The jeers started from the crowd.
“NYPD fixing to get his ass run!” someone shouted.
James circled the table, eyeing the eight ball in relation to my scatter of untouched stripes. Passing on a direct shot into a side pocket, he indicated the far corner and crouched over his stick. Like the final shot in the last game, it was a challenging angle with way too much traffic. James wasn’t just playing for money. He was playing for reputation.
I was going to enjoy this.
James snapped the cue ball into the eight, sending it on another arcing circuit toward the corner. Without a pool stick to hold, I had tucked my cane nonchalantly beneath one arm. Now, standing behind the corner pocket, I angled the cane’s tip down and whispered, “Protezione.”
The shield that spread over the pocket was too thin to be visible, but too thick to allow the eight ball passage. Instead of sinking, the ball rattled around the edge of the pocket and popped out.
A collective “oooh” pushed from the crowd.
James straightened slowly, staring at the missed shot in disbelief. I switched my aim to the cue ball, which was still rolling idly, and changed its trajectory by a few degrees. It clunked into a corner pocket. Stepping forward, I clapped James’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze.
“Tough break,” I said.
For another moment, the crowd around the table remained entranced in a questioning silence. Then, like waters breaking a dam, they shouted and clamored at once. “Holy crap, he scratched!” “James just blew twenty G’s!” It was clear they were delighting more in his loss than in my win. Their voices coalesced into a chant of “Pay up! Pay up! Pay up!”
With a tight grin, James pulled out two of the rubber-banded billfolds from his pocket and pressed them into my hand like we were shaking around them. But instead of releasing them, he clenched and drew me up against him. I could feel the hard breaths from his nostrils.
“What the fuck was that?” he whispered.
“An unlucky shot, apparently.”
“Who are you?”
“Someone who needs to talk. Now.”
He clenched my hand harder. “You cheated me.”
“Hey, man, I was only playing your game.”
James didn’t have an answer for that. The breaths cycling against my ear began to tremble in anger. I sensed him debating whether to hit me with an invocation, felt the charge building.
“Do it, and the gig’s up,” I warned. “Word will get out, I’ll make sure of it. I’m guessing there are more than a few stiffs who will come looking for their money. Maybe even a few in this crowd.”
The power around him ebbed. “I’m not telling you shit,” he whispered.
“Tell you what, take a walk with me, and maybe you can earn back what you lost.”
His breathing smoothed. His grip relaxed around my hand and his money. When we separated, he was grinning again. He shrugged at the crowd as though to say, Win some, lose some.
“Gonna take a little break.” He tossed his pool cue to another player.
The crowd broke apart and started their own games at the other tables. James strode from the pool hall ahead of me, leaving me to follow in his path. When he reached the bar, the bartender had a bottle of beer waiting for him. James grasped it wordlessly and turned toward the exit, taking a pull from the bottle as he shoved the door open with a leather-booted foot.
We stepped out into the sun. James leaned against the building and took another pull, then let the bottle dangle at his side between a pair of hooked fingers. I couldn’t see his eyes beyond his sunglasses.
“You some kind of magic-user?” he finally asked.
“Just like you,” I said. “We belong to the same organization.”
“Never seen you before.”
“Seems to be how the Order likes it.”
James tipped the bottle to his lips again, face aimed at a boarded-up building across the street.
“Do you mind telling me how it all started for you,” I said.
“How all what started?”
“You know, discovering your abilities. Getting noticed by the Order. Your training. Your work.”
He pulled in his lips in thought. Despite the heat, he made no move to remove his leather jacket. Underneath, he wore a plain undershirt. A silver cross hung over his chest. His jeans were stonewashed, shredded at the knees. I knew the type: too cool for school—and definitely too cool to answer to authority. But he was having to weigh that against the itch to get his money back. Blow me off, and he could kiss his twenty grand goodbye.
“I was in boarding school,” he said at last. “St. Mary’s, though we called it Catholic lock up.”
“Your parents sent you?”
He shook his head. “Never had any.”
Another magic user who’d grown up without a mom or dad. Orphan tales were a dime a dozen, apparently. Either that, the voice in my head whispered, or Lich claimed them too. James caught me looking at him. “I don’t know their story, so don’t bother asking.”
“You were telling me about your boarding school?” I prompted.
“Yeah. Roomed with three other guys. We were sort of a pack.” He gave a small snort of reverie. “Around the time we were in the eighth grade, Parker smuggled in a Ouija board. I didn’t believe in that shit—I don’t think any of us did—but to ruffle the priests’ gowns, you know.”
“Rebellion,” I said.
“What can I say, we were little adrenaline junkies. You can only get caught smoking behind the chapel so many times before it’s time to up the stakes.”
I nodded as James took another swallow. He was beginning to loosen up.
“So, not really knowing what we were doing, we set up the board one night, lit some candles, put our fingers on that little plastic thingie.”
