Warlock 4 - Preview Chapter

A one-chapter preview of the next bit of Warlock 4 for Halloween.

I had some ideas for something Halloween-themed, but didn't get to it, in favor of working on Warlock 4 itself. It's best to stick with what the words are coming for. :)

Nothing else coming this Sunday, and I plan on preview chapters every other week in November. We'll see about December's schedule at the end of November when I can see how things are falling out.

Chapter

“Glamours on?” Morgan asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

We were all crowded inside a dark alley we’d entered from the other end.

“Ready,” Sam said.

“Yep,” said Rachel.

“Who made you checklist-witch?”

Yes, that was Cassandra.

It wasn’t that the two didn’t get along, it was that their method of getting along could really look a lot like not getting along.

“Mrowr — pfft!”

The question would be asked in any case — it matters not who does the asking.

Felicity might have started talking to all of us mentally at the beginning of summer, but she still made cat sounds when she talked most of the time.

“Right,” I agreed. “That way we don’t forget something — so if you think we haven’t thought of something, speak up.”

“Fine,” Cassandra muttered. “Yes, my glamour’s up.”

“On,” Morgan said. “It’s something you wear.”

“Up. Like shields, the glamour is up.”

“Girls,” I said. “In the admonishing tone of ‘who wants a spanking when we get home’ — since we’re sharing grammar tips or whatever.”

“Me!”

I glared at Sam until she stopped grinning — or, at least, hid her grin by ducking her head.

I sighed. “Can you guys please treat this seriously? If we get caught —”

“We’re not gonna get caught,” Sam scoffed.

“Not a chance,” Rachel agreed.

I would not allow it.

I paused, realizing we needed some explicit rules of engagement for the evening.

“Okay, so first of all — Felicity, there is no set of circumstances tonight where you have the option of killing, maiming, or even injuring someone.”

I meant my own glamour will keep any from seeing us, even if one of yours fails.

I frowned. “I find it hard to believe that’s what you meant.”

“Pfft!”

That is what I meant.

“Uh huh.”

It … is.

I raised an eyebrow.

Felicity stepped out of the alleyway and started down the sidewalk, tail raised at me.

I do not enjoy it when you perceive me so clearly. It is intrusive.

“Let’s go,” I said, starting after her.

The girls came with, crowded around me, and I had to wonder, again, why there were so many of us coming along on what could have been done by … well, Felicity all by herself, when you really thought about it.

That’s even where we’d started in the planning, with Felicity going in alone, but then Rachel said she didn’t want to stay home alone, because Sam was going, and Sam had to go because Cassandra was going, and Cassandra was going because, if Morgan got to go, then Cassandra wasn’t getting left out, and Morgan was going because I was going and it involved her, too, and I was going because … well, it was an important step for me and I wanted to have a bigger part in it.

So, yeah, the crowd was my fault, but that doesn’t mean I thought it was a good idea.

We got to the door we wanted — glass in a glass-fronted building — and clustered around it.

There are motion sensors — do not forget. Some infrared, so ensure your glamours are full-spectrum.

We all nodded — then stood there.

I cleared my throat, but Morgan spoke before I finished.

“Okay,” she said, gesturing at the door. “Elsa, you’re up.”

“What?”

“Yeah — the door, unlock it.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

“Why?”

I didn’t blame Cassandra for the skepticism — Morgan was being … nice.

Morgan’s brow furrowed. “So … we … can … get inside?”

“No, why me?”

Morgan shrugged. “You’re the best with telly, right? Did I hear wrong?” Another wave at the door. “Telly the door open.”

Cassandra frowned. “Okay …” Her brow furrowed and she moved forward, warily eyeing Morgan.

She concentrated for a moment, manipulating the lock with her telekinesis, and we heard a couple clicks, then metal scraping as the locks at the top and bottom of the door withdrew their bolts.

“Good job. Oh,” Morgan said, but went on as though Cassandra hadn’t just jumped as though the compliment had burned her. “There’s going to be a magnet thing in the frame somewhere that’ll fall when we open the door — can you keep that in place, too?”

“Yeah,” Cassandra said, then frowned. “Okay, I got it … yeah, we’re good.”

“Great job, thanks!” Morgan grinned. “Felicity do you have the door glamour so they don’t see it opening?”

I do.

“After you,” Morgan said, swinging the door open and motioning for Cassandra to enter.

Cassandra went through, never taking her eyes off Morgan. She even turned and walked backward into the building so Morgan wouldn’t be at her back.

“What’s that about?” Sam whispered.

I shook my head — this wasn’t the place to talk about it … but I did know exactly what it was about.

Morgan had just confirmed Cassandra’s anxiety level and was now prepared to move on to phase two of tormenting the other witch — doing nothing and letting her anxiety grow as she waited for the thump of the next shoe hitting the floor.

