POLARIS: BOOK I, Ch. 4 -- Touch the Light and Heat
The multiverses are rarely black and white
It was LEO Silence who disturbed the balance again.
We'd developed a routine, weaving our separate lifestyles and schedules into a working pattern that met both our needs. Angered as you'd been about my coming out to see you alone, you'd take me back uptown yourself in the mornings, before returning to your hunt in the streets. I'd spend a day with practices and fittings and interviews and all those other inconsequential things that filled my time until I walked off the stage at the end of a show and found you waiting in my dressing room.
The nights were ours, making love either in my protected penthouse or your fortress home. At first you tried to avoid telling me about your work, wanting to forget about it yourself for a few hours. But I started asking questions:the news was on the streets, a serial killer uncaught (no public word about demons yet, you noted with grim relief). However, you and Silence were still baffled, at this point partially because the killing was just still killing, and you were both waiting for something more to develop.
You were dead asleep on the night the chief detective came, too tired to hear the buzzer to your door. I let him in, knowing it had to be bad if he couldn't wait until morning. I dressed while the two of you conferred briefly, then confronted you: "let me come with you." "No." It could have been a hell of a fight, convincing you, but Silence decided we were wasting time, and said that if you didn't take me, he would, anything to get moving.
Back uptown, during that hour of quiet when the nightlife has crawled home but honest (?) business folk were not yet out. Through a side door, down some stairs to the basement of a private house. Two rooms there, the first a wreck in the normal sense: furniture thrown about and smashed, broken glass, loose items flung about. But here and there ... a small stain of something darker than wine, more and more of them closer to the door of the second room. I found myself following you in there, drawn by the trail of blood, and by something else.
You were standing with LEO Silence near the center of the room, in what you hoped was a semi-dry spot on the floor. The room was large and square, probably the basement area for the whole front of the house. The walls were draped in swaths of black gauze, and there was a pentagram traced in what had been a light powder on the dark floor. Now the outline was scarlet, and the pentagram obscured by blood and bodies. Five women, heads together at the center, bodies pointing out to the points of the pentagram. What had been black robes lay cut away in pieces. Blood congealed in pools under their heads, and under their touching hands, where their throats and wrists had been slit. You saw Rhian come in out of the corner of your eye, but she was quiet and not disturbing anything, so you kept your attention on the LEO as he examined the bizarre scene.
"This isn't serial murder, it's turning into mass murder. He's gotten two together
before, but five? How did he get five at once, and lying like this? No signs of the bodies being moved: they were cut right here, like this. Why didn't they fight?"
"They did." You looked at Rhian when she said this, her voice soft but angry. Her face was very pale as she moved toward you, and you were worried that this was too much for her, but she wasn't looking at the bodies. She seemed to be searching the air itself for some clue. "They did fight. Can't you feel it? The power is still bouncing off the walls in here. Even five of them weren't enough. They were beaten by magic." She paused, turned suddenly, and touched the naked foot of one corpse. "No pain. I mean, I don't think they felt it when they were killed. I don't sense anything like that. Bonney, remember when I nicked your arm? When I touched it, I could feel it hurting. But here, nothing. It's like their spirits, or souls, were already gone."
Magic again. And either growing stronger, or testing how much it could get away with. The women had been witches, of a minor sort, their own private coven. But all of them had possessed some amount of magic. The three of you revisited all of the crime scenes, and the theme became clearer. The early kills were more random, almost as if the killer had trouble finding his prey. The third had been your average Joe, someone with absolutely no magic at all. But as the sequence progressed, the victims became people who had stronger and stronger degrees of latent magic. Interviews and research showed some of them knew about their power, but more of them didn't. It seemed the killer was seeking out magicians of any sort - and eliminating them.
Thea had stopped singing. At first you thought it was just because she was involved in the investigation, throwing her time and her days into that rather than performances. She concurred briefly, saying that attendance was down anyway, people wary of being out at night. But then you realized how long it had been since you'd even heard her hum, how silent the warehouse was - when you used to be able to locate her by her singing, now you had to look to find her, usually sitting quietly, wracking her brains like the rest of you on the case. You asked her about it one night, during one of those after-sex moments when the barriers are down and serious questions come easier.
She lay silent a minute, watching you get dressed. "I'm scared to sing. It wasn't just my voice that got to people, it was because I threw myself into it - reaching out to make people feel better, in some fashion, combining magic and music. And now, well, we're after someone who can sense magic in others - which in itself is nothing big, even I'm figuring that one out - but he's misusing it ..." You dropped your medallion as you pulled it from the bedside table, and she leaned off the bed to hand it to you. As she lifted it in her hand, you heard her gasp, then ask "What is this?"
"Just an old emblem from my military years. You might say it was my unit's crest during the wars." Eyeing the way she was holding it gingerly, you said "Why?"
"It's magic - in and of itself. It has power ... it's got some purpose of it's own, I can't tell what, but this was - is? - important!"
"Power. Like you've been feeling at the crime scenes? Like you feel in others with magic?"
"No. This is very different. It's on a whole other level. I feel like it's - sleeping? - now, but if it were awake, it would outdo anything I've felt so far. This is serious ... what we've seen is petty compared to this. Horrifying, yes, but not this."
"Are you sure?" She was surprised by your intensity, but firm in her decision. "Absolutely."
Startled, she watched as you grabbed the medallion, spun it in the air, and caught it, laughing.
"Don't ever be scared of using your magic, if this is what it can do. This could be the break we need on the case. This medallion is demon-silver. It can detect demons by the intensity of their magic. You aren't strong enough for it. And apparently neither is our killer. We've been looking for a forest when all we need to find is one tree! And there isn't a man alive I can't find."
