“Who is Kedrax?” McManus’s voice asked from the darkness surrounding her.
Bianca opened her eyes and blinked several times. Everything came back into focus and the pounding in her head receded a little more. She turned to find McManus’s ice blue eyes mere inches from her face. “I’m sorry?”
“You frightened the living daylights out of me, you know?” His tone was hoarse with concern, and he brushed her left cheek with his thumb, just like he had last night when he wiped away her tears. A tingling warmth flooded her cheeks and made her stomach flip.
“You and me both,” she croaked, sitting up.
“Don’t do it again,” he said, the tightness around his eyes easing a little.
She found herself on the shop counter. McManus must’ve carried her.
“So who is Kedrax?” he asked again.
“Um,” she said, thinking fast. “He’s my new . . . cat. I thought I was at home and heard him meow.”
“I only saw that big black one.”
She placed her hand on her head to try to stop the world from spinning again. “He’s shy.”
“Careful.” He wrapped both hands around her waist to keep her from falling off the counter. “What the fuck happened?”
“There was dark thaumaturgic energy trapped behind the bookcase doorway. I wasn’t prepared for it, but I’ll be okay in a minute.”
“It really hit you that hard.” His face was so close to hers, his breath brushed her cheek.
She closed her eyes and breathed in his musky scent. It was warm and comforting. “Do you ever think of the time we . . .” She dropped her eyes from his face. “You know.” Where had that come from?
His hands softened against her waist. “To be honest, we were so drunk I hardly remember.”
“Oh!” she said.
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about what we could do,” he whispered next to her ear.
Her cheeks warmed.
McManus dropped his hands and stood back. “How come other witches don’t feel that dark energy the way you do?”
She tried to squash her disappointment at his obvious change of subject. “The Sins have a long history of being sensitives, something to do with the cubii blood. My mother is one of the most famous. A talent she passed onto me, thankfully. It helped me to calibrate the forensic thaumaturgic equipment I’ve developed.”
She took a deep breath and held it in her lungs. Surrounding McManus and herself in a pure white energy field, she protected them from the dark thaumaturgic essence. He wouldn’t even know she was doing it. I hope.
With Kedrax’s comforting presence in her mind, she jumped from the counter. Her bag was on the floor where she must’ve dropped it, and she lifted it over her back and put both arms through the straps. “Okay, let’s see what’s in there.”
“Are you sure?”
No. What she really wanted to do was go home and bury her head under her blankets. “I have to find out.” With hidden rooms and magic locks, not to mention that much dark energy, it couldn’t be good. “I’m more prepared now.”
“Right,” McManus said, unclipping his shoulder holster and pulling out his gun.
“I thought you handed that in.”
He grinned, his ice blue eyes crinkling at the corners under his thick blond eyebrows. “It’s my spare.” The smile slid from his face as it set in a mask of concentration, then he gave her one quick incline of his head. “Let’s go.”
She opened the secret doorway again. This time when the dark energy flowed toward her, she could almost see it, but it washed over and around the protective shell she’d set up, leaving them untouched.
“Okay,” she said aloud, and switched on the flashlight.
“Here, I’ll go first,” McManus said, gently pushing past her.
Just beyond the opening, a staircase led down into the darkness. As the detective took the first step, light burst into life on either side of them, negating the need for the flashlight. Sconces attached to the wall burned with a magical luminescence, marking the progress of their descent and pushing back the darkness.
“What the fuck is happening?” McManus asked over his shoulder.
“It’s just an automatic response to our presence.” Unease stirred in the pit of her stomach.
“This isn’t right, it shouldn’t be this simple to just walk in here,” he said, as if reading her mind.
“Hmm . . .” She swallowed the knot of fear in her throat. “Just be very careful how you go, and if you get a sudden feeling that something is wrong, run.”
McManus’s brow furrowed in concentration and his steps became more cautious. He stopped as he reached the bottom step, and held her behind him with an outstretched hand as he pointed the gun into the room. Everything was veiled in darkness, except for the lights behind them on the stairwell. Bianca pushed his arm down and he let her past. As her foot hit the floor, the large room flooded with light, momentarily blinding her.
16
Magic Shop of Horror
Never before had Bianca seen such an abomination or smelled anything so vile. Everything needed to practice the dark arts was stacked, hung, or piled around the dingy underground store. Her stomach churned as she looked at the jars containing the fetuses of different creatures, from fish to bird to mammal, but worst were the tiny human babies in bottles.
This was the real magic store, not the fake one above. An illegal black magic store.
Books filled the shelves to the left, heavy ancient tomes both in size and content. Some were even bound in what could only be human skin, while others were newer hand-bound texts. An archway led off to the side, and she moved through it into the next room.
A long altar stood at the far end, painted in the dark castings of dried blood. Beside the altar sat a large jar with a fully developed female human fetus preserved in fluid. It looked fresh, but it was difficult to tell from where she stood.
Is it the victim’s missing baby?
