Black Gold

  Black Gold

  A Black Records Novella

  Alexis Blakely

  © 2020 Alexis Blakely

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, businesses, places, events,

  and incidents are either the products of the

  author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead ,

  or actual events is purely coincidental.

  First Digital Edition, 2020

  www.AlexisBlakely.com

  Contents

  Books in the Black Records Series

  Free Book Offer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Afterword

  The New Black

  Continue Reading

  About the Author

  Books in the Black Records Series

  Novellas

  THE NEW BLACK

  BLACK GOLD

  Novels

  BLACK MAGIC

  BLACK MARKET

  BLACK ICE

  BLACK ARTS

  BLACK & TAN

  Want to shed light on Alex’s dark past?

  Visit alexisblakely.com/mailing-list to sign up and get your free copy of The New Black prequel novella. Available exclusively to subscribers.

  Chapter One

  One of the beads of sweat collecting on my forehead gave up its tenuous grasp and rolled downwards, running between my eyebrows before sliding into the corner of my eye. I wanted so badly to wipe it away, but I didn’t dare let the salty sting become a distraction. Hovering before me, visible only with the aid of mage sight, was a ticking time-bomb with a thousand invisible trigger strands reaching into every corner of the boiler room. One wrong move on my part, and not only would I disintegrate myself, but I’d also be responsible for the death of my best friend. Chase stood several feet to my right. His eyes were closed, and I could hear the steady huff and hiss of air being pushed and pulled through his nostrils. He’d been holding his exact position without saying a word for nearly an hour.

  “Almost got it,” I breathed, my voice a bare whisper.

  I bent every last bit of my attention towards manipulating the key strands within the spellform. The margin of error was so slim it practically didn’t exist. I couldn’t afford to waste another second picturing our bodies being blasted to dust if I was going to have any chance of deactivating this thing. As it stood, I gave myself fifty-fifty odds of success. On the up side, neither of us would feel a thing if I screwed up.

  Concentrate. Don’t think. Just work.

  Another droplet slithered down my forehead. This one ran down the bridge of my nose, rolled over the tip, then hung there for what felt like an eternity. I had such a complex web of magic energy woven between the spell-bomb’s trigger strands that something as simple as a sneeze could cause the whole thing to come crashing down with deadly consequences. With a considerable force of will, I calmed my mind. My legs and arms ached fiercely, and I had to use every meditation trick in my arsenal to push the discomfort to the background. It was only after I was confident my mind was as clearly focused as it could be that I finally slipped a strand of energy into the spell-bomb’s core.

  Here goes nothing.

  Tuning into the frequency of the foreign spell, I merged my energy with the magical bomb hovering in the middle of the room. My spell sliced into it like a surgeon’s scalpel carving through flesh. I worked as quickly as I dared, manipulating my energy into the foreign spell until I could sense the shape of the spellform from the inside out. When I was as confident as I could be that I’d overridden every last backup measure, I prepared to send a pulse through the energy mass that would theoretically collapse the entire thing. Either that or blow us up. I was pretty sure it would be the first one. Mostly sure. Okay, kinda sure, but it wasn’t like I had any other options. Chase and I couldn’t exactly stand around all day while I triple checked my theory.

  With nothing left but to go for it, I let the pulse fly, and was rewarded with a soft whumph and a pressure change like someone opening the door of a walk-in freezer. Still a little surprised I hadn’t missed anything and detonated the spell, I collapsed to my knees and dry heaved a few times.

  “That was intense,” Chase croaked. He coughed to clear his throat. “You would not believe how badly I need to find a toilet. I swear, five minutes after you told me to freeze I had the worst urge to crap I’ve ever had in my life.”

  I spat a gob of sticky saliva from my too-dry mouth. “I hope you managed to hold it in. I don’t have enough energy left to conjure up an air freshener, never mind clean pants and underwear.”

  “About twenty minutes ago I started wondering if we were going to make it out of here alive. My bowels locked up two seconds after that.” Chase laced his fingers behind his head and twisted his torso back and forth a few times to loosen up his stiff muscles. “You look like hell. Going to be okay?”

  “Eventually.” I sat back on my ass and hugged my knees. Darkness pulsed at the edge of my vision, and my head felt about ten pounds too heavy for my neck. “Got any food left? I ate my last energy bar when we got out of the car.”

  Chase checked his pockets but came up empty.

  “Alright,” I muttered. “Let’s finish this up and get out of here before I pass out.”

  In the very back corner of the room, tucked between a wall and the rusted out metal drum of a massive old boiler was the altar we’d been searching for. Hardened mounds of melted wax had piled to nearly waist height. A number of idols and offerings sat half embedded or resting on the uneven surface, shadows wavering in the flickering light of a dozen candles. I didn’t have the first clue what most of the items were for, but I could feel powerful magic radiating from everything.

