Gambit: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Solumancer Cycle Book 1)

by J. C. Staudt

  I stop at the gym on my way home to blow off some steam, changing into a sleeveless gray shirt and blue athletic shorts in the sweat-dank locker room before stowing my backpack in a tall locker behind a black combination lock. My horsehair bracelet stays on even when I work out. Even when I shower, and sleep, and when I’m sitting on the can, I never take it off. It’s not the first such bracelet I’ve worn, and it won’t be the last. Nor are the only types of hair woven into its fibers those of a horse.

  The gym’s Friday evening pre-happy-hour crowd has died off, so I grab an empty machine, pop in a pair of earbuds, and pump up the jams. I set the treadmill on an incremental cycle and start my run, ushered by the opening notes of The Way You Look Tonight.

  People pass on the sidewalk outside, where the front of the gym meets the street in a wall of plate glass windows. I like people-watching, especially without the aid of magic. It means I have to guess who’s a normal and who isn’t. Sometimes it’s easy to judge by posture or height or hair color. Other times it’s impossible to tell who’s from the otherside and who’s from plain old here.

  I notice a man standing beneath a streetlamp on the opposite sidewalk. Trenchcoat and hat, shoulders bunched up around his neck as though the summer night is cold. I can’t see his eyes, but he’s definitely watching the near-empty gym. Almost like he’s waiting for something.

  The treadmill kicks up a gear as Ol’ Blue Eyes croons. Sinatra always gets my blood flowing. He’s the gold standard, as far as I’m concerned. No other hundred-year-old singer gives me goosebumps while I’m pushing my heartbeat toward double-time. It doesn’t take searing guitars or a pounding drumbeat to get me going. Just a smooth voice and plenty of soul. There’s something to be said for music that’s just as relevant under the gun as between the sheets. He’s timeless, and I will have words with anyone who says differently.

  The man beneath the streetlamp is gone. For a while, I zone out and get lost in the routine, chalking him up to one of the many freakazoids one encounters while living in a city like New Detroit. I switch from treadmill to rowing machine, from rowing machine to leg press. I’m halfway through my workout when the classic re-run of Everybody Loves Raymond on the gym TV blinks out and is replaced by a prim blonde in a navy-blue suit jacket seated behind a smooth wooden news desk. She’s one of the fae, as is every newscaster in town—a particularly attractive pixie, as befitting someone whose job it is to lull the masses into a gratified trance. I remove an earbud to listen.

  “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special news bulletin,” says the blonde. “Earlier this evening, Mayor Jack Everton was found dead in his home, the victim of an apparent heart attack. Special investigations units were dispatched to the scene, though police have reported no evidence of foul play. City Council President Gerold T. Douglas is set to serve as acting mayor until the end of the mayoral term in January. Mayor Everton was serving his third term in office, the second-longest running incumbent in the city’s history behind only Coleman Young, who served a full five terms before retiring due to health issues. Mayor Everton is best known for his success in city-wide rejuvenation efforts and for his role in its historic renaming, a landmark decision met with strong public opinion on both sides. He is survived by his wife and three children; he was fifty-two years old.”

  File that under Things That Make You Go Hmm. Why are they sending out special investigations units if there’s no evidence of foul play? Something as cut-and-dried as a heart attack shouldn’t warrant such thorough scrutiny. Then again, he was the mayor. I guess they’re just covering their bases.

  Sad day. It’s a terrible thing to hear about the passing of a good mayor like Everton. He’s been in office since I was in grade school. New Detroit is the comeback kid of the twenty-first century, a Cinderella story due in large part to his efforts. He did the best he could to rebuild a city whose population boomed, then fell off a cliff, and is now booming again. Most people think the new boom is being caused by immigration from other cities. There’s a different kind of immigration happening, though, and I’m among a select few who bear the privilege of knowing its cause.

  I finish my workout and hit the showers, turning the water halfway toward cold because summer is no time for sustaining first-degree burns on account of the gym’s fickle water pipes. It feels good to be rid of the day’s grime and rinse off the sweat of good exercise. I can hear someone moving through the locker room as I soap myself down. Probably the night janitor cleaning up.