A large banner with reddish brown symbols in an upside-down pentagram painted in blood hung behind the altar.
“I’d say this is where the girl was killed,” she said over her shoulder, not taking her eyes off the banner.
McManus joined her. “What is this place?”
“A shrine of obscenity,” she spat. “This is the blackest of the black. The pentagram is the symbol of protection, and an upside down one means the opposite. Each point had one of the five castes of magic—Natural, Familial, Divination, Focal, and Necromantic—all upside down in their darkest forms. The symbol in the middle should be of the Unari, the first ones, but it’d been replaced by the sign of the Dark Brethren.”
“The same as at the murders.”
“Yes, they’re an ancient race of nasties, mystically imprisoned by our ancestors who are now trying to get back to our world by corrupting parahumans on this side to spill enough blood in their name.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Afraid not.”
McManus took out his cell. “As much as it shits me, I’ll have to let that fucker from VCU know about this. Damn, no signal.” As the words left his lips, the banner burst into flames.
“Fuck,” he said.
Bianca ran back into the other room. “Double fuck.”
The stairwell leading out of the underground room was ablaze. Books started disappearing from the shelves, evaporating into thin air. Flames erupted in their place and other dark magic objects started disappearing.
“What the fuck’s happening?” he yelled above the roar of the fire.
“It’s a trap. They mean to kill us while they magically move their inventory and destroy the evidence.”
“How did they know we were here?”
“They had a security system after all,” she yelled back, the roar of the f
lames making it difficult to hear even her own words. “A magical one.”
He looked around the room as flames burned higher. “We have to get out of here.”
“But how?” She glanced around. “The staircase is burning.”
He swept her up in his arms and strode toward the stairs. Smoke filled her lungs, scorching her throat and throwing her senses into confusion. She coughed and gasped, trying to draw on magic, but disorientation muddled her senses. She looked around for an escape route in the chaos of flames and heat. A coughing fit took over and she struggled to draw breath.
“Hold on,” he yelled as he got to the stairs.
The blaze had burned the first few steps, but he leapt over them. Bianca managed to gather enough of her senses to give him some extra lift so he could land on the lowest stair that the fire hadn’t yet reached. She looked down. The wood cracked dangerously, the flames reaching for him. McManus’s pants had caught, the fire burning up his legs, but he made another leap as the stair beneath them caught and collapsed. The heat sucked what was left of the air around them. He took the rest of the stairs two at a time until they reached the top, only to find the secret entrance closed fast.
Bianca wrapped her arms tighter around his neck as he slammed into the solid wood. It remained sealed tight. She pulled it together just enough to draw on the last of her reserves. As he geared to slam into the door again, she reached out and pushed with her mind. This time the bookcase door flung open. McManus toppled through to the floor, dragging her with him. Bianca managed to hook the bookcase with her foot and kick it shut before the fire escaped after them.
She sat up quickly and removed her jacket to smother the flames on his legs.
“Thanks,” McManus said when the fire was out, sitting up and leaning back on his hands.
Her lungs still burned and another fit of coughing over came her. “No, thank you,” she said when she was finally able to draw breath. “We would’ve died down there.”
“Well we didn’t. Now let’s get out of here before help arrives and finds us.” He climbed to his feet and held out his hand.
The room began to heat, and flames suddenly burst through the floor, cutting off the back of the shop.
“Quick, out the front,” he said, dragging her to her feet.
As she and McManus ran through the front door, he stumbled and fell. Bianca stooped to catch him or at least break his fall. With the amount of flames she had put out, she knew his burns would be extensive.
She managed to push him out the front door as part of the roof collapsed behind them.
17
Into the Underbelly
Something exploded in the store behind her. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” McManus said, hauling Bianca to her feet. “Before the emergency services arrive.”
“Your bag is in there,” she said, feeling the familiar weight on her back.
“It’ll burn with the rest of it, I’m afraid.” He glanced over his shoulder. The flames from the building reflected in his eyes, making it look for a brief moment that they burned with an inner fire. Wailing sirens grew closer. “Time to go,” he said, sweat slicking his brow.
“We have to get you to a hospital and get those burns seen to.”
“I’m in no pain,” he said, hiking up his tattered trouser leg.
“But your legs were on fire, I put out the flames myself.”
The skin below was smooth and bare as if the hairs on his leg had been seared off, and that was all. “Ever since the fire at the Sanctum, I knew I had some resistance to fire. But I had no idea it was this much.”
“It’s miraculous,” she whispered, looking closer at his legs in the glow of the streetlight.
Her phone beeped with a text message in her backpack. She dropped the bag to the pavement and pulled the cell out of the side pocket.
“It’s Oberon,” she said to McManus. “He wants me to get those reports finished.”
“Why don’t you grab a cab, and I’ll go back to where I left my car down by the tracks. I’ll catch up later to work out what we do with this lead.”
“Lead?”
“Fast Jimmy. He got Angel that job, he might know who really owns this store.”
