To date, there are approximately 620,476 people in Brinehaven. Of those, experts estimate that 615,528 of them are classified as mundanes; otherwise ordinary folk living in a city that does not shy away from its occult, arcane and esoteric entrenchments. Indeed, just under 5,000 classify themselves as mesmers, artificers, witches, and the likes. Of those 5,000, fate forced two together: a hexling and a demonic contractor. But both are far from happy.
PROLOGUE: ARBITER'S LICENSE
GARLAND HEIGHTS, CYPRUS ALLEY—OCTOBER 12th, 1992 | EARLY MORNING
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Ten hours ago one Professor Sandra Mathers reached out to Leroy Waters.
He was sitting in his apartment, half-asleep, when his wall-mounted phone rang, and she explained her dilemma.
Something about a stolen book on sigilmasonry, a 2nd or 3rd edition of a volume that was particularly dangerous in the hands of someone who studied the Arts. Or, in the hands of novices making an attempt at learning them. According to Professor Mathers, it was taken directly from the Brinehaven College of the Arts.
Leroy, in turn, asked her plainly what the problem was with having something like that on the streets and regretted it soon after asking. He knew in principle why it was a problem, and he should've known better than to invite a lecture.
"Sigilmasonry is one thing, Mr. Waters. A delicate, intricate form of the Arts, which requires a great degree of concentration and an equally as great attention to detail," she explained. "As you well know, it is the sigilmasons from our college who maintain the wards around this city, around our monuments, our homes—"
"You know any that fortify apartments for cheap?" he asked, voice somewhat grainy through the phone.
"What?"
"Go on."
"As I was saying," she continued. "The book that was taken is one that explores a lesser known branch of sigilmasonry—skinmasonry—which is an order of magnitude more dangerous. Volatile, unseemly, and especially so for this volume, which offers insights into—..."
Leroy stopped listening. He stared out of his large, oblong window, coffee in hand, phone tucked neatly into the crook of his neck. It was early. His view from the 3rd floor of his apartment complex offered him a window-sized approximation of Cyprus Alley, Garland Height's ugliest stepson of a district.
The buildings were mismatched and stacked on one another, a mixture of brick and concrete and wood, and nearly every window was covered by black iron grating. A cluster of urbanity, as charming as it was crowded, and as lively as it was bothersome at the crack of dawn. Somehow, it was still dark. It was always dark in Brinehaven, no matter where you were in the city.
Always foggy. Always on the verge of raining. And even in the shadows of the morning, there was neon. Dim blues and teals and azures, advertising pleasure houses and gambling dens next to well-intentioned alchemists and innovative artificers.
"Uh-huh. Heard of them, even knew a few guys who got some skinmason sigils," Leroy muttered. "Never worked the right way. Look, do you have any names? Anyone you can point me to?"
"A description, and a name, gifted to us by the very student who took it—"
"You as in the college, or? What, you sick the blackjackets on him, haul him to Sterling Yard for questioning?" Leroy asked, half-joking.
"Mr. Waters. If we wanted the Occult and Civic Authority involved, I would not be having this conversation with you," she clarified.
"So you know where the book is." Leroy stated.
"Yes," she answered.
"Why'd the kid steal it?"
"Mr. Waters," she began, exasperated. Leroy smiled at that. "The student in question will not be named. He has been dealt with, and if you must know, his thievery earned him a prompt removal from our institution. Moreover, he will not be necessary for what we are asking of you, for under the scrutiny of our questioning," she stressed. "He revealed to us that he sold it to a tattoo artist in the South End. An Adam Rakowski."
Leroy wondered why it was so important to her that he know they were capable of handling their students, when the very reasoning for his hiring was due to their inability to handle their students. Her tone was holier-than-thou and reserved to a fault; like she couldn't allow herself to express anger, only mild frustration made it sound like she was on the verge of issuing a scolding. It reminded him why he never attended college in his younger years.
"How much?" Leroy asked.
"Excuse me?"
