Chapter 6: Mechanic's Surprise
The scent of motor oil and concrete dust was a gritty tonic after the cloying, perfumed memory of Jan’s apartment. Leanne stood across the street from ‘Hank’s Custom & Repair,’ a cinderblock bunker tucked between a shuttered laundromat and a pawn shop. The address had been easier to find than she’d expected; a search of property records linked to a ‘Fatima Abaza’ showed a co-ownership on a commercial garage with a ‘Henry Powers.’
“This is a long shot,” Kent muttered, his hands deep in his coat pockets. He looked tired. The haunted, hungry look from yesterday had settled into a grim resignation. “She’s probably just a friend. A normal friend.”
“Jan’s closest confidant,” Leanne corrected, her eyes scanning the roll-up door. It was shut, but a side entrance stood ajar, spilling a rectangle of flickering fluorescent light onto the cracked sidewalk. “Johnny knew us, Kent. That means we get to them eventually. Maybe this is how.”
The sound reached them first, as they crossed the street. Not tools. A voice. A woman’s voice, strained, climbing a peak of pure, raw feeling. It was followed by a lower, guttural groan.
They exchanged a look. Not alarm. A sick, familiar recognition. The same magnetic dread-pull that had drawn them to Casey’s studio window. They moved to the open side door without a word.
The garage was a cathedral of grime and metal. A vintage Mustang sat on jack stands in one bay. In another, under the stark, buzzing lights, a sleek, black motorcycle was up on its central stand. A man—Hank, they presumed—stood behind it, his back to them. He was shirtless, his torso slick with sweat that carved paths through a fine dusting of grease. His jeans were shoved down to his mid-thighs.
Bent over the motorcycle’s fuel tank was Fatima Abaza.
Her voluptuous body was bare from the waist down, her dark, flowing skirt rucked up around her hips. Her face was turned sideways, resting on the cold metal of the gas tank, her eyes screwed shut. Her top, a silky blouse, was open, pushed aside to free her heavy breasts, which swung and jiggled with every brutal thrust of the man behind her.
Hank’s hands, big and grease-blackened even now, gripped the full curve of her hips like he was holding handlebars. He drove into her with a steady, piston-like rhythm, his muscular ass clenching with each deep, seated plunge. The sound was obscenely wet, a rhythmic, slapping suction that echoed off the concrete walls.
“Fuck, Fati, you’re so goddamn tight,” Hank grunted, his voice ragged. “Take it. Take all of it.”
Fatima’s response was a choked, keening cry. “Yes… ya kalb… right there, don’t stop…” Her fingers, delicate and clean against the dirty motorcycle, scrabbled for purchase. Her back arched, pressing her ass harder against his pounding hips. “Harder! I need it… I need to feel you break me…”
He obliged. The pace became punishing, a furious, animal rutting. The motorcycle rocked on its stand, the chrome vibrating. Leanne could see everything: the thick, glistening length of Hank’s cock sheathed in Fatima’s darker, curled flesh, the way her inner lips clung to him each time he pulled back, the slick, creamy evidence of her arousal coating his shaft and balls.
It was raw. It was filthy. It was nothing like the compelled, frantic coupling in Jan’s apartment. This was practiced, hungry, born of deep knowledge and deeper need. It was a private language of sweat and grunts and possession.
Hank leaned over her, biting the nape of her neck. Fatima screamed, her body bowing, her cunt clamping down on him in violent, fluttering pulses. “I’m coming! Allah yastur! I’m coming!” Her orgasm racked her, visibly, from her trembling thighs to her clenched fingers.
It triggered his. With a roar that seemed to shake the tools on the walls, Hank slammed home one final time, his body going rigid as a statue. Leanne saw the muscles in his forearms cord, saw his toes curl inside his work boots. He held himself there, buried to the hilt, pulsing into her in hot, endless jets.
They stayed like that, locked together, panting like wounded animals in the chemical-scented air.
