by D. Levesque
I look at her and can’t help but grin back. “Sure.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The good thing about going to a new place is my Portal stone automatically tags it as a new location and adds it to my list. Once Carmen and I pass through the Portal she created, the first thing that hits me is the smell. It’s the smell of food cooking. I always loved Moroccan food. Especially a dish called tagine.
It’s afternoon from what I can see by looking at the sun. I glance at Carmen, and I notice she is back in human form.
“Why are we using a Portal in the middle of the day?” I ask her, perplexed. It’s not just that it’s the middle of the day, we’re also in the middle of a busy city. I can hear the hum of typical city noises. Cars stereos blaring, folks shouting, kids playing or crying.
“Don’t worry. This spot is the portal-approved zone. Most who live within a five or six hundred radius are not human. “
“What?” I say, surprised by this.
Carmen turns to me with a grin. “We live among you humans. Many Magic folks did not run away when the Gods offered the portals to us. My family is one of them. I am from Earth. Actually, I’m from New Jersey.”
“Wait, you’re from Earth?” I ask her, intrigued.
“Yep. Born and bred. I’m from the Mother World.”
“Mother World?”
Carmen nods and motions for me to follow her, but she keeps talking. “Mother World is where we are all from. We were all born here or came here. Elves, Changelings, Werewolves, Vampires, Fairies, to name a few. There are hundreds of others. Some races have been significantly reduced. And some have died off completely.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I tell her.
And I really do mean that. I am pretty sure we humans are to blame. Not only are we putting animals to extinction, it seems that we are doing the same to creatures of Magic.
“They had the chance to go across the abyss if they wanted to, as we called it. This was before we knew it was called space. I am not one to talk, though. My ancestors stayed here instead of going across. But we still visited the worlds. I might have been born in Jersey and grown up there, but my schooling was on Vraka.”
“How many Magic folks are living on Earth?” I ask her.
“No clue,” she says with a shrug. “Unlike some worlds, we don’t take a census. I know they do on Vraka. Now. The Fairy and goblin worlds don’t. The Dwarves if they do, they don’t tell us,” she says with a shrug of her shoulders.
“So Dwarves are real?”
“Yes,” she says, turning a corner and heading up a side street that angles upwards. “Have you seen the Lord of the Rings movies?”
“Yes?” I say slowly.
“Well, they look like that, except their skin is black as midnight. They don’t see the sun a lot. Even in their world, it’s always dark. There’s tons of ash in the air from thousands of volcanos. I went once and that was it for me. I was on a job. Otherwise, they limit visitors. But I was on official M.A.G.I. business so they had no choice.”
“So they look like Gimli, but with black skin? Short, long beards?” I ask her incredulously.
“Yep,” she says with a grin. “And they use axes and all that. Their power is Earth-based, or I should say planet-based,” she says with a frown. “They are one of the rare Magic folks who can connect to the Magic of the world they are on. For us, it’s tougher, or it is for my ancestors who went to Vraka. I was born here and lived here, so I can tap into the Magic here.”
“I guess, being human, I would have nothing to tap into,” I tell her.
“Hmm. Not really. Sorry, hon. I heard through the grapevine, though, that you can do Magic because you swallowed an elixir?” she says, turning another corner and looking back over her shoulder at me.
“Yeah,” I tell her with a growl. “Wrong place, wrong time. But now I possess Magic and a shit ton of knowledge that was force-fed to me.”
“Well, it ain’t all bad,” she says with a laugh. “I like that you’re human.”.
“You do” I ask her, a little perplexed since everyone I have met has hated my guts.
“Remember, I grew up here on Earth. My tastes tend to run more towards humans than my own kind,” she says, and I can tell she is a little uncomfortable about that.
“Oh?” I know I should leave it, but this has got me really intrigued. A person of a Magic race who likes a human?
