Chapter 11 Veronica #3
The tengu nodded its head and closed the briefcase. “Very well. You can find me here most evenings should you change your mind, my lady.”
“Thanks,” I muttered, moving deeper into the crowd.
Now that there were more beings around, I worried I might actually be spotted, though that was still highly unlikely.
The sheer number of people here was both shocking and relieving.
Most were in human form, though some weren’t, but I blended in pretty well.
I did, however, remove my glasses, though that made me anxious, like taking away a comfort blanket from a small child, but if it helped keep me from being noticed, I’d deal with it.
The sights, sounds, and smells were too much to sift through with my enhanced senses. I couldn’t make out Declan’s scent, so all I could do was wander around until I hopefully found him.
At another intersection I found a group of creatures and beings gathered in circles around different street performers.
I stopped to watch a woman, tall and beautiful with flowing blonde hair.
She wore an outfit that looked like it had been made of nothing but dental floss, leaving very little to the imagination.
Gyrating and dancing, she put on a hell of a display of magical expertise by conjuring, swallowing, and spitting out balls of fire, electricity, and water.
At one point, she juggled one of each element, tossing them into the air with enough speed and skill that they blurred.
Caught up in the display, I watched her until she tossed all three up at once, where they combined to form a flaming plasma orb.
She did a perfect backflip, landing in a split, her head thrown back, mouth wide open.
The orb fell into her mouth. Closing her lips around it, she grinned and opened her eyes, which now glowed as though electricity crackled inside her skull.
Smoke curled from her ears. I clapped along with everyone else, and several folks stepped forward to toss money into the small hat by her feet. This place was freaking amazing.
My grin slipped as I finally caught a whiff of Declan’s scent.
I hurried down the street, chasing the smell.
It led away from most of the activity of the downtown area to a more rundown portion of the city.
People still milled about, and there were a couple of sordid-looking bars and clubs, but for the most part, it looked like a place time had left behind.
Most notably, I walked past an empty, open-air blacksmith shop that looked like it had been abandoned for a couple centuries, and a crumbling townhouse with broken windows where a strange, shimmering light moved back and forth in front of the windows.
A ghost or spirit of some sort might still be living inside.
Toward the end of that street, I found a small and intimate nightclub that sat back off the sidewalk a bit, almost completely cloaked in shadows. The sign above the door looked like it had been traced in smoldering and flowing mercury. The Catch All Club. Declan’s scent was strong here.
I walked up to the door, where a massive man with broad shoulders sat on a stool behind a velvet rope that blocked the entrance.
When he looked up, I nearly gasped in surprise.
He gazed at me with shimmering bright red eyes, but they weren’t the dark, deep, blood-red orbs of a demon.
Instead, they were the cut and polished stones of rubies.
The rest of his body was all angular and chipped stone.
He was a golem, a creature of stone and earth given life by magic.
“Can I help you?” His voice sounded like a bucket of gravel being shaken.
“I need to go inside,” I said, pointing through the door.
I peered over his shoulder through the glass door. I could see a bar along one wall, and a lady dancing and singing on a stage. The door must have been magically insulated because no sound came out.
“Are you on the list?” the golem asked.
“List?” I swallowed hard, trying to think of what to say.
He rose from his stool, his body crackling as if the stones his knees were made of were being struck with small hammers. His full height was nearly two feet taller than my slim five-foot-four frame. He gazed down at me with his glowing ruby eyes.
“Ain’t nobody get inside if they aren’t on the list,” he growled.
“Uh, got it,” I said, holding up my hands and taking a few steps back.
Once I was off the sidewalk and on the street, the golem decided I was no longer worth his trouble and sat back down on his stool. I paced up and down the street, trying to figure out how to get inside. Declan was in there. His scent was strongest right by the door. There was no mistaking it.
While I waited, I watched a few more people walk up to the door. The golem checked a scroll and waved them in once he’d found their names. Could I try to talk to someone before they headed in? Maybe I could turn on the charm and get them to take me in with them? Maybe if I tried flirting with—
“Excuse me?”
