CHAPTER 69: PHANTASM | THE RAID—XI

  SPECTRE—NOVEMBER 26th, 1992 | MORNING

  ?

  Leroy’s hand tightened around the waterskin between his fingers.

  Gideon writhed on the ground, utterly useless by way of Marcus’s anaconda phantasm, which slithered around his body in trails of pink and violet, each micromovement shedding a fractal or illusionary wisp. Marcus sat on the front of his desk, watching his former errand boy suffocate on make-believe breathlessness. Leroy’s jaw clenched. Gideon was meant to be his ace in the hole. His trump card.

  The walls of the vast office were covered in shadows—in hands—meant to make a fool out of Marcus. Gideon had more power than he knew what to do with; and his body expressed it through those small, strange abyssal fingers that bordered his eyes like a domino mask. His demonic vow was at the cusp of its fulfillment, and it still didn't matter. Marcus had rendered Gideon's capabilities into nothing more than an afterthought.

  “How long?” Leroy asked.

  He needed a plan, which meant he needed to stall. His eyes darted around the room. As far as he could tell, the only available water sources were his three waterskins. But if Gideon’s heightened state failed to do anything meaningful to Marcus, he doubted how useful his own abilities would be. Even if he were outside with the mist to draw from, Marcus seemed more than just proficient at mesmerism.

  Marcus raised a brow. “How long what, Leroy?”

  “You’re a mesmer,” Leroy muttered.

  Old Man Winter needed time. He’d just fired off a shot, and he still didn’t have quite a handle on when he’d be able to do that again. All he knew was that the artificial objects with stronger effects required a longer period of being idle between uses. Either way, stalling would only serve to Leroy’s benefit—and the best way to stall, he’d found, was by stroking someone’s ego. Fortunately for Leroy, Marcus Velvet had assigned himself the title of the Uncrowned King of Cyprus Alley. His ego was large. Larger than large. Massive.

  “Leroy,” Marcus began, exhaling with a knowing, lion-like smile. “Please. Really? You’re asking me that? Now? See, I know what you’re doing, but I’ll humor you anyways.”

  Gideon. If he could get Gideon to snap out of it, that was his way out. Leroy had never dealt with a mesmer before, not directly, but he knew enough about them to know that the only thing stronger than fabricated pain was real pain. Tangible pain. But he needed a window. A moment of opportunity that Marcus wouldn’t anticipate.

  “College of the Arts?” Leroy asked.

  “No,” Marcus clarified, shaking his head. “You’d be surprised, Leroy, by the amount of people in this city who learn a thing or two about the arcane entirely on their own.”

  “And you’re one of those people,” Leroy said.

  “In a sense. You don’t care about my story, you care about killing me, so, I’ll give you the shorthand version. No parents, single surviving kin in the form of an aunt—a mesmer who prostituted her abilities to the highest bidder. Companies out of Godfrey Tower, the Syndicate, rich folk who needed something done. The usual,” Marcus explained.

  “No records, then,” Leroy muttered. “No way for the Civic and Occult Authority to know.”

  Marcus smiled at that. “They know me, of course, but only as the sole proprietor of Spectre, and more recently, as an accessory to Bluestein Philterworks many crimes related to ether.”

  Gideon continued to gasp. The illusionary anaconda clenched tighter and tighter around his frame, but his face did not blue, and not a single drop of blood had been spilled. No damage had been done; and yet his torture persisted at the discretion of Marcus. Marcus didn’t seem to take any pleasure in doing so, but there was a certain dread that radiated from him, something deeply twisted and matter-of-fact about his quiet indifference.

  “And this? This whole thing, Leroy,” Marcus said, pointing his finger up and twirling it, as if to bring attention to the situation itself. “Easily avoidable.”

  “Never would have ended,” Leroy said. “Second favor would turn into a third. Third would turn into a fourth. Fourth into a fifth. On, and on, and on.”

  “Well, maybe,” Marcus admitted. “But here we are. Back to the danger. And, might I add, you’re a damned fool—bringing Captain Holmes here. To me. You’ve gone through all of this trouble only to put him in the same position he would’ve been if you’d followed through with your end of the bargain, Leroy.”

