Paranoid Mage

Florida was unreasonably warm, at least to Callum’s sensibilities. Despite it being well into November, it was temperate enough he didn’t need a jacket, which just seemed wrong. He had to adjust his attire to fit in, though the license plate of his van still marked him as out of town. Admittedly, most all moving vans had plates from different states, but he still felt conspicuous.

Miami itself was no treat, either, the actual city crowded and claustrophobic, though there was more green than he had expected. The real problem, though, was that it seemed to be quite the supernatural hotspot. He could sense the trails of various mage-bubbles and spotted a number of shifters and fae with his own eyes. They seemed to cluster around the financial district, which only made sense. Even in the supernatural world, money was important.

It wasn’t just individuals, either. There were threads of wards running over the entire city; nothing immensely powerful, just something that linked various houses or businesses that had their own, denser warding schemes. If that sort of infrastructure required actual wire strung along the utility cables, that was one explanation for why it was in short supply. Utilities generally trumped luxuries.

It was the most complex magical infrastructure he’d seen, or rather, the most complex one he’d paid attention to. He hadn’t been looking for such things in other places, not even in the Night Lands, so there might well have been similar setups there he just hadn’t noticed. The one other GAR building he’d sought out had been in a far smaller city as well, so it might just be a scale issue.

Either way, he wasn’t comfortable driving around and possibly tripping some kind of alert. Given that every mage carried enchanted materials in the form of foci, the raw material he had with him probably wouldn’t set anything off, but mages also had the tattoo. Callum had no idea how much of an anomaly he’d look like, but he had to assume there was some kind of surveillance. He’d be far more comfortable if he could work his way around the various lines of wards.

He stowed the van in a parking lot and walked into town. The address of the GAR office was not in the densest part of the urban sprawl, but close enough. There were buildings everywhere, fenced in houses and squat blocks of businesses, pretty much all of which seemed to be owned and occupied by normal people. Still, mixed in here and there he saw some blatantly fae figures, or sensed some shifters by their vis.

It made the back of his neck itch, but there was nothing to make him stand out from the teeming masses, or at least he hoped there wasn’t. With his tattoo long gone and no bubble, plus having the RFID blocker in his wallet enchanted to suck up any stray vis, he shouldn’t have anything to make anyone suspicious about him being a supernatural. Not that he’d stand out in a city like Miami.

Even without the address he probably could have tracked down the office of his own accord. Not only was it at the center of the spiderweb of various ward lines, or maybe they were even mana transmission lines, but there was a subtle flow of mana coming from it. Callum was almost certain his ability to perceive mana had improved, since he was able to tell that not only was there denser mana at the GAR building, it was generating a slight current.

The effect was a very, very underpowered version of the outflow from the portal worlds, enriching the local atmosphere. Since he knew what to look for, it was easy to follow that upstream to the source, which was a fairly ordinary-looking two-story office building. At least, to his eyes it was ordinary; to judge by the layered threads of mana and vis around it, there was some serious glamour at work.

He took a walk around the block as he slowly worked his perceptions past the intricate warding, noticing a number of supernaturals coming and going even as he did so. Not just mages, either. There was a steady trickle of fae and shifters going into the office and leaving again, engaging in some kind of workaday business.

It took him at least twenty minutes of patient and focused inspection, during which he ran across a small gaming store and flipped through books as an excuse to linger, but eventually he was able to see through the outer defenses and into the actual building. Aside from the magic everywhere it was almost depressingly mundane. There were clerks at their desks, a janitorial staff emptying trash cans and vacuuming, and a bunch of offices mostly staffed by mages.

That immediately shut down the vague plans he had of leveling the building somehow. Someone had to answer for the blatant evil of kidnapping the victims of fae tricks, but it wasn’t the people who staffed the computers or cleaned the floors. The bureaucracy was evil, but it would be monstrous to judge all those laboring under it as equally evil. Some were, no doubt, but most people were likely just indifferent at worst.

