by Sonya Clark
“No, what you’ve got is power.”
I started to protest again but he talked over me.
“Would you carry around a gun without knowing how to use it?”
I gave him a skeptical look. “What, now I’m dangerous? I’m being lectured by a vampire about being dangerous? For real?”
Daniel’s face warred between amusement and frustration before settling on neutral. “I’m just saying, I think you should talk to someone about this. That’s all I’m saying.” He rose, walked to the counter where he’d left his cellphone and a notebook, bringing the notebook back to the table with him. “How about we just deal with our demon problem right now?”
It took me all of half a second to agree, but I made him wait for a full three seconds. “You go first.”
“Okay. This guy named his little posse the Brimstone Club. I’m guessing I don’t need to give you a rundown on the old Hellfire Clubs?”
I shook my head. The Hellfire Clubs of two, three hundred years ago in London and Dublin were basically groups of rich men hanging out and partying. Booze, hookers, plenty of mockery of the church to reinforce the image of themselves as naughty, naughty boys, but probably no real devil worship going on despite all the rumors.
Daniel continued. “I ran a trace on the address. The utilities are registered to a Blake Harvill. Here’s the picture on his driver’s license. We need to show it to Seth, make sure this is our guy.”
He handed me a color printout: black hair, dark eyes under heavy black eyebrows, a full mouth, fair skin. Blake Harvill looked like he could blend in with the wallpaper and slip by unnoticed, or burn the memory of himself into your dreams. Or nightmares. I stared for a long moment before something occurred to me. I looked at Daniel and gave the paper a shake. “How’d you get this? You know somebody at the DMV?”
A faint pink blush crept across Daniel’s cheeks, something vampires rarely did. “I hacked into their computer network.” He said this in the same tone of voice someone else would have said they’d checked the TV listings to see what reality show was on tonight. It wasn’t nonchalant enough to make me ignore the blush.
I craned my head to make a show of examining the color on his cheeks. “Did you also hack into the utility company’s computers?” Dancing With the Stars or American Idol?
“Yes, I did.” I swear he sounded proud of himself.
“What the hell.” I shrugged. “I broke and entered last night.” Though I was far more impressed with his illegal feat.
“Get anything out of those journals?”
“He’s been practicing magic for a long time. Years. Started off on his own. At some point, I think when he was in college, he found someone who acted as a mentor. He wrote a lot about what the man taught him, the lessons, the exercises he gave him to learn energy work. How to use the elements. But never a name. He was very careful not to give the man’s real name. The guy used the name Paralda as a magical name.”
“Suppose he was calling himself intellect or gas?” Daniel said with a snort of derisive laughter. Paralda is the name of the spirit considered the ceremonial ruler of the element of air. Air rules intellect and its corresponding state is gas, like water’s is liquid, earth is solid and fire is plasma. Fire and plasma… I lost the train of what I’d been talking about, thinking about my little candle-lighting trick and how it paled in comparison to Delia’s big flamey exit. Of course it was the same magic. Sort of. I think. So what did that mean? How far could I take my little trick?
Daniel made a noise. I blinked, remembered what I was supposed to be talking about and continued. “He, uh, Blake dabbled in a lot of different stuff. Studied a lot of different stuff. Wicca. Different forms of Paganism. Every form of ceremonial magic I’ve ever heard of. I think he experimented with a lot of different things. I didn’t have time to read everything, and I skipped around a lot. But I did figure him out before I found confirmation in the journals.”
“What’d you figure?” Daniel said after draining his tea glass.
“Blake is a chaote.”
Daniel slammed the glass on the table. “Well God damn motherfuckin’ son of a bitch.” Daniel was a man--vampire--who could swear with flair.
“So we’re dealing with a sorcerer who has no rules, no boundaries. No method, all madness. He could cast a circle invoking the four corners of South Park if he wanted to. And his own magical name is Kalidas.”
“Which means magnificent asshole, right?”
“I found two definitions. In Greek it means beautiful. In Sanskrit it means servant of Kali.”
