Demon Zero

by Randall Pine

  “If you want out, get out,” was all Abby said as she sped along the interstate. The needle on the speedometer quivered near 90.

  Simon frowned as he watched the pavement flash by outside his window. “Look, all I know about sorcerers is, they’re incredibly powerful, and that much power almost always goes to your head, and most sorcerers turn evil.”

  Abby shrugged. “You haven’t met this sorcerer,” she said.

  They drove along the interstate, looping over downtown Templar and cruising out toward the east, the sun still high in the western sky. Simon hadn’t spent much time in East Templar; it was a transitional area between the rough parts of downtown and the bedraggled, economically depressed residential clusters in the Bypass Mountains, and it was dotted with old warehouses and trailer parks and industrial complexes with long-abandoned factories that had been left to rust several decades long past. “A sorcerer lives in this part of town?” Simon asked, glancing uncertainly out the window.

  “What exactly do you think the going rate is for people who practice magic in a town where every single member of the population dedicates their entire lives to working hard to pretend like the supernatural doesn’t exist?” Abby shot back.

  Virgil tapped Simon on the shoulder. “She has a point,” he said.

  They drove on until they hit the River Road exit. Abby pulled off the interstate and slowed the truck as they approached the surface road that ran north along the dubiously named East River. The East River was really little more than a glorified drainage ditch—a wide, geometrical U-shaped concrete pour that served as the confluence for most of the storm drains that ran through Templar proper, flushed through with occasional overspills of water from the banks of the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River up north.

  In other words, it was a huge concrete channel that ran through the eastern edge of Templar, and the liquid that trickled through was usually equal parts rainwater and waste.

  Abby eased the truck over to the side of the road, near the Mallard Street Bridge, ramping the Sierra up onto the curb since there wasn’t much of a shoulder to speak of. She turned off the ignition and popped open her door. “You guys ready?” she asked, dangling one leg out of the truck.

  “Ready? Ready for what?” Simon asked, incredulous. “Three days ago, I didn’t want anything to do with any of this! Then there’s a zombie, and a demon—and that was terrifying—and now a sorcerer? No, I don’t think I am ready!”

  Abby shrugged. “Well, too bad. We’re here.” She jumped out of the truck and slammed the door behind her.

  Virgil watched her go with awe. “She cares less about what you think than anyone I have ever known,” he observed. A wide grin spread across his face. “I like her.” He opened his door and leaped out after her.

  “Great,” Simon grumbled, fumbling with his seat belt and forcing open his door. “I’m the only one who’s thinking straight.”

  He climbed out of the Sierra and followed them down into the concrete channel of Templar’s East River.

  Chapter 11

  “The sorcerer lives beneath a bridge?”

  Virgil screwed up his face in confusion as he stared at the tarps that had been draped over a series of exposed rebar jutting out from the concrete pylon beneath the bridge. An upturned shopping cart rested near the front flap, held in place on the concrete slope of the drainage ditch by two cinder blocks. A metal trash barrel was propped up on the other side of the tent, held even by a big wooden wedge that was similarly held in place with blocks. A few other cinder blocks were scattered across the concrete nearby. “Are we about to get mugged?” he asked Simon, careful not to let Abby hear.

  “I’m starting to think we might be, yeah.”

  “So what if he lives under a bridge?” Abby asked with an edge of steel in her voice. She sounded defensive. “I told you he doesn’t have money. Besides, he’s not out here for him; he’s out here for you. For all of us. He has powerful enemies...if they find him in Templar, they’re going to come for him hard, and how many survivors do you think there’ll be if a bunch of sorcerers go Super Saiyan in the heart of Midtown?” She pushed past them, annoyed. “You don’t judge people by where they live,” she murmured.

  Simon blushed. “Sorry,” he said quietly, staring down at his shoes.

  “Sorry,” echoed Virgil.

  Abby marched up to the tarps. “Llewyn? I brought a couple of guys you should meet.”

