Magitek (The Rift Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  The boys’ school young Mr. Moncrieff attended was larger than Sarah’s school, but not as exclusive, and to my eye, not as pretty. I never understood why schools looked so much like prisons. Surely a more aesthetic surrounding would better facilitate learning.

  I showed my badge to get through their gate security, parked, and walked through the gardens over to the athletic field. It looked as though half of the school was out there, with different age groups practicing and dozens of adults yelling at them.

  I found a coach, flashed my detective’s shield, and said, “I’m investigating the disappearance of a girl. Her mother said that Bill Moncrieff was one of her best friends. Can I take him aside and talk to him for a few minutes?” I smiled. “He’s not a suspect or anything. I’m just trying to get a picture of what the girl is like.”

  And sure enough, the coach pulled Moncrieff aside for me. He was a bit imposing. I figured about six-three and two hundred twenty pounds. Good-looking kid, in spite of the two or three pimples. Even rich kids with magik had their crosses to bear.

  “Hi, Sarah’s mom said that I should talk to you. I’m trying to figure out what happened to her.”

  He was nervous at first, but he soon relaxed. Kids tend not to trust cops. We spoke for about fifteen minutes. He and Sarah and Cassie had been friends since kindergarten. The most important thing he said was, “I don’t think any of her boyfriends had anything to do with it. She’s the one in charge, always, and they’re just there to please her.”

  “That seems a little harsh.”

  Bill shook his head. “I don’t mean it that way. You know how some guys treat girls as arm candy? Well, she treats guys that way. It’s nothing malicious, and they know their purpose. Hell, most guys would do anything to get in her pants, you know? But I would look at her stalkers.”

  “Stalkers? Plural?”

  “Yeah. She’s always complaining about geeks following her around and old guys staring at her. She attracts them like a magnet.”

  “Any names?”

  “Naw, not really. Except Eleanor Johansson’s father. But he letches after all the girls, even his daughter. I think he just likes to look. I’ve never heard a girl say he’s tried to touch her.”

  Two votes for Martin Johansson. Definitely someone I needed to check out.

  I still had a couple of hours before I needed to meet Novak, so I dropped by my house. Our neighborhood dated to the middle twentieth century, clapboard and brick one and two-story homes built by prosperous businessmen and professional people. Not nearly as large or fancy as those in Roland Park where Sarah lived but nicer than the working-class row houses that covered so much of old Baltimore. I used my computer to check the department’s Missing Persons database. They hadn’t written Sarah off, they just weren’t working on her case. I flipped a priority tag on her and inserted my name as the case contact.

  I had worked Missing Persons for about six months, so I knew the routine. I ran the standard searches for traffic citations, towed vehicles, train and plane ticket purchasers compared to her picture, arrests, Jane Does, and everything else I could think of. Nothing turned up, but I felt I had eliminated the standard means Sarah could have used to disappear. Her credit card still hadn’t been used.

  Chapter 7

  I picked up Novak at the station so we could head to Washington. On the way out of the building, Whittaker caught up with us.

  “James. Ruth Harrison will meet you in DC.”

  Best news I’d heard all day. I gave him a smile. “Fantastic. Thanks.” Ruth was a detector—magik, magikal residues, spells, artifacts. If magik or any kind of Rift influence had even breathed in a stadium, Ruth could tell.

  Before the First Atomic War, Washington and Baltimore had been separate cities—although the space between them was filled with suburbs—each with their own police departments. When the nukes hit Washington, that changed. Multiple police departments proved to be too unwieldy and uncoordinated, especially later when dealing with beings crossing the Rift.

  Although it made sense to use scarce resources wisely, the distance between North Baltimore and South Washington was daunting for those of us whose responsibility spanned the entire metropolitan area. I hit the freeway out of Baltimore, and as soon as I had an open space in front of me, I drew a rune in the air in front of the dash. A matching sigil lit up in red, and I sent my magik into the converter. The sigil turned silver. The car lifted off the ground and gained altitude.

