Black Alice — Two
t took me an hour and a half to get home, because I took the scenic route, out to the boonies through Romulus and back into Detroit, to Highland Park, just in case my stubborn Irish friend decided to try to tail me. I wasn’t sure the long, bass-ackwards trip would stop him, but I figured I could at least cost him a small fortune in gas. I spent a fair amount of time as the only car on the road, so I felt pretty secure when I pulled into my driveway and parked my Nova in my little cinder block garage.
They say that the folks in the suburbs are scared of Detroit, and the folks in Detroit are scared of Highland Park. I’m not sure how true that is, but I do know Highland Park is no place to enter lightly, and my neighborhood, in particular, is unpleasant. Gun fire is a regular occurrence, and the police response time is a joke.
Highland Park is actually its own little town, completely swallowed by the cancerous growth of Detroit. It’s dirt poor, and the city coffers are so empty we haven’t had our own police force in years. We rely on Detroit’s over-worked cops. I hear things are getting better, but I’ve yet to see any evidence. Particularly in my neighborhood, where better than half the houses are abandoned, and the ones that aren’t have the windows barred and security doors installed, and their yards are patrolled by large, angry dogs.
I live in a two-story brownstone, once a pretty little house, now crumbling around the edges. The yard is overgrown with browning weeds, and the back fence is falling down and needs a paint job. I have bars on my windows as well, and reinforced doors, because I’m a sorceress and therefore sensible enough to know better than to rely on magic in matters of security.
I don’t have any dogs, but Gene, my house zombie, met me at the door when I came in. It’s almost like having a dog, except if you think dogs stink when they get wet, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Gene had been a thin, spare man in life, and he was thinner and more spare in death, graying comb-over gone stringy and dull, eyes opaque white, skin gray. He still wore his little round glasses and tidy suits, although I’d had to staple the glasses to his face when his nose withered too much to hold them up. I wouldn’t have bothered, except he seemed so upset about it when they kept sliding down and falling off. He also wore a little pine tree air freshener around his neck, over his tie. Believe me, it’s necessary.
He grunted at me as I handed him my leather jacket. Zombies aren’t the most vocal bunch, and Gene was less so than others because I’d had to stitch his mouth shut. He’d bitten a gentleman friend I’d had over. Gene had been my husband in life, and he had a little jealousy thing going.
I headed into the bathroom to wash my face, changing into jeans and a t-shirt and taking my hair down. My shadow crept along the wall behind me, serpentine and restless, as I went between the bedroom and bathroom, and the darkness in the house shifted and writhed with her mood.
“Stop pacing.” I told her as I went up to the second floor. “You’re making me nervous.”
The second floor was wide open, and stacked with books. Shelves lined the walls, and sat in steady library rows through the large room, packed to capacity and overflowing to stacks on the floor. I have some of everything, from astrophysics to car repair, great literature to a secret, guilty stash of trashy romance novels. The really good stuff, though, is locked up in a heavy oak cabinet at the back of the room. I snagged the key hidden in a copy of Windows Hacks and Mods for Dummies and unlocked the cabinet. Inside were my grimoires.
Mostly, they were notebooks, covers tattered from use. Those were mine, full of notes and spells, rituals both failed and successful. Several were office binders, with printed sheets. I’d gotten those online, because, oddly enough, there were people out there blogging their grimoires. I often wonder what the commoners, the ordinary, mundane humans, think when they stumble across those. Do they think it’s fiction?
A few, at the very bottom of the cabinet, were dusty old books, pages going yellow and brittle despite layers of careful preservation spells. These I had bought or found or stolen, packed full of scribbled handwriting in old, dry languages, or carefully illuminated in those same old languages. The information in these books is largely obsolete these days, but I’d gotten them as collector’s items, anyway.
Magic is the act of focusing one’s will power to harness natural energies and forces. Most humans need a hand with that kind of focus, so we use tools like symbols, or items, or rituals. We pray to a cross, we throw salt over our shoulders, we chant, or inscribe circles, or carve runestones. Some of these rituals and symbols are so common that even mundane humans use them every day to work a little magic. Baking a cake just the same way your mother did, which is just the same way your grandmother did it, and her mother and grandmother, and so on, until the very act of repetition focuses the will and creates a little kitchen magic. That kind of thing happens so often that most people don’t even realize it’s magic.
Because we rely so much on symbols and rites, magic is in a constant state of change. Symbols change meaning, rituals pick up new facets, spells take on new words and new meanings as the definition of old words are changed. The swastika starts as a symbol of peace, and these days, it’s evil. Christians started out drawing fish, lost that for the cross, and only recently started picking up on the fish again. Everything changes, and old magics become obsolete, only to be rediscovered and renewed.
