Death Magic

THIRTY-ONE

THE pinkie-swearing took less than five minutes and was, indeed, a solemn business. Cullen left the room right after that, saying he wanted to call Fagin’s lawyer then talk dirty to Cynna . . . “and you know how that makes Lily blush.”

Though Harry was the only brownie Lily met, the rest of his troop was nearby—out in the backyard, having fun hiding from the guards. Whatever magic brownies used to hide in plain sight didn’t work on Lily or Cullen, who was shielded against mind-magic. It worked great on everyone else. Very good spies, indeed.

“Dul-dul works on scent,” Harry said when Lily asked why the lupi couldn’t find him or his troop. He was perched on a small stack of books set on one of the chairs so he could join them at the table. “Not hearing or touch, though. Just sight and scent.”

“Why scent but not hearing?”

He rolled his big green eyes. He had long lashes and cute little eyebrows that made perpetually surprised arches. “Because we need it to work on scent, of course. We can learn how to move silently, but we can’t learn how to not smell, can we?”

That wasn’t exactly an answer. “How did you get in? Everything’s locked.”

That just made him giggle.

Before asking him about his ability to hide, Lily had asked several questions about Parrott’s meetings with Chittenden. It turned out that brownies loved watches and clocks and had a keen sense of time on the hours, minutes, and seconds level. They had very little grasp of calendars. Harry knew Chittenden’s last visit to Parrott had taken place the day Sadie’s cousin Hermie let the pigeons out of that coop over by the park with the cannons—and hadn’t that been fun? He didn’t have any idea what day that was. After some nose-wrinkled thought, he decided it might have been ten days ago. Or maybe five. Or fifteen?

Fortunately, Rule knew what day Harry had reported the meeting to Ruben: a week ago yesterday.

However lacking they might be with calendars, they were aces at details. The kind of details that interested them, at least. Lily learned a great deal about the flora and fauna in Parrott’s yard and a fair amount about his neighbors. The couple on the west side had three kids, two dogs, and a nanny—who was playing hide the pickle with the husband and oyster diver with the wife.

It was a rambling report, but there were some good nuggets in it. “I’m wondering if you could follow someone for me.” She glanced at Rule. “That homeless woman you talked to. If we knew where she sleeps, we’d have an idea where to ask questions, see if anyone else has seen anything. I’m thinking we could show pictures of Parrott, Mullins, Drummond, and Chittenden.”

They arranged for Harry to meet them at the Twelfth Street Kitchen at three. “How do you get around the city?” Lily asked.

“Cars, mostly. Motorcycles are more fun, but it’s hard to keep from touching the driver.” Harry hopped down—straight down to the floor, which seemed like a long drop for someone only eighteen inches high. But Lily knew Harry could jump a lot farther than that without harm. Like everyone else in the country, she’d watched videos of brownie acrobatics on brownies.com. The Wall Street Journal said the brownies made a tidy amount of money selling ad rights on their site.

“They perch on the bumpers, I’m told,” Rule said, rising. “Harry, you’ll take my good wishes to the others?”

“Sure.” Guileless green eyes beamed up at Rule.

“And this goes along with those wishes.” He knelt and held out a small plastic Baggie filled with Hershey’s Kisses.

Harry nodded happily as he accepted the Baggie. In the old days, brownies were happy with a saucer of milk. That was before they discovered chocolate.

Rule went to the back door. “And Harry?”

“Yes?”

“Give Lily back her ring.”

Lily’s gaze jumped to her left hand . . . which was bare. “How the hell—”

Harry chortled and slapped his thigh. “You’re getting better, big wolf!” He reached into one of his many pockets and took out her ring. “Here you go!”

Rule accepted it. “This ring is off-limits for the game.”

“Sure.” Harry nodded, his eyes twinkling. “Whatever you say.”

Karonski spoke. “Harry, what would you do if someone played the game with your grandmother’s ti-tutwelli?”

Harry giggled. “No one would do that!”

“Pretend someone did.”

The brownie wrinkled up his cute little face and thought about it. “I guess I’d pull their guts out through their nose.”