  “What the hell?” Novak looked to be even more terrified than he had facing the purple pizza-trash eater.

  “I’ve modified the car,” I said, pushing the accelerator to the floor and setting the cruise control. We leveled off fifty feet above the freeway at one hundred fifty miles an hour.

  “Modified the car?”

  “Yeah. I’m a magitek, remember? Installed a magitek converter, baffles and directional controls. Hell, it would take us forever to get to DC in this traffic if we stayed on the ground.”

  “I-I didn’t know you could do something like this.”

  “Sure. I mean, most people just think of us controlling the light switches in a house, or enhancing the velocity of a pistol like the Raider, but there’s a lot of things we can do with electricity and machinery.”

  The converter I had installed in the Toyota took the magik I fed it and turned it into kinetic energy. Although the car was a normal hydrogen-electric hybrid, I hadn’t changed the hydrogen cell or plugged it into an electric socket in over a year.

  Most people had no concept at all of magitek, and that included other mages. There were three kinds of magitek devices—enhancers, converters, and disrupters. The latter were considered quasi-legal. They had legitimate uses, but a lot of illegitimate uses as well.

  The majority of those mages with tek ability worked in engineering labs and factories, creating and building the enhancers and converters used to channel magik into operating electrical and mechanical devices. If that was all it could be used for, it was still pretty neat, although limited. I didn’t doubt that Diana Benning enjoyed waving her hand and having the lights come on and her favorite music play. Parlor tricks.

  If I hadn’t become a cop, that is where I would have been with my university degree in magikal engineering—sitting in a cubical in a windowless building somewhere, designing magikal blenders or datanet routers and going completely stir crazy.

  Some teks were experimenting with wormholes. Instant transport. Maybe a trip to the stars someday. Teks doing that kind of work had enhancers implanted in their brains. Expensive, and considered radical. Many of the churches were against it, and the ethics were hotly debated, along with other types of mechanical and electronic enhancements.

  I hated arguments, so I never mentioned the enhancement I had. Nobody’s business but mine.

  Of course, there were downsides to being a magitek that no one liked to talk about. Don’t even get me started on the registration laws. I was prohibited from working in certain occupations. The law barred me from coming within a mile of a nuclear power plant or weapons facility. With the surname James, I was surprised there wasn’t a special provision that made that limit fifty miles. I often wished my grandfather had really thought the thing through. I mean, in what world would a magikally enhanced nuclear bomb sound like a good idea?

  I found a lightly traveled side street and landed a few blocks from the northwest precinct station. We drove the rest of the way on the ground. Mychal seemed relieved. Personally, I felt better in the air where I didn’t have to worry about people running stop signs or turning across multiple lanes.

  I pulled into the station’s parking lot, sending magik to the electric keypad to open the gate. I did the same thing when we hit the station door. Mychal tried to follow me through and set off the alarm, earning a scowl from the desk sergeant. He had to go back out and scan his badge.

  “How come you don’t have to scan in?” he asked when he caught up to me.

  “I did.”

&nb
sp; A tall woman with wild red hair and freckles came down the hall toward us. She was wearing a gray pantsuit, the jacket covering a white shell. Dr. Ruth Harrison was a force of nature, with a wicked sense of humor and zero patience with fools.

  “Novak, be careful of what you say,” I muttered as an aside. I didn’t think his ego could survive Ruth if she was having a bad day.

  “Dani!” Ruth gave me a big smile. “How are you doing? How’s your roomie? We need to get together soon. It’s been far too long.” She leaned close and gave me an air kiss next to my cheek.

  We made small talk on our way to the ready room, where we were to meet the uniforms assigned to our raid.

  “Ruth, this is my new partner, Mychal Novak. Mychal, this is Dr. Ruth Harrison, psychiatrist and the best magik detector in the business.”

