A Fistful of Evil: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Madison Fox, Illuminant Enforcer Book 1)

by Rebecca Chastain

  I gestured to my sweater and jacket lying on the back of my dining room chair.

  “Good. Glad you’re not one of those silly women that puts fashion before health.”

  Personally, I thought I looked quite fashionable in my sweater and coat, but that wasn’t a conversation I was going to have with a woman who had felt people on her sweater. I slipped on my extra layers, gave Mr. Bond a farewell pat, and followed Doris outside.

  “Whew—these stairs!” she exclaimed on the way down, but I had to jog to keep up. “We’ll take my car. At least we’ll be prepared that way.”

  Groaning to myself, I followed her across the dark parking lot, expecting a Buick or Cadillac. I was shocked when she stopped next to a car buried in the shadows of two minivans. The thing didn’t even come up to my waist. A Buick suddenly didn’t seem so bad.

  I folded myself into the toy car. Doris was already in place, her seat pushed so close to the steering wheel that a thicker sweater would have gotten in the way.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a car so small.”

  “Mazda Miata. Best car out there. Not like those metal death traps. It reacts.” She laughed as she zipped out of the space. My seat belt caught, and I braced a hand against the dash. “Marilyn is like an extension of my body, like we’re fused together when I drive. We’re quick. And our average age is thirty-three.”

  I peered around me at the hubcaps of cars she rocketed past on the boulevard. Please let us be more visible than I feel.

  “Brad seems to think you’re still wet behind the ears, Madison, so I’ll start at the beginning and you can stop me if I’m covering information you already know, okay?” Doris didn’t wait for my response before launching into her lecture. “Evil, darkness, whatever you want to call it, is about as predictable in where it clusters as you’d expect.” She down-shifted before a corner, then floored it through the curve like a race car driver. I gripped the edges of my seat and checked the mirrors like I was the driver. “It grows in low-income areas, anywhere abandoned, near bars, tattoo parlors, and head shops.”

  “That sounds a bit stereotypical.”

  “With reason. It also forms in wealthy areas where corruption is not as visible to the naked eye, so don’t think I’m a reactionary old woman. For training, we’re going to go to the obvious areas.”

  I grabbed the dash as we slid between two SUVs.

  “Sometimes I feel like I should be able to slide under those beasts,” Doris told me gleefully. “They’re like the dinosaurs of the road, and I’m the dragonfly!” She looked over at me and cackled. “You should see your face, girl. You need to lighten up if you’re going to last.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  She rolled her eyes at me, then thankfully focused on the road again. “Light, good, again, whatever you want to call it, grows, too,” Doris said, picking up her lecture where she’d interrupted herself. “I spent many of my enforcer years as a real estate agent. Move a few good people into an area, and they can change the whole balance with very little effort on your part. And if a neighboring enforcer pissed me off, I’d stick ’em with the bad people.”

  “How can you tell if someone is really good?”

  “You can see it in Primordium. You are an enforcer, right? So tell me what made you stop using it? What horrible event lurks in your past, kid?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Doris slowed to pull into a neighborhood. We cruised through evenly spaced streetlights on the quiet street. Everyone was inside, enjoying late-night TV or asleep in their beds, somewhere I’d like to be.

  “Come on. I’m not stupid. Neither of us would be here if something hadn’t spooked you in your teens. You don’t get to be an ignorant old woman like you unless you’ve had a bad experience in the past. Otherwise, you’d be training the next IE now, not me.”

  “I’m hardly old,” I said.

  “By the time I was your age, I’d transferred twice to tougher regions just to give myself a challenge. Out with it.”

  I thought about refusing to tell her, but there was something confidant-inspiring about the cocoon of the darkened car and the sleepy street. Especially knowing I was talk to someone who might understand.

