Soul Breaker

by Clara Coulson

  I take it and attempt to read it. “Is this…the occult shop on Broad Street?”

  Riker nods, a hint of color returning to his cheeks, but his voice is still strained when he speaks. “The owner is a witch, and she’s a member of the International Council. She’s been more forthcoming with information in the past than many of the other witches and wizards in town, so I like to check with her whenever we get a case where a practitioner is involved. I’d like you to stop by and show her the photos, especially the circle. See if she recognizes the magic style. And ask if she’s heard anything about a new potential sorcerer in the area.”

  “Ah, information gathering.” I fold up the note and stick it in my pocket. “Anything else, sir?”

  He scratches his stubble and shakes his head. “I’ll ask around and see if I can, uh, borrow a detective from one of the other elite teams. If so, I’ll partner you with him or her. Then I’ll let you back into the thick of it, tracking down this creature and the summoner, the real fight, if that’s how you want to put it. Until I make such an arrangement, however, I want you to steer clear of the crime scene and the circle. I’ve got a lower-level team, Delarosa’s, securing and documenting all the evidence for now. They’ll also handle the interviews with the victim’s family and the general canvass.”

  He stops to take a breath and drink the rest of his water, then finishes. “I mean what I said, Cal. I don’t want to hinder your development. But I know how quickly a case like this can go south. I don’t want you to get cornered by things you’re not ready for. You have a lot of potential. I want to see you fulfill it. Not end up dead in a ditch somewhere a month in. Okay?”

  I feel the corner of the address note prodding at my skin. “Okay, sir,” I say. “Okay.”

  Chapter Five

  The little occult shop on Broad is sandwiched between a bistro and a post office. The bistro must be a popular lunch spot, because droves of men and women in business suits constantly enter and exit, sandwiches and subs and large coffees in hand. My guess is they’re employed at the dozen plus office towers that loom up behind the small stores on Broad, ten or twelve blocks away. Sleek, modern buildings that aren’t quite skyscrapers but mark the era of Big Business well enough. They make up the commercial center of Aurora.

  I park my work car in a public lot across the street, watch the occult shop for any suspicious activity for a minute, and then head inside. The bell on the door jingles when I enter, and the second I cross the threshold, I’m greeted by the intense odor of incense. It’s so thick, my nostrils burn, and I swat it away from my face like a fly, fighting back a sneeze.

  Once I acclimate to the overbearing smell, I move through the narrow aisles of the shop, checking out all the wares on display. Most of it is useless junk. Mass-produced dream catchers. Charm bags filled with sticks and plastic gems. Lucky coins made in a factory in China. Herbs and spices you can get by the pound that would be far more useful for baking a pie than performing real magic. All the stuff you’d expect to see in your standard fake occult shop. Stuff that makes tourists giggle and open their wallets.

  The real magic paraphernalia, I know, is hidden in a back room somewhere. When an actual practitioner walks through the door, the cashier will let him past the counter, into the secret space where all the potion mixes, spell ingredients, and charm materials are stored, in jars and cans and boxes and baskets, for your friendly neighborhood witch or wizard to purchase at their convenience. And that’s where the real money comes in, too. Gold and silver and precious gems, bits and pieces of extinct animals, plants that only grow in one country in the world. Crafting good magic, I’ve heard, can be a pretty expensive process.

  Bad magic, though…I wonder how much that costs.

  I make my way past all the cheap novelties, reaching the counter. No one is manning it, so I ring the little metal bell next to the tip jar. A moment later, someone starts to shuffle around in the employee (or magic paraphernalia) room hidden behind a long violet curtain, and a female voice calls out, “Just a minute.”

  The woman who emerges from behind the curtain might be twenty-five. Or fifty. Wizards and witches have this habit of using magic to make themselves age more slowly than us normal people, but the exact rate at which they age isn’t quite the same for all of them. So the witch who saunters up to the counter, all smooth tan skin and long dark hair, could be somewhere around my age. Or she could be old enough to be my grandma. It’s a crapshoot.

