Paranoid Mage

“We’re about finished with the cleanup, Alpha.”

Chester muttered an acknowledgement over the radio. Normally he only worked with his pack and could send messages through the bonds, but now that he had the Alliance he was bringing in the occasional fae to help. When it came to eliminating messes, fae definitely made the process easier. Which didn’t make him any happier about moving on the building across the street.

It wasn’t so much that he disliked cleaning after trespassers that were treading on his territory, but that there were so many of them. It was mostly vampires trying to muscle in, apparently completely unworried about the consequences of infringing on the American Alliance. Something that he had objected to with great emphasis.

His ears flicked as he caught another sound from the vampire stalking him. Chester was fairly certain it was the master of this little nest, and it thought it was being sneaky. Either it didn’t know who Chester was or it didn’t have good intelligence on exactly how good Alpha shifter senses could be. Especially under the circumstances, where he was fully open to his pack magic since he knew there was a vampire after him.

It was amazing how often a vampire master would go for the person in charge, presuming that would be enough to rout everyone else. Though that seemed to be true enough for vampires, due to whatever remained of their original instincts and society. They grouped up in an almost slavish fashion. The fanatical loyalty of thralls was an echo of that same attitude, proof of how they’d been twisted from human. It made them both extremely dangerous and extremely predictable, as a master’s subordinates obeyed orders immediately but also nearly always defaulted to swarming the most powerful-seeming person.

This particular master was somewhat sneaker than normal, since it seemed to have left its subordinates to distract Chester’s people in order to go for Chester himself. Something that hadn’t gone well for the lesser vampires. He turned slightly and unlimbered a pistol with mordite bullets from the holster on his armor, the bane metal a gift from the redoubtable Mister Wells. A glimpse of another perspective came from another of his wolfpack as they managed to lay eyes on it, of the vampire aiming a gun, and he launched himself sideways.

The sudden reports of gunfire from three different sources sounded at once, and a moment later the vampire was dead. Chester hadn’t been hit, but he had to assume that the vampires were using silverite just as he was using mordite. The body armor was extra insurance against it, but it was better not to tempt fate at all.

He sent a wordless question out through the pack bonds and got confirmation back that there were no other vampires out and about. The only way they’d be able to slip past his people was if they had fae help to mask things in ways he couldn’t detect, and he had his own fae for that. The smallest fae, the pixies, were surprisingly gung-ho about sniffing out any potential enemies or interference.

“All clear,” he said over the radio, and added an extra confirmation through the pack bonds. The gunfire wouldn’t be a problem. One of his subordinate Alphas was the chief of police. Not many shifters actually liked living in the city, but a few did, which was useful in places like St. Louis. It was impossible to guard the entire edge of the territory the American Alliance claimed, but since most vampires aimed for cities they didn’t have to worry about every mile of the border.

“Where are they all coming from?” Lisa’s voice sounded in his ear, from where she was running overwatch. They’d followed Wells’ example and started employing drones, which weren’t as good as supernatural senses and were still susceptible to glamour, but did provide an eye in the sky that was surprisingly helpful. “There can’t be all that many vampires in the US.”

“It seems like a lot,” Chester agreed. “But we’ve only taken care of fifty or so. Who knows how many are over in the Night Lands?” While they didn’t have any solid confirmation, everyone figured that GAR was letting a lot more vampires through onto Earth, especially into the lands of the American Alliance.

It wasn’t just because he’d promised Mister Wells, or rather The Ghost, that he’d keep from abusing mundanes. He had a responsibility to his territory, and anyone that couldn’t cooperate needed be eliminated. Not just to keep his authority secure, but because supernatural fights always ran the risk of putting cracks in the protection of ignorance.

The vampires weren’t even the only problem. Crime was up all over, and while Chester had no proof that it was directly related to GAR loosening its grip, he had a hunch that certainly wasn’t helping. Humans were perfectly capable of generating violence on their own, but to his eye it seemed like someone was stirring the pot. And the more violence there was, the more likely it was that supernaturals would get involved and make everything worse.

