exactly how to throw this spell.”
“Blood magic?” Stotts asked.
“I’ll check.” I took a deep breath, through my mouth and nose to get the taste and scent of the spell at once. And it was not the sweet smell of cherries that I caught. It was the heavy mineral stink of old vitamins.
I knew that smell.
When? Where?
“No Blood magic,” I said to give myself time to think. “But I have smelled the scent of this spell before. Have smelled it on someone.”
My father brushed the back of my mind. Gently. Like he was thumbing through paper again. It was odd and made my teeth itch.
And then the memory came forward. A memory of my old apartment torn apart, my furniture and belongings broken, trashed. This was the same scent that was left behind. Whoever had broken into my apartment had also broken in here.
“The spell’s hard to parse. The casting is really tight. I don’t even know how someone could cast magic with the network down,” I muttered.
“The disks?” Stotts suggested.
“Maybe.” I walked to one side to get a different view on the scene. And that was when I could tell. I knew who cast the glyph because I had seen him recently.
Sedra’s bodyguard, Dane Lannister.
Which meant the Authority had broken in here.
Which meant the Authority had broken into my house.
There was another, more frightening, sickening memory attached to that smell, but I could not pull it to the front of my mind.
He did not respond. If he knew where that memory was, he didn’t seem willing to kick it forward.
“Uh, I still think it’s a man’s signature,” I said.
“Who?” asked Stotts, the magical police detective who did not know about the Authority, who should not know about the Authority, and whom I should not tell the Authority even existed, much less that its members broke in and stole the disks.
And even that didn’t make sense. My father had been a part of the Authority. Kevin currently was a part of the Authority. Violet had a passing knowledge of the Authority.
So why would the Authority break into the lab if they could, as far as I could tell, just ask Violet for the disks, or, at the very worst, tell Kevin to steal them from her?
Maybe he had.
Maybe this spell had only been cast to act like it was cast by Dane.
Which left me one hundred percent confused about what I should tell the nice detective.
So I went into default mode: the truth.
“I think a man named Dane Lannister might have been involved. But the spell is tangled, collapsed. It could be someone trying to make it look like Dane Lannister is involved.”
“Anything else?”
“I’d say get another Hound in here to double-check my findings, but since that isn’t going to happen, let me do a little more footwork.” I checked the spell again. Yep. Still looked like Dane’s. “Still seems to be Lannister’s signature,” I said. I checked the boxes. “None of the glyphwork has been broken.” Which meant he had taken the time to Unlock each box instead of just blowing the thing apart.
“The disks were in here. I’d say one per drawer.” What else? What was I missing? I looked around the room, and caught the angry red slash of a spell hovering about midway across the room.
That was not Unlock, or Hold, or any of the kinder spells. That was Impact and I could tell the target had been Kevin.
Dane attacked Kevin?
I looked the opposite direction to see if a spell from Kevin was there.
“Allie?”
“Just checking a few other spells. Cast in about the same time period as the Unlock,” I said. “Similar decay rate.”
Beyond the desk, where maybe Violet had been sitting, was the tattered remnants of a Shield spell.
Kevin had tried to keep Violet from getting hit with magic.
Dane had been here to kill Violet?
“Uh, one of the spells is aggressive. Not sure what kind, but in the category of Impact. Not one I recognize. That’s midroom. There’s another spell over here, a Shield. Tattered, like it withstood a blow or flux of magic.
“Is this where they found Violet?”
“Yes.”
Okay, so my theory about attackers seemed to be holding up.
I walked to the opposite side of the room and looked for anything Kevin might have cast.
Holy crap. Kevin had cast at least a half dozen spells. Hold, Freeze, Impact, something that involved blood and pain, and more. And they had all fallen-no, they had all been drawn-to this side of the room, and smashed together into one big tangled, useless spell.
Kevin had hauled on a hell of a lot of magic-recently, like after the magic had turned off-and it had all been batted aside and crushed like empty beer cans.
The smell of minerals and old vitamins was stronger here.
Okay. I didn’t know why Dane and Kevin were fighting. Sedra’s bodyguard fighting Violet’s bodyguard, but they had both accessed a hell of a lot of magic with the grids down.
Maybe they had disks to drain, but I didn’t see any discarded empty disks on the floor.
“Allie?”
“More spells over here. There was a fight. All these spells are collapsed in on themselves and tangled together.” I shook my head. “It’s a mess, but they still bear Kevin Cooper’s signature.”
The crystal in my hand was feeling heavy and cold. “Is there anything else you want me to look at, because I think my battery’s going dead.”
“This is where they found Kevin.” He pointed to a place near the door of the room. Like Kevin had been trying to get out and leave Violet behind. Strange.
I walked over to the door without losing my hold or concentration on Sight and Smell.
Death magic. I couldn’t smell it, but it cast just enough of a shadow that I knew it had been mixed with dark magic. The only people I’d ever seen wield dark magic were Frank Gordon, who tried to raise my dad’s soul from the dead, Zayvion, who used it as well as he used every other discipline of magic, and Greyson, who used it mixed with Blood magic to control Tomi. Since Frank was dead and Zayvion was comatose, that left Greyson.
I inhaled, trying to catch his scent-death and blood and burnt blackberry-but all I came up with was the slight tang from Death and dark magic, and the scent of old vitamins. Beneath that, I caught the notes of Kevin’s cologne, a mix of spices, and blood-his blood.
“There’s nothing here I can testify to,” I started. “Magic was used, but I don’t know these spells.” I didn’t want to tell Stotts it was dark magic. As far as I knew, he didn’t know about dark magic. The entire event in the warehouse with Frank and my dad’s corpse had been chalked up to some kind of mutated Blood magic. That was not what it had been, but that was what the Authority had wanted people to think it was.
And so that was what the lab tests came back with, that was the official police report, and that was what the causes of death on the four kidnapped girls’ death certificates read.
I glanced out in the hall to see if there was anything else beyond the room. Nothing, or at least no spells, that I could see.
The crystal suddenly went so cold it hurt.
“Ow!” The pain in my hand broke my concentration, and the glyphs for Sight and Smell faded.
I almost dropped the crystal, but instead tossed it to my other hand, and then back and forth like a hot potato.
“That it?” Stotts strolled over. He didn’t look at all concerned that I’d gone all Hacky Sack crazy.
