The quite English night is broken in one apartment bedroom as Alecto's phone buzzes to life with cold white light, an unknown number displayed on the backlit screen.
How much money does she actually have right now, inheritance included but disregarding plans for extracting money from her father.
The emergency credit card her uncle gave her has a $30,000 limit. After questioning Wilson, she learns the estate she's set to inherit is valued between fifty and sixty million dollars, with modest real estate holdings in Melbourne, London, and Tucson, Arizona.
She's honestly more worried about losing access to the ?magic lawyer? than by the cost of him, then. But she can't force him to stay; there's a clause right there about exit rights (and what a good and desirable clause it is too.). She'll just have to be a good and desirable client. She'll read the contract in close detail, asking any questions she has, but taking this deal is a foregone conclusion - she needs allies, ones more topical to the problem at hand than her miscellaneous internet and university friends. She'll sign the contract.
Also, apparently her Uncle owns land in a city she's barely even heard of. She makes a mental note.
The contract she signs is nearly identical in design to the one bearing her uncle's signature. The moment her pen lifts from the paper, a cold chill wraps her bones from head to toe, momentarily intense before fading to a subtle presence.
"How would you like to settle payment?" Wilson asks. "Sadly, the state has yet to release your uncle's estate, so funds will have to come from elsewhere".
It can go on the credit card. Her personal savings could cover it, but that'd take time to liquidate. So would the gold. If she's not solvent by the end of the month, she has bigger problems. (Her father would have to be also dead, or out of contact, at a minimum).
"I'll pay on my card, for now."
After the payment goes through.
"The contract is now officially in effect?"
"After briefly glancing at his phone, the only piece of technology present in his office, he says 'It is. My services are at your command. What can I do for you, Ms. Collins?'"
She pulls herself up to her full height of seriousness and importance.
"I have three questions off the top of my head. In order of difficulty: First, where, in your opinion, can I most effectively convert gold bullion into currency?"
She pulls the mystery coin out of her pocket. She takes care not to touch it, holding it by the handkerchief it was wrapped in.
"Second, Have you the faintest clue what this coin represents? Someone planted it on my person at the airport."
"Third, what in the names of the hopefully fictional nine hells sort of mess did my uncle get himself into?"
As soon as she sets the coin on the desk, Wilson snatches it up, momentarily forgetting her other questions.
"Not good. We are being watched," he says, standing from his desk, coin in hand. "Will you allow me to dispose of this?"
"If doing so is in my best interests, do so."
Well, it's not like she hadn't considered the possibility. And the disregarded it, because who can use a limp of solid silver as a surveillance device? Witches, apparently.
When the coin has been disposed of, she asks:
"Do you know what they could see? Could they hear?"
Wilson steps into the hall briefly to hand the coin off to his secretary, instructing her to incinerate it. He returns to the room, leaving the door open.
"I don't know the specifics of their practice," he says. "What I do know, however, is that through those coins they can see and hear practically anything. Having one on your person is not good for your health"
"That's a problem, then." They probably know the password to her phone, if they were paying attention. Her password manager would have concealed everything else, at least. She starts fiddling with her phone to change her password. "At least I feel that planting it in such an unsubtle way implies that there's not any other magical surveillance of that quality, because otherwise it would have been better to simply remain entirely unnoticed. Unless your next advice is a ten step program for magical information security that includes several potential leaks I couldn't possibly be anticipating right now."
" I am aware of the existence of at least one more subtle tradition for surveillance but the are likely more of which I am unaware" Wilson sighs. " They would have seen whatever your uncle wrote to you in that note, along with the details in our contracts. You should know that each magical practice is a walled garden. No matter how hard I tried or who taught me, I could never see through one of those coins."
"So our surveillance guy can only surveil and you can only do contracts? What's the more subtle guy's trick? What could my uncle do?"
Based on the content of the letter, she has lost the following secrets: what Abernathy can do and how the two of them are related, the location of both of the caches she was supposed to seek out, the passcode of one and the appearance of the key to the other. The fact that her uncle had plans at all, if they didn't know. Several of those were also lost by the conversation more broadly.
"Not necessarily. Some traditions are more versatile than others, but yes, I can create magically enforced contracts, and that is the limit of my power,' Wilson explains. 'I don't know about our eavesdropper, but I would assume they don't have too many more tricks up their sleeve."
He pauses briefly before adding, "Jonathan was a practitioner of Phoenician charm traveling. He could travel instantly between linked carved cedar tokens."
"To go back to my initial questions. What sort of mess was my uncle in, that I have sinister plots coming up like mushrooms around me as his heir?"
That explanation reeks of incompleteness - why would he forbid a travel witch to scry on him? But she's not going to push.
"I don't know what your uncle got himself into. he was a bit of a fixer in our community he sometimes acted as a mediator between groups and would ask me to draw up contracts to settle disputes"
"to answer your earlier question, there are plenty of perfectly mundane ways to turn gold into cash, I do however know one group that would be more than willing to buy any gold your uncle left you in bulk and for fair market rates"
"I'll keep that in mind if I manage to even get to my Uncle's caches before whoever's watching us clears me out. I should probably call the storage company."
"Can you summarise the magical political situation as you understand it? Why aren't you going public with this stuff?"
Wilson returns to his desk and sits down. He begins to explain:
"Let me give you Magic 101. There are broadly four categories that all magical entities fall into."
"First, you have practitioners. Some call us witches or hedge witches. This is the category that I fall into. We learn a magical tradition and use it to our own ends. Traditions are diverse, and no two are exactly the same."
"The second category are ritualists. Not usually worth mentioning, these are people who are aware magic exists and have found some scrap of it to cling onto."
"Then we have creatures. Vampires, dryads, goblins, and faeries - if it's inherently magical, it's a creature."
"Finally, we come to The Order Arcanum. They're the longest-standing magical institution. They call themselves classically trained magicians, somehow having managed to unlock the key to learning multiple traditions. They impose one absolute rule: you cannot establish a school for magic. Hope you never meet a member of the Order - they have been known to nearly wipe out covens that grow too large."
"Now, as to why I don't just reveal magic to the world, the answer is twofold. First, it would be all I spent my life doing. Without experiencing magic firsthand, most people are unnaturally resistant to abandoning their disbelief. Secondly, we police our own. It's better for everyone that magic stays underground. If ever a coven decides this isn't the case, they are usually dissuaded by other covens. And if not, you can count on the Order to come in and make sure they stop running their mouths."
So, cope, the fact that Order would murder him, and more cope. She barely knows two things about the magical world and she has a strong first contender for who killed her uncle, the professor of anthropology. She wonders how many of his students will drop dead in only barely plausibly deniable manners over the next month. Also, the order can teach people multiple types of magic, so that's her main method of threat mitigation out the window already.
"What other things will people get murdered for doing?"
Never visiting one of Australia's most ecologically distinctive forest regions will have to be her tragic cross to bear. If she wants iron mines, she can go somewhere other than Perth. She's not technically a witch (yet), but even so.
"And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that for every mysterious city-wide death field that you personally know of, there are five or a hundred you've never heard of?"