“Don’t take it too far,” I whispered to Morgan as I went past. “And no more tonight — it’s too important.”

“Of course not — she’s family.” Morgan patted my shoulder. “Elsa and I are fine, Ashe,” she whispered. “Stop worrying.”

I nodded. They could work out their stuff later, when it wouldn’t get us caught breaking into the Department of Child Services office.

We were there to get all the records we could about me and Morgan.

Like exactly where and when we were found as infants, whether there were any witnesses to us being left in baby drops, stuff like that. There was some information we could get just for the asking, but there were other things.

Stuff they’d never tell us.

We thought there might be something in there to give us a starting point at finding my mother or the family Morgan had been taken from.

We let glass door close behind us and made our way across the lobby and past the empty security desk — there were rounds being made, which Felicity had timed over the last three nights.

“Why do we have to take the stairs?” Sam asked, again, as we passed the elevators.

I could almost hear Felicity’s sigh.

None of you have glamour strong enough to affect all the aspects of an elevator.

I nodded.

The doors opening, the numbered lights on every floor — a lot of little things that the security guard might notice on his screens — the noticing of which could break our glamours entirely.

Felicity had told us glamouring live security footage was harder even than glamouring the guard in person would be, because the mundanes — people without magic — were suspicious of video glitches after watching too many bad movies. Their thoughts immediately went to the video being tampered with and that led to disbelief of the glamour.

The stairwell doors in this building had windows — small, but enough for one of us to see the other side as we opened and closed the door, allowing us to keep a glamour in place so the movement wouldn’t be visible on the security tapes.

Sam huffed. “I wouldn’t say none of us. Felicity could glamour the stupid elevator and we wouldn’t have to —”

Cubs must learn.

I chuckled at the glares the cat-witch got for calling the girls cubs — again.

The cat-witch was treating the outing as a learning experience for all of us — I just hoped she didn’t cripple a pigeon to teach us how to hunt later.

It wasn’t something that bothered me, since I’d already spent the last year being told how little I knew about magic and witches, and I agreed with Felicity. If we were all coming along on this instead of letting Felicity handle it alone, then we should be learning from it.

“Think of it as tutoring,” I whispered to Cassandra as I slipped past her into the stairwell, getting in a dig over how she’d spent the last few months threatening to get me a magic tutor over the summer.

We went up the stairs, with Felicity pointing out particular security features we might need to adjust our glamours for, until we got to the floor where the DCS offices were, then out into the hallway and through the door into an expanse of shadowed cubicles.

Felicity and Morgan stopped at an out of the way cubicle and started up the computer there, while the rest of us fanned out to search file cabinets.

Thanks to Felicity’s earlier recon we had someone’s login for the computer system.

Felicity really could have done the whole job herself, it was only that once I said I was coming along, the cat-witch needed someone to work the computer for her, since she wouldn’t show either her human or catgirl forms to any of us.

That meant Morgan, since, I was told, I didn’t know enough about computers to follow Felicity’s instructions, while Morgan did. It appeared the two had been working on more than gaming over the last couple weeks since Morgan had moved in and gotten her own high-powered computer. Probably longer than that — the two had spent a lot of time together while we waited for Morgan to age out of the foster system and be allowed to leave the home.

As we separated, the others sort of blurred, their glamours less effective on me since I knew they were here, but working a little because I wasn’t actively resisting them.

I heard the muted clicks of computer keys and some muffled sounds of file drawers opening as I made my own way to the row of file cabinets that were my responsibility.

You’d think there’d be just one file for each of us, but you’d be mistaking the sheer power of the government office.

Both Morgan and I had seen that power in person, sitting in front of a case worker’s desk while she went to five different places to retrieve files about us to review before finding a replacement home — or dealing with the latest reprimand in Morgan’s case.

Control your flash, Felicity’s voice sounded in all our heads as someone’s camera flash made it through her glamour.

I concentrated on finding the files in my bank of cabinets.

You’d think it would be easy, right? Ashe and Corrie.

Look us up and be done with it … but only some of the files were in alphabetical order. Others were by date — specifically the details of where Morgan and I had been dumped in baby-bins.

I really should change my thinking on that, now that I knew I hadn’t exactly been “dumped” as I’d thought all my life, but instead had been left in foster care to protect me from the psychotic cousin chasing my mother — and Morgan had been dropped off by the equally psychotic, yet surprisingly polite, Cait Sidhe who’d stolen her from her family to act as the physical vessel of an ancient Celtic war goddess.

Both of us were hoping for the chance to apologize to our parents for some rather disrespectful thoughts we’d had over the years.

Other sections of files were organized by location — the foster homes each of us had been in over the years, and there were a lot of them, but neither Morgan nor I could remember all the addresses, so we had to cross-reference our personal files, that gave foster homes and dates we were transferred into them, then cross-reference the name DCS had given each foster home to look up the address, which was how the location files were stored.

