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

by Rebecca Chastain

  “How?”

  “Focus on your hands. Focus on the light glowing brighter.” I watched as her hands gradually brightened, though the light didn’t extend beyond the boundaries of her fingers. If she had been a flashlight in the real world, the edges of her fingers would have blurred as the light got brighter, but Primordium didn’t follow the normal laws of physics.

  I held my hands up. They glowed their usual butter white color. However, I hardly registered the dizzying sensation of looking into myself this time. Maybe it was the embarrassment.

  Focusing on the light growing brighter in my hands seemed too simplistic and new age-y, but I concentrated nonetheless, keeping my eyes glued on my fingers, picturing my hands changing as Doris’s had. At first, nothing happened. Then the glow gradually intensified.

  “Look at that!” I’d done it! I was using lux lucis! I stared at my hands in awe.

  “Congratulations. You figured out what every fourteen-year-old enforcer-to-be learns on her own.”

  I stuck my tongue out at her. I was still impressed.

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t see that. Now remember that imps will recognize you. The more you manipulate energy and the more time you work as an IE, the more quickly they’ll recognize you.”

  “Won’t they recognize you, too?”

  “Oh, sure. Tonight they will.” Doris gave her car one more pat and took off at a brisk pace down the sidewalk. I lurched to catch up. “Lesson two, which is the most important lesson: To kill an imp—to kill any creature of the dark—you must force enough lux lucis into it to overpower its atrum.”

  “How?”

  Doris grinned at me. “You grab ’em and squeeze real tight.” She cackled. “Close your mouth, girl. I’ll show you how.”

  “What about all the teeth?” There was no way I wanted to get within range of an imp’s teeth again.

  “All show. Well, if you’re stupid and leave them attached to your soul, they’ll drain you of your lux lucis and they’ll create weaknesses for the dark to get in and take hold.”

  “Oh, is that all,” I muttered. The warmth of the car had dispersed, and I bounced from foot to foot to keep warm.

  Doris flipped on her light. I stared in wonder—I could see it in Primordium! Like a normal light in the normal world, it shone through the darkness of Primordium, illuminating a circle in front of us. Of course, unlike real light, it didn’t cast any shadows.

  “You’ll want to get yourself one of these. They’re pretty handy. Aha! See. There’s our first victim.”

  A tiny, adorable (in an I-know-you-have-crazy-teeth-and-want-to-eat-me-but-I-still-want-to-cuddle-you kind of way) imp scurried along the edge of the apartment wall. The moment the light fixed on it, it froze.

  “Does it feel it?” I whispered.

  “Speak normal, girl. You’re not going to frighten it. And, no, the light doesn’t hurt it. It’s not lux lucis. It’s just a different kind of light.”

  It occurred to me to wonder what the light looked like in normal vision, but I wasn’t about to check while there was an imp in my sights.

  “Watch and learn.”

  Doris turned off her light. There was no need to wait for my eyes to adjust in Primordium. I could still see the imp against the apartment, though I wasn’t sure that I would have picked it out so quickly without the light. Doris took a step forward and crouched down. The imp cocked its head to the side, much as the little bugger that’d attacked me earlier had.

  Doris’s hands began to glow brighter. The imp scurried forward in quick, delicate hops. When it was about two feet away, it opened its mouth. I jerked back. Row after row of jagged teeth in a perfectly round mouth bounced toward Doris. She held out a hand toward it like she was offering her flesh up as food. In fact, that’s exactly what she was doing. I held my breath as the imp pounced. Doris stood and turned to face me. The imp was attached to her wrist like a leech. Doris appeared unfazed. I swallowed several screams.

  “Get a good look. It’s nothing more than a ball of evil. Darkness coalesced. Which is nothing to be afraid of. Touch it.”

  “Touch it?” I repeated stupidly.

  “Now,” she barked, thrusting it in my face. I instinctively blocked it, and my hand slid through its inky little body. It didn’t detach from her wrist. Goose bumps slid down my spine in one long shudder.

  “Grab hold of it,” Doris ordered.

