Magic Brew

by T. Rae Mitchell

  Death-dealing bolts arc in all directions, striking every Widow in sight. Shrieks and screams fill the storm drain as they thrash and writhe in pain. There’s no getting away. Their bone-white skin fries off their bodies, first turning red, then purpling into bloody blisters, until their bodies are as black as the skin of a hotdog burning on a grill.

  Most of them fall in charred, twisted heaps, where I strike them, but the ones too stubborn to die stagger in the opposite direction, trying to escape. This makes me angrier.

  Stretching my arms out, my body turns to solid muscle as my power slams into them, so hot their bodies incinerate instantly, breaking into embers and ash before they hit the ground.

  With the last one dead, the unforgiving power shuts off, throwing me back into darkness. Every ounce of energy drains from my body. Gasping for air, I gag and heave as the rank stench of burnt flesh fills my lungs.

  Nyx wraps her shadow cloak around me. “It’s go time, Edge.”

  “I’m not leaving without Sienna,” I groan.

  As Nyx shakes her head, her features smear like a watercolor painting of smoky hues. “We can’t take her. She’s infected.”

  “No. There’s got to be something I can–” My voice breaks. I won’t let Sienna turn into one of those things.

  “What’s with you and this gullie? Five minutes with her and you go all school boy on us.”

  I drop my gaze, unable to look at the hurt on Nyx’s face. “It’s not that. I never should’ve involved her. It’s my fault she’s been bit.”

  “Stop playing the martyr. Shit happens. That’s her fate now.”

  Her willingness to doom Sienna to a lifetime of luring horndogs into this cesspool infuriates me. “It doesn’t have to be,” I snap. “I don’t care what you think. We’re taking her to the Ghost Market with us. I’ll find a cure for her.”

  “Fine, have it your way,” she says, surprising me by giving in, “but you’re gonna regret bringing her with us. That bitch is nothing but trouble.”

  22

  Enter All Creatures

  NYX’S SHADOW CLOAK MELTS AWAY, dropping me onto solid ground. The trip here–wherever that is–was fast and furious, a frenzied blur of the city’s darkest places as she slid us from one shadowy stretch to another.

  With the dampening of the cloak gone, the sounds of the city return. Brooklyn’s skyline glitters on the other side of the river. I check the street signs. We’re on the quiet corner of Peck Slip and South Street just below the bridge. Feels damn good to be so much closer to home.

  The two monster bikes are parked across the streets. “Where is everybody?”

  “Pan said they took Zulu into the market right away. He’s worse. Knox had him strapped on the bike behind him. I guess the ride was pretty rough on him. They’re afraid this might be his last stop if we don’t find a white witch soon.”

  That’s worrisome. I need the white witch for Sienna too. “They haven’t found one yet?”

  Nyx stares into space for a second as she connects with Pandora. “Nope. Still looking. You know how big the market is.”

  Sienna lifts her head from my shoulder and rubs her eyes. She’s been asleep since we left the Black Widows’ underground lair. “What’s going on?” she asks, squinting at the city lights.

  “You’re safe now,” I say as I set her down on her feet.

  Still dizzy, Sienna holds onto my arm. “I had this awful nightmare,” she says with a haunted expression. “I was in some dark, dark place and there were things biting me.”

  Nyx looks at me impatiently. “Are you gonna tell her, or do I have to?”

  “Tell me what?” Sienna says, looking from Nyx to me.

  Dark hollows rim her eyes, but the blue of her irises are brighter than normal, unnaturally intense. Her face is pale and translucent as frosted glass lit from behind, and the color in her lips has deepened to a deep red. In some ways she’s even more striking, but it’s an aggressive beauty that feels wrong on her. My heart sinks. The change is already happening.

  “You’ve been bitten by Black Widows,” Nyx says when I hesitate too long.

  Sienna looks down at her arms and bare legs in panic, gasping at the puncture wounds and dried blood. “Oh my god! I have to get to a hospital!”

  “Wrong kind of treatment. You need a cure for vampirism. If there even is one,” Nyx says, throwing me a doubtful look.

