Black Gold

by Alexis Blakely

  “Okay,” I said, still not opening my door. “I guess we’re doing this.”

  Chase didn’t move either. He still had his hand on the keys where they sat in the ignition. “Have I mentioned lately that I wish you were more cool with letting me carry a gun? It’s not fair you have magic to protect you and I’ve got what, a cell phone?” He waggled the backup phone he’d taken from our gear bag in the trunk for emphasis.

  “Do you have service?”

  The light of the phone’s lock screen was blinding in the darkness of the car. “Two bars.”

  “Great,” I said, finally summoning the courage to yank the door handle. “If shit goes sideways, you can call 911 to come collect our corpses so we don’t have to rot in this place forever.”

  Without giving myself another second to chicken out, I got out of the car and began walking towards the house.

  Chapter Eleven

  Chase had also retrieved a small flashlight from the gear bag in the car, and the broken-down house looked even more terrifying beneath the roving spotlight beam of light that followed wherever he swung his hand. And he was swinging it around a lot, flashing it behind us as often as he was on the house itself. Up close, we could see that the holes in the walls had been haphazardly covered with discolored tarps and sheets that would have been easy enough to either push aside or slice through. Instead, I took the lead and went for the front door, which swung open with a creak when I turned the knob.

  “After you,” Chase said when I glanced at him. “It’ll be easier for me to drag you back to the car when you step on a trap or fall through a rotted floorboard.”

  With that lovely image in my head, I stepped carefully into the house. The wooden floorboards creaked loudly in the small space, but they seemed firm enough. With only the one flashlight, and me without my phone, Chase reluctantly handed me the flashlight, resorting to the little LED on the back of his phone. Sticking close together, we crept through the main floor, beams from our lights illuminating dust-covered piles of broken pieces of furniture that had been swept to the side of the room. The walls were completely covered in graffiti, and there was a charred patch in one corner of the room where someone had once lit a small fire. The place smelled of mildew and rot, once again making me wonder how anyone would want to voluntarily step foot inside. I thought back to the girl’s reaction after I not-so-subtly hinted that I was only planning to use Gus for sex, and the idea of me coming back to this place for a night of passion was so absurd I laughed out loud.

  “Jeez, Alex!” Chase whispered harshly. “You scared the hell out of me. What’s wrong with you?”

  It wasn’t worth explaining, so I just shook my head. “I’ll tell you later.”

  Chase shone his light on a door that might have been a closet, but looked like it probably led down into the basement. “Any chance this guy is a vampire?”

  “Pretty sure he isn’t,” I said. “I saw him in the middle of the day, remember? If he was young enough, he’d be able to tolerate that kind of light, but it doesn’t match up with how terrified Slaski was. That gnome might be a coward when it comes to facing real danger, but I doubt he’d be so shook by a baby vamp.”

  I swiveled my own flashlight towards a staircase that climbed upwards. The house was small enough that we could see into the total wreck of what once would have been a kitchen, so the only options were to go upstairs or down. Since I didn’t feel all that jazzed about going into the basement, I headed for the stairs, testing every step carefully before putting my full weight on it.

  “Stop!” Chase said, grabbing the back of my shirt and nearly pulling me off balance near the top of the staircase.

  I glared at him, but he nodded towards the top step and said, “Look.”

  Strung at ankle level was a superfine length of wire that I’d definitely had stepped into had Chase not warned me. We switched places on the stairs, and Chase knelt down to inspect the trap. After a minute of fiddling with his multi-tool, he plucked the end of the tripwire free from the far wall, coiled it up, and laid it on the ground beneath what I could now see was a military claymore mine.

  “Guess we’re in the right place,” he said. “Someone’s trying to keep trespassers out.”

  Indeed. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of damage a mine like that would do to me, but at the very least, I’d probably have had my legs blown clean off below the thigh. A healer like Slaski could work miracles if he wasn’t trying to blackmail his patients, but so far no healer had figured out how to completely regrow lost limbs. And Chase. The guy had been right behind me on the stairs, which put his head right at blast-level. He’d have been dead before either of us even realized what had happened.

