Blood and Magick

by James R. Tuck

  Or so I’ve heard.

  Couches lined one wall. They were well-used, broken in to comfort by people sitting on them. An electronic shiatsu foot massager lay in front of each couch.

  The opposite wall was lined with fully loaded bookshelves. Shelves sagged and bowed from the weight of thousands of pages. Books jutted haphazardly in stacks. The music of the club is too loud for a television to be worth a damn, so we provide books for entertainment.

  There was also a vanity table and mirror with an array of cosmetics so the girls could spruce up before going back out to the customers.

  Only one dancer was in the room right now, everyone else had been sent home. Because of her condition, this girl lived at the club just like I did. Veronica Maria Benedetta Bellini, Ronnie to her friends. Her condition? She wasn’t knocked up. She was beset by spiders.

  Not just any spiders, she was psychically linked to a brood of supernatural ghost spiders. They were the offspring of Longinus and a Were-spider named Charlotte. Yes, that Longinus. The immortal cursed by God Longinus.

  She became bonded to the murderous little yo-yos after being kidnapped by an ex-Yakuza assassin with a demon trapped under his skin.

  Like I said, normal is a relative term.

  I had saved her from the assassin, and she had saved me from the spiders by letting them imprint on her.

  Now they followed her around, skittering along ceilings and walls, watching out for her, being creepy. She’s their grounding, their anchor that keeps them from going on a murder spree.

  It makes it hard for her to have an apartment.

  The pet deposit would be outrageous.

  I looked up. A few of her spiders clung to the ceiling. They hung upside down, all of them bobbing gently in unison, like they were listening to the same music. They had grown; their translucent bodies now the size of baseballs. Long, spindly legs folded out from each of them. The legs lifted, waving around in unison, all of the spiders moving as one mind.

  Once again for the record, creepy as fuck.

  Ronnie sat on the red velvet couch, talking to Special Agent Heck. Either he didn’t notice the spiders hanging over his head or he was one ice-cube-cool SOB. Sophia stepped away from me, moving to watch her kids. I started moving toward the government secret agent and the exotic dancer. As I walked, I ran my thumbs under the straps of my shoulder holster, settling it into place.

  The matched set of Colt 1911s hung under my arms in spring-steel pressure holsters. They would slip out with a good solid tug, but otherwise were held tight like a baby in its mother’s arms.

  The harness also held two long knives under the guns. The blades were pointed up, handles hanging down for ready draw in a split second. Both blades were ten inches, made of solid stainless steel with a silvered edge. Ten inches is a good length for monster hunting. The blade is long enough to get under most rib cages, and the edge is long enough to get through a human-sized neck. And if your monster is more than human sized, then it’s still big enough to do some real damage.

  The knives hung where I normally carry spare magazines, so I had them in a waist bandolier. Ten clips of .45-caliber ammunition. Seventy bullets besides the sixteen that were in the guns already. If eighty-six bullets weren’t enough for me to carry, then we were well and truly screwed. Half of them were regular bullets for the witches, half were silver bullets in case we ran into any more vampires. The bandolier also held my trusty snub-nosed Taurus .44 at the small of my back, ready in case of a pinch.

  I stepped up and the conversation died. Special Agent Heck looked over at my shirt. He read it. Read it again.

  “I don’t get it.”

  It was a forest green shirt with the words SPEAR MENTAL MONKEY stamped across the chest in bright blue letters. I waved his statement away. “It’s from a story. If you don’t get it, I don’t have time to explain it.” I flopped down beside Ronnie. My legs stretched out, red dinosaur-skin boots blending against the red velvet of the couch. “So what are you two crazy kids talking about?”

  “Funny you should ask, Mr. Chalk. Perhaps you could clear up the issue we were discussing.”

  Ronnie’s cheeks turned red. Ronnie is as Italian as lasagna, her skin a constant shade of Mediterranean tan. For her to blush is something else.

  My eyebrow went up. “I can’t wait to hear this. But first things first. Is the wizard ready for questioning?”

