Cole’s expression softened and he leaned in the door. “So you’re not a student,” he said, “then what do you do for a living?”
Penny pursed her lips, assuming it was a come on. She was starting to wonder if she’d have to blow this guy for him to look at the vial. And while he was hot and everything, she did have her dignity. “I’m a restaurant hostess.”
“How much do you make an hour?”
“About fifteen.”
Cole snorted and grabbed the vial out of her shaking hand. “Then don’t go promising somebody a grand. Jesus Christ. I don’t do this kinda thing for money anyway.” He squinted at the vial. It was full of a burnt orange, sludgy substance. It didn’t look familiar to him. “What is it you think is in here, Miss ah… What was your name again?”
“Penny Sax.” She licked her lips and said, “I found it in my brother’s room. He’s mixed up in some...some crazy shit, okay! I mean like outside the conventional. For sure. Supernatural stuff. He blew up all the lightbulbs with some magic spell and he’s in this weird cult! They call themselves The Salvaged? I don’t know what’s in there but I can tell you it’s probably bad! There were jars of teeth in his room!”
Cole grimaced. “Teeth?”
“I think they were animal teeth but I’m not sure.”
“Alright,” Cole said, scratching his head with both hands. “Shoot. Boy, this is wrecking my night. I’m gonna look at this real quick-”
“Oh my God, thank you,” Penny said, her shoulders dropping as some tension left them.
“You don’t have to give me a grand,” he said, practically sneering at the very idea. “What you could do is go to the break room around this corner to the vending machine and get me a cream soda. Fair?”
Penny opened and closed her mouth, the sudden shift into kindness taking her aback. “Yeah. Sure. Be right back.”
“Thank you,” Cole said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose in a gesture that Penny had no memory of previously finding kind of sexy and yet... “I’ll be here,” he said.
Penny bounced on her toes and went around the corner to fetch the sodas. A part of her remained optimistic despite everything. Maybe there really wasn’t anything bad in the vial. Maybe her brother was playing pretend after all or maybe he could do some weird magic stuff but nothing very dangerous. She half expected this Montgomery guy to get pissed at her for wasting his time. She returned to his office and found him sitting at a stool in front of a huge wooden counter. He was taking a sample from the vial and placing it on a slide. She set the soda down next to him and leaned in, watching his process.
Standing this close to Professor J. Cole Montgomery who had just turned down a thousand bucks in exchange for a cream soda, it was difficult now not to realize exactly how hot he was in a way that was equal parts rugged and professorial.
Indiana Jones, Penny thought. Down to the glasses. Although this guy seemed to be turning it on a little more with the black leather jacket. He’d changed out of tweed. Penny watched him squeeze a drop onto a slide and wondered if the guy considered himself more tweed or leather. Was tweed just his professor’s persona? Was he both? He was very put together yet also looked like a guy who would be at home chopping wood for a fire or hiking up a mountain.
He also smelled wonderful. It was just Old Spice but damn, some things were classics for a reason, Penny thought.
“So you study magic stuff here on the side,” Penny said. “Doesn’t the university, like...mind?”
She watched the corner of his mouth turn up as he squinted through the eyepiece of his microscope, fidgeting with the focus. He had just a bit of stubble on his chin, a particular weakness of Penny’s.
“I’m not the only one who does,” Cole said quietly. “It’s a quasi-open secret, I guess you could say. We just keep quiet.”
Cole frowned and leaned back and motioned to a bottle of some liquid on the table. “Hand me that, please? And a dropper...over there, yes.” She watched him drop something else on the slide along with a sample from the sludge. Now, he sealed the sample and slid it under the scope again.
Cole sat up again and popped the soda, taking a sip. “Sorry, it’s just taking me a minute.”
“It’s fine.” Penny shrugged.
“You drove six hours?” Cole said, scratching his nose.
“Yeah. I live in Brooklyn.”
Cole whistled at that. “And you’re a restaurant hostess?”
“I live in my parents’ old house. My brother and I inherited it when they passed.”
