The Circle Gathers (Veil Knights Book 1)

by Rowan Casey

  Jessie headed in their direction, the ticket she’d received from Dante Grimm held firmly in one hand.

  She glanced at those waiting in line as she passed, feeling more out of place with every step. Everyone was dressed to the nines; the women wearing dresses that likely cost more money than Jessie saw in a month of fighting and the men in custom-tailored suits that fit their toned bodies like a second skin. More than a few cast disdainful looks in her direction as she went by and a handful went so far as to point and laugh. She did her best to ignore them; her dress might be a simple black affair, but it still fit her body well enough and the boots on her feet were serviceable, if a bit worn.

  The bouncers watched her approach without a word or change of expression on their faces, and she mentally commended them for it.

  “Can I help you?” the one on the right asked, when she drew to a stop directly in front of him. He was a few inches taller than she was, with a solid physique that was certainly an advantage given his line of work.

  “I have a personal invitation from Mr. Grimm,” she said, handing him her ticket.

  He took it and slipped it into his pocket without even glancing at it.

  “Of course, Miss Noble,” he said, with a smile. “We’ve been expecting you. If you’ll follow me.”

  Expecting me? But I didn’t let anyone know I was coming. Didn’t even know myself until the last minute.

  But she kept her thoughts to herself and didn’t say anything as the bouncer unclipped the velvet rope in front of the entrance and led her toward the door. There were several shouts of protest from those waiting in line, which the other bouncer quickly squelched as the first held the door for Jessie.

  Inside, Jessie found herself in a small foyer with a coat room to her left and a set of double doors leading into the club proper directly ahead. The bouncer jabbed a thumb over his shoulder and said, “Ignore those idiots. The whole lot of them are nothing more than a bunch of rich little cretins with inflated opinions of themselves. Mr. Grimm has directed that we make your visit with us as stress-free as possible, so if anyone gives you any problems, you let me know. The name’s Anthony.”

  Jessie wasn’t sure exactly what to say, so she chose to just nod and say nothing at all.

  That seemed to be good enough for Anthony. He turned and without another word led her inside Avalon proper.

  The club was set up like a giant U surrounding a large sunken dance floor in the center. Each arm of the U held a large common area with tables and chairs for seating while the base of the U was taken up with the bar and waitresses’ service area. Jessie followed Anthony as he threaded his way toward the rear of the club and then up a spiral staircase to the balcony above.

  A VIP area had been set-up facing the stage, with several tables and chairs roped off for privacy; Anthony led her to a center seat and then flagged down a waitress for her.

  “Drinks are on the house, Miss Noble,” he told her. “Please enjoy the show.”

  Jessie ordered a Jack Daniels and Coke from the waitress, then settled back and spent the time before the show people watching. While she had the VIP area to herself, the sections to her left and right where full of Hollywood royalty, more of the twenty-somethings with an inflated sense of self-worth and money to burn that she’d seen waiting in line out front. They were loud and boisterous, all of them competing to be the center of attention, and she’d had just about as much as she could take when the house lights suddenly went dark, signaling the upcoming start of the show.

  Thankfully the noise quieted as the lights went down. They stayed down for a moment or two and then the stage lights came up, the spots focused on an area in the middle of the stage, right where you would expect the show’s host to be.

  The stage was empty, though.

  The crowd waited silently, no doubt wondering what was going on, just as Jessie was.

  A minute ticked by.

  Then…

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming.”

  The voice was smooth and rich, the kind of voice that made you sit up and take notice whether you wanted to or not. Jessie found herself looking around the stage, searching for the speaker, even as the voice went on.

  “I’m thrilled to see so many of you in the audience tonight. I can tell you we’re going to have a terrific…”

  The voice paused.

  “Oh, excuse me,” the speaker said, “I didn’t realize…”

  The speaker went on, seemingly mumbling under his breath, but the voice was too low for Jessie or anyone else in the audience to understand. That was okay, though, for their attention was entirely taken up by the oval-shaped pool of darkness that sudden appeared in the center of the stage seemingly out of nowhere.

