Murder by Magic: An ONSET Universe Novella Read online

  Murder by Magic

  ONSET Prequel Novella

  Glynn Stewart

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

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  Preview: ONSET: To Serve and Protect by Glynn Stewart

  Chapter 1

  ONSET: To Serve and Protect by Glynn Stewart

  About the Author

  Other books by Glynn Stewart

  ONSET: Murder by Magic © 2018 Glynn Stewart

  Illustration © 2019 Shen Fei

  ISBN (epub): 978-1-989674-04-8

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

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  1

  “Some of you already know why you’re here,” someone said in the silent conference room at the FBI National Academy.

  The speaker was a man dressed in a plain black suit, similar to though more tightly tailored than those worn by each of the twenty-three men and women sitting at classroom-style desks in the brightly lit room. All of them had just completed the gruelling twenty weeks of training to be FBI Special Agents. They’d received their badges and credentials from the director of the FBI that morning, but all they’d received for assignments was an instruction to be in this room at this time.

  “The rest of you, I am certain, realize that all five of the members of your class who joined late are sitting in this room,” he continued. “You have also, given the talents that led to you sitting in this room, heard rumours of a group within the FBI named ‘Division O.’

  “To lay your mind at ease, I will tell you that those rumours are completely false,” he said with a straight face. “My name is Kyle Ardent, and I do not work for the FBI. If you accept the offer I’m here to present, neither will you.

  “This is Nineteen-Ninety-Nine, however, and I am no longer allowed to draft you,” he told them as concerned mutters rippled through the room. “There are, in the desks in front of you, detailed non-disclosure agreements. Breaking these agreements is treason.

  “If you do not wish to sign these agreements, you may leave,” Ardent concluded. “Report to Special Agent Jason Miller, and he will make certain you are given a regular FBI assignment. If you remain, you will become part of something... more.”

  The agents shuffled. The tone of this meeting seemed as if it belonged in a stuffy room buried in a basement somewhere, not this skylight-lit conference room on the top of the FBI National Academy.

  Jamie Riley smiled at his fellow agents’ consternation as he quickly skimmed the non-disclosure agreement. It was the third such document the dark-haired twenty-year-old had signed in the last six months, and it was completely identical to the first two.

  After signing it, he looked up to watch five members of the assembled group slowly make their way from the room, leaving the papers unsigned on their desks. When the door shut behind the last of them, no one in the room made a move. It seemed to Jamie that everyone was holding their breath.

  “Agent Riley, could you collect the forms for me, please?” Ardent asked, sounding unconcerned that he’d just lost almost a quarter of his audience.

  Jamie, who had been one of the five late joiners to the regular class due to, among other things, classes Ardent had taught, stood up at the older man’s instruction. He collected the agreements, quickly checking that each Agent had signed it and giving his former classmates reassuring smiles. The four other “special” recruits looked more comfortable than the rest but still awkward.

  The tall young man delivered the stack of papers to Ardent, who gestured for him to remain standing up with him.

  “Very well,” the older man said quietly. “If everyone is sure this is where they belong, let’s begin with a more complete introduction of myself.

  “I am Senior Special Inspector Kyle Ardent of the Office of Supernatural Policing and Investigation,” he said in a flat, crisp tone that brought the roomful of agents to straight-backed attention before they could even question the word “supernatural.”

  “The office is what is often referred to as Division O in FBI operations, but it is, in fact, a completely separate entity—an entity to which you may be transferred.

  “Since the most common response to this speech is the claim that the supernatural does not exist, I have asked Jamie to remain up here with me,” the Inspector continued with a small gesture at Riley. “Could you alleviate your fellows’ doubts, Mr. Riley?”

  Jamie had suspected that was why Ardent had kept him up at the front. Like the other four recruits who’d undergone additional training, he was a supernatural—in his case, a Mage.

  With a deep breath, Jamie reached inside himself and muttered a nonsense phrase under his breath as he exhaled and lift his right hand. Considering a visual to be best, he conjured a six-inch-tall pillar of blue flame on his extended palm.

  A ripple of confusion, surprise, and fear ran through his former classmates, all but four looking at him with new, horrified eyes. He let the magic flame flutter over his hand for a moment and then blew on it, tossing it to Emily Rossum, the other Mage among the five supernaturals in the class.

  She caught it with a smile, turned it pink, and then scattered it in sparkles across the room.

  “Now that you’re done showing off, take your seat, Inspector Riley,” Ardent told Jamie.

  A shiver ran down his spine—technically, he was an FBI Special Agent until later that day, and Ardent was the first to refer to him by that title.

  “As Riley has competently demonstrated, magic is, to a certain extent, very real,” the Senior Inspector told the agents quietly. “He, Ms. Rossum, Mr. O’Conner, Ms. Groen, and Mr. Riesling were all inserted into your classes by OSPI upon completion of our specialty training course. They are all supernaturals.

