The Curse Mandate (The Dark Choir Book 3)

by J. P. Sloan

  He stared at the table for a long moment.

  Ches exhaled. “Dorian, it’s important to know he didn’t do this. I mean, it’s the curse the Dragons put on him.”

  I gave Ches a cock of my head. “Huh?”

  “It’s not his fault he got hooked.”

  “That… doesn’t matter, Ches.” I pushed my mug away. “Look, I’ve worked with addicts for over ten years, now. I lost my righteousness over the subject a long time ago. It’s a hell of a thing to happen to someone, and even if he did fall down the rabbit hole all on his own, I’d still want to help him.”

  She rocked back in her chair, eyes rimming red.

  As did Ricky’s.

  “You’re working on a charm for addiction?” I asked Ches.

  She nodded.

  “They were all a proof-of-concept for him, weren’t they?”

  A tear wandered down her cheek.

  “Okay. I know a thing or two about addiction charms. Making them and breaking them. Here’s the problem, though. This isn’t normal addiction. It’s a curse. I don’t want you to stop what you’re doing, Ches. Seriously. I think it could be your calling. But nothing you do for Ricky’s addiction is going to lift the curse. We’ll have to try and dismantle it energetically, or else some other damn thing will happen and he’ll lose his kids anyway.”

  “I don’t think Quinn will help,” Ches mumbled.

  “Agreed. So we’ll have to do this the hard way.” I turned to Ricky. “And we have ten days?”

  “That’s when I’m due to pick up the kids for my visitation day.”

  “Does she know you’re out here?”

  He shook his head.

  “All right. I have some research to do. Happily, I don’t have to go far. In the meantime, we really, really have to keep him out of sight.”

  Ricky’s eyes shifted back and forth between me and Ches. “Why’s that, exactly?”

  Ches added, “Yeah, I was just going to put him up at my place.”

  “He’s a pawn in Gillette’s chess match with the Dead Dragons, is why. With the Presidium looking to scratch an itch, I really don’t think it’s smart to have him anywhere near an ATM or traffic camera, or anything else that’ll paint a bullseye on him, or you, or me.”

  We sat in silence for a moment until I ran out of coffee. I stood up and set the mug in the sink.

  “I’ll put him in one of the bedrooms upstairs.”

  Ches let slip a dry snicker. “Which one? The room full of boxes or the other one full of boxes?”

  “Ricky’s choice. Whichever room he wants to stay in, he cleans out.”

  Ches’s jaw stuck out, but Ricky tapped the table. “Sounds good, boss.” He turned to Ches. “I think he’s right. I don’t want to give you any more stress.”

  “Ricky,” she muttered, “I’m the reason you’re in this to begin with.”

  “Still, you have school. A life. I’m going to be more problem than you need right now.”

  Before Ches could resist, I countered, “He’s going to get worse.”

  They both looked up at me.

  “I assume you’re going to detox? You’re not going to partake as long as you’re here. That’s just a given. We’re all on the same page?”

  They looked slowly one to another.

  “You’re about to pass through the gauntlet, Ricky. I can help with some charms, but it’ll be Hell. I mean it, it’ll be the Christian Hell. But I’m here to tell you, from experience, there are worse fates to suffer. You get through this, you keep your strength and you survive this ordeal, and I’ll do everything in my power to put your family back together.”

  Tears flowed as the siblings gripped one another in a tight hug. Once they composed themselves, they moved upstairs to start clearing out a guest bedroom.

  And just like that, I had a roommate.

  t didn’t take long to move Ricky into the first hallway guest room. He didn’t exactly pull up with a U-Haul full of furniture, after all. With Ches lending a hand, and Ricky doing most of the heavy lifting, we had him settled in an afternoon.

  The trick wasn’t the space he’d occupy. The trick was the withdrawal. Even though the heart of his addiction was a curse by the Dead Dragons, there was nothing I could do to allow him to avoid the body-churning turmoil he’d have to endure to get clean of the heroin. Nor was I an expert at that particular aspect of recovery.

