Dirty Magic (37 page)

Before long, a black sports car pulled through the gates and drove to the large bay door set into the facade of the building. It wasn’t a vehicle I’d seen before, but I definitely recognized John’s profile through the window.

I was relieved to see he’d come alone. Part of me had been wondering if he’d bring that bitchy lawyer along, too, just to make my indentured servitude legally binding.

How do you know this isn’t a trap? my practical inner voice challenged.

“Only one way to find out,” I said aloud. I threw off the seat belt, checked the piece at my shoulder, and touched the amulet hidden inside my shirt for good luck. “Here goes nothing.”

The street was so empty it might as well have had tumble-weeds blowing down the center. The algae stench of stagnant water mixed with the stink of trash from the landfill down the road. Most of the buildings in this part of town were warehouses and abandoned tenements. Inside they were like ant farms filled with potion junkies, hookers, and mentally ill homeless people who’d never touched a potion but had nowhere else to turn. Maybe I imagined the eyes glittering in the shadows like polished dimes, but I doubted it. Not much happened in the Cauldron without someone seeing it. Problem was, when shit went down, witnesses had a tendency to scatter like rats escaping from a sinking ship.

When I finally reached the building, I knocked on the metal door to the right of the larger bay. Not five seconds later, it opened and the void it left was filled with John Volos. He didn’t smile or offer a greeting. He just grabbed my arm and pulled me inside before I could slap his hand away. Once he slammed and locked the door behind us, he jerked his head, saying, “This way.”

Several things hit me at once. First, the air stank of wet concrete and stale urine. No doubt the walls had seen their share of vagrants exchanging all sorts of indignities for hits of a cheap buzz potion. The temperature was a good ten degrees cooler here than it had been outside, but my palms were sweating. The front of the warehouse was empty except for the car, which clicked as its engine cooled. “Hold on,” I said, grabbing his shirtsleeve when he turned to walk away. “What the hell is this place?”

His jaw clenched with annoyance. “I just bought the building for a new business venture.”

I raised a brow. “A legal venture?”

He shrugged.

I nodded. “Do you have the supplies in the car?”

He smiled like I’d made a joke. “Everything’s already set up. Come on.” He looked eager, like a kid who wanted to show off a forbidden treasure. I shook off the thought as soon as it arrived. John wasn’t the mischievous teenager I used to worship anymore. He was a man with an addiction to power.

“Kate?” he called, sounding impatient. I jerked my head up to see him standing twenty feet away next to a set of stairs. I jumped into motion. The sooner we could get this done, the sooner I could get as far away as possible from the confusing feelings that rose up every time I was around him.

The stairs curved up to the second story and dumped us at the edge of what used to be the brewing floor. Huge metal-encased windows on three of the walls provided late afternoon light. The sun I’d watched earlier was now positioned perfectly to send a warm glow into the old building, making the decay and ruin look almost otherworldly.

“We still have a lot of work to do just to get the place cleared out,” he said, almost apologetically.

“So you’re going to what—gut the joint and turn it into a mall or lofts?”

His lips twitched at my jaded tone. “Nope. This will be a pet project. A new hobby.”

I raised my brows.

“A few years ago I found an old alchemist’s grimoire at an estate sale. Inside were the most wonderful recipes for spirits and liqueurs. And then it hit me: Alchemists basically invented distillation, so why not start an artisanal alchemist liqueur company?”

I blinked at him. “Really?”

His smiled wobbled. “Yeah, why?”

I shook my head at his injured tone. “Nothing, it’s just—” I searched for words that wouldn’t insult him more.

“You figured if I was involved it would be something underhanded and possibly illegal?”

I chewed on my lip. “Something like that.”

“Kate, you’re the last person I’d pretend to be a saint with. But I honestly do try to mostly stay on the right side of the law these days.”

I shrugged because I was withholding judgment on that. “So alchemical liqueur, huh? It’s kind of a cool idea, I guess.”

He shook his head at me. “You’ve grown too jaded in the last ten years.”

And he’d gotten too … everything. I crossed my arms and looked away from his knowing gaze. “Are we going to do this or what?”

