In the City of the Nightmare King

by V. S. Santoni

  I’m a Gay Wizard in the City of the Nightmare King

  V. S. Santoni

  CONTENTS

  Also by V. S. Santoni

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Excerpt From The Diary of an Unknown Wizard

  When Last We Met Johnny and Alison . . .

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Also by V. S. Santoni

  I’m a Gay Wizard

  Author’s Note

  Dear Reader,

  Two terms that featured prominently in the first book have been changed: Asura, are now Void-spawn, and Devas are now Creators.

  Dedication

  This one’s for all my gay wizards

  Excerpt From The Diary of an Unknown Wizard

  There’s an old story that wizards tell around the Institute. Some say they first heard it in the Night Market, that place where all dream creatures slither around. It goes something like this:

  In the beginning, there was the Void. Darkness. But not nothing. No. Nothing is the absence of something, but this darkness wasn’t an absence. It was alive. Maybe the Void was one consciousness, or maybe there’s no such thing as oneness in the Void—either way, some of the Void split away and became the immortal Void-spawns.

  Some Void-spawns were content to exist in the endless nothing, but others longed for more than the Void’s cold embrace. They longed for love. They dreamed of it, despite having never known such a feeling. Some say their dreams took on a life of their own and became Everywhen—the dreamworld. Those Void-spawns fled into Everywhen, and absent of the Void’s influence became the Creators.

  The Void grew jealous, sending its loyal Void-spawns to destroy the world the Creators had built; however, the Creators had planned for such treachery and built another world—ours. Using clockwork that they’d forged in Everywhen, they built this world and gave it meaning, purpose. And so, before the Void-spawns could wipe them out, the Creators fled into our world, continuing their quest to build a place of infinite love.

  But the Void’s loyal servants wouldn’t let the Creators go in peace. They chased them, fought them, hunted them down. The war lasted eons. Some say the Void-spawns eventually succeeded in their tireless quest to annihilate the Creators, but in doing so lost their way back to the Void and became trapped in the maze of Everywhen. As the story goes, the Void-spawns came to know our world, their new prison, as a cursed land that damned their bodies to an endless cycle of death and rebirth.

  Many in the Night Market insist that a shadow war continues between the Creators and the Void-spawns, and that wizards are their descendants.

  When We Last Met Johnny and Alison . . .

  After outcasts Alison and Johnny barely survived a run-in with a gang of bullies, Alison encountered a pale woman in black who offered a book that promised her revenge. She convinced Johnny to help her, and they cast a haywire spell, causing an earthquake in their hometown, and making the Marduk Institute—a secret organization that claimed to train wizards—aware of their existence. The Institute kidnapped Alison and Johnny, whisking them away to a walled-in facility in the Ozarks. The Institute’s head scientist, Melchior, explained that Alison and Johnny’s power allowed them to manifest psychic phenomena in inexplicable forms. Melchior also told them that their old lives had been erased. The Institute was no magic school—it was a prison.

  Inside, they met fellow prisoners Blake and Linh. Blake told them wizard society was divided into two castes: wizards born into long-running magical bloodlines, called Lineages; and those who weren’t, non-Lineages. Legacies, magical fraternities that conferred great privilege and power to their inductees, helped Lineage children maintain their family’s generational wealth and power. But the Legacies also allowed some non-Lineage wizards to join their ranks in exchange for loyalty—for helping to protect wizard society’s old hierarchal power structures.

  When Johnny started classes, he met fellow non-Lineage wizard Hunter, and their fates became inextricably entwined. Over the coming months, a vicious monster Johnny called the Sandman plagued his dreams. Johnny and Alison delved into uncovering the Institute’s secrets and came across a mysterious man in white who led them to a clockwork manual. Johnny initially dismissed the manual as useless. After Johnny discovered a Defector conspiracy within the Institute, the mysterious man in white manipulated Johnny into escaping, convincing the boy that only he could help Johnny defeat the Sandman. Linh helped Johnny and his friends break out, but Johnny didn’t follow the Defectors to Sanctuary. Instead, he chose to find the elusive man in white, Gaspar, a long-defected former Institute scientist.

  At Gaspar’s hideout, Johnny and Alison came across the woman who gave them the earthquake spell book. Gaspar and the woman, a black cat Mara, deceived Johnny and Alison to conjure a cintamani—a legendary wishing stone. Summoning the stone also unleashed the Sandman, a powerful being sworn to annihilate any who sought the cintamani. Gaspar revealed that the Institute cursed all non-Lineage wizards to death, and he intended to use the cintamani to destroy the Institute and liberate wizardkind. The black cat Mara, however, solely desired to send herself back to the Void. Johnny and Hunter ventured into Everywhen to retrieve the stone, but when they finally found it, it merged with Hunter’s soul and he became the cintamani. The black cat Mara, the only one who knew how to activate the cintamani, used its power to return to the Void. Before Gaspar could use the rest of the stone’s power to destroy the Institute, Hunter used it to banish himself and the Sandman to the Void, saving Johnny from the undefeatable creature.