  Ches ran down a few volunteer organizations with support for addicts, one of which offered personal “coaches” for extreme cases. But Ricky wasn’t exactly an extreme case, and it wasn’t long before a couple thousand dollars secured Ricky an in-house facilitator to do some medical hand-holding.

  That was the easy part.

  My end of the equation was most certainly the bitch of the bundle. How would one dismantle a Chinese curse? Curse deconstruction was unfamiliar territory for me. This was a skill Emil had no problem skipping. I had to try and break this down on my own.

  Curses are far more difficult to shake when you’re the target. But if you’re outside of the energy equation, the mechanics of a curse aren’t so different from a hex. The major, crucial distinction being the power source. One can power a low-level hex with one’s own personal energy… a bad idea, but still, possible. One could hitch a hex to a natural source such as a leyline or a lunar cycle. Or one could use my particular cheat… karma.

  All Netherwork curses, however, require the Dark Choir to keep the gears running. As long as I kept clear of the power source, deconstructing a curse would simply be a matter of identifying which wire was red and which wire was black, and snipping the right wire.

  I say “simply” largely because I’m an asshole. Truth is, the Dead Dragon curse was assembled from a Chinese context, and Asian magic was something Emil never had any real experience with.

  Still, it was worth a few hours’ study in my workspace. I took advantage of a late evening after Ches had gone home and Ricky had collapsed upstairs to descend into the basement and hit the books. I ran a quick finger over my standard texts along the expanded wing of my workspace, finding nothing remotely Chinese in content. This wasn’t a problem I’d be able to run down in-house. I’d have to find a good source for Far Eastern Netherwork, and brave a face-to-face. Only one name from my recent dealings came to mind.

  Lillian Hsu.

  She was technically one of Edgar’s contacts, keeping shop in downtown Pittsburgh. She made trips down to Frederick now and again to acquire certain materials her associates in Pittsburgh didn’t need to know she was purchasing. I’d met her once on a reagent run, and she gave me her card if I ever wanted to “trade notes.” At the time, I’d assumed that was some kind of pick-up line, but in retrospect one shouldn’t assume that much about a career professional involved in Ancestor Enslavement.

  I gave Lillian a call that evening, and reached voicemail immediately. Recognizing it was common practice for Practitioners to screen all calls, I left my name and number, and a brief reminder that I wasn’t some random yahoo calling her business line. By the time I was halfway through whisking together an alfredo sauce for two, my phone rang.

  “Mister Lake?” Lillian’s voice buzzed into my ear.

  “Yes, thank you for calling me back.”

  “I was not inconvenienced.”

  I whisked the skillet, searching for a pithy comeback.

  “Awesome.”

  Shit.

  Lillian prodded, “What can I do for you, Mister Lake?”

  “Actually, I want to pick your brain. I have a new client whose problems are pulling me into unfamiliar territory. I think you can help me fill in some gaps.”

  “This is an active client?”

  I pulled the skillet off the burner to keep the sauce from scorching. “Yes.”

  “Hmm, best not to converse over the phone.” After a space, she continued, “I can’t leave the city, but if you’re able to drive in, I wouldn’t mind being inconvenienced over a working lunch.”

  “I can
do that. What day works for you?”

  “Tomorrow, of course. Why wait?”

  Why wait, indeed? Ricky was on a short clock, here.

  I made arrangements with Lillian and hung up just as Ricky wandered back downstairs, hair a mess but otherwise chipper. Perhaps a bit too chipper.

  “Hey,” he chimed. “You look like you just won a lottery.”

  I shrugged. “Just not used to talking to a Netherworker who wasn’t trying to make life more difficult.”

  Ricky leaned into the range to check out the dinner unfolding under my less-than-expert hands.

  “Going all Food Network on me?”

  “Don’t get too excited, not until you taste it.”

