by N. P. Martin
Shaking my head and pouring myself another coffee with lots of sugar, I idled in the kitchen for another while, staring at the floor while I figured out my next move. My chief concern was reversing the spell I was under, which I wasn’t even sure could be done. In general, the more powerful the spell, the less likelihood there was of ever reversing it, and the spell I was under was a fucking powerhouse. Certainly one of the most potent and expert uses of magic I had seen in a long while. I mean, think about it, the power it would take to erase the world's memory of anyone affected by it and anyone else standing close enough to it. Like me, for instance. There weren't many who had access to that kind of power and those that did probably channeled it from an entity much more commanding than themselves.
All of which meant only one thing. If I had any chance of reversing the spell put on me, I had to find out exactly what kind of power I was dealing with.
It was time to hit the books.
6
A Welcome Distraction
THE BASEMENT OF the Sanctum was where the majority of the spell books were kept, or at least, the ones that held real power. Make no mistake, some books are dangerous. Some books will kill you just for opening them up. With books like that, you need to make sure you're fully suited up before you even think about approaching them. And by suited up, I mean charged up with defensive magic.
There are two books in the Sanctum—The Babylonian Book Of Black Magic and The Book Of Deathly Shadows—that are virtually unapproachable. My Uncle Ray warned me not to go near either of them when I first moved into the Sanctum, not unless I wanted to be sucked into a dimension that wasn't anywhere near as much fun as Earth. Only a master wizard like Ray could have handled those books, and only when he absolutely had to. Luckily, I had no need for either of the books. I was hoping to find what I needed in one of the less dangerous tomes. Assuming the spell was documented anywhere at all. There is always a high probability that a spell won’t be documented anywhere except in the mind of its creator, especially if said spell had only recently being crafted. Time would tell on that front.
The basement itself was long and narrow, with a low ceiling and a perpetual smell of damp mixed with the strange odors of the books themselves. An entire wall was filled floor to ceiling with hefty, dusty tomes that buckled the wooden shelves under their weight. And despite there being thousands of books, each one was unique in both appearance and content, and I knew them all intimately. If there was a spell that erased the world's memory of a person (and I was living proof there was), I hoped to find it in one of those books.
In the center of the basement floor, there was a large wooden table with stout, intricately carved legs. Scattered over the surface of the table were a whole collection of glass funnels, flasks, beakers, cylinders and other stuff that I used for my alchemical experiments. The wall opposite the bookshelves was where I kept all the potions, elixirs, magical compounds and a plethora of other ingredients that I used for spells (not every spell required props, of course, but many of them did).
Also on that side of the room was an old record player and a stack of vinyl from the sixties through to the eighties (anything after that I didn’t much care for). After sorting through the pile, I selected the 12” extended version of Blue Monday by New Order, a tune that always helped me think. And when the soothingly familiar synth hook of the track kicked in, I began to walk slowly by the bookshelves, running my eyes over each title.
The first book I took out was a centuries old Grimoire that had been bound in dark red leather and which smelled faintly of decayed vegetable matter. I dropped the heavy book on the table next to all the alchemy stuff and opened it up, a cloud of dust blowing up to greet me as I did so, causing me to sneeze.
For the next twenty minutes, I turned each waxy page in the book, quickly scanning the spells in there to see if any of them resembled the one I was looking for. When I came up empty, I slammed the book closed and moved on to the next one. And the next one. And the next one after that. Until before I knew it, I’d spent half the day down there, pouring over dusty tomes (which was nothing new for me as I’d lost weeks at a time studying old books, time that I barely noticed go by, such was the depth of my fascination and concentration).
Eventually, I halted my search and poured myself yet another whiskey, half filling one of the glass beakers on the table and plunking myself down in a rickety chair, the sounds of Crimson Glory now filling the stuffy basement.
What the hell am I going to do? I wondered.
Already I felt the dark corners of my mind begin to stretch out as they threatened to consume my sanity, driving me toward a madness that I might never escape from. For the first time in a long while, I felt genuinely scared about my prospects. The thoughts of going out into the world and starting afresh, although it might appeal to some people, didn’t much appeal to me. The weight of loneliness was crushing.
You only think that now, I thought, drinking more whiskey and trying to keep my mind focused on finding solutions instead of highlighting the problem. You’ll find a way.
I hoped I was right as I finished the whiskey in the beaker and went to leave the room, intending to go upstairs and start in on the books up there. As I went to leave, however, my phone rang. The caller ID said LEONA. A smile crossed my face when I saw her name. Thank God for Leona. She was the only thing making my nightmare more tolerable. "Hey, sweetheart," I said, tipsy from the whiskey. "I told you I would grow on you, didn't I?"
Leona made a tutting sound. “Get over yourself,” she said sternly. “And didn’t I tell you not to call me that?” She sounded agitated.
“What’s wrong? And what’s all that noise in the background? It sounds like explosions.”
"It is explosions. There's some fucking nutjob in Harlington blowing the place to shit, using fireballs that come out of his hands."
