The Realm

by A. Q. Owen

  The room fell into an eerie silence as the two men stared down at the coffee table.

  “Sorry,” Orion said. “I didn’t mean to barge in here. I just didn’t know where else to go.”

  “No problem.” Steve passed it off with the wave of a hand. “I don’t sleep all that well, anyway. But why did you come?”

  Orion sighed. “They were watching my place. I don’t know. I had a bad feeling. Felt like when that Koch woman left that wasn’t the end of it. I think they sent someone to take me out, but I can’t figure out why.”

  “Have anything to do with the ring, that energy surge that shorted out your stuff?”

  “That’s what she said. She also said that they enforce regulations on magic use, which could mean if you go over some kind of limit, you get arrested. Or worse.”

  “Worse?”

  Orion met his host’s gaze. “I don’t know. They felt more like the Gestapo than a regulatory agency. Almost like a hit squad.”

  Steve’s lips flapped for a few seconds as he blew air through his mouth. “That’s a little heavy.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, after I saw their watcher on a rooftop across the street, I had to get out of there. I knew something was coming. When I got to the stairs, someone was at the bottom waiting for me.”

  “That Myra woman?” Steve twirled his finger around in the air.

  “Nah.” Orion shook his head. “Some guy.” His voice drifted off.

  Steve’s head gyrated with his body as he waited for the rest of the story. “So?” He put both hands out wide. “What happened?”

  Orion was still staring at the coffee table. Then his head rose, and he fired a sidelong glance over at his host. “Yeah, I’m not really sure yet. Still trying to figure that out.”

  “Okay…”

  “I killed him.”

  “I figured.”

  “You figured?”

  “You’re here and alive. If that dude was there to kill you, yeah, I figured you came out on top. Can’t say I’m surprised.” Steve shrugged and finished his drink, then stood up and walked over to the kitchen to pour another. “You want one more?” he asked, holding the bottle in the air by the neck, swishing around the amber liquid inside.

  “Yeah.”

  Steve emptied the contents of the bottle into the glasses and tossed it into the trash bin next to the counter.

  He brought Orion’s glass over to him and set it down on the coffee table.

  “You don’t seem bothered by that,” Orion noted. “Most people would be a little freaked out if their guest just confessed to a murder.”

  Another shrug and a tip of the glass from Steve told Orion what the priest was thinking. “If he was gonna kill you, then he had it coming.” He paused and gazed into his drink for a moment. “I’m a little surprised it’s bothering you, though. I mean, you’ve killed before. Right?”

  “Yeah, but never like this.” Orion’s voice remained distant.

  Thunder cut through the darkness outside. The lightning was nowhere to be seen, which either meant it was really close or too far away to notice.

  Steve leaned forward, his curiosity bubbling over, though he tried to contain it. He didn’t want to appear too interested. That would have given the wrong vibe, especially for a man of the cloth.

  “What do you mean?”

  Orion shook his head to the right and then bit his lower lip. Then he held up the hand with the ring on it and spun the jewelry around on its finger so the cross faced his host. “This thing…it’s…not just a ring. It speaks to me.”

  “Speaks to you?” Steve made no effort to hide his confusion.

  “I ask it questions, and it pulses with light. Sometimes the colors are different. I haven’t figured that out yet, but it glows. And I’ve learned that if it pulses twice, it means yes. I guess no is one time. When trouble is near, it points with the sides of the cross and goes kind of crazy.”

  “That’s…unusual.”

  “That’s not the weirdest part.” He took a deep breath and exhaled. “It’s given me some kind of magical abilities, Steve. I killed that assassin with a fireball.”

  A pair of headlights passed by on the street outside. Thunder rocked the building again.

  Steve’s eyes were wide for a moment. Then the lids blinked rapidly. “You…killed him with magic?”

  Orion’s head bobbed slowly up and down.

  “Okay.” Steve mimicked the motion like a person trying to agree to something he didn’t think was correct. “This is a good thing. You have magical abilities.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.” Orion raised an eyebrow and steepled his fingers together.

  “No. No, it’s not that. I just…I’ve never really known anyone that could…you know, kill someone with magic. That’s…a crime?”

  “Murder is a crime, yes. But it was self-defense.”

  “Right. Right.”

  Orion could see there was something else to Steve’s probing question. “What exactly are you wondering, Steve?” He got right to the point.

  The priest shifted uneasily. “I mean, I don’t know. I…we of the cloth don’t usually believe in that kind of stuff.”

  “You brought me a magical sword that can slay demons. I’d say you crossed that line before I did.”

  Steve chuckled. “I guess I did.” He could feel the warm buzz from the alcohol coursing through his veins, numbing his senses but opening his mind. “It’s just difficult, you know? I mean, here I am a priest, a man of God. We’re taught to trust in God with all our heart and not to lean on our own understanding.”

  “Live by blind faith, that sort of thing.” Orion twirled a finger around in the air. He was starting to feel the booze, too.

  “Something like that,” Steve said with a curt nod. “You make it sound like a bad thing.”

