Paranoid Mage

“Well, this is weird as heck,” Lucy said, squinting at her phone. Callum had no idea how it was comfortable for her to sprawl across the couch at that angle, let alone read on her smartphone while half upside-down. If he tried that he’d have a headache in about a minute.

“You can’t just leave it there,” Callum said, not looking up from where he was trying to feed Alexander. Mage baby or not, he was still as fussy and messy as any child that age. “Considering our line of work, if something’s weird it’s weird.”

“No kidding!” Lucy agreed. “One of the packs out near California had a run-in with a vampire that turned into bats and flew away.”

“Um.” Callum blinked. “Vampires can’t do that though, can they?”

“Nope.” Lucy said. “That’s just mythology. So what the heck?”

“Maybe it was some kind of glamour or illusion? I don’t know why they’d go with something that involved, though,” Callum said, wiping off Alexander’s chin. “Unless — you know, that would kind of make sense for a fae, right?”

“I guess, but why would they be masquerading as a vamp?” Lucy rolled off the couch and onto her feet. “I mean, okay, I guess that’s an option for fae, but why would they bother? I dunno, maybe they’re making up something to cover why they let a vamp get away.”

“That’s possible,” Callum agreed. He didn’t believe shifters were very far different from ordinary humans when it came to that sort of thing. For that matter, he would bet there was the same impulse to shirk and deflect in vampires and fae, so someone inventing a wild tale wasn’t out of the question. The question would be why, since if they needed help with a vampire nest they only needed to supply The Ghost with certain details.

“I think we’ll have to look into it anyway. Vamps are bad news no matter what and if they’re teaming up with other supernaturals…” Callum trailed off and shook his head.

“I mean, they’ve teamed up with other supernaturals for forever,” Lucy pointed out. “That’s what GAR is anyway, right?”

“Point,” Callum admitted. “But this feels different. Enchantments are pretty damn limited if you’re not a mage, but fae magic can do more if you can get ahold of it, right?”

“I know some people use fae artifacts for stuff, but I don’t know how well they affect mages as such. Some of the things they do are just weird. Like with how they protected the Connors.” Lucy shrugged and Callum nodded. He still wasn’t sure how the fae king had managed to affect the whole of GAR; that was some world-changing power. But then again, the Connors were inside Ferrochar’s land and he’d already seen that fae kings had serious power there.

He didn’t like the idea of what fae-empowered vampires might be able to do.

“Right, well, where are we going to be looking for this storybook vampire?” He asked.

“You’re gonna laugh,” Lucy warned.

“Lay it on me.”

“Tijuana,” she said. He laughed.

“Okay, that is pretty funny,” Callum admitted. “Hard-partying vampire fae.”

“They may not even need their glamours,” Lucy agreed. “Makes me wonder what the shifter pack was doing out that way, but I guess they’re not one of Chester’s so whatever.” She waved it away. “There’s probably vampires in all the west coast cities but if we’re looking for fae you should be able to find them, right?”

“Maybe,” Callum said. “I mean, the enclaves are kind of obvious but if it’s over the whole city it might well be the same problem as hunting vampires in general. I don’t suppose they’ve got any more precise a location than a huge city.”

“Not so much. Here, check the email,” Lucy said, holding out her phone. Callum took it with telekinesis and looked over the message. What Lucy hadn’t mentioned was how careful the wording was in the email to the Ghost, as if the author was afraid he was going to offend Callum by being disrespectful. Verbal circumlocutions aside, the meat of the message was clear enough.

The Sonora pack, as they called themselves, were trying to push over to Baja California, and in doing so they’d stopped by Tijuana. The sighting in question was on the outskirts of the city, and reading between the lines someone had stumbled across a vampire trail and tracked it down to start a fight. Which seemed a poor decision from his point of view, because it was the vamps’ home turf and they’d have all the advantages. Regardless of how questionable the choices had been, it’d still led to the sighting.

Once they put Alexander down for a nap they headed down to the war room to start moving a drone in that direction. Given his slowly increasing finesse with the Alcubierre magic, it really didn’t take more than an hour or so to get a remote into the area. He’d never been to the area in his prior life as an architectural consultant, and looking at the video feed from the air he didn’t think he’d been missing much. His mental picture of a Mexican town was shaped by westerns and historical studies, but Tijuana was just another boring modern city.

