by L. J. Red
“Tiana—”
“Leave,” I snapped at him, my voice breaking. I couldn’t take any more of this. The memories that had been stirred up by his presence were too thick and too cloying. I reached instinctively into my magic and pulled upon it, tangling its threads around us both, catching his limbs and making him jerk upright.
My magic was death and vampires were already dead.
“Get out,” I shouted, gripping the threads tightly. It was a struggle, he didn’t want to leave, and he brought his own vampiric magic against my own. But I pulled harder until I saw his muscles twitch once more. He took a step away. “We can pay,” he said. “I know you need the cash.”
“You know? What, so you’re not just stalking me, you’re checking my financials as well?”
“Tiana—”
But for once his voice didn’t work on me. “Just go away, Valerian. Just leave, okay?” I said, and all my exhaustion was in my voice.
Maybe that was what got through to him in the end, I don’t know. Either way, he finally walked out of the bar.
He left the file behind.
Chapter 5
I didn’t open the file for a week. Eventually I got sick of seeing it on my desk every time I came into my apartment, so I swept it into my bag to get it out of my sight. I could still feel its presence hanging over me. A little storm cloud made for one.
The dead guy was still on the news, though the cycle pushed him out of the headline slot after a few days.
The file was still in my bag when I went to the coven that weekend.
Like any self-respecting modern coven of witches, Starlight Coven was understaffed, underpaid and about 50 percent underage. I knew we were in trouble when I was what counted as a rational adult.
The coven had been formed about four years ago when Jasmine had found me in a bad place, and it had been more of a counseling group than anything about magic. Two years ago, Jasmine, who went by Jazz to everyone except the taxman, had taken it a step further and started doing outreach amongst the local magical community, finally resulting in a regular training class for young magical kids, and she’d enlisted a few of the other old hands to oversee. Last fall she’d bribed me into it with a promise of free snacks, and somehow I was still helping out a year later. She was a doctor, as well as the leader of our coven, and I guess the caring for people thing was in her blood.
Most of the kids were teenagers, though we had a couple of young ones and a couple who were almost ready to go off to college. The majority were locals from central or international district but a few came from further out in Seattle. None of them could afford to hire private tutors to teach them the ins and outs of harnessing their magical powers and help them to apply to the fancy, powerful covens of the West Coast like Broken Mirror, Live Oak or Blood Sand, so they came to us, Starlight Coven, the home of the awkward, the unwanted and the forgotten.
Any witch with magical abilities could cast a spell, it was simply a matter of learning how to channel power through from the half world into the real. Words and rituals were just tools we could use. But every witch had their own affinity for something special; it could be an element like the pyros I’d encountered at the bar or something harder to pin down, like a talent for sensing the future, the ability to speak to animals, or, in my case, to speak to the dead.
Dark shit like that was rare, and had a bad rep, but Jazz had never made me feel strange or twisted for my affinity to the dead. I loved that about her, and she brought that same attitude to the training classes.
Jazz’s magic was what mundanes would call ‘pure’. She hated that term—it just meant she could channel power directly from the half world—but it was rare and witches who could do it were seriously strong. I knew only a little about Jazz’s history, some she’d told me, some I’d pieced together from gossip. Magical Seattle wasn’t a big place. Word got around. She’d come up through a big name coven in New York, got snapped up by a magical corporation. The corps pay you well, shower you in benefits and hope you’ll turn a blind eye to the less-than-legal shit they want you to do. You think mundane mega-corporations are bad? Trust me, ours are worse.
Whatever happened, Jazz left, and I mean set fire to the room on the way out, left. She’d crossed the entire country to get away from her previous employers. I figured I didn’t need to know much more than that. Either way, her time in a corporation had left her with little love for magical hierarchies. Magic was different, she would say, but different doesn’t mean better and it doesn’t mean worse, and anyway a coven was stronger the more varied its powers.
Not that we had been called upon to do any serious workings. Nowadays, fights between rival covens didn’t really happen. The fallout was just too dangerous and anyone with serious power got snapped up by the big ones and folded into the system. There weren’t many like me who fell through the cracks.
I’d had my own run-ins with the magical establishment before, but since no one really wanted a necromancer on staff I’d managed to escape unscathed. Turned out messing around with dead people even made other witches nervous. Who’d have thought it? From the way Jazz’s eyes turned haunted sometimes, I figured I’d dodged a bullet. I wouldn’t have fit in at any of those swanky rich places anyway, and if my time with the vampire elite had taught me anything, it was that rich people were plain fucked up.
There was only one other witch of the same strength as Jazz and me in Starlight coven, and unfortunately, she was my responsibility.
Raven had started coming to the meetings a couple of months ago. She didn’t talk much about her home life and I didn’t ask, but I could recognize a fellow foster kid from a mile off. She had enough power to get into one of the big covens, and Jazz was dead set on training her up well enough to rival them. The problem with training Raven was that her magic was too dark for Jazz to get a handle on so that task had fallen to me. Oh Joy.
