by Nazri Noor
“It’s not that,” I said, pushing a grain of rice around on my plate. “I mean I knew we were coming out for lunch, but you did mention that other thing.” I leaned forward over the table, glancing to either side of me before speaking in a softer voice. “You know. Meeting an entity.”
“Ah. That.” Thea leaned back and set down her chopsticks. She patted at her lips with a napkin, then smiled. “Would you believe me if I told you that this was all part of it? We’re gathering reagents.” She raised a hand, beckoning our waitress over.
“Uh. Reagents? From a Chinese restaurant?”
Thea nodded, at me, then at our waitress. She fired off a fluent barrage of phrases in Chinese, the second time she had done it that day. The waitress nodded, grinning, then scuttled off.
I couldn’t help myself. “So you speak Chinese?”
There was a quirk in Thea’s smile, but there was no trace of condescension when she spoke. “Mandarin, actually. And a little, yes. Mostly enough to order in a Chinese restaurant.” She smiled in a way that told me that wasn’t true.
I wondered how much else Thea was hiding, how many other talents this woman had. I couldn’t help feeling a little bit smaller considering how badly I spent my own free time. I mean, she was studying foreign languages and I was on my couch playing video games and grinding out levels. Yikes.
“So we’re done here?” I wiped my mouth roughly with my napkin, a little more excited than I should have been, perhaps, to get moving.
“Not quite,” Thea said, and I watched with quiet dismay as she picked up her chopsticks again. “I just ordered takeout is all. Keep eating, it’d be a shame to let this go to waste. And we can’t take out those dumplings anyway, they aren’t any good when you reheat them.”
I couldn’t hide my confusion, and I sat there for a good few seconds, fiddling with my chopsticks. “Sorry. I’m – I guess I’m baffled, Thea.”
“What’s there to be baffled about?” She leaned one forearm on the table, then flicked her chopsticks out deftly to pick up a slice of ginger beef. “I’m just taking my best boy out on a lunch date is all.”
I must have reddened a little, because hey, it was always nice to hear that my boss thought I was doing a good job. She laughed softly. I opened and closed my mouth, looking for something to say, but mercifully, Thea picked up and filled the silence for me.
“Oh, fine,” she said, chewing thoughtfully on the beef. She swallowed, took a small swig of her tea, then set her utensils down. “What I ordered, that’s part of what we need for setting up our meeting. It’s always going to be something different, depending on the entity. Each one has its own wants and desires, and you have to make an offering lovely enough for it to be lured to our plane, or at least to convince it to open a door to its own.”
“So the offering is orange chicken.”
Thea tutted. “Not in this case. Plus this place doesn’t even do orange chicken. Although it depends on the entity, like I said. There was one that just wanted frozen hotdogs.” She patted at the corner of her mouth with a napkin, eyes distant with remembrance. “No condiments. Didn’t even ask for them to be cooked. Just wanted them frozen.”
None of that explained much of anything at all, but there wasn’t time to probe further. The waitress showed up, presenting Thea with a large bag of – something, along with the check. True to her promise, Thea picked up the tab, swatting my hand away when I offered to split the bill. I scratched at the back of my hand and muttered my thanks.
The waitress sorted the check, then came back with exactly two fortune cookies, presented lovingly on a brass serving dish.
“Now,” Thea said. “I did say that they don’t do Americanized Chinese food here, but some things are expected, so they still do the fortune cookies. Customers can be funny like that.”
She picked one up, cracked it open in a single hand, then pulled out a slip of paper. She chuckled after reading it, then tucked her fortune into her breast pocket. “I’m pretty sure that was a song lyric,” she said, patting at her pocket. “How about yours?”
I eyed the cookie suspiciously. I never did subscribe to anything involving superstition, fortunetelling, or divination, but what harm was there in playing along? It was just a mundane urban ritual. Just a fortune cookie, I told myself.
