Angel: Private Eye Book One (14 page)

I did up my belt and patted the trench
flat.

I frowned.

I could feel the wad of paper next to my
chest, but as I patted the outside of the jacket, it was as if it
wasn’t there. Continuing to frown, I undid my belt and cast my gaze
around the room.

I found a rather large candle stump about
the size of a fist that had been half burnt and had a collection of
strange looking imprints in the wax.

I made a face as I brought the candle up and
shoved it in my inside pocket.

I closed my jacket, and I couldn’t see it
anymore. There was no bump, just the smooth tailored line of the
camel-colored coat.

Though it made sense that Mr Marvelous would
have access to magical clothing like this, it blew my mind. It made
the fact that I was now a real magical private detective all the
realer.

Though I would have loved to shove massive
objects in my pocket all day, I knew I didn’t have the time.

Swallowing my gumption, I grabbed the keys
to the beast.

Then I drove that overpowered, roaring
monster of a car to Susan Smith’s apartment.

This was crazy. Christ, was this crazy.
Before I knew it, I was standing out on the city street, hand
crammed in my jacket pockets, canvassing the city. Like a bona
fides private eye.

I began yesterday as a jobless, hopeless
bum. Now I was tracking down a vicious murderer.

I kept cramming my thumb into my mouth,
chewing one nail and then focusing on the next like an assembly
line of jittery nerves.

If the perp had come back to check out his
handiwork, he’d take one look at the nervous out-of-place woman in
her overly large jacket, and run a mile.

And heck, there was a worse prospect than
the perp coming back – Detective Cortez. While I'd been able to
deal with him last night, that had been nerves and the overwhelming
crushing experience of seeing my first dead body.

If he came back and growled at me in that
by-now-familiar guttural tone that made you feel as if he was
standing on a rumbling engine, I doubted I'd be able to tell him to
sod off.

The reason I wouldn't be able to tell him to
take a hike, was that he was right. 150% totally right. I shouldn't
be here. This world was not for me. And yes, in reality, I had
exactly zero chance of solving this crime without a) throwing up
over everything, b) ruining the case, or c) getting myself
killed.

Just thinking about that horrible
possibility forced me to bring up a hand and cram it over my
stomach, wriggling my fingers under the buttons of my coat.

The weather was going crazy. It was meant to
be early autumn, but you wouldn't be able to tell that from the
onslaught of storms we’d had over the past week. A ferocious gale
kept ripping through the streets as if it were trying to denude the
trees and push the cars over. It was the perfect creepy
accompaniment to the solitary pound of my footfall as I wended my
way around the apartment block.

I expected to see police tape, the whole
area cordoned off like it had been last night. But it wasn't. The
tape was gone, there weren't even any uniformed officers on patrol,
and the only evidence that there'd been a murder here last night
was the softly trodden grass outside the main entrance.

Oh, yeah, and the vibe.

Like I keep saying, I'm not magical. This
world is so new to me it's like I’ve been transported to an alien
planet. But I could feel it. Christ, could I feel it. This horrible
sense that hung in the air, that charged up my back with cloying,
clammy hands. It felt like ghosts swarming over my skin, like
demonic worms wriggling over my back.

I kept bringing a hand up and distractedly
pinching my shoulders, thumping my arms, balling my hands into
fists and striking them into my legs – anything to push away that
fiendish feeling.

Before I knew it, my teeth began jittering
in my skull as if they were tectonic plates being thrown around in
an earthquake.

“Get a grip on yourself,” I commanded myself
under my breath.

Easier said than done. At that exact moment,
a car backfired along the main road. It was clearly not an
explosion, a gunshot, or the first volley of a magical attack. You
couldn't tell my hindbrain that, though. It sent such a pulse of
adrenaline shooting down my spine I jolted forward with the force
to spit my teeth out.

I spun on the spot, eyes wide, heart pulsing
so hard I swore my collarbones were shaking.

