Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  The… I swiveled around toward the doorway. Standing there with a crooked smile on her face was Alessa.

  “Alessa.” Lionel went to her, and they embraced. “How are you?” he asked as they separated. “The bullet wound on your arm?”

  “Much better. Is the helsing ready to go?”

  “Go where?” I asked.

  “Put your tuxedo back on, but without the bow tie. That should be the right look.”

  She was wearing black, but not her usual black jeans and leather trenchcoat. Instead, she wore a figure-hugging evening dress that reached down to mid-thigh. “Are we going to another benefit?” I asked.

  “Someplace much more fun than that,” she said. “The appropriately named Casino Demonica.”

  “Why would we go there?”

  “We are going to get the magtroller.”

  “We are? How?”

  “By winning it in a game of poker.”

  Chapter 19

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Kind of,” Alessa said. She shut the door behind her. Only then did she notice Becca standing over her dismantled maser gun. “Oh. Hi.”

  “Becca, this is Alessa,” Lionel said.

  Becca raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know you was seeing anyone.”

  “It’s complicated,” Lionel said. “Beyond complicated.”

  Becca sat down in front of her gun, and retrieved some tools from her backpack. “My favorite type of relationship. Tell me more.”

  “Later,” I said. “What’s this about a game of poker?”

  “Grimstar has been bragging about stealing the Cressington magtroller,” Alessa said. “In fact, he’s got it up on display in his casino. It’s hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the gaming floor.”

  “Why would he do that?” Lionel asked.

  “Because he can, I guess,” Alessa said. “Apparently, he’s joked about having a poker tournament and giving the magtroller out to the winner. At least I think it was a joke.”

  “So your plan is for us to walk straight into Grimstar’s lair and take the magtroller?” Lionel asked incredulously.

  “Not all of us. I was thinking just the helsing and myself. It’s too dangerous for you. You’d be recognized, and the dark community doesn’t love Cressingtons.”

  “Do you have a plan?” I asked. “You can’t just walk in there and ask for it.”

  “That is my plan.” Alessa smiled sweetly. “You think it won’t work?”

  “Of course it won’t work.” My voice rose. Why did she insist that us two go? She was clearly trying to punish me for not letting her into Cress House, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what she was trying to accomplish. “Grimstar went to a lot of trouble to take that magtroller. He wants to use it to steal the swirl key. He’s not going to hand it over.”

  Alessa shrugged. “Perhaps we have to steal it from him.”

  “He’s able to fold the underworld into our reality. He’s not someone we can just overcome with strength or speed. And we would be going into his territory.”

  “Does he give you the night terrors?” Alessa asked. “Is that the problem? You are too scared.”

  “No.”

  “Good. Get your tux, then. Let’s go.”

  “Fine.” I went to the armchair where I had hung the jacket, shirt, and trousers of the tux, snatched them all up, then stalked into the bathroom. I shut the door, guided Harps off my shoulder and onto the sink, then I took off my hunting jacket and dumped it on the tiled floor.

  Careful with that, Harps thought. That’s my home.

  I finished undressing, ignoring Harps.

  Why are you even mad? Harps thought.

  I’m not mad. It took me several stabs before I got my foot into the leg of the trousers.

  After you have torn those clothes into pieces, will you admit you are mad? Harps thought.

  I let the trousers fall to the bathroom floor and took a deep breath. Harps was right, of course, though I wasn’t sure what exactly had made me angry. Something about Alessa’s smug smile. When will I get permission to stab the damn vampire in the heart? I thought.

  Dagger’s not around, Harps thought. You don’t have a boss to ask permission.

  That wasn’t true. I didn’t need to flounder for direction when I had direct access to a dragongod’s commands. And Gabriel wouldn’t want me to kill Alessa while the swirl key remained in danger.

  I picked up the trousers again and put them on, then started with the white shirt. From the living room came the muffled voices of Lionel and Alessa arguing.

  You don’t have to go to this casino, Harps thought.

