by Nazri Noor
She doubled over wheezing, reeling from a kick to the midsection. I swore I heard something crack, but better than being gored by Gil’s claws. The flames around her fists flickered, then guttered out, but she returned with an uppercut to Gil’s jaw. Something snapped, and Gil backed off, clutching his chin.
Talk about job hazards. This was far from ideal for any of us. I couldn’t just give Vanitas up. He wasn’t just a thing, after all. He was a friend, almost a person, honestly. Who was the Lorica to dictate his fate? And he attuned with me. If we were separated, he’d just go dormant and inanimate again. The only thing worse than losing him as a buddy and bodyguard was knowing that he’d be as good as dead. He only had sentience because of our resonance. Herald said so.
I slapped my forehead. Herald. He must have told them. I filed that away in the back of my mind. We were going to have some very serious words if I somehow got out of this alive.
And if Bastion somehow survived this with all his limbs intact.
“The sword, Dustin,” Prudence cried.
“You can try and take it, lady,” Gil said, chortling through a split lip turned crimson with his own blood. “The Lorica doesn’t have a monopoly on artifacts.”
“Say it,” Vanitas hummed.
“Fuck no.”
“You can pry it from his cold, dead hands,” Sterling snarled. He had snuck up behind Bastion, who was still fending off both sword and scabbard. Bastion turned to defend himself, but too late: Sterling’s fist landed on the back of his neck.
“Ack,” Bastion gurgled. He slumped to his knees.
“Vanitas, enough,” I shouted, and the sword stopped its assault bare inches from Bastion’s face. He slid back into his scabbard then hovered to me wordlessly. I tucked him back into my knapsack, an odd sense of dread building in my chest.
“Bastion!” Prudence ducked under another swipe of Gil’s talons, then sprinted to Bastion’s side. She fell to her knees, catching him in her arms just before he crashed to the ground.
The barrier around us gleamed, then flickered, then faded. The dome was gone.
“Now,” Sterling hissed, tugging on my jacket.
“Wait,” I said. Bastion wasn’t moving. Prudence was breathing quickly, fiddling with a phone in her hand.
“We need to get out of here before more of the Lorica shows up,” Gil said. His talons had retracted into his body, but his fingers were still ragged and bloody.
“Is he going to be okay?” I heard myself say, as if from a distance.
Prudence eyed me coldly, then sighed. “You should run. He’s unconscious, but – ”
Gil was already gone. “I’m out,” Sterling said, before vanishing in a silver streak, dashing off into the night.
“I’m sorry,” I told Prudence.
“Yeah,” she said, stroking Bastion’s forehead. “Me too.”
I stepped into the darkness.
Chapter 8
“You could have killed him,” I said.
Sterling picked under his nails. “I fail to see your point.” Against the grimy interiors of Mama Rosa’s Fine Filipino Food, even with his clothes and hair a little torn and tousled, Sterling’s pallor made him stand out like a beacon.
“You knocked him out flat.” I was trying to focus on the beer in my hand, but even a nice, frosty San Miguel straight out of Mama Rosa’s fridge wasn’t enough to cool me off.
“And you were charging him down with a sword. You know what, you’d think I’d get a little more thanks for getting us all out of there. And if you think it was easy for me to just pop my bones back into place after he basically crushed me to a pulp – ”
Carver cleared his throat. It was enough to silence us both. “Sterling did what he had to do to facilitate your escape, Dustin. Don’t be so hard on him.”
Sterling smirked. I scowled.
“About time, too,” Gil grumbled. He had a raw, chilled steak over his eye. I remembered him pulling it out of the freezer to thaw earlier that day. Dude must have been saving it for dinner before Prudence roughed him all the way up. “That chick did a number on me. She might have broken something. What was her name again?”
“Prudence,” I said. “Prudence Leung.”
“Interesting. And kind of fitting. I just know how to hurt things, but she knew exactly what she was doing. Patient, looking for openings, timing her strikes and everything. Very skilled.”
“Years of experience. She’s legitimately a martial artist.”
