Like him, I just hadn't met one yet.
Darius's constant stare at me made me a little bit uncomfortable. He was a big guy, standing a good half foot taller than Mike. Dark skin, a head full of braids pulled back in a ponytail, and eyes the color of light beer. The dude was scary and he slung a mean drink. "You know," he said in his rumbling voice. "I never would have thought of you as dangerous." He stepped away from the door and pointed a good-sized gun at me, holding his arm up in front of Mike as if to prevent him from interceding. "But from what I hear, you might just have something of value that could make a lot of people a whole lot of money."
I straightened up with my hands out to my sides. I hadn't come armed—why would I? It was nearly ten in the morning on a Saturday! Not that I was any good with a gun.
Mike moved faster than I'd ever not-seen him. Two beats and he had Darius's gun in his hand and released the magazine from the handle. I didn't know what model the gun was—I only knew he'd been pointing it at me. When I knew the big guy had been disarmed, I finally found my voice. "'The hell, Dar?"
"I second that," Mike said as he shoved the magazine into his back pocket and handed the gun back to the bartender. "Why the fuck are you pointing a gun at Dags? And why in the hell do you think he would have something that would make any money?"
Darius took the gun, and for a split second I thought he might try and clock Mike with it—which would be just plain stupid on a monumental scale. I mean, come on, the guy just disarmed you and didn't break a sweat. He didn't hit Mike, but he did give him a nasty look. "You can't bring him in here right now." Darius tilted his head down toward me when he said the word him.
"What…" I put a tennis shoe on the single step into the bar, but Mike put a hand up. I stopped, not because he told me to, but because, well…Darius is a lot bigger than me. "This is ridiculous. I was just in here last night, Dar. I didn't do anything."
"You can't come in here right now." The bartender continued looking me over as if I were a curious bug. I wondered if something else was going on here.
"Darius, we have a problem, and I'm pretty sure you don't want to hash it out here on the street," Mike said. "I got information from someone in your bar. Information that led us smack-dab into a little gathering of zombies. We need to talk. Now." Mike moved to the right, on Darius's left, and braced himself against the brick wall to the right of the door. When Mike looked as if he wasn't ready to hurt someone, that's when he was at his most dangerous.
And Darius knew it. He finally tore his very uncomfortable gaze from me and looked at Mike. "Meet me across the street. I'll be over in five." He stepped back and slammed the door.
Mike and I exchanged looks. Mine simply read, What the hell is going on? But Mike's…well…his was unreadable. He looked serious. And pissed off. "Come on."
Apparently, across the street meant meet down the sidewalk to Martin Luther King Blvd., and then right. I glanced in the window of Zen Sushi as I followed Mike, and then we made another right and walked up that sidewalk. By the time we were finished, we were in Franklin Square, diagonal to The Night Pub and across from the City Market. The smell of fried chicken and Chinese food set my stomach off and my mouth watered. I'd eaten a good breakfast—how could I possibly be hungry again? The place was filling up fast with locals as well as visitors, everyone out for food or sightseeing. A tour trolley was parked near the Square, along with a horse and buggy.
Gotta love Southern tourism.
"We just walked in a big circle." Yeah, I was stating the obvious. But there was a reason for it.
Mike waited until we were under an oak—a lot of those down here—before he answered. "Darius said across the street."
"And that's code for around the block."
"Yeah."
Oh. Well. Sure. Everyone knows that.
It wasn't long before Darius approached, a backpack on his left shoulder and a stern expression on his face. "Sorry for the treatment—and for pointing a gun at you, Dags."
"That was an act?" I leaned forward. "What the hell for?"
"Who was in the pub?" Mike cut right to it. "Because whoever or whatever they are, they've got you spooked."
"Damn straight." Darius pulled the backpack from his shoulder and set it on the ground between him and Mike. "I don't have long, so here's the short version. Who'd you talk to last night? The one who sent you into a pack of zombies?"
"Tango." Mike put his hands on his hips. "I've never known him to set us up. Usually his info's legit."
