Magie Noire

By Rurouni Star

Chapter Ten

I called both Carmichael and the Lieutenant on the way to the Varsity, keeping them apprised of my movements. It was good partner etiquette with Carmichael, but there was more to it than that — I needed to keep this meeting open and aboveboard, so no one could accuse me of secretly cozying up to the crime boss. It would be terribly ironic, after all, if I put so much effort into staying out of Marcone's pocket, only to have the Lieutenant cut me from the force over accusations I'd been passing him information.

I walked into the Varsity at six in the evening, on the dot. I didn't want to give Marcone the satisfaction of thinking I'd gone out of my way to be early.

The club catered mostly to the college-age crowd. It was far from packed at six in the evening, but it still had a modest throng of young adults, all talking in the sort of casual slang that made me feel old. A few jocks gave a whistle as I passed, but I was too weirded out to be offended. I was twice-married, twice-divorced, and not quite old enough to be their mother. I pulled off my coat to reveal the badge at my belt, and the whistling died abruptly, confirming my suspicion that at least one of them was too young to be there legally.

Marcone was sitting in a large, circular booth near the back of the bar, along with a handful of his little minions. He didn't look up as I approached, though he must have known I was there, based on the uneasy silence that followed the movement of that badge through the bar.

"Mister Hendricks," he said to his red-haired bodyguard, as I came within speaking distance. "Could you please do the honors?"

Hendricks rose from his seat. I spread my arms expectantly, with a roll of my eyes. The large man patted me down, searching for wires. I had my phone taken from me once again. I'd slipped on my mother's silver bracelet out of plain old superstition, though I knew it was useless and run-down by now. Hendricks gave it the fish-eye, but passed it over. He paused at my gun, frowning deeply, but I gave him a warning look. "I'm not gonna shoot your boss in public," I said. "The gun stays."

Hendricks glanced back toward Marcone, who waved a hand in confirmation.

I slid into the booth, just as Marcone jerked his chin at his goons, dismissing them from our presence. The three of them moved off in different directions, Hendricks included, to form a discouraging perimeter around our discussion.

Marcone opened his mouth to offer some sort of pleasantry, but I cut him off. "You started a gang war," I said.

The mob boss frowned. "You're such a sparkling conversationalist, Detective," he said sardonically. "I can't see how it is you've garnered such a difficult reputation."

"Your opinion of my conversational skills means the world to me," I drawled. I was about to barge right to the point, but my eyes fell to a strange object that had been set at the center of the table. It was a withered black scorpion, a little smaller than the size of my palm.

Marcone raised an eyebrow at me. "A warning, I presume," he said. "I found it in an envelope on the office desk, addressed to me by name."

"And it's not in the dumpster by now?" I asked.

"I thought I would let you have a look at it first," he said.

"How generous," I muttered. I took the opportunity to skim my eyes over it, though, since it was there. It certainly looked threatening enough, in a general sense, but I wasn't aware of any relevant connotations. Normally, I might have tried to take it with me to check it for fingerprints, but Bob's discussion of Thaumaturgy and long-distance links made me wary of that.

"You didn't touch it, did you?" I asked.

Marcone frowned. "You must have a dim view of my intelligence to ask that," he said. "No. I touched neither the envelope nor its contents."

I focused my eyes on his face. "You think it's magic?" I asked.

That got a fleeting reaction of surprise. Marcone tried to cover it with a neutral expression, but we both knew I'd already caught it.

"...perhaps," he said. "It seems most prudent to assume as much."

I considered him carefully. It occurred to me that I had more cards in this conversation than I'd had in the last one. Marcone hadn't just been offering me knowledge of Tommy Tomm and his movements — what he'd really been offering me was knowledge of the supernatural.

As I ran into more and more instances of frightening, inexplicable things, I was supposed to realize just how in over my head I was, and come running to him for help. That, I thought, was why he'd really sent me to the Velvet Room. I was supposed to have a run-in with Bianca. I was supposed to have a come-to-god moment, to be confronted by something I couldn't handle on my own.

But now, I suspected, I had more knowledge at my disposal than Marcone had at his, in the form of one overly-chatty, pun-prone air elemental. The balance between us had shifted abruptly, whether he knew it or not. I just needed to decide how best to use that to my advantage.

Huh, I thought. Game theory. Maybe it wasn't quite as useless as I'd once thought.

"I gather you've reconsidered my offer, Detective," Marcone said.

"You gathered wrong," I said. "I'm here to ask you to do the right thing, and help me clean up your mess before someone else gets hurt."

