by J L Collins
The MARC building loomed ahead, disrupting the beautiful skyline with its foreboding stone structure. I pictured the plaque by the front iron gates that I’d passed numerous times:
1825 Gowan Lane
The Magical Acts and Regulation Control,
founded circa 1558.
Coinnitheoirí Draíochta A Choinneáil Ar An Tsíocháin
“Keepers Of Magic, Keepers Of The Peace”
The carriage slowed to a smooth stop right outside of the gate. Gentry hit a button I hadn’t noticed, and a small screen popped up on the would-be dashboard. It sort of reminded me of one of those newer built-in touch screen displays in a car. Not my car, obviously.
“What’s this?” I asked.
My Uncle Gardner’s transparent, floating head appeared over the screen, his voice suddenly booming through the carriage as if he were barking orders at us from inside of it. “Report to my office, you two. I have a meeting with the head of The Children of the Moon Society shortly, and the last thing I need to deal with is a grumpy werewolf.”
Gentry nodded. “Will do, sir.”
“Um, yes sir,” I added, not sure if Uncle Gardner could even see me. When his head swiveled to face me, his eyes softened. Okay, so maybe he could.
“Thank you.” With that, he was gone.
I waited until Gentry had pushed the button again and the whole interface had disappeared before I sat back against the seat. “Well, that was . . . new.”
“Recent upgrade to the transportation energy grid. The transport mage got the idea from the Human Realm, funny enough. I guess they can be useful from time to time. The smartest bunch of them, anyway,” he shrugged, pocketing a small shining disc into his cloak pocket.
Personally, I knew a whole bunch of smart humans. It was pretty hypocritical of him to compliment them and insult them all in one breath. I guess it’s a habit of his.
Raising a brow, I pointed to his pocket. “Transportation energy grid? Interesting. I didn’t know they finished setting that up yet. Is that electrum?”
His mouth gave a little twitch. “Yes.”
I waited a beat and then, “And what’s it for?”
“It syncs the carriage with the grid. So if for instance, I needed to take my hands off the steering wheel I could. The carriage would follow the grid to wherever I will it to go. This,” he tapped his pocket, “will lock my intention to the grid. We’ve only started using it inside MARC. It’s not widely available. Yet.”
So. He was apparently capable of holding a reasonable conversation if it involved cars. Typical.
“We better hurry up and get inside,” I mumbled, sliding out of the carriage.
But before I had a chance to shut the door, something squeaked from one of the back rows.
Gentry looked over his shoulder, confused. “Did you hear—?”
“Yep,” I replied, peeking around the window until I saw a flash of red. I jumped back into the seat and leaned over, snatching up the woolly cloak that was lying in an oddly-shaped heap along one of the furthest back rows. “Fiona-Leigh Brady! Are you freaking kidding me right now?”
She peered up at me innocently, giving me one of those “please don’t murder me” looks.
“Um. This isn’t where I left my retainer?”
I grit my teeth. “Yeah, no crap. Get out. Now.”
“A stowaway, huh?” Gentry stood at the front of the carriage wearing an amused grin.
Nudging Fiona-Leigh to book it, I shook my head behind her. “More like a child who’s looking at her first week of summer stuck in her room when we get back home.”
“You have to admit it, though. The girl has guts.”
“I don’t suppose you have kids, do you, Whitemourn?” I asked once the gates opened up for us. “Because I have this crazy feeling like maybe not so much.”
But it was too late. Fiona-Leigh was already staring at him with little hearts in her eyes.
Good grief.
15
The Dark Market
The immaculate lobby was bustling with the usual busy folks hurrying to get to their desks and offices on time. I even caught sight of what must have been the group my uncle was scheduled to meet with—werewolves, judging by their sheer size and grizzled-looking faces. The smaller female werewolf with the streak of brilliant white through her ponytail rounded on the others who were grumbling to one another.
