In Plain Sight

10 The Sorceress

Women tended not to be sorcerers. For whatever cosmic twist of fate, only one in every twenty or so who had the power was female. Suffragettes complained about it endlessly for a while, but since there just wasn’t anything anyone could do about it, they eventually gave up. Of the six sorcerers in New York, only one was a woman. Nicknamed the Ice Queen, she made her fortune enchanting metal rods so they would remain bitter cold for over a year. Once these were cut into thin disks and put into iceboxes and room coolers, the Ice Queen made millions.

The Ice Queen’s real name was Sorsha Kincaid and, if rumor was to be believed, her personality matched her nickname. Nothing in the Ice Queen’s appearance dispelled that rumor when she entered Alex’s office. She looked to be in her late twenties, but magic tended to retard aging, and Sorsha had come into her power quite young. Alex had heard that she was closer to forty. She was dressed in a white, button-up blouse with an azure blue vest and dark slacks. Her only concessions to her femininity were her high heels and the design of her vest, which cut under her small breasts, emphasizing them.

If the purpose of Sorsha’s clothing was to minimize her sex, it was sorely inadequate. Her face was stunningly beautiful, skin like marble, with high cheekbones, full lips, and eyes of pale blue. They reminded Alex of the way the sun looked, shining through an icicle. Her hair was the palest platinum blonde he’d ever seen, almost white, and it fell down on either side of her face in a short bob. She used makeup to darken her eyebrows, giving her a stern look, and Alex knew it had been done for just such an effect.

Her eyes were hard and fixed on Warner as she entered, and the young man leaned back against the wall as if he wished it would give way and let him escape. She held that gaze for a long moment, then turned to Alex and smiled. The smile was warm enough, but Alex felt a chill go down his back. Sorcerers were immensely powerful and equally dangerous. Most people would take a poke at you if you insulted them, but a sorcerer could turn you into a toad for any perceived offense — and there wasn’t much the law would do if you were a nobody. New York was full of nobodies, more than they could ever use, but sorcerers were rare and valuable commodities. Only an especially egregious breach of the law would bring one to account. Alex resolved to choose his words very carefully.

“I must admit, Mr. Lockerby, I’m impressed.” Sorsha sat down in the chair in front of his desk and crossed her legs. If she’d been wearing a skirt, that movement would have been quite sensual, but with the Ice Queen, she wore pants and there wasn’t any flirting involved. “I had supposed that a runewright who became a private detective must not have been a very good runewright. Seems I was wrong.”

Alex inclined his head in her direction. ‘I appreciate the compliment,” he said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. What is the Archimedean Monograph?”

The Ice Queen smiled. Her lips were demurely together, but Alex could have sworn he saw teeth.

“I’m afraid that’s a government secret, Mr. Lockerby.”

“Alex.”

“What I need to know, Mr. Lockerby, is what you know about these runes,” she indicated the photos on his desk. Alex sat back in his chair.

“I know who these boys are, Miss Kincaid,” he said, indicating Davis and Warner. “But I don’t remember hearing that you joined the FBI.”

Sorsha smiled. Not the cold, mocking smile she’d worn earlier but a warm smile of amusement.

God, she’s gorgeous.

“I help the FBI as a consultant,” she said. “Much the same way as you do the New York police department, though the FBI actually wants my help.”

Alex let the dig go by, but the fact that she knew about his rocky past with the police meant that she’d done some homework about him.

“Now,” she said, getting back to the topic at hand. “Tell me what you know about these pictures. Please,” she added.

“I’ve already told your agents what I know about them, Miss Kincaid,” he said sweeping them back into the manila folder and holding it out to her. “So, if that’s everything…”

“Why were you at Thomas Rockwell’s apartment yesterday?”

Alex smiled. He’d been right to have Leslie hide Thomas’ Lore book.

“So that’s what all this is about,” he said.

Sorsha reached into thin air and pulled a small flip notebook into her hand. It was such a casual display of magic that it appeared ordinary, but Alex couldn’t do anything like that on his best day. He didn’t want to be impressed, but he couldn’t help it. She flipped a few pages and began reading.

“You were seen entering Mr. Rockwell’s building yesterday afternoon around two and you didn’t leave until after five. You appear to have combed through the apartment very thoroughly, despite its being in a disheveled state, and the only thing you removed was Mr. Rockwell’s blue Lore book.”

“I wondered why I kept feeling as though I was being watched,” Alex said. The thought that Sorsha could have been actually watching him while he worked was disturbing. He made a mental note to add a short-term privacy rune to his little book and use it when he did his investigations.

