1
THEY WERE KILLING pixies.
I glared at the brown brick house with its neat little lawn and trimmed hedges. I wanted to storm inside and set the pixies free before I took a baseball bat to the head of whoever was running that slaughterhouse. Instead, I slouched in the passenger seat of Bronx’s Jeep, thinking of all the ways I would love to kill Reave, but I was no closer to getting out of the car.
I couldn’t set the pixies free and I couldn’t beat anyone’s head in. I was there to set protective wards on the house, not burn it down.
Bronx shifted in the driver’s seat, watching the house as well. “You know we can’t sit here all night.”
“They’re killing pixies,” I said, glancing over at the troll. “They’re making fix—killing not only pixies, but anyone who is stupid enough to take the drug. I can’t put a protective ward on that house. I’d rather hand myself over to the Ivory Towers.”
“Reave isn’t going to let you out of your deal just because you have moral objections to his business pursuits.”
“F*cking bastard.”
Months ago, Reave discovered that I was a former warlock. Well, just a warlock-in-training, but the information was enough to get me killed. To keep him from selling me to the highest bidder, I had to work for him. And because I was an idiot, Bronx was stuck working for the dark elf Mafia boss as well. I needed to extract both myself and the troll from this mess, but I didn’t have a clue as to how. So for now, here I was protecting drug manufacturers and helping them kill creatures for their livers.
Sitting up, I unbuckled my seat belt. “I warned Reave that I wasn’t going to kill anyone for him. Protecting these a*sholes would make me an accessory to murder.”
“Then we go back to Reave and we tell him that we’re not going to do it,” Bronx said as he reached for the key still sitting in the ignition.
“No,” I snapped. I wasn’t angry at the troll. I was angry at Reave and maybe even angry at myself. If it was just me, I’d tell Reave to shove his little task up his ass. But Bronx was in this mess too, and if I told Reave to f*ck off, Bronx would get hurt.
Unlocking the door, I pulled the handle and rolled out of my seat to the sidewalk. Bronx climbed out of the Jeep at the same time and walked around to stand beside me. The large troll with the spiky blond hair scratched the stubble on his chin as he stared at the house. “Let’s take a look,” he suggested. “You should know what you’re protecting. Things could go wrong, through no fault of your own, if you don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
An evil grin spread across my mouth as I shoved my hands into the pockets of my baggy jeans and strolled down the block toward the two-story house. Man, I loved his wicked sense of humor. We were going to see what kind of trouble I could cause while maintaining a somewhat believable alibi. It was unlikely that Reave was going to buy any excuse that we came up with, but it was worth a try. If I taught the Svartálfar anything, it was going to be that you never backed a warlock into a corner.
A woman with a blue handkerchief wrapped around her greasy brown hair jerked the door open after we stood pounding on it for a couple of minutes. A cigarette was pinched in the corner of her mouth, while lines dug deep furrows in her face. Working for Reave wasn’t helping her preserve her youthful vitality.
Slipping the cigarette between two fingers, she pulled it away long enough to blow a cloud of smoke in our direction before barking, “What do you want?”
“Reave sent us,” Bronx replied while I coughed, gasping for some clean air.
“Oh. You’re him, huh?” Her eyebrows jumped toward her hairline and her mouth hung open in surprise. Apparently I wasn’t exactly what she’d been expecting.
“Yeah, I’m him,” I said.
“You gotta come inside to do your thing?”
“It helps. Reave said he wanted this place thoroughly protected. If I don’t know what I’m protecting, things could go wrong.” I leaned close, flashing a wicked grin while struggling to ignore the gagging body odor rising from her. “Horribly, painfully wrong for anyone inside.”
The woman jerked away from me, her dull brown eyes going wide. She pulled open the door and moved out of the entrance so Bronx and I could enter the house. From the exterior, it looked like a normal suburban house. You would have expected to see a tidy living room with upholstered furniture in floral patterns, neatly piled magazines on the coffee table, and maybe a stack of cartoon DVDs beside the TV in the corner. You would have been wrong.
The house was a lie. It had been chosen so it wouldn’t draw any attention. The police didn’t expect to find a lab for manufacturing lethal drugs in the middle of suburbia. They were looking for things like that in the slums on the other side of town.
