The Rabbit Sergeant and the Dragon Cult

[JennyDracos]

Jess looked up at the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Colombia and bit her lip.

Like so many of the buildings in Washington, it was made of pale stone, grayer in places where it hadn't been powerwashed recently, with plenty of narrow windows. There was a wide flight of stone steps leading up to the main building, a few people going in and out.

She bit her lip. She hated this. It was another briefing - but she'd only met the detective once, and unlike a formal military brief there was no protocol. She didn't know the material that well, and she had absolutely no ideas what questions he was going to ask - or what questions she needed him to ask. If there was one thing she needed, it was preparation. And she didn't have that, either.

But there was no help for it.

The lobby on the other side of the door was a wide, open space, with a heavy counter opposite the entrance. A man with a blue shirt and gold badge was sitting behind the counter, watching her as she came in. Someone moved to her right; a woman, sitting in a chair, not paying attention. Just someone waiting for something. There were a lot of chairs, hard, plastic, bolted to the floor. The rest of them were empty.

She tried to key on the smell of disinfectant. Whoever cleaned the place clearly believed in quantity over quality; the disinfectant was particularly acrid, but it didn't do nearly enough to cover up the urine, the sweat, or the fear.

"How can I help you, ma'am?" asked the man at the desk. He was heavyset, with the look of a man who used to spend five days at the gym and now figured three games of basketball a week was all the exercise he needed. Three chevrons graced his right sleeve.

Jess shoved her other self aside for the moment. "I'm Jessica Dunbar. I have an appointment with Detective Conlon?"

He tapped some keys on his keyboard. "Can I see some ID?"

She pulled out her military ID and set it on the counter.

He scanned it, looked at the monitor. "Well, Miss Dunbar, you're about twenty minutes early."

He said that like it was a bad thing. Rogers had told her to wear civilian clothing, so she'd had to go to Babs' place on the way. It wasn't a big detour, and basically all of her clothes were in Babs' closet, which meant she'd been able to get one of her pantsuits on, but it had still been a detour. And she'd still managed to get here with plenty of time to spare. "Better early than late," she said finally. "If you need me to take a seat, I can."

"Not out here." He pushed a button on his phone. "Frost, need an escort."

A moment later, a younger officer came out of a side door. "Yes, sergeant?"

"She goes to the CID break room. On your way back, let one of the Homicide guys know she's there. Got it?"

"Yes, sergeant."

Jess was led up two flights of stairs and into a small room. The chairs were old, cheap, with bent metal frames and cracking plastic upholstery, but they were almost relaxing. Through the open doorway she could hear a busy kind of bustle that made her feel more at home than she had since the accident. The clicking of keys, the shuffle of paper, the exchange of insults with no weight behind them - it was like seeing an old friend that she hadn't known she'd missed.

It was different, of course. The uniforms were dark blue instead of green camo, and the room was better lit than what she'd worked in before. The scents of anger and fear, of gunpowder and blood, those were different. Also the lights were much brighter.

But it still felt a little like home, and so when she pulled her language workbook to work on a few exercises, she blew right through it. She tucked it away, trying to convince herself that reading through her dictionary was almost as good as the second workbook, sitting on the bookshelf in the apartment, when a door just around the corner opened and Conlon stepped out. He turned to look at her and frowned.

She slid the dictionary back into her binder and waited.

Conlon's frown deepened. After a long moment, he jerked his head over his shoulder and started walking back into the nest of cubicles.

She was on her feet catching up to him in seconds.

As soon as she was only a step behind him, he glanced back at her. "So what is it you want?" His voice was gravelly, level, controlled. "Why are you here, exactly?"

Jess started to answer, then stopped to order her thoughts. It took her a moment to figure out what was safe to say for public consumption. "Yesterday, someone killed a woman in order to bring a maneating creature into the world," she said. "That's scary, but it's something that I figured the police could deal with. You know more about killers than I do, and a creature that spits poison is worse than a scrapyard dog but not much."

"Spits poison? What makes you think that?"

She shrugged. "Jurassic Park. Yesterday I gave you everything I know, so what you're getting today is speculation."

He turned to his right, then gestured at a doorway. "After you."

She stepped through and froze.

The room was small - tiny, really. It had white walls, a small table with four chairs, and a laptop. The walls were covered with photographs of the crime scene, and the victim.

Especially the victim.

An instant later, she kept moved over to take one of the seats.

He sat at the laptop. "So what changed between yesterday and today?"

She sighed. "Yesterday I figured this was new territory for you, but not that new. It was a killer, probably crazy, and yeah, he'd probably kill again if he wasn't stopped. But I am not a police officer. I'm an intelligence analyst. What do I know about killers? Yesterday I figured the best thing I could do would be to get out of your way. Tell you everything I could, and if you had any questions, you knew where to find me. Today..."

Jess reached over and tapped one of the pictures of the victim. "This morning someone said something that made me realize that if he can do this, he can show others how to do it. If he has some kind of bizarre belief system, the fact that he has some kind of creature with claws will convince people he's onto something." She turned to Conlon and let the fear show in her eyes. "If he's not stopped, he'll have an army."

"He?" Conlon asked.

She shrugged. "Fifty-fifty. But there's another reason I needed to come here today. This script here." She tapped one of the kludged prayers - the singed one - written in a language she'd help invent. "On the one hand, this is a spell to keep people from seeing the alterations the 'Lord of the Land' didn't make. It's what kept that writing in blood - and the scratches and gouges - from being in plain sight. The reason it looks burned is because it's what I blew out with my own spell." She sucked some air through her teeth and looked at Conlon. "If 'lord of the land' wasn't a mistranslation of 'landlord,' then your killer is capable of hiding the evidence you might need to find him. If it was, he can still figure it out."

His eyes narrowed. "There's something you're not telling me."

"Not a big thing. I think. Yesterday when I woke up, I would have sworn to you that only three people in the world know that script, and your victim was not one of them." She pulled out the arcane dictionary. "I made this, and I want to know how she learned to use it."

He frowned. "Looks professionally printed to me. Why's the Eiffel Tower on the cover?"

"Because when it was professionally printed, it was an English to French dictionary." Jess relaxed into the chair. "Basically we took a whole bunch of French language study materials, and we built a really obnoxiously complicated spell to take all the French - and I'm going to be honest and admit that trying to translate the name of languages that grew out of Latin into Latin was-"

He waved both hands, frantically. "Whoa, whoa, too much, too fast." He slid the dictionary back over to her and squeezed his eyes shut. After a moment, he opened them and looked at her. "You can create a spell to do something like that?"

She shrugged. "Yeah. It's even easier with the arcane script, partly because it's what we spent all that time stipulating the arcane script to do, and partly because you would think it would be easier."

"Why does that matter?"

Jess blinked at him. "Well, that's one of the basic principles of spellcasting! Intent, belief, symbolism. The arcane script was designed to be good at symbolism. Nice, clear, easy to work with. But it's also a magical language made to do magic with, and that means it's much easier to believe that if you write it, or speak with it, it will do what you want it to do. Like I said, one of the basic principles of spellcasting is that if you don't believe it will work, it won't."

Conlon closed the lid of his laptop. He sat back in his own chair and stared at the wall. After several long moments, he turned to look at her. "Can you teach me how to see things that have been hidden by magic?"

"Do you think I can?" she answered. "That's the best way I can put it. Or, I can definitely teach you how, but learning is harder than just going through a lecture or a course. Belief is critical."

He sighed. "I was afraid of that. Because no, I don't think you can teach me. At least in time to be useful."

Jess grimaced.

"Plan B," he said and picked up the laptop. "I need to talk with the vic's professor. Can you ride with me? I need to pick your brain some more."

 

[JennyDracos]

Conlon was enough taller than Jess that she had to work to keep up with him as he strode down the university hallway. The sounds of their respective shoes clicked against the tile flooring, continually refusing to come to a rhythm, but aside from the plaintive whine of a printer that had gone too long between servicing, they were the only sound on the office level of the building. Too many books and papers lined the walls, mostly sitting on top of overstuffed file cabinets.

"Her name was Victoria Trepes," Conlon explained as they walked. "She was a Ph.D student here, studying Biology. Professor Simon Oblange was her advisor. I made the notification yesterday and he didn't take it well. In my opinion, and this is just opinion, I don't think he knew she was dead until I told him. He's on the list, but low."