  “As you can imagine, this does not remain secret without the action and co-operation of the United States government. A number of offices, code-named the Omicron Branch, wield the full power and authority of the United States in domestic affairs of the supernatural.

  “Such authority includes investigative and law enforcement responsibilities and powers very similar to those of the FBI,” Ardent continued. “To fulfil the need for appropriate personnel, we both run supernatural volunteers for OSPI through the National Academy and make an offer of recruitment to some of the top students from the regular course.

  “Mr. Riley and the other supernaturals in your class were the first group,” he concluded. “The rest of you in this room are the second. The agreement you have signed means that if you refuse this offer, you would be well-served to simply forget that this meeting ever happened—chalk it up to a post-graduation celebration.

  “Those of you who accept are going back to school for another fifteen weeks, to learn everything about the Omicron Offices and the nature of the supernatural we can possibly teach you.

  “If you accept, I have travel papers and tickets here for each of you,” he told them. “If you do not, feel free to leave to avoid any accidental pressure by your peers.”

  Three more of the group, muttering about “stage tricks” and “lunacy” quickly left. Jamie, followed quickly by the other four OSPI volunteers, was the first to pick up the manila envelope with his name on it.
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  The only contents of the envelope turned out to be three taxi chits, a printed online hotel room booking, and an embossed reservation card for a five-star restaurant in downtown Washington.

  The first chit delivered Jamie and the single suitcase that contained all his worldly possessions to the hotel, where he changed into another black suit. He’d gone directly from his parents’ house to college and directly from college to OSPI’s training program when he’d been identified as a Mage and recruited.

  Somewhere along the way, most of his things had ended up at his parents’ home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and he’d never recollected them. His suitcase contained two sets of athletics gear, four black suits, six dress shirts, and a semi-automatic pistol.

  The pistol stayed in the suitcase as he pulled out a small black box and removed the one item in the suitcase that wasn’t standard-issue special agent: a three-inch-long bronze brooch in the form of a leaf.

  Delicately carved into the face of the brooch was a series of blessings written in Sindarin—one of the two elvish languages created by J.R.R. Tolkien when he wrote The Lord of the Rings. The brooch, its blessings, and Jamie’s ability to read the blessings (and to, though he’d rarely admit it, speak the fictional language) were gifts from his mother, who was obsessed with Tolkien’s fictional world.

  He pinned the brooch to the lapel of the clean suit then hung the other up for the hotel room service to clean and press, before calling the cab to take him to the restaurant, where, unless he was severely mistaken, he would finally, officially, become an OSPI Inspector.

  The second taxi chit delivered Riley to a genteelly pseudo-French building in southern Washington, DC, only about fifteen minutes from the hotel the agency had booked him in at.

  He was met at the front door of the restaurant by the tuxedoed maître d’, who apparently had mastered looking down his nose at people who shopped at even the expensive end of Walmart’s suit section.

  “May I help you?” he asked, somehow managing to look down his nose while still having to look up at Jamie, who had at least three inches on the man.

  “Special Agent Jamie Riley,” Jamie said softly, handing the man the reservation card. “I’m meeting a party.”

  First the title and then the embossed card took the haughtiness out of the man in a flash. He bowed slightly over the card.

  “Of course. Right this way,” he said, his voice suddenly as smooth as silk.

  Jamie followed the tuxedoed man through the gorgeously decorated restaurant. The main dining room, despite being the same size as most major restaurants, had a total of eighteen tables in it. Each table was secluded away from the others by decorative fountains and potted trees, allowing privacy even in this public space.

  The maître d’ led him through the restaurant to a set of double doors and opened one of them, gesturing Jamie through. The private room on the far side of the doors had been set up with a stage and a dozen round tables, all covered in the same white tablecloths as outside. This room lacked the privacy screen of plants and fountains to keep the tables private, though.

  He knew he was in the right place, as he spotted Kyle Ardent immediately. The instructor was one of the fifteen people already in the room, none of them Jamie’s classmates from the academy.

  Ardent spotted him in turn and gestured Jamie over to join him where he stood talking to a looming giant of a dark-haired man.

  “Jamie Riley, this is Brigadier Michael O’Brien,” he introduced the new graduate to the looming man. O’Brien was easily Riley’s own six-foot height but far broader and heavier with it. “Brigadier, this is one of our new graduates, Jamie Riley. He’s one of the supernatural volunteers we sent to the FBI Academy.”

  Jamie, like most Mages, had a touch of the Second Sight, and the brigadier’s aura glowed brightly to his eyes as the commander of OSPI’s High Threat Response teams—the name had come up in his courses—offered his hand.

  “It’s always good to see new blood,” the brigadier rumbled. “Especially supernaturals—of the twenty Inspectors we’re commissioning tonight, only you and your classmates have gifts worth mentioning in that area.”

