Spell Caster

by Clara Coulson

  During an enlightening conversation that mostly consisted of lies on my part and thinly veiled threats on hers, Newsome revealed to me that Reid the faerie promised the Aurora Wolf rep’s office a favor, owing to the fact that some years ago, Vincent Wallace saved one of Reid’s employees from a rogue ghoul that had been prowling around Fifth Street for a number of weeks and eating any unfortunate lone pedestrians it could snatch off the sidewalks.

  Given the tenuous situation with Sadie Wheeler, Newsome decided that now is a good time to call in that favor. So she wrote a formal contract proposal requesting that Reid fulfill the terms of his promise, stuck it in a fancy envelope, and sent the helpful Crow who’d strong-armed his way into her office to deliver it at his own peril.

  Thus, here I stand, under another shoddy veil, waiting for the crosswalk light to send me to my potential doom.

  I mean, sure, in the DSI academy, I took classes on how to interact with the fae in ways that minimize your odds of dying horribly, but this situation—a Crow operating outside the bounds of DSI to secretly deliver a contract designed to thwart the intentions of a murderous wizard—is so far out of the context of what I was taught that I literally can’t even determine the best way to introduce myself. I guess I’ll just have to wing it. The way I wing most dangerous supernatural situations…right before they take a turn for the worse and send me tumbling into another hospital bed with my life flashing before my eyes.

  The crosswalk light displays the walking man symbol, and I force my legs to propel me across the street. As I close in on the claustrophobic alley between Reid’s and the former arcade, I remind myself that less than an a hour ago, I remained calm and collected even while surrounded by half a dozen angry and vicious werewolves. I was confident that my magic would allow me to extricate myself from any fight with those Wolves, if not allow me to win outright with relative ease.

  I should be confident in myself now as well, because even if this interaction with Reid and his faerie gang goes horribly wrong, there’s still a damn good chance I can blast my way out of the building and run for the hills before the faeries can kill me. Lucian said you packed a big magic punch, Kinsey. If push comes to shove, don’t hold back.

  Skulking into the alleyway, I drop my veil with that awkward crackle and spark combo and stride over to a thick metal door that looks like it came from a prison’s solitary confinement cell, complete with one of those rectangular panel sliders that allow you to creepily ogle the person on the wrong side of the door. In this case though, the wrong side is outside, where I happen to be.

  When I knock on the door using the code sequence Newsome provided, the man who yanks the panel back and glares out at me with unnaturally vibrant green eyes has such an overbearing presence that I nearly choose option B from the fight or flight scenario.

  It’s only when my left foot actually leaves the ground, the first half-step on a mad dash to safety, that I realize my terror isn’t entirely natural. The guard is poking at my amygdala with a metaphorical stick, hyping up the uncertainty I’ve been feeling since I left Newsome’s office to an insane degree.

  The resulting unbounded fear is the same sort of artificial emotion that the polong manipulated my brain into feeling at the Wheeler apartment. Only this time around it’s far stronger—faerie magic, it must be—and if I wasn’t cognizant enough to notice when I’m being mentally manipulated, then I’d already be three blocks down the street, cowering behind the USPS box next to the hardware store.

  As it is, instead of darting back out of the alley, I stomp my foot on the concrete and tug the envelope out from under my arm, holding it high enough for the guard to observe. The guy behind the door raises his eyebrows in surprise—he clearly thought he whacked my brain hard enough to get me to run off with my tail between my legs—but when his attention lands on the envelope, all the emotion drains out of his eyes in a flat second.

  He backs away from the door, slams the panel shut, and unlocks six different locks on the heavy metal slab before he finally hauls the door open. Then he steps into the threshold, a menacing bruiser over six feet tall with half a dozen visible black tattoos, a buzz cut, and an enchanted nose ring imbued with so much magic energy I don’t even have to switch on my magic sense to see the green glow.

  “Who sent you?” he asks with a voice like a tractor-trailer skidding over gravel. The accent strikes me as vaguely Russian, and I can’t help but think immigrant mob enforcer.

  I tell the scary man who sent me.

