Darkling Mage BoxSet

by Nazri Noor

  He scratched the back of his neck, grinning sheepishly. “Well, I mean, that depends on what you mean by beating – ”

  I smiled so hard I must have sprained my neck. “No need to explain. Honestly. Please. Stop.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Madam Chien’s apothecary glowed like a lamp, lit with old light bulbs that pulsed like braziers, like little fires. It was the kind of place that permanently smelled like incense, the austere aura of an antique store combined with the comforting must and dust of an old bookshop.

  It wasn’t the strangest assessment. The apothecary was way more than just your standard assortment of ginseng and wolf berries, filled as it was with unusual decor, things in jars, illustrations of the human body on yellowing sheets of paper wrapped in cellophane. Still, it was warm in a way, almost welcoming. I could imagine spending the night and not minding it much.

  Behind the counter, wizened and wiry, her hair a snow-white cloud, sat Madam Chien. Her pursed lips showed the impression of someone who permanently disapproved of everything, starting with me. Her eyes narrowed as I approached the counter.

  “Him,” she said. “He did it.”

  “Grandma, I’m telling you, that’s not possible. Dustin’s our friend.” Prudence shook her head, waving me over. “I’m sorry, she’s just so frightened. She’s a wreck right now.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, forcing a smile.

  I studied Madam Chien. Frightened wasn’t quite the right word to describe her. Frankly, she looked pretty relaxed for someone whose place of business had just been broken into. She did look at least a little pissed off. She seemed just about ready to smack my head right off my shoulders.

  “Come here, Dust,” Prudence said. “You should see this.”

  Madam Chien folded her hands together as I stepped closer, her lips puckering even tighter. I couldn’t be sure if her tunic was what she wore day-to-day, or if it served as her sleepwear since she’d probably woken in response to her security system going off, but it gave her the appearance of a martial artist.

  Peering out of one of her sleeves was a tattoo of what I thought was an arrowhead. On closer inspection, it turned out to be the head of a dragon. She scowled and slipped her hand over it when she caught me looking. I bowed my head in what I hoped passed for an apology.

  “This is why she’s so suspicious. Look.”

  Prudence tapped at the screen of a laptop that was quite a few generations out of date, but still recent enough to run the security camera’s software. It was a blur at first, the figure walking from the other side of the street, but as he came into focus, the breath caught in my throat.

  The man – thing, whatever he was – looked to either side of him, then up at the security camera. I looked into my own face as it grimaced, then made a small grin.

  “Holy shit,” I murmured.

  Sterling made a nervous chuckle. “That’s messed up. Look at that, Graves. That’s creepy as hell. Right, Graves? Oh crap, I’d be shitting myself.”

  “Make him stop,” Prudence said.

  In my peripheral vision I caught Gil elbowing Sterling in the stomach. I knew Sterling was just being himself – a douchebag – and trying to freak me out, but I was still too focused on the thing in front of the camera to engage.

  Other-Dustin took off his jacket, wrapped his fist in it, then punched clear through the window. He disappeared off-camera, then less than a minute later, reappeared with something bundled under his arm, dashing off into the night.

  “He’s paying for my window,” Madam Chien muttered.

  “Grandma, I told you, it can’t be him. Dust wouldn’t need to break a window.”

  The old woman harrumphed and folded her arms. Prudence groaned.

  “Dust, would you please just show her?”

  I blinked. What, just shadowstep, like a performing monkey? “Uh, I’m not sure about this.”

  “It’s cool. She’s one of us.”

  I blinked again. Huh. Somehow it never occurred to me that Madam Chien could have been a mage. Did magic run in the family? Was there something about arcane blood that I didn’t know? I filed them away as questions to ask Carver, or maybe Herald, later on.

  I decided to go simple and quick. I picked a shadow near a medicine cabinet, one of those ornately carved ones with dozens of miniature drawers. Maintaining eye contact with Madam Chien, I sank into my own shadow on the ground, jaunted as quickly as I could through the Dark Room, then emerged just inches from the cabinet.

