Doom swallowed and pressed his back against a wall. No demon scared him as much as that red-haired woman did. And he had enough gray matter inside his skull to be scared of her, not just crave her with his male parts.
As he closed his eyes, Alex suddenly heard a distinct and very familiar patter of heels. But when he turned, all he spotted was a brief flash of brown hair.
“Bitch,” Alex cursed. “Why do dwarves have to recover that quickly?”
By the time the fast-food employee placed the boxed burger onto a tray, the visitor who’d ordered it was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 69
“Have another?” Cherry asked, edging the glass of whiskey closer to Alex.
“No, thanks,” he replied and continued playing. “What’s today?”
“October 16th. What does that matter?”
Over the past fortnight, he’d barely left the Schooner except to give his lectures at First Magic. Very boring lectures. Not that they’d been the epitome of fun before, but now…
The B-52 group was boycotting their supervisor. They’d stopped attending his lectures and had even planned their everyday routes so as not to bump into him in the halls.
Dean Lebenstein was apparently too busy with his direct responsibilities to keep pestering Alex. Neither did he see any of Miss Perriot—she was obviously avoided him, too. Only the class schedule told him she was still teaching history.
As for the Guards, they were completely engrossed in brainstorming what the Mask was up to. He’d shown no signs of activity since the massacre at the park.
Given the fact that Alex had repaid his debt to the Syndicate by the fixing the tour and sending B-52 to the very bottom of the tournament table, there hadn’t been any reason for Pyotr to visit again. And he hadn’t.
That’s how Alex came to be spending almost all his time at the Schooner despite being on vacation, tormenting the old piano in the farthest corner of the hall. He played it every evening, and Diglan was generous enough to offer him free drinks for his free concerts. That was probably his gratitude for saving his son’s life.
“See that girl?” Cheery pointed at a female visitor in leather pants and leather vest over a white bra. She was sitting at the end of the bar closest to Alex. “She’s had her eye on you all night.”
“She has? Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” the irrepressible waitress replied with a wink. She’d gotten another drastic makeover, changing girlfriends more often than some people change their toothbrushes. “If you offer her a drink, she’ll—”
“Thanks,” Doom interrupted.
Closing the piano lid, he stood and walked over toward the groupie. When he got closer, she bent forward a bit, showing off her breasts, thin waist, and…all the other non-verbal communication she had to offer.
Alex walked right past her.
Leaving the astonished Cherry and disappointed groupie behind, he walked out into the street. The night was far from young in the wizard city. The tall buildings scraping the low, heavy skies glowed like columns of cold, neon light.
The occasional car dashed along the roads, probably carrying its passengers off on some important business…or maybe just going home. Or to Amalgam Street, with each of its nightclubs throwing a loud party at that hour.
A part of Alex wanted to go there. But instead, he headed off in exactly the opposite direction.
Smoking cheap, crumpled cigarettes, his hands thrust into his pockets, he wobbled through the maze of streets in his light leather jacket and jeans, torn sneakers, and stubble that was already turning into a real beard.
Alex loved the nighttime city.
It did away with all the masks. The enticing luxury of salons and boutiques was closed, all the glamor and sheen of dressed-up clowns worshipped by other clowns.
All the lies. All the blinders. Everything that was superficial and unimportant went to sleep at night or lurked in the places that still had light. That’s why Myers City’s streets at night were always far more vacant than in the daytime.
Truths are always outnumbered by the lies.
Alex wasn’t surprised to find himself shortly roaming the familiar High Garden streets. He couldn’t remember if he’d gotten there on foot or if he’d used public transportation. Whatever the case, he was walking the same streets he’d lived on as a kid. (If he ever was a kid.)
For some reason, one particular episode from his past came to mind.
***
The tall buildings blotting out the sky looked like gloomy, silent giants to the sixteen-year-old. They towered over the road as though guarding the passing cars from curious glances.
At times Alex smelled (apart from the vapor around sewer covers) the cheap entertainment in the air. He slowed down at the brothels to watch the often-homely women slathered in makeup laugh in the arms of drunken men.
Doom had hated that laughter ever since he was a kid. However merry and ringing it was, the eyes of the women who laughed like that were as cold and harsh as those of a worker on his second night shift.
Alex opened the throttle, his steel horse racing off in a direction he didn’t know. The cigarette smoldering in his lips left wisps of smoke behind him. At times the young man took such abrupt turns that his knees almost touched the asphalt, clearing it by less than an inch.
The nights in High Garden were action-packed.
In one alley shrouded in vapor and mist, three gangsters were beating up a guy, a girl screaming next to them.
Two doors down, café visitors applauded another guy as he knelt in front of an embarrassed lady. Her hands trembled as she accepted a small red box containing a shiny ring.
In a passage next to the café, a dying homeless man sat on the ground, trying to get warm by embracing a flea-ridden dog. It was the only creature he loved, the only one that loved him.
Next to the road, a well-off family stood trying to catch a taxi. What were they doing here? Maybe they mixed up metro stations and got off at the wrong one.