Fatima’s head slowly lifted from the gas tank. Her eyes, dark and furious, opened. They didn’t dart around in shame. They found Leanne and Kent in the doorway immediately, as if she’d known they were there the whole time. Her gaze was not embarrassed. It was annoyed. Profoundly, dangerously inconvenienced.
Hank, still inside her, followed her look. He blinked, his post-coital haze taking a second to clear. “Uh. Hey.” He didn’t move to cover himself or her. He just gave a small, awkward nod. “You guys, uh… customers? We’re kinda closed.”
Fatima pushed herself up, disengaging from him with a wet, intimate sound. She let her skirt fall, a simple, graceful motion that seemed to restore a layer of dignity despite the sweat gleaming on her chest and the semen already leaking down her thigh. She didn’t bother to close her blouse.
“They are not customers,” she said, her voice cold and precise, cutting through the humid air. “They are the reporters. The flies buzzing around the O’Connor shit-heap.” She took a step toward them, and the power in the room shifted. It wasn’t the overwhelming, awe-inspiring flood Jan had unleashed. This was a razor’s edge, a focused, intellectual threat.
Leanne found her voice, trying to project a confidence she didn’t feel. “Ms. Abaza. We just have a few questions about your friend, Jan O’Connor. And about your… affiliation.”
“My affiliation is with my fiancé,” Fatima said, her eyes narrowing. “And with my own peace. Which you are disturbing.” She glanced at Hank. “Love, can you get me a shop towel? And offer our… guests… a beer. They look like they need to sit down.”
Hank, seemingly unperturbed by the strange request, nodded. He pulled his jeans up, buckling them over his still-softening cock, and ambled toward a rusted fridge in the corner. “Miller Lite okay?”
Kent just stared, dumbfounded by the surreal normalcy. “Sure.”
Hank tossed two cold cans to them. Leanne caught hers by instinct, the aluminum shockingly cold in her hand.
Fatima accepted a red shop towel from Hank and wiped between her legs with a detached, clinical efficiency. She then used a clean corner to dab the sweat from her brow and chest before tossing it into a barrel. “You have no idea what you are looking into,” she hissed, finally closing her blouse. “You peeked at a succubus feeding. Jan gave you a show. And now you think you are detectives. You are children poking a hornet’s nest with a stick, convinced the buzzing is a song.”
“We know about the Perpetual Sunrise and the Archimedes Socierty,” Leanne said, popping the tab on her beer. The mundane act felt absurd. “We know about Johnny. He’s a time mage. He knew us from a future where we already know you.”
For the first time, a crack appeared in Fatima’s icy composure. Her eyes flickered. “Johnny spoke to you? Directly?”
“He appeared in Jan’s apartment. Right after she left,” Kent said, taking a long swallow of beer. “He thought he was in the wrong ‘when.’ He told us to forget we saw him. And he said to tell Jan to check her perimeter wards. And to leave the ‘Davenport case’ alone until December.”
Fatima went very still. She looked past them, into the deep shadows pooling in the far corner of the garage, where old transmissions were stacked like forgotten skulls. She gave an almost imperceptible nod.
From those shadows, a shape detached itself.
Cordelia Chace stepped into the light, her movement eerily fluid. She looked like a blonde co-ed who’d wandered into the wrong part of town, but her eyes held a timeless, predatory calm. She had been standing there, watching, all along. The air grew subtly cooler.
“The Davenport case,” Cordelia said, her voice a smooth, pleasant contralto. “That’s a mortal matter. A boring one. Real estate fraud. But if Johnny is splicing timelines to warn about it…” She tilted her head, studying the reporters. “It means your poking has drawn attention to something that should have stayed buried. Attention from parties who find the post-Veil world… deliciously chaotic.”
“What is your interest in this?” Leanne asked.
“As Vivian’s mother,” Cordelia smiled, a flash of perfect, faintly pointed teeth, “I owe Jan a debt for helping my daughter. Part of that debt involves ensuring naïve little mortals don’t get her killed.” She took a step closer. The scent of her, a mix of expensive perfume and something older, like incense ash, washed over them. “You feel brave, with your notepads and your cameras. You feel chosen. You are not chosen. You are noticed.”
