Houses there had less graffiti on the walls. There was almost no trash scattered around. The dumpsters were where they were supposed to be. There were even some trees growing in special beds by the road. The apartment blocks had five, seven, even nine stories, central heating, and water tanks on the rooftops.
By High Garden standards, it was a very good neighborhood to live in.
“Let’s go.” Gribovsky motioned to him before tramping off loudly toward a group of cops. After lingering for a moment to cover his ring with his left hand, Alex followed.
“Barney…seriously…I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Oh please, things were way worse during the gang war six years ago.”
“No, Barney, you don’t get it. Nothing like this happened back then.”
Two cops who were presumably standing guard were smoking by the entrance. One of them wasn’t actually standing; he was sitting on the stairs and smoking rather nervously. Apparently, he was the one not named Barney.
Alex looked around once again.
Weird. The only cops on the street were the pair in front of them, even despite the two buses parked nearby. From what he remembered, buses like those always carried at least a score of blue uniforms.
“Hi guys,” Gribovsky said with a smile and a wave.
“Who are you?”
Instead of answering, the lieutenant pulled his ID out and showed it to the cops. They straightened up so quickly they almost choked on their cigarettes.
“Sir!” they replied with an instant salute.
“At ease, soldiers. He’s with me.”
Walking past the two cops standing at attention, Alex had mixed feelings. There was a perverse sense of glee, on the one hand, though it was accompanied by a sense of foreboding.
His gut instinct said the whole thing meant trouble.
They went up the stairs and into the building.
The hall looked absolutely normal. Two elevators. A set of stairs zigzagging upward. Long rows of mailboxes across the opposite wall. The plaster was somewhat shabby, and the floor had apparently not been washed since the day before, but that was it.
Traces of drunken mishaps that hadn’t yet been cleaned up clued the pair in to the building’s cleaning schedule.
Alex followed Gribovsky onto the elevator.
Hell. Was it school kids throwing a party?
The elevator was smelly and dirty, too, though the lieutenant was unphased. Pressing the button for the ninth floor, he tapped a painfully familiar rhythm on the door.
“Nirvana?” Alex asked.
“Bingo,” Gribovsky nodded. “You love Kurt, too?”
“Oh, no,” Doom replied, shaking his head. “I’m more a Metallica guy.”
“That’s seriously ancient.”
“Well, shit, it’s not like Nirvana is any newer. They’re both almost a century old. Pretty ancient stuff.”
“Ancient stuff? I’ll bash your teeth in, Dumsky.”
As they talked about the sublime, they rattled (literally—the elevator was horribly shaky) up to the ninth floor.
The door slid open after the third attempt, letting cigarette smoke pour into the elevator.
“Ugh.” Pinching his nose with one hand, Gribovsky waved the smoke away from his face with the other.
As he stepped out into the corridor, Alex saw why the smoke was so dense. Two scores of cops were standing along the walls, all of them smoking. Many of them were doing so for the first time, judging by all the coughing.
Along with the blue uniforms of all ages, Doom spotted specialists in their white smocks and detectives in their civilian suits.
They were all trying to get as far away as possible from apartment 172.
“Who are—”
Apparently expecting that question, Gribovsky flashed his ID on the go. The cops’ leader, a menacing man in a shabby, cheap suit with a plain trench coat over his shoulders, just nodded.
“The specialists are done,” he said. “We questioned the neighbors.”
“And?” Gribovsky’s bravado and frivolity, apparently feigned, were gone in a flash. He was once again the grumpy character who first entered Alex’s apartment.
“Same as always, sir. No one saw anything. No one knows anything. Judging by their descriptions, the people who used to live in the apartment were saints… They’re terrified. All of them.”
“With good reason.”
They fell silent for a moment.
“Can we go?” the detective asked.
“Yes.” The lieutenant nodded and headed for the apartment door. “We’ll take it from here.”
Noticing the plural pronoun, Alex followed Gribovsky as he opened the door and entered the apartment.
He felt a tingling sensation in his fingertips as he stepped over the threshold.
That’s a bad sign.
There was nothing special about the apartment. It had been remodeled a long time before, with subsequent generations doing nothing but repaint the walls and change the furniture.
First was a narrow hall cluttered with shoes and a cumbersome wardrobe with the standard built-in handles. Whoever had been living there probably thought it was fancy.
There was nothing special except the strong smell of copper and sulfur mixed with something like ammonia.
It was a creepy smell. One that tended to lodge itself in your skull and instantly ruin your appetite no matter how hungry you were a second before.
Following Gribovsky, Alex stepped into the first bedroom and froze on the threshold.
“Fucking hell’s bells.”
“You’re probably right about that, pumpkin.” Gribovsky pulled a pack of Skittles out of his inside pocket and tossed several of them into his mouth. “Or something even worse.”
Smeared all over the white sheet covering the double bed was thick, dark blood. It had been used to paint circles around symbols pulled from various alphabets, not to mention lots of other geometric shapes.
There was also a huge magic seal that a non-magic person would’ve most likely called a pentagram. It was drawn in blood, too.
Alex already knew what he was going to see when he looked up.