The father had an arm out. The mother was dressed in furs, gold, and diamonds. The two sons in their suits looked more funny than formal. The younger boy had a balloon he wanted to give to the homeless man, but the mother clapped him on the back of the head. The boy froze, casting apologetic glances at the nearly dead man and his sad dog.
Alex wasn’t sure which of the two (the homeless man or the family) stood a higher chance of living to see the dawn.
Sitting on a bench a block away, a couple was sharing what looked like a first kiss. A masked man was raping a gagged woman some four hundred feet from them.
Around the corner, some cops were arresting a petty crook for stealing a well-dressed lady’s bag. The soft clatter of suppressed gunfire came from another block. Italian mafia style. Maybe even the actual Italian mafia.
High Garden didn’t just have the Cosa Nostra. It was infested with the Chinese Triads, the Russian Bratva, the Japanese Yakuza, and lots of other criminal organizations that together made up the shadow world of Myers City.
But Alex still loved the place.
Unlike the central districts, it had…it had…
…absolutely everything. Blood dripping softly down shop stairs. Intoxicating lust at brothel entrances. Rivers of alcohol at cheap bars. Cigarette smoke engulfing billiard rooms. Flowering love on park benches and in cafes, raging passion in apartments and motels betrayed by doors creaking as quivering hands tried to turn keys in locks.
Glancing at his watch, Alex turned around again.
It was time to wrap up his farewell ride.
He passed by the alley, turning toward a biker bar. His steel friend would be safe there.
Alex stopped, turning the engine off and mulled it over, the ashes of his smoldering cigarette falling onto the mangled, cracked, bumpy asphalt.
Giving it some careful thought, Doom realized there was one thing the night was missing.
And that was why he immediately turned the engine back on and rode off without a b
ackwards look.
He slowed down by the hotel at the road separating High Garden and Amalgam Street District. Concentrating, he created a set of keys with a wave of hand. He lurched, and his bike wobbled, but he stayed in the saddle, albeit nearly drained of magic.
Somebody else could probably have created a dozen sets without even getting a tingling sensation in their fingertips. But for black wizards, that sort of magic was exhausting.
Kicking the foot peg down, Alex handed the keys to the hotel valet and walked inside as calmly as if he owned the place. He knew it well, having spent thousands of credits a night there at his best times.
The doors kept spinning behind his back. The vast hall looked like a giant cave, shiny with sparkling velvets and golden paint. It was a five-star establishment, after all. Alex wondered how it came to be located so close to the city’s criminal eyesore.
At 4 a.m., there was virtually no one around. Only seldomly did you see a sleepy guest turning their key in and plodding toward a waiting taxi, an equally sleepy bellhop right behind them with their suitcase.
Alex stood at the elevator. Then, groping around in his pocket for the eternal crumpled pack and finding it, he headed toward the lobby bar.
It was on the small side, accommodating no more than forty people at once. There were only seven there right then. Two men at a far table looking like mafia. A few other visitors. The bartender. A girl at the counter rocking a martini. Her sparkly red dress had already swept all the dust up off the floor. The polish on one of her nails was chipped, and her perfume couldn’t drown out the smell of cheap cigarettes that contrasted sharply with her overall expensive looks and young face. She was apparently no older than Alex, probably below the legal age, but Doom couldn’t have cared less. Her dark eyes stared straight through the wall of bottles. Her brown hair, once beautifully styled, was a mess.
The girl slid another cigarette out of the pack that sat next to her on the counter, probably forgotten by one of the guests. That was odd. The cheap pack in a luxurious hotel like the one they were in just served to spoil the overall picture. The lady flicked at the lighter courteously provided by the bartender, but it refused to produce even a semblance of a spark.
Coming over, Alex snapped his fingers to summon a lilac flame.
“Thank you,” she said.
Doom nodded and beckoned the bartender over with two fingers.
“Whiskey. The juice from a quarter of a lemon. Two ice cubes. Stir until they melt.”
The bartender nodded. Soon Alex was sipping an expensive whiskey ruined by his Russian tea recipe—the two ounces cost him two hundred credits even. Exactly the amount he had left in his account.
The girl smoked away, paying no attention to anything else. Her makeup was smeared.
“Do you like me?” she snorted suddenly, swirling an olive around in her glass. “You keep looking at me.”
Alex actually had been staring at the lady, and he wasn’t at all embarrassed by her calling him out on it. Nothing about sex or relationships really bothered him.
“Yes. The tip of your nose is insanely beautiful. I’ve honestly never seen one like it.”
The girl looked at him appraisingly, almost as if he were on sale in a shop window.
They sat like that for a while. Then she put a banknote on the counter and stood up. Walking to the entrance, she turned around.
“You coming?”
“Yes,” Alex nodded. Leaving his unfinished glass behind, he followed the lady.
Silently, they waited at the elevator that for some reason lingered for a really long time at the twelfth floor.
Alex didn’t know what the girl was thinking about, but it probably wasn’t anything all that bright. He had absolutely nothing on his mind. That was something he was really good at that. According to the Professor (may the worms of the Abyss shred him), that was the only thing he was good at.
When the door opened, Alex let the lady on first. She stood meekly, waiting for him to follow, then pressed the button. The door closed. The engine hummed, the cables stretched, and the elevator drifted upward.
