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grumpygreenwitch · 10 months ago

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The Witches and Wizards Job 9 - 10 - 11

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NINE

Morning came virulently early. No one had gotten much sleep, and in the end the team decided it wasn't worth the attempt. A few calls got enough food delivered to bury the kitchen bar under a variety of donuts, egg sandwiches, coffee and tea, and they stared at each other, simply because it wouldn't have been polite to stare at their consultant.

Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard, was sitting at one corner of the bar, eating slowly, looking like the victim of a bad suntan booth accident. He didn't look nearly as bad as he had when Nate had dragged him up to the loft, at least. As if the shower had washed away the burns.

As if they hadn't been real.

"Hey, man." Hardison was holding a bag of frozen peas to his head with one hand, and a smoothie with the other. He looked profoundly hungover as he took a seat between Parker and Eliot. The sweatpants Dresden was currently wearing were his; the shirt was Eliot's. "Thanks."

"No problem," the wizard replied, unfazed.

"Harry," Sophie asked as gently as she would've out of any of them if they'd been hurt on the job, "what happened down there?"

Dresden sighed and shifted minutely. Eliot knew that motion; he'd grown out of it himself many years back as a dangerous telltale, but he knew it. It was how you braced yourself to focus on what needed to be done, away from the pain. It went right into the hitter's mental file about the wizard, along with the scarred knuckles, the one bandaged hand, the ready way in which Dresden shifted so his back was nearly always to a wall.

"You found a Burning Witchwell." Nate scoffed minutely, but Dresden didn't seem to mind.

"A Burning… ," Sophie repeated carefully.

"Witch's Well," Dresden enunciated more carefully. "Shorthand, Witchwell."

"Is it still dangerous?" Nate asked.

"Probably. I'll go down in a bit and contain it," Dresden sipped at his cup. "It's a trap, a booby trap."

"Can't you destroy it, dismantle it?" Nate insisted.

"I can try." The wizard glared minutely at the mastermind. "Look, you gotta understand, I was not expecting to find a piece of arcane magic on my first night in Boston. Witchwells are incredibly old magic. I've only ever read of them, I've never even known of someone in the past four hundreds years with the chops to make one."

Sophie threw Nate a quelling look before she turned to Dresden once again. She was both amused and concerned that, at the moment, he looked very much like Parker did: frustrated, restive and angry. The wizard knew there was an enemy before him but he couldn't see it, couldn't target it, couldn't act. There was a great deal of physicality to the man; he was obviously rusty when it came to dealing with people, he'd proved that amply in Chicago, when he'd been about as tongue-tied in front of her as a schoolboy, but he was also used to the world lashing out at him while he had to stand there and take it. Parker was mad that Hardison had gotten hurt and there was no one she could hurt back in retaliation; Harry was just mad that someone had gotten hurt on his watch. "Harry, what exactly is a Burning Witch's Well? How is it a booby trap?"

The wizard sighed deeply. "The first thing you have to understand is that there are laws for me, just as there are for everyone else. There's a lot less for me," he said calmly, "but the penalties are a lot heavier. I can bend a lot of them to help you because you already know there's weirdness going on. I can twist some more because you've been put directly in the line of fire, and because honestly, I don't think anyone's going to be able to look you up for an inquest. But there are still questions I won't be able to answer."

"That's not what we hired you for," Nate protested, knowing it wouldn't matter but still wanting it on record.

Unsurprisingly, Sophie threw him a quelling look before turning back to the wizard. "Go on."

"You've read those fairy tales where someone finds a magic book or a magic cauldron, and read the inscription on it, and it activates?"

"'Speak, friend, and enter'," Hardison murmured.

"It works like that. A normal Witchwell is any item, any thing that's been empowered so you read the command words on it and it activates. It does the one thing it's supposed to do, and it turns off. Very neat, very clean - and very hard to make, because, I mean… Just like any other piece of machinery, anything magical needs power to run. You plug in a coffee maker, you charge a phone, you put batteries in a flashlight; magic's no different. A Witchwell doesn't need any of that. All the power it needs comes from its making, from it being used."

Hardison perked up; this sounded suspiciously like a Rule. He liked Rules; science and technology were full of Rules. Hacking wasn't even breaking the Rules so much as it was applying them in new and exciting ways. To hear that magic had Rules was exactly what he'd been hoping for. "Like a Rolex."

"Say what?"

"There's a rotor, a little pendulum thing, inside most Rolex watches," Hardison explained. "You don't need a battery, you just need to wear the watch to keep it going."

Harry looked surprised at this bit of trivia. "You can do that?"

Nate stepped in. "So this thing downstairs," he declared, trying to shepherd the conversation back in place. "It's going to keep running forever?"

"No," the wizard said forcefully. "It's going to run whenever someone reads what it says on it."

"I didn't read it, I couldn't," Hardison said immediately.

"But you tried," Harry said, not unkindly. "That's where the fernflower comes in."

"I'm very curious about this 'fernflower'," Nate said mildly.

Harry gave the mastermind a suspicious look. Apparently he'd already learned that 'mild', when it came to Nate Ford, meant danger. "For starters, it's not a real plant."

