Magie Noire

By Rurouni Star

Chapter Eighteen

We met Hendricks at a parking lot just outside an IHOP. It wasn't classy, but it was an easy landmark on our way out of town. The red-headed bodyguard was driving a sturdy black SUV; the glass in the windows looked suspiciously bulletproof.

"Just you?" I asked. I didn't mean to sound disappointed, exactly, but I'd hoped that calling in the mob would get me at least a little more firepower.

"Found a traitor," Hendricks told me, as he popped open the back of the SUV and started rummaging. "I trust me, at this point. Probably you." He gave Carmichael a brief fish-eye. "...maybe him."

Carmichael grunted. "I never asked for trust," he said. "It's not like we're buddies."

Hendricks tossed me a bulletproof vest. It was a little big for me, but it was better than nothing. I peeled off my jacket and pulled it on. The one he handed to Carmichael sat a little better on my partner, even with his impressive beer belly.

"There's a GPS in the cop car," I said. "It's better if we don't take it across state lines, so it looks like we're riding with you. I'll get you the address."

I caught sight of a few impressive-looking weapons under a blanket in the back of the SUV. I suspected they weren't anywhere near legal. I was already deeply uncomfortable with this whole idea, but it was far too late to change my mind. I heard a rumble of thunder overhead, so I headed for the front seat of the car.

"Plan?" Hendricks asked me, as he buckled into the driver's seat.

Uh. I tried to shoot Bob a mental plea.

"I still think you're up the river without a paddle," the spirit told me. "But if you manage to get past any wards and sneak up on the guy before he gets off a spell, you might have a fighting chance. Just so you know, if he manages to talk before he dies, he's probably getting off a death curse and taking someone with him. He could send it after anyone, technically. You, the big guy over there, maybe even his wife."

I was starting to feel a little bit like Han Solo trying to navigate an asteroid field. Maybe I'd been better off not knowing the odds.

"We need to catch him flat-footed," I told Hendricks. "Park a ways out from the lake house. We'll head up on foot, I'll do some checking around to make sure we don't trigger any nasty surprises. We really need to catch him before he gets any spells off. Preferably before he talks at all."

"Backup plan?" Hendricks asked.

I grimaced. "I wish I had one. This guy is bad news, and he's got me on a time limit."

Hendricks pulled out of the parking lot. He looked thoughtful. "Could just burn the place down," he said.

I cringed. Bob made a sound like a buzzer behind me. "Nope, wrong!" he said cheerfully. "If there's a Way nearby, he might just duck into the Nevernever and disappear. You'd never-never catch him that way."

"Nevernever?" I whispered, as quietly as I could. Hendricks shot me a sideways glance.

"The Other Side," Bob replied. "Astral Plane, Arcadia, so on and so forth. It's where stuff like faeries and demons come from. But you can't get in just anywhere, and you need someone to open the way." He snorted to himself. "Open the way. Open the Way. Hah! Sometimes I crack myself up without even trying."

I cleared my throat. "He might have a kind of… reality back door," I told Hendricks. "If we try to flush him out without eyes on him, he could just rabbit where we can't follow."

Hendricks looked annoyed at that. "Magic," he muttered. "Inconvenient."

I saw Carmichael watching Hendricks from the back seat. He seemed surprised to hear the mobster talking so calmly about the supernatural. I felt a tiny bit better about having Hendricks with us. At least that meant I was two to one against my partner's tendency toward skepticism.

"Very inconvenient," I said. "If we don't take him out quick, we get to find out whether he's got Evocation. That's more movie magic stuff — blast and boom." That was one of the few basics I'd already gotten through with Bob so far. "At that point, it's duck and cover and hope he doesn't get too creative."

"Take him out," Hendricks repeated. He glanced toward me. "Shoot to kill?"

I went quiet at that. I knew how dangerous it would be for Victor to get a chance to fight back. Taking him down before he could he could speak was the safest course of action… not just for us, but for Monica. It was the latter point that decided me, in spite of my misgivings. "Don't try for anything fancy," I said. "Shoot center mass — better chance to hit him." I paused, and swallowed hard. "I won't cry if he dies. But if there are people there with him, it's police procedure for them. Only appropriate, reciprocal force."

Hendricks didn't seem a fan of that, but he nodded anyway. "We wear masks, then," he said. "No identification."

I scowled, but I didn't argue. I might not have liked the idea of using tricks of the criminal trade… but we didn't have a warrant. That meant this was criminal.

"Better and better," Carmichael observed bleakly.

I couldn't contradict him.

0-0-0-0

We beat the storm by a few minutes — just enough to park the SUV down the road and out of sight of the lake house. Hendricks fished out some painfully stereotypical ski masks and gloves for us, and a very illegal, fully automatic gun for himself.

"Do you guys just keep these SUVs loaded up and ready to go for all your criminal needs?" Carmichael asked. "Is this just like a typical Tuesday run?"

Hendricks clicked off the safety on the gun. "Are you complaining that I'm properly prepared?" he asked.