“You’re in a lot of trouble, Mr. Lockerby,” Sorsha said, the cold smile returning to her lovely face. “We’ve got you on breaking and entering and theft. Now I’m perfectly willing to forget that, provided you tell me what brought you to Thomas Rockwell’s apartment.”

Alex tried to keep the relief off his face. Sorsha Kincaid, New York’s most dangerous woman, would have to do better than that if she wanted to put the arm on him. Also, her threats meant that she hadn’t been watching him with magic, some Fed had been staking out the building and had seen Alex go in. If she’d been watching him, she’d already know what he was there for. The finding rune was a dead giveaway.

“Someone reported Thomas missing,” he said. “They asked me to look into it, find him if I could.”

“Why didn’t they just go to the police?” Warner asked. Alex laughed.

“The police don’t have time to track down missing people unless some crime is involved,” he said. “They usually send these exact cases to me.”

“Who hired you?” Agent Davis asked. Alex put on his most charming smile.

“Agent Davis,” he said, in a wounded voice. “You know I can’t divulge the names of my clients. Not without a warrant.”

“I can get one in an hour,” he said, his tone hard and flat.

“Of course you can,” Alex said. “You’ve got New York’s celebrity Sorceress working for you, no judge in the city will turn you down.”

“Then why not save us all some trouble and tell us who hired you?” Sorsha asked.

“Some of the people who hire me can’t go to the regular police, Miss Kincaid,” Alex said, his voice serious.

“Because they’re criminals,” Warner said with a sneer.

“Sometimes,” Alex admitted. “Or they’ve had bad run-ins with the cops, or they’re embarrassed about the reason they’re seeing me and don’t want it on any official record. Whatever the reason, what do you think would happen to my business if word got out that I gave up a client just because some Feds said pretty please?”

“I don’t give a rats ass—”

Sorsha cut Davis off with an upraised hand, then lowered it back to her lap.

“The simple fact is that we have you over a barrel, Mr. Lockerby,” she said. “Give us a name or I’ll have Agent Warner place you under arrest.”

Alex smiled and played his trump card. He tossed the key to Thomas Rockwell’s apartment onto his desk.

“What’s that supposed to be?” Warner asked, already reaching for his cuffs.

“The key to Rockwell’s apartment,” he said. “Feel free to check it out. Since you obviously inventoried his apartment before I arrived, you know I didn’t get it from there. He gave that key to someone he trusted, and that person gave the key to me when they asked me to find him. So no breaking and entering.” Warner’s sneer evaporated and it was Alex’s turn to smile. “Furthermore, the only person who can complain that I took the Lore book is Thomas Rockwell, and I seriously doubt he’ll be pressing charges.”

Agent Davis had gone red in the face and Warner had gone absolutely purple. Sorsha just sat with her hands in her lap, glaring at Alex. He wiped the smile from his face. There was no sense in poking a bear.

“Now, I’m perfectly willing to give you whatever help I can with this,” he said, pointing to the manila folder. “But I need to know what this is all about first. Those are my terms.”

Sorsha leapt to her feet and slammed her hand down on Alex’s desk. Instantly a coating of frost spread across the top.

“How dare you dictate terms to me?” she said. Her voice was calm but there was fire behind those pale eyes.

Davis had a look of terror on his face but Warner leered with eager delight. He couldn’t wait for the Ice Queen to take this insolent PI apart. Alex pulled his hands off the desk as the frost spread. He hadn’t intended to provoke the Sorceress — he hadn’t even been pushing hard. Clearly Alex had hit her hot button and now he had to deal with a furious Sorceress.

Goosebumps spread across his arms and his left hand instinctively tapped his right forearm. If things went pear-shaped, his last play was the rune he’d had tattooed there a year ago.

Sorsha saw the move and it seemed to shake her out of her anger. She pulled her hands off the table, rubbing them together as if they hurt. The frost began to disappear in a cloud of fog.

“Agent Davis, Agent Warner,” she said in a trembling voice. “Please wait for me outside.”

“But ma’am—” Davis protested.

“Now, please,” Sorsha said, now in full control of her voice. “I’ll be quite all right, I assure you.”

Warner looked disappointed as he shuffled off after Davis and pulled the door closed behind him.

Sorsha sat, slowly, holding Alex’s eyes the whole time. Alex didn’t know what to make of the Sorceress. She’d been angry enough to freeze him solid a moment ago, but that emotion had passed.

“I’m sorry, Mister…Alex,” she said with obvious effort. “You made me lose my temper. Did you do it on purpose? I’d just like to know.”