  “Almost. Father Mulcahy will come get us. You had someone show up who is helping with the prep work.”

  Someone show up?

  Before I could ask, Ronnie piped in. “Boothe and Josh are here. Boothe is helping Father Mulcahy.”

  “What’s Josh doing?”

  “Making coffee.”

  Boothe was the bouncer at Polecats. He was a Wererabbit who I met when all the Leonidas shit was happening. Being a Were-rabbit may not sound impressive, but Boothe was one tough hombre. He could more than hold his own.

  Josh was Boothe’s partner of three years. He was also a tough hombre . . . for an accountant. He’d helped us with the taxes on the club this year.

  Yes, we pay taxes. I can handle monsters; I would prefer to avoid the IRS. Talk about some scary shit.

  “So what burning question can I answer, then?”

  Special Agent Heck’s face was straight and bland as an unsalted cracker. “Why do you own a strip club?”

  “Why wouldn’t I own a strip club? Not that it is, technically, a strip club.” The ordinances in this county only allow a choice between nude dancing and alcohol sales. I chose the alcohol sales, so the dancers didn’t actually strip. They just danced onstage wearing very little clothing. Technically Polecats was a bikini bar.

  “But why would you pick this particular business?”

  “I used to work in clubs like this. They make money. Actually, they make a metric ass-ton of money. And do you know what takes a metric ass-ton of money to do?”

  “What’s that, Mr. Chalk?”

  “Monster hunting. Bullets aren’t cheap. Start putting silver on them and without a hefty revenue stream, you won’t be able to afford them.” I realized that he probably didn’t have to worry about the cost of bullets since he worked for the government. They don’t worry about the cost of thousand-dollar hammers, why would they worry about the cost of silver bullets?

  “Why don’t you charge people to handle their monster problems?”

  The laugh burst out of me, shotgunning from my mouth in a blast. It took me a second to pull it together. Special Agent Heck just looked at me the whole time. “Oh, wait. You’re serious?”

  He nodded sharply.

  I sighed. “Look, monsters usually stay out of sight, you know that. They try to avoid being exposed to humanity any more than they have to. If humans knew about monsters and decided to do something about them, then the monsters all know they would lose. Humans outnumber them hundreds to one. Humans can move during the day, humans can use silver, humans can pray and have faith. In short, it would be a bloody massacre, but the humans would survive and monsters would be destroyed.”

  Heck held up his hand. “What does this have to do with you owning a strip club?”

  “It’s not a strip club, but the point is that monsters stick to the shadows. They hunt the herd of humanity like lions on the Serengeti, taking the weak and the injured. They prowl the seedy underbelly of the world, preying on the people who can’t or won’t go to the police. People who usually won’t be missed. Their victims don’t have any support system, and they surely don’t have any damn money. Besides, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself taking money from people who had been through the hell of a monster encounter, so I have this business to fund things.”

  “So you have young women like Miss Bellini dance out of gratitude to you for saving their lives?”

  Before I could speak, Ronnie leaned forward. “Let me answer that one.”

  I smiled. “Go ahead.”

  Ronnie turned to face Special Agent Heck. “I don’t dance h
ere out of gratitude; I dance here because I’m a dancer. I was a dancer before I met Deacon; it’s what I do. And let me tell you, I have danced in some really terrible clubs.” A shudder ran through her compact fame. “Here, I’m safe. Deacon, Kat, and Father Mulcahy take care of me and all the girls here. Deacon never asked. This is what I do, so now I do it to help the next girl who is in the situation I was. Monsters love strippers, so there are a lot of girls like me.”

  “So you choose to be a dancer?”

  I raised my hand up in a “stop” gesture. “Wait just a second.” I looked at Special Agent Heck. Hard. “Did you think that I run around saving pretty girls from monsters and then being like ‘you owe me, now shake your ass for me’?”

  He shook his head. “Not exactly like that, but it’s such a strange dynamic that I am curious.”

  I shrugged. “Well, that’s not what happens. Not at all. It was suggested to me by . . . well, by someone who isn’t with us any longer. I needed money, and she reminded me how much money these kinds of clubs make, and the fact that they are always going to be around, no matter what. It seemed like a smart move.”

