Chapter 18

When my alarmwent off Monday morning at seven thirty, I'd been lying awake in bed for almost an hour. What little sleep I'd managed to get had been plagued by nightmares about blood mages and faceless, dark figures chanting around an altar and an object I couldn't see. My restless brain bounced from one topic to the next: Natalie, Malcolm, the mystery mage, Betty, harnads, John West, the Kasten, and even Charles and Sean. The worst part was, they were all big question marks.

Since I already had my phone in my hand, I pulled up Natalie's number and called her before I realized it might be too early.

She picked up on the third ring. "Hi, Alice!"

I was relieved that she sounded perfectly awake. "Morning, Natalie. Sorry I'm calling so early."

"Nah, I was up. Did you get my message last night? Did any of that make sense?"

"Some of it," I hedged. "Not sure what the Kasten is—I'm still looking to that. A harnad is the name for a group of blood mages."

A very long pause.

"Natalie?"

For the first time since I'd met her, Natalie swore. "Are you saying my grandmother was a blood mage?"

"It looks that way," I admitted. "I'd really like to look at those letters."

"I've got them here. You can come look at them anytime. God." I wasn't sure if she was swearing or if it was a prayer. "I thought I couldn't be shocked by this anymore, but I was wrong. Do you think my grandmother killed people?"

"I don't know, but we're going to be very careful. Harnads are dangerous. Don't talk to anyone about this."

She whimpered.

"I was wondering if you could do something for me," I said.

"What do you need?"

I explained that Malcolm and I were going to see if any of her aunts or uncle were hiding their magical abilities. "In the meantime, you mentioned you were still in touch with your grandmother's attorney."

"Yes. He's helping me fight my aunt in court."

"Could you call him and ask if Betty had any other siblings or children besides the ones we know about?"

Another long pause. "If my mother had any other brothers or sisters—even half brothers or half sisters—I'd think she would have told me," Natalie said finally.

"Unless she didn't know. Maybe there was a black sheep in the family."

Natalie snorted. "At this point, anything is possible. Sure, I'll call him and ask. I'm sure the answer is no, but we might as well check."

"Thanks. Let me know what you find out. I'll keep you posted on our end."

We made plans to touch base in the afternoon and said good-bye. I rolled out of bed and headed for my bathroom to shower and brush my teeth.

When I came out of the bathroom, Malcolm was in my room.

I shrieked, jumped, and almost lost my towel. "Damn it, Malcolm, what the hell? What if I'd walked out of my bathroom naked?"

He whirled around to face the other way. "Sorry! Sorry! Shit."

"We need to have some ground rules about my bedroom." I went into the bathroom, put on my bathrobe, and came back out. "Okay, I'm decent."

Malcolm turned around. "Seriously, sorry about that."

"It's fine. What's up?"

"Couple of things. I've got the masking-spell detector ready to go. I made the bolt-hole spell for your earring, but I need to test it."

"Awesome! How—"

Malcolm vanished.

I jerked. "What the hell? Oh." I went over to the nightstand and picked up my earrings. One of them buzzed with energy. "Release."

Malcolm popped into my room, looking quite pleased with himself.

"Way to go. Any idea what its range might be?"

"That I'm not sure of," Malcolm said. "In theory, range shouldn't matter since this is metaphysical, but I would like to do more testing in incremental distances before I rely on it to jump me across town."

I felt a hell of a lot better about the situation now Malcolm was able to jump into the earring in case of an emergency.

"What about a spell I could use to get out of the earring, instead of needing you to let me out?" he asked.

I frowned. "That is going to be more of a challenge. The earring is a heavy-duty containment spell designed from the ground up to keep its contents in and only respond to my commands. I'll have to mess with it. It's possible, I think, but it's going to take some time."

I went to my closet to find clothes. "I asked Natalie to call the lawyer to find out if she's got any other relatives we don't know about. She's not very happy about the thought of her grandmother being in a harnad." I grabbed a blue plaid shirt and a pair of jeans and emerged from the closet.