Hank handed Fatima a bottle of water and stood beside her, a solid, silent pillar of support. He wasn’t following all the magic talk, but he understood threat. His posture changed, just slightly, ready.
“What’s in the Davenport case?” Kent pressed, ignoring the chilling presence of the succubus.
“A key,” Fatima said abruptly, reluctantly. She seemed to be making a calculation. “Not a real one. A metaphysical construct. A… focus. From the Lodge Incident. It was supposed to be lost. If Johnny is warning about it, it means it wasn’t lost. It was hidden. And your investigation is creating a scent trail leading right to it.”
“A key to what?” Leanne’s heart was hammering.
“To a door that should never be opened,” Cordelia purred. “A door my kind, and worse than my kind, have been looking for since the Veil fell. It doesn’t belong in this reality. Its very presence here is a tear, a weakness.” Her smile vanished. “Jan, in her infinite, chaotic wisdom, likely thought hiding it in plain sight, wrapped in a boring mortal legal dispute, was clever. It seems her brother disagrees.”
The pieces clicked for Leanne with an almost physical sound. “That’s the real story. Not the sex magic. Not the… the feeding. It’s a key. From another world.”
“And you will forget you ever heard that word,” Fatima said, her voice dropping low. She raised a hand. A faint, greenish light began to coalesce around her fingertips, not the radiant aura of Jan’s power, but a tight, intricate pattern of glowing lines and sigils. “This is not an Exposure. This is a surgical strike. A memory edit. It will not feel good. It will feel like a migraine being born in your skull. But you will walk out of here and you will remember only that you had a nice chat with a mechanic and his girlfriend. You will drop this.”
Leanne took a step back. “No.”
“It is for your protection.”
“Like Jan ‘protected’ us?” Kent spat, his jaded anger flaring. “We’re already in it. Johnny knew us. You can’t un-ring that bell.”
The green light around Fatima’s fingers pulsed. Her face was a mask of reluctant resolve. “I can try.”
From the shadows of the open doorway, a new voice, young and trembling with effort, cut through the tension.
“Stop.”
Vivian Chace stood there, one hand braced against the doorframe as if for strength. Her red hair was a mess, her eyes wide with fear. “Fati, don’t. Cordy, you promised. No more… scorched earth.”
“They are a vector, little bird,” Cordelia said, her tone softening only slightly.
“And if you scramble their brains, what then?” Vivian took a shaky step inside. “Their editor knows they’re on this story. Their notes are somewhere. You make them forget, and you just create a new mystery—two reporters with amnesia. That brings more people. It’s what… it’s what he would look for. A anomaly.”
She was talking about the key. About whatever wanted it.
Fatima hesitated. The green light flickered.
Hank looked at Vivian, then at Fatima’s tormented face. “Babe,” he said softly. “The kid’s got a point. You can’t fix everything by burning it down.”
The silence stretched. The smell of sex and oil and cold beer hung in the air.
Fatima lowered her hand. The magical light winked out. She looked exhausted. “Fine.” She pointed a finger at Leanne and Kent. “But you listen. The Davenport case is a property dispute over a storage locker. You will find nothing of interest there. You will stop looking for Jan. You will stop looking for me. You will leave Vivian and her shop alone. You will go back to your little paper and you will write about Bigfoot sightings and celebrity divorces.”
“Or what?” Leanne challenged, emboldened by Vivian’s intervention.
Fatima’s smile was thin and cruel. “Or the next time you interrupt me,” she said, her gaze drifting meaningfully to the still-warm motorcycle, “I won’t be on the receiving end. And I won’t be nearly as gentle as my fiancé. I will use magic to make you fuck each other until your skin bleeds and your voices give out. And then I will leave you that way for the cops to find. Do you understand?”
The graphic, specific threat landed with more force than any vague warning about monsters. Leanne believed her.
Kent nodded slowly, defeated. “We understand.”
