I thought about it. “I might.”
“Pooling our information could be useful, couldn’t it?”
“We don’t need any help from the damned—” Huey’s outburst cut off abruptly, although James hadn’t even moved.
I blinked.
It was impressive, in a Darth Vader-y kind of way.
“We’re both on the same side,” James told me smoothly.
I looked at his boys, who might not be talking, but were breathing like a couple of bulls in winter. Sure. Same side.
But I still needed to get in there.
“Okay.” I stuck out a hand. James took it.
He smiled brilliantly. “See? Was that so hard?”
Fin and I exchanged a glance.
Freaking war mages.
* * *
—
There were more mages inside, but nobody else smiled at me. Or at Fin, who was ambling along at my side, like a three-foot Watson to my diminutive Holmes. One with wild tufts of hair sticking up from the ride over, which made him look like a crazy-haired troll doll. To the point that I saw a war mage do a double take while I looked around for Big Blue.
Or parts thereof.
I didn’t find any. And it wasn’t like I could have missed him, and not only because of his size. But because the mages had done more than turn on the lights.
The warehouse was a relic from an earlier age, slowly moldering to pieces on the waterfront. It had probably been empty before the slavers found it, because pieces of the roof were missing and weeds were growing up between some of the floorboards. But the smugglers had done enough to make it usable, which mainly involved installing some cheap hanging fluorescents. It was still gloomy, the size swallowing the dim glow from overhead, but in places—
In places it was downright dazzling.
Footprints and handprints gleamed on walls and floors like angels had left them, sparkling with a bright white-gold fire. The marks the slavers had made when they hit down had left smears and splatters that blazed a brilliant scarlet against the dark. And a pile of crates by the wall, large and perilous looking, had a rainbow of different colors spilling out from gaps in the wood, as if screaming, “Look here!”
A reveal spell, then, and a good one. It had even brightened moldy graffiti back to readability, and left ghostly imprints of long-rotted advertising posters glowing against the bricks. And there was a sizeable crew in place to take advantage of it: war mages were guarding entrances, medical staff were examining bodies, and what I guessed were forensic types were crawling all over everything, muttering spells at suspicious items.
One of the latter had just made a glowing footprint float up into the air and rotate like it was 3-D. And then actually become 3-D when it suddenly flew off and attached itself to the shoe of a guy being loaded onto a stretcher. Immediately, a whole line of bright footprints, including some near us, suddenly went dark.
Having now been identified, I realized.
“Okay, take him,” the mage said, and the body was carted out, one shoe still glowing.
Another mage was busy summoning a trail of blood off a support beam, causing the drops to separate from the peeling paint and fly into the air. And then to shimmer and change, from crimson to gold, and from tiny to huge, before turning into a mass of gleaming strands that whipped about wildly in space, like the tentacles off a crazed octopus. Until, with a final flash, they coalesced—
Into the shape of a man.
It looked like a life-sized hologram of a mummy, its missing body outlined by threads of floating magic. They glimmered golden bright against the darkened room, which was visible through gaps between the filaments. The whole was strangely beautiful, like an artist had carved a statue out of light. . . .
But the features were liquid and shifting, impossible to read, and the body itself was generic, with no identifying flaws that I could see. It was an impressive display, but other than approximating the guy’s height, I wasn’t sure what the point was. I’d seen more useful police sketches.
“Got a weird one,” the mage called to James, who stopped abruptly.
“How weird?”