  The oval was roughly six feet high and three feet wide. It hung there, a few feet above the stage, the darkness within its boundaries undulating gently, the way a pool of water will when a breath of wind rushes across its surface.

  Almost quicker than one could follow, two sets of fingers poked through the surface of the oval and pushed in opposite directions, creating a rift in the center of that darkness like a tear through a piece of paper and in the next second a man stepped through it onto the stage. He was tall and thin, his blonde haired streaked with a deep crimson that matched the color of the Henley he wore. Jeans and cowboy boots completed the outfit.

  Jessie recognized him as Dante Grimm.

  Grimm grabbed the opposite side of the oval along its outer edge, and collapsed it between his hands until it vanished from view with a loud pop, heard clearly across the nightclub.

  Turning to the audience, he smiled and said, “That’s better. Now, where were we?”

  It had been quite an entrance and the crowd, unsurprisingly, erupted in enthusiastic applause.

  All but Jessie, that is.

  She sat still in her seat, trying to figure out what the heck she’d just seen.

  For the briefest of moments, when Grimm had pulled the edges of the darkness apart, she’d caught a glimpse of what lay on the other side.

  Instead of the backstage area she’d expected, she’d seen a trail running away from her into a deep wood. Birds had flitted through the air, diving and chasing each other about, while off in the distance, she thought she’d seen a white stag staring back at her.

  A very familiar looking stag at that.

  What the hell?

  But she didn’t have time to give it any more thought; the show was just getting underway.

  As the applause slowly died down, Grimm stepped to the front of the stage and addressed the audience. “Thank you, thank you! It’s so good to see you all tonight. I guarantee we’re going to have a good time.”

  “I was hanging out backstage, getting ready for the show, when the stage manager came over and told me something so incredible I just had to come out here and find out for myself if it was true.”

  Grimm looked over the audience, slowly looking from one side of the room to the other, and asked, “Do you want to know what he said?”

  Shouts of “Yes!” filled the room.

  Grimm nodded, then held up his hands palm out in a gesture for silence.

  When the audience quieted, he said, “I was under the impression that you came to see some illusionist’s tricks, but he told me that wasn’t the case. I know, I know – it was hard for me to believe, too, but he was insistent.”

  Grimm had the audience in the palm of his hand at this point and Jessie marveled at how quickly he’d gotten them on his side. He’d barely said six sentences and they were already hanging on his every word.

  “He told me that you’d come here to see – wait for it – some magic! Can you believe that?”

  The audience erupted again, forcing Grimm to hold up his hands and wait for them to quiet down again.

  “Now I’m not talking about stage magic,” he said softly, conspiratorially, forcing the audience to bend forward, to hang on his next few words.

  “None of that ‘pul
l a rabbit out of my hat’ crap, as, obviously, I don’t have a hat. I could pull a dove out of my sleeve though, if that’s what you want,” at which point he proceeded to do just that, reaching into the sleeve of his coat and pulling out a small white dove. Applause rippled out as he held the bird out in the spotlight for all to see.

  “And I could turn that one dove into two-,“ he began, as he cupped the bird in his hands, momentarily hiding it from view, only to open them a second later to reveal not one, but two, identical doves now sitting there, “but that’s pretty simple, don’t you think?”

  “Is that the kind of magic you want?”

  Jessie found herself grinning and shouting “yes” along with the rest of the audience. Grimm’s mischievous attitude and general good nature was infectious, it seemed.

  “Seriously? You want pick a card, any card, kind of magic?”

  As he spoke, Grimm pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket and fanned them out in one hand before the audience. Holding them high, he used his other hand to pull a card out of the deck, and then walked away, leaving the fanned deck to hang in the air all on its own!

  He took several steps away from the seemingly levitating deck and held up the card he’d plucked out of it to the audience, revealing a Joker.

  “Is this your card?” he asked and the audience roared in response.

