Murder by Magic: An ONSET Universe Novella Read online

  O’Brien looked vaguely embarrassed, clearly not meeting the senator’s gaze as he joined the two Committee members on stage, but he shook Cardston’s hand gamely and took the microphone as the senator took a seat beside Shuler.

  “I’m not nearly as pretty a speaker as Senator Cardston,” the officer rumbled. “So I’ll say this: I know what each of you, supernatural or mundane, went through to stand here today. Thank you.

  “If you can approach the stage when your name is called,” he continued, “we can get through this quickly and get to the food.”

  2

  The next morning saw a bleary-eyed and hungover Jamie Riley bidding his former classmates farewell in the main concourse of the Washington National Airport. All five had stayed up long after the official graduation had finished and were all varying degrees of worse for wear. Except Emily, who was as perky and happy as ever, earning the petite blonde Mage looks of disgust from the others.

  “Where are you heading?” she asked them all.

  “Montana,” Riesling said with a grimace. “Hopefully I can get a transfer to somewhere warmer eventually. It’s not like they’re sending me to somewhere I have family.”

  “Los Angeles,” Jamie told them with a smile. “It’s beaches, and Hollywood stars for me, folks.”

  He suspected he’d be lucky if he saw a beach, let alone a Hollywood star in the seaside city. The first six months on the job as an OSPI Inspector were notorious for being utterly overwhelming.

  “Where are you?” he asked Emily.

  “The Big Apple,” she replied with a smile. “I’m heading right to the head office for a stint with Thaumaturgical Research.”

  That made sense to Jamie. He was, as Mages ranked these things, a Second Circle Master. He was strong, with a natural gift for wielding that power. Emily was a Fourth Circle Initiate, one of the fifty or so strongest Mages in the United States. Part of it was training, part was natural gift—and Thaumaturgical Research would want to break down how much was which.

  “Researcher or lab rat?” Liam O’Conner asked pointedly, and Jamie gave the broad redheaded man a dirty look. Liam was the reason the students knew that Emily was gay, as he’d been persistent in pursuing her—despite the efforts of the rest of the other two men—until a very public fight in which she’d flat-out told him she had no interest in men. He didn’t seem to be over it.

  “Both,” Emily responded with a toss of her hair. A boarding call rang out through the concourse for Jamie’s flight before the conversation could continue.

  “That’s me,” he told the others, hefting his small carry-on. The suitcase that had followed him around for the last year or so had already been checked in, his Colt M1911-Silver service side arm and the three clips of silver bullets that came with it in a lockbox at the bottom of the case. The black leather folio with the silver badge in it he’d received with the gun was tucked into the breast pocket of his shirt.

  Emily gave him a quick hug, and he traded handshakes with the others.

  “Good luck,” he wished them all and then set off for his new city.

  Four hours later found him in the concourse of the Los Angeles airport, pushing the cart with his carry-on and suitcase while looking for the man he was supposed to meet. Finally, he spotted a short, swarthy gentleman in a navy-blue suit, holding a sign with “Riley” on it.

  “I’m Jamie Riley,” he introduced himself, hoping this was the right person.

  “Good to meet you,” the suited man responded with a bright grin and a flash of pleasure in his aura. “I’m Adrian Pattakos. The boss is assigning you to me, so she figured I should come pick you up.”

  “I appreciate it,” Jamie told him, shaking the man’s hand gratefully. “I’ve never actually been to LA before.”

  “I’ll give you the rundown on the way to the office,” Adrian offered. “The rest of your stuff is being shipped over?” he asked with a gesture at Jamie’s suitcase.

  The new Inspector flushed slightly. “I’ve been living out of college dorms and FBI training quarters for the last two years,” he told the older man. “This is everything.”

  The older OSPI man whistled quietly as he appropriated the cart from Jamie, leading him towards the exit.

  “I see I’ll have to get Laura to take you shopping,” Adrian said with a laugh. “She’ll like that. I apologize in advance.”

