Dark Wizard's Case Read online

  Alex would have escaped that time as well if it hadn’t been for the bloody Adept. The trained Mystics had been stupid and clumsy. If it hadn’t been for the bloody Adept.

  “Then the court hearings. Your case had seventeen volumes, almost as many as you were years old, no? And what did they throw at you? Fifteen counts of theft. A hundred and ninety-nine counts of illegal dark spell crafting with intent to sell. Five counts of aggravated assault. Thirty-six counts of assault on an officer of the law. Seven counts of murder by dark magic.” The suit coughed and pressed a button. Wooden cabinet doors opened, revealing their gilded interior and a china set that a complex mechanism instantly filled with water. It even dropped some ice in. “None of the seven counts held up. Otherwise, I’ll be frank, we wouldn’t be having this talk.”

  It didn’t escape Alex that the suit stole a glance at his ankle cuff. Damn. Damn!

  The whole thing was heading somewhere very bad.

  “And the cherry on top: demonology and demonic magic. Both of those are prohibited by law.”

  Alex chewed the cigarette silently, oblivious to the fact that he’d already eaten just about the entire thing.

  “Given that you weren’t a first-time offender, you were sentenced to…three hundred and fourteen years in prison.”

  “That’s nothing,” Alex replied with a nervous snort. He had a sudden urge to throw open the door and hurl himself onto the sharp rocks. He liked that ending better than what was coming.

  “Released on parole four year later, on the condition that you keep that cuff on for the rest of your life.” He glanced back at the ankle adorned by the artifact blocking Alex’s magic.

  The suit slammed the file shut and leaned back in his armchair. With his little finger waving in the air, he took a noisy gulp of water from a faceted glass.

  “So, what do we have here? An incredibly talented—even brilliant—self-taught wizard choosing dark magic and reaching levels of power most can only dream of at the age of sixteen.”

  If it hadn’t been for that bloody prison and the four years I lost, Alex thought, I’d have your Duncan on his knees.

  “The state can’t—well, can’t and shouldn’t—waste a gift like yours. So—”

  “Let me interrupt,” Alex said, raising a hand like a student at one of the schools he never attended. “Why did you get me out of prison?”

  “You’re quick. We wanted to make it a surp—”

  “Why?”

  They stared at each other for a few seconds.

  “As you’ve no doubt guessed, we’d like to offer collaboration that, if you prove your worth, will let you forget your past and find a place in the upper echelons of society.”

  “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Okay, I’ll put it simply.” The suit intertwined his fingers and flashed a predatory gaze, his good-natured mask gone. “On either side of you are sharp rocks and limo doors badly in need of repair. Behind you is a prison where, as far as I can tell, you don’t have many fans. And in front of you is me, promising you a job and the chance to get that cuff off your ankle.”

  “Sounds delightful.”

  “A better offer than what most get.” The suit held up his hands. “So, what will it be?”

  Alex glanced into the suit’s eyes. They were made of cold steel. Shit. Which department is he from exactly?

  “Four years getting myself off in my bed,” Alex sighed. “I never thought I’d be screwed by government officials the minute I walked out the door.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “I don’t think I have much choice,” Doom replied with a nod and a sad smile. He’d long since gotten used to the nickname, almost forgetting his actual last name. “What’s the job?”

  “In a nutshell, you’ll be entering First Magic University,” the suit replied, smiling disarmingly. “You’re going to be its Professor of Dark Magic.”

  Pausing, Alex waited for the suit to say that he was joking. He didn’t.

  “Wha-a…”

  Alex’s stunned cry dissolved into coughing as he swallowed the remains of his cigarette.

  Chapter 2

  Turning up his jacket collar, Alex made a fist and flicked his thumb up. A small tongue of flame flashed over its tip.

  [Elementary magic action. Mana used: 0.5 points/sec.]

  Anyone even at the lower end of the Apprentice level (0-250 mana points) was used to messages like that popping up in their peripheral vision thanks to the lenses they wore.