“Hush now! The Shadow Hand Inquisitor said ten o’clock, sharp. He knows I don’t like to be kept waiting.”
I traded a look with Gentry and both of us seemed to pick up speed at the same time, weaving in and out of the crowd. I dragged Fiona-Leigh after me, refusing to let her get lost in the morning rush.
By the time we made it to Uncle Gardner’s office, he wrenched open the door. “Oh good. I thought I’d have to come find you myself.” It was funny watching his bushy brow cock upward as his gaze landed on Fiona-Leigh. “I didn’t realize you’d be bringing her, Gwendolyn.”
My mouth twisted on its own accord. “Neither did I. I was actually hoping she could stay here at headquarters. Keep her busy and out of the way.” I threw another look in her direction. “And out of trouble.”
“Mama!” she whispered. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
All I could do was shake my head. This was one of those moments where it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to hear me come back with a “Just you wait, girl. One day you’re going to have a kid of your own, and they’re going to feed you the same crap you’re trying with me now. And I can’t wait for that day to come.” But I kept my mouth shut, waiting for my uncle’s reply.
“I’m sure we can find something to occupy her. There are always plenty of admin tasks that even a sylph could do.”
I recognized the same crinkle around his eyes as he regarded Fiona-Leigh. There used to be a time when he reserved that look for me when I was growing up.
Totally oblivious, Fiona-Leigh folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the far wall of his office while he debriefed us on the latest information in the investigation. Which was pretty much nothing, naturally. Except for the part where he mentioned there was an issue that had recently sprung up.
“You’re going to need to use alternative cloaking methods beyond your usual, Gwendolyn.”
I frowned. “How come?”
“The marketeers have decided to add in some extra precautions in their surveillance, it seems. There’s a blanket grid spell that’s been enacted to protect them from outside cloaking. From what we’ve seen, however, it’s penetrable by using a brew instead of a spell. A loophole, I believe.”
He handed Gentry two small vials. “These should do the trick.”
Ignoring how utterly useless this made me feel, I cleared my throat and accepted this anyway. I didn’t want Uncle Gardner to think I was complaining. “We’ll be starting at Enoch’s residence,” I said.
Uncle Gardner nodded. “Wise choice. Always start at the scene of the crime. While I highly doubt your brother is anywhere near the Dark Market—if he’s being smart about it anyway—you may find something that’s been overlooked.”
Enoch had lived in the actual Dark Market? I would never admit it out loud, but maybe I hadn’t exactly done my due diligence with going over every detail in the case file. Either that or I really was losing my marbles with being thrown back into my former magical life. It was anyone’s guess.
I gave Fiona-Leigh a stern look before Gentry and I headed back out, making a mental note to figure out how to ground her once we were home.
The narrow lanes cut through the town square, surrounded on either side by colorful shops and stands, with everyone and their grandma walking between them. Spell Haven’s main market hadn’t changed much since the last time I was out running patrols along it. As trustworthy as many of the town’s citizens are, you can never be too careful. The market was a place where you could find a mug of steaming hot Hyssop Tea with a shot of Hocus Pocus Focus to start off your day with a bang, then
do a hop, skip, and a jump down the lane to find a Love Potion Lotion to end it with one, too. If you were so inclined.
But it wasn’t the main market that was our concern, and as the long lane wound around several turns in the road, the shops became further and further spaced apart with fewer visitors and more ominous-looking signs. A tent with small animal skulls hanging from it had a scar-faced troll in need of a toothbrush grinning like a lunatic from ear to ear as we passed. One shop was completely enclosed with a simple sign that read, “Not-so-niceties to stimulate.” My chest tightened. What in the heck was that about?
We were approaching the Dark Market.
“Careful.”
I looked down at where Gentry was pointing. My nails were practically embedded in the leathery fabric of the carriage. I quickly let go, flexing my fingers, blushing. “It’s been a while since I’ve been out this way.”
