Chapter
Three
O llie came to on his knees. The resinous, sweet odor still clung in his nose.
He was in the shop by the entry again. A car drove past on the street, and he scrambled back as if the dark thing he saw might burst through the front door. But it was quiet.
“What are you doing?”
He cried out and twisted in the other direction and turned to find Mary Ann staring down at him, eyes wide and clearly frightened. The piercings that dangled from her ears twitched.
“What is wrong with you?” She came to his side and helped him up.
“Nothing,” he said.
“You were on the floor.”
“I—” He had no good explanation for why he was on the floor. He couldn’t tell her about the vision. She was mundane, a mortal. There were things she couldn’t know about what he was. The supernatural world for her went as far as the items sold in his shop. Besides, there were too many rules from the Synod that governed what he could and could not tell mortals, and it was a whole thing, a lot of steps he’d have to go through to let the right Synodian authorities know if she became informed. “Are you done backstocking the shipment from today?” he asked her.
Her expression changed to one he’d come to recognize, a cynical look. “I find you on the floor, and that’s what you lead with?”
Mary Ann was his best employee out of the six he had working for him at the shop, the store’s manager when he wasn’t there. She wore a velvet peplum top that gave her an air of old-world sophistication while still marking her place as a goth girl who could go on for hours about dark wave and goth bands from the 80s and 90s. And, even though he was technically her boss, she was also a friend.
When he didn’t say anything else, she waved a hand and shook her head. “I just came to tell you that the phone call?—”
Phone call? When did the phone ring? How long was he out?”
“—was Char. She called off again,” Mary Ann continued.
Ollie frowned, his brow furrowing. Besides Mary Ann, Charlene was one of his longer-running employees. This was the third time in two weeks. “Again? What did she say it was this time?” He really wanted to get to his office, but this could cause problems.
Mary Ann shrugged, her multiple bracelets jangling as she reached over to straighten a stack of books slightly askew. “She didn’t really give one. But I think it’s her ex.”
Charlene’s personal life was none of his business, but he didn’t like hearing his employees had issues, especially since what he knew about Char’s ex made him sound like he belonged in prison. “Have you tried talking to her?”
“Of course,” Mary Ann scoffed, rolling her eyes. “But you know how she is. Ask her about her ex, and her chat battery suddenly hits zero.”
“She’s opening tomorrow,” Ollie said.
Mary Ann waved a hand. “I’ll cover it. I’m scheduled at ten anyway. I’ll just come in to open.”
“You have plans tonight. I can make some calls…”
“Don’t worry about it. I got it covered.” She smiled. “But I wanted to check with you if that was okay. I think that’ll put me over forty hours.”
This was why Mary Ann was his favorite employee. She’d been hired by his mother four years ago, two years before Ollie’s mother died. And now she was the store manager. “I’ll pay the overtime.”
“Gucci!” She shot a smile at him. He expected that was it, but she lingered, which was good because he really wanted to get to his office and… “So...” Mary Ann continued. She leaned back against a table of New Age books, fixing him with a pointed look. “How about you?”
Ollie swallowed. “ How about me what?”
She paused and touched another corner of a book to straighten it. “The date…”
It wasn’t the date of his mother’s death, so that meant she was talking about the other thing…
He blew out a breath, crossed his arms, and studied a mark on the hardwood floor. “Yeah, well. I’ve been trying to forget.” Today marked a month since Emmerich, his boyfriend of the past seven years, broke up with him.
Ex-boyfriend. That’s a term he needed to get better at thinking. Not boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend .
It was still fresh. It still hurt.
“I’m fine. I mean…” He shrugged. “It’s good. It’s better. I’m doing good.” He nodded and tried to figure out how to stand, moving his weight to one foot and then the other as a weird silence spread between them.
“Oh, good.” She pushed up off the table display and brushed the palms of her hands together. “Well then, I guess that’s that.” She started toward the back of the store again. “Everything’s good with you, so I guess we’ll just go on about our night.”
“Really?” Ollie gave her a squinty stare. He knew that tone.
“No!” She turned on him. “No, it’s not okay. You’re still hung up on that asshole. You and Char should start a club.”
Ollie dropped his arms. “What am I supposed to say?”
“It’s been a month.”
“Exactly! A month since he dumped me. We’d been together for seven years. ”
Her lips pressed tight, and she frowned. “Your mom wouldn’t want you wallowing around here every single day. Not over a guy like Emmerich.”
