Dirty Magic (3 page)

“Seems like you complicated it yourself when you lost your snitch, Special Agent.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t rise to the bait. “A few weeks ago, one of our agents working undercover in Canada reported that an illegal shipment of antimony was being sent to Babylon.”

Antimony is a common metalloid used in everything from cosmetics to the treatment of constipation to the manufacturing of ceramics. Gardner’s mention of a shipment was notable, however, because the element was also used in a lot of potions. In fact, it was so commonly used in alchemy that the government had started regulating its sale a decade earlier to try to limit street wizes’ access to it.

“I don’t suppose they gave you a delivery address?” I asked in a dry tone.

Gardner’s lips pressed together. Guess she wasn’t a fan of sarcasm. “No, but we got our team in place shortly after and have been watching things since. About a week ago, Captain Eldritch called to tell us there had been a couple of unusual assaults.”

“Nothing like what happened tonight, but pretty violent,” Eldritch said. “The victims had each been bitten multiple times.”

“Why didn’t you put it in the debriefing reports?” I demanded.

His face hardened at my challenge. “I didn’t want to alarm anyone unnecessarily.”

I swallowed my retort. If I had to bet, Eldritch hadn’t made the report official because then his precinct would have gotten some unwanted attention from the chief and the mayor, who was up for reelection. “So you told the MEA instead?”

“Ever since Abraxas went to Crowley, the MEA has been keeping an eye on Babylon,” Eldritch offered, “waiting to see who would step up to fill the power vacuum.”

I snorted. “No one would be dumb enough to do that while Uncle Abe’s still alive.” As I spoke I kept a careful eye on Gardner to see her reaction to my casually claiming Abraxas Prospero as kin. She didn’t even blink, which meant she’d known who I was before she walked into that room. Part of me was relieved not to have to explain the connection or how I’d walked away from Uncle Abe and his coven a decade earlier. In fact, the last time I’d seen him was when I watched his trial on TV with the rest of the city. During the testimony, he’d smiled at the camera like he’d been savoring a juicy secret. I shivered, shaking off the memory.

“So you figure whoever ordered that antimony is trying at least to consolidate the Votaries.” I crossed my arms and tried to sort through all the angles.

Votary
is another name for wizards who specialize in an alchemical form of dirty magic. In the dirty magic food chain, Votaries are at the top, followed by the Os, who specialize in sex magic, and the Sanguinarians, who deal in dirty blood potions.

“That’s one of our theories.” Gardner was watching me carefully now that she knew I had criminal blood in my veins.

It had been five years since Abe earned his all-expenses-paid trip to Crowley Penitentiary. Before his downfall, he’d been the grand wizard of the Votary Coven and the godfather who’d kept all the other covens in line. Once he was behind bars, no one had the balls to come forward and declare themselves the new kings of the Cauldron, so the covens splintered, which resulted in lots of turf battles. If Eldritch and Gardner were right about someone’s trying to make a power play, we were looking at a lot more dead bodies piling up before this was all said and done. But that was a pretty huge
if
.

“Antimony has lots of uses besides alchemy, Special Agent.”

She crossed her arms and smirked at me. “That’s true, I suppose. But we’ve checked the official shipment manifests of every freighter that’s come into Babylon in the last month. No shipments of antimony showed up. That means whoever received it was trying to keep it off the record.”

“Look, even if you’re right and the antimony was used in the potion Harkins was on,” I countered, “it doesn’t mean we’re looking at consolidation of power. It could just be a new wiz who wants to make his mark.”

“You could be right.” She nodded. “That’s one of the reasons we sent Harkins to make a buy. We were hoping that once we knew who was dealing the potion we could convince them to flip on the distributor.”

“But he got hooked before he could report back to you,” I said.

She nodded.

“What’s the potion called?”

Gardner exchanged a tense glance with Eldritch, who’d remained tellingly silent during the exchange. No doubt about it. Special Agent Gardner was in charge. “The street name is Gray Wolf.”

“Clever,” I said.

“Why?” Eldritch asked. He’d worked the Arcane beat for years, but he was still a Mundane. Sometimes the intricacies of the craft eluded him.

“The gray wolf is the alchemical symbol for antimony,” Gardner explained.