  Sienna backs away from us onto the street, shaking her head in denial. “No, this can’t be.”

  A car rounds the corner. The sudden flash of its headlights scares her. Hissing, Sienna cringes from the light. Before I can stop her, she leaps over my head, grappling onto the steel girder of the elevated tracks with fingers that have become inhumanly elongated.

  Worried she might keep climbing and get away from me, I move slowly toward her. “Sienna, come down. We’ll figure this out. Just climb down.”

  “Looks like you came back with a nasty little spider,” Hurley says from behind me.

  “Nasty little problem is what I’d call it,” Knox says as he strides across the street.

  Startled by their sudden appearance, I spin around. “Go back inside. You’re scaring her off.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?” Knox says.

  “Edge, let her go, man,” Hurley adds. “She was bad news before. Now she’s a nightmare.”

  “I’m taking her into the market and I’m getting her a cure.”

  Knox shakes his head. “Dude, you’re lettin’ your lady dagger do all the thinkin’,” he says, taking a drag so long, an inch of ash appears at the end of his cigarette.

  My hands form into fists. “It’s not about that.”

  “Oh no?” Hurley steps close, his face flushing red. “Then why’d you take her up to the Acropolis? It wasn’t to decorate cupcakes.”

  “Don’t be mouthin’ off to me!” Before I know it, I’m driving my knuckles into his jaw.

  Hurley instantly bulks up. Snarling at me, he takes a swipe with his deadly claws. I duck out of the way as Knox snakes an arm around Hurley’s neck, pinning him in a front headlock.

  “Take your meat hooks off me!” Hurley growls.

  “Not until you girls kiss and make up,” Knox says, squinting through the smoke of the cigarette clenched between his teeth.

  “No way! Edge sucker punched me!”

  “Only because you asked for it,” I shout back.

  Nyx grabs hold of my bad arm. I try not to wince as she pulls me aside. “What is this, Edge? Are you in love with her?” she asks, her voice tense and low.

  “No,” I say, but my chest fills with a dull ache. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Nyx holds me in her fixed gaze. “Then let me ask you this. Would you take her place to save her from becoming a Widow?”

  “Yeah. But that’s because it’s my fault she–”

  “That’s love, Edge,” Nyx says. “That’s love.” She lets go of my aching arm and puts her back to me. The sag of her shoulders tells me she’s hurt.

  I catch Knox and Hurley staring at us. Knox lets go of Hurley and they both look the other way, giving Nyx and me the space we need. Torn between wanting to make her feel better and getting Sienna down off the tracks, I decide to focus on the more urgent of the two.

  Sienna’s staring down at me. The savage look in her eyes is gone. She obviously heard me answer Nyx’s question. Relaxing her grip on the girder, she slides down to stand next to me.

  There’s lots I’d like to say to her, but not with everyone watching. I take hold of her hand, thrown off by the feel of her bones retracting to normal size. I do my best to squelch a shudder of revulsion. “So where’s the entrance to the market?” I ask, desperate to change the subject. “I don’t see any of the usual signs.”

  “Around the corner,” Hurley says, also looking relieved to be onto something else. He turns and leads the way across the street.

  Catching a movement out of the corner of my eye, I stop in the middle of the road. Anguish is stan
ding on the second story fire escape of the old building we’re heading toward. Instant fury flushes hot in my veins. I want to pound the angel to a pulp for leading us into that pixie trap and getting my girl turned into a vamp. Instead, I’m reduced to glaring at it.

  Sienna glances at the building then back at me. “What’re you staring at?”

  I frown in confusion. “What do you mean? Don’t you see Anguish standing up there?”

  She searches the face of the building and shakes her head. “No, I don’t see anything.”

  Pinching knots form in my gut. She doesn’t have the Sight anymore. The infection must’ve wiped it out.

  “The last time I saw the angel was just before the pixies grabbed me,” she says, her brow wrinkling from the memory of it. “Anguish told me to run, to get away, but they were too fast.”

  So Anguish had tried to help Sienna. I guess there really is nobody else to blame for what happened to her. It’s all on me. “I never should’ve left you there all alone.”