  “Is that the poppet we’re after?” Chase asked, pointing to the twisted figure propped in the center of the altar.

  Most effigies were crude representations constructed from a length of jute rope or roughly carved from wood, but this was something else entirely. Not only had it been painstakingly carved from clay to look more realistic than a plastic doll, but someone had also taken the trouble to sew an outfit and make little shoes for it. I would have bet my last dollar that the doll’s wardrobe had been stitched out of fabric cut from items stolen from our client’s closet. The hair was a tiny wig — again, most likely made from real hair scavenged from our client’s house — and the face had been modeled with enough care to be immediately recognizable.

  “Holy shit,” Chase said. “I don’t know a lot about voodoo dolls, but that looks like some serious bad juju right there.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I told him. It was tough filtering out the magic radiating from the doll, but I did my best to scanned the altar for secondary trap spells. If there was anything hidden in the background, I couldn’t detect it.

  Chase stepped up to the altar and reached out to pluck the doll free. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said as he slipped his backpack from his shoulder. “This thing is giving me the creeps.”

  I heard the click of the pressure plate a second before the flash of light blinded me. For a moment, there was only blissful and silent weightlessness before I was slammed int
o something solid. Around the same time, my senses caught up to the booming explosion rolling over me. My guts went liquid and my eardrums felt like someone had jammed pencils into them. Vision blurry in the now darkened room, I scrambled to my knees and called Chase’s name.

  I could feel my lips moving, but no sound emerged. My first thought was a muffling spell, but it quickly dawned on me that the explosion had left me temporarily deaf. At least, I hoped it was temporary. Nothing to be done about it now, though. I conjured a weak little light spark. The spell hovered above me, casting faint blue light over the remains of the altar. My eyesight was slowly returning to normal, and as I scurried across the floor, splinters and metal fragments digging into my palms, I caught sight of Chase’s unmoving body lying amidst the rubble.

  “Chase?” His name came out as little more than a harsh croak. “Chase, are you okay?”

  When I finally managed to crawl up to him, I had to stop myself from rolling him over. It was a bad sign that he wasn’t moving. His body must have blocked the brunt of the blast, because he looked way worse than I felt. He’d been thrown halfway across the boiler room, and what I could see of his temple and cheek was a mess of sticky blood and abraded skin.

  “Come on, Chase,” I muttered, more to myself than anything else. “You’re okay. Just unconscious, right? Quit being so fucking lazy and wake up already, bud.”

  I shuffled around to the other side of him so I could get a better look at his face. Half of it had been sliced to ribbons, and the other half was so coated in blood I couldn’t even tell if his eyes were open or not. If my vision hadn’t been so messed up, I might have been able to at least do a visual check for breathing. Instead, I had to stick my fingers against his bloody neck to feel for a pulse.

  It was faint, but it was there. If his heart was still thumping, there was hope for him yet. Even if I hadn’t been as burnt out as I was after dismantling the spell-bomb, I still wouldn’t have been able to fix the worst of his injuries. As it was, I could maybe, just maybe keep him alive long enough to get him to someone who could save his life.

  Pouring every bit of magic I could spare into a rudimentary healing spell, I commanded the energy to take care of the worst of Chase’s injuries first. That was the great thing about magic, I didn’t have to know whether he had fractured vertebrae or a ruptured spleen. All I had to do was channel the energy. My intention and focus would take care of the rest. The more I thought about how it all worked, the less effective it was. So instead I just knelt by my friend’s side and pictured the energy flowing from my hands and into his body. Every thought flickering through my adrenaline-addled mind was one of making him whole and healthy again. It would only achieve a slim fraction of what I envisioned, but that was more than any non-mage in my position would have been able to do for the poor guy.

  When I was so tapped out I was afraid I might do permanent damage to myself, I took a moment to psych myself up, then forced myself to my feet. It was a long way back to the car, and Chase wasn’t going to be able to walk himself out of there.

  Chapter Two

  “I guess this makes us even,” I grunted as I manhandled Chase’s limp body into the backseat of his car. I couldn’t help but remember our reversed roles the first time he’d picked me up after my nearly fatal run-in with a kryte had forced me to bring him in on my little secret.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d had a little more gas in the old magic tank. Instead of relying on a quick spell to help me lift him gently into the vehicle, I’d opened both doors and was hauling him onto the seat by his arms. With a final heave and a disgusting pop sound like giant knuckles cracking, I dragged him far enough inside that I was able to run around and shut the doors without breaking his ankles. I’d already grabbed the keys from his pocket, and when I slid into the driver’s seat, I fumbled them several times before finally jamming the right one in and twisting it to start the car.

  “Alright, Alex,” I said to myself. “Shift into Drive, foot off the brake, and then just ease down on the gas pedal.”