  Orion leaned back, ran his fingers through his hair, and then crossed one leg over his knee, spreading his arms out along the back of the chair. “You should never take anything on blind faith, Padre. Always know why you believe what you believe. Whether you’re an atheist, a magic user, a Buddhist, a Christian, whatever, knowing why you believe it is as important as what you believe.”

  “I guess I just never really thought about it that way. It’s easier, sometimes, to simply take things on blind faith. What you say makes a lot of sense, though.”

  The room fell silent, pierced only by the occasional flash of lightning that seemed to be growing more frequent by the minute. Orion watched through the rain-splattered window as another car drove by outside.

  “Why didn’t you turn your back on God?” Steve asked. The question filled the room like a balloon and at the same time sucked the air right out.

  Orion’s head ticked up for a second with a snort. “I could ask you the same question.”

  The priest smiled. “Mine was easy. After what happened…I had nothing left. Initially, I blamed God for what happened. Truth is, I never really did much in the way of worship or trying to understand him. I guess I was a peripheral believer but nothing more. When my family…” He cut himself off with a choking sound as he tried to force the pain back to the shadows of his soul. “When all that went down, I went through a very angry time in my life. I started getting drunk all the time.”

  “Good plan.”

  A laugh shot through Steve’s teeth. “Yeah.” His eyes fixed on the coffee table then glazed over in a distant stare. “I put a pistol in my mouth more times than I could count. I didn’t want to be here anymore. I even got to the point where I knew exactly how tense I could make the trigger before it would fire, the precise amount of pounds of pressure that would end my life.”

  Orion nodded. “Why didn’t you? Why turn to God?”

  Steve shrugged. “I guess because in this life, it’s all about the test.”

  “The test?”

  “In science, when you test something and it doesn’t work, you go on to the next thing. I’d tried everything, or so I thought. Then I realized there w
as one thing I hadn’t tried.”

  “The priesthood?”

  “Giving myself wholly to the church.”

  “Ah. I don’t believe in giving myself to any entity.”

  Steve shook his head and shifted in the seat to get more comfortable. “It doesn’t have to be the church. I meant giving myself to God. The church just paved the way for me. It was what I needed. It changed everything. It saved my life.”

  Orion contemplated what the priest was saying.

  “What is it you have against the church, anyway?” Steve asked with a playful grin.

  “I don’t like narrow-mindedness.”

  “Narrow-mindedness?”

  “Like you said, the church considers magic to be evil, right? Something unnatural, not of God. My beliefs are that whoever made us wanted to empower us, like a good parent. If our creator is our father or mother or whatever, they would act like a parent. The universe, after all, is full of fractals, both literal and metaphorical—the things that look the same, like how a twig mirrors the branch and the branch mirrors the tree.”

  “I guess I never thought about it that way.”

  “Christ, Buddha, lots of other great teachers showed people an empowering way to live their lives, to change them for the better in their current reality, not just in pursuit of eternal life or nirvana and all that. The here and now.”

  Steve scrunched his forehead, the wrinkles creasing his skin above the eyebrows. “So…why all the drinking, the reckless behavior? You know you’re killing yourself, right?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Kind of contradicts what you were saying.”

  “It’s a hell of a thing when you stop giving a damn, Steve. When all hope is lost, when the clock is running out and there’s no way to stop it.”

  “So, you still feel like there’s no hope?”

  “No. Not anymore.” He let the room descend into silence again. After a few seconds that felt more like twenty minutes, he planted both feet back on the floor and leaned forward. “When you gave me that sword, you gave me hope, hope to get the one thing I want more than anything else in the world.”

  “Purpose?”

  Orion’s head shook once. “Payback. And now it’s all I can think about. I need to get back in there, Steve, to the Realm. I have to find him.”

  “Find who?”

  “The devil.”

  Lightning slashed through the room. Thunder cracked.

  Orion narrowed his eyes as he stared out the window.

  “Well, at least you have a sense of purpose. It’s suicidal, sure, but it’s a start.”

  “Wait,” Orion said, holding up a hand.

  He noticed a familiar red hue bouncing off the wall of the building across the street.

  “What?”

  Orion kept one finger up, signaling more silence from his host. He eased out of his chair and tiptoed over to the window, skirting the back wall to stay as invisible as possible through the window.

  “What is it?” Steve insisted with a whisper.

  Orion pressed his shoulder against the wall next to the window and leaned his head forward. He sighed and shook his head. “They found me.”

  “Who found you?” Steve stood up, suddenly in a panic and instantly sober.

  Orion snapped his head back to the priest. “The people who tried to kill me.”

  18

  Steve led the way toward the back of the house. The kitchen had a back door leading onto the porch and into a modest patch of dirt and grass that passed for a backyard.

  “Where’s your car?” Orion asked.

  “Around back. I had to park it up the street.” Steve kept his voice low as Orion pushed the back door open. It creaked, probably not as loudly as he thought, but in his ears it sounded like he might as well have rung a gong.

  Rain poured from the black sky above. The deluge would at least give them a little sound camouflage for the moment, but Orion knew that could only help so much. This Myra woman was running an ultra-covert operations unit. Even though it was a nontraditional sort of criminal they were looking for, with new tech and tactics many of the old approaches would still be in play.

