Chapter 2 #2
“A magic wand? Or a magic wand?” Jeremy waggled his eyebrows and gestured to his crotch.
Sometimes I wondered if Jeremy was still going through puberty. His humor and questions often circled back to sex or penises.
Dillon, bless him, blinked and glanced at Ash for guidance. “I’m not sure I understand. It’s just a wand.”
“Is it spewing anything? Like sparkles or something?”
“I…” Dillon’s forehead creased. “I don’t remember any spewing.”
“No, Jeremy, the wand is not an ejaculating or urinating penis,” Ash muttered to his friend.
“Oh, is that what he meant?” Dillon’s cheeks darkened.
“No whizz in wiz? So disappointing.” Jeremy frowned.
“Why are you interested in supe history?” Adrian asked in an obvious attempt to steer his mate’s brain back to a normal conversation.
Jeremy shrugged. “Seemed like something I—I mean Parker—should know now that he’s in the supe world. Me too, I guess, since the Eternal Magic upgraded me from human to supe-lite.”
“That’s not the reason. This has nothing to do with Parker.
You just want to look up the supe wars.” Ash rolled his eyes.
“I’ve been waiting for you to remember the whole vampires versus werewolves argument you had with that D you know that. But I’m getting the hang of steering them around to my way of thinking.”
“Have you been assigned to a team yet?”
“I’m between teams at the moment.” There was a story there, but I understood from her voice that she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. “I’m calling you about something else.”
“Oh?”
“I heard you’ve been going to black magic markets.”
My fingers tightened around my phone. Was the SC watching me?
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Venus said when I didn’t respond right away. “We’re running surveillance on the markets, not on you.”
I grunted. That wasn’t surprising, but shadows never wanted to be noticed. The idea of showing up on SC surveillance logs made the back of my neck itch.
“And I don’t think anyone else spotted you,” she said quietly. “But people like us, we notice things differently, don’t we?”
That helped ease my discomfort a little, but I still didn’t like that I’d been caught, even by her. “What’s going on?”
“Are you in a location where you can speak?”
No one had followed me outside—not that I’d expected anyone to. The already frosty evening was getting colder by the minute. No one would be eager to linger outside for long.
“I can talk,” I said.
“Good. We have intel about a black magic market taking place on the new moon.”
That was only a few days away. “There’s nothing special about markets like that. My team and I chased down dozens of events like that over the summer.”
“Not like this one,” she said. “It’s supposed to be very elite. Very exclusive.”
I leaned against the cold brick wall again. “Will the SC be there too?”
“We’ll have cameras there, but we doubt they’ll give us much. Most of the time our surveillance operations get blocked or shut down before anything interesting happens.”
I wasn’t surprised. The market organizers probably had an air mage on their payroll. Those bastards could interfere with communications and transmissions. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You wouldn’t be going to all those other markets without a reason. Can’t I just want to help you?”
“And…?”
“And… I think a guy named Rudy Tada might be in trouble. I want you to keep an eye out for him. Maybe get him to safety if he looks like he needs help.”
I frowned. “The SC wants me to be some guy’s protection detail?”
“Not the SC,” she whispered. “This is a personal favor. I’ll owe you.”
I absorbed that for a minute. No one with magic like ours indebted themselves to someone if they didn’t have to. “Who is this guy?”
“I don’t really know…”
“You aren’t making any sense.”
She blew out what I could only imagine was a frustrated breath, since I could hear it through the phone.
“I know. But I can’t get inside the market myself, because I’ll be stuck watching video feeds from a small hotel room down the road with two other SC agents.
You’re the only one I can trust with this. ”
I frowned. “Can you at least tell me about his magic? Because I draw the line at protecting assholes.”
Most people would refuse the job based on the guy’s presence at a black magic market alone, but I understood better than most that not everything was black and white, light and dark.
“No black magic,” Venus said quickly.
“So why is he going to a market like this? What else do you know about this guy?”
“All I can tell you is his name.”
That wasn’t quite the same as her not knowing anything about the guy, but… I thought about it. Did it matter? Maybe it didn’t. I needed to get the hell out of town for a while. Figure out my next steps without everyone watching me.
“Okay, tell me more.”