Existentially Challenged, page 5
Then, just a few yards from the entrance, he lifted one foot, spun smartly on the other, and began heading to the side of the building. Alison watched him, confused, then noticed a prominent poster in the window near the door.
“Amateur Magic Night at the Builder’s Arms!” it read, in lurid pink text surrounded by white stars. “See the latest new magic in a showcase of up-and-coming talent!”
Alison might not have had much faith in her deductive abilities, but she knew even before checking that the date at the bottom of the poster was that day’s date. She felt a complex blend of disappointment and foreboding, as if she had just witnessed a single baby spider emerge from the wrapping of an unusually weighty Christmas gift.
Meanwhile, Diablerie had traffic-police-sauntered all the way to the side door of the venue, onto which someone had airbrushed a large star. Its intended effect was fighting a losing battle with the smell rising from the nearby drains and dustbins.
Diablerie rapped his knuckles three times upon the door, then took a step back, clasping his hands behind him. An impish smile was fixed upon his face.
The door opened to reveal a thin man wearing large spectacles, a cream-colored shirt, and a matching pair of trousers that seemed, to Alison’s eyes, to have been pulled up alarmingly high. He froze for a second at the sight of Diablerie, then threw out his hands and put on an impressively convincing show of delight.
“Doctor Diablerie! I haven’t seen you in so long!” he exclaimed. He shifted forward uncertainly, trying to gauge if this was a hug situation, and rebounded off Diablerie’s glare. “Super, super good to see you. Agh, it’s such a pain, if only you’d warned us, we could have left a slot open for you, but the whole evening is booked up . . .”
“Fret not, Terence,” boomed Diablerie, pronouncing the man’s name as if he were disdainfully biting the end off a cigar. “Diablerie has no intention of sharing the mysteries of the inner realms this night.”
“Oh, good,” breathed Terence, before tensing up again. “I mean, oh dear, that is a shame. You’ve got a super, super act. It’s . . .” He made an indistinct shape with his hands as he sought the right word. “Super. But the audience, bless them, have never really . . . got it, have they?”
“That is of no concern,” said Diablerie, gathering up his cape. “My companion and I are present tonight only as observers.”
Terence stared at Alison over Diablerie’s shoulder, then looked back to Diablerie, his mouth going through a little ballet of pouts and confused smiles, as if he was having to reassess certain things. “Oh, of course. Super. Thank you so much for taking the time to say hello first.” He pointed vaguely toward the front of the building, already preparing to shut the door with his other hand. “If you could just go in the front entrance, there are plenty of seats, and I’ll ask Jenny to—”
“Yes, observers,” clarified Diablerie at the top of his voice. “In our capacity as skepticism officers for the Department of Extradimensional Affairs.”
“Oh?” said Terence, feigning interest, already going through the motions of closing the door. But then Diablerie’s words seemed to sink in, and he froze, his face still smiling desperately in the middle of the eight-inch gap. “Oh.”
“Yes, I’m sure you have been made aware of the new legislation that empowers us,” continued Diablerie, rocking back and forth on his heels with an undisguised glee that Alison had never seen in him before. “And I’m sure that a fine hostelry such as this is not enabling any activity that might earn the ire of justice.”
“Um, no, of course not,” said Terence. The door he was holding began to wobble back and forth rapidly. “As I say, front entrance, talk to Jenny, super to see you, goodbye.” The door snapped shut. Diablerie turned around slowly, to give Alison the full effect of the smirk that had unfolded across his face.
“What are we actually doing here, Doctor?” asked Alison flatly.
The smirk widened. “Nothing more nor less than our sacred duty to the rule of law, my girl. Come! Let us find a suitably foreboding corner in which to lurk.”
08
The moment Victor realized that he was cut off from his colleagues, all hell began breaking loose outside. Great roars and hisses swept through the building, chasing the silence to the furthest corners as flashes of orange and yellow lit up the murky glass of the unwashed windows.
