The Troll-Demon War

by Leah R. Cutter

Then came the realization that Christine had a Destiny. Not only that, but his bio-sis, Tina, also had one.

  No one had even bothered taking Dennis to the Oracles to see if he had a Destiny. He wasn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.

  Once Lars had finally been put into prison for a good long while, Christine had taken Dennis to Nik, as well as bargained for some time with Tina, to see if they could at the very least teach Dennis some magic.

  But Dennis had the magical power of a used-up piece of gum. That is to say, none. Nada. Zip.

  Magic ran in families. Now, Christine was a powerfully magica; troll because she was a princess. While Tina was magical just on her own.

  There had to be someone in the Tuckerman family who was magical. Tina wouldn’t occur in a vacuum. Magic might skip a generation, though normally it didn’t.

  No one had suspected that Dad might have magic. He certainly hadn’t registered as magical earlier. Seemed that the constant exposure to magic may have triggered his latent tendencies.

  The same exposure to magic hadn’t changed Dennis in the least.

  He liked to tease Christine that he’d been “born ready,” an expression from a bad 1970s action flick.

  He wasn’t, though. Not really. Nothing could have prepared him for magic and demons and trolls. While his job continued normally, hanging out with his friends had been slowly evolving as well.

  Most of his buddies were now either married off or already engaged. Dennis didn’t even have a steady girlfriend. He hadn’t been able to keep any.

  Again, always playing second fiddle, permanently in the “friend zone” with most of his exs.

  Tonight, it had all come crashing in on him when he’d started thinking about the consequences of Dad having magic, of the war about to start again, how Christine wouldn’t have much time or even use for him.

  He was merely human. There wasn’t anything he could do against a magical demon attack, except to act as a distraction and maybe get himself killed before Christine could come and save him.

  Second fiddle.

  He took another swallow of sour beer. It matched the sour taste the words left behind.

  Tomorrow, he was certain he’d see things differently. He’d come up with yet another grand scheme to help his trollish sister, or the various worlds, during the course of the war.

  Maybe tomorrow he could make a significant contribution.

  Tonight…tonight he’d just stay in his spot, accept his fate, and not try to push beyond it.

  Second fiddle.

  But at least he had a great view of the action from here.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Vern looked with interest around Malcom’s house. He’d been in Christine’s practice room, but that had been built for a large troll swinging an ax. The rest of Christine’s sprawling underground home had been filled with books and knickknacks, much like Christine’s human apartment had been.

  She considered it comfortable. Vern felt claustrophobic in that warren, but he never said anything except how proud he was of his daughter. Both his daughters.

  Because he was.

  Malcom’s house was located up in the Queen Anne neighborhood. Not one of the expensive mansions, or one of the older craftsmen, but a nice brick rambler built in the 50s. The yard was tiny but immaculate, the grass carefully tended, the cherry blossoms all blown away, even from the cracks in the sidewalk.

  The house itself felt warm and lived in, the perfect combination.

  “Want some coffee?” Malcom asked as he welcomed Vern in. The usual greeting for anyone in Seattle.

  “Sure,” Vern said. “If it wouldn’t be that much bother,” he added hastily.

  Malcom laughed, a warm expression that just made Vern believe that everything was going to be all right.

  Malcom wore yet another argyle vest, this time knit out of yellow with black lines and baby-blue highlights, along with gray slacks and house slippers. Vern felt decidedly underdressed in his red sportswear T-shirt, jeans, and flipflops. But he couldn’t seem to motivate himself to wear much else. It just didn’t seem worth the bother anymore, though he’d never been what you would have called a clothes horse.

  “Making coffee isn’t a bother,” Malcom assured Vern. “I was just about to make myself another cup.”

  Malcom led Vern through the living room (full of wood and books as well as a lovely fireplace in the corner and comfortable chairs in front of it) and into the kitchen. It was just as welcoming. White-painted cabinets covered two of the walls, while windows overlooking the backyard filled a third wall, and doorways leading into the room as well as to the downstairs took up most of the last one.

