Chapter 8
I stepped out into the bright sunlight and took a second to let my eyes adjust after the dimness inside Bran’s. Then I noticed the figure standing on the sidewalk across the street. A man, judging by his posture and general outline. Shorter than average height, but not exceptionally so. He had the hood of his long coat pulled over his head so I couldn’t make out his face, but he was clearly looking directly at me. There was nothing overtly threatening about him. But his obvious focus on me, combined with some subconscious feeling I couldn’t explain, was enough to make me wary. I focused for a fraction of a second and opened my magical senses.
He was something I’d never encountered before—human, mostly, but the energy around him was a deep black, as if it sucked in the light surrounding him, and it was tinged with death. He wasn’t a sorcerer, but clearly a mage of some kind. And there was something off—his life-force didn’t seem to be anything I knew from personal experience.
He was apparently waiting for me to make the first move, so I obliged.
“Who are you?” I called out to him, my voice flat.
“You are the Sorcerer Thomas Quinn, yes?” he asked instead of answering my own question. His voice was heavy with an Eastern European accent. Somewhere in the Balkans, if I had to guess.
“Just a sec.” I held up my right hand with my index finger raised in the universal sign of “hold on.” “I don’t know what this is about, but I’d prefer the neighbors don’t overhear.”
I had no intention of going anywhere with whoever the hell this guy was, but if our conversation were going to involve open discussion of titles and references to the magical underworld I was treaty-bound to keep out of public knowledge, this had to be a more private conversation. I quickly focused on drawing energy from the ley-line below us and directing it into a containment field in a circle around the two of us.
He surely felt it—no magical being would be oblivious to that much power swirling around them—but it was just a standard illusion spell to keep potential eavesdroppers from seeing and overhearing our conversation, so there was no reason for him to take offense. He politely waited for me to finish, a matter of a few seconds, then gestured for me to answer his question.
“Okay, yes, I am Thomas Quinn,” I acknowledged without changing my tone. There was no point denying it; while any trained sorcerer could have cast the spell I just had, as a mage he could easily read the marks of my station embedded into my coat, and there was only one member of the Arcanum’s First Rank who lived in the area. “And you are?”
“That is good.” He nodded without answering. “It seems I am the first to find you.”
“What the fuck does that mean? Who are you?” I growled, my hands shifting to overlap in front of my waist. It was a casual posture, but one that positioned me for easy access to the Glock in my new Enigma rig if it came to that.
“Of course, how rude. My apologies; I wished first to confirm I had the right man. Allow me to introduce myself: I am Jure Grando Alilović, master štrigon,” he said with a deep bow, then straightened back up to face me again.
“A štrigon?” I raised an eyebrow. “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?”
I’d never met one before, but I was familiar with the lore around them. Warlocks with some vampire-like characteristics, native to parts of southeastern Europe, especially the Balkans. They weren’t as rare as true vampires, parasitic demons inhabiting magically animated corpses, and weren’t known for drinking blood, but they murdered healthy humans and stole their life energy, prolonging their own lives and fueling their dark magic. I’d heard of this one by name, actually—Jure Grando Alilović had supposedly been killed a century before I was born, but clearly that wasn’t true.
“Indeed I am, Sorcerer.” He nodded, and he flashed a toothy smile as he pushed the hood back and revealed a pale face with angular features. “But the price was worth the trip.”
“The price?” I asked, frowning. “What price?”
“The bounty, I should have said.” He shrugged. “For you, Sorcerer Thomas Quinn. It seems you have angered someone very powerful.”
“I have?” I cocked my head in surprise, my mind racing as I tried to think who might have put out a contract on my life. There were several possibilities, but none of them jumped out as particularly likely. “Who?”
“I do not know.” He shrugged. “You know how these things are done; it is never a face-to-face with the person who wants the vengeance. But whoever it is can offer much. And I will be the one to collect.”
I nodded. It really didn’t much matter who was behind it right at this exact second. I could figure that out later, assuming I survived the next few minutes.
“And what exactly does collecting this bounty entail?” I asked.
“The preference is to deliver you alive,” he said simply. “I don’t suppose you would come with me willingly?”
“No, not gonna do that.” I shook my head.
“Very well.” He shrugged. “The reward for your head is smaller, but still quite substantial. If you will not—”
I didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence.
When you’re anticipating an expected stimulus, like a racer sitting in the blocks waiting for the starting gun, it takes the human brain a tenth to a quarter of a second to recognize the signal, process it, and tell the muscles to respond appropriately. When you’re not anticipating it but have a highly trained response to a known stimulus, a half-second or so is about the best you can manage. And when you’re distracted, thinking about something else, it can take a second or more even to begin reacting to a surprise.
Jure wasn’t fully human, courtesy of the dark magic with which he’d bonded his soul, and I knew that it gave him superhuman speed and toughness. But his brain still had to process information and make a decision before he could move with any speed. Information still had to travel along his optic and cochlear nerves, be processed in the brain, and signals from the brain then had to travel back out to the muscles to begin moving. That basic physical reality didn’t change even for magical beings, and it limited potential reaction time to about the same range for pretty much everyone. Once they got moving, the game might be over quickly, but there was still a strong first-mover advantage.