His openness of a few moments prior evaporated and his smile froze. “Of course.” He held out a gallant hand for me to precede him. “The lab is just through there.” He pointed to an arched doorway at the far corner of the cavernous room. As we walked, we skirted around the huge holes where the brewing vats used to rest. Judging from the darkness below, the floor we were on was over a boiler room or storage basement.

John led me through a bricked archway to a room that probably had been a testing room where quality assurance techs made sure the batches were up to the brewery’s standards. But now, it had been completely transformed into an alchemy lab that would make most wizards greener than a youth-potion addict. “Holy shit,” I breathed, walking in.

Large copper distilling vats had been set up along one wall. Under the massive warehouse windows, a dozen barrels and even more boxes with shipping stamps from Canada and Europe sat patiently, waiting to be opened and turned into elixirs. I noted that several of the barrels were marked as containing rose quartz oil. Guess that explained the mysterious shipping manifests Shadi had found.

I turned from the windows toward the worktables that had been set up along the wall opposite the distilling vats. Long coils jutted from glass flasks like alien antennae. This was no slapdash operation. Volos hadn’t gotten my call and hastily put all these things in place. I turned to look at him. “How long have you had this set up?”

“A few weeks. I’d originally intended to use it to refine the recipes for the products we’ll eventually make here, but once Gray Wolf came into the picture, I decided to start working on an antipotion.”

I narrowed my eyes. “When did you start working on it?”

“The day after you killed that MEA snitch.”

My eyes widened. “How did you find out about it so quickly?”

His lips lifted at the corners. “Is that really what you want to ask me?”

I held his gaze to show him his pointed question didn’t embarrass me. “What’s in this for you?”

He nodded, like that was the question he’d been expecting. “It’s the best way I know how to ensure Bane’s plans don’t interfere with mine.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said.

“I know.” He crossed his arms. “You’re wondering what I want from you.”

I tipped my chin down.

“I don’t know yet.”

In the silence that followed that admission, I felt a lot of conflicting emotions. One, I was surprised he’d actually admitted to being unsure about something. Second, the fact he couldn’t say he didn’t want anything worried the shit out of me. And third, I was both intrigued and terrified to wait for the moment when he finally figured out the answer.

I cleared my throat and looked toward the cold beakers. “How far have you gotten with the antipotion?”

His gaze burned into me for a few moments while he obviously debated whether to let me change the subject. Finally, he sighed. “I’ve already thrown out a couple of batches. I think I’m close with the most recent sample, but there’s something I’m missing in the original potion.”

“Can I see that one?”

He nodded and grabbed a couple of test tubes from a small fridge. “There’s a sample of Gray Wolf, too.” I jerked my gaze toward him. How in the hell had he gotten his hands on the potion when the MEA couldn’t? He shrugged. “How else was I supposed to figure out the recipe?”

I rolled my eyes. Raising the vials, I examined the one labeled
GRAY WOLF
. “You don’t look like much for a potion that’s been causing so much trouble,” I said to it. I shook the glass and the liquid inside sloshed around like oil.

“What do you know about it?”

“It’s a mix of blood magic and alchemy, but you knew that. Antimony is a core ingredient.” He urged me toward the worktable, where a notebook was laid open with writing in his bold hand. He pointed to a line. “But what’s really interesting is that instead of human blood, Bane used wolf blood.” My brows rose. “And, I could be wrong, but I also detected Van Helmont’s Alkahest, also derived from a wolf.”

My expression morphed into a sour grimace. “Gross.” Van Helmont’s Alkahest was a fancy term for piss salt. Yeah, that’s right, salt derived from urine. “Guess it’s a good thing the potion isn’t administered orally.”

“The thing is, I can’t get over the feeling that if we could read the alchemical signature we’d know what’s missing in the antipotion.”

He was referring to the energy fingerprints wizards left on the potions they created. Typically they didn’t tell you the ingredients as much as the identity of the wizard who cooked it, but sometimes wizards used signature ingredients. If we could figure out which alchemist had helped Bane, we might be able to find the key to breaking the potion.

And by “we,” he meant me.

