Chapter 9 – Reaction

“Thank you for your time, Miss Holt,” Ray said politely, and was rewarded by the door shutting in his face.

“So that’s it?” Felicia asked.

“According to Langley’s list, that’s all the fae in town.” It was a short list. “And I haven’t sensed anything else while we’ve been driving around.” Ray frowned. “GAR doesn’t have any records of any mages living out here either. Or dragonblooded, obviously.”

“So we’re out of leads. Except that Chase weirdo,” Felicia pointed out. “He can’t be mundane and be immune to my suggestions.”

“Just because he’s mundane doesn’t mean he has no protections,” Ray cautioned. “Especially in a shifter town. He may not even be aware of it.” It did happen. Heirlooms passing from generation to generation sometimes fell out of supernatural hands, and if it was just some minor enchanted object nobody would care enough to go looking for it.

“But he’s the most suspicious character we’ve run across,” Felicia protested. “I mean, I actually tried and he just ignored me. Plus he lives right down the road from one of the mundanes the vamps got. That can’t be coincidence. I mean, what if the vamps tried him first and ran into his protector instead?”

“Hm.” Ray considered. It was rather far-fetched, especially since he hadn’t sensed any energies of any type near the guy at all. If he had someone actively watching over him, some supernatural relative or another, there should have been some traces. That left some sort of enchanted item, which was why Ray hadn’t really looked for because he frankly hadn’t thought of it. “Well, it’s not like we have any other leads. Unless we get someone in here to do truth compulsions on everyone in town, and Alpha Chester would have my head if we did that.”

It was actually terribly frustrating. And also weird, that there was no magic trace left behind. Or mundane trace, at that. Normally Felicia’s ability to sense what had happened to the recently dead was enough to put them on a useful trail, but in this case the best that she’d gotten was that someone had fired a gun. Which they already knew from the corpses.

“We’ll do that, then go back and see about scanning the rest of the dead,” Ray decided. “If not who killed them, what was going on in that hotel. There had to be some reason someone decided to kill everyone.” That was still the most baffling part. The vampires insisted there was nothing special about that particular nest, but Ray was skeptical. The inclusion of the crest especially made him sure there was something else going on. Like there was someone they’d pissed off that had followed the vamps out to Winut.

The two of them got back in the truck and headed through the small town back to the wooded lane where Chase Hall’s house was. Ray wasn’t really expecting to get much, and when he saw that the car was gone, he knew he could expect nothing. It was possible that Hall had gone into town for something, but Ray had a hunch that wasn’t the case.

“Nobody’s home,” Felicia observed. “Let’s snoop.”

“Yeah,” Ray agreed. His pushed out his air senses and found there was nobody in the house or the yard, so he hopped out of the truck, helping Felicia down, and headed up to the front door. He mentally rifled through his focus until he found the standard lockpick spell, and pushed mana through it while pointing it at the door. It swung open and the two of them stepped inside.

It was empty. It was clean. It was, in fact, too clean and too empty. There weren’t any mementos or pictures, and not even enough random trash and discarded books. No electronics, either. Ray had to admit that he probably should have listened to Felicia, because there was definitely something screwy about Chase Hall.

“Wow, it’s like he never moved in.” Felicia wandered into the kitchen, looking, but touching nothing. She knew to wait for him to ensure there were no traps, magical or mundane.

“Yeah,” Ray agreed. “One second.” He closed his eyes and pushed out his air senses to the maximum, combing the house from top to bottom. It was completely empty. There were appliances and pots and pans and a few relics of someone living there, but that was it. Except for one thing.

Ray held out his hand as he sent a gust of wind whipping around under the couch, rolling a small metal bead across the hardwood floor. He reached down and picked it up, not at all worried about the tiniest hint of energy he could sense in it. Even if it was incredibly deadly, the amount of vis involved wouldn’t be able to push through his shields, and judging from what he could sense whatever it was had decayed almost completely.

“What did you find?”

