement had been broken, but without sophistry, where would we be?”

“I wish for them to live their life without any supernatural influence due to their connection to my activities,” Callum continued, ignoring Ferrochar’s continued prodding. “I imagine it would take a fae king to make that happen.”

“I could…” Ferrochar mused. “It would be quite fun to poke some noses, but at the same time, it’s not all that interesting. What do you think, my queen?”

“I want to see the Ghost in action,” a female voice said. Callum grimaced, because he didn’t know what the queen’s name was, and he really would have preferred to maintain a veneer of omniscience. “If the Ghost is to visit our fair city, then surely he will not leave without exhibiting his skills.”

“That is a wonderful idea, my queen. If such mundanes as you describe made their way to our door, then we would be willing to shelter them. Of course, we couldn’t possibly retrieve them from GAR custody ourselves. And it would be far easier to claim we have no idea how they arrived if the ward-lines were to mysteriously go dark.”

“And with the wards out, the fact that nobody will be tracking your activities is merely happenstance,” Callum said, trying to act like that had occurred to him long before the conversation.

“Oh, entirely,” Ferrochar said gleefully. “Of course, considering your proclivities so far, I will muse idly that the wards are to protect supernaturals from each other, and mundanes probably wouldn’t even notice the difference.”

“Of course, we can’t make any deals with someone wanted by GAR,” the queen’s voice came. “These are things that would simply happen.”

“They do happen when I am about,” Callum agreed. He was actually happy with such an offer, since it meant he wasn’t unleashing some wild hunt on other poor folks. There were some very noticeable gaps, though. “I suppose it would be unsporting if your subjects who would be in the area were to be less observant than usual.”

“Certainly not! We can’t breach our agreements with GAR, after all, but I assume the Ghost would have no issues avoiding such a simple thing.”

“No doubt,” Callum said dryly. It didn’t much surprise him, and in fact, he would not be much surprised if there was extra surveillance. At this point they even knew he was a spatial mage, so there might be some special pieces of surveillance just for that. On the other hand, it was obvious from the coarse framework of the wards they were using that he could still operate below their resolution.

He just had to be extra careful.

Frankly, he didn’t like it. He didn’t want to draw the attention, he didn’t want it to be known that he cared, he didn’t want to be connected to anything except by rumor and implication. Yet, it was probably the only way to keep the Connors safe, and it was obvious that in the future he would have to be even more careful about leaving evidence where normal folks were involved.

Or he’d have to do what he was doing now, and make sure that they understood that any time they tried to get a handle on him, he’d punish them for it. In some ways that was far more sure, but he struggled with it because it was not a simple of matter of dealing with obvious problems. There was some degree of malice aforethought, and he had to be damn sure of his targets and damn sure of his reasoning.

“I believe we have an understanding,” Callum said. “Do you agree?”

“Once and twice and thrice, I so agree,” Ferrochar said, which sounded to Callum like as strong an oath as he was going to get for something so unofficial.

“Excellent,” Callum said, and hung up. Then he extracted the memory and SIM cards from the phone and surreptitiously teleported it into the nearest storm drain. It might have been a little bit overcautious, but there was no telling what was possible with the fae.

Mostly, he didn’t trust that Ferrochar wouldn’t somehow try to track him down just for the fun of it, though it was probably next to impossible with whatever obscured routing Lucy had set up. The thought of which made him get a different phone and text her about Ferrochar maybe trying to track her. He couldn’t do anything about that, but perhaps she could.

In truth, the extra conditions Ferrochar wanted for no doubt nefarious purposes were basically what he’d have to do anyway. Callum didn’t want to attack random employees at the GAR office, but infrastructure was another matter. The ward setup was just too dangerous, as were the teleportation platforms. The only problem was the dubious morality of letting the fae run free.

It was a lesson to him to not allow any loose ends in the future. The less he had to interact with the corrupt power structures of backstabbing and grift, the less he’d compromise himself. Keeping free of such loose ends might not really be possible with fae around, but on the other hand, if the fae were marginally on his side that would help. He imagined that was how GAR had found the Connors, anyway.

Ultimately he needed a way to get GAR to leave him alone completely, and that wasn’t going to happen at the moment. It was a process, either of becoming more invisible or more dangerous or both, and he wasn’t there on either front yet. He just had to work with what he had.

Now that he had specific targets, he swept his senses back over the GAR office as he walked away from it. The ward-lines over the city merged into the GAR wards, but all those had to be controlled from somewhere. There were undoubtedly some that were independent, but removing the central control would have to count for something. Besides which, he could probably snip the wires that carried the ward thread-lines outward.

The interior of GAR was so dense with various vis threads for wards and whatever other magics were in play that it took him some time to find the center. The actual core, where everything linked up, was in one of the rooms near the center of the second floor. When he peeked inside it, though, he didn’t just see the enchantment that tied it all together. He also saw the source of the abundant mana.

There was a portal.

It was tiny, about the diameter of his pinky finger, and while he couldn’t tell much about what was on the other side, it seemed to be very close to, or even inside, a portal world. It might have been inside the actual facility that guarded the dimensional portals themselves as, though he hadn’t seen anything in the Ardennes, he hadn’t been looking, either. In hindsight, it was obvious that the extra mana had to be coming from its ultimate source, and if they had teleportation enchantments, portal enchantments were only logical.

Callum practically wheeled in place as he hunted for a location where he could sit down and pull out his laptop. Even if getting the Connors out was his first priority, there was no way he could turn down the opportunity to sketch out the portal enchant. Even at a glance it was obvious that the portal enchant was so mana-hungry that making large permanent portals was a nonstarter outside of the portal worlds themselves, but even a small one could be insanely useful.

It seemed a little odd they were that inefficient, considering that he didn’t find portals that much more taxing than teleports, but he still didn’t have a good grasp of the complexities of enchanting. Then again, the long-distance teleport took way more juice than just the normal one, and a portal was a constant drain rather than a one-time one, so maybe it made sense. All the spatial stuff was excessively advanced anyway, and while he could copy it, he didn’t fully understand it.

While his senses were mostly focused on the enchantment powering the portal, he still noticed what might be termed the night shift arriving at the GAR site. Some fae, of course, including a few of the pixies, and a number of vampires settled into various offices throughout the building. He had to admit it was absolutely surreal to think of some blood-sucking magical being doing data entry, but GAR seemed to be like any bureaucracy, which meant paperwork.

Miami’s excessive night life worked in his favor, because there was a café that was still open and had actual customers that let him keep the GAR office within range of his senses, although at the extreme end of them. While normally he didn’t rely on chemical stimulation, it was looking to be a long night so he ordered coffee while he booted his CAD program. He worked as fast as he could, feeling guilty the whole while, but the Connors had been in custody for days so another half-hour wouldn’t make too much difference.

Like the teleport spell, it was something that had been sawed in half, but it was far more intricate. Unlike any previous enchantment he’d looked at, it actually had different sized wires, likely to go with the different sized components of the portal. Like the dragonlands portal, there were intakes and recirculation structures on a smaller scale than the main portal frame. The smallest ones weren’t as small as his threads, and the largest ones weren’t as relatively outsized as the portal’s tubes, but they were very definitely on different scales. Fortunately, those were reflected by physically smaller and larger bits of enchanting metal.

It would take some practice, but he was pretty sure that he could reproduce the pattern himself. Once he had it down to his satisfaction, Callum packed up and headed back to his U-Haul. He knew where the teleporters were, he knew where the wards are, and he knew where the Connors were. All he needed was a plan.

Chapter 12 – Jailbreak

Callum spent a few hours driving around Miami to get the last of the materials he needed to deal with the GAR office. A big plastic office jug that he filled with seawater, some shears, and inflatable mattresses to fill the back of the U-Haul. The last was mostly to make sure the Connors didn’t land on anything hard when he pulled them out, as they weren’t likely to be braced and ready for a teleport or portal.

Plus, it was pretty likely they wouldn’t be up to moving around much, considering how traumatizing his teleports were for others. He clearly wouldn’t have time to make the clumsy and clunky tube version of his magic, even if it would be more comfortable for them. Unfortunately for their comfort, the back was also fairly well fumigated with patchouli oil, for two good reasons.

The primary one was that Lucy had suggested it to him as a way to sabotage shifter or even vampire scent abilities. It would smell very strongly and so be very obvious to such superior senses, but at the same time would be almost impossible for a shifter to pick out a particular person’s scent, making identification difficult. Besides that, if the Connors got sick from the teleportation, well, it’d help cover that up too. Not that it would fool skilled trackers like the ones Chester had sent after him, but it’d drown out human scents in a casual survey.

The rest of the back of the van was mostly taken up by the chair, with all his enchanting stuff and weaponry packed into it, along with less important bags with clothes and toiletries and snacks. He’d originally intended to turn in the U-Haul after hours and teleport the keys back out, since it was paid for up through the next day and he wouldn’t feel too bad about a couple extra hours. But the lot was absolutely covered with cameras and he could think of no way to sneak the van out without causing even more issues for himself.

In the end he had to fall back on anonymity, because there was no reason for people to try and check random moving vans multiple miles away from the target location. Trying to finesse the van thing would probably just draw attention to it, if people noticed it disappearing and reappearing. In the end he’d just have to drive it in and drop it off normally.

It would have been amazing and perfect if the drop-off was within range of the GAR building, but such was not to be. Instead, his staging point would be a gas station, and then he’d proceed past the fae-owned bank and drop off the Connors before disposing of the moving van. He was hoping he could just hide out until normal business hours and rent a new van, from a different place, but if he needed to use the flight chair to escape, he would.

With that, he was prepared for a few bits of inspired sabotage. He hoped that taking out the central nexus of the wards and the portal that supplied the extra mana would crash the ward-lines, but if not, he could physically disconnect them. While he couldn’t take down any wards that weren’t connected to the box, he could just thread his way through them so all they could do was inconvenience him.

The actual teleport network he waffled over a bit, because he could target just the physical component holding the spatial enchant. The teleportation circles were incredibly complex, but ultimately, that was the lynchpin that made it all work. If he did that, it would reveal he knew how the teleportation networks worked, whereas if he just destroyed everything, it would reveal nothing.

On the other hand, it risked a lot of collateral damage, which was something Callum wanted to minimize. Someone would be cleaning up after him, after all. There was a difference between doing a job, and making a mess. He decided to compromise by targeting a number of important-looking spots, rather than just the single one. That would imply a degree of knowledge, but perhaps not a precise ability to target the most glaring weakness.

It was good to hold some cards in reserve.

What made it far easier for him was that the teleportation enchantments had built-in maintenance access. It was magically protected, true, but there was a lot of stuff to make it run, and he’d had proof himself that enchantments didn’t last forever. The pure materials lasted far longer, but he didn’t think everything was made out of pure bane metal, so there was still degradation.

Beneath the teleportation setup there was a maintenance room, or really, a maintenance closet, which had plenty of access to the enchanted portions from below. There seemed to be clever mechanical things to slide them out and probably replace things piecemeal, but all he needed was a place from which to do some damage.

Callum didn’t exactly have a ten-step plan, but he did run through the action items in his head half a dozen times before he shifted the moving van into gear and started to maneuver through the late-night traffic. Even in Miami, the witching hour wasn’t exactly bumper-to-bumper, so it was a bit of a worry that a U-Haul moving around at that time would stand out.

Nevertheless he made his way along streets, stopping at the lights and stretching his perceptions to try and make sure there was nothing untoward going on. Not that he knew what the usual patterns were and there were far too many people within his sphere of perception, normal and not, to pay attention to anyone in particular, but he was still wary of being ambushed. Callum was already regretting dealing with Ferrochar, even if it was necessary. He felt like he had a target painted on his back.

It was best to be done quickly, then. His path brought the GAR office into the extreme edge of his range, some six hundred yards away, something like three blocks between him and his target. It took him a few minutes to work his perceptions back through the ward and shield walls, if not as long as the first time, but a quick sweep assured him there was nothing too amiss. The Connors were still in their cell, people were still at desks, and while there was a large group of shifters hanging out in the lobby, they didn’t seem to armed or armored. If anything, they seemed to be janitorial, but he wasn’t sure why there were so many.

He left that worry to another day and focused on the ward nexus, his first target. The central connection was a box with a bunch of trays inside it with enchantments. It reminded him a bit of very old analog computers, or maybe electrical junctions, more than electronics. There was someone in the next room monitoring it, a vis link going to one of the enchantment sections of the box, but so far as Callum could tell the guy wasn’t paying much attention.

Apparently Ferrochar hadn’t passed along a memo.

Very carefully, Callum slipped his vis in, threading it all the way to the interior of the ward box, and then reached back for some of the water from his jug. Not to drink, of course; it was his latest trick. As with every trick he’d figured out, it was something he preferred to keep in reserve, though he was pretty sure that any investigators would have issues figuring out exactly what had gone on given the scanty evidence.

Or maybe they wouldn’t, since they would have the whole knowledge base of magedom to draw on and he doubted any of his tricks were completely unknown. The only thing that might well be novel was his perception, and the size of his vis threads. Which he figured were connected, since if the ward he’d tapped into once before was any guide, mages had a much lower resolution and they’d have to use larger vis structures. Either way, he suspected they would have to strain themselves to understand what he was doing.

First he made a little box of flattened threads inside the jug of water, maybe half an inch on each edge, and stuffed it full of vis to expand the space inside. The volume of seawater in the jug dropped as it filled the suddenly-larger interior of his vis box, and he held the construct in place as he layered on two more pieces of spellwork. One was a bit of gravity, drawing the water in toward the center of the box rather than letting it fall down through the vis construct, and the other was a teleportation framework.

After all, it was all his own vis, so if he was careful none of it really interfered with itself.

That teleport went into one of the pieces of equipment he’d brought with him, a small but robust steel casing. The water just about filled the space inside, and with that he made a teleport framework on the end of his vis thread and shoved the makeshift grenade through. He let both constructs drop immediately, the magic holding them in place dissipating, and there was suddenly too much water for too little a space.

The ward box exploded.

So far he didn’t have much of an expansion or compression ratio, however it was termed, but really any amount of too much inside to outside was an explosive proposition. Of all the things he’d tried, liquid was the best. Gas just compressed itself or, at most, sprang a leak, while solids were somewhat tricky. Metals actually held onto the compression framework a little bit, so the expansion was slow. It destroyed the capsule, alright, but it didn’t really pack the punch he had hoped for.

Wood was slightly better but it had a tendency to crunch and, once again, not pack the punch he’d hoped for. Besides, cutting blocks of wood or metal to size was tedious, when he could just use any old bucket of water and let the teleport take care of the portioning.

In the grand scale of things it wasn’t even that good a weapon, at least not until he could scale things larger. Frankly a bullet was more lethal in general, especially since if he could put a teleport somewhere, he could generally put a bullet there too. But some way to improvise explosives was extremely useful, especially when all that was left was water and a bit of random metal scrap. Scrap he could always add a vis cleanup enchantment to.

The detonation crumpled and distorted the various trays in the ward box, thoroughly trashing the actual enchantments and immediately sending ripples along the ward-lines. Unlike an electrical wire, the failure cascade happened slowly, far too slowly for him to sit and watch. The portal enchantment was anchored on the top of the ward box, and its collapse was rapid, vanishing in a burst of mana.

The mage that was supposed to be monitoring it reeled backward, scrambling to his feet as a shield and other conjurations spun up out his vis, but Callum was already moving on. He deposited another three spatial bombs into the maintenance closet, one directly below the plate that held the actual teleport pairing and the other two at some complicated-looking nexuses of enchanted material. The impromptu bombs weren’t powerful enough to actually break any of the material, but it scored, bent, and distorted, and that was sufficient. He knew from experience that even minor deviations from the required geometry would make an enchantment unusable.

In the few seconds it took for him to lob his follow-up grenades, the ward-mage had triggered some kind of alarm, to judge from the way everyone inside the office jolted and swiveled around. The shifter janitors grew into their warforms, becoming ten-foot-tall monstrosities, but there were two rows of buildings between Callum and the office, so they had nothing to attack. If they did manage to target him, that amount of space was less reassuring than it might seem. He’d seen how fast they moved.

The difference between normal human reaction time and that of other supernaturals was on clear display. While the mages were still fumbling with phones and things, the vamps were already out surrounding the building, while pairs moved at absurd speeds to sweep through the building. They blurred through the offices, the front desk, the storage areas, and of course the ward and teleport rooms.

It was a clear they were executing some pre-planned emergency drill, which focused on the sensitive areas of the offices, the personnel and the magical infrastructure. The cells in the basement were an afterthought at best, which was good for him. That gave him the time to wrap his teleport framework around the Connors and pull them into the back of the van, letting them drop onto the patchouli-smelling air mattress.

His last act was to drop a small pin with the cleanup enchantment inside the Connors’ old cell. While it wasn’t like he could hide his involvement in the jailbreak, removing evidence where he could made him feel more secure. The metal scrap from the grenades had a few intact cleanup enchantments, since he’d put several on them ahead of time, and with all the magery going on over there they’d probably be enough to reduce his component down to barely detectible levels. Then the light changed, and he drove on, headed directly away from the office.

It was as well he did, because a set of vamps and shifters, followed very belatedly by mages, began searching the surrounding area. Just before it slipped out of his range of perceptions, he caught the teleport area surge with mana before the nascent threads of spellwork collapsed. They wouldn’t be getting any reinforcements that way.

“What— urgh.” Leo Connors’ nauseated voice came from behind him, from the darkness of the van’s rear. “Man, what is this, who, I mean—”

“I’m moving you to a friendlier place,” Callum replied, glancing at the forms of the two through the rearview mirror. He almost ran a red light as he kept a survey with his perceptions, having a hard time focusing on everything going on, including the pair he’d stuffed in the back of his van. Supernaturals were swarming out into the open as the ward-lines faded, including flying fae zipping around overhead. Some were pixies, but there were larger and less humanoid things as well, even a mounted noble flashing through the upper part of his perception sphere on some amorphous mass of fae magic.

“Wait, you! I thought you— urgh.” Callum could guess at what Leo was saying, though all Danika could manage was a pained moan in what Callum guessed was agreement with Leo’s questions. “What the fuck is all this?” Leo continued, trying to prop himself upright on the mattress. “Why are these things after us all the time?”

“Unfortunately, you got caught up in my problems,” he explained. It really did need some comment after he’d told them he couldn’t help them anymore.

“Why? What did you do?” Leo managed to get out as Callum continued driving as casually as he could toward the financial district.

“That’s not important,” Callum said. It’d take too long to explain, and besides, he wasn’t sure how much they’d believe or empathize. Sure, they’d encountered the supernatural, but there was no telling exactly how much they knew or how well they were dealing with it. “What matters is I made a deal and you can go back to your normal lives.”

“That’s,” Leo wheezed. “That’s not good enough, man. The hell am I supposed to do when something jumps out of the wall and—”

“Dear,” Danika interrupted, faint but firm. “Please don’t yell at the guy who’s saved us twice now.”

Callum sympathized with Leo. He’d been pretty indignant when the supernatural world had come knocking at his door, and if that had happened when he’d still been married, he would have been even less sanguine. That didn’t make it any less tiresome to deal with though.

Callum drove on, and had gotten to the next stoplight when a big wall of twisty fae magic flared behind him and some sort of barrier went up over the block or so surrounding the GAR building. A glance in his side mirror showed nothing visible, but then, they probably wouldn’t want it to be. Undoubtedly there was all kinds of magic visible to mages and possibly other supernaturals, but not to normal people and not to him.

“There’s too much to tell you and not enough time,” Callum said distractedly. “I’m taking you to the people that should protect you from everyone else. You’ve already seen there’s supernatural out there, and most of it doesn’t care about normal people.”

“Yeah you’re not kidding me! Man, this can’t be legal or whatever, we didn’t do anything!”

“I know,” Callum said. “But—”

“And why the hell does it smell like weed in here? Are we tripping or something?”

“No,” Callum said firmly. “It’s to hide your scent in case shifters come around.”

“Hide our what? You’re fucking kidding me—”

As far as Callum could tell he hadn’t done anything suspicious, but maybe just driving around in van late at night was enough, because a police strobe lit up behind him. He almost stomped the gas, but instead managed keep control and not immediately rear-end the car in front of him. A thousand thoughts flickered through his head, but he couldn’t really act on any of them because there were still supernaturals within his perceptions, and he didn’t dare teleport or activate his glamor.

He had hoped that the police car would pass him, but no such luck, and Callum grimaced and pulled off to the nearest parking lot. Of his options, that seemed the best considering the supernatural presence about. The man in the police car wasn’t supernatural, so Callum wasn’t that worried about him as such, but if he had to teleport out things might get sticky. He’d have to see if he could bluff his way through or not.

“We’ve got cops,” Callum interrupted.

“Can’t you just magic us away?” Danika asked.

“Not without attracting attention,” Callum said, keeping his senses focused on the police car. “But I will if I have to.”

He scanned everything nearby, looking for the faintest hint of supernatural suspicion, but none of the fae or even mage figures overhead seemed to concern themselves with a mundane traffic stop. In fact, Callum realized, if the cop wasn’t looking for anything supernatural, that would be fantastic cover because no mage would bother with what they considered mundane authorities.

“I guess we can’t tell the cops we were kidnapped,” Leo said with disgust.

“Maybe just pretend you’re high or something?” Callum suggested.

“Haven’t done that since college,” Danika said, a little wistfully. Callum suppressed a shake of his head. College was so long ago for him that he could scarcely imagine it.

The minute or two it took the cop to get out of the car stretched to an eternity, as Callum was afraid of searchers coming up behind them, but the greatest concentration of activity was happening closer to the office, several blocks away. How long that would be the case, he didn’t know, but he could feel time ticking away as the officer leisurely got out of the car and came up to the side of the van.

“Late night moving?” The officer inquired in exactly the tone of voice that set Callum’s teeth most on edge. In a previous life he probably would have been mildly obstreperous, if not outright curmudgeonly, but this wasn’t West Virginia and he really needed to get this over with as fast as possible.

“Just bringing these two home,” Callum said, hiking a thumb toward the back. He still hadn’t gotten a good look at the Connors, despite being able to survey them with his spatial senses. It was hard to discern how disheveled they looked just from a sense that was closer to touch than sight.

The policeman clicked his flashlight and leaned into to shine it on the rear of the van. In the rearview mirror he caught the pinched and squinting faces of the Connors. They really did look like they’d had a couple rough nights, but more of the drunk and hungover type than the kidnapped by supernatural forces brand of rumpled. Danika, particularly, was a bit red-faced and baggy-eyed.

“What’s going on, man?” Leo said, and Callum’s jaw almost dropped at the way Leo suddenly sounded about one quarter as intelligent as he had before. He had abruptly become a stereotypical stoner or hippie or other late-night druggie. Danika added to the illusion by giggling, which made Callum wonder whether they’d actually done this sort of thing before.

“You people know you’re not supposed to drive around without seatbelts, right?” The officer said mildly.

“But it’s so comfortable back here!” Danika complained, almost hitting a valley girl type accent. Callum kept his mouth firmly shut and let his passengers play the bluff. Part of him was surprised they had the presence of mind to come up with a cover story themselves, but they couldn’t be that far out of college. Perhaps their hard-partying days were still fresh in their minds.

“Right,” the officer drawled. Callum could see him weighing the merits of dealing with a pair of stoners versus getting back to whatever else he was doing at that time of night. Eventually, laziness won. “Look, you need to wear a seatbelt. Don’t fuck in the back of a moving van. Get out of there and take a proper seat.”

The Connors glanced at each other and Danika squeezed herself forward to sit in the passenger seat, while Leo sat down in the flying chair where it was crammed against the other side of the van. There wasn’t a seatbelt, and the thing wasn’t even properly secured to the floor, but that seemed to be good enough.

“I’ll give you a warning now, but don’t do this again.”

“Sure, man,” Leo said.

“And you,” the officer said, looking at Callum. “Make sure you clean this damn thing out before you return it.”

“Yessir,” Callum told him, doing his best to look put-upon. The officer thumped the side of the van and returned to his car, and Callum checked the traffic before starting off again.

“Huh. You’re shorter than I expected,” Danika said after a moment. Callum glanced sideways for a moment before returning his eyes to the road. Of all things to say, that was one he didn’t have any ready reply for, so he elected to ignore it.

“We can’t really talk here, wait for a bit,” he said. Although if someone was really supernaturally surveilling all the conversations, Leo would have already made that theoretical listener suspicious. Callum wasn’t going to compound that risk, though.

Surprisingly, the Connors did keep their silence through the next few red lights. The fae and mages zipping around in the air seemed to mostly converge on the GAR office, which they were steadily leaving behind, though thinking of it as a crowded sky was not actually correct. There had been a dozen or two pixie things, but he’d only spotted four or five mounted fae and an equal number of flying mages. Which was still quite a lot, but he was sure an assault on a GAR office was an all-hands-on-deck situation, and the aerial forces he’d seen probably represented everyone in the city.

Another block, and something big rushed through Callum’s perceptions. It was clearly fae magic, all liquid and twisty, a massive wall of it rushing at him from somewhere ahead. He barely had enough to tense up instinctively before it was over and past, receding into the distance. It didn’t interact with him at all, so far as he could tell, but that was enough to start him charging his emergency teleport. He’d stirred up something really big.

Of course he had; he’d stolen prisoners from a government building. There was a difference between knowing that and seeing some grand working coming from the fae. Considering his deal with Ferrochar, Callum had no idea whether that huge chunk of magic was meant to prevent mischief or cause it, and either way he didn’t want to be around to find out.

“What is it?” Leo asked, and Callum glanced in the mirror again. He wasn’t aware that he’d betrayed anything, but then, under the circumstances it wasn’t surprising Leo was watching him like a hawk.

“Supernaturals reacting,” Callum replied, not really wanting to tell the guy that he didn’t actually know. “It’s not trouble yet.”

“Yet?”

“It’s going to be trouble for someone, somewhere, somewhen,” Callum replied. “Just not us right now. I’m taking you to a bank the fae own, a different set from the ones who hunted you. They agreed to keep you safe from any supernatural shenanigans.”

“Why?” Danika asked.

“Supernatural politics,” Callum replied absently, changing lanes to avoid some idiot who was trying to speed on the late-night city streets. Why the cops went after Callum rather than someone in an overly loud muscle car was beyond him. “You got brought in because of my mess, so I’m fixing it.”

“Oh.”

Acting as some professional supernatural agent felt rather surreal, especially since he was barely a mage to begin with. He’d been doing well so far, but escapades like rescuing people from GAR’s grasp were something that would catch up with him real quick. At the same time, he had to do such things. If he stayed completely cowed by what GAR could do, and let them do as they wanted, there was no point in staying free. Scratching out a living in a cave wasn’t freedom.

The difficult thing was balancing that freedom with caution. From what he could tell they wouldn’t be able to harden their wards against him sneaking in his vis, but they might well trap the wards in some way if they knew how to bait him. Even now they might be tracing the Connors, so he wanted to get them off his hands as soon as possible.

“When I drop you off, just tell them your name and that the Ghost brought you.”

“The Ghost?” Leo repeated incredulously.

“Not my idea, I assure you,” Callum told him.

“Are you going to do it, the, ah…” Danika asked hesitantly. “I mean, I feel kinda awful.”

“I know, I’ll use portals,” he told them, taking pity on the pair. “I’ll be sending you off in a minute here.” Callum wasn’t about to get any deeper into the financial district than he needed to, and the target building was almost within his perceptions.

A number of the big banks had some degree of magic within them, though it wasn’t all mage warding. Some of it was flowy, floaty fae stuff that probably served the same purpose, or maybe some of the gold or jewels there were fairy fakes. Or maybe actual fairy valuables, for all he knew.

The actual target was pretty easy to spot because it had a lot of protections he could see, and maybe more he couldn’t. While it was pretty easy for Callum to discern the general gist of human magic structures, fae ones were completely alien. He could only guess at the difference between protection and utility magic by whether the swirling stuff formed more of a wall or suffused the interior in crossing currents.

Even with the differences he could still thread his vis in past the protections, though he suspected that it’d be a lot easier for the fae to notice his intrusion than a mage. Or to stop it, because there were definitely places where the magical current was so strong it’d snap his vis thread pretty instantly.

“Ready?” He asked.

“Not really,” Danika said. “Can’t you come with us?”

“The deal was about you two, not me. Fae are tricky.” He actually didn’t know if Ferrochar would try and accost him or not, considering what he understood of supernatural politics, but it was best not to find out.

“Is there any way we can contact you?” Leo asked.

“Or repay you?” Danika added.

Callum considered. He wasn’t going to give them his phone number, or Lucy’s either, but he could see about having her contact Ferrochar and set them up with something like what she used to talk to him. It would be nice if there was some way to keep tabs on them other than through police reports or something. Just to make sure the fae were playing nice.

“I’ll have an agent contact you if it’s safe,” he told them. For a brief moment the thought that it’d be great to have someone help him with his knee crossed his mind, but he threw it away. There was no way that would do anything but expose him unnecessarily. “Time to go, now. Remember, tell them who you are and that the Ghost sent you.”

“The Ghost sent us,” Leo confirmed, getting out of the chair. Callum selected a room up in what were probably executive territory without anyone in it and teleported the mattress there, followed by a portal linking the van to just above it.

“Hurry,” Callum urged, and Leo stepped through his side of the portal. Danika glanced at Callum.

“Thank you, again,” she said, and hurried through her side, even as fae started to converge on the room. Callum tossed a vis cleaning pin through just for the heck of it and dropped the portal, signaling a left turn as he stopped at a light. He kept his senses focused on them to make sure that the fae didn’t treat them badly, circling the bank building at a three-block remove.

The first set of fae entered the room and stopped as the Connors’ said something, hopefully what Callum had told them to. Then suddenly and without any fanfare, there was suddenly a fae with a lot of magic swirling about him in the room with them. He bowed very flamboyantly, head turning as he seemed to look around the room. More of the fae magic spilled outward from the bank, running through the streets, and Callum took that as his cue to leave.

He had no idea what the magic was meant to accomplish, but since it seemed that Ferrochar was going to keep his word, Callum wasn’t needed there anymore. While he couldn’t speed through the streets or teleport himself across under the circumstances, he still made his way to the drop-off with all due haste. It helped that the U-Haul lot was far enough from the center of activity that he wouldn’t have supernaturals around. Or if there were, he’d know they were up to no good.