Bianca finished her last email, hit the send button and wondered where McManus had gone. She’d been trying to call him, but his cell phone was probably in the bag destroyed by the fire.
A familiar knock at her front door made her smile. She closed the laptop and crossed to answer it.
“About time you . . .” Her words trailed off when she found a well-dressed man in a black suit and camel coat standing in her doorway. “Sorry, I though you were . . . McManus?”
He took off the dark glasses and grinned. “Yep.” He looked good, real good.
“Why the fancy dress?” she asked. “Are you going to an early Halloween party?”
His grin slipped. “Something like that. Get dressed in something tight and sleazy. We’re going down to Sin Town.”
Bianca swallowed as McManus crossed her threshold. Sin Town was one place she’d managed to avoid her entire career, and she didn’t relish going there now. “Why?”
“That’s Fast Jimmy’s territory. If we’re going to find him, it’s the best place to start. And I can’t exactly go in there as a cop. Too many people know me.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see what I can find.”
Her wardrobe consisted of conservative work clothes, jeans, and T-shirts. She really didn’t have anything sleazy. Except . . .
She drifted down to the other end and the clothes her mother had bought for her to come out into society. She hadn’t worn any of it. Now, she pulled out a black leather corset with red lace trim, a pair of knee-high vinyl boots, and a floor length multilayered red net petticoat.
McManus waited in the living room while she changed. The black cat he’d seen yesterday jumped onto the kitchen windowsill and eyed him suspiciously.
“Whatchya lookin’ at, puss?” he said.
The cat’s eyes narrowed and his one ear flattened against his head as he hissed. McManus was a little taken aback. Animals usually liked him.
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye as something jumped onto the terrace behind a bush. Probably a gull or a pigeon. The cat leapt down and raced toward it.
“Look out birdie, here comes the big bad pussy cat,” he whispered to himself, and chuckled, though the cat didn’t appear to be in stalk mode.
It disappeared into the lush undergrowth of the tropical terrace garden, and he wondered how Bianca managed to get some of the plants to grow, especially here in New York.
The cat raced out from under one plant and disappeared behind another. Two seconds later something followed. A lizard. A giant lizard.
“A giant blue lizard?” he asked the empty room.
“What did you say?”
He hadn’t heard her return. “You have a—” McManus looked up and completely forgot about the lizard. “Well . . .” He plastered on a smile to cover his loss for words. His mouth was drier than a desert storm even though his skin felt slick with sweat.
“Will this do?” she asked, smoothing down the front of the corset.
He couldn’t even think for the moment, let alone talk, only nod like an idiot. Her whiter than white hair was piled on her head, spiked with a kind of messy punk chaos. Smoky dark makeup enhanced her pale blue eyes, and the scarlet tint on her lips highlighted their lush fullness.
A black lace choker surrounded her slender neck, with strings of black pearls forming shiny loops against her throat. The leather corset hugged her sumptuous figure, pushing her breasts up into magnificent cleavage. Under the corset, she wore a red net skirt down to her knees at the back and so short at the front it barely covered her. A red lace garter belt held up a pair of black lace stockings that highlighted her smo
oth pale thighs. To finish off the ensemble, she’d added a pair of chunky black knee-high goth style boots with silver buckles up the side.
She had a kind of edgy sleaze crossed with an almost angelic innocence, as if the perverseness highlighted her purity. In Sin Town, men would pay a fortune for her. He’d wanted something to divert attention from himself, and this was definitely going to do it.
“Um . . .” He cleared his throat. “Yeah, great. Perfect.”
“Really?” She looked down at herself, self-conscious doubt written all over her face. “You sure it’s not too much?”
She has no idea. “No, not at all. But we’d better get going if we want to get there before night fall.”
Sin Town—the dark underbelly of the city—infested with the worst of both human and parahuman society. If it was illegal or immoral, Sin Town was where to find it.
Every now and then Vice would put together a task force and raid. The place shut down then, so all they managed to bag were a few minor drug dealers and whores, nothing more. Then Sin Town would be back in business within hours of the police’s departure.
“Do exactly as I say,” he said to Bianca. “And stick close to me.”
“Okay,” she said, looking nervous.
Riddle Street, the unofficial border between Sin Town and the rest of the city. As soon as McManus stepped into the street, he could feel the corruption in the air. He could feel the eyes on them. Eyes from the street, eyes from the shadows, eyes of the damned.
Gang members leaned in apparent nonchalance, carefully scrutinizing all who came and went. Hookers stood on the corner dressed in bands of scant material, barely covering the flesh they peddled, while their pimp held court nearby in a fancy colorful suit. Drug dealers surreptitiously passed little baggies of chemical fun in exchange for cold hard cash. This was Sin Town.
The pimp pushed away from the wall and watched them, his hungry gaze drifting to Bianca. McManus took her arm and staked his ownership. She was his property and his alone. The pimp got the message and returned to his usual nonchalant stance. But McManus could still feel his hungry eyes on them as they walked away.
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