Sorcerer's Creed Books 1-3

by N. P. Martin

  “You feeling better there, buddy?” the cab driver asked. “We’re in Amsterdam Street now.”

  "Worse actually," I muttered as I looked out the window just as the cab stopped at the start of a wide street that had a mishmash of houses and tenements running up both sides, with storefronts in between. I paid the cabbie and got out onto the road.

  “I hope you find your sister,” the cabbie said through the open window as he pulled away again.

  “So do I,” I said, looking around. “So do I.”

  8

  Franklyn

  Amsterdam Street felt like walking into a strange sort of twilight zone. On the one hand, you had all these grimy, dilapidated pre-war houses and tenement buildings that looked like they needed pulling down before they fell by themselves. And on the other hand, you had recently constructed buildings, all shiny and new and looking like they belonged in a different part of town. Most of the new buildings were business premises that sold art supplies and books and records and fashionably used clothing. It was like the Bohemian set had decided to infringe upon a random, drug-addled neighborhood and set up shop there.

  The people I saw there seemed to be mostly young, many of them emaciated whips in need of a good meal. It was hard to tell who the drug addicts were and who the so called artists were, since everyone slinking about on that street looked much the same to me, and I guessed this was because there was a lot of crossover between the junk and the art. It certainly seemed that way in similar places I'd been in the rest of the world, where often being an artist also apparently meant you had to be a junky as well. Amsterdam Street appeared no different in that respect.

  Donna had said Jennifer was last seen hanging out in one of the tenements, but the problem was, she never specified which one because she didn't know. I nodded to myself, realizing I would have to pound the street until I came across someone who knew Jennifer and could hopefully point me to her or at least the building she supposedly stayed in around there.

  As I worked my way up the right side of the street, I ended up trying to ellicit information from half a dozen different people who barely seemed to know what day it was, nevermind anything else. Thinking to myself that it might prove more fruitful to talk to someone who was on the same planet at least, I crossed the street, my interest spiked by what appeared to be a New Age/Occult type store.

  Like every other such shop that I'd seen (and I'd seen many all over the world), this one had the requisite occult tomes displayed in the small window, along with small glass jars and bottles filled with God knows what, artfully placed around some black candles and witchy looking stick figures made out of twigs and twine. From experience, I knew most of those shops sold or procured little of any real occult value. Maybe a few rare books on magick if you were lucky, but that's about it. Most of the time the stores were just gateways so the owners could try to upsell the customers with psychic readings and seances. Such shops were also popular with those who liked to dabble in ritual magick. Hedge magicians as they were also known. Individuals or groups (especially cults) who sourced rituals from old books, sometimes with disastrous consequences, as when they inadvertently summoned dark spirits and got themselves killed. Most did the rituals for the thrill of it, for the taste of danger that came with it. Others took things a bit more seriously, but that didn't make them any less foolhardy.

  There’s a reason why it takes so long (decades or more) just to get to the point where you can start to get a handle on magick and occult practices in general. Magick as a property is immensely complex and hard to control, even for those skilled in it. Magick never stops being dangerous and foolhardy, even when you know what you’re doing. Of course, that didn’t stop the uninitiated from dabbling, usually to their detriment. There didn’t exist the same respect for magick as their once was. Now anyone who read a book on the occult or who owned a Ouija board thought they could play around with magick.

  And so it was that I entered the little occult store with a scathing disinterest in what was on display inside, crinkling my nose at the expected, sickly sweet smell of incense that tried to make me feel like I was walking into some darkly sacred place that was filled with all things strange and dangerous and enticing, when in reality, it just made me feel nauseated. My boots sunk into the plush red carpet tiles as I walked further into the shop, briefly glancing at a bookshelf and recognizing the expected titles from the likes of Crowley, Mathers, and the newest guy on the scene, the Satanist, Anton Le Fey. Such figures were always present in popular culture, having found a way to exploit people's ignorance for their own gain, which was usually money and infamy.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  A small man in a black suit from a different era stood at the back of the shop in front of a wooden counter, his hands clasped in front of him as he looked at me expectantly with a pleasant smile on his face that didn't mask his apparent curiosity in me, maybe because I didn't look like his usual class of customer. Which is to say I wasn't pale-skinned, sullen and dressed completely in black.