Nailed to the ceiling, right over the seal, were two bodies…or rather, what remained of them. The carved up and shriveled remnants had their bellies slashed open, their entrails dangling out of them, their limbs broken, and some bones removed. The bones had probably been used to disembowel them.
It was only circumstantial evidence that told the pair that the two chunks of bloody flesh had once been a man and a woman.
Their eyeballs lay on the bedside table, from where they stared at the entrance.
Their hearts were impaled on the bed posts.
The blood and entrails soaked into the carpet squelched, and there was more strung across the window.
“So, this is why you actually got me out of jail,” Alex said through gritted teeth.
“You’re not the only dark wizard in this city,” Gribovsky replied calmly, without an ounce of mirth. “But you’re the only demonologist we know.”
Holy shit.
Chapter 16
As Alex gazed at the blood seal, he had the distinct impression that it was looking back at him. In those bold, scarlet lines and the glimmering lamplight reflected in the blood, Doom saw something he wished he could have forgotten for all eternity.
He saw one of his memories.
***
“Alex,” a tall girl called, distracting him from the porn magazine he was paging through.
It was probably a surprising sight for passers-by: a boy no older than seven hiding beneath a dog rose shrub to read a fairly hefty porn magazine. It actually had too many pages to just be a glossy periodical.
However, upon seeing the tall and decrepit building of St. Frederick Orphanage behind the boy, not to mention the ramshackle fence with five gaps in each board, they would have hurried on, having reached a very definite conclusion.
A
nd they wouldn’t have noticed the dog-eared Practical Magic Math handbook hidden between the busty women of different races depicted on the cover of the magazine.
Had they seen it, those random passers-by would have wondered how a seven-year-old orphan was able to understand graphs and charts that were a mystery to most people with a bachelor’s degree. But that would have been a completely different story.
“Alex!” the girl called again, this time a bit louder.
“Coming!” the boy shouted back. After placing a bookmark and hiding the book in his homemade stash under the shrub, he ran over to her.
She was wearing a sandy-colored dress, a wide-brimmed white hat, and blue shoes. A first-year student at the community college for domestic magic.
She was studying to become a florist.
Fortunately for Alex, she’d happened to draw the short straw and get an internship at St. Frederick Orphanage, where she was helping restore the garden.
The garden had supposedly once been used to teach kids how to take care of magic plants. But right then, overgrown with weeds almost as tall as Alex, it was a spot for…lots of things, none of which were academic.
“Miss Elisa,” the boy said with a smile.
“Reading the handbook again, you naughty boy?” Frowning and putting her tiny (although they seemed huge to Alex back then) hands on her hips, she loomed over him like a giant shadow. “You should be playing with the other kids.”
“They’re boring,” Alex lied. The real reason he avoided everyone was completely different. “The book’s interesting.”
For a while, Elisa stared at him, her warm, soft brown eyes shining as brightly as the midday sun on that fine spring day.
“You little devil,” she laughed at last. “You know I can’t be mad at you for long.”
She reached out a hand to flick his nose.
“The tip of your nose is insanely beautiful,” Elisa smiled.
Alex grabbed at the aforementioned part of his face and backed away.
“That’s what my mom always told me to make me smile,” Elisa explained. “So, will you help me today?”
“Sure,” Alex replied. “And will you show me how to grow a peony?”
“That’s advanced magic, but…sure! Okay, go get a spade and a trowel. No amount of magic will help if you don’t know how to work with your hands.”
Alex rushed over to the shed where the gardening tools were stored.
I should’ve just kept reading the handbook.
***
“What do you think, Doom?” Gribovsky’s voice had taken on a gray, bleak tone once again. It was distant and absolutely devoid of emotion, no trace left of his recent joviality.
The giant, red-haired descendant of Eastern European immigrants chewed his candy, looking so natural among all the bloody chaos that he might have lived his whole life surrounded by it.
“Cheap props. All of it.” Alex sighed, straightened up, and stepped away from the blood seal.
“Props? What do you mean?”
Wow. As he continued, the officer’s voice suddenly flashed an emotion: surprise.
“These entrails look pretty real to me. And the hearts, too. Why did they place the eyes there? To see everyone who enters, something like a surveillance camera?”
As bleak as Gribovsky’s voice might have been, his manner of speaking was largely unchanged.
“Not they. He,” Alex replied softly as he continued to examine the scene.
The farce was definitely not a proper crime scene. The officer smoking at the entrance had been right about that. When gangs waged wars, lots of violence was inevitable—Alex had been in many a fight back in his day. But when people got killed in them, it was civilized. They would be stabbed in the stomach. Shot in the chest. Killed with a spell.
Nothing like the scene in front of them.
Gribovsky froze, his hand just a few inches short of popping a tiny red Skittle into his mouth.
“One man, Doom? Are you sure?”
“If you know any other demonologists in Myers City, you’re welcome to check with them.”
“Explain,” Gribovsky ordered before tossing the candy into his mouth. There was a loud crunch. “Pumpkin.”
Somehow, it didn’t sound as affected as all the other times he’d said it over the previous hour. It was more like a cocked gun.
