Savage: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Solumancer Cycle Book 2)

by J. C. Staudt

  “Champagne and hors d’oeuvres at seven, dinner at seven thirty. The event should wrap up around ten. I hope this isn’t going to be like the probate hearing.”

  I can’t believe she’s still giving me crap about that. “I said I’ll be there. You can count on it. In the meantime, try to stay away from Mottrov. If you can.”

  “Oh my god. I heard you the first time, Arden. Bye.”

  She hangs up before I can respond. When I slouch into the leather armchair with an exhausted sigh, Ersatz climbs onto the armrest beside me. “You’ve broken one of the cardinal rules of being a man.”

  “Only one? Feels like I just broke them all.”

  “Never tell a woman what to do unless you want her to do the opposite.”

  “How am I supposed to protect her if she won’t listen to me?”

  “Now you’re really seeing things from my perspective,” says Calyxto, emerging from the kitchen behind Quim to take a seat on the couch.

  “It’s hard dealing with normals,” Quim agrees. “You can’t warn them about the danger they’re in or they’ll just look at you like you’re crazy.”

  “Sometimes I think I am crazy, Quim. I can’t believe I agreed to go to that stupid gala.”

  “It’s too bad, right?” Calyxto observes. “With Mottrov at the Civic Center Friday night, it would’ve been the perfect time to raid his mansion for the grimoire.”

  “That’s an amazing idea. You should break into Mottrov Manor while I’m at the gala.”

  Calyxto shakes his head. “No can do, partner. Direct intervention is strictly verboten. I can guide you to the object-slash-person of your desire, but I can’t interact with said person or object on your behalf. I do the finding. You’ve got to do the doing.”

  “What if I knew someone else who could do the doing? Could you help them find the book?”

  “Not for free. I’d need to mark them.”

  “But theoretically, you could find the book for me and I could tell them where it is.”

  “To find a creature, I need an object they own. To find an object, I need a part of the creature who owns it.”

  “So like a hair from Mottrov’s head could be used to locate the legendary magical grimoire he owns.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That idea’s out, then. Unless I shake his hand and pluck a hair from his head like it’s some form of weird cultural greeting.”

  “One does not simply steal body parts from vampires,” says Ersatz.

  “I guess we’re going in blind, then.”

  Quim looks worried. “Who’s we?”

  “Don’t freak out, QuimTak. I’m not gonna make you stand on stage and pretend to be me while drinking liquid narcotics again.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “The only way I’m ever going to get that book is by tipping off someone who wants it as badly as I do.”

  Chapter 13

  It’s a good thing goblins are creatures of habit, or Buster McCracken would be harder to find. He waddles into the Neon Cafe at the same time of night with the collar of his trencher popped and his fedora slung low. He looks and smells like he’s had a full Tuesday of doing gobliny things in gobliny places with gobliny people. Like me, he enjoys his creature comforts, and a salted caramel double mocha skim appears to be just the thing to get him through the evening.

  “Buster,” I call from my booth seat across the cafe, just as the barista hands him his drink. I’m not going back-alley on this one. We’re gonna sit across the table from one another in plain view, and we’re going to look each other in the eye and talk this out like civilized individuals.

  The goblin’s brow darkens at the sight of me. He grabs a cup holder for his drink and comes over, slides the paper cup onto the table, and hoists himself onto the bench seat across from me. He tries a sip and burns his tongue. Beneath the partial shroud of his coat and hat, I notice a bruise on his forehead. His cheek is split open, and his right eye is swollen shut.

  “What’s you doing here?” he wants to know.

  I ignore his injuries, which haven’t helped his face any. “I came to deliver some good news.”

  “Oy? What sort?”

  “It’s about the Book of the Dead.”

  His good eye twitches. “Go on, then.”

  “Your real name is Kaz Golug. Mind if I call you Kaz?”

  “I’d sooner you didn’t. What’s it to you?”

  “I don’t like fake names. Anyway, since I’m a nice guy, and I want to help you get the book, I’m going to tell you exactly when to strike Mottrov Manor.”

