His Father's Eyes - eARC (5 page)

“Hey there, beautiful. What are you offering?”

None of the men spared me a glance. Kona did look back at me, but only long enough to shoot me a “you owe me for this” glare.

While she pretended to flirt with Tall, Dark, and Handsome, I stepped into the cockpit, making sure that I didn’t touch anything.

I spotted the magic right away. It would have been hard to miss, as it covered the instrumentation, though it was concentrated on the screens above the windshield, where the warning signals would have appeared. Whoever had cast the spell wanted to be certain that this plane wasn’t going anywhere.

It was the same magic I had seen on Howell: a deep shimmering green, brilliant but translucent. The skinhead’s murderer had also seen to it that this plane didn’t get off the ground.

I left the cockpit and walked down the aisle toward Kona and the Feds, which, I decided in that moment, was a great name for a band. Kona sent an anxious glance my way, but none of the men reacted to my presence. A few feet short of where Kona stood, I slipped out of the aisle and into a row. I didn’t go so far as to lower myself into a seat; doing so would have made too much noise. Instead, I pulled out the sock I had taken from Howell’s bag and my scrying stone, a slice of sea-green agate that I always carry with me.

In the weeks since I had been shot, Namid had been teaching me all sorts of seeing spells. I disliked scrying magic; always had. Often scrying spells offered little more than portents, hints at the future that could be interpreted any number of ways. They tended to obscure as much as they revealed. But seeing spells of this sort were a little different; I wasn’t trying to divine the future so much as I was searching for clues about the past. And Namid seemed to think that the more I could discover with magic, the less likely I was to place myself in danger. I wasn’t sure I shared his confidence, but I had to admit that the seeing spell I’d used the previous night had made catching Mark Darby a good deal easier than it otherwise might have been.

The seeing spell I planned to use now was one I had learned a few months ago, and had used to see Etienne de Cahors for the first time. I wanted to see and hear what Howell had seen and heard when he was on this plane, and this casting allowed me to do that. It was specific to place and person. I would only experience what he had experienced on this plane; to see his killer, I would have to go back to the place where he had died. And I could only see the events in question through his eyes.

I folded the sock and held it beneath the scrying stone. This was a powerful spell, and elegant in its simplicity. Three elements: Howell, the plane, and my stone.

After a few seconds, the sinuous white and blue lines in the agate appeared to vanish, leaving an image of a seat back, a pair of hands—the skin around the wrists tattooed—and jean-clad legs, one of which bounced incessantly. He was jittery. He toyed with his seat belt, rolling the slack into a tight cylinder, letting it unravel, and then rolling it again.

He glanced up after a few minutes, in time to catch the eye of a flight attendant as she walked by. She checked to see that his belt was buckled. He turned to stare out the window. I could tell that he was in the middle seat, but he took little notice of the passengers sitting on either side of him.

There was no fast-forward button on a scrying stone, but after a few minutes of gazing at the image I had summoned, I realized that I wasn’t going to learn much more of value here on the plane. Howell was trapped in his seat, and with each passing minute he seemed to grow more uneasy. He must have been a wreck after two hours of this, and that would have made it easier for the conjurer to pick him out of the crowd of passengers once they deplaned. Howell never had a chance. It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for him.

I raised my eyes from the scrying stone and found that Kona was watching me, even as the FBI agent continued to chat her up. I was tempted to whisper in his ear that she was gay, just to see the reaction I’d get. But I was good. I nodded once to Kona, eased back into the aisle, and walked with care to the cabin door.

“Well, I’m glad things are going well here,” I heard her say behind me. “I’ll see you boys later.”

“Aw, but you don’t have to go.”

“I’m afraid I do. But this is going to be a long investigation, and we’ll have a chance to talk again.”

“Good,” he said, in a tone that made me want to smack him.

“Yeah. We can have a beer. You, and me, and my lover, Margarite. You’ll like her, too. Good day, gentlemen.”

There was a brief silence, broken only by the sound of Kona’s footsteps. Then the other two agents burst out laughing. It was all I could do not to join them.

“Now, that was fun,” she said in a low voice as we exited the plane. “What did you learn? Something I hope. I’d rather not find out I went through all that for nothing.”

“There was magic all over the cockpit,” I said, my voice low. “The same color and quality as what was on Howell. Whoever killed him also kept the plane from taking off.”

“From the cockpit?” she asked. “Does that mean it was a member of the crew?”

“Or a weremyste who managed to get in there. You’ve seen what a camouflage spell can do.”