  That was particularly true there, in Myers City, the heart of New Earth’s magical world.

  But not for Alex.

  Four years. The four goddamn years he’d spent in the underground prison kept him from taking the little things for granted.

  Lens messages. The freedom to use magic. Unlocked doors. The joy of taking a shit any time he wanted to without having to wait for the moment when none of his roommates were eating.

  “Your belongings are at the safe house already, Mr. Dunsky.”

  “Dumsky,” Alex replied.

  “Whatever,” Duncan responded blithely before pressing the button that controlled the limo’s windows, closing them in Alex’s face. “I hope you fuck it up.”

  Any old-school dark wizard worth their salt would have cursed Duncan for his lip. And at the very least, it would have been a curse that covered his penis in boils the next time he tried to get it on with a woman.

  But Doom was cut from a different cloth.

  He adjusted his glasses with his middle finger, the one that had DOOM tattooed on it in the runic script of the fae people.

  He hated those bloody fairies.

  Sidelights flashing, the limo vanished around a corner. Alex followed it with his eyes, bowed low and mockingly in its direction, and wheeled around, only to immediately bump into the breasts of a very tall lady. In her cashmere coat, the collar of which had been made from a two-tailed fox, she looked like just any other working girl.

  “You lost, boy?” she snarled.

  And it wasn’t a figurative snarl. No, she actually snarled. Her skin was green, and she smelled something like an animal, or maybe like a dried raisin. Her claw-like nails and fangs were yellow, all pierced with golden rings.

  [Name: ??? Race: Troll. Mana level: 129.]

  “Ma’am,” Alex said, reaching to tip his hat to her but suddenly remembering that he hadn’t gotten it back when he’d been discharged from the city’s best all-inclusive resort. Bastards.

  “I’m a miss,” the troll hummed. “Want a look at the goods?”

  Alex just turned the pockets of his pants inside out to show that they were empty.

  “Fuck off then, beggar.” The troll gave him a shove so forceful that he almost stumbled out onto the street. “You aren’t the only one here.”

  Doom glanced over at the dark alleyway behind her. There, in the glaring light of a cheap hotel’s neon sign, stood a bunch of half-naked women, all from several races. Alex could have sworn he even spotted some with the white pointed ears of elves, but he told himself he had to be imagining that. Even the poorest elven families were wealthier than the desert sheiks.

  “Why you stickin’ ‘round ‘ere?” Someone shouldered Alex.

  “What you gapin’ for?” When Alex turned around, another shoulder drove itself into him, knocking him off balance.

  Tipping over the edge of the sidewalk and almost falling onto the asphalt road, Alex just missed a speeding bike that shot by a second before he’d have been run over.

  “Got a spare head, moron?” The wind carried the shout over to him despite the roar of the gasoline engine. The rider had to have been a gangster—in High Garden, Myers City’s main cesspit, only gangsters could afford the gasoline tax.

  Well, that’s not quite accurate. They just didn’t pay it.

  Shaking his head and popping his jacket collar again, Alex turned around and looked up at the dark sky. The clouds were dense and illuminated by searchlights flashing regularly through the
darkness, not to mention the occasional magic airship or glider.

  High Garden was the only place in the city where the sky didn’t look like a Christmas tree. Not far away, the night never really had the chance to take over, what with how brightly lit the sky was.

  Alex was in one of the central districts in Myers City. Despite being twenty subway stations away (and that was actually including a shortcut), they were visible even from High Garden.

  Think Manhattan in the 2010s. Make the island six times larger, merge it with Hong Kong, and you’ll have downtown Myers City.

  No one could count all the skyscrapers, as there were more of them popping up every year. It was a jungle of chromium and steel, metal and glass.

  And there were thirty-six million sapient creatures living there, from humans to fairies.

  It was an anthill that never slept, was always active and lively, and was soaked through with magic, from the sewer system where the troglodytes dwelled (Alex had personally killed three of them and would’ve killed the fourth if he hadn’t escaped, almost chopping Alex’s leg off in the process) to the spires of the highest towers the ever-wandering thunderbirds sometimes alighted on.

