by Gary Jonas
“You should know that my ex-father-in-law is coming to Galveston tomorrow. He’s not happy with me, and he wants some set of Tarot cards you stole from him.”
“I didn’t steal anything,” I said. “Wait, your father is coming here tomorrow?”
“He’s not my father, but yes, that’s what he said.”
“He can’t.”
“Tell that to him.” She hesitated a moment. “Don’t tell him I told you. He really wants those cards, Brett. He’ll kill to get them back.”
“Is Gentry with you?”
“Who?”
“Clyde Gentry.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“How about Delgado?”
“I’ve heard of Delgado, but I’ve never met him.”
“Well, thanks for coming semi-clean.”
“Before you go, let me just warn you that my ex father-in-law won’t take no for an answer. I’m going to leave town tomorrow morning.”
“Wait. Any idea who tried to kill us?”
“Probably Delgado. He has a reputation. Hey, when my father-in-law confronts you, it would be best if you give him what he wants. He doesn’t have much patience.”
“I’m running out of patience myself,” I said.
“You don’t want to face Joseph Sinclair.”
“You got that right,” I said. “Have a nice life.”
I hung up, and went into the restaurant. It was crowded, and the tables were tiny. Sabrina had a spot at the back. She’d finished eating already. As I maneuvered through the maze of tables to reach her, she looked over at me. “Your food is cold.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Michael was waiting at the house when Sabrina and I walked up. I’d parked the Malibu in a no parking zone on Seawall Boulevard, and with a little luck, the cops would have it towed by morning.
“Are you all right?” Michael asked.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Michael said.
Sabrina smiled. “I’ll live,” she said.
“I was worried. I wanted to help, but I can’t go out in the daytime. Skin condition.”
“I know you’re a vampire, Michael,” she said.
“You do?”
“I’m a wizard. I can sense the undead.”
“Your cousin took forever to figure it out.”
“He doesn’t pay attention.”
He put a hand up and touched her cheek. “Your eye.”
She self-consciously touched the shiner. “It’s nothing.”
“I can fix that,” he said.
“You want to feed on my bruise?”
“It’s broken capillaries,” he said. “Blood stuck beneath the surface of your skin. I can clean that out for you, and it won’t leave a mark.”
“You’re going to kiss her boo boo?” I asked.
“And make it all better,” he said.
“All right,” she said. She took him by the hand, and led him inside. I watched them go up the stairs.
“You sly dog,” I said under my breath. Then I shook my head. “What is it with chicks and vampires?”
I went to my room, turned on some music so I wouldn’t hear Michael and Sabrina, then climbed into bed.
Sleep is usually my friend. Most of the time, I can just stretch out on the bed or a sofa or a floor and drift right off into dreamland.
That night, I tossed and turned.
So not only was it a crappy week, but now I couldn’t sleep.
Napping was like a superpower for me, so this should not have been happening. It was just wrong.
But no, I had to go over everything in my head.
I dreaded my father showing up.
I hoped Olivia was going to be all right.
I was pissed at Sabrina because she refused to give up the damn cards. I was envious of Michael because he was getting laid. Not that I wanted to sleep with my cousin. That would be wrong on too many levels. My thoughts went back to the cards.
And I don’t even know why I wanted them. Those cards were nothing but trouble. Sinclair and Delgado were willing to kill for them. Ditto with Gentry. And for all I knew, Madame X, whoever the hell she was. I grinned at the thought of her flunkies waking up in such a terrible position.
Why did I care about the cards?
Was it the tuning?
It made sense.
Was Sabrina right that the only way to break that tuning was for me to die? That seemed ridiculous. Magic was about will, so couldn’t I just will the damn things away? I sighed.
What about Michael? Would my father cure him?
I just wanted out.
None of this should be my problem.
And why the hell couldn’t I sleep?
My brain drifted back to the cards. Think it through.
I’d handled them.
They were tuned to me.
Sabrina hid them.
But if they were tuned to me, shouldn’t I be able to find them?
Probably. Definitely if I’d paid attention in magic class.
I hated magic.
I hated not being able to sleep.
I gave up on rest after a few hours. I tugged on my sneakers and left the house to go for a walk.
Galveston is dead in the wee hours of the morning. The wind blew in from the Gulf, and the lights of distant freighters were visible on the horizon. I walked along the beach toward the jetty. The Caterpillar excavator still sat in the sand.
I climbed up into the cab and sat in the driver’s seat, avoiding the joysticks on either side. I leaned back, and breathed in the night air. Waves lapped on the shore.
I gazed out to sea.
This was the calm before the storm.
So far, I’d managed to slip this way and that through the crazy obstacle course created by those stupid cards. I’d managed to avoid most of the direct confrontations. Michael and Sabrina had handled things effectively. Now they were handling each other.
But I was cool with that.
I’d be more cool with it if I was getting some action tonight, too.
Maybe I should have gone to see Olivia at the hospital.
