First Sight: The Rune Sight Chronicles Read online

  She stared into my eyes far longer than I did hers, and I saw a tear fall down one cheek.

  “I’m sorry, we’ve failed you. Mages like us should have and would have protected you and your mother,” she said.

  I closed my eyes and shook my head, knowing a gaze like that showed the true self, but not every aspect. Still, the images and memories stay with you. Quite often you got a feeling of what they normally felt. I reached out and took her hands, and she trembled, but let me. Her hands were soft.

  “I don’t know how much you saw, but I don’t think you or the bureau could have stopped what was happening. Your agency and the council tried their best.”

  “Oh crap, Cindy is going to be pissed,” Rose said as the fruit cup was emptied.

  “Naw,” I said, looking back into Vivian’s eyes, “She’s got the hots for JJ, and she is closer to his age.”

  Vivian jerked her hands back from me. I looked into the future to see if I was about to be attacked and instead saw a lot of sputtering. Rose laughed softly, so as not to call attention to herself.

  “Sorry, you tried to start a gaze, it’s not a one-way street,” I told her, trying and failing not to smirk at the situation.

  After a couple moments, Vivian quit looking so indignant. “If you were ever to allow yourself to fall in love, it’d be that cop. Why don’t you?”

  “The whole age thing,” I told her.

  “She looks older than you,” she told me, “or do you mean mental?”

  “No, more like, she’s going to grow old and die someday, long before me.”

  “So, you’re taking the Dresden excuse?”

  “Who’s Dresden?” Rose asked from my shoulder.

  I saw she’d finished off her food and I put the last of the sandwich in my mouth while I considered how to answer. Vivian beat me to it.

  “Fictional Wizard who falls in love with a cop. Now that I think about it, it’s a rather strange coincidence.”

  “She’s a sheriff,” I told them, “and it’s a valid argument. Besides, me and true love will not be a thing.”

  “Why’s that?” Rose asked.

  “Because I’m never going to have a life safe enough to settle down. It would be horribly unfair of me to get involved with somebody when I have the world’s foremost assassin after me, who has been chasing me since I was a baby.”

  Vivian made a swallowing motion in her throat and looked away. I felt Rose wrap her arms around the side of my neck.

  “I’m sorry boss, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s just a thing. Now, you want to see if we can save JJ before those girls start ripping their clothes off here and cause a bigger scene?”

  “What is it with him and nudity and… holy mother of—”

  “JJ,” I said, my voice commanding, as what I’d just joked about was about to happen.

  He bolted up out of his chair and stood stock still, almost at attention, which startled the crap out of the other two agents.

  “Yo boss!” he said, dusting crumbs off his shirt.

  “We gotta go to the next stop. Viv here is gonna go with us. You ready to roll?”

  “Yeah boss,” he told me then turned and whispered to the two women.

  One of them didn’t see it, but her friend slipped something into JJ’s pocket as he kissed each of them on the cheek and headed my way. I stood up and got my bag. “Thanks for dinner,” I told Viv.

  “Boss, where we headed?” Rose said as the ladies waved.

  “My apartment. Want to catch a cab?” I asked Vivian.

  “Wait… you have an apartment here in New York City?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The cab might not last,” Agent Samson said, walking up.

  “You two aren’t coming,” I told them.

  “But…” Agent Black sputtered.

  “It’s ok,” Vivian said, “you going to finish that?” She asked JJ and looked at the table he’d just vacated.

  A lonely sandwich, still wrapped, sat there.

  “I uh… you want it?” he asked.

  Vivian smiled and retrieved it, making sure to lean over, just so. The agents looked, JJ looked, hell I know this, because I looked. Apparently the two departing ladies who’d been whispering sweet nothings in JJ’s ears also looked, and their expressions were stormy. I almost laughed out loud. Now that I knew that she was mildly attracted to him, I was trying to figure out if her show was for his benefit, or for the hanger-onners who had watched him put down five or six sandwiches.

