But in such a progressively conservative kind of society as Atlantis, old traditions were a thing to be reckoned with.
Passing the hut and stepping out onto Myers City’s Central Boulevard, Alex winced—the lights were too bright. Thousands of them merged into a single multi-colored canvas that shone in the night like a never-fading lighthouse.
The light from the skyscrapers reached far past the clouds, up to the gliders of the sky patrols guarding the heavens.
Sky predators seldom approached big cities. The bright lights scared most of them away, though, to be fair, some were attracted to it. The sky patrols, recently introduced by the city government, were far from useless.
Out in the streets, the thousands of shop windows, the streetlamps, and the headlights of cars swishing by melted into rivers of cold, artificial light.
The nights in Myers City were sometimes brighter than the days. But the nights were also the time when the shadows cast by the bright lights seemed particularly vivid.
“I’m turning into a poet,” Alex grumbled, adjusting his collar again.
The skeleton warriors were still on sentry duty by his steel horse. Judging by the number of parking tickets on the handlebars, they made for awfully lazy guards.
“You’re fired.” Alex waved a hand, reducing them to dust.
Humans and non-humans (however politically incorrect that sounded) scattered all around him. Paying no attention to the scared whispers behind his back and the hasty attempts to retrieve phones from bags and pockets, Doom jumped on the bike and opened the throttle.
Rearing up on the rear wheel, he sliced through the night traffic. Horns blared as cars screeched to a halt, trying not to run down the crazy biker. Shouts were hurled at his back from lowered windows.
They’re fearless in the central district.
High Gardeners would have just crawled on to where they were going, aware that any careless move might attract the attention of shady characters.
“And you call me crazy, pumpkin.” Gribovsky, wearing his usual hat and trench coat, stood leaning against his tiny sports car.
“The crossing was too far,” Alex replied as he kicked the footpeg down and crossed his arms over the handlebar.
“You just came from right over there.” The lieutenant pointed at the crossing some six hundred feet away.
“That’s too far, I’m telling you. So, are we going? Or are we just going to stand here?”
Gribovsky whispered something under his breath. It sounded like a curse, albeit an admiring one.
“Get off that gasoline monster of yours, and we’ll go.”
Opening his car door, the guardsman realized that Alex was still mounted.
“Do you need an invitation, pumpkin?”
“We’re taking my bike.”
“Wait, what?” Gribovsky frowned.
Alex knew all too well why they were using a service car. The Guards didn’t trust Doom (with good reason), and that was one of their precautions.
“They’ll notice a strange car before we ever get close. There’s no way we’ll get into the Abyss.”
Gribovsky squinted; his face looked even more predatory.
“You’re lying,” the cowboy more stated than asked.
“Maybe,” Alex replied with a cunning smile. “But there’s no way you can know for sure.”
They stared each other down for a while until Gribovsky, muttering something like, the Asian’s going to kill me, closed the car door, activated an alarm that made a funny quacking sound, and came over to the bike.
“Is that…?”
“My niece playing with the car computer. I’m already used to it,” Gribovsky hissed through gritted teeth as he climbed into the passenger seat. He wrapped his arms tightly around Alex’s belt.
With a quacking sound reminiscent of the alarm duck, Doom glanced down and then back at Gribovsky.
“Are you a homophobe, pumpkin?”
“I’m a High Gardener,” Alex snapped. “You have a grip behind you. Use it.”
“Touchy,” the guardsman snorted, but he released his embrace and grabbed hold of the upright chrome stick that jutted up over the place for the bags.
“Try to keep your hat on,” Alex said, kicking the footpeg up, rolling the throttle on, and slicing back through traffic onto the street.
The engine roared, cylinders rattling. The reinforced suspension maintained its sure grip of the road, letting Alex and his apparently non-sports bike make unimaginable turns without stopping at red lights. He accelerate to a scary speed, completely ignoring the magic car traffic.
