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

by Margo Bond Collins

  “S-sir,” the woman raised her hands in an effort to relax the situation, “please calm down. That was the last of the eggs. There’s nothing we can—”

  “Really? So you’re telling me you just—what?—ran out of eggs! With what I paid to stay here—with what everyone paid to stay here—you’re saying that there was nothing in the budget to pay for the breakfast I was promised!” he reached down and jabbed at the yellow mound with a massive index finger. “I don’t care if you have to run across eight lanes of traffic to do it! Go fetch another dozen and make some goddam eggs that aren’t boogery and cold!”

  The help frowned and looked around, obviously hoping that any other staff might overhear and come to aid. Nobody did. Still stammering, she tried to negotiate despite not having enough authority to offer anything besides a personal apology.

  The fear in the small woman’s eyes was enough to get Serafina to stand.

  The promise for conflict—any sort of conflict—had her walking towards the scene.

  “Maybe you should’ve showed up earlier if the quality of your breakfast means so much to you,” she called out to him as she approached, planting her hands on her hips. “Or maybe you should’ve lowered your expectations to begin with.” Extending her arms long enough to motion around them, she said, “And what were you really expecting from a place like this? Five-star dining? You think Chef Ramsay’s hanging out back there waiting to cook your delicate ass a poached egg? You ain’t getting made-to-order service for what you’re paying—what we’re all paying, for that matter—because what you’re getting is the sort of no-questions-asked dive that I was personally hunting for.” Her arms migrated from her hips to cross at her chest. “And no questions asked,” she went on, “includes the kind that come from arrogant schmucks who think they can bully the staff of this sort of dive into getting the sort of service you should’ve dragged yourself to a diner to get. So lay off, buddy! I haven’t even had my coffee, and you’re already expecting me to deal with the likes of you? I need some peace and quiet for the day I’m about to have! Now sit down and shut the hell up!”

  The man, who’d turned to glare early on in Serafina’s speech, was, at a glance, too stunned by the interruption to stop her. She imagined that nobody had ever called him on one of his tantrums because of his size and for her, another woman without anything in the bulk or height department to lend her any credibility, to be the first was likely a bizarre turn for him. At her last line, however, his eyes had gone wide, and she realized that what she’d passed off as almost black irises were, in fact, a dark, dark blue that reminded her of the sea.

  Just like…

  No!

  She wasn’t going to go there.

  Still standing her ground, she kept her gaze fixed on his, fighting her instinctual response and, instead, maintaining the alpha pose, daring him to challenge her further. Either he’d fold under the threat of real conflict or she’d finally get to kick some ass. Either way she won, though, secretly, she was hoping for the latter option—she really needed to vent her aggression in some way.

  “And who asked you?” he demanded as he stepped closer. Then, leaning his face towards hers, he asked, “She somebody to you?”

  Serafina made a show of giving the maid a glance before shaking her head. “Nope.”

  “Then you got some kinda hero-complex?”

  “No,” she shook her head again, cocking her head so her face tilted closer to his own. “I just don’t like seeing assholes taking advantage of people who can’t defend themselves.”

  “And what makes you think she can’t defend herself? You seem so capable of doing it, so who’s stopping her.”

  “Probably the people paying her to stomach people like you in this shit-shack day-in and day-out.”

  “Shut the fuck up!” the man growled, obviously having no other rebuttal to offer.

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP…”

  Serafina nearly hauled off and hit him then and there.

  Though she hadn’t “talked” with anybody else the previous night, there was another interaction that she could suddenly remember.

  “You were the asshole pounding on my wall last night,” she muttered as she glared up at him, somehow glad to have a face to go with the event.

  He glared right back. “That must make you the psycho who was screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night. You think you got some right to fuck up a man’s night like that and then talk to anybody about respecting others and prattling on about ‘peace and quiet’?”

