VenCo(13)
There was a steady clicking of keys and small chatter as the Bookers scoured lists, profiles, directories, and databases, searching for the missing witch.
4
Player Two Enters the Game
Jay Christos lived in what some people would call a house and what other people would call a compound, depending on which end of the economic scale you inhabited. The main building was a twenty-thousand-square-foot bungalow that poured out onto the acreage like an oil spill. The grounds were coated with tamed Bermuda grass, buzz cut, then sprayed to ensure no dot of riotous colour, no foreign weed dare push through. Even the insects avoided the lawn.
The drive was sliced off from the road by steel gates, a full three feet above code, but no one had challenged him yet. Besides, he didn’t have any real neighbours out here in the California desert, only dirt and scrub for hundreds of miles.
An indulgently long and narrow in-ground pool had been dug into the dust so that Jay could do his laps. A cedar platform surrounded it, scattered with several chaise lounges for sunbathing that no one had ever used. Different varieties of cacti stood like bristly thumbs at the far end of the deck, and beyond them was the tallest structure on the grounds: a metal pole that held the dishes necessary for a high-speed internet connection that allowed access to streaming channels in forty-seven languages, all of which he understood.
The house was furnished in a style that was minimal and masculine. Dark wood, black leather, steel accents. His main bathroom had a Japanese toilet with LED lights, overlooking the countryside through a glass wall. Most people would be uncomfortable with that kind of exposure, but Jay liked looking out over his kingdom while taking a shit. A huge aquarium acted as a dividing wall between the living room and the kitchen in an otherwise open floor plan. That there was so much water used for leisure in his desert home was itself a flex. The aquarium alone required a cleaning specialist to drive out once a month for maintenance. When the cleaner, wearing a scuba suit, was in the tank, Jay retreated to his study. He didn’t like people in his home, and he certainly didn’t like having to make small talk. He’d chosen his new weekly cleaning lady partly because she was mute.
Only one other creature besides the master, and the fish, lived in this house: a small, grey, hairless cat named Benedict, after the patron saint of holiness of mind. The lithe animal was delightfully independent and smug about it, and, like his master, he was a relentless hunter.
Jay had been around for a long time—a very long time. He didn’t look anywhere near as old as he actually was, which made him feel good, valued, rare. He liked being valued. He loved being rare. He took intense care of his body, swimming for two hours every day, practicing yoga in the morning and evening, consuming nothing but lean meat and sweet fruits, with gallons of springwater he had flown in from Southern Italy monthly. His skincare regime was eccentric and involved bribing customs agents twice annually. Every night before bed he oiled and braided his long black hair to preserve the curls he’d developed in childhood, back when boys wore pantaloons. He was his own greatest achievement. Well, almost.
He was proud of other things he had accomplished in this world, even though, by and large, people had forgotten he was responsible. Jay Christos’s name was not in the history books or in the economics texts. He had never been honored for displacing the old women and story holders from the land, paving the way for the rise of capitalism. He did not have a monument on Wall Street or a chair named after him at Harvard Business School. But he knew what he had done, and most of the time that was enough. He had amassed a fortune over the years. When one doesn’t believe they will die, they make different decisions, play a longer game in the market.
The witch’s dream came to Jay when he was in the bath, listening to Monster Magnet on surround sound, his eyes closed and his wet hair hanging over the edge of the tub, so long it almost reached the heated floor.
It was an old trick, this ability to link to a target’s dreaming, one he’d learned from a witch who had ripped into his chest and left him surrounded by fire, a witch who had taken his heart long before she almost pierced it. The only problem was that, try as hard as he liked, he couldn’t link in real time, the visions coming to him late—sometimes by a few hours, sometimes a few days. All these years and all these resources and he still had to wait for the visions to appear, like a peasant without a satellite dish. Even worse, his reception was spotty, jumping in places and moving at irregular speeds—now slow motion, now comically sped up.
“Oh, come on,” he moaned, eyes still closed. “Alexa—turn music off!”
In the silence he tried to focus. Trees, fire.
“Have you pulled together the coven, little bird?” he asked in the echo of his bathroom thousands of miles away, even though he knew it wasn’t true. The tension in his shoulders told him she was one step closer, which was too close. He was kept alive and motivated by a singular purpose—to keep the witches from assembling, to keep the old guard safe and prosperous and male. But this witch—the bitch in Salem, of all obvious places—had gotten further than he’d expected, and he would not fail.
He focused harder, trying to adjust the sound and the contrast. Was that . . . bees? The film skipped to a postcard. He let the scene run, catching a glimpse of the front and back of the card.
“Greetings from Toronto!”