Chapter 4

Despite my gung-ho attitude after leaving Maricopa, I didn't make it to the Crow and Hammer until lunchtime the following day. My red-eye flight out of Phoenix and the desperate need for a midmorning nap had postponed my Consilium-abolishing aspirations.

I was still yawning as I walked into the guild. It turned out that leaping off an overpass onto a moving train, battling three Consilium pseudo-assassins—calling them real assassins would insult the former title of my co-conspirator—and dodging my way through an interview with a DD agent had drained my batteries more than I'd expected.

The Crow and Hammer's main floor pub was as dimly lit and shabbily cozy as always, the wood-paneled walls and heavy beams across the ceiling leaning hard into the old Irish pub mood. Fifteen or so members were grouped at the tables, and a low hum of conversation filled the air. The chill vibe was pleasant, and a knot of tension unraveled from between my shoulder blades.

A familiar redhead was perched behind the bar, but I'd only taken a few steps toward her when voices rang out.

"It's Kit!"

"Hey, Morris, over here."

"Kiiiit!"

I swerved off course, heading toward the largest group in the pub, who were clustered around two tables that had been pushed together.

"Nice timing, Kit," Zora declared, slapping me on the back as I stopped beside her. Despite being a five-foot-nothing sorceress, she delivered her playful smack with the force of an MMA fighter. "We need your expertise."

I arched my eyebrows. "Are you debating whether or not Deckard was a replicant? I think we all know he was."

Blank stares and snorts sounded from the rest of the group, which included a stocky telekinetic, several other Arcana mythics, and a hydromage—all bounty hunting combat specialists.

"Okay, so, hypothetically," Zora began, "if a small bounty team had just taken down a pair of vampires, and while they were cleaning up the mess, someone's dog happened to snatch a dismembered hand before we—I mean, the hypothetical team noticed, would it be legal or illegal under MPD law to use magic to get the hand back?"

I gave her a squinty look. "Where is this hypothetical scenario taking place?"

"In an alley beside a park. But it's late at night."

After a moment's thought, I said, "I guess it would depend on the magic used."

"Telekinesis," Drew stated. Coincidentally, he happened to be a telekinetic.

I shrugged. "As long as no one saw. That's all that really matters."

The group exchanged looks.

"Right." Zora nodded. "But what if, hypothetically of course, the telekinetic didn't realize the dog's owner was… uh… basically right there?"

I groaned. "Seriously?"

"It was dark! He blended in!" Drew protested. "Hypothetically."

"So, hypothetically," I said, "some poor shmuck going for a late-night puppy stroll not only got to see a gory severed hand in his precious pooch's mouth, but said hand then flew off into the night of its own volition right before his eyes?"

Silence answered me.

"It wasn't an off-leash park," the hydromage, Laetitia, tossed out. "The dog owner broke the law first."

"That definitely justifies the years of horrific nightmares he's bound to suffer." I rolled my eyes in an excellent Lienna impression. "What did he do after the hand floated away?"

"He just sort of stood there for a minute," Drew muttered. "Then he put the leash on his dog and turned around to walk in the other direction."

Probably questioning his sanity and/or whether someone had spiked his water supply.

"Assuming you included all relevant details in your report," I told them, "it'd be a minor guild fine for reckless magic use. But if the traumatized dog owner shows up on The National to warn the world about an autonomous-zombie-limb invasion, you might have the DD come knocking."

"Shhh," someone hissed at me. "Saying the name three times makes them appear, you know."

"The DD?" I repeated.

Everyone at the table shushed me. I indulged in another eye roll since Lienna wasn't here to do it. Mythics could be so superstitious—though I couldn't really blame them. The DD had the power to levy some of the biggest, meanest fines the MPD could muster against misbehaving guilds. Plus, the literal mountain of paperwork that followed their agents everywhere.

Which reminded me of the very non-hypothetical DD paperwork waiting for me at the precinct. I suppressed a cringe.

I chatted with the group for another minute, then extracted myself and headed for the bar.

Tori watched me with an uncharacteristically saccharine smile. I cautiously leaned on the bar in front of her.

"Kit," she said sweetly.

Uh-oh. "Yes, Tori?"

