Chosen

by Adam Dark

  But it was currently checked out from the university library and there were no other copies within the current lending circuit that could be shipped to BU and right into his hands. Of course it was. What were the chances of someone else here, at the same school, wanting this book out of all the others?

  With his scrap paper of what felt like consolation-prize titles, Ben downed the other half of his latte, tossed the cup, and set out to track down the books that might—and that was a ridiculously big might—help him track down some demonic creatures. He hoped.

  * * *

  Three hours of skimming through numerous tables of contents, skipping to the potentially relevant chapters, and poring over the fairly disappointing literature within them passed a lot quicker than he’d expected. And even after all that, he didn’t find anything more than collections of beliefs, instructions for summoning, strengthening, and tuning into the “power within oneself”, or accounts with very clear disclaimers that none of the claims or details therein had been substantiated or proven in any way.

  So now, at noon, he wanted that Lesser Key of Solomon even more, and he hadn’t put anything in his body but a sixteen-ounce latte, leaving him with a caffeine crash, a growling stomach, and a concentration headache. He didn’t check out any of the books he’d been looking through, so he packed up his stuff and headed toward the front doors.

  The woman at the information desk typed furiously at something on her computer screen, and Ben thought it couldn’t hurt to try for an extra little push in person. “Excuse me,” he said, slipping his hands through the straps of his fifty-ton backpack.

  Her nametag said Anita, and her short gray hair and thin, frameless glasses helped pin her at somewhere in her late fifties or early sixties. She lifted her head toward him before her eyes finally decided to follow suit. “Can I help you?” Anita blinked.

  “Yeah. Hi, Anita.” Her smile was thin and unamused, and Ben had never been a successful student in the School of Charm. “There’s a book I wanted to check out, but somebody else already has it right now—”

  “Did you put it on hold?”

  A nervous laugh escaped him, fueled by her dry apathy. “Yes. I did. And I—”

  “You’ll receive an email notification when the book is returned to the library. Then you can come get it.” Her eyes went back to the computer screen, her fingers to the keys, and she kept typing.

  Ben took a deep breath. “Thanks. I’ll look for that. I also just wanted to ask if you could watch out for it yourself. Maybe put a note up for any of the other librarians to send me an email or something the minute the book’s checked back in again? I just… sometimes my email swallows stuff, you know?” That wasn’t it at all; his email worked just fine, like all the other student email addresses. Asking this had seemed like a harmless thing to do until the woman acted like some other part of her job in that computer was more important than treating him like a real person. And that was enough to make him put his foot in his mouth.

  Anita glanced up at him once as she continued typing, then extended one hand over the counter while she stared at the monitor. “What book is it?”

  Did she expect him to have all the information already written down? She had one of the most powerful searching tools right there in front of her, for crying out loud. Ben drummed his hands on the counter and pulled himself over it a little to lean toward the computer. “Uh, it’s The Lesser Key of Solomon.”

  With a slow, deliberately irritated blink, the woman looked up at him over her frameless glasses, pursed her lips so hard they bloomed into a million wrinkles, and said, “Okay…” Her fingers moved quickly, and then she stared at the screen some more. Ben was starting to think she took this long on purpose. “This book was checked out the day before yesterday.”

  “Right.”

  “For a seven-day period.”

  “Yeah, I saw that.”

  “So it should be returned by the end of the day this Thursday.”

  Ben tried so hard not to scream at her. “I know how the—”

  “You’ll get an email alert when it’s been entered into the system as returned.” Anita lazily swung her head back down toward the monitor and resumed her energetic typing.

  With a huge sigh and a nod, Ben slid his hands back across the counter and dropped them from the edge. “Thanks,” he muttered. For nothing. He hoped the woman was as good at whatever else her job entailed as she was at giving him nothing more than the exact same information he’d already found in the library catalogue. He thought he knew what a hundred-year-old tortoise felt like as he trudged out of the library, the weight of all the books for his actual schoolwork bearing down on him in his backpack.

