Published at 8th of March 2024 7:45 am

Book 2, Chapter 17

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

“Yes, I’m fine, Bogo. Let me up,” I said to the excited not-dog doing his best to sniff his (or my?) distress away.

Bogo must have sensed my mood because he immediately backed off and sat a foot from me. I heard my name yelled and was joined by Alice and Ida, who arrived just in time to see me regain my feet and wipe the dirt off the back of my pants.

“I am so sorry!” Alice said, her normally steady voice heavy with emotion. “With everything going on I totally forgot about the fucking letter and—and I forgot that YOU have amnesia and didn’t remember the date and I’m a double fuck-up because I forgot it was today and THEY ACTUALLY TELEPORTED YOU?!?”

I heard a sound and looked down the lot, seeing a middle-aged man with a woman that I hoped was his daughter exiting a room and giving us curious looks. “Let’s take this inside,” I said and headed for Alice’s room, which was closer.

The room was a disaster. Someone (I presume Alice) had lifted the bed, frame and all, and shoved it up against the wall where the headboard used to be. Where it had been was a big, partially done magic circle with… I squinted my eyes and looked at the center. Yup, those were likely my hairs.

I turned and raised an eyebrow at Alice. Externally, I was trying to be calm, but internally, the meeting with Jager had shaken me greatly, dealing a heavy blow to whatever mental progress my night of meditation had given me. No, that’s not fair to myself. Without the gains of last night, I’d probably be handling this a lot worse. Even so, it was all I could do to keep my breath steady and my hands from shaking.

“I thought you had been kidnapped by the Doorman’s brother or something!” Alice almost yelled as Ida closed the door behind them. “I badgered Ida into helping me find some of your hair from your comb and was halfway done with a Reprisal Sign when Ida talked some sense into me. Thank God she is ice under pressure because she calmed me down enough to get me thinking and I remembered that stupid letter Ade and Stewie gave you.”

I frowned. “I take it from your reaction that being teleported isn’t a normal occurrence?”

“Fuck no!” Alice nearly shouted. Ida put a hand on her shoulder and Alice made a visible effort to calm down. “No. It barely ever happens. Hell, I used to think my grandma was full of shit until literally a few minutes ago. Usually, you are taken to an office and have the magical equivalent of a Skype call, they tell you “obey the rules or die” and that’s it.”

I made a frustrated noise. Ida crossed the room and went to take my hand but I flinched away from her. “Sorry,” I said quickly. I slowly placed my hands on her shoulders. “I’m—when I’m stressed some old tics with being touched come up. It has nothing to do with you.”

She nodded. “I know,” she said with a weak smile. We had spoken about my problem before, it having come up in one of our many Facetime calls, but this was her first time experiencing it. She was putting on a brave face but I could tell it hurt. I’ll have to make it up to her when I’m in a better frame of mind.

What a shit time to start a relationship.

“I—“ I took a deep breath and held it for five seconds before letting it out. I repeated this twice more, letting my hands fall back to my sides. “I need to take a walk and calm down. Not only was being teleported out of the blue terrible, but I also learned the Doorman is still out there… if the big guy can be believed.”

Alice and Ida spoke up but I waved off their questions. “Gimme a few minutes,” I said and left the room.

Bogo was waiting for me, looking worried and boofing with every other breath. “C’mon,” I said as I jerked my head to the sidewalk. “I need to clear my head.”

I had a lot of problems. Missing brother, top of the list. Now a mysterious organization that can teleport people from any corner of the planet has made itself known to me. The face of said organization was the first thing that has ever made my mostly silent passenger feel anything other than mild interest. I nudged it mentally and felt the same apprehension as before. I didn’t dare engage it any more than that, as the last time I had fully contacted it I had gotten the ability to grow tentacles and gained knowledge I tried not to think about.

Then there was the fact that people kept finding me. How the hell was that happening? I’m sure I would have taken measures against tracking magic during my missing time but I couldn’t be sure because my fucking memories were missing. Part of me wished I hadn’t killed that guy so I could kill him again. What a fucking pain in the ass this whole memory thing has been.

I sighed and dipped into an… alley? I guess it’s an alley. A small street between two buildings. It was between a gas station and a McDonald’s with a chest-high wall on the McDonald’s side that served as a buffer for the drive-through. I found a dusty patch of asphalt and looked around to make sure no one was looking before I used my magic to draw a complicated spell into the dust. One of the unexpected benefits of focusing on telekinesis as my first spell with Circe’s Method was that I could whip up large spell arrays much faster than drawing them out by hand. It was also easier on my knees.

