A Deeper Darkness

by Jamel Cato

  “That sounds like a diet drink for fat people,” Art protested.

  Stanella glanced down at his bulging gut. “You could budge up a bit, especially if you want to hear my other accents.”

  “Kale smoothie it is,” he said with a smile.

  We grabbed a table and Art spent the next hour briefing me on the dark doings of the political classes.

  On the walk back to my office, I told him that nothing I’d heard thus far explained why Peakes had paid me a visit.

  “What do you see when you watch clips or photos of Serenity?”

  “Unusual electromagnetic emissions in the Astral spectrums,” I admitted.

  A few were in frequencies commonly found around magic users and supernatural beings, but the vast majority were of types I had never seen. The frequencies I recognized constituted such a small part of her total Aura that they might have been overspill from other individuals. There was no way to be sure without meeting her in person.

  “That’s what I figured,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He pulled two white pieces of fabric from his pocket and handed one to me. “Put this on.”

  It was a surgical mask of the kind worn by people in cities with dangerous air quality. They were ideal for preventing people from reading your lips. The mask was a brazen acknowledgement of the man who had been discreetly tailing us since we’d left my office.

  After we both donned the masks and learned to ignore the odd looks we were getting from passersby, Art said, “Our tail is a contractor from Dark Water.”

  Dark Water was a private security contractor that the American government utilized for classified activities.

  “How do you know?”

  “He followed me from DC. That means he’s a contractor. Dark Water is the only contractor with a prime contract with the House Armed Services Committee that Speaker Schmidt co-chairs. Ergo, he most likely got this assignment from Jasmine Perry.”

  “How do you know he’s not working for Peakes?”

  “Peakes has the whole intelligence apparatus at his disposal now and rarely uses contractors. If it were him, the reconnaissance assignment would have been transferred to a local FBI asset and there would have been no need to follow me here. I made the trip to find out which one he was.”

  “And you’re sure he’s not just tailing you with nothing to do with me?”

  “He didn’t show up until after you called me.”

  “Peakes knows about me?”

  “The DSO has a file on you an inch thick. They know about Darlene and Eve as well.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Parts of it.”

  “How?”

  “I know a guy who knows a guy.”

  “A human guy?”

  “A guy.”

  “They want me to find out what Serenity is because they can’t do it with their own resources,” I guessed.

  “Bingo.”

  “And failure is not an option.”

  “Failure is never an option for people like us.”

  “What do you think Serenity is?”

  “I have no idea, but if I were a betting man, I would wager she’s some kind of Tryvodyn.”

  Tryvodyns were humans with beast taming magic. They were the descendants of human warlocks who had mated with succubi. There have been an exceedingly rare few who were strong enough to tame both humans and animals. History books refer to these outliers by the titles and positions they leveraged their abilities to obtain—Pharaoh, King, Robber Baron.

  “Could be,” I said neutrally.

  “Translation: I’m dead wrong,” Art said. “I take it she doesn’t have a Tryvo Astral signature?”

  “Not even close,” I confirmed.

  “What about Alastina of Horothodox?”

  According to the lore, Alastina of Horothodox was an ancient Tryvodyn who had the unique ability to tame people, animals and the dead. Taming ghosts was particularly impressive since the translucent representations we encounter on this plane don’t possess the olfactory senses that would make them vulnerable to the pheromones that Succubi and Tryvodyns emit. That was the main reason I personally considered her an overhyped fable. But my position was the minority view within paranormal circles. Adherents to her legend often pointed to the trove of eyewitness accounts and other supporting evidence stored in the Library of Truth maintained by Art and his staff at the NAPR.

  “I can see some parallels,” I said honestly. “But it still doesn’t add up.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “I thought the feds had a Temporal Mystic captive at Guantanamo Bay. Why don’t they just ask her?”

  “She’ll say anything to keep from being deported. They test her regularly and she lies like a rug.”

  “What did she tell them about Serenity?”

  His hesitation only lasted half a second before he said, “I’m trying to find out.”

  “What happens now?”

  “I’m almost certain someone from Speaker Schmidt’s office will reach out to you now that we’ve called out their spook. It might even be Perry herself.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “During election cycles, they keep close tabs on each other. They know Peakes came to see you. They’ll want to know why.”

  “What should I tell them?”

  “Tell them whatever you told Peakes.”

  “I told him that I would get back to him.”

  “And he accepted that?”

  “No. He told me he would contact me again in seventy-two hours, at which point I could tell him something about Serenity that he didn’t already know or he would turn me into a statistic.”

  “Sounds like classic Garrison.”

  “Is he really that dangerous?”

  Art skipped his usual levity. “Yes.”

  “Should I pack up and move to Mexico?”

  “That will buy you a week.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Serenity’s life story is a campaign manager’s wet dream. Start there.”

  “You mean the bees?”

  “I mean the black gold.”

  We had arrived back at the entrance to the sunglasses store that was below my office.

  I removed my mask, but Art kept his on.

  “Preston,” he said, making eye contact with me.

