Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ Book 1)

by Rachel Aaron

  Julius stared at her, uncomprehending, and then it dawned. She was talking about the seal, the one his mother had put on him to trap him in his human shape. After that, it was all Julius could do not to burst out laughing, both at the notion of a mortal mage breaking his mother’s seal in an hour and how Bethesda would react if it actually worked. He glanced at the girl again, just to make sure she wasn’t kidding, but her expression was deadly serious, and all he could do was shake his head.

  “I’m afraid my curse isn’t the sort you can remove,” he said. “Thank you for offering, though.” That last bit came out surprisingly heartfelt. Her unexpected sales pitch was the nicest thing anyone had said to him all day.

  The girl stared at him a moment, and then her shoulders slumped. “Well, do you have anything else you need done? Wards? Spirits banished? I can show you my portfolio.”

  She’d started pulling a binder out of the enormous black messenger bag on her shoulder before she’d even finished the question, and Julius fought the urge to sigh. Humans.

  “I’m good, really,” he said, putting up his hands. “You don’t have to show me anything. I’m not interested.”

  The girl stopped short, and then she stuffed the binder back into her bag, her face falling in utter defeat. “Sorry,” she muttered, flopping down on the barstool beside him. “I’m not normally so…” She waved her hands as she searched for the word, making the chipped silver glitter polish on her nails sparkle in the club’s low light. “Car salesman-y,” she said at last. “It’s just that I really need the work. If you have anything magical you need done today, anything at all, I’ll give you a huge discount. I swear I’m completely legit. I’m fully licensed in Nevada, actually, but I’m new in town and, frankly, getting a little desperate. So if there’s any work you need a mage for, just say the word. If not, I’ll stop bothering you.”

  Julius opened his mouth to say sorry, he had nothing, but the words stuck in his throat. The girl was looking at him so earnestly, and that word desperate kept rolling around in his head. Bob had told him to be a gentleman and help desperate women. Of course, Bob had also once told Julius that he would have dinner with a phoenix on his birthday.

  Turning away from the human, he pulled out his phone and reread the seer’s message, but he hadn’t made a mistake. There was the warning from his maybe-insane, maybe-future predicting brother who’d mailed him a phone loaded with a Detroit ID and money four months before he’d needed it, and here was the desperate woman said brother had told him to help, and now Julius had to make a decision.

  On the one hand, years of well-honed paranoia told him for certain that this was a trap. No one’s luck was good enough to have a random mage walk up and offer her services at the exact moment she was needed. Far more likely was that this Marci Novalli was working for someone else from the Three Sisters who didn’t want Katya found, or maybe another clan entirely. If he took her offer, he’d be playing right into the clutches of his family’s enemies like the idiot failure his mother always said he was. On the other hand, though, rejecting her meant he’d be going against his brother’s advice, and therein lay the quandary. Unlike most of his family, Julius didn’t think Bob was crazy, or, at least, not only crazy. He wasn’t sure if his brother actually saw the future, but Bob definitely saw something. Trouble was, Julius wasn’t sure which side this particular warning fell on: the crazy or the something. He was still trying to figure it out when the girl slid off the barstool.

  “I’m really sorry to have wasted your time,” she said quietly, looking down at her feet as she adjusted her bag on her shoulder. “Thank you for listening, and I hope you have a nice—”

  “Wait.”

  The girl looked up in surprise. Julius was surprised, too, because he hadn’t thought he’d made up his mind yet. But while he still wasn’t sure if the mage was a trap, a vision of Bob’s unsettled mind, or some combination thereof, he had come to a decision. The sorry had been the deciding factor, but the thank you had sealed the deal. Julius couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard those words from anyone’s mouth except his own and, trap or not, he couldn’t let the person who said them just walk away.

  Of course, now that he’d stopped her, he had to come up with something to say.

  “Marci, right?” he asked, clearing his throat as she sat back down on the stool. “Can you do illusions?”

  “Absolutely,” Marci said, counting off on her fingers. “Area, personal, spatial, full sensory immersion, though I’ll need a day to set that last one up if you want it on something bigger than a ten by ten square.”

