It took me ten minutes, twelve at the most, to prepare my thoughts and will. By the time I stood up again, there was nothing left in the whole world but me, Little Chicago, and my need to find a murderer.
"Bob?" I whispered.
"Everything's nominal. We're in the green, Captain," he said, affecting a Scottish accent.
I nodded without speaking. Then I drew in my will, and the skull's eyelights dwindled to the size of pinpricks. So did all the candles. Newborn black shadows began stretching between the pewter buildings, overlaying the model streets. The temperature in the lab dropped another degree or two as I pulled in energy from all around me, and my skin flushed as my body temperature went up a couple of degrees. When I slowly exhaled, my heated breath formed vapor that drifted around my nose and mouth.
I moved slowly, precisely, and picked up the matchbox. Then I opened it and exposed the fleck of paint inside, and leaned over to carefully place the paint down on the tiny model of my apartment building. I stood over the table, my hand touching the paint and the map, and released my will with a repeated murmur of, "Reperios. Invenios. "
I felt my senses blur for a moment, and then Little Chicago rushed toward me, its buildings growing, until I stood upon the street outside the now life-sized pewter replica of my apartment building.
I took a moment to look around. It looked like Chicago. Flickers of motion surrounded me. Faint outlines of leaves stirred in the pewter trees, ghostly images of the real-world leaves on the trees of the actual Chicago. Faint lights emanated from blank pewter windowpanes. Ghostly cars whispered by on the streets. I could hear the muted sounds of the city, catch the barest hints of scents on the air,
Unnervingly, I could look up and see... myself, my actual, physical body, towering over the model city like Godzilla's hyperthyroid cousin. The sky over Little Chicago held twinkling lights - the dim glows of the lab's candles and Bob's eyelights, all too large to be stars, the way the sun is supposed to look from the outer planets.
I held up the matchbox, my will surging down my arm. It touched on the little flake of paint, which erupted into viridian light and rose into the air above my hand, hovered for a moment, and then streaked off to the north like a miniature comet.
"Maybe you got away with this crap in other towns, Grey Cloak," I muttered. "But Chicago's mine."
My own flesh dissolved into flickering silver light, and I felt myself rush after the energy of the seeking spell, streaking through the ghostly images of Chicago's nightlife in the model all around me, one more insubstantial shade among thousands.
The seeking spell came to rest a block and a half south of Goudy Square Park, a little slice of green the city managed to squeeze in amidst a bunch of architecture. The brilliant mote of light settled onto a ghostly image of a moving car and the image suddenly became solid and visible.
"Gotcha," I growled under my breath, and drifted close to the car, hovering right over its rear bumper, and focused on the driver.
The ghost image remained hazy, dammit. My magic had latched onto the car, and it wasn't going to be easy to get a better look at the driver than I already had. I might be able to pour more energy into the spell, attain greater clarity, but I wanted to save that as a last resort. Too much could cause the whole thing to blow - and it would certainly leave me too exhausted to maintain the connection. Better to hover now, and listen. Sound would be easier to pick up, resonating against the car, against the surrounding city I had modeled for the spell.
The car stopped a stone's throw from the park. It's a bifurcated little place, simultaneously trying to contain a designer garden and a children's playground, and every time I'd look at it, it seemed to me that the kids were winning. Good for them. Nobody who is four, or six, or eight years old needs to feel conflicted about their play area impeding the Italian Renaissance sensibilities of a landscape artist. Heck, I was probably at least that mature, and I was pretty sure I didn't need it, either.
I focused on the spell, and the sounds of the city night came to life around me, growing in volume, rising from a distant, ghostly murmur to simple ambience, as if I'd been standing there. Traffic sounds. A distant siren. The almost subliminal sound of wheels rushing by on the highway a mile off. The cricketlike chirrup of a car alarm. To me, it was the orchestra tuning and warming up before the overture.
Footsteps, swift and confident, coming closer. The curtain was going up.
The passenger door of the green car opened, and a second shadowy figure joined the first. The door closed, harder than it needed to.
"Are you insane," the passenger asked, "meeting here?"
"What's wrong with here?" Grey Cloak asked. His voice was a light tenor, though it sounded distant, hazy, like a partially obscured radio transmission. An accent? Something from Eastern Europe, maybe. It was hard to make out the particulars.
"It's a bloody upper-class WASP neighborhood," the passenger snarled. His voice was deeper, similarly obscured, and bore no trace of foreign accent. He sounded like a newscaster, standard Midwestern American. "There's private security here. Police. If anyone raises any kind of alarm, it's going to attract a great deal of attention in short order."
Grey Cloak let out a low laugh. "Which is why we are safe. It's late at night. All the little dears are sleeping the sleep of the fat and happy. No one is awake to see us here."
The other said something rude. There was a flicker of light in the passenger seat, and it took me a second to work out that he'd just lit a cigarette. "Well?"
"No."
"No?" the passenger said. "No kine? No wizard? What do you mean, no?"
"Both," Grey Cloak said. His tone turned cold. "You told me he was afraid of fire."
"He is," the passenger said. "You should see his fucking hand."
I felt my left hand clench tight, and the crackle of popping knuckles in my very real laboratory drifted through the magical simulation of the city.
Grey Cloak's head whipped around.
"What?" the passenger asked.
"Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"Something..." Grey Cloak said.
I felt myself holding my breath, willing my fingers to unclench.
The passenger looked around for a moment, then snorted. "You're nervous about him. That's all. You missed him and you're nervous."
"Not nervous," Grey Cloak said. "Understandably cautious. He has more resources and more versatility than your people realize. It's quite possible that he's keeping track of me in some way."