Dirty Magic

by Jaye Wells

  “Sir, I—”

  He slashed a hand through the air. “Don’t bother. You weren’t thinking. Not a damned thing. That’s the only explanation that makes any sense. Because I know you were trained better than to enter a dangerous confrontation with a hexed-out suspect without backup.”

  “If I’d waited for backup that bastard would be running free through the Arteries.”

  “Thanks to you he’s not going to be running anywhere ever again.”

  I leaned forward, my hands up in a pleading gesture. “It was a clean kill, sir.” If you could call blowing someone’s face off “clean.”

  He sat back and crossed his arms over his gut. He hit me with his best cop glare—the same one I used on suspects until they broke under the oppressive weight of silence. But I wasn’t a criminal—not anymore, anyway—and I knew I’d done the right thing. In fact, if I had to do it over again I would have made the same call.

  “Even if I’d waited for backup the outcome would have been the same.” I looked right in his eyes. “He was immune to every defensive charm I tried. There was no stopping him without lethal force.”

  The captain scrubbed a hand over his face and sat up. His chair creaked in protest. “Christ, Prospero. Damned if I wouldn’t have done the same thing.” I opened my mouth to ask why I was getting the riot act if that was the case, but he held up a hand to stall my arguments. “Be that as it may, since this case involved deadly force, the rules dictate that I put you on suspension pending an investigation of the incident.”

  My mouth dropped open. “But—”

  “There’s not a damned thing I can do about it, so don’t waste your breath. We got bigger issues to discuss.”

  I shook my head at him. Forcing a cop to take leave after the use of deadly force was standard procedure, but I wasn’t about to sit on the sidelines with a new lethal potion on the streets. Still, the look in his eyes told me arguing would only prolong the suspension.

  “The ME identified your perp.” The lightning-fast change in topic nearly gave me whiplash.

  “And?” I frowned.

  “His name was Ferris Harkins.” The female voice surprised me from the doorway.

  I swiveled to see a tall woman in a smart navy pantsuit. Her brown hair was cut in a no-nonsense bob. The lines between her brows told me they were used to frowning, and the steel in her gaze hinted at a razor-blade tongue. She wore her watch on her right wrist and her briefcase was clutched in that same hand. Whoever she was, she was definitely a Lefty—just like me.

  I glanced back at Eldritch. He didn’t look surprised by the new arrival so much as resigned to it. He pasted his best politician smile on his lips and rose to shake her hand. “I was about to inform Officer Prospero of your interest in the case.”

  “That’s a diplomatic way to phrase it, Captain.” She turned to me. “Special Agent Miranda Gardner.”

  I frowned at her. “Which agency?”

  She smiled tightly. “MEA.”

  Something heavy bounced off the base of my stomach. If the Magic Enforcement Agency was involved, things were about to get … complicated.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I rose and offered her my left hand. I usually offered my right to Mundanes to avoid awkwardness, but she offered me her left, which confirmed she was an Adept.

  Her handclasp was brief but firm enough to tell me she meant business. When I looked down at our hands, I noticed a cabochon ring on her middle finger.

  “Nice ring,” I said. “Tigereye?”

  She nodded and pulled her hand away. “The stone of truth and logic.”

  And she wore it on her Saturn finger—the finger of responsibility and security—which meant she wanted a boost in those areas. Interesting.

  She tipped her chin at my wrist. “And your tattoo—Ouroboros?”

  I placed my right hand over my wrist, as if the snake might jump off my skin otherwise. “A youthful transgression,” I said in a flippant tone that disguised the massive understatement it really was.

  Eldritch cleared his throat. I looked up to see Gardner watching me with a too-wise gaze. Either she already knew the snake swallowing its own tail was the emblem of the Votary Coven or she merely smelled the lie on me. Time to change the subject.

  “Why is the MEA interested in Ferris Harkins?” I glanced at Eldritch, but he looked away.

  “What your captain was about to tell you before I interrupted,” Gardner said, “is that the man you killed tonight was an MEA informant.”

  I closed my eyes. “Fuck. Me.”