Nate pinned a vaguely murderous look on the wizard.

"Harry," Sophie was trying not to laugh. "You and Hardison didn't get hurt by an imaginary flower."

"The fernflower didn't hurt him, or me." He gestured, trying to ferry his own thoughts back into a semblance of order. "Fernflower's a flower of the Nevernever, the world on the other side, fairies, all th-"

"Fairies are real?!" Parker interrupted him.

Dresden closed his eyes and fought to focus. "Yes, they are, no, they're not nice, no, they don't grant wishes, if you see one, run."

"Why? What would you do if you saw one?" she challenged.

"Run," Dresden replied earnestly without missing a beat. "It's rare even there. It only grows in places of power, places were magic naturally gathers. It's that plant you hear about in fairy tales that gives you magical powers, but only for a little bit. It lets you talk to animals, protects you from curses or," he sighed, looking at Hardison, who immediately realized the cause-and-effect involved.

"It lets you read magic," the hacker said slowly, testing the words even as he spoke them.

"That's the booby part," the wizard admitted.

"Because even if whoever found the cylinder didn't know anything about magic, they'd still activate it." Hardison lowered the bag of peas. "That's nasty, Dresden."

"That's the harmless bit," the wizard told him wryly, "hangover aside. The killer in there was the night's breath."

"Let me guess," Nate pointed out dryly. "Another plant that doesn't exist?"

"Oh, no, you can grow night's breath on this side," Dresden replied in the same tone. "It's just illegal and if you do grow it a man in grey with a big sword's gonna show at your doorstep, torch your garden and cut your head off."

There was a very long beat of silence.

"That brought up so many questions I don't even know where to begin," Sophie declared, stunned. Nate scoffed and worked on refilling his cup.

"I got one," Eliot stepped in. "Dresden, you washed off the burns. You were covered in blisters. Hardison was covered in blisters. They were real."

"They sure hurt like it," Hardison muttered.

"But they still washed off. You're hurt, but you're not hurt as bad as you were."

"He doesn't actually have magic." Dresden pointed at Hardison. "Night's breath burns magic, corrodes it. In his case, it burned off the fernflower, not him."

"And in your case?"

"I sloughed off what it had damaged. A bit like scouring a wound that's gone bad; it's not pleasant, but at least the stuff underneath's healthy. And I'm thinking I can't afford to take my time healing, if you're finding Burning Witchwells just lying around."

The fridge began to rattle.

"Getting hurt doesn't work like that," Eliot protested tightly.

"Stuff from the Nevernever doesn't last on this side," the wizard countered. "It needs a power source, energy, will, same as anything else. For starters, the fernflower. But once that burned off, all it needed was belief. If…" He trailed off, staring at Hardison in sudden befuddlement.

"Alec Hardison." Hardison put aside the smoothie and offered his hand.

"Harry Dresden." Dresden shook it.

"Pleasure to meet you."

"You bet." Neither man missed a beat. "If I could get to Hardison before he realized what the night's breath had done, before it had time to cement itself in his mind, I knew he'd be fine."

Hardison started laughing a bit. "You had to catch me before it got compiled." He looked terribly pleased. Despite his words to Parker or Nate, Hardison had expected a hoax and a riddle in equal parts. What he had never, in his wildest imaginings, had expected, was that he (and Arthur C. Clarke) had been right. But he was, they were. In his own way, the partially singed Chicago beanpole was just a different sort of hacker, with a different language, with different tools. Just like Hardison was a master of his own science, so was Dresden. Dresden's tech was just incompatible with everything else.

The big ol' monolith was indeed just a different breed of computer.

"I think I'd like to know what's going on now, if it's not too much trouble," the wizard said evenly, looking at Sophie and Nate.

Surprisingly, it was the mastermind who replied to the request. "You go lock that canister down," he told Dresden. "By the time you get back hopefully we'll have hard copies of everything so we don't have any more screen mishaps -"

The coffee-maker chose that moment to chirp sadly and shut down.

"Yup." Dresden hopped to his feet.

"Eliot, go with him," Nate directed.

"Alright."

"Can I come?" Parker asked hopefully.

"Are you good at following directions in a hurry?"

"The sort of directions people give in a hurry, yes."

A smile twitched along the wizard's mouth, making him look younger and handsome for the briefest of moments. "Can't argue with that condition. Come on."

TEN

If Parker and Eliot had been expecting to see some magnificent display of magical fireworks as their contractor dealt with the canister, they were sorely disappointed. Dresden stepped warily enough into the room, and examined everything else: the table, the camera, the rumpled tablecloth on which the canister rested - everything but the canister itself.

"You got any duct tape?" he asked Eliot, further confusing both thief and hitter. Then, with utmost care, he taped a piece of cardboard from a box of straws on top of the inscription of the canister.

"That's it?" Eliot asked in disbelief.

"Yeah," the wizard shrugged. "Can't read it, it can't activate." He shook the canister slightly; they all heard something sloshing in there, and Dresden grimaced. "I don't like that sound, though." He wrapped the canister in the tablecloth, duct-taped that down as well, set it back down on the table and dragged a sharpie out of a pocket in his weather-beaten duster. He drew a long, deep breath.