All of which means that, while the basic tenets of harnessing energy through the application of trained iron will stay the same, the actual details change so much so often that it’s pretty much pissing useless to read any of the elder grimoires. Still, they have pretty pictures, and some of those old mages put a lot of time and effort into their illuminations, so they make nice show pieces.
And, the truth is, some things never change. Things like unspeakable glyphs.
The glyphs explained why Tyrell had called me. I had something of a specialty in them, as much as any human could. I’d been suspicious of the call, but I’d answered it, because proving my loyalty to Detroit is a constant process for me. I’m not well liked around here.
I sat down in my easy chair, dropping my cell phone and smokes down on the end table next to me, lap full of my own notebooks and a couple of the old books. I lit a cigarette and started reading, trying to find some clue to the meaning of the glyph. I heard Gene start up the vacuum downstairs and relaxed to its gentle rhythm, tapping ash from my cigarette as I read.
I didn’t realize I’d fallen asleep until my cellphone rang and I jerked, spilling books to the floor. I scooped it up, frowned at the caller ID and the time, and answered.
“Hello?”
“Alice.” The voice that greeted me was a smoky female contralto, a husky sound full of old jazz, cigarette smoke, and whiskey. It belonged to Gianna deAngelo.
“Gianna. What’s got you calling so close to dawn?” It was going on six in the morning, and if the sun wasn’t up yet, it would be soon. Gianna was a vampire. Vampires were nocturnal by nature, but they could be awake during the day if they needed to be. They weren’t at their best, but they could do it. I’ve heard that some of the old ones could even walk in the sun, if they wanted to.
“I’ve run into a small issue. Are you available?” Her tone, polite and made of steel, didn’t leave me any room to be unavailable.
“Sure.” I ran a hand through my hair, rubbing my eyes. “What do you need?” I wasn’t much for jumping when people said “frog”, but I’d worked for Gianna for years, magical security and sometimes other jobs, and she paid well.
“Can you come to the house?”
She had more than one house, but I knew she meant her main home, out in Farmington Hills. She was naturally careful on the phone. She’d been a mob boss for most of her eighty years, and that led to caution.
Gianna was also known as Mama deAngelo, and back in the day, when she’d been a cabaret singer and still alive, she’d married the man who would become Don of the deAngelo crime family. She’d given him five sons, each of whom she kept firmly bound by the apron strings. When the Don passed away, his oldest boy had taken over, but it was really Gianna running things from behind the scenes. Under her ruthless leadership, the deAngelos had taken over Detroit, stomping on a lot of toes along the way. Some of those toes were undead, and one of the idiots had decided that the best way to control the deAngelos was to control Gianna, and so he’d vamped her. She fed him his fingers, toes, and balls. And then let him grow them back, and did it again. For over five years.
“Yeah.” Farmington Hills was a fair drive from here. “Give me an hour?”
“Hurry, if you can.” Her tone was still polite, still warm, and still made of steel. Mama deAngelo was the quintessential iron fist in a velvet glove.
“Sure.”
She hung up on me and I sat up straight, rubbing my eyes. I’d had, maybe, an hour’s nap. Ah well. Sleep is for the weak.
I pushed myself out of my chair, tossed the grimoires back in their cabinet and locked it, tucking the key in its book on my way out of the library. Gene was downstairs, dusting. “Need my coat, Gene.” I said, on my way into the bedroom to throw on some decent clothes. I ran a brush through my hair and snagged my frayed denim jacket from Gene on my way down to the basement.
The basement is where I keep all my good toys, and my work shop. Mostly, I’m an artificer, a crafter of artifacts and talismans. Down here, I keep all my equipment, everything from mundane tools and machines to the smelter and the kiln. It looks something like a cross between a mad scientist’s lab and the New Yankee Workshop. I tossed my coat over a bench and grabbed my shoulder rig, tucking my Colt Python into the holster under my left arm. I added my athame, which is a fancy, magical name for a really sharp knife. My really sharp knife is about eight inches long, double-edged, and rides in a handy back sheath. It’s good for purification rites, blood magic, and carving someone the hell up. I shrugged into my coat, filled my pockets full of useful bits like salt and chalk and homemade ammunition, and headed back up the stairs.
Gene had my keys, phone, and smokes. Honestly, I don’t know how I’d get by without him. He’s a lot more use dead than he ever was alive. He waved good-bye as I went out to the garage.