"You want me to get the book back for you, fine. Need a fair price and an arbitration note with your signature and a statement of intent. I'll take the money and the note after. Called me on short notice, no in-person meeting, no consultation. Going rate for that kind of busy work is a grand, two if you want it back by the end of the day," Leroy said, "and we can add another five hundred for hazard pay, since you're sending me to the fucking South End."
The line was silent for a long while, and right as Leroy parted his lips to speak again, she answered. "Very well."
Like music to his ears. What an upsell.
"The book. What's it called?"
She told him and ended the call.
Leroy made for his room, threw on a set of utility pants, a long-sleeved black turtleneck, and carefully attached a gun harness to his torso, removing a heavyset handgun from the pillow of his unmade bed and placing it into the nook of the harness. He grabbed a brown leather jacket off of the floor, tossed it on, and put on a checkered flat cap on his way out of the door. He gave a final cursory glance toward the window. Outside, the fog had grown thicker.
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It smelled of ink, blood, and body odor.
Leroy Waters hated tattoo shops, and he hated that people would so casually mark up the skin their mother gave them with anything other than scars. Scars were earned—and even if they were ugly and in the worst of places, they were respectable. Everyone inside wore self-inflicted scars, made not of scar tissue, but of ink.
He stood in the door frame for a long moment, his broad shoulders and taller frame not taking kindly to the smaller entrance.
Leroy recognized his target as soon as he walked into the tattoo shop: a scrawny, lanky man in a sleeveless tee shirt who wore his hair slicked back. Just about matched the description he was given, and he sat at the far end of the room tattooing a woman’s back.
“Adam Rakowski?” Leroy asked, his voice already tired.
The man, no older than thirty-something, glanced towards the door, brows folding in what Leroy imagined to be some odd mixture of uncertainty and annoyance. “You want a walk in, you gotta’ wait,” he said.
Two other tattooists shifted their awareness to Leroy as he stepped into the shop, and the receptionist, a younger woman, who might’ve been pretty if not for her excessive, gothic makeup, smiled at him. He pursed his lips in the way that one might when suffering through an unintended greeting on a sidewalk, or in a subway, or at the airport, and proceeded along towards Adam.
There were mirrors and neon signs and sheets of flash along the walls, and all of these things together created an echo chamber of reflections. Leroy saw how his wrinkles set under the neon in particular, how his salt and pepper hair and beard were now more salt than pepper, and how his brown eyes seemed more black.
People often told him getting old was a privilege, a blessing, and something to look forward to. Especially in Brinehaven. Making it to fifty-two-years-old was no small feat for a man in his line of work, but as his attention shifted to the punkish Adam Rakowski, he set his jaw in envy. Here was a man in the prime of his youth, covered in tattoos, no, in unearned scars, who looked like he hadn’t lifted a weight in his life.
“Man, I said you have to wait, I’m busy here,” Adam said, removing his tattoo gun from the woman’s back and twisting to dip it into a vat of ink.
“Miss,” Leroy began, tapping her on the shoulder. “Need you to leave. Right now.”
The woman looked up, dumbfounded, and then towards Adam. Leroy stood idle and stared at her until she got up and made towards the door, murmuring something low to the receptionist. She, at least, had the sensibility to listen. Leroy had a hunch about Adam, and convinced himself that Adam did not have the sensibility to listen.
As such, he skipped the step of introductions and explanations, as he often did, and used his favorite technique, aptly dubbed `no forgiveness, no permission`, and lurched toward Adam, grabbing him by the back of the head and slamming his face into the leather tattoo table.
“What the fuc—” The needle was still running. Adam hadn’t turned off his machine, Leroy hadn’t given him time to. Leroy grabbed it, stray splotches of black ink peppering his face as he stabilized his grip around it, and stabbed it into Adam’s hand.
His scream was shrill, loud, and whiny.
The surrounding tattoo artists stood up and yelled profanities, reaching for the nearest blunt objects. One picked up a chair and the other grabbed a vase. They both crossed towards Leroy, demanding that he release Adam. The clientele, fearful and shocked in equal parts, made for the door and out onto the street, while the shop’s receptionist began scrambling for the wall mounted phone, spinning its dials.
