Elemental Flame by Phaedra Weldon

hard to tell who's initiating the call."
    I pointed at Kyle. "What did you see in the first car? The one I flipped?"
    Kyle looked at each of us. "There's not much to say. I bent down to look inside and I expected to see a body. There was a body—and it looked like a man—but it was made of stone."
    I blinked. I hadn't expected him to say that. "A stone driver?"
    "You mean like a golem?" Dharma said.
    "Like a clay man," Kyle put his hands on the table, palms down.
    "Yeah," Dharma said. "One of Blackwood's crowning achievements in alchemy is making golems, formed from clay or dirt. They're damn creepy. When Blackwood presented this to the Parliament as a possible project for funding, they rejected him and forbid him to create any more of them. There's a moral code involved in their creation."
    "Moral code?" Kyle said.
    "Blackwood puts a bit of himself inside of the golem. Like a touch of his own soul. Last I heard, they were still debating the legitimacy of golems being sentient or property. I think they tabled it when Higgins was killed."
    "He makes golems?" I pursed my lips in thought, then shook my head. "Explains the Fetches, since he likes to animate things."
    "Yes. Which is why I'm not surprised you had trouble fighting them. He's the best there is. And if he created a golem and used him as a driver, for whatever purpose, then I'm sure Blackwood's going to send a clean up crew out there to get rid of evidence. He can't afford to have evidence of his rule-breaking lying around for long."
    "I didn't know this about Blackwood," I said. "I just considered him a Ceremonial Magician."
    "None of us really know him. Except Cromwell and a few of the Elders," she clasped her hands on the table. "Blackwood's the closest thing the magical community has to a mafia. He's strong, powerful and patient. And he's got a lot of money and influence in all the right places. A few members of the Parliament grew up with him, know him and even trust him."
    Kyle put his teacup on the table with a thunk. "Now that's a scary thought."
    I chewed on my lower lip. "Yeah it is. But it means that he's spread out. That he's got his fingers in a lot of pies. Is there anyone in New Orleans in our community that would be particularly close to him? Someone he'd feel he could confide in or turn to?"
    Dharma glanced at Kyle. "Arden Vervain."
    My shoulders slumped. Now why was I not surprised by that? Her name popped up all the damn time. "Ehhh…" I leaned against the refrigerator and chewed on my thumb. "I just don't see that connection."
    I expected Kyle to protest or something, seeing as how Arden was his aunt, but instead he surprised me. "Blackwood was the one that pointed us toward Circe's powerbase. The house in the woods, on property he owns that backs up to my aunt's. If that's not connection enough, then I think we need to hang up our investigative hats right now."
    Ivan had sat back and his eyes were green as they concentrated on quickly moving sets of wispy images. He reached out and pinched something, then with the other hand brushed all the other images away before releasing his chosen item. It expanded into sets of documents that he displayed sideways like a deck of cards. "Ivan?"
    "I've got…emails. Lots of them. Between two accounts with IP addresses that match…" he said as he squinted. "Is Edmund Blackwood his real name?"
    "I think so—" Dharma snapped her fingers. "No wait. I remember there was some function, a dinner or a meeting, and someone printed his name out wrong. Only Emily told me the name was right, but it wasn't a name he wanted to be known by."
    "There was a function between the Clerics and a Ceremonial leader?" Kyle said in a voice that matched my own internal surprise.
    "Yeah. Don't freak out. Happens all the time. But they're always held for negotiating something. I remember this one was before Samhain last year, before the Malleus Maleficarum was stolen from Higgins. Something about a possible issue with world borders,"