It was hard to say exactly what it was about Chase’s enthusiasm that was enough to convince me to not give up. There was no ignoring that he’d been right about there being no one else to take up the fight. The Amulet of Duan Marbhaidh was the kind of artifact that all Light mages, and even many of the Dark hoped would never again come into play. Whoever had written the entry about the amulet in the compendium had been clear about the ramifications of letting the amulet fall into the wrong hands, and it seemed like that was exactly what had just happened. There was no telling how bad things would get if the mage behind the theft and murders managed to find the grimoire as well.
I leaned in and slapped my hand against Chase’s, trying to hide the pain that lanced down my back. Whatever Chase believed, I had no doubt the most serious fight still lay ahead. If I was to have any chance of surviving it, I couldn’t afford to show weakness to anyone. Not even my friends.
Chapter Fifteen
There is an insane amount of factually accurate information about magic on the internet. It’s sitting right there, waiting for anyone with an open mind and a few choice search words to stumble upon. It is, however, so buried amongst celebrity worship, narcissistic social media, and silly cat photos; that virtually no one takes any of it seriously. It also doesn’t help that most mages are pretty hardcore luddites. Among modern mages, these guys are better known as graybeards; wizards who think they have to look all mysterious and wizened to do magic. Think old-school Merlin types who were more magic miss than magic missile. Mages like that still filled volumes of leather bound books with chicken scratch handwriting rather than trust anything to a computer.
The world is changing though. Some forward thinking mage nerds in the seventies had seen the potential of sharing knowledge via a rapidly growing network of computers that was changing how information was exchanged. They rallied against the inherent secrecy in our ranks, and they set about building digital libraries containing every scrap of magic history they could find.
One of the most reliable knowledge repositories was still hosted on a Tripod account, proudly boasting its optimization for Netscape 2.0. The thing was a horrendous looking piece of crap that was impossible to browse on a phone, but if you dug through it long enough, it was possible to learn a few things that had the potential to be pretty dangerous in the hands of an amateur.
It was on this same site where, browsing from a public terminal in the downtown library nearly fifteen years earlier, I’d learned how to cast the energy bolt I’d jolted the kryte with earlier that morning. That first experimental casting was cringeworthy to say the least. As I’d read the description, my brain had begun working through the mental process required to cast the bolt. What I’d meant to be a simple spark directed towards a wad of crumpled paper had manifested as an electrical surge that had knocked out the entire neighborhood grid. Caution and patience hadn’t been close friends of mine back then. It wasn’t until a poorly cast attempt to light a candle burned away every bit of hair on my body that I’d started taking my experimentation more seriously.
The other problem with websites like this was that none of them were indexed for search. A search engine like Google or Bing has crawlers that scan every bit of data on every public facing network around the world, but a single line of text in a robots.txt file could stop those crawlers from adding your content to a search engine’s database. While the people who’d set these sites up in the first place had been all about the open exchange of magical knowledge, they hadn’t been all too keen on broadcasting its availability to just anyone out in the wider world. It was there in the open for anyone who knew where to look, yet at the same virtually invisible to the general public.
That meant Chase and I had to search through everything manually. I’d set him loose on the Tripod site while I commandeered one of his laptops to undertake a painstaking search of several dark web sites. Most of these were set up so first time visitors were limited to subforums containing relatively harmless information, while more trusted users had access to increasingly more useful and dangerous resources. I had decent clearance on a few of these from my early years of self-education in the magical arts, and that wasn’t the kind of access I was about to hand off to someone like Chase. He’d already been exposed to enough craziness. I didn’t see the point of overloading him with what lurked in the depths of these more sensitive archives.
“Huh,” said Chase from where he sat as his desk. “Is it really true some magic requires the use of human blood as a catalyst?”
“What exactly are you reading about?”
“Dark sorcery and banned practices,” he replied. “What exactly is the difference between a mage, a wizard, and a sorcerer?”
“Semantics mostly.” I looked up from my screen and squinted, blinking away the ghosts of words that had been burned onto my retinas after hours of reading on a digital screen. “The only really important thing is that you don’t call any of them by the wrong name. Especially sorcerers. Better to volunteer as a source for that blood magic you’re reading about than call an old-school sorcerer a wizard. They hate that.”
Chase swiveled around in his chair, and took a long pull from a can of sugar-free Red Bull. He swirled the can’s remaining contents around a few times.
“So sorcerers tend to be evil, and wizards and mages are good.”
“Not exactly. There’s no simple way of telling how a magic user is aligned. Regardless of what they call themselves, all those with the ability to work magic eventually have to choose between the Light and the Dark. The two groups don’t exactly get along, but you’d be hard pressed to find a Light mage who’d go so far as to call Dark mages evil per se. It’s more like the difference between Liberals and Conservatives, or Democrats and Republicans. They’re separated by ideologies and practices, but they’re really not that different from each other.”
“Conservatives are pretty fucking evil if you ask me,” said Chase.
“And like most Tories, Dark mages tend to be assholes interested only in furthering their own agendas.”