“Any leads from our faerie friends?” He asked, walking away from the ambush spot as the cleanup crew came to take care of the vampire corpse. While vampires were dangerous, they weren’t all that stealthy. It was the infiltration of things from faerie – and not just the fae themselves – that worried him. The American Alliance claimed vast swaths of open land, and there was only so much that could be done to patrol them. Especially since they had very little mage support.

“They haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, but you know how that is,” Lisa said. “We haven’t lost any of our people either, so if there is anyone or anything they’re staying quiet.”

Chester grunted. With all the extra work he was having to do, he almost missed GAR. Almost. With House Hargrave and House Taisen at least loosely aligned with the Alliance, he had pretty much restored everything that they’d been lacking. There were just some things that mages were better suited for.

“Let’s finish up here and head on back,” he said. “Get some time to relax before the next crisis.”

***

“I’m sorry,” Lucy said, rubbing her temples as she sorted through all the emails they were getting. “This is my fault.”

“Wait, what?” Callum said, looking up from a giggling Alexander, whom he was entertaining with floating, hand-carved alphabet blocks.

“I was supposed to decide who we target or don’t target. I should have realized that messing with the Department of Acquisitions would result in this mess.” Lucy wrinkled her nose and pushed away the laptop. Callum shook his head and stood up, crossing over to her.

“No, it’s my fault. I didn’t listen to you and I pushed ahead anyway.” He pulled her up and hugged her. “I was just mad and focused on getting rid of Constance. I was supposed to listen to you when it came to these things, and I didn’t and all this started happening. Next time, smack me good if I’m fixated like that.”

“Well, so long you’ve given me permission,” Lucy said, slightly more cheerful. She smacked his arm gently. “Bad Callum.”

“Save that for the bedroom,” he murmured, and Lucy giggled.

“Anyway, that’s all well and good but what do we do now?”

“I’m not sure. It was always going to happen,” Callum said, keeping an eye on his son as he started to crawl across the hardwood floor after the blocks. “Though I guess maybe we should have been more prepared.” He’d managed to get some of the filing cabinets, which were full of records, but that hadn’t seemed to make a difference. Or maybe it was for the best, considering that what they had learned was that the Department had practically abandoned any real enforcement.

Callum was pretty sure they knew he and Lucy had access to the servers. There had been some desultory attempts at improving security, but Callum could always just give Lucy physical access to the server room so that hardly mattered. Instead they’d reverted to using a lot of physical or verbal messages. Which seemed like a lot of work to Callum, but there was still plenty of activity on the servers. It was just the juiciest stuff that was hand-delivered.

Not that it mattered, since there was plenty of stuff outside of GAR to worry about. The American Alliance was dealing with supernatural incursions where it could, and House Taisen was going after some of the worst offenders in other places, but it felt like gears were becoming unwound. There was no way they were catching everything, especially since Taisen had to split his personnel between Earth and the Portal Worlds.

“Which is one reason why I didn’t want to do it! Next time I am going to make you listen to me.” She narrowed her eyes at him, and he lifted his hands, having already conceded the point. “Anyway, I’ve got a couple leads from the American Alliance that are worth looking at.”

Callum made a face. He’d had to do three raids on vampires and two on minor fae in the past few months, and while none of them had been particularly dangerous he was growing to dislike such things more and more. It had to be done, but every time he felt like the other shoe was about to drop. There didn’t seem to be all that much that either type could do against his particular brand of magic, but there was no such thing as a perfect offense. He just didn’t know what the countermeasure was going to be.

“Alright,” he said. “We’ll take a look at them in a little bit. After we put Alex down for a nap.”

Sometimes he still found it surreal that he had a son. Though that went away when it came time to change Alex, something that was almost entirely Callum’s job thanks to the telekinesis focus. While he’d always known magic was fantastically useful, there were just so many little applications that he never considered before they came up.

For good or ill, they actually couldn’t find anything of substance to the rumors the Alliance had fed them. It could be just overzealous whispering, but it could also be that people were learning how to hide from his surveys. Combing through a city was nigh impossible without a specific address or neighborhood to start from, even with his range. Unless he found an actual vampire nest or witnessed a crime in progress, there were too many incidental supernaturals moving about to really localize anything suspicious.

