Magical Threats (Vegas Paranormal/Club 66 Book 3) Read online

  Magical Threats

  Vegas Paranormal/Club 66 – 3

  C.C. Mahon

  Copyright C. C. Mahon 2019

  ISBN : 979-10-95394-36-5

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover by Melody Simmons

  1

  With seven-foot-long wings on my back, showering became a particularly delicate endeavor. In bed, it was almost impossible to find a comfortable sleeping position. Walking through doors, I bumped into the frame. The worst was in my own club: I couldn’t fit behind my bar anymore. My promotion to the rank of Valkyrie had unexpected consequences. And some work was needed in the club.

  I hadn’t thought about all this when I had open Club 66. The double doors were wide but no higher than usual. I was human at the time. I didn’t understand how much my waitresses—a harpy and a troll—had to twist themselves to move behind the bar and between the tables…

  The architect considered the staircase leading down to the club. “I’m not sure I understand. Do you want the stairs to be wider?”

  “No. Give it more height. I have several employees and a lot of really tall customers…”

  “You have eight feet under the ceiling on these stairs.”

  “Exactly. Isn’t ten possible? Same for the door at the bottom of the stairs.”

  This time, the architect considered me as if I had two heads—which was not the case. And he couldn’t see the large raven wings sticking out above my shoulders. Maintaining an illusion in front of humans had become second nature since Odin had stuck these wings in my back.

  The architect slowly descended the stairs. I followed him. Five steps before I reached the bottom, the top of my wings hit the ceiling. As usual.

  The architect was now inspecting the double door that opened onto the bar-room. “I guess we can extend the opening up to the ceiling,” he says. That should bring you to ten feet. But you’ll need custom-made doors, and at the moment, it might be a bit complicated…

  The biggest disaster in Vegas’ history had occurred a few days earlier. A block in the busiest part of the city had exploded. Reduced to ashes by a magical detonation. Of course, the authorities had not uttered the word “magic.” Nor “ley lines.” Officially, it was a gas leak. An army of workers toiled day and night clearing the site, and all the local contractors had their order books full. Vegas lived fast and refused to waste time—and, therefore, money. The city had to rebuild, to get the tourists back, and to reassure the public.

  But the rumors were anything but reassuring.

  Just after the explosion, the first people on-site—first responders, emergency workers, and firefighters—noticed the strange atmosphere of the place. Some, more sensitive to the supernatural than others, had declared it haunted. Then there were the mysterious “diseases” that affected the rescuers. At least two firemen had woken up one morning in animal form. An ambulance driver was on the run after assaulting an injured man, tearing off a piece of the guy’s jugular with his teeth. The authorities—mainly my friend Detective Lola King, and her supervisor, Oliver Dale—were doing their best to cover up these cases, maintain a semblance of normalcy over the city, and avoid panic in the human population. Among the supernatural, panic was not far off. The community knew that the ley lines converging under the city had been destabilized. These natural lines carried “high voltage” magic, a raw and dangerous energy. Customs, whose mission was to prevent Vegas from going up in smoke in a huge explosion of magic, was on edge. It had enlisted the help of the Sorcerer’s Guild to establish a safety cordon around the disaster. It took the shape of a giant invisible dome, a magic-proof barrier. To avoid contagion, nothing supernatural could now leave or enter Las Vegas.

  And it wasn’t a paranoid reaction. Contagion was already there, as two new metamorph firefighters and a panicked paramedic who perhaps understood that he was now a vampire (or a ghoul, no one could be sure until he was found) could testify.

  The cordon prevented the “magical leak” from contaminating the rest of the country. But inside the perimeter, the situation was…unstable.

  In these uncertain times, the supernatural community tended to gather in places where it knew to be among peers. Club 66 was one of those places. Every night since the disaster, we had a packed house. It wasn’t the best time to have some work done on the place, but I was tired of bumping into everything in my own club.

  “I can give you a cost estimate within a week,” said the architect. “After that, we will have to file the administrative paperwork, obtain the authorizations, contact the contractors… I think we can start work in three or four months.”

  “That long?”

  The architect shrugged. “You have not chosen the best time to remodel. My assistant will send you a provisional schedule.”

  I walked the architect back to the threshold of the hangar that housed my club, closed the metal door on the sun-drenched street, and turned around to contemplate my domain.

  The ground floor of the hangar was bare dirt. My motorcycle was parked near the door. One set of steps went down to the club, and another went up to my loft. I could have transferred the bar to the ground floor. We had almost twenty feet from floor to ceiling and all the space we could have dreamed of. But it meant that the street entrance would lead directly into the club, as would the stairs from my loft. I liked the idea of separation between the different spaces—between my different worlds: a divider between the street and the club, a divider between the club and the loft… A lot of empty space all around me.

  Speaking of empty space…

  I concentrated on spreading my wings, waking up my aches and pains.

  With these new limbs came new muscles, which I now had to learn to use.

  I folded and unfolded my wings several times in a row as a warm-up before moving on to vertical movements. You couldn’t call it “flapping my wings.” It was too slow, too clumsy. I exercised until my muscles cried for mercy. I was sweating, and I hadn’t even taken off from the ground. I checked my watch; I had an hour left before opening the club. Enough time to take a shower.