“Yeah, nice work, by the way. That would be a handy spell when Hibbard’s around.”

“Why haven’t I ever thought of that?”

“So what now, partner?”

“Now we take Howell’s sock back to the men’s room where he was found and try a seeing spell there.”

“And we couldn’t do this before because . . . ?”

“Because I didn’t want to touch the body and mess up your crime scene.”

“Right. I appreciate that.”

We went back to the terminal and made our way to the restroom once more. By now, there were several cops with the body, as well as a photographer from the ME’s office. This wasn’t a casting I could do in front of others without drawing attention to myself, which meant another camouflage spell. I retreated to the gate area, cast the spell so that it would work in the restroom—why couldn’t the guy have been murdered in a bar, or one of those lounges designed for wealthy business travelers?—and went back in.

As on the plane, no one noticed that I was there, not even Kona, since she was in the restroom when I cast the spell. I took up a position near the entrance, pulled out the sock and stone again, and cast the seeing spell.

Once more, I saw in the stone what Howell had seen. He walked into the men’s room, took a piss, and then went to the sink to wash his hands. Several other men were in here already. They gave Howell a wide berth. I assumed they had taken note of his appearance: the tattoos, the T-shirt, the shaved head. No one spoke to him or even dared make eye contact.

He braced his hands on the sink and closed eyes his, taking a long, rattling breath. Then he bent over and splashed water on his face. Seeing hand blowers but no paper-towel dispensers, he muttered a curse and pulled up his shirt hem to dry his face. Leaning on the sink again he stared at himself in the mirror. A man crossed behind him and appeared to leave the restroom.

At this point, Howell gave no indication that he had noticed anything unusual. But viewing the scene through his eyes, knowing to watch for it, I did.

No one had entered the men’s room since Howell’s entrance, and now it seemed that those who walked in with him, and those who had already been here, were gone. Howell was alone, or at least alone with his eventual killer. I don’t know how the sorcerer managed this, but I didn’t doubt for an instant that he had.

Howell straightened, then swiveled his head left and right, his brow creasing. He checked the stalls, all of which were empty, before starting toward the restroom door. After two steps, he halted.

Anyone in here
? he said.

His voice echoed off the tiles, but no one answered him.

He took another step, stopped again. Without warning, he whirled, an audible gasp torn from his chest.

What the f—
?
Who’s there
?

He sounded more scared than angry, though I could tell he was trying for the latter.

Again, his question was met with silence. He was edging toward the door now, his back to the sinks. This was where he was going to die, and I didn’t see anyone. Not a soul.

He spun a second time, practically jumping out of his skin, swiping at something on his shoulder, something I couldn’t see. His killer seemed to be toying with him now. Was he camouflaged? Had he found some other spell to make himself invisible to Howell, and thus to me?

By this time, Howell was terrified; I could tell from his labored breathing, the tremor in his hands. He took a single purposeful stride toward the door and bounded off of something unseen, the way he would if he had walked into a wall.

Fucking hell!
he said, the words choked, like a sob.

A blinding flash of green light made me squint and turn away, even as I heard Howell’s truncated scream in my head. When I peered at the stone again, it was nothing more than sea-green agate.

“Damn it,” I muttered, forgetting that I was camouflaged myself. My oath drew a frown from an older gentleman who was walking past me. He kept going, though, and I ground my teeth together, vowing to keep silent from now on.

I left the men’s room and positioned myself in a corner of the gate area. There I cast the seeing spell again, hoping that Howell might have seen something—anything—between the gate and the men’s room that would tell me more about his killer. But he walked straight from the plane to the restroom, interacting with no one, his gaze sweeping over the crowded airport but settling on nothing in particular. Considering all the trouble I had gone through to cast the seeing spells I had little to show for my effort.

I walked to a deserted spot where I could remove the camouflage spell, and then found Kona again. She was speaking with another detective from the PPD. I hung back until she was finished with him.

“What have you got for me?” she asked.

“A sock.” I slipped her the sock, which she stuffed in her blazer pocket.

“Seriously, Justis.”

“Seriously, that’s about all I’ve got.”

“You mean, after all that mojo you were going to do, you didn’t find out anything?”

“Just that our killer casts a mean camouflage spell and can move around a men’s room without making much noise.”

“So you didn’t see him.”

I shook my head. “I saw what Howell saw, which was nothing at all. The guy snuck up on him, toyed with him for a few seconds, and then killed him with a spell.”

“The killer could still be here, then,” she said. “He could be watching everything we do, and we wouldn’t know it.”

