by Izzy Shows
“What, are you giving me, the Police Caution?” I asked, fighting to keep the fear from creeping into my voice. And had he said magic? I didn’t use magic?
“I take it from your tone that your parents did not instruct you in any of this,” he said, pushing a sharp breath through his nose.
“Uh…” I looked away at one wall and then at the opposite. “What parents?” I laughed at my own joke. Joys of being a foster kid. I had never met my parents, but I had long since grown past the point of resenting that or wishing I could meet them. No point in wishing life was anything other than the shit-hole it was.
His face only seemed to get more tired. “You have got to be joking.”
An overly bright smile was the only answer I gave him. He did not seem to like it.
“You—” He cut himself off at the sound of rustling outside, glancing around cautiously. I considered making a joke about it not being a big deal, but he hadn’t exactly been head over heels for my other jokes, so I kept that one to myself.
“There is a lot you need to be told. This is not a safe place to have a conversation,” he said.
The words hung in the air for a minute, an air of expectation around them, and I realised a moment behind that he was asking me to leave and discuss this somewhere else.
I weighed the possibility of getting kidnapped and killed against sating my curiosity.
“OK.” I shrugged.
I’d never had a mother to tell me not to talk to strangers. Blame it on that.
8
STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF HIS living room, I tried to reassure myself I wasn’t about to get murdered. I’m the Queen of Bad Ideas, and I should not be anyone’s role model.
Good thing I’ve never tried to be.
I took a quick survey of the room, getting my bearings.
It wasn’t exactly the lap of luxury, but it was nicer than anything I’d ever been able to call my own. He had a large couch against the wall opposite the door, old but well cared for by the looks of it. An armchair was positioned at each end of the couch, facing one another, with a coffee table in between them. The fireplace—recently used, by the smell of the room—brought the whole cosy ensemble together, directly across from the coffee table—it was directly to your left when you walked into the room.
Closer inspection revealed that electricity had apparently not been invented in this house yet. I saw no lamps, there was no bulb in the fixture on the ceiling, and candles dotted the various available surfaces in the room.
“Do you want something to drink?” he asked from the kitchen. My attention jerked to him.
Jittery. Hyper-vigilant. My instincts told me that I wasn’t safe. I filed them into a corner of my mind, not ignoring them but also not obeying. I was going to find out if this guy was crazy—because it was undeniable that something had happened in the warehouse that, so far, I could not explain.
Part of me didn’t want him to be able to either.
“Coke.” My voice sounded careless, carried the quality of an implied shrug of the shoulders. Barely managed not to crack. I don’t take alcohol in strange situations, with strange people. I didn’t need a mother to tell me that.
I had learned better on my own.
He brought me a cold can and gestured towards the settee. I glanced over at it and shook my head—I couldn’t settle. I began to pace, my heart racing and my fingers drumming a tattoo on my thigh.
He sighed and sat down. “I assume you have questions?” He sounded more at ease here, but that made sense. He was in his element now.
I held the unopened can in one hand, kept drumming my thigh with the other, counting the steps as I walked from one side of the room to the other and back again. I paused. “Who are you?”
“Not a bad starting place.” He nodded. “My name is Aidan Wallace. I am a Wizard of the First Order.”
My brows knitted together and I started pacing again. “What does that make you, the magical police?” I snapped at him, feeling like a caged animal.
I heard him sigh behind me. “I guess so. There’s only so much I can really say before you’re introduced. The First Order is a…an organization of magic users. Really, the only organization. You’re either in or…” I turned back in time to see him shrug. “All members of the First Order are Wizards, it’s a title. There are occasionally others, hedge witches that haven’t drawn the attention of or dodged the Seekers, but mostly it’s just us. That’s really all I can tell you.”
I snorted, pivoting to turn my back on him again even though I hadn’t made it back across the room.
I hated secret clubs. I hated people who blindly followed the rules of their secret clubs.
Call a spade a spade; it was a cult.
“You can drink that, you know. It’s safe. Or at least, it was before you shook it up.”
I blinked, glanced down at the unopened can I’d been clutching and had mostly forgotten about already. “What do you mean, safe?” I asked, voice just barely above a whisper. I opened it and took a sip before he answered, and felt a sudden lifting of tension from my body, like a weight had been removed.
The anxiety returned sharply along with the question of why it had eased?
“Guest rites.” He answered before I could follow up with that question. “I’ve given you something to drink, I’ve invited you into my home. You’re safe.”
I turned around, slowly this time, my brow furrowed. “Well what does that mean?”
“Oh, come on, surely you’ve had someone at some point tell you to offer your guest something to drink?” He grinned, and I got the distinct impression that I was being teased.
I frowned.
I suppose one of the foster sets had done that at some point or another.
“So?”
“Guest rites are ancient, and have a lot of history that no one really remembers anymore. Though I suppose the food and drink bit don’t mean as much to those who don’t remember. The important part is the invitation—if you’ve been invited into someone’s home, you can use whatever powers you have. If you have not been invited in, you can still enter, but your power stops at the threshold. Trust me, it’s physically uncomfortable.” He shivered.