  They’d surround the building, securing the front entrance first before working their way around to the back to set up a perimeter. Then, like boa constrictor, they would slowly move in, squeezing the area until there was nowhere to run.

  Orion had seen the lights on the street in front of Steve’s place. As of yet, he’d seen no movement or signs that the agents were in the back. That could change, however, in a blink of an eye. If they were going to get out of this, they’d have to move fast.

  “Come on,” Orion said, crouching low and motioning for Steve to follow.

  His instincts had been to reach for the weapon he usually carried at his side, but the events of the day and his short stay at home had prevented him from even thinking of it.

  Then again, maybe he wasn’t powerless.

  He glanced down at the ring as he shuffled across the short porch to the rickety stairs leading down to the yard. For the moment, the object remained unremarkable. No glow, no pulsing, just a ring on his finger.

  “Come on,” he hissed. “What do we do?”

  Still no reaction.

  He wasn’t going to wait on some mystical jewelry to tell him to keep moving. He took the lack of information as a sign and flew down the stairs in three big steps. His feet hit the muddy grass with a squish, and he was abruptly reminded of the fact that he wasn’t wearing shoes.

  Steve had the same realization the second his feet hit the porch, but there was no time for shoes. Every second counted, and the only thing the priest had had time to do was snag his keys off the ring next to the door.

  Orion led the way across the yard, sprinting to the chain link fence where an old link hung on for dear life to one of the posts. The thing was crooked and rusty, but when Orion lifted the clasp and pulled on it, the gate opened with a squeak.

  “Come on,” he urged, motioning to Steve to hurry up.

  The priest was only a few steps behind and rushed through the opening, cutting to the right. “My car is just over there,” he said in a hushed tone, motioning across the street.

  Orion recognized the vehicle. It was a little over a block away.

  “Go. Hurry.” As he gave a quick nod, he saw the glow of headlights back to his left, opposite of the direction Steve was heading. He glanced down at the ring. It pulsed rapidly, pointing toward the beams.

  He took off running after Steve, who was sprinting as fast as he could down the sidewalk.

  The lights grew brighter as the car made the turn onto the street. An engine roared. Then another pair of headlights whipped around the corner and barreled toward the two men.

  Orion risked a glance over his shoulder and saw two black SUVs speeding his way.

  “Great,” he said, still wishing he had his gun. Not that it would matter. These people were pros, just as he’d been. He was still good, real good, but taking out an entire unit of assets might prove difficult, even for him. Being unarmed gave him little to no chance.

  Then he looked down at the ring and remembered what happened before, how he’d killed the assassin.

  He slowed to a trot and then turned back toward the oncoming vehicles. He looked over his shoulder and saw Steve scurrying barefoot across the street.

  Lightning cracked overhead and thunder boomed.

  Orion knew they weren’t going to get out alive if he didn’t do something.

  In a moment, the decision was made. He stepped out before the two cars and stood on the road, staring at the oncoming headlights. “Wanna do a fireball again?” he asked with a quick look down at the ring.

  It pulsed twice.

  “You got it.” He flicked his wrist, and a ball of flame the size of a softball appeared in his palm. He drew a deep breath and slung the orb forward with a powerful push.

  The ball of fire zipped through the air at incredible speed. The driv
er of the SUV swerved to the left, and the fireball sailed by, exploding into a streetlight on the other side of the road, leaving the post and bulb nothing but a blazing hunk of twisted metal and glass.

  Orion flicked his wrist again and held up his palm. “Bigger,” he said, thinking of something more the size of a basketball.

  The flame appeared again over his hand and grew instantly, like a miniature version of the sun. He felt its warmth but not the full, searing heat it carried; only a hint.

  The SUVs were close now, bearing down on his position faster. He needed to take them out, or he’d get pancaked on the wet pavement.

  He reared back his hand and whipped the flaming sphere forward. The ball was thrown with incredible force this time. The driver of the SUV jerked the wheel to its left, but Orion twitched his head the same direction to compensate. To his surprise, the fireball followed his unspoken command and struck the truck’s grill dead center.

  The resulting eruption was instant. The vehicle flipped forward, its back end launching up and over. The fireball consumed the engine block in a flash of bright yellow, orange, and white. Then the rest of the vehicle exploded, sending fragments of metal, plastic, and glass across the entire street, setting off car alarms by the dozen.

  Orion stood fast as the SUV tumbled toward him and then skidded to a stop on its burning roof about thirty feet away.

  Steve glanced back at the sudden flash of light and the boom of the explosion. He frowned at the sight of Orion standing there in the middle of the street, mere feet away from the burning wreckage. Then he kept going, reaching the car as he fumbled with his keys.

  “Come on, O! We gotta move!”

  Orion stepped to the right, ignoring his friend’s order. The other SUV was still there, though its driver had slammed on the brakes and twisted the body of the vehicle sideways to block the road, not that they needed to. It was a standard tactic to close off one end of the road, which meant at that very moment the agents inside were calling for backup to close off the other end of the street.

  Two men climbed out of the front, each holding black pistols in their hands. A woman and another man poured out of the back, equally equipped with weapons.