Trent and I walked that area, but I didn’t see anyone I thought would talk.
Trent pushed loose black hair away from his face, as his eyes continued to roam. “Let’s try another street.”
We turned the corner, went down the road, and around another corner. A guy in a red shirt levitated in the air, then pulled a digit out of his pocket. Digits were small communication devices, which were about the size of a large smartphone, only they had about a hundred extra functions and uses.
A different guy, this one in a green shirt, levitated up until he was just a few inches from the guy in the red shirt. Then he held out a hand, shooting a line of thick silver energy at the first guy, wrapping it around his throat, and choking him until he dropped his digit.
The dude with the green shirt snatched it up before it could hit the ground, and then tried to quickly run away. Not so fast, buddy. A spike of adrenaline ran down my spine. I probably should have hung my head in shame because this was the part I loved the most, always had, the thrill of the chase.
I held up my arm, using my telekinesis to bring him back, slamming him down in front of me. The digit fell out of his hand, and the other guy dropped down, picked it up, and took off around the corner.
Knowing this was the only way to get respect here, or even have a conversation, I put my foot to his throat. His eyes went hard, his breathing a little erratic, but for the moment, he didn’t try anything.
“My brother,” I said, making my voice sound as cold as he probably thought it should. “No one has seen him in weeks. Best I can gather his last known place was here. His skin is a little darker than mine, an almost ebony color, and he usually keeps his hair cut short. Someone said they saw him bleeding in an alleyway in this area with the letter D carved into his face. Only when they went back to help, he was gone. Now, what do you know?”
It was a heck of a tale, but if he fell for it, maybe we could find out something that would help lead us to Celina. His eyes went wide, and pure panic crossed his face before he shut down completely. Damn. No need to keep trying, especially if he was this scared then he wouldn’t be telling us anything.
I let him go, and he looked between me and Trent, shook his head and took off down a nearby alley.
Walking on, we caught a lady ready to use her power to drain another woman of her energy, we stopped her, asked the same thing, and got the same reaction.
“Hmm,” I said after the fifth person had basically hightailed it away from us, the last one delivering a sucker punch to my stomach first. “Not like the Mellen people to be scared of anything. Something is definitely going on here.”
Trent stared after the woman who’d just hit me as if trying to fit a puzzle piece together. “The question is, how does it connect to Celina? She never said anything?”
I shook my head. “She didn’t want to talk about it and I didn’t push.”
It was three hours later when we finally got a whiff of something we could follow. A short guy with a head full of curly red hair, who’d obviously had a few too many, came wobbling out of the bar we were standing in front of.
Trent and I both had a Gouj beer in our hand. Gouj beer came in very dark bottles so no one could tell ours were still full to the top, which was a good thing since we were both pretending to be drunk off our faces. This was our tenth attempt at this, so hopefully this time someone took the bait.
“I heard,” I hiccupped out, and waved my bottle through the air. “I heard that when they get you, they carve a D in your face, so everybody knows you belong to them.”
Trent rocked back on his heels, pretending to stumble as he fell against the building, fingers still gripped tightly around the neck of his bottle. “Nah, babe. I heard talk the D comes after the initiation. That’s when they let you into their crew.”
The guy with the red hair raised a bottle of blaze wine to his lips and then let out a long burp. “You’re both wrong. The D is for Dox. Vane and his boys are hunting them all down.” He took another swig and held up a single finger to us. “Be careful.” With that, he continued swaying down the sidewalk.
“Fuck,” Trent said, tossing his bottle in a nearby trash can.
“Yeah,” I said, actually taking a swig from mine before throwing it away.
Vane was one of the top players here. One of the top six people that you absolutely did not fuck with. He had more than a few thousand hard-ass tough men and women ready to do his bidding at a moment’s notice.
None of the top six got along, and they’d spent years ripping each other apart and bloodying every inch of Mellen. Then, things had slowly cooled down and they’d decided to come to the table.
The bar we’d been in front of was probably owned by Vane or one of the other top six, no doubt about it. If not, then one of them was getting a nice cut of the profits, or it wouldn’t still be standing.
All businesses here had to either pay one of the big six for protection or see their building leveled to the ground and their employees killed. Though the big six owned a lot of the real estate around here as well.
Either way, all money went through their hands and no one else was allowed to stand on their level.
It’s one reason why doctors and such on Mellen had no problem getting paid for services rendered. If you owned your own practice, ten percent or more of your profit went to one of the big six. They’d let you stay in business as long as they got a kick back, and patients knew that if they didn’t pay, one of the big six would come for them.
As I’d said before, there was no order here on Mellen, no law enforcement, no council nothing. Which was the main reason the big six were able to hold this world in its grip.
They didn’t care what you did, as long as you didn’t mess with their money, it didn’t matter that citizens were robbing and killing each other on a daily basis. As long as the big six held all the power and kept getting richer, it was life as usual on Mellen.
