Magitek (The Rift Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  The man looked fairly normal, although his features were exotically handsome enough to attract attention from women in a meat market bar. He had his hands on the girl’s head, fingers entwined in her hair. His eyes were closed, and the expression on his face was rapturous. He didn’t seem to be aware of our presence.

  I approached him cautiously, and when I came within reach, I grabbed his arm and pulled his hand away from her head. His eyes shot open, and his expression changed to rage in an instant. Before he could react, I punched him in the face.

  The guy stumbled backward into the wall, and Larson joined me. We held the man down until we got him cuffed—wrists and ankles.

  I motioned Novak over. “Take her upstairs to Dr. Harrison. Tell her that she’s been attacked by a psychic vampire.” Revulsion showed in Novak’s face. “Be gentle with her.” He nodded.

  Larson turned to a couple of his men. “Arrest him. Don’t bother being gentle, but watch out. He’s strong as an ox.”

  The next room we entered was occupied by another demon, who waited until we kicked the door in, then bolted out and attacked us. Larson got one shot off, but I didn’t see if he hit it. I fired twice at its back, hitting it once. Then it was gone up the stairs. A volley of gunfire erupted above us, followed by silence.

  “Well, this seals Fredo’s fate,” I said to Larson. What the demon had done to the woman in that room was pretty ugly. There wasn’t any way Fredo could deny renting the room, and he probably couldn’t deny supplying the woman. I could charge him with accessory to murder at the very least.

  The only other occupied room we found on that level contained a naked blood vampire and three naked teenage boys. The boys were still breathing and looked as though they would survive.

  At the end of the hall was a steel door with an impressive lock. I touched it and used my magik to open it. The large room inside held a dozen cots and a toilet in the corner at the far end. Ten human women of various ethnicities and ages stared at us with wide, frightened eyes.

  “Looks like we’ve nailed him good,” Larson said.

  “One link in the chain,” I answered. “Tell Dr. Harrison to call social services. I’m going up to his office. If we get really lucky, we’ll find who Fredo bought them from. But I’m betting we’ll at least get a list of where he planned to sell them.”

  Chapter 9

  Officially, I had the following two days off, so I didn’t have to worry about explaining anything to Novak. Two days I could devote to finding Sarah Benning, assuming I didn’t get tagged for another case. Murder and mayhem repeatedly proved they had no respect for my personal life.

  Kirsten was in the kitchen making her breakfast, so I stumbled in to see if I could beg some scraps.

  “Good morning, Miss Merry Sunshine,” she said. “Sit.”

  I did as she ordered, and she placed an omelet and a cup of coffee in front of me. Having a hearth witch as a roommate had no downside that I’d ever found.

  “You’re going to make someone a wonderful wife,” I said.

  “No, I’m not. Any man who wants my company full time had better have a herd of servants standing by to fulfill my every whim. Although, why I would want to settle for one man forever eludes me. Any leads on that rich kid?”

  She put her own breakfast on the table and sat down.

  I told her what I had found out from my afternoon of interviews.

  “Johansson? His wife is a customer of mine. Witch. She’s brought her daughter into the store with her a few times.”

  “Know anything about the husband and father?”

  “Never met him. But there was some kind of scandal a few years ago. Don’t remember anything about it, though.” She stared off into space for a few moments, then said, “Maybe more than a few years. I think I overheard my parents talking about it.”

  The lives of the filthy-rich and magikal were standard gossip material for the lower classes.

  “Do you think you’ll have time to stop by the store today?” she asked. “I’ve got a pump in the greenhouse that’s making funny noises.” Kirsten gave me that wide-eyed ‘oh, poor helpless me’ expression that had helped her overcome most of her life’s obstacles.

  “Yeah, I’ll make it by. Not sure when,” I said around a mouthful of eggs.

  She finished her breakfast and darted out the door. I gathered our dishes, rinsed them, and put them in the dishwasher. After that, I tidied up the house a bit, took a shower, and sat down at the computer.

