Karyn reached into her purse and retrieved what looked suspiciously like a liquid eyeliner pen. She uncapped it, and with a few deft strokes, she painted dark smears around her eyelids just behind the lashes. I squinted in the darkness, leaning in close to watch while she dabbed three small dots in the form of a triangle on each closed eyelid before capping the pen and shoving it back in her purse.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Proprietary formula,” she snapped back. “It’s like Mage Sight Plus. Lets me see a few shades of the spectrum not even you can detect.”
Karyn closed both eyes and mumbled a short incantation in a language too foreign for me to make any sense of. As with every time I’d worked with a witch, I thanked the stars that I didn’t have to mess around with potions. They were far too finicky and had a tendency to go terribly wrong if not concocted just the right way. It was bad enough making a mistake with the power flowing through my own veins. I could only imagine how badly things could go wrong with a potion applied so close to the eyes. I suffered an annoying spasm of admiration for how confident and adept Karyn was with her craft.
Whatever Karyn had done to herself kicked in quickly. She paced the edge of the circle, pausing every now and then to pluck a bent and broken blade of grass so she could sniff it before tossing it aside. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have taken her for a charlatan putting on a show before ripping me off. The thing about Karyn though, was that she had the skills to back up her arrogance. She’d proven it to me in spades the last time we worked together. In fact, she’d been so proficient that she’d elevated my opinion of witches in general.
Of course, I’d never admit that to her face.
“What were the dates of the other murders?” Karyn asked after she’d inspected the center of the circle.
I still stood at the edge of the clearing, not wanting to mess up the scene while she went about her witchy business. I couldn’t remember the dates off the top of my head, so I pulled out my phone, wincing at the bright white light shining from the screen. The dates and locations were all in a file Chase had prepared for me, and I read them off one by one.
“New moons,” she said after a pause. “Just like the one tomorrow.”
“And I suppose that’s significant?”
She tilted her head and stared at me like I’d just asked her if the earth was flat or round. “What the fuck do you think?”
“Okay, so why is it significant then?”
Karyn bent down and picked up a pinch of blackened ash. She lifted her fingers to her lips, then blew softly, sending the ash out into a cloud that spiraled upwards like a miniature tornado. Barely visible in the dim evening light, the trail of ash stretched out into a thin line as it rose up towards the sky. After a few feet it dissipated to the point that I lost sight of it.
“Every site we’ve visited tonight is an antipodal nexus,” she explained. “Natural power nexuses like this one are attuned to different natural forces. Some are powered by earth, some air, others by various celestial bodies. These all happen to be tied to the moon. Given the potency of what I’m seeing here, they’re at the height of their strength when the moon is new.”
I went to join her at the center of the circle. The pile of ash looked like nothing more than the remains of a fire neighborhood kids might light in their tame impression of a bush party. Unlike a party fire, however, there were no beer cans or cigarette butts lying among the ashes.
“So if someone is using these nexuses to murder old men, we’re most likely dealing with a witch?”
“Not necessarily.” Karyn stood up and brushed her hands clean of ash. “Could be any number of fae. Hell, could be druids.”
“Shit, there are druids in Vancouver now?”
Karyn smiled and shook her head. “Thank the Goddess, no. Most of them are up the coast living as far away from the pollution of the city as they can.”
“Any guess as to what someone might have been doing here? If we can figure out the reason, we might be able to narrow down who’s behind this.”
“No idea.” Karyn bit her lip and surveyed the area once more. “There’s an informality to it that makes me believe it’s an amateur or wild fae. If we were dealing with a coven, this place would be warded and maintained as a semi-permanent casting circle. This feels hasty and a bit lazy. It’s like whoever did this was either in a hurry or just didn’t care about the details that much.”
“Could it be a local hedge witch still figuring things out?”
Karyn shook her head. “Doubt it. If anything, hedges put too much emphasis on ritual and adherence to whatever spells they’ve managed to scrounge up. This feels more like something a bunch of frat boys would set up as a hazing ritual.”
“Gross.”
“Tell me about it.”
I nudged the pile of ash with my toe. This was completely foreign territory to me. If Karyn had no clear idea of what the purpose of the circle was, I didn’t see how I was going to figure it out on my own.
“This isn’t a summoning circle, is it?” I asked.
“Not like any I’ve seen before. It’s so much easier to just draw a summoning circle with chalk and use an incantation to summon a demon. Killing old guys and setting up a natural circle like this is way too much extra work.”
“There’s nothing else of interest here?” I asked, desperate for any tiny clue that would give me something to go on.
“Nope,” was all she said.
Frustrated and worried I might be missing something important, I pulled up the photos of the dead men. Zooming in on each of the areas surrounding their bodies revealed nothing like the circle we were standing in. There were no hints of foul play, magic or otherwise.
“Oh,” I said as I scrolled past a closeup of the tattoo that Chase had isolated for me. I tilted the phone towards Karyn. “Does this mean anything to you?”
Karyn grabbed the phone from my hand with such force that her nail sliced into the skin on the back of my hand.
“Ow!”