Cole’s eyes flicked her over for a moment and he muttered, “I’m sorry,” before looking back into the scope.
“It’s fine.”
Cole snorted a laugh at that. “Not everything can be fine,” he said, fidgeting with the dial on the side of the scope. “You’re young, your parents were doubtless way too young to have passed away. Both of them. Doesn’t sound fine. People have died on me too. It was not fine.”
Penny’s cheeks were hot. That bugged her but not in a terrible way. “Alright,” she said. “It’s not fine. It blows.”
“That’s better,” Cole said cheerfully.
He squinted through the eyepiece again, leaned back, and frowned. “Pass me that other bottle? This is the weirdest…” She handed him another bottle of some solution and he fixed a slide again. “Okay. This is the one.” He looked at the new slide under the scope once more and Penny, bouncing on her toes again, waited. He was taking a long time as he stared through the eyepiece. He frowned and adjusted it and adjusted it again.
“Jesus,” Cole whispered.
“What?”
“Uh. Hold on.” She watched him put on thick, black plastic gloves and an apron and take another sample from the vial. He looked back at her and said, “You should get back, like way back. Get back to the door. And get ready to bolt if you need to.”
“From what?”
“Not sure.”
Cole laid the sample in a test tube tray and went to a small, steel fridge labeled “J.C.M. FOOD DON’T TOUCH” where he took out a small pot. He poured some liquid into a beaker and set it on a burner and then leaned on a counter, his eyes wide and fixed on the sample in the test tube tray.
“What’re you doing now?” Penny said.
Cole nodded at the burner. “This is a potion that reveals strong magical properties.”
“You think this thing is strong then?” Penny said, her heart sinking.
“Possibly,” he muttered. “Okay. Stand back. Shit.” When the pot was bubbling, Cole grabbed a metal tray and held it in front of his face before dropping his sample from the eyedropper into the boiling solution.
Penny was backed up against the door across the room and even from there she saw the giant black bubble that now grew from the pot before it burst and a spiral of black and silver smoke rose in curlicues as if spelling out words Penny couldn’t read. But judging by Montgomery’s face, none of it was good. He stared at the smoke and looked back into the pot before grabbing a tin can and sprinkling something into it. Penny crept forward just close enough to peer into the pot where swirls of silver and purple marbled on its oily surface.
It meant absolutely nothing to her but now Cole was shoving her back and grabbing a shoe box. “Shit!” He said. “Shit! Shit!” He took out a bunch of crystals and dropped one into the pot, laying the rest in a circle around it. He peered back into the pot and relaxed again.
Penny said, “What the hell just happened?”
Cole rubbed his chin, his eyes still wide. He strode forward and pointed back at the vial still sitting innocently on the counter. “What the hell is your brother into?”
“I...I told you!” Penny said, trying not to panic. “It’s some weird cult called The Salvaged! With these other guys-”
“That is dark magic!” Cole said.
“Well yeah, that’s what I was trying to say-”
“No, Penny!” Cole said, pushing his hair back. “I mean any two-bit wizard can do s
ome dark magic but this shit is for real! Is your brother Voldemort?”
“No! He’s just… a goth kid,” Penny said, shrugging. “Who’s gotten out of hand. And might be a dangerous psychopath.”
“I know goth kids,” Cole muttered, glowering at his little cauldron. “They’re nice. This is fucked up.”
“Why? What does it do?” Penny leaned in closer and saw Cole’s gaze flicker and his mouth twitch a little. She tried not to change her expression. Montgomery seemed like a cocky type. He didn’t need to know how attractive she found him.
“I don’t know exactly,” he admitted. “There’s definitely a mutation agent.”
Penny felt a rush of anxiety. Was Cole done now? Was that it? If it was very bad, what was she supposed to do about that? How bad? Would it make people dance funny or it would make their intestines disintegrate? She chewed on her thumbnail, a habit since childhood, frowning at the bubbling silver and purple potion.