“Good.” Fatima turned her back on them, dismissing them utterly. “Hank, the clutch cable on the Ninja is still sticking.”
“Right. On it, boss.”
Cordelia melted back into the shadows, a final, silent warning. Vivian lingered for a moment, giving the reporters a look of profound, apologetic sorrow before she too slipped away.
Leanne and Kent stood in the garage, holding their half-finished beers, the sounds of normal life—a wrench turning, Fatima’s soft instruction to Hank—filling the space where cosmic threats had just hung.
They walked out into the failing afternoon light. The door shut firmly behind them.
Kent drained his beer and crushed the can. “A key,” he muttered.
Leanne stared at the crumpled aluminum in her hand, the cheap beer bitter on her tongue. The visceral memory of what they’d just witnessed—the raw coupling, the threat, the fear in Vivian’s eyes—was already hardening into something else in her mind: data.
“Davenport,” she said. “We have a name.”
“She said to leave it alone.”
“Johnny said to leave it alone until December,” Leanne corrected, a wild, reckless light igniting in her blue eyes. “He didn’t say never. He gave us a timeline.” She tossed her can into a overflowing city bin. “We just need to be more careful. And we need to find out who or what ‘Davenport’ is before December.”
She started walking, her pace quickening with purpose. Kent watched her go for a moment, the weary cynic warring with the man who had finally seen proof of the impossible. With a long, exhausted sigh, he followed. The hornet’s nest was buzzing, and against all sense, they were climbing the tree to get a better look.
The hornet’s nest was buzzing, and against all sense, they were climbing the tree to get a better look.
Back inside the garage, the moment the door clicked shut, Fatima’s composure shattered. She snatched her phone from a cluttered workbench, her thumbs flying across the screen. Hank watched her, wiping his hands on a fresh towel. “That bad, huh?”
“Worse,” she spat. The phone rang once, twice.
Jan’s cheerful, muffled voice answered, competing with public address announcements. “Fati! You’ll never believe the hideous pink streamers I found for Rebecca’s shower. They’re perfect.”
“Shut up and listen,” Fatima hissed, pressing the phone to her ear. “Your idiot brother just paid the reporters a visit. He spliced into their timeline like a drunk stumbling through a stained-glass window.”
A pause. “Johnny? He’s not due back until Thursday.”
“He was early. Or late. He thought they already knew everything. He told them to leave the Davenport case alone until December.”
The line went so silent Fatima thought it had disconnected. Then, a low, heartfelt, “Fuck.”
“Yes. Fuck.” Fatima paced, her heels clicking on the oil-stained concrete. “You are now officially not the most careless member of the O’Connor family. Congratulations. Your trophy is a pair of mortal journalists who now know the name of the artifact you hid inside a fucking real estate scam.”
Jan’s voice lost all its playfulness. It became sharp, cold, and utterly focused. “Where are they now?”
“Gone. I threatened them with a memorable death. Cordelia loomed. Vivian pleaded. They left. But they have the name, Jan. The scent is in their noses.”
“I need to move it. Tonight.” Rustling sounds came over the line, like Jan was already gathering her things. “I stuffed it in a locker at the Davenport unit because who the hell would look there? It’s a boring civil suit over unpaid storage fees.”
“A civil suit two reporters are now investigating. Your brother gave them a deadline. They will dig.”
“I know.” A car door slammed. Godfrey’s happy bark was faint in the background. “I’m taking the puppy and heading down to the Dark Market. I need a new hiding place, something warded against mortal snoops and demonic sniffers. Tell Mara to stall the legal proceedings. Use any lever she has.”
“And the reporters?”
Another beat of silence. “If they’re smart, they’ll chase Davenport. If they’re lucky, they’ll find nothing but paperwork. If they’re neither…” Jan’s voice trailed off. “Then they’ll find James Murphy. And he will eat them alive. I’m not cleaning up that mess.”
The call ended. Fatima stared at the phone, then at Hank’s concerned face. “She’s going to the waterfront. To the Market.”
