Storm Chaser: A Novel of The Black Pages

by Danny Bell

  All right, Elana, enough procrastinating. It’s time to get to work.

  I’d been working on a couple of new items since my last adventure. The long coat was fantastic and here to stay as far as I was concerned. It was well built, easy to recharge and had already saved my life on more than one occasion. It was the first thing I checked before bed every night. The flame tower bracelet was far too dangerous to try to duplicate and, for the moment, was something I wasn’t comfortable working on. Something like that could’ve gotten any number of people killed, and it had nearly killed me, as well. The sap bracelet wasn’t a bad idea, but I was expending too much energy to get one made. So, I’d found myself alternating days between two projects.

  The first was Thor inspired. Aside from Mjolnir, his severely overpowered hammer, Thor had other, lesser-known, magical items. It was a pair of iron gauntlets that helped him take full advantage of his hammer’s abilities. The second was a belt that doubled his already ludicrous strength. I am not a big person and, even if I were in tip-top Olympic-level shape, I wouldn’t be as strong as a vampire, werewolf, or even an elf, so doubling my strength wouldn’t be all that impressive. Still, I, sort of, met in the middle with the two things and fashioned a pair of leather fingerless gloves. They gave me a sort of slight passive boost to my physical strength, and, if I needed to, I could unplug some of the magical energy within and get a massive but fleeting burst of raw force. It was a last resort, sort of thing, though, as using them left me sore and exhausted after. Even just wearing them too long was taxing, which was why they weren’t a permanent fashion accessory.

  They were also incredibly difficult to craft and maintain, not to mention that charging them meant double the work since each glove needed to be charged separately. There wasn’t just some generic strength spell I could pull out of book either, but thankfully, I had Ann’s big brain to help me work out a custom sigil to sew in. It was a combination of a relatively simple kinetic energy spell and a variation on the Stoneskin spell I’d learned was possible by fighting a sorcerer last year. I couldn’t alter the physical properties of my skin, but there was a spell that made me just a bit denser. No jokes about me being dense enough, please.

  Combining elements of the two into something new translated into a magically charged physical strength, but it held maybe an eighth of the charge of anything else I was working on because it was so damned complicated. Getting the sigil to work had been the easy part; getting the magic to stay put had been the hard part.

  The next item was maybe one of the dumbest ideas I’d ever had, but I’d managed to figure out a safe way to get it to work, fortunately. I had worked out the idea at a campsite far from any homes or people, just to be safe. I know how this will sound, at first, but bear with me. I’d made a lightning ring.

  Again, I know how that sounds, given my track record with elemental forces and fashion accessories, but I wasn’t ripping full lightning bolts into a ring. That would be suicidal, and I didn’t have anywhere near the magical strength to call lightning on the regular, anyway. But the one time I’d done it with an assist made the feeling familiar to me. I’d worked out a spell I couldn’t cast, and I’d realized there were fickle components needed in any case. What I’d been trying to use outdoors was captured steam by boiling water in a covered pot. The spell also required electricity, which I had learned the hard way, one day, when I instinctively checked my beeping phone mid-spell. A surge of electricity arced towards the steam in the pot, and I’d needed to claim the insurance on my phone. Now all I needed to do was place the ring at the spout of a tea kettle and keep that next to an electrical outlet as I cast the spell. Severely overheat the pot, walk it to an outlet, cast the spell, and there you go. An infinitely tiny and adorable bolt of lightning stored into my handy-dandy joy buzzer.

  Another bit that made this more difficult was learning the different magical paths one could take. There were the things I, for sure, was not. I wasn’t a Druid by any stretch of the imagination. The idea of using mass quantities of blood for magic made me a little ill, so I knew I wasn’t a Thaumaturge. I, for damn sure, wasn’t a Necromancer, and I was about as much an Artificer as a first grader with finger paints is a fine artist. There were, however, a couple of classes I had more closely identified with. Magicians, which was the path Ann seemed to be walking, were literal crafters of magic and were known for solidifying magic into the world where it was once amorphous. They were the ones who invented new spells, created alchemical potions and elixirs, imbued magic into objects, and, perhaps the most dangerous of all, partook in summoning and the crafting of sigils. By understanding how the mechanics of magic worked, Magicians could take it apart and put it back together again.

