Magical Secrets (Vegas Paranormal/Club 66 Book 1)

by C. C. Mahon

  “No, simply that I can only make true statements.”

  “And by ‘true,’ do you mean ‘frank?’”

  “You want to know if I have access to hidden truths? It can happen, yes.”

  “What kind?”

  “Anything: sometimes I know when someone is lying; other times I see the future. I don’t control it.”

  “Let’s say a customer was talking to you,” I said. “He needs to be cheered up. But you know that something horrible is waiting for him once he leaves the club. What do you do?”

  She didn’t have to think before answering. “If it’s something that can be avoided—an accident, a mugging—I generally try to help the person discreetly. For example, if thugs were waiting for him in the street, I would advise him to take another way home.”

  “And if it’s unavoidable? If he’s going to rupture an aneurysm, for example?”

  “Then I cheer him up as best I can. I get him talking—people love that.”

  “But you wouldn’t warn him?”

  “Not if it can’t be changed. No one likes prophets of doom, and I know how to hold my tongue.”

  “Do you have questions about the job?” I asked. “Do you know why the job is available?”

  “Nate explained it to me. Your bartender was killed by a Valkyrie.”

  “That doesn’t scare you?”

  “You avenged her. You could have left, but instead you stayed and fought. You decided to protect your team, and you killed the Valkyrie.”

  “I brought the danger to them,” I said. “It could happen again.”

  Her doe eyes became veiled again, and Enola shrugged nonchalantly. “It’s possible.”

  I promised to be in touch and walked her back to the foot of the stairs.

  3

  Britannicus arrived at the club exactly two hours after my phone call. The wizard was dressed to the nines, as usual: charcoal gray suit, embroidered vest, shirt with a white collar that highlighted the contrast against his black skin. But his aristocratic face seemed concerned.

  He stood near the table that I indicated to him, pulled out a chair to leave me the booth, and waited patiently for me to sit before doing the same.

  I motioned to the bottle that I had prepared for his visit. “I found that Chilean wine that you like so much,” I said. “Do you want a glass?”

  He nodded, seeming distracted.

  “Brit, stop looking at me like that,” I said. “It’s like I’m growing horns.”

  I felt my head, as if I was looking for said horns. My joke didn’t even make him smile.

  “My humblest apologies,” he said. “My manners escape me. This wine is delicious. Thank you for the gesture.”

  I put the hairbrush on the table, between our glasses. “Explain,” I said.

  Brit took the brush and moved it closer to the small ambient light to examine it. There was nothing to see; I had scrutinized the object to be sure.

  “Can you give me a hair?” he asked.

  “And after you’ll explain what’s going on?”

  “I will explain what I understand of it.”

  I took a hair by the root and pulled. “Ouch,” I exclaimed. “It’s really on there the bugger.” I chose another one at random. And another.

  “You can’t pull out your hair,” said Britannicus.

  It wasn’t a question.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I said. “What did you do to the brush? You want to get into the hair care business now that you slammed the door on the Guild?”

  “I did absolutely nothing to the brush or your hair. If I offered you this brush, it was to…check something.”

  “I think you’ve checked it. So now, explain.”

  “Valkyries don’t lose their hair,” he admitted.

  “I know.”

  For the first time of the night, he looked truly surprised.

  “Of course,” I said. “A thing like this happens to me, I do some research online. And what happened to me just before? A wizard offered me a brush, and I used a magical sword to decapitate a Valkyrie. Google did the rest.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Of course, of course…”

  “So by decapitating Goldilocks, I inherited her scalp mojo? Does that mean I’m going to go blonde?”

  “I really don’t know. A mortal killing a Valkyrie…to my knowledge, it’s a unique occurrence.”

  “She had lost most of her powers,” I said. “Odin had taken her wings and…what powers does a Valkyrie normally have? Other than invincible hair. The Internet isn’t very clear about that.”