“I can find out what it does to people,” Cole said. “Test it.” He crossed his arms and moved again to scratch his head, shifting from foot to foot. He seemed exceptionally restless. Penny thought briefly of somebody in withdrawal and wondered if he was an addict or something but then, if he needed a fix, surely he could just excuse himself and go to the restroom or something? He seemed able to focus. Penny had met a few addicts in her day. This didn’t look like that, though he was very edgy about something.
“Not on yourself,” Penny said warily.
“Hell no,” Cole said. “I’m not insane.”
“And not on an animal,” Penny said with wide eyes. “Please?”
She saw him smirk and then shake his head as if he’d been about to make a joke and then thought better of it. But he chuckled as he crossed the room and opened a metal cabinet, poking around a small plastic shelf of tiny drawers.
“Nope,” Cole said. “Do you have a problem with testing potentially dangerous potions on algae, Miss Sax?”
“No,” Penny said wryly, and hopped up on a stool, to watch him. “That’s fine.”
“Well, thanks so much for your approval,” he snarked, but the corner of his mouth was turned up as he took a bottle from his cabinet. She watched him set up the live algae in a small terrarium.
Penny considered herself an artist, though she did not describe herself publicly this way, preferring instead to think of it as a secret identity; restaurant hostess by day, painter by night. She was hooked on landscapes as of late but before that she’d painted people; portraits from photographs she particularly liked. She’d taken the cheapest life drawing class she could find in the city which had still set her back a good chunk of money. She’d become used to observing people’s faces and bodies and the way they moved. Professor Montgomery had heavy eyelids that made him look a little sleepy and made the brightness of his eyes all the more startling when he deliberately opened them wider. He also had distinct tendons in his hands and it was hard not to follow the line of them to his forearm, his sleeves rolled at the elbow. She noticed too that he had a precise way of moving as if afraid that if he wasn’t careful, he might knock all his glass beakers and flasks over. Penny noted that he moved like somebody who thought themselves too large which was odd because although he was tall and muscular, he wasn’t huge and did not have the look of a clumsy person.
“Okay,” Cole said, interrupting her observations. She was lucky she had not been caught openly staring as her eyes had drifted more to the shape of his fingers and the muscle in his arms rather than what he was doing with the algae and the potion. “Let’s see exactly what your brother and his stupid cult are up to.”
Cole started with just a few drops of the toxin injected straight into the algae sample that sat listlessly on the glass bottom of the terrarium.
Nothing happened.
A couple of minutes passed and still nothing happened. Penny felt a perhaps foolish hope blossoming within her that maybe although the magic was dark, the potion was useless and her brother was full of shit. He’d certainly always sounded like he was full of shit.
“How long do we wait?” She asked quietly.
“Hard to say,” Cole muttered. He stroked his chin and then abruptly stepped forward and injected a little more potion into the algae.
“What if it doesn’t work on algae?” Penny said. Knowing nothing about magic except that she assumed it was wildly unpredictable and capable of anything, she could only surmise. “What if it only works on people?”
“Totally possible to conjure something like that, of course,” Cole said offhandedly. “But you’d have to brew it specifically to do that. Most potions with something like a mutation agent will affect any living organism regardless of-”
EAAAAAGHHH.
The sound the algae made reminded Penny of a croaking gremlin.
“Oh,” Cole said.
The algae sat, green and still, until quite suddenly it spat a slimy black substance at the wall of its terrarium and then swelled to about twice its size, changing color from bright green to a muddy blackish brown and changing consistency to something much slimier as a couple of slithering tentacles crept out of it, sliding up the glass of the terrarium to the lid.
“It has tentacles,” Penny said. “It didn’t have tentacles before, did it? Algae definitely doesn’t have tentacles.”
“Uh, nope.” Cole crouched down next to the terrarium to get a good look at it.
Penny murmured, “Be careful-”
“I am…” The words were hardly out before the blackish, slimy blob reared up, its tentacles risen above itself, and abruptly lunged at the wall nearest Cole, expelling a great, wet sounding croak. The glass of the terrarium began to crack and Penny screamed, clapping a hand to her mouth, and scrambling off her stool. “Shit!”