Occasionally he saw crime of the more mundane variety in the cities and took care of it as best he could. Teleporting people away, or pulling the bullets out of guns, or in one case relocating some poor bound and gagged woman out of the back of a shady van and into a police department. But he was all too aware that it was a patchwork job at best and there wasn’t much he could do about the source of the problems. Fixing human nature was too big an issue for any kind of mage.

Even when he did have obstacles that needed to be dealt with lethally, they didn’t take up too much time. It was, in the end, a fairly simple thing. Most of his time, between parenting and working with his Guild of Enchanting contact, was spent trying to spin out new tricks or at least new foci.

The best thing to come out of that experimentation was finally getting an enchantment for faux gravity. It wasn’t nearly as optimized as the enchantments he’d been cribbing, and there was still quite a bit of experimentation to do to make it more efficient, but it worked. Which was somewhat less valuable than it might have seemed at first, but still useful. Even if it turned out to have no real application, he was damned proud of it.

“Oh man, now I feel like a superhero,” Lucy said, hefting a big chunk of stone he’d enchanted to experience a tenth of a gravity. “Or maybe like I’m on the moon,” she added, letting the stone drift down onto the grass in their back yard.

“You know, magic is still great,” Callum said, holding an Alexander who was wide-eyed at his mother’s antics. Or maybe just in general. It was pretty easy to impress an infant, so far as he could tell. “Though I wouldn’t trust that enchantment with anything really large just yet.”

“Maybe not, but it’s still fun,” Lucy said, watching the rock drift downward like an oddly-shaped inflatable. “What are you planning to do with it though?”

“I’ve got some ideas,” he said. “How well they’re work is another matter.”

The first thing he thought of was increasing the gravity in the pipe that fed his hydroelectric generator. That way he could increase the power generation or reduce the amount of pipe needed. In fact, he could use the hydroelectric generator to make energy even in space, for when they expanded the moon nexus. The same sort of enchantment could also make a gravity gun, accelerating anything inside the barrel at multiple gravities. A regular gun was probably more useful for most targets, but the gravity gun could work on anything and he could set up some kind of portal loop in the moon nexus if that ever felt like a good idea. Those were all long term plans, which required a more reliable enchantment and more infrastructure, but none of them were off the table.

The best offensive use was to enchant giant slabs of stone. Since such enchantments didn’t have a hope of directly affecting a supernatural, using it to send a target skyward at a rapid clip by using the ground underneath the enemy was a good bet. Or, alternately, crushing them with a two-ton rock under ten gravities.

Admittedly, mages could probably deal with that, and other supernaturals were likely quick enough to get out of the way. But he was pretty sure that nobody would be expecting a rock that looked entirely mundane to suddenly start moving. Even if it was unlikely to kill anyone, it’d be a great delaying tactic.

Portals made it entirely possible to drill deep into solid rock without any specialized tools, or at least, more specialized than a rock drill to begin with. Once he had a hole bored into the center and a pocket hollowed out, he put in the enchantment with one of the crystal mana capacitors they still had. The whole thing was triggered through one of Lucy’s remotes, and testing it launched the boulder way, way into the air. If he hadn’t put a portal anchor inside it during the testing, it might well have continued all the way into space.

Lucy added a timer so the enchantment would cut off far earlier, and started considering how to make it into something useful. A few random booby traps would be ineffective; they needed some kind of area denial or some way to funnel people if the enchantment was meant to discourage intruders. He didn’t think the enchantments had enough force to kill them directly.

They ended up laying down a net of small cables under the grass, and attached it to said boulder. Activated, it formed a large metal net that would go off into the sky. Not lethal, but more effective than a projectile. It wouldn’t be clear what the purpose was once the grass mat grew back either, though he suspected any supernatural worth their salt would be able to see there was something there.

Retooling the generator was much quicker and felt more useful. The tall pipe necessary for the proper pressure was awkward, so reducing that while keeping the same power made the entire apparatus look less ramshackle. He also made a small region out in the back yard with lower gravity just for the fun of it, because there wasn’t any point in having magic if you couldn’t enjoy it.

