Spell Caster Read online

  Spell Caster

  A City of Crows Novel

  Clara Coulson

  Spell Caster

  Copyright © 2018 by Clara Coulson

  Cover Design by Rebecca Frank at http://bookcovers.rebeccafrank.design/

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  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

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  For more information:

  http://www.claracoulson.com/

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  To contact the author, email [email protected]

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  To Be Continued

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  Books by Clara Coulson

  About Clara Coulson

  To Louise Penny, whose Armand Gamache books kept me sane after Hurricane Michael knocked out the power for half a week.

  Chapter One

  The magic circle ignites with a violet flare that casts a harsh glow across the bare concrete walls. The intricate webbing of symbols around the circle’s perimeter begins to pulsate, bright to dim, dim to bright, as the activation words flow off my tongue, pinging each of the symbols one at a time as if I’m striking keys on a piano in a quick, precise cadence. Halfway through this process, known as sigil winding, the object in the middle of the circle is enveloped by a violet haze. As I’m closing in on the last few strings of tongue-twisting words, the object begins to noticeably change form, growing denser, juicier, more delicious looking.

  Finally, I reach the last sentence, a long, complex closing sequence that bridges the gap between the starting and ending symbols. I raise the pitch of my voice to finish on a high note, urge the energy arcing from my outstretched hands to the grounding points of the circle to “close the circuit” of the spell. I speed through the last few syllables, mood lightening as I see victory on the horizon, and just as the final gasp of completion rolls off my tongue…

  The hamburger catches fire and burns to a crisp.

  Then the sprinkler in the ceiling comes on and drenches the room. Again.

  “Goddammit!”

  I stomp over to the pipe bolted to the wall and turn the lever that shuts off the sprinkler. Wiping water from my face and ignoring my heavy, damp clothes, I slink to the circle drawn on the floor in rapidly disintegrating chalk lines, searching for the place where I messed up. Because it wasn’t the words this time. After sixty-five repetitions of this spell over the last four days, even I can’t get the words wrong. No, I must’ve written one of the symbols incorrectly, or smudged something as I was drawing and damaged a vital piece of the temperature regulation element.

  The symbols unfortunately fade to white smears before I can find the problem though, so I’m left scowling and crossing my arms, like indignation will make anything better. Until I run out of steam and just stand there, gazing sadly at my poor burned burger, now a soggy, charred disk that can’t even be called meat.

  Oh man. I was planning to eat that for lunch.

  Sighing, I backtrack toward the front of the room, where the single sprinkler doesn’t quite reach, and retrieve the towel I keep on hand from my duffle bag. This is the eighteenth time in the last three weeks, since I started practicing magic, that I’ve set the sprinkler off. When Riker had the thing installed, I’d laughed at him and told him I wasn’t going to burn the building down, that an extinguisher would do instead. He’d slapped me with his trademark death glare and told me he wanted to make extra sure I couldn’t possibly in a thousand years burn up his shiny new DSI fortress. And I was going to accept the sprinkler like a good little minion.

  I’d accepted it with a pout.

  And now Riker is laughing at me from his fancy commissioner office.

  Because clearly, I am a walking fire hazard, and—

  The door to the storage room swings open, letting bright hallway light into the dimmer space. Desmond and Amy are in the hall, and they both grin when they see me scrubbing my wet hair with the towel. Amy steps into the room and gets a load of the puddle on the floor, along with the black hunk of cow meat that I really wanted to slather in hot cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, and ketchup. At the horrid smell of smoke mixed with dank water, she scrunches her nose and says, “What the hell were you trying to do? Make a stink bomb?”

  “I was trying to cook a hamburger. Medium,” I admit.

  Amy stares at the remains of the burger for a few seconds. “I think you missed medium by about three thousand degrees.”

  “I noticed.”

  “What happened this time, Calvin?” Desmond asks. “Another construction error?”

  I retrieve the spell book from my bag and open it to the bookmarked page to review the circle design. “Must’ve been. But I don’t exactly know what yet. I guess I’ll reset and try again.”

  “I don’t get it.” Amy rubs her boot across a lingering chalk line, wiping it out of existence. “You shot a lightning bolt at that vampire bitch and made it look easy. Why is this so much harder?”

  “Because indirect magic is a precise art.” I raise my right hand and flex the muscles a couple times—the scars have been gradually healing over the past few weeks, but there’s still a ways to go before the internal damage is well and truly fixed—and then snap my fingers. A small violet spark leaps from my fingertips, and a bright yellow flame grows from it like a flower from a bud. The flame is about the size of a baseball, rippling with the currents of air blowing from the vent in the ceiling. “This here is direct magic. Comes right from the source. Immediately makes things happen. But it’s pretty imprecise, and extremely limited in some ways. Indirect magic is where the real ‘science of magic’ comes into play.”