  “I…” she paused, unsure how to respond to that. Suddenly feeling the gazes of everybody else in the room on her, she looked around and became very aware of just how much attention they’d attracted. With the wind officially yanked from her sails, she turned, shaking, back to the man. “Just go find your perfect breakfast somewhere else, okay?” she forced herself to say in a low, even voice. “Leave the help alone. They’ve got it rough enough as it is.”

  Staring at her a moment longer, seeming to see something there that amused him, he took a step back and gave a shrug so calm and casual it nearly toppled Serafina. “Sure,” he muttered. “Whatever you say. And a pleasant rest of the day to you, too, Miss Screamy.” With that, he turned, offering a glance to the maid, who hadn’t moved or even seemed to blink since the altercation had begun, and said, “Be sure to pass my complaint on to the management, kay?” before heading out of the room.

  Seeing the door close behind him, Serafina felt her shoulders relax. While part of her was still raring for a fight, she couldn’t deny that she no more liked the idea of hurting another person for any reason not tied to Rumpel than she’d ever liked the idea of violence at all. She was glad he’d walked away. She really was—

  Turning back, she saw that the family had taken advantage of the moment and set her bag against the wall so that they could claim her table as their own. With the show over, they didn’t even look up from the monumental task of their breakfast as she stepped over to retrieve her belongings before storming out.

  Realizing she hadn’t even gotten to finish her apple, the already pent-up aggression got another heap added to the pile and she decided that it was better fuel than any breakfast would be.

  It was time to track down Rumpelstiltskin.

  It wasn’t long before Serafina came to realize that Chicago streets were awful. This wasn’t an insult to the city—she really didn’t have time to pass any judgement as a visitor—but, as a person with something to do, it stood as an unchallenged fact. The sky was blue; grass was green; Rumpelstiltskin was a monster of immeasurable evil; Chicago streets were awful. She’d been fortunate to see from the motel parking lot that driving would be impossible with the amount of traffic, but what she hadn’t seen was that the sidewalks were just as congested. The small pockets of air that weren’t teeming with aggressive pedestrians was filled with smoke, noise, and, on a few occasions, dog turds. After dodging her third canine stink-grenade, Serafina’s realization had been made and, with a pair of set shoulders and a steady gaze that refused to look at anything but the potentially dook-littered minefield, she began pushing her way through.

  When in Rome, she figured.

  Finally reaching a subway terminal, she offered a silent prayer to whatever god would listen at that point before hurrying down the steps. Though, for the most part, the Rom she’d traveled with were Catholic, she wasn’t about to disrespect a deity she hadn’t considered for freeing her from the hell that was a Chicago sidewalk.

  While the foot traffic in the subway wasn’t light, Serafina, having just barely survived the congestion of the streets above, couldn’t bring herself to complain. Eager to find an informant who, though helpful several months earlier, had said that he’d only be able to offer more in person if she managed to track him down in his shop. On its own, this offered little help—a nameless shop in Chicago would be harder to track than the proverbial needle in a haystack—but then she recalled him mentioning that he’d lucked out in ne
ighboring a place with the best eggrolls in the city. Realizing this was a hidden message, she hurried to the next train heading for Chinatown and, barely making it through the doors before they closed, secured herself as it started off.

  Initially, between the stress of everything she’d fought through on the sidewalks and the anxiety of chasing riddles in the subway, Serafina was too preoccupied with resting her own racing thoughts to pay much mind to anything going on around her. As her heavy breathing, racing heart, and flustered mind all settled, however, her senses began to perk up. That’s when…

  “S-stop! No! Please…” a meek-yet-clear feminine voice pleaded.

  It was a familiar and unwelcome sort of pleading, and one that Serafina wasn’t about to stand for.

  What is this, Asshole Day? she thought as she began to scan the crowded subway car for the source.