  2

  Nate, my bouncer, arrived thirty minutes before opening hour. A tall blond guy with long hair and broad shoulders, he was also a metamorph—a grizzly bear. And before the club, he had worked a lot of small jobs in town.

  “Nate,” I said, “do you know anything about construction?”

  “What kind of construction?”

  I explained what I wanted.

  He listened to me with a frown and examined the staircase and door as the architect had done. “I can make the doorway taller,” he said. “It’s not complicated. I’ll do it for you tomorrow if you want. Making new door panels will take me a few days, but it’s simple. On the other hand, the stairs…I’m not sure. We should dig around here…maybe add some steps there… I don’t know. And the bar counter, did you want to move it, too?”

  There was no room behind the bar for my newly acquired wings. No more than for Barbie’s, my harpy waitress. As for Gertrude, the other waitress, her troll stature barely allowed her to sneak between the counter and the back shelves, but her large hands tended to crush glasses. That was the reason I hired a bartender: Enola.

  Enola was a young woman who looked charming. She was a prophetess, and I didn’t know what that meant exactly. What I knew was that she was a traitor. Madly in love with Callum, my ex, she had tried to kill me in order to eliminate the competition for Callum’s heart. The fact that I had run away from this guy, faked my death, changed my identity half a dozen times, and tried to kill the sadist myself didn’t seem to change anything for Enola. She wanted me dead, and she let me k
now. So I had to do without her services.

  To replace her, I hired Johnny.

  Johnny was a smiling man. He wore 1940s’ fashionable costumes, spoke with a strong Chicago accent, and had spent the previous seventy years in the form of a peacock. He was not yet up to date in his knowledge of cocktails and had kept strange reflexes from his years in bird form. But he was competent, fit comfortably behind the counter, and to my knowledge was not in love with Callum.

  Even an employee as enthusiastic and dynamic as Johnny was entitled to one night off every week. And I liked to open every night, especially in these troubled times. I felt that the community needed places to meet. Apart from my club, I knew of the Take a Chance, a bar with a bad reputation, located in the sewers. I wanted to believe that Club 66 was better than that kind of dive.

  For the moment, Gertrude was replacing Johnny behind the bar one night a week. But the cost of broken glasses was starting to worry me. Not to mention the morale of poor Gertrude, always eager to do the right thing and devastated by each of her mistakes.

  It wasn’t her fault that my glasses weren’t designed for trolls.

  I let a sigh escape. “Either I find glasses that are resistant to Gertrude’s grip or I move the counter so that Barbie or I can replace Johnny for his nights off. Frankly, I don’t know what’s simpler.”

  “Troll glasses?” said Nate. “Moving the counter forward would be quicker. I’ll ask someone to help me out.”

  “I can help you with that.”

  He shot me a disapproving look. “I was thinking of someone strong enough to lift the counter. Another metamorph or…”

  “Or a valkyrie? Not to brag, but since Odin gave me my wings, I’ve also gained in strength. If I knew anything about carpentry, I would have moved the damn counter myself. But it’s fixed to the floor, and I’m afraid to tear off the hardwood.”

  Nate’s face stiffened. “I’ll take care of the door first. We’ll see about the counter later.”

  He turned and went up the stairs to take his place at the hangar’s entrance.

  What had gotten into him?

  I had long since given up understanding his moods, which ranged from marshmallow teddy bear to angry grizzly bear, often changing for no apparent reason—especially since the magical explosion.

  Johnny arrived dressed in his favorite costume, the peacock-blue one with giant shoulder pads.

  “Boss, guess what?” he said, hanging his jacket on the coat rack.

  “A new metamorph in town? A flying firefighter? An emergency room attendant who goes through walls?”

  “A haunted backhoe loader!” replied Johnny with a wide smile. “According to the workers who are clearing the explosion site, their machine has decided to live its own machine life and has set sail.”

  “On its own?”

  “Yep! I don’t know where it went or why, but half the workers quit, and their boss is pulling his hair out.”

  “The Guild should have found a solution by now.”

  “I don’t want to offend anyone, but I’m still waiting to hear good things from your local sorcerers. They’re a bunch of snobbish people hiding in their golf club. At least, that’s what people say.”

  “They are good at their job,” I said, “but not known to act in a hurry. Especially if they have no one to send the invoice to.”

  Johnny worked for a moment behind his counter, taking inventory of his bottles, before starting to cut limes. “In the end,” he continued as if to himself, “this magical contagion stuff, it may not be bad for their business. I mean…if someone had to look for a solution to a magical problem, like those poor firemen who woke up all furry, who would they turn to for help? The Guild. And I guess they’d pay a lot of money to get back to normal.” His hands stopped as he stared into space.

  Johnny had been turned into a bird by a mysterious sorcerer named Elsie. She had kept poor Johnny prisoner in an aviary for decades, along with dozens of other “birds.” I imagined that he would have given everything he had to become normal again at the time.

  He snorted and started cutting his limes again. “I mean, what do I know? I just hope I don’t get to see my feathers grow back. Because I’m sick of those, I can promise you that.”