“You know, can we make a higher gravity training area?” Lucy wondered out loud, bouncing around the low-gravity field with Alexander. “We could get Gayle to heal us up, right?”

“I’m not sure that works in real life,” Callum laughed. “But it’s a good point that we need to do more exercise.”

“Boo, that’s not what I meant at all!” Lucy complained. “Isn’t dealing with a kid exercise enough?”

“You’d think, but I swear I’m starting to get a spare tire,” Callum said, frowning down at himself.

“That’s just your imagination,” Lucy said, sliding in closer and pinching his waist while Callum laughed and grabbed at her fingers.

The gravity trick, however fun it was, didn’t really contribute to his personal survival. The thing he really wanted to figure out was spatial shielding, but even asking judicious questions of the tutor didn’t help with that. Everything with normal shields was bound up in the shell, and he wasn’t any good with that. He was pretty sure the trick that shells allowed, effectively permanently fixing patterns inside it, didn’t even apply to him.

Wizzy’s advice had been along the lines of using his magic to affect his body and defending that way, but that was easy to say for him. He controlled blood, and it was easy to imagine how that would make it difficult for someone to hurt the Archmage. For Callum, it was less obvious. The actual space his body occupied changed all the time, and even if he could introduce some kind of walking distortion, putting it under his skin would result in massive trauma.

The best he could imagine was something that lay right on top of his skin, but he was leery of powerful magic so close. After yanking out his own tattoo and getting floored by his first, low-quality teleport he knew that he could hurt himself with his own power, but Wizzy seemed to think he ought to be immune to incidental magical effects. Which was probably why he was never bothered by his own teleports, though that didn’t explain why his attempts at pseudogravity were so uncomfortable.

Perhaps the Guild tutor could have cleared that up, but he was still too skeptical of the Guild of Enchanting to consult them about that sort of personal problem. He just had to experiment. What to experiment with, when it came to shielding, was something that he turned to Lucy and the internet in general for.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have ideas, it was that he wanted completely outside perspectives. It was obvious that the normal mage approach wouldn’t work, and while it wasn’t like anyone else knew precisely how his magic would work, a lot of people had spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen if you could tie space in knots. Not just conceptually either; there was a lot of math and physics out there.

He was pretty sure that Mictlān was a hyperbolic space, for example. Something which was sort of like an expanded space, but also not. For all that he was supposed to be good with spatial reasoning, stretching his brain to make non-Euclidean spaces and not just read about them was a bear.

A brief test with the meat of his thumb showed that trying to turn his actual body into a non-Euclidean space was about as bad an idea as he thought, if not for the reasons that he had considered. It wasn’t that suddenly occupying a space with odd distortions resulted in catastrophic damage, but that the exposed tissue suddenly had more space to occupy. There was some expansion into a vacuum, but also bits of tissue that shouldn’t have been touching each other were, and that resulted in massive bruising.

“You know, it might be okay if it was a full body thing,” Callum mused to Lucy, looking at some models of higher-dimensional topology. “The issue is the disjoint between normal space and weird space. Actual higher dimensions is probably a bad idea, but twisted space ought to be fine if it’s not applying force.”

“I caught maybe one third of that,” Lucy said.

“Now you know how I feel when you talk about computer stuff,” Callum laughed. “This is really annoying. If there was a way to harden space that’d just be so much easier.”

“Isn’t there?” Lucy asked. “Couldn’t you make it so, I don’t know, extra stuff can’t enter a space?” Callum pursed his lips at that, then shook his head.

“What I can mostly due is change the shape and location of space,” he said. “There’s also some weird esoteric properties that are, I guess, the dimension-ness of it. Like whether it’s Earth or a portal world.” He made a vague gesture at the bit of empty air where his current spatial construct was hanging, even though it looked like nothing visually. “I wish I could just will something to happen without understanding it and it’d work, but that’s not how it goes.”