Fire station twenty-three, Felicity told me.

She was relaying the references to avoid us having to walk back and forth between the filing areas, since we couldn’t just yell across the room. I suppose we could have texted, but Felicity was faster.

I pulled the files for the week I’d been dropped off and started searching for forms from fire station twenty-three, getting a photo of each one with my camera, then replaced those and moved on to the week Morgan had been dropped off after Felicity relayed that location.

“It’s going to take days to put this all together,” Cassandra whispered, sidling up to me and slipping inside my glamour.

I let her handle blending our glamours as I photographed another page, then kissed her — because that’s what you do when a pretty witch wraps her arms around you and tilts her face up with her eyes half closed.

I’d gotten pretty good at reading subtle cues like that over the last few months — and discovered that a kiss worked perfectly well, even in situations where that wasn’t what the witch was primarily after.

“All done?” I asked.

Cassandra nodded. “Disciplinary reports were by name, so just the two folders.” She raised her eyebrows. “You got in a lot of fights.”

I shrugged. “I don’t like bullies.”

I finished getting pictures of the week I’d been dropped off and replaced the file, then found those for the following year, when Morgan had been dropped off.

Someone comes.

That must have been relayed from Rachel, who was over near the office door and keeping a lookout on the corridor outside. The whole wall fronting the corridor was glass, along with the door.

We all froze, concentrating on our glamours.

Even though the corridor was brightly lit, I saw the beam of a flashlight coming, then shine through the office’s glass wall as the building’s security guard arrived and shone it on the darkened office. Guard and light made their way down the glass wall, peering inside.

“Shit,” Cassandra whispered. “Did we relock the office door?”

Of course we hadn’t — we were supposed to be long gone before the guard got to this floor, but some odds of the random-patrol had caught up with us.

“Can you —”

“Too far for my telly,” Cassandra said with a headshake.

Felicity? I projected. I think the door’s unlocked.

The cat-witch looked up from the monitor she was scanning and twitched her whiskers.

Someone should do something about that.

“Rachel?” I hissed.

She was closest.

“I don’t have any telly! What do you want me to do? Melt it?”

“Something!”

The guard was approaching the office door with his hand outstretched — since he wasn’t holding any keys, I figured he was just trying doors to make sure the office staff had locked up properly, but that didn’t change what he was about to find.

Maybe an unlocked door might be brushed off as a mistake by the staff, but it could also trigger a search or, worse, the guard standing at the door until more people could get there to search the office, effectively locking us inside.

I had an image in my head of the six of us playing hide-and-seek around the office, trying to keep our glamours in place and not get bumped into by one of the searchers.

“Fuck,” Rachel muttered, hopping over the front counter.

I saw her glamoured blur make it to the door just as the guard pushed against it.

The door moved inward about an inch before Rachel’s blurred form pushed against the other side, knocking it closed again.

The guard outside narrowed his eyes and frowned.

He tried the door again, but Rachel had a good hold of it now and it didn’t budge.

Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to satisfy the guard, because his frown only deepened and he gave the door another good shake.

Fuck. And the guard was just outside the door, so if I called out to Rachel, he’d probably hear too.

Felicity, tell Rachel it has to rattle!

The guard was shaking and pushing on the door now, looking even more suspicious, while Rachel tried to hold it closed with one hand and reach down to the lock with the other.

The glass door had its lock at the bottom, with the bolt sliding into a spot in the floor.

I tensed, wanting to rush over and help, but I likely wouldn’t make it in time and the guard was already suspicious.

Rachel’s fingers reached the knob, but she seemed to be having trouble turning it.

Having to hunch over reduced her leverage against the door and she didn’t have that much weight to bring against it to begin with, so the door had moved inward enough that the bolt hit the floor instead of going into the hole.

The two struggled for a moment, then the guard’s feet went out from under him, sliding back and he crashed face-first to the floor. Rachel seated the bolt and stepped back, panting.

The guard got to hands and knees, felt at the floor, jerking his hand back quickly, then stood and looked around with a bewildered look on his face.

Wisps of mist rose from Cassandra’s outstretched fingers.

“My range is better with ice,” she whispered, then narrowed her eyes and gestured again. “There — all gone.”

The guard was carefully poking at the floor with the toe of one boot, then shrugged and shook his head. He jerked the door back and forth a few times and I heard the sound of a metal bolt clacking against the sides of the hole.

The guard rubbed at the side of his face where it had slammed into the floor, then rattled the door a few more times before shrugging and moving on.

The mundane mind will dismiss much, Felicity said, provided a plausible reason to do so. Thus the Veil keeps us hidden … even when we fail to secure our path.

“Sorry,” Rachel whispered, hopping over the counter to resume her watch.