by Unknown
“Is this what you want?” he asked.
The crowd hollered.
I stepped toward him. The women and children screamed; the men threw their fists into the air. I reached out with my mind, trying to find a real person among them, but all of their minds were blank.
I stalked toward Kellinger, trying to usurp his thoughts, but his mind was thick and impenetrable. He grinned as I advanced. Even with my powers restored, it was unlikely I’d get an advantage.
He wouldn’t have allowed my approach otherwise.
I summoned a firebrand, hurling it at him. He ducked easily, skirting the ball of fire and sending it into the crowd behind him. The spectators parted to avoid it.
I launched a second, then a third, but Kellinger anticipated each move, and the firebrands sizzled and disintegrated around him.
“I was expecting a little more from you,” the warlock yelled.
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Don’t be sorry—just step it up.” Kellinger grinned. “These people want a show.”
At the sound of his words, the crowd cheered wildly, waving their arms in the air. He turned to face them, like an orator in a stadium. Once the noise had subsided, he spun back to face me.
Without another word, Kellinger raised his arms, summoning two human-like shadows. They hovered at his side, awaiting his command. After a pause, he gave the signal. The figures darted toward me, covering the ground between us in a heartbeat. Before I could avoid them, they flanked me on both sides and started to attack.
I raised my arms, shielding myself from their blows. I could hear them breathing as they beat into me, two faceless shapes that were nothing more than a blur. I took several hits before I gained control, grabbing one by the arm and swinging it over my shoulder. The thing grunted as it hit the ground.
Working as a bouncer had given me lots of practice.
I parried with the other opponent, doing my best to avoid its shapeless hand. After a few seconds, I knocked it back with a closed fist. The thing faltered, then recovered. It weaved from side to side, searching for an opening. In my time in the clubs, most of my opponents had been human, and I’d always been able to enter their thoughts.
The form in front of me was unreadable.
The two of us circled one another. My knuckles ached; my mind was sapped from conjuring the firebrands. Sweat leaked from my brow. I could hear the rise and fall of the crowd’s cheers from the sidelines. One of them was screaming my name, calling for my blood. Without warning, the figure darted in with a right hook. I wrenched to the side, avoiding it. A gust of air filled the space where my head had been. The movement set me off balance, and before I could recover, the thing hit me with its left hand. The world pulsed. Blood trickled down my forehead.
The crowd roared.
Kellinger raised his arms, stirring up the audience further.
I wiped the fluid from my brow.
For a second, I contemplated failure. My mind reviewed the events that had brought me here: the letter, the photograph, the journey to Chicago. If I gave up now, all of that would have been for nothing. I couldn’t let that happen.
Regardless of my predicament, I couldn’t let this man win.
Letting the pain fuel my anger, I charged at my attacker, knocking it to the ground. The thing writhed and squirmed beneath me. I raised my fists and beat its face. Although the thing had no clear features, I could make out the outline of a mouth, nose, and eyes. Its cheekbones caved beneath my knuckles. The rooftop spun. The figure recoiled but didn’t make a sound. I continued to pummel it until my fists were sore and the shadow was silent and still.
When I’d finished, it evaporated with a hiss.
The crowd booed.
I stood back, massaging my sore knuckles. Kellinger glared at me from across the deck, eyes blazing. Although he was angry, he maintained his smile.
“Better,” he said.
I staggered to my feet, my eyes locked on the florin. The adrenaline of the battle had strengthened my resolve, and I wanted nothing more than to take it from him. Before he could speak again—before I could second-guess myself—I charged at him.
The man kept his smile. He made no effort to move, only watched as I approached. I cocked my arm back, ready to pound him with my fist. If spells and magic wouldn’t work, I’d take the florin by force.
At the last second, he blinked and disappeared. I swiveled around the observation deck, looking for where he’d gone. He reappeared on the opposite edge. He was several hundred feet away, barely visible around the enormous pillar.
I made another run at him, but he evaporated again, vanishing before I could reach him.
The audience jeered.
“Give me the damn florin!” I screamed. My words reverberated in the air, as if there were an invisible dome above me. I scanned wildly from left to right, searching for Kellinger.
Something clinked by my feet, and I looked down to find the florin, spinning on one golden edge. I reached down to grab it, but my hand passed through the image. I heard another clatter from my left, and I spun to face it, finding another coin spinning in tandem with the first.
Metal began to rain all around me.
I looked up to find the raised arms of the crowd flinging one florin after another. Frank Kellinger had reappeared, and he laughed at me from across the deck, his voice audible above the din.
“Fuck you!” I shouted.
The coins clattered to the deck, bouncing and spinning and turning, and I made my way through them, heading toward the warlock. Despite the illusions around me, I could still make out the original, hanging like a trophy around his neck.
“Keep hiding, you coward!”
With each step I took, more and more coins fell, obscuring my vision. The distance between the warlock and me grew, as if the observation deck were stretching out beneath me. I gritted my teeth and continued on, focusing on the man I intended to reach.
The distance broadened.
“You never stood a chance against me! You know that? That’s why you have to hide!”
