In Eleanor’s defense she had a lot on her mind. Having dealt with the state police, only temporarily if she were any judge, she got back into her car and drove off in the general direction of the city with the vague plan of grabbing a quick bite before heading back to the office. She didn’t spot the tail until she was back on 55 heading south. A dark blue crown vic four or five car lengths behind her, completely unremarkable save for an odd feeling of recognition. At first she dismissed it, her thumbs hadn’t pricked, but as she crossed from one lane to another to pass the slower traffic it stayed with her. Frowning she tried joining the slow pokes and the blue car also seemed to lose the haste of moments ago. There was a lot you could tell by the way someone tailed you. A professional team used several cars and rotated through them to stop you from getting suspicious. Cops and feds tended to favor drive bys. Extraction teams wanted to close the distance. This tail appeared to simply be content to follow, staying well back but not doing anything beyond that to conceal its interest. Amateurs? Eleanor was about to make a more serious attempt to shake the tail when her phone played the snippet of Shakira’s ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ which was assigned to Emmaline’s number. Eleanor plugged the phone into the hands free and picked up, her eyes still on her rear view mirror.

 

“What’s up babe?” she asked, shifting lanes yet again to get in front of a semi-trailer, hoping to lure her playmate into moving closer.

 

“Are you with Mal?” Emmaline asked without preamble. Eleanor frowned and turned her attention to the phonecall.

 

“No, why?” she asked, confused as to why Emmaline was asking. She didn’t normally take an active interest in a case unless Eleanor specifically sought her opinion, which she tried not to do unless they were at a dead end.

 

“He is in danger,” Emmaline declared portentously. Eleanor thought she could hear the mixer running in the background. Danger evidently didn’t include a respite from whatever domestic task Emmaline had in mind for the day.

 

“How do you know that?” she asked, watching through the mirror as the crown vic moved up to get a look around the big rig. The windows were tinted dark, but the moment it saw she was still there it dropped back again. Too eager, too obvious.

 

“I’m forecasting him,” Emmaline replied cagily. Forecasting was a type of fortune telling, a sort of predictive surveillance that you could run magically. In the basement of their home Eleanor and Emmaline kept a large clear section of polished marble with naturally occurring veins of silver in its matrix. Using various algorithms one could interpret the returns generated by certain items belonging to an individual, blood and hair worked best. The problem with forecasting was that it had a non-zero effect on the skeins of probability, by observing the future it was easy to change it, no matter how mathematically rigorous you were. The changes induced by a probability function were rarely good ones.  It was a tool best used infrequently and with exceeding care.

“Ok... Next question. Why are you forecasting him?” Eleanor asked. There was a long awkward pause.

 

“Remember that conversation we had last week?” Emmaline asked, her accent sounding more Austrian than usual. A dead giveaway that the blonde witch was nervous. Eleanor goggled in shock.

 

“Are you serious right now?!” she demanded. “Emmaline Godzilla Von Morganstern!”

 

Emmaline coughed awkwardly. Eleanor knew she wouldn’t have called unless she was sure of her numbers and felt that the threat was both real and immediate. Unfortunately they couldn’t call Mal directly because doing so would be a direct intervention in the skein of probability Emmaline had just read. That was certain disaster.

 

“We can talk about it later. Dump the forecasting. I need to work and I don’t want to be entangled,” Eleanor replied, shrinking the call screen to an inset and pulling up her arcanalytics app, hurriedly punching a preset ritual. There was a sound on the other end of the line. You had been in the game way too long when you could recognize the sound of chalk marks being scrubbed out with hair over a phone line.

 

“It’s done,” Emmaline responded a moment later. Eleanor nodded despite the fact Emmaline couldn’t see the gesture. She shifted over to the far right lane glancing at the thick trees that lined the median as she muttered calculations to herself.

 

“Is there anything else I can do?” Emmaline asked urgently. Eleanor glanced at the app. A green circle was marked with 88%. Electronic fidelity was much better than a coven of humans chanting, and an order of magnitude faster.

 

“Can you take up 2 or 3 miliSterns?” Eleanor asked. Sterns were the unit of entropic dissonance that Emmaline and her sisters used to quantify the chaos that all magic depended upon. Their tendency to use variations of their last name for almost everything was both endearing and annoying. The app clicked up to 99 percent as, fifty miles away, Emmaline added her mathematical clarity to the spell. Eleanor pulled a stylus from her console, pricked her thumb and made a few last minute notes on the dash of her car in fresh blood.

 

“Ill talk to you when I can. Love you.” Eleanor said, taking a few deep meditative breaths.

 

“Love you too,” Emmaline replied and the call ended. Eleanor hummed gently, the bitter taste of lilac root scratching at the back of her throat. She closed her eyes. Closing one’s eyes while driving was not a wise choice under most circumstances, but it beat the next step all to hell. With deliberate calm Eleanor yanked the wheel hard to the right. Tires screamed as the lexus swerved off the road, going momentarily airborne as it leaped over the shallow ditch between pavement and verge. The car bounced slightly and then plowed straight into the strip of trees which separated 55 south from 55 north. Branches slapped at the windscreen as the lexus crashed through the undergrowth. The odds of missing a tree were a million to one. Actually it was more like six million five hundred thousand to one to within 4 standard deviations, but luck, like fate, could be managed if you knew how the chaos of the universe worked. The interior windows of the car beaded with condensation and every light on the dashboard lit as the arcane backwash played merry hell with quantum mechanics for a few moments. Horns blared and Eleanor felt her tiers thump onto the northbound, she reefed the wheel, fishtailing slightly into positon between a minivan and a delivery truck. Leaves and forest debris flew from the windshield as the wind whipped past, whisking away the smell of burned rubber. Eleanor blew out a breath and killed the app, punching up one of the fake sim cards which Fynn had installed and dialing 911.

 

“911 what is your emergency?” a voice came back immediately. Eleanor took a few deep breaths as though on the verge of hyperventilating.

 

“I just saw some men shoving a woman into the trunk of a car… oh god … they had her tied up and…”

 

“Ma’am,” the dispatcher replied, her voice growing from professional to intent in the single syllable. “Can you tell me where you are?”

 

“They are pulling onto 55 north near exit 23. It’s a late model crown vic with number plate CD 3455. I need to…” Eleanor dropped the call. Her amateur tail was in for an interesting time when they got of the south bound and tried to follow her north. Every police cruiser would be on the look out for them.

 

“Amateurs,” she muttered to herself, and gunned the engine, heading back towards the gas station and hoping she would be in time to help.