“And it shows.” Gil winced as he lifted the steak off his face. He took a bite out of the corner, ripping at the raw meat with his teeth. “I’m honestly not that mad that she almost kicked my head off,” he said, chewing thoughtfully.
“Yeah, I’m honestly surprised you survived that.” I tried not to focus on the trail of red fluid dribbling down his chin. “How the hell did you manage to dodge her so consistently?”
“Werewolf reflexes, I guess?” He shrugged. “It was a matter of wearing her out so she couldn’t expend any more magic. I figured that out, at least.”
“Yeah, about werewolves.” I held my hands up, fingers extended. “What the hell was that all about with your nails? Talons?”
“Keeps me useful. I don’t have to wait for the full moon to get things done, if you catch my drift. Carver taught me how to do it. But I didn’t want to go full dog. I don’t exactly want the Lorica coming down on us. I wasn’t planning to kill her or anything.”
“That makes one of us,” Sterling said. “I should’ve ripped pretty boy’s spine out the back of his head.”
“God, Sterling, please.” I squeezed the bridge of my nose. Bastion was okay. He had to be.
“Yes. Please.” Mama Rosa swatted at him with one massive hand. The eponymous proprietor of the Filipino restaurant that concealed our home, Mama Rosa was an excellent cook, and was possibly descended from giants. She was huge, built like a rhinoceros and likely just as violent. She spoke so rarely, but when she did, even our resident vampire sat up and listened. “Please get out. No smoking, how many times do I have to tell you.”
“You smoke, too,” Sterling said.
“Not inside.” She swatted again, her hand making a meaty thunk against his shoulder. Sterling whined. “Out. Get out.”
Carver tutted. Sterling sulked, then slunk outside, making a show of wrapping his leather jacket tighter around himself. I was pretty sure that vampires were impervious to cold, but apparently they weren’t impervious to acting like gigantic babies. He pulled out his cellphone, face screwed into an exaggerated pout.
“At least we got out fine, and with the goods intact,” Gil said. He nodded at my backpack. “That sword is ridiculous. You don’t want to give that up.”
I nodded. Not a chance, not when Vanitas was both my roommate and my personal bodyguard.
“Indeed,” Carver said silkily. “Far be it for you to surrender the only weapon you have.”
I cringed. Here we go again. He was going to bring up the magic.
“But I’ve been trying,” I said.
“Not hard enough. Well and good that generating fire takes time and practice, Graves, but between your innate talent and my enormous brain, you would think that there would have been more progress.”
I held my hand up, staring hard into the creases of my palm, willing something, anything to happen. Carver sighed.
“Well you can’t expect anything at this point, can you? You’re exhausted.”
“But you brought it up.”
Carver folded his arms, tapping his foot from his table in the corner of the restaurant. Rosa tutted and tapped her foot as well, seemingly in rhythm. Gil gnawed on his raw steak, his eyes carefully avoiding mine.
“And then there’s the matter of the honing,” Carver said ominously.
“You know that’s even harder for me, Carver. That’s not fair. You know the risks better than I do.”
He slammed his hand against the table, the crack whipping the inside of the restaurant into renewed
silence. “Then when will you learn?” he hissed.
I took a deep pull on my beer, half to buy time, and half to drown out whatever retort might have tried to make its way out of my body. The honing. That’s what Carver had come to call our process of refining my connection to the Dark Room. The battle at Central Square had seen me unleashing its contents, resulting in both wide-scale destruction and the incredibly painful, incredibly bloody reopening of the scar in my chest.
Carver wanted us to fine-tune that process, to hone my use of my ability, as it were. Instead of fully breaking down the door to the Dark Room, I could open it just a crack, enough to use it surgically. If I could learn to let out just enough of the shadows, I might be able to control them enough to use them as weapons. Given time, by literally sharpening my mastery of the darkness, I could conjure blades made of solid night out of nowhere. Trust and believe, that sounded so insanely fucking awesome that I jumped at every opportunity to practice and give it a shot.