Had he actually been a clowning fool, he definitely wouldn’t have been assigned as a partner to the convicted dark wizard who’d been leashed and told to play nice.
“Gribovsky, everything here is designed to play a trick on the eye.” Alex was standing close to the bedside table when he said that, and the unintended pun was not a good one.
“It wasn’t done by a demon?”
“A demon couldn’t have done this,” Alex replied, shaking his head. “Only one powerful enough to command a legion, anyway. But if a beast like that had been summoned to Myers City, there would’ve been no way to conceal it.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Again, unless you want to…” Seeing the piercing glare of the man’s green eyes, Alex sighed and made a vague gesture. It was a stupid habit he had. “It would be like trying to hide a nuclear explosion. Or a dragon attack.”
“Well, as far as that last one goes, we’ve been concealing dragon attacks for over 1,500 years. We only failed once, in the 6th century AC.”
Alex did his best to contain the surge of interest triggered by the words we’ve been concealing. Which department did the major, the fairy, and the redhead work for, exactly?
“Imagine you were drugged, yanked out of your warm bed, stripped naked, and thrown into the Arctic wilderness. How much time would you need to regain your senses and defeat a battle-ready polar bear?”
Gribovsky looked thoughtful.
“About…twenty minutes,” he replied, not at all the I’d be as good as dead Alex was expecting—that was his point.
The scariest thing was that Gribovsky’s words weren’t an empty boast. They were a clear statement of fact.
Alex looked over at his partner once again.
[Name: Gribovsky. Race: Human. Mana level: 615.]
He was at the sixth Practitioner level. Sure, the information could have been a cover, but…Alex didn’t think it was.
“Well, a demon would need more time.” Alex ran his palm in front of his eyes. No tingling. Not that he’d expected any; the old-fashioned practice was just sometimes more useful than cutting-edge technology. “Like angels, they aren’t just a different race. They’re from another plane of existence entirely, and—”
“Did you say angels?” Finally, Gribovsky flashed a strong emotion. His candy fell to the floor. “Shit! Dropped them. That was my last pack, too.”
“Yes. Angels,” Alex replied with a shrug.
“But they don’t exist. That’s just a myth.”
Doom knew better than to argue. But the scar running from his left shoulder to his right hip was a reminder that some myths were real.
“Demons are classified in a variety of ways, Gribovsky.” Taking off his shoes, Alex stepped right onto the dried seal.
“What are you doing?! That’s—”
“Also fake,” Alex interrupted, stomping on the scarlet seal. “A strong demon, one of their ruling elite, can’t be summoned by a human unless they have the power of a coven. Mid-level demons capable of teaching you something for the right price…hm…you need special equipment for that. The whole summoning process is very complicated and very dangerous. As far as I know, the last attempt was made in Mexico, where someone tried to summon an officer from a second-century legion. The whole thing ended up a horrific failure.”
“A second-century legion?”
“Dante was only slightly off,” Alex continued while examining the sacrifices nailed to the ceiling. “Did you know that the Divine Comedy was the first actual classification of the creatures living in hell?”
Gribovsky mumbled something unintelligible. His fingers twi
tched nervously as he periodically lifted them to his mouth.
He’s giving up smoking—that’s why he was eating those Skittles. I wonder why.
“The nine circles…don’t really exist. Hell is a different plane of existence. It doesn’t have a spiral shape, but it does have a structure: 900 legions, each of which has 6,666,666,666 soldiers. And the ruling elite—all the demonic barons, dukes, and so on—are at the top.”
“Thanks for letting me know…and for the hours of peaceful sleep I’m sure I’ll be getting now. But why are you telling me all of this? You’re the expert here when it comes to demons and black magic. Not me.”
“I just want you to understand what I’m talking about when I say that someone was trying to summon a bottom-legion soldier demon here.”
Alex ran his palm through the air beneath the dead bodies. No tingling again. Just as expected. Then, he jumped off the bed and stepped over to Gribovsky. Standing next to the officer, he cracked his neck and shook his wrists.
So long.
It had been forever since the last time he’d done that.
“But you said it’s all fake,” the lieutenant frowned. “The summoning failed?”
Alex retrieved a pack of cigarettes, tapped the bottom to knock a cancer stick out, and caught it deftly out of the air with his lips. Lighting it with his finger, he inhaled deeply, drawing the air in forcefully while the fire was still burning. That way, he could smoke the whole cigarette up to its filter in a single breath.
It was a cheap trick he’d once used to win ten cents in a bet.
“If it had failed, you wouldn’t have brought me here.” Cupping his hand, Alex shook the still-hot ashes into it. He spat into his hand and started to mix them in with his saliva. “The demon was summoned. After that, the summoner left a message.”
“A message? For who?”
Alex shrugged again.
“You’re the detective here. I have no idea—you find out. I’m just going to show you what really happened. Hold out your hand.”
“Why? So you can get it all dirty with your spit?”
“These ashes are from a plant grown in our reality. It absorbed the sun—that’s fire. It was nourished by the rain—that’s water. It dug its roots into the soil—earth. It breathed—wind. And since it lived, that’s—”
Dark Wizard's Case Page 9