  Black and white tile covered the countertops that ran between a large, brand new, stainless steel sink, a modern black gas stove, with a matching refrigerator tucked into the far corner.

  “How long have you had this place?” Vern asked. The kitchen felt cozy, particularly with the smell of buttered toast that lingered in the air.

  “Almost twenty-five years, now,” Malcom said. He poured water into a pot and set it on the stove, then got out a French press. “The neighborhood has changed quite a bit.”

  Vern snorted. “Kind of an understatement, right?” he guessed.

  Malcom nodded. “True enough.” He measured coffee beans into a tall cylindrical hand-grinder.

  “Huh,” Vern said, indicating the hand-grinder. “Why would you do that by hand?”

  Malcom gave him a sly grin. “And not by magic?”

  Vern shrugged. That had been his question in part. He didn’t know that much about magic, despite having two daughters who were active practitioners.

  And wasn’t that a kick? Daughters who had power like that?

  “Now, I can’t tell you much about troll magic,” Malcom warned. “To start with, trolls are rare on the human plane. And in addition, not many trolls have magic.”

  Vern nodded. He already knew that.

  “As for human magic, as far as I can tell, it operates on a whole different set of criteria. Christine uses the elements for her power, right?” Malcom asked as he finished grinding the coffee and poured the grounds into the press.

  “Yup,” Vern said. “She has some sort of elementals, of fire, water, earth, and air, who make up her magic. They, in turn, get their power from the actual elements of fire, water, earth, and air.” He was proud that he knew at least that much.

  “Fascinating,” Malcom said. “You’ll have to tell me what you know about it later.” He sounded like an eager scholar, looking for the topic of his next thesis.

  Malcom lifted the lid on the pot sitting on the stove, checking the temperature of the water. “One thing to remember—all magic has a cost. It might not be obvious at first. But you can’t create something out of nothing. The power and the materials, or even the essence, comes from somewhere.”

  “So where does Tina get her power from?” Vern asked. He’d never really thought through the mechanics of magic, just that it was nifty keen that Tina was so strong.

  “Some of it comes from the elements, like Christine’s magic. Some of it leaks through from the other planes. And some of it comes just from Tina’s self.”

  “Cool,” Vern said. “Does she get to pick and choose? So, say, she’s feeling kind of yucky, can she still do magic, just stealing it from somewhere else?”

  “It doesn’t really work that way,” Malcom said as the water in the kettle on the stove finally reached the perfect temperature. “What Tina would do, if she were feeling yucky, as you so aptly put it, would be to choose a different spell. She would have learned as she practiced which spells put more strain on her personally, versus the spells that didn’t.”

  “How does the magic get renewed?” Vern asked as Malcom poured the water over the grounds, then set a timer. Vern approved. He really liked a good French press, and Malcom seemed to be an expert at this, turning it into a ritualized art form.

  “What do you mean?” Malcom asked.
<
br />   “If a spell sucks away some of the magic from one of the pocket worlds, how does that world recover that magic? Does it just regenerate it? Is there some special formula for renewing the worlds?”

  Vern knew he sounded like some sort of hippy, but he’d never really cared.

  “There are theories, of course, about how it happens,” Malcom said. “But no one knows for certain. Just be assured that we aren’t sucking the other worlds dry of magic. It continues to renew itself.”

  “Kind of like magic?” Vern said with a wink.

  “Exactly,” Malcom said, grinning. “But that won’t be where we start when it comes to learning magic,” he assured Vern. “We’ll need to start at the basics and work our way up from there.”

  “When did you first discover you had magic? And became a teacher?” Vern asked. “And thank you, by the way, for volunteering to teach me.”

  “I don’t take on many students these days,” Malcom said. “I’m semi-retired, like you. However, teaching an adult is always easier than teaching kids who think they already know it all.”