Elves in their elegant and sporty coupes. Orcs and trolls in giant SUVs. Humans in all sorts of vehicles, and the Fae driving the brightest and newest cars they could find. All of them flashed by in Alex’s peripheral vision.
The expensive boutique windows hurtled by, too. The plainest scarf in shops like those cost an uptown factory worker’s annual salary.
So, too, did the gleaming signs of night clubs and cinemas sweep past. In and out walked young and old, humans and non-humans.
The nighttime glitter of downtown Myers City, with its broad avenues and crammed sidewalks, fell behind them. The district Alex was heading to was far less respectable than the center, though it still had its special kind of charm and chic.
Amalgam Street District, named after its central street, had once been a mecca for free minds. The anarchists gathered there to discuss the necessity of overthrowing the government and handing power to general assemblies of free wizards. Artists came to leave trendy graffiti on the walls or, sitting down at their easels, paint portraits or the cityscape. Writers and film directors came for inspiration.
Musicians, performers, drug addicts, vagrants, adventurers, sculptors, poets…all of them flocked (and continued to flock) to Amalgam Street.
And that made sense.
It was only there, in that district, that you could still find the remnants of past historical ages among the steel and chromium of the downtown skyscrapers. The asphalt sometimes gave place to cobblestones, the high-rise concrete jungle to the squat buildings in the old city. The style was pompous and somewhat grotesque pseudo-Gothic, with towers, gargoyles, houses looking like palaces, and palaces looking like castles.
Amalgam Street was the second (after the downtown) tourist mecca in Myers City.
It was the only place you could see a skyscraper with an actual garden and real medieval castles on the rooftop. It was the only place that still boasted rows of houses, each of which deserved its own mention in architectural guidebooks.
A beautiful and controversial place.
High Garden for the rich, it was called. Along with its luxurious architecture, the district had the greatest concentration of brothels, bars, cheap strip clubs, and night clubs where it was easier to buy drugs than a bottle of clean, fresh water.
But all of that was hidden in the shadow of the rich bohemian and cultural life. It wasn’t as outright seedy as High Garden, though it was still better to avoid taking its far-too-attractive appearance at face value.
Alex stopped at a line of small, five-story houses from the eighteenth—or maybe seventeenth—century. They practically breathed France with their balconies, terraces, and stain-glass windows. The first floors were occupied by cafes, galleries, and boutiques.
“Follow me,” Alex said without looking back. Not bothering to cast an alarm spell on his bike, he walked into the small alley between a boutique and a café.
Filled with sewage vapor and crammed with stinking trash bags, the alley was so narrow only one human and a half could walk shoulder to shoulder. And it was a perfect demonstration of Amalgam Street’s seamy side, not to mention that of greater Myers City.
“I’m still not sure we are going to the Abyss.” Gribovsky’s voice had turned creepily serious again. Alex couldn’t see what the cowboy was doing, but he assumed he had a hand at the ready on his enchanted gun.
“We’re not,” Doom replied with a s
hake of his head. “We’re already here.”
Having said that, he walked over to an inconspicuous steel door. It was the kind you wouldn’t have even noticed as you walked by, and it looked like it led to the café’s kitchen.
And it did.
It really was the café’s back door.
Although it didn’t lead to the kitchen.
Rummaging around in his pockets, Alex retrieved a gold coin big enough to cover two thirds of his palm. It was engraved with various symbols surrounding a face under a deep hood.
He stepped up to the door, moved one of the wall bricks aside, and tossed the coin into the hole behind it.
“Seriously?” Gribovsky was apparently surprised. “Pure gold?”
“A lot of them are allergic to silver.”
“Good point. But still, so trivial and so…John Wickly.”
Alex turned around to give Gribovsky an appraising once-over.
“The owner is a big fan of the John Wick movies. And Keanu Reeves. So, no Matrix jokes in there, got it?”
Gribovsky was about to reply when, with a metal clang, the door was unbolted and two dark, almost black eyes peered out.
Alex shuddered.
Damn.
He’d forgotten how uneasy Joe’s eyes always made him.
