Heirs to Grace and Infinity

By Carole Cummings

It all comes down to trust. Or it will. It's Jackson Hunt's job to keep the Bureau's strike teams on their toes and in good fighting form, and to keep rogue theurgists in line. And one rogue in particular—the shadowy and powerful Sorcerer—is getting too bold, liberating captive theurgists right out from under the Bureau's collective noses.

 

Jackson decided long ago he's going to need Kyle, the Bureau's resident IT genius, to make it all come right in the end. But when the Bureau starts detaining children, and the Sorcerer's rescues start getting bolder, individual definitions of justice get a little skewed. Jackson just hopes Kyle's definition will turn out to be the same as his.

 

(Winner of the EPIC eBook Award for short fiction.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rocky Ridge Books
• Release date: Sep 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393425007

Carole Cummings

Carole lives with her husband and family in Pennsylvania, USA, where she spends her time trying to find time to write. Recipient of various amateur and professional writing awards, several of her short stories have been translated into Spanish, German, Chinese and Polish.

Book preview

Chapter One

IT’S DARK, though not dark enough, but he’s already cutting it too close and this can’t wait. He’s done this enough now they probably know he’s coming, though they know they can’t beat him—or at least they haven’t so far—but they also won’t do this kind of transfer in the light of day. People—even good people—are fine knowing the Bureau regularly rounds up theurgists, as long as they’re told those theurgists are breaking the rules. Skirting the licensing laws; casting against citizens; spelling for personal gain. But seeing the Bureau herding a group of children from one detention facility to another, right out in the open, and with the sun shameless on their faces….

Even the Orthodoxers would balk at that. At least out loud.

The timing will be a little close, but it can’t be helped. He’d only found out about this place and the planned move yesterday, and there’d hardly even been time to determine the coordinates and make proper arrangements. And he needs to get in and back out before one of the strike teams shows up. A place like this goes out of comm for even ten minutes and the alarm goes up. A team can scramble, assemble, and arrive out here in probably just over another fifteen. Bureau lackeys, regular guardsmen, and rent-a-cops—even competent rent-a-cops—he can handle, but he doesn’t like his chances against a real squad of soldiers trained to take people like him down.

The bus meant to transport the kids is just sitting there in the drive, waiting. Innocuous, nothing special, but the pooling shadows of twilight make it look oddly sinister. Which is stupid. It’s just a bus.

He doesn’t risk a spell too close to the fence. He doesn’t want to set off any magic-sensitive alarms, and though he hasn’t had time to pull the dossiers and schematics on this facility like he’d prefer, only the public record blueprints, he knows it has to have at least a charm pinger around the perimeter. They always do.

Wary, he crouches yards away, slides his fingers into the dew-lipped grass, and digs down a few inches into rich loam. This is one of the nicer places they’ve used to stash the children they’ve collected. An estate, actually, way out in the country with no inconvenient neighbors, seized from a theurgist convicted of skewing the safety tests on a manufacturing plant’s jet engine designs.

He purses his lips, sends a tiny, friendly little pulse into damp earth, and doesn’t think about how the whole thing had reeked of a jumped-up trickster getting too big for his britches and the full force of the Orthodoxers converging to shut him down and seize all his assets by any corrupt means necessary. Someone else will have to worry about that cesspool of sleaze. He’s only one person, after all, and there’s only so much he can do.

It’s faint but