  My hands spread to either side of me, I waggled my fingers, a silent, half-hearted ta-da. Showing her my magic trick only reminded me that there was someone out there wearing my own damn face, the difference being that I could shadowstep, and they couldn’t.

  “I don’t see your point,” Madam Chien grumbled. “Your Uncle Stephen could teleport, until that time he was stupid and showed up in the middle of traffic.”

  Aha! I fucking knew it happened. Teleportation mishaps weren’t just urban legends after all.

  “The point is, grandma,” Prudence said, through gritted teeth. “The point is, he could have just teleported in. He didn’t need to break the glass.”

  Madam Chien barked something back in Mandarin, which set Prudence off, and the two went at it. The guys and I stared off into the corners of the apothecary for some uncomfortable seconds, caught in the crossfire of a familial spat.

  But all of that just raised another question. If it was Thea impersonating me, then surely she wouldn’t have resorted to something as crude as punching through a window. Well, shit.

  “Fine. Fine. So it wasn’t him. That doesn’t help. I want my peach back.”

  “You’ll get it back, Grandma. We just need to track whoever it was down.”

  “Get one of your Eyes to do it. What good is the Lorica if it can’t even help us in this matter?”

  I looked around the store. “Wait. That’s right. Where’s the Lorica? Or the cops, for that matter? You said something about a security system.”

  “I wanted to handle this before reporting anything to the Lorica,” Prudence said. “I don’t want the authorities in on this. Neither does Grandma. Her system is more of a series of wards that she put up herself,” she continued, gesturing at a number of yellow paper talismans pasted around the apothecary. “The security camera is really the only nonmagical precaution we have in place.”

  “We,” I said. “So this is a family business?”

  “One hopes,” Madam Chien said, eyeing Prudence meaningfully. “My son and his wife are doctors, but this one here decided her place was with the Lorica, punching and kicking things for pleasure.”

  “I don’t do it for fun, Grandma,” Prudence said icily.

  “You should put those days of danger behind you, the way that I did. What’s so wrong about running the store, the way I do? There is great pride in our business. When will you learn, Mei Ling?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Mei Ling?”

  Prudence blushed.

  “Leung Mei Ling,” Gil offered. “It’s her Chinese name.”

  It was kind of cute that he knew that about her. The two of them made an oddly sweet couple, honestly, if you didn’t think too far about the possibility of magical flaming werewolf babies in their future.

  “You guys,” Sterling called out. “Come here.”

  None of us had noticed that he’d sauntered off to examine the broken window. I stepped over, spotting the glinting glass shard in his hand. On its edge was the smallest trace of blood, easy enough to miss in the dark on the damp sidewalk.

  Gil slapped himself on the forehead. “I should have noticed that.” He gave Prudence an apologetic glance. “I don’t know how I didn’t notice that.”

  “Because it isn’t regular blood. Nothing in the conventional sense, at least. Hard to sniff out.” Sterling dragged the shard lightly across his tongue. I felt like I was the only one cringing at the sight of him doing it. He smacked his lips a couple of times. “Ugh. It’s bland. Life
less.” He nodded at me. “Almost reminds me of how you taste, Graves. Almost.”

  Every head in the apothecary turned slowly in my direction. Prudence folded her arms, a cheeky grin blooming on her face, the kind that asked: “Is there something you aren’t telling us?”

  “Look, he stole it from me when I was injured, okay?” I threw my hands up. “It’s not like I let him chew on my neck or anything. I’m not a cow.”

  Madam Chien brushed me aside with a surprisingly powerful stroke of her arm as she went to examine the bloodied shard. “I don’t judge,” she said, an absent grin in the corners of her lips. “It’s a very modern arrangement,” she continued, waggling her eyebrows at Sterling, then at me.

  Sterling nodded. “I know, right? So progressive.”

  “Please stop,” I said. “There’s nothing going on between – ”

  Madam Chien waved a hand. “So you can find my peach?”

  Sterling looked to Prudence for an answer.

  “A jade peach,” Prudence said. “It’s an heirloom artifact, passed down from our ancestors. Its enchantment is very specific – most mages won’t even find a use for it. But it belongs to our family.”

