“So.” She settled further into her seat. “Tell me, how much of your beleaguered detective act is real, and how much is a defense mechanism?”
“Defense mechanisms would require a plan. I’m more of a figure it out over a beer and a sandwich kind of guy,” I said. “I just move forward, doing the best I can.”
“Oh, sure.” She tapped the nails of one hand against the window, a rat-tat-tat that kept time to the rumble of the snow-runner’s treads. “You’re practically an open book.”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“Too bad about the typos.”
“Cute.” I tried changing the subject. “What do you think about the victim?”
“I think he’s dead.” She still watched the featureless ice plains roll by, only occasionally broken by the dark gray of a rock outcropping thrust up from the freeze, or the even more infrequent shape of a waypoint shed. “I think he was murdered, and someone prevented Harris from figuring out who did it. What I’m trying to decide,” she turned to me, “is whether someone did that on purpose, or accidentally.”
“You think someone influenced the manna connection between Harris and the victim’s body?” I asked.
“Could be,” she said. “Or it could’ve been someone closer. Someone who didn’t mean to have that effect.”
It wasn’t exactly a subtle accusation. Okay, I thought, here goes.
“You know when I came to you, telling you that I could affect manna?”
“Yeah.” She looked at me from the corner of her eye, still tugging on her coat zipper. “You claimed you could boost the magic that ties my baton to my brooch pin. It didn’t seem to work.”
“No,” I agreed. “It didn’t.” Because that link had been made with official department-issued manna, stolen from the belly of an unfortunate whale a century or more ago. I’d learned the hard way that my connection was only with “next gen” manna pumped from below ground, the first manna source found since whales had been hunted to extinction. A discovery that had turned my life upside down.
“Because I thought what you claimed is impossible. But then I saw you on television, fighting beside Ambassador Paulus.”
“Not beside her,” I said. “We had a common enemy. That’s all.”
“She’s a powerful sorcerer.”
I didn’t respond. I’d seen evidence of Paulus’s strength firsthand, so close that it had almost cost me my life. If Gellica, Paulus’s lieutenant, hadn’t intervened, it likely would have been the end of my story. I owed Gellica my life.
Guyer was still talking. “But even a sorcerer that powerful has limits. And what she did, turning a man into clay? That’s impossible, too. Unless her magic was boosted somehow.”
“And?”
“And how do you think that happened?” She stared at me as I drove.
I swallowed, ignoring the bitter taste in my mouth. But there was no avoiding this. If Jax had figured out that I was keeping my connection to next gen manna a secret, then there’d be no keeping it from a smart and determined DO like Guyer.
“That was me,” I said. “Not all of it, but . . . yeah. That was me.”
“I need to know more than that.”
“Okay.”
“I need to know what you can do, why you can do it—”
“Okay.”
“I need dates and times and something I can wrap my head around—”
“Okay! Imp’s blade, I get it. I’ll tell you all about it. I don’t have all the answers you want, but I’ll give you what I have.” I puffed out my cheeks and exhaled. “You’d think the least you could do would be to wait until you could buy me a meal while we talk.”
“I owe you a beer and a sandwich. Duly noted. Now keep talking.”
The tent-draped shape of Shelter in the Bend was approaching fast.
“Whatever it is, it happened at the manna strike,” I said. “With Vandie’s uncle.”
“Harlan Cedrow.”
“Yeah.” I clenched my left fist, missing the feel of my pinkie and ring fingers. “Since then I can feel the threads between enchanted items. I can pull on those connections, drawing energy out and dumping it into others. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t know.”
She blinked, swallowed, then blinked again. She shook her head slightly, and seemed to struggle for words. “That’s . . .”
“Impossible, I know. You told me the same thing a few weeks ago, before you sent me home like a kid making up stories in class.”
“I was going to say hard to wrap my head around. The idea of sensing the actual connections between manna-bound objects is . . .” She shook her head.
“Whatever. When I first came to you I didn’t understand that I only had a connection to next gen manna. Traditionally sourced manna I’ve got no ability to affect.”
“That’s why you couldn’t affect my baton.” She looked thoughtful. “But say I’d recharged that link with a bit of next gen manna. Could you reach over right now and alter it?”
I glanced at her. “Not while I’m driving.”
“Why? Is it difficult?”
“Dangerous. Consuming. And,” I hesitated, “it isn’t something I understand. So I don’t like the idea of being, I don’t know, frivolous with it.”
“Okay,” she said, and something in her voice made me believe it. “But later, we’ll have to do it.”
When I didn’t respond, she pointed at the waypoint shed, a wood and concrete shack with a steeply angled roof and chimney, barely big enough for two people. “Have you ever spent time in one of those things?” They were scattered along the ice roads, oases of shelter for any travelers unlucky enough to have a broken-down vehicle.
“Yes. Overnight.”
She frowned, as though my tone had been dour enough to short-circuit any follow-up questions.
“I’ll tell you the story sometime,” I said, “in exchange for a beer and a sandwich.”
Guyer’s lips quivered as she held in a chuckle. We weren’t back to where we needed to be, but we’d at least called a ceasefire.
A temporary peace was okay. I’d take that as a win.
Arriving back at the concert site, we parked in a side lot