  Julius didn’t know enough about human magic to gauge whether that was good or not, but Marci certainly sounded like she knew what she was talking about. “I guess it would be a personal illusion,” he said. “On me. But I’d rather not explain it here. Do you have somewhere else we could talk?”

  Marci nodded and hopped to her feet. “I’ll need my workshop to do a credible illusion anyway. We can discuss terms on the way over. Would that be okay?”

  Julius glanced over his shoulder, but his brother and Svena were still sitting in the VIP area with their heads together, and he was loath to interrupt. Really, though, he saw no reason to deal with Ian again at all. He had the chain, he had the information about the party, and now he had a mage to help him get inside. If he moved quickly, this whole mess could be over by midnight.

  “That sounds great,” he said, smiling at Marci as he slid off his own stool. “Let’s get out of here.”

  ***

  Getting out of the club was much simpler than getting in. Rather than running the gauntlet past the augmented bouncer, Marci led them out a side door and down the alley, away from the tree-lined square and its well-dressed crowds. Then she led them down from the street, descending a long set of cement stairs from the elevated skyway.

  “I swear I’m not taking you off to mug you,” she said as they walked away from the evening sunlight and the bright glow of the Upper City’s ubiquitous halogen street lamps. “It’s just that you don’t have to pay for parking down here.”

  “No worries,” Julius said, glancing around. Even with his dragon sealed, he wasn’t terribly worried about a human mugging him, and he was far more interested in his first look at the underbelly of Old Detroit.

  Going below the skyways was like entering another world. All the brilliance of the Upper City—the fancy tree-lined square, the towering superscrapers, the elegant curving roads full of luxury cars and computer driven taxis—was like a model sitting on a table, and underneath it, an entirely different city thrived in the dark.

  After all the stories he’d heard, Julius had expected Underground Detroit to look like a war torn ruin, but this looked more like Shinjuku in Tokyo. The buildings, many of them apparently dating from before the flood given the high water marks on their second stories, had been completely renovated to hold as many shops as possible. Every window seemed to have at least two signs hanging in it, and the combined glare of all the neon, back-lit plastic, and flashing LEDs, actually made it brighter down here than it had been up top in the sun.

  If there was any organizational system, Julius couldn’t see it. Bars, restaurants, and theaters shared walls with banks, private schools, and massage parlors in a chaotic jumble. Some establishments didn’t even bother making divisions, advertising salon services and gambling at the same time. Even the buildings themselves were mismatched. Some, the short ones, looked like the normal office buildings and strip malls they must have been before Algonquin had built an entire other city on top of them. Others, ones that had collapsed and been completely rebuilt in the years since the flood, or the ones that had been too tall to fit under the skyway’s eighty foot clearance and had been cut to fit, reached right up to the ceiling, using the huge cement base of the Upper City in place of an actual roof.

  The chaos continued on the ground as well where food carts and semi-permanent kiosks competed with cars for room on the ruler-straight grid of the
old roads. Trash and advertisements and people were absolutely everywhere, crammed into every nook and cranny and selling everything under the sun to anyone who was willing to pay regardless of age. The only breaks in the madness were the enormous, city-block-long cement support pillars that held up the skyway overhead, but even these were plastered with billboards advertising everything from concerts and exotic pets to drugs and pay-as-you-go augmentation clinics. Just trying to wrap his brain around the chaos of capitalism gone crazy was making Julius feel overwhelmed and dizzy, but most astonishing of all were the people.

  Back in Arbor Square, the crowd had been ethnically diverse, but still so uniformly wealthy and well dressed that they’d all blended together. In the Underground, though, there was some of everything: ethnicity, class, religion, occupation, everything. It was like some power had swept the world, picked people at random, and dumped them all here. It was nothing short of extraordinary, and Julius almost fell down the stairs in his eagerness to get a better look.

  “First time below decks?”

  Julius winced and glanced up to see Marci grinning at him over her shoulder. “That obvious, huh?”