  “I was fifteen, no sixteen. I really liked this boy. He was seventeen. A senior. Real cute.” God, Steve had been gorgeous. A football star with charisma. It was such a cliché that I couldn’t stand it now. Of course, then I’d been a bundle of hormones and thrilled to think my life might follow a movie plot—and I had thought I was head deep in the kind of love Shakespeare wrote about. “I couldn’t believe he’d noticed me, let alone asked me to the prom.”

  By then I’d been using my soul-sight long enough to know what I was seeing. I thought I was getting pretty good at judging the level of evil in a person based on their soul. I couldn’t correlate a particular shade of smut with any particular crime or immoral offense, but I thought I could tell who was really bad from who occasionally stole candy from the grocery store bins or lied to their parents about their weekend activities.

  “I checked everyone then in soul—in Primordium.”

  “No, tell me your word for it,” Doris said.

  “I called it ‘soul-sight.’ I know, it’s corny.”

  “And only half true. You see people’s souls in Primordium. You also see their health, their energy levels. It’s more like life-sight. Sometimes a sick person can look as bad as an evil person.”

  “How can you tell the difference?”

  “Practice. Something you’ve obviously been avoiding. Tell me more about the boy. I bet you he wasn’t just white.”

  “Well, no. He was mostly white, a bit gray in the hands, but nothing alarming. So we went to the prom. Halfway through, Steve—that was his name—suggested we go to a party at a friend’s house he knew in the city.” I had been having too much fun with him to say no. I’d felt wild and adult. I’d felt ready. For it. Steve wasn’t a virgin, and he’d been sweet to me all night. When we’d started making out in a quiet bedroom at the party house, I’d been an eager participant. Until he lowered his pants. His groin was so dark in soul-sight it had looked like he was wearing oil for briefs.

  “And?” Doris prompted, jolting me back to the dim interior of her car.

  “Well, one thing led to another—”

  “You had sex,” Doris supplied. She grinned at my discomfort.

  “No. Yes. I mean, we were going to. But while most of him was light gray, parts of him—important parts—were black.”

  “Ah.”

  “He didn’t like it when I told him I wanted to stop, either.” Seeing his black groin had worked like a bucket of cold water to the face, making me realize I was going too fast for my comfort. Steve, however, thought we weren’t going fast enough. He’d held me down when I’d started to get up, and his light gray hands had boiled with black flecks that spread, coating his palms, bleeding onto me, tainting my soul around my wrists.

  I remember screaming, terrified. I went wild, thrashing and fighting with strength I hadn’t known I possessed. I’d landed a knee to his groin, which finally gave me the upper hand.

  “I fought him off. Somehow the darkness on his soul got on me. It grew on his hands and stuck to me.” I shuddered and pushed aside one of my least favorite memories.

  “How did you get rid of it?”

  “I didn’t. Eventually it went away, faded with the bruises.”

  If only Steve could have faded from my life as easily. He made the rest of that year a living hell, and before he graduated, he’d given me such a bad reputation that none of the boys in my class would look twice at me. It was just another reason I’d been happy to leave Berkeley behind and head to Davis for college. The boys there had never heard of me, and when I did have sex my freshman year, I’d gotten so good at avoiding soul-sight that it never occurred to me to check the boy.

  “And that was it? You were too scared to look in Pri
mordium again?” The soft scorn in Doris’s voice jarred me.

  “Would you have wanted to? I watched evil form out of nothing on what should have been a good soul. I hadn’t been able to tell he was evil until he was naked. I couldn’t trust my soul-sight. I felt betrayed. I didn’t need that kind of complication—being normal was already hard enough.”

  “But you could trust it. Steve wasn’t all good.” Doris waggled her gray brows.

  “So what was I supposed to do? Ask everyone to disrobe for me?”

  She let that one go. “You’ve never done anything with lux lucis?”

  “I guess I’d know if I had?”

  That earned me a snort. “You stagnated yourself. Child, you’ve got a lot of learning to pack in. Look at me.” I looked. “No, in Primordium.”

