It took us over an hour to drive home from the client’s house. The adrenaline from working magic and dodging soaring appliances wore off quickly. After a quick stop for burgers — mine done up Australian style with a pineapple ring, beets, and a fried egg — I was half asleep by the time we pulled up in front of the house after dark.
Groggy and cranky, I collected the imp from the back seat and shuffled into the house. Only six months earlier, I’d watched a man die on the threshold of my old apartment. The worst part of it was that he’d only been trying to help me after I’d been injured on a job. But he’d paid the price for my carelessness. Experiencing a thing like that is enough to kill my enthusiasm for even the best apartment, so I’d packed up and moved in with Chase. His house was big enough that a family of six could comfortably avoid each other for a year, and now that he was basically my sidekick, it only made sense for me to use one of his several unoccupied rooms.
“What are you going to do with that thing?” asked Chase.
“Probably stick it in the fridge.”
“Ha ha,” he said. “What are you really going to do with it?”
“We’re going to have to build a safe room of some kind,” I explained. “That’s pretty involved work though. For now I’m just going to stash him on my dresser.”
Ignoring Chase’s doubtful look, I went upstairs and opened the door to my room. The likelihood of me mistaking a pickle jar on my dresser for one that wasn’t the new magical prison for a demonic imp was pretty low, so I set it down next to a stack of books and a few half burnt candles. My head felt more strained than usual, and my mouth was bone dry despite having chugged nearly a gallon of ice water at the burger joint. While Chase was quick to laugh it off, there had been a real danger of death by fiery explosion after the imp had severed that gas line. It set my stomach churning to think about how many times he’d put his life at risk since meeting me.
Lying back on the bed, I rolled onto my side and reached out for a small wooden box that sat on my bedside table. I whispered a command word to unlock it, and I stared down at the six little pills lying within. This was the last of the supply I’d been able to steal from Chase’s pot dealer when we’d last been at his house, and I didn’t dare risk Chase’s life and reputation by pulling such a stupid stunt a second time. If I wanted more after this, I was going to have to fork over serious cash to get them on the street. That was a line I hoped not to cross.
I plucked one of the oxycontin pills out of the box and placed it on my tongue, swallowing it quickly before the coating dissolved. It had been three days since my last dose, and if I was going to wean myself off them, I was going to have to start spreading them out a little more. With a bit of discipline, I could make it through to the end of the month with what I had left. After that I’d get serious about kicking them. It wasn’t a habit I could afford to maintain. The work Chase and I were doing required me to be clear-headed and one hundred percent focused at all times. While the Oxy did help fight back some of demons haunting my every waking thought, it was becoming something of a monster itself. If I didn’t get control of it, the need to get high would take control of me. That was the kind of thing that could very well get me killed when a poorly conjured spell backfired.
“Alex?” called Chase from the hallway.
I snapped the box shut and set it back down on the table just as Chase poked his head in the door.
“What is it?” I asked.
He had that look in his eye. The look that said he was wired and wanted to talk for the next several hours while alternating between energy drinks and coffee. I’d once seen him pour Red Bull into his coffee while trying to fuel an all night coding binge.
“I think I might have our next case,” he said, unable to hide the excitement in his voice.
Ever since becoming my partner, Chase had jumped into the public relations role with both feet. His website brought dozens of new potential clients in each week, although half of them were just flakes and weirdos trolling us for their own personal amusement. Of the remaining fifty percent, most of those people suffered from mental delusions that couldn’t be fixed with the kind of help we had to offer. Only a very small fraction of the overall messages we received were from legitimate new clients needing assistance in supernatural matters.
“Can’t it wait until morning?” I pulled a pillow over my head and curled into a ball. “I’m so tired, Chase.”
“I think you’re going to be impressed with this one,” he said. “I’ve been following the news stories for a couple of weeks now, and I think I just hit on something big. If I’m right, there is definitely something supernatural going on here.”
I threw the pillow at his head, irritated to see him still grinning like a fool after batting it away.
“Tomorrow,” I grumbled as I pulled a corner of the blanket over me before rolling away from the door. “Alex go sleep now.”
“Fine,” he said.
I heard the door close, and I listened for the sound of his heavy footfalls fading down the stairs. Once I was sure he was gone, I flipped on my bedside lamp and got up to turn off the overhead lights. Then I grabbed my bulky over the ear headphones and plugged the jack into my phone, firing up a playlist that would let me cruise through an hour or two of blissful numbness before eventually drifting off to sleep.
Chapter Two
The thing no one ever remembers when they’re about to pop a pill or stick a needle in their vein, is what an abso-fucking-lutely pathetic wreck it leaves you the next day. Magic use had similar side effects, but they were easier to control since the essence of a mage’s power came from within and was therefore always present in their system. All I had to do was flush a little power through my veins to clean up that hot mess. It didn’t do much for the lights on in the bar at three a.m. situation happening in my gut. Actual Oxycontin had been hard to find lately, and I was becoming more and more certain that this batch was what people called Fake 80s. Mostly made up of stepped-on fentanyl, each of the little green monsters varied in potency. Whatever I’d ingested last night had hit me like a freight train.
