Five

The Apartment on the Corner of Magic Alley

 

That night after midnight, I was crouched in front of my brother’s door picking the lock.

I swore I wouldn’t. I didn’t particularly care if he was in trouble. But...Dad. If something had happened and I didn’t warn Dad about it, I wasn’t sure he’d ever forgive me.

Devdan’s apartment was on the west side of the city. “Magic Alley” as it was unofficially called, though it wasn’t an alley—more like four square blocks where half the magic users in the city lived and worked. Magic supply shops, back-alley spell exchanges, witches dispersed among various apartments and townhouses. A handful of humans lived in the area, but the housing turnover rate was high for them.

Interdimensional demons popping up at inopportune times didn’t help.

Dev’s apartment was tucked on the top floor toward the back, the hallway curving out of sight of the other doors. The deadbolt was tricky, but I’d been taught how to pick a physical lock as soon as I had the fine motor skills for it. The magical variety had followed closely thereafter.

 The light was low, the bulb over his door having burned out at some point in the past week when he wasn’t around to complain. I got the final pick in place and unlocked the door, the bolt clicking back as I rose.

I silently opened the door and slipped inside.

Magic flared around the doorframe—the same warding I’d been taught as well, though with his own spin on it. The threads were deep orange and braided with red in various spots—blood magic, a heavy line of defence that wove straight through the walls, floor, and ceiling.

A light switch waited to the left, but I left it in favor of a penlight; if Dev was in trouble, if there was any chance someone might be watching, I didn’t want to overly advertise my presence.

His loft was sparsely furnished, at least on the lower level; a set of steps directly ahead led to his room which, unless he’d grown out of some lifelong habits, would be a nightmare to go through. I started on the main floor first, checking the drawers of the hutch on my left, the small dark bathroom next. What I was looking for, I couldn’t say.

Except that Melinoë had one theory about what happened, and I couldn’t let that cloud my judgement. I was not a typical investigator, but if I was, I’d try to start without assumptions.

The license wasn’t just a piece of paper—I did have to earn the fucking thing.

Nothing interesting in the medicine cabinet. The bathroom was polished and clean but smelled faintly of toothpaste and wintery soap—it still smelled lived in, even though he’d been gone long enough for dust to gather around the mirror.

My penlight aimed at the floor, I turned and started out of the bathroom.

As I nearly collided with someone, my heart leapt to my throat and my fingers twitched, magic rushing to my call in preparation, lighting the space more than my penlight had.

Melinoë took a single, quick step back and stopped. Didn’t raise her hands or say anything, her brows lifting in silent question.

I coiled magic back, the sparks rolling back up my arm and disappearing. “I have a lot of free time right now and I was curious.”

“Mmmhmm,” was all she said.

I rolled my eyes and passed her, continuing toward the kitchen. Glanced through the cupboards, the drawers. Tried to wrack my brain and think back to where he used to hide things when we were kids. He was eight years older than me, though—we were hardly playmates. I was the annoying baby sister who would throw spells at him and he wasn’t allowed to retaliate because he was older.

“You got past his door.” Melinoë followed a few steps behind me as I crossed the living room. “He said his wards were locked with blood magic when he was out and only he could pass.”

“We do share some DNA—more than you and he do, so how did you get in?”

“He gave me a magical...passcode. So to speak.”

How trusting.

The warding was customizable—plenty of witches would pack a lot more restrictions to keep blood relatives out as well, but Dev and I had very few of those. No other siblings, and on both sides of his family nearly everyone had been wiped out thirty years ago. We grew up with each other, our dad, my mom, our aunt, and my parents’ friends who acted like relatives.

I paused by Dev’s desk—his laptop was missing, a faint layer of dust interrupted by a square indicating it had been moved fairly recently. Within the last week? Maybe. No spare papers, no notepad with anything important jotted down. He’d have used his phone for that anyway, but I checked none the less. The potted devil’s ivy to the left had grown rubbery and lifeless—I’d have to water it before I left. Maybe take it back with me, as there was no reason for the plant to die because Dev disappeared.

Along the top shelf above the desk were family photos—he got the habit from Dad, I figured, who had them all over the place—and the pics were old. Dad and Dev’s mom when they got married—a selfie, nothing formal. She was pretty if not a little plain, wavy blonde hair parted down the center and falling over her shoulders, her eyes a vivid green. Dad looked the same, of course—other than a trim, I didn’t think he’d even changed his hairstyle in thirty years.

The pictures had been in our house until Dev moved out. It was one of those things I grew up around but didn’t ask about, how all these pictures of a dead woman were in Dev’s room as well as the drawing room. My mom didn’t like that room and I didn’t entirely understand why except that the knotted heavy tension in the room whenever Dev’s mom was brought up was enough to choke me.

Hanging over one of the photos of his mom was a chain—normally it had an old wedding band on it, a gold one made of Celtic knots.

The ring was gone, though. Dev wouldn’t’ve left that behind.

Small garbage bin by the desk—empty but for a couple of Kleenexes. I turned away from the desk and shelf, and finished in the living room—honestly, it was all pretty boring—then hit the steps, jogging softly up to the loft.

