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After several rings, a familiar voice said, “Ranger station, Jaz Marin speaking. How can I help you?”
Jaz was a brown-haired, brown-skinned wolf who’d come here from a New South Wales pack and had subsequently married into the Marins. She and I had become friends thanks to a mutual love of good hot chocolate, cream cakes, and British baking shows. “Jaz, it’s Lizzie—”
“Oh dear,” she said, trepidation evident in her tone. “There can be only one reason for you to be ringing when you know Aiden isn’t on duty.”
“And I’m afraid you’d be right.”
She blew out a breath. “You want to give me the details? I’ll pass them on to Tala.”
Tala was Aiden’s second, and a straight-talking, no-nonsense wolf. We weren’t exactly friends, but she’d at least come to accept that psychic talents did indeed exist and that they could also be quite useful.
I told her what we’d found and provided directions, but didn’t bother mentioning the magical elements within the clearing, as they may or may not be relevant.
“Tala’s in Rayburn Springs,” she said, “so it shouldn’t take her more than twenty minutes to get there. You hanging around?”
“I daresay she’ll want me to.”
“Probably.”
“Then I will. Thanks, Jaz.”
I hung up and shoved the phone away. Ashworth didn’t look happy.
“Is there a problem?”
He rose. “Yeah. The magic inside this thing is active but I’ve never seen anything like it.”
If Ashworth had no idea what it was, we were in deep shit. “Do you think he was an unvetted witch?”
Unvetted witches were generally half-breeds who’d somehow avoided the accreditation process that both uncovered their power levels and aligned them to one of the major or minor houses. Belle and I—despite the fact we were full-blood witches—were technically unvetted, as we’d never gone through either the accreditation or registration ceremony that happened when a full-blood witchling reached eighteen years of age.
“No, if only because there’s too much power and control involved.” Ashworth swept a hand over his bald head, frustration evident. “I think it’s more likely he’s an extremely well-trained full-blood witch gone bad.”
My gaze briefly swept the body. Again bile rose, and again I swallowed it down. The short crimson-red tufts that topped the remains of the stranger’s head certainly indic
ated he was from one of the blueblood families. The remnants of his features weren’t Asian, which cut out the Kang line but not the Marlowe or Ashworth lines.
“Does that happen often?” I’d certainly never heard of any such event in my years up there, though that sort of thing was probably only spoken about in hushed voices behind closed doors.
“More often than people think,” Ashworth said. “Not everyone is happy with the hierarchy situation in Canberra.”
And much of that discontent, I suspected, came from within the inner circles. While the three royal families were supposedly of equal standing, in reality, the Marlowes held more powerful positions in the capital than either the Kangs or the Ashworths. My parents were considered to be amongst a mere handful of the most powerful witches Canberra had ever produced—a fact that went a long way to explain their utter disappointment in producing such an underpowered witch as me.
“They keep a log of heretics though, don’t they? Which means you should be able to find his identity through his prints easily enough.”
“Heretics are treated no different to any other criminal—their prints are only taken after they’re caught and charged.” He grimaced. “And it’s been my—admittedly limited—experience that heretics on the run tend to get rid of as many identifying marks as possible. And what they can’t erase, they conceal.”
Concealment had certainly worked for Belle and me, but it wasn’t like anyone other than my parents had any reason to bring me home. Heretics were another matter entirely—and had been responsible for many an atrocity committed against witches over the centuries. There’d been more than a few stake burnings that were the end result of heretic interaction with humanity, even if it was something as simple as a spell going bad.
“It’s easy enough to change your hair, grow a beard, or even use contacts to change your eye color,” I said, “but how on earth do you get rid of something like fingerprints?”
“They can be surgically removed, burned away, or otherwise mutilated.”
“All of which sounds damn painful to me.” And from what I could see, the stranger’s fingertips appeared intact—although I wasn’t about to get any closer to check. “Doing any of those things would raise red flags if they were ever stopped by cops, or tried to head overseas, though. I wouldn’t have thought the pain worth it.”
“That’s because you and I are normal, sane people. Besides, any witch capable of producing a glamor can get past most security checks. They haven’t invented machines that can detect spells as yet.”
No, they hadn’t, but most major airports these days did at least have witches on staff for that very reason.