It was a tense fifteen or twenty minutes to get to the lot, but the supernatural presence faded as he went, even if there was some lingering magic about. It was like a faint mist curling about the ground, blowing here and there in unseen breezes. A demonstration that fae kings were not something to be taken lightly, indeed, and while they might not be all-powerful, they did have a long reach.

With the magic blanketing the ground, Callum was a little careful when he did finally reach the lot. He kept it completely mundane as he dropped the keys in the deposit envelope for the after-hours lot, then the envelope itself went back in the deposit bin. With his own flashlight he made sure everything was packed up into the trays he’d put under the flying chair, enchanted some vis cleanup into the walls of the van, and then teleported both himself and the chair onto the roof of a nearby building to keep out of the magical mist.

Learning from the last time, when Callum settled himself in the chair and pulled it into the air with inverted gravity, he aimed himself at a point on the ground in the distance, rather than just the horizon. The world blurred, then seemed to twist oddly, and he stopped pulling with a stab of unease. When things resolved, he was indeed near the ground, but not where he had aimed. Instead of miles and miles away from the city center, he was maybe two miles from where he’d started, next to a huge, dense-flowing wall of fae magic.

Since it was fae and not human, he had no idea where to even start with puzzling out what it was and how it worked, but he could sense some sort of spatial twist to it. Nothing that he could analyze; it was more of a different flavor, the same way that the portal worlds were. Considering that he’d gotten stopped at the wall, it didn’t take much imagination to figure out it was some kind of barrier, and one that had stopped even his bootleg Alcubierre drive.

“Ah, dammit.” There was a reason he had his implant, but he had hoped he could avoid using it so soon, if for no other reason than he couldn’t bring his flying chair through. While he could push out his vis and take some things with him, the receiving pad in the shed wasn’t big enough for the chair.

The implant was nearly charged anyway, so that wasn’t a problem, but he didn’t trust that he hadn’t tripped something by running into the wall. Callum lifted himself up again and dragged himself in the opposite direction, toward the ocean, in a bid to dispose of his chair properly. There was another blur and twist, and Callum dropped his field.

Seawater rushed in, catching him by surprise and making him choke as he clamped his lips together. He scrabbled with his senses, lungs burning, and grabbed his drawers from the chair as it sank down toward the seafloor. Something big and heavy with magic moved on the edges of his perception, and he pushed out his vis to encompass his supplies before he pushed, not wanting to meet whatever that was.

The world shifted around him and he was suddenly in a dark, close, freezing cold shed somewhere in northern Montana. He was dripping seawater, his phones, guns and cash were soaked through, and he’d lost the latest flying chair. On the up side, he’d rescued the Connors and negotiated with a fae king without losing his shirt.

It could have gone worse.

***

“Why the hell wasn’t this better guarded?” Ray Danforth asked, mostly rhetorically. Miami was a bit far out of his jurisdiction, or Felicia’s either. No matter how cute she was when she was angry, he didn’t like Felicia having to go pay homage to the local fae king. Nor was he happy about having to deal with more aftermath of the Wells fellow when they’d very specifically discussed him possibly coming after people of interest in the case.

“With respect, sir, we had double crew for shifters and vampires, and we had full wards up.” The mage that had been manning the wards looked somewhat worse for the wear, more from realizing how deep a hole he’d gotten himself in than actual injuries. For how deadly Wells could be, it was interesting that the body count for this incident was zero. Even if the actual damage was fairly significant.

“You were told that they have ways to bypass said wards, right?” Ray asked in exasperation, then shook his head. “Never mind. Just make sure nobody else comes in.”

“Yessir.”

Ray prowled through the evacuated office, lightly brushing his senses around. Even if he knew it was silly, the first thing he checked for were ball bearings, but there were none, only bits of metal scrap. He frowned at the floor in the maintenance room where water pooled, not certain what to think of it.

“It is merely the blood of the sea,” a leathery, whispery voice sounded in his ear, and he couldn’t help but jump. Ray wheeled around to see a tanned, round-faced man with a nose like a squashed pepper in jeans and an old white shirt, with the badge of an Archmage pinned to it.

He should have felt another mage’s sphere of authority intersect his. In fact, an Archmage’s should have displaced his, but the man had no shell of vis at all. Despite that, and despite his casual air and relaxed posture, he fairly radiated danger.

Then there was the shadow. It wasn’t just a regular shadow; it was dark as pitch despite the illumination in the room, and two diamond-pinpoint eyes stared at Ray. Working with Felicia, he’d seen a lot of odd fae stuff, but the shadow held a certain edge that was more disturbing than fae magic.

Especially since it was attached to a mage.

“Archmage,” Ray greeted him cautiously, not even sure what House the man belonged to.

“One suspects you chase something greater than you,” the Archmage said, not exactly returning the greeting. “The cycle turns as it will, and cares not for that which is trampled in its wake.”

“Uh. Yessir?” Archmages could be eccentric, but usually they weren’t this weird. The response he got was a sigh.

“You will want to get Archmage Duvall,” the man said to him. “She may be able to understand what happened here.”

Chapter 13 – Involvement

Serena Duvall ignored her scry-com’s chime. No, she was focused on locking down the last corner of House Janry’s new estate in Faerie. Spatial stabilization was the task that consumed the most of her time — no one else had the talent or the vis reserves to do it. Everyone needed her to do it, since every mage habitation in the portal worlds needed to be adjusted back to something similar to Earth.

The native space of the portal worlds made casting difficult. And odd. Fine under some circumstances but not for daily life. More pragmatically, it interfered with her delicate teleportation enchantments — and nobody who was anybody would go without her network. Too useful. The sheer demand for them overwhelmed her apprentices, few of them that she had.

House Duvall had a ten-year backlog at this point.

The most important part of the spatial tuning was preventing the corruption of humans. Corruption into other things, like the fae and with shifters. Portal worlds were fantastic, for mana. Less fantastic, for living. Given a few generations, the portal worlds would twist mages into something else — unless she twisted it first.

It was better than the other supernaturals. Some couldn’t even enter other portal worlds without losing their talents. Or dying. Mages could cast no matter the portal world — living there was another matter.

One last shove locked the space into alignment. She pulled in her vis and sent a trickle through the scry-com — not without reservations. There had been so many interruptions of late, and she was getting tired of it. Her work was wearing enough without people whining at her. Wanting her to hold their hands and clean up after their messes — she’d gotten tired of that two hundred years ago with her own children.

“What?” She snapped, just knowing that, whoever was calling, she wasn’t getting home on time. That she’d be running short of sleep — again.

“We’ve had another sighting of Callum Wells,” the voice on the other end said. One of the BSE people.

“So you didn’t catch him, then,” she said.

“Technically, we didn’t even see him. It’s just that he freed two mundanes we were holding as witnesses, and the techniques match his operation.”

“So why are you calling me then?”

“There may be some residue of what he was doing left about. We still don’t know how he manages to slip past wards and since he’s a space mage we need an expert analysis.”

Duvall growled. She didn’t want to have to deal with these things — but no one else qualified. And she wanted Wells caught, too. If there were a bunch of spatial mages somewhere, they were a threat to her House — and a monumental waste of talent! If it was just Wells, he was clearly competent enough to be of use — if he was finally brought to heel.

“He also sabotaged the teleporter and feeder portal,” the man continued. “So we need replacements.”

“Then submit a request for them!” Duvall snapped. She was the one who approved emergency replacements, and the process existed for a reason — no chance she was going back to being hounded in person by the others. Not to mention half of GAR.

“Yes, Archmage,” he said.

“Well?” She demanded when he didn’t continue. Her patience was wearing thin. “Where is this?”

“Miami, Archmage.”

“Fine,” she said, and dropped the scry-com’s construct. Her vis pulsed outward, and she tied into House Janry’s teleport pad. Even she couldn’t transport herself directly to a target location without some kind of anchor — so she’d made sure there were anchors all over the place.

She popped into one of the GAR facilities and sent out another pulse, locating the teleportation switchboards and moving herself there. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of all the anchor locations — it was her network, after all. Far better than the original, now. That had just been a long hallway with plaques labeling the destinations.

Duvall ignored the operators, searching for the Tampa anchor in the wall of them at the back. Then she linked in and transferred herself. Such was impossible for most, needing to link their vis in through their tattoos. Archmages could do better, of course.

The moment she was in Tampa she teleported up and out, riding her flight focus through the night, south and east. Space stretched around her, making her journey shorter as she soared through the skies. She had been to every anchor location — and space mages always knew where they had been. One of the first things she taught.

She could see the residue of a large fae working when she neared the city. Probably from the King of Miami. It had left a mess, as usual — fae magic didn’t have the structure or control of real magic. One reason she didn’t like Faerie, even if all the other houses did.

Duvall punched through the remnant spatial distortion and landed down at the GAR office. Some shifter dregs moved to intercept her, but when they saw her Archmage emblem, they stopped — as they should. She ignored them and transported herself inside, not even needing to worry about the wards. They were down.

The most powerful mage on site besides herself was in the maintenance room, and he jumped when she appeared. Showed he wasn’t paying attention — he should have noticed her vis from active sensing. It was some BSE person, but not one of the ones she recognized.

“Well?”

“Archmage Duvall, thank you for coming. As you can see there is damage to multiple sections of the teleportation framework, and we think he delivered something with his spatial magic. There’s water residue so we’ve asked Grand Magus—”

“Out!” Duvall pointed to the door. She was tired of the man’s yammering on about things she could see with her own eyes — things that didn’t matter. Besides, if they wanted her to find out something about Wells’ magic, she needed to have no others obscuring it.

There was no point in using active senses — they’d just drown out whatever residue was left. Passive sensing was the only way. Duvall redirected some of her vis from her shell into her body, then directed a trickle into her own mind, the surroundings billowing into existence in her head. She stopped at ten feet, since there was little point in going further. There was too much information, and it was a dangerous and vis-hungry thing.

Such internal reflection was limited to Archmages — and was one of the criteria to become such. For Archmages, the entirety of their vis and the metabolization was in the shell, with any vis inside their body being structured completely for reinforcement or augmentation. For any other mage, feeding vis inward would cause a loop, as the vis tried to drain into itself. Like a hole in a dam, locking their entire power into themselves. It took a powerful healing mage to interrupt the process — and not incidentally, it took total vis externalization to protect against healing. Another thing only Archmages could do — more shell than flesh.

She traced the faint echoes of vis, easily noticing the remnants of spatial vis — of course. They were faded and distorted, pulled in a direction. Her kinesis focus plucked a fragment of metal from the ground and she frowned at the tiniest hint of a lingering enchantment. Mundane metal couldn’t handle much, but she had read the reports. Something to clean up his vis.

The framework remnants were oddly fragile. She would say it was crude yet fine —accurate, but sloppy. Too much power, and barely enough. Woven gossamer instead of a properly solid framework. He was working through finesse tools, but she had no idea why. They were useful for close work, but had no range or real power — maybe to hide his normal magical signature.

Not that she needed his normal threads to see his style. Clearly not someone she had trained. She’d never stand for such terrible spellwork. Terrible, but it obviously worked well enough. Even if it was underpowered.

A teleportation framework — yes. Inside that, some dense mass that might indicate expanded space. Might. It wasn’t how she would go about it, clearly. Yet — she did recognize some of the shapes and features. With the fragments of metal strewn over the room it was clear what had been done.

It was appalling — a transgression of everything spatial magic was. The reason she restricted expanded spatial spaces to the portal worlds was their danger if they were disrupted — danger to everyone. Turning the precision and wonder of expanding space into a crude tool of disruption was absolutely unconscionable.

He definitely needed to be found — for everyone’s safety. She would certainly recognize his magic if she ran across it again, but she couldn’t even connect the teleport to the other end — too degraded. Deliberately.

“One is always mystified by the harbinger of the cycle.” The voice made her jump, because she hadn’t sensed another mage enter the room. But there he was, the spooky bastard — Huitzilin.

“Archmage Wizzy,” she said, not bothering to keep the disapproval from her voice. He insisted that everyone call him by that ridiculous nickname unless they could pronounce his real name properly. Which nobody could.

“Archmage Duvall,” he returned, in his weird accent that he refused to change.

“I didn’t know they called you to analyze the water magic,” she said.

“They did not.” Huitzilin seemed smug. “I came to see if the sparks and smoldering I heard of were beginning to catch or not.”

“Speak plainly!” She didn’t have time for his nonsense.

“The thorn in your paw,” Huitzilin said. “The Wells issue. One is merely curious about their provenance and their role.” He tilted his head slightly, and a shadow slipped through the doorway to take its place where it belonged. His shadow, which whispered to him in a sibilant language nobody else living understood.

It wasn’t something a mage should have. Something a mage should do. But that was just Huitzilin — creepy. And strange. Too close to the fae, even if he predated them. Predated everyone, if he could be believed. They found him when the first mages reached the new world, already there, already old.

“Well, he’s a damn nuisance.” Duvall brushed past him. Of them all, Huitzilin didn’t maintain a proper shell — now called a sphere of authority by young jumped-up mages far too impressed with themselves. Not that he was any less powerful or dangerous. He just didn’t come from a proper background, and it was bizarre to see someone with an Archmage pin with no vis aura.

“One suspects he is long overdue,” Huitzilin said. Duvall whirled on him.

“Are you supporting him?” She gathered the vis within her sphere. Space magic might well not be able to harm directly, but there were many indirect methods to deal with someone. Even another Archmage.

“One has never met the man. Perhaps one should, but he has not yet passed within one’s sight.” Duvall scowled, but figured he was telling the truth. Of them all, Huitzilin was the least political. Never showed up to meetings. Didn’t even have a House.

“Then go back to guarding your temple,” she said, and left. The teleport enchantments would have to be replaced entirely. The sabotage was very targeted — he’d known where to look.

Aside from the transport array and the ward nexus, there were traces of Wells’ vis in one other place — the cells. That was just a simple teleport residue, even if it was in Wells’ bizarre style. Duvall turned to the man who had been shadowing her. From a safe distance.

“Who was in here?”

“A pair of mundanes who were witnesses to the fae disappearance Wells was implicated in,” he told her.

“Did they know anything?”

“No, they didn’t even see him.”

“Then why did he take them? Why did we even have them here?”

“It’s standard procedure for the Department of Acquisitions to—”

“Oh, Constance,” Duvall said scornfully. “She’s not an Archmage. Why did she have them and not us?”

“The Department of Acquisitions—”

“You know what, I don’t care. Find them again, figure out why he took them. Maybe he’ll come after them again.”

***

“The fae have them,” Jahn reported. “Some kind of obscuring working. All their names are gone from our paperwork, or rather, replaced, with Prospero and Sycorax.”

“Fae,” Hargrave said in disgust. “Of course, we already knew Wells was working with the fae. Someone there, anyway. What did the King of Miami have to say?”

“Oh, he practically rubbed my nose in it. Miami is his territory, I already knew it had to be his intervention. But the mundanes were fae responsibility under the accords and so on. You know how much a stickler for rules they are when they want to be.” Jahn sighed, sorting through his notes.

“They won’t even admit they have them, not out loud, unless we can specifically name them and why they’re needed. Which of course we can’t now. And apparently there was some deal made. I sent some feelers out and a number of the other kings back him up, so, well. It’s a political thing now.”

“Mmm. At least we know he can be enticed out of whatever hidey-hole he has,” Hargrave pointed out. “We can use that. Perhaps not with those mundanes, if they are indeed that well protected, but there are others. Anyone he’s come in contact with.”

“That’s a little bit difficult. Most of the people we can confirm are either in Tanner, and under Scaletooth’s protection—”

“Damned dragonblooded.”

“Indeed. The others are in Winut, so they’re Alpha Chester’s people. That is perhaps somewhat easier to deal with, but rather more politically awkward.” Jahn set the notes aside. “But there’s an angle here. How did Wells know? Not many people got the report about their whereabouts, or that they were even detained. There’s a leak somewhere.”

“You already did an investigation,” Hargrave pointed out.

“Sure, but we know Wells’ group uses mundane stuff all the time. I’m going to get in some Feds to go over that chain of communication, figure out where the leak was,” Jahn said, giving Hargrave a level look. “Maybe we didn’t find anything with magic because there wasn’t anything to find.”

“You’re the one in charge,” Hargrave grunted. “I never really approved of all this mixing GAR does but that hardly matters at this point. Do what you have to.”

***

Somehow, the trip gave Callum a cold. Even though he had extra clothing in his stash, the temperature shock, coughing up seawater, and general stress meant that he still picked up some kind of ick. At first he had thought it was just the normal nausea of his imperfect homebond, but once it progressed into sneezing he knew it was more than that. The misery of runny noses and coughing and sneezing was at least not out of place in the weather, since Montana had snow even if it wasn’t Thanksgiving yet.

He moved the shed-stash while he was at it, even if there was no evidence that anyone could track down the destination of his homebond. It was just for peace of mind that he wasn’t using the same place twice. Fortunately, being sick didn’t seem to impair his ability to manipulate magic, so he could use gravitykinesis and teleports to get everything situated a hundred miles away, with a trail of old rusty metal scrap to suck up all the vis.

Unfortunately his knee was stiffer than ever after the chill, though that might just have been psychosomatic. He was glad he’d left a cane in his cache, though, since he couldn’t use teleporting when it came to getting taxis or rideshares or hitchhiking. If he could find a usable flight focus, that would make everything he was doing so much easier.

He couldn’t even call Lucy until he’d gotten himself back to civilization and got himself a new phone or two. Even if he was already in the habit of buying disposable low-end phones to make calls, the smartphone he used for pocket navigation and wifi access was out of commission, maybe permanently ruined, and that was irritating. Not a huge expenditure in the grand scheme of things, especially if he had a significant payday coming in from the sale of the teleport pad, but he still didn’t exactly have a stable income.

“Big man!” Lucy said when he finally rang her number. “Heard you really made some waves down there!”

“I imagine so. The Connors’ are safe?”

“Oh man. Now that’s a trip. Nobody even knows who they are. You just told me their names and it just slipped right out of my head. The fae did something and kinda made them unmemorable? I dunno, fae magic is weird.”

“So long as it works,” Callum decided. He did wonder exactly why he was immune to that kind of alteration, since he was demonstrably not immune to all fae magic. Unless he was specifically excluded, or it was a glamour on an enormously grand scale.

“They’re all stirred up beyond that, but I’ve been trying to keep a low profile, so I can’t give you details.”

“No, it’s fine,” Callum assured her. “I just don’t want to do that kind of thing again. Too many things can go wrong. I really don’t like the idea that anyone might be held hostage on my account.”

“Yeah, yeah I hear you big man,” Lucy said, after just a moment of silence. “Better to stay outta sight.”

“I’d say I was doing my best, but I’m obviously not,” Callum sighed. “After this, I absolutely intend to bunker down and stay out of things. I have so much work to do.”

“I can just imagine,” Lucy said sympathetically. “Speaking of work! Our mutual friend tested your merchandise and it works just fine, so he’s going to be paying out when you’re ready.”

“Any time is fine. Just so long as it’s in a nicely crowded location.” He was on fairly good terms with Alpha Chester, but he still wouldn’t put it past the man to have some observers out at the drop-off point. He’d tracked Callum down once before, and he might try to do so again. Not out of malice, just out of caution.

“Crowded, huh? I thought you’d want remote.”

“Kind of hard to be anonymous if I’m the only one around,” Callum said.

“Ooh, right you are, big man.” He heard the tapping of a keyboard over the phone. “I’ll make sure he knows. Probably will have a place for you in the next day or so.”

“Great,” Callum told her. That would give him time to get all the way down to where he’d left his pickup and actually have proper wheels. They might well put the dropoff somewhere near where he’d left the teleportation plates, but they might not. He didn’t much care either way, so long as he didn’t have to keep paying for a car to move him from one point to another.

“One more thing,” he told her. “Once I get that I may be out of touch for a while, doing some busywork. If you don’t hear from me for a week or so, don’t worry.”

“I’m touched that you’re thinking of little ol’ me,” Lucy teased him. “I’ll be sighing and pining at the phone until it rings.”

Callum felt himself relax a little as he chatted with Lucy, who seemed to be the only person he could actually talk with. Which he realized was probably a dangerous position to be in, but he’d go insane if he didn’t have anyone that he shared some kind of connection with. Even back in Winut when he closeted himself up, the townsfolk were friendly when he went out to get supplies. It had helped.

When he hung up he focused back on the task of going south. Fortunately, he could alternate taking taxis and teleporting between his destinations, which both broke up his trail and vastly sped up his progress. While he was in no way capable of chain-teleporting the thousand-plus miles from Montana to Texas in one go, he could cross spates of fifty or sixty miles, accounting for the lower mana in the States.

He napped in the car or truck or whatever vehicle he was in at the time. Continuous casting really took it out of him, and he felt like he was some geriatric having to sleep all the time. At some point he’d have to ask Lucy, or maybe Harry, if regular mages had such issues.

Overall it took him three days to make it down to where his pickup was parked, pay the bill, and liberate it from the lot. By that time he had a dead drop location from Lucy, on the roof A/C unit of a restaurant located in a small town outside Wichita. It made his commute a bit longer, but he couldn’t complain. Not when he was getting paid so much for it.

When he drove through the streets near the restaurant, he did indeed spot a few shifters around, though it was difficult to tell if that was incidental or they were surveillance. It was the territory of some pack, after all, so presumably they had legitimate jobs and errands in the area. At least there was nobody on the roof where the package was supposed to be, and the package itself was easy enough to find. It was just a small case placed inside the housing of the A/C unit, and so far as he could tell it didn’t have any trackers.

Callum teleported it onto the seat beside him and continued driving, heading out of town. After an hour’s driving he turned on the phone and texted Lucy that he’d picked up the package. She replied with a thumbs-up and he turned the phone off before continuing on.

It was just as well he wasn’t at home, since he had to exchange more gold for cash, and he could only do that one plate at a time. A few thousand dollars a pop. Which meant just one or at most two different places per town or city, and since he had a long way back home he might as well stop off on the way.

The first stop was Dallas, to see if the consultation review was done for his plans. If it had been for certification he’d be waiting for a long time yet, but for just a review and sanity check, a week might be reasonable. It wasn’t like anything he was doing was groundbreaking and he knew exactly where to look online to crib proper plumbing and wiring.

For once he was in luck, and their resident engineers had gone through the plans and made corrections. With, of course, the understanding that it would still have to go through the appropriate process if he wanted to actually build it. Which he did, but not in the United States.

Callum took the packet and went back home. Not that the trailer house was much of a home, but it was better than nothing. Mostly he just assured himself that everything was still functional, it hadn’t been broken into, and nobody was trying to evict him. He’d paid rent of course, but given that he’d done so more or less on the sly it was a worry the landlord would try to cheat him. All that was different, though, was a mailbox full of flyers and advertisements.

He idled around for about half a day, doing laundry and cleaning his guns, before realizing he didn’t actually have any reason to stay there. While he did want to put together more enchantment infrastructure, he also wanted to get the ball rolling on his bunker, so after making sure he was ready and resupplied, he headed south. It was time to go back across the border.

There were two good reasons. One was that if he was closer to the South American portal world, he’d have more mana to work with, and the other was that it was a lot easier to stay anonymous in a place that wasn’t the US. Not that he was abandoning the States, but it was a sad truth that he couldn’t operate as freely as he liked with GAR arrayed against him.

Especially since they seemed to have some sway over the normal government.

From the GAR literature Lucy had provided, Portal World Six wasn’t actually in South America, since it was located in the vicinity of historical San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán. It was an amusing bit of sloppiness from his introductory literature, and it was good that Lucy had given him something more concrete because otherwise he’d have been planning on heading to Brazil or something.

Pragmatically, he couldn’t hitchhike or rideshare through Mexico like he could the US, for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, he had a pickup, and he could teleport, so getting across the border was exceedingly easy. It wouldn’t be rapid progress, but it was better to have the pickup anyway since his target was far away from any cities.

The Oaxaca region of Mexico had plenty of empty land, full of greenery, and most importantly: that land was for sale. Or could be bought, anyway. He really didn’t need much, just a place that was remote enough that nobody would bother him while being close enough he could actually get it built. There wasn’t even a need for power or internet access, since he’d designed the bunker to be completely off the grid and he could supplement things with magic.

If he had enough local mana to form permanent portal enchantments, there were a number of obvious ways to generate unlimited power. For internet, he could rent a business incubator office or something and feed a signal through a tiny portal. He was sure Lucy would have some good ideas there, but the point was he didn’t even have to have the access in the US.

They were all grandiose ideas, but first he had to find some property. He could probably pay directly with gold, and it would go a lot further than it would have in the US. With such thoughts on his mind, he wrapped a glamour around his truck and headed past the border, driving through portals as he headed into Mexico.

***

Lucy sipped at her rum-and-coke and brooded. She didn’t really go in for alcohol that much but it had seemed more appropriate of late. There was the mess at work, which was still ongoing, making every day tedious and depressing as every single thing everyone did was scrutinized. Then there was the mess with the big man.

She hadn’t needed to tell him about the couple that GAR was holding in Florida. He had made it clear that he would need to deal with it if it came up, so she knew exactly what would happen when she had given him the information. At the time she’d seen it as a great way to get GAR’s goat, but in hindsight, it had been an awful shitty thing to do. Sending him off to something that could have been terribly dangerous, just because she was piqued, was about the worst thing she could have done to him.

He wanted to know, yes, and wanted to take care of it, but she could have waited to tell him. At least until there was an easier way to get at them. Something, anyway. Even if he didn’t seem too worried about what had happened, the rumors she’d overheard had a lot of salacious detail. The Fae King had gone so far as to put up a barrier to prevent any supernaturals from leaving, though given the big man’s homebond that was never going to be much of a problem.

Even at the best of times, the big man talked to her only intermittently, and now he was going to be gone for a while. It made her feel that he was upset with her and didn’t want to talk her, even though she knew that was silly. But it still hurt, even if she only knew him as a voice on the phone.

Just a voice on the phone, but a friendly one. One who actually laughed at her jokes rather than taking them with a sort of amused tolerance like the shifters. Also a mage that didn’t think of her as a second-class citizen at best. She’d barely talked to her family in years, and now she was afraid she’d messed up one of the few normal relationships she had.

The fact that she’d gotten a lot of extra money, enough to make a decent retirement fund, ought to have been a salve but it really wasn’t. GAR never lacked for money and her pay was fine anyhow, so the minor fortune was less of a real benefit than it had seemed at first. If anything it made her feel more guilty, even though it was completely unconnected.

The sudden tones of the ominous music she’d selected for the big man’s call startled her enough that she spilled rum and coke all over her shirt, and she hastily put it aside to pull up her telecom program. By this point she’d made it automatic to track where he was calling from, and even put it on a map for herself. It wasn’t exactly a slick design, but it was neat to see anyway.

“Big man!” She said, forcing cheer into her voice. “Mexico, this time? Didn’t travel as far for vacation, I guess.”

“Hey, Lucy! Just a short trip, yeah,” he said. He certainly didn’t sound upset with her. “Calling a bit earlier than I figured because I realized I forgot something. Do you think you could set me up with a supernatural map around the isthmus?”

“I can do my best, big man.” She made a note about the request so she could charge it properly and started sorting through the databases she’d built up over the years. “I already know there isn’t too much out there, though.”

“Yeah, most of them seemed to be in Europe?”

“Europe, US, China, and the portal worlds,” Lucy agreed. “Where the money is and where they originated.”

“I have to say, I was a little surprised to find out there was a fae king of Miami, of all places. Didn’t really strike me as a faerie spot. I figured more trees and toadstools for that kind of thing.”

“Haha! Yeah, there’s a few that like the urban spots. Miami, Las Vegas, Paris, a few others.” She poked at the computer, waiting for her database to process. She didn’t have access to a huge server farm so it took time.

“Huh. I guess it wasn’t coincidence the couple were being held in Miami then?”

“Nah, the biggest GAR offices are where other supernaturals are anyway, usually. Or the other way around, I guess. It depends.”

“That does make sense,” the big man said thoughtfully. “I think I heard something like that before.”

“Yeah probably. It’s kinda funny, the different types of supernaturals don’t really get along that well but still like clustering up.”

“That explains GAR, I guess,” he said idly. “Hey, Lucy? I don’t remember if I said this before but thanks for telling me about those two. I’m working on exposing things less, but, they were my responsibility and you let me take care of it.”

For a moment Lucy thought that he’d read her mind, or that she’d said something, but she reminded herself that he didn’t actually have that capability. Probably. He was a bit of a mystery but even the fae couldn’t pull your thoughts from your head over the phone. Then she corrected herself; he’d probably been brooding over it the same as her, since they hadn’t talked that long about anything of consequence when he’d first gotten back.

“Hey, you’re welcome,” she said, still feeling a little guilty but not sure how to express it. Or if she even should. “I thought you would’ve wanted to know, so…” She wasn’t quite sure how to finish that thought.

“I did,” he said firmly. “I can’t do everything, but I can do some things. If you’re ever in trouble with supernatural stuff—” He paused a moment. “Yeah. If you’re ever in trouble with supernatural stuff, you tell me, okay? You’re important to me, so if there’s ever any trouble I want to be there to fix it.”

“Oh,” she said, her cheeks heating a little. “Well, thank you, big man. I will.”

Chapter 14 – Bunkering

His bunker really wasn’t going to look anything like what the word usually implied. There was no way that he could actually protect himself against a group of mages, and really all he needed to deal with vamps or shifters was some kind of panic room because all they could bring to the table was physical force. Though if they found the bunker, there was probably no point in fighting to begin with. Instead, he was relying on obscurity. It had worked well enough before, until his cover had been blown, and it was always the first and best way to stay hidden.

What he was actually building was a normal house out in deeply rural Oaxaca. Two bedrooms, two baths, though he wasn’t actually expecting to have company there. It was just absolutely bizarre to build a house of any size without at least two, and he could always use the extra room for something else. A large kitchen combined with dining room, a living room that would probably be a gym, an attached garage.

The basement was probably where most of his magic stuff would go. He was leaving it unfinished for the moment since he didn’t know exactly how his various tests would go, but a giant concrete room was good enough. He’d also put a separate workshop off to the side since he would be doing metalworking, and having a place for his own crucible and molds and things like wire-drawing equipment would be great, but also not in an enclosed basement.

For the moment he had solar panels planned to power the place, but he was optimistic about using a pair of portals to generate energy. Oaxaca had a lot more mana than the States, and it was pretty obvious that permanent portal enchantments made perpetual motion machines pretty straightforward. In fact, it was so straightforward that he had to imagine GAR and BSE used it themselves.