  “What’s that?” he asked, turning and cupping his ear to the audience. “It’s not the right card? Oh, bollocks, I can’t ever get that one right.”

  With a grin he flicked the card sideways, back in the direction he’d come. The card shot through the air, looping around behind the hanging deck and striking it from behind in a perfectly illustrated feat of aerodynamics, sending the cards scattering wildly into the audience as if blown from behind by a big wind.

  The crowd, predictably, went wild.

  Grimm smirked, bowed once, and waited for the crowd to quiet down.

  “I’m sorry, but if that’s what you’ve come here to see tonight, you’re going to be terribly disappointed. I’m not here to practice petty tricks of prestidigitation, no sir.”

  Petty tricks? Jessie thought, watching from the balcony above. He calls those petty tricks?

  “I want to show you something better. You see, I’m not some simple street magician, with fast hands and witty banter. Nor am I a master illusionist, adept at using technology and misdirection to make you believe you’re seeing something that really isn’t there. No, I’m much more than that.”

  Grimm glanced around, as if to be sure no one was eavesdropping on his conversation with the crowd, then said, “You see, I’m the real thing.”

  He gave them a moment to take in what he’d said, and then went on. “Mage. Magic-user. Master of the Arcane. Modern-day Merlin. I’ve been called them all. And tonight,” he paused, looked the audience over, and then gave a conspiratorial wink, “tonight you’re going to see why.”

  “This isn’t just a show, ladies and gentlemen, no, far from it. This is a journey back into the depths of time, back to the world the way it used to be.”

  As he spoke, Grimm began weaving his hands together in front of him in a complicated pattern. Within seconds, a thick grey fog began spilling from between his twisting, turning hands. Streams of it fell to the floor and then began snaking outward, into the crowd, filling the room with a haze that quickly became difficult to see through.

  From the center of that haze, Grimm’s voice went on.

  “In those days, magic ruled the world. It was everywhere; you could taste it in the wind, feel it writhe deep in the earth beneath your feet, watch it as it roiled through the tempest waves.”

  A cool wind blew across Jessie’s cheek and the floor beneath her feet seemed to shake and move as Grimm spoke the words. For a moment she even thought she could smell the salt spray of the sea in the air, as if she were standing on the shoreline somewhere, gazing out over the ocean. They were neat tricks, but given they could all be accomplished with a few pieces of readily-available equipment, they weren’t all that surprising or impressive in a show like this.

  “The Demimonde was discovered and doorways were opened to other realms. Man began to mix with the beings that he found in those realms. Trade, of a sort, was born.

  “As one might expect, some of these beings began to take up residence in our world. The Nine Races, as they came to be called, were unlike anything man had ever seen. Dragons that soared through the skies. Dwarves, and their cousins, the Norn, that dug deep beneath the earth or made their homes out under the ice. The Fae and Fairy folk, with their demeaning little tricks that could turn deadly in an instant if you weren’t careful. The Spellcasters, with their power over the elements and the very energy of life. The Vampyr, that fed on the blood of the living, and all the other variations of the Walking Dead, from ghosts to spectres to wights. And let us not forget the Demons, with their endless temptations and their undying desire to corrupt all that was good.

  “These are the creatures our ancestors were forced to deal with on a daily basis and it wasn’t long before they discovered that mankind didn’t have the kinds of abilities or natural weapons that they possessed. They saw us as the weaker race and it didn’t take long for us to move from there to easy prey, in their eyes.

  “When that happened, the balance of power shifted and our world entered an age of darkness.”

  No sooner had Grimm uttered the word that the entire club was plunged into darkness.

  Jessie waited for the lights to come back up but they didn’t. Instead, the darkness began to weigh heavier on her shoulders, as if it had a physical presence all its own. The crowd must have felt it, too, for there was none of the usual applause or good-natured calls to turn the lights back on, but rather a heavy, pervading silence, as if the others were holding their breath against it, afraid to speak lest whatever was out there in the dark would hone in on them.

