Trio of Sorcery (13 page)

Knowing that, she invoked mage-sight, and saw the
walls, floor, and ceiling of the place glowing with the same black-green energy that Tamara's card had. The child turned her head to wipe her streaming nose and Di recognized her as the missing Melanie.

Hanging over her was a sense of deadly peril—a sense that something truly worse than death was in store for her. For a moment, a sign formed over the child, superimposed on her tiny form. Di didn't immediately recognize the sigil but she instinctively knew it meant doom.

Mentally, she cursed. So Tamara
was
the kidnapper, and she had warded this place strongly against detection. She was smart and probably paranoid;
she
was a magician, so she assumed there might be other magicians who would look for the child. It was a logical assumption; since there was currently a huge reward for Melanie's return, funded by one of the TV stations, there were going to be people looking for the child, and some of them might well be magicians. There was no other reason to have warded this room so heavily.

And if Tamara had warded the place magically, it was also warded psychically. The two abilities were often linked, and it was easy to add wards against mental intrusions. If Tamara was that smart, and that paranoid, this room was probably hidden in a place where no one would look.

Not surprisingly, the room itself looked nothing like the room that Tamara had described to Chris Fitzhugh. It might be a storage room in a basement, or a really big storage closet, or even some sort of storage shed; it had no
windows at all. The floor was wood; the floorboards were worn, with spaces between them. The walls were painted but the paint was cracked and peeling. There didn't seem to be a source of heat or light.

The door opened.

There was light outside; the person who had opened the door was silhouetted against it. It seemed bright, but only in comparison to the darkened room. If it was electrical, it couldn't have been brighter than a 40-watt bulb, and it might have been from a kerosene lamp. Di tried to move past the door to see, but couldn't get near it, because of the personal wards on the person standing there.

The person in the doorway was Tamara. Because of the mage-sight, she was haloed in that awful energy. She didn't see Di, which meant this really was a vision—if any part of Di had actually been in this room, there was no way that Tamara would have missed her.

Tamara strode into the room, skirts swishing angrily, heels pounding on the wooden floor. She bent down, pulled the little girl out of her nest of blankets by one shoulder, and shook her until her teeth rattled.

“Shut up, you little bitch,” Tamara snarled, and dropped Melanie back on the mattress. Terrified into silence, the little girl curled up into a ball and pulled the covers over her head.

Without another word, Tamara turned back around and stalked out the door, slamming it behind her.

Di really woke up this time, head aching and her heart
pounding. She sat up slowly, trying to extract every bit of information she could from that dream.

Tamara definitely had something to do with the kidnapping of Melanie; at this point, there was no telling exactly what her role was. Di was betting the Gypsy was the original, even the sole, kidnapper, but it was possible that Tamara was acting in collusion with someone. And at the moment, Di had no idea why she had snatched the child…but based on the little she had seen, it wasn't
just
to leech her misery along with that of her mother, nor was it to “discover” her and claim the reward. Melanie had seen her and could identify her; there was no way that Tamara was going to turn her over alive. So Tamara had other plans for the child, probably awful ones, plans that required her to keep the child alive for some unknown time.

If
the vision was right.

Sometimes the visions weren't. Even though Di had “seen” Tamara, it didn't follow that Tamara had actually been there. Someone else could be responsible, someone who was using Tamara's powers to keep the child hidden. Or, it could be someone connected with Tamara, but because Tamara's was the only face Di knew, that was the face the vision showed her.

Twice in the past, she'd gotten it wrong. Once, when she thought she'd pinpointed a murderer, and once when she thought she had witnessed a particularly brutal rape. Fortunately Memaw had stopped her before she had
gone rushing to report what she had “seen” to the police. In the first case, the murder was long solved; the vision had been meant to warn her not to stir up old, terrible memories for someone. In the second, she had been right about the rape, but wrong about the rapist; what she had seen was what the victim “remembered”—and the victim herself had been wrong.

But Melanie
was
in danger. That much she was completely convinced of.

The problem was, she didn't have a shred of evidence. There was no point in taking this to Joe; without evidence, he couldn't do anything either. For that matter, she didn't even have a location, so all she could do was to tell him that what everyone hoped was right—Melanie was alive—and what everyone feared was right—she was in great danger. What could she do with this information other than make Chris Fitzhugh more miserable?

For that matter, although Di herself was strongly convinced that this vision had taken place in present and concurrent time, it might be in the past.

“Dammit,”
she said aloud into the dark. She tried to think. What
could
she do? There had to be something…

Maybe protection? Could she do something that would make it difficult, or even impossible, for anyone to harm the child for a while?

Not through those shields…at least, not without something that belonged to Melanie.
That was the problem, she had no personal connection to the girl. She'd need
something
very
personal—hair, saliva, or blood—to get through the wards in place around her.

Di ground her teeth until her jaws ached, then went to the locked cupboard that held her magic books and grimoires. She took them all back to bed and spent the rest of a sleepless night leafing through them, looking for something, anything, that would help, and coming up with nothing at all.

She didn't realize that she had fallen asleep over her books until she woke with a start. There was a crick in her neck and the phone was shrilling away. Heart pounding, Di shoved everything aside and scrambled out of the bed, hoping to get to the phone before whoever was on the other end gave up.

