Black Magic (Black Records Book 1) Page 11

Another hand caressed my back, and I pulled my mouth away from Manoj, turning to see Kumiko coming in for a kiss of her own. Her lips were sweet and slightly sticky from whatever gloss she wore. As we kissed, I felt one of her legs wrap around me beneath the water.

  The music thumped louder now, and I felt an urgency welling up within me. I spotted another gorgeous boy out of the corner of my eye, and I wondered why he wasn’t joining us as well. All I wanted was to have as many sets of hands and lips and everything else on me all at once. It was so stupid how prudishly people limited themselves when it came to such pure and simple pleasures.

  I watched Kumiko and Manoj came together, their tongues tangling between parted lips, and I looked up to see Lorelai slipping into the water to glide towards us. Her eyes were like two pools of molten emeralds, and I felt a hunger in me so strong I thought I might cry if I couldn’t find satisfaction.

  Lorelai reached us at the same time as the boy I’d been eying, and I lost the ability to keep track of who was doing what to whom. The more I was touched and kissed, the more I wanted to do the same to others. As I melted into the writhing mass of naked flesh, I let go completely, giving up the idea of Alex to become a part of something greater than myself.

  Chapter Ten

  “What the fuck happened last night?” I asked an empty room as I sat up in bed and ran a hand through the tangled mess of my hair.

  At least, that’s what I tried to say. What actually came out was more of a hoarse groan that sounded like a first attempt at speaking after years of ritual silence. My gummy eyelids refused to open beyond a sliver, I was parched and dizzy, and I felt sore in places that hadn’t been sore when I’d slipped into the pool the night before.

  At least I didn’t have to deal with waking up next to anyone. There was always the chance someone had gotten up and left while I slept, but the blanket was so thoroughly wrapped around the lower half of my body I was pretty sure I’d been alone when I’d climbed into bed.

  Throwing off the sheet and blanket, I hurried to find something to cover my nakedness. I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I’d left the clothes I’d changed into after my shower, so I put my sweater on over the bra and underwear I’d been wearing the day before. The sweater hung down just far enough to cover my ass, and once I pulled on my stockings it almost passed for the kind of terrible outfit some girls might wear on purpose. Given my lack of options, it was going to have to be good enough.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, desperately trying to get my shit together. Although it was cloudy and gray, the light was bright enough that it had to be well into the morning. Other than the feeling I’d stretched my body in a dozen inappropriate ways last night, I felt remarkably good as far as my health and energy were concerned. I was more emotionally broken and confused than ever, but I physically, I felt fantastic. Even the scrape on the back of my head had healed to the point where I could no longer feel the rough scabbing that had been there only the day before. While my magic felt far from recharged, my skin and muscles had been given a supercharged boost of healing energy.

  If my own magic hadn’t been the source of my physical recovery, I could only assume it must have come from whatever I’d done with Lorelai and her groupies the night before. While I couldn’t remember any of the specifics, I knew without a doubt I’d taken part in more than a few licentious acts before escaping to my room. If this had been my first time waking from one of Lorelai’s nights of depravity, I might have been a little more freaked out about most likely having had sex with more than one guy in the last twelve hours without any clue what the STI protection situation had been. There had been a lot of tears and yelling first time I’d gone through it, but Lorelai had assured me such things were never an issue around her. As embarrassed as I was over letting myself get caught up in the one damn thing I’d been trying to avoid, at least I knew there weren’t going to be any unfortunate lasting side effects.

  The real concern was figuring out what to do next. I’d rested and healed as much as I was going to. Staying at Lorelai’s any longer would only drain my magic while pulling me deeper into the black hole of irresponsibility that followed the woman wherever she went. I needed a lead, but with Viktor in the wind, I had no idea who to ask for help.

  My work as a mage for hire to this point had been simple enough I hadn’t formed much of a network of other mages and academics in the city. If Viktor couldn’t help me, I had to find someone who knew enough about the fae to identify the creature that had killed Weathersby and Jenkins. The problem was that I didn’t exactly have any fae zoologists on my speed dial, nor did I have the first clue where else to start looking for answers.

  Before I did anything else, however, I needed to find my clothes. While I couldn’t stay at Lorelai’s house any longer, I couldn’t exactly go out on the street in the middle of January dressed as I was. If I did it up all the way, my jacket was almost long enough to make it look like as though I was wearing a skirt beneath it. I thought about going back to my apartment for more clothes, but I wasn’t ready to risk that just yet. If I didn’t want to go hunting for information wearing nothing but a sweater and thin wool tights, I was going to have to venture back out into the house.

  Gambling on being able to make one quick tour of the lower floors while it was early enough that everyone was probably still passed out, I opened the door. Something at my feet caught my eye, and I let out a sigh of relief upon seeing that my skirt, underwear, and t-shirt had been left neatly folded in a pile outside my room. There was no scent of chlorinated pool water on anything, and it was as clean as it had been when I’d hit it with the spell the night before.

  “Fucking Lorelai,” I muttered.

  A piece of paper fluttered out from where it had been tucked into the collar of my t-shirt when I picked up the pile.

  It read simply, Talk to Xiang Wei.