  For Ann, that made sense. She could make certain potions already, something I was nowhere near confident enough to attempt. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have these sweet knockout gloves. She even made a working spellbook, something a literal god told me I wouldn’t be ready for in, perhaps, my lifetime. She was low on power, but she made the most of what she had and understood how magic worked better than anyone I knew. Anyone mortal, anyway.

  Then there were Sorcerers, which had a slightly different meaning than what I’d grown up with in fiction. Relying on raw magic, Sorcerers didn’t use power words or learn complex spells. For them, it was all about relying too heavily on one type of magic, usually evocations, but hey, they could create something from nothing. Their power came from within, and only people with deep wells of magic had even the slightest of hope of becoming useful Sorcerers. They exemplified the phrase, “The brightest flame burns quickest.”

  I’d been unwillingly acting as a Sorcerer since day one and was trying to kick the habit the way I’d seen smokers deal with their last pack. The scary thing was, the longer you acted as a Sorcerer, the harder it was to do it any other way. Olivia didn’t have the patience for anything else, and she was, quite frankly, both comfortable with and more than capable of being a Sorcerer. Every time she cast a spell, it was like she was punching someone in the face with the train in Grand Theft Auto. That didn’t stop me from trying to do things my way.

  What I’d been aspiring for was that of the good old-fashioned Wizard. All about patience and the intuitive nature of magic, Wizards allowed themselves to feel magical energy, harness complex threads, and call it forward for their use. Wizards treated magic as life itself, and, only through intense study and trial and error, they’re able to weave it into whatever they want. Wizardry was about focus, research, and, above all, the belief and love of magic itself. This appealed to me. I loved the way magic made me alive and confident. Magic was primordial and cosmic. It was in the air and the earth. It was in everything, and I could barely scratch the surface of it the way most people would only ever see a fraction of the world. I knew that, in the right hands, it could heal and make the world better. I’m not religious, but magic made me see why one might find religion. When treated with reverence and respect, it was beautiful, and I didn’t know how I’d ever live without it again.

  The problem was that wizardry was such a refined process that trying to cast spells with magic words was extremely hit or miss. The benefits of casting a spell with a magic word were immense. The spell was precise and used a fraction of the caster’s magic, but the concentration needed was intense. It worked best if you were fluent in your chosen language. I was only fluent in English. The go-to for most people was Latin, but it didn’t work for everyone. Using the language that was most appropriate for you was purely a guessing game. Latin didn’t resonate with me. I’d had limited success speaking French, but I could already tell it wasn’t my perfect match, and I had no idea what it could be. It could be Korean, Sumerian, or even Elven. I wasn’t a polyglot, and I didn’t know that I had the time to learn which language was best for me, let alone figuring out what the right words were for each individual spell. Wizards of old probably had a hundred years to sit in a tower and learn everything before they came out to play, but I h
ad places to be and people to see. For now, I sometimes lacked the patience to cast the spells properly, but attempts were at least being made, even if I wasn’t Wizard combat ready.

  The horn honking let me know it was time to go. I shouted an impatient plea to wait that no one but me and the cats could hear as I poured about five cups worth of coffee into a thermos that I intended to drink by the time I arrived. My bag was packed, items were charged, and despite assurances that I wouldn’t need it, I slipped on a black wool cap to conceal my hair as much as possible.

  Okay, Elana. Let’s go steal artifacts like our name is Indy Jones.

  Chapter Five

  The first thought I had when I got into my car wasn’t about the task at hand or even that four heavily armed soldiers would be following me across the city, but that maybe I could be called Mindy Jones for the evening. My second thought was, if Indy was short for Indiana Jones, then Mindy would be short for Mindiana Jones—I immediately thought that was the dumbest name I’d ever come up with. Elana Black was just fine, thank you.