Just the thought of it really irked him. It was infinite electricity. Sure, there were limitations, but if they’d wanted to, the supernatural community could have provided the world with free and unlimited power. Among other things. He could do that, if it weren’t for the impositions of GAR authority and the fact that the grid wasn’t really cut out for some random person pumping huge wattages into it.

Instead, he was stuck using it for his own little house.

It was a damned travesty. If the various governments of the world were in bed with the supernatural, as seemed to be the case, it seemed pretty weird that they hadn’t asked for infinite portal energy. Of course, explaining that away without revealing the existence of magic would be difficult, but it could just be presented as a classified technology and just have wires run from a black site.

In the end it wasn’t his problem, but it was a bit of a personal peeve seeing potential wasted like that. Though it wasn’t like he was really living up to his full potential either, tromping around in the wilds of Mexico, so maybe it was a bit hypocritical. The forests were rather nice, though.

Callum had found a hundred-acre slice out near some township somewhere, mostly completely wooded, and with a few systems of caves that he could sense. His house wasn’t going to go directly atop any of them, but it would still be near enough that he could use one as a panic room. Once he’d freshened up the air in it and maybe furnished it a little.

It was just a matter of purchasing it. Callum drove his pickup to the outskirts of the nearby township, really hoping there was someone who could speak English. He had a translator program loaded on his phone, but that would just show he was ripe for ripping off.

In order to offset that, Callum was dressed in a nice set of slacks and a polo, and had gotten himself a nice silver cane to lean on. The pickup being somewhat beat-up undercut the image a bit, but he wasn’t planning to be seen driving it up to city hall. Instead he just teleported himself nearby and walked the rest of the way, even if that was not that great for his knee. He’d been doing the exercises, but it still was a point of weakness.

His attire and cane drew eyes as he approached what passed as the municipal building. That was fine; he’d made sure to turn his hair completely grey and was wearing glasses, so if for some reason it ever mattered, nobody would guess he was only thirty-one. The only thing he couldn’t do anything about was that he clearly wasn’t from Mexico.

The man inside the municipal building blinked at him when he walked inside, taking in Callum’s garb and straightening up. There was a certain amount of suspicion in those eyes, which Callum didn’t blame him for, but what Callum wanted was straightforward enough. So far as he could tell the land he’d picked wasn’t even being used for crops, and besides which, he had plenty of money to pay for it. Or rather gold, in the briefcase he carried in his other hand.

“I need someone who can speak English,” he told the man. “I need to buy some land.”

“Si, señor,” was the reply, along with a motion for Callum to follow him inside. He was led to someone’s office, given a chair, and the man vanished back out to the front. Callum followed with his senses, and when the man took out a phone, he formed a tiny portal to listen in. Considering there was no sign of supernatural presence, that didn’t seem like much of a risk.

Not that eavesdropping did very much when Callum didn’t speak the language. The translation application didn’t really do a good job either but he seemed to be calling someone else with more authority and who had actual English skills. That was all to the good, but Callum felt that was a bit too easy. Then again, it was probably the easiest thing for them to just see what the man with money wanted.

“Thirty minutes,” the receptionist or whatever he was told Callum in fairly broken English, coming back into the room after finishing the conversation. Callum nodded in return, and was left alone. The wait wasn’t unexpected, but he did worry about a possible ambush or attempted strong-arming by whomever was coming.

While he waited he surveyed everything around with his senses, locating the best places to teleport if he needed to make an exit. He had his glamor focus ready, and if people had guns he’d pre-emptively make sure they weren’t going to function. Most mages probably thought they had nothing to fear from normal folks, him included, but Callum was very aware that nobody was actually invulnerable.

The wait was closer to forty minutes than thirty, but he knew the local leader had arrived when a truck with a half-dozen people rumbled to a stop in front of the building. That was too many individuals to be comfortable, but only one of them actually headed toward the door. The rest spread out to simply hang around just outside.

There was a brief discussion between the man who’d arrived and the receptionist, before they approached the office. Callum stood as they entered, leaning on his cane, and studied the fellow they’d brought to talk with him. He looked weather-beaten and wrinkled, but his eyes were sharp as he took Callum’s offered hand and introduced himself as Miguel.

“I was told you wanted to buy land?” Miguel asked, moving to take the seat behind the office desk while the receptionist left to give them privacy.

“Yes, and build a house there. I have the plans for it, and I was hoping that you might be able to suggest local companies.” He opened the briefcase and took out a printout of a plat of the land he’d picked out that showed the boundaries, along with a copy of the schematics and items list. He arranged them on the desk, but Miguel focused on the land.

“The price for the land, Señor, it is quite a significant expense…” Miguel began. Callum silenced him by taking out one of the gold plates.

“I will be paying with these. If you could arrange for the construction companies and other such details, I would be grateful.”

He was pretty sure that Miguel thought he was with the cartels after that, which was not an implication Callum actually minded. At any rate, Miguel easily agreed to take care of all the details that a local would know after Callum displayed the gold. There was some discussion, and Callum didn’t push too hard, but he wanted to make sure that Miguel knew he wouldn’t stand for any ideas of just taking his money.

For some reason, that wasn’t very hard.

“One more thing,” Callum said, sliding across several of the hundred-gram gold plates. “What are the men outside for?” Miguel twitched, half-glancing around to check if there were some place Callum could have observed them from. There wasn’t.

“Ah, it was in case of any trouble, Señor. Men with money sometimes bring trouble, you see.”

“There won’t be any trouble.”

“Of course not,” Miguel assured him, taking the gold plates. Callum was sure he would siphon off some of that money for himself, but really, that was not a problem. He just wanted to make sure that the house was built to standards. “If there is no trouble, there is no trouble.”

“Good.”

“We will start clearing land tomorrow,” Miguel said, and offered his hand again. Callum took it.

“I’ll be by on occasion to check your progress. And see to expenses.”

“Of course. My door is always open to you,” Miguel said, offering to Callum an honest-to-goodness business card, which he accepted. Hopefully Callum wouldn’t have to spend too much time overseeing things. It’d be tedious enough running back and forth with some of the stuff he was going to source State-side, like the solar panels, but he did want to get the bunker done.

At least he didn’t have to drive the whole way each time. Being able to teleport sped things up immensely, and he was planning on making another set of teleport plates. Their placement was going to be a bit of an issue, but he figured it might be good to make use of the caves he was sensing. Probably even buy a local pickup, and use that in order to disguise how he was bringing things in.

The next few weeks promised to be extraordinarily busy. He was going to be making enchantments, ferrying equipment back and forth, and even learning some amateur metalwork stuff. Figure out some new transportation, too, since he wanted a van of his own. All the stuff he needed to do in order to harden himself against anything GAR might try.

***

“According to Duvall, he’s probably using a finesse tool to get past the wards.” Agent Danforth reported, breaking Jahn out of his contemplation.

“Enchanter’s Guild is going to love that,” Jahn sighed. A focus for working at smaller scales than that of standard vis was not exactly a common piece of equipment, since only certain kinds of enchantments actually needed them. “Either them or BSE, if he’s using a picker instead.”

“I don’t think so,” Danforth disagreed. “Again according to Duvall, everything was at the same scale, which isn’t how any of our pickers operate. What I don’t get is how he got the range on it. No matter what tool you use, those little strands can’t go all that far.”

“Another thing to figure out when we catch up with him. Or them, I suppose.” Jahn tapped the desk thoughtfully. “We can’t harden every ward, but there are some measures we can take for some place we expect him to be.” At that scale, vis threads were so fragile that they’d break just from the passage of someone’s field of authority, so making wards that way was no good.

Jamming did work, breaking those fragile threads, but it was mana-intensive and made normal spellcasting difficult, not to mention, once again, tripping wards constantly. But it could be done. Just not everywhere all at once, and if the wards kept going off they’d be useless against everyone and not just Wells.

“We definitely need to give him a target,” Jahn said at last. “We have to entice him to attack a place of our choosing. We had that chance with the mundane pair, but we weren’t careful enough.” That still rankled. Wells’ group was so devoid of handles that it should have been obvious the pair were more than just witnesses.

The Department of Acquisitions hadn’t done nearly enough. Though they’d had the pair in custody for over a week and nothing had happened, Jahn would have still preferred if they’d been moved to a BSE safehouse. Of course, all that was hindsight. When they’d first acquired the couple, everyone had been focused on Europe and reinforcing the landings to the Portal Worlds. Wrestling with the Department of Acquisition over a pair of mundanes had not been on anyone’s mind.

That was not a mistake they’d make again.

“What about Ferrochar?” Jahn asked, turning to Agent Black. He’d tried applying some pressure to the fae in order to get ahold of the mundanes once again, but it was exceedingly difficult when he couldn’t even name the people in question. Such a powerful working meant that it had to be part of a bargain. A fae couldn’t summon that kind of thing of their own accord.

“He’s all but saying he had contact with Wells. As the Ghost, of course.” Black typed the words, displaying them on a portable monitor. While Jahn knew how to protect himself from Felicia’s talents, he appreciated the habitual caution.

“That idiot is going to get someone killed,” Jahn said bluntly, and Black nodded agreement. He wasn’t sure how exactly she’d wound up on the outs from the various fae enclaves, but she was loyal to GAR rather than any of the fae kings. For the fae version of loyal, of course, so it wasn’t like he trusted her implicitly.

“Well, if Ferrochar is determined not to support GAR, then we need not support Ferrochar,” Jahn decided. “I’m going to ban his fae from the Miami offices until he decides to start cooperating. Or rather, the Archmages are.” He tapped his breast pocket where the Archmage seals sat.

“You’re not worried about loading up BSE, under the circumstances?” Danforth asked doubtfully. “I mean, fae go kind of weird when they can’t do their thing.” He gave Black a look when he said that, something with a bit more feeling than that of an assigned partner. It wasn’t any of Jahn’s business, but he was pretty sure there was something there. They were just a little too much in tune, stayed a little too close to each other, for just coworkers.

They actually reminded him a bit of a pair from one of his favorite shows, but for a fae, that was probably intentional.

“There’s a number we can cycle off the fronts if it’s an issue,” Jahn reassured them, though it was a worry. All the races needed GAR in one way or another. Vampires needed blood and lairs, shifters needed jobs and land, and fae needed to pursue whatever story they’d decided to embody. But that’s exactly why it was a credible threat. “Anyway, it’s not more people we need to deal with Wells, it’s better planning.”

“No argument here,” Black wrote.

***

“We still have not recovered,” Antoine Lavigne, the Master of Minneapolis, didn’t shout, but his voice was cold and hard. “Almost sixty years worth of recruiting from the Night Lands wasted, all because GAR failed to locate a rogue mage.”

“I fail to see why you are complaining to me,” Archmage Janry said, maybe a touch impatiently. “I’m not in charge of the Night Lands. Or rogue mages.”

“Because GAR has not reached out at all to offset the results of their error. You haven’t punished Chester, you haven’t found more newcomers for me, you haven’t even found and punished the mage!” Lavigne eyed Janry. “So what is going to be done?”

“All that can be done, already is. If you mean on your account, as I said, I don’t control the Night Lands. Nothing is stopping you from heading there on your own.” Janry waved dismissively. Lavigne glared.

“I see,” he said icily. “Thank you for your time.” Lavigne didn’t bother to wait for the dismissal before he blurred out the door. Moving at his speed rather than the laggard humans, who for all their power never achieved the sort of physical mastery that a vampire could.

He was fed up waiting. GAR was supposed to support them, not hang them out to dry. A mass murderer was out there, and nobody seemed to care at all. The only answer was to do something himself.

Lavigne pressed his thumb against his passkey, a drop of blood linking it to him so the teleportation network could move him from place to place. He could have done as Janry suggested, and gone to visit with the Master of Weltentor in the Night Lands. There, he could have supped on fine moon-water and tried to negotiate for some lesser spawn to come over to earth.

That wasn’t him, though. That wasn’t why he was on Earth. His was to take whatever he could seize, hold it and drink his fill. That was what made him the Master of Minneapolis, and why he had come so near to crushing the pretensions of that cur Chester. If it weren’t for the murderer.

Instead he took the network back to his own nest, standing proud in the Minneapolis skyline, and strode into the main room. The thralls seemed to sense his mood, melting away into the corners or side rooms as Lavigne stalked up to an underling. It was one of the youngest of his recruits, newly arrived through the portal and too clumsy in his new body to be sent out on missions.

“Bring me a meal,” he ordered. “And Zegrev.”

The underling bowed and moved off, barely faster than a human, and Lavigne looked out the window at his city, lit up for the night. It was all his, but it just wasn’t enough. It was right and meet that everything he could see, he could claim, by whatever means. He’d tried playing nice, and it had become obvious how ineffective that was.

Zegrev appeared with a squirming mundane, and Lavigne took the meal, holding the food with the implacable strength of a vampire and sinking his fangs into its neck. Blood itself did not taste very good, but the essence of life he pulled from the mundane was oh so sweet. When he was sated he cast the thing aside for the thralls to clean up and patted his lips with his kerchief.

“We need to take our own action to lure out the murderer,” Lavigne told his second. “We only have access to one target we know matters. Clara Langley.”

“Yes, sir,” Zagrev said. “What is it you wish?”

“I want you to take three — no, four of the eldest and take her. Or all the Langleys, I don’t care. I want them here, where he has no advantages.”

“Of course, sir,” Zagrev said. “Under what auspice?”

“Power, of course. Chester reminded me that the only true power that exists is force. GAR didn’t do anything about Chester’s crimes, so they’re hardly going to object to anything I do.” They’d already shown that, being too weak to actually enforce any of the laws they proclaimed to have.

“It will be done,” Zagrev said, and withdrew.

Lavigne went back to contemplating the skyline. If nothing else, the murderer had shown what a weak and feckless organization GAR really was. They couldn’t rein in shifters, they couldn’t rein in fae, and they couldn’t even fulfill their obligations to him.

If it was like that, he would simply do as he wished.

***

Callum realized he really should have cribbed some of the building protections the last time he’d stopped by a GAR office. While he had a glamour that was good enough for him, he didn’t have anything that would cover an entire property, or at least a house. He’d have to go shopping.

The main worry was whether or not he’d be able to reproduce some of what he’d seen. It wasn’t so much the complexity that was the issue, since he was pretty confident he was able to trace the geometry of enchantments fairly well. The problem was that he only had access to mana and spatial vis. Just like spatial enchantments required spatial vis, a glamour or protection might require light or wind vis, or a reinforcement shield might need earth vis. Anywhere there was a converter, rather than it just using raw mana, he couldn’t make his own.

He figured the reason the glamour enchantment only used mana was because they had to make so many. If it were gated behind a specific vis there’d be a situation like with the teleports, where there was a waiting list. In fact, there probably were other glamour enchants, ones that used different principles, for people who had the appropriate vis types and could fuel them directly.

Either way he needed to do more surveillance, but fortunately he didn’t need to do anything to actually intrude on the operations of the office in question. For that, he just went to nearest one over in Dallas and snooped a bit from six hundred yards away, transcribing things into his CAD program.

Frankly, he felt he was understanding more about enchantments by cribbing from the existing ones than trying to muddle through the theory. He could at least recognize certain common patterns, like the bits for conversion or defining areas, and slot them in properly. It wasn’t exactly a thing of great finesse, but he was confident that he could make a glamour that would hide his entire house.

If it were in the States he’d probably need to make a feeder portal first. Considering that Portal World Six was in Mexico, it was a little bit of a surprise that the total mana was so relatively low, but when he’d been driving through he’d noticed that it dropped off very quickly as he went north. It might just be that Europe was so mana rich because it had three portals in close proximity.

To compound the issues with enchanting, Callum was going through the mordite startlingly quickly. He was still fairly certain that most of the stuff that was used was alloyed somehow, but Lucy couldn’t get him any of the enchanter’s guild records, so he didn’t know what it was alloyed with. Considering how little he had and how it was already processed, he had to put off experimentation and just focus on minimizing the use of the stuff.

He archived the sketches of the various warding and shielding reinforcements the GAR office had, and just worked on figuring out the building-size glamour. Or rather, glamours, because when he started analyzing it he could see there were three different converters feeding it. In the end there was only one part he could really use, and it was the actual part that projected it to the size of a building. The core of the enchantment, the part that defined what the magic actually did, required things he couldn’t duplicate.

It was a good thing he’d gotten a look at how GAR did it, because it was a different design than the personal glamour focus. Designing the new enchantment, running it over to a fabrication shop to get the blank cut, then enchanting with his mordite wire took a couple days. Especially since he had to use the tubes instead of his normal threads. The end result was the personal glamour core, but with a building-size projection.

He tested it on his own trailer house, to his satisfaction. People could still stumble across it, but it was uninteresting enough that nobody would even look twice. A supernatural would probably notice, though, so he shut it down. It barely functioned anyway; the mana levels in Texas were just too low.

The other thing he did was make a second set of teleporter plates. One he just kept in the trailer house, but the other he took down to the bunker site in Mexico. It was a long drive, even with the way he cheated, and he was glad that it was the last time he’d be making it in a pickup. By the time he got out at the bunker site, he was aching all over from the poor seat padding.

There was already construction equipment where he’d wanted the house put, and even though he didn’t enter their sight, the workers seemed to be actually doing things instead of just hanging out to get paid. The latter was, sadly, surprisingly common among the contractors he had talked to in his former life. For now there was just a bunch of muddy dirt as trees were cleared, but it was a start.

Callum formed a portal between the fair-sized cave he’d picked out and a random patch of open air under the trees, sweeping it back and forth to make sure there was real oxygen there. The memory of what he’d done to the fae was still fresh in his mind, and he shook away the nauseous feeling that accompanied it. Only then did he transport himself and his equipment inside.

It was pitch black, of course, but when he clicked on the light there wasn’t anything interesting to look at anyway. It was exactly what he had sensed: a big empty pocket in the rock, irregular and unadorned. There wasn’t even a properly flat patch for him to put the teleportation pad on, but he moved a few pieces of deadwood down from the surface to wedge under it so it was mostly level.

He placed a few long-life LED lanterns about, and piled up camping equipment in a corner. While he could have made a second homebond, he wanted to be able to go both ways, and with the plates he could move both ends around. Once he finished and was ready to go check in with Miguel, he pursed his lips at the teleport plate.

There was no reason he couldn’t make one large enough to transport vehicles.

Of course, it would take a lot more time to charge, and it was a lot harder to find a safe place to stash something that size, but actual cargo transport might be really useful. So long as he didn’t have to make the physical receiver that large, anyway. Thus far he’d been copying GAR and using a fairly rigid framework embedded in a plate, but the magic wasn’t restricted to the physical location of a focus.

It was obvious in retrospect, but it made him wonder what the actual limits were. He had a six-hundred yard range; if his enchantments could have that range as well then he could think of all kinds of applications. Even being able to displace things a few feet would be useful.

He considered options as he drove over to meet Miguel, who still had toughs hanging about his place of business. Callum didn’t like it, but as long as they didn’t try to intimidate him it wasn’t really his problem. Especially since everything seemed to be going well on the construction side.

Callum supplied a few more gold plates before leaving. He had weighed the merits of paying in cash versus gold, and while the gold was more traceable due to the marks, that was only if it wasn’t melted down and recast. Which it probably would be. Besides which, it went a lot farther than trying to convert it in the US by relying on people willing to do things off the books. Building a house was an expensive proposition, and Callum needed to be smart about it.

Especially since the solar panels and HVAC equipment was coming from the States. He’d arranged for deliveries at a self-storage, which had pretty much destroyed all the free cash he had left. While Callum wasn’t exactly impoverished, it wasn’t like he could casually buy new vehicles. Or even burner phones. The expenses added up.

He had a few guilty thoughts about robbing a GAR office, but if he really needed a cash infusion it would be better to make another enchantment to sell. Maybe just a glamour instead of something as ridiculous as a homebond. So far he hadn’t even heard back from Chester about how well they were working, or if they were at all useful.

On the way home he chewed over how to connect things so he had at least some protection against one of the endpoints being compromised. There was no value in a network that was just unconnected pairs, but he had to assume that anyone, or at least another space mage, could use his if they found them.

So a big room full of teleporters was out, but maybe some kind of dispersed network was possible, with endpoints a mile away from each other or something. He’d have to rethink his emergency location, or at least re-site the teleport plates. Or make more plates. The last seemed the best solution, since the core spatial part that made it all work could always be slotted into something else.

When Callum got back to Texas, he’d have to do a lot of enchanting.

Chapter 15 – Grievances

“There are definitely vampires headed for Winut,” Roy Wilton said.

Alpha Chester grunted. There was a reason that he’d had his people keeping an eye on the Minneapolis nest ever since their first play. It had been obvious that they were not intending to follow the accords, and that GAR wasn’t going to do anything about it. The only surprising thing about the vampire’s actions was that they had waited until now.

“No formal demands, no communication at all. Sounds familiar, really.” Chester shook his head. “Get Jasper,” he ordered, taking out his phone. “I suspect we’ll have the opportunity to use our new acquisition sooner than I thought.”

“Alpha,” Roy said, and left. Chester dialed up Arthur Langley, hearing the phone ring a few times before Arthur picked up.

“We’ve spotted more vampires coming your way,” Chester said without any preamble. “I suspect they’re a little bit piqued since our mutual friend remains evasive.”

“What do you have in mind?” Arthur asked. “Going to come here to camp out?”

“Just swap for a bit,” Chester agreed. “I’ll have Jasper ferry everyone around. You don’t have to worry; we’ll ensure they don’t do anything to Winut. I suspect they’re just after us. Or rather, you.” Chester knew vampires, and how vindictive they were. Winut and the Langleys were the closest things to the redoubtable Mister Brown that Lavigne could hurt.

Somehow the story about how Clara had been taken from the motel had leaked. Unofficially, of course, and figuring out the origin had driven Arthur up the wall, but Chester was pretty sure nobody had actually betrayed them. It was just hard to keep things from fae when they decided they really wanted to snoop.

That meant everyone knew, unofficially, that Mr. Brown – in addition to whatever compatriots he might have – had started their spree on Clara’s behalf. For better or worse, mostly worse, that meant there were a lot of people interested in Winut. Unofficially. Already several powerful fae had dropped by to visit their very, very distant relatives in hopes of getting some kind of line on the Ghost.

It really hadn’t taken much foresight to put the other half of the black-market teleport pad in the Winut compound. As he’d been warned, shifters couldn’t actually use them, not like the GAR ones, but a mage could. Or, a crippled mage and a number of mana batteries.

They did still need to use the tokens that temporarily suppressed their resistance to magic, which was annoying, but at least they were going from safehouse to safehouse. That forced vulnerability made using the GAR teleporters untenable for most Alphas except under the most dire of circumstances. Not that any shifter particularly liked that requirement.

“I’ll get everyone together,” Arthur assured him. “We’ll be ready in twenty minutes.”

“Expect me in twenty, then,” Chester said, and hung up. Roy returned with Jasper a few moments later, the tired-eyed mage blinking at Chester.

“Get the Wolfpack together,” he told Roy. “We’ll be leaving in twenty minutes.” Then Chester glanced at Jasper and hitched a thumb in the direction of one particular saferoom. “We’re going to need transportation for a few groups.”

“Yes, sir,” Jasper said, without any enthusiasm. Not that he ever showed any, though he had seemed slightly more alive controlling the teleportation platforms, even if he couldn’t fuel them.

Chester rose and went to find his mate to tell her what was going on. It wasn’t hard; he merely had to follow the scent of fresh-baked cookies. It was a good thing his mate liked baking, because he wasn’t sure how he’d satisfy the Wolfpack’s sweet tooth otherwise.

“Hey, love,” he said, poking his head into the kitchen. “Lavigne is making a move on the Langleys. We’ll be trading places with them for the next few hours, maybe a day. Did you want to come with, or stay here and play host?”

“Hmm.” Lisa pursed her lips. She was almost as deadly as Chester was, able to draw on the same amount of pack magic, but didn’t enjoy fighting all that much. “I’ll stay here. It’s always nice to see the Langleys. Shame it’s always when something awful is happening.”

“We’ll have to have a meetup when all this is done,” Chester said, leaning into the kitchen a little further to steal a kiss before heading back down to the basement. The six other members of the Wolfpack were there, half of them already shifted into their War Forms, with Jasper sitting by the teleport plate watching it charge.

He had Roy give them the briefing, though there wasn’t that much to it. They just knew that a number of vampires were being convoyed out of Minneapolis and they were headed in the direction of Winut. At this point it was obvious what the destination was; they hadn’t even tried to hide it. But then, they didn’t need to. It wasn’t like it was illegal for them to drive around.

When the time rolled around, the seven of them crowded onto the teleportation plate, only barely fitting, and used their tokens as Jasper sent them off to Winut. The experience was not as good as with the GAR gates — there was a definite jolt, a shock that took a tiny bit of shifter healing to deal with, but nothing that would really threaten even a mundane. As promised, Arthur Langley was waiting on the other side, with most of his immediate family.

“Alpha,” Arthur said, the pack bonds snapping and humming as the two Alphas met. After a moment, Arthur inclined his head, and the magic settled.

“Arthur,” Chester said. “My home is open to you.” Then he smiled. “Lisa’s baking cookies.”

“Well, we sure can’t miss those,” Arthur chuckled. “Come on, everyone.”

The Wolfpack handed off their tokens to the shifters heading the other way, and Chester texted Jasper to bring them through. It took three trips, with Jasper sending the tokens by themselves, but most of the Winut pack went through. The only exceptions were those who weren’t staying at the compound, and had other jobs or housing throughout Winut.

That did mean closing down a number of businesses for the day, but that wasn’t without precedent. The Langley clan was known to have big family gatherings on occasion. For those who knew their true nature, it was even less of a surprise.

The Langley compound had some defenses, mostly in the nature of reinforced walls and doors, since they had to deal with the occasional spats between supernaturals. Even outside of the allowed challenges, Chester and his pack didn’t really trust GAR to protect their interests. Under the circumstances, though, neither Chester nor the rest of his Wolfpack really needed them. They were planning to ambush rather than defend.

The evening turned on toward night as they settled themselves in and waited. All of them were in war-form, crouched and readied with the patience of the hunter. The stars had been out for several hours when a series of figures silently ghosted across the lawn and arranged themselves at windows and doors. Chester watched coldly from his post by the front door, waiting until the vampire suddenly wrenched the wood-veneer steel off its hinges.

Chester pulled on the magic of the pack bond, accelerating his strength and speed far beyond mortal limits. The wall cracked behind him, steel denting from the force of his leap as he tackled the vampire, three-inch claws punching through supernatural flesh. He recognized the face of Zagrev, contorted in pain and fury, but unable to struggle against the power of the Midwest Alpha.

“You!” Zagrev managed to get out, just before Chester’s jaws closed around his head. Shifter magic pushed against vampire magic as he tore off Zagrev’s head, spitting the foul thing out and tossing the rest of the corpse back through the door. There were other noises from the house, banging and splintering and the cries of vampire and shifter alike as combat was joined and subsequently finished.

Through the pack bonds he could tell that the only injury of note was from Tessa, who’d broken her hand on the skull of one of the vamps. She’d not hear the end of that one. Chester fed her extra magic to accelerate the healing process, looking around at the mess he’d made. It was going to take some fixing.

The entire ambush had lasted two seconds at the outside, and had deprived Lavigne of his right-hand man, at the very least. It had been so very simple, but only because they could get there without anyone knowing. Both GAR and Lavigne would have been alerted if Chester had left the compound, let alone gone to Winut, but with the black-market teleportation nobody was any the wiser. They wouldn’t know that Lavigne’s vampires had taken on a wolf rather than a puppy.

He'd have to see if he could get more.

***

When Callum actually made the portal enchantment, he found out why it took so much mana. Or rather, he found that he’d been massively underestimating how much mana teleports took. It was a matter of inefficiencies; it took a lot of ambient mana funneled through a converter into the spatial vis enchantments to mimic what vis normally did. A single teleport took five minutes to charge up in the States, but it only took a few seconds down at his Mexico place. Taking that instantaneous cost and turning it into a constant one meant that yes, indeed, large portals were hard to support.

Even small ones weren’t really possible if both sides were in the US. He’d need to either site them closer to a portal world, or have a feeder portal like GAR used. If he was handling them himself, he could hold both sides open regardless of the mana level, so it wasn’t like it was useless in other places. Just slower. It also let him push his perceptions through the portal, so he could teleport things or people, which was potentially better than making an enormous teleportation plate.

Little portal anchors would be easier to hide than a plate, but they would take longer to charge enough to open initially and he’d have to spend more vis to keep them open. Considering his limited amount of enchanting material, he’d have to decide on his approach sooner rather than later. For the moment he needed at least two pairs of portals, one for the generator and one for general testing, something that was a long and tedious process. Even if he didn’t have much else to do, it was an effort.

On the other hand, at least he didn’t have to reinvent the wheel when it came to his portal power device. People had done extensive hypothetical calculations online, for a variety of options. There were some crazy designs out there, but he really wanted something with essentially no maintenance.

Unfortunately, it required moving parts. It wasn’t like a solar panel where it could all be solid state. He was exploiting gravity, and that meant something, somewhere was falling. In the end he decided to just go with a water column and a small turbine generator. All that stuff he could buy practically off the shelf, which made putting together a perpetual motion machine that much easier.

All of that equipment came from metal shops and their associates, who were rapidly becoming his best friends. There was a lot of overlap among skilled tradesman and finding someone who could provide him a small generator and a storage bank was really not that hard. Of course, normally the setup for a hydro turbine involved a lot of engineering to deal with the water flow, but since Callum was cheating he could manage it fairly easily himself.

The only thing he really needed customized was a couple stands for the portal pair, some adjustable tripod kind of thing so he could lock the two sections of pipe together. He tested the final apparatus in the back yard of the trailer house, out of sight of the road. The pipe was tall enough to project over the top of the trailer anyway, but since there was nobody around he felt like a quick run-through wouldn’t hurt.

Despite the column being infinite, the water had only the length of the pipe as the head before passing through the turbine, so to some extent that was the total amount of energy he could extract from it. Except, of course, that the turbine didn’t stop the water completely dead, so there was some residual carryover until all the forces balanced. He was actually a little worried that the eternal water pipe might overspeed and break the apparatus, but when he finished testing it, he found he was worried for nothing. Water wasn’t frictionless and neither was the turbine, so while the energy was infinite it didn’t happen all at once.

He filled it by forming a portal between the pipe and the bottom of a barrel full of industrial-purified water, letting water in and air out at the same time. The goal was to have no air at all, just water, and he was pretty sure he could get very close. When he did it for real he’d have to be far more careful to ensure there weren’t air bubbles continually falling upward, but for the test it did well enough. Watching it charge the capacitor pack was surreal and quietly amazing, even if he had to hold the portal pair open himself rather than letting the ambient mana do it.