Malcolm snorted. "I can't say I blame her. Imagine if your grandmother was in a harnad."

My grandmother founded three harnads, but that was neither here nor there. "I did tell her not to talk to anyone about it, which I would think would go without saying, but better to be safe than sorry. Now shoo so I can get dressed."

Malcolm went through the door into the hall. I put on my clothes, then brushed out my hair and pulled it into a ponytail before doing my makeup and putting on my jewelry.

Once I had my boots on, I opened the bedroom door and Malcolm was waiting in the hall. "You ready to go solve this thing?" he asked.

"Absolutely," I said. "Just as soon as I get some coffee."

I figured we'd start with Elise and work our way backward up the suspect list. I hit a fast-food drive-thru for a breakfast sandwich and gigantic cup of dark roast.

"How's your cholesterol?" Malcolm's disembodied voice was sardonic.

I took a big bite of my sandwich. "No idea. Probably fine, though," I said through a mouthful of food.

"You are a classy woman."

"Shut up."

By the time we got to Elise's neighborhood, I'd finished off the sandwich and most of the coffee. I rolled past Elise's house and told Malcolm to meet me around the corner.

"Roger that," Malcolm said, and I felt his energy leave the car.

I cruised down the street, turned the corner, and pulled over to the curb. I took my phone out and pretended to be in the middle of an animated conversation, as if I'd just stopped to make a call. Several morning dog-walkers and joggers passed by my car, saw me on the phone, and moved on without paying me much attention.

It was nearly ten minutes later by the time I felt Malcolm's energy in the car. I'd started to get worried around the six-minute mark. "Boo," Malcolm said.

I put my phone in my lap. "Very funny. What took so long?"

He snorted, which was a weird sound to hear from an invisible ghost. "‘Gosh, Malcolm, it's pretty cool you can detect masking spells and you can sneak up on people without them knowing since you're invisible and whatnot, but gee whiz, can't you work faster?'"

"Was that sarcasm? I couldn't tell."

"Yes, that was sarcasm."

"Yeah, so was that. So what took so long?"

There was a pause, during which I tried to imagine what expression was on Malcolm's face. "I had to do some ‘tuning' before I could get it to work," he said finally, sounding aggravated. "But I'm 99.9 percent certain Elise is exactly what she seems: a nonmagical human. She's not hiding anything. Well, except maybe alcoholism. She was drinking wine."

I glanced at the clock on my dashboard. "At nine a.m.?"

"Yup. Red wine. In a coffee mug."

"Damn." I couldn't decide whether to be amused, disapproving, or impressed. "Well, that's one we can cross off the list, again." I pulled away from the curb.

"Who's next on the list?"

"Deborah Mackey."

"Sweet."

Three hours later, I was parked just down the street from Helen Matson's house in Hope, crushing candy on my phone, when Malcolm returned to the car. "You won't believe this, but it was negative too."

I shut the game off and hit the steering wheel with the heel of my hand. "This is nuts. You and I both think that energy signature on the library wards belongs to a child or sibling of Betty Morrison, but you're telling me your spell is not picking up masking spells on any of them?"

"Yep. We've eliminated Elise, Deborah, Kathy, and Peter, and even Robert and Helen."

"And you're sure it works?"

Malcolm sighed. "Yes, I'm sure. It picked mine up before I tuned it out. It's picking yours up."

"Then what the hell?"

"Maybe we should call Natalie and see what the lawyer told her."

"Good thinking." I called her cell. There was no answer, so I left a message to call me.

"What now?" Malcolm asked.

I sighed. "I guess let's go back home. I want to keep looking for info on this Kasten and try to figure out what the hell it is. If nothing else pans out, I might try to track down John West or call that journalist about the local harnads."

By the time we got back to my house, it was almost two and I was hungry. Malcolm went down to the basement to work on spells. I started to pull a small pizza out of the freezer, but I thought about my cholesterol and decided to make a salad instead. I grabbed a diet soda and carried my lunch downstairs.

