Home > Well of Magic (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill #4)(7)

Well of Magic (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill #4)(7)
Author: B.R. Kingsolver

I nodded.

“Thousands of years ago, a Fae sorceress named Fuamnach decided to challenge Danu for supremacy. She fashioned an artifact to harness the magic of the ley lines and thus enhance her power. Standing in the Well of Magic—the point of origin of all magic, of the ley lines—she tied the lines into a ruby the size of her fist. Then she went forth and confronted Danu. In a battle that lasted five days and broke the world, Danu was victorious. Danu took the artifact—the Heart of the World—and buried it deep in the Well.”

One of the kitchen staff brought out his meal. He took a bite, a sip of his beer, and another sip of aquavit. I stood there waiting, and waiting. In that instant, I decided he might be the most infuriating man in the world.

“And?”

The expression on his face was grave. “My mother and some of the other Fae believe that someone has found the Heart and taken it from the Well.”

“Assuming the legend is true, who would have the power to do that?” I asked.

“That is the question, isn’t it? Rumors over the past century are that a group of mages believe the legend and have searched for the Heart.”

I wondered if those mages were connected with the Knights Magica. It seemed a strange coincidence that the ley lines screwed up at the same time Knights had come to Westport. I had lived almost twenty-four years without encountering a single member of that order, and suddenly they were everywhere I looked.

The order was formed in twelfth-century Venice, around the same time as the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller. As with the better-known militant orders, they were religious in nature and charged with the mission to free the Holy Land from the Infidel. Unlike the other orders, their members were magic users.

Due to the religious creed at the core of their beliefs, they were always at odds with the Illuminati, who were founded later as a secular order, opposing superstition and religious influence over public life.

When I trained with the Hunters’ Guild, our masters portrayed the Knights Magica as a sort of bogeymen. The goals of the two orders were remarkably similar, but their outlook on the world was very different. Both wanted to implement a magiocracy, but one had a secular ideology whereas the other masked their ambitions in religious evangelism.

I wondered if the Knights were as corrupt and evil as the Illuminati had become.

“Well, that’s interesting,” I said. “Do the Fae have any idea what could be done if the Knights have managed to find that artifact?”

“None whatsoever. When do you get off tonight?”

“Two o’clock.”

“I think you should take me home with you.”

That was blunt. “Are you always so romantic?” I asked.

Oriel chuckled. “Not usually, but you inspire me.”

He reached across the bar and took my hand. Warm electricity flowed from him through my body and settled between my legs. With a gasp, I stepped back, pulling my hand away, and stared at him.

“Oh, well,” he said. “Another time, then. You will give in eventually.”

“You have quite an opinion of yourself.”

“I have quite an opinion of you,” he responded. “I won’t give up.”

I moved away from him to check on my other customers and discovered my legs felt shaky and weak. My face felt as though it was on fire, and that wasn’t near as hot as the rest of me.

By the time I finished refilling drinks and taking an order from a waitress, I turned to see him lay some bills on the bar, then get up to leave. When he reached the door, he turned back and smiled, then slipped out of the room.

Chapter 6

When I went for a run the following morning, I debated taking the sword with me. No one could see it, but running with it, even strapped tightly to my back, was awkward. After strapping it on and jogging in place, I decided that carrying it was a stupid idea. Instead, I took my long dagger.

It had snowed about an inch overnight—enough to almost shut Westport down because the streets were slicker than an ice rink. The air was crisp and clear, except over the water. Along the river and toward the ocean, the fog was impenetrable.

I ran on a path along the creek behind my house. It was three miles until the creek ran into the river, then I could either run the same distance home, or cross the river and run another five miles to the university and take a combination of the train and a bus home.

Standing at the south end of the bridge, I debated briefly which route I should take. Other than a light dusting in December, and a couple of ice storms in January, all I had seen of winter in Westport was cold rain. The mountains all around us had been white for months, but below-freezing temperatures in the city were very rare.

I decided to go on to the university up in the foothills and see what it looked like. When I reached the campus, I was rewarded with snow covering the firs and hemlocks and looking almost like the forests surrounding the City of the Illuminati in northern Minnesota. The sidewalks were clear of snow, but the lawns and bushes were still white. As the fog burned away, the snow was starting to melt, but it was still early enough in the day to have that calm quiet that a new snowfall always brought.

