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I twiddled my thumbs. “I like going out on my own.”
Thea frowned. “Not going to happen anymore. Not for a while, at least. Things are getting dangerous out there. Even the higher-ups are talking about this. No one is happy. Least of all the Pruitts, with those holes blown through their bodies.” Her features softened, as did her voice. “This is what I meant when we met, Dustin. Remember? Protecting people from their own greed, from power they don’t understand. It’s why you do what you do. And you’re so good at it.”
She was right. Hound or no, it didn’t make sense for me to work on my own anymore, which made me a little sad, frankly speaking. But sad was better than dead.
“I do question that sometimes, you know. I mean, I’m just a Hound.”
“Just a Hound,” Thea mimicked. She drew back, her face going hard. “Who told you that? Nonsense. You’re just as important to the Lorica as anyone.” She reached out, clasping my hand, the gold of her many rings cool against my skin, her opals glowing like little suns. “You’re valuable to us, Dustin. To me. You are special. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
I didn’t return her gaze, but I nodded.
“You’re like a son to me, kid.”
I didn’t know if Thea intended for me to notice, but her eyes swept past the monitor of her computer and landed on a couple of framed photographs on her desk. Pictures of her kids, a boy and a girl, but old ones that were obviously taken some time back. Nothing recent. I never asked about her children, or why she never had new pictures of them. Maybe that was why we understood each other.
She had lost part of her own family, the way I’d lost part of mine.
“Don’t forget why you’re here. We still need to find who did this to you.” Her eyes fell on my chest, staring there like she could see through my shirt. The scar over my heart itched just then. I reached for it and scratched. Thea knew everything that happened, anyway. No sense hiding that I still found it difficult to talk about my death.
“Someone mentioned the Black Hand,” I said, carefully.
Thea’s eyes narrowed. “Office gossip spreads fast, I see. Yes. We have reason to believe that this Black Hand is the same organization behind all of these recent incidents: Resheph’s murder, the Pruitts’, even yours.”
“It doesn’t make sense, though. If they had plans to spread some new kind of magical plague, why did they leave the book?”
“Perhaps the Black Hand got what they came for. I think this goes deeper. Resheph was only vulnerable because he stepped outside of his home dimension. That’s the only way a god gets killed, and the only reason a god would leave is for something extremely important – say, taking the Book of Plagues away so that no one would ever bother him with a summoning again. The Pruitts were just dabblers, fools playing at magic. Likely just casualties along the way.”
I squinted, trying to unravel the scenario. “So you’re saying that the Pruitts summoned Resheph, just to see if they could, and the Black Hand was already waiting to – to what, exactly? Were they after the Pruitts, or the god himself?”
“As I said, the Pruitts are inconsequential. Unfortunate that they died, to be sure, but they were collateral damage. You see, a god’s death comes with its own repercussions. It leaves a gap in our reality, and while the world rushes to fill that void, we see and feel the aftereffects. In Resheph’s case it could be as awful as an epidemic, or as minor as some restless rodents.”
A shuffling sound made its way across the wall just behind Thea’s head. She tutted and rolled her eyes.
“Restless rodents it is, then. It’ll be chaos for some time. Expect to find lots of overactive rats. Think of it as Resheph’s disappearance causing reverberations across his former dominion, his area of power. But more importantly: we need to remain vigilant. The Black Hand may strike again. But who knows when?”
The scratching noises continued, making it seem as if there were at least a dozen of those rats maneuvering between the walls. I shifted uncomfortably, wondering if the Lorica had its own way of dealing with vermin. But the scuffling stopped when someone knocked on Thea’s office.
“Come in,” Thea said.
I turned my head to follow the door when it swung open, and in stepped Odessa, one of the Lorica’s Scions. She favored a more esoteric kind of fashion, keeping to conservative dresses and long, black hair that framed her face with severe bangs, and looked for all the world like a living, breathing doll.
The Scions were the Lorica’s elders, high-ranking mages who were more learned or experienced than the rest of us, whether through skill or seniority. It was tough looking at Odessa and thinking the words elder or senior could ever apply considering she looked just shy of eighteen, which wasn’t to say anything of her mastery. There was just something off about her, in the depth of her voice, the deliberateness and confidence of her gestures. Her presence was laden with the kind of gravity that came from immense inner storehouses of power and knowledge.
If the water cooler talk was true, she was actually a little over a hundred years old, though how that translated to her appearance none ever dared to ask or even pry. It was the mage’s most coveted mystery, after all: the secret to eternal life, or at least, to longevity.
We all had our specialties, granted, but the surest way for a mage to continue growing in power was through studying the Lorica’s immense collection of scrolls and grimoires. According to Thea, that kind of learning and mastery could take years, even decades.
The more time a mage had to study, the more they absorbed into their occult arsenal, and the greater their power. A mage who could wield fire was one thing, but a mage who also knew how to fly, turn invisible, and summon demons on command? That was the stuff of nightmares. I couldn’t guess at all the things Odessa knew, all the mysteries that she had unraveled.
Odessa turned from Thea to me, nodding with the curtest of silent greetings. I took that as my cue to leave. I stood bolt upright, gave Thea a small wave, then almost found myself bowing to Odessa. She didn’t seem to notice, but Thea’s sharp intake of breath told me that she found the little unintentional jerk of my head amusing.
“I’ll be in touch, Dustin,” she said, keeping her face straight. “Get some sleep for now. You’ve got the rest of the day off.”
Keeping my face stock-still, I sucked in my cheeks, doing my honest best to hide how thrilled I was to have a chance to recover from the events of last night. I was self-conscious enough about disguising my glee without having Odessa in the room. The Scions just made me nervous. Maybe it was how nobody knew for sure what any of them could do, magically speaking. Something about her told me that she had power enough to wipe me off the face of the planet with just a crook of her pinky finger.
I shut the door quietly behind me and glanced at my phone. It was barely past ten. I stretched my arms out as I sauntered off, happy to get some time to myself at last. But not five feet down the corridor I felt my opal pendant warm up again.
Groaning, I glanced down, spotting the faint glow at my neck. What now? I was supposed to have the rest of the day off. I sighed and touched two fingers to the stone. Thea’s voice in my head sounded distant, laden with echoes.