“Aside from the thriving underground trading, it probably hasn’t changed much.”
The outer edges of Amaranth Forest seemed to curl in around and partly over this part of the public market, giving it a darker, more enclosed feel. The shops were now gone as were visitors, and when I saw a faded, cracked sign ahead on the right, I knew we’d made it.
“We need to disguise ourselves. They know who I am and they’ll more than likely remember you,” Gentry said as he pulled the slow-moving carriage over to the side.
I frowned. “Since when has the MARC had to disguise itself to the public? Is that something new?”
He just snorted, throwing his cloak with the shiny Shadow Hand badge off his wide shoulders, and placing it in the row behind us. “Since the Dark Market became a massively organized trade center. They’ve . . . Upgraded a bit. And while it’s not hard to get in and out as a Shadow Hand, they won’t let us anywhere near Enoch’s place unless we blend in and don’t draw too much attention to ourselves.”
He pulled out two small glass vials from a compartment in front of us, brandishing them with an eyebrow raised. “This will give us cover for no more than two hours, so we’ll need to get in and out.”
It was starting to finally make sense why there hadn’t been any evidence retrieved. Everyone seemed to be too busy pandering to the criminals that ran the Dark Market to really get anything done.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered, taking one of the vials. “We shouldn’t have to hide to do our—you shouldn’t have to hide to do your job. And I’m only here to look for clues to find Tristan. It shouldn’t be that complicated.”
But I downed the contents of the vial just the same, wanting to avoid whatever argument I knew was on the tip of the man’s tongue.
It was sort of like getting a brain freeze after drinking a blue raspberry Slurpee too fast, the way my insides turned to ice. I yanked down the visor that looked very similar to the ones in my jeep, relieved to find the rectangular mirror attached to the inside of it. But all I saw was my normal-looking face.
“It didn’t work.”
I looked at him from the corner of my eye and nearly shrieked. Instead of Gentry Whitemourn sitting in the carriage beside me, there was a scruffy-bearded dwarf with a jagged scar crisscrossing others down the one side of his face. The corner of his wide mouth turned up, revealing ground-down yellowing teeth. “Didn’t it, though?’
“So it’s just a glamor potion, then. Good,” I replied, gesturing down at myself. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what I’m working with.”
He gave me a once over. “A female hobgoblin. I think.”
I grit my teeth. “Helpful.”
“You’re a three-foot tall hobgoblin with a wooden peg for a leg, wearing a sheet that looks like it fell off the trash wagon a good decade ago. There, is that sufficient enough? Do I need to describe the detail to which your left eye is certainly infected, or can we get back to our mission?”
I stopped short even though Gentry got out of the carriage and kept moving. “It’s not a mission,” I muttered.
The abrupt end of the lane led much farther back then what meets the eye, with the entrance to the Dark Market being guarded by two large, filthy-looking trolls with fists the size of boulders. My fingers closed around the grip of my wand instinctively.
A massively organized trade center? It could have fooled me. Once we made it through the Keepers, the rest of the market became visible. It had definitely changed since the last time I’d run patrols out here, easily doubling in size. To an outside human it would’ve looked like a county fair with white tents popped up all over the place, but not a fried Oreo or a bag of colorful cotton candy were in sight—any that wouldn’t likely poison you, that is.
“It’s this way,” Gentry hissed under his breath, nodding toward an opening in the sea of tents.
We made our way through, everyone quietly discussing their business all around us. In the main market you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a loud, obnoxious customer trying to drive a bargain with a shopkeeper, but here it was different. No one wanted anyone listening in, and everyone kept to themselves. It was one of the first things you noticed when walking around.
Past the tents were where the oldest physical shops stood, looming in the background like bouncers at a seedy, supernatural party. We turned down the winding lane that barely had room for more than two people shoulder-to-shoulder until we were standing underneath a large wooden sign painted in all black with gilded letters that read, “Night Visions.” It was one of the more formidable antique shops around, apparently having been in Enoch’s family for generations.