Jess frowned. "Is there anything to make you think he knew enough about magic to be our guy?"

Conlon snorted. "I don't even know what to look for?"

"Is there anything I should or shouldn't do?"

He looked at her over his shoulder, his expression purely unamused. "Try not to spill confidential information in front of him."

"Intel," Jess reminded him.

He snorted, then knocked on the door labeled "Simon Oblange, Herpetology."

A moment later, the door swung open to reveal a stooped-over older man. He was less than six feet tall, but not by much, with the darkest skin Jess had ever seen in person, and close-cropped hair that looked like someone had wrapped steel wool around the sides and back of his head. His eyes were deeply creased with laugh lines, but there was no laughter in his expression right now.

His arms held a large lizard, at least a foot and a half from nose to tail. Its scales were a deep green, and its head rested against his neck.

The man opened his mouth, but nothing came out. After a moment, words came to him. "Detective," he said in a thick, West African accent, "have you found the killer?"

Conlon shook his head. "I'm sorry, Professor, not yet. I just had some follow-up questions. Standard procedure, you know how it goes." He gestured to Jess. "This is Sergeant Dunbar, from the Air Force. She's consulting with us on the case."

Oblange glanced over at Jess. "You seem familiar for some reason," he said. "But where are my manners? I'd say it's a pleasure to meet you, but I'm afraid the circumstances."

Jess smiled at him. "I quite understand. And who's this?"

The man's face practically lit up. "This is Charlie," he said, and rocked his shoulder forward. "Come on, Charlie."

The lizard lifted its head from his shoulder, then turned to look at Jess. Then it looked at Conlon, and its mouth opened to reveal rows of tiny teeth. It hissed spitefully at the detective.

"Charlie!" Oblange said, chidingly. "He was the bearer of bad news. That doesn't mean he's a bad person."

The lizard simply tucked its head back under Oblange's.

Oblange sighed. "I'm terribly sorry. He's really quite smart for a reptile, but I have to admit that there is only so much I can work with there. He knows I hurt, and he knows you were there when I started to hurt, which for a lizard is frankly amazing."

Jess ran her finger lightly down the ridge of scales on the lizard's back. His scales were a bit spiky, but somehow they still felt soft to her touch. "What kind of lizard is he?"

"Well, he was a Central Bearded Dragon. They're an Australian lizard, fairly common pets. For reptiles, anyway. They are cold-blooded, which means they're a lot more delicate than those of us who can put on a sweater to get warm." He winked at Jess, then blinked in recognition. "My goodness! Sergeant Dunbar - the Sergeant Dunbar?"

Jess forced a smile, but glanced sidelong at Conlon, who was looking at her suspiciously. She looked back at Oblange. "Yeah, that was me."

Oblange's smile widened. "I watched the Senate hearings, you see. And read your report. Fascinating reading, and the implications! Although I suppose the one who really owes you is Charlie here." He hefted the lizard. "Would you like to hold him?"

Jess relaxed into a real smile. "Sure. Come here, cutie!"

The lizard was heavier than she had expected, and cooler. He tilted his head back to look at Oblange and chirped, then looked up at Jess.

She ran a finger lightly up the underside of his jaw, feeling the roughness of his scales. "You said 'was.' Is he not one any more?"

Oblange smiled. "As a matter of fact I have modified him, perhaps as far as I can go. There was one more thing I wanted to try, but then I heard about Victoria." He shook his head abruptly, as if trying to wake himself up. "And my manners are still not present. Come in, come in."

His office was definitely larger than a closet, but not by all that much. The wall to the left was lined with bookcases filled with books on frogs, lizards, snakes, crocodiles. More books were piled in front of them in haphazard stacks. The far wall had a desk, piled high with papers and more books, and a big glass tank partly filled with sand, some thick branches, and a big leaf clipped to one side. On the right -

Jess stepped in past Conlon, turning to the right to look at the wall. The whole wall was one big whiteboard. A few notes were on the sides, but the center of it was dominated by a large set of red boxes that showed the clear signs of having been traced by a ruler. More ruler-straight red lines connected them and led down to the floor, where one more rectangle on the floor was marked out in red masking tape. Each of the red boxes on the wall was filled with neat black runes written with a careful hand.

In her arcane script.

She focused on the top center block. It looked like an unaddressed prayer to grant wisdom, but something about the phrasing felt off. It looked like a literal word-for-word translation, which from her reading and practice didn't flow particularly well. Left of that was a prayer for tolerance, but the word was one that meant tolerance for temperature.

"What is this?" she asked, turning to look at the professor.

Oblange looked at the wall. "I wanted to see if Charlie could be a little more...well, it wasn't my idea, actually, but even if it didn't do everything we had hoped, Charlie is very much changed, I believe for the better." He held out his arms and the lizard happily clambered back over. "He knows that I'm sad, and that's not something that reptiles are truly capable of. He spends less time basking than he used to, because he's a little warmer." He reached out with his free hand and patted a blank space on the wall. "It's still a work in progress. It doesn't do everything we wanted, but I'm still tweaking it."

She looked over the wall. Carefully, trying to sound like she slightly curious, she asked, "What language did you write it in?"

Oblange smiled. "There's a - well, I call it a working group, but it's really more of a student club for which I am the advisor. We are just beginning to explore the potential of what can be done with nondirect methodology. It's open to anyone, but so far we only have a handful of people. I'm the only member of the faculty, though I do have hopes..."

Conlon took a half-step forward. "I'm sorry, 'nondirect methodology?'"

Jess looked at him and coughed, a little embarrassed. "Ah, in the initial report I wrote, 'nondirect methods' was what I called magic. We didn't know all that much about it at the time, just that there was a gap between cause and effect, so 'nondirect.' It wasn't until Dr. Nowroski figured out how much symbolism played into things that we started calling it magic."

"I still do not like that term," Oblange said. "It implies that you cannot approach it with a scientific mindset."

Conlon raised his eyebrows. "I see. And this language - your 'working group' found it?"

Oblange smiled and brushed a hand over the whiteboard. "I don't think 'found' is the right word. We devised it, brought it forth. We wanted - needed - something like it, and there it was."

Conlon nodded slowly. "Was Victoria Trepes part of your working group?"

Oblange's smile fell, as did his free hand. Charlie immediately put his head up against Oblange's jaw. After a moment, Oblange spoke up. "For about two weeks, yes. She was one of my grad students, very bright, very smart. Still early days as far as her research, but she had potential. I told her she should come, but she was always too busy. Finally I cajoled her into coming to the last two sessions. I had high hopes for her. I think she might have made some major breathroughs." He sighed. "But now that's not going to happen."

After a moment, he looked at Conlon. "Did she suffer, do you think?"

"The coroner said it was over in seconds," Conlon said. "She barely had time to realize it was happening."

Jess had seen the expression frozen on her face and wasn't so sure about that, but she held her tongue.

"That's something, then." Oblange sighed. "Bad enough when the young die. Perhaps I shouldn't, but I hope that when you find who did it, they suffer." His lip quivered.

Jess had to blink back her own set of tears. In self-defense, she looked back at the whiteboard. "Professor, you mentioned that this didn't do what you had hoped. What was that?"

He sighed, then shook himself and looked at her. "We wanted to test a point, you see. Turn one kind of creature into another kind, a kind that didn't exist. The idea was to turn Charlie into a-"

The door slammed open and a tall man, taller even than Conlon, stepped in. He was lean, with a slightly ruddy complexion, jet black hair, and a neatly trimmed beard. For some reason he smelled strongly of woodsmoke. "Simon, have you had a chance to-" Then he saw Jess and Conlon and jerked to a halt. "Sorry, sorry, I didn't realize you had visitors. Well, introduce me!"

 

[JennyDracos]

Jess's other self focused on the new man with an intensity Jess hadn't seen since Babs had taken her to the zoo. Jess couldn't afford that - she needed a little more context. She glanced over at Oblange.

Apparently Charlie agreed with Jess's other self. He was looking at the newcomer with something resembling absolute loathing, the spiny scales around his head flared out, his teeth bared. The man holding him, on the other hand, was smiling with welcome relief. Oblange himself was very happy to see the newcomer.