  “And it passes to Mei Ling next,” Madam Chien said. “If only she would marry.”

  “Grandma!”

  Madam Chien’s features hardened, and I braced myself for another angry Mandarin tirade, but it didn’t come. “I don’t care if you marry this wolf boy here. Times are changed. Did I ask you to find a Chinese boy? No. But I want to see you married before I die,” she said, a patently false tremble in her voice. “And wolf boy will do. He will give you tall, strong babies.” She sniffed. “Latin American-Chinese babies. Very modern.”

  “So progressive,” Sterling cooed.

  “We should track down the culprit,” Gil said, his ears flaming red, his smile so fake and tight he could have ground his teeth down to powder.

  “No. No.” Madam Chien shook her finger for emphasis. “You stay here with me, with Prudence. You help me clean up, close shop. Blood boy and his boyfriend can track down the peach.”

  “I swear nothing’s happening – ”

  “Come on, sweetheart,” Sterling trilled, slinging an arm over my shoulder. “Let’s go kill your doppelganger.”

  Chapter 7

  Sterling held the bloodied glass shard in front of him like a totem. It glinted in the streetlight as we moved, a crimson diamond in the palm of his hand. Every so often he would hold it up to his face, sniffing quietly, or flicking his tongue out to sample the blood. Then he’d point down a street or an alleyway, following the shard like it was a dowsing rod.

  I was pretty sure he had no idea what the fuck he was doing. Either that, or there was a vampire bloodhound quality to him that I’d never known about. I left the possibility open. There was still so much that I needed to learn about the arcane and the supernatural, after all.

  He wasn’t afraid of silver, for example, which was why he wore so much damn jewelry, like the wannabe rockstar that he was. He was a fan of garlic, especially when Mama Rosa made up a batch of beef salpicao, which was essentially beef drowned in butter, Worcester sauce, and garlic.

  Sunlight was devastatingly dangerous for him, though, something I’d seen him suffer twice. That second time totally didn’t involve a harebrained gambit that also resulted in the destruction of an artifact belonging to the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu. Based on our playful and often wildly offensive banter, I knew that both fire and a stake in the heart could kill him, too.

  Sterling held the shard up again, looking through it like a lens, or maybe he was studying the blood, gleaning whatever there was to glean from the bare traces of it that remained.

  “This way,” he said. And like a moron I followed along without a word.

  Despite never hearing about his blood-sensing skills, I knew that Sterling was a seasoned hunter. He was a beast of prey, at heart, something which fundamentally allowed him and Gil to get along in spite of their differences in attitude. It was weird knowing that the gentlest member of the Boneyard, at least before Asher came along, was our resident werewolf.

  But again, what linked the two of them was the fact that they were both truly, innately killers, apex predators at the top of their respective food chains. In a way I was almost relieved that Gil hadn’t come along, because when we found Other-Dustin, between the three of us, there was a good chance he was going to end up dead. And I had questions.

  If it truly was Thea, then we would have a fight on our hands. But again it was so unlikely. Smashing shit up just wasn’t her style. If this impostor was someone – or, let’s be realistic here, something else – then Sterling would want to play his wicked games.

  It was bizarre how territorial he could get about the Boneyard and its constituents, but I was getting the impression that vampires were clannish like that. Even Carver said so. It was strange to think of Sterling as less of a monster knowing that part of him valued his tribe so much, how absolutely fucking feral he got each time we encountered Bastion, knowing he was such a threat. And if tonight meant that we would be in danger –

  “We’re close,” he muttered.

  I looked around, chewing my lip as I understood exactly where “close” was. We’d wound up on the edge of the Gridiron somehow, Valero’s industrial district, no small feat considering we’d gone the entire way on foot.

  “Are you sure about this?” I gathered my jacket around myself, shuddering. I didn’t think to wear anything thicker, not imagining that we would spend so much time away from the Boneyard, but it was well past midnight by then.

  “You’ve got your magic, I’ve got mine.”

