Bats was a strictly vampire club, however, and vampires and their followers were notoriously stuck up. Vampires might not be highest on the supernatural food chain, but you’d be hard pressed to convince a vampire groupie of that. So Bats wasn’t a good bet in terms of information-gathering about anything that didn’t pertain to vampires directly.
That left Crow, the club Raff and I had gone to last month in search of information on the sellers. I didn’t expect the club to be open at this hour, either, but it was possible someone would be there restocking the shelves or whatever. It was a destination, and at the moment, that was exactly what I needed.
In the gray afternoon light, any magic in Crow’s atmosphere had completely evaporated, at least from the outside. It looked like a plain, run-of-the-mill brick building. Even its etched black sign seemed mundane in the sunlight. The front door was locked, since the club was closed, so I went around the back.
A truck was parked in the alley behind the bar, and the back door was propped open with a case of pale ale. The truck was open and full of boxes. A buff guy in a tight black t-shirt and jeans wearing a black cocktail apron came out of the back door. He had red hair and tan skin, and he frowned at me like I was a fly he’d just found in his beer.
“You’re the were girl,” he said after a moment.
“Charlie,” I reminded him. “Hi Brandon, long time no see.”
Brandon didn’t even crack a smile. He was a coyote shifter I’d met exactly once, when I’d pumped him for information. He didn’t look happy to see me.
“I’m busy. And we’re closed.”
He walked up the ramp to the truck and grabbed a large box.
“I can help,” I offered.
He stared at me as he carried the heavy box down the ramp and then shrugged. “Sure. Suit yourself.”
I happily marched up the ramp and grabbed a box labeled “bar napkins.” Okay, so not the heaviest box, but I was helping. I carried it in and set it with the other boxes in front of the bar. The inside of Crow also seemed less impressive with the sunlight hitting the matte black walls. They looked less chic when you could see the paint streaks.
Brandon passed me and went back for more, so I did the same, carrying the heaviest, biggest boxes I could manage while Brandon, a coyote shifter, carried much larger loads with ease.
After about an hour and a half, we’d gotten the truck unloaded. Brandon pushed the ramp in and closed the back of the truck.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly.
“Sure, no problem.” My arms ached and I knew they’d be sore tomorrow, but that was what I got for refusing to lift weights with Raff this week, I supposed. “So I had a question…”
He sighed. “You always do. Hit me. But keep in mind I won’t tell you anything that could get me in trouble with my pack or my boss. And you said ‘question,’ so let’s keep it to one, okay?”
Having met both Brandon’s pack and his boss, I was perfectly happy to stay on their good sides. “Have you heard anything about a temporary anti-shifting potion for werewolves, one that would let them skip a shift during the full moon?”
Brandon frowned deeply.
“No. That’s pretty messed up. You want something like that?” He asked with utter disdain.
“No,” I said, “but someone is selling it to werewolves. It seems to be poisonous, not real. I just thought maybe you knew who was peddling it.”
Brandon shook his head. “Someone came around trying to sell something like that, Vaselythe would make sure they never came back again, if you get my drift.”
I shivered. Vaselythe was… an elf? A dark faerie? I didn’t know for sure what he was, but I did know he was scary as heck and held nothing but contempt for werewolves.
“Why would he care?”
“Look, kid, werewolves are hybrids. Halflings. You guys have some magic, but it’s small, and you’re mostly human. That puts you on the bottom of the supernatural scale.”
I bristled. Wasn’t news to me, but it still sucked to hear it said out loud. Brandon turned his hands palm-up in a what can you do, that’s just how it is gesture.
“But that doesn’t mean Vaselythe or anyone wants people to come around selling lies or killing werewolves, okay? Hunters that start with you guys tend to work their way up. Best to cut them off at the pass, so to speak. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said, feeling a little queasy. “That makes sense. Thanks.”
“Sure thing.”
Brandon locked the back door to the club and then got in the truck’s cab to drive it away.
I checked my phone, surprised to see I had approximately half a million text messages and a few thousand voicemails. Some of the texts were from Michael. Most were from Raff, asking if I was okay with increasing intensity, though he knew I was going to be at work most of the day.
“I’m fine,” I replied to Raff first, so he wouldn’t worry.
The reply came almost instantly. “Where?”
Confused, I typed that I was outside Crow and about to head back home, since I’d learned all I could here, which was nothing.
“Stay. I’ll be right there.”
“Why?” I replied, annoyed. But no answer came, so I walked around the front of the club and waited on the sidewalk.
Raff’s car screeched to a halt at the curb about twenty minutes later. His hair was disheveled and uncombed. He wore jeans riddled with holes, and he wore a ratty gray sweatshirt; not the kind of clothes he usually wore out of the house. Beneath that, he wore a red t-shirt that said “Wolf Fever” in pink letters and had a cartoon thermometer on one side. I didn’t even know where he got these shirts, but one of these days we were going to need to stage a quirky t-shirt intervention on his behalf.
“Are you okay?” he demanded.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I was just helping unload some supplies, and I had my phone on silent.”