“I didn’t think I was pushing that hard,” he said, and shrugged. “But I was pushing.”

Sorsha closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

“You play dangerous games, Alex. What would have happened if you used your escape rune?”

Now it was Alex’s turn to be stunned.

“How did you know about that?” he said, easing his hand away from his right forearm. She fixed him with an amused look and raised one of her darkened eyebrows.

“The FBI consults with me because I know things,” she said. “May I see it?”

Alex stood and took off his jacket. He rolled up his sleeve, exposing the intricate tattoo, and held out his arm for Sorsha to see. Escape runes were just what their name implied, last-ditch magic that could transport a runewright out of danger. If they worked. Alex’s rune was trapezoidal in shape with four nodes, and each of those nodes had a node of its own. He’d had to touch the tattoo needle the whole time the artist worked, and supply him with component-infused inks he made especially for that purpose. The end result looked like a picture of the view through a kaleidoscope with six colors and multiple, interlocking patterns.

“It’s beautiful,” Sorsha said, taking his forearm and turning it to get a better look. Despite her icy reputation, Sorsha’s hand was warm and soft. Alex almost forgot she was a Sorceress who’d threatened to freeze him to his chair a moment ago.

Almost.

“Where would you have gone if you’d activated it?” she asked.

“It’s where we would have gone,” Alex said. “Assuming it actually worked, this rune will transport everyone within ten feet to a spot over the north Atlantic about a mile off the coast of Greenland. We’d appear a hundred feet in the air, then the magic would teleport me back to a secure location.”

Sorsha’s eyebrows rose and she let out a soft whistle.

“I was right to have Davis and Warner leave the room.” She released Alex’s arm and sat back. “Of course, I’d have been very angry once I teleported home.”

Alex put on his most charming smile.

“If you teleported home,” he said. “Falling one hundred feet into freezing water is disorienting, and the temperature would send you into shock in under a minute. After four minutes your body shuts down and you drown. The Titanic disaster taught us important lessons.”

“You are not at all what I expected, Mr. Lockerby.” Sorsha looked at him hard, as if trying to look through him. “How did you power it? It must have taken years to prepare.”

“It uses a life rune,” Alex admitted. “I figure if I ever have to use it, I’d rather part with a year of my life than all of it.”

If Sorsha judged him for this line of thought, she gave no indication.

“Perhaps you can be some use to me after all,” she said, taking the folder off the desk and pulling out the photographs of the runes. “These runes are pictures of original drawings that came into the possession of the British government during the World War.” She began putting the pictures back out on the desk as she spoke. “No one knows where they came from, but they relate to a story about a Lore book called the Archimedean Monograph, supposedly written by Archimedes of Syracuse.”

“The guy who ran naked in the streets when his tub overflowed,” Alex said. Sorsha smirked.

“Something like that. He was reputed to be a runewright of incredible skill. According to the story, he wrote down his most powerful runes on sheets of vellum. When he died, those runes were passed around among lesser runewrights who didn’t know what they had until eventually they came into the possession of Leonardo DaVinci. He collected Archimedes’ pages together into a book and began studying them intently. There are supposed to be DaVinci’s handwritten notes all through the book.”

Alex whistled. Everybody knew DaVinci’s work as a runewright; he was one of the great masters. Just to be able to read his notes on Archimedes’ runes would be incredible.

“From DaVinci, the book went through the hands of many great runewrights; Rene Descartes, Sir Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin and others. Each man added notes to the pages. Somewhere along the way, it began to be called the Archimedean Monograph, and a powerful protection rune was put on the book so that only a worthy runewright would be able to possess it.”

Alex had to hold his hands to keep them from shaking. The knowledge in that book could be life-changing. A Lore book that had come down through the greatest minds in history, what secrets would that hold?

“What happened to it?” he asked, a little too eagerly. Sorsha shook her head, her platinum hair flying in front of her eyes.

“No one knows, but many have tried to find it.”

Alex picked up the picture of the finding rune.

“Is that what this is?” he asked. “Some kind of treasure map with the book at its end.”

“That’s what we believe,” Sorsha said. “A man named Quinton Sanders believed it, too.”

“Who’s he?”

“Sanders was a research assistant at the government’s runic studies facility,” Sorsha said. Alex didn’t know that the government even had a research facility for runes. “The facility has an archive with many Lore books in it. During the war, the United States acquired the originals in these pictures from the British Government.”

Alex didn’t ask if acquired meant stole.

“Since they were supposed to be from the Monograph, the government put their top people to work deciphering the runes. We think we know what most of them are, but all work was stopped in 1926.”