“Or she. And yeah, that’s exactly right.”

She scanned the gate area, her expression curdling. “Honestly, I don’t know how you live every day with this magic shit. It would drive me up a wall.”

“Who says it doesn’t do the same to me?” I surveyed the airport as well. “But let me try something.” It wasn’t a spell I had attempted before, but Namid would have been the first to tell me that such things didn’t matter. If I could hold the elements in my head, I could cast it. It seemed easy enough, though I couldn’t figure out how to do it with only three elements; I’d need seven: me, the other sorcerer, his camouflage spell, my eyes, the gate area, his current location, and the removal of his spell. There were a few unknowns in that list, but I hoped I could conjure around those. I repeated the elements six times and released the magic on the seventh.

Nothing happened.

“Are you all right?” Kona asked, watching me, the corners of her mouth drawn down in mild disapproval.

“I was trying a spell. I hoped I might be able to strip away whatever magic our killer is using to hide himself. If he’s still here.”

“I take it the spell didn’t work.”

“Or he’s long gone.”

“Right. Look, Justis—”

“You have work to do,” I said, keenly aware in that moment of the fact that she was still a cop, and I wasn’t. Not that I’d needed the reminder. “I’ll get out of your hair.”

“I appreciate you coming all this way.”

“No problem. I think I can help you with this, if you want me to keep working on it.”

“I do. And with your new-found notoriety, the higher-ups are more willing to have you around.”

“Except Hibbard.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And nobody likes him anyway.”

We both grinned, though for no more than a second or two.

“I’ll ask around a bit,” I said, sobering. “See if any of my kind have heard people talking about a new player in town. Or about why the old players might take a new interest in domestic terrorists.”

CHAPTER 6

I left Kona there and ran the gauntlet of police, FBI, and TSA check points until I was out of the terminal and back in my car. The drive out of the airport loop proved to be a good deal easier and quicker than the drive in. Afternoon traffic on the interstates, however, was hideous.

I sat in my car, idling alongside about ten thousand of my best friends, the Z-ster’s air conditioner working overtime and the sun glaring off the cars in front of me, and I thought about James Howell. To be more precise, I thought about the final minutes of his life, and possible reasons for his murder.

It was too easy to assume that he was killed because he tried to blow up the plane. How would a weremyste know that, and if somehow his killer was aware of the bomb, why would he or she resort to murder rather than simply alert the police or the FBI? And if this sorcerer knew about the bomb, why would he or she bother with grounding the plane first? That made no sense. The bomb was in Howell’s luggage; it wasn’t in the plane’s cabin or cockpit or cargo area. Disabling the plane wasn’t going to save any lives. That was why Howell was antsy, but not panicked. If Howell hadn’t been murdered, the passengers and their luggage would have been moved to a different aircraft, and
that
plane would have been destroyed.

The more I pondered this, the less sense it made.

I don’t usually use my phone when I drive, and I’m intolerant to the point of abusiveness of drivers who do. But we weren’t going anywhere, and it occurred to me that I needed more information. I pulled out my phone and punched in Kona’s number.

“Miss me already, huh?” she said upon answering.

“Can you get me the passenger list for Flight 595?”

“Sure. I’ll e-mail it to you. Why?”

“I know a good number of the sorcerers here in Phoenix, and I’d like to see if any of them were on board.”

“I’ll send it right away.”

“Thanks, Kona.”

I switched off the phone and tossed it on my jacket. A few seconds later, the cars around me started to inch forward.

I drove the rest of the way to my office in a fog. I knew I was missing something, a logical, or at least magical, explanation for the sequence of events that ended in Howell’s death. But I couldn’t see it. I kept coming back to the same conclusion: Whoever had killed the man had made his crime more complicated than it needed to be.

It wasn’t that I thought criminals always behaved rationally. Far from it. I’d been a cop for too long to think anything of the sort. But this was . . . odd. That was the best word for it.

What did a dead skinhead, a Latino political leader, and a disabled 757 have in common? Well, for one thing, they were all messing with my head.

Because my day hadn’t had enough surprises already, when I got to my office, Namid was already there. Waiting for me. That had never happened before.

From the way he greeted me you would have thought it was the most natural thing in the world, like I was getting home from work, and he was waiting for me in the kitchen, fixing dinner.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, tossing my car keys and bomber jacket on my desk.

“You need to train. We have not worked on your craft in some time.”

“It’s been two days.”

“And that is long enough.”