Raff glared. “You came to a dangerous supernatural club alone, didn’t tell me, and then left your phone on silent?”
“Yes, that is exactly what I said.”
Although, now that he mentioned it, I supposed I could have texted him to let him know where I was going in case something went wrong. Food for thought.
“You’re way too reckless.”
I would have glared at him, but honestly, he looked more relieved than angry, and he was wearing “I ran out of the house in a panic” clothes, so I knew he’d been really worried. I’d been so absorbed in my research, I hadn’t even thought to look at my phone.
“Owen and Rayna said they lost track of you,” Raff said, his concern suddenly making sense.
That explained why I hadn’t seen them. I didn’t know when they’d lost my trail—probably when I slipped out the back door at work and took a different bus—but I was relieved they had. At the same time, I was sorry it had made Raff worry.
“I’m sorry. I was trying to evade them if they were following me, but I wasn’t trying to upset you.”
Raff nodded, some of the tension melting out of his shoulders. “Things are just pretty tense right now, what with the poison…”
“I know,” I said.
While none of us was going to drink that potion now, it meant someone else was after us, and that was scary all on its own.
My phone buzzed, now that I’d turned it back on vibrate. The call was from Michael, so I answered.
“Hey,” Michael said, his voice raw and tired. “Can you come over?”
It was early evening, which was morning for my vampire-dating friend.
“I’m with Raff, but we can swing by,” I said. “Why, what’s up?”
“There’s something you need to see.”
Chapter 12
Raff parked several blocks from Damien and Michael’s condo building, in the closest available spot. Saturday evenings were prime time in Belltown: All of the tech workers who lived there were home, taking up most of the spaces, and the rest were quickly filled by people heading to bars and restaurants in the
neighborhood.
Michael had been cagey on the phone, and I wasn’t sure what to expect when we reached his apartment. His boyfriend was a vampire, after all, so there was a large range of things he might consider urgent.
Raff’s shoulders tensed as I knocked on their front door, as if he were preparing for a fight. Michael answered. He wore black jeans and a black t-shirt. His hair had been combed, and he’d put on makeup including thick eyeliner.
Behind him, Damien was sitting on the sofa looking bored. He wore jeans and a red crew neck. He nodded as we came in. Raff nodded back stiffly, but at least he was making an effort to be polite. I said hello and sat on the easy chair. Michael flopped onto the sofa next to Damien, opening his laptop that was on the coffee table.
Raff remained standing.
“What’s so urgent?” he asked.
“I just uploaded a new video on my second channel,” Michael said with a furtive glance at Damien.
I’d never asked Michael how the vampire felt about his “Confessions of a Vampire’s Boyfriend” channel on YouTube, but he seemed nervous to mention it and afraid of how Damien might react. Damien, for his part, did not react at all.
“I watched a few of the videos it was recommending to people who liked mine and came across this guy with this channel called Mixing Up Magic.”
Raff and I exchanged a glance.
“As in magic potions?” I asked.
Michael flicked his lip ring with his tongue and nodded. He tapped keys on his computer and then spun it around so we could see the screen.
“At first, I figured it was probably a fictional web show or something.” That was exactly what most of Michael’s viewers thought about his show: that it was just a scripted fictional vlog for entertainment purposes. “But then I watched a couple of his videos and he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. Plus, even though he spends each video talking about making magical potions, he’s careful to never give the whole recipe.”
On the screen was a frozen video that showed a frozen still of a guy in his mid to late twenties, like Raff and Damien. He had dark hair and tan skin.
I shook my head. “What is he? A witch?”
Damien lifted his arm and draped it over the back of the sofa. “I’m betting he’s a warlock.”
“Isn’t that the same thing, but a guy?” Raff asked, a little curtly.
“A warlock is a half-demon,” Damien said matter-of-factly, clearly enjoying the way Raff blinked back at him. “They’re capable of types of magic that witches are not.”
I hadn’t known warlocks were real, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Great,” Raff said. “So why do we care?”
Michael reached over the laptop and hit play.
On the screen, the guy waved genially at the camera and smiled in a way that did not look at all demonic. He wore a gray cable knit sweater and seemed to be working in a brightly lit kitchen.
“Hi guys,” he said. “I’m Bryce, and today I’m working on a potion to help werewolves.”
The acid in my stomach curdled. Raff took a step closer to the computer.
Back on the screen, Bryce gestured to what looked like a chemistry set with a beaker full of a bubbling, bright blue liquid. “Now, you might be asking, why make something to help werewolves? They’re just people who turn into dogs once a month. Don’t seem to need much help, you know?”
I glared but, unfortunately, the guy on the video couldn’t see my expression.
“Well, I have a friend who’s a werewolf out in Chicago and while he loves it, sometimes the full moon comes at a terrible time. So I’m devising a potion that, if I can get it right, will help him skip a transformation. Isn’t that cool?”
Raff growled, low and steady, as he watched the screen.