As we walked on, I noticed that Trent’s lasso had left his arm and was now hanging around his neck. Sometimes I believed that thing actually had a mind of its own and had convinced itself that it was indeed a snake. “How do you want to play this?” Trent asked and from the tone of his voice, I could tell that he was just as confused as I was, trying to figure out how everything fit into place.
Trent and I decided to sit at picnic tables, not far from where a group of Vane’s men were working by the water, loading up a boat. We munched down on fully dressed hot dogs, chatting about nothing while trying to capture a name or location, anything that would give me a clue where Celina and the others might be.
We’d been there an hour before deciding to move on, not wanting to look suspicious. Once we’d made it to the sidewalk, and Vane’s people probably thought we were out of hearing range, I heard one of them say something about the world Sergin at nine.
I looked at my com and noticed that was only thirty minutes away. My pulse sped up with this new information because it was the first solid lead we had. Now we only needed to hide out and wait until they got ready to world hop so that we could follow at a distance.
A small part of my brain told me this could be a trap and we could be walking straight into danger. In the end though, it didn’t matter, I wasn’t scared of Vane. If he wanted a fight, I’d damn well give him one.
Chapter 5
Vane was a tall guy of medium frame with brown hair that stopped at his ears. He looked like the smiling, trusting doctor that would feed you a bunch of medicine you didn’t need just to get a kick-back from the drug company, or the grinning politician that told you of course your problems and concerns were close to his heart, then threw away your number the moment your back was turned.
He wasn’t a very handsome man, but he was about as charismatic as they came. That coupled with his natural charm and swagger meant he could sell you a truckload of flowers while you were standing in a field of roses and lilies and you’d still smile and think he had done you a favor.
His second in c
ommand, Lexnu, was slightly shorter, a little stocky, and had black hair that was cut close to his head. He had a hard, weathered face and looked every bit as mean as he was.
Both men were ruthless, and I’d come across and dealt with them more than once in making moves for a client or two, but never in a way that I had to defend myself. Though I had seen them take out others with only the smallest provocation. So, though I was worried about how this would end, and if we’d come out of it unscathed, I still refused to back down. Not until I knew my client was safe.
At nine p.m. a tall lady with long black hair came, and shortly after that, they disappeared through her portal.
Trent and I waited five minutes before I opened a portal of my own to bring us out down the street and around the corner from theirs.
The air was fresh on Sergin, and after coming from Mellen, where everything smelled of piss, vomit, and blood, it was a nice distinction.
Also, while the streets of Mellen were littered with everything from broken beer bottles, to late partygoers sleeping off the night's activities, not one piece of paper covered the ground here.
The Sergin were a hard-working people. A little strict on the rules, but most people here didn’t seem to mind. Not saying that things didn’t get out of hand sometimes, of course, they did. Unlike on Mellen though, when someone broke the law here there were consequences.
On Sergin, you couldn’t just break into your neighbor’s house, attack him, then rob him blind and walk away worry-free, knowing that nothing would be done to you because there was no law saying you couldn’t attack and rob your neighbor whenever you felt like it.
Sergin had elected officials and government set up. People who hurt and robbed others paid the price for it. This place was so different from Mellen that I did wonder why Vane had come here.
Also, we were in the industrial area. A lot of large factories and warehouses were here, but because I had the coordinates to Vane’s portal hop, I knew exactly where he and Lexnu were, or had been when they’d first entered this world.
It was closing on night here, and few people were out, but like home, some factories employed three shifts, so there were a lot of people still working.
“Strange that Vane would come to a place like this?” Trent said, mirroring my own thoughts. What was Vane up to?
“Come on,” I said, walking toward the address the portal hop had given me. “We’ll hang back for a bit, see what we can find out.”
We walked up to a large warehouse. It was on a dead-end road, and no others surrounded it. Companies did this sometimes, bought out a whole street so that only their buildings and business sat there.
The warehouse was huge, and from the look and upkeep, I’d say it hadn’t been used in a while. We stood for a moment, listening to see if we could hear anything, and then I remembered on Sergin the law required that all factories and such places be completely soundproof.
I didn’t know why this law existed, but it cut down on the noise flowing out into the street if nothing else.
“I’m going to levitate up,” I said to Trent. “See what I can find out.”
He raised a brow. “You suddenly learn how to make yourself invisible and not tell me?”
I let out a scoff. “Got any better ideas?”
“If someone looks out the window and notices you hovering there, their first reaction will be to attack. What happened to just taking a peek inside first?”
I looked at the large structure in front of us. It was three stories high and filled with doors and windows. “Nah, fuck that,” I said. “Give me your hand. I’ll levitate us both up and then just burst inside.”
The lasso slipped from his neck to his right arm, as he gave me a crooked smile. “Sounds like a plan but do try not to drop me this time.”
“I dropped you before because you were being an ass. Plus, we’d barely been off the ground that time. And you landed on your feet, stop being dramatic about it and come on here.”
He let out a small whistle. “I love it when you put that bass in your voice. Starting to think you do it on purpose just to get me riled up.”