  “Funny, that’s exactly what I said when his name popped up on ACD two hours ago as deceased.”

  ACD stood for the Arcane Crime Database, a federal clearinghouse of all magic-related criminal activity in the country. Actually, that’s not entirely true. ACD just kept track of the illegal dirty magic. The corporate labs that produced legal, “clean” magical products, aka Big Magic, bought their legitimacy through lobbyist bribes and the generous tax revenue they generated for Uncle Sam.

  I opened my eyes. “Were you aware when you recruited him that he was a hexhead with a hard-on for murder?”

  “He wasn’t a hexhead when we recruited him.” She handed over a picture of a male. Mid-twenties, scruffy with a hardness to his gaze that hinted at life on the street, but no noticeable signs of magic use—dilated pupils, scabs, etc. A far cry from the gaunt, savage creature I’d killed. A scribbled date at the bottom told me the picture had been taken a week earlier.

  “Are you sure we’re talking about the same guy?”

  “Positive. I’ve just come from IDing the body.”

  Usually potions took several months—sometimes years—of heavy use to transform normal people into freaks and monsters. “You expect me to believe a potion turned this guy”—I held up the picture—“into the beast I shot in less than a week?”

  She removed her cell from her briefcase and flashed another picture. This one was taken at the morgue. There wasn’t enough face left to compare so it was impossible to use that to verify whether the identity matched the first shot. But then Gardner tapped the image to indicate a tattoo of a skull with the words Et in Arcadia ego underneath on the dead man’s left wrist.

  Frowning, I lifted the old picture again. Sure enough, the same tattoo was on Ferris Harkins’s “before” picture. “The tattoo’s the same. But that’s hardly conclusive.”

  “True. However, as you’ll see in the file, the identity was also confirmed through fingerprints.”

  I blew out a deep sigh. “Okay, so how did this guy”—I held up the first shot—“end up like this?” I held up a screen shot from the file that had been taken from my vest cam. In it Harkins looked like something from hell: a wild-eyed hellhound with bloodstained teeth.

  “Four days ago, we sent Harkins to do a buy,” explained Gardner. “He was supposed to meet up with one of my agents an hour later but never showed. We’ve been looking for him since. At first we figured he ran off with the buy money, but then this.” She motioned vaguely at me as if I was the this in question.

  My mouth fell open. “You gave a CI cash and then set him loose in the Cauldron? What the fuck did you think was going to happen?”

  “Prospero,” Eldritch warned.

  “Sorry,” I grumbled. “But what was the MEA doing setting up a buy in the Cauldron to begin with? And why didn’t we know about it?”

  “Forgive me, Officer,” Gardner said, laughing. “I wasn’t aware the federal government had to ask your permission to run investigations in Babylon.”

  I crossed my arms and sucked at my teeth to prevent more expletives from escaping. Eldritch wouldn’t meet my eyes at all—so much for support from that quarter.

  “Your actions tonight have complicated the shit out of my case,” Gardner continued.

  “Seems like you complicated it yourself when you lost your snitch, Special Agent.”

  Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t rise to the bait. “A few weeks ago, one of our agen
ts working undercover in Canada reported that an illegal shipment of antimony was being sent to Babylon.”

  Antimony is a common metalloid used in everything from cosmetics to the treatment of constipation to the manufacturing of ceramics. Gardner’s mention of a shipment was notable, however, because the element was also used in a lot of potions. In fact, it was so commonly used in alchemy that the government had started regulating its sale a decade earlier to try to limit street wizes’ access to it.

  “I don’t suppose they gave you a delivery address?” I asked in a dry tone.

  Gardner’s lips pressed together. Guess she wasn’t a fan of sarcasm. “No, but we got our team in place shortly after and have been watching things since. About a week ago, Captain Eldritch called to tell us there had been a couple of unusual assaults.”

  “Nothing like what happened tonight, but pretty violent,” Eldritch said. “The victims had each been bitten multiple times.”

  “Why didn’t you put it in the debriefing reports?” I demanded.

