Play with Fire

chapter Twenty-Seven

IT TAKES A long time, even for a skilled practitioner, to conjure lightning. It was especially onerous for a wizard to arrange for lightning to strike somewhere far away, a destination visible only through a scrying spell. But it can be done, and Ware knew how to do it.

It was good – for their sakes, as well as his – that Ware’s young associates were gone for the evening. If one of them had interrupted him once he was deep in the spell to cast lightning on the interfering Morris and Chastain, Ware would probably have killed him – or her.

Actually, Morris and Chastain hadn’t interfered with any of his plans – yet. But if they’d been set on his trail by the FBI, it was only a matter of time before they became a nuisance. After all, he knew their reputation. One black magic practitioner whom he’d recently asked about the pair had said that together they seemed to constitute a “magical monkey wrench.” They seemed to have a knack for getting in the middle of one’s painstaking plans and somehow disrupting them. Well, they weren’t going to interfere with Ware’s plan – the stakes were too high, and he had already sacrificed too much.

He kept track of his targets this evening as they traveled by taxi from Chastain’s condo in Manhattan to a large, square house in Brooklyn, a place whose exterior and surroundings were well lit by the nearby streetlights. Ware could see everything clearly.

A third person had joined Morris and Chastain on the sidewalk in front of the house – a rather striking blonde woman. She had accompanied the meddlers inside the house, which meant she was about to become what the military likes to call “collateral damage.” The armed forces of several nations used that term, or one like it, because phrases like “a bunch of women and children blown to pieces by a bomb that missed its target” tended to upset the civilians back home.

The trio was still inside the house when Ware finally had his lightning prepared. All well and good – he would strike the roof with a bolt, almost certainly setting the whole place on fire. If Morris and Chastain tried to escape the blazing building, he had ready a second blast of lightning. He would burn them to cinders once they were outside.

Meteorologists throughout the New York City metro area were amazed to see a single storm cloud appear from nowhere to show up on their weather radar screens in the middle of a cold, clear night. Not only did such clouds rarely appear in winter, but they were almost always seen as part of a larger system, not a solitary soldier like the one hovering over the city. And such storm systems usually came together over bodies of water and worked their way inland, which meant their progress could be tracked via radar. An intense bundle of moisture didn’t just form spontaneously. Except, like magic, one had just done exactly that.

The weather watchers were further amazed when the renegade storm cloud let loose two bolts of lightning right into the middle of Brooklyn.

In his basement workroom far away, Ware took a deep breath, pointed at the scrying pool where the image of the house could be clearly seen, and screamed out a word of power. His efforts were immediately rewarded, as a bolt of lightning struck the Brooklyn house containing his enemies and did – nothing.

Ware stared at the scrying pool. He had seen the bolt of electricity, probably containing a billion or more volts of energy, hit the roof of the house – with no result whatsoever. By all rights, the place should be ablaze by now.

Well, whatever anomaly had caused the lightning to misfire, it could not possibly happen twice. Ware focused his concentration like an argon laser. Pointing again at the house’s image, he repeated the word of power, screeching it even louder this time.

Once again, his magic was successful. He saw the long, crackling to volt hit the house squarely. And nothing happened. It was as if the place was somehow immune to magic – and Ware knew that was impossible. He stared at the image of the undamaged dwelling for a few more seconds. Then, with a scream very different from the one he’d used to activate the lightning, he swept his arm across the table, sending the bowl crashing to the basement floor, where it smashed into a zillion little pieces, splashing water everywhere. What had just happened violated everything Ware knew about magic – and yet it had happened.

He stood there for ten minutes, spewing foul obscenities without once repeating himself. Then he stopped, went to the nearby sink, and splashed cold water on his face. He grabbed a towel, dried off, and went upstairs. He needed a drink, probably several. And he also needed to decide how best to deal with the extremely lucky Quincey Morris and Libby Chastain.

Nobody’s luck lasts forever, he thought, and theirs is about to run out.

Jeremy Bliss was up relatively early the next morning, since he hadn’t had a hangover to sleep off. He came into the living room to find Ware staring into the fire he had built in the small fireplace. Jeremy came in quietly, wanting to gauge Ware’s mood before saying anything – the black magician, to whom he’d given his allegiance, was sometimes grouchy first thing.

But this was apparently not such a morning. Catching movement from the corner of his eye, Ware looked up, saw who it was, and went back to staring into the fire.

“Good Morning, Jeremy,” he said absently. “Did you all have a nice debauch last night?”

“Yeah, I guess.” True to her word, Elektra had bought him a lap dance at one of the strip bars they’d cruised last night. But the bleach blonde with sagging fake tits, who called herself Destiny, apparently was not in the habit of showering between shows. Her body odor had squashed Jeremy’s libido like a bug. Instead of hoping to get off from the way she was rubbing her ample ass against his crotch, he had been relieved when the two-song set was finished. The tip Jeremy had given the dancer had reflected the amount of fun he’d had – in other words, not much.

“What’d you do last night?” Jeremy asked. “Anything interesting?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I tried to solve a problem that’s been bothering me, but I couldn’t get my solution to work satisfactorily.”

Jeremy didn’t know what to say to that, so he settled for “Oh. Sorry.”

“It was quite an educational experience, actually,” Ware said. “And one of the things I learned was that this problem may not be solvable at a distance.” He rubbed his chin, still watching the fire. “I think my best course may be to hire a subcontractor.”

“Yeah, that might be best.” Jeremy had no idea what his master was talking about, and Ware knew it. “Go get some breakfast,” he said to Jeremy.

Over the next twenty minutes, Ware’s gaze remained on the fire, but his mind was elsewhere. Finally he nodded to himself, stood up, and went off to make some phone calls.