Ant looked at her and at the folder. “The police have decided to give me my job back and they’ve allowed me to have Viktor with me at any of my crime scenes if I so choose,” he said before he went back to looking at his mate.
“How on earth did you know that?” Bridget sat down at the free chair at the table. “You’re not a future-seeing seer.”
“No, I know. But Viktor was busy last night. And apparently Carmine sent us a gift in the form of me being able to get my police consultant job back if I wanted it which I don’t – at least not at the moment.”
“All right then, so clearly there’re things going on you’ve neglected to tell your sister about. Viktor, you’re on coffee duty – you make it for me perfectly. And you, brother dear, explain to me what on earth is going on.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“What about the magic angle?” Bridget asked.
The question was so unusual it had Viktor paying attention. He had been half-heartedly listening to the banter between Bridget and Ant for almost an hour, and frankly he’d rather be outside playing with Able. Unfortunately, Able was doing his job, trying to help ground Ant, who was still having issues.
After Bridget had given her lengthy and blistering opinion on how Viktor hadn’t been trusting his bond with his mate by sneaking off like a thief in the middle of the night, she’d gone back to trading ideas with Ant.
Viktor was done with talking. He had an itch in the middle of his shoulder blades. A sure sign that danger was coming. Ridiculous in a way, because for Viktor, that had been his way of life for a long time. But he’d gotten comfortable since being with Ant. Worse, he’d gotten sloppy, especially with the business the night before. Too busy worrying what Ant would think instead of doing what he should’ve done.
But Bridget’s question was clearly startling to Ant as well. “What magic are you talking about?” Ant asked. “I already confessed that I made the mistake of misusing my magic, creating those gimmicks and party tricks to make Hammond believe that I knew his secrets when I don’t know anything of the sort. I don’t see how that’s helpful.”
“No, not the magic you used yesterday. What about back when you were doing the scene reading for Carmine?”
“Carmine’s scene reading? There was no magic related to Carol’s murder,” Ant said. “The only magic there had been placed a few days earlier, but it had no relation to the murder.”
“I know that,” Bridget said. “I also heard you when you explained about smashing the source of that magic, ostensibly to save Viktor from being sucked into the earth. But did you read the scene, after Viktor was saved, to find out who had placed it?”
“Er…I didn’t think of it.” Ant was glancing in Viktor’s direction and Viktor sighed.
“What Ant’s trying to hide, and he’s being very kind about it,” Viktor said dourly, “is that I didn’t want to set foot in that park again. Getting my foot sucked into the earth by an unseen force is enough to give me the willies, alright? I just wanted to get out of there. So no, we didn’t even think about doing anything like that. That would’ve probably been a good idea.”
“Of course, it was,” Bridget said, grinning widely. “I thought of it. But Ant, that’s what you need to do. You need to go back to the scene and read it to see A, who it was that laid that rubbish magic in the first place, and B, to see if Carmine was there when that happened. If he was there, then you’ve got him.”
“Got him for what? Setting magic like that was irresponsible but it’s not illegal.” It seemed that Ant didn’t understand any better than Viktor did.
“The act itself might not be criminal in a human sense, no. But if Carmine directed a Mage Academy student to lay traps with their magic - traps that are designed to impair and impact the magic of another user, the Dean of the Police Studies Department no less, that is a crime in accordance with the Mage Academy.”
“That all sounds a bit suspect to me,” Viktor said. “Is the Mage Academy going to come along and arrest Carmine simply for paying some stupid student to lay a bunch of magical jokes around a murder scene?”
“It’s a really important but not widely known aspect of the Mage Academy’s governance,” Bridget explained. “Ant is a high-ranking mage user. If any other member of the mage community - anyone with magic at all - interferes in his work, then that is a crime in accordance with the Mage Academy policies.
“It’s the same sort of thing if Ant tried to interfere with Robert’s studies he does, learning the nuances of astral projection. Even something as simple as Ant trying to put his foot down and telling me I wasn’t allowed to help Robert with his experiments could be seen as one mage trying to influence the work of another.
“Mages are, you’ll have to excuse me about this opinion Ant, but you know it’s true, they’re basically a bunch of educated snobs. They are all really protective over their own spheres of magic, and very anal-retentive about maintaining professional boundaries.
“Put simply, if Carmine ordered this student to set up anything that would interfere in Ant’s ability to read a murder scene – especially a scene Carmine has already paid Ant to do the reading for, then Carmine is the one held responsible.”
“Carmine’s human,” Viktor said quickly. “He has no dealings with the Mage Academy as far as I’ve heard.”
“He must know something, or he wouldn’t have been able to influence that student to do something stupid,” Bridget said firmly. “No matter, the fact still remains that if the student was paid or coerced to break one of the central Mage Academy policies, that person – not the student – is the one designated responsible. That is a direct offense.”
That had to be a good thing, right?Viktor certainly thought so, but it seemed Ant wasn’t so sure.
“Even if I could prove it, I’m not sure it would mean anything. I’m not part of the Mage Justiciary. They told me that wasn’t a possible position for me, because of the work I was doing with the police department. Being a contractor under two different organizations, both of which were part of law enforcement, would have been seen as a conflict of interest.”
“I know, brother dear,” Bridget said smugly. “However, you’re not a consultant for the police anymore. The Mage Academy has been sending you letters of invitation to become part of the Justiciary on a weekly basis since the day you handed in your resignation.”
“Why haven’t we heard about this before?” Viktor said. The Justiciary sounded like a very posh term, and Viktor wasn’t a hundred percent certain what it meant.
But the name implied, at least to Viktor, that Ant could do the same sort of work that he had been doing for the police, namely tracking down criminals, but this time maybe they’d be magical or paranormal ones.