  A pale hand emerged through the slit between the tarps. It pushed the canvas to one side, and out stepped a man, tall, broad, and old. He had long white hair that hung down in thick, twisted tendrils. He wore a wool, knee-length light blue coat with brass buttons, something a Union general might have worn during the Civil War. It bore the marks and stains of time. He wore a dirty white Henley shirt beneath it, and dark brown pants over a pair of scuffed leather boots. The skin on the sorcerer’s hands and face was cracked and wrinkled, leathery in texture, but soft white, like the underbelly of a fish. A deep, pale scar crossed his lips from his left cheek down to the right side of his chin. He had one green eye, the rich, dark green of an Irish hillside after a rain shower. His other eyeball was missing; in its place, a bright blue light shone from the deep recesses of his eye socket, illuminating the hollow inside of his skull like a brilliantly-lit ice cave. The blue glow was so sharp, so piercing, that Simon had to shield his own eyes when the sorcerer stepped out of the tent.

  “Llewyn the mage, meet Simon and Virgil, demon hunters,” Abby said.

  Simon and Virgil had never seen a human being as striking as this old man, and they had certainly never seen anyone with a burning blue light for an eye. They weren’t sure how to react. Simon gave an awkward wave with one hand. Virgil actually bowed.

  The old man grunted. “Small, for hunters,” he said. His voice was rough and dry, as if he gargled with sand.

  “And not very good at hunting, from what I can tell,” Abby said, almost cheerfully. She pulled the truck keys from her pocket and gave them a twirl. “I have to get back. I’ll leave you all to it.” She turned and headed toward the truck.

  Simon reached out and grabbed her elbow. “You’re leaving us here?!” he asked, alarmed. She twitched at his touch, as his emotions seeped into her, but Simon wasn’t thinking clearly enough to let go.

  “Leave us all to what?” Virgil demanded.

  Abby wrenched her arm free of Simon’s grasp. “My break’s almost over. You’ll be fine.”

  “How are we supposed to get back?” Simon said, alarmed.

  “Leave us all to what?!” Virgil asked again.

  Abby stopped. She planted her hands on her hips. “You guys. Llewyn is a sorcerer who’s here to battle the evil of Templar. You two are not-sorcerers who, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, have also decided to battle the evil of Templar. You’re a team now. I’ve made you a team. So go…” She twirled her hand in the air. “…team.” She turned and hiked back up the embankment toward the street. “I get off at ten,” she called over her shoulder. “Come find me then.” She reached the truck, pulled open the door, hopped into the driver’s seat, fired up the engine, and tore away from the bridge, leaving Simon and Virgil behind with the sorcerer, their mouths hanging open in shock.

  “Now what do we do?” Simon whispered.

  Virgil shrugged. “I guess we…‘team.’”

  They turned back toward the sorcerer. A brilliant blue orb flashed toward them, crackling with energy. Simon cried out and tried to back out of the way, but he tripped over his own feet. He and Virgil collided. The streaking blue light split into two smaller balls. One slammed into Virgil, hitting him in the chest; the other exploded against Simon’s shoulders. The energy balls burst with hard jolts that sent vibrating shocks through their whole bodies, and they collapsed in a heap onto the hard concrete of the drainage channel.

  The wizard grunted. “Slow reflexes,�
� he said.

  “I thought we were a team,” Virgil moaned, staring up at the blue sky.

  “I need warriors. Not children,” the wizard said gruffly. He stepped forward and lowered a hand. Simon looked at it warily, then reached out and grabbed hold. Llewyn pulled him to his feet. “Which are you?” the old man asked.

  “I’m twenty-four years old, and he’s twenty-five,” Virgil said, indicating Simon as he pushed himself to his feet. “We’re not children.”

  Simon nodded his agreement. “But…we’re not warriors, either,” he added.

  The old man stared at them with his cold green eye. The blue light in his right socket pulsed twice, then dimmed to a dark, crystalline violet. “Honesty is a virtue among warriors,” he said, giving them a satisfied nod. “Perhaps you can be taught.” He stepped back toward his tent and pulled open the canvas flap. “Come in. We’ll talk.”