"Yeah, he's not the problem, then. Might be whoever sent you into zombie territory was using him. Look, I got a visit this morning from something…" He patted his head on the side. "Well, she wasn't like anything I've ever seen before."
I wanted him to clarify what he meant. "Never seen before as in mundane…or Planar?"
Darius nodded at me. "I think Planar, but I'm not sure. She wasn't like anything I've ever dealt with before."
I felt Mike's eyes on me. "Did she feel Ethereal or Abysmal?"
"Neither."
I narrowed my eyes. "What do you mean neither? Mental or Astral, then?"
"No. I'm talkin' something from the 'Pheral, kid."
"'Pheral?" What I knew of the universe seemed vast until a few months ago. I'd been taught by Nona that there were five planes—Physical, Mental, Astral, Abysmal, and Ethereal—though Sam and Mike called them the Material, Mind, Spirit, Dark, and Light Worlds. Yet a few months ago Mike, Samantha, and I found ourselves in something called Alfheim, which apparently wasn't in any of the places I know about. "I don't know what the hell that is. Is it part of the outer planes?"
"No man, it's between the planes. The Peripheral."
That was a new one. None of Revenants had ever mentioned it, not even Nona. But I got it: He was shortening the word Peripheral to 'Pheral. Only, it sounded too much like feral.
Darius leaned back. "You mean you don't know anything about the 'Pheral but you know about the others?"
"Hey." I held out my right hand. "I just got into this gig a year ago. I'm still learning." Learning meaning having been schooled by a vampire and three witches who apparently left a whole fucking world out of the lesson. "So if the Abysmal is like what most would call Hell, and the Ethereal is sort of, or assumed to be Heaven…do I want to know what the Peripheral is?"
The bartender's skin actually turned ashen. Seeing a man his size suddenly look so afraid scared the fuckity-fuck-fuck out of me. I felt something crawl up my spine.
"No. You don't."
AN OBSESSED FAN
I managed to stay where I was and not run off in terror, screaming into the morning, which was a good start for me. It didn't help that Mike looked worried. Or that he kept giving me and Darius harsh looks.
Mike pinned Darius to the spot with one of his less-than-subtle sit! looks and said, "Pretend I don't know what the hell it is you're talking about and explain it. Thoroughly."
Darius looked down at me. "You've never told him?"
"Hey, I don't know what you're talking about," I shot back. "I've never heard of the Peripheral."
Darius rubbed at his chin with his right hand. "If you were trained by some high and mighty magic hag, Mike, you should know what it is."
"Sorry." Mike shrugged. "Sam never mentioned it."
Darius just stared at Mike for a few seconds with this sort of squinty-eyed, hashed-up face. I could tell he was having a hard time trying to figure where to start, and it was a daunting task to educate the Planarly Challenged.
"Maybe Sam didn't know about it either." I looked at Mike.
"That might be," Darius interjected. "It's something nobody wants to talk about."
Mike pursed his lips as he watched Darius. "You're talking about a new World that Dags doesn't know anything about. Or Sam. And we've been hanging together here for six months and you never thought to fill me in?"
Darius held out his hands. "Hey, how was I supposed to know your training was incomplete. I never even got to meet
this Samantha Hawthorne—"
"Hey…" I held up a hand. "Can we get back to talking about this 'pheral place?" I looked at Darius, then Mike and back to Darius. "Just assume we don't know anything."
Darius shrugged. "All right. It's sort of a well-kept family secret—like a bastard child who could upset the balance of the family power." He looked at me. "There are things there that want you—you do know that, don't you?"
"They want me?" Clouds moved overhead, covering the sun, switching the cast of the shadows in the square around us. "Who wants me? And what for? How do they even know about me when I don't know about them?"
"Does it have to do with whoever's in the pub? Did they come here looking for him?" Mike straightened, and I could see he was already putting himself in fight mode.
