Mask Gaze

  MASK GAZE

  Jonathan Moeller

  ***

  Description

  My name's Nadia, and I look after my family.

  So when a sketchy private investigator starts making trouble for my brother's company, I'm going to push back hard.

  Except the private investigator is like me.

  He's a wizard.

  Which means this is going to get ugly...

  ***

  Mask Gaze

  Copyright 2020 by Jonathan Moeller.

  Smashwords Edition.

  Ebook edition published April 2020.

  All Rights Reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.

  ***

  Chapter 1: Just Business

  My name’s Nadia MacCormac, and before I tell this story, there are three things you need to know about me.

  I got involved in the fruit business, I bullied the local head of organized crime into staying out of my brother’s company, and I don’t like to kill people.

  Okay. I realize that doesn’t help. Let me explain.

  The day I got married, the High Queen of the Elves made a brief appearance to give me a gift. Traditionally, an Elven noble is supposed to bestow a gift to his or her bondsmen and women on the day of their marriage. Since Tarlia had recruited me as her shadow agent, I was technically her bondswoman, and despite the chaos of the last year, she believed in maintaining some traditions. When the High Queen arrived to give me the gift before the ceremony, my brother Russell ran into her first. I’m still not sure how it happened, but somehow Russell convinced Tarlia to give him exclusive license to import fruit from the Elven homeworld of Kalvarion to Earth.

  Knowing Tarlia, she did it for several reasons – to help rebuild Kalvarion from the Archon occupation, to generate jobs on Earth, to create a powerful company she could control, and to use that company as a subtle threat to keep me loyal to her. If I betrayed her, she would destroy my brother’s company in retribution.

  The High Queen’s webs could make the most dexterous spider look clumsy by comparison.

  Anyway, Russell started Moran Imports, and I helped him get the company up and running since he was technically finishing his last year of high school at the time. It was immediately profitable and began expanding rapidly. The Elven farmers of Kalvarion (those the Archons hadn’t gotten around to killing, anyway) needed a market for their produce, the humans of Earth were eager to sample the fruits favored by their Elven lords, and the cities of Elven commoners were excited to enjoy the fruit grown on their previously lost homeworld. Russell and I borrowed a bunch of money to get the company going and put a lot of our own money into it, but we were on track to pay back all the debt while turning a considerable profit.

  But here’s one of the unfortunate truths of commerce – a successful business attracts parasites.

  Or, in our case, local organized crime.

  A guy named Arnold Brauner was a former governor of Wisconsin and a prominent businessman. He was also the shadow councilor of Duke Tamirlas, which meant that it was his task to keep organized crime in Wisconsin tidy and orderly and out of sight. That meant he would be the sacrificial lamb if anything went wrong, but old Governor Arnold was too cagey to be anyone’s scapegoat. Brauner wanted us to start using some of his companies for shipping and repair, and he wanted to buy a share of the company. When we refused, he started putting pressure on Moran Imports, sending Homeland Security officers to harass our employees or using some of his men to engage in petty sabotage.

  Russell and I persuaded him to back off.

  I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t even hurt anyone. But I could have. I could have killed every member of Brauner’s organization in a single night, and they wouldn’t have been able to stop me, and I wouldn’t have gotten caught. Hell, the authorities would never have even found the bodies once I was finished. My ordeal in the Eternity Crucible had given me tremendous magical power, and I had the experience and skills of a master thief. I could have killed Brauner and his men, dumped their bodies in the Shadowlands to be consumed by the creatures there, and no one would have ever known.

  But I would have known.

  I would have had to live with myself after. I had so much power now, and the price of power was responsibility. I had to use it wisely and well. I didn’t want to hurt or kill anyone.

  Unless someone tried to hurt or kill my family.

  Then all bets were off. Fortunately, that didn’t happen all that often.

  But Moran Imports was a successful and growing business…and while Arnold Brauner wasn’t going to make trouble for us (saving his life at Thanksgiving helped persuade him that I was a better friend than enemy), there were other parasites in the world.

  ###

  The trouble started in the middle of March of Conquest Year 317.

  I was at the main Moran Imports warehouse, sitting in my office. Well, office was a generous term. It had a door and a narrow window that looked out towards the parking lot. My desk was a folding table with a computer and a lot of paperwork on it. When I wasn’t helping to unload and load trucks, I was here, and Russell worked in here as well.

  Right now, Russell was at class. He needed to finish high school before he took over running the company full-time, and he was on track to take an equivalency test and graduate by May. But until then, he had to deal with academic crap, which meant I would help with the paperwork until he took over. I was sitting at my computer, scowling at tax forms, when Jake Bowyer and Dan Strauss walked into the office.

  “Boss,” said Jake, “I think we got a problem.”

  Jake was one of our loading crew chiefs, a wiry middle-aged man with a perpetually hunted look like he expected life to jump out from behind a bush and whack him over the head with new problems. He was a good worker when he stayed away from alcohol, which had been the source of most of his trouble, legal and otherwise. Back when Brauner had been trying to muscle the company, he had sent some Homeland Security officers to arrest Jake on some false allegations of parole violation. I had shut that down hard, and ever since then, Jake had decided I could do no wrong.