“The planchette,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever. At first we were just bullshitting. Will Mikey ever get laid?—crap like that. Then this feeling came over me, like I was being electrocuted. I went stiff, couldn’t breathe. And then something talked through my mouth. ‘Who’s going to die next?’ it asked. I remember the other guys laughing and tug-of-warring with the plastic thing, trying to spell out each other’s names. But I couldn’t move. I was suffocating. Felt like I was dying. All of a sudden, a force erupted through my fingers, and in three jerks, it spelled out a name: ‘B-E-N.’ And then I could breathe again. My buddies never noticed anything wrong. They were repeating the name to one another. Ben was this homely kid who lived down the hall. ‘Bedwetting Ben’ we called him, because, you know, he had that problem. The guys joked about him drowning in his own piss, but I was bothered, man. Had awful dreams that night, about leather belts and death. Next morning, the staff rousted us out of bed. We’re going to an assembly, they said. As we filed out of the dormitory, I could see an ambulance and a pair of police cars. Didn’t learn till that night they’d found Ben in the janitor’s closet. He’d cinched a belt around his neck and hung himself from the pipes.”
A chill went through me. “What happened to you sounds like demonic possession.”
“Ya think?” James took another sip from his bottle. “The demon hung around for a while. Didn’t take the Ouija board to call it up, either. For the next year, the feelings would just come out of the blue. I’d say something and it would happen. Always bad shit, though. Another suicide later that year. A fire in the administration wing.”
“So you developed precognition?”
“That’s what I thought. But then I started remembering the dreams more clearly. The one with the fire, for example. Word got around that whoever the arsonist was had set it with hymn books. When I heard that, I suddenly remembered dreaming that I’d stolen some hymn books from the chapel and was setting them around the inside of an office. Putting them under curtains and around wooden bookshelves—the things that would catch quickest. The dream was the same night of the fire. Freaked me out so bad, I told one of the teachers about being possessed. Thought I
could trust him, but he got me to tell him about the dream, and from there, he and the administrators wheedled a confession out of me for the fire. Even though I still couldn’t say for sure whether I’d actually set it.”
“No exorcism?” I asked.
“Naw, they didn’t believe in the possession part. Guess that’s what I got for being a delinquent. They called the police, and I was taken out in cuffs. Tried and convicted in juvie and sent to a pen upstate.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah, thank God I didn’t say anything about the suicides, ’cause I had dreams about them too.” He sent down another swallow of beer. “Anyway, there was this gang in juvie, group of guys who trashed the new kid as a matter of course. I was there about a week when my turn came. We were out in the yard, and they bum-rushed me. Knocked me down, started stomping me. Then that cold feeling came over me, and I shouted a foreign word I’d never heard before.”
“A Word of Power,” I said.
“Felt like a stack of TNT had gone off inside me. Next thing I knew, the guys were scattered over the yard. Faces bloodied, bones broken, a couple of them throwing up. I didn’t know what the hell had happened, but the story got around. Guys steered clear of me after that.”
I thought about how my first experience had happened around the same age. I’d been thirteen when I entered Grandpa’s study by repeating a Word I’d heard him utter. He’d suppressed my magic, though, and it wasn’t until I called up Thelonious a decade later that the magic returned with a bang. James’s latent magic must have been sparked by whatever took him over.
“About a month later, I was told I was being released into someone’s care,” he went on. “An older woman showed up, red hair, long white coat. Elsie was her name. She drove me to a Victorian house up in the Catskills. I just figured she was some strange broad who couldn’t have kids of her own. I was looking forward to running roughshod over her, but that first night, she scared me straight. Hit me with a paralyzing bolt, then told me I was a magic born. She’d been sent to teach me how to use my gift. If I didn’t do what she said, she would deplete my magic and send me back into the system. That’s when I learned about the Order.”
“How long did you stay with Elsie?”
“Till I was eighteen. So, five years.”
“You got five years of training?” I’d only received a few months under Lazlo before returning to New York and being put under Chicory’s mentorship—which hadn’t amounted to much.
“Yeah, she taught me mental prisms, Words of Power, how to shape energy.”
“What do you use as a conduit?” I asked out of curiosity.
James reached into his jacket and pulled out a metal wand. He twirled it over his first finger and thumb like a drummer before sticking it back in his pocket. “After that it was potions and spells, minor summonings. She took care of the demon, too.”
An ember of envy burned in my gut. I’d had to learn those skills from books. And Thelonious was still bound to me.
“When I turned eighteen, she said I was ready. Set me up with a place in the city.” He jerked his head. “Just north of here. Told me my new mentor would show up. After a couple of months I got tired of waiting, so I started putting what I’d learned into practice in pool halls and gambling houses. As you saw, the pay’s decent.”
“But someone showed up eventually,” I said.
“Yeah, and said he wasn’t happy about what I was doing.”
“Chicory?” I asked.
James nodded. “He wanted me to focus on getting to amateur conjurers before the little creatures they called up could do any damage. He put me in charge of the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island. Gave me a map that would light up when something popped into our world. The work was all right, but sort of dead in between. Magic or not, I was gonna live my life.”
So, he’d been given the same job as me, but in New York’s outer boroughs. More compartmentalization. “You and Chicory butted heads, I take it,” I said, remembering the infractions in his file.
“You could say that.”
“Weren’t you worried?”
He looked over at me, his face blank. “About what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The penalties.”