  I know. I adjusted my jacket across the shoulders while examining myself in the mirror. She obviously called me a coward to manipulate me into going.

  It’s obvious to me, Harps said. However, we both know you can be rather dim.

  Smiling, I reached forward and rubbed Harps’s neck. Is that so?

  Yes. And I’m beginning to think that you are especially dim when females are involved. A failing of your species, perhaps.

  My smile faded. She’s not a human female. I opened the door and exited the bathroom.

  She smells like one, Harps thought.

  “Slate, don’t go along with this crazy idea,” Lionel said. “Help me talk her out of it.”

  “Talk me out of it? He wants to go as much as I do,” Alessa said. “We know that Slate is a man of action.”

  “Think of it more as a recon mission,” I told Lionel. “We’ll evaluate the situation, decide how and if it’ll be possible to steal the magtroller. Gain the information that’ll allow us to plan a future heist with the whole team. But if we see a chance to immediately snatch it, then we’ll do that. Accepting, of course, that it would be unlikely.”

  “You don’t know what awaits you,” Lionel said. “Haunts like Casino Demonica are places for vampires, necros, trolls, even demons if they have managed to cross over. It’s not safe for mages, or any human not part of that world. They certainly won’t be rolling out the welcome mat for helsing warriors.”

  If Alessa was the traitor, I was possibly heading straight into a trap. She had been awfully insistent that it just be us two.

  “I’ve been to the casino before,” Alessa said. “I know the layout, the kind of people there. I’ll keep Slate safe.”

  “And what? The rest of us are supposed to just sit here?” Lionel asked.

  “Work on refining the plan to break into Cressington Tower,” Alessa said. “If we actually manage to get the magtroller, then we’ll have to move as fast as possible. Remember that the codes can be overwritten at any time. Maybe we’d even go tonight. If Gabriel and Danielle arrive later, don’t let them leave.”

  The lights of the apartment dimmed, then flashed super-bright, then returned to normal.

  “Oops,” Becca said, and we all turned toward her.

  “What are you trying to do?” Lionel asked. “Destroy us all?”

  Becca had opened the metal ring of her maser gun and was poking around it its innards with a strange looking tool. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Then what was that with the lights?” Lionel asked.

  “Just a little oops. No harm done.”

  “Grandpapa worked with magictech for decades, and he also thought he knew what he was doing. He’s now dead.”

  “He’s not dead,” Becca said. “He’s still in here.” She touched a component with a screwdriver, and electricity cracked across the center of the ring.

  “Let’s go,” Alessa said to me, making for the door.

  I took one step after her, then realized my other foot was restricted.

  Harps had grabbed the bottom of my pant leg. You can’t leave me with these two. I don’t like Lionel, and I fear Becca is worse.

  Good chance for you three to make friends, then.

  He stuck his tongue out and blew a raspberry at me. Danielle might be back soon, he thought. She’s nice at least. Maybe she’ll ad
opt me.

  Sick of my ugly face already, is that it, Harps?

  No, Harps thought. I can endure the ugly face. It’s your dumb chatter that is beginning to wear very thin.

  I scooped Harps off the floor and put him on the counter. You won’t fit in this jacket, so you’ll have to stay. Now be good.

  He blew me another raspberry. When I got out into the corridor, Lionel and Alessa were standing close to each other, their hands touching.

  “How are you dealing with what happened?” Alessa asked him. “Your family?”

  “I don’t know,” Lionel said. “Becca didn’t say anything about it, which is weird. I got a voicemail from Mom today. It consisted of several repetitions of my name and sobbing of varying intensity. It went on for one minute, twenty-three seconds. I listened to it four times.”

  “You wanted to break totally free of your father’s influence,” Alessa said. “It’s happened now.”

  “I didn’t want it to happen like that,” Lionel said.

  “There’s never an easy way.” She kissed him on the lips. “Tell Becca who I am. What I am. Talk to her about how your family is handling what you did. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  As Alessa moved away from him, Lionel held on to her hand until the last possible moment. “Be careful,” he said as their fingers finally separated.