And my hands were already positioned perfectly. As I began my draw, the fingers of my left hand curling under the hem of my shirt and pulling it out of the way as my right hand snapped to the pistol grip as I’d practiced so many times, Jure’s eyes began narrowing in recognition of the movement as his brain began to make the shift from speaking to responding to this new stimulus. The gun cleared the holster before he began to react. He was just starting to move as my left hand met my right and I began to press the Glock out into a firing position, my finger already on the trigger.
The best two-handed draw to first shot I’d managed the previous weekend, on a range under perfect conditions, with expert instruction, warmed up and anticipating the shot timer’s beep, was seven-tenths of a second. I doubt I was quite that fast this time, but Jure had barely managed to take a step by the time the front sight lined up on his chest and I pressed the trigger. The gun barked loudly as the ten-millimeter anti-Fae round, its copper casing inlaid with gold and iron surrounding a silver core, etched with glyphs to slip through magical defenses, slammed into his sternum at approximately 1,300 feet per second.
But this wasn’t a range drill, and my target wasn’t a stationary piece of cardboard. He was an inhumanly tough vampire-warlock, and I knew it would take more than one hit to put him down. As his momentum continued carrying him forward towards me, I maintained my grip, rode the recoil until the sights dropped back down onto target, and pressed the trigger again. And again, and again, and again, until the slide locked back on an empty magazine three or four seconds later.
It took me a second and a half to reload, but the damage had been done. I watched as his mouth opened and closed in shock, eyes wide in confusion. He looked down at the bloody mess of his chest, a spreading stain of dark blood ruining his coat. Then he staggered and collapsed to the ground.
With a fresh magazine in, I kept the gun trained on the štrigon’s form as I carefully approached. He wasn’t dead; I could hear ragged breathing through his broken lungs and saw him twitching.
“Wha…?” He gasped, the effort of speaking obviously excruciating. “How…?”
“Fuck you, that’s how,” I said as I stood over him for a moment, until I was convinced he wasn’t going to be getting back up.
Štrigoi were vulnerable to the silver in my bespoke bullets, and I knew he’d absorbed enough of it to poison him and prevent his rapid healing from taking effect. But it wouldn’t kill him. No, there were only two known ways to kill his kind, and fire hadn’t apparently worked the last time someone tried it on him, over a hundred years before. Which left decapitation.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have an axe on me, or even a large knife. It wouldn’t be easy. But it was necessary—not only would killing my would-be assassin potentially scare off anyone else considering following in his footsteps, but štrigoi are supernatural monsters who feed on murder and suffering.
With a grimace at the thought of what I was about to do, I carefully holstered my Glock and drew my clinch pick, a small, reverse-edged knife I habitually wore in a sheath on my belt, just to the left of the buckle. Then I kneeled next to him and stabbed the blade into his neck and cut across his larynx before he could scream. He jerked and gurgled in pain, but I just tuned out the sounds and set to work methodically sawing the small blade back and forth through the muscles and tendons of his neck.
Jure’s wide eyes stared at me in fear and pain throughout the process, knowing exactly what I was doing and silently begging me not to. But he wasn’t an innocent by any stretch of the imagination; he’d personally murdered hundreds, maybe thousands of humans, and it was my duty as a Sorcerer of the Arcanum to rid the world of such monsters when I encountered them, even when they hadn’t started the meeting by trying to kidnap or kill me. So I continued working my way around until I could slide the knife’s edge between his vertebrae and sever the spine. Then I grabbed a handful of his hair and looked into his eyes.
“Goodbye, Jure Grando Alilović,” I whispered to him, then jerked his head up and separated it completely from his body, the last fragments of flesh and sinew separating as I pulled. The dark magic that had kept him alive for centuries was broken, and as I saw the life fade from his eyes, I knew that this time he’d stay dead.
I heard the sound of approaching sirens as I dropped the štrigon’s head next to his body and stood up. I wasn’t surprised; the anti-eavesdropping spell I’d cast would have prevented anyone from seeing exactly what had happened, but guns are really loud, far beyond what it was intended to muffle. Philly was one of the more violent cities in the United States, and Fishtown was no stranger to shootings, but sixteen rapid-fire gunshots in the middle of the day still tended to result in someone calling the cops. And the spell wouldn’t keep the responding officers from seeing me; it just deterred casual observation. Hell, the caller may have even been able to see some of what happened once they heard the shots and started trying to figure out what was going on.
Based on the increasing volume of the siren, I had less than a minute before they arrived, and I really didn’t want them rolling up on me standing over a decapitated corpse with a drawn blade. That was just begging for them to shoot me on sight. In fact, it would probably be better for there to be no corpse at all. And I had an idea of what to do with it.
