She approached the corpse quietly and touched his neck with two fingers to make sure he was actually dead. The contact wasn't pleasant. His skin was saggy and vaguely wet, and even though it hadn't yet started to decay, it didn't seem like it would take much longer.

  The expression on his face was that mixture of tiredness and pleasure typical of someone who has just experienced a very fulfilling sexual encounter, at least from his point of view.

  There weren't any wounds or signs on the body, nothing that could explain his death. She carefully searched it for byte marks, though she didn't think she would find any. Even as he was, he looked too rosy to be the victim of a vampire.

  Kate had mentioned an out-of-control summoning, but what could kill a man like that?

  There was a picture trying to take shape in her head, too misty to give her an answer. Still an answer had to exist, and it shouldn't be too far.

  A magician would never part from his tools, and unless that particular magician had another place in which he performed his spells – and seeing the place he lived in, that was at least unlikely – she should have found them in the flat.

  She went to the wardrobe. No one jumped out from behind the door, which pleased her.

  Inside there were a few clothes and a ceremonial tunic, easily the best-kept item in the whole house. A shelf housed some books, a few jars and a box like the ones normally used to keep plied shirts. She was already reaching out to take the tomes when she realized what she was doing and stopped still. No worthy magician would ever leave his spellbooks without any kind of protection, and the fact that she didn't see any was just another reason to be sure there were. She had to call Shim and ask him to go there with an expert. Provided there was still time for that.

  She opened her bag, thrust one hand inside, and just then the window of the room exploded, hurling glass shards all around. Amanda screamed, jumped backward and knocked her head against the back wall of the wardrobe, fortunately shielded by the clothes inside.

  She couldn't imagine what could have been of her if she hadn't been in there. Then again, she thought looking at the body on the bed – turned into a weird kind of hedgehog by the shards sticking out of his flesh – she could imagine it all too well.

  She risked to look out, barely poking out from her relatively safe place. A twisted metal sheet had appeared just below the windowsill, after coming in through the glass. She couldn't understand what it was, but she had no trouble understanding how he had gotten there. For that, she only had to listen to the icy howling of the wind coming through the window. She'd never heard anything like that, and it seemed to get louder and stronger by the minute.

  She thought she felt a slight vibration under her feet. Was it possible that the building couldn't stand the wind blasts? Maybe not... or more likely yes, considering its conditions. Anyway, she really had no intention to stay there and find it out by herself.

  CHAPTER 7

  She ran down the stairs as if her life was at stake, which might actually be the case as far as she knew.

  Once in the atrium, she found out that the wind had succeeded where she had failed, and now the rusted door was wide open and almost unhinged. Chilly blasts swept away the dust, howling like hungry wolves.

  Amanda launched herself toward the doorway, only to be pushed back by the wind. She had to grasp the frame of the door not to fall down, and pull herself out with the strength of her arms, but once there the situation got no better. She found herself pushed against the wall, breathless, and for an endless instant she thought she was going to suffocate, until she was able to turn her head and finally breathe again.

  Obviously she wasn't going anywhere like that. She thought that maybe it would have been better to go back in, and at least make use of the feeble protection of those unstable walls. She was about to do that when a crash from within drew her attention, as a large chunk of plaster fell down from the roof, filling the atrium of a whitish cloud, quickly dissolved by the wind.

  What was better? Being carried away by the wind or buried alive in an abandoned building? Hard choice.

  The small but strong arm that caught her from under an armpit, lifting her bodily, startled her. Her scream got lost in the wind at first, then could clearly be heard when she was suddenly flung into a little quiet oasis.

  «Stop shouting or I push you back down», a very familiar voice grunted. Amanda turned to see Shim scowling at her. In spite of the constant whistle of the wind all around, his voice had reached her clearly, thanks to the invisible bubble which surrounded the carpet, shielding them from the awful weather.

  «I thought you hated flying», she said, confused, surprised, but most of all happy to see him there.

  «I hope you will still remember when I tell you what I think of this bravado of yours», he replied. «Now we have to go away from here quickly.»

  He was right. Flying carpets where enchanted so that they protected their passengers against bad weather conditions, but they weren't designed to fly in an hurricane, and soon the protection would fade out, considering the hard challenge it was facing.

  «Were are we going?» she asked.

  «Central!» he replied quickly before concentrating again on piloting.

  They raised, even though all but steadily. The carpet was violently flung around, and even though its magic kept them on board, it looked like they could be thrown away at any moment, so much that Amanda flattened herself as much as possible on it, as if this could somehow protect her from what was happening. Around them, the hurricane unleashed its fury. She didn't think she'd ever seen something like that in her life.

  Rain had started pouring, and now the wind was pushing towards them compact bodies of water which looked almost like waves. The carpet seemed to be floating in water rather than flying, like an odd surfboard facing higher waves than it had been designed for.

  The sky was black, engulfed by clouds crowding together like people trying to conquer the front line in the audience of a concert, though the show they wanted to see was quite different.

