Shifting Loyalties

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

The next morning, I found myself preparing to walk into the office of the Seers Guild. The organization I had spent the last decade of my life hiding from.

The Seers Guild was born in a darker age when people with special abilities were apt to be burned at the stake or drowned as witches. It was an organization created for the protection of seers against Simples, with a centuries-old mission to keep the existence of magic a secret from the Simple world. The Guild consider themselves the police. But, as with any centuries-old institution, the Guild was prone to corruption.

In the modern world, the Guild operates less like the police and more like the mafia. Any seer who makes money using magic is required to pay a tax to the Seers Guild, for "protection" against discovery by Simples. Of course, all seers are assumed to be making money using magic. Everyone pays, if they value their property and their kneecaps. Everyone except a few outlaws like me.

You might expect that the headquarters of the southeast district for an organization that was effectively the "magic mafia," would be extravagant, flamboyant, ostentatious. You would expect it to be a corner office in some shiny, glass-and-steel tower downtown.

You would at least expect it to have windows.

You’d be wrong. The actual place was two interior rooms on the fifth floor of a renovated, century-old brick warehouse at the edge of the Old Fourth Ward. It was the office of Rebecca Mann, private investigator.

I parked my rusty excuse for a bug-out vehicle at the Starbucks in the shopping center across the street. Bought a cup of coffee. Eased myself into a comfy chair, being careful not to pull too hard on the stitches in my belly. Opened my inner eye onto the astral plane.

A seer’s inner eye gives them access to higher planes of reality, beyond the physical plane. The astral plane is the lowest of these non-corporeal realms. All seers have access to it. It looks like a glowing layer of energy laid atop the physical plane, like a fog generated by the auras of every living thing.

I watched the steady flow of urban dwellers willing to overpay for a fancy coffee-flavored beverage. Crunchy granola types who had been shopping in the organic grocery across the lot. Skinny women in yoga pants coming from their vipassana classes. Hipster boys with chest-length beards, wearing cargo shorts, arriving via bicycle. Jewel-adorned women with still-drying manicures. And a never-ending parade of office workers from across the street.

I wasn't watching them idly. With my inner eye open to the astral plane, I could see their auras. Glowing, amorphous clouds of ethereal light, the visible symbol of the living soul. Visible to seers like me, anyway. I was watching for auras that were not clouds, but sharp, fully resolved shapes. The mark of a seer with their inner eye open on the astral plane.

I didn't see any. And that bugged me. In a city this size, I figured there must have been a hundred or two Guild operatives. Why did their headquarters have only one occupant?

I wasn't too worried about being seen myself. After all, I was about to walk right into Guild headquarters. The captain of the Seers Guild didn't seem to want me dead or locked up, despite long-standing orders to the contrary. For fourteen years, the Guild has been trying to send me to a dark hole in the Ring. She'd had ample opportunity to take me down if that had been her goal.

Instead, she had asked me to help her out on a case.

I'm not generally inclined to assist people whose job is to hunt down seers. I made an exception in this case. We had a mutual interest. The seer she was looking for was a fortune teller calling herself Madame de Fortuna. Said fortune teller had, barely a week before, drugged me, tied me up in a basement, and tortured me to try and discover the location of the relic I protect, the Piero Codex. Needless to say, I was a little sore about that. Figured some payback was in order.

Seeing nothing of interest on the astral plane, I shifted my inner eye’s attention to the other plane I had access to. The Tapestry of Destiny. We call it the Tapestry because of its peculiar appearance. Every human Fate is a thread in the Tapestry of Destiny, glowing faintly with the power of life and possibility. Every decision a person faces, from whether to order the skinny latte or full fat, up to marriage and life-and-death stuff, every future decision creates a fork in their thread. All those threads intertwine with each other to form the Tapestry. Only Fate-benders have access to the Tapestry. If we learn to read it right, we can use it to predict the future. If we learn the right spells, we can even change the future.

According to legend, the Piero Codex contained spells so powerful, they allowed the wielder to see hundreds of years into future, and influence Fates decades ahead. Personally, I was skeptical about that. I had never been able to see further than a month or two, myself. But some important people must have believed it. They wanted the Codex, and they were willing to kill to get it.

