Dark City (The Order of Shadows Book 1) (4 page)

L
unar Avenue was only
a couple of turns off the main street that runs through the heart of the city, but almost no one knew about it. There's a heavy glamour in this neighborhood and it works well, keeping non-magical people out. Me and Haskins, we're exceptions.

I hurried down the sidewalk as the rain thundered down on my umbrella. Nika's Diner's at the end of the road, near a shoe shop that I've never seen open in the twenty five years I've lived here, and a bar called The Lucky Coin.

Sometimes the Coin opens during the day, sometimes at dusk, and if there's any rhyme or reason to its business hours, I can't figure it. The place has a reputation for anonymity and easy violence. I've found more than a few of my charges there and some of the bloodstains that littered the grimy pavement outside were definitely my own. Which was why I kept my head down tonight. If I'm not on Organization business, I'm not supposed to carry a weapon. Not that I cared but I wanted to stay off their radar, for now at least.

My reflection was like a ghost in the diner window. The dingy pink light from the jukebox and faded turquoise formica countertops gave the place a 50s look. Not in a retro way, this place literally hasn't changed for going on seventy years. And it didn't need to, not when it had a captive audience who'd come here no matter what the place looked like.

A few customers were huddled in the shadows but the candles on the tables illuminated their faces. Drunks, junkies, dreamers, plotters, planners and people like me engrossed in meetings they probably shouldn't be having.

There was no sign of Haskins.

The door chimed as I shoved it open and stepped inside. The music was perfectly nondescript, easy listening from the 60s and 70s. I looked down trying to avoided eye contact with the people and creatures sitting in the alcoves but I managed to spot a troll who wasn't bothering to cloak himself, as well as a witch and a pair of mages among the usual low life schemers.

The aroma of coffee, pancakes and bacon grease hung in the stifling air. I made my way along the counter to the bar stool where Nika, the owner, sat. She was a tall, handsome lady; her thick auburn hair spilled out from under a small white cap and her emerald green eyes glinted like jewels as she glanced up from her magazine.

There was warmth in her eyes, but also tragedy. I'd never asked Nika her story, and she'd never told it. Not asking questions is part of the Diner's allure.

"What can I get you, Morgan?" She asked, her voice as direct and hoarse as ever.

"Coffee." I also ordered a donut I had no intentions of eating. Nika placed it on a china plate, and there it sat, the sugar gleaming on the greasy splodge of dough. She passed me a cup of acrid black coffee with a sachet of brown sugar balanced on the rim of the saucer.

"Keep the change."

She accepted the twenty without a word. Everyone overpays Nika. The diner's both an institution and a haven within our community. I reached for the coffee but paused as I saw someone appear in the corner of my eye.

"Detective Haskins." Nika barely kept the disdain from her voice. "Coffee and cheesecake?"

"Yeah, that'll get things started," Haskins answered, just as he always did. He squinted at the bruises on my face and the bloody crust on my neck. "Busy night?"

"Probably about the same as yours." Haskins looked more disheveled than ever. Wild spikes of dirt-brown and ash-grey hair crowned his head. His tired pebble-like eyes were red and his frayed suit seemed like it was about to unravel, I hoped I'd be far away from him when that finally happened.

We walked over to our usual booth at the back of the diner and sat in the shadows beneath the flickering cola sign. Haskins' hands shook as he placed his cup and plate on the table.

He looked haunted. A man with a spectral monkey on his back. He stabbed his fork into his cheesecake and swallowed it without bothering to chew. And then he glanced at me with his usual look of expectation.

I slid the envelope across the table. The irony of having a police detective for a narc wasn't lost on me. "So what have you got?"

Haskins poked at the remains of the cheesecake. "I've spent most of my night at a murder scene. The victim was an older man." He paused and set his fork down. "Someone cut his throat, took his eyes out and laid him on the floor like he was sleeping. He was definitely one of your lot, loads of occult shit in the house."

"Can you elaborate on
occult shit?"

"Strange old books, black candles, weird statues, hands of glory, that sort of shit." Haskins took the envelope and folded it into his raincoat. "He had some weird scars too."