  “Maybe you should go back to the car,” I suggested. “Who knows what else is waiting for us up here.”

  Chase looked hurt. “You’d have triggered that tripwire if I hadn’t been here. I’m not leaving you. We do this together, or we both leave right now. If we drive the limit all the way, we can be home in a few hours. We’ve done everything the client asked for. The way I see it, this job is done and we’re on unpaid overtime.”

  I considered it. This job was just too messy to be worth the risk of messing around with an apparent psychopath with no clear motive. Chase and I had already narrowly survived one explosion, and now averted a second one by mere inches. What would happen if we didn’t spot the next trap in time? What if I couldn’t bring a shield up quick enough? At a certain point, it had to be wiser to walk away and regroup, right? With what we already knew, we might even be able to get the Conclave to take over. I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about contacting them since I was doing my best to avoid the only member I knew. The vampire, Kalev Eskola, and I weren’t exactly on friendly terms. If I asked him for help, he’d probably do everything in his power to block the Conclave from stepping in.

  “Someone has to deal with this guy,” I said. “And since we’re already standing in his creepy lair, we should probably just see it through.”

  “Figured you’d say something like that,” Chase said with what I thought was a hint of a smug grin. “But maybe let’s go slow and keep an eye out for more tripwires.”

  Trying not to think about the possibility of a pressure plate or other hidden trap, I focused my efforts where they were best suited, to scanning for magical traps. Oddly enough, the place was magically dead. A simple ward on the front door would have been enough to deter most people from entering, but I hadn’t been able to identify so much as a thread of warding anywhere. I knew better than most that it was possible for a talented practitioner to obscure their wards from mage sight, but after the incident that had taken someone’s life when they’d opened the door to my apartment, activating a trap that had been meant for me, I’d done some research into alternative methods for sensing those kinds of traps. I still wasn’t a hundred percent confident in my abilities, but we’d been taking enough care that I was fairly certain there was no magic at play anywhere in the house.

  Except… what was that?

  I urged Chase towards a room without a door at the end of the second story hallway. This room wasn’t exactly inviting, but unlike the rest of the house, it was at least inhabitable. A thin mattress lay near a window, neatly made up with a rough woolen blanket and a sad, flat pillow. The surrounding floor was covered in candle stubs that sat in puddles of hardened wax. A small pile of books had been left beside the bed, and it was from this stack that I saw the source of the subtle energy emanations I’d been able to sense earlier. To the naked eye, the stack of books were all the kind of best-selling paperback spy thrillers you’d find on the wall of an airport gift shop. All but the leather bound volume sitting on top of the pile. This looked just like a grimoire. Exactly the kind of thing I’d hoped to find. If it belonged to Gus, it would be just the thing to tell us more about who he was and what he wanted from this random little town.

  I reached down to pick it up, and I felt the gentle pop of a spell breaking loose. It was litt
le more than the slightest pressure change in my ears, but there was no doubting the source.

  “Shit,” I muttered. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “What?” Chase shone his light in my face, then quickly lowered it to the book. “What’s wrong?”

  “I think I just activated a trap left for a mage.” I flipped open the book, and sure enough, the pages were blank. “Yeah, definitely a trap. Let’s go.”

  Since we knew the way we’d come in was clear of traps, neither of us hesitated to run along the hallway and back down the stairs. Nothing had changed about the house or the total lack of magic energy, but that didn’t mean something bad wasn’t about to happen. Best-case scenario, we’d just set off a little alarm that would make Gus come running back to his hideaway, giving us at least fifteen or twenty minutes if he was on foot. Worst case? Well, I didn’t really want to think about that. Not until Chase and I were back in the car and driving away from this stupid house to somewhere we could make a new plan.