  At the other side of the cart, in a less congested area, three young men had surrounded a girl and begun prodding and poking, offering various taunts and lewd requests as they did. As she drew nearer, she heard the girl’s pleas suddenly go silent and, though it was difficult to see around the three’s hunched forms and she doubted any of the other passengers cared enough to take notice, she spotted a small knife that was now being held between them. Between the cries going unheard, the entire section of the train car being left open for the soon-to-be attack, and, now, the eerily unnoticed knife, Serafina was beginning to wonder how nobody else had noticed a thing. Looking around the train, she realized that not only had nobody noticed, but every passenger seemed totally oblivious of anything; it wasn’t the vacant, labored stares of a group working to ignore something they wanted no part in, it was a blatant void being forcibly carved from an ignorant mind!

  They weren’t ignoring the poor girl; she was being hidden from their very minds!

  Magic!

  Slipping through the crowd, none of them noticing her as a result of the enchantment, she made her way to the other side of the cart in what she was sure was record time. As she approached the three, she pulled out a pair of sais that she had tucked away in a secret lining she’d stitched into her back several months back. Despite making no effort to be silent about her approach, she smirked realized that the three hadn’t noticed her approach, too certain in the spell that was hiding their antics from the rest of the passengers.

  They were cocky. Too cocky.

  And cockiness always ended in an ass kicking.

  Serafina didn’t think that was quite how Sun Tzu worded it in The Art of War, but if it weren’t for alternate translations there wouldn’t be so many different copies of that text floating around.

  In either case…

  Closing the distance the rest of the way, she moved the end of one sai to the middle of the far-right’s back while wrapping her left arm around the far-left’s neck so that she could bring the tip of the other sigh to the center’s neck, ready for a direct stab to his carotid if he decided to try something. All three went ramrod straight at once as they found themselves on the wrong end of a potentially deadly move.

  “I think you can already guess where this is going for you three,” she hissed at their backs, “but I’ll make it crazy simple. I want you to hand that sad little thing to her—and, no, Romeo, I don’t mean your dick—and, when I say so, you’re all going to take one big step away from her. In return, I won’t cripple or outright end you.”

  The two on the left didn’t have enough freedom of movement to nod or breath enough to speak, but the far-right’s quick set of agreeable nods led her to believe they were all in agreement.

  “Now,” she instructed.

  The center slowly rotated the blade in his hand, holding the hilt out to the girl, who took it in a shaky hand; her eyes darting between him, the knife, and Serafina.

  “Good,” Serafina kept her voice down even though she knew nobody would overhear her. “And back away.”

  All three took a long step back with her leading the movement, maintaining her hold on all of them as she did.

  “Now,” she gave a reassuring nod to the girl before saying, “you’re all going to turn around and tell me what this is all about. And don’t leave out the part where you spellbound the entire train to get your jollies.”

  Hearing this, the three tensed even further, seeming to share a moment of even greater panic. This didn’t surprise her. Spells could be imperfect. A one-in-a-hundred chance that somebody wasn’t enchanted? Yeah, that was possible. That that single person privy to their attack on the poor girl was not only a trained fighter but an armed one, as well? Statistically speaking they should be considering that night’s lottery play. But having that same trained-and-armed somebody outright duck the spell because they, too, were versed in the ways of magic and weren’t about to bend over for it—that just had “we’re fucked” written all over it.

  The one on the right stepped away and half-turned as he yanked his own knife from a clasp at his belt. Though Serafina saw the girl move to warn her about what she saw, the sai that had been pressed to her attacker’s back was already on an upward path…

  Straight into the underside of his jaw.

  Stainless steel hissed through meat and bone as it passed through the base of the young man’s skull; Serafina’s strength, knowledge as a healer, and personal magic making the process as surgical as it was swift. Several inches of the elongated blade birthed from the top of the wide-eyed boy—his partially open mouth exposing a recently pierced tongue and a few trickles of blood that began to seep down his chin—as the two smaller blades on either end rose to meet either side of his jawline. The force of the impact against the hilt slammed his mouth shut, forcing him to bite off the tip of his own tongue, and the lingering sounds of his fading life were muffled and funneled through bleeding nostrils. The knife he’d been meaning to cut Serafina with slipped from his hands. Serafina caught it, confident that the sai wasn’t about to slip free and that the knife’s owner wasn’t about to fight back. Despite a few lingering spasms, he was already dead. He might not have known it, but Serafina and his friends certainly did. Pocketing the stolen weapon, she returned her free hand to the killing-sai’s hilt and yanked it free, pushing the body off to the right so that it wouldn’t risk toppling back into the girl.