  As we ate in awkward silence, I stole a glance or two. He was beaming with enthusiasm, head bobbing to music he was humming just under his breath. Every motion seemed to telegraph “I’m okay; everything is okay.”

  But it wasn’t. He knew it. I knew it.

  This was the manic brace before the anvil that would land on his head. Perhaps less an anvil, which hits with a sudden strike, but more a hurricane that batters the coast before it makes landfall. The winds were already blowing inside his body. Soon, the storm would come.

  “So, tell me about this magic,” he announced in between bites of fettuccini. “Is this, like, something that’s going on worldwide or what?”

  I nodded. “Since before humans figured out how to draw in the dirt with sticks.”

  “You’d think we’d make a bigger deal about it than we do. Us normal people, I mean.” He winced and added, “Not that you’re abnormal.”

  “You’d be surprised how much of my world you actually see every day, Ricky.”

  He paused mid-bite and lifted his brow.

  I explained, “Coincidences. Those little nagging injustices you don’t figure make any sense. Long spells of bad luck. The fortunate turns of the card that seem to give the same few people all the advantages.”

  “That’s magic?”

  “No, that’s this shitty world we live in. Magic lies just underneath all of that, getting on with business.”

  He finished his bite and shook his head. “Figured you’d be rich, if you could make things happen.”

  “There’s not that much I can do to improve my own situation. Magic is generally a zero sum game. If you take today, you’ll pay tomorrow. I try to let the Cosmos decide what karma is available for cashing in.”

  “How did you get started with all of this?”

  I pushed my plate away and leaned back in my chair. “My dad.”

  “He was a magic man, too?”

  “The term I prefer is ‘practitioner,’ but no.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  He obviously wasn’t going to let this go, so I had to just dive right in and give him a double-barrel truth blast directly to the chest.

  “I studied the hermetic arts to avenge my father’s suicide.”

  Ricky blinked a few times, then slowly lowered his fork to his plate.

  “How?”

  “Hmm?”

  He cleared his throat. “How do… how did you avenge a suicide?”

  “Short answer, I didn’t. There was nothing to avenge. He was an investment banker, and he made some poor decisions. Lots of them. He tried to shelter our family’s money from the fallout, but when he discovered federal charges were on deck, he took a loaded Browning nine millimeter into his home office, put it under his chin, and shot himself.”

  “Damn.”

  I took a deep, cleansing breath. “Then it was just Mom and me. I was a senior in high school, already accepted at Yale. Everything was… impossibly horrible. But Mom and I had each other. Then her cab got t-boned by a truck at an intersection. Killed her instantly. Then it was just me.”

  Ricky ran his hand over the back of his head, eyes wide. “Holy crap!”

  “They gave me my high school diploma, even though I never went back to school. Didn’t make it to Yale, either. I spent half a year obsessing over it all. I mean, how the hell does a kid lose both parents in a week, right? There had to be something going on behind the scenes. I made a nuisance of myself with NYPD. They courteously requested that I stop contacting them. And by ‘courteous’ I mean ‘we’ll arrest you for offering a false instrument for filing.’ Can you believe that’s an actual misdemeanor?”

  “That sucks, but what does it have to do with magic?”

  I stood up and took my plate to the sink, dropping it unceremoniously with a clatter. “Thoughts get twisted inside a brain latched onto an obsession. Add grief and a healthy dose of entitlement, and you get a notion that you’ve become the victim of some kind of conspiracy.” I turned to face Ricky. “I honestly can’t tell you what drew me to esoteric alleys of inquiry. I think, yeah… it was some lame back page advertisement on one of those free papers you find sitting in the subway benches. Guy offering scrying services for money. I didn’t really know what scrying was.” I paused as Ricky’s brow twisted in the middle. “It’s the practice of following energy trails to distant locations. It’s GPS for spooks.”

  “Gotcha.”

  I very nearly pulled out a lowball glass to pour myself a scotch, but caught myself. Okay, this roommate arrangement was going to be a problem.

