“Mags…” I tilted my head to the side. “Is that who Brett is? Why’d you let him do that to you?”
“He doesn’t do it all the time.” Her voice was small, doubtful. “Just when he’s been drinking and I get on his case. He’s a good guy. He’d never hurt me.”
“Maggie, be honest with me.” I tugged on her sleeve.
She pulled away. “I have to work, Josiah.”
I frowned and watched her scurry to the other end of the bar to smile and chat with other drunks. I love him. He’d never hurt me. Now where had I heard those words before?
I was hooked the second Christian introduced me to Evette, and he knew it. The two of us hit it off straight away. She liked the same music as me, wanted to travel the world like me, loved magic just like me. Even if she hadn’t, she was a girl and she knew I existed. That automatically meant I was going to try to get her to sleep with me. I just didn’t expect to succeed. After all, why should she be interested in a homeless fifteen-year-old boy whose magical skill began and ended with parlor tricks?
By midnight, the crowd had begun to thin out and the music had gotten darker, more screaming vocals and heavy guitar riffs. Small crowds of people gathered in the living room to jump and crash into each other, laughing like idiots whenever they fell and got up bloody. It was a music driven possession, this strange yet familiar worship of heavy metal. Familiarity. Comfort, even in that strange place, though I still felt on edge.
Evette’s hand closed on my arm and she leaned in to say in my ear, “Are you okay?”
Reason told me she was only touching me, so close to me because the music was too loud to hear her otherwise. The rest of me was convinced if I asked her to go back to the bedroom with me right then, she’d do it.
“Just a little overwhelmed,” I shouted back. “Is Christian’s place always like this?”
“Not always.” She shifted, looking through the crowd as if she’d spotted someone she’d been searching for. “He’s a good man, you know? Christian. He’d never hurt anybody.”
Her words seemed strange, out of place. I considered for a minute how unusual it was, and then dismissed it. She was only trying to put me at ease in a strange place, after all. I tried to follow her gaze, but there was so much movement under flashing lights that it was impossible. “What are you looking for?”
“I’ll be right back,” she said. Before I could object, she was gone, pushing her way through the crowd. Evette slid into a corner with her back to me, talking to a man in a netted shirt.
A few moments later, she burst out of the crowd, all smiles, and tripped into me. I caught her and helped her get her balance back. She smiled and we both laughed at her clumsiness like it was the funniest thing we’d ever seen.
Until it wasn’t funny anymore because somehow her lips were pressed against mine. Her tongue glided against mine soft and wet, all except for the small lump of sweet tasting candy she slid from her mouth to mine. It was dry as chalk. I pulled away and plucked whatever it was from my tongue to examine it. A little white pill with a smiling face stamped on it.
“It’s no big deal,” Evette said. “It makes everything better. Unless you’re not into it.”
Who was I kidding? I was into whatever would get me into her pants. “No, it’s cool.” I put the pill back into my mouth and swallowed it, sticking my tongue out for her to check.
Evette threw her arms around me and stuck her tongue down my throat like she was trying to suck out my soul. With how things turned out, maybe she was.
I dropped a twenty on the bar and left before Mags came back. I couldn’t look at the bruises anymore. Why had she come back to this God-forsaken city? Why had I? It called to us, this spawning ground.
Outside, beetles threw themselves in vain at the orange light of a street lamp proving easy prey for hungry bats. Roaches buzzed their wings in dumpsters to attract females, driven by thousands of years of evolution to mate and die in the same rotten sewage where they were conceived. Carapaces, legs, and antennae twitching, writhing in confusion, they were little more than puppets and evolution held the strings.
I rejected the smog and exhaust-rich air in favor of tar and nicotine. The familiar buzz flowed into my chest and out through the rest of me. My heart pumped it on, unable to tell the difference between deadly poison and life-saving oxygen. Relief dawned top down, calming the pacing man inside. I closed my eyes and exhaled, but instead of release, I imagined Maggie’s pain.