The curtains were drawn over the front windows and the living room was lit by a single desk lamp resting on an old orange crate. A large man sat on a metal folding chair behind the crate, cleaning one gun while another was disassembled and resting on the crate. A small TV played in the corner, sound muted so he could hear our conversation at the front door. The guard watched us as we entered, but said nothing.
The stinky woman shut the door behind Bronx. She dropped her half-burned cigarette on the hardwood floor and crushed it under her stained pink house slipper before guiding us to the back of the house. We passed through an empty dining room and she started toward the kitchen, but I stopped her at the stairs leading to the second floor.
“What’s up there?”
She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Couple cots. Bathroom. Reave don’t keep any kind of furniture or valuables here.”
“Where are the other guards?” Bronx asked. The woman narrowed her eyes and I held my breath. I didn’t want her to whip out a cell phone and call Reave to check our story. I wanted to get in and out. “He needs to know. Otherwise your own guards could be locked out.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” she murmured, and it was hard not to laugh because Bronx was just piling on the bullshit. “The other two are picking up dinner. There’s usually only three guards here, plus me and my husband. Except on delivery and pickup days. Then Reave sends over four more guards.”
We continued to the kitchen, where we found all the counter space covered with take-out containers and greasy fast-food bags that desperately needed to be thrown out. The trash was overflowing with empty beer bottles and more rotting food. This place needed more than extra security. It needed a cleaning service, but then both the people I had seen so far also needed a few lessons in personal hygiene.
At the back of the house, the woman pulled open another door and we descended into the basement. This wasn’t one of those nice finished basements with a big-screen TV, minifridge, and pool table. This was an old-fashioned basement with cold stone walls, concrete floor, and exposed pipes overhead. All the lights were bright bare bulbs and an odor of mildew hung in the air.
A man looked up from where he was leaning over a long table, his black eyes enlarged by his thick glasses. “Where the hell have you been, woman? I’m ready for the next batch,” he shouted as we came into view. Along the wall behind him was another long table, but this one held a row of silver boxes and several glass containers with tubes coming out of them.
“Those men Reave called about arrived,” she snapped irritably, waving one hand back at Bronx and me.
The man’s eyes settled on us and his frown deepened. “Why they down here?”
“We need to see all of the premises so that the work can be done properly,” Bronx said, but the man didn’t seem to be as trusting as his wife. His frown deepened as his fists landed on his hips.
“Is that one of the new gravity convection ovens or are you still using forced air?” I asked, stepping around the woman to approach the table. The man straightened, his frown disappearing as he glanced over his shoulder at the row of ovens behind him.
“The two on the far end are forced air. I just got in the new gravity convection,” he said slowly, sounding as surprised as Bronx looked beside me. Unlike a lot of tattoo artists, I had studied various methods of preparing ingredients used in potions. Most tattoo artists bought their ingredients prepared for them, while I liked to work with the raw materials. The result was that I knew a fair amount about the machines found in professional laboratories.
“How do you like it?” I asked, scratching my head as I looked over the ovens. “I’ve worked with the forced air for years and think they’re great. I’m reluctant to change when I think something works just fine.”
“The gravity is a dream,” the man said with a chuckle, his whole demeanor relaxing as he imagined that he was talking to someone who was in the business as well. “It took me forever to talk Reave into getting me one, but it has sped up production. It’s a lot more reliable than the forced air.”
“You’ve got a great collection of desiccation jars, particularly the vacuum ones. I wasn’t expecting you to use those.”
He shrugged as he took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses on the hem of his dirty Black Sabbath T-shirt. “They come in handy if you get backed up. If we can’t get the livers directly into the ovens after harvesting, they’ll go into the traditional desiccators, but if we need to let them sit for a while after coming out of the ovens, we’ll drop them into the vacuum desiccators. With all the moisture in the air down here, we have to be careful that the product doesn’t get contaminated.”
I nodded, pretending to be interested in his tools and gadgets when my stomach was churning inside. I knew the basics of how fix was produced. Pixies were torn open, their insides ripped out and separated. Their livers were used for the drug, but most of their other organs could be sold to vendors for potions and a few delicacies. The livers were thrown into laboratory-grade ovens and dried until they could be pounded into a fine powder, which was later snorted or injected by trolls, ogres, giants, and other large races. A smaller creature’s heart would quite literally explode in its chest in a matter of seconds.
“Yeah, that’s got to be a problem,” I murmured before turning back to the man. “Do you keep the pixies on-site?”