  There’s a nametag clipped to her T-shirt that reads Erica, and as she approaches the counter, she throws up a cheery smile. Then she gets a load of what I’m wearing, and her smile drops into a frown dark enough to send small children fleeing in terror. “Oh, great. A Crow,” she mutters.

  Yup, the supernatural community has their own word for us, too. Crows.

  So the normal people call us crazy, and the magic people call us annoying.

  Not sure which of those I find more offensive.

  Erica the witch drops a book she was carrying onto the counter and stares up at my face. A few seconds of uncomfortable silence pass between us, and her repulsed frown softens to pursed lips that might be interpreted as ambivalence. “Huh,” she says. “A hot Crow.”

  That throws me for a loop, but I try to roll with it. “Do you always start conversations with people you don’t like by hitting on them? Seems like a weird strategy to me.”

  She flips her braided hair over her shoulder and rolls her eyes. “Sorry. I’ll try to restrain myself next time. Thing is, most Crows I know look like weather-beaten driftwood. To put it nicely.”

  “I imagine that’s because most Crows you see don’t hesitate to put their necks—and ‘beauty’—on the line to protect the innocent people of this fair city. Using your body as a shield tends to leave a few marks.” I tug my phone out of my pocket to pull up the photo files again. Best to get this over with before I start a verbal war with a witch that ends with my ass getting blasted out a window by a wind spell. You have to be powerful and skilled to win the title of witch or wizard from the International Council of Magic. The ICM doesn’t let minor practitioners into their ranks. So Erica here must pack a punch.

  I’m not really up for a punch right now.

  Erica’s face twitches until her lips shimmy up into a sly grin. “You must be new to DSI.”

  “Graduated two weeks ago. What gave me away?” I mimic her smile. “The fresh, handsome face, or the fact that I didn’t slip a knife out of my belt when I walked in, wary of you getting funny ideas?”

  She raises her hands in a mocking gesture of peace. “Both, if you must know. New Crows always have this air of undue confidence hanging around them. Think they can take on the magic world with a .45 and a few fake magic rings, defeat the big bad monsters, play the valiant knights. But they learn real quick, most of them, the truth of the matter. That—”

  “The world of monsters and mayhem can’t be controlled by mortal hands.” My voice drops two octaves. “Don’t mistake my inexperience for naïveté, witch.”

  The woman shifts backward a step, and I sense a stream of magic building in her palms. A faint aura forms around her hands, an earthy green hue. A sign she’s preparing to attack.

  I respond by activating my beggar rings with a simple mental command, Build. My fingers begin to grow warm as the rings absorb the energy in the air around me. There’s a bit more than usual—a consequence of being in the presence of a magic user—which means I can produce a bigger bang for my buck.

  Beggar magic isn’t real magic. Normal people like me don’t have an internal source of power to draw from, like actual magic users. So us DSI agents cheat. The minor practitioners who work in Weapons Development forge beggar rings for us to use. A charm etched into each ring allows non-magic folk to pull in excess environmental energy and release it in various forms.

  Which forms depend on the rings, and which rings depend on the user. I favor force, fire, and electricity, on my index fingers, middle fingers, and ring finge
rs, respectively. The rings for my thumbs and pinky fingers are stabilizers that help me channel the energy for an attack.

  Beggar magic can’t win against the true spells of witches and wizards, but it can make for a decent defense when you decide to flee for your life.

  Erica the witch must sense my move the same way I sensed hers, and she slowly lowers her hands to the countertop, letting her power drain back to whatever spiritual well it flowed from. “My apologies, Crow. It seems I read you wrong. I don’t want a fight in my shop. Don’t need the mess.”

  I dispel the energy in my rings back into the air. “Apology accepted. And a word of advice: Judging a book by its cover can be a recipe for some bloodshed. Just ask the cops who unknowingly worked the Gloston Square vampire case.”