I saw the car shift off from the mouth of
the laneway, a suitably dense and ominous cloud of exhaust fumes
billowing out from behind it.

I went to turn back, to continue heading
down the laneway that ran around one side of the apartment
block.

But that's when I saw it.

Just to my left.

A spark.

Small, tiny, practically indiscernible from
the haze of lights and noise and the general sensory onslaught that
was Hope City.

A rush of tingles exploded down my spine,
cascading down my back, and making every inch of skin feel as if it
had been struck by lightning.

That tiny little, apparently insignificant
spark was just hanging in the air several meters to my left.

There was no one else down the laneway with
me, though a couple of pedestrians had been walking around the
apartment earlier. So there was no one else to confirm what I was
looking at. Nobody to point to and say “Do you see that random
spark just hovering there in mid-air?”

Occasionally in this new magical world, I'd
have the same reaction I did five years ago – when the world
formally found out about the otherworlders. I say formally –
because most of the world had known about magic and magical
creatures for eons. All the important people who’d made all the
important decisions – like politicians and bankers and presidents
and royalty – they'd known for centuries. In fact, their judicious
use of magic and their ties to prominent otherworlders was usually
what gave them the edge.

Us – the simple ordinary people like me –
five years ago we had the shock of our lives. Because five years
ago, simplicity, innocence, and the illusion of human progress had
been turned on their heads. Every history book had to be rewritten
and every memory re-evaluated.

So even though it had been five years,
occasionally I still had that same reaction – that magic was new,
impossible, incredible. This flight of nerves that flew down my
back like a swell of birds rushing up into the sky.

Taking a very cautious, wary step forward, I
stopped about a meter in front of the spark, half hoping it would
disappear or turn out to be a speck of dust on my eye.

It didn't.

Instead, it appeared to grow at my
presence.

“Oh, that's not good,” I had time to
say.

Then the thing exploded.

Fortunately the explosion wasn't big enough
to tear me apart or throw me backwards, but it was enough to
terrify me.

I shrieked and doubled back just as the
spark popped with all the force of a party popper.

It could hardly be classed as deafening or
particularly powerful, but that didn't stop me from cramming my
hand over my ears and shuddering like somebody was trying to remove
my spine.

“What the hell?” I stuttered as something
began to ooze from the spark.

There was no crack, no split in space.
Nothing for anything to leak from. But that didn't stop the oozing
substance from trickling down and sloshing on the ground by my
feet.

Instantly I jerked backwards, desperate not
to get any on my skin, let alone my shoes. I brought a shaking hand
up, crammed it on my chest, and stared on in horror as that oozing
substance became thicker and thicker. It now looked as if somebody
had chucked a bucket of goo down a wall.

Except there was no bucket, and there was no
wall.

I kept swiveling my head from left to right,
trying to find a fellow human being – anyone to share the
impossibility of the situation with.

I was alone.

I was also a budding private eye, and I’d
just found a clue.

When Mr Marvelous had employed me last
night, he’d promised to give me training. You know, some help
before he threw me in the deep end, chucked me onto the streets,
and told me to solve a violent magical crime.

Right now, I sure could use some
training.

I kept taking several steps back, hoping for
the crack to heal itself and that godawful green, sticky, almost
blood-like goo to stop dribbling over the pavement.

When it hit the trim of grass that rimmed
the pavement, it began to hiss. This nasty sulfur like smell filled
the air as if somebody had just cracked a case on 1000 bad
eggs.

I gagged, balling my sleeves over my mouth
and coughing into them in great splutters. “God, what's that?”

I got my answer.

A man was walking past, a pensive look on
his face as he considered that green goo bleeding from the very
air.

Though I was just starting to wrap my head
around the various magical creatures, I got the distinct impression
the guy was a warlock. Though he was neatly dressed with a pair of
neat glasses on his face – and didn't look anything at all like Mr
Marvelous – his hands were dappled white and pink from compromised
circulation – so definitely a warlock. Their magic, apparently,
required fine control of their circulatory system. Used up chi, or
personal energy, or whatever it was called. Point was, I was dead
certain this guy was a warlock.