I shook my head at Carmichael. There was no point in antagonizing the help. "No one's complaining," I said. "For tonight, we have each other's backs, we do this as right as we can. Tomorrow, we can go back to business as usual."

Hendricks offered us each a pistol. "No serials," he said. "No history."

I grimaced, but I took the gun. The odds of us getting out of this without me having to shoot something were pretty fucking slim. It wasn't a good time to be using my legally-registered backup gun.

Carmichael was starting to look rattled. I didn't blame him. Somehow we'd gone from no more Marcone straight to murder-date with the mob. It was feeling like a bumpy transition.

Lightning cracked in the distance behind us. I had a brief vision of Monica, sitting inside Saint Mary, praying not to die. I turned to start hiking my way up the dirt road. After sitting still for so long, my injuries had settled into an awful soreness. I carefully stretched my muscles as I went, trying to work out the kinks.

"Can you think of any way to bring this guy in normally?" I asked Bob quietly. I was a good fifteen feet ahead of the other two already, but I kept my voice low anyway.

Bob made a strange sight in my mind's eye, walking next to me out in the open without a mask or a vest. I noticed that the spotty rain didn't wet his hair or dribble down his face. "I don't know why it upsets you so much, kid," he said casually. "The Wardens are gonna come for him eventually. They're big on execution, and not in the humane way. The way I see it, you're just speeding up the process so he doesn't cause more damage in the meantime."

I thought on that darkly. It made a certain amount of sense. It still didn't make me feel any better. "It's a really different matter to be the one doing it," I said finally. "I'm a detective, Bob, not an executioner. I'm supposed to drag people back for a fair trial, let society make the final call."

Bob chuckled, entirely too calm for my tastes. "Well… society doesn't believe he did anything," he said. "And kid, let's be honest — what would you do with him if you did catch him alive? Hide him in your basement? I'm just saying, basic logic." He waved a hand. "If it upsets you so much, let the big, burly guy kill him."

I scowled. "That's a cop-out," I said.

Bob snickered. "Cop-out," he said. "Good one."

"This is so not the right time for puns," I muttered crossly.

"Kid," said Bob. "There is no such thing as a wrong time for puns." He let out a low whistle, though, as the lake house came into view below us.

"Whew," said the spirit. "That's a spiritual fixer-upper if I ever saw one. This guy's been leaking black magic like a sieve." He squinted. "Oh, right. I forget you've only got the five senses normally. Probably for the best. Even I'm feeling a little wigged out looking at it."

I tried to calm down my roiling stomach to focus on the present. I knew I still wasn't comfortable shooting to kill. That was a really big problem, but I didn't have time to come to grips with it. The lake house was right there — smaller than I'd anticipated, but much more expensive-looking, with a lot of glass and polished wood. All the curtains had been drawn, but that didn't mean someone wasn't watching through them. In that respect, the thick clouds overhead were a good thing; the darkness would mask our approach.

"Back door?" Hendricks asked me quietly, as the other two caught up with me.

I nodded, my chest tightening. "Stay back and let me check it first."

The lake house was built on two levels; I headed toward the deck on the second level, where an inconspicuous door led inside. I paused a few feet away.

"Keep it narrow," Bob advised me. "Once you take off the blinders, you'll be Seeing more than I do. I don't think you want to take in the whole view here."

I took in a deep breath, and tried to steady my nerves. I knew I wasn't in the right frame of mind to be intentionally prying open my Third Eye. My brain still felt barely recovered from my low point this morning. I wasn't sure I wanted to be here, doing what I was doing, spitting in the face of almost everything I believed. But life and the weather weren't going to run on my timetable.

All I knew was that the Father was going to have his work cut out for him the next time I saw him.

I reached for the aching point in my forehead that I'd come to associate mainly with fear and madness and misery… and forced it open one more time.

The first thing I became aware of was the deep, suffocating air of hunger.

It was the kind of blind, angry hunger that consumed everything else. I deserve, said that hunger. I want, I need, why shouldn't I have. Victor's insatiable lust had permeated the whole place. I felt it on my skin, slick and dirty. I had to resist the urge to try and wipe it off me.

I tried to keep my focus on the door, but I saw shadows flickering at the edges of my vision, skittering along the walls of the lake house. "Bob," I whispered. "Are those real? Are they alive?"

"Huh?" Bob said. "I can't See what you're Seeing, kid. Describe it."

"There's… things… crawling all over the house," I said. "Shadow creatures."

"Oh," said Bob. "Yeah, I can see those too. They're just low-level carrion feeders. They're not intelligent or anything, they're just attracted to the all the leaky magic around here. I'm thinking his rituals aren't exactly what you'd call energy-efficient."

"Can they hurt me?" I asked.

Bob shrugged. "Maybe in the long-term," he said. "If you decided to move in and live here. I wouldn't worry about 'em right now, though."

I nodded, and refocused my awareness on the door. There was something about it — a hiss and crackle of phantom flames, criss-crossing the outside.

"Look but don't touch, grasshopper," Bob told me, as I described the Sight to him. "Sounds like our barbecue scenario to me. You're going to have to get your head around the wards, kind of chew on them with your brain. You're looking for what triggers them."