I didn’t know how to teach, hell I barely knew how to interact with adults, teenagers, even almost-an-adult ones like Raven, were beyond me. I was hoping we could work out some kind of exchange programme with a big coven, you know, they send one of their prissy little kids to slum it with us, we send Raven to kick up a stink in their fancy houses. It would be good for a laugh at least, though Raven might not see it that way.
Our coven met in Edgar Community Center, a squat concrete building on the edge of the park about a ten-minute walk from Joe’s bar. I shoved open the door with my hip, clutching a coffee, dark glasses covering half my face, and was met with the usual scent of gym slippers, stale sweat, and the lingering, inexplicable smell of hard-boiled eggs coming from the little kitchen in the back. Who boiled eggs in a community centre?
Jazz was the only one there, unstacking chairs and setting them in a semicircle in the center of the room. She looked up as I came closer and smiled broadly. “Hey,” she said, “ready for today?”
I clutched my coffee cup closer and mumbled something that might have been a greeting.
Jazz was about my age, curvier and shorter than me, with dark lined eyes and inky black hair about as wavy as mine, but somehow it fell in natural-looking curves rather than sticking up every which way. Maybe she’d brushed it. I’d heard that helped. She was wearing a soft red sweater to stave off the morning chill and it set off her olive skin, giving her a healthy-looking glow.
I fell into one of the chairs and stretched my legs out in front of me, crossing my boots over at the ankle.
“You can help,” she said.
“I’m overseeing,” I replied. “The space between those chairs is a bit too wide.” I pointed. She flipped me the bird and I laughed into my coffee cup. “So why did you tell me to get here at this godawful hour?” I asked.
“It’s only half an hour earlier than usual,” she said.
“Whatever,” I replied, hiding a massive yawn behind my coffee cup.
She came over to me. “Well, we have a little bit of a problem.”
“Problem?”
She
nodded. “The library upstairs?” She pointed at the ceiling.
“Yeah.” It was a bit of a stretch calling it a library; we had about three bookshelves ranged against the walls in our administrative office.
“Somebody’s been taking the books.”
That got my attention. “Stealing our books?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Not many, just a couple gone missing so far. I thought at first maybe someone had borrowed them and forgot to sign them out, but there’s nothing on the logbook and they were from the new shipment; you know, the lot you got from that house cleanout.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. We got lots of our books that way. When people died, their libraries got auctioned off and sometimes you could find some real gems in there.
“Well, I was going to start working through them.” She paused. “Let me be honest; I was going to have Michelle work her way through them. That’s why I hired an assistant, right?”
“Right.” I smiled but felt a tinge of concern. Where was Michelle? I’d forgotten about her in the stress of Valerian’s visit, but I still hadn’t heard from her.
“Well anyway, I don’t think she got to them yet but there’s definitely fewer in the stack than before and I don’t like the thought of someone breaking into the office and taking stuff, let alone taking magical books. It can only reflect badly on us. We’re the only coven that operates out of this area after all.”
“I’ll look into it,” I said decisively and Jazz smiled at me in relief. She returned to setting out the chairs and I drank my way through the rest of my coffee.
“Who we got coming in today?” I asked.
“Not many,” Jazz said. “It’s still break, some people are away, the twins are sick, and I’ve had a couple of the others let me know they won’t be back in time. Raven might turn up.”
I shrugged. “That sounds about right. You never really know with Raven.”
“Rufus said he would come by,” she said. “I wanted him to talk a bit about opportunities for further magical study, colleges, that sort of thing for the older kids.”
“Alternatives to the corporate route eh?” I said knowingly. “Might be useful for Raven,” I said. “How old is she now? Seventeen, eighteen?”
“Something like,” Jazz said. “How are the training sessions coming along?”
I pushed my sunglasses onto the top of my head and gave Jazz a bleary look. “I’m sure they’d be going just perfectly if she bothered to turn up.”
Jazz sighed. “Give her time,” she said. “She’s got strong powers and you know that kind of thing can be… scary.”
“Yeah,” I said. I knew it. That was exactly why I wasn’t expecting Raven to turn up at all. Which is why I was quite surprised when, about halfway into the session, her slim form slipped into the hall. We were pretty thin on the ground that day so she couldn’t exactly slide in unnoticed, but she did her level best to fade in with the brickwork before coming around to join me at the refreshments table.
Jazz was holding court in the center of the room, running a question and answer session. I had made myself comfortable next to the coffee pot and was slowly demolishing a plate of cookies. Raven sidled over to me. She was about average height—a little taller than Jazz, a little shorter than me—tending toward thinness, mostly from lack of nutrition than from any choice on her part. Unlike my own resting bitch face, she had a deceptively sweet expression that she deliberately obscured with a scowl.