“This is Joe O'Brian,” said the tinny voice on the other end of the line in response to her hello. “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

“Good news?” she faltered.

“The bitch won't be bothering Chris Fitzhugh anymore.”

The way he said it made her heart sink.

“Because?” she asked.

“She's bolted. We got a warrant for her based on your work—good job, by the way, the captain's impressed—and
went looking for her last night. We knocked on the front door, and near as we can figure, she went out the back.”

Di closed her eyes as her heart plummeted. She wanted to ask, “Why didn't you have someone watching the back?” but in the first place, that wouldn't do any good, in the second place, it wouldn't win her any points with Joe, and in the third—only she knew that Tamara was something more than a fraud and an extortionist. It all came back to evidence, of which she had exactly none.

“Any idea where she might have gone?” she asked instead.

“She's a Gypsy, she's probably halfway to Chicago by now.” She could almost see him shrug. “At least that's one complication in this case that we won't have to worry about anymore. Thanks, Tregarde. I owe you.”

“That's all right, Joe. I wish I could have done more—” she said, but he had already hung up the phone.

She carefully put the receiver back on the cradle, because if she wasn't careful she was afraid she just might smash it.

So Tamara was gone—and maybe that vision last night had indeed been reality, maybe even in sync with reality. She could well imagine why Tamara was angry, if she'd had to flee a half step ahead of the law.

Now she cursed herself for not taking something of the woman's with her when she had had the chance. With a physical object, she
might
have a chance of finding her.
Without one? Not with those shields in place. She stood there next to the phone in her underwear, feeling utterly helpless. And utterly alone.

Why am I doing this?
she thought in despair.
Why? What's the point? I'm not actually succeeding at anything. Tamara isn't in custody, I have no idea where Melanie is, something horrible is going to happen to her, and I can't stop it. What good is all this power, all this sacrifice, if I can't save one little girl?

She wanted to howl, scream, tear out handfuls of her hair, break something. She wanted to
hurt
something.

How much of her life had she given up? The chance for a normal life, for friends, for guys, for—well, everything that everyone else took for granted. She'd done it all in the name of helping people.

And now she couldn't even manage that.

What
good
was all this if whatever had given her this power couldn't even give her the tiniest little sign, the smallest bit of help, so she could—

Her thoughts shattered at the tentative knock at the door.

“Um. Di?”

It was Emory's voice.

Flustered, Di looked around frantically for a bathrobe.

“You there?”

“Just a second, I'm not exactly decent—” She wrenched open the closet door and grabbed the first thing that came to hand, one of her old granny dresses. She pulled it on
over her head. It was a light yellow cotton with short sleeves, wildly inappropriate for the season, but at least now she wasn't three-fourths naked. She ran back to the door, flipped the locks, then opened it.

She didn't think it was possible for her heart to sink further, but it did. All four of them were there, looking somber, and very much as if they too had had a sleepless night.

“Can we come in?” Emory asked somberly. “We'd like to talk to you.”

Numbly, she nodded.
So they've come to tell me to bugger off in person.
…

At least they were going to give her that much courtesy and not treat her like she had suddenly contracted leprosy.

They filed in, and she closed the door, then turned to face them.

The foursome exchanged a look, then Emory took a deep breath.

Here it comes. “Sorry, we just can't handle—what happened. So…let's say we don't know each other, okay?”

“We talked things over last night,” Emory said, brows creased. “All four of us. We went off to the Dudley and stayed there most of the night, talking. That stuff that happened—it was kind of hard to—” He took another deep breath. “I mean, it's not something that's easy to accept, even when it happened to you and you've got the evidence right in front of you—and—we wanted to talk it over somewhere normal, where we could look at things objectively and—”

“We want to help,” blurted Marshal.

That was so unexpected that for a moment she didn't believe what she'd heard. “Um—say again?” she said stupidly.

“We want to help you,” Emory repeated. “That's what we were talking about all last night. I mean, you didn't just pull all that stuff out of your ass. You weren't surprised, you weren't running around screaming, you recognized what you saw and you knew what to do about it. You're like Dr. Strange or something. You do magic to help people, and we think you've been doing it for a while. So we want to help. Not sure how, but you shouldn't have to do this alone.”

All she could do was stand there and blink at them.

“Look,” Emory said, “I know the only one of us that can actually do anything like what you do is Zaak and he's like the bumbling apprentice—”

“Hey!” Zaak said indignantly.

“Shut up, Zaak,” the other three said simultaneously.

“Anyway—” Marshal made a helpless little gesture with his hands. “The thing is, we
know
this stuff is real now, and we can't unknow that. And we all work pretty good together. I mean, when you're running the show. So—um—can we, like, sign on?”

She felt as if her jaw should be hitting the floor and shattering at this point, she was so shocked. This wasn't happening. This
couldn't
be happening—

She watched their faces start to fall in reaction to her stunned silence, and realized that she had better say something before they walked out the door, thinking that
she
had rejected
them.

“Yes!” she blurted. “Oh, hell
yes
!”

For a moment, they stood in stunned silence. Then Zaak let out a whoop, and the others began punching fists in the air and generally carrying on as if she had just offered them all brand-new Ferraris.