  Chase hit the main floor first, and crossed what would have been a living room to get to the door a few steps ahead of me. Before I could follow him outside, the door slammed shut in my face, trapping me inside. I yanked on the handle and twisted it as hard as I could, but the stupid knob just came off in my hands. I heard Chase pounding on the door and shouting my name, so I yelled for him to back away. Calling up enough energy to blast the door to splinters, I let loose a kinetic blast that didn’t so much as knock loose the few remaining flecks of dried and curling paint that hadn’t yet peeled away.

  Then everything went dark.

  I shook my flashlight and clicked the button a few times, but it was completely useless. The darkness was more than just the loss of my light. I should have been able to see moonlight through the windows and gaps in the places where nothing but tarps covered the walls. Instead, I was enveloped in a blackness so complete it swallowed my own voice when I called out Chase’s name. I tried casting a light spark, but nothing happened. I felt the magic coalesce in my hand, but the spell just disappeared as soon as the energy left my body. I was as blind with my mage sight as I was without it. At least, I was until a ghostly green light shimmered behind me.

  “Hello Alex,” the man calling himself Gus said. A menacing smile creased his lips. “So happy you decided to drop by.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Fuck. Not only had I walked right into a trap set specifically for me, but the psychopath who’d set it for me had also seen too many movies where the bad guy toys with his victims before eating their liver or whatever ridiculous thing he had planned. In the wan light of what I could now see was a candle, I realized Gus was no longer wearing his filthy gas station coveralls. Dressed in modern slim cut suit, he cut quite the imposing figure. You could almost call him handsome if it wasn’t for the fact that his eyes brimmed with unbridled malice. I felt bitterly cold beneath his stare, like I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry, or claw my eyes out rather than have to see him look at me that way for another second.

  But this wasn’t my first rodeo. I knew how to stand my ground against those kinds of feelings. They weren’t real. Well, they were real, but they didn’t reflect the reality of my situation. I wasn’t some helpless child who’d wandered into the witch’s lair. I had a few tricks of my own, and this guy was going to have to work harder than this if he wanted to intimidate me.

  “Nice place you got here,” I said, hating the quaver in my voice. “Bet all the girls you bring back here swoon when they see it.”

  Gus laughed. “You’re even better than I’d hoped for. So feisty. It’s almost a shame we won’t have time to properly get to know one another. I believe I’d rather have enjoyed your company.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  “What’s the plan here?” I asked. “Ritual sacrifice? Creepy sex stuff? More blackmail? If you want the hermitess dead, you’re going to have to go do that yourself.”

  The candle in Gus's hand guttered, then flared again. He eyed me curiously, then shook his head. “That old cow is of no concern to me. She can totter around up in the woods, singing to the birds and caring for her animal friends all she wants. She is weak. Hardly worth the effort of going up there for such a light snack.”

  “Snack?” I called energy to my fingers, sending threads out to search tentatively in the empty space around me. The energy fizzled apart as soon as it left my fingertips. “Like, roast the bones and boil the flesh snack, or…?”

  Gus's smile became more sinister. “I think you already know what it is that I want from you.”

  “Look, Gus,” I began, “Wait, that can’t be your real name, can it?”

  “My real name is immaterial. Gus serves as well as any other.”

  “Okay, Gus. You’ve clearly got me at a disadvantage you’ve taken pains to engineer. What happens next?”

  I had no way of being sure, but I was pretty sure that whatever spell Gus had used to nullify my magic was also blocking his. Something about the way he was using a candle instead of a more dramatic effect made me wonder if he was as magically impotent as I was. If that was the case, he was doing a hell of a job of not letting it show. By all outward appearances, the guy had the upper hand on me. Even if he didn’t have the ability to use magic in this void, it was a containment field of his creation. That meant he could drop it the instant he was ready to cast a spell, giving him the precious milliseconds he’d need to hit me before I could respond.

  Unless I hit him first.

  Gus opened his mouth to say something, but the words never made it out. I stepped in close, popping him right in the jaw with a quick right hook. His eyes widened in surprise as his head snapped back — physical violence wasn’t common among those of us who worked magic — and I followed the punch up with a strong knee to his groin. Gus dropped the candle and doubled over, making it easy for me to grab him by the hair and smash my knee into his nose this time.