As Adam’s coworkers neared, Leroy looked at them, then to Adam, and jammed the tattoo gun further into his hand. He cried out once more, and the coworkers, understanding Leroy’s warning, stopped their advance. “You a sigilmason?” asked Leroy.
“What the fuck!? What the fuck! Wh-.. let me go, man, shit, stop!” Adam whined.
“Sigilmasons, Adam, make sigils. Those sigils make wards, barriers, ritual perimeters,” Leroy continued, pressing the weight of his body along Adam’s back. He grabbed him hard by the skull with his free hand. “Your shop is lacking in all of those things. I walked right in. And there are other sigilmasons, Adam—skinmasons—who don't make any wards, nor barriers. Just symbols of power on the skin. Same as the stupid tattoos you put on people, but better. Useful. And as far as I can tell, Adam, you are not a fucking skinmason. You’re a tattoo artist who found a book that doesn’t belong to you. Where is it?”
“You’re insane, I—” Before Adam could finish, Leroy dug the tattoo gun around within the open wound of Adam’s palm. Blood and ink spilled out onto the leather table, rotting the air with a metallic, blood-iron stench and the smell of chemically processed coloring.
The receptionist tried to contain her horror, and spoke as calmly as one could, given the circumstances. Leroy suspected she was informing the Brinehaven Civic and Occult Authority. In five to ten minutes, they'd be sending out a unit, and a pair of constables would be at the door.
“Fuck! Okay, okay, okay! It’s--it’s, there’s a um, a door, behind me, to the right, yeah, and it goes upstairs, and there’s a room, okay? We all share an apartment up there, and a—
“The book, Adam.” Leroy, at last, removed the tattoo gun and threw it onto the ground, twisting Adam around and shoving him into a nearby wall and into a set of glass-framed pictures. “Tell me where the book is, and this stops.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Floorboards! Floorboards, floorboards, it’s under the floorboards, under the coffee table, there’s a rug, it’s under that,” Adam said, panic speeding up each word, making his vowels and consonants breathy and timid.
In a swift motion, Leroy grabbed him by the collar and threw him into the leather tattoo table, which rolled on its dollied wheels and crashed into Adam’s two coworkers.
One of them dropped the vase, the other dropped the chair. They all groaned. Leroy pointed a stern finger at all of them, wearing a warning on his face.
“Gonna’ go upstairs now. Don’t follow me.”
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The apartment was dirty and reeked of cat piss and cigarettes.
The lights were on, but dim from years of use, and the sizable shared space was covered in movie posters and framed vinyls.
An awfully skinny black cat brushed up against Leroy’s leg and nipped at the utility pants that cover his ankles. He picked it up with one hand and placed it onto a kitchen table covered with further paraphernalia: heroin spoons, bongs, and half-empty beer bottles.
The black cat yowled at him from the kitchen table. Somehow, the checkered flat cap he wore on his head hadn't been lopsided from his encounter with Adam, and Leroy tipped it at the moaning feline. “I’ll get to you in a sec’.”
Per Adam’s instructions, Leroy crossed towards the den of the shared space. He tossed aside the dainty coffee table with a single hand, and whipped the rug over his shoulder.
The hidden floorboard was obvious. It was so poorly hidden, in fact, that Leroy’s sensibilities told him it was some sort of trap. But a secondary glance around the apartment confirmed to him that Adam and his coworkers were not the capable, conniving sort. They were addicts and slobs and horrible pet parents, and all of them probably deserved another tattoo gun through the hand and a few punches to the head.
Leroy lifted the floorboard and found a cache of money, pills, and the aforementioned book.
He picked it up, and realized that by the weight of it alone, the thing had probably been worth considerably more than what he was being paid to return it to its rightful owner. Twenty years ago, he would have sold it, stolen the money, and taken the pills without even second-guessing what they were. But he was older now, and liked to think he was wiser.