  “He can handle himself,” Leroy said.

  “But can he handle what I’ve thrown at him?” Marcus said snidely. “Can you?”

  Yaerzul’s words came to mind. His warning; an omen he’d expressed within moments of Leroy nearing Spectre for the raid.

  If you wanted to save him, you’d handle this yourself. In your own way. Yet you stand here about to enter the belly of the beast, bringing it the very lamb that it seeks to slaughter, a shepherd of danger. This is a mistake. A folly. Your fool’s errand.

  Leroy felt his brand alight. Yaerzul wasn’t speaking to him now, but the mark on Leroy’s neck oscillated and drummed with remnant energy.

  “You’re skilled, Marcus, better than most mesmers, I’d imagine,” Leroy continued. “So why this? Drugs, booze. Could’ve worked for the Special Response Unit. Hell, would’ve made a better arbiter than me.”

  Leroy had to strike a chord. He had to find something that would give Marcus pause; find a sensitive spot, like an exposed root canal in his memory. He had to pry deeper and crack that facade of nonchalance that Marcus wore like a mask permanently grafted to his skin.

  “Aunt died,” Marcus said casually. “Left me with nothing, Leroy. She taught me the basics, but didn’t leave me with any notes on mesmerism or on how to live a life. Only lesson she really taught me that stuck with me was that you don’t get anywhere by working for people. You only get fucked.”

  “Now you do the fucking,” Leroy said with a tut.

  “Right,” Marcus said, his smile bright and roguish. “I do the fucking. Have to. People don’t need to fear you, Leroy, they need to fear what you can do to them. Learned that quickly. Mesmerism, as dear old auntie used it, made her enemies she couldn’t afford to keep. Gideon here is scared, but that snake around his neck won’t kill him. That’s not a noose. The noose is what I learn about people. What I get on people. How I use that—use them—to keep myself alive, happy, well-fed and my enemies far from my doors.”

  Leroy laughed. “And yet here I am, Marcus. At your doors.”

  Marcus nodded in his direction. “Uh-huh. And there’s been a noose around your neck the whole time.”

  “Not suffocating quite yet,” Leroy retorted.

  “Just you wait. I’ve got just the thing that’ll take your breath away,” Marcus said.

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  He pushed himself off of his desk and paced towards Leroy. Gideon remained unmoving; tamed and docile as a tiger who’d lost its prey drive. This wasn’t the moment. Leroy hadn’t yet found the lull, or that moment of hesitation he’d been looking for. Marcus’s confidence only grew. Assuredness oozed from him like a force of nature so primordial it simply was, and always would be.

  “See, you know me. You’ve known me for enough time, Leroy, to know I do my homework on the people who have crossed me, or seek to cross me, or even think of crossing me,” Marcus said. He began circling Leroy, his snakeskin boots slapping against the floor.

  Leroy’s waterskin remained heavy in his hand. The Vigor that coursed through Leroy’s veins—the only thing that kept him awake and even functioning after the last 48 hours he’d had—prompted his heart rate to spike. The alchemically-influenced perception he had of danger had already been heightened, and with each step Marcus took, that very same recognition of hazard amplified. Compounded. Multiplied.

  “You proved yourself to be a problem to me, Leroy, alllllll the way back in 1986, when your old ass decided to show up in my club,” Marcus continued.

  “Get to the point here, Marcus,” Leroy said.

  “Six years! I had six years to find out about you—but you already know that. You know that I know your real name, where you live, the fact that you worked for Carlisle Booker. For the Syndicate. So it won’t come as a surprise to you, Leroy Callahan, that I know why you sold your soul.”

  Cold whispers snapped forward into Leroy’s awareness. His temples ached like frost was trying to claw its way out from under his skin. Yaerzul whispered something, but Leroy couldn’t make it out. There were no words, just the noise of bones breaking in some distant and bitter winter.

  “A woman! It’s always a woman. Melinda Rostavich,” he said.