  Alex breathed in deeply.

  The fragrance of perfumes mixed oddly with the stench of mud and trash-quality dope. It stank of money and misery. Even the gleaming shop windows of the best boutiques were overshadowed by the darkness of the alleys and dens, and the roar of luxury sports cars was sometimes drowned out by the noise of diesel-powered self-propelled guns.

  A city of contrasts.

  A city where all the races dwelled.

  The capital of Atlantis.

  The city of magic.

  “There’s no place like home,” Alex said with a smile. Reaching out, he snatched a black hat right off some random guy’s head.

  “Hey,” came the protest, though his victim slipped into the maze of alleyways when he saw the misty lilac flash of a magic seal on Alex’s palm.

  “And there’s certainly no place like High Garden.” Alex adjusted the brim of the felt hat, his favorite kind, and ripped the stripe off the crown for a more predatory look. “Well, Mr. Bromwoord, I’m coming to take what’s mine.”

  Shoving his hands into his pockets, Alex started toward the lower park. Not far from the orphanage where he’d been raised, next to Seven Corner Square where he’d fought in many a gang war, and some two blocks away from the house of the crazy old man who’d taught him dark magic, there was an inconspicuous shop. The sign read Hunting & Fishing. No one but a few (that is, everyone in High Garden, including the policemen who were in it for the cash rather than the honor of the badge) knew it was one of the biggest smuggling fronts in the district.

  But Alex had something more important than smuggling in mind.

  He had to find out what the hell the government needed from him. Whatever it was, they needed him badly enough to yank him out of the wizard prison, knocking several centuries off his sentence in the process.

  And he had to find out why the hell they wanted him to attend First Magic University. As a professor!

  Professor of Black Magic, huh? Anyone who actually had that title would’ve sold their soul—and their ass, to boot—for the knowledge Alex had in his head.

  As a side project, he wanted to figure out who Duncan and the narrow-eyed man really were.

  And finally, while a trifle barely worth mentioning, he needed to repay his debt to one of the biggest crime syndicates in the city. They’d kept Alex from ending up a spinner around someone’s genitals while he’d been in jail. It was a debt of one hundred thousand credits, which converted to dollars at a rate of one to ten.

  Neat, huh?

  The clock on his debt was already ticking.

  But Alex’s most pressing concern was finding some grub. He blew his nose into a dumpster and inhaled deeply before adding out loud, “and someone to fuck.”

  “Oh, you made up your mind?” the female troll called out from behind him.

  Alex did the exact same thing he always did when he wasn’t sure what to do.

  He breathed in deeply, blew out a ring of smoke, flashed his DOOM tattoo, and trudged off down the street.

  One bearded dwarf in particular, one who owed him buckets of money and a good dinner, was probably tired of waiting for him.

  Chapter 3

  “It’s like I didn’t even spend the last four years on vacation,” Alex drawled, flicking his cigar butt into the trashcan at the bus stop.

  High Garden was the only area in the city that still had electric buses instead of the usual magic-powered ones. For magic buses, you needed a special kind of pavement that had been recently (if four years prior counts as recently) laid on most downtown streets. But High Garden still had regular asphalt, albeit the good, durable kind.

  Doom was standing by a small, two-story building. The crooked Hunting & Fishing sign swayed in the wind. Some of the neon letters on the sign were burnt out—if it hadn’t been for the light cast by a nearby streetlamp, it would have been difficult to make sense of the whole thing.

  The shop was flanked by taller, five-story apartment blocks. Made of red brick and peppered with wooden shutters covering plain glass windows, they looked more like anthills than homes for self-respecting Atlanteans. They were where the city’s blue-collar workers lived.

  Head to the factory in the morning. Work all day. Back to the doghouse at night.

  “Doghouse” was the only word that really fit the tiny apartments, especially since there were always six to eight family members cooped up in each one.

