same kinds of things that make remnants of the dead stick around.
I didn’t get anything like that from Alexis’s room, just the faint static of daily living, as if she hadn’t been there in a while. There was a stronger energy attached to some childhood books and mementos on a shelf and a hot spot near the desk where Lauren leaned, arms folded, watching me. Alexis must have invested a lot of time and emotional effort there. I guess you don’t study Latin and Greek if you don’t like putting in the hours.
There was also a curio case holding trinkets she must have collected. I reached for one, a small human figure carved from reddish stone, and Lauren’s voice stopped me. “Careful. Those are old and delicate. And possibly cursed.”
“Then shouldn’t they be in a museum?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure the piece was fake, maybe a gift-shop replica. If it had been truly old, let alone cursed, I was close enough that I would have been able to tell without touching it. “There are laws about importing artifacts, aren’t there?”
Lauren rolled her eyes, and I remembered who I was talking to. Mafia staff witch.
“Is this important for finding Alexis?” asked Carson. He leaned against a bookcase, arms folded, but his vibe wasn’t relaxed. More like he was hanging back, observing.
“I don’t know what’s important yet.” I tried to think like Agent Taylor had taught me. Focus on the victim. Her path had to have crossed the kidnapper’s somehow. By knowing her habits and haunts, so to speak, eventually I would see the intersection. “Tell me about Alexis. She seems like a bit of a nerd.”
“Being smart doesn’t automatically make you a nerd,” said Lauren. Which I guess was true. Alexis had been heading out for a night of partying when she’d disappeared.
“She is pretty brilliant,” said Carson. “But yeah, I think she’s too cosmopolitan to be called a nerd. I think it was shopping in Rome with her mom that first got her interested in the classical world—ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt.”
Since I doubted Roman gladiators had kidnapped her, I switched directions with my next question. “How much magic are we dealing with?” I asked. “Are there magical protections around the property? Wards on Alexis’s dorm room? Tracking charms sewn into her underwear?”
“Can’t you tell?” Lauren asked—about half real question and half taunt.
“I keep telling you guys,” I snapped, to cover how naive and outgunned I felt. “I read remnants of the dead. Magic isn’t my thing. Mary Poppins could have grabbed Alexis and I wouldn’t know it.”
Carson allowed himself a small smile. “There is a long list of people who would want to stick it to Devlin Maguire. But Mary Poppins isn’t on it.”
“Lord Voldemort, then?” What I really wondered was, if Maguire had an arcane arsenal, what did the kidnappers have in their bag of tricks?
Lauren heaved a sigh. “Magic one-oh-one, Red. This isn’t Harry Potter. There are protection charms here and on the dorm room, of course. Tracking charms are a great idea in theory, but huge power drains. Expensive—magically speaking—to maintain when a GPS chip in her phone works just as well. Most of the time,” she added, preempting my next question.
That part I got. My cousin Phin loved to give me lectures in Magic 101, and now I wished I’d paid more attention. But I did remember that the major impediment to big, flashy magic was the impractical amount of energy required to make something go against its nature. Magic worked on probabilities and enhanced inclinations. That was why fireballs and flying carpets were fantasy.
At least, that was what I had thought until now. Maybe it really was just a matter of getting enough power. But power had to come from somewhere.
Dude, magical theory was a mental labyrinth and I didn’t have a map. So I focused instead on the current problem.
“You said that Alexis was hidden from your locator spell,” I said to Lauren, confirming what she’d said in Maguire’s office. “Do you think the spell was blocked somehow?”
She didn’t have to think about it. “Less blocked, more like scrambled.”
I worked that through. “So someone could be doing it deliberately. Like a radar scrambler.”
She pointed at me like a game show host. “Ding! Give the girl a toaster.”
“Look, you.” She was seriously pissing me off. Worse, her bad vibes were majorly interfering with my mojo. That’s not just an excuse fake psychics use. “You don’t want me to be more useful