  Buster touches his split cheek. “Too late for that. We already struck. Went after it yesterday. Reckoned the only way to do it was fast and hard in broad daylight. Little did we know, the bloodsuckers left their thralls standing guard while they slept. Two of me mates went down in the fracas. I nearly lost me head.”

  “You didn’t get the book?”

  “I got a right walloping. That’s what I got.”

  I can’t believe it. I figured a bunch of goblin sorcerers would have a decent shot at coming out clean. Now they’ve made things worse for the both of us. “You need to strike again.”

  “What, so we lays out for the grimoire while you sits back and reaps the rewards?”

  “Mottrov can’t be allowed to keep that book.”

  “There’s no getting it now. The grimoire ain’t at Mottrov Manor no more. Like as not it’s locked up in one of his vaults. It’ll never see the light of day so long as he lives. These grimoires have a way of disappearing for centuries at a time. Ain’t often one rears its head. We did our best, but we couldn’t hold our own against a hundred thralls.”

  “A hundred? Don’t the covens have limits on how many thralls a vampire can take?”

  “Aye. Someone’s been breaking the rules. So tell me, wizard, when’s the perfect time to strike?”

  “Answer me one question first. Did you send the orc on the bicycle?”

  His face scrunches together. “Orc on a bicycle?”

  “You didn’t send me a message in fiendish script? Written on a black silk ribbon?”

  “I ain’t got the faintest idea what you’re on about.”

  “That’s the honest truth.”

  “Honest truth.” He rakes a hand across his chest with two fingers extended, which I assume to be some kind of goblin swearing gesture.

  “Alright, here’s the tip. Mottrov is attending a fundraising gala on Friday night. From seven to ten p.m., he’ll be at the old Civic Center down by the riverfront.”

  “And?”

  “And… that means he won’t be wherever the book is. You and your buddies were looking for the perfect opportunity to steal it. This is the one.”

  “I told you, it’s over.”

  “So what does the Warrendale Crew do now? Move on and forget about it?”

  “Keeps our eyes peeled, is what we does. And our wits about us. We waits for the next grimoire what turns up.”

  Clearly this isn’t the time to tell him about the gun safe in my walk-in closet, which holds, among other things, two of the six legendary Grimoires of Magic. “You and your buddies must have megacorp backing to put up the kind of money you were bidding at Throgmorton’s.”

  “Wouldn’t you likes to know?” he sneers.

  “Yeah, I would.”

  “We’s got a few assets of our own.”

  “And what sort of activities fund these assets?”

  “Little of this, little of that. Gaming, pharmaceuticals, and hustling, mostly.”

  “Gambling, drugs, and prostitution.”

  Buster shrugs. “Tomato tomahto.”

  “Which coven is the Mottrov family allied with?”

  “What’s with all the questions?”

  “I’m looking for someone who may have been abducted by an organization with ties to Mottrov’s syndicate.”

  “Mottrov’s with the Ascended.”

  “The Ascended. That’s the big one, right?�
��

  “Second-biggest in the world. Only reason they ain’t the biggest is the infighting. They’ve been trailing the Hallowed for years. Can’t quite gets a leg up on ‘em, what with all the quibbling. Worse than a pack of blithering gits, they is.”

  “And you’re sure Mottrov is Ascended.”

  “I’ll puts it to you like this. A couple of Mottrov’s guys meets with some of ours in the back room of my Auntie Gragie’s bowling alley every Thursday night for Texas Hold‘em. Now if you needs a more inside bloke than my Gragie, I defies you to find one.”

  My schedule just got one bowling alley fuller. “Ever heard of a group called the Order of the Raven?”

  Buster wrinkles his mouth. “Can’t say as it rings a bell. Oy, any chance you minds me making a quick run to the loo?”

  I’ve never had a goblin I was interrogating ask to use the restroom before. What’s the protocol for that? “Promise you won’t run off?”

  “I’ll leaves me joe sitting right here. I runs off, it’s all yours.”

  I try not to look disgusted. “Great.”

  Buster slides off the bench and waddles to the restroom.

