Pepper / INK /

Legal Matters

"Excuse me," It was Daniel’s rich baritone. She had never really stopped to look at him in his full regalia. The sun glinted off the silver threads and made zoetrope pictures that seemed to move frame by frame as he walked. Some of them only showed up at certain angles, but every tattoo he had was represented on the cloak, some stylized others just shrunken, some both. The whole effect was mesmerizing and she couldn’t help but stare for a moment.

"Daniel? Did we have a meeting?" A frown went over her face like a raincloud over the sun as she hurriedly went through her schedule in her mind to see if there was a missed meeting.

The picnic a few months ago had become a tentative relationship between the two, she, fighting her fear of the lunars she had been told were evil, and he, tired and still feeling a little like he was betraying his dead wife, but Claire made him happy.

"Did you have an appointment?" She asked again, when she knew she finally had his attention.

"No, I actually had a legal question. I was told that you work with magic services and Legal."

"Yes. What is this about?" There was that fear again, but he had never shown her a reason to be afraid of him. She tried to force down the fear. After all, he’d never shown himself to be like the Presidium, and people, for the most part, didn’t just vanish if they made others unhappy as often happened at the Presidium.

He caught himself staring, worriedly at her, as the frown clouded her features, and decided to move on with what he had to say, in hopes of jarring her out of whatever memory she was in. "Ok, there is, in a nutshell, a magic user, past the age of Location, who is being cared for by Mortals, maybe unbelievers, but he’s from a magic family and is being punished for using any of his abilities in public." For magic users, the age of location, usually somewhere between twelve and seventeen, depending on the user, was the age at which they were considered able to make their own choices about magic, since they were now well-versed enough and powerful enough to locate on their own successfully without incident for six months.

The storm cloud was back, but this time it seemed to have a little thunder in it. "You know this for certain?" She was angry, and unlike most people, not good at hiding her anger or pain. Keeping a magic user from magic was enough to make her angry, and he figured she would be the best one to come to.

"He’s a Seven, and the child of my sister, I try to keep an eye on him, but while I was... out he was given to a Mortal family that berates him for magic saying that magic is what killed his mom, so he should know better than to ever get near it."

"Do you know his name?" Alistair Gordon Emmett-Huron. My sister and brother in law were murdered by a necromancer during the storm a few years back, you can look it up if you weren’t here. He goes by the name Shum now. Shum Najl Aibna. "Son of an Unlucky seven"

"The deaf kid?" She nodded.

"You’ve heard of him?"

"Just found his file this morning, got handed over to me after Collette came down with Fever. Her boyfriend wears black and red, and there is some talk that is why she is sick."

"I don’t know that the talk is true, but if you could look into his case and see what I need to do to get him out of that house, it would be great. If I’m not available, then you can call-- call the police office, they’ll know how to get me."

He had almost said to call Max, a man he hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. The man who was supposed to protect him, but if the young man wasn’t willing he was not going to compel him, he’d already lost his entire family to the war of the Ink.

But already he was feeling cold again, and he knew what he needed, he needed his keeper, more than that, he needed the grotto he had destroyed in a fit of rage a hundred years ago. Or at least he had always assumed he destroyed it.

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Next Chapter: Manhunt