“Do Dark mages have different abilities then? Like, can they cast blood magic that someone like you couldn’t do?”
I shook my head and thought about how best to explain it. Discussing my abilities was something I’d only done with a select group of people, and none of them had been ungifted. There was a bond all magic users shared, and it stemmed from an implicit understanding that they were different from everyone else. Only another human magic user could relate to the role magic played in our lives. We stood apart from even the fae, for whom magic was as normal as breathing or walking. They tended to regard all humans as either nuisance or curiosity, considering those of us with magic only marginally less annoying.
“Magic is like music,” I told him. “Some people have an innate talent and don’t need to be taught how to use it, while others have potential that can only be realized through intense instruction and study. Some people feel music in their bones, while others can only hack out a tune if they have sheet music in front of them.”
“Does that mean anyone can learn to cast spells?” asked Chase, his eyes on his fingers as though they might contain some deeply hidden power waiting to be unlocked.
“When it comes to magic, most of the world is unfortunately tone-deaf.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry, bud,” I said. “The odds of being a full blown mage are practically non-existent. There are only a few thousand of us in the world. A bigger chunk of the population is magically sensitive, but if you were, you’d probably already know it by now.”
“Ah well,” said Chase, a resigned smile forming on his lips. “Some people get all the luck.”
“Said the guy with millionaire parents.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not always as much fun as people think it is.”
“Neither is being a mage,” I said, pointing to the nasty bruise darkening a quarter of my face.
Chase swiveled back around to his computer. The room
was silent but for the clicking of mouse buttons and the whirring roll of scroll wheels. Minutes became hours, and hours bled from one into the next. At some point I got up to turn on a couple of lamps, and then a delivery guy appeared at the door with two pizzas I hadn’t noticed Chase ordering. I didn’t comment on the two liter bottle of Pepsi that arrived with the pizzas, but I did accept a big glass of it when Chase offered. I wanted to be a good friend who would help him maintain his sugar-free diet, but with everything he’d been through that day, I couldn’t begrudge the guy a bit of cheating while he worked through the night to help me locate the lost grimoire.
“Hey Alex,” he said sometime around three o’clock in the morning. “Come take a look at this.”
I peered over his shoulder, and saw he was deep into the archives of the site I’d asked him to look at. The breadcrumb trail of links that had led him there were so obscure I couldn’t ever remember having seen any of these sub-sections during my own previous visits. I didn’t even want to think about how much dense and convoluted text he’d had to sift through to get to this point.
The bulk of the article was made up of oral histories of the battle at Clach na Carraig. I didn’t get the relevance at first, but then Chase highlighted a section near the bottom of the page, and a familiar name jumped out at me.
“Carolus,” I said. I skimmed the rest of the paragraph. “But all it says is that he fell to the Light. There’s no mention of what happened to his body or his grimoire.”
“No, but it got me thinking, and I started digging through some of the other references I’d seen. It’s not much, but there’s this account here that I thought was unrelated at first. Now I think it’s exactly what we’re looking for. It talks about how the leader of their sect was rendered powerless at the culmination of the battle, and how his most valuable possessions were nearly lost in the mage fire that consumed his body. This says they managed to save the song and stone. That has to be it, don’t you think? The song is the spell from his grimoire, and the stone is the amulet.”
“That was more than a thousand years ago; so much could have happened between now and then. If the amulet has made it as far as Vancouver, what evidence is there to suggest the grimoire never left Scotland?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Chase. “That’s why I think we have to go there to find out.”
“You think we should fly to Scotland in search of a book most people think was destroyed along with Archmage Carolus’s body?”
Chase grinned at me with the smugness of someone who knew he’d won an argument before it had even had a chance to play out.
“Even if I do think going to Scotland is a good idea, you know I’m not taking you with me, right?” I said in a feeble attempt to prevent the inevitable.
“Yeah, no,” he said. “If you’ve got enough cash on hand to buy a flight you’re welcome to take off. Or, I guess you could use your credit card, which could very well alert whoever is out to get you that you’re going to Scotland. I mean, if you’re so dead set on going alone that you won’t accept my offer to book the flights for us.”
“You’re not going to let this go, are you?”
“Nope.”
“Then I won’t fight you on it.” I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to draw up as much authority as I could muster. “But after this, you have to promise me you’ll back off. You can come to Scotland and help me track down the grimoire, but the second things get dangerous, you’re going to make yourself scarce.”
“We’ll fight that level boss when we get to it,” said Chase as he opened a new browser tab and began searching for flights.
Rather than force the issue, I left him to his work. Collapsing onto the couch, I opened the pizza box and picked out a piece of now cold Hawaiian. Chewing made my face hurt, the taste of blood on my tongue every time I went to lick grease from my lips, but I couldn’t seem to stop eating. Chase weighed nearly twice as much as me, and yet I’d devoured three times as much pizza as he had. My body burned with a fever that would have had me worried if I hadn’t experienced it before — albeit on a much smaller scale. If I could rest for a while, I’d be back at full health. The cut on my lip might even heal up before I had to go through security.