It took him a bit longer to actually find the people he was looking for. The basement of the GAR office had cells that looked a lot like the ones the shifters had back in Winut, only with an additional layer of warding and shielding. That made them just that much harder to see through, and he actually went walking again in the hopes that the change in physical perspective would help him finagle his perceptions through the walls of vis and mana.

It didn’t, of course. Peering through just took time, and a sensation a little bit like his eyes adjusting to bright lights as his perceptions resolved the strands of energy. He was pretty sure it would be actually impossible for him to push his perceptions through a completely flat wall of vis or sufficiently condensed mana, but nobody used those as structures, save maybe for mage bubbles. Since every functional bit of magic had some specific shape to it, a flat wall would actually interfere with the way that a ward or shield even worked.

There were two normal people in one of the cells, with a woman lying down on a cot and a man sitting in a chair next to the cot, reading a book. He couldn’t precisely judge whether they were the exact same people he had rescued before, but they were a close match and besides, there probably weren’t many non-supernaturals floating around in GAR facilities. At the very least it was good to see they were being treated reasonably well, not that he had expected whips and chain.

It was tempting to try and pull them out right then and there, but Callum knew that he was not ready for such a thing. It’d probably cause a furor that might well bring more kill teams through the teleports, plus he wouldn’t be surprised if the pair had been tagged with tracking devices of some sort. If it were magical he could probably find it, but some little tech bug was probably beyond his abilities.

The truth was he needed some way to keep them safe, and he sure couldn’t do it alone. He could barely take care of himself, let alone some young couple who ought to be off honeymooning in Acapulco. Unfortunately, the only way he could figure that GAR would let them be was if they were taken under the wing of some supernatural force or another. He remembered, vaguely, that Lucy said that once a normal person was in the know they were supposed to be someone’s responsibility.

That was a genie he couldn’t put back in the bottle. The only thought he had to deal with that was put them in the care of someone who was supernatural, and could at least be trusted to be reasonable. He didn’t know enough about supernatural politics to know if it was really possible though, so he’d have to expose himself a little bit.

“What’s up, big man?” It was evening by the time he called, after spending a couple hours observing the GAR office. It had taken him a while, but he’d eventually concluded that some portion of the visitors were simply getting foci recharged. He wasn’t sure how the fae and shifters used magical items, or if they were just passive, but there was a definite exchange of mana-charged crystals.

“Hey Lucy, I’m kind of at an impasse,” he said, walking along a relatively uncrowded side street several blocks from the office. As much as he disliked using anything magic unless necessary, he had a glamour up just in case. “I need to know some political stuff, but the only person I can think to ask is basically you. Maybe Chester, but it might get weird.”

“Ooh, kinky.” Her tone was pitched precisely to pull an involuntary bark of laughter from him. “Whatcha need there, big man?”

“Well, you know those people you told me about? I was thinking about it and what the heck am I supposed to do with them when I get them?”

“Uh. You know what, that’s a good question.”

“Yeah, so at this point GAR knows about them and how they got pulled into the supernatural world, so it’s not like I can vanish them properly. Not unless they’re going to change identities and stuff, which is possible, but they probably wouldn’t be up for that. Most people aren’t.”

“Oof. You’re right, most people aren’t like you. No offense there, big man, I just can’t imagine keeping so low profile for so long.”

“None taken,” he told her. Sometimes he found it kind of weird himself. “You can see how they need to get some sort of supernatural sponsorship so they can live their lives normally, but that is probably quite a bit of an ask since GAR is going to want to use them against me.”

“Hoo boy, you’re not asking for a small thing there, big man. Yeah that’s a problem.”

“Right, so how do I get that protection? I’m not conversant with the internal politics but there’s got to be some way.”

“I dunno, big man. If the people up top want something, and want it hard enough, it’s awful hard to say no.”

“Sure, but, they can’t all be aligned. Internal politics and that.”

“Oh, yeah, no, there’s all kinds of bickering. Let me give it a think, big man.” There was silence from the phone for a little bit. “Okay, okay, I think I’ve got an inkling of a hint. You said you rescued them from fae?”

“A wild hunt,” Callum confirmed. “Or their re-creation of it, anyway.”