He opened the book to verify its contents and found that, while the brown cover was without a title, the inside read A Treatise on Hexological Skinmasonry; Applied Uses on Organic Tissue.
Adam Rakowski, tattoo artist, probably couldn’t even have said that outloud, but as Leroy flipped the pages, he saw notes, scribbles, and profanities in a handwriting that was certainly not cursive and barely legible. If the book was worth anything, its value was just cut in half. Leroy sighed and placed the book in his heavy and old brown-leather jacket, and made for the kitchen towards the yowling and hungry cat.
Footsteps approached. Leroy stopped and turned, exhaling sharply as Adam returned with his two coworkers.
Without so much as a single word, Adam put his hand forward, and Leroy realized where his supposed wisdom had fallen short.
The job seemed so clean-cut, so foolproof, that he’d hardly considered that a tattoo artist was, in fact, capable of performing some botched form of skinmasonry.
Professor Sandra Mathers would've told him such a thing was outside the realm of possibility. But there Adam stood, a glowing, red sigil on his opposite forearm that Leroy failed to notice during his impromptu interrogation. He thought that it must have been another tattoo. Another unearned scar.
Adam’s veins darkened and bulged beneath his skin, and the skin next to his skinmasoned mark paled, as if the life was being sucked out from beneath it and powering the sigil. He recalled Professor Mathers using the words volatile and unseemly during their conversation that morning; both seemed apt.
Adam groaned and steadied his forearm. He held his hand towards Leroy.
A blast of translucent and wispy red energy lurched out from Adam's hand, misfiring and hitting the ceiling. A reddish aura attached itself to a small radius of the ceiling. Suddenly, it collapsed, towards Leroy, as if the debris itself was chasing him.
Leroy rolled onto the ground, letting out a huff. He searched, surveyed--looked for something, anything in his immediate surroundings.
The rug. It was still on the ground where he'd thrown it. He grabbed hold of it and draped it over his shoulder. A grunt left him just as the red-soaked clusters of stray piping and wood slammed against him; making use of a rug as a shield was a Hail Mary at best.
The two coworkers advanced, feet heavy, fists hungry.
Leroy tugged, once again, and the rug snapped, sending the piping and clusters of wood towards them. It disoriented them just enough for Leroy to stand up and bound towards the table, where the cat meowed and yowled incessantly.
Leroy grabbed it and threw it towards one of the two coworkers. The cat lashed out, clawing the man with its front and back nails—untrimmed, of course. He yelled out and tripped over himself, hitting the floorboards with a thud.
The other coworker proceeded towards Leroy, fist raised, arm cocked back, shoulder primed for a punch.
Leroy hit him first and struck him in the throat, hard, with calloused knuckles. The man was sent onto the ground, and Leroy soccer kicked him in the head with a steel-toed boot. He wouldn't be getting up from that.
Adam prepared himself for another blast, sigil swelling with a deep crimson, the veins in his forearm bulging once again.
Leroy denied him this. He reached under his leather jacket and removed a handgun, whipping it out from the leather harness he wore to shoot Adam in the chest. Adam fell onto his back, writhing, squealing.
A second shot was fired into his forehead. Brain matter spilled onto the floor, and Leroy shuffled his gun back into his harness, face placid, breath steady.
His attention turned to the black cat, who had just finished ruining the face the man it had been thrown at. It purred and walked over to the man's ankle, biting at it.
Leroy paced over to the cat, and with his free hand, reached out to it. "What's to say you and I go and grab a bite, and I can figure out your name by the time we get back to mine? I'm thinking Foot.”
With all of the violence, Leroy was surprised that he hadn't heard any screams from below. He surmised that the receptionist was long gone by now. Another pair of footsteps were approaching from the tight stairwell. There weren't any other coworkers to account for, which only meant one thing: the receptionist's call from earlier went through.
Leroy knew who was going to come up, and it was no reason to panic, and even if he didn't know who was going to arrive, something more incessant demanded his attention.