Even with the added speed, it took several minutes for me to draw out the spell, having to scratch the symbols into the asphalt in places where the dust wasn’t thick enough. It took long enough that Ida came looking for me. She nodded at me in greeting but didn’t say anything, just crouched next to Bogo and gave him some attention while I worked. It was another minute or two before I was satisfied the spell was complete.

“That’s very neat,” Ida said when I took a step back. “You get this Gandalf look when you do magic like that.”

“That’s the hottest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” I said, eliciting a laugh from her. I circled the spell, which was laid out in several concentric circles about eight feet wide, taking up most of the alley. I made a couple of adjustments as I saw it from different angles.

“What’s this do?” Ida asked.

“Hopefully it’ll tell me how people have been finding me,” I said. “First, the private eye my folks hired found me. Then those two douches from the Concord. Then the assholes that attacked us in the food court. Finally, being teleported by Elysium. I have a ward in my wallet that’s supposed to stop tracking magic but people keep showing up to harass me.”

“Maybe they are tracking you the old-fashioned way,” Ida said.

I made another adjustment to the spell. “Possible, but I find it unlikely,” I said. “I’ve barely left my house in the last year, and the first day I’m in LA my folks find me at Alice’s place? That would imply that I, you, Alice or her tight-knit psychic family let the information slip to someone snooping around. And then the Concord guys show up when we go to my brother’s place.” I shook my head. “I don’t like it. Something’s up. I need to get a handle on it before I can focus on finding my brother, especially since the fight in the food court. What if they track me again and Conner gets caught in the crossfire? Or any one of us?”

Ida nodded. “So how does the spell help?”

“It’s hard to explain, as I’ve only used it once or twice,” I said. “I found it when I was researching ways to circumvent being tracked… the spell I used on the cruise ship has some side effects that I don’t want to encounter again.

“Basically,” I said as I stepped into the center of the spell, giving it a final once-over as I spoke to Ida. “It looks over the subject—in this instance, me—and checks to see if any sympathetic links have been made. The size of the spell, or the power used if you’re mentally casting it, dictates how far back it checks. This size right here should check back a week or two.”

“Like checking the logs on a router,” Ida said.

“Similar!” I agreed. “Magic is basically taking your energy, be it mental, physical, or other, and melding it with the energy or the material or astral plane to produce the desired result. Doing that always leaves a trace until reality bends back to the way it was.”

“Is it dangerous?” Ida asked, giving Bogo a final pet before standing.

“Shouldn’t be,” I said. “But if magic were exact, it’d be a science. A lot of what makes a spell work is the mindset and willpower of the person doing the magic.” I winked at her and raised my crossed fingers. “Fingers crossed.”

Then I initiated the spell.

So, the first time I used this spell, I had cast some tracking magic on myself in preparation to give the spell something to display for me. It displayed the tracking magic as a thin, hazy gold line that originated from me, went to where I had cast the spell, and terminated at me. The second time I had cast the spell I had asked Alice to use a few tracking spells, and I had gotten similar hazy lines that had pointed off into the distance. The tracking spells I had blocked showed up as small circular blemishes on the perimeter of the spell.

This time, when I cast the spell, it lit up on the edges like a force shield had suddenly popped up. So many tracking attempts! I could tell from the density and slight color changes that only a handful of practitioners were responsible for them. I spun around, looking at the light show, but didn’t see anything making contact with me. Which means none of the tracking magic had succeeded. I was about to end the spell when I noticed something new.

While there were no hazy lines attached to me, there were impressions of me. I was standing in the middle of them so it had taken me a moment to see them, but there were several images of myself in various positions. Still frames of me walking, sitting, eating, talking. God damn it, I didn’t bring out my spell book and I needed to check my notes. I didn’t want to summon it in the middle of the spell for fear of interrupting it.

“Hey, can you text Alice and bring her here?” I asked. “This is a behavior I’m not familiar with.”

***

“That explains a lot,” Alice said.

“It does?” I asked.

“Yeah, those are divining impressions,” she said, gesturing at the images of me. I was standing just to the right of them. “They aren’t tracking you; they are tracking where you will be.”

I sighed. “Fuck me.” I don’t know how to defend against fucking seers. Now that I thought about it, though…

“Jager—the guy who teleported me,” I began. “Said that he only meets with people who have a strong… presence? In the timeline? The way he phrased it was along the lines of ‘people who keep showing up in the future.’ Could this be related?”

Alice shrugged. “This is beyond me,” she said as she pulled her phone out of her pocket. “But Mama is a diviner.”

I killed the spell and scraped it away as best I could without destroying a section of the asphalt. “Let’s hit the road, we can pick her brain while Bogo tracks.”

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