Then he had to disassemble it all because there was no need for it at the trailer. It’d have to come with him to the cave, to be set up once the bunker house was done. There were instructions for maintenance and lubrication that he’d have to deal with, but only eventually. Industrial equipment was pretty hardy.

Flush with success, he decided he’d call up Lucy and see how she was getting on. He’d been a little busy with shuttling things back and forth for the past few days and while the folks at the machine shop were nice enough, they were still strangers. Laboring in complete isolation, he found he tended to get a lot more stressed and twitchy than things really called for.

“Hey, big man!” Lucy said, picking up right away. That was a rarity of late, though it was the weekend, and wearing on toward Thanksgiving. “Anything shaking down there?”

“Actually a bit, yeah. Nothing exciting like the vacation trips I’ve been on, but a few personal projects are coming along.” He was never sure exactly how much he should tell her. Obviously she knew his real identity and some of his capabilities, but at the same time the more he told her the more she could give away. Likely not willingly, but two people couldn’t keep a secret.

“Ooh? Anything fun? Anything sexy?”

“Something fun, but probably not that sexy unless you’ve got a kink for power generation,” Callum told her. “It does make me wonder how much enchanting is used to make technology work better. I’ve seen some things that are super new, like the magical laptops and phones, but a lot of stuff seems kind of ancient.”

“Oh yeah, big man, ongoing process. Especially since you have to pry any super advanced stuff from the Enchanting Guild’s cold, dead hands. Probably literally.”

“I can just imagine,” Callum said, but he did wonder exactly how it kept a monopoly on the creation of enchantments. With his spatial perception he could trace out the circuits of most any enchantment he’d run into, but then, he hadn’t tried reproducing some of the really complex stuff. The security portions of the teleportation enchants, or the wards in GAR offices. Maybe there were flourishes that he hadn’t run into yet, because he'd mostly just been using the simplest and most straightforward things. Nothing that reacted or sensed, just an input and an output.

“Oh speaking of that! I have some good news, bad news, good news, related to your special project that just got bought.”

“That certainly isn’t ominous,” Callum said, shifting in the cab of his pickup and switching the phone from one ear to another. It had decided to be miserable outside, and he had to peer through murky rain as he drove. “At least there’s more good than bad?”

“That’s the way you gotta approach life, big man,” Lucy told him. “So good; everyone is fine. The bad; The Master of Minneapolis has been agitating about you and after that stunt in Florida got super peeved. He sent a bunch of vamps to go bother the Langleys, probably to get your attention. The good again; your merchandise was used to add reinforcements and ambush the vamps in question, so the boss man wants another. Just in case.”

“He did what?” The news was somewhat disarmed by the fact that it had turned out well in the end, but finding out that the vampires were still bothering Clara and the rest of the Langleys was a jolt. He’d thought he’d left that behind, but now it seemed not.

There was a type of person who could never let well enough be, and had to make sure everyone, everywhere conformed to their vision. To whom merely existing was an affront. The kind that would never, ever leave him alone. It seemed Lavigne was one of those types.

“Hey man, it’s fine. Like I said, they got caught out and taken care of.” Lucy seemed to catch something in his voice, and he shook his head to try and clear his mind.

“Yeah, I know,” Callum sighed. “It’s just that I am so tired of people trying to get at me by going after someone else. I want to stop people from doing that, but I don’t know how. Except plan to punish anyone that does, I guess. If someone goes after you, goes after anyone, I need to be able to deal with it.”

“Whoa there, big man. I know where you’re coming from but these people are big names. Not to mention GAR itself.”

“That only makes it worse,” Callum told her. “That just makes it more likely they’ll try, and that they think they can get away with it.” He rubbed at his eyes, feeling suddenly tired. “You know, it’s probably not the best idea to keep dealing with me. It’ll get you into trouble eventually.”

“Nah, big man,” Lucy replied. “I’m in it to win it. Besides, what would you do without me? Probably be off in a hole somewhere, yeah?”

“Probably,” Callum admitted. He needed someone that knew what was going on, that was certain. “I appreciate it, Lucy, even if maybe it’s not the wisest choice.”

“Hey, I like you a lot more than I like any of the people I work with. I mean, you get me, big man. All the others are stiff old twigs with no sense of humor. And I have to admit…” Lucy stopped to laugh. “You’ve been my biggest payday ever and even if it’s just money, it’s still a lot of it!”

“Hey, you’re worth it,” Callum said. “You said that he wanted another set of teleport plates?”

“Yeah, same deal. Guess they’re worth it.”

“Mmm.” Callum considered. “Not immediately? I have my own projects and I have limited resources to work with. Unless he can get me raw portal world materials?”

“I don’t think he can, big man. Especially since he’s kinda-sorta under a cloud because they know he did some dealings with you. Can’t get at him directly, but he’s no mage so trying to get that would be real rough.”

“In that case, I can’t say yes right now. I’ve got my own projects I’m still doing that take priority. But I’ll keep it in mind and figure out when I can get him another set.”

“Sure, big man. I’ll let him know.”

Callum didn’t press for too many details on the vampire attack over the rest of the conversation, since really he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. There was obviously a bunch of bad blood to begin with between the two factions, and need-to-know went both ways. If he didn’t know what went on, he couldn’t betray it by accident.

He did want to know a lot more about the Master of Minneapolis, because Callum was pretty sure that just losing once – or rather, twice – would not be enough to get him to stop. For the moment he wasn’t quite sure how he wanted to deal with it, or if he was even capable of doing so, but it was better to be forewarned and forearmed than write it off as someone else’s problem. That was a good way to get blindsided.

In his darker moments of anger he’d considered ways to wreak some real havoc with his magic. Or even without it. They were thoughts he hadn’t really followed through on because he didn’t want to become some sort of maniac. There was a big difference between punishing people who deserved it and wholesale destruction.

He’d considered and mostly rejected one of the simplest ways of weaponizing portals on a large scale: the infinite portal box. The idea was to take a box, put a portal at the top and bottom, teleport the air out, and then teleport in the ammunition. Let it fall for a week or two and it made for an extraordinarily high yield bomb. The trouble was, it was a bomb he couldn’t disarm and he had no idea when it’d go off.

Something like that could fail in a lot of ways, like hitting the side of the container, or whatever molecules of air remained in the box making enough friction heat to melt things, or just the portals not being able to handle high speeds. Add in that it needed a high mana environment or him keeping the portals open manually and it just wasn’t a viable weapon. Besides, all it did was explode.

If he wanted to do that, there were probably easier ways to go about it. Plenty of things exploded, from methane to dispersed flour, assuming he needed a larger detonation than his little water grenades. Which did an admirable job of damaging delicate equipment, but were probably fairly useless against any supernatural.

Now that he was facing having to potentially deal with some master vampire or some similar individual, he needed to think about how to really do a lot of damage. Thermite plates wouldn’t be enough. Pistols might not be enough, not after he’d seen the way that a fae could actually dodge such things.

So he was going to have to spend some time coming up with approaches to dealing with such people. He had some ideas, ranging from the simple to the insane, but each would require him to actually investigate and see how expensive they’d be. The problem was that any that required a permanent portal ate into his stocks of mordite, meaning if they were disposable they’d damn well better be worth it.

His personal notebook was starting to look pretty alarming. In addition to notes on infinite power, he had notes about how to collapse buildings and how to get ahold of large amounts of nitrogen or methane. If anyone else saw it, they’d think he was a total nutter, and they’d probably be at least half right.

In addition to thinking of ways enchantments could be weaponized, he started playing around with his gravity field more. He hadn’t forgotten how effective just a random boulder could be, and he could fling fairly large projectiles, so long as he didn’t have to do too many or anything absolutely enormous. Theoretically he could actually launch vehicles, though not very often, given the strain it was to encompass something of that size.

The great thing about the gravity launcher and the accompanying gravitykinesis was that mass didn’t matter. It was all about volume, and a boulder the size of a car was a lot of mass. Hurling something like that at a hundred miles an hour or more was more realistic than trying to make something relativistic with clever exploitation. Not that he could carry a boulder around in his back pocket, but he was a spatial mage.

He hadn’t cracked making a useful spatial compression enchantment. Or expansion. Or whatever it was called. While he could hold together the enchant manually, that took time, attention, and vis, and wasn’t particularly portable. On the other hand, he did have teeny tiny portals. There wasn’t much functional difference between compressed storage and a portal back to some cache somewhere full of useful things.

It'd have to be one of the caves on his bunker property, since the only way he could have a portal open in a reasonable timeframe was to put it in a high-mana area, but that was fine. It wasn’t ideal, since keeping everything as physically separated as possible was the best idea, but he’d need physical access to it anyway. Putting it in the same area meant he wouldn’t have to double-up access to his home, and he could move the teleport plates elsewhere. Or sell them to Chester.

With that thought he started making another portal set, but this one aimed for letting his spatial perceptions through rather than funneling mana or running pipes. So it only needed to be as wide as a finger, or really, even smaller than that if he could manage. He’d already found that he could send his perceptions through fairly small holes and while the sensation was weird, small apertures didn’t impair him at all, so he wanted the portal to be less noticeable.

What he had in mind was another implant. Two was probably the limit he was willing to risk, at least without getting an actual surgeon involved, but that would probably be good enough for now. One for his homebond, which he needed to redo with tubes so it wasn’t so awful, and one for this cache.

The main difference between a portal enchant and the homebond was that the portal had to physically exist somewhere as a discrete torus, rather than using the resonator that just grabbed everything inside the volume of his vis. The homebond’s input didn’t even make sense with the way a portal worked. He just used the enchantment he’d sourced the portal pairs, which had the portals appear just above the enchantment plate. Since he was making something very small, he could just enclose it.

That would make the implant a little larger than the homebond, but not much larger. After all, the portal itself was smaller than a dime. Since he could use threads instead of tubes, the physical space the spell matrix took up was that much smaller and meant it didn’t need to be all that much wider than a dime, either. The enchantment geometry required to define the portal didn’t need to be strictly three-dimensional, so he could stack sections together to make it thicker without making it wider. Doing so meant he spent slightly more mordite on the connections, but he could hardly begrudge the use of his portal materials for something so important.

Planning was one thing, doing was another, and he had to go visit his friendly metal-shop to get all the made and cut. The two portal anchors, which were identical so either of them could be implanted, and a new homebond to replace the old and terrible one. Even if he had some equipment, he really wanted professional help with these, especially since they couldn’t have sharp edges and they’d be getting medical-grade titanium coatings.

Then there was his own work with tapping the mordite into place, enchanting it, bonding it to the next piece of mordite, continuing the enchantment, and all that tedium. Though he supposed it was good that he was already to the point that it was tedious rather than worrying he’d mess up with every motion.

They didn’t look like much when they were finished, but he was damn proud of them. He wanted to break out some champagne, or call Lucy and brag, but he’d never liked champagne and no matter how he felt about Lucy it wasn’t a good idea to detail his hidden cards over the phone. So he just toasted himself with a bottled tea and let the moment pass.

Callum did test both of them before he took them off to get coated. The new homebond, using his new tube technique and benefitting from extra enchanting practice, was better than before even if it didn’t measure up to GAR teleports. There was a distinct feeling of disjunct and disorientation, but it wasn’t anything that lingered.

The mini-portal was pretty well perfect, though. The magical construct manifested in a tiny pocket inside the implant, with essentially no space on either side of it, connecting the two titanium discs. It was completely enclosed, but since most of it was just normal metal it didn’t block any of his perceptions. What was better, he could teleport himself through the portal, though that sort of dislocation tended to destabilize the portal structure.

What he ended up with was a twin pair of titanium discs, thin and flat but completely rounded. The homebond was nearly identical, only being slightly thinner the portal pair. Callum felt that he was being a little prosaic about shoving stuff into his abdominal cavity, but since he wasn’t breaking any skin or anything, all he had to do was make sure they were sterile. Which he did by washing them thoroughly before running them under a high-powered UV light at the machine shop, then teleporting them into a bottle of saline when nobody was looking.

The old homebond came out and the new implants went in, and Callum went on a brief jaunt as he used the old homebond to get to his cache and replace the receiver plate, then used the portal implant to return home. The reshuffling continued as he picked up the telepads he’d used to connect himself to Mexico and scouted around for another cave, one that he could use as a cache. With as large as his property was, he spent some time hunting to find the best possible cave, something large enough to fit everything, but still dry enough to be safe storage.

Strictly speaking, the portal was just as much an emergency button as the homebond, and maybe a better one. Even if they somehow got vis-blocker bracelets on him again, he wouldn’t be sending any power outside himself, so they shouldn’t have any real effect. Though he was pretty sure that if they caught him a second time that trick wouldn’t help him. Nor would having two separate implants. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of a better way to hide it.

That said, two backups were better than one. The portal did far more for him, but part of him was a little concerned about others being able to sense through the portal. He knew the worry was probably groundless, but it was still in the back of his head, so he kept the homebond for an alternate emergency escape. If he had serious reservations about the portal, the homebond had nothing that gave away what was on the other side. He felt a little bit unsettled the rest of the day, though he wasn’t sure how much was psychosomatic and how much actually was the added pressure of another tiny implant. Callum knew people regularly had much larger implants put inside them, but under far different circumstances.

Once he had all the logistics checked and doublechecked, he moved some of his largesse of weaponry to the new and larger cave. Although, looking around, he’d have to renovate to some extent just to make things organized. At the very least bring in storage racks and some concrete to level out the floor. He’d already put air quality sensors out, though he’d already refreshed the atmosphere in the house-sized cave.

He wouldn’t exactly call himself prepared for every contingency, but the portal-cache massively simplified his logistics. It even made it possible for him to bring his pickup back and forth, already loaded up with materials. The problem of the Master of Minneapolis lingered in his mind, because he knew he’d have to address it somehow, but he let it stay in the back. So long as nothing happened, he could focus on bunkering down.

Chapter 16 – Groundwork

“So what do you think?” Agent Ray Danforth asked the federal agents that Felicia had managed to secure for the investigation. They weren’t exactly in the know, but at the same time the loan of their services was somewhat legitimate. There were so many convolutions to the federal bureaucracy that a little bit of fae ensorcellment made it easy to get some off-the-books talent. So long as everyone got paid, nobody even thought to raise a fuss.

“The pattern is very concerning,” said Dave. He was also an agent, but for the moment they forewent the honorifics.

“Yeah?” Ray asked, leaning forward. “I thought it was a bit of a relief that he hadn’t been killing people.”

“It means that he’s finding out what the minimum necessary force is,” Dave explained. “The first one, he killed everyone. The next set, just the targets. When he didn’t kill anyone, that meant that there was nobody he considered a target at the site. So he didn’t start out as an experienced operator and is still learning.”

“If he wasn’t experienced, how did he manage to do everything he did?” Ray asked skeptically. None of what he saw was the work of a novice.

“He didn’t have wetwork training,” Dave clarified. “There are all kinds of expertise that can translate to real havoc, if someone is determined enough. What this means is that he’s getting more dangerous. If he were escalating, that’d actually be easier, because then he’d very quickly try something that was too much for him.”

“That is a worry,” Ray conceded, but for his own part, he was just glad Wells wasn’t running around slaughtering people in job lots. He wasn’t sure how much more dangerous the man could be than that. “But it mostly seems he’s reacting to threats against him or people close to him.”

“Well, you’re trying to find him, aren’t you?” Dave pointed out. “If I were you I’d worry about agents going missing or something if they get too near. Did you hear of anyone who had an unfortunate accident lately? Allergic reactions, maybe? If he’s learning finesse as he goes, you may be overlooking the more recent victims.”

“I don’t believe so,” Ray said. Admittedly, the disappearance of the fae was a big question mark. The assumption was that they were dead, but there was no telling what had happened. Jissarrell’s spell hadn’t revealed the destinations of the portals, only that they had existed. “But I will check.”

“Aside from that, there’s not much to go on for where he might be now. If he’s in the system for facial recognition he’ll pop up in an airport and a few other places, assuming he’s not using some kind of disguise.” Dave shrugged. “We’ll keep crunching data to see if we can find Wells, but there’s a lot of places in the US where you can stay out of sight.”

“Very well.” Ray suppressed a frown. He had hoped that they’d be more helpful, considering how difficult it’d been to track the man through magical means, but perhaps that was asking too much. “What about the other matter?”

“Ah, now that one, that one has meat.” Dave switched folders. “We’ve pulled all the logs and records and copied all your servers, and we’re starting the deep dive now. We’ll see who had access when, and if anyone could have been getting it some other way. Plus, there’s the money.”

“Which money?” Ray asked, suddenly interested.

“I’m not sure yet, but there’s always money. We’ve started digging into the financials for everyone that works there. Any discrepancy, any suspicious spending, any of that, and we’ll find something interesting. Wells and his group have to be paying off someone at GAR. Even if it’s ideological, something weird will show up with the money.”

“I hope you’re right.” Ray shook his head. That was a lot of tedious effort that his department was not cut out for. For this alone, it was worth bringing in the mundane experts.

“It never fails,” Dave said with assurance. “Follow the money.”

***

Callum was having great fun filling in his portal cache. Having access to a huge inventory at will was incredibly, obscenely powerful, for everything from offense and defense to just everyday chores. He never had to worry about forgetting his keys, could easily stash away groceries without toting them to the truck, and could even store the pickup instead of needing a parking space. Admittedly, the last was needless, since none of the places he ever went were particularly crowded, but it would surely be useful sometime in the future.

Of course, he didn’t magically get a nice, neat, organized inventory. He just had a big chunk of space in a cave. He had to make a special trip to find a place with a lot of free-standing racks and shelving that he could inspect and figure out how to use. Mostly he wanted a bunch of big flat surfaces and neatly sorted drawers, because there was nothing more multifunctional than a flat space.

In keeping with that, he spent a lot of time evening out a chunk of the floor. He was sure that someone, somewhere would have been horrified by him ruining a natural cave, but it wasn’t one with beautiful stalactites and the like. It was just a hole. A few wheelbarrows full of gravel filled in a lot of cracks and corrugations, and then a few more wheelbarrows of cement he mixed up himself did a lot to create a nice foundation to start from.

The portal anchor went on a stand he’d found at a used furniture place, right in the middle of the pad, and he arranged the rest of the stuff relative to that. A set of cones to demarcate where vehicles would go, a bunch of tables where he put the weapons, as well as packs of trail food and jerky. Under that, a few packs of bottled water.

He got some racks and big bins for holding water grenade supplies, extra clothing, currency, materials for disguises, and all that. Food and big barrels of water, especially, since there was no telling when he’d need them. The cache was still a little scanty, but eventually he’d fill it out. At some point he’d have to get electricity in so he he’d have more options, but that’d require either another portal generator or somehow running cables.

Outside the concrete pad, he put a bunch of boulders. There were plenty of nice big rocks like that wherever glacial moraines could be found, which was all over the northern US. By his estimation, the car-sized boulders were on the order of thirty tons, while the smaller ones ranged from two or three to ten or fifteen tons. He hadn’t been considering it at the time, but it was no wonder his boulder weapon had simply smashed the wood fae.

The cave didn’t have room for too many big rocks, and besides, they were probably worthless against earth mages, but they were still the best large-scale projectiles he had. He took one of the tree trunks from the forest-clearing that was still going on around the house site for alternative ammunition, but it just wasn’t as good. He’d have to find out whether metal would be better, and possibly visit a scrapyard, but boulders were free. A full ton of metal was expensive, even if it was scrap.

Since he’d armed himself with such projectiles, he figured he’d better practice while he had the time. There was no point in a weapon he couldn’t use properly. He’d not really used his gravitykinesis as an offensive weapon, since it required some amount of preparation, but now that he’d done that preparation he had no reason to put it off.

He ended up spending the better part of a day hucking rocks.

Even though he’d invented the gravity alteration trick a while back – which wasn’t actually gravity as such, but altering the spatial tensor or some jargon like that – he hadn’t really tried many tricks with it. It was basically a static flexing of the space field inside of a box, and he’d left it at that. Now that he was being more proactive with it, he had to set aside time to experiment.

Countering gravity took effort; making gravity go in an entirely different direction took twice the effort. It was really a matter of how much he was distorting space, relative to what it was supposed to be by physics. He could get a rough idea of the effects just by using the gravity field on a weight placed on a bathroom scale, and it was pretty easy to see that the ratio of effort to effect was roughly linear. Twice as much vis, twice as much gravity.

While he didn’t have access to whatever equipment mages used to measure such things, he’d say that gravity manipulation was actually the most vis-intensive of his tricks, aside from spatial expansion. Teleportation was the easiest, and portals fell somewhere in between. They all scaled with volume, though for portals that was the volume of the torus that formed the perimeter, since the hole was perfectly two-dimensional.

The recirculation bits he’d stolen from the Dragonlands portal actually helped quite a lot. Even if he wasn’t using them too efficiently, incorporating them into his frameworks meant that he could handle larger things than before. Maybe double the volume, which didn’t translate to much in terms of linear dimensions, but it was not a small increase.

The final result was that the size and speed of things he could huck was a weird sort of optimization puzzle. The easiest thing was to make a column of altered gravity and let the rock accelerate along it with a force of ten or fifteen times standard, but he couldn’t make those columns overly long without bumping into the upper limit of the total vis output he could handle. Increasing the gravity force meant he got more bang for his buck for each bit of acceleration, but meant he could accelerate for less time.

It might have been nice if he could use the gravity directly, but all the acceleration came from the distortion imposed by his vis frameworks. For mages or even supernaturals, that’d just slide right off. In fact, the mage bubbles might disrupt the entire thing, he wasn’t sure. Either way, throwing things was a far better use of his time.

In fact, he didn’t ever want to try and engage a mage with actual magical combat. They were better, they had more training, and they seemed to have more vis capacity. He was basically playing a game of rocket tag every time he encountered them, because he had no real way to defend himself. If he didn’t kill or at least neutralize his target right off, he was pretty well screwed.

Given the nature of his testing, he found a disused quarry far away from any kind of population and brought along some earplugs. They helped, but didn’t protect him from the bone-jarring shock of the impacts as he smashed boulders against the quarry walls and let them splash into the dark water that had pooled there. It was quite a kick to throw multi-ton boulders around like he was an actual mage and not some cut-rate amateur, even if it was exhausting. He ended up opening the portal in his implant just to get some extra mana flow and replenish his vis reserves.

It was in a way tempting to leave the portal open all the time, so he’d have extra mana flow for himself, but it left a definite residue behind which necessitated cleaning up after himself. Besides which, surely someone would notice a high-mana source wandering around if it was left open for significant lengths of time. He didn’t think that short periods really impacted much, especially since it was inside him.

Callum thought it unlikely there were any significant side effects from having that mana flow in him simply because people lived in the portal worlds, and those had far more mana than he was getting through the portal. They breathed in air and drank water completely saturated in the stuff. It still was a little niggle at the back of his brain that dumping a lot of mana right into his guts might not be the best idea, though, so he kept it conservative.

At the end of the day he was completely wrung out but thought he had a pretty good grasp of how to properly throw a rock. He was even able to incorporate flinging the gravitykinesis matrix itself around to give things a bit of an extra oomph. Beyond the range at which he could use portal delivery, he wouldn’t have any real accuracy, but it was better than being forced to close the range.

The practice had also sparked some more ideas for how to use his portal connections effectively. The gut portal had not only been amazing in terms of logistics, it showed he could freely connect two different areas with portal anchors. Rocks weren’t the only thing he could fling, and while portals were fragile, they did let through things like air and light. Even water, if there wasn’t too much flow, since he still had the issue that any real movement of matter through the magic threads disrupted them.

Somewhat regretfully, he set aside most of his remaining stock of mordite for making a few extra portal enchantments. It was more than a little alarming how fast he’d burned through it, though fortunately it seemed that it would last a lot longer than the paste. So far he’d seen no signs of degradation from his old homebond implant, at least not before he re-melted the mordite so he could use it in something else.

With the gut portal fully functional he reshuffled his destinations. The portal went to his bunker, the homebond stayed in northern Montana, but the teleport pad got moved to transition between Montana and his trailer house in Texas. Soon enough he’d be ditching the trailer house and free up the telepad, though when it came to construction, soon was generally measured in months.

Once he had portioned out the mordite for each project he decided he did have enough for one more to sell to Chester. Considering how expensive the bunker project was, having the extra money would be a bit of a relief. He absolutely hated how much he was spending getting all his infrastructure up and running, when for most of his life he’d been fairly frugal, but soon he’d be able to return to normal. Normal-ish.

“Hey, big man!” Lucy answered the phone on the third ring, as Callum sat in his pickup with the heater going. “What’s shaking?”

“Hey, Lucy,” he said. “Thought I should check in, since I kinda got wrapped up in stuff the past couple days. Everything still quiet over there?”

“What, at work? Hell, no. There’s a million new policies and procedures and enforcements, the scheduling is all out of whack, and all the bosses are mad at everyone and everything. On the up side, we all got a few days off while they were figuring out whatever they were doing on their end. Paid vacation!”

“Glad I never had to deal with that stuff,” Callum said, with feeling. His stint in a cubicle farm had been all of a few months before he’d gotten fed up and quit. In hindsight he’d been fairly lucky to build up the contacts he did so his consulting business worked, but at the time he had just been thinking about how he couldn’t stand the environment.

“Eh, it’s not so bad. I have my own little dungeon full of toys.”

“Kinky.”

“Ha! Not that kind of dungeon, sadly. Just a basement full of servers and such.”

“Sounds pretty nice, actually,” Callum admitted. “Though I’m a little surprised you actually go into GAR for that. I would have thought you could be remote at this point.”

“Ha! Computers are new enough to GAR, something like remote work is asking a bit much. Besides, you can imagine what they think of anything like that slipping out from under their thumb.”

“That is a point,” Callum admitted. Admittedly, most of what he knew about GAR was really second or third-hand, but monolithic entities weren’t very friendly to independent agency. “I suppose extra vacation is the best you can expect out of the mess.”

“Yeah, but gotta be honest, it’s not like I do that much at work. Except when someone breaks something.” Lucy laughed. “I’m not sure I actually know what to do with all this free time!”

“Go out somewhere? See a movie?”

“Ugh, man, there’s nobody here to go with but the shifters and they have just the worst taste in movies.” For some reason that made him laugh, but at the same time he was a little curious.

“You don’t have any mage friends? Mundane friends?”

“Not really. I mean, I’m a dud. Neither fish nor fowl. Mages are all stuck a hundred years in the past and don’t care about me anyway, and I’m not really cut out for trying to hide all this stuff from mundanes. Technically I’m supposed to get some kinda release form or whatever to actually go out past the shifter territory, not that anyone actually cares.”

“Well, that’s a shame. Though I guess that explains some stuff.” The glamours explained part of why the whole supernatural thing was a secret that kept, but only part of it. If they policed the people who actually went out into public to some extent, at least gave them an orientation, that would help. The magical cleanup squad would probably do the rest.

“Yeah, so, that’s me. Kind of a homebody.”

“You should probably get that release,” he told her. “If you’re going to be retiring and all. Since one of the reasons I called was to tell you that I can make another telepad for our mutual friend.”

“Oh! Oh, man, yeah, he’s gonna be happy about that. Kept asking me about it.”

“Well, you can tell him yes.”

“Great, yeah! Let me call him up right now actually.” Callum waited a moment, and the line clicked as Lucy did her telecoms magic.

“Chester here.”

“It’s me,” Callum said. “I hear you’re in the market for a second device.”

“I certainly am,” Chester said, with a grimness that didn’t seem to fit a purely commercial transaction.

“Same as last time, or did you want it larger? Or smaller?”

“Larger,” Chester replied. “Five feet or so, if you can.”

“Sure, that’s not a problem. I won’t be able to supply any more for a while, though.”

“Understandable. The additional one will be sufficient for our purposes.”

“I can have it to you in a few days,” Callum said, wondering vaguely at what purposes Chester had in mind, but not asking. It was better if he didn’t know, considering the use the last one was put to. Not that he disapproved at all, but Callum didn’t want to get entangled in Chester’s supernatural struggles.

“Excellent. Same pay as before?”

“Works for me.” Considering that Chester seemed to really want it, he probably could have pushed for more, but it didn’t seem worthwhile. Chester was really the only person who would buy the stuff, and something close to a million dollars was more than enough for his purposes.

“The same drop-off locations work for me, but I assume you want payment in a different city?”

“I do.”

“Then I shall be looking forward to the package delivery.”

“Good doing business with you,” Callum said, feeling oddly aware of how much it sounded like they were dealing in drugs or something equally degenerate. Not that black-market teleports were any less illegal under GAR. Chester hung up with a click, and Lucy got back on the line.

“All right, big man, you keep me updated.”

“Will do, Lucy. Thanks for playing go-between for me.”

“Anytime, big man!”

***

Gayle Hargrave absolutely loathed her teachers. It was in part what she was learning, because she didn’t really have any interest in the destructive uses of healing magic, but it was also because they were all Fane’s old apprentices and complete jerks. They condescended to her because she wasn’t Chinese and wasn’t House Fane.

The Chinese Houses had been absolutely sullen ever since the dragonblooded had requested their portal be moved into Europe, some two hundred years back. With no portals in China, especially not ones that could be lived in, they’d been less important than the European families and couldn’t stand it. They especially couldn’t stand House Hargrave because it was an actual American House, and it showed.

What really rankled, though, was that she wasn’t really able to be part of House Hargrave. Grampa’s influence had kept them from forcing her into no-House blacks, but at the same time, it was clear that BSE claimed her. Frankly she didn’t care about the spooks and didn’t feel any pride in whatever business they had. It was her family that mattered, and unless things changed she was stuck on the other side of a procedural wall from them.

She wasn’t even allowed to go back and visit when she wanted. Garrison Two was somewhere in the Deep Wilds, and the only way off-site was a set of teleporters that were guarded and controlled. Not that she’d try to sneak out. After what had happened with Professor Brown, Gayle was not about to try and circle around the rules again.

Gayle gathered her vis into the dissonant framework that she’d been shown, watching dispassionately as her bolt of what the apprentices called Gu slammed into the monstrous, six-limbed tiger-thing prowling around the outskirts of the BSE facility. It wasn’t even a challenge; the beast just dropped as her magic instantly necrotized its brain. She understood the importance of keeping the infrastructure clear of the ravenous beasts that prowled the Deep Wilds, but it felt like she was pointlessly wasting time.