  Erica curls her fingers into fists, and a horrified look of understanding flashes across her face before she buries it. She shakes her head, a stray lock of hair falling over her cheek, and blows warm air through clenched teeth. Then she fakes a cough and says, “You came here for a DSI reason, I assume? Some evidence you want my opinion on?”

  “Yeah, Nick Riker sent me. Said you were a little more forthcoming than most of your friends.” Flipping through the images on my phone, I come to the first crime scene photo of Jason Franks’ dorm room. I almost move past it, to the circle, unsure if I should show this woman such an extreme level of gore. But I need her to grasp the seriousness of this—else she might hold back vital information. “There was a murder at Waverly College this morning. Freshman student. It was definitely supernatural. The culprit was a creature that has yet to be identified. An Eververse creature.”

  Her finely plucked eyebrows arch up, and she smacks her palm on the book she was reading, some old, dusty tome. “Are you sure? A summoned creature? That’s sorcerer work.”

  “Yeah. I know. That complicates the problem further. We have no leads on the creature or its magic master.” I set my phone on the counter and slide it toward her. “Whoever summoned the creature had it out for this kid, and whatever creature was summoned had more than enough juice to enact the desired level of death and destruction.”

  Erica glances down at the crime scene photo and sucks in a quick breath. She leans closer, as if she can’t believe what she’s seeing on the small phone screen. “Gods almighty,” she murmurs. “This may be beyond you, Crow. Council business.” She uses a finger to scroll through the photos, cringing at each new gruesome angle that depicts Jason Franks’ untimely demise. Finally, she reaches the image of the mystery writing on the wall and stops, trying to decipher the meaning.

  “You know that language?” I ask.

  She chews on her lip. “No, unfortunately. I don’t recognize it. It’s not a standard language for magic instruction.” Her finger taps the screen a few more times, and up pops the image of the summoning circle. “I can’t say—”

  Erica recoils like something smacked her in the face, stumbling back into a shelf behind the counter. A dozen jars filled with strange-looking liquids clang together, and one of them slides off the shelf and crashes to the floor in an explosion of glass. The witch raises a hand to her mouth to stifle a low whine, eyes transfixed on the image of the circle. She begins to mutter in yet another language I don’t know.

  “Erica?” I grab the phone, clear the screen, and stick it back on my belt. “Are you all right?”

  Over the course of half a minute, she unwinds from her panic, rubbing her temples and sighing. “That circle is in this city?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then so is a dangerous sorcerer. The intricacy of that summoning…I’ve only seen things like that in books. Never in practice. Eververse summonings are largely forbidden by the Council because of the inherent risks involved in attempting to command and contain a creature more powerful than you. Given that circle’s level of complexity, whatever came out of…is it still here, roaming around Aurora?”

  “That’s my guess. There was no banishment done at that circle.” I reach for a small rack of fake stone charms on the countertop and run my fingers over the various options. Prosperity. Bravery. Tranquility. “The residual magic leading away from the circle indicated the creature was summoned there but never returned after it murdered the student. So unless it was banished at another circle, which seems impractical to me, it must still be here somewhere, presumably with its summoner.”

  Erica rubs her arms and then tips up her head like she noticed something on the ceiling. “Wait, you can see residual magic?”

  “I’m a tracker.” I shrug.

  “Oh. A rare skill for a Crow.” She approaches the counter again and picks up the aging book. “I’ll inform the ICM of this infraction. Expect Allen Marcus, the head of the Aurora chapter, to contact your liaison tonight or tomorrow morning. We don’t want a sorcerer of this caliber in our city any more than you do. Trust me on that. I think this might end up being one of the rare occasions where the Council and DSI see eye to eye.”

  “Ah, so it’s the end of the world, is it?” The Council avoids direct contact with DSI unless the equivalent of an apocalypse-grade meteor is bearing down on Aurora.

  Fantastic. My first real case, and the sky is already falling.