  My phone starts buzzing. It’s Quim. “Hey, QuimTak. What’s up? Make it quick. I’m with Buster. He’s in the bathroom.”

  “Did you ask him about the ribbon?”

  “Yeah. He had no clue what I was talking about.”

  “Strange.”

  “I know, right? So what’s going on?”

  “Dug up some new info. Makes sense why Carmine has never heard of the Order of the Raven. They’re not operating in the open. They don’t even call themselves by that name in public.”

  Quim’s voice fades into the background as my eyes focus on Buster’s coffee cup. There’s steam rising through the tiny mouth hole in the lid. A lot of steam. More than any salted caramel double mocha skim has the right to be letting off. When I inhale, there’s a faint burning smell. That’s when I realize it isn’t steam rising from Buster’s coffee cup.

  It’s smoke.

  “Holy sh—” I dive over the back of the booth as the cup explodes, blowing out the cafe windows in a sea of glass. A fireball swells through the room, sending patrons and employees to the floor and blasting the double-sided booth seat out from under me. Tables buckle. Vinyl upholstery melts. The force tosses me under the adjacent table, and I’m buried beneath a pile of burning debris. Smoke fills the cafe while its confused occupants scramble to escape.

  That goblin is dead meat, I swear as I claw my way out from beneath the heap. I shove half a table aside and wave away a flurry of airborne ash on my way to the men’s bathroom, where I kick open the door and look around. It’s a windowless single-person facility, and it’s empty.

  There must be a pocket of Between in here somewhere. I cast a detection spell with my thinning bracelet and reach into my pocket for a pill. Purple vapor leaks from the seal where the urinal is caulked to the wall. “Why do they always put these things in the nastiest possible place?” I mutter.

  Just before I step into the urinal, I remember I was on the phone with Quim when the explosion happened. My cell phone isn’t in my hand or in any of my pockets. When I return to what’s left of my table, I find the molten remains of what was once a beautiful, functional smartphone, now a lump of gray plastic with nickel-and-silicone guts behind a cracked glass face. Hope Quim isn’t offended that I hung up on him.

  Red and blue lights are flashing outside, so I duck into the bathroom and high-step through the porcelain urinal. A dark clump of Between spits me out beneath a four-lane bridge with traffic rushing by overhead. Two trolls hunch on the rocks beside the slanted bridge supports, passing a can of baked beans back and forth and taking noisy slurps. They really do love bridges as much as the fairytales claim.

  “Hey,” I shout over the noise. “Did you see a goblin pass this way?”

  They toss me bored stares and return to their supper.

  I draw from the residue pill, waking a torch-sized flame in my hand. “Hey. I’m talking to you. Did a goblin come through here?”

  The trolls cringe away as I wave the flame at them. One points. A three-foot-tall pedestrian waddles down the distant roadside, hugging the highway toward Warrendale.

  “Have a blessed evening,” I say, extinguishing the flame.

  I slide down the smooth concrete slope and give chase, resisting the urge to throw spells at him. When he glances over his shoulder, I no longer have a choice. I lob a goopy green mass through the air, but he yanks out his wand and blasts it with a bolt of white energy. Tiny spatters of limp gel land harmlessly around him. I should’ve known stopping him wasn’t going to be that easy.

  Before I can close the distance, Buster reaches an idyllic suburban avenue and scurries out of sight behind a low brick rambler. I follow him through the neighborhood, refraining from magic use so as not to draw attention from the residents as they return home from work and sit down to dinner and watch evening television. Buster’s short legs are no match for mine, but his size keeps him well-concealed as he ducks through evergreen shrubbery and backyard playgrounds.

  He doesn’t stop running until the neighborhood ends at a corner drugstore, where he finds himself trapped in the back lot by a high brick wall flanking a pair of dumpsters. He takes up a defensive position and sends a spell scudding through the air inches from my head. I step back behind the corner of the building, my left ear buzzing with the near miss. Time to jack this little fucker up.