The shower helped a little. I ran it long and hot, letting the powerful streams of water drown out the tribal drummer beating a rhythm against the inner walls of my skull. It soothed the aches in my muscles, and it served as a physical transition from the peacefulness of sleep to the abject shittiness of being awake. It did not, however, do much for the nausea. When I snapped out of my haze to realize I’d been in far longer than was reasonable, I cranked the tap as cold as it would go. Icy needles of water sending my body into a muscle convulsing spasm of shivers within seconds.
I clenched my hands and bore the freezing water as long as I could. I forced my face under the stream, opening my mouth wide to parch the incessant thirst I could never seem to shake lately. An eternally long feeling thirty seconds later, I slapped at the tap to kill the flow before I shivered with such ferocity that I slipped and cracked my head open. I’d faced death more times than I like to think about, but being discovered naked and dead in the tub was not my idea of a glorious end.
Still trembling from the cold, I toweled dry and dressed in a pair of cut off jean shorts and a Tatooine Summer Camp t-shirt. My room was already warm and muggy. The city had been hit by a heat wave that showed no signs of easing up in the near future. It was a significant shift from the oftentimes cool and rainy summers that plagued the city, but it went a long way towards warming my bones after the frigid shower.
Despite it being nearly eleven o’clock in the morning, Chase didn’t appear to be awake yet. I went through the elaborate process of making coffee to Chase’s exacting and painstaking specifications, thinking for the hundredth odd time how happy I was that making potions wasn’t something mages typically did. At least not like it’s shown in the movies anyway. When the coffee was finally ready, I took a steaming cup of it into the living room where I set it on the table and flopped down on the couch to get comfortable with my Kindle. Busine
ss had been almost too good since word had gotten out about my involvement in taking down the Dark mage Bracchus before he could activate a spell that would allow him to drain the power from every mage or fae he laid eyes on. This was the first day in a month where I could relax in the knowledge that I didn’t have a single commitment. I had no plans other than reading, drinking coffee, getting some wholesome food into me to cleanse away the junk I’d been binging on after using my magic, and hopefully getting back into bed before midnight.
I made it about twenty pages into my book before Chase came downstairs and ruined everything.
“Are you ready to hear my theory now?” he asked from the kitchen.
He came into the room with a cup of coffee in hand and an eager look on his face. He sometimes reminded me of a puppy. As much as I wanted to tell him to fuck off, I decided the hurt feelings weren’t worth it. One way or another, we both knew I was going to hear him out eventually.
I turned the e-reader off and set it on the table with an inward sigh. My book had just been getting good, and I knew that once Chase got going, it was going to be a while before I made it back to my reading.
“Lay it on me,” I said.
I sipped coffee while Chase fetched his laptop. He used his phone to dim the lights — a neat trick considering how dingy and run down the place was — and then he used the same app to activate a ceiling mounted projector which mirrored and magnified his laptop screen on the far wall. It first showed his desktop wallpaper, an image of Shyvana from League of Legends, her dragon form roaring flame behind her. This was replaced a second later with a browser window displaying a news item from nearly a month ago. From what I could see, the story was a two paragraph blurb about an old man found dead in the bushes out in the suburbs. There was mention of a similar case from a month earlier, but the police were saying they didn’t believe the deaths were linked.
“Kind of old news, isn’t it?” I asked.
“It’s one of the first stories that caught my attention after you let me in on the big secret about magic being real and all,” he said. “I don’t know what it was about these old guys, but it kept nagging at me. I’ve been researching it ever since.”
The news story disappeared, an Instagram photo taking its place. It took me a minute to figure out what I was looking at, but I finally realized that the blurry photo depicted an old man’s body lying in the grass.
“What am I looking at here?” I asked.
The cursor on the screen danced around one area of the photo, highlighting a smudge on the victim’s skin that looked like a tattoo.
“You see it?” asked Chase.
“Barely. Can you zoom and enhance or something?”
Chase switched apps and showed me a contrasty cropped version of the image. It was still grainy and difficult to make out, but the lines were more clearly visible now. It looked tribal at first, but the more I stared at it, the more I saw that Chase’s instincts had been right when they’d prompted him to look deeper into the deaths.
“Is that the guy from the news article?” I asked.
“One and the same. This photo is from the account of the guy who found him and then called the police.”
Chase loaded a Facebook post in place of the Instagram image. He clicked on the first photo in the attached gallery, flipping through them one by one. The first photos were of a crime scene and had been taken from some distance. As Chase scrolled through, it became clear that the photographer had gotten closer to the action. At the end of the gallery was a sequence of a body being loaded into an ambulance.
“There,” said Chase. “Different guy.”
The image showed the forensics team lifting the body into the bodybag, its limp arm hanging off to one side and clearly displaying the exact same tattoo.
“How far apart were these taken?” I asked.
“Three months,” he said. “I’ve got a crawler scouring old stories for keywords, but it’s throwing up a lot of noise that’s taking a while to sift through. It’s also slow going cross-referencing relevant social media images since so many of them are locked behind friends only privacy settings.”