He had to get surprisingly close to get a hint of the fae enclave. The subtlety of it reminded him of the fae he’d tracked down over in India, though he knew that didn’t mean they were directly connected. Still, he suspected. The enclaves in Florida and Colorado and even in Paris were all fairly obvious, almost flaunting their existence. They weren’t trying to hide, at least not from other supernaturals.

The Tijuana enclave was definitely trying to be circumspect. Callum wouldn’t have been surprised if they were completely off the books, hiding even from GAR. Though considering GAR’s diminished capacity, he wondered if there was a point to that. Admittedly, they were definitely enforcing their rules within GAR, and a lone enclave was probably easier to make an example of than either Callum or the American Alliance.

“You think maybe we should capture someone to explain what’s going on here?” Callum wondered aloud.

“I mean, that’d be awesome, but do you think you can?” Lucy asked.

“No, I don’t.” Callum sighed. “Taisen has a bunch of stuff for imprisoning supernaturals and it all looks really specialized, and he still backs it up with guards. I guess I could try tossing someone in an enclose cave; a vampire isn’t going to be able to get out of that, even if they can turn into bats. But only if there’s an opportunity.”

“Sure,” Lucy agreed. “Safety first. Also, finding them first.”

“Yeah,” Callum agreed. “Might be a while.” The enclave was spread out over a huge area, spilling over the border into California, and he had doubts that he’d find his target at the exact center. If they were trying to be subtle they’d avoid that issue exactly because it was so obvious.

In a normal fae enclave he would have used the wooden ball, but Tijuana was full of the usual hustle and bustle of a city. It was busy enough that the drone wouldn’t stand out, and besides which there was already mage activity there to mask anything he did. It wasn’t a full network like in Miami but it was clear that the fae-vamps weren’t the only game in town.

“Or maybe,” he said, musing to Lucy. “Maybe there’s already a fae presence here and the vamp types are hiding in it.”

“Eh, let me doublecheck, but I don’t think GAR has one registered there.” She took a moment off from working the cameras to dig through her database connection. Despite the clear move away from using the electronics from GAR, they hadn’t yet found Lucy’s tap nor had they purged the extant databases. Callum figured that was because most of what was in those databases was harmless and useless, except for GAR’s internal bureaucracy. Especially the parts that collected money.

While she was busy, Callum poked around the city, finding a few neighborhoods where there were mages about but no GAR office as such. Either the teleporter was like the hidden ones he’d seen, a single pad for discreet use, or the office had gotten shut down when GAR had to scale back. He didn’t see any shifters, which made sense, but he did run across traces of something that he was pretty sure was a dragonblooded.

So far the only one of those he’d met was Shahey, but he knew that there were others, if not many. For better or for worse he couldn’t find an actual dragonblooded, just traces of magic that looked like theirs. It certainly didn’t look like fae or human.

“Okay there’s a lot of entries for Tijuana,” Lucy said, sounding surprised. “More than I thought. But not a fae king or anything. Have an address for a vampire nest but I bet it’s outdated.”

“Might as well start there,” Callum said, and Lucy navigated the drone to the block in question. As expected, there weren’t any supernaturals there, but there were remnants of wards in the walls where someone had missed stripping out all of the enchantment metal, resources he promptly took for himself. If nothing else, a normal private detective could probably find out who had rented it and where they’d gone — assuming that the vampires hadn’t just brainwashed someone and hijacked the building.

He started spiraling outward from the old address, something that took a lot of time and was the reason why he didn’t just skim over every city that crossed his path. Despite the scale of his perceptions there was just so much that he’d be doing it every waking hour if he expected to get anywhere. Lucy left to go check on Alex, and Callum followed to help after a moment since he didn’t actually need to be in the war room.

It was lunch by the time something supernatural crossed his senses, and he paused in the middle of assembling his sandwich. Lucy was scowling at him because he was adding pickles, and for some reason she thought pickles on a sandwich was a travesty. When he stopped she actually brightened for a moment before he shook his head at her.

“Got something,” he said, finishing the sandwich and taking a bite. Lucy made a face at the crunch the pickle made. “We’ll see if it goes anywhere,” he added, after he chewed and swallowed.