“That means that they’re sort of under the fae’s umbrella, then.”

“I’m hardly going to send them back to the people who were hunting them,” Callum said dryly.

“No, no, I mean. Not all the fae are like that, I mean, they’re all a bit weird but that whole human-hunting thing is not normal. Heck, they fight each other way more than they bother humans.”

“Mmm.” He could see that. A lot of the nonhumans he’d seen over the years were fae and for the most part they hadn’t been given anyone issues, even if it was damn weird to see a tusked ogre thing buying eggs at the grocery. “Okay I can buy that much. What are you thinking?”

“Didn’t the fae make that pair an offer of some sort?”

“Hmm, yes,” Callum said slowly, starting to see what Lucy was getting at. “That if they survived to sunrise they’d be free.”

“So there you go. Fae take their offers very seriously, and right now, GAR is breaking that agreement.”

“Huh. I don’t know that I like it, but what do you think are the odds? That the fae would actually make sure they were left alone?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask. I may not be as plugged into the GAR stuff as before but I can get you a direct line. So, some advice: giving the local fae king a reason to stick his thumb in the eye both of GAR and of a different fae king might be enough for him.”

“Mm.” Callum considered it. He didn’t much like the idea of dealing with the fae directly, but he’d always known that at some point he’d have to interact with the frameworks of authority. Most people couldn’t exist outside them, for very good reason, and it wasn’t like he didn’t already have some illicit links in the persons of Lucy and Chester.

The question was how much he was willing to risk. Pragmatically, he couldn’t give up everything to help two people, and just in driving to Florida he’d let emotional reasoning rule him maybe too much. At the same time, he wasn’t going to give up just because he had to do something difficult.

“Can it be done safely?”

“If you mean can I get you an anonymous link to them, yeah I think so. If you mean can you deal with the fae without agreeing to something you didn’t mean to, that’s on you, big man. It’s not like they can bind you to anything over the phone, but, you know. Still don’t want to agree to things you shouldn’t.”

“I suppose I have to give it a try. Unless you think Chester would be willing to help?”

“Nah, not without a lot of finagling. Keeping people unmolested by GAR is a completely different ball game from deniable assets. I could be wrong, but I just don’t see him taking that risk.” Callum had more or less figured that. Just because he avoided politics didn’t mean he was totally unaware of the subtleties of high-level play.

“So what do I need to do to talk to this fae?”

“Weeelll,” Lucy drew the word out, and he could hear papers shuffling in the background. “First I gotta tell you, Jissarrell, the fae king who was after you before, has been telling the story of tracking you over to Europe all over the place. So you’ve got a reputation, and they gave you that scary name and you’re supposed to be some real bad dude with big backers and stuff.”

“I knew I wasn’t really anonymous anymore, but I don’t like that.” He still found being called The Ghost incredibly stupid, but there were probably worse things he could be called.

“Not much you can do about it, big man. Fae loooove their stories.”

“Ugh.” Callum tried to recall what he’d read about the fae, that wasn’t confused with pop culture descriptions. “They actually can lie, right?”

“The less powerful ones, definitely, but the kings and stuff, not really. Supposedly the King and Queen back in Faerie literally can’t, because if they say something it just is true.”

“Well that’s not terrifying at all.” It sounded like Faerie was very definitely not on his list of tourist destinations.

“Eh, yeah, but that’s so deep in Faerie you’ll never see it. Of course, that’s all stories I’ve heard from the fae that moved out here so who knows how accurate it is.”

“Mm, so, they’ll keep their word and not lie, but be careful of what words?”

“That’s exactly it, big man.”

Callum considered. On one hand, he absolutely was not the caliber of person who negotiated with fae kings. On the other hand, something he’d learned while being a consultant was that all that mattered most of the time was projecting that you were, in fact, capable. The old adage about faking it until making it was not entirely untrue, and if he did have a reputation, it was something he should take advantage of.

“Alright, how do I get in touch with the guy? Obviously with the maximum possible mystique.”

