Or, you know, a bored NSA agent with an arrest quota.
Its reliance on anonymity made the users of the darknet feel safe in doing things they wouldn’t want to come to light (pun intended), but the rub was that as soon as what was discussed on the Net was put into action in the real world, that anonymity disappeared. When you actually started to do stuff physically, people got the chance to see you doing it and figure out who you really were.
Kylie was counting on that, and kept it as a mantra in her mind while she began to slowly and carefully follow the threads of the nocturnis’ plans for the April conference.
Knox and Wynn elected to return to Chicago for a couple of weeks. With the group fairly certain that whatever was going to happen wouldn’t happen until late in the month, hanging around twiddling their thumbs together seemed less than productive. Wynn could work more and better magic in her ritual room at home, and Knox could train and prepare from anywhere. They would return once they had all agreed on their plan to foil the Order, and in plenty of time to set themselves up.
Before leaving, Wynn had dragged Kylie away from the computer long enough to give her a few short lessons in what it meant to be a woman of power. Apparently, no one intended Kylie to get away with being a supernaturally gifted hacker and nothing else. Since she knew she had magic inside her now, Wynn fully intended to show her how to use it.
She had to learn to feel it first. Wynn showed her how to turn her attention inward and look for the spark of the power inside her, the little buzz that always lived in the corner of her mind. And here for all these years, Kylie had thought of it as the mark of undiagnosed ADHD. No, Wynn laughingly contradicted her; that was magic.
Once she found the spark, she got a lesson in how to nurture it. How to blow on the tiny flicker and bring it to a small, steady flame, then how to pull on it and let the power in it seep through her until it waited, tingling, in the tips of her fingers, ready to do her bidding.
Wynn, though, wouldn’t let her bid it for bupkes. No, teacher witch told her that for now, she needed to concentrate on just learning to recognize the magic and calling it to her command. Anything more advanced would have to wait until they had some real time to concentrate and work together.
Just the idea made Kylie grimace. It was like those three horrible months when her mother had forced her to take piano lessons all over again. Kylie had wanted to rock a little ragtime and the stern, humorless teacher just had her practicing scales over and over and over until the very sound of them made her teeth ache.
At the time, giving up had felt like being released from prison, but to this day, she couldn’t play more than “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano. Wynn assured her that taking the same path with magic practice would undoubtedly lead her at some point to singeing off her own eyebrows. At the very least. So Kylie promised to practice.
Wynn and Knox’s departure left Kylie and Dag alone in the house, which worked out better than she had expected. Her new live-in-the-now philosophy kept her from getting too worked up by analyzing everything that happened between them, and she had to admit the sex continued to rock her world.
That pun she had not intended, but she couldn’t deny its applicability.
Trying to discern the details of the Order’s plans proved to be slow going, but if nothing else, her crawl through the deep Web was turning up some really interesting reading material. She’d known about the deep forever, and used it herself for her more … well, actually, her less officially sanctioned projects, but she had never thought of what a perfect place it was for magic users.
Part of that probably stemmed from the fact that, like most people, she had never believed magic existed. Now that her eyes had opened to that particular world, she found that the anonymity and discretion offered by the deep allowed people all over the world to discuss something that users of the surface Web would have either mocked or tried to copy, with potentially disastrous results.
Kylie got to listen in on a group of ceremonial magicians in Europe discuss the effects of days of the week on the quality of raised energy. She watched a Yoruba priest from Benin counsel a young practitioner in South America on the basis of Oshun’s passion for honey. She even saw a witch in Ireland sending out an enquiry on the sudden uptick in seismographic activity in her area and what magical causes might be underlying.
She freely admitted that she understood almost none of it, but just seeing it all fascinated her and opened her eyes to how much she needed to learn. Especially if she had any intention of sticking with this Warden gig for the long term.
Right. Still not thinking long term. Move it along, Kylie. Nothing to see here.