Cold anger flickered behind Marcone's eyes, but he controlled himself. "I gave you a very specific proposition, Detective," he said. "If you've come here to waste my time, you will find me far less accommodating than I have been so far."

I wanted to look him in the eyes — to let him know I wasn't intimidated in the least. But Bob's advice came back to me, and I forced myself to stare at his chin instead, just in case. "You don't own me," I said. "And you will never own me. I know you're used to forcing people to kiss your ring, but you're going to have to get that through your head. I think you're the worst scum on this earth, Marcone — but you're still Chicago scum, and that means I'm obliged to make sure you don't end up with your heart outside your chest. Now if you've got something that might lead me to the wizard that's got it in for you, I personally think it's in your best interests to spill."

The word wizard put him off-balance again. I knew what he was thinking. Had I been playing dumb this whole time? Did I know more than he did? It probably wouldn't occur to him that I'd managed to get an infodump off a magical talking head in the space of only a few hours. That was just the kind of bizarre circumstance even the smartest man couldn't account for.

"And how is it you've concluded there's a wizard after me?" Marcone asked. He was going to do the reasonable thing now, and search out the limits of my knowledge. He needed to decide what value I held to him now.

"That's not how this works," I said. "I'm the cop. You're the guy who wants to keep his heart beating. Tell me where to look, and I'll make sure this guy ends up behind bars, before he gets what he needs to take you out. That's only a matter of time, by the way. You might be professionally paranoid, but even you can't account for every hangnail and every strand of hair."

Okay, I gave him that one for free. I was telling the truth when I said I considered it my responsibility to keep him alive.

Marcone's face was pale with anger now. He might have been a man of great control, but he was also genuinely frightened, and he clearly didn't like having the tables turned on him one bit. Powerful men do stupid things when they feel like they're in a corner. "You are in the process of doing something you will deeply regret," he told me in a low, strained tone.

"Wouldn't be new for me," I said. "Ask me about my ex-husbands." I raised my eyebrows at him. "I came here to offer you help that you clearly need. You don't strike me as the sort of guy to throw that away on account of your pride. I guess I'm ready to be proven wrong, though."

I watched the battle play out in his face. Marcone hadn't gotten where he was by being stupid. His underlings were far enough away that none of them could hear us. If he knuckled under and gave me what I wanted, he'd be one step closer to ridding himself of a dangerous rival, and no one would be the wiser.

But he would know that I'd outplayed him. And I would know it, too.

"...if you're so well-informed," Marcone said. "Then why put your people in danger instead of mine?"

"Because it's our job and not yours," I said. "Because anything you do will be you protecting your own ass first and foremost, instead of protecting everyone else." I lowered my voice. "Because we both know what happens to innocent people who walk into your line of fire."

Marcone's jaw twitched. A bright, angry fire flashed behind his green eyes. His knuckles clenched white on the table. I realized too late that I had hit a sore spot.

That was bad. I thought I'd just been restating well-known facts. I'd been aiming to make my position known — not to piss him off.

"I think we've exhausted the possibilities of this conversation—" he started.

I jumped back from the table with a high-pitched shriek.

Okay. Look.

I can deal with dead bodies. I can deal with mobsters. I can even deal with shadow men and talking skulls.

But we've all got something that bypasses our rational reactions and shoots straight for our lizard brain. Something with way too many chitinous legs had just skittered across my hand, and god damnit, I cannot deal with that.

Hendricks had his gun out. I belatedly realized he had trained it on me.

But Marcone had risen from the booth quickly. His eyes swept the table, searching for something.

I am not proud to say, I let out a little moan. "Oh god," I said. "Where the fuck did it go?"

"It's disappeared," Marcone snapped. He raised his voice. "Clear the establishment, Mister Hendricks."

There was something weirdly satisfying about watching students scramble out of the way of that tall, brick house of a man. I've had to corral young adults before, and believe me, it doesn't work half so well when you're five foot nothing with a cute little button nose. Where Hendricks went, though, people just bolted for the door with an exceedingly polite yessir.

Something much larger than my palm skittered toward Marcone's feet, its little legs scrabbling across the floor with a sound straight out of my worst nightmares.

Pure, terrified instinct flooded my body. I gave the thing a solid kick to the middle. It flew a few feet back, twisting in the air and skidding across the floor. The little dessicated scorpion had turned into a horrifying brown menace the size of a small dog. Its stinging tail was longer than the rest of its body combined, and dripping with venom. I didn't want to think what a sting from that thing would do to me.

The unnatural scorpion was already darting away behind one of the tables, dislodging chairs as it went. A girl screamed as she saw it, and I felt a momentary sense of solidarity with her. The few lingering college kids hustled for the door more quickly, though Hendricks had to haul away one of the jocks I'd seen on my way in — the moron had paused to crane his head, trying to get a better look from the doorway.