“Ha! Yeah okay, so, I can do some telecoms magic on my end if you give me a minute. The King of Miami is named Ferrochar, and I think he thinks he’s part dragon or something. He loves gold and owns a huge bank.” Lucy gave him the name and address, which he marked down in his notebook. “Pretty sure he’s not actually part dragon though.”

“Yeah, I’ve met a dragonblooded. Definitely aren’t going to be any dragon-fae hybrids running around anytime soon.” Even as he said that, he realized he couldn’t be sure, but if they were mostly just avatars he didn’t think any dragon would be too interested. It was a moot point, though.

Callum juggled his phone, retrieving his laptop from the carry-bag he had it in and sorting through the stuff he’d downloaded from Lucy. So far he hadn’t even learned the names of the people he was rescuing and he’d need that for his chat with Ferrochar. The email Lucy had given him had at the briefest possible precis, naming them as Leo and Danika Connors, physical trainer and nurse respectively. Where they were employed and what their current legal status was, it didn’t say, but if they were missing for too long then any cover story would be somewhat strained.

“By the way, Lucy,” he said, scribbling some quick notes to himself on his notepad.

“Yeah, big man?”

“Thanks so much for the help.” Callum couldn’t help but let the genuine appreciation for the one normal human contact in his life bleed through. “You’re just, absolutely the best.”

“Hey! Yeah, you’re welcome!” Lucy sounded a little flustered, but she recovered quickly. “But it’s gonna cost ya!”

“Fifty a night, right?” Callum said. Lucy laughed.

“All right, big man, let me get this set up before we get into trouble,” she said. Callum smiled and tapped a few more notes, keeping a sweep of the area with his perceptions. Despite the hour, there were still an awful lot of people out and about, both mundane and supernatural, though none of them seemed to notice him in particular.

Just tracking them nearby made him twitch, especially since some number of them were undoubtedly murderers, but he wasn’t there to exact vigilante justice. Not exactly. Not unless he saw something that needed it.

If vampires all preyed on humanity, it might well be justified to erase them from existence, but that kind of systematic extermination was not something he could do. Not if he wanted to remain human himself. Even what he had already done had changed him, and although he had every intention of dealing with whatever evil crossed his path, he didn’t want to start seeking it out.

He took a few breaths, trying to figure out his mindset for dealing with Ferrochar. So far he’d been more or less winging it whenever he had to deal with the supernatural world, and while that worked to some extent, he didn’t have the security of obscurity from before. Rather, he had to create an entirely new layer of protection by this persona of the Ghost.

Which was a really stupid name.

“H’okay, big man. According to the records I have I’ll be putting you through to Ferrochar’s general. That’s the closest I can get you.”

“I appreciate it, Lucy. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“You’d better!” With that, the phone clicked over and rang twice. A voice answered, saying something in Gaelic.

“This is the Ghost,” Callum said, not bothering to try and disguise his voice. For this, it was known who he was. “Connect me to King Ferrochar.”

There was silence from the other end, and he could imagine Lucy tittering away somewhere at the introduction. It was a little bit overbearing and ostentatious, but if he understood things right that was just a bonus to the fae. Dragons might see the world as a play, but fae considered themselves actors in a theatre.

“This is King Ferrochar,” a gravely voice rumbled. “To what do I owe this call?”

“I have an opportunity for you to annoy both GAR and King Jissarrell,” Callum said, keeping things short, to the point, and framed in Ferrochar’s interest. While he had never been excellent at sales, he’d learned enough to at least sell his services to his customers.

“Oho? I didn’t realize the Ghost was playing politics now.”

“There are political consequences to any direct action,” Callum said obliquely. He really didn’t want Ferrochar to know that the Connors’ were actually his first priority. “An acquaintance of mine suggested you would enjoy those consequences the most.”

“Enjoy them? Ha! I like the way you put things. And someone I know, knows you? Fascinating…” Ferrochar trailed off, considering, which Callum didn’t like. For all he knew, the fae had some weird spell that could track people along connections like that, so he bulled on ahead before the fae king could pursue that line of thought.

