Black Magic Outlaw: Books 1 - 3 Read online

  In the corner of my eye, the bokor jerked an arm. It took an extra second to realize he wasn't casting, and that slowed me down. I saw the flying knife too late. My shield was raised but the heavy knife clanged right through it, not unscathed but not deflected nearly enough. The blade gashed my shoulder. On instinct I knew the shield was meant for small projectiles only. Luckily, the trajectory was altered enough or it would've stuck my neck. I winced in pain as the knife clanged off the alley wall, now spattered with my blood.

  With my hand jarred and my shield lowered, a bullet cut into my gut. I buckled backward against the stucco building. The street thugs converged on me, removing my cover from the equation. I feebly pressed closer to the grimy dumpster.

  They saw their opening and opened fire.

  The only shadow in the entire alley was cast by the dumpster, just a sliver of darkness immediately adjacent. It was no accident I was now huddled within it.

  I phased backward into the wall, slipping into the shadow. I became slightly embedded, a part of the wall, visible as a protruding darkness. The bullets whizzed through me and shattered the stucco in a hailstorm of dust.

  I wasn't fully ethereal. Not really. Shadows are all about blurring the lines between dark and light, between the known and unknown. I was still there, only I wasn't, and I watched as the Haitians emptied their magazines in frustration.

  I couldn't stay like this long. While physical attacks would prove useless, the bokor was coming up at the rear, chanting in response. Against magic, my fortified position was a straw house.

  I slipped forward and solidified, smiling as the gang reloaded. It was the perfect chance for a counterattack, but I was still reeling from the gut shot (and whatever had left me half dead in the dumpster). I snatched the bokor's knife and strategically bolted for the other end of the alley.

  Before I got there, more gunfire came my way. The shield held strong. Well, except for the one bullet low enough to graze my thigh, but who's keeping score? I tumbled to the cement as the barrage whizzed over my head. Rolling over, I lay low and parallel with the alley, like a surfer paddling on his board. With my shield up, the position provided full cover. The energy at my palm didn't feel as strong as it should have, but it held as another round of mags was spent.

  My leg complained about getting tagged, though. That's the weakness of my patchwork Norse protection. No one ever asks how Captain America blocks incoming bullets with his relatively small shield, but trust me, it's difficult.

  The Bone Saints began approaching but the bokor called them off. I squinted and watched him step aside. My eyes followed his to his feet.

  A snarling pit bull raced from behind him and headed straight for me. To him I must've looked like a giant ham hock. I scrambled to my feet and burst out to the next street like nobody's business.

  This road was much less busy than Washington. I easily avoided the one car in my way while crossing the street. I had a decent head start on the Haitians, but that dog was quickly gaining on me. Who sics dogs on animists anyhow?

  I cut into a small produce market. The glass door jangled against the chimes and closed with a satisfying click. I turned and took a breath as the pit bull silently reached the sidewalk and stopped short of crashing into the glass. I plucked a mango from a box for defense but I didn't throw it. The dog didn't come inside. It didn't bark. It just stared at me with cold, dead eyes.

  Oh wait. I got it suddenly. A bokor? Siccing a dog on another practitioner? I may be slow but I ain't stupid. This was no normal attack dog.

  It was a zombie pit bull.

  Chapter 3

  On the plus side, the dog wasn't thrashing around and causing a scene. It barely looked dead, really. Bloody, matted fur. Glazed over eyes. Half an ear. It easily passed for a neglected ghetto dog. It stood still, like a pointer, and that's what it was doing. The necromancer controlling the zombie knew exactly where it was, and in turn, me.

  That didn't give me a lot of time to think. I'd wanted to keep things low key, but that was pretty much out the window when he cut the zombie dog loose. My best bet was to try a bit of necromancy myself.

  I calmed my mind, visualizing the connection between master and thrall. The Baron was the primary Haitian loa, the one I was familiar with. Unfortunately, the bokor channeled a different patron. Besides that, the connection was stronger than I expected from a low-level banger. I couldn't sever it, but I did my best to cloud the energy, to make it difficult for its master to home in on us.

