Paranoid Mage

“Thanks, Lucy,” Callum said.

“Hey, no problem big man. Sorry I couldn’t help more.”

“It’s fine,” he assured her. “I figured as much.”

“Well, good luck,” she said. “Check in later.”

“Will do,” he assured her, and hung up. Removing the battery as usual, he stuck them both in the glove compartment and focused on driving.

With the bunker construction under control and the bulk of his enchanting done, Callum figured that the best use of his time was to go foraging. Not so much for things, since Callum was fairly flush and the portal worlds were off limits, as for information. Actually analyzing and experimenting with the ward designs he’d gotten showed him that there were a lot of bits he couldn’t do, since they took specialized vis. Which meant he needed more options.

He'd checked with Lucy but like he’d thought, all the places where there might be repositories of complex enchanting were in the portal worlds or GAR headquarters, and so off limits. There were mage Houses on Earth, too, but that was just as bad as trying to break into GAR, if not worse. At least GAR expected people coming and going all the time, whereas a private estate would suspect anyone hanging around uninvited to harbor ill intent.

That limited him to smaller GAR offices and private businesses, but the book run where he bumped into Gayle showed there were a number of supernatural businesses about, though primarily near large cities. It’d take a lot of driving, but that’s why he had the van. That was something he could park overnight and be relatively certain it’d remain unmolested, while he slept at the trailer in Texas.

For the moment he’d shifted his telepad from up near his homebond cache to inside the van, letting him jump back and forth between wherever he was driving and his home. If for some reason he had to use the homebond, he’d have to make his way south manually. Although if some attack forced him to recall and he couldn’t take the telepad with him, the trailer was a write-off anyway.

Callum was basically on a road trip, with the list of GAR’s offices as a guide. Lucy didn’t have a list of private businesses, partly because she didn’t want to risk poking around GAR’s documents at the moment and partly because GAR didn’t even have a comprehensive list. At least not all in one place. Most of the private little things were offshoots of Houses, and so governed more by whichever given House than by GAR proper.

He'd scoped out the Dallas GAR office more than once, so there was nothing new there, but he hadn’t snooped on any of the surrounding businesses. In fact he’d stayed well away, since he didn’t want to attract attention, but his range meant he could peek at them without risking anything. The anonymous white van with a ladder on top meant he could park wherever he liked for as long as he liked and people would just look right past him.

The new armored vehicle wasn’t too bad to drive even in the city streets, despite its issues. Even with better shocks to compensate for the extra weight, it accelerated slowly and braked weirdly, making him keep the speed lower than he otherwise might have. Still, he wasn’t at risk of rear-ending anyone and just having the protection was worth the money he’d paid for it. He wasn’t exactly relaxed when he sensed mage bubbles around, but didn’t feel as horribly exposed.

Considering the increased mana concentration around GAR offices and the access to teleporters, all the supernaturals tended to cluster in the same spots. Fae, shifter, and vamps sprawled out more than mages and in different ways, but he couldn’t reproduce or use their types of magic anyway. His plan was to poke around near the offices, use the trails in vis to track people’s comings and goings, and just generally snoop.

Part of the problem with foci was that he didn’t even know what tools were available. He knew some of the common ones, of course, but there had to be dozens or hundreds of specialty types he could use, assuming he could find a template. Even something for doing laundry or heating meals could be incredibly useful, and he still hadn’t found a version of the self-cleaning focus that didn’t use air and water vis in the enchantment mechanism.

Unfortunately, he kept coming up pretty much empty. The personal foci were generally kept inside a mage’s bubble, and those were practically opaque to Callum’s senses. He was pretty sure less so than before, as some weaker ones were verging on the translucent, but he definitely couldn’t resolve the intricacies of a commercial focus through that kind of murk.

Ultimately he decided the issue was that Dallas wasn’t really a major supernatural hub. At least, not compared to other places like Miami. After spending two days poking around without much to show for it, he called Lucy again. The list of supernatural areas was useful so far as it went, but he wanted the opinion of someone who actually understood supernatural society.

“Hey Lucy!” He drove along the interstate, an hour or so away from the urban center.

“What’s up, big man? Just couldn’t wait to hear my voice again?”