It was a part of my magic I’d never fully understood, but so long as I was rested and hadn’t used my abilities in a while, my body would to heal itself anywhere from four to ten times faster than what it’d take a normal person. I was nowhere near fully rested, but if I could get eight or nine hours of sleep, I’d feel a lot better about everything.
“You got your passport on you?” asked Chase.
I rooted around in my bag and pulled out the fake to show him.
“Helga Nussbaum?” he asked, looking at the photo of me in the passport, then at me, and then back again. “Where did you get this thing? Walmart?”
“Just put the info in,” I said.
It was going to take a bit of magic to get past security and customs with such a poor forgery, but given the circumstances, flying under my real name didn’t seem like the best of ideas.
“When do we leave?” I asked.
“The flight is in seven hours, and we should be at the airport at least two hours early. I’ll arrange car pickup for seven thirty.”
Great. That gave me all of four hours to sleep, and I’d downed enough caffeine to keep me awake through most of it.
“Tell me we at least have a direct flight,” I said.
“We have a direct flight,” he replied. “On the redeye to Toronto. Then we fly to Heathrow, then to Glasgow, and then to Oban. Total trip time is twenty-eight hours and forty-three minutes.”
I went back to the couch and flopped down into it. I pulled the blanket over me, shoved a pillow on top of my head, and tried to fight off the creeping feeling I was about to make a terrible mistake in taking Chase to Scotland with me.
Chapter Sixteen
The alarm jolted me to back life five minutes after I’d fallen into a dead sleep. At least that’s what it felt like. I’d done my best to meditate and relax while lying in the darkness, but the residual ache of my still healing back and the worry that going to Scotland was a wild goose chase had kept me from getting anywhere near a proper REM cycle for at least a couple of hours.
I threw off my blanket, thought about going to take a shower, then decided to make coffee instead. When it came right down to it, I’d take caffeine over cleanliness every time. It took me a while to figure out how to work Chase’s coffee maker, but once I heard the first gurgling confirmation that brewing had begun, I grabbed my bag and went to the bathroom to see what I could do about cleaning myself up.
Sharp pain shot through my neck when I bent down to splash water on my face. Sleeping on the couch had only made the stiffness worse. The miraculous unicorn balm had worked literal magic on the slash across my back, but it had done little to heal the minor whiplash I’d sustained after being flung against the wall the day before. It also hadn’t mellowed the swelling around my eye. The area had turned a lovely shade of banana slug brown in the night, and I was going to have to do something about that if I didn’t want to arouse suspicion at airport customs. A few minutes of work with some concealer and foundation reduced it to a barely noticeable discoloration. To further hide it, I left my hair in a loose ponytail with a few wisps hanging over that side of my face.
There wasn’t much I could do about the busted lip though. I did my best to lightly dab concealer over the purple bruising below the wound itself. At least the cut had stopped cracking open and bleeding every time I talked or tried to eat.
Chase had done a decent job of cleaning the unicorn balm off my back, but when I lifted my shirt to check, I caught a blast of the rank odor wafting off my armpits. I hadn’t thrown deodorant into my bag, so I pulled the bathroom mirror open and gave my pits a generous hit of the Axe body spray I’d found.
Having done what I could to get myself back to something vaguely approaching human form, I returned to the ki
tchen where Chase greeted me with a travel mug of steaming hot coffee.
“You smell like a pack of bros at a spring break pool party,” he said with a wrinkled nose. “How much of that stuff did you put on?”
“It’s got to last until Scotland, right?” I lifted my arm and stepped in close to him, wiggling my armpit in front of his face. “You want to sit next to this, or would you prefer the stench from me lying in my own sweat for hours while my body goes through a month’s worth of healing overnight?”
“Point taken,” he said as he covered his nose and pretended to shove me away. “It’s too early for this.”
“Tell me about it.”
Chase’s phone buzzed.
“Shit, that’s the car service,” he said. “You ready to go?”
I nodded towards the backpack slung over my shoulder. “Although, the kryte shredded my jacket. You have something I can borrow?”
“Should have something around here,” he said as he went to dig through the hallway closet. “Hang on.”
Chase emerged a few seconds later with a pink hoodie emblazoned with the the logo of a local yoga brand. “Here, this should fit.”
“One, I’m not wearing this,” I said, holding the thing up between thumb and forefinger like it was a dead rat. “And two, why do you even have this?”
“Some girl I know left it behind okay?” Chase walked over to a large wheeled suitcase and pulled out the handle. “I don’t get what the problem is. I’ve seen you wear things just like this.”
“Yeah, to yoga class,” I fired back. “I try not to wear things that make me look like a fourteen-year-old when I’m off to hunt down a centuries old spell book of unimaginable power.”
“It’s either that or you can borrow one of my jackets and belt. I doubt it’d do much for the twee wizard thing you’ve normally got going on.”
Black Magic (Black Records Book 1) Page 15
