Circle

I touched a button on the undersurface of my desk, a motion of less than two inches, and then made a steeple of my hands again as I eyed Mag and said, “Excuse me, sir. This is a private office.”
Mag surged forward half a step, his eyes focused on the girl. “Hold your tongue, mortal, if you would keep it.”
I narrowed my eyes.
Is it so much to ask for civility?
“Justine,” I said calmly, “if you would stand aside, please.”
Justine quickly, silently, moved out from between us.
I focused on Mag and said, “They are under my protection.”
Mag gave me a contemptuous look and raised the staff. Darkness lashed at me, as if he had simply reached into the floorboards and cracks in the wall and drawn it into a sizzling sphere the size of a bowling ball.
It flickered away to nothingness about a foot in front of my steepled hands.
I lifted a finger and Hendricks shot Mag in the back. Repeatedly.
The Fomor went down with a sound like a bubbling teakettle, whipped onto his back as if the bullets had been a minor inconvenience, and raised the stick to point at Hendricks.
Gard’s axe smashed it out of his grip, swooped back up to guard, and began to descend again.
“Stop,” I said.
Gard’s muscles froze just before she would have brought down the axe onto Mag’s head. Mag had one hand uplifted, surrounded in a kind of negative haze, his long fingers crooked at odd angles—presumably some kind of mystic defense.
“As a freeholding lord of the Unseelie Accords,” I said, “it would be considered an act of war if I killed you out of hand, despite your militant intrusion into my territory.” I narrowed my eyes. “However, your behavior gives me ample latitude to invoke the defense-of-property-and-self clause. I will leave the decision to you. Continue this asinine behavior, and I will kill you and offer a weregild to your lord, King Corb, in accordance with the conflict resolution guidelines of section two, paragraph four.”
As I told you, my lawyers send me endless letters. I speak their language.
Mag seemed to take that in for a moment. He looked at me, then Gard. His eyes narrowed. They tracked back to Hendricks, his head hardly moving, and he seemed to freeze when he saw the sword in Hendricks’s hand.
His eyes flicked to Justine and the child and burned for a moment—not with adoration or even simple lust. There was a pure and possessive hunger there, coupled with a need to destroy that which he desired. I have spent my entire life around hard men. I know that form of madness when I see it.
“So,” Mag said. His eyes traveled back to me and were suddenly heavylidded and calculating. “You are the new mortal lord. We half believed that you must be imaginary. That no one could be as foolish as that.”
“You are incorrect,” I said. “Moreover, you can’t have them. Get out.”
Mag stood up. The movement was slow, liquid. His limbs didn’t seem to bend the proper way. “Lord Marcone,” he said, “this affair is no concern of yours. I only wish to take the slaves.”
“You can’t have them. Get out.”
“I warn you,” Mag said. There was an ugly tone in his voice. “If you make me return for her—for them—you will not enjoy what follows.”
“I do not require enjoyment to thrive. Leave my domain. I won’t ask again.”
Hendricks shuffled his feet a little, setting his balance.
Mag gathered himself up slowly. He extended his hand, and the twisted stick leapt from the floor and into his fingers. He gave Gard a slow and wellpracticed sneer and said, “Anon, mortal lordling. It is time you learned the truth of the world. It will please me to be your instructor.” Then he turned, slow and haughty, and walked out, his shoulders hunching in an odd, unsettling motion as he moved.
“Make sure he leaves,” I said quietly.
Gard and Hendricks followed Mag from the room.
I turned my eyes to Justine and the child.
“Mag,” I said, “is not the sort of man who is used to disappointment.”
Justine looked after the vanished Fomor and then back at me, confusion in her eyes. “That was sorcery. How did you … ?”
I stood up from behind my desk and stepped out of the copper circle set into the floor around my chair. It was powered by the sorcerous equivalent of a nine-volt battery, connected to the control on the underside of my desk. Basic magical defense, Gard said. It had seemed like nonsense to me. It clearly was not.
I took my gun from its holster and set it on my desk.
Justine took note of my reply.
Of course, I wouldn’t give the personal aide of the most dangerous woman in Chicago information about my magical defenses.


Brief Cases, Even Hand, Page 149-152