  A pink fracture erupted in front of Leroy. From it, illusionary shards pieced themselves together into a clearer image; something like a hologram that lacked any color other than varied shades of violet and fuschia. But even in the absence of other colors and hues and shades, Leroy’s mind filled in the gaps.

  His mouth dropped open. His breath shook.

  Melinda stood in front of him just as he remembered her. Her features were pale. Her nose was long and thin and distinct and beautiful, and her eyes were black. Black like long hair that she always parted to one side, rather than letting it drape down her back. Her face had thinned with the early signs of maturity that one wore as they entered their forties; creases had formed along her laugh lines, and the early signs of crow’s feet framed her eyes.

  If it wasn’t a phantasm, her cropped blazer would’ve been brown. Her button up beneath it would’ve been a muted lilac. Her bootcut jeans would’ve been a deep blue, and the heels she was wearing would’ve been black. The stack of papers she held closer to her chest would’ve been off white. The earrings she wore would’ve been bronze, or copper, or some sort of gemstone like tourmaline or tiger’s eye.

  Marcus rested an arm over Leroy’s shoulder, and leaned forward. He nodded at her phantasm.

  “It’s the good ones that make us consider a change of heart,” Marcus said. “And she should’ve been damn impressed with herself. See, it’s not every day that you’re born with the feminine wiles and the moxy to pluck one of Carlisle Booker’s top enforcers out from his well-earned position on the Syndicate’s food chain.”

  “Enough,” Leroy said, his voice trembling.

  “And she did it! Domesticated good old Lucky Leroy Callahan! That's what they used to call you yeah? Lucky Leroy, the one and only, the biggest, baddest, and meanest mundy in Dockside. But, see, from what I’ve pieced together, you had a good few years. Calm years, after the not-so-calm-ones. Carlisle, he threw you a bone; transferred you to the legitimate side of his business. A foreman over at Booker Import and Export. Set you up on the straight and narrow path.”

  Leroy clenched.

  The waterskin broke between his hand. Yaerzul’s brand was alight, and a dim blue outline encased the water that drenched Leroy’s fingers. Before a single droplet could hit the ground, ice encased his fist, and jagged spikes of frost sprawled out. When he swung into Marcus, his form shattered into a kaleidoscope of pink, only for him to step out from thin-air next to the phantasm of Melinda.

  He had no way of knowing where Marcus truly was. There were levels to this, to his mesmerism, that Leroy couldn’t understand. Phantasms were one thing, but Marcus’s ability to seemingly appear and reappear on a whim had to be something else entirely. He wasn’t teleporting, not truly. Something was skewing Leroy’s perception of reality itself; and it was as if Marcus simply being there was itself a form of passive compulsion that deluded Leroy’s senses. Whatever exuded from Marcus, then, was attacking both Leroy's memories and his ability to understand what was playing out before him.

  “Rumor has it that the two of you were ready to tie the knot, too. Engaged to the tune of what, a few months? Five? Six?”

  Leroy held his hand forward. The spikes around his frost-covered hand were expelled outward in a burst, shooting jagged icicles out in front of him. Marcus’s form shattered, and when the fractals recalibrated, he was pacing behind Melinda’s phantasm, hands in the pockets of his khaki-colored slacks.

  “You, the blue-collared Docksider, her, the academic with a budding career as a Professor of Applied Witchcraft at the Brinehaven College of the Arts,” Marcus said, smile still stuck on his face. “It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. And you were happy, yes? Happier than you’ve ever been.”

  Six years. It gave Marcus a lot of time to piece all of this together, but there were details that Leroy had never told anyone. Not ever. Aspects of his life and his time with her that belonged to only him—up until the current moment.

  “Get out of my fucking head, Marcus,” Leroy said, his voice stern and framed by a bitter anger.

  Blackmail got him far. But the people who he confronted directly, the victims he’d made out of the people in Cyprus Alley who’d been turned into his unwitting informants, all of them had their minds molested by the influence of his mesmerism. He only ever needed a little bit on someone—enough to get them in front of him in person, and as soon as he did that, he’d been all but guaranteed a new subordinate. It wasn't direct compulsion. Marcus couldn't control anyone's mind; but he almost certainly had some capacity to burrow deep into their psyche by means of proximity. Simply by standing close to him, one's secrets were made forfeit.

