Of a sudden he shivered. Must be the cold. Must be.
The train dragged to a halt at the Cermak-Chinatown stop, and Adrian was out the door with a flourish of the floor-length coat (never forget the charade!), the hard air almost burning his lungs as he pulled in huge amounts to banish the stink of the L-CAR. To forget what just happened. To forget…
“So what do you think’s up, boss man?” Martinez asked, apparently unconcerned with Adrian ’s strange behavior, already over his petulance from the scene of the murder. “I spoke with the cops, and they got nothing.”
As if they’d tell you anything of worth. “Of course they have nothing. If there were even one scrap of evidence that pointed to a mundane murder, they’d hound that trail wherever it led, even if it was a dog chasing its tail round and round. Anything but call in my services.” Now away from so many people, he was forced to cinch his coat up as the cold worked past his shield. Stepping carefully down the stairs, he came out under the El-no pigeons overhead to drop their surprises during winter- Cermak Street running left to right directly ahead. The sand/salt station to the left, across the street, looked like a kicked anthill as trucks and personnel prepared for the coming blizzard. It was nearing January after all, and Chicago almost never failed to deliver its annual dump of two feet of solid cold.
“So, what we doing, then?”
“Back to the warehouse.”
“Not the estate?”
“Are we not here in Chinatown?” he responded, arm sweeping to the right to take in Chicago ’s Chinatown. “Would we not need to be someplace markedly different if we were heading to the estate?”
“Right…” Martinez responded, voice trailing off as though in amazing discovery. “Will I finally get into the sanctum, boss man? Or do I have to stay in the mundane again? It’s been a year.”
Adrian ’s silence was answer enough.
“Right.” The man could teach a course on sullenness. “So why the warehouse?”
A sigh. He glanced to the left to see how long the Cermak bus would take, and a reminder that he needed the man. Would never be caught without a follower again. “Because there’s something about that death, some astral signature that reminds me of… something.”
“Yeah, boss man? You remember everything. I bet you remember exactly what I said to you the first time we met, after your other assistant ran away.”
In excruciating detail.
“So how you couldn’t recognize an astral print… wacky.”
From Adrian ’s peripheral vision he watched Martinez put down the last of the teeth-killing drink. He then flicked the bottle toward the trash can with its side opening and it sailed right in. Adrian slowly blinked at the surprising dexterity from the usually ungainly, overweight man.
“Yes,” Adrian spoke slowly. “As you say. Wacky.” The few other individuals at the bus stop abruptly began shuffling toward his position at the edge of the street, a sure sign of the approaching bus that they dared come so close.
The tick in the back of his mind became an itch, one that he finally acknowledged after leaving astral space and the murder scene with only a negative shake of his head to the on-scene officer; they knew he’d get back to them. There’s only one way that I couldn’t recognize the astral print. That’s if it was obscured. No undead, werecreature, or spirit-unbound or not-would think of obscuring its astral signature. Most wouldn’t even know how, and the few spirits that have pilfered enough essence from the mages that have summoned them to know such a thing was possible wouldn’t consider it. No, this was different. Trepidation and yearning filled him in equal measure. There was only one answer. An answer to a question he’d spent his life trying to find.
Another magus.
A lifetime of learning through ancient, crumbling tomes taught him that magus existed in the past, oftimes learning and teaching together. Yet he’d almost given up, convinced that he alone wielded magic in this modern world. The abrupt irony was almost more than he could take. For though the answer must be another magus, it was someone that knew Adrian… and Adrian didn’t know this man! He knew enough about Adrian to know exactly how to obscure his astral print, to bar him from any ability to tweak out the littlest detail. That type of intimate knowledge wasn’t just unnerving-it was down right terrifying. He’d read of what could happen under these circumstances. Such intimate knowledge conveyed immense power over Adrian.
He gingerly stepped onto the bus, ignoring the gasp of foul, black smoke from its diesel engine and the fearful look on the bus driver’s face as he passed by without paying the fare. He sat down at the rear of the bus-sending one occupant scurrying toward the front-but the sudden in-rush of people allowed him to uncinch the coat once more.
He needed to find who was responsible for the murder. Needed to find him right now, before the man moved against him. That he might have to kill the magus after all the years of searching was a bitter bill to swallow.
Adrian stepped off the bus at 1100 West Cermak, across from the Fisk coal-burning power plant, Martinez at his heels like an obedient pup. Though he could easily walk through the front door, as ever-especially with the conjuring he planned-he walked briskly toward the road entrance to the inner dock. Once he hit the shadows of the tunnel, he stepped carefully, for patches of black ice might have formed overnight, then moved into the inner parking lot proper.
A twenty-four-foot truck already sat at the dock, driver talking animatedly to the building supervisor. Several handlers-puffs of breath in the cold actually larger than the smoke rings they’d be blowing on break-easily maneuvered pallet jacks with their paper cargo to be warehoused on the fifth floor.
Taking the steps two at a time up to the loading dock, he almost reached the group of men before they noticed him. The building supervisor blanched, cutting off mid-discussion, while the driver looked around confused at the other man’s shocking change of demeanor.
“Good morning, Mr. Kohl,” the building supervisor spoke, voice brittle as the icicles clustered along the corrugated awning all along the dock.
Adrian stared right through the man.
“If you’d like to go right up, the freight elevator can take you immediately.”
Adrian swept past the super without a nod, ignoring the confused driver as well; no time to educate the man on why he should fear Adrian. A single man-especially if he proved somewhat intractable to the mind-bending realities that Adrian would unveil for him-would not make that large a difference.
The lift took them quickly up to the third floor, where the building supervisor managed to open and close the heavy doors, and slide in a hasty “good day,” all without once glancing into the interior.
As the rumbling lift took the repellent man away, gloom descended onto the room, the single bulb at the entryway barely making a dent against the thickness; a perfect mood setter for the type of work accomplished in the setting. A long-used wooden blank floor covered every square inch of the four-thousand-square-foot warehouse. Boxes and bundles and packages seemed to rise out of the ground like grotesque trees, festooned with a myriad of rotting, ancient vegetation: cloth and dust and mildew. Adrian reviled such filth and clutter. Yet years ago he’d tried cleaning the entire area, installing full lighting and generally making the place habitable for humans, only to lose control of those who worked this sanctum; sickening how much humans relied upon trappings and regalia for their faith to flourish. Lost to the point where, in disgust, he was forced to dispose of them all and start again new. He hated new. It took so long to work with what he had. Starting new was anathema to the very core of who and what he was, to the arts he practiced.