by SJ Himes
Angel took a bite of his cheesecake and thought about it. Swallowing, he said, “Nope, sounds about right.”
“You’re fucking lucky, Angel.”
He thought about the last twenty-four hours and had to disagree. “How so?”
“Someone is after you.”
“I noticed that,” Angel said, pushing off from the island and picking up their plates. He went to the sink, feeling her eyes on him the whole time. “So how is that lucky?”
“You’re lucky you’re not dead, young man.”
Angel rolled his eyes, and got a crumpled napkin tossed at him for his trouble. It bounced from his shoulder to land at his feet, and he scooped it up and threw it in the nearby trash can.
“Finding out if the events around Mr. Doyle are connected to the demon’s summoning might narrow down any list of potential enemies you may have.” He turned to watch Milly as she poured herself another cup of tea, dunking the bag as she ruminated over her thoughts. She sipped her tea, and her eyes were unfocused, deep in thought. “There are plenty of people, be they human, supernatural, or magical that would like to see you dead, even after all these years. Have you pissed off anyone in particular in the last few weeks?”
Angel thought about it, but other than Detective Collins and his frequent dislike, there wasn’t much to draw on for possible subjects. Most of his enemies were lessened by time, distance, or death.
“I turned away that one potential student a few months ago. You remember, the necromancer groupie who was far more interested in my history than in learning higher magic?” Angel asked, and she nodded. “I sent him packing, and I know he cast some threats out as he left. I don’t remember his name, though.”
“Yes, I recall. The young man was rather rude. He had made an appointment so he’s in the book somewhere, I’ll check in the morning. Are you coming in, my dear? We have two students scheduled for shielding work tomorrow, and it will require both of us there.”
“I’ll be there. Sorry I slept through the day, it wasn’t my intent. I meant to show up for the afternoon sessions, but…”
“Yes, dear, I know. It’s fine. Sleep tonight? Eat something healthy, and go back to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow, bright and early.” Milly gathered up her coat and purse, and came around to give him a kiss on the cheek. He smiled and gave her a hug, which she tolerated with a chuckle before stepping back. “Ward your doors, Angelus.”
“Yes, mum.” Angel teased with a grin, following her to the front door. At some point the building super left a large plank of plywood in the hall outside his door, and he sighed, already regretting waking up. He would need to fix his door if he was going to be leaving anytime soon.
Milly put on her coat in the hall, the dark blue and gray fabric accentuating her pale skin and dark gray hair. She always reminded him of an old-fashioned Hollywood icon, impeccable, enigmatic and striking. She put her purse on her shoulder and frowned.
“Angel, my dear.”
“Yes, Mildred?”
“You just destroyed the circle, yes? At dawn’s first light?” She asked, and he nodded. Already ahead of her.
“Yes, I did. The dawn and the breaking of the circle and the anchoring rune chased it back to its home dimension, but may not have released the geas on the demon itself.”
“If the sorcerer who summoned it calls back the same creature…”
“The geas will snap back into place, and it will come for me again. I’m aware.”
She glared at him, probably because of his too calm tone of voice. He was on guard now, when he should have been before. Ten years of peace made him soft in some ways.
“If he had the hair to cast it once, he may have more. He can summon not just that one demon, but another, and send them after you.”
“And I can get hit by a bus full of tourists on my way to the Aquarium. Worrying will do nothing but keep me awake at night. I’ll be careful. I got a good look at the runes used in the circle. I’ll check the books we have at the studio, see if I can’t narrow down the technique of the caster, get a better idea of who this is. I can handle this, Milly.”
“Yes, my dear, I think everyone knows just how much you can handle. My next point is that you don’t have to do this alone.”
Angel gave her a rueful smile, and nodded. “I’m sorry. I know I’m not alone. Thank you, Milly.”
“Forgiven, as always. Now don’t fuck this up. I’ll see you at the studio.”