It was a bitter cold November morning, dark, gray and dismal, and a light frost of snow covered the ground. I pulled out into the street, feeling the wheels of my old green Nova slip a bit on the wet pavement, and then headed off towards Farmington Hills. This is ordinarily a fair drive. A couple of whispered cantrips put traffic in my favor and the lights on my side. Since I tend to drive like I have a death wish anyway, I made good time, despite the fact that, as usual, everyone in Detroit had forgotten how to drive in a little snow.
I was about a half hour from Gianna’s house when I spotted the tail. Two men followed me in a dusky dark blue family car of some kind. I frowned, shifted lanes, made a couple of turns to be sure, and when I was positive, scooped up my cell phone and called Gianna.
She greeted me in the same tense voice she’d used before. “Is there a problem?”
“Yeah.” I slouched down in the seat some, hair swung over the phone to hide it. I didn’t think the tail was close enough for them to see I was calling anyone, but better safe than sorry. “Someone’s following me. Maybe you could tell me a bit more about what’s going on?”
There was a pause. I could swear it was a surprised one. “Following you?”
“Yep.”
She made an irritated tsking noise. “You’ve heard we’re having some problems with the Russians?”
“Russians?” I flicked another glance at the car in my rear view. It had fallen back some, behind a big black SUV driven by a blonde woman applying lipstick in the rear view mirror. Nice.
“The Russian mafia – the Bratva.” Gianna didn’t have an Italian accent, but she did have their rhythm of speech, and hearing the hard Russian word in that rolling rhythm was amusing.
“Oh, wait, I think I did hear you were having some trouble with some bunch or another. I guess I just figured it was the Chinatown bunch again.”
“No, they’ve shut up for now.”
The deAngelos didn’t own all of the Detroit underworld, but they owned enough to keep a fairly heavy foot on the rest. Despite that, they still had little scuffles with the local street gangs, and we had our fair share of the ethnic gangs and organizations, as well. Gianna’s general policy was that business arrangements were preferable to outright wars, but not everyone agreed with her.
“So this is the Russians?”
“Unless you’ve pissed somebody off lately.” Her tone was decidedly dry.
I smirked. “Nobody unusual.”
“They stole a shipment of ours. We found it, and retaliated. They . . .” I heard her take a breath. “They’ve upped the ante.”
“What did they do?”
“They took Benny’s kids.”
I let the silence fall, too dumbstruck to answer. Beneccio was Gianna’s youngest son. I couldn’t imagine anyone being suicidally stupid enough to do that. The second-to-last person in Detroit that you ever wanted to mess with was Mama deAngelo. The last person you wanted to mess with was any member of her family. “The fucking Russian mafia kidnapped your grandkids?” I tossed another glance up at the mirror. The car was two back, now, but still following. “Why? Wait – and why are they following me?”
I worked for Gianna, not the deAngelos. I wasn’t in tight enough with the actual Family to be on a list of targets, or at least, I hadn’t thought I was. Unless . . .
“Do these guys have talent?” I demanded, using the common euphemism for being magically inclined. If they had mages, and had been scoping out the deAngelos, then they would know that Gianna was a vampire, and that she had someone warding her house on a regular basis. Hell, if they’d been watching her for long enough, they would have seen me out there, walking her property to reinforce the wards.
“Yes. They used something like that mirror thing you do, to let Gustavo know they’d taken the kids.” She said, referring to the mirror spell I used sometimes to send messages. The mirror would steam over, the words written in the steam, and stay that way until found, kind of like magical text messaging.
“Goddammit.” The Arcana had very clear laws concerning mages in Detroit. You announced your presence to the Arcana, and swore oaths of loyalty to Detroit and our laws, or you didn’t get to stay. That meant either some of our people were on a Russian payroll, not such a problem, or there were rogue mages in Detroit.
Rogue mages meant I had to get the Praetorians involved, and the Praetorians would want to know how I found out. If I told them the truth, I’d be in deep trouble for dealing with Gianna. Not as deep of trouble as I’d be in for talking to an Orderman, but deep enough. Mages and draculas haven’t been on speaking terms since we nearly wiped them out during the Twelfth Street Riot in ‘67. From what I’ve heard, the vamps had it coming, but that was before my time, and mostly before Gianna’s, so I don’t see why it should stop me from making a little money.
“They killed Benny’s wife, and two of the children.” Gianna’s voice had taken on an edge of sharpened ice.
I set my back teeth. “Benny?”
“He’s become.”
This just got worse and worse. I smacked my forehead, and then quickly remembered what I was doing and put my hand back on the steering wheel. Vampirism is one of the oldest active curses known to magekind. The curse is passed through an exchange of blood, and the exchange usually results in death, but it doesn’t have to. A vamp can do it and leave their victim alive, the curse lying in wait for the moment of the victim’s death. Gianna had done that to all five of her boys. The dormant curse offered a few benefits, like being stronger, tougher, harder to kill, and longer lived, which was why Gianna, at over a hundred years old, was only on grandkids, and not great grandkids, yet.