"Scars?"

"Hocus-pocus symbols. Just above the wrist."

"Scars or tattoos?"

"Both. Rough, like the artist used a knife instead of a tattoo gun."

"What kind of symbols?"

"I don't know what any of that crap means." Haskins shrugged. "I guess they looked like runes."

"They might have been for protection." Protective runes were common in our community.

"Well they weren't very effective, considering...."

"Did you get pictures?"

Haskins pulled out his phone and smeared the display with his greasy thumb as he flicked through it. His face wore a sickly look as he turned the screen my way.

A man, in his late sixties, lay neatly upon polished floorboards with his arms folded diagonally across his chest. A red slash marked his throat and blood pooled around his head like a halo. Flecks stained his white hair and two wet red eye sockets gaped emptily above his drawn lips.

Haskins switched the phone round and thumbed through some more photographs. He pulled one up that showed the faint red rune marked upon the man's wrist.

I felt sick.

I'd seen the symbol before. A friend, of sorts, had the exact same configuration in exactly the same place. I'd only seen it once; the guy wore a raincoat all year round, no matter the season. But I recognized it instantly. It looked like a wheel with nine spiked spokes issuing from its center, the top surrounded by strange, alien writing. "I need a copy of that."

Haskins shook his head. "No. I'm not sending out copies of these pictures. I'm deleting them the minute I leave this place."

I grabbed a pen from my pocket and sketched out the symbol on a napkin, then I asked him for the address of the murder scene. Haskins patted his pocket, no doubt reassuring himself the envelope was still there, and then gave me the location. "You gonna eat that donut?" he asked.

"You can have it."

Haskins wrapped it in a napkin and stood. "Later, Rook."

I nodded. He left the diner, turning the collar of his coat up as he ran for his car. The headlights blazed in the rain as he drove away, passing from the magical quarter back to the city.

The swell of nausea returned as I glanced at the symbol once more.

The victim seemed to be about the same age as my friend, same build too. I took a sip of lukewarm coffee, grabbed my umbrella and headed out, a string of questions churning in my mind.

* * *

T
he train rattled
across the city as crimson moonlight washed over the dark monolithic skyscrapers. An ominous sight, as if some demonic painter had colored the city blood red. It looked unreal, like a backdrop of a movie set.

Haskins' words tumbled through my mind, I kept seeing flashes of the victim and the rune on his wrist. I wondered what it meant, and how my friend Tom had come to have exactly the same one.

I hadn't seen Tom for weeks, but there was nothing unusual there. Like a lot of homeless people, he tended to drift from place to place and then he'd reappear like a forgotten season. But I needed to find him now, make sure he was okay and see if he would tell me what in the hell that symbol meant.

The murder, along with Tudor's warning, pricked me like a rash. Something was happening on my patch, something that Erland Underwood, my boss at the Organization, hadn't bothered to tell me about. I pulled out my phone in case he'd left a message, but there was nothing. Just the one text my girlfriend had sent over a year ago, that I hadn't been able to delete. The last message she'd sent before she'd been murdered.

I thought about calling to demand an explanation but I knew I wouldn't. Underwood and the Organization were my only link to the magical world, and there was no way I'd risk breaking it. At least not until I'd found Elsbeth Wyght and avenged Willow.

The skyscrapers receded, their silhouettes like jagged shards of onyx. The train began to slow.

I got up, jabbed the button until the door opened, and leapt to the platform amid a wash of moonlight that looked like blood.

An ominous sign in what was fast becoming an ominous night.

C
igarette butts
, broken bottles and trash littered the street. The sidewalk was pitted, filthy and stained. The shops had security bars on their windows, and the faint glow of televisions flickered in the cramped apartments above.

I checked all the obvious places; park benches, bus stops, dumpsters, doorways, and alleys. I didn't bother with the homeless shelter, Tom liked being on the streets. No, maybe like is the wrong word. He seemed to need to be on the streets. Like he was protecting his domain.

