Rise of the Warlock Ch. 03: Deals

Foreword First my thanks to LegMann for his editing. Second all there is no under age sex here. And Last sorry for the wait and I hope you enjoy the latest installment of R.O.W.

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RISE OF THE WARLOCK

Deals

My sister sighed against my neck and I smiled briefly as I considered what to do. In the immediate future I knew I had to get my sister to her own bed. Then I would need to find a way to keep my family safe while I dealt with Lord Dick eater and the T.K.K.

The info I was given held a bit of background information on the Krew as well as a list of the leaders and where to find them. What I inferred was that Lord Avery didn't care about the Krew so much as eliminating its leaders. Why I didn't know. All I knew was that they in some way threatened his influence.

As for my family, I couldn't simply lock them in this house, use magic to ward my land, and curse anyone who attempted to get on it until I could figure this shit out.

"Fuck," I muttered. I slipped out of bed, but not before placing a small charm upon my sister to keep her sleeping. I checked the time on my phone - it was a little before five. Made sense. I rarely slept more than four hours. I dressed in a pair of sweats, put on a pair of socks then lifted up my sister to carry her to her own room.

Completing that task I checked the living room and as I thought, our clothes were still there. I picked them up, placed her clothes in her room, and mine in a hamper in the mud room.

I turned on the TV and watched Tom and Jerry as I began working out a rough plan. First, I needed to even the playing field with Avery. As I saw it at the moment, I was a pawn in his game. Not a good place to be - after all, pawns are meant to be used and sacrificed. Second, I did want to deal with the T.K.K. They did murder my mother after all, and they were into some seriously messed up shit.

Lastly, I needed power. The soul was a powerful thing, but you could only use so much energy before you did real damage to yourself. I also needed more resources. I considered and discarded plans one after another. All in all I was worrying myself to death.

Sighing, I sat down on the floor. Taking a classic meditative pose, I began to breath in and out, in and out. Part of learning to strengthen my body through the use of magic had me learning to meditate. There were various meditative techniques to achieve different results. Part of the eastern understanding of magic was not to amass a huge reserve of energy, but to purify the existing energy within to achieve greater results with less.

However, what I was doing now was just putting myself in a state of pure thought. This way all my problems would clarify themselves... at least that's how it was supposed to work. Sadly all I achieved was the settling on something I already knew, and that was that I didn't know enough.

So there was only one thing I could do: deal with the small problem first, and work my way up to the larger. By that I meant dealing with the T.K.K., and not in the way Lord Jerk Off wanted. I was going to perform a "Sam Axe" special and give the jerks half of what they wanted.

That Afternoon

I waved as the two cars drove down the driveway. My Aunt's van led the way and Daphne followed behind. Daphne had taken quite a bit off time off work, and as for the others, there was the school year that they needed to finish up. It was only because of spring break that they had stayed as long as they did.

I pulled the burner cell I had been given from my pocket and called the only number programmed on it. The phone rang twice then it was answered. "I'll do it," I said, then hung up and popped the back off, pulled the battery, slipped out the SIM card, and tossed the pieces in the garbage can by the garage.

So for the next few weeks as school worked its way to finishing for the graduating classes, I went through, and re-went through, all the information contained on the USB flash drive.

I found the perfect target to begin with. His name was Jake Bosch. Bosch was a wannabe rapper who only got big due to his association with the T.K.K. From the few tracks of his music I found on YouTube he was a truly dreadful rapper. Under the name J Bomb, he had a short career as a performing artist that failed miserably. However, with the backing of the T.K.K. he started his own recording studio and opened up a few clubs.

The clubs and the studio were all a money laundering front. The T.K.K. gave him dirty cash and he cleaned it and returned it to the gang. That was the entirety of what I had on him. Bosch worked out of a club in downtown Grand Rapids called Paradise.

Surveillance

Paradise... shitty name... anyhow, Paradise was located on the edge of downtown GR. The building used to be an old furniture warehouse in the fifties. The building was two stories and built at the height of nuclear paranoia. Which is why it had a decent sized bomb shelter located underneath.

