No Quest for the Wicked Read online

  “Yeah, Sam warned them in time.”

  “Someone really doesn’t want us to succeed.”

  “And that someone seems to be a step ahead of us.”

  “On the bright side, our unknown follower couldn’t possibly have kept up with us through all that, not on foot, and we’d have seen anything else in the air.”

  When we finally reached the MSI building without further incident, I asked the driver to take us to the front door. “I’m not getting off in midair this time,” I said with a shudder.

  Much to my relief, the carpet landed on the ground, and all of us let out a collective sigh. I sat there for a while, reveling in the knowledge that I couldn’t fall from where I was. Owen stood first and extended a hand to help Granny up, then he pulled me to my feet and straight into his arms, where he held me in a fierce hug. I buried my face against his shoulder and hugged him back, enjoying the feel of solid earth beneath my feet and solid man in my arms. “I am never, ever getting on one of those things again,” I said. “At least, not until they install seatbelts.”

  “Seatbelts sound like a very good idea,” Owen agreed. Without loosening his hold on me, he spoke over my shoulder to Rocky and Rollo, the security gargoyles who had just landed beside us. “Someone’s animating gargoyles. I don’t know where they got that one, but it looked old and European. It even had moss growing on it.”

  I turned to see Rocky shuddering. “Moss? Talk about a personal hygiene problem! What kind of creep doesn’t bother to scrape off the moss?”

  “We’ll look into it,” Rollo said.

  “Thanks,” Owen said. “Now, could one of you escort Katie’s grandmother up to Merlin’s office?”

  Granny gripped her cane with both hands and planted it firmly on the ground in front of her. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had grown roots. “I’m not letting Katie out of my sight. She’s going to need me.”

  “I’ve already needed you,” I said. “Maybe all that”—I gestured in the general direction where our aerial adventures had taken place—“was when I needed you, and you saved us.”

  She shook her head. “Nope. That’s not it. I’ve still got the ache in my big toe, so it’s still to come.”

  “But Mrs. Callahan,” Owen began.

  Granny cut him off. “You can call me Granny.”

  He blinked and blushed slightly. “But Granny, the thing is, we’re going to be working in a restricted area that’s very dangerous for anyone with magical powers. You can’t go in there. And by that I mean you physically wouldn’t be able to get in that area. It has nothing to do with wanting you there or giving you permission. We won’t be there long, and I need Katie’s help. Inside this building, nothing will happen to her.”

  “And you can hang out with Merlin,” I added. “We need you to tell him what just happened to us. Maybe you could help figure out who in the company is working for the other side.”

  She glared back and forth between us for a long time, then nodded and said, “Well, alrighty then. I’ll report to Merlin, and you two run along and do your thing.” She waved a warning finger at us. “But don’t take too long because I’ll have to come looking for you.” Then she turned and told the gargoyles, “Gentlemen, let’s go.”

  With my grandmother temporarily out of our hair, Owen and I entered the building and ran down the stairs to the basement workroom. It seemed like days had passed since I’d brought Owen breakfast that morning. The coffee Thermos still sat there in the outer room, and I emptied the contents into a cup. The coffee was a drinkable temperature, though perhaps not as hot as I preferred. Under the circumstances, I wasn’t going to complain about the temperature of my caffeine. I added a good dose of sugar and drank half the cup in one gulp before handing it to Owen. “Here, the sugar and caffeine will help after all that excitement,” I said.

  He obediently drained the cup, then abruptly hurled it across the room so that it bounced off the wall and then shattered on the floor. Bright spots blazed on his cheeks as he fought to get control of himself. “Did that help?” I asked him.

  “Not so much.” The red patches on his face faded, to be replaced by a pink flush that rose from his collar to his hairline. “I was so helpless out there. We would have died if it hadn’t been for a little old lady with her folk magic. I had to teach someone else to do a spell because I couldn’t work it myself.”

  I knew there was nothing I could say to make it better, so I didn’t try. Instead, I said calmly, “It’s about time.”