It wasn’t just the bruises on her head and arms that hurt. It was in her chest, that feeling of lost control, diminished worth. The death of the superego in favor of the id.
Another buzzing set of wings lost in the squalor of garbage.
I woke up in a strange bed. Something was inside my head, pounding behind my eyes. I felt sunken, drained. It was as if someone had sucked the life out of me from the lowest section of my belly.
Evette was next to me, snoring with her arms above her head on the white pillows. The blanket laid low on her stomach, leaving her chest exposed. Sun cut through the blinds, sharp and blinding to me, yet she was like a cat in a sunbeam. Content just to be.
I considered waking her up for another go when the door opened and Christian stepped in. With a curse, I scrambled to cover myself and Evette. That’s right. This was Christian’s bed. How the hell had we wound up here? Where else would you go, idiot?
“Christian, I—” I broke off whatever it was I was going to say when I saw the box in his hands. It was covered in circles and runes. Even with my inexperience, I could feel the magic radiating off the box from a distance. It left me awestruck. “What is that?”
“This,” he said as he placed the box in front of me, “is your first lesson. How do you feel?”
Evette shifted in the bed next to me, sitting up. She didn’t even bother covering herself.
I frowned. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters, Josiah. You have the gift, yes, but you need to learn to harness it. Make it yours. To do that, you’ll need a better understanding of its source. Magic is in your blood. All around you. But harnessing it has a cost.” He opened the box. Inside, something formless and bright pulsed in time with my heartbeat. “Go ahead,” he urged. “Touch it.”
I raised my arm and slowly reached for the glowing orb only to pull my hand back at the last second. “What’s the cost?”
A curious light danced in Christian’s eyes. “It costs what all power costs. Pain. Death. Suffering. We live at the expense of other, smaller beings. Predators survive because prey exists. The strong survive. That’s the way of the world, Josiah. But you can’t know how strong you are until you’ve been pushed to your limit. You must know pain. Conquer death. Embrace suffering. Endure the pain in this box and you will unlock a new understanding of the power within you.” He pulled the box back a few inches. “Unless you are too afraid. In which case, you can collect your things and go.”
“No!” I shouted, probably too eager.
Christian smiled. “Prove it. Put your hand in the box.”
Fear beat in my neck. I swallowed it, but it didn’t fill the pit in my stomach. Sweat trickled down my spine as I stared down the ball of thumping magic. My fingers hovered over the box, feeling the steady beat. A bass line. It was music in magic form. Beautiful.
I put my hand in the box.
I flinched awake choking on a scream and gripping my hand in front of my face. A terror rhythm throbbed in my veins, making my stomach reel in disgust. Red mottled skin hovered in my vision, broken in the center by thick scars cut and burned there through years of use. The back of my hand. The arcane arts were not for that faint of heart.
Police sirens screamed one or two streets over. Probably what woke me in the first place.
Dizzied by the nightmare, I rose and went to the toilet for a piss that I had to work too hard to coax out. Dehydration probably. I’d spent the day before drinking coffee, whiskey, and beer. For a minute, I worried it was som
ething worse. I was getting older. With all the abuse I’d put my body through, it was only a matter of time before it gave up on me. It might be cancer. God, I hoped it wasn’t cancer. I had seen great men, true forces of nature, die penniless and alone because of cancer. But then, those men had never put their hands in Christian’s bloody box.
All the great poets of the world could gather and debate on how to describe the box and they would all come to the same conclusion. The box was sentient pain. Not normal pain, no. Normal pain, a man could adjust to. The body compensated, shutting things down, acclimating to whatever new level of hell the nervous system encountered. The pain in the box wasn’t like that. It shifted, flexing, growing, devouring.
My hand went to my stomach. Sometimes, I had nightmares about it eating me from the inside out. The empty pit that was left in me after that first night with Evette grew into a black hole and sucked the rest of me in. At the center of the black hole was that box, like it was supposed to mean something. But it didn’t. Nothing meant anything, not when I could cheat. Not when I had magic. When you had magic, you made the rules. That was Christian’s way, and he had passed it to me. The bastard had filled me with his hate and called it love, and the memory of it and that stupid box made me sick.