  Marcus stopped pacing. He pivoted, ever so slightly, and his sunglasses lowered along the bridge of his nose. Brown eyes bored into Leroy.

  “And then it all came crashing down. A tragedy among tragedies in this oh-so-beautiful city we call home. Melinda Rostavich, trailblazing witch and scholastic powerhouse. Melinda Rostavich, princess of Garland Heights. Melinda Rostavich, kidnapped,” Marcus said.

  “Marcus,” Leroy warned.

  Marcus snapped his fingers. Melinda’s phantasm shattered.

  “Melinda Rostavich, gone!” Marcus said.

  “And with her went Leroy Callahan," he continued, "pronounced dead, officially, by means of a worksite accident—slipped off a crane in Dockside and into the icy waters of our bay during the bleak midwinter. Consumed wholly by the sirens and kelpies… or was it selkies? Trows? No body, no funeral. Just a name put into the records of the Civic & Occult Authority, and the help of who else but the then Councillor of the Department of Ordinance! Mikel Rostavich! Consumed, just as equally as his brother-in-law-to-be, by a desire for revenge!”

  Marcus clapped his hands together. Leroy didn’t even have a chance to speak.

  “And before that, of course, we cannot forget, a moment of desperation so strong, so pronounced, so cold, that it prompted something to you. And it was this twisted combination of grief, of anger, of extreme duress that created the shatterpoint—in comes the demon, and out goes your soul.”

  Leroy charged towards Marcus.

  He knew it would get him nowhere; but with each word that was spoken, an anger gnawed and gnawed and gnawed. He couldn’t think beyond the memories he wanted to forget, made manifest by way of a mesmerist named Marcus Velvet. He didn’t even whisk his fingers. He didn’t clench. He didn’t pull. The spikes he’d sent out earlier remained fixed into the ground.

  Marcus shattered and rebuilt himself, wisps of pinks colliding into themselves like rose petals to reintroduce his silhouette to the room.

  “Leroy Waters had no criminal record! Leroy Waters never worked for the Syndicate! Leroy Waters, then, qualifies to be an arbiter, and is appointed the very day that Councillor Rostavich becomes Minister Rostavich,” Marcus said. “And their agreement is a simple one. Leroy Waters will use his newly vested powers as a state-sponsored mercenary to investigate what happened to Melinda, and Minister Rostavich himself will write the arbitration contract for him to do so.”

  Leroy dropped to his knees. His hands lulled by his side.

  “And for the better part of the last decade, that contract has been gathering dust,” Marcus continued.

  Leroy saw only Marcus’s khaki slacks and his snakeskin boots as he encircled him at a deliberate pace, each step poised and haughty.

  “Dead end, after dead end, after dead end! You gave up, Leroy.”

  Pain surged through Leroy’s forehead, and his hands snapped up to his face. He clenched either side of his skull, pressing his palms over his temples. His checkered flat cap fell from his head. His teeth chittered and his jaw clenched so tightly that one of his top teeth chipped. Yaerzul screamed at him in a language that Leroy couldn’t hope to decipher. It wasn’t meant to be understood. It was a declaration of disappointment steeped in a rage that burrowed itself inside of his body like a blizzard.

  Marcus’s hand—his real hand—gripped the back of Leroy’s neck. He crouched down next to him.

  “But the noose I have around you, Leroy, isn’t your museum of failures,” Marcus said.

  With both hands still clenched against his skull, Leroy slowly turned, his blonde-white hair shuffling as a singular strand along his forehead.

  Marcus removed his sunglasses with his free hand.

  “It’s the rogues’ gallery that you didn’t know you had. People with names you know, and names you don’t, that all had a part in the death of Melinda Rostavich. And I’ll tell you all about it,” he continued, a smile widening across his features. “I just need you to do me a favor.”

  LEROY WATERS

  GIDEON DRAVES

  MARCUS VELVET

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