Our reasons for doing it were different, of course.
Before I’d even opened my mouth, Alaric held up a square, greenish-silver device in his left hand. It hung from a hook-like handle, looking a fair bit like a very dated, human, analog radio, only the yellow-green face glowed eerily and let off faint puffs of black and gold magical smoke. The round glass part, whichlikely would’ve been a clock-face with hands in Overworld, had a pulsing light at its center. A spiral coil moved counter-clockwise around the edges of that light, and as it moved, glowing, rune-like symbols appeared and vanished.
“It’s only just started!” he burst out, his voice matching the mania in his eyes. “I got the tip-off from Blompkoff and ran straight up here!”
“Which one was he following?” I asked, stepping out of the doorway.
“Pants… I think?” Alaric grew flustered. “Maybe Scar? I don’t know. I’d have to look at the schedule sheet––”
I was already waving him inside with the hand not holding the door.
Nicolai “Pants” Panzen, and Scarpen “Scar” Maskey were both exceedingly unlikable and physically intimidating mages with whom Alaric and I attended university. Pants, I was pretty sure, had the rough I.Q. of a toad––a gerbil, if I was being generous. They were two of the twelve or so mages and witches we’d been surveilling since I’d returned from France.
Blompkoff, our spy, was a creature called adrakai.
Drakai, I found out, was the name for those fist-sized, fiery, person-faced creatures with bat-like wings, the same ones I’d seen all over the Parliamentary buildings when I first arrived in Magique. I’d seen them all around London in the time since: on the streets, in the windows of coffee shops, perched on Magical shoulders and on Magical fingers and arms, in office buildings and even flapping their tiny, bat wings around the inside of night clubs.
They got used for all sorts of jobs in Magical London, including as messengers.
And, well, spies.
Alaric paid twelve drakai to surveil the Magicals on our carefully-compiled list of possible members of Dark Cathedral.Because members of Magical political organizations bent on overthrowing the current social and political order, and, incidentally, exterminating over half the human race, didn’t tend to advertise their involvement, the list was really just our best guess. We didn’t believe any of them were significant players in the movement. These were the younger acolytes, the mages and witches whomightbe involved, at least peripherally.
Alaric jokingly called them the “genocidally-curious.”
Even so, we’d gone back and forth for weeks about which of those names we should be surveilling. Alaric suggested, and I agreed, that we should keep our sights low, at least until we knew more. Dark Cathedral’s security was likely better than that of the Magus Imperius, and we risked death if we got caught, probably unspeakablyhorribledeath. So yes, it made sense to remain cautious, and keep our eyes on the adult children of royals, not the heads of prestigious families themselves.
That said, I struggled with that caution.
I knew it was fucked up, and probably a form of stalking. I also knew the stalking part came mostly from my obsession with one adult child of the royals, in particular.
Given that same child of the royals wanted absolutely nothing to do with me, and had made thatveryclear, it was definitely a sign of mental instability, or an unhealthy fixation, at best. I couldn’t even confide in Alaric about the source of my obsession, given he was one of Alaric’s best friends. I definitely couldn’t justify it to myself, given the fact that Caelum Bones hadn’t so much aslookedat me in over eight months.
Alaric, for all his own obsessiveness, and tendency to act before thinking, had at least more practical reasons to be manic about what we were doing.
His own father wanted torecruitAlaric into Dark Cathedral.
Alaric wanted to know what they were doing so he would know when to run.
I had no such excuse.
I told myself I wanted to know what Dark Cathedral was up to because Dark Cathedral was a cult of human-hating, sadistic, violent, dangerous fanatics who wanted to burn down the current government of Magique, kill me and my brother, and kill half the people in Overworld. That happened to also be true, so it wasn’t a difficult half-truth to sell, even to myself. But I knew that wasn’t all of it. When I was drunk, or being honest with myself for some other reason, I knew that wasn’t even most of it.
I wanted to know if Caelum Bones was one of them.
Honestly, it felt like Ineededto know if he was.
More than that, if hewasone of them, I wanted to know if he was a true believer, or if he was only playing a part to placate his father. After all, Alaric feared he’d be forced to do the same, just to stay alive, and he’d often compared Bones’s father to his.
The last thing I wanted was to get Alaric, or myself, hurt in the process of finding out those things, but my obsession only worsened as the summer wore on. I knew Alaric’s goals were more urgent than mine, so I tried to focus on those, and let the quieter voices of my own fixation live somewhere out of sight, where I wouldn’t have to defend them.
Alaric walked past me and quickly over to the blue couch by the fire.
By now, he knew my suite as well as I did.
Before I’d even reached him, he’d already placed the silvery-green machine down on a hand-painted, lacquer tray I’d bought from a kiosk along the Thames a few days earlier. Without waiting, he cranked a small knob on the front of the receiver.
“Do you have your mother’s crystal?” he asked, voice tense.