“That too,” Callum said with a laugh. “Really wanted your quick opinion on something. What are the biggest supernatural places in the US? Like, the cities or areas where there are a bunch of mages and such?”

“Oh, uhh. I’d say probably Vegas, New York, and Miami? Used to be more but a lot of Houses have moved into the portal worlds.”

“Huh.” Callum wondered if, in the end, GAR wasn’t somewhat of a self-solving problem. The more they migrated off-world, the less reason they had to meddle in Earth’s affairs. Of course, unless all the supernaturals went back there too, a lot of the fundamental problems remained. “Well, that’s all I needed. As always, you’re the best, Lucy.”

“Hey, you know it big man!”

“I’ve got my marching orders, then. I’ll let you know how everything goes.”

“You’d better!”

Callum chuckled and hung up, juggling phones as he brought up a route into Nevada. Las Vegas was the closest of the three hotspots, and he was pretty sure he didn’t want to go back to Miami anyway. The fae there might recognize him even with a disguise on.

For this road trip he’d gotten himself a little bit of cosmetic putty and altered the shape of his nose, plus gotten his hair cut short and wore a cap. Combined with winter clothing, he was probably, likely, hopefully unrecognizable by sight. If he was going to be hanging around supernatural areas, even with the distance his perceptions afforded him, he didn’t want to look like any photos they might have.

Unlike when he was traveling by motorhome, he didn’t have to scrupulously plan where he would park for the night. He didn’t need special facilities or attend to special maintenance, or even use gas station bathrooms. All that he needed was a space where the van wouldn’t get towed, and he could go back to the Texas trailer.

It was an entirely different experience with his home in his back pocket, one he’d recommend to anyone who was a spatial mage with teleportation enchantments. Or could at least could tag along with someone like that. He was pretty sure that the people who went out to deal with the front in the portal worlds had already discovered the wonders of being able to return to a friendly redoubt at any time, though maybe they didn’t use that kind of thing on purpose. It was hard to take a threat seriously if it was just a day trip.

It was a thought that made him step back and doublecheck that he was being cautious enough. Now that he had an easy way back to his home, it was possible that he’d start behaving in ways that would make him stand out. A van made it less likely that anyone would notice if he toted around something that would be out of place for a tourist or visitor, but he’d have to make sure he didn’t act too stupid.

Especially in Las Vegas. Even in the normal world, it had a reputation. He imagined it’d be even worse on the supernatural side.

***

Callum Wells was an annoyingly slippery customer. His calls were few and short, and when he did talk it was far enough away from any of the GAR teleporters that a strike team couldn’t make it in time. They could localize his position thanks to the cell towers, but if it wasn’t a place with surveillance it wasn’t much of a lead when he was gone long before anyone arrived. Nor was he treading on fae territory, which would let them track him with fae magic.

The signal also vanished completely after the conversation was over, so they couldn’t even keep tracking him. The best they could do was try and piece together any common cars from the surveillance they did have, but there were just too few data points. Of course they’d sent teams scouring the areas each time he called, but there was no trace of any magic and half the time the call had been from a highway or interstate.

“Depowering his phone every time,” Dave commented. “That’s not what a normal person does. He’s gotta know someone’s after him.” That was probably true, but there’d been no trace of that in any of the conversations. In fact, the conversations leaned more toward friendly chatter with Harper. Listening to borderline flirting between a criminal and a traitor was not particularly fun. He didn’t even say anything concrete, up until the last call.

“I’ve got my marching orders, then. I’ll let you know how everything goes.”

“I do wonder who he’s working for,” Jahn said, as the line went dead. They’d already dispatched a BSE team but barring some miracle there wouldn’t be anyone around by the time they got there.

“I’m more worried about what he’s going to do when he reaches his destination. That’s three cities that we need to warn and get reinforced.” Danforth stood. “Good luck. Tell me if there’s anything else that comes through.”

Jahn nodded and waved in dismissal. He didn’t think that Wells was headed to any of those cities in order to wreak havoc — the man was a vigilante, certainly, and his group had done incalculable damage, but not nearly as much as they could have given the demonstrated talents. With how they could slip past wards and evade detection, there could have been a lot of casualties, thefts, and sabotage. Yet Wells was still asking basic questions, as if he’d actually only run into the supernatural a year or so ago.

