The whole thing started because I wanted to try out a new spell. And because I was trying to annoy Harry, which isn't so surprising, since I get into more trouble that way…
Harry and I had a fight. I'd spent a long time the day before trying to improve my veiling technique, had finally gotten fed up and had started trawling the internet for ideas. (After going to the library, obviously, since where else was I going to get a computer?) Naturally I'd just found an interesting site when there was a shower of sparks and the computer blew up. At least I'd gotten to copy down the suggestions before everything exploded.
Harry found out and promptly hauled me over the coals for damaging technology and when he looked at the suggestions I'd found he said they were dangerously close to dark magic—some mumbo-jumbo about voyeuristic intent and shit—and I told him I'd just been trying my hardest to get something right, he countered with me being too lazy to work things out on my own and the fact that none of the suggestions would work anyway. He was in a bad mood, I was in a bad mood, shit went down.
We had a shouting match, is the short version, and I stormed out.
I was more upset than usual, I guess because usually when Harry flips a shit like that I at least feel like he has a point. Sometimes I am lazy and slap-dash, but this time I'd really been trying. I'd been trying hard enough that I had a headache, and I came into my apartment sort of sniffling and not really crying but pretty upset.
"Molls, what's the matter?" asked my roommate, Billie. We'd moved in together a couple of months before, after Mom finally agreed that, at age twenty, I was old enough to live on my own. I still spent weekends at home, of course, and I was over every other day, helping Dad with some of the chores or watching the kids.
Billie's a few years older than I am, but pretty nice. Mom would have a fit about her, of course. She's a funny mix of hippy and Wiccan, who thinks that sex is magic. She's hit on me a couple of times, in a weird way, like she thinks it's really healing. Maybe for her it is.
Whereas for me…I haven't done a whole lot of sexy stuff since Harry gave me the long "you-could-kill-yourself-it's-dangerous-because-of-magic" talk. Which is probably total BS, but it isn't something I was too excited to find out. Plus…I guess I still kind of have a crush on Harry. I know it's stupid, but it's pretty hard to shake. I figured out a while ago that it would be a bad idea all round—he's crap with women, he sees me as a daughter, we have the teacher-student thing going on—but something inside me doesn't always agree.
"Oh, my teacher was being an asshole again," I answered Billie, flopping into one of our totally-retro-and-not-at-all-in-need-of-refurbishing chairs. It made a groaning, popping noise at me.
"Man, he really needs to chill," Billie said. "Have a beer."
I've been trying to be a law-abiding citizen lately. After Dad got so badly hurt, I wanted to make sure he wasn't ashamed of his kids. And technically, I'm under twenty-one. But that law is just stupid. So I took the beer with a very faint twinge of conscience and promised myself I wouldn't have anymore. I was supposed to be up early the next day anyway, so I'd be better off not barfing my brains out and waking up with a killer headache.
Cut to half an hour later, when Billie and I were slumped on the couch, giggling, playing a rousing game of Truth-or-Dare. It's actually pretty fun, although being smashed helps.
"Okayokayokay, I got one," Billie said. "I dare you to go try that thing you were talking about your teacher thought was so screwy."
At this point, the rational thing would have been to say 'no,' or preferably, 'hell no,' because while I sometimes forget about it, I really am under the Doom of Damocles, after all, and generally listening to Harry is the best way for me not to end up dead. But since when have I ever been rational?
I bit my lip. I was pretty confident in the new twist I wanted to put on my veil, and I wanted to prove it. The fact that I could hardly tell Harry the next day after he'd expressly told me not to try didn't occur to my slightly buzzed head. "You're on!" I told Billie.
We didn't know where to go, so we settled for this ritzy health-club a few blocks away that I had never paid much attention to. I figured it was the kind of place that, even if my veil failed, I could just make up some bullshit story about looking for my dad, bat a few eyelashes at the security guard and get away, not that I was expecting to have to.
Billie and I walked over—at least we weren't dumb enough to try to drive—and clung together giggling and staring up at it. The place practically barfed light into the night, but all the windows were frosted glass, so all you could see were silhouettes moving, strange dark splodges that were forced to waver into slightly inhuman outlines by the effects of the glass bending the light. The sight made me pause for an instant. There was an undercurrent here that I hadn't expected.
Harry says I'm sensitive to psychic vibrations. Probably he's right. I know I can often get a good sense of a place or a person without doing anything other than being there. There was a sense of offness about this club, the feeling of a façade. It was pretending to be something other than it was. It wasn't an illusion—not a magical one, at any rate—I would have recognized something of that nature instantly. But it shared some of the same characteristics.
I almost turned around and went home then. But I didn't feel magic, and a lot of businesses represent themselves as something other than they are. Besides, I'd had a little too much to drink, and I might have just been imagining things. Something else Harry says a lot is, "Trust your instincts." I usually do, but I was feeling mulishly uninclined to listen to any of Harry's advice, so I shook off the odd sensation.