  “Now I know why you think chicks be cray, cray,” Rose whispered and I tried not to laugh.

  “Tell me,” Vivian said, red in the face at my refusal to talk about what Mage Rasmussen had told me.

  “When we get to my apartment,” I said, mentally double checking streets, “it’s only two more blocks.”

  Rose’s voice came out of thin air between us as she flew, “What’s the address boss?”

  I told her and, even though she was invisible, we still heard the popping sound as she poofed somewhere else.

  “I’m never going to get used to that,” JJ said.

  “How is it you were hunting fairies?” Vivian asked.

  “I was on the run and desperate for money. A guy I know in California said if I could get him a fairy, he’d get me papers and put me on a ship someplace new.”

  “Why were you on the run?” she asked and I zoned out as he told the story.

  I walked, observant, but not really paying attention. I was scanning the futures for danger, and I switched the duffel to my left shoulder so my right hand was available. JJ was retelling the fight scene between me and him when something in a future timeline warned me.

  “JJ duck now!” I yelled, just as a man swung a crowbar from a darkened doorway.

  Inhumanly fast, JJ ducked as I shouted and spun in the direction of the man whose baseball bat miss had left him off balance and his midsection open. JJ started throwing body blows before the man could recover and he slumped to the ground after the third fist to the ribs. I scanned ahead more, but didn’t see any more danger, as far as I could see.

  “So, then he whacks me a good one,” JJ went back to his story like this was an everyday occurrence.

  I walked over to the groaning man. “You should find a new job,” I told him softly.

  “Busted me up,” he said, and I realized the kid was wearing gang colors.

  I left before he got a good look at me and hurried up in the direction we were all going. Vivian and JJ heard me say the address, but I was supposed to be leading this merry band of—

  “Hey boss,” Rose said after a popping sound, “You know we’re going to a brothel, right?”

  That stopped Vivian cold, and she spun. “Excuse me?”

  “Well, I’m sure some of that goes on there, but I have an honest to God apartment, paid for, on the sub level.”

  “Figures,” Rose said.

  “I thought you were going to tell me you owned the building,” Vivian told me and I bit the inside of my cheek.

  Not everything I’d done my whole life had been exactly legit, but when you’re on the run from the law, you tend to live your life as good as you can, because at the end of the day it’s your own conscience you have to answer to while being free. I slept very good, but I did own the building. It had been one of many investments I’d made a long time ago.

  “This place is a pit,” JJ said as he stopped in front of it.

  “Yup, sixteen units, three floors,” I told them and then held the door open, “Well? Come on in,” I pulled a set of keys out.

  “There’s like six girls doing the mambo jambo,” Rose informed us.

  “The what?” Vivian asked.

  “The horizontal bop? The vertical wiggle? No? How about hide the salami, or… procuring the pickle—”

  “Stop,” JJ said, holding his sides, trying not to laugh.

  Vivian was grinning broadly, “Tom, she’s all right.”

 
“Thank you,” Rose said softly.

  The door opened up to a desk, with heavy plexiglass.

  “Can I help you… oh, it’s you.”

  “Yup, here for a day or two Curtis,” I told him.

  The old man behind the counter was in his seventies with an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. He reached under the desk and pulled out a key ring and tossed it through the opening. I caught it and winked at him and turned to leave.

  “You check in and out of your own apartment? How do you know he doesn’t go in there?” JJ asked me.

  “Come on, I’ll show you,” I told them, “and it has more to do with me always forgetting to bring the right set of keys, like I did this time,” I said, holding up the set of keys I had been playing with as we’d walked, “so he keeps spares for me.”

  We walked to a door at the end of the hallway marked ‘employees only’, and I used one of the two keys on the ring to unlock the door. We walked past a mop bucket station and cleaning supplies, then the racks of linens waiting for when the hotel rooms were cleaned out, and then to a narrow stairwell in the back.