  Erica clears her throat and shakes the rest of her ill ease away. “The world will survive, I’m sure. But anyone who gets in the way of that thing”—she glances in the direction of my phone—“is probably going to end up the same way that poor college boy did. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, Crow. I really am.” She knocks one end of the book against my arm. “It’s fun to tease Crows when they’re chasing down magic children playing tricks or minor practitioners in over their heads, making zany things happen.”

  She balances the book on her fingers and whispers something I can’t interpret. With a faint pulse of green, the book levitates from her fingers and hovers in the air, steady as a rock. She blows the dust off the cover and sighs again. “I wish this was one of those times.”

  “As do I.” I step away from the counter and incline my head toward her. “Thanks for giving it a try though. I’ll be on the lookout for the Council call. Hopefully, by working together, we can rein this creature and the sorcerer in without any further loss of life.”

  Erica lets the book drop back into her hand. “I suppose hope is all we have at the moment, Crow.”

  “Cal.”

  “Pardon?”

  “My name. Cal Kinsey.” I retreat through the racks of useless ornaments, toward the front door, away from the source of real power in the room, who still stands at the counter.

  “Cal Kinsey, huh?” She clutches the book to her chest with one hand and tugs at her braid with the other. “Well, I suppose it wasn’t bad to meet you.”

  I bump into the door with my back and lean into it, forcing it open under my weight. The bells above me jingle again, echo across the store. “Same goes for you, Erica…”

  “Milburn. Erica Milburn.” She waves goodbye as I move past the threshold, onto the damp street beneath an overcast sky, a smirk playing at her red lips. “And, by the way,” she calls out, a moment before I let the door go, “I meant what I said earlier.”

  “Oh?”

  “You are pretty hot, for a Crow.”

  Chapter Six

  After I return to the office and update Riker again, he reroutes me to Archives. Our analysts haven’t found any crimes similar to the Jason Franks murder in our records, and none of the supernaturally themed digitized texts we have in our knowledge base contain anything that matches the writing on the dorm room wall or the symbols in the circle. So we need to toss our modern tech aside for the moment and go old school. Also known as visiting the library.

  The basement and subbasement levels of the DSI office are reserved for the agency’s extensive collection. Thousands of books, loose rolls of parchment, scrolls, stone tablets, and anything else you can write on are stored in the stacks of the DSI Archive. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of shelves, filled with information from dozens o
f cultures all over the world. And every line of that information is related, in some way, to the supernatural.

  A small number of the texts were printed within the last fifty years or so, and you can check those out for research. But most of them are centuries old (and some were written before the turn of the last millennium). Those have to stay in house, and to access them, you need the help of an archivist.

  Archivists are generally considered to be the lowest agents on the office ladder, but I’ve heard from many a detective that the help of an archivist can be crucial when it comes to locating obscure texts and figuring out the origins of rare creatures or strange magic. So when the elevator lets me out in the musty-smelling lobby of Archives, I go on the hunt for a person I sincerely hope will help me get to the bottom of the Franks murder. Or at least point me in the right direction.

  If a trained witch doesn’t even recognize the components of the summoning, we must be dealing with very uncommon magic.

  I make my way past a series of comfy-looking chairs and low coffee tables, a lounge area of some kind, currently deserted, and head toward the towering stacks near the back. Rolling ladders sit at the end of each bookcase, waiting for an archivist to find the need to clamber up a full story to locate an old leather-bound title or a scroll in a protective box. The ceiling is vaulted, and soft, filtered light cascades downward, nothing like the fluorescent bulbs in the rest of the building. Must be to protect the books from damage.

  About fifteen feet in front of the stacks is a large checkout desk for the archivist on duty. At first glance, the desk looks empty, and I’m worried that I wandered in during the agent’s lunch break, or that the guy is back in the stacks somewhere, slowly picking his way through a hundred and one books for another request. But as I close in, I realize the desk is just tall, and the person sitting behind a dual-screened desktop computer, typing away, is just short. His head is about an inch too low to be visible from a distance.