by Rowan Casey
“Go on home,” she suggested, but from her it sounded like an order. “The casino won’t fall apart without you.”
Maybe it wasn’t Journeyman. Maybe the luck had flowed exactly as I’d planned and this was just an unfortunate coincidence. A small, ironic laugh almost slipped free. Around me, there are no coincidences, but I had to know.
The elevator doors opened, revealing the casino’s usual storm of noise and light. The visual and audio assault washed over me as I cut though the crowds to the entrance. The emergency services blue strobes beat against the outside of glass doors. I had to know for sure, to see the truth for myself, to see if it had happened again.
LA’s artificial night cloaked the lot. The EMTs and a squad firetruck had arrived on the scene. The crews drifted about with none of the urgency they would need to save a life. I heard Grace’s voice rise above the general background chatter as she started to usher the crowd back. My feet carried me forward as a numbness soaked through my limbs.
The car, a sleek sports car, had mounted the curb, hit a wall and bounced back out, coming to rest, partially mounted on a crumpled sign. I absorbed the scene, taking in the dark stain on the sidewalk and the shattered glass twinkling beneath the flickering glow from the casino’s lights.
The EMTs wheeled a gurney from the sidewalk to their waiting ambulance. A white sheet draped over the unmistakable outline of a body, but a limp hand had escaped its strap. His green sleeve stuck out against the stark white.
Journeyman hadn’t made it far.
Hushed conversations murmured through the crowd. They had begun to disperse now that the show was over. Some headed back in to the casino to continue betting their weekly paycheck, stalking that illusive big win that would be their final bet. They didn’t know their luck was a finite resource and that I could take it from them as I had the CGI studio executive now lying dead on the gurney. He would be missed. Once the press caught on, the news would spread like fire in the Hollywood Hills.
“Such a terrible and unexpected way to go.”
With my thoughts tied up in knots, I almost didn’t hear the woman beside me until an icy touch licked up back of my neck and rifled through my short hair like fingers. I’d felt the same chilling sensation beneath the illusionist Grimm’s club and for a second wondered if he stood behind me. The woman smiled in such a way that may have been reassuring if not for the sharp glint of slyness in her bottle-green eyes.
“His luck ran out,” she said, in a matter-of-fact way.
Her words chilled the rest of me. She couldn’t possibly know what I’d done, but the intensity of her gaze revealed she must have deliberately chosen those words.
“Excuse me.” I turned away from the scene, flicked my jacket collar up and tucked my hands deep into my pockets, squeezing the dice in one hand.
“Jazmine Archer,” she barely raised her voice but I heard her words like a whisper in my ear. “I can erase your mistake and your guilt.”
I stopped. She could have gotten my name from the business listing. It didn’t mean anything. And the mistake. A lucky guess. Everyone felt a certain amount of guilt after witnessing a tragedy, didn’t they?
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” the stranger asked. “For the pain to stop?” How could she know that? “What if I told you I could bring this man back?”
Her breath touched my neck. I whirled, but found her several strides away, oddly detached from the crowd. The streetlight didn’t fall on her the same way as it did the rest. The light fell around her, not on her, as though she didn’t quite fit with the crowd, or this world.
“I’d say you were crazy,” I told her.
“Did you tell Grimm he was crazy when he showed you another world? What was it this time, a demon, a wyrm? Perhaps he allowed a worg to run free before slaughtering the beast as evidence of his power?”
I blinked at her. She knew of Grimm, the knights, the weird and horrifying things I’d seen in the room beneath his club? “Who are you?”
“I can bring him back. Mark Journeyman has twin daughters. It’s not too late. The family hasn’t been informed, but the clock is ticking. You can save their father. They need not know what has happened here this night.”
“I condemned their father.” I’d said it before I realized the words were on my tongue, and now it was too late to take them back. Horror gripped my heart and snatched my breath away. Her lips curved in thin, shallow smile. She knew too much.