Marcone pulled a gun. I didn't bother asking if he had a permit for it. He aimed carefully, tracking the thing's movements, waiting for it to come out into the open again. One of the goons who'd been sitting at the table before had straight-up disappeared, I noted. That wasn't going to be a good look for him later. The other one fanned out to cover other angles, and I abruptly remembered how little I appreciate the brute force approach.

"Head for the back door," I told Marcone. "It's after you. No need to make its job any easier."

Marcone narrowed his eyes. "I don't run," he said shortly.

God. Men.

"There's way more open space outside," I gritted out. "It'll be easier to kill if you lure it out there where we can shoot it."

Marcone didn't respond — but he slowly began to back himself up past the booth. I stepped out in front of him, keenly aware that I'd intentionally turned my back on a pissed-off mobster with a gun.

I pulled my own firearm and slid off the safety, with a careful side-eye toward Hendricks. The last thing I needed was one of Marcone's goons getting the wrong idea and thinking I was part of the ambush on their boss. Hendricks met my eyes and nodded incrementally.

The scorpion exploded out from cover with unnatural speed. I raised my gun and squeezed the trigger, even as my senses belatedly informed me it had grown again — its three sets of awful, beady eyes were level with my chest now, and the stinger on the end of the tail that swung down toward me was now the size of a rapier.

I abandoned firing and threw myself backward as quickly as I could. The stinger grazed past my shoulder, instead of slamming into it — the venom burned like a bitch, but adrenaline kept it from slowing me down for the moment. Unfortunately, the scorpion was much quicker than I was. It lunged forward again like a rubber band, and I knew it had me.

A table slammed into it from behind, with a slight crunch of chitin. I blinked.

Hendricks followed up his bizarre assault with a heavy chair, slamming it down on one of the thing's many leg joints. As I scrambled backward, I wondered briefly why he hadn't just shot it — but the answer came to me quickly. I'm in the line of fire. Chair's safer. Someone hauled me up by the arm, dragging me back, and I hissed in pain. Marcone had me in hand, and he'd started dragging me back toward the door with him. The other goon took a potshot at the scorpion, and Hendricks had to dance back quickly to get out of the way.

Some of the bullets had sunk in. I saw a coppery blood oozing from the thing where one of my shots had caught it in the side. I was woefully lacking in knowledge of scorpion physiology, so I had no idea whether shooting center mass would hit anything important. Given the way this thing was growing, I feared we had a short timeframe in which to kill it before it became too much for our firepower.

The scorpion shook off its momentary confusion, and I saw it sweep around to look directly at me. I realized I was currently in the grip of its primary target. Shit.

Marcone squeezed off a gunshot past my shoulder. His bullet hit the thing in the head, just barely missing an eye. The two of us backed into the wall near the back door, and I caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye.

I tried to pull free from Marcone's grip, but he held on out of pure instinct. "Let me go," I snarled. I jammed my elbow into his ribs — hard enough to shock him, but not hard enough to wind him. As he released me, I lunged for the fire extinguisher next to us, hauling it off the wall and hoping to god that the mobster still bothered keeping his buildings up to code.

As the scorpion charged toward Marcone, I let loose with the extinguisher. It kicked against my shoulder, sending jolts of pain through my body, but I somehow managed to hold onto it as it spewed frigid carbon dioxide at the creature.

The scorpion staggered back, shuddering. Hendricks and the other goon took advantage of the window of opportunity to pump more bullets into it from a safer angle, though some of the shots seemed more blind than others due to the cloud from the extinguisher. I kept the cold going; I was satisfied to hear the agonized clitter-clack of the scorpion's legs against the floor.

More shots rang out. The venom in my shoulder burned and burned. The extinguisher slid from my hands in spite of my best efforts, clattering awkwardly to the ground — but the damage was done. The scorpion shuddered once more… then curled itself into a tortured-looking position, much more reminiscent of the mummified thing it had previously been.

Then, it collapsed into formless, colorless goop.

I stared blankly for a second, my shoulder still burning. Black had started seeping into my vision from the corners. I knew that was a bad sign, but I just couldn't bring myself to pay attention to it.

"...anyone else feel like we just walked into a horror movie?" I mumbled. I paused. "Shit. Am I the blond chick at the beginning or the cop at the end?"

Sirens rang outside — at least one ambulance and two cops cars, if my ears were working right.

I had just enough time before I blacked out to look on the bright side — at least while I was unconscious, I wouldn't have to be the one to explain what the hell had just happened.