Ollie started like he’d been slapped. Nearly two years since she died, and it was still hard to hear others speak about his mother.
And Mary Ann knew it. Her face softened. “I’m sorry,” she said. She pulled at her short skirt and blew out a breath. “I shouldn’t have…”
Ollie waved it away. One day, it wouldn’t sting so much. “It’s okay.”
Mary Ann came back to him and put a hand on his arm. “Still, you know I’m right. I mean, yeah, breakups are hard and all. I get it. Especially ones with that much time. But you’re so much better than him. You can’t go through every day like all your good times are behind you.”
“I know.” He felt like a scolded teenager.
“You should put yourself out there again. Forget that asshole Emmerich.” She sneered. “I mean, what kind of name is Emmerich anyway? It’s a stupid name.”
That made Ollie smile. “Somebody who wants their kid beat up at school.”
“Right?” She grinned back at him. “I mean, seriously.”
Ollie sighed.
“Why don’t you come out with us tonight?” Mary Ann said. “I know it may not be your scene, but we’re going to Underground Lounge tonight.”
“It’s a Tuesday. And you’re opening the store tomorrow. ”
“Tuesday is Underground Lounge’s best night. We can make it work. Maybe you’ll find a nice goth boy to scare away your troubles. And I’ll be in bed by three. It’ll be an early night.”
This time, Ollie’s smile was truly genuine. “Thanks. But I’ve got some work to finish up here.” Really, what he wanted to do was get to his office and figure out his vision. “But if you have plans, why don’t you go ahead and clock out?”
“An hour early?” Mary Ann looked hopeful.
“Sure. I’ll even adjust the timesheet so you get paid for that last hour. Leave the backstock. Have Nicholas do it when he comes in tomorrow afternoon. It’ll give him something to do instead of watching TikTok videos on his phone all shift.”
Mary Ann straightened. “Well, I’m going to get out of here before you change your mind,” she said, turning toward the back of the store and the time clock. She stopped. “Just so you know, you can talk to me if you’re ever feeling down about everything.” She waved a hand toward the floor. “No more crawling on your hands and knees or whatever that was.”
Ollie met her eyes, offering her a small, grateful smile. “I know. And I appreciate that. Really.”
She grinned. “And now I’m going to go find some nice goth boys to scare away all my troubles.” Then she disappeared between the shelves and displays.
Ollie locked the store’s front door behind Mary Ann after she left with a coffin backpack dangling from her shoulder.
He turned and leaned against the door.
Emmerich. The name really was stupid, but not for the reasons Mary Ann thought. As far as mage names went, it was pretty standard. But Emmerich left a hole, a void in his chest. Even though mages lived a long time, centuries, in fact, seven years was still hard to forget, especially for him, who was just at the start of it all at thirty-two.
Really, what happened was this: Emmerich showed up at their apartment late one night several months ago like he’d been spattered by a twist of destiny. Darius Vale, he said, showed up in Chicago and spoke to him. Ollie didn’t believe it because Darius Vale wasn’t a man to be seen; he was a man people talked about like the bogeyman. And he was the man who was supposed to have ensured his mother was no longer marked by the Synod. There wasn’t a lot Ollie wanted to think about Darius Vale, nothing good at least. But there was Emmerich, grinning like an idiot and fawning over the man like he was some big pop diva.
But Darius Vale’s word carried the weight of the Synod behind it, and Emmerich was smitten as if he’d won some arcane lottery. And maybe the fact that Darius Vale took himself out of hiding in the Paris Aetherium Forums, the gathering places for mages, to speak to Emmerich in person, meant Emmerich really had done something right— right, at least, in the eyes of the Synod. Not so much to Ollie.
That meeting led to Emmerich getting a job offer as the Scribe Chronicler. Not just a Scribe Chronicler. The Scribe Chronicler of Chicago, surprising for someone under a hundred years old. It meant he was now the head librarian of the Synod Archives in Chicago. It may not have sounded like much, but suddenly, Emmerich found himself with access to ancient texts and a number of Synod secrets. Sure, it wasn’t the Archives in Paris, a font of information that would make the Roman Catholic Church’s libraries look like a little free library in front of someone’s house. But to hear Emmerich tell it, the Chicago stacks were pretty… well… stacked with information most mages would commit murder to gain access to. And now, Emmerich could access it all.
