Frost Moon (5 page)

“Sure,” Annesthesia said, sounding irritated. “Spleen left like fifteen minutes ago—why aren’t you ready yet?”

“Ready for… what?”

“Don’t you check your emails? You have two clients waiting for a consult—”

“I’ve been with a client,” I snapped, “and I don’t check emails until—”

“Hell freezes over,” Annesthesia replied. “I’m sending them back now—”

“Wait,” I said, but the line clicked dead.
Really.
The waiting room was thirty feet away. She could have knocked or something. But Annesthesia is pretty, coquettish, and beautifully tattooed. Other than me, she’s our best advertisement—no, honestly, for straight guys, she
is
our best ad, since I can scare the little dears—so I put up with her.

I opened the door to the hall, hoping to intercept the visitors and draw them off to our “conference” room before they could see the mess which was my office, but stepped back in shock at the sight of a small but wiry old man with a flaring beard and hair. He was standing so close to the door it seemed like he’d materialized. Behind him, a dark-suited young man with blond hair smiled down at him, eyes lighting when he looked up and saw me. The kindly old man stepped forward, and my jaw dropped in more shock.

“Hello,” he said with a wicked, cheerful grin, devilish black eyebrows serving only to accent his twinkling blue eyes. “I’m Chris Valentine and this is my colleague, Alex Nicholson—”

“Christopher Valentine,” I breathed. “The Mysterious Mirabilus!”

7. THE VALENTINE CHALLENGE

The Mysterious Mirabilus smiled, and gave a slight bow. “The one and only.”

Christopher Valentine, AKA “The Mysterious Mirabilus,” was the world’s most famous magician—and debunker. Technically he was what real practitioners called an illusionist—someone who simulated magic through nonmagical means—but this Einstein-haired “illusionist” could do
without
magic things that most experienced sorcerers couldn’t do
with
magic. I mean, showy, big league stuff like walking on water, parting a small lake, and, most famously, appearing in two places at once, a trick he’d demonstrated on TV’s famous talk show way back when,
The Night Shift with Jack Carterson.

I’d caught that one live. As a child, before I was old enough to know stage magic from real Magick, the Mysterious Mirabilus had been my hero, and I’d stayed up countless nights to catch his appearances performing his latest trick. By the time I grew older and had turned to real magic, the Miraculus Mirabilus had come out as Christopher Heywood Valentine, stage magician, and had turned his considerable talents to debunking what he considered “the flim-flammery of our age.” He traveled the country, issuing the Valentine Challenge to all magicians: to do a magic trick he couldn’t replicate under controlled conditions.

I know, I know, you’re thinking, charmingly nai’ve—no real practitioner would advertise themselves, and the rest are all charlatans, so why did I still idolize this guy? But like many other Edgeworlders, I find myself sifting through endless tomes of New Age fuffery looking for something real. Valentine’s probing books and debunking tours helped me winnow through the crap to get to the occasional nugget of gold.

And so—”I have all your books,” I blurted. Like a schoolgirl. How embarrassing.

But the Mysterious Mirabilus looked at me with sharp new interest. “How interesting,” he said, sitting in the client’s chair opposite me as I sat down at my desk. “That strikes me as very unusual. Given your profession.”

I grinned. “And why can’t a tattoo artist read Christopher Valentine?”

“I meant, as a professed magician,” Valentine said, all serious, dark pointy eyebrows beetling into a serious look of concern. He was much more interesting in person: on camera he looked all pale and WASPy, but with him sitting in my client’s chair I could see a slight Middle Eastern slant to his features and a subtle, swarthy tint to his skin that would have made it a wonderful canvas to ink on. “After all, I have spent the last few years of my life—”

“—exposing all the junk in the so-called ‘magickal’ world,” I replied, “freeing the rest of us practitioners to focus on the good stuff?”

Valentine and Nicholson looked at each other.

At this point I really noticed his colleague, Alex Nicholson: young, not too tall, tanned, with firm angular features that hinted at little or no body fat beneath his trim suit and turtleneck. Subtle, colored streaks wove through his wavy blond hair and the trimmed tuft on his chin. A single blue captive-bead ring hung in one ear. Like a slightly edgy Ken doll. Yummy.

“A skeptical witch,” Valentine said at last. “How about that.”

“Technically I’m not a witch or warlock,” I said. “I don’t have a magical bloodline—I do technical magic, with potions and tools and leylines, which makes me a magician—”

“I thought
I
was the magician,” Valentine said.