  She smiled. “You don’t get to be as old as I am…” She saw me looking then, and her smile died and she walked past me toward the elevator. “Let’s go.”

  I followed, and instead of joining her in the elevator, I took the stairs, adding a burst of speed to my descent so I was at the ground floor well before the elevator and Alessa.

  Outside, the fresh night air gave me a shot of adrenaline. Alessa feet tapped against the steps as she came out behind me. She may have been wearing an evening dress, but she wasn’t wearing high heels.

  “Where is this casino? Do we run?” I asked. I liked the idea of testing my speed against hers and beating her.

  She stuck two fingers in her lips and whistled. A taxi came to a stop. She opened the back door, and climbed in. “No, of course we don’t run. We don’t just super-speed around the city for no reason. Get in.”

  I walked around to the other side of the taxi and got in opposite her.

  “Where to?” the taxi driver asked.

  “Corner of Third and Cambridge,” Alessa said.

  “That’s…” The driver glanced at his rearview mirror. “Are you sure you know where you are going?”

  “Just drive,” Alessa said to him.

  We sat in silence, our outside elbows against our respective doors, leaving plenty of space between us.

  “What kind of name is Grimstar, anyway?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe a name he got by combining his favorite planetary body with what he found under his fingernails,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t that be grime-star?”

  “Necros like to reinvent themselves, distance themselves from given names. Those who choose to sell their souls aren’t people who are happy with their previous selves. Anyway, you can’t talk; helsing names are nearly worse. Most of the ones I’ve heard are some variation of rock or mountain.”

  We lapsed back into silence. Ten minutes later, the taxi driver stopped. He pointed at a corner just ahead. “Over there. But—”

  “I know where we are.” Alessa handed him money and got out. I followed. She waited until the taxi drove off, then headed down a narrow alleyway.

  The streetlamps by the entrance to the alleyway were broken. A man, with a shadow cutting him in two, leaned against the side of a wall, watching us walk past. “You know where you are going?” he called out.

  “I’m a Colescu,” Alessa said.

  “A Colescu. I heard…” The man thought better about what he was going to say. “Go on.”

  Falling from a broken pipe somewhere close, heavy drops of water beat metronomically against stone. The gathering darkness of the alleyway brightened both of our auras. Green and red, walking side by side. I still hadn’t gotten used to that, and I hoped I never would. An unpleasant smell grew in intensity. “Are we going to a sewer?”

  “Worse than that.” Alessa grinned. “Much worse. We’re going to hell.” She faced me. “Before we go in, let’s make one thing clear. No fighting.”

  “Come again?” Fighting was what I was good at—why had Alessa brought me if not for that?

  “There’ll be vampires, there’ll be trolls, there’ll be necromancers, there’ll be all sorts of unsavory characters,” Alessa said. “But, in there, they aren’t the enemy. Do you know who the enemy is?”

  “Yes,” I said reluctantly.

  “Who.”

  “Grimstar.”

  “Wrong. In there, you are the enemy. I’m sure you get great comfort each night, wrapping yourself up in the warmth of knowing that you are the hero, always fighting on the side of the righteous, but to the dark community, helsings are the enemy. Massacring bands of young trolls who venture too far down the mountains, burning vampire families while they sleep at night.”

  “I nev—”

  “I don’t care what you personally did. I’m just explaining that you are the enemy. If a fight breaks out, you’ll be on the wrong side, and we’ll be killed. So if a troll steps on your foot, you apologize for being clumsy with where you stand. If a vampire insults your mother, you laugh along with him and tell him he’s the funniest person you ever met.”

  “And if I don’t agree to all that?” I had just about come around to working with Alessa; that didn’t mean I would play nice with other vampires.

  “Then head back to the others. Better I go in alone than with a bomb about to go off.”

  “I don’t understand. If we aren’t going to fight our way out, how do we get the magtroller?”