  And there was something out there, Jessie had no doubt about that. She could hear it, whispering to itself just on the edge of her hearing. Whispers she couldn’t quite understand, but that were nonetheless full of a sense of both bottomless hunger and overwhelming need.

  At one point, she thought she heard it snicker in laughter.

  The silence stretched for several long, terrible moments and when Grimm spoke up out of the darkness at last, Jessie nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “The newcomers had voracious appetites and a desire for territory unmatched by even the worst of history despots and they set out to claim what they desired.”

  A spotlight abruptly came to life, illuminating Grimm where he stood in the center of the stage, the darkness raging around him like a living thing, threatening to drown him in its depths.

  With no apparent concern for what was happening around him, Grimm stretched out his hands, palms down. Jessie watched in astonishment as he seemed to gather all that darkness into himself, watched it vanish into the center of his hands like vacuums sucking up dust. In seconds, it was gone and the stage lights shone brightly again.

  But Grimm wasn’t done, not by a long shot.

  “War was everywhere,” he proclaimed and with a wave of his hand, his words became reality. The nightclub around them vanished, and Jessie and the rest of the show’s guests found themselves surrounded by men and women fighting vainly to protect themselves and their families as creatures out of a nightmare swarmed over them, cutting them down and then devouring them with seeming impunity. The shouts and screams of the living and the dying alike mixed with the clash of weapons and snarls of animal ferocity. The lights dimmed for a moment and Jessie glanced up to watch the shadow of a massive winged beast soar overhead and disappear into the shadows.

  “Land after land, kingdom after kingdom, fell to these creatures until one man decided that he’d had enough.”

  The battle vanished with a snap of his fingers and Grimm once again stood alone on the stage.

  “Already strong in the mystic arts, this man brought together ten of the
world’s greatest surviving champions and trained them to become greater still. Masters of the arts of warfare, he bestowed some of his own power upon them and together they set out to reclaim our world from the creatures that had invaded it.”

  The space behind him began to fill, one by one, with figures that appeared to step out of nowhere. One minute the stage was empty and the next there was a rank of hardened individuals staring out at the audience from behind Grimm. The vast majority of them were men, but a few women stood amidst their ranks as well. They were clad in armor and carried a variety of weapons, from axes and bows to hammers and swords, as if they’d just stepped off the set of The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones.

  At first, Jessie thought they were nothing more than images projected onto a translucent curtain hanging in the space between Grimm and the back of the stage, but then the figures began to move their limbs and glance about, showing her that they had a heft and substance that no mere projection could ever produce.

  How the heck is he doing that? she wondered.

  Jessie focused in on one of the champions, a tall, bearded warrior with long blond hair that he wore loose about his shoulders like a Viking. There was something about him that seemed familiar. As if sensing her scrutiny, he turned to stare in her direction and she felt a jolt of connection pass through her frame when their gazes locked.

  I know this man, am positive of it, and yet I am equally certain that I’ve never met him before! What the heck is going on?

  “With the help of certain mystic artifacts, these warriors, together with their leader and his allies, confronted the nine races in battle, pushing them back through the doorways from whence they’d come; forcing them out of our world and back into their own.”

  On stage Grimm brought his arms up on either side, fingers extended, and as he did so the mist from earlier in the show returned, rising from the floor at his feet, obscuring the warriors standing behind him. Once the space at his back was filled completely with that mist, he turned and began pointing at its twisting, churning surface. Each time he did so, the mist in that spot would cease roiling and transform itself into an image of battle, presented in such amazing detail that she couldn’t resist being pulled into each scene. She watched as the warriors that had just moments before been gracing the stage in front of her were now leading armies of men against their enemies, watched them confront vampires and ghosts and strange, goblin-like creatures twice their size, among others. Dragons soared through the skies and legions of human archers fired thick clouds of arrows in an attempt to bring them down while elsewhere strange, demonic creatures tore into warrior and priest alike even while they were being forced back toward a blazing ring of fire hanging in the air like a doorway to hell itself.