All of which was easily learned on the net. The first time I checked out the club was during the day on a Sunday. As I was hoping the place was deserted. I went through an alleyway leading to a loading dock in the back. A heavy steel door sat beside the closed dock. The lock on the door was easily negotiated and I walked into the building. It was dark, and while there had been no cameras outside I couldn't be sure there wouldn't be inside.

I had bet on the fact that Bosch was a criminal and wouldn't want any video of his crimes laying around and it paid off. I walked through the dock and found the door to the club proper. I kept walking until I found a small office in the back. I had assumed it would be upstairs but I didn't mind being wrong.

This door wasn't locked. Inside was a large desk with a computer, and a couch pushed along one wall. Walking behind the desk I found a good size safe. I placed my hand against the cold metal and concentrated.

See, magic can affect just about everything and that includes different metals. I pulled out my pocket knife and dinged it off the surface of the safe. Concentrating on the feel of the vibrations I got a decent feel of the safe's inner workings. It felt right, though to be absolutely truthful, I had no idea how to crack a safe. Well, that's not quite right. I have seen many different heist films and seen every episode of Burn Notice and most of White Collar.

So anyhow, I turned the dial, feeling for the vibration. Sadly it all felt the same, and seeing how I didn't want anybody knowing I'd broken in I gave up. Moving back to the desk I looked through it. Luckily, these locks were easily dealt with. However, there was nothing incriminating or even useful. Some receipts, a few magazines, and that was it.

The computer was the same as the safe, as in I didn't know enough about hacking to break into it. So after trying a few combinations of his birthday, his arrest date, then the release date, and finally the day he first made a record I gave up. As a last ditch effort, I tried those dates on the safe and still bupkis.

I was annoyed and I didn't want to give up but didn't see any other option when something occurred to me. Moving under the desk I carved a quick symbol into it and then focused on it, placing a charm that would allow me to hear whatever was said in the room, or I at least hoped it would. I put everything back the way I found it and left.

Of course, I couldn't monitor the room from Blackburrow, but every weekend I returned to the club. I used a glamour to change what I looked like. I couldn't do anything too extreme as glamours were only skin deep after all. I could change my hair, skin, and eye color. I could even change the shape of my face. However, I could not change my height or body shape.

The first night I felt like Cinderella as with every movement or brief distraction I almost lost control of the glamour. So when I got back home I grabbed the book and did a little more research on glamours and realized the problem.

See, it turns out that glamours require a lot of energy and concentration to constantly maintain, so it was best to enchant a trinket of some kind to help with one or both parts. So I went about the task of enchanting my belt for the task.

See, any organic material was a decent medium for magic and silver could hold a fair bit of energy. I carefully carved runes into my belt, inside and out, and then placed a fair amount of energy into the buckle. I tested it in front of a mirror, my face and skin color changing with each passing thought.

I had fun with going green like the Hulk, turning as black as night, or as pale as a ghost. I even made myself look like a Sith from Star Wars. Laughing, I patted myself on the back, my fun interrupted only by the alarm on my phone telling me it was time to leave for school.

School was quickly coming to a close which is perhaps the best part of being a senior. I had already informed the principle that I wasn't going to attend the graduation ceremony. He wasn't surprised. Daph and I would occasionally "talk"... by that I mean she would call me, start to make small talk, then I would hang up. I didn't do small talk.

It was the last weekend until school would officially end for the senior class and I was at the club. This time I'd entered through a pair of double doors into the club proper. Along both walls were booths, except half way down the left was a large bar. Along the back wall was a stage with plenty of room for a band, though at the moment their was just a DJ at a sound table or whatever those things were called.

The acoustics were terrible sadly. All that you could feel or even here was the bass, not the actual music, so mostly I just got a ringing headache every time I entered the place.

Bosch sat at a back booth in the corner near the rear door to the back dock. Bosch was your typical "gangsta" wannabe: looked like Barney Fife and dressed like 50 Cent. Bosch was maybe 5'5", had dark hair, brown eyes, and an overly large nose. He was also incredibly thin.