  “I have no idea. Still, not like we had much better of a plan when we went into Cress House or the Dulane Building. Now, are you going to be able to keep a lid on your burning desire to instantly kill vampires and other creatures of a similarly foul nature?”

  “You’re still alive,” I said. “I think that speaks volumes about my levels of restraint.”

  “You say the prettiest things,” Alessa said, putting on a Southern belle accent. She held out her arm. “Let’s enter, then.”

  “No one said anything about taking your arm.”

  Alessa raised her eyebrows, and I reluctantly took her arm and roughly guided her forward.

  “This is going to be such a fun evening, I just know it,” she said.

  Chapter 20

  No sign hung over the rickety old door that led the way into the casino. As we passed through the dim corridor beyond, a blocky figure stepped in front of us. I did a double take, realizing he wasn’t just a juiced-up bouncer. Alessa hadn’t been kidding about what we were to expect—it was a mountain troll. It towered over us, waiting for us to speak.

  “Alessa Colescu and friend,” Alessa said.

  His head was bigger than a human’s with a square chin that stretched downward, out of proportion with the rest of his face. His skin was more gray than white. His body was thick and blocky. Though I had never fought one, I had been taught their strengths and weaknesses. Or rather just their strengths, since they were built like granite and didn’t have much in the way of weaknesses.

  If Dagger had been here, he would have been at the troll’s throat already. Before he’d trained Flint, Crystal, and me, a mixed band of trolls and vampires had wiped out everyone in Dagger’s family and cost him his eye. Of course, Dagger wouldn’t have arrived with a vampire. Even if I killed Alessa before this was over, explaining what I had done to Dagger was going to be impossible. If I didn’t kill her…

  Alessa gave me a nudge, and I realized that the troll had stepped aside to let us continue. “I could handle him,” I told Alessa once we were out of his earshot.

  “Possibly,” she said, pushing open a door and gesturing out across the floor of the casino
. “Could you beat all of them at once?”

  I stopped at the doorway in shock. The main casino floor was bright and glitzy, more like the Cressington function than the corner poker table in a dive bar I’d been expecting. The dark community actually liked it bright, it appeared, once no one from outside the community was watching.

  A bar lined one wall with over a score of trolls sitting on stools with open vodka bottles in front of them, no glasses. The barman was also a troll, and he swigged vodka from a bottle while he worked. Green-felted tables were spread across the floor, each one surrounded by a cheering mob, most of whom were—I blinked rapidly to ensure my eyes weren’t deceiving me—woodfolk.

  Woodfolk were ethereal wisps of nature, only to be found in the deepest forests, or so I’d thought up until this moment. I’d caught several glimpses of them, but each time I’d tried to get closer, they had vanished. They looked somewhat like human babies, totally hairless, with ivory-white skin. They were around four feet high, slender with wide circular eyes. When I’d spotted them in the forest, they’d been naked, but here they dressed in children’s clothes.

  “I’ve never seen one of the woodfolk for longer than a few seconds,” I said.

  “Here, they don’t disappear until after they collect their winnings,” Alessa said.

  “Who has done this to them?”

  “Done what?”

  “The gambling. The children’s clothes. It looks so wrong.”

  “Themselves, I suppose,” Alessa said. “They’d hardly be let into the casino naked. Stop staring like a bumpkin.”

  As I followed Alessa further into the casino, I leaned closer to one of the gambling tables to get a closer look at the woodfolk. One of them turned suddenly, opening his mouth wide and snarling, showing two rows of pointy teeth. I jerked back, and he immediately returned to his game, pushing some chips across the table.

  Alessa was watching me. “Come away. They get bad tempered when losing.”

  I hurried to her side. “I never…” I trailed off, looking around, trying to take everything in. Despite the numbers of trolls and woodfolk, humans outnumbered them. And several red auras were scattered around. With everything else, the presence of vampires seemed almost ordinary. I’d never imagined I’d ever think of vampires as ordinary.