“That’s why I’m helping you. I want to see if I can foster your friendship,” she says with an impish grin. “I heard you’re pretty powerful, and I don’t know about you, but I like powerful people. The fact that you’re tall and handsome is a bonus. Were you a model here on Earth before you got Magic?”
“Pfft,” I tell her with a laugh. “God, no. I worked at a desk job doing financial stuff.”
Carmen looks me up and down and grins. “Bet you had all the ladies in the office after you.”
“Yeah,” I tell her, rubbing the back of my neck. “I tried not to, as the saying goes, dip my pen in the company ink. There were some girls in the office. Most were married, thank God. But I wasn’t one for dating.”
“Virgin?” Carmen says with a delicious smile.
“No,” I answer with a laugh. “That I am glad I am not. I have had relationships, but they all seemed so one-sided. So I stopped dating.”
“So no girlfriend?” Carmen asks me, looking at me sideways with a smile.
“Well, I am technically married now,” I remind her with a shrug.
“To Marrisa.”
“Yeah,” I say, but leave it at that. I don’t know Carmen well enough to go into the details of how I got married to save me from a life of slavery to the Council.
“Ah, here we go,” Carmen says before things can get too awkward. She points to a door in the building we are passing.
“What city are we in?” I ask her. The area we are in looks pretty slummy.
“We are in Casablanca. Just out that way is Baghdad Boulevard. We have homes in the more influential places too, but for this, I need help.”
With that, she opens the door without knocking and I follow her in. We end up inside some kind of small entryway. Inside the room are a couple of chairs and another door leading out of the room. Carmen goes to it, knocks, and waits.
I hear shuffling from the other side, and then a small panel in the door slides open and a woman speaks in Arabic.
Carmen says something back in the same language. The panel closes and the door unlocks, and then it opens. On the other side is a smallish woman who looks Arabic; a human, who is wearing jeans and a blouse. She waves us in and gives Carmen a quick hug, looking at me curiously.
“We need information,” Carmen tells the women.
“Ah.” The woman nods. “Come into the back,” she says in cultured English with a British accent. “Your friend does not speak Arabic, Carmen?”
“No, Ila. He does not.”
Carmen doesn’t offer any more information, so Ila nods and closes the door, motioning for us to follow her. She goes deeper into what I assume is someone’s home until she gets to another door. This one she opens as well, and once we’re through, I see that it heads down a flight of stairs.
When we get to the bottom, I stop in surprise. It’s a basement, but there is no way it’s only for this house, is it? It’s humongous. But the real reason for my shock is all the monitors all over the place. The walls are plastered. I stop counting when I get to twenty. On each monitor is something different—either a news feed, a live camera feed, or some kind of data graph. Some of them are switching on their own.
There is only one person in the room; a man who appears to be Arabic as well. He looks over from his keyboard, where he seems to be in command of all this, and sees Carmen.
“Ah! Carmen!” he says with a big smile. He walks over and kisses Carmen on both cheeks after grabbing her hands. “We have missed you. Are you-?” He interrupts himself and looks at me suddenly.
“No, I am not ba
ck working in Morocco. I am only here on loan from the CIA,” she says.
CIA? What the hell. Is that the story they use to cover up who they really are? It makes sense. Not like they can say, oh, hey, I’m really a Changeling who can do Magic.
“Ah, that’s good. We miss you. So, to what do we owe the honor of having you visit?”
“I need help. And I told my friend here,” she points to me. “That you would be the best person to go to. We need information on a person. He might have only arrived, say, a week ago? He’s rich. A tourist. Mostly liked to party at night. He is also very well educated. He is white, rarely out in the sun, so no tan. He might have talked about going to a fancy university in the United States of America. He would be young. Maybe early twenties? Does that fit anyone you have been watching, Houmad?”
“Hmm,” Houmad says, looking thoughtful and walking towards his desk.
Sitting down again, he begins to type quickly, and the largest screen in the room switches from CNN to the inside of a bar. The screen flickers from image to image, and after a minute I realize that it’s switching through different camera angles, rotating through the cameras in a club.