Her top was threadbare, poked through with holes where she’d stretched it over her hands and her black pantyhose had long ladders. She looked like any other teenager stretched out, grown up, and starting to navigate the world of adulthood. Not yet entirely comfortable in her own body.
“Working hard?” Raven looked at my cookie plate skeptically.
“Hey,” I said, clutching the plate of cookies tighter. “I am an invaluable part of this coven I’ll have you know.”
Raven rolled her dark eyes. “You know Jazz just says that to get you here,” she said. “And she bribes you with cookies,” she added.
I shrugged with one shoulder. “She knows me too well,” I said. “Where have you been? We were supposed to have a session last week.”
“I was busy,” Raven said. One of her long-fingered hands fluttered toward her ribs then away. I narrowed my eyes. Was she moving stiffly? But she was wise to my game and stared me down. I offered the cookie plate as a peace offering. Whatever was going on with Raven, it wasn’t really my business. Still, I thought I might try to get her home address off Jazz, if Raven had even given it to us, I wouldn’t put it past her to have left that part of the form blank.
The group in the middle broke up, the smart ones making a beeline for the refreshment table.
Jazz jerked her head for me to join her. I rolled my eyes at Raven. “Work, work,” I said.
Raven was right; I didn’t do much for the coven. Jazz was pretty much our leader, and Michelle, whose silent treatment was starting to bother me, was in charge of keeping our accounts in order and making sure we didn’t get in trouble with the authorities.
Any group that catered to magic users had to deal with enough regulation to bury a house under the paperwork.
“Have you heard from Michelle?” I asked Jazz once I was close enough.
“No, she doesn’t usually come to the sessions.”
“Yeah, I just haven’t seen her at the bar.”
“You do keep odd hours,” Jazz said.
“She left a message on my phone a couple days ago. She sounded weird, wanted to meet, but then she didn’t turn up.”
“Ask Rufus,” Jazz said. “He works at the university too. He might be able to pass on a message.”
“Yeah, good idea,” I said.
“So,” Jazz said, “after the break we’re going to run through some basic forms in small groups. Can you oversee?”
“Sure.” I nodded. This was my main task in the coven. My magic was rare and creepy but it also worked as a kind of safety check on more active magics. Like the pyros in the bar last week, I could pull living energy out of a stray magic spell, hell out of anything, which was useful when you had a bunch of hormonal teenagers flinging their magic around.
“When did you say Rufus was coming by?”
“After the practice session,” Jazz said. “I see Raven turned up.”
I glanced around. She was still propping up the wall in the corner, eyeing the other kids with a kind of instinctive hostility. She was a real charmer, was Raven. “Yeah, making friends as usual.”
I saw an expression of worry cross Jazz’s face. This was the difference between me and her; she actually gave a shit about other people.
I walked toward the back of the room as the kids began to return to Jazz. I picked a place in the corner, checking sightlines again, this time so that I could cover the entire group around Jazz.
I was looking forward to Rufus arriving, or Dr. Allister as he was known to his students. He was the fourth member of our coven and a lecturer in the magical department of Washington University. We were pretty close. He had been the one to pick me up and get me back on my feet four years ago after… after everything went to shit. I didn’t get to see him as much as I would like since I’d moved out and found my place above Joe’s. Since I started working cases, my hours, always antisocial, had become even more so.
I felt guilty that I hadn’t made time to see him. Hell, if it wasn’t for the fact that Jazz had managed to make my position on the coven a paid one, I probably would never see her either.
Jazz called the kids to order and she started off on the simplest of forms, calling up a trickle of magic from the half world, focusing your intent and directing it outwards from your body.
Most of them failed to achieve even the first task, to reach the half world. The only two who managed to get anywhere was Tom a tall blond who had been coming to the class for years, who managed a puff of air that rippled through his hair, leaving him gasping for breath from the ex
ertion. And a young girl with a dark, serious face under a purple headscarf, and even she was shaking from the concentration it took her to create a small ball of light between her hands that fizzled out to nothing the moment it got more than a foot away from her.
“Good job you two.” Jazz smiled at both of them.
I was pretty impressed. It had taken me a long time to create light; my magic was just too dark for that.
Then, out of the corner of my eye I saw something black flicker.
Raven had her hands cupped in a similar way to the younger girl but it wasn’t light between her fingers but darkness, a pitiless darkness that sucked the light out of the room and wavered the edges of my vision.
Raven’s hands shook, and as I turned she looked up at me, her eyes wide enough to see the whites.
“I can’t… I can’t control it,” she said, her voice trembling with fear.
Chapter 6
I took two quick strides toward her. Her hands flexed and the blackness started to expand like it was shoving her hands away from each other rather than anything deliberate on her part. Another step took me close enough to touch and I smacked my hand down on her wrist and sucked in the magic. It resisted me, slick and dark, fizzing weirdly under my skin, an power to it that actively fought against me. I’d never felt anything like it. I sent more power into my grip and my magic finally cut through and consumed it with a snap.