  “What’s up?” I said, leaning back in my chair.

  “Someone’s spying on us,” said Dan Strauss. He was a bit older than Jake, a beefy man with a receding hairline. He’d retired from Homeland Security and decided he wasn’t ready to leave the workforce quite yet. Since we’d had a growing problem with thefts and attempted burglaries, Russell had hired him on as our security chief. He had since busied himself installing cameras all over the warehouse and hiring equally humorless men to patrol the grounds.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “I think you can see the asshole from your window,” said Jake.

  I walked to the narrow window, reminding myself for the thousandth time to clean it. Between the wire mesh inside the glass and the grime, it didn’t admit much light. But I saw the county highway that ran past the Moran Imports grounds, and the cornfield on the other side, currently muddy and plowed up for the spring planting.

  I also had a clear view of the unmarked white van sitting on the far shoulder of the road.

  “Guy in the front seat’s taking pictures,” said Jake.

  “I took a walk when Jake spotted him,” said Dan. “He’s sitting in the front seat with a telephoto lens. I think he’s taking pictures of the truck dock and the new warehouse construction.
”

  “Okay,” I said, thinking it over. That could mean a bunch of different things. The guy in the van might be a reporter. Moran Imports’ meteoric rise had drawn attention, and sometimes journalists came around sniffing for a story. I absolutely hated reporters and refused to talk to them, so Russell did that.

  The man in the van could also be from a trucking company thinking of getting our business. Or maybe another construction company. We had broken ground for the new warehouses, and the foundations were being poured while the weather held out, but maybe someone wanted to snap up that contract.

  Then again, maybe it was someone thinking of making trouble.

  “Should I call Homeland Security…I mean, the MSPD?” said Dan. At the start of Conquest Year 317, Homeland Security had started breaking up, with numerous branches becoming municipal police departments. The High Queen had been disappointed with Homeland Security’s performance and decided to break it up, and former law enforcement officers like Dan had to keep reminding themselves of the new terminology.

  “No,” I said. “Won’t do any good. He’s on the shoulder of the road, so he’s not trespassing. Far as I know, there’s no law against taking pictures of a building while you’re legally parked. But I’ll go talk to him.”

  I adjusted my coat. I have problems with cold thanks to my magic, so I usually wore black jeans, a heavy gray sweater, and a naval-style pea coat. Within the interior pocket of my coat rested a small revolver.

  Not that I planned to shoot anyone, mind you. I might be one of the most powerful human wizards alive, but I don’t look threatening. I’m three inches over five feet, for God’s sake. My husband towers over me.

  A short woman doesn’t look very threatening…but a short woman with a revolver is another matter entirely.

  Who said that you get further with a kind word and a gun than you do with a kind word alone? I don’t know, but he wasn’t wrong.

  “Be right back,” I said, and I headed for the door.

  ***

  Chapter 2: Private Eye

  I headed for one of the side doors in the warehouse. I pushed through it and walked along the side of the big building until I came to the corner, the last spot before I would be visible to the guy in the camera with the van.

  Then I took a deep breath, cleared my mind, and cast the Cloak spell.

  While Cloaked, I was invisible to all eyes and impervious to any methods of magical detection. I was also skilled enough with the Cloak spell that I could move around while invisible, though I could only manage it for about twelve minutes. Of course, I couldn’t use any other spells while Cloaked, but I could still pull a trigger. Not that I was hoping to shoot anyone. Hopefully, we could avoid that.

  I jogged across the parking lot and over the front lawn, which was still brown and dead and a squishy from the thaw. A drainage ditch ran alongside the road, and I jumped over it and paused on the gravel shoulder to make sure that no traffic was coming.

  Then I crossed the county highway and strolled up to the driver’s side window of the van.

  It was a white utility van, little different than thousands of others. The driver sat in the front seat, a high-end camera with a telephoto lens lifted to his face. He lowered the camera, and I took a close look at him from about a foot away. He was in his middle forties and wearing jeans, work boots, and a hooded sweatshirt. He was on the rawboned side, almost gaunt, and his brown hair and goatee were going gray. His face had been tanned too many times and was starting to look leathery, and he had bloodshot brown eyes. A notebook was open on his lap, and he paused in his photography to jot something down.

  I paced to the side, looking through the windshield, and saw that the back of the van was full of surveillance equipment – more cameras, remote microphones, and the like – along with various pieces of survival gear. I took a few steps back, reached into my coat and took out a small notebook, and wrote down the van’s the license plate number and VIN.

  Illinois plates, not Wisconsin. Interesting. He also had a digital audio recorder on the side of his seat, maybe for taking notes.

  I walked past the driver’s side window again and waited until the man had taken his next round of photographs. When he lowered the camera to take notes, I dropped my Cloak spell, stepped in front of the window, and grinned my rictus of a grin.

