Female Once-Over—a process by which one woman creates a detailed profile of another woman based upon about a million subtle details of clothing, jewelry, makeup, and body type, and then decides how much of a social threat she might be. Men have a parallel process, but it’s binary: Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?
“Harry,” Susan said, kissing me on the cheek. I felt like a pine tree in cougar country. I’d just have to hope territorial scoring of my bark wasn’t next. “Who is this?”
“My apprentice, Molly Carpenter,” I said. “Grasshopper, this is Susan Rodriguez. That’s Marvin someone-or-other.”
“Martin,” he corrected me, unruffled, as he entered. “Can she be trusted?”
“Every bit as much as you trust me,” I said.
“Well.” Martin’s voice couldn’t have been any drier, but he tried. “Thank goodness for that.”
“I know who they are, Harry,” Molly said quietly. “They’re from the Fellowship of St. Giles, right? Vampire hunters?”
“Close enough,” Susan said, standing right next to me, well inside my personal space perimeter. It was an intimate distance. She touched my arm for a moment with fever-hot fingers, but never looked away from Molly. “An apprentice wizard? Really? What’s it like?”
Molly shrugged, averting her eyes, frowning slightly. “A lot of reading, a lot of boring practice, with occasional flashes of pure terror.”
Susan looked from Molly to me and seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. She drifted out of my personal space again. “Did you speak to the Council?”
“A bit,” I said. “The duchess was at headquarters. Spoke to her, too.”
Susan drew in a sharp breath. “What? She hasn’t left Mexico in more than a hundred and eighty years.”
“Call Guinness. She broke her streak.”
“Good God,” she said. “What was she doing there?”
“Being compassionate and understanding and forgiving me for challenging her to a duel in front of about a thousand fellow wizards.”
Martin made a choking sound. Susan’s eyes looked a little wide.
“I wanted a piece of her right there,” I said, “but she was operating under a pledge of safe conduct. Council intelligence says there’s all kinds of vampire activity starting up. I’ve got feelers out for any other word, but it will take a little time.”
“We already knew about the mobilization,” Susan said. “The Fellowship warned the Council three days ago.”
“Nice of the Council to inform everybody, I guess. But I’ll get whatever else the Council knows in the next few hours,” I said. “You guys turn up anything?”
“Sort of,” Susan said. “Come on.”
We went to the seating around the coffee table, and Martin plopped the valise down onto its surface. He drew out a manila folder and passed it to me.
“Out of nearly a petabyte of information—” he began.
“Petawhat?” I asked.
“One quadrillion bytes,” he clarified. Helpfully.
Susan rolled her eyes and said, “Several libraries’ worth of in formation.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Martin cleared his throat and continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “We retrieved fewer than three hundred files. Most of them were inventory records.”
I opened the folder and found several sheets of printer paper covered with lists, and several more that consisted of photographs of any number of objects accompanied by identification numbers.
“The objects in this file,” Susan said, “were all categorized as metacapacitors.”
I grunted, paging through the photos more slowly. A stone knife. An ancient, notched sword. A soot-stained brick. An urn covered in odd, vaguely unsettling abstract designs. “Yeah. Can’t be sure without physically examining it, but this stuff looks like ritual gear.”
I frowned and started cross-referencing numbers on the lists. “And according to this, they were all checked out of a secure holding facility in Nevada and shipped as a lot. . . .” I glanced up at Susan. “When was Maggie taken, exactly?”
“A little less than twenty-four hours before I called you.”
I frowned at the timing. “They shipped it the same day Maggie was taken.”
“Yes,” she said. “About three hours after the kidnapping.”
“Shipped where?”
“That’s the question,” she said. “Assuming it’s connected with Maggie at all.”
“Odds are that it isn’t,” Martin said.
“Yeah. Your time would be better employed running down all those other leads we have, Marvin.” I spared him a glower, and went back to studying the pages. “If I can figure out what this gear is used for, maybe I can rule it out. For all I know it’s meant for a rain dance.” I tapped the pages on my knee thoughtfully. “I’ll do that first. While I do, Molly, I want you to go talk with Father Forthill, personally—we have to assume the phones aren’t safe. Forthill