Black Magic (Black Records Book 1) Read online

  My stop came up, and I slid out of the seat, threw my bag over my shoulder, and pushed on the door to open it. I felt a little safer with each step closer to Viktor’s house, and I promised myself this time I’d listen more carefully to his warnings. It had been a colossal error on my part when I’d ignored his original concern, and I tried not to make the same mistakes twice. When magic went wrong, it had a tendency to backfire in the worst possible way. I’d learned way too many painful lessons teaching myself how to use it over the years, and it was time I started applying that caution to the rest of my life.

  I picked up my pace when I rounded the corner and saw the house. All out running by the time I got to the front gate, I left it hanging open as I dashed up the steps to push the front door open. Instead of feeling it swing open before me, it held fast. I slammed into it with so much force it would have been embarrassing had it not been so confusing.

  Viktor’s front door had never been locked in all the time I’d known him. His entire property practically radiated magic even for those without the second sight, and even though I’d never been able to make heads or tails of the complex wards that locked the place down tighter than a magical bank vault, I’d known Viktor was not the kind of man to worry about ill-intentioned visitors making it as far as his front door.

  So why was a man with no need for locks suddenly locking his doors?

  I tapped my magic and surveyed the house and yard with my second sight. The place still glowed with potent magical energy configured in a number of protective measures, but it was only half of what it had been the last time I’d checked. In fact, most of the property had been neglected completely, leaving only a tight weave of wards protecting the house itself.

  “Viktor?” I banged on the door with a closed fist. “Viktor, it’s Alex! Open up!”

  I stood there a long time, listening for any sound of movement within. It soon became obvious that Viktor either wasn’t there, or that he was deliberately not answering his door. I worried I’d done something to piss him off, but that didn’t didn’t seem like reason enough for him to leave me out in the cold. I’d spent enough time around the guy to know he was a high level empath and at least a minor clairvoyant. Viktor wouldn’t ignore me if he knew I was in trouble.

  I backed off from the front door and pushed through the thick foliage so I could skirt the edge of his house. There weren’t many windows on the main floor, and the few that looked down into basement rooms were so blacked out and dirty I couldn’t see anything through them. I prodded one of them experimentally and found it was shut tight as well.

  The situation at the back of the house wasn’t much better. There was little open space in what might have been a backyard on any other lot. Dense jungle-like growth choked out the light and I could have sworn the humidity had skyrocketed. It was warm enough I was tempted to take off my jacket and sweater, but I kept them on in case I had to get out of there in a hurry.

  As I’d expected, the back door was locked just as securely as the front. I could see that curtains had been drawn shut on both the main and upper floors, giving the impression the place had been closed up for the season while Viktor wintered in Florida or New Mexico. I didn’t think he’d leave on a trip without telling me, but then again, how much did I really know about the guy?

  My mage sight revealed that the protective magical mesh had been much reduced here too. Some small spells still operated throughout the backyard, but as near as I could tell, they were climate modifiers to keep the tropical plants from dying in the city’s cooler temperatures. Had the protective wards still been out at their original range, it might have been an option for me to camp out on his front porch for a couple hours in order to rest and formulate a game plan. With the place locked down and operating on reserve power, I didn’t dare risk staying some place so exposed.

  I banged on the door and yelled Viktor’s name a few more times for good measure. Only when I was absolutely certain I’d been chasing a dead end, did I make my way back to the front of the house and out the front gate.

  It had been a long time since I’d felt like I had nowhere to go. My instinct was to go to The Bolt-Hole to talk to Jessica, but it was way too early in the day for that. There was also the risk of it being too obvious a move. If someone was out to get me, they’d likely be watching the bar in case I was dumb enough to show my face there.

  Rather than stand on the sidewalk drawing undue attention to myself, I started walking. When I hit the closest main road, I saw I was only a few blocks away from the creepy gnome doctor’s house. I wasn’t entirely sure if I could trust him or not, but he’d had every opportunity to fuck with me while I’d been unconscious on his couch. If he hadn’t murdered me then, I had to assume he wouldn’t do it this time either. I didn’t want to stay there any longer than I absolutely had to, but if Lorelai had recommended him, there was a good chance he’d know someplace I could seek refuge.

  The walk turned out to be farther than I’d thought, and I was soon licking my lips and trying to remember the last time I’d had a drink of water. The Sport Beans had given me a sugary boost of energy, but I was so parched my brain felt swollen and tight in my skull. The minor high I’d gotten from huffing Brody’s magic had worn off quickly, and all that was left was the dull ache that accompanied excessive use of my power. This was further compounded by the throbbing pain radiating away from the part of my skull that had made contact with the brick wall after Felix blasted me with his artifact.

  All in all, I felt like shit. The longer it took me to find some place to rest and regain some strength, the worse it was going to get.

  When I arrived at what I was pretty sure was the right cross street, I scanned the identical low rise apartments and tried to remember which one Samuel Jenkins lived in. Everything had been a little fuzzy the last time I’d been here. Even though it had only been a few hours earlier that morning, it felt like days had passed since Brody had helped me stagger down from one of these buildings.