Sitting in the coffee shop, I wasn’t trying to look a century into the future, or even a month. I was only concerned with the next couple of hours. After all, I was about to walk into the office of the Seers Guild. I didn’t have any reason to mistrust Recca. But the last time I walked into a place without checking my future first, I nearly got killed. Like the old man said: trust, but verify.

I continued watching the foot traffic, on multiple planes, until my coffee went cold. Then, I forced myself out of the comfy chair, feeling the tug of the sutures. Hobbled my way across the street with a group of coffee-bearing office workers. Took the elevator to the fifth floor.

Normally I would take the stairs. I don't like being boxed in. But the whole left side of my abdomen was aching like a… well, like a damn gunshot wound, which it was. If you ever have a choice about getting shot, I recommend against it. The Tapestry of Destiny didn't reveal anything dangerous in my immediate future. So, I took the easy way.

The office was easy to miss. From the outside, it looked like a storage closet. But she had added a sign since the last time I was there. A little placard with small black letters. "Private Investigator" it read. I knocked. The door opened.

Rebecca Mann — Recca to her friends, which I guess included me now — had natural red hair and emerald eyes as sharp as broken glass. Her face had a look of experience, but not age. I figured her for early thirties. Her aura, when it was resolved, was lithe, muscular, powerful. Even on the physical plane, the woman had presence.

She pinned me with those sharp eyes and held me in place for a few seconds. A subtle smile grew on her lips.

"Canceled your move out of town," she said. It was more a statement than a question.

"Postponed, anyway," I said. "I'd feel a little more confident in my new digs if I knew that fortune teller was off the streets."

"Come inside, let's talk about that."

Recca was a puzzle. An enigma, even. The district captain of the Seers Guild seemed to be some kind of throwback to a lost era of chivalry. She had told me, with a straight face, that she fought for justice. Her aura gave no indication of deception when she said it. And I knew she wasn't afraid to break every rule when she needed to. That’s why I was still alive, and Manny Ramamoorthy was dead.

Manny had been a Guild tracer, and he was looking to lock me in a damp cell in the Ring and pull out fingernails until I spilled my secrets. When it came down to the final choice, the gunfight where I had received my belly perforation from Manny's pistol, Recca took my side against him. Even though he was a Guild operative, and I was an outlaw.

Recca told me Manny was a member of a shadow organization called the League of the Dragon. I had never heard of the League of the Dragon before Recca mentioned them to me. Up to then, I thought it was the Guild itself that was trying to collect the Relics. Recca claimed it was this shadow organization. Now the whole business was a gray area. Maybe it was the Guild itself, maybe a shadow organization within it, maybe a third group entirely. I still wasn't going to trust the Guild. But, Recca was sincere. Either she was right about the League of the Dragon, or she didn't know she was wrong.

Recca's office was sparse. A wooden desk with a task lamp on it, and a worn swivel chair behind it. A couple of hard-back chairs the other side of the desk, facing it. Bookshelves lined the walls on the left and right of the desk. Behind it hung the only other wall decoration, a framed certificate indicating Rebecca Mann was a licensed investigator. There was a sofa and another chair to the left of the door, surrounding a small coffee table. To the right, a door led into a smaller room with another sofa, a filing cabinet, and a folding table with a secretary chair. The overhead fluorescent lights were turned off. The rooms were lit instead by warm floor lamps. There was no computer on the desk, but there was a laptop on the coffee table.

Recca plopped herself into the corner of the sofa and plucked the laptop from the coffee table. "I haven't been able to nail down an identity on your fortune teller," she said. "There are dozens of women fitting the description, but none of them registered with the Guild in Atlanta or the surrounding counties."

I eased myself into the chair, wincing a little. "I thought you said you had a lead?"

She cut into me with her sharp eyes. "My intel indicates that she was working in gray market trade. Most of the gray market trade in this area is controlled by a Fae family named Laroche. Since she wasn't registered with the Guild, odds are good that she was connected to the Laroche organization. I have some sources checking on that. But it would help if I had more to go on. What can you tell me about this fortune teller?"

