Chapter 12 – Preparation

Callum ate takeout while he browsed the catalogues of the nearest used motorcycle places as well as the online classifieds. The classifieds were actually his preference for purchase, but too many of them were suspect, not working, or actually terrible bikes. In fact, most bikes were what he considered terrible bikes, at least for his purposes. He needed something fast, reliable, light, and not flashy.

It took him a lot longer than he liked to settle on an option, and even then he had to make another hours-long trip to get another piece of gold exchanged, but eventually he had his auxiliary transportation. Since he already had the books and materials for when he was supposed to meet Gayle, he could spend the time doing reconnaissance. And practicing his gravitykinesis.

Simply knowing that his ability to manipulate vis was not as good as he had initially thought helped him focus on what improvements he still had to make, but grappling with the more ephemeral filler between threads was not easy. It helped to have something to compare himself, but at the same time, he was clearly not very good at making crisp and clean vis constructs like Gayle. It was still an intensely nauseating and exhausting experience to try and lift himself, so self-flight was off the table for a while.

Given that he was already putting in long hours, he didn’t let a little thing like being tired get him down. He drove his motorcycle toward the first target, using his teleport when he could. While it wasn’t nearly as fast as it might have been if he had a longer range or could do it more often, he probably doubled his overall speed.

He’d done some math on practicing his self teleport, and he could go tremendously quickly if he was willing to spend all his vis. Even if he had an effective range of five hundred yards, it didn’t take but a second for him to reorient and teleport again, so he could go a full mile in about four seconds. Not that he could keep that up for long, so it was impractical for cross-country trips.

When he arrived at the first, nearest town that had vampire problems, he circled far around the target address. While Chester had given him contact information for the local Alphas – and it had not escaped Callum’s attention that the Alphas all lived in or near the vampire locations – he considered it a trap. The less he was known, the less likely it was someone could give him away.

It was one of the ones without a mage, but apparently that didn’t mean it was without magical protections. There was a ward up, but it was static, probably powered by mana in some way. It wouldn’t be too hard for Callum to push past and he could probably wreck the source fairly easily. Though upon further thought, it was better if he didn’t.

It seemed weird to him that the wards were so permeable, but his best guess was that they were not meant to keep mages out. There was absolutely no way a shifter or a human or even a vampire could just waltz onto the grounds of the big old pseudo-mansion they’d taken over without triggering them. Callum wasn’t sure what happened if someone did, or how the personnel managed to bypass the ward, but the only reason he could push through was that all he needed was a single thread of mana. The size of the grid didn’t matter since really any grid was useless.

Since it was daytime, it was easy enough to find the vampires. They were the ones sleeping, though he could tell the differences from human if he looked close enough. Different ears, different jaw shape, weirdly slow and deep breathing pattern, bizarrely little difference between them. They could have all been related. He wished he could really see them.

Then he realized that seeing them with his naked eyes would mean that a vampire was awake and aware and nearby and revised his thought. Seeing them with spatial sense was enough. Once he was done poking about, he got out his paper notepad again to take notes, though the layout was straightforward enough. Once that was done, he stowed his stuff in the saddlebags and took off to the second target.

It was extremely late by the time he reached it, late enough that only three of the ten vampires were actually in the movie theatre they’d taken over. That was enough to make the back of his neck itch, and he was incredibly twitchy while he took notes on the defenses.

That one had an earth type mage defending, and the entire structure and the grounds around it were permeated with spells. It was significantly stronger than the other defenses he’d seen, but at the same time didn’t extend into the air at all. Which meant for him the entire thing might as well not exist, except for around the mage.

Like all mages he’d seen so far, the earth mage had a bubble around him, but unlike the others, it was dense enough that it did a fair job of obscuring his details as well as having complex threads woven throughout it. Clearly he had personal shields up, and Callum would have to put a lot more effort into neutralizing him than anyone else he’d run into so far.

The defensive shield meant that Callum couldn’t put a portal within five feet of the guy, and probably couldn’t open portals nearby at all without him noticing. He really didn’t want to just shoot the guy, not if he didn’t absolutely have to, and while the target mage was technically aiding and abetting Callum wasn’t really feeling like he could actually murder the man in cold blood.

At least until one of the vampires returned with a body.

The vampire couldn’t, or at least didn’t, fly, but it did move shockingly fast. One second it wasn’t there at all, and the next it had traversed the entire range of Callum’s perception and entered the house. For all his straining Callum couldn’t hear what was said, but the vamp tossed the body on the ground in front of the mage and moved deeper into the house. All the mage did was make a notation of some sort on a notepad.

Magic flashed and the mage shoved the body down into the ground, past the foundation and into the earth some thirty feet below the building’s floor. It was one thing to know that they were helping the vamps, and it was another to see them do so without any hesitation or revulsion. He still found it hard to believe that GAR actively aided the vampires in their depredations, but it wasn’t like mages actually cared much about or for what they called mundanes.

He grit his teeth against a hot flush of anger and considered the situation again, burning the emotion on a determination to take out the vampires’ defender. He couldn’t use a gun, but the little he had gleaned from the literature on shields told him there were limits on what it could handle at a time. While he didn’t have any experience with proper magical attacks, enough brute force would work.

With half of his targets surveilled, Callum drove home, brainstorming approaches on the way. He had to be fast, he had to be accurate, and it had to be something that he could get away with doing in broad daylight. If he could get that glamour focus done he’d have some leeway, but not much. He assumed that any vampire or halfway competent mage would be able to utterly wreck him if he didn’t annihilate them with a first strike, so he had to make his first strikes count.

