Read an Excerpt
Two Wizard Roulette
Modern Nights: Book 2
By Joshua Bader, Yelena Casale City Owl Press
Copyright © 2017 Joshua Bader
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-944728-17-5
CHAPTER 1
COLIN
Loud pounding on the front door of my apartment was never a good way to wake up. A timid gentle tap or a rhythmic knock might have been okay and could have meant anything: Jehovah's witnesses, local police, a visitor from the Fairy Realm. Pounding, hard and determined, meant it was Timmy. Everyone else had reason to be scared or polite. The police knew I was in the employ of Valente International, and specifically Lucien Valente, CEO of said corporation. Most cops wouldn't talk to me unless they had an ironclad warrant and a smoking gun with my fingerprints on it. The rest of the cops were on Lucien's payroll. A giant troll could pound on my door like that, but in general, I had found they were too polite and well-mannered to do so. Timmy, on the other hand, didn't care that a mysterious wizard and his crazy assassin girlfriend lived behind the door. He just wanted to make sure we heard him.
Speaking of Veruca, I was surprised to see she was already up and gone for the morning when the acoustic assault roused me from my six a.m. slumber. She hadn't mentioned any work projects scheduled for today, but that wasn't highly unusual. The longer we lived together, the more secrets we kept from each other. I loved V: her rebel spirit, wild hair, curiosity, and lethal talents. But I still had a softy and squishy part inside of me known to most people as their conscience. It bugged me to know that our livelihood required two to three assassinations per week to maintain. The fact that her family had demon blood in it from four generations back couldn't have bothered me less. Believe me, I was living in a heckuva glass house to start casting stones on that count.
I groggily stumbled to the still-pounding door. I thought I had won after the servers at Valente International went crazy on my first day. My apartment (all 7,200 square feet of it) had no computer, no telephone, no tablet ... not even a television, though V kept agitating on that point, insisting she was addicted to the infernal TV device. My position was a bit more complicated: technology did weird things around me. There was something about combining a wizard and anything that allowed bodiless voices to communicate through means not generally well understood to the layman. To be blunt, sometimes the dead saw it as a free-range opportunity to call up and express their dissatisfaction with the afterlife. Random dead might have been acceptable, but I never, ever wanted to talk to my mother like that again. Death changes a person.
Lucien Valente, however, had refused to accept that he could have an Inner Circle employee who wasn't available to him by modern communication technology. Enter Timmy, the future community manager for the first floor of apartments underneath me, if that community ever actually opened. A lot of people in the area weren't thrilled with the idea of the first floor of the abandoned motel being turned into low-income housing for recently released sex offenders. I wasn't thrilled, but at least their sex offender registration prevented them from owning a computer or having an Internet connection. The first offenders were still two months away from moving in ... but Lucien had brought in Timmy, community manager wonder boy and possible future frog (if I ever learned that spell), two weeks ago. I'm pretty sure the entire purpose of moving him in early was so that Lucien could install a phone line into Timmy's apartment ... and call him anytime he needed to talk to me. Best I could tell, the new hire thought of his job as a religious calling and saw Lucien as patron saint. Accordingly, he beat on my door with zealous fervor whenever Valente said jump.
My front door was still vibrating when I turned the handle and pulled it open. I shot out my best death glare, the kind that made most supernatural baddies pause for at least a second or two with dread and doubt. Timmy smiled his exuberant, possibly mentally challenged, smile. "Hiya, Colin. How are you doing? Great morning, huh?"
I looked down at my naked wrist for a beat. "Half past who the hell is awake this early. What's up, Timmy?" I knew the answer already: please call Mr. Valente, at your earliest convenience, from the payphone in the parking lot. Timmy would likely add that I was welcome to use the phone in his apartment if I wanted to stop in, maybe have a cup of coffee. That was always the message.
Except it wasn't the message this time. "Mr. Valente said to get dressed; he'll be by to pick you up in ten minutes." Timmy beamed and held out a ceramic mug with a cartoon of two cats tangled together in a ball of yarn. "Coffee to get you going?"
Lucien Valente, CEO of Valente International, the richest man you've never heard of, lord of subsidiary upon subsidiary upon subsidiary, and employer of demon-blooded assassins, was picking me, his personal wizard, up in ten minutes. I grunted something to Timmy, slammed the door in his face, and began hurried preparations. The shit was about to hit the fan.
CHAPTER 2
COLIN
It must have taken Timmy a minute and a half to make a cup of coffee for me and hurry upstairs, because I heard the precise, controlled tapping on my door eight and a half minutes later. I scooped up my leather jacket, made sure my chaos blade was still in the left pocket, and scurried to the door while trying to put the jacket on at the same time. Before sunrise was never a good time for me to try to multitask and I nearly tripped over the newly installed humidity-regulated scroll case. Still, I survived to open the door. I was surprised, but not shocked, to find that Lucien had climbed the stairs himself, rather than sending his driver up.
