chapter 12
SEPTEMBER
I was down in Arachne’s lair when I heard the news.
Pretty much the only downside to Arachne’s lair as a home base is that it gets terrible reception. The wards screw up magical callers, and radio signals can’t make it through the tons of earth and rock. Which means that if you want to get a message to someone there and you want to do it fast, then you have to go there in person.
This particular day was a Friday, and we were planning a birthday party for Anne. She was turning twenty-five on Monday, but we’d decided to have the party at the weekend instead, partly to make it more of a surprise, and partly because that way I wouldn’t have to worry about being called away to the War Rooms. Luna and Variam had been supposed to be doing the arrangements, but they were having a fight about something or other. I wasn’t sure of the details and didn’t really want to get involved: Luna and Vari have a complicated relationship that regularly hits rough patches and I’ve learnt that when that happens, the best thing to do is to give them space. Instead, I’d gone back to Arachne’s for yet another try with the dreamstone. It was going about as well as usual (i.e., badly) and so I wasn’t really listening when I heard Arachne talking to Variam through her message focus. I did vaguely notice that Variam sounded more urgent than usual, but all of my attention was on the futures of me interacting with the dreamstone, and I kept focusing on that right up until I heard running footsteps from the tunnel and Variam’s shout of “Alex!”
I looked up. “What?”
Variam skidded to a halt at the tunnel entrance, one hand resting on the wall as though he were poised to turn and run back. “They’ve taken Anne.”
“What? Who?”
“Don’t know. Come on.”
I stared at Variam for about one second, then dropped the dreamstone onto a table. “Arachne—”
“Go,” Arachne said. “I’ll clean up here.”
I grabbed my coat and ran after Variam up the tunnel.
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Variam filled me in on the way. Luna had been due to meet up with Anne in the evening, and when Anne hadn’t shown up, Luna had called and had no answer. At this point, a normal person would have assumed that Anne had forgotten to charge her phone, or left it switched off, or had no signal. Luna had treated it as a potential emergency and gone straight to red alert. It was just as well she had.
“How did they get her?” I asked.
“Looks like by surprise.”
“How?” I demanded. Anne had a flat which we’d set her up with in the spring. “The wards should have bought her enough time . . .”
“She wasn’t at her flat,” Variam said. “She was at her clinic.”
I swore. “So they just walked straight in pretending to be patients. Who’s ‘they’?”
“Dunno,” Variam said. “You got any ideas?”
I tried to think of the most likely suspects. It wasn’t easy—Anne’s list of enemies is almost as long as mine. “Crystal?”
“She’s been lying low for years.”
“Didn’t stop her last time.”
Variam grimaced. “Maybe someone got a description.”
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But we didn’t need to look for a description. After Luna had sent Variam to find me, she’d done some thinking and quite sensibly realised that while we might be able to figure out what had happened to Anne, there was someone else who could do it a lot faster. So she called him instead.
Sonder was waiting next to Luna when we found her, a young man with curly black hair and a scholarly look, his clothes a little nicer since the last time we’d met and his stomach a little rounder. It was a measure of how serious things were that neither of us mentioned last Christmas. I’d worked with Sonder back then, and things had happened, and at some point we’d have to talk about it, but right now we had bigger problems. I looked at Sonder, and he looked back at me, and somehow all of that was communicated and agreed upon in less than a second. “What did you find?” I asked.
“Two mages,” Sonder said. We were out in the street, and there were houses around, enough to make it possible that someone could overhear, but we didn’t have the time to worry about that. “They managed to knock Anne out and take her through a gateway.”
“That sounds way too—wait.” My mind made the connection with what Sonder had just said. “Was one of them big and dark-skinned, and the other one white and skinny?”
“It wasn’t Sagash’s apprentices this time.”
I shook my head. “Not them. The Crusaders have a black-ops team who’ve been coming after me. Lightbringer and Zilean.”
Sonder frowned. “The Crusaders? Why?”
“I don’t know . . .” I trailed off. Over the last couple of months, the Council had been fortifying the War Rooms, but the rumours of an impending Dark attack hadn’t gone away. And everyone still seemed to believe that it was linked to Richard and Morden.
Anne didn’t know anything about Morden’s activities. Ever since that first day in January, she hadn’t even seen him. But on that day, she’d been seen with him. And the Crusaders didn’t know that Anne wasn’t secretly still in touch with him. All they’d know was that Anne was still officially Morden’s appointee . . .
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“What?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling.” I looked at Sonder. “Where did they go?”
“They gated, but it was masked,” Sonder said. “I can try to trace it.”
I nodded. “I’m going to try and track her directly. Tell me if you find anything that might help.”
Sonder left, hurrying across the road. “Track her how?” Variam asked.
“Here, this is for Anne’s flat,” I said, handing Variam a gate stone as we started running the other way. “Remember that seeker focus?”
“I thought you lost that at Christmas?” Luna asked as we ran.
“We got a replacement,” I said. Two years ago, Anne had been attacked by a pair of Dark apprentices; their master was Anne’s old enemy, Sagash, but they’d been working for a renegade Light mage called Crystal. We’d won the battle but Crystal had escaped, and she still wanted Anne as an ingredient for a particularly nasty ritual that she’d shown no sign of giving up on, so once we’d made it back to London, we’d set things up so that if she had another try at kidnapping Anne and actually succeeded, the rest of us would be able to do something about it.
It’s probably not obvious, but this sort of thing is one of the main reasons that all the members of our little group are still alive. When we get attacked or ambushed, one of the first things we do as soon as we have the chance is figure out some kind of defence against the same thing happening again. We have contingency plans for anything from night attacks on our homes to getting outlawed by the Council in the middle of the workday. They aren’t foolproof, but Variam, Luna, Anne, and I are all much more difficult targets than we look.
We reached the park and Variam ducked behind a tree. Quickly he created a gate through into Anne’s flat, a small one-bedroom in Ealing, and we jumped through into the warm air. Light was streaming through the windows and past the plants on the sill, and it all looked very pretty, but I wasn’t here to sightsee. I pulled away a chair in the living room, took off a small ventilation grate that would have looked solid to a casual glance, and pulled out a box. “Now we pray she’s kept it up to date.”
“It needs updates?” Variam said, peering down at the thing inside. It looked like a glass rod with a thread of dark red running through the centre.