  She looked Novak up and down. “Novak? You’re joking. Who did you piss off?”

  He looked confused. “No one, that I know of. Why?”

  Ruth laughed. “You aren’t much of a detective, are you? Do your homework, kid. Danica’s partners have their own row allocated at the cemetery.”

  “That’s not true!”

  She laughed harder. “Okay, not all of them die. The rest end up in the Danica James wing at the mental hospital.”

  Lieutenant Billie Cargill met us with a scowl at the door to the ready room. As usual, her uniform looked like it had just came back from the cleaners. She looked at Ruth and me and said, “You two.” Then she caught sight of Novak and brightened. I introduced them.

  “Best thing you’ve ever dragged in here, James. Try not to get him killed, okay?”

  Cargill was a tall Black woman with a short afro and an attitude. We had gone through the police academy together, and she had finished second in our class. After ten years, she had never forgiven me for some reason.

  “Whatever you say, Second Place. Any of these guys you’re giving us have more than two weeks experience?”

  About that time, one of the uniforms turned around. “Hey, Dani! They didn’t tell me this was one of your ops. Hey, guys! Buckle your armor on tight and get ready for a wild one.”

  “Hey, Rob. Good to have you along,” I said. “Sergeant Robert Larson, this is my new partner, Sergeant Mychal Novak.”

  Cargill and Novak scowled. Harrison and Larson grinned, and Larson gave Novak a friendly salute. Mages didn’t shake hands, which didn’t matter because most normals didn’t want to shake hands with magik users.

  Novak eyed Larson and his band of merry men, then asked Cargill, “Do you have a vest I can borrow?”

  She stared at him, as stunned as I was at the request.

  “You’re not wearing armor?” I asked.

  “Bad move,” Cargill chimed in. “Are you sure you understand who you’re partnered with?”

  He looked me over. “You’re not wearing armor.”

  With a smirk, I opened my jacket, then unbuttoned my shirt, revealing my lace-trimmed blue bustier. “Kevlar, and the stays are stainless steel. They come in several attractive colors, although I never buy them in maroon. I don’t want to confuse any doctors as to whether I’m bleeding or not.”

  Harrison and Cargill both snorted.

  “And my motorcycle jacket is lined with ballistic cloth.”

  “You always wear that?” Novak asked.

  “Only when I leave the house.”

  “Even when you’re off duty?”

  “What’s that?” I turned to Billie. “Do you give your detectives time off?”

  Straight-faced, she said, “They can apply for vacation time.”

  “Oh, yeah, that. I had one of those once. Hell, if I could find a boss that gave me time off, I’d transfer. Whittaker calls me all hours of the day and night, and always expects me to be at the scene in fifteen minutes, no matter where it is.”

  “He’s always run a lax ship. Real policemen are expected to meet ten-minute response times,” Billie said, proving that she did have a sense of humor under all that starch and spit-polish.

  I briefed the assault team, then we all loaded up and headed out.

  Chapter 8

  Fredo’s massage parlor and escort service was located on the edge of a business district where it could attract customers from office buildings during the day and from bars and strip clubs at night. The massage parlor, sleazy as it was, simply served as a front for his less-savory activities.

  That part of town was a completely different world from that of the Novaks and the Bennings. Hell, it was a different world from anything Kirsten had ever experienced, and her closest connection to the life of a Hundred’s Family was screwing a few of them.

  To the south was the Waste—the area engulfed by the nuclear firestorm. For some reason, the start of every nuclear war involved nuking Washington. It had been bombed three times, even though the last two were wasted.

  On the east was an area where the Rift had manifested multiple times. Quality of living there was only marginally higher than in the Waste. Dive bars and nightclubs were mostly located to the west, and the business district and fashionable restaurants to the north—in Bethesda and Silver Spring. Fashionable being relative. In the part of Baltimore where I lived, they would be considered borderline dive bars.