As predicted his bedroom was terrifying. Bed unmade, clothes strewn around what was probably a laundry basket beneath the pile. Books stacked high on a second desk. And dresser. And nightstands. Sure, you could get digital grimoires and demonology textbooks, but the physical copies were still popular—there was a contingent of witches my age who were trying to digitize older works, but plenty of them had entities tied to the actual books themselves. Making copies? Well, there were enough substantiated claims to suggest entities could haunt digital files as well. Get a few too many fucked-up computers and even skeptics get careful.

I did another sweep of the bedroom with my penlight. Where were his actual supplies? The biggest spells—magic that affected a larger area or a lot of people, that really fucked with the world—still benefited from magical items. Dev had to have some somewhere, plus I knew there were several books he’d never leave sitting out like this.

I went for the nearest windowless wall and looked for a seam or secret door or anything that seemed out of place.

Melinoë still hung by the top of the stairs, watching me. “I told you I have all his stuff from the motel. What do you expect to find here?”

“Important lesson we both grew up with...” I moved to the next wall, crouching to peer under the dresser.

She sighed and walked to the bed to sit, rifling idly through the nightstand without really seeming to look. “Which is?”

I dropped flat on my stomach and shone the penlight under the bed. “Don’t keep everything important in one place. Mom had a whole network of supplies and safehouses squirreled all over the city. Dad was big on keeping backups.” When I found nothing, I rose to my knees again and twisted to shine my light around once more. “If you didn’t find any clues at the motel, either everything was on him or there’s something to find here. He has to be keeping his supplies around here somewhere.”

“You’re looking for some kind of...a hiding place? A glamour? Or like a safe?”

“With security, you have to consider who is most likely to break in.” Thanks, Mom. Dev might not have liked her but she was plenty wise and he listened. “Around here, anyone able to make it past the warding and get inside is going to see through a glamour.”

She rose again and paced, wandering around the room and peering out the doorway at the top of the stairs. “Look up.”

I glanced at her; she was peering at the ceiling outside the door.

I tipped my head back and shone the light upward, but didn’t see anything.

Melinoë pointed. “The ceiling out here is about two feet higher than in the bedroom.”

Hmm.

I climbed to my feet and focused on the ceiling this time, checking for any sign of a seam, anything off.

“You think there’s a crawlspace we can access?” she asked.

“Or a hidden room,” I mumbled. “It’s how we were raised.” Dev was tall—taller than me by five or so inches. He’d have something custom installed...easy to access, for him. He’d lived here for a few years and I didn’t know if he rented or had bought the apartment outright, but he had the money to subtly alter things without a landlord knowing. He was secretive by nature—had to be something here. Nothing too complicated, but not something that could be accidentally knocked open.

 I reached up with my empty hand, fingers splayed and palm up, and felt along the air. Magic rolled from my fingertips toward the ceiling, testing and tasting the expanse of white for anything that seemed...

A jolt ran through my arm; not painful but still startling.

“What?” she asked as I paused.

“There’s something here. I can feel it, I just can’t...” I tested again with my magic and a deep burnt orange sparked against my blue. This time the shock was sharper and I jerked my hand back with a hiss, my fingers tingling and magic rolling back up my arm reassuringly.

Melinoë stepped over softly, her leather coat creaking in the silence. Her head was tipped back, hair falling away from her face, and she studied the ceiling. Then she reached up as I had, her fingers moving in a graceful, circular gesture.

The ceiling seemed to bubble, an oily black rising to the surface. It gathered and grew, coiling around and around until a circle about two feet in diameter formed.

As she dropped her hand again, a ladder slid down, the exact height of the room and leading into a crawlspace.

I glanced at her. “Nice trick. Demon magic?”

Still peering into the hole with a frown, she nodded. “I don’t know where he got the substance in the first place, it’s not from this dimension. We’d be the only ones able to use it like that.”

I mean, a sledgehammer to the ceiling might’ve worked too, but it would’ve been awkward as hell.

I pinned the penlight between my teeth and gripped the rung at eyelevel to climb.

I went slow, feeling outwardly for any sense of a magical trap, but all I caught was more wardings similar to the one at the apartment threshold. Still nothing to keep out blood family.

At the top of the ladder I found a crawlspace, the two feet Melinoë had observed as well as an extra foot above that. Comfortable enough for crouching, and there was a thick yoga pad and pillow rolled out in the corner. Meditation, maybe, but also the odd spell could knock you out if you were unprepared, and lying down up here would be safer than trying to climb down the ladder while impaired.

Custom shelving ran along two walls, taking up the whole space—here were his rarer texts, some loose on the shelves, other in Plexiglas cases. The air hummed with magic that rolled across my skin, flaring to life at the presence of an intruder before coiling back again when it was clear I wasn’t a threat. If I let my eyes go hazy and unfocused, I could see the layers of magic and spinning sigils lining the space in precise placement. His spells were carefully crafted and expertly placed, but with the odd wisp of wildness, the moments when he cobbled something together perfectly in a way we were never trained for.

