Chapter 1

Red pill

“Living is easy. Dying is harder.”

– Lady Melanie Fitzjames, Duchess of Montagu

Charleston, South Carolina, March 1, 1815

The phone rang.

This was not an uncommon occurrence in this city of eight million souls, most of whom spent the majority of their in-between moments with their heads glued to a glowing screen.

But this particular phone was not an iPhone, an old rotary landline, or one of those fancy-at-the-time flip phones where the cover slid down with the press of a button.

No, this was a pay phone on the darkened corner of 1st Street and First Avenue. And it shouldn’t have been ringing at all, because as my research had confirmed after my prior visits to this nexus of firsts, this phone booth should have demolished several years ago with the rest of its brethren.

Despite all that, the phone continued its song, and I knew that the patience of the person on the other end was growing thin. So I crossed the darkened avenue without further delay, slid the folding door of the booth open along the rusty track, and stepped inside.

“Hello?” I said, picking up the dirty plastic receiver and wishing I had wiped it off first.

“You’re late, Jade,” said a gruff female voice on the other end.

I glanced down at my watch. It was 3:20, Monday morning. So, technically, I was a minute late.

“Look, I’ve been playing this game with you and your friend and that other guy who sounds like he’s always eating a bag of chips for five weeks now, and I don’t really appreciate the-”

“Enough. Do you want the next mission or not? Because from where I’m sitting, it sounds like you really don’t want to be in the Guild.”

“Fine, sorry. No more backtalk. What’s the scoop?”

“In 47 minutes, a crate of green apples will be delivered to the Union Square Trader Joe’s. You will make sure that it does not make it into the store.”

Apples, why was it always apples?

“OK,” I said. “But that doesn’t give me a lot of time to get up there and figure out a plan.”

“Well,” said the voice, “maybe next time, then, you won’t be tardy.”

The line went dead with a click and I hung up the phone with such force that I nearly broke the plastic in two. I briefly considered demolishing the rest of the booth using the quarter of a strength buff that I had left to my name, but thought better of it. Once I somehow completed this latest Quest, there would be time enough to vent my frustrations in a proper manner.

Except that was a lie, because every time I thought I had gotten one step closer to being done with this silly initiation, I found myself again thrust into a nearly impossible task.

They all started the same way.

A cryptic text message would appear on the simple black cell phone Gilbert had given me after I had thrown my gold token into the fountain at Greenacre Park. The first one had provided the location of the phone booth and the second one, a date and time. There was no pattern or rhythm to the timing of the five summonses I had received, save that I was always given at least an hour to get to the phone.

It was fortunate, then, that I didn’t have a job, didn’t have any friends (at least any who remembered me), didn’t have a boyfriend, and didn’t have a semi-sociopathic mentor-turned-Questing partner. All of that would have held me down, would have prevented me from completing the Guild’s gauntlet.

And what a gauntlet it had been so far. It was like I was back in my first months of the Quest Board, except these Quests weren’t of the simple fetch variety. No buying bagfuls of groceries at Chelsea Market for me. Instead, it was scrambling along wet rocks on Atlantic Beach, trying to collect enough moss to fill a ramekin. Or stealing a particular petal from the corpse flower at the New York Botanical Garden. Then there was the afternoon I spent smuggling rare books out of the library where I used to work.

Sure, it was satisfying to have handled everything that they had thrown at me. And the Quests also served as a useful distraction to help me forget about that horrific day on the island. But each time I received a new Quest, the same sinking feeling would return, that this would be the one that I couldn’t complete. And with that failure, I would be booted from the Guild, my gold token confiscated in the middle of the night by some Guild henchman, or Gilbert, or even Dalia herself.

I pushed aside such thoughts and began walking briskly uptown. It would be a 15-minute walk to my destination at this pace, and that would give me at least another 15 minutes once I arrived to formulate a plan. Assuming this was a popular delivery time, the loading bay would be swarmed with workers and I didn’t exactly look like the archetypical produce deliveryman. That was especially the case with the glamour activated.

The small green stone hung on a silver chain around my neck, nestled under my mother’s locket. That locket was the reason for my current predicament. What I had originally thought was just a stupid birthday gift from my now-dead mother was actually the hiding place for a gold token. And that token was worth more than just the gold it was made of. It was the twelfth and long-missing gold token of the Worshipful Company of Alchemists, otherwise known as the Guild.

My watch ticked over to 4 a.m. as I turned left onto 14th Street. Seven minutes to come up with a plan.

Perfect.

If I were Beatrice, it would have been plenty of time. I would simply sidle up to the worker unloading the truck, ask him his name, and then hand him a note written in command ink that would order him to give me the apples.

Or I would eat a small piece of a speed buff and just take the apples with no one the wiser. Or if that wasn’t feasible, then I’d use a strength buff or a sliver of power from the purple stone on my finger and steal the apples by force.