“He proposed today,” she said softly.
Alex didn’t reply, busy examining the painting on the back wall and wondering why anyone would hang a painting in an elevator.
“I turned him down.”
It was the sea. Doom loved the water, and the painting enchanted him. He’d dreamed of going on a cruise ever since he was young. It was his sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.
“I just couldn’t say yes.”
Flashing before his mind’s eye were scenes from a detective movie.
“He’s just a poor doctoral student.”
The movie was rich enough in sex scenes for Alex to do quite well his first time around. The Tkils gang had a very special rite of passage.
“I can’t be with him! I have my first concert tomorrow! And he even…”
Alex turned to look at the girl. A tear ran down her cheek, streaking her black mascara as it did. No doubt she loved the guy.
“I—”
Before the wannabe singer could finish, Doom bent over to seal her lips with a kiss. His palm slid downward, plunging beneath her sparkly dress. The girl screamed and then groaned.
Alex didn’t care what the dark-eyed beauty was telling him. The nighttime city had seen all sorts of things. It could handle that one just as well.
Like anyone ever cared.
The door opened.
***
Doom knocked off the ashes. Sitting on a bench next to the wrought-iron fence, he listened to the crows cawing over the dumpsters.
Five years had passed since that night.
He wondered if the dark-eyed girl had found happiness as one of the day’s most popular singers. He knew for sure he hadn’t as one of the day’s most knowledgeable black wizards.
“How many years, Alexander?”
“Five, holy father,” Alex replied. “Five since I last visited her.”
A tall, sturdily built man with plenty of gray hair sat down on the bench next to him. He was wearing a black cassock, a white square making up the tall collar around his throat.
“I’m happy to see you, Alexander.”
“Me too, Father Vinsens.”
It was probably a weird sight: a black wizard smoking on a bench next to a Catholic priest, an old church towering behind them.
The only church in High Garden.
But the nighttime city had seen all sorts of things. It could handle that one just as well.
Like anyone ever cared.
Chapter 70
The old church was the only place in all of High Garden where everyone’s life was safe. A zone of universal truce. Anyone who broke the truce incurred the wrath of the entire district, from the pettiest drug-addicted crooks to the big gangs and mafias all the way to the Syndicate, the crown of the criminal world. (No one knew for sure where the Syndicate was headquartered. Some said Ireland. Others claimed it was the UAE. Still others insisted on Brazil. Whatever the case, it was top secret.)
The credit for the old church attaining that status belonged entirely to Father Vinsens.
A tall man with strong shoulders and the neck of a bull, his face bore two scars that formed a cross over the bridge of his nose. The pupil of his left eye was deformed by one of them running right through it. If it hadn’t been for magic, Immortal Vinnie (the nickname he’d earned during gang wars) would have been half-blind.
Why immortal?
Because like fuck you’ll ever kill him.
As a kid, Alex didn’t have heroes from books. He had Immortal Vinnie, the man who’d been tortured by orcs. Who’d wrestled a mountain ogre. Who’d been shot with twelve bullets from an assault rifle. Who’d stopped a sniper bullet with his belly. Who had more broken bones than Jackie Chan.
Vinnie had survived all of it. But when he got tired of pushing his luck, he retired and built a church in the middle of the district. He became a priest, leaving his ungodly past beh
ind him and kind of trying to set the local gangsters and other scum on the straight and narrow.
He wasn’t much of a success at that.
But, since almost all the major gangsters knew Vinnie (and had worked with him in the past), most of them either liked or deeply respected him. The priest became the district’s mascot, the church untouchable.
Once, a stray drug addict got into the church looking for money for a fix. Vinnie—Father Vinsens—was the kind of guy who’d give what little he had without any resistance. But the drug addict wanted more and got so angry he hit Vinsens over the head with a candlestick.
The priest wasn’t even knocked off his feet. He just stood there in the church doorway and watched the addict run off with the stolen stuff.
The next morning, several very expensive black cars with gas engines stopped by the church. All the stolen items were returned to the priest. Two dozen hunks from the Shanti gang, which had the honor (no overstatement there) of catching the crook, also painted the church fence, fixed the gate, cleaned all the ancient gravestones in the graveyard, and installed several benches.
Over the next week, the gangs all pledged money to the church. Father Vinsens used everything he got to feed all the homeless and needy he could find for a month.
Alex was one of those people. After Follen’s fall (sounds like a pun), he was living under the bridge, and the only food he had was a bowl of peanut soup he got at Father Vinsen’s church. Paid for by gang money.
That was what later prompted him to join the Tkils, but that’s a different story.
The waxing moon glowed overhead. It was going to be full on Samhain/Halloween, making the ancient holiday even more powerful, the border between the realms of the living and the dead even thinner.
“Do you have some?” the priest asked with a gleam in his eye.
“Always,” Alex replied with a nod.
“Spare me one?” the priest almost begged.
Avoiding touching the church fence (it would have burned like napalm) with his back, Doom retrieved the crumpled cigarette pack from his jacket pocket. He used it, old and taped together, as the case he always had with him.
Dark Wizard's Case Page 37
