“Who are you?” Laura demanded. At this range, she could peg his chest no problem.
“Oh,” the man smiled, his teeth shining in the darkness like moonlight off a machete. “I think you have a sense of that.”
Laura faltered for the first time. He’d said in words what she’d been suppressing since the first noise had gotten her attention.
“I’ll be in the cab,” the man said. Long black hair blew in the wind. He put hands in the pockets of a black great-coat and began walking around the truck, out of Laura’s line of sight.
Laura swallowed, listening to footsteps, hearing the door on the passenger-side open, feeling the weight of the man legging up into the cab.
Laura took one last look around, then jumped down from the container and shut the doors. Movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention and she glanced into the tree line. Multiple pairs of eyes reflected moonlight from the darkness: wolves gathering in the gloom, waiting. She’d heard a report that wolves had been making a come-back in these parts, along with cougars and other wildlife. So you guys’re probably natural at least, she thought as she headed to the front of the truck.
She took a deep breath before opening her door, trying to envision the mechanics of getting into the driver’s seat while maintaining readiness with her gun. When she was ready, she proceeded, bounding with fluid grace from one action to the next. She didn’t always move like her pops—that deliberate country-boy gait. When she was scared and acting on instinct, she moved like something else.
She’d switched the gun to her left hand, holding it across her body as she sat. She left the door open, both for the ease of exit, as well as for the fact that closing it would leave her vulnerable for a moment.
The man was playing with her radio, sorting through the stations. Up close, his hair was long and black and very coarse; his eyes did actually glow with a light of their own and his face—while human-esque—was longer and more chiselled than normal, possessing jutting cheekbones and severe angles at the brow and jaw. He settled on a pop song—Britney, Ariana, Taylor maybe—Laura didn’t know much about music. The creature smiled a sharp-toothed smile, turning to lean his back against the door.
“I’m solid enough now that you’ll do damage, if you fire that thing,” he said. “Good thing you’ve got ice-water in your veins, hey? Makes me feel safe.”
“You’re not real,” Laura said.
“Yeah, well, reality’s shifting, kiddo. Has been for a while now.”
“Why am I seeing this? You.”
“We’re family, lass. It was time.”
Laura had nothing to say. In her heart, outside of her words, she felt something true clicking into place. But just because it was true didn’t mean it was easy. “What do you mean, you’re . . . like my father?”
“Not exactly. It’s not family in the human sense. After all, you’re making me as much as I made you. I could maybe say you’re my mother, but that wouldn’t be exactly right either. Part of me is in you though. You’re in between, kiddo. Makes you special. Useful.”
Laura narrowed her eyes, thinking things through. “What am I carrying?”
“Hey, I thought we agreed no questions asked?” The man had been replaced by Ms. Burke, sitting there in her power skirt-suit and heels, snooty rectangular glasses, and pixie-cut hair. The transformation was so sudden, Laura almost fired her gun on reflex.
The man was back, smiling his smile. “But if you’re going to ask, I guess that’s the right question, all right.”
“What is it?”
“Something old that’s new again. Something very, very old, whose time has come.”
“You paid me in real money.”
“Aye. The electronic age—ain’t it a miracle? Makes things a lot easier. Just one part of the reason things’re happening now, and not before.”
“Can’t be good, what you’re up to.”
“Can’t be good, can’t be bad, can’t be stopped. You signed a contract, honey. Whatever you think of me, I know you’ll honour that.”
Laura crimped her lips. He had her there.
“Look,” the creature said, changing gears. Laura thought of down-shifting as his face took on a less ironic, more contemplative aspect. “We’ve a few hours together. You’ve got a delivery to make. I’m not going to hurt you—quite the opposite actually. Why don’t we get a move on? Get to know one another? What do you say?”
Laura stared at the man for a moment, taking him in. It was a look she didn’t use often, because she knew it made people uncomfortable, but she gave it to him full bore. She couldn’t know it herself, but the look was like the look of wolves: dispassionate, alien, predatory. She found that people didn’t like to lie to her under that gaze; found they tended to fidget, and give away more than they intended. The man in her cab didn’t fidget, didn’t seem uncomfortable, and he clearly knew what she was up to. He returned her stare with a knowing look, letting her take in whatever she needed to take in.
Laura got the sense that he could hurt her if it came down to it, but that he’d had the drop on her before, and could’ve made his move then. She got the sense that he was getting more and more real the more she talked to him. Maybe without her, he’d be all air, and shadow. Maybe he needed her, and while that didn’t mean she could trust him, it meant that their relationship was grounded in something. Something she could understand.
She made up her mind the way she always did: suddenly, and decisively. She closed her door, then reached across to the glove compartment, putting the gun away right in front of him.
The man watched her and nodded in acknowledgement of the new bargain struck.
BECAUSE THIS IS where the action is, honey—the energy. The oilsands. The blood of Tiamat—the great cosmic dragon herself─in the very soil. Here’s where we come through.