The waves rolled in and out, and I wished they could take me with them. The lights of the freighters on the horizon caught my attention again. What if I could be out there? Life would sure be different then. No bullshit magic to deal with. No creeps trying to kill me. No…
A thud sounded not too far away. Then another.
I leaned forward and gazed toward the seawall.
Someone jumped from the wall to the shrub-covered ground fifteen feet below. Then another.
Why didn’t they use the stairs?
Four men in suits walked out of the scrub grass carrying square bundles of something wrapped in plastic. They each leaned forward and placed their bundles on the ground.
Then they walked toward the ocean in a line, removing their jackets, ties, shirts, and shoes as they went. The moonlight traced them in a soft glow as they moved. They discarded their clothing behind them.
The men waded naked into the water, and kept walking. Eventually, they disappeared beneath the waves.
Was this some kind of suicide pact?
I stared at the spot where they’d disappeared.
A few minutes ticked by.
Then a head broke the surface. And another. And another. And a fourth.
The men walked out of the ocean. They stopped and turned back toward the sea. The waves rolled in, splashed around their bare feet.
Four more heads rose up out of the water, and these men walked naked out of the sea to join their brothers. Their hands looked like fins for a moment, but then they splayed their fingers.
Shit. They were Mako Clansmen.
The first four gathered up their clothing, donning it as they went.
The other four followed them toward the seawall. The naked guys stopped, peeled the plastic from the bundles and took something from each of the four piles. Pants, shirt, tie, jacket.
Suits. They got dressed, and walked toward the seawall.
Instead of using the stairs, they jumped up fifteen feet to land on the top of the sloped wall. It was one thing to jump out and down, but to jump up didn’t seem possible.
All eight men jumped up.
I hopped off the tractor and ran to the stairs, climbing them as quietly as I could.
The eight men stood on the sidewalk waiting for the light to change. Their suits were wet in spots, and four of them were still barefoot.
They didn’t look over, but I still made sure to stick to the shadows.
The light changed.
The Mako Clansmen crossed the street, and walked down Seawall Boulevard toward the closest hotel. They could have been doing a scene from a Tarantino movie called Reservoir Sharks. They crossed the parking lot, and I lost sight of them.
I looked back at the open bundles on the beach.
The torn plastic flapped in the wind, and I could tell there were more clothes in each package.
More heads and torsos appeared in the water, and four more Mako Clansmen exited the ocean, grabbed suits, and dressed before walking to the seawall and making the leap to the top.
The stairs would have been so much easier. I guess the shark dudes weren’t that bright.
Four more rose up from the sea.
And four more after them.
I watched them exit the water, get dressed, make the jump to the top of the seawall, and cross the street to the closest hotel.
Why were there so many of them? They kept coming out of the Gulf in fours.
Why were they going to that hotel in particular?
And then I realized. It was a whole army of shark men. And they were going to that hotel because it was the closest one to my house.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The shark dudes kinda freaked me out. I watched them file into a hotel, but none of them came out, so I figured they were gearing up for war because my father was coming to town.
I knew he was going to arrive in the morning. That meant I needed to run an errand.
It was after midnight, so I had to make a trip to Houston because Walmart was closed, and Walgreens didn’t stock nursery monitors in their stores. Houston had a twenty-four hour Walmart, and that was just what the doctor ordered.
I bought three battery-powered monitors and a bunch of batteries, then cruised back to Galveston.
Call me a chickenshit if you want. I don’t care.
I hid monitors in the vents of the living room, family room and study downstairs.
Wizards are incredibly powerful, but when they’re dealing with other people in the wizarding community, they focus on magic, so they tend to notice wards and spells and sigils. They protect themselves from such things. They’ll block a scrying mirror out of habit even though I doubt anyone’s used one in more than a century.
What they tend to forget is technology.
More than one wizard has had to go to a police station to get close enough to cast a spell to erase a video recording from a computer. These days, a lot of recordings are stored in the cloud, so some wizards have hackers on retainer to delete sensitive information so it can’t air on CNN. Sometimes something gets on Infowars, but when they do stories on aliens or magic, people don’t take them seriously. Even Alex Jones sometimes gets things right. He caught politicians and other members of government who are part of a weird secret society where they burn a giant owl in effigy at a place called Bohemian Grove. Yeah, those are our elected officials on their weekend retreats.
And you thought wizards were weird.
Where was I? Oh yeah, I set up the monitors, and I put the receivers in my bedroom beside my pillow so I could get the lay of the land.
Low tech. Fools wizards all the damn time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
My father can melt people with a look.
Oh, yeah, I mean that in the literal sense as well as the figurative. He carries himself with a quiet resolute confidence, and nothing fazes him. He’s stared down demons, defeated powerful sorcerers, created his own brand of blood magic, and commanded the respect of world leaders.
He’s saved the world on multiple occasions, and his demeanor is such that nobody can ever get him to lose control and raise his voice.
Well, no one but me.