  “This place is creeping me out,” Vivian said, dodging a spider web.

  “It’s one of my hidey holes,” I told them and flipped on a switch and went down stairs that were new during the turn of the century.

  “I can smell the asbestos in this place,” JJ said.

  Interesting, I hadn’t thought about his senses, but if he could pick out a particular smell like that, how much better were his other senses than mine? Was that the canine portion of his being a Were that did that, or did he have a naturally good sniffer?

  “Yeah, lots of old buildings have it. Here we are,” I said stopping at the end of the stairs.

  An old steel door, red and rust pitting its surface, awaited us. I put the last key on the chain into the lock and worked it a couple of times until it clicked, then put my shoulder into the door and pushed. Steel screeched against the metal jam and I got the door open three quarters of the way and stepped in, hitting the light switch. They came on immediately and I got out of the way as the others piled in. JJ had to come into the doorway sideways and was surprised at how stuck the door was. He pushed it back and forth until it swung a little more freely, making an ungodly sound, before closing it and turning the deadbolt, locking it up.

  “How… very… you,” Vivian said, tight lipped, and walked over to an old threadbare couch and sat down.

  A plume of dust shot up, and she looked at me with stink eye. Rose flew into the middle of the room, visible, and spun in a circle looking around. “This place looks like the cat’s ass, minus the cat.”

  I walked over to the fridge, an old single door unit, and opened it and got out a six pack of Budweiser and then walked over to a small table and put it down. I put down the duffel on the floor.

  “Anybody want a beer?” I asked.

  “I’ll take one,” JJ said immediately.

  “I want you to quit holding out on me,” Vivian said in an angry voice. “They don’t just hand out those pendants.”

  JJ looked over at her, mildly alarmed at her tone, and then shrugged and took an offered beer.

  “Come crack some suds and we’ll talk,” I told her and snaked one out and held it in her direction.

  She got up and brushed her backside off as she walked, glaring at me. She took the beer, opened and downed half of it in one gulp before yanking a chair out and flopping in it, glaring at me.

  “Talk,” she said.

  I knew why she was upset. She’d worked so hard to be where she was now that she’d been shocked by me having a pendant that gave me an equivalent rank to her. She probably saw it differently than me having council sanction for this case, and more as a usurpation of the chain of command, training and everything she’d had to do to get the position of lead investigator and her own strike team to command. She wasn’t the combat mage, but she was definitely the brains behind the scenes.

  “So about eighty eight years ago roughly, Vassago murdered the Merlin and sent his wife and baby son fleeing.”

  “Holy purple turd balls, Batman,” Rose shrieked.

  “What’s gotten into you?” JJ asked, “He’s telling us the story.”

  “How old is he?” Rose asked.

  “88?” JJ answered.

  “Whose mother was fleeing from who Tom thought was the council?”

  “Is this a trick question?” JJ asked, his huge grin from earlier fading as he pondered her questions.

  “No dummy, Tom and his mother were on the run from the Council of Mages, to later find out that an assassin named—”

  “Vassago,” Vivian said and dropped her beer bottle.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I woke up to the unfamiliar sounds of snoring. JJ was sprawled out on the small couch, a new sheet from upstairs draped over it first. Rose was curled up on a folded blanket on a small bedside table in the far end of the apartment. I had slept on the Army cot I kept for the infrequent times I stayed in the small efficiency apartment I’d made for myself. This used to be the equipment room, and when I’d found out it connected to an old abandoned mail tunnel, I’d paid, back then, what was big bucks to move everything out so I could have this space of my own. I had been feeling especially paranoid after coming back from Korea, and had wanted my supposed death to not be looked at too closely.

  JJ was sawing logs, and when I sat up, Rose did as well, at nearly eye level to me, and yawned and stretched her arms and wings.

  “Danger?” she asked.

  “Can’t sleep,” I admitted.