At first, that is. At first. Because I realized the fundamental difference between merely moving through the Dark Room and actually opening the door. One was creepy, and cold, and always made it hard for me to breathe. The other made it feel as if someone was plunging a white-hot dagger straight through my heart.
I rubbed at my temples. This was why I even agreed to join the Black Hand – sorry, Carver’s little brigade – wasn’t it? To learn more about myself, what I could do, and ultimately, what I’d become after Thea not only sank a dagger into my heart, but planted something there. And there was something else I needed to talk to him about, too. There was the small matter of the poison rushing through my system. Fine. I decided to adjust my attitude.
“Soon,” I said, straining to soften my tone. “I’ll learn soon. But listen, can I talk to you somewhere private?” My eyes flitted between Gil and Mama Rosa.
Carver said nothing, but stood up in understanding, marching to the exposed patch of brick wall by the industrial refrigerator. He drew a circle in the air out of pale amber flame, used one of his many rings to prick the end of his finger, then embedded both the fire and his blood into the wall. The bricks slid apart, revealing a portal into Carver’s domicile, our home, what the guys and I had come to think of as the hideout.
We stepped through in silence, and Carver gestured down the hallway of our dimensional apartment-cum-office, which resembled a darkened temple hewn completely out of smooth, gray stone.
“Meet me at my desk,” he said, pointing past the knees of the enormous statue standing in the center of the temple, the sculpture that rose so high into the darkness that I still didn’t know what it represented after months of working and living there.
“We won’t have to,” I said. “I’ll make this quick.”
He folded his arms, cocked his eyebrow, then tapped his foot once, very much like a parent waiting for an apology. I wanted to just roll my eyes, but I caved.
“Okay, fine. I’m sorry. But is it really my fault that I’m so bad at this? You don’t bear down on a student for being dumb. You help them.”
Carver watched me for a tense moment, then sighed. “Oh, Dustin. It isn’t that. You’re just – unpracticed. Inexperienced. This is all so new to you. Sometimes I forget that you’ve lived your whole life not knowing about the existence of true magic.” He clapped me on the shoulder, leveling me with ocher, cat-like eyes that smoldered with fatherly understanding. “You’re absolutely right, Dustin. It isn’t your fault that you’re so very stupid.”
“Hey now. Ouch.”
He laughed softly. “I only want for you to come into your full potential. It’s been so long since I’ve had anyone to apprentice.” He folded his hands behind his back, as if to tamp down his enthusiasm, like he didn’t want me seeing that he was getting excited. “I very much want for you to progress past being just a mage.”
“Just a mage?”
Carver waved his hand. “Sometimes it’s only a name, after all, but it’s so – generic. We, all of us who have access to the invisible energies of this earth, are mages in our own respect. But it all comes down to nomenclature, whether by power or tradition. Elementalists, shamans, brujas. All roads lead to Rome, yes? Everything has a name, and sometimes it is only a word. But how wonderful to hear the name of something and know it for what it is.”
His words lingered. I knew he wanted me to ask, and so I did, even knowing that he might not answer. “So what are you, then?”
He smiled. “I already told you that I might be considered a sorcerer, but I know you want something more specific. The word you are looking for is ‘lich.’ Undying, for as long as I have reason to live on this earth.”
I’d actually heard the word before, but only in a gaming context. Liches were wizards who refused to die, so driven by their hunger for occult power that they would do anything – and I mean anything – to lengthen their lives. I studied Carver’s face, wondering what he had done himself. But I had more questions.
“And Thea. What was she? No. What is she?”
“An affront to the discipline and study of the arts.” Carver grimaced. “Thea Morgana is no mage. She is a monster.”
“And what am I? Am I a monster because of what she did to me? What could I become?”
“No, that much we cannot say just yet. Your energies stem from the Eldest, yes, but as for whether you will become one of their abominable children? Unlikely.”