His eyes trailed towards the hole in the ceiling.
Water gushed out on account of the new piping malfunction. Leroy raised a hand to the side of his neck, feeling a set of connected, articulated bumps where his skin was marked by a symbol he hated. An unearned scar and an unearned power. Loathsome, wicked, and vile. It whispered sweet nothings to him.
The room grew cold, and the cat lurched away from him as his brown eyes stared absently into the newly formed puddle from the pipe leak. His knuckles whitened around the handle of his gun, and he gripped it, hard, trying to break himself free from the discordant voice that only he could hear.
Use me.
His head turned, and his whole body swiveled as another pair of footsteps came to a halt at the stairwell. He fired on instinct. Leroy didn't hit anyone; only a cabinet and the glass behind it.
On his neck, the symbol alit in a dim, azure glow, and the water in the nearby puddle swayed until it froze.
Leroy’s gaze softened and he lowered his gun.
Two shell-shocked Civic & Occult Authority constables stood idle with their standard-issue handguns, their black and buttoned uniforms half hidden by darkness and the dim lights overhead. The metal plaques on their shirt collars designated them as Constable Briggs and Constable Heathcliff.
“Put your hands behind your back,” Constable Briggs said, moving closer to Leroy, finger on the trigger. “Drop your weapon and deactivate whatever ritual it is you’re doing.”
Constable Heathcliff remained at the door, gun still trained on Leroy.
Leroy searched the room with his gaze, looking for the cat. It was hiding, just barely peeking out behind the coffee table Leroy had thrown earlier.
Constable Briggs steeled his resolve with a set jaw. “I said—”
“Wallet, left coat pocket," Leroy said calmly.
They were all bark, even if they liked to think they had a bite. A lucky thing, too. Any constables worth their weight in salt would've emptied their clips the moment Leroy fired, but these two were green. Inexperienced. Scared, in their own way.
He could see how their nerves were making their steps shaky, how they held their guns with fear instead of tact, how their faces paled at the scene: a dead tattoo artist with a jerry-rigged sigil and a pale vein-swollen forearm, an unconscious tattoo artist with a broken face, and another one covered cat scratches deep enough to require reconstructive surgery.
Blood, brain matter, bullets, all gift-wrapped by a neglected apartment that somehow looked just as bad as when he'd walked in.
Slowly, Leroy removed the gun from the inside of his coat and placed it onto the table in front of him. He closed his eyes, exhaled, and made a large effort to ignore the cold and dissonant whispers in his head.
The constables exchanged a cautionary glance, and Leroy, hands in the air, urged them to get on with it, nodding his head as if to say, ‘go on’. With great reluctance, Constable Briggs stepped forward. Constable Heathcliff fell in closer, stepping away from the stairwell. He inched closer to Leroy whilst his partner retrieved the wallet, pressing the barrel to Leroy’s head.
“You’re—” Constable Briggs stared at an identification card on the inside of his wallet.
ARBITER’S LICENSE | A0902-82
LEROY JOSEPH WATERS
31 LEFTSHED LN UNIT 201
D/O/B: 09-02-1940 SEX: M
ISSUED: 10-17-1982 HGT: 6’1”
EXP: 10-17-1992
HEREBY CERTIFIED BY THE OFFICE OF
THE MINISTER OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF BRINEHAVEN
“Leroy,” Leroy said, leaving his gun, and wallet, on the table.
He stood up slowly and crossed the room towards the cat, holding out a hand to it. The cat sniffed it and meowed. Constable Heathcliff, who held the gun to Leroy’s head only seconds ago, hardly moved, too stunned by Leroy’s brazenness to issue anything close to an order or a demand. “And I have five days before that expires.”
P.S - This post-chapter note was made after going through and proofreading this initial entry several times over. In earlier drafts, there was a lot of issues with past/present tense slipping, which by now I hope is fully addressed and fixed. Many thanks to all of the commenters who took the time to point out those errors, I am always on the lookout for edit suggestions!
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