  “I attempted to find out on my end,” said the wizard. “Unfortunately, since I’m cut off from the resources of the local Guild, my research was a little complicated.” He thought for a moment before adding, “That said, the library of the Nevada Guild is lacking in information concerning Viking magic in the best circumstances. Therefore I contacted colleagues in Stockholm and Oslo. I’m waiting to hear back. For the moment, I only have very generic information that’s not necessarily reliable.”

  “Tell me.”

  “As we have already said during this…’affair,’ Valkyries are minor goddesses of the Scandinavian pantheon. Legends state they are subservient to Odin. They would be tasked to look over battles, choosing the winners and bringing the dead to a particular afterlife destined to warriors.”

  “Valhalla,” I said.

  He nodded. “Typical imagery represents them as young women with wings,” he said. “I’m unsure if that’s meant to be literal or figurative.”

  “You mean, do they have real wings like harpies, or is it a way of saying…what?”

  “That they can travel between this world and the afterlife, for example. Or that they are of divine origin. Or…”

  He threw up his hands in a gesture of ignorance.

  “In any case,” I said, “Goldilocks didn’t have any wings when she came looking for trouble. And that doesn’t tell us anything about this whole hair thing. Why watch my mane? And why not tell me this outright?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you for no reason. I supposed…no, I vaguely wondered if the death of the Valkyrie had had any secondary effects on you. The fact that you could wield her sacred sword was already impressive in and of itself, then the fact that you could kill the goddess…” He sighed and twirled his wine in his glass for a moment before starting again: “Since I was unconscious at that moment, I wasn’t able to see what happened.”

  “Ah,” I said, “that’s it then: a previously unheard of magical phenomenon happens under your nose, and you missed the show. Frustrating?”

  “To say the least. And intriguing. According to Matteo, you lost consciousness for a moment while you were surrounded by the same fire produced by the sword.”

  “The ‘holy fire?’”

  “Exactly. Matteo claims that the fire completely surrounded you without burning you. Then you passed out, and the flames disappeared. Without singeing a single one of your hairs.”

  “And what did you conclude?”

  “Nothing for the moment. It might be an effect of your sword.”

  “It likes me so it protected me?”

  “For example.”

  “Do you have another hypothesis?”

  “The death of the Valkyrie could have created a sort of magical explosion, to which you were exposed.”

  “Like radiation, but instead of losing my hair, I got supermodel hair?”

  “Exactly.”

  I looked him over in the semi-darkness of the bar. “You were nearby too. How’s your hair?”

  He ran his hand over his crinkly black hair, buzzed to his skull. “Nothing to report.”

  “Matteo will be here soon to prepare his kitchen,” I said. “He was nearby too. We could ask him. But…”

  “But what?”

  “He hasn’t fed since that night, and it’s starting to show. His hair is flat again.”

  Matteo, the club’s cook, was a psychic vampire. He fed off of
human emotions. He was also vegan, which meant he refused to eat this way. Accordingly, he generally looked like a sickly sparrow.

  “That leaves Detective King,” Britannicus interjected. “Have you heard anything from her?”

  “Not for several days. Do you want me to ask her?”

  “It couldn’t hurt.”

  Lola King, Las Vegas police detective, had found herself mixed up in this thing when the Valkyrie had murdered my bartender to get my attention. I had done my best to keep Lola ignorant of the supernatural world, but she was even more stubborn than me, and she had insisted on knowing the truth. I imagined it must have shaken her some, but she hadn’t let it show. I decided to invite her to lunch tomorrow.

  “Other than that,” asked Britannicus after a few moments, “how are things going?”

  “If Barbie and Gertrude keep breaking so many bottles, I’m going to have to shut down.”

  “Why are they breaking so many bottles? Are they not doing well?”

  “I put Barbie behind the bar to replace Agatha,” I said. “But every time she turns around, her big harpy wings knock over everything that isn’t glued to the counter. So I asked Gertrude to take over. But when she tries to work quickly, she forgets her strength and breaks the glasses between her fingers.”