  I had no idea who that was, but if Lorelai had gone out of her way to leave this message for me, he was probably someone I needed to track down.

  Not wanting to spend another second around the influence of Lorelai and her harem, I pulled my skirt on and stuffed everything else into my backpack. As I slipped my phone into a side pocket, I caught sight of the second Oxycontin pill I’d tucked away. Saliva pooled in my mouth, and my heart beat out a quick rhythm of desire. No amount of Lorelai’s healing power could undo the emotional hurt I’d suffered over the last twenty four hours the way this tiny chemical gem could.

  I gave in to temptation, savoring the familiar feeling of the tablet sitting on my tongue before I swallowed it down. Thus prepared as well as I could be under the circumstances, I snatched up my bag and snuck out of the house as quickly and quietly as possible.

  Since Lorelai hadn’t been kind enough to leave me an address for Xiang Wei, I went to the only person I knew who might be able to tell me where to find him. It was a hell of a long shot. If I’d been able to think of any other way to get the information, I would have jumped on it, but at this point I couldn’t afford to be picky.

  It took over an hour on public transportation to get to the café where Eddie spent his time until The Bolt-Hole opened each night. With anyone else, it might have been an annoying series of trial and error trying to find them by looking in places where they were known to hang out, but Eddie was so much a creature of habit he might as well have had a website listing his regular business hours at each of the two locations. He showed up right at one o’clock every day, ordered the same cup of coffee, filled a glass with water, and sat at the same table if it was free. If it wasn’t, he had a hierarchy of backups he’d sit in until he could make the switch to his top pick.

  He must have been having a lucky day, since he was in his favorite spot when I arrived twenty minutes after one. As he’d done in the bar, Eddie fidgeted and tapped his way through a single sip of coffee, muttering to himself while unfolding and refolding the newspaper in order to get it exactly so before he could read it.

  “Hey Eddie,” I said as I set
my coffee and chocolate croissant down on the table. I slipped my backpack off my shoulders, and I dropped into the chair opposite him. I could see it had thrown him off his routine, but I didn’t have time to tiptoe around his issues.

  He blinked five times in rapid succession, his body twitching with the urge to adjust whatever was bothering him. Unfortunately for him, it probably meant touching my breakfast, and I had to admire how quickly he managed to set aside his frustration.

  “Alex,” he finally said.

  I lowered my voice a touch. It was one thing to talk about the fae openly when it was only Jess and Eddie at the bar, but this was a public place with too high a chance of someone overhearing something they shouldn’t.

  “I’ve got a favor to ask, Eddie.”

  “You never visit for any other reason.”

  I thought I saw a hint of a sad smile flicker in the corners of his mouth, but it was gone so quickly I might very well have imagined it.

  “I thought you didn’t like company,” I said.

  “I don’t.”

  Eddie placed the folded section of newspaper on the table next to his drinks. He then spent a good minute squaring it with the other sections already lying there.

  “Do you know of anyone by the name of Xiang Wei?” I asked when he’d finished.

  “You don’t want to talk to him. Xiang doesn’t like visitors.”

  “I don’t really have any choices left here, Eddie.” I took my phone out of my pocket and showed him one of the photos of Samuel Jenkins’s severed arm. “Unless you can tell me what did this, I need to talk to someone who can.”

  Eddie didn’t even blink when he saw a graphic closeup of the bizarrely clean cross-section of Jenkins’s bicep. He stared at it for second and then looked back at his coffee cup, his fingers tapping the handle and saucer a dozen or more times while he gave me an address in Chinatown.

  I put the phone back in my pocket. “Thanks. I owe you one.”

  “It’s not a good idea to chase after this,” said Eddie. “You should really drop this job. It’s not worth your life.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Eddie looked me in the eyes, the connection every bit as out of character as it had been the last time I’d seen him.

  “Something’s happening out there,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s bad, Alex. If you go talk to Xiang, you’re heading right into the eye of the storm.”

  “If it was only me, maybe I’d walk away, but it’s bigger than that now. People are dying. I can’t just drop it.”

  “As long as you keep pulling at this thread, these people won’t be the last to die. Do the smart thing and leave it alone. Go back to playing Nancy Drew.”

  “Fuck you, Eddie,” I said as I stood up.

  People turned to look at me as I gathered my things and stormed out of the café. Eddie had never been one for social graces, but that didn’t mean I had to put up with his insults. He’d given me what I needed, and that was all I cared about. The crusty old bastard could sit there tapping away at his coffee cup and ignoring the outside world if he wanted, but it didn’t give him any right to tell me what to do.

  I pushed open the door and started walking down the street at a furious pace. Xiang Wei’s place was less than a fifteen minute walk from the café, and I was more determined than ever to find out what the hell was going on.

  Chapter Eleven

  Hot coffee sloshed over the rim of the cup and onto the skin of my hand. Cursing loudly, I stopped walking and held it away from my body so it didn’t drip all over me. The pastry I’d been clutching too tightly was now a mangled mess, and the lidless cup of coffee had proven far too dangerous to walk with. I set the half empty cup down on a newspaper box, flicked as much sticky brown liquid from my hand as I could, then used the side of my jacket as a makeshift napkin. I’d need to calm down if I was to have any chance of getting close to this Xiang Wei character, and charging down the street like a hot mess wasn’t going to help anything.