"Are you free next Saturday evening?"

"Nope."

Her eyes narrowed.

"I'm working a lot of overtime," I said truthfully.

She huffed and tossed a white towel onto the counter behind her. "Twiggy has gotten himself addicted to noir detective films."

I grinned before I could stop myself. Twiggy was her roommate, who happened to be a woodland faery with an obsessive love for the motion picture arts. My kind of fae.

"He keeps skulking around the house, narrating everything I do in that dumb noir drawl, and"—she glared at me like this was somehow my fault—"he keeps trying to imitate smoking. My apartment stinks."

I couldn't help it. A fit of laughter bent me over the bar. It took me a moment to pull myself together. I cleared my throat. "What does this have to do with me being free on Saturday night?"

She sighed. "I was hoping you could do a movie night with him and get him hooked on something new. Something without chain-smoking detectives."

Finally, someone who appreciated my pop-culture worldliness.

"What are you thinking?" I asked with a smirk. "Slasher flicks? Mobster movies? Boxing films?"

I could only imagine the utter chaos that would ensue if Twiggy started emulating any of those genres. Based on the contemptuous glare Tori leveled at me, she was imagining the same.

"I was hoping for something without violence, swearing, or excessive drinking," she growled.

"Why can't you get him started on a new film genre?"

"I'm running out of ideas, to be honest." She pointed her thumb over her shoulder at the shelves of liquor. "The usual?"

"Nah, just a Coke. Is Darius in?"

"Not yet." She pulled out a glass, dumped in some ice, and filled it with fizzy liquid to the brim. "I think he's back in town, though. Do you want me to ask Clara?"

"No need." I'd already texted him that I was on my way to his guild. I also knew the slick silver fox had beaten me back to the land of poutine and polar bears by a solid ten hours, despite his "recover the abandoned rental car on a random overpass in the desert" side trip.

"Your aura is troubled, Agent Morris."

The crooned words sounded in my ear, and I turned to find Rose, a diviner, standing beside me and leaning close to peer into my face. I didn't know if it was intentional, but with her short white hair, colorful shawl, and turquoise-framed glasses, she personified every single aspect of the stereotypical "elderly fortune teller."

"Sorry, what?" I muttered.

"You're troubled." She fanned out a deck of worn tarot cards. "Would you like guidance? I sense much turmoil on the horizon for you."

I sighed. I didn't need a diviner—especially one as pushy as Rose—to tell me that making an enemy of the Consilium, chasing down Kade, and hiding my partnership with Darius from Blythe would spell turmoil for future Kit.

I shot a look at Tori, silently pleading for an escape.

She raised an eyebrow and mouthed, "Saturday?"

I scowled back at her.

Rose leaned closer, her eyes glittering. "I can feel it. Your future will be magnificent—or catastrophic. I must divine for you."

"Oh, that sounds ominous, Kit," Tori said, her grin taking on an evil edge. "Rose, you'd better do a reading for him right now."

"Yes," the diviner agreed fervently. She began shuffling her cards. "Agent Morris, begin by clearing your mind?—"

The bell above the guild's door jingled, and I looked desperately over my shoulder.

"Darius!" I exclaimed with way too much enthusiasm. "Sorry, Rose. Work to do."

Her face fell. "But your future?—"

"I'll manage, thanks." I turned to Tori. "By the way, I'm busy every weekend for the next three months."

Her mouth fell open. "What? Why?"

I gave her a "you could've helped me, but you didn't, and that's what you get" look, to which she responded with a "your next drink may contain arsenic" look, and then I zoomed away from the bar to join Darius by the stairs.

"It's so weird," I commented as we started up the steps, the guild master in the lead.

"What is?" he asked over his shoulder.

"Most people in this guild actually like me." I tilted my head in thought. "They all seem to like each other, too."

It shouldn't have been that strange of a phenomenon, really. But my experiences with KCQ, my first guild, had involved a lot less good-natured banter and a lot more checking your back for unexpected knives. My precinct wasn't exactly populated by Judases and Brutuses, but there wasn't a ton of camaraderie either. Agents worked with their partners or small teams, but otherwise, we did our own thing.