  * * *

  He did, in fact, have instant ramen for lunch, but he added a poached egg, sliced green onions, and an unreasonable slathering of sriracha to make himself feel something like an adult and not a freshman using the microwave in the dorm room to save a few bucks. Ben had hated the dorms; they’d felt exactly like high school only without parents, curfews, zealous hall monitors, or a TV—at least in his room. His roommate had rivaled him in sloppiness and somehow smuggled a twelve pack of Bud Light into the dorm almost every other day, which he’d kept under his bed with who knew what else. Ben wouldn’t have touched it even if the guy had offered.

  Nope, it was the flying-solo life for him, all the way. He had a relatively cheap, one-bedroom apartment in West Roxbury. It boasted a community laundry room, covered parking he’d opted not to pay for, and what had so far proven to be effective insulation, judging by his eerily low heat and electricity bill. Even after having renewed his lease for the second time that July, he expected his bill to suddenly skyrocket, which would of course force him to call Eversource asking for an explanation, to which they’d reply that they’d mixed his account with someone else’s by mistake and had been undercharging him for almost two and a half years.

  Ben took a deep breath, swallowed, and jammed more thin, spicy noodles into his mouth. He had to quit thinking about crap like that—like everyone everywhere in every capacity was out to get him in some way; like the things he used to think were stable and dependable were actually just wet cardboard waiting for him to walk over and fall right through. Yes, he’d run into a demon again and managed not to die. Yes, the voices everyone called schizophrenia had suddenly come back. Yes, Peter had finally called him crazy to his face and wanted no part in Ben’s probably useless and definitely insane idea to go back to that house because Ian told him to in a nightmare. Yes, he’d just tried to check out a book over five hundred years old on how to summon and entreat with demons.

  But now, Ben felt like he finally had a reason to keep going beyond just surviving and pretending like everything was normal and fine and enough. If he could do this—if he could find the information he needed to learn how to deal with these spirits and demons and forces that had pretty much ruined his life before it started, he’d be back in control. He could fight, and he could quit running away from the person he wanted to be because the idea of having it all stripped away again scared him too much.

  Well that was one hell of a realization. Now all he had to do was wait another couple days to grab that book from the library and hope nothing else tried to kill him in the meantime. At least he had a clear idea of the next step until he figured out whether The Lesser Key of Solomon would give him anything he could use.

  Yeah, okay, he could probably just buy a copy; it wasn’t like the only printed version of it in existence just so happened to be sitting in BU’s library. But that felt like way too much of a commitment too soon. If college had taught him anything—if his depressingly cautious life had taught him anything—it was that he couldn’t invest his time, money, or hope in something he wasn’t a-hundred-percent certain would give him what he wanted. How messed up was that?

  Ben finished the rest of his noodles, slurped down the broth, and left his bowl and fork on the folding card table that served as the only furniture in his ti
ny apartment’s kitchen, besides the two folding metal chairs he’d bought with it from the thrift store. Then he slumped down on his fraying brown couch, grabbed the remote, and turned on the TV. Right now, for just a little bit, he didn’t want to think about anything at all. That meant turning to the rather narrow selection of acceptable things he let himself watch, which hadn’t really changed much in the last eleven years.

  He used to be a huge fan of Fantasy and Sci-Fi. Nowadays, the TV and movie industry seemed to be churning out more paranormal crap than ever—werewolves, vampires, shifters, witches, ghosts … demons. He couldn’t watch that stuff anymore, for obvious reasons, plus the fact that it only made him angry that these people had no idea what it was actually like. Thrillers were mostly off the table; stories of anyone running for their lives or trying not to get killed made him sick. The History Channel was safe, but most of the time it bored him, and police dramas were a no-go; he’d had enough of the police and psychological profiling and therapists and interviews and depositions than most people ever thought about in their lifetimes. So yeah, watching TV sucked, and he’d never taken a girl to the movies, because he was obviously picky and didn’t want to have a meltdown in the theater and didn’t want to come across as overly eager to see a chick flick, thus making any potential date a little suspicious as to just what it was that might be wrong with him.