  The third one down looked more familiar than the others, and rather than overthink it, I walked up to the front door. The place was old enough to have a rusty intercom with plastic sticker label nameplates, and sure enough there was S. Jenkins right on the list.

  I considered hitting the buzzer to ask if I could come up, but I didn’t want to risk advertising my presence to anyone who might be eavesdropping. Names are powerful things in the magical world, and even a fake one like mine could be tracked down if spoken aloud by the owner. The fact that magic didn’t give a damn about legal name changes was one of the reasons I’d kept Black instead of going back to the original, but that didn’t mean I could afford to be so reckless as to announce it into an intercom.

  One of the first simple spells I learned was picking locks with magic. It’s easy enough to do with a proper set of picks, and once you know what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s a simple matter of manipulating the tumblers and pins into the right position so you can apply a bit of mental pressure on the barrel. The beauty of using magic instead of tools was that you didn’t have to know exactly where the breakpoints on the pins were; you simply had to set the magic to moving them into the place they naturally wanted to be.

  It’s the magical equivalent of a bump key, with the added benefit of being quite a bit less conspicuous. All I had to do was twist my hand over the keyhole like I was using an actual key, and the lock clicked open. There were a lot of spells that didn’t require hand gestures or muttering phrases in long lost languages, but it was sometimes easier for a mage to focus their power by associating it with external foci. I’d come up with the twisting motion during my earliest trials in order to better mask the act of breaking into places I wasn’t supposed to be entering. I’d quickly learned it helped with consistency and speed too. I still didn’t know if the part of my brain that projected spells was tied to muscle memory or if it was a habit I needed to rid myself of. Either way, it worked, so I stuck with it.

  Avoiding the elevator,
I walked down the hall quickly and quietly, yanking out my earbuds and pressing stop on my music player. My legs burned more than I’d have liked on the way up to the second floor, and I had to remind myself that not so much time had passed since I hadn’t even been able to walk under my own power. If Jenkins was in a mood to let me in, he’d hopefully have food and water to offer. A few minutes rest on his couch looked more and more attractive the closer I got to his unit.

  I raised my hand to knock, and that’s when I noticed the door was already ajar. Not so open that anyone walking by would notice, but off by enough that it swung free when I pushed against it. My brain snarled at me for being stupid enough to go inside rather than turning tail and getting the fuck out of there, but my instinctual opening of the mage sight revealed nothing of significance, so I pressed on.

  “Sam?” I called softly as I stepped into his apartment. “Anyone home?”

  I tried to convince myself he’d gone out for groceries. Surely he’d forgotten to lock his door. It was easy enough to pretend I was only going to drink a glass of water and leave him a note to explain my intrusion, but lying to yourself never works very well. There’s a feeling most people get when they know something’s wrong. You didn’t have to be a mage or even magic-sensitive to feel how not right the situation was in Jenkins’s apartment. The air was too still. It wasn’t so much the absence of life in an empty man made space, but rather the oppressive weight that seemed to push on me from all sides.

  There was no sign of Jenkins in the living room, and so I called his name again as I went into the kitchen to see about grabbing that glass of water.

  “No, no, no,” I stammered, stumbling backwards so quickly I banged my calf on the hard metal edge of the recliner’s leg rest. “Fuck, no. This isn’t happening.”

  I shut my eyes tight and took a deep breath. When I opened them again, I went to the edge of the kitchen and peered around the corner. Sure enough, the glassy eyed corpse sitting at the small table did indeed belong to Samuel Jenkins.

  Chapter Eight

  To my credit, I didn’t throw up this time. Instead, fear and anger flared within me. I wanted to be anywhere but in a room with yet another dead body, but that was a panic response I couldn’t afford to indulge. Trying my best to shut down such lines of irrational thought, I went to the cabinet, and took down a glass. My hand shook while I held it under the tap, but I made myself stand at the sink until I’d drained the whole glass down in one long gulp. Water splashed over my chin and onto my sweater, but still I kept drinking, trying to swallow my helplessness along with the water I so desperately needed.

  I filled the glass again, this time chugging only half its contents before setting it down on the counter. Belly aching from the sudden influx of fluids, I beat down the urge to run. I had to get my head in the game if I was ever going to get in front of whoever was responsible for this mess. Brody’s death had been an accident, but here was something else entirely. Samuel Jenkins had been deliberately tortured and murdered in his own apartment, and it had all gone down sometime in the last few hours.

  There were hundreds of reasons a man like Jenkins could wind up dead in his own apartment. In this case, one clear clue made it unquestionably obvious that the same person or creature that had killed both Norman Weathersby and Brody had been here as well. Jenkins’s left hand had been amputated above the wrist. His right arm had been removed from the elbow down. Neither of the missing pieces was anywhere in the room that I could see.

  When I moved in closer to inspect the wounds, I saw they were as clean and bloodless as the stumps on Norman’s body had been. As expected, the magic signatures dancing around the wound when I inspected the area with my mage sight were a perfect match. There was no doubt in my mind the two incidents were related.