The thing was, Ollie and Emmerich’s relationship had always been built on a foundation of flipping off the Synod. They read the pronouncements, listened to the rumors, went to the meetings only if they were required, and they listened with that grimace on their faces and eye rolls reserved for the truly obnoxious. Any time they talked about the Synod, it was all head shakes and heavy sighs and, ‘guess what bullshit they pulled this time…” Bashing the Synod was their thing, and it’s why he and Emmerich got together in the first place.
For Ollie, hating the Synod was easy. Ollie was a Hartley, and the Hartley name still carried that stone around its neck known as Preston Hartley. For Emmerich, Ollie always thought hating the Synod was simple for him too. But Ollie wasn’t even sure he knew Emmerich anymore.
After the Darius Vale sighting, things with Emmerich were okay for the first month or so after he took the job in the Archives. But then they turned weird until Emmerich finally up and moved out of their shared apartment. For more than a week, he tried to reach Emmerich. Ollie began to think he was dead. But finally, when Emmerich answered, he sounded different. He said it wasn’t working, that it was over. No shit, it was over. He said he’d come over and get his things, then that was it. Emmerich still hadn’t gotten his stuff, so now Ollie was stuck paying the full rent and stepping over all of Emmerich’s crap. Something like that takes more than a month to get over.
Finally alone, Ollie hurried to the back, through the storeroom, and to his office.
Standing in front of the closed office door, he was hit with the memory of that scent: resinous and tinged with sweetness, the same as he smelled in the vision.
A week before his mother left, two weeks before he sensed her pass, before he received notice she died in a plane crash, he stood in this very spot and caught a whiff of woody citrus that he thought might have been a candle or some incense. It wasn’t unheard of in the shop. But he found his mother bent over the table in the middle of the office, reading a passage from the family’s book, the Hartley grimoire. Not an unusual occurrence. They often referred to the grimoire. It was a book handed down from one Hartley to the next for centuries, and it was where all the information related to the family was kept—births, deaths, important moments in Hartley history.
That is, aside from the redactions. When Preston Hartley committed whatever he did, the Synod struck any mention of him and his direct bloodline from the grimoire. There were blank spaces, whole pages in the grimoire where Preston Hartley was presumably discussed yet magically scrubbed from the parchment. It was as if they believed removing his name would erase his deeds.
But, for Ollie’s purpose, the grimoire contained notes on spells and rituals.
He entered the room lit only by a table lamp on a dusty corner of his desk. The office was surprisingly spacious with an apothecary cabinet from the late eighteenth century that dominated one side and bookshelves on the other. The table where he’d seen his mother stood in the center, covered in books and a tablecloth. Her desk—his desk now—took up the back of the room with a laptop open on it that appeared out of place among the dark wood and antiques. A chestnut wall unit that was said to once belong to some pope or other in Rome stood behind his desk. This Ollie opened with a key to reveal an assortment of jars, old books of a mystical nature, and various other arcane trappings.
The center space of the wall unit held a stand supporting the open grimoire, its pages stained by age and hundreds of Hartley hands sliding over the vellum through the centuries. When news of his mother’s death reached him, it fell to him to record the date she died. The book became his, the last person who would ever possess it.
Unless he somehow managed to conjure up a kid from someone willing to carry on his name. With his dim love life, there wasn’t much chance of that, if at all. So, as it stood, he was the end of the line, and the Hartley grimoire would end up in the Synod Archives after he moved on to whatever awaited mages in the afterlife.
But that thought soured. Maybe he could arrange to have his grimoire sent to London or Paris just so his angry ghost didn’t have to haunt Emmerich for putting his hands on one of his family’s most important possessions.
Ollie turned the pages of the grimoire, moving backward in the book toward the front. Its early pages were written during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, which was when Preston Hartley ruined the family name. Older volumes of the grimoire existed—the Hartleys had been around for millennia—but those had been lost.
He’d only glanced at the page his mother read from that day, noting it looked like a diary entry or field notes of some sort. But there was a notation in her handwriting on the page, something about the “legacy of power.” That’s what he searched for.
Then he found it: A margin scribble. It was definitely his mother’s handwriting. He would recognize Rowan’s loops and whorls anywhere. At the top of the page, she wrote, “We are the legacy of power, the keepers of our strength.” The note made no sense to Ollie. It sounded poetic or philosophic. But it seemed to be on a page of notes on an experiment.
The date of the entry was May 21, 1723.
He stopped. Wasn’t that close to the time Preston Hartley supposedly did his dark deed? Whatever it was. There wasn’t much in the book about what exactly Preston Hartley did that caused the Hartley name to be forever tarnished.
