“What a mess,” I breathed as I took in the sight of the damaged mansion. Once again, I didn’t have to pretend to be seeing it for the first time. The mansion had been ablaze last time I was here, courtesy of Mzatal and lightning, and before that I’d only seen the side that faced the lawn and the pond. Was it even a pond anymore? Most of the water had boiled away when Mzatal grounded his power. It would probably take several months of Louisiana rainstorms to fully restore it.
Pellini parked in the visitors lot and killed the engine. A weird quiet enveloped us as we exited the car, and the closing of the doors echoed like gunshots. The valve thrummed in my arcane senses, low and insistent, like music with a heavy bass playing several blocks away.
I meandered in the vague direction of the back of the mansion, and Pellini followed a few seconds later. The once luscious lawn with its copious flowers and ornamental trees lay in ruin—plants trampled, crushed, and strewn with rubble. Yellow crime scene tape bounded large swaths, and an odd, fresh ozone scent lingered over a more earthy foundation of mud and charred wood. Potency arced like violet lightning between chunks of debris. Steam rose from the pond basin, and the mud boiled in slow bubbles near the center. Several agents moved among the outbuildings but none gave us more than a passing glance.
“Anything jumping out?” Pellini asked, cutting into my musings. I glanced his way to see him watching me. Oh, right, I’m supposed to be helping him find a link between what happened here and his murder victim. In fact, there were plenty of links, but none I’d be stumbling over on the lawn, nor any I chose to share with him.
“It’s not like I get weird vibrations or anything, y’know,” I lied with what I hoped was the right combination of sincerity and tartness. Pellini didn’t need to know about my arcane skills. I started to add that I wasn’t a clairvoyant like Marco Knight but clamped down on it. I had no idea whether Marco’s talent was simple clairvoyance or an ability far more complex.
I continued to wander in aimless fashion while Pellini dogged me several steps behind. Ahead of us lay the shattered remains of the gazebo—with the valve node at its center. Broken columns rose from the edge of the raised stone platform. A pillar of potency flashed in the center, oscillating from brilliant peacock to deepest midnight blue.
“Looks like a bomb went off there,” I remarked as I headed toward it. In othersight, residual potency drifted like fragile luminescent tumbleweeds.
“The reports agree that there was an explosion centered at the gazebo,” Pellini said.
His eyes remained on me as I cautiously stepped through the residue and to the center. He won’t have any idea what I’m doing. To anyone without the ability to see the arcane it would appear as if I was idly flexing my hands. Keeping my back to him, I went to one knee and pretended to peer at the cracked and crazed marble at the center of the gazebo floor. To my immense relief there was no sign of instability or fraying within the node. Damn good thing since it would be nightmarishly difficult to get Idris out here to fix it. For security, I retraced the barricade seal, and Kadir’s implanted training rose to guide my movements. The intricate barricade comprised of Kadir-style sigils prevented the node from being used by the demonic lords as a passageway to Earth.
Energy flared as I completed the final sigil, and I jerked aside to avoid the burst. I shot a look behind me only to see it head straight toward Pellini like a flickering golden basketball. A warning shout rose in my throat, but I swallowed it back. The arcane burst wouldn’t hurt him. At most he might experience a few seconds of discomfort, like a stabbing headache or a sudden deep chill.
Yet, as the flare reached him, Pellini casually brushed it aside with one hand as if waving away a fly.
He just moved that potency! I mentally screeched. No, surely I’d misinterpreted a coincidental movement, or my eyes were playing tricks on me. No way had Pellini—Pellini of all people—swished arcane power aside. Physically manipulate errant potency? I sure couldn’t do that. I had to rely on tracings and sigils to guide and shape power into the needed form.
What the hell was I supposed to do with Pellini now? Confront him? Yo, dude, I happened to notice you got you some arcane skillz there. Wassup wit dat? I’d worked with the guy for years and never seen any hint that he was anything but mundane. Then again, I’d managed to hide my own weirdness for a long time.
No, confronting him wasn’t the right move. Not yet at least. Pellini didn’t know I’d seen him flick the potency away, which meant I had time to come up with a brilliant idea for how to handle the situation. It seemed outrageous, but I had to consider the possibility that Pellini was working for Katashi and his crew. Had he seen me reinforcing the node barricade? I’d blocked his view as much as possible, but he still might have seen me tracing sigils.
Maybe Pellini wasn’t aware of what he’d done? But how was he able to do it at all? Most people with any sort of arcane talent developed it during or immediately after puberty. How could a guy in his mid-forties suddenly come up with those kind of skills? Then again, maybe the not-long-after-puberty rule was yet another of my many erroneous beliefs.