“I’m not sure,” Ray admitted. “It’s a weird and crude enchantment on a piece of steel. It’s nearly gone. I’ll try, but I don’t think I can get a signature from it. But it definitely shows that Mister Hall knew a mage. Or a mage knew him. Steel degrades after about a day so this is recent.”

“Doesn’t sound like he’s coming home,” Felicia observed.

“No. Someone made him disappear and cleaned up their tracks almost perfectly.” He smiled grimly at the steel bead. “Almost. We’ll write this up and put it out to the other agents. See if anyone knows what this might be or if it’s been seen before.” Or, if it was new, they’d know to look for it in the future. It was so bizarre it almost had to be unique to whoever had been involved.

“I’ll put out a stop and search on the car,” Felicia said, flipping open her phone. She must have gotten a picture of it when they had first talked to him. She really didn’t like that a mundane had ignored her glamour suggestion.

“And then we’ll go talk to Alpha Langley about Mister Hall. See if this new development will loosen his tongue.”

***

Callum wasn’t sure how long it’d be safe to drive the car. At some point it’d be noticed he was gone, and at some point they’d send out a bulletin to keep an eye out for it. That was why he got off the interstate after the first hour and stuck to smaller roads. It wasn’t like they were any less straight.

Pushing his spatial sense to the limits he could drive pretty much as fast as he wanted to, since he could always slow down before he passed another car or got near an animal wandering about the road. So he actually managed to push eighty most of the way, which was about as far as he trusted the used coupe. Callum had never been a speed demon anyway, so that was as far as he trusted himself.

He ended up ditching the car after seeing a truck for sale out front of a home that didn’t look to be in too bad a shape. He paid cash for the pickup, transferred his bags over, and then consulted a map and drove his car to one of the many lakes around the state. Just abandoning it would have been easier, but that might have drawn attention and he didn’t want anyone on his trail.

Callum’s idea was just to levitate it in. He’d never done anything that large before, and the strain went up with volume. It wasn’t mass, since he wasn’t actually moving the matter inside the spatial bubble, but a car had thousands of times the volume of things like brooms and boards. Actually trying it, it felt like he nearly sprained something in the few seconds it took to go from lakeshore to the middle of the water.

He had to sit down and breathe deeply while water bubbled and burbled as the car sank into the lake. Before actually sinking it, he had checked it was deep enough to hide the car because it would have been embarrassing to put in all that effort and wind up with something more obvious than a simple abandoned car. By the time it vanished from sight he was up to teleporting back, in stages, dropping a siphon bearing at the lake site and by his last teleport nearest the truck.

All of that was merely temporary camouflage. He needed to get yet another new ID, a more permanent vehicle, and put together some kind of plan other than running away to a different city and staying quiet. Between the looted cash and the gold he was set for a long time, possibly even for life if he decided to go homestead in Alaska or something, but he wanted to know more about magic.

Point of fact, he needed to know more about magic. He still didn’t know why it was that he didn’t see glamours, or how he could learn to either turn that bit off or figure them out from their magic. That meant his mundane act had limited utility unless he swore off interacting with magic and supernaturals entirely and hid.

Which he wasn’t prepared to do. While some, like Sen, were fairly awful, the Langleys had been nice people and Clara had seemed like any normal teenager. It seemed likely he’d run into the supernatural at some point unless he wanted to be a hermit, and that didn’t appeal to him.

Some of it was because he genuinely wanted to know more about what he could do, but some of it was what was called sheer cussedness by the people Callum grew up with. The better he understood the supernatural world and how things worked, the firmer the foundation he could build for himself regardless of what he wanted to do. He wasn’t going to let the magical authorities control his life.

He resumed his journey in the pickup, taking time out to cover the various duffles and bags with a tarp as storms rolled in. The headlights were so anemic that he was doubly glad that he had spatial sense, else would have needed to stop for the night, especially as the rain intensified and the windshield wiper became inadequate.

Hours and miles later, it was still raining, but he could see again by the glare of city streetlights. He found a cheap motel, paid in cash and, after a look at the room, slept in his truck. Then once again he went surveying for a fake ID, using his spatial senses to make the search easier.