"Of course, David, of course. This is Detective Conlon of the Metropolitan Police Department, and Sergeant-"

"Jessica Dunbar, of course!" interrupted the newcomer. "I should have recognized you at first glance. The Rabbit Sergeant, here in person!"

Jess wished she could sink through the floor.

"David," Oblange said reprovingly.

The newcomer smiled. His teeth were very white. "Quite, quite, I do apologize, Sergeant. I'm just excited, that's all."

"Fine," Jess said. Anything to change the topic. "It's totally fine, mister...?"

"Professor," he said. "Professor David Murray, of the Walsh School of Foreign Service." He smiled again. It was a very sharp smile, reaching but somehow not quite touching his eyes.

"My partner," Oblange said. "In rather a few things."

Murray's glance flicked to him, and momentarily down at the large lizard. "Simon, I was wondering if you'd managed to put my suggestion into practice?"

Oblange sagged slightly. "I'm afraid not. I just have not been able to gather the concentration today."

Jess glanced from Oblange to Murray. "If you don't mind my asking, what was your suggestion?"

Murray smiled his artifical smile at her. "I assume you've noticed the rather complicated spell formula on his wall? Simon has been trying to turn his little creature there into a more...evolved being."

"David!" Simon objected over Charlie's outraged hiss. "One can hardly call it 'more evolved.' For one thing, evolution-"

Murray waved him off. "Yes, yes, so you've said. In any case, the answer to your question, Miss Dunbar, is that I suggested he rewrite his spell in another language. Surely, I said, it would work better in the language of dragons?"

Jess stopped breathing as she put the pieces together.

Conlon frowned. "But dragons don't exist," he said. "How can they have a language?"

Murray turned towards the detective. "Whether or not they are here, on this small world, has remarkably little relevance to whether or not we can determine what their language is. If we know for what we reach, surely we can pull it from the aether." He turned to Simon. "You should do it. I think you owe it to the little fingerbiter."

Oblange sighed. "I'll try, David, I'll try."

"In the meantime, Professor," Conlon said, "do you think you could give us a list of the people who've been attending your working group?"

"Certainly, certainly. Let me get Charlie settled first." Oblange hurried over to the glass tank and set the lizard inside. He lowered the lid of the tank while Charlie darted under a mass of branches.

Jess tilted her head at Murray. "Are you a part of his working group?"

"I'm not, no." His lips twisted into something that could be called a grin, if one were charitable. But at least they weren't flashing his teeth at her again. "I think that the discovery of magic will rock the world, but somehow a student group seems so..."

"Who better, David," Oblange said absently as he used his index fingers to punch something into the keyboard on his desk. "Who better?"

Conlon turned to Murray. "Professor Murray, I do need to ask you some questions. Procedure, you understand."

Murray laughed. "Trust me, I teach International Finance. Procedure, I understand."

"Did you know Victoria Trepes?"

Murray shook his head blankly. "The name sounds familiar, but-" He shrugged.

Conlon pulled out a phone in a thick, rugged case. He flipped through some pictures, then raised it. From her angle, Jess could see it was a picture of the dead woman when she had been alive and well.

Murray narrowed his eyes. "I've seen her before. Oh! She's one of Simon's assistants. Oh." He looked down and away from the picture. "She's the one who died."

A fresh whiff of grief drifted over from Oblange's desk.

"Can you tell me where you were Tuesday night between six PM and midnight?"

Murray's gaze slammed back to Conlon. His brow thundered. Rage filled the room. "Surely you don't think I-"

"It's just procedure," Conlon said soothingly. "Just so I have it in the record."

Murray closed his eyes. Jess could almost see a wave of control wash over him. When he opened them, the anger was gone from his voice. "Of course. Procedure. Tuesday - that would have been the dinner for the Foundation, at the George Town Club. That was from just before five until about nine." He looked at Oblange. "You spent most of that pinned to Doctor Herrara."

Oblange chuckled. "I can't help it! She has the best stories. And you were with that idiot." His voice had turned cutting.

Murray's grin was cold. "But he's a useful idiot." He winked at Jess. "Michael Penlon. Senator Keller's chief of staff."

Jess felt her throat go dry.

"After that, we went home," Murray said with a shrug. "I'm afraid nobody saw us except for each other."

"And where is home?"

Oblange raised his head. "North of campus. It's very convenient." He smiled. Then a printer hummed behind a stack of books. "And I have your list here."

Conlon nodded and started walking towards the desk. "Thank you, Professor. If you wouldn't mind putting down your home address...?"

"Professor Oblange," Jess asked, "Would you mind if I looked at the spell you used to make your symbol set?"

He frowned as he scribbled something on the sheet of paper in front of him. "I'm afraid I'm not entirely comfortable with that," he said. "If you attended the working group, we might exact certain promises, but magic misused can have disastrous consequences."

Jess snorted. "I'm well aware. That said, it wasn't your language I wanted, or to duplicate your spell. You see, I already have that." She pulled the English-to-Arcane dictionary out of her purse.

Oblange blinked.

Jess gestured at the whiteboard. "I can read about nine out of ten words there, and recognize the rest, which is very strange. I want to compare your spell with mine, and see why whe got the same language."

Murray's grin widened. "It's like I said, Simon. The language was somewhere out in the Aether and you pulled it out. It's the only logical explanation."

Jess pasted a smile on her own face. "Perhaps."

 

[JennyDracos]

Jess sat down in the passenger side of Conlon's car and shuddered. "That was him, wasn't it? He killed her."

Conlon lowered his hand from the ignition. He frowned slightly, then raised his eyebrows gently. "We don't know that. It's a possibility, and we'll be looking into him, but until we find solid evidence, we need to continue to check out other leads. Remember, it's not the only possibility. He could be a creep because he's a serial killer. He could be a creep because he's something else that we need to look into, but someone else is the one who killed Trepes. He could be a creep because he's a smug rich bastard who'd never raise a hand to murder someone because it's too much effort."

The printout crumpled in Jess's hand. She straightened it. "Right."

"If his alibi checks out, that puts him on entirely the wrong side of downtown during rush hour, but we will check it out, and I'm going to put some guys on him. In the meantime, I have some questions for you. Pardon me." He reached over the center console and into the laptop bag next to Jess's feet. He came back with a laptop, flipped it open, and started tapping notes in.

"Such as?"

"When Murray walked in, he called you 'the Rabbit Sergeant.' What does that mean?"

The printout tore. Jess set it down in her lap and closed her eyes. "That's...what the media started calling me during the Senate hearings. Well, Senator Keller came up with it, but they ran with it."

"Which Senate hearings?"

Jess looked at him, to see him looking at her with genuine confusion. "The...hearings about magic. Everything that happened to me happened in a military hospital, under the eyes of military doctors, and that meant plenty of witnesses to say that what had happened was one hundred percent physically impossible, but that it had very definitely happened. Afterwards, I did a compilation of a whole bunch of OSINT of similar cases, and the report went up the chain of command until the Senate called us in. Uh, not the whole Senate, just the Intelligence Committee."

Conlon narrowed his eyes. "How likely is it that other people will recognize you?"

She shrugged. "It depends on how much they watch the news. Or where they watch it. Or when. The Senate hearings were big news when they were on, but now they're not. Of course anyone who watches the Good Reverend's video podcast will see my face regularly, sometimes with demonic features edited in." She stared blankly out the windshield.

Conlon grunted and settled back into his seat. "So, most of the people on this list."

She blinked. "Um. Possibly, yes."

"And they're more likely to talk freely to you than to me."

"That would depend on how they feel about the military."

He snorted. "Your uniform isn't likely to close all that many doors that stay open for my badge. I think it'd help if you came with me."

She blinked. "I can do that."

"Right. First stop is Tom Hill. He's one of Oblange's other teaching assistants, he's been in his 'working group' since the beginning, and he has a sealed juvie record. Can't be that bad, because it's sealed, but." Conlon closed the laptop and slid it back into its bag.

Hill's apartment was across the Anacostia, in River Terrance. It was less than a mile from the apartment Trepes had died in; like hers, it was part of a row of brick duplexes. Unlike hers, it was at the end of the row, with the only thing between it and the side street a low single-car garage with blue siding. The apartment looked dingy; the windows had white curtains on the inside that weren't completely closed but weren't open, and what looked like a thin film of grime around their edges. The white door had plenty of dark smudges on it, and mud spatter around the base, and the brass mailbox was dull.