I rubbed the stubble on my chin and tried to recall the details of that very bad day. "She was about fifty, I guess. Short. Plump. Mediterranean look to her. When she wasn't doing her Gypsy psychic act, she had a New York City accent, Bronx or Queens or something. Maybe Jersey, what do I know? She claimed that she had studied at the Guild Academy. She could read the runic script in my tattoos so that might even be true."

Recca looked up from her laptop, locking her gaze on the symbols inked over my right hand. Each finger bares an intricate runic design, ward runes. The back of my hand has a Florentine Cross, the symbol of my order, surrounded by runes of protection. "She recognized your sigil? Knew you were an ordained Protector of the Relic?"

I nodded. "Not only that. She recognized my ward runes, too. That's Black Arcane magic. There's what, a thousand seers in the whole world with that level of training?"

Recca frowned. "A few more than that, but you're right, that's not something your average seer is going to know."

"Any chance she's connected to this League of the Dragon you told me about? The ones trying to nab all the relics?"

Recca shrugged. "I don't have a lot of intel on them. I won't be able to verify that. But, it is possible."

"There's something else, too," I said. I paused for a moment. Took a breath. "She's a mind-bender. And she's been trained in magical interrogation techniques."

Recca marked the hardness in my eyes. Took a few seconds to process that. Connected the dots in her head. After a long pause, she said, "I'm sorry."

I shrugged. "My parents were killed in the Purge. I've been fighting for my life ever since. It was just another bad day."

Recca's eyes softened a little. "You know the Piero Conflict ended years ago. Fate-benders are no longer anathema."

I snorted. "Sure, now that most of the Fate-bender lines outside the oligarchy have been wiped out or decimated, suddenly we're welcome back into the fold. Forgive me if I don't feel very welcome in the organization that murdered my entire family."

Recca leaned forward like she was about to say something else. She stopped herself. Leaned back again. Returned her eyes to her laptop screen. "What else can you tell me about this fortune teller?"

"One more thing. Guy she was with called her 'Beryl.' Don't know if that was an alias or her legit name, but it's unusual enough that you might pick up something on it."

Recca typed that into her notes. "Anything else?"

For a brief moment, I considered telling her about the threat to the Piero Codex. The missing keymasters. The plea from Marina. I wanted to believe I could ask her for help. I would like to think that the Guild was an instrument of justice as Recca professed. But what if it wasn't? What if it was actually the Guild itself making a move on the Codex? Even if they were not the culprits, if the Guild did poke their nose in it, I had no guarantee they'd be on my side, or Marina's.

"Nothing else," I told Recca.

She finished typing her notes and shut her laptop. She stood and walked back over to her desk. Every once in a while, my mind forgets that Recca is a captain of the Seers Guild, a black belt in martial arts I can’t pronounce, and deadly as a viper. I experienced one of those forgetful moments, as she walked across the office, and I was captivated. Recca was beautiful. Her body was beautiful. Her face was beautiful. Her aura was beautiful.

Lilly had tried to convince me that Recca actually had the hots for me. I didn’t buy that for a second, of course. But watching her walk to her desk, the thought crossed my mind. The fantasy of having a real relationship flashed through my head.

Then I remembered how well I handled the last relationship I’d had. Marina hadn’t spoken to me in five years. By the time Recca set her laptop down and turned around, the thought was gone. She was the lethal Guild captain again.

Recca looked at me curiously. "What?" she inquired. Wondering what I was looking at, I guess.

I shook the dust out of my head. "Nothing. Sorry. So, what’s our next move on the fortune teller?"

"Come back to see me tomorrow afternoon," Recca said. "I should have something lined up by then."

I pushed myself to me feet. On the way to the door, I stopped and turned back. "Say, Recca, where are all your minions?"

"Excuse me?"

"The Seers Guild is a big organization, right? City this size, I figure there must be a hundred operatives. But you’re all alone in here. Don’t even have a secretary. Why not a fancy corporate headquarters instead of a hole in the wall?"

Recca rolled her eyes and gave me a disdainful smirk. "Some Guild captains think looking impressive is more important than getting the job done. I am not one of them. I don’t waste my limited budget on useless decoration. My operatives are in the field operating. Having an office for them to loiter in would just encourage loitering. I don’t need them taking up space here."

I smiled at that. Not sure I would want Recca to be my boss. "Fair enough, I guess. See you tomorrow."