“Excuse me, it means magnificent egotistical asshole.”
“I found all kinds of details about the rituals. His planning was meticulous. He did divination about it for months in advance. He made all the candles, the incense, the anointing oils. Everything. Even the robes.”
“Don’t sound so impressed. Any hippie can do all that.”
“He had the entire ritual mapped out, all the way through. No one was supposed to die. It was supposed to end with Delipitore possessing Delia, but she wasn’t supposed to kill anyone. He had instructions for what the guys were supposed to do as their part of closing the circle, even.”
He raised a hand. “Wait, who was supposed to possess the girl?”
“According to his journals, a demon named Delipitore. That’s the word the guys were chanting during most of the ritual. He wrote that she is a demoness of sorcery, of enchantment and enlightenment. He wanted to learn from her. He’d already learned from her. He did rituals to invoke her spirit and she taught him things. Taught him magic that went past even Paralda’s teaching. But he wanted more and I think getting her a solid form, a body, was the price.”
“So even if he didn’t plan on sacrificing his Brimstone posse, he did sacrifice this girl, Delia. He picked out a cute little thing for his evil spirit to move in to, so he could what exactly? What exactly did he want from, what was the name again?”
“Delipitore. Near as I can figure, he wanted knowledge. He wanted magic, he wanted power. He wanted knowledge.” I shrugged. “Sometimes there was a lot of detail in the journals. Sometimes he was pretty vague. He was very vague about other people, like he didn’t want someone to be able to identify them if the journals fell into the wrong hands. I went over everything to do with this ritual and there’s practically nothing about Delia except her name. And only her first name. I’m gonna have to find the guy and talk to him.”
Daniel shook his head. “You mean we. We’re gonna have to find…”
“This is not the time to Scooby up and ride along.”
“Whoa!” he snapped. Guess he didn’t think that was as funny as I found it.
“I need you to stay with Seth and Levi. I don’t know if Delia could find them here, but since we don’t know how she found Gabe at the hospital I don’t want to take any chances. You can protect them better than I can if she shows up and things get nasty.”
“What if she’s with Blake? What if he gets violent, even if he’s alone?”
“If I can even find him, I’ll watch him first. See if she’s with him. Try to get a sense of him. If I think it’s too dangerous I’ll back off and call you. Did you find out if he’s got a job in all your hacking?”
He made a face, disgust mixed with disbelief. “Last year’s ten-forty he called himself an antique dealer. He’s probably got an eBay store selling his old Dukes of Hazard lunchboxes, Star Wars trading cards, who knows what. I didn’t get that far yet.”
Instinct told me I’d be wasting my time staking out the duplex. If I didn’t have a job site to watch, where else could I look? “What about that club Seth mentioned? The place with no name on the door?”
“Roxie, that place is a pit. You don’t want to go there.”
“So you know where it is?” I tried not to sound too eager.
“That dive makes the Mos Eisley cantina look like a church retreat.”
“For a guy who makes references like that, you really should
n’t mock someone over their Star Wars trading cards.”
He glared at me, lip curling up to flash just a hint of fang. But he tore off a strip of paper and wrote the address. I grabbed for it but he held it just out of reach. “Do not drink anything there. Don’t dance with any of the skeezy losers there. And for God’s sake, use the bathroom before you go. I don’t want to think about how nasty the bathrooms must be in that place.” He shuddered, making a noise of disgust.
I promised and crossed my heart and said I would take my pepper spray and my brass knuckles, and he finally relented, handing me the paper. I folded it, tucked it into the front pocket of my jeans, wondering if I had anything appropriate to wear to a place that gave a vampire a case of the wiggums.
* * * *
Shades of red and blue rippled through the satin darkness of his aura. In the press of bodies on the dance floor it was easier to keep sight of his aura than him, so I kept my glasses low and my head tilted down. He wasn’t dancing. He stood at a small table at the edge of the dance floor, nursing a beer while he talked to a pair of girls. It didn’t look like he was hitting on them. The body language and aura colors of all three suggested something else. After a moment he nodded and moved off, deeper into the crowd. I had to get closer to keep him in sight.
