The Circle Gathers (Veil Knights Book 1)

by Rowan Casey

  “Unh, unh-unh. Don’t say another word; this one’s on me.”

  He smiled that evil clown-smile of his and, before she could say anything else, tossed her a brown paper parcel about half the size and thickness of a cigarette pack.

  Jessie caught it more by reflex than thought, but the minute it was in her hands she knew what it was.

  She’d bought enough of them to recognize a packet of heroin when she saw one.

  Her mind recoiled the instant she caught it – I thought you were done with that shit! – but her body practically screamed with need – Yes! Yes! Yes! - as she recognized it for what it was.

  The two halves of her were still fighting for control when Reardon laughed in her face and turned to leave, only to be brought up short by something just outside the door.

  As Jessie looked on, her former manager backed away from the door, which by this time had filled with the bulk of Grimm’s right hand man, Hautdesert.

  He glared at Reardon for a moment – Do they know each other? Jessie wondered – and then turned to look at her.

  “Everything all right here, Miss Noble? Is this man bothering you?”

  Despite her ability to defend herself, something she’d just visibly demonstrated in the ring, she found herself glad at Hautdesert’s sudden appearance. Something about the man was immediately calming to her psyche in a way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She didn’t know him from a hole in the wall but she was equally certain that if he was told to take a bullet for her, he’d do just that - no questions asked. Maybe it was the sense of quiet confidence that just seemed to seep out of his very pores; she didn’t know. Either way, she felt stronger just having him in the room.

  “Everything’s fine, Hautdesert. Thank you. Mr. Reardon was just leaving.”

  The two men glared at each other a moment, before Hautdesert stepped out of the way and let Reardon slide past.

  On his way out the door, Reardon looked back at Jessie and said, “You enjoy that now, you hear?” before disappearing from sight.

  “What did he mean by that?” Hautdesert asked.

  “I honestly have no idea,” Jessie answered, trying to look like she really didn’t know what he was talking about while at the same time bringing her other hand over her first, the one holding the heroin packet, so Hautdesert wouldn’t see it.

  She didn’t know why, but his opinion of her suddenly mattered.

  It mattered very much.

  She turned away, using the action of grabbing her gloves and stuffing them into her training bag to hide the transfer of the packet from her hands. Turning back, she found Grimm’s man still watching her.

  “Can I help you with something?”

  He ducked his head, seemingly embarrassed at being caught staring, and said, “My apologies, Miss Noble. I was asked to let you know that the use of a room here at the facility was part of your earnings for the night.”

  He reached into his suit jacket and withdrew a hotel room key, which he then handed to her. “Check out time is noon tomorrow and your sponsor asked me to be sure to congratulate you on a fight well fought. He was rather pleased with the outcome, I assure you.”

  “Well, you can tell him that makes two of us,” Jessie replied, still wondering about the identity of her mysterious sponsor but knowing she wasn’t going to get it out of Hautdesert anytime soon.

  Still, if she were a gambling woman, she’d bet half, if not all of her winnings, on her sponsor being Dante Grimm.

  Which raised an interesting question.

  What did a self-described street magician want with someone like her?

  11

  Dante Grimm had just arrived back in his hotel suite when he sensed the presence of someone coming down the corridor toward his door.

  Four.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  Someone knocked lightly on his door.

  “Come!” he called, and a moment later the door opened and his majordomo, Hautdesert, stuck his head inside.

  “Mr. Reardon to see you, sir.”

  Without a change in tone or expression, Hautdesert somehow managed to convey his sense of disgust when he said Reardon’s name. Just one of his many gifts, Grimm thought with a smile.

  Aloud, he said, “Please, show him in.”

  Hautdesert nodded, then pushed the door open wider and stepped back, barely getting out of the way as the man behind him shoved his way past and stepped into the room. Tall but slightly overweight, the newcomer wore an expensive but ill-fitting suit that screamed poser to anyone who bothered to take a second look. The rings on several of his fingers didn’t help, either. Grimm didn’t need to see the man’s face to know that he was pissed; the anger came off him in waves that were all but visible.

  Still, Grimm did his best to be accommodating. A little politeness never hurt anyone, after all.

  “Ah, Mr. Reardon. Good to see you.”

  “Fuck you, Grimm!” the other man said, crossing the room to stand in front of his host, who was still sitting on the couch. Reardon glared down at Grimm and said, “You set me up.”

  Grimm sighed. So it was going to be one of those conversations, was it? How tedious.

  “Fuck you, Reardon? I think not. Ignoring for the moment the fact that you are far, far from my type, let’s not forget that it was you who wanted this match, eh?”

  It was true. Reardon had come to him a few weeks earlier, after Grimm had quietly let it be known in a few select circles that he was representing the comeback of former bantamweight contender, Jessie “The Berserker” Noble. Whether it was a case of payback against his former fighter, Reardon having been Noble’s manager when she’d gone off the rails so spectacularly several years earlier, or just the simple desire to see his current fighter beat someone who had once been a title contender, Grimm didn’t know, but the idea of putting Noble in the ring with Dellacroix had been 100% Reardon’s. Grimm had even played hard to get at first, which had simply caused Reardon to pursue the idea that much harder.

