“It’s not about whether you’re a good diviner,” Caldera said. “Working as a sanctioned auxiliary is different from being a freelancer. You need to pass a security screening.”

“Okay, how do I do that?”

“You don’t. They investigate you.”

“How long does it take?”

“Yours is finished.”

“That was fast.”

“I don’t think you quite understand,” Caldera said. “Council security screenings are current for two years. They didn’t do a security screening because you called me. They’d already screened you because they’d investigated you anyway.”

“What for?”

“Do you really need me to answer that?”

“I’m just curious about what I was being charged with.”

“Well, first on the list, you’re one of three people listed as being responsible for the destruction of the Nightstalker group the summer before last.”

That wiped the smile off my face. “All right,” I said. “As far as I know, it was the Nightstalkers who broke the law that time, not me.”

“And you and your associates were involved in the apprentice disappearances around the White Stone.”

“Oh, come on. I was working for the Council that time. It’s on file. And I was the one who found out what happened to those apprentices.”

“Then there was the break-in at—”

“Okay, look, I already explained how that one wasn’t my fault. And I offered to help, it wasn’t as though you were—”

“And,” Caldera continued, “the deaths of the mages Griff and Belthas three years ago.”

I shut up.

“Not going to justify yourself?” Caldera said.

“I didn’t kill either of them,” I said. I kept my voice level.

Caldera was watching me, apparently casually, and I noticed that her eyes stayed on me as I spoke. Cops tend to be very good at picking up on when people are lying to them, and I had the feeling Caldera had been paying close attention to how I answered that question. I hadn’t quite been lying. Technically I hadn’t killed either of them, in the same way that if someone comes after you and you lead them into a tiger pit, then from a certain point of view the ones who actually killed them were the tigers.

Unfortunately for me, both Griff and Belthas had been Light mages in good standing with the Council. The Council may turn a blind eye to infighting among Dark mages, and they really don’t care very much about what happens to adepts or Orphans, but that definitely does not apply when the victims are Council mages themselves. To make matters worse, Griff and Belthas had also been working for a Junior Council member named Levistus. Offing them (and messing up his plans in the process) had placed me firmly on his shit list. Levistus didn’t come after me personally—that’s not his style—but since then he’d taken the opportunity to bureaucratically screw me over in several ways, some of them quite lethal.

My past history with Levistus was one of the other reasons I wasn’t comfortable here. Logically, I knew that staying away from the Keepers wouldn’t actually make it any harder for Levistus to mess with me—if he really wanted to nail me, he could do it no matter where I was—but I still didn’t like the idea of being any closer to him than I had to.