  Busy with exploring the dark energy around the dog, I didn't notice the little old lady inching her walker towards the glass door. She admired the hound with a beaming face. "Ay, que lindo," she squealed.

  Right before opening the front door and trying to pet the thing.

  With a vicious snarl, the pit bull bowled past the woman. She clutched her walker for support and barely avoided falling and turning into a spokesperson for a medical alert commercial.

  The store owner, more prescient of the danger of rabid dogs, hopped over the counter with an aluminum baseball bat in his hand.

  "Coño, perro!" he exclaimed as he feinted with the slugger.

  He wasn't trying to hit the thing. I mean, who really wants to beat another living thing with a bat, especially man's best friend? But the pit bull isolated the threat and caught the aluminum in its mouth. Sharp teeth spilled to the ground like marbles, but the dog had made its point and yanked the weapon from the store owner's hands.

  The man bolted towards the door with a "Carajo!", shoved the old woman outside with him, and slammed the door. His eyes met mine and he mimed a halfhearted shrug in response. So much for being a hero.

  My mango went flying like a cannonball and bounced harmlessly off the pit bull's snout. It lunged for me, going for a leg bite with half its remaining teeth. I picked up the entire cardboard box of mangoes and upturned it over him. The hail of fruit didn't do much, but the box fell over the dog perfectly. I side-stepped and the whole bundle of fur and produce crashed into the plantains display.

  The bokor and one of the gunmen were crossing the street. I hadn't seen where the other two men went, but I knew it was time to go.

  I ran to the back room and navigated around the disorganized store inventory. An upside-down mango box with bananas on top gave chase. The blind dog looked like a pinball as it bounced off various obstacles, but its single-mindedness made up for its other failings. Eventually, the box fell away and the dog bounded after me. It wasn't fast enough, however, to beat me to the back exit.

  The metal door banged as I hefted my weight against it. It didn't budge. Unable to halt my momentum, my head bounced loudly against the door. It still didn't budge.

  Damn. The exit was locked from the inside. If I ever made it out of here alive, I could file a fire code violation. For now I scrambled up the adjacent utility shelf just as the pit bull snapped at my heels.

  Straddling the top shelf, huddled against the wall and the low roof, I wasn't overly proud of myself. But I was out of range of the zombie pit bull. It barked and howled and leapt at me, but I was safe for the moment.

  Back to necromancy, then.

  Death magic is a patient art. Its most powerful applications are heavily threaded in ritual and preparation. Even its flash magic utilizes tokens and tributes. None of which were handy.

  Fetishes aren't completely necessary. Like rituals, they're used to amplify magic. The most common scenario is an animist who has no power without them. I'm not that kind of animist. I can do plenty on my own. I can tap innately strong power for my age. (Cisco Suarez is no slouch.)

  But you may have noticed I'm not a specialist. I've always preferred the jack-of-all-trades route. Being confined to a single patron's power is boring, but there are schools of thought that believe the only way to truly master a discipline is to specialize. While I'm a good necromancer, this bokor had likely studied nothing but this brand of voodoo his entire life. And here I was, without a fetish to stretch the boundaries of my spellcr
aft.

  That meant I had little chance of deanimating the drooling zombie trying to make me its lunch. But I was right next to it. Far closer than its master. Odds were I could exert some control over it.

  I got inside the dog's mind again. I didn't bother with clouding its position. I didn't try to break its link with the bokor. Instead, I pushed a suggestion.

  "Stop," I commanded.

  The barking halted immediately. The pit bull ceased jumping, even though it still paced side to side in anticipation.

  "Stay."

  The dog stopped cold in its tracks.

  "Um... Sit?"

  The pit bull retained a mask of fierce hunger but parked its butt on the ground without hesitation.

  Like I said, no slouch. I may have been a little rusty, but I still had it in a pinch.

  I dropped to the floor cautiously and took in a relieved breath when the pit bull didn't move. "Good dog," I said.

