Moonshine

by Jasmine Gower

  “Ouch! Hell!” Ming heard a smack on the other side of the partition. She and her group – still Jase, Kelsie, and Arnold – had taken their quarry to an abandoned shack in the industrial district that she sometimes used for such purposes. It was the closest of her spaces to where she had found the woman, and she wasn’t keen on taking this lady up to her main base. The last thing Ming wanted was for these magicians to figure out where she lived. Ignoring the struggle she could hear, she finished sharpening the blade she was working on. It was just a small jackknife with a heavy hilt – useful for these sorts of interrogations.

  Stepping around the partition, she entered a space occupied only by a single wooden chair, a dull electric light hanging from above, her three minions, and their target.

  Regina Sadowski – this scrawny, vacant-eyed mana addict found and taken just a few blocks from an ordinary deli where she had gotten lunch, where Ming and the others heard the counter boy call out her name when her order was ready. The woman that Ming’s spies had photographed with the bowler-hat mage at that same deli a week back, and who had been with the group that dropped the bird charm. She sat tied to the chair, a pink mark on her face where Kelsie had slapped her. Kelsie now stood the furthest from the captive, clutching her wrist.

  “She bit me.” Ming didn’t respond. She wouldn’t have done any differently in Regina’s position.

  Ming stood before Regina, absently spinning the knife in her hand. “Hello, Miss Sadowski. I have a few questions for you.”

  Regina ignored the knife and instead tried to peer into Ming’s face. The room was ill-lit, and Ming and all her companions were dressed in their dark coats and hats. Ming also had a black scarf wrapped loosely around her, and it concealed most of her face. She didn’t intend to kill Regina to keep their identities secret – it was so much easier just to cover up. When the young woman didn’t speak, still squinting and trying to catch even a glimpse of her kidnapper’s features, Ming continued.

  “I do hope you will cooperate. We only want information. This can be a simple, straight-forward interaction, if you’re willing to make it so. We already know that you keep company with a few magicians – that you haunt Walter’s and the Gin Fountain. Tell me: do any of your magician friends do an unusual sort of magic? Something different than what the other magicians do? Maybe some kind of magic with foreign roots?”

  Regina stared up at her, and when Ming began to fear that Regina wouldn’t readily speak, she stopped twirling the jackknife and stepped closer. Her threats were already clear, but with the knife held at the ready, hopefully it would stir up Regina’s survival instincts and get her talking.

  The young woman sounded calm – bored, even – when she answered. “Yes, I know magicians.”

  Ming tried to recall the terminology Johnston had shared with her about different types of magic. “Ones that do methodical magic? Or others?”

  Regina rolled her head, and her black curls bounced on her shoulders. “Both.”

  Ming relaxed the arm that held the knife and gestured toward Jase with her free hand. He stepped up and dropped the bird charm in her palm, which Ming then held out in front of Regina. “Do you recognize this?”

  The young lady squinted again, seeming to seriously consider the question. “No.” Ming believed her.

  “It’s a charm with magical properties. Do you know who might own such a thing?” Regina’s expression remained still as stone, but her cheeks pinkened. The length of her hesitation was telling.

  “I don’t… I don’t know for sure.”

  Ming closed her hand over the charm and began twirling the knife again. “No guesses?”

  “I don’t know.”

  That wasn’t good enough for Ming, and she halted the knife and shoved it forward, edge perpendicular to Regina’s neck. Ming stopped and held the blade a hair’s width from Regina’s throat. “I don’t have any particular desire for blood,” Ming said, and she meant it. “But I need this information. Cooperate.”

  Regina swallowed, now quaking a bit in her chair. Her eyes were bloodshot, and Ming wondered if it was fear or addiction that shook her. She didn’t have any mana with which to bribe the woman, she realized with a pang of embarrassment. That probably would have been more convincing than the knife. But threats, it seemed, were not completely useless.

  “Wh– Why?” It wasn’t an answer, but it was better than silence. That she spoke at all told Ming that Regina was scoping out her possibilities, trying to see how little she could get away with tattling. Which meant she was willing to tattle, at least a little.