Darius looked at me. "I think she did. But she never asked me directly who you are. Just…wondered if I really knew you and hinted that you were a lot more than what you seemed." Darius leaned his head toward his right shoulder. His braids moved as well. "You care to clarify what she means?"
"How would I know what she means? And if she didn't ask you where I was, what did she want?" I felt very, very uncomfortable, but it was the kind of uncomfortable I associated with realizing I'd forgotten to pay a bill.
Darius knelt down beside the backpack and unzipped it. I saw Mike twitch just a fraction as his hand moved to his back where he kept one of his smaller guns tucked into a denim holster he'd sewn in himself. When Mike was nervous, I was nervous, and normally Darius wasn't in the bad-guy column for us. But pointing a gun at me pretty much guaranteed him a spot on the suspicious side.
"The owner let me crash in the back last night. Wasn't feelin' good. Came out of a dead sleep to find myself opening the door." He paused as he put his hand deep into the backpack. I had a spell on the tip of my tongue. I was set to whammy whatever it was he pulled out of that bag if looked like it was going to eat me. Or us. Me first.
Darius continued speaking. "I was a little more than pissed off that my body moved on its own while I was sleeping. Didn't matter. I still did what she told me as she came in. I made her a drink, one of our most expensive ones, without her even asking. I didn't even know why I was doing it. She sat at the bar while I worked and made a few comments about you. Wanted to know how you were, what you were doing, who you were sleeping with." He sighed and lowered his shoulders. "I answered her truthfully on what I did know. I swear, Mike, it was like I had no control of myself. She gave the order and I obeyed. Once I set the drink on the bar, she asked me to give the Guardian a gift, and placed it beside the drink. When she got up to leave I found my voice and planned on calling her every ugly name in the book. But all I did was ask her about the drink. She told me it was for me. And I drank it." He made a face. "And I hate those fancy-ass drinks."
"She has something for the Guardian?" Mike said. "She actually called him 'the Guardian'?"
"Yep." Darius pulled a large, thick, familiar book from inside the backpack and stood. He turned and held it out to me. I stared down at it, not wanting to touch it. It was a tome I thought I'd never see again. I'd brought it with me from Atlanta, and Mike, Sam, and I had used it to defeat Maab. But after that, after I'd come home from the hospital, someone broke into the townhouse, brushed away the wards as if they were nothing. I'd been pissed off about the break-in, especially since whoever did it ran a knife through all of my clothing plus my mattress and sheets. But the only thing they took—the only thing missing from the townhouse—had been this book.
The Big Book of Everything.
SHOOT THE MESSENGER
I felt their eyes on me and sensed the tension between the three of us as I took the tome, but I wasn't as worried about their expectations as I was about the identity of the woman who gave this book to Darius. If it was who I thought it was, then the questions she asked Darius made sense. "Tell me her name." That came out in a pretty demanding voice. Forget the fact the man was a foot and a half taller than me and built like a stove. My voice held a bit of the old power behind it. Why?
Because I was panicking like a son-of-a-bitch.
Darius took a step back, his expression shifting from stern to surprised. "Dags—"
"I'm not fooling around, Darius. What was her name? What did she look like? Is she still there—" I looked past him to the corner of the building where The Night Pub was. "She is, isn't she? She's the reason you pulled a gun on me." I couldn't remember the last time I was this angry.
"Dags—"
I shoved the book at Mike and took off running back to the pub. Mike's and Darius's footfalls were close behind me, and when I got to the pub door and grabbed the locked handle, Mike was the first one to catch up with me. I saw him reach out to grab my arm, but I wasn't going to be stopped. If she was in there—without magic or not—I had to see her. Talk to her. Demand answers to questions I assumed would never be asked again.
"Batiltu."
The word, a simple spell given to me by the Grimoire, stopped the two of them in their tracks. Mike had seen this power since I came to Savannah. But Darius had never seen me use any magic, so his eyes were wide. He struggled to move forward but instead met an invisible wall. To an onlooker it would appear they were caught in a freeze-frame.
