“Still here?” I returned to the office, only to find Sammy still seated at the front desk, his fingers pecking away at the keyboard.
“I had to take the train this morning, I’ll be damned if I take it again tonight. Now that you finally brought my car back, I’ll be heading out.” He stood and breathed a heavy sigh, looking forlorn down at the computer screen.
“Busy day?”
“Every day seems to get a little busier. The streets are getting scary, Gus. Even if half or three quarters of these tips are bogus— it’s an uptick of at least thirty percent. Whatever happened with that Armenian vamp, it uncorked something. And I’m not sure how we put it back in the bottle.”
I shrugged off my jacket and slung it over the coat rack. My thoughts raced between the coven to Loren, to that orc bodyguard in the laboratory reception area. Lamar’s pointed ears emerging from within his tuft of dark hair. How had it happened? The gradual emergence of supernatural life intermingled with human reality. I’d spent hundreds of years trying to keep the two existences separate, and by the looks of things, I’d failed utterly.
“Any word from Loren?” I gestured toward my bedroom door.
“Quiet as a church mouse.”
“I should really get back to the apartment,” Indigo said with a sigh, running her fingers through her dark hair, tinged with purple. “Miranda’s already been alone all day and I need to go check on her. Help her make it through the night.”
I could see the weariness in her eyes and sense the heavy weight of the responsibility for her friend lowering her shoulders. Not for the first time, I questioned the decision to rescue the woman. Indigo barely had the resources to care for herself, much less her drug addict friend.
“I can drop you off on my way out of town,” Sammy said and lifted his jacket from the coat rack near where I’d left my own. “Be a great night for a drink at Montgomery’s.” He lifted his eyebrows.
“It would. But—”
“Say no more.” He held up a hand. “You have responsibilities now. Rain check.”
“Rain check.”
A moment later, Indigo and Sammy had left, and the apartment was finally, blessedly, quiet. I made my way to the kitchen and went through my normal ritual of retrieving a glass and topping it with cheap whiskey, thinking about the chaos that swirled around me in almost every phase of my life. I sipped from the whiskey, my eyes closed, trying to draw upon my multiple lifetimes of memories. I could recall an evening in the early 1700s, during a rare break in my service to the Caretakers. A visit to a small Scottish pub just outside Edinburgh, sipping scotch from one of the first commercial distilleries, sitting across the round table from Loren. I couldn’t remember the context of our conversation, but I could still taste the acrid burn of that scotch on my tongue.
The warm rush as it slipped down by throat, followed by that telltale burn. Whatever that scotch had been called, whatever process had been used to brew it had been long since lost to the sands of time. As I stood in my kitchen, a two dollar glass from Wal-Mart clutched in my fingers, the swirling ripple of amber liquid inside, I felt as though I was somehow betraying the rich heritage of the liquid. It took me about four seconds to get over it and I swiftly drained whatever remained in the glass, suddenly unconcerned with its expense or its pedigree.
With the apartment empty, I walked to the hallway and past my bedroom, heading straight toward my closed-off office. I lingered near the bedroom door, wondering for a moment if I should go inside, but continued past. After I punched in the combination on the office door, a lesson I’d learned when Indigo had first arrived, I pushed the door open and went inside. Already, there was a knife tucked into a sheath at my hip, but it was an offensive blade, not a defensive one, and at that moment, I was preparing for everything. I swept a book from the bookshelf and set it down on a small table, then located the knife I was looking for, a blade I affectionately referred to as The Stand, one of my favorite Stephen King books. The name made no real sense in the context of the novel— it wasn’t like the knife would start a world-ending plague. But what it would do was generate a mystical shield. Create a barrier comprised of latent veil energy, which had protective features, a guardian against physical attack. I flipped through the book until I found the page I was looking for, then trailed my finger along its words, silently murmuring the magic incantation to commit it to my substandard short-term memory.
Next, I found myself crossing the living room floor, quietly reciting the phrase in my mind as I approached the door to the apartment, my fingers tensing around the handle of the knife. I stood before the door, blade pointed down and held out my palm, quietly chanting the magical phrases in a language that nobody but those from the mystical realm would understand. I extended the blade, pointed it toward the top right corner of the door and finished the incantation, thrusting the blade a bit, pricking a bright hole in mid-air. A flash of sparks formed where the knife’s edge touched nothing, a wound of veil energy bursting from the invisible puncture. With a sweeping motion, I drew my arm down, then across the bottom of the door, up the other side, then across the top, a thin, bright line following the path of the blade, forming a hovering, rippling rectangle in the air. Taking a step back, I extended my left palm and touched it to the air a few inches short of the door and the air itself shimmered outward from my hand, forming a strange, distorted rectangle which pressed against the entrance to the office. It was like looking at the door through an equally sized pane of frosted glass.
It collided with the door noiselessly, then scattered, the energy dispersing, leaving the door illuminated by a soft, pulsing glow. As far as protection spells went, it was quite rudimentary, but it would be enough, I believed, to stop a Shade from trying to work its way into my apartment. If either Ricard or Lucinda themselves wanted to get in, there would be little I could do to stop them— but at least I could put some sort of obstacle in the way. I returned the defensive blade to my office, resting it back in its stand within the display case, then returned the book and exited, closing the door behind me.
With the protection spell cast, Loren still snug in her bed and whiskey burning my throat, I knew there was something else still left to do. While in the office, I’d retrieved one of my knives— the one I’d named Lisey’s Story, so named because in the Stephen King novel, it spoke about another world operating in parallel to reality.
Lisey’s Story had a unique enchantment, the ability to carve a portal between those two worlds— the human one and the supernatural one. I’d used it to call forth an old friend when I’d found a murdered Caretaker a short while ago. As these memories ran through my head, I went through the motions yet again. I recited a quiet enchantment and drew the glowing blade in a rough oval shape in mid-air. The apartment immediately began to reek of sulfur, the trademark smell of veil magic intersecting the human world, a noxious combination that both turned my stomach and, in some ways, reminded me of home.
Drawing the knife in a wide, circular motion, a tear of sparks followed in its wake. It wound around and around, as the circle of air contained within those sparks shifted and simmered, revealing a different universe beyond the four walls of my apartment.
I stood for a moment, looking at the portal, and waited for something— anything to happen.
“Hello?” I called into it, my voice carrying. “I request— assistance!”
Nobody responded to my call. I knew that reaching out to the Caretakers was quite possibly a fool’s errand. They had their own priorities and it was rare that those priorities aligned with mine. The last time I’d reached out to them, it was next to the body of one of their dead comrades, and yet still they’d sent Troels, a Viking messenger to help instead of confronting me directly.
“The covens are at a tipping point!” I shouted into the swirling void. “A warlock has called upon a shadow demon— he wishes to overthrow Darkheart Coven! It could spark a war!”
Not even a hint of response. Not from the Caretakers, not from Troels— not from anyone at all. “This is urgent!” I all but screamed the plea, and the silence screamed back in return. My jaw flexed in anger and I slashed Lisey’s Story in a sharp, downward angle, the circular portal bursting into a shower of floating embers. The portal vanished and once again I was left in my apartment, alone with my thoughts.