Chapter 32
“Good evening, Joe.” Entering the small tambour sheathed with rusting tin, Alex tipped his hat.
Gribovsky swallowed noisily behind him.
It was hard to blame him. Sitting on the small stool beside the entrance was…a creature. It would have looked almost human if it weren’t for the physique that would have been the envy of all the famous bodybuilders and powerlifters in Old Earth.
And not just human athletes. Even some small orcs and ogres would have envied Joe.
From head to toe, he was 7’4.3” tall. Doom knew his height so exactly because he’d once been suckered by local hustlers and lost a hefty sum betting on the club’s eternal bouncer’s height.
But lofty proportions didn’t keep him from having an Apollo-like build. Muscular and absolutely symmetrical, he looked sculpted from bronze or stone, every fiber and tendon clearly visible.
He was some kind of living anatomic tutorial, always dressed in pants with suspenders. His white shirtsleeves were rolled up to expose tattooed forearms, there were black patent-leather shoes on his feet, and under them were…cartoon character socks.
“Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” Doom said, recognizing the seductive, red-haired beauty on Joe’s right sock.
“Here on business, Doom? Or just for fun?” Joe’s voice matched his body. It didn’t sound human—more like a nuclear-powered icebreaker cracking its way through the ever-frozen ocean. Alex couldn’t bring himself to call it merely deep or husky.
“Business, actually.”
Joe looked up from his book (judging by the cover, this time it was The Old Man and the Sea). His black eyes crossed Doom’s emerald stare, sending shivers down the latter’s spine.
Facing a whole pack of gorilla demons like the one in the museum wouldn’t have been enough to make Doom shudder. At least, no more than any reasonable member of the black magical profession would have in that situation.
But Joe…
Still a callow youngster back then, Alexander had witnessed Joe, with his bare hands, break (literally, shedding lots of blood) a Supreme Vampire to the point of knuckling under. A nephew to the duke of Myers City.
Alex would have been damned if he, even were he as strong as Peter from the Syndicate, could have even wriggled free of a Supreme Vampire in the middle of the night without losing his face. Not to mention wounding it.
But Joe had broken every single bone in its body. The only reason he hadn’t killed it was because all killing was prohibited at the Abyss.
But only killing.
That was one of the club’s few rules.
“You were expelled.”
“Yeah, I heard Farrokh.” Doom gave a wry smirk.
Putting a good face on a bad deal was something he’d learned from… Well, that didn’t really matter.
“Then go ahead,” Joe said, pointing up the spiral staircase with his big hand.
“Have a good evening, Joe.” Alex doffed his hat and started up the familiar stairs. Too familiar.
Over the six years that Doom had been banned from the Abyss and its associated businesses, virtually nothing had changed. Even the stairs seemed to sway at his every step exactly the way they had in the past.
He had to hold onto the ever-damp steel railing. It must have accumulated the moisture from the brick walls of the tall well leading up into the main hall.
“Who…what was that sitting down there?” Gribovsky asked.
Alex heard the distinct click of the enchanted gun being cocked.
“Joe,” Doom said with a shrug.
“Joe? What’s that supposed to mean? That thing… My lenses couldn’t scan it. They showed nothing.”
Alex had been astonished by that fact as well when he met the club’s bouncer for the first time. But over time, he’d gotten used to it. And he’d stopped asking questions he had no hope of getting a reasonable answer to.
“Mine can’t either.”
“Doom, fu—…” As Gribovsky stumbled on the stairs, his swear word turned into an unintelligible whisper. “You don’t get it. My lenses are nothing like yours.”
That confirmed Alex’s guess. He’d heard the rumors that the lenses used by civil servants had different functionality than regular ones.
Gribovsky worked for the Guards, an organization so ancient that most Old Earth countries were too young to be its younger siblings.
“And they…they showed nothing. Nothing. So, let me ask you again: who—or what—was that sitting down there?”
“Joe,” Doom repeated. “Just Joe. I hope that’s the last time we’re going to talk about him today.”