The whole thing still didn’t add up. Too many question marks, and they’d yet to get a glimpse of anyone other than Wells and Hall. Though it made sense why such an organization would have a spatial mage as a designated point man. Wells clearly had an insane, near-Archmage level of mobility, and while Duvall would never risk a spatial mage without a great deal of backup, the more aggressive approach was clearly working.

If anything, he wished they’d caught on to Lucile Harper earlier, so they’d have more time to entrap Wells and his organization. Slow and careful was the play here, but everyone

was agitating that something be done. Despite Archmage Hargrave putting him in charge of the overall investigation, he wasn’t going to be able to hide Harper’s involvement for long and when that came out, he’d have to deal with all kinds of people who wanted a piece.

In the end, GAR existed to make things easier for the Archmages. The amount of pressure he, or anyone at the Guild, could put on the Archmages was mostly limited by how nice they were willing to be. With Hargrave, Duvall, and Fane all personally interested, he was sure at some point one of them would swoop in to try and take Harper for themselves, because of course they knew better than he did.

Then there was all that mess with the younger Hargrave and BSE, and Taisen would surely want that resolved as soon as possible. A rogue organization was BSE’s responsibility so they should be willing to be patient, but not everyone had the same priorities. He could, ironically, count on the mundane help more because their thinking aligned with his, and they had no stakes in any of the political morass.

“Do you think he knows that we’re listening in, somehow?” Jahn was fairly sure Agent Dave’s preparations had been adequate. They’d had to break into Harper’s place to physically plant their devices, and even there they’d been limited by some of Harper’s protections. Not so limited that they couldn’t compromise all her communications, but some of the more elaborate snoopery would have been too obvious.

“No,” Dave said, with flat certainty. “That doesn’t mean that they don’t suspect it. Depending on how paranoid people are, they might have a lot of code words and anything that’s not said in person and privately uses some variant of that. Most of it sounds too natural to me, but it’s possible.”

“And we’d have to take Harper to figure it out,” Jahn mused.

“If you can turn her, that’d be great, but it doesn’t sound like he gives her much information to begin with. I mean, wait long enough and someone will slip up, that’s for sure, but I don’t know how urgent this all is.”

“Urgent enough.” Jahn frowned. “But she’s our only lead. I want to play it carefully.” They could go in and try to compel her to entrap him, but Harper had already demonstrated an ability to resist or corrupt compulsions. For the moment, it didn’t seem worth the risk.

“Tell me if he calls again,” Jahn concluded. “I better go follow Danforth. We have three cities to reinforce.”

***

Las Vegas was very strange.

The whole thing was like some alien planet, a full city in the middle of a scrub desert for no apparent reason. All the people living in the dull sprawl of suburbia only there to feed the sudden neon and skyline of the Strip. It was as far from his own West Virginia home as he could imagine and made him suddenly homesick.

Of course he’d studied some of the stuff in Vegas, because the buildings there were famous for various reasons, but it was different seeing them with his own eyes. Not surprisingly, the supernatural presence seemed more concentrated on the Strip than on the suburbs. The GAR office itself wasn’t far from the Luxor, the latter of which had a lot of twisty-swirly fae magic around it. It was still a perfectly normal hotel, so he didn’t think it was a fae stronghold exactly, but there was clearly something going on there.

Of course he didn’t drive down the Strip itself, not willing to fight the traffic or wanting to put a van with an enchantment in it so close to supernatural activity. So long as it was inactive he was pretty sure it was difficult to detect from any distance, but driving it through a bunch of high-powered traffic was just asking for trouble.

There were mages zipping about, active vis senses sweeping the area as they patrolled. The wards glowing in his perceptions clearly had been deemed not enough, though he wasn’t sure why the Vegas area was more on edge than Miami had been. Though it could very well be his fault, after he’d raided the Miami branch. Or it might be that the supernaturals in Vegas were more fractious.

The more he circled around the area the less he liked it. There was just too much going on, with all different kinds of supernaturals out and about and alert. If this was business as usual for Las Vegas he probably wouldn’t be able to blend in properly, and if it wasn’t, he definitely wouldn’t be able to wander through unobserved. He didn’t have a bubble so he didn’t stand out, but he still had more vis than a normal person so stringent enough security checks would catch him.