Karonski nodded as if that’s what he’d expected. “The way you feel about your ancestors’ ti-tutwella? That’s how humans are about their wedding rings. Now, Lily’s ring is an engagement ring, not a wedding ring. An engagement ring is not quite as important as a wedding ring. What would you say, Lily—maybe seventy percent as important? Eighty?”

Harry squeaked like a mouse. Amber skin paled to an ashy shade. His gaze darted between Lily and Rule. “I didn’t know that. I really, truly didn’t know that. Are we okay?”

“The ring,” Rule said, “is off-limits.”

“It is! It is one hundred percent points off-limits!”

“Then we’re fine. See you at three.” Rule opened the door. The little brownie bounded out as if a werewolf was after him, the Baggie of Hershey’s Kisses slung over his shoulder.

Lily watched, bemused. “What in the world was that about?”

Rule shut the door and came to her. “You don’t seem upset.” He handed her the ring.

“Baffled, more like.” She slid the ring back where it belonged. “But he’s so cute it’s creepy. At least now I know what’s behind all that cute—larceny.” She frowned and took the ring off, then slid it back on. “How in the world did he get it off my finger without me noticing?”

“That I can’t tell you. Harry would be deeply wounded if you called him a thief, though. Taking your ring was part of the game. Brownies play it constantly. I don’t know all the rules, but I think anything that’s in plain sight is fair game. If they snitch something and leave without you noticing, you have to pay a forfeit to get it back. The forfeits can be quite imaginative.”

“And if you catch them, they just give it back. They don’t have to pay a forfeit?”

“There are points involved,” Karonski said. “But don’t ever ask them how the points are figured. The scoring seems to change on a whim.”

“Huh.” Lily frowned at her ring. Harry should not have been able to remove it without her feeling it move. He couldn’t have used magic on her, so how . . .

Cullen breezed back into the kitchen “The runt’s gone? Good.”

“Why do you dislike Harry?” Lily asked.

“Because he’s a sneaky little bugger.”

Rule said dryly, “Several years ago, before Cullen got those shields, a brownie snitched an old document he’d recently acquired. He wanted it back badly enough to pay the forfeit—which meant running around the block three times. Backward.”

“The little bastards ran alongside me and laughed the whole time. I couldn’t see them, but I damn sure heard them.” Cullen sat at the table. “Sneaky little buggers, every one. Now, I’ve got to meet Fagin’s lawyer at the bank in an hour, so we have to be quick. And don’t give me a hard time about rushing off,” he told Lily. “If we’re really lucky, that grimoire will give me something solid about dopplegängers. What I’ve got is rumor and conjecture and not worth much. Oh, and you may be getting a call from a priest.”

“A priest.”

He nodded. “The one who married me and Cynna. Father Michaels. Cynna’s going to call him. It’s possible the Church knows something about dopplegängers.”

“You discussed this with Cynna over the phone? I don’t like to be paranoid, but your phone could be tapped.”

Rule spoke. “Cullen has a new spell that’s supposed to block anyone trying to listen in technologically. I have no idea how it works, but it’s tricky and requires physical components. Which I imagine is the real reason he made his calls in his room.”

“Okay.” She looked at Cullen. “And you think the Church knows something about dopplegängers.”

“Something, yes.” He shrugged. “The pope declared them anathema back in the sixteenth century and trained a special group of priests to banish them. That’s one reason the rumors about them never quite died out—the Church took them seriously.”

“The sixteenth century was a long time ago. Surely this Father Michaels won’t know how to banish dopplegängers.”

“No, but he’s got a mentor who’s pretty far up the ladder in the Jesuits. Those people know how to hang on to information—and secrets. If anyone has anything solid about dopplegängers, it’ll be them. The real question is whether Father Michaels can pry anything loose from his buddy.”

“I’m going to have to go pretty soon, too,” Karonski said. “But I’ve got a question for Seabourne first.”

“Shoot.”

“If it was a dopplegänger that put the potion in Ruben’s coffee, does that mean we don’t have a traitor in the Bureau?”

Lily’s heart jumped. She hadn’t thought of that.