  A glance at the clock told me that the sun had just set. Upstairs, Nate would open the hangar door. Gertrude should be here a little later. When you’re a troll, you don’t leave your house until dark. So I was busy finishing preparing the room when Lizzie and Britannicus appeared. The amateur witch and the British sorcerer had been inseparable since I introduced them, always in lively conversations about the nature of magic or the comparative effectiveness of spells (Britannicus’s favorite tool) and rituals (by which Lizzie swore).

  Recently, they had been trying to understand the magical contagion that was affecting Las Vegas. And if I judged by their concerned faces, their research was not progressing as they had hoped.

  I set them up in the back room, at their favorite table.

  “No cooking tonight,” I said. “Matteo is off duty.”

  “Erica,” Lizzie begged, “can’t you make me an omelet? I came straight from work. I’m starving.”

  “What is your work?” I asked.

  I never thought to ask her what she was doing when she wasn’t immersed in her magic books.

  “Librarian,” she said. “I had a lot of filing to do. I’m running behind. I think this whole contagion thing is too much on my mind.”

  “Did you understand what’s going on?” I asked.

  “We believe so,” said Britannicus.

  “It’s the damn ritual,” Lizzie said. “The one that monster Carver distorted to steal powers from the supernaturals.”

  “Is Callum the one who’s having fun contaminating humans with magical powers?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” Britannicus said. “We think the explosion dispersed the ritual.”

  I looked at them for a moment in silence. “I have no idea what that means,” I confessed.

  “Remember when we arrived at Carver’s apartment?” said Britannicus. “The ritual was in action, and two of Carver’s accomplices were stealing Patricia and Kitty’s magic.”

  I nodded. The succubus and the puma had been unconscious, surrounded by crystals. Callum’s accomplices had been sitting in magic circles.

  “The explosion of the building should have stopped everything,” Lizzie said. “With the circles broken and the crystals vaporized, the ritual should have stopped immediately. Except that Carver had drawn energy directly from the ley lines. And when you inject such power into a ritual, you should expect…” She shrugged. “In fact, I don’t know what we should expect. What I do know is that the ritual survived the explosion. Ever since I regained consciousness in the rubble, I can hear it around me, fragmented but recognizable. And with the amount of magic still escaping from the ley lines, it has only grown stronger since then.”

  “These bits of rituals wandering around,” I said, “what do they feel like? Are they dangerous?”

  “The ritual was created to transfer magic into a human being,” said Lizzie. “And that’s exactly what it’s done since the explosion.”

  “You mean the meta-firemen?” I said. “And the ambulance vampire?”

  “Contaminated by the ritual,” said Britannicus. “Probably while they were working in the rubble just after the explosion. So close to the magic source, the ritual fragments probably received all the energy they needed.”

  “Without magic circles?” I said. “Without crystals?”

  “The circles were intended to contain the magic,” Lizzie said. “To prevent it from spreading throughout Callum’s apartment and getting diluted. The crystals are mainly used to set up the ritual, to focus energies. As long as the ley lines continue to feed the ritual fragments, they will not need crystals. As for the circles…that’s the problem. If we could isolate the fragments in circles, they would stop contaminating passersby. But the fragments have traveled all over th
e city, invisible and unpredictable. Yesterday, my coworker arrived in a panic. She thinks she’s going crazy because she hears the thoughts of the people she meets on the street.”

  “Is your job close to the site of the explosion?”

  “Miles away. But the ley lines have leaked an incredible amount of raw magic into the atmosphere, and the whole city is contaminated.”

  “Can we find a vaccine?” I asked. “Some kind of ritual or spell to protect humans before the entire population of Vegas inherits powers they didn’t claim and the problems that go with them?”

  Britannicus sighed before confessing, “We are working on it, but we lack the resources.”

  “What about the Guild?” I said.

  If anyone had resources, it was the Sorcerer’s Guild.

  Britannicus pinched his lips. “My American colleagues seem more interested in money than in the public good. Or they take a long time to react.”

  “Probably both,” Lizzie said. “They probably spend their days in discussions to decide whether or not to get involved.”

  “But all this magic,” I said, “won’t it run out at some point?”

  “On the contrary,” Britannicus said. “According to my observations, the leak is emitting more and more magic.”

  “How? Why?”

  “I think the ley lines are getting unstable,” said Britannicus.

  I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but Lizzie immediately enlightened me. “Maybe we’ll get our magic Chernobyl.”

  3

  Rumor had it that if the balance of the ley lines was upset, we would undergo a “magical Chernobyl.” The rumor was not very precise in its definition of such an event—rumors rarely were. But if I believed what I saw at Callum’s…

  When I confronted Callum in his building, I chased him to the third basement level. There, I discovered a forest of giant crystals. I had later described their orange, purple, and blue lights, the way they sometimes emitted arcs of pure magic, their constant humming. Britannicus and Lizzie had concluded that it was a kind of transformer, intended to channel the raw magic of the ley lines into a slightly less explosive magic. Like an electrical transformer that changed high voltage into domesticated electricity.