  I blinked. Doris glowed a soft white, hardly brighter than the average person, though no gray tainted her soul.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  “Well, you’re rather dim compared to Kyle.” I realized the moment I said it how rude it sounded. “I mean, Kyle glowed like a freaking search light.”

  “He’s always been an ass. A stupid one, too. He was making himself a beacon. You could do that, too, if you wanted, but I can’t think why you would. All he did was gather as much lux lucis into himself as he could hold, which made him a target for any scrap of darkness out there.”

  “What is lux lucis?”

  “Light. Life. It’s what you see when you look at people; it’s their life force. All plants and animals have it. Without human influence, plants and animals are typically immune to evil, but humans are completely capable of corrupting their own lux lucis. Which is why your teenage fling had darkness in him. It was evilness corrupting his soul, his life force. If you’d looked later, I’m sure Steve’s underlying evil would have been impossible to miss—without making him drop his drawers. Teenage years are formidable years; they set up the balance of a person’s life force, or soul, as you called it. Using Primordium to judge a teenager’s balance is always tricky because they can change so much—from good to bad or bad to good.

  “Everyone naturally generates a certain amount of lux lucis—or if they’re bad for long enough, atrum,” Doris continued. “I guess it’s like blood—you can lose or use some lux lucis and it grows back. Or you can take it.”

  “Like a vampire?”

  “Not the blood, silly. The lux lucis. You can absorb it from the plants around you if you need it faster than it naturally replenishes—and you will. Evil creatures have atrum, which is dark energy just as lux lucis is light energy. You’ll use lux lucis to overpower atrum when you take on an imp. Is this making sense?”

  “Sort of. So Kyle wasn’t radiating because he was a particularly good person?”

  “Hell no. Before we get out, I want to explain a few things. Then we can get to the fun.”

  I looked around. I had been so captivated by the conversation, I hadn’t noticed that Doris had parked. We sat in front of a row of two-story rundown apartments I could just make out in the gray-on-gray of Primordium.

  “Use Primordium all the time. In the grocery store. At the office. In the car. Use it until you can see depth and colors in it, until it’s as natural as your normal sight.”

  “Colors?”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s not a black and white world. It’s just not a world that relies on light to create color. Some creatures, good and evil, have color tints to them, like citos and dryads, but I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, just use it. All. The. Time.”

  “Primordium is my new friend. Got it.”

  “Okay, we shouldn’t encounter anything worse than an imp or two out here tonight. Even if he was a prick, Kyle was good at his job. He left you a very clean region to start in.”

  “Hang on,” I said, stopping her before she could get out. “I’ve never done anything with Primordium or lux lucis. So, I mean, it’s not too late for me to”—I searched for the words—“give it up.”

  “Give it up?”

  “On a permanent basis.”

  Doris turned from where she’d swung her legs out the open door to give me a long, considering look. “Child, there’s no off switch. If you decided you didn’t want freckles anymore, they wouldn’t go away. Your ability is like that—it’s a sense, not a button you can turn on and off. You’re stuck with it.” She bounced out of the car and slammed the door shut behind her.

  The quiet cocoon of the car pulsed in my ears. The shreds of hope to which I’d been clinging remained suspended in that silence, holding me frozen. The moment I exited the car, my life was going to change forever.

  I willed my freckles to disappear and then glanced down at the back of my hand. It glowed butter white in Primordium. I blinked and held my hand up to the feeble streetlight. The freckles were still there.

  Doris rapped on the window beside me and I jumped. I took a deep breath and opened the door. Who was I kidding—my life had changed the moment I’d accepted the signing bonus.

  6

  If Found, Please Return Me to Reality

  “Come on, girl. You’ve got a lot to learn and the night oil’s going to burn up fast. Before you get out, take a good look at me. Can you see the definition in my face?”

  I blinked back to Primordium, steadying myself with a discreet hand on the dash. “Of course.”

  “Good. What about this?”

  “What?”

  “I rolled my eyes at you. I could see that in Primordium if you did it, so don’t think about it.”

  “Are you looking at me in Primordium right now?”