"I'm sure Tori has a list of guildmates she'd be happy to never see again," Darius remarked.

"Not a list," I mused. "A dartboard. With photos of their faces."

"A definite possibility."

We passed the second-floor landing, which led to a communal work room, and continued up to the guild's third level. When we reached the top, I took two quick steps to fall in beside Darius.

"Seriously," I said as we walked down the hall. "Do you have some secret trick for the friendly ‘extended family' vibe here? Is there a Seven Habits of Highly Affable Guilds how-to book?"

He shrugged as we rounded a corner and stopped at a closed door. "Not all members are close, but we're all committed to the guild as a whole. It's difficult to unite individuals to other individuals, but it's easy to unite them under a shared ideal." He unlocked the door with a key from his pocket, and as he pushed it open, he added, "That concept also works for our enemies, unfortunately."

The space we entered had previously served as a rarely used boardroom. It was now our center of operations—or, at least, our depository of information. Piles of papers and stacks of bulging folders that would have made Blythe envious covered the long table, chaotically marked with colorful sticky notes. The only thing missing was a giant corkboard covered in newspaper clippings, blurred photographs, and red string.

I'd spent so many hours in this room over the past five months that I knew exactly which documents had come from Tino. They were the only ones I didn't immediately recognize. Zipping straight to the end of the table, I dropped into a chair and leaned over the new stack. The top sheet featured a grainy photocopy of an Arcana circle and lots of tiny handwritten Latin. I quickly flipped through the stack, finding more poor-quality copies and a few sheets of aged, yellowed paper.

"You might find the other pile more helpful," Darius said as he settled in the chair beside mine. "I only asked Tino to store the documents for me, but he can't resist anything older than fifty years and in need of translation."

I turned to the second stack, which had seemed less interesting at first glance—a stapled bundle of lined pages full of boxy printing. I skimmed the first page, eyebrows rising, then flipped rapidly through it.

"Wow, Tino is one thorough dude."

"One of his many admirable traits," Darius replied, and damned if I couldn't tell whether he was being sarcastic or not. "He translated each document and noted his interpretation of the purpose for each, where applicable."

I nodded distractedly as I skimmed Tino's notes about that top page with the Arcana circle—which was actually a very nasty mass-murder spell outlawed in the 1500s. It surprised me that something so horrific had only been illegal for half a millennium. It should've been illegal since the dawn of humankind.

"So Tino saved us a whole bunch of time figuring out which of this outlawed, illegal, and/or extra evil magic might be of interest to the Consilium," I concluded.

"All of it was of interest to them at one point or another." Darius tapped the stack of old documents. "I found all of these in the hands of various Consilium supporters."

Consilium supporters he'd murdered, but he didn't say it and neither did I.

"What we don't know is how active their interest in any of them is, or whether they have plans to utilize any—or all—of these options." He leaned back in his chair. "Though I doubt they'd use all of them."

"Yeah, no kidding. Is this for real?" I waved at the page of Tino's handwriting I was skimming. "An experimental spell to explode the moon?"

Darius's mouth curved up. "My point exactly."

Shaking my head, I started flipping through the original documents, searching for the moon-splosion one, when I stopped on a page that featured an illustration, not a spell.

It was a drawing of a single man that resembled an odd combination of an Egyptian hieroglyph and a medieval medical sketch. His arms were spread wide, and he appeared to be levitating off the ground. Above his left hand hovered four symbols: a flame, a water droplet, what was probably a rock, and a trio of squiggly lines I assumed was either meant to represent wind or perfectly cooked bacon. Over his right hand sat an Arcana circle surrounded by sparkly dots. Beneath his levitating feet were leafy vines and swirly lines, and above his head were three more symbols: a hand, an eye, and a triangular shape I couldn't interpret.

And at the center of the man's forehead, the artist had drawn a sun-shaped emblem.

"What's this one?"

"Ah." Darius shrugged. "That one isn't likely to be useful. The rest of the documentation that went with it was lost."

I frowned at him. "Lost how?"

"I was interrupted and had to leave it behind." He rolled his chair back. "I'd hoped to steal it out of MPD evidence storage, but it disappeared before I had the chance, as evidence relating to the Consilium typically does."

