A-Cup Angst Ch. 07

"Are you quite finished," Martin asked.

"Oh, you stupid suit, things are just getting started," he said. "You have no idea how much power is at our disposal! We've been holding back because we wanted to get back in your good graces, but now that it's clear it's a matter of us or you, we are going to-"

"Oh, do shut your pie hole, you gray haired drama queen," Harris said, wearily. "I brought you here to mend the rift between us, not to let you threaten me with silly, little nothings. Or don't you want your clan's former glory restored?"

Ben glossed over the dismissive tone The Suit used to speak of his clan and said, "And this means the release of my imprisoned kin, as well?"

Harris nodded. When Ben kept staring at his collar in expectation, he rolled his eyes and sighed. "Yes," he said. "All will be released, the charges resolved and your old jobs will be offered to you, again."

"And in return?"

"I need you to find and contact some people for me," said Martin, "and pass on some information."

"Who and what," Ben asked, laconically.

"Do you remember The Organization," Martin asked.

Ben sighed heavily. In all his years of dealing with the scum of the magical world, he had never had a more terrifying time then when he went undercover with that international crime syndicate. "Yes, of course I do," he said. "I went undercover and infiltrated their ranks so we could destroy them. It is not something I'm likely to ever forget. Nor the fact that we could have wiped them all out if you hadn't delayed by negotiating with the other agencies over who would seize what assets. Several top capos got away, without a trace."

Harris' predecessor on the job was responsible for that, but he didn't let that be known. Just as no one knew who The Suit was, they had no idea when one was dismissed and another named. "I want you to find one of those capos and pass this file along," Martin said, brandishing a copy of their file on Jamie and his coven.

Ben laughed bitterly. "You intend to send me on a snipe hunt while you pick off the rest of my family? I'm not that stupid! This is the final straw! War is coming for you, Suit. You best get ready."

"Don't be so melodramatic, Ben," Martin said. "This is a legitimate offer I'm making here and finding these people and passing this information along is going to be very easy."

"Easy," Ben shouted. "Easy?!" He tried to get up from his chair but couldn't so he settled for glaring at where he thought The Suit's head was. "I've been searching for them for the past twenty years, on and off. They don't want to be found and it can't be done. We should have taken them all when we had the chance!"

"They are looking desperately for this very information," Martin said.

Ben calmed down some and took the file to browse it. It all clicked in his head. "You do realize they've formed a crime syndicate of their own since then, don't you," he asked. "If this information gets to them, they'll do as they did in the old days. Lots of innocent people are going to die a slow, miserable death."

"This coven represents a clear and present danger to the safety and interests of the United States of America and all the people we are sworn to protect," Martin said. "Some collateral damage is unavoidable when dealing with a threat such as this one."

"If this goes down the way I think it will, we're going to have a full blown magical throwdown on our hands, right here on the east coast," Ben said, shaking his head.

"We'll contain it, deal with the survivors and clean it all up afterwards," Martin said.

"Two birds with one stone, eh," Ben said and slowly nodded. "All right, I'll do it."

"I realize this means sacrificing your niece Alice and her daughter Helena," Martin started saying.

Ben interrupted him with a raised hand and said, "They're no longer a part of our clan. I don't care in the least about them."

"Very well then," Martin said, "get going." Ben nodded and found himself able to stand up and leave. "Oh, and Ben?" Ben turned back around to face The Suit. "See to it that no one can ever trace this tip off to me, would you? If anyone ever does, I'll snuff you and all your little clan in a heartbeat."

Ben nodded and left. Martin pulled out the files on the recent vampire issues and rubbed his temples. Lately, it seemed that as soon as he plugged up one hole, another one, that was even worse, opened up in response. Relocating all those casters from L.A., San Francisco, Seattle and Portland was a logistical nightmare, especially as they all had established businesses there and were facing a big loss of revenue.

Jamie left the classroom and grinned. The final seemed to be have been tailor made for him. Basically, all the information he had managed to retain, despite the numerous distractions that were plaguing him, was on the test. He was going to get a passing grade for sure. It was beginning to look like his college education might be saved, after all. He put his coat on and tied his scarf around his neck before exiting out into the quad. He was going to go to a restaurant for some lunch and then hit the library to prep for his next final.