“It just doesn’t seem right that magic involves so much math and engineering,” Lucy agreed. “Also, before you start doing anything on the scale of your whole body, we’ll want to have Gayle there in case it goes bad. I know you’re careful, but still!”

“Mm, you’re right,” Callum agreed, less reluctantly than he might have before. While he didn’t trust mages as a general rule, it was hard to hold anything against Gayle. Even if she’d never taken the Hippocratic Oath, she definitely adhered to it. She was obviously less naïve than when he’d met her, but her attitude was the same. “It’s going to be a while, though. I’m still trying to work through ideas.”

“Sure,” Lucy agreed. “But hey, if we have a healing mage on retainer we’d better make use of it.”

“Heh. Feels weird to actually have the money that we can do that.” The gold plates that supernaturals tended to use amongst themselves were supplemented by more valuable bane metal plates. Usually mordite, but sometimes corite, with gold being the lowest denomination and banic alloy being the highest. The emphasis on vampire bane-metal for many transactions was probably why he’d not found any of it in the loot he’d gotten from raiding nests. The pay that he’d gotten from the Guild of Enchantment gave them a small cache of usable currency, instead of having to trade favors or rob the dead.

“Oh please, like Gayle would take your money,” Lucy said.

“Gayle wouldn’t, but Glenda would,” Callum pointed out. “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t like me.”

“She’s a mom,” Lucy said, as if that explained everything. Which perhaps it did.

The training exercises from the Guild of Enchanting actually came in handy, which Callum had not been expecting. While his portals and teleports were down to reflex actions, holding everything in place while he tried to twist space in ways that defied description required certain habits. It was akin to muscle memory rather than multitasking, some ability to hold things without directly focusing on them.

He was pretty sure that he was going to need to make a focus for some of it, though. Other mages used the bubble, and a shield entrained with it, something that was completely unconscious and instinctual. He didn’t do either of those things, so he had to figure out other methods.

Considering how difficult it was to try and turn the Alcubierre effect into an enchantment, he wasn’t looking forward to the long hours it’d take to make anything as complicated as a shield into a focus. Especially when he had so many distractions, with Alexander and Lucy and even working in the garden. It was to the point he even got the feeling that the Guild of Enchanting contact was a little put out that he’d pulled back on the spatial enchantments he’d been doing for them, even if it wasn’t that much of a reduction.

Every once in a while he marveled at how life in the bunker had become his new normal. Instead of drawing up building plans and researching properties, he was creating magical items and making space itself do tricks. Not to mention having a wife and child.

What he wished was that there was some way to avoid the spates of supernatural violence. He’d set himself on that path and didn’t regret it, but it was tiresome having to constantly plan for combat. Yet so long as there were supernaturals preying on humans, he would have to do something about it.

***

Teller Janry was not particularly enamored of his new job. It might not have been so bad if he’d gotten it immediately after it was previously vacated, but he was stepping in as the head of the Department of Acquisition nearly a year after Constance’s death, with months of mismanagement by a number of different candidates. It was, frankly, a mess, both inside and out. Part of that was his own fault for not stepping in earlier, but the wisdom at the time was to let someone else suffer the blame for the inevitable consequences.

“More paperwork,” his nephew Coran said, dropping a stack onto the brand new desk. Teller grunted. They were still finding things that dated back to before Constance’s assassination, and not even all of it was strictly Acquisitions related. The attempts to centralize GAR had been massively set back by her death, especially with the endless bickering between the remaining department heads and those Houses that were not part of the realignment of GAR interests.

“Anything on our mutual friends?” Teller asked. The most pressing urgency was less GAR itself – after all, it wasn’t like the organization was going anywhere – than the price that his House’s fae associates had demanded for their help. For all that they lived as long as mages, or possibly even longer, they were damned impatient when it came to calling in debts.

“We’re still looking. There’s a note that Constance had found Miss Black before she was removed, but nobody stored the paperwork in her office properly. Whatever paperwork that survived, anyway.”

“Well, keep looking,” Teller sighed. “I’ve more meetings to attend.”

“Better you than me,” Coran muttered, and trooped out again to return to the archives for the Department of Acquisitions. Even fae magic could only help so much when huge chunks of it were not even labeled properly, let alone ordered or organized.