"Mr. Fisher," Lucien bowed by the slightest tilt of his perfectly coiffed head. "I hope you do not mind the intrusion. I would not have bothered you so early if it were not urgent."
Valente was, as always, immaculately put together. He was the absolute picture of style and grace, with a tall, athletic body in a custom-tailored suit. Today's was a harder granite gray, rather than the more typical silver fabric, but the white Nehru collared shirt with silver jet buttons was his normal attire. I didn't even try to compete: khakis with lots of pockets and hopefully not too many stains from yesterday, paired with a wrinkled green shirt straight from the clean laundry basket. Hopefully my trademark black leather jacket concealed the worst of the wrinkles and any socks that may have been electrostatically attached to my back. Lucien paid me enough that I could have dressed like him if I wanted to, but something from my homeless vagabond days still insisted it was morally wrong to shop at anything more upscale than Walmart or Goodwill.
I nodded back. "Of course, sir. What's up?"
"We can talk in the car on the way to the airport. I need your expertise in Las Vegas."
Lucien closed the distance between my front door and the stairs down from the old motel second floor before he realized I wasn't following him. When he looked back, I said, "I don't do airplanes, sir. Too many electronics."
For a brief moment, I thought I saw a micro-expression of rage on his face before it settled into confusion. Lucien Valente had very little recent experience with people saying no to him. He was the CEO of a multi-national corporation with a unique combination of intelligence, ruthlessness, charisma, and power that made Bill Gates jealous (I knew this for a fact. I had spent most of the company New Year's Eve party reading Mr. Gates' body language). Add in the fact that my girlfriend was not the only assassin he employed, and Mr. Valente was the epitome of the man people didn't say no to. When he finally recovered from the shock, he walked halfway back to me before saying, "We can discuss your aerial status in the car on the way. Let me show you a few things and we can decide on the best way to proceed."
In lower tones, he added, "Given the number of attempts on your life in recent weeks, I would prefer to be discussing this inside my armored limousine."
That gave me pause. The last assassin I had heard of Veruca had killed on Thanksgiving day. Valentine's was right around the corner and nobody had bothered to tell me if anyone else was trying to kill me. Even so, it didn't matter. Saying no to Lucien once was good, clean fun. Twice in one morning and mysterious assailants might be the least of my concerns. I closed the door on my ritual laboratory-slash-home, before thinking better of it. "Be right down, sir."
I popped back inside, grabbed the Tic-Tac-size plastic box off the shelf, pocketed it and headed back out, being careful both to lock the door and to activate the runes on the doorway. Up until last October, I had lived out of a '84 Crown Victoria and protecting my possessions had been a minor concern. Now that I was personal wizard to the head of Valente International, my home contained not just my meager possessions, but a host of weird and exotic artifacts of unknown but potentially magical properties. No one had said to make sure that Lucien's property didn't get stolen, but I had thought it wise to take a few more precautions than when I lived in my car.
CHAPTER 3
COLIN
To be honest, I had always imagined that the inside of Valente's personal limousine would be more impressive. It was slightly larger than a normal Lincoln Town Car and in the prerequisite black with chrome highlights, but on the street I wouldn't have looked at it twice. Knowing my boss, that might have been the point. He enjoyed luxury and power, but he also valued his anonymity. State-of-the-art oversize stretch limos undoubtedly attracted paparazzi like a restaurant dumpster summoned flies. As I slid onto the black leather seat next to him, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the leather was toasty-warm despite the early February Boston temperatures outside. It had been a relatively mild winter after that nasty December 3rd storm, when a cannibal winter demon might have become trapped inside my copy of the Necronomicon, but even a mild Massachusetts winter was too cold for me.
Lucien waited till I had settled in before beginning. "Put these on, Mr. Fisher. My hope is that they will delay or disrupt the effect you have on technology."
I was not overly surprised to discover that the black leather gloves he handed me were a perfect fit. They were a little bit over-padded, and crinkled when I put them on, as if there was something else layered between the inner lining and the leather. "I'll try anything once."
After they were on, Lucien retrieved a large black tablet and began tapping away at the screen. I had loved computers as a kid and would have loved to know more about the strange device, but ever since I made the pact that gave me my magic, technology and I were not friends. After a few moments, Valente spun the tablet to show me a grainy, zoomed-in image of a man standing near a blackjack table. "I need you to find this individual for me, Mr. Fisher."
I studied the face, what little there was to study. He was white with dark, scraggly hair and a goatee. He looked tall and broad, but without a reference to other people it was hard to say just how big he was. "What else do you have on him?"
"That is a large part of my problem. This individual has spent the night in at least three casinos owned and operated by subsidiaries of Valente International in the last week. Do you have any idea how many cameras are inside a casino, Mr. Fisher?"