The pages pertaining to whatever evil Preston practiced were seized by the Synod along with Preston’s other journals. Those pages were torn from the grimoire, which made finding that place in the thick book where a void existed that much easier.
The place he read from now occurred just before the torn pages, paragraphs not written by Preston Hartley—those would have been taken too—but inscribed by another family member who must have been his contemporary. That’s probably why they were left intact. Even Preston Hartley’s name was scrubbed from the pages as well, but his was a name passed down verbally along with the vague stories of his dark exploits.
Ollie ran his finger down the page until he landed on a paragraph he remembered seeing:
Day 17:
Spell attempted: Resonance Alignment
Progress: Significant breakthrough achieved. successfully established a momentary harmonic frequency between our realm and the ethereal plane. Observed a brief shimmer in the air, akin to heat distortion, lasting approximately 3.5 seconds. This puts us in a position to proceed to the next step in our research.
Notes: As we approached the final phase of the incantation, an unexpected olfactory phenomenon occurred. At precisely 37 minutes into the ritual, I detected a faint citrus aroma, reminiscent of fresh orange peel. By minute 42, this scent intensified and melded with a new fragrance—unmistakably frankincense. The combination grew stronger as the spell reached its crescendo.
At the moment of culmination, the frankincense-citrus scent became overwhelmingly potent, seeming to saturate the very air around us. Most curious: the aroma lingered for hours after the ritual’s completion .
Further investigation into this sensory manifestation is warranted in future attempts.
Yes, that was it! That was the odor, frankincense and citrus. The odor from the vision nearly caught in his nose again, the same scent he picked up outside the office door when his mother last worked with the grimoire.
He wasn’t sure, exactly, how a spell that sought to align resonance between realms related to a creature summoning souls. Aligning resonance, if he recalled correctly from his education at the Synod schools, only sought to draw energy in some way from another realm. It was an entirely theoretical field of arcane study. But it wasn’t a dark art. There were stories of mages trying to pull energy from all sorts of realms, even heavens or hells, in order to power their magic. The energy itself wasn’t evil. It’s what one did with it that made it good or evil. Magical energy was simply magical energy.
But could this somehow be related to the vision? The ghost had given it to him, and she’d shown up when his mother died. When the man from the Synod came to the shop to tell him she was gone and implied it was because she was on the some dark path. He assumed it was because of his family’s history. But was this what he meant?
Was his mother working on the same magic as Preston Hartley? The idea of it sunk a fist of dread in his gut. He couldn’t imagine his mother following a dark path, especially Preston Hartley’s path.
He needed to find out.
Ollie picked up the grimoire from the stand and carried it to the carved wooden table in the center of his office. The table’s surface was covered by an old tablecloth and stacks of books. He moved the books from the table to the floor and pulled off the tablecloth to reveal inlaid wood markings in a circular pattern. To most, it might appear as a design feature of odd patterns and nonsense markings. But to a mage, it was a ritual table, its symbols runes that helped mages focus power and direct arcane forces.
He retrieved a small leather pouch filled with a mixture of dried herbs and crushed gemstones from the apothecary cabinet. Next, he dug out an old map of Chicago and he plucked a white candle from a drawer, its wick already infused with a drop of his own blood, a potent binding agent.
He arranged the items on the table, taking care to align them according to principles of sympathetic magic he remembered from school. With a flick of power, he lit the candle, the flame casting dancing shadows across the room.
The grimoire lay just outside the circle. He flipped through the pages, many of them hand-scrawled. Margin notes had been added up the sides, among them, a personal-notation symbol that looked vaguely like a sigil of magic that could have been a leaf or a fish. It was powerless. Someone’s way of noting information that proved true, perhaps, or spells that worked as expected. This symbol was how he landed on the spell that would allow him to pinpoint the specific location where he witnessed the dark entity’s attack on the man in the alley.
He took a deep breath to center himself. And to work out his nerves.
This was likely a tricky spell, and sometimes his magic didn’t go exactly as planned.
But he could do this. He needed for this to work. He needed answers, especially if this was related somehow to the death of his mother.
Closing his eyes, Ollie focused his intent, drawing upon the well of energy that thrummed within him and from the ley lines that moved through the store. He allowed the magic to flow through his veins, a familiar warmth spreading through his body. He read from the book using a soft chant, the words rolling off his tongue in an archaic language known only to those initiated in the deepest mysteries.
As the chant grew in intensity, the air around him seemed to crackle with energy, the very fabric of reality bending to his will. The herbs and gemstones began to glow, their latent power awakened by the force of Ollie’s magic.