IT’S BEEN A long time coming. Since Greek fire, and the petro-sorcery that protected Byzantine ships from their own conflagrations. The energy of the dragon echoing in the roar of the combustion engine. Panzers rushing across steppe. Nagasaki searing. All of it a symphony, for those who can hear. Ask me, Standard Oil splitting into the seven sister companies was a little on the nose, what with Tiamat’s own body forming the heavens and earth and all. But that’s part of her charm—the irony. E pluribus unum—out of many, one. The calculus: differentiation and integration. I mean, really—how could anyone miss the signs?
BRITNEY SPEARS? HER songs are our anthems, baby. Where you hear “Toxic”, I hear a triumphal Roman fanfare. I see torches in the night; I smell the pyres.
THEY’D ARRIVED AT daybreak, the sun turning low-lying clouds into thick clots of blood thanks to the late-season forest fires farther north. She’d been given GPS coordinates, not an address: the place was only accessible at all because of an old trunk road built by some oil company, some years ago, for some reason.
To the naked, human eye, it looked like a junkyard. Maybe an abandoned work-site. There were the remains of a corrugated metal shed and some wooden outbuildings. There were the skeletons of old pick-ups, and cable-spools; old railway ties and tractor gears. Everything was rusted and breaking down under the elements. To the human eye, a junkyard: to the eye that could see, a cemetery. Hallowed ground.
“You gonna help me with this?” Laura had asked, working the dolly in underneath the crate; backing the load gingerly out of the container.
The man had grinned, shrugged. His face had changed over the course of the trip—becoming less elongated and angular. Becoming more human. He’d watched her as she lowered the heavy stone idol down the ramp, offering helpful supervision.
She might not have been as strong as some men, but she never pulled muscles, or needed a chiropractor and could work all day long. Worked out in her favour, over the long haul.
RAIN PELTED DOWN, which was odd for September up here. You’d get snow or drizzle this time of year, but this was a good heavy rain; the big raindrops of May arriving in fall. Still cold, but not as cold a
s it should be. Almost tropical at times: the wind would shift, carrying with it the inexplicable scent of papaya and rot.
“You could stay,” the man said. He really had changed by this time. He’d aged maybe—the long, lupine lines of his face had contracted into something that was merely “seasoned” rather than grotesque. His hair was greying at the edges, and he’d grown a salt-and-pepper stubble-beard. His eyes still glowed in shadow, but in full light, they looked normal. Deep-set and penetrating, but normal. Human.
She looked out at the rain—listened to the noise of it, like someone throwing handfuls of stones at the metal. She knew what he was offering.
The more real he seemed, the more dreamlike she felt her own perceptions becoming. They’d set the idol up deep within the shed, placing it on a concrete block foundation. There was already a stone altar in place, brought out of Asia via the ivory-smuggling trails of East Africa, apparently. It was like pieces of a cosmic puzzle, each put in place by some unwitting pawn hired by a mirage, paid in crypto-currency. And it was humid in the shed, like the botanical house at the zoo that housed all the exotic plants. The air was heavy, and time seemed strange: wherever Laura looked, it felt like the first time she’d seen that part of the shed.
“You don’t have to,” the man continued, “but you could.”
“I know,” Laura said. “It’s tempting.”
“But what? You don’t know if it’s real yet?”
“No. I know it’s real.”
“What then?”
She turned her gaze from the rain. “You’re going to be hurting people.”
“I’ll be hurting them anyway. It’s just what’s going to happen. A great and terrible burning.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t think that’s for me.”
“Kind of compartmentalizing, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I am. I know I haven’t given you your money back. Call me a hypocrite.”
“We all draw our own lines. That’s probably something you got from Ed.”
“Yep.”
“It’s surprising to us, you know. How much of a difference that man made to you. In you. How much pull he had.”
“He’s my dad. I mean . . . whatever I am, that’s gotta be part of it.”
“Sure.”
They both turned their attention back to the rain for a while. It would burst and back off, but to Laura’s ears, it seemed as though it might be letting up.
“Listen,” he said when he mistook her restlessness for a readiness to leave. “You can always come back here, if you have to. We don’t want you to feel like you have to choose. Things get hard out there, things don’t go the way you planned . . . you’ve got a home here.”
She looked at him, and nodded, knowing that when she looked at him with real attention, it gave him strength, made him solid. When he looked at her in turn, she didn’t know what she got out of it, but it was something.
She could feel herself becoming under his gaze.
“You know what you don’t get about my dad?”
“I guess by definition the answer there would be ‘no’.”
“My mom.”
“Okay, crypto-girl: go on.”
“She was an academic—quantum physicist. Worked as a freelance data-scientist.”
“With Ed Driscoll? That’s some odd couple.”
“On the surface maybe. But Ed had a way about him—he grounded people, centred them. I always imagine her gravitating towards him because of that. The weight of him.”
“Fascinating stuff. Mortals!”
“She didn’t just adopt me by accident. She predicted me, searched me out. Selecting me collapsed my wave function, located me on purpose. Averaged me in. She saw the signs; she heard the music. She died young, but Dad knew the purpose, did the best he could to anchor me in the world.”
The man frowned for the first time, mind racing to fill in the gaps in Laura’s story. His mind raced, but she was already at the finish line.