"Where are you, Tom?" I shone the light from my phone into the gap behind a newsstand, straight into the eyes of an old man huddled under a moth-eaten blanket. I put a couple bucks in his hand and apologized for waking him.

It seemed finding Tom wasn't going to be easy. And when I actually thought about it, I don't think I'd ever actually attempted to look for him before. He just always had a strange knack for turning up, and notably during some of the most significant events in my life.

Like moments after the first, and last, beating I received on my third day of high school. Or when he'd arrived just as my foster father kicked me out onto the street, his evil twisted girlfriend hanging off his arm. My father had stuffed my clothes and what little I owned into a trash bag and mumbled something about being sorry, and how it was for the best. Well, it was for him at least.

But as I'd seen his disgusting girlfriend's grin, I'd lost it. Thankfully Tom had appeared at that moment and pulled me away, but not before making me take back the flippant curse I'd thrown at the bitch.

Words have power.

I still remember Tom saying that, and the look in his eyes. I'd apologized and backtracked immediately, because somehow Tom, a ragged homeless man, carried more authority than any cop or judge I'd ever encountered.

The last time I'd seen him was at Willow's funeral. He'd been standing on the gravel path in the graveyard, feeding breadcrumbs to a pigeon. He'd offered me some grim booze from a paper bag and we found a bench, sat down and stared off into the long grass, each in our own world. It had been stiflingly hot and Tom had removed his raincoat. He'd looked so strange to me, I'd never seen him without it on.

That was when I'd noticed the symbol on his arm. I asked about it and he'd said something I hadn't understood. Then I'd just sort of forgotten about it.

As if the question had never crossed my mind in the first place.

A smash and a tinkle of glass brought me back to the present. The scrap of land below the overpass had become a growing camp for the homeless. A place for the specters the city had tried to hide, to meet and trade information or insults, to scrap and confer. Fires blazed in old rusted metal barrels, and painfully thin people gathered around for warmth.

Someone stumbled along the sidewalk, their eyes wide below wild wiry hair. It took me a moment to realize it was a woman and for the moonlight to reveal the large purple bruise below her eye. She gave me a skittish, panicked glance and edged towards the street.

"I'm looking for someone." I glanced at her coat, spotted with stains, and did my best to appear benign. "You might know him, his name's Tom and-"

She pointed towards the end of the street. "He's in the alley with the bad men." Her hand strayed to the bruise below her eye. "Really bad men."

"Did they do this to you?"

She nodded. "They said they were going to set fire to me but Tom came...he told me to go. So I did."

My shoes pounded the road as I ran, the moonlit world jolting around me, all hard black edges and red and silver shadows. Nausea flooded through me as I thought of the victim from Haskins' photograph.

Throat slashed, eyes removed.

I ran past figures huddled against the wall in sleeping bags, my shoes crunching slivers of broken glass. Braying laughter echoed from the alley as I turned the corner, followed by a savage, excited shout.

Five men surrounded a doorway. I could just make out Tom behind them, his back to the door, facing them head on. His long grey white hair was swept back in a pony tail, and he had one hand out before him, as if to push them away, the other inside his battered old raincoat.

I pulled a shard of quartz crystal from my pocket and let the magic flow through me. The charge swept from my hands to the center of my skull. It felt like tiny fireworks were igniting in my mind. I reached out and tapped the air for more power, but there was scant magic in this forlorn place.

Tom glanced at me as I approached the group and shook his head, then the thugs turned my way.

They were just your garden variety pricks. Fresh from a late night bar and an evening of rejections from women wise enough to see the savagery below their smart clothes and expensive aftershave.

"What the fuck are you looking at?" The closest asked. He was short and ripped, but I could still see the weak, fat little kid he'd once been. I scanned the rest of the group. They were a good ten years younger than me, and by the way they positioned themselves, used to fighting in a pack.

The only one that worried me was the one near the dumpsters. There was a snide, low cunning look in his eyes as he stooped down, spilled a bag of clothes and tore off a strip of fabric.

And then I saw the bottle of Everclear at his feet and I knew with sickening inevitably what was about to follow.