  “You’ve got good color for your age. Don’t be shy about it.” She started to walk away, then turned back and squatted in front of the open door. “They did this experiment with kittens in the sixties or maybe the seventies.”

  “In Primordium?”

  Doris waved my question aside. “Has nothing to do with Primordium. These were ‘real scientists.’” She did air quotes around the words, like there really was no such thing as a real scientist. “These scientists put goggles on kittens so they saw only vertical lines during some key developmental phases in their lives. When they were grown, the scientist let the kittens loose in the world, without their goggles. The cats fell over everything—off tables, walked into walls, missed stairs. They couldn’t see horizontal lines.”

  “That’s horrible! Why would anyone do that to a cat?”

  “Because scientists need a way to get their jollies, too. The point is, you’re like those cats.”

  “I have no problem seeing horizontal lines,” I said, feeling dense, my mind stuck on the image of kittens wearing goggles.

  “Of course you can. But you’re missing all the nuisances of Primordium. You’re seeing only part of the world. You’ve got to take off those blinders you’ve so blithely been wearing and really view the world. Come on. And act natural, too. I don’t want to have to explain this to the cops.”

  I wriggled out of the toy car and stretched, feeling ten feet tall. The cold air seeped down my neck and up my jacket’s sleeves. Shoving my hands into my pockets, I moved around to the trunk to see what Doris was doing.

  “Ever woman needs her accessories,” she said. She’d pulled on a black hoodie with a white skull and crossbones on the back. She opened a small kit in the trunk and selected a flashlight and a wand. “This place is pretty clean. We shouldn’t need more than pet wood and our hands.” She quietly closed the trunk. “We’ll not stray too far, Marilyn,” she promised her car.

  I blinked out of Primordium to get a better look at our surroundings. Muted colors washed through the dark world and I steadied myself against the Miata. Only one light on the street worked, illuminating a fire hydrant and a patch of dead grass. Cars lined the street, and the sleek Miata stuck out like it had a “free” sign on it. Broken down 4Runners, rusted Mercurys, and dented Metros were more the norm. The apartments were in worse shape than the cars. In flickerin
g porch lights, I could see ripped window screens and scattered trash, with torn-apart children’s toys littering the walkway. I blinked, checking for signs of life in Primordium. A single spindly tree glowed faintly against the apartment building. No animals or humans were foolish enough to be out in this neighborhood at night.

  Except me and a crazy old lady.

  “Not the country club, is it?” Doris asked. “First lesson before we go anywhere: Gather lux lucis in your hands.”

  “In my hands?”

  “Sure. Where else would you do it?”

  “But I thought this was all about looking at things and, ah, zapping them with my glare.”

  “With your . . . ? Humph, give me your best . . . zapping,” Doris said.

  “That’s just it. I don’t know what muscle to flex.” I squinted at her and thought about zapping that grin off her wrinkled face.

  Doris guffawed. “That’s pretty fierce.”

  “Feel anything?” I asked hopefully.

  Doris’s cackle echoed off the nearby walls.

  “This isn’t funny!”

  “Keep your voice down,” she sputtered around giggles.

  I planted my hands on my hips and glowered. Doris crumpled over in laughter, leaning against the Miata for support. I watched her, feeling foolish without knowing why, which made me angry.

  “Look. If this is your idea of training, maybe we should call it a night.”

  Doris got herself under control. Wiping at tears running down her face, she said, “You’re strung tighter than a clothesline, girl.” She held up a hand to forestall my retort, burst into giggles again, then regained control. “I see where you’ve had some, ah, confusion. Your ability to see the world in Primordium is just that—a sight. It’s not telekinesis or telekinetic judo. Just like you can’t pick up a rock and throw it by looking at it, you can’t move lux lucis with just your sight. You’ve got to use your body.”

  “Oh.” Was it dark enough to hide my flaming face? Could she see the red glow in Primordium?

  Still grinning, Doris said, “Let’s try again. Gather lux lucis in your hands.”