Then there were the wards. They were mostly the same stuff that he’d gotten past before, but here and there some secondary enchantment fuzzed the area, like some kind of mana jammer. He could still see through it with sufficient effort, but he imagined it’d make wriggling vis threads through a tedious prospect.

He wasn’t all that surprised that there were some defenses that seemed specifically geared at him, not after the furor he’d caused, but it was still a little depressing how quickly they’d been deployed. Not that the defenses would do all that much if he was determined, but they were more than he wanted to deal with. Just getting some more enchantment foci to play with was not worth daring an entire city of riled-up supernaturals.

Callum turned around and drove away.

It was irritating how little activity it took to shut him out. The improved defensive warding was at best an annoyance, but the people were the real barrier. He couldn’t fake being a mage, and between his glamour blindness and mage-quality vis, couldn’t quite pass as a normal person either.

A sufficiently attentive person could figure him out; it didn’t even need to be some elite. The supernatural version of if you see something, say something was probably the best defense they had. What Callum had was the natural advantage of the attacker: he could choose the time and place.

Las Vegas, halfway through December, was not a good time or place. After his stunt in Miami, maybe all of the larger areas were off-limits until they cooled down. There was no way they could stay on full alert forever, and there were probably plenty of smaller supernatural areas he could crib knowledge from. It’d be more work than doing the rounds of a supernatural city, but he was probably being too greedy anyway.

He made sure to stay scrupulously within the speed limit as he drove back out of the suburbs. At least, until he got far enough out that he was more likely to get pulled over for being too slow, and then he just took a random road that headed out into the desert. Supernatural presence was thin on the ground out there, as was everything else.

Callum pulled off the road, off behind a jut of rock, and got out long enough to open his gut-portal. The van went into his cache, and he closed the portal and dropped a cheap piece of scrap with a vis cleaner before invoking the homebond. Only when he was safely in the little shed in Montana did he relax, rubbing at his eyes.

“That was a bust,” he said to himself, and opened the gut-portal once again to get out the maps of supernatural stuff that Lucy had supplied him. From what he’d seen in Miami and Vegas, it wasn’t just mages that had enchantments; fae and shifters had some small trinkets as well. Which meant they were something that could be manually operated and only used mana, so he was very curious about how that worked. Visions of hooking up enchantments to computers danced in his head, though he was sure if it was so easy it would already have been done.

Or maybe it had been done and he just hadn’t spotted it. There were entire swaths of supernatural society he hadn’t taken a close look at. Anyone wandering through the fields of the Midwest wouldn’t know about the Grand Canyon, or redwood forests. Computers were pervasive enough that he should have seen more integration than the magic dongles used for supernatural phones and laptops, but most people didn’t see all the servers that made the internet run. He had to keep reminding himself really knew very little about magic society at large.

While he was at the Montana shelter he doublechecked the homebond enchant, but it still seemed fine. The pure mordite hadn’t noticeably deteriorated. With that chore done, he debated just putting the teleport plate back in place and returning home. After wasting all that time driving up only to have to bail the moment he’d gotten a look at Vegas, he was pretty well fed up with the whole idea.

Instead he sighed and got out the laptop, ignoring the low charge, and pulled up the maps Lucy had given him. Not an itemized listing so much as regions generally covered by various factions and GAR branches and Houses. There were all kinds of overlapping spheres of authority, which probably resulted in a ridiculous morass of bureaucratic and political wrangling, but that meant it wasn’t likely all of them would be on such a high alert.

He did want to avoid entangling Chester though, so he decided he’d head west, out the California way, and see what he could see. After some teleporting to get to a place where there were actual roads, he retrieved the van and headed out. Only once he was a few hours away from his cache did he call Lucy again, putting the phone on speaker as he drove.

“Hey, big man! How was your trip?” Not that he’d specified a trip, but Lucy could connect the dots.

“Learned a few things, but not what I wanted. They were kinda stirred up so it’s probably better if I go elsewhere,” he told her. “Just curious if you knew anything about that.”

“Not that I’ve heard,” Lucy said. “But they’ve been pretty extreme ever since Miami, so, it might just be that.”

“True enough,” he allowed. It might take months for things to die down from that kind of stunt. That was why he’d gone hiking, before. Probably, he should just wait for the bunker be done but he wasn’t sure he could hole up for months without something to work on. What he could, and maybe should do was buckle down for serious magical experimentation, and see if he could grind out any improvements by sheer repetition.