  I pepper the dumpsters with glittering sparkstones, then release a deep red cyclone to smash them backwards a hop-step and shred the garbage bags within, lifting their contents into its twisting storm. Buster breaks the cyclone with a windwall and flings a trio of glowing white bolts at me, striking the building’s corner and blowing chunks of brick off the wall. I hurl a series of sizzling blue missiles, one after another, to shock the dumpsters with crackling voltage. Buster catches a jolt and goes stiff, toppling to the pavement like a felled tree.

  Now’s my chance to gain some ground. I dart from behind the wall and thrust a searing firelance at his chest, aiming to kill. He knocks it away with his wand and counters with a black globe, which lands at my feet and bursts into a noxious cloud. It’s the smoke orb spell I used to great effect against Krydos and Jerry Douglas in Club Sephora a few months back, only Buster’s version is laced with poison.

  I fall back, coughing, eyes watering. The cloud spreads, obscuring my view and pushing me to the drugstore wall. If I circle the cloud toward open ground, Buster will have me in his sights before I can get to him. I try dissolving the cloud with a wind spell, but the toxic smoke only swirls and plumes and intensifies.

  I hold my breath and charge straight through it, heaving a small brown bead into the space between the dumpsters to cover myself as I advance. The bead strikes pavement, and a wave of force blasts the dumpsters away as if they’re cardboard boxes. I follow up with a quick fireball, pinpointing Buster’s position. Though my eyes are watering and I’m coughing up a lung, I manage to invoke a respectably large blast.

  When the smoke clears, Buster’s not there. I dredge the last of the pill’s power on an interstice spell, but there are no pockets of Between to be found. He’s gone, vanished, and I’m left with burning, itchy eyes and lungs as black as a career coal miner’s.

  I walk the area to make sure Buster isn’t hiding behind a trash bag or under a bent scrap of metal. No such luck. The little bastard gave me the slip. He’s a good liar, I’ll give him that. He probably sent the orc with the black ribbon after all. Now I’m stranded in Warrendale, the left armpit of America, with my car across town outside the burning cafe I left behind.

  No use going back for it with all the attention the cafe’s probably getting right now, so I shiver through the cold night toward the nearest bus stop—which isn’t near by any stretch—and make my way home. I’m exhausted, frozen, and wheezing through my black lungs by the time I step off the elevator into the fifth floor hallw
ay of Phipps Plaza Tower. I resist the impulse to run when I see what awaits me. Standing outside the door to apartment 503 is a uniformed officer of the New Detroit Police Department.

  Chapter 14

  She’s tall and slender, with an athlete’s build and sharp features. She stands with her hands clasped behind her back, feet shoulder width apart, and turns her head in a smooth, measured arc to watch me as I approach. She studies my singed coat and soot-stained blue jeans with particular interest. “Mr. Savage?” she asks as I come close. “Arden Savage?”

  “That’s me.”

  She flashes her badge. “Officer Desdemona Dolman, NDPD. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  I wonder whether she’d go away if I said I was tired and didn’t feel like talking. “Not at all. Come on in.”

  I pick up a scent as she walks past me. It’s like perfume, but sterile. Her black hair is slick and flawless and pinned back in a tight bun, and when I invite her to sit at the kitchen island she occupies the barstool with perfect posture.

  “Can I offer you something to drink? Something to eat?”

  “No thanks.”

  I nod and break into a fit of uncontrollable coughing. I take out a glass for myself and fill it with water from the fridge’s dispenser. Buster got me good with that damn smoke spell.

  “You alright?” asks Officer Dolman. “You don’t sound so good, there.”

  “Must be coming down with a chest cold or something.” I can feel her eyes on the back of my neck as I slide a residue pill to the lip of the glass with my thumb, taking it into my mouth and gulping down half the glass’s contents.

  “It’s that time of year,” she says. “This kitchen is gorgeous, by the way.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “Shame about that, though.” She points at the cabinet Quim punched a hole through. “How’d it happen?”

  “Oh, that. I was moving a piece of furniture the other day. Sometimes I get clumsy. Didn’t watch where I was going. I’m not even sure they make these cabinets anymore. I’ll probably have to get a new door custom-fitted and finished.”