Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black) (5 page)

You couldn’t have one without the other, which is why the symbol to mark a practitioner was called the White Dragon Black. The Chinese called the symbol a
taijitu
, better known as a ying-yang symbol, but without the center dots. The symbol was far older than the Chinese use of it. Anthropologists had found the image in Etruscan art from the fourth century B.C. It had served as a way for practitioners to know each other and marked safe havens for centuries before that.

Jonathan knew he was a functioning junkie. To remain so, he didn’t like to push his luck, not if he could avoid it.

He tried using his own energy when there was no other choice. What he’d just done for Wendell’s magical ball had required a small amount of energy dispersal, but even that had still left him downing another glass of bourbon to counter the yearning and jittering deep within.

Jonathan filled his glass, lit a smoke, and sat down.

There was another reason he couldn’t use the same method on the fortuneteller machine—it wasn’t exactly subtle. Jonathan adhered to the unspoken rule to hide the truth of the world, from the world. He had to think of a substance to place on the machine that would perform the same test without overtly drawing attention

It also had to be something that wouldn’t damage the machine, should it prove, like the Magic 8-Ball, to be magic free.

If it did appear to be cursed, Jonathan would deal with that problem, even if it ended up being destructive and obvious. Some things were more important than the issues they caused.

He leaned back in his chair, sipped from his glass, and drew long drags from his cigarette while staring at nothing.

Had there been anyone there to observe him, they might have concluded that he couldn’t care less about his client’s problems. It would be easy to think, in fact, that he had lied to Wendell about doing anything for him. However, in his mind, Jonathan scrambled about like a rat in a maze made of cheese and garbage.

He combined and recombined ingredients to find a way to test the fortune machine discreetly. Such mental exercise also helped distance himself from the effects the magic usage had wrought.

Jonathan never tried to go dead, straight out, cold turkey, even when using magic was unnecessary, but he had a feeling his new client would make his chance of controlled usage a laughable effort.

Jonathan focused on creating the perfect mixture: a substance that would require little expenditure of his own power. He needed a concoction that relied mostly on the active energies and magical properties of the ingredients themselves, but would still reveal any paranormal tampering.

Slowly the right combination fit together in his mind. Knowing that he wouldn’t conceive of a mixture that would cover every possible application of esoteric influence, he had targeted the most logical spells and curses that a practitioner would employ.

Jonathan had found, in his own history of interacting with this sort of thing, that there were just certain ways a practitioner did and did not make things happen.

Someone might have used an incantation whose residual magical energy wouldn’t show up with his final formulated concoction, but the odds were so low that he couldn’t allow himself to worry about it.

If he was honest, Jonathan still thought the whole thing a prank—that someone, somehow, had played this out on poor Wendell. He just couldn’t figure out why. At this point, he had no fucking idea
how
either.

Whoever had targeted his client had to be using magic. There should have been something for Jonathan to pick up on.

Suddenly, his mind supplied the last ingredient needed to make a paste that would turn different colors as it reacted to each residual energy left by an incantation or conjuring.

Jonathan wouldn’t bother making much of the mixture since the very nature of the concoction would inherently make its effectiveness last only a few hours. No use wasting the ingredients on something that would shortly be good for nothing, except possibly masking bleach spots on dark natural fibers.

Jonathan got up and opened the only other door in the office, revealing his own little apothecary.

Stored in the large closet were glass jars, small boxes, hanging plant material, cork plugged bottles filled with various liquids, and assorted writing materials, on shelves lining the walls .

On the back of the door, among other paraphernalia, hung his shoulder holster. The gun currently lay in his desk drawer, but he almost never left the office without it, so he took a moment to strap the thing on before collecting together the ingredients he needed.

After he’d gathered everything required, Jonathan carried the tray to his desk and, shoving a few papers out of the way, set it down. He got to work using a mortar and pestle to crush herbs, minerals, and other organic materials.

Occasionally, as he added an ingredient, he would chant in languages—most of them obscure and quite dead—to activate certain properties inherent in the substance or call on the innate power of the herbs.

His brow began to bead as he fought against the urge to summon up his own energies. Jonathan fought his addiction and concentrated on the making the paste.

He knew the mixture was a success when it suddenly congealed into a waxy substance. It also turned the color of green one expects from the blood of overgrown frogs or bloated lawyers.

Jonathan went to search the front office desk for a suitable container. He knew that one of the secretaries no longer in his employ had to have left something he could use.

Sure enough, at the back of a bottom drawer, he found a small circular container of lip balm with only half the yellow waxy substance left inside. The label said something about bees, but Jonathan didn’t care what it had been, just that its former product would be a great cover for his potion.

Jonathan took the lip balm into his miniscule, and admittedly grungy, washroom behind the secretary desk. He turned the hot water tap on, placed the container in the sink, and walked back to his office.

He took the tray of ingredients back to the closet and put each jar, box, and herb back in its place. The closet looked a disaster, but Jonathan knew where everything was, give or take the odd item.

The walls shuddered and the industrial clanking of old steel pipes choking on their own load filled the air.

Jonathan took in another portion of the bourbon and finally wandered back to the washroom. He put his finger under the stream of water and, taking it back out, returned to his office to get a smoke.

He leaned on the washroom doorframe, smoking, until a particularly loud and disturbing rattle came from the wall behind the sink. For a full five seconds following the clattering, nothing came out of the spigot. Then, water sputtered and spurted forth.

Steam began to curl around the tap and Jonathan stuck the rubber stopper over the drain hole and allowed the sink to fill.