  “The last time I probably thought I knew it all was when I was a snot-nosed kid,” Vern said.

  Malcom poured them both cups of coffee, then held his out to clink his cup against Vern’s. “Here’s to never returning to the foolish days of our youth,” he said solemnly.

  “Here, here,” Vern agreed.

  “Now, to answer your question, I was told by my Mammy, my grandmother, back when I was a little thing, maybe five or six,” Malcom said. “She was known as a powerful witch in the community. So she started training me early. However, turned out that I never had that much power.”

  “Why’s that?” Vern asked, curious.

  Malcom shrugged as he added a spoonful of honey to his coffee, then topped it off with cream. Vern took his black, as always. He’d considered it personally a shame for someone to ruin a good cup by adding things to it.

  “My mom always said it was because I was a spiteful thing, contrary by nature, and never doing what was expected of me,” Malcom said with a big grin.

  Vern raised his cup to that, too. “Been accused of that many a time.”

  “Honestly, being selfish…that’s just the nature of magicians,” Malcom said seriously.

  “So I’ve heard,” Vern said, just as serious.

  Malcom led him into a study that was just as comfortable as the rest of the house. A large, roll-top desk was pushed up against the far wall, with a glass-fronted bookshelf sitting on top of it. More bookshelves covered one wall, filled with books that Vern could smell were ancient. A curiously blank spot stood between the two windows, given how every other wall was covered. Gauzy white curtains hung over the tall, skinny windows that overlooked the side yard.

  At least half a dozen chairs filled the small space. Malcom grabbed the captain’s chair that was in front of the desk, then wheeled it over to one of the wingback chairs that stood in front of the first window.

  “Please, sit,” Malcom said.

  Vern gulped. He was ready for this. Really. He sat and then tried to stay still, not fidget like a two year old who’s had too much sugar.

  He took another sip of his excellent coffee, setting the mug down on a coaster on the end table beside him.

  “Okay,” Vern said, spreading his hands wide and pressing them down on his thighs. “Do your worst.”

  Malcom gave him a sly smile. “Oh, I intend to.”

  Wait a minute. Were Malcom’s eyes suddenly glowing?

  Vern felt himself falling forward, out of his chair.

  Then darkness.

  Vern found himself sitting back in the wingback chair in Malcom’s study. He reached for and took a sip of his ice-cold coffee, still delicious even though it was no longer fresh.

  “What…happened?” Vern asked. “I remember walking into here. Then…nothing.” He felt very unsettled, missing all those hours.

  Yet, at the same time, he still felt as though he’d learned something. What exactly, he couldn’t say. But he felt more full now, than he had earlier. He suppressed a yawn. And tired.

  “It’s a perfectly normal reaction to not remember the details of your first lessons,” Malcom explained. “You’ve considered yourself a regular, mundane human being your entire life. When faced with the new reality, your conscious self shuts down. In time, after your unconscious comes to accept your powers, you’ll start to remember these first few lessons. I see it all the time.”

  “Even with children?” Vern asked. Everything Malcom said sounded reasonably enough. Yet…

  “Not as frequently with them,” Malcom admitted. “It still happens.”

  “So Tina—”

  “Took to her lessons like a duck to water,” Malcom said. “There was no stopping that girl, no holding her back from her magic.”

  “Good,” Vern said. He didn’t feel like a duck, or water, or much of anything at all. Another wave of tiredness washed over him, and he was unable to stifle a yawn.

  “And that’s perfectly normal too,” Malcom said. “Most of the kids go for a nap as soon as they finish their lessons.”

  “That sounds like good advice,” Vern said as he slowly stood up. “Gosh diddly winkers, I’m tired.”

  “Go home. Sleep. We’ll meet again next week,” Malcom told him.

  “Thank you,” Vern said. Though he knew that people who performed magic didn’t like being touched, he still held out his hand for Malcom to shake.