  “Yes?”

  “Whatever you do, weigh your decisions like the Midwife of Troezen.”

  That was when I first became worried.

  CHAPTER 5

  “How’s Art?” Eve asked after I sat down at my desk.

  “Overweight.”

  “So you took him for smoothies?”

  “I ordered Zeus Juice.”

  “Oh,” she said with equal notes of surprise and understanding. “What did he say about Serenity?”

  The fact that she’d asked this question so directly let me know that she had secured our office against human and magical eavesdropping.

  “He thinks she’s some kind of Tryvodyn.”

  “Interesting. I don’t think we’ve ever worked a Tryvo case.”

  “I worked one before I met you.”

  “Is that right?”

  I told her about the case of the Msakayeya Snatchers. An astrophysicist I knew from grad school had taken a post at the SALT Observatory in South Africa. It was there he heard the tragic stories about the troops of marauding baboons who were breaking into homes and stealing sleeping children. The incidents were happening in a village in the Cape Peninsula, at the foot of Table Mountain. My colleague reached out to me after learning some of the villagers claimed the baboons could speak a few words of Afrikaans.

  Three weeks later, I tracked down the Austrian Tryvodyn who had been taming baboons and selling children to human traffickers. The abductions stopped and all seemed well again. But something gnawed at me that kept me in Africa a little longer. There were far easier ways to find and abduct vulnerable children than the tactic I had disrupted. It
didn’t add up. After buying a lot of rounds of Bekezo beer and doing my share of flirting with women with irresistible accents, I was led to the humble home of the single mother who the locals said had driven off a baboon attack with her bare hands. Since I knew that baboons can weigh hundreds of pounds and possess inch-long fangs, I had prepared myself to meet a stout matriarch who was handy with a shotgun, or, if I were lucky, an attractive young warrior princess who made love with the same vigor she showed in repelling home invaders.

  What I found was a tiny, devoutly religious woman who insisted an angel had run off the baboons with words in a strange tongue. I asked her to describe her savior and repeat his words. In another two days, I slid into a stool at a hotel bar near Tambo Airport. A white man in his thirties with dark hair and numerous scars on the back of his hands sat next to me sipping a European lager. He wasn’t an angel. My investigation into the baboon abductions had benefited from several fortuitous breaks. I asked the man if he had been responsible for those. He admitted he had been.

  His real name was Thulakonamo Sun Neehejee, but most people who actually knew his name just called him Thul. Many supernatural communities police themselves in order to stay beneath the notice and weapons range of humans. Thul was a kind of Tryvodyn law enforcement agent. He told me that the baboon abductions had been part of a larger conspiracy to prevent the rise of a South African boy named Daniel Msakayeya, who would grow up and change the world. The bartender interrupted us seeking payment before I could ask Thul how he knew that. When my new friend waved two fingers in the air and made the bartender completely change his demeanor and forget about our tab, I decided to ask different questions.

  Thul’s honest answers are why I didn’t think Serenity Blakemore was a Tryvodyn.

  “What do you think she is?” Eve asked me.

  “I think she’s the new Daniel Msakayeya,” I said with conviction.

  We talked for a while longer about my plans for the case and the specific things I needed her to do.

  An alarm on my smartwatch chirped and I abruptly rushed toward the door.

  “The custom V Shades you ordered for her came in yesterday,” Eve shouted at my back. “They’re on the counter behind the Transitions display case.”

  I grabbed the box Eve was referring to when I quickly passed through the sunglasses store beneath my office.

  A spiteful African American parking attendant named Viola Crescent had made it her life’s mission to ticket my car. Sometimes she would ticket me while I was standing right in front of her. The City of Philadelphia had recently replaced its old coin-operated meters with a network of digital kiosks that accepted credit cards and Bitcoin. Viola had a handheld device that could interface with the kiosks. More than once, she had used it to reverse a payment I had just made. I had no idea why she hated me, but I had tried to change the situation by plying her with gifts. If she liked a particular gift I was offering, she would accept it. Then she would ticket me anyway.

  I walked up on Viola just in time to see her writing my latest parking violation.

  “Aw c’mon,” I protested. “You started writing that ticket before the meter even ran out.”

  She pushed the completed ticket toward my face. “Talk to the hand.”

  I flipped open the lid of my gift box. “I got you a pair of custom V Shades. This is the only pair like it in the whole world. It has your initials on the hinges.”

  She peered down into the box. “I don’t wear sunglasses. And even if I did, I wouldn’t wear those gaudy things. What do I look like, a blind rapper?”

  “If you don’t like them, you can sell them on eBay. You could get at least a grand for them.”

  “Are you trying to bribe a Parking Authority agent?”

  “I’m trying to reason with you.”

  “Reason with that ticket I just wrote you.”

  I knew I would regret it even before I said it, but I’d had enough of being the bullseye of Viola’s unhappiness with life. “You’re always doing the most. That’s why you’re a meter maid.”