Paradise had a number of waitresses for serving the sitting customers, or just to act as eye candy. Half of what I picked up from his office was him trying to leverage sex from his employees. Sadly he succeeded more than I would have liked. If the women wouldn't do what he wanted for their job he'd threaten them with the T.K.K. Basically, he told them that if they refused him, He would have them servicing every cock in the T.K.K.

It was almost two a.m now and I was about to take off when I saw someone I hadn't seen an years.

Derek Washington walked in. He wasn't much different than I remembered. Same self satisfied smirk, same walk. Hell, even his clothes looked the same. He had some tattoos on his arms though I couldn't see them all that well from where I was standing. He walked over to Bosch and stood over him. I saw Bosch say something to him then they both got up and headed to the back.

I grinned to myself as I made my way to a private booth and sat down to listen.

I heard a door open and shut, then their voices.

"So what's up?" Bosch asked.

Derek sighed. "The usual shit and something new. My brother told me to get the word out that we're looking to recruit a wizard?" Derek said almost in disbelief, like he thought his brother had lost his mind.

"Wizards. Really? What the hell has your bro been smoking and can you get me some?" Bosch laughed.

"No idea so onto the usual business. Any problems with the money?"

"None. I've even managed to increase some of the return by lowering the overhead a bit by getting a new liquor supplier. I managed to get eighty cents on the dollar instead of the normal seventy," Bosch informed Derek.

Derek then replied, "Meaning you're getting ninety and giving me half of what you're taking in, right?" he said, real friendly, but I could hear the threat in his voice.

And apparently so, too, could Bosch as he answered a little shakily, "Yeah man, of course. We're homies, right?"

"Yeah, we're homies, Jake," he said condescendingly as he left.

Taking that as my own cue I left as well, a new idea forming in my head. One that would serve all my goals.

Rise

Dropping the bag on the motel bed I looked around the motel room. Dingy was perhaps the only way to describe the room. The "no tell" motel was just off the highway. It was the kind of place where most of the patrons paid in cash and stayed for an hour, maybe two. In other words the perfect place to lay low until I could find something better.

I dug through my pack pulling out some jewelry I'd made. They wouldn't sell for too much, but then again I only needed a small stake to get me started. For the last month, in between monitoring the club and waiting out school, I had been taking care to shut up the house.

That afternoon I left the motel and visited a nearby pawn shop for a bit of haggling and a bullshit story about how the pieces had been in my family for generations. In the end I managed to get about five grand out of him. I would have been happy if I hadn't spent nearly twice that on the materials over the years.

I headed back to the motel and napped for a few hours while trying not to think about the activities that the room had been used for.

"I'm waking up, I feel it in my bones" blared from my phone as it rang. "Y'ellow?"

"I knew if I called using my friend's phone you'd answer, asshole," my sister shouted into my ear. I had been trying my damndest to avoid this conversation though I should have known I couldn't. My sister was damn stubborn when she wanted to be.

"Hi Daph," I said, already cringing.

"Hi? HI?! That's all you have to say to me after hanging up and screening my calls for who knows how long?!" I was holding the phone away from my ear as she screamed into the receiver.

I sighed slightly knowing that the decision I made would hurt her, but feeling it to be the right one said, "Well I had no interest in the weather and didn't particularly care about what your friends and/or neighbors were doing."

"Asshole, I... I was trying to connect with you." She cried into the phone. Another sigh escaped my lips, my left hand clenched into a tight fist.

"Well stop. I mean it's nice you want to be closer and all, but I really don't care about what your friends and neighbors are doing, much less what their friends and neighbors are doing."

"Dammit Bart, if you'd talk to me then I wouldn't need to fill the conversation. It's like you're pushing me from your life and, and I don't want to be pushed away, ok?"

"Daph, I know you care, you all do. However, I like being alone. I prefer being alone. Us sleeping together does not change that. So thanks, but no thanks. In other words, leave me be. When I want to talk, I will."

I heard a half choked sob over the phone before she angrily shouted, "Fine! If that's what you want then I'll fucking leave you be...ASSHOLE!"

