I found some Tupperware containers in the kitchen, and while I fished around through the hole in the living room floor for a solid enough piece or three, I sent the shadow creeping along through the house, looking for the glyph Tyler had mentioned.
The lady of the house was a tad worse for wear, and the bits of gristle and bone I fished out made my fingers sting and burn when I touched them. After another trip to the kitchen, I soon had half a dozen Monster McNuggets wrapped up in tinfoil and tucked into a Tupperware sandwich box. While I worked, I was treated to a rapidly improving topographic map of the house as the shadow flowed into every room in the house, sliding along the ceilings and walls and wafting through the air. She found where the man of the house had stashed his porn collection and where his youngster had tucked candy wrappers hidden away in his room. But no glyph.
“Come on, already, it’s a freaking scar on reality. How hard could it be to find?” I got up to help her look around, and within minutes found the glyph in the pool in the backyard.
I crouched at the edge, staring into the pool why my shadow sulked. She felt she’d been told to search the house, not the pool, and that I’d cheated somehow. The glyph was much easier to see in the water than it had been in the air. The mind-wrenching lines of the thing carved through the water, leaving empty spaces, almost like there was a glass shape floating in the depths.
Next week: Car chase! Battle royale! Blood and shadows! New to Black Alice? Start here!
(Image ‘Shopped from random bits on my hard drive. If it’s yours and you want credit, or don’t want it used, let me know, and I’ll fix it ASAP.)
I skidded to a stop near the staircase as my brain caught up to my panic and politely reminded me that I shouldn’t know anything about those maggots. The existence of the utangards was common knowledge in the Arcana, but specifics? Those were strictly need-to-know, and way above my clearance.
Aw, hell.
Tyler came barreling down the stairs, vaulting over the railing to meet me halfway, with pale blue flames already gathered around his fists. “What is it? Are there more of them?” He turned a slow circle, scanning the room and looking around for another enemy while my mind raced.
“It’s Grace,” I gasped, winging it. I grabbed him by his jacket and dragged him along with me toward the patio. “Those maggoty things – they’re in her!”
“I know,” Tyler snapped, pulling loose. “It’s gross and all, but Jada can take care of her later tonight. Jesus, Alice, what is your problem?”
I almost laughed at that. He didn’t know Jada was dead. From within me, where she was clinging to broken limbs and numbing the pain of my injuries, the shadow sneered at the Knights and their poor communication skills. “No, look, you know Pardell, right, the piper?” I grabbed his arm again and pulled, but I might as well have been tugging on a building. He didn’t budge.
“That sniveling hippie with the cat? Sure. I know of him.” He jerked his arm out of my grip, and the flames he was holding flared yellow before they went out. “What does he have to do with anything?”
“I ran into him earlier. He was babbling about some dogs at the old abandoned Henry Ford Plant –”
Now Tyler grabbed my arm. “What do you know about that?”
My big project this summer has been overhauling the Commuter’s website. It’s finally finished, and I’m fairly pleased with it. It’s still got a few wrinkles that need ironed out, but over all, it’s not too shabby.
Anyway, I wrote things:
Net Neutrality, for the Commuter
Let me tell you a quick story.
Back in 2008, a video of Tom Cruise talking about Scientology hit the Internet. It was a sensation when it broke, because, frankly, Tom comes off a bit nutty in the video. Also, because Scientology works hard to keep its secrets, and the video was inside information on Scientology, gone viral.
Black Alice: 15) Knightfall
I hung up on Honey and shoved the phone in my pocket, opening the door and standing up out of the car. The meteorite, or whatever it was, had hit a car less than a hundred feet back. The car was totaled, and on fire, but the alarm was blaring away dutifully. I cast another look down the road, to see if my followers were coming back, but the coast looked to be clear. With a sharp whistle and a firm pointing gesture, I peeled my shadow off the Barracuda and sent it flitting toward the fire to investigate. She billowed as she slithered and flew, and the few streetlights on the residential road seemed to flicker and dim as she permeated the block.
I sighed. I really should get back in my car and get myself home. I had enough to deal with without adding fireballs to the list. I scanned the houses, but couldn’t figure where the whatever-it-was came from. In fact, even with the firelight and the car alarm blaring away, no lights were coming on anywhere on the street. That seemed odd. This was a nicer neighborhood, not the kind of place where people determinedly ignored this kind of noise outside after dark.
We were up until almost two in the morning to polish off this chapter, but we’re pretty pleased with it.
Black Alice, by Marci Sischo James Agle
I pulled the Baby Eagle from my back holster and pointed it at Gianna as she approached. I didn’t make a big show of it, keeping the gun tucked in by my tummy, but I didn’t make much effort to hide it, either. No point in worrying about spooking the regulars. Most of them would have their own ordnance close to hand anyway. I saw Gianna’s gaze flick from my face to the gun barrel back to my face, saw her eyes harden and just the slightest wrinkle appear between them in her forehead, as those perfect pursed lips twitched into a condescending smile.