I pushed open the door to find that despite this, the store had been almost completely ransacked. Lights in display cases along the walls were flickering, and the floor was covered in glass dust from where someone or someones had smashed the glass cases and stolen all of the more valuable items, save for a few weird-looking totems. Absolutely all of the weapons that I knew must have been hanging on the walls before, were gone. The shop counter’s baskets had all been overturned and thrown everywhere, and the antique-looking safe behind the counter was open and empty as well.
“They didn’t wait long, did they?” I mused, picking my way carefully around the glass and shards of other random materials—splintered wood?
“It was like this when we showed up the first time. Enoch had been killed a full day before the proper authorities were alerted to what was going on. It seemed that those who knew about it after the fact wanted to take advantage of the situation,” Gentry said as he inspected the busted door frame that led upstairs to a room above the shop. “I’ve heard some . . . Troubling things about what happened with all the stolen goods.”
I waved him off and headed up the steps. “I don’t care what happened to all of the weird and creepy stuff he had here, remember? I’m here because I’m—”
“—looking for your pitiful brother, yes, I know.”
I whipped around at the top of the steps, glaring down at him. “Watch it. No one talks about my family like that.”
But he just rolled his eyes, moving past me and into the room. “I’ll try to remember that.”
Enoch’s living quarters were fairly clean and minimal, mostly whites and blacks with barely a hint of color anywhere. With the more modern furniture and pieces of my own favorite black and white photography scenes by the famous Ansel Adams himself, Enoch’s place looked less like a vampire’s den and more like an ad from the latest IKEA catalog.
I ran my hand over the edge of the sofa. “A vampire with a suburban mom’s taste. Who would’ve thought?”
I grabbed the notebook and pen stashed in my cloak and set them on the arm of the sofa, whispering a quick self-note taking spell as I tapped my wand on it. The pen sprang up as if someone invisible were holding it while the notebook flipped to the first available blank page, both of them floating behind me as I walked around.
“No evidence of anyone having been in here for a while. The last trace of footsteps, hm, I’d say from a week ago,” I said, waving my wand over
the floor to check. I paused, thinking about what Gentry had said about the things missing from downstairs. “If you had to make an educated guess . . . Who do you think was responsible?”
“For what? The murder?” He looked inside the refrigerator, revealing a dozen or so bottles of dark red liquid lined up on the shelf. He shut it again, looking disgusted. “Do you really want me to answer that?”
“I think we both know my brother didn’t do it.” The words cemented themselves in my brain the moment they rolled off my tongue. I’d thought about it and there was just no way Tristan would’ve resorted to something like that, no matter how badly things had gone for him. Which only made me worry more about him.
Kicking over the edge of a well-made rug, he shrugged. “Probably the same people who wanted him out of the Overseer position. There’s been a lot of rivalry between different gangs in the market.”
I frowned. “Different gangs? Like, different creatures or families?”
Gentry paused, hesitating before he continued on. “No. I mean gangs. They constantly have turf wars here. It’s been one of the biggest issues we’ve had with them. There’s this odd sort of tension underneath everything. Like it’s about to all boil to the surface. The way Enoch was running the Dark Market . . . Many of the others weren’t fans. He wanted to legitimize it, make it less of a problem with the MARC and more of a credible market area. To a degree, anyway,” he added, turning back toward the kitchen, his eyes narrowed.
“You know an awful lot about it.”
“I should. I studied it intensely when I was in the Inner Sanctum. It’s a good idea to know your enemies through and through.”
Enemies? “Right,” I said, shaking my head. “Because that doesn’t sound psycho at all.”
I decided to ignore Gentry and continue taking my own notes, checking through Enoch’s bedroom. His room bore little resemblance to the rest of his place, the dark tapestries that hung on the walls depicting medieval scenes of dragons breathing fire and basic hell upon earth. Lovely.