  “How do you know this place was safe to talk to her in?” Rose asked me suddenly.

  “Because of the way it’s shielded,” I told her, “Plus, I wanted to be somewhere safe if ninjas attacked us.”

  “Ninja’s aren’t real,” Rose said.

  “Well, if Ninja’s were real, we could come here and flee, in case we couldn’t gate.”

  “Boss, this is a hole in the ground, with one way in, and one way out. That rusty old door. Unless you did something sneaky and… wait, you did?”

  “Behind the fridge is an old air intake from when this was the mechanical room. It’s about four feet by four feet and opens up into an old unused elevator shaft, back when I could afford to keep it maintained.”

  “You do own this joint! You didn’t… I mean… Vivian would have kicked your ass!”

  “The business that goes on in the rooms I have nothing to do with, I just own the property and Curtis thinks I am the owner’s funny cousin. It works out that way, besides, this place barely makes enough to keep the taxes paid.”

  “So, then you should be running the brothel!” She said, “No, that’s another kind of forced slavery, in a way. You wouldn’t do that.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I told her, “but listen, if you and JJ should ever need to get out of here fast, go back to the old elevator shaft. I broke through the concrete to an old mail tunnel. You can take that for close to six miles, but there’s lots of entrances and exits to old abandoned sub basements and a stocked bomb shelter. You have a hatch on this side that can close off our section of the tunnels. Not that I think anybody but me has been down here in a decade or more.”

  “Holy hell, you really went all Batman after all? Subterranean lairs, secret bunkers… practically a weapons factory in the retirement hideout.”

  “The weapons factory is in Burma,” I told her, deadpan.

  “Excuse me?” Rose asked.

  “Kidding, you were talking… Dark Knight… Alfred… never mind. So, what do you think of being tasked as a card-carrying member of the Enforcers? You know, now that we’re part of the entire magical enforcement biz.”

  “You might be, but I’m not,” she said. “We just go where you go. You’re running this crazy ship.”

  “And I still have no idea why you’re along for the ride, I mean, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate all your help.”

  “Someday, maybe I’ll tell you, bu
t I’m more interested in your plan. To draw out the world’s foremost assassin, trap him and win the girl, save the day for Mister Crabs…” her words turned to a singsong voice at the end and I had to grin at the reference.

  For one of the little folk, she knew a lot of human references. I mean, it isn’t your average fairy that has watched the first Spongebob movie. Then Rasmussen’s words came back to me.

  “How do you know Sigmund Rasmussen?”

  “Well, that’s out of left field,” she said, “Can a girl get a couple grapes or something before we play twenty questions?

  “Sure, if I have any,” I said and got up. She followed behind me, her entire body lit up from her magic.

  I was pretty sure if I did, they wouldn’t be any good, but I might luck out and find a can of fruit cocktail. That wouldn’t be superior to the fruit cups she’d had earlier, but I had to wonder…

  “So, since it’s just you and me and nobody is gonna blow me up, shoot me up or stab me and steal my powers… what kind of magic can you do? I know the invisibility, and that poofing thing you do like gating…?”

  “Yeah, um… I am a little bit limited, not like some of the mages I’ve worked with over the years.”

  “Like Rasmussen?” I asked, bringing her back to the original conversation.

  As I’d suspected, nothing in the fridge was good, but I did find the fruit cocktail. I grabbed a can opener and started working it.

  “Spill your guts, short stuff,” I told her, my voice rougher than I had intended.

  She looked at me and then walked slowly to the can. I pulled a bowl down and dumped the can in and grabbed her a couple of toothpicks.

  “I know Sigmund, because… Gods, this is embarrassing… once he questioned one of my former masters. Serek. I was there and, even though I was invisible, he knew I was there. I didn’t screw up. Instead of relying on Serek’s answers, he could look right into my mind and see everything I already knew. He was interviewing the both of us at the same time.”