  I took my phone out of my pocket and snapped a few photos of the area around his right arm. Once again, I was struck by how it appeared to have been cauterized as it had been cut. For a moment I forgot the cross section of flesh, muscle, viscera, and bone was part of what had once been this man’s bicep. It looked like something a specialty synthetics maker might craft out of ultra realistic plastic and rubber for use on a grotesque movie special effects piece.

  This time there was something new. The lightest glaze of some sort of translucent liquid coated the surface of the wound. It looked a hell of a lot like saliva, making it much less likely that it’d been a human who’d attacked Jenkins. By magnifying and applying a sharp contrast curve to the photos from both crime scenes, I could just barely see that the injuries weren’t quite as perfectly smooth as I’d first thought. Almost imperceptible ridges ran the length of the sealed wound. Taking into account the goopy saliva dripping from Jenkins’s wrist, my best guess was that they’d been left behind by a fae creature that could sever a limb in one smooth bite.

  I shuddered at the thought of anything with teeth big enough to leave such a clean and even cut. There were scary things living in the shadows, but nothing I knew of was capable of inflicting such a terrifying injury. The last thing I wanted to do was find out first hand what was so intent on neutralizing me that it had tracked me to this apartment, but it didn’t look like I’d have that luxury. It was becoming painfully clear I was going to have to face this beast down sooner or later.

  For the second time that morning, I stood up and walked away from a dead body I’d been indirectly responsible for creating.

  As I passed through the living room, I caught sight of the two little green pills still sitting right where I’d left them. For whatever reason, Jenkins hadn’t put away the painkillers he’d set out for me. Clenching my teeth so hard I almost cracked a molar, I walked on by.

  Or at least, I tried to. I got as far as putting my hand on the doorknob before stopping and turning back to take one more look at the coffee table. I stared at the pills. They stared back. They whispered a promise of salvation if I’d only give them free reign in my bloodstream. As wrecked as I was, I didn’t know how to deny the little green gems the trip through my digestive system they so obviously craved. Their sole purpose in life was to relieve people of pain, and if dealing with two dead bodies in as many hours wasn’t enough suffering to warrant a little relief, I didn’t know what was.

  I picked up a pill and swallowed it dry.

  It seemed a shame to leave the second one lying there, so I slipped it into my bag for later. Although I knew there had to be a stash of the pills somewhere in the apartment, I wasn’t about to risk relapsing into old habits. Two pills I could handle. One now, and one to get me through the comedown. One for Brody, and one for Sammy Jenkins. There’d be hell to pay for that decision in a day or two, but that was a bridge I’d cross when I had no other options. What I needed above all else was to be able to function, and curling up in a ball weeping over the shitstorm brewing around me wasn’t going to solve a damn thing. I just had to take the edge off until I could make some headway. Only then would I be able to spare a bit of willpower to work on fighting my desire to dull the sharp edges of my fractured emotions.

  I made sure the door was completely shut when I left, slipping quietly down the hall and into the stairwell. I was down on the street before I realized I’d left fingerprints all over Jenkins’s apartment. Then again, given that I’d spent at least a couple of hours sleeping on his couch that night, there was probably a full catalogue of hairs and other identifying evidence scattered about the place. There were spells I could cast that would erase all such traces of myself, but I couldn’t afford the energy expenditure.

  I kept walking.

  It took my brain a while to catch up to where my feet had already decided I was going. It was too far to walk to Lorelai’s house, and being out on the street made me nervous, so I fished the burner phone out of my go-bag. I popped the battery and SIM card into it, then called for a taxi to pick me up at an intersection a few blocks away. I didn’t have a lot of cash on me, but it was imperative I get off the streets as soon as possible. I was in no hurry to fi
nd out what was so eager to meet me it was killing anyone who’d only barely associated with me.

  The taxi arrived a minute after I did. I sunk into the back seat and gave the driver the address, settling in for what might be my last bit of calm for a while. My energy was still nowhere near normal. My head hurt from the bashing it had taken the night before, and although I’d been unconscious for a few hours earlier that morning, I felt as though days had passed since my last decent sleep. Lorelai might offer me safety from harm, but I had little faith the atmosphere at her place would be one of rest and recovery. If I’d been able to think of any other place to go, I would have gone in a heartbeat.

  Before too long, we pulled up in front of my destination. I paid the fare, but I didn’t get out just yet. Staring out at the boxy house, I did a last inventory of people I knew and places I might be able to hide out. None of them could offer me the protection I’d find behind that door. Whatever Lorelai was, she was feared and respected enough in the fae community that no one dared fuck with her.

  I tried to keep that in mind for my own future behavior as I trudged up the front steps and rang the bell.

  Chapter Nine

  This time Lorelai answered the door herself, and she didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. I might have considered this suspicious if I hadn’t smelled the dank stench of marijuana clinging to her robe and hair like an earthy perfume.

  “Heeeeey,” she said as she pulled me into a hug. “Long time no see.”

  Her body was warm beneath the robe, and it felt far too good to have her arms around me. I can’t tell you how tempting it was to bury my face in her shoulder while I sobbed out all the pain and frustration that had been building in me since I’d agreed to take this job. Lorelai’s embrace was like that of a mother, lover, and best friend all wrapped up into one perfect bubble of respite.