Just then, they reached the well cover. And that wasn’t a metaphor—it was an exact description of the entrance to the club’s main hall.
The owner of the establishment (or rather a secret organization, a shadow government for those the world preferred to forget: the Dark Creatures), Farrokh, didn’t just like Keanu Reeves. He was also a fan of horror movies.
And so, Alex and Gribovsky entered (or rather climbed into) the hall from a very real, authentic well. According to Farrokh, it had been the location where they’d filmed the original version of that same movie.
As soon as Doom stepped up into the Abyss, his ears were assaulted by deep, bass sounds. The rhythmical, knocking, and gliding music altered his heartbeat to match the local ambience.
And the place did have ambience.
The dim light created the illusion of a caustic semi-dark that was further amplified by smoke from cigarettes, cigars, pipes, hookahs, and even fog machines.
The red, pink, and crimson stage lights cut through the dark beneath the ceiling but didn’t reach the floor. Instead, they stopped halfway in the air to turn into a variety of illusions floating over the heads of the crowds dancing next to the stages.
The illusions ranged from a sexy female vampire with a half-open mouth to a guitar-shaped bottle of expensive wine that wasn’t actually wine at all.
Wriggling on the poles enclosed in columns of silvery-whitish light were naked and half-naked female dancers so sexy and beautiful they gave first-time visitors a hot sensation in their pants no matter their gender.
Alex had heard that Farrokh had been offered up to 500,000 credits for a night with one of them, but they were off-limits. Like museum paintings, they were there for everyone to feast their eyes on and keep their hands off of.
Beyond the fence, in the dense darkness, different kinds of creatures were eating and drinking at the round tables. They probably weren’t there for fun. Instead, they’d come to discuss business or just feel at home.
It was a home where they weren’t regarded as second-rate creatures ineligible for the presumption of
innocence.
Although, to be honest, nobody innocent ever patronized the Abyss.
“What now?” Gribovsky yelled in Alex’s ear.
Alex jumped aside and dug around in his ear with his little finger. Turning to the lieutenant, he looked into his eyes and replied softly.
“Don’t shout. If you want to be heard, just look at the person and speak in a normal tone. The magic will do the rest.”
“Magic?” Quick on the uptake, Gribovsky was already talking regularly. “Pumpkin, I’m in a place that’s remained hidden for ages even from the Guards. That’s real magic.”
Alex ignored the compliment to the Dark Community. Over centuries of persecution and incessant wars with the constantly growing Light Community, the Darks had become unsurpassed masters of one art. The art of hiding.
Even then, with the actual wars and persecution long since turned into a cold war under the cloak of acceptance and tolerance, the Darks remained hidden in their communities. They avoided contact with an outer world that held far more danger for vampires and the rest of their ilk than there had been for mortals or champions of Light in the Dark Ages.
In other words, the Light had won.
And the Abyss remained the last fortress of the Dark. Or, as romantic youngsters put it, the last bastion of freedom.
Squeezing through a small crowd of werewolves, chimeras, and even a couple undead, Alex reached the bar counter. In the kingdom of hi-tech, chromium, steel, premium leather, and Persian carpets that the Abyss was, the counter was the single nod to the redneck spirit.
A shabby oak top. Tall chairs on wooden legs. Several beer vending machines. A couple poles. Hustling bartenders. An enormous mirror crisscrossed by shelves loaded with all kinds of bottles.
“Alexander,” a slightly surprised and pleasant female voice called.
Valerie. She was a pretty blonde with long hair and shiny, cheerful eyes, her clothes just a bit revealing, yet still neat and stylish.
One of the Abyss’ long-standing employees.
But Alex was probably the only one who saw her that way.
Valerie was a kind of human known as a chameleon. When speaking to someone, they became what the other person would be most comfortable dealing with. Doing it subconsciously rather than purposefully, Valerie still remained one of the most pleasant creatures at the Abyss.
Dark Wizard's Case Page 18