“Why?” Alex couldn’t imagine being ordered to stop working on something so interesting. Sorsha fixed him with a hard look before responding.

“Because, of the thirteen runewrights they had working on the project, twelve of them went mysteriously missing.”

Alex felt a cold chill run down his back that hat nothing to do with the Ice Queen.

“So how does Quinton Sanders fit into this story?” he wondered.

“Two months ago, a magical alarm was triggered when someone opened the file on the Monograph. Quinton Sanders was the only person in the office that day who had the proper keys to get into the secure archive.”

“Let me guess,” Alex said. “He went missing.”

Sorsha shook her head. “No, we traced him here, to New York. Since we have pictures of the original pages, I cast a scrying spell to alert me any time any of these runes are cast. So far, this one’s been cast twice,” she indicated the elaborate finding rune. “I couldn’t track the first one, but the second led us to Thomas Rockwell’s building.”

“And now he’s missing,” Alex said. “Did Rockwell know Quinton Sanders?”

“Not that we know of,” Sorsha said. “That’s why we need your help. Clearly Thomas saw the original runes and copied them into his book. We think Quinton is trying to find a runewright with enough skill to help him decipher the finding rune so he can locate the Archimedean Monograph.”

“What if the Monograph doesn’t exist?” Alex asked.

“That’s not a chance the government is willing to take,” Sorsha said. “Now I’ve put my cards on the table, Alex; it’s time you did the same. Who is your client?”

Alex hesitated. He didn’t want to out Evelyn to the Feds, but he couldn’t see how she could be involved. So far nothing he’d discovered pointed to Quinton Sanders or anyone else.

“Rockwell’s sister hired me,” he said at last. “She was supposed to have dinner with Thomas and he never showed. All she knows is that he kept talking about making some big discovery.”

“I need to talk to her.”

“Sorry,” Alex said. “If I think she can help you, I’ll arrange a meeting.”

Sorsha glared at him with a look that explained how she got the title Ice Queen.

“I wasn’t lying about my reputation,” Alex said. “You need to let me handle this. If I run across anything about Quinton Sanders or the Monograph, I’ll call you right away.”

“Fine,” she said, producing a card with her name and number on it from the pocket of her vest. Alex took the card but Sorsha didn’t release it. “But I want Thomas Rockwell’s rune book,” she said. “Right now.”

“I can study the runes for you,” Alex said, still holding the card. “Maybe give you a clue to what Sanders and Rockwell were up to.”

The Ice Queen sighed and for a moment she looked tired. “You seem like a decent person, Mr. Lockerby,” she said. “People who investigate these runes are never seen again. You may be irritating and arrogant, but I don’t want your death on my conscience.” She released the card. “Now, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I’ll take Thomas Rockwell’s Lore book.”

Alex hesitated. He really didn’t want to turn over the book. He’d copied the runes last night of course — it was the first thing he did after getting home with the book, but he promised Evelyn he’d find her brother’s killer and he might need Thomas’ book to do that. That said, turning over the book looked like the only way to keep Evelyn out of whatever Thomas had gotten himself into. In the end he really didn’t have any choice.

He pushed the key on the intercom on his desk. A moment later Leslie answered.

“Would you bring that blue book in here, Miss. Tompkins?”

A moment later, Leslie entered with the book. She handed it to Alex and withdrew. Once the door was shut, Alex offered it to Sorsha.

“I give you the book, you leave my client out of this. Deal?” he said.

“Unless she has information about the Monograph,” Sorsha said, taking the book. “Deal.”

Alex started to stand, but Sorsha flicked her hand and suddenly he couldn’t move. He strained against the invisible bonds, but it was as if he’d been imprisoned in amber like some unfortunate insect. He couldn’t move or even blink. Sorsha put the blue book and the folder of pictures into the briefcase Agent Davis left beside the chair, then she stood and walked around the desk.

“If I find out you’re hiding something from me,” she whispered into Alex’s ear, so close he could feel her breath, “I’ll make certain you regret it, and I won’t bother the FBI about it. Understood?”

Her spell ended and Alex gasped, slumping against his desk. He wanted to say something glib about how she didn’t intimidate him, but he was busy suppressing the tremors that threatened to break out all over his body. When he finally mastered himself, he stood and tucked her card into his pocket.

“Understood,” he said.

Sorsha favored him with her cold smile, picked up the briefcase, and walked out.

Alex waited until he heard the Sorceress and her FBI escort leave the outer office before he slumped down, into his chair. So far today, a police captain had threatened to put him in jail, and a sorceress had threatened to do worse. And it wasn’t even lunch yet.