Victor hurried over to one and rubbed a clear circle out of the grime just in time to see Adam and the others sprinting behind the nearest cargo container, pursued by tongues of fire that moved like caffeinated snakes. After the three of them were out of sight, the deluge of fire halted. An indistinct head peered around the corner—Victor couldn’t make out whose—and an extremely precise blast of fire lasered out and splattered into sparks on the corrugated metal mere inches away. The head ducked back out of view.
Silence fell again, but for the slightly festive crackling of distant burning debris. Victor leaned back. This had all rather conclusively removed the possibility of this being a possessed animal. Something sentient was acting very deliberately here.
The pyrokinetic power he’d seen on display so far had already told him he was dealing with a heavy hitter. Possibly as powerful as him, which suggested a demonic possession (Victor was loath to use the phrase “dual consciousness” even in his internal thoughts). And if they were as powerful as Victor, then they could have melted straight through that cargo container even at this distance. Which meant they weren’t trying to kill the others, just hold them back. Because whatever they were intending was intended for Victor alone.
He struggled to think. It was always a lurch for Victor, being in a situation where his powers didn’t immediately outclass everything else in the room. Suddenly having to formulate a clever strategy was like being tasked to complete a coloring book with a paint roller.
Now that the fireworks had stopped, Victor’s eyes were adjusting to the gloom. There was no one around, but the ceiling was flat, rather than angled, like the roof. Therefore, there was an upper level. That must have been where the suspect was throwing magic from. Ergo, locate a staircase. He nodded to himself. Solid strategizing. Focus on one thing at a time; that was the trick. He headed into the maze of boxes, holding out his glowing hand.
Victor himself had no explanation for why his level of power was so high. It might have been because he had started young. His fire had first manifested at the age of eleven, on that fateful night when his family had been staying with Uncle Jim and Auntie Val and the young, hormonal Victor had stumbled upon Jim’s collection of vintage Playboys.
The boxes were laid out like a maze, possibly intentionally, but after a few turns Victor spotted a set of metal steps leading up to a mezzanine overhead. He was squeezing himself halfway through a narrow gap between boxes to get to it when there was another lash of magical fire at the front of the building, bathing the warehouse’s interior in orange again. Presumably Adam and the others were still being kept at bay.
Victor placed a hand on the steps. He could already see that the mezzanine led to the upper level of the warehouse’s front section, where the hostile pyrokinetic was almost certainly waiting for him. Blundering into line of sight didn’t strike Victor as wise, since he was clearly expected, but his enemy probably couldn’t watch him and the agents outside at the same time. Victor crouched and hugged the steps, waiting to scamper up them the moment he heard another magical blast. He felt the heat throbbing in his palms in anticipation.
It was doubly strange that Victor’s power outclassed even demonically possessed pyrokinetics. He had never succumbed to Ifrig, the Ancient from which his power derived, even for a moment. He had been fighting to block its malevolent voice out of his head even before the Ministry’s magic school took him in and showed him the most efficient way to do so. More than one Ministry expert had speculated that his increased resistance to Ifrig may have been the cause, counterintuitively. Perhaps his resilience made him all the more interesting to Ifrig, and drew the Ancient’s power into closer reach.
For his part, Victor had simply concluded that Ifrig wasn’t the smartest monstrosity in the Ethereal Realm. It had been frightening at first, that dark, smoky voice in his head commanding him to burn and kill, but it had never had a convincing argument. After two weeks of commanding Victor to boil the milk and atomize his breakfast cereal every morning, it had been hard to take seriously.
There. After a minute or two of waiting, there was another schwoof of magical energy igniting, and Victor threw himself up the steps as another insane display of orange light outside sent a spiderweb of shadows dancing through the warehouse.