  He scowls as he gives me a once-over, skeptical that the Wolves would send a non-Wolf to do any sort of important task, especially one involving negotiations with the notoriously cantankerous fae. But the envelope emblazoned with the special sigil must force his hand, because after a dismissive snort, nostrils flaring around his nose ring, the man backs into the hallway and ushers me inside.

  I step into the cramped hall, which is somehow both brighter and dimmer than the near-dawn morning outside, cloudy bare bulbs screwed into recessed ceiling lights, deep shadows shifting in every corner. There are four doors spanning the length of the hall, three on the right side, one on the left, and another door at the very end, directly opposite the entrance. The scent of old food wafts from the left-hand side of the hall, so I figure the corresponding door leads to the restaurant, whereas the three doors on the right open into some combination of offices and supply closets. Given the size of the building, the door at the end of the hall can only lead to a basement staircase.

  Naturally, the bruiser directs me to the staircase door. And by “directs,” I mean he grabs my coat collar and practically throws me across the hall. “Downstairs. Door on the right. Knock four times. Present envelope to the woman who answers. You draw a weapon or act hostile in any other way, you die.”

  My handgun suddenly seems to grow much heavier in my pocket.

  “Uh, thanks,” I reply with a nervous chuckle. Then I scuttle over to the door.

  The staircase is completely unlit, and I have to brace one hand against the wall to guide myself down a set of steep, uneven stone steps that would make a building inspector faint. The bottom of the staircase lets out into some kind of lounge, a couple sagging couches on opposite walls, an old TV on top of a bookcase set between them, DVDs and video game cases scattered across the coffee table, a stack of newspapers in one corner, and two overfilled trashcans reeking of old coffee and stale pizza crust in the other.

  I can only hope the state of this side of the building isn’t representative of how Reid runs his pizza parlor. Else he’s begging for a health citation, and depending on how good or bad this meeting goes, I might just be the one who tips the health inspector off.

  A short hall branches off one end of the lounge, and there are two doors on the hall, positioned directly across from one another. I cross the lounge and enter this hall, scrutinizing the door on the right-hand side with my magic sense jacked up as high as it’ll go.

  You’d think that sensing absolutely nothing would reassure me I’m not about to walk into trouble, but in this case, that nothing stops me in my tracks. Because it’s not just nothing. It’s not a normal nothing, a regular absence of magic. The door and about three feet of the wall on either side appear to my magic sight as a black, sunken void. A null space.

  I flick off my magic sense. The door looks like a regular door.

  I flick on my magic sense. The door turns into a black hole again.

  Cold sweat beads on the back of my neck, and goose bumps prickle up my arms. I have no idea what sort of power this is. It’s not like anything I’ve seen before or read about in my magic texts. I’m way out of my league here. If anything goes sideways during this conversation, I’m shit out of luck.

  But I made my bed, and now I’ve got to lie in it. Newsome’s contribution to my plan to save Sadie depends on Reid agreeing to make good on his favor to the Wolves. So I have to knock on the door to the abyss, have to enter the faerie’s domain, and hope that the room within the darkness
is nice enough to spit me out into the world again once Reid is done with me.

  I raise my hand, a slight tremor in my fingers, and knock gently on the door four times.

  After the third knock, a woman opens the door. Somehow, my fingers still make contact with the wood of the door instead of the woman’s face, despite the fact that the door is no longer in the same place. The woman says in a soft, smooth voice, “Can I help you, Mr. Crow?” I hear her voice from behind me instead of before me, and the words are out of sync with the movement of her lips. Oh, and the woman is upside down, feet on the ceiling of the room within the void, head roughly even with my own, not a blond hair out of place on her head even though it’s hanging loose around her shoulders. As if gravity switches directions between the hallway and the room.

  For about ten seconds, the only thing I can do is stand there and gawk. What the fuck?

  Somehow, my hand manages to raise the envelope.

  The woman glances at it, and nods. “Right this way, sir,” she says, words mismatched to her mouth again. She steps back from the threshold and gestures for me to enter the room, which at this point still appears to be nothing but an inky black pool that absorbs all light, from which nothing can escape.

