«Chief?» Banshee suddenly stiffened on her chair. «Jesus wept, guys, I hear his voice in me head. I'm going mad.»

«I wish. Madness is treatable, idiocy eternal.» the voice hissed again.

«How can ye talk in me head?»

«Because I'm at table five having lunch with my family and my wife is a telepath!» growled the voice. The three looked in the not so distant corner of the room, where a family of four was indeed having lunch: a blonde beautiful woman, a brown-haired kid, a blonde girl in a high chair and a seriously pissed Chief.

«How the hell could ye hear us from far there?»

«I have been monitoring you since the moment you sat at the table!»

«So, that's why you wanted to come here to have lunch, today?» Francesca's voice chimed in, with a note of resentment.

«I wanted to try and gather information for myself, not knowing how they could have tried to act. Clearly, I was quite right. But no, I didn't know they'd be here today at this time. Destiny must hate me, a lot. Or maybe it was Divine Intervention who put me there to stop those fools. This time.» Garaham's voice didn't change its ruffled tone, but he was not apologetic.

«It was a perfectly sound solution! Distract everyone with something harmless that would have perfectly been explained with mass hallucination, no fuss no muss.» Banshee defended her idea, standing up and going towards their table, arms crossed. «Me could swear me just heard someone exclaim "A giant pie, that's genius!" somewhere around here.»

«Hallucinating, wonderful. Not that I am surprised, it's noon and you already smell like a detonated distillery.» Garaham glared at her. «No public use of magic! You, ragtag band of dunces!»

Banshee opened her mouth to reply.

She closed it.

«Maybe you're right when you say those three would be lost without you.» Francesca chimed in, with a scornful snigger.

Banshee shot a glance to the woman but didn't give in to the provocation.

«We'll think of something else.» she conceded and turned to go back towards her table, under the wondering and curious gaze of little Michael and Joan. Garaham sighed and beckoned the waiter to ask for the bill.

Banshee sat down, disappointed, and summarized the situation to the other two, while Chief and family left the restaurant, the kids still turning to look at the three people sitting at the window table in a strange, thoughtful silence.

«So no magic.» said Vopros.

«Nay, not in public, anyway. We need something else.» Banshee shook her head. «Chico, why don't ye, I don't know, start having some kind o' seizure, right in the middle o' the balcony? Everybody would flock there and... Vopros?»

Banshee stopped talking when she saw what Vopros had taken out of his jacket. It was a small stick of dynamite.

«Duck.» he just said. He moved his hand, slightly, and the stick disappeared into thin air. Banshee and Chico had just the time to understand what was happening, as they saw him put something in his ears with peaceful and well-calculated movements, then they could just react rolling under the table a mere couple of seconds before the men's bathroom blew up with a thundering sound.

Chaos started.

People were screaming, running around, coughing as black smoke filled the room, making many eyes water. Everyone stuck down to the pavement, trying to follow the panicked instructions of the restaurant's personnel, guiding the evacuation procedure.

«Vopros, Jesus wept!» she roared, standing up, her ears still ringing from the blast of the explosion. Chico was squinting his eyes between the smoke and his traumatized eardrums. The Russian was unperturbed. He stood up.

«Nobody in bathroom. This time, I checked. So, you happy. No deaths.» he said, and started to follow the screams towards the exit. «... not because of explosion. Americans can't handle panic. Not my fault.»

In the general panic, nobody was manning the reception, because the emergency exit was on the opposite side of the room.

Banshee and Chico started moving in the opposite direction from the tide, avoiding running people and using the black smoke to conceal as they could. But with everyone too much preoccupied with saving their own bacon, nobody had attention to spare. They got to the reception and while Banshee remained on the lookout Chico rapidly checked the software.

Table twenty for three: man, woman, and child, right in the time slot when everything. He must have been their man.

Chico seared his name in his memory: Fabrice Grasshopper.

Then, they ran towards the exit, where Vopros was waiting for them, hidden beside the emergency exit. The place was almost empty, and judging from the sirens out there, police, firefighters, and ambulances were coming.

Vopros waited until Banshee and Chico had put a hand on his shoulders, and then she started casting the Displace spell that would have taken them out of there. The trio shot a last glance to the smoke-filled room that had been a lively restaurant just minutes before.

«It had stupid name anyway.» sentenced Vopros. Then, they disappeared.

https://youtu.be/vMSgNE_IMnk

«Grasshopper? Why would Justin D'Yves save Grasshopper?» Banshee couldn't wrap her mind about what they had found out at the restaurant, as they ran through the streets of Boston in the Simca.