  “You are gawking a bit,” she said, slowing her pace until they were climbing down side by side. “Not that I’m judging, of course. I was shocked too, my first time.”

  “It’s actually a lot nicer than I’d thought it’d be,” Julius admitted, nodding down at the young, excited crowd waiting to get into a five-sense theatre. “I’d always heard, you know…”

  “What? That the whole place was a giant slum of rotting buildings and desperate characters straight out of a corporate dystopia? Oh, don’t worry, there’s plenty of that, too. This is actually one of the tourist areas the DFZ Visitor’s Board pays to keep colorful and edgy, but not so scary that outsiders won’t spent money.”

  Julius looked over at the brightly colored, music playing, fully automated gun, alcohol, and party drug vending machines that lined the landings of the stairwell. “This is the tourist area?”

  Marci spread her arms wide. “Welcome to the DFZ!”

  A proper, crafty dragon would have shut his mouth after that and kept his ignorance hidden, but Julius was curious, and this seemed kind of important. “What about security? I mean, I know everything is legal here, but isn’t this kind of excessive? How can so many corporations have their headquarters in the DFZ if there are vending machines selling drugs to tourists only fifty steps down from Arbor Square?”

  “There’s plenty of security,” Marci said. “It’s just reserved for people with money, spirits, and fish. Especially fish, actually. Life’s great here if you live underwater.”

  He arched his eyebrows in question, and she pointed over at a giant yellow hazard sign posted on the nearest support beam. Julius hadn’t noticed that particular billboard amid all the other advertisements, but now that Marci had pointed it out, it was impossible to miss the giant wave crest logo of the Algonquin Civic Corporation followed by a list of substances that you were not allowed to dump into the water system and the horrible punishments that awaited anyone who did, written in a world tour of languages. There were more signs when they reached ground level with similar warnings against littering and burning illicit materials, but nothing for human on human crimes like theft or assault, which made a pretty clear statement about the Lady of the Lakes’ priorities.

  “I see what you mean,” Julius said, stepping closer to Marci as they pushed into the teeming, noisy crowd that smelled strongly of sweat and human at bottom of the stairs. “Crime here must be ridiculous.”

  “It varies,” Marci said, turning them down a side street that, while still crowded, at least had breathing room. “If you stay in areas where people can afford to pay their police fees, it’s not bad at all. If you go where they can’t, well…better not to do that.”

  Julius nodded silently. Now that they were actually down in it, he could see the glitz of the tourist area was only on the surface. The main streets were full of vendors and tourists, but the side streets were packed with a very different crowd. Humans in filthy clothes sat together against the buildings, their eyes glassy and empty. Others waited on corners, watching the crowds of tourists like predators eying a herd. Every now and then, one of them would duck off only to come right back with a purse or shopping bag tucked under their arms. Julius shook his head, rolling his eyes up to the sooty black underbelly of the elevated highway that served for a sky in this place. “Why do people put up with it?”

  He’d meant that to be a rhetorical question, but Marci answered immediately. “Opportunity. The Lady of the Lakes might care more about fish than people, but this is still the Magic City. There’s no immigration office, no background checks. Anyone can come here with nothing and try to make a new life. That’s a powerful draw, and there are a lot of jobs here, especially if you aren’t too squeamish.” She shrugged. “I think of it as a gamble. The DFZ is dangerous and unfair and full of weird magic, but if you’re willing to brave the risks, you can win big.”

  “Or lose everything,” Julius countered, eying a line of drugged out humans taking refuge behind a dumpster, several of whom were children. “I don’t know. It seems kind of like a step back.”

  “Maybe,” Marci said. “But it is what it is, and the city’s held on this long, so something must be working.”

  “I suppose,” Julius said, but only to be polite. Honestly, he didn’t see how a city ruled by an ancient spirit who clearly didn’t care at all for human life, where the rich lived literally on top of everyone else, and you had to pay a fee just to call 911 could be anything other than a dystopia. He didn’t want to rain on Marci’s enthusiasm, however, so he kept his mouth shut, sticking close to her side as they walked away from the bright, jangly tourist area into a slightly quieter, more residential part of the crowded Underground.