The main reason he hadn’t was that he was so far behind other mages. He couldn’t outgun them or outlast them, and he had no idea how many countermeasures they had waiting for him once they knew what he could do. What he needed were more tricks, more bits and pieces of things that he could throw at the wall or, more to the point, at anyone who came after him.

That couldn’t work forever either, but most people would consider being a magical outlaw a losing proposition to begin with. He had a little more optimism than that, but at the same time he knew that most of his approaches would only be effective the first time. Or from ambush.

“Guess I’ll just have to be a bit more circumspect in the future,” he concluded, mostly to himself.

“Gotta say, big man, I don’t think you have it in you to be circumspect.”

“Maybe that’s what I want them to think,” Callum said in amusement. “But I suppose my track record is rather dramatic.”

“I haven’t heard of anything like it,” Lucy agreed. “But you know, these days I wonder if that actually means anything. It’s not like they really are talking about you officially. It’s mostly the fae swapping tales and everyone knows they’re notorious gossips.”

“Yeah, I would seriously doubt any official history of theirs.” After his trip to the Night Lands, he wasn’t even certain the threats that the various portal worlds had were real. Or still real, anyway. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that supernaturals had driven the worst offenders extinct.

He would have, in their place.

“Sounding a bit conspiracy theorist there, big man,” Lucy observed.

“Nah. Just compare any two country’s official versions of history when it comes to a war,” Callum said, downshifting as he coasted along a mountain road, foot hovering over the brake. “If they were on opposite sides, sometimes even the same side, those are very different versions of facts. What gets recorded is whatever suits the person doing the recording at the time. It’s just basic human nature.”

“I suppose it might be,” Lucy said.

Callum didn’t push. He knew he had a rather more cynical view of most of human nature than most people, and that was fine. Probably for the best, even.

“Anyway I’ll catch up with you in a bit, I’m losing signal here.”

“You really like being out in the sticks, don’t you big man?”

“That’s where all the fun is,” he told her.

“You’re gonna have to tell me how that works one of these days,” Lucy said. “Talk to you later!”

***

“So they didn’t even see him,” Duvall said with a scowl. “He was there, at one of those sites, and even if he didn’t get what he wanted, he was there. With all the wards and jammers and watchers, still nobody saw him.”

“We couldn’t shut down the entire city,” Jahn pointed out. “Anyway, if we had it would have been obvious.”

“Then there’s not much point in laying in wait for him, is there?” Duvall pointed out. “Just take the dud to the BSE facility as bait. That’s the only way we’re going to get Wells, or any of those people, somewhere we can make sure they won’t get away.”

“We’ve barely been at this a week,” Jahn replied, frowning. “Given enough time—”

“Given enough time they’ll have complete reign to carry out their plans,” Duvall cut him off. “Besides, you and I both know that without Wells they have no transportation or screening. The gunmen and financial backers are irrelevant, and besides, we can make Wells tell us about them.”

“You still want to take him alive?” Jahn said doubtfully.

“Of course! He’s a spatial mage! And at least marginally competent too, despite his obvious lack of teaching. Never mind the fact that we have to know his bloodline. Spatial mages are far too rare.” Duvall jabbed her finger at Jahn. “Your way hasn’t worked. Mine will. Get her, take her to the Deep Wilds, and make sure you have people set up to catch him.”

“Archmage Hargrave—”

“If you won’t, I will,” Duvall said. “I’ve had enough of my time wasted arguing about what should be done. We tried it your way, and all we’ve done is lose assets, people, and trust. All the while they run about unopposed and do whatever they want. No, this ends now. We do it my way.”

Jahn pressed his lips together, then nodded. There wasn’t much he could say to that, and in the end, he really couldn’t override an Archmage. Not one that was dead set on a course, at least. He wasn’t even sure that Hargrave would disagree. He was more interested in Wells personally than in the organization, anyway.

“Very well, I’ll bring her in.” He picked up his phone and dialed up Danforth. His partner, the fae, would make it easier for them to bring in Harper. Not that a dud could really do much to resist a mage, but compulsion was easier than force. Quieter, at the very least.