  Clenching his eyes shut, Ben shook his head and told himself to suck it up. Then he pulled up the Food Network and found himself slipping away into the journey of some guy who traveled the world to meet new people, eat all their food, and get paid millions of dollars to talk about it.

  * * *

  Four hours flew by in the coma-like state induced by sitting in front of the television, and he wouldn’t have even bothered to check the time if he hadn’t gotten a text. The supposed-to-be-soothing chime pulled him lazily from what he was watching, and he shifted to slip his phone out of his pocket and take a look.

  ‘Brunch tomorrow?’

  He unlocked his phone and opened the message app to make sure it really had come from April and wasn’t some kind of operating-system glitch that mixed up the contacts on his phone. Then he wondered if that truly ever happened.

  But it was definitely from her, right under the text she’d sent him a few days ago with the address of the Phi Kappa Alpha house and the time of the party. Brunch tomorrow? He couldn’t believe she’d texted him, that she actually wanted to see him again after the awful turn the night before had taken. Yeah, she’d asked him before she left if he wanted to hang out again, but in the back of his mind, he didn’t really think she was serious, just extra kind. Then again, people who shared “traumatic experiences” oftentimes formed strong bonds with each other, pulling them to reconnect and draw closer even after such an experience came to an end.

  Ben snorted. The therapist he’d seen when he was thirteen had told him that, referring to his friendship with Peter when the conversation had turned to how their relationship had changed in the first year after that night, if at all. He couldn’t believe the woman’s words were digging themselves up now, just because he’d gotten a text from April. But it did kind of make sense.

  Maybe she wanted to talk about Friday night and the burning frat house. Maybe she wanted to thank him for trying to help everyone get out safely, though it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been there too. Maybe she wanted to feel close to somebody, to not feel alone with the images of that girl’s hair on fire and the guy smacking his face against the wall that kept playing over and over and over again in her mind. Maybe she just liked him. Maybe this was a casual date for Sunday brunch, which felt more appropriate after their first party together had ended in flames and ambulances.

  Ben told his brain yet again to dial it down already and worked on texting her back.

  ‘Yeah. Where?’

  That was all he could come up with, and when the words slid up from the typing bar and into that little blue bubble as a sent message, they looked ridiculous.

  She answered almost immediately. ‘Manney’s, 10:00.’

  He didn’t think; he just typed. ‘Sounds great.’ He knew if he gave himself enough time to agonize over two words sent in a damn text, she’d never hear back from him. For a minute, he hoped it didn’t sound suspicious, that she didn’t wonder why he wasn’t saying more or acting like he was excited to see her.

  He wanted to slap himself. It was a text. She hadn’t sent him more than two words at a time either, so it wasn’t like she was hoping for some long, drawn-out exchange that was more anxiety-inducing but less awkward than actually talking on the phone. Ben needed to chill.

  Of course, the Food Network wasn’t actually a very good distraction anymore, reminding him now of the fact that he’d be eating brunch tomorrow with April, on a maybe-date, alone. Smiling felt good.

  7

  He pulled into Manney’s parking lot two minutes after 10:00, not wanting to look like he was all that concerned about being there on time and also because he’d driven right past the last turn onto Durham Road. The place was busy but not so much that he didn’t see April the minute he walked through the front doors.

  She’d already gotten a high-top at the far end of the restaurant, and she sat there reading the menu without ever looking up. The hostess distracted Ben from that view, asking how many were in his party.

  “I’m meeting someone,” he mumbled without making eye contact, pointing weakly toward April before he shouldered his way past the girl who seemed completely unphased by his dismissal of her. He really didn’t like restaurants that much; having someone wait on him always made him feel like he was being rushed just so they could turn the table. But for April, he figured he could pull himself together, maybe even let himself take his time.