  “Laura?” Jamie asked, following the senior Inspector out into the parkade.

  Pattakos popped the trunk on a boxy blue Lincoln and easily loaded the two bags in before answering.

  “Laura is the other junior Inspector assigned to our ‘team,’ such as it is,” he explained. “She’s a redheaded spitfire, one of the best investigators I’ve worked with—and she adores shopping.”

  Jamie hopped in the passenger seat of the Lincoln when Adrian popped it open. With the door closed, he breathed a small sigh of relief. It was more than a little worrying to talk work in public.

  “You have a team?” he asked the senior Inspector as they left the parkade.

  “Not really,” Adrian admitted. “One of my cases is more complex than I can handle on my own with the rest of my caseload, so the boss assigned two of our new Inspectors to support me—Laura and you. Laura’s only been with the Office for a year or so, and you’re brand new.”

  “What’s the case?” Jamie asked, eager to get to work.

  The older Inspector laughed. “I think you need a bit more LA background before you dive into Empowered drug distribution,” he told Jamie. “What do you know about LA?”

  “In all honesty?” Jamie considered for a moment. “A handful of specific case studies with regard to supernatural affairs, high school American history, and what Hollywood tells us.”

  “So, not much,” Adrian concluded. “The big thing to realize about Los Angeles is that this is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world—so we’ve got a lot of poor black fucks who think gang life is cool thanks to idiot rappers.”

  Jamie opened his mouth to disagree with the older man’s assessment of the impact of LA’s multi-ethnicity but closed it again. The other man’s tone made him uncomfortable, but he couldn’t argue with his new boss. Not yet, anyway—and not when Pattakos himself was dark-skinned enough that most people would have figured the Inspector for an immigrant, if not one of the kids he was disparaging.

  “Both the Crips and the Bloods were born here, and LA is still a stronghold for both of them,” Adrian continued. “The two gangs are fighting a pretty constant low-level war. Mostly that, and the crack cocaine issues that come along with it, are an FBI or LAPD issue. The PD has ‘Community Resource Against Street Hoodlums’—CRASH—units that are doing a pretty good job of keeping things under control, despite what some would tell you!

  “Both sides have a handful of supernaturals ‘on staff,’ though, and those bad boys turn into our problem,” the senior Inspector explained. “It’s also starting to look like their distribution networks are being used to run something else into the city.”

  “What’s that?”

  Adrian grunted in response. “That’s something you’ll get a full briefing on at the office. I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise,” he told him.

  “A lot of the imports brought various traditions of varying levels of real power along with them too,” Adrian continued, changing the subject back to the general tone of LA. “We’re one of the supernatural hotspots of the country, so the office is kept busy. There’s only fifty or so of us, ten real supernaturals including you and me. Expect to be busy.”

  Jamie nodded agreement with Adrian’s last comment as they pulled up to a small four-story glass-and-chrome building with a sign outside that declared it to be an FBI Regional Office.

  “We’re here,” Adrian told him.

  The bright afternoon sun reflected painfully from the glass building as Jamie followed Adrian into the office. The main doors led into an artfully adorned reception area, blocked from the rest of the building
by solid walls decorated in black walnut. There was a door on either side of the room, and the floor was covered in a thick blue carpet.

  A young Hispanic woman in a pristine blue suit sat behind a large desk of the same dark wood as the walls. The desk was flanked by a pair of US flags. The symbol behind the desk was the only clue this was not a standard FBI office—a stylized Omicron in silver.

  “Welcome back, Inspector Pattakos,” the raven-haired receptionist greeted Jamie’s companion cheerfully. “The chief said to send you and Inspector Riley up to see her as soon as you got in.”

  She slid a plain dark-blue pass card across the table. “This is your personal card, Inspector,” she told Jamie. “It’ll let you into the first three floors and the basement. The top floor and most sections of the basement are restricted to senior Inspectors and the chief—you’ll need permission from the chief to enter those areas. Ms. Wilson’s office is on the third floor.”

