"You think he's planning a coup?" Curran wondered.
"I hope so." I turned to Jim. "Is there any chance you'd overthrow the tyrannical Beast Lord and his psychotic Consort?"
"Yeah, I want a vacation," Curran said.
Jim leaned toward us and said in a lowered voice, "You couldn't pay me enough. This is your mess, you deal with it. I have enough on my plate."
He walked away.
"Too bad," Curran said.
"I don't know, I think we could convince him to seize the reins of power."
Curran shook his head. "Nahh. He's too smart for that."
We finally made it up the stairs, through the long hallway, up the second flight and into our quarters. I dropped my bag down, shrugged off the leather sheath with my sword in it, and took a deep breath. Aahh, home.
Generally tackling someone from behind is very effective, because the person doesn't know you're coming. However, after being tackled a dozen times, the victim becomes accustomed to it. Which is why when Curran made a grab for me, I danced aside and tripped him. He grabbed my arm, then we did some rolling on the floor, and I ended up on top of him, our noses about an inch apart.
He grinned. "You're jealous."
I considered it. "No. But when you stared at that woman like she was made of diamonds, it didn't feel very good."
"I stared at her because she smelled strange."
"Strange how?"
"She smelled like rock dust. Very strong dry smell." Curran put his arms around me. "I love it when you get all fussy and possessive."
"I never get fussy and possessive."
He grinned, showing his teeth. His face was practically glowing. "So you're cool if I go over and chat her up?"
"Sure. Are you cool if I go and chat up that sexy werewolf on the third floor?"
He went from casual and funny to deadly serious in half a blink. "What sexy werewolf?"
I laughed.
Curran's eyes focused. He was concentrating on something.
"You're taking a mental inventory of all people working on the third floor, aren't you?"
His expression went blank. I'd hit the nail on the head.
I slid off him and put my head on his biceps. The shaggy carpet was nice and comfortable under my back.
"Is it Jordan?"
"I just picked a random floor," I told him. "You're nuts, you know that?"
He put his arm around me. "Look who is talking."
We lay together on the carpet.
"We can't let the necklace kill that boy," I said.
"We'll do everything we can." He sighed. "I'm sorry about the dinner."
"Best date ever. Well, until people died and vampires showed up. But before that it was awesome."
We lay some more.
"We should go to bed." Curran stretched next to me. "Except the carpet is nice and soft and I'm tired."
"You want me to carry you?"
He laughed. "Think you can?"
"I don't know. Do you want to find out?"
It turned out that carrying him to our bed wasn't necessary. He got there on his own power and he wasn't nearly as tired as he claimed to be.
*** *** ***
Morning brought a call from Doolittle. When we got there, Roderick was sitting on the cot, the same owlish expression on his face. The necklace had lost some of its yellow tint during the night. Now it looked slightly darker than orange rind.
I crouched by the boy. "Hi."
Roderick looked at me with his big eyes. "Good morning."
His voice was weak. In my mind the necklace constricted around his fragile neck. The bone crunched...
We had to get a move on. We had to get it off him.
Doolittle lead us toward the door and spoke quietly. "There is a definite change in the color of the metal. He's beginning to experience discomfort."
"So that thing is getting hungry," Curran said.
"Probably." Doolittle held up a small print out. A pale blue stripe cut across the paper. The m-scan. The m-scanner recorded colors of magic: purple for vampire, green for shapeshfiter, and so on. Blue stood for plain human magic: mages registered blue, telepaths, telekinetics. It was your basic human default.
"Is that the necklace or Roderick?" Curran asked.
"It's the boy. He has power and it's obscuring whatever magic signature the necklace is giving out." Doolittle pointed to a point on the graph. I squinted. A series of paler sparks punctured the blue.
"This is probably the necklace," Doolittle said. "It's not enough to go on. We need a more precise measurement."
We needed Julie. She was a sensate - she saw colors of magic with more precision than any m-scanner. I stuck my head out into the hallway and called, "Could someone find my kid please and ask her to come down here?"
Five minutes later Julie entered the medward. When I found her, she had been half starved, skinny, and had anxiety attacks if the protective layer of grime was removed from her skin. Now at fourteen, she had progressed from skinny to lean. Her legs and arms showed definition if she flexed. She was meticulously clean, but recently she decided that invention of brushes was a waste of time, so her blond hair looked like a cross between a rough haystack and a bird nest.
I explained the necklace. Julie approached the boy. "Hey. I'm going to look at the thing on your neck, okay?"
Roderick said nothing.
Julie peered at the metal. "Odd. It's pale."
"Pale yellow? Pale green?" Any tint was good.
"No. It looks colorless, like hot air rising from the pavement."
Transparent magic. Now I had seen everything.
"There are runes on it," Julie said.
"Can you read them?" Curran asked.
She shook her head. "It's not any runic alphabet they taught us."
Dolittle handed her a piece of paper and a pencil and she wrote five symbols on it. Runes, the ancient letters of Old Norse and Germanic alphabets, had undergone several changes over the years, but the oldest runes looked the way they looked because they had to be carved into a hard surface: all straight lines, no curves, no tiny strokes. These symbols definitely fit that pattern, but they didn't look like any runes I'd seen. I could spend a day or two digging through books, but Roderick didn't have that long. We needed information fast.
Curran must've come to the same conclusion. "Do we know any rune experts?"
I tapped the paper. "I can make some calls. There is a guy. Dagfinn Heyerdahl. He used to be with Norse Heritage Foundation."
Norse Heritage Foundation wasn't so much about heritage as it was about viking, in the most cliché sense of the world. They drank huge quantities of beer, they brawled, and they wore horned helmets despite all historical evidence to the contrary.