  Around its neck was your standard tough-guy dog collar, black leather with spiked studs. I like dog trinkets. One can be a fetish in the proper hands. Fetishes with an emotional connection to the animist work best. I'd say hanging from a metal shelf and nearly pissing my pants was emotional enough. I carefully reached around the zombie's neck and unclasped it. As I did, the pit bull whisked its head around and gave my arm a lick. I drew away but the dog didn't move. It now stared mindlessly ahead. I shrugged and wrapped the collar twice around my right wrist like a bracelet. Cisco Suarez, master of improvisation.

  With the zombie neutralized, my next problem was the exit. I studied the door and wrapped my hands around the metal handle.

  In line with my jack-of-all-trades persona, I knew an artificer who had introduced me to metallurgy. I'm not very good at it. (In fact, I'm downright awful.) But I can weaken the structural integrity of base metals. It takes too much effort, I'm limited to small objects that are mostly breakable anyway, and my face knots up like I'm taking a dump when I do it. It's embarrassing and I don't like people watching when I work it, but the undead dog wasn't much of an audience.

  I grunted and squeezed and rocked back and forth, but I could feel it coming loose. The handle clunked to the ground and I smiled.

  Daylight.

  Without bothering to wipe or wash my hands, I burst through the door and ran toward Collins Avenue. The street was a slow current of passing Corvettes and convertibles, one of which happened to be the jeep with the bad paint job. That was where the other two flunkies had gone. On my side of the street, a thin shadow ran along the storefronts. I backed into it to hide.

  Too late, of course. A hangover from hell, a step behind—I wasn't getting any breaks today. The passenger of the jeep jumped out twirling a machete in his hand.

  He was either out of ammo or he preferred to get up close and personal. Judging by the glee on his face, he had plenty of ammo.

  Chapter 4

  "You should be dead," growled the Haitian. He approached slowly, with confidence, and flashed a yellow smile. "Maybe we kill you again, yes?"

  The bokor was nowhere in sight. As I was on a main thoroughfare, it was only a matter of time before he spotted me. I needed to shelve this brawler quickly and quietly and get on my way. Instead of running, I remained in the shadow of the storefront and waited.

  In broad daylight on a packed street, the gangbanger wiped the rusty, two-foot blade on his grimy shirt and stepped onto the pink sidewalk. No attempt at subversion or secrecy. The Bone Saints must have had a real beef with me to risk this. Too bad I didn't remember a damn thing about it.

  "Tell me how to fix this," I urged as the man got closer. "Whatever it was you think I—"

  I didn't have time to finish the sentence. In a smooth stroke, the Haitian lifted the machete high. I crossed my left hand over my head, and the blade crashed down on my forearm.

  Right on top of that second Norse tattoo of protection.

  This one resembled an arrow. A straight line ran the length of my outer left forearm, with fettered sticks at my elbow and a sharp point on my wrist. In the center were three hardening runes, crosshatched lines cutting through the shaft. This was a shield as well, similar to a single branch of the snowflake on my hand but on a grander scale and distilled into its most powerful form. To make my third comic book reference of the day, it's like I had adamantium encasing the far side of my forearm.

  This didn't form visible energy like the palm sigil. It didn't extend away from my body. It was crap for bullets and projectiles, but this machete right here was its bread and butter. Once again, I instinctually knew how the tattoo worked, but it was muscle memory more than anything. I couldn't tell you where the ink came from or how I learned the spell. Frankly, I was surprised it worked.

  The heavy blade sparked against my arm. The Haitian nearly lost his grip on the knife and took an extra second to secure it. In his unreadiness, I brought my right fist up under his guard and socked him in the belly. As I connected, I called on the shadow I stood within.

  For the uninitiated, black magic is a vast umbrella of spellcraft. Anything dealing with death and darkness and the afterlife. If I'm a specialist at anything, it's the darkness.

  Now armed with the dog collar as a working fetish, I could channel the full power of my patron, Opiyel the Shadow Dog. He's an old Taíno god of the underworld, relatively unknown in spellcraft circles, and his domain is the shadow.