  The scandal involving Johansson had occurred when Kirsten and I were Sarah’s and Cassie’s age. The wife Kirsten knew was his third wife, and his affair with her had been part of what broke up his first marriage. Maybe his second as well, but I didn’t find anything about that.

  She wasn’t the scandal, though. That involved the pregnant sixteen-year-old daughter of a business associate. Martin Johansson had been sixty-two at the time. The girl’s father had imprudently challenged Johansson to a magikal duel of honor and been left a paraplegic.

  As was normally the case in such unfortunate events, the injured man refused to press charges. He was left to raise his daughter’s bastard, who would have been a constant reminder of all the injuries Johansson had inflicted on his family. There were rumors of more indiscretions with underage girls, but none of the rumors included names.

  The important thing from my standpoint was the validation of Martin Johansson as at least a borderline pedophile. And at seventy-nine, he was far from the age when mages lost interest in sex.

  I hauled my motorcycle out of the garage and rode up to Loyola to talk to the boyfriends Cassie had told me about. I was proud of that bike. It was only a year old, sparkly red and black and chrome, and I had customized it with every magitek enhancement I could think of.

  I had checked, and one of Sarah’s boyfriends lived in a dormitory, while the other rented an apartment near campus. I started with the one in the dorms, who Cassie identified as the previous month’s fling.

  Joel Vanzetti was a nice Italian boy from New Jersey who was very handsome but turned out to be devoid of any magik. At first, he didn’t want to talk to me, but when I told him Sarah was missing and that he might be considered a person of interest, he stumbled all over himself to establish an alibi. The underage girl he was sleeping with that night turned out to be Jerilyn Novak, one of the girls that Justus Benning identified as Sarah’s friend.

  Kurt Darlington, who according to Cassie was Sarah’s current bedmate, didn’t strike me as being particularly studious. He didn’t show up for his ten o’clock class. When I checked his apartment, he was playing naked games with his roommate and two coeds, who obviously weren’t the studious type, either. He quickly established that he was a mage, and definitely not jealous, when he invited me to join them and tried a bit of magikal coercion.

  I grabbed him by the throat and hauled him out his front door and onto the balcony overlooking the parking lot.

  “You do know that coercion is illegal, don’t you?” I asked, dangling his naked body out over three stories of air. His answer wasn’t intelligible. He just turned red and made strangling noises while pawing at my arm.

  I pulled him back over the railing. “Son, if you ever try that on me again, you’ll be spending the next ten years in Gettysburg. Comprende? Now, where were you last Tuesday night between nine and ten o’clock?”

  He stammered out something about playing pool at a bar near campus with half of the student body. I collected enough names to check it out, then left him lying there and went inside his apartment.

  “You two,” I pointed at the girls. “Get dressed and get out.”

  They didn’t argue and were gone in less than five minutes. I turned to Kurt’s roommate.

  “Coercion is against the law. I’ll tell you the same thing I told your buddy. Ten years in the maximum-security prison in Gettysburg. The courts don’t show any leniency, and it doesn’t matter how much money your daddy has.”

  I was angry, but on my way do
wnstairs to get my bike, I crossed Kurt off my list. Coercion wouldn’t work on an empathic projector. Sarah would have laughed in his face if he tried that with her.

  So far, all the friends and lovers I’d been pointed toward had turned out to be just kids like Sarah. I could see a jilted or manipulated lover killing her in a crime of passion, but her car probably would have turned up. Perfect murders by teenage masterminds weren’t very common. Geeks and stalkers seemed a lot more promising avenue to pursue.

  The missing car bothered me a lot. Brand new fire-engine-red Italian sports cars didn’t just disappear, and despite what I told her father, probably wouldn’t be broken down for parts.

  The other friend that both her parents had mentioned was Jerilyn Novak. I was avoiding her for a reason, but a quick check online showed me that Jerilyn was a cousin of Mychal’s and not a sister. I barely knew a lot of my cousins, and the Novak clan was at least as prolific as Findlay. I checked her school schedule and gave her a call at her lunchtime. Jerilyn told me that she didn’t have a last period that day, and we arranged to meet after she got out of school.