  “Just doing my job.”

  “You gonna hurt her?”

  She’d slipped, but that told Ming little except that she probably wasn’t looking for the blond man. “Probably.” Regina choked back a whimper and set her jaw. Ming didn’t have time for that. “I get you want to protect your friend, but here’s the thing: we know some of your other friends, too. If you help us out, we won’t have to go pestering them.” Regina tilted her chin down until it nearly rested against the knife, staring at the floor – a gesture Ming couldn’t interpret, so she pushed onward. “Your friend who wears the bowler hat, perhaps? The busty lady in white?”

  Regina kept staring at her toes, but she spoke in a whisper. “They will destroy you.” Ming frowned, but she refrained from interrupting. “You know what magicians can do? Everybody – all those politicians and concerned mothers’ groups and people who listen to Franklin Blaine – they all think it’s a morality thing. ‘Unnatural,’ or whatever.” She glanced up, her pupils seeming too small for the dim lighting. “But they’re dangerous. I think people forget that, but a magician can fry your guts from the inside out. They can flay you with their minds, melt your bones, make you bleed out the eyes. So go a-fucking-head. Try questioning them. See what happens.”

  Ming waited a moment longer, hoping Regina might have more to say. She did, but nothing that helped Ming. In a quiet, wicked voice, Regina whispered, “I dare you.”

  Ming snarled and pulled the knife back to strike Regina across the face with the hilt. Regina yelped as her head whipped aside, but Ming could only hear her own breathing ringing in her ears as she panted and thought. There were still too many uncertainties, and she needed to narrow it down. She had to be sure. She couldn’t afford more mistakes like at the Gin Fountain, kill the wrong the kind of target, and turn every magician in the city against her. Especially not if those magicians were as dangerous as Regina’s portents suggested.

  Ming dropped the knife and took a fistful of Regina’s dark curls, jerking the young woman’s bruised face up to look her in the eye. “Just tell me who the little bird belongs to! That long-haired woman?” Regina stared back with vacant eyes, expressing no pain, fear, or even anger. Ming wasn’t even sure Regina understood to whom she was trying to refer. Ming tried to remember the others she had seen playing cards, the ones Regina had left with. “The pale one that’s all angles? The dark woman in the gold dress? It has to be one of them!”

  Unless she had been mistaken. What if someone else dropped that charm there, maybe hours before Regina’s friends arrived?

  But she noticed that Regina’s small pupils had expanded. Which of Ming’s descriptions was that reaction to? The last one? Or was Ming imagining it in her desperation? If her suspicion was correct, this would be the same woman that she had tried to capture that night at the Gin Fountain. Perhaps some part of Ming only wanted it to be this woman who she had already once set her sights on.

  She decided to bluff, figuring it had to have been one of the last two she had mentioned. “The one in the gold, huh? What’s her name?” Regina’s eyes widened further. Ming was on the right track, but she didn’t want to alienate this woman worse than she already had. She had to be gentler. “Just her name. Then, you can go.”

  “You don’t even know if she’s the right one.” Not for certain, no, but that was the risk with interrogations. Regina’s little tells were enough, Ming hoped. “And what w
ill you do with just a name?”

  Ming had used as little to track a target before, but of course she wouldn’t tell Regina that. “Exactly. So, you shouldn’t be too worried about handing that information out, right?” Ming tucked the jackknife in her belt behind her back as a sign that she meant it when she said that she would let Regina loose.

  Regina bit her lip. Ming had struck her with the knife hilt right where Kelsie had earlier slapped the woman, and the bruise on her cheekbone was starting to swell. She had to have been in pain, and Ming was beginning to see that Regina’s earlier confidence was waning.

  “Daisy.”

  Ming crossed her arms. She had to admit, she admired Regina’s gumption, as much as it wasted her time. Again, she would have done no differently in the young woman’s position. “You can’t meet me halfway here?”

  Regina winced. “Daisy Dell.”