Conlon led the way up the concrete stepping stones to the front door, and Jess followed. From up close, she could smell dirt, and oregano, and pizza. Not a lot of soap. More than a little marijuana. She frowned. "Do you smell that?" she asked Conlon.

He knocked on the door and threw her a look. "Obviously."

The door was opened by a tall, skinny young man. He wore a loose t-shirt over sweatpants. The t-shirt read "Ask me about EBIDTA." His blond hair was long enough to be messy. There was a slight red tinge to his eyes. He blinked at the two of them. "Can I help you?"

"I'm Detective Conlon, MPD. This is Air Force Sergeant-" and the door slammed in his face.

Conlon swore and pushed the door open. Jess caught a glimpse of the man at the back of the apartment, fumbling with the rear door, before Conlon's back blocked her view.

The garage was barely eight feet tall. Jess leapt up and slapped the edge hard, using it to make sure her feet could clear it. As she kicked off towards the rear of the house, she thanked Rogers for telling her to change into civilian clothes. Running in her uniform skirt and heels would have been much more difficult, even with the help she got from her other self. Instead she cleared the roof with two strides and kicked off over the small grassy yard, turning to face the rear door of the apartment, bracing her hands to throw the runner back.

He was in the process of slamming the rear door shut, came face to face with her, and jerked to a halt. He turned to run the other way.

Conlon came out the back door and grabbed him by the arm and shoulder, guiding him carefully but firmly into the back wall of the house. "Tom Hill? We need to have a little chat."

"Um. I'm Tom Hill," said a young man in a red t-shirt and jeans. He had brown hair, blue eyes, and looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here.

"I don't want to go to Guantanamo Bay!" the runner said into the bricks.

 

[JennyDracos]

The two young men had three chairs at the table in their kitchen, so Jess took the one closest to the front door, while Conlon leaned against the back door. The two young men took the remaining chairs around the small round table, pinning them between the detective and the sergeant.

It was a decent enough kitchen, fairly well maintained unlike the apartment's exterior. A clean towel hung from the handle of the refrigerator decorated liberally with fast food delivery magnets. The sink smelled of dish soap. There was a somewhat dented-looking knife rack close enough to the runner to put Conlon on edge. The room smelled of spices, flour, tomato sauce, olive oil. She could pick up traces of wood smoke and marijuana, but that was almost buried under the food smells.

The runner turned out to be Nathan Washington, Hill's roommate and an undergrad finance student. Even after Conlon had failed to immediately cuff him and throw him in the back of a police car, he kept glancing from the detective to Jess and back. "You're not here to arrest us?"

Conlon raised his eyebrows. "Should I be?"

Jess shook her head. "Magic isn't illegal," she said. "What you do with it might be, but just doing it? No."

"But...why would the military be here?"

Hill was frowning at Jess. "Hey. Aren't you Jessica Dunbar?"

Jess sighed and nodded.

"Holy shit, dude!" Hill said, turning to Washington. "That's Sergeant Dunbar! The Sergeant Dunbar!"

Washington rocked back in his seat and stared at Jess. Then his mouth broke into a grin, though his eyes still looked sick. "I tried to run from the Rabbit Sergeant?"

Jess sighed and nodded. Again.

"Holy shit, dude!" Washington said. Then his eyes relaxed a bit. "Uh, no disrespect, or nothing."

Conlon snorted. "Speaking as an officer of the law, we do tend to find people running from us rather disrespectful."

Washington slumped. "I'm sorry, I just panicked. I've just been helping Hill with some of his ideas, and I did try one thing, and then we had the Air Force at the door, and I freaked out."

Jess looked at Hill. "What ideas are he talking about?"

Hill flushed. "Well, don't laugh, okay? So, I'm from NYC, and all the pizza places around here, none of them really know how to make a pie. But my oven won't get hot enough for long enough to get the stone warmed right, so I etched in some runes. You said you know Professor Oblange, right? Well, his symbol set works great if you want to surround an area, especially a circle."

"You don't say," Jess murmured.

He kept going. "So what I did was, I do two things to the stone. The first is, when there's no pizza on it, the stone has a really low specific heat. That means when I preheat the oven, by the time the oven is at temperature, so's the stone. Then, when I throw the pizza on it to cook, the stone has a really high specific heat. So it really soaks the heat into the pizza, gets the crust cooking fast. And when it's done, and I take the pizza off the stone - well, then it goes back to the low specific heat, and it cools down fast and I can put it away in no time."

Jess glanced at Conlon. He was giving Hill a look of horrified fascination.

Hill was looking at the table, still a little flushed. "There's one other project I'm working on, but it's not all there yet."

Conlon raised an eyebrow. "More pizza? Pizza duplication, maybe?"

Hill coughed. "Actually...ice cream. See, the creamiest ice cream is made with liquid nitrogen, but the landlady would never let a nitrogen truck pull up in front of the house to fill a dewar, you know? But I got this." He stood, turning around, opening a cabinet. Conlon straightened to clear his holster, but Hill just reached up to the top shelf and pulled out a pair of thick blue gloves and a big plastic bowl. Then he pulled the gloves on and carefully pulled out what looked like a beaker made out of frosted glass.

The instant he moved the beaker, Jess realized that the glass was literally frosted, as a clear liquid splashed up and out of the beaker and vanished into a cloud of thick fog that curled down towards the ground. Carefully, Hill lowered the beaker to chest height, then emptied it into the bowl. The bowl filled with fog and the sides of it iced over.

And then the beaker was empty, with only a bare trickle coming from within.

"And...that's why it doesn't work so good," Hill said. He sighed and set the beaker down on the table, then pulled the gloves off. "Basically, there's two little things etched on the inside of the beaker. The first one sets the temperature to about two hundred degrees below zero. That's cold enough for nitrogen to liquefy, and since air is mostly nitrogen, it puddles on the bottom. Problem is, air is only mostly nitrogen. If I leave it sitting upright, all the nitrogen in the beaker will condense, and more air will be pulled in. But after a while, it's mostly really cold oxygen inside, and only a little nitrogen, so it slows way down. If it's upside down, it works faster, but I can't store it."

Conlon's eyebrows were raised. "This for ice cream?"


Hill coughed. "Partly. Mostly to see if it could be done. And the answer is 'yes, technically.' But the other way is just way easier."

Jess frowned. "You said the beaker did two things?"

Hill coughed again. "Well, yeah. I had to, uh, change the boiling point of oxygen in the beaker, or I get a beaker full of liquid oxygen. Once was enough."

"Ice cream," Conlon said, shaking his head. Then he looked at Washington. "And you?"

Washington squirmed.

 

[JennyDracos]

Jess pulled out her notebook, flipped to the first blank page, and threw together a stanza in English. She frowned at the page. "You have to admit, proctoring a midterm is a pretty good alibi. That's a lot of witnesses."

Conlon sighed. "I don't mind ruling out suspects. I just wish it hadn't taken so much time."

She looked up at him. "Are you sure it's okay to let Washington go? I mean, alibi or not, there is still the whole 'turning oregano into marijuana' thing, and I'm pretty sure Hall is telling him to call a lawyer while we sit here."

He shrugged. "Honestly not my concern. To me he's one small-time stoner, and I have a homicide to investigate. Now, I am going to pass his information on to Narcotics. They'll decide whether to bring him in or not. In the meantime, I have a long list of possible associates to speak with." He stared at the front of the house. "Is that normal? Using magic to cook pizzas, make ice cream? Drugs?"

Jess began substituting words in Arcane. "Thankfully, yes. Right now they're just playing around, trying to figure out what they can do. They're dipping their toes in the water. There really are not a lot of people trying to do things that are real, and most aren't having much success." She frowned. "On one level, it bothers me. This is something that can and will change the world. On the other hand, it means your people and mine can maybe get ahead of the curve before we start dealing with supervillains."

"Supervillains?" Conlon scoffed. "Seriously?"

She looked up at him. "Do you know what's stopping our killer from changing himself to be arbitrarily stronger? Or other people? Because if we're lucky, it's that he knows it'll make him even more crazy than he is." She looked back down at her page, rearranged two words, then started counting runes. "And if we're not, then it just hasn't occured to him yet."

