after the Great War, presumably. He’d not had many dealings with them since. Aside from Leticia, of course, who had always been, he’d thought, the exception which proved the rule. A singular bright spot, a lively and unpredictable adventurer among bumbling academics. The Brigantium, to him, was dull, slow-moving bureaucracy more inclined to study than to practice. Prone to inaction, not action.
The smoothly orchestrated activities here suggested quite the opposite.
For so long he’d dealt with the Brigantium only on an individual basis, and as such he’d lost track of the whole. Here, as with Idris, more attention should have been paid. Much more.
So many people, working tirelessly, for all of their youth and uniformity looking like members of a battalion. Their movements were focused and precise, with none of the little wanderings, the breaks, one might expect from a casual workforce. No chats by the van. No personal phone calls. No trips to grab a snack or a warm drink. Just in and out. In and out. He shifted uncomfortably on the bench. As traditional London shops had sold out to make way for chain stores; as building facades had been torn down to be replaced by massive panes of glass and illuminated lettering; so too, it seemed, had the Brigantium changed. Become sleeker. More efficient.
More threatening.
It had taken hours for a weak spot in their security to reveal itself—or, rather, herself. Just when he’d been nearing his wits’ end, a harried looking girl had emerged from Leticia’s house, consulted a scrap of paper, then shown an advantageous lack of concern for her surroundings as she’d trotted down the street.
He’d been quick to pursue, confident that with his slicked-back hair, colored contact lenses, and quintessentially boring suit he looked not only distinctly unlike himself but also not liable to arouse concern. Three blocks later, she went into one of those commercial sandwich shops that had popped up everywhere, seemingly overnight, back in the 90’s.
Franchise buyouts, the toadstools of the commercial world.
He’d kept his distance in the shop, pretended to read the ingredients on a bag of crisps while the girl collected items with frequent consultation of her scrap of paper. Gathering dinner for the troops, he figured, the implication being that they planned to work into the night. No one bothered to feed people who would soon be at home.
When he’d seen her having a bit of trouble at the beverage case, he’d made his move. With a smile forced all the way to his eyes, he’d stepped up and gallantly freed the jammed bottle of Orangina from the rack. From then it had been a simple matter to silently recite the charm’s trigger word and transfer a small amount of energy to the glass before he set it in her basket.
If the girl had felt his use of magic, she’d given no indication during her effusive thanks. She’d blushed a bit, which he supposed he should’ve found flattering, but under the circumstances hadn’t felt anything at all. He’d bid her a polite good evening and returned to the garden to wait.
And here she was, finally, hurrying back with two overstuffed plastic sacks in each hand. In one of them, unless she’d got wise to the trick, was the Orangina bottle and his key into the house.
With some trepidation, he watched her move through the propped-open iron gate—and when she paused at the top of Leticia’s front steps, he worried outright. But she was only adjusting her grip. That sorted, she entered the house and he felt the sharp prick of the charm breaking through. The tiny hole it created in the wards began healing almost immediately, so that by the time the girl moved out of sight, it was as if it had never been.
Should the house’s barrier be under careful monitoring, even that tiny breach would have been detected the instant it occurred. Indeed, if the neighborhood were under surveillance, the smallest use of magic might be detected—hence his solely practical disguise by way of clothing and lenses.
Yet as seconds passed, the workers kept to their routine, carrying items out of the house like ants looting a picnic.
As Cormac put away his mobile, he took a chance and preternaturally reached out to the charm lodged in the glass, felt the energy of it travel farther into the house. Still no noticeable change outside. Workers came out with boxes, went back in without. The door remained open.
He expanded his awareness and, using the glass as a focus, reached out to its immediate surroundings. Soon he could feel the people moving around the bottle: getting close to it, then quickly falling away. Coming into the room to fetch food and drink, then returning to work.
Time was limited. Once the Orangina was consumed, the bottle was liable to be put out in the recycle bin out front. Outside the wards, it would be no use to him. He expanded his Sight to its fullest and rapidly searched the house’s multiple stories. Of the many isolated spots, few seemed viable. This method of scanning a location was imprecise at best, much like looking through thick fog at night. One wrong transit and he could find himself bisected by, pierced, or impaled upon any number of household or architectural items. Since he’d rather avoid that, he had to choose what was definitely a large, open area—a room as opposed to a crawl space or closet—and hope he could find cover before someone happened by.
Uttering the spell’s trigger, he sent himself flowing through the glass to what he very much hoped to be a deserted attic.
Granite Springs, Oregon
Thia hurriedly scraped a scissor blade along a strip of metallic ribbon and, after it sprang into a mound of tight curls, handed the gift box it adorned to Stefanie for stickering and grabbed another. Wrap ribbon, snip ribbon, curl ribbon, hand to Stefanie. Wrap ribbon, snip ribbon… Thia had no idea how long she’d been at it, but by the looks of things, she’d be at it for a while longer. That didn’t bode well for Mrs. Blumquist’s matinée seat—or those of the increasingly impatient customers waiting behind her. The Shakespeare Festival had a strict policy on late seating (namely, there wasn’t any).
Madame Demetka really hadn’t been kidding about trouble. Along with the school tour, a group from the Crystal Hills Retreat and Wellness Center, and an unusually large number of locals looking to prepare for Halloween parties and Samhain celebrations, Natalie Blumquist—binge shopper extraordinaire—had arrived for what Abby had described as the woman’s annual spree.
“Are you certain you wouldn’t like to pick these up after the show?” Abby asked for the third, maybe fourth time.
Mrs. Blumquist gave a blithe wave of her hand. “I’m sure it’s fine. I need to know what goes where.” Her manicure matched the color of her beehive: lavender. Somehow, the older woman managed to carry the hairstyle off. Thia bit back a smile. She imagined the people who would find themselves seated behind her at the plays would like to carry it off as well—to somewhere far, far away.
“We’re labeling them, Mrs. Blumquist.” She tapped her scissor points on a slip of paper tacked to the bottom of the latest box. “Easily removed when needed.”
Mrs. Blumquist’s brow arched. “That’s all well and good, I’m sure. But I still need to know what everything is. The labels could fall off.”
“Of course.” Thia’s smile felt brittle. Before she could resume curling ribbon, someone near the back of the line cleared his throat. A man in an argyle sweater held up an inexpensive garden statue.
“My wife just wants this one frog,” he said. “She’ll kill me if I miss our show.”
“I’ve only got postcards,” a bespectacled woman chimed in. “The sign said I could get five for a dollar. So I picked out five—and have a dollar right here. There’s no sales tax. Please, I don’t need a receipt. Can’t I just go?” She set four quarters on the counter while the man behind her waggled a tiny pewter figure. “I promised my daughter this fairy thing,” he said. “She’s waiting out there with her mother. We’ll all be late.”