  “That means using circles and mediums, I suppose?” Desmond says.

  “Right. You use magic circles and physical objects to focus energy in more nuanced ways so you can perform complicated, multistep processes. Like cooking food to exact temperatures in a matter of seconds.” I let the flame dissipate by cutting off the flow of magic exiting through my fingers, and the hum of power that always wells up under my skin when I draw my energy from within my soul fades to a faint tingle. “As you have no doubt learned from my numerous failed experiments these past few weeks, indirect magic is, in fact, as complicated as rocket science.”

  “Not an excuse.” Amy returns to the door. “You got good grades in school. You even graduated from high school early. If you can get into Stanford, you can cook a damn hamburger using your magic juice.”

  “I mean, I agree with you.” I stuff the book back into the duffle bag and sling the wet towel over my shoulder. “But it’s going to take a lot more trial and error before I start getting most of this stuff right. It’s like learning how to draw realism and do theor
etical calculus at the same time.”

  “I guess we now know why regular practitioners spend so many years in their apprenticeships.” Desmond steps away from the door, farther into the hall. “I wish we could get a teacher for you.”

  “You and me both.” I zip the duffle bag closed and pick it up by the strap. “So, I’m guessing you guys didn’t show up for a social visit, since it’s still technically my ‘desk hours.’ What is it, eleven thirty?”

  “There about.” Desmond gestures for me to follow him. “And yes, we have a case. Ella would like you on it, since you’ve mostly been doing auxiliary-level work for the past few weeks. When you aren’t down here, learning magic in a closet.”

  “Ha!” Amy saunters out of the room. “Ella just wants you to move up from training wheels to a kiddie bike with one speed. Nothing major. We caught a pretty standard-looking murder. One body. Various gruesome injuries. No obvious signs of a break-in. First team on the scene says it looks like a practitioner’s work, maybe a nasty curse cast from a distance. Victim’s a total normie. No obvious connections to the supernatural.”

  “So maybe a personal dispute?” I step out into the hall and follow the duo to the elevator. “An actual crime that isn’t entwined in a world-shaking conspiracy?”

  “Looks like.” Desmond taps the up button on the elevator pad, then cocks an eyebrow at me. “You should perhaps not look so cheery about the situation when we interview the family, Calvin.”

  “Oh, sorry.” My shoulders shake as I try to hold in a laugh. “Am I smiling?”

  “Yeah,” Amy says as the elevator doors roll open, “about a murder. Like a weirdo.”

  “Sue me.” I shoulder past her to enter the elevator first and proceed to stand directly in the center so Amy and Desmond have to squeeze in around me. “It’s better than psycho vampires.”

  “True.” Desmond presses the button for the third floor, and I catch him suppressing a grimace. Likely a result of his resurfacing memory of the DSI versus vampire showdown at the museum last month. He nearly got his head bashed in during that fight, and only made it through without brain damage because Lucian was nice enough to share his blood. “Very, very true.”

  The elevator whisks us up to the top level of the building and spits us out right in front of Riker’s office. We make a hard left and head to Ella’s office instead, which still feels odd to me. All of us slip up and call Riker “Captain” from time to time, but since he’s the only captain I had before he was promoted to commissioner against his will, the shakeup to the team roster has left me a bit more out of step than anyone else. Which is only exasperated by the fact I was on leave for three months, incidentally gained access to a vast well of magic energy mere weeks before I was supposed to return to work, and am now required, by Riker’s orders, to spend half my time at the office learning magic so I don’t accidentally blow everyone up in the middle of a fight.

  Ella’s office door is open, so we all slink in to find our dear captain finishing up with a phone call to the team currently securing our scene. “Yes, they just walked in,” she says. “We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. Hold down the fort until then.”

  She ends the call and clips her smartphone back onto her belt, then quickly logs out of her computer and snatches her coat from the back of her expensive leather chair. “Hey, guys. Sorry, I should’ve called down and told you to go directly to the garage. I got caught in a rather repetitive conversation with a nervous new team captain. But we don’t have any time to waste. The press are already dogging the guys at the crime scene perimeter. Woman who died was a kindergarten teacher. She’s a ‘sympathy story’ subject, so they’re being really aggressive.”

  She hurries out of the room, and us three lackeys spin around and retreat the way we came. As we crowd into the elevator behind Ella, she picks up with, “So, Cal, did you have a shower, or did you set off the sprinkler again?”

  I run a hand through my damp hair. “The latter, unfortunately.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get it soon enough. Just don’t use whatever spell went wrong in the field, okay?”