Even more fun than Benny joining the undead – shame, too, he’d been a decent enough guy for a mob boss – was that the reason we hadn’t wiped out all the vampires during the Riot was that fighting had been brought to a halt by the Twelfth Street Treaty. All the dracula signatories, including a much younger Gianna, had agreed not to create any more undead.
If Benny had risen, then Gianna had broken the treaty, and in theory, the fighting would be back on. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to conduct a supernatural war without the Order catching wind of it and turning up to bitch-slap the whole lot of us back into place? That place being, of course, the grave. They had the man-power to do it, too, whereas neither the mages or the vampires could deal with each other and the Order at the same time. Not enough of any of us.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” I glanced in the mirror. The blue car had crept up on me again. I was in a really bad spot, here. “What do you want me to do, Gianna?” She knew what kind of spot she was putting me in, too.
“Find my children, Alice.” Her voice was completely empty of inflection.
It was not beyond Gianna to burn the city to the ground in an effort to find her kids. Vampirism might be a curse, but in order for it to work, in order for the body to rise and walk again, there had to be something there for the magic to work on. There had to be some drive, some powerful emotion, something in the person vital enough to make the corpse restless enough to rise. In Gianna, that drive had been her love of her family. She was, in essence, the love of her family. Sure, she was still the jazz-singing Italian spitfire who’d married a mob boss, and the ruthless, intelligent mafia business woman, but that was just left-overs, echoes of the live woman she’d been. The curse had taken that love and warped it, like curses will do, which is why she’d condemned her own kids to the same damn thing, and why she’d use her impressive resources to level Detroit for her grandkids.
Unless I could find them. Which meant going up against either rogue mages, or mages of the city. Either way, my finding and rescuing her kids meant I’d have to kill some mages and hush it up, or I’d get my own damn self in trouble. Oh, and there was still the problem of Benny, which could result in war, or something else equally unpleasant.
“Fan-fucking-tastic.” I spat into the phone. “This is going to cost a lot, Gianna.” I snapped the phone shut and tossed it on the seat next to me.
I ran a hand through my hair. Now what? I didn’t want to take a tail to Gianna’s house. I cut through two lanes of traffic and onto a side street, looking for someplace private, empty. I glanced in the mirror, watched the car pass the street. The passenger broke the rules of good car tailing by staring at me as they went by. I glanced up the street. Public or private? How bad a mood was I in today?
Well, I wasn’t in a very happy mood, that was for damn sure.
I drove up the street, more a narrow alley, really, until I found an empty, leaf-blown lot behind a tall building. Things seemed nice and quiet here, and there were no immediate witnesses that I could see. I got out of my car, slamming the door behind me, and walked around to sit on the trunk. I lit a cigarette while I was waiting.
I had just flicked my cigarette butt away when the blue car rolled by. I waved as they passed. A moment or two later, it doubled back, turning into the lot, and I put some will power behind my protections, in case they decided on a drive-by to solve their problems.
They drove up next to me, passenger side facing me, and the passenger window slid down. I was looking at a pale blonde man with a square face, big jaw, little piggy eyes a cool green color. His driver was a bigger man, wide shoulders with a gut that almost pushed the steering wheel, like a sports coach gone to fat. He was a swarthy guy, dark shaggy hair, hard dark eyes, and a big hawk nose, broken at some time or another, maybe more than once.
The passenger held up a big gun, maybe a Glock or something like it, barrel extended by a silencer. “Get in the car.” He said. His voice was harsh, gravelly.
“No.” I said, and lit another cigarette.
He stared at me for a moment, blinking, like he couldn’t quite understand that I told him no. He had the gun, not me. I didn’t get to say no. I just got to get into the car. He frowned. Apparently, the Russians, if that’s who this guy worked for, didn’t hire for smarts.
He pointed the gun at me, like maybe I just hadn’t noticed it. “Get in the car.” He said it a little more slowly this time. Maybe he thought my English wasn’t very good.
I smiled. “No. Who do you assholes work for?”
He set his jaw, anger furrowing his forehead. He leveled the gun and fired once. He was three feet from me, no chance of missing. The bullet curved unnaturally off to the left, and I heard it hit the concrete somewhere behind me. Some mages construct their shields and protections to absorb a hit. I specialize in not getting hit in the first place.