Fortunately for him, he didn’t need to meet with Gayle until after lunch, because he got back late and was exhausted enough to sleep until nearly noon. He thought he’d feel terrible when he got up, but he actually felt fairly normal. College had been the last time he’d been able to pull those hours and not feel like he’d fallen down a staircase, so he wasn’t sure what to attribute his newfound resilience to.

He wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, though, and packed up his books and brass and drove, then biked, back to the used book store. Not on his motorcycle, though that would have been easier. Callum also stuck to a small carrier bag appropriate to a professor, rather than a more useful backpack or suitcase. In hindsight, his assumed identity could have been better crafted.

The same couple was around, but they were upstairs in the apartments rather than down in the main part of the store with Gayle. Callum had no idea why that was the case, but then, he had no idea what normal mage behavior was. Maybe they didn’t care because he wasn’t a stranger anymore.

No matter the reason, Gayle was sitting at the same nook, with a different set of books. When Callum rounded the corner, he was glad to see none of them were duplicates of the few he’d been able to find. It made him feel less bad about how ignorant he was.

“Miss Hargrave,” he greeted her, setting down a stack of blank, polished brass plates with a clunk.

“Professor Brown,” she said, eyeing the brass. “Don’t you think that’s too much?”

“I’m assuming we’re going to mess up the first few times we try enchanting these,” he said, putting down his pair of books on the table. “Maybe we can wipe them, but I’d rather just start with a new one.”

“Oh, good idea.” He could tell Gayle was fresh out of college. College kids never seemed adequately prepared for failure.

“I also got a couple more books that might be useful, one of which talks about light spells.” He tapped the book in question. “Now, I don’t have fire or lightning magic, but supposedly you can make it from just ordinary mana if all you want is some light. I’m hoping between us we can figure it out.”

“Wouldn’t you know already?” Gayle cast him a sideways look.

“Ah, but to construct one without a focus or references?” Callum asked her, and she pursed her lips and nodded. He almost felt bad about misleading her, but she was benefitting as much as he was. More, if she actually could use it to skip an apprenticeship with someone she didn’t like.

“Oh, right, so,” Gayle said, shifting topics without a clutch. “I went and looked at the stuff you suggested and it’s kind of horrific! I’m not sure I can use my magic that way.”

“Hmm,” Callum said, not really sure how to address that. Offensive spells were one of the absolute requirements, so she was going to have to learn it whether she liked it or not. Instead of pointing that out, he tried to be more diplomatic about it. “You aren’t going to be using it against people. Imagine if you’re in one of the portal worlds healing people and something like a giant cockroach sneaks into your room to try and eat one of your patients. Would you feel so bad about killing one of them?” Gayle had blanched at the phrase giant cockroach, as well she might, and nibbled her lower lip in thought.

“I suppose,” she said grudgingly. “But how am I supposed to practice it?”

“I couldn’t say,” Callum responded offhand, dividing up the brass plates between them. “Get a bucket of feeder crickets from a pet store?”

“You can do that?” Gayle blinked at him. He considered her a moment, and realized that it was pretty likely that she’d never had a pet reptile or amphibian. She didn’t seem the type.

“Sure. Mice and stuff too, depending on how adventurous you feel. I definitely wouldn’t suggest testing it on people.” He eyed her. “Did you start with people for normal healing?”

“Well, yes,” Gayle said, in a tone that implied it was obvious. For some reason Callum wasn’t surprised. If early healing had been instinctual she probably healed her own scraped knees or whatever, but he thought they would have started her out on animals for more deliberate training. Then again, he didn’t know what healing was like for her. Maybe it was something she really couldn’t mess up. His own portals weren’t infinitely sharp ruptures like they could have been, so perhaps healing didn’t arbitrarily interrupt functional biochemistry.

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about magical healing,” he said. “I’ve had it done to me but that doesn’t mean I know what it’s like on your end.”

“Oh, of course,” she said. “It’s actually very easy. My healing vis reacts with a mage’s own vis, for the most part. It makes it easy to target.”

“What about healing mundanes?” Callum pressed, though he hated using the term.

“Why, I’ve never tried it,” she told him. Considering all the hospital-bound people in the world that seemed wrong. Even if it was just for practice, he would have thought she’d have had the experience.

“You probably should. If it’s different, then you’ll know more about healing magic than you do. I’m assuming that you can just visit a hospital and do it, but you might have to be careful not to raise any suspicions.” There were occasional tales of miraculous recoveries from various diseases, so it wasn’t like it would be completely unheard of.

“I’ll ask mom and dad,” Gayle decided, and turned her attention to the brass plates. “So how do you even start enchanting? I’ve never done it before.”

It wasn’t like Callum really knew what he was doing, but he’d still done a lot. Enchanting was condensing threads inside a material and holding them in place until they stuck. It required certain geometries, curves an intersections, relative positions, and the like, and they didn’t simply mimic the form of the spell frameworks. It was more like the enchantment was the integral of the spell form, some arcane topological translation that he didn’t know the rules to create.

Of course, most enchanting was supposed to be done with mana rather than vis. Different types of vis did different things, such as Gayle’s healing actually working with someone else’s vis. Even simple things like the mana acceptor functioned differently when made with mana or vis. In that case, it changed what it pulled in, so building a mana acceptor with mana would use mana, while building one with vis used vis. There were supposedly ways to transform one into the other even inside an enchantment, though at an extreme loss, but he didn’t know the details.

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