"That's a cheery thought." He sat up, leaned forward to turn the keys in the ignition. Then he looked at her book. "What's that?"

"I want to test a theory, based on something Murray said." She sketched out a quick circle and began filling it with runes. "He said that just because a magical creature didn't exist didn't mean we couldn't conjure up its language. It makes sense that the killer would use the language of the creature he was trying to summon. And the chain. Why chain her? Yes, it does fit the bait theme, but from the perspective of mythology, it makes more sense."

"Mythology?" Conlon's eyes narrowed. Then widened. "Saint George!"

"Derived from Perseus and Andromeda, of course, but Saint George fought dragons." She scribbled 'Hello, World' in the middle of the ring of text, then closed the circle.

Two rows of crooked lines appeared where the English words had been.

"And our killer wrote a spell in Draconic on the wall." She slapped the book closed.

"You can reverse that, right?" Conlon nodded to the book. "You can translate from the dragon language to English?"

Jess looked at him, then faced forward and banged the back of her head into the headrest.

Wordlessly, Conlon pulled out a sheaf of photographs, flipped through them till he found one with the wall, and passed it over.

Jess flipped to the next page, carefully traced out the revised spell. She set the photo in the center, and closed the circle.

The script in the picture morphed from the jagged strokes of Draconic to the more familiar curves of English.

"The Dread God Vranex, Ruler of Dragons, comes to seize the Realm. Grant him six offerings of the wise and do him obeisance, lest he destroy you. Make ready the way and he shall set you above the flocks. He rules the sky wreathed in flames, and his anger is death."

"Dear God." Conlon squeezed his crucifix.

"Shit." Jess glared at the verse. "Okay, it sounds big, but it's not the spell he cast. It's not what brought his dragon in."

He frowned. "How so?"

"It's not commanding," Jess said. She closed her eyes and leaned back. "It's describing. It's not stating the way things are or will be, it's a promise, this for that. And it doesn't fit the symbolism. Six offerings - but unless we missed something big, there was one. Make ready the way? That's very different from bait."

"Then why did he put it on the wall?"

Jess looked at Conlon. "I don't know. I think we need to talk to the Doc. He's way better with theory than I am."

 

[JennyDracos]

Joint Base Andrews wasn't far from Hill and Washington's duplex, but there was plenty of time for Jess to call Nowroski and give him the bare bones. Once they arrived, Jess led the way to his office, and someone in blue scrubs waved them towards the lab.

"Detective Michael Conlon," Jess said as she stepped into the room. "Colonel Edward Nowroski, AFRL, PhD, MD, etc."

Then she got a look at the lab bench he was using.

The end of the bench, the one with his computer and his notes, was even more jumbled than ever. The rest of the bench was lined with circles in varying sizes and colors. Aligned, unaligned; red, green, blue, silver; thin, tight writing, fat block characters. Near the colonel's workspace, a group of steel marbles hovered over the center of two nested circles.

Conlon had to step around Jess to get in. He gave the bench a quizzical glance, but focused on the older man and strode over, hand outstretched. "Colonel," he said.

"Detective." Nowroski smiled and shook Conlon's hand. "But please. Let's not stand on formality. Nowroski is fine. Or Doc."

Jess walked slowly towards the bench, leaning in to get a better look at the table. "Zone spells. Up, down, in and out?"

Nowroski smiled at her, but instead of answering, he pulled one of the spheres out of the mass, then flicked it down the table. The first line it crossed, it jumped six inches, then dropped down to barely over the table, then curved away from the center of the next ring like it had hit an invisible hill. Eventually, it rolled to the side of the table, then went ramrod-straight back up to the workspace and rejoined the hovering pile.

"Interlocking spells," Jess said after a moment. "And they all work like that?"

He nodded. "If the sphere crosses the line of a circle, it takes effect. When I apply a nested spell, if they compete, the inner wins, but the outer lasts. But!" He pointed at a point where the arc of one circle cut through another, blackened and dark. "If the borders of the circles overlap? Destructive failure for at least one of them."

"I wonder if there's-"

"Excuse me," Conlon cut in, hard edge to his voice. "Little matter of ritual homicide?"

Jess blanched, then flushed. "Sorry." She pulled the modified photo out of her book. "This is what the killer wrote on the wall. It's translated - what he put up was apparently in the language of dragons."

Nowroski blinked. "Dragons? Oh, dear." He took the photo and read it carefully, twice.

Conlon described the crime scene in clinical detail. Jess listened in near-stupefaction. She'd barely noticed a quarter of what he was reciting from memory. Soon he drew to a close, and a pause. "What do you think, Colonel?"

Nowroski frowned and looked at the ceiling. "So you saw no evidence of fire, sheep, or wayfinding?"

Jess sighed and shook her head. "No." She reached out and grabbed one of the marbles, then slid it down the table. It rolled right, then left, then rose, then fell again. "It has all the hallmarks of a spell, but it doesn't match the scene. Could it have just fizzled?"

The ball hit the edge of the table, rolling into the return.

Conlon took one himself, then lobbed it in a soft underhand. It dipped low, almost hitting the bench before it launched up. "Why fizzled?" he asked. "What makes you think it didn't do exactly what he wanted? Something small."

Jess shook her head. "It's big. Literally, and thus metaphysically. It's the writing on the wall, it's in huge letters - or runes, or characters, whichever - and it's written in the lifeblood of a woman, a young woman in the prime of her life. Whatever it was meant to do was big. It doesn't make sense that we could stand in the same room and not see what it was, and those claw marks don't match 'Dread God, Ruler of Dragons.'"

He rolled another marble down the bench. "What if it happened outside the room?"

Nowroski shook his head. "It's the context problem. A room is surrounded by walls, and walls make irritatingly effective barriers to magical effects."

"I've had spells fail just from me walking through a doorway," Jess added.

"I've had one work when I walked through a doorway, but then someone closed the door and the spell failed."

"On the other hand..." Jess frowned, then started to walk down the length of the bench. "What if...Colonel, do you mind if I write on here?"

"Please, be my guest." He tossed her a silver marker.

Jess found a reasonable spot on the table and scribbled out a quick verse. A step to the right, another stanza, then one more on the far side of the bench. Two steps left, two more stanzas. Then she took a step back.

The five dots were in a very rough pentagram. One was in a green circle, one in red. Two were in separate blue circles, and only one wasn't in one of the circles that Nowroski had drawn.

"Context," said Nowroski. "They're all in separate contexts."

Jess nodded and walked back to the end of the workplace with the midair mass of steel marbles. "Alright, let's see how this goes." Then she pushed her hand through the floating pile.

The orbs flew down the bench, spreading out as they did. Some hid the first circle and deflected; another hit a different circle and went high or low or bounced in another direction. Each and every ball, however, stopped even before it reached the first stanza, freezing in midair.

"They didn't cross the line," Conlon said. "They didn't even reach it. What did you do?"

Jess nodded at him. "It's a three foot radius," she said. "They get within three feet of some point - probably the geometric center of that circle, and they stop."

"In effect," Nowroski said slowly, "you're generating your own context, that ignores the existing boundaries."

"And that's what the killer is doing." Jess sighed. "If he can get his spell in enough places, then it'll make a region that his dragon can come through."

Conlon's phone rang. He pulled it out, glanced at the caller, blanched and put it to his ear.

"The wise," Nowroski frowned. "Wizards, perhaps? So people who can use magic."

Jess's throat tightened. "Every person on that list isn't just a suspect, they're a target. And he's going to be killing five more."

"On my way," Conlon said, lowering his phone. "Four. Narcotics detectives just went to pick up Nathan Washington. He's missing. Tom Hill is dead."

 

[JennyDracos]

Chapter Four

Jess didn't even count the cars as Conlon rolled past, slowing to park. He'd barely parked before he was out of the car, heading to the apartment they'd been in barely an hour before.

Jess followed closely behind. There wasn't a whole lot of pattern to work with - but there also hadn't been a whole lot of window for the killer.

"He must have watched us leave," Conlon was saying. "But why?"

"Maybe," Jess said. Something about it bothered her. "I need to see Washington's work space."