  I took a bite of the crushed croissant and realized how hungry I’d been. I hadn’t eaten anything since waking at Lorelai’s house, and I practically inhaled the pastry in a few big bites. Buttery flakes fell from my fingers when I rubbed them against my thigh, and I drank enough of the coffee to be able to walk without spilling it again. Once sated, I resumed my trek to Chinatown.

  As much as I wanted to forget about Eddie’s surprising expression of interest in my well-being, I had to wonder what had provoked him to warn me off. I couldn’t say I really knew what Eddie’s deal was, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t a diviner or even a proper mage. I’d always lumped him into the same group as Jessica; people who had no magical abilities themselves, but who had found a way into the world of the fae. There were several shades of magical awareness people were born with, from a belief in fate or miracles, all the way up to outright supernatural abilities like my own. Jessica fell somewhere in the middle of that, what with The Bolt-Hole being such a popular hang out for the fae. Even then she’d had to be especially attuned to magic in order to both sense and remember that her patrons were something other than what they presented themselves as.

  It struck me that Eddie could very well be a Chronicler. For as long as humans had been using magic, there had been men and women who observed and recorded what magic users were doing. The founding Chroniclers had been among the first to discover that there were hundreds, if not thousands of fae creatures sharing the world with them. Over the years they’d evolved into an ultra-secret society that remained independent of magic users. They operated as half of a symbiotic relationship that helped keep the general public from learning the truth of just how many wondrous and terrifying things existed beyond the edge of common awareness.

  The Chroniclers were the secret society even other secret societies didn’t know about. From what little I’d learned of them, they had agents in all levels of religion, government, and multinational corporations. I’d become pretty convinced President Obama was a chronicler based on some initiatives that had been quietly pushed through near the end of his second term, but that was a hunch I kept to myself. Hinting that the organization existed, let alone speculating on agents, wasn’t exactly something you did out loud.

  If Eddie was a Chronicler, it would explain a lot about why he spent so much time at The Bolt-Hole, and why he’d seemed to know so much about what was going on in the city. I almost turned back to press him for information on the amulet, but if he suspected that I knew anything about his true nature, I’d have a whole new problem on my hands. Chroniclers didn’t deal with exposure at all well, and I wasn’t about to get in the middle of that whole mess.

  Besides, I was only a few blocks away from Xiang Wei’s office.

  I tossed my empty coffee cup in a trash can and turned onto a street lined with herbalists, green grocers, and restaurants. Chinese characters outnumbered English words by a factor of a hundred to one in this neighborhood, but the buildings were numbered in clearly marked English numerals like anywhere else. It only took me a few minutes to find the door I was looking for.

  The front door was unlocked, so I pulled it open and climbed the stairs to the second floor office. A nameplate next to the propped open door told me I was in the right place, and I stepped into a room that looked like the Cryptkeeper’s personal library. A thick layer of dust covered almost everything except a well worn path between the entrance and the big desk at the back of the room. Ancient leather-bound books lined every available inch of wall space. There were so many books that several waist-high stacks of those that wouldn’t fit on the shelves had been piled in every corner. More books and scrolls took up so much of the sill beneath the room’s only window that hardly any light trickled into the place, lending the room an ominous atmosphere that probably kept even the most curious of visitors from doing anything more than poking their head inside before getting the hell out of there.

  “Mr. Wei?” I called into the darkness of a doorway
leading off the main room.

  There was no sign anyone was in the office, but that didn’t make sense if the door had been left open. Either Xiang Wei had forgotten to lock up while he went to the bathroom, or something wasn’t right about the situation.

  I held out the index and middle fingers of my left hand to cast a small spark spell. A crackling orb of light spluttered to life in front of them, sending blue tinged light into the shadows. Hoping I wasn’t about to find what I thought I was, I walked further into the room.

  It may sound terrible to those who haven’t had the misfortune of having spent a lot of time around dead bodies, but it’s amazing how quickly you get used to it. Samuel Jenkins had been a shock so soon after watching Brody die right in front of me, but the first emotion I experienced upon seeing Xiang Wei’s armless body lying facedown on the floor of his back room was annoyance. As far as I knew, the only connection between the creature that was doing this and the man lying on the ground was that he was my best chance of identifying the damn thing. I didn’t care how smart this beast was, there was no way it had gone around murdering everyone who knew anything about its kind on top of trying to track me down.

  As nonplussed as I was by the sight of Wei’s corpse, something about the whole situation felt off enough to make me want to get out of there. Call it mage’s intuition, or simple common sense that hanging around dead bodies wasn’t the smartest of ideas, but my gut was telling me to go, and to do it quickly.

  Instead, I knelt down to check out the body. As I pretty much expected by now, the man’s limbs had been severed at various points, each cut cleanly sealed off to prevent blood from spilling out. Observing the scene through my sight was enough to make me stumble backwards, ready to cut my losses and run as far as I could from this room and even the city itself. Magic residue coated the man’s arms and legs, a hazy fog of it permeating the entire room.