  A violent blast almost made the carpet topple over, and left Amanda wondering what would happen if it did. She didn't think the magic would be of any help against gravity in that case, and probably they would crash on the street below, or maybe be flung away by the wind alone.

  Shim looked calm and self-assured. In truth he was just entirely focused on what he was doing, all of his efforts taken by the task of keeping the carpet steady and preventing the contents of his stomach to come back the way it had gone in. He would have cut a very poor figure if he had retched, but most of all he wasn't sure he could be able to pilot and vomit at the same time, and it was this thought which helped him the most to keep his last lunch down.

  «There!»

  Amanda's scream drew his attention on a dark shape moving towards them. He pulled up the carpet abruptly, just in time to avoid a door which must have been stripped away from some house and was now floating freely, waiting to crash against something or someone. He heard a muffled thump as it hit the rear edge of the carpet, which steered unexpectedly and almost made him lose control. The air was getting wet even in there, and some raindrops were already pushing their way through the barrier, a clear sign that it was about to stop existing at all.

  Reaching the headquarters was unthinkable, they had to find a nearby place to stop to, and stay there until the weather improved. If it was ever going to.

  «Down there!» Amanda shouted again, trying to show him something he couldn't see at first. Then he noticed. At their right there was a place in which clouds seemed to be thinner, as if there was an area the hurricane wasn't hitting.

  He immediately steered in that direction, hoping it was really the case and that they could be able to be there before the protection of the carpet was completely broken.

  When they got there, it was like breaking a barrier between two different worlds. The carpet poked out of the storm in a zone that seemingly had been left untouched by it, not even brushed by the wind.

  There they would have been safe, if they hadn't been a second too late.

  The magic of the carpet gave way completely, and a sudden burst of wind grabbed it and threw it away, towards the safety they were looking for, but not the way they wanted to go there.

  Shim did his best to stay in control, and almost succeeded, but it wasn't enough. The carpet crashed to the ground, making Amanda roll away and sending the dwarf headfirst against a tree.

  She was the first to get up. She was confused and hurting, she probably had bruises in places she hadn't even known the sheer existence of so far, but she was alive.

  She look around, searching for Shim, and in doing that she finally realized where she was: in front of the university.

  Then she saw the dwarf, collapsed against the trunk of one of the trees lining the courtyard. She rushed to check if he was fine. He was unconscious and had a vicious cut on his forehead – the collision must have been quite hard to do such damage to his hard skull – but at least he was breathing. There wasn't much she could do for him but pulling him to a covered place before wind and rain got there as well. Neither she had a lot to say about the place to choose: the university seemed to be the only building the hurricane wasn't hitting. The actual problem was how to get in, but that she would worry about once she was there.

  She lifted the dwarf from his armpits, trying not to shake him too much, and started pulling, surprised by his heavy weight. She could only take a few steps before she had to surrender to the truth: she wasn't going anywhere like that.

  Then her gaze fell on the carpet, heaped not too far. She hurriedly fetched it and managed to pull Shim on it, then she grabbed one edge and started pulling again. The weight wasn't changed, obviously, but this way she was able to move him more easily, so much so that she reached the stairway to the entrance. Then the carpet became useless, and she had to lift the dwarf little by little, step by step, to the archway. She got there breathless, ready to look for something with which to break a window and enter. To her big surprise, she didn't need to. The door was closed, but unlocked.

  Even though she didn't understand, she wasn't going to complain. She opened it and brought in Shim, who didn't seem about to wake up. She rolled the carpet and set it under his head. Now she needed to find something to cover him. In the basement there were sheets used every now and then to cover desks and furniture. They weren't the best choice, but there was nothing else she could think of, so she headed to the stairs, opened the basement door and stood there astonished for a sight she would never have been able to foresee.

  The center of the room had been almost completely emptied, and now there stood a large metal frame in which several crystals were mounted. In the middle of it, a man wearing a ceremonial tunic. He stood with his arms open and flung upward, and she could almost hear power crackling around him as he murmured barely audible and completely unintelligible words. Crystals were reacting to whatever he was doing, pulsing with a dark and regular light, like a huge heart beating in the chest of a giant. Something that looked like the before-unheard crossbreed between light and smoke was spiraling away from the frame, rising to the ceiling where it seemed to disappear.

  Even though she had never seen something of the like, she didn't need anyone to suggest her what it was. After all it couldn't just be an accident that the university was right in the middle of the quiet zone.

  The man seemed to be so absorbed in what he was doing that he was unaware of her presence. Amanda stood for a while, uncertain about what to do. She had no idea of what could happen if she interrupted the magician, but she didn't think things could be any worse than they already were.

  She unsheathed her wand, that she had managed not to lose this time. It was very much alike the ones carried along by police officers: its bolts stunned their targets but caused no permanent damages.

  She took aim and was about to shoot when a sensual voice whispered «Don't.»