“Shit,” I said. “If this stuff takes off, we’re toast.” From what I’d seen, Gray Wolf created both immunity to defensive magic and a ravenous craving for human flesh. Plus it acted incredibly fast on the user’s body chemistry.

“And now that Harkins is dead, we’re back at square one,” Gardner said.

My stomach dipped. I didn’t regret killing Harkins, but I was sorry my actions made getting the potion off the streets more difficult. “How can I help?”

“Nothing beyond a detailed report on your altercation with Harkins. Maybe you saw something we can use.”

I nodded absently. “You mentioned that you thought Gray Wolf was alchemical. Does that mean you had a wizard analyze the ingredients?”

“Yes, off a blood sample we gathered at one of the crime scenes. But our team’s wizard has only had a chance to do preliminary tests.”

I chewed on my lip. I’d love to get my hands on that sample to figure out what made Harkins change so quickly. A new thought arrived hot on the heels of that one. “Wait, do you have any BPD officers on your task force?”

Since the 1980s, the MEA had been partnering with local police agencies by bringing local cops in on cases. It benefited the agency because it got access to locals who understood the dynamics of their cities, and the cops benefited because the MEA paid generous overtime. In other words, if they were hiring, I wanted in.

Gardner frowned at the change of subject. Then she exchanged a glance with Eldritch.

“I’m putting together a list of candidates,” he said, not meeting my eyes. Translation: I wasn’t on it.

“Look, I know you don’t know me from Adam,” I said. “But I’d love a chance to consult on this case.”

Her eyebrows rose at my audacity. When she didn’t laugh, I forged ahead.

“I was the last one to see Harkins alive”—I counted the reasons off on my fingers—“I grew up in the Cauldron, and, as we’ve already covered, I was raised in the Votary Coven.”

She glanced at Eldritch, who suddenly looked very uncomfortable. “Officer Prospero, I wouldn’t need extra bodies on my team at all if you hadn’t killed my star CI tonight.”

I snapped my mouth shut.

“She’s right, though,” Eldritch said, shocking the hell out of me. “She knows these streets. Plus, when you asked for that list you said you wanted Adepts. There are only a handful on the force.” Usually Adepts in law enforcement went the CSI route because of the lab work.

Gardner raised a brow. “So why wasn’t she on the list already?”

Eldritch glanced at me with an expression that put me on edge. “Leave us.”

“Sir, I—”

“Go.” His voice was quiet but held a thin edge of steel.

Gardner didn’t smile or send me any other sign of encouragement. “We’ll call you back.”

I shot Eldritch a pleading glance before I walked out the door. I was pretty sure Eldritch wanted me to leave so he could tell her I wasn’t ready for MEA-level work. After all, I was just a beat cop. Usually detectives and officers already members of special Arcane units got the sweet gigs on MEA task forces.

The other officers in the bull pen were doing a minimally convincing job of looking busy. But the instant I exited the office, the energy in the room shifted.

I crossed my arms and leaned against a metal desk. Inside the office, Eldritch was talking. Gardner listened with her arms crossed. Every muscle in my neck was so tight it cramped. The more I thought about my idea to join the team, the more I wanted it to happen.

Promotions were rare and incredibly competitive in the department. Thus far, I’d been told that my background in the covens wasn’t a factor in being passed up. Instead, the excuses were always that I fell a hair short of the top score on the test or that someone else was just more qualified. But with each missed opportunity, I grew more restless. After five years, busting hexheads and the occasional corner kid felt like playing Whac-a-Mole. But being on a task force would let me be where the real action was happening. I’d be going after the supply side of things—potion cookers and the coven wizards.

“Yo, Prospero?” A deep voice called from behind me. Guess the other cops got tired of watching and had decided to drum up some drama by shit-talking.

I ignored them and started chewing on my right thumbnail. Was Eldritch arguing for or against me? I couldn’t tell from Gardner’s body language, which hadn’t shifted at all.

“I heard you shot a guy in the dick,” another baritone called. “That true?”

“Why?” I didn’t turn around. “You want a demonstration?”