I set out my lunch at the table in the library area and pulled a couple of books from the shelves. Malcolm was using my circles in the workspace. It looked like he was trying to set up additional bolt-hole spells that could jump him to different crystals. Not a bad idea; we could leave one here and another at the office in case of emergencies.

I ate my lunch and started thumbing through the books, looking for any references to anything called a Kasten. I checked the indexes in the back, then skimmed them, finding nothing. When my vision got blurry, I took a break to do more Internet searches, but nothing came up, no matter what I searched for. Even alternate spellings gave me nothing.

I went back to the books, this time looking through some of my books on fire magic. Over an hour later, I still had nothing except a headache. No call from Natalie yet either.

Malcolm, meanwhile, was jumping in and out of crystals in the work area. "I hope you don't get stuck in one of those while you're testing your spells," I told him as I headed for my storage cabinets. "Before we start using them to jump you from place to place, I need some way to get you in and out of them too."

"I'm working on that," Malcolm said, disappearing and reappearing. "Right now I can jump in and out, but there's no masking spell on the crystals, so any mage who wanders by them would be able to tell I was in there."

"Good point. We should work on that too." I went to the leftmost cabinet, traced four runes on the door, and opened it. Four of the shelves held books and notebooks, the contents of my carefully curated but limited blood magic library. These books were black market and extremely hard to find. They'd been procured through third parties and delivered to post office boxes.

I pulled out any books that dealt with harnads or objects of power used in ritual blood magic. I took the books to the library table and spread them out while Malcolm went back to his bolt-hole spells. I bent my head over my books.

Twenty minutes later, I dropped a book on the table with a yell.

Malcolm popped to my side. "What?"

I pointed to the page. "I found it!"

"Found what?"

I picked up the book, a rather dry tome on harnad history and myth, and read: "‘In the year 1648, a small village in Germany was destroyed by fire. Witnesses reported that the fire moved with unnatural speed, devouring everything and everyone in the village in a matter of seconds. The fire was said to have been the work of a local harnad leader, a man named Adelbert, who had been driven from the village after suspicions of witchcraft years before.'"

"What does this have to do with—"

"I'm getting there. ‘Only one family survived the fire. Adelbert warned a young woman named Alide, whom he had hoped to marry before his banishment, that he was returning to take his revenge on the town and she should take her family and leave. He told her that he was in possession of an object of power he referred to as der Zauberkasten, which he claimed would destroy the village.'"

"What else does it say?" Malcolm asked.

I read on. "‘The Adelbert Kasten, as it came to be called, is often considered to be a mythical object, as no reliable sources have ever documented its existence. It has been described by various anecdotal sources as a wooden box or chest with a lid. One account from mid-eighteenth-century France references the Kasten as a reliquary containing bones supposedly belonging to Adelbert himself. Another report, this one recorded by a monk in eighteenth-century Germany, describes the Kasten as wielding enormous destructive power when filled with the lifeblood or severed body parts of mages representing all four cardinal elements: air, fire, earth, and water. Such an object would be of obvious interest to a harnad, whose members regularly practice ritual blood magic, but there is no record of the Kasten being used since 1748 in Europe, and never in the United States. The evidence seems to suggest that if Adelbert's Kasten ever existed at all, it has been lost to time.' That's all it says."

"Holy shit," Malcolm said after a moment.

We stared at each other.

"So this Kasten is some sort of magical weapon of mass destruction that runs on the blood or body parts of mages?" Malcolm asked. "Do we think it's possible Betty Morrison and her harnad had it and she was keeping it hidden in her bookcase?"

I rubbed my forehead. "I don't know. The person who wrote this book certainly seems to think it probably didn't really exist, but Natalie's got a letter from John West to Betty thanking her for keeping it safe. Whether that was what was in the bookcase, I don't know."

I picked up my phone and called Natalie again.

"Hey, Alice," she said breathlessly. I heard traffic sounds in the background. It sounded like she was downtown. "I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to call you. I'm having to run some errands and deal with an accountant, and it's taking all day."