  His face hardened at my challenge. “I didn’t want to alarm anyone unnecessarily.”

  I swallowed my retort. If I had to bet, Eldritch hadn’t made the report official because then his precinct would have gotten some unwanted attention from the chief and the mayor, who was up for reelection. “So you told the MEA instead?”

  “Ever since Abraxas went to Crowley, the MEA has been keeping an eye on Babylon,” Eldritch offered, “waiting to see who would step up to fill the power vacuum.”

  I snorted. “No one would be dumb enough to do that while Uncle Abe’s still alive.” As I spoke I kept a careful eye on Gardner to see her reaction to my casually claiming Abraxas Prospero as kin. She didn’t even blink, which meant she’d known who I was before she walked into that room. Part of me was relieved not to have to explain the connection or how I’d walked away from Uncle Abe and his coven a decade earlier. In fact, the last time I’d seen him was when I watched his trial on TV with the rest of the city. During the testimony, he’d smiled at the camera like he’d been savoring a juicy secret. I shivered, shaking off the memory.

  “So you figure whoever ordered that antimony is trying at least to consolidate the Votaries.” I crossed my arms and tried to sort through all the angles.

  Votary is another name for wizards who specialize in an alchemical form of dirty magic. In the dirty magic food chain, Votaries are at the top, followed by the Os, who specialize in sex magic, and the Sanguinarians, who deal in dirty blood potions.

  “That’s one of our theories.” Gardner was watching me carefully now that she knew I had criminal blood in my veins.

  It had been five years since Abe earned his all-expenses-paid trip to Crowley Penitentiary. Before his downfall, he’d been the grand wizard of the Votary Coven and the godfather who’d kept all the other covens in line. Once he was behind bars, no one had the balls to come forward and declare themselves the new kings of the Cauldron, so the covens splintered, which resulted in lots of turf battles. If Eldritch and Gardner were right about someone’s trying to make a power play, we were looking at a lot more dead bodies piling up before this was all said and done. But that was a pretty huge if.

  “Antimony has lots of uses besides alchemy, Special Agent.”

  She crossed her arms and smirked at me. “That’s true, I suppose. But we’ve checked the official shipment manifests of every freighter that’s come into Babylon in the last month. No shipments of antimony showed up. That means whoever received it was trying to keep it off the record.”

  “Look, even if you’re right and the antimony was used in the potion Harkins was on,” I countered, “it doesn’t mean we’re looking at consolidation of power. It could just be a new wiz who wants to make his mark.”

  “You could be right.” She nodded. “That’s one of the reasons we sent Harkins to make a buy. We were hoping that once we knew who was dealing the potion we could convince them to flip on the distributor.”

  “But he got hooked before he could report back to you,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “What’s the potion called?”

  Gardner exchanged a tense glance with Eldritch, who’d remained tellingly silent during the exchange. No doubt about it. Special Agent Gardner was in charge. “The street name is Gray Wolf.”

  “Clever,” I said.

  “Why?” Eldritch asked. He’d worked the Arcane beat for years, but he was still a Mundane. Sometimes the intricacies of the craft eluded him.

  “The gray wolf is the alchemical symbol for antimony,” Gardner explained.

  “Shit,” I said. “If this stuff takes off, we’re toast.” From what I’d seen, Gray Wolf created both immunity to defensive magic and a ravenous craving for human flesh. Plus it acted incredibly fast on the user’s body chemistry.

  “And now that Harkins is dead, we’re back at square one,” Gardner said.

  My stomach dipped. I didn’t regret killing Harkins, but I was sorry my actions made getting the potion off the streets more difficult. “How can I help?”

  “Nothing beyond a detailed report on your altercation with Harkins. Maybe you saw something we can use.”

  I nodded absently. “You mentioned that you thought Gray Wolf was alchemical. Does that mean you had a wizard analyze the ingredients?”

  “Yes, off a blood sample we gathered at one of the crime scenes. But our team’s wizard has only had a chance to do preliminary tests.”