  I wasn’t going to tell Special Agent Heck about the first year of hunting.

  When my family was killed, I went off the deep end. Drank myself into oblivion for days on end, locked in the house where they were murdered. Not eating, barely sleeping, pouring tears like blood from a gut shot.

  I could still see those walls. The same walls we painted that light blue in one weekend of beer and paint fumes, giddy and laughing about the silly stupid stuff that couples share. The taste of Southern Comfort washed back into my throat in memory.

  Those pale blue walls, the symbols smeared on them in swaths of dark brown dried blood.

  The blood of my family.

  Whoa. STOP.

  A warm hand touched my leg. I shook my head to clear it. I opened my eyes to Ronnie leaning forward. I could feel the hard, slick scar tissue on her palm through my jeans. Her face was soft, framed by a mass of tight, dark ringlets, dark eyes filled with pity for me.

  Why did I keep going back to that day? I had pushed those memories deep, burying them as far as I could, layering over it to keep getting up every day. Why was it so raw and open now?

  Realization clicked.

  Athame.

  That bitch. When she stuck me with her soulsword earlier, it ripped that memory free and threw me back to that awful day. Now it was right under the surface of my mind like a shark under bloody water–circling, swimming, hunting, waiting for the first sign of weakness to bite.

  That’s great. Just what I needed.

  What was I thinking?

  The first year of hunting.

  That’s right.

  After I started hunting, I sold my business, sold my house, cashed out my retirement, and cashed in the life insurance policy. It was a fire sale, everything burned in my pursuit of revenge. I had a pile of cash to buy weapons and equipment.

  It didn’t last long. Killing the Nephilim bastard who murdered my family just about wiped it out. When I began hunting other monsters, it got hand to mouth pretty quick.

  Now, monsters have to live in this world. You find a lair of vampires or Nephilim, or even rogue lycanthropes, and usually they will have a stash of ill-gotten gains to plunder. Even that doesn’t last long.

  I had been at the ragged edge when I met Dolly, a dancer who had great taste in clothes but terrible taste in men.

  Well, not men, elves.

  Dolly got a taste for the Keebler gone bad and just couldn’t stay away. When I met her, she had come to Father Mulcahy for help dealing with a real mean piece of shit named Mael.

  Typical story, good-hearted girl with low self-esteem and daddy issues finds some asshole who’ll reinforce those feelings while drinking up the money she earns and smacking her around to make himself feel powerful.

  Typical in my world, anyway.

  This guy wasn’t some redneck, though. He was the third son from the throne of some elven royal family. His lineage gave him a hefty dose of supernatural ability to back up his threats to kill her when she left.

  Anyway, she went to Father Mulcahy after this pointyeared bastard decided he would sell her to an ogre, and the priest called me in. I discovered that silver only hurts elves, it takes iron to kill them, so I bashed his skull in with a crowbar. After the dust settled, there was a pile of elvish gold. I tried to hand it over to Dolly so she could start a new life, but she was having none of it. That’s when she proposed using the money to start a club as a way to fund future hunts.

  She was even the one who named it Polecats.

  We had lost Dolly a year into being open.

  Not to another abusive elf. Not to anything supernatural at all.

  No, Dolly was taken out on the slow train of breast cancer at the age of twenty-five.

  Life fucking sucks sometimes, even without monsters.

  31

  “Sometimes.”

  I snapped out of the memory, still on the couch with Ronnie. Sophia sat on the stairs across the room watching the kids play. Special Agent Heck was standing by the bookshelves a few feet away. Tiff was next to him. It had been her voice that brought me around.

  I sat up. “Sometimes what?”

  She smiled at me and began to walk over. “Sometimes you drift off on us.”

  “Must be inconvenient,” Heck said.

  “It usually only happens when things are calm.”

  “I am in the room,” I said.

