“Can we maybe talk about something else?”
We reached the platform level, and it would have become awkward for me to stick close to Chase had there been anyone around to notice us. As it was, the platform was completely empty with no trains in sight.
“I’m going to head back down,” I told him. “You just keep shaking that ancient ass, and we’ll just have to hope our killer is cutting it as close to midnight as possible. They might be trying to avoid wasting time between kidnapping their victims and performing whatever ritual it is they have in mind.”
“Remind me again why I wanted to work with you?” he asked.
“I honestly have no idea, buddy. I really don’t.”
A bus pulled away from the stop in front of the station, so I went to the bench and sat down in such a way that I could still watch the area. I took my phone out again, scrolling through messages and social media sites without really reading them. My eyes stayed glued to Chase as much as was possible without making it seem obvious I was watching him, straying to check the time every now and again so I could get up and walk around again before the bus came back. We had no reason to suspect the killer knew we were on his trail, but there was no point in advertising our stakeout. There were only so many ways I could avoid leaving the station without looking like I was there to make trouble.
The lights of a train flashed by overhead. It pulled up to the stop with a mechanical screech, and a moment later I saw the feet of a herd of passengers making their way down the stairs and into my line of sight. Chase shuffled in the middle of the small crowd of people, moving slowly enough that he was soon overtaken. He hunched his shoulders and stepped aside to avoid being bowled over by a group of six teen-aged boys who raced down the steps behind him before hopping over the turnstiles without swiping their fare cards. With no one else coming into view, I was just about to turn away when I saw Chase’s eyes widen in the shock of recognition.
He stood bolt upright, discarding his hunched disguise. Waving one hand in the air to catch my attention, he pointed at the knot of kids with the other. I couldn’t quite make out the words he was mouthing frantically, but when he stabbed a finger against his neck and jerked his head towards the kid who’d been the last to clear the turnstiles, I immediately knew what had set him off.
Inked in fresh black lines that couldn’t have been more than a few days old was the tattoo we’d seen on each of the dead old men. The group of kids moved from the light of the station into the surrounding darkness too quickly for me to get a good look, but I was fairly certain I hadn’t seen that tattoo on any of the others.
“You saw it?” asked Chase when he caught up with me half a block later.
“The tattoo? Yeah, I saw it. Did you catch if any of the others had one as well?”
Chase shook his head. “Most of them had ink on their arms or necks, but nothing like that rune that I could see. They walked right past me like they didn’t even see me though. You think we’re missing something?”
“There’s no way this is just a coincidence.”
I slowed my pace a little to make sure we hung well back of the pack of teens. They were heading right towards the spot Karyn had identified as the power nexus, but I didn’t want to spook them before I had an idea of what they were up to. The neighborhood around the SkyTrain station was quiet at this time of night. There were still a few blocks to go before we reached the wooded area surrounding the nexus, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to pass for a couple of pedestrians who just happened to be taking the exact same turns as the kids we were following. They’d quieted down considerably after leaving the SkyTrain station, one of them even casually looking back over his shoulder as though making sure they weren’t being followed. His eyes lingered on me and Chase until I faked a laugh and took Chase’s hand, tugging him off down a side street as though we were just a couple of crazy kids coming home after a date. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the kid slow a little, a look of confusion furrowing his brow as he lagged behind his friends to watch until we were out of sight.
“Good call on breaking off from following them,” Chase said once we were out of sight. “But the old I’m-with-my-boyfriend routine may not have been the best choice here.”
I looked him in the eyes and was immediately reminded of the glamor Karyn had cast over him.
“Guess that explains the weird look that kid gave me. He must think I’ve got a serious case of grandpa love.”
“As long as it didn’t creep him out enough to be extra alert.”
The kids were gone by the time I poked my head around side of the house that had blocked us from view, but we had the advantage of knowing where they were going. Rather than follow them into the nexus, Chase and I set off on the route Karyn had identified for us earlier that night. Yet again, I found myself pushing aside thorny brambles that lusted after my eyeballs with such fervor I half wondered if they’d been animated as part of a protection spell. A quick check with mage sight revealed they were just annoying inanimate plants, but it didn’t save me from the thorn that hooked the sensitive skin a hair’s breadth from my eye socket.
“Shit,” I said a little too loudly.
Chase, who’d been leading the way, stopped in his tracks. He cocked an ear out and held his fist up in what I was pretty sure was a Black Ops or Navy SEAL gesture telling me to shut the hell up. We stood like that for a few minutes, waiting for some indication that my little outburst had attracted unwanted attention.
I took a small step forward and whispered just loud enough for Chase to hear. “I respect your professional caution, but we really need to get eyes on them before they start whatever it is they’re going to do.”
“Okay. Please stay quiet though? Not all of us can put up a magical shield at the last second if someone down there decides to launch a magic missile at us.”