He stopped beside me, bottom lip drawn in.
“Not every day you see a magical bleed,” he commented.

I snapped my head towards him. “You know
what that is?” I hesitantly pointed at the green goo, not wanting
to get too close in case some splashed on my hand.

He settled his gaze on me, that frown still
pressed over his bottom lip, crinkling his chin, and folding his
neck. “It's a magical bleed. Happens when a powerful spell is cast
but isn't employed properly. Magic tends to unbalance the natural
order of things. If you don't have an earthed spell, excess magic
has to discharge somewhere. It’s a little like electricity.”

I nodded, even though I barely understood.
“So… it means a powerful magical spell was cast around here
recently?”

“It could have been anytime within the past
24 hours. It takes a while for a bleed like this to happen. Judging
by the amount of discharge,” he shrugged towards it, “That was a
pretty significant spell. And it wasn't all used up.”

“All used up?” I crumpled my nose in
confusion.

“When you're casting a spell in advance, or
maybe you are using it to hide something, or you’re not expecting
an immediate effect, you have to allot a portion of magic towards
it. You kind of have to guess how much it needs. Well, I'd say that
whoever cast that spell got interrupted.” He shrugged towards the
goo again, which was now marching across the grass and singeing
everything in its path. It came across a Styrofoam cup, and the
poor piece of trash was completely crumpled before it burst into a
tiny spurt of blue flame and disappeared completely. “That's a lot
of discharge. Which means that a powerful spell was cut short.”

“Is there any way to tell what kind of spell
was cast?”

“Sure – you just need some kind of forensic
magic unit. Like they have at the police. For an ordinary
practitioner,” he shoved his hand in his pockets and shifted his
shoulders around, clearly thinking, “There are a few ways. But
you’d want to be careful,” he settled his gaze on me.

“Careful?” This guy had my full, undiluted,
absolute attention. He was the first magical creature I'd met who
was actually answering my questions. Answering me without
belittling me, offering me a job, or cramming an unwanted vampire
contract under my nose.

“You've got to have real balls to go
sniffing around in somebody else's spell. If you don't know what
you're doing, you could accidentally restart it.”

I winced.

“Anyway, you probably don't want to stand
there,” he finally got around to saying.

I yelped, jerking backwards, thinking that
the goo was about to rush up and swallow me. “Why?” I said once I
was standing in the middle of the street. Right now I would rather
be run down by a car than run down by discharging magical goo.

“You breathe in too much of that stuff,” he
shook his head in disgust, “And you'll start seeing fairies.”

“Fairies?”

He chuckled, and there was a real edge of
mirth to it. “Believe you me, they can be distracting, but the
little pests rarely shut up.”

My head was swimming. Literally. Not only
was I learning too much information in one big blast, but I didn't
know how to separate fact from euphemism. Was this guy for real? If
I stood around this weird green goo for long enough, would fairies
appear and start talking my ear off?

Again reality struck me with a bone-shaking
punch right to my jaw. God, I did not know enough to be here. In
fact, I knew just enough to know that I was in a world full of
danger.

I wrapped my sweaty hand over my collar,
digging the fingers in until my nails almost perforated my
blouse.

“Anyway, nice talking to you,” the warlock
said as he shrugged and turned away.

“I'm sorry, Mister, but is there anything I
should do? Is there anyone I should call?”

He was already out of earshot.

I rolled my bottom lip through my teeth as I
jerked my head back to the green goo.

It was still spilling out of that invisible
hole in the air, the sludge only travelling faster and faster,
thicker and thicker as wet globs sloshed along the pavement like
slops thrown from a kitchen bucket.

I stood there for about five more minutes,
just staring at it, alternating between chewing my nail and
ensuring I was well enough away from the smell that I didn’t start
seeing any fairies.