“Oh, you mean the Big One?” He drew a finger across his neck and gave a lazy laugh. “Yeah, Chicory tried holding that crap over my head, but after a while it got old. I just nodded and went back to whatever I was doing. The guy only showed up once in a blue moon, anyway.”
I thought about the terror I’d felt upon being issued the same threats, the loss of appetite, the hives that would break out over my chest, the sleepless nights. And here James had tuned them out like they were background static. I felt like I was talking to a much cooler version of myself. But what did it mean that the Order had never followed up on the warnings?
“What happened to your first trainer—Elsie?”
James shrugged. “Never heard from her again.”
“You never went back to visit?”
“Never thought to. It wasn’t like we were friends.”
“What about Chicory? Did he ever, I don’t know, say what he was up to when he was away?”
“Checking up on other magic-users, best I could tell.”
I nodded. That had always been my assumption.
“You consulted for the NYPD last month,” I said, changing course.
“Yeah, was running out of people to hustle. Figured it was time to do something legitimate. Something the Order would be more agreeable to. So I hung out a shingle. Was sorta surprised when the NYPD called.”
“You told them Lady Bastet was killed by magic. How did you know that?”
“A reveal spell. The magic was hidden but it was there.”
Same thing I’d used. “You were going to run a test on the residue,” I said, “the stuff found on the mutilated cats. Did you get anywhere?”
“The NYPD had me turn in my hours before I got started. And if they weren’t gonna pay me for it…” He swirled his beer, and took a foamy swallow. He was getting to the bottom of the bottle.
Before I could ask him anything more about the case, a young woman sauntered up. She was curvy and coffee skinned with a midriff shirt and purple eye shadow. “There you are, baby,” she said to James, planting a lascivious kiss on his mouth, which he seemed more than happy to return.
I shifted my weight, pretending to become interested in the bent fender of Chicory’s car. When James’s and the young woman’s faces separated, she pressed herself to his side and turned toward me.
“I’m, ah, Everson,” I said, extending a hand. “We spoke earlier.”
She squinted back at me, not moving her arm.
“Carla, right?” I prompted.
“Carla?” The young woman jerked from James and planted her fists on her hips. “Carla?” she repeated, this time with even more venom. “You’re still running with that skank?” Before James could answer, she slapped him across the face and stormed back the way she’d come.
James straightened his sunglasses and rubbed his jaw. “Thanks, man.”
“Not Carla?” I said.
“What the hell is all this about, anyway?”
I sensed his impatience, but it was a good question. Everything he had told me could be consistent with either the official story, that there was an Order, or the alternate version, that Lich had created a shadow Order and was manipulating magic-users to feed his efforts.
“Did you ever meet anyone higher up in the Order?” I asked.
“The money first.”
“Money?” Then I remembered I still had his twenty thousand in my pocket. I drew out one of the rubber-banded bill folds and handed it to him. “I’ll give you the other one when we’re done.”
“If you want an answer, you’ll give it to me now. I’m tired of talking.”
“Even for ten thousand?” I asked, holding the other wad back.
“Keep it,” he said and turned away.
I needed answers more than he needed the money, and he knew it, dammit.
“All right,” I said, my jaw tensing.
James turned back, accepted the money, and pocketed it. Then he tilted his beer to his mouth, draining the last of it. He reared his arm back and heaved the bottle across the street. I watched it shatter against the side of the vacant building, wondering why he’d done that. I turned back in time to catch a close-up of his knuckles before they plowed into my chin.
More stunned than hurt, I staggered back and drew my cane, but not before James had drawn his wand.
14
Silver magic flashed from the end of James’s wand and streaked toward me like lightning. I threw up my cane, forgetting that the magic-absorbing capacity of the staff had been cleaned. Voltage roared through me as the bolt struck and lifted me from my feet. I landed down the block, performing several backward somersaults before coming to a bruising rest.
I was surprised to find myself still holding the cane, the current apparently having locked my fingers around it.
“Protezione,” I called as I staggered to my feet.
Energy coursed through my banged-up prism and emerged from the staff’s orb, manifesting a shield. Sparks blew from it as another of James’s bolts struck. The young wizard was pacing toward me, lips set in a determined line. The air around him glimmered with power.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted, drawing my sword.
He unleashed another attack, splitting the silver bolt in two. They arced around—much as he’d made the billiard balls do—and slammed into either side of my shield. My protection buckled. A clapping sound landed against my ears, as though they’d been hammered by a pair of open hands, the pain driving to the center of my head.
I stepped back, incanting to maintain my prism. My recent training with Chicory had increased my capacity to cast, but another couple of shots like that and I’d be toast. What was this about, though? The stupid pool game? Or was I dealing with something more sinister?
Need to put him on the defensive.
“Vigore!” I called, swiping my sword in a clumsy arc.
The force caught Chicory’s car and heaved it toward James. With a Word, he manifested a silver light shield and used it to shove the car back into the street. Still backpedaling, I shouted another invocation, this time uprooting a section of chain-link fencing from an adjoining lot. With sharp clangs, the fence whipped around and encircled James.
Death Mage (Prof Croft Book 4) Page 10