  The wall clock says it’s ten forty-five when I emerge into the empty locker room with a towel wrapped around my waist. Every sound echoes as I pad down the aisle past row after row of identical lockers toward my own. I stop at the wall-mounted mirror and rub a clear spot in the condensation with my forearm so I can admire myself.

  My heart stops.

  Someone’s standing behind me, visible over my left shoulder at the far end of the locker row.

  I whirl.

  No one’s there.

  “Hello?”

  The echo of my own voice is the only reply.

  Maybe I’m seeing things, but for a second it looked like the figure I saw beneath the streetlamp. I find my locker, flub the combination twice before getting it right, towel off, and get dressed. Backpack on, and I’m out the gym’s side door onto a dim nighttime street where empty fast-food bags roll like tumbleweeds in the hot breeze.

  I opt to walk home instead of taking the bus. I do that sometimes. Saves money on fares and gives me a few extra minutes of good pain after an especially thorough workout. After my run-in with the werewolf earlier today, I’m in no mood to be nice to bus drivers or get stared at by hungry trolls on the bus. The fewer people—or creatures—I’m forced to interact with between here and my front door, the better.

  The streets are sparse with pedestrians, no surprise for a Friday night in this part of town. I only make it a few blocks before convincing myself to stop ignoring the fact that I’m being followed. I turn and catch a glimpse of a figure ducking back into an alley. This time I’m sure it’s him.

  Were I a smart man, I’d keep walking. I’m not a smart man, though. Never have been. Let me rephrase that. I’m not a wise man. I’ve never seen the value in old sayings like ‘look before you leap’ or ‘shoot first, ask questions later.’ That hasn’t stopped my friend Ersatz from pounding little truisms like them into my head for the last fifteen years or so. He’s also been telling me to lay low; to live on the edge of nonexistence, because for a wizard it’s safer when no one knows your name. I try to fulfill his wishes most of the time, but I tend to do a lot more leaping and shooting than looking or question-asking.

  Just now, I’ve got some leaping to do. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being messed with. Someone is messing with me, and if I can make them sorry I won’t pass up the opportunity. Gripping my backpack straps, I jog against the tide of foot traffic until I reach the alley, ready to confront my devoted spectator.

  Aside from half a dozen dented metal garbage cans, some cardboard boxes, and the piles of black trash bags which fill the space between me and the gated wooden fence halfway back, the alley is empty. I pick up no sound or movement. Unconvinced, I check both ways down the street. A few people are coming from either direction, but I’ve got several seconds before they arrive.

  Stepping into the alley, I cast a simple detection spell. Strands of hair blacken at the edges of my bracelet, burning off into nothingness. My vision clears and sharpens as if I’ve put on a pair of night vision goggles. Things begin to glow a dull blue inside a few of the garbage bags; the shapes are faint, none larger than a quarter. If the person following me is back here, they’re no othersider.

  I turn back toward the street. Crowds shuffle past. Normals appear as they always do, shedding no trace of magical energy. Othersiders glow blue like the objects in the trash bags, only brighter, waves of intense power blurring off them. Even my horsehair bracelet glows under my enhanced vision.

&nbs
p; I walk down the alley and check the gate. Locked. Looking through the narrow slit in the frame, I notice it’s padlocked from the other side. The alley’s other half is the same as this one; more trash, a few small items glowing with magical residue. No one’s there. Guy must’ve hopped the fence and run off, I decide.

  Since one never knows when an alley troll is about, I return to the street and take the long way home in case anyone’s still following me. It’s almost midnight by the time I reach the front door of my garden-level walkout at 31 Plankside Row. Garden-level is a term real estate agents apply to basement apartments to make living in a hole sound less shitty. In case you came into this with any preconceived notions about young wizards being moneyed men, sorry to burst your bubble.

  My two-room rental occupies the foundation of a massive brownstone, one in a row of identical-looking houses in a part of town people only visit when they need things you can’t buy legally. According to my landlord, Mr. Montpellier, who’s as old as two tortoises and is the biggest scrotum I’ve ever met, the apartment used to be a tiny shop that sold curiosities of dubious origin before he bought and converted it into living space. Every now and then I’ll get a whiff of something strange in the air, so I believe him.

