Ash arrived early at the address the ratcatcher had written on her card—a little hole-in-the-wall diner on Allegheny. Told the overattentive staff when they asked to take his order that he was waiting for someone, and a glass of water would be all, thanks. He didn’t need to look at the menu to know none of its offerings would meet his nutritional specifications.
Once alone, he got out his iPhone, brought up Valentine’s channel in the YouTube app.
Valentine’s videos were all just a few minutes long. Each had racked up a couple hundred thousand views. They were artfully filmed and edited, almost always against the same background dressed up different ways, and featured alt fashion, hairstyles, sometimes silent cosmetic tutorials, all set to dreamy bedroom pop music. If Valentine had been aesthetically pleasing in person, onscreen they looked barely human. In person, there had been an awkwardness to their speech and mannerisms that Ash had found disarming—and apparently, it had distracted from how striking they were. Onscreen, with all the careful lighting and camera angles, the facial expressions and movements, the editing, no sound escaping their lips, they seemed ethereal…impossible. Ash had to keep reminding himself he’d just sat next to this person. Played piano with them, had a conversation with them. That they’d asked to touch his tattoos.
He looked at the card again. At the symbol Valentine had drawn on it.
“How could you know?” he whispered to himself.
He looked up, startled, as the server delivered his water. Again waved off an exhortation to put in a food order.
Once she was finally gone, resumed navigating eagerly through Valentine’s videos.
Mentally noted the titles.
Cintamani.
Amrita.
Ambrosia.
“Names of primordial gold,” Ash murmured. “The substance created by the philosopher’s stone…” His heart drummed an ominous beat in his ears. “Who the fuck are you, ‘Valentine’? What do you want from me?”
He set to work cataloging the videos that fit the naming pattern, going through them one at a time. Noting any text in the descriptions and the videos themselves, dates of upload, durations in minutes and seconds of total videos as well as of each individual shot each contained, hex codes of colors prominently used—any and all metadata and data he could glean.
Lapsed into a deep inhibitory gnosis, running analysis after analysis.
You wouldn’t have directed me here if there wasn’t something you wanted me to see…
It wasn’t till the server came around to check on him again—breaking him out of his gnosis, disrupting the analysis—that he realized Navarrete was more than half an hour late, and he didn’t know how to get in touch with her.
But then he saw her approaching through the window and quickly stowed his phone.
Ash went over and over the encounter with Valentine in back of his head during the next few hours, while he and Navarrete reviewed the murder case, first at the diner, then at her apartment. Wondered what the odds were that Valentine was connected to Lex or the killings—but it wasn’t a suspicion he dared share with Navarrete or anyone else. The simple fact that he recognized the symbol the YouTuber had drawn on the card was potentially incriminating. And if Valentine had, as it appeared, specifically targeted Ash to receive the communication, it meant they must somehow know about Ash’s illicit research.
Which meant if Arcanus Enforcement investigated Valentine, they, too, would find out what Valentine knew about Ash.
If that happened, Ash was toast.
•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•
“…This is where you always go when you start hunting a mark?” Ash stared up at the backlit sign over the door of the establishment in front of him, which read Umami Boy. “…A karaoke bar?”
The full moon hung low in the sky. Navarrete stood a few feet away on the rain-slicked Chinatown sidewalk, one hand shoved deep in one of the many pockets of her grungy trench coat. The other clung to a cigarette like it was a lifeline. For all her streetwise swagger, there was an undercurrent of desperation to everything the ratcatcher did, even idling. Right now, her eyes were roving around as if on a quest for something—anything—to latch onto. The leg that bore most of her weight jiggled restlessly underneath her.
“Karaoke bar and Asian fusion restaurant,” she drawled. “Beloved of The Whites; four-point-eight stars on Yelp!” She dropped and stomped out her cigarette on the pavement. Made for the door. “Let’s go, Daddy’s Boy.”
It was rude that she called him that, Ash thought, and he didn’t know why she did it. But she was a pretty rude person in general, so he’d decided not to take it personally.
He followed her inside, observed as she gave the name Mynsicht to the host, who then proceeded to lead them both past rooms full of mundanes warbling off-key renditions of cheesy pop songs, to one empty private room in the back—on the far side of which a hazy glamor-wall masked a curtained passageway from mundane view.
“Oh,” said Ash, as understanding dawned.
There were underground magic venues all over Philadelphia, he’d long been aware. Most of them had mundane fronts. “Umami Boy,” apparently, was one of them.
The host left them. Navarrete ushered Ash through the passageway, into a dim vestibule where the throbbing bass of trap music vibrated the floor beneath their feet. Further down the way loomed a second gossamer curtain, in front of which posed a small, muscular, black-clad woman with dyed-lavender hair cut in blunt bangs framing a round face webbed with mystical tattoos.
At Navarrete’s approach, the woman turned enormous eyes on her—pale green and striated, like twin cross-sections of a frozen grape. They registered recognition; the diminutive bouncer nodded her head, bidding Navarrete pass.
Ash followed—and froze in place as the woman’s eyes caught his. He felt a dull pulse of panic, but couldn’t seem to compel himself to look away or move.
His heart sped up as she took his chin firmly in one hand.
Her eyes probed his for a moment that seemed to yawn into eternity. Everything outside the depths of those celadon orbs came to feel distant. Irrelevant.
Finally she pronounced, in a low, warning tone, “You have no authority here, Martial Magus.”
Ash’s wits took a moment to catch up to him, his tongue a second to break free of some unseen weight bearing down on it. “I’m not here in an official capacity.”
The bouncer looked him up and down, released his chin. Held aside the curtain.
Navarrete grinned her fang-toothed grin before leading the way into the room beyond.
“How did she know…?” Ash began, but trailed off as he took in his surroundings.
The club was dark, crowded, hazy, the odor of cigarettes mingled with aletheia vapors used by pythias in their divinations, smoke from weed strains both magical and mundane, a host of other alchemical odors…nothing unfamiliar, but too many for Ash to distinguish with his nose alone. He covered his nose and mouth with his left hand, activated his tattooed channels as a filter.
“Dude, she’s like a Namer lite.” Navarrete raised her voice to be heard over the music. “There aren’t a ton of them, but they’re out there. You should be more careful who you look in the eyes and what you let them see.”
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