black out on us before. But never this long.”
“Okay, so you know I can’t Hound without magic.”
“I’d just like your eyes on the place.”
There were already police officers and other specialists working the scene. Stotts’s MERC crew was inside, using a few gadgets that looked like they were low-magic but useful, like the glyphed witching rods, and nonmagical things like cameras and fingerprinting tools. Very old-school police procedural.
I felt out of place—I didn’t know what all the stages of investigation would be. All I ever did was Hound magic, track spells, identify casters, and not get involved in the cleanup and meticulous recording of the event.
Stotts had once told me that I was different from other Hounds he’d used, and I saw things in more detail than they did. I guess we were about to find out if that was still true without magic.
I walked through the room, careful not to touch anything, looking at the tables, the couches, the shelves, the walls. I inhaled through my nose and mouth, taking in the scents of metals and plastics, carpet cleaner, and the musty-closet smell of old books.
If magic had been cast here, in this room, I could not smell it.
“How’d the door get bashed in?” I asked.
“Police.”
Okay, so that was good. No magical battering ram. “Is there another room?”
I knew there had to be. There had to be a research room—maybe a clean room, a room glyphed and warded and I didn’t know what all else—to actually produce the disks, if the disks were made here.
“This way.” Stotts led me down a short hall, where windowed rooms lined either side. I followed, tasting the air, listening, looking. I might not have magic, but my senses were acute.
At the far end and right of the hall was a room with a door open. I stepped through the doorway and covered my nose. Magic had been used here. A lot of magic. I could smell the burnt-wood stink of it, hot as red peppers shoved up my nose. I didn’t remove my hand, instead breathed through my fingers. This was the lab. This was where the disks were made.
Stotts didn’t have to tell me. The magic that was used in here—no, the magic that was stored in here—hung like a flashing billboard that said WATCH YOUR STEP, MAGIC AHEAD.
The room had several long, low working counters sectioning it off, and the walls were bracketed by cupboards and countertops. Toward the back of the room was a wall of little silver-plated drawers, like safety-deposit boxes. Maybe a hundred, two hundred drawers.
All of them were pulled out, broken open, busted.
Drawn forward like a string on a reel, I walked over to the drawers. Black velvet lined the bottoms of the drawers. Glyphs, whorls of glass and lead, were worked into the walls of each drawer, scrolling a repeating pattern around the inside. Hold spells, I thought, maybe Containment. Tricky, intricate stuff. It had taken a fine, fine hand for that. A hell of a magic user had made these boxes and it was clear they were intended to keep whatever was inside them, inside them.
A flutter at the backs of my eyes, feather soft, brushed harder the longer I looked at those boxes.
And for a second my vision shifted. It was as if I were looking at the boxes through someone else’s eyes. My father’s eyes. I remembered—or rather I saw his memory of—the disks nestled in the drawers, one disk per box. And I knew that every disk had been fully charged with magic before it had been placed in the box.
Why would anyone store that much magic in one place?
As soon as I thought it, I heard his answering thought. Experimental. Untested. We were pushing the parameters, calculating the decay rate. Finding out how much magic the disks could hold and for how long.
How long could they hold magic? I asked.
When I . . . when I was alive, they had yet to degrade. At all.
The reality of what this meant was slowing soaking in. Someone, maybe more than one someone, had more than a hundred disks, all filled with magic.
Hundreds of magic disks that caused no price of pain to use, filled with magic, in a city currently empty of magic.
Holy shit.
My father’s grim agreement didn’t do much to steady my nerves.
Do you know who would do this? Who would want this? I thought.
Who wouldn’t want it? he asked.
Yeah, I got that. When there is no magic, the person who has