“Goodnight, Mildred,” Angel said as his teaching partner nodded graciously and swept off down the hall, majestic as always. He watched until she was out of sight, and then went to go back inside.
“Ward your doors, dammit!” She hollered up the stairs, and he chuckled.
Angel arranged the last nail and hit it once with his finger, knocking it home. He couldn’t recall where he put his hammer, so he was hitting nails in place with a bit of kinetic magic, the tap of his fingertip enough to set the nails deep in the wood. The plywood sheet was now nailed to what remained of his door, and the doorknob and lock still functioned, so he would be able to close it and leave if he wanted.
He walked back into his apartment and shut the door. It wasn’t perfect but would do until the super found a replacement. They lived in a historical landmark building, and the new door would need to match the aesthetic of the rest of the doors. He wasn’t too picky; it would make do. Especially after he reactivated his wards.
After the Wars ended ten years’ prior, Angel and Isaac had moved out of the family estate and taken an apartment here. There were too many nightmarish memories to remain in the house where they both grew up, so leaving was what was best. In the early years after the final battle, Angel had laid the foundations for an impressive and exhaustive series of shields and wards around the apartment and the building itself. Unwilling to take the chance that his presence would place the mundane human occupants of the apartment building in danger, Angel layered protections between his place and the apartments above, below, and the other apartment that shared the same floor as his.
Most shields created by magic-users were put in place to protect the conjurer from magical attacks. Stronger, more gifted practitioners were able to generate shields that could block physical attacks, but those were incredibly hard to maintain for longer than a few minutes, or the sorcerer who cast it would be drained near to death and would collapse. Fueling a shield with veil energy was possible, but doing so left the caster splitting their attention between the veil and the shield. A shield was generally put in place at the moment of need, and would then be unmade after the threat passed.
Wards were best described as magical alarm systems. They were varied in type and purpose, yet the ones Angel had in place were of the kind used in hostile situations. A lifetime of growing up in what amounted to a warzone left Angel proficient in hostile wards. A ward could be used to alert, notify, even identify and mark trespassers. Stronger, higher level wards could even entrap and snare one type of supernatural being, while leaving other species unaffected. Runes, the physical representation of spells, could be inscribed permanently into wood or stone, and placed in areas that needed warding, and then were charged by the creator, or if the spells were designed correctly, anyone with the ability to do so. Wards could be created and sold, and it was a major part of the magic-driven economy in the last decade.
Angel’s wards and shields were his design, and not even Milly or Isaac knew how he engineered them or how they were placed. A particularly gifted and skilled sorcerer, if given the time, could eventually examine and discern how he built them, but they would need more time than any casual observer could take, and any in-depth examinations would use enough energy that Angel would be able to sense it if he were home, and leave traces of the nosy magic-user behind.
Angel went and changed. He put on warmer clothes, a heavy wool sweater warded against bad weather to replace a jacket, and thick socks and boots. It was raining, the downpour a mix of thick drizzle and fat raindrops. The wind was blow
ing, driving the rain harder, and was plastering leaves everywhere. Usually, it was the type of evening to stay in, but he had to find Isaac and see if Simeon was unharmed. Isaac wasn’t answering his cell, and Angel was past annoyed and into a familiar mix of anger and concern. Angel was certain Simeon was alive and well, but the vamp did stick around until dawn and help him by holding off the demon long enough for him to destroy the circle, so he felt an annoying wiggle of obligation to make sure he was unharmed.
He kept his mind off the breath-stealing kisses and how his body remembered Simeon’s weight and hard strength. Last thing he needed was to fuel a disastrous infatuation with the vampire elder.
