Southwest Nights (Semiautomatic Sorceress Book 1) by Kal Aaron (large ebook reader txt) 📕

Elder Theodora. It was only a matter of time before it disintegrated and returned to the Vault of Dreams anyway.

Tradition. Lyssa didn’t always respect it, but the death of an Illuminated meant something to her. A regalia was more than a costume or a source of power. It was a fundamental reflection of their soul and deserved to be treated as such.

Adrien Allard was blamed as the source of all the shards, and the job was over for both the EAA and the Society, though Samuel mentioned he’d come and chat with Lyssa again after everything settled down.

The rogue Sorcerer’s dying words gnawed at Lyssa as she stood in front of the storage unit’s door. She hadn’t mentioned the storage unit to Aisha, Damien, or Samuel. She didn’t know what they meant yet, and her concern about what had gone down lingered. Adrien’s mention of her brother could have been nothing but a trick, as Jofi suggested, but it was hard to be a Sorceress and not believe in fate a little.

Did she just want to believe? Probably. There was a good chance she’d open the storage unit and find nothing more than some keepsakes.

Part of her hoped that wasn’t true, but another part hoped it was. Anything inside that might lead her to her brother would change her entire life. It was easy to say she wanted to find him when she had no real leads. A desire without a plan was nothing more than a dream that would never be fulfilled.

Lyssa took a couple of deep breaths. A building pressure bothered her as she walked down the hallway toward the indoor storage unit, her boots leaving a trail of wet footprints. Whatever was inside, there was some sorcery involved. That confirmed this lead was something more than a humiliating empty trick, but nothing else.

Then and there, she wasn’t Hecate in front of the storage unit’s door. She didn’t bother to disguise her white jacket. The woman checking out the lead was Lyssa Corti, the younger sister of Chris Corti.

She eyed the keypad. Remembering the code, 06-20-20-15, was easy. June 20, 2015. M-Day. She entered it, and the door clicked open.

“Be aware that the man might have been attempting to manipulate you,” Jofi said.

“I assumed as much, but that doesn’t make him wrong.” Lyssa opened the door and stepped inside. Without her regalia, she was forced to resort to turning on a light switch. “And people tend to lie less when they’re dying.”

Annihilation has a beauty all its own.

She’d been thinking about Jofi’s statement over the last week. As unprecedented as it was, he’d not followed it up with anything similar. Telling Lee and having the Sorcerer overreact about an aesthetic preference statement was a bad idea. She’d worry about it if Jofi said anything else odd.

Three large briefcases sat on the floor, aligned side by side. Lyssa knelt and opened the first one. Scattered objects lay inside. An emerald with a fire burning inside. A bone flute. A slingshot inscribed with glyphs. Shards.

Lyssa opened the other briefcases and found more shards, but in the third suitcase, there was something unexpected: a small memory card. She picked it up and placed it in her palm, stepping away from the suitcases.

No sorcery radiated off it. She chuckled.

“What’s so amusing?” Jofi asked.

“The Elders in the Society might not want to modernize, but it looks like the rogues have.” Lyssa pulled out her phone and inserted the memory card. “Probably has a virus, but what the hell. This is my month for unnecessary risks.”

Nothing nefarious happened. The phone didn’t explode, and no spells went off. Something extremely conventional was stored on the card: photos identified by the date, most taken three or four years ago.

Lyssa gazed at the first picture. An elegant blonde woman in an elaborate red evening gown was being helped out of a limousine by a handsome older man in a tuxedo.

The second image depicted a slender woman in a billowing gossamer scarlet gown with a tight red and black corset. She stood in the center of a room, a red Venetian mask covering her eyes and a scarf inscribed with glyphs covering her face while semi-translucent birds made of light flew around her. The dagger-like red heels looked painful, and Lyssa was glad she fought in boots.

“Do you recognize that woman?” Jofi asked.

“This is a regalia, the Beautiful Stranger.” Lyssa narrowed her eyes. “I met the owner a long time ago, a Sorceress named Helga Strand. She lives in Oslo, I think. She used to, anyway.”

“Is she a Torch?” Jofi asked.

Lyssa shook her head. “Nothing like that. Not a Torch or an Eclipse. A performer, an entertainer—high-class, but that’s it. She’s more the future of coexistence than someone like me.”

She flipped to the next picture. She didn’t recognize the man but was unsurprised when the next picture contained a regalia for a man of the same build.

Five minutes passed as she continued through the matched picture and regalia pairs, over fifty Illuminated. She didn’t recognize all the Sorcerers and Sorceresses on sight, but Lyssa could associate a name with a good chunk of the regalia. Only a small number of Torches and Eclipses she knew about were in the photos, and she couldn’t discern a geographical, essence, or regalia pattern.

“What’s the point of this?” Lyssa frowned. “Preparing something to send to the internet?”

“To what end?” Jofi asked.

She stared at her phone. “That’s the real question. Right now, even the rogues understand that shoving everyone’s identities out in public wouldn’t work out well for them either. It’s kind of like being spies. Even when you know a guy’s working for the other side, you don’t go screaming it from the rooftops if you don’t want attention on you.”

“That seems like an unsustainable strategy.”

Lyssa snickered. “Yeah, because it is. I’m surprised the Society managed to negotiate our privacy in the Sorcery Control Accords, but I’ll take it while it lasts.”

“Simple exposure of all Illuminated identities would cause some difficulties, but