“They saw you coming,” Laura said as she withdrew the ancient African knife she’d obtained from another demon on another run, the hieroglyphs on the blade glowing a pale lunar blue. “And I’ve been waiting.”
THEY’LL BE DRAWN to you, honey—they’ll need you. They’ll need to be seen by you. You’re a strange attractor, Lor: embrace it.
MOST FOLKS’ ROOT cellars were filled with roots, preserves, storage─and Laura’s was too. But there were also boxes of her mother’s old books and notes; laptops and thumbdrives and external hard drives. Feynman diagrams incorporating unlikely vertices; equations that may as well have been incantations. And there were the objects accumulating on shelves now—statues and masks and talismans from all parts of the globe that made their way to Alberta by some force not unlike gravity. The new one—the hideous, misshapen, tentacled affair─had been too heavy to do anything other than place in a dark corner and put a blanket over. Laura wondered at the confluence of dark energies radiating out from the accumulated artefacts; thought of fission reactors and critical masses. The seething will of the dragon sullen in the dark. Super novae waiting to explode.
She thought it might be dangerous concentrating the items here, but she also thought it was too late to worry about, or change now.
Demon money was stupid-good, and it accelerated her time-table. She had the down payment for the second truck, and had an option on a third, if a nearby oilfield liquidation went her way. She was building the company her father had told her would be necessary, not just as a source of self-sufficient income, but as a bulwark against extra-dimensional incursion. Her mother had had the math, her father the practical, mundane solutions for occult problems. It had fallen to Laura to execute.
She felt the memory of her foster parents like a physical weight, like a force that made her human. She wasn’t in-between as the demon had said. She’d made her choice, and the choosing had made her in return.
Magnesium Bright
Lizbeth Ashton
THE SPRITE WOKE when its metal prison shattered. Shrapnel splintered from the chamber, singing as it skittered across rough tiles. The sprite dragged in a ragged breath as it clawed free; sparks ignited in its vision and prickles of fire danced on its tongue. Fully aware for the first time since it was plucked from its grate, it cast its gaze around. A full moon shone high overhead, illuminating the rooftop and cramped terraces in its ghostly glow while artificial beams of light cut across the darkness—moving, searching. Planes flew through the dark sky and explosions rang out in the distance, the smoke they spewed reaching up to brush the stars.
It could have been fascinating, this snapshot of the outside world─but the sprite’s attention was caught by glittering powder spilled from the other end of its prison which crackled and sparked where the sprite touched it. It licked the powder; the soft grains fizzed and sent a rush it had never felt before through its being. The sprite squealed and threw itself into the pile, rolling in the sparkling dust and scattering it in its enthusiasm. It burned a brilliant white, and the sprite was enraptured.
The whole street was engulfed in noise; a cacophony of sirens, shouts, and screams bounced between the brick walls. People spilled out of houses and through alleyways and the sprite watched them, recognising families from their linked hands and tight huddles and feeling a sour pang for the family it had lost.
It had been snatched from its hearth, shut in a jar, and transported to the metal prison with stale air and no fuel. The dim light it could generate itself was only a meagre comfort and it had railed against the suffocating darkness. It realised it had to conserve energy or die before a chance for escape, so let the dark enclose it.
It had thought of its family and home in that darkness.
It had been born in a grate, an errant spark from a piece of kindling imbued with spirit. It learnt happiness and joy through its peaceful existence, always ready to dry wet socks and caress chilled faces. The family it watched through the flames offered a steady supply of fuel and cultivated the per
fect atmosphere for it. The sprite liked to play with the small child, spit at it when it made gurgling enquiries and clap when it ran around. It devoured paper offered to it with a blush by the daughter, touched she would trust it with her secrets. It helped the mother rearrange the coals, metal poker and fiery fingers working in tandem to keep the blaze alive and the room warm. That was its world, those people its family, and the sprite had thrived.
But the people in the street were not its family, and its family had not stopped the man with gloved hands from delivering it to the dark prison.
Now it lay on a scorched timber and breathed into the wood, feeling it groan as it glowed and creaked. Part of the roof had given way, but the sprite gave no mind to the inferno that raged beneath it. Instead, it listened: above everything was the sound of fire, roaring and fierce as it fed on anything it could. It was a sound of beauty, of freedom. Everything was fuel, not just what people decided was suitable; wallpaper, soft furnishings, children’s toys, and blackout curtains all burned in the face of it.
A projectile screamed as it fell from the sky. The sprite realised it was another prison when it spilt its magical dust over the road. It searched the wreckage from afar, and joined in a whistle when it heard the newly freed sprite sing of its fortune. It saw the other sprite flicker before a man with a metal hat dumped sand over it, extinguishing it and smothering both the powder and prison for good measure. He shouted orders at the panicked mass of people clustered near him, and directed others wearing similar hats to where the fire raged.
The sprite recoiled, grief clutching its embers, and felt something new rise within—something unrecognised but powerful. It roared, anger swelling its voice. It circled down into the house, riding the air currents through soot-blackened rooms as it collected the flames and called the heat to its embrace. It surged through a window and lashed out with broken glass and burning air at the people who had killed its kin without thought or remorse.
Fire: Demons, Dragons & Djinns Page 4