  A black wrought-iron gate flecked with rust guards a set of steps descending to a side-facing front door beside a pair of low barred windows. I unlock the door and flick on the foyer light, slipping into a dim entryway with creaky hardwood floors and mold-spotted plaster walls. Yeah, I know the stuff’s unhealthy. Did I mention my landlord doesn’t care, and is a dick?

  The larger of the apartment’s two rooms is what real estate agents call open concept. It means there are three rooms crammed into one—a kitchen along the front wall, a living room along the exposed-brick rear wall, and enough space between those two walls to stand or sit awkwardly while pretending you’re in the dining room.

  I fling my backpack onto the “dining room” table, which is so cheap and flimsy it shakes under the weight. There I unzip the main pocket and remove a pair of Tupperware containers holding samples from today’s earlier jobs. I can hear Ersatz scuttling along the wall behind me as I open the fridge and place them beside a row of identical containers, each with its own band of tape displaying name, address, and species.

  “Welcome home,” says Ersatz in his sultry baritone, peering down at me from the top of the single row of kitchen cabinets. He sniffs. Gray smoke trails from his nostrils. “You smell like trouble.”

  “Trouble smells like me,” I sigh, grabbing a half-empty gallon of whole milk and a box of Lucky Charms off the fridge. I pour a healthy helping of each into a white plastic bowl and add a spoon before plunking myself down at the table.

  Despite the atrocious TV ads, Lucky Charms is the best cereal of all time. No leprechaun I’ve ever met is letting his charms, lucky or otherwise, fall into the grubby hands of a couple of dimwitted kids. If there were such a thing as truth in advertising, every commercial would end with the children being fishhooked to a powerline by their ears, or lured into the forest to be brutally murdered by rabid muskrats, or chased off a cliff by a herd of porcupines, or doomed by a magical curse to encounter bad luck for the rest of their miserable lives.

  “Has something happened?” Ersatz asks, clambering down the wall and slithering up a table leg to stand beside my bowl.

  I take a break from shoveling cereal down my gullet long enough to glance sidelong at him and say, “Yes,” in that full-mouthed way where you feign a speech impediment so you don’t spit food everywhere. I swallow my cereal and say, “I got caught.”

  “You what?” The tiny horns on Ersatz’s head flare like the spines of a desert lizard. His scales blush the color of ripe cherries. He’s a minikin dragon, which is to say I could cradle him on one forearm with his face in my palm and his tail hanging from my elbow. If he would ever allow himself to be subjected to such affections. He’s not my pet, though. I called him my pet once and lived to regret it.

  “It’s okay,” I assure him. “She doesn’t know my address.”

  “Whose house did you clean tonight?”

  “Felita Skaargil’s.”

  “The werewolf?”

  I nod, my taste buds bursting with the delicious marshmallow flavor of a new spoonful.

  “Why did you let her catch you?”

  “I didn’t let her. She walked in on me. When she realized what I was doing, she kicked me out and threatened to call my manager.”

  “And what do you plan on telling him if he demands an explanation?”

  I shrug. “I would think Ms. Skaargil has more to worry about in that regard than I do. What’s she going to complain about, exactly? That she doesn’t like the way I cleaned her shower drain? It’s not like she’s going to tell him I’ve been stealing her wolf hair because I’m a wizard.”

  “All she needs to do is make something up, like you were sniffing around in her underwear drawer, and you’ll be reprimanded—or worse.”

  “I don’t think it’s a big deal. The company will just give me a new client to take her place. I’ll be more careful from now on.”

  “You can’t possibly believe it’s that simple.”

  I keep my mouth shut. I know it isn’t that simple, but Ersatz’s outbursts only get worse whenever I bite back at him. Red dragons are said to be the fiercest and deadliest of their kind on the otherside. Though in his mind he’s the size of a real dragon, Ersatz bears the ferocity of an epileptic tomcat.

  “Those who stand to see their powers weakened by magical means seldom hold fond regard for wizards.”

