“More like blood,” I said. The hard part of setting this up hadn’t been figuring out a way to track Anne: it had been figuring out a way to track Anne that would stick. The standard trick of planting a subcutaneous tracer was hopeless; the simplest magical scans pick up that kind of thing. Tracking spells are better, but they’re easy to block with wards. But wards aren’t foolproof either. If you have a piece of someone’s body to set up a sympathetic link, you can put together a tracking spell with enough power to punch through most things. Hair or nail clippings are decent; saliva is better; blood is best of all. But it has to be fresh.
Luna and Variam fell silent as I closed my eyes and concentrated, channelling into the focus. My heart was in my mouth: if this didn’t work, it would be very bad. For a moment, as I scanned the futures, I could see nothing but myself standing there; then my heart leapt as I saw movement. An instant later, I could feel it: a mental direction. It was fuzzy, as though the signal was struggling to get through, but it was there.
I snapped back to the present and pulled a map from where it had been folded in the box. “Got something?” Variam asked.
“Yeah.” I dug around until I found a ruler and a pencil, pulled out the compass on my phone, checked again with the rod, then drew a line on the map. It ran a little south of northeast. “Okay,” I said. “Vari, gate us to . . .” I traced the pencil right and made a wide circle below the line. “There. Anywhere between Barking and Greenwich.” From there we could get another reference point to triangulate. If we were lucky, that would be enough.
Variam nodded and we gated out.
| | | | | | | | |
We were lucky. The mages who’d taken Anne could have gated her to Scotland, or Sweden, or Australia, or anywhere else in the world where they had a roof and enough time to ward up a safe house. They could even have taken her to a shadow realm, and any of those things would have made it far more difficult for the tracer to work. But they were Light mages, and like so many other Light mages, they didn’t want to get too far away from the Council’s centre of power. They couldn’t take her to the War Rooms or to Keeper HQ, and so instead they’d taken her here, to a small, nondescript end-of-terrace house in Walthamstow, with few windows and high walls.
“No,” I said over the phone. Variam, Luna, and I were on the other side of a set of railings and a small car park, using a block of flats to shield us from the house. “It’s E17, not N17. House number one.”
“All right,” Sonder said. In the background I could hear the clicking of keys. “One sec.”
“You think they’ve got cameras?” Luna asked quietly.
“They’re bloody idiots if they don’t,” Variam said. Evening was turning to night, and the autumn sky was fading to black.
“Alex?” Sonder said. “I’ve got it. It’s Council owned, but the records show it as mothballed. It should be empty.”
“It’s not,” I said. The curtains on the windows were thick, and only a faint glow of light showed from behind them, but the tracer focus was pointing straight there.
“It could be squatters . . .”
“And they’re having Anne inside for a cup of tea?”
I heard Sonder sigh. “Okay, it’s not squatters. What do you want to do?”
“What do you think I’m going to do?”
“You don’t have any authorisation . . .”
“I’m a Keeper, blah blah, emergency situation, necessary use of force,” I said. “But honestly, I really don’t give a fuck. Acting now, rationalising later.”
“All right,” Sonder said. “But Alex? None of the Keepers I’ve talked to seem to have any idea what’s going on. Be careful.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I know why. We’ll keep you posted.” I hung up.
“Think I see a camera over the porch,” Variam said.
I looked into the futures in which I ran closer, branching them so that my future images searched the outside of the house from all three sides. “Two cameras,” I said. “One front, one back.” I looked at Luna. “Remember that spell Chalice taught you?”
“You point me at them and I’ll turn them into junk.”
We moved forward to the corner of the flats and Luna and Variam waited as I concentrated, looking ahead. Sometimes I have to make an effort to get into the mental state to do something dangerous, but not this time. Anne was in there, and I was going to get her. The only question was how.
“Well?” Variam demanded. He was shifting from one foot to the other, clearly itching to go.
“Tricking our way in isn’t going to work,” I said. Ringing the doorbell would result in being ignored at best and outright attacked at worst. “We’re going to have to blow the doors.”
“Good,” Variam said. “What’s the count?”
“I’m not seeing many,” I said with a frown. Normally Council mages have servants—guards, security, cannon fodder, whatever you call them—but in all the futures where we blasted the door down, the house was barely occupied. It didn’t occur to me at the time that there might be a reason for that. There are some kinds of work for which people don’t want witnesses. “One or two, maybe. But at least one’s a mage.”
“What kind?”
“Light and force. I’m guessing it’s Lightbringer.” Which meant it was a good bet that we could also expect Zilean.
“So we clear to go?”
I hesitated, feeling the coin of fate spin. I couldn’t get a clear read on what would happen after we forced our way inside. There might be traps, hidden deeper where my divination couldn’t so easily see, or the enemy could be there in greater numbers. If I waited, and kept path-walking, I could narrow the odds. But that would take time, and every extra minute increased the chances that they’d get reinforcements or move Anne . . . or worse. I remembered what had happened to Morden’s last two aides, and what Lightbringer and Zilean had been planning to do to me, and all of a sudden waiting wasn’t an option. “I’ll take the front,” I said. “You two take the back. Luna fries the cameras, then you go in first. I’ll follow a second later, try to split their focus. Fight your way upstairs the first chance you get. Remember, our best guess is that Anne’s on the first floor, so don’t get caught up. We want to punch through to where she is. All clear?”
Luna and Variam nodded.
“Do it,” I said to Luna.
Luna stood up, reaching out a hand towards the front of the house, and to my eyes a tendril of silver mist seemed to extend from her fingers, crossing the street to soak into the small dark shape of the camera. When Luna’s curse touches something, then whatever can go wrong, will, which in the case of computers means bugs, crashes, and hardware failure. With the amount of power Luna had just put into that camera, the only thing it would ever be useful for again was scrap metal.
I broke cover, running for the front door, while Variam and Luna split off towards the garden. I was dimly aware of Luna working the spell a second time, but I didn’t stop to analyse. At any second the mages inside might notice something, and our best defence was speed. I dropped my bag beside the front door, pulled out one of a handful of things that looked to a casual glance like bundles of thick cord wrapped in electrical tape, ripped off the backing, stuck it to the door around the keyhole, unwrapped the wire leading to the activator, let the wire unspool as I backed off around the corner, pulled out my 1911 from the bag, took the gun in my right hand and the activator in my left, and spoke into the communicator in my ear. “Vari. I’m ready at the front.”
There was a moment’s pause, then Variam’s voice spoke into my ear. “Ready at the back.”
“Ready at the back,” Luna said.