He tossed the cigarette butt into the toilet, where it died with a hiss, and grabbed a pen off the front desk. He used the end of the pen to hold the lip balm container under the hot water slowly filling the sink.

The room began to fill with the cloying, sweet scent of honey. Jonathan hoped the container would clean out quickly, but in the end, he had to use the tip of the pen to dig lingering blobs of wax out of the bottom.

Then, to be certain there was no remaining residue, he carefully washed out the container with soap and rinsed it under fresh running water.

Jonathan brought the now clean container to the mortar and pestle and scooped two fingers worth of the substance into it.

It in no way resembled anything that anyone would want to put on their lips, but Jonathan didn’t expect the owner of the store to ask to borrow his lip balm anyway.

He didn’t plan on engaging the owner at all, really, until after he had already used the paste. According to Wendell’s account of the owner, he wouldn’t be spending much time observing Jonathan either.

It was a gothic day—bleak, windy, and overcast. Autumn’s grasp on the season seemed tenuous compared to the icy grip of her sister and, though the return from Daylight Saving remained a couple of days away, the sun seemed to have already given up illuminating this part of the world.

Jonathan had one flask in his breast pocket for keeping him warm and one in his coat pocket for keeping away daemons, ghouls, and certain other undesirables.

He got into his old Lincoln and, shutting the door against the insistent wind, slid the key into the ignition.

The car, which had reached the age where people referred to it as ‘classic’ instead of a ‘piece of crap,’ gave a shudder and coughed but then fell silent.

Jonathan patted the dash. He assured the Lincoln that he understood its reluctance and turned the key once more.

After four minutes and a few choice words aimed towards his means of transportation, Jonathan was heading across town to the fortunetelling machine that had started this whole debacle.

He found the antique dealer’s shop without any issue or hassle and with even a parking space across the street from it.

After waiting for a delivery truck to rumble past, Jonathan strode across the slush-covered street, his hands stuffed in his pockets to ward off the cold.

He didn’t immediately enter the store but stayed on the sidewalk looking in at the items displayed in the front window.

There was a wooden box with real silverware in it, a lava lamp, an assortment of china dolls, and an imitation Tiffany lamp. Other items were displayed in the window as well, but Jonathan didn’t see any signs of a practitioner’s trade there.

Sometimes shops like this, the antique and curio, were run by either users of magic or just those in the know. These people sold mundane items alongside items and trappings for the esoteric. Often the arcane items displayed were small, discreet things that only a practitioner would know as being other than knickknacks.

Nothing in this display, however, said the owner knew that life comprised more than brushing one’s teeth and collecting stamps. It actually would have surprised Jonathan to discover otherwise, as he considered it a professional necessity to know who trafficked in the esoteric.

Jonathan put his hand on the handle and pulled the door open, hesitating at the threshold to see if his wards, a ring of protective symbols and names tattooed just below his neck, reacted.

The game Jonathan played was a dangerous one. His best friend since high school, Ralph, had once compared his profession to being the target for attack-dog training without the benefit of padding or even a way to call off the dogs. Jonathan had never forgotten that comment.

When nothing burned, rippled, or flared under the collar of his shirt, Jonathan entered the store a little disappointed. He didn’t go straight to the fortuneteller’s machine but slowly meandered about, browsing as one did in a place like this and keeping his eyes open for anything irregular.

The man behind the display case looked his way briefly, but when Jonathan nodded, he simply returned his attention to the folded up newspaper on the countertop.

Wendell hadn’t been lying; the owner seemed to care little for anything but completing a crossword. The store itself was clean yet cluttered, and the place was filled unabashedly with both the valuable and the craptastic.

Nothing leapt out at him. There were no items of a mystical nature—no simian’s appendages, no hands belonging to the life-impaired, no altars, amulets, grimoires, or goblin ears. There was also no White Dragon Black symbol.

Satisfied that the place was nothing more than what it seemed, Jonathan made his way to the fortuneteller machine. The contraption stood six feet tall and was in good condition. It had clearly been used, but just as noticeable was its maintenance. Jonathan wondered if the antique dealer himself had done any restoration on it.

A strange chirping sound disturbed the silence such stores seem to command, and then a muttering buzzed at the edge of his hearing as the shopkeeper spoke into his cell.

Discreetly opening his cigarette case, and wishing these were still the days when you could smoke wherever you wanted, Jonathan caught the owner’s reflection to see if the man in turn watched him.

If the owner did have any interest in the fact that Jonathan was examining that particular piece of stock, he deserved an Oscar for hiding it.

He had resumed working the crossword despite the phone balanced between cheek and shoulder. Jonathan put away his case and focused on the fortune machine itself.

The words ‘Gypsy Tarot’ adorned the sides and front of the machine, and the character in the booth was much as Wendell had described. The mannequin resembled an older woman, a black headscarf over her grey hair and a bright, multi-colored shawl draped over her shoulders. Her shirt, which would be best described as a peasant blouse, was the color of fresh blood on a surgeon’s smock.

Before her, on a shelf covered in purple velvet, were six cards in a pattern Jonathan thought of as the circle of life.

He glanced at the cards themselves.

Nothing about the spread was sinister. It was comprised of the Two of Swords, the Hanged Man, the Queen of Wands, the Fool, the Knight, and the Six of Cups. He didn’t spend a lot of time working out if there was a hidden message in the cards but considered it wise to scribble them down in his notepad anyway. Jonathan had an associate he’d have to call later to see if she had any thoughts on the displayed cards.