I no longer resisted Namid’s attempts to help me hone my craft. I still feared the powers I possessed, knowing where they would lead me. And if ever I forgot, all I needed to do was spend a few minutes with my dad. But I also understood that as my runecrafting skills improved, so would my ability to hold off the worst symptoms of the phasings, thus slowing their cumulative effect on my mind.

On an already weird day, though, his presence in my office was too weird for me to let pass.

“You’ve been waiting here so that we can train? That’s it? That’s what you want me to believe?”

“Have I ever lied to you, Ohanko?”

That brought me up short. “No,” I said without hesitation.

“Then why would you doubt me now?”

It didn’t take long for my thoughts to catch up with the conversation. “You haven’t lied to me,” I said, ignoring the second question. “But when you’re concerned about my safety, you start behaving strangely. You show up at odd times. And you avoid direct questions by asking questions of your own. So why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here?”

“First we train. Then you may ask your questions.”

It was like arguing with a kid. A seven-hundred-year-old, watery, magic-wielding kid.

He lowered himself to the floor, gazing up at me with those endlessly patient glowing eyes. I heaved a sigh and sat as well.

“Clear yourself,” he said with a low rumble, like a river in flood.

I closed my eyes and summoned an image from my youth: a golden eagle circling over the desert floor in the Superstition Wilderness, its enormous wings held perfectly still, its tail twisting as it turned. I’d been no more than nine years old when I saw it; my parents and I were on one of our many camping trips, and it was one of the happiest and most memorable moments from my childhood.

Clearing was something runecrafters did to empty their minds of distractions so that they could cast spells more efficiently and effectively. Long ago, when Namid first began to teach me the rudiments of crafting spells, he led me to this memory—there’s really no other way to put it—and told me to focus on it whenever I needed to clear myself for a spell. At first, clearing took me several minutes. Now, years later, I could do it in seconds.

I opened my eyes again, indicated to the runemyste with a curt nod that I was ready.

“Defend yourself,” he said.

We had started these sessions when I was pursuing Cahors, and ever since then, Namid had found new and excruciating ways to test my magical defenses. Today he started me off with a spell that made me feel as though he had driven a spike through my forehead. I gasped at the pain, resisting an urge to cradle my head in my hands.

Three elements: me, the pain, and a sheath of power surrounding me. I had to repeat them to myself several times—the agony clouded my thoughts. But at last it vanished, leaving me breathless, my face damp with sweat.

“Your spell was too slow,” Namid said. “In the time it took you to cast, an enemy would have killed you.”

The problem with having a teacher who was just this side of all-powerful and all-knowing was that I couldn’t argue with him.

“I know,” I said. “It hurt. It was hard to concentrate.”

“That is why you clear yourself, Ohanko. If you do so properly, you should be able to cast despite the pain.”

“You understand that I can’t walk down the street clearing myself all the time, right? Sometimes I have to do other stuff, like drive and interact with people.”

He stared at me, his face as still as ice, not allowing me the satisfaction of drawing even the hint of a smile. “Clearing is a technique for the most inexperienced of runecrafters,” he said after a weighty pause. “When you can cast at will, with the immediacy of thought, without having to pause to clear, then you will have mastered what you call magic. Right now, when it comes to runecrafting, you are little more than a child.”

That stung.

“Defend yourself.”

The assailing spell crashed down on me, its weight palpable. I felt as though I had been encased in glass. I couldn’t move. Not to cry out, or to fight free of the invisible prison he had conjured. Not even to breathe. Panic rose in me like a tide, though even as it did, I had time to think, in a distant corner of my mind, that he must have been saving this one for a time when he was really ticked at me.

I couldn’t use either of the two most common and rudimentary warding spells—reflection or deflection—nor could I rely on the sheathing spell I had cast. Those were my standbys, the spells I went to whenever possible. Namid knew this, of course. He wanted to push me away from the magic with which I was most comfortable, and for good reason. The most comfortable spells were also the easiest, and the most readily defeated by other weremystes.

My lungs were starting to burn, and my panic was about to tip over into desperation.

An idea came to me. It was ridiculous to the point of foolishness. But magic didn’t always make sense, and I had no other ideas.

I’d envisioned Namid’s attack spell as a prison of glass. So why not three elements: me, the glass, and a giant hammer?

Power surged through me as if I’d stuck my finger in an electrical outlet. My body jerked, and an instant later I could breathe again.

Namid canted his head to the side, surprise and—dare I think it?—a touch of pride on his crystal clear features. “That was well done, Ohanko. What spell did you cast?”

“What spell did
you
cast?”