“How many similar deaths have you found?”
“One other so far,” he said. “But I can’t find anything indicating whether or not they had the tattoo.”
Chase brought the lights back up, but he left a zoomed in image of the clearer tattoo photo visible on the screen. I studied the lines and shapes done in deep black ink, amazed at how crisp the work was. It looked like it had been done only weeks earlier, although I had a hard time picturing either of these guys walking into a tattoo parlor for a design like that in what looked to be their late nineties.
“What’s the cause of death?” I asked.
“Every source I’ve been able to find says natural causes,” replied Chase. “The only thing that really makes these deaths stand out is the fact that they were all found outside in parks or wooded areas in the middle of heavily populated urban areas. I don’t think the police care too much. They probably think these guys are just wandering away from old age homes and forgetting to take their meds. They haven’t been able to identify any of them, so they’ve all been processed as John Does.”
“This is definitely some kind of weird.”
“Do you recognize the tattoo?” he asked. “Does it mean something?”
“I don’t know.” I stood up and went to the screen, tracing the lines of the tattoo with my finger as though the projection would be able to illuminate their meaning. “It’s vaguely familiar, but I’m not great with ancient languages. It looks occult though. See that symbol in the middle? I think that’s a stylized goat head. Satanists, maybe.”
It was nice to see I could still freak Chase out even with everything he’d learned about the world of magic in the last several months. The look on his face was so priceless I was tempted to take a photo. Instead I smiled reassuringly and told him that, “Satan isn’t real. While it’s true that demons do exist, and that they can be summoned into our world from another plane that happens to resemble the fire and brimstone version of hell, it’s not the same thing. No God, no Satan, no Flying Spaghetti Monster.”
“But, you don’t know that for sure, do you?”
“No, I don’t have proof that those things don’t exist.”
I bit off the rest of what I was about to say. It had never occurred to me to ask, and so I had no idea where Chase’s religious beliefs lay. I’d lived my entire life as an atheist, but with all the crazy stuff I’d seen since learning about magic and the fae, I wouldn’t write it off as nothing more than neat special effects if an angel floated down from heaven to tell me his boss wanted to have a word.
“Anyway,” said Chase. “Back to these old guys who maybe did believe in Satan, because maybe he does exist and is plotting to rise once again to enslave us all. Do you think this is worth looking into?”
“Do we have any other cases?”
“Nothing solid right now,” he said. “I took the site offline temporarily since I was getting so many messages from assholes trying to troll us. We’re going to have to figure out a better way of getting the word out that we’re open for business.”
“Then let’s check out these dead guys,” I said.
“Really?” His face lit up.
“Yeah, why not?” I reached out and picked up my Kindle. “We can start looking into it first thing tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” asked Chase. “But it’s not even noon yet. Why don’t we start today?”
I looked at my book, and then to Chase. Book. Chase. Book? Chase.
“Okay,” I said, swinging my legs over the edge of the couch. I set my Kindle down for good. “What’s your plan?”
Chase and I wandered through the patchy undergrowth in a narrow stretch of forested ravine that had been turned into a city park. Phones in hand, we were trying to match some part of the surrounding landscape to what he’d been able to dig up in his photos. After twenty minutes of searching
, we found what we were both fairly certain was the exact spot.
“It must have been creepy as hell to find a body in here,” said Chase.
From what we’d been able to gather from several news sources, a jogger had come across the corpse on an early morning run while venturing off trail to access a dead end street that bordered the ravine. Despite the sea of houses not fifty yards from where we stood, the area felt unnervingly spooky under the canopy of trees that blocked out much of the mid-day sunlight.
“So the police think the guy collapsed here?” I asked. “And there were no signs of a struggle?”
“That’s what was in the news reports. Like I said, there wasn’t a lot of information. Who knows what the police actually think. I considered trying to hack into the VPD database, but that’s more work than I’m willing to put in just yet.”
I knelt down and ran my hand through the dirt where the body had been found. There was nothing to indicate that anything out of the ordinary had ever happened there. My mage sight revealed no traces of magic or other evidence that might have been missed by the police during their initial search of the scene.
“This place feels wrong to me,” I said. “Are you getting that? Like you wouldn’t want to hang around long if you didn’t have a reason to be here?”
“Not really.” Chase turned off his phone and tucked it back into his pocket. “I mean, the whole knowing there was a dead body here thing is kind of icky, but it seems like a nice enough place. People walk through here all the time.”
I stood up and looked around. The trail on this side of the ravine would take only ten or fifteen minutes to walk before dumping us back at a busy road like the one on which we’d left our car. Since I hadn’t started feeling the negative vibes until we got closer to the spot where the body was found, I continued down the path, surprised to learn that the feeling only got stronger as I walked. I’d expected it to lessen as I put distance between myself and the site of the old man’s death, and it wasn’t until I rounded a bend in the path until I understood why that hadn’t been the case.
Black Market (Black Records Book 2) Page 2