“If it does, at least wait until Alex is finished,” Lucy said, bouncing their son before settling him in the high chair to feed him. By now he’d been up for a few hours while Callum had worked. They’d had to work their hours around his. “Your father has very weird food tastes,” she added, speaking directly to Alex. “You’d better not have inherited those.”

“What’s wrong with pickles?” Callum asked in exasperation.

“What isn’t wrong with pickles?” Lucy answered, sticking her tongue out. Alexander giggled. Callum rolled his eyes and kept teleporting the drone in pursuit of the speedster, who was actually flying. It had a small pair of butterfly wings keeping it impossibly aloft, though considering it was only three feet tall to begin with it wasn’t as silly as it might have been.

It wasn’t quite as straightforward as leading Callum right to the vampires, but the winged fae seemed to be some kind of messenger. It went from group to group of supernaturals, something that Callum considered to be rather indiscreet, but after the third stop he was more than happy to just follow it around. Even if it didn’t bring him directly to what he was searching for, it gave him a short list of supernatural concentrations.

The tracking paid off at the ninth stop, where there were a number of supernaturals resting in interior bedrooms. It only took a moment of study to determine they were vampires, given how familiar Callum was with their vis and their general physical proportions. The question was whether any of them were actually fae, or if some aspect of fae magic had altered normal vampires. Just because he’d found a nest didn’t mean he’d located the source of what had been reported.

“Right, marking this one,” Callum said, and left a drone there while he continued following the messenger with one of the others. Part of him was surprised that the drone hadn’t been noticed, though given that he was teleporting it from rooftop to rooftop several hundred feet away from the little flying faerie it would be difficult to tell even with super-senses. Whoever was in charge of the enclave probably realized there was magic about, but relative to all the residue kicked up by mage bubbles and whatever active spells were going on, his teleports were barely there.

“You think there’s more than one?” Lucy asked, taking down notes while Alexander played with blocks. “I mean, generally different nests don’t play well together.”

“Yeah, but if there’s fae involved who knows how many rules are being broken,” Callum said. “Just want to see if there’s anything else obviously off.” He rubbed at his face. It was entirely possible that the vampire nest were not the only ones who needed to be dealt with, but sorting out normal innocent supernaturals living their lives from those who were preying on people was difficult enough. Some of them might well be part of mundane crime to begin with, and that was a knot he didn’t even know how to start untangling.

The little fae seemed to have finished its route a few stops later, and while Callum was suspicious of pretty much every set of supernaturals that the messenger had visited, none of them had been doing anything obviously terrible. Not even the vampires, though Callum simply marked that down to them being inactive during the day.

If he was being fair, most supernaturals didn’t seem to be particularly evil. Vampires fed on people, and so were monsters absolutely, but it seemed to be the minority of fae who decided to go the monster route. Most of them wanted to be minor pranksters or fairy godparents or whatever harmless role they were acting out. There were probably some nasty shifter packs outside the American Alliance, but Chester had stomped on things pretty firmly, so there was less to worry about on that score. Despite knowing that, he still felt like any supernatural he ran across might be doing something terrible just out of sight.

Lacking any actual evidence, however, he returned his attention to the vampire nest. There were fifteen vampires, which was actually on the large side for a nest so far as he’d found, but if one of them was actually a fae he couldn’t tell the difference. Not with them inactive and with the lake of fae mana that every enclave had muddying the metaphorical waters. He would bet that the vampire disguise wouldn’t extend to mordite vulnerability though, so if one was unusually resistant to his bullets, that would mark them.

“Okay, let’s go downstairs so I can check the weapons and get this done.” Barring actual emergencies, he wasn’t going to perform any carnage anywhere but the war room, which was meant for that kind of thing. He had to separate the activities of the Ghost from his normal life or he’d go crazy.

“I’ll hang around outside,” Lucy said, picking up Alexander. “It isn’t naptime for a while.”

Callum nodded. There wouldn’t be anything to see, since the drone with its cameras would be parked a hundred yards away or more from the building, but neither of them felt it was appropriate to bring Alex into the war room. Hopefully by the time he was older and trying to get into places of his own accord, the war room wouldn’t be needed.