A Pyromancer, I thought straight away. Probably one of the aforementioned breed of practitioners whose obsession with magic has gotten the better of them.
"So shoot him. That's what you always do with these out of control types, is it not?”
"You think I haven't tried to already, genius? He has some sort of forcefield around him. Nothing is getting through, and no one can go near him without instantly bursting into flames. People are fucking dying here, Creed.”
I made my way hurriedly out of the basement to the living room where I grabbed my trench coat and pulled it on. "Don't worry. I can help you. I'll be there in a minute."
“You’re in Harlington?”
"No, East Oakdale."
“Then how—”
“Hang tight. I’m coming.”
I tossed the phone on the armchair and looked over at Blaze, who was lying on the floor, his head now raised as his yellow eyes sparked with interest. “This sounds like a job I could use your help on, Blaze. Come on.”
Blaze jumped immediately to its feet and quickly crossed the room before standing at heel beside me, making excited rumbling noises in his throat. One thing about Blaze, he was always up for some action.
"Ready?" I said to him.
I placed a hand on Blaze’s back, closed my eyes for a few seconds and then we disappeared out of the room like we never even there to begin with.
7
Pyromancer
Teleportation is something that takes a long time to master. You have to manipulate a lot of different strings at once to pull it off successfully. I mean, it involves splintering yourself into a gazillion tiny pieces and then transporting those pieces across space and time so you can reassemble them all afterward. Imagine if you threw a handful of sand as far as you could, and then tried to rearrange that handful of sand into the exact same formation as it was in before you threw it. Every single grain. Does that sound hard? Impossible even? Well, that's the level of difficulty you're up against when you attempt teleportation.
It’s a skill that took me nearly thirty years to master, and one which I didn't use very often, mainly because it put a s
ignificant drain on my magic reserves. The farther I had to teleport, the more of a drain I experienced. I could also only teleport to within about a five hundred mile radius at that point. Which was okay, because Harlington was well within that radius, being about ten miles away from East Oakdale.
After fully visualizing where wanted to go, I landed with Blaze in a dark alley in Harlington, which was intentional. Onlookers tend not to take too well to people just appearing on the street out of thin air. Plus, there was also another reason for my secrecy that I haven't yet mentioned. Due to the paradoxical nature of magic, if any non-adept (Sleepwalker) happened to witness magic in action, the magic itself would become skewed (how skewed would depend on how many people saw it). The consequences of misaligned magic could often be disastrous, as I found out to my detriment enough times in the past. To a certain extent you could offset this unwelcome side effect by concocting a spell and casting it on certain individuals, so their presence would have no negative effects on any other spells that were cast. As with Leona for instance (I neutralized her influence shortly after we met since I would often have to perform magic around her). So bottom line, I gotta be careful about who sees me do my thing.
I couldn't say the same for the maniac who was burning up the place in Harlington. From the alley, I saw flames and smoke rising half a block away, past the rundown tenement buildings and near the local Taco Box. There was also a gas station nearby, and I wondered how long it would be before the whole place went boom. "Not looking good," I said to Blaze, who was standing beside me with his ears pricked up, his tail held straight out as if he was waiting for a signal to go charging in. "Not yet, Blaze. Let's see what we're dealing with first."
Blaze looked at me and then turned invisible as we headed out of the alley, although he was still clearly visible to me. He could show himself to whomever he wanted, which was usually only me.
We ran across the street and hurried the half block to where all the chaos was originating. Not surprisingly, there was only one firetruck that I could see, four firefighters attempting to put out a number of burning cars in the street and not succeeding because the flames were so fierce. I couldn’t see any cops or media yet, nor did I expect to. Harlington wasn’t far off being a slum town, so the city authorities tended to avoid it as much as possible. Cops and other badge carriers were not welcome in Harlington, and given what was happening at present, that was probably for the best. The last thing I wanted to see was some out of control Pyromancer all over the damn news and social media.
“Creed!” Leona came running across the street in her usual getup, her long black coat billowing behind her as she ran on powerful legs. She gripped one of her custom Berettas in one hand. “How’d you get here so fast? And is that a damn wolf with you?" She stayed back a few feet as she eyed the huge wolf with fearful suspicion, raising her gun slightly, so it pointed toward Blaze.
“You can see him?” I asked.
“Of course I can see it. It’s a huge fucking wolf. How can I not see it?”
Leona and Blaze knew each other well. But as Blaze was attached to my memories, that meant Leona's memory of the wolf had been erased along with everything else about me. The spell was thorough, I’d say that much. “He’s here to help. Don’t worry.”
“How’d you get here so fast?”
“I teleported of course. Now where is this firestarter at?”
Leona gave me a queer look like she didn't quite take in what I said. Then she just shook her head and pointed toward the Taco Box across the street. “Behind there, currently blowing up cars.” As if to confirm what she said, there was a loud explosion from behind the Taco Box and a cloud of black smoke billowed up into the night sky.
Goddamn amateurs, I thought as I shook my head. They don’t know how to keep it in their pants. “Let me guess. A kid, early twenties at most? Looks like a crazed obsessive?”