They made these little guys in a factory somewhere, with fortunes probably scoured from the web and printed out by some bored interns. It wasn’t like Thea was shoving a soothsayer in my face, begging me to have my fortune told. And weirdly, yes, I still felt this apprehensive even after learning about the Veil, even knowing that some of this divination stuff was actually true. Sorry, can’t tell you which. Trade secret.
“Fine,” I said, perhaps a little mopier about it than I should have been. I picked up the cookie in one hand and crushed it, the way Thea did, except in my case it just splintered and crumbled all over the pristine red tablecloth. Damn. After I’d made so much effort not to spill anything over lunch, too.
Yet when I opened my fist, that’s all there was in the palm of my hand: shards and crumbs of fortune cookie. No slip of paper to be found. No fortune.
“Um. Well that’s – ominous.” I meant it as a joke, but somehow saying it out loud drove a tiny sliver of dread into my chest.
Thea clapped her hands together, seemingly tickled. She shrugged, then made the worst possible joke she could have in that moment.
“That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
Is it possible, I ask you, for someone who isn’t a dad to make a dad joke? I’d like to know.
Minutes later we were making our way down the block, Thea all but gleaming in her pantsuit, looking out at the streets of Valero through a pair of aviators that somehow made her look even more executive than executive. I trailed after her like a hobo in my wrinkled jeans and jacket, squinting against the sunlight. Hey, I didn’t know I’d be working so long that day, all right?
The bag of whatever it was from the Seven Dragons rustled as Thea carried it along on our little sojourn. She didn’t ask me to bring it for her, and I didn’t dare to ask lest she go on another of her circuitous “Did you know that tea is from China” lectures. I’d find out soon enough, anyway, except that instinctively I knew that I’d only have more questions as the afternoon stretched on. She stopped in front of a store just some blocks from the restaurant, and I knew I was right.
I looked up at the sign. “This is a bodega.”
“Yes,” she said, her face neutral. Those sunglasses really did a lot to hide her expression.
I cocked my head, then looked around. Absolutely nothing mystical at all about this place, but I shrugged and relented. “So – more reagents?”
Thea smiled. “You got it. I know it isn’t quite as magical as you might have expected,” she said, waving her one free hand in the air, waggling her fingers as she said the word. “But it works.”
This time I didn’t bother hiding my sigh. She laughed again, and I followed her into the store. Minutes more later we were back out on the streets again. She had picked up some of those little tea candles, a box of chalk, a water for herself, and a juice box for me. I was thirsty, and in need of sugar, don’t judge.
At this point Thea took out her phone, peering at a map of the neighborhood to look for – well, whatever it was we were looking for. I tried to be cool about peeking over her shoulder, but she caught me out pretty quickly and chuckled it off.
“Hold on there. We’re getting close.”
“Another shopping expedition?”
“Very funny, Graves. No. We’re looking for the entity’s tether. It’s like their signature in this realm, how we know we can access them from a physical location.”
“Huh.” I rubbed my chin, noticing that I’d been awake long enough to grow a faint bit of stubble. “So like an address.”
Thea stopped mid-stride, then favored me with a wry smile. “Yes, actually, exactly like an address.” She snuck another glance at her phone, then cocked her hea
d over to the right. “This way.”
I followed for a few more steps before asking the obvious. “I mean clearly this entity’s address isn’t just on your maps app, right?”
“Again: very funny. No, I’m looking for a specific brick wall. You’ll understand when we get there.” She poked her head down a particular alley, one that was shrouded in darkness despite the light of the noon sun, then slipped her phone back into her pocket. “Right. This is the place.”
We stepped into the alley, the smell of it dank and musty, and maybe the burgeoning darkness of it should have made me nervous, but since I’d learned how to step, something about shadows soothed me, somehow. I knew I was safer with them nearby since I could always hoof it and find an exit. Which was almost what I did, mind you, when Thea pulled out a knife.
“Whoa.” I backed away, my hands in the air. “Hey. Whoa.”