They trooped down the stairs and Callum stepped into the war room. By now it looked like some sort of CEO’s meeting room, with one wall covered in monitors and another with the magical tile arrays that Lucy had put together. There were two desks with peripherals, and the servers that powered all the electronics hummed in the corner, plus a closet with some emergency supplies of one sort and a refrigerator with emergency supplies of another.

He put the glass he’d carried with him on the desk while he started checking over the shotguns. He cleaned them after every use, and with the cave mostly covered in concrete there wasn’t that much moisture, but it was better to make sure they were functional first. He made sure they cycled properly with Lucy’s homebrew remotes, replaced the batteries in one, then opened a few small portals to load them up and focused on the building.

As usual there were wards, but at this point he barely noticed anything that wasn’t a full jammer defense. It probably was unlikely that there’d be wards at the same fidelity as his threads any time soon, both because nobody else operated at that scale and because threads that thin were so fragile. In the absence an active mage, the building was pretty much defenseless. The thralls definitely didn’t have any chance in stopping him.

“Right, starting,” he said absently, focusing on stretching out his vis threads and forming the portals. As usual he went with four at a time, so as to not overstrain his ability to multitask just in case something unexpected came up. The portals snapped open, he pressed the remote and the shotguns triggered, and then everything went sideways.

The wards that he’d bypassed so easily flared, seemingly tripped by the formation of the portals. Instead of trying to throw up a shield or trigging an alarm, it sent out a huge magical pulse that he’d never seen before. He barely had time to parse that when the pulse latched on to his vis threads, racing up through his connections, through the nexus, and into him.

Fireworks exploded behind his eyes.

***

Lucy leaned against the door jamb, making faces at Alex even though she should probably be letting him play with something more substantive. She just felt like she needed to hold onto him at the moment, reassuring herself while Callum was dealing with more horrible vampires. When she had been in GAR she’d merely disliked them, but being confronted by what they were doing, constantly, she had gotten closer to Callum’s visceral murderous reaction.

She was still glad she wasn’t doing it herself. Shooting guns was exciting and working on the automatic firing mechanisms had been fun, but there was a big huge gap between that and actually using them. Seeing how Callum’s face went cold and hard when he had to deal with monsters, she didn’t want to.

Even so she wasn’t going to leave him alone to deal with it on his own. Her worries in that direction were vague and unarticulated, but she didn’t want the man she married to change. She was his conscience and his sense of fun, and after the massive mistake with Constance it was even more clear that he needed her for both things. So she stayed.

Suddenly he made a garbled noise and she glanced in to see him toppling out of his chair. Panic seized her chest and she just stared for a moment, before Alex made a cry of displeasure at her holding him too tightly. Then she caught up to herself and rushed over, grabbing at him and trying to hold him steady as he slumped down onto the floor.

“Callum? Callum!” The only response was a shallow and gurgling wheeze of breath. Drops of blood oozed out from beneath his eyelids and Lucy nearly screamed. Alexander started crying and she held him with one hand as she fumbled for her phone with the other, nearly dropping it before she managed to punch the three-digit panic code that would alert both Gayle and Chester.

There wasn’t time to try and calm Alex. She just held onto him the best she could while trying to drag Callum out to the teleport pad. While he wasn’t actually a big man and she had been exercising at his insistence, his limp body was still astoundingly heavy.

“Come on, come on!” She repeated, uselessly and nonsensically as she hauled on his arm, sliding him across the rug with a strength borne of adrenaline. Her world narrowed to the distance between the office door and the teleport, which was suddenly way too far. She grunted and cursed and promised she would hit the gym harder, digging in her heels and pulling. The seconds passed like years, but after another few tugs she got him onto the teleport pad. Then she slapped the button labeled Chester’s.

They had tested the link thoroughly, because there was no point in having an escape route that didn’t work. Still, it was mechanically activated rather than electronic and the long moment between button-press and action nearly had her crying. The electric motor whirred and then suddenly they were elsewhere. If anyone other than Callum had made the teleports it wouldn’t have worked, not with a mage’s natural resistance to teleports, and they’d have to change to portals when Alex got bigger, but she was really glad that it worked this time.