Yeah, okay. Not impressed by guns. That’s okay. She’d be impressed plenty by the dragonsbreath ammo, if it came to that.
“Alice. Dear.” She paused by the bar stool. Her voice was chilled, like church bells on a winter morning. “You’re looking … well.” She studied me with the unblinking stare of a desert snake, but made her lips form a brittle, rehearsed smile.
“Thanks,” I nodded at the unoccupied bar stool next to me. Gianna glanced down at the stool and considered it, like she was toting up her chances of catching something if she sat on it, then hooked the leg of the stool with the toe of her incredibly expensive shoe and pulled it out. She swept her skirt under her with one hand as she sat, crossing her legs at the knee. She did it all in one easy swoop of motion, graceful and thoughtless.
“Is that necessary?” There was a little more life in her voice now. She was forcing it there, trying to put me at ease. As I watched, her dead eyes warmed up a bit, her smile becoming a little more natural. She was exerting herself. I felt my monkey hind brain reacting to her effort, and caught myself feeling a little embarrassed over the gun. The shadow, though, didn’t like the taste of her. Microfine filaments of shadow tasted her in the smoky gloom, sampling the flavors that clung to her skin and the scents that wafted off her. Blood and jasmine, rotten meat and lavender. We noticed she still had some flecks of meat under her fingernails.
Next week: Robert gets treed, Alice loses a tail, and another car explodes. It’s a banner night in Detroit! New to Black Alice? Start here.
See, this is where things start to get complicated. The story so far: Around six o’clock Friday evening, while our protagonist, Alice, is entertaining her favorite traveling salesman, the infamous Irishman, local headhunter and bogeyman to the supernatural denizens of Detroit, turns up looking for information from Alice. After shooing off Randall, the salesman (and possible date fodder), Irish and Alice head out to his car to look over some nasty critter Irish had killed earlier in the evening. Only, the nasty critter isn’t dead. It’s very much alive, and really pissed. After dispatching it, and Irish’s car, Irish insists Alice come along to see the rest of the monsters and offer her “expert” opinion.
At the old Henry Ford factory, Alice seeks out and finds the remaining monsters, who have continued to mutate into semi-Lovecraftian horrors, while Irish stumbles over the Knights, the local heavies for the magicians of Detroit, and picks a fight with one of them. Alice kills the monsters, and in the process, discovers the grandson of one of the vampire mavens of Detroit dying in the junkyard, next to the ravaged body of Detroit’s deputy mayor. Before she can investigate further, Alice has to run off to find out what kind of mess Irish has gotten himself into.
Narrowly avoiding discovery by the Knights, Alice arrives just in time to witness Irish killing Jada Lewis, Knight of Cups. Irish completes his evening by meeting Damian, Knight of Pentacles and head of Detroit’s Knights, and pissing in Damian’s cornflakes. That having been accomplished, Irish and Alice part ways, leaving Alice to get the vampire’s freshly undead grandson back home. Alice arranges a meet-up between with Gianna deAngelo, current grandmother, former mafia wife, and always a ruthless vampire, to give her back the body of her grandson.
And now, on with the countdown:
I smoked my cigarette, frowning at my rainy windshield and sipping coffee as I thought. I didn’t know a lot about vampires, and even less about how they ran themselves. I knew they did have some sort of organization, although I was under the impression that it tended to stop at a city level. The bloodsuckers all followed the orders of the scariest vampire in the area.
I knew Gianna wasn’t the top dog herself – there was another guy, Gianna referred to as “Eldest.” I didn’t even know if that was an official title, or if that was just how she talked about him. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that most of what I did know was just snippets of conversation. “The Eldest was very clear on this point,” or “What the Eldest doesn’t know, can’t get me killed.” I’d never met Mr. Eldest in person, either. I’d heard of him from people other than Gianna, though. He was the butt of a lot of jokes, but they were the kind of jokes you told when you were absolutely sure he wouldn’t hear about them.
What I did know was that the bloodsuckers had a strict rule about not creating any more vamps. That was common knowledge, and I had the feeling a lot of vampire bosses made that rule. It was a survival issue. For one thing, considering how murderous vamps are, you couldn’t have too many in an area, or people started taking notice of all the bloodless corpses. For another, I’d heard it was actually pretty easy to screw up the process, which resulted in a kind of mindless revenant shambling around, randomly munching on the public. At best, that was seen as a faux pas among the undead, and at worst it attracted the wrong kind of attention, from people skilled at killing vampires.
Also, the Arcana really frowned on having too many vampires around. Since bloodsuckers were the bitches of the supernatural pecking order, it behooved them to keep the rest of us happy.
Next week, Black Alice takes a couple of mysterious phone calls, gets a dead body out of her trunk before it hopelessly stains the carpet, and then gets herself into real trouble. New to Black Alice? Start here.
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