  Ming nodded to Jase, who came up to Regina with a burlap sack to drop over her head before he began untying her from the chair. She didn’t yell or thrash – a smart girl, and Ming was glad that she had not been given reason to hurt Regina any more than she had. She had gone in prepared to do as bad to Regina as the lady in white had done to Elicia, but Ming truly didn’t want unnecessary bloodshed. It was all just business.

  “We’ll take her back to where we found her,” Ming said to Jase. Regina would tattle about this exchange the instant she reunited with her friends, Ming was sure, but she hoped at worst that would only scare Daisy into flight or hiding, which wasn’t as much trouble as hanging on to Regina and risking her magician friends coming to hunt Ming down in some rescue attempt. For all the hassle of dealing with Regina already, she hadn’t offered much, but it might be enough. Ming’s main concern, now, was the small window of opportunity she had to find this Daisy Dell.

  Ashfall began drifting down in a thick shroud about the time Vicks pulled the car up to Daisy’s apartment building. She still had the machete clutched in her hand when she got out, and Vicks failed to ask for it back, even as her fist tightened over its hilt.

  “Thanks for the ride,” she said as she stepped out.

  “Sure thing, Daze. Take care.” His farewell was unexpectedly soft-spoken. In the backseat, Vinnie only offered a solemn nod. It was an uncomfortable parting, and she felt ashamed for getting either of them swept up in her mess. She had told Vinnie he could blame Mr Swarz, but she felt more and more like all this was her fault.

  She should have never trusted Mr Swarz.

  Daisy didn’t bother to hurry through the ashfall, indifferent if it clung to her hair and clothes. Night had already come, and she might have a chance for a shower before bed if she could talk her employer into sticking around for a few minutes more to keep an eye on Cyan. Vicks drove off once she was inside the foyer, and she tried to push him and Vinnie out of her mind as she climbed the creaking, narrow staircase of her building.

  When she reached her door and began to unlock it, an aching headache throbbed behind her eyes. She wished she could do something for Lavender or something more for Cyan, and she wished that these mage-hunters would just mind their own business. Not even clear still on who was chasing her or why, the stress of it all was finally began to catch up to her, accumulating as a thunderstorm in the center of her skull. She couldn’t hold back a weary but relieved groan as she shoved the door open.

  “Mr Swarz, I’m back. I think I got a lead.”

  Stepping inside and shutting the door behind her, she realized she still held the machete and leaned it against the wall. Turning into the studio, she paused at the sight of something unfamiliar. She almost didn’t recognize it at first, that pale mass covering her bed, but after a second of mental delay, her mind registered it as a human body, naked and stretched out facing away from her. Mr Swarz turned his head to glance over his shoulder at her voice, and even across the room she could see his pupils widen.

  Daisy yelped and backed into the door at the same instant that Mr Swarz tried to thrash his way off the bed, scrambling to grab a knitted blanket that lay crumpled on the floor. At his movement, another shape on the bed stirred, and Cyan pushed himself into a sitting position, looking straight at Daisy as he rose.

  Daisy ignored the faerie for the moment.

  “What the hell!?”

  Her boss was in the process of wrapping the blanket around his waist as he stood. Not a single piece of clothing adorned his body, not even his spectacles. Even with the blanket draped over him, there was enough exposed to see him blushing down nearly to his stomach. “I’m so sorry, Miss Dell! I can–”

  “No!” Daisy held out a hand as though to push him away, and used the other to cover her eyes. “No more of this ‘Miss Dell’ nonsense. I just saw your bare ass – we are on a first name basis from now on!”

  Mr Swarz – Andre – gave a shaky sigh. “All right. Fair enough… Daisy.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “We were–”

  “Don’t answer! That was rhetorical.” She let the hand slip from her eyes, having given herself a moment to recover from what she had seen. Andre had shuffled over to her dresser to retrieve his glasses and slip them on, and Cyan was still on the bed, watching her patiently with the occasional glance toward Andre.

  “I apologize. Profusely. Things got… out of hand while you were gone. I swear, I will replace your bed sheets. And burn these ones.”