I’m his weak spot in most senses of the word. I’m the weakest in the family when it comes to ability to work simple magic. I’m the weakest when it comes to handling confrontations. I would rather sleep than work. I’m the one person in the family he’s had to help out of bad situations. I’m the only one of his flesh and blood who doesn’t work for the family business.
My mother says my father loves me, but in a private meeting with him when I was eighteen, he told me that not only does he not love me, but he doesn’t even like me. He offered me a stipend to stay the hell away from him. He lets me come home for special family gatherings, but that’s just for my mother. In front of her, he pretends to care. When we’re alone, there are no pretenses.
He once asked my mother if she’d ever been unfaithful to him because he couldn’t believe I was the fruit of his loins. How could one of his sperm have produced someone like me? Had his semen turned? That didn’t make sense to him, so he wondered about the mailman. He hoped for the plumber or one of his drivers or the pool boy or the gardener.
When he walked into the house, Sabrina was awake to greet him. I pretended to be asleep, but I had the nursery monitor receivers in the bed under the sheets. I kept the volume low, and had a fan blowing to mask any noise that might drift out.
“Report?” my father said as he closed the door.
No, hello, how are you? from him. Just, “Report.” What a dick.
“He’s sleeping, of course.”
“It’s almost eleven o’clock.”
“He didn’t get home until after three, and didn’t go to bed until five. He won’t be up until at least one.”
“He continues to waste his life away. Are the others here yet?”
Others?
“No, sir. They’ll be here in fifteen minutes. I told them eleven.”
“Very good. Fill me in.”
“He hasn’t noticed.”
“Typical.” The disappointment dripped from the word even through the monitor.
There’s nothing like knowing how much you disappoint your father. Even now, the feeling made me want to curl up into a fetal position. I was never good enough. At least now I had the excuse that I’d stopped trying. It still hurt, though.
Wait a second. What hadn’t I noticed?
“I put them where you told me.”
Them? What was she talking about? The cards?
“I fear this may have been a waste of our time.”
“He did try to rescue me.”
“I know, but he was so inept they had to give him a ride. By the way, the men complained about the way you tied them up.”
“Granger hit me.”
“He does get overzealous. He was going for realism.”
“Brett wouldn’t have noticed or cared.”
“I don’t see any bruises.”
“I got it healed.”
“And Gentry?”
“With the first contact, Brett’s friend, Michael, was more than Clyde bargained for, so I helped to get rid of him so he wouldn’t get killed. Michael’s a good guy. He’s a vampire, but still a good guy.”
“Yes, I can smell traces of this undead person.”
“He was here last night.”
“I don’t understand your vampire fixation, Sabrina.”
“I’m a victim of circumstance.”
“Your weakness for the undead is not appealing.”
“That’s not your concern, Uncle. I’m not your daughter.”
“Fair enough.”
Wow, she scored a point off my old man. I was impressed. If I ever tried to talk back to him, I’d get smacked in the head with an invisible fist.
“Clyde told me abou
t his second attempt,” my father said. “My so-called son ran away from him like a coward. Despicable. What were you able to learn about his supposed kidnapping?”
“According to my sources, Mario Delgado is in Spain.”
“So he lied.”
“He claimed to have taken out a couple of Mako Clansmen before I got here.”
My father snorted. “Right.”
“Well, he said the rug ate them.”
“Have you seen any sign of Mako Clansmen?”
“Uh, no sir. Can I get you something to drink?”
“No.”
“Would you like to sit down?”
“No.”
A faint knocking sound.
“They’re here.”
The sound of the door opening and closing.
“Hi, Olivia,” Sabrina said.
Olivia? Jesus! Was everyone in on it?
“Hi, Bri. Hello, Mr. Masters, sir.”
“Where’s the witch?”
“She’ll be calling right about now.”
As if on cue, my father’s cellphone rang. His ringtone was “The Wizard” by Uriah Heep. He thinks he’s amusing.
“This is Nathaniel Masters; you may speak now.”
Pretentious prick.
“Why aren’t you here?” he asked. “I wouldn’t do that.”
Whatever it was, he probably would do it.
“Very well,” he said. “Report. I see. Very good. Thank you. The rest of your payment will be wired this afternoon.”
“All good?” Sabrina asked.
“I don’t understand why witches are so hesitant to speak to me in person.”
“Maybe because you crushed Wanda Bronstead’s skull back in oh-five?”
“She betrayed the community.”
“Some people say she was innocent.”
“The term some people say is weak and simply means the speaker doesn’t have the courage of their convictions.”
“Or it means you have a history of killing witches,” Sabrina said.
“Only when they deserve it.”
“That’s not how some people see it,” Sabrina said. “And for the record, I am one of those people.”
“Whatever. Olivia?”
“I met your son, sir. He has potential, but he doesn’t apply himself.”
“The omnipresent description from his schoolmaster and everyone who’s ever had the misfortune of dealing with him.”
