Page 77 of Up in Smoke

“I’d be trying to circumvent death. That’s no joke, Jade. It could easily become my life for theirs.”

I opened my mouth to scold him, thought about it for a moment, and shut my mouth with a clack of my teeth. “How do we prevent that?”

“We prevent his plan from happening in the first place, but honestly, I don’t think we’ll get that chance. Why? He wouldn’t tell me about something like that. He knows I would never support or approve of it.”

One of the scryers, the youngest one of the lot, who refused to name herself like the others, crouched and wrote something in the dirt. I crouched beside her, realizing she’d listed a date. “October 1, 2043. Is there any relevance to that date, Sandro?”

“Yeah, it’s significant; he wants to have the railways reopened by then. He has told me he planned to celebrate when the first supply trains could come back to Tulsa.” Sandro joined us and knelt. “Have you seen something happening on that date?”

The woman nodded, and she wiped her hand over the dirt to erase the date, and then she began to draw puffy clouds with snaking twisters descending from them with a rectangle with wheels beneath them.

“A swarm of twisters meant to destroy the trains?” Sandro asked.

The woman nodded, and then she drew a few stick figures on what I could only assume was a nearby hill.

“Mansfield?”

She shrugged, and then she mimed pulling a cowl over her head.

“Their faces were covered by their clothes?” I asked.

She nodded.

I wiped some dirt smooth so I could draw the symbol I’d seen in my visions. “Was this on their clothes?”

With widening eyes, the woman nodded.

“Ryleigh? Have you found the choir with this marking?”

The Voodoo queen looked over my shoulder. “Some of the choirs had that mark, but not all of them. I’ve no way of knowing if we’ve gotten them all, but I will ask the spirits. A simple enough task once I have these ladies home and safe in New Orleans. I will email your pet if we discover anything of importance.”

“What code will we use?” Sandro asked. “While I try to make sure my emails remain secure, I can’t promise Mansfield isn’t reading everything I send out.”

“I have a cipher prepared. Most of our emails will look like friends discussing some business. You now have a house in New Orleans, and I’ll be communicating with you about it. Technically, you’ll have two houses. One will be in the sanctuary, and the other is next door to my home. The spirits have made it quite clear that will be your domain when you’re visiting New Orleans. During your tutoring, you’ll stay with me most of the day, and you’ll retreat home at night. I’m having it furnished as we speak, so I’ll be spending quite a lot of time discussing those things with you. I will include the costs so Mansfield believes it’s a standard business transaction. I will assign one of the other queens to start looking into the railway issues. I may have an idea on how to help mitigate Mansfield’s plans to open death’s door.”

“How?” I asked, rising to my feet and brushing the dirt off my clothes. After a swipe or two, I came to the conclusion I’d need a bath if I ever wanted to feel clean again. “If the railways open and Mansfield is selling the idea of Asylum being accessible to more people, a lot are going to come for the opportunities. It’ll be like the gold rush days.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. But I don’t know what Mansfield is pitching at the end of his rainbow. There isn’t any gold in Tulsa.”

Sandro frowned. “I still don’t understand how Mansfield could possibly benefit from bringing down the boundaries.”

“He’d kill off a lot of the prominent families, especially in the East. He’ll find New Orleans won’t fall so easily to a mere pulse,” I muttered, flexing my hands at the thought of the bastard trying to kill so many for his personal gain. “If he has enough people backing him, and the fluctuating magic kills off a lot of his competition, he could stage a takeover, be it economic or political.”

“Or even a military takeover,” Ryleigh added. “That’s a possibility. It depends on how much ammunition he has and how badly the magic fluctuates if the boundaries fail—or the quadrants collapse. I suppose he’s more after the quadrants collapsing and the entirety of the United States becoming a huge boundary. But he believes himself to be invincible. Nobody will emerge unscathed from the whole of the country becoming a boundary. Nobody.”

“Except possibly foxes like me,” I reminded her. “The boundary doesn’t bother me much at all, even right after the crossing, and I don’t think there’s really a limit for how long I can be in it. Sandro would fall into a coma within a week.” I scowled at him. “You need to work on that, sir!”

Sandro held up his hands in surrender. “I will do more boundary crossings and work on my endurance in the boundaries after we deal with Mansfield.”

As I couldn’t ask for more than that, I glared at him before giving Ryleigh my full attention. “How much money do you think it would take for Mansfield to build a military offensive if he’s trying to start up a civil war during the chaos of the quadrants collapsing or the boundaries expanding?”

“Perhaps half a million dollars? Most people use magic over firearms, although he’ll find the South and sections of the East difficult to take over that way. The West would be easy pickings for him; almost nobody has a gun, and those who do don’t really know how to use them.”

While the mystery amounts in the budget I’d seen hadn’t quite added up to half a million dollars, the figure came close enough to worry me. When I added in the circumstances of having been shot in the Alley, I questioned everything I thought I had known about the incident. “Sandro, what is the possibility that the shooter wanted to warn people that Asylum does have access to firearms and ammunition? We know the gun was sourced from Asylum.”

“If the shooter was trying to warn me, it’s possible. The shooter either has excellent or terrible aim, though. I can’t tell if you being shot in the arm was intentional or a mistake—or if the mistake was shooting you in the abdomen. We don’t really have a way of finding out, unfortunately. That’s been driving me crazy, because I can’t tell if shooting you was meant to hurt me or you—or if somebody believed you were better off dead than in my hands.”

“Don’t you even think that, Sandro Moretti!” My fox agreed with me, and to make it clear what we thought about not being in his hands, I muttered curses, turned my head, and refused to look at him. “If that’s the case, I will be forced to educate him on the errors of his ways.”