  “Oh, blazing embers! Just… just put your pants on.” Daisy averted her eyes from him as she stepped further into the room, meeting Cyan’s gaze. She was never sure about faerie expressions, but he looked perfectly shameless and quite content, though he did follow her every step with his eyes. He understood that she had been out looking for a solution to his predicament and now waited for her report. Under normal circumstances, she would have envied him for how carefree he was. That he and Andre had been fooling around while she fixed their mess was infuriating. They were both lucky she had set that machete down by the door.

  “I’m decent,” Andre announced, and she dared to look back at him. He had slipped into his pants and white shirt, but the garments were crumpled, and his waistcoat and hat were still strewn on the floor. His long hair was mussed, with several wild strands sticking out in tangled loops and arches. It was the least decent she had ever seen him. “Did you manage to speak with Vinnie? You were gone a long while.”

  “Long enough to have a honeymoon with our otherworldly charge?” The red already splotched across Andre’s face darkened, and he ducked his head.

  “Yes, we rather lost ourselves in the heat of the moment.”

  Daisy crossed her arms, digging her nails into her skin until it began to burn, but she was too annoyed to care. She should have made Andre go out and pester Vinnie, and she could have stayed home and relaxed. “Heat of what moment? Weren’t you just sitting around in here?”

  He looked up, and a puzzled or maybe hesitant expression flitted across his face. “No, the most phenomenal thing… here, I must show you.” He stepped closer to the bed and knelt, picking up something she hadn’t noticed before on the floor, half rolled under the bed. When he held it out, she saw that it was just a stout glass jar.

  “Please tell me that isn’t lube.” It was going to be too long before she could get the unsightly vision of her boss’ bare, flat ass out of her head as it was.

  Andre flinched. “Ah, no. Cyan picked it up in your bathroom. Just an empty jar of your pomade. But look.” There was only a half-second pause before a light began to grow in the center of the jar, shining through the stained glass so that it glowed warmly.

  Daisy sucked in a breath and stepped up to snatch the jar from him. Peering inside, she could see a suspended little ball of light. No electricity, no wires, no oil or wick. It was magic, but none of her trinkets took the form of a jar.

  Gripping down on it, she glared at her employer. She dropped her voice low enough that she wasn’t even sure he would be able to hear. It was a question she didn’t want to have to ask, and she w
asn’t sure she wanted the answer. “Did Cyan make this?”

  “It’s not what you think. There was no sacrifice. He got into my mana, and it made him… energetic. He was able to use that power to create this little lamp.” As Andre explained, Cyan crawled off the bed and came to stand beside them, peering over Daisy’s shoulder at the item. “I don’t know exactly how the mana affected him, but I gave him more when he wavered after enchanting the item. I was marveling over it while he recovered, and that’s when…” He shrugged absently, as though she should know what came next. She did, and for once in many days she felt gratitude toward Andre for the small mercy of not saying it out loud.

  She shook her head, turning the object over in her hands. “I can’t imagine that a bit of mana is anywhere comparable to the complete life energies of a full-grown human.”

  “That’s what I thought. Perhaps he cannot do any more complicated enchantment than this without more power, but he was able to accomplish at least this much with only half a vial of mana. It certainly has wide-reaching implications for everything that’s known about methodical magic, and I imagine for ritual magic, as well.”

  Daisy shoved the magic lamp back to Andre. “It doesn’t matter. We’re getting rid of him.” He frowned, and not his usual disapproving frown. “I did speak with Vinnie. His grandmother was able to point us to another faerie ring outside the northern edge of town, down the highway to the coast. I communed with the faerie there, and I think I got her to understand that I need to bring Cyan to her.”

  “How is it that everyone’s grandmothers know so much about folk magic?” If the joke was meant to hide the disappointment in his expression, it didn’t work.

  “Don’t tell me you want to keep him.”

  Andre flinched and set the jar back on the dresser. “No, no. I understand that he needs to return to where he belongs. But there is so much to learn from his kind and their abilities, and…” He trailed off before he could make any mention of the sex.