  She cocked her head back in offense, then started furiously scribbling on her ticket pad.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “The most,” she barked. Instead of handing me my new ticket, she placed it under the windshield wiper of my car.

  I retrieved the paper and read it. It was a Level Three violation for illegally parking on a snow emergency route. There was a court date at the bottom.

  This really grated my nerves because it was early Summer.

  CHAPTER 6

  My car waited at a red light in a neighborhood called Wynnefield. On the opposite side of the intersection, a Philadelphia Police cruiser did the same.

  When the light turned green, I mashed the accelerator hard enough to make my tires screech. I made an illegal left turn which cut off the Police vehicle. Its sirens started flashing and it forced me off the road a block later.

  A thirty-four-year-old African American officer who was six-foot-six inches tall and two-hundred-and-thirty pounds of suspect-intimidating muscle leapt from the cruiser wearing a bulletproof vest and stomped toward my car. A few moments later, a Latina officer who was half as small emerged from the other side of the vehicle speaking into a radio. She pressed a button on the radio and then yelled, “Jason! Wait for backup!”

  But Jason Tiptree ignored her. He yanked open my door and pulled me from my car like I was a shirt tangled in a pile of laundry. That was a commentary on his immense strength because I’m six-foot-two and hardly a lightweight.

  I smiled.

  My first cousin recognized me.

  “You better stop playing games, Horn,” he said, grimacing at the crowd of onlookers who were recording the scene with their smartphones. “I was about to turn you into a meme.”

  Most of the men in my family get christened with the nickname Tree. To reduce confusion when we were around each other, Jason called me Horn, which was a reference to Thelonious, my middle name. I called him Tip, because he had once dreamed of becoming a socially conscious professional rapper before inevitably following in his father’s footsteps and enrolling in the Police Academy.

  I gave him a hug, which disappointed and dispersed the crowd, some of whom had no doubt been having their own dreams about the rapper lifestyle they would live after selling their police brutality footage to CNN.

  Carmen Mercado, Jason’s partner, walked up shaking her head at me. She was as pretty as he was powerful. “You’re going to catch it one day, Poppy.”

  “Did you get married yet?” I asked her.

  “Why? Are you proposing?”

  “Hell yes if you promise to bring your handcuffs to bed once a week.”

  She laughed.

  “Did you cancel the backup?” Jason asked her.

  She looked up at him. “Yeah, but the Lieutenant wants to see you at shift change. Somebody posted a video clip to Facebook Live.”

  “Dammit,” he said, turning to me. “You’re always getting me in trouble, Cuz.”

  “My bad. Do you want me to call your Lieutenant and explain it was just a mix up?”

  “No, I want you to call me when you need to get in touch with me instead of doing this.”

  “You keep your phone on vibrate. Half the time you don’t pick up.”

  The two officers exchanged a meaningful look.

  “What’s up, Horn?”

  Carmen walked away to give us some privacy.

  “I might need you to watch my back on this case I’m working.”

  We both knew my back would never go unwatched as long as my cousin could stand on two legs, so he asked, “Is the whole world at risk?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is it legal?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Is somebody trying to kill you?”

  “Not yet, but I’m pretty sure that will change once I put my foot in it.”

  “Is it somebody we know?”

  “In a way.”

 
“What does that mean?”

  “I’m about to investigate Serenity Blakemore.”

  He covered his face with his hand and sighed. “You can’t just ask for help with a parking ticket like everybody else.”

  The mention of a parking ticket made me think of Viola. “I need help with that too.”

  He furrowed his brow and I explained my predicament with Garrison Peakes.

  CHAPTER 7

  I sat in an observation room looking through one-way glass at legal proceedings in the Special Pretrial Adjudication Unit of the Philadelphia Courts.

  I was sharing the room with Lucinda Kagan, a fifty-six-year-old Criminal Justice Professor at Temple University.

  Unlike typical pretrial hearings, these proceedings were interesting to watch. And they were fast. No hearing thus far had lasted more than ten minutes.

  We watched as deputies escorted in a handcuffed man with a bald head and gang tattoos.

  The defendant was led in front of a low oak table with two men seated behind it. One was a grey-haired white man in black robes. That was Judge Bachlin. The other was an African American man in his late fifties wearing the uniform of the Philadelphia Police. That was Clifton Tiptree, my uncle and Jason’s father.

  Judge Bachlin paid the proceedings scant attention while Clifton scoured paperwork and grilled each defendant with probing questions. If one didn’t know otherwise, it would appear that my uncle was the Judge.

  “Why does the gun have your fingerprints on it?” Clifton asked the gang banger.

  Judge Bachlin, who had been scrolling through his phone, looked up but said nothing.

  The defendant’s attorney whispered in his ear, which led to a brief argument of whispers on their side of the table.

  “I don’t have all day,” Clifton said.

  “My lawyer wants me to say they got there when I legally purchased it at a firearms expo.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Naw.”

  “May I have a moment to consult with my client?” the attorney asked Judge Bachlin.

  Bachlin looked to Clifton.