Duvall waited, visibly radiating impatience, until he’d relayed the orders to Danforth and hung up. Then she gave him a short nod and vanished in a brief twist of vis. It was easy to believe Wells was at Archmage level considering that Duvall could pull off the trick of teleporting around as she pleased, though admittedly her active vis senses were fairly obvious.

Jahn crossed into the other room, where Dave was sitting at the monitoring station, and gave him a wave. The mundane raised his eyebrows and stood up, stretching as he got out of the chair. There were a couple others under Dave, but Jahn had never tried to instruct them himself, since he was not familiar with the particulars of their expertise.

“Boss-lady chew you out?”

“A bit,” Jahn admitted. “Looks like we’re done here. We’ll get you debriefed and paid.” A little bit of fae tinkering would remove any untoward knowledge of the supernatural, and they’d be available the next time GAR or the BSE needed mundane agent expertise. It was butting into the Department of Acquisition’s turf a little bit to turn them loose again, but he’d bet on Grand Magus Taisen and Archmage Hargrave over that harpy Constance.

“You know what this means, boys,” Dave said cheerfully to his underlings. “Paperwork!”

There were assorted groans, and Jahn left them to it. He needed to go explain things to Grand Magus Taisen, before Danforth and Black showed up with an unexplained inmate. Fortunately, the head of BSE was easier to deal with than most Archmages, so long as there was no politics involved.

Besides, if it came down to it, he would bet on Taisen over Wells.

***

“Lucille Harper, you will stop what you are doing and come out here.” Felicia Black’s voice rang out in the basement, and the sound of typing stopped. Even with the protection afforded Ray by the special techniques he’d learned, Felicia’s voice carried a commanding tone. Though she was quiet and soft-spoken most of the time, when it was time for business she leaned into her siren heritage and grabbed attention.

Harper emerged from her office with the slightly stiff movements of people under heavy compulsion. Not that Ray was worried that Harper would be able to resist it at all. Felicia’s abilities were a lot more advanced than any but the oldest of the vampires, and her magic was a lot more difficult to resist. While the vampires often needed a vis bypass to do anything to mages, Felicia could affect almost anyone directly.

“Lucille Harper,” Ray said. “You’ve been found to be in collusion with Callum Wells. Your rights under GAR are forfeit and you will be remanded into the custody of the Bureau of Secret Protection.”

Harper didn’t say anything, completely under Felicia’s influence, but Ray could see the fear in her eyes. He almost felt sorry for her, but only almost. She’d been helping someone who’d murdered mages, vampires, and fae. There was no telling what havoc he’d wreak in the future, especially if he had someone inside GAR.

“You will follow us,” Felicia added, as Ray went over and cuffed Harper’s wrists behind her back, using a vis blocker even if Harper was supposed to be a dud. Not that he expected any trouble, but Wells had already proven to be an unpleasant surprise. There was no point in risking a sudden and unexpected use of magic.

They escorted her out of the basement and over to the teleportation pads, where one had already been reserved for transportation to the BSE facility. Those teleportation anchors weren’t normally kept in the main area of GAR, which was why one of the BSE agents was in the switchboard mezzanine to oversee the transfer. The procession attracted a few stares, but not many, since there weren’t too many people around that time of day, and only a few of the teleport booths were seeing any use.

He linked his mark into the teleportation matrix, while Felicia discreetly palmed her charm, and the white walls of the BSE entrance facility replaced the paneled wood of GAR Midwest. If it weren’t for the thick mana it would be impossible to tell it was in the Deep Wilds, since there were purposely no windows in the holding area. He glanced over at Felicia, but the BSE facility had feeder portals so vampires and fae could still function, so she didn’t look too disturbed by it.

The sound of their footfalls on the tile floor echoed off the walls as they escorted Harper to the interrogation room. Although only Ray and Felicia were supposed to interview Harper, there were a number observers in the next room, including two Archmages and the Master of Weltentor. It really wasn’t possible to be in any deeper trouble than Harper was.

They steered her into the interrogation room and Felicia ordered her to sit across from them. Ray stood behind Felicia, linking into the room’s monitoring enchantments, and making sure it was transmitting to the observation room. This was not an interrogation they wanted to flub.

“Lucille Harper,” Felicia said. “Tell us everything you know about Callum Wells.”