thumbing through paper again. It was odd and made my teeth itch.
And then the memory came forward. A memory of my old apartment torn apart, my furniture and belongings broken, trashed. This was the same scent that was left behind. Whoever had broken into my apartment had also broken in here.
“The spell’s hard to parse. The casting is really tight. I don’t even know how someone could cast magic with the network down,” I muttered.
“The disks?” Stotts suggested.
“Maybe.” I walked to one side to get a different view on the scene. And that was when I could tell. I knew who cast the glyph because I had seen him recently.
Sedra’s bodyguard, Dane Lannister.
Which meant the Authority had broken in here.
Which meant the Authority had broken into my house.
There was another, more frightening, sickening memory attached to that smell, but I could not pull it to the front of my mind.
Dad? I asked.
He did not respond. If he knew where that memory was, he didn’t seem willing to kick it forward.
“Uh, I still think it’s a man’s signature,” I said.
“Who?” asked Stotts, the magical police detective who did not know about the Authority, who should not know about the Authority, and whom I should not tell the Authority even existed, much less that its members broke in and stole the disks.
And even that didn’t make sense. My father had been a part of the Authority. Kevin currently was a part of the Authority. Violet had a passing knowledge of the Authority.
So why would the Authority break into the lab if they could, as far as I could tell, just ask Violet for the disks, or, at the very worst, tell Kevin to steal them from her?
Maybe he had.
Maybe this spell had only been cast to act like it was cast by Dane.
Which left me one hundred percent confused about what I should tell the nice detective.
So I went into default mode: the truth.
“I think a man named Dane Lannister might have been involved. But the spell is tangled, collapsed. It could be someone trying to make it look like Dane Lannister is involved.”
“Anything else?”
“I’d say get another Hound in here to double-check my findings, but since that isn’t going to happen, let me do a little more footwork.” I checked the spell again. Yep. Still looked like Dane’s. “Still seems to be Lannister’s signature,” I said. I checked the boxes. “None of the glyphwork has been broken.” Which meant he had taken the time to Unlock each box instead of just blowing the thing apart.
“The disks were in here. I’d say one per drawer.” What else? What was I missing? I looked around the room, and caught the angry red slash of a spell hovering about midway across the room.
That was not Unlock, or Hold, or any of the kinder spells. That was Impact and I could tell the target had been Kevin.
Dane attacked Kevin?
I looked the opposite direction to see if a spell from Kevin was there.
“Allie?”
“Just checking a few other spells. Cast in about the same time period as the Unlock,” I said. “Similar decay rate.”
Beyond the desk, where maybe Violet had been sitting, was the tattered remnants of a Shield spell.
Kevin had tried to keep Violet from getting hit with magic.
Dane had been here to kill Violet?
“Uh, one of the spells is aggressive. Not sure what kind, but in the category of Impact. Not one I recognize. That’s midroom. There’s another spell over here, a Shield. Tattered, like it withstood a blow or flux of magic.
“Is this where they found Violet?”
“Yes.”
Okay, so my theory about attackers seemed to be holding up.
I walked to the opposite side of the room and looked for anything Kevin might have cast.
Holy crap. Kevin had cast at least a half dozen spells. Hold, Freeze, Impact, something that involved blood and pain, and more. And they had all fallen—no, they had all been drawn—to this side of the room, and smashed together into one big tangled, useless spell.
Kevin had hauled on a hell of a lot of magic—recently, like after the magic had turned off—and it had all been batted aside and crushed like empty beer cans.
The smell of minerals and old vitamins was stronger here.
Okay. I didn’t know why Dane and Kevin were fighting. Sedra’s bodyguard fighting Violet’s bodyguard, but they had both accessed a hell of a lot of magic with the grids down.
Maybe they had disks to drain, but I didn’t see any discarded empty disks on the floor.