Marked By Magic by Christa Wick
Chapter Twenty-Two
With Lanacharming Esme into her first sound sleep in days, Denver left the latent to keep an eye on his mate. Walking through the mansion, he checked the ground floor exits. Sensing Oscar's presence in the main salon that had been turned into a sleeping area, he poked his head through the open doorway.
Tavi sat on a bundle of folded blankets, one of Camille's diaries on her lap as she looked for pages to transcribe from witch script into plain English. He couldn't tell if her pinched brows were a sign of anger or concentration. More likely the latter, because it took her a few seconds to realize Denver stood in the doorway.
When she did, her head jerked up. He made the sign for "cub" then a question mark in what Tavi jokingly called shifter sign language. One of Denver's early orders as clan leader was that all latents must learn the clan signs. Similarly, they all had to become comfortable with firearms.
"That means 'heart' in ASL," she said with a faint smile. "What is it in wolf again?"
"Cub," he answered, nose twitching. The room's odors suggested Oscar had at least passed through the area recently.
"That makes sense." Putting down her pen, she pointed toward the center of the wall on her left. "You'll find him over there."
The "over there" was a wall with wainscoting on it, but no Oscar.
Charmed wainscoting, Denver remembered. Quentin had created a number of hiding spots behind similarly paneled sections on the mansion's first and second floors. Esme said the charms used were "null" charms. They were meant to hide sources of magic—which included any shifter small enough to hide inside one.
Some of the hidden spaces were quite deep, but only a few feet tall. Quentin had used the cubs to take things to the back of such blank boxes, which was how Esme had been able to map out the locations using Oscar's memories.
Reaching the center panel, Denver knocked three times, then waited for the cub to emerge.
The panel pushed outward, opening just a few inches. Denver pulled it all the way open, bent down, and looked inside. He found the cub curled in a ball with a blanket, with his small frame tucked far out of arm's reach and a pout on his face.
Denver didn't have time to wonder why Oscar was pouting. He was too busy trying to puzzle out how Oscar could have pushed the panel open and returned to his nest with both haste and stealth.
"How'd you open the door?" he asked, crouching so he was on an even level with the cub.
Still curled up, Oscar lifted one shoulder.
"I wanted it open, so it opened."
Finding the conversation more interesting than the journal she was reading, Tavi left her blankets and came over to stand by Denver. Digging into the pocket of her skirt, she pulled out a shiny rock big enough that her palm barely closed around it.
"You remember when I told you there were treasures in the streams around here and you didn't believe me?"
Oscar nodded.
Bending down, Tavi placed the rock at the threshold to the cubby. While most of the surface had a soapy dullness to it, one side had been sharply cleaved to reveal a blue and green iridescence.
"This is labradorite," she explained. "Out in the other world, people believe it is a stone of transformation. I think it's the perfect stone for a boy who can shift into a cub."
Oscar began to unwind from his blanket, but Tavi brought her hand up to signal him against moving closer.
"If you want it, make it come to you."
The boy squirmed, started to move again.
"Nope. Make it come to you or I'll put it back in my pocket," she warned.
Denver watched, heart pounding in his chest at a conversation that seemed innocent on its surface but would send dangerous shock waves through the shifter world if the cub really had opened the door with his thoughts instead of racing back to the little nest he'd made for himself before Denver could see—or hear—him do it.
First the legend of latents had proven true, then Iris—a rare witch-wolf—had been discovered, and now there might be at least one male shifter capable of wielding magic.
"Too late," Tavi said, moving to scoop up the rock.
Right before her hand could make contact, the piece of labradorite shot along the floor, into the cubbyhole and straight into Oscar's small hand.
"Well done!" Tavi clapped.
"Come on out, cub," Denver said, his voice soft but firm so Oscar would know it wasn't a suggestion.
The boy complied slowly, crawling along on his hands and knees. Reaching the threshold, he stopped and looked up at Denver.
"You're not in trouble," he told Oscar, reaching down, easing his hands under the cub's armpits, then scooping him up. "But none of us are going to talk about what just happened with the rock and the door before I discuss things with Esme."
Oscar hid his face in the crook of Denver's neck and softly asked, "Can I discuss with Momma, too?"
Fighting the way his throat wanted to strangle the words, Denver kissed the crown of Oscar's head.
"Momma still can't leave her room and you still can't go in."
Oscar twisted until he could meet Denver's gaze and study his expression. "Because it makes Abby angry when we try to leave?"
"Yes," he agreed.
"Everybody hurts when Abby is angry," Oscar whispered.
"Yes," he agreed again. "But Momma wants you to know how much she loves you."
Oscar nodded, but the sparkle left his gaze and his mouth turned down at the corners.
"Before I talk to Momma, let's figure out if Jet found anything on the computer stuff Tanner and Michelle brought back from town."
The boy brightened. Jet was at just the right age where he was only half pretending to be an adult. The kid-like part of his personality that he was still trying to lock down or leave behind always came out around Oscar. The boy liked that Jet called him "buddy" and always agreed with Oscar that the two of them were friends.
Unfortunately, friend Jet still had a potty mouth on him and the newest addition to Oscar's growing vocabulary was "what the fuck?"
"If anyone found anything on that hard drive array, it's Philia," Tavi called as she settled onto her cushion of blankets and picked up the journal. "That was her jam on the outside."
"Jam on the outside?" Oscar whispered as Denver carried him toward the kitchen.
"Not like what you eat," Denver smiled, these rare moments with the cub a temporary cure for all the problems that pulled at him as both clan leader and as Esme's mate. "But we love to eat jam, right?"
Oscar nodded vigorously. "And honey!"
"Right. So jam is something someone does really well. If Philia's 'jam' is computers, that means she works really well with computers. Got it?"