  “Hi there,” I said.

  The result was gratifying. The man all but jumped out of his seat, and his expensive camera fell out of his lap and landed in the footwell with a thump. He reached for his side, and I saw that he had a holstered pistol. I also felt a sudden surge of magical power from him. Ever since the Eternity Crucible, I had been able to feel magical force without using a spell, especially when I was close enough.

  The man in the van was a wizard. Not a strong one, but he did have some talent.

  It was interesting to watch his expression shift from surprise, to anger, to alarm, and then to baffled wariness.

  “Jesus Christ, girl,” he said. He reached down and picked up his camera, scowling at it. “You shouldn’t startle people like that. You might get hurt.”

  “Somebody might,” I said in a cheery voice. “And you shouldn’t sit in the street with a camera. People might get all kinds of wrong ideas about you and act on them.”

  “Not breaking the law,” said the man. I saw him reach over and flip on the digital audio recorder I had spotted next to his seat.

  “No,” I said. “But there are all kinds of things that are legal but remain bad ideas.”

  “Hmm,” said the man. He picked up his notebook and flipped through it, and I saw a page with pasted photographs. I recognized an image of me from the news reports about the Sky Hammer last year. “Let me go out on a limb and guess that you’re Nadia MacCormac.”

  “It’s really rude not to introduce yourself,” I said.

  “That’s true enough,” said the man. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small leather wallet, and flipped it open. Within, I saw his official ID card and a more ornate license card. “My name’s Karl Stack, and I’m a licensed private investigator for the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio.”

  “Sure,” I said. In the movies, private investigators were heroic figures who solved crimes that eluded the grasp of Homeland Security. The reality was much less glamorous. I’d run up against private investigators a few times during my years as Morvilind’s shadow agent, and they tended to be unscrupulous men and women who made their living from taking pictures of people in the process of committing adultery or insurance fraud (or sometimes both). “So why is a licensed private investigator sitting on his ass in a creepy van taking pictures of my building.”

  “A job,” said Stack. “I get paid by the hour.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Who is paying you by the hour to sit in an unmarked white van like you're some sort of serial killer?”

  His lips thinned. “You know I can’t tell you that. Professional ethics…”

  “You spy on people for money,” I said. “Kind of late to be worrying about professional ethics.”

  “Fine. Fiscal prudence,” said Stack. “I don’t reveal the name of my clients.”

  “Sure you don’t want to?” I said. “I’d really appreciate it.”

  “Can’t do it, little lady,” said Stack.

  I looked at him and considered what to do. I could use the mindtouch spell to break into his thoughts and find out, but that was a bad idea for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I wasn’t good enough with the mindtouch spell to break into his thoughts without him realizing it, and while it was no longer a secret that I was a wizard, I didn’t exactly go around advertising. For another, if Stack was a wizard himself, he might have the training to fight off my mental intrusion. Best not to pick a fight until it was necessary.

  “Okay, well, I gave you a chance,” I said. “Wait, what are you doing?”

  “Sorry?” said Stack.

  “Oh my God, you’ve dropped your pants and are exposing yoursel
f to me,” I said. Stack’s confusion increased. “You are committing indecent exposure in broad daylight. And you’re fondling yourself now. So gross. Gosh, I hope nothing’s recording this conversation, or else…”

  Stack hissed in irritation and switched off his recorder. “You are a very annoying person.”

  “That’s what they tell me,” I said. “Are you gonna take some more pictures or what? I have all kinds of questions about photography. Like, is it true that if you rub the lens in lemon juice, you can take pictures of invisible ink? I think I read that on the Internet.”

  Stack sighed, started the engine, rolled up the window, and drove off.

  I watched him go, laughing to myself, then walked back to the main doors of Moran Imports.

  Jake and Dan were waiting for me.

  “You scare him off, boss?” said Jake.

  “Yeah,” I said. I turned to Dan. “His name’s Karl Stack, and he’s a private investigator. Someone hired him to spy on us. We can’t do anything about him parking on the road, but if he sets foot on our property, call the police and have him thrown off.” I thought for a moment. “And if he shows up again at all, let me know right away.”

  “Are we just going to let him spy on us?” said Jake. He seemed offended at the idea.

  “Nah, don’t worry,” I said. “He’ll be back soon. I’ll take care of it. It’ll be all over by tonight.”

  ***

  Chapter 3: Pursuit

  Unfortunately for Mr. Stack, he might have bitten off more than he could chew by spying on my brother’s company.

  I went back to my office, unlocked my cell phone, and opened the interface for UNICORN.

  In the grand tradition of computer stuff getting impenetrable acronyms, UNICORN was the Unified National Intelligence & Crime Online Reporting Network, the tracking database Homeland Security used for crime and surveillance. Well, Homeland Security used to use it, though the agency was in the process of breaking into smaller organizations. But every law enforcement agency in the US would still use UNICORN, which would no doubt give the High Queen and the Inquisition a way to keep an eye on them.