“Have to. The product has to be fresh.”
“Can I see the room they’re kept in?”
The man’s expression closed once again as he crossed his arms over his slightly bulging stomach. “I don’t know why you need to see that.”
At the same time I could hear the heavy thump of two sets of footsteps descending the wooden stairs into the basement. The men fetching dinner had returned. Excellent—more gun-wielding a*sholes running around this enclosed space. Three people with guns we might have been able to handle quietly, but five was getting tricky. The scent of salty fries and greasy burgers hung heavy in the air, adding to the uncomfortable gurgling in my stomach.
I forced an indifferent shrug. “Fine. Reave said to protect the house. It was my understanding that meant the most important parts of the house. I’ll just do the upstairs. You can explain to Reave why I didn’t protect the pixie storage room. You can also tell him that I’m not making a second trip. I’ve got better things to do with my time.”
Bronx was expressionless as he started to follow me back toward the stairs. I didn’t even reach the bottom stair when the man was anxiously calling me back.
“Look, man, I didn’t mean nothing. If anything happens to the supply, it’s my neck.”
“I’m just trying to do a job,” I said, still standing by the stairs as if I was going to bolt at any second. “The sooner you let me do it, the sooner I can get out of your hair.” What this guy didn’t know was that Reave hadn’t said anything about protecting the pixies. I think he wanted me to put a quick ward on the front and back doors and drop a fireproof charm over the house before calling it a night. I had something better in mind.
“Here. The storage room is right here.” The man scurried to a door in the far wall. He took an old iron key out of his pocket and unlocked the door while waving me over. I gave a quick nod to Bronx to hang back while I stepped over to the room. The man flicked on the light and there was no stopping my harsh gasp. It was a small room, barely larger than a walk-in broom closet. The entire back wall from floor to ceiling was covered in small cages made of fine mesh metal wires so the little bodies they imprisoned couldn’t squeeze through the openings.
The small room was filled with the sound of rapidly beating wings like a thousand insects gathered in a single space. Over that, there were high-pitched cries. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it was heartbreaking to hear. Unlike faeries, pixies glowed with an almost phosphorescent light from the inside, a variety of red, blues, greens, and orange. Their lights seemed dimmer than usual to me.
The man in the thick glasses grabbed a baseball bat from near the entrance and hammered on the front of the cages. “Shut the hell up! Nasty vermin.”
The pitiful cries stopped, but not the sound of those desperately beating wings. It was all I could do to keep from ripping the bat from his meaty hands and using it on his skull. I kept facing forward, walking up to the cages with my hands buried deep in my pockets. Tiny hands reached between the mesh wires at me while wide, liquid black eyes held my gaze.
“How do you keep them from using magic on the locks?” I said in a rough voice, struggling to keep the anger from my tone. The people in this house saw the pixies as animals, or worse, something to be used up and thrown away.
“The inner workings of each lock are made of iron and each lock is opened with an iron key. Their magic don’t work on iron.”
I nodded. I’d guessed as much, but I had to be sure.
“So, you got a way of protecting them?” the man asked my back as I continued to look over the wall of cages.
I winked at the pixie hovering directly in front of me. “Yeah, I’ve got something that will protect them,” I said. The pixie cocked her head to the side, looking a little confused for a second before a small smile lifted one corner of her mouth. Turning back to the man, I motioned for him to precede me out of the storage room. “I’ll need you to leave the door open and stay out of that room while I work.”
“How long is that going to take?” he demanded, looking over his shoulder at me.
“Not long. Few minutes at most. Go eat dinner while I work.”
The man hesitated for several seconds before he walked over to the guards holding the food, his head shaking as he went. I smiled to myself and pulled some blue chalk out of my pocket. Time to go to work.
All around the door and on the interior doorjambs I wrote a series of symbols in blue chalk, murmuring a spell as I went. Each glyph briefly flared to life with bright white light as I finished writing it, then went out. The spell and ward combination was what I considered loud magic, like sending up a signal flare on a cloudless night for anyone who might be watching the magical currents in the area. There would be no escaping Gideon’s attention with this, even using the excuse of defensive magic. Since leaving the Ivory Towers and turning my back on the warlocks and witches, I had been banned from using magic except in self-defense. This was not what they had in mind.