"In a bit," Conlon said as a uniformed officer bustled up to him with a clipboard. "Who's first on scene?"

"Detective Valentine." The officer gestured towards a woman walking towards them. "Her and Detective Williams came to talk to the missing, saw the body. They called it in and cleared the house, then came out."

Conlon looked at the approaching detectives and sighed heavily. "Contaminating my scene?"

Jess took the chance to appraise the part of detectives. Valentine smelled of gunpowder and Kevlar, a little tension, and a very, very little of marijuana and cocaine. Williams smelled of sweat, and looked like he spent most of his off-time in the gym. He was big, with dark skin, a neatly trimmed beard, and short black hair. His jacket looked like it could barely contain his muscles. She wasn't nearly so big; tall and curvy, with lighter skin that was still so much darker than Jess or Conlon contrasted nicely with her gold earrings, and her own jacket was easily loose enough to cover the vest she was almost certainly wearing under it.

Her eyes narrowed, their lines showing through a thin layer of makeup. Then they rolled. "Looking for threats or injured, Mike, you know procedure." She had an accent. Hispanic, though Jess couldn't tell whether that meant Puerto Rican, Mexican, or something else. "Who's the Fed?"

"Sergeant Dunbar," he grunted. "Military."

Both narcotics cops looked at her sharply, but it was Williams who spoke up. His voice was deep and rumbling, and he made exactly zero effort to keep the suspicion and mistrust out of his voice. "What's the military doing here?"

Jess's other self quivered and tried to make herself look small, but Jess pushed that aside and forced a smile. "I'm a specialist in non-direct methodology. Since the killer seems to be using it, I'm here as a technical advisor."

"Non-direct what?" Williams frowned.

"Magic," Conlon grunted. "She's a mage. Focus, people. Dead body. What happened?"

Valentine's eyes stayed locked on Jess, but when she spoke, she talked to Conlon. "Nathan Washington fit the profile of a guy we suspect of supplying the gangs around here. Not competing with the cartels, you understand, but supplementing. Exotic strains of weed, mostly. Basically the minute you passed his name our way, he flagged, and we came down here."

"We logged arrival, approached the door." She shook her head. "Door was wide open, Mike, and we could see the body from outside. And the blood. So we radioed for backup, then went in to see if our guy was here, or maybe the cartels got him and the roommate for a message. He wasn't, in or out."

Valentine shrugged. "Thing is, we got nothing. I got a report for you here, but he wasn't on our radar till you tossed him to us. No known haunts, nothing."

Conlon nodded. "Alright. Dunbar, I want to walk through everything as-is. If there's anything invisible, can you break it after I finish?"

"I'll have to do it room-by-room."

Valentine raised a hand. "Wait, wait. Invisible? Seriously?"

Conlon grimaced. "There was at the first scene. Big-ass message written in blood, all over the wall. One minute nothing, next minute, boom. Alright, Dunbar."

Jess followed him into the house, Williams and Valentine trailing after them. Like with Trepe's apartment, the whole place stunk of blood but was quiet as death. The only noise was Conlon's feet against the carpet as he moved across the tiny living room to stand in the doorway to the kitchen, sparing a glance for the small hallway to his right.

He stood and looked for a long minute, then stood there in thought. Finally, he glanced back at Jess. "Alright. Dunbar, you're sure that spell won't go through the walls?"

"I'm sure," she said.

"Alright. Go ahead and un-spell these two while I look at the bedrooms."

Valentine gently pushed Jess aside. "Not alone you don't, not if we couldn't actually clear the house. Williams, give Dunbar here some help. See if you can see what she does. Invisibility is the last thing we need."

Williams grimaced and turned to face Jess. "She's right. You mind if I watch?"

"Not for a heartbeat," Jess said as she pulled her book out and tore a blank sheet from the back. Then she flipped to the invisibility removal spell and copied down the runes, reversed from inside to out, the same way she'd done at Trepe's place.

"On paper?" Williams sighed. "I was kinda hoping you were gonna draw it in the air. Paper feels so..."

She glanced up at him, her eyebrows quirked in amusement. "Mundane?"

He sighed again.

She frowned, giving it some serious thought. "In the air...I have no idea how you would do that. Logically, it would work better, but paper works fine and it's easy to destroy if you need to, which can be very important." She looked back down at the paper and scribed the runes for the inner ring. She turned so she could show him the notebook. "Outer ring clears invisibility. Inner ring creates a gust of wind and pushes the outer ring out. Magic doesn't work well through walls, so it'll stop there. Now all I have to do is..." and she completed the circle.

As it had at the last crime scene, a gentle burst of air pushed out from the paper.

"Well, damn," Williams said. Then he frowned. "Nothing showed up, though."

Jess shrugged. "Honestly, I don't know if the killer knows how to make things invisible, or has any interest in it. I'm pretty sure it was the victim at the last scene that did for that room, it just carried on after she died."

Williams frowned at the paper. "Is that something I could do?" he asked. "Valentine's right - if we can just walk past a truck full of cocaine, we're pretty much dead in the water."

Jess nodded. "Sure. I'll let you do the kitchen, even." She hesitated. "Though I think I'll draw the runes. I know them better, and they could do something wonky if they're not precise enough." She moved to the back of the apartment.

The instant she stepped in, she froze, her other self screaming that she needed to get away from the blood, the body. Predators could still be here, scavengers could be coming. Jess ignored her and took the next step, and a good look at the room. Her nose only told her one thing. Her eyes told her so much more.

Tom Hill had died on his own kitchen table. His head hung over a bowl full of blood and water - the same bows he'd poured liquid nitrogen in as a demonstration. His ankle was handcuffed to one leg of the table, and his face held confusion and fear. The wall between the kitchen and whichever bedroom it was held the familiar prophecy, in four-inch strokes of blood.

Something about that writing bothered Jess, but she had work to do. She pulled out another sheet of paper and carefully went through the runes, then she held it up for Williams. "Alright, now all you have to do is complete the inner circle."

He frowned at her. "That's really all it takes?"

She grimaced and waggled her hand. "Yes and no. Belief, intent, symbolism. These symbols - my group worked hard to come up with ones that would work. These do. They describe the specific effect we want. Intent - you want to cast the spell, right?"

He nodded. "Definitely."

Jess grinned. "And that means the only factor left is that you believe it works, and you saw me do it two minutes ago. So now all you have to do is draw the circle and complete the spell." She held out the pen.

Williams hesitated for a moment, then took the pen and closed the circle. A burst of wind flowed out from the page.

Jess looked around the room. Nothing different. She looked at Conlon as he entered the room. "Nothing here," she said. "Or the living room."

Conlon grunted. "Alright. Valentine, how long you planning to stick around?"

She shrugged. "Depends. You want me to talk to my Captain?"

He started, cocking an eyebrow at her.

Valentine shrugged again. "It's not like Williams and I have time to spare, and your killer isn't exactly in our jurisdiction. But your missing is, and very. If someone in town can straight make narcotics, we need to stop that, and if the only way we can do that and not get in your way is to be right next to you, hey, we all swore the same oath to serve and protect."

"Alright. I can live with that." He raised a finger. "But it's my case."

She grinned. "And I can live with that." She paused, then jerked her head towards Jess. "You mind if I watch her while she does her thing in the other rooms?"

Conlon shook his head. "Go ahead."

Jess nodded to Valentine and led her through the short corridor, giving the detective a quick rundown on the known principles of magic. As she walked, she sketched out the runes for the counterspell.

The room on the left was somewhat sloppy; it smelled of unwashed sheets and male body odor. The desk was strewn with papers, held in place with biology textbooks. A laptop was on the bed, open, screen locked.

Jess stepped to the center of the room and completed the inner circle.

"Nothing," she said after giving the room a second pass.

Valentine frowned. "You're sure it worked, though?"

Jess nodded. "Definitely. Basically, that blast of wind was half the spell. If the whole spell didn't work, the whole spell wouldn't work. If we don't see any changes, then there was nothing to change."

"Spells never work halfway?"

Jess thought of Oblange's big lizard. "Not with this structure," she said. "My spells all use nested rings, so the spell is the spell. Now, it's possible for a spell to do something other than what you expected if you use the wrong symbols."

Then Jess stepped into the other bedroom. The smell of smoke rolled over her in an overpowering wave, and her thought process was abruptly derailed.