  “You didn’t know.” She steps closer. Her mouth parts in silent invitation. I can’t keep my eyes off those blood red lips. Tipping forward, I lean in for a taste.

  “Hey, Edgienna! Get bouncy with each other on your own time. Let’s do this,” Hurley calls out before he disappears around the corner.

  Pulling away from Sienna in a huff, I flip him off and continue across the street.

  The three of them are gathered around the glass-paned door of the historical Jasper Ward House, now an empty corner of the power substation. Nyx won’t look at me. Her arms are stiff at her sides and she’s staring at the door like she’d burn it down if she could.

  Knox draws the Ghost Market’s sigil on the glass-paned doors with his finger. Neon-blue tracers hover over the surface in the shape of the mark–two overlapping half circles run through by an upward pointing arrow. The concrete encasement around the two doors wavers, becoming wispy as smoke. An archway solidifies out of the mist, reforming into the aged architecture of the market’s entranceway. The glass-paned doors melt away as a huge oxidized copper door, embellished with fancy scrollwork, takes its place. A bronze doorknocker in the shape of a devil’s head leers at us, with an inscription engraved just below it: Intrat Omnis Creaturae.

  “What’s that say?” Sienna asks.

  “Enter All Creatures,” I translate. “Guess that means you too now.”

  “Yeah,” she says, licking her red, red lips in a way that looks thirsty.

  Knox grabs the doorknocker, then pauses. “Crap, I forgot already. Was it three knocks, then one and three?”

  “No, it’s three, two, one,” Hurley says.

  “You’re both wrong,” Nyx says, the irritation in her voice obvious. “It’s four, two, three.”

  “Right,” Knox says, dropping his smoke and crushing the butt under his boot. Lifting the heavy ring, he knocks out the sequence. The sound rings loud and ominous.

  So this is how everyone else enters the Ghost Market. Kind of slow compared to teleporting your way in, but interesting.

  The metal door shudders with a startling thud, suddenly pulling straight back, sliding away like it’s on a track. The door keeps receding, traveling through a long corridor of brick archways. One after the other, the door slides past each arch with a loud bang, until there’s at least thirty archways standing before us in a long row. Finally, the door slams to a stop so far away I can barely see it from where we’re standing.

  Knox leads the way down a long, worn dirt path. There’s a multitude of footprints and marks in the sand, some of them clawed, many of them snaky. The brick walls are painted with wards and sigils I’ve never seen before. I assume at least a few of them are meant to keep the entrance protected and secret, and more importantly, prevent a huge gathering of every kind of supernatural you can think of from killing each other.

  When we reach the end of the tunnel, Knox bangs the doorknocker in the reverse order of the original sequence. The door springs open. All the colorful sights, smells and busy, crowd-filled sounds of the marketplace rush out at us.

  Hurley barrels inside. “This place is off the hook. Why didn’t anybody tell me what I was missing?”

  “Guess I’ve come here too many times to be impressed anymore,” I say. Nothing’s really changed since the last time I was here, which was before I joined the gang. But then why would it? The market’s been around for thousands of years.

  “Where are we?” Sienna asks, her eyes darting everywhere as she takes it all in. “What is this place?”

  “It’s called the Ghost Market, because the entrances are constantly changing. All doors leading in can be accessed from around the world. The market itself doesn’t actually move, only the doors. Word is, the marketplace is located in Europe somewhere. Technically, we’re not in New York anymore. Trippy, huh?”

  She slows down, resisting me as I try to pull her along. “Are we trapped here? How do we get out?”

  “Relax. Whatever door we leave through, we’ll end up back where we entered. From what I’ve heard, there’s a bunch of ironclad magical treaties in place to keep unapproved immigrations from happening.”

  Sienna tilts her head in a guarded way as she glances up at the multi-tiered plazas cut high into the ancient stone of the underground market. She drops her vivid blue gaze to the plaza stretching out for miles to either side of us here on ground level. Her body goes rigid when a necromancer turns to stare at her as we walk by. He probably senses she’s becoming one of the undead.

  I turn to Hurley. “Do you think a necro would know how to reverse a Black Widow’s bite?”