Thea blinked at me, then lowered the knife, sputtering apologetically. “Oh God. Sorry. I forgot. I know you have a thing about these now.”
I scratched at my chest, maybe unconsciously, my scar itching and burning as I eyed the knife. There wasn’t much light in the alleyway, but whatever sun made it in there still caused the edge of the blade to glint in a way that made me a little too uncomfortable.
“Part of the process,” Thea said, her voice softer and lower, adjusted to be reassuring. “Trust me on this.” She set the knife carefully down on the ground, as if to assure me further, then placed both the Seven Dragons takeout and the bag from the bodega down as well. She got to work, sitting on her haunches, not seeming to care at how close her flawlessly white pants were to the filth of the alley.
“I’m guessing we’ve got the right spot?”
“Yep,” Thea said, flipping open the box of chalk. She cocked her head at the near wall, gesturing at something there. “See for yourself.”
I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t noticed, but something was marked on the wall, not quite in the spray-painted softness of the graffiti left there, but with a more definitive kind of precision, sharp edges and perfect lines deliberately placed, almost as if made with a stencil. I couldn’t tell what it was exactly, this octagon with its criss-crosses of lines through the center, but I can tell you that it looked arcane and mysterious enough for me to buy Thea’s story about tethers.
She huffed as she began sketching something out on the ground. “Truthfully,” she said, “I had all these supplies back in my office.” She scratched a few more lines into the asphalt, then looked up at me, grinning. “But where’s the fun in that? This way we got to go on a little field trip together.”
I smiled and shook my head. It had been an interesting afternoon, to say the least, and watching as she sketched out more symbols in chalk, I couldn’t help but think that it was about to get even more interesting. She incanted under her breath, her lips moving as she went.
The drawing on the ground was starting to take shape, a loose collection of sigils and glyphs I didn’t recognize from any language, all arranged in a ring. Thea drew a circle around the entire thing, as if to close it, then rummaged through her pockets for a lighter. She set the tea candles at specific intervals, then lit them.
“Okay,” she said, getting up and brushing her hands against each other, patting off the chalk dust. “Story time. Sometimes it isn’t enough to use incantations or hand gestures to get the magic flowing, especially for bigger projects like this. We’re opening a doorway to another plane, after all. Knock knock. That takes more power, and that needs a circle.”
My eyes widened at the thought of it. “So is that why cults exist? In terms of ritual magic, I mean. Bigger circles, not just of symbols like the stuff you drew, but actual circles of people?”
Thea looked up and tilted her head. “To a point, yes. You’d need a large enough group of like-minded people to get something going, or failing that, a large enough circle. For best results, both. It’s the beauty of magic. It’s like a built-in failsafe.” She dusted her hands off some more, then laughed.
“I mean who ever heard of a giant summoning circle? The logistics alone. Still,” she said, bending over to pick up the takeout bag. “That’s the kind of stuff we don’t want happening. Big circles, or big groups of people? All that energy and psychic ability directed towards the same goal? That’s how you get an apocalypse going.”
A squeaking from the corner of the alley called my attention. I grimaced at the sight of so many rats rushing for the darkness, even in broad daylight. Thea only shrugged. “They’re still discombobulated after Resheph’s death. Don’t mind it, Dustin. It only takes time.”
She stuck one hand into the takeout bag, retrieving, of all things, another fortune cookie. This wasn’t explaining anything for me at all. Thea noticed my confusion and piped up again.
“Like I said, different entities, different tastes. This one likes Chinese restaurant fortune cookies. I wish I could tell you why.”
Cookie in hand, she thrust her arm out over the circle, crumbling it into dust, letting the pieces fall into the chalk drawing. Then she picked up the knife and held her hand out again.
“And their tastes and reagents can change, but it’s pretty unanimous that every entity expects a little bit of blood.”
Before I could protest, Thea had poked the knife into the tip of her thumb. Blood welled up immediately, a big enough drop that I could see it fall and splash onto the cement. It hissed, then smoked.