Gideon may have admitted that he wasn’t opposed to my staying alive, but that didn’t mean he was willing to risk his life and his cause in order to protect me. If it meant protecting himself and his family, the warlock would haul me in front of the Ivory Towers council in a heartbeat and let me be executed.
Stepping back into the storage room, I knelt down and started drawing more symbols on the sloped concrete floor. The sound of the beating wings had died down and the room was silent as the pixies intently watched me. The pixies held no love for the drugmakers, but I suspected that they liked the warlocks and witches even less. The Ivory Towers had been hunting them for centuries to obtain the magical properties found within their organs. We all knew that any good potion could be made even better with a little pixie heart. I was afraid that whatever trust they had put in me was dissolving before my eyes as I sketched each symbol, but it didn’t matter. They didn’t have to trust me. They only had to escape when the time came.
Standing again, I looked over the cages and smiled at the pixies before turning and leaving. The man and woman were seated at the end of the long table in the middle of the basement, inhaling some fast food, while a pair of guards stood watching over Bronx and me. On a patch of dry floor, I drew one more symbol.
“Stay out here for a few more minutes. I’m almost done,” I announced while motioning for Bronx to accompany me up the stairs. The troll was silent, watching my back as I walked through the house, drawing on each door and on the floor before reaching the front door. No one questioned what I was doing. We had all been raised not to question the witches and warlocks. Hell, you never approached one if you could help it. People had been killed by the members of the Ivory Towers just for wishing them a good day.
Drawing one last special symbol on the doorknob, I pulled the front door closed as I whispered the last word of the spell. I chuckled to myself as I followed Bronx down the front steps to the sidewalk.
“Should I ask what you’ve done to the house?” Bronx asked while picking his way across the front lawn beside me.
I smiled up at him, unable to hide my excitement as I tucked the piece of chalk back into my pocket. “It’s called the Spell of Defenseless Enticement.”
“Reave is going to be pissed. You were supposed to do a protective spell.” Bronx shoved one hand nervously through his hair as he turned back to look at the house. Everything looked fine, but that was part of the enticement. That so-called fine was only going to last for another second or two.
“I did. It’s a very powerful protection spell, but to achieve it, you have to leave yourself completely defenseless. In this instance, all locks become useless. You can’t lock a door, a window, or, say, a cage in this house.”
As if on cue, screams erupted within the house followed by loud banging. We paused in the middle of the lawn and looked at the house. Lights could be seen being flicked on through the cracks in the curtains, followed by more bangs. A few sounded like gunshots, but I wasn’t worried about the pixies. They were wickedly fast when they took flight. The humans were more likely to shoot each other than a pixie in that chaos.
“What’s the protection?” Bronx asked.
“Oh, if you enter the house with ill intent toward the occupants, your feet become stuck to the floor,” I said. I was still waiting to see the pixies escape. “A warlock has to release you, or you have to have your feet cut off to get unstuck again.”
“That’s pretty powerful.”
“I’ve been dying to use it for years, but could never come up with a good excuse.”
The front door was thrown open and the man I had spoken to in the basement and one of his guards came running out. They had their hands over their heads while screaming at the pixies, who were pelting them with what looked like scalpels. As they hit the warm night air, the pixies scattered in all directions, rising higher into the sky until they disappeared from sight.
“What have you done?” shouted glasses man. “They’re all loose.”
I gave him an indifferent shrug. “It’s a protection spell. Unfortunately, it has the side effect of disabling locks. I thought you could handle the pixies.”
“You’ve ruined me!”
The a*shole grabbed a gun from the guard and pointed it in my direction. Bronx jumped in front of me, acting as a shield. Grabbing at the troll, I tried to shove him away. My magic was out in the open here. I could stop a damn bullet without risking harm. He couldn’t.
“I don’t think so,” said a calm, irritated voice over the din. The gun exploded in the man’s hand, leaving behind a bloody stub. He screamed, clutching his wrist as he fell to his back in the grass. The guard stood beside him, frozen and white-faced as he stared over my shoulder.
I didn’t want to look, because I knew who I would find. There were things in this world worse than a pissed-off dark elf and his Mafia thugs. Like an irritated warlock with a chip on his shoulder.
Gideon stood behind me, glaring at the moaning man. Reaching into the left sleeve of his shirt, he pulled out a wand. With a quick flick of his wrist, the night was filled with an ugly gurgling before becoming completely silent. The man was dead and I was definitely f*cked.