As soon as he stepped outside, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a familiar smile. "Mr. Jacobs," Dana Moran said and waved at him. Jamie was stunned the lying sack of shit would have the nerve to come see him in person. "I need to talk to you."

"Go fuck yourself and your lying mouth," Jamie said and went on his way.

Moran trotted after him to catch up and said, "Sir, I apologize for my earlier deceptions, I was in a bad place, emotionally, and I made some wrong choices, but now-"

Jamie flicked his finger and Moran grabbed his throat in sudden pain. His vocal chords hurt like hell if he tried to talk. "Fool me once," Jamie said and kept walking. He didn't even glance behind himself as Moran fell to his knees in the snow.

After a long afternoon in the library, during which he accomplished as little studying as was his norm of late, Jamie came out and decided to head home. He was walking across the grounds to the parking lot where his Pagani was waiting. A figure started to jog towards him from one side. Jamie looked at it and recognized the magical muzzle in the figure's aura. It was Moran, again. Jamie didn't feel like running so he kept walking at his own pace and that allowed Moran to catch up to him, just shy of the parking lot. Moran was still holding his throat with one hand and held out a piece of paper, insistently. Jamie looked around to make sure no one was looking and took the folded up paper. He used his power to incinerate it and got in his car to drive home. Moran just stood there and watched him go.

When Jamie got home, he was greeted, as usual, by his gaggle of girls. Nova informed him that Moran had just sent him an email and Jamie rolled his eyes at the news. Helena, however, asked the robot for the content of the email and it recited it out loud. Moran claimed in his email that witches and warlocks in major cities on the west coast were performing the rituals to turn themselves into vampires. Four had already been detected by their seers and at least one of them had already eaten a caster. Moran went on to claim that the vampire they had stolen from him told them she just received her copy of the ritual anonymously. Moran concluded that someone was touring the country and handing out copies of the forbidden ritual. He implored them for help and again apologized for spinning his falsehoods earlier on.

Jamie only half listened to the recitation. He took off his winter clothing and sat down at the dinner table. After Nova finished, Sandra ordered it to hack into Section's communications and see if it could verify Moran's story. Jamie ignored the order, knowing that penetrating Section's network was a fool's errant. Nova announced that it had managed to verify that Moran was telling the truth. Jamie and the girls listened in shock as Nova explained that Section had contacted hundreds of magicians in L.A., San Francisco, Seattle and Portland and instructed them to leave those cities. Section was using unsecured lines to contact so many people at once and the email trail was right there for Nova to find. Jamie sat down at the dinner table and Nova served dinner. Everyone ate in silence.

Jamie had just dug into his dessert when Helena said, "Well?"

"Well, what," he asked around a mouthful.

"Aren't you going to do something about this," she asked. "Aren't you the vampire slayer, nowadays?"

"Well, technically, I'm the east coast vampire capturer," Jamie said. "These new guys are on the wrong coast."

Helena set down her fork and sat back in her seat. She crossed her arms under her ample bosom and said, "I can't believe you. You were all 'grrr' when you heard of the first vamp and you nearly got us all killed over it, and now you're all, like, whatever about it."

"As you said," Jamie said, "I nearly got us all killed. Won't make the same mistake again. This outbreak of vampires is not my problem."

"But you're the only one who can take on a fresh vampire and win," Helena insisted. "If you don't go after them, then who will? Who's going to save all those innocent people from getting killed?"

"Not my problem," Jamie repeated.

Helena cocked her head. She could tell from Jamie's expression that she had hit a nerve with her last question. She decided to probe further. "You know you can do this and do it safely. You've got your stored up powers and you can buy more ammo for Nova and the gatling gun and you've got the cash for the bindings. You can end this threat to the general public with ease. You know that. But maybe there's something else that's stopping you? Maybe you've decided the little people don't matter any more? Just like those worthless, dead whores we saw in Nassau, with their-"

"SHUT THE FUCK UP," bellowed Jamie, scaring everyone. His face was red, his eyes wet and all the veins on his forehead popped out. The utensils in his hands were glowing with heat, slowly melting in his grasp. He blinked back tears and stood up from the table, throwing the knife and fork on the table. Rose and Sandra slathered them with ice, lest they set the whole table on fire. Jamie let out a primal scream and went off to pace around the ground floor, rubbing his temples with both hands.