After a good ten minutes of going through different clubs, Houmad finally slows down. Suddenly I see a familiar face in one of the images.
“That’s him!” I say excitedly, pointing to the screen.
William is seated on a couch in a club drinking wine, with two beautiful women on either side of him. One is a white woman, who looks Russian, and the other is a woman of African American descent, whose skin is as dark as coffee. They are all laughing, and the women are both looking at him with dreamy eyes.
“Ah,” Houmad says, nodding. “Let us see what we can find of this man.”
Soon there are yellow lines superimposed over William’s face. Like you would find if you were editing a face for some game.
“Face recognition,” Ila supplies at my confused look. “What Houmad will do now is run a search for him and see what that turns up.”
“Ah, good,” I tell her, relieved.
“I got something,” Houmad says two minutes later. “But you will not like it.”
“Why’s that?” Carmen asks him slowly.
“He is no longer here. He was taken by private jet out of Morocco. According to the flight plan from a week ago, it says he was going to Bombay, but looking at the actual radar and airport reports, they landed in Miami, USA,” he says, looking over his shoulder at Carmen and I. “There is another issue as well.”
“Oh? What now?” Carmen says with a frown.
“Someone is chasing this man. Desperately. She stole another jet and had it fly to Miami as well. But the plane never made it. It was blown up over Miami somewhere. The local police, CIA, FBI, you name it, are all over the area.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” Carmen says, waving her hand.
“It is?” I say, and I hear it echoed from Houmad.
“Yes. We know who that is. She’s one of ours. She did it to hide her tracks. Though, blowing up a full private jet was probably a little much. But,” Carmen shrugs her shoulders, “it’s who she is.”
“Hmm. Very well. Is there anything else?” Houmad asks her, and I can see the confusion on his face. Right there with you, buddy. Right there with you.
“Yes. Can you get false IDs for my partner and I, and two plane tickets to Miami?” Carmen asks him sweetly.
“Of course. Standard fee,” Houmad tells her, nodding.
“Of course,” Carmen says, and out of nowhere, she pulls out a small gold bar. Houmad’s eyes light up.
“You will need the rest in American cash?”
“Or on a credit card. Whichever is easiest. Though I doubt I can bring such a large amount into the US undetected. So make it half and half?” Carmen tells him.
I watch all this, impressed. Damn, this is some spy shit if I ever saw it. What the hell will working on Earth mean for me now as a M.A.G.I. Bounty Hunter? Can I expect this to be the normal thing for me now? I can’t help but grin. Jason Bourne, here I come.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Flight from Casablanca to Miami has been uneventful so far. Total flight time is fourteen hours, but I’ve slept through most of it. Before we got on the plane, I had just finished training, then there was my surprise party at my new apartment Marrisa on Vraka, and then I had to rush out again. I had already been ready to crash when Marrisa and I were on the couch after the party. By the time I boarded the plane, I was running on fumes. Carmen saw that and told me to go ahead and sleep since it would be a long flight.
While we were waiting for the plane, I asked Carmen where she got that gold bar from. She looked at me with a grin and told me to look in my spells and find the one that tells me what I would use to conjure a gold bar. But no matter what I looked for, there was no spell to conjure a gold bar. I told her so, and she said to sleep on it and see if it comes to me.
Surprisingly enough, it did. During my last sleep session on the plane, just before I had to get up and use the facilities, it came to me. I looked at her and told her she had used a spell to summon an Earth element and had it bring her gold. She laughed and said, “exactly.” And the gold was real. She had told the Earth element what she wanted in the way of purity and how it was shaped, since she had held one before, and the rest was done on the sly. Magic people did not lack for money on Earth. Credits were created, Carmen said, because otherwise everyone would just be conjuring stuff up. You can’t conjure credits. You needed to earn them. So the Council decreed it that no business could be done except with credits.