  The Institute felled Gaspar and recaptured Johnny and his friends. Melchior scanned their thoughts and gathered everything they knew about the Defectors. Later, Johnny discovered the clockwork manual he’d earlier dismissed and realized that it belonged to Gaspar. In the book, Johnny found a spell called unwinding, that allowed him to retrieve things from the Void. Using the spell, Johnny reached into the Void and pulled Hunter back out, rescuing him.

  Chapter 1

  Joey Ramone’s voice came blaring through the radio, hiccupping Dad’s favorite old punk song. The racket jolted my nervous system, like being hit with an electrical wire only more nasally. A tropical air freshener hung from a vent flap. Dad’s favorite scent—Hawaiian Breeze. Hadn’t smelled that since the Institute kidnapped me. Next to me, Dad drummed on his steering wheel and mouthed lyrics. Outside, trees rushed by in a warm green blur. Wait—where the hell am I? I thought. What the hell’s Dad doing sitting next to me?

  He took his eyes off the road long enough to give me a funny look. “You all right, Juanito?” Dad didn’t have an accent. When he said my name in Spanish it always sounded a little funny. His familiar voice almost hypnotized me.

  My last memory put me at the Marduk Institute. But now I found myself in Dad’s Camry while he drove down a backroad. “You . . . remember me?” I asked, confused. The Instit
ute claimed it had purged us from our loved ones’ memories.

  “Juanito, did you bump your head?”

  White flowers bloomed on the catalpa trees roadside—springtime. Dad’s touchscreen dashboard read March 29, 2020. The last three months floated around like bits and pieces in my head, but I didn’t remember anything specific about them. Dad turned left down an exit with a beat-up road sign that read Misthaven. Misthaven, the northern Missouri town outside the Institute. Melchior had warned us that it was under heavy surveillance. An unlikely coincidence. But my memories leading up to this moment didn’t make sense. Sometime in December I’d gone looking for Gaspar. After the Institute recaptured us, everything got blurry. “Dad, what’s going on?”

  “Juanito, are you okay?” Dad tested my head for a fever. I flinched when he touched me. His hands felt real. Real as the seat I was sitting on, or the trees flying by outside, or the air blowing through the vents. This couldn’t be a dream.

  “Dad, what’s going on?”

  “Weeeeell, we’re on our way to a town called Misthaven. I got a job at a newspaper there, remember?”

  No. I didn’t. Or maybe I did. Memories poured in like grains of sand. Mom and Dad finalized their divorce last fall, then Dad fell into a deep depression and struggled to find meaningful work for a few months. Alison’s mom had died in December. The Misthaven Inquirer offered Dad a job in . . . February—maybe early March?—so we picked up and left Chicago.

  This had to be a spell. More Institute magic. Or, what if it wasn’t? What if the Institute and all my experiences—meeting Hunter and Blake and Linh, fighting all those monsters, breaking out—had never happened? My memories blanked out after Gaspar’s. Besides, if all that had really happened, why did I also remember Dad getting the job in Misthaven? Even the night before the big drive stayed fresh in my mind: Dad had told me to tape up all the boxes, and I whined because movers were coming to do it in the morning anyway. Remember what Tia Frances always says, Juanito, Dad had told me, si lo puedes hacer tu mismo, lo haces. Aunt Frances’ Spanish idiom meant, “If you can do it yourself, you do it.”

  Then there was Alison. My last night in Chicago, she visited me and told me her grandma wanted to move to Florida.

  She lamented on my bed about the bare walls stripped of band posters. “Where’s that signed Black Parade poster you had?” she asked. She loved that one. I won it in an online giveaway. I’d stashed it away to give to her before I left. When I handed it to her, all rolled up and cinched with rubber bands, she looked like she wanted to slap it out of my hands. But she didn’t. She just cried. I did too.

  Melchior’s words in the white room at the Institute, where they took me after extraction, rang sharply: “Imagine the world around you as a ticking clock”—then epiphany struck. One last test, to make sure this was real. Eyes closed, I pictured the vivit apparatus, the magical clockwork that governed our reality. When wizards moved the cogs and wheels—whether with their minds or their hands—it caused unexplainable phenomena: magic. To see the clockwork, wizards need only imagine it in their mind’s eye. The machinery’s orange-gold color shimmered with a brightness that even shone past closed eyelids.

  “Juanito, what’re you doing? You’re acting strange?”

  Nothing—no glowing clockwork. The magical foundation no longer ticked and tocked behind reality. Maybe it never existed at all.

  “Are you okay, Johnny?”

  “Yeah, Dad. I’m . . . I’m fine.”

  We drove along Main Street, past the Welcome to Misthaven sign and a long-abandoned fairground, both on my right. It all looked familiar. Town hall stood at a fork where Clanden Road and Main Street intersected. Dad veered right at the crossroad, eventually passing the Misthaven Fire Department, and drove until he reached Pine Street, where he headed left. The road led up to an idyllic subdivision past a wooden sign that read The Pines. White colonials lined the street on both sides, and elm trees swathed the lane in broken shadows. Each house came outfitted with its own little portico and a miniature American flag in brackets near the front door. No denying it: I knew this place. I rolled down my window. Barbecue soaked the air with a delicious smell, and children played loudly. I first visited Misthaven with Hunter. We rode in from the Institute on a small bus, and Hunter spent the whole day showing me around. Nothing had changed. How was that possible if my memories weren’t real?