  It wasn’t Grimm’s fault that Reardon had completely underestimated the true nature of his fighter or that of her opponent.

  Reardon scowled; apparently he didn’t like hearing the truth.

  “Yes, I wanted the match but I expected Noble to be…”

  Grimm rose to his feet suddenly, towering over the other man and cutting him off. “Expected her to be what, Reardon? An out-of-shape junkie who couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag? Where would the challenge have been in that?”

  “I didn’t…”

  “Oh, yes you did, you miserable little twat. You thought it would be funny, didn’t you? You wanted to laugh as your shiny new toy beat the living shit out of your former protégé, to get even with her for leaving you high and dry and making you the laughing stock of the fight circuit for so long, didn’t you? Well, sorry chump, joke’s on you. Next time you might want to pay a little more attention to what’s going on right in front of you before committing yourself and your fighter to an opponent sight unseen. Dellacroix’s bones will heal; not so sure about your pride, though. Be happy it was an unsanctioned match or your pretty little contender would be back at the bottom of the rankings after a match like that. Now where’s my money?”

  Reardon reached inside his suit jacket and withdrew an envelope thick with bills, Grimm’s share of the under-the-table bets that had been taken that night. As with the match against the Russian the week before, very few other than Grimm had seen the fight going in Noble’s favor and the take was considerable as a result.

  “Here’s your damn money!” Reardon said. He tossed the envelope onto the nearby coffee table in a fit of pettiness rather than simply handing it to Grimm, before turning away and crossing the room.

  When he reached the door, he looked back at his host, a smug expression on his face. “I wouldn’t get too comfortable, Grimm. Given what I know about Jessie ‘The Loser’ Noble, her comeback is probably already over.”

&n
bsp; Reardon’s laugh was too full of self-satisfaction for Grimm to ignore as just another spiteful remark. Reaching out with his power, he plucked a memory from the forefront of Reardon’s mind; saw the other man toss a bag of heroin to Jessie, and heard the crude remarks he made as he went out the door, laughing as naked need ran across her face.

  It set Grimm’s blood to boiling and it was all he could do to keep from reaching out with a tendril of power and yanking the other man back inside the room. The problem with doing so was that it would leave a bit of a mess to clean up, something that Grimm didn’t want to deal with, no matter how satisfying it might be.

  No, there were easier ways of handling things.

  He got up and walked over to the wet bar, using the ritual of pouring himself just the right amount of hundred-year-old Glenfiddich to get his irritation under control. Drink in hand, he walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over the street ten stories below.

  He took a sip, feeling the burn as the liquor slipped down his throat, thinking about time and its impact on the world as he waited for Reardon to step out of the hotel entrance and into view.

  One hundred years was a long time, both for a drink to age and a man to live, he thought. When the whiskey he was drinking had first gone into its barrel to age, he’d been sitting in a bunker in Flanders, no doubt sharing a cup of tea with Davis and Somers as they waited for the latest barrage of German artillery to end. A hundred years before that, on a rainy night at the Villa Diodati, he’d been sitting with his friends Byron, Shelley and Polidori, and Shelley’s fiancée, Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin, telling each other scary stories, tales that eventually had gone on to introduce both Frankenstein and the Vampyre to the world. And a hundred years before that, he’d been…

  A knock at the door interrupted his musings.

  “Is everything good, sir?” Hautdesert asked, glancing around the room as if to be sure that Reardon’s presence hadn’t somehow corrupted the elegant surroundings.

  “Just fine, Hautdesert, just fine.”

  “Very good, sir. If you should need me…”

  “I’ll be fine, old friend. Go home and get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Hautdesert nodded, closing the door behind him as he went.

  Grimm turned back to the window and was just in time to see Reardon emerge from the hotel. The fight manager stood on the curb for a moment, waiting for a break in traffic, and then hustled across the street toward a dark Mercedes parked on the other side.

  Now let’s see…

  Grimm let his gaze wander about until it came to rest on a window washer’s rig on the building opposite. It was situated about three stories higher than his own window but directly above the Mercedes that Reardon was getting into.

  That should do nicely.

  Grimm raised his right hand and drew a complicated sigil in the air beside him. A flash of brilliant blue power could be seen for a split-second wherever his finger cut through the air. The scent of evergreen swept through the room in its wake.

  Across the street, Reardon started his vehicle and turned the wheels, intending to pull away from the curb. Before he could do so, the fifteen-foot long rig, its redundant cables all mysteriously failing at exactly the same moment, came tumbling down from thirteen stories above to land with a thundering crash right on the roof of Reardon’s car, crushing it, and the man inside, like an eggshell.

  As the vehicle’s alarm began blaring and spectators on the street began running toward the wreckage to see if someone might be inside, Grimm turned away from the window, a smile of satisfaction on his face.

