That was the question, wasn’t it? I took the tablet and set it on his desk, so he and Albert could both see it.
“Please try to remember.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He’d told someone. His voice held too much outrage. He was trying to use his age and position to intimidate me.
“Strathearn Pipeline,” I said. Last warning.
Christian showed no reaction. “As odd as this has been, I still have business to take care of tonight. If there’s nothing else . . .” He let it hang.
I tapped the tablet. On it a large crowd of people gathered on the shore of a picturesque lake, holding signs. The sun was setting and the green hills around the lake all but glowed.
“What’s the Strathearn Pipeline?” Albert asked.
“Strathearn is a small town in Maine. Its main source of income is tourism from the Strathearn lake. A year and a half ago the Synesis Corporation decided to build a Teflon factory in the area. They promised a lot of jobs, but the locals didn’t want factory jobs, they wanted clean water that was free of perfluorooctanoic acid, which the factory would dump into the lake. They lobbied their congressional representatives, and when that didn’t work, they started protesting.”
On the screen the protestors shook their signs. An older black woman lectured the cameras as journalists held their mics out to her. A young girl, about eight or nine, with curly red hair and pale skin, stood awkwardly next to her, not knowing what to do with herself.
“These weren’t anarchists,” I said. “Look, there are families there. Young people, old people, couples with children. They were locals who’d lived there for generations.”
Christian sighed, clearly put upon.
“The protests gained national attention. Synesis didn’t like the bad publicity, so they decided to do something about it.”
On the screen, someone screamed. Placards flew and people ran, colliding. The journalists dropped their mics and charged toward the lake. One of them ran into the older black woman, knocking her out of the way, his face a mask of primal terror. She fell. The redheaded girl tried to pick her up, but the crowd surged around them, and she fell too. People trampled them, running back and forth, stomping, wailing, hitting each other.
Albert stared at it. “A psionic attack. A really strong one, fear-based, omnidirectional, layered. A targeted attack would have driven them all in the same direction.”
“That’s what the National Assembly thought too. This went on for twelve minutes. Seven people died, three drowned, four were trampled. One man was paralyzed, and dozens suffered injuries. Synesis attempted to spin the whole thing as radical groups infiltrating the protests.”
“No,” Albert said. “It’s not multiple psionics, or the flow of the crowd would have varied in intensity. This is a single psionic, likely a Prime, delivering controlled bursts of magic along the perimeter. As soon as they run one way, the psionic pushed them in the opposite direction. They couldn’t escape. Nowhere was safe.”
“There is an investigation,” I continued. “The internal records of the company were subpoenaed. They show that a decision was made to hire an outside psionic for an exorbitant sum. Unfortunately, the only woman who knew the identity of the psionic jumped from the roof of a parking garage three months ago.”
A smile flickered on Christian’s face, half a second long, but I saw it. I spooled my magic, reinforcing my mental defenses. I had been reinforcing them since I drove away from Alessandro.
Albert was looking at his father.
“Samantha Corners is dead,” I said. “But she had insurance.”
I tapped the tablet. A country road came into focus with a black Escalade parked in the middle of it, filmed from the side, most likely by a hidden camera in someone’s pocket or handbag. Christian Ravenscroft crouched on a black square platform about ten feet wide, placed on a flat spot in the field, next to the SUV. He was drawing a complex arcane circle with a piece of chalk. Two hundred yards down, protesters chanted on the grass.
“Five minutes, no more,” a female voice said.
“Do you want this done right? If so, shut up.”
“We want what we paid you for.”
“And you’ll get it. Once I start, don’t interrupt. You don’t want to make things worse.” He finished the design, stepped into the circle, and closed his eyes.
Orange light dashed through the chalk lines and faded to a dull glow, throwing eerie highlights onto Christian’s face.
The first desperate scream tore through the air.
On the screen, Albert’s father smiled.
“Cascade . . .” Albert murmured, squinting at the circle. “You used our House spell.”
A torrent of magic tore out of Christian. It smashed into my defenses and broke against my mental wall like waves on a rock. He recoiled, stunned.
“Not strong enough,” I told him.
“Dad!” Albert thrust himself between us. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Shut. Up.” Christian hammered each word into the ground.
I walked over to one of the overstuffed chairs, sat down into it, and crossed one leg over the other.
“Why the hell would you do this?” Albert snarled. “Not only is your face on video, but the entire design of Cascade can be made out. All they have to do is call any local Prime psionic, and they’ll recognize it. Attacking her isn’t going to fix this.”
House spells were specific to each House, complex and closely guarded. Magic talents were like fingerprints, unique. Victoria and Nevada were both truthseekers, but even though they were related by blood, the exact nature of their talents differed slightly. Circles developed by a specific family wouldn’t work as well for anyone else because they were precisely attuned to the magic of that particular bloodline. When Christian had drawn Cascade on that board, he’d damned himself.
“If this gets out, we’re finished as a House.” Albert raised his arms. “We don’t need the money. Did you owe someone a favor? Were you blackmailed? Why?”
“Because I wanted to.” Christian’s expression turned dark, his cheeks flushed, his mouth a furious slash across his face.
The oldest reason in the book. All psionics restrained themselves. Their talents had no purpose outside of military applications or the rare cases civilian law enforcement required crowd control. There were memes online that showed random sad people with the caption “Psionic waiting for a riot.” They felt the pull to use their magic just as much as any of us, and they had turned practicing personal restraint into a religion.
“You wanted to?” Albert dropped his arms to his sides, slapping his legs. “Are we animals, Father? Do we have no self-control? Did you not drill the Mantra of the Psionic into me since before I could talk?”
“We have a bigger problem.” Christian stared at me. If looks were blades, I’d be a pincushion.
“You’re not strong enough,” I repeated. I knew exactly how I looked, slightly bored, emotionless, my expression icy.
Christian trembled, struggling to contain his rage. He’d sunk everything into that first attack. If it had hit me right after the Pit, I would have shattered and run for my life, straight into traffic, off some roof, or into the water. Whatever was handy. But I’d had time to recover.
“Who else knows?” Christian squeezed out through his teeth.
When I’d realized Albert was serious about marriage and he would not go away, I asked Bern to run a background check on the family. He came across an old business partnership between Samantha Corners’ sister and Christian Ravenscroft’s distant cousin. Other people had looked into Christian’s background, but none of them were Bern. Being a pattern mage, Bern had put the pieces together and then dug in other people’s personal computers until he found the recording two months ago.