Read half-lich 02 - void weaver for Free Online Page B

but his thoughts kept circling back to the courtroom, to the camera, and to Alice. He checked his watch. She should be with Cameron by now, and would likely be on her way out of the safe house.
    Good.
    The safe house probably wasn’t so safe anymore now that Isaac had involved another mage. He wasn’t sure how he felt about Alice wandering around Ashwood without protection, but she was the only person who could uncover the secrets Isaac was unable to uncover. But Cameron was a good guy, a capable mage, and a good friend. He was someone Isaac could trust, which made him a rare commodity indeed, and yet precautions needed to be taken to further decrease the chance of Alice running into trouble.
    Sending her out of the safe house was one of them.
    Isaac wished he could be there with her, helping to find Nyx, but he couldn’t leave the apartment. He wasn’t, however, entirely powerless. It hadn’t been easy. Getting a message to Cameron had required him to summon a special kind of earthly, dark magic; magic so mundane it could slip through even the powerful wards surrounding the apartment. Because as powerful as they were, they weren’t terribly sophisticated—and he had succeeded.
    Isaac had cut his palm with a knife multiple times and had stood waiting at the kitchen window calling for the crows in his mind. On the third night, one crow came, but then there were more of them, and when there were enough crows gathered in the same place, their intelligence boomed. They say crows never forgot the faces of people who wronged them. That wasn’t entirely true. Crows never forget faces, period; and they remember a person’s name, too.
    At least, they did in Ashwood.
    A crow’s call snapped him out of his thoughts, and Isaac realized he had dozed off with the book on his lap. He blinked the sleep away and checked his watch again. The librarian was late, but then they hadn’t made a formal appointment. Isaac stood, placed the book on the table, and stretched. The crow called again and he turned to face the window it was perched upon. The window was closed but there were three of them watching him, waiting for more blood; more of his blood.
    Finally, there was a knock at the door, and Isaac crossed the living room in a hurry to open it. The door opened into the kind of corridor one would expect to see behind a simple brown apartment door and not the ornate marble hallway he had earlier been ushered through. Standing there was a man in his mid-forties. He was wearing a brown jacket, he had a closed umbrella by his side—which was leaving drip-drop trails all along the hall—and had a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles which, along with his preppy haircut and buttoned up shirt, made him look exactly like the professor he was.
    “We don’t have time,” he said, and he pushed his way into the apartment.
    Isaac checked the corridor behind the librarian and closed the door. “Hello to you too, Jim. Where is your escort?”
    The librarian set his umbrella down in the kitchen sink, so the water wouldn’t pool on the floor, and wandered back into the living room rubbing his hands. “I have no escort,” he said. “I came alone.”
    “Why would you do that?”
    “Because I had to talk to you before… before I have to talk to them.”
    Isaac found his brows furrowing with concern. James Allen, who Isaac knew as Jim, wasn’t exactly a mousy fellow, nor was he easy to scare. As librarian, he was entrusted with the analysis, categorization, and storage of just about any magical artifact surrendered to the magistrate. This included cursed items, possessed items, and worse. This wasn’t to say that Jim looked scared but he did seem… jumpy.
    “Where did you find it?” he asked.
    “Find what?”
    “The camera. Where did you find it?”
    Isaac considered Jim before surveying the room. It was probably bugged, of that Isaac had little doubt. Even if Jim was a friend and fellow lover of old things, he wasn’t about to give the