“GAR has annoyed me by taking two mundanes, Leo and Danika Connors, into custody. I do not like that my interests are being meddled with, so they will not be in custody much longer. One of King Jissarrell’s nobles promised them freedom if they survived until sunrise. They are currently not free.” He kept things short and obvious, but tried to avoiding stating his precise intentions. The more the fae read into things what they wanted to see, the better.

“That is interesting,” Ferrochar mused. “Perhaps a little specious, to claim that an agreement had been broken, but without sophistry, where would we be?”

“I wish for them to live their life without any supernatural influence due to their connection to my activities,” Callum continued, ignoring Ferrochar’s continued prodding. “I imagine it would take a fae king to make that happen.”

“I could…” Ferrochar mused. “It would be quite fun to poke some noses, but at the same time, it’s not all that interesting. What do you think, my queen?”

“I want to see the Ghost in action,” a female voice said. Callum grimaced, because he didn’t know what the queen’s name was, and he really would have preferred to maintain a veneer of omniscience. “If the Ghost is to visit our fair city, then surely he will not leave without exhibiting his skills.”

“That is a wonderful idea, my queen. If such mundanes as you describe made their way to our door, then we would be willing to shelter them. Of course, we couldn’t possibly retrieve them from GAR custody ourselves. And it would be far easier to claim we have no idea how they arrived if the ward-lines were to mysteriously go dark.”

“And with the wards out, the fact that nobody will be tracking your activities is merely happenstance,” Callum said, trying to act like that had occurred to him long before the conversation.

“Oh, entirely,” Ferrochar said gleefully. “Of course, considering your proclivities so far, I will muse idly that the wards are to protect supernaturals from each other, and mundanes probably wouldn’t even notice the difference.”

“Of course, we can’t make any deals with someone wanted by GAR,” the queen’s voice came. “These are things that would simply happen.”

“They do happen when I am about,” Callum agreed. He was actually happy with such an offer, since it meant he wasn’t unleashing some wild hunt on other poor folks. There were some very noticeable gaps, though. “I suppose it would be unsporting if your subjects who would be in the area were to be less observant than usual.”

“Certainly not! We can’t breach our agreements with GAR, after all, but I assume the Ghost would have no issues avoiding such a simple thing.”

“No doubt,” Callum said dryly. It didn’t much surprise him, and in fact, he would not be much surprised if there was extra surveillance. At this point they even knew he was a spatial mage, so there might be some special pieces of surveillance just for that. On the other hand, it was obvious from the coarse framework of the wards they were using that he could still operate below their resolution.

He just had to be extra careful.

Frankly, he didn’t like it. He didn’t want to draw the attention, he didn’t want it to be known that he cared, he didn’t want to be connected to anything except by rumor and implication. Yet, it was probably the only way to keep the Connors safe, and it was obvious that in the future he would have to be even more careful about leaving evidence where normal folks were involved.

Or he’d have to do what he was doing now, and make sure that they understood that any time they tried to get a handle on him, he’d punish them for it. In some ways that was far more sure, but he struggled with it because it was not a simple of matter of dealing with obvious problems. There was some degree of malice aforethought, and he had to be damn sure of his targets and damn sure of his reasoning.

“I believe we have an understanding,” Callum said. “Do you agree?”

“Once and twice and thrice, I so agree,” Ferrochar said, which sounded to Callum like as strong an oath as he was going to get for something so unofficial.

“Excellent,” Callum said, and hung up. Then he extracted the memory and SIM cards from the phone and surreptitiously teleported it into the nearest storm drain. It might have been a little bit overcautious, but there was no telling what was possible with the fae.

Mostly, he didn’t trust that Ferrochar wouldn’t somehow try to track him down just for the fun of it, though it was probably next to impossible with whatever obscured routing Lucy had set up. The thought of which made him get a different phone and text her about Ferrochar maybe trying to track her. He couldn’t do anything about that, but perhaps she could.