Cole jumped back, knocking bottles and flasks on the counter behind him to the ground, shattering them as the algae blob began to seep through the crack in the glass. Penny could only scream into her hands, hating the helplessness she felt at not knowing what the little monster now attempting to break through the terrarium was capable of. It was definitely a bad sign how panicked Cole appeared now as he dug through the metal cabinet and came up with a corked glass bottle that he unpopped before carefully taking the lid from the terrarium and sprinkling some clear blue liquid onto the algae. He stood back, his breath short.
The algae monster’s ensuing screech was so high-pitched that Penny had to plug her ears before it began to fizzle and foam; white bubbles popping all over it as it sank to the terrarium floor and dissolved into a foul-smelling pile of dark goo.
“Is it dead?” Penny asked flatly.
“Yeah.” Cole stood, catching his breath, his eyes fixed on the slimy little puddle of monster. “So...I think we can assume this substance is meant to turn organisms into...I don’t know what. Monsters. Goblins. Something like that.”
“Humans,” Penny said, nodding. “It makes sense with what Henry said to me. This is the reckoning he was talking about. They want to turn people into these things.”
“Do you know how much of this stuff they have?” Cole said. “Or exactly when they plan on doing what with it?”
“I have no idea,” Penny said. She had a lump in her throat. She felt guilty, suddenly. She should have poked around for more information, she should have tried harder. What if they were about to hurt a lot of people? She coughed, stifling tears, but her eyes glimmered anyway. “I’m sorry. I’m s-sorry I didn’t...I should’ve-”
“Hey hey.” Cole frowned. He walked up to her and, hesitating for a moment, he rested his hands at her elbows. “You drove all the way out here to find me and I was the right person to find. You didn’t do anything wrong. You did more than most would. We’ll figure this out, alright?” He rubbed her arms and she nodded, feeling comforted. “I’ll help you. This is what I do, anyway. It’s just not usually this...urgent. Most of the time I’m investigating potions nobody cares about anymore. But I’ll help you, Penny. I promise. We’ll figure it ou
t.”
She looked up at him, hopeful now. “Yeah?” She squeezed her eyes shut suddenly, racking her memory for any clues as to Henry’s plans. She’d heard them talking quietly. They’d said something about supplies in the next day or so. She didn’t know what kind of supplies and at the time she’d assumed it was something weird but unimportant. “I think we might have a couple days. They said they needed supplies and they were having trouble getting them. I’d guess it has something to do with this.”
“Okay.” Cole nodded and his eyes blinked rapidly as he rubbed his own arms. Edgy again, Penny thought. He took a long swig of cream soda and said, “I’m going to email some wizards I know, ask them for advice. And I have some friends who might be useful later...if necessary. And trust me, I hope it’s not necessary, but I’ll give them a heads up.”
“You’re going to email some wizards,” Penny said.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Okay. Just checking.”
“And then...I guess I’ll try brewing an antidote. Shouldn’t have killed the algae. I’ll just have to test a smaller organism, keep it better contained. I’ll wait until I have an antidote to test.”
“Maybe I should go back home for now, then,” she said, wincing. It was such a long drive. She wished she’d taken a train after all. But it was good to have the car. “Maybe I could find something more concrete about whatever their plans are.”
“Whoa,” Cole said, his voice rising sharply. “Absolutely not. You’re not going back there on your own. You’re probably used to him being your brother but the person who created this,” he said, pointing to the still bubbling cauldron, “is very dangerous. You’re staying right here while we figure out the next move. Besides, I need your help.”
Penny scoffed at that. “My help? To do what?”
“Grade papers,” Cole said. He strode over to a messy desk by the biggest window in the room, and picked up a giant stack, handing it over to Penny. “My T.A. is sick and I’m swamped. Answer key is on top. And...maybe tidy up around here if you finish. That is, if you don’t mind. Saving the world comes first but it would be nice if my life wasn’t a mess afterward.”
Secrets & Dark Magic Page 4