"You have to go up to the top floor and come back down," Billie said. "Without being caught. I'll wait here. Call me if you get into trouble."
I giggled, told her to live-long-and-prosper (something else that annoys me about Harry—it's always Star Wars with him!) and let her push me toward the building. I had already begun to whisper, "Mekurumeku," and I crushed the bit of horseradish I'd brought with me between my fingers as I put up my veil before remembering that I didn't have a cell phone. Oh well.
I was tempted to open the door very carefully, but the point of this exercise was that I had added a generous measure of antipathy to my normal veil. Basically, people would not only not see me, they would subconsciously look away from where I was at any given time. It wasn't foolproof, but if I had done it right, I shouldn't have to worry about people noticing a door mysteriously opening with no obvious cause. And if I hadn't done it right, the front door was a much better place to find out than halfway through the building. So I took a deep breath and shoved the door wide open.
No one looked up. I was standing in a brightly-lit lobby with a lush red carpet underfoot. A bored-looking secretary was filing her nails at a desk station; other than that the only thing in the room was a small, neat directory. There were several doors leading away, each of which was marked with a brass plaque. An accounting firm, a law firm, and a household cleaning business. I was obscurely disappointed. They'd all be closed at this time of night.
I walked over and stood directly behind the secretary, though I backed up when her computer started making protesting noises. She shivered a little and scooted her chair away from me. Awesome. I silenced a little protesting voice, which sounded a lot like Harry's, that this was skirting the edge of mind-manipulation, and headed over to the directory.
The health club—a division of "Priority Executive Health", which was a hugely snooty name in my opinion—was apparently on the second floor. It had to be open; otherwise, who were all the people I had seen through the windows?
I made my way upstairs, where I was stopped short by a key-card entrance. Oops. I was pretty sure I could get in by shorting out the system temporarily, but asking people not to notice that was hoping for a little much. On the other hand, I didn't want to back out on the dare, and they probably wouldn't know what was causing it. It was just a ritzy health club after all, and it wasn't like I was planning on doing anything wrong. I shrugged off my conscience again, which by now was starting to prickle uncomfortably, and applied my attention to the electronic lock. There was a soft shower of sparks and the red light flickered to green long enough for me to yank the door open and step inside.
The wave of human desire that hit me was enough to cause me to stumble slightly and clutch at the wall for support. Like I said, I haven't experienced much in the way of sexytimes. Not in the past few years, at any rate. I mean, I'm not completely innocent, but the sheer magnitude of lust that caught me was crippling. My palms started to sweat, and I had to restrain a moan. I put my hands to my head and desperately scrambled to put up my mental barriers. It took me what felt a long time, battered by eager sexuality, with obscene sounds ringing in my head, and the force of what felt like a hundred orgasms at once working against me. When I finally managed to put up some semblance of a wall between me and the feelings, I found myself crouched on the ground with my head between my knees. Thank God my veil didn't seem to have slipped.
I drew in a shaky breath. I was covered in sweat, and there was a distinctly funny feeling between my legs. I could still feel the emotions, but they were damped out—like listening to someone have sex through a few feet of solid concrete. I stood up—or tried to. My legs were wobbly, and it took me a few attempts. Finally, I felt capable of paying attention to my surroundings.
I was in a small foyer at the edge of a large room. There was another desk beside me, behind which a secretary was cursing at a desktop computer that was emitting smoke and sparks. She also seemed to be talking on a phone at the same time, and I quickly moved to the large room. One of the lightbulbs in the room had also exploded, probably when I had my little meltdown.
I leaned against the edge of the doorway and looked into the room. It was your standard gymnasium, lined with black machines that looked a little like torture contraptions and filled with sweating human bodies, running, lifting weights. Mostly older men, all of them slightly overweight, in a vaguely soft-around-the-edges kind of way. It took me a second look to realize what was unusual about this particular scene.
The fitness trainers. They were all very young, very beautiful women, wearing the kinds of things that fitness trainers wear, but they weren't sweating (except a few of them in a half-heartedly look-at-me-glow kind of way). Besides, most fitness instructors, even the ones who work at an exclusive health club, don't have double-D breasts and the kind of ass a porn star would be jealous of. I mean, I'm not saying you don't get attractive fitness instructors. I'm just saying that when every single fitness instructor in the place is female, under twenty-five, and super-model gorgeous, there's something slightly weird going on.
Maybe I wouldn't have jumped to that conclusion if I hadn't just had a close and personal encounter with the energies of this location. But, fresh from the wave of overwhelming desire, I knew exactly what this place was. A high-class brothel. Ew.