Hank shrugged, grabbing a wrench. “Want me to go with?”
“No. You have a clutch cable to fix.” She leaned against the bike, the cold metal seeping through her blouse. “We wait. And we hope those fools are at least a little bit smart.”
Leanne and Kent did not feel smart. They felt dirty, used, and thrillingly, dangerously close. They sat in Leanne’s car, a battered sedan that smelled of old coffee and desperation, the engine idling just to power the heat.
“Davenport,” Kent said, staring at his laptop screen. The blue glow lit his tired face. “It’s a civil case.Davenport vs. Chicagoland Storage Solutions. A dispute over unit L-17 at a facility on West Belmont. Plaintiff claims the contents are family heirlooms. Defendant says fees haven’t been paid in eighteen months and wants to auction it off.”
“Family heirlooms,” Leanne repeated, her voice flat. “A metaphysical key from another dimension.”
“Hidden in plain sight,” Kent nodded. “Just like she said. It’s genius, in a completely insane way.” He scrolled. “But it’s a dead end for us. The case is sealed while they mediate. We can’t get near the locker without a court order or breaking in.”
Leanne drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The memory of Fatima’s threat—the vivid, gruesome image of fucking until they bled—was fading, replaced by the sharper, more professional sting of a blocked path. “So we can’t get to the key. And Jan’s friends have made it abundantly clear they won’t talk.” She turned to him, her blue eyes glinting in the dashboard light. “But what about someone who isn’t her friend?”
Kent looked up from the screen. “Who?”
“The Dock Incident. You pulled the arrest report. The most prominent name was James Murphy, the architect. A pillar of the community, caught in an orgy.” She leaned closer, her intensity palpable. “Jan’s magic caused that, right? That was her… her ‘Power of Exposure.’ She humiliated him. Ruined his reputation, even if the charges were dropped.”
“So you think he’ll be eager to chat?” Skepticism dripped from his words.
“I think he’ll be eager for revenge. Or at least, to warn people about her. He’s a victim. A normal person who got tangled up in this.” She put the car in drive. “If her friends won’t tell us the truth, maybe her enemy will.”
James Murphy’s architectural firm occupied the top three floors of a steel-and-glass tower overlooking the river. The reception area was a study in minimalist cool: pale wood, brushed steel, abstract sculptures that probably cost more than Leanne’s yearly salary. The air smelled of espresso and money.
The receptionist, a man with sculpted eyebrows and a headset, regarded them with polite disdain. “Mr. Murphy is in a design summit. He is completely unavailable.”
Leanne placed her Chicago World News press card on the slick desk. It looked laughably cheap. “Tell him we’re here about the Dock Incident. And about Jan O’Connor.”
The receptionist’s polish cracked for a microsecond. His eyes flickered. He recovered, his smile growing colder. “One moment.”
He spoke softly into his headset. A long minute passed.Then he nodded. “Mr. Murphy can give you five minutes. Eleventh floor. Conference room B.”
The elevator doors opened onto a corridor of silent, carpeted power. Conference Room B was a glass box with a stunning view of the city. James Murphy stood at the window, his back to them. He was tall, broad-shouldered, his suit tailored to emphasize a physique that didn’t come from a desk. He turned as they entered.
He was handsome in a severe, carved way. Dark hair, professionally cut. Wire-rim glasses framed eyes of glacial gray. There was no warmth in his face, only a calculated, assessing coldness.
“Reporters,” he said. His voice was smooth, devoid of inflection. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Leanne blinked. “You have?”
“Of course.” He gestured to two chairs, but remained standing, a power move. “You’ve been bothering Miss O’Connor and her… associates. It was only a matter of time before you stumbled onto the more public collateral damage. Me.”
“The Dock Incident was public indecency,” Kent said, not sitting down. “Multiple participants. You were the only one named in our paper’s police blotter.”
A muscle twitched in Murphy’s jaw. “A regrettable lapse. A moment of… collective hysteria. The charges were dismissed.”
“Because of her,” Leanne pushed. “Because of Jan O’Connor’s magic.”