In the bedroom, the cracked red display of the alarm clock announced it was three in the morning. My flight to Okinawa had left without me hours ago. Okinawa could wait. I needed to meet Brett. Maybe I would make a box for him.
Christian’s cult had nine members, four teenage boys close to me in age, and four girls, all of them between eighteen and twenty-two, plus Christian himself. Over the course of the first month, I met all of them. We got on well enough, but mostly, I was with Evette, spending every spare moment I could with her. Christian never let me have her alone again. Not until I proved myself, he said.
There were drugs, music, parties and power.
And we would do magic. Real magic, not just the low-level tricks he showed me at first. The more he gave, the more I demanded. I was an addict. The same way my body needed air, my mind needed the magic. It sustained me, became my reason for waking, for breathing, bathing, existing. Every moment became dedicated to learning the next incantation, the next symbol, mastering the next summoning.
Inside two years, I was Christian’s second in command. He gave me unrestricted access to everything, including Evette. I felt like I had won.
What is it they say about reaching the top? Once you do, there’s nowhere to go but down.
It was the Fourth of July and there were fireworks exploding in the sky. Christian was throwing a party on the roof, but Evette and I didn’t go. Instead, we hid in the bathroom with a paper sack full of plastic test strips while she pissed on them and then waited three minutes for lines or crosses to appear.
I leaned against the locked door and crossed my arms. “Do you really think the fourth one is going to say anything different, Evette?”
She massaged her forehead and let out a quivering breath. Her voice was strained, panicked. “I can’t be pregnant, Josiah. You don’t understand. I can’t.”
Evette was right. I didn’t understand the problem. If she didn’t want the kid, she’d just do what Deirdre and Ellie had done. Both of them had been pregnant too. Christian sent them away somewhere until it was all over. Like a little vacation. They’d be back soon.
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “We just need to go to Christian with it. He’ll take care of it, just like he did with the other two.”
Her hand slid down to cover her mouth. She choked on a sob. “I can’t. I won’t.” She got up from the toilet and gripped me by the shirt. “You have to help me get rid of it.”
I raised my hands. “You need to tell him, Evette. He should be a part of this.”
“No!” She threw herself into me, sobbing against me. “Please, you can’t tell him!”
Invisible hands choked me. Still a boy myself and I had fathered a child with this woman. Someone who could never be mine. Not truly. I didn’t love her. Not like I loved magic.
I could have her if we left, I thought. We could walk out the front door while everyone else was upstairs, drinking and doing their small magic. No one would stop us. But if I left, there would be no more lessons. No more power. No matter how good I got, I would always be second best to Christian. We would live on the run, always afraid that he was coming for us. What kind of life was that? A seventeen-year-old father, a twenty-two-year-old mother, on the run from a sorcerer with limitless power? We would be dead inside a week.
I pushed her away from me. “It’s not my problem, Evette. Do what you’ve got to do.”
She fell to her knees on the bathroom floor behind me as I opened the door. I left her there, sobbing and alone.
Everything that came after was entirely my fault.
The air in the motel room grew heavy. I struck a light and watched the flame dance in the wind coming through the open window. More sirens had joined the cry of the first, painting the alley below in flashing blue and red watercolor on black. Whatever was going on down there, it had nothing to do with me.
I lit my last cigarette and smoked it, trying to remember the beat to a song I’d once written. The rhythm eluded me, so I wrote a new one in my mind. This new song began slow, quiet, steady, a predator studying his prey. The predator moved in the shadows, gathering evidence using a new magic: Internet and background checks for the low-low price of nineteen ninety-nine. Credit cards. Bank accounts. School records, all easy enough to find if you knew where to look.
Public records told the tale of a violent man named Brett Trace with multiple arrests, dropped charges for assault and sexual battery. He was a small-time porn director, preying on would be starlets. Brett was a predator too, but a much smaller one. He was a house cat hunting an injured mouse and he’d drawn the attention of a lion.