  After seeing the inside of one of them back when he was little, Alex had realized that he’d rather live on the streets than in one of those cramped hellholes.

  Walking up to the stone porch leading to the shop entrance, Doom wiped the soles of the sneakers he’d been arrested in on the familiar, almost comforting stone path.

  He pushed the door open and shuddered the way he always did at the banshee-like howl of the magic doorbell. A curse later, it struck him that nothing had changed.

  “How many times do I need to tell you to get a new doorbell?” he snarled, holding the door open behind him.

  Four years may have passed, but everything was the same inside the old dwarf’s shop. The same shabby green carpet was still on the wooden floor, making the spacious room appear even larger.

  The wooden tables by the walls featured glass display cases housing a variety of tools. Fishing tools on the left; hunting tools on the right.

  Driven by curiosity, Alex approached the table on the right. A long, jagged knife instantly caught his eye. It had a carved, wooden hilt and several runes along the broad, gray blade.

  [Item: Hunting Knife. Item rank: F. Maximum mana level: 12. Price: 145 credits.]

  “The old man lost his last scrap of conscience.” Alex whistled. “A hundred and fifty credits for an F-class item? I’d rather rip a Dark Rat’s throat out with my bare hands than pay that much.”

  F was the lowest class of magical items, meaning that a knife like that could only have been used to hunt Dark Rats or other random mutants.

  Of course, for beginner monster hunters, that was possibly enough. For non-magic hunters, anyway. An artifact with 12 mana points was a blessing from heaven to them.

  Hanging on the walls above the tables were items of clothing. Pants and jackets were on racks, while the boots were on shelves.

  “Columbia Jacket,” Alex read on the price tag of a dark green double-buckle jacket made from apparently very durable fabric.

  [Item: Jacket. Item rank: F. Maximum mana absorption: 7.5. Ice resistance: 0.5%. Price: 210 credits.]

  Alex was so astonished, he almost started muttering a prayer, just about forgetting that prayers were worse for dark wizards than holy water was for vampires. Once, back when he’d been young and stupid, Doom had walked over to the entrance to a church. The gang had to spend an entire week nursing him back to health.

  And the burns he�
��d gotten while being tortured with a cross back in prison would probably never heal.

  “Are you looking for something specific or just browsing? Mr…?”

  Alex turned toward the voice. Behind the counter, leaning on a retro-style cash register and looking bored out of his mind, stood a pimply student listening to a single wireless earbud.

  His pimples had nothing to do with his age—he wasn’t much younger than Alex. It looked like he’d just never washed his face with soap.

  Getting ready for a life in jail.

  But Alex wasn’t going to spend much time joking on that topic. He’d already graduated, or left it, and he had no intention of ever going back. Not in the near future, nor any time after that—never again.

  “Where’s Jeremy?” Alex asked, stepping closer to the student. He reeked of cheap cologne, and his sweaty armpits cut a sharp contrast to the soft, sweet smell of the baby cream on his wet palms. The perspiration on his forehead and the tablet that was turned over face down told him exactly what the old dwarf’s shop assistant had been up to.

  Does this Probationer—let’s call him that—know there are cameras everywhere?

  “There’s no Jeremy here anymore,” the Probationer answered unpleasantly.

  “May his memory stay with us forever,” Alex replied, lifting his hat slightly.

  “No, it’s not that!”

  “What then?”

  “He was fired.” The Probationer shrugged and, probably thinking he was being smooth about it, slipped the tablet off the countertop and onto the bottom shelf. What he didn’t realize was that there was a reflection of the screen in the cabinet glass. Kids really watch stuff like that? “About four months ago.”

  “Why was he fired?” Alex was surprised. “I really liked him. He always offered me a cookie, and it doesn’t look like you have anything for me.”

  “Well, I’d say you’re asking too many questions,” the Probationer said as he squinted at Alex. “If you’re not here to buy something, fuck off, beggar.”