Then he sketched a near perfect circle on the table and began to sketch swift, unrecognizable scribbles around the perimeter.

Parker brightened up. "What are you doing?"

"Making it so the owner can't track this thing to here," Dresden replied distractedly. "At least not without warning me that they're doing so. It's a warding circle." He gave them both a very level look. "Whoever did is very, very powerful. Powerful enough that just their image, not even their presence, is messing with your equipment. I doubt I can stop them if they really want their little death bottle back, but I can at least be here to get a good look when they come for it." The fingers of Dresden's bandaged hand twitched restlessly.

With Eliot carrying the camera, they headed back up to the loft. Rather than gathering before the bank of screens, they surrounded the kitchen bar once again, cleared of food and buried instead in any number of documents, printouts and paperwork.

Dresden picked up a chair and slid it back and away a whole two feet when Eliot put the camera down on the table. Nate shot the wizard a pointed look. "All done?"

"As much as it can be without my workshop," Dresden admitted.

"What do you need from your workshop?" Nate asked distractedly as he read from a very official-looking folder.

"The list is endless… Is that… Is that a police report?"

"No." Nate tipped his chin vaguely at the bar. "That's the police report. This is the insurance investigation report."

Dresden's mouth worked emptily for a moment.

"Harry," Sophie said mildly. "I think it's time we told you what we know."

"That'd be nice," he admitted, not quite managing to keep the doubt out of his tone or his expression. It quickly changed to disbelief as Hardison began speaking, even though every now and again the hacker got sidetracked into grumbling while he dug through the mountain of paperwork to find some tidbit or another.

"Is it magic?" Sophie asked into a brief silence when Hardison finished speaking.

"What? Yes." Dresden shook himself. "Yeah, of course it is. I knew that the moment I realized you'd found a Witchwell. Of course there's magic involved."

"You look so unconvinced, it's all," she pointed out.

"I'm not unconvinced, I'm -" He hesitated visibly, and then smiled wryly. "The people who hire me rarely tell me everything they know. Or anything at all."

Nate set a hand on the papers, looking deeply thoughtful. "Honesty, mister Dresden. I believe I mentioned that before."

"You did." Dresden said nothing else. He could feel the mood around the table sharpening, every eye coming to rest on Ford.

"You know what bothers me?" the mastermind said at last.

"That people nearly died?" Sophie suggested.

Nate flapped a hand at her. "That doesn't bother me, that upsets me. Very different."

"That they could have ruined the artwork?" Dresden suggested meekly.

"Argonite systems are designed to be completely safe to the art," the mastermind told him distractedly, picking up and tossing two stapled pages on the center of the table. "The Tetryakov Gallery is delighted, actually, that the Gardner Museum was willing to kill in order to protect the collection."

"Is that… Is that normal?"

"They're Russians, Harry," Sophie explained, leaning closer. "If you really want to see cutthroat, you should try to get an art loan from the Egyptians. Or the Japanese."

"What bothers me," Nate said firmly, "is that we found the cylinder at all." Silence fell around the bar. "Nothing else was this sloppy, not even the ones that could've gotten away with it."

"Rush job," Eliot murmured.

"Why?" Sophie asked. "What changed, what was different?"

"We were there," Parker pointed out.

"We aren't the target." Nate shot that one down. "We hadn't even taken the job at that point."

"Fedorov was there." Eliot picked up their dossier on the Russian enforcer and threw it atop everything else. "He did say this has been targeting people from their side."

Nate paused to consider that.

"I have been meaning to make time for the Sokolov collection, but I am a busy man, mister Ford."

"Fedorov might be a target, but this wasn't for him. He'd planned this visit ahead of time; they would have known he was coming, it wouldn't have been sloppy."

"The woman," Sophie murmured. "Baba Yaga."

Nate grimaced openly, then visibly braced himself. "Dresden, you're up. What can you tell us about Baba Yaga that we don't already know?"

"That I hope it's not her? If she is, there's next to nothing I can do to help you. You could call in a dozen wizards and they still wouldn't be able to help you." Suddenly aware that he had the team's attention, the wizard exhaled resignedly. "Stories and fairy tales aside, Baba Yaga is… a single step down and sideways from a god. Just like prayer and belief, and time, and a bunch of other variables empower a god, she's the same way. She depends on people to empower her, yes, but she's also been around so long that she has gained other sorts of power, magic, knowledge, alchemy, favors. She used to be a kind of litmus test for royalty, not just Russian, but most of the Slavic bloodlines. The Royal had to either trick her or survive her to prove they were worthy of the throne."

"And if they didn't?"

"She ate them," Parker replied before Dresden could.

The wizard, looking sheepish, had to agree. "She ate them."

"She ate p- like, for real she ate people?" Hardison demanded confirmation.

"You'd be surprised how many things out there think we're just convenient little walking snacks," Dresden said, voice tight. "But. It's entirely possible that she also just ate them metaphorically, like… eating their magic, eating their mind, their luck, their knowledge, eating half a dozen things that could, would, leave them alive. Just not in a way they'd appreciate."

