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.
A woman moved out of the gloom, coarse shift barely covering a thin frame, a holy sheen in her eyes and an obsequious bow practically taking her forehead to the ground. Years before he thought he’d get over it. Thought he’d eventually take it for granted, or perhaps come to enjoy it. Finally prayed that he would at least forget about it. But it never seemed to happen. The guilt over what he’d slowly done to this, his inner cadre, always twisted like a rusty shiv. That it happened to this very woman… bile threatened; a quick snag at a white cloth, from an interior pocket, pressed to lips the only salve to kept his rebellious stomach under control.
“We serve, my lord.” Her voice, soulless as an automaton, raised the bile again until he coughed several times, dry heaving before he remembered the urgency propelling him here: the thought of another man with such intimate knowledge concerning Adrian; another magus with the ability to strike him with deadly force from afar. He glanced toward the walls, floor, and ceiling and noted the carefully tended ruins that marched like horrific hieroglyphs, twisting, fading and throbbing even as he watched. A faraday cage for magic, one might say. But much, much more. That power, that safety brought a small measure of respite.
“We’ve work to do,” he clipped after several more moments to assure his voice was back under his control. Without a further thought for Martinez -the man would stay behind, as he always did-he began to follow the winding path through the stacked goods. He immediately felt a shift in perception, as though a breeze he could not feel were ruffling his close-cropped hair, a fairy’s blown kiss caressing a cheek. After long years, the trail seemed natural, his feet automatically finding the proper runes. Here, in his inner sanctum, where the faith of his workers lay embedded in the walls so thick they actually appeared solid in astral space, flowing with that power like pulsating veins, he might manage the transfiguration by himself. Yet it would require a needless expenditure; instead, one of his workers always met him at the portal to allow an easier passage.
That soft, unfelt breeze became a tangible force as they continued the seemingly random twist and turn down strange corridors of crookedly stacked, mysterious boxes and crates, always following the unique path marked on the floor, a path only a select few even knew existed, much less could manipulate. An uninitiated mundane, if he managed to cross the initial threshold and live-highly unlikely-and then managed to trail him-almost beyond comprehension-would see him slowly fade from existence until they were left in a warehouse devoid of human life, simply piled with incomprehensible bits and bobs from around the world.
As Adrian neared the final gate and the end of the piercing of the veil by the path, the power built up along his chakra until his skin vibrated with pent-up energy. With a last step onto the final glyph, he opened both hands wide and released the energy, like the greatest static charge release imaginable. Unlike the viewing of astral space while still in the mundane-as accomplished in the subway tunnel-this didn’t bring pain. This brought ecstasy as he and his follower finished the transfiguration of flesh into pure energy that allowed them to occupy the astral plain.
Still shuddering from the echoes of that energy, which far outstripped any sexual experience of his life (even that he’d experienced with her), he stepped into the warehouse. Yet one unrecognizable from anything viewed by human eyes. Ghostly and ethereal, yet as solid as anything touched in the real world, every part of the warehouse shone with an inner light covering a rainbow of colors beyond imagining, luminosity varying depending upon the object. Bought, scavenged, and oftimes outright stolen by a network he’d spent years building, to the mundane each object was simply a rare artifact or beautiful, precious stone. But each was in reality an item imbued with astral force that he could manipulate, some naturally occurring, others created by ancient magus, some dropping back as far as the dawn of mankind when man first discovered the meta planes of astral space, the spirits and monsters that resided there and that, like gods, men could learn-albeit very painfully-to manipulate to their bidding.
“Master, we serve,” a half dozen men and woman intoned, their naked bodies translucent like crystals, energy pulsing in one rhythmic swell. While each beat to its own rhythm, all immediately fell into a single chorus shimmering with latent potentiality; he closed his eyes, felt the power mirrored in the thrum of his own heartbeat.