Trio of Sorcery (4 page)

She came to herself with a start, staring at the dying flames in the fireplace.

Crap. Tomorrow is the first day of classes.

Well, if old memories are the worst the universe is going to throw at me tonight, I guess I'm going to be all right here.

Phooey. I am cream-crackered.
She dropped her books on the top of the bookcase next to the desk and stared at the little kitchenette with a frown.
Lunch. Must make lunch. And my brain is full.
Finally, after a moment of indecision, she went to the stove to start hot water for tea. Tea and a PB&J was about all her brain was up to for the moment. She had known intellectually that college was going to be hard, but she hadn't really grasped that it was going to mean a racing start right out of the gate.

Speaking of racing starts…
This building was full of other students, and there was no elevator. The staircase was at the far end of the hall, but she could still hear people running up or down it to get to or from their apartments for lunch. She could see now why the House for the off-campus types was a good idea. It had a library, a lounge, and a cafeteria…and when winter came in earnest, staying there between classes instead of going home was beginning to sound like a good idea.

As she made the sandwich, she cocked her head to the side and listened to the sounds from her upstairs neigh
bors. There was only one floor above hers—she'd really wanted a studio on the fourth floor, to prevent the inevitable herd-of-elephants above her head, late-night party noise, and bathroom leaks, but there weren't any available. So far, though, they hadn't been too bad. Or else the floors were thicker than she thought. They mostly didn't seem to use the floor as a trampoline, or a football field.

They were men, though, so their footfalls weren't exactly light.

Their names were Itzaak Meyer and Emory Sung, and she imagined that mealtime up there probably got pretty interesting. Probably American, maybe New York deli versus—well, she didn't know Emory's exact nationality, “Sung” could be Korean, Chinese…probably not Japanese. Kimchee versus sauerkraut?

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they both like the same food. Hell, for all I know they both like Italian.

Wait, they were men. They wouldn't cook. Would they?

The kettle whistled and she made tea. She amused herself with those thoughts and ate her sandwich in neat little bites before working her way through the Moral Reasoning course homework. That was one of the Core courses that all Harvard students were required to take, and she had figured she would get it out of the way as quickly as possible. She hadn't quite known what to expect from the title Moral Reasoning, and then she'd seen that it wasn't just one course. She could choose one from
among several options; she'd opted for Human Rights, a Philosophical Introduction. It seemed like a good solid choice, something she wasn't likely to flounder in.

That was her first course of the morning. Then came one of the Historical Study track courses, another Core Requirement; those assumed that you had a general foundation in history and elaborated on what they figured you knew. They were supposed to give you insight into how major issues had developed. She'd picked the course on Japan. She didn't know very much about Japan, and now would be a good time to work on that before she had to deal with Japanese folklore in class or nasty Japanese critters on the street.

I need to take a martial arts course.

Judo? Probably. Nasty critters were sometimes very physical in nature. It would be nice if she could ever find someone who actually believed they existed to teach her, but that was like hoping for a money tree to sprout.

The third course that rounded out her morning was a science class, also in the Core Curriculum. She'd picked a basic Archeology course, which had looked pretty interesting from the source description. Now that she'd gotten into it, it looked as if it was going to be more physical than mental, which was good, because she needed something that wasn't going to make her brain explode just before lunch. And who knew? She might be able to use some of what she had learned at some point. Guardians kicked around a lot of strange things.

After lunch was her first Folklore course, followed by nothing. Which would give her most of the afternoon for homework, and most of the evening for writing. Assuming that—

There was a knock on the door, which made her jump and spill her tea a little. She sighed at the interruption, swiped at the tea with her napkin, and got up. Well, maybe it would be one of the boys upstairs. Maybe one of them would be nice. Even handsome. Maybe he'd ask her out.

Maybe pigs will grow wings.

She opened the door, eyeballed the man standing there, half illuminated by the staircase window at the end of the hall, and immediately knew it was
not
one of the boys from upstairs.

It was a cop. She knew cops; how they stood, dressed, moved. She could spot a cop at five hundred yards. Even though this one was in his civvies, she knew cops, and this was one.

“Miss Tregarde?” the cop asked. “Diana Tregarde?” He had a nice voice, a calm tenor. He did not flash a badge. So whatever he was here for, either he was trying to find out something without being official or he really was off-duty. In either case, he knew her name, and obviously where she lived—and why did he know these things? She didn't have a car to be illegally parked, she was just another Harvard student. Her suspicion meter went up a couple of notches.

She nodded, but did not step aside nor invite him in.
Until she knew why he was here, she wouldn't either. Not just because she was paranoid—you couldn't live in Nixon's USA and not be paranoid—but also because she wanted no part of some fishing expedition. She didn't know anyone here in Cambridge except one other Guardian and she hadn't had any real friends to speak of back home, but that didn't mean that a cop wouldn't try to make something out of nothing.

And he knew her name.

For all she knew, that flashback last night had been a warning, telling her that something out of the past was going to come calling and make trouble for her.

The hallway was very, very quiet. So she wasn't the only one around here who had spotted him for what he was. Lovely.

The cop smiled, looking embarrassed. “I know you don't know me, but Lavinia Thurgood sent me. I asked her for a little help with something, and she told me you were in town and that you were better suited to what I need than she is. She says you're pretty good at exposing phony tea-leaf readers and Gypsies.”