  The car lurched forward violently, slamming my head back into the seat. I lifted my right foot off the gas pedal and slammed both feet down on the brake. Seems my recollection of how much pressure a gas pedal needed was a little off. After all, it had been months since the last time Chase had tried teaching me to drive.

  I took a calming breath and fastened my seatbelt. “Let’s try this again.”

  This time I placed the ball of my foot a little lower on the pedal, pushing down with my toes until the car began to creep forward like a lazy tortoise. My hands already ached from gripping the wheel so tightly, and at this rate it was going to take me twenty minutes just to pull out of the gravel parking lot and onto the road. The last time I’d been behind the wheel, I’d been so overcome with anxiety I couldn’t even make it out of an empty parking lot with Chase encouraging me the entire time. As mentally and physically burnt out as I was now, I could barely see straight let alone deal with the abject panic flooding my bloodstream.

  An incoherent whimper from the backseat nearly broke my heart. Chase was going to die because I didn’t want to do something most kids had figured out by the time they were sixteen. The only way he was going to live was if I got him to a healer. If I hadn’t fried my phone beyond repair by dropping it in sheep’s blood the day before, I might have been able to call someone to come to me. That wasn’t going to happen though. We were in the middle of nowhere at an abandoned lumber mill. No one was going to stumble upon us. No one was going to show up at the last minute to save the day.

  “Fuck it,” I said, gritting my teeth.

  Foot to the floor, I gunned it across the parking lot. Gravel clacked across the side panels after being spit out from beneath the front wheels. The car fishtailed wildly when I tried turning out on to the road, and I came within a hair’s breadth of flipping it onto its side before regaining control.

  “Maybe a little slower,” I told myself. As long as I focused on the road ahead of me, it wasn’t all that hard to ease off the gas and hold it relatively steady. I had no idea how fast I was going since I was too afraid to look down at the speedometer, but if the trees whipping by on the side of the road were any indication, it was probably fast enough.

  The only problem I had now was figuring out how to find a healer. We were more than three hours from Vancouver. The nearest town was a place called Boston Bar, population: 860. Blink and you’d miss it. The town was little more than a couple of gas stations and a diner. I’d barely paid it any attention on the way through except to make a crack about the fact the motel bar was called the Pig’s Ear Saloon. After that, it was an empty stretch of highway for longer than I was willing to risk. I hadn’t engaged my mage sight on our first drive through town, but I’d been burning it from the minute I’d pulled onto the highway in the hopes I’d see the kind of sign that had been made just for people like me.

  As luck would have it, I was halfway through town when I caught sight of a faded glowing overlay on one of the gas station signs. I forced myself to slow down so as not to attract attention when I veered off the road and onto a quiet little street, eyes scanning the mailboxes for another of the healer’s marks. The paved section of the road was only a quarter mile long before it became packed dirt and gravel. The few ramshackle houses I caught flashes of between the trees were set far back in the trees, as though the owners were happy to keep a little distance between themselves and the outside world. None of them were the house I was looking for, but this was exactly the kind of place I’d expect to find a healer who wanted a little privacy to practice their arts. Squinting through eyes watery from even this slight use of magic required to keep my mage sight active, I scanned every tree and mailbox for the symbol that meant I could finally get help for Chase.

  The road got rougher, and just as I was on the verge of giving up and turning back, I saw what I was looking for. Emblazoned on a rock was a faintly glowing waypoint marker. Without that sign, I’d almost certa
inly have driven right past the overgrown driveway leading up to a moss-covered double-wide trailer. I pulled up next to a VW bus that looked like it hadn’t been on the road in decades, hopped out, and ran to the trailer to make sure someone was actually there before I tried moving Chase again.

  The door opened before I had a chance to knock. A short balding man stared up at me through wire-rim glasses with a look that said he wasn’t exactly happy to receive visitors. “What do you want?” he asked gruffly.

  “My friend is hurt. I’ve stabilized him as much as I could, but he needs a proper healer.”

  The little man stepped half out the door and peered around me to look at the car. From this angle, there was no way he could have seen Chase’s unconscious form lying in the back of the car, but he narrowed his eyes and nodded a few times.

  “Kid’s in rough shape.” He kicked his slippers off and stepped into a pair of rubber boots. “I’ve got a wheelbarrow ‘round the side. Be a dear and fetch it for me.”

  He toddled off towards the car, giving me little choice but to do what he said. I found the wheelbarrow overturned in the dirt. When I spun it right side up, I tried my best to ignore the dark rust-colored patches that looked suspiciously like old blood stains. I was too exhausted and not nearly strong enough to carry Chase anywhere, so if dumping him into a wheelbarrow was going to get him somewhere the healer could work on him, that’s what I was going to do.