  12

  The hotel room turned out to be a suite, and a large one at that. Jessie knew she could have fit her entire apartment inside the place twice over, with room to spare. It had been a long time since she’d been near such luxury and she couldn’t keep the smile off her face as she wandered around, checking out the king size bed, the Jacuzzi tub, and the well-stocked mini-bar. A chilled bottle of champagne stood in the center of the table, a note of congratulations beside it.

  Things were starting to look up at last!

  She threw herself onto the oversized couch in the living area and considered the night’s events.

  She’d done it!

  She’d beaten Dellacroix!

  She could hardly believe it and she knew there were many in the audience that night who felt the same way. She knew how these things worked. Most of the audience had been invited for their ability to give generously to the charity sponsoring the event, rather than their knowledge of the fight game, but it didn’t take a genius to figure the odds. Dellacroix was a world-class contender at the top of her game while Jessie was a former has-been brought out of retirement to help put on a show. It was unlikely that anyone, save perhaps herself and her mysterious benefactor, believed she had a chance of going the distance against an opponent like Dellacroix, never mind defeating her. But win she had!

  Better yet, her second-round knockout had guaranteed her an additional five thousand dollars in bonus pay. Between the bonus and the ten thousand she’d been paid to take the match in the first place, she had enough money to make some serious changes in her life. She could get out of that scummy apartment, for one, find someplace that didn’t make her feel she was one step above being homeless. And once she had a decent place to live, she could start looking for some legitimate work. While the fight hadn’t been officially sanctioned, news of Dellacroix’s defeat would spread like wildfire and Jessie knew she could use that to her advantage. Maybe get some work as a sparring partner or a trainer.

  Hell, why settle there? she thought. Maybe I can find a promoter who might be willing to take me on and get back to fighting again.

  The possibility of a rebirth to her career seemed tantalizing close and Jessie wondered if she was crazy for even imagining it. After all, she still hadn’t solved the thing that had driven her away from the fight game in the first place – her visions – and the events of the last few days showed that the problem was alive and well. She was still seeing things that couldn’t possibly be there; the creature in the alley and the awful thing she’d seen lurking behind Dellacroix’s face in the middle of the fight were prime examples.

  But did they have to be the impediment that she’d always believed them to be?

  Her thoughts returned to that moment in the fight when, in her desperate need, it had felt like someone else had taken over her body. Logic told her that it couldn’t have been any more real than the other strange things that she’d been experiencing, that it had to have been just another hallucination, though one that helped rather than heeded her for a change.

  And yet, that explanation just didn’t feel right.

  She’d long been fascinated by the berserkers of Norse myth, warriors so fierce and so committed to the fight before them that they would often go into battle without mail coats or other armor, wearing nothing more than the furs of wolves and bears that they’d slain with their own hands. Legend had it that they were Odin’s special warriors, who fought with an almost-inhuman focus and ferocity. Some of the ancient sagas even suggested that the berserkers took on the spirit of the animal whose fur they wore, that the savagery and determination they exhibited in battle was granted to them by the totem spirits of Wolf and Bear. Whatever the truth behind it all, one thing was certain. Once a berserker entered battle, they didn’t stop; they either won the fight or were carried out with the dead when it was all said and done.

  Jessie so admired the sense of dedication and tenacity those ancient warriors had exhibited that she’d adopted their title as her fight moniker in the ring. Hearing “Jessie ‘the Berserker’ Noble” before every match reminded her to give her all every time she set foot in the ring.

  If she was honest with herself, what happened in the ring earlier that night felt exactly like what she’d always imagined having an actual berserker spirit would be like; that sense of allowing a deep, more primeval version of herself to
come to the fore of her consciousness, to give herself over to it, to let that more primitive and at the same time more powerful sense of self take the wheel and direct her actions.

  Simply put, it had been exhilarating, a far cry from the other types of hallucinations or visions that she’d been having.

  The question was whether she could control the process, determine, perhaps through sheer force of will, exactly what kind of vision she was going to have ahead of time.

  She cast a guilty glance through the open bedroom door to where her bag rested on the bed. Just knowing that packet of heroin was in there made her skin itch.

  Visions or not, she wanted a hit.

  She tried to ignore it.

  She took a shower, washing off the sweat and grime of the ring, relaxing in the soothing heat of the water before getting out, drying off, and wrapping herself in the terrycloth robe that waited for her on a hook inside the bathroom.

  As she came out of the bathroom, she resisted the urge to glance into the bedroom where the bag, and its contents, waited.

  Instead, she poured herself a glass of champagne to celebrate and then perused the room service menu, finally deciding on a thick steak and mashed potatoes to soothe her appetite. The food was as good as she expected it to be, perhaps better, and she was feeling pretty full when she pushed her plate away from her an hour later.

  But that nagging twitch at the back of her mind hadn’t gone away.

  She grabbed the remote, flipped on the television, and curled up on the couch, scrolling through the channels looking for something of interest.

  It only took a few minutes for that inner voice to start nagging at her.

  You know you want to.

  Yes, she admitted to herself, she did want to. But she was also used to depriving herself of things she wanted but didn’t really need and this was one of those situations.

  No, it’s not. You’re having visions again.

  Visions that were, for the first time, actually helpful, she reminded herself.