  Driving around the city had become a much different experience since I began to actively work to protect it. More than anything, it made me feel small. Los Angeles had always been huge, but even with the millions of people inhabiting it, I’d always felt like it was still mine—still my home. Now, I think, I just know too much. When I drove past the cheap motels on Venice Boulevard, I wondered if maybe something horrible was happening in one of those rooms. When I saw that the lights had gone out behind the Von’s, I couldn’t help but think that maybe it wasn’t an accident, that something didn’t want to be seen. So, when I drove past the countless buildings that I’ve never stopped to consider in the past, buildings whose purpose and contents were a mystery to me, I couldn’t help but feel a little anxious about everything.

  I had to remind myself, like most things I feel anxious about, I was probably blowing it out of proportion. One of Freyja’s domains was sorcery, so if anyone was using any significantly dangerous magic on her turf, she’d have known about it and filled me in. She’d already told me there were forty-two humans with magical talent in Los Angeles, including me, Olivia, and Ann. That might sound like a lot, but if you’ve ever tried digging around on Facebook, you’ll find multiple groups of thousands of people who claim to be practicing witches and a much more significant number than forty-two who claim they can astral project or speak with the dead or cast hexes and curses or send healing energy or you name it. My own unskilled search turned up eight-hundred-and-seventy-six people in L.A. who claimed to be Reiki practitioners and, according to Freyja, one of them was legit. I don’t know which one it was. Hell, a significant number even claim to communicate with Freyja directly, which I don’t think is quite the serene activity they believe it is. Who knows? Maybe they could, but that only went for thirty-nine of them, at most.

  You might think that these combined communities themselves were huge, that’s thousands of people, even tens of thousands, but in the same way forty-two is a disappointingly small number compared to ten or twenty thousand, juxtapose that number with the millions and millions across L.A. You begin to realize that maybe most people don’t even believe in magic, and perhaps that’s how all the scary things remain hidden. I hadn’t seen one, but I know vampires are real. In a city this size, there’s absolutely no way they aren’t active and, maybe even embedded into its core, but I wouldn’t know where to look for one. Or if I’d seen one. That goes back to my original point; I kept seeing things in every shadow, but how many were really there? It didn’t need to be thousands. It could be forty-two.

  Though, now that I thought about it, forty-two vampires would be piss-your-pants scary.

  I almost lost Freyja’s team by accident as I drove through a pretty risky yellow light, but with no other cars on the road, James had no qualms about running the red. I wondered if he would’ve taken that red if it had been closer to noon rather than to midnight. I shuddered when I realized that, given who they work for, the answer is highly likely, yeah. Yeah, he would’ve gunned it. Thank goodness for the lack of traffic.

  People often talk about the traffic here in L.A. It’s always either the people who’ve never been here or the people who came after they lived in a flyover state for most of their lives. For them, to have to wait more than five minutes at a stoplight is absolute madness. To an extent, they’re not wrong; traffic can be a problem, but it’s never the locals who complain about it. Traffic was just simply a part of the city and part of the price you paid to live here. It was the unspoken agreement, there are going to be times when you need to get somewhere, and no quick way to do it.

  Then there are times like this night; the empty, brightly lit streets on a warm summer night where, if you take just an extra moment or two, you could appreciate something special. There was no doubt that Freyja’s team would be annoyed by my scenic route; I didn’t hop on the 10 and, instead, opted to take main roads all the way to the 110. More than enough of this night was being done on her terms, and we had an hour to get there, so this was going to be my personal touch to the mission. I was going to ignore all the maybes and the what ifs. All the scary possibilities, and drive with my windows down and my A.C. up, while chugging a Thermos full of hot coffee, singing at the top of my lungs and enjoying the good bits of this place I called home.