"Better to just get eaten," Eliot muttered, daunted.

"Do we agree, then, that she's the target?" Sophie asked.

"No, we agree on nothing just yet, "Nate protested. "Only that she was there, unexpectedly. Someone saw a shot and they took it. So why was she there to begin with?"

"The portrait." Parker rummaged through the mound of paper until she found the printout of Nate's photograph, and frowned minutely at it. "She really does look upset."

"Can I see that?" Dresden asked politely, and Parker surrendered the printout. He squinted at it. "Do you have a bigger one?"

"Sure, the one hanging on a wall at the Gardner Museum, why?" Nate told him flippantly.

"This." Dresden stood up to move closer to the table, then hesitated. Hardison picked up the camera and put it aside, and the wizard set the paper down, pointing at the barely visible flash of green under the man in black's coat. "This is magic."

"How can you tell?" Sophie moved closer.

"I can't, that's why I want a closer look. But the setting around it, that silver, diamonds, whatever it might be? They just saw me draw something like it downstairs. A warding circle."

"Who's the man?" Eliot asked. "Did we figure that out?

Nate stared at the printout. "He was there, too."

"You saw him?" Sophie turned to look at him.

"I'm… not sure." The mastermind closed his eyes, trying to remember that moment. Motes of dust in the golden sunlight, barely stirring. The quiet murmur of a dozen admiring conversations. The portraits all around. Sophie nearby. Parker. Fedorov. The old woman.

The man, passing by the open doorway before the shutters slammed down.

Nate opened his eyes and shook his head. "I saw someone that looked like him, but it was just a quick glimpse. It could have been anything."

"Harry, who is he?"

"He could be anyone, a Royal, a pupil. It's said she took on apprentices every now and again."

"An asshole. That's what Fedorov said." Parker cocked her head. "I kinda agree."

"Hardison, did you get a chance to go through the security camera footage?" Nate shuffled through the paperwork.

"No, because every time I tried, my failsafes started beeping. How do you- is there any technology you can use?" the hacker demanded of Dresden.

"I've got a landline, and a VW Beetle," the wizard was trying not to sound amused at Hardison's plaintive demand. "Anything old. The older the better. Pre-WWII is pretty much guaranteed to work fine."

"Oh, my god, you want me using…" Hardison sighed in exasperation, hanging his head for a moment. "Fine. Fine, I guess backwards-compatible means we have to go way back." He looked at Nate. "I gotta go shopping, but I can have something set up by lunch."

"Parker and I could take Harry to the museum," Sophie suggested.

"Why? The painting's not there anymore." When everyone looked at her, Parker shrugged. "The MET demanded we move the collection to secure storage, and the Gardner doesn't have the vault space. It's in the MFA vaults now."

"How long would it take you to get in there?" Nate asked without hesitation.

"I can be in and out with it by lunchtime, too."

"No, I don't want you to steal the painting, Parker. You and your friend worked too hard to get this loan set up. How long would it take you to get yourself and Dresden into the vault?"

"Oh." She turned to look at him. "Can you make yourself invisible?"

"Uh, no. That's a little involved, and I don't have my workshop."

She huffed. "Magic's not very fun, is it?"

"Parker, how long would it take you to break into the vault if there were no other security concerns?" It was Sophie's turn to look like she was thinking hard.

The thief thought on it and shrugged. "Nine minutes from the front door to the vault. It's a Milwaukee 2300, they're a little temperamental sometimes."

Sophie turned to look at Nate. "We don't need anything from the vault. We just need Harry to get in, have a look and get out."

Nate paused to digest that. "The Mona Lisa?" he suggested. Sophie's smile told him he'd guessed right.

"Mix in a little Golden Fiddle, and we could probably go as long as twenty minutes before the police are even called."

"Hardison, how many decent fakes can you give me in," Nate checked his watch, "five hours?"

The hacker looked delighted. "Give me six and you can have a hundred solid."

"Lunchtime, then." Nate nodded and moved to the door, where Sophie was already waiting for him. "Dresden, make your list."

"My list?"

"You keep saying you need your workshop, which is fair, but I need you working at full efficiency. Make your list. I doubt it's endless but hey, we like challenges around here." The mastermind pointed. "Parker's going to run you through a little escapade -"

"Are we breaking into a museum vault?!" The wizard sounded a little indignant, and a lot full of disbelief.

"Well, yes," Nate admitted cheerfully, "but we're not stealing anything," he added, as if that made everything better, and walked out of the loft.

ELEVEN

The con went off just after lunch. It gave the team time to set up a few failsafes, and gave their hired wizard a chance to stuff his pockets with a variety of very strange things.

Around 3 PM, with the wind rushing down Huntington Avenue and the trains of the Green Line clattering back and forth, the nondescript white van finally found a parking spot a little bit away from the entrance to the museum. There was a sparse crowd hanging around, mostly art students waiting for the brief period when admittance was free. A great many of them had sketch pads and were busily putting down, in broad charcoal strokes or distracted color lines, the ephemera of the people passing them by. The rear doors of the van swung open. "Ladies and gentlemen!" A powerfully built man in faded jeans, heavy steel-toed boots and a comfortable jacket sat on the edge of the van's bed, his voice pitched to carry and catch the attention of those around him, his good looks and the peaceable, charming half-smile he wore like sunlight set to keep it. "How about we engage in some mischief!"