  In the meantime, I did some more checking into Martin Johansson. Although I had an extensive education in computer systems, magiteks with certain enhancements didn’t need to interface with computers the way other people did. Normally, it was easier to use a monitor and a keyboard. And bank records didn’t lend themselves to normal methods of access.

  I found an automated teller machine and disabled it by simply sending a jolt of magik into it and breaking the mechanism that fed the money out of the chute. An ‘out of order’ message immediately appeared on the screen.

  Having taken care of any possible disruptions, I used my embedded enhancer to jack my consciousness into the datanet connection. Once inside the banking system matrix, I queried Johansson’s identification, and using that, queried his accounts. There were a ton of them—business accounts, personal accounts, accounts for his wife and daughter that he controlled, an account for his mistress, and then at least a dozen accounts that a forensic accountant would probably have a ball going through. It was readily apparent that some of his business interests wouldn’t withstand legal scrutiny.

  There wasn’t any way I had the time to go through all of that. I noted the accounts that looked interesting, memorized the mistress’s address and phone number, and backed out of the system.

  Did I mention that banking was one of the industries with rules against employing magiteks? Short-sighted, really. I’d rather have a tek handling my security instead of hacking it.

  Chapter 10

  Jerilyn, “call me Jeri,” met me a block from the school. Dark-haired and olive-complexioned like her cousin, she was pretty but not in Sarah Benning’s league. I mentally slapped myself. I needed to stop making that comparison. Sarah was in a class by herself, and her looks had probably put her on the missing-persons report.

  “Cool bike! Yeah, better we meet here. Some old busybody would be sure to report that I was hanging out with a motorcycle gang.” She laughed. “It would be fun to have a rumor that I was in a lezzie relationship with a motorcycle mama, though.”

  She climbed on the back of the bike and wrapped her arms around my waist like she knew what she was doing.

  “Ready!”

  I took us to a place near Johns Hopkins that had an extensive veggie menu, a good beer selection, fantastic milkshakes, and dynamite fish and chips as the only meat dish.

  “You’re Mychal’s new partner, aren’t you?” she asked after we ordered. She grinned. “It’s the current family scandal. They have to have something to gossip about, you know?”

  “I’m a topic of conversation in the Novak household?”

  “I don’t know about the big house, but all of the siblings and cousins are getting a kick out of it.”

  “I didn’t know I was so famous. Are you and Mychal close?”

  “Naw. He’s twice my age, and our circumstances are a lot different. I’m the oldest daughter of the youngest son, while he’s the youngest son of the oldest son. I actually have a lot more prospects than he does. That’s why they made him a cop. Figured that having someone on the inside would pay dividends.”

  The gate in the compu-menu opened to reveal our milkshakes. After taking a long pull on her straw, Jeri continued.

  “Hasn’t worked the way they hoped. Mychal’s just not very ambitious. I mean, ten years on the force, and he’s still a sergeant. So, five years ago Uncle Frank had him moved to Arcane Division. You know, kind of hoping it would give him a kick in the pants. And now he gets partnered with you, the most infamous detective in the metro area.”

  “Infamous?”

  She grinned. “Sure. You’re a walking scandal. Not only are you a girl, but a James, and the cop who took down a corrupt police captain. That took balls to nail someone that high and with all his connections to the Hundred.” She shrugged. “You know, you’re a lot prettier than I thought you’d be. I sort of expected an ogre.”

  My ears burned, and I decided to change the subject.

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention to your cousin that I’m looking for Sarah,” I said. “I’m sort of doing this as a favor to someone.”

  “No prob. I already like you better than Mychal, and we just met. You’re cool, and he’s a pompous prick with a silver spoon up his ass.”

  I decided I liked Jeri, too. At least at first blush, our taste in men had some similarities.

  “So, tell me about Sarah. She’s been missing for a week, and no one’s heard from her.”