He returned to his front door, and stepped into the hall, and instead of trying to set the lock, put his hand on the wall beside the door. He leaned into his hand, pressing on the wall, and called to his wards. The shields would lay quiet for now; they weren’t needed if he wasn’t home, as there was nothing worth spending that amount of power on in the apartment to begin with. The wards woke, near-sentient spells that slept in the very bones of the building, in the floor and walls and ceilings. The windows were covered in invisible marks and runes, the thresholds of doors painted in his will. He set the wards for ill-intent and aggression, and powered up the set for tracers. If anyone did manage to get inside his apartment while he was gone, the tracers would place a small energy signature upon the trespasser and allow Angel to follow that signature to the perpetrator. These dots of energy were so small that unless someone was intimately involved in their engineering they would be dismissed as ambient magic.
To his mind’s eye his apartment and the surrounding walls glowed with a vibrant green fire the color of new spring leaves, interspersed with undertones of emerald and moss. A part of him always found it ironic that a sorcerer with an affinity for Death would have a magical signature usually seen in those whose element was for life and growing things. Angel always thought it was a gift from his mother’s side of the family, as she had in her family line dozens of elemental witches with an affinity for the earth and plants. His father’s bloodline won out in the end though, gifting Angel with sorcery-level abilities and the death affinity.
A hum reverberated up his arm through his hand when the wards awoke. He took one last look, made sure they were properly set, and then withdrew his mind. Angel blinked, eyes blurry, but they cleared after a moment or two. He headed down the hall to the stairs, the windows in the stairwell revealing a dark evening lit only by streetlamps and the reflective shine of falling rain.
Vampire HQ had an actual name, not that Angel or anyone else in town bothered to recall it. It was a tall stone building in downtown Boston and had the distinction of being one of the oldest buildings in the whole of New England, not just the city. The oldest parts of HQ were the areas the public had access to, and the rear of the building abutted a ten-story luxury condominium and casino complex. The Master’s rooms were rumored to be in the penthouse though Angel thought that unwise, considering the penthouse’s exposure to sunlight, and the unreliable nature of anti-UV spells and treated glass. Gossiping blood slaves and vampire groupies weren’t really the best sources of information, never mind they spent a better part of their days and nights with a vampire attached to various pulse points. His personal guess was somewhere in the sublevels of the tower, safe from light and curious eyes. Hiding where the oldest and most powerful vamp in Boston slept was a wise precaution, one not unexpected in a vampire as old as the Master purported to be.
The front façade was three stories tall, with a vaulted front entranceway that oozed elitism and wealth, and was kept a chilly forty-five Fahrenheit year round. Vampires didn’t need much in the way of heating though the humans who attached themselves as donors and slaves had heated quarters.
Angel gripped the brass bar of the heavy wood and glass front door, and pulled it open, stepping into the lobby. His cab pulled away when he went inside, as if he had been expecting Angel to return to his senses and come back before it was too late. The cabbie’s haste showed how prevalent the fear and superstition was surrounding the vampires’ clan house in the city.
The reception desk was a heavy monstrosity of white and gray marble carved from a single block of stone, and curved in a half-moon around the lone occupant, a young, nondescript man in a gray suit to match the stone. It stood against the left hand wall, while a pair of brass-doored elevators were on the right hand side. A set of wide, red-carpet covered stairs disappeared upwards, and to either side of the staircase hallways and doors led deeper into the building. Somewhere back there was the entrance to the residence tower and private casino and the vamp’s club.
It was quiet, the faintest scuffle of a shoe on the floor echoing, and the rustle of paper and keystrokes loud enough to be right in his ear instead of halfway across the room. Angel was glad he wasn’t the poor man at the desk, as he would likely go insane due to the oppressive atmosphere.
“Mr. Salvatore?” Angel turned to the speaker, the young man now standing behind the desk, hands folded in front of him, gazing at Angel with a blank expression. He wasn’t surprised the receptionist knew who he was. While most days he spent at his studio instructing youngsters on how to channel veil-drawn magic, in the last two years he’d unfortunately spent a few evenings here in vamp HQ, dealing with cursed and hexed vamps and humans too stupid to leave the local magic practitioner populace alone.