There were already a pair of shifters waiting when they appeared on the pad, credit to Chester’s people, both of them in war-form and armed to the teeth. Even as an eight-foot wolf-person, Lucy recognized Jenna, who was also a licensed nurse, as she jumped forward to pick up Callum.

“What happened?” The other shifter asked over Alex’s crying, someone Lucy didn’t know offhand, but she answered anyway.

“He was taking care of some vampires and just collapsed!” Lucy bounced Alex and made soothing noises, trying to get him to calm down. “There might have been some fae around but nothing powerful so I don’t know what it might have been.”

Jenna put Callum on the couch and cocked her ears, studying him, before going to the closet with blurred speed and pulling out an oxygen kit. The valve hissed as she slapped it over his face. Then she went to dig out more medical supplies from the closet.

“Where’s Gayle?” Lucy asked. She knew it was unreasonable, but her husband was dying. Even with teleports people moved only so quickly, but she wasn’t willing to wait. Even though she knew the only reason the shifters were there was that they did move at superhuman speed. Then she saw Jenna’s expression, and took a breath to try to steady herself. “I mean to say, how is he?”

“Bad,” Jenna said bluntly. “Full hospital wouldn’t do much for long.” Lucy winced, feeling like someone had stuck a knife in her heart, but that was how shifters worked. They wouldn’t sugar-coat something so important.

“Maybe like that rot thing Ravaeb did?” Lucy hazarded. “Dammit, we can’t deal with fae at all can we?”

“I don’t smell any fae magic on him,” Jenna said. Lucy frowned but before she could reply she felt the other teleporter turn on. While she still couldn’t see magic as such, she could feel it going on nearby, and she turned to see Gayle blink into existence on the pad, along with someone she didn’t recognize. He was an older mage, severe looking, and while he looked vaguely familiar she couldn’t place him.

“What⁠—” Gayle started to say, then saw Callum on the couch and rushed over to him. Her chaperone followed at a more leisurely pace, eyes flicking over the room in a way that raised Lucy’s hackles. She stepped back toward the other shifter guard, almost bumping into him, holding Alexander protectively. But the mage stopped in the middle of the room and glanced Lucy’s way.

“What happened?” He inquired.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said, after a moment of silence. “He was just taking care of some vampires and fell over.”

“It’s negative healing,” Gayle said, one hand on Callum’s forehead and the other on his chest. “Honestly not much of it, but it doesn’t take much.”

“But how? He said there wasn’t even a mage there.” Lucy said with a frown. They still hadn’t told everyone of the exact nature of Callum’s senses, but by this point most people had figured out the general idea. Which might mean that someone had figured out how to dodge Callum’s senses, but it didn’t seem likely to her. Even if they had, targeting him was not easy.

“I don’t know,” Gayle said crossly, doing whatever it was that healing mages did.

“There were programs in place to create defenses against him when I left GAR,” the other mage said. “But they hadn’t amounted to anything at that point.”

“Who are you, anyway?” Lucy asked, knowing she was being a little rude but not really caring much. The man raised his eyebrows at her and then turned to face her fully and gave her an odd little bow, like someone who was raised in one of the classical mage Houses.

“Archmage Taisen, at your service, Mrs. Wells,” he said.

“Oh.” Lucy said. Alex protested as she squeezed him a little tighter. It was no wonder that his presence made her feel weird, and no wonder he looked familiar. Callum had worked with Taisen a bit, so she should have remembered who he was, but Lucy still associated him with her captivity at the BSE compound.

“At ease,” Taisen said. “I am here to safeguard Ms. Hargrave — and because I well know how slippery Mister Wells is. If he has run into something he can’t handle, it’s something I need to worry about, too.”

“Ah.” She knew that made sense, but it was hard to focus, instead looking over to where Gayle was doing whatever healer mages did. Jenna stood there, holding a box of wipes and syringes and bandages, but wasn’t using any of them while Gayle was at work. “How is he?”

“He’ll be okay, Lucy,” Gayle said with a reassuring smile, and Lucy almost slumped to the floor with relief. It was like a massive weight had suddenly lifted from her chest. “Lucky you got him here so fast. It wasn’t very targeted negative healing, but that just means that there was damage everywhere.” She glanced up at Jenna. “If you have a saline drip that will actually help.”

