Fire erupted between us. Not just erupted, but shot out in all directions, a mixture of blue psychedelic flames and a full-on purple blaze. The contessa’s screams now mingled with those of her would-be saviors, and Nigel didn’t hesitate. He grabbed hold of my shoulder and hauled me out from underneath the bed, both of us rolling to our feet.
The tableau we faced was breathtaking. The contessa on top of her bed, her mouth hanging open in a long scream, her hands spread wide. The men on all sides of her bed frozen with her… frozen completely, it appeared. The fire crackled all around…but nobody was moving but us.
“What the hell is this?” Nigel demanded, but I couldn’t concentrate on that crazy. I had crazy of my own to solve.
“Unstick me,” I gasped.
He dropped down, pulling the magnetic cubes off my ankles, then cursing loudly as they adhered to his palms with the same energy that had stuck them to me. Nigel was only marginally Connected, enough to make him a great bounty hunter but not enough to get him a slot on Magical Jeopardy, but whatever energy he had inside him, the cubes seemed to like it too. He grunted with pain as he staggered back upright, and the two of us set off across the room, through the fire and smoke, through the frozen bodies of the contessa and her staff, all the way to the main doors. Working together to get the ends of our fingers around the door handle despite the giant cubes stuck to our palms, we flung the doors open and dashed into the corridor.
The shift of energy behind us betrayed our mistake: if you took the magic out of the room, everything returned to normal.
The contessa’s wail filled the entire wing. “What is happening?”
Once again, Nigel didn’t hesitate. He shoved me into a run, and we raced past two doors, but at the third, he flopped his hands at the handle, and once again, between the two of us, we were able to open it and stumble inside.
The room had clearly been given over to a madman’s version of a library. Books lined the space from floor to ceiling, all four walls, except the far wall, which had a graceful window seat cut into the bookcase, arranged with pretty pillows. The seat seemed completely unusable, but was picturesque nevertheless. Otherwise, the chairs scattered around the room appeared comfortable enough, but none of this afforded us much in the way of protection.
“Staircase,” Nigel asserted, running for the far wall. I immediately had images of the bookcase swinging open, revealing a curving staircase down into the bowels of the mansion. But we didn’t have that kind of time.
“Nigel,” I shouted.
He whirled back to me, his eyes wild, and I did the only thing I could think of. As the door burst open behind me I flung my hands wide, putting all my energy into reversing the polarity of the two uranium cubes that were stuck to my palms, enjoining them instead to return to their mates.
Nigel’s eyes registered patent alarm as the energy built within me and the cubes finally released. A second later, they hit his body with the force of a battering ram and he flipped backward toward the window seat, crashing to the floor even as I leapt after him.
I vaulted the low couch separating us more or less smoothly, then sprawled on top of Nigel, flattening him the rest of the way as shouts sounded behind us. He’d gone positively white and his hair was smoking, but, free of the cubes’ electrical pull, I could at least do my job.
I wrapped my arms around Nigel and crackled us out of existence.
3
“Dollface.”
The words were real and present, spoken directly in front of me, but they still didn’t make sense. Nikki Dawes couldn’t be hovering that close, because I was curled up in my own bed in the Palazzo Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, a bed I’d seen far too little of in recent months. And no matter how good friends Nikki and I were, she didn’t tuck me in at night. At least I was pretty sure she didn’t. It’d been barely a week since Nigel and I had finished our round-the-world cube-collecting tour and I was still playing psychic Jenga in my sleep. Maybe I’d officially gone on supervised bed rest.
“Yo, dollface.”
The words came again, more insistently this time. And there were more of them. “You’ve got to get up. Or get down, but get off that pile of glass, however you can manage it.”
That statement was so odd that I slid open one eye and realized I wasn’t actually in my bedroom. Or on my bed. Instead, I had somehow managed to stretch out over the top of my desk in my office at Justice Hall. I’d arranged myself amid a short pile of canisters, thick glass tubes that apparently made reasonable bedfellows, at least when covered by the velvet cushion I’d dragged out from the trough that usually collected them. I glanced over worriedly only to find that a new velvet lining had been installed at the base of the nineteenth-century pneumatic tube assembly constructed behind my desk. More canisters filled the wide tray as well, each of them containing a new message for me. Parcel post at its steampunk finest.
“Are you running a sweepstakes or something?” Nikki asked, picking up the nearest canister and waving it at me as I slid back into my chair. I blearily took in her dark red hair and crisp business attire. “Because this is an awful lot of mail for a Tuesday.”
She shook the canister and popped open the top, slipping out the curl of paper inside. “This one’s about the Dolmen of Guadalperal—some kind of Spanish stone circle gone bad. Stones recently revealed by drought and falling sea levels caused a lot of excitement, blah, blah, blah, but the stones, which should have had unusual powers of healing, are now being blamed for people getting sick. They want you to take them away.”
She furrowed her brow, glancing up at me. “Seriously?”
I sighed, gesturing at the pile of canisters to the right of the desk. “All problem artifacts go into that pile. Psychics behaving badly go in front of the desk, and responses to my recent request for information on magical artifacts that can either augment or diminish magic, I’m keeping separate. Artifacts of magical enhancement to the left, and this pile,” I pointed to the desktop, “is for artifacts of nullifying magic.”
There were only a few canisters on the desk, and I’d been using them as pillows, apparently. You had to take your comfort where you could.
Nikki issued a soft whistle. “I wouldn’t have expected there to be so few of the nullifying-magic ones,” she said, confirming my own reaction. “I mean, I guess it makes sense that people don’t necessarily recognize magic-destroying properties as easily as they would magic-enhancing properties in an item, but…”
I straightened the half dozen canisters. “But there should be more of them. The fact that there’s not could mean anything. It could mean that nobody’s searching for magic-nullifying artifacts, or it could mean they’ve all been taken off the market already, or at least a significant pile of them, and are being hoarded somewhere off the grid.”
I pointed to the pile of magic-enhancing artifacts some of the faithful had actually sent along on loan—totems, icons, amulets, or chips, splinters and flakes of larger pieces. “The problem with these is that a good forty percent of them are total fakes. Their nominating parties believe in them, but…there’s nothing there.”
“The placebo effect is alive and well.” Nikki sighed. “Why do you get the sense that they’re fakes? No mojo in the notes themselves, or are the totems simply duds?”