He frowned even harder, surprise showing in his squinty little eyes, and fired a few more times. The gun made a soft phut-phut-phut sound. My hair moved with the passage of the bullets, and I flicked ash.
“Last chance to do this easy, buddy. Who do you assholes work for?” I looked over the interior of the car. The day was dim and gray, and the car was dark, full of shadows. Lovely.
He glanced at his friend, who was drawing his own gun. The friend had gotten a nervous look on his face. Maybe he was the smarter of the two. As he lifted his gun, I saw a dull glitter flash across the barrel, a shimmer of magic, invisible to anyone who wasn’t trained in the Sight, but plain enough to me, and I decided I was done screwing around.
I gestured with the cigarette, and the shadows in the car lunged, boiling up in curls and tendrils, sharpening and barbed, and a second later, there was a series of wet squelching noises, and the interior of the car was painted a chunky red. I threw up an arm to block the spray of blood that burst out of the passenger window.
A low, dull wheeze came from the car, and I lowered my arm for a look. The driver sat, gun still raised, ghostly pale and eyes the size of dinner platters, wide with horror and shock. He was coated in the blood and chunks of his now very dead passenger. The passenger was a red ruin, punctured in a hundred places. Except for his face, which I’d left, so the driver could have a good look at the pained surprised etched into his buddy’s last expression.
I flicked some wobbly bits off my arm, hit my cigarette, and leaned a little to look in at the driver. “Who was that you guys worked for?”
The driver spilled his guts. Literally, all over the lap of his dead friend, and when he was done heaving, I politely repeated the question.
“Some guy.” He panted as he spoke, eyes huge and showing too much white. “Big guy, dark.”
“Names, please.” I slid off the trunk and squatted next to the car, my arm squelching in the blood as I leaned against the lip of the passenger window, looking in at the driver.
“Yuri.” He was frantic, gaze squittering everywhere, as though he couldn’t believe there was so much blood in a person to look at. “Yuri Gladrilov.”
I nodded, glancing around at the mess, pleased with it. Wet bits dripped from the ceiling of the car, and oozed down the windows. Inside, the shadows still writhed around the floor. The driver twitched as they stroked his legs.
“Oh God, oh God, please . . .”
“And he hired you to do what now?” I watched as the driver started to weep. His chest jerked, making his gut wobble.
“Please, please, please –”
“I asked a question.” I said it sing-song, grinning.
“Follow you!” He gulped and wretched again.
The stink was pretty bad. I must have got the passenger in the bowels. “Just follow me? He gave you that gun and said just follow me?” I tsked, shaking my head. It was a guess about the gun. “I don’t believe you.”
“Okay, okay, please, just – we was supposed to bring you in!”
“Better. Give me the gun.”
His hand shook as he handed it out to me. I took it and set it on the lap I’d made by crouching. In the light, it gleamed a soft green. I was guessing by the color that it was enchanted for some kind of sleep or paralysis. Clumsy, doing a whole weapon like that. I just do the ammo. That way, I can switch out if I think I need to.
“Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me, Jesus, what’d you do . . .” He gave a little squeak as the shadows crawled higher, up into his lap.
“And it was this Yuri guy, gave you the gun?”
He nodded, panting, weeping, approaching the point where he’d be hyperventilating.
“Where were you supposed to take me?” I gave a quick glance around. As far as I could tell, we were still alone, surrounded by dark office buildings.
“Dunno, dunno, I was just supposed to call –”
“Let’s have the number, then.” He stuttered it out, and I shoved the sleeve of my jacket up, scraped a finger-full of blood off the windshield, and wrote the number on my arm. He gagged, eyes bugged.
These guys were flunkies. I doubted driver-boy knew anything else useful, but I quizzed him about child hostages and locations just to be thorough. I was beginning to detect the fragrant odor of urine over the other stinks in the car, and figured I’d scared the driver honest, and probably also useless. I crouched there for another moment, looking around the empty, lonely lot, trying to think of any other interesting questions to ask, listening to the man make high-pitched mewling sounds in his throat as my shadows stroked his face and hair.
“Well, I guess that’s it, then.” I looked back into the car, into the driver’s face, and he met my eyes. His were round with terror, lips trembling, and he was leaning back into the window, flinching as my shadows touched him. He was beyond words, and beyond screams.
I looked him in the eyes for a moment longer, until finally I saw the warm glow of his soul in them, and then the shadows dove into his eyes and jerked it out. He made a gagging noise as my shadow, a deep black shape, rose up from the ground behind me, passing over me in a cold flood, and lunged into the car, grabbing greedily at his soul and devouring it.
Waste not, want not, I always say.
Black Alice by Marci Sischo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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