“A practitioner would call you a
illusionist.
,” I replied, “though I prefer the term
wizard.
As in Mister Wizard? Because what a stage magician can do with science is far more than conjuring. But… I somehow don’t get the feeling you came here to quiz me about what I call you, because it might be different when you’re not around. How can I help you?”

“Well, then,” Valentine said, rubbing his hands together. “I hoped you might help me with, as you put it, ‘helping people focus on the good stuff.’ I’ve heard you claim to be able to create ‘magic’ tattoos—”

“I ‘claim’ nothing. My work speaks for itself,” I responded, shrugging my shoulders so the vines and snakes rippled down my bare arms. Nicholson was trying not to look, but it wasn’t working; I was trying not to smile, which wasn’t working either. “I am an expert artist, and if you have a tat in mind, I can ink it, whether the design be mundane, magical, even spiritual.”

“Weeell, then,” Valentine said. “Perhaps you could help us. I and my lovely assistant—”

“He is that,” I said. Nicholson suddenly looked down, embarrassed, which made him doubly cute, and Valentine blinked a couple of times before continuing.

“Ahem. I and my assistant would like you to participate in a little test. We would like you to draw a magical tattoo—and then I, who happen to be trained in the tattoo arts myself, will attempt to replicate it, to our mutual satisfaction.”

“Are you issuing me the Valentine Challenge?” I said, now openly grinning.

Valentine bowed. “That I am.”

I leaned back in my chair. Fuck the Vectrix—this was a brand new Prius, with a house and garage to put it in. “A million bucks. Mmmm. I do so hate to take your money. BUT—I don’t ink as a performance, or for tricks. Tattooing is an invasive procedure that violates the body. It needs a sterile environment—and an encircled one, if magic is involved. And it’s a permanent mark on the human body; I don’t ink as a stunt—”

Valentine had listened with mild interest, then with a triumphant smile. “So you won’t do it?” he asked, grinning at Nicholson.

“I didn’t say that,” I said, looking straight at Nicholson. “Does your lovely assistant actually want me to make a permanent mark on his body?”

Nicholson looked up, caught my gaze, and looked away again, embarrassed. It was so cute! “Actually, yes,” he said, flushing, looking up at me at last, his eyes catching on mine with a bit of electric desire. “On my wrist.”

He held up his left hand, pushing his watch down to expose his wrist. “A hider,” I said, reaching for the Big Blue Binder. “I have a good selection of magical flash for the wrist—”

“Actually,” Valentine said, smiling, “we had a specific design in mind.”

“Oh…kay,” I said. “But if you want a magical tattoo—”

Nicholson pulled out an envelope, “I hoped you could do this.”

Oh…kay.
This was a bad scene. I took the envelope gingerly, while Valentine and Nicholson looked on—Valentine gleefully, Nicholson bashfully, a bit skeptically. I opened it up and unfolded a bad photocopy of an ornate bit of flash, a Victorian-inspired design with constellations and Roman numerals and circular filigree that was the magical equivalent of gears. It took me a moment to realize what it was—a clock.

“I’m not going to do this,” I said, tossing the paper down.

“I knew it,” Valentine said, slapping Nicholson’s shoulder. “You owe me—”

Nicholson batted him away. “Why not?” he said, almost hurt.

“It’s a
watch,”
I said. “This is a permanent mark and you want me to do a
watch?”

“Why not?” Valentine said, grinning even more broadly. I was starting to dislike the man, and this after such a good start. “Won’t it keep time—”

“Obviously not,” I said, pointing at the zodiacal marks. “It’s calibrated to the stars, to a
sidereal
day, not a solar day, so it will lose time—a whole day, as the Earth goes around the sun. Didn’t you take astronomy in school? And what if he moved? It would be off by however many time zones were involved!”

Valentine’s jaw remained open. Nicholson remained undeterred.

“It has ‘knobs’ so you can reset it,” he said, pointing.

I stared at the design for a moment. “It… does,” I said. The more I looked, the more masterful the design appeared. “That’s… good. To use the knobs, I’ll need to tattoo contact points on the fingers of… oh. That’s these associated disc designs here?”

Nicholson leaned forward. “Uh, yes. So they are.”

“Who did this?” I looked back and forth at Nicholson and Valentine, who looked back and forth at each other. “This is expert work, but
I
certainly didn’t do it, nor did anyone I know of in the Southeast. Where did you get it?”