I wiped the blood off my clinch pick and returned it to its sheath, then focused for a second and opened a small portal through the veil, right next to the body. I wasn’t sure exactly where in the Otherworld corresponded to this location on Earth—the view through the portal was a grassy hill dusted with snow, and no signs of local habitation—but anywhere that wasn’t here was good enough. I roughly pushed Jure’s remains through with my foot, kicking the head after the rest of him, then closed the gate just as a patrol car sped around the corner and screeched to a halt just down the block from me. I let the privacy spell fade, suddenly feeling drained. Working magic is always tiring, and with the post-shooting adrenaline crash after the stress and effort of the past couple minutes, I needed what energy I had left to deal with the cops.
I was standing in the middle of the street, covered in gore, surrounded by a pool of blood on the asphalt. I appreciated how it must look and didn’t take it personally as they exited their vehicle and aimed guns at me, yelling for me to show them my hands. I raised them calmly and made sure to avoid any sudden movements, obeying all their orders as they had me place my hands on my head and sit on the ground before they approached.
They ran up to me, one covering the other, as they ordered me to lay on my belly. I complied, then felt myself being cuffed.
“Do me a favor,” I said when there was finally a break in the yelling, “and call Captain Gerald Paulson at the 16th District, and Detective Adrienne Connors at Homicide.”
“You’ve been shooting off rounds and are covered in blood, and you’re asking for favors?!” one of the patrolmen asked incredulously. “Fuck you, buddy!”
“Okay, but when you arrest me and I get my one phone call, it’s going to be to Captain Paulson, and he’s gonna be pissed if that’s how he finds out about this,” I said with a shrug of my cuffed arms.
“Officers!” I heard Henri’s voice interrupt, and I looked over to see him walking down the street from the shop, hands held up in a non-threatening posture as he approached. “I’m Detective Henri Lajoie, recently retired from the 16th District. I know this man, and I saw the whole thing—he was acting in self-defense.”
“You got ID?” the same officer asked, as I heard the other radioing to request a supervisor on scene. I couldn’t see, but presumably he took out his wallet to show them his LEOSA card, which confirmed he was a retired law enforcement officer.
“Okay, fair enough, Detective, but with all due respect, dispatch reported that the 9-1-1 caller said he just pulled a gun and started blasting at some other guy.”
“Call Captain Paulson and Detective Connors,” Henri said calmly. “They’ll handle this.”
“The sergeant will be here in a few minutes; I’ll let him make that decision,” the officer said. “In the meantime, let’s get your statement.”
His partner sat me up on the curb, then they started getting Henri’s version of events.
I couldn’t hear it perfectly, as they stood a bit away and spoke quietly, but I knew that Henri was making the whole thing up, as there was no way he’d been able to see what happened before the shooting started. But even without knowing what happened he automatically defaulted to covering for me; that was nice of him. Something about the other guy drawing a gun on me first and then running away after being shot. It wouldn’t really stand up to detailed investigation—someone was bound to notice that there was no trail of blood leading away from the scene—but it just needed to be plausible enough to mollify the patrolmen and their sergeant, who arrived in the middle of the conversation and agreed to call Paulson and Connors as Henri requested.
A black unmarked police car pulled up beside the patrol unit about twenty minutes later, and out stepped Captain Gerald Paulson, commander of the Philadelphia Police Department’s 16th District, and Henri’s old boss.
“Henri, what’s going on here?” he asked as he looked around. “Quinn shot at someone?”
“Can we talk in private, sir?” Henri asked.
The Captain gestured for him to lead the way, and Henri took him into Bran’s. Before they emerged, Adrienne had also arrived and informed the sergeant this was now her scene. He told the patrolmen to secure the scene and provide whatever assistance she needed, then returned to his cruiser and left.
“Where’s Henri?” she asked me once the sergeant had walked away. I jerked my head in the direction of the door and she headed inside, leaving me on the frozen curb with the two patrolmen, who both looked bewildered at the way events had unfolded.
“Who the fuck are you, man?” the one who hadn’t spoken earlier asked. Now that my face wasn’t on the asphalt, I could see that his nametag read Browning. His partner was Officer Novak.
“I did some work with the 16th District last year. This is related.”
“If you fuckin’ say so,” Novak said. “I still don’t see how this could possibly be self-defense. Seems pretty cut and dry to me.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” I muttered.
A moment later Captain Paulson, Adrienne, and Henri emerged from the pub.
“Thanks for handling the initial response, guys, but I’ll take over from here,” Adrienne told the patrolmen. “I need you two to talk to the neighbors and get statements from any eyewitnesses. Find out if anyone has video of what happened, too. Captain Paulson and I will be interviewing the suspect here in his shop down the street; report there once you’re done canvassing. Quinn’s Esoterica. You can’t miss it.”
After they nodded and headed to start knocking on doors, she uncuffed me and helped me to my feet. I rubbed my fingers; between the cold and the cuffs, they were starting to go numb.
“What the hell happened, Quinn?” Captain Paulson asked in his deep voice, his expression the same stern one he’d had when we’d first met.
“Someone’s apparently put a price on my head,” I growled. “But let’s go inside first. I’ll tell you all about it, but I’d rather do it somewhere warm.”