DEDICATION
Thanks to Jason Hardy for taking a first-time writer on, Patrick Goodman for bringing me in and letting me add to the Sixth World’s vampire lore, and John Helfers for making this novel happen, and happen well. A writer is only as good as their editor, and I couldn’t have asked for better.
For Kelsey, who got me writing in the first place.
For P.N. Elrod, who wrote the stories that helped me find my voice.
For Tina Jens and Mort Castle, who taught me how to use it.
And for everyone else who has Porphyria and has been called a vampire for it. This book is for you. Let’s have some fun with it.
Prologue
Absent Friends • Seattle, 2064
10
The view from the ninth floor of Hotel Andra wasn’t terribly impressive unless you faced away from the window, third eye open, staring back into the rooms. There, dozens of dancers swirled across the floor, doing everything from the Charleston to the Foxtrot to the swells of swing and jazz. Up in the air, back and forth, skirt tassels, spat shoes, slicked-back hair, and laughter. The clink of martini glasses came from the kitchen, and somewhere the crash of broken glass sounded sharp and clear, followed by a yelp and shocked laughter. It was enough to distract me from a pair of dancers so absorbed in their Lindy Hop that I didn’t see them until the lady’s foot was flying at my face. I flinched as it made contact, then passed through my head, leaving a cold, dissonant ripple in my aura.
Unlike that of the New Century Square Hotel, the Andra’s management couldn’t figure how to turn their paranormal occupants into a profitable attraction. These were long-standing hauntings, deep-rooted, like a stain, almost impossible to drive out. Unable to knock the place down, they were stuck with a historically preserved and protected madhouse of a hotel. The next best thing was to have a live-in mage who could somehow channel the sometimes mischievous ghosts and act as caretaker.
This is where I lived.
The view was still nice enough on a rainy spring evening, as most Pacific Northwest evenings are wont to be, and a whole floor to myself wasn’t bad, either. My geomantic alignments kept the jazz to a quiet level, their power fueling my wards in a circuit of self- sufficient adaptation, and I tapped my toes and sipped my bagged drink. I wished it was warmer, or fresher, but it was guilt-free at least. My PocSec sat inches from my drumming fingers.
The call wasn’t late. Su Cheng was never, ever late. It vibrated once, and was in my hand.
His voice was as calm and cryptic as ever, a single syllable.
“Come.”
9
Twenty minutes later, I braked my old Yamaha Rapier to a stop in Chinatown. Thermals of steam rose off faux-paper lanterns as the rain pelted onto them, complementing the crimson and gold façade of the Taoist temple the Yellow Lotus Triad called home. The thrum of power was low and quiet in the astral, as calm and potent as a rushing river.
A pair of Yellow Lotus, an ork and a human, watched me from across the street, adjusting SMG-shaped displacements in their fashionable HK knockoff jackets. I was expected, of course, but they had to make their show of strength, keep up face. At least my elven ears weren’t out of place among them, the meta-friendly Triad. Giving the door guards a discreet nod, I headed up the steps and past a pair of holy statues of the Dragon and Tiger, their eyes seeming to follow me as I passed into the main hall.
Seated facing me, flanked by great pillars, the ancient Incense Master meditated before the three great forms of Yu Qing, Shang Qing, and Tai Qing. His eyes opened, burning yellow. He never revealed this aspect of his nature to any but those who shared it. I stood before him and bowed low.
“Greetings, great master.”
He rose, silent and smooth in crimson and black robes, his yellowed teeth baring in a smile under his drooping Fu Manchu. “You do not try to speak to me in Cantonese any more?” His soft voice belied immense power.
“I try not to speak any language I don’t fully grasp. Not after last time.”
“I’m quite sure Li Kwan has forgotten it entirely.” He chuckled, beckoning at me with a single, long talon as he walked into an antechamber upholstered in burning reds and golds. He sat at a low, carved table, its glossy lacquer making the dark wood gleam.
I sat on a silk pillow across from him as he poured a deep crimson mixture into a pair of small, delicately painted porcelain cups. Someday he would have to tell me what alchemical process he used to prevent it from coagulating.
“I have a task for you that should settle our mutual debts to one another.”
I accepted my cup with a slight bow of thanks. “I’m surprised you would call upon a gweilo for any task of import.”
“Hmph. Culture means less among our kind. You should know that. And aren’t you and I ‘ghost-people’ already?”
I nodded, drinking with him. The coppery taste was mitigated by hints of some sort of herbs. We set our cups down, and formalities completed, he drove straight to the point.
“The Kenren-Kai Yakuza have recently engaged in a string of assassinations against other organizations, contracting a specialist to remove those among their rivals that control industries they covet. The assassin is not one of their number, but is quite well-paid for his work.”
I nodded. “The Kenren-Kai stand to gain a lot from expanding into rival syndicates. It might even look good to the other Seattle Gumi.”
“Quite. But we cannot strike directly against them, and their hired dog is particularly well-suited against more mundane efforts to stop him.”
“A mage?”
“More than that. One of us. And one who shares your tradition, but with a decidedly darker bent.”
“There aren’t many darker paths than Black Magic.”