  I returned the little man’s pleasant smile. “Maybe,” I said, fishing the sketch of Jennifer Crow out of my coat pocket and showing it to him. “You know this girl, by any chance? I was told she hangs out around here.”

  He looked at the sketch for a brief second, then nodded. “She comes in here with her friends sometimes. Her boyfriend usually.”

  Finally, some progress.

  “Do you know which building she hangs out in around here?”

  The shop owner, who I placed in his late fifties going by the lined face and white hair, looked into me for a moment with his sharp blue eyes. “I’m sensing you’re no stranger to the arcane practices. No stranger at all.”

  I laughed as if to dismiss him. “And you can tell, right?”

  He nodded and held out his hand. “My name is Peter Franklyn.” I shook his hand, surprised at his firm grip. “And yes, you could say I can tell these things.”

  Looking harder into him, I saw that Peter Franklyn had hidden depths. Magick of a sort that he kept well concealed. “Let me guess. You’re a medium, right?”

  A slight smile appeared on his face as he nodded. “That is one of the gifts I am blessed with, yes.”

  Gifts? I never saw magick as a gift, not with the toll it extracted on the long-term user. I saw magick as more of an addiction, something you couldn't do without after a while. Something you rather wouldn't have at all half the time, as it seemed to bring more pain than pleasure, more heartache than joy. "And what of your other gifts?" I asked him.

  Again, Peter Franklyn smiled. “To only be revealed to those in need of them,” he said. “You don’t seem to be in need of what I have, Mr…”

  “Creed. August Creed. And how would you know what I need or don’t need?”

  That deflective smile again. “Tell me, why are you seeking the girl? You are certainly not one of her ilk. Perhaps you work for her family?”

  “Something like that.”

  Franklyn nodded and went behind the wooden counter, producing a teapot from underneath. “Can I interest you in some tea? It’s a special blend of my own. Good for opening the chakras.”

  "My chakras are open enough, thanks," I said as he went ahead and poured himself one into a small china cup. "You seem familiar with Jennifer. Does she talk to you when she comes in here?"

  Sitting cross-legged on a stool, Franklyn sipped from his tea cup and then held it under a saucer in his other hand. “Sometimes. She comes in here after dark, obviously. I keep the shop open late most nights. Many of my customers don’t come in until then. The days here are slow.”

  “I can imagine. What does she talk about?”

  Franklyn stared at me a moment. “Do you mean her harm, Mr. Creed?”

  “Harm?” I shook my head. “No, of course not.”

  “It’s just you seem to have a deep interest in her.”

  “Listen,” I said, holding up my hands. “Her mother asked me to find her as apparently Jenn
ifer has done a runner from home. I have no interest in hurting her. Although I will admit, she intrigues me somewhat.”

  “Why?”

  “The same reason she does you, I’d imagine. Someone of her background, fleeing to a place like this, no offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “It makes me wonder why. It might even make me want to help her.”

  “Help her?”

  “If she needs help, that is.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  I shrugged. “Then I call mommy dearest to come pick her up.”

  Franklyn took a long, contemplative breath before placing his cup and saucer on the counter. “I believe your motives are genuine, Mr. Creed, which is why I might tell you where to find Jennifer.”

  “Might?”

  “I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Creed. I lost a daughter once, in a horrible accident that haunts me to this day.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said as I thought of my own dead family members.

  "Thank you," he said. "Jennifer reminds me of my dead daughter, enough for me to feel protective of her, vampire or not."

  “So why are you going to tell me where to find her then?” I didn’t get it.