  Tiff began walking toward me. She had been gone from the bedroom when I finished my shower so I hadn’t seen her since. A pair of pants that fit close and were made of heavyduty leather hugged her hips and thighs like a jealous lover. They were tucked deep into sturdy combat boots with a tirethick tread that laced up over her calves. A short-cropped, leather-pants–matching jacket was slung over a simple black T-shirt.

  The Judge rode her hip, leaned forward for a more natural draw. A knife hilt stuck up from her right boot and, even though I couldn’t see it, I knew she had a .44 snubnosed revolver at her back to match mine. Dressed for combat, she looked dangerous.

  She looked sexy as hell.

  Planting her feet on either side of my legs, her hands went to her hips. My eyes traced up her body to her face. A smile crossed her lips that was a little bit wicked. Her hair had more tousle than normal and was still wet on the ends. It fell, like always, over her missing eye.

  She wasn’t wearing her eye patch, though.

  “Like what you see?”

  I reached up for her. “Oh, hell yes.” Leaning in, she planted her hands on the back of the couch. Her lips pressed to mine. Damp hair brushed the side of my face, carrying the warm honeysuckle scent of her.

  Too soon she broke the kiss and stood up.

  Ronnie sighed. “One day a man is going to look at me like that.”

  “You and me both, sister.” Boothe spoke from beside the doorway. I hadn’t seen him there. Then again, I’d been a bit distracted.

  Tiff laughed. “You better not let Josh hear you say that.”

  “True. He’d kick my ass.”

  Boothe was taller than me, hitting around 6'7'' and pushing 280 pounds of lean bodybuilder muscle. He was a fifth Dan in hapkido, which means nothing to you if you aren’t into martial arts, but trust me, it meant he was a serious asskicker. Combine that with the strength and speed of a lycanthrope, and you have a deadly combination. That’s why he was the bouncer for the club.

  Josh stood about 5'6'' and might top the scales at 120 pounds. He was slim and boyish. Like all the Were-rabbits, he had some martial arts training and knew how to use a

  162 James R. Tuck

  gun, but he would pick doing karaoke or golf on Sunday over hitting the gym or dojo. If he was kicking Boothe’s ass, it was only because Boothe let him.

  “We’re ready to get started with this guy in here, Deacon.”

  “I’ll be along in a second.”

  He
stepped back out of the room. My hand reached down, grabbing Tiff ’s as I stood. Our fingers entwined. Hers were slender, still soft and smooth. Mine were more scar than skin, the fingers hard with calluses. My knuckles jutted up, enlarged from being used as bludgeons. The skin was darker than hers, permanently stained with gunpowder residue. So much that it dulled the colors in the tattoo on the back of my hand.

  Lifting her hand, I pressed my lips against it. Just quickly and away, a soft kiss. Her blue eye stared, a smile quirking up the corner of her luscious mouth. “What do you want?”

  “Who says I want anything?”

  “The way you’re being sweet does.”

  The chuckle surprised me, rising up through my chest.

  “Okay, okay. I do want something. No, I need something from you.”

  “You want me to stay here with Sophia and the kids while you question Mr. Wizard out there. Am I right?”

  “Actually, I want you and Ronnie and Special Agent Heck to stay here and guard Sophia and the kids.”

  “Are you putting me on the sidelines?”

  I lifted my hand up. “I swear that’s not what I’m doing, little girl. I have to go do this. I want you and Ronnie to keep the kids out of that room. We’re going to have to do things that no child should ever see. More important, we still have two witches out loose who are after those kids.”

  “You don’t think you kicked their ass enough to stop them from trying again?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Slacker.”

  I pushed her playfully. “Keep talkin’, little girl. Your mouth is writing checks your ass can’t cash.”

  Her smile was a beautiful thing. “Promises, promises.” She waved me away with a slender hand. “Go. Get your information. I’d like to get some sleep tonight.”

  “You and me both.”

  I didn’t want to leave her, but I turned and went to question a warlock.

  32

  The main room of Polecats was still bright as hell. The houselights filled the room with light. The main stage ran down the center of the room. The brass poles on each end ran from the waist-high stage up to the ceiling. The closest one had a warlock handcuffed to it.