The fight went… surprisingly well. Mathilda had gotten wrapped up in fighting wargs and dark wizards with me. Oliver had been in a few of my fights, even though he'd mostly been out of danger or taken out early. Penny and Percy had obviously been training together. Alexis was the big unknown, but she didn't get to be a Gryffindor prefect because she was a slouch at magic or afraid to fight.
The gang of thugs had probably assumed a half-dozen teens would be easy pickings.
Honestly, in a fight where nobody was throwing Unforgivables or had terrifying monster powers, the whole thing felt a little nonthreatening for me. Maybe I was getting too blasé. I had little trouble holding off everything coming in on my flank with my shield. Oliver and Percy shielded against the other directions. It was honestly amusing watching the members of the gang attacking us realize that it was the three girls of the group that were taking them out with pretty accurate stunners. The magicals of Egypt had never really embraced Islam any more than those of Europe had embraced Christianity, but the patriarchal notions still seeped in.
They broke and ran when five of them were down, dragging their stunned friends off into the labyrinth.
"Good job, team," I told everyone. It had been our first fight as a group, and, for Alexis, her first real fight at all. There were smiles all around, but before the inevitable adrenaline crash set in, I suggested, "Let's get going, before our reputation precedes us."
It wasn't too much further to Necropolis. It wasn't an actual necropolis, which I understood were usually kept on the west side of the river while we were on the east, but an establishment with that name. "Now I really feel like an adult," Oliver quipped. "Goin' t'my first bad neighborhood pub."
While it looked like the actual structure was a simple masonry rectangle taking up the ground floor of the apartment block with a front entrance on the alley and a back that might drop right into the Nile, the decoration made it much more complex. The room was broken into a twisting array of booths and tables with partitions snaking around them. They were probably ideal for making it difficult to listen in on conversations or being certain who was there at any given point. But it was pretty clear that, this early in the afternoon, the place was close to as dead as its name. Only a few tables had guests, possibly there for the lunch special?
The bar was near the front door, and looked pretty new: simple wood without too many stains from long use. But it already had signs of having been repaired with magic, faint scars that didn't quite set back properly due to missing material. My guess was that the place got rowdy, and the bar had to be replaced pretty often when someone smashed it or blew it up in a barfight.
Slowly taking count for the night and stocking new bottles of liquor from crates, the barman was an actual ghoul, not trying to hide his deformed, mouthy features. "Great, f'n tourists," he muttered in an indefinable European accent. Louder, he suggested, "You've seen the sights, kids. Buy a drink then get back to the main drag before dark. Full moon tonight."
As potentially the most cosmopolitan of the six of us, at least as much as she'd spent a lot of her childhood on the European continent, we'd elected Alexis our spokesperson. The dark-haired witch sauntered up to the bar like she was in a film noir and said, "We're not just here to see the sights… we're looking for information."
It might have been a better delivery if there hadn't been five other teens in various states of "gaping tourist" mode. It probably didn't help that we were all clearly various shades of not-wealthy. A mysterious and world-wise source of a potentially big bribe, we were not. Maybe we should have sent her in alone.
The bartender smirked with a smile that went way further back on his face than it had any right to and said, "Pick a table. Maybe you'll learn a lot."
And that's how we wound up at a large table to the side of the room, day drinking in a seedy wizard bar. Penny and Percy had done a number of detection spells on everyone's drinks for both intentional and unintentional toxins, and still both nearly spit out their room-temperature beer. Mathilda and Alexis sipped politely at theirs, but their glasses weren't lowering much over time. I was being much more mature, I thought, appreciating all the flavor of beer brewed in the nation that had a pretty good argument for having invented it. Which is to say that I also wasn't a big drinker, but I thought I could eventually acquire the taste.
Oliver complained that it wasn't as good as Guinness, but happily drank his down. I once again marveled that one of my best friends was such a high school jock stereotype.
While the night crowd at the bar was probably way more interesting, there were nearly a dozen patrons that filtered through while we were there. A couple of old women that might have been hags were actually trying the lunch special, so I really wasn't interested in it. A guy passed through at one point whose tics reminded me of Remus before a transformation, so hopefully he was just getting one for the road before locking himself up for the upcoming full moon that evening.
Perhaps the most interesting was the man holding court with a half dozen hooded wizards that slunk in one-by-one throughout the afternoon. Despite his guests being locals, from what we could see of their faces, he stood out more than our group as a foreigner. Tall and fair-skinned, he wore a dark silk shirt, blue jeans, and a red ball cap. And, if the looks the ladies at our table were giving him were anything to go by, he had the same kind of impossible sidhe beauty as Maeve. Okay, fine, I could also tell that he was a real hottie.
Lacking anything better to do, I tried to overhear his conversation, even though the arrangement of the room scattered noise and the magically-powered fans pulling air through the building from the Nile exit weren't helping either (although they did keep the building merely uncomfortably warm rather than sweltering). It also didn't help that he was a native language speaker and I wasn't. But the general gist I got was one of planning and convincing of some upcoming event.
Hopefully they were just arranging a dark magic bake sale.
Finally, they broke up their conference and he headed out. Oliver, headed back from the bar with another pint, bumped into one of the wizards who was heading out. "Sorry, pal!" he said, brushing off the guy's robe. "No harm done?" The group froze for a moment, but then decided not to bother with British tourists.
As the ringleader walked past the table at the rear of his group, I realized that his red cap had an Oakland Raiders logo, and I thought they only did black and white apparel. Even the logo was red and black. And the cap looked slightly damp, like it had been recently dyed red. Or dipped in a reddish substance…
"Lefayson," he tipped his bloody ball cap to me as he walked past, a knowing smirk on his face, carefully stepping around Oliver. Great, the fae all knew me on sight at this point.
"What did he call you?" Percy asked as the sidhe in the red cap left the building.
I tried to figure out how to explain in a way that wouldn't catch on all the things my implicit oaths to my godmother and Maeve prevented me from saying about the sidhe. "My mother got the nickname Margaret Lefay, because of some of her extracurricular interests. I know at least one house elf that called me that…"
"He's like Maeve," Mathilda got it.
"A boy Maeve," Alexis said, it almost seeming to slip out. She flushed when everyone looked at her, but Penny and Mathilda giggled too.
"And if you're right, Maeve is one of the fae," Oliver interjected. "So who's that guy? And what's he up to?"
"His cap didn't start out that color," I suggested.
"Merlin's beard, Harry!" Mathilda suddenly lost some of the effect his aura and appearance had on her. "You're saying that's like a full Nevernever version of a red cap!? They're already triple-X threats!"
"And not nearly that hot," Alexis grinned.
I shrugged, "Just guessing based on how damp that hat was, and how that team's sporting apparel is normally black and white."
"So what now?" asked Penny. "Do we just, like, wait here, or follow that guy, or maybe we should–"
She was interrupted by a tremendous crash of breaking wood and plaster toward the back of the room near where the red cap and his meeting had been sitting. A section of the ceiling caved in and a large person covered in splinters and dust barely landed safely, groaning and rolling away as the table partially broke his fall. Staggering to his feet, it took me a moment to recognize Michael due to all the masonry and plaster dust stuck to him.
A pair of eight-foot-tall brutes dropped confidently from above into the detritus. One of the ogres told the bartender, "Caught someone peepin'!"
Exasperated, the ghoul asked, "Then why didn't you throw him into the river instead of through the floor?"
"Oh," the burly creature grunted. "Guess we'll do that now." They both moved to try to herd Michael out the back, and the man hadn't brought his sword.
"Does that answer your question?" I asked Penny, as we shoved out from behind our table to help.