Teller frowned around at the office room, which had been repaired and reinforced with the best they could think of to block off Wells. Despite the refurbishment and the fact that everything was being brought in only when necessary, it was already starting to show signs of disorganization. It hadn’t helped that Constance’s collection of fae artifacts had made any documentation that might have been at her own apartment unavailable. Either destroyed, or hidden away somewhere impossible to find. Even if the lesser Courts of Faerie were nominal allies of House Janry, Teller found their magic damned inconvenient at times.

He left and locked the door behind him, a complex focus linked to his mage’s mark sealing the room and activating the defenses. Coran could leave anything he found in the delivery box outside the door. It might be overcautious, but Teller didn’t want anyone but himself to have access to the office and the official seals and symbols therein. Not to mention the possibility of Wells making another appearance.

The teleportation system was somewhat more cumbersome to use than it had been in the past with the new security in place. Not only did it require the old mage mark connection, but he had to wait for the link to be verified and then the teleportation pad itself had defenses activated to prevent interference. It was only after the switchboard operators had checked and doublechecked that everything was proper that the teleportation happened.

Houses used portals now, so the wait time and, frankly, the danger that teleporters posed were beneath his station. By the time the magic clicked into place, Teller was tapping his foot impatiently, even though it wasn’t the operators’ fault. Finally the room changed around him and he could feel the rich mana of the Night Lands. Teller actually preferred the flavor of the mana in Faerie, though that was hardly surprising considering that was what he grew up on during his boyhood in House Janry.

He showed his badge of office to the guards of the World Portal, and they nodded him through into Weltentor Castle. The Houses there still had direct teleports, but the increased security had restricted all other travel through the portal proper. Something he found amusing, considering how many supernaturals were bypassing the portals anyway of late.

There were more vampires in Castle Weltentor than the last time he’d visited, likely thanks to how much the Master of Weltentor’s status had risen under the new Department of Acquisitions. Teller wasn’t actually sure where all the vampires were coming from, but there were entire communities of them out there in the Night Lands, and apparently more than a few were eager to abandon the quiet darkness for the opportunities of Earth. Some of them ran afoul of the American Alliance, but they knew the risks of the territory.

“Director,” said the vampire attending the portal. Judging from his size and bulk and poor accent he was relatively new, but at least had attained enough merit to be trusted. “The Master is ready for you.” Teller nodded and followed the vamp out of the portal room and up to the next floor of the castle, then finally to a study that looked out onto the glowing lights of Weltentor Landing. The Master was standing there at the window, but when Teller entered he turned around with the exaggerated grace of supernaturals who could move faster than any human.

“Welcome,” the Master intoned. “I understand that you have an offer from certain of the fae courts,” he added, moving straight onto business. Which was interesting, because he wasn’t supposed to have been told that much. Someone would get in trouble for leaking it, but Teller didn’t much care since it made his job easier.

“Indeed.” Teller waited for the Master to be seated, then joined him as the vampire poured some kind of wine into two glasses. Frankly, he was pretty sure the Master had been watching too much mundane media, with their strange ideas of vampires. His manner of dress was uncharacteristically ornate. “With the changes to GAR and the new threats that have appeared, it has become obvious that we need more supernaturals around to keep things under control.”

The Master nodded but didn’t speak, sipping the wine and regarding Teller. He surely knew how many vampires had ended up dead trying to jostle the shoulders of the American Alliance, or had attracted the attentions of House Taisen. How much he cared about them, Teller wasn’t sure, since they were freshly taken in by the Master and not tutored for years.

“Some of the fae have expressed an interest in joining with vampire nests and establishing a sort of joint enclave, combining magics and strengths,” Teller said, withdrawing a formal scroll from inside his vest. He placed it on the table between them. “Matters on Earth have been allowed to slip from our control for far too long. At this point, Earth is almost a liability. It’s time to make it useful once again.”

“On that, I can certainly agree,” the Master said, reaching over and picking up the scroll. “I will give this offer all due consideration and get an answer to you soon.”