Helena grimaced. She had hit a nerve. He was obsessed with the dead girls in Nassau and he felt guilty about his incidental role in their deaths. The other girls glared at her and she noted that even Nova had an expression of distaste on its face. Helena stood up and said, "Jamie..." She shut up when Nova rushed next to her and held its finger over her lips in a menacing manner. Helena swallowed against the sudden dryness in her throat. Would the robot hurt her? She decided not to find out tonight. She sat down and stayed quiet under its glaring eyes.

Jamie finally got his rage under control and his heart to slow down some. It was bad enough that he had caused the deaths of those girls, but having it thrown into his face like that? That was more than he could handle at the moment. He kicked at the antique coffee table and sent it shattering against a wall. He fell down heavily into the couch and put his face into his hands. Rose, Sonya and Sandra walked over to him and sat with him, offering silent comfort as they rubbed his shoulders. After a while, Sandra said, "What are you going to do, Jamie?"

He looked at her. There was no guilt or recrimination in her eyes, only compassion. He looked down at the floor and asked himself that very same question. What was he going to do? Was he going to sit around and mope while innocent people died, or was he going to do something about it? Was he going to tolerate these witches and warlocks that had no compunctions about sacrificing innocents to gain more power? Was he going to allow for the Nassau tragedies to be repeated on the west coast? He wiped the tears from his eyes and looked up. His heart told him he couldn't live with himself if he did that. If there were evil fucks loose in major cities, then he was going to go visiting.

"I'm going to make a fucking massacre and roast a bunch of goddamned vampires on a motherfucking spit, is what I'm going to do," he said, in answer to Sandra's question. Helena overheard him and smiled a wide smile. "But first thing's first. I've only got five stored spirits. We need to store up a full ten before we go vampire hunting." Rose and Sandra nodded. "That'll probably mean a week's pause between each vamp, so we'll need to talk to the administration and postpone our second semester, perhaps indefinitely. We'll all be finished with our finals next week, but I really doubt we'll end the vampire menace before the start of the next semester. Especially if what Moran said was true."

"What about the rift spell," Sandra asked.

"What about it," Jamie said.

"Well, I've been thinking about it a lot, ever since we first saw it," she said. "Both Lilah and Alice only explained it to us in broad strokes, but I think we could try to make a disintegrating rift of our own and use it against the vampires." Jamie's eyebrows raised in surprise. He wiped his nose as Sandra retrieved a sketchbook. She showed some of her drawings and Rose and he immediately recognized them. It was a fairly good representation of how to cast the paradoxes needed to atomize matter. "If we had a proper rift, not just this communications one that follows Nova around, we could just vaporize the vamp and be done with it. No leaving it for Section to steal, or whatever."

Jamie studied the drawings and nodded. "Yes," he said, absently. They suspected the casting would be a bit more complicated that it seemed, but it was worth a shot. "Let's try and make one and use it to clean up the broken table."

Rose, Sandra and he sat in a circle and concentrated. Jamie began with the first casting. He tried to use his power to make a loop of space in which all molecular motion could be read. He failed repeatedly. Rose and Sandra tried as well, but none of them could do it. Finally, Jamie had an idea. "We need to look at this scientifically. We need to make three separate loops, each only reading the molecular motion in one of the spatial directions. Follow my lead!"

He successfully formed a loop that would only read the forwards and backwards motion of molecules. Sandra piled on that and created a loop that read the sideways motion and Rose added her loop that read vertical motion. The three loops were stable, but they were separate. Jamie expended a power spirit and it cast a loop that synchronized and united the three. Now they had an event horizon in which molecular motion was completely readable. It was like a magical scanner. The next step in forming a rift was creating a mystical field in which all molecular motion in the three dimensions would be manipulated at the same time. But neither Jamie, Rose nor Sandra could spare the power or the mental concentration to create it. They were completely committed to the scanner.