My mind raced, trying to remember if that was something I had ever experienced—but it was hard to really tell; I’d never felt comfortable in anyone’s home, not even the ones I’d lived in.
“The food and drink is more of a custom than an actual bond. If you are offered, and partake in, food or drink then it is a pact between the two parties to not attack one another. Temporary, only for the short time that you are in their domain. Now, there isn’t anything preventing you from being attacked, not like the threshold of invitation, but saying it’s bad manners is a giant understatement.” He grinned, as if he had made the joke of the century. “On a larger scale, disrespecting guest rites, attacking your host or your guest, is grounds for death.”
“Grounds for death? By whom?” He wasn’t saying anything to make me feel safe.
“The Order. One of the vampire houses, if it’s their domain you’re invited into. Oh, that’s nasty business, violating guest rites in a situation like that. The Order and the House would have to agree on how to handle it.” He shook his head. “I can’t remember the last time that happened though. If it ever has.”
I nodded. “So if you killed me, your Order would kill you? No police involved?”
“Well, not quite. The Order doesn’t know you exist…” He trailed off at the look of panic on my face. “You set me up with that one.”
I shrugged, letting out a half-hearted chuckle. “Good to know Wizards can be tricked.”
“Not usually,” he murmured.
I tilted my head to the side, eyebrows lifted, and thought about asking for clarification. I let it go, though, and drank more of the Coke. It was nice to have some caffeine, though it wasn’t like I was tired. Adrenaline was pumping through me still, keeping me up and running. The caffeine was comforting, probably odd, bu
t I basically pump the drug in with an open vein.
“Oh, hey, one other thing,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“What’s up with the lighting?” I asked, gesturing around at the lack of electricity.
“Oh.” He chuckled. “That. Electricity doesn’t play well with magic. The more you train, the more powerful you become, the less it works. It’s easier to just give up on it in whatever areas you can, to scale back on things breaking. That, and it can interfere with magic sometimes. Disrupts the flow of energy.”
My mouth formed an ‘O’ and I nodded. “Yeah, that’s happened to me. I break lifts all the time. Blew a computer earlier today actually.”
His eyebrows jumped up again; they were getting quite the work out. “That’s impressive, for someone who’s never had formal instruction.”
“What can I say? I have a knack for breaking things.” I winked and was rewarded with another laugh.
“All that aside, I really do need to impress upon you that if you do not trust someone, do not invite them into your home. It’s dangerous. Kind of thing that gets a lot of young practitioners killed,” he said, the warning as clear as day.
“Aw, you sound like a grandpa.” I teased, grinning. Not that I really knew what a grandpa sounded like, but I assumed the overly protective warnings directed at the ‘young’ made it a safe bet.
He scowled and took a sip of his drink, a coppery liquid inside of a tumbler. If I had to guess, I’d say it was whisky.
An awkward silence settled on the room for a moment, yawning between us like a chasm. I tapped a fingernail against the coke can, my other hand kept up its tattoo against my thigh.
“You said, back at the warehouse, that it was your duty to report my…” My throat closed on the words before I could get them out, not quite willing to say that I had used magic yet. Not quite sure I believed in any of it.
“Use of magic.” He supplied the end of the sentence. “You’ll get your head around it eventually.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Yes. As a Wizard of the First Order, I am bound to report you. It’s not as scary as it sounds, you haven’t done anything wrong. You’ll be assessed, they’ll decide if you have the capability to study and train for the exams, if you pass, you’d then become a Wizard yourself.”
“And if I’m just a…what did you call it, a hedge witch?” I quirked my head to the side again.
“Then you’ll be given the incredibly long and boring list of rules you would need to comply with to avoid attracting the negative attention of the Order, and be released back to your normal life.” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter at all.
“My normal life…” I mused, shaking my head. My smile was tight. “Normal.” Nothing had ever been normal for me, I didn’t have a base line. I had a jerky chart that failed to measure anything against it.
I didn’t want that life.
But I didn’t want anyone making decisions about my life for me.
“And if I refuse?” My voice was as tight as the smile I’d worn. I didn’t make anything easy.
“Refuse? What do you mean?”
“Well, this whole reporting and dragging me before the school board thing, it seems to be operating under the assumption that I just go with the flow. Walk up there with you. What if I don’t?” I said.
“They’ll kill you.” His tone was so matter-of-fact, so complacent. Fact of life.
“Of course,” I muttered, turning my back to him again so that he couldn’t see the fear etched into my face. My fingers practically blurred, they tapped against my thigh so quickly.
“The difficult in all of this is, we don’t have time for that. I don’t have time for that.” He said.
I spun around on the ball of my foot so fast I almost dropped the can in my hand, eyebrows knitted together at the same time my eyes were wide enough to drink in all the light in the world.
“You don’t have time for that? You don’t have time to report me, to possibly get me killed? Oh, I’m sorry for the bloody inconvenience.” The words came out laced in poison and twisted my face into a vicious snarl.
“Don’t take it so personally. I don’t know you, I don’t have time to care about you, or anyone for that matter. I have a job to get done, last one before retirement, and I need it to go smoothly. Now, this job has a time crunch so, I really don’t have time to deal with you,” he said.