“Not good enough. Do it again.” Fane Xan, who was supposed to be her tutor, didn’t say what she’d done wrong, or how she could improve. BSE had mandated that she be trained, but they hadn’t made sure she was being trained well. Gayle glowered at the man and turned away from the crenelations.

“Where are you going?” Xan demanded, and Gayle scowled back at him over her shoulder.

“You do not speak to a daughter of House Hargrave in that manner,” she said coldly. “If you do not intend to teach me properly, you will be silent.” Her mother had made sure she knew when to invoke the House and when not to, and this was certainly a time when she should rest on her House’s dignity. If Grampa hadn’t kept them from inducting her into no-house like BSE normally did, she wouldn’t even have that.

Considering the man had the black uniform, despite his name, he certainly didn’t have the standing to order her around like that. Even then, she might have listened, if he actually did anything helpful. Instruction was not the same as making someone repeat the same thing over and over.

Archmage Fane might have been more helpful, but she hadn’t talked with him. Or seen him. She wouldn’t, either, until and unless she learned the dialect that he spoke. Which she probably could, if she put her mind to it, but there hadn’t been much incentive. Instead, she was waiting for the political struggle to end and she could go back to House Hargrave.

Gayle was pretty sure the only reason BSE was so insistent on keeping her was because Professor Brown was still at large. Or rather, Callum Wells, who bore the juvenile nickname of the Ghost. She still didn’t know what to think of that, since she couldn’t imagine the elderly man going out on a massacre. The thing she wanted to know was why he’d sent her on the path of destructive healing.

She refused to call it by Fane’s name in her own mind.

If it weren’t for the fact that he was wanted by everyone, she would have thought he was one of Fane’s agents, meant to force her into the archmage’s care with forbidden knowledge. In fact, she still wasn’t completely convinced that wasn’t the case. She’d done a little bit of snooping on her own and the fact that he was there at one of Fane’s stupid attacks on a dragonblooded was very suspicious.

Inter-House warfare was subdued under GAR, but by no means was it gone. Callum’s strange aptitude test could well be the result of one of Fane’s experiments. She’d only heard rumors, but Fane had not hidden the fact that he thought he could change and improve magical talent by proper application of healing vis.

Gayle walked down the stone steps into the inner courtyard. The BSE facility had a thick stone outer wall, with a dome composed of interlaced metal and glass above it to keep out the flying monsters. Despite the medieval look, the interior buildings were properly insulated, furnished, heated, and cooled. The entire thing sprawled over two or three square miles of real estate, a crowded grouping of buildings that reminded her more of the campus she’d learned magic at than a top secret facility.

She stopped to let several shifters in war-form past, the party carrying in a somewhat smaller beast than the one she’d just dropped. It looked like some twisted offspring of a boar and a bird, though it did make for a very good barbeque. It wasn’t exactly haute cuisine, but it had a certain rustic charm. Supplies did come in through the teleports, but the facility was at least partly self-sufficient.

Technically speaking, she outranked the shifters here, who were mostly support staff. At the same time, this was their portal world and they were due some deference. Besides, they were more powerful here than on Earth, more in tune with the dangers and the ebb and flow of magic. She could just see the local mana; they could actually interpret it like the weather.

“Shouldn’t you be training?” Gayle jumped as Grand Magus Taisen appeared from nowhere. The head of the BSE possessed a vanishingly rare triple aspect, though for some reason he’d never advanced to Archmage. Gravity, Light, and Force meant that Taisen could appear practically anywhere at speeds that nobody would believe, and was an utter monster in a fight. Unlike Fane’s lackeys, she actually respected Taisen.

Taisen’s abilities were not in doubt, and he’d built the Society for Portal Defense from the ground up before GAR folded it into the BSE. He was polite and respectful, even though he outranked practically everybody. Plus, he'd been her mother’s rival back when they were still in the academy, and that said a lot.

“Just having me shoot the same thing and then yelling at me is not training,” Gayle said bluntly. Then she relented a bit; he was still her superior. “Grand Magus,” she added. “I know that only Fane’s apprentices can teach me how to properly use negative healing, but I don’t believe they are actually trying. House Fane and House Hargrave do not get along.”

“There is a reason I insisted that the members of the Bureau of Secret Enforcement swear their allegiance to no House,” Taisen said. There wasn’t any particular bite to his tone, but she understood what he was saying anyway.

“I understand, Grand Magus, but this is not what I chose.”

“Yes, indeed. That is certainly not common.” Taisen didn’t actually apologize or offer to change things. She understood why, but it was still hard not to resent him. Just like she resented House Fane, and Professor Brown, and all the other people who had gotten her stuck here.

“I’ve seen your transcript,” Taisen said instead. “I suspect you’ll have no trouble understanding the scope of what negative healing can do if you acquire more mundane medical literature. There is far more to the body’s capabilities than most healing mages realize.”

“That’s what got me into this mess.” Gayle gave Taisen a sideways look. He looked older, distinguished, with a hard face and greying hair, but moved like he was built from coiled springs. The rumors were that he fought in mundane wars, using their weapons, just to see what it was like, and he certainly spent more time killing things in the portal worlds than running BSE. “But even if that’s true, where would I get such things?”

“You’ll find some in your quarters tomorrow,” Taisen said neutrally. “I’m sure you’ll find that the knowledge contained therein can be used in many ways, and not just in combat.”

“Thank you, Grand Magus,” Gayle said, not missing the hint he’d tossed her way. While she didn’t really have any interest in learning more harmful healing, studying on her own was one way to discharge her obligations, and if Taisen thought she might find healing applications he was probably right. So it wouldn’t be a complete slog.

“It is my responsibility to make sure all my people have what they need,” Taisen returned. “Be it material or information.”

“Speaking of information,” Gayle ventured. “Is there any news on Pro- I mean, Mister Wells?”

“Of late? He removed two mundanes from GAR custody and somehow convinced a Fae King to shield their identities.” Taisen responded promptly. “He remains as elusive as ever, but eventually he’ll slip up. Or someone will.”

“I hope so,” Gayle said glumly. “I just want to know why.”

Chapter 17 – Blame

“Second verse, same as the first,” Callum muttered to himself as he drove through a small town in Nebraska. It was a bit of a haul from Texas but he didn’t really mind, since he was there to pick up almost a million dollars worth of gold bullion. It was hard to be grumpy about the drive when that was the reward at the end.

Especially since he could use his new gut portal to store the truck and teleport back home.

This time the padded case was located in the open belltower of a church, and Callum wondered why Chester had gone for high roofs. At this point he was certain that Chester knew Callum was a spatial mage, but then again, it wasn’t likely that his subordinates knew that it was Callum who was doing the work. Sky access might be a plausible excuse for how the gold vanished without anybody seeing anything.

He stopped at a light while he located the case and the dense gold in the sphere of his senses, and pulled it into the pickup. So far as he could sense none of the few shifters hanging about the small town had line of sight to the case, and none of them made any particular reaction to him driving off with it when the light changed.

Callum waited until he’d driven out into the country for an hour or so before calling Lucy to tell her he’d picked up the package. It seemed she was still on vacation, and it sounded like she was going a little stir-crazy being stuck at home.

He sympathized. At least when he’d gone into his self-imposed exile he had a lot of projects to keep him busy, but all of Lucy’s stuff was over at GAR. Which was a good argument for why she shouldn’t let other people take care of her stuff, as it meant that it wasn’t really, properly hers. Not that he’d point it out at the moment, since it’d just be adding insult to injury.

“I tell you what, big man,” Lucy complained. “I can’t even pet dogs around here ‘cause I’m not sure when it’s going to be someone’s kid instead.” Callum barked a laugh.

“Nothing you want to order off the Internet? I’m sure there are some toys you’ve been wanting to get for a while.”

“Kinky,” Lucy said, reflexively. “Nah, though. I mean, I’ve got everything back in my office. 3-D printers and stuff take a while to ship and what would I do with two anyway?”

“I guess that’s a point,” Callum admitted. “When do you start back, anyway?”

“Still a couple days,” Lucy replied. “This break thing runs into Thanksgiving. I like vacations, but I’d rather plan for ‘em, you know? At least let me bring my coffeemaker home with me.”

When they wrapped up their conversation, Callum opened his gut portal and teleported the case of gold onto a table set up for the purpose. So far as he could tell there were no electronics in it, but even if there were, there was no way any signal would make it out of the enclosed cave. The truck got teleported to the concrete pad as well, and he tossed a rusty hinge with his cleanup enchantment down to cover his tracks. Then he invoked his homebond and made his way to the trailer via telepad.

Callum actually felt rather smug as he pulled the pickup back out of the cave and put it in his driveway. At least, until he noticed how low it was on gas, but he could make a run for that later. The trip back had given him a few more ideas that he felt really dumb for not having explored before.

Obviously he could nest portals. There was no problem running vis through his gut portal, which meant there was no problem running it through any other portal he made. So one between his current position and the edge of his perceptions gave him two sensory spheres, and let him chain out to double his normal distance. Then he could make another portal set, and triple it.

Actually trying that ran into some issues, though. Not so much with the magic, which worked just fine, but with his perceptions. Even if he didn’t pay full attention to that six-hundred-yard perceptual sphere, it was still there. Doubling that input was something he could handle, even if it was somewhat of a strain. Tripling it was not something he could sustain for long, like staring into a bright light, and quadrupling made all his threads collapse as his brain overloaded in a sort of white-out moment and he lost track of his magic.

A little bit of experimentation showed his proper limits were something closer to two and a half times his current volume. He could probably work his way up to three, but if his base perception got larger, that multiplier might actually go down a bit. There had to be some upper limit. The human brain, however magical, was not infinite.

That didn’t mean he could only nest three portals. He could pull back his magical perceptions, and what mattered was the total space he was looking at, not how many ways he could see it. That was why his other experiments with using portals hadn’t really bothered him; they’d all overlapped the same space. If he put five portals within ten feet of each other, six hundred yards away, he only got ten feet more radius on a bubble that half overlapped his original one. Or whatever complicated math described that intersection.

Still, being able to double his range if he needed to was not something to sneeze at. Especially since he only needed to use teeny tiny portals to do so, and those had to be harder to detect than something large. Obviously not impossible, but it might give him an edge. Considering what he was up against, he needed every edge he could get.

Callum took a break from his work simply by driving into town and getting a burger and a milkshake from the local greasy spoon, then pulling up some videos on his laptop to distract himself with. Thanksgiving hadn’t been much for the past few years, but at least he’d had a proper house. It was all he could do to not be maudlin.

On the other hand, despite what he’d given up to be on the wrong side of GAR and supernaturals in general, it wasn’t like he hadn’t accomplished anything. He’d seen other worlds and dealt with dragons, and most importantly he’d actually saved some people. Not everyone, but at least the Connors and Clara.

A few good deeds were better than none.

***

Getting a teleport pad smuggled into Lavigne’s penthouse was not easy. Vampires tended to use thralls for their gruntwork, so there was nobody to suborn, coerce, or bribe. On the other hand, they still had to take deliveries and Chester’s work with Lucy had prompted him to get in contact with other unsavory mundane elements.

The team he had hired gave the go-ahead when the crate was unpacked and the pad free and open. It was afternoon, but considering how many vampires Lavigne had lost, it probably wouldn’t matter if it was midnight. Once other nests caught wind of how weak Lavigne had become, they’d likely start making moves, but Chester was making one first.

He owed Lavigne for both what had been done, and what had been attempted.

To avoid suspicion, he’d had members of his pack bring their mana charges to the compound. They’d have to forego some of the benefits of commercial enchantments for a week or so, but some judiciously arranged family reunions and vacations ameliorated most of that. There were plenty of people at Chester’s compound, enough to gather a number of watchers who would be absolutely certain Chester never left.

It wasn’t like GAR was even being particularly subtle about it. Some poor bastard from the Bureau of Shifter Relations was sitting in one of the guest houses to be available to Chester in was tritely referred to as trying times. Although Chester, certainly, wasn’t really being tried by GAR’s issues with Wells. At least Chester had long had the interior of his compound warded from prying eyes, with Jasper certifying it properly worked.

“Team One, ready?” The Wolfpack made noises of agreement.

“Team Two, ready?” The secondary team, including a few of his subordinate Alphas, nodded.

In the next room, others were stocking janitorial carts with chemicals, mops, brooms, vacuums, and a few fae charms. Even Chester couldn’t evade the consequences of eradicating one of the Masters of the Midwest, if GAR knew about it. But only if they knew about it.

It wasn’t like he could hide Lavigne’s disappearance, but he could deflect the blame. After all, he was at his pack compound the entire time and there was someone else who could infiltrate a protected building and clean it out. It didn’t matter whether or not the Ghost had done it, just that he could have done it.

Jasper sat next to the new, double-size teleport pad as it energized. The other end had some mana charges to reduce the cycle time, so it didn’t take more than a minute after the surveillance team had given the go-ahead before it was ready for them. Chester stepped onto the plate, both teams crowding on with him, and pricked his finger with the token.

The moment their surroundings shifted Chester pushed the go-ahead through the pack bonds. Now that they were inside Lavigne’s building, they wanted to keep things quick and quiet. They spread out from the storage room the pallet was being kept in, all of them in war form and with claws out. They’d bypassed the outer wards, but there were still internal alarms that could make life difficult for them.

Unfortunately, a lot of the thralls would have to die. While Mister Summers, or Wells, or whatever he was calling himself had spared them, it was a wasted effort. Thralls had once been mundanes who had somehow survived feeding, but something essential had still been taken from them. They were slavishly obedient, unable to consider doing anything other than carrying out the orders of whatever vampire they had latched onto.

That didn’t mean they were stupid, though, and they wouldn’t ignore the invasion of a bunch of powerful shifters. Not that they would be expecting said invasion to come from the core of the building. Chester’s team headed upward, while Alpha Vernon’s team went for the security center. Arthur Langley would have wanted to come, but Chester thought it was better if he was nowhere near the operation. Or even knew about it.

They tore through three rooms before there was any hint of resistance, snapping necks and tearing out throats, as the thralls were only slightly faster than an ordinary mundane. The danger was in their silverite weaponry and ammunition, because all it really took was one good hit. The petrified tree sap silverite was made from was poisonous to the symbiote, disrupting their intrinsic magic if it even pierced the skin. It wasn’t simply a risk of wounds that didn’t heal with their usual alacrity; a shifter could be rendered temporarily mundane. Or permanently, with enough of the stuff.

The thralls were equipped both with all kinds of bane types, as shifters were not the only threat Lavigne had to worry about. He was quarrelsome even for a vampire, and got into occasional spats with other Masters or even fae, which could easily result in at least moderate amounts of violence. The first pops of gunfire came as Chester entered a large lounge area, punching holes in the wall behind him as he dropped to all fours and rushed the shooter.

Sheer impact sent the thrall flying backward, organs ruptured and bones shattered before he even hit the wall, and the first actual vampire appeared through the far door. While they didn’t exactly burst into flames in sunlight, they were very nocturnal and their raw power waned with the sun. They relied on blades and guns more than shifters did, so the one that came through the door had a silverite dagger in each hand.

It was more difficult to deal with a vampire that was aware of the threat, even a sun-weary one, than one surprised by ambush. There was a reason that shifters moved in packs, though, and Chester feinted forward, drawing out attacks from the daggers as they ripped through the air while Roy maneuvered to flank their attacker. Chester and Roy danced with the vampire for a few moments, feinting and swiping, until he overextended and Roy’s claws lashed out and severed his spine.

Chester’s earpiece clicked twice to let him know that Alpha Vernon’s team had secured their objective, and if the mundanes he’d hired were doing their job right, any attempt to call out should be jammed. That actually made things easier; the vampire’s own glamours would silence the sounds of battle, so none of them needed to worry about being quiet.

Climbing upward was the most dangerous part of taking the building, because whether they used elevator shafts or stairwells, there was an angle for someone to shoot at them. Even so, silverite bullets were still only bullets, which was why Chester had given Craig a big steel shield, and why the burly shifter took point as they went upward. The Wolfpack practically sprinted up, but nonetheless making sure to check and verify each room and kill. According to public record, Lavigne was supposed to only have a dozen vampires with him, but that same record said that Chester was still in his compound so he knew how little to trust it.

Despite owning the whole building, Lavigne’s nest only filled the uppermost floors, so it didn’t take very long to reach the top. He had to send two shifters back due to injuries, and three more were relegated to support because they’d gotten silverite injuries, but he had more than enough people to deal with the remaining vampires and thralls. Most importantly, enough to deal with Lavigne himself.

By the time they reached the opulent penthouse on the highest floor, Lavigne was waiting for them. The vampire master had kitted himself out for a fight, with silverite-lacquered armor and a long silverite-edged saber, rather than just a knife. Chester could smell it from across the room; it was the pure stuff, not the alloys normally used for weapons.

“You’re not even dogs,” Lavigne sneered, holding the saber in a ready stance. “You’re jackals, slinking around the backs of your betters.”

Chester didn’t respond. He was more concerned with the surroundings than the words of a soon-to-be dead vampire. There was no way that Lavigne would be out in the open like he was without some kind of trap or fallback. Nothing presented itself too obviously, but Chester remained cautious as he directed his people to fan out along the walls on either side of the door.

“Cat got your tongue, dog?” Lavigne taunted, poorly, then switched to French. “Honorless cur, come forth and fight me properly. It is what you are here for, is it not?”

“It is not, actually,” Chester replied in the same language, happy to have extra time for his people to move. “A fight is for an opponent, not an enemy. Besides, I’m a shifter. We work in packs.”

He directed his Wolfpack through the bonds, two of them shifting down to beast form and feinting in toward Lavigne. Even if they weren’t as powerful in beast form, they were more agile and far smaller targets. Considering that Lavigne almost certainly had something planned, it was more important they be able to dodge.

There was a snap of some spellform as Roy darted in, and he yelped as something lashed out from beneath the floor. He scampered backward on three legs, the fourth one pouring blood out onto the carpet, his foreleg a stump. A flex of pack energy staunched the bleeding, but Chester could feel the crackling of competing magics at the wound. That was something that would take a while to heal.

“Only you can approach me,” Lavigne said, pointing his saber at Chester. “Your vaunted pack will not help you here,” he added. “Once I tear you apart—”

Lavigne’s speech was interrupted as Vernon’s team, having finally made it to the roof and rappelled down a floor, appeared at the top edge of the windows and fired. The vampire blurred into action, but even he couldn’t dodge a shifter-directed fusillade of bullets completely. The mordite ammunition tore through Lavigne’s body and sent him sprawling on the floor, still mouthing imprecations with his last breath.

Chester watched dispassionately. It would have been far more difficult if Lavigne had kept his subordinates on the same level, instead of lording over them. But that was the difference between Chester and Lavigne. Chester and his Wolfpack were the fastest and strongest, but that just meant they could feint and lead with the least amount of risk. Roy’s wound might have been lethal for a slower shifter. There would have been some satisfaction in disassembling Lavigne himself, but that was nothing compared to getting the job done right and bringing everyone home alive.

“Good job, everyone,” Chester said, reaching up to his earpiece. “Send in the cleaners.”

In a sense, actually killing their way through the building was the easy part. Now they had to make sure there was no evidence of shifters. Not even a trace. They’d have to somehow break the spell trap that was on the carpet, and probably take away the carpet itself, given that Roy had bled on it.

After all, they’d never been there. It was the Ghost.

***

Buying an armored van was more complicated than it should have been.

Callum was somewhat staggered by the sheer variety of armored vehicles available to him, at least in theory. Most of them were old cash trucks, but there was a lot of military surplus knocking around up to and including honest-to-goodness APCs. Not that he wanted one of those, tempting as it was. They’d stand out too much.

A normal armored van wouldn’t look like much, though. Put a ladder on one of them and it’d be hard to tell it apart from some random utility vehicle. He definitely wanted the additional protection that an armored vehicle gave him, mostly because he needed a very secure place for a teleport plate, one that he could move around. That was the primary reason, but part of it was also that he wanted to be able to handle an attack like the one that had hit him in France.

He actually had no idea what level of armor rating would be required to resist a spell like that, but he was pretty sure it would take more to punch through a proper armored car than a brick wall. It was magic, true, but he’d seen that his constructs failed to work properly when they hit solid material. He didn’t imagine that a fireball or whatever would just pass through obstacles. Mana wasn’t entirely ephemeral.

Hopefully he’d never have to find out, but at the same time he felt a lot safer in a vehicle that would deflect rifle fire and small explosions. Heavy enough munitions would still be an issue, but he was dealing with the supernatural. An actual tank likely wouldn’t be enough against a serious opponent.

The guy who actually had the armored van, which looked like some generic white utility vehicle, was in fact quite happy to take gold bullion instead of cash. He reminded Callum of some of the people his father had hung around with, old and crusty and full of stories. The heavy Texas accent really helped round out the stereotype, but Callum wasn’t complaining. The official sale was just a twenty-dollar bill and Callum had a new vehicle to use.

Callum’s only real objection was that it was a bit of a gas hog, and was bulkier than the pickup with an oddly floaty start and stop. Still easier to handle than the Winnebago, though, so he couldn’t complain too much. The back was big enough to haul practically anything he would have wanted to put in the pickup, too, so it was just as handy.

The best part was, he could just slide it into his portal cache rather than trying to figure out a way to drive both it and the pickup all the way back home. He was still tickled by how useful it was. Obviously he had to do so out of sight of the previous owner, but that was only a little bit awkward.

Unfortunately, he was really damn low on enchanting stuff so he couldn’t kit out the van as much as he might like. Not without cannibalizing supplies he’d already earmarked for just-in-case weaponry and eventual home warding. He’d really have to get more, but he was sure that the portal worlds were still being very closely guarded, and trying to get through one now would be idiotic.

Not that his original trip was any great shakes, but he hadn’t had much of a choice.

There was a temptation to try and raid some depot somewhere, but that wasn’t the same as taking from those who preyed on people. They had forfeited their right to property. GAR as a whole was definitely on his bad side, but there were a lot of people inside GAR as a whole who hadn’t done anything wrong. Just stealing stuff from a random bunch of people who had no doubt paid for it with their own time and labor would make him no better than a common criminal.

It was a problem he mused on as he took another trip down to his bunker to survey the ongoing construction work. Things seemed to be going well, but building a house took time. It’d still be a couple months before he could move in, let alone start properly furnishing and doing magical experiments.

For the first time in what seemed like ages he was on top of all the various crises and had time to focus on fundamentals. He still had years and years of magical theory and practice to catch up on, everything from basic magical reflexes to vis field uniformity exercises. Not to mention, he just needed more magical stamina.

Between the rock-hucking and moving the armored van around, it was pretty obvious he didn’t have much of a capacity. Studying his own vis with his perceptions, he didn’t really see any significant change in his body, even when he was completely out of gas. Though it wasn’t like he could tell a difference when he was biologically tired, so it was probably something closer to the molecular level than the thread level.

At least he had enough of a tank to escape when he needed to, but crashing for twelve or eighteen hours afterward was not good. It also sent him looking for any biological understanding of vis, because if he got physically tired then there was some physical role it played in his biology. Unfortunately, the backup literature he’d cached didn’t have anything useful.

The only real references to vis-exhaustion he could find were about when a mage was first learning how to construct their bubble. Or shell, or most officially, “sphere of authority,” which sounded insanely pompous. The segment on the bubble was fascinating otherwise, though, since there were various basic social rules for interacting with other mages when bubbles would intersect.

Generally, bubbles were supposed to be kept flexible so they’d deflect each other and mages could do things like shake hands. Though, reading between the lines, mage society didn’t have much in the way of casual social contact. That was reserved for only the closest of family or lovers, and going without a bubble entirely was akin to being naked, so it was basically only done when a mage was completely safe.

That meant the very first mage he’d killed had almost literally been caught with their pants down.

A more powerful mage, though what powerful meant was left vague, could effectively shoulder a less powerful mage’s bubble aside. That was, quite obviously, considered somewhat rude, but that didn’t stop people from doing it. The whole thing sounded tedious, but Callum had to concede bubbles made some kind of sense.

Or at least, it made sense in a world with low-grade inter-House feuds and other kinds of supernatural violence. The sort of world from five hundred years ago, not the modern one that ordinary people had spent a lot of time and blood building. Not exactly the kind of society he would spend his time in, if he had the choice.

“Hey, big man!” Lucy greeted him when he called, pre-empting his question with one of her own. “Did you go and take out Lavigne?”

“What?” Callum blinked. “Who? Oh, right. No, I didn’t. What happened?”

“Oh man, he just vanished. The whole nest, all cleaned out and empty, everyone gone. No traces of anyone, the security tapes trashed, whole nine yards. Looks like your work, kinda, just because the outer wards didn’t get tripped and there’s no evidence of anything.”

“No, that wasn’t me,” Callum said, frowning. His first thought was, naturally, Chester. He very well knew how absolutely insane being able to teleport was, and Chester had two sets of telepads. That didn’t mean it was him, though, because it was one thing to arrive somewhere undetected, and it was another to eliminate an entire building undetected.

“I suppose I should have seen this coming,” he concluded glumly. “Copycats. If anything, I should have expected this earlier. Why not take out a rival and blame it on me? It’s not like I’m going to issue a press release stating that I didn’t do it.”

“I guess not, but like. That’s just going to make things harder for you, isn’t it?”

“It might?” Callum pursed his lips. “I don’t like it, but if I was nowhere near, they’re just going to come up empty. Damn. I almost wish I could tip someone off that it wasn’t me, but at the same time, there’s no way to do that without it causing all kinds of problems. Besides, it’s not my business.” It still rankled, though. Not that he had any objection to taking out Lavigne as such, but if such copycat crimes caught on then a lot of things might get blamed on him.

On the other hand, they couldn’t mimic the ability that made him so difficult for them to deal with: his physical distance from any kind of crime. His vague understanding was that copycats often got caught very quickly, because committing a crime in a certain way meant it was premeditated. That meant a paper trail, and that meant getting caught.

“If you say so, big man,” Lucy said, somewhat doubtfully. “But if it wasn’t you, who was it? The boss man?”

“Yah, probably,” Callum agreed. “But maybe some other vamp was tipped off, who knows. It smells like high level politics and that’s not a game that either of us want to play. If we ask Chester and he denies it, what are we going to say?”

“I guess,” Lucy grumbled. “But I’m a little hurt. Usually he lets me in on these kinds of escapades.”

“Mmm, but this one involves me. You’d probably have told me, and I would’ve objected. And he wouldn’t have cared unless I pressed the issue, and I might have.” Callum sighed. “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell him not to do that again, whether or not he admits that he did in the first place.” Technically Callum could talk to Chester himself, but he had enough foresight to know that was not a conversation he wanted to have.

“Will do, big man. Though the boss man doesn’t take orders too well.”

“Yes, well, if he didn’t do it, he’s got nothing to worry about. If he did do it, he deserves it.”

“You’re not the one who has to tell him!”

“Tell him if he has to growl at anyone, growl at me.”

“Ha! Man, do not make dog jokes at a shifter.”

“What, afraid they might bite you?” Callum grinned as he got Lucy to laugh. “Anyway, it’s a message from me. I’m pretty sure he won’t blame you. Didn’t seem the type.”

“Nah. I’ll let him know, big man.”

***

“I think we’ve got something.” Agent Dave, no last name given or required, slapped down the folder on Jahn’s desk. “Well, there were a lot of somethings, but most of that was just people gambling or other stupid things. This…” He paused for effect. “This is substantial.”

“How substantial?” Jahn asked, not particularly impressed by the theatrics.

“Over a hundred thousand dollars in gold. She tried to hide it, but large amounts of gold get noticed.”

“She?” He was impressed, now.

“Lucille Harper. Two large cash transactions, one just after the incident down in Florida, and another one right about the time that Lavigne fellow got hit.” Dave looked very smug. “She did try to use different accounts, but all the actual exchange places she used where in the same geographical area so it wasn’t too hard to localize it.”

“Hm.” Jahn didn’t recognize the name, so he picked up the folder and flipped through it. She was just a dud, so it was no wonder he didn’t recognize the name. “She was already interviewed,” he said, somewhat doubtfully.

“Yeah, I pulled the video on that. Whoever you got to do it did not do a very good job. I spotted a couple of answers that were clearly evasions, and a couple of questions that were just flat out stupid. You should’ve gotten that other lady, Black, to do all the interviews.”

Jahn grimaced. Agent Black was definitely good at pulling out answers, given her fae background, but she’d been focused on the high profile members of GAR. People who had real access, real connections, and real stakes. They just didn’t have enough people with experience in questioning to handle the hundreds of GAR employees, so inevitably the less valuable targets had gone to less experienced BSE agents.

“What do you suggest?” Jahn knew that if he reported things up the chain, or really to anyone, they’d want to rush in and grab Harper. He also knew that was a stupid idea, given how she’d already proven to be at least somewhat resistant to questioning under compulsion.

“Bug her office. And her home. See who she talks to, and track them down. Depending on how plugged in she is to the network, we could uncover the entire group if we just give her enough rope.” Dave reached over the desk to flip to the end of the stack of pages, and tapped the spec sheet he’d included for the devices in question. “Don’t think a place like this would have problems with the budget.”

“No, indeed.” The only reason Jahn wasn’t spending more money was because he didn’t have anything to spend it on. BSE was crawling all over Lavigne’s office already, and adding more people wouldn’t help that. There were really no other leads to go on, since the fae were being unreasonable and he was already applying what pressure he could.

“Very well, you’re cleared to do that. A full work-up, everything. I’ll have Danforth and Black join you; they’re wasted on the Lavigne scene.”

“Fantastic,” Dave beamed. “I think we’ve finally got a good lead here. We just have be patient and reel it in.”

Chapter 18 – Ramifications

“Thanks, Lucy,” Callum said.

“Hey, no problem big man. Sorry I couldn’t help more.”

“It’s fine,” he assured her. “I figured as much.”

“Well, good luck,” she said. “Check in later.”

“Will do,” he assured her, and hung up. Removing the battery as usual, he stuck them both in the glove compartment and focused on driving.

With the bunker construction under control and the bulk of his enchanting done, Callum figured that the best use of his time was to go foraging. Not so much for things, since Callum was fairly flush and the portal worlds were off limits, as for information. Actually analyzing and experimenting with the ward designs he’d gotten showed him that there were a lot of bits he couldn’t do, since they took specialized vis. Which meant he needed more options.