He let his instincts guide him as he expended another stored spirit to start creating the field. As soon as he did, he became aware of a whole host of problems. The power spirit that was synchronizing their scanner expended itself and they stopped investing their power into the loops. "Well, that was discouraging," Jamie said, when he caught his breath.

"Yeah," Sandra agreed. "We need four casters for the scanner, then we need some more people for the disintegration field..."

"Four," Jamie said. "We need two casters to divert the random motion of molecules in directions parallel to the rift onto the main axis where one caster dampens the motion away from the rift and another draws all that motion and diverts it into amplifying the molecular motion in the direction of the rift, thus achieving disintegration."

"And another caster to synchronize all of their efforts," Rose said.

"Add another caster to sync up the scanner to the disintegrator," Jamie said.

Sandra reviewed her drawings. Now that they had actually tried to make a rift, the impossible complexity of the casting was becoming apparent. "This isn't like setting something on fire, or freezing it," she said. "When we enchant the explosive rounds for the shotgun, we're just shaping the blast that results from the inherent chemical properties of the round, making it safe for the shooter in close quarters and more effective that it would have been. But this... This is some deep, quantum physics shit. We are actually manipulating forces we can't perceive. Or even conceive properly. Brownian motion. Van der Waals forces. We are trying to undo basic, molecular forces of the universe. This is heavy." She shook her head and pointed to a few of her drawings. "Plus, we need to make an outer shell that contains the event horizon and turns it into a controlled disintegration and teleportation, instead of a random explosion in our faces."

Jamie rubbed his eyes and sighed. "How many more people to do that," he asked. "Without the teleportation bit. Just so we can disintegrate someone on the spot."

"Well," she said, "we'd need one caster for each of the ones that are dampening sideways motion, so that's two. Another one that coordinates them and another to sync it up with the disintegration field spells... Geez, we need a fucking army division just to start this shit up!"

"I count fourteen casters," Rose said.

Jamie shook his head. "There's no fucking way we can gather up fourteen casters to create a rift spell. Especially since the spell would only last for as long as they were all committed to it."

"That's not the worst of it," Sandra muttered as she studied her drawings.

"What do you mean," Jamie asked.

She looked over to him, seemingly surprised her last comment was out loud. "Well," she said, "once we make the rift, we need someone else to manipulate it, to guide and actually use it." Rose and Jamie nodded without getting her point. "Look at it!" She gestured to her drawings. The other casters found no fault with them. "There's no position in which we could attach a ward to the spell so we could name an exclusive handler. Whoever was near could try to wrest control of the rift from the handler." Rose and Jamie shuddered in fear as they simultaneously came to the same realization. "If we were to make a rift spell and bring it to a vampire, it would take control of it and use it against us."

"Fuck," said Rose.

"Ok, so no rift spells," Jamie said. "Shit, it's no wonder nobody uses them for anything. If you want something blown up, you just blow it up! Not use this mad series of quantum, synchronized loops." Jamie's brow bunched up. "There's one thing that bugs me, though. The rift the suicidal cleaning lady used. It was a solid object, magically speaking. This rift we were trying to make? If we had managed to make it, I think it would look like wet paper in comparison to that thing."

Rose nodded and said, "And that rift had a ward that named a sole user! Remember? It looked like a leash."

"Yeah," Jamie said. "That's right! But how did they do it?" He looked over to Helena. "Who's running your clan, nowadays?"

"Uncle Ben," she said. "Benjamin Johansson. But he disowned my mom and me, I can't call him up and ask him."

"Yeah, that's ok," Jamie said. "I think he'd lie his guts out, anyhow. It's best if we find him and then ask him some questions about rift spells, in person." He stood up and went towards the stairs. "Nova, clean up the coffee table. Ok, girls, get to your studying and let's finish up with the finals! In eight days we go vampire hunting. The old fashioned way. Nova, email Moran that I'll go after the vamps only if he determines their identities and locations for me and also, he has to send me all the information Section has on the Syndicate. Every single clue. I want to take another shot at the fat cats that run it."