York Street, walking without fear along the shadowy sidewalks. It was a good part of town, but still nowhere a nice young woman would ordinarily be seen alone. Of course, she wasn’t alone, but she didn’t know that she had an invisible magician trailing twenty feet along behind her. She took a left onto Jersey Avenue, and I ducked behind a tree, wary despite my spell. I watched from the shadows as she crossed the street in front of the public library and entered a house. Moments later, a light came on in a second-floor window, and I turned to go home.
Only to come face-to-face with another of the wannabe coven, standing right behind me and holding a Schrade Presto switchblade low and out to the side. He pressed a button, and the four-inch blade leapt out, catching the gleam of a streetlight and winking back at me, thirsty.
“What do you want with Rosalyn, you creep?” the man asked, staring right at me.
I shook off my surprise at him seeing right through my illusion and said, “She looked like somebody I used to know. I wanted to make sure it was my friend before I said anything. I didn’t want to scare her jumping out at her in the middle of the night. But it’s not her, so I decided to head home.” I took a step forward, hoping to end the confrontation without violence.
He didn’t budge, and from the look on his face, he didn’t buy my story, either. “So you just decided to follow her all the way from the park and peep in her windows, huh? Is that what you are, some kinda Peeping Tom? Maybe I cut out your eyes and you don’t do no more peeping, Tommy.”
I sighed. This was not going to end well for this guy, and if I didn’t keep it quiet, it wouldn’t be good for me, either. “My name isn’t Tommy, I’m not a peeper, and you really don’t want to mess with me, pal. Now step aside and I’ll just go home and nobody has to get hurt.”
He grinned a savage grin, and I could see just the slightest hint of amber glowing in his eyes. Shit. He was demon-touched. Not possessed, not yet. But he’d dabbled in enough dark magic that someone from Down Below took an interest in him, and now their claws were deep in this guy’s soul. I’d first seen it in Europe. It explained some of the Nazis. Not all of them, though. Sometimes terrible human beings are just terrible human beings, without any supernatural explanation.
If left alone, this guy was going to dig deeper and deeper until he got so far into black magic that he either called up a demon or went nuts and murdered a bunch of people. That happened with greater frequency after the war, with cases like the Lipstick Killer and the Lonely Hearts Killers grabbing national attention. The headlines didn’t mention anything arcane, but Luke and some of his people had found definite links between demonic influence and some of this new breed of murderer. Now it seemed like Jersey had a new devil, and he was standing right in front of me.
“Last chance, friend. Fold up your little pigsticker and go home. Sleep off whatever you’re on and stop playing around with things you don’t understand. Otherwise, you’re going to end up in way over your head.”
“I might be in over my head, but you’ll be dead,” the man said, a vicious grin stretching across his face. He swung the knife up toward my throat, holding it like someone who’s never cut anything more dangerous than a sirloin. I leaned back, letting the blade whiz by my face harmlessly, then punched the would-be murderer in the stomach. He staggered back, one hand holding his gut and the other bringing the knife back around to defend.
“You still want to play around, pal?” I asked. “There’s no shame in running from a stronger opponent.” I really didn’t want to kill this guy. Maybe if he got help, he could shake loose of the demon’s hold on him. But if I snapped his neck on the sidewalk, there would be no coming back from that.
He didn’t answer, just growled and charged at me. He lowered his head,