  Jamie blinked for a moment, processing the young woman’s rapid-fire delivery of information, and Adrian laughed.

  “Slow down a moment and let the poor man listen, Lily,” the older Inspector told the receptionist. “I’ll get him up to Karina.”

  Lily giggled with a sheepish smile. “Of course,” she agreed. “Welcome to LA, Inspector Riley. I’m Lily Matter. Call me Lily. Everyone here does.”

  Jamie took her hand and shook it carefully as he returned the smile. “Thank you, Lily. Call me Jamie,” he requested. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around.”

  “Of course! I’ll let Ms. Wilson know you’re on your way up,” Lily told them, reaching for the phone on her desk.

  “Stairs are that way,” Adrian told Jamie, gesturing to the right-hand door. As they passed through into the main offices, Jamie realized that the apparent transparency of the glass outer walls was something of an illusion. There was a single set of cubicles against the glass and then an interior wall concealing most of the building from the outside.

  Adrian led Jamie to a door in that interior wall that revealed a stairwell heading up. Eager to get started, Jamie took the lead, taking the steps two at a time up to the third floor, where his security card unlocked the door.

  On the third floor, a slightly out of breath Adrian pointed him to the door leading into the interior of the building. Stepping into the central core of the office, Jamie could see that this door led a corridor that linked four parallel corridors, each lined with offices.

  “Far-right corridor,” Adrian told him. “Center office. Each of the inspectors has their own office on the third floor. First floor is administration staff. Second floor is Forensics, Thaumaturgics, and the clinic—you’ll probably be spending a good chunk of time there. You’re only our second Mage. The armoury, morgue, and detention are in the basement.”

  “What’s the fourth floor?” Jamie asked, wondering what was up there that even Inspectors were barred from it.

  “Secured conference rooms, interrogation, and a special research lab,” Adrian replied. “It’s nothing special or amazing, just stuff we don’t normally have use for, so there’s no point in us having access.”

  Jamie nodded as they approached the office Adrian had specified. Most of the doors, he’d noted along the way, were wide open, allowing him to glance in at offices in various states of organization and setups, mostly occupied at this time of day.

  Senior Special Inspector Karina Wilson’s door, however, was closed. A brass nameplate on the door stated her rank and name with the subheader of Station Chief.

  Adrian rapped on the door, and Jamie’s eagerness dropped out of the bottom of his stomach like a stone as a wave of nervousness hit him. Suddenly, it sank in that this was real, and he was about to meet his first OSPI station chief—his first real boss.

  “It’s Pattakos,” Adrian said through the door in response to a query Jamie hadn’t heard. “I’m here with Riley.”

  “Lily said you were coming. Come on in,” Wilson responded. With a deep breath, he followed Adrian into Ms. Wilson’s office.

  3

  Station Chief Karina Wilson’s office was a windowless box nearly at the center of the building. It was perfectly clean, without a single stray paper on the immaculately polished wooden desk. Four gray filing cabinets lined one wall, and a large whiteboard covered the other. A dark-blue screen with the stylized silver Omicron on it had been pulled down to cover most of the whiteboard.

  Wilson herself sat behind the desk, half-concealed by the computer. Jamie’s first impression of her was of a stocky, heavyset woman. She was perhaps five feet five and heavy with it, but with enough muscle to still look like she could snap him one-handed.

  Her graying hair was knotted behind her head in a tight bun, and her blue eyes were flat as she looked at him, her lips slightly curled as if ready to launch into a sneer at a moment’s notice. Her aura was plain and mundane, without a drop of power, woven through with a degree of exhaustion and bitterness that could never quite heal.

  “Come in, gentlemen,” she instructed, her voice hoarse as if from too many cigarettes.

  There were two uncomfortable-looking chairs in front of her desk. Jamie waited for Adrian to sit down to be sure he should and then followed suit.