  “Ella, that spell takes fifteen minutes to set up. I don’t think a werewolf or vampire or angry creature from the Eververse is going to wait that long before it tries to kill me. I’ll stick with the lightning and the fire and the other things I can conjure up fast enough to actually stop my head from getting lobbed off.”

  “Fair enough.” She glances at my hands. “Don’t forget to put your rings on.”

  Ah, my fake beggar rings. Since I can’t openly use magic without exposing myself to the ICM—who will pitch a fit that a major practitioner is working for DSI, something they explicitly disallow as part of their running agreements with us—I have to wear a set of rings cooked up by R&D that look like beggar rings but are actually magic suppressors. They hide my aura and restrict my power expenditure so I don’t expel waste energy and leave a residual trail. I can still perform direct spells while wearing them, but only of substantially limited strength. Nothing even close to the equivalent of the lightning blast I used to roast Lizzie Banks.

  I’m also explicitly disallowed from performing any spell in the field that doesn’t resemble something you can do with beggar rings. Which sucks. Big time. Sure, I’m pretty good at element-type spells, but I’d still love to use other categories of direct magic. There’s a whole wealth of spells out there I’ve barely begun to experiment with, and some of them I’m not half bad at. I actually picked something up with a telekinesis spell the other day and didn’t crush it to a pulp like I did the first forty-seven times. I’m learning!

  But additional practice will have to wait until I’m back in the privacy of my “closet.”

  The elevator lets us out on the basement level, and we march right past my designated study room again on our way to the underground hall that leads to the detached garage. Two guards at the checkpoint post wave at us as we badge through the turnstiles on our way to the exit doors, but the guy on the right gives me the stink eye. He’s one of the guys I beat up when I escaped from the DSI infirmary so I could save Foley Banks from being murdered. He’s also one of the two guys Erica spelled to sleep that time I broke in to stop Delos’ curse plague.

  Damn. I should apologize to that guy sometime.

  In the garage, we all pile into our assigned SUV, and I stick my duffle bag in the empty seat between Desmond and me. It still seems odd to have an empty seat, but Ella hasn’t finished reviewing the candidates for our new fifth, in part because she was assigned to lead the DSI leg of the museum cleanup, and in part (I believe) because she hasn’t completely accepted the fact that Riker is forever stuck in the big chair upstairs. I don’t blame her. He might be a gruff asshole sometimes, but Riker is the captain. It feels wrong without him here.

  Ella pulls the SUV out of the garage, past the heavily warded perimeter fence, and out onto the busy street. The lunch-rush traffic slows our pace considerably, so I take the opportunity to change out of my wet clothes and into the dry winter uniform in my bag. This requires me to become a contortionist for several minutes, during which Desmond eyes me with mild concern and Amy stares at me with an eyebrow arched, like she thinks I’m a moron.

  I do manage to get dressed without dislocating any joints though, so at least I don’t make a total fool of myself.

  Ella glances at me through the rearview mirror. “Sorry I didn’t give you time to change, Cal.”

  “No problem.” I leave my damp clothes folded on the floor and go to zip up my duffle bag, only to spy my tablet lying underneath my spell book. I nibble on my lip for a minute, not wanting to sound like a nag, but eventually relent and say, “Hey, Ella, any news on that whole fried server situation in Omsk?”

  Cooper was only supposed to be out of contact for a week or so after the Omsk facility where he’s on a temp assignment suffered a network meltdown. But somehow, one week has turned into three, and I haven’t heard a peep from him via any alternate forms of communication.
All the info on the issue has been flowing through Ella’s project contact, who works in Moscow. I’m getting antsy, because I still haven’t had the chance to tell Cooper about the whole Lizzie Banks fiasco—that and I really, really miss him.

  Long-distance relationships suck ass.

  “Sorry,” Ella replies. “Latest update says they’re looking to restore the system by Saturday evening, but they had to replace more equipment than they originally thought, so it might take until Monday.”

  I beat my head lightly against the window. “Of all the things to rip Cooper away from me, it just had to be something stupidly mundane like server problems, didn’t it?”

  Desmond rests a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t look so glum. Even in the worst-case scenario, you can have a sweet, loving reunion with him at the airport when he comes home.”

  “Thanks for the reassurance, but he comes home in nine weeks.” I zip the duffle bag with more aggression than necessary to hide the tablet from my sight, then start strapping on my assortment of weapons. “I would prefer not to wait that long to hear from him again. I’m worried about him. He’s only got ‘colleagues’ over there, no real friends.”

  “He’s hardier than he looks,” Ella says. “You know that.”

  “Yes, I do know, but I’m his boyfriend.” I pour the suppression rings out of their small felt bag and slip them onto my fingers. “It’s my job to worry when he drops off the face of the earth.”