  CHAPTER 8

  Amanda turned. There seemed to be a whole world trapped someway in that simple word. In her whole life, she didn't think she'd ever heard a voice like that... and actually she still wasn't hearing it, because it didn't reach her ears, she perceived it at a much deeper level. It wasn't even like telepathy, it was something completely different, just as if, in some way, although she hadn't heard anything, she just knew what had been said, and with such a clarity that no form of communication she knew could convey.

  Not far from her stood a woman she'd never seen before. She was tall, slim, full of a grace no simple mortal could possess. Long blond hair framed her face and body, embracing her in soft spires which seemed to flow around her as if they had a life of their own. Her features expressed a sensuality that was out of that world. Her long and dark eyelashes surrounded eyes that seemed to have all existing colors and no color at all at the same time. Her lips where soft and full, slightly parted in a smile showing white and perfect teeth. A dark violet dress covered her body from the lower part of her full and well proportioned breast to the ankles, fitting perfectly her exquisitely carved hips and barely brushing her delicate feet, wearing simple heelless sandals.

  «Who are you?» Amanda asked. She had wanted to say something wittier, and she would have if she hadn't been startled by the presence of that woman more than by that of the magician.

  «Let go of the wand», she answered, barely moving her lips. She mustn't really need to, as she wasn't making any sound. It almost looked like she did that to be more believable.

  For a second Amanda strongly felt the desire to humor her, just for a second. Instead she aimed the wand at her and let go a bolt with a simple act of will.

  A light-blue lightning left the tip of the metal cylinder and hit its target, apparently with no effect of any sort.

  «Let it go, you don't need it», the woman reiterated, disregarding the fact that she had just been hit, as she moved a few steps in her direction. «Trust me.»

  As she approached, her features started to change. It wasn't a gradual transition: in-between one step the woman was replaced by a man. He had short, black hair and was wearing black trousers as fitting as a second skin, matching soft boots and a shirt halfway between blue and dark green, unbuttoned on his slightly bronze chest. The only things he had in common with the woman where the indescribable eyes and the charm they both radiated. But it was none of this that hit Amanda like a tidal wave, it was a weird déjà-vu feel that swept over her suddenly. She knew that man, she'd seen it before. At the station, briefly, the evening of the day Parker had been killed... even though that wasn't the first time. Meaningless images clustered her mind, untouchable sensations like the ones sometimes felt in... dreams! She had dreamed of him!

  Like threads of water opening their way through a dam, spare memories surfaced in her mind. She was remembering dreams she had canceled even before waking up, which had tormented each of her nights of the last days. Dreams that should have been pleasant but actually were... dirty... rotten.

  That's what Vivienne had tried to tell her in her twisted way... Marsten had been so fool as to summon an incubus... a being that hadn't walked the world for centuries. That explained a lot of things, other than saying that that magician had a great power and an even greater idiocy.

  Amanda was almost sure he had summoned the incubus – or, better, the succubus, as that's what it had to be, although they were but two sides of the same coin – thinking he could use her as a sex slave with no consequences. In truth she had fed on it until he was dead. Because that was what incubi did, they eat humans almost like vampires, just in a slightly less detectable way, not stealing their blood but draining their life force during sex. Surely way more pleasant than a bite on the neck, but not less lethal.

  That his lust had brought him death was almost pitiful. That the being had been able to take from his mind, most likely in dreams, the information about Weather Control that had supposedly been removed from his memories was almost a tragedy. It shouldn't have been difficult then to reach the weather station in which Marsten had worked and find the controller who had replaced him, seduce him and earn his love, as blind as delusional. How she had been able to find out the names of other controllers and enchant them one after another, finally reaching the one in charge, the magician she had brought at the university, was not clear at all, but some way she had. Amanda didn't know those beings enough to be sure of the powers they could command.

  Meanwhile, she had found her... she had fed on her, trough her dreams. That explained her tiredness, her inability to rest. Evidently her nature, not entirely human, allowed her to resist, to avoid being drained completely like the summoner had been... and it allowed him... that being... to keep strong as he was carrying on his plan.

  The rest was easy to understand. The incubus had had to find a place in which to build a facsimile of the control frame used by the head controller to gather the power. He couldn't use the real one, because he couldn't get in, no matter what his powers were, and he had to stay close to his victim to be sure he did what he wanted. Seducing someone and stealing his endless loyalty didn't include the ability to order him around from a distance, how sad!

  How he had been able to build one, and what had been Parker's role in all that, were questions most likely doomed to be unanswered. Did Parker found out anything and got killed for that? Or was he implied in all this? For sure he would have been able to put together that frame, having the proper information. Maybe he had been killed to eliminate an uncomfortable witness. Or maybe he had changed his mind and tried to get out. Was that the meaning of the fable book in his study? A hint left there for someone who could understand it, just in case things got for the worst?

  The light touch of the creature's fingers on the skin of her face startled her. When had it gotten so close?