Male chortles echoed from the break room nearby. The swoosh and thump from the potion vending machine hinted that one of my colleagues was helping himself to a late-night energy potion. I always found it ironic how many cops justified using clean magic to fight the dirty kind. Then again, most cops weren’t Adept, so it was easier to compartmentalize magic into a good camp and an evil one. Black versus white, legal versus illegal. Hell, the Big Magic corporations claimed their government-sanctioned potions weren’t even addictive, which they “proved” using studies they themselves had funded. But anyone who cooked potions could tell you the line between the two was little more than vapor. Whether you used it with good intentions or ill, magic was magic, and instead of being black or white, most of it was smoke-screen gray.

Just then, Gardner’s head swiveled and she stared right at me through the window. I met her gaze without flinching. Whatever Eldritch had just told her put that speculative gleam in her eyes.

Movement behind me. One of the knuckleheads decided he’d bring the bullshit to me instead of yelling across the room.

“Did you really chase the guy into the Arteries?”

I turned to see Officer Michael Hanson. He was nice-enough-looking for an idiot. While I got a lot of BS from my colleagues for being an Adept, most grudgingly accepted that I was decent at my job; Hanson always found a way to remind me that magic made me an outsider. Ironic since his utility belt was weighed down by enough protection amulets to choke a dragon.

“No,” I snapped.

“That’s too bad.” He took a too-casual sip from his can of Excalibur, the most popular brand of energy potion.

I frowned up at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He shrugged. “Just figured you’d feel at home down there with all the other Sinisters.”

Sinister
was derogatory slang for someone born with a genetic predisposition to do magic. A lot of cops didn’t trust any Adepts, period, because they didn’t believe anyone could wield magic without being corrupted by its power. Plus, since laws made any evidence gathered through arcane means inadmissible in court, a lot of cops didn’t want any Adepts on their teams because they didn’t trust us to do things by the book. Therefore, as an Adept cop who had grown up in a coven led by a known criminal mastermind, I was doubly damned in the eyes of bigots like Hanson. So I’d gotten used to being called everything from “Lefty” to the middle-of-the-road “Gauche” to my personal favorite, “Freakshow.”

I pinned him with a pitying glare. “That the best you got?”

His eye flared at the challenge. “No, this is.” His hand cupped his balls.

“According to Alice in Dispatch”—I lowered my gaze to his crotch and winced—“there ain’t much magical about that wand.”

In addition to being a prejudiced dick, Hanson also had a fetish for Adept chicks like Alice. He’d never hit on me, which told me he had either some sort of intelligence or at least a healthy sense of self-preservation.

His face went pale and then flared red. Heavy silence loomed in the background where the peanut gallery looked on.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m kind of in the middle of something.” I turned back to the window and dismissed him altogether.

“Bitch,” he muttered and stormed away.

Inside the office, Gardner was standing with her back to the window. Her shoulders and head obscured my view of the captain’s face. Whatever was being said, it was clear they were wrapping up.

A loud racket behind me sounded like Hanson kicking a chair. I was saved from having to turn and face the disapproving looks of my colleagues when Gardner opened the door. She walked out without sparing me a glance. I rose slowly, watching her go. I wanted to call out and ask what was going on, but pride prevented it. I did, however, notice a thick folder tucked under her arm.

Eldritch came to the door. “Prosper—” The yell cut off when he saw me standing ten feet away. He shot me a look dripping in annoyance. “Come on.”

When I walked in, Eldritch’s expression gave me nothing to go on.

“Well?” I demanded, watching him for any hint of what was coming.

He blew out a breath and tossed a pen on his desktop. “She said she’d be in touch.”

My mouth fell open. “That’s it?”

He nodded and dropped into his chair. The overtaxed vinyl sighed in resignation.

“Was that my file she had?” I asked.

“I gave her the down and dirty, but she wanted time to review your performance records.”

I chewed on my lip. My record was pretty good despite the lack of promotions, so that wasn’t my concern. Instead, it was the background search she’d also find in there. “You told her about … everything?”

He took a sip of cold coffee and nodded. “Yep,” he said after he swallowed.

“And?”

He looked up with a warning glance. “And what, Officer?”

I relaxed my tense shoulders and tried to look contrite. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m just trying to figure out if I have a chance at the task force.”