Magic on the Storm

roses in the rain. It looked harmless.

Is it going to hurt me if I pick it up? I asked.

Not that I know of. And if he hadn’t been suddenly so curious to see what happened when I touched it, I would have just gone right ahead and done that. Instead, I decided to clue Stotts in on all this.

“I think this is a disk. A prototype of some sort. It’s holding magic.”

Stotts strode over to me, his loafers hushed against the deep, soft carpet.

“The crystal?” he asked.

I pointed. “That crystal.”

“Do you want me to pick it up?”

“No, I just thought I’d tell you what I was doing in case I ended up on the floor or something.”

“Maybe I should pick it up.”

“Let me. I’m the Hound.”

I reached over, careful not to touch the other crystals, and put one fingertip on the disk.

My dad, in my head, chuckled.

Shut up, I thought at him.

Of all the times in your life, it is now that you develop a sense of caution? he asked.

Okay, peanut-gallery dead guy wasn’t working for me either.

No buzz, no shock, nothing beneath my fingertip but the slightly oily feel of the magic-infused crystal. I didn’t absorb it like a sponge-yes, that thought had gone through my mind, since I usually carry magic-and it didn’t explode or anything.

So far, so good.

I picked it up.

If the crystal had been beautiful from a distance, it was absolutely mesmerizing in the palm of my hand. Soft, pink, it didn’t seem to sparkle so much as glow against my skin. The glyphs carved or maybe grown into it seemed to shift, slowly, slowly, as they made a snail’space path through the crystal.

Are the glyphs moving? I asked Dad.

Growing, he said. Slowly.

Not so slowly that I couldn’t see it.

Stotts leaned in for a better look. He whistled. “That’s amazing.”

“It is.”

“Does it have magic in it?”

Oh, right. I was here to do a job, not to look at the pretty baubles.

I licked my lips and concentrated on the disk. Yes, it very much did hold magic in it. But it held it in a natural sort of way. The magic didn’t feel like it filled every speck of crystal, but there was plenty enough in there for one spell.

It reminded me of the void stones, reminded me of the cuffs we wore to feel one another during a hunt. It felt natural enough, I had a hard time believing it had been made in a laboratory.

It wasn’t, Dad said. We simply enhanced it in the lab. He was proud of that.

Where did you find it?

He hesitated and I could feel his unease. In St. Johns. A long time ago.

Strange. St. Johns had no naturally occurring magic. A magical stone out there didn’t make any sense. Unless someone had taken it there, left it there.

Is there more of that I should know? I asked.

No.

That was quick. He was lying. I could taste the bitter wash of it across my thoughts.

Just tell me if it’s going to blow up on me, okay? I thought.

“Allie?” Stotts asked.

How long had I been standing there staring at the rock and talking to my dad? “Sorry,” I said to buy myself some time to think of what he had last said to me.

He wants to know if it has magic in it, my dad offered with droll patience.

Okay, it was beyond strange to have my dad helping me out at all. He’d never been this helpful in all the years I had known him. It made me suspicious. The man never did something without getting something out of it for himself.

Hound the spell, he said, not angry, just calm and quiet, the way he always sounded right before he got killing mad. Find out who hurt Violet.

Ah. Revenge. Now, that I could understand.

“Yes,” I said before my silence got out of hand again. “It has magic in it. I think enough for a spell. Maybe just one. I’d like to Hound the safety-deposit boxes. Does that sound good?”

Stotts let out a breath he’d been holding. I had to give it to him. He put up with a lot of crazy to get information out of Hounds, and I wasn’t doing much for Hound reputation right now.

“I think so.” He motioned for me to leave the room in front of him, which I did, holding the crystal away from my body like it was going to turn and bite me at any minute.

Which it might.

Stotts shut the door and then we were both in the other room again, in the lab. A couple people from the police department, I assumed, were there, taking pictures. Stotts asked them all to leave so he and I could look at the room alone for a few minutes.

They left and I walked around the room, deciding what my best view would be if the magic gave out quickly.

“Were Violet and Kevin in this room when they were attacked?” I asked.

“I didn’t tell you they were attacked.”

“They were taken out on stretchers. What was I supposed to think?”

“It could have been an accident in the lab.”

Huh. He was right. It could have been. But one look at the empty drawers told me it was not.

Stotts knew that too.

“Well, that looks like a robbery to me,” I said, pointing at the wall of boxes.

“Anything you want me to do?” he asked.

Since there was no magic, Stotts couldn’t even cast Sight to watch what I was doing.

“Nope, I’ll do this old-style. I’ll repeat everything I see. If you want to take notes, that might be good.”

He pulled something out of his pocket. A tape recorder. He held it up, then thumbed the button down.

Good idea.

I calmed my mind, sang my jingle, set a headache Disbursement, then traced a glyph for Sight and Smell. “Sight and Smell. I don’t know how much magic I’ll have at my disposal, so I don’t know how strong the spells will be.”

Then I very carefully closed my hand around the crystal and urged the magic out of it and into the glyphs that hovered, invisible, in the air in front of me.

Magic didn’t so much flow as uncoil out of the stone and then stretch out into the spell. A tendril of magic stayed hooked in the stone, like a root set deep.

I shook the crystal a little. The tendril, the root, did not let loose. Okay. Strange. But then, I’d never used magic by pulling it out of something like this. Maybe it was supposed to stay attached.

My dad didn’t have anything to say about it, and I didn’t have any time to waste.

“Using Sight and Smell,” I said again. “There was at least one caster here. A man, I think. Give me a minute.” I took a couple steps toward the wall of boxes. “There’s a spell here, maybe more than one. But they’re really tight. Tangled. Like they collided or were crushed. Hold on.”

I leaned in closer to one of the spells that clung like a spit hair ball the size of my head, near the middle of the boxes. “Okay, there’s a big spell here. Not Illusion. Something with force. Impact? Oh.” It came to me in a rush. “Unlock. Nice. It’s masterfully cast,” I continued. “Even wadded up and kind of tangled, I can tell someone knew