So much movement, so much activity. In a way it was all because of me, and yet everyone was ignoring me. It was good, I supposed—safer that way—but it felt weirdly isolating. I pushed myself up, holding the side of the car until the wave of dizziness passed, and headed for the ambulance that Caldera had been moved into.
I heard the sound of laughter as I drew closer. Walking around the back, looking into the brightly lit interior, I saw Caldera lying on one of the stretchers. She hadn’t been bandaged, but her hands were clasped over her stomach and she was smiling. Landis was sitting on a chair by the stretcher, long arms and legs sprawled out like an ungainly spider, and he was in the middle of a story. “So then the fellow gets indignant and tells me, ‘I don’t know what you mean, I haven’t anything like that in my family tree.’ Well, as I’m sure you know, I wasn’t going to stand for that. I got up and told him—”
“Hey, Verus,” Caldera said, glancing up at me. “Thank God you’re here—maybe you can shut him up. Nothing I do seems to work.”
“You wound me, dear lady.” Landis clasped a hand to his chest. “Can I not ask for a token of your favour?”
“Oh, bugger off,” Caldera said, but she was laughing. “I swear, you’re lucky I’m not allowed to get out of this bed . . .”
I had to grin. There’s a weird rush from making it through a combat. When you come out of one alone, then it doesn’t last, but when you have friends around it turns into something happier. A celebration, I guess. You’re alive, your friends are alive, and all of a sudden you’re intensely aware of it. “Let me guess,” I told Landis. “You’re on duty to make sure she doesn’t try to run off for another round?”
“A fearsome duty, ’tis true, but needs must, eh? You hear that, my girl? Bed rest, that’s the ticket.”
“Oh, you wish.”
“Well, well, one can hope. Ah, Verus, Vari and I had no joy, I’m afraid. Gave the place a good old search and quarter, but the boy’s vanished into the ether.”
I nodded. It wasn’t really a surprise. “Thanks for showing up so fast.”
“A bit of a sticky situation, eh? No need to worry, happens to the best of us. I remember this time out in Guernsey when—”
“Okay,” Caldera interrupted, “before you start another of your endless stories, how did you show up so fast?”
“Oh, just a friendly request from your new junior.” Landis leant back against the wall, nodding at me. “He mentioned you two might have a spot of bother, so I had Vari toodle over and take a look at the place so he could open us a gate. Better safe than sorry, eh?”
Caldera gave Landis a sceptical look. “Weren’t you on standby for the Rayfield case?”
“And wasn’t it fortunate that it turned out to be related? Happy endings for all!”
“Lucky for some.” Caldera glanced at me. “They have any idea who those people were?”
“Leo was connected to White Rose.” I looked at Landis, keeping my expression carefully neutral. “They seem to be the obvious suspects.”
“Yes,” Landis said, drawing out the word. “They do, don’t they?” He jumped to his feet. “Well, I’ll leave you in Verus’s safe hands. If you see Vari, let him know he can take off for the night, eh?”
“I’ll tell him.”
Landis hopped out of the ambulance, and I took his seat with a sigh. Caldera cocked an eye at me. “You all right?”
“I should be asking you that.” I nodded at Caldera’s side. “How bad was it?”
“Oh, you know life mages. Always make it sound worse than it is.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Not quite sure that’s true.”
“Yeah, well, they’re going to keep me out for at least a day. You okay to go to the War Rooms as my stand-in?”
I nodded. “I’ll be there.”
“Good.” Caldera paused. “Sorry for giving you a hard time in there.”
I looked at Caldera in surprise. “About the kid,” Caldera said. “Wasn’t your fault. Just pissed off at myself.”
“For what?”
“Don’t like not being strong enough to do the job,” Caldera was silent for a second. “Don’t like losing people, either.”
“Neither do I.”
Caldera glanced up at me. “Why’d you go back?”
“When?”
“Middle of that fight, after the second icecat went for you and the kid. After you were done with that, you went straight for the golem.”
“Yeah.”
“Wasn’t Leo out the door by then?”
“I thought you were too busy with the golem to notice stuff like that.”
“I’ve been in enough fights to know what’s going on around me.” Caldera looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Don’t dodge the question. You could have gone after the kid. Why didn’t you?”
“There was a force mage covering the door,” I said. “At least one other guy too. If I’d gone after Leo, it would have meant going one-on-one with a force mage in an open street. I couldn’t have won that. The best I could have managed would have been to get away in one piece, and they probably would have got Leo anyway. And I knew the golem was going to kill you if I left you. I figured that two on one, we had a chance to beat it. It was a choice between losing two people, and giving up one person to have a decent chance of saving the other. I picked the battle I thought we could win.”
Caldera snorted and closed her eyes. “Always the pragmatist.”
A man I didn’t know stuck his head around the corner. “Hey,” he said. “We’re heading back. You riding along?”
I shook my head. “It’s just her.”
The man disappeared. I got up, started to leave, then paused. “Caldera?”
“Yeah.”
“That was half the reason. The other half . . . I’d rather you stayed alive.”
Caldera looked back at me for a long moment, then nodded. I climbed out of the ambulance and went to find Vari and go home.
As Vari and I walked out of my downstairs storeroom, there was a clatter of footsteps from upstairs. Luna poked her head out from around the banister, and she seemed to relax as she saw us both. “You’re okay?”
“We’re okay,” I said, wearily starting up the stairs. “Looks like you’re getting better at sensing gates.”
Luna had an endless stream of questions, and I used the excuse of making tea to let Variam do most of the talking. When it came to the fight in the safe house though, I had to tell the story, sitting in the armchair with legs crossed, a tiny trail of steam rising up from the mug in front of me.
“You’re so lucky,” Luna said disconsolately when I finished.
“I just had an eight-foot golem try to redecorate the room with my internal organs,” I said. “Lucky is not the word I would choose.”
“Can I come with you tomorrow?”
“It’s a police investigation. They don’t run ‘Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.’”
“Yeah, well, I spent the day on Theory of Magic makeup classes,” Luna said. “At least you got to do something fun.”
Even I have trouble believing Luna sometimes. “Luna, I swear, by the time you’re thirty, either you’re going to have more combat experience than any other girl in the British Isles, or you’re going to be dead. And no, I don’t know which.”
“Okay,” Variam said, “you’re not going to like hearing this, but I’m going to say it. Your new magic teacher, this Chalice? Maybe this whole thing was a setup.”
Luna frowned. “How?”
“She was the one who sent him to Uxbridge, right?”
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“Yeah, well, she’s a Dark mage, and the first place she sends you, you nearly get your head chopped off. You don’t think that’s a funny coincidence?”
“Just because—”
I raised my hand and Luna subsided. “I did think about it,” I said to Variam. “When Chalice was doing that spell, I didn’t sense any magic. Could mean that I just didn’t spot it, but it could mean she wasn’t doing anything at all—she just knew the address already. That’s what you were thinking of, right?”