I took a stab in the dark. "A hundred on the guests, a couple hundred on the employees."
"You're not too terribly far wrong. Given my connections within the Nevada Department of Transportation and the Las Vegas Traffic Commission, I could create a moment by moment picture album of most tourist visits to Sin City. Beyond traditional security cameras, I have infrared and ultraviolet devices, facial recognition software, and a security chief with some unique talents. All that technology, and that's the only picture I have of the individual in question."
I pondered the possibilities, both magical and otherwise. It sounded strange, to be sure, but strange alone didn't mean it was necessarily sorcerous. "What happened to the rest of the images? You should have hundreds of shots of him. Any chance he's bribing one of your security staff to edit him out?"
"Inside job was my security chief's first explanation for it and I have given him ample opportunity to investigate in that direction. Having reviewed the evidence myself, I think something else is to blame." Lucien tapped on the screen a few times and a video clip of Clint Eastwood's famous "Do you feel lucky" scene began to play on the tablet. As soon as the clip finished, it looped back to the beginning and played again. "For the twenty-two hours he was inside the first casino, this is what was recorded by every single camera in the building. According to the personnel who were working, the monitors were working normally ... but the hard drives recorded Dirty Harry."
"Odd, but I assume someone with sufficient computer skills could have accomplished that."
"Technology is not my field, either, Mr. Fisher, but there are always multiple possibilities. This is what was recorded at the second casino. Nineteen hours, no overlapping personnel between the two casinos."
The feed had been edited to combine multiple camera angles. A large man in a black trench coat, of roughly similar size physically to the man in the initial image, entered through ornate sliding glass doors and began wandering throughout the casino. The video captured his boots, coat, and clothing, but throughout all the tape a giant yellow smiley face with a bleeding gunshot wound dead center had been superimposed over the man's head. "Again, the workers insisted the live feed to their monitors was normal, but this is what was recorded."
"And his third stay?"
"For the vast majority of his twenty-hour stay, the system recorded nothing at all, only static. Mixed among the nothingness were a handful of images. Only one of those included any footage of our mystery guest and you have seen it already."
I chewed it over mentally. "If it is magic, it might be getting weaker. Some kind of a ritual confusion aura. The further he gets in time from the ritual, the less helpful it is to him. First time, closest to the ritual, you get nothing. Second, you at least get a rough physical description as far as height and weight. Third, you get a picture of him, even if that's all you get."
Lucien nodded. "Potentially. Are you aware of any such rituals?"
"Of that scope and power? No. But it seems vaguely possible at least."
"I will take your word for it." Lucien paused. "If he is using some sort of magical means to conceal himself against electronic surveillance, could you find him? My security chief and I would both like to have a conversation with him."
I thought about the six-digit paycheck that got deposited directly into my bank account every Friday morning. "I'm sure I could arrange that ... But mind if I drive out there? I'm still a little bit suspicious about the idea of flying. You've got enough of a description to keep him out of any other properties you own."
Lucien chuckled. "You would think ... but he seems to have strange effects on casino staff as well. When the dealers and game operators are interviewed about him, their answers are all over the map: fifty-year old Hispanic, twenty-year old Caucasian female ... one of the dealers insisted that former president Jimmy Carter was the guest in question. I had put out a citywide alert after the second casino. They still let him break the bank two nights later in another casino."
"That sounds vaguely familiar."
I tried to ignore the dark voice in the back of my head. He was sometimes useful, often sarcastic, and always a pain in my ass. I needed to focus on my boss before dealing with my tainted subconscious.
"Sure, sure. Take your time. Why pay attention to the ancient deity in the room?"
I replied out loud to Lucien. "So he could hit another one at any time, if your staff can't recognize him on sight?"
"I'm hoping that, whatever he's doing to conceal himself, your unique talents will be able to see through it."
"I'll find him. One way or another. But flying still isn't a great idea."
Lucien tapped the screen a few more times and turned the tablet towards me. "Not a single disturbance so far, Mr. Fisher. You can use my private jet. I've briefed the pilots to expect the unexpected with you aboard and I trust their skills, even if their instruments malfunction."
The video that played this time was a segment from Clockwork Orange involving the William Tell overture. "When was that one recorded?"
"Two days before his first casino stay, this was captured by an outdoor traffic camera in Kingman, Arizona. What isn't being recorded, but should have been, is a dozen police officers opening fire on a lone bank robber. According to the sheriff, he took out two of her squad cars by pointing his fingers at them, then disappeared into thin air."
"Maybe there's more to life than just a fat paycheck."
"Suddenly turning into a chicken, Yog?"
"I prefer the term 'pragmatic survivalist.'"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Two Wizard Roulette by Joshua Bader, Yelena Casale. Copyright © 2017 Joshua Bader. Excerpted by permission of City Owl Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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