  I watched Mychal’s reaction with interest as we drove through a middle-class neighborhood into one that could charitably be called a slum. We parked on the street, and I enabled the security system on the car.

  Even armed, I wouldn’t want to walk in that neighborhood alone. A succubus emerged from the shadows and immediately put the make on Novak. He recognized her for what she was and pushed her away. She was only one of the sex demons working the street, but none of the rest bothered us. A rat the size of a beagle sneered at us but didn’t bother to stop munching on whatever garbage it was dining on.

  The massage parlor was located between a bar and a liquor store. I had been in the bar once, and I swore I wouldn’t go back without a hazmat suit. The liquor store didn’t sell many brands I would drink on a bad day. Then there was Fredo’s place, which lowered the overall neighborhood property values.

  Larson directed his men to cover the exits, then he, Novak, and I approached the front door.

  I rang the bell and waited for the little window in the door to slide open. When it did, I placed the muzzle of my pistol between the eyes of the man who looked out and held up my badge with my other hand.

  “Police. Don’t say a word, just open the door.”

  There was a click, and I kicked the door open, hitting the man inside and knocking him off balance. I walked by him toward the interior of the building, tossing the search warrant at him on my way past.

  Larson and his men followed me, a couple peeling off toward the side and back doors to open them for their buddies waiting outside.

  The building was larger than it appeared from the outside and had a full basement. The uniforms trundled the two bouncers and the woman at the front desk out to wait at the curb. In most of the rooms on the ground floor, we found one ‘masseuse’ or ‘masseur’ with one customer. Most of them were stretching the definition of massage past the breaking point, but that wasn’t what I was concerned about. There were also a few rooms with a man or a woman alone, waiting for business.

  Fredo came pounding down a set of rickety stairs from his office with a pistol in his hand. At least six-and-a-half feet tall, and a sloppy three hundred-fifty pounds, Fredo wasn’t human, but I’d never figured out what he was. A wild fringe of gray-green hair surrounded a bald head, and he always seemed to have a patchy, unattractive three-day beard. His skin was pale gray, not a human color at all. I had wondered, more than once, if he got into the skin trade because his natural charms couldn’t attract a woman.

  “Drop the weapon, Fredo!”

  He stopped, the gun half-raised. “James,” he sneered.

  “Your favorite defender of life and property, lovely and alluring as always. Drop it!”

  The pistol clattered down the la
st three steps, and I bent over to pick it up, my Raider never wavering from its target on his chest.

  “Where’s your warrant?” he growled.

  “I gave it to your doorman. Sergeant Larson? Please escort our host out to the foyer so he can read it.” I gave Fredo a friendly smile. “You can read, can’t you? If not, we’ll find someone down at the station to translate it into one-syllable words for you.”

  Larson was a large man, but Fredo dwarfed him. Two of the uniformed cops took Fredo out at gunpoint.

  “We’ll leave the upstairs for last,” I told Novak and Larson. “Station one of your men here in case Fredo has any friends upstairs who decide to leave.”

  Downstairs turned out to be where the real action was. The bouncer at the foot of the stairs was a minor demon. Nothing illegal in itself, but it raised the question of how Fredo was paying him. Demons didn’t use money in their own dimension and usually couldn’t buy their preferred foods with it in ours.

  “Freeze!”

  Of course, the demon didn’t obey me because it saw me as prey rather than a threat. So much for surprising anyone in the basement. I fired three times, the Raider deafening in the enclosed space.

  “You’re going to be buried in paperwork,” Larson commented as he brushed past me, his assault rifle at the ready. “He wasn’t even armed.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.” The demon had two-inch claws on its hands and feet, and two-inch teeth.

  Larson kicked in the first door he came to. “James? Something for you.” He backed out of the room but kept his rifle pointed at something inside.

  I peeked around the corner. The girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen, sat upright and still in a chair, her eyes open and staring straight ahead without a trace of awareness. She truly was beautiful, with wavy red hair spilling over her shoulders and breasts.