Something changed in the alley just then. Perhaps it went colder. Maybe it became darker, and I knew I didn’t imagine the way the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end, electric. And that strange chittering definitely wasn’t there before.
Thea dropped the knife and picked up the takeout bag, her lips moving, but her mouth making no sound. Another incantation. I kept staring, waiting for her to say something audible, when a low humming emanated from the wall. The symbol on the bricks was gone. In fact, most of the wall was missing, replaced by a pulsing, silvery oval.
“A gateway,” Thea said. “Your very first one.” She beamed proudly. I looked at the portal uncertainly, then swallowed.
Thea beckoned, one hand lugging a plastic bag stuffed with fortune cookies, the other waving for me to step through the shimmering gossamer doorway. There was no backing out of this now.
“Come on, Dust. She’s waiting.” Thea smiled encouragingly. “Time to say hello.”
Chapter 6
Magical transportation is an unusual concept, the kind of thing that needs to be experienced to be truly understood. I still haven’t had tons of practice with shadowstepping, mainly because I’ve never had to stay inside of the darkness for very long. Not that I would want to. It could get bizarre inside the Dark Room, the name I’ve given the eerie dimension I have to traverse every time I shadowstep.
The shadows are cold, and it’s hard to breathe. And there are different shades of dark, if you can believe that. Sometimes, in the scant seconds it takes me to walk from one shadow to the next, I fancy that I can see things moving in the black ethers. But the worst is the silence. When you’re in that swirling chaos of darkness and shade, and you realize for the first time that you can’t hear a single thing – not even the sound of your own voice as you scream in fresh terror – it cuts a little notch out of your soul.
Strange, I know, that someone should be so apprehensive of their own powers, but the Lorica taught us to respect those elements that were out of our control. And the world hiding behind shadow, that was a whole lot of stuff that was out of my hands. All I could do was accept the rules of that other dimension, to adjust to its realities. It was the same approach that I kept in mind when we entered the gossamer portal.
The gateway Thea and I stepped through was unnerving, to say the least. There was an immediately different quality to it, not the bleak silence and blackness of the Dark Room, but this odd feeling of thickness. Viscosity, maybe. The gossamer portal offered some resistance as we moved through it, forcing us to walk as if in slow moti
on. Even Thea seemed to have some trouble, forcing herself forward through what felt like an invisible barrier. Ever been in a Halloween haunted house? That was kind of what it felt like. Like walking through spiderwebs.
What awaited us on the other side was no more comforting. Dimness, all around, not quite like the dreary black of the shadows I’d become familiar with, but its own kind of pervasive dark. There were no fires here, magical or otherwise, like at the Lorica, only unseen sources of a sickly green light, cast over the entirety of the immense room. The white of Thea’s clothing turned into a pale, diseased jade, the same color as the huge swaths of silk draping from the ceiling.
Did I not mention the silk? In the gloom the long, flowing sheets seemed to shift and billow, fluttering in the large, windless chamber we had found on the other end of the portal. In the stillness of the atmosphere, the sound of chittering was all the more disconcerting, no breeze blowing, but the noise of it like wind trailing through reeds. And all about us the thick, cloying smell of incense, of nothing specific, only a scent of something ancient and steeped in ritual.
That was all there was in the chamber, or this realm, to be more specific. I was just about to open my mouth, question at the ready, when Thea nodded to the far end of the darkness. The silks streaming from the ceiling parted, like curtains on a theater stage about to reveal something dramatic, something game-changing.
A woman sat behind the silks, bare-chested and beautiful, at least from the parts of her face that I could see. Her eyes were bound in the same whisper-light cloth that adorned the rest of the chamber, a kind of strange ceremonial veil. Her hair might have been a very silvery blonde, so close to white, her lips full, and slightly parted to show wet, white teeth. But in the strange, eldritch glow of the room, everything seemed greenish and ghoulish, and so she sat there unmoving, a statuette in jade.