  Logic dictates there must be some kind of illusory magic at work here, some spells or wards that fool the senses and confound the mind. But logic doesn’t stop my brain from setting off nineteen different alarms, and it doesn’t prevent my struggle with an intense urge to race back up the stairs and flee from Reid’s Pizza.

  Biting my tongue until it bleeds, the pain short-circuiting my petrified paralysis, I manage to force my feet to shuffle forward along the dusty tile floor until I reach the threshold. As I pass through the doorway, I feel the distinct sensation of a lacy curtain sliding over my body, coarse threads catching on the corners of my face and ruffling my hair. The instant the end of this invisible curtain slips above my eyes, the dark void around me blinks out of existence, and in its place sits a cavernous room two stories tall and five times as wide, a room that can’t possibly exist in the basement space beneath a tiny pizza parlor.

  The floor of the room appears to be made of reflective glass, but the image on the floor doesn’t display a mirrored version of the room itself. Rather, it showcases a scene from another world. It’s as if the glass is actually the floor of two separate rooms, one on each side of the veil between Earth and the Eververse. On this side, there’s a secret club, a fully stocked bar in one corner, heavy oak tables clustered near the walls, coasters and napkin holders piled high atop them, the center of the room left bare, presumably designated a dance floor. On the other side is a grand ballroom, enormous crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, delicate metal tables draped in expensive white cloths arranged in perfect circles, another dance floor in the middle of the splendor.

  There are people in the ballroom. Walking. Talking. Laughing. People wearing clothes that don’t match any earth fashion, silver-stitched shirts clasped with crystalline buttons, pants secured with leather bands too wide to be called belts, short swords strapped to their hips, sheathed in elegantly decorated scabbards. People with facial features that don’t precisely match those of any human, the cheekbones too high and pronounced, the ears too pointed, the colors of their eyes too saturated, an unearthly brightness in their irises. Faeries. These are faeries.

  Somehow, the basement of Reid’s Pizza is connected to a ballroom in one of the Faerie Kingdoms. How the hell?

  The sound of a door clicking shut behind me jars me out of my stupor. I look over my shoulder to find the young blond woman standing on the same plane of the room as me, but I have no idea whether she moved down or I moved up, or whether we were actually both standing on the floor to begin with and my eyes were just playing tricks on me. Behind the woman, the wall and door now look perfectly normal, no sign of the intimidating darkness lingering among the wooden wall panels or the ornately carved doorframe or the antique bronze doorknob that looks like it was jacked from somebody’s Victorian mansion.

  The woman, who isn’t wearing any shoes, walks past me and motions for me to follow. My feet try to root themselves to the spot again, but I prod them into moving by reminding myself that I don’t know what’ll happen if I get left in this room by myself. I could end up falling through the glass floor into Faerie, the same way that I would’ve gotten transported there had I touched the walls of the Eververse Bridge. Or, hell, for all I know, the room could have some kind of defense ward array that burns any unaccompanied strangers to a crisp and then sweeps their ashes out into the smelly alley between the restaurant and the former arcade.

  This is faerie territory. Anything could happen.

  I hurry along and catch up to the woman.

  She approaches a circular table near the bar, which I am surprised to find occupied. The five people at the table must’ve always been there, but for some reason, I didn’t see them when I first scanned the room.

  In a big, cushy chair sits a man who must be Reid, his bare feet on the table, a mug of beer in one hand, a smoldering cigar tucked between his lips. He’s wearing a human disguise—that of a weathered middle-aged white man—but in this weird, altered space, and with my magic sense running on high, I catch glimpses of his real face in the corner of my eye:

  Rich brown hair with natural mossy-green streaks. Bright green eyes dotted with glittering gold flecks. A trio of thin scars on one cheek I assume were made by an iron weapon, one of the few substances that can truly damage the fae. No other marks, not even a wrinkle or freckle.