Well that was a bolt out of the blue. She blinked at him. “How do you know Lavinia?” she asked cautiously.

“She's a cousin,” he said, and coughed. “I, ah, ask her for help sometimes when I get the kind of…you know…weird stuff. Stuff no one can explain…” His voice trailed off.

That made sense, since Lavinia was another Guardian.
One of the handful that Di had actually talked to; in fact, one of the first ones she had talked to, who had given her what she called “Arcanum 101,” walking her through the basics of what it meant to be a Guardian.

She nodded. “I understand.” For all that Lavinia knew her Ritual High Magic like no one else, she was not good with real-world stuff.

So, phonies. That had been Memaw's pet bugaboo.

That had nothing to do with Guardians, and everything to do with the fact that Memaw had debunked many a “trance medium” in her time. She took a very dim view of people exploiting other people and giving magic a bad name. Real magic, that is. Her pet peeve was the kind of charlatan who would use stage magic to convince people in some of the new witchcraft circles—people who didn't know any better—that he was the real deal, then take everything he could get from them.

There was one guy Memaw really, really hated. He'd been all over the country—he'd pull his song and dance number on some “New Pagan” group, milk them blind, seduce anything with boobs, then do a vanishing act. Then he'd turn up in some old lady's tea and séances Spiritualist group, and do the same there, minus sleeping with the women. And
then
he'd vanish and turn up at some Bible-thumping church, begging to be saved from satanism and use the same stage magic to convince them that he was really being besieged by demons and get into
their
pockets (and sometimes their beds). She still hadn't
managed to nail him when she died, though not for lack of trying.

Memaw had taught Di everything she knew about debunking.

“First, you probably should tell me the problem.” Di still didn't let him in, even though he was kind of cute. Actually, really cute. Black hair, faintly tan, like a young Ricardo Montalban. Black Irish, obviously—the many-times-removed descendant of some of the Spanish sailors from the Armada wrecked off the shores of Ireland back in the fifteenth century. Very, very cute. Still.

He stood in the hallway, looking uncomfortable, but did not ask to come in. He shoved his hands deeply into the pockets of his blue Members Only jacket and shifted his weight to one foot. “I'm one of a bunch of guys on that kidnapping case,” he said slowly.

He didn't have to say more than that, because you would have to have been living in a cave not to know about it. She drew in her breath in a hiss. The kidnapping had been everywhere in the news, and it was making even the Harvard students nervous, though they were way, way outside the age of the victim.

Melanie Fitzhugh was eight years old; she wasn't a particularly pretty little girl, she was actually fairly ordinary, but that just made it all the worse. Every parent with a child could imagine the same thing happening. Melanie and her mother had been shopping and the little girl had gotten
permission to play in a designated play area in the mall. She knew not to leave, but when her mother came back, she was gone. Other children at the play area told Mrs. Fitzhugh that a “policeman” had come to take Melanie to her mother and that she had gone away with him. There had been no other adults in the play area at the time, but it was supposed to be a very safe place, surrounded by stores, the perfect place to leave a responsible child for a few minutes.

Unless, of course, there was a predator in the area who was very, very clever. One who knew exactly how to approach exactly the kind of middle-class child who would trust someone dressed like a policeman.

Still, what did that have to do with debunking psychics?

“I'd like to know who I'm talking with and why before this goes any further,” Di began.

“I'm not asking you to help with the case,” the cop said, and finally produced his badge and ID, flushing. “Well, not directly. This would be strictly off the books.” He handed her the badge and ID to look over, and shifted his weight to the other foot. “If you can, I'd like you to give me a hand with Chris, Melanie's mother. Some creep of a so-called ‘psychic' got to Chris Fitzhugh and now we can't get anything out of her but ‘Tamara says' this and ‘Tamara says' that and ‘Did you look into Tamara's leads yet?'”

“Has she been asking for money?” Diana asked, cautiously examining the ID.
Joe O'Brian.
Well, it looked
genuine, and his very being did shout “cop”; she handed it back and he shoved it in his pocket again. “The psychic, I mean. That's what they usually want.”

“No, which is why we can't get Bunko on it.” O'Brian looked incredibly frustrated. “You'd think she was one of God's own saints, to hear Chris rave about her. I just…” He shook his head. “It's making us crazy.”

She refrained from commenting.

“Her husband too. This Tamara is the only person that Chris is listening to, she's not even talking to him anymore.” Joe ran his hand through his hair, disturbing it from its “regulation” comb. “If you can just prove she's a phony, I mean prove it in a way that Chris can't help but believe—”

Di shook her head. “I don't know. You're talking about someone who is desperate, and this psychic is giving her answers of the sort she wants to hear. That's like arguing with someone's religion. I mean, using only empirical evidence I can prove that half the saints in the Catholic calendar either never existed or were nothing like the legends—”

Joe flushed again.
Ha. With a name like O'Brian, I figured he was Catholic.

“But that means nothing to what people believe, and belief is impossible to budge until people are ready, on their own, to hear the facts. Sometimes that never happens.” It certainly had never happened with Memaw's
bête noire
.

He grimaced. “Would you at least check this chick out? See what she's all about? Find out if she's working an angle so we can shove a stick in her spokes?”

Clearly he was not going to go away until she said yes. He had the look of a man on a mission.

Okay. What can it hurt? Maybe I can find out an angle that Bunko can get her on.