What I got was a stack of paper.
“What?!” I cried, turning the box upside down to dump the pile of perfectly normal, not-even-ancient paper into my lap. “You’ve to be kidding me!”
They were notes. Notes for what I couldn’t say since they were written in the same gobbledygook custom spellwork as everything else, but they looked like plans for something complicated. There were tons of size and time calculations written in the margins, along with dollar amounts that made my eyes go wide. I was trying to figure out if they were costs or expected earnings when I found the stack of receipts.
I didn’t actually recognize what they were at first. I mean, who still used physical receipts? But our dead guy’s love of paper must have extended beyond books, because he’d printed and kept hundreds of receipts going back more than a year. Some were for startling amounts, and even more interesting, they were all for magical reagents.
In the old days, back when the local ambient power had been too thin to just pull whatever magic you needed out of the air, mages had been forced to use external sources to power their spells, usually the body parts of magical animals. These days, there was so much magic floating around that that sort of thing wasn’t necessary unless you were after a very specific magical flavor or property, but this mage must have been doing something crazy, because he had receipts for stuff I hadn’t even heard of. Very expensive stuff.
“Sibyl,” I said quietly, fanning the stack of receipts in front of my cameras. “What’s the total on these?”
“Two hundred eighty-three thousand nine hundred and forty dollars and twenty-seven cents,” my AI replied immediately. “It would have been less, but he got rush shipping on a lot of stuff.”
That was a number to make my eyes go wide. “What was he doing with it all?” I whispered. “I mean, why pay this much for power when you live in a city that’s drowning in free magic?”
“No clue,” Sibyl said. “But if he’d done it anywhere else, it would have been illegal.” She placed a red arrow on my heads-up display, drawing my attention to a receipt in the middle of the pile. “This one’s for a unicorn horn, which only comes off with the unicorn’s head. I don’t have to tell you how heavily protected unicorns are. They’re not even endangered, but humans go crazy anytime one gets hurt. If we weren’t in the DFZ, just having this paper could get you in trouble.”
“Maybe that’s why he was here,” I said thoughtfully. The current DFZ wasn’t quite as laissez-faire as it had been under Algonquin’s rule—the spirit of the lakes had famously cared more for fish than for people, and her lack of laws had shown it—but the modern Detroit Free Zone still lived up to its name. Practically everything short of murder, theft, and slavery was legal here, including, apparently, unicorn poaching. Still. “This has to be worth something,” I said firmly. “You don’t spend this much on reagents and not get something good out of the spell.”
“Well, whatever he was doing, he didn’t do it here,” Sibyl pointed out. “There isn’t enough room in this apartment for even the starting ritual circle he drew on page one.”
That was a good point. “You know,” I said, looking around the tiny bedroom, which was well stocked with general supplies like clothes but curiously light on personal items. “I don’t think he actually lived here. I think this was a place he ran to in emergencies. You know, like a safe house.”
“That would explain all of the security,” Sibyl agreed. “And the cruddy location. No one ever seems to hide in nice places.”
I nodded, paging through the spell notes again. Even accounting for my terrible skill at reading spellwork, they still looked depressingly like a madman’s manifesto. Every page was written out to the margins, and there were doodles of weird creatures with chicken heads and snake tails surrounded by arrows and exclamation points. But nutty as the notes looked, they were all I had. There was no way I was hauling a thousand pounds of books up those slimy, mold-covered stairs for a measly hundred bucks. If the spell laid out on these pages wasn’t worth money, I’d wasted my entire morning and three hundred bucks on this hole.
“Sibyl, does Heidi Varner still work at the Institute for Magical Arts?”
“According to her social media, she does,” my AI replied. “Do you want me to send her a message?”
“No,” I said quickly. I hadn’t used any of my social media accounts in a year, and I wasn’t about to reopen that can of worms for a long shot like this. But where I’d focused primarily on the art and history parts of my magical art history degree, Heidi was a trained Thaumaturge with a specialization in ancient alchemy. She also owed me for not telling her boyfriend about the time she got drunk and kissed another guy in college.
“I’ll just pay her a visit,” I said. “Are her office hours still the same?”
“Same as when you left, according to IMA’s website,” Sibyl reported. “But are you sure you want to go? Not that I’d ever read your private mail, but the subject lines of the messages she’s sent you over the last year and a half seem pretty angry.”
I was sure they did, which was why I’d never looked at them. But desperate times, desperate measures. If there was a chance the spell outlined in these notes was worth anything close to the cost of its reagents, then visiting Heidi was a risk I was willing to take. I was overdue for a change of luck. Maybe our mage had ordered all that stuff but died before he’d gotten the chance to actually cast the spell. For all I knew, there was $283,940.27 worth of reagents just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, waiting for me to come and pick it up.
“I guess it could happen,” Sibyl said when I mentioned this. “It’s not likely, but—”
“I know, I know,” I said as I tucked the pages into my bag. “Just pull the truck around, would you?”
My AI heaved a long, recorded sigh. “Calling it now.”
“Thank you, Sibyl,” I said, walking down the path Peter had cleared through the living room to see if he needed any help getting the dead body up to the street.
Chapter 2
Most established Cleaners owned their own trucks, which made sense when you considered that we basically moved houses for a living. But owning a vehicle of any sort was stupid expensive in the DFZ, so I’d opted for the much cheaper route of leasing from one of the car subscription services. Better still, in a rare stroke of foresight, I’d prepaid for the entire year back in January when I’d had money to burn. I’d also bought a fancy intelligent rice maker and an augmented-reality TV, both of which I’d had to turn around and sell months ago to make my rent.
But the car thing at least I’d gotten right. Subscription vehicles weren’t fancy, fast, or particularly safe—the small pickup I’d been given this time was missing its bumper and looked like it was made entirely from recycled plastic—but it cost less than half what owning my own vehicle would have, and I got to use it for up to two hundred hours a month. Sometimes more if no one else had it booked.
I didn’t even have to drive. Once Sibyl activated it, the truck’s AI piloted itself. The cab didn’t even have a steering console, just a flat plastic dash with a cheap touch screen featuring a badly animated dog asking where I wanted to go in a cheerful, childish voice.