I paused in my pacing and glanced toward the door. A woman stood beside the golem, looking at me with a faint, bored smile on her face.
“Are you Veronica Paolo?” she said.
“I…uh…yeah, I am,” I said, taking a step forward, throwing a cautious look toward the golem once more, who sat there, staring at me.
“Fantastic. Please come inside. Madam Nyxia is already waiting for you.”
“She is?” I said, unable to keep the surprise from my voice.
“Indeed,” the woman said, bowing her head slightly.
She waved to the golem. “Solomon? Let our guest in, please.”
The golem rose and unclipped the velvet rope, moving it aside for me to step through.
I hesitated. Could this be some trap? Had someone inside the club been hired to find me the same way the changeling had been?
But if that was the case, then Declan had probably already been captured.
He was inside. That much I knew for sure.
At this point, if he had been taken captive, I might be the only one who could save him.
“Fuck it,” I muttered under my breath and walked past the golem.
As soon as she pushed open the door, music and conversation assaulted me. The woman on stage belted out a song that sounded like R&B, but the language wasn’t one I knew or had ever heard before. Either way, the crowd seemed to enjoy it.
The woman led me past the bar to a set of stairs in the back. A witch was polishing glasses and eyeing the singer with a serene smile on his face.
“Would you like a drink before we head up?” the woman asked, noticing me looking at the bar.
“No. Sorry. Just checking the place out.”
She smiled knowingly. “The Catch All Club is the best little hidden secret in all of The Shadow Streets.”
“Shadow Streets?” I frowned at her.
She nodded back outside. “The Shadow Streets. The neighborhood you were walking through. A place of perpetual night, and perpetual excitement. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
” She sighed. “When I have to go about in the human city, it feels…so boring. Anyway, let’s hurry, Madame Nyxia is waiting. ”
Walking up the stairs, I cast one last look around at the strange bar.
The woman was right. The regular world did pale in comparison to what I’d seen tonight.
Most magical beings traversed, worked, and lived in the human world.
Seeing places like this and Tombstone Station, showed me there was a much more exciting and vibrant world of magic right under the surface.
I chuckled to myself. What would a normal human think marching into this place?
We reached an ornate door at the top of the stairs.
The woman waved a hand over the knob, and it unlocked with a click.
It swung inward, revealing an ornate den.
The hardwood floors were dark with age and polished to a gleam, reflecting the light from the sconces along the wall.
Dark green wallpaper decorated with twisting vines and red roses covered the walls.
The twisted vines shook as I looked at them, as though an invisible breeze had managed to make the printed plants move.
Beneath the mahogany molding, the lower half of the wall was black obsidian marble laced with white veins.
A card table with two chairs stood in the middle of the room.
In one, an older woman of about sixty sat, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a severe bun, and the only adornment on her face was bright red lipstick.
The rest of her was pale and equally as severe as her hairstyle.
She wore a black pantsuit, complete with a silk tie at her throat.
Across from her, Declan leaned back in his chair, arms folded, glare trained on me.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he said.
The look on his face was a mixture of surprise, disappointment, and anger. It made me feel like I’d been shoved out on stage with a bright light shining on my head.
“I… I came to find you,” I said, shrugging lamely.
Declan rolled his eyes, and shook his head. “Yeah. No shit.”
Stepping forward, desperate to change the subject, I said, “What’s going on here?”
He sighed, uncrossing his arms and waving to the woman on the opposite side of the table. “This is Nyxia, a warlock. The god Janus is her patron,” he intoned. “She is a relocation specialist.”
“A teleporter?” I said, eyeing the woman.
My quick escape from the academy had been done with panic-induced magic, and even then, the small portal had only transferred me a hundred yards.
A true teleportation specialist could send themselves, other people, and items to pretty much any location in the world with ease.
That kind of magic required incredible concentration and ability, as well as a near-encyclopedic understanding of spell work.