A thin red line of blood welled up along the scratch. I put it to my mouth in a lame attempt at keeping the blood from smearing all over my shirt.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?” Karyn snapped. “Do you have any idea what this means?”
“Um, obviously not,” I mumbled around my hand. “Is it bad?”
“That would be putting it mildly. This is some next level arcana. I’ve read every last scrap of information on power runes I’ve been able to get my hands on, and I’ve never seen it before.”
I zoomed in on the tattoo, turning the phone this way and that to try to make sense of the rune shapes. I had only a passing knowledge of runes and written magic, and although it seemed to be vaguely magic-like, it didn’t suggest anything specifically dangerous to me.
“How do you know it’s that powerful if you’ve never seen it before?” I asked.
“How do you know the pyramids or the Parthenon are old? If you’re familiar enough with the base forms, it’s easy to see. It’s almost a compound of several runes, but they’re mingled together in a way that doesn’t make sense. See this one?” Karyn traced a path along one part of the tattoo. “This is almost the rune for need but it’s worked into the form for chalice. It’s simple, but incredibly complex at the same time.”
“Do you know anyone who might be able to read it?”
Karyn seemed to think about it before shrugging. “I consider myself something of a local expert. The only other person I know who might be able to decipher it is somewhere way off the grid in Borneo right now.”
“Do you need to look around anymore?” I asked, feeling a chill creep down my spine. “Or can we get out of here and back to civilization?”
For the first time since I’d known her, Karyn nodded sympathetically and led the way out of the thicket. She held thorny vines aside until I’d completely passed, and she even apologized after stopping so suddenly that I bumped into her. Once we were free of the hidden
casting circle, she made a beeline for the street and the comforting glow of the overhead street lights.
“Alex, I don’t know what this means, but it’s not good. If you send me any images you’ve found where those tattoos are visible, I’ll work to unravel their meaning. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it before the next new moon.”
“You think someone else is going to die tomorrow night?”
“It would fit the pattern,” she said.
“And we have no idea where they’re going to strike?”
Karyn gestured vaguely out across the city behind her.
“It could be anywhere,” she said. “Power nexuses like these are everywhere. With a ley line map, a star chart, and a few hours; I could probably get you a list of the specific locations you’d have to watch for. But there are probably two dozen within the circle of where the three bodies were found. There’s no way we could cover them all.”
“Could you relay the relevant criteria to Chase?” I asked, already dialing his number. “The guy’s practically a wizard with a computer. Maybe he can narrow it down somehow.”
“What the hell, Alex,” Chase mumbled on the other end of the line. “It’s after two a.m.”
“I know, but this is important, I’m going to hand you over to Karyn.”
“No. Please don’t do tha—”
Karyn reached out to take the phone, immediately launching into a difficult to follow conversation on zeniths and tertiary celestial arcs that left me baffled. I could only hope that Chase knew how to make sense of the information so we could narrow down the search zone. In fewer than twenty-four hours, someone was most likely going to end up dead if we couldn’t intervene. The only way we were going to do that was if we could pinpoint the exact spot of the next murder; something I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea of how to go about doing alone.
Chapter Four
I returned home to find lines of text scrolling down both monitors of Chase’s computer. A sticky note on his keyboard warned me not to touch anything. As with most of the custom search programs he created, I had no idea what was happening on either screen. Most of it was what looked like random strings of numbers, symbols, and letters jammed together in long blocks of text. I had about as much chance of figuring out the meaning behind the code as I did deciphering the tattoo rune on the dead old men, so I went up to my room and fell into bed.
Sleep was a long time coming. My head ached, and after lying there for twenty minutes I realized I’d been clenching my jaw for hours. The little wooden box in my bedside drawer practically sang to me, whispering promises of relief from the pulsing in my skull and the thoughts that kept me awake. My skin was coated in a light sheen of sweat. Instead of going for the box and the little pill within, I got out of bed and changed into a pair of pajama shorts and a tank top. Still feeling unnaturally hot, I went to the bathroom to splash icy water on my face. I wet a cloth and draped it over the back of my neck, bracing my hands on the edge of the sink while I stared at my reflection in the mirror.
No amount of concealer could hide the bags under my eyes. Aside from chemically induced near blackouts, I hadn’t had a restful night’s sleep in weeks. It was beginning to affect me more than I wanted to admit. My left eye twitched in sync with the flickering of the cheap fluorescent bathroom light. No matter how hard I tried to focus my vision, the outline of my reflection remained a fuzzy around the edges.
There were herbal remedies that Karyn could probably have given me to help me get back on track, but that would have required telling her why I needed them. While I didn’t exactly go out of my way to keep my sordid past a secret, it wasn’t something I was all that proud of. I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that anything had changed between Karyn and I after her drastic shift in attitude upon seeing the rune tattoo. While we’d found a tenuous balance that allowed us to be civil when we worked together, she wasn’t exactly the person I wanted to confess my near constant state of terror to. Maybe she’d understand the nightmares that plagued me. Maybe she’d have sympathy for the lives I’d ruined in my pursuit of the dark mage, Bracchus.
