On the one hand, years of well-honed paranoia told him for certain that this was a trap. No one’s luck was good enough to have a random mage walk up and offer her services at the exact moment she was needed. Far more likely was that this Marci Novalli was working for someone else from the Three Sisters who didn’t want Katya found, or maybe another clan entirely. If he took her offer, he’d be playing right into the clutches of his family’s enemies like the idiot failure his mother always said he was. On the other hand, though, rejecting her meant he’d be going against his brother’s advice, and therein lay the quandary. Unlike most of his family, Julius didn’t think Bob was crazy, or, at least, not only crazy. He wasn’t sure if his brother actually saw the future, but Bob definitely saw something. Trouble was, Julius wasn’t sure which side this particular warning fell on: the crazy or the something. He was still trying to figure it out when the girl slid off the barstool.
“I’m really sorry to have wasted your time,” she said quietly, looking down at her feet as she adjusted her bag on her shoulder. “Thank you for listening, and I hope you have a nice—”
“Wait.”
The girl looked up in surprise. Julius was surprised, too, because he hadn’t thought he’d made up his mind yet. But while he still wasn’t sure if the mage was a trap, a vision of Bob’s unsettled mind, or some combination thereof, he had come to a decision. The sorry had been the deciding factor, but the thank you had sealed the deal. Julius couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard those words from anyone’s mouth except his own and, trap or not, he couldn’t let the person who said them just walk away.
Of course, now that he’d stopped her, he had to come up with something to say.
“Marci, right?” he asked, clearing his throat as she sat back down on the stool. “Can you do illusions?”
“Absolutely,” Marci said, counting off on her fingers. “Area, personal, spatial, full sensory immersion, though I’ll need a day to set that last one up if you want it on something bigger than a ten by ten square.”
Julius didn’t know enough about human magic to gauge whether that was good or not, but Marci certainly sounded like she knew what she was talking about. “I guess it would be a personal illusion,” he said. “On me. But I’d rather not explain it here. Do you have somewhere else we could talk?”
Marci nodded and hopped to her feet. “I’ll need my workshop to do a credible illusion anyway. We can discuss terms on the way over. Would that be okay?”
Julius glanced over his shoulder, but his brother and Svena were still sitting in the VIP area with their heads together, and he was loath to interrupt. Really, though, he saw no reason to deal with Ian again at all. He had the chain, he had the information about the party, and now he had a mage to help him get inside. If he moved quickly, this whole mess could be over by midnight.
“That sounds great,” he said, smiling at Marci as he slid off his own stool. “Let’s get out of here.”
***
Getting out of the club was much simpler than getting in. Rather than running the gauntlet past the augmented bouncer, Marci led them out a side door and down the alley, away from the tree-lined square and its well-dressed crowds. Then she led them down from the street, descending a long set of cement stairs from the elevated skyway.
“I swear I’m not taking you off to mug you,” she said as they walked away from the evening sunlight and the bright glow of the Upper City’s ubiquitous halogen street lamps. “It’s just that you don’t have to pay for parking down here.”
“No worries,” Julius said, glancing around. Even with his dragon sealed, he wasn’t terribly worried about a human mugging him, and he was far more interested in his first look at the underbelly of Old Detroit.
Going below the skyways was like entering another world. All the brilliance of the Upper City—the fancy tree-lined square, the towering superscrapers, the elegant curving roads full of luxury cars and computer driven taxis—was like a model sitting on a table, and underneath it, an entirely different city thrived in the dark.
After all the stories he’d heard, Julius had expected Underground Detroit to look like a war torn ruin, but this looked more like Shinjuku in Tokyo. The buildings, many of them apparently dating from before the flood given the high water marks on their second stories, had been completely renovated to hold as many shops as possible. Every window seemed to have at least two signs hanging in it, and the combined glare of all the neon, back-lit plastic, and flashing LEDs, actually made it brighter down here than it had been up top in the sun.
If there was any organizational system, Julius couldn’t see it. Bars, restaurants, and theaters shared walls with banks, private schools, and massage parlors in a chaotic jumble. Some establishments didn’t even bother making divisions, advertising salon services and gambling at the same time. Even the buildings themselves were mismatched. Some, the short ones, looked like the normal office buildings and strip malls they must have been before Algonquin had built an entire other city on top of them. Others, ones that had collapsed and been completely rebuilt in the years since the flood, or the ones that had been too