I broke into a run. Before I knew it, I’d narrowed the gap. I could see Frank’s face through the rain shower of gold. He was struggling to maintain the illusion, stretching beyond his limits. It looked like I’d finally angered him, and he was letting out his rage in his spell. Soon he’d have to break.
Even the most powerful warlocks couldn’t last forever.
I was getting closer. A hundred feet away. Fifty. I reached out with my mind, attempting to invade his thoughts. This time I was able to get a handhold. I could feel him fighting to keep me out, but I could also sense his struggle. He was overloaded, about to snap.
The last of the coins clinked to the ground and evaporated. The crowd shimmered. Frank let out a startled cry.
Suddenly it was just he and I.
I was in his thoughts now, and I could see the grip he had over the building. For the past two years, he’d built his spell, increasing his hold on the tower and its tenants. I could see the instructions he’d been given regarding the florin, as well as the warlocks he’d killed to protect it. I could also see the tenants he’d killed for fun.
Although I’d had my fun in the nightclubs, I’d rarely harmed my subjects. Not unless I’d had to.
I sent another burst of fire at him, but he ducked to avoid it. The flame hit the metal railing. I sent two more, hoping to catch him off guard, but he avoided those as well, sidestepping them before they could connect. At the same time, I continued to pry at his mind.
Keeping him occupied, keeping him drained.
I was twenty feet away now. Ten.
Frank attempted to teleport, but before he could pull off the maneuver, I barreled into him with my shoulder, sending him reeling against the metal railing. The metal gave, weakened by the firebrands I’d just thrown. The warlock cried out, flailing for a handhold, but there was nothing to find. He was already toppling downward, and his hands slid uselessly off the railing. B
efore he pitched over the edge, I dove to the rooftop and ripped the florin free from his neck.
Frank Kellinger plummeted from the West Tower.
I watched as he cascaded into the darkness, screaming all the way down. As he fell, the lights of Chicago winked on one by one, illuminating the skyline, shaking off the spell he’d cast.
It took almost a minute for Frank to land. I heard a splash from somewhere below, the sound of a body hitting the Chicago River, and then the noise was swallowed by the sounds of the city.
Cars honked their horns. Traffic rushed by. Pedestrians resumed walking on the streets, carrying shopping bags and cruising the Riverwalk.
My lungs heaved, and I got to my feet.
I removed the tarot card from my pocket and examined the picture in the dim lighting: a tower with bodies falling from the side. Fire at the top, ice at the bottom. A fortress of pretense and illusion that I’d shattered.
Then I stared at the piece of florin in my hand, taking in the shape and contour of the prize that I’d earned—the one that had almost cost me my life.
Someone would find Frank’s body, but by that time, I’d be long gone.
It was time to get my ass to Ohio.
August 9
“I need you to go into town.”
“For what?” Matthew asked.
“Some of them new battery-operated LED lights. The kind that look like they're from the future.”
Matthew grabbed my plate from the table and placed it into the sink with the other dirty dishes. The humidity was stifling and we weren't even halfway through August. It made my apparent sickness easier to fake.
“Okay,” he said. Matthew chuckled and put his hands on his hips. “For?”
“The stills. In the cavern. Been reading up and although we got good ventilation coming through the cavern, the vapors are explosive. A flick of a light switch could ignite the whole place. We'd lose all of our stills. I want you to trip the breaker to the circuit running the lights in the cave. LEDs only — once you get'em installed.”
Of course it wouldn't matter in the end. I was going to blow everything to Hell anyway, but I didn't want it happening too soon. This would be the perfect cover for my plan, sending Matthew on a task to prevent an explosion when that was exactly what was going to happen.
“I'll go soon as I git you into bed.”
“I can get myself there.”
I was careful to manage my descent towards death. I spent more and more time in bed, but I wanted it to appear to Matthew as a slow degeneration. Drinking jars of white lightning with breakfast helped.
The Story of The M12 by Stephen Knight
I unfolded the letter and read it once again. The characters on the paper were illuminated by the waxing glow of the sun, which had set only minutes ago. The contents revealed nothing new that had not been understood upon the first reading. The message, to paraphrase a timeworn saying, did not improve with age. Furthermore, the single tarot card that had been in the express mail envelope did nothing to convince me that everything was going to turn out all right.
The card was Death.
I lowered the letter and looked out the floor-to-ceiling window. Stretching across the center of Manhattan, the northern expanse of Central Park was an oasis of tall green trees that continued to stand silent sentinel as the day faded and twilight emerged. In a matter of hours, the tourists and residents of the Upper East Side and lower East Harlem—where I lived—would vacate the park and return to their residences or hotel rooms, fearful of the vermin that still came out at night despite decades of police patrols and crime prevention programs that had supposedly made New York City one of the safest places to live in America.