"That's okay. Did you get in touch with the lawyer?"

"I left a message," Natalie replied. "He hasn't called me back yet. If I don't hear from him today, I'll call him again in the morning."

I debated telling her what I'd found out about the Kasten, then decided it was a conversation better had in person. "Okay, great. Let me know what you find out." We said our good-byes and hung up.

"What's the plan for the rest of the day?" Malcolm asked.

I glanced at the clock on my phone. "Well, it's almost four. Now that we know what the Kasten is—or might be—I think I need to know more about John West."

Malcolm floated back and forth nervously. "Well, we know he's a high-level fire mage, and if he's in a harnad, that means he's probably a high-level blood mage as well."

"I'd like to get a sense of his magic so I could recognize it again, and to know exactly what I might be up against if it turns out he's in the middle of all this." I started gathering up the books on the table.

"Are you going to use a ruse so you can shake hands with him?"

I shook my head. "I don't think that's a good idea. It worked with Peter and the others because they have low-level magic and they have no idea how to use it. West is a high-level mage. If I touched him with my shields even partially down, he'd sense me immediately. I don't want to attract the attention of anyone in a harnad, least of all a high-level fire mage."

"I could do it," Malcolm suggested. "Like I did today, with the spell detector."

I thought about it but shook my head again. "No, it's dangerous for you too. Even with the masking spell, you're still vulnerable. All I need to do is get near him and I should be able to sense his magic."

My phone rang. I glanced at the screen. Wolf. I remembered he'd invited me to dinner tonight and I hadn't had time to think about it today.

I answered the call. "Hi, Sean."

"Hi, Allie." I smiled at the sound of his familiar voice: deep and a little growly. "I'm leaving the office and thought I'd check in and see if you were interested in getting dinner tonight."

"I was just about to head out to check on a person of interest who's come up in the last day. It may take up most of my evening."

"Want a colleague along for the ride? You can catch me up on the situation with Vaughan."

I thought about that. As a pack associate, I did owe its alpha a summary of what had transpired at my meeting with Charles. Plus, having Sean along was good camouflage for surveilling West. "That would work. I need to be at his office before he leaves work at five, though."

"It's four now. I can be at your place in twenty. Is that enough time?"

"Should be. I'll be ready."

"See you in twenty." We disconnected.

I finished collecting the books on the table and took them over to the cabinet. Malcolm followed me.

As I was putting them back on the shelves, he said, "So this thing with the werewolf."

"There's no ‘thing' with Sean. He's useful."

"‘Useful,' huh?" Malcolm didn't bother to hide his skepticism. "Useful for what?"

"Professionally useful." I put up the last book and closed the cabinet. "It was easier to get access to Natalie's aunts and uncle with him posing as a colleague or fiancé. I can use his car to surveil West. My alliance with his pack strengthens my reputation in the supe community and improves my bargaining position with the vamps."

"What alliance?"

I told Malcolm about my new status as pack associate and briefly recapped my meeting with Charles as we went upstairs and into my storage room.

He was understandably concerned about my close call with Charles, but wasn't easily distracted from his original question. "Sean may be useful, but it's more than that," Malcolm said as I pinned my hair up and reached for a blonde wig. "I saw the way you smiled when the phone rang."

I slipped the wig on carefully, then adjusted it in the mirror and used my fingers to gently comb out the hair. When I was satisfied with how it looked, I slipped on a pair of thick-framed fake glasses and left the storage room, turning the light off and closing the door.

"I do like his company." I checked to make sure I had everything I needed in my bag. "He's a good colleague and a good resource. Anything else that happens is purely recreational."

Malcolm grinned. "Good for you. All work and no play makes Alice a dull girl."

I scowled at him. "Whether or not I ‘play' is none of your business."

"Duly noted. But if you're planning on having ‘playtime' tonight, warn me so I can go hide out at Nat's house, okay?"

Aggravated,I dove at him, magic sparking on my fingertips. With a laugh, he vanished.