With that she hung up, and I felt deserving of that moniker, though I still felt that I did the right thing. I sighed as I checked the time on my phone. Pulling myself out of bed I got ready. I showered, shaved, and brushed my teeth.

I had gone to Anton's Discount dress clothes earlier that day to buy a number of off the rack suits and dress shirts. I dressed in a black dress shirt, black dress pants with a red vest and tie. The vest and tie were faux silk but it looked good, perhaps not as good as the real thing, but at least I wasn't completely broke. I had chosen to wear my grandfather's pocket watch along with my wallet. Both the wallet's and the pocket watch's chains were on my left side.

I had shined a pair of black boots. It was funny as the attendant at Antonio's had been attempting to get me to purchase some dress shoes or at least a nice pair of cowboy boots. He had continued right up until I left. Still, I filed his persistence away for further consideration. After all, if I was going to barter for people's souls, the attendant was a great example to live up to.

...10:00...

I entered the club and unlike the other times I had come, I actually parked in the lot instead of a block away. True, it was mostly paranoia that had kept me from parking in the lot. Still, better paranoid than dead.

I quickly identified my first potential clients. I started with Brad Dahmsey. He was 5'5", good looking, had blond hair and a picture perfect smile. This night he was wearing the usual brand named clothes and appeared as confident as I was used to seeing. This was a good thing though.

See, Brad had a problem. Despite his outward confidence and the many women he would make a pass at, or in some case's be hit on by, he'd never go home with any of them. At first I wondered if he was gay. My curiosity, as always, drove me to make a pass and see. Mind you it wasn't until after he turned me down that it hit me. What if he was? I wasn't. I had no interest in being with him so what in the hell was I thinking? Luckily, he turned me down.

So another Friday night came. It was nearing closing, and he was well on his way to being well and truly wasted so I approached him again.

...That Night...

"You strike out, too, man?" I yelled into his ear as I drunkenly swayed into the bar. Brad looked over to me. He nodded before trying to drink from a glass of ice. "Yo, barkeep, bring us another round!" I yelled out.

Brad took his refreshed glass and said, "Thanks, man."

I nodded a little too vigorously before going into a tale about how I had this perfect ten just eating out of my hand until some asshat bumped me and spilled my drink on her. "To say the least, she didn't go home with me," I whined into the drink. "So what's your reason?"

"Reason?" he asked.

"Yeah, the reason you're all dressed up with know one to fuck." I laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world he joined until he realized it wasn't all that funny.

Brad looked at me for a moment. For a second, I thought he wasn't going to tell me, but then he spoke. "You know I look good. By my looks alone I'm more than confident. But you see I'm, ahh... I'm really small, you know, down there."

I looked at him and said, "Ah, come on man, I mean I won't bull shit ya, but if your good with your hands and tongue, you can generally make up for that."

He looked at me before saying, "You don't get it. The first girl I ever slept was a virgin. We both thought we'd be together forever, you know?" He paused for a beat, staring at the glass in his hand, then continued, "But then I get this fucking text from her phone showing a video of her fucking some guy, moaning out how much bigger he is..." He took a heavy gulp of his drink.

"I tried not to let it get to me and move on, so I went out with this girl I worked with. She'd been dropping hints for awhile about hooking up. So we're in my apartment and making out real heavy, when she starts pulling my shirt off and kissing her way down, undoes my pants, pulls down my skivvies, and laughs. Fucking laughs."

He finished off his drink and dropped his head to the bar.

...Present...

That night as my made-up persona I had told him I might know someone who could help and now it was time we were introduced.

"Brad Dahmsey? I'm Bartholomew Schultz. A client of mine, Michael McBride, said you had a problem you could use some help with," I said while holding a hand out to him.

He took it, shook it, and speaking in a hushed tone asked, "Yeah McBride said you could help me get larger uh down there? Is it like a pill or something, because the pills I took in the past never seemed to work."

"Well, it's not a pill. I thought Mike had gone through this with you." I answered him.

"He did, but I was quite drunk and thought I heard him wrong when he said it'd cost my soul and be done through magic," Brad responded with an uneasy smile.