Walking along near the architecture building, I watched students hurrying to their classes, and thought about how I was only six months away from joining them. Being in that area reminded me of my short-term boyfriend Lucas. He had seduced me around New Year, and convinced me that we were falling in love with each other. I knew nothing about love, so I was a pretty easy target.

Then the spring semester started, his fiancée returned to town, and they flew off together to an archeological dig in Costa Rica. Silly me. I should have known that I wasn’t the kind of girl men took home to meet their mothers.

A man in a dark suit strolling along caught my attention. I stepped off the sidewalk into the shelter of some bushes and watched him walk past. It was my dangerous-feeling, Swiss-German-speaking visitor at the bar. He was dressed in the same black suit he had worn on our previous meeting and carried a brown briefcase. I waited until he was well past me, then followed him.

He entered a building, and I broke into a trot to catch up with him. Once inside, I saw him ahead of me, walking down the hall. Halfway to the end, he turned into an open doorway. Cautiously approaching where I had seen him last, I peered around the corner and saw him standing at the front of the room. The briefcase was open on a table next to a lectern.

“Excuse me,” I said to a student walking into the room, “can you tell me what class this is?”

“Eastern European History,” the guy responded.

“Is that the professor?”

“Yeah. Doctor Bonato.”

“Thanks.”

I turned away and left the building, then strolled over to the History Department offices a short distance away. Finding the main office, I went in and picked up a course catalogue.

“May I help you?” a young woman sitting at the receptionist’s desk asked.

“I’m interested in taking a class next semester,” I said. “Eastern European History with Doctor Bonato.”

“Oh, that class is only offered in the spring,” she said.

“Is he teaching other classes in the fall?”

“I think so, but the class schedule isn’t set for next fall, yet. Doctor Bonato is new this year, and I’m not sure what he’ll be teaching in the fall.”

I thanked her and left. At a café off campus, I found a table and used my phone to Google Doctor Nicolo Bonato. The picture was the man I had met. He was listed as a professor at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Italy, until the previous year.

Venice was the headquarters of the Knights Magica. Too damned many coincidences.

After musing for a while about who I should tell, I called Frankie Jones.

“Are you busy this afternoon?” I asked when she answered.

“I’m always busy. What’s up?”

“You know those thugs that Shawna and I had a run in with the other night?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got some additional information.”

“I can stop by this evening,” Frankie said.

“I’m up at the university. I can drop by your office on my way home.”

“Sounds good.”

I took the train into downtown and hiked over to the courthouse. Her secretary waved me toward Frankie’s office, barely looking up from her computer.

Frankie pushed a stack of papers she was working on off to the side and stood when I entered the room. At six feet tall, plus high heels, and adding in another two or three inches for her short afro, she towered over me. Usually when I saw her, she was dressed semi-casually, but that day she wore a peach-colored business suit.

“Come on in. I’ve got about half an hour, then I’m due in court,” she said. “Your playmates from the other night are trying to bond out, and we’re trying to prevent it. Cindy said you identified them as being members of the Order of Knights Magica. I looked them up, and what I found was an obscure semi-monastic order of the Universal Church. Why do you think these guys are part of that?”

I told her what I knew about the Knights, then I told her about Bonato’s visit to Rosie’s and what I learned at the university.

“Interesting,” she said when I finished. “If he’s teaching this semester, then he’s been here since the beginning of January. You really think he’s with the Knights Magica?”

“I’d bet on it. And considering his age, I’d bet he’s high up in the organization. According to his biography that I found online, he’s sixty years old, and he looks it. But you and I both know how old a mage who looks sixty really is. I found a picture of his father, same name, from World War One, and he looks exactly the same, only younger.”

She nodded. Frankie looked to be in her thirties, but she’d once said something about seeing the Jefferson Airplane play in Golden Gate Park in the 1960s.

“So, what you’re guessing is that those fools who attacked you are the tip of the iceberg,” Frankie said. “Wonderful.”

   
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