She blinked and looked around the room. Rumpled bed, desk, laptop. Open cardboard box on the desk. Finance textbooks, potted plants - household herbs, all. Fennel, bay, was that mustard? She closed her eyes and inhaled. Smoke, blood, marijuana. In that order.

"Do you smell smoke?" she asked.

Valentine grimaced. "A bit, yeah. It doesn't smell like house fire, though. Maybe he thought it'd cover up the weed."

Her spell would probably work better if she was in the center of the room, but she couldn't bring herself to take another step. Well, it would still work where she was. She stood there, just inside the doorway, and wrote out the same sequence of runes one more time. A burst of wind flowed out.

As it passed over the ground, rings of draconic runes in red paint appeared, carefully placed on the surface of the carpet. Another, smaller ring was burned into the desk - right next to the soldering iron that must have been used to do it. A half-dozen more plants appeared on the bookcases, draconic runes ringing their pots.

Jess froze. She should have known - she should have guessed - if only she'd- "FUCK!" she shouted.

A moment later, Conlon pushed past Valentine. His face tightened, but he just pulled out his radio. "Dispatch, One David Fourteen. Please revise the BOLO on Nathan Washington. He is considered a suspect, and may be armed and dangerous. He may be accompanied by a large, aggressive animal."

"Copy that, One David Fourteen."

Jess was still swearing at herself. "I should have looked at his spells," she said.

"Don't second-guess," Conlon said. "We know he didn't kill Trepes. We don't actually know he killed Hill. Process the scene."

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. She slowly let it out through her nose. Opening her eyes, she looked at Conlon. "I'll start translating the spells, then."

He nodded and left the room. Valentine headed over to the shelves to get a closer look at the plants, carefully walking around the circle on the floor.

That circle was the priority, Jess decided. It was big enough for Washington to have stood in, and on the floor, which meant he could have used it on himself. Probably did, given the difficulty in putting it on the carpet. Hesitating, Jess pulled out a blank sheet of paper, sketched a circle, and scribed her translation spell. Then she began to carefully copy the draconic runes onto her page.

"These look like hemp crosses," Valentine said. "But I don't know what with."

"They could be magical mutations," Jess said. She closed the circle and read the writing within. "Fuck. This one on the floor confers knowledge. Draconic, to be precise."

Valentine shrugged. "Could be worse."

"It probably is worse." Jess sighed. "I don't see any limits or controls on it, which means it's a spell that changes your brain in at least one specific way. I don't think there's any way that can end well. It also means that Washington knows how to, and is willing to, magically alter himself. I wouldn't be surprised if claws or scales or fire breathing was next."

"Well, those will make it harder for him to blend in," Valentine said. She leaned in very close to the pots. "This one smells like ashes."

Jess stepped over to the desk and copied down the burned in runes. She closed the circle, watched as the ink blurred. She read the translatio.

Then she read it again.

She sighed. "The one on the desk is gibberish. Just words. 'Alchemy,' 'dragons,' 'blood,' 'breath,' 'smoke,' 'fire,' a few others. It can't be a spell. It has to be a part of one, with the rest spoken and performed."

Valentine nodded. "Makes sense. He wasn't ready to mass-produce. Burning that in might make it more effective, but he was stuck with what he had."

Jess grimaced. "That fits, but it also means I don't know what he was doing here."

Valentine gestured at the plants. "Well, I'm seeing evidence that these plants have been pruned back very thoroughly and repeatedly. So either they're crazy fast-growing, or these pots are healing the plants after he cut a branch off."

"Dunbar, Valentine!" Conlon called from the kitchen.

As soon as they got there, Conlon looked at them. "I'm turning the scene over to the examiners. Valentine, talk to your captain; we could use the help. Dunbar, do you have everything you need from the suspect's room?"

She sighed. "Everything I can get, anyway. Everything else isn't written down."

Conlon's face tightened. "That's...well, it is what it is. I'm not comfortable taking you on a manhunt - you're not armed and I don't have a spare vest, and I'm going to have to rattle some cages. Can you find something else to work on?"

Jess's throat squeezed, but she nodded. "Let me talk to Oblange, then. I can keep an eye on him. He's a target, too."

Conlon grimaced, then shrugged. "Alright. Do you need me to get you there?"

"I can make it," she said.

 

[JennyDracos]

A half-hour cab ride later, Jess was knocking on Professor Oblange's office door. "Professor Oblange? It's Jessica Dunbar."

After a moment, the door opened, and Oblange's brown face was looking down at her. "So it is, so it is!" He held it open and waved her in.

As she walked in, she glanced at the board. To her surprise, the runework had been replaced with the jagged strokes of Draconic. Unlike the scrawls she'd seen at the two crime scenes, they were neat, straight lines, almost like they'd been drawn with a ruler. Their arrangements hadn't changed, however; still the same boxes, still the same lines, all running down to a marked-out square on the floor.

She saw a flicker of motion out of the corner of her eye. She turned in time to a black blur moving towards her and she threw out her arms to ward herself.

Then the blur resolved into a winged creature that set down, softly but heavily, on her arms. Carefully, she folded them so that she could hold it.

Him.

Now that he wasn't moving - much - it was clear that Oblange had run the spell to turn Charlie into a dragon, and that this time, it had worked. His scales were even darker, almost black - the green was just a trace of iridescence against the soft lights of the room. He had tucked his wings against his sides, so it was hard to tell how big they were, but he had wings. He could fly. He could also sit on his haunches, rest his forefeet on her shoulders, and line his bright green eyes with her own, which she knew because he promptly did. A soft trilling note came out of his mouth, and he tilted his head inquisitively.

"Oh my goodness," she whispered. She felt a smile rising on her lips. "You are so cute!"

Charlie blinked at her and chirped. Then he twisted slightly, craning his neck to look past her, and chirped again.

She turned to see Oblange closing the door and turning a shiny, new-looking deadbolt. She raised an eyebrow.

"I'm not trying to lock you in, Sergeant Dunbar. But I may have done something..." He pulled in a breath, worry in his eyes as he tried to find the right words. "Rash. I have acted without due consideration."

Jess looked down at the dragon. "I can see that."

"I'm so very glad you came." The worry was still there, but Oblange's smile looked genuine. He started walking towards his desk. "David's gone out of town, and I really want to talk about...well, Charlie. I felt I owed it to him, you see." He set his hands against the surface of the desk and slumped slightly. "He was there for me at a very bad time in my life, but...most lizards only live for so long, you know."

Jess stroked the lizard - no, dragon's- head. He closed his eyes and hummed, and pushed his head into her palm. It was definitely much bigger than it had been when he had been a dragon lizard. It was shaped differently, too; the ridge of spines running above and back from his eyes were joined into what looked like a band of armor, flaring out into a single horn on each side at the back of his skull. His neck had gotten longer, too.

She glanced over at the whiteboard. "I see you went with Professor Murray's suggestion," she said.

"I did," Oblange confirmed. "Although I didn't change the format, just the language of the writing. This way just feels more natural."

"That's important," she agreed. Then she grimaced and lowered her hand to rest on her arm and give the dragon a little more support. "Though I'm afraid I can't be much help. I'm almost at comprehension for the arcane runes, but the best I can do with this is say 'yes, that's draconic.'"

He smiled at her, turning to face her with his hands behind his back. "Ah, but what if I gave you a cheat sheet?"

Jess narrowed her eyes. She turned to look at Charlie. "Do you know what he's talking about?"

Charlie dropped from her shoulders, but twisted his neck around to look at her and chirped.

"Et voila," the professor said, and whisked a glass disk from behind his desk. He held it out.

Jess freed her right hand from the dragon, cradling him in her left. She reached out, took the disk, and looked at it, curiously. It looked like a blank lens. She frowned at Oblange, then took a close look at the rim of the glass.

Etched in arcane runes was a translation spell from English to Draconic.

"Handy!" Jess held the disk in front of her eye and looked at the wall. Clear descriptions, spell out in very neat English lettering, stood where the rigid lines had been. "How did you make it?"

"Very carefully," he said. "I inked out the design, then used a scribe with a very light touch. Did you know that you can actually line the runes up end to end and form an unbroken line?"