"Damn," I muttered, staring at that odd sun symbol on the illustrated man's forehead.

"You'll want to read Tino's notes from front to back." Darius rose to his feet. "Twenty years ago, the Consilium was very interested in illegal magic and artifacts. That probably hasn't changed."

Nodding, I resettled the stack without disturbing the order of the pages and swiveled to face Darius as he sat down in front of a laptop halfway along the table.

"How did it go with your current batch of stooges?" I asked, using my feet to wheel myself along the table until I was parked beside him. "Mine, by the way, were a bunch of dead ends. Again."

Darius nodded without surprise. "Mine as well, though I'm waiting to hear back from a contact on the artifact broker."

"How many more suspected Consilium lackeys do we still have to probe?"

"Fewer than fifty."

I winced. Fifty was still a lot of frustrating sleuthing. Twenty years ago, Darius and his allies had collected a giant list of suspicious mythics who were possibly involved with the Consilium's activities. Darius had left the list with Josip—the cigar-smoking, Croatian guy-who-knows-a-guy—for safekeeping.

After recovering the list last month, we'd been divvying up the names and digging into the backgrounds of everyone on it, trying to figure who might still be buddy-buddy with the Consilium of the twenty-first century.

"Oh," I said as a thought popped into my head. "We didn't happen to skip over a Peter Kade on the list, did we?"

"Not likely. Who is Peter Kade?"

The name "Kade" would've rung about a bazillion bells if it'd been in any of these files. Nonetheless, I pulled the folder over to me—yes, I knew exactly which one without having to look at the label—and skimmed down the master list of names, just to be sure.

While I fruitlessly triple-checked everything, I filled Darius in on what I'd learned from Kade Jr.'s middle school teacher. When the list, as expected, produced exactly zero "Kade" references, I rolled my chair back down the table to Tino's notes, leaving Darius at the laptop, where he dug into yet another two-decades-old name from the list.

As I picked up the fat bundle of translations, I gazed across the overflowing table. It was wild to me that Darius and his allies had gathered this level of intelligence on the down-low—and in the age of dial-up internet, no less. From suspicious financial records within the MPD—provided by a mysterious contact Darius would tell me nothing about—to a list of MPD-sanctioned contract killings—provided by an old assassin buddy of Darius's—to business records of suspected Consilium puppet companies, we had oodles of info.

Unfortunately, half of it was out of date, and we had yet to find a solid lead on the Consilium's current operations or who their top guns in the upper echelon of the MPD were.

Not for the first time, my thoughts slid to Lienna. I wanted her here helping us, and not just because she was insanely good at this kind of academic paper-pushing. And not just because I missed her, either. There was something magical about our two minds working in concert to solve puzzles that I just couldn't replicate with anyone else.

Before I could start thinking about texting her—or how many days it'd been since she'd last texted me—I got to work. Tino's notes were insanely detailed. Maybe a bit too detailed. I really didn't need to know the historical context of all this ancient illegal magic. I just needed to know what it was and how scared I should be.

Darius and I toiled for over an hour before my phone chimed in my pocket. I pulled it out enthusiastically, hoping for a message from Lienna, but instead, Blythe's name glowed on my screen.

"Time's up," I informed Darius as I rolled my chair back. "Captain Blythe wants a report."

With anyone else, I might've quipped about Captain Kill-Joy, but I'd noticed that Darius didn't like me throwing anything resembling disrespect in Blythe's direction. Not that he'd ever commented, but I was getting the hang of interpreting the cagey GM's non-expressions. He didn't even like me calling her Blythe, sans Captain.

I'd tried calling her Aurelia once, mostly to see the reaction I'd get. He'd barely acknowledged the first-name-dropping, but his expression had been cold enough for me to never dip a toe in those waters again.

We conferred briefly on a few more names for me to investigate from the MPD archives, and then I let myself out, feeling the weight of impending doom on my shoulders. It wasn't that Darius and I hadn't made any progress. We had dozens of potential avenues of investigation we could pursue, but none of them were strong enough to stand out.

With every week that passed, I worried that an invisible timer we didn't know existed was ticking down, and when it hit zero, it would be too late.