  “WHAT THE FUCK?” the middle’s eyes widened, seeing that both of his friends had been killed so quickly.

  The one on the left shivered and, a moment later, a stain began to form and grow at the crotch of his pants. “Dead…” he muttered, eyes wide and seemingly unaware of his ongoing accident. “He’s dead…”

  “You wanna end up like your friend?” Serafina demanded, dividing the two sais between the equal number of survivors.

  They shook their heads.

  Serafina nodded, satisfied. “You gonna tell me what I want to know?”

  Piss-pants’ only response was to continue muttering “He’s dead” while his stained knees wobbled and threatened to give up the fight. Serafina was certain it wouldn’t be long before he was on his knees, though he’d likely not know it when it happened. He’d be of no help.

  She focused the entirety of her attention on the one in the middle. Her sais followed her focus, and the man made a sad, resigned noise deep in his throat as he saw this.

  “C’mon, lady,” he pleaded, holding his hands up as though the forked daggers were loaded guns and he was on the wrong end of a stickup. “C’mon… he’ll kill me if I tell.”

  “Kill you?” Serafina stifled a macabre laugh, failed, and aimed the sai in her right hand towards the corpse that lay slumped against a set of doors. “What does it look like I just did to him? He look like he’s sleeping to you?”

  The young man shook his head, still not connecting the threat of what could be with the threat of what would be. “No, man. It ain’t like that; ain’t like that, at all,” he assured her. “You was just reactin’, just defendin’ yourself. That ain’t killin’. You… you didn’t—you don’t…” he shook his head and, draggin
g a palm up across his face and over the top of his head, smearing his sweat-soaked hair back in the process, seemed to regain some of his thoughts before he clarified, “I can see you didn’t want to. You still don’t want to, do you?”

  Serafina stiffened and reset her grip on the sais, readying against another attack.

  The man only shook his head. “I ain’t gonna try nothin’,” he told her, nodding back to the body. “He was the best of us for fightin’, and you kabobbed him faster than a Greek picnic.” He groaned and shook his head again. “Boys just wanted a bit of fun. I thought… I thought, ‘what the hell.’” More shaking of the head. Serafina was beginning to wonder if this one truly had more of his mind than Piss-pants. “He gave us the magic a few weeks ago, and it’s been nothin’ but work, work, work with it, y’know. Seemed a waste. Finally have these abilities like something out’ve a fairy tale or sumtin, and we was just putzin’ it all around on ‘go-fer’ jobs. Seemed a waste,” he said again with a shrug.

  “You going to tell me how you got the magic?” Serafina asked. “Or, better yet, who gave it to you?”

  The man shook his head again. “He’ll kill me, man. He’ll kill me, and unlike you he’ll like it.”

  “Dead is dead,” Serafina scared herself with how cold her voice sounded in her own ears.

  This seemed to resound with the young man, and watery eyes took her in as though he was seeing her for the first time. “He ain’t got no name,” he said in a low voice, as though the spell they’d cast to hide themselves from the other occupants wouldn’t be enough to hide the words he spoke. “Not one he was gonna go tellin’ us, at least.”

  “What’d he look like then?” she demanded.

  The man shrugged—What a nice change of pace from shaking your head, Serafina thought. At least uncertainty is a step ahead of refusing to talk.—and glanced back at the crowded section of the train. “Looked like any one of them, I guess. I mean, I…” he started to shake his head and, instead, shrugged again. “It’s crazy—I know it sounds that way—but the dude… he never really looked the same each time we saw him. Like, he was him, sure, but… he wasn’t. You’d look at him and recognize him the way you’d recognize your own mother or an old buddy or something, but it was like only your mind was recognizing him; your eyes would be telling you a whole ‘nother thing entirely.”