  “For what?”

  “For you to admit that this sucks. You’ve been playing Pollyanna all along, acting like you’d practically planned to end up this way, and wasn’t it great that losing your powers meant you got to do all this awesome research and kept the magical world from seeing you as a threat. I knew that couldn’t be real. I mean, really, you were the most powerful wizard of your generation, and you lost all trace of magic. It’s awful. It’s like losing your eyesight, or an arm or a leg.”

  “Thank you for the pep talk,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  “I’m not trying to cheer you up. That would be pointless. I’m just glad you’re finally being honest with me—and with yourself.” I hesitated, then asked, “Do you also really believe it will come back?”

  He worried his lower lip in his teeth for a while, then whispered, “No.” His shoulders sagged in defeat.

  I stepped forward and pulled him against me in a big hug. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

  After holding me for a couple of minutes, he said, “So, now that we’ve dealt with my issues, are you ready to talk about what’s going on with you?”

  “Well, since I’m not throwing things, that’s not an immediate crisis, and we have work to do.”

  He placed his hands on either side of my face, kissed me, and said, “Fine, but at some point, you’re going to have to stop avoiding the discussion. I won’t forget.” Then the two of us headed into the manuscript room.

  He pulled a stack of paper toward himself, lifted off the top half, and handed it to me. “I labeled it as I was transcribing. Look for the word ‘spell’ in the margins and pull those pages.” I shuffled quickly through the pages, handing the “spell” pages to him as soon as I had a handful. From there, he turned the rest of his stack over to me while he read more carefully through the spells, sorting the pages into piles. After he’d gone through the whole stack, he picked up one of his piles. “These are the ones the doorman used and a few others that fall into the same era that seem like they might also be used for attack or defense.”

  “Is there anything in those spells that might give us a clue what this is about? Are they related to the Eye?”

  “No, they’re actually after Merlin’s time, probably from one of his immediate successors. At the most, maybe two generations later. But they are all from the same era and I think they can be traced back to the same wizard. I’m not sure what that tells us, but there’s probably some old grimoire out there from that time period, and the doorman could have read that. Now, let’s go get your grandmother and get back to the others.”

  When we reached Merlin’s office, he was standing at the conference table with someone I assumed, based on the beads, scarves, and scent of incense, was from Prophets and Lost. “Ah, there you are,” he greeted us as we crossed the threshold. “I just heard from Mr. Gwaltney. They haven’t found the brooch or Ms. Perkins yet. I trust your search was successful?”

  Owen held up the stack of spells and opened his mouth to say something, but whatever he was about to say came out as “Ouch!” when Granny’s cane jerked and rapped him across the shin so hard that the sound of it made me hop on one foot for a second.

  She looked up at him with an expression of fake innocence. “Oh, dearie me. I’m so sorry. My muscles must still be twitching from all the excitement earlier. I can’t seem to control myself.”

  The P & L person finished adding colored pushpins to a map of the city lying on the conference table. “There, those ar
e our latest findings,” she said. “Red is confirmed sightings. Blue is where we’ve picked up an aura that could mean something. Green is potential visions of the future.” The pins spread over most of the Upper East Side, with a few blue and green pins trickling down to Midtown.

  “Thank you,” Merlin said. The woman nodded as she picked up her notebook and left, her scarves wafting behind her.

  As soon as she was gone and the doors had closed, I whirled on Granny. “What was that for?” I demanded.

  “Loose lips sink ships,” she snapped.

  I groaned inwardly and was about to tell her that just because someone dresses funny, it doesn’t mean they’re suspicious when Merlin said, “She is right about that, though I suspect she could have conveyed the same warning without resorting to physical violence.”

  I gestured to the doors where the P&L lady had exited. “You think she’s the mole?”

  “We’ve narrowed it down to that department.”

  “But why stop me from saying anything when you just said everything that was going on?” Owen asked as he straightened from rubbing his sore shin.

  Granny grinned. “That’s because we’re setting a mole trap!”