  Simon and Virgil looked at each other uneasily. They had been friends long enough that they knew what each other was thinking without having to say it, and their consensus boiled down to this: What are we going to do, try to run away from a sorcerer who shoots energy blasts? They resigned themselves, Virgil with a shrug, and Simon with a sigh.

  They stepped forward, ducked beneath the canvas, and stepped into the wizard’s tent.

  Chapter 12

  “Don’t touch anything. I forget what does what to which kind of people,” Llewyn grunted.

  Simon and Virgil stood just inside the entrance to the canvas tent. Their eyes were as big as saucers, and their jaws practically hung down to the floor. On the outside, the sorcerer’s dwelling was a small, shabby, makeshift structure, just a few pieces of fabric thrown over bits of rebar. But on the inside, it was a massive, sprawling, luxurious mansion of unimaginable grandeur.

  They found themselves in a stately foyer, with walls of dark, polished mahogany, and a floor of smoothly-hewn granite. The ceiling was built from enormous timbers, laid in a notched, cross-hatched fashion, with painted plaster frescoes adorning the squares between the beams. A large rug spread across the floor, a brilliant tapestry of reds, blues, oranges, and yellows. Torches set into iron bands in the walls flared with huge, bright flames, washing the foyer in light. The room opened up into a wider parlor with a double staircase, each set of stairs curving away from each other, then back again as they neared the mahogany landing of the second story. The floors in that farther room were white marble, and beyond the parlor, a wide hallway led into a darker area of the manor.

  Simon stepped backward. He poked his head back outside. It was still a canvas tent, maybe ten feet in length. He stepped back inside. The mansion remained.

  He found himself completely without words.

  But, as usual, Virgil did not. “I’m sorry I thought you were definitely a crazy person and not an actual magician,” he breathed, walking forward into the foyer and gazing up with wonder at the high ceilings. “I know I never said out loud that I thought you were a fraud, but I did think you were a fraud, even with the bright, shiny light thingy in your eye, which is a great effect, and it crossed my mind for a second that those energy blasts could have been just you shooting us with bottle rockets, ’cause I’ve done that before to people, and it’s pretty funny, so I did think you were a fraud, and I want to be upfront about that, because we are in way, way over our heads, in a whole different league, and I want you to teach me everything you know about everything.” His eyes traveled the length of the foyer ceiling and back down the wall, toward the door. They came to a rest on the sorcerer as he ducked his huge frame through the opening of the tent and joined them inside the room. “It also makes me think your eye is more than just a showpiece, and I am very excited and terrified to learn what that’s all about.”

  “Things are rarely what they seem,” was the sorcerer’s simple reply. He pushed past the two young men and strode across the parlor, into the hallway on the far side. Simon and Virgil hurried to keep up with his long strides as they passed door after door set into the hallway. The sorcerer led them purposefully to the end of the hall, to a great wooden door that bowed out toward them, like a hubcap. He grasped the wrought iron handle and pulled the door open. “We’ll speak more in here.”

  The chamber at the end of the hall was a perfect sphere, built from a series of carefully and artfully bent wooden planks. Simon had the distinct sensation of stepping inside a bocce ball as he crossed into the room.

  A bridge-like platform extended into the center of the room, suspended over the curved floor of the chamber by two thick metal cables secured to the wall above the door. At the end of the platform was a stone basin set atop a marble pedestal. It looked like a tall fire pit, or a fountain. And it was the only object of interest in the room; the curved walls were smooth and bare, and though the spherical chamber was filled with a soft light, that light had no discernible source.

  “I have so many questions,” Virgil said, stepping into the room and following Simon onto the platform, looking around the chamber with awe. “I guess the most important one is, are we going to die in here?”

  The sorcerer entered behind them and pulled the door closed. It shut with a heavy CLUNK. He turned to the other two men, his blue-light eye even more brilliant and crystalline in the softer light of the sphere. “If I wanted you dead, I’d have made a show of it outside,” he said, and his mouth curled up into a smirk.