"Got it!" Oscar squealed as they entered the kitchen to find Philia and Jet shoulder-to-shoulder, their gazes on a laptop screen and both of them scribbling furiously on paper.
Denver noticed that, judging by their positions, Philia was in control of the touchpad and keyboard.
"What have you learned?" he asked.
"I've learned how to hook up a hard drive from a PC and get it to work on one of our mission laptops," Jet answered, flashing one of his pages at Denver. "I also learned that chicks get pissed when you tell them they're pretty good at something considering they're just a girl."
Philia elbowed Jet at the same time Oscar grumbled in a perfect imitation of the young wolf he was starting to idolize.
"Chicks always get pissed," the cub said.
Jet jumped out of the way as Philia tried to punch his arm.
"Stop polluting the next generation," she said.
"Rootin', tootin', pollutin'," Jet teased, holding out his arms to Oscar.
The cub leaned forward. Denver let Jet scoop the boy up.
"Mister Computer here missed the part about first setting up a quarantine before hooking up the drive, partitioning it and fire walling the…uh…heck out of it," Philia said, casting a glance at the cub as her fingers zoomed around the keyboard and over the keypad. "Anyhoo, first disturbing thing we found was a database of women."
Philia hit a few keystrokes and pulled up a picture of Michelle Ripley, more strokes brought up Lana's picture. "So far, I've found twenty faces and names I recognize, including a girl I met in college who always felt like a long-lost twin and was lost again in what would have been our senior year."
Philia delivered the words with a machine gun approach, erasing any trace of emotion in saying them, but Denver saw the strain around her mouth and how her lashes flicked tears when she blinked.
"So that guy Frank at the medical supply store didn't have some internal 'latent' detector. He just had access to the database," she continued, clicking further into the file Quentin had kept on Philia herself. "Wasn't just ID photos, either. There are surveillance photos in here, names and addresses of other female relatives, stuff like that. Which brings me to a simple spreadsheet of names."
Denver leaned closer as she left the database file and opened another program.
"In addition to the women I recognized from real life who are in the database, I recognize a number of additional names from the loose sheets of paper down in the cellar that Esme showed me. Those names and charts seemed like they were written long before Quentin started using the other side. Like they were left behind by the building's previous owner, some as far back as the mansion's original owner."
Philia paused and scrubbed her hands over her face before continuing. Her skin was raw from such scrubbing. Denver lightly touched the back of her shoulder, his wolf seeking permission to comfort her. Catching the slight bob of her head, he pushed a gentle wave of his alpha energy into her, then withdrew his hand. The exchange was what he would give any member of his clan as their leader.
"So," she continued, her emotions a little less raw. "The pages in the cellar all stop in the late 1960s. But, I've checked and those names are all duplicated on the hard drive, plus later births have been recorded."
Pointing at some cells highlighted in different colors, she sighed.
"It looks like a genealogy spreadsheet." Her finger tapped against a few green-shaded cells, then against pale-red cells. "The ones with green share the fact that they are all males and were all still alive the last time this resource was updated. The ones with red are females. The red ones all have deceased dates. They all died in their twenties. I think he's using it to track latents. The males he turns into Hunters. The females—"
"Batteries," Oscar said. "Girls are only good for batteries. Sorry, Philia."
Her tears returned, threatening to spill over. She swiped them away, swallowed hard, then forced a smile in Oscar's direction.
"That's okay, sweetie. No man is the boss of me and I'm not going to be some battery bit—"
Her lips froze, then she exhaled sharply before shifting focus from the computer to her cell phone. Pulling up a web page, she showed it to Denver. He leaned closer to see the small screen.
"It looks like his way into the community has been through a local religious cult," she said. "I'm guessing he founded it a couple of centuries ago because its history goes back to before Gibley was any kind of official settlement and there is a documented familial line of archdeacons."
She clicked the link that led to the biographies of the church's current and former leaders. A contemporary picture was at the top, showing Quentin in a humble man's business suit, his age somewhere in an ambiguous range of mid-forties to late fifties. Almost toppling out of Jet's arms, Oscar leaned over Philia's shoulder as she scrolled through more photos, his expression growing fearful.
"That's him, too," Oscar interrupted, his finger pointing at a faded picture of a man from just after the civil war.
"Yeah, I think so," Philia agreed, double tapping on the picture Oscar had pointed at. "These are the only two original photographs. The rest are all snapshots of paintings with just enough variation to the features and age to avoid looking like the same person and instead showing a strong family resemblance."
She put the phone down and swiveled in her chair to look at Denver.
"The biographies I've read show the same life patterns. The then current archdeacon has a son, never more than that unless the boy dies in childhood. Once the son is an adult in his mid-twenties, he leaves on a mission to spread the church's filth. Stays gone for a decade or more, only returning once his father dies while still leader of the church. And the son always comes back with a very young son of his own, never a daughter and never a wife because the woman has died by one misadventure or another—fires, miscarriages, fevers, scalped by heathens and shit like that. I'm thinking, Quentin keeps having a son or stealing one, raises him then gives him a big send off, and probably kills him immediately after that. Then Quentin fakes dying and comes back as the prodigal son to lead the next generation of congregants."
"In summary," Jet interrupted with a blatantly false cheer. "We landed in a damn vipers' nest in which no encounter is a safe one."
"Your phone won't work in the basement," Denver said, reclaiming Oscar and starting for the door. "So save the web pages you just showed me and meet me with your equipment in an hour. Esme needs to see this."
"It's more than the web pages you just looked at," Jet joined in. "We've been through their social media. Quentin's little cult of crazies is about to go Armageddon. They're talking 'final battle' shit, and it's not just the males."
Denver looked at Philia for confirmation. Dropping her gaze, she nodded.
"Fine," he answered, stepping into the hall. "Gather what you can—but make it thirty minutes."