“Afraid not,” Cullen said, “if what little I think I know about dopplegängers turns out to be true. Dopplegängers are physical doubles, but they don’t get the mind and memories of the original. They have to be piloted or controlled, and the pilot has to be fairly close to the dopplegänger. I don’t know how close, but Ruben’s office is in a subbasement. Underground, in other words. Earth blocks mind-magic, so the pilot pretty much had to be on the same level as the dopplegänger to direct it.”

Lily drummed her fingers on the table. “So making dopplegängers takes lots of power, which our perps are supplying with death magic. They’re made mostly of water, and they don’t have minds of their own—”

“Hold off on the assuming. They don’t have the original’s mind and memories. Whether or not they can think, if they’re aware at all, I have no idea. A couple more things that all the accounts agree on. They’re temporary constructs. I don’t know how temporary, but it’s probably related to power. The more power poured into them, the longer they’d last.”

That made sense. “And this amulet we’re assuming Rethna made. The thing that makes dopplegängers. It wouldn’t be a one-shot deal, would it? They can make more dopplegängers. But would they be more Idas and Rubens? Can they change the setting on the amulet to make dopplegängers of other people? Or do they have more than one amulet, with each one set to a specific dopplegänger?”

Cullen frowned. “Hmm. I think the amulet could be reset each time it’s used. No, I think it would have to be. I suspect the amulet does the heavy lifting—the parts of the spell no one here would be able to handle. Whoever uses it supplies part of the spell, though—probably through a fairly simple ritual—as well as the blood or tissue from whoever they’re copying. The user would need to be Gifted and have some knowledge of spellwork. Not a lot, maybe, but some. I’m sure about the tissue and blood part,” he added. “That’s definitely part of the spell or ritual. The rest is guesswork.”

Rule asked, “Would they need to do the ritual with the artifact at the same time they killed to create the death magic they need? Does it all happen in one location, all at the same time?”

“The artifact would’ve been the focus of the death magic ritual, the place their leader directed the power. The ritual invoking the amulet could be done at any time after it was charged. If Rethna was an adept, we have to assume he could make an amulet that stored power well. The one real limit is on how long the dopplegängers last. No, there are two limits. First, our bad guy had to be in Headquarters, probably on Ruben’s floor, when he invoked it. Second, there’s timing. Unless you’ve got a constant power source—like ritually killing people every hour or something—any dopplegängers you make are going to be short-lived. Or so I think. I don’t—”

His phone chimed. He took it out, glanced at it. “José says the rental car I sent for is out front. I’d better go. I have to drive the rental company guy back to their lot, wherever that is, before I head to the bank. You got so surly when I used yours last time,” he said, rising and slipping his phone back in his pocket. “I thought I’d better get my own wheels—on your dime, of course.”

“Of course. You’re here on clan business.”

Cullen grinned. “Who says I can’t be considerate? I was frugal, too, and passed on the Ferrari.”

“You’ll take a guard with you.”

Cullen stopped. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Our enemies want you dead. You’re still injured. You do a good job of hiding it, but you are. You’ll take a guard with you.”

Rule was using his mantle voice. Lily couldn’t feel it the way Cullen undoubtedly did. Cullen managed to argue anyway. “You don’t have enough guards here as it is.”

“More are on the way. Leidolf, since they’re close. I called Alex this morning.” Rule had his phone out. He tapped the screen a few times. “José has assigned Steve to you. He’ll meet you out front.”

Cullen rolled his eyes. “All right, but I drive. Oh. I almost forgot. I don’t know that it will help, but there’s one other thing you might need to know. The tissue or blood used to make a dopplegänger has to come from a living person. Or bumblebee, as the case may be.”

“I don’t see how that’s significant,” Rule said.

Cullen shrugged. “I don’t, either, but—”

“I do.” Lily’s hands were cold. Her stomach was knotted. “I think I do.” She looked at Rule. “You remember I couldn’t figure out why I was put in that particular jail. Why was it suddenly best to get me locked up instead of killing me? It’s almost always easier to kill someone than to frame them. I couldn’t figure it out.”

Rule didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The tightness in his face said he was following her very well.

“That jail has a policy,” she went on. “Everyone—even those just in holding—are tested for HIV. They took blood from me.”