Chapter 7 – Consequences

Callum was a wreck for the rest of the day. Not because it had been hard, but because it had been easy. So easy. Terrifyingly, horrifyingly easy. He was a terrible newbie mage with all of three or four tricks and he’d destroyed the vampires and their thralls. If he lost his mind and went on a rampage, there wasn’t a single mundane in the world who had a chance against him, and he was just starting to learn.

It was almost enough to make him understand the restrictions GAR put on mages, but fortunately after a few hours of showering some semblance of sense returned. The only reason he’d gotten away with it was because their mage had been stupid and careless, the defenses were geared against shifters, and because he had a completely safe area coincidentally close enough to actually reach. In the real world, he couldn’t fire a gun off willy-nilly even if he could displace the bullets a hundred feet away.

When the adrenaline high finally left him, he actually fell asleep in the shower, only waking up after he had exhausted the tank and the water turned cold. He tried crawling into bed but slept only fitfully, starting awake every time a car drove down the road. By the time he dragged himself out again it was evening and he was feeling a little more human, but there was still a tight knot in his stomach that he couldn’t do anything about.

Callum went ahead and burned the clothes that he’d been wearing, though it wasn’t likely that anyone could track them. In fact, it was far more likely that he’d be traced through one of the Langleys spilling what happened than it was from some forensic investigation of the scene. There wasn’t much he could do about that.

In fact, in hindsight, it would have been far better if he could have taken care of everything without going down to that basement at all. Not that he regretted saving Clara one bit, but it would have been far better to agree, leave, and do things out of sight from everyone. He wasn’t sure how he could have gotten Clara out of there without teleporting her, but if he’d done it somewhere other than the saferoom, it might have been easier to explain.

Either way, he was stuck with it. He couldn’t change what he had done, just make sure he was better about it in the future. Part of him was actually surprised someone hadn’t been by yet to follow up; it had been hours and the motel fire was probably out. The best case scenario was that the Langley shifters, or whatever they called themselves, had collectively decided to keep Callum a secret, but he couldn’t plan for that.

He hoped he wouldn’t have to abandon Winut, but he probably would. Which meant he had to plan for that, and that meant he needed to get the stash of loot. Callum cast his senses outside and, finding nothing suspicious, got on his remaining jacket and started his car.

Instead of going into town the usual way he circled around, coming at the gas station from the other direction. Unsurprisingly, the actual street where the motel had stood was blocked off, but he only needed to get within range of the gas station in order to teleport all the luggage into the back of his car. He replaced the entire bundle with a single screw enchanted as a siphon, in the hopes that if someone actually looked there wouldn’t be any traces.

By the time he got back home he had been up and moving long enough to realize he was absolutely ravenous. He basically hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day, so he made himself a sandwich from the stuff in the fridge as he teleported all the loot into the main room of his house. Eight duffle bags of weapons, six large cases of ammunition, two briefcases with the hard drives he’d purloined, and then several large lockboxes with money and valuables. Finally, one loose duffel with the magical stuff he’d looted from the mage’s room.

It was actually too much. He didn’t have anywhere he could hide it all from a determined search. There were hollow spaces in the walls, of course, and some odd nooks and crannies, but the sheer amount of weaponry alone meant he needed to find or make a stash somewhere else. Callum summoned his notepad to his hand and wrote that on his list before digging into the actual specifics of what he’d acquired.

The weapons were, to his disappointment, just normal commercial weapons. He’d been hoping for some magically enhanced ones, but no. Not that he could really complain, since now he had enough armament to outfit an entire platoon. Callum itemized the actual numbers of pistols, rifles, and shotguns as he went. The pistols seemed to be mundane armament, since they were merely standard nine-millimeter types, but all the rifles and shotguns were big and heavy.

The magic, as it turned out, was in the ammunition. There were cases of normal commercial stuff, but most of it was not normal or commercial. The bulk of it was labeled silverite, engraved on the cases of rifle and shotgun ammunition, but there was a decent amount of black mordite and silver-grey corite stuff too. For use against vampires and fae respectively, he assumed. What people used against dragonblooded was anyone’s guess.

While he could manipulate the silverite and mordite and corite with his magic, he couldn’t see inside them. With a little effort he could sweep his spatial sense into a material, like a rock or a wall, but the magical ammunition completely resisted that. Which was a little discomfiting, but it at least meant he’d be able to identify the stuff easily enough in the future.

When he took a closer look at it, a good amount of the stuff he’d looted from the mage was the same way. There were a few jars of liquids and powders, with labels in a script he couldn’t read, and trying to push his senses into them was difficult. They weren’t quite as bluntly impossible as the anti-supernatural weapons, but it seemed anything that held magic was hard to sound out.

Aside from what he’d made himself, of course. It was an interesting question whether or not his little ball bearings would be magically opaque to another mage, or if he needed to do something special to get the effect. Unfortunately, there wasn’t another mage to ask.

Along with the components there were a set of ceramic slates with designs on them, clearly made with the liquid and the powder. Probing them with his senses he found that while some of it was just as hard to read, the center was completely open with a loop of magic in it not unlike the vortices. If he had to guess, the plates were magical tools and the center was where the user fed mana.

He didn’t try to use them. He had no idea what they did, and no matter how curious he was he didn’t want to take the risk of blowing himself or his house up, or igniting some magical beacon that would draw attention down on him. The magic stuff became a note on his notepad to investigate later, and he put them aside.

The other source of magic was something that looked like a woman’s compact, but the interior had a set of thin metal plates with etching similar to the ones on the slates, arranged so the user could flip through them. The main difference seemed to be that the compact’s plates were far simpler. It was all very mysterious and he didn’t dare supply it any mana or vis without knowing what it was.