Murphy’s gaze could have frozen lava. He didn’t deny it. He didn’t confirm it. He simply said, “What is it you want?”
“The truth. What happened that night? What is she?”
He walked slowly to the head of the conference table, placing his palms flat on the polished surface. “Miss O’Connor is a contagion. A societal poison dressed in bohemian thrift-store chic and a smile. What she did on the docks was not an isolated event. It is her nature. She corrodes order. She breaks down decency. She makes a mockery of every rule that keeps civilization from collapsing into animalistic squalor.”
His words were crisp, precise, and venomous. This wasn’t the anger of a humiliated man. This was the cold, clean hatred of a zealot.
“You’re talking about her like she’s a disease,” Kent observed.
“I am talking about her as a symptom. A symptom of a larger sickness that believes might—magical, biological, or otherwise—makes right.” He finally looked at them, his gray eyes boring into theirs. “There are those of us who believe in a different principle.Order. Logic.Science. The meticulous application of human reason to perfect our world, to scrub it clean of such… chaotic infestations.”
Leanne’s reporter instinct prickled. This wasn’t just bitterness. This was a manifesto. “Who is ‘us’?”
A thin, icy smile touched his lips. “Concerned citizens. You’ve seen what she can do. You’ve felt it, I imagine.The compulsion. The loss of control.” His eyes flicked between them, missing nothing. “It’s revolting, isn’t it? To have your own will stripped from you. To be reduced to a… a animal in a breeding pen.”
Leanne felt a flush creep up her neck, remembering the helpless, consuming need on Jan’s rug, the frantic, soulless coupling.
“We offer a different path,” Murphy continued. “A world where such things are not just illegal, but impossible. Where the playing field is leveled. Where science provides the answers, not superstition.” He straightened up. “My five minutes are up. I have a city to help build.”
“That’s it?” Leanne stood. “You call her a poison and then clam up? What is ‘The Consortium’?”
For the first time, real emotion flashed in James Murphy’s eyes. It was a spark of pure, unadulterated fury, quickly banked. “Where did you hear that term?”
“Around.”
He walked to the door and held it open. “Leave.Now. Do not come back. Do not contact me again.”
“Or what?” Kent challenged, echoing Leanne’s words from the garage.
Murphy’s smile returned, colder than the Chicago wind. “Or you will learn that there are far more efficient ways to silence a story than sex magic. We have scalpels for tumors. And we are not afraid to cut.”
They were in the elevator before the full weight of his words settled. Kent leaned against the wall. “He’s not a victim. He’s a soldier.”
“He’s part of something,” Leanne breathed, her mind racing.“The Consortium. He confirmed it just by reacting. Science versus magic. Order versus chaos.” The elevator doors opened to the lobby. “He’s the enemy the Abaza woman was talking about. The one with scalpels.”
They pushed through the revolving doors, back into the gritty, real world. The wind bit through their coats. Leanne looked at Kent, a new, grim determination solidifying in her gut. They had two sides now. A chaotic, sex-magic wielding redhead hiding a cosmic key. And a cold, ordered architect who wanted to scour her from the earth with science.
And they, two reporters from a joke paper, were standing squarely in the middle.
“We need to find that key,” Leanne said, her voice barely audible over the wind. “Before either of them does.”
Across the city, in a derelict warehouse district that smelled of rotting fish and diesel fuel, Jan O’Connor stood before a seemingly blank brick wall. Godfrey sat patiently at her side, his service animal vest looking incongruous in the gloom. She held her compact, the mirror not showing her reflection, but a shimmering, green pulsing light.
“Okay, pup,” she whispered, her breath fogging in the cold air. “Look sharp. The Market’s not big on strangers.”
She pressed her palm against a brick that felt no different from the others. It shimmered, and the wall became a dank, misty alley lined with stalls that shouldn’t exist. The sounds of strange languages, bartering, and things that slithered wrapped around her. She stepped through, the key’s hidden presence in her backpack feeling suddenly, terrifyingly heavy.