He gestured to the back of the van, where canvases sat in neat, orderly rows, hanging from a specialty shelf. "I have one hundred and twenty pieces of art here. Twenty bucks a pop, only one per customer, no refunds, no returns, no buyer's remorse." The man reached into the rack, gently dislodged one of the smaller canvases, and set it on his lap.

A sigh went up from the crowd. Renoir's 'Madeleine', one of the artist's smallest portraits, well known to be in a private Louisiana collection, gazed soulfully at them. "At least one of them," the man told the crowd while he had their attention, "is the real deal."

Gasps followed that proclamation. "Yeah, right!" Someone yelled. A crowd was beginning to gather around the back of the van.

Eliot grinned merrily. "You don't gotta believe me, man." He set the Renoir aside, reached for a larger canvas. The crowd cried out in disbelief. Titian's 'Salome' stared them all down haughtily. "It's your buck against my bang. You can just walk away."

"How much for the 'Salome'?" a woman's voice shouted from the crowd.

"Twenty bucks for each of the nine."

"Can I buy four?"

"One a pop."

"I'll give you fifty each for four of them," another man exclaimed, rushing up to the van.

"Nope, twenty each, one per customer."

"I can just come back," the man protested.

"My man, you're gonna what, take it off the frame and roll it up to hide it in your shirt? Titian's 'Salome'?" Eliot pinned a level gaze on the man, who caved pretty much immediately. He still passed out a twenty, and Eliot readily surrendered the canvas. "Pleasure doing business with you."

The crowd began to close in. Seemingly at random, Eliot grabbed another canvas and brought it forth.

Every voice went profoundly silent. The hitter peeked around at the painting. A masterpiece, missing since World War II, stared back at him. "Oh, that one." His grin was pleasant, his blue eyes full of cheer. "Got four of those."

"Twenty, I got a twenty!" A young woman surged breathlessly forward.

"You got it, sweetheart. Wanna wipe your fingers before you grab it, though," he pointed out, offering her a tissue so she could scrub charcoal dust off her hands.

The crowd detonated. People rushed forward, chatting, exclaiming, questioning. It was a lottery, yes, but at 100-to-1 odds it was brutally effective as bait. Word went out. Passersby detoured. Not everyone was buying, not everyone was convinced that any of the paintings were real, rather than merely exceptional copies. Arguments exploded discussing brushstrokes, pigments, styles.

Jessamine Lochlin fought her way to the front of the crowd. "One 'Salome'," she demanded breathlessly. "And I'll have you know this is just the worst -"

"One 'Salome' for the gorgeous young lady." Eliot turned the full force of his charm onto the young curator. "Picked it special just for you."

Lochlin went pink to the roots of her hair, her righteous indignation choking out with a squeak. By the time she recovered she was short a twenty, richer by a highly suspicious canvas, and the horrible man peddling a potential masterwork out of the back of a van had moved on to argue with two people who each wanted a copy of 'Madeleine' - except they wanted the same copy.

She huffed angrily, and pressed her mouth into a thin, undecided line. Some part of her still wanted to tell the man fifty different kinds of whatfor. A tiny part of her wanted another one of those gorgeous grins, but she stepped on that part with angry determination.

Most of her, however, was whispering very loudly. What if it's true?

That was the part that won, eventually. It would have won in any of the people there, most of whom loved art in one form or another. She turned and fought her way through the crowd, half-running, half-speedwalking to the entrance to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, rushing through the afternoon crowds and the beautiful displays without seeing either.

"Jessamine!" A familiar voice, a soft Russian burr, called out to her, and the curator turned in both surprise and exasperation. It was the Russian woman, Iggy's friend, the curator, apparently admiring the Japanese exhibit. "Hello, what a pleasant surprise."

"Oh, hi!" Lochlin beamed at the woman, paused exactly three seconds, not even listening to what she was saying. "Bye!" She ran on, leaving the other curator open-mouthed and puzzled. She burst into the main laboratory. "Michael, I need your Titian database!"

There were two men currently in the room, a vast, airy, sealed space full of sedately humming, dormant machinery under blue halogen lights. One was an older man, lanky and silver-haired, the unruly mane braided at his back. He had an indecent amount of stubble and a lab coat over a tee telling the world that finger-painting was an acceptable form of art, the writing surrounded by prehistoric hand stencils. The other was a short, stocky man with little hair on top of his head, but an impeccably groomed silver beard and moustache, a fine button-down shirt and slacks under his own coat. He sputtered in surprise at the invasion. "Jess, what on Earth -"

She hefted 'Salome' and while she didn't quite slam it on the work table between the two men, it was a close thing.

They gaped at it, speechless.

"There is a man out there selling these out of the back of a van. He's promised one's the real deal, I bought a 'Salome', and I need your Titian database, and then I need your Raphael database because he has a 'Portrait'."

"A portrait?" The lanky man straightened up. "The 'Portrait'?!"

Lochlin nodded intently.