  Malcom gamely took Vern’s hand and gave it a strong pump. “It was my pleasure,” he said, sounding sincere.

  It wasn’t until Vern was driving back through Seattle, using city streets to make his way back to Madison Park, that he realized how strongly he felt the magic inside of him, as if he could have just flown back home. Despite his exhaustion, Vern felt himself grinning and singing a cheerful song about being a king.

  Though he didn’t remember much of the morning, how he felt now would surely make up for it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Buddy had insisted on written reports from Lars, just because he knew how irritated it would make the younger demon.

  Lars would have much preferred meeting with Buddy in person, just so he could brag about his results, or because he thought he’d be able to actually lie about his failures.

  They always did, not realizing that as a prince of hell, Beelzebub had kind of been around at the time of the invention of the lie. May have contributed a little something to it.

  So he didn’t even need to be in the same room in order to smell one, even a little white one.

  Buddy sat in his office, bare feet up on the desk, looking over the report that Lars had sent him. The room was only big enough for a full-sized demon or three. Buddy had an old desk carved out of marble, then enchanted so that (most) demon slime didn’t automatically eat its way through the rock. It was a stark white with black streaks running through it, with some flecks of gold in the veins.

  One of the things Buddy liked about his desk, besides the fact that it was fucking solid (and he had actually fornicated on it, more than once), was that it retained a natural coolness, even in Hell. He frequently placed his feet on it to cool them off, particularly after spending an afternoon walking on hot coals while he met with some of the other demons. (The coals served as a distraction, being too hot for some demons, really comfortable for others, and therefore always giving Buddy the upper hand since he could ignore the heat until later.)

  The rest of the room was more mundane. Really, the huge iceberg of a desk was the most impressive thing in there. He had some limestone stalactites reaching down from the ceiling, dripping water sometimes on those unfortunate enough to be made to stand there. Unlike the throne room, Buddy went for more modern here: walls made out of solid concrete tiles, gray and black; floor made out of poured concrete (that also stayed cool most of the time); window portals that looked out on the domain of Hell, so Buddy could keep an eye on his workers as well as take a break now and
again to watch souls being tortured.

  The only chair in the room was the one Buddy sat on. Really, if he called some other demon in here, it wasn’t going to be an extended affair. (Okay, so maybe there were a few exceptions to that, but then again, they’d actually been affairs.)

  Lars’ report contained all of the detailed minutia of a dense year-end business statement from a company trying to hide their falling profits.

  Except that…Lars was reporting victory, as far as Buddy could tell.

  Lars had completely wiped out ninety percent of the fawns, and was busily tracking the rest across the planes and killing them off as well.

  Buddy got a tingling feeling inside at the thought of an actual xenocide. They hadn’t had one of those in centuries.

  Of course, Lars had to brag about how his plans had worked, how successful the armies had been carrying the corrupted corruption spell gems (CCSG for short, which was not to be confused by just corruption spells—CS—as well as corrupted corruption spells—CCS.)

  Buddy found himself torn. He wanted to win the Great War. Lars had just taken a nice step forward in their plans. Buddy sincerely hoped that Lars would be as successful with his next battle, and the one after that.

  However, Buddy still wasn’t sure that he wanted to be shown up by such a young whippersnapper. Lars was still in his first body. Older demons would eventually swap out their previous physical form for a newer one, generally by swallowing the soul of the former inhabitant.

  Buddy could claim credit for everything. He probably would, eventually.

  But did he really want Lars to win? Buddy was pretty comfortable here in his spot in Hell. The other princes of Hell would grumble just as much when Lars demanded his own offices down here. And if he won the war, they’d have to grant him the space.

  No matter how much of the spotlight Buddy stole for himself, eventually Lars would have to be recognized.

  Or else that stupid punk would try to start a revolution in Hell.

  More than one demon had gotten a good start that way. Additionally, Lars would already have a following, particularly if he was successful at the war.