  Chapter Nine

  “A mole trap?” I repeated dumbly, shocked to learn that my grandmother was involved in espionage. Not that I should have been at all surprised. She always did keep close tabs on everything my family and everyone else in my hometown did.

  “Minerva is sending her staff members here on errands, one by one,” Merlin explained. “While they are in the room, I take phone calls or have conversations about where our searchers will go next. Sam and his people are watching those locations, and if something happens in any of those places, that will reveal our mole’s identity. But now that we’re alone, what was it you wanted to tell me, Mr. Palmer?”

  Owen sat at the conference table and handed the pages of spells to Merlin. “These are the spells that fake doorman used. I realized I’d seen them in the Ephemera. I’d guess they’re from about a century before the Norman invasion, based on the language and syntax. We’ve been building on these spells for centuries, so there are now far more effective ways to accomplish the same things. No one uses these anymore, which actually made them difficult to counter.”

  There was a polite rap on the door, and Merlin waved a hand to open it. A young woman entered, and at first I didn’t think she could be one of Minerva’s mole candidates, since she was dressed professionally with her knee-length black skirt, medium-heel black pumps, crisp white blouse, and a chignon at the nape of her neck. “I’ve got some new readings for you, sir,” she said, handing Merlin a folder.

  “Thank you,” he said, opening it. Then his desk phone rang, and he put down the folder to answer it, indicating with a gesture that he didn’t want the woman to leave. “Oh, hello, Mr. Gwaltney,” he said into the phone. “Ah, so no luck at the salons. Where are you now? Well, it’s only a few blocks down Eighty-second from where you are on Lexington to get to the museum. Perhaps our best hope is to wait for her to arrive at the museum. Please keep me posted.”

  After he hung up, he smiled at the woman. “My apologies.”

  “I understand completely, sir,” she replied.

  He went back to the folder and flipped through the documents. “Is there anything you need to explain in here?”

  “I’m sure it’s all self-explanatory for you, sir.”

  “Very well, then. My thanks to your department for all your hard work today.”

  She nodded in acknowledgement and strode briskly out of the office. “Are you sure she works in P and L?” I asked when she was gone. Most of Minerva’s department tended to dress like they were working at a carnival fortune-teller’s booth, so she didn’t look the part.

  “Minerva says she’s one of the best scryers she’s seen,” Merlin said. “And I believe she’s the last one on the list. Now we wait to see where—if anywhere—our opponents go.”

  Owen’s phone rang, and after answering it, he hit a button and set it on the table. “Okay, Rod, you’re on speaker,” he said.

  “We’ve hit all the salons on the list and the good news is that we found Mimi’s stylist,” Rod reported. “The bad news is that the stylist is meeting her at the museum.”

  “I should have known,” I muttered. “She’d want plenty of flunkies on-site.”

  “I’m afraid the first time we’re sure of being able to get to her will be at the museum, possibly during the event setup. Do you think she’ll show up to supervise, Katie?”

  “Oh, yeah. She has to be there to micromanage and change her mind a dozen times.”

  “Then we’ll go into the museum as patrons,” Rod said. “We’ll veil ourselves while they clear the regular visitors out of the exhibits and be in place to wait for her.”

  “How do we get in?” Owen asked. “You’ll need us when it comes to getting the brooch.”

  “Sneak in with the catering staff. Surely she won’t know everyone.”

  “The caterers will probably be scrambling to staff this event after everyone who’s met her quits,” I said. “It could work, but I’ll have to avoid her while I’m undercover. Not that she’d pay enough attention to a catering waitress to recognize me.”

  “Did you find those spells?” Rod asked.

  “Yes, and a few more they might use, just in case,” Owen said. “I’ll bring them with me. We’ll be up there as soon as we can.”

  While Owen ended that call, Merlin’s desk phone rang. “Yes, Sam?” he said, answering the phone. Then he frowned as he nodded somberly. “Are you certain? Have them followed. At the moment, I would prefer that they not know we’re on to them.” Merlin then dialed an internal extension. “Minerva?” he said. “Miss Spencer appears to be our person. Please bring her here immediately.”