  Jeri sobered and shook her head. “I dunno. I’d like to think that she’s just having a fling. You know, flew off to Bermuda with a handsome billionaire or something. But it doesn’t feel like that. There was a guy at Hopkins she was seeing, but he called me asking if I’d seen her lately.”

  “A student at Hopkins?”

  “Oh, no. A professor. A mage.”

  “Cassie told me she liked older men, but I thought she was talking about college guys.”

  She gave me a conspiratorial grin. “That’s Cassie’s thing. And Sarah’s sometimes, too. But Sarah has a kinky side that includes much older men.”

  “Like how old? My age?”

  Jeri grinned and shook her head. “Your age on the lower end. You’re what, thirty? Thirty-five?”

  I nodded. Close enough.

  She looked around as if to see if anyone was listening, and her voice dropped. “Yeah. Forty, fifty, sometimes older. She had this thing about being a dominatrix. One of her older guys turned her onto it, and it really got her off. She showed me a diamond necklace one guy gave her, and one time, we went shopping with a debit card another guy gave her.”

  “You don’t happen to know any of their names, do you?”

  “Only one, the prof at Hopkins, but…” She pulled out her phone and showed me a picture of a man, then scrolled through two more men. “I can send these to you.”

  I nodded. “Please. Does Cassie know about this little sideline of Sarah’s?”

  “Oh, no. Cassie is kinda straitlaced, and definitely not into men that old. She wouldn’t have understood.”

  “But you’re not shocked.”

  “Ms. James, my mother is a dominatrix. That’s how my father met her.” She shrugged. “Not my thing, but I don’t judge. And I do like older men. Sex is so much better when the man knows what he’s doing, don’t you agree?” It was strange to hear a sixteen-year-old talking like that.

  I found Jeri to be quite interesting, and we chatted for a couple of hours. I enjoyed the conversation far more than I would have expected. Not only was it informative about Sarah but about Mychal as well. She also verified some suspicions I’d always harbored about the lives and children of the Families. Although I’d spent a lot of time at Findlay House and briefly gone to the same high school as Jeri, Sarah and Cassie, I had always lived with my mother. We spent our time foraging for berries, fishing, and hiking in the hills.

  The mag
ikal Families had a reputation for licentiousness, to the delight of the gossip-hungry lower classes. Just from what the kids were telling me, it was well-earned. Kirsten and I had gotten started around the same age, but we hadn’t been nearly as wild as Sarah and her friends. I definitely wasn’t playing grown-up games with men three times my age.

  When I gave Jeri a ride to her neighborhood, she grinned at me as she hopped off the bike. “If you ever do want to have a lezzie hookup with a sweet young thing, give me a call. You’re really cool.”

  Chapter 11

  I had promised Kirsten that I would take a look at her pump, and I also promised I would go out with her that evening. I drove over to her shop when I finished with Jeri Novak.

  After attending university on scholarship and taking a degree in pharmacology, my roomie had studied at the Cambridge College of Magikal Arts. A boyfriend she met while in England—a younger son of one of Europe’s ruling Families—provided funding to start her business. Another wealthy boyfriend in Baltimore donated an unused parcel of land in the harbor tourist area.

  A third pair of boyfriends—identical twins—built the shop and two greenhouses, and I re-engineered and magikally enhanced all the equipment and systems. I was the only one who didn’t get laid, but they were all out of her life, and I was still getting fed regularly.

  I walked my bike through the side gate and parked it next to her bike, then walked around to the front. The shop faced the harbor, with six parking slots directly in front of it. The hand-painted sign over the door read:

  ENCHANTMENTS

  Apothecary and Herbarium

  Tinctures, potions, poultices, and charms

  A painting of Kirsten, wearing a pointed hat and riding a broomstick sidesaddle, adorned the left side of the sign. A pair of sexy gargoyles—how she made gargoyles look sexy I still didn’t understand, but she managed it—framed the front door. Did I mention that in addition to being beautiful and magikally talented, she was also artistic? A lot of women found it easy to hate her, but she was really sweet.