  I was working up the courage to wrap my hands around it—and trying to figure out how to hold something intangible—when she shoved it at my face again.

  “Stop doing that!” I grabbed at the dark little body, cupping its weightless form with my hands. I could vaguely feel the imp; it was like dense air or very light water—not quite solid, but not completely vaporous, either. I couldn’t tell if it was my imagination or not, but it felt cool against my skin.

  “Use the lux lucis in your hands and push it into the imp.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant exactly, but I didn’t want to touch the creature any longer than necessary, so I didn’t waste time with questions. I thought about my hands getting brighter and that energy flowing into the imp. There was resistance as I pushed the light against the imp’s body, then suddenly, like the pop of a bubble, the light burst through the imp. My hands flared like twin beacons.

  I jerked back, letting my hands fall to my sides. They dimmed to normal brightness. White and black sparkles drifted between Doris and me. Feeling a thousand imaginary spiders scuttle across my skin, I met her gaze.

  “Not bad, but you need control. If there are any more imps in the area, they’re headed this way now.”

  “What happened to it? And don’t ever do that to me again!”

  “You disintegrated it like you were using a maxi pad on a paper cut.”

  I grimaced. “Did you have to shove it in my face?”

  “If I’d waited for you to get your nerve up, it would still be sucking the life force from me. Clean your panties; we’re on the hunt again.”

  I gathered my tattered ego and marched after her.

  We didn’t have far to go. As Doris had predicted, my hands had acted like the beacons they had looked like. We rounded the corner, sidestepped a mysterious puddle, and ran across three imps. They hopped like bunnies across the deadened ground directly for us.

  “I’ll take two this time,” Doris said.

  She boldly strode forward into their cute, teeth-filled midst. I followed before I could second-guess my sanity. I wasn’t going to be a coward this time. Two imps bounded toward me, but Doris reached out and snagged one. The other continued, oblivious to the particles of its previous companion floating in the air around it. How can anything so cute be scary? The imp grinned, all its tiny ebony teeth flashing. Ah, yes. That’s how.

  I reached for it the way I’d reach for a spider; the imp pounced. I yanked lux lucis into my hand and smashed it into the imp. There was the same resistance as with the first imp, then a spray of light and dark particulates. My hand glowed like a miniature star.

  “Where was the control in that?” Doris snorted.

  “So your second kill was perfect?” I demanded.

  “Not by half, girl. But I wasn’t in charge of a region at that time, either.”

  A healthy revulsion of anything made of pure evil made quitting, going home, and burying myself under a pile of blankets sound like a good plan. But there was this other niggling emotion, one that felt remarkably like enjoyment, that made me look around the vacant street for more imps.

  “How old were you when you first started doing this?”

  “Thirteen.”

  I rubbed my palms frantically on my pants when Doris wasn’t looking, trying to get the strange, sticky feeling of the imps off me.

  “It doesn’t stay on you,” she assured me without looking. “When they disintegrate, they’re gone. Oh, good. There’s a few more.”

  “You like doing this, don’t you?” I asked. Once again
, I found myself jogging to catch up with the elderly woman. I was getting used to looking at her glowing head and features in Primordium, and as an added bonus, it was harder to see the skull and crossbones on the back of her sweater in this vision.

  “Oh, yeah! I’d forgotten how much fun this is! But I’ll let you have all the ones in the next batch.”

  “Gee. Thanks.”

  Luckily, the few more she spied ended up being only three again. I stopped beside Doris when she paused, but she gave me a firm shove in the back that sent me staggering toward them.

  “Have at ’em, girl.”

  I knew I couldn’t flinch or falter, not with her waiting to judge me. Feeling like I was walking into battle, I stepped into the middle of the street to meet the imps. The high noon showdown music played in my head. The little cuties bounded toward me. I let them come, widening my stance, testing my control of lux lucis.