  When I eventually hopped on the freeway, that’s when the fun really kicked up. Hot summer night or not, having both front windows down, while doing seventy, really kicks up the windchill factor. The coffee had become just warm enough that it was mostly gone before I passed my first off-ramp. My Singasteinn was in the front seat with me, out of the bag for the trip, and I was belting out her favorites acapella. Through sheer trial and error, I found that the songs that put her in the best of moods were 99 Red Balloons, Kids in America, and that Magic Dance song from the movie Labyrinth. What can I say? She had a thing for the eighties. She even liked some of the faux eighties acts, people like Ollie Wride, Jessie Frye, or NINA. Anyone who saw me screaming these songs without the accompanying music coming through a radio might’ve thought I was a maniac, but they couldn’t feel the happiness I felt as she pleasantly pulsed and shook in her seat, occasionally letting out a high note of her own to match mine. I couldn’t tell if my mood improved because she was genuinely happy—and I knew that I was making her happy—or if she magically altered feelings, somehow. I chose to believe it was the latter. She was adorable, despite being a fist-sized hunk of gold.

  As we approached the end of the freeway, where we would need to choose between the Vincent Thomas bridge and invading San Pedro—a place I was unfortunately also responsible for protecting, James sped up alongside me and yelled at me to follow him from here on out. Well, at least he’d been kind enough to pretend I’d been in charge for a little while.

  I stayed behind them as we made our exit and approached Terminal Island. Freyja wasn’t kidding; the whole place seemed to be working with a skeleton crew. Maybe this was just how it always was in the middle of the night. I assumed that a spot like this would be busier in the off hours, if anything, just based on getting all the trucks ready to be driven out in the morning. By the time we reached our destination—a warehouse on the waterfront with a single guard out front in a small wooden outstation, I had the feeling that this was definitely not the sort of place I would be allowed to make a return visit. After a moment or two, the guard handed something to James and we were waved in. I noticed, as I pulled into the expansive, empty parking lot, that the light to the outstation went out and the guard walked away.

  The number of cars in this lot could’ve been counted on two hands and I didn’t feel the need to park quite as close to the doors as my team had. I took the first available spot and stretched out a little as I got out of my car and walked towards my bodyguards. James furrowed his brow at me, visibly annoyed at my pace, and it may have been my imagination, but it looked like his grip on his rifle was tighter than the others. “Real nice route back ther
e. You want to get your head in the game? We’re behind schedule.”

  “Ease off, the warehouse isn’t going anywhere,” Luis remarked.

  “Oh, was I supposed to take a specific route here?” I said as innocently as possible. “I don’t remember that being one of the instructions.”

  “Here,” Kisi said without emotion, handing me a sheet of paper. “The shipment number and manifest. Get in, get what you need, and we all go home.”

  I took the little sheet and examined it, thinking. The items were mostly mundane, a couple of oddities, but nothing about this situation made sense. The only thing that made sense here was that Freyja didn’t trust them, or anyone else for that matter, to know what I was getting into. I had a sinking feeling that included me.

  A breeze picked up off the waterfront as if to gently remind me that it was time to get inside, and, as warm as these nights could get, standing near the ocean after midnight always made me feel better about wearing a coat. I gave the mercenaries a somewhat sarcastic salute and placed my hand in my book bag to grip my rod, more for reassurance than anything else, as I stepped inside.

  Nothing happened as I did and I don’t know why I half expected something. The inside was enormous, but then, it was a warehouse at a major port, after all. For as large as it was inside, and for as many crates and containers as it held, I could still tell that this place was mostly empty. It was lit, though barely. I had moonlight and, what felt like, the absolute minimum fluorescent lighting. The sheer size of the structure swallowed up the light as it tried to reach each corner and crevice.

  Before I did anything else, I removed my rod from my bag and held it out in front of me, reaching out with my senses for magic. There was plenty of it, but nothing that felt like the traces of recently spent magic. Everything felt still and coiled, like potential energy ready to burst if it were disturbed. That was good enough for me. As far as I could tell, I was the only one in there and some of that magic was probably coming off the plate I was here to steal. I had a little leather holster I’d made to attach my rod at my hip so that I could get to it quicker and, after fishing that out of my bag and slipping the rod into it at my waist, I finally got a look at where I was supposed to go.