In truth, the extra conditions Ferrochar wanted for no doubt nefarious purposes were basically what he’d have to do anyway. Callum didn’t want to attack random employees at the GAR office, but infrastructure was another matter. The ward setup was just too dangerous, as were the teleportation platforms. The only problem was the dubious morality of letting the fae run free.

It was a lesson to him to not allow any loose ends in the future. The less he had to interact with the corrupt power structures of backstabbing and grift, the less he’d compromise himself. Keeping free of such loose ends might not really be possible with fae around, but on the other hand, if the fae were marginally on his side that would help. He imagined that was how GAR had found the Connors, anyway.

Ultimately he needed a way to get GAR to leave him alone completely, and that wasn’t going to happen at the moment. It was a process, either of becoming more invisible or more dangerous or both, and he wasn’t there on either front yet. He just had to work with what he had.

Now that he had specific targets, he swept his senses back over the GAR office as he walked away from it. The ward-lines over the city merged into the GAR wards, but all those had to be controlled from somewhere. There were undoubtedly some that were independent, but removing the central control would have to count for something. Besides which, he could probably snip the wires that carried the ward thread-lines outward.

The interior of GAR was so dense with various vis threads for wards and whatever other magics were in play that it took him some time to find the center. The actual core, where everything linked up, was in one of the rooms near the center of the second floor. When he peeked inside it, though, he didn’t just see the enchantment that tied it all together. He also saw the source of the abundant mana.

There was a portal.

It was tiny, about the diameter of his pinky finger, and while he couldn’t tell much about what was on the other side, it seemed to be very close to, or even inside, a portal world. It might have been inside the actual facility that guarded the dimensional portals themselves as, though he hadn’t seen anything in the Ardennes, he hadn’t been looking, either. In hindsight, it was obvious that the extra mana had to be coming from its ultimate source, and if they had teleportation enchantments, portal enchantments were only logical.

Callum practically wheeled in place as he hunted for a location where he could sit down and pull out his laptop. Even if getting the Connors out was his first priority, there was no way he could turn down the opportunity to sketch out the portal enchant. Even at a glance it was obvious that the portal enchant was so mana-hungry that making large permanent portals was a nonstarter outside of the portal worlds themselves, but even a small one could be insanely useful.

It seemed a little odd they were that inefficient, considering that he didn’t find portals that much more taxing than teleports, but he still didn’t have a good grasp of the complexities of enchanting. Then again, the long-distance teleport took way more juice than just the normal one, and a portal was a constant drain rather than a one-time one, so maybe it made sense. All the spatial stuff was excessively advanced anyway, and while he could copy it, he didn’t fully understand it.

While his senses were mostly focused on the enchantment powering the portal, he still noticed what might be termed the night shift arriving at the GAR site. Some fae, of course, including a few of the pixies, and a number of vampires settled into various offices throughout the building. He had to admit it was absolutely surreal to think of some blood-sucking magical being doing data entry, but GAR seemed to be like any bureaucracy, which meant paperwork.

Miami’s excessive night life worked in his favor, because there was a café that was still open and had actual customers that let him keep the GAR office within range of his senses, although at the extreme end of them. While normally he didn’t rely on chemical stimulation, it was looking to be a long night so he ordered coffee while he booted his CAD program. He worked as fast as he could, feeling guilty the whole while, but the Connors had been in custody for days so another half-hour wouldn’t make too much difference.

Like the teleport spell, it was something that had been sawed in half, but it was far more intricate. Unlike any previous enchantment he’d looked at, it actually had different sized wires, likely to go with the different sized components of the portal. Like the dragonlands portal, there were intakes and recirculation structures on a smaller scale than the main portal frame. The smallest ones weren’t as small as his threads, and the largest ones weren’t as relatively outsized as the portal’s tubes, but they were very definitely on different scales. Fortunately, those were reflected by physically smaller and larger bits of enchanting metal.

It would take some practice, but he was pretty sure that he could reproduce the pattern himself. Once he had it down to his satisfaction, Callum packed up and headed back to his U-Haul. He knew where the teleporters were, he knew where the wards are, and he knew where the Connors were. All he needed was a plan.