  Then the lights came back on. I’d dropped my flashlight when I’d gone in for the punch, and it now illuminated half the room beside us. Partially masked in shadow, it was impossible to read Gus’s features, but I didn’t have to see his eyes to feel the anger burning in the magic that roiled off him in sickening waves.

  I got my shield up just in time to block the crackling streaks of black energy that surged towards me. Tendrils of the stuff wrapped around my barrier, constricting it like a nest of pythons determined to strangle the life out of me. I could hold it off for a while, but eventually it would wear me down. This guy was strong. Way stronger than I was. If I let even a crack show in my defenses, he’d slip something deadly into it before I could blink.

  “You’re a resourceful one, aren’t you?” Gus asked, thumbing blood from his nose. The front of his shirt was stained crimson. “I’d hoped chasing the witch woman in the woods might have left you a little more depleted.”

  He didn’t know how close I’d come to being so low on magic reserves that his attack would have crushed me effortlessly. Slaski’s thaumatochalyx had saved me, but it wouldn’t get me out of there alive. With what I was expending by maintaining the energy shield, I’d have enough left for one desperate act if I was to have any chance of escaping.

  “People who underestimate me usually end up dead,” I said. “I’m tougher than I look.”

  Gus muttered something and made a blurry finger gesture over his nose. He sniffed once experimentally, then pressed the knuckle of his index finger to the side of one nostril in order to blow a clot of blood onto the floor.

  “No matter,” Gus said when he was done, gross smile still plastered on his face. “I didn’t know who would come poking around my little trap, but I am beyond pleased that it was you.”

  He stepped closer, then reached through my shield spell to grab me by the throat. I couldn’t help but groan at how recently I’d done this exact thing to Slaski. It was every bit as panic-inducing as I’d intended it to be when I’d used it. Since the barrier spell was already in place, it d
idn’t take much effort of will to keep it steady, but I felt it flicker and waver as Gus squeezed hard enough to make fireworks dance across my vision. I choked out a plea for him to let go, but it was little more than a pathetic gurgle.

  The shield barrier fell away, and the fireworks became hazy darkness crowding the edges of my sight. All I could see was Gus leering at me hungrily, mouth moving in the silent incantation of some ancient spell.

  Magic flushed unbidden within me, like a pile of gasoline-soaked wood erupting into flames at the first kiss of a match. I tried in vain to harness it, to use it to escape Gus’s grasp, but it was as useless as the weak flailing of my arms and legs as I battered my attacker with all the strength and fury of an irate kitten. Somehow, Gus had latched onto my magic. He drew it from me, first in a whisper of a thread, then in a gushing torrent that spewed from my slack jaw. There was nothing I could do to stop it. At this rate, he’d drain me within seconds, eventually stripping me all the way to the last gossamer thread of my life force, leaving me an empty husk. A very dead, empty husk.

  I was so lost to fear and panic that I was oblivious to what was happening next until it slammed right into me. There was a loud crash, and then something collided with my legs. I was vaguely aware of the snapping of something important. A femur maybe? And then I was hurtling over something hard and metal. I kept rolling until I hit the ground with a thump that knocked the air from my lungs, and in the settling dust that filled the air, I could just make out Chase’s car.

  “Alex!” Chase shouted at me. “Get in!”

  The passenger door was open, and Chase was leaning out of it screaming at me. I tried to push myself up onto my hands and knees, but pain flared in my leg so badly I collapsed onto my face. In a moment of utter disorientation, I couldn’t remember if I was still in the abandoned saw mill after the explosion, or if a very long day had passed since then. A low groan of pain from somewhere on the other side of Chase’s car brought me back to reality. Gus was still alive, and in another few seconds, there was nothing Chase or I would be able to do to stop him. We might be able to run, but how far would we get before Gus tracked us down again? And he’d definitely come after us now that we knew about him. We were loose ends he couldn’t afford to leave hanging.