Going through a city with his magical sense active was far different than being out in the country, and not just because of the physical surroundings. There were tracks and traces of magic everywhere, entire buildings with magic nets around them, and even active magic users, though not many of those. The entire time he was driving he only caught one, and it nearly made him jerk off the road.

Obviously he’d been spoiled by the peace and quiet of Winut, at least up until the vampire incident. All the magical mess implied he could hide in plain sight in a city simply by virtue of there being enough ambient noise to hide his use, but he hated cities so that was out. It did make him feel less exposed, though, if everyone left magical tracks everywhere. It also made businesses that catered to the supernatural easy to locate.

Considering his last experience, he restricted himself to paranormal-run pawn shops and gold-fencers, and simply colored in the spot on his tattoo where he was supposed to have a pip for his magic with a pen. Unlike that experience, he actually wanted to register as supernatural to the proprietor. Which meant he had to leave his siphon ball bearings in the truck, and he frankly felt naked without them.

He wasn’t really sure what to do to project the smell of magic, either, other than teleporting a bunch and that would be too noticeable. He wanted to hide his exact caster type even if he was admitting he was a mage. His solution was just make a large spatial bubble around himself but not do anything with it. That was actually enough of a strain that he made a note to add it to his exercises.

His impromptu magical projection seemed to work well enough, and the man in the gold-buying shop actually gave him a nice questionnaire for a new ID. It seemed to be somewhat more upscale an operation than the ogre’s, with a commensurate price increase, but that was fine with him. Hopefully this one would last longer.

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From there, he went to several secondhand stores to get the disguise together for his new persona of Denver Brown, retired geometry professor. He ditched the hairpiece but got some greying dye for his stubble, which would eventually be a beard. A tweed suit and a crumpled hat emphasized the look, and some zero-prescription bifocals completed it. He kept the cane, since he’d found he liked the prop, but he changed to a new one that was more clearly vanity.

Without a specific destination in mind, he decided to ditch the entire idea of a destination and bought a Winnebago. It was surprisingly expensive, far costlier than the house in Winut had been, but with the largesse from the vampires he could afford it. Though he’d have to exchange some of the gold plates in the next city if he also wanted to keep eating and have enough fuel.

The pickup was discarded by the simple expedient of driving it into the bad part of town and leaving it unlocked. He expanded his senses to make sure nobody was watching as he rounded a corner and teleported back, a couple hundred yards at a time, until he was back inside his motorhome. Then he drove off again, heading for another city. It was probably overly cautious, but he didn’t want to make all his purchases in one place.

Once again he went to a paranormal-owned shop to get his business done. Partly because the source of the gold was paranormal and a mundane shop might give him grief, and partly because he was hoping that they’d have more than just supernatural-compatible laptops and phones.

“Anywhere you would recommend if I’m looking for some books on magic, for apprentices?” Callum asked as the man counted out money, coming up with a cover story on the spot. He was pretty sure the guy was a shifter, since he looked entirely human.

“You can try Pearson’s Used Books, over on fifth and main,” the proprietor said doubtfully. “But I haven’t heard of many out there.” That didn’t surprise Callum. It was obvious that supernatural society didn’t believe in freedom of information, even if they did have their own version of the internet.

“Thanks,” Callum told him, taking the bundled money. He planned on visiting later, but a quick look on his phone showed him that it was already closed, so it would have to wait for the next day.

Before he left entirely, he had an idea, and spent a while chewing it over while looking for holes. He felt a little bad about leaving without so much as a word to the Langleys, who had been more than accommodating. Even though Arthur Langley had clearly suspected something from the beginning, he hadn’t pressed. Neither had Jessica or Clara, and Callum genuinely regretted that he’d had to leave Winut. It had reminded him a lot of Tanner, and the people there had respect for privacy.

He took time out for dinner and waited until the gold buyer was closing, casting out his sense as the proprietor locked up and headed out. Callum made a tiny portal nearby, linking it to one just behind the proprietor, and spoke.