  She looked up before he got to the table, saw him, and flashed him a brilliant grin. “I think fashionably late is something like half an hour.”

  Ben couldn’t help himself; he smiled, loving the way she opened with a little jibe. “Not for brunch,” he said, then slid into the high barstool across from her at the round table. “What time did you get here?” She shrugged as he picked up his menu and pretended to look it over; he’d need a little more time before he could focus on reading the thing. His heart felt like it was going to explode.

  “Nine forty-five. I come here a lot. The wait’s pretty much always the same, and I wanted to make sure we got a table.”

  “Good thinking.” He looked up from his menu to meet her blue-eyed gaze, and she just smiled again, her nose crinkling, before she glanced back down at her own menu. So far, so good. “So what’s good here?”

  “Everything.”

  “Thanks. That’s really helpful.” The words blurred on the menu, and he wished he’d been smart enough to look the place up online and decide what he wanted before he got too nervous to read.

  April chuckled. “Okay. Any of the benedicts. They make the best French toast. Uh… bacon’s always delicious.”

  Ben laughed, nodding, and zeroed in on the section of the menu reserved for the five different benedicts. That was a start. “What are you getting?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.” He looked up at her and watched her tuck her blonde hair behind her ears before she lifted her head and leaned forward on the table. “I’m glad you could come,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you were busy or… you know, even wanted to get out…”

  He thought she was going to keep talking, until she didn’t, and then he jumped a little just to fill the silence. “Yeah, I don’t do a lot on the weekends. Just kinda hang around. Read. Catch up on school stuff.” Boy, wasn’t he just the most interesting guy on the planet.

  “Well, thanks for slipping me into your super busy schedule.”

  Before he could say anything witty in reply, their server appeared at the table to ask what they wanted to drink. Sunday brunch, and they both ordered coffee. Either April also didn’t drink, or she didn’t want to completely lower her
guard with a morning buzz, or she expected him not to drink and didn’t want to seem like a lush. He guessed there were a million other possibilities, and he tried to remind himself it didn’t matter why. They were here, everything seemed normal, April was smiling at him. He really wished he didn’t have to make everything so complicated all the time.

  When their server stepped away again, there was a tense little silence. Then April took a deep breath. “So I know the other night wasn’t the best party and you almost got burned alive—” She stopped suddenly, and Ben could only blink at her. Her eyes grew wide, and she pressed her lips together. “Too soon?”

  Ben bit his bottom lip and tried not to laugh. “A little.”

  A nervous chuckle escaped her, and she shook her head. “I’m sorry. Apparently, my default is to try to make jokes out of the worst possible things. I really just wanted to ask how you’re doing.”

  Her anxious frown embodied all the humiliation Ben put himself through when he seemed to say the wrong thing in every situation and wished he’d never opened his mouth. The fact that he knew exactly what she felt right now—that she was nervous too—made him relax more than he thought was possible. “Well, I’m definitely doing better than the guy who started the fire.” Yes, it was a macabre joke. Yes, it sounded just as insensitive as April’s attempt to break the ice. Yes, it did exactly what he wanted it to do.

  Her laugh echoed out through the restaurant, and she clamped a hand over her mouth and shrank into her shoulders. “That’s awful,” she whispered, but she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face.

  “I know,” Ben said, running his teeth along his molars. She obviously remembered the guy who’d bashed his face against the frat house until he collapsed, and he wondered how she’d react if she knew that same guy had been possessed by a demon while she was busy squirting water all over the girl on fire. He had a feeling she wouldn’t it find it nearly as funny; a morbid sense of humor only went so far. “I’m pretty okay, considering,” he added. Though he was being entirely honest, he realized how much he really wanted to tell her everything—the truth. And that thought almost made him cringe. “How’s your housemate? They did take her to the hospital, right?” A slow, curious smile spread across her lips, and Ben wanted to kick himself. He should have asked about her first, not some girl he’d never met, but he was trying to play it cool. Maybe he was also taking that too far.