“It was a binding, a crafting intended to paralyze you.”

I shook my head. “Then my spell shouldn’t have worked. It felt like you had encased me in glass—that was the first image that came to mind. And so I imagined a hammer shattering it, and somehow that worked.”

“And why should it not?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “Your spell had nothing to do with glass.”

“That matters not. I have told you many times before that runecrafting is an act of will. The images or words you use do not matter.”

“I know that. But . . .”

“You know it, but you have not understood it until now. Not really.”

He was right. He was always right. But this once it didn’t bother me so much. Because even as I had told myself again and again that the words of a spell didn’t matter, I always assumed that my wardings needed to be matched in some way to the intent of the assailing spells they were meant to block. I was starting to understand that they didn’t. They needed to match my
perception
of those attacks, which was totally different, and much easier.

I said as much to Namid, and he nodded, the smile lingering. “It has taken longer than I would have liked, but you are learning. Defend yourself.”

He threw attack after attack at me, some of them torturous, others merely terrifying. But the last one was the worst. He managed to mess with my mind so that with no warning I found myself in the middle of what felt like a phasing. Disorientation, paranoia, delusion. All I could think was that it was too early, that the sun couldn’t possibly be down yet. And so with the last shred of rational thought I could muster, I grasped at three elements: me, the phasing, and sunlight.

When my thoughts cleared and I remembered where I was, I sat up—somehow I had collapsed onto my back. Namid was watching me, in a way that made me vaguely uncomfortable.

“What?”

“You have come far,” he said. “Today alone, I sense the progress you have made. It may be that we are ready for a new kind of training.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

“We will not begin today. You have cast enough. But soon.” He nodded, more to himself than to me. “Yes, I think soon.”

I stood, stretched my back. My shirt was soaked with sweat, the way it would be after a workout at the gym. But I felt good; I could tell that I was getting stronger, quicker with my spells.

“When was the last time you saw Leander Fearsson?”

I turned. Namid was standing as well, his eyes gleaming in the late afternoon light.

“Today. Why?”

“How is he?”

I stared at the myste.

“Ohanko?”

“Did you really just ask me how my father is doing?”

“Do your friends not do this? Does not Kona Shaw, and the woman, Billie?”

“Well, yeah, of course they do, but they’re . . . ? What is this about, Namid? You’ve never asked about him before.”

“If it makes you uncomfortable, I will not do so again.”

“It’s not that— I’m not uncomfortable. But you don’t ask questions casually. So why don’t you tell me what this is about.”

“I am sorry if I have disturbed you, Ohanko. I will leave you now.”

He started to dissipate.

“No!” I said.

His form solidified once more.

“I don’t want you to go. I was . . . You surprised me with the question. The truth is, he’s not doing well at all. He’s more incoherent than usual. He’s not taking care of himself. And worst of all, he seems to be in pain, though I can’t tell if what he’s feeling is imagined or real.”

Namid’s waters roughened, like the surface of a lake under a gust of wind. “What kind of pain?”

“He talks about burning, and about somebody testing him, prodding him. I don’t understand half of it, but as delusions go, it strikes me as worse than usual.”

“I am sorry to hear this.”

Something in the way Namid spoke the words caught my attention. “Does any of that mean something to you?”

“Tell me more of what he said.”

I frowned, thinking back on the conversation I’d had with my dad that morning—if I could even call it that. “He said
they
were burning him, and something about brands. He thought he was being marked, like whoever was doing this owned him. I tried to get him to tell me who had hurt him, but he wouldn’t.”

As enigmatic as Namid could be, it was pretty easy to tell when he was troubled. Moments before he had been as clear as mountain water. Now his face and body were turbid, muddied, like the waters of a churning river. “What else?”

“That was all—” I stopped, the memory washing over me. “No, there was one other thing. He said that they think he matters, but he doesn’t. And then he told me that I did matter—he was pretty emphatic about it—and he said that if I spent too much time with him, they’d find me and they’d hurt me, too.”

The myste was as roiled as I’d ever seen him, as roiled as he was when Cahors attacked me in my home.

“Does all of that mean something to you, Namid?”

“I do not know,” he said. “Perhaps. There are old powers in the world, nearly as old as my kind. Scrying their purpose can be difficult.”

“You mean someone might actually be doing these things to him? He’s not just delusional?”

“The moontimes were not kind to him. You know this. All that he said to you may well be the product of his moon sickness. But it is also possible that there is a kernel of truth beneath the layers of delusion. I must go, Ohanko.”