  That enigmatic little smile creased his face again. “Like I said, I have other gifts. Your motives are pure, it seems. I trust you will do the right thing by Jennifer.”

  “I never planned on doing anything else,” I said. “Though I make no promises. There are other factors involved here.”

  “There always is, isn’t there?”

  "Look, Mr. Franklyn, it's like this. If I find her, I'll talk to her and see what she wants to do. I'll do my best to help her out. But if I don't find her soon, then her cold-blooded mother is going to flood this neighborhood with vamps, who will tear the place apart, including this shop of yours until they find Jennifer, and I don't think that's a scenario any of us wants to see go down. With me, at least she has a chance."

  Franklyn maintained eye contact with me for a long time it seemed, then he nodded. “There is a tenement building at the very end of this street that sits on its own on a patch of waste ground. Jennifer squats in there with her boyfriend, who I don’t care for at all, by the way. There are others in the building as well that come and go. I’ve never visited the place so…” He trailed off just as the phone on the counter started ringing.

  “Alright,” I said, shaking hands with him again. “Thanks for your help, Mr. Franklyn.”

  “Call me Peter. And do let me know about Jennifer.”

  “Sure, I’ll let you know. Peter”

  He picked up the phone and covered the mouthpiece, his blue eyes fixing on me. "My gifts have a darker side, Mr. Creed. I hope you never have to see that side."

  I stared back at him a moment, then smiled and nodded.

  Franklyn gave me his enigmatic smile once more before finally turning his attention to the phone, and I left the occult shop feeling like I had made a new friend.

  9

  First Contact

  The dilapidated tenement building was at the very end of Amsterdam Street where Franklyn had said it was. It sat on its own, back from the other buildings with about twenty feet of waste ground on either side of it, the buildings that once stood there long since demolished. Graffiti, old and new, was scrawled all over the face of the building, and every window had a weathered wooden board over it. The building did appear to have a working front door, though, so I walked up the worn concrete steps and knocked on it. As I waited for an answer, I stood looking around at the neighboring houses. Most of them were in such bad shape it was difficult to tell if they were occupied or not. A few young children were playing ball in the street, so I assumed they lived in there somewhere, the last dregs of the street's longtime occupants, holding on in the face of imminent gentrification from investors looking to create the next trendy neighborhood so they could line their pockets.

  There’s no stopping progress, I thought to myself, turning my attention back to the front door with the few strips of peeling blue paint on it hanging on for dear life. I had knocked three times already and gotten no response. Not that I expected Jennifer Crow to open the door in the middle of the day, but I half-expected some response from whoever else lived in there with her, if indeed she was in there at all.

  After banging the door with my fist a few more times, I finally heard a lock open on the other side of the door and then the door itself was cracked open. "Yeah," said a young but gruff sounding voice through the gap in the door. "What do you want? There's no dope here. Score somewhere else."

  The door went to close, and I quickly jammed it with my boot, coming face to face with the person on the other side, who had long stringy dark hair hanging over most of his face. "Hey, wait a minute," I said, trying to sound non-threatening, even though jamming the door open didn't exactly make me seem so. "I'm just here to see Jennifer. Is she here?"

  The boy, around nineteen or so, scowled back at me through his hair. "There's no Jennifer here, man. Get your foot away from the door. I have a fucking knife here. I'll cut you man, I mean it."

  Jesus, what is this kid wired up on?

  “Hey, relax,” I said, wondering now if I was going to have to use magick to gain entry. “I just need to talk to Jennifer, that’s all. I have something important to tell her. Is she here?”

  The kid went quiet for a second as he continued to lean his weight on the door. “You don’t look right to me, man.”

  I doubted anything looked right to him, having just glimpsed how dilated his pupils were, which probably meant he was speeding his tits off. “Alright, how about I just take my boot away from the door and we can—”

  The door slammed in my face the second I removed my foot from it. “Son of a bitch!”