“I have my sources,” Valentine said, leaning back in his chair.

“Weeeell,” I said, miming his earlier intonation. “I can’t just ink this as is—”

“I told you so—sorry, am I jumping the gun?”

“Don’t be a dick, old man,” I snapped. “I take my profession as seriously as you do, and I am not going to put a permanent magical mark on the human body without two things: first, you have to get me some virgin flash—meaning
unfolded,
without lines that obscure the design. And no low-quality photocopies, either. I need something as close to the original as possible or a high-resolution digital image, TIFF preferred.”

“A… ‘tiff?” asked Valentine, looking at Nicholson.

“It’s a… graphics format,” Nicholson said. “Like a JPEG. Not a problem.”

Valentine shrugged, nodded. “Sounds fair,” he said. “We can do that.”

“Second, I need to get it vetted by a local witch,” I raised my hand before Valentine could say anything. “I’m not weaseling. I can ink a known design, but for something this complicated… I need a second eye, someone trained in graphomancy. Normally that would cost some coin, but I can get a witch to do it for free. If—and
only if-
—she approves, I’ll do your tattoo, and I guarantee it will do what she’ll say it will do. But I make no guarantees about what Mister Valentine can pull off, no matter how skilled a tattooist he is. And if he can replicate my work—” I cracked my neck, then cracked a smile. “Hey, more power to him.”

After that, I fixed my smile and stared straight at Valentine. He stared back at me for a moment, then looked at Nicholson. “Sounds fair, Alex?”

“Sounds fair,” Nicholson said. “Can you get her some better flash?”

“Today, preferably,” I said. “I have an appointment with my witch this afternoon—”

Valentine jiggled in his pocket and pulled out an USB drive on his keychain. He scowled at it for a moment, then seemed to think better of it. “I have a picture on here, but it’s really no better than the photocopy. Can I email you when I get back to my hotel?”

“Sure—it’’s just
dakota at rogue unicorn dot net,
no dash.”

“Will that take large files?”

“Yes, it just goes to my gmail account,” I said.

“A skeptical witch with a gmail account who wants TIFF files,” Valentine said, jamming his hands back into his pockets. “What is the world coming to?”

“I’m not a witch,” I replied. “I’m just a tattoo artist.”

Valentine was as good as his word—I had the file before my break. I printed out a copy of his “watch” and Wulf’s suspected Nazi flash on the 11x17 printer to speed things up, and dumped his files and my scans on a USB key to meet Jinx. I’m nothing if not prepared.

A distant noise of a leaf blower greeted me as I stepped back to our reception area, and I grinned at Kring/L, a big, beefy bald man with a walrus moustache, going over flash with a young couple over the distant noise of the leaf blower. Unlike me, he did jinxes—lover’s names—so he got work I generally didn’t; but he still felt the same way I did about them, and was trying to sell the kids on matching designs rather than something they’d regret in six weeks.

“You think all the leaves would have fallen by now,” he said, looking up at me, cocking his head back at the muted whine from the parking lot. He was a great artist, and yet didn’t sport a single tattoo. “I thought they did this on Wednesdays.”

“That’s the beauty of global warming for you,” I said. “Blow the leaves around enough with a gas mower, and you get to watch them fall later every year.”

He cocked his head at the two kids—they were actually pretty cleancut, kind of preppy, and had stiffened at my crack. I took the hint and shut up. I slipped out the door, then stomped in my big old boots back to the balcony at the end of the stairs. I was willing to bet I’d see a huge-ass SUV in the parking lot—no, two. Why should I expect that they’d ridden together?

My jaw dropped. A black helicopter sat in the back parking lot of the Rogue Unicorn, its blades spinning down slowly from a light whine to near-complete silence.

The leafblower had wings.

8. SECRET AGENT MAN

In shock, I descended the stairs, watching the set of counter-rotating, oddly spaced blades slowly come to a stop. The helicopter was simultaneously sweeping and angular, landing gear curving back from its nose in a horseshoe, tail swooping up like a fin, making it look like a giant metal Shamu carved from matte black panels that ate up all the light.

Then I noticed the same Fed logo I’d seen at City Hall, black on black, embossed on the helicopter’s side in a slightly shiny effect similar to what you get if you push the levels too far on Photoshop… and leaning against the ‘copter, next to the logo, was the same dark-suited Fed.