  I squinted. “All you’ve done is lick a piece of glass all night and we’re barely even close. I’m ninety percent sure that you’re just making shit up so we mmff – ”

  Having Sterling’s hand clamped over my mouth was an odd and frankly terrifying feeling. The best way to describe it was having a dry and weirdly smooth frozen lamb chop pressed over my face. I struggled, my protestations muffled, but he gripped harder. He lifted a finger, pushed it against his lips, then pointed across the street.

  Someone approximately my height and build had just ambled across the sidewalk. It was too far to make out any real features, but I could see the same ill-fitting jacket that I’d seen on the apothecary’s security footage, the same strange gait. Other-Dustin kept walking, slipping into the darkness of a warehouse. I kept my eyes glued to his back. At least we knew that the thing couldn’t shadowstep.

  “That’s our man,” Sterling said.

  Grunting, I slapped his hand away, wiping at my face with the sleeve of my jacket. Who knew where his fingers had been? But more importantly, I had a thumping sensation of dread in my chest. I wanted this horse shit with all these cases of mistaken identity to end.

  I didn’t need vampires accosting me in dark alleys when I was just going out for a burger, and I still owed Bastion a punch in the face. Yet I knew somewhere inside me that confronting Other-Dustin was going to result in some kind of catastrophic mess.

  I frowned at Sterling as he dipped the shard in his mouth again. “Will you please stop licking that damn thing?” I half-wished he’d cut himself on it, just so he would stop.

  He ignored me, his eyes turned curiously up to the sky. “The blood tastes wrong. Almost – artificial. Soulless.”

  “So stop licking it then.”

  “Never.”

  Sterling dashed across the street, his feet soundless against the asphalt. I’d long accepted that I would probably never get used to how fast he could move, just a bolt of leather and silver streaking through the darkness.

  Call it cheating, but I felt more secure when the two of us were walking abreast of each other, so I shadowstepped to keep pace, emerging in the darkness of the same warehouse Other-Dustin had entered. Sterling stood there, his face raised to the shadowy walls of the structure.

  “Abandoned,” he whispered. “You’d th
ink the owners would make more of an effort. Renovate, sell it on, rent it, something.”

  “What do you know about business and real estate?” I hissed. “Plus, shut up. We’re trying to be sneaky about this.”

  “I know plenty. Also, no, you shut up.” He raised his nose in the air and took a slow, deliberate breath. “He’s still in there. Flank him. You creep in through the left entrance. I’ll take the right.”

  The left entrance being the ramshackle remains of one of those sliding shutter doors, clinging for dear life onto the battered, chipped wall. I should point out that we weren’t working in total darkness. It was shadier there since we were technically in an alleyway between buildings, but there were still streetlights. The moon was out, and for whatever you could see over the glare of a city’s lights, so were the stars.

  Yet as I crept all I could think of was how Sterling had once told me that we worked best in darkness, him, myself, and Gil. They used their superior senses, and maybe through some affinity with the shadows, I had better than average vision in gloomy situations myself.

  And in that darkness I saw him. Traces of movement came from among the splintered crates and pallets sitting like capsized ships in the shadows. Other-Dustin, this thing that was wearing my face, was rocking on his feet, his hands cupped close to his lips, so close that his cheeks glowed with the same jade-green of the artifact nestled in his palms.

  I began the slow, arduous duck walk I knew I needed to use to creep up on him. En route I picked up a loose plank, careful to dislodge it soundlessly from its brethren, weighing it in my hand. One sound smack and I could probably knock the thing out with a Sneaky Dustin Special. But as I approached, I became more and more consumed with the notion that all this stealth, and the pincer attack Sterling suggested, weren’t all that necessary.

  The creature wasn’t very bright. Madam Chien’s apothecary was only three blocks away. Other-Dustin was clearly in a rush to spend time with the peach, a fact only supported by how he started petting it like a mouse in the palm of his hand. And when I thought things couldn’t get weirder, Other-Dustin brought the peach to his face, nuzzling it against his cheek. I gripped the board tighter, splinters pushing into my palm. This was going to be easy.