“So make it right.” She extended her hand toward me. Her nails glittered in the lurid glare from the casino’s lights.
Make it right. She couldn’t have known Grimm had said those exact words to me, could she? “Who are you?” I asked again, unsure if I’d spoken the first time.
“My name is Siobhan,” she said, with a curiously smooth and melodic accent, making her name sound like shee-vawn. “And I’m here to help.”
“By bringing that man back? You can do that?”
Her smile stretched almost too wide for her mouth. “Will you allow me to demonstrate?”
“The catch?”
“None. Call it another demonstration.”
I closed my hand around hers. Her skin shifted beneath my touch, as though it lay loosely over her bones and could slip free. I didn’t trust her, but I didn’t trust Grimm, either. He had shown me a nightmare, maybe this woman could show me a dream?
“Do it.”
3
Siobhan carved through the crowd with that same detached indifference I’d noticed in her earlier. People instinctively moved aside, some long forgotten Neolithic part of their brains firing warnings. I had no idea who she really was, but a few days ago Grimm had pulled a demon out of thin air, so perhaps she really could bring someone back to life. A week ago, I would have dismissed her as crazy. A week ago, the world had been a more straightforward place.
I followed in Siobhan’s wake. She flashed a smile and tossed her hair at one of the EMTs, and said something that sounded like she was asking to see the body, but there was more to her voice than the words alone. I almost didn’t catch a second layer under the crowds background chatter. But they were there: words, old words that didn’t make any sense to my modern ears. I heard them like whispers of a dozen voices in the wind and felt them skitter across my skin like things alive.
Glassy-eyed, the EMT stepped aside and turned his back to Siobhan as she approached the gurney and peeled back the sheet.
Journeyman could almost be sleeping if his lips hadn’t paled to the color of cream, blending into the greyness of his face. Memories flashed of another time, so many years ago, looking into my dead father’s eyes.
“It’s going to be okay.” Siobhan’s soothing voice brought me back to the present but I wasn’t sure if her words were meant for me or Journeyman’s corpse.
She placed her hand over his face. Her fingers twitched and stretched, curling around the man’s skull. The part of me who had been rooted in reality all my life screamed that what I witnessed wasn’t possible. A trick of the light, an act. Instincts tried to pull me away, warning me that this was wrong, but a deeper, grim fascination gripped me, holding me rooted to the spot. The whispers came again, spilling from her lips as well as drifting on the warm city air. She leaned over him and blew onto the back of her hand. I watched, caught between awe and fear. Transparent tendrils wove over her hand and through her fingers, sinking into the man’s skin, blooming warmth and color back into his face. It seemed to take a lifetime and no time at all, and then he gasped, his chest rose, his fingers twitched. His eyes opened.
Siobhan released him, whispered something too quietly for me to hear and then turned to me. Her long thin fingers encircled my arm as she led me away. “You probably don’t want to be here for what happens next.”
About to ask why, a shout stopped me. Followed by another. Excitement strummed through the crowd, bring the stragglers back into the throngs. The press were there, rushing toward the ambulance where the young executive sat up on th
e gurney, his eyes wide. I spotted the EMTs fighting their way back to his side, just as Siobhan ushered me along the sidewalk, passing the casino entrance and heading toward the casino’s parking lot. It wasn’t long before excited shouts of miracle chased my retreat. The press would adore this. A miracle outside the Aces High Casino. The casino’s PR people would surely spin it in a way that brought more people crossing the threshold, parting with their cash. But Siobhan was right, I didn’t want to be here for the circus. Journeyman was okay, that didn’t change the fact I had killed him. Nausea prickled my skin with cool perspiration.
Siobhan’s grip tightened. Her fingers dug in. “Now that fortunate man gets to go home to his wife and daughters. What a hero you are, Jazmine Archer.”