"Fakes. All fakes. A conman's game, Eli, don't you dare, Elijah!" The other man was already running out. Michael Erlkist, one of the MFA's most seasoned curators and its Egyptian and Fertile Crescent expert, scoffed. "They're all fakes, they have to be," he protested at Lochlin.

"Michael!" she all but shrieked at him.

"Alright, alright!" The man moved over to one of the computers. "Mel isn't here, though, Jess. She's the Titian specialist, none of us are near as good."

The young curator paused, struck by the truth of that. As much science as one could apply to telling the difference between an original and its replicas, verifying artwork, particularly paintings, was still a matter of skill, of finesse, of expertise acquired on the field. "We're plenty good, you and I."

"I like mummies and you do watercolors." His tone was dry and deadpan. "And you bought this out of the back of a van."

"Michael, he has a 'Portrait'."

"Everyone always has a 'Portrait'."

"Are you willing to take that chance? The one in a million chance that it's the real 'Portrait'? That this is the real 'Salome'? He has nine 'Madeleine's!"

"'Madeleine' is in a private collection in Louisiana," he retorted primly.

"Is it? Would they have said anything if they'd lost it, if it got stolen?"

"Jess, what do you want?" He demanded impatiently.

"I want to know if this is the real 'Salome'!"

"What if it is?" Without letting her answer, he asked, "What if it isn't?"

"If it isn't that means another chance that one of the 'Portrait's is real," she told him with hyperbolic focus.

That shut him up. He turned and typed furiously on the computer. "This isn't going to work, you know. We know the theory, the basics. Never mind that no one can authenticate a painting without taking at least a few hours to do so. You need someone with more expertise, who's actually worked with other collections."

She huffed angrily at him, but couldn't dispute that point. Chewing on her lip, a sudden idea occurred to Lochlin. "Get started with the analysis, I'll be right back."

"Oh, what now," he moaned.

She was already gone, sprinting past the late afternoon crowds and looking about desperately. She nearly ran down a woman and her two kids as she closed in on her target. "Hey! Hi. Hello. Ekaterina, right?"

Ekaterina Yegorov turned and smiled her calm, steady smile at the younger curator. "Please, Jessamine, Kate is fine. Ekaterina is for formal occasions and for customers, you do not need to -"

"That's nice. Have you ever curated Titian?"

"Oh, another personal favorite we share, is it?" The Russian brightened up at once. "The detail work on 'Flora' is just so exquisite -"

"Good. Come with me."

Ekaterina found herself all but hauled along, her sensible heels clacking a harried staccato on the marble floors, her confusion warring with her implacably calm demeanor. Lochlin dragged her past several guards and security locks and very nearly shoved her into the lab.

"Jessamine Esther Lochlin, you do not bring strangers into my lab!" Erlkist cried out.

"She's not a stranger! She's an independent curator. She's good, too, I should know, I've spoken to her before! And she knows Titian."

Both curators turned to look at Ekaterina, who shrugged delicately. "My work is discreet, but not secret," she declared, flicking her fingers to the computer. "You can find it if you search for it."

"Let me just do that, if you don't mind," Erlkist replied with stiff, frantic courtesy, turning back to the computer and tripping over his own fingers.

"Between the three of us, we can surely tell -" Lochlin hissed impatiently at him.

"Ah-buph-buph-buph," he shushed her. "You brought a stranger into my lab, Jessamine Lochlin," he accused her irately, but equally sotto-vocce.

"We need more eyes on this," she snapped. The screen suddenly began to load a vast list of responses to Erlking's query. "Besides, she's obviously not a stranger," she declared, gesturing sharply.

They stared; they read. Ekaterina Yegorov was, as she'd pointed out, discreet but not a secret. Her work was there to be found, everywhere, from small private collections to some names that made both the curators glance nervously at her over their shoulders.

It didn't matter if they were being subtle enough or not, she wouldn't have caught them: Yegorov was curiously examining the 'Salome' Lochlin had left on the table. Lochlin elbowed Erlking minutely, and they both turned as covertly as they could to watch as idle curiosity became radiant focus.

Yegorov began to mutter in Russian. She wouldn't touch the painting, obviously, but she paced back and forth along three sides of the table, leaning close and squinting fiercely at it from each side she could reach. "Bozhe moi," she breathed after a moment, her expression stunned and her voice strangled, "is this 'Salome'? I thought we had lost it to some, some," she sought angrily for a foul enough word, "selfish private collector."

Lochlin gave Erlking a triumphant look.

"That is not proof!" he protested. "That is one opinion out of three -"

Elijah Randall burst into the lab, wheezing, his face red, carrying a canvas. "Oh, my god, I just bought the 'Madeleine' for twenty bucks out of the back of a van." He laid the canvas down on the table next to 'Salome' and leaned down, his cheek nearly on the table, making frantic little noises.

"It's a fake! Elijah, you know this con! We all know this con! This is Brooklyn all over again!"

"Wasn't one of those real?" Yegorov pointed out meekly.

"I know Renoir, Michael!" the lanky man fired back. "Oh, my god, I touched it, where are the glov - Sorry about the 'Salome', Jess.