  When Merlin hung up, Owen stood and said, “We’d better be going.”

  “I want to see this,” Granny said, planting her feet solidly on the floor in front of her chair.

  “I would prefer that you stay, for the moment,” Merlin said. “It may help if you have firsthand knowledge of who is getting in your way.”

  When Minerva arrived, I was shocked to see the professionally dressed woman with her. She’d seemed too normal to be a magical spy. It didn’t appear that she knew why she’d been brought to Merlin’s office for a meeting. She carried a notepad and looked very much the way I must have once looked when I’d been Merlin’s assistant and went with him to meetings.

  “Please, have a seat,” Merlin said to the newcomers with an expansive gesture. “Thank you for coming on such short notice on such a busy day.”

  Minerva sat across from Merlin and beckoned to her associate. “Come on, Grace, sit over here by me.” She’d positioned the possible traitor so she’d have to get past all of us to get to the door.

  “I thought it was a good time to update everyone on the status of our project,” Merlin said. “We’ve run into a few obstacles, the first of which being that we appear to have someone within the company working at cross-purposes to our operation. Someone has provided misleading information to our team, has withheld useful information that should have been easily obtained, and is sending information about our team’s activities to people who are interfering with and even attacking our people.” If you didn’t listen to his words, Merlin’s tone sounded like he was starting any ordinary staff meeting. He even looked perfectly calm and neutral.

  But as Grace heard his words, her face went as white as her blouse. She jerked back in her chair, like she was trying to shove away from the table so she could flee, but Minerva reached over and pushed her chair back up to the table. “Now, Grace, the meeting’s just getting started,” she said.

  Merlin continued as though there had been no interruption. “Do you have any input on this matter, Miss Spencer?”

  Grace stammered, then blurted, “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “You brought me some reports not too long ago,”
Merlin said.

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “While you were here, I took a phone call and discussed where our people would go next. Our enemies happened to converge on the spot I mentioned, very soon after you left my office. I find that interesting, don’t you?”

  Grace glanced from side to side, as though trying to decide whether she was more afraid of Merlin or Minerva, but she kept her mouth shut.

  “And here’s the interesting part,” Merlin said. “They weren’t really there. It wasn’t a real phone call. What you overheard was bait.”

  “And you took it, honey,” Minerva concluded, sounding more disappointed than angry. I recognized the tactic from the way my dad dealt with my brothers. The tone of disappointment was far more painful than anger. “Now, why would you go and do something so silly? I’m dying to hear who you’re really working for. I’ve been under the mistaken impression that it was me.”

  A battle seemed to rage within Grace, as she wavered between continuing to play innocent and throwing herself on her boss’s mercy. She went with an entirely different approach that I didn’t think any of us saw coming. She straightened her spine and looked down her nose at Minerva as she said with a sneer, “Because I believe in true magic, not in power that is so bastardized by the modern age.”

  Owen reached for his pages of spell notes, a light dawning in his eyes. “You mean, the only good magic is the pure magic from the old grimoires,” he said softly.

  Her face lit up, losing the anger and wariness that had been there a moment before. “Yes! We are wizards. We have no need for technology. Long before anyone invented the engine or ways to generate and use electricity, we had power—true power. And we have weakened ourselves by not using it that way.” Her eyes glittered with the depth of her passion, but then they turned hard and cold as she glared at Owen. “You’re one of the worst—you, who took old spells and created new things out of them, taking away their purity.”

  “So, you’re like magical Amish?” I asked. “Anything modern is wicked?” Now I saw her conservative business attire in a new light—and I came to the uncomfortable realization that I’d liked her outfit because it was almost identical to mine. Her hairstyle was more severe, and her blouse was buttoned up all the way, but everything she had on could have come from my closet. I’m making Gemma take me shopping this weekend, I thought as I surreptitiously unbuttoned another button on my blouse.