Jenna nodded and moved to pull more stuff out of the closet, which was apparently a lot better stocked than Lucy had imagined, but Lucy still felt uneasy. Not that she’d seen any major healings but she thought it was supposed to be fast and didn’t require any outside help. She didn’t really suspect Gayle of anything but that didn’t mean she liked it. Taisen noticed.

“Gayle has been using a slightly different approach to reduce long term consequences of substantial healing,” Taisen informed her. Gayle glanced back at them and caught Lucy’s eye, nodded, and then turned back to Callum. “A shock heal can result in vis weakness for some time, depending on how badly off the person is.”

“Oh, okay,” Lucy said, glad there was some real explanation. She shifted Alex slightly and wrinkled her nose. “How long is it going to be until he wakes up?”

“Another ten minutes at least,” Gayle replied. “I want to clear the blood out of his lungs first, and make sure there’s no neural bruising.” Lucy shuddered.

“Yes, please,” she said, and turned her attention back to Alex, who was still unhappy. Not that she blamed him. She wasn’t happy either, but at the same time, extremely glad about all the precautions they’d put in place. At the time she’d just thought it would be for Alex, since young children had mysterious health problems all the time, but if they hadn’t made sure that everyone could use it under every circumstance, her husband might well be dead.

She watched Gayle fuss over Callum for a few minutes, rocking Alex and making soothing noises until he stopped crying. Part of her was actually glad to have something to focus on, rather than just staring at Callum’s body on the couch. Even if he was supposedly fine, there was still blood dribbling out of his nose and eyes and ears, most of it already starting to dry, and while his breathing was getting steadily better it had sounded too shallow and liquid for far too long.

The other shifter, whose name Lucy still didn’t know, vanished out of the room and returned with a baby bag full of supplies. She gave him a grateful look and dug out some toys while she kept half her attention on the couch. Jenna opened some disinfectant wipes to get rid of the blood on Callum’s face, though the clothes were going to need more attention when they got home.

She found her brain hiccupping back and forth between stupid petty details like that, the fact that Callum had almost died, and the fact that he hadn’t died. Lucy hated how scattered she was, since that was the exact opposite of how she wanted to behave in an emergency. Though she supposed the emergency was over, but still, the adrenaline crash left her feeling awful.

“Going to bring him around,” Gayle called, removing the saline drip, and the two shifters backed away from the couch even as Lucy hurried over. After a beat, Taisen joined the shifters at a reasonable distance, so it was just Gayle, Lucy, and Alex. The healer mage tapped Callum’s forehead and his eyes snapped open. She felt the familiar sensation of his magic wrapping around her and she was half surprised he didn’t immediately teleport them away. Instead he glanced over the room and reached out to take Lucy’s hand as he shifted himself upright.

“I imagine I need to thank you for your services, Gayle,” he said. He was in full Ghost mode, to judge from the non-expression on his face. “That was not pleasant.”

“I imagine not!” Gayle said. “You got hit by an unstructured blast of negative healing somehow.”

“Ah.” He grimaced. “There was a booby trap in the vampire nest. I got past their wards just fine but they seemed to have been tuned to detect spatial magic. Or just human magic in general; there weren’t any mages in the building.” His eyes flicked to Taisen. “It seemed to be a combined fae-vampire effort, but that part was human enchantment. It went off, latched onto my vis, and you know the rest.”

“Understood,” Taisen said grimly. “If that becomes common, we are going to have serious issues.”

“Wouldn’t that just kill whoever’s inside the building?” Gayle wondered aloud.

“I don’t know,” Callum said, even if the question wasn’t really directed at him. “That level of enchanting is beyond my expertise.”

“Wait, if it’s negative healing enchantment, doesn’t that mean they have negative healing people making it?” Lucy said. “There aren’t all that many of those around.”

“I’m not sure my house has been tracking all of House Fane’s former assets, but even if they supplied their services to the Guild of Enchanting, that doesn’t change the problem.” Taisen sighed. “I’ll speak with the GOE but there’s no telling how many of these are out there already.”

“In the meantime, we’re not going to be doing any more vigilante work,” Lucy said, ready to insist on it. “We can’t have something like this happen again. It might be worse next time.”

“No, I agree,” Callum said. “We need a different approach.”