  Instead, I grabbed a tea from the fridge and continued, “It just got my wheels turning. I called this guy. Real asshole, I might add. But he gave me another name to contact. That one led me to another. So on, so forth. Spent a good year trying to find someone who could help me find out who was behind this… curse. I suppose that’s what I thought it was. Some curse on my family. Funny how that sounds in retrospect.” I took a swig of tea. “Then Emil found me and pulled me out of the fringe practitioner circuit before I got myself in real trouble.”

  “That was nice of him,” Ricky offered with a helpless shrug. “Wasn’t it?”

  “Nicer than you realize. Emil… was not a good man. In fact, he was somewhat notorious around the world as being one of the preeminent Netherworkers. Had his heyday in the early seventies when the sheer insanity in the Middle East kept the old Levantine cabals busy.”

  Ricky stood up and brought his plate to the sink. “I understood maybe half of that.”

  “He was one of the bad guys.”

  “All right, that I understood.”

  “But he was scared, because… you know how I said magic is a zero sum game? Well, Emil had taken and taken in life. He knew his debt was going to get called up one day, and when it was, it wasn’t going to be pretty. That’s the price of Netherwork. You take tremendous, unbelievable power from a truly sinister source. The Dark Choir, he called it. And those ancient beings own you at that point on, into eternity, or whatever passes for eternity in their realm.”

  Ricky blanched. “You’re talking about demons and crap?”

  “Demons and crap. Heh. Well, they’re a bit bigger than demons and crap, and a lot older.”

  “So that’s why everyone isn’t signing up to be a magic practitioner? It’s evil?”

  “Not always, but it’s too easy to let evil in. Takes practice just to keep from getting people killed. And maybe that’s why people don’t get involved.” I gestured with my tea bottle in broad circles. “It’s not like you have to be some kind of Chosen One. That’s what surprised me most when I began my training. I figured Emil chose me because I had some special quality. But that wasn’t it. Anyone can learn this. It just takes years and years and years of mind-numbing study. You have to sacrifice your own life to the study. Nothing else can distract you, steal your focus. Not friends. Or love.” I took another long swig of tea.

  “Yeah, sounds like a real drag when you put it like that.”

  I gave Ricky a grin. “It has its moments.”

  A headache took Ricky before long, and he turned in early. The hurricane was approaching landfall. Once he was upstairs, and the floorboards overhead stopped squeaking with his movement back and forth, I finally pulled out the scotch.

/>   wanted to get an early start for Pittsburgh to be sure I wasn’t late for my lunch date with Lillian Hsu, seeing as to how cooperative she was being. However, I knew I had to wait for Ches to arrive and take her turn on Rickywatch. I wandered down the hallway after I’d gotten dressed. Before I could knock on his door, the sound of Ricky’s sobbing flagged me off, so I left him be.

  Ches arrived just after 7 a.m., looking like she had rolled directly out of bed and driven herself here.

  “Good morning,” I said as I held the door for her.

  “Hey. How’s Ricky?”

  Nodding to the ceiling, I replied, “Sounds like he’s hitting some emotions up there.”

  Ches nodded. “It’s really unfair, what happened to him. They were so happy, Dorian.” A tear welled up in her eye, and she rubbed it away on her sleeve with a centering grunt. “This is going to suck.”

  “When’s the coach arriving?”

  “Eleven. I’m skipping my noon class.”

  “Good,” I said, moving for the kitchen. “Had breakfast?”

  “Why good?”

  “I’m taking a day trip.”

  She followed me into the kitchen, hands on her hips. “Wait, you’re leaving? Today?”

  “Before you get pissy about it, it’s for Ricky.” I grabbed some orange juice from the fridge and added, “I’m meeting someone who can walk me through Chinese curse crafting.”

  “Oh,” Ches muttered. “Is there that big a difference?”

  I shrugged. “Never studied Far Eastern hermeticism, so I have no idea.”

  She reached out and patted my arm. “Thanks, Dorian.”