Callum was really starting to get irritated, so he turned to the last bit, the lockboxes and the cash. At the very least, the more fungible part of the loot would cheer him up. Even though he didn’t have the keys and hadn’t learned lockpicking, he could simply teleport the stuff out of the locked containers.

There was just shy of one hundred thousand dollars in cash, but that wasn’t really the main haul. The gold plates, each of them labeled at one hundred grams of 999.9 pure gold and stamped with an unfamiliar logo, were. Ten kilograms of gold was a lot of money. A lot of money. Callum’s consulting business had put him comfortably right at six figures for income, but actually staring at so much money gathered in one place was something else.

There was also some sort of elaborate crest, the kind that used to be used for sealing wax on documents, that looked like it was gold but resisted his senses enough to be an alloy of one of the supernatural metals. It had some sort of abstract logo on it, nestled in among a bunch of baroque swirls, which if he was fanciful might represent vampire fangs, but it was difficult to tell. That, unfortunately, was something he couldn’t sell. It might be magical, and it was definitely traceable.

Callum opened up the briefcase with all the hard drives he’d taken and stared at them. It had seemed like a good idea at the time but he actually had no idea what he’d look for. He had no tools for cracking open encrypted files, he didn’t have the resources to reference phone numbers or account numbers, and he didn’t have the contacts to make use of any information he did manage to get.

Not to mention he didn’t have the know-how to make sure his computer was safe from any malware or whatever that was encoded in the hard drives. Sure, that might be giving them too much credit, but he couldn’t think of a single reason to take the risk. At the same time, he was loath to simple toss them, so he got a bottle of rubbing alcohol and wiped them off to get rid of his prints in case he ever did pass them on.

He wasn’t sure he would. The only person he could give them to was Arthur Langley, and for all he knew shifters would be able to smell his scent on them unless he gave them a bath in alcohol or something. Obviously Arthur already knew Callum was involved, but whatever specialists would be trying to get at the data did not. The same was true of the crest.

Callum felt woefully underprepared. He had originally thought that he’d stay in Winut for years, slowly working out magic details while lying low, then when he knew more he’d know what the next step would be. Now it was clear that not only would that not be happening, he didn’t have even the basic supplies for dealing with brushes with the supernatural.

The list on the notepad got longer. He could have used his phone, but he didn’t entirely trust the sanctity of his data there. It might be excessively paranoid, but anything connected to the internet could be compromised, and without a supernatural-friendly phone he was probably even more vulnerable. The people at the top of GAR certainly didn’t have to worry about their electronics being hacked. Or at the very least, didn’t have to worry about the consequences if they were.

He hemmed and hawed over the magical stuff, but eventually put it in a separate bag. If he figured out or found out what it was, he might take it with him, but there was no point in loading himself down just because it was shiny and magical. Everything else got repacked and moved to the basement. If nothing else, it was far, far easier to deal with moving things with his magic.

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One of the duffles got repurposed into his new bug-out bag, with all the currency and some of the new weapons. The old ones he’d brought with him when he moved to Winut would have to be discarded and destroyed, considering they were still registered to Callum Wells. Which was a shame, but if someone came by and wanted to inspect his guns, the matching serial numbers would give the game away.

For better or for worse, it was near midnight by the time he finished sorting. Which meant he couldn’t actually address his list, but he was also still exhausted. It wasn’t just from a lack of sleep either, it was from the imagined echoes of what he’d just done. He could still feel the kick of the shotgun against his shoulder and hear the sound. Shooting targets was one thing; shooting people was another. Since he had run out of things to do, Callum ascended to his bedroom again and tried to sleep.

***

“So the weapons we retrieved from the building matched those that were used to commit the murders,” Arthur Langley told the reporter. “We’ll have a full report later, but we’re certain that the murderer was part of the drug gang that was caught inside the motel.” He found it absurd that even in a distant place like Winut, someone showed up hunting down news. Even after he’d vastly under-reported the number of bodies and attributed the fire to drug manufacturing gone wrong.

“You’re confident that there will be no further murders in Winut?” The reporter asked, in exactly the most irritating possible tone.

“Nothing is certain but death and taxes,” Arthur told her. “But those druggies won’t be killing anyone else. No further questions.” He walked away from the camera, ignoring the inane and useless questions she was shouting. It was all just a show anyway, because the people he actually had to worry about were yet to arrive.

Just as he was thinking that, his phone buzzed, the caller ID proclaiming that Gerry wanted his attention. He took a moment to make sure he was out of earshot of the mundanes before he answered it, sliding into his car.

“They’re here?” He asked, turning the key and starting the engine.

“Waiting for you at the pack compound,” Gerry confirmed.

“Please tell me they didn’t bring a vamp along.” It was still daylight, so a vamp wouldn’t be particularly active, but they always traveled with an annoying coterie.

“They didn’t, thankfully. It’s a mage and a fae.”

“Anyone we know?” Arthur wasn’t surprised GAR hadn’t sent a shifter agent. Considering the nature of the tensions, there would have been severe conflicts of interest.

“Nobody I know, but maybe you’ve heard of them. Agents Danforth and Black.” That didn’t ring any bells for Arthur, but he wasn’t plugged in to the inner workings of GAR anyway.

“Text that to Alpha Chester,” Arthur ordered. “See if he knows anything about them. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Yes, Alpha.” Gerry hung up, and Arthur concentrated on driving for the next thirty seconds or so before his phone buzzed. He stopped at an intersection and checked the text from Chester.