The no-name club was in the basement of an old building in the funky part of town, near the industrial area of the river. The inside was dark, red and white lights flashing, not fast enough to give you a seizure but fast enough to be disorienting. The weeknight crowd seemed fairly subdued. Only a handful of the cages hanging from the ceiling had somebody writhing around inside. With mostly a young Goth crowd in the club, I felt like I stuck out in jeans, an old brown cardigan, glasses, and my hair loose to help hide the Hello Kitty band-aid on my forehead, but nobody gave me a second glance. I could feel the angry industrial music from the soles of my ratty sneakers all the way to my already throbbing head. A copy of the driver’s license picture Daniel hacked for me was in my back pocket, but I found Blake Harvill so quickly I didn’t need to show it to anyone. He looked like he was doing the same thing I was, searching for someone.
I lost him in the crowd, spotting him again heading up a stairwell, without even needing to take my glasses off. Blake Harvill stood six feet tall according to his driver’s license. He claimed a spot at the railing, giving himself a good view of the ground floor. Mercifully the music segued to something less angry and more listenable, a cello-heavy cover of Bad Moon Rising. He scanned the dance floor and I stepped out from against the wall, chancing a clear look at him. Wearing all black and with some muscle on him, he swayed slightly to the music, moving with a grace you don’t often see in men. Combine that with the air of power rolling off him in waves and the dark, sensual good looks his DMV photo didn’t show, he made quite an impression. Several women cut glances his way, hoping to spark his interest, and a few men too. Whatever, whoever, he was looking for here tonight, it wasn’t a hookup. He ignored the attention, the unspoken invitations. All the peach and orange floating around him, spiking out from other people’s auras, didn’t help my concentration or my headache.
I took my glasses off, wanting a better read of him. Scarlets and maroons, indigo twisting through like a swirl of paint, shooting stars of iridescent pearl, all of it shining against a velvety blackness. His aura radiated power. Blake knew he had power, knew how to use it.
Someone only vaguely aware of chaos magic might expect a practitioner to be a wild-eyed hot mess of spiritual mayhem, but generally the exact opposite was closer to the truth. Chaos is not for the faint of heart or the weak of will. Other magical systems, both secular and religious, will have rules, boundaries, structure. A map for an adept to follow, with warning signs that say things like “don’t make love spells that subjugate another’s free will, don’t hex the guy who cut you off in traffic, don’t be dense enough to think a weight loss ritual will work without diet and exercise.”
Be careful where you point the energy of your will, in other words. With Chaos, you are off the map, and here be dragons. Your average structured practitioner will find themselves a comfortable home within a single mythological pantheon, usually Celtic, Egyptian or Norse. A chaote could call on a Norse god and an Egyptian goddess, or use Stan, Kenny, Kyle and Cartman to represent the four elements. They’ll use whatever works, because what’s important, what the real fuel for their magic is, is their own intention, their own belief in what they are doing. A female chaote looking to bring out her own inner warrior could invoke the Celtic Morrigan, Greek Athena, Hindu Durga, Egyptian Sekmet--or Ripley from Aliens. Or all of them, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster help whoever that chick’s gunning for.
I may have had a can of magic whoop ass, but Blake the Chaote Sorcerer had a fifty-five-gallon drum.
He also had enough indigo running through his aura to make me nervous, indigo usually indicating psychic ability to me, among other things. As soon as I had the thought, he looked right at me. Damn it. Getting busted while doing surveillance never makes you feel like the sharpest undercover brother on the block, but I wasn’t going to back down. I put my glasses on and returned his gaze. The corner of his mouth quirked in what I thought to be amusement. He took another drink from his bottle and stepped away from the railing. A group walked single file between him and my line of sight and I took off for the stairway. Not being big and imposing, I had to push my way through the crowd. His beer bottle was all that was left when I made it to the spot where he’d been standing. I looked around, finding no sign of his dark head or his shimmering aura.