He'd checked with Lucy but like he’d thought, all the places where there might be repositories of complex enchanting were in the portal worlds or GAR headquarters, and so off limits. There were mage Houses on Earth, too, but that was just as bad as trying to break into GAR, if not worse. At least GAR expected people coming and going all the time, whereas a private estate would suspect anyone hanging around uninvited to harbor ill intent.

That limited him to smaller GAR offices and private businesses, but the book run where he bumped into Gayle showed there were a number of supernatural businesses about, though primarily near large cities. It’d take a lot of driving, but that’s why he had the van. That was something he could park overnight and be relatively certain it’d remain unmolested, while he slept at the trailer in Texas.

For the moment he’d shifted his telepad from up near his homebond cache to inside the van, letting him jump back and forth between wherever he was driving and his home. If for some reason he had to use the homebond, he’d have to make his way south manually. Although if some attack forced him to recall and he couldn’t take the telepad with him, the trailer was a write-off anyway.

Callum was basically on a road trip, with the list of GAR’s offices as a guide. Lucy didn’t have a list of private businesses, partly because she didn’t want to risk poking around GAR’s documents at the moment and partly because GAR didn’t even have a comprehensive list. At least not all in one place. Most of the private little things were offshoots of Houses, and so governed more by whichever given House than by GAR proper.

He'd scoped out the Dallas GAR office more than once, so there was nothing new there, but he hadn’t snooped on any of the surrounding businesses. In fact he’d stayed well away, since he didn’t want to attract attention, but his range meant he could peek at them without risking anything. The anonymous white van with a ladder on top meant he could park wherever he liked for as long as he liked and people would just look right past him.

The new armored vehicle wasn’t too bad to drive even in the city streets, despite its issues. Even with better shocks to compensate for the extra weight, it accelerated slowly and braked weirdly, making him keep the speed lower than he otherwise might have. Still, he wasn’t at risk of rear-ending anyone and just having the protection was worth the money he’d paid for it. He wasn’t exactly relaxed when he sensed mage bubbles around, but didn’t feel as horribly exposed.

Considering the increased mana concentration around GAR offices and the access to teleporters, all the supernaturals tended to cluster in the same spots. Fae, shifter, and vamps sprawled out more than mages and in different ways, but he couldn’t reproduce or use their types of magic anyway. His plan was to poke around near the offices, use the trails in vis to track people’s comings and goings, and just generally snoop.

Part of the problem with foci was that he didn’t even know what tools were available. He knew some of the common ones, of course, but there had to be dozens or hundreds of specialty types he could use, assuming he could find a template. Even something for doing laundry or heating meals could be incredibly useful, and he still hadn’t found a version of the self-cleaning focus that didn’t use air and water vis in the enchantment mechanism.

Unfortunately, he kept coming up pretty much empty. The personal foci were generally kept inside a mage’s bubble, and those were practically opaque to Callum’s senses. He was pretty sure less so than before, as some weaker ones were verging on the translucent, but he definitely couldn’t resolve the intricacies of a commercial focus through that kind of murk.

Ultimately he decided the issue was that Dallas wasn’t really a major supernatural hub. At least, not compared to other places like Miami. After spending two days poking around without much to show for it, he called Lucy again. The list of supernatural areas was useful so far as it went, but he wanted the opinion of someone who actually understood supernatural society.

“Hey Lucy!” He drove along the interstate, an hour or so away from the urban center.

“What’s up, big man? Just couldn’t wait to hear my voice again?”

“That too,” Callum said with a laugh. “Really wanted your quick opinion on something. What are the biggest supernatural places in the US? Like, the cities or areas where there are a bunch of mages and such?”

“Oh, uhh. I’d say probably Vegas, New York, and Miami? Used to be more but a lot of Houses have moved into the portal worlds.”

“Huh.” Callum wondered if, in the end, GAR wasn’t somewhat of a self-solving problem. The more they migrated off-world, the less reason they had to meddle in Earth’s affairs. Of course, unless all the supernaturals went back there too, a lot of the fundamental problems remained. “Well, that’s all I needed. As always, you’re the best, Lucy.”

“Hey, you know it big man!”

“I’ve got my marching orders, then. I’ll let you know how everything goes.”

“You’d better!”

Callum chuckled and hung up, juggling phones as he brought up a route into Nevada. Las Vegas was the closest of the three hotspots, and he was pretty sure he didn’t want to go back to Miami anyway. The fae there might recognize him even with a disguise on.

For this road trip he’d gotten himself a little bit of cosmetic putty and altered the shape of his nose, plus gotten his hair cut short and wore a cap. Combined with winter clothing, he was probably, likely, hopefully unrecognizable by sight. If he was going to be hanging around supernatural areas, even with the distance his perceptions afforded him, he didn’t want to look like any photos they might have.

Unlike when he was traveling by motorhome, he didn’t have to scrupulously plan where he would park for the night. He didn’t need special facilities or attend to special maintenance, or even use gas station bathrooms. All that he needed was a space where the van wouldn’t get towed, and he could go back to the Texas trailer.

It was an entirely different experience with his home in his back pocket, one he’d recommend to anyone who was a spatial mage with teleportation enchantments. Or could at least could tag along with someone like that. He was pretty sure that the people who went out to deal with the front in the portal worlds had already discovered the wonders of being able to return to a friendly redoubt at any time, though maybe they didn’t use that kind of thing on purpose. It was hard to take a threat seriously if it was just a day trip.

It was a thought that made him step back and doublecheck that he was being cautious enough. Now that he had an easy way back to his home, it was possible that he’d start behaving in ways that would make him stand out. A van made it less likely that anyone would notice if he toted around something that would be out of place for a tourist or visitor, but he’d have to make sure he didn’t act too stupid.

Especially in Las Vegas. Even in the normal world, it had a reputation. He imagined it’d be even worse on the supernatural side.

***

Callum Wells was an annoyingly slippery customer. His calls were few and short, and when he did talk it was far enough away from any of the GAR teleporters that a strike team couldn’t make it in time. They could localize his position thanks to the cell towers, but if it wasn’t a place with surveillance it wasn’t much of a lead when he was gone long before anyone arrived. Nor was he treading on fae territory, which would let them track him with fae magic.

The signal also vanished completely after the conversation was over, so they couldn’t even keep tracking him. The best they could do was try and piece together any common cars from the surveillance they did have, but there were just too few data points. Of course they’d sent teams scouring the areas each time he called, but there was no trace of any magic and half the time the call had been from a highway or interstate.

“Depowering his phone every time,” Dave commented. “That’s not what a normal person does. He’s gotta know someone’s after him.” That was probably true, but there’d been no trace of that in any of the conversations. In fact, the conversations leaned more toward friendly chatter with Harper. Listening to borderline flirting between a criminal and a traitor was not particularly fun. He didn’t even say anything concrete, up until the last call.

“I’ve got my marching orders, then. I’ll let you know how everything goes.”

“I do wonder who he’s working for,” Jahn said, as the line went dead. They’d already dispatched a BSE team but barring some miracle there wouldn’t be anyone around by the time they got there.

“I’m more worried about what he’s going to do when he reaches his destination. That’s three cities that we need to warn and get reinforced.” Danforth stood. “Good luck. Tell me if there’s anything else that comes through.”

Jahn nodded and waved in dismissal. He didn’t think that Wells was headed to any of those cities in order to wreak havoc — the man was a vigilante, certainly, and his group had done incalculable damage, but not nearly as much as they could have given the demonstrated talents. With how they could slip past wards and evade detection, there could have been a lot of casualties, thefts, and sabotage. Yet Wells was still asking basic questions, as if he’d actually only run into the supernatural a year or so ago.

The whole thing still didn’t add up. Too many question marks, and they’d yet to get a glimpse of anyone other than Wells and Hall. Though it made sense why such an organization would have a spatial mage as a designated point man. Wells clearly had an insane, near-Archmage level of mobility, and while Duvall would never risk a spatial mage without a great deal of backup, the more aggressive approach was clearly working.

If anything, he wished they’d caught on to Lucile Harper earlier, so they’d have more time to entrap Wells and his organization. Slow and careful was the play here, but everyone was agitating that something be done. Despite Archmage Hargrave putting him in charge of the overall investigation, he wasn’t going to be able to hide Harper’s involvement for long and when that came out, he’d have to deal with all kinds of people who wanted a piece.

In the end, GAR existed to make things easier for the Archmages. The amount of pressure he, or anyone at the Guild, could put on the Archmages was mostly limited by how nice they were willing to be. With Hargrave, Duvall, and Fane all personally interested, he was sure at some point one of them would swoop in to try and take Harper for themselves, because of course they knew better than he did.

Then there was all that mess with the younger Hargrave and BSE, and Taisen would surely want that resolved as soon as possible. A rogue organization was BSE’s responsibility so they should be willing to be patient, but not everyone had the same priorities. He could, ironically, count on the mundane help more because their thinking aligned with his, and they had no stakes in any of the political morass.

“Do you think he knows that we’re listening in, somehow?” Jahn was fairly sure Agent Dave’s preparations had been adequate. They’d had to break into Harper’s place to physically plant their devices, and even there they’d been limited by some of Harper’s protections. Not so limited that they couldn’t compromise all her communications, but some of the more elaborate snoopery would have been too obvious.

“No,” Dave said, with flat certainty. “That doesn’t mean that they don’t suspect it. Depending on how paranoid people are, they might have a lot of code words and anything that’s not said in person and privately uses some variant of that. Most of it sounds too natural to me, but it’s possible.”

“And we’d have to take Harper to figure it out,” Jahn mused.

“If you can turn her, that’d be great, but it doesn’t sound like he gives her much information to begin with. I mean, wait long enough and someone will slip up, that’s for sure, but I don’t know how urgent this all is.”

“Urgent enough.” Jahn frowned. “But she’s our only lead. I want to play it carefully.” They could go in and try to compel her to entrap him, but Harper had already demonstrated an ability to resist or corrupt compulsions. For the moment, it didn’t seem worth the risk.

“Tell me if he calls again,” Jahn concluded. “I better go follow Danforth. We have three cities to reinforce.”

***

Las Vegas was very strange.

The whole thing was like some alien planet, a full city in the middle of a scrub desert for no apparent reason. All the people living in the dull sprawl of suburbia only there to feed the sudden neon and skyline of the Strip. It was as far from his own West Virginia home as he could imagine and made him suddenly homesick.

Of course he’d studied some of the stuff in Vegas, because the buildings there were famous for various reasons, but it was different seeing them with his own eyes. Not surprisingly, the supernatural presence seemed more concentrated on the Strip than on the suburbs. The GAR office itself wasn’t far from the Luxor, the latter of which had a lot of twisty-swirly fae magic around it. It was still a perfectly normal hotel, so he didn’t think it was a fae stronghold exactly, but there was clearly something going on there.

Of course he didn’t drive down the Strip itself, not willing to fight the traffic or wanting to put a van with an enchantment in it so close to supernatural activity. So long as it was inactive he was pretty sure it was difficult to detect from any distance, but driving it through a bunch of high-powered traffic was just asking for trouble.

There were mages zipping about, active vis senses sweeping the area as they patrolled. The wards glowing in his perceptions clearly had been deemed not enough, though he wasn’t sure why the Vegas area was more on edge than Miami had been. Though it could very well be his fault, after he’d raided the Miami branch. Or it might be that the supernaturals in Vegas were more fractious.

The more he circled around the area the less he liked it. There was just too much going on, with all different kinds of supernaturals out and about and alert. If this was business as usual for Las Vegas he probably wouldn’t be able to blend in properly, and if it wasn’t, he definitely wouldn’t be able to wander through unobserved. He didn’t have a bubble so he didn’t stand out, but he still had more vis than a normal person so stringent enough security checks would catch him.

Then there were the wards. They were mostly the same stuff that he’d gotten past before, but here and there some secondary enchantment fuzzed the area, like some kind of mana jammer. He could still see through it with sufficient effort, but he imagined it’d make wriggling vis threads through a tedious prospect.

He wasn’t all that surprised that there were some defenses that seemed specifically geared at him, not after the furor he’d caused, but it was still a little depressing how quickly they’d been deployed. Not that the defenses would do all that much if he was determined, but they were more than he wanted to deal with. Just getting some more enchantment foci to play with was not worth daring an entire city of riled-up supernaturals.

Callum turned around and drove away.

It was irritating how little activity it took to shut him out. The improved defensive warding was at best an annoyance, but the people were the real barrier. He couldn’t fake being a mage, and between his glamour blindness and mage-quality vis, couldn’t quite pass as a normal person either.

A sufficiently attentive person could figure him out; it didn’t even need to be some elite. The supernatural version of if you see something, say something was probably the best defense they had. What Callum had was the natural advantage of the attacker: he could choose the time and place.

Las Vegas, halfway through December, was not a good time or place. After his stunt in Miami, maybe all of the larger areas were off-limits until they cooled down. There was no way they could stay on full alert forever, and there were probably plenty of smaller supernatural areas he could crib knowledge from. It’d be more work than doing the rounds of a supernatural city, but he was probably being too greedy anyway.

He made sure to stay scrupulously within the speed limit as he drove back out of the suburbs. At least, until he got far enough out that he was more likely to get pulled over for being too slow, and then he just took a random road that headed out into the desert. Supernatural presence was thin on the ground out there, as was everything else.

Callum pulled off the road, off behind a jut of rock, and got out long enough to open his gut-portal. The van went into his cache, and he closed the portal and dropped a cheap piece of scrap with a vis cleaner before invoking the homebond. Only when he was safely in the little shed in Montana did he relax, rubbing at his eyes.

“That was a bust,” he said to himself, and opened the gut-portal once again to get out the maps of supernatural stuff that Lucy had supplied him. From what he’d seen in Miami and Vegas, it wasn’t just mages that had enchantments; fae and shifters had some small trinkets as well. Which meant they were something that could be manually operated and only used mana, so he was very curious about how that worked. Visions of hooking up enchantments to computers danced in his head, though he was sure if it was so easy it would already have been done.

Or maybe it had been done and he just hadn’t spotted it. There were entire swaths of supernatural society he hadn’t taken a close look at. Anyone wandering through the fields of the Midwest wouldn’t know about the Grand Canyon, or redwood forests. Computers were pervasive enough that he should have seen more integration than the magic dongles used for supernatural phones and laptops, but most people didn’t see all the servers that made the internet run. He had to keep reminding himself really knew very little about magic society at large.

While he was at the Montana shelter he doublechecked the homebond enchant, but it still seemed fine. The pure mordite hadn’t noticeably deteriorated. With that chore done, he debated just putting the teleport plate back in place and returning home. After wasting all that time driving up only to have to bail the moment he’d gotten a look at Vegas, he was pretty well fed up with the whole idea.

Instead he sighed and got out the laptop, ignoring the low charge, and pulled up the maps Lucy had given him. Not an itemized listing so much as regions generally covered by various factions and GAR branches and Houses. There were all kinds of overlapping spheres of authority, which probably resulted in a ridiculous morass of bureaucratic and political wrangling, but that meant it wasn’t likely all of them would be on such a high alert.

He did want to avoid entangling Chester though, so he decided he’d head west, out the California way, and see what he could see. After some teleporting to get to a place where there were actual roads, he retrieved the van and headed out. Only once he was a few hours away from his cache did he call Lucy again, putting the phone on speaker as he drove.

“Hey, big man! How was your trip?” Not that he’d specified a trip, but Lucy could connect the dots.

“Learned a few things, but not what I wanted. They were kinda stirred up so it’s probably better if I go elsewhere,” he told her. “Just curious if you knew anything about that.”

“Not that I’ve heard,” Lucy said. “But they’ve been pretty extreme ever since Miami, so, it might just be that.”

“True enough,” he allowed. It might take months for things to die down from that kind of stunt. That was why he’d gone hiking, before. Probably, he should just wait for the bunker be done but he wasn’t sure he could hole up for months without something to work on. What he could, and maybe should do was buckle down for serious magical experimentation, and see if he could grind out any improvements by sheer repetition.

The main reason he hadn’t was that he was so far behind other mages. He couldn’t outgun them or outlast them, and he had no idea how many countermeasures they had waiting for him once they knew what he could do. What he needed were more tricks, more bits and pieces of things that he could throw at the wall or, more to the point, at anyone who came after him.

That couldn’t work forever either, but most people would consider being a magical outlaw a losing proposition to begin with. He had a little more optimism than that, but at the same time he knew that most of his approaches would only be effective the first time. Or from ambush.

“Guess I’ll just have to be a bit more circumspect in the future,” he concluded, mostly to himself.

“Gotta say, big man, I don’t think you have it in you to be circumspect.”

“Maybe that’s what I want them to think,” Callum said in amusement. “But I suppose my track record is rather dramatic.”

“I haven’t heard of anything like it,” Lucy agreed. “But you know, these days I wonder if that actually means anything. It’s not like they really are talking about you officially. It’s mostly the fae swapping tales and everyone knows they’re notorious gossips.”

“Yeah, I would seriously doubt any official history of theirs.” After his trip to the Night Lands, he wasn’t even certain the threats that the various portal worlds had were real. Or still real, anyway. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that supernaturals had driven the worst offenders extinct.

He would have, in their place.

“Sounding a bit conspiracy theorist there, big man,” Lucy observed.

“Nah. Just compare any two country’s official versions of history when it comes to a war,” Callum said, downshifting as he coasted along a mountain road, foot hovering over the brake. “If they were on opposite sides, sometimes even the same side, those are very different versions of facts. What gets recorded is whatever suits the person doing the recording at the time. It’s just basic human nature.”

“I suppose it might be,” Lucy said.

Callum didn’t push. He knew he had a rather more cynical view of most of human nature than most people, and that was fine. Probably for the best, even.

“Anyway I’ll catch up with you in a bit, I’m losing signal here.”

“You really like being out in the sticks, don’t you big man?”

“That’s where all the fun is,” he told her.

“You’re gonna have to tell me how that works one of these days,” Lucy said. “Talk to you later!”

***

“So they didn’t even see him,” Duvall said with a scowl. “He was there, at one of those sites, and even if he didn’t get what he wanted, he was there. With all the wards and jammers and watchers, still nobody saw him.”

“We couldn’t shut down the entire city,” Jahn pointed out. “Anyway, if we had it would have been obvious.”

“Then there’s not much point in laying in wait for him, is there?” Duvall pointed out. “Just take the dud to the BSE facility as bait. That’s the only way we’re going to get Wells, or any of those people, somewhere we can make sure they won’t get away.”

“We’ve barely been at this a week,” Jahn replied, frowning. “Given enough time—”

“Given enough time they’ll have complete reign to carry out their plans,” Duvall cut him off. “Besides, you and I both know that without Wells they have no transportation or screening. The gunmen and financial backers are irrelevant, and besides, we can make Wells tell us about them.”

“You still want to take him alive?” Jahn said doubtfully.

“Of course! He’s a spatial mage! And at least marginally competent too, despite his obvious lack of teaching. Never mind the fact that we have to know his bloodline. Spatial mages are far too rare.” Duvall jabbed her finger at Jahn. “Your way hasn’t worked. Mine will. Get her, take her to the Deep Wilds, and make sure you have people set up to catch him.”

“Archmage Hargrave—”

“If you won’t, I will,” Duvall said. “I’ve had enough of my time wasted arguing about what should be done. We tried it your way, and all we’ve done is lose assets, people, and trust. All the while they run about unopposed and do whatever they want. No, this ends now. We do it my way.”

Jahn pressed his lips together, then nodded. There wasn’t much he could say to that, and in the end, he really couldn’t override an Archmage. Not one that was dead set on a course, at least. He wasn’t even sure that Hargrave would disagree. He was more interested in Wells personally than in the organization, anyway.

“Very well, I’ll bring her in.” He picked up his phone and dialed up Danforth. His partner, the fae, would make it easier for them to bring in Harper. Not that a dud could really do much to resist a mage, but compulsion was easier than force. Quieter, at the very least.

Duvall waited, visibly radiating impatience, until he’d relayed the orders to Danforth and hung up. Then she gave him a short nod and vanished in a brief twist of vis. It was easy to believe Wells was at Archmage level considering that Duvall could pull off the trick of teleporting around as she pleased, though admittedly her active vis senses were fairly obvious.

Jahn crossed into the other room, where Dave was sitting at the monitoring station, and gave him a wave. The mundane raised his eyebrows and stood up, stretching as he got out of the chair. There were a couple others under Dave, but Jahn had never tried to instruct them himself, since he was not familiar with the particulars of their expertise.

“Boss-lady chew you out?”

“A bit,” Jahn admitted. “Looks like we’re done here. We’ll get you debriefed and paid.” A little bit of fae tinkering would remove any untoward knowledge of the supernatural, and they’d be available the next time GAR or the BSE needed mundane agent expertise. It was butting into the Department of Acquisition’s turf a little bit to turn them loose again, but he’d bet on Grand Magus Taisen and Archmage Hargrave over that harpy Constance.

“You know what this means, boys,” Dave said cheerfully to his underlings. “Paperwork!”

There were assorted groans, and Jahn left them to it. He needed to go explain things to Grand Magus Taisen, before Danforth and Black showed up with an unexplained inmate. Fortunately, the head of BSE was easier to deal with than most Archmages, so long as there was no politics involved.

Besides, if it came down to it, he would bet on Taisen over Wells.

***

“Lucille Harper, you will stop what you are doing and come out here.” Felicia Black’s voice rang out in the basement, and the sound of typing stopped. Even with the protection afforded Ray by the special techniques he’d learned, Felicia’s voice carried a commanding tone. Though she was quiet and soft-spoken most of the time, when it was time for business she leaned into her siren heritage and grabbed attention.

Harper emerged from her office with the slightly stiff movements of people under heavy compulsion. Not that Ray was worried that Harper would be able to resist it at all. Felicia’s abilities were a lot more advanced than any but the oldest of the vampires, and her magic was a lot more difficult to resist. While the vampires often needed a vis bypass to do anything to mages, Felicia could affect almost anyone directly.

“Lucille Harper,” Ray said. “You’ve been found to be in collusion with Callum Wells. Your rights under GAR are forfeit and you will be remanded into the custody of the Bureau of Secret Protection.”

Harper didn’t say anything, completely under Felicia’s influence, but Ray could see the fear in her eyes. He almost felt sorry for her, but only almost. She’d been helping someone who’d murdered mages, vampires, and fae. There was no telling what havoc he’d wreak in the future, especially if he had someone inside GAR.

“You will follow us,” Felicia added, as Ray went over and cuffed Harper’s wrists behind her back, using a vis blocker even if Harper was supposed to be a dud. Not that he expected any trouble, but Wells had already proven to be an unpleasant surprise. There was no point in risking a sudden and unexpected use of magic.

They escorted her out of the basement and over to the teleportation pads, where one had already been reserved for transportation to the BSE facility. Those teleportation anchors weren’t normally kept in the main area of GAR, which was why one of the BSE agents was in the switchboard mezzanine to oversee the transfer. The procession attracted a few stares, but not many, since there weren’t too many people around that time of day, and only a few of the teleport booths were seeing any use.

He linked his mark into the teleportation matrix, while Felicia discreetly palmed her charm, and the white walls of the BSE entrance facility replaced the paneled wood of GAR Midwest. If it weren’t for the thick mana it would be impossible to tell it was in the Deep Wilds, since there were purposely no windows in the holding area. He glanced over at Felicia, but the BSE facility had feeder portals so vampires and fae could still function, so she didn’t look too disturbed by it.

The sound of their footfalls on the tile floor echoed off the walls as they escorted Harper to the interrogation room. Although only Ray and Felicia were supposed to interview Harper, there were a number observers in the next room, including two Archmages and the Master of Weltentor. It really wasn’t possible to be in any deeper trouble than Harper was.

They steered her into the interrogation room and Felicia ordered her to sit across from them. Ray stood behind Felicia, linking into the room’s monitoring enchantments, and making sure it was transmitting to the observation room. This was not an interrogation they wanted to flub.

“Lucille Harper,” Felicia said. “Tell us everything you know about Callum Wells.”

Chapter 19 – Recriminations

Callum dialed Lucy’s number and frowned as it rang. Ever since the shake-up at GAR he’d made sure only to call in the evening when she was home, and while he didn’t think she had nothing better to do than wait for him to call she’d always answered before. Once again, any break in normal behavior made him anxious. After the third ring someone answered.

“Callum Wells.” It wasn’t Lucy’s voice. He nearly dropped the phone as he fumbled in a spasm of panic, barely hearing the rest of whatever spiel the man on the other end had for him. “—Agent Ray Danforth and—” Finally he stabbed the call end button then steered off to the side of the road and yanked out the components out of the phone. Then, lacking any nearby bodies of water within his perceptions, teleported the bits outside and ran over them several times before getting back on the road.

He felt sick. Somewhere in the back of his head he’d always known there was a risk that they’d find Lucy, especially after they’d interviewed everyone. But at the same time, since she’d already passed the magically-compelled interrogation, he’d thought she was safe. Even if she wasn’t, he wasn’t about to tell someone how to live their life. That was the exact problem he had with GAR, and it was wrong to inflict it on someone else.

Now he wished he had said something to her, though he knew that wouldn’t have gone well. At least, he sure wouldn’t want someone else butting in and telling him how to live his life. Even and especially if it was from good intentions. That was really the worst kind of condescension.

It was a good thing that he was on a mostly untraveled back road somewhere on the border between Idaho and Washington State, otherwise he might have run the risk of crashing into someone. He sure wasn’t able to pay close attention to the road, fingers trembling with stress he wasn’t able to release while he was essentially fleeing from where he’d placed the call.

Eventually he pulled off at a runaway truck ramp. There was enough random detritus around that he could just enchant loose bits of metal with his cleanup pattern before he teleported himself and the van through to his cache. Moving the portal through itself was always an odd experience, though he’d found that it mostly only collapsed if he used threads, the instability interfering with the portal structure. If he used tubes, it was perfectly fine; the portal didn’t care where it was located.

Callum sat down in the cool darkness of the cave and rubbed his eyes. He’d been intending and hoping that after the Miami thing he could just lay low, collect enchantments, and work on his general prowess. Perfect his tricks and invent new ones, maybe something as useful as the gut-portal. Admittedly, there wasn’t much that could be as handy as that, but there was no telling what he could come up with if he had time to just sit and play around.

Part of him regretted just hiking around for two months and not doing any real magic practice, but the fact was he couldn’t have done anything useful without enchantments. Probably. Either way, he’d needed that time.

There had been a lot to digest out on his very long hike. Mulling over the people he’d killed, over how he was a fugitive with no real prospects. Thinking about his prior thirty years of life, now that he knew magic, and wondering whether that latent magic had somehow caused his wife’s death. The possibility that just being around him might have affected Selene, or maybe even his parents, was not a very palatable one.

Ultimately he had to come to terms with the fact that he couldn’t have, or wouldn’t have, done anything different. The best he could do was to work on his own abilities, so as to not waste the opportunities he’d been given. He still sincerely intended to take that time to work on making himself a better mage, but he had to do something about Lucy, first. Part of him was guiltily glad that he’d never shared anything too incriminating, or even called her from any of his safehouses. That didn’t mean he was totally safe; they probably knew he was in Texas and there was no telling how long they’d been tracking his phone.

The Texas house was probably a lost cause and at the very least he’d want to change license plates or something for his van. It was generic enough that getting the numbers on it altered would be sufficient to preserve its identity. Obviously they didn’t know it already, or he’d have been pulled over somewhere, but given enough time and data crunching they might be able to figure it out. He couldn’t verify he’d never called from areas with some kind of surveillance. Despite the part of his mind screaming at him to do something about Lucy, he had to check over his own safety before he could start contemplating it.

Callum got up and paced the length of the concrete floor he’d installed, making his way by sense instead of sight. While he did have LED lamps scattered around, he didn’t actually need them except to read. For a little bit all he did was walk, trying to shake out the buzzing adrenaline and clear the taste of stress from his mouth, his stomach churning with worry over Lucy.

The problem was that his attempts to insulate himself from everyone meant that he didn’t actually know much about Lucy’s own situation. He knew she worked for Alpha Chester and had a residence in that area, and that she worked for GAR, but that was it. Aside from the phone number she’d given him, he had no way to get in contact with her — not that any such contact was possible if GAR had snatched her away. But if he’d known more, maybe he could have found a trail.

As it was he had exactly one contact who might know something, and that wasn’t even someone he could talk to on his own. The card Alpha Chester had given him once was long gone, assuming that number was still being used. Not that he’d trust phones anyway. If they got Lucy to talk they’d know Chester was involved, and while Chester might have political protection that didn’t stop people from tapping his lines or whatever.

He need to talk face to face. Or at least, voice to voice, in a way that would keep anyone from eavesdropping. Either way, he’d have to travel physically, though the more he thought about it, the less he thought he’d really need to be there in person. His implant and cache had really gotten him thinking about portals, and the abuses thereof when he could push his perceptions and magic through them.

One of the items he’d created was a second pair of portal disks, two dime-sized metal pieces, and there was no reason that he couldn’t send half of that in lieu of his actual body. Such a thing wouldn’t work everywhere — he’d already found that the portals spawned by the enchantments were fairly fragile and it would be easy for any mage to shut it down even by accident. They’d work well enough to insulate him from shifters, though.

It wasn’t that he distrusted Alpha Chester, exactly. The man had proven to be as good as his word and seemed to be a fair dealer. It was just that Callum was very aware of how massively outclassed he was when he was within physical proximity of a shifter. They weren’t human. He might well say something deeply offensive in shifter society and that was something he’d rather be at a distance for.

He spent a few minutes chewing over the concept before committing to anything, but didn’t see anything really wrong with it. Except maybe the implicit insult in not actually arriving in person, but there was nothing to be done about that. Besides, if he was never physically there, that made it easier for everyone to assume there was no contact.

Callum teleported himself back up to Montana, but instead of getting out his van or his truck, he got the chair. The third or fourth version of his flying chair, he’d lost count, was practically identical to the previous, with the roll frame and shelves and a tarp, but was somewhat smaller. Since he didn’t need to carry as much with him, the gut portal being superior to any kind of shelving, less volume was definitely better. The Alcubierre trick was extremely vis-intensive and his reserves weren’t exactly enormous.

One of the changes he’d made was to add a tank of oxygen. It was far too easy to get extremely high up and he didn’t want to suffocate if he made some kind of mistake. Not that he planned to do another jaunt like he had in France; that had come far too close to him exiting the atmosphere entirely or going into freefall from thousands of feet up. No, he’d do things safely, but safely also meant he had to be prepared for emergencies.