He produced a clear quartz crystal, not unlike the stone the odd customer examined earlier. The ones he sold to customers were just pieces of shiny rock, but this one was etched with runes and imbued with power. He held it up to his eye and tried to focus his sight through it.
Ollie’s other hand hovered over the ritual table, pulling the power from the ley line, focused by the words, aided by the magical energy in the components laid out in the ritual space, and channeling all that power into the crystal, causing it to pulse with energy.
Beads of sweat formed on his forehead. This was usually where things got tricky for him.
The power turned above the ritual circle, as expected. A soft white glow from the magic diffused into the space.
Ollie let out a breath. Maybe this time…
His power coursed like a sudden thrill through his body.
The circle spun faster.
Okay, he could control this. He reached his free hand toward the spinning power to try to curb it, keep it reined in.
The power he called, meant to be a controlled flow, instead flooded into him. It broke into an open torrent like a levee failing to contain a raging current. Something gave way, and the power leapt from his hand and fed even further into the circle.
He set the crystal he held aside, lifting both hands to try to keep the power under control.
The spinning circle changed color from white to a charged purple. Tendrils of the power shot off the circle and arced to the ceiling, to the apothecary cabinet, to the desk. The computer sparked and smoked. Papers launched from the desk and caught in a strange wind cast from the spinning circle.
This was not what he intended.
His instinct was to reach for more power to try to control it, but instead he forced himself to breathe, to let in a deep breath and push it out slowly. He closed his eyes and reached his hand forward once more, almost touching the spinning power.
It arced into his hand, stinging where it touched. Not a great pain, but a surprising shock that caused his breath to hitch. He forced himself to ignore the pain, instead keeping his focus in check to try to pull the power back, to make it manageable again.
And the magic responded. The flow inside him tempered. He allowed himself to glance once again at the spinning circle. Its color remained the same—a strange, eerie kind of purple, but the spinning slowed. Tendrils of power no longer sparked in all directions.
He let out a breath.
Calling power, filling it with his intent, and leading it somewhere, that was the easy part. He could do simple spells all day long without so much as a magical bump. But getting it to do something complex… He could do it, and oftentimes he could do it well. His problem usually lay in how to do it without blowing up the room.
Once, during an advanced spellcasting class, he unintentionally unleashed a burst of raw magic which shattered all the glass objects throughout the room, injuring several students. On another occasion, he caused a minor temporal anomaly during a history exam, making a two-hour exam last for an entire day and leaving the academy stuck in a time loop.
That was one his classmates had endless fun never letting him forget.
He glanced over at the laptop with a frown. That would be the third one this year…
At least it was over now.
Ollie picked up the crystal again and peered at the circle. The idea was to focus power to be able to look through the crystal and to…
The crystal began to glow, pulsing with energy as it absorbed his intent. He could feel the power building, the air around him growing thick with magical potential.
But then, something shifted. The energy within the crystal seemed to spiral out of control, the glow intensifying to an almost blinding degree.
Before he could react, the crystal exploded with a deafening crack, shooting shards of quartz out in every direction. Ollie instinctively focused on the bracelet he wore, a personal shield, and he raised his arms to shield his face. But he was too late. Several shards sliced through his skin, drawing thin lines of blood.
The force of the explosion sent him stumbling backward, his back slamming against the bookshelf behind him. Books and knickknacks rained down around him.
Clearly that didn’t work.
A wink of light beneath a sheet of paper blown askew by the force of the shattered crystal caught his eye. He moved forward and lifted the page to find a piece of the crystal twinkling with its own light.
As he looked around the room, other shards of the crystal did the same thing.
With a push of his will, he held out a hand, reaching for the bits and pieces of the shattered crystal. Immediately, they all responded by lifting from the floor to float within the small space of his office.
He was able to make something out in a piece closest to him. Leaning closer, it was as if a scene from the vision played out in front of him. With a step back, he took in the whole of each shattered piece floating in the air. Hundreds of pieces held moments of the vision.
Ollie quickly grabbed the map and unfolded it over the casting circle. He reached out with his willpower toward the shattered shards of crystal.
Each piece trembled where it floated, then they swirled over the map. It occurred to him that this could all still go bad, but he had to keep trying. By now he felt compelled to figure out where this murder took place.
The shards spun faster over the map until they finally seemed to find a point of focus. One by one, the shards shot toward the map, punching a hole through it.
Right over the center of a block in Lincoln Park.
Now he had a place to go.