“Except for those few who practice it like you do, perhaps.” Su Cheng’s smile was almost mocking; he didn’t have a high opinion of my morality. “But he stands to stereotype, and has learned sacrificial practices.”
“A blood mage, then?”
“Yes. He simultaneously makes an impression, publicly and in the astral, by leaving the results of his work for all to see, and pollutes the site with fear and hatred. His defilements interfere with the feng shui, ruinously disruptive. Hardly good business, but very effective psychologically.”
“And you want me to kill him?”
He grinned. “It is my understanding that the Draco Foundation bounty for live blood mages is still a generous sum.”
“Why not test some of your disciples, send them after the killer?”
“Because we must marshal our strength. And because we cannot risk association with the deed. It is better we are thought weak by those who would strike at us, and it is better to avoid making a show of force just for the sake of pride. And because this man is a shadowy reflection of you. He is the Hun to your P’o. You are perfect to overcome him. And because you are in my debt, as I am in yours.”
He inclined his head to me, his point made. I sighed. I hadn’t run the shadows for a year, had largely remade myself into a fixer and consultant. Hunting down a threat like this, I might be a little rusty now.
But a debt is a debt, and it doesn’t pay to cross the largest triad in Seattle.
8
Hunting an assassin requires thinking like one. Just the same for a blood mage. Both often have sizable bounties on their heads, and that means the ones who are successful, or just survive long enough, develop a healthy sense of paranoia. They learn to keep their ears open, find out when someone is looking for them as soon as possible, the better to eliminate the threat.
I was spared the risks of working my contacts by the information the Yellow Lotus had found on their tormentor. All that Su Cheng had intimated was there, and more. V
asili Ivchenko, most personal details unknown, and only a sketch gathered from descriptions by one of a very few witnesses. Conjecture, mostly, but it was believed he might have been an operative for Yamatetsu, a Vory triggerman, or any of a dozen other origins.
Current intel stated that he was almost certainly employed by Chimera, the elite cabal of assassins, though no one could confirm if he was currently still among their number. What was certain was that he was called upon not for clean kills, but those meant to make a statement. Scorched earth of a magical nature, burning the life force of his victims to damage astral space itself to leave his mark.
What caught my attention so quickly was not his nature or his crimes (I’d hunted many kinds of monsters over the years), but the traditions he used to do so. Astral forensic analysis of the scenes of his strikes showed the emotions of his ritual sacrifices, aside from the terror of his victims, to be hedonistic ecstasy and terrible focus. The blood was used to paint blasphemous runes, pentagrams, Baphomet goat heads and inverted religious stylings, none of which held any real power beyond the psychological reaction to them. They were the textbook trappings of Black Magic, but with an important caveat: they incorporated technical designs drawn from all kinds of traditions. Hexagrammatic circles, mathematical lemniscate, esoterica from a dozen paradigms, and all of them harnessed purely for psychodrama, which usually confused the authorities. They didn’t know that the exercise was only for focus and theatrics, creating the mindset necessary to feel powerful, and exert that inflated ego upon magic, itself.
Dark Magic, my old master would have called it. It was a kind of hybrid tradition, Chaos Magic and Black Magic, which eschewed Chaos’ need for scientific methodology and the Machiavellian motives of Black, and instead demanded that magic obey the mage’s pure will. Force of personality shaped spells, bent mana, and lent power to the mage’s very id, one feeding the other. It was the pure, crude, and immediate pursuit of godhead. A path to absolute command of magic by way of one’s own dark, solitary nature.
I knew this, because to my regret, it is the same rare style of magic I was educated in.
7
It took two days to get everything in place, the tracing rituals, bound spirits, and research on his background and tactics, even with Su Cheng’s considerable documents and tissue samples recovered from previous assassination sites.
The night of the operation, I pressed the hidden catch on a pair of bookshelves containing my collections of magical hard texts, opening them to my small armory of gear. Past the collections of knickknacks and curious souvenirs I’d picked up during more than a decade of fighting supernatural threats and carrying out contracts for high-paying corporate intrigue were the black long coat, custom Ares Redline chambered to look like a Predator I, an array of sensor packages small enough to fit on a button or in a pocket, and the most expensive piece of equipment I owned: my vibro-katana weapon focus, etched in runes and with a fine Damascene veining of exotic steels sharpened to a mono-edge. Enchanting something so technologically advanced had required a lot of time and money, but I had yet to find a blade that cut harder or deeper.
From behind me, a voice of water and bells echoed into existence. “Why are you doing this? Do we need the money?”
My eyes didn’t leave the sword. I knew my ally as well as I knew myself; a feminine, elven form of water. She was my voice of reason, the calm in my moments of storm.
“We have plenty of money.”
“Then what? Settling things with Su Cheng?”
My fingers traced along the treated black leather and steel scabbard, baffled against sensors, the link between us radiating a sense of familiarity, almost like déjà vu. “My style of magic is just rare enough that there are very few of our kind that would know of it. There’s a chance this assassin learned it from...the same one I once learned it from.”
“Then this is about tracking down your origins? Revenge?”
I smiled. “I don’t think revenge would mean anything after all this time.”