I looked past Mike to Darius. "Is she still here?" I narrowed my eyes and removed a part of the spell to allow him speech. I…didn't know how I'd known to do that.
"Then it is true…" he gasped. "She was right. She said you were dangerous. Very dangerous."
"I'm not dangerous, Darius. Not like the woman you spoke with is. If she's who I think she is. So tell me, is she still here?"
Darius's eyes hardened. I silently released the spell and he took a step back and put his hand on his hip where he kept his gun. Mike reached out and put his hand on Darius's and shook his head. Darius looked at me, but kept his hand near his weapon. Nevermind that Mike had his magazine—the man could still try and beat me with the gun. "No."
"If she's not in there, then why all the sneaking around to get to Franklin Square to talk?"
He didn't answer that one. This was getting me nowhere. A glance at Mike told me he was more curious than upset or worried. He was carrying the book tucked under his arm like a football. I turned and looked at the door handle.
I tugged once to make sure it was locked. The book opened inside of me. I took in a deep breath, drew a circle in the air with the index finger of my right hand. The circle materialized as a white line where my finger had gone. I drew a pentagram within the circle. The image flared brighter white as I spoke, "Peta."
The lock clicked and I yanked it open. The two of them followed me in.
"Rhonda!" I called out as stood in the center of the pub. The bar took up most of one wall on the side. I moved past it to the side door for employees only. It felt odd, saying her name after all these months. "Rhonda!"
Darius came into the empty office behind me. "Who's Rhonda?"
I turned on him and pointed to the ground. "Rhonda Orly. She gave you that book, didn't she? Is she still here?"
"She didn't say her name was Rhonda." Darius moved in front of me. I saw Mike standing at the office door. "She called herself Miss Beleti."
Beleti? What kind of a name was that? I frowned at Darius. "Was she medium height? Black hair? Black nails? Very goth?"
"No…" Darius glanced back at Mike. "She wasn't goth at all. Real looker. Reddish blonde hair. Very shapely."
Mike leaned against the door frame. "What exactly did she say about Dags?"
"I already told you. Miss Beleti told me that of all the creatures in the universe, he's the most dangerous." Darius shrugged. "I don't know why she wanted me to give him that book if he's all that and a bag of chips. She just said he lost it and would need it back."
Mike pulled the book from under his arm and set it on a nearby filing cabinet. "Yeah, well, you see, he didn't lose this book; it was stolen from my townhouse over a month ago. And now some reddish-blonde we don't know h
ands it over to you and calls Dags dangerous? So much so you pull a gun on him?"
I was pretty sure Darius's mysterious visitor had been Rhonda, the witch responsible for fusing my soul with the Grimoire. Four months ago she'd been stripped of her magic and fled Atlanta. No one had seen her since. I'd always suspected she'd been the one to take the book—working through the wards. Just because she didn't have magic didn't mean she wasn't dangerous.
But the description Darius gave wasn't Rhonda. Not even the name. I tried flipping back through my memories of Rhonda, thinking maybe Beleti was an old family name. "You said you felt like you didn't have control of yourself. But you didn't see her work any magic?" I asked the question again, mostly to satisfy my own curiosity.
"No magic, not like you just did." Darius moved to the office desk and opened a drawer on the left. He pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels—correction, a half-full bottle of the infamous whiskey—and grabbed three shot glasses out of the drawer as well. He filled each of them halfway and, after replacing the top on the whiskey, picked one of them up. He stared at the golden liquid. "I'm sorry about the gun, but when you knocked, she said it was you. She told me to pull the gun out and prepare to defend myself. It didn't feel as if she were controlling me, but I felt compelled to do what she said to do. No fuss, no muss. She asked, I answered. She commanded, I obeyed." He swallowed the contents of the shot glass and then hissed. I thought it was pretty damn early for whiskey, but then, Darius had had a seriously upsetting experience. "That's the kind of loss of control that haunts a man."
Minutes to Midnight Page 3