"Yes," she said quietly. "It's one of the things we wanted from it, which is why I'm pretty sure we invented it and you called it forth." She raised the disk to her eye and began reading the translation, module by module. One quick pass over the whole thing, then a deep dive, looking at each specific module. At some point Charlie jumped down from her arms and darted over to a pile of books, but she hardly noticed. She focused on the words, hunting for loopholes, exceptions, or things that made no sense.

After a few minutes, she lowered the glass and looked at Oblange. "What was it you wanted me to look for?"

Oblange sighed and crouched down, holding his arms out, and Charlie jumped into him. The professor rocked back a little with the force of the little creature, but he held it close as he stood. A shadow covered his face. Slowly, he said, "Charlie has been a friend to me for many years. But after it was done, I started to worry. What if I turned him into a monster?"

Jess turned to look at the wall. Now that she knew what she was looking at, she could tell he had arranged the various modules to correspond with the body; the brain at one end, the tail to the other, and the bulk of the changes in a sort of hump over the middle. She scanned the text one last time. "Okay, I can definitely say that the enchantment to make him smart won't make him kill humans for food or sport. He's not venomous, either." She sighed. "But I have to admit, I don't really understand the transmutations. I can see you're doing something to his heart, and his digestive tract, but not what. They do. I don't know what will trigger aggression in him, or..."

Oblange sighed and shook his head. "I can tell you that none of the changes I made would make him more aggressive. And you've seen how friendly he is. But under the circumstances, I don't know who would believe me." He looked up at Jess, fear in his eyes. "I don't want to see him destroyed."

Charlie reached up and nuzzled Oblange, trilling quietly.

The man reached up to stroke the dragon's back. "Thank you, Charlie," he said, but she knew there was nothing the dragon could do to ease his fears.

"What about your partner?" Jess asked.

"David?" Oblange sighed again. "He's a wonderful man, and he does know more than a little about the law, but he is a finance person. He barely knows the difference between a clade and a clone. And he's away so often lately. I know times are getting difficult, but I'd rather have someone at home who could calm Charlie down before someone sends Animal Control at us, and, well, he can't. And lately, just the sight of him scares Charlie, I don't know why."

Jess frowned. "He's been travelling?"

Oblange nodded. "Oh, he's always gone places. Conferences, committees, boards, other universities, you know. But lately, it's all been on such short notice. I understand, everything is a little crazy these days, but it's still quite frustrating. Even today, with everything going on with Victoria, he had to go to New York for an advisory council."

Jess really hoped that Conlon had managed to alert New York. She tried to keep that out of her voice. Nice and easy, just curiosity. "When did he find out about this council meeting?"

The professor opened his mouth to answer, but then Charlie twisted out of his arms, his wings fluttering to drop him gently between Oblange and the door. The dragon hissed angrily, flaring his wings.

Jess could smell it, too. Smoke. Marijuana. Blood.

Tom Hill's killer was right outside the door to Oblange's office, and Simon Oblange was a target.

 

[JennyDracos]

Someone pounded on the door.

Jess yanked her bag open and grabbed her phone and a thick marker. Then she tossed her bag to the side, dropped low, and spun, marking out most of a circle on the floor.

"Professor Oblange?" A part of her head recognized Nathan Washington's voice, but she'd known that by the smell. Her other self, though, keyed in on the undercurrent of excitement in his voice.

He was here to kill.

She glanced up at Oblange, who was looking from Charlie to the door to her and back, shook her head frantically, and waved him towards the back wall. Then she began marking out runes. It was a race. If she finished the runes in time, she won. If she didn't finish - or if one single line was out of place - she died.

"You might not know me, I'm Nathan Washington? I'm one of Der- uh, Professor Murray's students."

Oblange crouched down and gently scooped up Charlie. The confusion on his face had been replaced by worry, but he took a step back.

Jess finished the last rune, then carefully scrutinized the first stanza, and the second, and the third. Everything looked acceptable. A weapon would have been better, but she didn't have nearly the time it would take to do that.

She completed the circle, then dialed Conlon.

The door handle turned, but the deadbolt was still in place. "Professor? Professor Murray sent me here with a personal message. It's really urgent. Could you please let me in?"

"Conlon!" Jess whispered urgently. "Washington is here. Oblange's office-"

The phone sparked and died in her hands, and the door blew inwards.

Washington stepped through the cloud of splinters.

He was breathing heavily, a puff of smoke coming out with each breath. His lips were contorted into a smile, and Jess could see that his teeth were all vaguely pointed. His eyes were red - very red, beyond bloodshot. They were also locked on her own.

"I knew it was you," he growled, his voice sounding rough. Then he straightened, his eyes widening, as if some thought had just occured to him. His expression turned into a smile, flashing those pointed teeth at her. "But that's right! I don't care, do I? This just means there are two of the Wise to offer, that's all! And perhaps after, I'll dine on well-roasted rabbit. The wizard won't mind that, as long as your hearts go to serve the Dread God."

Jess tossed her dead phone onto her bag and shifted into a fighting stance. She clenched a fist and drew it back, as if to throw a punch over the ten feet between her and the smiling killer. White hot rage flooded her. "Kill him? Kill me? Eat me? FUCK THAT!"

Her fist went forward. Next to it, an orb of fire coalesced out of thin air, flying at Washington.

He fell right on his ass, and the orb smashed into the wall to his left. He scrambled backwards on all fours, his eyes wide.

She pulled back her other fist, her blood boiling. Another orb of fire popped into being as she punched.

Washington rolled out of sight even as the ring around Jess's feet burst with a short, sullen glow, then went smokey. The orb puffed out as quickly as it had puffed in.

But Jess still wanted blood.

She kicked off, leaving the blown spell behind her. Two steps and she was in the hallway. She glared down the hall. Washington was thirty feet away, his hands on a student he'd just shoved out of his way. Papers flew through the air behind him. Most of that group was now between him and her, crowded enough she couldn't see past them except to see the end of the hallway, another sixty feet along.

She sprinted towards them, building up speed. The group had turned to yell at Washington, milling, blocking her off. Going through them would take too long. That was okay. She flexed her legs and pushed herself up and into the air, spinning. Her foot caught the wall, stopped the spin, pushed herself over the crowd.

From here she could see Washington. Somehow she hadn't gained at all, and now there were only thirty feet between him and the door at the end of the hall. And no more students. She reversed the spin so she'd hit the floor right side up.

As soon as she did, she accelerated. Her arms pumped and she gained on him.

He hit the door, rolled off it as it opened, making it through the crack, letting in just a moment of light, then slamming it shut and heading right out of view through the windows. That would be down the stairs to the ground, then.

She hit the door three seconds later and didn't turn. It was only one storey up. She just vaulted over the rail, holding it just long enough to make sure she landed where she wanted.

Washington burst out from the stairwell below, still running. He looked back, but she wasn't behind him.

She was on top of him, and he broke her fall nicely. She rode him down, then tumbled clear and bounced back to her feet.

With a moment to think, she took stock of the situation.

She went cold.

She was alone, unarmed, unarmored, and facing someone who had clearly magically augmented himself.

He snarled at her, his hand coming out from under his coat with a knife. It was wicked and curved and dark and there was dried blood on it. "Meat can bite," he said, "but in the end, it's still meat."

Jess's eyes narrowed. "Don't push me, Washington."

He actually hissed at her. "That is an old name. An old name for an old world."

"The world make have changed, but we still live in it. Nathan." Unarmed or not, she could still outrun him. All she had to do was keep his attention until Conlon-

"FREEZE!" Conlon was running up from the left, his pistol up and out, trained on Washington.

Washington's head whipped towards Conlon. His eyes widened. Once again, the acrid smell of rage vanished, replaced by the sharp smell of terror. He raised the knife a little, backing away slowly, then turned around.

Valentine and Williams came around that corner, their own pistols up. "Drop it!" Williams said.

He did.

Jess took a step back from him, her own breathing evening out.

Conlon moved in towards Washington, keeping his pistol trained. "Valentine, you want to book him?"

"My pleasure," the female detective said. She moved in, too. "On your knees, hand behind your head. Keep them where I can see them."

Conlon took a few sideways steps, still facing Washington's back. "Dunbar, status?"

"I'm good," she said. "Oblange is good - was good - shit, what if he wasn't alone?"

Conlon went pale.