“Take them, and when Mattis comes back, he’ll know we were here.”
“All his fucked-up spells will tell him that.”
“Andwhat we came for,” Cas continued. “That’s not even a tenth of what we’re looking for. He’ll know to warn whoever he got them from.”
Damn him for being right. Again. “You’re so good at thinking like a criminal, I have to wonder if you were one.”
His booming laugh took me by surprise. “That’s me. A criminal.” He could see the wheels turning through my squinted eyes, because he told me, “I’m not Hermes, doll.”
I crossed my arms, annoyed my thoughts had been so obvious. “Then who the fuck are you?”
He winked. “Cas.”
I couldn’t remember anyone annoying me nearly as much as him. “I really am going to kill you one day, if you keep trying to get under my skin.”
“Feel free to try, doll. That ought to be entertaining.”
“I’d like to request to have Mattis followed,” I conclude after summing up our findings. “He doesn’t have a huge reserve—on hand, in any case—and we might learn more from observing him than from an interrogation that could clue in any partners that we’re on to them.”
Gideon nodded. “We’ll get runners on it. Isla and I had a little chat with Baron Snaith. He was high as a kite so I’m not sure he would have remembered it in, but Isla wiped it out of his head to be safe.”
Cas lifted an eyebrow, impressed. “You can enter minds? A rare skill.”
“Only on weak-ass people with shit shields,” Isla replied modestly, blushing at being addressed directly by the shirtless Adonis. “Thankfully, he was one of those.”
I knew that even doing it to completely magicless regulars was beyond the abilities of most mages. Even Kleos and Lucian were unable to actually read people’s minds, let alone modify existing memories. It was a skill people were either born with or not.
“Useful all the same. So, what did Snaith reveal?”
“He was partying—selling lunar essence to kids, by the sound of it—when a rival he knew offered him some magic reserve, free of charge.Between friends.He didn’t question it.”
“That’s not good,” Isla said.
I nodded. If they were being given away for free in small quantities, there was almost no way to actually trace the source.
“Well,” I stated, “it could be one of two things: a small-minded crook who assumed people would get addicted to using such a high level of magic and be willing to pay him a fortune for a refill. Or a wider plot.”
After recent events, we were all leaning towards the second option.
“I say better safe than sorry. We’ll keep treating this as a bigger issue until we’ve recovered the majority of the stones. I’ll ask Kleos, try to figure out how many crystals we’re looking at. She said hundreds. We have to know if that means something closer to two or seven hundred.”
I winced. “Knowing her, I’d say if she admitted to hundreds, it means she had thousands. She’s sort of trained herself to always downplay just how much she needs to drain her magic—even to us. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did it once per day, for decades. More so in recent years.”
A heavy silence followed as we took in the scale of the problem we were handling.
“All right, I’ll pop by Valesco House tomorrow—see if there’s anything left, and try to check if I can spot any clue. I think my uncle had a security system, and the maid could have heard something. Continue with your list and we’ll meet again tomorrow, same time.” Gideon then turned to me. “Ready for your trip?”
I hadn’t even thought to start packing yet, so I nodded.
“By that I mean, are you ready to play nice with your partner?”
“You should askhim,” I grumbled belligerently. “He let me get hexed a bunch of times at Mattis’s.”
Cas snorted. “If you needed help with those hexes you might be in the wrong vocation.”
It would be a shame to break such a perfect nose, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to.
“All right, that’s it,” Gideon said. “You two, I want you down in the pit for the rest of the afternoon.”