The mezzanine platform led, via a second set of steps, to a network of metal walkways that ran over the box labyrinth below. In the forward corner, Victor could see a little enclosed office, ideally positioned to oversee the warehouse, and therefore probably belonging to the overseer. Next to that was a walkway that ran along the windows in the front-facing wall, and on that . . .
Victor quickly dashed forward and hugged the next set of steps, then carefully raised his head to look again. There they were. The hostile, with their back to him, still silhouetted against the conflagration outside. They were humanoid, but that much Victor was expecting. Every other identifying detail was lost in the flickering light.
As Victor watched, the stranger sent another barrage of fireballs across the car park with a casual sweep of the hand. This was the . . . fifth or sixth excessive display of pyrokinesis in about ten minutes? And who knew how many before the DEDA agents had arrived. If this had been Victor, he’d be at least staggering at this point. But the figure in the window up ahead was throwing out fire as if they were flicking bogeys. Looking closer, Victor was pretty certain they were propping up their chin with their free hand.
All of which pointed to this individual being possessed. If not, then using that much of an Ancient’s power in such a short time would make them a prime candidate for possession in the very near future.
Victor felt a thrill. Possession or near possession plus demonstrated hostile intent equaled a justifiable use of extreme force. But this didn’t seem like the average chump, and Victor’s usual method—extend a hand and wait for the squealing to stop—wasn’t going to work. Still, his strategizing hadn’t failed him yet.
He checked the terrain again. Yes, this seemed doable. All he had to do was wait until the target was distracted again. Then just stand up, dash up the steps, across that section of walkway, kick off the handrail there, swing off that overhead pipe, land on the opposite walkway, and blast the suspect’s head off his shoulders before he can react. Easy.
The target was distracted again. Victor stood up, dashed up the stairs, caught his foot on a handrail, and fell flat on his face with a loud clang.
“Victor?” said the suspect, turning from the window.
The voice had that strange layered effect that openly possessed people have, but there was something familiar about it. Victor frowned in confusion, which made it all the more difficult to peel his face off the steel grating. “Grnph?” he said, looking like an angry pug trying to extract itself from a chainlink fence.
“You’re Victor Casin, aren’t you?” The stranger moved along the walkway with an airy manner, as if their body weighed nothing at all and was simply being pushed through the air by a breeze. “I wasn’t sure they’d actually send you. I didn’t think this would work so well.”
Victor finally pulled himself into an all-fours position thanks to a nearby handrail and stared at the encroaching figure. Now that they had moved away from the window, he could see that their face was half covered in chin-length blond hair, and the other half was a mass of black leathery skin, lined with glowing orange cracks.
“Do you know who I am?” they asked, the human side of their face smiling.
Victor squinted. Somehow he did. He knew who they were. It wasn’t the face—he couldn’t even tell if the human part was male or female—but he recognized the voice. The growling, smoky tone of the Ancient. It wasn’t precisely how he remembered it, but . . .
“. . . Ifrig?” he asked.
09
The interior of the Builder’s Arms had a much more welcoming appearance than the outside, but that may have been because most of it was shrouded in darkness. There was a bar, behind which a young woman in a collar and tie stood in an arms-akimbo pose suggesting she didn’t expect to have much to do tonight, but the most prominent feature was the semicircular stage and its purple curtains patterned with reflective stars. A couple of spotlights were angled toward it, along with every table and booth in the place.
A rather eclectic audience was dribbling in. About half of them were locals, old people with little else to do with their evenings and much younger people desperately hoping that their air of aloof maturity would stave off requests for their IDs. In short, nobody who had to be at work in the morning.
The other half of the crowd was what Alison assumed to be the “hardcore” audience, the real amateur-magic enthusiasts. Most of them looked like anyone who describes themselves as a “hardcore” fan of anything looks: lots of acne scarring, spectacles, and tightly cinched cargo shorts losing the battle with expanding guts.