“This isn’t possible.” I looked at her hand, expecting to find her fingers elongated, like spider’s legs. But there was no sign of the strange disfigurement. I shook off her hand and stepped back. “He was dead. I saw him. And you…You just… what? Made him alive again?”
“Dear, what is and isn’t possible is a matter of opinion.” She spoke as though humoring a child, as though I should know all of this. “Did Grimm not teach you anything?”
“Who the hell are you? What does any of this have to do with Grimm?”
“You don’t remember? I see the rumors are true. That is...unfortunate.” Her little smile gave the impression she preferred this unfortunate turn of events. She stabbed her now-normal fingers at her pinned back hair. “Well, then I have some explaining to do. I’ll meet you at your home. On arrival, I will appreciate a glass of milk.”
Milk? What?
She stepped into the road and sauntered across without checking to see if it was clear. A bus rumbled by, blocking my view. When it cleared, she had disappeared. It happened so suddenly, I was left reeling at the side of the road, wondering if I was losing my mind.
I glanced back at the crowd, saw cameras flash, and tucked my hands back into my pockets, closing my fingers around the dice. What I wanted to do was go back inside the casino, park myself at the bar, down a few drinks and have Grace tell me all of this was just an elaborate joke. Bringing the dead back to life and demons beneath nightclubs? Knights and magic? Was I really believing all this, was it really happening?
For so long the magic had been mine and mine alone. I had known it was real from the moment the traveling carnival had rolled into town when I was seven and I’d visited the stalls, winning stuffed toy after stuffed toy, because I could —I’d been using magic all my life to get what I wanted. Magic was a part of me, it was my secret. But for all Grimm’s talk of knights of old, he had picked the wrong woman in me. I didn’t save people. All my life I’d been surrounded by tragedies of my own making.
Tucking my chin in, I headed toward the casino’s basement parking lot. Whoever Siobhan was, she had answers, and there was one question burning a hole in my thoughts.
She had brought one man back from the dead, could she do it again?
I tossed my car keys on the table, stripped off my jacket, pushed up my sleeves and collected a wine glass from a kitchen cupboard. The only bottle of wine I had was a dusty champagne wine left over from the casino’s fifty-year celebrations. I’d been saving it for a special occasion, but figured after all the dead bodies and demons of the last few days, I’d earned a few glasses.
My sister judged me from her picture above the decorative fireplace. “Don’t give me that look,” I told her smiling, unworried face and poured the wine into the glass. “A little bubbly is nothing compared to our nights after a race.” I lifted the glass to her memory and downed the contents in one.
“Younger sibling?”
A gulp of wine lodged in my throat. I spluttered much of it back up again and whirled to find Siobhan standing near the coffee table. She wore a long emerald green coat that looked far too heavy for LA’s warm city nights. Its slim line cinched in at the waist, that coupled with her long blond hair and its curious pinned design seemed to lend her a formal sophistication that hadn’t been present at the casino, at least not that I remembered. Had it only been an hour since she’d brought Journeyman back from the dead? It felt like longer and maybe as though it had happened to someone else.
“I er…Would you like a drink?” I asked.
She smoothed down her coat and plucked at some invisible fluff. “Milk.”
“Right, the milk.” I crossed the living area to the galley style kitchen and poured her a glass of milk. “You were asking about my sister. She was younger—yeah, by two years.” I handed her the glass of milk. She took it and wrapped her long, thin fingers around the glass. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me. And now I’d noticed her stillness, I wasn’t sure if she’d blinked either. She looked human. She had all the right pieces in all the right places, but something beneath all that, something I couldn’t see, but sensed in some deeper part of me, was throwing up warnings.
“She died?” she asked.
“How did you know?”
“You mentioned she was younger. Most siblings do not suddenly become older.”
“Right, of course.” I needed more wine. Maybe the entire bottle once Siobhan had answered my questions and crawled back under whatever magical rock she’d emerged from. “Kari died, yes. A motorbike accident.” The lie was so smooth, so well-practiced over the years, that I almost believed it.