  “There’s a reason why so many trolls live under bridges,” said Britannicus. “It’s hard to keep a job when one is so…cumbersome.”

  “Gertrude is barely bigger than a human,” I said. “But I met her cousin, Yorik, and…Yeah, ‘cumbersome’ is one way to describe him.”

  “Who is tending bar then?” asked Britannicus.

  “Tonight I am,” I said. “But I’m looking to hire.”

  “Any promising candidates?”

  “Two. One guy with experience but who spent the past seventy years as a peacock and a girl who’s never worked in her life but who memorized the cocktail encyclopedia.”

  “A civilian?”

  “No. She has hooved feet and an inability to lie. Sometimes she ‘knows’ things, if I understood correctly. A little like a psychic.”

  “The truth is a very dangerous thing. Especially in a bar. What are you going to do?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. The guy is good, but no one knows him. The girl still has work to do, but she’s a friend of Nate’s.”

  “And she needs help,” said Britannicus.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You can’t resist a woman in distress. It’s the ‘mother hen’ side that you have in common with Nate.”

  “Me, in common…? With Nate? No way!”

  He tried to hide his smile behind his glass of wine, but I wasn’t fooled.

  I had spent six months on the road, on the run, before settling here in Vegas. I had lived in fear that my ex would find me. Since then, I had defeated a goddess, my ex was presumed dead, and my employees had become my substitute family. I had changed. Maybe I had in fact become as much of a ‘mother hen’ as Nate, my big hearted metamorph bouncer.

  “I can’t take in all the strays in Vegas.”

  “You could,” he said. “If you decided to.”

  “I already have enough to do managing my four employees. And now I need to find a fifth…”

  4

  I STILL HADN’t decided who to hire, and I was therefore stuck behind the bar. Tonight was quiet. Less customers than usual, a somber ambiance, almost gloomy.

  A guy who’s name I didn’t know sat down at the bar on a stool off to the side. Shoulders hunched, head hung, somber expression.

  He ordered a double whisky.

  “Bad day?” I asked, serving him.

  “If only it was just the day,” he grumbled. “My life sucks.”

  I put back the bottle but stayed facing the guy.

  “My name is Erica St. Gilles,” I said.

  “Henry.”

  “Henry. You look like a man who needs to talk.”

  He shrugged. “She doesn’t want to hear from me,” he finally let out.

  “Ah. Heartache. It hurts, but it doesn’t call into question your whole life.”

  “She dumped me when she found out what I am.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “She left,” he said. “Without a word. One night we were out to dinner in a romantic restaurant, and the next day, poof! Gone. Not even a phone call or an email. Another one who’s scared of spiders.”

  Not too sure what the connection was between the bugs and the rest of the conversation, I let Henry continue at his own pace.

  “You know,” he said, “I’m a direct descendant of Iktomi.”

  “I…uh…”

  “White people call him a ‘trickster god.’ The Native Americans see him as a hero and still tell many tales of the tricks he’s played. He could create the best illusions…It is said that he could use the silk of his web to manipulate humans like puppets. He could have abused this power, but he wasn’t a bad guy. He liked to laugh and set up epic pranks. Not many people remember him nowadays. Everyone is scared of spiders. Even here, among supernaturals, I’m forced to hide behind an illusion. If I revealed my true form, your customers would run away screaming. Even you, I’m sure you’re scared of spiders and you scream when you see one. And after that, you squish it.”

  He looked me straight in the eyes, as if challenging me to lie to him. I looked away and stammered.

  “Let’s say…it depends on the spider. What size are we talking here?”

  His hands stayed around his glass, but the air blurred around him and something pushed back the stools next to him, to the left and the right. The stools scraped against the floor and moved three feet each, leaving roughly ten feet in diameter with Henry in the middle. The man rolled his shoulders as if to relax his muscles and let out a sigh of relief.