But scattered among them Alison spotted members of another subgroup. They were all men in their late twenties or early thirties, and all dressed in accordance with a very specific style. Some of them wore turtlenecks, some tight leather trousers, some had silk dress shirts unbuttoned far enough to show off the chest hair, but there was one clear connecting factor: every single thing they wore was black. Also, while the other demographics congregated in little groups of their peers, these men were invariably alone, or dragging along an openly uninterested girlfriend or boyfriend, and were watching the stage waiting for the event to begin with narrowed eyes. Although many of them had offered respectful looks to Doctor Diablerie.
Alison took all of this in as she picked her way between the chairs and tables carrying the drinks back to their booth. Diablerie had wanted a red wine, and for herself she had gotten a bottled vodka drink the color of an attention-starved teenager’s dye job.
Diablerie had carefully chosen a booth near the stage, and was currently sitting in the exact center of it, leaning back in satisfaction as if soaking in a hot bath. He was holding his walking cane between his legs, clasping his fingers over the skull-shaped decoration on the top.
Alison set the drinks down. “Sorry it took so long. They didn’t have any obsidian goblets, so I had to go back to the car.”
“No matter,” declared Diablerie. “You have my thanks.” Between the low light and his top hat, his face was hidden in shadow, but Alison could tell that he was grinning from ear to ear.
Alison sat down on the furthest edge of the booth seat, took a sip from her own drink, and idly bobbed her head back and forth in time to the generic rock music that was rolling in from some distant unseen speaker. She had come to terms with the fact that Diablerie hadn’t brought her here for anything more important than settling some grudge he had with an amateur stage magic group that had shunned him, but despite everything, she was having a better time than usual.
Part of that might have been Diablerie’s good mood rubbing off on her. She was aware that she was the kind of person who couldn’t smile or laugh without self-consciously glancing around the room to make sure someone else was doing the same, and she occasionally fretted that people thought less of her for it.
But she was also a little stoked that she was “going out.” Taking part in the “nightlife.” It was foreign territory to her, one that had held a certain mystique ever since her mother had made it perfectly clear that if she so much as indulged the thought of staying out a single nanosecond past eight, then she would return to find the locks changed, a binful of burning documents, and a houseful of people denying that any person named Alison Arkin had ever lived there.
So a little campfire of gleeful rebellion was burning in the pit of Alison’s stomach as she bobbed and sipped on her extremely colorful vodka drink that tasted like melted-down Skittles. When she thought about it, this was also the first time she had ever been on anything one might interpret as a “date” . . .
She glimpsed Diablerie out of the corner of her eye and consciously screeched that thought to a halt. In that direction lay madness. She took a longer sip and fixed her gaze on the twitching stage curtain.
“Drinking it all in, girl?” boomed Diablerie, somehow sensing the opportunity to stoke the awkwardness. “Storing away the details?”
“Um. Yes, Doctor,” said Alison, not looking away from a particularly poorly cropped half-moon in the middle of the curtain pattern.
“Thinking of how you will word it when you report back to our mistress?”
Alison coughed on a throatful of her drink. It was like being briefly strangled by a gummy bear. “You know about that?!” she sputtered.
Diablerie cocked his head in poorly feigned confusion at her reaction, smiling broadly. “Know about what? It is the way of things that our superiors expect debriefings from their agents, and I know they have not been getting them from Diablerie himself.”
“Oh yeah,” said Alison. “Debriefings. That’s all.”
“Tell me, girl,” said Diablerie, drumming his fingers on the top of his walking cane. “Has she enlightened you as to the full history of our dealings?”
“Um, no. Not yet.”
“Not. Yet,” repeated Diablerie, biting his t’s with loud clicks of his tongue. “Hmm. How elucidating.”
Alison was getting that familiar feeling that she had just stepped in the kind of mess that was going to be rubbing off everywhere she walked for a while yet. Fortunately the music stopped and the lights began to turn down at that moment, so Diablerie left her in her little private cringe and leant forward eagerly.