  “I’ve never stolen anyone’s powers,” I say, something Ersatz already knows. “I’m not even sure I know how.”

  “Do you think a werewolf will be mollified by that excuse? The full moon is next week.”

  “What do you want me to do? Run around the kitchen in my underwear screaming about how worried I am?”

  “I think you should find somewhere to hide for a few days. Somewhere far from here.”

  “I told you she doesn’t know where I live.”

  “And if you believe a werewolf can’t find out, you haven’t been paying attention.”

  “If she wants to go to the trouble of tracking me down over a clump of wet hair, let the bitch and her pups come and get a piece. I’ll be ready.”

  “You overestimate yourself.”

  “Always. It’s the only way to live.”

  “You’ve become a formidable wizard, Cade, but you aren’t as good as you seem to think.”

  “The fact that I think it is what makes it true.”

  “It’s also what gets you into messes like this.”

  “There’s no problem that can’t be solved with an explosion.”

  “Speaking of explosions,” says Ersatz, “I’m hungry. I thought you might like to prepare my dinner.”

  I gesture at my cereal bowl, where a flotilla of marshmallow ships drifts on a sea of pinkish milk. I always save the marshmallows for last, because that’s what life is all about. “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

  “No bother. I’ll eat live tonight.”

  I sigh. “Alright. Hold on a sec.”

  At the back of the apartment, a glass aquarium rests on a hardboard stand along the exposed-brick wall. Inside, a dozen feeder mice scurry through colored tunnels over a bed of pine chips. Snatching a plain brown mouse by the tail and lifting it from the tank, I cast a spell I know by heart. When I touch the mouse’s head, it goes limp.

  Where a full-size dragon might chow down on livestock, Ersatz spent the first two-hundred and fifty years of his life feeding on mice and small birds, and his tastes haven’t changed since he crossed over from the otherside. The mouse is only sleeping, but I can’t bear to see the little guys awake while he’s eating them. I’m a softie in that way. Shut up.

  I fling the mouse across the room, close the tank lid, and head back toward the table to finish my cereal. Ersatz launches himself off the table and spre
ads his wings, catching the mouse between his teeth mid-flight. He makes a graceful arc around the room and lands on the table again, stumbling over my cereal bowl and upturning it in a spray of sugary, milky goodness. He stands there dripping, marshmallows plastered to his scales, the sleeping rodent in his mouth, and a sheepish grin on his face.

  “I was looking forward to that.”

  Ersatz bathes the mouse in a gout of flame before flinging his crispy entree into the air and swallowing it whole. He belches like a backfiring car engine, wheezes, then coughs and mutters, “My apologies.”

  I wipe up the spill with a handful of napkins, scooping the tainted marshmallows into the cereal bowl and tossing the whole mess onto the teetering tower of dishes in the sink. It irks me when my apartment is dirty, but the last thing I feel like doing after a long day of cleaning other people’s houses is cleaning mine. Especially when there’s magic to be done.

  A pair of bricks pulls free of the rear wall, revealing a cavity shaped like a Tetris block. There a flat rectangular box leans against a glob of dried mortar beside the chimney. The box lid slides off to uncover the second-most valuable object I own.

  My spellbook.

  Chapter 3

  I’m not special. So when I say magic is the only thing I’ve got going for me, it’s no exaggeration. I wasn’t born with unique mystical powers, and I’m not the chosen one. I’m the guy the chosen one steps on while he’s climbing the ladder toward his ultimate destiny.

  Now magic, on the other hand… magic is special. I could try to convince you I’ve earned my wizardly talent through hard work and discipline, but you’re a preposterous individual if you think conjuring fireballs in your backyard sounds like work. Any hobby that turns you into the human boomstick of the third grade requires way more little-kid-on-Christmas-Eve restraint than grown-up discipline.

  If I had more friends, maybe I’d have other hobbies. Ersatz gets nervous whenever I talk about making new friends, though, so I’ve learned to keep desires like that to myself when he’s around. It’s a dangerous world, and one must be prepared for the eventualities of supernatural phenomena. That’s what Ersatz says, anyway. He likes using big words.