I shuddered. The Eldest were beings far older and far more powerful than the entities of earth, primal forces beyond our understanding. To the gods, demons, and creatures of myth, humans might be seen as pawns, playthings, and very rarely, as allies. But to the Eldest? We’re just insects. Specks of dust. And as little as they cared for humanity, there were still those mad enough to worship the Eldest, to risk attracting their corruption in exchange for power. Thea was one of them. Knowing that I wasn’t transforming into an abomination warped by the madness of the Eldest would have been a relief, if I didn’t already know I was going to die in a couple of days.
“But back on pace. As a mage? You are someone who uses the darkness, who employs forces that the unenlightened deem nefarious and unclean, perhaps even evil. You could be a warlock. Goodness. If you truly come to your power then the precious Lorica might even have to find new words to describe you and your unusual talents. An umbral sorcerer. A weaver of darkness.” His eyes widened and gleamed a bright amber, like young fire. “A shadowcrafter.”
“Badass,” I said, and I totally meant it. A shadowcrafter? I mean damn. I could live with that. But there was still that one thing we had to discuss. “But I don’t know if I’ll have the time.”
He nodded gravely, reaching for my wrist. “Yes. About that.”
“You – wait, you knew?”
“I thought we’d been through this.” Carver sucked air through his teeth, his eyes narrowing as he peered at the tattoo. “You are stupid, and I am not.”
“Be serious. I could die. I probably am dying.”
“Perhaps. It’s hard to tell with these entities sometimes. The time he gave you to live might be inaccurate. It might even be a ruse.”
I blinked, hope blooming like a flower in my chest. “You mean I might have more days than Dionysus mentioned?”
“I mean that you might have even less.”
And just as quickly, that flower wilted. “That sucks. That really, really sucks, Carver. And I haven’t even seen my – ”
“Your father, yes,” he finished. He looked up into my face. “Locating him has been more of a challenge than I initially thought. It is difficult to find someone who doesn’t want to be found. Even the Lorica and its Eyes would be hard-pressed. They can’t find our base because of our wards, and they can’t find me because one of these keeps me cloaked.”
He waggled his fingers, drawing attention to his rings. Much like Thea, Carver put a lot of stock in enchanted baubles. So mages could cloak their signals from scrying? Huh. Good to know. “Rest assured that I am attempting still
, but now I have more to occupy my time.” He turned back to my wrist. “I will have to study this. For now I need you to go about your life as normal. You won’t mind if I take a sample, do you?”
I stiffened. “Of what?”
Carver’s hands moved too quickly for me to react. I cried out at the sharpness that stuck into my wrist.
“Ow. Carver, what the fuck?”
He had the nerve to shush me. I only then spotted the tiny needle protruding out of one of his rings. This one didn’t have a gem set into it, but what looked like a hollow glass globe. It was a piece of jewelry that acted like a syringe. What the – had he always worn that one? How did he even know he’d need it?
Carver lifted his hand away, admiring that particular ring, which was now filled with the bright red of my blood. “Thank you,” he said, already spinning on his heel to head towards his office.
“A little warning next time?”
“You should have known to react faster,” Carver called musically. “Work on the Viridian Dawn. Pretend that nothing has happened. Carpe diem, Dustin.”
Seize the day. Easy for him to say. And yeah, we still needed to get in touch with the contact on that business card the maenad gave us. That would have been easy to do from where I stood, except for how cellphone reception never worked from the inside of Carver’s hideout. I couldn’t say that he was frightened of technology, exactly. Maybe it made more sense to say that he had a low opinion of it, compared to everything that magic could accomplish.
No wifi, either, which I’m sure you can imagine is basically torture. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve climbed out of the hideout’s portal to huddle in the midnight cold of Mama Rosa’s kitchen to try and get a signal, only to find Gil already there swiping away on his phone.
I stepped back out into the kitchen, pulling my phone out of my pocket. The Viridian contact was one thing, but I did remember that I wanted to confirm something about what happened earlier that night. Prudence and Bastion couldn’t have known about Vanitas unless someone had explicitly told them about him. I frowned, looked up my contacts, and hit dial. Herald had some ’splaining to do. I held the phone up to my ear, sweeping past Rosa and Gil right onto the street outside the restaurant.