“You weren’t always a casino owner, Jaz. Were you?”
“No, I…I dabble in a few things. Look, I’m grateful for what you did back there—”
“Not as grateful as the man is.”
“No, I mean, I am. It’s just…Last week, all I had to worry about was casino profits. This week…things are very different. I’m still trying to catch up with it all.”
“You feel as though the world around you has switched on its axis and yet to everyone else nothing has changed at all. You’re disconnected.”
Disconnected. That was exactly it. But this wasn’t the type of change that came with a new house, or a new relationship. This was fundamental. It went deeper than reality, peeling back all the rules and exposing something more complicated and sinister beneath. The real world was a façade. Grimm had shown me the truth, and now Siobhan had driven his point home. The real world was a happy veneer over an ugly truth.
“It appears you’re awakening is somewhat hindered this time.”
“My awakening?” I recalled Grimm’s talk beneath the nightclub. The Nine Races, magical doorways, and the Circle of Knights. “Oh, Grimm’s knights. Yeah, he mentioned this whole...” I waved my hand, trying to come up with the right word, “process was different.” I took a generous gulp of wine and swallowed it down. “Then tonight, the accident at the casino—”
“We both know it was no accident.” Her tone was light, her face soft. She wasn’t accusing, but she knew too much. She knew the impossible, just like Grimm.
“How else does a young girl learn to control luck while other little girls are attending ballet classes or singing lessons?” she asked.
Ballet classes? I wasn’t sure if I was more surprised by the fact she knew I could manipulate luck or that she believed my parents could have afforded private lessons in anything. The closest I had come to private lessons was a ride home in the back of a police cruiser while the cop reprimanded me on the fact that decent kids did not play near the local refuse yard.
Siobhan lifted her glass of milk to her lips and drank long and deep, gulping the entire contents down without stopping to breathe. After setting the empty glass down on the counter, she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth in a gesture completely at odds with her pristine clothes and poised manners.
“What do you want more than anything in this world?” she asked.
My grip on the glass tightened. I stared back at this woman who could raise the dead with her soft smiles and smooth voice. She knew what I could do, she knew about my life, even knew where I lived, and just like Grimm she had turned everything in its head in the space of a fe
w hours.
“What do you want?” I asked quietly.
Her green eyes glittered. “No more than Grimm has asked of you.”
“Grimm wants me to find something,” I replied carefully. He hadn’t exactly specified not to tell anyone about the motorbike I was supposed to retrieve, but considering the weird shit he and his knightly crew were into, and the fact this bike clearly wasn’t just a bike, I figured it was probably better to keep the details to myself.
“Oh, he wants more than that, dear. Do you trust this Grimm?”
“Of course not.” I snorted a laugh. Who the hell would trust an illusionist, never mind the rest of his insanity?
“Good, there is hope for you yet. He is a trickster and a master manipulator.” She bowed her head slightly. “What did he offer in return for your services?”
“A chance to make it right.”
“Ah.” She smiled and began to cruise around my apartment, her heeled boots barely making a sound. “A chance to make it right,” she echoed. “And by that we can assume you will retrieve this item for him, he’ll take it from you, pat you on the back and send you on your way. And you’re supposed to be grateful for what exactly?”
“There was a little more to it than that.”
“Oh, of course. He’s a showman. He wants his quest, his drama, he naturally wants to save the world. I’m sure he showed you the horrors of a world existing beyond that which can be seen—the Unseen, the Demimonde. He revealed the monsters and then told you to save us all from them. Isn’t that right?” She turned her sly smile on me. “We know Grimm. We have known him for a very long time.” She swept her long, light fingers across the back of my couch, seeming to delight in the touch. “He has told the most fantastical stories through the ages, and here he is, in this time and place, weaving tales once more. For fantasy and fairy tales are all that they are. Stories to charm people such as yourself into following him. Stories to worship him by. You have only his word. What is the word of a professional storyteller worth?”