  “I wouldn’t trust a necro as far as I could throw one, and that’s damn far,” he says.

  “Yeah, I don’t think keepin’ her alive would be top of the list,” Knox adds. “They like playin’ with dead things too much.”

  Nyx pushes past us. “Just heard from Pan. She found the white witch. We need to make this quick, so keep up.”

  We follow her through the twisting maze of countless kiosks, each one overflowing with specialized goods. You can buy anything here in the market so long as you’ve got the coin or something to trade.

  Trading’s the riskiest way to go. The merchants here are dishonest and shrewd. They make it their business to know the value of everything. Learned that the hard way. Like the time I traded a tear in exchange for a hearth candle, something I really needed at the time. These candles never burn down, and just one of those babies can heat up whatever drafty old place you happen to be squatting in. So I squeezed out a tear. Later on, I found out one tear’s worth at least a hundred hearth candles.

  Crafty bastards.

  “Are those really unicorns?” Sienna asks, slowing down as we walk by a stall displaying the decapitated heads of unicorns. Stacked in rows behind the heads are their hooves, tails, manes and hides. At the front of the stall are bottled vials of unicorn blood and a half dozen baskets filled with hundreds of long, spiraled alicorns.

  “They’re not nearly as rare as everybody thinks,” I say, hoping she’s not too upset.

  “They smell nice, like wet pennies,” Sienna says, bending down to sniff one of the heads.

  I know it’s the blood that smells good to her, but her reaction grosses me out.

  Running her fingers over the vials of blood, she turns to me, her eyes wide and shining. “Will you buy me one? Please?”

  I search for the girl who would’ve cried a river for those poor butchered animals before she was bitten. But she’s licking her lips greedily. “Maybe on the way back,” I say, swallowing down my dismay.

  “But I need it.”

  “What you need is a cure,” I say, tugging on her to go.

  Fuming silently, she falls in step behind me.

  I hold my breath as we pass by the fish market. It smells foul. The catch of the day looks to be grindylows. Lots of them. Sea serpent tentacles and cubed up sea serpent eyeballs are mounded over slabs of ice. Next to these nauseating delicacies, are f
illets of hippocamp, kelpie and mermaid.

  We no sooner escape the stink of fish before the reek from the demon spice market hits us. There’s only one way to describe the rank odor wafting off the heaping bowls of colorful powder filling the front tables. Think road kill, skunk and gangrenous flesh, all wrapped up in one. Further back, smoking over a low fire, are cuts of liver, heart, spleen, intestine and too many other organs to name. Odds are good the parts are human, usually soaked in unspeakable things like troll sweat or werewolf urine before being dried and ground up into all the first-rate gourmet spices being sold at these fine establishments.

  Sienna jerks her hand out of mine, runs over to the spices and leans over the bowls. The merchant–a grumpy looking Slemlohr demon–walks over the same time I get there. “Take the blood sucker away before I eviscerate it for flavoring my spices,” he says.

  Nodding, I put my hand on Sienna’s shoulder. She shrinks from my touch, hissing at me with lips twisted back from a row of fangs and eyes black and heartless as a shark’s. Startled by the sudden shift, I freeze in place. I don’t want to have to get violent with her.

  Hurley steps in, the Oni demon taking over as he grabs her from behind, squeezing her neck. “And down comes the rain to wash the spider out,” he growls.

  Struggling against his iron grip, Sienna thrashes wildly for several long seconds, until the black filling her eyes returns to blue and she passes out from lack of air.

  It kills me to see her like this. “Thanks,” I say as Hurley throws her limp form over his shoulder like a sack of grain.

  “Somebody has to protect you from yourself.” He shakes his head at me. “Edge, you better watch your ass. This chick’s your kryptonite.”

  He might be right, but I won’t say it out loud.

  We press through a sketchy horde of customers. All sorts of goblins, demons, shifters, ogres and the like mill in amongst the multitude of shops catering to all things having to do with black magic and the dark arts. It seems like this part of the lower plaza is a lot larger since I was here last–not something I want to see. But wishing this part of the market would shrink and disappear is like trying to wish the dark side of the moon away.