  It was the first time they’d seen him smile. It sent shivers rippling down their spines.

  He pushed past Simon and Virgil and stepped up to the stone basin. He placed his hands on the rim and leaned forward, staring down into the depths of the bowl. “My name is Llewyn Dughlasach,” he said, and they noticed a soft Scottish lilt to his words. “I’m a kinesthetic mage of the Seventh Order. To answer what I assume are some of your questions: I am several hundred years old, old enough that I would have to work the sums to remember my exact age; my magic is True Magic, some of it inherited, most of it studied and learned; my dedicated purpose is to purge the world of evil, as far as I’m able; and no, I am not from Templar. I am from quite a different place.” He drew himself up from the basin and turned to face his guests. He crossed his arms, and he gave a mighty exhale. “I’m guessing you have more questions. I’d like you to ask them now, if you would, so we can have them over with and turn our attention to more important matters.”

  Simon threw Virgil a look. Virgil returned it with a shrug.

  “Okay,” Simon said, clearing his throat. “I guess I have some questions. First of all, why are we here? And how do you know Abby?”

  Llewyn nodded slowly. “Abby brought you here because she believes you can aid me in my quest. She came to Templar because she felt the pull of my call.”

  Virgil screwed up his face in confusion. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I feel like a little bit of detail is going to go a really long way here.”

  Llewyn grunted. He wiped one huge hand down his face, and he looked tired...or maybe he just wasn’t used to this much conversation. “As I said, my dedication is to purge the world of evil. I have long felt a powerful malignant energy emanating from this place. It reached me even in Europe, and now that I’m here, it stinks to me like a rotting animal.” He wrinkled up his nose and shuffled with disdain and disgust. “There’s a convergence of evil in this city, and it’s growing stronger. More powerful. I imagine you feel it.”

  Simon nodded slowly. “Weird things have always happened here,” he admitted. “Supernatural things that don’t seem to happen anywhere else. And…yeah. They’re happening more often.”

  “Your city of Templar sits above an intersection of preternatural energy fields that make it susceptible to ultra-dimensional invasion. That bad energy manifests sometimes as monsters, as demons, as who knows how many kinds of evil. But only on occasion. Only once every long while.”

  “Something has happened to bring the evil to life more
often,” Simon said, understanding as he spoke. “The intersection is becoming…” He searched for the right word. “…busier.”

  Llewyn nodded curtly. “Exactly right. Templar is in danger. Serious danger.” The blue light in his right eye glowed even brighter, casting a glow against the wooden walls of the chamber. “I aim to stop it, if I can.” He turned to the pedestal and placed his hands into the bowl. He closed his eyes, and though they were standing behind him, Virgil and Simon could see the soft and eerie glow of Llewyn’s brilliant blue light glowing through the filter of his eyelid, illuminating the space in front of his brow like a halo.

  The sorcerer began to mumble a spell; as he spoke, his hands began to glow orange, as if they held a secret fire. As he continued the incantation, the glow spread out from his hands and became a strange ball of thick light, almost as if formed from a semi-solid substance, like a gel. The outer rim was a vibrant, fiery orange, but the inside of the sphere–the core–was a grey-dappled black; they could see the darkness of it through the orange crust of the globe.

  As the sphere became larger, filling the basin, the black edged out the orange, until the fiery color disappeared altogether, or maybe was sucked inside of it. Llewyn’s lips stopped moving, and he opened his eyes, drawing his hands out of the stone bowl. He slipped his palms out of the sphere, shaking them free like he was pulling them from a vat of Jell-O, and the sphere closed up behind him, its asphalt gray coloring rushing in and filling the space left behind by his fingers. As they watched, the inside of the sphere began to churn; the orange bits collected in the swirl, forming into miniature balls of light. All of these balls met in the center of the sphere, and the whole globe spun so fast, it became a blur. Then, suddenly, it stopped, and the orange bits of light burst outward from the center, coming to quick, sharp stops in various spaces, spread throughout the inside of the globe. Some of them were the size of dimes; others were hardly more than specs of dust.