  The largest imp was the fastest, and it sprang for my throat from two feet away. I hadn’t been prepared for that, but pride didn’t let me jump aside. I threw my hands up to grab it. It swallowed my right hand to the wrist. There was no pain, only a slight tingle that quickly faded. Gritting my teeth to hold in a scream, I pushed lux lucis into the imp while staring into its glowing eyes. The teeth convulsed on my wrist. A little more lux lucis, and pop, there were only sparkles in the air in front of me.

  Before I could congratulate myself, the next one attacked, this time aiming for my knee. I scooped it up and used two hands to press lux lucis into it. It sprinkled out of existence, and the energy flared in my hands for a moment too long.

  “Not bad, eh?” I asked, turning to get Doris’s nod of approval. I was learning fast.

  “Yeah, except you’ve still got one attached to your ankle.”

  I glanced down. An imp I’d completely forgotten about was gnawing on my left leg.

  “Ggnaa!” I shook my foot frantically, trying to dislodge it. “Off! Get off!” Hopping and flailing didn’t shake the creepy chinchilla-wannabe. I caught sight of Doris out of the corner of my eye: She was doubled over with laughter. A rush of embarrassment broke through my panic, and I forced lux lucis into the imp the fastest way I could: through my ankle. It popped in a shower of sparkles. Apparently, just as clothes were no barrier against imps, they were also no barrier against lux lucis. My ankle swelled with light.

  “Ah, child. Good move at the end. And a lot of good moves before that. If I could learn a few of those dance steps, I’d knock the socks off the men in my salsa class.” She gave her hips an experimental shake.

  I assessed myself. Yep, everything was still intact. No thanks to Doris.

  “Let’s go find us some more fun.” Doris gave me a cheerful pat on the back.

  “More fun” ended up being a few streets away in the form of a small pack of imps. Doris challenged me to an “imp-off” to see who could kill the most first. I lost, but at least I was able to kill five to her eight. I also consoled myself with the fact that Doris had props. She used the wand she’d taken from her trunk, infusing it with lux lucis, then spearing imps before they reached her. When I asked her about it, she only snorted.

  “One thing at a time, girl. If you can’t control the lux lucis in your body, you’re definitely not ready to start brandishing it around.”

  The whole point was to avoid contact with the imps, hence my interest in the wand and being able to kill from a distance. Still, I didn’t push Doris for more information. I was learning a lot, and killing imps—even barehanded—wasn’t as bad as I’d expected.

  We roamed through a three-block area of rundown duplexes and apartments, killing stray imps as we went. Doris challenged me to different forms of attack, first allowing the imps to land on my body and binge-feeding lux lucis into them from whatever piece of soul they’d latched their teeth into, then having me rush a small herd and try to disintegrate all the imps before they could jump on me. Of the two methods, the latter was the hardest. The imps had no sense of self-preservation. Rushing them was the equivalent of ice cream leaping toward my mouth; they merely opened their jaws and started feeding.

  It took over an hour for us to flush out all the pockets of imps in the small neighborhood.

  “Why are there so many imps here?” I asked.

  “It happens. There was a hit-and-run here a few days ago. They tend to congregate after bad events. They might have dispersed on their own, but this is such a bad neighborhood, it looks like they found a home.”

  I felt overwhelmed by how much I still had to learn—and how much I would be expected to do on a daily basis.

  “When you were an IE, how many hours did you work each week?”

  “It depended. If something big happened, it overwhelmed my life. But most of the time, I put in the normal hours, just not always at the normal times. You worried you won’t be able to handle it?”

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t. You’ll get the hang of it. Let’s cruise for a bit.”

  We backtracked to Marilyn, which was fortunately still there, then zipped back to Douglas. Doris took us across the interstate to Dairy Queen, because she was hungry and “it was too late at night to be bothered with chewing.” Since my last meal had been gelato—not counting the nachos at the bar—I ordered a salad. There’s something massively unfair about eating a salad when your dining companion has ice cream, though.

  Doris drove while she ate and parked at the outskirts of an apartment complex near the junior college while we finished our late-night snacks. An occasional car passed by, dark and lifeless, with only the glowing heads of the passengers easily visible in Primordium. The apartment complex was quiet on a Wednesday night, though I knew that this time on Friday would see most balconies crowded with smokers and drunk coeds.

