James Baldwin - Blood Hound

Moni—that was his name—looked sidelong at me and furtively licked his teeth. By the shift in his manner and the look in his eye, I knew what he was thinking before he said it: “And if the wife’s up there?”

“Don’t leave a mess.” Nic’s flat voice turned a little stiff with distaste.

Pig . I finally stirred from my seat and left the car, masking my own opinions behind a pleasant nothing-face. I put the wave of disgust aside with my first breath of fresh air. Fresh, at least, by New York standards. I could taste pennies on my tongue. The wind was metal-tinged, heavy and humid after the last summer rain, and ripe with magic.

After you pierce the Veil for the first time and make the switch from ‘dabbler in the Occult’ to ‘mage’, something in you changes forever. You develop a sense of presence, of something else thinking behind your own thoughts. Many of the greatest mages describe it almost like another person, and it has many names: The Holy Guardian Angel, the Genius, Anima, Neshamah. I had never had the compelling relationship with this presence that other mages had described to me, but I could tell that it was less like an angel and more like a large, patient snake gazing upon a world of mice. As I tuned into the street, I could sense the Art in this part of town. Magic crept and crawled and waited in a thousand places. Some of it was old and ghostly, arcane architecture coded straight into the design of the city itself. Some of it was newer, still shining like spiderwebs. Burglar alarms, house-blessings, benedictions, curses, wards of all kinds. Wards are the most common form of magic found in cities: static enchantments written onto the energetic matrix of a structure, place, or object. Of those wards, most are really just simple alarms: they alert someone when the ward is breached. Evocation wards—complex, dynamic spells that can do all manner of wonderful things—are in the minority. They are used, for instance, to blow people up.

Only about two hours ago, my Avtoritet , [6] Authority. The ‘ground commander’ or 4-star general of any given Organizatsiya. They effectively rule, but generally answer to a Pakhun or a board. Lev, sent two men to kill Semyon Vochin in his car. Surzi and Boris pulled up alongside him at a red light, where Surzi stuck his pistol through the driver’s-side window and promptly exploded. Boris hadn’t been any luckier. Semyon’s evocation wards turned them both into cat food and caused a six-car pileup on Water Street. Then, like a frightened rodent, he’d scampered back to his burrow. Unfortunately for him, Lev knew exactly where he’d run.

The apartment lights were on, shielded by heavy drapes. Were they even still in the building? If it had been me, I would have split town while I was still in the car. Clothes, money, they could all be replaced. But life? No. Heavy magic and big guns had a way of making men overconfident, though, and Semyon was surely a greedy man.

Moni trailed behind as we headed for the foyer, hats pulled down. Even with the heat, this was an occasion for Manhattan goon formal, after all—hats to hide our faces, overcoats to conceal our weapons, and gloves to hide our fingerprints. We had ski hats on under the brims so we didn’t lose any hair for the cops to find later on. With forelocks, we could have passed for a couple of rabbis.

“So, uh, what’cha gonna do up there?” Moni spoke as we passed the desk. “Sacrifice a goat or somethin’?”

“If there just so happens to be a goat handy in this New York penthouse suite, we could make a party of it.” My voice stayed deep and dry, a little flat.

He scowled. “Are all Americans assholes, or is it just you?”

“I have on good authority that I occupy the extreme end of the bell curve.” God, Moni was nervous. I could smell it, the sour tang of spent adrenaline. The Bulgarian was half a foot taller than me, big and brawny, but he was sweating like a new side of lamb. “But in all seriousness, I will look over the wards, examine them for flaws, and either use those flaws to destroy them or find another workaround.”

“The hell does that mean?”

And here was why I discouraged questions about magic. Very few people really want to know what they think they want to know, and even if they do, the information rarely sticks. I sighed.

“Heap big magic,” I said in English. “Wizard do things good.”

Moni’s brow furrowed. He didn’t understand a word. “What?”

I half-opened the door and turned back to glare at him. “Blood magic. Now, please. I must concentrate.”

The foyer was stripped clean of spells, but like so many of these old buildings, it had been made to handle them. The Freemasons and Rosicrucians once had and still do have a significant hand in the building of America, and sure enough, we passed across a checkered floor and between two columns, one black, one white. Beneath the dome overhead lay the compass within a circle, a very powerful magical construct in its own right. A chandelier hung down from the center of the dome over the compass rose, like a knife poised over a beating heart. The core of these old buildings channeled magical energy like a lightning rod. If I concentrated, I could sense its unimpeded flow.

“We take the stairs,” I said, already heading for them. The security desk was unmanned. Lev had called and arranged the bribe in advance. “The elevator will be trapped.”

Moni made a stupid, thick sound in his throat, but he followed. Thank goodness I only had to work with him for one night. I clamped my teeth together and locked them just to feel them click.

The stair climb was a good way to relieve some tension, and by the time we hit the fifth floor, I felt better. Sweating, laboring, thighs trembling a little—but not too much—my heart thumping with every step, I felt properly alive. My intuition was playing my body like a violin, and my fingers vibrated more the higher we went. I don’t know how I knew Vochin and his wife were still in their rooms when common sense told me they should have already fled. I am not very powerful as mages go—with the right tools and a lot of my own blood, I can break wards and move paper clips around on a table without resorting to magnets—but this sense of fatedness has been my guide ever since I was a child, and it has yet to fail me.

The first ward was on the sixth-floor landing. I pulled up hard as the hum washed over me, holding up a hand to wave Moni back. The hissing ozone smell of magic filled the echoing stairwell, but we hadn’t pushed past the threshold. “Wait. It’s here.”

“What?” Moni drew his pistol from his coat, as if it would do him any good. “Where?”

“Put your pistol away. And don’t move.” I breathed in deeply, scanning the greasy walls, and focused my will into a sharp point of intent. The faint dizziness from the climb helped my vision split between the two closely knit layers of reality on Earth: Malkuth , the material plane, and Yesod , the subtle aetheric layer. On one level, I saw nothing but stained concrete and peeling metal railings. On the other, my vision swam with fine blue lines that danced and glimmered like strands of hair in sunlight. The threads led back to the landing door in a fine web and were bound to a square foot of wall beside the exit. A freshly enchanted sigil, crawling with energy. The mage had drawn it in lemon juice and salt water, that old invisible ink recipe we all learn as kids.

“Go back down, and watch the stairwell. Try and head anyone off,” I said. “Magic draws attention. People might come out to gawk.”

Moni holstered his pistol and glared at me reproachfully, but to his credit, he obeyed. He excelled at following orders. That was good.

I reached into my coat for one of those tools I rely on: a knapped onyx knife, a small, leaf-shaped blade with a fine razor edge. Calmly, I rolled back my sleeve with two precise turns of the cuff, exposing my forearm. The humming of the magic rose an octave and spilled out, reacting to the stirring energy that built in my blood and hands. Wards fed off ambient energy, and this one sent out little tentacles towards any focused source of power, like a plasma globe. Moni couldn’t see it, but he could feel the creeping weirdness. He looked back. That was not good—he was too jumpy, and it made the energy wobble and shift slippery around us.