I wanted to be offended, haughty, to impress upon him how horrid he was being, but his words resonated with everything everyone had told me my entire life.
I was an annoyance. Unworthy. In the way. No one wanted to deal with me. His words deflated me quite perfectly, and I sat down in a very ungraceful fashion on the closest chair.
“I didn’t ask for any of this,” I mumbled, the words emerging in a rather pathetic fashion and me staring down at the can of Coke cupped between my hands. I recognised the burning sensation in my eyes and blinked rapidly to try and stop the tears brimming there.
“I know.” He sounded tired. “No one ever does. Normally, your parents would have prepared you for this…” His voice trailed off, likely recalling the comment about no parents from earlier. “Magic is mostly hereditary. Occasionally it crops up a bit randomly.”
I grimaced. “I still don’t know if I believe I have anything to do with any of that.”
His eyebrows jumped up. “In the warehouse, I was…attempting to compel you to forget the encounter and leave. You threw it off much easier than some of the experienced Wizards I’ve seen. That leaves no doubt in my mind that you have quite a gift.”
“Your mind, maybe,” I muttered. “Not quite so much mine.”
He smiled, chuckling. “It’s harder to do something concrete when you’re thinking about it, than to react in a situation. Believe me, the reactions are more important, they reveal more about you.”
My shoulders wriggled, not quite a shiver, at the thought of revealing anything about myself.
“I don’t have any problem giving you introductory training, if you want to work on this case together. And then, when it’s over, we can cross the bridge of reporting to the Order.”
I nodded, slowly. “That…No, wait I have my own case I need to be working on.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, a woman’s husband is missing. Last name Brady. And I’m on a time crunch too.”
His brow furrowed, he stared down at his drink for a moment. “I think our cases may be intertwined. You were looking for him in the warehouse district, one of his old haunts, right? I was too. His name’s come up a few times during the investigation. He’s not just a missing spouse, he’s involved in a potentially dangerous magical crime.”
I blinked in surprise. “Uh. Wow. OK then. Training works. When do we start?”
“Tomorrow. What do you say we whet your appetite though? I’ve got one more stop for the night. Might be fun. Definitely going to be interesting.” His eyes were twinkling with excitement.
I narrowed mine. “What is it?”
“How do you feel about vampires?”
9
WE RODE IN HIS CAR. IT was awkward, the old banger was tiny and crammed, but it was the silence that made it worse.
Silence was something I was overall used to, but it was my own silence I was familiar with. Me sitting alone, driving alone, walking alone, with my thoughts and nothing else to keep me company. That was safe.
Sitting in a car with someone I’d only just met—I don’t know how much farther from safe you can get.
“So, what exactly have I got myself into?” I asked, breaching the silence.
He glanced my way before returning his eyes to the road. “Tonight? A building full of vampires of varying ages, who all operate on ancient tradition and their own vague morality. In general? Probably some horrendous form of death when you least expect it, and yet somehow simultaneously have seen it coming for some time.” He punctuated the response with a few nods of his head.
Of course.
“You sou
nd like you’re on the ‘in general’ side of things.” I said.
“Eh.” He shrugged. “Best to keep it in mind. It’s the ones who think they’re invincible that have the problems.”
“Doesn’t that put you in a bit of a catch-22 though?” I grinned. “You think you’ll be OK because you think you’ll die, but then you’re thinking you’re OK, so you’re going to die?”
“That made no sense at all,” he growled.
“Uh huh.” I laughed.
Better than silence.
“No, seriously, why are we going to see a vampire nest?” I prodded again.
“Not a nest.” He was quick to correct me. “They’re much more refined than nests. I’m sure you studied history at some point or another; you remember when Medieval families ruled the world? A tiny handful of families making decisions that affected everyone, while they sipped wine and argued?”
I frowned. “Well that’s one way of putting it.”
“That’s who we’re going to see.”
“You mean they’re like that?” I asked.
“No. They are the families.” His voice was stern, flat, no nonsense.
With good reason too. I tried not to be shocked, but my silence gave me away. Vampires in general was an idea I was still wrapping my head around, and I supposed that on a certain logical level it made sense that they were incredibly old and had long since had their fingers in a lot of pies; but don’t you tell me that isn’t incredibly shocking to just be told. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin.
“So, uh. So, who are we seeing?” My voice was now very soft, very quiet. No longer jovial.
“No Kings or anything like that, so settle down.” He said, his tone wry. “Just a Baron. I call him Duds, short for his last name, Dudley, but you’ll probably not want to do that until you can throw him against a wall.” Again, he shrugged. Helpful hint. “If you’re in the mood for being polite, just call him My Lord and you’ll be fine.”
“Ah, OK then.” I nodded to myself, absorbing the information. I had to wonder—and I knew this was a question for a later time, because Aidan was slowing down—had the man been a Baron back in the old days when it had really mattered, or was it just a title the vampires bandied about? Did he have an official title, an actual barony awarded to him? Had it been passed on down the line, but he kept the name and title to be used in vampiric circles?