  Dad parked in our new driveway and stepped outside, knotting his fingers behind his back and stretching with a grunt. Our house dripped with the same pastoral energy as every other aluminum-sided Better Homes and Gardens photo op in the neighborhood. Places like this—bucolic little towns where people still left their doors unlocked and everyone knew each other—always grabbed me as urban myths.

  “Isn’t this place beautiful,” Dad said excitedly. He never gave me the impression he wanted to live somewhere like this. He still wore cut-off shirts because he liked showing off his sleeve tattoo, which he got during his drummer-in-a-screamo-band days. How would the PTA moms here respond to a tattooed single dad and his kid with the stretched earlobes? I walked to the driveway’s edge to scope things out.

  Across the street, an old man in a bucket hat watered his primrose bush with a garden hose. He noticed me staring and waved. I did the same, awkwardly. Dad opened the front door and walked in, and I abandoned my investigation and followed. Light flowed in through the many windows, showering the inside. The entryway parted the living room on the left and the dining room on the right. A sunroom bridged the den and the back porch, and a stairwell to the second floor divided the kitchen and the dining room.

  A moving truck pulled up to the mailbox. Dad stepped outside to give them a hand. I ambled into the sunroom. The previous owner left behind a coat rack, and a fire poker in a metal stand on the hearth. Our freshly trimmed backyard offered no clues, so I headed back inside to search for cameras hidden under the vent covers. The front door swung open and a mover staggered in with his back to me, struggling to squeeze our couch through the opening. Dad wedged himself through the doorway and tried to help them, but the mover dropped the couch. I caught it before it smashed Dad’s toe, though. He thanked me and walked into the kitchen, allowing the movers to finish their job without his meddling.

  Having turned up nothing downstairs, I headed to the second floor and crept into the master bedroom. I checked the bathroom, opening the medicine cabinet and all the drawers, looking for anything that might lead me back to the Institute. My search proved fruitless.

  I thought about using magic even though I didn’t excel at it—it had taken me months to learn how to cast a light sword (a dangerous spell if you didn’t know the physics behind it). I imagined heat gathering in my palm, light rays coalescing into a glowing ball. The next step required courage and caution. If I cast aside those prerequisites, I chanced the spell going haywire and turning into a fireball and blowing me up. My magic really shined in Everywhen, the dreamworld, because I’d spent the most time there harnessing my abilities against the Sandman. The unpredictable risks involved in using magic in the real world turned me off to the idea altogether. Besides, I hadn’t even managed the first step.

  The Marduk Institute’s website, I thought. It turned up once before, during my initial investigations into the Institute. A quick phone search could answer many questions. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in my pockets. I headed downstairs and into the kitchen, where Dad kept a watchful eye on the movers.

  “It’s a new start for us, kiddo,” Dad said when he saw me. “No more dirty city with all that smog and all those rude people.” A mover dropped a box labeled Books. “Hey, careful! There’s some good stuff in there.”

  “Dad, do you have my phone?”

  He felt his pockets and pulled it out. “You left it in the car.”

  A search for “Marduk Institute” didn’t uncover anything. No suspicious webpages detailing an elite microcommunity with a private s
chool for gifted children. It didn’t matter what search engine I used, the results never changed. The Marduk Institute simply didn’t exist. And if the Institute didn’t exist, I didn’t dream this place up, either. Even if Misthaven appeared familiar, it must’ve been a coincidence. A very, very strange coincidence.

  The movers carried and hauled and lifted and pushed and pulled until they’d gotten everything inside. After they’d left, Dad hauled me into the living room, where boxes lay stacked shoulder to shoulder.

  “Let’s clear out some of the boxes in here before dinner time, okay?”

  Dad handed me a box cutter and pointed to the stack in the bay window. I eased the top one down, then dropped to one knee and sliced it open. Junk bundled in Bubble Wrap filled the inside. A picture frame with a family photo sat near the top. Even after the divorce, Dad’s sentimental nature prevented him from throwing away all these old photos. This one was from one of our many excursions to North Avenue Beach. Mom stood to my right, in a wide-brimmed hat and a floral-print sarong over a striped bathing suit. Dad wore blue swim trunks and a ratty white shirt, and flashed a peace sign with a cheesy grin. I jutted out between them with a silly look on my face, wearing an outfit that made me look like Dad’s Mini-Me. Mom and Dad had met at North Avenue Beach, where they’d communed over their creative interests. We’d gone there at least once a year.

  “Do you ever . . . miss our family—me, you, and Mom?” I asked.

  Dad stopped rummaging. “It takes a lot more than a piece of paper to make a family, Juanito. A family isn’t something you’re born into, or two people taking wedding vows. A family is something deeper, and a real family can endure anything.” Dad always said stuff like that—more for himself than for me. He turned back to the box. “Oh wow,” he said, taking out an old handheld radio. “I haven’t seen this thing in years.”