  Once Doris had scraped the bottom of her Blizzard clean, we roamed through the pathways of the complex without speaking, past doors with turkey-themed wreaths and balconies crammed with bikes and patio furniture. Doris walked with confidence, like she lived in one of the apartments and always took a late-night stroll. I kept waiting for the complex’s security guys to find us and kick us out. Not to mention that it was creepy, moving between all the buildings filled with unconscious people, hunting evil creatures. Creepy, and cold. I’d forgotten the cold earlier when we had hunted through the rundown neighborhood. The adrenaline had kept me warm. Now the chill crept into my bones and settled there. Doris appeared oblivious.

  I kept my hands buried in my coat pocket except for the two times I needed to take out an imp. Since there were so few in the complex, Doris let me have them all. I destroyed each one quickly, temporarily able to forget the cold during each satisfying kill.

  “You look like you’re beginning to have fun,” she said when we returned to the car.

  I hadn’t realize I was grinning. “I think I’m good at this.”

  “I think you are, too. Don’t get cocky, though. We’ve hardly scratched the surface of everything you need to know. But at least now Brad knows he’s got a little more than bait on his payroll.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  “You look tired. Let’s get you home. I’ve got a plane to catch tomorrow and I still need to pack.”

  It wasn’t until Doris mentioned it that I realized how tired I was. I checked the clock. It was nearly three in the morning. Doris still looked like she could run a marathon. I didn’t need a mirror to know that I looked frazzled and exhausted. I could only hope that I would be as energetic as Doris when I was her age. Hell, I would like to be that energetic at twenty-five!

  Of course, Doris hadn’t just had the longest day of her life. It was incredible to realize that it had been less than twenty-four hours since I’d interviewed with Kyle. There was something to be said for the mind’s ability to adapt. Yesterday I’d been an unemployed, unsuccessful used-car saleswoman avoiding my soul-sight. Today, I was an illuminant enforcer, charged with destroying evil wherever I found it, and enjoying viewi
ng the world in Primordium. I hadn’t even known what lux lucis was twenty-four hours ago, and now I wielded it as a weapon against creatures I would have refused to believe existed yesterday.

  Tired or not, I felt a tad badass.

  Doris parked when we got back to my apartment. I was surprised when she bounced out of the car while I was still fumbling to retrieve my purse from under the seat. It wasn’t surprising that she was faster and more energetic than me; it was surprising that she’d gotten out at all.

  “Thank you for the training,” I said to the skull and crossbones as she strode toward my apartment. I switched back to normal vision to navigate the stairs, not trusting my compromised sight in Primordium when I was so exhausted.

  “You’ve got a lot more to learn, but that’s a good start. We’ve got one last thing to do.”

  My pride wouldn’t let me fall too far behind as she trotted up the two flights of stairs to my apartment. I stuffed my key in the lock and let us in.

  Mr. Bond bounded to greet us, sniffing our shoes and telling us about how happy or upset he was. It was hard to tell the difference. After he’d twined through our legs a few times, he raced to his food dish. If nothing else, he was predictable.

  “You’ll need protection,” Doris said.

  “Like a gun?” I asked fuzzily.

  “Like a ward, girl. Keep it together.” She snapped her fingers under my nose, and I scowled at her. “Watch.” I blinked. Doris gathered lux lucis in her palms as we had done to kill the imps, only this time she spread it around the frame of the door. Wherever she touched, it left a faint smear of light.

  “How are you getting it to stick?” I asked.

  “You can do this with any inanimate object, but it won’t last long. For now, you’ll need to do it every night.”

  “What’s that do?”

  “Keeps out evil. You’ve just made yourself one big target, announcing yourself as an illuminant enforcer. Some of the dark creatures won’t sit by and wait for you to come and get them.”

  “The imps are coming for me?” I giggled. Man, I was tired. I blinked to focus on my apartment again.