It was an oddity that after the Halloween confrontation two years before between Angel and the vampire clan at the club, that instead of giving him a wide berth or trying to have him killed, the Master, and his Elders, routinely sought him out for assistance in magical problems. He’d lost track of how many young vamps he’d cured of magic poisoning, the fools drinking from humans with a smidgen of magic in their family tree. Anything within two generations was enough to make a vamp ill, and a full-blood’s veins ran with enough magical poisoning to kill a vamp. Boston was not a healthy place to be a vampire, since the city was a stronghold for hereditary practitioners. Why there was a Master and Clan here in town Angel had no idea. Though most Clans used screened donors and blood banks for food sources, so they must have enough to sustain them in Boston.
“Yes, Angel Salvatore, here to see Elder Simeon,” Angel finally replied to the receptionist, who gave him a slight nod and reached for the phone behind the desk. Angel turned his attention to the windows, watching the rain fall in the light cast from the iron wrought torches outside the building.
The rain had yet to let up, and Angel could feel the shifting in the atmosphere, the scent of frost and snow on the wind. Soon it would be cold enough that the rain would become snow, and everything would ice over.
A subtle but powerful thrum went through his boots, and Angel tensed as the building’s wards were activated. He waited, cautiously eyeing the street and the bowels of the building, waiting for the building’s alarms to sound next. The receptionist was still on the phone, and not paying Angel any attention whatsoever.
He waited, but nothing further happened. The building’s wards were old, as old as the structure, and were sunk deeply into the foundation and the earth. He sent out a tendril of awareness, investigating what could have triggered them, but all he got from the wards was a wary watchfulness and a sense of expectancy. They weren’t responding to anything specific, not that he could sense. Perhaps they were merely set to come awake at this time of night, though it was odd for wards in a vampire clan house to come on at night when they were most vulnerable during the day and needed more protection.
There was another jump in the wards, almost as if someone was casting too close to the boundaries. It was sporadic, and didn’t feel intentional, but the ambient magic moved in waves that said whoever it was must be a sorcerer, since the veil was tapped. It cut off a moment later, and Angel went back to listening to the wards. If he didn’t know any better, he would think an apprentice was botching an attempt at casting with the veil, but there were no sorcery students in the Tower. They h
ummed, at a higher pitch, then settled back down, still aware and watching, but no longer reacting. If there was a sorcerer in vamp HQ or the Tower, as the condominiums were nicknamed, then the only way he or she could be there was by invitation, and Angel put the incident out of his mind.
He relaxed, though he kept his mind open to the wards in case something changed. He didn’t want to repeat the demon attack in vamp HQ—though it would be nice to not deal with the mess afterwards.
“Mr. Salvatore?”
Angel looked to the receptionist, who was wearing an apologetic expression on his otherwise bland face.
“Yes?”
“Elder Simeon is unavailable at the moment; may I take a message?” The receptionist must be used to violent reactions to denials if he was going to cringe while telling Angel Simeon was not up to talking. Or maybe his confrontation with the demon that morning had already made the rounds, and the poor thing was afraid of Angel. He bit back a smile at that odd thought. Being smaller than average and slim left most humans underestimating him.
“Unavailable? So he’s here?” Angel asked, making sure. If Simeon was dead or injured surely the response wouldn’t be for him to leave a message. Relief swamped him when the receptionist gave a hesitant nod. “No, no message. Just tell him I was here, I guess. Thank you.”
Trying not to show how relieved he was that Simeon was still alive and presumably well, Angel put his hands in his pockets and walked to the door. The wards under his feet hummed and writhed as he pushed the door open with his shoulder, and Angel stepped out onto the front steps. The overhang kept him dry, and Angel looked up and down the street, looking for a cab. He really didn’t want to call for one, since the cabbies usually put up a fuss about picking people up at Vamp HQ, and Angel had to give them a bigger tip to encourage them out this way.
