Goliath MacGregor unbent and could almost look me in the eye. He was as tall as Charleston, but built leaner like me, except even more willowy—the way I’d looked before the separation had me hitting the gym harder. He and I had only been out together a handful of times and twice people had mistaken him for a famous basketball player. I didn’t follow sports, so I didn’t know the name, but I looked it up later and I didn’t see the resemblance. Goliath was tall, black, and handsome and so was the famous player, but he wasn’t as muscled as the athlete and I thought Goliath was more fair of face. First time he got recognized had been by a middle-aged couple, the second by two pretty, star-struck women. He’d told them he wasn’t the famous player both times. They’d all been embarrassed at the mistake. He’d gotten the phone numbers of the young women with a line that went something like he could make their fantasy come true. I’d never thought of turning something so awkward into a pickup line, and I’d never asked him if he’d followed up with the “date.” I didn’t want to know, especially since once they were out of sight, he’d turned to me and said, “We all look alike, I guess.” I’d apologized as if somehow it was my fault just by skin association. He’d accepted the apology with a smile, and a “Not your fault, Havoc.” I didn’t understand how he could think the two women were racist and still want to have sex with them, and not being black I didn’t feel like I could ask him to explain it.
Charleston asked, “What do you sense, Havoc?”
I realized I’d been staring at Goliath longer than necessary, but I realized why. I couldn’t “hear” the hum of his magic either, but now that I couldn’t sense it, I knew that his powers were close to the same level of white noise as Charleston and Ravensong, which made him a lot more powerful than I’d realized.
“Nothing and I mean nothing, Lieutenant. I don’t even feel anything coming from you, Ravensong, or MacGregor. It’s like all the magic in the room is dampened.”
“Hey, it’s not me,” Lila said.
“I know, because even when you use your powers, I can still feel the hum of Ravensong and Charleston. I haven’t been around MacGregor here when you went into full null, so I don’t know, but I’m betting it would be the same; right now there’s nothing.”
“She doesn’t aim her powers at us,” Charleston said.
“Wait,” Goliath MacGregor said, “she’s a psychic null, they’re like light switches—on, all the magic in the room stops working, off and the magic works again. It’s an area-of-effect power, not a point-and-shoot.”
Charleston said, “Do you want to explain, Bridges?”
“I can aim my nulling field to the front, leaving my team free to work magic behind me.”
“She’s being modest,” Charleston said. “She can narrow her field of effect down to a few feet, so that the rest of us can move into the room and still work psychic or magical gifts and the criminals can’t.”
Goliath looked at Lila, and there was nothing but respect on his face. “That’s very impressive, I’ve never heard of any psychic null that was able to narrow their field of effect. It was explained as a sort of psychic version of an electromagnetic pulse.”
“Most of them are,” Charleston said.
“But I’m not blindsiding Havoc,” Lila said.
“We felt it at the house,” Goliath said.
“Let me see whatever ‘it’ is, and we’ll go from there,” I said.
Ravensong moved aside and I could suddenly see a small bottle. I thought glass, then realized it was crystal set in a delicate lace of gold. It was beautiful like something that you’d see in a museum or in an old black-and-white movie in the hands of a queen. It didn’t look like anything that a nineteen-year-old college student like Mark Cookson would have in his possession.
“Before I describe it, tell me if it looks beautiful to anyone else.”
“It’s pretty,” Lila said.
“It’s like an old-fashioned perfume bottle that my great-aunt Lottie would have had on her vanity. She wore feather-edged silk robes and nightgowns. When I was ten and my sister was eight Aunt Lottie took us out for high tea at the fanciest hotel restaurant we’d ever seen. She wore a feather boa.” Ravensong smiled, her face alight with happy nostalgia.
“It’s like an old movie prop,” Charleston said.
“Is it an illusion?” Lila asked.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“Crystal and gold, like it’s some kind of oversized jewelry,” she said.
“I think we all see the same bottle,” Charleston said.
“It’s a beautiful bottle, what made you gather it as evidence?” I asked.
“First, look at it, does it look like something a nineteen-year-old guy would have in his man cave?” Lila said.
“It did sort of stand out,” Goliath said.
“The bottle was sitting in this little alcove hidden behind books like a twelve-year-old girl hides her diary,” Lila said.
“His room looked like it belonged to a much younger boy,” Goliath said.
“Some parents don’t let their kids update their rooms,” Charleston said.
“Maybe,” Goliath said, “but the room felt like this Mark Cookson just stopped. It was all arrested development.”
“According to the techies his browser history was a lot of incel sites, angry-at-women-for-not-fucking-you kind of shit,” Lila said.
“That explains the rape and violence,” Ravensong said, “but it doesn’t explain this.”
“It doesn’t feel evil, and it seems to dampen magic better than Lila does. What made you look behind the books in the first place?” I asked.
“The choice of books,” Lila said.
Goliath nodded. “They were occult, but nothing too unusual except that they were right next to a set of Hardy Boys mysteries.”
“Hardy Boys, really?” Ravensong said. “I used to read those when I was in junior high, along with Nancy Drew.”
“The whole room was a mix of younger-than-high-school-boy stuff and then the occult,” Goliath said.
“Did you say that the bottle was behind the occult books?” Adam asked. It was almost startling that he was still in the room. I’d noticed he could be so quiet that you forgot about him, until he decided to go back to being his usual persistent self.
“Yes,” Goliath said.
“So, the occult books marked the spot like an X on a map in a Hardy Boys mystery?” Adam asked.
“I guess,” Goliath said.
“It’s like it wanted to be found,” Adam said.
“You mean Cookson wanted the bottle to be found?” Lila said.
Adam shook his head. “No, the bottle wanted to be found.”
“The bottle can’t want anything, Thornton, it’s an inanimate object,” Goliath said.
Adam was shaking his head slowly back and forth, staring at the bottle. “The bottle can’t, but what’s inside it can.”
“How do you know what’s inside it?” Goliath said.
“Who told you?” Lila asked.