The cigarette burned low and the sun rose. The siren song died hours ago, replaced by car horns and shouting. The rumbling of a predator’s empty stomach. Los Angeles had awoken.
I looked into the face of a dead man on my screen. “Hello, Brett,” I said before crushing out the cigarette and rising for the hunt.
Months passed. I spent them learning Enochian, which Christian called the language of angels. A language of power words wrapped in magic. Flawlessly, I folded them into my practice while everyone else struggled to grasp the most basic concepts. They hated me for it.
I stopped seeing Evette. Our child grew, and no one said anything about it. I thought more than once about bringing it up to Christian, but it didn’t feel like my place. I wasn’t growing an eight-pound sentient tumor in my belly, so I felt I had no say in what was done with it. Evette would do what she wanted, and if she didn’t ask me to acknowledge it, I didn’t care.
It was an April night with the cries woke me. My eyes fluttered open to the steady tapping of rain on glass. I’d fallen asleep on the floor, twisted in the arms of whatever initiate groupie was available. Her arm was still on my chest. I pushed it off and staggered to my feet, pulling up my pants as I stood.
Another muffled cry cut through the room. It was coming from the bedroom. Why was the door closed and the light on? It was three in the morning. And where the hell was everyone? I searched the mess of bodies on the floor. Everyone with any real power, our entire inner circle, was missing. Maybe Christian had called them together for a late-night ritual. If so, why hadn’t he woken me?
Every step closer to the door felt heavier. Magic made the air tremble, synced to my heartbeat just like the light in the box. It vibrated over me as if I were standing in front of speakers right in the front row, punctuated by another pained cry. Fear pierced my spine. Evette.
Possessed by some new sense of devotion, I stormed to the door and threw it open, only to pause dumbfounded by what I saw.
The seven other members stood in a circle around the bed, which had been moved to the center of the room over an intricate summoning circle. An identical circle had bee
n painted on the ceiling and on each wall.
Evette was tied to the bed naked, one limb to each corner. Someone had shoved a gag in her mouth, which explained why her screams had been muffled. She was cut open, thick sacs of bloody jelly lying around her. So much blood… it was everywhere. There couldn’t possibly be any of it left inside her.
Christian stood at the head of the bed, his ritual knife in hand, except it wasn’t Christian. It was some strange, angelic imitation, a version with bloody white wings. Gore dripped down from the feathers in chunks, staining him and the floor. He was a newborn child, covered in afterbirth. His box of pain stood open next to him, the light strobing too fast. In his arms, a bloody mass squirmed and gurgled, desperate to draw its first breath.
It took me three, maybe four seconds to deduce the purpose of the circles, the patterns and what they meant.
“Good of you to join us, Josiah.” Christian raised his head.
I stared at the scene in shock. “What did you do?”
“She was going to kill it. I couldn’t let her do that.” He shifted the child so I could see. “Come hold your daughter, Josiah.”
My legs were numb. I couldn’t move, not even if I’d wanted to. Evette was dead, and Christian was covered in her blood, holding my child. And Christian had wings. This couldn’t be real.
Christian crossed the room and grabbed my arms. He forced me to hold her. I didn’t want to. I wanted to drop her and run screaming. Evette was dead, and it was my fault. The baby girl cried and turned her head, searching for Evette to feed her. But Evette was dead.
Steel flashed, and I found Christian holding his knife out to me.
“I don’t understand.” Tears fell when I blinked. “What’s happening?”
“Complete the ritual,” he commanded. “You must kill the child and claim the power of her soul so you can rise as I have done. Then we will be gods, you and me. No secret beyond our reach. We can enter Heaven itself, Josiah. Angelic blood flows in our veins! Why do you think you take to this so easily? You’re more than this weak world. More than human.” He pressed the knife into my limp hand. “Be strong! Do it! Join me!”
Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within Page 28