  “Welcome to the Los Angeles OSPI station,” Wilson told Jamie, who started to relax somewhat. “As I’m sure you’ve established by now, I have assigned you to operate as Inspector Pattakos’s partner. I don’t expect much from a new graduate supernatural, but I hope you at least don’t drag his investigations down too much.”

  Any hint of relaxation left Jamie halfway through her sentence, his back rigid. He didn’t think he’d done anything to make Wilson angry with him, but something seemed to have upset her.

  “Do I have a case load of my own?” he asked, carefully turning his best professional gaze on the station chief, who hesitated halfway through her sneer.

  “We do have two cases that should be simple enough,” she allowed carefully. She slid open the drawer in her desk and removed two dark-blue file folders. “I intended to assign them to Laura.”

  “Laura is already jointly responsible for eleven cases with me and Inspector Lager,” Adrian suggested, his voice respectful. “I can, of course, provide appropriate support to Inspector Riley with his cases.”

  Hesitant for a moment longer, Wilson finally slid the folders across the empty desk to Jamie. “Very well, Inspector Riley,” she told him. “These will be your first cases. Both are quite simple, and you should be able to present us with enough evidence for an arrest within the week.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Jamie said quite honestly. He hadn’t joined OSPI to run errands for others.

  “That said, you will also be Adrian’s partner, and you will also need to focus on supporting his cases, which are by and large more complex and longer term,” she continued, ignoring his words in a way he wasn’t used to.

  “The largest of these is what he has sensationally codenamed the ‘Black Dream’ file,” Wilson explained, turning her flat gaze on Adrian, whom Jamie saw smile slightly out of the corner of his eye.

  “Black Dream, to be clear,” the Inspector told Jamie, though the words were also directed at Wilson, “is the street name of the drug whose distribution I’m investigating.”

  “Mostly, OSPI leaves the gangs and their drug networks to the FBI and the LAPD’s CRASH teams,” Wilson continued, acknowledging Adrian’s words with a small nod. “In this case, Black Dream is both Empowered and extremely dangerous. We don’t know the drug’s source, and we have only the vaguest notion of how it’s manufactured, but so far, it hasn’t expanded far beyond Los Angeles, which means we can probably stop it here before it spreads farther.”

  “What do we know?” Jamie asked before he could catch himself. Wilson continued to ignore him, but he saw the flash of irritation in her aura and regretted speaking.

  “It seems to have been moved into either the Crips’ or the Bloods’ distribution network and fully integrated alongside crack
cocaine, at least locally,” she told him.

  “Black Dream’s effects are threefold. Firstly, it significantly increases the user’s physical strength and speed. Secondly, it gives the user... delusions of grandeur, basically. Impressions of their strength and speed above the augmented levels they do possess. Lastly,” she finished, her voice softening with an edge of sadness, “they suffer from extremely detailed, hyper-real hallucinations.

  “The combination makes them a deadly threat to those around them and extremely difficult to stop. The use of deadly force has been authorized in all cases of Black Dream usage,” she concluded.

  “Some of the dealers see the danger as much as we do,” Adrian added. “They’ve set up ‘dreamhouses’ where they lock the users in—trapped in a room while the drug runs them through whatever power fantasy is locked in the back of their brain.”

  Jamie could imagine the idea quite well. It probably worked well for stopping the users from hurting others, but...

  “I can’t imagine that does a lot for stopping the users hurting themselves,” he said quietly.

  For the first time since starting her lecture, Wilson acknowledged him with a curt nod. “If nothing else, using the excess speed and strength the drug gives them leaves them drained for days and quite possibly injured.”

  “So far, we’ve had almost no luck tracking the chain past individual dealers,” Adrian told Jamie. “At least one has dosed himself on Black Dream when we caught him and tried to use the increased strength to escape.”

  “Has anyone had the chance to thaumaturgically examine samples of the drug?” Jamie asked carefully, hoping that he was allowed to ask questions now.

  “Inspector Lager has taken a look, but the Inspector’s Sight is below par,” Wilson replied, the disapproval in her voice and aura probably not directed at Jamie. “I hope a second look will reveal more.”