He was trying to take my mind off of what I might find behind those doors, and I appreciated the effort, but my stomach was still in knots.
Trent wrapped his arm around my waist and I lifted us up to the third floor. The windows were all tinted, so we were going into this blind, which made my pulse and heart start doing jumping jacks, as the adrenaline junkie in me reared its ugly head.
This is what my sister called my addiction, always pushing the bar, always going to the limit, and then jumping over it. I didn’t particularly like when she said that, but I couldn’t deny the feeling of elation that washed over me every time I found myself teetering on the edge, about to fall over.
Instead of hovering directly in front of the window, I went to the side and then used my telekinesis to fly the thing open. Nothing happened immediately, so I took a peek, as Trent had suggested and noticed that it was an empty room with a lot of dusty equipment that looked like it hadn’t been used in a decade.
Trent’s arms stayed tight around my waist as we went through the window, and I tried not to cough as dust particles began to fly. We landed in front of an old-style printing press.
Now that we were inside, it was easy to hear the screams, the demands. My first instinct was to run through, head first but that wouldn’t help anybody. No, I needed to figure out what was going on, because if I acted too quickly, I’d just make things worse.
Trent and I took cautious steps, as we crept toward the sound. We went down as far as the second floor, and since we were following the noise, it led us to a hidden spot where we had a better view of the bottom part of the factory.
It was a large empty space, and I wondered if that’s how they’d found it, or if they’d moved stuff around. My eyes traveled the length of the floor, and I almost gasped when I saw what was really going on.
There were at least twenty men and women on their knees, hands behind their heads. Most of them had bruised and busted up faces, some were still dripping blood, and worse, some were missing eyes and ears. All of them had a large letter D carved into their face.
Red hot fury started in my gut and spread to the rest of my body. My hands begin to shake with the urge to do something and I knew I wouldn’t be leaving here until every one of them was free.
My eyes took them in, looking for familiar faces, and everything in me froze when I saw Celina. Her brown hair was dirty and tangled. Her face was lopsided, one side bruised and swollen, her left eye hanging loosely from her face.
She had burns and cuts on her arms and neck and I noticed that was true for most of them. I swallowed hard, my whole body trembling, because right now what I wanted more than anything was to snatch these people up and get them out of here.
Beside me, Trent had gone still, but there was enough light shining from below for me to see the tight set of his jaw and the rage in his eyes. He, like me, seemed to be barely keeping it together and I wondered how much longer we’d be able to hold out.
Vane and Lexnu stood talking off to the side, while about fifty of their men guarded the people on the floor and the doors and entrances into the room.
After talking to Lexnu for a few more seconds, Vane moved toward Celina and the others. “I’m not being unreasonable,” he said, walking the length of them, and I could just imagine that ‘hey, I’ve never told a lie in my life, you can trust me,’ sick smile on his face. “What I want is simple. Tell me who the other Dox on Mellen are and what they’re planning. Also, we know you have contacts here on Sergin. Tell us about them, please and we’ll invite them to join us.”
One guy, with brown hair that reminded me of Celina, was missing his right eye and had several old cut marks on his throat. Looking at Vance, he threw his head back and laughed. “The only way you and the other big six can continue to stay on top is because there is no one to oppose you. No laws, no regulations. The Dox is going to chang
e that. Your time is limited. If you think you’ve captured even a fraction of us then-”
Vane kicked him in the face and the man’s head lolled to the side.
I started to move, but Trent put a hand on my arm, holding up one finger as if to tell me to wait.
Celina let out a scream, and then scrambled toward the dude who’d just been hit. “Leave him alone,” she spat at Vane, and I could see that she still had a little fire left in her. Maybe a few of them did. “The Dox will never bow to you. You won’t stay on top forever. Mellen will come under order. It’s already in progress and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
He smacked her hard across the face, and I wasn’t sitting still a moment longer. Grabbing Trent by the hand, I hovered down to the ground floor, landing directly in front of Vane.
His brows furrowed when he saw me, though he tried to play it cool. “Rekia the world hopper.” His voice was loud and overexcited. “Did you come here to save the day? Really think you can take us all on?” He pointed to where his people were starting to circle us.
No, we couldn’t take them all on, but all I needed was enough time to open a few portals and start sending people through. Not a foolproof plan by any means, but still the best I had at the moment. “I don’t want to fight,” I said, holding up my hands. “I just want you to let these people go.”
His face went hard, and he opened his mouth to say something, but then must have changed his mind, because next, he pointed a finger at me and Trent, and then something hard hit me in the face, dropping me to my knees.
Chapter 6
I used my telekinesis to throw back as many of Vane’s people as I could, then quickly came to my feet. A guy with black hair shot silver energy out of his hand at me, and I ducked. It hit a wall, causing it to shatter and crumble.
Energy workers could control the strength of their blast and I’d say this guy had been trying to take my whole head off. He aimed at me again, and I held up my hand, using my telekinesis to pull his teeth and tongue from his mouth.
Street Spells: Seven Urban Fantasy Shorts Page 15