John was a talented wizard, but his strength lay more in the energies of transformation than those that allowed one to read magic. That was my specialty. The only problem was that reading a potion’s energy sometimes meant seeing other things—like bad omens.

My palms were already sweating. But first, I decided to see if he was right about his prototype not working. I grabbed a small beaker off the shelf.

“You’re going to want to be careful,” John said.

Ignoring his unnecessary warning, I flipped the top off the vial of Gray Wolf and sniffed. The acrid stink of copper and sickly sweet burnt brown sugar of heroin and the chemical bite of drain cleaner singed my nose hairs.

I grabbed a beaker and poured a quarter of the potion—only a couple of teaspoons, really—into a glass beaker. My eyes started to water from the fumes. I reared back to escape the stink. “Grab me a pair of goggles and a mask, will ya?”

While he did as instructed, I opened the stopper on the sample of antipotion. The liquid inside was a gray-brown color—like brackish water. Its scent was reminiscent of dirty feet and rotten meat, but it was still a pleasant change from the Gray Wolf’s horrible odors. John returned and I made quick work of donning the goggles and mask.

I took a small pipette from the counter and sucked up a little bit of the antipotion. Behind me, John scooted back a couple of inches. I glanced at him over my shoulder. The goggles made him wobbly, as if I were watching him through water. “Just in case,” he said.

With a grimace I turned back to the beaker. If this were truly dangerous, he would have already run from the room. I blew out a breath. “Here goes nothing.”

The instant the first drop of antipotion hit the Gray Wolf, a puff of smoke curled up from the surface. A split second later, the consistency of the oily liquid morphed into a sort of greasy, smoking solid. I touched the edges of the beaker and found it seriously hot to the touch. And all that was before the clump burst into a small column of flame. “Huh,” I said. “That’s not good.”

We weren’t in any immediate danger in the lab since it was such a small sample. But it wasn’t hard to imagine what injecting the antipotion into the vein of a Gray Wolf addict would do to their body.

“Well,” I said, “I’d say that’s pretty much a fail.”

The corner of his mouth came up. “Told you. Now what?” He said it too casually. We both knew exactly what came next. He just didn’t want to risk saying it out loud and spooking me. I kind of hated him for knowing how to manage me like that.

I’d watched too many people die from potions. Seen people burn from the inside. Seen flesh and bone collapse as a body consumed its own cells. Neither fate was one I wanted for my brother.

Which meant it was time to get down to the business of magic.

“I need a heat source, a Florence boiling flask, water, and glass stirring rods.” I continued to list as Volos gathered equipment. Finally I finished, “Oh, and gloves and a beer, if you have any.”

While he went to collect everything, I stared at the potions and tried not to look as if I was screwing up my courage.

“I think this is all of it,” he said, setting the last of the items down. I grabbed the beer he’d pulled from the fridge and smiled at it. I typically bought the cheapest lager I could find, but this was an expensive brew from Germany. “Good to go?”

I pulled my mask down, twisted the top off the bottle, took a long pull, and exhaled loudly. The fancy lab and equipment I could live without, but I could definitely get used to the fancy beer. “Let’s get to it. How much Gray Wolf you got?”

“Two more vials, but that’s the only sample of antipotion.”

After I replaced my mask, I poured about half of the Gray Wolf into a boiling flask and set that over a Bunsen burner. While that started to simmer, I used a pipette to place a few drops of Gray Wolf on a glass slide. A quick look through the microscope didn’t provide any clues. I hadn’t really expected it to, though.

Truth was, I was just trying to ease my way into the magic by using more scientific methods. Luckily, Volos had made sure his lab was filled with all sorts of expensive equipment. It was ironic since, back in the day, we’d cooked in kitchens and bathrooms with whatever supplies we could beg, borrow, or steal. That’s why dirty magic was sometimes called “bathtub alchemy.” It’s also one of the reasons dirty magic is considered dirty—the cooks weren’t in sanitized labs with sterile equipment and controlled ingredients. Though Volos’s lab was clean, the work we were doing was definitely dirty.

I lit a match and held it to a piece of paper coated with a drop of Gray Wolf. The paper didn’t blacken at all. Instead, the ashes were snow-white immediately. That was the antimony’s fingerprint at work.