Or maybe she’d tell me to suck it up. She’d seen her share of bad things, of that I was certain. She’d never talked about it, but it was there in the way she assessed risk at every turn. Evident in the professional distance she put between herself and everyone she worked with. Karyn Willowshade had a reputation for ruthless proficiency when she was on a job; something I experienced firsthand every time my path crossed with hers. If she had feelings of remorse and regret, she sure as hell didn’t go around looking for shoulders to cry on. At least not from people like me.
I flipped the light off in the bathroom and shuffled back to my room. If sleep wouldn’t come, the best I could do was try to calm my brain down. Slipping my headphones over my ears, I selected a long and mellow chillstep mix and settled back into bed. With any luck, Chase’s program would spit out a lead sometime before the sun came up. Since time of death for each of the murders had been established as somewhere around midnight, it was looking like I’d have another late night ahead of me. If push came to shove, I’d do what I had to in order to stay alert enough to catch the killer before they struck again.
Even if that meant accepting help from the little green monsters I kept locked away on my bedside table.
It was as though the heavens sensed my mood when I woke later that morning to the sound of Chase calling my name. Flat and grey, the sky seemed to press down on me with the weight of an incoming rain storm. My eyelids were sticky with crusted sleep, and my mouth was dry as a cotton ball. The headphones had slipped down in the night, the cuffs pressing into my trachea while I slept. It took me a few seconds to untangle myself from the cord before I managed to sit upright and notice that Chase was now standing in the doorway.
“Is your program done?” I croaked. “Do you have a location for us?”
Chase shook his head. “The parameters are way too broad. Karyn wasn’t kidding when she said there were a lot of possibilities to sort through. I’ve tapped a botnet to add extra processing power, but we’re still looking at a few hours at best. Sometime this afternoon at the outside.”
“Then you’re yelling my name from across the house because…?”
“We have a new client waiting downstairs.”
“Are you kidding me? We don’t have time for a new client, Chase. I’m barely handling this side project you came up with.”
“A side project that doesn’t pay anything,” he added quickly. “Trust me, you’re going to want to talk to this guy. I think his shoes are worth more than my car.”
I slipped my feet over the edge of the bed and stood up, flipping my loose and shaggy bed hair back over my shoulders. “So, like fifty bucks?”
“Har har.” Chase gave me a quick once over with his eyes. “No time for a shower, but maybe change and put on some deodorant? I think I can smell you from here.”
Chase turned and left before I could fire off a comeback. After a moment of hesitation I ventured a sniff at my armpits and decided he was right. Still dropping frames from the all too brief amount of sleep I’d managed, I struggled into a pair of black jeans and a grey v-neck t-shirt. I ran my fingers through my hair in a lame attempt at working out the tangles from last night’s bushwhacking. Pieces of dried up leaves and even a decent sized twig fell to the ground around me.
With another quick stop in the bathroom to pee and splash water on my face, I took a swig of mouthwash, gargled on the way down the stairs, and surreptitiously spat in the kitchen sink before entering the living room. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it was definitely not the wide-shouldered Asian man standing next to the coffee table with hands clasped in front of him. Dressed in an immaculately tailored suit and what looked like thousand dollar shoes, the guy looked like the head of the Secret Service walking the runway during New York Fashion Week. When he moved to remove his sunglasses, a subtle bulge strained the fabric of his jacket. I didn’t doubt for a
second that this guy could murder me five different ways with those sunglasses alone.
“Greetings, Mrs. Black,” he said in a clipped voice which gave me the impression he was a man used to giving orders. “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”
“Uh, no problem. What can we help you with?”
I shifted uneasily, wondering if I should offer the guy a seat. He seemed perfectly content to stand, and I wouldn’t have blamed him if he didn’t want to sit on Chase’s ragged furniture. Not sure if I could keep myself from fidgeting if I stayed standing, I perched myself on the armrest of the couch. Chase loitered in the background, settling in at his computer and making a show of fine tuning his algorithm even though I knew he was listening as intently as I was.
“I represent Mr. Trang of Trang Enterprises. Last month, our warehouse was broken into. Despite our advanced security systems, we have been unable to make any progress in determining the method by which the criminals are gaining access to our building.”
“Have you gone to the police about this?”
“The police were informed as soon as we discovered the intrusion,” he explained. “They too have been unable to come to any useful conclusions.”
“Why come to me? And why wait until now?” I asked.
The man snapped his chin forward in a curt nod. “You are not the first person we have turned to for assistance in this matter. It was only by chance I discovered your consulting business. It is because of your unique talent that Mr. Trang has explicitly requested I secure your services. Mr. Trang suspects that whoever is targeting us is working outside the bounds of mere human ingenuity.”
“What makes you think it’s not an inside job?” asked Chase, abandoning all pretense of not paying attention.
The man glared at Chase. “The loyalty of Mr. Trang’s employees is unassailable. There is no concern that anyone in our operation would dare betray Mr. Trang.”
Black Market (Black Records Book 2) Page 4