He invoked his glamour focus and the gravitykinesis field, shielding himself and lifting the chair into the air. Since he was already up in the mountains he had a fairly good view and his first jaunt, aimed down at the ground, got him pretty far to the south and east. Winut was a fairly small target, but he could get most of the way there by the very coarse navigation afforded him through the flying chair.

One jaunt brought him into weather, and he was glad that the tarp provided some protection because, even bundled as he was, being hammered by sleet was not a fun experience. Lifting himself up only meant he was surrounded by fog, so he actually had to switch to the pickup and drive for a while toward his location. He wasn’t going to risk running into something he couldn’t see when completely surrounded by cloud.

When he actually made it to the Winut area, he was very cautions. The Langleys were probably well-disposed toward him, but assumptions were a very bad thing in his situation and even if they were happy to see him, there might be watchers about. Possibly even watchers the Langleys didn’t know about.

He’d just have to hope he could track down someone he knew without getting spotted himself.

***

Sherriff Arthur Langley tensed as he smelled a brief spike of human magic, and he glanced over his shoulder at the rear of his cruiser. There wasn’t anyone else in the car, he could tell that much, since even a glamoured mage would displace enough air that he’d be able to tell something was off. Not that there had been enough magic for it to be a proper mage presence. Then there was another waft of magic from the passenger side, along with cold air and the smell of stone.

“Sherriff Langley?” The voice came from a small, dark circle hovering in the air, but it was a voice he recognized and he relaxed slightly.

“Mister Hall?” He had never thought that he’d hear from Hall – or rather, Wells – again. It was a shame, since Wells seemed like good folk and with fantastic skills. But it was understandable that he’d had to leave, given the way GAR wanted his head.

“Yes,” Wells’ voice echoed from the hole. “I realize using this to speak is probably a little bit rude, but you understand I have to be somewhat careful about when and where I’m seen.”

“Certainly,” Arthur replied, a little bemused by the voice coming from a floating hole in space. He knew that mages were capable of all kind of tricks, and since Wells was a spatial mage something like that perhaps made sense, but it was still a bizarre application. He’d seen them use air-type magic for far-speaking, but never tiny portals. “What do you need from me?”

“I need to get in touch with Alpha Chester. Not through the phone,” Callum added immediately afterward. “I’m obviously using a portal to speak to you; there’s an anchor that I’d like you to bring to him so I can speak the same way.” There was another whiff of magical scent from Wells’ teleportation as a small disc of metal appeared in the front seat. The speaking-portal vanished at the same time, only to reappear a moment later. “Can you do that?”

“Certainly,” Arthur said, reaching over to pick up the metal disc. There was a faint tingle of magic from it, barely perceptible, and he had to guess the speaking portal was somehow being projected by it. “Can I just put this in my pocket or something?”

“Absolutely,” Wells said. “Just don’t damage it.” Arthur slipped the anchor into his breast pocket and reached for his phone, dialing Chester’s number.

“Chester here.”

“Alpha Langley,” Arthur said. “I need to come by in an hour or so on a matter relating to Claire.” He was aware of Wells still listening through the floating portal, and besides, there was some need of circumspection when it came to these things.

“You probably should expedite the matter,” Chester said, which Arthur well understood. The teleportation pad, Wells’ own creation as he understood it, was still stored at the compound. It would probably be moved eventually, but for the moment there was still instant transport between his house and Chester’s.

“Yes, Alpha,” Arthur said.

“I will make sure things are ready.” The phone went dead and Arthur hung up.

“Does that work for you?” He asked Wells.

“It does. I’ll be closing this portal now, but I know what’s going on around the anchor.”

“Understood.” Arthur did appreciate the warning. Not that it mattered overmuch, but he would have been somewhat put out if he hadn’t been told he was bringing an observing eye and ear along with him.

He reached for the radio to inform headquarters he was heading back to the compound and simply made a U-turn, driving back along main street. By the time he reached the compound and dropped a few words about where he was going, John of the Wolfpack was in the basement room with the telepad. John tossed him a teleport token as he approached.

“Something happen?” John inquired idly.

“I have a message for Alpha Chester,” Arthur said. “And a bit of a package?” He tapped his breast pocket. “I’ve got an observer along so don’t say too much.”

John raised his eyebrows but shrugged and nodded, waiting for Arthur to step onto the telepad before poking at his phone. A moment later there was the snapping sensation of the black-market teleporter and they appeared in Chester’s basement. He wasn’t worried about giving away any particular secrets to Wells; the teleporters were from him and the basement saferooms for any shifters having issues were well known to begin with.

The smell of magic coming from the anchor in his pocket wavered oddly with the teleport but still lingered as Arthur stepped out of the saferoom where the telepad was kept. Chester was there in the basement in war-form, ears perked inquisitively in Arthur’s direction. For his part, Arthur inclined his head. As always in Chester’s presence, the pack-bonds shift and settled, reaffirming their connection.

“Hall – Wells, I guess – wants to talk. He gave me a magical anchor that lets him do so; said he was watching from it.” Arthur plucked the little metal disc from his pocket and offered it to Chester. The Alpha took it, giving it a frown, and then his ears slanted backward as he frowned at the hole that appeared in the air.

“Alpha Chester, I presume?” Wells’ voice came from portal.

“Indeed,” Chester said. He didn’t seem too excited, but Arthur knew that Chester resented how imperious Wells was. Even if he found the man too useful to properly chastise. “I presume you’re calling about Lucile.” He gestured for everyone else to take seats as he placed the disc down on the table, lowering himself into the massively oversized armchair that had been built just for him.

“I am,” Wells said shortly. “All I know is that someone else answered her phone.”

“Well, GAR took her in yesterday. I got the impression they had her under surveillance for a week or more before that. Of course they’ve interrogated her and I have some issues to deal with because they know about those telepads you made.” Arthur winced. Those were useful and expensive and GAR would almost certainly want to take them. He wasn’t sure if Chester could manage to keep ahold of them.

“Do you know where they took her, and what the dispensation of forces is at that location?” That was very odd phrasing, one of those things that made Wells seem like something other than the supposed architect his background provided. Chester shook his head.

“I owe Lucile some consideration for her service with me. She may not be pack but she is one of my people. However, that sort of consideration is not the same as sending you after a heavily guarded BSE facility as if you were some kind of guided missile.”

“So you won’t help?” Wells’ voice was flat and hard, and Arthur had to restrain an inhuman growl from his throat. Nobody talked to an Alpha that way. Fortunately, Chester had practice dealing with non-shifters and didn’t turn a hair.

“I didn’t say that, but this requires more consideration. If nothing else, there are shifters at the facility that I would prefer remain alive and intact.” That actually surprised Arthur a little. He didn’t know that Chester had gotten some of his people into GAR’s pool of shifter labor.

“I see.” Wells’ voice warmed fractionally. “A more considered approach is a better idea than just going in there half-cocked. What are you thinking?”

“This is not just some vigilante action,” Chester said, claws tapping on the reinforced arms of his chair. “This is an all-out declaration of war against GAR, to which I am not yet willing to commit either my pack in particular or the shifters in general. So any agreement between us would be, of necessity, a clandestine one.”

“So no change there,” Wells said, a trifle impatiently.

“No, but we need an agreement. If you would follow my direction—”

“No.” The response was instantaneous and reflexive, but no less final for all that.

“—then perhaps an alliance of sorts. You are very, very dangerous. Your brazen flaunting of GAR's authority and their inability to catch you have already started the process of infighting. It’s a bit of a cause célèbre among the fae, some of whom are rattling the chains of authority.”

“It’s not much of an organization if one person can threaten it so,” Wells said.

“It is not the one person, it is that anyone is successfully defying their authority. The appearance of strength is strength; the appearance of weakness is weakness. How much faith would you put in an authority so publicly unable to fulfill their basic function?”

“Fair,” Wells said after a moment. “What did you have in mind?”

“Even if you will not operate at my behest as such, I would want to know what you are doing. So I can get my people out of the area, or take advantage, as the case may be. Or, despite what you may think, I may have knowledge of what you’re about.”

“The only reason I can do anything is because nobody knows what I’m doing, or where, or why,” Wells replied. “I could use more information at times, but anything you act on could compromise me or my plans.”

“Do I seem like that sort of blunderer to you?” Chester demanded.

“No. But two can keep a secret only if one of them is dead.” Wells was silent for a moment, and Arthur couldn’t help but shake his head at how deeply suspicious that sort of sentiment was. “I can agree to share information in good faith. Nothing more than that.”

“This is, after all, a gentleman’s agreement,” Chester said. “While we’re at it, it’s quite likely the teleportation equipment you provided will end up with GAR. They’re already insisting on it. I’d like more.”

“If you can provide enchanting materials, it’s not a problem,” Wells said brusquely. “Now, what about Lucy?”

Arthur could see Chester controlling himself. It wasn’t so much the attitude as Wells not being there in person, so none of the normal signals a shifter would rely on were there. Tone of voice alone just wasn’t enough.

“The BSE facility is located in the Deep Wilds,” Chester said. “The only way in or out is by teleport; actually reaching it on foot is nearly impossible. I don’t know exactly what they have planned but I’m sure they have wards, guards, all of that. There hasn’t been enough time to gather what changes they’ve made, but I do have a building plan.”

“That would be helpful,” Wells said. “So far as reaching it goes — I have options, but could you have someone carry in an anchor like the one I’m using here?” Everyone’s eyes went to the small silver disk resting on the table. It was completely innocuous, but if it was a way for such a dangerous man to access something, it was also very ominous.

“I could,” Chester said, drawing out the second word. “What is it you intend to do?”

“Retrieve Lucy,” Wells said promptly. “That’s the main goal. How it goes from there depends on what I find. I would be lying if I said I was not prepared to level the entire thing.”

“I see.” Chester didn’t contend Wells’ assertion of his capabilities. It was obvious that Wells was deeply angry, but he was also not stupid or boastful. It wasn’t something a shifter or a vampire could contemplate, but mages and fae had access to some truly destructive options. What exactly a spatial mage could do when provoked, Arthur couldn’t imagine.

“Any shifter casualties will not be tolerated,” Chester said bluntly. “I know you have the capacity to bypass obstacles. Most shifters at the site are simple menial personnel. There are a few who may be troublesome but it’s better to avoid any shifters at all.”

“I can’t be held responsible for what the mages might do once a firefight erupts,” Wells warned. “I can avoid targeting them directly unless I notice something truly objectionable, but last time BSE targeted me they killed a number of people in a café just to try to get at me.”

“Yes, any direct action,” Chester amended.

“I’ll take responsibility for Lucy, but if she needs medical care or something I may have to come to you,” Wells added.

“That is reasonable. She is, as I said, one of us. But you are right, she can’t remain with us after such an assault.”

“Then I believe we have an understanding.”

“Yes. The soonest I can get the anchor there is approximately fifteen hours from now, with the next shift.”

“Understood. Here is a number you can text the building information and tell me when the anchor has been delivered.”

Wells rattled off a number and Chester gave his mate Lisa a glance. She wrote it down as it came and gave him a return nod.

“I will contact you later,” Chester promised.

“Thank you,” Wells said, and the black portal vanished, the smell of magic slowly fading from the room.

“What are you thinking?” Lisa asked. Not challenging, just curious.

“That I couldn’t convince him to do anything else, regardless,” Chester said. “We might as well take advantage of it. It’s not like he’s going to bring down the BSE , let alone GAR, but if they get their teeth kicked in enough we might be able to gain a little more independence.”

“And if they capture him?”

“I don’t think that’s an option, for anyone.”

***

Lucy was wrung out.

The fae’s compulsion had been far different and far more insidious than the vampire’s. She’d genuinely believed that the agent was her friend after the first few minutes of conversation, and it wasn’t until the spell was broken hours later that she’d realized what had happened. They’d even had drinks and chatted about life and work, bantering like old pals. It left her feeling sick and violated and she barely noticed the vampire escorting her out to a cell.

“You will sit down,” the vampire told her. They’d done whatever it was that removed her innate resistance again, and she was forced to take a seat on the cot. “You will not move,” the vampire added, and her muscles practically locked in place. As he turned to go, she thought he looked like the one who originally interviewed her.

Minutes ticked by as her thoughts spiraled in on themselves, unable to focus on anything but the mess she was in. Her muscles started to ache, then cramp, but she couldn’t even shift, the compulsion holding her in place. The cramping turned to creeping agony, but all she could manage was a pained keening noise as she was held prisoner by her own body.

She wasn’t sure how long that lasted, the searing, almost tearing pain and weakness stealing through her body taking away her vision as she panted, lost in a haze of suffering. Her entire world contracted down to the screaming of her muscles. Then, suddenly, a cold wave washed it away instantly, as if it were some nightmare she was waking from. Lucy blinked, seeing the face of a young woman out of the corner of her vision, since she couldn’t really even look around,

“Why aren’t you—?” The woman said. “Oh! I see.” She touched Lucy’s elbow and the feel of that cool sensation was accompanied by a loosening of the compulsion that held her in place. Lucy collapsed onto the cot. She couldn’t help it. Her body was refreshed with magical healing, all the pain vanished like a bad dream, but somehow that made it worse. Between that and the compulsion she didn’t feel like she could even tell what was real. It wasn’t until she felt the trickle of tears down her face that she realized she was sobbing.

For the most part she thought of herself as tough, but the preceding few hours had been by far the worst thing she had ever experienced. Part of her was terrified it would happen again, and she really didn’t know if she could handle it. Or what she might say or do to avoid having to go through it.

When she finally wiped her eyes free of the tears the woman was still there. She looked faintly sympathetic, but didn’t actually move to help. Belatedly, Lucy realized that the woman had to be a healing mage, which was the reason why she wasn’t in screaming agony anymore In fact she felt really good, physically, even if her wits were scattered hither and yon.

“You’re Lucile Harper, right?” The woman said finally, when Lucy managed to sit up and look over at her. For a moment Lucy didn’t reply, feeling like she’d almost forgotten how to speak of her own accord, but then her brain recovered.

“Yes?” She felt like she should be hoarse and strained but her throat was fine. Which just seemed wrong.

“I’m Gayle Hargrave,” the mage said. Even if she was physically fine, Lucy was so shaken it took her a few long moments to place the name.

“Oh,” she said.

“You know Callum Wells, right?”

Lucy rubbed her eyes, trying to get her thoughts together. She really, really didn’t want to talk about Callum anymore, but Gayle’s question was a completely different thing than the interrogation from before. She’d even healed Lucy up and freed her from that horrifying hell of compulsion.

“I’ve talked to him, but I’ve never met him,” she told Gayle. “I don’t know— I don’t know if there’s anything useful I can tell you.”

“I just wanted to know why he told me to use my healing magic for harming instead,” Gayle said, a bit plaintively. “I don’t want to be part of BSE but the anti-healing technique is supposed to be secret.”

“I’m not sure if it helps,” Lucy said slowly, “but I don’t think he actually knew what he was suggesting. His background is really weird. It’s like he’s completely ignorant of most of mage society, but at the same time has some super elite training in certain things.”

“That doesn’t help,” Gayle sighed and crossed her arms. “He ruined my life and pulled me away from my House and it was just an accident? That’s just— no, I don’t believe it.”

“I think he’s some House’s pet project,” Lucy offered. “One they lost control of.” Either that or he was exactly what he appeared to be, which was actually a scarier proposition.

“You think he’s going to come get you?” Gayle asked abruptly, and Lucy blinked. For some reason that hadn’t crossed her mind, but now that it’d been asked, she realized a lot of the interrogation had centered around it. Everything she had said and felt during the fae compulsion was distant and weird, like someone else’s memories.

There hadn’t been anything she could tell them. She really didn’t know all that much about his capabilities and he’d been coy when describing exactly how he’d managed some of what he had. But one thing he hadn’t been coy about was that he would lever her out of GAR’s hands if they ever closed on her. Which they had.

“Yes, and they know it,” Lucy said. It wasn’t betraying anything she hadn’t been forced to say already. Gayle scowled.

“He’s going to answer for ruining my life,” she said and left the cell.

Lucy wasn’t sure the door was even locked, but she wasn’t about to try a facility full of mages and vampires. She hunched down on the bed, focusing on breathing. There was nothing she could do herself, not as a dud, but she could at least be prepared. She didn’t know when Callum would be coming, but when he did, she’d be ready to make a break for it.

Chapter 20 – Heretic

Once again it was obvious why he couldn’t just hide in a hole. He had a moral imperative to do something, in addition to his own personal responsibility. Technically, Lucy couldn’t be used to get at him if he didn’t allow it, but he refused to even entertain the possibility of abandoning her. Callum didn’t want to leave Lucy in GAR custody for any longer than he needed to, but it was just like the couple down in Florida. He needed to prepare and do things right.

An unavoidable delay was letting Chester’s people smuggle the portal anchor in. The fifteen hours was in a way a good thing, because it forced him to take the time to make sure he had everything ready on his end. Since he’d been stocking his cache for so long, it wasn’t actually much a survey, but it was better to do that without feeling overly rushed.

There was one stop he did have to make before anything else, and that was to get a vacuum flask from the nearest industrial shop. The beat-up old thing wasn’t rated to protect from something like lava, but it’d still prevent ambient heat from getting at the portal focus. The focus itself was metal so it could stand more heat than he could, but mordite had such a low melting point that he didn’t want to take the slightest risk. He didn’t even care if the dewar got trashed, so long as it worked long enough. His portal focus falling apart mid-rescue would be a problem.

After he recalled to his cavern-cache, he changed into the civilian body armor and helmet he’d gotten, which felt overly cumbersome but it wasn’t like he was going to be running around. Nor did he expect it to block any serious offensive spells. He was more worried about shrapnel and debris and other incidental things, like what had hit him in France. Especially since he was going to be hanging out somewhere fairly dangerous even before the attack.

Callum’s ability to work through portals gave him a ridiculous flexibility that he’d only just started to explore, but he’d already figured out one application. Not too far south and east of his Mexico hide out was Pacaya, Guatemala, which was in a near-continuous state of eruption. There were lava rivers all over the place, which was precisely what he wanted.

Fortunately, a thermal-reflective blanket was one of those things included in the basic camping equipment he had stashed away, and even though it wouldn’t be all that effective, it was better than nothing. That combined with the breathing apparatus he’d already gotten was enough that he felt safe getting near an active lava flow, especially with the six hundred yard buffer.

Once again he used the chair to get around. It was annoying how dependent he was on GPS to figure out his location, but it wasn’t like he could see what was going by whenever he was in mid-blur. By this time he’d picked up an old-school GPS hiking handheld, and while he wasn’t completely sure he trusted it, at least it wasn’t a smartphone.

While flying chair trips were still fairly draining on the vis front, the new model didn’t need carrying capacity so it was just a little bit smaller, and every bit helped. So did the excess mana in the area, which helped him recover between jaunts. For some reason, the mana generated by the sixth portal world didn’t seem to drop off as rapidly to the south as to the north, so he didn’t even need to tap his gut-portal for the boost. It was only maybe four hundred miles, so it really didn’t take him long at all, even though he was being far more conservative than the panic-driven stunt that had seen him to Mallorca.

Nighttime made it easier to navigate, actually, since the lava flows stood out starkly against the dark ground around the volcano. It was a sort-of tourist area and so not supposed to be terribly dangerous, but even so he had his breath mask out as he aimed himself down toward a dark patch near a particularly large flow. There were still hours to go until he expected a message, so he was going to have to camp out for a bit while he waited.

The value of a portal focus was made very clear with how he could leave it open without spending any focus or vis on it. That meant he could just keep his gut portal active and occasionally open a small portal to the area above his cave-cache. That was where he left his phone, since he could get a cell signal from the tower in the nearby town. It wasn’t a great signal, and it wasn’t a great phone, but it worked and that was enough for him.

It turned out that he didn’t actually need the thermal-reflective blankets if he didn’t try to walk right up to the lava itself, so he stayed on the rocky, ashy ground on the next slope over. He knew he had to nap before it was showtime, even if it was just a couple hours, but he was too keyed up to manage it right away. Instead he pulled up the layout that Chester had given him and looked it over for the fourth or fifth time.

The black site was surprisingly large and small at the same time. It sprawled out over a big compound with training and housing and storage and all the things a completely independent operation would need. Teleporters should have meant that a lot of that wasn’t necessary, but he appreciated that the base was set up so it could be run independently if necessary. It made the place a lot different from most of GAR’s centralized infrastructure, which made him think that whoever ran it was independent of the stuff he’d seen so far.

The actual holding cells were just in a small central area, underground, which was all he was worried about. There weren’t many of them, so it wasn’t like it’d be difficult to find Lucy, but at the same time it meant he wasn’t likely to be able to cause a distraction by letting a bunch of prisoners loose. An isolated cell was better for him anyway because if she was surrounded by mages he had no idea how he’d deal with that without massive collateral damage.

Hopefully they didn’t realize that themselves.

Even with all the preparation, with his boulders and water grenades and the lava flow, he actually didn’t want to fight anyone. In fact, real combat was very much a losing proposition for him, since he didn’t have training or proper magical defenses. The best thing would be if he could portal in, grab Lucy, and bail before anyone was the wiser. That didn’t seem likely though, since they surely knew at least some of what he could do.

They’d be ready for him. He just had to make sure they weren’t as ready as they thought.

***

“Are you sure he’s even coming?” Harold Harper, head of House Harper, glanced up from the document he was signing and gave Ray Danforth a frown. “You said he hung up on you.”

“Fairly sure.” It was not a secret that they’d put Lucy in the BSE facility. In fact, they were making it as public as possible, because they needed Wells to know where she was. There was no use baiting a trap that was hidden away from the prey.

Ray had actually been surprised by how Wells had cut off the communication. Usually people listened and responded, even when it might not be in their best interests to do so. But Wells hadn’t even hesitated, which made it difficult to know if he had enough information to actually come after the Harper dud. Lucile was the only connection they’d found inside GAR, and she was even the go-between for Wells and Alpha Chester.

So far, there hadn’t been a hint of Wells contacting the shifters, though it wasn’t like they could stop every subordinate that came to Chester’s house for business. Not that they were making any secret of their scrutiny, and Duvall had even sent someone to demand the teleportation pads that Wells had supplied them. She had hit the roof when she’d found out, but she was far too busy to go deal with that sort of thing herself. Or at least so she claimed; Ray suspected the reason might be she just didn’t like dealing with shifters.

Still, Wells had been shown to be resourceful and the more people who knew her location, the more likely it was to get back to him. Considering the effort he’d taken just to retrieve a pair of mundanes from custody, it didn’t seem likely he’d leave Lucile Harper to languish. It still wasn’t a sure thing, but they were acting as if it were. They had to.

“Here,” Harold said, pushing the document across the table. Ray glanced at it before putting it in the folder. Officially removing Lucile from the Harper family was probably unnecessary; their loyalty wasn’t in question as a cadet branch of House Janry, and it wasn’t like they needed more leverage on Lucile. But Harold had insisted when Ray had come to spread the news.

“Thank you for your cooperation.” The words were rote, and Harold barely glanced his way as Ray stood up to leave. He collected Felicia on the way out, who was half-glad and half-sad to be visiting the Janry-Harper estate on Faerie. She hadn’t told him the full story of how she’d ended up on Earth and unaffiliated with any of the fae enclaves, but on the rare times they wound up in the portal world she was visibly uncomfortable.

“Should just hold her in Faerie,” Felicia said quietly, even though she clearly didn’t like the idea. “It doesn’t matter how sneaky he is if the land itself is looking for him.”

“What fae king would we owe if we did that?” The question was more rhetorical than anything, just like Felicia’s comment. Felicia nodded in acknowledgement.

“My family would love to offer, and you’d be a fool to agree,” she said. Her voice was more resonant than usual, the siren heritage coming to the fore along with a brogue that she’d worked hard to hide.

“You okay?” Danforth asked, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m worried,” she said, the sky darkening with her words as just the tone of voice called in cloud cover. A good reminder of how the human portion of Faerie was still Faerie, and fae magic held sway. “They’re already telling stories about the Ghost. Maybe that doesn’t mean much if he’s a mage, but there are fae undercurrents in motion. I’m not sure what happens if we can’t catch him.”

Danforth glanced around. The vestibule of House Janry was not exactly private, but there also wasn’t anyone about at this time of night, so he pulled her closer. Underneath the glamour he could feel the corded muscle of her real form shift as she leaned into him for a moment.

“Time to get back to work,” she said soon enough, thumping her head against his shoulder, then pulled away and straightened her uniform before turning back to the teleporters. Danforth followed, giving her a little bit of space. She wasn’t overly touchy in general, especially not on the clock, which told him how worried she really was.

When they returned to the BSE facility, it was in the process of being locked down tight. There were guards around the perimeter, in case Wells came overland with his flying artifact, and around the teleporters, if he could use the GAR transportation system. Lucile’s cell was protected not by wards, which hadn’t been very effective in the past, but by a high-powered mana jammer to keep any kind of vis construct from manifesting.

The two of them passed through a new set of magical scanners and a hastily-installed airport scanner to hopefully spot any implants that Wells or any of his group might have. It was annoying to have to pass his focus folio through the checkpoint, but that particular security measure was only temporary. Felicia had her token, and some bits of jewelry that she was equally reluctant to give up. One of them was the necklace he’d given her, but others were of purely fae origin and she clearly hated giving them up.

The pair passed deeper into the facility, through the hallway of the central building, past the interrogation rooms, and outside. The holding cells were in a completely separate building, forcing people to cross the open courtyard inside the walls of the BSE base. The grass there was the oddly springy, wiry stuff of the Deep Wilds, and outside the walls the canopies of the monstrous trees broke the horizon like distant mountains.

Unlike the Night Lands, where there was only ever the moon, or Faerie, where the time of day depended on location and the general mood of the inhabitants, the Deep Wilds had an actual light cycle, though twilight and dawn lasted a lot longer than they should. The oversized sun beat down overhead, through the dome that protected the courtyard from the similarly oversized wildlife that wheeled and circled in the too-blue sky.

Ray was already starting to sweat just in the short walk between buildings, and resorted to conjuring up a breeze to keep Felicia and himself comfortable. It didn’t help that they were dressed more for Earth weather than the portal worlds, since they generally didn’t spend too much time in any of them. Cooling enchantments brought the air to a more comfortable temperature as they stepped back indoors, in the vestibule of the jailhouse.

“Ah, good.” Jahn looked up as they entered, the agent overseeing operations by sheer inertia, though the BSE employees knew what they were about. “You can’t by chance lay a geas, can you?”

Felicia shook her head. Jahn heaved a sigh.

“Guess I’ll have to ask King Ravaeb. He’s about the only one we can use who’s not involved, one way or another.”

“Hopefully not,” Ray replied. Ravaeb had a brutal streak, which could make an already nasty business even worse. But it wasn’t his business, so he just moved on and held out the folder. “For what it’s worth, House Harper severed all ties with Lucile when I filled them in.”

“That’s not too surprising,” Jahn said, taking the folder and put it on the desk behind him without looking at it. “Nobody likes a traitor.”

“Out of curiosity, what is the geas for?” Ray was only passingly familiar with what exactly constituted a geas rather than a compulsion, despite having a fae partner. It was more of a fae royalty thing, and while he suspected Felicia was closely related, she definitely wasn’t in that power bracket.

“It’s because despite all this,” Jahn said, waving his hand around to indicate the activity, “there’s the possibility we won’t catch anyone. So it’s insurance. If we can get Lucile to report on whatever base they’re operating from, we can come in full force.”

“Ah.” Ray couldn’t argue with that. Everything they’d seen indicated a group whose strength was stealth rather than raw power. Wells hadn’t been particularly impressive back when they’d first accosted him in Kennecut, and he hadn’t even tried fighting back in the Ardennes. If they could locate his home base, they could attack him on their terms. “You think he’d slip past the Grand Magus? Or Archmage Hargrave?”

“Under the circumstances, I don’t think we can rule out other traitors,” Jahn said bluntly. “We know he’s made agreements with the fae and with Alpha Chester. We haven’t turned up anyone else here in BSE, but these are shifter lands. I wouldn’t assume we know everything and everyone around us, or that this facility is as well-hidden as it’s supposed to be.”

“I’d say you’re paranoid, but this case has been weird from start to finish,” Ray observed.

“Speaking of which, are you going to stay here while we wait?” Jahn asked. “I know you’re not as combat-rated as a lot of BSE folks.”

Ray didn’t answer immediately. Instead he looked to Felicia, who was not combat-rated at all and was actually inconvenienced by being in the portal world. On the other hand, she was more tenacious than he was and had a bit of a fixation on properly finishing their cases, even those that were supposed to be out of their hands. Not that Ray terribly objected, but for Felicia it was part of her fae story.

“We’ll stay,” Felicia wrote on her tablet, holding it up to show Jahn.

“Then get yourself equipped at the armory. I’ll ask Grand Magus Taisen to put you into one of the shifts.”

“Yessir,” Ray replied, and braced himself to head back into the unseasonable heat.

***

Lucy felt like her head was stuffed full of gauze wrapped around thorns. It was hard to think, and when she did think she couldn’t think about some things or else the thorns would start tearing and twisting, cutting through her memories and ideas. Trying to turn her into something else. The fae magic from before was terrible, but it hadn’t been like this.

She sat on the cot, holding her head in her hands, prodding at the chains the fae king had bound her with. It wasn’t the same as the compulsion which had made her act in accordance to strict rules, and it wasn’t like the siren song, which had made her believe something that wasn’t true. It had some components of those but it was all together in a single thing that she could feel poised around her, waiting to strike.

It was terrifying.

Just trying to think around the edges was hard and painful in a way she couldn’t properly describe. It would have been a lot easier to just relax and go with the flow, just lean into the geas and let whatever happened, happen. But if she did that, she had a terrible suspicion, creeping in from behind the gauze, that she wouldn’t be able to change her mind afterward.

Yet, as she groped around thoughts of the big man and shied away from them as the thorns threatened her, she felt there were gaps in the hedge. The geas had too many components, too many moving parts where things didn’t quite meet up. She couldn’t even articulate the thought that she could exploit them, but the feeling was there, down deep where the thorns couldn’t see.

She had to act natural, but she also had to find out everything she could. Be friendly and inquisitive, but not to the point of arousing any suspicion. Any time she got a chance to call in and inform them about what was going on, she had to, but at the same time could never do so where the big man or anyone with him would notice. The conflicting mass of requirements hurt her head, she refused to let them come together or try to make them make sense.

It would have been easy, and she was so tired, but Lucy had been lorded over by the magical all her life. This wasn’t new, or at least, that’s what she forced her fuzzy brain into thinking, even if deep down she knew. She knew she was in trouble so deep that she could never dig her way out on her own.