I opened my mouth to explain the unlikelihood of any of those kids being able to conjure anything resembling a magic missile without first performing a very complex spell that would likely just launch the thing straight in the air, but Chase was already moving forward, crouch walking like someone who’d seen one too many war movies. I mimicked the motion, if only to minimize the number of branches and vines that snapped back in my face. Thankfully I didn’t have to keep it up for long.
By the time we got to the small clearing, it was obvious the kids were so wrapped up in their casting that they weren’t paying the slightest bit of attention to anything else. Still, we dropped lower and crawled to the edge of the bushes, lying on our stomachs to observe without being seen.
A small fire burned brightly in the middle of the grassy circle, five of the kids arranged evenly around the edges while the kid with the tattoo stood awkwardly in the middle trying to keep up with the incantation. Firelight flickered in the eyes of the more practiced members of the group, and like some kind of demonic boyband, they moved in unison when they began the first motions of whatever ritual they were attempting to perform.
“These kids look more like a gang than a coven,” Chase said. “I actually think that one over there is wearing an ankle monitor.”
He had a point. They’d all walked with the kind of swagger that was easy to write off as teen posturing, but there was a seriousness to these kids that made me wonder if a few of them didn’t have guns tucked into their waistbands. Three of the five kids were asian, but they all showed at least glimpses of tattoos of demons and mythical beasts that looked vaguely Thai or Vietnamese. I also noticed that every one of them except the kid in the middle had a black bandana either tucked into a back pocket or tied around their wrist.
“They’re amateurs at best,” I said, observing the swirling patterns of magic that were revealed through my second sight. “They’ve got the pattern down, but the magic itself is so sloppy I have to wonder if the three bodies we found were practice runs.”
“Any idea what they’re doing?”
“The spellforms are so foreign to me, I really couldn’
t even guess. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was an initiation of some kind. Notice how the kid in the middle seems to have no idea what’s going on?”
“Should we stop them or something?” asked Chase.
Orange firelight flickered across our hiding spot, casting eerie shadows as it shone through the leaves concealing us from the clearing. Chase’s concern over preventing things before they got out of hand was valid, but I had to weigh the risk of learning what they were doing against the possibility that they could still have plans to track down and kill another elderly person. For all I knew, they could be charging some object with enough power to carry out their crime. It didn’t seem likely, though. There wasn’t enough magic in the circle to really do much of anything drastic. The nexus was spewing out a tremendous amount of raw power, and they’d so far only been able to tap into a tenth of a percent of it.
“Let’s see what they’re up to first,” I said.
Turning my attention back to the group, I saw that they’d made some progress in forming the power flowing from the nexus into something they could work with. It swirled around the kid in the middle, rippling his hair, and pulling sparks and fingers of flame from the fire into a miniature whirlwind that spiraled around his body. He’d completely given up trying to follow along with the chanting of the others. The five kids forming the casting circle had settled into a focused rhythm, repeating the same long phrase over and over again while they stood with arms outstretched, one palm up, the other facing the ground. White light burned in their eyes where the reflection of firelight had danced only moments before. The culmination of their casting approached, but I still couldn’t make out what they were trying to do.
“I think they’re trying to channel power into that kid in the middle,” I told Chase. “To what end, I can’t tell. There’s nowhere else for them to direct that power though.”
“Maybe you’re right about this being just an initiation,” Chase mused. “Instead of jumping him into the gang, they’re giving him his first dose of power then making him go kill someone.”
“Could be.”
I scanned the circle, observing each of the five kids in turn. As rough as their casting was, they were undeniably practiced. It also hadn’t escaped my attention that there were only five of them. If they’d already gone through this ritual three times in the last few months, their group would have begun as just two people. Even with what little I knew of witchcraft, it didn’t seem likely they’d been building their numbers up this way. There was something odd about the arrangement of the kid in the middle. If he was really being initiated into the gang, he should have had a more active role in the proceedings.
Thinking maybe Karyn could help from a distance, I rolled onto my side to dig my phone out of my pocket. It caught on the edge of my jeans as I tugged it free, slipping from my fingers and falling to the ground.
“Alex.” Chase grabbed my shoulder. “Alex, are you seeing this?”
“Just a second.” I clawed for my phone, trying not to lose sight of the black case in the darkness of the bushes.
“Alex!” he hissed loudly.
My fingers closed around the hard plastic of the phone, and I looked back up in time to see what had made Chase so eager to get my attention.
As I watched, the kid in the middle of the circle went limp, body held in the air by the force of the spell that had been cast around him. I say kid, but he’d already aged a decade in the few seconds I’d delayed while scrambling after my phone. As I watched, too shocked to think to record it, his body filled out, taking on the shape of an adult man where the rail thin teenager had stood only a minute earlier. His jawline became more square, and his shoulders widened a little. As the seconds ticked by, his skin began to sag, mottling with liver spots and other signs of aging. His hair lightened to grey, then stark white. In the span of only one or two minutes, he’d aged a good seventy years, his lifeless form collapsing to a heap when the last of his life energy was sucked from his body.
“What the fuck was that,” breathed Chase.