"But," Lochlin blinked at him. "'Salome''s real."

Everyone in the lab came to a dead stop. He sputtered a question he couldn't finish. Lochlin gestured at Yegorov.

"Obviously I would need to go into more detail," the Russian woman admitted. "But I would readily offer my word that this is the real 'Salome'.

Eli and Jess crossed a look. "He's got multiple originals," she breathed.

"He's got a 'Portrait'," he choked.

"Who's got a portrait?" Yegorov asked in confusion.

"Everyone always has a 'Portrait'!" Erlking yelled. "It's the most counterfeited painting in the history of painting! Everyone wants to be the one who finds it, undamaged, safe, famous!"

"Wait, the 'Portrait'?" The Russian woman's attention sharpened all at once. "'Portrait of a Young Man'?" she asked Randall.

He nodded breathlessly.

"They're fakes! They're all fakes!"

Yegorov looked at 'Salome'.

They all looked at 'Salome'.

Yegorov looked at 'Madeleine'.

They all looked at 'Madeleine'.

"Um, I think, if you do not mind, I will go -" she said most politely, inching for the door.

Randall and Lochlin sprinted past her and raced out.

"No, don't -!" Erlking was too polite a creature to swear openly, but his face was blotchy and his expression was angry. "Stay right there!" he yelled at Yegorov, for lack of any other target to take the brunt of his mood. She jumped and nodded warily. He snatched for his coat and ran after his peers.

The lab was silent, only the quiet whisper of technology surrounding the lone woman.

Sophie gave the curators ninety seconds to get out and succumb to the mob mentality Eliot had provoked outside before she opened the door and peeked out, just in time to see Parker and Dresden coming up to her. "You are going to wreck this place," he told the wizard almost gleefully.

"I'm already breaking into a museum full of priceless art," Dresden shot back dryly. "Destruction of property is low on the list of crimes I'm committing today."

"Oh, you'll be fine, Harry," she grinned wickedly at him, holding the door open for them. While Parker could have breached the security defenses of the MFA, Sophie infiltrating instead had shaved nearly three minutes off their timeline. "It's just computers, machines."

Harry was staring all around him with a little grimace, trying to stay dead center of the room and as far away from anything digital-looking as possible. "The computers aren't important?"

"Not as much as the art. They can replace a spectrograph." Sophie put on gloves while Parker moved to the far end of the lab, where a door stood discreetly to one side, a lock blinking sedately at them all. "'Salome' can never be replaced," the grifter murmured, picking up the canvas with utmost care and setting it aside, safely out of the way.

Dresden blinked at her. "You m- You mean it's real?!"

"Yes, of course. The Golden Fiddle only works if some part of what you offer is real, Harry. Normally you have a fiddle, but sometimes you have to get a little creative."

"So this is the one real painting you had in there?"

"God, no," Sophie took off the gloves and pocketed them. "This con was geared toward people who know their art, Harry. One real work wouldn't have fooled them." The lock, under Parker's ministrations, beeped cheerily and the door hissed open to a tiny room that looked very much like an airlock, since it actually was one. "There's seven originals," Sophie explained.

"What is it you guys do again?" Dresden croaked hoarsely.

"We're past the lab," Parker said mildly.

From his spot in the service parking lot behind the museum, Hardison stared at the screen and the chatter he was getting from the earbuds of the team. There was an almighty amount of feedback trying to whistle into the collective channel from Sophie's line, which he took to mean she was the one currently closest to Dresden. Giving the wizard an earbud had nearly blown the other five; Hardison was sensible enough not to try a second time, but everything in him itched to know one of his teammates, however temporary, was in there without communications, without support. It made him twice as aware of anything else that might clue him as to Dresden's location and general state of being. When Parker spoke, he was ready. "Nate?"

"Internal power's off." Their mastermind had never been the sort to shy away from getting his hands dirty - literally, in this case, when he'd had to hunt down the immense generators that supplied power to the security systems of the museum and do mean things to them. He rubbed grease off his hands and scowled minutely. So much effort wasted for a hunch of 'magic'. "Eliot, how're you holding up?"

"Oh, we're fine, Nate." Normally a Gold Rush would have run with two people, but Jessamine Lochlin already knew three of the team's members, and Hardison had been needed elsewhere. Eliot, shuffling into the van to reach canvases further back, was having a blast with his current partner. "Dresden's security's working like a charm. Right, Mouse?" The immense Temple dog, sitting shotgun in the van, whuffled; after those gigantic jaws had caught and delicately held onto the hand of someone trying to break into the van, no one else had tried.

Hardison shut off the external power feeding into the lab area. Nothing much seemed to change for two of the three people stepping out of the airlock into a dimly lit hallway. For Parker, it was as if an incredibly loud world had gone abruptly silent. Chem-detectors, bubbling microscopically to themselves, went quiet. The delicate subsonic zap of the laser grid faded. The heat sensor began to cool with inaudible pings. Only the lights that dotted the hallway beyond the airlock, which ran on their own dedicated batteries, remained.

She led the way at a quick trot, Sophie a step behind, Dresden three. One of the lights above them crackled and fizzled out, and both women turned to glare at the wizard, who shrugged awkwardly. "Are you seriously going to crack a museum vault in nine minutes?"

