“What exactly do you mean?” Trinity said.
“Someone’s been unmaking churches around town,” Zeke said. “Or hadn’y you noticed?”
“Yes, with fire and mundane accelerants,” Trinity said. “I got a whiff of that through DELPHI’s 4B contacts, since the FBI was called in. If there were any ritual elements, I’d have at least given it a look… but, nothing.”
“You’re getting sloppy, Trinity,” Zeke said. “Only some of the churches were bombs… the others had some kind of fiery runes of unmaking.”
“How do you know that?”
“Eyewitness reports,” Zeke said. “Some of the local heroes… small-time, not much mystic power or knowledge… were kind of on the spot. That’s why I was making inquiries. Someone’s out there doing these spells, which means your tracing spells missed something.”
“Not necessarily,” Trinity said. “There are a few other possibilities, some of them fairly… disquieting.”
“You mean like someone who came by this knowledge before you started watching?”
“It would take an old power to pull that off,” Trinity said. “An old power invoking old magic… not the least likely scenario.”
“Yeah, yeah… the real question is, how do you miss whoever it was actually doing it?”
“Uncreation magic’s got a low signature… if you’re not looking in the right place at the right time, there’s just nothing to detect. That’s why we work so hard to keep a lid on it… and I’ve had a lot on my plate,” Trinity said. “One of my less reliable agents dropped completely off the fucking radar, just utterly fucking disappeared. It would be one thing if she’d died… she does that a lot, comparatively speaking, but she just vanished without a trace, like she…”
“Like she ceased to exist?” Zeke said.
“Oh, great fucking mother of fuckery,” Trinity said, slapping her face. She shook her head. “If her trail intersects one of these fires… and you’re not more full of shit than usual… I would have put it together. I just been stucking running errands since getting to town.” She glared at the phone still in her hand. “I don’t like operating in this town anyway… it feels like her domain. Of course, she probably already knows all about this stuff… and didn’t feel the need to tell anyone else what’s going on.”
“I suppose you always tell your other masters what any one of them is having you do,” Zeke said.
“I only have one master,” Trinity said. “But I work with others for the access they can give me. That’s what I’m talking about: working with others. If she were willing to do it, we could share intelligence.”
“What kind of intelligence would you have to share with the Seeress that she doesn’t already know?”
“She doesn’t know everything, Zeke,” Trinity said. “She doesn’t know as much as she thinks she does. And why am I telling you all this?”
“I’ve got that kind of a face,” he said.
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