"He has that look," Leona said, eying me up at the same time like she saw the same look in me. "Why? You know him?"
"Not him specifically, but I know his type. A member of this new Occult Underground that has sprung up in the last ten years or so. You've heard of them, no doubt?" I had told her all about the new breed of adepts before, but of course, she wouldn't have remembered a single word of it, only the information given to her by The Division. “I’ve heard of them.” She shook her head dismissively. “But listen, they’re all fucking hedge magicians to me. I don’t care what they call themselves. When they do shit like this, that’s when I care. You gotta plan, you and…your wolf?”
"I hadn't thought about it," I said, beginning to head across the street toward the Taco Box. "Hey, maybe it's just a guy who had too much chili on his taco earlier."
“Did you really just say that to me?” she asked, striding purposefully beside me.
"Humor. Don't worry. I know it isn't your strong suit."
She threw me a look. "Like this is a really fucking funny situation. Three people have burnt to death so far."
“Just trying to lighten things up. Why have you no backup here?”
"Because we're stretched kinda thin right now, that's why. So much shit is happening in this city these days that we can hardly keep up. Every day, some new freak like this guy comes crawling out of the woodwork."
“I hope you don’t include me in that summation.”
“We got incidents all over tonight,” she went on, ignoring me. “Crazies everywhere for some damn reason.”
We were at the corner of the Taco Box. I had to stop and stare in astonishment at the post-apocalyptic scene of destruction in the small lot. There were about a dozen cars in the parking lot, and about half of them were on fire, creating a fierce heat that you could feel searing your face. The cause of all the fiery destruction was a young looking dude standing in the center of the parking lot. From what I could see of him he was completely naked, either from his clothes being consumed by the flames and heat surrounding him, or because he'd presumably wanted to save that very thing from happening and thus came out without them. Either way, I didn't care. I just wanted to stop the guy before he decided to hit the gas station down the street and caused even more damage. Getting to the guy would be the first challenge. Getting to the guy was going to prove difficult, however, and not just because he was shooting jets of flame like napalm from his hands, but because he was surrounded by some sort of crackling, fiery force field that shimmered around him, sealing him in an orangey translucent cocoon.
Leona stood beside me, her gun aimed at the naked hedge magician in the parking lot. "So what do we do, Mr. warlock?" she said. "Any bright ideas?"
"I'll excuse your pun there," I said back. "And I'm not a warlock. warlocks are drama queens. Do I seem like a drama queen to you? Don't answer that." I stood and thought for a moment, then nodded to myself. "I might be able to work something here."
"Well, do it quick because he just saw us."
I snapped my head toward the wannabe adept in the parking lot, who was now staring straight at us. Through the veneer of his defensive energy cocoon, I noticed the sneering grin on his face as he was quite literally drunk with power.
He thinks he’s unstoppable.
In my mind I was rapidly sorting through an index of spells that I could use on the guy. It had to be something that would bring down his defenses, so that Leona could then shoot him. No sense thinking she was going to detain the guy, not after he killed people.
Standing just ahead of me, and showing no fear of the crazed fire conjurer, was Blaze. Wisps of dark smoke were beginning to rise out of his hackles, and along his head and body, deep veins of fire began to split open and spew small but intense flames. The Garra Wolf in Blaze was coming to the fore, his elemental power reacting to the Pyromancer before him. "Wait, Blaze," I barked at him. There was no way Blaze would get through the force field surrounding the guy in the lot, and I didn't want to take the chance that it would somehow cause him injury. You never knew with crazed, uncontrolled magic.
Just as the naked Pyromancer raised both hands in our direction, gearing up for another infernal blast, my mind hit upon a spell that might just take care of the dude's defensive shield. It was a simple enough elemental spell that would counter the fiery energy protecting the guy. But just as I was about to quickly utter the words that would focus the magic for the spell, the novice Pyromancer's hands lit up with flames and then erupted like volcanoes, spewing twin jets of fire right at us. It felt like we were being attacked by an angry dragon who wanted only to annihilate us from the face of the Earth.
Now having no alternative due to the immediate reduction of my reaction time, I opted for the only option that matters; which is to say, I grabbed Leona to tuck her tightly against me whilst completing a 180° turn, and raising my trench coat to protect us from the approaching conflagration (despite what you might be thinking, that is the exact priority order I'll always opt for, that which protects Leona first and foremost). You see, a crucial piece of information pertinent to this scenario that I've not yet mentioned, is that my coveted trench coat is actually the cultivated hide of some unfortunate demon. Born of skin capable of withstanding the infernal flames that scourge the Underworld clean of creatures too weak to survive there, meant that I was comfortably sure that it could handle the abuse of some manic earthly Pyromancer. Fortunately my faith in my trusty clothing item was paid in full. Besides which, having a sneaky spooner moment with my gal' did wonders for my morale.
A split second later, I felt the hot pressure on my back as the jets of fire hit like two high-pressure hoses, forcing me to pitch forward into Leona as the two of us fell to the ground. The flames continued for another few seconds, my trench coat beginning to heat up to a temperature that was going way past comfortable.