Parker grinned at him. "I could do it in four, but I'm not gonna." She lifted a keycard with a picture of a stocky, older man, balding, with a neat beard and moustache. "Hardison, we're here."

"Restoring power now," Hardison replied. The lights brightened. The lock next to the door blinked back to life. Parker ran the card through it and the immense vault door clicked and clanked loudly as several bolts slid open.

"Sophie, tell Dresden to move away from you," Hardison said suddenly into the line. "The feedback's getting bad."

"He is away from us," she replied as Parker dragged the immense door open, glancing at the wizard, who was five steps away and looking decidedly uncomfortable with the proceedings.

Hardison chewed on his lip. "He might be affecting the intranet system I'm piggybacking for our communications." The buds would have never been powerful enough to get a signal past the tremendous amount of steel and concrete currently between the outside world and the three interlopers, but the museum had run its own communication network into the vaults. Unfortunately, as with most technology trapped in direct proximity to a wizard, it was becoming increasingly unhappy. "Hurry."

The door swung open on soundless hydraulic systems. "Harry, we're about to lose comms," Sophie told him tersely. "In, out, now."

He charged past them, his coat flaring behind him. They followed him into the vault. It was a cold, dark space, lighted only as much as necessary. Racks, easels and pedestals stood at regular intervals, granting no space for observation, merely for each piece in storage not to touch its neighbors.

"We need light," Sophie murmured. Both her and Parker reached for their phones.

A warm, silvery radiance filled the space, spilled all around them, touched the shadows and sent them scurrying away. Both of them stared. Dresden had lifted up the plain pendant he carried tucked under his shirt and it glowed like starlight between his fingers. Sophie could only gape; as magic went it was nothing, a tiny trick, likely easily replicated with tech. But it was there, before her, real. She'd thought herself willing to believe; she hadn't realized how far she'd been from taking the actual leap of faith until that moment.

Parker grinned triumphantly at the sight. Finally, some proper magic.

"Where is it?"

"Here." The thief led the way to the largest frame in the vault, Sokolov's double portrait. Harry followed after her -

The buds screeched feedback. Wherever they were, all of the team winced.

"Dresden!" Hardison yelled.

"Sorry, sorry!" Though Harry couldn't hear the hacker, he could readily figure out why the two women with him had jerked violently and slapped a hand to their ears, and stepped immediately back.

"No, Harry, you step forward, we step back," Sophie told him sternly, giving him a little shove, Parker and her moving further into the vault. Just like that, the wizard was before Sokolov's portrait.

Almost immediately he was frowning. "Stay behind me," he told them distractedly. "Can I touch it?"

"No," both women replied tartly.

Dresden lifted his free hand and ran it just shy of the portrait's surface. "Ok, this is -" He grimaced minutely. "This better not be another trap," he muttered and flicked his fingers.

There was a flash of deep, rich green light, brighter than what he'd conjured. On the portrait, the half-hidden emerald brooch shone like a star, as if someone had kindled a light behind it to show it off as one of the most striking jewels in the world.

"What is it?" Parker asked while Sophie stared, open-mouthed.

"A lock," the wizard replied without turning. "A literal lock." He took a full step back and threw his arms open. The entire frame, ancient gilt and carved wood, began to glow. "This isn't just a portrait, it's a door." He went very still. "It's a gate."

"Good or bad?" Nate asked on the line. Sophie repeated the question.

"Well, odds are it opens to the Nevernever," Dresden replied, then seemed to hear his own words. "So bad. Very bad. Except it's, you know, locked."

"Bad enough that we should take it?"

"No," Nate refuted at once. The line crackled over the one negative.

"Parker, no," Sophie gasped.

"I'm not leaving another death bottle lying around," the thief declared sharply. "Particularly around Jess. Harry?"

Dresden dropped his arms and his head and turned very slowly. "You… have a point," he admitted unhappily, then rubbed at his forehead. "You both saw it. It took nothing to activate the lock. Obviously without the key it's not doing anything, but if the key does show up…" He trailed off. "Almost nothing in the Nevernever's friendly. Neutral at best. Hungry, almost always."

Sophie gritted her teeth and made the only decision she felt she could make. "Everything we need to safely move it should be back at the lab."

Nate huffed, rushing out and hopping on the driver's seat of Hardison's van. "Eliot, start a few arguments. They'll need a little more time. Sophie -"

The line squealed feedback, fired off a few angry popping sounds, and Hardison hissed. "I lost the communication intranet. It burned out."

Nate exhaled sharply, turning to look at the museum.

The three people inside rushed out of the vault, Sophie giving out terse directions. "Harry, will taking the frame apart affect th-" They came out of the vault, around the immense door, and face to face with six people clad in black from head to toe.

Everyone came to a stunned halt.

One of the black-clad figures snarled something in Russian.

The three didn't hesitate: they stepped right back into the vault.

#leverage #nathan ford #parker #sophie devereaux #eliot spencer #alec hardison #the dresden files #harry dresden #fanfiction #my writing #urban fantasy #crossover

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