I wanted to ask him what the hell he meant by chew with your brain, but I understood it intuitively as I looked harder. I had to narrow my consciousness — send it a little deeper into the magic. It wasn't pleasant. Victor's magic was angry, oil slick, and even just a little bit misogynistic; he'd learned to draw power from making women fear and obey him. I didn't want to understand that too well.

Nevertheless, I dove in deeper, feeling at those lines of fire. They were barely-restrained power, waiting… searching out some particular moment.

"They're all over the house," I said softly. "I think they're tuned to go off when a human being touches the place. But there's a bypass when the door is unlocked. To let in guests he actually wants, I'm guessing."

Bob made a thoughtful sound. "Huh," he said. "Just humans? No protection against spirits?"

I frowned. "I'm not sure what that would look like," I said. "But… I don't think so?"

Bob winced. "Can't do any better than that?" he asked me.

"I'm really new at this, Bob," I told him. "But as far as I can tell, he's mostly worried about people."

Bob sighed. "Ah, well," he muttered. "Worst case scenario, I get a little zapped. I don't think Mister Exploding-Heart novice is good enough to take me down in one go." He stretched his arms a bit. "Permission to break and enter, boss lady?"

I blinked. "You can do that?" I asked.

"Hah," Bob said. "Not normally. But if this place ever had a threshold, it's been long-since shredded. Habitual demon-summoning and leaky black magic really don't do your metaphysical defenses any favors."

I nodded slowly. "Okay. Do, uh. Whatever you're thinking of doing."

The phantasm next to me disappeared. I felt the electrical tingle underneath my skin quicken and surge forward. It felt especially weird since I'd nearly forgotten it was there; Bob's presence had become a kind of accepted background noise in my brain. Slowly, those orange-gold motes leaked away from me, curling toward the door and flooding through the lock. I stared at the spirit with the Sight, a little bit flabbergasted by the impression he left upon me.

He was… well, powerful. I hadn't realized just how powerful until this very moment. I had the sense of an endless array of knowledge packed away within him — enough to fill thousands of libraries. Nor was it purely static; there were new books being written every second, existing books being revised and adapted, as Bob hungrily pulled in new thoughtforms and ideas from the metaphysical world in which he lived. There were whole different dimensions to him, whole different senses, that I knew I could spend lifetimes just trying to understand.

For the first time, I was also painfully struck by the fact that Bob's consciousness wasn't human. It was a sparkling web of information, held together by cold, rational decision-making that reminded me more of a computer than a human being. But that cold consciousness didn't quite track with the being I'd been interacting with until now. Just because I was looking for it, I saw the little mote of personality glimmering within him; an atom of irrational, artificial emotion, built in imitation of all the humans he'd interacted with.

Bob was building himself a personality. I wasn't even sure he knew he was doing it. It wasn't a perfect parallel to the sort of thing a human being would have, but that didn't make it any less real.

Seeing him next to the bracelet I still wore also made me keenly aware of their similarities. The dark, dull magical circuits of my mother's bracelet had been modeled after Bob, I realized.

The flood of orange lights whispered back toward me. I breathed in, and the electric tingle slid back down my spine. Uncle Bob appeared next to me again; this time, the unearthly glow in his eyes held more of my attention.

"Hey, that was fun," Bob said. "I feel kind of like James Bond. You think you could imagine me up a suit?"

I blinked a few times. I was having trouble meshing the image in front of me with the very inhuman thing I'd just Seen.

Bob snapped his fingers in front of my face. "Kid?" he said. "Door's unlocked. Ritual's started. You're gonna want to stop him before he finishes, I'm guessing?"

I closed my eyes. Again, it didn't help. I really needed to excise that impulse. "Sorry," I said. "I Saw… you."

"Ooh," Bob said. "Didn't think of that. Well, that's embarrassing. Kind of like being caught without your spiritual clothes on, isn't it? Hope it wasn't too unflattering."

"No," I said slowly. "Just… really different." I shook my head. "I've gotta turn this thing off. Give me a second."

I forced myself to clear my mind. It really wasn't easy this time. I had Victor's gross magic all over me, and I was sinking into the really cold, clear understanding that I'd been interacting with things that truly weren't human at all. If I had kept looking at Bianca that night — if I'd really known what I was doing back then — would I have Seen something similar underneath her skin?

A crack of thunder overhead dragged me out of my drifting thoughts. I shuddered instinctively at the power it contained. Somehow, I managed to pull my Third Eye closed again.

The world went dark and still again. I had to blink a few times to adjust myself to the dullness of reality, seen only through normal human eyesight.

I reached out hesitantly for the door. I flinched as my hand touched the handle… but nothing happened.

I turned to head back up toward the other two. Hendricks was looking at me with a carefully guarded expression. I wondered if he'd caught sight of Bob's spirit form for a moment. Maybe, I thought, he'd mistake it for magic. There were worse things than letting Marcone and his people think I was a spellcaster.

"We're good to go in," I said. "He's started up a ritual. We can't let it finish."