  “I went on a plane once. I had to book three seats to myself, and I came off with knots everywhere.”

  I concluded that Henry didn’t transform into a spider, not like Nate turned into a bear or Max into a coyote. Henry was both a man and a giant spider at the same time.

  Henry maintained his human appearance, for which I was ever grateful to him. He pointed to his empty glass. “Another bourbon, please. I still have a few dark thoughts to drown.”

  His appearance might only be an illusion, but his voice didn’t hide anything. His sadness hit a soft spot in my chest, an old wound that I was unaware of until now. Instead of self-reflecting, I put the bottle of bourbon down on the bar. “On the house,” I said. “Just promise me not to drive to get home. Nate will call you a cab.”

  “Nah, forget about it. The cars are too narrow for me anyways. I’ll curl up in a corner of the parking lot long enough to sober up.”

  The air blurred again and the stools around him lifted up, seemingly on their own. I watched them flip over and be set back down, seats down and legs up, on either side of Henry, effectively stopping anyone from sitting next to him. I tried very hard not to picture the giant legs that had moved the stools with so much precision and care. I failed.

  Henry’s mind seemed to be somewhere else already. “Sometimes it skips generations. Like my great-grandmother who looked completely human. It was a shock to her when my grandmother was born with the legs and the eyes that go with it.”

  “Ah, yes,” I stammered. “Truly, it must…”

  “Be shocking, yeah. Magic is strange. And when genetics start getting involved, it gets crazy. Like me. It might be better that my lady left me. Who knows what we would’ve resulted in, her and me?”

  He let out a soul-splitting sigh and undertook drowning his relationship and genetic sorrows in alcohol. I left him to his task, more uncomfortable in his presence than I would have liked to be.

  I was cleaning glasses and thinking about Henry, his heartbreaks, and my arachnophobia when Gertrude came to find me.

  “Boss, there’s people who would like to talk to you.”

  The troll’s face seemed preoccupied. It’s not easy to read trol
ls’ expressions because they’re always halfway between flesh and stone. But being around Gertrude so often, I was starting to recognize her signs. At the moment, her massive forehead was wrinkled and her eyebrows were furrowed. She had also started to wring a rag in her hands.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked.

  “Yes. No. I mean, yes.”

  I put down the glass I was cleaning. “Is it Schrödinger’s problem?”

  The nerdy reference made her smile.

  “There is a problem,” she said, “but it’s not about the bar. It’s just people who need help, and we thought of you. It would be best if they explained it themselves.”

  She turned back towards the room and waved them over. Those sitting at a table all stood up at the same time. It was a strange group. A young, fragile-looking woman, a couple in their fifties, and three bikers, bald, tattooed, and pierced all over. They came over and stood in front of the counter, like children in front of a principal’s desk. Gertrude slipped away without making any introductions.

  “Uh…sit down,” I said, gesturing to the barstools. “I’ve been told you have a problem. What’s going on?”

  “People are disappearing,” said one of the bikers.

  I didn’t know how to answer. He didn’t say anything else, and we looked at each other in silence for a few moments before the lady in her fifties interjected.

  “Our son, Adam, he’s nineteen,” she said. “He hasn’t come home in three days.”

  She placed a picture on the counter. It was a typical yearbook photo, with the usual blue background and three-quarters pose. This one represented puberty incarnate: a brown-skinned teenager with a face covered in acne and a smile barred by braces. You could just make out emerald eyes behind his glasses.

  I pushed the picture back towards the woman. “I’m sorry, I haven’t seen him. And we don’t serve those under twenty-one.”

  “This is Kitty,” interjected the biker.

  He pointed to a young blonde guy in a group photo—half a dozen bikers posing with their Harleys on the side of a dusty road.

  “Kitty?” I said.

  The biker shrugged. “We’re pumas. Kitty is the youngest.”