  “So,” Marci said, smiling at him. “I probably should have asked you this way earlier, but what’s your name? Unless you want this to be a secret contract, of course. Again, not judging.”

  “Not that secret,” he said, laughing. “And my name’s Julius.”

  She nodded. “Julius what?”

  Julius faked a cough to buy himself time and grabbed his phone in his pocket, popping up the AR display only he could see right through the fabric of his jeans. It still took him a few seconds of fumbling before he was able to navigate the new menus to see what last name Bob had put on his residence ID. “Quetz,” he read, gritting his teeth. “Julius Quetz.”

  “Quetz?” Marci repeated incredulously.

  “Short for Quetzalcoatl,” he explained, letting the phone go with a huff. “It’s an old family name.” And Bob’s idea of a joke. Or at least, Julius hoped it was a joke. There was no other reason a sane individual would think using the name of the most infamous feathered serpent ever to terrorize the Americas as a cover alias for a dragon in hiding was a good idea.

  “Wait, you shortened your last name?”

  Julius missed a step on the uneven sidewalk, eyes wide. Was that not something humans did? “Um,” he stalled. “It was too hard to spell?”

  That explanation seemed to fly, because Marci nodded. “I see. It’s too bad, though. I think Quetzalcoatl would have been a pretty awesome last name.” She shrugged and flashed that infectious grin of hers at him again, stopping to put out her hand. “Well, Julius Quetz, I’m happier than you can know to be doing business with you. And speaking of which, I hope you don’t mind signing a standard U.S. contract. As I said, I just moved here, and I haven’t had a chance to get my DFZ paperwork in order, such as it is.”

  Julius shook her hand after only a slight hesitation. He was about to tell her a U.S. contract would be fine when Marci turned around and walked over to the dusty car parked on the sidewalk beside them. It was a beat-up old junker that looked a good ten years older than Marci herself, but it wasn’t until she walked around to the trunk and started wiggling the key—a metal key, not a wireless fob—into the ancient lock
, that Julius realized this was her car.

  With that, the last of his fears that Marci was a trap set by another clan vanished. If there was any draconic trait even more universal than their love of plotting, it was snobbery. No dragon, no matter how cheap or desperate, would be caught dead using a human who drove a car like this. With that settled, though, there was only one question left. Why had Bob set him up with this mage?

  He was still wondering when Marci finally got the trunk open. “I normally charge a flat hourly fee plus expenses,” she said, pulling out a stack of slightly creased papers. “But I promised you a discount, so I’m cutting my rate in half and waiving my retainer.” Closing the trunk again to use its hood as a writing surface, Marci crossed several clauses off the top of the contract with an expensive-looking marker she’d pulled from her pocket. Once it was all marked through, she wrote in the new rates by hand before giving the contract to Julius. “Is that okay?”

  Julius took the pages with trepidation. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an actual physical contract, let alone signed one. The paper felt odd, too, almost tingly. “Is there a spell on this?”

  Marci’s eyes widened. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I forgot to mention that. Yes, a minor truth spell, just the usual security against falsification. It’s all on the up and up, though, see?” She pointed at the top of the page where the paper had, indeed, been notarized by the State of Nevada Magic Commissioner’s Office. “Nothing nefarious.”

  Julius studied the seal for a moment, and then he glanced through the rear window of her car at the backseat, which was packed high with bags and boxes. There’d been boxes in her trunk as well. Clearly, Marci Novalli had left Nevada in a hurry. He wanted to ask why, but he wasn’t exactly in a position to pry, and with the discounted rate she’d written down, he was getting her services for almost nothing.

  He felt kind of bad about that, actually, but he needed a mage, she needed work, and a paper contract would keep his name out of any databases that could come back to haunt him. So, before he could second-guess himself into paralysis, Julius took the pen she offered and signed his first name on the dotted line. Only his first name, since the truth spell would have outed his last as a fake. Marci arched an eyebrow, but she didn’t comment as she signed her own name on the line below.