She had to rely in the big man. Even in the privacy of her own mind she didn’t call him by name, and it galled her to have to just hope for external help. She’d worked hard to become self-reliant and self-sufficient, as nigh-impossible as that was for a dud serving in GAR. But that didn’t mean she was so stupid or proud as to not know how bad things were.

The ambient magic was so high it hummed against her skin, vibrating off her teeth and making the back of her neck itch. She didn’t know what it was, and the geas kept her thoughts from doing anything but idle uselessly for fear of being torn, but it was just another tiny torture to add to the rest of the mass of misery. She could recall how she’d felt after the first time they’d interviewed her, and how inconsequential that seemed in comparison. Lucy was sure that, one way or another, someone would pay for this.

“I don’t like this.” The sound of someone else’s voice made Lucy twitch and peer blearily up to see Gayle sitting on a chair on the other side of the cell, lips pressed together in distaste. The geas twisted around, assuring Lucy that Gayle could be trusted and that she should tell people Gayle could be trusted.

“I’m not a combat mage. I don’t even like using reversed healing!” Gayle continued to complain, though it seemed to not really be directed at Lucy. “I bet grandpa doesn’t even know,” she continued darkly. “Got half a mind to go out there and tell him.”

Yet, she didn’t.

***

Grand Magus Taisen laced his fingers together, frowning at the others in the room. He couldn’t deny that Wells was the BSE’s responsibility, but he misliked using the Deep Wilds outpost for it. It was never meant to be a containment facility. Like all the garrisons he’d built, it was designed as a training outpost and a staging area for eliminating some of the worst threats the portal worlds had to offer.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have the ability to overrule two Archmages and the Master of Weltentor. In theory he had the authority, but pragmatically they’d just ignore him at best and remove him at worst, and Taisen doubted anyone else understood the logistics that kept the portal worlds under control. There were factions that already decried the resources he needed, and ignored the fact that small problems became large problems.

Just like Wells, in fact.

“We all want our pound of flesh,” Hargrave said, his aura crackling slightly. “But there isn’t enough to go around.”

“He’s a spatial mage, so he’s mine,” Duvall said flatly. While her raw magical might didn’t match her fellow Archmage, her wealth and influence could absolutely bury House Hargrave if she wanted to.

“A spatial mage that nobody has been able to keep under control,” Taisen pointed out, keeping his voice mild. “How do you propose to do so?”

“Lock him down with vis drainers and set him to enchanting for the next decade or two,” Duvall replied, waving it away. “Even if he never amounts to anything else we know he can make enchantments. Speaking of which.” She glared at Jahn.

“We’re in the process of confiscating the teleportation pads,” he said mildly, showing remarkable aplomb for someone who ranked far below everyone else in the room both in terms of status and prowess. “They have been stalling a bit but I wouldn’t be surprised if I had them before anything happened here. Even if Chester is playing against GAR he’s not willing to completely defy us.”

“And what of the vampires?” The Master of Weltentor, Victor Dumas, spoke in a calm and controlled voice. Taisen doubted he actually cared too much about the deaths himself, but as the nominal head of mage-vampire relations he had a valid complaint. “If nothing else, we are owed a weregild for the deaths of so many at the hands of this group.”

“When we find out who else is working with him, and what their resources are, we’ll make sure to include you,” Jahn said.

“I’m not sure there is anyone else working with him,” Taisen said, speaking at last.

“Oh?” Jahn suddenly looked more interested. “We have at least Wells and Hall that we know of.”

“True,” Taisen conceded. “But I’ve looked at the reports of the various incidents. I don’t pretend to know how it was done, but it all has the feel of a single mind, a single approach.” He couldn’t put his finger on it exactly, but it was the sort of instinct he’d learned after dealing with thousands of engagements, both supernatural and mundane.

“If it’s just one mage, then our preparations ought to be more than enough,” Hargrave said. “He folded easily enough the first time. Two Archmages and however many mages and shifters are here already ought to be more than enough to take care of him.”

Taisen suppressed a sigh. That was exactly the sort of attitude that caused disaster. He couldn’t really blame Hargrave though; the man was an absolute monster and practically invulnerable. There were few people on Earth that could really threaten Hargrave, and not much in the Portal Worlds either. But Hargrave wasn’t the target.

“Archmage Duvall,” he said instead. “As you say, he is a spatial mage and in your jurisdiction. But I’m unclear what your role is in our defense. Is there a method whereby you can suppress his spatial abilities?”

“No more or less than any other magic,” Duvall said with a tremendous scowl. “Spatial magic is special because of what it does, not how it acts. Any of you should be able to shatter his shell if you get close enough. From what the younger Hargrave said he is a far cry from being an Archmage.”

“Grand Magus Taisen,” Jahn said. “Ultimately, the actual combat is in your hands. We are trying to capture Wells, or whomever he brings with him, but I understand how difficult that can be.”

“He’s one of my spatial mages,” Duvall growled.

“Archmage, so far he has proven extremely difficult to deal with, and demonstrated abilities that don’t comport to spatial magic—”

“That…” Duvall sputtered. “That heretic is abusing some very dangerous and unusual corners of spatial magic. Nothing that could stand up to any real spellforms.”

“Heretic or not, he has done immense damage to GAR and to BSE.” Jahn said firmly. “Whether captured or killed, if— when he comes here, he will not leave.” The response to that was nods all around.

“Agreed.”

Chapter 21 – Rescue

Callum paced back and forth beside the campsite he’d set up near the Pacaya volcano in Guatemala, counting down the hours as his cane dug into the lose, rocky ground. He’d gotten a little sleep, somewhat further away from the actual lava flow than his staging point, but only a little bit. The anxiety was just too much for him to relax.

He ran over his supplies in the cave cache once again. Guns, his spatial grenade materials, and a number of boulders. None of which he wanted to use, but he had to be prepared. Food and drink and a medical kit, because there was no telling what shape either of them were going to be in afterward. He had his van parked near a hospital in Mexico, with the telepad relocated from his house to the cave.

There’d been no traces of supernatural activity at the trailer. That was good, since it was that as a bolthole or a random hotel, and Callum didn’t much trust hotels. The less he showed his face, the better.

Once he finished yet another inventory, he stopped to review the map he’d gotten of the BSE base. The problem was that Chester couldn’t guarantee where the portal anchor would be placed, or that Lucy was actually in one of the cells. He wanted to move as quickly as possible once he activated the portal, so he’d need to get himself oriented and figure out which building was which from his sensory sphere.

Undoubtedly they were waiting for him, but unless they had every square inch of the facility locked down and under surveillance, he was pretty sure that the activation wouldn’t be obvious. His major worry was that the portal anchor itself would be blocked, because even if Chester’s shifters got caught smuggling it in, having the anchor dumped in some lockbox wasn’t an issue. Even if it was somewhere offsite, he could just teleport the anchor back through the portal and do things the hard way.

Even though assaulting the BSE facility was in many ways incredibly stupid, he wasn’t going to just rush in, guns blazing. He had some idea of the capabilities normal mages possessed, and more importantly, what they didn’t possess. They couldn’t see through walls the way he could, and they couldn’t cast through walls the way he could. In a weird sort of way, their facility was more of an advantage for him than it was for them.

All that said, he couldn’t stand up to combat mages. At all. Which was why his plan was to simply not be exposed to combat mages, though of course no plan survived first contact with the enemy.

Callum gnawed on a stick of beef jerky and opened a portal through the connection in his implant to the area above his cave-cache. He could just see the bones of his bunker through the trees, but more importantly, his cell phone could get signal so long as it was high enough. He’d solved that problem by balancing it, along with a solar charger, in the canopy of a tree.

As with every time he’d checked it so far, there were no messages, so he snapped the portal shut and went back to pacing. He had too much nervous energy, though his knee was complaining about the uneven ground, cane or no cane. It was well past dawn in whatever time zone Guatemala counted for, but he had no idea what time it was in the Deep Wilds. For all he knew it was an eternal time like the Dragonlands and Night Lands, but there had to be some sort of standardized shifts. Probably. Hopefully.

Once again he snapped open a small portal to his cell phone, even though it’d been less than five minutes, but this time when he peered through the opening he saw it had a text notification. He reached through the portal and grabbed it, the few moments the old phone took to open up the text display seeming to take forever. It was from Chester.

Package should be delivered.

Callum didn’t like the qualifier, but it couldn’t be helped. He imagined that there was no actual communication between the facility and the outside, so the best Chester could do was verify that the person with the portal anchor had gone there. Possibly with some time buffer to account for getting it past security. Considering it was small and inactive, it was probably not too difficult for a shifter to keep it hidden. Or even for it to pass through in plain sight; he’d seen that shifters did have foci for one reason or another on occasion.

He set a timer for five minutes, just to give it a little more padding, and went and took care of his ablutions before the final checks. Callum doublechecked the body armor, even though it shouldn’t matter at all, finishing off the jerky and taking a few swallows of water. His hands felt sweaty, and the worm of fear gnawed at his gut, but he took a deep breath and watched the timer tick downward.

When the alarm rang, he silenced it instantly and teleported himself closer to the lava flow, where a portal anchor sat in the dewar. The vacuum bottle was, in hindsight, probably not even necessary, but it was still a hundred yards closer to the flow than he felt comfortable going himself. Mesmerizing as a lava river was, it was still twelve hundred degree rock.

Callum reached out and energized the portal anchor. It sprang up right away, and mana started flowing through. It was in a portal world. His perceptions flowed through, and he concentrated on feeling out exactly what was on the other side.

Given the separation between him and the anchor, he had approximately five hundred yards of range through the portal anchor, maybe a little more. The total distance of his perceptions had probably grown a touch, but he’d not done any specific tests for a while. That was still a large enough sphere to encompass a building, if not quite big enough for the entire campus that was supposed to be on the other side.

Chester’s agent had deposited the portal anchor in a utility closet, among a jumble of cleaning supplies. At least that’s what he assumed all the bottles of liquid were, among mops and brooms. The building itself seemed to be something like a barracks, with a number of rooms with bunk beds arranged around a central hall. Outside of the barracks, there was a thick, magically reinforced wall in one direction and what seemed like warehouses in the other.

There were three mages and six shifters within his sphere of perception; two of the mages and three of the shifters were in bunk beds, scattered throughout the barracks, the others were on the wall, where it turned into a dome overhead. He waited with bated breath to see if they noticed the portal focus, but none of them so much as twitched. Though it wasn’t like the portal itself was a particularly large or intense bit of magic, by anyone’s standards, so it wasn’t too unreasonable that they didn’t notice.

Callum looked at the map, figuring out where the anchor had ended up. The buildings weren’t even warded to speak of, just having some minor enchantments around the windows and doors. They didn’t look like the screens of wards, anyway, and the way the mana flowed through the structure was different, but he intended to avoid them anyway.

From the reference he had, the anchor had wound up on the north side of the compound. There was no gate leading in or out; they probably used magic for that. The warehouses and barracks were more or less as he had suspected; mostly empty at the moment, but he put that down to it being the off-season at the moment. Or maybe just during local day.

He wrapped his threads around the portal anchor, extending his vis out to the warehouse through the mana-saturated ground, and pushed. It wasn’t much of a jump, but with his range he really didn’t need too much to cover most of the rest of the facility. The perspective bubble on the end of the anchor shifted, and the portal bobbled. If he were cleaner with his threads, or used tubes instead, he could move without the portal destabilizing, but he was in a hurry so he had fix it by shoving more vis into it instead. It didn’t take much, but it was a concerning tradeoff when he knew he was relatively vis-limited.

The new location meant new buildings came into range. They were more central; the administration, the communal hall, the processing center. They were far more warded, and it took time for him to get through into the interiors. He cared little for what was stored in the warehouses, mostly normal supplies from what he could see, but even if there was any magic stuff there he couldn’t afford to raid it. Betraying his presence before it was absolutely necessary was a terrible idea.

That particular consideration was immediately tested when he brushed his perceptions through the administration area and found a case with a number of lumps that were very mana-dense. They seemed quite similar to mordite, so he could only guess they were silverite, harvested however and stored somewhere secure. It was annoying that he only ever ran across interesting things when he had more important issues at stake, because he didn’t dare touch the silverite no matter how much he wanted to.

In addition to the extra warding, there were a bunch of mages around and a number of them were using active vis senses. They were little feathery pulses drumming through the air or the ground, which Callum regarded with a lot more trepidation than the wards. Enchantment spellforms were limited, but he had no idea about direct magic scrutiny. Evading a security system was one thing; evading the naked eye was another.

Unlike the naked eye, he could actually see the use of the vis senses and where they were aimed. Some of them were just everywhere, others were focused, sweeping here and there, so there wasn’t really much space for him to run a thread that wouldn’t be observed. That said, he only needed a single, small thread to move the anchor from one place to another, and the anchor itself was a small thing.

The various sorts of warding seemed to block the active senses fairly well, and there were all kinds of enchantments active in the buildings he could sense. Were he to try something large and flashy, especially out in the open, it’d be noticed immediately, but he might well be able to hide most of his activity behind the existing enchantments.

There were lots of mights and maybes, but he couldn’t take forever to make a move. Just because nobody had noticed his portal yet didn’t mean they wouldn’t ever. The outflow of mana alone might alert someone if the portal stayed open long enough, and if a searcher got closer to where his anchor was hidden they might well find it.

His target, the cell block, was a little bit further along. If he could teleport the anchor to the full extent of his perceptions like he preferred, he’d already have it within range, but he was limited to sneaking about and hiding the anchor in storage drawers or other places that weren’t immediately visible. Even though he could loft the anchor with his gravitykinesis, he had to assume the moment any mage or even shifter laid eyes on it they’d sound the alarm.

Callum waited, counting the beat from the regular pulses of the ground-based active vis, and as soon as he had it down he shoved a vis thread out between one pulse and the next, running it to the plumbing gap behind a sink in the communal hall. The followup teleport was barely in time, and he paused, heart pounding even though all he’d done was a little bit of magic. The seconds stretched onward, but it didn’t seem like he’d been noticed.

He turned his attention to the actual cell block, because it was a painfully bright blaze in his perceptions. There wasn’t just warding — or rather, he wasn’t sure there was any warding at all. Instead there seemed to be some kind of mana overload, something that churned the ambient energy into a chaotic maelstrom. It reminded him a bit of what he’d seen in Las Vegas, but with a lot more power.

It was pretty clearly a defense aimed specifically at him. At this point his ability to bypass wards was no secret, and they probably even had some idea of exactly how he was managing it. Whatever was going on with the mana wouldn’t be any defense against a shifter or a vampire, but if he tried sending a vis thread in there it’d just get shredded.

The sheer amount of mana noise made it difficult for him to tell the details about things deeper in, but he could at least figure out where the walls and people were. Mages were, of course, obvious by their bubbles, which meant the one figure without the bubble was Lucy. Obviously he had to remove the jamming source, but he had to do so without risking Lucy. If they had been really smart, they’d have put it in the same room as her, as close as possible so he couldn’t smash it from range.

That was all assuming he was right in his conclusions. He wouldn’t put it past them to make the entire cell a complete honeypot and hold Lucy somewhere else. It wasn’t like Callum even knew what Lucy looked like, so a ringer was not out of the question. On the other hand, using that kind of bait was a risk in and of itself, and he was fairly sure they didn’t care too much about Lucy as such. They would have already wrung out whatever intelligence she had, considering their resources.

Still, the information that she was being held in this particular facility had come from Chester, not through some official source that would be very obviously trying to lure him into an ambush. If she wasn’t the one in the cell, there weren’t very many places in the facility where they could be hiding her. In fact, he’d already passed over most of them and hadn’t run across anyone else human without a bubble.

The presence of vampires and fae implied there were some of those feeder portals Callum had cribbed his designs for somewhere about, and he considered tracking them down first. He was sure that if he broke them, that’d send some of the personnel into a bit of a flurry, maybe even force some evacuations.

Despite the urgency he felt in the back of his head, he needed to be methodical. There was a mage in the room with maybe-Lucy, so whenever he made his move, he had to be quick. He could only imagine the mage was there to take her hostage if he managed to break in. Or maybe the moment things kicked off.

He took a moment to scrutinize everyone he could reach within his perceptive sphere. For the most part mage bubbles looked all the same to him, but a few people stood out. In near the jammer there was one mage that had a bubble that wasn’t just opaque, but almost reflective in how solid it was. A second mage of similar quality was in the admin building, along with a third whose bubble seemed like hammered iron. It wasn’t like he could sense through any of the bubbles to begin with, but most didn’t seem as substantial as those three.

Callum was absolutely glad he wasn’t actually there. Those bubbles were intimidating even if, so far as he could tell, they had no idea he was there. Aside from the normal movements of people, mostly shifters walking from one place to another, there didn’t seem to be any real activity. Carefully, he made a mental note of where everything of even marginal sensitivity was placed. The teleport pads, ward boxes – there were only two of those, for admin and in-processing – the jammer, and the feeder portals. He found three different clusters of the last, so there might be more somewhere out of range, meaning that cutting them off entirely would be difficult.

The jammer would require a little bit more work than the rest, since he had to go through multiple walls – or a ceiling – and it was right near the cell. But everything else he could reach, and while it might not be all the infrastructure in the facility, it was a lot of it. What he wanted to do was smash the jammer, grab Lucy, and run, but there was no way to guarantee that would work and the cost of failure was too high. Better to spend a second and a bit sowing chaos and preventing reinforcements or communication, because once the element of surprise was lost he wouldn’t have much time or space to react. He ran through the actions he was planning over the next few seconds in his head several times to prepare, and make sure he covered all the contingencies.

With a limit of sixteen or so constructs, he felt comfortable targeting four things at a time. Two sets of portals and a high-powered directed gravity field. He picked his priorities, waited for a lull in the active sensory sweeps, and then spun up everything at once.

Basketball-sized portals opened up in the maintenance space for the teleporters, by the ward boxes, and one of the feeder portals. A gravity shear accelerated streams of scorching lava through the portals at something like one hundred fifty miles per hour, more or less obliterating the targets and making an absolute mess of everything around them. Despite not aiming at any people, he still saw some debris bounce off the shields of the mages monitoring the ward boxes, as the splash was somewhat more impressive than he’d expected.

Immediately he snapped the portals to his next set of targets, the remaining feeder portals and one of the warehouses since he had attention to spare. It took a moment of juggling to keep the lava from breaking his portals, but less than a second later another several hundred pounds of liquid rock smashed into and through walls and enchantments.

Mages started to move, and Callum focused on the jammer.

***

Taisen had mastered the art of waiting long ago, but neither of the Archmages showed much patience. Duvall, especially, clearly wanted to be elsewhere, though Taisen could hardly blame her. He knew a thing or two about having far too much work and far too little time to do it in. Hargrave showed a more ordinary impatience, frowning at whatever reports he’d brought with him.

It wouldn’t last forever. Even as important as Wells was, tying down two Archmages in addition to himself was an enormous expense. If the man didn’t make a move soon, or at all, all the preparations would be for nothing. From the way he read Wells’ history, though, a credible threat to the Harper girl would be good enough to force his hand.

Taisen pulsed his light-aspect vis outward, sorting through the flash-impression it gave him of every nook and cranny and searching for anyone who might be out of place or acting oddly. The current crop of BSE trainees was off in the Night Lands, since he didn’t want a bunch of novices in a firefight with a rogue mage, so there weren’t all that many people around.

Despite his experience and the steady sweep of his senses, he wasn’t ready for the sudden explosion of violence. From absolutely nowhere magic flared up and a confusion of destruction followed. Taisen began moving before he even consciously realized it, his hindbrain cataloguing the targets. Communication, coordination, reinforcements. Valuable infrastructure. They shouldn’t need backup, not with a pair of Archmages and a Grand Magus, not to mention a full gamut of BSE agents, but backup was no longer an option.

Force and light shields went up around his sphere, giving him protection and rendering him invisible, the pure corite foci worked into his uniform creating perfectly crisp and clean spell forms as he energized them. Some people swore by banic alloy, but he always found the stuff from the fae lands worked best for him. The bracers around his forearms spun up the beginnings of his preferred offensive spellwork, disks of ravening light and crushing gravitic spheres just waiting to manifest.

“Teams one and two, suppress the lava.” Taisen had no idea where Wells had gotten ahold of an earth-fire aspected mage, but neither type by themselves could deal with something like a half-ton of molten rock, which was already starting to catch things on fire. “Three, surround the cells.”

Hargrave burst out of the building just behind him, the door splintering as it couldn’t open fast enough, joining Taisen in the air as they swept for Wells. There was nobody immediately obvious who could be opening the portals, nobody clearly out of place, as he spun in the air gauging distances and angles. The realization came just as another portal opened near the cells, and Taisen flicked out a gravity sphere to intercept it.

Wells didn’t need line of sight.

He caught a glimpse of a magical construct through the new portal, accelerating lava as if it were gravity but clearly not gravity. He knew what gravity did and didn’t do, and something that looked like that wouldn’t result in such extreme acceleration. Then his own gravity ball smashed into the portal, disrupting it and rolling up the lava that had been coming through. The glowing ball of rock that resulted would have been a fantastic projectile to send after Wells, if only they could locate him.

“Duvall!” He snapped over the scry-com. “Where are these portals coming from?” She hadn’t joined them outside, but Duvall was not a combat mage. Spatial mages never were; the spatial aspect had nothing useful in terms of shield-forms, and relying on mana-fed foci for a shield was hopeless. Even Duvall’s Archmage-level shield did nothing more than displace her away from attacks.

She was more interested in capturing Wells anyway, so she was stationed near the jammer, in hopes of either catching Wells or at worst spiriting the younger Hargrave out of danger. Taisen and Hargrave were on the same page, though. Wells had to be eliminated.

Archmage Duvall didn’t answer immediately, as Hargrave just bulled forward toward the cells. Not that Taisen disagreed; that was Wells’ ultimate goal, and any other destruction was just distraction. It was just that he couldn’t tell where Wells actually was, the portals seeming to open from practically nothing. He focused his senses down, trying to catch anyone who might be disguised or sheltering under some fae artifact.

“They’re coming from Earth,” Duvall’s reply came just as another portal snapped open, this one just in front of the walls of the cell block. A car sized boulder smashed through the wall and carved a path of destruction before a quick-reacting earth mage turned it to sand with a flare of mana. Unfortunately, a ten ton boulder just turned into ten tons of sand, rather than vanishing like an earth-magic construct, and the resultant destruction might actually have been worse than if it had remained a boulder. “He might not even be here!”

“Then how—?” Taisen cut himself off as he caught a bare flash of vis connecting the portal to somewhere else. It vanished when Hargave collapsed the portal with a bar of pure force, but there was enough to get a lead. He let Hargrave deal with the cell block while he concealed himself and floated into the communal hall, hunting for traces of the man.

Taisen’s estimation had been that Wells, no matter what tricks he used, wouldn’t be able to stand up to a real mage for more than a few seconds. Wells clearly agreed with that sentiment, if Duvall was right and the man wasn’t even physically present. The problem was, Wells’ tricks were really good.

***

The mages were a lot better than Callum had even figured. They hadn’t been able to stop the damage of the initial chunks of lava, but they’d reacted basically instantly and didn’t seem at all confused or surprised. The first pair of portals he’d made to try and smash the jammer had been absolutely rebuffed; one by the elite mage inside the cell block and another by a different elite that was hovering in the air.

Every moment that slipped by tilted the advantage away from him, so he gave up trying to finesse it and just sent a boulder at the wall. Not aimed directly at Lucy’s cell, or even at the jammer, but to open up a hole for subsequent salvos. It worked, but it was a shock to see how easily an earth mage had dealt with it, and how easily the mage bubbles of the people in the way had shrugged off the attack.

Those shields made him feel a bit better about throwing a lot of lava through his next portal. He aimed the spray of molten rock directly at the jammer source, but it still spewed everywhere once it left the acceleration field, splashing over everything and everyone along its path. To his utter shock the opaque-reflective mage actually blinked aside, or rather, outside, in a ripple of somewhat-familiar magic that made him believe it was a spatial mage.

The shock made him pause for a moment, part of him wishing that he could see what had happened more closely. The way the mage’s teleport had worked was so unlike what he did that he knew he could learn from it. But he didn’t have time.

Since he couldn’t hide his vis threads like he had before, another of the elite mages homed directly in on the hall where his anchor was hidden, waves of vis washing through the building. There really wasn’t much time. Thankfully the lava he’d hurled through the gap in the cell block walls, covering practically every surface in molten rock, did its job. The jamming field dropped, heat or impact finally damaging some part of the enchantment, and he could finally properly sense into the cell.

The mage bubble overlapped where Lucy had been, but he didn’t have time to try and figure out how to disentangle the two. The one mage with the impossibly strong bubble was sweeping in toward the cell, straight through the walls in the way. Before he could second-guess himself, Callum opened as big a portal as he could make and swept it over the mage bubble, cot and all, as fast as he could so the portal wouldn’t get disrupted by shields, dumping everything sideways into the containment room he’d made.

He'd actually taken apart his infinite-energy portal pair for this particular purpose, and put one end in yet another cave, somewhere in northern Texas. There was no way that Lucy didn’t have some sort of tracking on her, magical or technological, whether it was an implant or something woven into her clothing or what. While he would have liked to make the rescue in comfort, there was no way that was in the cards.

The mage bubble and its contents had to wait for a moment, because Callum wasn’t done quite yet. His last bit of magic had been enough to betray the location of the portal anchor, since the mage that had been hunting it down started flicking out little lances of vis that tore apart the wall the anchor was behind. Callum wrapped his threads around the anchor and teleported it back to his hand.

His perception of the BSE base vanished, the portal destabilizing and collapsing. He hadn’t been seeing with his eyes or hearing with his ears, but it seemed like a sudden silence regardless, just the empty volcanic landscape and the small cave with a mage and, hopefully, Lucy. Callum turned the portal anchor over in his hand and put it in his pocket. Job done.

***

“What the hell was that?” Archmage Hargrave was furious. Not quietly furious, either, his voice a stentorian bellow as he vented his spleen at Archmage Duvall. “Why did you let that maniac kidnap my granddaughter?”

“I could ask you the same thing!” Duvall snapped back. “You know I’m not a combat mage. You were supposed to keep anyone from even getting close enough to matter!”

Nobody wanted to get near a spat between two Archmages, even if neither of them were being so gauche as to move beyond words. Hargrave’s solid force armor rendered him a faceless automaton, but he wasn’t even flexing his outer shields. Possibly he was too mad to.

“We knew he was slippery! You should have gotten Gayle out of there the moment things started happening!”

“What, in the five seconds before someone battered the wall down with sand?”

“Five seconds is a hell of a long time—” Hargrave began, then cut himself off as Taisen floated down toward the pair. “So how’d he get in?” He demanded of the head of Bureau of Secret Enforcement, whose facility it was supposed to be.

“I don’t think he did.” Taisen was less upset than either of them, and more thoughtful. “Like Archmage Duvall said, I don’t think he was ever here. I’m not sure how he was sending portals over here, that’s not my business.” He looked pointedly at Duvall.

“I can think of a few possibilities,” she said grudgingly. “None of them seem likely, but he did do it.”

“Regardless, there were two things that struck me during the attack — no, three. One, he didn’t need line of sight.” Taisen held up a finger, looking from Archmage to Archmage. Neither of them responded. “Two, he was using some construct that acted like gravity, but wasn’t. If it were gravity it would have resulted in things being drawn in and crushed, not launched like it was.”

“Heretic,” Duvall muttered. “I don’t know where he’s learned but he’s twisting space magic all out of bounds.” Taisen ignored that. He’d had any preconceptions about proper or improper magic use beaten out of him by long experience with hostile creatures and mages alike. What worked, worked, and what didn’t, didn’t. The Houses were slightly touchier about things, which was one reason why the BSE was of no House.

“Three,” he said. “There was some tiny bit of something that he was doing behind one of the sinks in the canteen. I couldn’t find anything, but maybe one of you can.”

“I’ll go,” Duvall said immediately. Hargrave just growled silently and loomed behind as Taisen went to show Duvall to the spot. Along the way, mages were already cleaning up. Most of the damage was easily taken care of by earth and fire mages, to quench the lava and shift the stone, to repair walls and doors. The damage that would take real repairing were all the enchantments. There was also the quickly vanishing touch of the other portal worlds. It’d take hours, but they would need to evacuate the vampires and fae before it ran out entirely.

Unless Duvall could conjure up a new connection, but that seemed unlikely. Wells seemed to be able to open a portal wherever he wished, but Duvall wasn’t as flexible. It took an actual portal anchor, preferably one made with pure portal world material, to bridge something like that.

Danforth and Black were guarding the site. Taisen felt a little sorry for them; they’d been stationed at intake and aside from getting slightly lava-scorched when the teleportation pads got destroyed, they hadn’t gotten near their quarry. Duvall ignored them and homed in on the location, seeming to go by smell. Taisen certainly couldn’t sense any residual magic.

“There was a portal anchor here,” Duvall announced, frowning at the spot. “Very small.” She did something he could barely follow, her speed and precision better than his, despite her lack of combat experience. “Damnation,” she said. “His terrible thin threads just snap. I can’t re-open it.” Taisen carefully concealed his reaction. He didn’t know Duvall could open portals just from their residue, though now that he did, certain past incidents he was not supposed to be privy to made more sense. It also meant Wells wasn’t impossibly conjuring portals from nowhere, which at least brought the man’s abilities back to reasonable ground.

“Then I suggest you find another way to get my granddaughter back,” Hargrave said, voice hard as diamond. Duvall replied, but Taisen wasn’t really listening. He was thinking about how damn pathetic their defenses really were.

If Wells could run roughshod over the barriers and wards of Garrison Two, there was no reason to think that it was actually effective. Someone else, or something else, from the portal worlds might have some of the same talents. Who knew what things had passed through the portals that they hadn’t even noticed?

Wells was a threat to GAR, but Taisen really didn’t care about that. He didn’t even care about how much Wells had wrecked Garrison Two, since that could just be repaired. Taisen was more worried about what his abilities meant for the safety of the world. Wells was many things, but he wasn’t some otherworldly horror lurking in the dark.

As far as Taisen was concerned, all Wells had done was demonstrate that GAR did not have as good a handle on things as they said. He’d been defending the Earth from the portal worlds for years before GAR came in and merged him with the BSE. That was something he’d had to accept at the time, but things were different now.

Let GAR handle Wells. He needed to return Defensores Mundi to its roots.

END BOOK TWO