I got out of the way so Melinoë could join me. I couldn’t find a separate light source, but let my own magic float up, weaving between the threads of Dev’s spells. Cool blue electric light filled the space and I put away the penlight.

I moved on my knees toward the nearest shelves, looking for anything out of the ordinary—where a book might be missing, something moved in haste. “How exactly have you been tracking the Aanzhenii?”

“The old-fashioned way.” When I looked sharply at her, she elaborated. “Reports of sightings, rumors, social media. They sometimes cause blackouts, especially if there are two or more together—power outages, WiFi down. In addition to warping space and time, that is. I get alerts about outages, we compare it with known sightings.”

“That sounds...tedious.”

“It is.”

Dev was brilliant. Focused and patient when he needed to be, but he did not do ‘tedious’. He didn’t look for shortcuts because he was lazy; he looked for shortcuts because he didn’t want to waste time, because he believed there were better ways of doing things. But he was prideful—if he was experimenting, refining his spellwork, he wouldn’t have brought it to her until he had something concrete. Possibly after testing it out...?

Maybe there was no sign of the Aanzhenii taking him at the motel because he’d found a way to magically track them and went there to test his work.

It was a big leap for me to take, especially considering we hadn’t talked in so long—I was basing it on the Dev I grew up with, colored by the perspective of a baby sister. But like any good theory, there might be evidence to support it; it could be tested as I went.

“Someone else was in here...”

I looked over at Melinoë, whose black brows had pulled into a frown. She crouched in front of a chest of small drawers set between the shelving, her fingers splayed as she ran them a few inches back from the dark wood. The crackling blue light above us tinted her glossy hair as she moved.

“Someone other than Dev,” she elaborated. “They were focused over here.”

“Aanzhenii?” I guessed. What else would leave invisible imprints in the environment? I didn’t see anything myself, but—

She shook her head. “No. Demon.” She shifted over, making room for me, and I crawled over to sit on my knees at her side.

I looked. Saw nothing. “Not visible to a witch, I guess?”

She gave me a self-deprecating smile. “Sorry, right. I’m used to working with Dev and I don’t... Well.” She dropped her left hand but kept the right extended, hovering it just an inch from the wood. “There’s this...residue. Certain demons leave it when using their particular brand of magic. It looks like...black oil, at least to me and Dev.”

Like the magic that had hidden the crawlspace. “But it’s not his?”

“No.” She sat back cross-legged and set her hands on her knees. “I’m guessing they were looking for something. Recently—the residue fades over a few days.”

I moved a few inches closer and reached for the first drawer. There were eight of them, three narrow ones at the top, two long ones below, and another row of three small ones at the bottom. The bottom held supplies, some I could identify by smell before I even opened the drawers—a mix that was almost spicy and other times more acrid and sulphuric. Gemstones and talismans were placed in careful, individual compartments, probably with some kind of organization order but I could only guess how. One of the longer drawers had rolls of scrolls under an acrylic lid.

I reached another drawer where nothing but a small slender black-lacquer box waited. If it was velvet, I’d expect jewelry, but this...I wasn’t sure. I pulled the drawer out fully and reached for the box.

“Wait,” Melinoë said quickly, her hand flying out to caution me.

My fingertips hovered over the box. “What? Demon boobytrap?”

“There’s a lot of that residue around it,” she said, frowning. “Like whoever else was in here spent a lot of time on this.”

So this might’ve been what they were looking for—or, at least, whatever was in it. “Is it going to explode?”

“I’m not a bomb-sniffing dog, so...maybe?”

“I mean, was that why you told me to wait.”

“Oh. No, I don’t think it’s explosive.”

Comforting.

I took a breath and grasped the box, gingerly sliding it out. The lid was on hinges, delicate black ones along one side of the seam so small I nearly missed them. With care and a silent prayer to whatever goddesses might be listening, I eased the lid back.

The box was empty. But it hadn’t always been.

The interior had a cut-out that was in the shape of the pendant that it had held, a long loop for a chain that went the circumference of the box and then joined to continue up to the center where the place for the pendant itself was.

No pendant now, though I could picture it. An oval, blood-red stone with flecks of black that sometimes—at least to my eyes as a child—seemed to move. It both fascinated and repelled me, and even with its absence, I could see it so clearly I swore I’d blink and it might appear.

I knew what had been kept in this box—saw it many times before.

“Elis?” Melinoë prompted—clearly as close as she and Dev seemed to be, he’d never revealed this.

I snapped the lid shut. “I think—”

The crawlspace floor beneath me rumbled suddenly.

I tensed and shifted, eased to a crouch balanced on my toes and angled my back against the supply shelf as I looked around. “You feel that?”

Melinoë nodded. “Something’s here.”

Hello Obvious Woman, thank you for your insight.

The hairs rose on the back of my neck and the magic around me grew sharper, the air humming with razor blades about to strike. I eyed the trek back to the ladder—Dev must’ve had another escape route, but we didn’t have time to look for it—and weighed the possibility of running for it without being remotely clear on the threat.

“I can go first if you—”

My words were cut off as moving, shrieking darkness exploded up from trapdoor hole in the floor.