After nearly forty-five minutes of searching the club, the alley behind it and a few surrounding blocks, I gave him up as lost and headed for my car. A quick phone call to Daniel assured me all was quiet on that front, Seth and Levi safely tucked away in guest rooms. Too keyed up to go home, I drove to the office with the window cracked, a sharp breeze coming off the river and curling through dark streets. I played some Junior Kimbrough to get the taste of industrial Goth out of my head.
The only real problem with the Broom Closet’s location was lack of parking. The best place was a small lot across the street, which meant crossing four lanes of traffic and a turn lane. Traffic could be heavy sometimes during the day but I never had any problem making it at least to the turn lane. At night, especially this late, there was barely any at all. The whole area felt oddly deserted, which made for an easy walk across the five lanes, but I stayed alert. I didn’t much want to admit it, but I didn’t have any illusions about being able to fend off Delipitore. I’d gotten lucky today. Nothing guaranteed that luck would hold.
I unlocked the door to my office, looking up and down the street as I did. The west end of the road had a small used car lot, a convenience store, more random buildings like this one holding various businesses, eventually moving into neighborhoods and shopping centers. East went back downtown to the city center and on to the river. Street lights lit the night comfortably. A breeze rattled some discarded newspaper on the sidewalk just past the Broom Closet’s entrance. Leaving my office door unlocked but still closed, I walked the several feet to pick up the trash, still looking around. Took my glasses off to check for spectral energy, scanning the night for whatever was skittering across my nerves and making me feel like someone was watching me.
Something seemed to vibrate up from the ground, pulsing in the soles of my feet in an eerie match to the trance-like blues I’d been listening to in the car. In seconds it was gone, leaving nothing but the hum of distant traffic. I crumpled the newspaper in my hand as I replaced my glasses, heading to my office. I locked the door behind me, reaching for the light switch on the wall. It came on long enough for me to see Blake Harvill sitting in the chair behind my desk in the back room, just for a moment before he smiled and waved at me, plunging the office into darkness again.
An embarrassing squeal shot out of my mouth and I threw the newspaper. I could hear the chair wheels roll as he pushed away from the desk and stood.
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“Sorry about that,” he said in a voice that didn’t sound the least bit sorry. “Sometimes it gets away from me.” A candle sitting on the filing cabinet came to life, giving us just enough light to see each other. He stood behind my desk, hands in his pockets, the side of his mouth curled into a smirk.
I crossed the front room and halted in the doorway to the private office. I had no idea how to play this. The computer was on, stuff had been moved around on the desk and one of the drawers in the filing cabinet was slightly open. “What the hell are you doing here?”
His smirk broadened into a smile. “Were you looking for me in the club tonight? I saw you watching me.” He came around the desk, stopping at the corner. “I thought about asking you to dance, but I wasn’t sure you’d say yes.”
Clearly he did not lack for nerve. “You break into my office, go through my things.”
His smile faltered a bit and a flare of anger flashed across his face. “At least I didn’t break into your home.”
I drew in a breath, sharp. He had me there, but damn I didn’t want to admit it.
The smile returned. “So, would you have said yes? Back at the club, if I’d asked you to dance, would you have said yes?”
Like we’re having two entirely separate conversations. “I’m gonna ask you again. What are you doing here?”
Blake stepped mere inches closer, and it took everything I had not to retreat. His smile slowly faded, his face becoming impassive as he gazed at me. He looked me over from head to toe, but not in a way I’d ever had a man check me out before. Usually when men examine a woman with that much care it’s sexual, and blatantly so. This seemed more like genuine curiosity. It also seemed as if he was filing observations away for future reference. Another step closer. “May I call you Roxanne?”
I swallowed. “I’d prefer you didn’t.” How far would he go to get his journals back? I still had my keys in one hand, and a key would make a good gouging weapon. My cellphone was in the front pocket of my jeans. I didn’t think there was much chance of getting it out without drawing his attention. I still felt drained from charging the mojo hand, so I didn’t have much hope of using magic against him, if I could even figure out what to do.