“Then what?”
“Ivchenko’s dossier reads like a demon’s resume. And Su Cheng pegged it. This guy... he’s everything I’m afraid to be.”
“Afraid to try to be?”
“Afraid to let myself be.”
I pulled the blade from its sheath. To my astral sight, it glowed with power even as its edge hummed to life, vibrating faster than even I could see. “The world is better off without something like me out there.”
“Something like you?”
I turned to her.
“What I could become.”
6
The circle was cast in grave dust and oak ash, the ruined products of the mortality that sustained me and the fruits of nature that abhorred me. I could feel in it the echoes of sunlight and pulsing, living wood, both of which would cause me nothing but pain and death. All of it was dust in my hands, and that was proof of my power over them, bone and grain rendered into carbon that formed connective lines. Death to carve a channel. Life to form a link.
My practiced eye took in the shape of the circle, quickly and quietly measuring its dimensions. An imbalanced circle, or one with broken lines, would do me no good. Likely it would ruin the spell. Not because the circle itself was important, but because a perfect circle represented a sound mind, steady nerves. Sure action. Confidence.
At each of the cardinal points I placed the Enochian symbols for Air, Earth, Fire and Water. Widdershins formed into a Choku Rei swirl, overlaid with a geometrically reinforced pentagram. Without breaking my concentration, I mused over the misnomer that a pentagram, or even a dark mage should automatically be considered “evil.” The pentagram did not point downward to summon demons, but mageward, to focus the harvest to the harvester. To be a Dark Magician was not to be evil, nor even to cast oneself into the darkness, but the see the world—good and bad, dark and light, life and death—for what it is, and accept it, taking it all into oneself and thereby becoming stronger.
The circle was complete and time was running short. At the distant point of the circle, I deposited Ivchenko’s blood sample upon the point for Earth to stabilize it. On either side of me were Fire and Air, elements of motion and change, leading to where I stood at Water, ironically the element I philosophically favored, and its accompanying render of data into fluid wisdom.
I watched as the blood seemed to soak into the ash, watched as the echo of Ivchenko’s True Name whispered life into the bone dust and oak ash, forming small, red lines that leached quickly across the circle. Waiting for the exact moment, I sliced a finger on my right hand and let a drop of blood hit the symbol for Water just as the lines reached it, one side vibrating with an internal breeze, the other burning like a fuse.
Met with my sanguine offering, a single red drop formed, hovering above the Water symbol, the merged essence of him and me, forming a connection I could use to track him. I grasped it with my left hand, clenching my fist tightly to smear the fluid all over. I could feel the resistance of the forces I called upon, and felt the ecstatic shudder of exerting my own will over them. Quieting, their rebellion became a cowed support, and I held my bloodied hand over the circle and pressed it down into the center of the ash. My palm stopped at the marble table, but my soul pressed through into the astral, and soon I was following the bright red trail of the assassin’s blood, passing through time and possibility, and into his plans to know where he would be tonight.
5
Ten in the evening, and the distant rumble of thunder made for a dramatic setting. Except Seattle didn’t have thunderstorms. More likely a volcanic gust of fresh ash into the choked sky.
It would probably be raining acid within an hour, and I pulled my hood up out of the collar of my long coat. I had a commanding view of Ivchenko’s target from a taller roof across the street, a sleepy motel in Everett that housed a Yellow Lotus brothel, one of the few criminal enterprises they maintained in the up-and-coming neighborhood.
The front doors and lobby were in sight
, and a pair of masked watcher spirits kept sight of the back alley entrance. Ivchenko would have masking of his own, but with his astral signature specifically known to me, I had the upper hand. If I had a team, I’d have picked a drone rigger to help patrol the area, posted a sniper where I was, and waited in the motel myself. I worried for the people inside, criminals or not, and my one reassuring thought was that Ivchenko did not favor bombs. He would go in personally and unleash hell with his magic.
And that was when I would stop him.
The watcher spirits proved useless as I spotted a small, hunched man with skin like an old potato slowly approach the hotel. My eyes narrowed as I focused on his aura, masked and fluxed so potently that there was almost no chance to see who or what they really were. Powerful, though, there was no mistaking that. There was a chance this was simply an old mage looking for a good time, but I couldn’t stay out here if that really was Ivchenko.
As soon as he passed the threshold, I took my katana by the scabbard and leaped from the roof. A whispered word of power, and I floated down to land, shoe meeting pavement with a gentle tap.
The lobby was clear of any obvious security besides a lone surveillance cam. There had to be more hidden throughout the building, considering its hidden enterprise. Piss-yellow carpets and old cream walls trimmed in forest green, dirty black-and-white tile for the lobby floor.
No sign of the old man. I whispered a command for one of the watchers to cover the front door in case I was playing the wrong hunch and headed to the second floor, where an large ork “attendant” sat near a caution-taped off hallway.
“Under construction,” he grunted, looking up from his hard copy trog-fetish magazine.
I leaned close. “I brought an umbrella.”
He nodded at the code phrase and flipped a switch near the taped wall, causing the web of yellow and black to swing back into the hallway like a gate.
Shadowrun: Crimson Page 1
