Orcs smelled like moldy cheese.

Even if I couldn’t see under their thinly-veiled illusion charms to their true faces, I would be able to smell them from across a room because they reeked of cheese. Every race had its own smell. Demons smelled like charred meat. Not pleasantly charred meat, but the kind that you left in the oven for an hour too long and caused a visceral, uncontrollable wretch in your gut.

Elves smelled like lavender and not in a pleasant way. More like that “why did you fill a room with lavender and then close all the windows for a week, so the lavender plumed out all at one time and kicked me in the face” kind of way. Dwarves smelled like stale grog, even if they hadn’t been drinking.

Humans smelled the worst of all. They smelled of death, like a corpse trying desperately to mask their rotting flesh with perfumes and cologne.

My sensitive nose was only one of the many curses my parents heaped on me. I was also cursed with second sight, which allowed me to see through any illusion charm to the true nature of something, even if I didn’t want to see it. They also bestowed on me a hatred of everything on either side of the divide, angels and demons alike, though that was more a function of nurture and not nature.

It’s amazing I turned out as stable as I did, given the truckload of garbage heaped on me as a kid. On second thought, though, perhaps working in the underbelly of Los Angeles, trafficking in magical weapons and trinkets wasn’t the best way to prove that I turned out well-adjusted.

Most people who don’t know any better call it the black market, but to me, it was just the market. If you needed a hard-to-find weapon to kill a lasa, or a spell to impress a girl, or just a charm to make you smarter to pass an upcoming test, I was your girl.

I wasn’t a drug runner, or an arms dealer, or an assassin, but those were the types that filled my Rolodex. I preferred to think of myself as a facilitator. Somebody who could introduce you to the right monster at the right time for the right job at the right price.

Sure, you could search for what you need yourself, and you might even find it, but you’d more likely get your face busted, ripped off, or killed, than if you’d hired me. I wasn’t cheap. I was absurdly expensive, actually, but I got the job done, and I kept you out of the fray. How much would you pay for that kind of peace of mind?

My clients paid a lot for it, and I made a good living working with bad people. I knew they did bad things, but they never did it in front of me. To me, they were perfectly pleasant, sweet even, sometimes to a sickening extent. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t bad to look at or because I could slice their throat with the flick of my wrist. Either way, I never had issues with my clients or my suppliers.

Or, I rarely did.

My latest client was a complete pain in the ass. He buzzed my beeper every two hours asking for updates on the location of the precious dagger he had contracted me to find. Usually, it could take me months to track down a specific piece, but he was paying me three million dollars to find it in a week, forcing me to push my contacts to push their contacts, and well, in the end, everyone was on edge, and I hadn’t slept in three days. I hadn’t slept in a month before that, honestly, because I didn’t sleep much. The past week was because of stress, and I didn’t like stress. Though I operated in a very dangerous profession, I went out of my way to only work with and for people who reduced my stress, or at least didn’t add to it.

This was the exception to the rule. I had no idea who my client was, which was completely against protocol. However, three million was too much to turn down, even for me. Even after I had greased every palm in Los Angeles, I would still be left with two million, free and clear, for a week’s work.

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It had been a hellish week, but I had finally tracked down the dagger to an orc named Blezor. Of course, he was only an orc to those in the know. To almost everyone else, he was just an eccentric art dealer. A smaller group of misfits knew he laundered drug money through his art collections, but even those people knew him as a human.

It was a special kind of person that knew who we were, which was how we all lived in plain sight for thousands of years. We were your bank tellers, your grocery store clerks, and your doctors. If you’ve ever had a strange interaction with somebody that didn’t seem quite human, that was probably one of us.

I preferred to do my work through proxies rather than get my hands dirty, but when the money was right and the timetable was tight, I didn’t have any other options. I took it upon myself to make a move on Blezor. Orc males run hot, and it was particularly easy to seduce them. I wasn’t the most sexual person in the world, but for three million dollars, I was willing to bed just about anything. I had no problem being a whore, especially a rich one. We’re all whores for something.

Blezor wasn’t a bad lay. He wasn’t great, but his problems lay with being a selfish lover and not in the stamina or aptitude departments. The whole time I couldn’t get over the fact that he smelt like rancid Limburger cheese, and when he was done, his musk had oozed all over me. At least he tired himself to sleep.

After I screwed him into a sex coma, I slid his arm off my naked stomach and rose slowly. I dressed in the leather pants and crop top which I had worn to get his attention. I reached into the pocket of my leather trench coat and pulled out my sunglasses. I never took them off if I could help it, but Blezor insisted, and…again, three million dollars, so I relented.

I slung my black leather coat around my narrow shoulders and walked out of the bedroom. Blezor was all too happy to regale me with stories about his collection of art and weapons, including the gnarled, sinewy, black dagger I was after, mounted behind a glass case in the study set off from the main foyer.

I pulled my willow bark wand from the interior pocket of my coat. “Toddi gwydr.”

Most witches and wizards used standard Latin to cast spells, though they were effective in any language, especially if it held specific significance to you and your wand. My mother had given me my wand, one of the few things she ever gifted me. She’d made it herself with the core of a unicorn hair she plucked herself from her beloved Welsh countryside.

Of course, you didn’t need a wand to cast spells, at least not when you were as powerful as I was; it just helped focus your power for more delicate or powerful spells that you needed to be concentrated in a specific area. I wasn’t interested in blowing the case to kingdom come, so I needed the deft touch only a wand could bring.

A thin stream of orange light came from the end of the wand, and I used it to cut the glass case protecting the knife. When I had cut a circle big enough for my hand to fit through, the glass popped off into my hand.

“Dyblygu,” I whispered to the wand, and it made a perfect replica of the dagger in the display, hovering above it. I jammed my hand into the display and picked up the dagger, placing the duplicate behind it to complete the illusion.

When I pulled the dagger free, I replaced the piece of glass and melted it back in place. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do in a pinch. Hopefully, Blezor wouldn’t be able to tell it disappeared until I was long gone.

“What are you doing?” I heard a gruff voice grumble. I turned to see Blezor scowling at me. “Are you stealing from me?”

Well, this wasn’t good.

“Oh, this?” I said, stepping backward. “I can see how you would think that, but… FFLACH!”

I closed my eyes, and a flash of white light escaped the end of the wand. Blezor screamed, and I barreled over him, rushing for the exit.

Outside, I flung open the door to Lily, my 1968 Plymouth Barracuda, tossing my wand and the dagger into the passenger’s seat. It would be a pain to fix this mess now that he’d caught me stealing, red-handed. There wasn’t time to worry about that. I looked down at my watch. I had less than an hour to get to the meeting spot and make the exchange. Cutting it close, Ollie. Real close.

I gunned the engine and sped off into the night, wheels squealing as Blezor rushed out into the driveway. He screamed something at me that I couldn’t hear over the blare of Lily’s engine, which was probably for the best. Whatever he had to say couldn’t have been pleasant, and I didn’t need that kind of negativity in my life.