Or if all of those options for some reason failed, then I would stab the guy with the Medoblad, turn him to stone, and take the apples. And then, if I was feeling charitable and the incident hadn’t made the national news yet, I would come back later and stab him with the other end of the blade to heal him.

But all I had at my disposable was the tiny bit of strength buff, a tube of vitality serum, and the glamour, now that Beatrice was gone. When activated, the stone created a projection around my entire body that made me look and sound like a 22 year-old redhead with sparkling green eyes and a raspy voice. I had dubbed her Jade Peters, after my old handle, JadePhoenix42, and I was spending more and more of each day as her as the weeks of my initiation had slowly ticked by.

This was the unfortunate consequence of presenting myself as Jade during our initial encounters with both Dalia and Gilbert. And then there was the high I still felt every time I stepped out in public behind her facade. Truth be told, I didn’t like what the glamour was doing to me. There were too many nights where I would go to sleep as myself and wake up the next morning up as her. But that was a problem for another day. Now, I needed Jade in spades.

I crossed 14th Street and walked the full block to survey the scene. The store was bounded by two sets of metal doors, and hordes of workers were already furiously moving pallets of wooden crates onto hand trucks at both ends before pushing them inside. This would not be as simple as batting my eyelashes, flashing a smile, and walking away with the apples. I cursed under my breath as I reached 4th Avenue and saw a red truck rumbling toward the intersection. I was out of time and out of options.

The light turned green, and I watched the truck begin to cross the road. But before it could pull through the intersection, something grabbed hold of my body and forced me into the street. It was as if someone had attached puppet strings to my limbs and was manipulating my movements from above. My arm raised itself up from my side and stretched out in front of me, my hand now urging the truck to stop.

Thankfully, it did.

The truck let loose four successive blasts of the horn, but whatever was controlling me held its ground and my other hand began pointing to the curb on the south side of the street. The driver stared at me in disbelief and then, to my relief, turned on his blinker, and I felt myself step backward to give the truck berth to maneuver over to the curb.

That’s when I saw it, out of the bottom corner of my eye. The glamour stone was glowing ever so faintly, the green light shimmering in the darkness of the early morning. If I could just reach my hand up a few inches, then I could deactivate its alchemy and regain control of my body. But it was as if the stone could read my thoughts, because no sooner had I formulated the thought than the glamour’s pressure around my real body increased exponentially. I struggled against its weight, but found my will being pushed into the back of my mind, leaving me a bystander in my own flesh.

I watched as I walked over to the truck and rapped my knuckle against the door. The driver glared at me through the window, his eyes bloodshot and his hair ruffled, before slowly opening the cab and stepping out onto the street.

“You mind telling me what the fuck you think you’re doing?” he said, spit flying from his mouth.

I wanted to say that I also would like to know the answer to that question, but then my mouth, or rather, Jade’s mouth began to move on its own accord.

“And good morning to you too, sir,” said the voice with a sing-song note. “We’re full in front, so you’ll have to unload here, I’m afraid.”

The man looked at me cross-eyed and I thought he was about to unleash a second tirade at me, but instead, he grumbled something to himself and started walking to the rear of the truck.

I followed him, the glamour pulling me forward like I was a dog on a leash, and watched as he slid the back door of the truck up to reveal crates filled with produce. Including one near the front filled to the brim with green apples. The driver took out a small hand truck and unfolded it on the street, before stacking several crates on top of it and wheeling them away toward the store without another word.

The crate with the green apples remained and my hands quickly snatched it from the truck and then my feet were on the move. It seemed too easy, putting aside the fact that I had completely lost control of my body. Jade walked me south on 4th Avenue for a block and then turned onto 13th Street, continuing on until we reached a 24-hour parking garage, which we entered. The attendant was asleep in the booth, and so we journeyed unimpeded to the back, where a door opened into a dark alleyway. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that we were behind the Trader Joe’s, a smattering of empty crates and other refuse strewn about. Something about this place was familiar, but I couldn’t quite remember what or why.

“You’re welcome, by the way,” said Jade’s voice, before the pressure suddenly subsided and my body reappeared from the beneath the glamour.

A wave of relief washed over me and I looked down to see my hands, my real hands, holding the requested crate of apples. There would be time to deal with what had just happened, but for now, I wanted to take a few moments to savor my success.

But it was a short victory party, because a minute later, I heard the patter of footsteps approaching, and I turned around slowly to see a group of a dozen teenage girls all dressed in black leather jackets with jet black hair and black eyeliner, pleated black skirts, and knee-high black boots emerge from the shadows of the alley.

“You,” said the girl in the middle, who was holding a very long, very sharp, and very glowing knife with a bright white hilt, “are trespassing in our territory.”

It all came back to me in an instant and I could feel my stomach turning itself inside out.

“And you are?” I said, but I already knew the answer, the images of the glowing green scar and the frail old man flashing in my mind.

The girl with the knife smiled.

“We’re the Black Vultures. And you’re about to die.”