The effects of the alcohol had mostly faded, leaving only a lingering nasty taste in my house and a faint, insistent, buzzing headache. I was no longer certain if I wanted to leave or not. I had the vague feeling that maybe if I stayed I could pick up some kind of evidence to shut this place down. I'm not Harry. I'm straight, and I'm female, and I don't immediately assume that a prostitute or a call-girl or whatever is in need of rescuing. But I was also raised Catholic, and I've also had some experiences that meant I couldn't just forget this place now that I'd found it. It didn't occur to me that it would be highly protected and impossible to touch politically. Besides, the feelings that had surged through me had been dark and compelling, frightening and sickening. I didn't want a place that felt like that to exist. I guess some of Harry's idealism had affected me.
I didn't know what I was looking for. I wandered through the exercise room, pausing for a minute behind one of the girls and watching with satisfaction as the man who had been ogling her looked away with a vague shiver of fear.
Heading out the other end, I found myself in a long corridor with doors on either side. For a horrible, sick moment, I thought those rooms were where—and I was surprised at myself, at the strength of my revulsion. You'd think after just having that much sex dumped into my brain, I would be, I don't know, fascinated, but it didn't work like that. I thought I never in my life wanted to have another sexy feeling about another human being. Then I realized I understood my mother's faith better than I ever had before, and I started to laugh, silently.
I couldn't feel anything from behind the doors—anything more than I already had felt, that is, so I knew my first instinct had been wrong. I gathered up my courage and tried the handle. Locked. Probably an office or something. That was a pity. I didn't think I knew any useful spells for getting into a locked room. I could have opened a way to the Nevernever and tried to get through it somehow, but that would have been like using a flamethrower to take on an ant—a flamethrower that was liable to blow up any minute. Besides, given what this place was in Chicago, I really didn't want to find out what was lurking next to it in Faerie.
I was getting to the point where I was thinking strongly about leaving, confessing everything to Harry, and asking him what I should do. What we should do. I was also getting to the point where I was beginning to wonder just what Harry would say if I confessed to him what I had been doing. For the first time, I realized that I could really be in a lot of trouble if anyone found out about this. If the White Council heard about it, would they even believe that this had been a half-drunken dare? Not in a million years. They would come up with some sinister interpretation of it, and I'd be lucky to get out with my life.
My hands started shaking, and I had to take several deep, gulping breaths. It would be fine. I would just turn around and leave and, well, I didn't know what I would do then, whether I would tell Harry or whether I would just let this place fill my nightmares for the next few months, but in any case, I would be out. I turned to hurry back the way I had come, when one of the doors beside me opened, and a group of people surged out, blocking my path out. I took a step back.
"Really, Mr. Marcone," said one of them, a harassed-looking woman who seemed to approaching middle age. "I assure you, there is nothing wrong with the security. In all likelihood, this is all a small mechanical error."
"I don't like mechanical errors," said the man standing in the center of the group. He was a relatively short man—nothing like Harry's ridiculous height—but he gave the impression of looming over the rest of them. His voice was mild, even a little slow, but somehow I knew that he wasn't somebody to cross. "I find mechanical errors that are accompanied by exploding lightbulbs to be somewhat suspicious."
His eyes flicked toward me, and I shrank back against the wall, even though I knew he wouldn't see me, even though I knew he couldn't hold the look for more than a moment. I didn't relax until he shifted uneasily and slid his eyes away again.
"I know you'd rather work with Helen," said the woman. She sounded strained and sharp. She was worried, but it made her whine. "But I promise you, I'm competent to handle this when she's not here."
"I have no doubts whatsoever as to your competence," the man said smoothly, almost ingratiatingly. "However, you will not dispute that I am the owner of this establishment, and free to investigate small disturbances in any manner that I wish?" The voice had a dangerous edge now, and the woman seemed to sense it, because she folded back in on herself a little.
"I—oh—of course," she stammered. "I didn't mean—I mean, I never thought that you…"
"Naturally," he said in that same cold, smooth voice. His eyes swept across the room again and passed over me again, slipping away quickly. I found myself breaking out into a cold sweat, and I put my hand over my mouth to stifle any breathing noises I might be making.
"Come," the man said, making a gesture, and the group started down the hallway. I leaned shakily against the wall, and he paused, turned. I began to shake, my stupid muscles refusing to cooperate properly. His eyes slid toward me, tried to focus, slid away again. Just go, I thought at him, terrified enough that I caught myself almost infusing that desperate thought with a shade of compulsion. He turned away for a moment, then turned back again. This time there was a gun in his hand, and it was pointed directly at me, though his eyes were focused on a point slightly to the left of my head.
He barked out an order I couldn't quite make out, and suddenly, all of the men had guns out, and they were all trained on me.
"Whoever you are, I suggest you come out," the leader said. "I know you're there, and if you don't stop hiding, I will have no compunction whatsoever in ordering my men to fire."