“They used him to channel the power into themselves,” I said, too numb to feel anything beyond amazed curiosity. “It’s a crazy inefficient way to manipulate power from the nexus, but that’s what they just did.”
“They killed him just so they could take on a bit of magic?”
Since Chase didn’t have the ability to view layers of the magic spectrum the way I did, the scene would have looked dull and muted to him in the fading light of the small fire that was now little more than ember and ash. What he couldn’t see was the blinding gush of energy pouring from the ground like white hot lava spewing from a volcano. Having been freed of the constraint of being channeled through the unwitting kid in the center of the casting circle, it now swirled around freely, fizzling out like sparks from a bonfire once it drifted too far from the source.
Chase also couldn’t see how the five kids forming the casting circle now radiated with power. They pulsed with white light, eyes glowing with supernatural ability. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Mages and fae were born with power that they generated within themselves, while witches like Karyn were able to draw it from the elements before shaping it to their will. When Karyn worked a spell I could see the strands coalescing and bending to her will, but they were never a part of her. What these kids had done was like swallowing a swarm of bees that then fought frantically to escape. They’d used their flesh and blood to temporarily contain the energy. To my enhanced vision, it appeared as though they pulsed with energy that threatened to go supernova at any second.
“They charged themselves with magic from the nexus,” I explained. “I don’t know how long it’ll last, but each of them is carrying enough power to do some serious damage.”
“Do we stop them now?” He lowered his voice further and scooted further back into the shadow of the bushes. “Is there something you can do to, I dunno, knock it out of them?”
I matched my voice to his, whispering so lightly I didn’t know if he could hear me.
“No. There’s nothing I can do to stop them. If even half of them target a spell on me, I’m done. My strongest shield can’t protect me from that much raw energy. Even if they completely botch the casting, they could probably vaporize us with a thought.”
“But then they won’t be able to use the power on anyone else right?”
Leave it to Chase to make me feel like a coward. Sacrificing myself to save an innocent bystander hadn’t even entered my mind.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
Chapter Seven
The kids in the circle grinned at each other, but gone was the boisterous energy they’d shown at the SkyTrain station. A frightening calmness had settled over the group, and they moved with a ruthless efficiency. One of them smothered the last glowing embers of the fire while the two others collected the now frail body of their victim. With one person carrying his legs, another holding him under the armpits, they showed surprising discipline in not using their newly gained power to float him out of there with a simple levitation spell. The five teens fell into a silent single file, marching back the way they’d come with near-military discipline.
When they were completely gone from sight, I nudged Chase to get up to follow. We crept along the edge of the clearing until we reached the well concealed path leading out to the main road. I signaled for Chase to hang back, poked my head around the edge of the bushes, and saw that the way was clear.
“Let’s see where they take the body,” I whispered. “But we can’t let them spot us again. It’d be way too suspicious, and I don’t want to risk them using that kind of power near the SkyTrain station.”
“I’m going to go back around and try to get to the station before they do,” Chase said. “I doubt they’ll remember someone as old as I look. Hell, I doubt I could even tell myself apart from any other old guy on the street.”
“Alright. I’ll message you if they don’t go back to the station.”
Not waiting to hear if Chase had anything to add, I darted around the corner and made my way down the path as quickly as I could manage without tripping in the darkness. If I pressed it hard enough, my mage sight let me see a whole new world of magic energy glowing from every plant and a few critters and insects scurrying through the underbrush. It did not, however, do a whole hell of a lot for helping me see things like the rock that nearly sent me sprawling headfirst onto the ground. I regained my balance without breaking stride, picking up my pace once the bushes thinned and made passage a little easier. If I squinted through the leafy undergrowth, I could just make out the supernatural glow of the kids down the trail. I closed the gap until I figured I could follow them without accidentally giving myself away if I stepped on a branch or something.
The trail ended at a clump of bushes that had intentionally been left unpruned in order to shield the opening from uninvited guests. I stepped through the bushes and emerged onto a fairly major road with a steady stream of cars zipping by even at this late hour. It seemed insane that the kids would take such care to not be discovered only to haul a corpse along such a busy road, but then I caught the shimmer of a spell emanating from the spiky-haired at the back of the line.
To confirm my hunch, I cut off my mage sight and observed the group as any other person might see them. Sure enough, they disappeared as soon as I lost the ability to view the energy that practically oozed from their pores. In the darkness of the moonless sky, it didn’t take much talent to conjure a rough cloaking spell that mirrored whatever background they walked past. As soon as they marched into the glow of a street light, I could easily make out the choppy and distorted illusion. Anyone with a trained eye would spot the incongruity immediately, but to the drivers passing by at high speed, it wouldn’t even register.
Viewing the scene with mage sight once again, I saw that the kid working to maintain the cloaking spell had drained away a significant chunk of his temporary power infusion. Where the others burned bright with the energy they carried, this kid’s aura had faded to a dull shimmer. The spell wouldn’t hold much longer, and that meant they were probably close to dumping the body.
Black Market (Black Records Book 2) Page 6