Lupi 08 - Death Magic

the Old One he worshipped—the one Ruben referred to as their enemy. The one lupi often called the Great Bitch because it was dangerous to speak any of her names. Lily and Rule had been present for part of the ritual that invested Friar with his new power, but unable to stop it . . . Rule because he was in a cage. Lily because of all those elves trying to kill her. Soon after that, the node used to power the ritual turned unstable, bringing down half the mountain, burying Lily’s SIG Sauer and presumably Robert Friar as well.
    Lily had never believed that. “How could you know that?”
    Fagin just smiled. “Patterning. Friar is a new and incredibly powerful patterner. Ruben discovered this soon after Friar supposedly died.”
    She looked at her boss. She’d placed her life on the line based on his hunches more than once. But to take his word—unsubstantiated, unsupported—for everything . . . he could be wrong. He was good, but he could still be wrong. “How do you know? Another hunch?”
    “My knowledge is subjective, but not a hunch. Lily, you know that normally my Gift grants me knowledge of events in the near or very near future. More distant events are too fluid for a sense of them to emerge.”
    “But you’ve seen some pretty damn specific events this time. Events that are more than a month away.”
    He nodded. “That’s what raised my suspicions. My visions started after the node collapsed.”
    “I don’t see why—”
    “If you’ll stop asking, you’ll get your answer faster. I have to explain a bit about how my Gift works. I seldom receive hunches, much less visions, about events more than a few days in the future. Even a week away, the future is usually too fluid for me to pick up much.”
    He’d spoken of this before. “Too many decision points, you told me once. Too many possibilities, choices, and people are involved in determining events, and the more distant a possible event is, the more these multiply, until it’s all static.”
    He nodded. “Yet suddenly I was having explicit visions about events that were, at that point, three months distant, and some of them six months or more. I could only find one explanation for this abrupt explicitness. The future had been artificially constrained. I realized that an extremely strong patterner was manipulating events, forcing a single channel through which events flowed. Once I understood this, I consulted Sherry. You know that her coven observes node action throughout the nation through a simulacra map.”
    Lily did know that, even if she was fuzzy on what a “simulacra map” might be. She nodded.
    “We’d hoped she could reconstruct what was done through the node used to imbue Friar with his Gift. So far she hasn’t been able to. In the process, however, she discovered that virtually every node in the nation is being drawn upon by what appears to be a single, albeit untraceable, source.”
    “Every node? But that’s not possible. That’s . . . don’t practitioners have to be in physical proximity to—”
    “So we’ve always believed. But it would take a great deal of power for a single patterner to influence events across the entire country.”
    Fagin spoke up suddenly. “They call it the Gift of the gods, you know. Patterning is the most subtle and dangerous of Gifts. I think you encountered a patterner once.”
    Lily shot Ruben a hard glance. Apparently he’d been sharing a lot with Fagin, some of it highly classified. “I’ve run across a couple of them, actually.”
    “Oh?” Fagin’s bushy brows shot up. “The one I was thinking of was named Jiri. You had some difficulty overcoming her.”
    “I didn’t overcome her,” Lily said dryly. “I managed to stay alive. She didn’t, but that’s because she only cared about one thing. And she got that.” Her daughter’s life. Jiri had not been a good guy by any means, but she’d given her life so her daughter would live. The child had been adopted by the Leidolf Lu Nuncio.
    Fagin steepled his hands on his belly. “You have some understanding of the Gift, then. Patterners are rare, for which we can thank the good God. When the Gift does appear, it’s almost always in the weak form. A weak patterner senses event patterns unconsciously. He may learn how to control his Gift so that his effect on events is less haphazard, but he doesn’t sense the patterns directly. A strong patterner does. A strong and experienced patterner can manipulate those patterns in subtle