  The other four people at the table are also fae, but each one seems to be a different kind. An apparent teenage girl with a canary-yellow bob who’s tattooed from the neck down with elegantly scripted magic sigils. A black man wearing glasses whose catlike green eyes glow even brighter than the Wolves’ in the dim light. An Asian-looking guy who at first glance seems like he was plucked from a tech firm analyst’s desk, but upon closer inspection has a pair of ram’s horns protruding from above his ears and an extra eye in the middle of his forehead. And a young woman who appears human in all regards, except for her eyes, which contain at least twenty shades of blue and are so mesmerizing that I get lost in them for the better part of a minute.

  And here I thought cavorting with vampires was strange.

  The blonde who answered the door, and who I now realize has a pair of dragonfly wings tucked against her back, sidles up to Reid and murmurs in his ear, pointing to the envelope in my hand. Reid takes a drag off his cigar and slowly blows the smoke out the corner of his mouth, his gaze like a physical weight as it roves over my body. His focus lingers on my neck, on the faint scar left by Vanth’s sword—the only scar I have that hasn’t faded under the influence of my newfound healing factor—and then on my chest. For a brief moment, I feel a hint of magic prodding at my skin.

  No, not my skin. At my soul.

  “Excuse you,” I say before I can stop myself from being an idiot.

  Reid makes eye contact, and it’s so intense it feels like he slaps me in the face. “You felt that?”

  “Yes,” I say through clenched teeth, “I did.”

  “Huh.” He knocks some ash off the cigar into a glass ashtray on the table. “A sensitive one, you are, if you felt something that subtle. Don’t often see that degree of sensitivity in humans, not even the magic sort.”

  The girl with the yellow bob leans toward me and sniffs loudly. “Huh. This Crow’s not human. Not entirely. Half and half, I’d say. Must be the nonhuman half that gives him the extra sensory juice.”

  All the eyes in the room stick to me like glue, each pair tugging at my skin as if they want to dissect me. Faeries, I learned in my DSI academy classes, have this innate urge to “collect” pretty and unique things. A tendency that has influenced centuries of child snatching (aka changeling cases) along with countless incidents where hapless adults end up spending decades in a faerie court, bound by their food and dazed by their seductive magic, bef
ore getting spit out like a piece of garbage when the thieving faeries finally get bored of them.

  I am keen on not joining the “kidnapped by faeries” statistic today.

  I swallow in a vain attempt to wet my dry throat and say, “Yeah, I’m only half human. What of it?”

  Reid scrutinizes me again. “Well, what sort of half-blood are you?”

  “That’s not pertinent to this conversation,” I reply, hoping my heart palpitations don’t reflect in my voice. “Maybe we can talk about it some other time, up in the pizza parlor?”

  Some place where the faerie magic doesn’t permeate the very air I breathe, putting me on edge and screwing with my senses, knocking my reality off kilter, dragging the world slightly to the left of where it’s supposed to be. Some place where I actually have an avenue of escape, if Reid does indeed decide he wants to “collect” a wayward Crow with magic in his soul and a mystery in his blood.

  Reid catches my drift, and grins. There’s something in it I might call respect. “Fair enough.” He nods toward the envelope. “So, what’ve you got for me, boy?”

  I set the envelope on the tabletop and slide it over to him. Exchanging his beer mug for the envelope, he thumbs up the flap, peeks at the contents, then shakes the stapled papers out of the envelope and onto the table. With a flick of his wrist, he tosses the envelope aside. Halfway through its arc toward the floor, the paper catches fire, and the harsh green blaze burns away every scrap before a single one flutters down to the glass.

  Reid stamps out his cigar in the ashtray, retrieves his beer mug, and starts poring over the dense text written on the cover page of the contract.

  Silence fills the room, as no one dares to interrupt Reid’s train of thought. Or, well, silence almost fills the room. Faint footsteps catch my ear now and again, and I’m embarrassed to admit it takes me several minutes to figure out they’re coming from the ballroom on the other side of the floor. Sounds from the Eververse are literally filtering through whatever magic mirror separates the impossible basement from the realm of Faerie. Idly, I wonder if sounds from this side of the floor are filtering over to the ballroom, and if the faeries traipsing around in there can see me if they look down.