I knew many of those oft-cited statistics were false. I’d been born in Harlem during the late 1980s, and I had experienced the thrill of crime, both as victim and perpetrator. But that was before I discovered my skills, before the magic began to speak to me, first in a ghostly whisper, then with a spectral shout. But before the voice consumed me and drove me mad, Levi had found me. Before the forces that were building up inside of me slipped the few bonds I used to restrain them and began to run amok, Levi had taught me that the forces were mine to control, but they needed to be handled in a specific way, and always with utter care, for I was but a gateway. Without discipline, without unyielding, iron will, the forces that brewed inside of me could corrupt me, leaving me their slave as opposed to their master. Indeed, as I learned from Levi, those forces could grow to lay waste to the entire city—not in a gigantic explosion of fury, but by creating a deeper, more subtle, insidious type of decay that would have the Big Apple rotting outward from the core within weeks. All I knew, all I cherished, would fall victim to a seething corruption that would forever change New York, creating a blight upon humanity.
Levi had saved me, and in doing so, had saved the city. And I was indebted to him for that. While Harlem was nothing but a joke to most of the world, the neighborhood was where my roots lay, and I wanted nothing bad to happen to it.
But the time had come for me to repay my debt. Levi had made me swear allegiance to him and the cause. Along with my fellow warlocks, I served Levi, acting as his conduit to the normal, more prosaic world where humanity lived in utter ignorance of the forces that swirled and eddied around them in the constant battle between light and dark. And in his service, I knew that I was a tool for both. I had provided compassion and mercy for those Levi selected, and I had doomed others to misery at his behest.
But those were not my “core mission,” per se. I was to assist The Black Fang by manipulating the great markets and leeching off wealth. I would execute elaborate rituals designed by Levi that would affect certain markets in ways that would always result in a windfall of profits. The profits went to Levi, but he was a generous master. Those proceeds paid the rent on my two-bedroom luxury condominium with the fancy Fifth Avenue address near the border where the wealthy Upper East Side gave way to East Harlem. It was from there that I conducted those rituals, made invocations, and paid the price.
Rarely did one of Levi’s rituals not require a blood sacrifice, and a skill the old man had helped me harness was best described by a single word: murder. Be it animal or human, blood was spilled, and only through magical subterfuge and sleight of hand did I manage to escape retribution for the acts, every time. No one in the glass tower at 1214 Fifth Avenue and East 102nd Street knew anything about what happened inside those walls in the dead of night. And no one except another mage would be able to tell that the apartment was any different from the hundred or so others just like it in the building. Only a mage or someone with the ability to detect the workings of the arcane arts would notice the ghostly remnants of death that clung to the condo like a nest of cockroaches hiding in plain sight.
I ran a hand over my close-cropped hair, studying my pale reflection in the window glass. I was a black man, like so many others in that neighborhood, dark skinned with a broad nose and eyes that always seemed to show nothing but utter disinterest in the world at large. “Hoodlum eyes,” my maternal grandfather had told me one time after picking me up from the slab-sided stationhouse that housed the NYPD’s 23rd Precinct. I’d been involved in the attempted heist of a liquor delivery truck and had been the only one of my gang to get caught. Thankfully, the driver wasn’t able to identify me when viewing the rogue’s gallery, so I was released. While the NYPD hadn’t been able to hold me without sufficient evidence, my grandfather knew that I was rapidly devolving into one of the street hoods he utterly despised.
I wondered if, in the afterlife, Grandpa knew exactly how badly I had turned out. While petty theft, assault, and larceny were no longer my chosen pursuits, an argument could be made that my new ones were infinitely worse.
I turned away from the window and settled into the cool embrace of the leather sofa. I looked back at the letter again. A photograph had been taped to the bottom, and the visage of a kindly, older black man looked back at me, smiling just above claspe
d hands. It was almost a Norman Rockwell moment, that wizened man with a bald head, white eyebrows, and benevolent smile. Of course, he was anything but. He was a warlock, just like me. His name was Louis J. Walker, and he lived over a thousand miles away, in Memphis, Tennessee.
And I had told been to kill him.
But in order to do that, I had to find him. Levi had sent no information in that regard. That was not unusual. Warlocks were able to find each other through a variety of ways, even over great distances, and even if they had never met. That Levi had sent a photograph of Walker was enough. I merely needed to craft a seeker spell, a type of mystical hunting dog that would transit the ethereal pathways to hunt down the likeness of Walker, one that bore the silver thread of a warlock in his consciousness. We all had them, that flare of light that only we could see, a light that thrummed with power and vitality that no normal human possessed. And while normal humans couldn’t exploit it, we could. It was one reason we kept to ourselves and rarely associated with our own kind. Any physical trace we left could be used against us. Truth be told, I was impressed that Levi had a photograph of Walker. Even though the picture showed what seemed to be a kindly man, one did not live to Walker’s apparent age without being careful... very careful. Clearly, Levi had been accumulating information on Walker for quite some time.
But seeker spells could be traced. I would have to spend some time on it, designing it in such a way that it could complete its mission without being noticed or traced back to me. While Walker’s eyes looked mirthful and spry, I knew it was all an act. The man could be deadly, otherwise Levi would not have uncaged me on him. And the last thing I wanted was for a formidable warlock to know I was looking for him, or even worse, to find me before I found him.
It took four hours to refine the spell to the point to where I felt it would be untraceable and, more importantly, undetectable. When the spell found its mark, it would lead me to Walker like a blood trail led a shark to a wounded fish.