  I stood there shaking my head, looking around in annoyance as I considered what to do next. From what little I got from the kid who answered the door, it seemed that Jennifer Crow was in there. And if she wasn't, it was more than likely that someone in there knew where to find her. There was no point knocking the door again. The psycho kid from before certainly wouldn't be opening it. I could have just blasted the door off its hinges using magick, but that would have attracted too much attention. Besides, the kids playing in the street were eyeballing me, and I didn't want any more magick related injuries or unfortunate accidents to happen just because my magick use was witnessed by Sleepwalkers.

  So I did the obvious thing and went around the back of the building where I found the back door to be unlocked (after I stepped through the mounds of garbage leading up to it, that is).

  "Idiots," I said, shaking my head as I barged in through the door and into a back hallway that smelled dank and damp, then into a kitchen area that smelled even worse, as if there was a compost heap in the corner somewhere. The place stank to high heaven, exactly how you would expect a place occupied by a bunch of dirty kids to smell. Dusty bulbs in the kitchen and hallway bathed the place in a dull light that did little to take away from the general gloom of the place.

  Indeed, it was because of this gloom that I almost didn't see the shadow figure running down the main hallway towards me, something shiny in their hand that I realized a tad too late was a knife. It was the creepy speedfreak who answered the door to me a few minutes before. A screech left his mouth as he came barreling into the kitchen and charged at me with the knife pointed at my belly. Surprised by this sudden attack, I was somehow able to whip myself sideways just in time so the blade of the knife glanced off my trench coat instead (I mentioned it was made from demon skin, right? Everyone should have one).

  The strung-out kid tried to push the knife through my coat, but the blade wouldn't penetrate, so I took advantage and grabbed the kid's scrawny wrist with both hands before snapping his wrist sharply to the side (after five years of traveling and quite a few violent encounters along the way, I had managed to pick up a few moves which I combined with the advice Ray had given me before I left Ireland, which w
as, and I quote, Keep hitting the fuckers until they go down, then run like Billy-o!).

  The kid screamed as I violently twisted his wrist, causing him to drop the knife, which clanged onto the dirty broken-tiled floor. The kid hit the floor a second later. "You broke my fucking wrist!" he yelped.

  "No, I didn't," I told him, keeping the pressure on the wrist lock as I planted a boot in the center of his chest, just hard enough to keep him pinned. "You would know if I did. You would have heard the bone snap, for a start. And you would be screaming the place down right now, not complaining that I'd broken your wrist when I haven’t.”

  “Who the fuck are you anyway, man? What do you want?”

  “Those are good questions.”

  Questions I was about to answer when another voice sounded from down the hall, and I snapped my head around to look. A lean looking guy was walking down the hallway, dressed in blue jeans and nothing else, tribal tattoos covering most of his arms and shoulders. Long brown hair was swept back from his high forehead. He didn't seem to be particularly put out by my presence as he lingered in the doorway staring at me with intense brown eyes.

  "Sorry to intrude," I said, still holding my knife-attacker down. "I'm looking for Jennifer."

  “You one of them?” he asked.

  “No, but going by that stake in your hand, you’re obviously expecting ‘one of them’.”

  The guy, who looked more in his early twenties than teens, fully revealed the wooden stake he had been trying to hide behind his leg. “Who are you?” he asked, pointing the stake at me.

  “My names Creed,” I said, finally allowing the kid on the floor to get up, which he did, scurrying out of the kitchen like an injured goblin. “I’m here to see Jennifer.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d prefer to tell her that. Who are you?”

  “Jasper. Her boyfriend.”

  I nodded. "Of course, yeah. Well, Jasper, I'm not leaving here until I speak to Jennifer, and since I know she's slumbering in this place somewhere for the next few hours, how about you find us some whiskey and we can go and drink and chat for a while?" I smiled. "How's that sound? And in case you're wondering, I'm not here to hurt anybody. You're paranoid, strung-out mate here attacked me, not the other way around. I'm only here to help if I can."