  The brigadier shook Jamie’s hand firmly and then caught a glimpse of someone else across the room. “Excuse me, Mr. Riley, Mr. Ardent. I need to speak with Senator Cardston.”

  And with that, the second most senior OSPI officer in the United States separated from Jamie and Ardent, heading across towards a graying black man in a perfectly tailored suit.

  “It looks like some of your classmates are joining us,” Ardent told Jamie after the brigadier had moved on, gesturing to the door. Damien Riesling had arrived side by side with Emily Rossum in a manner that clearly had Ardent wondering about their level of friendship.

  Jamie, who knew perfectly well that Damien and Emily were both completely gay, smiled at his teacher’s discomfort and walked over to join them, collecting a swift handshake from Damien and a peck on the cheek from Emily.

  “I can’t believe we’ve actually made it this far,” Damien murmured. The Inspector-to-be rivalled Jamie’s height but had a weightlifter’s breadth to go with it. Jamie’s hand almost vanished in the fair-haired man’s impeccably groomed paw. Unlike Jamie and Emily, Damien was not a Mage—his primary supernatural ability boiled down to getting about five times the result from any degree of physical exercise, and having skin that rivalled Kevlar for its resistance to damage.

  “I wish I could disagree,” Emily said with a nod. The Mage was shorter than either man, petite and frail in a way that belied her magical strength. “I thought that after we’d passed the OSPI training, they’d almost wave us through the academy training.”

  “I think they forgot to tell our instructors we were supposed to be special,” Jamie told her, remembering the brutal slogging of physical and mental education that had filled the last ten weeks. Unlike the potential Inspectors recruited earlier in the day after the FBI graduation ceremony and the fifteen non-supernatural Inspectors graduating that day, the five supernaturals had spent twenty-five weeks at an OSPI training facility before heading to the National Academy to finish off the FBI training.

  The non-supernaturals would add fifteen weeks at that OSPI training facility to their FBI training and then graduate. The reasoning, as Jamie understood it, was that non-supernatural Inspectors mainly need a crash course in the supernatural and the US government systems that dealt with it, whereas the supernaturals often needed detailed training in their own powers.

  The three had moved away from the door, so they missed their last two classmates entering. They didn’t miss the microphone turning on as the graying black senator, accompanied by a redhaired woman in a dark-blue skirt and suit jacket, took the stage.

  “Good evening, everyone,” the man said, cutting through the scattered conversations in the room. “The last of our new Inspectors has arrived, so if I can get you all to take a seat, we can get things started.”

  The five supernatural students ended up sitting together, with Senior Special Inspector Ardent taking up the sixth seat at their table.

  Jamie exchanged quick nods with the two classmates he hadn’t managed to speak to, but he didn’t have time to do any more before Cardston spoke again.

  “For those of you who don’t know me, I am Senator Larry Cardston, and I am the longest-serving member of the Special Committee for Supernatural Affairs,” the politician introduced himself. “This”—he gestured graciously to the redhead standing with him—“is Congresswoman Valerie Shuler, the most recent addition to our ranks after Congressman Deville’s unfortunate heart attack.

  “You all, I am sure, know of our group as ‘The Committee of Thirteen,’” he concluded the introductions, earning a small chuckle from the crowd. “We were created in the fifties in response to a number of supernatural incidents that led to locked sessions of Congress—and the realization that this could not continue.

  “We are the brain of Omicron, the directing intelligence behind ever
ything we all do with regard to the supernatural in America, but we cannot act alone. Like any agency, we are bound by checks and balances, the laws of our great nation.

  “To enforce those laws upon the supernatural citizens of our country, upon the Omicron Agencies, and if necessary, upon the Committee itself, we created the Office of Supernatural Policing and Investigation.

  “OSPI is the beating heart of Omicron!” Cardston declared to the gathered crowd of officers. “Without you, those to whom God gave great power but not great control would be unfettered, left only to their own morals and faith to keep them to the path of right.

  “To the Committee and the Omicron Offices we lead, many powers are given,” he said quietly. “We are all entrusted to wield greater power than others, and so we are given greater responsibility. But when asked, ‘How do we know this power is wielded rightly and justly?’ the Committee has an answer. When we are asked, ‘Who guards these guardians of America’s citizens against the dark?’ the Committee answers: the first and greatest Omicron Office. Your office. The Office of Supernatural Policing and Investigation.”

  Jamie knew, on a conscious level, that Cardston was playing the crowd he faced. That didn’t really matter, as the old senator’s words hit the chords that had drawn the young Mage to OSPI when his powers had been discovered by his anthropology professor half a year before. He was applauding with everyone else.

  “We are gathered here to pass on that burden,” Cardston reminded them. “That part of this gathering is for others. I am here to remind you why you serve, and to bear witness. To present our graduates with their official papers, I give you Omicron’s greatest legend: Brigadier Michael O’Brien!”