«Maybe the Chief got it wrong. Maybe it was just any other mage who was around the place who simply did the good thing, saving the poor falling guy, and there's nothing more to it.» Chico theorized. «I saw at least four mages I know around the tables.»

«He's at Eva's party, he's me parishioner and now this... that guy is always surrounded by mages, in one way or another.»

«Well, to be fair, that's not so uncommon in Boston nowadays. We're Headquarters for North America, you are potentially always within a mage's sight in Boston.» Chico reminded her, trying not to roll on the other side of the car when Vopros took the steepest turn of the day, almost getting the car on two wheels. The Simca didn't even flinch.

«So, how we go about it? We interrogate him, straightforward as Chief said?» the driver spoke, coming out from his concentrated silence.

«When the Chief says that "The Nameless Division" would take care of any problem about him knowing about magic, does it mean what I think it means?» Banshee asked.

«They come, they clean his memories of any trace of magic, they leave.» Chico nodded.

«And it isn't... nice, is it?»

«Well, he wouldn't remember a thing of course, but it's not pleasant. Plus, memories of magic are... strange.» Chico stopped talking. Normally, at this point, Banshee would flail away the topic with her hand. But Banshee was still looking at him, clearly waiting for him to go on. He blinked in a stupor but didn't stop to ask. «You remember how magic was Kindled in you, right?» he chose to start from scratch.

«Aye, thanks. Terrible trauma, fell in a coma, a leprechaun...» she shivered just by saying the word. «... came up in me head and told me he was me familiar and that he would teach me the basics of the magic I was born with. Then followed a blur of bad-given instructions and I woke up feeling the Fluxes and all that shit.» she cut it short, with her face darkening as she went. None of them loved talking about their pasts, and about their Kindling even less. «How is that on topic?»

«Every human can be kindled to magic. Magic is the extreme response of the brain to incredibly overwhelming situations. When everything else fails, magic is kindled. It's... a natural evolutionary response, that only some people unlock because the other solutions, like faith, or therapy, fail to give you the instruments to face the overwhelm. That's why many Mages are kindled when they are young, in their teens mainly.»

«Aye, I remember Logan pouring out this speech when he brought me to his home in Lexington.» she grumbled, sourly. «Still not on topic, and getting too personal. Are you going anywhere with this?»

«When you use magic on a... let's say a "normal" person, you never really know what would happen. Which is basically why we are discouraged to do so, and why mages aren't ruling the world simply mind-controlling presidents and kings, you know?»

«I thought that was because the Order's too busy in the backstabbing game.»

«Also that, but mainly because... let's summarize it, I see that I'm losing you: magic does things to the human brain. Not always, many times it doesn't, sometimes it happens. So, the Nameless Division putting their hands on Grasshopper's brain could be perfectly harmless, could not be. Does this answer your question?»

«Jesus wept, you're like me Heal teacher. He always starts from the origins of Magic before explaining to you how to use fluxes as sutures.» Banshee shook her head and went back looking forward, now that Vopros was running a red light in the middle of a crowded crossroads.

«For the first time in forever, you actually looked interested.» Chico protested.

«Aye! Because Fabrice's a good guy. We're not friends, but he has a heart o' gold and does a lot in the parish. I don't want something bad to happen to him, and magic is the first bad thing! He has a wife and a daughter for Christ's sake.» she explained, clenching the car door as they glided through an alley that wasn't supposed to be glided in by cars. «Especially if we're not sure if he's actually mixed-up in all of this shit. Maybe, as you said, he simply slipped and the rare good Samaritan of the Order stepped up, and Fabrice is none the wiser.»

«Does sound convenient.» Vopros commented, striking terror on a zebra crossing with a bold maneuver, coming out from the alley.

«Nevertheless, we've got to try, before exposing him to the Order.» Banshee was adamantine about it, and the other two remained silent, pondering for some time. Then, of course, only Chico asked.

«You have a plan astuto, verdad?»

«No, I don't.» she denied, suddenly gloomy. «That's why we'll have to resort to magic. Vopros, you need to go and meet Grasshopper.» she said. Vopros turned to look at her, missing another car's mirror by a breath.

«Why?»

«Because we're going to have a ritual, and it's a complex one. So, Chico has talked to him at the party, I've known him for years, you need to go and talk to him as well. We'll have to spend the whole day gathering materials, as well.»

«I'm listening.» Chico sounded incredibly interested. Vopros was still looking at her, driving blind.

«We're going to his Oneiron.»