  I chewed on my lip. I’d love to get my hands on that sample to figure out what made Harkins change so quickly. A new thought arrived hot on the heels of that one. “Wait, do you have any BPD officers on your task force?”

  Since the 1980s, the MEA had been partnering with local police agencies by bringing local cops in on cases. It benefited the agency because it got access to locals who understood the dynamics of their cities, and the cops benefited because the MEA paid generous overtime. In other words, if they were hiring, I wanted in.

  Gardner frowned at the change of subject. Then she exchanged a glance with Eldritch.

  “I’m putting together a list of candidates,” he said, not meeting my eyes. Translation: I wasn’t on it.

  “Look, I know you don’t know me from Adam,” I said. “But I’d love a chance to consult on this case.”

  Her eyebrows rose at my audacity. When she didn’t laugh, I forged ahead.

  “I was the last one to see Harkins alive”—I counted the reasons off on my fingers—“I grew up in the Cauldron, and, as we’ve already covered, I was raised in the Votary Coven.”

  She glanced at Eldritch, who suddenly looked very uncomfortable. “Officer Prospero, I wouldn’t need extra bodies on my team at all if you hadn’t killed my star CI tonight.”

  I snapped my mouth shut.

  “She’s right, though,” Eldritch said, shocking the hell out of me. “She knows these streets. Plus, when you asked for that list you said you wanted Adepts. There are only a handful on the force.” Usually Adepts in law enforcement went the CSI route because of the lab work.

  Gardner raised a brow. “So why wasn’t she on the list already?”

  Eldritch glanced at me with an expression that put me on edge. “Leave us.”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Go.” His voice was quiet but held a thin edge of steel.

  Gardner didn’t smile or send me any other sign of encouragement. “We’ll call you back.”

  I shot Eldritch a pleading glance before I walked out the door. I was pretty sure Eldritch wanted me to leave so he could tell her I wasn’t ready for MEA-level work. After all, I was just a beat cop. Usually detectives and officers already members of special Arcane units got the sweet gigs on MEA task forces.

  The other officers in the bull pen were doing a minimally convincing job of looking busy. But the instant I exited the office, the energy in the room shifted.

  I crossed my arms and leaned against a metal desk. Inside the office, Eldritch was talking. Gardner listened with he
r arms crossed. Every muscle in my neck was so tight it cramped. The more I thought about my idea to join the team, the more I wanted it to happen.

  Promotions were rare and incredibly competitive in the department. Thus far, I’d been told that my background in the covens wasn’t a factor in being passed up. Instead, the excuses were always that I fell a hair short of the top score on the test or that someone else was just more qualified. But with each missed opportunity, I grew more restless. After five years, busting hexheads and the occasional corner kid felt like playing Whac-a-Mole. But being on a task force would let me be where the real action was happening. I’d be going after the supply side of things—potion cookers and the coven wizards.

  “Yo, Prospero?” A deep voice called from behind me. Guess the other cops got tired of watching and had decided to drum up some drama by shit-talking.

  I ignored them and started chewing on my right thumbnail. Was Eldritch arguing for or against me? I couldn’t tell from Gardner’s body language, which hadn’t shifted at all.

  “I heard you shot a guy in the dick,” another baritone called. “That true?”

  “Why?” I didn’t turn around. “You want a demonstration?”

  Male chortles echoed from the break room nearby. The swoosh and thump from the potion vending machine hinted that one of my colleagues was helping himself to a late-night energy potion. I always found it ironic how many cops justified using clean magic to fight the dirty kind. Then again, most cops weren’t Adept, so it was easier to compartmentalize magic into a good camp and an evil one. Black versus white, legal versus illegal. Hell, the Big Magic corporations claimed their government-sanctioned potions weren’t even addictive, which they “proved” using studies they themselves had funded. But anyone who cooked potions could tell you the line between the two was little more than vapor. Whether you used it with good intentions or ill, magic was magic, and instead of being black or white, most of it was smoke-screen gray.

  Just then, Gardner’s head swiveled and she stared right at me through the window. I met her gaze without flinching. Whatever Eldritch had just told her put that speculative gleam in her eyes.