Oh. Questions about Kurt. My stomach did a little flip. “Sure. Is this, um, in a professional capacity?”
The smile turned into a wince. “I’m sorry, but it is.”
“I thought you were on a stakeout,” I said, and only then realized how ridiculous that sounded. He was looking for someone who had killed at least one mage. Maybe someone who had killed Kurt. I thought back to that day, trying to pick out any notion of foul play I had seen, but nothing stood out. “Sorry, none of my business. Ongoing investigation or whatever, and I’m not a cop or a member of the Aureum.”
He offered a tiny smile and motioned toward the couch. “It’s okay. And I can tell you a little. I’m not a cop. The problem is that there isn’t that much to tell.” He sat across from me and continued, “There were two murders before last week, and your man in the coffee shop was number three. When examined by dead mages, we determined that all three had their magic burned out. Like they tried to channel so much that it literally killed them.”
That didn’t make any sense. “Kurt was ordering coffee. He wasn’t using magic. Not even something subtle like social. I’d have known.”
“That’s right,” David agreed, pulling pen and notebook out of his pocket. Well that made things feel painfully formal. Maybe that was good; it would keep me from thinking of him as the goofy guy with the penchant for mediocre thrillers. “You’re social. Class two, correct?”
I nodded unthinkingly, the answer an automatic, “Yeah.”
Not that I’d have told him the truth, even if it had been the first thing to pop into my head. Someone, or probably some group, had been killing arcane mages for at least my lifetime, and probably quite a lot longer. Until someone proved to me that Gideon hadn’t been murdered, I would believe it started all the way back with him.
David sighed and leaned back. “Kurt was a class five body mage. Not the most power, but enough that it was apparent something had happened.”
“It didn’t look that way in person, though. He just grabbed his chest and fell down. He sort of, um, convulsed. And his heart was going way too fast.” I rubbed my eyes with my hands as though I could erase the image of it. “I tried to scrape some magic, to slow it down, but—” I shrugged helplessly at him.
He nodded. “Fair enough. He’d have appreciated it, I’m sure, but I promise, even if you’d been a medical mage you couldn’t have helped. His heart was a symptom, not the problem.”
It didn’t make me feel better. If only I had agreed to train with Gideon earlier—or heck, if I had found out about my ability earlier. If I saw it happening now, I might be able to do something about it.
My logical mind knew there was no way for me to have stopped it, but that didn’t slow the self-blame train. A man was dead, and I hadn’t fixed it. Surely that was a failure on my part?
I closed my eyes and tried to remember. I hadn’t seen any magic. That didn’t mean it hadn’t been there, but it did mean it was probably a subtler kind than social magic. So nothing elemental or death-based. Those disciplines were flashy and tended to announce their presence when in use.
After going over it all at least twice, I shook my head. “I didn’t see any magic. None at all. I was looking at Fluke, the girl at the counter said something scared, then Kurt turned and grabbed his chest. Everything happened so fast after that.”
“Fluke?” David asked.
My face flamed and I had to press my frozen fingers against it to cool it down. “Ah, that’s what I’ve been calling foxy. Kind of rude to just call him by his species all the time, you know? And it’s what he is. A fluke.”
David smiled at that, but it was a more fixed, less genuine smile than his usual one. He was clearly still uncomfortable with me having someone else’s familiar. A small part of me wanted to spill everything, explain that Fluke really was mine and I wasn’t stealing him at all, and oh fuck, please help me because someone’s out to kill me. That was silly, though. At best, David would laugh at me because arcane mages didn’t exist. It was what I’d done to Gideon, after all.