When I asked her how they back up the credits without gold like, say, the U.S. did ages ago before banks took it over and started printing their own money, she said that it was covered by something that you can’t get an Earth element to bring you. Fay gold. When I looked at her oddly, she said that fay gold was unique in that it was gold that held power. Magic power. It was naturally occurring but hard to find. It was also impossible to create. So that was what they used.
Walking back from the lavatory, I sit back down and look at Carmen. “I thought you all had issues with iron? Or the stories say you do,” I whisper to her.
She nods. “We still do. But the good thing is, most planes now have something covering the iron. It’s not close proximity that does it, it’s touching it, and even then, we can handle it for short periods. Over time, we have gotten less sensitive to it. Now, if this was thousands of years ago. It would have been a death sentence for any magical creature.”
“And Werewolves and silver? Vampires with holy water?”
“There is some truth to that. Shoot a Werewolf with silver and it does reduce their rate of healing. But it would have to be a critical shot. Like a heart or a head shot,” Carmen says, thinking about it. “Vampires with holy water? Maybe when the church priests had more faith.”
“Is God is real?”
“I really can’t say. But Faith is a very powerful thing. Ages ago, it was much stronger, so holy water was a spell in the form of water. It would hurt a Vampire. Now? They might get a slight rash.”
“And sunlight? You know, as I am thinking about my question, the answer is coming to me. I’m still not used to this information. Sometimes it feels like it’s behind a cotton cloud.”
“Yes. You will get used to it, though. As the information begins to process in your mind, it will come easier.”
She’s right. As I think about it, the knowledge comes that sunlight doesn’t kill Vampires. But it does hurt them. They are literally creatures of the night. That is why Sir William Tonlia looked so pale. He doesn’t get out into the sun. There is some kind of light that the sun throws off at a certain wavelength that is harmful to a Vampire’s skin. Think cancer but on a faster scale. Instead of years, hours. So most wear lots of sunscreen, which seems to work. That SP 60 stuff was actually created by the Vampires to use for their personal use, but they hyped up the benefits to humanity so much that now it’s readily available to
everyone.
“This is your captain speaking,” comes through the overhead speakers. “We are about to land. Miami is a nice 78 degrees, and the sun is out. The current time is 2:43 PM, and if there are no delays, we will be at the gate around 3:05 PM. Thank you for flying with us.”
“There, we should be down soon,” Carmen says with a sigh of relief.
“Hate flying?” I ask her with a smile.
“I hate it with a passion, but it gets me where I need to go faster, so I put up with it. I might have been born on Earth, but I am still a Changeling through and through. No way were we meant to fly like this. The Gods, if they wanted us to fly, would have given us wings like the Fairies.”
“Well, like the captain said, we should hit the gate in about twenty.”
“Thank the Gods,” Carmen mumbles under her breath.
“Ah, that would be our ride,” Carmen says. We landed ten minutes late, but we still were doing good for time. We have no luggage, so we essentially just got off the plane, walked through security, and headed outside.
“How come they didn’t detect, or even see, your rifle?” I ask Carmen. It’s kind of hard to miss. It’s on her damn back!
“Easy, a Foci it’s not really made of metal, no detector will catch it. And if I don’t want someone to see it they won’t unless they are a high level Magus.”
“It’s not metal?” I ask her, surprised.
To me, it looks exactly like metal. But wait. She said that only a high Magus could see it. So how was I able to see Marrisa’s that first night on Earth? Oh right, I had drunk that nasty shit just before she popped out of the window. Jesus, that stuff worked fast.
We walk out and there is a limo waiting for us. I look at her sideways.
“All good,” she says with a grin. “I used the credit card. I doubt I will use it all up before we rescue Marrisa.”
“Hey, I’m not complaining. I have been in limos often enough, thanks to Mike. I like them,” I tell her with a laugh. “So this is just a normal limo driver?”