  Here's the thing about shadow magic. As far as spellcraft goes, it's not the most powerful, especially in terms of pure evocative destruction. It's mostly ethereal. An absence. It's how I did the phasing-through-bullets trick back in the alley. But don't assume the shadow can't be manifested into something solid. Something strong. It takes a lot of power and can't be done in direct sunlight, but it packs one hell of a punch.

  And boy did it. My fist propelled the Bone Saint through the air and onto the hood of a yellow Lamborghini stuck in slow traffic. The car was dope, but I didn't have time to ogle it. I stepped into the light and picked up the dropped machete, daring the gangbanger to come back at me. He tumbled off the car and hit the asphalt. He wasn't even getting back up.

  The tough guy in the Lambo hit the brakes and laid on his horn. He opened the door and screamed at us.

  "Watch the car, idiots!"

  His attention fixed on the blade in my hand, and he squirmed under my icy stare.

  "Chill out," I said. "It's only a Gallardo."

  He wanted to take me to task for the comment but wisely kept quiet.

  Unfortunately, the police are either less wise or more brave.

  "Put the knife down!" yelled a cop down the block.

  The uniformed police officer skipped his bicycle from the street to the sidewalk and sped my way.

  Bike cops. Faster than slow traffic. Faster than fleeing pedestrians. And most people don't realize they're trained to hop off the bike and flip it forward, tackling you with the back wheel. That didn't sound pleasant.

  Great, now I had a Haitian voodoo gang and the Miami Beach police after me. Another beautiful day in paradise.

  "We'll see about only a Gallardo," taunted the driver of the Lambo, no longer cowed.

  I let the machete clatter to the floor and hopped onto the hood of the Gallardo. The driver tugged at his hair in distress, but I didn't stick around to gloat. I leaped to the hood of an Impala, then into the bed of a pickup truck. It was like playing Frogger, except the street was only three lanes and I cheated. When I landed on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, I spun around and smiled.

  Let's watch a bicycle do that.

  The Haitian driving the jeep was still watching me, but with the officer present, he kept a low profile. Unfortunately, I couldn't exactly ask the cop for help with my gang situation. Appealing to him was a risky proposition. First off, nobody trusts a black magic user. It's not that they believe in magic, necessarily, but there's a vibe they can sense. Or maybe I'm a smartass. Either way, it wasn't worth taking the chance.

  In front of me w
as a premier boutique hotel. Not quite on the sand, but a resort oasis all in itself. I'd never been able to afford a room, but that didn't stop me from taking shelter there now. I barged through the marble lobby with two kinds of trouble right behind me.

  A giant chandelier with old-timey light bulbs, hip lounge furniture, a trendy beat—these were all nice things. Part of me wanted to kick back and revel in the decadence. But being chased by gangs, police, and zombies kinda gives you an appreciation for the simpler things. You know, like staying alive.

  I ducked into a rear hallway. Nice. The area was covered in thick shadow. I waved my hand over the floor as I passed and the nether thickened. It was invisible, but the shadow was sludge now. It wouldn't stop my pursuers, but it would slow them, just like they were running in a dream. I'd finally bought myself some time.

  I rushed out to the back patio and passed a bar with the thinnest flat screen ever. I mean, I was being chased by the cops and I stopped to gawk. I'd never seen anything like it.

  Football highlights captivated two men on stools as well as the bartender. A tattered wallet sat on the granite bar top beside an empty plate of food. I winced but I swiped it anyway. Don't call me a thief, call me an opportunist. The thing was begging to be picked up and I was in a tight spot.

  I raced to the pool section. Women in bikinis and men with the kinds of muscles I didn't use to have loitered in deck chairs and cabanas. I slowed as I passed a group of Brazilians in thongs because I'm only human. Next was a blonde with breast implants reading a magazine and, uh, let's just say I passed her completely before I realized it wasn't a magazine in her hands.

  My feet slid on the wet concrete and I wiped out on the floor. I wasn't embarrassed, just confused. The woman held a weird little TV thing, thinner than the one at the bar. She let it drop to her lap and scowled at me, but all I noticed were the words scrolling on the screen.

  Holy crap. What the hell was that thing?