The rest of the video, which was only a few minutes long, showed Bryce as he added ingredients and cooked the potion until it turned a sickly green, adding magic into it with a dramatic flourish. As Michael had said, he didn’t show all of the ingredients, and he only gave vague instructions. Then the camera returned to a close-up of Bryce, grinning and holding a vial of the green potion up for show.
“I think that did it! Excited to see how this works. I’ll report back after my friend tests it. See you next time on Mixing Up Magic.”
The video ended. I grabbed the computer off the coffee table.
“When did he post it?” Raff asked.
I checked the date on the werewolf video. “About three months ago.”
I scrolled through Bryce’s channel. He had videos about making anti-curse potions and charms to ward off vampires and faerie magic, among other things. He had about four thousand subscribers, a paltry number. Most comments on his recent video were about how the show was only funny the first time and needed better writing.
“Why would he put this stuff up?” I asked. “I mean, if it’s for real, no one can follow his recipes because he leaves too much out, so what’s even the point?”
Michael shrugged. “People post videos of literally everything, Charlotte. There are people making a living filming their grocery shopping and how they sort their closets. They get tons of views.”
“That cannot be true,” Raff said.
Michael took the computer back. “Anyway, you can ask him yourself. We’re meeting him in an hour.”
The curdled contents of my stomach roiled. “What?”
“He lives up in Everett. I sent him a message earlier today, and he’s willing to meet up with us. In fact, we should get going. We’re meeting him halfway.”
Michael stood and slipped the laptop into his messenger bag. Damien stood, too.
“You’re coming?” I asked, surprised.
Usually the vampire wanted nothing to do with me, and he and Raff weren’t exactly friendly.
“Yup.” Damien’s gaze roved over Raff. “I want to meet the warlock. Is that okay?”
“Great,” Raff said. “That’s just great.”
I did not miss the sarcasm. I didn’t think Damien did, either, but he was polite enough not to comment on it.
Michael gave us directions, and we took separate cars with Raff and me in his black sedan and Micheal and Damien in Damien’s big black SUV. There was no real reason not to pile into one car, except that Raff hated being in close proximity to the vampire. Damien didn’t seem to care either way.
Raff drove silently, fingers clenched tight against the steering wheel. When we pulled into the parking lot of a chain burger restaurant, I double checked the address Michael had texted to me against the one on my phone’s GPS to make sure we were in the right place. It was probably the least supernatural location one could choose.
Damien’s SUV was already there, and he and Michael were seated in a large round booth at the back of the bar area.
The burger place was bright with stark yellow lighting and red walls. Though Damien sat in the darkest corner of the booth, the restaurant’s stark lighting only emphasized his inhuman pallor. The waitress, who came to grab drink orders from Raff and me, didn’t give him a second look. Maybe working at the bar section of a chain restaurant meant she saw a lot of weird things and had long ago stopped questioning them.
Michael sat beside Damien, who was poring over the menu though he couldn’t eat food. Michael’s menu remained closed. I slid in next to my friend and opened my menu to find 10 glossy pages with expertly staged photographs of burgers and fries. The menu itself offered over forty variations on the burger alone: BBQ burgers, Hawaiian teriyaki burgers, mushroom and Swiss. You could get a beef patty in five sizes, or a buffalo, turkey, or veggie patty if that was your preference.
“They need a werewolf burger,” I said. “Five rare patties with cheese.”
“I’d eat it,” Raff said.
Michael curled his lip in disgust. “I’d pay to not have to watch you eat that.”
Damien’s nimble fingers turned the plastic pages. “You know, when I was a kid, they only had two types of hamburgers: regular and ch
eese.”
“Fascinating. Maybe next you can tell us what life was like during the Great Depression,” I teased.
“I was born in 1953,” Damien said shortly, closing the menu.
“So you can regale us with stories of soda shops or whatever.” I’d actually known that, and that he was turned in 1977, but I wasn’t going to say so. Damien rarely got my attempts at humor, and Michael got weird when I started listing facts about his boyfriend like he was some kind of historical figure.
The waitress came back to get our order, and Michael told her we were still waiting on someone. And then we spent the next twenty minutes in relative silence, staring at the entrance to the bar area and waiting for Bryce.
“What time were we supposed to meet?” I asked after the waitress brought my second refill of lemon lime soda.
“About ten minutes ago,” Michael said, looking down at his phone. “He’s probably just running a little late.”
Finally, Bryce appeared. He wore an olive green sweater beneath a plain black coat and jeans. His dark hair was spiked up with gel and, in person, he had blue eyes that were the color of the sky on a sunny day. There was nothing about him that seemed supernatural.
“Hi,” he said when he reached the booth.
He searched our faces and then settled on Michael, who was in the middle, extending a hand over the table.
“You must be Michael.”
Michael shook his hand. “Thanks for coming.”
“No worries,” Bryce said, smiling a bright game show host smile. “Glad to meet fellow… well… you know.” He winked. “And it’s always a pleasure to meet fans.”
Raff glared. Damien smirked. Michael’s cheeks reddening only slightly and he nodded, swallowing uneasily. He wasn’t going to introduce everyone, so I took it upon myself.
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